This is John Batchel, conversation with colleague Jonathan Shenz,

the Executive Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Jonathan identifies, amidst all the talk of a peace plan for Gaza,

two capitals to watch that have separate agendas from peace.

That would be Iran, wounded and in retreat,

an anchor a powerful, ambitious,

and extremely successful not only in the Middle East, but across Africa, establishing its authority and in the Mediterranean basin, watching Tehran and Ankara as Jerusalem finds an end to the Gaza War.

More of this tonight.

Well, you can never be too bookish, John, and it's one of the things that I love about your program.

I think we need to acknowledge the fact that the Ottoman Empire has absolutely contributed to the mess of the map that we're

looking at today, the French involvement, the British involvement, the U.S. involvement, for that

matter. I mean, you've had a bunch of foreign powers that have tried to insert themselves

and to try to fix this conflict in different ways over the last century, all have failed.

What I think we need to be aware of right now is that there are two powers that I think

matter the most regionally.

One is Iran.

That is a power that is on the wane.

They have tried and apparently failed to conquer the region to create that Shiite crescent stretching from Iran into Iraq, into Syria, into Lebanon, into Israel.

Right now it looks like that Shiite crescent is fading.

It is only existing in small chunks.

And the Iranian star appears now not to be what we thought it would be.

However, at the same time, we see the resurgence of neo-Ottoman aspirations.

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