How significant is it that this has come just days before the UN General Assembly gets together? Is there any sort of logic in that timing?

Oh, that's a good question.

And I am a strong supporter of the UN.

I worked with the UN for many years.

That said, I don't think that the Houthis or the Iranians, well, certainly the Houthis, I don't think, are planning it around the General Assembly.

sessions, but rather around local, regional moments of opportunity and or ways to pressure the White House.

So the UN, much as I love it, I think in this case is probably a secondary

If he's not going to wipe out Iran, the other two, make a deal and let them rot economically, which of the two do you think?

that

the various tit-for-tat attacks wherever in the Middle East are really signs that things will fall apart.

Certainly the United States, Trump is basically desperate to get out of the fix that he's put himself in, all of us.

And Iran has a lot of reasons too, of course, to want to stop the various kinds of pressure and strain that they are under so these attacks to me are really negotiating tactics and it could sputter along for a while but both parties I think actually do have an interest in coming to some sort of a grudging agreement.

Is it closed? Does the states have the power to force the Strait back open? Or are we in stalemate there?

Well, we're going to stalemate.

The United States does have the power to open the straits, but it's unwilling to pay the price because that would entail almost certainly a substantial number of soldiers on the ground in Iran, on the coast, and that would mean that a lot of people, a lot of Americans probably would die or get wounded.

And Trump, for many reasons, came to prominence, but one of the few things he's said consistently, which he's betrayed by attacking Iran, is that he doesn't want to have Americans involved in a foreign war and occupying a country in a quagmire.

[laughs]

... which shows how many clothes I had or how dirty my clothes were, either way.

I love Boston, but even before I went to college, I always had wanted to see something else, and I realized I always felt that one's education, half of it was to challenge one's assumptions and what one knew.

So I wanted to get out of Boston.

I also had always wanted to learn a foreign language for reasons which I'll, I'll skip just to save time, and the one language, uh, foreign language that I knew anything about was French.

I had studied French, and, and that was because in the Brookline school system at age 12, there was a choice of two languages.

One was French, and the other was Spanish, and my mother said, "French is the language of diplomacy.

With that, I'm gonna shut up.

This is a taco, isn't it?

Yes, I think that's a good acronym.

It pretty accurately captures his normal way of behavior, and he's really caught himself in a bit of a trap this time.

What's the trap? Well, he thought that the American military, which is as impressive as he says, would give him an easy victory in that by decapitating him, The regime, blowing up a lot of its military capabilities, the regime would fall and he'd have a relatively easy victory and he'd be a great hero.

But that's not the case because the Iranian regime is much more resilient and multi-layered than his actions would have given success to.

And so now he's stuck actually in a worse position strategically than before he attacked Iran with the straits closed, the world economy teetering, and the Iranian regime very, very seriously hurt.

hurt, but more in power and more intransigent than it was eight weeks ago.

Now, is he right in him saying that the US blockade is hurting Iran, that the storage is almost full and will be full in a couple of days and that's when they start shutting down the oil fields? So really, there is a few more days in which time they have to strike a deal?

But were you clear on the 800-pound

gorilla in the room? It was instantaneously clear to me what we were talking about.

And I thought in that millisecond, I realized quite consciously, this is not ex post facto justification, rationalization, recreated recollection.

This is exactly what I thought at the time in real time.

what I just said to you.

And my thought was, this is the greatest, the most significant moment, the decisive moment in my career, my career, I think, in the history of the agency, and one of the significant moments in American history.

I was explicitly conscious of that at that moment.

That must have felt really incredibly conflicted in any number of ways.

What was it that caused him to lose his mind so badly over the weekend and send out that expletive-laden message?

Well, there's sort of nothing new really there.

He's been that way forever.

He's uncontrolled, sort of pre-adolescent, childish psychology and sociopathic.

And I'm being serious.

I'm not just trying to insult the man.

But what specifically happened was, I think, growing frustration.

Glenn, do you think that countries that have been name-checked by him in that press conference, and I'm thinking specifically of our neighbours, Australia, for not helping out sufficiently should be worried?

What was it that caused him to lose his mind so badly over the weekend and send out that expletive-laden message?

Well, there's sort of nothing new really there.

He's been that way forever.

He's uncontrolled, sort of pre-adolescent, childish psychology and sociopathic.

And I'm being serious.

I'm not just trying to insult the man.

But what specifically happened was, I think, growing frustration.

Glenn, do you think that countries that have been name checked by him in that press conference, and I'm thinking specifically of our neighbors, Australia, for not helping out sufficiently should be worried?

What does Trump mean, you think, when he says the hardest hit is yet to come?

Well, I think often Trump doesn't really know what he's saying.

He's speaking in sort of vague terms without having reasoned things out.

However, in this instance, I think what that must mean really is that it's relatively straightforward to go after air defense systems and the missile launch systems and the... specific command and control locations.

Those are the targets that you initially go after.

And then after that, what do you do? Because without soldiers on the ground, you'll have a mass of armed men with AK-47s and machine guns and tanks and so on, and the Revolutionary Guards, who can't strike beyond the border of Iran, except maybe with some relatively low technology drones like the Shaheed drones.

But then what does the United States and Israel do to force whoever is holding the guns out or to do what the United States wants? So that's certainly harder than blowing up air defense systems.

Yeah, so what do you think happens at that point?

What does Trump mean, you think, when he says the hardest hit is yet to come?

Well, I think that I don't think Trump, I think often Trump doesn't really know what he's saying.

He's speaking in sort of vague, vague terms without having reasoned things out.

However, in this instance, I think what that must mean really is that it's relatively straightforward to go after air defense systems and the missile launch systems and the, and the, uh, specific command and control locations.

Those are the targets that you initially go after.

And then after that, what do you do? Because without soldiers on the ground, you'll have a mass of armed men with AK-47s and machine guns and tanks and so on, and the Revolutionary Guards, who can't strike beyond the border of Iran, except maybe with some relatively low technology drones like the Shaheed drones.

But then what do the United States and Israel do to force whoever is holding the guns out or to do what the United States wants? So that's certainly harder than blowing up air defense systems.

Yeah, so what do you think happens at that point?

It's perhaps not surprising they'd see Maidan as entirely artificial, that they'd fail to understand that you can actually have organic politics that is effective at that scale, and they're more inclined to the more, you know, paranoiac view that it's, say, a CIA

coup.

It's all true, and there are a couple of dynamics happening, one psychological, the social psychological, and the other cultural, which overlap from...

when you look at what Russians believed, Russian officials believed and then did in Ukraine.

But this is just a good example.

It's the truth pretty much everywhere.

But every country, two things come to mind to help frame it.

And usually to consolidate that power, it involves starting wars as well.