Ambassador Dan Kurtzer

Over the years, the Islamic Republic has built redundancy and various layers of institutional control and decentralized control into their system.

They have all of the coercive levers of power.

There's a million men under arms in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and an untold number under arms in the more radical Basij.

And as we saw a couple of months ago when the opposition did go out in the streets,

They don't carry arms, and therefore they were slaughtered.

Somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people were simply mowed down by this regime.

So looking at a post-war Iran, we're probably looking at some maybe slightly modified governance by this regime.

in some respects it'll be much more radical than what we had before the war because the supreme leader's son who's now the supreme leader is a much more radical person than his father was there may be a little bit of realization that the power disparity between iran and the united states is great enough that they have to figure out something other than opposition to the existence of the united states the existence of israel but i would not anticipate

much other significant change in Iran.

I think where there will be significant change will be the degree to which Arab Gulf states now have to rethink their national security concept.

On the one hand, for quite some time to come, they're going to be reliant upon the

good an idea that is when the United States goes to war without even consulting them and they bear part of the burden of the United States having gone to war.

I never nitpick the use of words, but I will in this case.

There are no wins emerging from this war.

At some point, President Trump will announce victory, but then he announced that we had won this war a few days after it started.

So it'll be an empty comment or an empty pronouncement from the president.

The Islamic Republic will announce that it won.

It will announce victory because it survived.

But the devastation that's been wrought on that country has set it back decades, if not more.

So they'll be governing a broken country and a failed state.