WarRoom Battleground EP 964: President Trump Gives Updates On The War In Iran
President Trump asserts the U.S. preemptively destroyed Iran's ballistic missiles, drones, and naval capabilities to halt nuclear ambitions, framing the conflict as a brief "excursion" rather than a total war. While coordinating with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine and debating domestic legislation like the Save America Act, analysts note a strategic divergence between Trump's goal of negotiated peace and Israel's push for regime change. Concerns mount that hardliners may pressure for indefinite fighting, risking base fractures, yet market stability suggests oil prices will drop if the Strait of Hormuz remains open, ultimately challenging whether this counter-force strategy prevents Persian nationalism or secures a lasting regional balance. [Automatically generated summary]
Granite is pretty good, but they wanted it protected by a lot deeper.
They wanted to go a lot deeper.
And they started the process while rapidly building conventional ballistic missiles.
They were going to do it all at the same time.
It threatened our overseas bases and soon could have reached even our homeland.
The regime's intention was to use this exponentially growing ballistic missile threat to make it virtually impossible to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
So as you probably saw, they had a tremendous number of missiles, most of which have now been used or destroyed and very unsuccessfully used because we have been able, for the most part, to shoot them all down.
What incredible technology.
The Patriots have been unbelievable and other things.
And the laser technology that we have now is incredible.
It is coming out pretty soon.
We are literally lasers.
We will do the work of at a lot less cost, do the work of what the Patriots are doing or what other things are doing.
The situation was very quickly approaching.
The point of no return and the United States found it intolerable, in my opinion, based on what Steve and Jared and Pete and others were telling me, Marco was so involved, that I thought that they were going to attack us.
I thought they would, if we didn't do this at the time we did it, I think they had in mind to attack us.
And if you notice, they did something which was very foolish, very stupid, I would say.
They attacked their neighbors.
And their neighbors were largely neutral, or at least weren't going to be involved.
And they got attacked.
And it had the reverse effect.
The neighbors came onto our side and started attacking them, and actually quite successfully.
If you look at Saudi Arabia, you look at UAE, Qatar, and others, but they were strong and they were smart.
But they got attacked.
Nobody, when I first heard it, I said, no, somebody made a mistake.
There was no mistake.
UAE had over 1,000 missiles shot at it, knocked them almost all down.
On the very first day I came down the escalator in 2015, I said, quote, I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
And all I'm doing is keeping my promise.
Think of that.
That was in 2015.
I said it.
It was a threat then and a much bigger threat now, but no longer a threat, not for a long time anyway.
We want to keep it that way.
As we continue Operation Epic Fury, we are also focused on keeping energy and oil flowing to the world.
And I will not allow a terrorist regime to hold the world hostage and attempt to stop the globe's oil supply.
And if Iran does anything to do that, they will get hit at a much, much harder level.
I will take out those targets that were easy and that I mentioned just before.
We will take them out so quickly they will never be able to recover, ever.
If they want to play that game, they better not play that game.
In the long run, oil supplies will be dramatically more secure without the threat of Iranian ships, drones, missiles, nuclear menace, or anything.
So, the Strait of Hormuz is going to remain safe.
We have a lot of Navy ships there.
We have the best equipment in the world, inspecting for mines.
Again, most of their ships are down at the bottom of the sea.
But we will hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them or anybody else helping them to ever recover that section of the world.
They do anything.
In recent years, the regime and its terror proxies have launched attacks on hundreds of commercial vessels.
We are putting an end to all of this threat once and for all, and the result will be lower oil prices, oil and gas prices for American families.
We have done that.
We have done it.
We have brought it very low.
This was just an excursion into something that had to be done.
We are getting very close to finishing that, too.
In the meantime, during this brief disruption, the United States is offering political risk insurance to any tankers operating in the Gulf, so we are putting up risk insurance.
We will perhaps go alongside of them for protection.
We don't think it will be necessary if it is.
And if they do anything, the price will be incalculable.
It will be so great that they will have wished they never did it because you have to keep the straits flowing.
With all of that, it affects other countries much more than it does the United States.
It doesn't really affect us.
We have so much oil.
We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need.
We have Venezuela now as our new partner, great partner.
It worked out so wonderful.
We are working with the Administration, the President, and it is a massive source of oil, gas, everything.
But we are in a very good position, but very unfair to other parts of the world, like China, as an example.
I mean, we are doing this for the other parts of the world, including countries like China.
They get a lot of their oil through the straits.
So we are doing this.
We have a very good relationship with President Xi in China.
I am going there in a short period of time, and we are protecting the world from what these lunatics are trying to do.
And very successfully, I might add.
We are also waiving certain oil-related sanctions to reduce prices.
So we have sanctions on some countries.
We are going to take those sanctions off until this straightens out.
Then, who knows, maybe we won't have to put them on.
There will be so much peace.
But when the time comes, the U.S. Navy and its partners will escort tankers through the strait if needed.
I hope it is not going to be needed, but if it is needed, we will escort them right through.
And we have the greatest mind-sweeping ability.
We have the greatest ships and all of that.
We know exactly where they are placed.
We will get them out of there very fast.
But we hope we don't have any of that.
And again, if they do that, if they play that game, we are going to hit them at a level that they have not seen before.
So we are winning very decisively.
We are way ahead of schedule.
Our military is the greatest in the world with the greatest equipment and the greatest people in the world.
Nobody has ever seen anything like it.
Iran is a very powerful country.
They were going to take over the Middle East.
If we did not hit them, they were going to take over the Middle East.
They had thousands and thousands.
Since their last hit, they had thousands and thousands of missiles and everything else.
Most are now destroyed.
But they were going to take over the Middle East.
Those weapons were aimed at Middle Eastern countries that had nothing to do with this.
They were going to take over the Middle East and they were going to try and destroy Israel.
So we stopped it with good timing.
And we are very proud to be involved in this, and it is going to be ended soon.
And if it starts up again, they will be hit even harder.
Look, everything they have is gone, including their leadership.
In fact, there are two levels of leadership, and even actually, as it turns out, more than that, but two levels of leadership are gone.
Most people have never even heard about the leaders that they are talking about.
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uh it's obviously been very very powerful very effective to cuba you said that cuba wants to make a deal yes what would the united states get in return for that And why should Americans trust Marco Rubio to negotiate it?
I think he's going to go down as the greatest Secretary of State in history.
Look at what we've done as a presidency.
Look at what we've done as an administration.
They trust Marco, and so do the American people trust.
He has been successful no matter where he's been.
He also speaks the language, which is always nice and always helpful.
But he's dealing, and it may be a friendly takeover.
It may not be a friendly takeover.
It wouldn't matter because they're down to, as they say, fumes.
They have no energy.
They have no money.
They are in deep trouble on a humanitarian basis.
And we don't want to see that.
But they were very, very bad to a lot of people, as you know.
And a lot of people living are the Cuban-American vote, which I got at record levels, very important.
Those people are very important to me.
I know what they went through.
They went through hell.
Some of them have gone on to be some of the most successful people in the country.
Cuban-American business people, some of them are like the most successful in the country, and a lot of them are friends of mine because I've been fighting this battle with them for a long time.
The Castro regime was brutal, but they lived off Venezuela.
Now they don't live off Venezuela.
It sends them no energy, no fuel, no oil, no money, no nothing.
They lived without Venezuela.
They couldn't have made it.
And we cut them off from everything else.
So, yeah, they're going to make either a deal or we'll do it just as easy anyway.
And I will say that the tomahawk, which is one of the most powerful weapons around, is used by, you know, is sold and used by other countries, you know that.
And whether it's Iran, who also has some tomahawks, they wish they had more.
But whether it's Iran or somebody else, the fact that a tomahawk, a tomahawk is very generic.
So in order to get it, you are going to need Democrat votes.
And what we are saying is the Save America, not the Save Act, which nobody knew what it was, the Save America Act, the Save America Act.
And that is voter ID.
We want voter ID.
We want to be able to see a picture of the voter.
We want to be able to see that the voter is legitimate.
We want, very importantly, confirmation that this voter is a citizen of the United States of America, and we want no mail-in ballot scams.
So we have exceptions for the military, for sick, for disabled, and for people that are away, business trips or whatever.
Even vacations will be very liberal in that.
We have added two things to it: no men and women sports and no transgender mutilization of our children.
We don't want our mutilization of our children, and we don't want that.
So we added those two things.
That's the five points.
We have five very good points.
It polls at 86 percent with Democrats.
Think of that.
The overall vote is 86 percent.
With Republicans, it is 98 percent.
And the only one opposed to it is Democrat leadership because they cheat.
They want to cheat.
So we added those two points.
We are going for the gold, and we are going to have to fight like hell.
Now, certain things will happen, certain things will take place.
I am here to do a great job for the country.
But we don't have a country if we are going to have elections that are so corrupt and so dishonest like we have witnessed over the last period of time.
You know, as an example, few, I mean, virtually, nobody has, like we, nobody has a system of mail-in ballots like we have.
No other country in the world.
France went away from it.
They all went, you know why?
Because it's corrupt.
And Jimmy Carter, when he had a commission, frankly, I think it is probably the best thing Jimmy Carter did.
He said, you can't have mail-in voting because it's inherently dishonest.
One of the things we have to do is get the Democrats to stop the Democrat shutdown, because, as you know, the apparatus that looks into that, Schumer and the Democrats have shut it down, which tells you they probably hate our country a lot, but the Democrats have to open that up.
But we have got very, very good intelligence into that.
We know a lot of different things that have happened that have been very bad.
A lot of them came in during the Biden open border period, but we have them under them.
We are watching every single one of them.
Yeah, we know a lot about them.
The biggest problem we have is the Democrat shutdown.
We know a lot about them, but the shutdown doesn't allow us to do what we have to do.
Where they're not going to be starting the following day to develop a nuclear weapon, where they'll look at that man and some other people from the administration and say, all right, we're not going to do it.
They were not willing to say that.
And when Steve called up and he said that to me, I said, well, here we go.
Let's do it the hard way.
But the hard way, I think, is probably the easy way.
When basically I can see that they will no longer have any capacity whatsoever for a very long period of time of developing weaponry that could be used against the United States, Israel, or any of our allies.
We have great allies in the Middle East, great countries that are allies.
And they were staying out of it until they got hit.
Someday they will have to do a story.
Why did he do that?
Why did they do that?
But they were going to hit them.
If I didn't hit them first, they were going to hit our allies first.
I believe upon information and belief, but I believe that he was going to take over the Middle East.
They were looking to take over the Middle East.
Now, had Operation Midnight Hammer not taken place, that was definite, because they would have had a nuclear weapon within a matter of weeks.
But that took place.
That was a setback.
But look at the number of missiles they were able to buy and make over the last six months.
And those missiles were aimed at various countries.
And when you look at 1,000, over 1,000 missiles shot at like UAE, they were looking to take over the Middle East.
We got there first.
Lucky.
I'll tell you what, the Middle East and those countries, very rich countries, are very lucky that I was President instead of somebody else.
unidentified
Mr. President, are there any points of disagreement between yourself and your Vice President when it comes to U.S. action in Iran?
You promised the Iranian people you would help them, but it sounds like you're willing to end this fight after your military objectives have wrapped up.
President of the United States with a press conference right there.
Took about 30 minutes.
You know, I said yesterday in the Sunday morning show, given the intensity of the bombing on Saturday night, and this is why we're so thankful for Real America's voice, let us do the Sunday morning show.
Given the intensity of the bombing on Sunday night, I said several times, because we had a packed show, also given what the president was saying about unconditional surrender and Pete Hegseth, which he reinforced on 60 Minutes.
I know it was shot beforehand, but what he reinforced when it was played last night.
I said many times, well, we're not going to have an off-ramp by Tuesday.
I was wrong.
I guess we got an off-ramp on Monday afternoon.
I think.
Dr. Thayer, we're going to break it all down.
The president's actually obviously been thinking about this a lot.
Dr. Thayer, and Mark Levin, and people know I don't agree with Mark Levin a lot on things that are said, but Mark Levin has put up something.
I just want to pull it up.
My crack staff, my production staff, has sent this to me, if I can pull it up.
Mark Levin just put out a tweet, and I'd like to have you respond to it, Dr. Bradley Thayer.
And of course, Kurt Mill's going to join us here momentarily.
The tweet is from Levin during this press conference.
Is Iran, quote, a short-term excursion, unquote, or unconditional surrender and complete defeat?
Is it a condition-based operation or Or a time-based operation, inquiring minds want to know.
So, Dr. Thayer, given what the President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief, who's been pretty adamant, at least over the last five or six days of, I think we're in day 10, of unconditional surrender and on pretty tough terms about what that unconditional surrender would look like.
Did he set a condition that if they change out the leader, the new Ayatollah, the Ayatollah's son, that's now the new head of the government as the Ayatollah, although the Revolutionary Guard still controls the day-to-day, if they make that change, that President Trump could see a way to bring down the military operations that we have here, sir?
Well, Steve, first point to make is that the president sets, the president has a conception of what America's national interests are, informed by his cabinet, of course, and other actors as well.
And so, when he's making the point that we've won, perhaps we haven't won enough, but we soon will once this attrition continues.
He referenced the ballistic missiles, the drones, for example.
In essence, their ability to harm the U.S. and our national interests, Israel, and our allies in the region, then that's going to be sufficient.
That's victory.
And so that's the first point to recognize.
It's President Trump who frames that.
Second point to keep in mind is that President Trump is absolutely a flexible realist, right?
He adapts as circumstances change, as the battlefield dynamic changes.
He's seeing victory in terms of the campaign against the Navy, the Iranian Navy, which has been so successful.
Strait of Hormuz does seem to be open, which is absolutely essential.
Great success in the air campaign, great success against their air defenses.
The nuclear campaign was taken out last year, and I'm sure there were additional targets that were hit this time around to hit that.
And you have had great attrition in the regime.
As he referenced, two layers of the leadership have been removed.
So from President Trump's perspective, U.S. national interests have been met or very soon will be met.
So that, I think, is that's his assessment, and that's the assessment that matters.
Others who want to go on to an invasion of Iran or to go on to having some type of conquest of the totality of Iran, I think are losing that point.
We have in our present that a consummate, flexible realist who's able to advance our national interests and win battlefield victory, U.S. National objectives have been met.
To recognize that and not to continue in a way that would become self-defeating and that would lead to additional escalation and that would lead to a continuation of a war that need not continue when the U.S. Has other adversaries, the Chinese Communist Party as well, to Face.
So there's much to like in what President Trump has said today.
He covered a gamut, obviously, quite a few topics.
And of course, we've been, I think, part of the realist camp here, although supportive of the president, but part of the realist camp.
So there is a lot to like here.
I just want to make sure that we fully understand it because even I'm kind of confused here.
But I just don't see, and I'm sure they've got back channel discussions going on.
The Israelis have just come out, I think part of the United Nations.
The Israelis are talking about a completely different alternative.
I mean, they're all in not just simply for regime change.
I think they're going for continue to go unconditional surrender.
As I said on the show this morning, I think Saturday night was a big, it showed you a gap between our greatest ally in the United States, a big gap about what intentions were and what the follow-through was going to be.
Anyway, Dr. Bradley Thayer's here.
Kurt Miller is going to join us in a second.
Natalie's going to be back tomorrow morning.
She's got a report out about the refugee situation, but I think everybody ought to pay attention.
It says it's going to dwarf whatever happened in the Syrian civil war, Afghanistan, Iraq war, all of it.
And it's very well thought through.
Dr. Bradley Thayer is with us.
President of the United States just had, I think, the most important press conference so far.
Really the first time of a press conference in this war, but took a ton of questions and answered them all.
You saw the president speak at the Republican conference.
Then he went over, spoke again, very powerful, in front of the press, and then had a press conference that lasted about the speech and the press conference combined with the media lasted about 30 minutes.
Technically, you've got two other things you want to bring up, or I think are quite important for the audience to understand about what President Trump said.
First, Trump spoke very clearly about the causes of this war, right?
He said that we preempted Iran.
Iran was going to hit us.
Secondly, he addressed the conduct of the war and conveyed that our military objectives had been met or were very close to being met.
What were those objectives?
First, we had to be at the point where the Iranian regime recognized that they're unwilling to continue to develop the weaponry to hurt the United States, our national interests in the region, Israel, and our Arab and other allies.
Secondly, regional hegemony.
Iran sought regional hegemony, he said, and that this action has stopped Iran's bid for regional hegemony.
So in terms of the causes, Iran was going to, we preempted Iran from attacking, and then the conduct, our military objectives have been met or are being very close to being met in terms of destroying the weaponry.
He referenced the ballistic missiles, that they're greatly down, right?
That they're really now ragged in the ability of the Iranians to launch them, and that the drones were down to 25%, as he mentioned, of those attacks.
So that's very good news.
The Iranian Air Force has been decimated, and the Iranian Navy has been as well.
I think the president is signaling an interest in an off-ramp.
I think this was a good press conference.
I think this is good news.
I think the president is seeing that the military options from this point forward are not particularly attractive, but he doesn't want to quite wrap it up yet.
And that will create the potentiality for spoilers who want to keep us in the war.
The people that are messaging and we're messaging ahead of the press conference, frankly, on Monday, that the war must go on were the same people who succored the president into the war.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Josh Hammer, Mark Levin, Lindsey Graham.
They're going to message all night on Monday night that this was, yes, Mr. President, thank you, thank you, thank you, but you really need to do more.
You shouldn't pull out here.
Many of these folks are already poo-pooing the increase in gas prices that Americans are paying in the pump, saying that it's a small price to pay for Israel's war.
I mean, obviously it's an open question about whether the United States is going to try to kill Moshtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, or Israel is going to try to kill him, frankly.
Additionally, it's a question of whether or not they can.
Presumably, Mashaba Khamenei is going to be much more secured and underground.
But it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, yeah, but it's not when, I mean, yeah, so they killed this guy who's a guy's son.
They don't like this hereditary thing anyway.
They kill him.
They got 500 more guys who are just as dug in as this guy or more, thousands.
What their selection the other day was up in our grill saying, hey, you want us to change?
Not only are we not changing or we're going to get a younger guy who's supposed to be even more hardcore.
They got plenty of those.
So if the Mossad takes this guy out, at least their tendency to date has been we're going to show continuity and that continuity is going to be even harder than we were before.
No, this is why I think the president's getting bad advice.
I mean, the reality is that Iran is a much different scenario than Venezuela.
It is a tougher state.
I mean, Venezuela wasn't lobbying shah head drones to everybody in the Caribbean.
Venezuela didn't have ballistic missiles that they could fire to Mexico.
This is just a completely different scenario.
The reality is, if the president wants an enduring relationship with this government in Iran, he's got to walk away from this war and come back to the negotiating table if the Iranians will even come back to the negotiating table.
Let me just put another piece of information out there that the president's heard for the last 24 hours.
Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, even the great MBZ, the tough fighter, MBZ, and the Saudis, I think, have been blowing up the phone lines going, what in the hell are we doing here?
These guys are crazy and they're lobbying hot ones over here.
They're taking down our desalinization.
They're taking our water.
Qatar warned forever.
We had Trita Parsi on here, I think, that said that it could be five to seven years before Qatar gets their gas field back.
Those guys are sitting there going, hey, they're trying to shut down our oil operations for years.
They're trying to block the straightest arm moves.
They are taking out our desalination, and water is just as important here as oil.
I think collectively, they all, from what I'm hearing, all were all over people today saying, we got to see a plan to wind this thing down.
But if the wind down is the president puts a condition that it's got to be a regime that's malleable to American influences, I think that and because of what happened Saturday night is a game changer.
Do we have that Dan Senior thing?
And here's why, Kurt and Dr. Thayer.
I think it galvanized Persian nationalism.
This is the one thing you didn't want to do.
Once you galvanize Persian nationalism, it's the Persian people.
It's not this Islamic Republic against this is why I think you haven't seen uprising the street besides the fact that they killed 30,000 of their best guys who would get to the streets.
I think part of this is now they look at it as a nationalistic cause because they look at it as Israel and the United States against them as a nation and a people.
It's not this Islamic Republic, which they hate and two-thirds would probably hate.
I will tell you, Jessica, I have never seen integration between the United States military and another military, not just between the United States and Israel.
Certainly, that has never been the case, but the United States and any other sovereign military.
I've never seen this level of integration.
Aircraft from both countries, you know, in the skies above Iran at the same time, all feeding into a central command function, sharing the same information between those aircraft, sharing the same intelligence, sharing in some cases the same command structure and chain of command.
It's just total integration.
And don't take it from me, you can hear this from the Pentagon.
U.S. CENTCOM put out a post yesterday with the Israeli flag and the American flag talking about how these air forces are just achieving total excellence and performing with incredible excellence and success and professionalism, working together.
It's really, they're attached to the hip.
I think about the 91 Gulf War, where the U.S., the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, asked Prime Minister Shamir, Prime Minister of Israel at the time, to show restraint, that Israel couldn't get involved.
Why couldn't Israel get involved, according to the Bush administration?
Because that would fracture the coalition, which included many Arab countries.
The Israel and the Arab countries couldn't be seen in the Arab country's eyes to be fighting on the same side.
Now that is, we've completely inversed that.
Now you have Israel and the U.S. fighting side by side, totally locked in, and the Arab countries are joining that coalition.
So we are living on so many levels through truly historic times that I couldn't have even imagined in terms of the transformation in the region, potentially, and certainly the transformation in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
And everybody knows Dan Sr. is a, how do I say, former spokesman for the Iraq debacle under Bush, where he lied, baldface lied to the American people only every day.
But he's also, let's say, quite close to the Netanyahu clique in Israel.
And he's 100% correct.
They got guys.
He says it, one joint command.
It is impossible to have happen on Saturday night what happened on Saturday night with that structure.
And it's from his lips, that structure to have, oh my God, the Axio story that sits there.
And even Lindsey Graham putting out a tweet afterwards, hey, guys, we got to calm down.
Unless the Israeli Air Force, the IDF, and the senior command of Israel baldface lied to the Americans.
And I think right there, that was an inflection point.
I believe President Trump, because they said, oh, he's going to have a heated conversation with Netanyahu.
The Allies are not together on this at all.
Our war aims, and you just saw President Trump.
The war aims of President Trump look quite different than the war aims of B.B. Netanyahu, Kurt Mills.
And this is why I think Saturday night was an inflection point.
President Trump was adamant.
I don't want any oil assets.
I don't want any infrastructure touched, right?
I'm trying to get the Persian people on our side.
If we got to do things on in Tehran, I want the bombing of like the Air Force command center that the IDF did take down, I think, on Saturday night, which is a hard target.
But I don't want to spread this war into a Dresden-type fire bombing of Tehran.
That's exactly what I don't want, because you know what?
Then the Persians will dig in and we'll be here five years from now.
This is to me the beginning of the separation that led President Trump to this podium today to kind of say, hey, thinking about this, we got a couple other things I want to do on my punch list, but we're out.
Yeah, I mean, look, that Dan Sanera person basically works for another country as far as I'm concerned, and all but name.
And so, you know, this also was the Romney foreign policy person.
This is a complete neoconservative.
It's not clear why this person should have purchased anywhere near the White House for a president who ran against all these people.
But that's neither here nor there.
I think the reality here, though, Steve, as you are alluding to, is that the president is going to have to tell the Israelis no.
The president is going to have to disappoint Lindsey Graham.
He's going to have to disappoint and reject the Foundation for Defensive Democracies.
He's going to have to reject Tom Cotton, or we're just going to do this again and again and again.
The Iranian political system is opaque.
So they put in the sun.
But in many ways, there could be an opportunity there.
The analysts who understand the country, which are few and far between, basically are of the mind that this could be the moment that they are passing from a clerical dictatorship to more of a military dictatorship, that Mustafa is in some sense the cat's paw of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
And, you know, military dictatorships are not Jeffersonian democracies, but they could be more pragmatic.
There are people in the system.
The president himself pursued Peshashkian, his team, Arachi, they won election two years ago on negotiating with the West, on negotiating with the United States, on negotiating with Donald Trump.
You know, there are other people in their system who think, screw the Americans.
We'll just deal with the Chinese and the Russians.
And when we have, you know, black skies at 10 a.m. Tehran time, you're kind of vindicating the hardliners in the system.
So yeah, again, other things on President Trump's punch list.
Talk about other things on President Trump's punch list in his term.
He needs to take the off-ramp here and the off-ramp for a very, very, very long time.
And I think Israel has been shown to the world as charlatans for this military endeavor.
They are trying to spike oil to above $120 a barrel.
They are shutting down air traffic.
They are getting Americans out of 15 plus countries.
It is making Uncle Sam a pariah throughout the region and throughout the world.
And we need to cut bait on these guys.
We need a long, hard talk about what the U.S.-Israeli relationship is.
And I think it's going to come either sooner or later.
And if it comes later, it's going to come in the Republican primary and it's going to be pretty nasty.
I mean, Levin just said, is this times-based or conditions-based?
He's said the president has laid out some things that he wants to accomplish that he thinks accomplishes his war objectives, and then we can move on.
And part of that is obviously deal with the regime and what the regime is going to do.
But the Israelis more than ever are all about regime change and destroying the regime.
Those are two right now diametrically opposed.
You know, the president did not mention unconditional surrender.
He did not mention the total and complete destruction of their warm capability.
If you're going to take out any possibility of their power projection on their own people, as hard as this is to say, you're going to be there for a while because these people are not pushovers.
They're hard to, it's the Persians, same guys the Romans fought and the Greeks fought.
They're still there.
And now they're bigger and more powerful.
Not that you couldn't take them down, but it's a process.
And you've seen the targeting list we've been going through.
How do you think this plays out?
Because you're right.
The guys that want us to stay forever are already all over this.
You're going to see it on Fox News tonight.
You're going to see it on Fox and tomorrow.
They're going to be saying, President Trump, you can be Churchill here or you can actually look and try to get a peaceful exit.
And they're all going to be for taking the hard way.
And as you can tell, the hard way is not going to end next week or the week after or the week after that, sir.
I thought it was interesting that Mr. Senor went after George H.W. Bush.
Of course, because attacking George H.W. Bush for not marching all the way to Baghdad in Gulf War I became the rallying cry for what became the neoconservatives.
And they're the people who ruined Mr. Bush's son's presidency and helped ruin U.S. position in the world.
And so I think it's very interesting that they attacked HW because they don't want President Trump actually to repeat the lessons from the Bush 41 White House, which is you can wipe out a tough military, but you don't go all the way.
You don't do regime change.
You leave the regime weakened and in place.
And I think that's obviously at this point the best option for President Trump.
If he leaves now, if he leaves now, this will be a bad memory.
This will be a moment of fracture within MAGA.
But I think Trump will be able to keep his coalition together.
I think Trump will be able to compete in the midterms.
If this is all we are doing, if Pete Hegseth is screaming at 60 Minutes in July, it's going to be a major problem for the White House.
You fight a war to win the peace, and President Trump has explained the causes of this war, why we went to war.
That was to preempt an Iranian attack.
He also talked about the conditions, the conduct of the war that would lead to its end, right, to having the U.S. win the peace.
And that was when the Iranian leadership said we're not going to continue, in essence, to build, I'm paraphrasing, but to build the ballistic missiles to reconstitute an Air Force and a Navy that's going to be able to hurt U.S. national security interests, Israel, and the allies in the area.
So President Trump has a path to winning the peace.
I would just say, secondly, and finally, Steve, that there are really three sets of targets here we're talking about: counter-leadership targets, counter-force targets, and counter-value targets.
Counter-leadership targets, the Israelis seem to have been driving.
That was getting rid of the regime.
Counter-force targets were the military targets.
That's what President Trump wanted to hit.
Going after the ballistic missiles, going after the Air Force, the Navy, the nuclear facilities, obviously last year, and continuing those attacks.
And then the counter-value targets, President Trump does not want to hit, right?
Very importantly, because that ties into nationalism.
If you start going after the value, what the society values, the oil, the infrastructure, the way people make their money, the sources of the economy, you're going to generate a tremendous nationalist reaction.
Trump did not want to counter-value target.
He wanted to counter-force target, very importantly, and maybe counter-leadership targets.