THREATS FLY After US SEIZES Iranian Ship

Good morning everyone. Welcome to Breaking Point. We got a little bit of an unusual setup here.

Really unusual.

Sager is out and apparently, we needed more than one person to be able to shoulder that load.

Unprecedented, I think, right?

Yes. It is unprecedented. Yeah. So, a little bit of an unusual setup here today. We're all going to do the first block. You're talking about the Iran war, then we're gonna have a little Crystal and Emily time, then we're gonna bring Ryan back for the later half of the show.

Anyway, we're working out with scheduling, but I wanna make sure we're all involved here for the biggest news of the day in terms of what's going on with Iran. Negotiations may be on, they may be off. US seizing an Iranian ship. doesn't look good in terms of the escalatory ladder. So we'll break that down. We've also got an inside look at Trump's mentality

and his own doubts and concerns about whether he himself is turning into Jimmy Carter. So that's an interesting one. We've got backlash after an IDF soldier desecrates a statue of Jesus. Kash Patel apparently on thin ice

and drinking extremely heavily. Zoran and Obama being really adorable with some children. We'll show you that and talk about what it means about the future of the Democratic Party. We've got some fake AI war supporters that obviously is a very dystopian disturbing trend.

And Trump is threatening that Cuba is next. So we will take a look at what is going on there. Let's go ahead and start with the latest with regard to Iran, if we can put A1 up on the screen. So, Trump says, Ryan, he's sending Witkoff and Kushner to Islamabad for round two of

Iran peace talks. There was a lot of J.D. Vance was in, he was out, he was in again. I think the final decision is he is not going. There have been a few things read into that. Obviously, J.D. Vance is seen as being somewhat more skeptical of this war. The Iranians felt a little more comfortable negotiating with him versus Whitkoff and Kushner.

I also saw it speculated, well, maybe they're not sending J.D. Vance and Trump's head of security concerns because Trump himself wants to potentially make an appearance of some sort of deal is struck and you wouldn't want both of them in the same place. So what do you think about those dynamics and also the Iranians have not agreed to go forward with these talks at all and you know it seems less likely now that you know the US has seized this Iranian ship, fired on this Iranian ship as well. So how do you think the Iranians are viewing things at this point? Yeah the the Iranians they

probably will end up sending somebody to this. But as of now, the reporting over the last several days was that, oh yeah, Iranians are sending a delegation and they're going to meet and maybe even Vance will be there. That was not true. They still, and to this hour, they still have not agreed to send, to even send anybody there.

Is your sense that the administration was trying to manifest that, That they would go? Like publicly ratchet up the pressure?

Yeah.

And also I think a little bit of obliviousness that like they can just call the shots. They say like, hey, we're having coffee at three, we're gonna talk and everybody just shows up. Like kind of this residual superpower kind of feeling.

And CEO mindset too. Right. Where it's like, oh, if I tell my underling that we're having this meeting, like, obviously they're going to move heaven and earth to be there.

And we're still within the 12 or 14 days of the ceasefire and both sides do want an agreement. So the thing is, well, they'll show up. But then you have this attack on the ship. And so that, you know, that has thrown a real wild card. Some in the US government feel like that the IRGC baited them into this

and that the US took the bait because there's real tension inside the Iranian government. The IRGC is not monolithic, but is now dominated by people who have a more hardline attitude and they think they need to extract more pain from the US and Israel. That they're not done beating us up. Whereas you've got some of the kind of civilian leadership

that is saying, no, we're never going to have better leverage than we have now. So within that, if they can, it's a similar way that Netanyahu approaches things, to just kind of take action and bomb something and just kind of start the war again. So the IRGC may have manufactured this incident, and then the US takes the bait, attacks it.

And your sense is that tension is real, it's not a good cop, bad cop kind of a negotiating tactic.

No, I think it's very real. Because I think that it has been there under the surface for decades. But it was kept down by Khamenei, who was saying, no, we're gonna take a more moderate, pragmatic,

diplomatic approach. We're not going ham on these people. And then they all got killed.

Let's go ahead and talk a little bit more about that ship. We can go ahead and skip forward to A4 because this is very significant. This is Trump announcing the seizure of this Iranian flagged ship, today an Iranian flag cargo ship named Tuska, nearly 900 feet long, weighing almost as much as an aircraft carrier, tried to get past our naval blockade. Did not go well for them. The US Navy guided missile destroyer USS Spruance intercepted the Tuska in the Gulf of Oman and gave them fair warning to stop.

The Iranian crew refused to listen, so our Navy ship stopped them right in their tracks by blowing a hole in the engine room. Right now, US Marines have custody of the vessel. The Tusca is under US Treasury sanctions because of their prior history of illegal activity. We have full custody of the ship and are seeing what's on board. Originally, the Iranians had put out

different narrative of what happened here, but at this point, we also have video and we can put this up on the screen next, this VO that was posted by CENTCOM of the U.S. ship firing on the Iranian ship. That's what you can see there on their screen. They've since released this more sort of like montage of the whole operation.

So that's what's being put out from the U.S. And reportedly, this ship was there for like six hours and not listening to the U.S. saying you need to turn around. Also, reportedly, there were other ships that were able to get through, something like seven ship was there for like six hours and not listening to the U.S. saying you need to turn around. Also, reportedly, there were other ships that were able to get through, something like seven other ships that were able to get through this U.S. blockade.

So to your point about whether it was kind of like an IRGC setup, you know, both the fact that, okay, we're going to keep transiting here and we're not going to listen to you and your blockade. And the fact that the warnings were ignored for some number of hours does sort of suggest that that may be the case.

Yeah. Well, and that brings us to this drop site post. This is going to be A6. So we're going to do this one A6. The blockade itself, and I'm curious, given everything you just said, Ryan, about how this tension is very real, the blockade itself was apparently a huge part of the disagreement on Friday over what

had actually happened. Was this a big breakthrough in the negotiations? As Donald Trump had said, he was framing this as historic, a great deal, what did he say? Great day for the people of the world, world peace, whatever he said. But in this drop site post, you all highlight reporting that says IRGC linked Tasnim News Agency added quote as long as Trump's announcement of a naval blockade remains in effect there will be no negotiations.

And I'm not curious given what you said is it was there internal disagreement in Iran over the blockade itself was the blockade itself seen as a red line to whatever was announced Friday by one side and not the other side?

Certainly there were some who wanted to at least message how it was opening up differently. Aragci put out a post that was very kind of olive branchy to the Americans, saying it's open under our you know under our conditions and under our logistics And I think he posted before Trump right right and so that's a so it what it was giving Trump an opening To be magnanimous and move towards a final agreement now the way that Iraq she

Phrased it it was clear that still meant the Iranians would charge a toll and that they would be kind of running it But it's open. Anybody who wants to go through can go through. You just have to kind of negotiate with us as you're going through. I think the IRGC did not like the olive branch kind of nature of it. They wanted a much harder line that, no, no, no, our battlefield victories are going to

be manifested by our control of the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah.

Though that's not how he framed it.

He gave Trump the opportunity to be a peacemaker, to be a diplomat. And Trump comes out and says, aha, these suckers surrendered. And if they're not, and I am the one that actually is going to close the Strait of Hormuz. Naval blockade is on. We're the greatest, we're the hottest country in the world. So that made Aragci look like an idiot,

then the IRGC comes out, and they're like, Aragci was wrong, it's closed, F-you, it's ours.

Interesting, because then fast forward 48 hours later and you have, as you're saying, Ryan, is it even possible that the IRGC was kind of baiting the US into firing on the vessel as it showed.

Right, because if they're warned for six hours or whatever, and if they really don't want any conflict with the US, then you'd tell the ship, all right, you know what, things are tense, back off, come back to port, we don't want to really test things here. But if you actually want the US to kind of collapse the ceasefire, because you think you need to keep fighting to get a better position, then you would say, you know, keep going.

They're not going to mess with you. They'll let other ships go through.

Trump is using truth as his vision board. So it's also like...

Yes. And Trump, by doing that and trying to humiliate them, oh, they surrendered. What does that do? That strengthens the case of the hardliners.

You see?

We told you.

We told you. Every single time.

Yes, you have to continue fighting them. We need to go back to the war. And we can put A5B up on the screen. There's now a threat from Iran. They said that they had launched drones toward US warships following that attack. We also can put A8 up on the screen.

This is Professor Morandi, who we had on the show last week, who is a university professor, but he also was at the talks in Islamabad. He also was part of the delegation during the JCPOA. And he put this out, and he said, leave UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait immediately. Iran will retaliate, destroying everything. These regimes are guilty partners in the genocidal Epstein coalition and won't be forgiven.

The rising temperatures in the Persian Gulf will soon make them uninhabitable." And that was something that he talked about when he was with us on the show. He said, listen, we're talking about summer around the corner, and the temperatures are truly uninhabitable in these Gulf Arab states. He's like, in Iran, we might be uncomfortable, but we'll be OK. But you have this vulnerable electrical grid, effectively.

And so if you are partnering with the US, there are a lot more things we can do. The other thing, obviously, is getting the Houthis more engaged and blocking that part, that transit point as well. So they, rather than, you know, when we talked on Friday during the Friday show, it was, OK, this olive branch, and it looks like there's kind of sort of a ceasefire in Lebanon, and Trump is saying, OK, we're not, I'm not going to tolerate any more attacks on Lebanon from

Israel, then Trump's own rhetoric and new threats also against the Iranians have sort of destroyed all of that and strengthened the hardliners and made it much more difficult to imagine how they can then even go to these talks given the escalatory chain

that we're now facing. We don't actually even really know who's in charge of Iran. Like seriously because the first step of the war was to take out the top of the regime and that's if you're if you're just making the case that Trump has waged this war in a rational, logical sense, I mean, obviously, we know Netanyahu's been an influence on him, and Netanyahu wants abject chaos. And what we're seeing right now is clearly abject chaos, just as we're trying to read

the tea leaves from these negotiations. So the idea that Trump is on the cusp of a breakthrough is, it seems laughable. Ryan, you guys at DropSight are obviously, like Jeremy has a great story as of, what was that last night that it dropped? Yesterday, yeah. Yeah. It seems like it's not at all near the finish line.

And imagine if you're the Iranians. So the US is trying to figure out who's running Iran. Iran's trying to figure out who runs the US.

Like, who's in charge over there? Well, it seems like they've decided Netanyahu runs the US is what they feel like.

Yeah, and then who runs Netanyahu? And who is it? Kushner in Netanyahu? Is it Whitkoff in Netanyahu, is it Whitkoff and Netanyahu directly to Trump? Like, yeah, what is Hegseth telling Trump? It depends on the time of day for Trump. And so the Iranians are dealing with Whitkoff and Kushner

because Vance isn't really fully back in yet, who all the reports are from the UK, from everybody else, like had no idea what they were talking about at the last round of negotiations. And so the Iranians are from the UK, from everybody else, like had no idea what they were talking about at the last round of negotiations. And so the Iranians are left to consider, okay, was this actual ignorance? They were just dumb, like they didn't understand nuclear physics.

Like I don't get it. Like why would they understand it? But did they just forget to bring tactical experts?

So this isn't going to be the moment when Ryan reveals his secret past as a nuclear physicist. Right after the finance guy, then nuclear physicist.

We joke about it, but it really could be true.

Definitely not true. I would have to bring a tactical expert. So did they forget one? Was it incompetence? Or were they just planning to do the war the entire time, which means that do you trust them more or less this time around? Because they're basically asking for the same things that Iran already agreed to in the past.

So if you're Iran, how do you make sense of that?

And what Morandi told us, and I don't know if this is PR, if this is their actual thinking, number one, he says, listen, in our view, every day that this continues is advantageous. Because we can withstand more pain. You know, the idea is that the economic noose gets tighter around the US and the world every day that this goes on. And you don't have full flow through the Strait of Hormuz.

And ironically, after Friday, when it looked like, oh, there's going to be, you know, it's open and there's going to be ships,. It is actually completely closed in a way that it was not previously So which is why the oil markets are responding, you know oil prices are spiking again this morning getting blown up futures are down That's right. That's right as well. We could talk about that in a minute, too So he said, you know That's our view is the longer this goes on and that's part of this the thinking behind going to these negotiations

Is it basically mean means like the clock is ticking for Trump. For us, okay, we're not being bombed, but that economic reality is becoming increasingly real. The other thing that he said is, you know, we don't really believe that they're serious about these negotiations.

He's like, we didn't believe they were serious last time leading up to this war. We didn't believe they were serious before the 12-day war. We were right about all those things. But we wanted to go to demonstrate that we are operating in good faith and basically put out a sort of message to the world of like, we're willing to negotiate. We don't want this war.

But they suspect, again, this is according to him, they suspect that these negotiations aren't serious and that they are planning to, in Pete Hegess' words, reload and go back to war. They also felt, it seems, that JD Vance did not have authority last time around to really negotiate. He was constantly on the phone, having to call Trump. They allege calling Netanyahu as well. I don't know if that's true or not.

But they felt that JD Vance did not actually even have the authority to be able to negotiate the deal. And then you add to that the fact that you've got the same morons who didn't understand the first nuclear physics offer that was on the table. And it doesn't really seem like a recipe for success here. And then what I got from Jeremy's article too, Ryan, is that even though basically the

only actual agreement between the two sides is that they would like to find some sort of a deal But in terms of the terms of that deal there has been really no progress Towards coming to an understanding what that would look like and it's very easy to understand why because the u.s. Is effectively strategically Lost this war, but it's not willing to accept the humiliating terms that, you know, acknowledgement of that reality would entail.

Yeah.

Well, it sounds like there's, on both sides, competing factions who have different ends for what that settlement should look like. And Al Jazeera reporting Trump may be seeking, quote, a Gaza peace style framework agreement. So that gets us to this question of, as they're trying to determine whether the negotiations are serious, I mean, the big question is serious about what? Serious about what?

Like a vibe style ceasefire? And I kind of feel like that's what, I don't know if Ryan or Crystal, you would describe what we have now in Gaza as a, I'm not trying to downplay it at all, but as like a vibestyle agreement, which was, the agreement is that we have an agreement and whatever's happening beneath the surface,

don't worry about it. If the terms are being carried out, don't worry about it. We're gonna keep pushing, we're gonna keep figuring it out as we go. But, you know, it's a vibe. The vibe is that we agree.

And, you know, you can spin things different ways as they happen on the ground. So what is that actually, what are you serious about at the end of the day? Are you just trying to get a PR win, which is what it seems like Trump wants more than anything. I mean, obviously he wants gas prices to go down. So that's why he's obsessed with the straight and should be, should have been obsessed with

the straight before he launched the war. But yeah, it's like on the Iranian side, there are two competing factions in the US, it's like there are a million competing factions about what is acceptable and a way to end the war because Trump is just waiting to see what he thinks is the right vibe.

Yeah, and with the Gaza deal, the Israelis in the US have refused to move to the next phase.

Right.

It's supposed to be reconstruction. They haven't allowed in the amount of aid that they're supposed to allow in for it. They claim it requires disarmament of Hamas, even though it's not in there. So they lie about the terms. They don't stop the ceasing of fire.

But the media talks about it as a ceasefire.

Thousands of violations of that quote-unquote ceasefire.

And they arm these militias, these gangs that they send in to carry out action on their behalf.

But from Trump's perspective, everyone in the press is calling it a ceasefire.

Right. But from the Iranians' perspective, they're like, that doesn't look like what we would agree to at this point.

To state the obvious, Hamas and Iran are not equivalent actors. Iran has real state power, real capacity.

It's not clear that we approach it as obvious.

Yeah. Trump certainly doesn't approach it as obvious, since he thought this was going to be over in four days. So I don't think there's any possibility that Iran is going to accept some Gaza-style approach to be imposed upon them. That's not reality. And I think that tension between Arachi and Golobov and some of the other sort of more

moderate, hey, let's try to work something out, versus the IRGC hardliners, I think that is very significant, because it means when they're at the negotiating table, they're under pressure to not cave too much, to hold the line in terms of the demands that they've been consistently asserting

since the beginning of the conflict.

And Lindsey Graham is mad at Trump right now, too. He's mad about that Barack Ravid report. It's been a long time without war for Lindsey Graham. He's itching. He's ready to move on to Turkey. No, he's upset about the Barack Ravid report, about $20 billion cash for uranium deal, and saying, you know, I support President Trump's desire to end the conflict, but any sanctions

relief has to be earned by complete and total acceptance by Iran of President Trump's reasonable reasonable demands, which are, and he goes on the list of all of the obvious points, no enrichment period, turning over the 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium to the US. So good luck.

And Ryan, what is your sense of what the Israelis might do? Because they certainly want to go back to war. This is an unacceptable, if there was a deal reached at this point, it would be totally unacceptable to them. What sort of actions might they take to try to undermine any potential peace deal?

I think continuing to fight in Lebanon is probably the thing that works for them because they like to fight in Lebanon. They're trying to seize all of this territory, which as we've talked about, pushes them up past the control of the gas fields off the coast of Lebanon as well. They're destroying all of the towns and villages. They're claiming that they're going to draw a yellow line similar to Gaza and that this is going to be theirs plus then a buffer zone.

Then you have to move people further up to settle the buffer zone and then you need a buffer zone above the settlement and then on and on and on. So I think they'll continue to do that and that creates the conditions to restart the war, though there are a lot of elements within Iran are fine with that. So that's not what Trump wants, but it's not clear how much it matters what Trump wants.

Lastly, let's put A14 guys up on the screen. This is something that you had flagged, Ryan, that this Rosneft's oil depot and export facility in Krasnodor, Kray, Russia, sorry for the terrible pronunciation, currently ablaze with dozens of tanks seen burning as thick black smoke pours in the sky following a large-scale drone attack by Ukraine against oil infrastructure across southern Russia.

Yeah, this is their Black Sea export facility. So at the same time that the US once again lifted sanctions on Russian oil to try to keep oil prices down, so the US wants Russian oil on the market to keep oil prices down. At the same time, they're getting their oil infrastructure and their export capacity smashed by Ukraine, which is, you know, it's interesting because it kind of helps Iran. If the US is to be believed that we want oil prices to be low and that Iran is correct,

that higher oil prices, higher gas prices, make it harder for us to wage the war, that this doesn't serve us.

You never know when you're in August of 1914. Like you just, you don't until you do. You never know, and like when you have these two hot conflicts with similar parties involved, it's the U.S. fighting obviously a proxy war in Ukraine and in Israel via military support for both of those countries. It can pop into something much, much, much bigger at basically any time.

What is your sense, Ryan, if you had to guess? Are there going to be further negotiations this week? Is ceasefire going to be extended? I would

say yeah. They'll have some talks and they'll extend. I think there'll be another response from Iran related to this ship, but that the U.S. but that it'll be more of like the last year kind of thing. We're gonna hit this place.

Heads up, we're gonna hit this because we have to respond.

And then they'll extend it.

That kind of requires the IRGC to go along with that kind of strategy, though, doesn't

it? It does, but I think the IRGC has not, they're not like fully in control and determined to go back to war. I think there's a lot of pressure in that direction, but they don't necessarily totally disagree with the leadership that is saying, no, no, there is a chance for a good deal here. Let's get it. Because then there's the other condition of what if

the U.S. takes Joe Kent's advice and just walks away, leaves sanctions on, Then what? then They don't get you know, they don't then what then what is Iran do at that point? So it's hmm. It's not obvious Yeah, so a deep a lot of them would prefer a deal if it's possible. They I think they just think it's not possible

Gotcha. Okay. Well, we will see what the next days bring now Emily and I are gonna talk about Trump's mental state and Ryan's gonna go away for a while. It's a return when we bring the topic of Zoran and Obama back. So, Ryan, we'll see you then.

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