They're linked with China. They're linked with Russia. They're linked with Iran. They, they have come together, truly believing that they have a huge opportunity now to change the world order that the United States and like-minded democracies established post World War II. And they have all become more aggressive as a result of it.
It's not isolated. Russia is at war in Europe, and President Xi stepped up his effort the last three or four years, and and obviously. Iran went to war with its proxies in Israel. This is all connected, and Iran has this terrorist activity network that has been a worldwide problem for some time. And that's who we've been chronicling.
And that's when people, you know, I love when people said to me, "Hey, you know what? You always talk about war, or Brian, you're very pro-war. I'm not pro-war. We just have these perpetual enemies out there." And they're continuing to rattle our cages, threatening us at home and abroad. And we look the other way.
We look to do deals. We look to do compromises. We have to fortify neighbors and locations. We have to adjust our naval fleet order to order to address our enemies.
So, China would love for us to be distracted in the Middle East, and then there's Russia, who thought they just cut through Ukraine. They've been bogged down for five years now. And they've been a perpetual problem through now Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and now they're threatening NATO on a regular basis.
So okay, continue to ignore it. You can ignore it all you want. Problem's going to be there. Trump's not ignoring anything. He's engaging with all our enemies, and he's confronting Iran, who's what's been a problem for forty-seven years.
And he's doing it in the same way. If he was the first one to attack them directly, took out Soleimani, the first one to go after him, and he bombed out. We bombed out with Operation Midnight Hammer, and then he took him on directly by looking to by taking out the Ayatollah and their first two or three layers of leadership. And now we're basically in a standoff. We're slowly squeezing the life out of him.
With us right now is Rebecca Heinrichs, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Rebecca, welcome back. Thanks, Brian. Good to be here, Rebecca. My hunch is Iran cannot figure out this president because they thought the midterms would force him to act and cut a deal that would be more beneficial to them in order to get gas prices down.
And the president's made it clear: I'll deal with you after the election. They write a 25-page letter. The American people say basically vote Democrat. What are they? What are they up to?
Well, so look. First of all, I thought that your your opening remarks there were just spot on. And so, just real briefly, just to footstomp something you said, for because I get the same thing. People say, Rebecca, it sounds like you you know you want to go. What you want to you?
You're supportive of President Trump's war against the Iranians. You know, it seems you want to be tougher on the Russians. You wanted you want to be tougher on China, and these countries are cooperating. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. They are, and you know, and what I say to people is, those who don't want to confront them.
And those who want to look the other way—they are far more effectively pro-war because you're going to get more war, more aggression against the United States and our interests if you don't take these these adversaries head-on. And so, I want to deter major war, and so I'm very, very supportive of handling these issues. As soon as possible, because that—if you don't—it gets far, far worse.
So I think that the Iranians, at this point, Brian, I think that they have really misjudged President Trump's commitment to finishing the job. I mean, the Iranians really thought that they could hold the global um energy markets hostage with the Strait of Hormuz, and they could get the president to cry uncle and and have President Trump essentially leave the region. He has not done that. He's crushing their economy, and we are successfully getting oil. Through the Strait of Hormuz, almost to the level of pre-war levels.
I mean, so it's remarkable. And then, you know, I really do believe we have to resume military operations to go after what's left of the IRGC. The president's decided he's going to do that. Almost certainly after the midterms, we'll see how it goes.
So, you know, the president was asked, you know, what if Iran was behind the plot in the UK, which thankfully was thwarted. We have a lot of questions there, and what if it was behind the the hijacking, which would have killed four Americans and wiped out 170 mostly Israelis? Usually, the president said, "Cut, cut six." You just ask them; they know what happened.
So he said he's going to hit him hard if it finds out that they were involved, and that it's an Omani guy who was online radicalized. We know that we're about to get his name. Yeah.
So look, I mean, the reason you would hit them back hard, obviously, is because you have to demonstrate that there's a cost to this kind of behavior.
So even though we're crushing the Iranians in you know seven different ways, there has to be a clear, direct retaliation against something that would be so egregious. If the Iranians did, I mean, they could have just sort of ideologically inspired this attacker, but if they directed it, supported it, and in any way, if the regime might even take credit for it. Um, if they do that, I think that the United States—and by the way, the United States with the UK—if we—if we discover that these that these potential terrorists in the UK were were were connected to the Iranians, we better see a united effort on the part of the UK government doing much more with the United States to counter this shared adversary.
So the USS Theodore Roosevelt is steaming that direction, is going to the Gulf.
So I thought he was going to rotate out. They're not rotating. They're staying. About ten thousand sailors and Marines. What does the what?
What do you think the president? I know the message he's sending, but there's a practicality to it too, isn't there? Yeah, so you wouldn't send that only for a message. That's a very expensive message to send if it was just just signaling. I think it's because you know the one thing that marks the way the President Trump has carried out and planned military operations is he wants to do it in an overwhelming fashion to have the least possible risk to U.S.
forces.
So you really want significant overmatch, and so you know I I would suspect Brian. I mean I would bet on it that that. President Trump, with Admiral Cooper, Secretary Hagseth, that people have been looking to see what does the United States need in terms of forces and defenses to reallocate throughout the region. Should the United States get the go-ahead from President Trump to resume military operations against the IRGC target that still exists that the Israelis wanted to hit when we took a pause, the Admiral Cooper still wanted to hit when we took a pause. You know, and and and you got to get the.
Forces in the region to be able to make sure that we can mitigate anything the Iranians might do in response. I I think whatever the Iranians can do in response will be very short-lived. They don't really have much capability left, Brian. But whatever they're going to do, it's going to be in those first probably initial days, and then it's going to sort of peter out because they just don't have much ability to reconstitute. And you know, Scott Besson's going to stop them from allowing to flying commercial flights.
And you know that they've got UAE is basically frozen all their all their assets. They were in their bank.
So you have that, and nothing's getting out of the strait.
So are we blockaded? Their blockade, and now we're getting seventeen point five million barrels through. And pre-war was nineteen million barrels through. Yeah, it's a cost, no doubt about it. And there's always a chance the drone's going to hit.
But I got to credit the merchant ship captains. The merchant ship captains are sucking it up and doing it. And in the beginning, one drone hit, and they're all going to stop, and no one's going to have insurance. And that was its story in the beginning, but it's not anymore. But yet, the refinery capacity has been damaged, so we're not seeing that drastic of a drop.
Yeah.
So, but the the big challenge has been: how do you get these commercial ships, these captains, confident enough to get to start moving through? This is why President Trump earlier on was saying, "Look, the strait's open. We just need people to go through it." And he was right in a sense. It was open in terms of we we did have our navy position there with the other services that were collaborating in an integrated way to be able to kind of point and shepherd ships through. It's basically Project Freedom that we started and then we stopped because the.
The Saudis were nervous that if we didn't go harder against the Iranians, they were going to get hit, and so they, the Saudis, actually wanted the United States to go harder against the Iranians if we were going to start escorting ships to the Strait. But but here we are. We're doing it, and so I really think you know I give a lot of credit to President Trump just communicating we're not leaving because he had a lot of pressure even on the far right politically. Brian, you know this to just say just get out of the region, just get out of the region. That would have been such a strategic failure.
I think it would have been awful, and it would have surrendered the Strait of Hormuz, of course, to the Iranians. But the Iranians are a proxy of the Chinese Communist Party, so you would have just it. It would have been such a strategic blunder to just give up and get out of the region. President Trump didn't, and so now we've got ships that have the confidence to keep navigating through there and getting the rest of oil through there and keeping the Iranian oil out. It's remarkable.
Rebecca, the one thing I disagree with the president on: falling through on the pledge of Joe Biden to pull out of Iraq. This is not the time. And we got two Iranian militias in Iraq, and even the most sincere prime minister in Baghdad does not have the power to to take those guns away. They're supposed to voluntarily give them up; they didn't. And isn't that where the militias took out the pipeline that the Saudi, the East West pipeline, the Saudis were using that have since been repaired?
So this is kind of how I view it. I sort of, in principle, the idea that the United States could draw down. In Iraq, sort of rests on some conditions that I think haven't quite been met yet.
So I sort of I understand sort of the desire, but you need you need Iran to be solved first because the United States was in there still in order to make sure that Iraq didn't become controlled by the Iranians, the IRGC, and there are as you say IRGC sort of militia still around there.
So even if you have a pro-American Iraqi government, you still have to make sure that they can. Box out and keep the Iranians out of there, and we still have not quite seen that yet.
So that does make me uncomfortable, Brian. And again, I think that that may have been something that the president could do after he has finally gotten a political kind of permanent stability in the region, and that includes eliminating the IRGC from the governance of Iran. Right.
So you remember what happened, the George Bush, thanks to the surge. And some brilliant moves from Gates and Petraeus and every McChrystal and everybody like that handed over a peaceful Iraq. We left our jeeps, left everything there, and two years later, Barack Obama had to go back, and we had this thing called ISIS. We're actually combining with Iran to oust the Sunni ISIS the Sunni, oust them from the area. Iran had more of a presence after the conflict, and we had to have more of a footprint, which cost us more money.
So in the beginning, you think, okay, let's pull out and declare victory. But people should think. Look around the corner on what it could mean.
Well, the other thing that you've got to keep in mind too, we our ability to. See if there is developing terrorist activity is because we're deployed in those particular regions. Yeah.
Yep.
So one of the worst things about the precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan is we lost our counterintelligence eyes and ears that we had in the region in order to predict. We still have some ability, but we don't have the clarity, the granularity that we want. And and so you know, look, if you're going to withdraw from that region. Then I want to. I mean, I think it is premature, Brian.
I agree with you, but I would also want to see the president and his team acknowledging that we need a web then of this other foreign intelligence collaborating with us, which is another reason we need allies. Yes, the Israelis. We need close Israeli cooperation. We also need European intelligence. One of the best things the Europeans do, for all of their flaws, they really do have pretty robust.
Intelligence operations, and so that's going to be really important. But I do worry that we are losing our critical forward deployed presence for intelligence collection. And I do say one other thing: I don't know why we didn't push back on on Bashar or Nassara on in Syria to let get the Russians out. The Russians still have a base there. Why do they have a base there?
No, if you, I mean, look, like that's got to be part of the trajectory of Syria. You got, you got it. I mean, under Bashar al-Assad, you essentially had this this country that was being, you know, run by the the Russians could could steer it. And one of the great successes of getting a new government in there is you get the Russians out. We got to follow through on that.
Lean heavy on him. I think Assad is still hanging out, being protected by Russia in Russia. I mean, so look, so this new Syrian government, we should be. Leaning hard. I mean, Russia is still an acute and ongoing threat to American interests, and so we got to we got to sort of keep pushing in this direction to make sure that we get the Russians out of the Middle East.
So, lastly, because you know Ukraine so well, you were there about a month ago. Ukraine has developed another long-range missile, FP7 ballistic missile, brings Ukraine to a small group of nations that can manufacture these types of weapons. They just got to do more of it. But what could that? This will do that drones can't.
Well, anytime.
So, I mean, with with drone development, you can see that that drones can do a lot of destruction as long as you have a whole bunch of them.
So, there's still these small kinds of munitions, but a missile has much more firepower.
So, it can destroy larger things, have a higher destructive capability.
So, what the what the Ukrainians have wanted to do is Ukrainians have long wanted a missiles that can reach farther into Russian territory and can hit these larger targets.
So they're trying to be more cost-effective and rely less on Western weapons. And so, if the Ukrainians have their own domestic ability to reach out and destroy these significant, larger targets deeper in Russian territory, they're not going to have to ask for American permission or the European permission to do that. They're just going to have that ability to do that. That gives Ukraine a significant advantage. Are you worried about this winter?
This because the Russians are doing a good job targeting the infrastructure of Ukraine. Yeah, I mean, look, the the what the the difference between when when the Ukrainians hit Russian refineries.
So sometimes you hear U.S. officials say both countries are hitting energy targets, but they're very very different targets. The Ukrainians hit Russian refineries because these refineries are being used to supply the war machine. What the Russians are hitting is infrastructure meant specifically for the civilian population because the Russians weaponized the cold. They try to freeze.
Out, vulnerable children, women, the elderly, and it's devastating to Ukrainian population because part of what Russia is trying to do is they're trying to demoralize and wear down the society, so that society pushes Zelensky to take deals that he simply can't do because it would be surrendering to the Russians. Lastly, do you see any legitimate interest the Russians have in any type of peace agreement? I don't, Brian. I I was very hopeful right after my trip. The Russians are doing so poorly.
Ukrainians are doing so well. The Russians are doing poorly economically. You even have senior Russian officials, kind of openly talking about how the war is hurting the economy, and of course that means they're been demoted or fired or disappeared when they do that. But things are really bad for Russia, so I was hoping that the United States government, the Trump administration, would seize on this opportunity to change its approach rather. Than acting as sort of a mediator between two sides equally, that we would fully back Ukraine.
Do these hardcore sanctions against the Russians and compel the Russians to, at very least, I thought it was credible, possible to get the Russians to abide by a ceasefire because the Ukrainians are just wallowing them by hitting their refineries. But unfortunately, that has not happened, and so I have not seen. There's not been an increase in U.S. pressure against the Russians, and so I think the Russians think that they can continue to, to, to stand, um, you know, continue the war effort. Yeah.
Meanwhile. Coffin sales are going to go through the roof because they're losing ridiculous amount of people. Rebecca Heinrichs, thanks so much. You're the best. Thanks, Bren.
Thanks, Bren. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
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