Ben Rhodes

We are a country of 94 million people.

We have not just a religious theocracy.

We have a military dictatorship.

That's the IRGC.

Yes, it is.

And that's changed, right?

In some ways, that could make the Iranian government more dangerous because, you know, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was no good guy at all.

But when you kill the 86-year-old Supreme Leader, you kill a guy named Lara Jani, who is also seen as the kind of key political operator behind the scenes, a guy that you would have negotiated with.

And you demonstrate that the only people that can stand up to the Americans, control the Strait of Hormuz, and inflict this pain on their neighbors is the IRGC.

Those are the ones that churn out the Shahzad drones.

The besieged militia that you mentioned are the ones that terrorize the population to not rise up, as Trump seemed to think they were going to do because he called on them to do that.

I think you leave behind a government that is actually more –

I don't want to say radical, but more militarized for certain in the IRGC.

That's right.

I mean, I think Israel, you know, it seems like Trump, in part because, you know, he's not surrounded by expertise.

There's no process to make decisions.

And in his first term, he had some experts around who told him not to do things like this.

But he seemed to believe that the regime would collapse and there'd be some transition to something else.

I think I find it hard to believe that the Israelis, given how much they understand about that region,

Actually believed that Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah who's lived in Northern Virginia for decades, was going to ride in on a white horse and usher in democracy.