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Trump says new Iranian leaders "want to talk"
Samantha Waldenberg
By Samantha Waldenberg

President Donald Trump told a reporter with The Atlantic on Sunday morning that the new leaders in Iran “want to talk.”

“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long,” Trump told The Atlantic.

Pressed further by reporter Michael Scherer, the president declined to say when he would speak with the Iranians.

“I can’t tell you that,” the president said.

Trump also did not say which particular leaders his administration was dealing with, and noted some with whom they had talked to in the past had been killed.

“Most of those people are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone, because that was a big — that was a big hit,” he said. “They should have done it sooner, Michael. They could have made a deal. They should’ve done it sooner. They played too cute.”

The president’s comments were reported just after he told a different reporter that 48 Iranian leaders were killed during the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Asymmetric Wars Are Different

You don't measure an asymmetric war by saying you need to assassinate leaders to gain any advantage, especially when that includes opposition leaders. A war needs to be won on the theater of operations, not through political assassinations.

You don't measure a war by the number of bombings. They need to be efficient enough to inhibit asymmetric actions, and that's far from happening due to Iran's size, the capillarity of its operations, and the scale of its arsenal.

How can we talk about air superiority at this point? Iran's MiGs, despite being outdated, are all intact, and certainly many air defense units are still operating, which is why no one has entered Iranian airspace.

No B-2 will penetrate Iran with MiG-29s in operation. And locating and neutralizing these MiGs, which can operate from any highway, takes some time.

There are reports of a corvette sunk and a frigate damaged, but Iran still operates dozens of ships (corvettes, frigates, catamarans and robust patrol boats).

It's too early to talk about the end of the war. Knowing what posture the Iranian navy will take is crucial for calculating the conflict's duration.

The advantage in military power in an asymmetric war against Iran will always be with Israel-US, and that shouldn't be the parameter for calculating the conflict's duration, but rather Iran's capacity to sustain operations while wearing down a much larger power than its own.

And we have to measure that capacity day by day, as Iran operates many underground bases it calls missile cities, replete with missiles and many silos across various cities.

It's estimated that Iran still possesses 25 missile cities with up to 60 silos and launch points each, plus dozens of bunkers and tunnels also used for launches. Degrading Iran's capacity will be a gradual and exhausting task, with high costs for US-Israel.

And it's not enough to bomb the surface structure, blocking the tunnels of these Iranian bunkers.

At night, they reopen the entrances with internal machinery and carry out launches quickly.

At the second day, the attacks with penetrating munitions on hangars is what Israel is doing, but at this stage of the war, I don't believe the planes are staying in hangars.

The situation is much more complex and takes more time than that. It requires hundreds of drones rotating and monitoring all these installations 24/7, which doesn't exist yet.

After four years, the Russians haven't been able to stop the Ukrainians from operating aircraft, and Iran is three times larger than Ukraine.

Yesterday, Iran shot down a Hermes 900 drone. Even monitoring activities must be done in a way that avoids losing assets.

There's a lot of fog of war in the air, giving the impression of the conflict's end when it's just at its beginning.

We'll be talking about the final phase when Israeli and American planes are flying over Tehran and American ships are in the Strait of Hormuz. Now the question is about who will run out ammo, https://x.com/pati_marins64/status/2028174654024634701?s=20