Hello and welcome to another episode of Realpolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad.

Today we're going to talk about the possibility of a resumption of the war with Iran

and whether or not Trump will actually go ahead and do it.

Reminder, this is a live episode. Our apologies for the delay in starting, but it does mean on the plus side

that you can ask any questions that you want, and I'll be doing my best to answer your questions

either as they come in or at the end of the show, subject to assistance from Samson.

So we've been hearing some noise in Israeli media saying that a war with Iran is going to resume,

and I won't go through all of the headlines.

I'll focus instead on the most important person to say it, who is the director of the defense ministry in Israel,

so somebody who would be in the know.

And his view is to shift the blame on the Iranians, saying that they feel humiliated

and they're investing huge sums of money in accelerating their force buildup.

And indeed, all of the reporting on social media seems to sort of suggest this.

We're seeing shipments from Russia

coming into Iran. We saw the Iranian defense minister visiting China, presumably with the objective

of acquiring some air defense systems to make up for the fact that Iranian air defense

really underperformed quite badly during the June

conflict. But the mood in Israel suggests that there's another round coming. And if we were to look

at some of the other indicators that might tell us whether or not this is something that's going to

happen, it seems that the United States has reinforced the terminal high altitude air defense systems

that were deployed in Israel with four new launchers added to the six pre-existing ones.

So that's a pretty big increase.

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