Iran Gets BOLDER as U.S. Forces Pull Back | Mike Drop Newsroom

Mike Ritland (0:00)

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Trump wanted to project power, but forces retreat. Shadow fleet for Iran's oil, despite Washington's threat to target them, companies continue to service Iranian tankers near Malaysia. This is really the main story today, which I want to kind of get into the big picture. I've had a couple of discussions on these morning headline shows about our role, how it's going in Iran, and kind of the global viewpoint and what you guys think on what winning air quotes looks like.

It's a tough prospect to look at what's been going on for the last seven months and think that things are going well and that everything is kind of as expected. The biggest selling point for a long time now is preventing a nuke. But we've heard that for decades now, and we'll set that to the side for a second, is that regime change, while they said it was clearly stated as not an objective, but if it happens great, I think it's easy to see that between Israel's involvement and the way we went about it, especially in those early few weeks of specifically targeting the upper echelons of the Iranian regime, that that was a pretty clear-cut objective. Even with them being taken out and dozens of the highest leadership levels of the Iranian regime being targeted and taken out, here we still sit with all of their replacements in place. The way that the country is being run is essentially the same. Their ability to project power, influence, and threats not only has not ceased, I would argue that it's actually been emboldened. We talked the last few days about the bomber jets on the UK air base that have been evacuated out of there because of a threat of Iranian drones attacking our planes in Britain. So there's an obvious disconnect between what the administration thought was gonna happen, how it's gone, and kind of how it's going now. One of the comments, somebody asked me, what does winning in Iran look like to you, i.e. to me?

Here's what I will say is, and I've alluded to this in the past, I'm gonna get a little further into it today.

You know, we've been meddling in the Middle East for decades, decades and decades, and we've generally taken kind of the same approach. You know, we have permanent bases in Bahrain, Qatar. You know, we've got different Ford operating bases and troops stationed in Syria all over Iraq. You know, there's talk about completely evacuating, and we're in the process of completely evacuating Iraq. But the reality of it is, we've got tens of thousands of troops over there, and we have for decades. I would argue that the stability in the region is, for sure, not any better than it was before the day we showed up. I think it'd be easy to argue that it's actually worse.

What is our intended outcome with this? You know, you hear over and over and over, whether it's Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction, which, you know, having been there, I don't think was a legitimate cause for us going there, especially given, you know, the evidence or lack thereof on the ground afterwards. Iran, it's the same thing, trying to prevent them from getting a nuke. Now, from an existential threat standpoint, does a nuclear Iran pose a threat to the United States in particular? I would say yes, but certainly not as a primary threat. You know, all of Europe, Israel, that entire region is far more threatened by a nuclear Iran than we are. It's not to say that I want Iran to be able to develop a nuke or that I think probably most people think that that would be a good thing. But I also don't think that our involvement, losing troops, spending billions and billions of dollars, at this point, trillions of dollars in the region over the last 25 years, from a return on investment, if you want to be as calloused as to call it that, is worth it. I really don't, you know. And we've tried the same things over and over and over, you know, with very mixed and poor outcomes, and generally have not met our goals. If you look at Afghanistan and say, okay, where are they at compared to before we showed up? It's tough to argue that we did a lot of good there, or frankly any good at this point, with the Taliban taking back over. The vacuum of power in Iraq, same thing.