SPECIAL REPORT: Is The US Winning Or Losing The War In Iran? | Ryan Bohl, RANE

**Adam Taggart** (0:00)
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 are joined as usual by RANE, Mideast specialist, Ryan Bohl. Hey, Ryan, how are you? Hi.

**Ryan Bohl** (0:16)
I'm obviously very busy, but yes, good to see you again, Adam.

**Adam Taggart** (0:19)
Great to see you. I'm sorry that we're seeing you again so soon. We were sort of selfishly hoping that things would quiet down in the Mideast as opposed to heat up, but here we are. Thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule to come join us. I know that your phone is ringing off the hook and that you are oftentimes staying up very late at night to talk to in-region sources there in the Mideast, but thank you for joining. I'm sorry to see you've shaved a little bit because everybody was talking about how we kind of looked like twins when you had your beard on, but maybe next time. I've got a few years on you, but I'm assuming this whole Iran stress is aging you faster than I am aging at this point.

**Ryan Bohl** (0:58)
It's also seasonal. We're technically at spring, so I got to cool down.

**Adam Taggart** (1:01)
All right, exactly. Okay. So I've got a ton of questions for you, but before we dig into them, if you could just give us a high level lay of things right now, set the table for this discussion.

**Ryan Bohl** (1:14)
Yeah. I'm going to just set this from a geopolitical standpoint that I don't see a lot of other sources approaching this at. At the RANE Network, what we do is we do classify countries into different power statuses and that's really important to understand why this conflict is dragging out and why the US strategy forward was in many ways inappropriate for a country of Iran's stature. So we start off at the very top, superpower, United States, global power, able to go anywhere, do anything, not can't do everything, but has global influence. You have your great powers, Russia, China. Those are continental powers. They are very significant. The United States has not fought a great power since World War II. Japan and Germany would have been those last great power battles, and we saw how tough that was. Then below a great power is what Iran is, what we refer to as a middle power. It is a regional country. It is able to influence and even control its neighbors at scale. Within the region, we have Iran, Turkey, and Egypt, which are our natural middle powers. It's where civilization keeps resetting every time these countries seem to get knocked off the map. Somehow somebody restarts an empire or a nation state from those locations for a whole host of reasons. I mention this because the United States has been, since World War II, fighting wars with minor powers, below middle powers. A minor power is a country like the United Arab Emirates. It is a country like Saudi Arabia. Many ways, Israel is a minor power except for on its military heft, which for a whole host of reasons is much more impactful. The US has fought minor powers since World War II in Korea, within Vietnam, within Iraq, within Serbia, and it's gotten used to fighting those because it's an outmatched struggle. This is the first time the US has been fighting a middle power since arguably China in Korea in 1950 This is why we're seeing the Trump Administration approach Iran as though it were a minor power, as though air power could break its political will and assassinations could wipe out a cadre of leadership, and then now you get the political changes that you want out of that country because that's worked in places like Serbia. It's worked with minor powers like Iraq. But it's not going to work with a country like Iran because of its sheer size. The amount more pain that the United States needs to inflict on a middle power is much higher. It involves a ground component. It involves an economic component that requires Americans themselves to choose the guns versus butter. We're going to have to do more guns if we want to win this war in the way that the administration has set out their victory conditions.
Because Iran is 87 million people, it's bigger than Texas. It's like the size of the American Midwest. It is a country that once dissolved and ate its own Mongol dynasty. The Mongols took it over and then the Mongols became Persians rather than the Persians becoming Mongols. Because of its middle power status means that invaders come to it and it changes the invaders rather than the other way around. That's just the status of a middle power.