Dr. Trita Parsi

The other element is, and I mentioned this on the show before, the Israelis in the December 29th meeting really managed to give Trump the impression that the Iranians are much weaker than they are and that he has this amazing once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to get rid of this regime.

We heard that in his speech talking about how this has been going on for 47 years.

You know, that he is the person who has this opportunity.

There has never been a better opportunity than this.

And we saw that in the way that Witkoff declared that, you know, Trump was frustrated that the Iranians had not surrendered yet because he had the wrong expectation that they were so much weaker than they actually are and that surrender was in the course.

I think a fundamental misunderstanding on Trump's end is that he thought the more aircraft carriers he brings to the Persian Gulf or to the Indian Ocean,

the scarier the Iranians will be and eventually they will cave.

Not understanding that what the Iranian theocracy fears far more than the aircraft carriers is capitulation and surrender.

They believe they can win, they can survive the war.

And frankly, they may not be wrong about that, particularly if the US is not going in with ground troops.

There's a high likelihood that they will survive this, but they cannot survive a capitulation or a surrender because their support base inside of the country has already shrunk.

The people that are left supporting this theocracy are even more important to the theocracy at this point because they have lost so much other support.

And the people who are left tend to be the most hard line and they will never forgive a surrender, but they can definitely live with a war that is lost as long as it is fought.

And this is that fundamental psychological misunderstanding on Trump's side in which he felt that he could just scare them into surrender.

It absolutely could be because we don't have access to all of those files.

And as you have reported on the show as well, a lot of the stuff that actually contains Trump's name was not released.

So we don't know what exactly is in those files.

So I think what we can say is that clearly there is some missing factors that would explain how we got to this point.

Could Epstein be one of them?

Absolutely.