Trump Says the War Is Ending. A Navy Commander Says It’s About to Escalate

Summary

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Podcast Summary: “Trump Says the War Is Ending. A Navy Commander Says It’s About to Escalate”

The Tara Palmeri Show
Host: Tara Palmeri
Guest: Ken Harbaugh (Former Navy pilot, recon mission commander over the Strait of Hormuz)
Originally aired: April 5, 2026

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Overview

In this urgent and incisive episode, Tara Palmeri and her guest, former Navy Commander Ken Harbaugh, dissect President Trump’s latest national address on the Iran conflict and dig into the reality behind official pronouncements. The conversation pulls back from headline optics, revealing mounting contradictions, lack of clear strategy, and the potential for dangerous escalation in the Gulf. Harbaugh brings the sobering perspective of a combat veteran with deep operational knowledge of the region, challenging administration talking points and explaining the complexities of asymmetric warfare, regional alliances, and American vulnerabilities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Analyzing Trump’s National Address

• Initial Reaction: Both Palmeri and Harbaugh express deep concern over the incoherence and lack of specifics in Trump’s speech, especially regarding the supposed imminent end to the Iran conflict.
• Absence of Strategy: Harbaugh argues the administration lacks rationale and planning, comparing the moment to previous US misadventures:
  • “What we are seeing from this administration is a total lack of a plan, which follows on the heels of a total lack of a rationale going into this.” — Ken Harbaugh [02:07]
• Impact on Military & Public: The guest describes the speech as “really alarming” for service members and their families—offering little reassurance or clarity about the road ahead.
  • “I just cannot imagine watching that performance last night thinking we have any idea what we’re doing as a country.” — Ken Harbaugh [02:30]

2. Hyperbole vs. Reality: “Mission Accomplished?”

• Many in government and military circles see a dangerous echo of the Iraq War’s “mission accomplished” moment, warning that early claims of victory ignore the long, grinding realities of asymmetric warfare.
• Harbaugh:
  • “I hope people in the Pentagon have stopped high-fiving each other about destroying Iran’s Navy and Air Force... Afghanistan didn’t even have a navy, and the US left Afghanistan with its tail between its legs. Iran is not going to fight this war on our terms.” [04:50]

3. Strait of Hormuz: More Vulnerable Than Portrayed

• Disrupting Oil Flows: Despite claims that Iran’s capabilities are destroyed, Harbaugh notes the Strait remains dangerous and easily disrupted. Small-scale tactics like mining and drone attacks threaten global commerce.
• US Options Limited:
  • “It is really easy to dump a mine, a seaborn mine, off of the back of a fishing vessel or a tugboat. And what are we going to do? Destroy every fishing vessel and tugboat in the Gulf?” [06:38]
• Reckless Promises: The notion that allies could quickly “flip the switch” and reopen the Strait is dismissed as fantasy.

4. Iran’s Asymmetric Edge — and US Vulnerabilities

• Drone Threat: “We are so far behind the eight ball when it comes to drone warfare. The Russians and the Iranians have been learning in Ukraine by the day.” [11:43]
• US has had to reverse-engineer adversary drones; still relies on costly missile interceptors versus cheap drones.
• Failure to learn from Ukrainian allies, who have excelled in counter-drone warfare, is attributed to Pentagon “arrogance.”
  • “They have tried time and again to reach out… Let us teach you how to do it. And we have said no.” [12:36]
• Force Protection: The loss of US aircraft and inability to secure bases underscores the real dangers.

5. Great Power Dynamics: Russia and China

• Russia-Iran Cooperation:
  • “Russia and Iran have operated hand in glove... we can all but guarantee that some of the targeting information... was offered by the Russians.” [11:11]
• China’s Calculations: China is watching and learning from US missteps, potentially preparing for its own moves in Taiwan or the Baltics.
  • Palmeri: “Here’s the new cover of the Economist: Xi saying, ‘Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.’” [15:24]
  • Harbaugh: “China is laughing... and it is learning from our failures in Iran.” [14:11, 15:38]

6. Ground Operations: Risks and Impracticality

• Seizing Kharg Island: The military logic behind holding oil infrastructure is deeply flawed and operationally risky.
• Securing Nuclear Material:
  • “There’s 460 kg of enriched uranium somewhere in Iran... air power does nothing to address that issue.” [19:25]
• Logistical Nightmares: Supplying a sustained operation in hostile territory is described as “really, really difficult to sustain.” [21:11]

7. American Leadership and Credibility

• Communication Breakdown: Allies are distancing themselves; the US is “begging for [allies] to come bail us out.” [09:53]
• Failure of Truthfulness:
  • “It is wild to me that our fact checker of the American administration is the Iranian administration.” [30:01]
• Petrodollar at Risk: The destabilization of the global oil trade could mark “an historically weak position” for the US if the dollar’s centrality is eroded. [23:37]

8. Escalation More Likely Than Resolution

• No Path to De-escalation: Harbaugh notes that the conflict is now beyond US control and warns of Iran’s still-unused “massive asymmetric capability.” As in the past, unpredictable, low-cost attacks could inflict large-scale damage:
  • “We are closer to something much bigger because it is now out of our control and the enemy gets a vote.” [32:01]
• Striking Analogy:
  • “The USS Cole... wasn’t a missile that blew a hole in it... It was a tugboat. And that’s what asymmetric warfare looks like.” [32:24]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Ken Harbaugh:

  • “The absence of facts and the presentation of lie after lie...” [02:18]
  • “Iran is not going to fight this war on our terms... They have a massive asymmetric advantage.” [04:44]
  • “We still don’t have a counter to it.” (Referring to asymmetric drone and mine warfare) [06:44]
  • “Taking the Strait would require the kind of leverage which... is the rationale for taking Kharg Island... That is going to be a very difficult task.” [09:53]
  • “The first mass casualty event inflicted upon Americans in this war was at the hands of a shahed drone, a $20,000 cheap plywood drone.” [13:08]
  • “China is laughing at America’s folly and it is learning.” [14:11]
  • “You cannot provoke regime change from the air. That requires boots on the ground.” [19:25]
  • “If the petrodollar turns into the petroyuan, if we give China that leverage... it puts America in an historically weak position.” [23:37]
  • “Victory would have been a JCPOA that was honored, that was enforced, and that had the democratic world behind it.” [24:43]
  • “We are closer to something much bigger because it is now out of our control and the enemy gets a vote.” [32:01]

• Tara Palmeri:

  • “It feels like a Mission Accomplished moment for those who are old enough to remember the Bush landing on the aircraft carrier...” [04:43]
  • “Every time Trump says there’s a ceasefire, I always retweet and say, ‘waiting for confirmation from the Ayatollah’, which is saying something...” [31:39]

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Important Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------| | 00:31 | Tara introduces Ken Harbaugh, setup of core topics | | 02:05 | Harbaugh critiques Trump’s address | | 03:34 | Hill/Republican reactions; “mission accomplished?” | | 06:01 | Harbaugh explains the reality of Strait’s vulnerability | | 09:53 | Feasibility & risks of taking Kharg Island | | 11:11 | Russia-Iran cooperation in drone warfare | | 12:27 | US lag in drone/counter-drone technology | | 14:11 | China watching and learning from US failures | | 15:24 | Economist “never interrupt your enemy” cover | | 19:25 | Trump’s “bomb them to the Stone Age” rhetoric debunked | | 21:11 | Logistical and strategic issues with possible ground operations | | 23:37 | End of petrodollar system and implications | | 24:43 | What would real victory look like? | | 26:22 | Diplomatic contacts bombed: How this sabotages negotiations | | 30:01 | Credibility crisis: Why Americans might trust Iranian media more than their own government | | 32:01 | Final outlook: escalation likely | | 33:24 | Asymmetric warfare: USS Cole analogy |

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Tone and Language

• Direct, urgent, unsparing: The conversation is candid, critical, and informed by personal experience, rejecting platitudes and official spin.
• Military realism: Harbaugh invokes both operational details and historical precedent.
• Political skepticism: Both host and guest scrutinize the political motivations and honesty of US leadership, with Tara’s journalistic edge in probing behind the scenes.

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Conclusion: Key Takeaways

• The administration’s narrative of imminent victory starkly contradicts dangerous on-the-ground realities and the nature of asymmetric warfare.
• US strategy in the Gulf is marked by overconfidence and a worrying lag in adaptability, especially in drone warfare.
• Geopolitical missteps risk not just local losses, but a weakening of global American influence—inviting escalation and emboldening rivals.
• The episode paints a sobering portrait: far from winding down, the Iran conflict looks poised to grow more volatile and unpredictable, as allies distance themselves and America’s adversaries test its resolve and vulnerabilities.

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Transcript

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[Tara Palmeri]

Hello and welcome to the Tara Palmeri show with the Ken Harbaugh of. Well, he, Ken is a former Navy pilot who actually did recon missions as a mission commander over the Strait of Hormuz. So he is going to give us all of the details about what is going on right now and, and what we can trust from President Trump. Following his address to the nation, Ken also released Drone Hunters of Kherson and was a co producer of a documentary film called Against All Enemies about domestic violent extremists. So, Ken, thanks so much for joining the show. Couldn't be better timing. I think a lot of us are still processing last night's address to the nation. I don't think we got a lot of answers. We don't know if President Trump is actually going to deploy troops on the ground. And the Strait of Hormuz, he basically said last night as soon as they want, the Europeans can use it as soon as we leave Iran, like it's no big deal, guys, flip the switch right back on. And I, I really would love to talk to you more about that. So here are just a few contradictions. He says the war is nearing completion, but he also said that the next two to three weeks will be, will, will include major escalation. So what does that contradict contradiction tell us about where this actually stands?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Well, first of all, thanks for having me, Tara. I think what we are seeing from this administration is a total lack of a plan, which follows on the heels of a total lack of a rationale going into this after, you know, plenty of opportunities to explain to the American people why we needed to do this. Every one of those opportunities missed. I thought last night would at least be an offering of some kind of explanation for what's in it for the United States. We got none of that. It was so much worse than I thought it would be. Not just the absence of facts and the presentation of lie after lie, but the, the affect and I'm Putting myself in the shoes of a soldier or a Marine or an airman or a sailor headed downrange right now, or a parent of one of those people heading into harm's way. And I just cannot imagine watching that performance last night thinking, thinking we have any idea what we're doing as a country? It was, was really alarming and should be setting off alarm bells all across Washington, all across the Pentagon, unfortunately. I suspect this morning that people surrounding the president are telling him he did a great job. And that's the most alarming thing. Every president needs someone with the integrity and the courage to be able to walk into the Oval Office and say, this is what could go wrong. I don't think President Trump has that person.

[Tara Palmeri]

So, you know, I've been checking in with Republicans on the Hill in close to the administration, you know, President Trump's allies to see what they were looking for from the speech. And we talked about it last night. I mean, we, we expected that he was going to say mission accomplished, right? And that everything's going well and that we're going to be out soon. But, you know, one of my sources described as rambling and incoherent and didn't outline goals for winding down, but they said, I think he did what, what we said, which was he would make the case that we won and he's going to finish the job. Another Republican, Hillsore said that, you know, pointed to the Dow Jones being down, the S P being down, and said, you know, there were no specifics. No one feels reassured. And the reports appear to be that there are going to be ground operations, seizing Kharg, putting troops around some of the sites with the uranium for a week or so so they can dig it out. But, like, is that even realistic? Can you just drop, you know, troops down? It feels like they're sitting ducks and they'll get. It feels so dangerous.

[Ken Harbaugh]

It feels like a Mission accomplished moment. For those who are old enough to remember the Bush landing on the aircraft carrier and that banner behind him during that speech. And look, I, I hope people in the Pentagon have stopped high fiving each other about destroying Iran's Navy and Air Force, because they need to be reminded that Iraq's Navy and Air Force lasted all of five minutes. And the war went on for years and years and years. Afghanistan didn't even have a navy, and the US Left Afghanistan with its tail between its legs. Iran is not going to fight this war on our terms. They're going to fight it on their terms. And this is page one of Sun Tzu's Art of War. Know your enemy. I think this Pentagon has an inability to understand that it doesn't control the battle space here the way it wants to. The Iranians have a massive asymmetric advantage, which is what the drone warfare and the advent of that new tech, technological approach to warfare is all about. And we still don't have an answer for it.

[Tara Palmeri]

Yeah, exactly. You know, it's interesting too, because he keeps saying, we've taken out Iran's capabilities, but if they can still disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, what does that say about how degraded they really are?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Well, they can still disrupt the Strait of Hormuz. They can still reach out and attack American assets in theater and American allies. We just lost an E3 Sentry, an AWAC 7, $100 million aircraft on the ramp in Saudi Arabia from an Iranian attack, likely supported with intel provided by the Russians. That's another matter. But the Iranians are not the, the, the first rule in warfare is that the enemy gets a vote, and the Iranians are showing that they still have capability. And when this morphs into the kind of asymmetric conflict that we ended up seeing in, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Iranians have a massive advantage. They haven't even mined the Strait yet. They have restricted access to the Strait simply with the threat from Bandar Abbas and the. The assets in the area. When they begin to mine the Strait, that becomes a almost insurmountable challenge. It is really easy to dump a mine, a seaborn mine, off of the back of a fishing vessel or a tugboat. And what are we going to do? Destroy every fishing vessel and tugboat in the Gulf? Of course not. They have the advantage in this domain, and we still don't have a counter to it.

[Tara Palmeri]

Yeah, you know, he. Again, he suggested that the Strait could just reopen or that allies could naturally. Yeah. Is that even realistic? Does he completely misunderstand how the Strait actually works? As I mentioned earlier, you were a mission commander who flew recon missions over the Strait. How does it work? Like, I'm confused.

[Ken Harbaugh]

Basically, you know, the real tragedy is that we have planned for this. I knew as a lieutenant 20 years ago that page one of the Iranian military's playbook was closed. The Strait of Hormuz. The military has probably a dozen different scenario plans for dealing with this, but again, you go back to an administration that doesn't have anyone in it who can walk into the Oval Office and lay out the worst case scenario, and you wind up in a situation where the Department of Defense is shocked that the Strait of Hormuz is closed or where. The President, when asked about all of these missiles landing in capitals across the Gulf, his response is, well, it all happened so fast. They are totally unprepared for what is happening on top of the lack of rationale for going into it. And they don't have a plan now for getting us out of it, other than saying it'll happen naturally. Which incidentally was the exact same language used when saying how Covid would end. Like, it doesn't work that way. We're dealing with laws of gravity here. You cannot open Pandora's box like we have in the Gulf and say it's just going to end naturally.

[Tara Palmeri]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, how could you realistically move oil through the Strait of Ramuz safely

[Ken Harbaugh]

with the Iranians permission? And I think that's where we're headed. Iran is going to come out of this with a deal far stronger than they they went into this with. They won't have a navy and an air force, but it turns out, as we're seeing right now, they don't need a navy and an air force to secure the Strait of Hormuz. And you know what? We had a deal with the JCPOA under Obama that restricted them in very severe effective ways, limited their ability to enrich uranium, actually forced them to surrender enriched uranium. If we get a deal half that good now, the deal that Donald Trump tore up because it happened to be an Obama deal, I think Trump is going to declare victory. I mean, the hypocrisy of it all is, it's almost unimaginable.

[Tara Palmeri]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, could we realistically take or secure the Strait? What would that require?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Taking the Strait would require the kind of leverage which I, I think is the rationale for taking Carg Island. Carg island doesn't actually control the Strait, but it's Iran's major oil export hu, hundreds of miles from the strait. But if we can control their main source of oil revenue, I think that the thinking is that then we can force them to open up the strait. To actually physically to force them to open up the strait would require securing the geography around it, including Bandar Abbas airfield, which I spent a lot of time as a mission commander surveilling and collecting intelligence on. And that is going to be a very difficult task. Actually, physically forcing the opening of the Strait of Hormuz is really, really tough. And it's why our allies want no part in it. We started this bar fight in a tough neighborhood without our friends behind us. And now we're begging for them to come bail us out. And I think they're wise not to.

[Tara Palmeri]

I can understand the bar fight analogy very well, actually. Ian Hamilton says, the thing that annoys me, Tara, is Russia is clearly helping IR target US forces. And Trump just believes that. And Trump believes that it's just the Ayatollah. Do you think that he's right about that?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Oh, yeah. I mean, Russia and Iran have operated hand in glove, not just in this theater, but in Ukraine as well. Remember, the main mode of drone attack for the Russians for the first phase of the war against Ukraine was shahed drones, Iranian made drones. Now those shaheds are being produced in Russian factories inside Russia. They work very closely together in terms of strategy, in terms of planning. And we can all but guarantee that some of the targeting information provided to the Iranians to attack US assets, including that base in Saudi Arabia, was offered by the, the Russians. And we're not, we're not catching up to that threat in any way. I think it is a damning indictment of our inability to match the threat, that we have actually had to reverse engineer Iranian drones to make our version of that, to be able to, to counter the Iranian drone threat. I mean, we are so far behind the eight ball when it comes to drone warfare. And the Russians and the Iranians have been, have been learning in Ukraine by the day.

[Tara Palmeri]

How, how are we so behind in drone warfare? Why?

[Ken Harbaugh]

If I had to boil it down to a, a single explanation, and it's a complicated issue, but if I had to boil it down to one, it's, it's arrogance. It's the hubris of the Pentagon and the Trump administration in particular, made all the worse by the fact that Ukraine has offered to help. They have tried time and again to reach out to the Americans and say, we're a drone superpower. We have been fighting and winning this drone war in, in Ukraine, fending off these Russian drones. Let us teach you how to do it. And we have said no. We have the most expensive military in the world, which turns out doesn't make it the best military in the world. The first mass casualty event inflicted upon Americans in this war was at the hands of a shahed drone, a $20,000 cheap plywood drone, maybe, you know, some composite material in there as well. But I've seen shaheds, I've seen, seen them flying overhead. I've seen them blowing up neighborhoods. They're not expensive weapons. And one of those shaheds got through every layer of our defenses. In the region, hit an American base in Kuwait that incidentally had no overhead protection and killed six Americans. The Ukrainians figured out years ago how to take those things down cheaply and at scale. And we're trying to do it with million dollar interceptors. I mean, think about the imbalance of that equation. Iran doesn't actually need its shaheds to hit their targets if they're soaking up million dollar American missiles for every $20,000 drone they're winning with every shahed they launch, regardless of whether they make it to the target.

[Tara Palmeri]

So these are all proxy wars obviously going on. What is China doing in the background right now?

[Ken Harbaugh]

China's laughing. China is laughing at America's folly and it is learning. It is learning from our failures in Iran. It is certainly learning from the Ukrainian battlefield. China has observers watching what is happening on that battlefield where America has, has held back. And China is leading the way in a lot of these areas. When it comes to drone warfare, you see a lot of Chinese parts in both Ukraine and in Russia that wind up at the front in this, this exchange of drones. I've seen them myself. China is learning all of the lessons that we should be learning in both Iran and Ukraine.

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[Ken Harbaugh]

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[Ken Harbaugh]

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[Ken Harbaugh]

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[Tara Palmeri]

Yeah, so here is, here's the new cover of the Economist. Here we've got Chi saying, never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. That is the COVID Yeah, that pretty much sums it all up, doesn't it?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Yeah, it's bad. It's bad. And that is the larger geopolitical ramification of all this. If you don't think Taiwan is implicated by our failures in the Gulf, if you don't think Taiwan is implicated by our failure to, to be there for Ukraine, you're kidding yourselves. Taiwan is definitely next in line, as are the, the, the Baltic states who know just how threatening Russia is because that's their neighbor and we're no, no longer the security guarantor that we used to be. Nobody can count on America's word, much less its defensive shield anymore.

[Tara Palmeri]

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[Tara Palmeri]

Thanks again, guys. So let's bring Ken back in and thanks for that minute from our sponsors. So Trump says he is going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. How credible is that? And what would that actually mean in practice?

[Ken Harbaugh]

First of all, it doesn't work even if you can achieve it. We bombed Afghanistan or claimed to have bombed Afghanistan back to the Stone Age and it did not work. You cannot provoke regime change from the air with those kinds of bombs. If anything, there's an argument that you actually entrench a power like the the IRGC because it becomes even more fanat. And who's to say that the new Ayatollah whose parents we killed, whose family we have destroyed, isn't more fanatical than the regime he is replacing? You cannot provoke regime change from the air. That requires boots on the ground. The other thing you can't do is secure nuclear material. There's 460 kg of enriched uranium somewhere in Iran right now and air power does nothing to address that issue. So I know it's, it's an easy go to option for a president like Donald Trump because it seems relatively low risk, but it opens that Pandora's box. And I think that is why you are seeing the movement of the Marine Expeditionary Units, the positioning of the 82nd Airborne. If you're going to do the things that he has claimed he is going to achieve in Iran, you need ground troops. There's no other way. And, and he's caught himself between a rock and a hard place here.

[Tara Palmeri]

Okay, so ground truths. Yeah, he didn't actually commit to that yesterday during his State of the. They addressed the nation. Excuse me, the State of the Union's not great. Addressed to the nation. So he's got to commit ground troops. I just, what does that look like? How long is that going to take? Can they, I, I like realistically just dig for uranium?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Well, I think there is an alternate pathway for the administration which is just to bug out and make it someone else's problem, which is equally irresponsible. But I wouldn't be surprised because Donald Trump has never cared about what his predecessors are going to inherit, much less what he is leaving the rest of the world in terms of his messes to clean up. So I think that is a possibility. As well, that he'll have opened this Pandora's box, set this region of the world ablaze, and that he will just bug out and leave it to them to clean up the mess. In some ways, that is a preferable option to boots on the ground because that introduces so many variables and who knows what the outcome of something like the takeover of Carg island would be. The Iranians might well blow up the infrastructure before we get it. And Karg island isn't some remote, unpopulated island that we can just pull our LSTs, our amphibious ships up to. It is very close to Iran, within striking distance of Iranian drones. It has something like 20,000 people on it. They will fight for it. And we can't get to it through the Strait of Hormuz because the Strait of Hormuz has been closed. So that assault is almost certainly going to have to be from the air with V22 Ospreys and other assets, maybe even the 82nd Airborne. That kind of thing is really, really difficult to sustain. A Marine Expeditionary Unit has maybe two weeks of supplies, which means we have to secure a supply train into an operation like that to keep those Marines alive. And I don't know how we do that with dramatically increasing the footprint. And we haven't even talked about what it takes to secure the thousand pounds of enriched uranium somewhere in Iran. I mean, it sounds like a lot. It's not. It's 20 guys with backpacks, right? You can disperse that really easily. How do we track it all down? Really, really difficult mission.

[Tara Palmeri]

Leaving says leaves the Strait as a tool toll booth. Iran wins. And what happens with the PETRA dollar Petrodollar? Excuse me?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Well, that's, I mean, that could be the, the biggest strategic blow here. If the petrodollar turns in the. Into the Petro one. If we give China that leverage after literally generations after the Post World War II consensus around the petrodollar, if that is blown up because of this war of choice, it puts America in, I mean, an historically weak position. And again, harken back to that cover to the Economist. Our enemies are laughing at us right now.

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[Tara Palmeri]

What could victory look like?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Ken, we've already. What could victory look like? Victory has to be minimizing the damage. At this point. Victory would have been a JCPOA that was honored, that was enforced, and that had the. The democratic world behind it. The JCPOA was the Obama deal that restricted Iran's ability to. To make a nuclear weapon, set them back years, and it was torn up. I hate to go here, but I think it's unavoidable at this point. It was torn up by Donald Trump because it had been negotiated by a black president. Donald Trump did not want Obama to get credit for the jcpoa, and that's why he tore it up. And we're in a position now where Iran will very likely get a deal even better than the jcpoa and Donald Trump will throw up his hands and declare victory, and we'll be left with Iran in full control of the Strait of Hormuz. That's the other thing about the, the situation in the Gulf right now. The control over the Strait was always a threat. It was a theory. It was this sword of Damocles that Iran hung over the region and said, we can do this if we want to. And everyone was thinking to themselves, can they really? Will they really? Donald Trump has given them the opportunity to prove now that they have a strategic weapon that is as powerful as a nuke. When you can control 20% of the world's oil supply, and when you're given the opportunity to actually demonstrate that you have a weapon of mass destruction.

[Tara Palmeri]

Wow. Okay, I want to show everyone a video. Abby's going to pull it up for us. She's our producer. It's some new reporting from this morning that while we are supposedly in diplomatic talks right now. Oh, Abby's asking what video. Hold on, let me tell her. So the, the Guardian is reporting that J.D. vance was. He was speaking to a senior Iranian official, considered one of the more reasonable, peaceful minded. And they were in back channel discussions about how this conflict could end. And all of a sudden, the residential building that he lives in was bombed. Unclear if he's alive. What kind of message does that send right now in the middle of this conflict?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Well, it undermines our ability to present ourselves as a good faith actor. Even if that conversation was happening in good faith, even if it was a real negotiation, who was going to take the risk of talking to J.D. vance? Now, when your signals are compromised, when a strike hits your compound, as I Understand it. We don't know if this was an American attack or. Or an Israeli attack, but if you're on the receiving end, does it really matter? You were on the phone with the Vice President of the United States and you got attacked. I think that that is a major disincentive to opening any kind of negotiation with the Americans, given the. The exposure that. That. That entails, and given the fact that. That you can't be sure that. That the Americans aren't. Aren't part of it. It is also another damning indictment of our inability to coordinate with our supposed allies in the region. The fact that. That the Americans and the Israelis, if it wasn't an Israeli attack, were. Were not coordinating as JD Vance was talking to a target is pretty humiliating.

[Tara Palmeri]

Yeah. Abby is going to find some of the pictures from the. The bombing. It's. It's quite startling. And, you know, they're saying it was a U.S. israel, you know, attack. Right. But doesn't it. Yeah, it's a missile strike. Seems like it's Israel, though. Right? If we're having conversations.

[Ken Harbaugh]

I mean, it would seem to me this is all speculation. I don't want to talk out of turn here, but even if it was an Israeli strike, not a US Strike, what does it say about our total lack of coordination and communication with our supposed partners in this, the Israelis, that they would kill one of the people JD Vance was in the process of talking to?

[Tara Palmeri]

Yeah. And obviously, J.D. vance is more of an isolationist. He would probably like to take a diplomatic route. It would help him politically in his future career. This is the former foreign minister in Iran, so he's not technically in the regime anymore, but, yeah, it's. It's quite striking. His name is Kamal Karazi, and he was injured. So.

[Ken Harbaugh]

Okay.

[Tara Palmeri]

I mean, maybe that means they can pick up talks again. But then again, why would you pick up talks after something like this happens?

[Ken Harbaugh]

Seems pretty risky.

[Tara Palmeri]

Yeah. You know, and how. How do you think it impacts the possibility of negotiations going forward?

[Ken Harbaugh]

I think we have to ask ourselves, do the Iranians want to negotiate? Every time the President has tried to calm the markets by saying negotiations are ongoing, the Iranians say, no, they're not. Which raises a number of issues, the biggest to me being the total lack of faith we can put in the words coming out of this administration. I mean, it is wild to me that our fact checker of the American administration, the American President, is the Iranian administration. I mean, think about the Iraq war and what it would have said, what it would have felt like if Every time George W. Bush said something that our fact checker was Saddam Hussein, that would have been insane at the time. Yet we're at the point now where Americans have as much of a reason to trust the Ayatollahs as they have to trust the Trump administration itself. That should shock everyone. The fact that this administration and this Pentagon is so unreliable, so untrustworthy that we have a better chance of learning the truth from Al Jazeera or from the Iranian media or from the Iranian government than we do from our own government. It feels like, it feels like new ground. I, I know governments and presidents have always lied. I'm, I'm no stranger to the five o' clock follies from Vietnam and, and the history of that kind of thing, but I think this administration takes it to a whole new level when the Iranians are actually more truthful in many cases than our own government.

[Tara Palmeri]

I know every time Trump says there's a ceasefire, I always retweet and say, waiting for confirmation from the Ayatollah, which is saying something right, or just adding allegedly in front of it. I know you have a hard out now, so I want to ask you one last question. In the next 60 seconds, are we closer to ending this conflict or are we closer to something much bigger?

[Ken Harbaugh]

We're closer to something much bigger. We are close to closer to something much bigger because it is now out of our control and the enemy gets a vote. And we haven't even seen the deployment of the massive asymmetric capability that the Iranians have. And I'll just offer one example as a metaphor for how this thing could go. The USS Cole, which admittedly was struck by an Al Qaeda affiliate, not an Iranian affiliate, but the USS Cole, and I say this as a, as a Navy vet, was a warship which with its picket defenses, had the most sophisticated anti missile system in the history of warfare. But it wasn't a missile that blew a hole in the side of the USS Cole in Yemen and killed 17 of my fellow navy sailors. It was a tugboat. And that's what asymmetric warfare looks like. The Iranians don't need a navy or an air force to inflict massive damage on the US and its allies in the region. You have a hundred thousand hardened IRGC fighters who are deeply motivated now to wreak havoc on the region and have weapon systems in the form of drones and other asymmetric weapons for which we have yet to develop a counter. I think that is coming.

[Tara Palmeri]

Wow. Well, on that note, thank you, Ken. Appreciate your time. And you can support both of us by hitting that subscribe button. If you are on Substack, please consider becoming paid subscribers to both of our shows. It's how you keep us going. And if you're on YouTube, hit that subscribe button as well. Share this with all your friends. Ken has invaluable information helping us decipher what they said, what they meant, what is real, what to expect, and can't. Thank you enough. And thank you for your service as always.

[Ken Harbaugh]

Thanks Tara. Good to be with you.

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