MEF Chief Editor Jim Hanson joined FOX anchors on set at the staging area for the armored vehicles participating in the Army’s 250th Anniversary Parade on June 14, 2025. He spoke with them about the better than expected results of the initial Israeli attacks and what the likely next steps were from both parties.
Transcript:
FOX: So in what you’ve seen over the last two days, what has surprised you, if anything, from either side at the beginning stages of this conflict?
HANSON: I don’t want to say I’m surprised, but I’m very pleased to see what a tremendous job the Israelis did preparing for this mission and conducting it. The deep intelligence, the targeting, the ability to hit them where they live, literally flying missiles in through windows and taking out leadership of the Iranian military and their terror groups in a way that’s not going to allow them to conduct really good and coherent retaliatory strikes.
They’re hitting back, but not the way they would have if they hadn’t been hit so hard.
FOX: Let’s talk about what this means for America, because I think that’s what our viewers want to know. I saw earlier in our notes with you, say these are very dangerous times, not just for Israel, but for America too. So what do you see happening next? What are the possibilities of America getting drawn into this, and what would that mean?
HANSON: I think President Trump has already offered to start mediating. He wants Iran to stop what they’re doing and come back to the table. You know, he gave them the greatest opportunity they were ever given. All they had to do was say, we’re not going to enrich uranium, which they only needed to make a bomb, and they refused that.
So when they spurned that, they paid the price, and Israel made them pay the price.
Now, President Trump’s offered that. Israel’s told them, you’re going to continue to suffer until we feel safe. All they need to do now, as Iran as the people who caused this problem is go ahead and stop their program, say we’ll open up all the stuff and let you clean it out.
FOX: Being involved in special operations, there’s this thing called counterintelligence, human intelligence. When we look at what happened in Israel, they didn’t just infiltrate Iran, they infiltrated Tehran. They really did. It took us 20 years to find Osama bin Laden living in Pakistan.
Are they just that much better than we are? Do we have the opportunity to elevate our game in that world of counterintelligence?
HANSON: I think the Israelis are the premier intelligence, counterintelligence, and special operations force in the world. We handcuff ourselves in a lot of ways. there was a time back when the CIA was doing a lot of things they shouldn’t. they pulled a,jerked a knot in their tail and pulled them back.
I think we pulled them back too far. I think we rely on signals intelligence and electronics rather than human intelligence and spies. That’s why the Israelis got what they got.
FOX: Wow. What do you expect to see? What are you looking for in the next couple of days and weeks?
HANSON: I think what I’d like to see is the Israelis continue to hit the things that can cause long-term damage. They’ve got a list. They’re working their way down their targeting list.
And I think at the same time, I would like to see President Trump and the other nations of the free world as a united front tell Iran, you can either stop now or it’s just going to get worse.
And my number one thing I’d love to see more than anything else, I’d love to see the Iranian people decide they want a better government and remove the ayatollahs of the Islamic Republic.
FOX: An amazing thing. And there definitely was a grassroots movement. We’ve seen that throughout the past decade. And unfortunately, they haven’t been able to gain traction and change their situation.
Let’s talk about this, because one of the things that our experts that have been coming on this network have said is they’re surprised at how weak the Iranian response has been. That’s interesting. But it also scares me because I go, if they’re weak there, what else are they going to do? Is this going to be a terror attack, not just on Israel, but on us?
HANSON: That’s the great danger. America is one giant soft target. All right. We don’t have the capability. You know, we’re behind our oceans. We live our lives and we assume bad things can’t happen to us.
Iran as an expeditionary military that could roll tanks around the region and create a war, a quagmire to drag us into, that doesn’t exist. All right, that was a hysterical reaction that people used to try and stop this from happening.
But their asymmetric capabilities are still there. They can still drop ships, you know, in the Straits of Hormuz and other places.
FOX: Well, and we can do that. We don’t have a great track record battling asymmetric warfare right now. It’s difficult.
HANSON: It’s the hardest thing to do because we can break big things. We have difficulty with small things.
FOX: Jim Hanson, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Jim.
HANSON: Pleasure.
