Ross Douthat

What do you make of Iran's capacity to...

do something apocalyptic to its neighbors using whatever kind of missiles and rockets remain to it because this is you know part of what's been going on is the president has sort of threatened various forms of escalation and then there have been sort of exchanges of fire that have involved natural gas desalinization different things and then there's been a kind of walk back and a sense at least

To some observers that Iran is willing to sort of go further up that escalatory ladder than we are.

Do you think that that's a danger where Iran where it's not just Hormuz, but it's Iran saying the regime saying if we're going down, no one's going to be able to drink fresh water in the Gulf for the next six months or something like that?

But again, they have the will right now because whether or not Trump himself is fully committed to regime change, we, in collaboration with the Israelis, have embarked on a policy of

killing their leaders, right?

Like that's where the will comes from.

if you existentially threaten the regime, you do give them more reasons to go higher on the escalation ladder.

Not that they would never have escalated before, not that they weren't interested in destroying Israel or being America's enemies before, but things like what we were just talking about, the sort of attempt at like a total destruction of the functional architecture of civilization around the Persian Gulf, right?

That's something that is more plausible to them today because

We, the Israelis, however you want to cut it,

have been killing their leadership, right?

Surely that just obviously changes their escalation calculus, just as an inevitable matter.

And then we have to figure out what to do about it.

Okay, but meanwhile, there are some risks to the United States as well here, right?

There are risks associated with

having the Straits of Hormuz closed, and there are risks involved in, again, I know you're not explicitly calling for this, but sending in ground troops and getting involved in a ground war in Iran, right?

So all of those risks from a, let's just say, from a domestic American political perspective seem incredibly substantial.

And they all, to me, seem like reasons why I completely expect the president to want

to cut a deal.