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June 23, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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BALANCE OF POWER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1110
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Coming up, Trump makes the most important foreign policy decision of his presidency, and I'll make the case for Trump's bold action in Iran, exploring how it alters the global balance of power and arguing the risks are worth it.
Zaneb Rabua, she's a Middle East expert at the Hudson Institute, joins me.
We're going to talk about some criticisms of Trump's action from within the MAGA movement, from Democrats, and also from abroad.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Music by Ben Thede.
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Just over the weekend, Trump made, I think, in foreign policy the most important decision of his presidency.
And that is he dispatched U.S. planes from Missouri in the dead of night to fly secretly to Iran and bombard with bunker-busting bombs the three key nuclear enrichment sites,
namely Fordo and Natans and Esfahan.
And the idea was essentially once and for all to decimate the Iran nuclear program.
The operation seems to have been carried out with brilliant deception.
And by that, I mean two things.
One is that Trump dispatched a bunch of jets over to Guam.
Those could easily be observed and tracked, probably looked like he was doing something else.
And in the meantime, you had these B-2 bombers making their way to Iran.
The second thing that Trump did was he pretended to be dithering and waffling, as if to say, I don't know, maybe I will, maybe I won't.
But Trump had already made up his mind.
So this was a Trumpian indecision.
And Trump is actually known for going back and forth.
Look at the way he goes on tariffs.
Two steps forward, one step back.
I'm going to hit you with 100% tariff.
No, there's a 60-day pause.
So it looked like this was Trump in that kind of uncertain mode.
But in fact, it was a ploy.
Now, Trump here, I think, got some weird help.
And by this, I mean he got some weird help from a faction of the MAGA movement.
This includes some quite influential people.
It includes Bannon, our friend Jack Bisobic, who's been on the podcast.
It includes Tucker.
It includes this comedian, Dave Smith, Ian Carroll, a bunch of people.
And these people can be described, I think, accurately as anti-Israel in that they blame Israel for most of these problems.
And in fact, they believe generally that Israel is controlling the United States.
In other words, they believe, I think interestingly, that the little Satan, if I can put it that way, is controlling the big Satan.
They believe the opposite of what the Iranians believe.
The Iranians believe that the big Satan, America, is controlling Israel.
This faction of the MAGA right believes that Israel is, through blackmail, through Jeffrey Epstein and through Mossad, through donors, they are controlling the U.S. government.
And these are important topics that I'll need to address in full at another time.
The point I want to make now is just this, and that is that these guys, in a weird way, I think, were part of Trump's deception.
And by that, I mean, I don't mean that was their intention.
What I'm saying is that the Iranians, imagine the Iranians, by the way, are all over social media.
They have their own accounts, Khamenei.
He posts the Iranian National Guard posts.
So they follow social media.
And what do they see?
They see that MAGA appears to be divided.
And they're probably thinking, this is why Trump is not going to act.
This is why Trump cannot act.
His own supporters are in two rival camps.
Trump is paralyzed by their indecision.
But no, Trump is not paralyzed at all.
Why?
Because Trump doesn't think anybody defines MAGA except himself.
And for Trump, MAGA has never meant that the United States does not act abroad.
The United States does not bomb anybody.
The United States does not strike at Iran's nuclear facilities, which Trump has warned about for a long time.
And so Trump basically goes in and he does it.
Now, having done it, all kinds of issues arise.
And I'm going to start by talking about them today, but I'm probably going to be addressing them in various dimensions really in the coming days, if not weeks.
The first question to look at is: was this strike, in fact, successful?
Did it disable?
Did it dismantle?
Did it destroy the Iranian nuclear facility?
And the answer is quite likely yes, but it's impossible for us to say simply based upon visual confirmation.
You know, in the movie, when a nuclear facility is destroyed, let's say in a James Bond movie, kaboom, the whole mountain is blown up, the mountain flies into the air.
It's basically Hollywood effects.
But in this case, the mountain doesn't fly into pieces.
The accurate bombs make deep craters or holes, and the explosion occurs underneath or inside the mountain.
So that's what the Trump people say happened.
There was significant damage to these nuclear facilities.
And yet, if you look at just video of these nuclear facilities, you can't see the full extent of that damage.
So as a result, some people say, well, these facilities were really not damaged very much at all.
Or the claim that the Iranians somehow spirited out all the nuclear materials.
They were ready for this.
You know, dumb Trump was telegraphing that he was thinking about it, so any sane person would have moved it out.
No, this did not happen.
The Iranians did not relocate their nuclear materials.
Why?
Because A, they've been under observation.
And if had they tried to do that, that would have been observed.
Observations have been occurring by international authorities, but also by the United States.
And the second thing is that this stuff is just not all that easy to move.
We're talking about highly secretive materials.
We're talking about a lot of stuff.
And this stuff cannot just be easily relocated.
Well, you know what?
Let's just put it all into a suitcase and take it away.
No, it doesn't really work like that.
And like I say, I don't think that the Iranians expected this kind of quick, sudden sort of lightning strike, if you will, that Trump delivered to them.
Now, was this the right thing for Trump to do?
I think on the balance, I would have to say absolutely yes.
I enthusiastically think it was the right thing to do, even though there are a lot of concerns about it that are expressed by people on the MAGA right that I actually agree with.
And so let's go through some of those because they really deserve a proper hearing.
So the first one is, we have bigger priorities over here.
Didn't Trump run on fixing the economy, lowering prices, lowering taxes, bringing the debt under control, getting America going again, manufacturing jobs, deportations, reducing crime?
It's certainly true that this was the centerpiece of Trump's program.
And I agree that if it were the case that foreign policy were now somehow a way of avoiding those things and the deportations stop and the Trump people stop fighting to make end runs around these crazy judges, and if Trump doesn't push his beautiful bill and if we don't get the tax cuts being made permanent, this would be very bad.
But no president can avoid foreign policy.
If you try to look the other way, foreign policy will thrust itself upon you.
You have to deal with the problems in the world.
And for people who say, well, but I didn't vote for that, the truth of it is we don't vote for foreign policy resolutions in general for the simple reason that you can't predict what's going to come.
You don't know what the circumstances are.
And the whole point of representative democracy is that we elect other people and we have them make those decisions, particularly foreign policy decisions, on our behalf.
They have better access to information.
And what we're really doing when we elect the president was we're saying, I trust your judgment.
And in fact, we're saying, I trust your judgment even over my own.
Because otherwise, why don't we just have a system where, let's just say we're thinking about striking Iran's nuclear facilities.
Let's just send out a national email to the American people or to the Trump voters and say, what did you really vote for?
Click box A if you want us to strike.
Click box B if you want us not to.
This is not how we do things around here.
This is not our constitutional system.
This is not the meaning of representative democracy.
So to people who say, I didn't vote for this, I'm like, I understand.
You voted instead for Trump and you voted to give him the power to make these kinds of decisions.
Now, Trump did not tell, did not make a kind of congressional, a full notification, nor did he seek congressional approval.
And many people in Congress were in the dark.
Now, not everybody, the leadership of Congress was in fact informed.
Chuck Schumer was told in advance.
Apparently, they tried to reach Hakeem Jeffries.
They couldn't reach him.
He was told immediately following.
But they were told.
Who was not told?
Well, lots of people were not told, including people like AOC.
Bernie Sanders was not informed.
Rashida Talaib was kept in the dark.
And I would say a good thing, too.
Why?
Because quite honestly, had you told them, they would be engaged in a sprint race through the halls of Congress.
Now, it's very hard to imagine Bernie Sanders, you know, doing a sprint race of any kind, but they would be sprinting essentially to alert Iran and the media.
And of course, to alert one is to alert the other, right?
If you leak it to the New York Times, they will immediately blast it out and the Iranians will know within minutes.
And so I think the Trump people Knew this, and so it is a very good thing.
Our whole surprise attack would have not been a surprise had you informed what could be called the sort of Islamic lobby or the radical left.
And very often, those are the same thing because they work in close concert, the one with the other.
Now, I was just this morning on Piers Morgan's show.
I was on, it was a very lively show, I have to say.
Debbie, a couple times came by and she's like, all I kept hearing was screaming.
And I'm like, you didn't hear me screaming, did you?
And she's like, no.
The screamer was Anna Kasparian, whom if you don't know who that is, and many people don't, she's basically from the Young Turks.
She's basically the female equivalent of Chenk Uygur.
And if Anna ever went trans, she would become Chenk.
And if Chenk ever went trans, he'd become Anna.
They're very indistinguishable, the one from the other.
But she was the one who just kept screaming.
And there was an Israeli guy, in fact, an IDF spokesman, Jonathan Conrigez.
This poor guy didn't even get a chance to say a word.
Or to put it differently, he said many words, but all his words came down to this.
Stop shouting and interrupting me.
Please let me speak.
And so the poor guy was intercepted, I'd have to say, or kind of missile struck by Anna Kasparian.
John Bolton came on for a few minutes and made a short statement about how, well, no surprise, enthusiastic he is about all this, how the U.S. should have gone a lot further and Trump took too long, but at least he did the right thing.
And regime change, of course, must be our goal.
I did think it was interesting that Bolton did say that while he does want to see the Ayatollahs fall, as by the way, I do, he was not in favor of the U.S. kind of going in there and like managing Iran or trying to run the country, export democracy.
I think even Bolton, even Bolton, this is progress, has learned from the Iraq experience and from the Afghanistan experience that that's not going to go too well.
Turn over Iran to the Iranians.
That's where Bolton came out on this.
And I made a couple of points that I want to visit here because I think they go to the heart of some of the divisions in our own side about all this.
In some ways, I think it's really unfortunate that our whole framework for thinking about what's going on now is the Iraq war.
And this is especially true for younger conservatives.
You know, when I think about even my daughter's generation, and, you know, Danielle was, well, born in 1995.
So she was a baby at the time of the Gulf War.
Well, actually, not even, right?
Because that was before that.
She certainly didn't live through Reagan.
So the Cold War, all of this is like history.
But the one war that they're familiar with is, and even that started with 9-11 when they were quite young.
They see things through the lens of the Iraq war.
And there are three key differences I want to highlight between the Iraq situation and what's going on now.
First of all, one is Iraq, one is Iran.
Two different countries.
And I don't just mean that they're two different countries, you know, but what I mean is that while Iraq was a country focused on regional ambition, Saddam Hussein was kind of a traditional dictator.
I want to be the big boss around here.
I want to kick around my own people.
I'm in charge.
Iran is an ideological regime with ideological aspirations.
In a way, I think it was very telling when one of the Iranian leaders said, we don't care about Iran.
We care about Islam.
And Islam, the idea of a global caliphate, this is what motivates the Iranian leadership very different from Iraq.
That's the first difference.
The second difference is that Trump is not Bush.
Two very different people.
Trump was very aware.
In fact, he focused his whole candidacy on, at least in the foreign policy area, distinguishing himself from Bush.
Remember those skirmishes with Jeb Bush over the Bush family legacy?
Trump was essentially, I'm not that.
And for all the people who say, well, yes, now you are, that I think fails to come to grips with who Trump is.
So Trump is not Bush.
Two very different people.
And they couldn't be more different, by the way, in manifest and manifold ways.
But they certainly are different in this crucial respect.
And the third is that the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the WMDs, were, well, fictional, right?
Even though we were told they existed, there was intelligence supposedly pointing to them, by the way, intelligence by the same unintelligent people who've been running our intelligence services for the past 50 years, getting virtually nothing right.
There were no WMDs.
But who will say that there were no nuclear facilities in Iran?
There were.
And to some degree, there still are.
The facilities still exist, even if their capacities have been greatly degraded, damaged, decimated.
The Iranians, in fact, were moving toward a bomb.
One of the points that Piers Morgan made in today's show was he kept saying, if the Iranians don't want to build a nuclear bomb, why are they enriching uranium to percentages, 60 or higher?
By the way, you need about 90% to go all the way to have a bomb.
But for peaceful purposes, you don't need to enrich uranium more than 2% or 3%.
That's enough.
So once you start going to the higher numbers, there's really only one motive for doing so.
Now, the Iranians could say, hey, we think Israel has a bomb, so we deserve to have a bomb.
But the Iranians have kept saying, no, we're not doing it.
We are not building a bomb.
We don't want a bomb.
We want peaceful nuclear energy.
And think about it.
When I look at all these things, and Of course, you always have conflicting reports.
This guy says this, this guy says that.
And a lot of times people cling to these reports and sometimes even speculations, as if the speculation itself substitutes for the truth.
You always have to look at human behavior because human behavior is a real clue to how people think about something.
So let's look at the Iranians.
Let's take the Iranians at their word.
They weren't building a bomb.
They weren't even close to a bomb.
They don't want a bomb.
Their goals are peaceful.
All right.
And then the United States basically comes along and says, we're thinking of bombing you.
And the Israelis go, we're going to bomb you for sure.
We're going to make sure that you don't have those facilities.
And the Iranians could say, well, listen, guess what?
We don't even aspire to have a bomb.
So guess, you know, we'll invite the Chinese in and the Russians and the Americans in.
We'll let the United Nations send its inspectors.
Come check out our facilities.
As you can see, we have nothing to hide.
And this way, the Iranian mullah stay in power.
You don't have these sort of surgical attacks that have been going on.
There's no need to blow up these Iranian nuclear scientists.
Why?
Because they're all working on a peaceful program.
But of course, this has not been Iran's approach.
Iran is very much acting like it wants a bomb.
It's moving toward a bomb.
It's not going to make any kinds of concessions.
It's not even making concessions now.
And finally, let me say a word about these Iranian attacks on U.S. bases, because I just saw moments ago from the New York Times that Iran, believe it or not, notified the U.S. about these attacks in advance.
Ha!
What does that tell you?
Well, what it tells you is that they are not attacking us.
They are pretending to attack us in the hopes that we will pretend to be outraged.
So this is a little bit of a game that we're playing.
And who are we playing it for?
We're really playing it for the Iranian.
Iran wants to mislead its own citizens.
So this is the way the game is played.
Iran goes on its media and tells its people, see, we attack the U.S. And our job is to basically jump up and down, kind of the way when your feet are burning on a hot day, ouch, ouch, ouch.
And then the Iranians go, see, we taught them a lesson.
We showed them.
Even though their real goal is not to show us and not to produce U.S. casualties.
Why?
Well, because of Trump.
Trump has made it really clear that guess what?
What you just saw was kind of round one.
It's like the pummeling you got in round one of the fight.
But there's a lot more where that came from, and we would be only too happy to administer it.
So we don't want to do it.
We're happy to stay out of it.
But if you give us a reason, we are not going to hesitate.
Trump could not have been more clear about that.
The Iranians know that.
So for all the kind of, you know, pundits who say, well, you know, get ready.
The Iranians sell.
Iran's going to do this.
Iran's going to do that.
I don't know if Iran is going to do anything.
And again, it's because they have to consider the logic of deterrence.
So the logic of deterrence is that when the other guy strikes you, in some ways, if he strikes you slightly, you're very strong and you can hit back.
But if you have been gravely damaged by this bombing campaign of Israel and by these blows struck to your nuclear facilities and you're weak, the weak man does not get the privilege to get up and try to get off a couple of blows because the retaliation against that is going to be unbearable.
The Iranians know that.
I don't believe for one minute that these Iranian mullahs, despite all their rhetoric, that they're all suicidal, they're all ready for martyrdom.
Nonsense.
They haven't shown themselves ready for martyrdom in 60 years.
Many of them have, you know, think of it, the Ayatollah Khomeini, what did he die?
He was like 175 years old.
And when he was like 90, people were talking about his dad, who was apparently over 100 years old.
So these people live very long and have shown, they're happy to pay $25,000 to some young fool who goes ahead and blows himself up, but they're not going to blow themselves up.
And so I think at the end of the day, the Iranian regime is going to try to cling on to power, even if in the end it proves impossible for them to do so.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Zineb Rabua.
She is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute.
In fact, the Hudson Institute Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East.
Before that, she was a research assistant in the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University.
Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Jerusalem Post, lots of places.
And you can follow her on X at Z Rebua, R-I-B-O-U-A, and the website, zanebrabua.com.
Zaneb, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
It seems that Trump's action in striking directly at these three Iranian nuclear facilities is a massive step, a transformational kind of event, perhaps a remaking of the balance of power in the region, if not even more broadly than that.
Do you agree that this was a very big deal?
Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me.
It's a real pleasure to speak with you.
Yes, I definitely think that it's a big deal.
And to just take a step back, I think Trump is reversing the Obama-Biden doctrine, which actually made the United States retreat from strategic choke points.
Under Obama, it really started in Syria.
And then with Biden, it started with the Chinese getting involved much more in the Gulf, etc.
And so on each one of these levels, you will see Trump reasserting American dominance.
For example, in Syria, he's making sure that it's more stable.
For the first time in decades, Syria is no longer a Russia-Iranian satellite.
It has opened itself to the West.
It had opened itself to Turkey, a NATO member, and the United States is now very much involved in stabilizing it.
In China, regarding China and the Gulf, with Trump's visit to the Gulf, it was an amazing visit.
We had real deliverables in terms of deals where the United States is now involved in infrastructure, on AI and other high-technology cooperation, which have been dominated by the Chinese.
And now on Iran, which has played an enormous role in destabilizing the region, in intimidating U.S. allies, in targeting the Israelis, in having the Houthis block the Red Sea.
And I think that Trump is trying to absolutely put an end to all of this.
I mean, he already started a new chapter in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords and the normalization.
And now it seems he's really strengthening the foundation of that, which is that it is through U.S. dominance and U.S.-Israeli cooperation and partnership that it's possible to really stabilize the region and help the United States pursue its interests.
And I think that's really the message he's been sending.
You have an article in Mosaic Magazine about the impact of all this on Russia and China.
And I'll turn to that in a moment.
But you posted a tweet where you have a picture of Obama and Biden, and you say, biggest losers tonight, meaning these two guys.
And you've just been saying this, namely that under Obama and Biden, there was a very different policy that seemed to somehow tolerate, enable, I don't know what's quite the right word, but enable Iran to have a relatively free hand with, of course, Russia and China manipulating things from the background, maybe using Iran as their surrogate in the region.
So it seems that you're interpreting what just happened as a kind of decisive end to all that on the part of Trump.
Would you agree, Zineb, that with Trump, you know, there are some people who are even on the right kind of complaining, we didn't vote for this.
This is not what we expected.
We thought that Trump was going to keep us out of this big mess.
But isn't Trump really doing the way he is?
This is what he's always wanted to do.
In a way, Trump is the one who's being consistent here.
And maybe some of Trump's own supporters are misreading Trump.
What do you think about that?
Well, I definitely think that there's a misreading.
Because you remember when Trump hit Qasim Suleimani and said that he should be assassinated, and that actually was such a big deal at the time.
People were saying, oh, there will be World War III.
We are going to war with Iran again.
And again, as if it ever happened.
But there were all these interpretations.
And they were done in a way to dissuade Trump from pursuing a strategy that actually benefits U.S. interests.
There is no way for Trump to pursue a good foreign policy without him using the tools available to him in foreign policy.
And He tried with the diplomatic outreach, he tried with the negotiations, he gave them two months.
They know exactly what type of person he is.
They had to deal with him in his first term.
And actually, I think the Iranians too thought that they could play him around and they could actually also restrain Israelis because they're the first victims of Iran's terror program.
And I think that this is also a misreading.
I think people should realize that actually Trump, you can see that with the operation he did.
A fantastic operation, zero leaks, absolutely well coordinated, and it hit the targets that it meant to hit.
And I think that this is, that I think Trump understands intuitively that nuclear proliferation is something that should not happen in the Middle East.
It's bad for America, and it's bad for all of America's allies.
So I think that, of course, I totally understand the isolationist voices and all the trauma of the Iraq war and getting involved.
However, the game is completely different now.
I always point out to people that the regime changed, especially during the Arab Spring, they happened to regimes that were aligned with the United States under Obama.
So I don't think that this is something that Trump wants to do.
I think it might be a result, but it's not a policy.
I think you just made a critical distinction.
It's not that Trump is seeking regime change.
That was not the goal or objective of this operation.
But I think what you're hinting at is that it may nevertheless be the result, right?
In other words, I suppose it depends a little bit on Iran.
The Iranians could just say, hey, listen, we will just be quiet at this point.
We will protect our, we will stay in power.
We won't try to cause any more trouble, so to speak.
We'll let things be.
But I wonder if Iran is ideologically unable to do that.
They're supposed to be the sword of Allah.
They're supposed to be doing global revolution.
They've been confidently chanting debt to America for 50 years.
It's a little difficult for them to now go, oh, well, guess what?
We are now cornered and we've got to be quiet and basically play the quiet puppy dog to stay in power.
It's almost like that.
And even just this morning, I'm seeing some reports they're firing some rockets at the U.S. base in Qatar.
So what do you think, Zinib?
Are they doing just like one of those fake displays of retaliation?
Or do you think that they're going to be forced to retaliate and then we're going to be forced to retaliate against that?
Yeah, no, I think you're totally right.
And I wrote about it on the revolutionary side, on the revolutionary doctrine of the Islamic Republic, the notion of martyrdom is very important for them.
So even the retaliation you see right now, firing six missiles, is actually not enough to destroy an American base or even to inflict enough damage.
So they are doing that to save face because their proxies are looking at them and they see how much Khomeini was not able to defend Iran.
He was not able to protect the Iranians.
And he probably, I've seen some reports saying that he reached out to Hezbollah and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is a proxy as well, said, no, we're not sure we're going to join this time.
And so I think that they are in deep trouble politically.
I think we are really at the beginning of the end when it comes to the Islamic Republic as a political engine for the resistance access they've been leading.
The fact that the Houthis now are really struggling because the Israelis have hit and have done enough damage to Iran's missiles facilities that they cannot really provide much to the Houthis is also a sign.
So yeah, I think they are going to do whatever to save face.
But at the same time, I think that because they're retaliating and they are signaling that they want to do some damage and that they still chant, you know, debt to America and that America is the great Saturn, these things are, I think, for Trump very serious and very dangerous.
And he is probably going to take them much more seriously.
And he's going to retaliate to the point where the because I think what he wants right now is total surrender from Khamenei and to come to him and have a deal or some sort.
I don't think he will do that, but I think for Trump, it's necessary, especially while he's dealing with the Russians and the Chinese, to show that he can hit Khomeini when he is defying him.
When we come back, I want to talk about the bear and the dragon, the bear being the Russian bear and the Chinese dragon, and your article about how Putin and Xi, looking at all of this from some distance away, how are they seeing it and how is the global balance of power different?
So hang in there, we'll be right back.
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I'm back with Zineb Rabua, the research fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Follow her on X at zrabua, R-I-B-O-U-A, the website zinebrabua.com.
Zaneb, let's talk about your article in Mosaic Magazine.
It's called How the U.S. Attack on Iran Hurts Russia and China.
And so what you're laying out here in summary is that not only is this a blow directly against the Iranian threat, the Iranian nuclear facilities, but in some ways it sends a reverberating message all the way to Moscow and all the way to Beijing.
What is that message and how are our other sort of great rivals and adversaries going to think about this and respond to it?
Well, I think that there is something that Trump sees very clearly, and it's how much the Chinese are trying to compete with the United States at every single level.
Have you seen his comments about the BRICS, about the UN, and so on?
The Chinese have been able to weaponize international organizations and to assert themselves.
And for that, they've been using a lot of Iran in the Middle East, but also more of the bigger Eurasia bloc.
First of all, because they need Iran.
The sanctions evasion system that Iran has been able to develop is very attractive to China, especially as they're considering maybe a retaliation from the United States or escalation and sanctions if they want to invade Taiwan and so on.
So for them, it's really for planning purposes that they think that this is something they can construct with Iran and have been doing that with Russia as well.
They also need Iran in terms of energy security.
The cheap oil is really the backbone of China's industrial complex.
They need it to function, but they also need it to have reserves so that in case there is an attack or a U.S. policy that is much more hostile to China, they don't have to rely on Gulf countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, who are pretty much aligned with the United States, and China cannot guarantee that they're going to stay neutral.
So for all these reasons, Iran has occupied a special place in Chinese foreign policy and also planning, force planning.
And I think that by hitting them, by the United States hitting the nuclear facilities, which the Chinese have helped indirectly build since they were buying all the oil, with the Israelis also hitting all the missiles, ballistic missiles, facilities, and so on, I think that, but they also hit the headquarters, the commanders and key people.
The Chinese are now reconsidering their position with Iran.
I think they realize that they've backed the wrong partner.
There is something that was very interesting that happened after Israeli's Pagers attack, where the Chinese realized all of a sudden that Israel was a strong U.S. ally.
They realized that maybe they shouldn't have went that far and supported the resistance access of Iran.
So they changed the ambassador to Israel.
And the Chinese ambassador to Israel started the speech of more collaboration with Israel, etc.
Why?
Because they realized that if they want to compete with the United States, they need to have access to Israeli technologies that can give them an edge.
And so I think that for all these reasons, really the attacks have disrupted a trajectory where China had guarantees from Iran to really function.
And I think the Trump decision really disrupted that.
As for Russia, I would say that the Russians would have never went so far and had so many successes without the Russia-Iran drone program.
The Iranians have trained them, have helped them build drones, have helped them develop them.
And I think that cleverly the Russians, I think very cleverly, the Russians realize that they cannot rely on Iran indefinitely, so they've built a similar factory inside Russia so that they stop relying on Iran.
But at the same time, there are so many other components, so many Other engines that are still needed.
There is still a lot of training that comes from Iran.
The IRGC Air Space Force commander Ali Hajizadeh was killed by the Israelis and he was really key for a lot of the coordination between the Iranians and the Russians.
And I think that the Russians are reconsidering their partnership.
They realize that they've lost a key ally here.
I think what you're saying is so important.
I want to restate it in my own way and see if you agree with my way of putting it, that Iran is a much smaller country than Russia or China.
It is less powerful, but the Russians and the Chinese had derived great benefits from Iran.
Iran was kind of like the bad boy of the Middle East.
Iran was not only causing a lot of disruption for the United States, but Iran had this kind of fanatical Islamist ideology.
And for the Russians and the Chinese who don't really share the ideology, it's like, wow, this is absolutely great because we've got this crazy man in the Middle East, Iran, and they are going to be a nuisance, a thorn in the side of America, and we could not be happier about this.
Not to mention they have a lot of oil that we can buy kind of cheaply.
And so Iran is very useful to us.
And what you're saying is that in order for Iran to stay useful, Iran has got to remain the tough bad boy.
Like, I'm going to be the bully.
I'm going to make you run for cover.
And the moment that the Obama and Biden policies are set aside, Trump basically goes, bam, bam, boom.
The Israelis come in and start battering the Iranians.
They can't control their own sky.
Suddenly, the Russians and Chinese go, uh-oh, you know, our supposedly tough guy friend in the region is taking a beating.
It's a humiliation for them, but kind of for us too.
Maybe we need to be looking for some new friends in the region.
I'm putting all of this, of course, in very simple terms, but isn't that basically what you said?
Yeah, yeah, no, it's exactly that.
I mean, when you see the Chinese talking about being the leaders of the global south and the Russians talking about multipolarity, it actually means exactly that.
It means taking the ideological side of Iran and dissolving it in this whole anti-Western discourse.
And it gives you a very powerful kind of concussion there that can attract other countries.
So for example, I work a lot on Africa and Sahel, where I track what the Russians are doing.
And for example, you see that very clearly.
The Russians went to Niger, they backed a group, the group took over, and one of the first things they did was to have Iran have a deal with them.
So they actually got a uranium deal from Niger.
And for the Russians, this was perfect.
They did the job, and then the Iranians amplified it.
And I think they've been looking into doing that because it's the best way to challenge the United States, to challenge it militarily, diplomatically, but also ideologically.
Maybe as we close out, Zanab, let me ask you about the impact on BRICS, because there's a big BRICS conference coming up really just in a few days.
It would seem that some of the members of BRICS, I'm thinking of a country like India, suddenly, you know, Modi is probably saying to himself, do I really want to be in this camp, you know, with Iran?
We're supposed to be creating this new currency, but is anybody going to trust a currency that basically has Russia and China at the helm?
In other words, is it possible that as a result of Trump's action, we're going to see much wider reverberations that go beyond the immediate benefit of disabling Iran's nuclear facility?
Suddenly, BRICS doesn't seem like such an attractive idea also.
Yeah, totally.
I do think that the mission of the BRICS, which is really about challenging and building a parallel system to the U.S.-led one, is definitely not going to be as attractive as before.
That being said, for a country like India, they geographically are trapped.
They have to deal with the Russians, they have to deal with the Chinese, they need to talk to the Iranians.
You know, these are geographical constraints that they have to balance.
So I think for Modi, it's very much of a smarter way to deal with it, to just look like he's neutral and play the non-aligned side because he has to deal with them.
But at the end of the day, I think you're right.
The BRICS mission and statement of values or however they call it is not going to be as attractive as before.
Guys, I've been talking to Zanab Rabua, research fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Follow her on X at ZRabua.
Website is zanabrebua.com.
Zanab, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you very much.
Really enjoyed it.
Thank you.
In this situation, confronting Trump in the Middle East, it is kind of instructive to ask the very simple question, what would Reagan do?
And I thought I might take a break or a detour from my sequential examining of Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
We are, after all, in the section on economic policy, and yet it is sort of Reagan's foreign policy approach that would be relevant here.
I've said before, and this is the theme I want to generally and briefly explore today, that Trump represents a repudiation of Bush.
And I'm thinking specifically here of George W. Bush, not so much of George H.W. Bush, but George W. Bush.
But nevertheless, he does not represent a repudiation of Reagan.
And what I'm suggesting is that there are similarities in the Trump approach and the Reagan approach.
Now, you can't make a direct equation because the situations are so different.
We're talking about, after all, a chasm of some 40 years separating the two men.
But on the other hand, there are some similarities.
We're still dealing with Iran, and we're dealing with, by the way, the very same Iran that was handed over to the Ayatollahs in the period immediately preceding Reagan's ascent to power.
Khomeini, who represented Radical Islam's captivity of a major state, that was in 1979.
Reagan comes to power in January of 1981, just a year or so later.
Now, in some ways, it's difficult to measure Reagan here with regard to radical Islam, because although Reagan did deal with radical Islam, I think Reagan thought he was dealing with radical Islam just at the very beginning.
In other words, there were the hostages, and the hostages were being held by Iran.
And of course, the Iranians recognized that Jimmy Carter was a wimp, and so they played him.
They were aggravating him, humiliating him.
Carter had this bungled effort to try to get the hostages out.
I mean, Ninkampupuri was basically that guy's middle name.
And the Iranians knew it.
And they also knew that not only was this guy a fool and an incompetent, but he didn't really have the courage to do anything, nor would he.
And so they held on to the hostages fearlessly.
Nothing's going to happen to us.
And nothing did.
Now, Reagan came in, basically, very simple.
And Reagan just said, listen, if the hostages are there when I come into office, essentially something terrible is going to happen to you people.
I'm not going to say what it is.
You can just basically sit back and watch.
And the Iranians decided we would rather not sit back and watch.
This is the key difference between Iran then and Iran now.
And Iran let the hostages go.
The hostages were released basically on inauguration day for Reagan.
And so it represented a kind of submission by radical Islam in that particular, in an important skirmish.
Now, in 1982, the Iranians were behind the Beirut bombing in which, what, some 200 or so American troops were killed.
It was a suicide bombing attack.
And this was a case where I think Reagan was tried and found to be wanting.
By that, I mean Reagan didn't do a whole lot.
He did make some gestures.
He fired a couple of rockets, but he didn't really respond commensurate with the attack.
And it's worth asking why.
Trump would have.
But the reason that Reagan didn't do it then was that Reagan's attention was deflected to the Cold War.
That was the primary focus.
Radical Islam is now the primary focus.
Radical Islam, of course, in conjunction with Russia and China.
But in Reagan's era, the Soviet Union was the main focus.
And we've also got to remember that going back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States, with Reagan's help, had been supporting the mujahidin, the Muslim fighters coming from all over the Muslim world who were repelling the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
So the United States was in a very peculiar position because, of course, the enemy of your enemy is in fact, at least temporarily, your friend.
And so we were friends.
It is not an exaggeration to say, with the radical Muslims because the radical Muslims' rage was directed at Moscow.
Now, I do think that from Reagan, we can derive a larger message.
And here is where you see that Trump and Reagan are closely aligned.
And Reagan's message comes out of the thing that we call the Reagan Doctrine.
Now, later in the book, I'll discuss this in some detail.
What is the Reagan Doctrine?
But the Reagan Doctrine can be summarized kind of this way.
The United States will not hesitate to take the side of people who are fighting for freedom around the world.
However, the United States will not itself do the fighting for them.
If people want to free their countries from tyranny, the United States will help them, but it's their job to do it.
And it's their job also to rule their own countries.
This was the key to the Reagan doctrine.
It was applied in multiple countries around the world with, I must say, some mixed success.
In some places, it worked.
In other places, it didn't work so well.
But the doctrine was kind of the same, whether it was Afghanistan, whether it was, I mean, there were Soviet regimes with rebel movements in Nicaragua, in Mozambique, in Angola.
In all these places, the United States was supporting rebels.
But the United States was not committing troops in any of these places, including, by the way, Afghanistan.
I think here you get that Reagan combination of aggression and restraint.
And we see that that's what defines Trump.
Trump is quite willing to do a master stroke.
He's quite willing to do the kind of move on Soleimani that he did in the first term.
This surprise attack, brilliantly conceived with appropriate deception, seemingly flawlessly executed.
But at the same time, Trump does not want to escalate.
But even though he doesn't want to escalate, and here again we have Reagan, he's willing to escalate.
What he's willing to do is he creates the incentives that make escalation painful.
It's like Iran, you know what?
Iran is firing some rockets.
But here's the question.
Iran's got to think about, if we kill Americans, it's almost like they've got to fire the rockets, but don't hurt anybody.
Because they know that if they kill Americans, essentially all hell is going to break loose.
And so I think that the Iranians may very well be aiming their rockets in such a way as not to do any real damage, just so they can turn to the people and say, wave, We struck back.
But if they do strike back effectively, ironically, that signals a great deal of pain for them.
And I think they know with Trump, as they knew with Reagan, that when he says he's going to do something, the one thing you can be pretty sure is he's going to do it.
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