Peter Zeihan

That was their attempted deterrent.

After the attacks of last June, the debate within Iran was whether or not that was still a good strategy, because obviously they had been attacked.

And so there were signs that they were moving to shorten the window.

Now that the Supreme Leader has been assassinated, now that there's a wide-ranging air war, obviously the Iranians think they need to get a nuke now because they're on the option.

So if you declare victory and go home,

they will have a nuclear weapon within a year if they're really slow about it.

So we've changed the strategic balance within the country.

We're starting to come to the conclusion that the Supreme Leader, who's now dead, was actually kind of, by Iranian standards, a strategic moderate.

And we're ushering in a new generation of people who are a lot more hostile to the United States with good and recent reason to be so hostile.

That's a lovely thought, but he's only been there for 48 hours, and we'll see how good he is at managing the political system.

Iran's a messy place, much messier than Iraq or Afghanistan to rule.

About half the country is Persian, the rest are a wide variety of minorities, and the only way the country is kind of held together to this point is to have a million-man army to occupy its own population.

And so just the mechanics of that are messy.

As for oil, right now, well, before this started, they were exporting about a million barrels a day.

And that is down from their 1970s peak of over 4 million barrels a day.

So the degree of build-out that you would have to have to get to a point...

where they have, as you say, neo-spore and despair, that's not going to happen in less than 10 years.

That's a long time to be seen as publicly toadying up to a government that just bombed you.

I don't want to say no, it's the Middle East, strange things happen, but it doesn't strike me as very realistic.

That is very much in question.