WTH: Live! U.S. Strikes on Iran. Dr. Kenneth M. Pollack Explains.
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the wake of a decisive US strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities, many questions are being asked. Did Donald Trump make the right call? What about the intelligence? Is this the start of US military action in Iran or a one-off? And what are the implications for Gaza, the region, and Iran in the coming months?
Kenneth M. Pollack, PhD., is Vice President for Policy at the Middle East Institute. Previously he was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he worked on Middle Eastern political-military affairs, focusing in particular on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf countries. Dr. Pollack has also worked on long-term issues related to Middle Eastern political and military affairs for the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he was a senior research professor at the Institute for National Security Studies at National Defense University.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:02.9 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. |
| 0:06.9 | Thanks for listening. Here's our show. |
| 0:08.6 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:10.2 | What's really going on? |
| 0:11.9 | We said, what the hell happened? |
| 0:13.4 | You don't have to know what the hell is on it. |
| 0:15.4 | They see what's going on. |
| 0:16.6 | I don't know what's going on. |
| 0:18.1 | What is going on? |
| 0:19.5 | We must find out what's going on. What is going on? We must find out what is going on. |
| 0:30.2 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:31.7 | And I'm Mark Thiessen. |
| 0:32.6 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.9 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.9 | Mark, what isn't going on? |
| 0:37.4 | Well, what the hell is going on is we're doing a live episode of the pod with our AEI Honor Scholars here today. So we've got a live audience. We're going to be taking questions for them. And it just so happens that we scheduled a pod about the situation in Iran the Monday after Donald Trump bombed the Iranian nuclear program. So I just want to start out by asking you a question on a scale of one to 10 with one being, |
| 0:58.9 | I'm really glad Donald Trump is president and 10 being best foreign policy president of my lifetime. |
| 1:05.0 | How much do you love Donald Trump right now? |
| 1:06.8 | I knew it was going to go like this. |
| 1:08.5 | I just knew it. |
| 1:09.7 | You know, anytime I feel really good about Donald Trump, you make me feel like I'm just not all the way there yet. Look, I think what a lot of folks don't know is that over the last weeks, Mark and I and several others have been talking about just what's going to happen, whether the United States is going to be involved. And, you know, again, for a lot of us who care about |
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