Israel Strikes Iran; What Next?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
News broke evening our time of the Israeli strikes on
Iran's nuclear facilities in a move that Benjamin Etna who
calls basically a matter of survival for Israel. And we're
joined for a few minutes this morning by doctor James Robbins,
the Institute of World Peace on this situation. Doctor Robbins,

(00:21):
good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Oh, good morning.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
How are you well? Great? It's good to have you
with us. You may have read doctor Robbins the USA
today is Senior Fellow and National Security Affairs at the
American Foreign Policy Council and studies these issues constantly. This
was not at any way to me, doctor Robbins, a surprise,

(00:43):
given the events and the rhetoric that we've seen rapped
up over the last few weeks. You expected this too,
I assume.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Well, yeah, I have to agree, given runs in transigence,
the lack of meaningful progress with the new clear talks
with the United States, Iran's insistence on maintaining their nuclear
and Richmond uranium and Richmond program, which was really the
centerpiece of this whole thing, and in particular when the

(01:13):
United Nations IAEA condemned Iran for their enrichment and Iran said,
you know what, We're just going to build more facilities. Well,
you know, that kind of arrogance is really going to
be punished.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
They had to know this was coming, right, I mean,
Israel is not going to be in the possession of
being literally obliterated by letting Iran have a nuclear weapon.
So so what does so does Iran have a death
wish of its own? They knew this was coming.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Well, yeah, they had to know that it was coming,
both with the nuclear weapons and the delivery systems with
the missiles. And Iran has shown that they can, I mean,
they can hit Israel with missiles, or they had before,
so they had to know that, you know, something was coming,
both on the nuclear program and on the missile side
since a lot of those were taken out too. And

(02:06):
I don't know if the Iranians believe that it would
come as quickly or as effectively, but lately Israel has
really shown a great technical capability in conducting these kind
of attacks.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Indeed, is the Iron Dome capable of handling all the
ballistic missile attacks that are likely coming from Iran?

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Well that's a very good question. You know, in the
previous attack that we saw some missiles got through. Of course,
Israel was defending itself with the help of the United
States and other countries. That may happen again. President Trump
said the United States would help defend Israel. Also, there
are a lot fewer missiles now because Israel took a

(02:46):
lot of them out on the ground. Reportedly, even with
drone strikes conducted from with any Iran. I'd like to
see some more details on that one, but you know,
the scale of the response is going to be tempered
by that.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Do you think that it is likely that this action
and reaction Israel to Iran and back and forth is
likely to produce a wider conflict in the region.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well, I hope not. The Iranians were hindered by the
fact that a lot of their proxies are now sort
of out of action. You know, Hamas is being devastated.
Has Balla taken out of action their ally in Syria,
you know, the Assad regime is gone. The Huthis are
still there, but they're heavily debilitated. So I think that

(03:37):
in the past Israel was was deterred by the fact
that these these other proxies could then have like attacked Israel.
But now They're not there to attack Israel, and so
the Iranians are, you know, they're responsible of as potent
as it might have been.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
What do you what do you believe are And by
our I mean President Trump's influence role in this was,
if any, Our Secretary of State Rubio said, this has
nothing to do with us. We were given, we were
told by Israel that this was something that we had
to do, and our interest now is in protecting our
people and our installations in the Middle East. What do

(04:15):
you think the role of Donald Trump was, if any?

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Well, I think the President's been very clear that he
was interested in having a negotiated and to a run's
nuclear program. The talks were really stalled because the Iranians
weren't giving an inch on the central issue, which was enrichment.
And a really interesting thing that I saw someone pointed
out was that two months ago President Trump gave Iran

(04:41):
sixty days and said we're going to see progress in
sixty days or other things will happen. And that was
sixty days ago, and now we're seeing the other things.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
Hey man, doctor Robbins, thanks for your time this morning.
Appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
You got good to have you with US doctor James Robbins,
Institute of World Peace,