Steve Hayes 0:00

[upbeat music] Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we look at the Trump administration's renewed strikes on Iran and the months of victory declarations from Trump and other White House officials. What are we targeting and why? Does America have the weapons stockpiles necessary to keep this up? How does this war end? Then we'll turn to the reporting by The Wall Street Journal that the Trump administration is green-lighting a civilian nuclear program for Saudi Arabia, and what that might mean for the region. And finally, not worth your time, Laura Loomer's flip-flop on Ukraine. Do we care? Should we care? I'm joined today by the Dispatch's editor-in-chief, Jonah Goldberg, contributing writer and retired Army Special Forces Officer, Mike Nelson, and New York Times columnist and Dispatch contributor, David French. Let's dive right in. [upbeat music]

Steve Hayes 1:07

Okay, 13 consecutive days of US strikes in Iran. Mike Nelson, what are we doing? What are we hitting, and where is this going?

Mike Nelson 1:16

Okay, so we've returned to traditional kinetic operations, uh, you know, that we had paused for a long time, originally since April 8th, and then again, again codified with the MOU. After the Iranians decided to try to test the limits of that and shoot at some of the maritime shipping, the president has returned to conducting what looked like periodic nightly strikes, but have, as you said, extended over the course of two weeks and have no signs of ceasing, at least in the immediate future. What's different from now is we have expanded a little bit into some of the targets that the president had mentioned before. We've been hitting some of the bridges that have been identified as dual use, both civilians, but also being used by the Iranian military to reposition forces, and he has suggested that he would expand that further into some of the civilian infrastructure that he's talked about before. More power plants. We st- are reported to have struck a desalination plant, although Centcom claims that was not intentionally targeted. So the nature of what we're striking seems to have changed a little bit, expanded a little bit some of the target set, but the intensity over the, the last two weeks has, has remained the same. What we haven't done yet, despite the administration's claims, this is all about preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, is as of yet, we haven't struck any part of the nuclear program, which was largely attrited and destroyed in twenty twenty-five with Operation Midnight Hammer. We know that they have reported to have repositioned some of their centrifuges to Pickaxe Mountain, as it's called, and we have not yet struck that. There are questions we saw with Secretary Hegseth's testimony in front of SAS, the Senate Armed Services Committee the other day. There are questions as to whether we have the technical capability to do that. He didn't wanna discuss it in an open forum, and that will be revealed, I guess, if we decide to strike it. But the other thing that's happened is the Iranians have also expanded the war. Not only have they been striking our Gulf Arab allies, originally specifically targeting those countries that host our forces, Kuwait and Bahrain, and some of the civilian infrastructure there, reportedly hitting an Amazon data center, reportedly hitting some of the CIA infrastructure that's sponsored in the region with the help of Russian or Chinese targeting. But they've also expanded it, as we saw with the loss of three of our soldiers to, to strike air defense artillery sites in Jordan. Part of the thinking is that this may be to try to attrit our air defense capabilities that provide part of the shield to Israel as a preemptive attack prior to conducting strikes on Israel itself. As well, we've seen the Houthis, an Iranian proxy in Yemen, threaten maritime traffic now in a second strategic choke point, the Bab al-Mandab, which is on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula on the Red Sea, at the mouth of the Red Sea. You'll remember one of the original uses of military force by the Trump administration, at least this Trump administration, was Operation Rough Rider, striking the Houthis to try to prevent their previous interdiction of maritime traffic. So what we've seen through the war is the, the Trump administration has either not further advanced any of the, of the, the gains that they had made before, you know, attriting the nuclear program after Midnight Hammer, reversed some of the status quo they enjoyed in terms of Iranian control of the strait, and reversed some of the previous gains they had made, like with Rough Rider, and that now the Bab al-Mandab is again an issue that we have to deal with. So what we're seeing over the past two weeks is, on both sides, an expansion of the war that had been paused since April 8th.

Steve Hayes 4:32

That is a fantastic summary, and you mentioned about five different things that I wanna make sure that we get to, including potential Russian Chinese targeting assistance for the Iranians, the Senate testimony, the expansion of the war, the Houthis, what have you. But before we get there-

Jonah Goldberg 4:48

Steve, I should also just note there's an IRGC lawn crew outside of Mike's office-