Ben Rhodes

But the reality is that we are in this and the world is going to see whatever happens in Iran next,

they're gonna see as the responsibility of the United States and Donald Trump personally.

And as we talked about, whether it's civil conflict, refugee flows into other countries, major energy disruptions in the Straits of Hormuz, periods of calm followed by periods of dramatic violence.

I mean, this could go all kinds of ways,

But the one thing we know is that Iran is now added to that list of forever wars.

And it's the biggest country yet that we've tried to do this in.

And we're doing it with no boots on the ground.

And we're doing it in conjunction with Israel, which we've also never done.

We've never done a regime change war, like literally with the Israelis.

So that is going to create impressions in the world too.

And I just think, you know, there's no real discussion of this by Trump.

Yeah, I mean, the first point is that, you know, Arachi, it's not clear, you know, who he even reports to at this point.

And negotiation, the Iranians have been bombed now twice in the middle of a nuclear negotiation where they were making concessions.

So the idea that that's a pathway to de-escalation seems less likely to me.

You laid out well what their options are for response, right?

They're not going to do all of them.

So we're not suggesting that all these things will happen, but they are all the available paths.

You know, ballistic missiles, drones, asymmetric attacks, including terrorist attacks, proxy attacks across the region, cyber attacks.

All these things are kind of in the Iranian kit.

And the question is essentially, do they try to kind of empty the, you know, magazine here