Are We Verging on Another Escalation in the Middle East? | Ali Vaez

In Episode 503 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/are-we-verging-on-another-escalation-in-the-middle-east-ali-vaez of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Ali Vaez, deputy program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Crisis Group and a closely watched analyst of Iran's foreign and nuclear policy, about where the war between Iran and the United States stands eight months after the start of Operation Epic Fury, how Iran has turned its control of the Strait of Hormuz into a tool for pressuring the global economy, what the conflict has cost Washington, Tehran, and their allies, and why the window for a durable diplomatic resolution may be closing. The first hour establishes the state of play eight months into the war, including: How the war has metastasized into a wider regional confrontation involving the Houthis in Yemen and attacks on Saudi Arabia. What the fighting has cost the United States militarily, from a significant depletion of its missile interceptor stockpiles to the loss of several regional bases. How the war has reshaped Iran's internal politics, economy, and society. Why coordination between Washington and Tel Aviv appears to be breaking down. The second hour examines: How the US and its Gulf allies have kept oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz despite Iran's blockade. How Iran's national security doctrine has shifted since the war began. The state of the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions. The degradation of Western intelligence networks inside Iran and its consequences. What a durable security architecture for the Middle East will require. Whether the Trump administration has the credibility to end the war or if it will be left up to a future administration. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 10/14/2026

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Ali Vaez, Deputy Program Director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Crisis Group, and one of the most closely watched analysts of Iran's foreign and nuclear policy, having played a direct role in the negotiations that produced the 2015 nuclear deal that the Trump administration withdrew from in 2018. By the end of today's conversation, you will have a clearer understanding of where

• 0:42Speaker 00

  the war between Iran and the United States actually stands eight months following the commencement of Operation Epic Fury, how Iran has turned its control of the Strait of Hormuz into a tool for pressuring the global economy, what this conflict has cost Washington, Tehran, and their respective allies, and why the window for a durable diplomatic solution may be closing, and what an escalation of hostilities would look like for the region, its geopolitics, and the global economy. Ali and I spend the first hour of our conversation establishing the state of play eight months into Operation Epic Fury, how the war has metastasized into a wider regional confrontation involving the Houthis in Yemen and attacks on Saudi Arabia, and what the fighting has

• 1:25Speaker 00

  cost the United States militarily, including a significant depletion of its missile interceptor stockpiles and the loss of several regional bases. We also discuss how the war has reshaped Iran's internal politics, economy, and society, and why coordination between Washington and Tel Aviv appears to be breaking down. The second hour is devoted to a conversation about how the United States and its Gulf allies have kept oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz despite Iran's blockade, and why that workaround is not sustainable. We also discuss how Iran's national security doctrine has shifted since the war began, the state of its nuclear ambitions, the degradation of Western intelligence networks inside the country, and what a new, more durable security architecture for the Middle East

• 2:09Speaker 00

  might require, including whether any of this is achievable before this war ends, or whether it will take a new administration in the White House to see it through. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected], and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this timely and deeply informative conversation with my guest, Ali Vaez. Ali Vaez, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Great pleasure to be with you.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  The pleasure is all mine, Ali. It's great having you on the show. I've been reading your work in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy Magazine and The New York Times, among other publications, and I've been following you on Twitter for some time. So I'm excited to finally get you on the show. I don't want to assume that everyone already knows who you are. You're the Deputy Program Director at the Crisis Group for Middle East and North Africa. So give us a little bit of a sense of your background. How did you become an expert on Iranian affairs, and what is the nature of your foreign policy experience?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's actually a peculiar story, and I don't want to get too much into its details, but I just shared the basics with you. Interestingly, I've actually published this in Foreign Affairs. I had an essay in 2023 that's called "The Long Twilight of the Islamic Republic," in which I intertwine my personal story, because I actually studied pure sciences, biotechnology and nuclear physics. That's where I got my master's and PhD, and even I did a postdoc in pure sciences until 2009, when I decided all of a sudden to completely shift gears and come into the policy world. But I realized I didn't have the technical background, and so I went to get another

• 4:33Speaker 01

  master's degree in international relations in DC, and that's how I switched. So I came out of school in DC in 2011, which coincided with a very dark period in US-Iran relations, with nuclear negotiations not going anywhere and the risk of war being pretty high. And I decided that if there's anything I could do to try to prevent another conflict between Iran and the US, or the US committing another mistake of engaging in another war in the Middle East, I should. And I kind of got lucky, because in 2012, I was hired by Crisis Group, and immediately

• 5:13Speaker 01

  I had fantastic access to policymakers in every key stakeholder countries. And in 2013, diplomacy became much more serious between Iran and the US, and I could have direct impact on the negotiations, which led eventually in 2015 to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA. So that's the main story of me getting involved in foreign policy from science, but I've had a lot of ups and downs throughout this process. You know, when I started working on nuclear negotiations, I thought, this is it. This is how people from the nonprofit world, from the outside of government, can have

• 5:55Speaker 01

  direct impact on policy, and that you could do really good things. I didn't realize that that was sort of an exception to the rule, which is that a lot of stars would have to align for think tankers and policy experts to be able to have direct impact on policy, and that often the cost and the frustrations of being involved in this process are so much more than the feeling of being impactful.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Or that the agreement would be negated so quickly. How many years did you guys actually work on that agreement?

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Crisis Group was involved from the beginning of this crisis in 2003. We had President Garrett Evans, who was the former Foreign Minister of Australia and a very well-known non-collaboration expert. He's also the author and the originator of the idea of responsibility to protect. And the core bargain of the JCPOA, which is nuclear restrictions and transparency measures in return for economic incentives, was really his idea that was put on the table in 2003. So the organization's been involved in and out throughout the years until I got involved, and then we were very intimately consulted by all sides.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  The whole process of JCPOA negotiation, I would say, took about two and a half years. It did survive for almost around the same period of time, two and a half years. It was implemented in January of 2016, and President Trump withdrew from it in May of 2018. And Iran stayed in it for another year, even after the US withdrew and imposed sanctions. By that point, the deal was already an empty shell. So two and a half years to negotiate, two and a half years to fall apart.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  So we're nearing eight months since the commencement of Operation Epic Fury and the constriction of commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. We have seen multiple reported ceasefire negotiations collapse and have since seen the war expand to the Red Sea with attacks by Houthi forces in Yemen, including devastating missile and drone strikes against Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport and King Fad International Airport on the Persian Gulf. What is the state of the war at this moment?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Well, it is a metastasizing conflict on the one side, and it's a stalemate on the other. A metastasizing in the sense that the Yemen dimension of this has already gained the life of its own, that is, I would say, independent now of what would happen between Iran and the US. You can imagine all sorts of scenarios of escalation or de-escalation between Iran and the US that would not necessarily affect the dynamics in Yemen. It might, but it also might not. But when it gets to Iran and the US, we are in an absolute state of stalemate. There were efforts on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York about three weeks ago, end of September, to try to figure out if there is a way of getting Iran and

• 9:03Speaker 01

  the US back to the negotiating table. The Khatari mediators tried very hard. The Iranians came with a new proposal that would basically condense the timeline that they had agreed to with the US in a memorandum of understanding that both sides signed on to back in June to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in 30 days. Iranians put a proposal on the table that would do so in seven days, and the concept was that they were hoping that a condensed timeline would be attractive to President Trump, because it would get to open the strait and bring down energy prices prior to the midterms. But my sense was that they were also realistic enough that that's probably not going to

• 9:46Speaker 01

  work because of Washington's optimism about what sanctions could achieve and what the renewed pressure that the US has been imposing on Iran in the past few weeks, not just in the form of a naval blockade. But also almost a air blockade and much tougher enforcement of existing factions would eventually bring Iran to its needs. And so the Iranians also did this, putting the proposal on the table in order to win both the international blame game, that they are not the inflexible party at all, but also to demonstrate to their own people that they are trying to find a solution. And if they can, it's because the US is in pursuit of maximalist demand.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  The US wanted Iran to include a nuclear concession in that package. And therefore, you know, the deal would be different than what was negotiated in June, because the president is clearly, I think the criticism about the June MOU got under his skin, that this was a deal that was very favorable to the Iranians. And so he was trying to get something that would be different. The problem on the Iranian side is that if they agree to a different deal, and they would put additional concessions on the table, they are afraid that that would send a wrong message to Washington. That pressure is working, and that's why Iranian position has become more accommodating of US demand. And that's why we're in a stalemate.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  So that means there is a risk that either the Iranians would try to mount an October surprise by escalating in a way that would allow them to break this blockade and the economic pressure that the US is putting on them, or that the US would do so either to give the president a victory in the run up to the midterms, or right after the midterms, when he would have very little to lose, because the outcome would be what it is.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  So your response raises a number of questions about how the war is actually going, and what effect it's had on the various counterparties. Before we assess the impact on Iran, or America's forced posture in the region, or how it's disrupted commercial traffic, and what Washington has done to try to mitigate that, I do have at least one more question about the Saudi experience, because the bombings I mentioned in my last question have happened only in the last few days. When is the last time that Saudi Arabia experienced anything like this? And how bad have these attacks been?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Well, the Saudis did experience cross border attacks, a lot of drones and missiles fired by the Houthis during the conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis from 2015 to 2022. But then they had a ceasefire agreement with the Houthis in Yemen. And since then, there was relative quiet across the border. And in 2023, the Saudis also normalized relations with Iran. After similar period of tensions from 2016, the relations were cut off until 2023. And that's helped as well to keep that conflict quiet, and

• 12:56Speaker 01

  the Saudis and the Emiratis not being directly affected. So you're right, this is now, after several years, quite a bit of shock to the Saudis, especially given how effective the Houthis targeting has been against civilian targets like the Riyadh Airport.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm familiar with cases where Saudi civilian infrastructure has been attacked, notably 2017, but I don't recall those attacks being as significant as what we're seeing now.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Well, there were some other airports that had been attacked, but not Riyadh Airport, especially not the case in which we had significant number of casualties, including an American.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  So how do these attacks on Saudi Arabia complicate the war for Washington?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Well, it complicates the war in several ways, in the sense that, you know, at this point, President Trump will have to decide whether he would break the ceasefire agreement that the US has with the Houthis as of last spring. For two months, the US last spring bombed the Houthis. It was a significant escalation, but the Houthis fired back, especially at US naval assets in the Red Sea. And the US lost several high tech fighter jets. I don't remember exactly if they were F-15s or F-35s, but in any case, it was a significant loss of assets, and it was very costly undertaking. And at that point, the president pragmatically

• 14:25Speaker 01

  pulled the plug on the continuation of that confrontation. I remember in the Biden administration, when the US was bombing the Houthis, somebody asked President Biden whether he thinks the bombing would work. He said, no, but we will continue doing it. And that's the real lesson of bombing the Houthis from the air, that it was done by Saudi left coalition for seven years, it was done by the Biden administration, it was done by the Trump administration, it has not worked. And it will not work. Even ground forces, the Yemeni government's forces have been mobilized and have retaken some of the territory that the Houthis have conquered over the past few weeks. They can't really roll back the gains that the Houthis have

• 15:10Speaker 01

  had, especially through the control of the capital in Sanaa. So there is a limit to what could be achieved militarily against the Houthis. And I think President Trump learned that lesson last year. But now, if he doesn't do anything, and decides that he wants to keep the ceasefire with the Houthis, it will be seen as a betrayal by Gulf allies, especially the Saudis. And it would diminish US credibility. So it's damned if you do, and damned if you don't, in this case. But if there is a new front open, and the US enters into the conflict, I would say that would generally work pretty well for the Iranians.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Because then, the US would have to protect its naval assets, who could come under fire from two different directions, both from the Iranians and from the Houthis. And I remind you that several weeks ago, the Iranians did successfully fire a warning shot towards one of US warships that was in Indian Ocean. And finding that vessel, and getting through its very sophisticated air defense system, to detonate a anti-ship cruise missile, in and of itself is quite a military feat. But the Iranians did it in order to send a warning to the Trump administration of what would happen if the economic pain on Iran would

• 16:35Speaker 01

  become too sharp. Now, having the Houthis aligned with them, and firing at the Americans, would be a gift to the Iranians. But again, the other side of the coin, which is not doing anything for the Trump administration, is not attractive either.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Does that kind of effective targeting suggest that the Iranians are getting support, maybe from the Chinese, as has been reported?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%. It's either the Chinese satellite imagery, or Russian intelligence. But undoubtedly, the Iranians have become better at targeting US naval assets, and could not do it on their own, without support from other great powers like China or Russia.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  How much cooperation and coordination is there between the Houthis and the Iranians? Or are the Houthis just simply taking advantage of this window of opportunity to gain more territorial control over Yemen?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  So these two are not mutually exclusive, in the sense that the Houthis are primarily driven by their own agenda. They were unhappy with the fact that the Saudis had imposed a blockade on their ports and on their airports, and wanted to find a way of getting out of that deadlock. And were looking for a pretext, were preparing for another round of confrontation with Saudi led coalition and their allies on the ground. And the Iran conflict at some point did provide them with an option. On the other side of the coin, the Iranians, also, they don't control the Houthis. The Houthis, they have influence on the Houthis, but the Houthis are not really their proxy. So there is a limit to Iranian influence on

• 18:10Speaker 01

  the Houthis. But again, the timing of Houthis escalation worked pretty well for the Iranians, because this is a period that Iran is trying to make sure that energy prices would remain high, if not go higher. And the pressure that the Houthis have put on the Red Sea, and especially Bab al-Mandeb, where about 5 million barrels of Saudi oil exports were going to the Asian markets, is pretty beneficial to the Iranians. In addition to the fact that, again, they use this fog of war to mobilize some of their allies in Iraq, to fire onto the East West Pipeline, which is a pipeline that takes about 3 to 5 million

• 18:51Speaker 01

  barrels of Saudi oil from the eastern province where it's produced, to the Yambu port on the Red Sea, where it could be then exported, basically circumventing the Strait of Hormuz that Iran now controls. So you see that there is alignment of interests, there is certainly a lot of cooperation, provision of support for the Houthis by the Iranians. But again, it's also not like Iranians will push a button, and the Houthis will do whatever the Iranians want. In fact, I hear from Iranian sources that they're not very happy with the way the Houthis stretched themselves out too much in this conflict. They conquered territory

• 19:32Speaker 01

  that they could not hold, especially around Bab al-Mandeb, because that's a very flat coastal area in which they would be very much exposed. And they are also against the Houthis conducting attacks against civilian targets like the Riyadh Airport. But again, you know, the Houthis don't necessarily listen. I had a colleague who covered Yemen for us, Peter Salisbury, who always had, I thought, the best formulation on Iran Houthis relations, which was that Iran has, often with the Houthis, it has its foot on the accelerator, it doesn't necessarily have its foot on the brake.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Hmm. So let's double back for a moment here, because I am curious to understand what effect this war, and let's talk more specifically about the war since Operation Epic Fury. What effect has it had on Iran? Its economy, its society? How has it accelerated trends that were already in place in the country, et cetera?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  So that's a very big question, because it has had a lot of different impacts across the board. Let's start maybe politically. I remember talking to about a dozen Iranian officials, former officials, experts at the Doha Forum last December. So this is after the 12 day war, that Israel launched against Iran in June of 2025, and the US joined briefly, bombing Iran's nuclear facility. And everyone agreed that Iran was in a state of absolute dead end, politically, economically, socially. And all of these interlocutors were telling me that they believed that change would have to come. Something's got to give.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  But they all admitted that this change can only come when the Supreme Leader dies. So everybody was waiting for Ali Khamenei to be removed from the scene so that change could come to Iran. So that was a system that I had described in the past as the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. A system that is at a dead end, is unable to reform itself, but it's not yet at a point of collapse. What the war did is that it removed several layers of top political and military leadership and replaced them with some new figures. And it basically made the system much more efficient in making bold decisions

• 21:55Speaker 01

  in a way that it wasn't under an 86-year-old Supreme Leader who was set in his ways. Socially, there was, according to surveys that were conducted inside Iran prior to the conflict, about 70 to 80% of the Iranian people who wanted to see fundamental changes. There was a high degree of discontent politically, economically with the system. If you remember, there was a massive protest in January of this year that the regime brought to decry. But what the war did is that it almost changed these dynamics in the opposite direction in the sense that the anger that was primarily in that the regime

• 22:36Speaker 01

  is now shared between the regime and the United States and Israel. The hope within many inside Iran that help would come from the outside, whether it's in the form of US or Israeli military intervention or that it will come from Iranian exile opposition, is also completely dashed because of, primarily, I would say, President Trump's own narrative, which was, you know, pretty postive towards the nation-state, the threat of civilizational erasure. That kind of language really turned off a lot of the Iranians. And these dynamics also energized the regime's core constituents and social base in ways that they were not. Even ideologically, it validated the regime's narrative

• 23:20Speaker 01

  because the Iranian Islamic Republic used to say that the animosity of the US and Israel towards Iran was against the nation-state and not just against the regime. And people didn't believe it until President Trump demonstrated the animosity is against the nation-state because he wanted to break Iran as a country, not just a regime. So you had the regime mobilizing its core constituents to come to the public square throughout the country consistently for almost, you know, eight months, which is quite something. And you could not have imagined this prior to the conflict. Economically, the situation was dire even before the war. It is now absolutely horrendous. Inflation is above 100%.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Unemployment, which was a chronic problem, is now even worse because some of the damage to the infrastructure has pushed literally millions of people out of jobs. For instance, a steel manufacturing factory was targeted, which not only that factory itself, but also the derivative products that it will produce for other industries. It has resulted in unemployment problem becoming way worse. Currency has lost 50% of its value since the beginning of the war. So, I mean, it's a whole litany of economic problems which has significantly increased the pressure on the population. And the regime does not hesitate to transmit that pressure to the population as long as it can protect institutions that are essential for its own survival,

• 24:50Speaker 01

  including, of course, security forces. So those are the, you know, political, social, and economic dimensions. Of course, there's a lot more to say on geopolitics and on the military, but I'll pause here to see which dimension you want to explore next.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Well, I am curious how this war has affected the region's geopolitics and the security architecture. So rather than ask you a question, why don't you finish what you were going to say and then I'll follow up with some additional questions.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  So I would say the two most important geopolitical effects of this war are, number one, the fact that Iran used a point of leverage granted to it by geography, which is the Strait of Hormuz, as means of putting pressure on the global economy. Now, we had seen the Houthis in Yemen putting pressure on the Red Sea, but the implications were so much more limited that what happened on the first day of this conflict with Iran immediately interrupted traffic in the strait. Shutting down the strait is not really the correct word because at least for the first two months, the Iranians were exporting their own oil to China. There was selective passage that was allowed. They didn't physically blockade the strait.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  They did selective attacks to basically scare off everybody else and jack up insurance premiums and so on. So that was the main means of controlling the strait. But it also is fundamentally a new phenomenon. Because if you think of the cost that the US has been forced to shoulder in other conflicts and prolonged conflicts, I want to necessarily call them forever wars, but, you know, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, these countries created costs for the United States by bugging it down, a high number of casualties, high military expenditure, and so on.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  But they were not really able to put pressure on the pocketbook of every American citizen. They were not able to put pressure on, you know, any European, any Australian, anyone in the global south who would go to a gas station to fill up their tank. This is the first time that a country that is subject to economic coercion by great powers is able to squeeze the global economy in response. And that is something, you know, again, everybody was aware of Iran's ability to shut the strait. I think everybody underestimated of what that really means if Iran does so in practice. And even, you know, until June, July, August,

• 27:29Speaker 01

  when the US was bombing the southern shoreline of Iran and was considering putting boots on the ground, there was still consideration of the fact that maybe there is a solution of removing Iran's control over the strait. But as we have seen, it hasn't worked. Even when there are periods that there is a little bit more optimism, that more oil is leaking out of the strait, the Iranians find new ways of going after shuttles or supertankers even beyond the strait, in the Persian Gulf or in the Sea of Oman and so on. So that, I think, is what has been one of the most fundamental effects of this conflict. The second, I would say, and that is still a little too soon to judge, but we've seen some evidence for it.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Depending on the trajectory of the conflict, it might have longer-term implications, which is what I call the reverse of the Ukraine phenomenon in the sense that in the war in Ukraine, the West realized that Ukraine could be a bulwark against Russia, that the country that everybody expected would be invaded in several weeks and the government would fall. And then people are thinking about, you know, what kind of insurgencies you can have to combat the Russian invasion, has actually managed to stand its ground and punch back and is doing the fighting for everybody else. And now, Ukraine has been very costly for the West, but the cost is not the same as fighting Russia directly.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  And it's the same thing that I think Russia and China are now thinking about Iran, that with very little investment, providing Iran with some intelligence, satellite imagery, electronic warfare capabilities, or even conventional weapons, they have been able to bug down the weakest military power in the world in the Middle East. And the US has lost tremendous amount of assets, especially interceptor munitions that could be used in defense of Ukraine and in defense of Taiwan and so on. And those are very beneficial achievements, again, to Beijing and Moscow at very low cost. So that's the second, I think, long-lasting effect of this conflict.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  How much of a toll has the war taken on America's ability to protect its forces and its allies in the region? You know, we've heard a lot about how it's depleted US inventories for Patriot and THAAD missile defense system interceptors. But what do we actually know concretely?

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Well, look, the problem is that the Pentagon is not going to reveal the exact numbers of how much it has in its stocks. You know, it's often referred to as magazine depth of, you know, how many interceptors there are left. But expert community in B.C. have been looking at these numbers in terms of production versus how many missiles were shut down and how many THAAD or Patriots usually used for shooting down a ballistic missile or a cruise missile. I have some estimates. And you have to remember that this was not just a one-dimensional conflict. The US was providing some of the same technology to Israel, to the Gulf states. It even moved some of the assets from East Asia to the region.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  And the numbers indicate that about 70% of THAAD missiles have been depleted and around 50% of Patriot missiles. And about 75% of the long-range, the US ballistic missiles have been depleted. They were used in attacks against Iran. Now, the problem is that it takes a long time for some of these to be produced. They're not easily replaceable. And, you know, it's not a matter of a few weeks or a few months. It's a matter of a few years. And, you know, my sense is that in the medium term, probably the US would learn some very valuable lessons from this conflict. And it would fight wars actually much more like the Iranians. It would fight it in asymmetric ways.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  It would not use a $100,000 interceptor to shoot down a $5,000 drone. It would use some of the cheaper technology that the Ukrainians, for instance, have produced. Or it would actually use extensively very similar technology to what the Iranians have produced. We know that the US has already imitated the Shahed drone missile technology and has even used it against Iran. So in the medium term, I think, again, the picture would be different. What is a source of concern for a lot of security experts is the short run, what could happen in the next year or two and how the US would be pretty unprepared for additional black swans that could emerge on, you know,

• 32:13Speaker 01

  geopolitically at the international level. The other effect, which, again, I think is very significant.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Is the fact that the US has been kicked out of the region militarily. If you look at all the bases in the Gulf states, in Iraq, in Syria, most of these bases were targeted. We have about seventeen US bases that were targeted. Some of them are completely inoperative and would require significant investment to get them back up and running. And I don't think it makes even a lot of sense to rebuild them, given the fact that not only they didn't deter an Iranian attack, they invited attacks on themselves and on the territory that was hosting them, mostly the Gulf states. And they would remain vulnerable to the same technology that Iran has. So it doesn't really make sense to rebuild them.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  But the fact that you think that US had to accumulate a lot of its military assets in Jordan, and even in Jordan, the Iranians conducted a preemptive strike in September that killed several Americans and the US couldn't defend its base. And so now it has to basically withdraw all the way to Israel. Israel becomes sort of this huge depot of US military assets. But the fact that the third-rate military could kick out a superpower from the region, it's quite stunning. And if you believe that the Iranians were involved one way or another in a potential attack on a US base in the UK,

• 33:46Speaker 01

  which resulted in the US withdrawing its B-1 fighter jets back to the homeland, it also again tells you that there are serious limitations in how the US military might, could basically throw itself around the region and the world when you have these asymmetric warfare tactics that are becoming more and more popular. And by the way, people are learning from each other. You know, if indeed the Iranians were trying to attack the US base in the UK with drones that were imported into the UK and operated by operatives affiliated with Iran from inside British territory,

• 34:29Speaker 01

  this is exactly the kind of spider web operation that the Ukrainians conducted against Russia last year. And again, the Iranians have learned that lesson. So again, it gives you a lot of insight into what the new kind of warfare is and what are some of the limitations that the United States has, despite there's going to be powers to fight in this new era.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  You mentioned Israel a moment ago. Washington and Tel Aviv were engaged in highly cooperative and coordinated joint operations leading into Operation Epic Fury. Are they still operating with the same level of cross-collaboration? Or have any failures emerged due to conflicting goals and public perceptions?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  No, that doesn't seem to be the case that there is as much coordination and cooperation as was the case at the beginning of this conflict. This is a war that Israel and the United States started together, but now Israel is completely sidelined. Part of it, I think, is as a result of the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu over-promised, under-delivered in terms of how easy the conflict with Iran would be. He, as public reporting suggests, had promised that the regime would collapse in a matter of a few days. This is why President Trump didn't take the risk of Iran shutting down the Strait of Hormuz seriously, because he thought they wouldn't even get to that point. They would be gone by then.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  And I think that created a deficit of trust in Israeli assessments. And is one of the reasons that Israel was sidelined from the conflict after the ceasefire in April. There is also the possibility that Iranian targeting of Israel was becoming too costly for Israel. You know, this is one of the asymmetries between Iran and Israel is that even at the height of the bombing in Iran, you know, it's quite something when you think about the fact that there were several hundred different sorties every single day in Iran, a total of about 13,000 attacks. And, you know, in some parts of the country, people didn't even feel that there is a war.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Or, you know, my own friends and families, they rarely went into a shelter. Whereas in Israel, every single day, 6 million Israelis had to go into shelters because, you know, a small country and it would be affected by a war like this that has economic implications, that again has implications in terms of munitions that you need to shoot down these missiles. So it might also reflect a limited capacity for attritional conflict for a state like Israel to fight. But I also think it's demonstrative of US disappointment in what Israel had sold to the Trump administration as sort of a slam dunk.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  So actually, this is not a question I had prepared or thought about, because it's been a while since I've seen videos of Israel being hit with missiles from Iran. But what exactly is the toll that the country has taken? And when's the last time that they were attacked? And is there an expectation that the Iranians would continue to attack Israel as a way of gaining concessions out of the US in the course of negotiations? In the way that they've targeted Gulf infrastructure, as an example?

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Right. So it's quite interesting, because even during the 40-day war, the UAE, for instance, received more Iranian attacks than Israel did. And when I asked a senior Iranian official to explain this, his point was that, you know, it's just a very simple question of geography, that the Gulf states are closer, Israel is a thousand kilometers away, and it is surrounded by a multi-layer air defense system, whereas most of the Gulf states are vulnerable to Iranian attacks. And there is a wider range of targets, because the Iranians were even going after data centers or some companies that were affiliated with the Trump Organization and so on.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Whereas in Israel, that kind of targeting becomes more difficult. But the last time Iranians fired on Israel was the end of the 40-day war, so in April. And since then, there hasn't been any attack, despite the fact that Iran and the US have engaged in several rounds of tit-for-tat confrontations. This is, I think, partly driven by what I mentioned to you, that Israel itself understands that there is a limit to what it can do and also a high cost to engage in a very lengthy fight with Iran. It's better if the US does the dirty job and Israel comes in every now and then. But it's also Iranian reluctance to bring Israel in, because unlike President Trump, who threatened to target Iran in infrastructure,

• 39:18Speaker 01

  and with the exception of a few cases, like some bridges and railways, he really didn't go after critical infrastructure. Israel was already targeting, as I mentioned, to steel manufacturing companies, petrochemical companies, and some of the sources of wealth for the Islamic Republic. And that, I think, is one of the reasons that the Iranians don't necessarily want to reopen the front against Israel. Now, push comes to shove, of course, if they are attacked, they will strike back. But my sense is that they would prefer the continuation of the situation in which they're not opening too many fronts at the same time. They're more focused on some calibrated escalation with the United States,

• 40:01Speaker 01

  rather than having Israel in, which in their view, doesn't act according to any kind of rulebooks and it's much more unpredictable.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  It seems from a lot of the analysis that I read after Operation Epic Fury, that the Israelis, and maybe more specifically Netanyahu and his supporters, viewed the escalation as a win-win, regardless of the outcome for Israel. That in the worst-case scenario, they just pummel the Iranians and the war sort of, it stays at this low-level conflict zone. And that's still better than what was the case before February 28th. Is that still the thinking, do you think, in Netanyahu's inner circle? Or do they now view the war as having been a mistake? Or the support of the war and trying to convince the president to attack Iran as being a mistake?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Well, what I hear from Israelis is disappointment in the fact that the plan didn't work and the regime survived. They put the blame on a lot of other people, including on Turkey, President Erdogan. Because one of the key elements of their plan was to facilitate a civil war in Iran by bringing in Kurdish minorities who were armed. And as President Trump has said even publicly, it was a call from President Erdogan urging President Trump to pull the plug on this idea, which resulted in the US shutting it down. And the Israelis really believe that if that plan had come to fruition, we would have had a very different outcome.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  I think it's an oversimplification and a misguided assessment, but that's what they believe.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  It's interesting that they would have thought that that was a strategy that could work, given how Erdogan has consistently made it a red line and given Trump's decision to withdraw US military forces from Rojava in 2019.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that at the end of the day, the Kurds would also be pretty cautious, given the fact that the US has pulled the plug, you know, or thrown them under the bus multiple times in the past, that they too would be reluctant to take big risks. And of course, the Iranians were prepared for this scenario when they actually used the Shia militias in Iraq very effectively to put pressure on these separatist groups in the Kurdistan area. The same with the Baluch minorities on the eastern province of Sistan Baluchistan, between Iran and Pakistan. But just to say, there is, from an Israeli perspective, it wasn't that the concept was faulty, its execution was problematic.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  And therefore, it could be tried again and it would eventually deliver results, because this is a regime that is, from their perspective, in a death spiral, especially economically. And therefore, they believe that the job could be done and completed with additional attacks. But the mirror image of this assessment is the Iranian assessment. But they don't want to become another Lebanon. They don't want to become another Basra. They don't want to become another Syria in which Israel believes that it has freedom of action to be able to go in whenever it wants and bomb the hell out of the Iranians whenever it wants. The Iranians are making this conflict so costly for the United States and for the entire world, so they would never happen again.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  This is their never again moment. And you can see that it kind of, you know, the fact that this is the biggest oil shock the world has ever experienced. You know, this is, you know, we have unprecedented situation that the yield on US Treasury bonds is the highest that it has ever been. You know, that a country like Australia has to issue debts in its own currency and a lot of countries are running out of strategic reserves when it gets to energy resources and so on. It is really designed to make sure that this Israeli policy that has been implemented in other places, the so-called mowing the lawn, going in every few months to make sure

• 44:09Speaker 01

  that an adversary is not able to rebuild its capabilities, is not a policy that could be implemented in the case of Iran.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Something that we haven't spoken about yet and that I'm curious to ask you about in the second hour is how exactly the US has managed to increase the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz during this war and how sustainable those efforts are, which opens the door to a broader discussion about what exactly the end game is here for Washington. Is the White House taking it day by day, focusing especially on surviving the midterms? Or are the resources currently being expended part of a larger strategy to bring the war to a close in the next few months or even before the end of Trump's second term in office?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  And I'd like to get a better sense from you on what you think an acceptable conclusion to this conflict would look like, where Iran can become a stakeholder in the Greater Middle East and be allowed to participate in its economic flourishing without simultaneously leading to its domination of the region, which would obviously be an unacceptable outcome for most of its participants. What would that necessitate in terms of the refashioning of a new security architecture in the region? And finally, where does the nuclear question fit into all of this? This is something that we only talked about briefly in the first hour. Is this still a red line for Washington?

• 45:40Speaker 00

  And more consequentially, has the war caused Tehran to rethink or reassess the costs and benefits associated with maintaining its nuclear weapons program, given how much of this conflict has actually been predicated on it? And given Tehran's ability to exercise deterrence through other means, the most significant of which has been its ability to disrupt commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and bombing Gulf infrastructure? For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener-supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Ali, head over to

• 46:21Speaker 00

  hiddenforces.io/subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers get access to our premium feed, so you can listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Ali, stick around. We're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the premium feed. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.