00:00You've co-authored a piece that I read on the Council on Foreign Relations website in which you and your
00:06co-author argue that U.S. policies since this conflict begun has been, to paraphrase you, incoherent.
00:13And you've also said that controllable mistakes had been made.
00:18I'm wondering what you think the U.S. has got so wrong these last six or seven weeks.
00:22Well, I think the fundamental miscalculation here is that the belief that this Iranian government would agree to capitulate or
00:31surrender under military and economic pressure,
00:35fundamentally, even with the decapitation of the previous regime leaders,
00:40it really is hard to imagine that the government would accept kind of betraying its foundational ideologies
00:48and accept what would amount to regime change under this kind of pressure.
00:52And I think that's a fundamental miscalculation of who you're dealing with on the other side.
00:58I think the other miscalculation was that the Iranian government wouldn't put the Strait of Hormuz at risk
01:05because it would come at great economic cost to Iran.
01:08And that's a fundamental misreading of how the Iranian government thinks about leverage.
01:13It doesn't really care about the economic impacts on the Iranian people.
01:18It doesn't care about the military strikes that might cause the Iranian people to suffer.
01:24It is looking for a way to survive and to this is an existential fight for it.
01:31So these fundamental miscalculations of how the Iranian regime will operate,
01:36I think, are at the heart of some of the some of the flaws in the strategy.
01:43I think that's a fundamental miscalculation of how the Iranian regime will operate,
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