Episode 5187: American Air Defense Continues In Iran; Updates On Operation Epic Fury
Episode 5187 dissects Texas’s Cornyn-Tallarico runoff, where $70M+ spent by Cornyn clashes with Paxton’s base appeal amid Trump’s wavering endorsement, while Operation Epic Fury’s B-2/B-52 strikes on Iran—sinking 20+ ships and crippling missile/drone launches—risk Strait of Hormuz blockades and munition shortages. Military strategists debate "declawing" Iran vs. regime collapse, tying oil disruptions to U.S. anti-China moves, as Texas conservatives celebrate Sharia bans while questioning Trump’s erratic leadership style. [Automatically generated summary]
So the runoff there is May 26th, and the winner will face state lawmaker James Tallarico, who won the Democratic primary overnight, defeating Congresswoman Jasmine Croggett.
On the Republican side, we are expecting this to be quite a contentious battle.
Things have already been heated between Cornyn and Paxton, and that is expected to continue in the coming weeks.
We heard Cornyn and Paxton both preview some of their lines of attack last night.
Paxton decried the amount of money that was poured into the state to try to boost Cornyn.
That was more than $70 million on behalf of Cornyn efforts, really adding to why this became one of the most expensive Senate primaries in U.S. history.
Cornyn, meanwhile, has really warned about Paxton's past controversies, his legal and personal scandals that Cornyn believes will be a drag on Republicans if he becomes the nominee in November.
One big question going forward, though, is whether President Donald Trump decides to get into this runoff, decides to endorse a candidate, something he declined to do in the primary, but he's left the door open to.
That's certainly something that both camps are pushing for over the next 12 weeks.
Flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the RGC, Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only U.S. and Israeli air power every minute of every day until we decide it's over.
I early on thought Paxton was going to probably get more votes, but now people are just assuming Cornyn's going to win.
But if I were a Cornyn supporter, there'd be a lot of alarm bells going off right now.
First of all, he's an establishment figure.
Secondly, this is a runoff, and I know better than anybody.
I lost my initial primary.
I won my runoff easily first time I ran because I was crazy.
Well, I still am.
I exaggerate a little bit, but I was intense, man.
And I had the base following me.
And I knew if I got in the runoff, I'd win the runoff because the most driven people vote in the runoff.
I'd be worried about that if I were Cornyn.
Also, something else that you can speak to very well.
The 2020 election.
Ken Paxton led Texans in stirring up bull conspiracy theories in 2020 for Donald Trump.
Ted Cruz supported stirring up the conspiracy theories, the unproven conspiracy theories.
John Cornyn did not, and he called them unproven.
And he voted to actually, you know, go along with the 2020 election.
I'm just curious, John.
You wrote the book on the big lie, and you follow the president.
Is there any issue that's more important to him on a loyalty test than where people fell in the 2020 election?
And if that's the case, I just understand he wants to win Texas, but how in the world does he not endorse the guy who lied the most for him in 2020 and vote and endorse instead John Cornyn, the guy who said, no, no, no, those theories are all unproven.
Debate Over Loyalty Tests00:09:21
unidentified
What do you assess the enemy's control and command status is right now?
And can you broadly describe our decisive point in this operation?
And now with complete control of the skies, we will be using 500-pound, thousand-pound, and 2,000-pound GPS and laser-guided precision gravity bombs, of which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile.
We used more exquisite standoff munitions at the start, but no longer need to.
Our stockpiles of those, as well as Patriots, remains extremely strong.
The enemy can no longer shoot the volume of missiles they once did, not even close.
And the chairman will lay out some of those percentages.
So our air defenses and that of our allies have plenty of runway.
We can sustain this fight easily for as long as we need to.
And as I said yesterday, we set the terms.
The Iranian Air Force is no more, built for 1996, destroyed in 2026.
The Iranian Navy rests at the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
In fact, last night, we sunk their prize ship, the Soleimani.
Looks like POTUS got him twice.
Their Navy not a factor.
Pick your adjective.
It is no more.
In fact, yesterday, in the Indian Ocean, and we'll play it on the screen there, an American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters.
Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo.
Quiet death.
The first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II.
Like in that war, back when we were still the War Department, we are fighting to win.
Also, yesterday, the leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed.
Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.
One of the strange things about Trump's presidency, and this is actually even different from some dictatorships.
I mean, there are a lot of dictatorships before they go to war would do a propaganda campaign, as the Russians did, for example, before attacking Ukraine.
They would spend months talking about the enemy and so on.
But Trump's method of leadership is often called personalist.
So he does what he feels like in any given moment.
His main aim is to win the current moment, whatever that is.
So whether it's a confrontation with a journalist or whether it's a confrontation with a foreign enemy, to be seen as the dominant person or the dominant figure in the room or the conversation or of the moment.
And it looks like that's what he did here.
In other words, there was no particular plan.
There was no clear goal, but he felt that this was a moment when he could demonstrate his dominance and he could win somehow, you know, in order.
Of course, he doesn't win, then he'll walk away and say he won anyway.
But the consequences of that for Americans, for anybody in the Middle East, and actually for Iranians, the Iranian people don't seem to have been at the center of this operation at all.
There's been no attempt to think about who might rule Iran next or how the Iranian democratic opposition might come to power or might at least have influence inside the country.
You know, instead, he's speaking about, oh, well, there were some other military leaders.
There were some other members of the Islamic Republic who he imagined they would take over as in Venezuela.
So it's this personalist way of running the country.
You know, there's no policy process.
There's no presentation of different points of view.
There's no consideration of alternatives.
There's no internal debate inside the White House.
And then there's no external debate in the country.
There's no public debate.
There's no debate with Congress.
As I've already said, there's no debate with allies.
In other words, there's no attempt to create any kind of consensus or movement or agreement, even if it's a minority consensus.
And that's very unusual, actually, not just in American history, but anywhere.
I mean, the whims of an individual leader would make these life and death dramatic decisions without any input from anybody else, which is certainly what it looks like from the outside.
This is very strange, and it's likely to produce very erratic and unpredictable outcomes.
Now, this is not a mission-accomplished situation.
This is simply a reality check.
The combination of U.S. and Israeli intelligence and combat power will control Iran and will control it soon.
Sure, Iran will still be able to shoot some missiles and still be able to launch one-way attack drones at civilian targets, and their proxies will attempt to attack our embassies, bases, and soft targets.
They are terrorists, after all, and they need to target civilians because they can't fight toe-to-toe.
But we will find them and we will kill them.
This is what the fake news misses.
We've taken control of Iran's airspace and waterways without boots on the ground.
We control their fate.
But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it's front page news.
I get it.
The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality.
The terms of this war will be set by us at every step.
It's a real litmus test and a dilemma for Trump because the 2020 big lie is still at the heart of so much what he's talking about to this day.
He's still talking about it now and raising fears about what would happen in 26 and 28.
Congressman Dan Crenshaw, who also spoke out against the Stop the Steel effort, lost a Republican primary yesterday in Texas.
So he will be out.
He crossed Trump.
Cornyn also disagreed with Trump.
So yes, it's true.
There's a lot of political people.
Trump's advisors are saying Cornyn's the safest pick, Dave Weigel, because they believe he has a better shot to win in the general election.
I have been talking to advisors in the last couple days saying there's some momentum for Trump to do that.
I think David Drucker's right that if Cornyn had lost even by any number, maybe Trump can't, but because he's more or less pulled even, he could justify it and say, I'll put you over the top.
But I'm not 100% sure he will for all the points that Joe just raised.
And Democrats are simply salivating at the possibility of taking on Paxton.
Obliterate Iran's missiles and drones and facilities that produce them, annihilate its Navy and critical security infrastructure, and sever their pathway to nuclear weapons.
Iran will never possess a nuclear bomb, not on our watch, not ever.
And this is why President Trump's moral clarity on Iran today is so vital.
Unlike the past, where vague red lines and endless negotiations let Iran fund terror and inch ever so slightly toward a bomb, this president sees the threat plainly and acts decisively.
No more half measures, especially when Iran is at its weakest.
No more letting Tehran play for time while our people pay the price.
His leadership ensures that we finish what we start and that we protect our warfighters by crushing the enemy before they can strike again.
Our offensive operations, refined through months of relentless preparation, are unstoppable.
And our defensive efforts are unprecedented.
In closing, as President Trump told German Chancellor Mertz yesterday, Iran negotiated in bad faith, stalling, scheming, and preparing to strike.
And we acted decisively to defend our people, our interests, and our allies.
President Trump took bold action, putting America first, the kind of bold action that the American people elected him to execute.
To our steadfast partner, Israel, your mission is being executed with unmatched skill and iron determination.
It's Wednesday, 4 March in the year of our Lord 2026.
Okay, so we're going to bifurcate our show here.
We're going to talk a politics and Texas politics specifically in the second hour.
We're going to have a number of people.
Luke Macias is going to join us to break down.
It was actually a very good night in the Texas House and other places, some congressional races for conservatives.
I wanted to have Brian Harrison won with 53% of the votes.
There's no runoff there.
There are some runoffs.
We're going to go through all that.
I do want to start with the military briefing first because I think that we have to work through these issues collectively this morning.
I do want to say a thank you to Real America's Voice, Parker and Rob Sig, the entire team, particularly our team in Denver that worked so hard, my own team here, everybody associated with War Room Texas, and the folks that not just came on the show, but helped drive the show in the background.
Last night, I think the Secretary of State's showing on the website almost 2 million votes for Proposition 10 to prohibit Sharia law.
This was done really in a campaign that kicked off with this conference's dinner that was put on.
I want to thank Gert Vilders for coming over from Holland to actually the Netherlands to show us what would happen if we didn't thwart this.
Really want to thank Glenn Beck for adding his, putting his shoulder to the wheel.
And everybody else, associated Grant Stinchfield, who was the host that night, and then everybody that came up.
This was a had no money, had really no visibility.
And with everybody pitching in here, true grassroots effort, I believe the combined number, I believe the number was actually more than Cornyn and Paxton combined, but I'll do that math here in a moment.
But it shows you what a strong issue.
People here in the state understand this.
We did give a permission structure for the first time to have an open conversation of this.
And I want to thank Governor Abbott for declaring the Muslim Brotherhood and CARE as international terrorist organizations.
Also for Brian Harrison and other people that said, hey, we got to have hearings on this now.
And then we have to have a special session of the legislator.
The conservatives and the Republicans in the state of Texas have spoken with one voice.
They're not going to give up their country.
And if you heard Tommy Robinson, I want to thank Tommy for joining Ben Berkwom last night at Paxton headquarters.
Tommy, we had about six or seven minutes with him in the last segment of, I think, the second hour.
And Tommy laid it out exactly what happened to his country, exactly what happened to England, and what happened particularly to London.
As you know, we had Peter McAlviny on here tonight.
So this is the beginning of the second wave of this effort.
But to come together with a state the size of a country with literally no money and no organization, but kind of to ride to the sound of the guns, the grassroots organizations in this state, which are enormously, enormously powerful, is just, and great people show what you can do when you pull together.
Let's go back to the business at hand, which is not that that's not the business at hand, we'll do it the second hour.
And Luke Macias and others will come on.
Debbie Gergadis and others will come on and walk us through what a big night it was for MAGA, what a big night it was for conservatives throughout Texas.
And of course, we have the issue before us of the Senate race.
So we'll get to all that.
Captain Fernel and Brandon Weickert, I think you guys have done a really good job of kind of walking through.
And I think this is very important.
I think that's why the briefing, we're getting there.
And I realize for OPSEC, we're not going to probably have a Norman Schwarzkopf type, but we're getting there with the Pentagon, hopefully every couple of days doing this.
But I want to go through and do a level set here, Captain Finnell, because our audience wants, there's a lot of going back and forth should be done.
Right now, we have sailors, airmen, and troops in harm's way.
We have to collectively come together as MAGA and make sure we just understand what is actually going on and what is the process here and what's the methodology.
And I think I've got two of the, and of course, with Thayer and Faddis and others, we've got really level heads that are professionals, been doing this for a long time.
Captain Finnell, I'll start with you.
As you've been going through this, you've actually laid out target patches, etc.
Given what you've seen overnight, given the briefing you saw from Secretary of War Hegseth and particularly General Raising Kane, your thoughts on where we are.
Well, Steve, I say that we are what Admiral Cooper, the commander of Central Command, said last night from his assessment is that we are ahead of the game plan.
So with just over 100 hours in, 2,000 targets have been struck, dedicated target lists that's probably got still more targets on that dedicated target list.
But we have struck those strategic targets both in Tehran, missile sites, missile production facilities, their Navy, and any associated known terrorist locations and compounds and training centers and things of that nature.
So we've gone through in four days a systematic destruction of those major four categories of targets.
Concurrently, we have been also rolling back their air defense capability both strategically and along the coast, as General Kane just showed us in that chart in his briefing.
And now we're moving, as he said, we're transitioning from standoff weapons into stand-in weapons.
And I think this will help address some of the concerns.
It's obvious in the last 48 hours or last 24 hours.
Lots of commentary, lots of articles about munition levels.
But the reality is we are now moving away from having to be exclusively tied to standoff weapons like a tomahawk or something else like that.
And we can now start using general purpose bombs that have all kinds of different kinds of kits on them, like the JDAM Joint Direct Attack Munition, which essentially takes an old World War II Vietnam War bomb that we had many of these.
And you put fins on the back and you put sensor fuses on the front and you're able to glide these things in very precision.
And we're going to be able to expand and roll back even further now.
That'll give us more air superiority.
General Kane said we have local air superiority in the southern tier of Iran.
We've destroyed their Navy, now 20 ships destroyed, 17 last night.
This morning we have in the briefings, two briefings in 12 hours: 17 ships killed yesterday night, now 20.
And with the one that was actually sunk by a torpedo, first time since World War II, of a Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka.
This is outside of the immediate theater of operations, but it just shows the completeness of our targeting and our awareness of what's going on.
And so I think this is really a testament to the detailed planning.
I heard one of your cold opens talk about there's no planning and no thinking.
Clearly, I disagree with that.
I think there's been a hell of a lot of planning, a hell of a lot of thinking, and we're systematically going through it.
And then what we're now able to do, as Admiral Cooper mentioned last night, we're in this phase of dynamic targeting, which when I was in service, we called time-sensitive targeting, which means now that we have local air superiority, we can fly and observe.
We have exquisite intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance that allows us to observe anybody that's going to come out of a tunnel, a cave, anything like that.
And if they move, we're going to be able to destroy those resources.
And that's why the ballistic missile launches went down 86% since the first day.
And the drone launches have gone down by 73% since the first day.
They're still out there, but our ability to be more time on target to take out those that are coming out of their bunkers is going to increase.
So I see us tightening the noose.
It's an anaconda, if you will.
We're slowly strangling off their conventional military forces to will, as General or Admiral Cooper said last night, we want to kill everything that they have that can shoot at us outside of their borders.
And I think that we are on the process to do that.
Captain, before we go to break, and Brandon will join us right after the break, as we go to break, as you listen to Admiral Cooper's CENTCOM, and we're going to try to, we've got a package on Admiral Cooper.
If I can't play it this morning, I'm going to play it this afternoon because it's very important.
He's CENTCOM commander.
He's the combatant commander.
Raising Kane, General Kane is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and senior military advisor to the president.
Do you have we bifurcated this?
Is the American, are we taking out command and control?
Are we taking out, you know, to get air superiority, to take out their naval forces, ballistic missiles?
The thing that Pete Hegseth walked through, what our objectives are, are the Israelis the ones targeting specifically the senior command structure and personnel of the Iranians, of both the Mulas and the Revolutionary Guard?
From what I've seen, the Israelis are attacking military forces as well.
I think there's a shared intelligence there.
I think they have better awareness of maybe some of the senior government officials, maybe some of the IRGC and Iranian Revolutionary Guard leadership, military leadership.
So I don't know the specific divvy enough of the percentages.
I'm guessing that it's more likely that the Israelis are doing more of the leadership of Iran and the military and the government, and we're doing more of the conventional military targets, especially the ballistic missile launchers, ballistic missiles, the command and control of their military forces, their radar sites.
That's why you're not seeing any firings of their coastal defense cruise missiles because their radars have been destroyed.
Captain James Fennell, Brandon Weikert, next on the military situation in Iran.
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Admiral Cooper is the combatant commander.
Remember, I've always said the three most powerful institutions in Washington, D.C. are the CIA, the Federal Reserve, and CENCOM.
He's the CENTCOM.
We've still never had, as hard as Captain Finnell ourselves, the first term, we've never really had the pivot to Asia.
I'd like to say we pulled it off.
We didn't.
CENCOM is all-powerful.
Admiral Cooper is the CENCOM commander.
Let's have a quick update by Admiral Cooper.
We have a short package here, and I'll bring in Brandon.
Well, as I said yesterday, the next 24 to 48 hours are going to be key for determining exactly how this thing is going to shake up in terms of the air war.
I certainly agree that we have degraded significant capabilities within the Islamic Republic.
I agree with the claim that we have gone after those missile launchers.
We have degraded those C2, that's command and control functions.
This is all very good for Team USA.
However, I do think the transition munition, the transition in munitions is an interesting story that might not being, not might be told very well.
Essentially, we were relying on standoff weapons.
Now, the argument is, is because we are now switching because the Iranians have been so thoroughly degraded.
We're able to now enjoy local dominance.
My concern is the real reason we are switching is because we blew through 400 Tomahawk land attack missiles in about four days.
And I would remind your audience, we've only got about 4,000, according to open source information, of those systems totally.
And it takes 18 to 24 months to procure about 100 every 18 to 24 months.
And right now, we've been building at most 90, which is considered low end.
So if you're sitting in the Pentagon, you're probably having conniptions because we're blowing through those tomahawks too fast.
So in a way, we don't have a choice but to switch over.
That timing is key because this weekend, as I told you, the original assessment was after eight days of full conflict, we would have to begin cannibalizing Indo-Paycom.
And I think the president is savvy enough to know I don't really want to do that unless I have to.
So, this is a smart move to have these guys come in and read them the Riot Act.
It's a little bit of all of that, but in my opinion, the defense industrial base, our defense contractors, are some of the most corrupt people in the world.
So, they, you know, they've been taking gobs of money, a nearly trillion-dollar defense budget, and yet somehow we're worried that after eight days of conflict, we're going to be out of weapons in CENTCOM.
How is that possible unless there's a lot of mismanagement?
I know Heg Seth is trying to address that.
He's got a great acquisitions guy in the Pentagon, but it's not moving fast enough.
That's just the nature of the bureaucracy.
So, my hope is that Trump can sit them down and say, Look, this has got to get done, like he did with the COVID personal protective equipment production when he kind of took control over that.
Maybe that will be enough to keep us going because otherwise, the Pentagon is going to hear from the defense contractors that we can't do anything more than we're doing, which means that that's going to start dictating the outcome of this war, which is why I've been saying it's a race to depletion.
There was zero new tomahawks made in 2024, the last year of Biden's presidency, even though he was shipping all of these systems around the world to places like Ukraine, where they were doing God knows what with.
They certainly weren't winning the war.
So, this is another reason why the Ukraine war should be ended tomorrow.
But, anyway, this is the real crisis, and I suspect that is also informing this transition in munitions.
Last night, around midnight, I watched in real time on open source tracking a logistics chain open up from the Middle East to the United States via Europe.
All of our logistics birds were constantly going back and forth because they were starting now to pull the new forms of munitions that are needed.
And I think the reason that they're doing this is because they're very worried in the Pentagon about having to pull from the greater resources in Indo-Paycom because the Indo-Paycom guys are already throwing a stink about, hey, if we do this and pull from us, we're never going to get that back.
And China's going to have open season on the region.
And so I think Trump is smartly saying, let's pull from whatever we can do in the United States.
He's going to, I hope, pressure these defense guys.
Something that they should be talking about is invoking the Defense Production Act.
Because I'm telling you right now, this war is not ending by this weekend.
It's going to go beyond, and they're going to have to start cannibalizing those existing stockpiles in Indo-Paycom, AOR, which is the worst possible scenario.
Yeah, which this gets back to my buddy Colonel Rob Manus, who was talking about this with me the other day.
You know, he's insistent that these guys popping off the missiles in Iran are a bunch of dead enders, that they've been isolated.
But to me, and that's that, you know, it definitely has drawn down in the last 12 to 14 hours.
But to me, the fact is the regime was savvy enough to disaggregate the command and control functions locally.
That way, when we did come in to take out their central C2, they would still be in the fight.
I want to make it clear: the Iranians are not out of the fight yet.
They've killed a thousand innocent people in the Middle East with these missiles.
But more importantly, Steve, they have managed to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.
And more importantly than that, they are targeting and effectively destroying Saudi and Qatari oil production.
It will take years and months to get those systems back online.
So this is part of a wider, longer-term strategy on the part of Iran to hurt the American economy and the global economy beyond even the next few weeks.
So that indicates to me that the Iranian leadership may be degraded, but the Iranian regime is still in this fight.
And I don't know if they're going to be able to be thrown out with air power alone, which gets me to my fear, which is that we're going to be putting a large number of special forces groups to try to coordinate with the MEK on the ground.
And I think that would be a grave mistake at this point.
Do we have Pete Hex answered that question or attempted to answer that question this morning?
Can we play the Kurds?
Can we play the Kurds club?
unidentified
The administration is considering arming Iranian and Kurdish groups.
So could you please clarify that whether any such plan has been authorized or and whether Congress or regional partners has been notified and consulted?
Does other entities mean the Central Intelligence Agency and the Israelis?
I mean, I love Pete.
I'm not so sure that got us to an answer.
The Kurds are a wildcard here, right?
Because I think Turkey, they just shut down a missile.
The Turks shot down a missile.
People are talking about their NATO maybe invoke Article 5.
The Turks can't be sitting there being wild about.
First of all, last time I looked, and folks remember, I didn't say I agreed with this, but the reality in Gaza is the Turks are supposed to be head of the security force.
I know people don't like hearing that, but that's just reality, at least what President Trump says.
You got the Kurds.
The Kurds are a wild card because they want a peace of Iran in what they say is their territory.
And they want to turn pivot and take on the Turks, sir.
Well, not only that, but they're also still smarting over what they say is our betrayal of the Syrian Kurds.
We allowed three or four weeks ago, Jalani or Shara of Syria, to go in and annihilate the Kurds of Syria that we were backing.
And he released all those ISIS fighters.
And it is my opinion.
And William Van Wagenen, who's a colleague of mine in Syria, he tells me that the Jalani is reconstituting the ISIS fighters to go into Iraq and attack the Iranian-backed militias there on our behalf.
So you've got that story as well that's not being told.
But with the Kurds in particular, they only want a small sliver of Iran.
So if they do open up another offensive, they're not going to go in to change the regime the way we want them to.
They don't have the manpower for that.
They're just going to target that little slice.
And that's going to trigger the mother of all reactions from our NATO partner, Turkey, because they do not want to see that at all because they know that's the beginnings of state building for a Kurdish independent country.
And they do not want that.
They will go to war over that.
And so this is a potential flashpoint that I think is unnecessary.
Again, we don't have the ground forces.
I know Eric Prince said this to you recently.
We don't have the relevant ground forces needed to overthrow the regime.
President Trump has killed Khamani.
He has gotten the bad guy.
He has gotten the people that not even Reagan could get.
So in my opinion, that's a golden off-ramp for him.
He can declare victory right now and say, okay, we've done it.
We've won.
We're going to pull back now.
We're going to rebuild.
We're going to reconstitute.
And we're going to focus on Western hemispheric defense and space dominance.
So, Captain Finnell, if you do listen to Admiral Cooper, if you listen to General Kane, you think about what they're talking about potentially for the next 24, 72 hours.
Brandon Reichard does make a compelling case.
Not that you would choose it, but you'd have the opportunity, given the degradation of the Iranian command structure, military, navy to the bottom of the Persian Gulf, the air defense is gone, their air force gone, that the president would have a possibility of an off-ramp.
Do you agree just with the military?
Let's leave the politics aside, but do you think that gets enough down the path that some, I won't say hawkish, but people are saying, no, you have to destroy it root and branch would be satisfied, sir?
We'll also have a little bit of a study of history.
I can go back to Sherman and his march to the sea.
I can go back to the desert storm and Trainer and book The General's War when we didn't finish because of the line of death or the highway of death.
History is replete of when military endeavors have been undertaken and we different generals, different leaders have backed off and allowed their enemy to get off the map.
There's no going back from this.
The Iranians were already at war with us beforehand.
They have declared war against us for 47 years and they are now certainly this regime will never ever accept anything left except to destroy us.
So why would we stop now when they still have combat capability?
The SEC war, the chairman, and the operational commander, Admiral Cooper, have all said we're still working at and chipping away and getting after the rest of their military capabilities.
So let's do that.
The increasing risks to our forces diminishes as their ballistic missile launches go down, as their drone attacks go down, and our attacks go down.
Kushner and Witkoff and the president's been adamant saying, hey, look, they're really tapping us along.
They weren't serious.
Given what we've done to the command structure, what we've done to the leadership, what we try to eradicate the Islamic Republic part of this, when you say there's no going back, you say you can't have a half measure here.
And I think Pete used that term, that these now, if they weren't your mortal enemies before, You're not going to go to a negotiating table and cut a deal because the hardcore that are still there are going to realize that their power comes from not from capitulation, but to fight down to the last man, essentially.
I'm well trained by you to always keep the main thing the main thing.
I want to bring in Stephen Mosher, one of our top experts on the Chinese Communist Party.
Stephen, I was so glad in the fog of war here, you had an incredible piece up in the New York Post that said, hey, when Trump's doing this, his real target is Beijing.
Well, I mean, Steve, that it's shock and awe in Beijing.
It has been since Trump took office.
The tariffs took a huge bite out of their ill-gotten trade profits.
And then it was Panama.
We're going to kick Hutchinson and Wampoa out of Panama.
That has now happened.
In fact, the Panamanian Supreme Court has said that the contract was void ab initio, which means from the beginning.
So all of their investment in the Panama Canal ports at each end, Atlantic and Pacific, is gone as if it never existed.
Big blow to China.
Then we have Venezuela taking away that particular footprint in South America.
Now we have the advances in Cuba.
Can anyone doubt that Cuba is going to negotiate a deal rather than live in the dark for the next century?
We have Iran, the oil from Iran, not going to China now.
The first thing I looked at, Steve, when we attacked Iran to see what happened to Karg Island, Karg Island, Iran's main oil export terminal, was in flames.
And that means China's oil lifeline from the Ayatollah was going up in smoke.
That's very important because it means a lot of things.
It means, first of all, the Iranians can't get money from China, which was half of their budget.
It means, secondly, that BRICS is probably dead because they were paying Iran in Renminbi, cheap Chinese currency.
They could print it at will.
Now that is gone, they'll have to pay in dollars again.
They'll need tens of billions of dollars to pay for oil.
Trump is smiling, said, we'll be happy to sell them oil.
Well, yeah, and they'll be paying in dollars.
So BRICS is dead.
The dollar will remain the dominant currency.
So all roads, in my view, lead to Beijing.
I mean, people should see the pattern from Panama to Venezuela, from Greenland to Iran.
All the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place.
Trump is thinking very, very bigly here.
You know, Premier Wen Jia Bao, 10 years ago, the Premier of China from 2002 to 2012, once said, Americans are naive and innocent and easily deceived.
Think about that.
The Chinese leadership think that Americans are naive and innocent and easily deceived.
Well, I think they've met their match in Donald Trump.
And one of the things he's doing is he's using one of China's ancient stratagems against them.
It's called taking the firewood out from under the pot.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, that meant in traditional Chinese warfare, you took some vital resource away from your enemy in order to prevent them from being able to mobilize an army and fight you.
Well, we're literally taking the firewood away from the teapot refineries in China that we're using it to fuel China's industry and fuel its war machine.
We're literally taking, Trump is taking the firewood out from under the pot.