David McCloskey

Yeah.

for a long time, Iran had friends and strategic depth in the Middle East from this so-called axis of resistance, right?

This network of partners and proxies and clients that it had built up over the years in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Yemen.

That has been

pretty brutally chipped away at by, in particular, by the Israelis in the conflict against Hezbollah, killing Hassan Nasrallah.

I mean, a story we talked about a bit in a few episodes on this podcast of the pager attacks that wrecked Hezbollah's command and control.

Bashar al-Assad's not the president of Syria anymore.

He's gone.

He's gone.

Hamas's leadership is in disarray.

And the 12-day war in Iran last summer,

The Israelis basically, with absolute impunity, operated in Iranian airspace, killed Iranian military and security officials seemingly at will.

Even Iran's friends, supposed friends like China, again, they're sort of squeezing Iran for better rates on the oil that they're trying to buy.

It's as simple as that.

Yeah, it's not a binary, is it?

The nuclear program wasn't destroyed in that strike.

But I think what the sort of culmination of that 12-day conflict showed is that the Islamic Republic cannot provide military security to its people.

This is the art with the pillars method, is that you can go through as we just did

and say the legitimacy narrative's gone.

The forward environment is not great.