John Podhoretz (1:54)

John, we are having you on not because we don't always love to have you on, but because, of course, one of potentially the most important events of the 21st century might be unfolding and happening right before our eyes in Iran. And this, of course, is a major subject and focus of the foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a matter that has been a focus of your studies in the Middle east for most of your adult lifetime. So let's go to this question, which is what is it that makes what has been going on in Iran this week in particular different from the protests of 2022 or the protests of 2017 or the protests of 2009 in the wake of the stolen, apparently stolen election that led to the so called velvet revolution that didn't go anywhere? What, how, why are we to look at what's going on and say, this really might be it for the regime?

Jonathan Schanzer (2:56)

Okay, so all really good questions, I think, start with 2009. That was the moment where you had hundreds of thousands of Iranians coming out into the streets. And this was, I think, the big moment. Right. It was right as we were heading into the nuclear challenge by Iran. It was an historic opportunity and it was just a swing and a miss from President Barack Obama. He basically decided to throw the Iranian people under the bus. They had every right to be out there protesting against their oppressors. And he decided to go for a nuclear deal with the regime, this human rights violating, terrorist supporting regime. And it was an historic missed opportunity. And you began to see the kind of Iranian people began to retrench. They were less bold, less willing to go out in protest. Now, we did see moments, flashes of protests after that, 2017, 2018. We began to see people coming out into the streets in smaller numbers because of mismanagement, because of a poor economy, because the regime was still oppressive. And in some ways what we're watching is a continuation of those protests. There have been something like 8,000 of these protests since that time period. We track them at FTD's website. And it's just amazing when you see that trajectory. It has been a consistent theme inside Iran that people are still coming out and challenging this horrific, autocratic, kleptocratic, theocratic regime. Now then you have 2022, right? That's when the Mahsa Amini protests, the women life freedom protests emerge, they explode. And once again we see an American president unwilling to harness what's going on inside Iran. And again, shameful. You know, when you look at what Joe Biden missed here, I think it was another huge opportunity. But yet those protests continued up until today. Again, I see a lot of continuity here, not so much change. What's different right now are a couple of internal factors and a couple of external factors. External. Donald Trump is actually calling for the regime to go down. He's telling them, don't touch the protesters, keep your blood soaked hands off of the Iranian people. That is a huge difference where the President of the United States comes out and does this. Another external factor is the fact that Israel shellacked the Iranians during that 12 day war last year. Punctuated by the US bombing of those Iranian nuclear sites, the regime has lost credibility amongst its own people. It looks weaker, it looks more brittle. The people feel more emboldened to go out into the streets and that's huge. Now internally you've got the collapse of the real. Right. It's like that's the currency. The currency. Yeah, it is. It's in the toilet. Right. You've got American sanctions biting, you've got, you've got a water crisis that's going on. I mean, they Were talking about moving the entire capital from Tehran because of the lack of water. Right. They've got environmental challenges, poor air quality, bad electricity. All of these things are driving the people out into the streets. And the more they see this sort of paralysis from the regime, the more they're out into the streets. Now the regime has responded last night by cutting the communications, Internet and, and phone. This shows the total fear that is being exhibited right now by the regime. This is all really positive stuff. Now, I'm not going to come out and say the regime is going to fall tomorrow. A lot of things need to happen between now and then. The last thing I'll just say, though, is the regime needs more people cheering from the outside. They need to feel more and more isolated. And, and I got to tell you, I am outraged by the lack of support from American college campuses, traditional places where we should be seeing this, the US Media not covering it. Right. Hollywood, where are all these self righteous, smug people that were like out there talking about Gaza and Palestine and they're not supporting the people of Iran as they're bravely standing up to their oppressors? I think we can see what's going on here, big picture. But suffice it to say this is an historic moment. We're all holding our breath at FDD right now because we've been calling for not just maximum pressure on the regime for all these years, but also maximum support for the Iranian people. And man, the Iranian people have come out and shown who they are.

John Podhoretz (7:37)

There are about 90 million Iranians. And we do know that there was, there were some revolutions in the Middle East 14, 15 years ago during the Arab Spring, Egypt, a country of more than 100 million. But you did have, and you also had a gerontocracy, very old leader who had been in power for 35, almost 40 years, almost exactly the same as this regime, which is 47 years old or about 47 years old. So there is a history in the Middle east of regime collapse even in these very large countries. The one difference is that Mubarak, I guess in Egypt, he was much more in a position where the feeling of losing the consent of the governed cut the heart out from him. And I think the Iranian regime really doesn't care whether it has the consent of the governed or not. It bribes them every now and then, throws things their way to keep them quiet. But this is a thugocracy as well as a malacracy. And I guess what we need to watch for is whether they listen to Trump, like whether they take Trump's threat seriously because the obvious next move for them to do is, like, widespread. If they have good control of the military, is widespread attacks on civilians by the military that will force them basically to go back inside and end the revolt.

Jonathan Schanzer (9:19)

Yeah. And I think the regime right now appears chastened by the Trump administration's threats. And, I mean, it is interesting. The people of Iran are absolutely not impressed with the attempts to buy off the people. Right. I mean, the regime offered, like, $7 per person. Kind of reminded me, I don't know if you remember the movie Trading Places, where the. The $5 wealthy guys, right, they give their. Their valet, like, a $5 bill at the end of the year as a bonus. This guy says, maybe I can go to the movies by myself. This is sort of like what the regime's just done, right? They're offering $7 to the people to stay home. Not happening right now. The big question is, again, just, does this turn violent? Does the regime turn its guns on the people? Right now we've seen 45 deaths, something like 2200 arrests. That's actually modest in scope compared to what we've seen in the past. The big question in my mind is whether the people find arms, whether you have people from those barracks, the besieged and the IRGC and elsewhere. Do they say, all right, we're going home and we're bringing our weapons with us, and we're willing to start to turn those weapons on the oppressive people of the regime. This is kind of the interesting moment here that I think it's the moment of truth. But again, I think as long as we see Trump pushing, that's great. You've probably seen, you know, the Mossad's ex handle, they're calling for more of this, right? But I gotta tell you, where's every member of Congress? On Instagram and on X, you know, where are these platform people? Where are all these Europeans that have been calling for a different Middle East? This is the moment. And in case we're not clear, if this regime collapses, that means Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the Shiite militias in Iraq, they all lose their top patron, right? This is like a domino effect that would be so incredibly healthy for the region. And people are not giddy about this. They're not. I just. I don't understand the lack of messaging, the lack of excitement over this. This is, as you mentioned, John, at the top, this is an historic moment for the entire Middle east, maybe the world.

Unidentified Female Panelist (11:46)

Could I ask a question? Because the coverage, as you correctly note, has been so sporadic for each of these sort of mini revolutions going on internally in Iran. In terms of the coverage, particularly here in the US One of the things that I've seen a lot of in the last few days are local. At the local level, not just in Tehran, but in cities and places all over Iran, torching local official buildings. And is that as. I don't. I didn't know if that was as common, but it seems to be widespread. So it's not just anything. Any, you know, the women who are supposedly lighting their cigarettes on burning pictures of the. Of Khomeini. It's, It's. It's, you know, the post office or the local tax officials building. So that strikes me as being more serious from the regime's perspective, because that's. It's not just the regime and the symbols of the regime. It's the local officials who, as John correctly notes, were our thugs themselves. Do you see that as being distinctively different this time around, or is that more of the same?

Jonathan Schanzer (12:42)

No, I think. I think it's significant that we're seeing more of that right now. And in other words, it's the trickle down from the regime to the local enforcement level that's important, that the symbols of local enforcement are also being challenged. But, I mean, I got to tell you, there's some other really interesting symbols to watch. One is the town of Mashhad, which is where the Supreme Leader hails from. We're watching a huge amount of activity there right now. That's interesting because that was always seen as kind of a bastion of support for the region. I'm watching that. There's some really interesting photos that have come out. And, you know, Starlink is kind of working overtime right now. Unclear whether, you know, Elon Musk is. He's not messaging about this. It's been actually kind of interesting.

John Podhoretz (13:30)

We should just quickly explain. Starlink is an Elon Musk global Internet system that can bypass or can be used if it's turned on and accessed in the right way for anybody to reach the Internet. It's how your car or certain types of people have, how their car can talk to the Internet. And if Musk has turned Starlink on over Iran, this bypasses the ability of the regime to shut down internal communications that they cannot themselves listen to, pay attention to or control.

Jonathan Schanzer (14:09)

Yeah. And according to my Iranian colleagues at ftd, some terrific guys, by the way, that everybody should follow Behnam Ben Talablu, Saeed Ghass. They, you know, the thinking anyway, is that Starlink's turned on, whether it's sporadically or full time. But that's how a lot of these images are still getting uploaded, despite the crackdowns. And one of the images that I saw, which was really jarring, is this woman kneeling in front of a motorcycle gang of the irgc. And it looked just like that man who was standing in front of those tanks back during the Tiananmen Square showdown. And really, you get chills just looking at these two photos side by side, just hoping that we're watching something as historic potentially unfolding right now in Iran.

John Podhoretz (14:58)

So, Jonathan, I have a question.

Seth Mandel (15:02)

I've got to think that, and I'm curious about how much evidence there is of this, that the besiege and other internal security forces at this point are less inclined to turn their guns on protesters, even if they're getting the orders to do so. Are there reports of that happening? Because that can be a kind of tipping point in these situations where.

Jonathan Schanzer (15:31)

Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know how to answer that. What I will say is that we're not seeing a huge amount of this right now. I mean, 45, 45 deaths is a lot. Right. But this has been going on now since December 28th. Right. So you're talking about day after day after day of growing protests, larger numbers coming out, the intensity is growing, and yet the regime has kind of kept a lid on this. 2200 arrests, last I checked. Also, you know, not massive. Right. When you think about a thug regime like this, you'd think that they wouldn't care about killing, they wouldn't care about arrests, they wouldn't care about repression. You're watching a more delicate approach. Some of that, I think, has to do with, you know, Donald Trump's warnings. Some of it has to do with, I think, the fragility of the regime writ large. I think they're afraid. I think they don't know what's coming next, that if they crack down harder, it might elicit a nastier response from the public. And you'd watch this kind of downward spiral. But I will say again, I think the moment that we're all waiting for is where you see the besiege, you see the local army, you see people that even if their weapons are not impressive, having them take them from the barracks, bringing them home, and then actually using them on the regime, that's the moment that you're, you know, you see that kind of flip because it's not like we've been providing a massive amount of weapons or Support. We should have been doing this and preparing them all the way through this process since 2017, 2018, etc. The Israelis may be Azerbaijan maybe, but there's a lot of gray area right now where we can't quite see the full picture. All I can tell you is the fact that this is happening is just making me downright giddy.

Christine Rosen (17:24)

We should also. I mean, there's got to be, although it's hard to quantify, there's got to be a way to express Israel's role in this. Not on the ground, you know, arming people, but in. In giving the regime a black eye the way it did during that war. I mean, the main thing, obviously, yes, is Trump, the United. If the United States. The United States has just attacked Iran. That's the big one, obviously, in terms of, you know, having a threat that the Iran brain, that the mullahs might actually listen to. But there is the. The idea that when you puncture the, you know, seeming inevitability or impermeability of something, the fear dissipates in a way, and you can sort of feel it in the air, right? That's not something you can measure. But isn't that kind of what we saw in Syria that, you know, Iran, you know, was brought to its knees, Hezbollah was brought to its knees, and suddenly the guys who had been trying to oust Assad drove all the way to Damascus and out he went. There was this feeling that something had collapsed and that people could push harder at the regime, that it was. It was vulnerable in a way they didn't see it be vulnerable. For is. Is that. Is that comparable at all to what we're seeing in Iran?

Jonathan Schanzer (18:46)

100, a thousand percent? I mean, just to be clear, when that war broke out in Iran in June of last year, the people had to go into bomb shelters, right? I mean, they had to go to ground, right? They have not experienced anything like that, I think, ever during the period of the Islamic Republic, since 1979.

Unidentified Female Panelist (19:10)

Right?

Jonathan Schanzer (19:11)

This was like a shaming of the regime. They were defenseless, right? The Israelis knocked out all their air defenses and dominated the skies over Iran for 12 days before Trump came in with Midnight Hammer and took care of additional business. That was a black eye for the regime. They were cut down. They no longer look 10ft tall. All the big talk about destroying America and Israel, that did not play well, right? That did not age well. And so the regime looked feckless and weak during that time. But now add to that Iran, Iran has lost its proxy in Gaza it's cut down to, I don't know, 15% of its strength that failed. Hezbollah down to about 20 or 25% of its previous strength. And they're, they're in bad shape. I mean, the government of Lebanon, the weakest government of all, is actually threatening to end the rule of Hezbollah inside Lebanon. That's amazing, right? And by the way, the Assad regime falling, right? Another just debilitating gut punch to the regime. And then don't forget what just happened a couple of days ago with Maduro getting kicked out of Venezuela. This is a regime that was doing money laundering and illicit trade with the Islamic Republic. So another ally lost. You look around the world and Iran looks more isolated. Oh, by the way, don't forget the Russians and the Chinese failed to come to Iran's assistance during that 12 day war. So they don't look like they've got any friends within the, what we call the axis of aggressors. Right? This group of countries that are against the United States and the west, none of it is working out well.

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John Podhoretz (24:07)

Okay, I want to connect three dots to suggest what else might be operating here or see whether you guys agree with this theory. So, in 2020, the United States assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the leading figure in Iranian terrorist activities abroad.

Jonathan Schanzer (24:31)

IRGC, Quds Force.

John Podhoretz (24:34)

Right, the Quds Force. In 2024, the Israelis assassinated in the middle of Tehran Ismail Haniyeh, right, in an apartment in Tehran. And last week, the United States extracted, landed in Caracas, extracted Maduro after an intensive intelligence operation that made sure for months that we had, we knew where he was, we knew where he went. We knew once, once we had, we were able to do the green light that this could be a snatch and grab that took a couple of hours and then he would be out of the country. If you connect these dots and you are the Ayatollah Khamenei and you know you have no air defenses or very few air defenses, your intelligence ability inside your country is compromised. And you are aware that the Israelis have you completely penetrated, but you don't know how and you don't know who is the penetrators or what modalities the Israelis are using to know this, the very real possibility must be haunting your brain that some, that some Delta force could land in the middle of Tehran, grab the Ayatollah put him on a helicopter and take him right out of there and arrest him as the leading figure as a. As under the same provisions under which we arrested Maduro as a global terrorist. Yeah, that. Am I.

Unidentified Female Panelist (26:10)

Am I sort of like, add one more. Can we add one more dot to make the ayatollah feel even more freaked out? And that's that we. And this is very important because it speaks to the ordinary heroism of ordinary Iranians, particularly the Iranian witch women who are taking their veils off. Because one of the protest moments, I think 2022 or 2021, was a hijab enforcement effort on the part of the regime, which some women to great. At great physical risk, themselves resisted. And there are all these 40% inflation, the water issue and water crisis in Tehran you mentioned. There's a huge number of domestic issues that when they would flare up, the regime could effectively suppress. But the anger about them has never disappeared. Ordinary Iranians deal with this every day.

John Podhoretz (26:54)

And an important point that from what I've been reading, the regime decided as one of the SOPs that it was gonna offer as this protest began to accelerate, to say, it's okay, you can take off your hijab. We're not gonna. We're not gonna rescue you a little too late. Right. I mean, that is. Whoever it was, some. I don't know if it was the president or the vice president or somebody said, you know, people should be allowed to do what they want. You know, it's amazing because, yeah, four years ago, you know, people were being, you know, a woman was murdered for walking around without her. Without her modesty garb on. And they are. That's. They went place one. It was like, okay, we're not gonna enforce that anymore. Does suggest a kind of weakness. Like, you know, we're gonna. Here, you want this? Here, we'll give this to you along with the $7.

Jonathan Schanzer (27:52)

Right, right, right. I mean, let me just to foot stomp everything that you all just said. I mean, a. Yes, the domestic stuff, it still looms large. Again, I draw a direct line between them. It was the Mahsa Amini was the woman's name, Kurdish woman who was killed by the. By the regime back in 2022. She was arrested for immodestly dressing. And then she was beaten and killed in prison. And this set off this massive, you know, additional wave of protests building on the several thousand that had already taken place over the previous four or five years. So, again, I see continuity throughout all this. There's been a steady Low flame that has now gone higher. And the regime is concerned about this. But then, John, to your point. Yeah, I mean, I would say that Ismail Haniyeh, I would say that Qasem Soleimani, but I would actually add more to that. I would talk about the attack that the Israelis launched in Doha on September 9 of last year. Right. The ability to target specifically in a place where no one saw this thing coming. American air defenses did not even intercept this. Remarkable. Right on top of that, you can look at what the Israelis did to Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, a key advisor to the Alta Cocker, you know, supreme leader of Iran. Right. These guys were best friends. There was like a bromance going. The Israelis knocked that guy out in his bunker. The Israelis killed like three quarters of the Houthi regime in Yemen with their intelligence. If you're the supreme leader and any of the people in his inner circle right now, you are plotting, you're starting to get a little worried here. You're starting to think like, okay, the walls are closing in. And by the way, Trump's willing to do this against, you know, Suleimani, he's willing to take out Maduro. These guys are all operating special forces full bore. How much time do I have left? And I like that.

John Podhoretz (29:52)

So this is a very important thing, which is American leaders. Although, as you say, shamefully and bizarrely, Obama and Biden both did not even use the bully pulpit to say, we stand with the Iranian people in their efforts for freedom. We will do whatever we can to encourage the freedom. We want this regime to go away. They didn't say it, they didn't mean it. They didn't want it. He wanted, Obama wanted to bring Iran into the community of nations by sort of weaving them into a treaty position where they could be brought back instead of being a rogue regime. So there has been, there was this wonderful liberal progressive president turned his back on this suffering population of a country that had murdered or had killed at least 1,000American servicemen in Iraq in the course of the war against Iraq. Trump comes along and says now, last week or two weeks ago, when he said, don't do it, don't you go fire on these protesters. I am not going to let that happen. What has Trump done? Blew up their nuclear program. He extracted Maduro without any US Casualties. He took out the Iranian nuclear without any US Casualties. And he has effectively backed, even if he had a little fakey tantrum about the Israeli mission in Doha, which I don't believe he was really upset about. He had backed Israel in these efforts. Extra, you know, outside their territory. Efforts that don't just involve the use of boots on the ground, but involve actionable intelligence leading to actual killing of actual people who are important to them. That is teeth. There are teeth. American for 40 years says, you're bad. Oh, you're really terrible. It's like, yeah, who the hell cares what he says? They don't mean it. They're afraid of us, or they don't want to. They want this, or they're worried about the oil prices or something like that. And now if you're the regime or you're the ayatollah, you can. You have no idea what Trump is capable of. What.

Seth Mandel (32:17)

And he just said, with Bibi by his side at Mar a Lago, we'll do it again.

Jonathan Schanzer (32:24)

We will.

Seth Mandel (32:25)

We will. We will bomb you again quickly if you're working on rebuilding nuclear program, and in any case, if you are ramping up your ballistic missile missile program.

Jonathan Schanzer (32:37)

Yeah. And by the way, and he reportedly.

Christine Rosen (32:38)

Told Bibi at that same meeting, you should not take Lebanon's word. You should maybe just go in and bomb Hezbollah again.

Jonathan Schanzer (32:46)

Yeah.

Christine Rosen (32:46)

I mean, this is. Trump is like hawkishness.

Jonathan Schanzer (32:48)

You know, look, I will just say that there is an interesting little maybe, sidebar to note, and that is that, you know, the conversations that I've been having over the last couple of weeks have suggested that Israel has grown increasingly worried about the ballistic missiles that Abe just mentioned. There's 2,000 or 3,000 that the Iranians have been ramping up production again, having learned what they did about targeting Israel the last time around. And a number of missiles got through, as we all know, destroying, you know, entire buildings in Tel Aviv and beyond. So there was a fear that we would be potentially careening toward another showdown over Iran's missiles. I got to tell you, one other potentially interesting wrinkle to all this is I don't know if the regime is going to be willing to take those risks, that maybe they were thinking about attacking Israel again with ballistic missiles as you're getting inundated with protests at home and people are burning local, you know, like, outposts of the regime and challenging, like the symbols of the regime in Tehran. Are you willing to take that risk? Are you willing to also engage in, you know, offensive activity now? I mean, we know that. I mean, as of yesterday, there was a reported cyber attack. Cyber is different. There's low cost for the Iranians to do this from a kinetic perspective. I think they've got to be nervous. And I think Again, this is all redounding to Israel's benefit, to America's benefit. Look, I need to be, you know, I need to be a little like level headed here. We still have a long way to go in order for this to do what I hope it does, which is to bring down the regime. We don't see real leadership emerging yet. It looks like it's all being organized at local cells. It's pocket by pocket, but it's all growing. Also interesting, by the way, that I didn't mention the Crown Prince exiled Crown Prince raise apoclovy came out and called for people to join that apparently augmented the numbers. So in other words, you have now another external player pushing for bigger numbers and more unrest. So fascinating all around.

John Podhoretz (35:01)

And again, I want to go back to what we talked about really in the immediate aftermath of the Maduro extraction and arrest, which is that when the United States moves and acts and does something decisively and what's more, did something both with the Iranian strike and with Maduro, that erases or supersedes the image of the United States that was created by the pullout from Afghanistan in 2021. So no longer is the image of American military action, defeat, chaos, pull out Americans being killed as they are fleeing a country that they had, you know, been present in for 20 years. We now have pristine 37 hour air mission that levels for now. And we have this astounding multi plane, multi agency task force assault on Venezuela in which not a single American was killed, in which 37 people were killed defending Maduro, all of them Cuban, thus actually making the point that this operation wasn't just against, you know, wasn't just against Maduro and the American military. Sort of like what has happened with Israel over the last two and a half years, despite all of the terrible publicity and the way people talk about Israel and all of that, like it is the what Pete Hegseth said, maybe, you know, not as elegantly as one would wish an American official to say it, but like this is the FAFO world, like don't test Trump if he says don't fire on the protesters, don't fire on the protesters. And then you are giving space for things to happen that have not happened there since 1978.

Jonathan Schanzer (37:10)

Yeah. And I mean, and I gotta say, the fact that it's Trump doing this right now, it's like a little bit mind blowing to me, right? When you think about the two other presidents that have this track record of like advocating for social justice and Lord knows what, right? These were the guys that you would have expected to come out on behalf of the Iranian people, and they failed, like, abject failure. And then Donald Trump, not the guy that you'd think would be the champion of the, you know, the oppressed. That's not the. The. The image anyway. Right. This guy's come out and he's done it. Now, I will tell you this. There is one sort of, you know, or an indicator or some like, I don't know, black swans that I want to watch out for. If Venezuela starts to bite Trump in the backside, we've got a problem.

Unidentified Female Panelist (37:59)

Right.

Jonathan Schanzer (37:59)

Because then all of a sudden, his foreign policy comes under pressure. He opened up a can of worms. He opened up Pandora's box in Venezuela, and now look at the collapse in our own hemisphere. And we need to learn the lessons of regime change. Even though we actually technically haven't brought down the regime, we just brought down one guy and kept the regime in place. You get the picture, Right. People want to hang him with this. And so the chaos that could emerge from the Venezuela operation is something to watch.

John Podhoretz (38:30)

I think that's unquestionably true. But that chaos, what you're talking about, is the product will be the project of a year.

Jonathan Schanzer (38:39)

Yeah.

John Podhoretz (38:40)

Like, unless something happens there that, you know, I don't even know what that would be. We're talking about something where Trump has running room and breathing space and has already said, I don't know when elections are gonna be. I don't know when we're gonna stabilize this. I don't know how we're hand that this is all a work in progress. We're talking about a revolt in Iran right now.

Jonathan Schanzer (39:01)

But, John, I would say just, you know, there are things that can go wrong over that year that would hasten the chaos. Right.

John Podhoretz (39:08)

I mean, I'm not denying that, but all I'm saying is there are real world events happening as we are speaking with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets now, again, it's a population of 90 million. It's a very big country. You know, this is not just a bunch of people in the capitol who are you know, gonna sort of, like, take over the president's palace or, you know, like, or.

Abe Greenwald (39:31)

Or.

John Podhoretz (39:31)

Or make sure that the. The military stands down and doesn't fire on them in a crowd. It's a much more complicated situation than that, but it's happening now. A lot of the decision points that are gonna be facing the administration, the Ayatollah, the Israelis, whoever are going to be in the next four to six to eight weeks at the, at the longest. And I don't think Venezuela blows up in that time period. I think the Trump, I hope it.

Jonathan Schanzer (40:00)

By the way, it doesn't, I hope nothing. I think, I hope it all goes smoothly. Of course, you know, I think we should expect some bumps along the road because you got the Chinese, you got the Russians, you got the, if the Iranians are still around, the Cubans, they would all like to, you know, kind of put a stick in the spokes and make things go, go sideways. But I think you're right. The immediate opportunity for, you know, for the US Again, where are the Europeans in all of this? Where are those Western champions of democracy that are like that, that are saying, hey, this is a great opportunity not just for the people of Iran to take their country back, Right. Because it's been occupied since 1979 by a crazy like, nutball regime. And so here's this great opportunity for, you know, for the world to give Iran back to the Iranians and potentially bring the temperature down across the Middle east because the Iranians have been so involved in the export of terrorism and violence and mayhem around the entire region. I mean, again, the opportunity here, I don't think people have understand it enough. By the way, I think I mentioned this before, but even the way the media is writing about this, and I know that there's lots of different media these days and there are good people out there podcasting about this and writing in their substacks. But where's the Washington Post on this? Where's the New York Times on this? I mean, where's the mainstream media that should be out there, you know, calling for us, like for Trump to do more? Right.

Christine Rosen (41:29)

There was an incredible thing in the BBC, right. The BBC had this, you know, was being questioned over where are they and why aren't they publishing some of these great images and videos and things that are floating around? And, and, and one of the BBC, one of the guys at the BBC responded on Twitter that, look, you know, you have to verify these things as a, as a news organization. We're not on the ground in Iran.

Jonathan Schanzer (41:57)

We're not so verified, you know, and it's like they were.

Christine Rosen (41:59)

Do you listen to your, do you listen to yourself? Like how 50 videos of flooding tents in Gaza a day, you put on a day. And how many of those, how many videos during the, the two year war were either AI or staged or saw? A lot of stuff that came through was just bs, right? I mean, let's just put it out. And the BBC.

Jonathan Schanzer (42:27)

Yeah.

Christine Rosen (42:27)

And the BBC was publishing all of this stuff and then going, well, you know, we report, you decide type of stuff. And now they're saying, well, we have to be responsible. I don't know exactly where this video came from. I feel like it's an admission of, you know, again, it's like an admission of fault in their coverage of the Israel Hamas war. It's an admit it's practically, you know.

John Podhoretz (42:52)

It'S almost exactly the opposite, that the reason that they are not covering this the way that they're covering this is because it dovetails with the idea that, that Donald Trump's actions in Venezuela have had a net positive consequence in terms of emboldening people in another faraway country of which we know little, where he had another foreign policy and military success just six months ago. And they are not going to focus on this unless they are beaten about the face and neck, am compelled to.

Jonathan Schanzer (43:28)

But, John, part of it.

John Podhoretz (43:29)

That's part of it.

Jonathan Schanzer (43:30)

But I just think part of this is they were like this before Trump came in.

John Podhoretz (43:35)

Well, of course, of course. But, yeah, there's a related point here.

Seth Mandel (43:39)

Which is that, you know, Jonathan mentioned, like, where are the campus protesters? And I don't think we're. We need to beat up on them a little more right now because it is absolutely not surprising that there are no campus protesters coming out in favor of the Iranian people. Now. They have spent years protesting in favor of the Iranian regime and its proxies. They have come to protests with flags of the Islamic Republic. They are, they are paid and organized by groups that are funded by allies of the Iranian Republic. The only protests I've seen in the recent days are against the extraction of Maduro from Venezuela. So to, you know, put it. To make us put a, put a sharp point on this here, what's revealed is these protesters are purely, and this goes for the BBC and the press as well. Yes, they're not covering it because it look, makes Trump look good, but also because they cannot come out against an enemy of Israel. They are not on the Iranian people's side. They are on the regime's side because the regime is an antagonist of Israel.

Christine Rosen (45:07)

There were pictures at some of these protests, right? Somebody, people in London, somebody brought actually a picture of Khamenei, right? I mean, literally held up. The guy who is ordering the crackdown of these protests is, you know, his holding up his picture like on a banner.

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John Podhoretz (47:09)

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Jonathan Schanzer (47:43)

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James Patterson (47:44)

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John Podhoretz (48:17)

You know, here in New York last night at an Orthodox outside an Orthodox synagogue in Kew Gardens Hills, there was a pro Hamas demonstration neatly timed to the week following the inauguration of the, you know, weird communist, semi Islamist, anti Semite Zoran Mandani. A test of the early question of how Mandani would treat such a protest. People chanting in favor of Hamas, the murderer of 1200 people on October 7th. The wounder of 3500 people on October 7th and October 8th. The takers of the 240 hostages over the course of two years. All of that. And that's who. The protests, those are the protesters. Those are the professional protesters who are now, of course, also moving on to start a Neo George Floyd wave in the wake of the killing of Renee Goode and whatever happened in Portland and all of that, that they're just going to shift over to that effort. And, yeah, they'll be entirely quiet about the world's, what would be the most important actual resolution of a long standing multi generational problem for the United States in Iran. And I think understanding Trump, it is important to understand. I will now speak as the old man on this. You know, I was 18 years old when Iran took over. When the, when the Mollus took over in Iran, I was, you know, still, I was 18 when the hostages were taken. The 52 hostages were taken at the US embassy in Iran. I was 19 when Desert One, the Desert One rescue mission, went belly up. And Donald Trump, who is 15 years older than I am, was standing there like everybody else of his type in America, going, what the hell is going on here? They're taking our people. They're humiliating the United States. Jimmy Carter is standing there doing nothing. And when he tries to do something, it's a complete disaster. And this was the formative, aside from the pull out of the helicopters from the roof of the embassy in Saigon In April of 1975, this was the formative foreign policy experience for people of his and my age that we experienced. And I think when Trump looks at Iran and started in with the maximum pressure doctrine that he started in on in 2017 when he said that Iranian houthis the worst deal we've ever made. And what we need to do is put pressure on the regime. He's going back to thinking about what Iran meant. And people don't understand how much Americans hated Iran in 1980. And, you know, Trump's a wrestling guy, right? Loved wrestling. Always, always loved wrestling. The main plot of the World Wrestling Federation or whatever it was called then, I don't think it was WWF then. The main plot was that there was this wrestler who called the Purple Sheik from Iran and Iron Sheik. So the Iron Sheik. And he was and basically was a series of American wrestlers who would basically beat the crap out of him and throw him out of the ring and tear him to shreds in a kind of, you know, this is what we want. Like, like the fantasy of Rambo going.

Jonathan Schanzer (52:07)

Back and winning the Vietnam War was in fact Iranian.

Unidentified Female Panelist (52:11)

He was an Iranian American Wrestler too, so.

John Podhoretz (52:13)

Yeah, right. That's right. Yeah.

Christine Rosen (52:14)

And they, they had. Who was it? Was it Sergeant Slaughter? For a time there was like this American super general. He came in, in military dress like, you know, he was an American.

John Podhoretz (52:25)

Trump's head as a 79 year old man doing this, obviously Biden, older Obama, my age, literally born the same year I was. It's not that you couldn't take different lessons from what happened, particularly if you were schooled by, you know, John Mearsheimer and Rashid Khalidi and people like that about what the Middle east was like, which Obama was. But what was it? What is it? This was an originating American humiliation. And he is now in a position and has shown himself willing with the strike on the nuclear program to provide some kind of cosmic payback for what? And it's the same regime.

Jonathan Schanzer (53:11)

It is. Can I just say, first of all, I'm really impressed with the collective wrestling knowledge of this group.

John Podhoretz (53:18)

I don't know.

Jonathan Schanzer (53:21)

But I'm truly impressed. Look, I think two other just things that I would want to add to what is dry. I think what's driving Trump, I mean, one is the politics played well, right? Obama signed this disastrous deal. It was not good for the United States. It weakened us on the world stage. And he came in, I mean, you.

John Podhoretz (53:42)

Remember Trump, and Americans didn't like it.

Jonathan Schanzer (53:44)

They didn't like it. Right.

John Podhoretz (53:45)

65% of Americans opposed the JCPOA.

Jonathan Schanzer (53:48)

Yeah, yeah. And he saw that political moment and it was actually, that was one of the key talking points of his first, you know, successful run for president, that he actually harped on this as a disastrous deal. I don't think he read every page of the JCPOA as claimed. But still, you know, I mean, I think he, he was able to take advantage of this. The other thing that I think, you know, I think we just need to give a nod to it. Not that this is the dominant factor, but the Trump bibi bromance. And I understand that there's still some issues between them and they occasionally disagree or maybe more than occasionally, but I think they both sense that they can make history here and they have sensed that for the first term and the second term. That explains the bombing of the nuclear facilities. It explains Israel's coordination on day 61, after the 60 day deadline that they go in and they invade Iran. There is a certain amount of like mutual understanding between these two men who I think really want to go down as historic figures. And I think if they keep at it, they're well on their way.

John Podhoretz (54:58)

I just want to move quickly. And Jonathan, you will excuse, you will excuse us if we're in a position where we're talking about, you know, stuff you may not want to get into. But I want to talk about some of the mail that we got in the, we've gotten in the last 24 hours here at the podcast about our program yesterday in which we talked about the killing of Renee Good and our own interpretation of what was going on that led us to give the benefit of the doubt in some ways to the ICE agents who shot and killed her. And it's very interesting to me because we've gotten dozens of emails from people who are very strongly, very strongly objective to that perception and about it. What strikes me as interesting is that it is almost like reading very literate emails about your, the football team strategy that you are really angry about when it lost the game, or you think that the refs made a bad call or something like that, that people are watching these videos and they are, they are becoming forensic scientists saying, you see, the wheel was turned this way. There was one second he could, all he had to do was jump out of the way. And so why did he shoot? And we need to do this. And I, you know, if you think otherwise, then you're just a partisan hack. And I, you know, I like the podcast, but you're just a bunch of partisan hacks. And I'm really disgusted with you and all of that. And I just want to say with all of the goodwill in my heart, the hell with you, because there's nothing partisan about what I see and what, and what we have been talking about. You know, my understanding of what law enforcement, what, you know, the, the, the history of judicial rulings on law enforcement, the regulations involving how law enforcement acts when law enforcement people is under threat is a subject that I have been intimately a student of for 25 years or more, in part because of jobs that I've had that led me into this place. This is a very, very horrible, tragic case.

Seth Mandel (57:20)

Can I add something to that, John, which is that whatever the ICE agent saw, it's not what all these people are seeing on Twitter. He was not watching events unfold from a vantage point across the street, slowed down, paused, where you could see a wheel turn and make this inference or that inference. He had an entirely different experience of the event in some sense. It doesn't matter what you see now slowed down or paused or from another angle. The question is what he saw, what he, what, what informed his actions in that moment. And it was not watching A video on X.

Unidentified Female Panelist (58:15)

By the people who've complained or written sort of angry emails where they begin their timeline analysis. Because the thing that's important to note is that she should not have been where she was, even in her car, had she not budged and move the car at all in the first place. She was blocking federal law enforcement. She was doing it as an act of protest. And I think that some of the media accounts that are now trying to rewrite that narrative and say she was just dropping off her kid at school. Oh, she just happened to be there. No, she was there to protest. She was blocking law enforcement, blocking a street. And when asked to get out of her car and to respond to law enforcement, she made a different and unfortunately, fatally tragic choice for herself. So I think that's all the emails I've received start with, he's looking at this car. He should have jumped out of the way. That's not where the story unfortunately begins. It actually begins in the radicalization process that I'm still very curious about how she fell into that rabbit hole online and became the kind of person who would drive and block law enforcement.

John Podhoretz (59:14)

I think even more important as these videos emerge, you know, last night on cnn, the New York Times did this three angle study of what happened that seemed to suggest that, you know, the wheel was turning away from the officer and so he shouldn't have. And so they're blah, blah, blah. And that also was a timeline issue because what CNN showed last night was a video of her pulling her car over, somebody getting out of the car, and then her taking the car and turning it perpendicular to the street and sitting there for three minutes until the ICE agents came and said, please get out of your car. And then everything happened in seven seconds. All she had to do was get out of the car or not move or anything like that. She, as you say, made a different choice. But if you don't start. Forget even the radicalization stuff. If you don't start with the what the hell is she doing taking her minivan and turning it perpendicular to the street? Why is she.

Jonathan Schanzer (60:18)

Why?

John Podhoretz (60:18)

What is the purpose of that? The only purpose of that could have been to impede in some fashion, even though people could get around her on both sides, to impede the ICE efforts. Now you can say, that's bad, that's good. She shouldn't have impeded the ice. She was. That was noble. Impeding the ICE efforts because they're so evil. That's not the point. The point is that what the ICE agents knew was that Someone had pulled this car over perpendicular to the street. Something untoward was going on. They go over and say one of them puts. Somebody puts his hand on the, on the handle, and then she makes the choice to try to leave the scene.

Jonathan Schanzer (61:03)

That's it.

John Podhoretz (61:04)

So does he have a reasonable. In the space of six seconds, does he have a. All we know about law and law enforcement and positions like this is, does he have a re. Is the reasonable man standard say that he had a justified fear for his own safety or his own life? And I have almost no doubt in my mind I could be wrong, but I don't have any doubt based on the last two days that he had a reasonable fear. And that most juries, faced with the question of whether or not a policeman in a situation like that, or law in a situation like that, including many famous cases that people scream and yell about, like Breonna Taylor and others, that juries say, and this will never go before a jury, but juries and grand juries say we're not prosecuting because the lawyer for the policeman in question has made it clear that the law says that according to a reasonable standard, you are not. You do not have to risk your life or have someone drive into you with a car or shoot you in the head. Because, because, you know, people in the country think that law enforcement agents have magical powers to detain and stop people, you know, short of, you know, discharging a weapon, if there's, if they have to make a split second decision about whether or not they're going to live or die. So that is a deeply held. And I don't want to describe myself as learned or educated or anything like that, because that sounds vain. But this is 25 to 30 years of writing, thinking, reading about this, particularly in New York under Giuliani, where there were a lot of controversies about this. And I had to write about it daily for the New York Post editorial page, where I was its editor. And so I am not speaking out of my ass, and I do not appreciate the emails that I have been getting accusing me and us of somehow, you know, being partisans for Trump, because I don't really like that ICE is in these cities, to be honest. And I am not a supporter of this militarizing of, you know, law enforcement inside the United States or federal officers being on streets. It's not something that I think is really a great idea, in fact.

Unidentified Female Panelist (63:34)

But.

John Podhoretz (63:34)

We'Re talking about an individual case and an individual officer and an individual victim or, you know, or perpetrator or whatever. And you have to take what you're seeing there and not turn it into a moral pageant, because it's the opposite of a moral pageant. It's a confrontation between two people with a split second moment of choice about whether or not you're going to live or die. Jonathan Schanzer, thank you so much for joining us today and imparting us with your, you know, decades, your decades of wisdom on issues of Iran and the Middle East.

Jonathan Schanzer (64:12)

As always, a pleasure always.

John Podhoretz (64:14)

And for Seth, Christine and Abe, I'm John Pothorc. Keep the candle burning.