Peter Zeihan

First, on the tactical side, we knew they had thousands of Shahids.

There's no anti-Shahid strategy, either for shooting them down or preventing the components to come in from China.

Chinese cargo ships are still docking at Iranian ports, bringing in more equipment.

That seems to me one of the first things you should have done.

Second, the idea that the Strait of Hormuz is vulnerable is something that has been core to American strategic policymaking since the 1960s.

And we've seen no strategy whatsoever and no adaptation whatsoever to deal with the fact that we have 15% of global oil that's just gone now.

Right.

On the front end, if you remember back to Trump 1, Trump stacked his cabinet with lots and lots and lots of military folks because they followed orders.

But they were trained in their jobs.

And so when Trump would come up with an idea that maybe wasn't the best, they would try to gently educate him about what would work and what wouldn't work and why.

And Trump hated every single one of those conversations.

And in the end, fired all of the people he brought in from the military.

This time, when he was out of power, he changed the Republican Party to remove the policy arm.

So there's no longer recruitment and training.

There's no longer a cadre of Republican people to come into a new administration and help the president.

He just brought in people who would never be smarter than him on any topic in any room.

And I don't care how smart you are, you can't be the smartest person in the room on every topic.

And then, of course, when he became president the second time, he purged the government of the top 6,000 people and really replaced none of them.

So there's not a lot of good information that makes it to the president in the first place to help make decisions.

But from what I've been hearing is, you know, the position of the intelligence and defense community of the last 45 years is that in an air war against Iran, there's zero reason to think we can affect meaningful long-term change.