“That’s Not Gonna Happen”: Israel Aims To Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Program

>> Benjamin Netanyahu: The result that has to be achieved is that Iran does not have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons to destroy the state of Israel as they promised to do while they're negotiating to create a missile ballistic missile arsenal that is equivalent to several atomic bombs. While they're negotiating.

 

That's not going to happen. And of course, to continue the proxy war that was meant to basically snuff out the life of the Jewish state, you know, that's we said never again. This is something we've said since the Holocaust. The Jewish people have suffered under the Iranian proxies the worst massacre since the Holocaust.

 

Now they're planning a nuclear holocaust. We're not going to let them get away with it.

>> Bill Whalen: It's Monday, June 16, 2025. And welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow. I'll be your moderator today.

 

Before we go any further, you should know this is an impromptu episode with GoodFellows. We did not have this on the books, but events have forced us together. Joining us today, the historian Sir Niall Ferguson and Former Presidential National Security Advisor, Lieutenant-General H.R. McMaster. They're both Hoover Senior Fellows.

 

As you know, the topic, as you might guess, we're going to talk about Israel, Iran, what comes next in the Middle East. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the show. And let's get right to it because our time is precious. Two questions for you to debate. Number one, the Israeli strategy, which is essentially dunking on Iran.

 

They control the airspace. They can bomb whenever, wherever they want to. They can decapitate leadership HRS of military strategists, I'm curious if you think this is a winning strategy if it gets Israel to where it wants to be. And then the second question for the both of you, what if Prime Minister Netanyahu calls the White house and says, Mr. President, we need your help.

 

We can keep bombing. But to get to the goal, which is to eradicate the nuclear program and the ballistic missiles once and for all, we need bunker busters dropped from American bombers. What do you do, gentlemen? Take it away.

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, I just say, first of all, I mean, it's a winning strategy because from Israel's perspective, this is an existential threat.

 

I mean, going Back to the begin doctrine, which was really revealed in 1981 with Israeli strikes against a nuclear reactor in Iraq, Israel has been determined that a hostile state like Iran, who has professed its desire to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews, cannot have the most destructive weapons on Earth.

 

And of course there's a subsequent strike in Syria in 2007 against a reactor there. But this is orders and orders of magnitude much more complicated, much more extensive because of the threat from Iran being much more extensive. The extent of the nuclear program is dispersed and deeply buried.

 

But this is an operation that has to have been in the making for years and to put into place the intelligence infrastructure, the ability to initiate many of these attacks from within the country. And I think what you've seen is initial blows which were designed to set back the nuclear program, but also to cripple Iran's ability to respond to those initial strikes with the decapitation of the RGC and other military leadership and then to grow that, to grow that the amount of destruction on the nuclear program.

 

And now Anil, I'd like to hear your view on this. What do you think the objective is? It seems like it's shifting almost to regime change where you see attacks now on economic targets combined with Prime Minister Netanyahu's announcement, even more recent extension of the target set to others rumored, maybe even the Supreme Leader and so forth.

 

So I, and, and will the United States come into it? I think that what really is at stake here are really two sites that are deeply buried and, and, and whether or not the, the United States will come into this, into this campaign to destroy those, to destroy those sites which are critical to setting the program back even even further.

 

 

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: Well, of course, Prime Minister Netanyahu has wanted to do this for years and has for years argued that Iran posed the threat to Israel and that it could never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. And then just a few days ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran was in violation of its non proliferation commitments.

 

And the Iranians as good as admitted that they were accelerating their enrichment program. And that provided the cue to for Israeli action, the reason it didn't happen before Thursday night, Friday, was that President Trump wanted to give negotiations a final chance. President Trump is often criticized. Sometimes we criticize him.

 

On this show there are members of the goodfellas team who aren't fans of his trade policy. But it's very difficult to argue, as some do, that he's a kind of warmonger. On the contrary, Trump is a president who is very reluctant to use American military force and reluctant to see war happen anywhere.

 

Think how quickly he acted to try to de escalate the conflict between India and Pakistan which we talked about in previous shows. So President Trump, who once upon a time walked away from The Iran nuclear deal gave the Iranians one last chance. Then the Iranians blew it, bizarrely failing to realize that Trump would give Prime Minister Netanyahu a green light to hit the nuclear sites if they didn't move their position on enrichment.

 

So they refused to take the diplomatic off ramp, and that was the critical mistake they made. The other critical mistake they made was not to rebuild their air defenses after the very successful Israeli strike of October last year, which really revealed the nakedness of the Iranian regime. It's amazing to me that they did so little to repair that damage that now Israel has complete control over Iran's airspace and can now carry on taking out targets at will.

 

But Bill, you asked a very specific question, and that is what happens if Prime Minister Netanyahu calls up President Trump and says, okay, now we need your bunker busting bombs because we cannot take Fordo, the enrichment facility at Fordo out by ourselves? I find it hard to believe that President Trump will say yes to that.

 

And here I'd welcome HR's reaction, partly for the reason I gave that he is, by instinct a trade war guy, not an actual war guy, and doesn't want to be seen to be the president who presides over a sustained massive bombing campaign of targets in Iran like the Fordo facility.

 

But also because President Trump cares a lot about the opinion of the Gulf states who were his first port of call when he went on his travels in his second term, and the Gulf states, particularly the Saudis, also the Emiratis. And needless to say, the Qataris don't want a full scale war involving the United States, even if it's a war against Iran.

 

Reached a kind of modus vendi with the Iranians in the last four years when President Biden was in charge. So I don't think Trump's gonna do it. Which means, and this is the last point I'll make, that the Israelis need to have a plan B. And I think that plan B is regime change.

 

I think plan B is topple the Islamic Republic. And then if you have enough chaos on the ground, then is really special for.

>> Benjamin Netanyahu: Forces may be able to take care of Fordo without the need for bunker-busting bombs in an SAS-type operation behind enemy lines. So I think we're seeing a shift here away from let's try and get the US to finish the job off from the air to it's never gonna happen.

 

We better get rid of the regime and in the ensuing chaos we can really finish off this nuclear program. What do you think HR?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, well, I agree with all of that. I think what may have shifted the balance more in favor of us acting is the success of the operation that the United States.

 

May be convinced that President Trump may be convinced that this is really a window of opportunity that could pass the United States by, kind of like 1994 vis-à-vis North Korea. I think the other variable of course is what Iran does. Does this remain a bilateral exchange essentially between Iran and Israel?

 

If Iran does have even more success in getting ballistic missiles through Israeli and US and other air defenses and there are more Iranian casualties, I think the likelihood of US action then goes up as well. And so I think that also it has to do with whether Iran decides now, well maybe they will go into some negotiation with the United States.

 

You're right, I mean, Neil, it was, I think, Iranian intransigence that led to President Trump, I think, essentially probably greenlighting this. Just saying, hey, I'm not gonna stand in your way. And you remember during these negotiations they had said they're gonna actually open up another site to enrich uranium at the same time as the IAEA came out and declared them not no longer in compliance with the non Non-Proliferation Treaty.

 

So hey, I think there are a lot of variables. Obviously, war defies any kind of easy predictions here. Well, we don't know either really what other actors might do, Russia and China, although I suspect they're gonna try to stay out of this. But does Iran try to shut down shipping in the Straits of Hormuz?

 

Do they attack the Emiratis and the Saudis as they said they would, right? They said, hey, if we get, if Israel attacks us, we're gonna blow up in the Middle East. So I guess question one is does it stay as bilateral exchange? I don't overall it's unclear. I think at this stage and as the regime becomes more desperate, I mean Heck, I mean Israel has taken out all of the IRGC leadership as well as, I think it's 14 now nuclear scientists.

 

And so they've demonstrated their ability to go after leaders very effectively. And as the regime becomes more desperate, how does it lash out?

>> Bill Whalen: It's an amazing illustration not only of what air power can achieve, but also what human intelligence can achieve. Because this operation would not have been nearly as successful without a phenomenal Mossad operation with a great many obviously Iranian assets on the ground aiding and abetting the targeting.

 

So it's a remarkable feat, and we should acknowledge this is another triumph of the Israeli way of warfare. This is a real asymmetry when you consider that the population of Iran is about nine times that of the population of Israel. And yet Israel has been able to achieve what eluded Vladimir Putin, who could not get dominance of the skies over Ukraine and has therefore had to fight a bloody war of attrition in a very short space of time.

 

Israel has not only dominance of the skies, but it's decapitated the IRGC, which is really the architecture of the regime these days, far more than the clergy. So my sense is that the war has a finite lifespan because there is a limited number of missiles left in the Iranian arsenal.

 

We don't know how many, because we don't know how many were destroyed on the ground, but enough I think really to blunt the Iranian retaliation. But it's also the case that Israel doesn't have a limitless supply of interceptors, and it can't fly sorties indefinitely. So one has a sense that the bilateral, the two sided war probably runs for a matter of weeks and not much longer than that.

 

The key question that you've raised, HR, is whether it can spread. And that will have to be one of the great concerns of the so-called restrainers inside the Trump administration. They don't want to find themselves tied up in yet another forever war. Their phrase in the Middle East, I don't think the risks of that are very high, to be honest.

 

I think the bigger risk is the simple unknowability of what a post-Islamic Republic Iran would be like. Let's just imagine that the regime does collapse. Certainly a regime that can't defend itself and is pretty universally disliked by its people isn't in great shape. But we don't know what would come after the Supreme Leader Khamenei, if he shuffles off this mortal coil with a bit of Israeli help.

 

And that's probably the real imponderable. We don't really know, other than that, it's probably pretty messy, right HR?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you've seen is the weakness of the Iranian regime. And but really as our colleague Stephen Cochin says, authoritarian regimes don't have to be that strong.

 

They just have to be stronger than any organized opposition. So, and he's right about that. And what they've done is they've suppressed their people, through these various coercive arms, the IRGC, the Basij. They've also tried to co opt large portions of the population because their commercial interests are controlled by these bunyads mainly the children or people associated with the clerical order or the IRGC.

 

And so then they also have a very conservative, mainly rural population that is supportive of the rule of the jurisprudent or Valeroflaki, the theocratic dictatorship there. So, and then you have a lot of ethnic minorities. So what you could see is what happened into Libya after Gaddafi is gone, except on a much more massive scale.

 

I mean, you've pointed out, I mean, Iran is a country of what, 80, 90 million people. Libya was a country of 6 million people, right? So, I think you could see fragmentation as a scenario. You could also see though, maybe around the conventional army or some other organization that has never really fully bought in to the theocratic dictatorship there, and that maybe emerge.

 

But it would be messy, it would be violent. I think the things to watch are I think the protests, sometimes don't deliver what they seem that they could deliver. Although it's the nature of the protest, how far it extends, if there is kind of another wave of protests.

 

But I think what's even more important to watch are maybe strikes. Like we saw a trucker strike like two weeks ago. And then also how some of the arms of coercion respond. I hear that the Basij which is kind of the equivalent of like the brown shirts to suppress the population, have had a really hard time recruiting in recent years.

 

So I think if Israel continues to Confine its strikes against the regime, against the leadership, that there is a chance, the population will find, will say, hey, enough of this.

>> Bill Whalen: So, Neil, I want to go back to the axis of ill will for a moment. Iran needs missiles.

 

Iran needs airplanes. China has missiles. China has airplanes. Iran needs an air defense. Russia built its air defense last time around. Iran wants a nuclear weapon. North Korea could send them parts for a dirty bomb. Why don't we see these things in motion?

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: Well, one reason that I picked on that axis analogy was that if you go back to the Original Axis of 1939, 40, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, then imperialist Japan, it's kind of confederacy of rogues.

 

And such organizations aren't famous for their mutual fraternal affection. So what has happened, it seems to me, is that the Iranians have supported Russia's war effort in Ukraine on quite a large scale, supplied a lot of drones at a critical point before the Russians had really got their drone game together.

 

And in return, the Russians are sending, what is it, thoughts and prayers, not much in the way of ordinance. I find it astonishing that so little was done to repair Iran's air defenses after the October Israeli raids. And I wonder if that's because the Iranian regime was simply foolish and didn't realize that they had to do something about that or whether their Russian friends are really frenemies.

 

And I somewhat inclined to the latter theory. The interesting thing about the Axis as a phenomenon is there really is no love lost between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The Crinks, as they're sometimes known for short. They just share a common desire, which is to undermine American primacy and to undermine neighboring democracies that they see aligned with the United States.

 

But I think it's very interesting how little the Russians have done to help Iran really, since this crisis began, because let's not forget, it began on October 7, 2023, when Iran's proxies, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, launched their attack on Israel. That's when this war began, not last Thursday night, Friday morning.

 

And the Russians, apart from, you know, making the usual offers to act as intermediaries, have been singularly unhelpful to the Iranians where it counts, which is actually supplying them with the. The hardware that they need to withstand this onslaught.

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, just a quick comment on this, Neil.

 

I think one of the factors is the lack of capacity in the Russian defense industry based on. Based on the, you know, the war, their war against Ukraine and their need for their own air defenses and the degree to which you know, kind of a lot of their equipment just doesn't work.

 

I mean, you know, the S300 and even the S400 systems, I think, are quite inferior to the whole range of electromagnetic warfare capabilities, anti radar capabilities, the suppressive capabilities that, that Israel has, has demonstrated. So, you know, I think that's kind of a message to everybody, like, you know, India, other countries, if you're using Russian equipment, it might be time for a change.

 

 

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: Of course, the Chinese have to worry about the oil flow. And their view of the Middle east is essentially of a gas station run by various quite crazy people that you don't fully understand. But as long as the oil is flowing and they've been able to get around US sanctions to be the principal customer for Iranian oil exports, they're fine.

 

So I think the Chinese will only get seriously interested in all of this if there's disruption to the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. I don't think Prime Minister Netanyahu has any interest in sending the price of oil skyrocketing. That won't make him popular in the White House where they have to worry about inflation just as much as their predecessors did.

 

Nor do I think that, that the Iranians are in any great hurry to start escalating the war in the way that they've threatened to do, including against Saudi Arabia, because if they do that, they increase the probability of US intervention on the Israeli side. So I think the Chinese will be content with the relatively modest spike in oil prices we've seen so far and won't become directly involved in this.

 

 

>> H.R. McMaster: And just a quick note, in terms of the axis of aggressors here, China is underwriting the regime by purchasing 97% of Iran's oil. A majority of that flows through pipelines that go out to the northeast of the country, which are quite vulnerable to interdiction. And China is doing everything it can under the radar to support the Iranians.

 

So just last week they shipped massive amounts of the chemical, I forget the name of it, but a chemical that was critical to reconstituting Iran's ballistic missile fleet. It's an additive that's important for the fuel that propels these missiles. So I think they are interconnected. China's doing everything it can, I think, to underwrite both the Russian war in Ukraine and to prop up or continue to prop up the theocratic dictatorship in Iran.

 

You already alluded to this, Neil, but what you're going to see the Russians do is posture themselves as the indispensable peace broker. And I heard some announcements from the White House inviting them to do that. That would be a huge mistake to play. And then what they'll do is try to parlay that into getting the Trump administration to put more pressure on Zelensky and the Ukrainians.

 

So I think that's where the Russians see an opportunity here.

>> Bill Whalen: I want your both your senses on where you think Iran is going next. I see very mixed signals. One day we see reports that they want to walk away from nuclear discussions. Next day we see reports they want to reengage.

 

What do you think is going to happen?

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: Well, I thought the Wall Street Journal got a bit overexcited with its story this morning suggesting that the Iranians were sort of coming back to the negotiating table. If you read all the way through, you got to the paragraph where it said they hadn't in any way altered their position.

 

Well, that seems to me to be the real headline. Despite being completely overwhelmed by Israeli airstrikes and having multiple of their IRGC commanders killed, they still haven't shifted their position on the nuclear negotiations. That's the headline. And as long as that's the case, then Israel can continue to exploit the advantage that it's established in the air, and I fully expect it to do so.

 

Now, at some point, somebody in Tehran may say, you know, we. We have a choice now, guys. We either go for it, we try and achieve nuclear breakout, we go. We go crazy at the risk of inviting the Americans into this war, or we go back to the negotiating table, we change our position, we say, you know what?

 

We've thought about it. And President Trump, you're such a great peacemaker that we've come to see the wisdom of, of your position. And Trump will put that on Truth Social within about three seconds. And I think that would not be at all surprising because it wouldn't be the first time an Iranian regime had lied its way out of a tight spot.

 

But they're not there yet. And it's surprising to me that they're still hanging tough, given the incredible casualties they're taking.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I just think we just don't want to underestimate the degree to which the Iranian regime really is driven by an ideology, the ideology of the revolution.

 

I mean, the revolutionaries are in charge. And so I think that will pro, that will limit the degree to which they'll be able to make the concessions that. That could end. End. End this. End this war. And that really is a very intrusive inspection verification regime, but also the super.

 

Supervised dismantlement of any of their enrichment capabilities. I don't see them being able to get there just from an ideological perspective. So I think what you'll have is an effort to kind of string along again. You know, I mean, there's this idea that the Iranians are really good negotiators.

 

They're terrible negotiators. What they do is they just don't concede anything and they just watch us make concession after concession to get to weak agreements that we declare as a, a diplomatic achievement, but they're really kind of a political disaster, or they just kick the can down the road.

 

So, you know, I, I think I don't see anything, you know, any, any way to an agreement with them that will satisfy, you know, what I think are President Trump's, you know, red lines associated with enrichment. So I think this is going to go on for longer than people think.

 

The question is, does, does it, does it expand? You know, does the, does the conflict expand? And there's a lot that Iran can still do, right? They could, as I mentioned, they could try to attack shipping in, in the Gulf. They could attack Saudi oil facilities. I don't know what kind of cyber capability they have left.

 

You know, they could conduct assassinations or other terrorist attacks internationally. I mean, I think it's, it's believed that they have sleeper cells, you know, kind of, kind of around the world. Could they do something short, you know, of, of a race to a nuclear weapon, like a dirty bomb, some, somehow that is, you know, that they have a cutout.

 

So, I mean, it's. The Iranian regime is still dangerous because it has some things it can still do. And as it gets cornered, what might it do that could shift this war from this bilateral war between Israel and Iran and a broader conflict?

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: Yeah, I guess I'm pondering what the end game is here, there clearly isn't the air power for Israel to finish this job on its own.

 

I think the probability, as I said earlier, is low that the US Comes in as a direct combatant to finish off the Fordo enrichment facility. The Iranian regime is clearly in a very vulnerable state. But how far it's possible for Israel to topple it is not clear to me.

 

And indeed it's not even clear to me that it's entirely desirable for Iran to plunge into the kind of chaos that we've seen in, in Libya as well as in Syria more recently. My wife is a greater expert on the Muslim world than I shall ever be. And on Friday, after the Israeli raids on Iran had happened.

 

She handed me a translation of a book by Abu Bakr Magi with the titled the Management of Savagery, in which this Salafist jihadist argued that it would in fact be desirable from the point of view of the Islamists if the entire region descended into chaos, if all the state structures fell away, because then they would be able to build the Islamic State the caliphate of their dreams.

 

So I think one has to bear in mind that you're not going to get a liberal democracy run by secular, liberally leaning Tehran sophisticates if this regime falls apart and everybody in, in the neighborhood, not only the Israelis, but the many Arab states will have to worry about what might follow a collapse of the Islamic Republic.

 

I've yet to hear a really compelling story about what a post Khamenei regime would look like. And that's partly because, as HR said, opposition movements have been crushed so effectively. It's also been a long time. And so the Iranian exile community doesn't really have a handle on what might be possible in a post Islamic Republic Iran.

 

So for me, the great unknowable is what comes after Khamenei. He's going to die at some point, even if it's not taken out by the Israelis. And there is no succession plan. So I guess the great unknown is, is, is the future of Iran that, that I wish I could see more clearly.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: And this would also be the argument against going after the political leadership, Neil, because it seemed you'd risk turning this into a holy war.

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: Well, I don't know, HR Whether that would be the response. It's, it's so hard to gauge the attitudes that, that people have in Iran today that they.

 

There's no love lost between the populace, certainly the urban populace and the regime. On the other hand, it's hardly likely that Israeli decapitation of, of the Iranian government be enormously popular. So I, I find this the most puzzling, perplexing part of what we see today, this simple difficulty of foreseeing where Iran goes from here after what, nearly half a century of theocracy.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: But I did mention, I want to mention that, Neil, because I read a report the other day as an Iranian state media where a top official said that the regime wants to unite with Turkey, Pakistan and several other countries to create what he called an Islamic army.

 

 

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: You know, this sounds like the kind of last desperate thing you, you send from the bunker rather than a coherent strategy.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: The more likely scenario, and here I'm just gonna play the historian, is that a very Weakened Iran will be easy pickings for its neighbours.

 

Remember, one reason that Putin isn't so forthcoming in his support is that once upon a time Stalin dreamt that he might be able to bring Iran within the Soviet sphere of influence. So I think this neighbourhood isn't notable for its, its lack of skullduggery and realpolitik. If, if Iran is to be weakened, then there will be responses from the NE to take advantage of that, just as Iran took advantage of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in ways that American policymakers failed to foresee back in 2003.

 

 

>> H.R. McMaster: And, and hey, let's not forget too, the, the degree to which the collapse of the Assad regime followed the, the decapitation, devastating attacks against Hezbollah by, by Israel. And I think all of that led to where we are today. And of course you had Turkey who was supporting really Islamist Sunni Islamist groups against the Assad regime, their long term interests in the region because Erdogan does fancy him as like the, the modern day Sultan who's going to, to re establish really Turkish primacy in, in the Middle east that clashes really with what Iran was trying to achieve by establishing this land bridge to the Mediterranean as a precursor to destroying Israel, which of course now is all rolled back then when you bring in the, the revanchist agenda of the Russians.

 

You know, I think that what we are witnessing are really three revanchist powers who are nostalgic, you know, for, for their old empires and their, and their interests are not aligned. And I think the more that U.S. and other diplomats can can play that, I think to our advantage, the, the better.

 

 

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: I think it's worth bringing this conversation back to, to the United States. I think that President Trump has in fact played rather a, a shrewd game. He's retained deniability so that it's been possible for Secretary of State Rubio to say that Israel acted unilaterally on Thursday night.

 

But at the same time he, he's been able to argue that the Israeli strikes happened after his 60 day ultimatum to the Iranians had. Expired. I was certainly taken in by the feint that there were going to be negotiations on Sunday in Oman between Steve Witkoff and the Iranians.

 

I fell for that hook, line and sinker. So did the Iranians. So there's been some deaf diplomacy here. There's also a kind of interesting internal politics to this story. It's clear that the administration has its restrainers who don't want to get involved in a war like this, but it also has his hawks who recognize that if nothing is done, one day Iran will acquire nuclear weapons capability, and that really can't happen, which is, I think, the President's position.

 

So I think this has been a very interesting development in the history of the Trump administration. If you think back to earlier episodes of Goodfellows, the three of us have spent a long time finding fault with President Trump's trade policy. It turns out the trade war was the phony war.

 

It wasn't really the thing that was going to matter. The real war is the one that, that started on Thursday night. And I must admit, I wasn't sure that Trump was ever going to give that green light to the Israelis. I'd begun to think he wasn't going to do it.

 

And maybe I read too many Financial Times columns about Trump always chickening out, but on this occasion, he, he didn't. And Bibi Netanyahu certainly didn't.

>> Bill Whalen: HR, were you surprised?

>> H.R. McMaster: You know, I, I wasn't surprised because, you know, you know, of course, I, I thought it could be, it could be a ruse, you know, essentially, you know, the withdrawal of US Dependents from the region, maybe that was to, to add more impetus to the negotiations.

 

But I also felt that it was this Iranian intransigence. President Trump doesn't have an infinite amount of patience as, as you've mentioned, Neil. Hey, he's definitely not capricious about the use of force. You know, he, he always would prefer some sort of a negotiated settlement, but he also recognizes the need to integrate the threat of the use of force with any kind of diplomatic efforts.

 

And one of the things we did with him in 2017 and 18, and I imagine there's still people around, maybe a couple people left on the NSC staff to do this is to help integrate the perspectives of intelligence agencies and others to highlight not only the cost and risk of action, but, but also the cost and risk of inaction or passivity in certain cases.

 

And I think he was convinced by Iranian intransigence, I'm sure, also, you know, maybe conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Ron Dermer and others who laid out for him the latest intelligence, right, that Iran was kind of trying to race to weaponization, that was determined to continue enrichment.

 

And then that combined with kind of the, you know, the talk to the hand approach that the Iranians gave Wyckoff, I think, I think made the, you know, convince President Trump not to stand in the way.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, last question, gentlemen. Israel currently is involved in his longest running war in Gaza.

 

Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that his country is on a path to victory with Iran, but he hasn't set a date. So what is your guess as to how long that path is for Israel? We talking days, weeks, months, years? Neil?

>> Sir Niall Ferguson: Well, I've said already that I think this war between Israel and Iran can only run for weeks because there's just a limit to how many missiles the Iranians have left, and there's a limit to how long Israel can continue these, these kind of operations.

 

So that war is not going to be going on for nearly as long as, say, the war in Ukraine. I think it's, it's going to be over relatively swiftly. The war in Gaza is another matter because there's still no real resolution between the conflicting objectives of the Israeli government to destroy Hamas, but to rescue the hostages.

 

My sense is that in Prime Minister Netanyahu's mind, the Iran question has always loomed much, much larger and has always seemed much more strategically important than the Palestinian question. But there is no obvious end game in Gaza, and it's certainly not likely to become the holiday resort of President Trump's imaginings.

 

HR.

>> H.R. McMaster: hey, sadly, Neil, I, I don't see an end to this war in, in Gaza because there's no space for an alternative political order to emerge that can, that can enter into, you know, a ceasefire or some, any kind of enduring peace between Israel and, and the Palestinian people in Gaza.

 

And that's because Hamas still has the guns. So until there is the ability of the, you know, of the Palestinian people to temporarily evacuate Gaza and until Hamas is destroyed, I think you're going to see a combination of a continuation of the war and continued suffering of the civilian population in Gaza.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: We've been spending the last half hour or so talking about matters of war and peace and H.R. I think it's worth noting that last Saturday, amidst all the chaos in the Middle East, the United States celebrated the 250th birthday of the United States Army. And I believe that you have some very great words of wisdom that you'd like to read.

 

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Of course, we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the United States Army. And we celebrated on the occasion that of the second Continental Congress approving the recruitment of ten companies of riflemen to go to Boston. To support the militias who were laying that British-controlled city to siege. And then George Washington was appointed the next day to our great fortune, to be the commander of that army.

 

And then later, of course, to become our first president. But what I'd like to read to you is a quotation from Washington when he addressed the Continental army on the occasion of their enlistments about to expire. This is now a year later, in 1776. And he said to his soldiers, the fate of unborn millions will now depend under God on the courage and conduct of this army.

 

And of course, that was a prophetic observation because it is our army, and we should say in alliance with the French army and navy during the revolution that secured our independence. And it's the United States Army that has been fighting to preserve our freedom since the Revolution.

>> Bill Whalen: Wise words.

 

And we salute General McMaster, you, and everyone who has worn the uniform of his country these past 250 years. Gentlemen, we're going to end the conversation there. Thanks for taking the time out of your very busy schedules to do this. And I suspect we'll be talking about this very much in the shows ahead.

 

So take care, both of you, and have a great summer.