Loading summary
Transcript87 lines
- [00:04]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of
- [00:14]
Jon Podhoritz
thirst the way of knowing which way
- [00:18]
John Podhoretz
it's going Hope for the best, Expect
- [00:21]
Jon Podhoritz
the worst, hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, March 23, 2026. I am Jon Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:38]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:39]
Jon Podhoritz
Washington Free Beacon editor, Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [00:43]
Eliana Johnson
Hi, John.
- [00:44]
Jon Podhoritz
And joining us today, our contributing editor, Pooh Ba at the foundation for Defense of Democracies. And our go to guy on what the hell is happening in the war, Jonathan Schanzer. Hi, Jonathan.
- [00:58]
Jonathan Schanzer
Hi, John.
- [01:00]
Jon Podhoritz
Everyone within the ambit of my voice should be aware that if you don't understand what the hell is happening in the war, you are not alone. Nobody knows what the hell is happening in the war. I think it's fair to say. My quick interpretation is this. Donald Trump decided to say, Iran, open the Strait of Hormuz in 48 hours or we will bomb all of your oil facilities everywhere. And then this morning announced that due to wonderfully productive talks, he has called off the raid on the Iran oil production facilities for five days and as Eliana noted just before we went on, has told CNBC that he's very optimistic about a deal. We have no evidence that these talks that he mentioned with Iran that have been so productive actually exist. This does appear to be a backdown from a kind of Hail Mary, you better do it or we'll kill you. The problem, of course, I think logically is that if Iran is pursuing the mullahs, mullahs, shall we pursue? Even if the heavens fall strategy, more destruction inside Iran would not necessarily be harmful to them because they don't care. They're in this. They're just trying to survive. And so they want to absorb all the blows they can somehow bring America to the point at which America will say, we're tired of this and we got to stop, and then they declare victory while they stand on top of their pile of rubble. Jonathan, would you say that that is a fair assessment of kind of conventional wisdom about Iran, that where they are now is drop more bombs on us, like if we just get out of this by not being ousted, we're going to say that this was a huge triumph for Allah and for the Shiite cause and against the west and all that?
- [03:19]
Jonathan Schanzer
That's about right. And of course, that's exactly what we've seen from all of the Islamic Republic's proxies. So every time Hamas has gotten shellacked in a war with Israel. They declare victory afterwards as they stand on rubble and say, we're still here. Hezbollah has done the same thing. The Houthis have done the same thing. And so, yes, that's exactly what the Islamic Republic is going to try to do. But here's the part where I remind you that when the fighting stops, the bombing, that's actually probably when phase two kicks in. And phase two is where the Mossad is providing weapons and communication and cash and intelligence to the people of Iran in an attempt to stoke some kind of uprising that would bring down the regiment. That's what happens after we've softened things up and destroyed a lot of that infrastructure. I think that's very likely what's going to happen next. So the Islamic Republic's leaders, whoever's left, they can come out and try to flex their muscles on tv, but I don't think they're going to have a lot of time to rest here. Because even if the US Stops bombing and even if the Israelis stop bombing, that doesn't mean that the assault on the Islamic Republic is going to end.
- [04:37]
Jon Podhoritz
And I'm glad I got another chance to talk to you about aura frames. I love aura frames. I'm looking at one right now, looking at pictures of my kids. They rotate every 30 seconds. Little film clips sometimes. I got photos on this frame from 25 years ago and from 25 minutes ago, pretty much. And I'm not the only enthusiast for aura frames. It is featured in 495 gift guides during 2024, selected three times as one of Oprah's favorite things. Named the number one digital picture frame by Wirecutter, the Strategist, Wired and PC Mag. And it is so easy to set up. It takes about two minutes. You basically send your photos through an app right into the frame. You can organize them, you can have them do split screens. You can have them play videos up to 30 seconds. And the photos look like real prints when they, when they freeze in place. They look like you are looking at a photograph, not like you're looking at a digital picture through a frame. So it is just a wonderful product. I'm thrilled by it. Named Number one by Wirecutter, Aura Frames takes the guesswork out of gifting shop now@auraframes.com or support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Look, I've spent decades arguing that ideas matter and I really believe that sleep does too. I suffer from sleep apnea and dealing with my sleep apnea has been one of the signal issues of my life. If you or someone you love suffers from mild sleep apnea or snoring, there's an FDA approved daytime therapy called Excite OSA available through GoodnightRx. And you need to hear about this. No masks, no equipment strapped to your face while you sleep, just 20 minutes a day, strengthening the muscles that keep your airway open. And in clinical studies, it cut apnea events nearly in half. Think of it as a workout for your tongue. Go to goodnightrx.com and use code pod at checkout for 25% off. That's goodnightrx.com code pod sleep better so you can argue better. Okay, there was a big story, I think the New York Times, it may be the Wall Street Journal. These are the only two outlets that are doing serious, substantive and extremely wrongheaded stories, in my opinion. But nonetheless, they're trying to dig into what's going on here in the war. And there was an intra Israel story about how the Mossad changed tactics from 2021, when Yossi Cohen was the head of the Mossad and resigned bitterly or was fired bitterly in a dispute with Netanyahu over how to pursue the policies toward Iran. And a new Mossad had David Barnea is now in charge. And it is Barnea who went to Netanyahu, according to this story, and said, we believe we see a way to support internal forces in Iran. If we go to war with them, they will rise up and they will take the regime down if we make, if we soften the ground sufficiently. And Bibi decided to believe Barnea, according to the story. They briefed the Americans, Trump got excited. Here they go, they start bombing and the regime seems to be holding. And Bibi's mad at Barnea. He yelled at him in a strategy meeting. None of this is confirmed. Sourcing is very weird in these stories. There's a lot of former officials that are sourced and there don't seem to be any quotes from live officials where you say an Israeli, you know, a senior Israeli official said x that none of that appears in these. But there is a clear effort to portray the Israeli strategy of bombing first killing off the regime's ability to respond domestically and then letting loose, letting the Iranian people loose to secure their future. This story was a direct assault on that plan. And I know that this is something that you at FDD and our friend Eli Lake and others have been investigating very seriously just how deep the Mossad's efforts are going here. So was that story just like a classic, eh? The Israelis screwed up and they believe their own propaganda and the Iranian regime is a lot stronger than it appears. Or
- [09:30]
Eliana Johnson
real quick, that story went up yesterday, March 22 in the New York Times for listeners who wanna go read it. And the headline is Israel thought it could spread spur rebellion inside Iran. That hasn't happened. And it's a quadruple byline investigative piece. Sorry, go ahead, John.
- [09:50]
Jonathan Schanzer
Yeah, yeah. You really needed four people to write that story. Yeah, I mean, you might as well just add two or three more and you know, you got a basketball team. So I mean, look, what I would say here is this. There are parts of that story that are 100% accurate. And somewhere around 2022, the Israelis made the decision that it was time to bring down the regime, that they, and we've all heard the way that this has been talked about in the media for a long time, that Israel was
- [10:18]
John Podhoretz
fighting the arms of the octopus and they weren't going for the head of the octopus. And there was a decision that it was time to change tactics, that we know for sure. Now the question of the strategy for
- [10:29]
Jonathan Schanzer
doing so and for trying to bring
- [10:31]
John Podhoretz
out the people of Iran, let me
- [10:33]
Jonathan Schanzer
just say in some ways it actually worked. We saw thousands, tens of thousands of people come out into the streets of Iran back in January. You might actually argue that they moved a little too quickly, that they couldn't wait, that their frustration was growing and that they maybe had an over inflated sense of their own capabilities or what they could do in terms of bringing down the regime. And they've suffered.
- [11:00]
Jon Podhoritz
You're referring to the Iranian protesters now.
- [11:03]
John Podhoretz
Correct.
- [11:05]
Jon Podhoritz
We're too optimistic that the regime could fall as a result of the protests that began on December 28th and then concluded on January 9th with the massacre of 30,000 people.
- [11:17]
Jonathan Schanzer
Thank you. Sometimes I need people to explain what's going on in my head, but yes, I mean, that's exactly what happened. And so we saw 32, 35,000 people slaughtered. And so fast forward two months in this war and now you've got the Israelis in the United States hammering the regime and reducing its capabilities, reducing its leadership, reducing its own confidence to continue to rule Iran. The question now is, will the people come out again? Are they willing to come out again
- [11:53]
John Podhoretz
because they've lost so many of, I'm assuming leaders, but also activists. And I think the demise of the Israeli plan for bringing out the people of Iran, I don't know, it may
- [12:07]
Jonathan Schanzer
be premature here, the declaration that this
- [12:09]
John Podhoretz
is a failed strategy by the New
- [12:11]
Jonathan Schanzer
York Times, by their basketball team of
- [12:14]
John Podhoretz
reporters, Feels a little silly to me because we don't know what happens in phase two. Yes, this was Barnea's plan. This was Bibi's plan. Bibi's not made any secret about it. He's been calling for the Iranian people
- [12:27]
Jonathan Schanzer
to come out into the streets.
- [12:29]
John Podhoretz
He just told them a couple of days ago in a video. It was a remarkable video. He said, we're watching from above. And it was a direct statement to them that, hey, we can maybe provide you with some close air support if you decide to come out. They've not done it yet. And here is the part where I think I just need to remind everybody,
- [12:48]
Jonathan Schanzer
the protest movement, the people of Iran, the population of Iran, they're a black box. They have been kept down by the regime for decades, right? 46 years of utter oppression. They have been turned against one another. They have been, I think, stripped of any sense of optimism about the future. And yet they keep coming out in ways that I think have surprised a lot of people. Large protests in 2009, protests again in, you know, 2018 and then 2022 and then just, you know, a couple of months ago. I'm still mildly optimistic here that we'll see more activity. The question is when. The question is at what point do they feel ready to do this and then when they are, are the Israelis going to give them the support? And again, I think that when the fighting stops, maybe even as we speak, money, weapons, intelligence, communication systems, I would be shocked if the Mossad is not providing those to the people of Iran, whoever is willing to take up this fight.
- [13:58]
Jon Podhoritz
The negativity of the coverage we could talk about, we've been talking about it for days. Maybe it just gets self reflexive. But the axiom of the coverage here is that America is failing to secure its goals in the war and that a it hasn't accepted, explained the goals and Trump hasn't explained to the American people why we're doing this and whatever the goals are not being secured. And there are two pieces of evidence to adduce this. The obviously the biggest one is trouble at the Strait of Hormuz. And the second is that Israel has now been hit. Two major mid range ballistic missiles evaded Israeli defenses and struck this weekend at two sites, one near, not that close to, but in the city of Dimona, which is the approximate location of the site of Israel's nuclear facilities. Though apparently they're actually nowhere near Dimona, but they're sort of called Dimona. And then the town of Arad in the south, extensive damage Done once again, miraculously, almost no death toll. Which is really startling because when we first heard about the Iraq hit, it was called a mass casualty event by the first reporters. And it really isn't. I mean, a lot of people were injured, but it's not what it appeared to be, which is like 100 people or more dead in one strike. But suddenly you get these articles again, New York Times like, Israel's missile fighting strategy under criticism. So Iran has fired 600 missiles at Israel with a success rate of 2%, actually making direct hits and then some extra trouble from shrapnel resulting from the interception of these missiles in a war, in an air War where 15 years ago there was no such defense period on the planet Earth. There were defense against small rockets. That was Iron Dome. But that you could actually shoot a missile with a missile that was, that is a mod. That is a new development. And Israel's success rate at protecting itself from this Iranian barrage is still astonishing. But we are now told that because of two hits, Israel's strategy of defending itself is failing. So that's where I get into the sort of the negativity thing. It's no wonder that people think the war is somehow going badly. No calculation on earth would say the war is going badly, except that it hasn't ended yet and that Trump may be over promised how quickly it would go. And there is this shipping problem which I do not mean to belittle, it is serious, but the threat there is an economic threat to a market. It is not a matter of how the actual goals and aims of the war, Israel and America, at the very least, totally degrading and disempowering the Iranian regime's offensive capabilities and maybe its ability to trigger its proxies, because it's also simultaneously, and we'll get with this with you with Jonathan, it's also simultaneously decided that time has come to end Hezbollah after 43 years on its border. Anyway. So
- [17:37]
Abe Greenwald
I think in listening to what you're describing, the media, the way they're approaching this war, it's a big giveaway, it's a big tell on their part that they are trying to attack the American and Israeli effort on every last front. They're trying to say everything's going wrong. Right? Trump didn't prepare for the Strait of Hormuz to be closed off. The Israeli air defense strategy isn't working. They're running low on missiles. The Israeli regime change strategy is a failure. It can't all be a failure, especially when none of it looks like a failure. So they are trying to chip away at every last aspect of the effort.
- [18:30]
Jonathan Schanzer
They are. And it really is just shameful to read some of this stuff. Look, you know, we already spoke about the regime change component of this,
- [18:44]
Jon Podhoritz
and
- [18:44]
Jonathan Schanzer
I think again, we're gonna have to find out what happens next. And I think that really is bothering the media. And I have to say, the lack of leaks from the Trump administration, I think is really what's driving everybody crazy here. The discipline that we see from the Trump team is killing the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and AP and Reuters. And they're all going crazy because they're not getting those little shreds of information that they are so used to getting. And you can feel that frustration building. I mean, the Trump administration has been remarkably disciplined and I think actually deserves an enormous amount of credit. I actually think those leaks that we see in other administrations and other wars have been very damaging to the national interest.
- [19:36]
John Podhoretz
So.
- [19:36]
Jonathan Schanzer
So I think that's number one. Now we should talk about a couple of these things. John mentioned the missiles that came in. Yes, they hit. Yes, they were direct hits. Yes, they caused a lot of damage. This is not abnormal in a war to have missiles penetrate air defenses. It doesn't mean that Iron Dome isn't working, which has, by the way, been used now to hit ballistic missiles, which is a remarkable development in Israeli missile defense. It used to be that they only were hitting those ballistic missiles with Arrow 3 interceptors. They're now using the short range interceptors, which cost a lot less money.
- [20:17]
John Podhoretz
And what it's doing is it's saving
- [20:20]
Jonathan Schanzer
some of their long range ballistic missile
- [20:22]
John Podhoretz
interceptors for another time. I'm actually really happy to see the way the system has been working.
- [20:29]
Jonathan Schanzer
A note on Dimona. Speaking to a very senior former Israeli official yesterday. There is virtually zero fear that the nuclear facility can be destroyed by an Iranian ballistic missile. So all the talk about how the sky's falling and now the Dimona is, you know, vulnerable to Iranian attack, don't buy it. There is no, I don't want to say that there is a zero chance. There is, of course, a non zero chance that they can hit something that is important to Israel. But the likelihood of Dimona being destroyed and having some kind of nuclear disaster is extremely low. And I don't think that's come through in any of the reporting. The other thing that I'll just note here is that the casualty number that John mentioned was high, but there's a reason why it was high. Most of the people who were injured. The vast majority of them chose not to go to shelter. Most of them chose not to go to shelter. And that is.
- [21:30]
Jon Podhoritz
This is an important.
- [21:32]
Jonathan Schanzer
Right.
- [21:33]
Jon Podhoritz
This is an important point. And Netanyahu said in response that the Israeli people could not yet get complacent because the threats are real. So that did happen. And much of the attacks on many of the injuries in Israel over the last three weeks either come from people not going into the shelters or actually injuring themselves on the way in or out of the shelters, not from Iranian strikes. The majority of injuries, even maybe the vast majority of injuries are from or to the shelter because you're running up and down stairs and old people trip on stairs, and I myself have been known to trip on stairs. So, like, that is a real thing. I don't want to turn this into a media bashing thing, even though you can't bash the media enough. But the. So let's move on tactically to the question of what Trump's responsibility here is to some degree for some of the bad news that he is getting or the bad coverage that he is getting. So this thing of the we're going to blow up everything. Oh, now we're not going to blow up everything. Coming the same weekend that he said he was glad that Robert Mueller was dead and that he was doing an executive order. So that the. I think it's the Army Navy game is the only game allowed to be played on a certain date. And getting weird and doing weird in the middle of a war, like, this is not a good communications strategy. And it looks inconstant. And this is where you start getting to the oh, my God. Like, can't he just hold himself in a little? I mean, he is who he is, but can he hold himself in a little bit like there.
- [23:36]
Abe Greenwald
But I think there's a worse aspect. I think the real damaging thing that he's doing is every time he comes out with a hyperbole. Look, we all think the war is going quite well for the US And Israel. But when he comes out and says, yeah, it's basically over, it's won already, we've already obliterated them. That, to me, is the problem. Because then the next day, Israel, Iran shoots at Diego Garcia or lands a missile strike somewhere, and then everyone gets to say, I thought you said everything was over. I thought you said you got all their weapons. I thought you said so to me, he should stop coming out with these premature yeah, we're basically done. We basically achieved our objectives. Those statements are the ones.
- [24:32]
Jonathan Schanzer
Let me actually address the Diego Garcia question for a minute, because I think this is actually crucial. John and I were talking about this yesterday, and I think people need to understand what happened here. The missile that was fired at Diego Garcia was a garden variety ballistic missile. Now, don't get me wrong, it's still the size of a bus and it's still scary looking as it hurtles across the sky to the Indian Ocean. But what they did is they actually reduced the warhead of a garden variety missile in order to put more fuel into the thing so that it could travel as far as it did. If it actually landed and made impact, the warhead would have been so small that it would not have done the kind of damage that the regime would have hoped it to do. And they can do this if they want to, but the threat is not what they would hope it to be. It's actually not as big of a threat. It was an attempt at messaging on the part of the Islamic Republic. They're trying to warn the Europeans not to join the Strait of Hormuz operation. And they're trying to show the Europeans that they can hit as far as Western Europe. That is what they're trying to message. And I'm thinking that the Europeans are probably scared as a result of what they saw. But let me just say this was not the threat that it was painted to be.
- [25:55]
John Podhoretz
That said, I agree with you that
- [25:57]
Jonathan Schanzer
I think Donald Trump's messaging has been scattershot. Is kind of par for the course for Donald Trump.
- [26:03]
John Podhoretz
But, you know, maybe one other thing
- [26:05]
Jonathan Schanzer
to note here is he may not
- [26:07]
John Podhoretz
be wrong that the regime has been degraded significantly. Its missiles are not as plentiful as they were. Their air defenses are down. Their ability to produce more missiles are down. Their leadership has been thinned out. Maybe these were the objectives of the war here, and maybe Donald Trump has reached them. His big problem is getting out of the Strait of Hormuz. He needs to solve that problem right now if he wants to get out of this war in one piece. And that is going to dog him until he figures out a solution. And I think over the next day or two, as Marines arrive in the theater, we're going to find out what that plan is. But it's too soon to declare whether he's failed at straight up Hormuz or not. It's a. It's a little bit of, you know, it's a black box right now.
- [26:56]
Jon Podhoritz
Look, the danger that has been caused by the Trump rhetoric is that he may be. It may be technically true that the War aims. If what you indicate is that the war aims are you take an enemy and you make the enemy completely. How would you describe this? Like, completely disempowered toward you, that you have degraded the enemy's capacity to respond against you in any meaningful way, that really did happen very fast. So in the extent that it's America versus Iran, America took Iran out as a combatant toward America, period. Maybe in the first week when he started saying that we've already succeeded. So this is where we get to what is the actual goal of the war? Because obviously it is tactically necessary to achieve supremacy over your enemy. But what then that's just. That's just creating conditions, battlefield conditions, that make you able to act and move at will. Israel, similarly, has had the same experience. There is no engagement with Israeli military assets. Like, for example, the Kiriya, which is the sort of the. The headquarters of the. Of the Israeli military during the war with Hamas. The Kiriya was nearly blown up by a Houthi drone, which landed, I think, 100ft or something like that from the Kira. It wasn't nearly blown up, but, I mean, it was nearly hit. Nothing like that has happened. You have this missile landing miles and miles from the Dimona nuclear reactor. That's not any kind of serious engagement, but they're not out of it in this sense. And I guess. And so they're not out of it, because Trump hasn't, for, I think, good reason, defined what he means by the end of the war. I don't think that's a bad thing in terms of the war itself. It's obviously a bad thing in terms of public diplomacy, meaning he doesn't want to come out and say, we only win if there's regime change, or we only win if the Straits of Hormuz are open or something like that, because then you establish a kind of pinhole through which you have to fit through in order to say we won. And all of these things might or might not happen. Obviously, the Strait of Hormuz will have to be in regular working order for us to say we're done with this mission. I mean, you can't leave world shipping in a state of crisis. We have to move on from that. But even that's not even the end of the war, per se. And so I think there was a confusion of what it is. If you're talking to a general, what they want to achieve, and what General Kane and Admiral Cooper probably said to him is, what we want to achieve is complete military supremacy over Iran. So that its forces pose absolutely no threat to any American. And they achieved that from the air and in the waters very fast. And so he's like, we won. But wars are political geopolitical events. They're not just like war games. And so that hasn't really happened yet. And so he's not lying, but he is. He's. And he's not even alighting. He's saying, we've done everything that we needed to do to make sure that we are doing whatever we want to do right now, including, by the way, if he wants to use ground forces to take Carg island, do we really think there's going to be an actual battle with regular Iranian military on the ground if an expeditionary force goes to Carg island after what the Iranian military has seen? That would seem to me to be very strange. Like, this is the moment at which, if you actually are facing, you know, if there's troops versus troops, and you're an Iranian troop and here come the Marines, you're like, I'm not. Sorry. I'm not shooting at those guys. I don't even know what magical machine. And they, of course, have the famous discombobulation device that we heard about. We don't even know what the hell it is, but the discombobulation device that completely paralyzed the Venezuelan protectors of Maduro. So, you know, we're in a position in which a lot of the war aims are very easily. You can see how they're going to be met over time. Hormuz will be opened and probably the regime will fall eventually, but it was never that the regime was going to fall forever. And the idea that the regime for now is holding fast. I don't want to sound like I'm just being a propagandist or a Pollyannish, but, like, what else was gonna happen? Everything is frozen in that country. People can't even, like, go out in the streets. Like, nobody knows what's running anything. When that happens, you turn the machine on and you let it run until the machine runs out of gas. But it's not like, oh, okay, well, I see we really need someone to run the Energy Department. So, you know, I'll get this guy from Parliament. He'll come in and run the energy. They're all, like, in bunkers or they're, like, in hiding, or they're crossing the Turkish border. You know, they're, like, running across the Turkish border. People in positions of authority. So, of course the regime is holding in that sense. You can't expect there to be a massive uprising in the middle of 5,000 or whatever it is, thousands of military strikes a day. That's not rational.
- [33:14]
Jonathan Schanzer
It's not rational. And I think maybe just to add to what you've just said, I mean, first let's just acknowledge that the leadership situation in Iran is essentially Weekend at Bernie's, right? We got Mujtaba Khamenei, who may be alive, may be dead, maybe severely injured, maybe not maybe in Russia, we don't know. But I mean, there's total chaos at the top of this that the guy can't even come out and make an appearance on Iranian tv. So there's a lot of confusion. The leadership itself, as you say, everybody's in bunkers. The one thing that they're able to do right now is to fire off more weapons. And in particular, they're able to fire off a lot of drones and short range rockets at the Gulf. And actually, I gotta tell you, this is the thing that to me is very interesting. You are going to have a situation when this war ends, eventually. When it does, the Gulf states are not going to forgive or forget what the Iranian regime has done. They've made permanent enemies. And so these Gulf states are going to do everything they can to bring down the regime, if it still survives, right?
- [34:22]
John Podhoretz
There's gonna be more rounds of this. You've got people with like bottomless pockets here where they can devote enormous amounts of money to, to bringing down the regime and to working with the United States and working with the Israelis. I just, I think you're probably right about the inevitability of the fall of the regime. The question for me is timeline. And, you know, here's the part where I think we all just need to remember that nobody has patience anymore. The American people are, you know, they're waiting for Donald Trump to bring down the regime tomorrow, right? That's supposed to be the big, you know, the big reveal. He gets to stand up and say, mission accomplished. I think what he's learned over time, right, he's watched other presidents do this. Never, never get up and say mission accomplished. Never pin yourself down to policies that you don't know if you could completely fulfill. He leaves himself always politically here at home as well as abroad, militarily, with maximum flexibility.
- [35:20]
Jonathan Schanzer
This is what Donald Trump does. I'm not surprised that people are frustrated with him, but I do think that at least right now, things are going well again. My big caveat is the Iranian people, I just don't know whether they're capable of coming out and organizing. That's the thing that concerns me. But you could still see a collapse of the regime even without the people of Iran organizing in some kind of, you know, like truly structured fashion where they come out and say we've declared some other new government, the regime could still implode. I mean, there's a lot of different options. We've got multiple forks in the road here as we try to analyze what could happen next.
- [36:00]
Jon Podhoritz
I guess the nightmare scenario is this, which was made, which was made possible by the two successful strikes, evasions of the Israeli protections in Irad and Dimona, and then maybe the Diego Garcia thing, although as you explain, that was a trade off between the value of the missile and the length at which the missile could fly. Which is, does Iran, somewhere hidden that we don't know about, have a second strike capability in this war? Meaning were the Iraq and Dabona strikes the beginning of a new assault with more powerful weapons than we've seen thus far that have the capacity to evade Israeli defenses and start causing real damage and not only to Israel, but to the Gulf states whom they've already made enemies? Or, and this is, it's not an either or, but I'm offering this as an either or or they got five or six or seven of these things, really good missiles. They don't have many. They got a couple. And this is it. Like they're going to fire them off this week. If they still have a couple more somewhere in a mountain, they're going to fire them off and see what happens. And then it really is game over for their air war, that they've spent their stuff. And according to both Admiral Cooper in an interview with Iran International and stuff, that Scott Besant, who is the Treasury Secretary but we assume is heavily briefed because he's of course dealing with the oil problem, that all our battle estimates are that they are very close to hitting rock bottom in terms of their air capabilities, that our effort to destroy their missile caches and their missile production facilities and maybe even their drone production have actually borne fruit and that they really don't have much left.
- [38:03]
Jonathan Schanzer
Here's what I've heard. And again, all this, I just need to say we need to caveat it because these estimates are constantly being revised. They are still a drone power. Iran is. They still have a lot of drones because they're flying drones that are cheap. They're like 50,000 bucks with Chinese motors and they can continue to attack their neighbors. They still have a lot of short range missiles and rockets. Those are not as hard to fire, shorter range stuff. You can kind of think about Hamas or Hezbollah, that they have a lot of these things and they can fire them for not long distances across the Persian Gulf and hit all of our allies around the region. The question about these longer range missiles, here's where the numbers start to really, you can feel the squeeze that there's something like 150 launchers left for the Islamic Republic. That's not a lot. And you need the launchers in order to get those missiles up in the air. And the missiles are probably somewhere around 6 or 700 total. And the problem for the regime is as soon as they start to pull these missiles out of those mountain silos,
- [39:09]
John Podhoretz
if as long as the weather's clear,
- [39:11]
Jonathan Schanzer
the Israelis find them, the Americans find them and destroy them. And so the regime is having, they're
- [39:18]
John Podhoretz
praying for bad weather. This is like, this is like, I mean, they're praying to God that there's more clouds, right, and more fog and more difficulty for the visibility of the American and Israeli fighter pilots because that's how this stuff is getting destroyed. But you can get a sense of the desperation just in how I've just described it here. It is extremely difficult operating environment for the Islamic Republic right now. And yeah, the walls are closing in on them. They feel it, they know it. And you get a sense, the Israelis actually, I mean, I heard somebody tell me this the other day that of course nobody likes to see the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, but from the Israeli perspective, the longer it continues and the more that we're kind of at a stalemate for at least another couple of days, this affords the Israelis more time to destroy those missiles. And you can see the missile arsenal drop further as long as this thing goes on. Nobody likes the stock market prices and the oil prices and the natural gas prices. But just imagine the trade off for a couple of days at least from a war fighter's perspective, you get a few more days of knocking out those arsenals and reducing the, the regime further to capabilities that, you know, we haven't seen them at in a very long time.
- [40:35]
Abe Greenwald
Jonathan, I have a question about another reported challenge for the US and Israel here. There are these reports that Iran has gone to this, the military has gone to this decentralized strategy where these sort of self contained units are spread, spread out across Iran and the individual commanders decide when to fire from where on their own, so they're sort of harder to take out in one fell swoop. How much of a handle is it? Do you understand, the US and or Israel to have on this. And how big of a problem is it going after these supposed individual sort of military cells?
- [41:29]
Jonathan Schanzer
Look, I've seen those reports, and I think the first thing to understand is that this is exactly what Iran built when it helped Hamas and Hezbollah create their command structures. In other words, you know, the Israelis had gotten a good handle on Hamas back in the 1990s, and they really began to pick apart the leadership of Hamas. And so they created this flat structure where they had, you know, decentralized cells across the west bank and the Gaza Strip, and the leaders themselves were underground and hard to find. So, you know, he had a few people who were directing traffic, and then they really empowered these cells to operate independently. Hezbollah has operated largely the same way for very similar reasons. And so it stands to reason that the Islamic Republic would do the same thing. If this was their strategy when their proxies were coming under severe attack, this is what they should do as well. The problem or the difference, I think, for the Islamic Republic is they still have a country they're trying to run. And so they need to have some kind of command and control structure for the everyday running of the country, for the repression apparatus, for. For the construction of weapons, for the movement of their military materiel from one site to another. The logistics necessary for a country as large as Iran makes all of this exceedingly difficult. So, yeah, I think you probably have, you know, missile commands and rocket commands and drone commands that may be operating independently. But don't forget, the government still. Still needs to try to function as much as it can under these strange circumstances. And I think that probably does represent the Achilles heel of the regime right now.
- [43:21]
Eliana Johnson
John, do you think that the US Begins escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz? And if not, how do you think that situation resolves itself? And we're seeing reports that thousands of more Marines are headed to the region. Do you think the Marines take Carg Island? And how do you think this. That. That phase one of these military operations actually do wind down?
- [43:54]
Jonathan Schanzer
Yeah, I mean, look, you're asking all the right questions to the wrong guy. I'm not a military guy, and so I can't tell you exactly what the strategy is going to be.
- [44:03]
Jon Podhoritz
What.
- [44:03]
Jonathan Schanzer
What we know right now is that there are 5,000 Marines that are going to be in theater, and the total number of military personnel is 50,000, give or take. And that's not something that's going to sit well with the President's or part of the President's base. The extra $200 billion that apparently is needed to fight this war also not sitting well with the President's base. And so the idea that we would put naval assets in the line of fire from, you know, Iranian missile crews, you know, the surface to sea missiles that they can fire, the Yakhant variant, is the thing that I keep hearing about that everybody's afraid of. The Hezbollah used that against an Israeli ship about 20 years ago with really deadly effect. And this is a tighter environment, right? This is a really narrow area that ships would have to go through. You know, you get a sense that they would be extremely vulnerable. And so you can feel the tension between the desire to win on the one hand and the risks posed to the President politically right now. And so if you ask me, the answer is, I don't know. There are a lot of people who are true experts in this space who say that eventually we have to do this in the Strait of Hormuz, that there will be no choice. I think they're probably right. But I'd like to see if we can solve this separately through maybe special forces operations. 5,000 marines can do a lot of damage to this regime. And maybe what they can do is they can clear out that entire area on the ground and push back to a security zone. Let's say that enables ships to go through without getting harassed by Iranian forces. But I've got a lot of questions and I don't have a lot of answers yet again. I mean, just. Just state. I'll state it clearly. The President has not tipped his hand specifically about what he wants to do. The people around him have maintained discipline. They've kept everything close to the vest. And I think that's good right now.
- [46:09]
John Podhoretz
You don't want to tell the Iranians
- [46:10]
Jonathan Schanzer
what you're going to do and then
- [46:12]
John Podhoretz
have them prepare for a plan that would undermine what we're trying to achieve in the region.
- [46:19]
Jon Podhoritz
I think it's important to note that the political problems for the President domestically are very peculiar because you mentioned things that won't sit well with the President's base. The fact is that the polling is showing that if you consider the President's base being the, you know, the entirety of the people who voted for him in 2024, more than 80% of them are reacting favorably to the war and are supportive of the war. 84. 85%. Something like that. So there is this rump that is unbelievably megaphoned by the woke. Right, and the podcasters and the entertainment wing. As Noel Rothman called it of the Republican Party who are punching well above their weight in terms of expressions of opinion because of course they're also useful to the anti war forces among the Never Trumpers and the mainstream media and the left. And so there is a kind of weird way in which they're getting koshered for their vile anti Semitism and various other things so that they can be used as a cudgel to beat Trump with on the idea that he's lost his base. So I don't think he's lost his base. And the polling is weird, is really, really weird. As Noah Rothman points out in the piece in NR Today, which is that the public is 43 to 57 opposed, but a majority support the idea of disarming Iran and taking out their nuclear program and opening the Strait of Hormuz and winning. So it's like they don't like the war, but they like the war aims or they like the possibility of the war ending on a positive note or something like that. I don't think if you were looking at this as a political strategy, you would say, no, I would really like 60% support for what I'm doing. That's what I want. That's what American military adventurism of a certain kind usually gets from the American public. That's not gonna happen. Trump is never gonna get that. But what happened to George W. Bush as he melted down from 2007 to 2009 was that he really did lose people who had voted for him in 2004 to the extent that after, by the middle of 2008 he was polling at 30% or something like that. Meaning that, I don't know, 25 to 30% of the people who had voted for him now viewed him unfavorably. That doesn't seem to be happening. Eliana. I wanna go back to the media cuz I can't help myself. And there was a story I really wanted to talk to you about, specifically published on Saturday in the Wall Street Journal, because my jaw dropped at the assertions in this piece without proof. And it was the lead piece of the second most important news organization in the English language, the Wall Street Journal. And the headline of the piece was Iran Believes it's Winning and Wants a Steep Price to End the War. By Yaroslav Trofimov, who has been a foreign correspondent for the journal for like 25 years. And though I do not believe is particularly anything like an Iran expert, and you know, his last work over the last couple of years has been based in and about Ukraine. So with a Dateline of Dubai, his story begins like this. Three weeks into the war, the Iranian regime is signaling that it believes it is winning and has the power to impose a settlement on Washington that entrenches Tehran's dominance of Middle east energy resources for decades to come. This attitude may prove to be a dangerous misreading, but Trump and Netanyahu have given mixed signals on how long the war will go on. Netanyahu said Thursday the war would end a lot faster than people think. Trump said this week the US Would wrap up the conflict in the near future. The problem, Trofimov writes, is Iran also has a say in when the guns fall silent. And for now, it seems to think time works to its benefit. Okay, I'm reading this to you because I've read this article five times. Nowhere in here is there a shred of adduced fact based on sources inside the regime. Anything that people are saying. This is a guess. I sort of asked, I asked Jonathan about it at the top of the show, about whether or not Iran thinks that if it can just stand on top of a pile of rubble without the mullahs, that they will say that they have won. But they literally quote like an assistant spokesman for the I'm trying to find the site here. Like the one oh Expediency council member Mohamed Mokbair, an advisor to the supreme leader on economic affairs, told Iran's mayor news agency Iran will turn its position from a sanctioned country to an enhanced power in the region and the world. Jonathan, have you heard of Mohammad Makhber? Cuz I think that to me this is like quoting, you know, I don't know, Ari Fleischer or something like that. Like, this is not a voice of the regime. This is not, you know, Khamenei coming out of his coma to inform everyone that we will win like that. That is literally the only evidence from inside the regime that Iran thinks it's winning.
- [51:51]
Eliana Johnson
Did they get a quote from the cardboard cut out of Khamenei Jr. Yeah, yeah. You know what's amazing is that, is that three years ago Iran was a regional power and could project force in the region. And it was Iran's dangerous misreading of the situation, dangerous miscalculations that have led it to be essentially defanged in the Middle East. Its proxies have been destroyed by Israel. Excuse me, its proxies have been destroyed by Israel. In the wake of October 7, it is obviously dangerously misread Trump in that its nuclear infrastructure spin attacked in Operation Midnight Hammer in June, and it thought it could string him along in negotiations. And now its military power is being obliterated in this war. And that, that's the story that's not being written is that Iran was a major regional power three years ago, and it's not any longer. And that's essentially a result of Trump's alliance with Israel.
- [53:17]
Jon Podhoritz
But this tone of the Yaroslav Trofimov piece, which is, Iran thinks it's winning the war, and it's written, there are four paragraphs in which the only sort of, like, note of hesitancy is maybe they're miscalculating. Not. I don't actually know whether Iran thinks it's winning the war. There are pieces of evidence that might suggest that Iran thinks it's winning the war. No. No qualification. The story says Iran thinks it's winning the war. So can you hate the media enough, is what I'm saying.
- [53:52]
Eliana Johnson
Let me just say it's run by a bunch of nuts, you know, who may think things that are insane.
- [54:00]
Jon Podhoritz
But this is the Wall Street Journal. This is like the. This is. This is the gold. This is a gold standard paper that supposedly isn't, you know, like. Yeah, okay.
- [54:10]
Jonathan Schanzer
Please, Jonathan, I need to say something. Yaroslav, he's a good reporter. I've actually talked to him a bunch about the Middle east over the course of a number of years, and I think he's had a lot of good scoops and a lot of good pieces over the years. This one, I gotta say, left me wanting for reasons that I think we've all described. But I just need to reinforce something here. The discipline from the Trump administration on what they've put out, what they've shared with the media, it has been very little. The stuff that we see from, like, Hegseth, you see more like, you know, flexing and sort of like Duncan on the other side, and much less information about what it is that we're doing and how we plan to do it and what our strategy is going to be. And so what's happened is, in my view, the media has no idea how this war is being fought, what the strategy is, the for victory. They're picking up little scraps here and there. It's not like Bibi's coming out and sharing information. And by the way, when you do see really good stuff coming out of the Israeli media about what's getting done, it is never picked up in the American media. I think it's actually one of the biggest blind spots of our. Of our journalism here in the United States that they're not following the Israeli media closely because so much is revealed. It's a huge source of mine, and they're not using it. They're not reporting it because they think they're using, I don't know, Zionist propaganda. What they don't understand is that the Israelis are. They have some of the most unbelievably
- [55:40]
John Podhoretz
dogged reporters who are willing to reveal
- [55:42]
Jonathan Schanzer
state secrets for the sake of getting a scoop.
- [55:45]
John Podhoretz
And they don't care what Bibi thinks.
- [55:47]
Jonathan Schanzer
They're just going to do it anyway.
- [55:49]
John Podhoretz
But I think the bottom line is I think our media is operating in a bit of a vacuum. I think our folks don't understand what's happening in the region.
- [55:56]
Eliana Johnson
They.
- [55:56]
John Podhoretz
They're not hearing enough from the White House, they're not hearing enough from the Pentagon, they're not looking at sources in the region. And so they're kind of flying blind right now and putting out stuff like this, which kind of feels like they're just wrapping up regime propaganda and putting it out there as news. So, yeah, we've got a big problem here. But I don't think that it's Yaroslav's like, you know, evil intention here. I think it's like everybody seems to be flying blind.
- [56:24]
Jon Podhoritz
I mean, I think it's his editor's
- [56:26]
Eliana Johnson
I just have a general posture of giving maximum benefit of the doubt toward our enemies, whoever they are, and minimum benefit of the doubt toward the Trump administration and our allies. When our allies, Israel, which in the
- [56:42]
Jon Podhoritz
end is why the only thing that matters here is victory, all of this will be forgotten. Whatever happened in the course of this war, in terms of what the domestic conversation was like is meaningless. What we are talking about here will go down the rabbit hole of history. Or is birdcage liner virtual birdcage liner. That will have no meaning. What matters here is that victory is secured. I still think in the end, ultimately we will not be able historically to say that victory has been secured without the regime, without the mullahs falling. But I don't think that that is a necessary precondition of the conclusion of the war. We don't need Appomattox at the conclusion of this war. We don't need the ending of the Confederacy as an entity to say that this war is won. That is not necessary. I do think it may be necessary in the year that follows, and particularly if the Israelis have the stick to itiveness to do what Jonathan is talking about, which is that while the United States says we have ended Iran's ability to project power, to control the oil markets, to have a nuclear program, to possess nuclear materials, which we are going to seize when we have the ability to do so physically. Because they're also going to tell us where they are. That might be the Appomattox Treaty. You tell us where they are, we're going to go dig and we're going to degrade them, and then we're going to bring them out, and we're going to show everybody that we have them. That might be the end of the war. The secondary stage has got to be that the regime that we fought no longer exists. But that, again, is a political geopolitical event, not necessarily a military battlefield event. That will take some time. And without that. So Trump should ignore us. Trump should not pay attention to Trofimov. Trump should not pay attention to David Sanger. Trump should not pay attention to us. He should just keep his mind on the idea that his presidency will be a failure, and he will be regarded in history as a failure if he does not succeed in the aim of unambiguously winning this conflict. And so if the statements over the last hour or so where he's like, we've had really good talks and Witkoff and Kushner are having good talks, and there's a lot of good talks, if they are not simply designed, which I think they might be, to relieve pressure on the oil markets. And there's been, like, a $30 decline in the cost of Butler Crude over the last hour because Trump pulled back from his threat to bomb all the oil facilities. So he's released a little pressure from that market. From this question of where crude is selling and the panic that that might or might not be causing, I got no problem with that. There are people that I'm looking at on Twitter saying, like, this is market manipulation. Like, he announced it, then he pulls it back, then the market goes down. And so he can say, I brought the oil market prices down and you can stop yelling at me. And if he did that, good, that's fine with me. Like, the market, oil price is itself part of the propagandistic effort against the war is to say, you see, you screwed up. Oh, this is an oil shock. Like, there was never any such oil shock. And you've heard that, by the way. People have been saying that this is the worst oil shock in history. And I want to pull my hair out, because I'm going to conclude by telling this story, which is that in 1973 and in 1979, there was an embargo of oil shipments into the United States by the entirety of OPEC in response to the Yom Kippur War. The west did not get oil from the Middle east by the choice of opec, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The price of a gallon of oil, which in the United states was around 30 cents a gallon, quintupled in a month and has never gone down since. Really like it reached a new level and stayed there even after the oil embargo was over and when oil had to be rationed, which happened twice in 73 and in 79 and 80. I lived on 105th and West End in New York City. On 96th and West End, half a mile away. There was one gas station, a mobile station, which is still there. Oil was rationed by license plate number. If you had an odd number you got gas Monday, Wednesday and Friday and Sunday. And if you had an even number you got gas Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. And for months the lineup of cars to get into that gas station, to get gas came up to my apartment on the corner of 105th, half a mile away in Manhattan. Double parked cars in a line taking two hours to get gas. The west went into a huge recession. The 1970s were dominated by the oil shock. That's an oil shock. Don't let them tell you that we are suffering an oil shock. It's conceivable that, that if something catastrophic happens in the strait, we will have a serious oil shock that lasts several months. There's nothing like that. There are market gyrations as a result of world instability. This happens every four or five years. That oil has some kind of a huge rise. Obviously this is a war, it's a big deal. Stuff can happen, all of that. But we are already being told that something world historical has happened when those of us who are over the age of 60 have a very vivid memory of what it was like to live through an oil shock. And this is not that gas is more expensive. That's bad. I'm really sorry for people who have to spend 20% more when they fill up their tank than they had to three weeks ago. That stinks and it's terrible. And efforts should be made to make sure that that doesn't happen. Which actually the administration has been making by trying to ensure that there is more oil available, including with this sort of liberation of the Iranian oil, just to flood the market with oil so that the prices don't go up. But don't let them tell you that we are in the middle of an unprecedented threat to the world economy from a threat to the oil supply. It is not true. It is not only not unprecedented, it is not even true, because we in 1973 were importing 50% of our oil, mostly from the Middle east, and now we are a net oil exporter. And as Trump says, we, the United States, get 1% of our oil that goes through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, this is a worldwide market, so prices go up here the way they go everywhere else. It's not like we're isolated and insulated from it because we have domestic oil production of this unprecedented level. But just don't let them con you. Like, be of better cheer. I know it feels hard to be of good cheer. We're at war. It's serious.
- [64:35]
John Podhoretz
Da, da.
- [64:37]
Jon Podhoritz
You know, there's a horrible missile strike in Israel. Don't let them wear you down and depress you and make you think that everything that's happening is terrible. It just isn't. It just isn't. And my friend Jonathan Schanzer must leave, and we've been going on too long. So, Jonathan Schanzer, thank you so much as ever. We will be back to you, you know, next time we're nervous. Pleasure. And for Abe. Okay. It's great. And for Abe and Eliana, John Pot Horiz. Keep the candle burning.