Name: Ret. Navy admiral explains 'Dante's Inferno' of US firepower near Iran
Uploaded: 2026-02-21T21:32:04.000Z
Duration: 9 min 21 s
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Tell me about the firepower that we've assembled in the Middle East.

It's also like 1990, Persian Gulf War One.

And let's kind of do it from the outside in, if you will, in concentric rings descending like Dante's Inferno.

On the outer rings are big strategic bombers.

They can come all the way from the United States.

They can operate from other bases, but at distance, inside are the two aircraft carriers.

One you see there on the screen, it's in the northern part of the Indian Ocean.

The other one is going to park right against Israel, where you see the word Syria on that chart.

These are 80 combat aircraft each, each with F35s, our most advanced jets, as well as plenty of FNA 18 Hornets.

And then you go inside that and you've got the capacity to launch Tomahawk missiles.

You can send drones in, you can use cyber.

And of course, there's land based aircraft, Air Force aircraft at many of those bases you show there.

So again, think of it like Dante's Inferno descending right in the center of it.

At the very bottom is Ayatollah Khamenei.

David Sanger, you know the President well.

You were part of that New York Times group that spent three hours with him in the Oval Office recently.

Should the Ayatollah be nervous that the administration just lost the tariff battle in the Supreme Court?

Well, you can certainly argue that the President is probably feeling right now the first pushback on his powers that he's felt really in the first year of his presidency.

For the first time, the courts have sort of come in in a big way and said this is not within the powers of the presidency unless the tariffs that he imposed were not legal.

And he may well want to push back by showing that he can operate in an area where the Constitution gives him an enormous amount of leeway.

But even here, the interesting question is this would clearly be an act of war.

I mean, the way you test it is if somebody massed this kind of force off the United States and threatened to conduct this, we would consider that a potential act of war.

And yet Congress has not issued either an authorization to use military force, as they did in the case of Iraq, or passed a war resolution.

And, you know, what did the President tell us in that interview.

Asked whether there were any limits on his power, he said, really, only my own morality.

Iran is preparing a new draft proposal after nuclear talks with the U.S.

iran's foreign minister is optimistic about a deal.

He says the US has not asked Iran to halt uranium enrichment and Tehran has not offered to suspend it voluntarily.

He told Ms. Now they're hoping to hand over the new proposal to Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, soon.

Perhaps in a matter of a week or so, we can start real serious negotiations on the text and come to a conclusion.

Meanwhile, the president warns that he's considering limited strikes on Iran to pressure the country into a deal.

The USS Gerald Ford carrier strike group is already in the Mediterranean Sea, heading towards the Middle east to join other US Military assets in the region.

But top Democrats are urging the Trump administration not to take military action without congressional approval.

Benham Ben Taliblu, senior director of the Iran Program at the foundation for Defense and Democracies, joins us now.

First, the optimism you're hearing from Foreign Minister Arachi, at least on the path to substantive negotiations.

I read that you see Iran playing the game it has always played.

I think we have to pay attention to who the real decision makers are in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

That's a title meant to be taken rather literally.

And he hasn't been speaking that much since the end of the 12 Day War with Israel and America.

But he's spoken about maybe 14, 16 times since then.

And his most recent speech struck a drastically, and

I want to stress that for the audience, drastically different tone than what Arakchi has said, both in his Fox interview as well as in his MSNBC interview that you just alluded to.

So while Arakshi is injecting a little bit of cautious optimism, I would say the chances of a deal are about 20% and dropping with the Islamic Republic at this rate, even if, for example, enrichment was not discussed, there's a whole host of other issues that do divide and keep apart the US And Iran, especially at this very tense moment.

And so you say there's a strong contrast between what we're hearing from the ayatollah and what we're hearing from the foreign minister.

What's the most relevant contrast that you hear from the Supreme Leader.

Well, I don't want to get too into the details.

It might sound a bit too theological, but

the Supreme Leader of Iran also is an ayatollah, as you mentioned, and

he does reference Islamic political history, and in particular Shiite political history to justify political moves.

For example, when he authorized nuclear negotiations with President obama back in 2013 under the auspices of the P5.1, he talked about Imam Hassan and he talked about heroic flexibility, needing to show flexibility with your opponents, and

that paved the pathway for the 2015 JCPOA deal.

But here he's been talking about Imam Hussein, whose epithet, the Master of Martyrs, kind of tells you all you need to know about the direction the Islamic Republic is headed in.

And it's quite rare also internally, to have military, political and religious elites sing from the same sheet of music.

And the same sheet of music is that if there's a strike, no matter how limited, Iran will respond in a massive way.

And so you mentioned the JCPOA that President Trump ended in his first term in 2018.

And I just want to read a bit of what we learned from that interview from the foreign minister.

We've not offered any suspension and the US has not.

The US Side has not asked for zero enrichment.

What we are now talking about is how to make sure that Iran's nuclear program, including enrichment, is peaceful and will remain peaceful forever, which would be too similar to the jcpoa, that it would be a complete contrast to what we're hearing from President Trump publicly.

Is that credible at all, that continuing an enrichment program is part of the conversation?

Well, certainly the challenge for the Islamic Republic right now is how to transpose the reality that they're currently not enriching since the end of the 12 Day War into something that looks like it's a concession for the United States of America.

And that's precisely why America can ask for bigger things, more things, more challenging things, because it's actually taken away enrichment from the Islamic Republicans.

It hasn't taken away the capability, AKA the know how.

But nonetheless, Iran is not currently enriching today.

So the Islamic Republic has increasingly, sorry, decreasingly been able to actually threaten to restore enrichment or anything else like that.

And therefore, it's trying to find a way to make Trump pay what he previously got for free.

And that gets at the heart of the matter of enrichment in this agreement.

Yeah, the USS Gerald Ford, that carrier strike group, is in the Mediterranean.

Of course, the Abraham Lincoln has been there for some time.

You've said that the chance of a deal is 20% and dropping.

So we know what you believe about the potential for a military strike.

What are the indicators from Iran that they believe that a military strike is coming?

Well, it's actually very interesting that both America and Iran continue to talk about being interested in negotiations, but

also continue to do things physically that tell you that they're getting ready for a strike.

The Islamic Republic, for example, continues to build back better when it comes to its ballistic missile program.

We know that that's really the spinal cord of its deterrence at this point in time.

It's the long pole of the regime's security strategy.

And then, most importantly, it seems to be hardening some nuclear sites.

So in the case that there's a strike, that is not just against missile facilities, but

actually against what's left of the nuclear program, particularly, you know, a Futurea plant that is believed to be a future enrichment facility or previous research and development labs.

Those things, per commercial satellite imagery, are being hardened.

So when you take its tough rhetoric on missiles and then you look at this kind of hardening and dispersal, it looks like both sides are getting ready for exit options from negotiations.

Ben Amen Taliblu, thank you so much for being with us.