Nancy Youssef

The other thing I want to point out is for all the reasons that the United States gave for conducting this war, Iran was very consistent throughout.

They wanted to survive as a regime.

They wanted compensation for the damages to their country.

And so I think to Tom's point, when one side doesn't have clear strategic aims and the other does,

No amount of firepower can resolve that.

And what you saw the Iranians do is take that strategy and marry it with an asymmetric warfare approach to take away the advantage that the United States had with much stronger munitions, training.

planes, weapons, ships.

And so that's where the strategy, I think, sort of, or lack thereof, played out on the battlefield.

Well, I should start by saying that the ceasefire is very tenuous.

I mean, almost immediately Iran announced that the Strait would be effectively shut down again because Israel, which did not believe in the part of the agreement that said that Lebanon would not be attacked, carried out extensive attacks on Lebanon.

So it's all very fragile because there are three parties with three different interests and we don't know the specifics of the deal.

Now, having said that, Trump, among the reasons he gave is that he didn't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

But I think what Iran discovered is that they actually have a deterrent capability that is immediately available to them right now that allows them to make revenue off of it, that allows them to have great influence over the global economy, and that was the Strait of Hormuz.

I don't know that Iran needs to look to nuclear capabilities as much, having now been empowered with some control of the Strait of Hormuz.

One of the things that they have said is that they want to maintain

that control.

And so what Iran has come out of this, I think, is a new form of deterrence against future warfare, not inviting sanctions through the prospects of a nuclear program, but rather sort of saying, if you punish us, it now affects the global economy, which certainly has that potential.

That was always sort of their nuclear option of sorts, that if it came down to the threat to their survival, which this for them

was that they would exercise that option of the Strait.

And now that they have, I think going forward, we're gonna see them try to continue to collect revenue as they did during the war to rebuild and potentially rebuild the regime from the strikes that they've endured throughout these past 39 days.