Jeremy Scahill

That's not just a sort of rhetorical thing that Esmail Baghaei was just sort of dropping off the cuff.

What it's a reflection of is the fact that the Iranians now view this as very different than the 2015 JCPOA because they've been faced with an actual existential war that was waged by the United States.

And so, you know, that's why I think you have real contentious debate about what this memorandum of understanding is going to look like.

Iran does not want to be perceived by its domestic population to have ceded a millimeter when it comes to the issue of the enriched uranium because of this debate, because there is a view that it was maybe a mistake not to have actually created a nuclear bomb.

So it's not just a matter of Iran is setting these red lines and they're doing it from a place of negotiating and later they're going to capitulate.

I think that it's viewed as a very, very serious issue that if they were to give up on the front end of any negotiation, it would be widely perceived as having kind of bent the knee.

Yes, but I still think that the nuclear weapon debate is a very, very serious one.

But certainly the Iranians recognize that they have an incredibly potent weapon that they can deploy using very low risk asymmetric technology.

I mean, Trump is fond of saying that their Navy is just sitting at the bottom of the sea.

That's true in terms of the big vessels that they had, etc.

But that's not how they were able to to create the situation in the Strait of Hormuz.

They did it with very, very small firepower and tiny, you know, fast boats and political will.

And that's why you see right now a scramble among Gulf countries and others to try to find alternate routes.

But a lot of those alternate routes also would either go across massive land areas or they would necessitate the Red Sea.

And in the Red Sea, you have Ansar Allah in Yemen,

which also has engaged in its own sorts of blockades.

I mean, the other day, an Iranian analyst said to Ryan and I, you know, you'll know Iran is really escalating when the Red Sea also gets closed.

And that hasn't happened at this point.

But at the same time, Crystal, I think that will happen.

I think other countries are going to realize that