S8 Ep710: 7. ESCALATION AND IRAN’S REFUSAL TO NEGOTIATE. JONATHAN SCHANZER. Schanzer details the five-man collective governing Iran and their commitment to revolutionary martyrdom. He describes US strikes on infrastructure while questioning if Pakistan is acting as
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 8 April 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
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7. ESCALATION AND IRAN’S REFUSAL TO NEGOTIATE.JONATHAN SCHANZER. Schanzer details the five-man collective governing Iranand their commitment to revolutionary martyrdom. He describes US strikes on infrastructure while questioning if Pakistan is acting as a Chinese proxy. (7)
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel. I welcome my colleague and friend Jonathan Shanzer, Executive Director, Foundation for the |
| 0:21.8 | Defense of Democracies. The Iran War, the Strait of Hormuz. The understanding is escalation |
| 0:28.1 | is at hand. We've been watching it for weeks now from the first strike on the end of February. |
| 0:34.7 | The escalation turns on two or three issues that keep moving to the four |
| 0:39.5 | and then fall back. One certainly is the Strait of Hormuz in the worldwide supply chain. |
| 0:44.9 | Two is the Fissau material, said to be most recent reporting, 440 kilograms of fisson material |
| 0:51.8 | that is ready to build a bomb, many bombs, but it's buried in two or more |
| 0:57.3 | sites that were struck last summer. And three is, who's in charge? Who is it that right now |
| 1:03.5 | has the say-so to either move to a ceasefire or end the conflict to resolve it in some |
| 1:09.8 | diplomatic fashion. |
| 1:11.4 | Jonathan, a very good evening to you. |
| 1:12.8 | The first, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz. |
| 1:15.1 | I'm not going to settle that today, but it is itself a product of escalation. |
| 1:21.4 | Escalation is a formula that you apply to conflicts that do not resolve themselves with a victor early on or a victor |
| 1:30.4 | eventually. I would say that this contest certainly qualifies as escalatory. What are you concerned |
| 1:38.3 | about when you see escalation in front of you? What is your major worry? Good evening to you, Jonathan. |
| 1:43.3 | Good evening, John. My major worry is that we don't necessarily have an end state here. Escalation does not necessarily |
| 1:51.0 | lead to resolution. Escalation can lead to more escalation and more escalation after that. |
| 1:57.1 | And so what we could be watching right now with an enemy that refuses to capitulate, it refuses to surrender, they could be seeing themselves as waging a battle without end on behalf of a religious and revolutionary ideology that refuses to allow them to seed ground or to capitulate. |
| 2:21.2 | So what you could see is escalation after escalation. |
| 2:25.4 | This morning we saw U.S. strikes on Karg Island, the primary location for the export of some 90% of Iranian oil. We saw strikes on the railway |
| 2:38.0 | of Iran used by the Islamic Republic for both civilian and military purposes. Both, I think, |
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