Ben Rhodes

Then you'll have a good regime.

And he was saying, not only is that right for the protesters, not only is that delivering democracy, but he was saying, I will be your strategic partner.

Their oil will be available.

And actually, a lot of people were speculating, well, maybe Trump's real interest in Iran is the oil.

which is actually not something that's discussed a lot publicly, but that it's not the nuclear issue and it's not the human rights concerns.

It's that, like Venezuela, Iran could be a source of oil for the United States or taking that away from China that's the biggest buyer of that oil.

So that was kind of the mood music.

I think there was also another interesting dynamic, Eamon, where

He has gotten a lot of support in the diaspora, but a lot of people I talked to were like, I don't know that that's the same as in the country.

And yet people in the country absolutely want change.

They're sick of this regime.

They want Khamenei gone.

He's old.

He's been around forever.

But there was a sense that there's this growing gap that's maybe not particularly healthy between the diaspora that is kind of going along with the Pahlavi play and people inside the country.

So that was kind of the read I got.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, this came up, and you don't see it discussed much, but four times the size of Syria.

And if you have an implosion in Iran, you could have millions of refugees into Europe, into Afghanistan, right?