Mark Dubowitz

And you don't need to do it necessarily with Marines.

You can do it with some innovative financial warfare tools, which I'm not going to get into on an open podcast.

Yeah, I mean, again, I think it's important to understand, number one, I don't think it's President Trump's objective to bring the regime down.

I mean, he's made it very clear.

He wants to do a deal, and we can talk about what the elements of that deal should look like.

But you're right.

I mean, I think in an apocalyptic situation, yes, the Iranians will strike.

And with whatever capabilities they have left that haven't been destroyed by the United States and Israel, they will fire whatever they have left.

at the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Bahrainis.

They'll go over pipelines, salination plants, electrical grids, try to wipe out all the energy infrastructure.

They'll have the will to do that.

There'll be an open question about whether they'll have the capabilities.

And that was to my point earlier about will and capability, right?

The fact that we would ever let Iran have both the will and the capability to do that would be very, very dangerous.

They now have the will, but they don't necessarily have the capabilities.

Well, my point is that they have been escalating against us and against Israel and against their neighbors for decades.

You're right, they continue to go up the escalation curve as they're prepared to take more and more risk against us.

It's often with the Iranians that they back down when they believe that the United States of America is committed to taking down their regime.

Now, that was under Khamenei.

That was always his calculus because he always understood that the only country in the world was not Israel.