Hello and welcome to another episode of Realpolitik.

I am your host, Firas Madad.

What's been going on? Has anything interesting happened?

Well, very unfortunately, it seems that something too interesting has happened.

My condolences to the nothing ever happens crowd.

I'm very sorry for your losses.

And now we're in the middle of a regional war in the Middle East,

where the Iranians have decided that they are going to take the energy,

Samson, option, in order to force the United States and Israel to back down.

This is a bit of a disaster, shall we say, for the rest of the world,

because the Americans don't really have a strategy.

To the best of their ability to explain it, the Americans have been saying that what they're trying to do is on the tactical level, destroy the Iranian missile program, destroy the Iranian nuclear program, and destroy the Iranian Navy.

And on the strategic level, Trump has been saying that maybe the military will decide to defect, or maybe there

is going to be a change in regime.

And Pete Texath is saying, we're not after a regime change war, but the regime has changed,

because obviously they killed the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, who was, for all of his many, many faults, an excellent

poster on X. Let's go through the American strategy and break it down into pieces. When it comes

to the nuclear program, there's a reason this damn thing is built under massive mountains

that are not penetrable to aerial attack.

The Americans already tried to destroy the nuclear program.

Trump said that it was absolutely obliterated, that it was erased, et cetera, et cetera,

and that everybody who was saying otherwise is spreading fake news.

...