Iran War Nearing The End? | Ryan Bohl, RANE

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Tax Act can think of a million things more fun than filing taxes. Tax Act is going to name some now. Sitting in traffic. Folding a fitted bedsheet. Listening to your coworker talk about his fantasy team. Digging a hole. Digging an even larger hole next to that original hole. Unfortunately, Tax Act's filing software can't make taxes fun, but Tax Act can help you get them done. Tax Act. Let's get them over with.

**Adam Taggart** (0:31)
And we should be live. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you here for yet another special report on the situation in Iran. We got a lot to talk about today, and we're joined as usual by RANE, Mideast geopolitical strategist, Ryan Bohl. Ryan, thanks so much for joining us again today. I'm sure this has got to be another crazy week for you.

**Ryan Bohl** (0:52)
Yeah, absolutely. And last night was another turnabout of this dynamic, and it's certainly not over this morning.

**Adam Taggart** (1:00)
Okay. So yeah, when I reached out to schedule this with you, we were facing the ticking clock of the President Trump's deadline, basically, hey, come to the table or else we're going to unleash hell on Iran. Fortunately, we now have a ceasefire. We'll see how long it holds. But I guess, let's start with this. What do we know so far about the ceasefire? What should we expect from it? And do you personally expect it to hold?

**Ryan Bohl** (1:33)
So the only part of the ceasefire that seems to be holding right now is the US not conducting airstrikes on Iran. We've already seen in the past 12 hours, yeah, I think it has been about the past 12 hours, Israeli escalation against Lebanon, Hezbollah. There have been strikes inside of Iran on Iranian energy facilities. There have been Iranian retaliation against Kuwait, Bahrain, and then most recently, that critical east-west pipeline in Saudi Arabia between the eastern province of Nambu on the Red Sea has also been attacked. And I think I did mention the Emiratis have been attacked. And the Iranian state media has said that Hormuz was open for about 10 minutes.
And that they've closed it again because of Israeli aggression within Lebanon. It doesn't look like the markets have kind of internalized this news. What they're looking at is the ceasefire process and the diplomatic process going forward. This is extremely untenable, what's currently happening. The Iranians came up with a 15-point ceasefire plan that they sent to the Americans, and Trump said, we can work with this, even though all of their demands were non-starters for the Americans.

**Adam Taggart** (2:41)
Just to be clear, there's 10 points, right? Ours is the 15 points.

**Ryan Bohl** (2:44)
Yes, that's right. Well, the issue is right now, we don't know on the Iranian side, are they sticking with their 10 to 15 points officially in Islamabad when the talks begin? Because it is entirely possible that the delegation that goes to Islamabad on Friday comes with new demands, older demands, we know some of their core demands are things like uranium enrichment, probable control of the Strait of Hormuz, the end of Israeli attacks on their proxies, and of course, a durable ceasefire with the US and Israel that guarantees that there's no future war. So with the number of points, perhaps doesn't matter as much as the bigger substance of what the Iranians are trying to get out of this, which is full-scale security on the energy front, on the economic front, the nuclear front, and of course, physical security. And it doesn't look like right now, they believe they need to offer any concessions. And for that matter, the Americans under the Trump administration believe that their ceasefire demands are at least going to be discussed and met in some capacity in Islamabad. And it doesn't, there doesn't seem to be any reason for this optimism other than the fact that it's largely aspirational ceasefire dynamics, is the way I would describe it, is that the Trump administration decided to pause whatever shock and awe campaign that they had planned to start last night and they still plan to carry out in the next few days if Islamabad doesn't go well. That seems to be the only thing that's been halted on this, because on every other front, the war is continuing relatively the same way it was on Monday and Tuesday.

**Adam Taggart** (4:14)
Okay. Real quick, when are the Islamabad talks supposed to start?

**Ryan Bohl** (4:20)
Supposed to be on Friday. We're getting lots of leaks as to who may or may not go, which tells us how serious these talks are. There's rumors that the Iranian parliamentary speaker will be going, and he's a guy who's attached to the IRGC but isn't exactly in charge of it. It may be a lower-level designation because they're worried about Israeli assassinations if they decide to leave the country or travel. So who goes to Islamabad will matter. The other on the American side is the rumors it'll either be JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, or Jared Kushner. Now, if it's Witkoff and Kushner, the Iranians don't trust them because they've done several rounds of talks with these guys and it's resulted in war. JD Vance is supposed to be a dove in comparison to the rest of the administration, and there is some signs the Iranians may be willing to trust him a bit more. But for that matter, Vance may end up going to these talks and then concluding that the Iranians are playing more games and having to come back and resume the war, and that's going to damage his dovis reputation that he's kind of counting on for 2028 So nothing is firm yet. We have to keep a really close eye on who's going to understand how serious these talks are, or is this a traditional Middle Eastern ceasefire process? That is, the worst escalations are contained, but the war is put into a box that allows the combatants to kind of fight each other to a stalemate.