Mark Dubowitz

then you start to ask, well, maybe it's not just propaganda.

Maybe it's intention operationalized into capabilities.

You know, what we're forgetting here, and again, it's this causal relationship.

It's we aggress against Iran and the Israelis aggress against Iran, and Iran is always reacting.

I mean, let's give the Iranians their due because Khomeini made it very clear when he established the Islamic Republic that there will be a revolutionary and expansionist

regime, and they will expand their power through the Middle East.

And so he built, and to his credit, was very successful until October 7th, this axis of resistance, as he calls it, which are these terror proxy armies, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Iraqi Shiite militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and certainly supporting the Assad regime in Syria.

He built a very, very

impressive and deadly axis that he turned against the United States and against Israel, which saw its culmination on October 7th.

I think after October 7th,

That was a huge miscalculation for Khamenei.

And we've seen the results of what's happened to his axis of resistance through quite devastating Israeli military capabilities over the past number of months.

But he has an ideology.

And I think where I agree with Scott is I'm not sure if Khamenei would actually use a nuclear weapon against Israel, the United States, because I don't think Khamenei is suicidal.

But I think what Khamenei wants is he wants a nuclear weapon

as a backstop for his conventional power, right?

It's very much the Kim Jong-un model of North Korea, right?

I'm going to have nuclear weapons with ICBMs to threaten America, but what I'm actually going to do is threaten South Korea with having massive conventional capabilities on the DMZ that I could take South Korea in a week.

I could destroy in a week.

So you, the United States and South Korea have no military option.