June 7, 2025 - Epoch Times
09:42
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| The key thing about Israel is that more than any of the other countries in the region, even the non-Islamist Arab countries, we share precisely the exact same enemies. | |
| Pretty much precisely. | |
| I mean, are they literally identical? | |
| Okay, fine. | |
| I mean, maybe not, right? | |
| I mean, maybe the Mexican drug cartels are more an enemy of the United States than Israel. | |
| But when it comes to the threat of jihadism and Islamism there, we're dealing with shockingly similar threats there. | |
| I'll give one very concrete example. | |
| So last year, At some point in the second half of the year, some decision was made to really start escalating and going after higher-profile jihadi targets. | |
| So, for instance, in... | |
| So, for instance, in late July in Tehran, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, disappears while being in Tehran for a funeral. | |
| And around that same time, there was a major Lebanese Hezbollah jihadist by the name of Fuad Shakur, who was assassinated as well. | |
| And then this culminates in the assassination, the bombing of Hassan Nasrallah, the decades-long head of Hezbollah. | |
| Hiding in his bunker in Beirut, Lebanon, and then the death of Yahya Sinwar, the October 7th mastermind in southern Gaza. | |
| But Fuad Shakur, who I mentioned, and then there was another top-ranking Hezbollah commander by the name of Ibrahim Akil, who were both taken out by the IDF during this time span there. | |
| And I like to focus oftentimes on Fuad and Ibrahim Akil because it's actually very instructive to the point I'm making here. | |
| So, who are Fuad Shakur and Ibrahim Akil? | |
| They are the mastermind respectively of the 1983 US Marine Barracks bombings that slaughtered 241 US Marines and of the US Embassy bombing in Beirut the same year that killed 60 to 70 men. | |
| These two men, Shakur and Akhil, had US State Department bounties on their head of $5 to $7 million respectively for literally over four decades from 1983 onwards. | |
| Until the IDF took them out as part of this kind of So, to me, that's what America First looks like in practice there. | |
| It's not necessarily saying that the United States military has to get involved in hunting down American enemies. | |
| Rather, it's, in this particular case, kind of relying on an ally that has the same enemies as you are to just basically tell them, go do your thing there. | |
| You know, I get asked on campuses a lot, John. | |
| I get asked, like, what is, Well, look, there's a lot of ways that the U.S. benefits. | |
| There's obviously technology. | |
| I mean, talking on a cell phone is really technology. | |
| I mean, there's a lot of examples to count there. | |
| There's intelligence, there's missile defense, you know, things like that. | |
| But the most concrete way, the most obvious, the lowest of all low-hanging freeways, in my opinion, that the U.S. benefits from this particular relationship, especially from an America First perspective, is that you get... | |
| There's a lot of fear among some parts of the America First or MAGA movement of war with Iran, bombing Iran around purported nuclear capability. | |
| Unpack that a little for me. | |
| So there's multiple levels of possible threat with Iran. | |
| Look, Iran is the source of evil in the Middle East. | |
| We should be very clear about that. | |
| This is the world's number one state sponsor of terrorism. | |
| have been ever since the hostage crisis that formed this horrific regime that ended the Jimmy Carter presidency in 1979 there. | |
| And by the way, just an example to kind of drill home the message that this regime does This regime actually really hates America, and by extension, the West will. | |
| So I was here in D.C. last summer speaking at a conference on similar issues, and I saw someone in the back kind of vigorously nodding along, like aggressively nodding along. | |
| Sure enough, he actually finds me after the talk. | |
| This guy was born and raised in Tehran. | |
| He lived there until he was 16 or 17 years old. | |
| He told me that in their schools in Tehran, their state-sponsored schools, Their version of the Pledge of Allegiance that they say in school every single day, it's, I solemnly vow to do all that I can today to destroy the little Satan of Israel and the big Satan of America. | |
| And this regime that has acted on it since the get-go, when it comes to the hostage crisis, through their proxies, Hezbollah, the Marine barracks slaughter in Beirut in 1983, roadside IEDs during the Iraq counterinsurgency, during the David Petraeus, George W. Bush era in the early aughts. | |
| So let me just first stipulate. | |
| That even though it is not, it has never been my stance that the United States should directly drop bombs. | |
| I have never once called for direct military involvement against Iran. | |
| I'm not going to do so now because it's not my stance. | |
| Let me just first say that the world would be a better place if that regime were to go. | |
| You know, there's this thing on the right that I think people have gotten allergic to the idea of regime change. | |
| It's become like a dirty word. | |
| I'm not saying the United States has to do it. | |
| That's the key part here. | |
| Well, but the argument is that, you know, this is what was with the Assad regime, you know, falling with Hezbollah collapsing and so forth. | |
| Right. | |
| People say, well, you know, Totally. | |
| And, you know, no country actually understands that exact mentality better, frankly, than Israel. | |
| That actually, in many ways, is the Israeli mentality, by the way, is deal with the devil you know rather than the opposition. | |
| In fact, you know, in 2002, when the war drums were beating for the Iraq War, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Rumsfeld, all that. | |
| It was actually Ariel Sharon, who at the time was the leader of the Israeli right. | |
| So Sharon actually called President Bush and essentially said, you're going to destabilize the region, you're going after the wrong guy. | |
| By the way, during the Obama administration, when we had the whole debate over whether to use force to topple Bashar al-Assad over the chemical weapons scandal, the Israelis, generally speaking, were not in favor of that either. | |
| In fact, after Hamas took over in Gaza in 2007, Same thing. | |
| The Israeli mentality was, we're not going to contain Hamas. | |
| They call it mowing the lawn. | |
| We're not going to eradicate it because what comes next could actually be even worse. | |
| Then October 7th happened, and there literally is no such thing as worse, so therefore they have to go. | |
| But that really is their mentality, actually. | |
| is very much a deal with the devil you know. | |
| The reason that I think that the Persian example is different Persia was a very secular country prior to the rise of the Islamic Republic there. | |
| Polling that I've seen that looks at the Middle East and they try to poll to assess rates of anti-Semitism in the various regions there, most of the Arab countries, basically all of them actually, even the Western-aligned ones. | |
| Have higher levels of anti-Semitism than Iran or Persia. | |
| Because, again, there's this vestigial kind of Western-aligned kind of Islamism skeptical sentiment that runs there. | |
| So I'm skeptical of the notion that a regime replacement would be worse than... | |
| Again, I'm not saying that the U.S. should directly seek to impose this. | |
| That's not my stance. | |
| My own stance on this personally is very similar to the first Trump administration's approach of maximum pressure. | |
| And they brought this back again to an extent when it comes to crippling sanctions and so forth there. | |
| I personally, you know, I'm not in love with coupling these sanctions with negotiations because the mere fact that you'd be entertained negotiating to me projects a little bit of weakness. | |
| But the most recent rhetoric that I've seen from the administration, from Steve Witkoff and so forth there, is actually a pretty hard line on the zero enrichment red line, that there can be zero enrichment of uranium. | |
| The latest that I saw is that the Ayatollah Khamenei said, So it seems like the negotiations are at something of an impasse, actually. | |
| We'll see who blinks first in this kind of grand game of chicken, I suppose. | |
| But this is the problem, that you're dealing with fanatics. | |
| I mean, this is not a normal regime. | |
| You know, the reason that mutually assured destruction could work during the Cold War And they could be counted on, I mean atheism is wrong to be clear, but they could at least be counted on to engage in something remotely resembling a sober analysis as to whether or not your civilization will be nuked to hell. | |
| But these are not rational actors in Tehran. | |
| This is a genuinely fanatical ideological regime there that wants to spread its ideas of the Shiite supremacist revolution throughout the region and throughout the world. | |
| So if push comes to shove, And there's no deal for Iran's nuclear programs there. | |
| And it looks like they genuinely, truly are about to acquire nuclear capacity there. | |
| The absolute most that I think America could play a role here would be to do tactical or operational support for an IDF-led mission to strategically bomb some of the nuclear sites there. | |
| And what that means in practice probably is maybe a couple of ad hoc bombs. | |
| Maybe midair refueling. | |
| Probably not even that, because I think the Israelis are capable of doing that there. | |
| This whole operation, by the way, would probably take just a few hours. | |
| You know, people are talking about this, like, this would be like Afghanistan 2.0. | |
| It's just not true. | |
| I mean, we're talking here about essentially like an overnight raid. | |
| So I think a lot of the fears are frankly overblown. | |
| Having said that, I prefer that Iran just gives up their enriched uranium. | |
| That they give it up. | |
| And ideally, in the long term, I hope that the people of Iran end up being liberated from this absolutely horrific fanatical regime. |
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