AP x NonZero - Trump's Gulf War

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Hello, Derek and Danny.

Hello, Bob. Hi, Bob.

Sounds like you're having to work to drum up the cheer, you know?

I'm Robert Wright, publisher and newsletters and nonzer podcasts.

It's also a crossover episode in the American Prestige podcast from where you guys come.

And, you know, I think the topic of the day is pretty obvious. It's a war.

I'm looking forward to this actually because I know Derek in particular, you've long paid very close attention to this region.

You're paying close attention to the war as reflected in the daily updates published in your newsletter foreign exchanges.

And I guess the first question is, are you guys coming around now to the view that Israel may have some influence on American foreign policy?

I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting to open my doors.

It's been a long haul. I've been working on you guys, but I can see that illumination is coming.

So, yeah, I mean, not that that's the only factor, but it was interesting the way it kind of burst into view.

I mean, thanks largely to Marco Rubio's verbal deafness.

The issue of where he basically said, yeah, look, we had to attack as Israel was going to attack.

And it's not like we have influence over them, like we could say, don't attack.

Because if you do, we will not defend you or anything like that. So we just had no choice.

Anyway, geez, we're a little trouble for that, but yeah.

Yeah, he did, which you know, may matter because I gather there's an intramural dispute between him and Pete Hegseth over ground troops.

Have you heard this at Hegseth? Actually, not only has said it out loud, but is is agitating for it and Rubio's against it or is that too much?

I haven't heard that. I mean, I'm not saying, I don't think it's too much.

I think Pete Hegseth would pretty much advocate for anything.

You get him, get him a happy hour and he'll tell you anything.

So yeah, I don't know. I mean, that that that seems perfectly plausible, but I just haven't heard it.

I'm happy our point just quickly. Does he have an ongoing drinking problem and does Lindsey Graham?

I don't know.

What's the one? The oral one. No, the question isn't the answer is that's why turn to you guys for the answer.

Yeah, okay. So get us a slander. We'll be slander.

Slander, slander is the oral and right.

I never mind. There are other ways to explain their behavior. I guess.

So well, the big one online is that that Israel has has blackmail against Lindsey Graham, right? That's that's what the online conspiracy theory related to what I would have no idea.

But that they have blackmail related. I have no idea either.

Couldn't involve. It couldn't involve sexual inclination. That's all.

How dare you?

We're not scoop so low.

No, of course not.

So I doubt it's that it's possible he may be used to swear word after having a couple drinks or something and they have it on hate.

And that would be intense.

So geez, so let me, okay, so let me do what the kind of lay person's recap that that I think I followed along with and then you guys can expand and elaborate.

And answer the question where this may be heading.

So obviously unprovoked a war that violates international law completely unnecessary.

Obviously you're just asking for trouble. Almost anyone with any brains said to Trump.

Don't do this.

The line about now he, I'm sure he was surprised by the magnitude and breadth of Iran's response.

The line about the response.

The first of all is that, you know, it's a rational response given where they are.

They feel the regime is at stake. They want to send the message clearly to Gulf states that they should put pressure on Trump to end it.

They want the financial markets to send him a message that he should end it.

And so on.

And you know, there may have been some misfires.

I think there's a mistake.

I gathered that they have said that the whatever straight into Azerbaijani territory.

I think they're saying was a mistake.

But by and large, yes, their plan was to hit first of all US bases in the area.

Even if they're in Gulf states that previously have been, you know, I'm not super bad terms with Iran.

And beyond that, they're hitting some civilian targets and some energy targets.

And, but it all is part of this plan.

That's the idea.

And then I gather that as for Israel and America, you know, I think Trump's thinking has evolved.

I honestly think he thought it might be kind of like Maduro.

Like you killed the leader.

We got it on the last leader and it was cool.

Yeah.

Well, it has worked out like that.

And I think whether he realizes or not, he's moving toward Israel's position, which is that.

Well, let me summarize.

You know, there's this Israeli analyst.

I want to quote and Derek, you may know of him.

I think I know the quote here.

His name is citrino wits or sin.

Yes.

Okay.

He seems good.

I followed him a lot.

He says Israel's in game.

He said Israel's position is quote, if we can have a coup, great.

If we can have people in the streets, great.

If we can have a civil war, great.

Israel couldn't care less about the future.

I think Trump, he's not talking about arming the Kurds.

I mean, that is de facto alignment with Israel's position.

That's a given, I think, at this point.

Yes.

And so that's, you know, it just seems like they just want.

You know, I think he's decided, look, what can I call a win?

Regime collapse, I can call a win.

And characteristically, he's not thinking more than like a nanosecond beyond that, right?

Like, oh, but could what happens next?

Tarnish your legacy and, and, and lessen the Republican's chances in the midterms.

Oh, we'll think about that later.

But so I think that's where he, he's like, okay, but Regime collapse would be a win.

And, and, and so you're on the Kurds, you, and, and Israel is, of course, bombing policing infrastructure,

just trying to induce a breakdown of order in Iran.

So it seems like US and American goals, because the other thing that this guy said, this analyst is,

he said, this is a point of difference between the US and us, meaning Israel.

I think Washington is more concerned about nation building and threats to the regional partners.

I think that distinction is less clear now.

Yeah, I don't know that that's true.

Like, I don't know how concerned the US is about nation building.

They are, I think, maybe a little bit concerned about the possibility of, you know,

a civil war or like raging conflict in the Gulf affecting energy, affecting, you know, commerce, affecting the Gulf's Arab states.

But that's different from caring what, what emerges.

Like, this has been typical. This is what they did in Venezuela.

Like, they didn't nation build in Venezuela.

They took out Maduro and now they're working with the same government.

They just have a compliant proxy in Delci Rodriguez and that establishment.

But they don't care like what, what comes after.

I don't even think they care if the system collapses.

If somebody like Ali Larajani or, you know, one of these people who's like more pragmatic, quote unquote,

who's still, but is still heavily embedded in the Iranian system were to take over and they could cut a deal with them.

They'd be fine with that. So yeah, I mean, but, but you're right.

I think the difference is like, they would still like to see something coherent and the Israelis just want to smash the place

and like smash and grab and get out.

And the US is coming around to that, which is where this, this Kurdish operation comes into play.

And I do think that this is something unique since the end of World War II.

I do think if you look to almost every American intervention since we entered the war in 1941,

that there has been some form of ideological justification or at least some sort of political project,

that there was a strategic goal that was supposed to be aligned with something related to American values,

whether you thought that goal was bullshit, whether it was bullshit or whether it was not.

I do think for the most part, some people believed it.

But I do think that the fact that there really isn't that, the fact that as we talked about before we started recording,

there was even no attempt to manufacture consent as many people commented on in the run up to the war,

indicates that we're in a new era.

And I think we're in an era where this type of liberal hegemony, I don't mean that in a political sense.

I just mean really sort of large, a liberal hegemony that emerged with the United States after World War II has truly come apart,

that the institutions are no longer considered legitimate, that the government isn't even making ideological justifications

for a particular US foreign policy strategies.

And so I think that we are in a new era, if US history, we really are at the end of history,

not in an ideological sense.

Fukuyama was some decree right.

It's not liberal, liberalism was the last ideology, but it turns out liberalism is just going away.

And now we've returned to pure capitalism and pure power politics.

And this is I think an example that as was Maduro.

Here we go.

This is an exclusive from Barak Raveed and Zachary Basu at Axios.

President Trump told Axios in an interview Thursday that he needs to be personally involved in selecting Iran's next leader,

just as he was in Venezuela.

He revealed this exclusively in an eight minute phone call with us to explain his war planning.

He said, well, they are wasting their time referring to Mochita Bahamini.

He said, how many son is a lightweight?

He's considered the front-runner to be supreme leader.

I have to be involved in the appointment like with Delsey in Venezuela.

And quote, so yeah, basically both of these points are true.

He expected this to be like Venezuela and he doesn't really care who takes power.

He just wants to be the person who picks them and gets to run it.

I think if he establishes an Iranian board of peace, this should be doable, right?

So, but Derek, I was about to ask you actually, do you, that you mentioned Lauren Johnny,

is that the correct pronunciation?

Lauren Johnny, yeah.

Is that a plausible scenario?

You mentioned possibility of a relevant moderate like him.

You don't.

No.

No, I mean, I think there was a,

I mean, Lauren Johnny's probably got more authority right now than he had previously.

He was sort of, you know, advising the supreme leader was secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.

He's not part of the interim committee that took over when Hamini was killed.

That by law, that's the president, the head of the judiciary and one member of the assembly,

I think of assembly backswords regarding council.

No, it's the assembly.

Lauren Johnny isn't part of that group, but I'm sure he's heavily involved in decision making right now.

But no, I mean, if the stories that much talk about how many is going to be the next supreme leader are true,

then that's like they're just doubling down on the hard line.

Like the decisions been taken, that not only are they going for the hardest candidate possible,

they want somebody who is basically an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps candidate to take power.

Well, you, you had said in foreign exchanges and actually we quoted you to this effect in this issue of the non zero network digest published at non zero dot org today.

But that in any event, the successor was going to be pro, you know, very much somebody that the IRGC was happy with somebody that could

tune some considerable extent to the IRGC's bidding.

Does that mean that a large army was never a realistic prospect in the first place?

I don't think so.

Yeah, I don't.

So I mean, yeah.

So are you saying basically there is no, I mean, obviously there's no, you know, strictly speaking,

Maduro like scenario, but is there, is there any scenario in which the regime survives and works something out?

With Trump in your mind or we're now looking at either a regime survival and Trump finally kind of gives up and claims he won with no accommodation, no agreement.

That's what I think is more likely than working on a accommodation.

I mean, they may agree to like something like we'll, we'll, you know, go back to negotiating, not that they should, you know, that they might they would necessarily think that that's a path out of anything.

But, but no, I mean, I think it's going to have to be Trump gets bored and says we won and, you know, everything just kind of.

Or regime collapse, which goes for me is a real prospect, right?

Sure. I mean, regime collapses.

But if the, if the regime survives with the structure that it sounds like it's, it's going to come out of this is basically more of a military government than a clerical government.

Then I don't see the possibility of a deal or certainly of what's happened in Venezuela where Rodriguez is just taking orders from DC and doing what they want.

I can't imagine that that would be the outcome.

Yeah, at the beginning of this, I was imagining maybe, you know, early on that they go around goes back and they basically wind up with the deal something like what was on the table to begin with when we started bombing except that Trump can say, oh, we got this in addition, whether that's true or not.

But at this point, that seems like a pretty unlikely prospect and.

I mean, on the regime collapse thing.

So first of all, I mean, we can talk about the Kurds in a second and the idea of fomenting, you know, nationalist insurrections and stuff.

Always works out.

Well, yeah, I mean, again, from as your point of view, fine.

And I mean, Trump doesn't actually give a shit except for the extent that it reflects badly on him and I would hope it would but you never know with American politics.

But anyway, the on the regime collapse thing.

You know, they're bombing the policing infrastructure.

They're trying to bring down the instruments of maintaining order.

And I would think that's beyond some point kind of doable.

If you are sufficiently dominant militarily, which brings up a couple of global Bob sorry that regime collapse through air war just to clarify.

Well, the breakdown of order in Iran, I mean, they know where all the police stations are.

And rarely works.

I mean, this was the promise of air war going back to the 1920s.

And it just seems that even devastating air war.

You couldn't target police stations in the 20s.

Yeah, but they would even look at World War II that they targeted everything.

And it didn't lead to regime collapse.

It very rarely.

I think Derek, what is the only instance is that the atomic bombs?

I mean, that's what the air war people always point to as ending ending a war.

But I don't think there are any other instances of air war actually ending a war.

It just doesn't.

I'm talking about just breakdown of order.

Collapse of social order.

Yeah, but that even that's pretty hard.

I mean, even that's what happened in Nazi Germany until the very, very last few weeks of the war.

It just seems like whatever reason societies don't collapse as a result of air war.

Okay, but again, the technology in this, I just think this is a completely different situation.

Israel has extensive intelligence penetration.

They know where everything is.

They.

So I think pretty soon it becomes a question of to what extent is Iran's retaliatory capacity intact, right?

Like if they can keep raining down, shit.

And it gets to a point where we've, we've exhausted our capacity to, you know, our air defense capacity.

Then maybe Israel and the US would have to stop.

But, but if they don't, there's just almost no limit to how much havoc they can wreak.

And they can do it in a pretty precisely, relatively.

I mean, obviously, oh, you kill the occasional 150 schoolgirls.

Sorry about that.

But, you know, compared to World War II, it can be.

It is more of a social, I think, I mean, to my mind, it's more of a social and political question.

And it is a question of precision strategic bombing.

I mean, you could, you could, you could look at it from the other perspective.

Actually, less precision would have been better because now you're just wreaking havoc all over a society.

I just think that this dream of precision air war, I just don't think it's, I think it's, it's a political and social question.

And from my understanding, and Derek is more of an expert in this, there doesn't seem to be a political opposition that would be ready to achieve power.

So at best, you would get a total social collapse.

But even that seems to rarely happen as a result of pure air war, which is why I think they're going to send in special forces.

That's what I think is going to happen.

And I think it's going to happen relatively quickly.

I think they're going to try to do an Afghanistan type operation where it's less mass troops, more special forces.

And then you're going to go in on the ground and try to control essentially key sites around the country.

That, that, to me, more than air war would, would, I think, lead to the situation that you're describing.

Bob, but I don't know, Derek, if you agree or disagree.

I mean, I, there, there isn't an organized opposition in the country that can take over.

There is the, the diaspora opposition, but it's very hard to say how much, like, purchase Resa Patlevy has inside Iran.

Like, there were people chanting his name and the protests back in January.

But, you know, were they doing that because they, they really want Resa Patlevy to restore the Patlevy dynasty or because they just needed a figure to claim.

To, you know, kind of express their anger to the government who knows.

It is, it's just fundamentally bizarre to, to say, we want the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government.

While we're bombing the country, like, people don't do that.

People's instincts when their cities are being destroyed are to run and hide and save their families, their children, and their lives.

And you can't marry those two things together.

So I do think, you know, leaving aside, like, the rallies, you know, the,

point of quote, rally around the flag effect, which may not be relevant here.

Anybody was going to rally around this country's flag has already done so.

But leaving that aside, like you're asking people to take their, you know, destiny into their own hands.

But, you know, try not to get hit by a, a cruise missile while you're doing it.

Like, it just doesn't make sense.

I mean, it's never, it's a approach.

Historically, it just has never happened.

Then Derek, what do you have in mind when you say regime collapse is possible?

What, what does that look like? The version you think this box looks like arming the Kurds and sending them in from the west

and then starting to Balkanize the country.

I think you could do all sorts of things.

The Kurds can hold on to territory.

Then you've got azery militants they can interact with.

They can serve as a conduit for the CIA or the, you know, US military to get weapons and support to other groups.

They can draw the attention of Iranian security forces so the groups in the south, the Arab militant groups or in the southeast.

Some of the, the Sunni jihadist groups essentially, J.J. laddle and so forth, could have more space to operate.

And then you're just asking like all these different groups to pick apart the state, you know, and, and take down with, with diminished capacity.

And as you say, I mean, they're bombing police stations, they're bombing IRGC command facilities.

Like you're, you're trying to take down that, that capacity to resist.

But that's what you're doing. You're just asking all these groups to.

I mean, I didn't emphasize that.

I'm not suggesting there's a scenario of orderly succession or clear coherent group that takes over.

I'm talking about just disorder in the first place chaos.

And maybe the two are the same because maybe if there's just no group that can rival the regime for imposing some degree of order.

Then there's a limit to how much order can break down because people don't want it.

I don't know.

But on the, on the, the Kurd thing, maybe you can answer this question.

So I was one reason I was surprised to read that an Iranian missile had been shot down while heading into Turkish territory.

Is that when I had tried to play out in my mind like ways that this war could get really big.

And I had already heard that Trump was thinking about arming the Kurds.

The first thought was, well, I can imagine Iran saying to Erdogan, hey, we could use some help with the Kurds and Erdogan saying, you know, always happy to do airstrikes against Kurds who have weapons.

And, and Turkey becoming a kind of, you know, getting slowly drawn into this on Iran's side.

Now, maybe that was, I'm not an expert on the area. Maybe that was crazy to begin with.

But in any event, what is it, what is the Turkish missile doing heading?

I mean, what is the Iranian missile doing headed toward Turkey?

But because Turkey, of course, is the closest thing I guess Iran has to a big powerful non adversary in the region, right?

Yeah, I think that's true. And you're right. I mean, there are elements of this Kurdish coalition that they put together in particular the Kurdistan Free Life Party, which is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party that the Turks would be very unhappy about being involved in something like this.

And have expressed already some concern and said that they're, you know, sort of monitoring this.

I don't think they would necessarily get involved in the war on Iran's side or anything like that.

But, but that's a real concern for the Turks for sure. And that's something you could sort of play with if you were the Iranians to try and make things less comfortable for the US.

There's a couple of things I would say about the missile launch. One is that we know because the Iranian officials have said so that they don't have control over all of their military units right now.

They've instituted policies of kind of decentralization and atomization before the war that give local commanders and units autonomy and latitude.

That's that was their explanation for the strike on Oman a couple of days ago that they said, you know, this wasn't what we wanted. It was, you know, a unit that was operating autonomously that did this, you know, they give them guidance in terms of targets.

I, I don't, I don't know if you can draw a complete conclusion about where this missile was heading given that it was intercepted midair, but it seems like it was heading toward interlink air base given where it was taken down.

I think it was a US base. That's the Turkish base that the US uses. They kind of cohabitate. And the US has, I think, or did at one point have tactical nukes there.

I don't, I don't know. But the given where was shot down given that there was wreckage that landed or that came down apparently in hotay province in Turkey, which is right on the way to injure like you can probably conclude that that was the intended target.

It's a stupid thing to do. I mean, I'm not going to argue with you like, you know, bringing Turkey into the war just on its own merits. If that were to happen, it would be very dumb. And it also, you know, does would deprive the Iranians of a, you know, not, not a potential ally, certainly, but a potential non adversaries, you put it.

So that, that would be extremely dumb. And the Turks haven't given the US permission to use interlink against Iran in air strikes.

So, you know, it's attacking the facility that's not even really involved in the war. So, yeah, I mean, I do agree. If that was done with intention, it wasn't done as a mistake or by some, you know, middle level commander who didn't really grasp the geopolitics of it.

Then, yeah, it was, it was not a good idea for them. They're probably lucky that it got shot down.

Are there any other parts of Iran's retaliation that seemed to you to have been kind of counterproductively undiscerning in the sense of another words.

What do they have to do it though? Like, what else can they do? I mean, they have to impose cost. I mean, like, right.

So, like, this is, they're really in a difficult place because they're not that powerful, but they did this deal last summer.

And then within a year, they're bombed again. It is just like a strategy from the Western powers to essentially force them to radicalize.

I truly don't see the geo strategy here because they have to be undiscerning. They basically will likely conclude they need to have a nuclear weapons program.

This is probably going to convince other powers that they need to have a nuclear weapons program.

So, I just don't see what they would do.

I just mean you can imagine they strike US bases in the area and energy infrastructure and don't do hotels in Dubai.

I'm just saying it's a pretty broad range and, but I'm just raising the question.

Right, but if you're trying to disrupt economically, if you're trying to disrupt the Gulf, and I don't think, I think there was an initial thought that, like, maybe if we cause some pain to the Gulf States, they will go to Trump and say, this isn't worth it, please stop.

I don't think they can't possibly be operating under that delusion at this point. I don't know why they would have thought in the first place because the Gulf States,

you know, although we don't know, there was reporting that, you know, MBS was, you know, on the phone with Trump urging him to move forward.

The Saudis have denied that and it wasn't really well, the well source was on the Washington Post, but it was very, it was anonymously sourced and all that type of thing.

This was after the Washington Post fired it since the entire day after they fired everybody. Yeah, it's hard to know.

So, but over at least you had all these governments, you know, kind of pushing back against a conflict.

And so I don't, and it didn't matter. Like it didn't, it didn't do anything like it didn't, it didn't stop the US didn't stop Israel.

So I don't think they can be operating under the delusion that, that now, you know, if the Saudis and the UA go to the US or Qatar or whoever and says, please knock this off, that it's going to have any effect, but they do want to cause just general economic pain.

And this is where they can do it most easily. It's a major, you know, shipping region. It's a major energy, obviously region.

And they're able to use their drones against these targets because they're close enough and the drones have been very successful in contrast in the missiles, which, you know, mostly seem to get intercepted.

The drones seem to be getting through. They're, they're using a lot of them, but they're cheap. They're easy to make.

And you, you know, you only have to hit on, you know, a percentage of your launches to cause real damage. And so that's, that's what they're doing. I don't, I, I tend to agree with Annie.

Like there's not, they don't have a whole lot of options here. The one concern that they may have is that the Pakistani government apparently, you know, informed them that if Saudi Arabia gets involved in the war and they have it so far,

that Pakistan, they could activate their mutual defense treaty with Pakistan and Pakistan would have to get involved in Pakistan. He's a war with Afghanistan right now, so they've got other things on their plate, but that could be a problem for the Iranians if that were to happen.

But yeah, I don't, I don't know. I mean, they've got to treat this as as somewhat existential. So I think that's what they're doing.

And all the Jones versus missiles thing. So there was a Washington Post piece, I think yesterday about how a lot of the missiles are now kind of trapped in these underground missile cities.

And this is, you know, because they've been the exits to those places have been.

And this is consistent with a threat. I saw a few days before the war by an apparently credible analyst is followed by a lot of people I know who said you have to understand.

Unlike in the June war, this time, given the US military assets in place, they can reach all of the underground missile sites and bomb the entrance has exit can't get the missiles out.

And the Washington Post says this has now happened. And it does seem that I have noticed it seems like over the last day or two, there has been a decrease.

In fact, to some extent, I think the number of the decrease in missile strikes is documented, but even beyond that, I just haven't seen so much footage on social media of even drones actually hitting stuff, you know, like originally there was this footage of them hitting like the radar installation in this Arab state and this and that.

I am my my sense is that the level of retaliation is either significantly less effective now or not being dark well documented in any event.

It may be that the missile, the problem of the missiles isn't just that they get shot down because when they do that, they still have the virtue of exhausting a lot of defense capacity right when they rain them down on Israel from from Iran's point of view to have that virtue.

But maybe they can't even get them. They don't have access to the missiles. They can't they can't fire them.

Yeah, I mean, I think they've they made the decision to go slower on the missiles in general. I mean, the tempo of their attacks on Israel, which is where they would really rely on ballistic missiles has been lower.

And that was from the start. That wasn't like that isn't something although the Pentagon did say the other day, Dan Kane, I think said they they're seeing a slow down and missile launches.

I don't know about the drones. I don't know that there's been a reduction in tempo or if we're just not getting reporting because these are famously opaque states where these things of these attacks are taking place and they're not sharing the video the way that the was happening previously.

I just don't know that you can draw any conclusions about that.

Okay, well, before in a few minutes, we should go into overtime, which is available to pay subscribers in the American prestige podcast and the non zero podcast.

And I want to talk about, well, number of things in there, including the Israel thing, but first before we do anything else on the overall global take, including how.

Cravenly, every European leader outside of the prime minister, Spain, I guess, has has become Trump's lap dog basically notwithstanding, you know, if you footnotes issued by Kierstormer, after, you know, agreeing to let the US user use their base.

I mean, right, I like, I mean, there's the Europeans have be clowned themselves. Mark Carney has been like doing some really amazing kind of bending and stretching to get away with saying that he thinks this war is against, you know, violates international law, but he also supports it with regret and he would be involved in it.

If he was asked, but it's bad, but we'll still do it. Like, I mean, it's the same, you know, maneuver that the Democrats are doing to say, you know, we oppose the war, but we're going to vote to fund it if it comes to that.

Like, it's just, you know, some extraordinarily flexible people, these guys should all be, you know, doing some, some kind of show somewhere where they show off their, their stretching ability.

Danny, do you have any thoughts on why the Europeans fell in line with Trump?

Because what else are they going to do? They're fundamentally weak.

Right. I mean, this is just the reality of power politics. I think that's it.

What are they fear Trump doing if they don't?

The United States totally disengaging. I think that's, I think this is like, Europe has really for generations now just relied on American power.

And so they really have no other option regarding whatever bleeding they might do otherwise. So they just have to fall in line. They're essentially a vassal region of the United States.

And I don't think it's more complicated than that. I think they have to do it. And they can't even pursue an independent foreign policy, not really.

Yeah. And I think that's why.

But what are they afraid of? Russia? I mean, is that the fear that I mean, what will Trump not defend them again?

Russia disengagement to the United States imposing some tariff.

The United States removing troops. They're afraid of everything because they're a vassal region effectively.

I mean, that's direct. That's how I view it. I don't know what you think.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's right.

I mean, you know, there's certainly, it doesn't take much. Like the US doesn't have to do anything proactive to Europe.

They just have to say, okay, we're not going to defend you guys anymore.

And then Russia becomes a concern or any number of other things.

I mean, you know, they, they're just, but also like we can't discount the importance of just learned helplessness, which is what Europe has been wallowing in for decades.

Like this is just how these people come up, you know, all the, you know, Starmer, Macron, all of these people, Fred Friedrich Merz, Mark Ruder, like they all developed their formative years were spent in a system where Europe was the helpless, you know, vassal of the United States.

And that's just what they know. Like they don't know any other way of functioning, I think, on some level.

Okay. Well, it's, maybe in over time, we can talk about this sinking of the Iranian ship that was unarmed in international waters.

That, and I want to talk about the expansion of the war into Lebanon. And I want to talk again about Israel.

Well, if we're talking about Lebanon, we're talking about Israel. And I want to talk about the etymology of the phrase learned helplessness a bit.

And with a short lecture on learned helplessness, just because it's interesting the way it's entered the lexicon.

And it has its origins in rap behavior as I will.

Also, it has its origin, I think psychology.

I think the winding is valid.

It doesn't, it doesn't, it didn't mean exactly.

All right. Let's get, let's get to oversight.

I know that punk, you have to pay for this punchline folks. We're going, we're going no further.

You, you know, if you're a paid subscriber to one of our podcasts, you get to, you get the rest of this enlightenment.

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Great review and then great review. Thanks.

Thank you.