Shawn Ryan

It's just, it's an entire mess.

Like, look, the Middle East basically, and President, again, President Trump used to understand this.

The Middle East is a place where you can just get involved in these never-ending quagmires and you start one fire to put out another and you never fully extricate yourself.

And at the end of the equation, there's never a clear benefit for the American people.

And that's gotten us to this state that we're in right now and we have to stop that.

Right, as part of getting rid of the JCPOA.

I think the idea with the JCPOA was it gave Iran access, and I partially agree with this, it gave Iran access to more capital with sanctions circumvention.

That was the whole famous, initially Obama unfroze a bunch of the assets that we had frozen, and that's why we flew over the pallets of cash that everyone talks about so frequently.

And then as part of throwing out the JCPOA, we got rid of the inspections and we did, and there was, because when they got, when they put in the inspectors, there was some sanctions relief that came there.

by getting rid of the JCPOA and slapping the sanctions back on them.

That made it more challenging for the inspectors to get back into the Iranian sites.

Again, though, like, Trump had used his leverage.

He killed Soleimani.

We were in a really good place.

At the beginning of this administration, President Trump was in a great spot with Iran.

Him and the Supreme Leader both agreed

No nukes.

We need to have a discussion about enrichment.

We need to have a discussion about how that's going to be supervised and checked.

But this was a discussion that could have been worked out by diplomats sitting at a table as opposed to a massive military conflict.