Karim Sadjadpour

But I also agree with the quote you mentioned.

Lawrence Friedman wrote the definitive book on strategy.

And that book, which is about 700 pages, starts with that sentence from Mike Tyson, that everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.

And we don't know how Iran is going to respond this time to a potential US attack.

It may be that they exercise restraint and they're gonna hunker down like a hedgehog because they want to stay in power.

Or it may be that their lesson from the previous conflicts was that by not really retaliating in a meaningful way, they projected weakness and they didn't exact any costs from the United States.

And it's now a moment to stand up to this American bully.

We don't know that.

And so I want to emphasize that it is a risk.

And if you're President Trump, you perhaps like your odds because American military power has prevailed in the past.

And the United States is several thousand miles away from Iran.

But if you're sitting not that far from Iran in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia,

you have much greater ambivalence about what Iran is capable of doing and whether the United States will maintain that massive military presence to protect against them.

Well, we can start with Israel by saying that Israel is both publicly supportive of a strike, they're privately encouraging the president, and they will very likely be part of any U.S.

operation against Iran.

And then if we move to our partners in the Persian Gulf countries like the United Arab Emirates,

Saudi Arabia, Qatar.

As I said, there's much more profound ambivalence.

Publicly, they're going to oppose a U.S.

strike, and they publicly said they're not going to allow the United States to use their airspace to attack Iran because they don't want to be