You're listening to American Prestige Heads.

Here, as always, with my friend and comrade, Danny Bessner.

We're very pleased to welcome back to the program, one of our favorite and most frequent guests.

It's Spencer Ackerman.

He is the author of Rain of Terror.

You know him as the proprietor of the Forever Wars newsletter. He's columnist for Zateo,

all around good guy and good podcast guest. Spencer, thank you for coming back on the program.

Thanks you guys for having me. I think American prestige has been

doing just top-notch work during the Iran War. So I'm happy to contribute to that and honor to have been

asked. Well, thank you. We appreciate that. It is a great moment for just American prestige in general,

the principle of American prestige in this war.

So we're very excited to talk about it.

But I do want to start maybe with just some your general thoughts as we sit here

approaching two weeks into the Trump-Natanjahua war on Iran.

Oil prices are, I want to talk about this, actually, are jumping

up and down as Donald Trump continues to try to manipulate the market. And the Strait of Hormuz

may be closed. It doesn't seem like it's going too well. So I just want to get your general

thoughts as we sit here at this point.

Overall, I think this is one of the most foreseeable foreign policy disasters. It hurts because I would have previously said that was the war on terror. Certainly its manifestations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this is just so much

worse, even at, you know, a week and a half into it. One of the things that I really learned from

that I just found like really vivid was when Derek, you had Yarr on, and he was talking about how this is the first time since

World War II, where really the economic metropoles of the world are directly, like, held at

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