This will ‘blow up’ in Trump’s face | Sir Bill Browder

**Bill Browder** (0:00)
It's almost impossible to destroy. This is, they're effectively running a guerrilla warfare operation now, which is just with having the mighty superpower of the United States, it can't destroy that. It pops up here, it pops up there.

**Maddie Hale** (0:24)
Hello, welcome to The Trump Report. I'm Maddie Hale. We've got to start with these Iranian developments. There's so much going on in the Iran War. It changes by the minute, on the minute. So, you know, I'm doing my best to keep you guys updated. We're also going to discuss Russia, Ukraine, and a few developments there. So my guest today is Sir Bill Browder. Bill, thank you so much for joining The Trump Report.
Let's kick off with the latest news on the Iran War. So here's kind of what's happened overnight. The US launched these fresh strikes in the Strait of Hormuz, targeting these Iranian drones and these military sites. It says that they were threatening ships and American forces. Iran then claimed that it hit a US air base, while the Gulf States reported missiles and drones overnight, fueling fears that this ceasefire, if you want to call it a ceasefire, is collapsing. Trump warned that these talks still aren't where he wants them to be and said the US might need to finish the job if Iran refuses a deal. And of course, these oil prices rose again as markets panic over the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. So this ceasefire, Bill, doesn't really seem like a ceasefire, never really has. And yet these negotiations are still falling flat. So your reaction to where we're at and whether you see it more likely or not that this will escalate militarily?

**Bill Browder** (1:35)
Well, so first of all, it's not a ceasefire. If the US is hitting targets in Iran and Iran is hitting US targets or US allies' targets, it's not a ceasefire. It's a war. It's just at a lower level of intensity than it was before. I mean, the main issue, and it's a very straightforward issue, not a straightforward issue to resolve, is that Iran, that doesn't have a very powerful military, has one huge point of leverage, which is, well, actually two points of leverage. The first is that they can close the Strait of Hormuz, and the second is that they can hit targets of US allies, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, etc.
with missiles. And those two points of leverage give them an unfortunately large advantage in this negotiation. And the problem is that, in a certain way, time is on the side of the Iranians, not on the side of President Trump, because President Trump has got this whole midterm election, high inflation issue leaning on him. And so it looks like, based on all the body language, that he wants to just wrap this thing up so that he can go into the midterms without a war going on in Iran.

**Maddie Hale** (2:58)
Well, we'll get into the midterms and language on the midterms in a second, but I want to get this, you said, you know, the capability of Iran. So Trump, again, threatened to finish the job, as I said, declaring that their Navy is gone, their Air Force is gone, everything is gone. But despite that rhetoric, Iran still retains these harder to counter threats, like drones, these fast attack boats, mine laying vessels and these mobile missile launchers. So this is enough for the United States to continue justifying strikes as self-defense. So is Trump's public message that Iran has effectively been defeated starting to fall apart to the American people, do you think?

**Bill Browder** (3:35)
Well, so if you remember, Trump and the Israelis struck the nuclear targets last year, and after striking those nuclear targets, they declared that Iran no longer had any nuclear capacity.
Now, fast forward, all of a sudden, it was the justification for starting the war to say that Iran had nuclear capacity and was two weeks away from using it, and so that they had to strike again. And so it's not exactly credible for President Trump to say that all non-nuclear military capacity has been destroyed. And of course, we've seen that. And just realistically, if you look at a map of Iran, it's an enormous country. It's a huge country.
And how you launch drones and how you launch attack boats along a very, very long coastline, it's almost impossible to destroy. They're effectively running a guerrilla warfare operation now, which is just with having the mighty super power of the United States. It can't destroy that. It pops up here, it pops up there. And that creates a very unpleasant asymmetric advantage for the Iranians, because while the US could destroy large swathes of any country with the US military, they can't destroy all drone launch sites and they can't destroy all boat launch sites because there's just too many possibilities. They'd have to destroy the whole country, which is that that wouldn't be a possibility militarily.