SPECIAL REPORT: US & Israel Now At War With Iran - What Will The Implications Be? | Ryan Bohl, RANE

**Adam Taggart** (0:01)
And we should be live. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart here, welcoming you here for a special report. I wish it were for better reasons. But as many of you know, there was a joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran yesterday that killed Iran's supreme leader and a number of members of the senior government there. This is a very chaotic, kinetic unfolding situation right now, and to help make sense of it for us. We have a great, good fortune of having Ryan Bohl, RANE's geopolitical Mideast analyst joining us here as he has in the past. Ryan, thanks so much for joining us. I know it is a crazy time for you. We've had you on here over past year a little bit more as we've been on the milestones to this moment. You know, some of the previous exchanges between Iran and Israel and then the US bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities. And through all that, I think we were all hoping that we were going to hopefully maybe be able to avoid a full-out kinetic situation, but here we are. So lots and lots of questions for you. I'm sure you probably know a lot of things that I'm not even going to think of to ask you, so please bring those in to the discussion as need be. But if we can just start, let's just kind of bring everybody up to speed. What exactly happened in yesterday's joint strikes with the US and Israel against Iran?

**Ryan Bohl** (1:34)
Well, very broadly, it was a joint mission between the Israelis and the Americans, which is different than June of 2025, where the Israelis led the strikes and carried out their campaign until somewhere around 10, 11 days. And then the Americans came in, delivered the final blow on the nuclear program. And then there was a ceasefire declared. This worked out together. It was extensive. It went after as many targets as they see, as they thought were viable as part of a decapitation strike. So their idea of killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a very deliberate act, with the idea of knocking out as many Islamic Republic officials at the top as possible in order to cripple their command and control, their political leadership, make their response more difficult. There was also a massive cyber attack that was involved, suppression of air defenses, strikes on nuclear-related targets yet again, underground missile facilities, launchers, and as many military bases as they could manage in that first round. And they continued to carry out strikes. And they are continuing to be strikes even today. And we are seeing from Israeli and American officials leaks that suggest that these strikes will continue for several weeks. They are planning for them up to 30 days. Now, whether or not they do 30 days is going to depend on all of our various off-ramp scenarios that we can kind of talk about. Nobody knows how long this war will necessarily last, and they certainly don't know how it is going to end. But there are certain paths that make more sense than others. We can kind of chat through those. But that's kind of where we're at, is we are at that massive attack by the US and the Israelis, and then the Iranians, once they started to understand the scope and scale of these attacks, they calculated their pre-planned retaliation for many, many years. Anybody who's been looking at Iran has worried that the Iranians would someday come under an attack like this, and that they would have nothing but an incentive to carry out strikes across the entire region. And they have now struck virtually, they've struck every single Gulf Cooperation Council country, including now Oman as of today, as well as Jordan and of course Israel. And so they have expanded their geography much further than they ever have before. Casualty Council are starting to come in. I've seen the CENTCOM confirm that three US soldiers were killed. We don't know where or exactly how.
There are many casualties throughout the GCC and within Israel and several hundred reported casualties inside of Iran. Those numbers will climb as this conflict continues. And it's very unclear how much more damage will be done across the region. And of course, we've seen some norms shattered. And things like seeing places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Qatar, places that I used to live in, seeing familiar towers coming under attack, in Burj Al Arab and interceptions near the Burj Khalifa, and over downtown Doha. These are all civilian targets that the Iranians have gone after. And they are economically linked, or they are prestige linked, or in some cases, they seem to have been caught up with air defenses downing something and then the debris causing damage on the ground, as seems to be the case with some of the incidents at places like the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai, which had a fire that's gained a lot of high-profile attention, but seems to have been the result of a shoot down, rather than a deliberate target. But it's still going on, and we're going to continue to see that over the next few days and few weeks.