Richard Goldberg
speaker
628 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 11 Jul
Richard Goldberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And if there was a moment to do it, it would be now or very, very soon.
If you were to bring back the blockade, you would expect there would be some heightened escalation on the Iranian part to try to shut down the Strait of Hormuz more than what you are seeing.
Three shots, you know, a few shots at three vessels is not a sustained campaign to shut down the Strait in my view.
they could be doing a lot more right now to inflict a lot more damage and frighten the shipping community from moving and inflicting a lot of precise damage on the critical infrastructure in the Gulf, on energy, on water desalination, etc.
If we feel confident in our ability to defend against that or degrade their capability to carry out those attacks and can prove that,
then I think the president has absolute flexibility to maintain a military operation that provides defense to our allies, defense to the shipping community, puts on the blockade and just squeezes them to death while you provide maximum support to the people.
If we don't have that confidence and they still retain that short-range threat that can do a lot of damage globally to the economy...
and to the shipping community, then that's why I think you see the president and the administration trying to stay in this middle area that doesn't feel great in the short term, but provides at least some sort of continued pressure relief in the shipping community, gets oil continuing to move, doesn't inflict harm on ourselves unnecessarily.
and still tries to maintain as much leverage and pressure on the regime as possible.
Again, the menacing piece here, whether you're doing it with a blockade in place or a blockade lifted, is what's happening on the ground.
Is there any material support to the people going on?
Is there a covert program?
If there's not, that's not good to the hopes of actually bringing them down.
Now, obviously, you can't predict the unpredictable, the unexpected moments.
You know, we didn't know that millions of people were going to come out into the streets of Tehran and around the country in January.
It just sort of happened.
This can happen again.
Right.
It's unpredictable type situation.
it would be nice to not make it unpredictable, but to actually make it quite predictable and planned with our support, materiel and financial support and communications, et cetera, intelligence.
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