00:00Jessica Gnauer is academic director of the Public Policy Institute at the University of New South Wales.
00:06Jessica, great to have you with us. So is this sort of what's happening right now?
00:10Because the U.S. doesn't necessarily seem to be winning the war.
00:13President Trump doesn't seem to be wanting an agreement right now in order to be ending the war.
00:19Is this more of that sort of retreat that you're talking about?
00:23Yeah, that's absolutely right.
00:25So essentially, President Trump is now at a crossroads where he has one of two choices.
00:30He can either double down now in the war and actually utilise the Marines who've been moving into the region
00:38and start to put boots on the ground.
00:40So that might be trying to take control of some of the small islands in the Strait of Homoor.
00:44It could be boots on the ground on the Iranian mainland, even though that's likely to be quite disastrous for
00:51the U.S. in the medium term.
00:54Or the second choice for President Trump right now is that he could unilaterally withdraw, pressure Israel to also withdraw
01:01and end their military operation and try to claim this as some kind of victory, even though the Iranian regime
01:07would stay in place at this point in time.
01:09And as long as the Iranian regime is in place, they are still going to have ultimately control over the
01:16Strait of Homoor in that they can make it too dangerous for ships to pass through if they threaten those
01:22ships with attack.
01:24So, yes, what we're starting to see emerging now is that neither of those two options are particularly good for
01:30President Trump at this stage.
01:32And because the Iranian regime has managed to survive to this point in time, despite the fact that a large
01:40number of the leadership have been killed,
01:42the Iranian regime can claim a kind of a victory by saying we withstood this massive onslaught from the greatest
01:50military power globally and we're still standing.
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