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I'm Venetia Rainey, and this is Iran, the latest. It's Thursday, 25th of June, 2026. Day four of the 60-day deadline for the US and Iran to reach a final peace agreement. On today's episode, I'm going to be speaking to the Pentagon's former Middle East point person about the looming munitions crunch facing the US as a result of the war and what it means for the wider world. We're also going to be discussing intriguing reports that it was an advanced jellyfish-style drone formation that took down that F-15 jet inside Iran back in April. Plus, why did Trump call a fellow Republican a lunatic? There's a growing row over the cost and legitimacy of his war in the US. But first, a quick look at where we're at today.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is currently in the Gulf. Here was him speaking earlier today. I have undertaken this trip here today first and foremost to express my gratitude and appreciation for all of the cooperation and all of the help that we were given and all the things we were able to do together. We now enter a new phase and one that we hope will lead to peace. It's what we all desire. But there are certain things that for us are important to point out now that will never be acceptable.
The first is the Straits of Hormuz are international waters. International waterways do not belong to any nation-state. This is a foundational principle in the world today, without which the world would be in total chaos. If in fact we accepted that you can charge money to use an international waterway because it happens to be near your territorial space, well, then this would spread throughout the world like a contagion. You can call it a toll, you can call it a fee. Whatever you want to call it, it's a game of semantics. The reality of it is that no country on Earth has a right to charge for the use of international waterways, and that will never be an acceptable condition of any deal. And the message that I come with is that we want to
ensure that in any decisions that are made throughout this negotiating process, the interest of our partners and our allies in the region are always taken into account. That there is no part of this deal that's undertaken that in any way undermines the security, the stability, or the prosperity of any of our partners in the Gulf region. He also said that talks for this much-vaunted final deal will resume on June 29th and 30th, so that's the start of next week. Over in the Strait of Hormuz, a British mine-hunting mothership has arrived to help clear the waterway. The RFA Lyme Bay sailed through the Red Sea with a German command and support ship and British destroyer HMS Dragon for protection.
Now, the Lyme Bay comprises six autonomous, crewless, and remotely operated systems that can seek out and neutralize sea mines. More than 270 personnel on board, and it's being led by UK Commander Gemma Retten. This is part of broader demining efforts, and that plus this new Omani route that we've been talking about on the podcast means more ships are getting through. Kepler, which watches these sorts of things, says traffic has seen a sharp day-on-day uptick. Confirmed Strait of Hormuz crossings yesterday, 24th of June, rose to 70. That was up 105% on the previous day. They said that this short-term confidence boost from the US-Iran peace deal is working, but could be dented by recent IRGC warnings
against ships using this Omani route. We will see how that plays out. However, it's having a really positive impact on the oil price. Oil prices have today fallen to levels that were last seen before the start of this war. So, Brent crude, the international benchmark, is now $72 a barrel. That's below its price on February 27th, the day before all of this kicked off, and way down from the high of $126 a barrel that we saw in April. So, all of this is good news. Meanwhile, over in the US, there has been an almighty row over the War Powers Resolution Act being passed earlier this week. We mentioned it briefly on the
podcast yesterday, but it has evolved since then. So, Trump branded four Republican senators who sided with opposition Democrats to pass the vote. He called them losers. This was him speaking to NATO chief Mark Rutte yesterday about the vote. So, we're doing great in our negotiations with Iran. Right in the middle of one of the key things, which we're going to get anyway, we got We have breaking news. The Senate has voted that they'd like Trump to stop the war. So, Iran sees that, they go, "What's that all about?"
Now, you know it's meaningless, right? But I had lunch with them. We had four Republican senators and all Democrats. You know, Democrats they want to lose the war because they're stupid. Now, after that vote happened, there was a meeting. It was supposed to be about something else, not about the War Powers Resolution Act, but Trump ended up having a shouting match with one of those loser Republicans, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. Trump called him a lunatic. This was Cassidy speaking to CBS News afterwards. The president didn't want to hear my question.
He interrupted me. I didn't care to be interrupted. I felt like I was trying to get answers for the American people. And I'm not going to be bullied when I'm trying to get answers for the American people. And so, uh so it escalated from there. At some point it deescalated. So, they have this row, and then Cassidy is invited to a private briefing with the White House about the Iran war, and he changes his mind. He goes back and he votes against a separate War Powers Resolution Act later that day, which leads to it being defeated. Now, all of this back and forth comes as Trump is asking for more than 80 billion dollars for urgent needs connected with the US war on Iran. So, how significant is this
domestic blowback for Trump? And what does that 80 billion figure represent for the Pentagon? To discuss all of that and more, I'm joined by our guest, Dana Stroul. She was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East from 2021 to 2023. That's the Pentagon's top civilian official with responsibility for the region. And during that time, she worked on accelerating integrated air and maritime defense, addressing Iran's destabilizing activities, sustaining the defeat ISIS coalition, and of course, responding to the Israel-Hamas war. She's currently Director of Research and the Shelly and Michael Kassen Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Dana, welcome to
Around the Latest. There's so much I want to discuss with you, but first, let me just get your thoughts on this row that has erupted over in the US over the War Powers Resolution Act, which is really a row about the Iran war, right? And whether it was a good war for America, and whether this deal that Trump is now selling, this MOU with Iran, is a good deal for America, as well. What do you think? Are you Are you for or against the War Powers Resolution Act first, and then maybe just give me your sort of broader view about whether America's in the right place at the end of this conflict.
Well, it's a pleasure to be with you today to have this conversation. I think the first thing about the War Powers Resolution is that it The United States of America is a system of laws, and we have a Constitution. And in the Constitution, the article the President of the United States, um, can declare war if there's an imminent threat to the United States. But in terms of a longer-term war, the way our laws are written, Congress actually has to authorize the use of military force for anything that extends beyond 60 days. And generally, we've had presidents in the executive branch who have been responsive and actually provided that information to Congress who represent the will of the American people in our separation of powers here.
So, before getting to what has happened in the past 24 hours, I think it's important to note that one polling here in the United States since this war started on February 28th of this year has been pretty consistent that Americans don't support this war, don't understand what we're achieving with this war, and as we went into the ceasefire, don't believe that the United States won this war. And we've seen members of Congress consistently raising concerns and asking questions and haven't seen much pro-proactivity from the Trump administration in explaining this either to the American people. President Trump had ample time to do this and waited multiple weeks into the war to actually say anything to the American people. And other than that, we've had a few congressional
testimonies from key cabinet officials, and that's basically it. Right, and that was Bill Cassidy's big criticism, right? That it's not been explained to the American people. He doesn't feel like this has been sufficiently justified. Is that how you feel? I do. I think that if a president of the United States is going to commit this much of American military capabilities given the broad scope of challenges globally, if the Middle East and Iran are going to be prioritized at a moment in time with the amount of resources and US lives on the line, then yes, the president of the United States owes it to the American people to say why this is the priority threat and why it's worth American blood and American treasure to address that threat. And we
never heard that in a compelling way from President Trump. This comes alongside Trump asking for more than 80 billion to cover urgent needs associated with the Iran war. Um the bulk of that, around 67 billion, for the Department of Defense. Um what do you make of that figure? It's It seems high. Well, it is high. First of all, we haven't seen the math on how they did the accounting, but here's the thing. The surge [snorts] in US military forces, our Air Force, our Navy, our Marines, our Army, etc. that deployed into the Middle East, the capabilities that we sent, two aircraft carriers at one point, three aircraft carriers, these configurations of
Marines, all of the logistics, that costs a lot of money. We also had a situation where the Strait of Hormuz was closed, which had an impact on global energy prices. Global energy prices also have implications for how the US military operates. So, it was always going to be more costly to get resources and sustainment to our forces. Then there's the munitions expenditures. And here, what the US military used from its own arsenals, both offensively inside Iran and then defensively, both for itself, its military bases, and in defense of its partners, is just enormous. Plus, there's the salaries of these service members, all the danger pay that's associated. So, the bill for this was always going to be quite
extensive, and it will be interesting to see how members of Congress debate and what kinds of questions they ask. I want to get onto that munitions um bit in a moment, but do you think that figure Do you think it was worth it? For me, when I look at and this is what I've been trying to understand about where the US Where the United States is at this moment in time. So, the United States for a long time has been quite aligned with allies and partners both in the Middle East and beyond on key issues related to Iran. It shouldn't have a pathway to a nuclear weapons capability. It shouldn't have a ballistic missile arsenal that can threaten the United States, threaten the Middle East, threaten Israel, threaten
Europe, threaten the United States, and it shouldn't be able to cultivate a network of terrorists across the Middle East all the way through Europe, and we know even in the United States, to target people, civilian locations, etc. So, when evaluating this war against those three core things, nuclear program, missile program, terrorist network, I look at it and I can't see what we've achieved that will be sustainable over the medium to long term. So, if you listen to Trump administration officials, they'll say there's no more air force, there's no more Iranian air force, there's no more Iranian navy, we've decimated their air defense, we've took out a lot of their military industrial complex. That may be true at
this moment in time. But, all of those things can be rebuilt. And Iran, knowing that it wasn't a conventional match for the United States military plus the Israeli military, didn't respond conventionally. They did not meet us fighter jet for fighter jet, strike for strike. What they did is respond asymmetrically. And the biggest card they played was closing the Strait of Hormuz in a way that the US military, the Israelis, and all of our partners were not able to prevent. And that is not something, even with this MOU, where we are going back to the status quo ante. It's never going to be restored to what it was before. We have to contemplate what it means to live in a
new navigational order where Iran can threaten the Strait of Hormuz and freedom of navigation when it doesn't like what the United States and its allies are doing. And so, faced with that, they can rebuild all of their programs if they want to, they can close the Strait of Hormuz when they want, and the United States has just agreed to an MOU that provides massive sanctions relief, a lot of dollars are going to flow into Iran, US dollars, because now we're allowing them to transact in US dollars. None of that is strategic victory for the United States. Right, and that's the big bone of contention for many American politicians, right? This financial aspect, you know, lifting the waiver on sanctions has happened immediately,
suggestion of reconstruction fund up to 300 billion dollars further down the line, which might come from Gulf partners, and Trump suggested that maybe it'll be used to buy American corn, but I mean, who knows? That feels like a huge sop to Iran, and you know, you used to work on the region. Um how significant is it to be giving Iran money, to be going into the IRGC's coffers at the end of this conflict? It's incredibly significant. So, generally, if one is the victor in a scenario, you ensure that the adversary you defeated makes all of the commitments in a verified way and follows up with actions that you wanted the adversary to do, and then you
provide some sort of incentives for that bad behavior to not happen again. That is not the framework of this MOU. This MOU actually requires nothing of Iran other than to open the Strait of Hormuz only for 60 days, after which Iran is allowed to negotiate with Oman and other Gulf states what the future of the navigational order will be in that critical waterway, and the United States [clears throat] under the Trump administration is providing an unprecedented amount of sanctions relief that goes far beyond the nuclear sanctions, and far beyond anything that any previous US administration has provided, including President Obama during the original Iran nuclear agreement talks. So, by allowing
Iran to transact in US dollars, by working to facilitate uh Iranian oil sales, by allowing Iran to sell its oil at market rate, by allowing Iran to sell not just its oil, but petrochemicals. All of this is a massive amount of financial windfall that's coming to Iran even without access to those frozen funds in escrow, which the Iranians continue to talk about. So, the incentives for Iran actually are quite significant to just stay in this MOU, never have to make any real commitments on its nuclear program, because it just stands to economically benefit so much from the terms of this MOU. I want to come back to the cost of the war for America, because part of that 80 billion that Trump is asking for is around 21 billion for munitions. Um
there was supposed to be a meeting yesterday. Trump was supposed to be meeting with um various defense officials and contractors, including people from Lockheed Martin, L3 Harris, RTX, uh which had all pledged millions of dollars billions of dollars in investment. And he was supposed to be talking about this munitions crunch that we've seen as a result of the really heavy use of you know, things like Tomahawks, Patriots, um all these sorts of things. How severe is the munitions crunch for America? Well, first of all, we don't actually know how severe the munitions crunch is, because the stockpile levels are highly classified and frankly, they should be. But, I think it's important to not just look at what happened this year, but
what's been happening since 2022. So, since 2022, um after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and then the US uh work to support Israel and its self-defense after October 7, 2023, have had massive implications for the US military and for defense industry. So, the US military has been providing support and weapons out of its own stocks to Ukraine since '22 and to Israel since '23, in addition to working to accelerate US defense industry new production for both partners and allies in Europe that are supporting Ukraine and face serious threats from Russia and also to support Israel and then also to support Gulf partners Jordan, Egypt, others who face threats from Iran. So, the pressures on defense industry, the
pressures on US military stockpiles, and concerns that US defense industry as it has existed for years is not able to resupply and build new production at scale and at cost effectiveness is not a new concern. And then add to that what we're seeing with how Ukraine is responding in Russia, how Iran worked and declared war across the Middle East is the changing nature of warfare. So, beyond just replenishing existing stockpiles, the big question is how do we update our defense industrial base and the kinds of weapons we need to fight future wars given the changing nature of warfare. All of that is coming together. There was tremendous work done in the Department of Defense under former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin
and the Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathicks. And we're seeing the Trump administration under Hagel, Seth, and the Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg work to accelerate those things now. This is going to require massive financial investments. There's also been a lot of pressure on US industry to work faster, to open new lines, to scale up production, and at the same time to empower the non-big guys. So, you're mentioning this meeting where all the big guys were summoned to the Pentagon and apparently raked over the coals for not being able to supply fast enough. And then the next question is how do we empower and enable smaller production that can rapidly innovate faster software upgrades to respond to the sort of the
the way in which warfare is so rapidly changing. As you noted, the stockpiles are of course classified and you're you're right that is for a very good reason. But, we have had some estimates about how much was used from CSIS and other places. So, more than 1,000 Tomahawks, more than 1,000 Patriot interceptors, at least 190 TAD interceptors. And those figures we think represent around sort of, you know, around 50% of pre-war inventories, in some cases more. And the US only produces 90 to 100 Tomahawks per year. So, for them to use 1,000 puts them back by, I guess, 10 years. Well, we don't know what the stockpiles are, as you say, but um were you surprised by those numbers?
The numbers are surprising because this was such a massive investment by the defense leadership of the Trump administration in this war against Iran, knowing what the stockpile numbers are, knowing they were at risk before the Iran war, and clearly prioritizing, as most presidential administrations have, readiness to fight future wars, and the real serious conflict yet to come, which could be with China in the Asia theater. And so much of the focus on training and doctrine and kind of weapons and how we would fight so far from American borders focuses on what that conflict looks like in China. So, the challenge of these munitions expenditures numbers, and I also follow the CSIS data really closely, it's
really alarming. And the likelihood is it is a decent reflection, but not the full story. The full story could be likely even more alarming is that leaders in Beijing are also looking at these numbers, and they can also read the CSIS report. And so, the question is what are our adversaries learning from how we fought, the munitions expenditures that just that we just used, and how does that encourage them to either think about escalating more or less in the coming years, knowing that our production timelines are so extended? Do you think the American um defense industrial complex is up to it? As you say, this meeting sounds like it went on for quite a long time. Wasn't tense, but you know, these officials
being told that they need to um you're not doing enough apparently was the initial message to executives, but by the end of the tone had shifted towards cooperation with officials saying the goal was to get on a war footing and work together to speed up production. I mean, what's it going to take to get companies and I guess the government on a war footing if not an actual war like what we've just had? I definitely think that American industry is up to it and I would never bet against the ingenuity of American defense industrial base and our scientists and our researchers. The issue is a lot of regulatory and bureaucratic issues. Some of that is on
defense industry and frankly some of it is on the executive branch, the Department of Defense, and a lot of it is on Congress. So, we need to change our a lot of our export controls, the way we share information with our partners and allies, how we do co-production almost well, we do production almost all in the United States. We don't have enough joint research and development. We don't have ways to integrate the lessons from our allies and partners into US defense industry, to share highly classified information, to do co-production where maybe we're not producing everything in the United States, but we're producing closer to where the wars are fighting. That actually requires regulatory reform
here in the United States, legal reform here in the United States, uh longer lead con multi-year contracting structures, and defense industry, if they're going to scale up, open new factories, hire new labor, hire new workers, they need reassurance that there's going to be a market for those goods years into the future. A lot of that requires demand signal from the executive branch, and I know that people are working on that now, but a lot of that is not only on defense industry. It's changing the entire ecosystem around which we do defense uh production. I mean, that procurement question is so naughty, isn't it? Because you need to be procuring things for the future war, and we don't know what that future war
will look like. It's the problem we're having here in the UK, and we're having across Europe. And we were trying to get a defense invest- investment plan out of the door here in Britain. And, you know, there's a lot of talk that we're trying to procure things that just won't be suitable for the next war. Is that a problem in America, too? I also want to just quickly bring in we've had some more details about um that F-15 fighter jet that was downed in April. Um there's some suggestion reporting in CNN um that one of the airmen said he saw a sort of jellyfish-like formation, a sort of mothership drone with other drones being controlled by it swarming at his plane. And the suggestion is, I guess,
that's what downed the plane. We still don't know what did down that jet and led to two airmen having to be rescued from inside Iran. It's that mismatch, isn't it, between what the Iranians have been able to do with drones and the kind of munitions and weapons that western military like the US has to respond to that, and whether we're nimble enough to be able to meet that threat. What do you think? I agree with you. I on a broader scale, I think we have to learn and rapidly innovate based on how we saw Iran fight and how we're seeing the Ukrainians fight. We're seeing glimpses now of exactly what the changing nature
of warfare looks like, and I think it's quite clear that nobody is prepared for what for what this means for defense procurement uh for future kinds of weapon systems and how we actually need to train our armed forces to respond, be adaptable and flexible in this very contested warfare situation. But we have two really good examples here. First is how Ukraine has adapted to what it's seen from Russia and these recent demonstrations with Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia using drones in highly innovative ways, I think offers really important lessons for how NATO allies, the United States, and our coalition can import those lessons, learn from a very flexible, nimble Ukrainian system. And then on the Iranian side, we've
learned a lot about how we need to prepare to defend our interests and defend our forces and our capabilities. And what is really important about the Iran war situation is the economics of current warfare, that we're using extremely expensive, with long production timelines, missile defense like the Patriots and the THAADs and these very expensive radars, and the Iranians used very cheap drones first to sense and test those radars, test the defenses around our military bases, and then go in for precision kills. That gives us a lot of information about the shortcomings in our current procurement and ways in which we fight wars, and important indicators of how we need to adapt going forward.
Now, unfortunately for us, what's very clear is that the Iranians imported a lot of defense technical know-how and a lot of tactics and procedures from Russia after what Russia experienced in the Ukraine theater. And we know that the Russians and Iranians are deepening their cooperation and they're sharing that with the Chinese and they're sharing that with the others. So, it's imperative that European allies, the United States, our treaty allies like South Korea and Japan in the Asia theater are now seeing what that rapidly changing curve at the edge of warfare is going to look like, and need to be taking steps now. And a good example of some of those steps that are being taken are look at our Gulf allies,
especially in the Gulf Cooperation Council, all recognizing that they need US-supplied missile defense architecture and capabilities, but it's insufficient on its own. And so, they're looking at what they can procure from Europe, from South Korea, what they can import in terms of lessons from Ukraine. These are actually all trusted allies and partners. And if we can figure out how to reform our own national systems to deepen that cooperation, I think we'll be much better prepared and ahead of that curve of warfare. In terms of what the American pilot saw, I it's one CNN report. It would be surprising to me if the Iranians deter- uh figured out a way uh to have a mothership drone and have the drones
operate like that before the United States, its partners and allies, given the amount of resources and investments we've made in these sorts of capabilities. This is something that's actively discussed about what future warfare looks like, especially in the context of a potential conflict with China. But remember that was a very high-stress situation. Uh the pilot was being debriefed. We're seeing just a fraction of what that debriefing might have looked like. So, I would take it with some context and a grain of salt. Okay, yeah. I mean, elsewhere in that report, there are some suggestions that, you know, he had suffered from concussion. I think it was the second time that he'd been involved in an incident during the Iran war, poor guy.
Um I want to get onto the Gulf in a second, but you mentioned the sort of Gulf learning lessons. Do you think the Pentagon is capable in its current form of learning those sorts of lessons? You know, we hear such bombastic talk. This war was a success, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor and it's treason. Do you think there's sufficient um humbleness, I guess, to take a step back and look at what went wrong and implement those lessons? I have confidence in the US military professionals and the civilian professionals that support uh the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. I think at the operational level, everyone understands what happens here. And it's
really unfortunate that the noise around this war is dominated by these insistent quantitative metrics of success. We eliminated these big pillars of Iran's conventional military. We dropped these many munitions. We operated against this number of targets. Uh we operated just distracting nonsense. I think it's one metric, but it's not the complete metric and it's not a full sense of what happened here. And it doesn't account for how Iran responded. And when you're only looking at it through this soda straw of data, of numbers, of what the United States did, you're missing the picture of what was left, what can be rebuilt, over what period of time, and what are the non-military tools that we actually need
to accomplish our objectives. And in this case, whatever those objectives were, they shifted uh according to President Trump multiple times. And most of those big objectives, whether it was unconditional surrender of the regime, protection of the Iranian people from the regime, complete of decimation of the nuclear program, those lofty objectives were not achieved. But I think inside US Central Command, the military headquarters of the United States responsible for the Middle East, they absolutely absorbed key lessons learned about this war and are already determining how to move forward. As did Jordan and the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, plus Israel, all of whom were on the receiving end of
Iranian missile and drone barrages, and are learning really important lessons about what air defense worked, where we need to improve, and where we need to plug in gaps going forward. You mentioned that the Gulf is going to need to rely more on the US for that kind of defense um going forward. You wrote an excellent piece talking about the sort of paradox there, that the Gulf will need to rely on the US more, but trust has also been diminished. It's the US has been found somewhat of sort of, you know, slightly wanting, slightly unreliable partner, and there's some tension there. You set out an idea that the US needs to become a security integrator rather than a
security guarantor. Can you explain that? Sure. So, the title of the piece is the Middle East power paradox for the Foreign Affairs magazine. It's just out in print edition. And that for me is the dichotomy of this moment that at a conventional military level, what the United States was able to do, there still is no military that can the military talks about projecting power, launch this surge, this massive amount of capabilities and forces, and achieve real military metrics so far from its shores. Uh that's remarkable. And frankly, in terms of missile defense against Iran's attacks, the Gulf countries and Israel and Jordan achieved about an 87% uh defense rate, which is pretty
remarkable. And that was done with US origin equipment, US origin training, US origin intelligence, US forces on the ground assisting our partners and allies. And the reality is that there's no substitute for that. So, at the military level, that military backbone that's provided by the United States is not something that can be replaced in the short term at all. And so, the military relationships are actually quite solid and quite consistent at this moment in time. The problem is at this political level. So, there are uh the leaders of all of these countries are frankly in strategic whiplash every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. There's different pronouncements,
different expressions of policy, shifting objectives that come out of Washington. And what these countries need and what these societies need to recover in a post-war sense is stability and consistency and assurance of sustained US commitment. And when they hear the kinds of debates happening in the United States, the war powers votes taken in US Congress, the polling numbers that show Americans quite pessimistic about investments abroad, they hear rhetoric about US first and de-prioritizing commitments to our allies and partners. That makes our what have been long-standing partners less comfortable and less willing to rely on us and more willing to take independent foreign policy decisions or explore new arrangements for ensuring their
interests. And frankly, that's exactly what we're seeing right now in the Middle East. All of these countries, especially in the Gulf, are talking about having some kind of conference with Iran to figure out what the post-war order is. The rhetoric coming out of a lot of Gulf countries right now is that a post-war order needs to more include Iran in that order. Um the talk about this $300 billion reparations fund. Maybe it's a reparations fund. Maybe it's just another way to ensure that Iran has less to lose, has more to lose if it resumes attacking these Gulf countries.
All of this is going to minimize the space in which the United States can operate it to pursue its own interest. The United States and Americans in general are going to do better if they can work with allies and partners. And all of those alliances and all of those partnerships are under tremendous strain because of political decisions being made in Washington. Do you have much hope that they will get to the kind of stability that you say they crave? This is Donald Trump is not particularly noted for sending out particularly stable messaging even if his administration would like to do otherwise.
I think what's happening with most of the with the Gulf countries right now is they are going to have to live with the reality of the Trump administration and the unpredictability that comes out of the White House. But, I also think there's a lot of private conversations happening and then there is this recognition of the US military backbone. So, the CENTCOM relationship with the military, we actually have the CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper going out across the entire Middle East. I think he leaves for the Middle East today and it's an indicator that they recognize the importance of these military relationships. And part of the way in which we're going to defend ourselves going forward is not the United States providing all of these
services to our partners. Our partners are actually realizing that they cannot exclusively rely on the United States, but they want the United States to play a role. And that's where it gets to this question of the security integrator. The United States is going to play a role, but it's no longer going to be able to dictate objectives, interests, policies, and expect all of our partners to line up because our partners don't think the United States has lined up for them. President Trump is going to be in the White House for another 2 and 1/2 years and nothing about this MOU is going to deliver long-term security even though we have officials talking about it in this transformational way. What we've
seen from Tehran in the past couple of days is that they're still willing to challenge it. Their rhetoric in no way suggests they're in a compromising or flexible mood. We're going to have to deal with a Middle East that's likely going to be more unstable for a significant and extended period of time and that the United States is seen as a less reliable actor. Hopefully, what happens here is that the Trump administration realizes it needs to really listen to allies and partners, hear them, and that it they can be value added. And frankly, he might be he being President Trump might be able to hear some of that at the upcoming NATO summit in Ankara where actually several Middle East partners are invited to attend.
That's interesting. Because yeah, the other thing that you point out in And in your piece is about the sort of unprecedented uh the unprecedented cooperation between the US and Israel, first time they sort of fought a war together. Normally the US goes in and leads things, but they were very much doing things together. Um and also the fact that the US it evacuated partially most of its sort of Gulf side bases and launched attacks from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and naval offshore platforms. We now know that the UAE and Saudi Arabia may also have joined in. There were reports that they also attacked Iran of their own accord. Can you talk a bit more about how CENTCOM functioned in this war and how it's been sort of different from
previous wars and lessons they might have learned from that cooperation? Sure. So, one of the important points in my essay is that there are certain trends that will be accelerated as a result of this war. So, there was long-standing views within the Pentagon from years ago that the United States needs to find a way to consolidate some of its very dispersed basing and the deployment of US forces across the Middle East that the Middle East remains an important theater, but that we needed to make sure that we were re-prioritizing and focusing also on pri- on trends in the European theater and of course in the Asia theater because of the threat from China. And largely because the Middle East continues to produce crises, whether it's Iran-related crises or ISIS-related
crises, it's been very difficult to reduce that basing architecture. But the key insight from this war is that because Iran used its short-range ballistic missiles to attack US military bases, CENTCOM recognized that it could not flow forces, as you noted, into those bases. It didn't leave its weapons and other uh kit in those bases. It mostly evacuated from those bases. And in order to get US military into the region, we were either the US military was either on its ships, its aircraft carriers, and its destroyers, and things like this, or it was flowing in from the western side, as you noted, of the Middle East. So, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and even Israel. And this was the first
time US forces were deployed in these significant formations inside Israel, and they're actually to this day present on bases inside Israel. Secondly, the United States military is always looking for partners and allies that it can fight with so that it's not American lives and American treasure on the line. And in the case of the Iran war, this was, as you noted, a truly combined operation. The Israeli Defense Forces had lives on the line. It brought critical intelligence to the war. It was the one who cleared Iranian air defense before US fighters were flying over Iran. There was clear division of labor and targets, sharing
of intelligence, and we even know that, um, the Israeli Air Force is ready to support the US Air Force in that rescue mission when we had the downed F-15 fighter pilot. So, taken together, this is actually what you would want to see if you're the United States, a military partner that's capable and willing of putting lives on the line and fighting alongside you. And again, the paradox of the moment we're in is that the US-Israel relationship is gaining more and more criticism and more attention in a negative way on both the right and the left in the United States, and it's unclear how that settles out, uh, over the medium term.
Just finally, a brief reflection on whether you think this war has damaged or improved America's military credibility on the global stage? That is the paradox of the moment that from a military perspective, there still is no military capable of what the United States just did. There's no military that can project this level of power, this level of capabilities, dominate the airspace of another country, take out so much of its nuclear program, missile program, military industrial complex with such precision. And I think it's important to not only reflect on this year, but what happened last year when the United States in a 24-hour period sent B-2s to drop these massive ordnance penetrators against these deeply buried targets inside Iran.
There is no air force. There is no capable military capable of what the United States has demonstrated in recent years. But the problem is not just a military one. It's a strategic one. And the challenge of this moment is that with the unpredictability of American leadership in Washington, D.C., the U.S. military on its own is just one tool. The question is, it should be one tool in a broader national security toolbox of wise decision-making that takes into account the concerns and needs of U.S. allies and partners. And the United States on its own is not good for the international system, and it's not good for Americans, Americans' safety, security, and prosperity. And because of the circumstances of how this
war was fought, despite the really important achievements from a military point of view, at a strategic level, the United States has made itself less safe, and it's made the international community less safe. That was Dana Stroul from the Washington Institute. And that's all for today's episode of Iran the Latest. We'll be back again tomorrow. Until then, goodbye.
