Hello and welcome to another episode of Realpolitik. I am your host, Fidaz Madad. Today we're going to be

talking a little bit about the Iran War, the war in Lebanon, and the buildup to a conflict with

Turkey on the back of what is going on in Lebanon. So it's going to be a bit of a long episode, I think, maybe. And some of the things

that we're going to cover, latest developments on the ground in Lebanon, where the negotiations

are between Israel and Iran, they're going nowhere, the trouble that Hezbollah is facing,

and why the Turks are probably going to end up backing

Hezbollah for a while at least against Israel but why that doesn't really solve very much for

them because they have become already the next Iran and how this could end up becoming a general widespread war in the eastern Mediterranean.

So it's a bunch of things that we should be covering and let's start.

The first thing is the U.S.-Iran negotiations and where these are.

And briefly, where they are right now is that

they're going nowhere. There has been a bunch of exchanges of texts between the Iranians and the

Americans. They've added their own proposals. They've gone back and forth. and all of the sticking issues that matter are still

there. Trump simply is in no position to make an agreement because any agreement would

essentially confirm Iran as a regional hegemon. And the reality is that if he lets the war end and the Iranians can still collect some fees

for passage through Hormuz and get back to exporting their oil, then they've won the war.

And the current proposals would do exactly that

while negotiations continue over the future status

of the enriched Iranian uranium.

And for the Iranians,

they also can't give up the enriched uranium

because the worst case scenario for them is to end up in a

...