00:00Professor, welcome back. A U.S. fighter jet downed by Iran's forces.
00:05What does this say about Iran's military capabilities?
00:10Well, it says two things, really.
00:12The one thing that is very clear is that, contrary to any claims that we have heard from the Pentagon
00:18and from President Trump himself,
00:20Iran is not completely out yet.
00:23The U.S. may have relatively uncontested air supremacy, but occasionally, as we have seen in this particular situation,
00:32clearly the Iranians still have weapons to strike at U.S. assets.
00:38The other thing, and that is equally important and relates more to the surge operation that the U.S. is
00:45now mounting,
00:46this was probably just a one-off strike.
00:50The Iranian capabilities have, by and large, been decimated by some assets that they clearly have retained.
00:59But this does not fundamentally change the weight that the U.S. can bring to bear over Iranians' cars.
01:06I wonder how serious is this moment of a downed U.S. air crew and a frantic search from both
01:13sides,
01:14both the Americans and the Iranians, to find him?
01:20Well, I think that is clearly the main escalation danger at the moment.
01:25If the Americans manage to extract the pilot dead or alive,
01:30I think that will be definitely better than the Iranians capturing him,
01:36because that clearly could lead to a massive escalation on the part of Trump.
01:42This could be one of the triggers where Trump actually decides that he wants to carry out the threats
01:50that he has previously mentioned, going after more Iranian critical infrastructure,
01:55potentially even deploying ground troops in the region.
01:58In your judgment, then, what is the likelihood of seeing U.S. boots on the ground in great numbers in
02:05this conflict?
02:07Well, I think that depends very much, I think, on the next couple of days,
02:12because we have a number of parallel developments going on here.
02:16On the one hand, there's obviously the situation around the missing pilot.
02:20The other one is the general sense that we have now got that there are actually stable communication channels
02:29between Tehran and Washington, both direct and through intermediaries.
02:33So there might actually be a dialogue ongoing that could potentially lead to at least a temporary ceasefire
02:42that might then enable proper negotiations between the sites or settlements.
02:48And the third thing that we need to keep in mind is, of course, the volatility of the global economy.
02:53And here, very clearly, I think there are concerns in the U.S., also domestic concerns,
02:58in terms of, in particular, rising fuel prices, that will weigh quite heavily on Donald Trump's mind
03:04in terms of where he sees this war going.
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