00:00I think that for Trump, the best strategy is to either go full scale or to continue the economic
00:13strangulation. I believe that he prefers the economic strangulation, and it makes complete
00:19sense because, again, as you pointed out, the war is not particularly popular in the United States.
00:25And while Trump tends to go back and forth on a lot of topics, the two things that he has
00:31been
00:32extraordinarily consistent about are border security and the situation with Iran. And I
00:39think that he has discovered after trying the aggressive approach that the economic approach,
00:48the naval blockade, the secondary sanctions is having as much, if not more, impact on Iran than
00:57the hard hand did. And since it's coming up to election season, he denies his opponents the club
01:06of saying, why are we in this war? Because it becomes essentially invisible to the American people,
01:13not economically. There is that. But it's harder for people to say it's because of the war. The
01:22price of petrochemicals has gone up significantly from $65 per barrel before the war to around $95
01:31now. But it ticks downwards. And with time, people begin to accept that this is the new norm. So I
01:41would expect that Trump prefers to just hold on as is keeping the economic pressure on and even jacking
01:50it up because it's got to be an utter crisis in Iran.
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