00:00If you decide to fight a war of choice, it's very hard to win.
00:04If you're fighting a war of existence, then your capacity is limitless.
00:09And in that sense, slightly unlikely bedfellows, you see Ukraine doing something similar to what Iran are doing,
00:15which is you can absorb enormous amounts of military superiority, enormous amounts of pressure, political, military, all the rest of
00:23it.
00:23And you can keep on going, maybe not indefinitely, but it's quite hard to deliver a knockout blow.
00:28And, you know, Iran has been fighting since 1979, three Cold Wars simultaneously,
00:33one with the great Satan, as Iranians like to call it, the United States, one with the little Satan, Israel,
00:39and with Saudi Arabia.
00:40And it's done so for 47 years with about 3% of the US defence budget.
00:45Do you think that Putin and Trump have something in common in that these wars with Ukraine and Iran, respectively,
00:53are with much less powerful countries?
00:54But have they both underestimated the kind of power that those countries can nevertheless wield?
01:01No question. And I think that powerful men often miscalculate and think that their muscles and brainpower are stronger, better
01:10than anybody else's.
01:11And the challenge in a system where you have a single powerful leader who expects everyone to bow down in
01:16front of them is that they're very hard to get to listen to advice.
01:19Peace.
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