Why It's Hard to Know What Comes Next in Iran

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Today, we're joined again by Retired,

US Navy Admiral James DeVritis

to help us make sense of developments

in the Middle East over the weekend.

Welcome back to the show, Admiral.

Good to be with you.

So I can't imagine how I wouldn't demand yours.

We'll bust right into it.

Here's where things stand.

Iran Supreme Leader is now dead following US Israeli strikes.

Iran has installed a transitional council

and is vowing fierce retaliation.

At least three US troops have been killed.

Israel is hitting the heart of Iran

while Iranian missiles target US bases and Gulf allies.

Oil flows are disrupted and air space is closing.

Admiral, from a military standpoint,

is there a clear off ramp here

or are we looking at the very early stages

of a longer war in the Middle East?

I'll answer that in one moment,

but you said

from a military standpoint,

I'll just ask everybody,

hold those service men and women in your hearts

wherever you are on the political spectrum

and whatever you think about this operation.

Scott, I'd say the future is

pretty hard to predict at the moment,

but I'll give you three scenarios very quickly.

First one is the happy scenario.

This would be where the people of Iran rise up

and overthrow the Mullahs,

the revolutionary guard.

I think sadly, that's a 30% chance at best,

but not impossible.

The other 70% breaks into two scenarios.

One, you could kind of think of it as Iran 3.0.

If Iran 1.0 was under the Shah,

and now Iran 2.0 has been under the Mullahs,

could there be any Iran 3.0

that includes some remnants of this government,

but that behaves in a more moderate, sensible fashion?

And then there's kind of the dark end of the spectrum

in that 70% tranche,

and that's that team Mullah,

Ayatollah, tuffs it out,

takes the bombing,

no boots on the ground are coming,

and they repress the populace even worse.

So there's a snapshot of the future as I see it.

So you were often mentioned as a potential VP candidate

for Secretary Clinton during her run.

Put yourself, if you can, in the situation group,

where you've been asked based on your military background

to give the president 72 hours before,

or as we were building up armaments here,

or hardware in the region,

and give us a sense how you would outline the risk

to the upside and the downside,

and ultimately, what your recommendation would have been

around this?

Well, to the point of your show,

Raging Moderates, yes, that was vetted for VP by Hillary.

I was also offered a cabinet post

by the Trump administration.

So I've kind of seen both sides of this.

I think in this situation room had I been,

let's say the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

or the National Security Advisor

or the Director of National Intelligence

for either side.

I would have started with, there's big upside here.

If we can, and it's a big F,

but if we can crack the Iranian regime

and bring in a better Iran 3.0, enormous upside.

Here's a country of 90 million people,

wealthy with oil and gas, highly educated population,

long civilizational track going back to the Persian Empire

to pull that entity into the world, big upside.

But here's the downside.

The downside is it's very hard to change a regime

strictly with air power without boots on the ground.

And therefore, Madam President or Mr. President,

take your pick, my advice would be,

let's spend more time prepping the battlefield

and preparing the people of Iran

for an overthrow scenario.

I don't feel that has happened.

So my advice would have been,

it's worth it to go after this prize,

but we've got to do it beyond simply throwing bombs

into Tehran and the bottom line question

I would end with is let me go back to the Pentagon

and build a plan with the CIA, with the Mossad

that preps the battlefield before we start launching

the missiles.

That would have been my advice.

And last question before I throw it over to Jess.

The soft tissue here, I think so far

in terms of the administration's approach to this attack

or the, in my opinion, the biggest region of soft tissue,

is it doesn't feel entirely clear to me.

I remember what was at the pal doctrine

that you have to have stated objectives.

And it feels as if there's some confusion

coming out of the Trump administration

around what it is the objectives are here.

Would you agree with that and what do you think,

if you were advising them on how to articulate

some objectives, what would they be?

Well, here I'm gonna put on a different hat

and I'm gonna take the hat of my good friend,

the chief of staff to President Trump, Susie Wiles.

Susie Wiles and fellow native Floridian understands

that you have got to get the explanation out there

before you start launching the Tomahawk missiles.

And we are really good at launching the Tomahawk missiles.

What we haven't done in this instant is launch the ideas.

So yeah, it's a weakness.

And if you'll permit me my Greek heritage

in a Achilles heel,

but I'll close with what I think the objectives

as I've heard them are,

overthrow the regime, support the protesters,

take down Iran's threat from ballistic missiles

and whatever is left of their nuclear program.

Those I think are the three objectives.

I've heard them articulated in varying degrees

at different times.

The president, as we're cutting this podcast

is about to come on and speak to the American people.

I hope that he will clearly articulate which of those three

or is it all three?

What's the priority order and what's the plan?

Tess?

Yeah, I'm glad that you talked about the confusion.

I guess that's going on right now.

I was listening to Secretary Pete Hegseth speak

and he didn't offer a ton of clarity except saying

which the president echoed in calls.

It seems to all the reporters that there are out there

that he's open to boots on the ground

and more American lives are going to be lost,

but it's worth it for this proverbial goal

that we still don't fully understand.

I wanted to ask you about the two main predicates

that I understood as the rationale for going in.

So first that Iran is on their way to a nuclear weapon

and that that's happening soon,

even though we had Operation Midnight Hammer just months ago

which was supposed to have eradicated their program.

And then the second that there was a strike coming

from Iran irrespective of what Israel did.

Now, the Pentagon has been briefing reporters

and they have refuted those predicates.

So those are not the scenarios we were facing.

What do you see in light of that as the rationale

for doing this right now?

I'm asked this question constantly

and there are two answers to it.

The first is nobody on this podcast

has access to the intelligence.

So here we've got to depend on Congress

which is supposed to be exercising oversight.

And evidently at this moment has not been briefed

in real detail on the very pragmatic questions you're raising.

So one answer would be, I just don't know

without access to the intelligence.

However, I think a sensible observer would say

it's kind of an amalgamation of the goals

that we talked about a moment ago, Scott and I did.

It's the perhaps chimera but perhaps it could actually happen

pulled the Iranian population into the streets

to overthrow and end this rotten theocracy.

I think number two, snip in the bud

any hope of a nuclear program kind of regenerating

like the Phoenix coming back.

But I think more realistically in terms of threat going

after those ballistic missiles, that's kind of point two.

And I think point three, frankly, is the protesters

in the why now category because as we get away

from the horrific 30,000 killed,

the moment could pass.

And so there's a temporal quality to this.

When you put all three of those together,

I think you can sketch out a reasonable case

on waiting to see or intelligence revealed to the public.

I hope that that's coming.

I just wanted to note one of the comments

the president Trump made to prepare from Fox

where he said that the model that they're following

is what happened in Venezuela.

And that feels very different to me.

I mean, it was Maduro is just a couple miles away

from me here, as I said here talking to you.

And we knew exactly who would be taking over

and Delsey Rodriguez and there was a plan.

Also talks obviously with Maria Machado.

What do you think of the fact that president Trump

is making that comparison?

I think it's a mistake.

I think the two scenarios are utterly different.

And the idea that you could find a kind of next tear down

in Iran seems very, very challenging to me.

Part of this is because that web of theocratic belief

is woven very deeply into the senior parts

of the body politic in Iran.

Number two, Iran is just a massive country,

even compared to Venezuela, which is a big country,

but it's double, triple in both population size and scale.

And then number three, the chances of finding a path

to moderation I think are very low

with the individuals at the top of the structure.

So I don't think it's a very good comparison.

I'll throw in a fourth, which is at least with Venezuela

we can send someone down there like Amarco Rubio,

fluent Spanish speaker.

We know the region, we've been interconnected with Venezuela

for decades, centuries, really.

They were one of the first independent countries

along with ours in the Americas.

There's a lot there that we understand about Venezuela.

Iran, not so much.

Okay, let's take a quick break, stay with us.

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After decapitation strikes against Iran's leadership,

what can we expect next in the escalating war?

The big question is, if there is going to be

a next strong man in Iran, what kind of strong man

will that person likely be?

I don't think that there's going to be

another powerful cleric, Supreme Leader.

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And we're the hosts of The Long Game,

a weekly national security podcast.

This week, we sit down with Kareem Sahjapur

to discuss what to expect in this next phase of the war

against Iran.

The episode's out now.

Search for and follow The Long Game, wherever you get

your podcasts.

Welcome back.

Is there a scenario that strikes me?

I'll make two thesis and you respond.

One, I don't see the American public having

the patience or the will for an extended ground war.

Boots on the ground.

And I agree.

Military history shows us it is very hard

to accomplish any sort of sustainable change

in government or governing from the air.

At some point, you do have to have boots on the ground.

And my sense is the Trump administration

is hoping that the boots on the ground

will be the Iranian public, that

they'll affect the change that they were waiting for

some air cover, literally, and that they would, in fact,

foment change on the ground or be the own boots on the ground.

Say that does not happen.

There's 150,000 Minustinus members of the IRGC,

and they're deeply integrated into the economy.

So it's just not taking over the White House

or whatever the equivalent is and everything

changes overnight.

So assume that they do the IRGC does survive in some form.

Is there a potential off ramp to diminishing their assets,

including the Navy?

And I'd love to hear what you think the next stage is

in terms of decapitating or neutering

their naval capabilities, which my understanding is

it's pretty formidable.

Where you could say, OK, we now control the air.

We now control the sea.

They're not going to disrupt the straight of form moves.

They have no real power to wreak the type of havoc

they've wreaked in the past.

But we're, quite frankly, we're out of here.

And it was worth it to just, quite frankly,

take them from a scale of 1 to 10.

We thought they were at a 7 or 8.

Ends up, they were at a 4.

Take them down to a 1 or a 2.

Is that a potential off ramp here?

Yes, it is.

Before we get there, let's stay for just a moment

on the boots on the ground piece of this being the population.

It won't be boots.

It'll be people, brave people in slippers, flip flops,

in sandals, in sneakers.

And God bless them if they have the courage to come forward.

The problem is they tried that about a month ago,

30,000 of them shot down.

And let's face it, those were the shock troops.

Those were the ones who were most passionate, most committed,

willing to get out and risk their lives.

And 30,000 of them by all accounts were shot down.

So back to my advice here, if you're

going to send them into this street,

and you want this not to be Tiananmen Square,

but instead to actually be the French Revolution,

you have got to prep that part of the battlefield

far, far better.

So now to your thesis, Scott, I agree with it.

And this is what I called a moment ago.

Iran 3.0, what's it going to look like?

It could be a regime that is neutered, as you say,

and diminished in its capability to conduct mischief.

And then see paragraph one, over time, the people can step in.

I can think of two times the people have stepped in in my career.

One was the Balkans, where we did in 1999.

Scott, you and I can remember this.

We bombed Belgrade.

I launched Tomahawk missiles.

Everyone was very engaged.

No US boots on the ground.

Milosevic then overthrown by his people

and ended up dying in a jail cell in the Hague

at the International Criminal Court.

Second one, Libya 2011, not that long ago.

I commanded that mission.

We launched 25,000 combat sorties,

serviced 6,000 targets all over the country,

and the people rose up.

Big difference in Libya, they had weapons.

They had guns.

They had some level of training.

The people of Iran have a shot.

But again, I think it's probably 30%.

We need to do more to prepare.

So how's it going to end?

As my friend Dave Petraeus would say,

tell me how this ends.

I think your scenario is probably the most likely.

We end up smashing away their capability.

We will take away their navy.

We'll take away their ability to lay minds

in the straight-over moves.

We'll take away their ballistic missiles.

We'll crush whatever is left of the nuclear program.

And then we could say, now you're contained

a kind of different kind of containment.

Your economy is still cratering.

Sanctions remain.

Your military's down to a one.

Now we're going to say that was the objective all along.

And in that scenario, again, see paragraph one.

Eventually, the people have a better shot of stepping up.

You talked about prepping the ground game.

That sounds like soft assets or intelligence on the ground.

And it's just curious to get your assessment.

My assessment is that the Mossad has deeply penetrated

the Errella.

I mean, we still, my understanding is,

don't fully, the American public,

don't fully recognize what has happened here.

We have taken out the equivalent of the president,

the secretary of defense, the head of the joint chiefs,

in the first 48 hours.

I mean, the level of intelligence here is just extraordinary.

And I don't mean to diminish the incredible service men

and service women in our intelligence.

But I would posit that the Mossad has

played a disproportionate role here.

Is our ability to control the skies?

Create, do you still feel like we should have done a better job

prepping the ground game?

Or does this create more opportunity

to have a stronger ground game?

Or what is your assessment of the intelligence to date

and what you think it might be moving forward?

You are absolutely correct.

Mossad has deeply penetrated

the Iranian society and governance

exactly as they did to Hezbollah.

I think they were less capable, obviously,

on Hamas historians will try and pull that one apart.

But Israel clearly had granular,

German say, finger school that feeling

about Iranian society.

And I think they ought to be leading this effort

to try and build a serious resistance movement

to your excellent point.

Yes, everything we've done,

not just dominating the air and the sea,

but also taking out command and control nodes,

taking out the police station.

All of that contributes to the ability

of the resistance to come forward in a serious way,

not just rolling into the streets and hoping for the best.

And a final thought here on all of that

would be for the protests to succeed.

It's going to take, in addition to everything

we've talked about, also really granular intelligence

and also cyber capability, the ability

to take down the opponents networks, to black them out.

All of that is something Mossad, CIA,

our special forces can do.

And I hope they do in the time they had.

So I wanted to get to this US Israel

what's most important to either side.

And I was particularly struck by Secretary Rubio's comments

that they didn't, we didn't know

that they were going to take out the Ayatollah,

that that wasn't actually on our list

and this came via Congressman Mike Turner.

So Israel, we know exactly what Israel has wanted to do

when they've been perfectly clear about that.

How much do you think of the US motivation

is due to countering China?

Because I feel like that hasn't been discussed

as much as it should.

I mean, the straight-up armors is shut down right now.

We've seen the huge spike, obviously, in oil prices.

But we know that our goal, and you certainly spoken about this

and written on it extensively,

is to push back against China

and they get cheap oil from Iran, also Venezuela.

So that feels like a connective tissue line,

maybe in President Trump's thinking.

So how much do you think the US rationale

has to do with China?

I think less than you might think,

but you're absolutely right.

It's both China and Russia

who are diminished by these events.

And don't forget, there's a knock-on effect

to all this in Ukraine, in a couple of ways,

some good, some bad.

On the bad side, a lot of munitions,

a lot of capability is now diverted

in incredible amounts of attention, intelligence,

cyber, space, all now focused like a laser beam

on the Middle East.

That will have knock-on effects,

not good ones on the Ukrainian side in this.

On the good side of this,

don't forget, Iran has been supplying Russia

with a great deal of their unmanned vehicles,

their drones, if you will.

They've been very involved in this.

So there's a military component on Russia

over on China and you're absolutely right to raise it.

It's energy and the economy.

China's way too smart.

Xi Jinping is way too smart

to really throw in geopolitically with Iran.

But economically, there's a lot of interaction,

including their big part of the Belt and Road Initiative

and a number of other things.

So yes, this is of benefit,

generally speaking to the United States

when we diminish Iran back to the Scott's thesis,

taking them down to a one,

they have less ability to do things with China

and with Russia, that's a good thing.

But at the end of the day,

that the principal focus here for this administration

has been this idea that they can kind of pull this prize

back into the world of the West

and into business and commerce.

I wouldn't entirely rule that out.

Certainly I've talked about 30% chance

the people rise up as investors

and many of the people who listen to you

and Scott are investors.

Yeah, there's an oil price spike now.

How about this trifecta?

The administration lands the plane in Venezuela

and that oil comes out from under sanctions.

The people rise up in Iran and flip the regime

and they come out from under sanctions.

And I said trifecta, what's the third?

We cut a deal with Russia.

Russia Ukraine frees the frame,

divide the country along the lines that are held right now.

This is a proposal on the table.

And if that happens and Russian oil

and gas come out from under sanctions.

Wow.

Now that's the equivalent of walking into a casino in Vegas

putting a quarter in the slot machine

and hitting three golden cherries.

It's not likely you're going to get all three,

but it does happen.

As investors, sometimes you have to be prepared

for catastrophic success.

And by the way, Scott is going to say

being the economist in the room,

but Admiral, there are winners and losers in that scenario.

That price of oil may come down.

That's not good for the Saudis.

That's not good for Texas.

That's not good for Canada.

Blah, blah, blah.

But point is that's the scenario

that's worth thinking about.

A lot more oil coming into the markets.

That could all happen in 2026.

Well, to your point,

that would effectively be the largest tax cut in history.

Thank you.

And also, I think when we asked what could go right,

if you took this, as you pointed out,

this 90 million person economy

that sits on the second largest reserves of natural gas,

third largest of oil, incredible appreciation for science,

education, and you unleash that economy.

Bang.

Yeah, I actually think this could be quite frankly

what Europe needs.

I would imagine it'd be just an unbelievable

trading partner for Europe.

100% Scott.

And we are, we add Carlisle where I work.

Of course, we have a significant buyout,

capability in Europe.

And we are looking actively to the,

well, what if this goes right part of this scenario?

Europe is primed for this.

Jess?

Yeah, it's additive to what you were just talking about,

though, I'm not good at going like bang,

but I like it.

It was like an exciting side to this.

It's an abnormal thing.

I've got to go bang over to CNN here.

OK, last question, Jess.

Just really quickly, is there an extra scenario

that involves diplomacy?

Because the homonies are still begging for people

to come back to the table and they say,

we have a better JCPOA available.

Do you give any weight to that?

I do.

And this would be in the category of kind of the 70%

and it's probably where Scott has talked about really

degrading the Iranian overall capabilities.

Let them come back to the table, cut the deal

that President Trump wants.

And you could possibly have Iran 3.0.

Somebody, we're not going to be super friendly with,

but it could be that they would come somewhat out

from under saying, it's a small version

of what we've been talking about.

Great.

Thank you so much.

My pleasure.

Always great to be on with the my fellow raging model.

Oh, yeah.

Admiral James DeVretis, graduate of the United States Naval Academy

in 1976, while in the Navy,

DeVretis served as the commander United States Southern

Command and Commander United States European Command

and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

Thank you so much, Admiral.

Bye.

Guys, bye.