SPECIAL REPORT: Israel's Strike On Iran | RANE's Ryan Bohl

**Adam Taggart** (0:00)
All right, and we should be live here. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and host, Adam Taggart. Welcoming you here for a special report. We sadly had Israel launch a preemptive strike on Iran last night, taking the world by surprise. Here to make sense of it for us is RANE's Middle East expert, Ryan Bohl. We've had Ryan on the channel in the past before, when there's been issues like this in the Middle East. So Ryan is going to tell us what's going on, how different last night's attack might be from the previous skirmishes we've seen in recent years between Israel and Iran, and then obviously trying to make sense for us what we should expect next and what the implications of all this might be. Ryan, thank you so much for taking time and what must be a very busy morning for you to talk to us.

**Ryan Bohl** (0:52)
Yeah, of course. I'm happy to be here. And yeah, I always cherish having these opportunities to engage with a wider audience beyond our client base. All right.

**Adam Taggart** (1:01)
Well, look, I guess, why don't we just start with the details? So what exactly has transpired in the past 15 hours?

**Ryan Bohl** (1:10)
So the Israelis have begun what we would call a strategic destruction campaign. And what we mean when we say that is that they are aiming to not just deter the Iranians, they're not aiming to just degrade some of their capabilities.
They're aiming to destroy the Iranian nuclear program and its missile production capabilities. They are going on a full escalation against these two systems or these two institutions that are seen as the primary threat to Israel. And this is a massive step up the escalation ladder. It's always been something that we've considered as a possibility. And we've always kept it as one of our lower likelihood scenarios so that Israel could suddenly jump to a strategic destruction campaign, more or less out of the blue. They had all the drivers there. It was a question of timing and whether or not they could get American buy-in to do so. But the timing, of course, it has caught us by surprise, in part because we expected that the US wouldn't back such a campaign until the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks had formally collapsed. But those talks haven't collapsed formally. They're still on life support. But President Trump seems to have lost patience with them. And gave the Israelis the yellow light or the green light, whatever you want to call it. Essentially, he's approved of these strikes.
And it's very unlikely that the Americans didn't know about them beforehand. And so this is result in a target package of top leaders within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard or the IRGC, nuclear scientists, missile bases, air bases, air defenses, and of course, at least one nuclear site in central Iran that has been struck repeatedly. And we're still waiting on whether or not the assessment, whether or not anything more than a surface building has been destroyed there. It's still very unclear. So at least one nuclear location has been struck. There doesn't appear to be any radiation leak or contamination because of that attack. And we are assessing that. And now what we are doing is we are waiting for the Iranian major retaliation. They've already launched about 100 drones toward Israel. Most of those were shot down long before they reached Israeli airspace. We're waiting for the ballistic missiles. So with the Iran still formidable arsenal of large missiles that they will eventually use against Israel. And then it's our question of what do they choose to target? And is that going to be an airbase like they have in the past? Is it going to be institutions like Mossad or the Ministry of Defense, which are located in Tel Aviv? Or is it going to be some other target sets, Israeli energy facilities, Israeli cities, the Knesset itself, other targets that would be much more escalatory if they choose to go in that direction?

**Adam Taggart** (3:52)
Okay, so a number of questions here. From an escalation standpoint, you know, in the US with nuclear missiles, we've got DEFCON 5 all the way down to DEFCON 1, right? DEFCON 1 being like this is high, high, high alert, right? As I understand it, you know, in the past when Iran and Israel have disagreed and it's become kinetic, they've, you know, the targets have been either proxies, right? So like embassies in Syria, that type of thing. Or when Israel has gone into Iran, you know, it hasn't gone after the underbelly. It hasn't gone after the nuclear sites. It hasn't really gone into Tehran much, right? It was stuff on the outskirts of the country that sent a message, but, you know, weren't particularly visible to the average Iranian citizen. Now, obviously, they're trying to send a much more hard message here, right? We sort of like we saw with Hezbollah, right? Hezbollah, I think I've got that right, where they decapitated a lot of its leadership in one, you know, fell swoop with those strikes with the exploding pagers.