In the grand theater of geopolitics, there are moments when the unthinkable becomes inevitable. We are living through such a moment now — one that may determine whether we’re witnessing a historic realignment of global power or the ignition of the kind of chaos that nuclear weapons were meant to prevent.

Twelve days after American B-2 stealth bombers struck Iran’s most fortified nuclear facilities, the world finds itself grappling with a paradox: Everyone is publicly horrified, yet privately relieved that the Iranian nuclear Sword of Damocles may finally have been cut down. Even Iran’s closest allies seem more concerned with diplomatic appearances than genuine outrage.

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren joins the WhoWhatWhy podcast to decode this historical inflection point. A historian, former Knesset member, and veteran of Israeli government service, Oren offers a unique perspective from someone who has spent his life at the intersection of scholarship and statecraft. Hours before Israel’s first strike, he published a prescient piece asking whether this was Israel’s “Dirty Harry moment” — the confrontation that would finally call Iran’s bluff.

Oren argues this conflict traces back to what he calls the “original sin” of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — a thesis that reframes the entire narrative. He reveals why Iran’s “ring of fire” strategy ultimately backfired, what the bombing of symbolic targets like Evin Prison signals about Israel’s true objectives, and why the international community’s muted response may be the most telling reaction of all.

While debate continues over whether Iran’s nuclear sites were truly “obliterated” or merely damaged, Oren explores what matters more: whether this represents a tactical victory or genuine strategic transformation. Can Iran’s theocratic regime survive being exposed as what Oren calls a “tissue paper tiger”? Will this moment lead to the stable regional balance that has eluded the Middle East for decades, or will it ignite the very chaos that diplomacy was meant to prevent? Oren reveals why the most important question isn’t what was destroyed in those 12 days — but what might be built from the rubble.

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[00:00:11] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the special WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In the grand theater of geopolitics, there are moments when the unthinkable becomes inevitable, when the careful choreography of diplomacy gives way to the brutal clarity of action. We are living through such a moment now, one that may well determine whether we’re witnessing the opening act of World War III or the most significant reshaping of Middle Eastern power since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. What began 12 days ago with Israel’s audacious strike against Iran has cascaded into something that would have been inconceivable just weeks earlier. American B-2 stealth bombers carrying 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs turning Iran’s most fortified nuclear facilities into rubble. The sound and fury of international condemnation fill the airwaves, yet beneath the diplomatic protestations lies a different truth, a collective, if unspoken, relief that the Iranian nuclear sword of Damocles may have finally been cut down. This is the paradox of our moment. Everyone is publicly horrified, yet privately grateful. The Saudis condemn while quietly celebrating. The Europeans express alarm while secretly exhaling. Even Iran’s remaining allies seem more concerned with appearances than with genuine outrage. Because in the end, no one, not even Iran’s closest partners, wanted to live in a world where the Islamic Republic possessed nuclear weapons. But here’s what makes the moment historically singular. It wasn’t American courage that led us here. For all our overwhelming military superiority, our stealth bombers and bunker-busters, America would never have acted alone. It took Israel’s audacity to show what was possible. Israeli intelligence to map the targets. Israeli resolve to pull the trigger first. The United States, for all its power, followed where Israel led. David, in this case, showed Goliath the way. Perhaps this is the new paradigm of American power in the age of imperial overreach and war-weary publics. Let the regional allies with the most at stake take the initial risks, demonstrate the possibility and only then commit American firepower to finish what courage has begun. It’s a doctrine born not of weakness but of wisdom, recognizing that the nations with the most skin in the game often possess the clearest vision of what must be done. Iran, cast as the eternal adversary in this regional drama, now finds itself in a position of having to respond to the unthinkable, yet lacking any meaningful way to do so. Their nuclear program lies in ruins, their proxies weakened, they are Samson, but the pillars have already fallen. Amidst the questions surrounding the current ceasefire, we stand at an inflection point where the old order is dying and something new is struggling to be born. The question isn’t whether the Middle East will be transformed, it already has been. The question is whether this transformation leads to a more stable regional balance or ignites the very global chaos that nuclear weapons were meant to prevent. To help us understand this moment and where it might lead, we turn to someone who has spent his life at the intersection of Israeli courage and American power, diplomacy and warfare, historical scholarship and contemporary statecraft. Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, historian of Middle Eastern conflicts, a former member of the Israeli government and a member of the Knesset, and one of the few voices who saw this moment coming long before it arrived. Just hours before Israel’s first strike, Oren published a piece asking whether this was Israel’s dirty Harry moment, the confrontation that would finally call Iran’s bluff. Today with bold actions taken, Iran’s nuclear facilities still smoldering and a region transformed, we ask him what comes next. It is my pleasure to welcome Ambassador Michael Oren here to the program. Mr. Ambassador, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Good to be back with you, Jeff. Well, it is a delight to have you here. You referred to this even before it happened as a dirty Harry moment, just hours before Israel launched its attack. We’re now living in the aftermath of that. When you look at this moment historically, not just the military operation, but what it represents, how do you see it in a historical context?

[00:04:36] Michael Oren: Well, you reminded me earlier that some years ago, almost a quarter of a century ago, you interviewed me for my book, Six Days of War, June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East. And my thesis of that book, Jeff, was that you couldn’t understand the modern Middle East without understanding the way it was formed over the course of six days in June 1967. And I will go as far as to say that 12 days in June 2025 can be at least as transformative, if not more so, than those six days in 1967. Can be. Much hangs in the balance. This is truly a hinge of history right now. And we don’t know quite which way it’s going to turn.

[00:05:18] Jeff Schechtman: Why this moment? What was the mood, the attitude, the politics in Israel at this moment that gave rise to what happened?

[00:05:27] Michael Oren: Well, it was two consecutive processes. One was that began in the 1990s. It really began well over 30 years ago when Iran first embarked on a military nuclear program and Israel became aware of it. And during his first term as prime minister in the 1990s, started 1996, Prime Minister Netanyahu made it the centerpiece of much of his strategic policy to block Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. And that policy is not changed when Netanyahu returned to the prime ministership back in 2009, in February 2009. And at that point, the Iranian nuclear program had progressed immensely. It was during the, in that month, literally in February 2009, that the secret installation at Fordow, under a mountain, was discovered. Israeli and American intelligence discovered it, passed it on to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, and it became public. So Iran had been enriching uranium illegally for years. It had a ballistic system that could carry a nuclear warhead. And the big question was, was it actually developing a warhead? Of course, Iran said it was and it wasn’t. But then we would learn later in 2018, when Mossad agents broke into the nuclear archive in Tehran, that they in fact had been working on a warhead and the project divided into various university departments and carried on secretly. So you put all these three factors together, the highly enriched uranium, the delivery system, and the warhead, and you’ve got yourself a nuclear weapon, which would change the Middle East irrevocably, existentially threaten Israel, and in fact, upset the international balance of power. In 2015, going back, President Obama, who had made it the centerpiece of his foreign policy to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, signed what became known as the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. And this basically kicked the can down the road. It paid the Iranians off to delay their nuclear program for about 10 years. There were sunset clauses that would expire after 10 years. It did nothing about the ballistic system. It did nothing about the warhead aspect of it, only focused on enrichment. And Netanyahu felt that this was a very, very bad deal, very, very dangerous, and enabled Iran, after 10 years, to enrich enough uranium on an industrial scale to make not one but many nuclear weapons if it wanted to, and in the meanwhile, it enriched Iran. Now here we come to the other process. The other process is what is known euphemistically in America and the West is Iran’s malign behavior. I have to laugh almost every time I say it, because malign behavior is what my kids did when they went into their playroom and wrecked their toys. Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. It has sponsored terrorist attacks around the world. It’s tried to assassinate American leaders, including the president of the United States. It’s tried to assassinate me in downtown Washington. Obviously, they didn’t succeed. They tried. Iran is responsible and complicit in the murders of hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, from Syria to Yemen, to housing al-Qaeda, to mounting attacks against Americans in response to the deaths of hundreds of Americans from the Marine barracks, suicide bomber in 1983, to just multiple, multiple attacks against American forces, bases over the last two years in the Middle East, blocking international shipping through the Mandab Strait through their Houthi proxies, and go on and on, and of course, funding Hamas and Hezbollah, Hamas and Hezbollah. And so Iran is immediately complicit in the horrendous events of October 7th, 2023. So here you have what Netanyahu says quite rightly, and keep in mind, I’m not his representative anymore, but I agree with he says this, you’re talking about giving the world’s most dangerous weapon into the hands of the world’s most dangerous regime, and it was simply that, the confluence of the two. And Israeli intelligence had indicated, had revealed that the Iranian nuclear program was on the verge of breakout, actually creating a nuclear weapon with enough enriched uranium to make between nine and 15 bombs. And sometimes the Americans had somewhat different analysis that we did about that time it would take to actually make these bombs, but keep in mind that Israel’s margin for error in these aspects is exactly zero, is exactly zero. And that’s what brought about this action called Rising Sun by the Israeli government to take out Iran’s nuclear program, but not just that, to take out much of the leadership of the Iranian regime, to take out the nuclear scientists who were making that bomb, to neutralize rockets that were firing at Israel and rocket launchers that were firing them. In military terms, there’s really been nothing like it, there’s been nothing like it in, I don’t know, perhaps ever, perhaps it’s not the 60s, 67 more when the Israeli Air Force took out the Egyptian Air Force in one morning. Quite extraordinary, they’ll be studying it in West Point for many, many years. But that event, that Rising Sun would not have been possible if Israel hadn’t already defeated militarily and broken Iran’s wing of fire of Hamas and Hezbollah and the collapse of Syria. So leaving Iran very, very exposed. And so for the first time since they ran Iraq War in the 1980s, the war was brought to Iranian soil, whereas Israel had Iran and Iranian proxies firing at us for decades. And that was a game changer, it’s a huge, huge game changer. And then the United States, on the orders of President Trump, came in and for a night of bombing dropped 14 30,000 pound bunker busting bombs on the three largest nuclear installations in Iran, in Detfordo, Nantanz and Isfahan. And a game changer. And Iran then sued for a ceasefire after firing some missiles deserterally at the U.S. base in Qatar. And Israel agreed that most of its military objectives had been achieved, and we too agreed to a ceasefire. So that brings us up to date, Jeff, that’s about, you know, 40 years of history in a few seconds.

[00:11:53] Jeff Schechtman: You’ve talked about the confluence of events. Talk about the nexus, because this relates to Iran’s proxies and them having been taken out. The nexus between the events that happened from October 7th forward, resulting in what we’ve seen over the past 12 days.

[00:12:12] Michael Oren: Well, I’m actually writing a book about this war, and I’m looking at the documents that Israel captured from Hamas in Gaza. It’s quite clear that Iran was deeply, deeply involved in Hamas’s training, Hamas’s finances, and then the decision to mount what Hamas called the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of the morning of October 7th, 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were massacred, burnt, beheaded, raped, mutilated, and 252 were dragged into unspeakable captivity in Gaza. And over 50 remained there, 50 unfortunately dead and alive, and probably mostly dead. This was the greatest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It was, for the state of Israel, a trauma that is very difficult, even today, to conceive. Israelis are still very much grappling with it. And it appeared to be the beginning, almost at the end of the Jewish state, because Israel was surrounded virtually on all of its borders with not just Hamas in the south, but Hezbollah in the north. Hezbollah, considered at the time, not just one of the most powerful military forces in the Middle East, but one of the most potent military forces in the world with 100,000 man army and upwards of 200,000 rockets, missiles, and mortars aimed at the state of Israel. To the east, there were pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, in Syria. To the south, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, all firing missiles at the same time. And there was also the Syrian government, which was basically an Iranian colony under a symbolic leadership of Bashar al-Assad, but basically a colony of Iran. So we were surrounded on all sides, the so-called ring of fire. And then slowly, slowly, Israelis united and began to move the enemy back. Moved them back in Gaza first, in an operation that remains very controversial to this day, and then turned its sights on Lebanon with a masterful Mossad operation involving beepers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah terrorists, which went off and killed and wounded thousands of them, and then proceeded to eliminate through the air Hezbollah’s leadership, Hassan Nasrallah killed. Once Hamas and then Hezbollah were cowered, were vanquished, very soon the rebels within Syria overran the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, he fled to Moscow. And Syria too fell, south the Sunni forces who were anti-Iranian, they’re not necessarily pro-Israel, but they were definitely anti-Iranian. And all of a sudden, Iran found itself isolated. For the first time since the early 1980s, Iran was totally cut off, and none of its proxies were going to come to its aid. And the Russian and Chinese, the Russian and Chinese who had lied themselves with Iran, with Iran was providing drones and missiles for the Russians to use against Ukrainians, and China was buying almost 90% of its oil from Iran, but they weren’t coming to their aid either. Not that they could, Russia had his hands full with Ukraine, and China’s not really a presence, a strategic presence in the Middle East. And that left Iran very, very vulnerable. Twice in 2024, Iran had fired ballistic missiles at Israel, upwards of 700 missiles, the vast majority of them were taken out, did not cause any major damage, nobody was killed. And so Iran was portrayed or revealed to be a paper tiger, and Israeli planes undertaking very long range missions, 2,000 kilometer missions, knocked out Iran’s air defenses, its Russian air defenses. And so Iran was totally vulnerable, totally vulnerable, and isolated. And that was the background. So you have an Iran that’s totally vulnerable and isolated, that actually increased, enhanced the influence of those members of the Iranian leadership who actually said, we got to have a bomb, because we don’t have any defenses, we need to bomb. So that was the evidence that was adduced by the Israeli government to show the Iranian government is moving to break out and create a nuclear weapon. And we, again, our margin of error was exactly zero, we had to act on that quickly to prevent that from happening. Because once Iran had a nuclear weapon, we would not be able to defend ourselves. And a very good example of this, Jeff, would be what happened in Ukraine when a week after Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Putin declared a nuclear emergency. And from that moment on, nobody in the West would give significant offensive weaponry to the Ukrainians for fear that it would touch off a nuclear exchange. Well, the same thing would happen with us. If Iran had a nuclear weapon, Hamas and Hezbollah could attack us almost with impunity. And really, what could we do against them with an Iranian nuclear weapon pressed to our forehead? So that’s the background. And I think it’s a very compelling causus belli. And I think that the Israeli military, particularly the Air Force and our secret services, performed truly, truly in a historic manner.

[00:17:19] Jeff Schechtman: How much of this goes back to the failure of the JCPOA and the right to enrich, which remained part of that?

[00:17:27] Michael Oren: Well, there’s a popular, I would say it’s a conventional wisdom among the opponents of Mr. Trump, the opponents of this military operation, both the American and Israeli aspect of it, that said that Iran was keeping the JCPOA, and it did not begin to violate the JCPOA until Trump pulled out of the agreement unilaterally in 2018. And that argument is fundamentally unfounded, it is fundamentally false. And I shall explain why. I mean, this battle has really been about the right to enrich. And we know now from published records that already in 2013, two years before the JCPOA, in secret talks with the Iranians, President Obama conceded the right to enrich, basically took an action by, an illegal action by Iran, illegally enriching uranium, and basically pardoned it, he koshered it. And in exchange for sanction relief and business deals, the Iranians then were to postpone their massive enrichment project. They kept their enrichment to 3.4% enrichment, significantly less than the 20 and 60% enrichment you need on way to a nuclear weapon. And they shipped about 98% of their stockpile abroad to Russia, which looked very, very good on paper. But the JCPOA had several fatal lacunae. One was it did not prevent the Iranians from developing more advanced centrifuges. So when the deal was signed, there was the IR-1 centrifuge that enriched uranium at a certain rate, and people knew how long it would take. But several years later, Iran had produced an IR-6, which enriched uranium at six pi at the rate. So it was actually immaterial whether Iran shipped its stockpile out or limited its enrichment to 3.4%. If the Supreme Leader decided, Iran could replenish the stockpile to 20 and then 60% within a matter of months and perhaps even a matter of weeks. So that was one fatal flaw. The other fatal flaw was that the nuclear deal said nothing about the ballistic system. And Iran has a space program that sends satellites into space. The same missile that carries a satellite into space for Iran is used to carry a nuclear weapon. And as a matter of fact, they are actually built to carry nuclear weapons. And right now, those ballistic missiles in the hands of the Iranians can reach Central and Western Europe within a decade. We estimate it could reach the eastern coast of the United States. And the Iranian nuclear deal did nothing, said nothing, said about warheads. Now, supposedly in 2003, in response to the American invasion of Iraq, Iran ceased development of a nuclear warhead. But we now know from the material recovered by our Mossad agents breaking into a nuclear archive in Iran in 2018, that in fact, the Iranians were working on a nuclear warhead. And so you put these three together, the JCPOA didn’t stop, didn’t in any way prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. But I’m not done yet, Jeff. One of the biggest problems was the enrichment of Iran, not of uranium, but Iran itself. We’re talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars. In the wake of the JCPOA, Iran gave a billion dollars to Hezbollah. It gave dozens and dozens of millions of dollars to Hamas. Iran financed October 7th, and was not just involved in the planning, but actually the financing of it. And so people who say this is Trump’s war is in fact Obama’s war. And it goes back to that original sin of acknowledging the right to enrich and letting Iran get away with this and develop a threshold capacity, is what it’s called, the ability to make a nuclear weapon very fast. And it’s worth stating that when Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement in 2018, Iran did not violate the agreement very quickly. It only began to violate the agreement in a very robust way once Joe Biden had been elected to president.

[00:21:29] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about the attitude right now inside Israeli society. It does seem to be different now than it was 13, 14 days ago. Talk about that.

[00:21:41] Michael Oren: Well, it’s certainly different than it was 20 months ago when this country was deeply, deeply demoralized. It was united, but deeply demoralized. 12, 13 days ago, the century was also very divided, divided particularly over whether the government could or should or must agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, which might get returned our hostages, but would also enable Hamas to survive and to reorganize and reconquer the Gaza Strip. A very painful, painful decision that deeply divided Israelis. And the country is exhausted, exhausted after 20 months of war. We’ve had tens and tens of thousands of reservists serving in combat for hundreds of days. They are exhausted. And then all of a sudden this happened, the Operation Rising Sun, which gave us a tremendous boost to our national morale. I think the first boost came with the victory over Hezbollah, but now this was even bigger. The revelation that Mossad forces had actually set up a base within Iran to fire drones at Iranian targets was extraordinary for us. And the fact that our pilots conducted hundreds of sorties at the distances of 20, 23,000, 2,300 kilometers, we didn’t lose a single airplane. And all this time we didn’t lose a single airplane. That in itself is quite remarkable. And so that was a tremendous boost to morale. But I think toward the latter days of the operation, Israel was trying to get tired again because it was a war of attrition. We were being hit several times a day by barrages of very large rockets carrying 200-pound warheads that not just destroy a building, but take down a neighborhood. People were getting killed. Students weren’t going to school. People weren’t going to work. The entire country was basically moribund. And the question was how long we can continue. And our pilots were getting tired too, can you imagine, flying five, six, seven-hour sorties every day? So I think that the government was perfectly satisfied to say, listen, we fulfilled almost all of our military accomplishments. We are now approaching the end of this war. And then the coup de grace for the Iranians was the American operation called Midnight Hammer. And there’s a big debate in America now whether to what degree these nuclear sites were devastated or to use President Trump’s word, obliterated or just damaged heavily. At the end of the day, the debate is kind of moot because if Iran is set on rebuilding its nuclear program or rebuild its nuclear program, whether a site is heavily damaged or obliterated. And the big difference now is going to be made at the negotiating table. This war was always going to end at the negotiating table. And the issue is going to be America’s position at that table. Will it agree to something like a JCPOA type treaty? I doubt it. The President is standing rather strong on the fact that Iran cannot enrich on its territory. But will he take it even further? Will he say that Iran can no longer be the largest state sponsor of terror, that Iran can’t seek Israel’s destruction, that Iran can’t keep calling for the death of the great state and to make a fundamental change in the Iranian leadership’s DNA, if you will, if this is all possible. And then we have to have very close supervision, observers on the ground in Iran and making sure that they are not violating this treaty. And always, always a credible military threat by the United States has to be on the table. Just has to be.

[00:25:16] Jeff Schechtman: Before the ceasefire, Israel bombed some of the symbols of oppression in Iran, even prisons, the Basaj headquarters. Talk about that and the sense that all of this is leading to maybe a slow motion collapse of the current regime.

[00:25:36] Michael Oren: Well, I don’t think Israeli leaders, certainly not Benjamin Netanyahu, do not dissemble their desire to see a change of leadership in Iran. Netanyahu has several times called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their oppressive government. And I think in certain ways, at least before the bombing, he was preaching to a very, quote unquote, I’m not being a joker, a captive audience, because many Iranians hate this government. It is corrupt. It is inefficient. It has spent countless billions of dollars on terrorism, on the nuclear program. And any type of dissent is quickly crushed and cruelly crushed. Last year, Iran executed 900 of its own citizens last year. So there would be no… I wouldn’t be many tears lost if it were this regime to fall. But having said that, I don’t think you can do this by military means. I don’t think anybody thinks you can do this by military means. It has to come from these Iranian people as well. And so the hope might be that the regime has been exposed as so weak, it’s not just a paper tiger, it’s a tissue-tied tiger, that elements in the army or other aspects of other elements in Iranian society will in fact rise up and overthrow it. And it’s a hope, but it’s a hope we’re gonna have to put on the shelf for a while, because I don’t know how long it’ll take. It may not happen from today to tomorrow.

[00:26:55] Jeff Schechtman: Are you surprised that while there’s been a lot of talk about the attacks on Iran, that really there’s been very little international outrage about any of it?

[00:27:06] Michael Oren: Right, because people understand. Nobody wanted Iran to have a nuclear weapon. You know, the United States and the West face four major adversaries, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. Three of the four have nuclear weapons already. And the West wanted the fourth to have nuclear weapons as well. And people understand what the Iranian regime is. It is bothersome when a symmetry is made, when people say, well, Iran and Israel have been battling each other for so many years. No, Iran and Israel have not been battling themselves for so many years. Iran has been trying to destroy us since 1979, and Israel has had to defend itself. It’s very different. The moral equivalency to me is repugnant. Talk a little bit about where we go from here. What do you see as the next steps? So I talked earlier about the hinge of history, and it can go really one of two ways. And one way is, well, nothing really changes. Iran uses the ceasefire as a shield for rebuilding much of its military and nuclear capabilities, and our hands will be tied. And maybe some agreement will be reached, maybe some agreement won’t be reached. I do not know. But alternatively, Iran will be neutralized, certainly as a threat, that the military triumph of Iran can be transformed into a strategic victory, and Iran will no longer be the major supporter of terror. It will no longer seek its destruction. It will no longer finance and train Hamas and Hezbollah. And it will grant independence to Lebanon, independence to Syria, both of which can make peace with us. Saudi Arabia can make peace with us. Someday, who knows, under a different leadership, Iran can make peace with us. And we have an entirely, entirely different Middle East. And America once again emerges as a muscular, respected, and feared superpower.

[00:29:07] Jeff Schechtman: And what’s the biggest misconception, do you think, that Americans have about Israel and about this war at the moment?

[00:29:14] Michael Oren: Oh, we hear it all the time that Netanyahu launched the war because the United States and Iran were on the verge of negotiating an agreement. It’s malarkey. What they don’t understand is the degree of threat which Iran poses to the Western civilization and to the United States in particular. And again, the worst regime with the most dangerous weapon, the United States, the Iranian military like the U.S. military, the only two militaries in the world that divide the world into theaters of operation. Iran looks at North America as a theater of operation to someday conquer it. And they are shooting at American service people that have been now for 40 years. They threaten international shipping. They have given shelter to al-Qaida. I don’t know how much worse you can guess, really, I just don’t. And Americans, many Americans don’t seem to understand just the magnitude of threat posed by Iran and the possibility, and a very real possibility, that that evil, evil regime would get its hands on nuclear weapons and what that would mean for America’s security and the security of the world.

[00:30:24] Jeff Schechtman: Ambassador Michael Oren, I thank you so very much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Delighted and an honor. Thank you again, Jeff. Thank you. Thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.