Last year, before President Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term, his former intelligence briefer told me that he did not like the obligations of alliances. He preferred one-on-one deals. But now, as we enter a third week of war with Iran, the president is asking for allies to put warships in the Strait of Hormuz. So far, no commitments to policing this important sea passage.
“His instincts were, going into this, that he didn’t need the allies,” Beth Sanner told me in our live video interview. “He’s only saying that now because the United States actually needs help. And we didn’t notify allies, we didn’t prepare the oil market to manage the shock which I think could have been anticipated… It’s like ‘We break you it, you buy it’ to our allies.”
Beth, the former Deputy Director for National Intelligence, current Director of Geopolitics at International Capital Strategies, and CNN contributor, shared more of the character traits she saw in Trump which may be at play during Operation Epic Fury.
“President Trump is highly adaptable,” she said. “He is a person that will start something and not worry as much about understanding a perfect ending because he believes that with the strength of the United States and his fortitude that he is able to adapt and be opportunistic. And if he blows up Iran and it falls into pieces, he thinks he can pick up the pieces and create another good outcome from that.”
I asked her if the U.S. and Israel, in an attempt to eliminate the threat of Iran’s regime, have actually incentivized deeper anti-U.S./Israel sentiment, a la Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s insurgency math. What she said is that the regime is “behaving like an insurgency, not as a great power.” And that a key assumption, “that we were going to win this war because we had overwhelming military force,” does not translate to defeat for this regime.
And we’re seeing that in the Strait of Hormuz. “President Trump famously says, ‘You don’t have any cards,’ and he thinks that these weaker players, like Iran, don’t have cards. But what we’re discovering is that when you are fighting an asymmetrical battle, other countries — smaller, weaker — if they’re creative and they think like insurgents, they have cards. And right now, Iran has the global economy as its hostage.”
She also said that she hasn’t seen any cracks in the regime, and that this new “IRGC generation,” and Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei himself, were likely “more radicalized from the beginning and probably more radicalized now.” Not that Mojtaba, who is injured or possibly dead, has any real power. It’s the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps calling the shots, Beth says.
Many people misunderstood the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, she added. He was not purely driving Iran toward a nuclear weapon. “He worried about the possibility of [Iranians] getting caught in between wanting to get a weapon and getting a weapon, and [that] just this kind of attack [by the U.S. and Israel] that would destroy the regime would happen.”
She told me that she agrees with Trump that peace and prosperity cannot be realized in the Middle East with a theocratic Islamic regime in Tehran. But even the recent targeting of Iran’s Kharg Island, with its important crude oil processing facilities, won’t lead to concession, she says. Instead, it is the United States mistakenly mirror imaging, believing “other countries are going to behave like we do.”
“The threat that we are going to take out Kharg Island to deny this regime oil revenue, because they live on that, and that will somehow cause them to capitulate, is I believe, this mirror imaging on an idea that is not where they’re at.”
Iran has about 450 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, and I asked for her thoughts on why we have not currently seen the targeting of Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified underground complex near Natanz where Western intelligence has assessed that Iran may intend to establish a new enrichment facility. “I’m wondering whether we’re saving our fire because we’re leaving open the option of some kind of special forces thing,” she said.
This is the first part of our discussion. The second part will be available to paid subscribers who make my work possible. More in the video.
