Matt Frei

you know, as quickly as the Americans and the Lebanese would like them to.

So I think this whole thing is very fragile indeed.

And remember, the danger hovering over all of this, which was not mentioned yesterday, is civil war within Lebanon.

And I mean, the first time I covered the Middle East in the late 1980s, that's how old I am.

I was based in Israel, but I did a lot of covering of the Lebanese civil war, which was absolutely brutal and tore the country to pieces.

So that specter still hovers over the whole thing.

And then coming to the Iran conflict, I see Donald Trump saying that there is confusion and infighting at the top of the Iranian regime now.

And that's why we have this stalemate.

They're crippled because nobody is in charge.

The other theory is that the hardliners in Iran are now taking over because, I mean...

We can guess whether those who were there previously were more amenable to American approaches or not.

But right now, because of what has happened, you have these hardliners saying stick in, fight and reject diplomacy.

So which do you think is the more likely scenario?

Well, I think, I mean, Donald Trump is right when he says there's infighting in the Iranian regime, as far as we can tell.

We're not there on the ground.

It's difficult to get a real handle on this.

But what we do know, and this is from official Iranian sources, that when the foreign minister, Arachi, or the president, Pesach Kian, offered an olive branch to the United States in the form of a promise, for instance, to indefinitely stop enriching uranium or to open the Strait of Hormuz completely, as they did a few weeks ago, that was not the case.

The Strait was immediately shut down again.

and there was a denial that they would stop enriching uranium indefinitely.

And that very much made us think that actually it's the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that is in charge.