Mark Montgomery

I think what we're in right now is an economic coercion campaign where the United States is trying to squeeze the Iranian economy through the blockade where we're fairly effectively blocking the 90 percent of exports that went by sea of fossil fuels on what was called the Shadow Fleet ships.

Conversely, they are providing an economic coercion campaign against both our Arab partners who provide fossil fuel and our Asian and European partners, trade partners like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the European countries.

So people we trade with, eventually that has an impact on our economy as well.

So you have two competing economic coercion campaigns going on

And when anyone tries to get a leg up on the other, you end up seeing some weapons being fired.

You know, I think you're right.

You know, United States is a democracy, which, you know, has a burden, a burden of public support and a burden of elections, something the IRGC does not have to deal with.

And for the IRGC, this is existential.

Right.

I mean, this is where they capitulate in a way from which they could not recover.

You know, they don't get to come back in, you know, after a bad election, whereas this is not existential for Donald Trump yet.

Right.

So, you know, he's not taking that same level of he's misjudging, I think, their ability to to their resilience on this.

So look, and what you see happening is they'll fire and we'll fire back just proportionately.

We are not escalating.

And that's for the exact reason you cited, which is that Trump does not want this to escalate into full-scale combat operations.

So we're being very careful to do a proportionate counterattack against the place that fired the weapons into Kuwait or United Arab Emirates or wherever, or against our ships.

Now, were they to actually hit our ships or to do significant critical infrastructure damage to one of those countries, I think we would then conduct a disproportionate attack, and it could very easily escalate to full-scale military operations, which is why Trump wants to get a deal soon.

Yeah.

Well, I think that's what we were hoping for.