Hello and welcome to another episode of Realpolitik. I am your host, Firas Madad. And today we're going to be talking about the war in the Middle East again, which seems to be expanding and getting worse. And really there doesn't seem to be any kind of plan to resolve it. So let's start maybe with some of the things that Donald Trump

has been saying and to focus on that. He said on the 6th of March, there will be no deal with Iran

except unconditional surrender. After that and the selection of a

great and acceptable leader, we and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners will work

tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever.

Make Iran great again.

Asking for unconditional surrender in the first week of the war seems to be a little bit extreme,

and Trump seems to have gone on a tilt because the president of Iran did something which seems

to have been not agreed by the rest of the leadership.

He apologized to the countries in the region for Iran's attacks against them and said that

Iran would only be attacking countries that were allowing their territories to be used against

it, which is kind of understandable. That actually opened a brief window for diplomacy

that could have allowed some talks and some communications, but Trump, by Insta reacting,

closed that window because he said that Iran is being beat to hell, has apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors.

Iran is going to be the great loser of the Middle East, and this will be for many decades until they surrender or more likely completely

collapse. And it tends to be that when you threaten a country with total collapse and total

destruction, they don't like it very much. And here we have to sort of remind you of what we

said last week about Shia theology.

The entirety of the Shia identity is based on the supporters of Ali and his children,

the nephew and son-in-law of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, having failed to back him in the Battle of

Kerala in southern Iraq. And so for the Shia, their slogan is death over humiliation.

And what Trump seems to be offering them is either humiliation or death, and they tend to

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