101: Will Trump finish the job in Iran? With Prof. Dan Schueftan
Ask Haviv Anything
Haviv Rettig Gur
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2026
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Trump says a deal may be coming to end the Iran war. Netanyahu says it could protect Israel’s interests. Iran’s regime says little that can be trusted. So what is really happening? Prof. Dan Schueftan returns to the podcast to help us step back from the daily headlines to ask the much bigger question: If this war ends now, who actually wins? And what’s at stake? From the Strait of Hormuz to the ideology of martyrdom, we ask whether free societies still have the nerve to confront movements built on destruction.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Habib Anything. We are very happy to have Dan Shifton back with the podcast. This is a pivot, a moment that is very dramatic. We don't quite know what it means. Trump announced that there might be a deal of some kind to end |
| 0:21.2 | the war. Netanyahu then said, we are recording on March 24th, Netanyahu then said that this |
| 0:28.7 | potential deal would protect Israeli interests. It's not clear if this is some kind of a maneuver by |
| 0:35.3 | Trump. We've seen complex maneuvers of this sort, |
| 0:42.2 | it might also be a way to actually end the war and to pull back. |
| 0:44.5 | And Trump may have concluded that the regime is too entrenched. |
| 0:49.7 | We have multiple episodes explaining why they're so entrenched, how they work, how they function, |
| 0:55.9 | what their ideological system is that enables them to, as they see it, martyr a great many of the leadership and still be standing and capable of controlling the country and leading |
| 1:01.4 | a war. |
| 1:02.4 | This would not be a war that ends just with airstrikes. |
| 1:05.1 | This was something that we discussed days before the war began. |
| 1:09.6 | That might be what Trump's conclusion is now, and he's looking to end the war. But he claims there's going to be a great deal that the Iranians are going to agree to that makes it possible. Netanyahu appears to be agreeing with him. On Netanyahu's side, does that mean that Netanyahu is agreeing with him because he actually thinks this is going to be okay, because Trump is going to get out of the Iranians who are |
| 1:27.7 | desperate to end the war, the kinds of things that we needed from them in order to make any deal |
| 1:32.4 | actually palatable. In other words, not a JCPOA with sunset provisions that would by now |
| 1:37.1 | have allowed them to build ballistic missiles and enrich uranium freely under the JCPOA rules, |
| 1:42.6 | but in fact something much, much more significant with the missiles, |
| 1:45.6 | with enrichment, et cetera, with the Strait of Hormuz. |
| 1:48.6 | We don't know is the short answer. |
| 1:50.6 | We don't know who's playing what game. |
| 1:52.3 | We don't know if the war is going to resume. |
| 1:54.4 | We're hearing out of the Gulf leaks to American press from Emirati and Saudi officials |
| 1:58.9 | talking about how they are inching toward joining the war. I don't know what that means. My Israeli instinct is to be a little bit sarcastic. Where have you been? What's going on? You know, if you believe it that this fight has to happen, you probably should be fighting it. If you don't, don't pretend. I don't know what these things all mean and where it's all going. We're going to talk |
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