00:00It's such a difficult picture right now when we look at it because it's essentially a double blockade.
00:05And as you say, what is going to happen because the strait of homos are still effectively closed.
00:11But Donald Trump says Iranians want to make a deal and J.D. Vance says future talks do depend on
00:17Iran ship.
00:18The U.S. is maintaining this hardline stance on Tehran's nuclear program.
00:23How could Americans militarily remove all that enriched nuclear material from Iran?
00:31This is something that is holding up these diplomatic talks.
00:35Or is that not even possible from a military perspective?
00:39Well, I've argued before that it's it's not at the moment because you need three things.
00:44You need exquisite intelligence on where it is.
00:47And this sort of notion that there's 440 kilograms of enriched uranium somewhere just waiting for the Americans to go
00:56in a locked room and take it is not credible.
00:59Secondly, you've got the complexity of geography.
01:01It took 150 ships to rescue airships to rescue one pilot the other day.
01:07The complexity of the operation would be there.
01:10And thirdly, the longevity of the operation, because it would be a complex operation, means that the ability of Iran
01:17to interdict it or do something about it in space and time makes it incredibly difficult.
01:23So it would be a operation of the utmost complexity, something that you don't really want to do.
01:30And you'd want to sort of find a diplomatic way out of that.
01:33And I think that's actually where we're going to get to, because in terms of what we look at in
01:38game theory in international relations, how diplomacy and negotiations work, we're really looking at what are the pain thresholds and
01:46the payoff matrix between each side.
01:49And it seems that the negotiations in Pakistan were not that far apart.
01:55I think Donald Trump is obviously under a bit of pressure for two reasons in terms of what he said
02:02historically.
02:02Firstly, he must get a better deal than existed under the JCPOA, which limited the uranium to 3.68%.
02:11And secondly, he's going to make sure that somehow the Strait of Hormuz is open, because it's always been one
02:17of the precepts of American foreign policy since 1945, that freedom of navigation is part of customary international law.
02:25How he deals with both of those is crucial for his credibility in the future.
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