Nika Kovacs

And this is a country of 90 plus million people

This is a civilization that has survived for 5,000 years.

This is a regime in the Islamic Republic that went through nearly a decade of the Iran-Iraq War, losing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people and continued to fight.

This is not a statement that the Iranian regime is a bunch of good guys.

It's a statement that they're not going to capitulate.

And Trump just doesn't seem to understand that.

And what I worry about with these deployments, as we saw in the run-up to the war, or as we saw with the deployments to the Caribbean, they take on a logic and a momentum of their own.

You don't send all these people to the Middle East without doing something with them.

Um, you know, I, I, it just feels ominously like he, he's going to pick from this menu of like season Island or open the straight or try to get the nuclear material, but that's escalation.

And if you boots touched Iranian ground, the Iranians are going to fight like hell.

And then we're going to feel like we have to hit them again because they killed some more of our guys.

And we just stay in this escalation loop that actually over time, the

benefits the Iranians in some ways because they know that they've looked at Afghanistan.

They've looked at Iraq.

They've looked at Libya.

They know that the United States is not going to stay invested in a multi-year ground war in Iran.

They know that there's no public support for that.

And they're just going to want to try to cause as much damage to us as they can so that we don't do it again.

And so this is the fundamental problem.

There's not like a Trump keeps wanting like the video game victory, you know, like the, you know, like the this island can become the objective, you know, when that's not how the Iranians are going to respond and.