Raz Zimmt: Iran's new leadership and the coming escalation
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
Welcome to The Times of Israel's Lazar Focus. Each Friday, join host diplomatic correspondent Lazar Berman for a deep dive into what's behind the news that spins the globe.
The war in Iran has reached a new, somewhat odd, phase. After hammering the Islamic Republic for four weeks, US President Donald Trump dropped a bombshell announcement this week -- that he was in talks with Tehran over an end to the war.
Iran initially denied the talks, then acknowledged that there were contacts, and released a series of demands for the war to end.
Now, the US and Israel continue to strike Iran, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and Trump talks about Iran talks.
Raz Zimmt, Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies, joins Lazar to make sense of what is happening inside Iran, and where the war might go from here.
He explains who is running Iran, and why the country is moving in an even more hardline direction. Zimmt argues that Iran's motivation for building a nuclear weapon has gone up drastically, and Ali Khamenei's fatwa against one is no longer in place now that he is dead.
The regime shows no signs of cracking, Zimmt argues, though its military industries and capabilities have been badly degraded.
If talks with the US fail, he says, the war seems headed for further escalation. That may come in the form of an invasion of Kharg Island, which Zimmt says is the wrong way to force Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz.
Lazar Focus can be found on all podcast platforms. This episode was produced by Gabriella Jacobs and video edited by Yitzhak Ledee.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Laser Focus. |
| 0:05.5 | This is our fourth wartime episode of the podcast. |
| 0:09.9 | Would you believe it? |
| 0:11.0 | I'm Laser Berman. |
| 0:11.8 | I am your host. |
| 0:12.7 | Now, we are at a somewhat curious point in this war. |
| 0:16.0 | After the initial strikes, after taking out Ali Khomeina-I, some of the top leaders, after a lot of very important successes, |
| 0:24.5 | we've reached kind of a different phase of this war. Now, there's no question that U.S., that Israel is continuing to hit key Iranian sites, |
| 0:32.8 | whether it's military commanders, whether it's their arms industry. At the same time, we see that the Iranian regime, or at least their military, is still able to operate coherently. They're still able to fire. We're recording on Thursday afternoon. Today there's already been at least eight launches at Central Israel. There might even be more, God forbid, but we see that the Iranians are |
| 0:55.7 | able to control their fire. They're able to respond in a coherent fashion. We also, the big news |
| 1:02.2 | of this week saw that President Trump surprised a lot of us with this bombshell announcement on |
| 1:08.9 | Monday that he is engaged in talks. |
| 1:11.6 | This is what he says with the Iranian regime, or at least some members of the Iranian regime, |
| 1:16.6 | and he is talking to them about a total end to the war. |
| 1:20.6 | Now, this obviously sent the Israelis scrambling to come up with a reaction. |
| 1:24.6 | It took over seven hours for Prime Minister Netanyahu |
| 1:28.2 | to come up with a very short 30-second video responding to it. But now the focus is on, are these |
| 1:33.8 | talks going to happen? What are the conditions of the talks? Is there any chance of reaching an |
| 1:37.9 | agreement to end the war? What does it mean for the survival of the regime? And what does it |
| 1:42.1 | mean for Israel? To talk about all these things, I think we have the best person in Israel to discuss this with us, to walk us through it. I'm here with Dr. Raz Zimt. He is the director of the Iran and the Shiite Axis Research Program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. Welcome, Raz. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. |
| 2:01.4 | So before we get into this fascinating discussion, I'm sure, we're going to take a quick |
| 2:04.8 | break, and then we'll be back. |
... |
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