U.S. allies say they won’t commit military aid to the war in Iran, and some foreign analysts say the U.S. lacks strategy. The view of the war from the international community.

Guests

David Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times.

Tong Zhao, senior fellow with the Nuclear Policy Program and Carnegie China. Nonresident researcher at Princeton University’s Science and Global Security Program.

Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London.

Also Featured

Gen. Richard Shirreff, former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Transcript

Part I    

DEBORAH BECKER: The latest tension between the White House and U.S. allies across the Atlantic centers on President Trump’s request that other countries help unblock the Strait of Hormuz that’s been effectively closed by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

DONALD TRUMP: We strongly encourage other nations whose economies depend on the Strait far more than ours.

We get less than 1% of our oil from the Strait and some countries get much more. Japan gets 95%, China gets 90%. Many of the Europeans get quite a bit. South Korea gets 35%, so we want them to come and help us with the Strait.

BECKER: But several NATO members say, while the waterway is crucial to the global oil supply, the area is complex and they have a lot of concerns.

Here’s German Federal Minister of Defense, Boris Pastorius at a press conference this week.

BORIS PASTORIUS: We are ready to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz diplomatically. However, there will be no military participation.

BECKER: And Australia’s transport minister Catherine King echoed that in a recent radio interview.

CATHERINE KING: We won’t be sending a ship to the Strait of Hormuz. We know how incredibly important that is, but that’s not something that we are contributing to.

CHAKRABARTI: Also, in an address to the UK Parliament, prime Minister Keir Starmer said he’s worried about getting involved in fighting that’s spreading throughout the Middle East.

KEIR STARMER: First, we will protect our people in the region, second, while taking the necessary action to defend ourselves and our allies, we will not be drawn into the wider war.

BECKER: President Trump reacted negatively to the foreign reluctance to his requests for more presence in the Strait of Hormuz. But he also said, it’s not surprising.

He says he expected this.

TRUMP: Why are we protecting countries that don’t protect us? And I’ve always felt that was a weakness of NATO. We were going to protect them. But I always said, when in need, they won’t protect us.

BECKER: He also said the United States will not be deterred.

TRUMP: Because my attitude is we don’t need anybody.

We’re the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don’t need them.

BECKER: I’m Deobrah Becker, and this is On Point, this hour: Military Strategy in the Iran war from an international perspective. Some international military strategists will be joining us later in the show.

But first to tell us what’s unfolding in Washington is David Sanger, White House and National Security correspondent for the New York Times. Welcome. Thanks for being with us.

DAVID SANGER: Great to be with you, Deborah.

BECKER: So I’m just wondering where do we start today in terms of what’s going on in Washington right now regarding this war?

SANGER: I think there are three moving parts. On the one that you just spent the most time on, which is whether or not the president can put together a coalition to help keep the Gulf open. It’s been, what, 72 hours now since he issued his first demand on this over Truth Social, and I don’t count a single country that has signed on.

And in part, this is not because they don’t think it’s important or even that they agree that it may require military action to secure it. That the president never built this coalition on the way into the decision to attack Iran. George W. Bush, whatever you thought of the Iraq war, whether you thought it was a good idea or a bad idea or the worst strategic mistake the U.S. has made in decades. He at least spent months trying to put together his coalition.

Some countries went along, Britain, for example. Some didn’t, Germany and France, but he had done the spade work of the diplomacy. Here, there was none. So these countries were being basically presented with an ultimatum that they had to send ships into a conflict over which they had no decision making about.

When it would end, under what conditions it would end, how their own forces would be protected, how they would coordinate with others. So there’s no surprise there.

On the military side of things, the U.S. is hitting all of its major markers, number of missiles destroyed. Number of launchers taken out. You hear Secretary Hegseth and others offer these metrics. But the problem is it’s not really a measure of Iran’s ability to strike back through asymmetric means, cyber, smaller missiles, terrorism, and so forth. And it doesn’t reflect whether or not the Iranians have decided whether or not to surrender as the president has demanded.

And in fact, all we’ve heard mostly is defiance, not surrender.

BECKER: And what’s the third one you said? Three moving parts.

SANGER: The third moving part to all of this is the future actions that the president has to decide whether to take, and those involve whether or not to go into ground action on two very different kind of sites in Iran.

One of them, of course, is Kharg Island, which is where the Iranians pump out their oil, load up their ships and send them down the Persian Gulf, then through the Strait and out to commerce. If the U.S. seized that, they would be seizing the main revenue producer for all of Iran. You can imagine for President Trump, who often used in Syria and other places, the phrase, take the oil. You can imagine why he would be thinking about that. But holding onto it would be another thing.

And the Iranians would be capable of blowing up the pipelines that run between the mainland and the island. That’s the first, the second big target, and I wrote about this in the Times last night and this morning, is the main nuclear facility at Isfahan, where the Iranians hold most of their 60% enriched uranium.

This is the uranium that is closest to bomb grade. It’s hard to imagine, given the amount the president has talked about the Iranian nuclear program and stopping it forever, that he would leave Iran with this material still there. And yet, going into that mountain, deep down, trying to get the material, flying it out or neutralizing it there, might be one of the biggest and riskiest commando operations in U.S. history if the president decided to go ahead with it.

BECKER: I guess there seems to be a lot of questions, right, about Iran’s nuclear capability. I think in June when you’re talking about the U.S. action toward Iran and its nuclear capabilities, in June, the U.S. did go in and bomb, right. Three Iranian nuclear sites.

SANGER: That’s right.

BECKER: And at that time, the president said Iran was within a month of making a nuclear weapon. Many intelligence officials disputed that. Yesterday counter-terrorism official, Joe Kent resigned. He said Iran did not present an imminent risk to the United States.

So I guess how clear is the information about what we’re talking about in terms of a nuclear risk from Iran?

SANGER: So the attack that you referred to in June of 2025. While it didn’t obliterate the nuclear program, it buried it for sure. And the Iranians were much further away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon after that attack than they were before it.

And the president deserves credit that they went into these remote areas. They bombed them. Everybody got out. Few, if any, civilian casualties. And so his political objectives and his military objectives lined up pretty well there. They were not, at that moment, within a month or two of being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

They were within a month, maybe even less, of being able to produce the fuel that could be used in a nuclear weapon. But fabricating the weapon itself takes months, if not a year. And so there would’ve been some more time, and I think there, the president has exaggerated, and I think that’s what you heard included in Joe Kent’s resignation letter.

Now the question is how close could they be today? And the answer is not much closer than they were after the bombing in June, which took out a lot of their production capability, their centrifuges, and so forth. But the president may simply make the decision that he’s not going to leave any nuclear material that a future Iranian government could seize, even if it’s underground, even if it’s under rubble.

BECKER: You mentioned Kharg Island and we’re told that U.S. Marines may be potentially on their way there and there may be the use of ground troops. What’s the likelihood of that, David Sanger?

SANGER: There is a marine unit that’s moving over to about 2,500 troops. They could do a couple of different things, but one of the things they’re good at is landings.

And it’s very possible that they could be used for this purpose. Not certain, but it’s possible. And there I could think of other things they could do as well. I don’t think taking the island would be all that difficult a military task for the United States, especially since Iran does not have a Navy to defend it and all that.

Right now, holding it would be difficult. And what would you do if the Iranians simply stopped pumping the oil to the island, which I assume they would do, or maybe sabotage their own infrastructure so the U.S. couldn’t take advantage of it.

BECKER: So Israel says today that it killed Iran’s intelligence minister, and that’s the latest high-ranking Iranian official who’s been targeted in this war.

I wonder, we know that the U.S. has said the strategy, part of this strategy anyway is to create conditions for a popular uprising in destabilizing the current power structure. Is that, do you think, still a main objective?

SANGER: I think the Israeli objective here is to try to decapitate the government as much as they can.

And you’ve seen that happen just before that when they had killed Ali Larijani, who had been the top security official, but also a top parliamentarian. He was a pretty hard-nosed character. I wouldn’t call him pragmatic, but I would call him somewhat flexible. I dealt with him some when he was doing nuclear and chemical negotiations and so forth.

I would say that the Israeli interest in whether or not the protestors can take over and turn Iran into a Democratic state is pretty small. I think they’d be perfectly happy to keep a chaotic state in Iran. Whether that’s America’s interest as well is a much deeper and more complex problem.

Israeli interest in whether or not the protestors can take over and turn Iran into a Democratic state is pretty small. I think they’d be perfectly happy to keep a chaotic state in Iran.

David Sanger

Part II

BECKER: Gen. Richard Shirreff is a former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. He also served in the Iraq war. He says he sees this U.S. war as lacking a clear strategy and risking a broader conflict.

RICHARD SHIRREFF: Here we go again with another American president who [has] decided to launch a war of choice without any clear idea of how the war ends or any discernable strategy for getting there. And in a sense, that’s been borne out by the flip-flopping between unconditional surrender, regime change, destruction of nuclear capability, destruction of missile stocks.

Here we go again with another American president who [has] decided to launch a war of choice without any clear idea of how the war ends.

Gen. Richard Shirreff

BECKER: And Shirreff says that’s why the U.S. is receiving little support from its allies.

SHIRREFF: You’re not going to win a war by bombing. This is nothing new here. There’s been plenty of examples of history. What happened in 1940 with the Brits, 1941 the ‘Blitz Spirit,’ Hitler didn’t succeed. What happened with the allies tried to bomb Germany. After that, it didn’t succeed.

I go back to Vietnam, Hanoi, I look what’s happening in Ukraine, all you do is entrench an existing regime.

BECKER: And as for the Strait of Hormuz and the international economic shocks from this war with Iran, Shirreff says that’s going to have some lasting consequences.

SHIRREFF: He has put in train a set of events, which I think are going to be with us for a very long time to come.

BECKER: And general Shirreff personally understands what can happen when military strategy is not clear. Prior to his NATO appointment, he served in the Iraq war in 2006 to 2007. His group was charged with routing an Iranian backed militia from Basra, Iraq, and things didn’t go well.

SHIRREFF: We put together a plan to reestablish security in Basra or to establish security in Basra.

But because there was no clear strategy either from Britain or indeed the wider coalition, the tactical actions were in a vacuum. And ultimately, we failed because we did not have the backing of the British government to do what needed to be done because there was no strategic thinking. And that exemplified for me the truth of the Sun Tsu dictum that tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. And I really fear that is what we’re witnessing now.

BECKER: General Richard Shirreff is a former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Tong Zhao joining us to talk about this international perspective on military strategy.

He’s a senior fellow with the Nuclear Policy Program and Carnegie China, [also] nonresident researcher at Princeton University’s Science and Global Security Program. Welcome to On Point.

TONG ZHAO: Hi, great to be here.

BECKER: So I wonder when you hear these comments, the comments that we just heard from General Shirreff, and you hear the saying, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

I’m wondering what you think this strategy, or perhaps unclear strategy is doing, particularly to China and other countries in Asia as they watch what’s happening in Iran.

ZHAO: I think that’s also Chinese perception. Because China was reading the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and other high-level documents.

They all said the U.S. is going to reduce its presence in the Middle East, is going to focus on the West Hemisphere and the country in China. But then you have President Trump suddenly deciding to go to war again. I think China initially was quite impressed by American military success. Both U.S. and Israeli forces were able to decapitate Iranian leadership and cause a lot of damage to their military forces.

But mostly surprise China was, again, the American political resolve to do a major conflict in a region far away from China. And also, U.S. was waiting to do regime change together with Israel again, because for U.S.-China relationship, China has been concerned about American interest in regime change in other countries. That Chinese official documents have been really stressing this importance of regime security for decades.

China has been concerned about American interest in regime change in other countries.

TONG ZHAO

So to see the United States wanting to get into regime change business again, I think could really increase Chinese threat perception towards the United States and could further harden Chinese approach to competing with United States by further focusing on building up China’s own comprehensive power to hedge against a more unpredictable United States.

BECKER: And that’s what you mean by hardening, how China might harden its approach? It would build up its power.

ZHAO: Indeed, China is already doing everything across the board to accumulate material power. It is trying to secure against vulnerabilities in its energy supply, and it is building up its capability against American cutoff of high technologies to reduce any potential points of weakness in its economic and technological system.

But most importantly, China is doubling down on its comprehensive military buildup. In the most recently released 15th five-year plan, there was another emphasis on fast and comprehensive military modernization with a clear commitment to further strengthening and enlarging its nuclear forces as well.

BECKER: What about nuclear weapons? What do we know about China’s nuclear capabilities?

ZHAO: The Chinese government never revealed much about its nuclear capability. But according to American government assessment, as recent as 2019, China still maintained a very small arsenal of about 200 nuclear warheads while the United States has about 4,000.

But in the past few years, there was a major expansion. So the U.S. assessment was by last year, the number of Chinese nuclear warhead has already grown to about 600, and the assessment also says China might build around 1,000 nuclear weapons by the end of this decade.

BECKER: Is there maybe a perception on the Chinese side of things that, you said at first China was impressed by the military capabilities here that were being exhibited.

But that faded because there did seem to be a lack of a cohesive strategy, but I also wonder if perhaps there was the thinking that maybe this war is being waged to weaken China’s partners. So China could then not have some of the support that it might need in any potential future conflict.

ZHAO: I think China suspects that’s one of the objectives.

Because Iran is a quite important partner in the region. China sees Iran as possessing a key geographical location. It is at the center of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. China sees Iran as providing broader access to the region and beyond. And China has been trying to enhance comprehensive cooperation with Iran, including the signing of a major bilateral strategic partnership agreement in 2021 in which China committed, reportedly, to invest $400 billion U.S. dollars in the next 25 years.

China has been increasing security cooperation with Iran. They have more and more military exercises, and China has been providing Iran with some key material to support its missile forces, et cetera. So this will undermine Chinese efforts so far. But I think the U.S., from Chinese perspective, the U.S. could end up undermining its own position in the broader strategic competition with China.

U.S. now appears a little isolated. We heard about U.S.-NATO allies now very crazy to jump into helping United States. And U.S. does not appear to have a solution soon for opening the Strait and U.S. is actually now asking China to send military expeditionary fleet to help open the Strait. So I think China feels this leverage in future relations with United States has increased.

BECKER: How is China affected by this essential blocking of the Strait of Hormuz?

ZHAO: There was some direct impact on China’s access to regional oil.

I think the majority of Iranian oil exported is towards China. And China also needs oil from other regional countries, the transport of which needs to go through the street. But I think China has built itself a lot of buffer capacity in recent years. It has a huge strategic resolve for oil.

It has also diversified its own energy sources. So I think the impact, direct impact is quite manageable and for China, I think it has a relative comparative advantage with the vis-a-vis many other countries in Asia and Europe, et cetera. So China’s not facing a real time pressure.

So it can wait a lot, a little bit and see how the conflict plays out.

BECKER: And we heard, we had some tape of President Trump at the start of the show where he did say that he was asking other countries for help in unblocking the Strait of Hormuz. And he said other countries depend on this oil supply even more than the United States.

So they should be helping to secure passage through the Strait. And he said China gets 90% of its oil from the Strait. What’s your understanding?

ZHAO: I think there is certainly a truth to the fact that China depends a lot on the opening of the Strait for its made to long term energy security.

But for the near term I don’t think China is under as much pressure as other countries. China might have a interest in helping reduce the tensions opening up the Strait, but not necessarily by sending a military fleet. China, I think, wouldn’t do anything that would appear to be against Iran, with China’s strategic partner.

China might attempt to offer some diplomatic mediation. But again, I think it’s uncertain whether Beijing sees now as a right moment to do mediation, since the military situation still appears very unclear.

BECKER: I wonder how this is affecting China and other Asian countries.

So what about, say, North Korea? What are we hearing in terms of nuclear capabilities and how other countries are looking at this?

ZHAO: I think China worries that this war would increase the risk of nuclear proliferation both in places near China and across the globe. North Korea is a major case in concern.

The North Korean leadership must be watching this with a strong sense of vindication. That his decision to build North Korea nuclear arsenal is really important to protect the regime from potential American military attack and regime change attempt.

So following this war, we might see North Korea making further commitment to strengthening its nuclear power and comprehensive military capability. That will negatively affect Chinese security interest. Because it might encourage U.S. allies in this region, South Korea, Japan, to further rely on American military alliance network. It might even encourage some of these countries to pursue indigenous strategic military technology. South Korea has already started to build a nuclear-powered submarine.

Some of the technologies could open up opportunities for South Korea to pursue more sensitive military technologies, even nuclear weapons down the road. So the broader impact, causing greater risk of nuclear proliferation by North Korea, by perhaps other countries. I think it’s a real concern for Beijing.

BECKER: So Beijing essentially really needs to make sure that it has a good relationship with North Korea, and that will be something that strategically, it’s an objective that strategically it’s going to try to maintain. Is that what you’re saying?

ZHAO: Yes. China because of the intensified commutation with the United States has an increasing interest in maintaining a stable and a positive relationship with North Korea.

That’s the way for China to maintain needs overall influence over the Korean peninsula, but North Korea’s nuclear program, its growing nuclear capability is also causing a lot of headache for Beijing.

Part III

BECKER: We’ve heard two main objectives for this war from officials in the U.S. One is that they would like to affect the power structure of Iran.

Trump National Security Council staff member Retired Colonel Joel Rayburn recently appeared on PBS NewsHour. He says targeting Iranian leaders like Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s internal security force, is a successful strategy.

If leaders are eliminated and new ones step up and they’re eliminated, eventually there’s a deterrent to the leadership. I don’t think they’re all suicidal. I don’t think they’re all seeking martyrdom. At some point, there’s pragmatism that sets in and there is a pragmatic element to the Iranian regime over time, they can be deterred over time.

BECKER: And the U.S. has also said that it wants to affect Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

It says that there was a big threat from Iran’s nuclear powers, and it needed to correct that. After the war began, President Trump’s Special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, explained how nuclear talks with Iran broke down before. Again, before the war. Witkoff, along with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were involved in the talks with the Iranians.

Here is Witkoff on Fox’s Hannity.

STEVE WITKOFF: Jared and I opened up with the Iranian negotiators telling us they had the inalienable right to enrich all their nuclear fuel that they possessed. That’s how they opened up. We, of course, responded that the president feels we have the inalienable right to stop you dead in your tracks. They then went on to say that beyond the inalienable right to enrich that was going to be their starting point. And Jared and I just looked at ourselves, flummoxed, and said we’re really in for it now.

BECKER: Okay, so nuclear power, political power. These are some of the things the U.S. has mentioned regarding this war in Iran.

Joining us to talk about this and more is Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. And author of the book, The Future of War: A History. Thanks for being with us.

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Good to talk to you.

BECKER: So let’s talk first about this discussion that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were a threat and the U.S. needed to move on, that we heard that cut from U.S. special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was negotiating with the Iranians before this joint military operation began. What do you make of that as a strategy for this fighting?

FREEDMAN: I think it was, to be honest, more of a pretext than the basic strategy. You will recall, last June the United States claim to have removed the bulk of Iran’s ability to enrich its uranium.

And indeed in his opening announcement, President Trump said it had been obliterated. And also, Witkoff’s account does not accord with other accounts of these talks. So there were issues about uranium enrichment. There are issues about the amount of already enriched uranium that nobody quite knows where it is, but suspects is buried deep in one of the facilities that was bombed last June.

Can I certainly understand why the U.S. should be concerned about it, but I don’t think that was the main reason. One should add to this, that where the U.S. has made a difference and will, I’m sure, claim success is in taking out the Iranian Navy, taking out a lot of its missile capabilities, production capacity, it’s obviously done a lot on the regime change side of things.

So it has attacked to Iranian hard power essentially. That’s where it’s made a difference.

BECKER: And what about also, when we talk about political power, what about the expectation really, that if the political power is weakened, there will be a public uprising in Iran.

Is that likely?

FREEDMAN: Sadly no. Again, both Netanyahu and Trump in their initial announcements both said that they hoped that the Iranian people would take the opportunity with the regime so badly weakened. But of course, the regime has been preparing for this. It goes quite deep.

They’ve been preparing all their succession plans, so there are layers of people prepared to step forward. And unfortunately, unlike what was suggested, they’re not necessarily more pragmatic and moderate as you go down the list. And also of course, are going to be less authoritative in terms of issuing orders.

And of course, the main thing is not many weeks ago the regime killed thousands of demonstrators as Trump acknowledged the other day, that they’ve got the guns. And that’s a problem in terms of encouraging an uprising. So though many people would’ve cheered if it happened, at the moment, it doesn’t look too likely. What’ll happen in the future because this is a, Iran is badly battered. And also, one of the reasons there were so many protests before was that the economy has been totally mismanaged, basic services don’t work well. People are pretty miserable. So you can’t, by any means, rule out major political change in Iran. It could happen.

What doesn’t seem to be happening is it’s triggered by these sets of attacks.

BECKER: At the start of the show, we heard about so many NATO allies not wanting to get involved in this and not, and being very reluctant to respond to President Trump’s call for help in unblocking the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for the global oil supply.

So I’m wondering, why do you think it is that so many allies are reluctant to do this?

FREEDMAN: I think the two, first the Europeans have got a real interest in getting the Strait of Hormuz open. I think to suggest I mean they should not give any indication that this is no interest or concern to them.

It really is. Secondly, however, the U.S. and Israelis started this war. And if it’s not quite going as anticipated, it sometimes it seems a bit much to turn to the Europeans who have been regularly derided by this administration to sort out the problems. More seriously, the U.S. Navy doesn’t know how to open the Strait of Hormuz at the moment and if the U.S. Navy had a plan, then I suspect other nations would be quite ready to work with it.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to open the Strait using the capabilities that we have, without in the process getting the embarrassment of a major warship being damaged or even worse. So I think, I don’t think Europeans have handled this particularly well, I should say.

Though I can understand the sentiment, but the basic problem is there isn’t a good plan to open the Strait of Hormuz. Not whether or not the Europeans participate.

BECKER: I wonder though, it’s always been my understanding that NATO’s main mission was as collective defense, right?

If one member is under attack, they’re supposed to join together and help that member. So regardless of who started it, so I guess I don’t, isn’t this part of NATO’s mission to help with something like this, or how is it different?

FREEDMAN: I think there’s a difference. The only time Article Five has been invoked was after 9/11.

And that was an example of collective defense. The U.S. is not under attack. The U.S. as the president makes clear is less dependent on Middle Eastern oil than others. The U.S. has begun an operation, a war of choice, which it doesn’t, is not quite sure how to end. So I don’t think you can just call on collective defense.

As I say, I think although the Europeans did not share the strategic perspective of the opening salvos of trying to undermine the regime in the way that they did. I think they are all quite anxious, not only to open the Strait of Hormuz, but to defend the Qataris and the Emiratis and the Saudis and so on, all of whom are important countries to them as well.

So I don’t think it’s a question of a lack of strategic interest in the end, in working on this problem. It’s just not clear what you actually do. Because this is a waterway that favors Iran. They control the shore. Now, eventually at some point, the U.S. may find a way to gain control of the shore, but that’s pretty difficult and will take time.

So that, I think, I come back to that as being the main difficulty. That it’s not, although it’s been presented as the Europeans not stepping up, and I think, I do think the Europeans could have handled that side of it better. In practice, it’s because the U.S. Navy and others in the administration don’t actually have a clear plan for opening the Strait.

BECKER: We are told that U.S. Marines are making their way to Kharg Island. We’ve spoken with our other guests about this. It’s a main oil hub in Iran, we should say. I just wonder how might that affect securing the Strait of Hormuz? It’s some 400 miles away from the Strait.

What’s the significance of that? And is that part of a more concrete U.S. plan for that area. And do we need ground troops? So two questions there.

FREEDMAN: … Kharg Island is very important. It’s critical to Iran’s oil distribution. It has been well defended.

It’s been attacked from the air with care taken not to do too much damage to the oil facilities. It would be a fight, but it would be a fight. But we can assume that the U.S. should be able to take it. I think it’s an easier task for the Marines than the shoreline. But that doesn’t mean to say it’s easy.

It’s just easier. And I think the objective would not be to open the Strait as such, but to give the U.S. more leverage in whatever happens in terms of negotiations with Iran, the situation at the moment is the first set of objectives we discussed of taking out Iran’s hard power in many respects has been achieved.

And more can be done in that. The Iranians have kept themselves in the game because of this threat, and they can keep that threat going for a very long time even with a sort of almost maritime guerilla warfare just to make it an economic and dangerous for any ships to try to get through.

I think we’re looking in some ways as a negotiation and if the Iranians start to see not only that leaders keep on being eliminated, but that they are losing control of their main source of oil revenue, then that may encourage them to move to some sort of negotiation, but they’ll want something in return.

BECKER: We’ve heard a lot about the effects on several other countries. What about Russia here and the temporary lifting of sanctions on Russia because of the oil supply and still what’s going on in Ukraine? How does that play into the sort of global international strategy?

FREEDMAN: The Russians so far have got more divisions within the Atlantic Alliance and they’ve got a windfall. It’s a significant windfall. I don’t think it helps them win the war, but it helps ’em stay in the war longer. And for that they’re grateful, also, although it’s been widely reported that the Russians are helping the Iranians with their drones, with targeting general intelligence.

The Trump administration has been remarkably reluctant to criticize them on that. And Trump has been far more willing to criticize his allies and even the Ukrainians who are trying to help world leaders now in defending against drones. So in that sense the Russians are doing fine.

If this leads to a wider recession, then they’ll suffer with the rest of us. So I think the Russians are taking what they can get from this. The other thing to note, of course, is that although they’re giving some support to Iran, it’s pretty limited. And in the end, these various alliances of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, that people have talked about, don’t actually add up to much when it comes to the crunch.

BECKER: So what do you think this instability then means really? What will be the long-term effect, or what should the strategy be? To make sure that instability does not break apart alliances and cause more damage.

FREEDMAN: We’re in a very difficult situation at the moment, and we’re not sure how it will end.

And there’s lots of moving parts here that we don’t, you get different reports about the speed of which missiles are being used up … and so on. My view is the Iranians can keep some sort of threat going for some time, but it’ll diminish over time.

So it’s a question of how it ends. My view is that the Iranians will need at least some promises that this won’t happen again, that their sovereignty will be respected. The Gulf States have invested quite a lot in Donald Trump and his administration, are pretty cross that they weren’t warned it was coming, that they think the administration was too complacent about the consequences.

At the same time, they’re furious with the Iranians for the way that they’ve been attacked. America’s economy is jeopardized. So it’s going to lead to a lot of soul searching about security arrangements in the Gulf in particular. I think we’ll see what President Trump does about NATO and so on, but I think the European relationship is, we know where it is now, which is the Europeans having to do much more for themselves.

And then that will have to, that will carry on. And the Europeans are becoming much more ready to be critical of the administration. So I don’t think that’ll make much change. I think the big question marks will be amongst the Gulf States. And I think also, with a big war going on, that we’re not noticing much with Lebanon as well.

The question for Israel too about the belief that if you decapitate your enemy, somehow they’ll stop being your enemies or die down for a while. Hezbollah has shown more capability than was expected after the attacks on Hezbollah in ’24 when it looked like they’d been effectively defeated.

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