Peter Zeihan

We're in a hot war now.

There's a lot of ways that can evolve.

So, at the start, whether you were Kuwait or Saudi or UAE or Qatar or the rest, there was a general belief that they had found a way to get along with Iran.

I don't want to suggest that they were friends or allies, but they had figured out kind of a way to grind past one another while the United States and the Israelis were doing their thing.

The nature of the weapon system in Iran, we probably should have anticipated this.

I certainly did not.

They don't have a good chance of damaging Israel.

It's too far away.

There's too many opportunities for the weapons to be intercepted, even before you consider the involvement of the United States.

and the Shaheds are dumb weapons.

You give them a GPS coordinate and a really, really good Shahed of which is, they don't have a lot.

They fly to that one coordinate and then they have a very short decision tree where they look for a silhouette and then they beeline to it.

That's one of the reasons why they're not particularly accurate.

You can't target a moving ship with that.

So the American Navy is functionally immune to the missiles and the drones.

In the first 48 hours, every ship the Iranians had got sank, every plane they had got shot down.

There's no air force, there's no navy.

So if you're Iran, your choices are shooting at Israel knowing that well over 90% of the weapons are going to get shot down or shoot at something that maybe you can hit.

And so they targeted Kuwait and Qatar and Bahrain and Saudi and UAE and even a little bit into Turkey, Azerbaijan and Oman.

And in doing that, they've changed the nature of the conflict and the nature of the region.