Iran Non-Hegemon

MEF Chief Strategist Jim Hanson joined Piers Morgan Uncensored to discuss the Iran War. He took time during that segment to point out that another guest Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute, is a well-known supporter of the Islamic Republic.
Hanson (to Parsi): “I’m sorry it offends you when I point out you’re a tool of the Iranian regime. It’s just a fact”.
The back and forth got somewhat heated, but Parsi has been a malign force for a long time and the response to his comeuppance has been very positive online.

Here is the discussion between Jim Hanson and Piers Morgan on the current situation in the Gulf. The situation is far from ideal but Iran’s proxies are limited and the other countries in the region are now taking action themselves instead of simply relying on the United States.

[00:00] PIERS MORGAN: It’s hard to see the win here. And where’s the win?

[00:03] JIM HANSON: First of all, if we were still operating under the JCPOA, Iran would have no limits at this point on the number of centrifuges they could run, which Trita lobbied for and Ali [inaudible] lobbied for. Both of them were making certain that there was a path to a fully legitimate nuclear program for Iran with the JCPOA. So President Trump threw that out the window, because that was an absurd thing to allow.

[00:25] PIERS MORGAN: Trump was told by Netanyahu in the White House Situation Room, right before the war started: look, they’re there for the taking. You saw what happened last summer. They’ve got no way of responding. We can take out the Ayatollah now, and when you do, with our help, then the regime will collapse, the IRGC will collapse, the people will rise up, and they’ll all be too distracted to think about the Strait of Hormuz. None of that happened.

[00:48] JIM HANSON: That would have been ideal. It didn’t happen. Fact. You don’t get to take the outcome of the war before you start it. Now, what did happen is the region is now united. Iran is no longer the hegemon, with their Axis of Resistance and all of their proxies pushing things their direction. All of their proxies are more or less destroyed. Their ability to project power is minimal.

[01:11] PIERS MORGAN: Well, hang on. Just to be clear, sorry. The Houthis are a proxy of Iran. They’re not looking very destroyed to me. It looks to me like they’re attacking Saudi Arabia with impunity, and they’re controlling the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb, which —

[01:23] JIM HANSON: [crosstalk] — which is — they’re fighting the Saudis, and the Saudis and Israelis, who are providing them intelligence. And now potentially Turkey might be joining that conflict against the Houthis. President Trump asked the people who live in the region (the Gulf states, Israel, Turkey, and others) to go ahead and take care of their own region. He said, I’ll take down Iran a few notches. It would have been nice if it was all the way down. Didn’t happen. But he took them down a few notches, for sure. They are no longer capable. Their country’s broke. They’ve got zero revenue coming in.

[01:53] PIERS MORGAN: And yet, astonishingly, the regime remains completely in charge. There have been zero uprisings from the public. They control, indisputably, the Strait of Hormuz, whatever Trump says about that.

[02:04] JIM HANSON: They do not. The Wall Street Journal reported today the amount of oil coming out of the region is the same as before —

[02:10] PIERS MORGAN: [crosstalk] Okay. Look at the flow of energy through the Strait of Hormuz and try and pretend to me that you’ve got control of it. You haven’t.

[02:14] JIM HANSON: They’ve got more — as much oil coming out now, between the Strait and between the pipelines and other ways out of the Gulf, than there was at the start of the war. The Wall Street Journal reported that yesterday. So the Strait is not under Iranian control. The U.S. changed the entire balance of power, and now the other people in the region, whose neighborhood it is, are taking action and are united against Iran.