Nancy Youssef

Thanks for having me.

So there was a lot of anxiety after that social media post right after Easter in which he threatened the destruction of civilization.

And people were really trying to figure out what was in the realm of possible in terms of what could be done.

The conversation I heard in the run up to the deadline was that the U.S.

wouldn't be hitting

historical sites or civilian infrastructure, but that they would go after what's called dual use, things that are used both by the military for military purposes and for civilian use.

But then you can't just sort of declare dual use and then strike.

It has to be proportional.

You have to demonstrate it.

So I think that was sort of the start of people looking for an off ramp from the rhetoric that we heard

And then by days and you could, I couldn't figure out why at the time you could feel that things that sort of calm down in terms of the anxiety that I was feeling in the morning from sources, but we didn't quite understand why at the time.

And I thought,

that maybe it was because even if the military had gone through, which, as Tom noted, would have caused a lot of mayhem, even that wasn't going to guarantee the fall of the regime.

So the question I kept coming back to is, what is the military gain that comes with doing these unprecedented strikes?

We've seen the Iranian regime survive.

the decapitation of its leadership, the destruction of its ballistic missile and drone capability to what extent, we don't know, the destruction of its Navy largely, and they have survived.

And historically, we've seen them quite resilient.

I mean, they were in an eight-year war with Iraq and survived that.

And so I couldn't understand how those strikes, had they been carried out with all the consequences associated with it,

got the president one of the outcomes that he said he was seeking, which was the collapse of the regime.