And granted, it's a small window, and we're talking about how effective Weil has been from 2025, but what aspects of the game did you sort of see immediate effects from his teaching mentality?

That's a good question.

There haven't been – players have not made great strides under him.

Sometimes a new coach comes in and there are players that were on the fringes that are suddenly elevated to main positions and they become – Jackson Hopkins would maybe be that.

This is a player who has played nine positions – Pretty much everything but goalie for DC United in his time here.

He was, I think, I like to say, I don't know if this is true or not.

This is how I read it.

Sean Johnson,

What do they get most wrong in your view?

From a perspective not rooted in American primacy, if we take a step back from this idea that the United States needs to dominate the region, if we just look at what the United States actually needs from the Middle East, I would say it's three things.

Free flow of oil, preventing terrorist attacks against the American homeland and preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon.

And I get it, two of those in the article, the oil and the hegemony arguments.

But the same goes for the counterterrorism argument is that, you know, when it comes to oil in particular.

These countries need to sell their oil.

They have the ultimate incentive to sell their oil.

What do you make of that?

So what I'd like to know is, what do you think of as the United States' interests in the Middle East, for instance, in particular? What are the United States' interest-- What would the United States like to see in the Middle East and vis-à-vis itself and other countries in the Middle East? And what would Israel like to see? In what specific ways do their visions for the Middle East diverge, and how does that translate into specific policies? And maybe as you formulate that answer, why don't we start, in fact, with what is it that makes the, quote, unquote, "special relationship with Israel," which is a term everybody uses, what is it that makes that relationship special? Where did this come from? What's the origins of that? And then maybe from there, explore some of these other issues.

The US-Israel relationship is special.

It is unique.

It is unlike any other the United States currently has abroad.

And you see this, for example, in the rhetoric of American officials.

You'll never hear American officials go to the lengths that they go to justify the US relationship with any other country as they do with Israel.

I mean, the term special relationship came from JFK, that he called this a special relationship akin to only what we have with the United Kingdom.

So is the result now that we're just gonna have a war with Iran every five years? I mean, what could the future possibly look like in this situation?

So everybody said, "Well, that's unlikely to be the scenario." So what is the scenario? I mean, did they really go into this without an end game, without having selected somebody or thought about how this would work?

I think they want chaos and civil war if they can get it.

I think that's their best-case scenario is to destroy the nation.

And I don't think they're gonna be able to do that probably because Shiite Persians are the majority.

So it's not like Iraq, where they're helping the Shiite Arabs kick the Sunni Arabs out of power and cleanse them out of the capital city in a big civil war and all that kind of thing.

You know what I mean? That takes huge power on the ground, and that was a majority, helping a majority run off a minority.

We're here, and even though there are Kurdish groups and Arabs and Azeris and Bin Ladenites and all different kinds of armed groups that are, or dissident groups that can be armed up to fightI don't think anyone really believes that any of them have the power to take over the country.

I don't know if John has a, an idea, but...

If otherwise, there's gonna be nothing left." Is that a credible threat, do you think, in terms of forcing the Iranians to capitulate?

Well first, piggybacking off of what Justin said, my biggest concern in terms of retaliation are the 63 US military bases scattered across the region, many of which are, are, uh, scarcely defended.

So, uh, the Iranians have a strong ability to, uh, retaliate directly against the United States.

But really, wha- what I would emphasize here in terms of what Iran probably thinks at this current moment is, I think Iran recognizes that in Washington, DC, there's really been two debates, uh, when it comes to Iran.

There's one regarding the nuclear program, and then there's another one regarding regime change.

And the folks who desire regime change, or Netanyahu and your other conservative, uh, uh, neocons within Washington, DC, they view any nuclear agreement as an impediment to their goal of regime change.

And Iran does not requi- uh, desire a nuclear weapon for some, you know, ide- ideological reason.

Do you think a similar dynamic is possible here, that even if, as I think happened, he did give the green light to Netanyahu, he is currently kind of gung-ho, thinking he can force the Iranians into capitulation, that if it goes on for long enough, that, that Trump will reach a similar conclusion as the one he reached in Yemen?