Who are the winners here, and ultimately, who are the losers? And, and when I say losers, does that mean, you know, our relationship with our former allies? Who are the winners and the losers from your vantage point?

I think nobody really wins outright because everybody got hurt.

You could argue that on a political level, Iran's power structure was set up deliberately like a lot of these autocratic countries with competing power bases that don't really trust each other to kind of minimize the opportunity of a coup.

So you had the Revolutionary Guard, you had the plain vanilla normal army, and you had the internal security guys, and over them was the ayatollah.

An unintended consequence of this war has been that it seems that the Revolutionary Guard basically wiped the floor with everybody else, so they are now in charge.

Now, on one level, you could say that's a good thing for everybody else 'cause we know what we're dealing with.

On the other side, it's not great because these are the guys that are most extreme, right [chuckles]? And they're now in a weakened position.

Are there lessons to be learned for China and Taiwan or maybe other areas of interest like Cuba, which is another area that the US has taken a certain amount of aggression with?