Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the bulwark.

And I'm Mark Hurtling from the Bullwork, and we are just honored to have our good friend Tom Nichols back with today. What are we going to talk about, though? There's not a whole lot to discuss. I don't know. Anything been going on? I haven't watched news this morning. Okay, so I'm going to lay out a bit of an ambitious agenda for us. We're recording on Wednesday afternoon. and people probably won't see this until Thursday.

So things will probably happen between now and when people actually see this video. But here's what we're going to try to cover. First, we've got to talk about the, is it a ceasefire between the United States and Iran and question mark, who else?

We're going to talk all about what the strategic outcomes of the war have been so far.

Will the ceasefire hold?

I think we have to talk about Caroline Levitt's press conference at the White House today,

partially because she has clearly been reading the bulwark

and specifically reading what Mark Hurtling has been writing.

I saw that. That was bizarre. And when they started out about the moral high ground, I'm thinking, holy smokes, this is unbelievable. So we'll see if we can get to that. And then if we have time, we'll hit the Pentagon Purge because we've got a lot of questions about that. But let's start off. So here's where things stand now with the ceasefire at the time that we're recording on Wednesday afternoon. There is a 10-point plan that the United States and Iran have apparently

agreed to. Not 100% clear to me that everyone is on the same page as to what the 10 points are.

Unclear also, it seems like Israel is not on board

with the part of the 10 point plan that concerns it and its war against Hezbollah and Lebanon.

And so the Iranians have once again closed the Strait of Hormuz because they said Israel violated

the ceasefire that Israel never agreed to. Thoughts, gentlemen? Tom, you're the guest. I mean, what do you make of it?

I've been waiting to catch up with Mark because, you know, as a military professional, he's,

I wanted to see if he loves the expression as much as I do, a double-sided ceasefire. You know,

if it's not double-sided, it's not actually a ceasefire.

It's sort of like an Oreo cookie.

You can break it in half and dip part of it in milk, but not the rest of it.

Right.

But, you know, almost as if, again, he's trying to manifest it into existence.

If I say this, the Iranians will then realize they're the other side of the

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