Ep. 27 - Iran War: The 2026 High-Stakes Gamble

A war begins on February 28 and the explanation arrives a month later. That timing alone forces a bigger question than any single headline: what happens to democracy when the commander in chief can stretch war powers without Congress, without a public case up front, and with a trust gap that never closes? I walk through the current state of the war in Iran, why stopping Iranian nuclear weapons still matters, and why regime change fantasies and ground troop talk should make all of us nervous.

Then we follow the money and the mood. Oil prices surge past $100 as markets fixate on the Strait of Hormuz, and the instability spills into everything from consumer budgets to business travel and long-term investment decisions. I also look at a weak labor market snapshot from the latest job creation numbers and why economic confidence often drives approval ratings more than any speech ever will.

From there, I shift to the No Kings protests as a massive coordinated movement focused on executive overreach and civil liberties, plus a blunt reminder that votes in November are what turn public outrage into consequences. I close with government dysfunction that shows up in a DHS shutdown with TSA workers still on the job, and a rare glimmer of bipartisan traction: the Kids Online Safety Act (COSA) and the push to regulate social media harms for teenagers through a duty of care, safer defaults, and transparency.

If you find value in this kind of clear, independent political analysis, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review. What’s the biggest risk you see in 2026 right now?

Transcript

Q1 2026 Review Begins

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome back, everyone, to the Radical Moderate Podcast. I am your host, Pat O'Brien. And this week we are going to do a quarterly review of the first three months of 2026. And I did this at the end of 2025, just kind of more what has been happening, what are the current events. There's going to be a big one that everyone has been dealing with, and that is going to be the war in Iran. But I'll talk about a little bit about the economy and a little bit of bipartisanship that uh has kind of snuck up on me that maybe gives me some hope that we'll get at least a little positive legislation done here in 2026. But we're going to start with the war in Iran. This uh began on February 28th of 2026. It has dominated the headlines every day since. Uh, I'm taping the day after President Trump on April 1st made a presidential address. And we're going to kind of just talk about the situation in Iran from a current event spectrum in a next week's episode. I'm going to talk about the radical moderate view on war in general and how Iran fits into that context. But let's start with Iran. I am one of those people whose understanding of Iran was formed in 1979 when the Shah was overthrown and they took uh the new regime, took hostages, and our hostages were there for well over uh a year. I forget it's probably close to a year and a half, maybe close to 450, 500 days. That dominated the headlines. And that was, I was 10 years old, and that was something that I was completely uh into and trying to understand. And ever since 1979, when you've had this theocratic republic, uh, which is driven by a Shia form of Islam in Iran, the country has been awful in terms of the leadership and in terms of the things they do. It's unquestionable. They are an enemy of democracy, they are an enemy of sanity. They have declared war on the United States and done everything they could to be a thorn in our side. Zero question about that. The question, though, is what is what do you do about it? You know, what is the right thing to do about it? And Iran has had nuclear ambitions the the whole time that other countries have had nukes. They, I'm sure they want them, uh, so that they can have power, you know, and that they can be a big dog at the table and and you know, security is what they would say of why they need it, et cetera, et cetera. And you can have that debate in a different time and space. I have no doubt that it's a bad idea to let Iran get nuclear weapons. So let me be clear on that from the onset. They they should not have nuclear weapons. I don't think there's any real debate about that. The question is what is our role? What how far do we go in keeping them from having nuclear weapons? And President Trump, what he decided was to proactively attack them. So let's size up just for a second. What are we talking about with Iran? Well, the first thing is it's a very big country. Uh, there's 90 million people roughly in this country. And while the leadership of Iran is controlled by religious fundamentalists who are not, who are not like you and I listening to this podcast. They are people who believe in uh, you know, any all rules are off in terms of what we would call democracy or or normal protocols. Like they recently there were protests in their country and they just killed the protesters. You know, that's that's how they operate. So the leadership of the country is horrendously bad, but the people of the country are not. The people of the country are primarily urbanized, primarily educated. Uh, I think that it's really a tragedy in Iran because they're they have a lot of uh people there who can do a lot more with their talents. Their economy could be so much larger and vibrant than it is, but they've uh there's a stranglehold by the clerics and the religious leaders uh who control the company, control the political machinery of it. So they hold the country back. You know, that's they're anti-capitalism, they're anti-democracy, et cetera, et cetera. But they're not gonna be a pushover. Okay, so let's break this down a little bit. The first thing is um the attacks happened on February 28th. There's no question that the U.S. military is unparalleled in our capacity to wage war. I mean, there's no question about that. The budget of the U.S. military is uh close to a trillion dollars. You add up the next nine or 10 countries that have military budgets, this includes Russia and China, and it still doesn't equal the budget of the United States. We have a very large, well-funded, well-trained military with all the technological capacity that you would want. And you you can't mess with us in that regard. So, President Trump, what he did, I would call, well, I'll say what here's my first reaction. My first reaction when I saw the news was this is a high stakes gamble. I mean, this is like standing at a craps table and and playing that game. It is very high stakes, very high risk. Now, you can win big on things like that, but you can also lose big on a gamble like that. I don't know where it's going to turn out. I've got plenty of skepticism that this was the right thing to do. You know, first off, let's go back to the justifications for the war. Clearly, Iran has nuclear ambitions. I stated a second ago that I think we need to stop that. Well, according to President Trump, I thought a year ago we already did. I believe it was last summer, and we bombed the hell out of them, obliterated their nuclear arsenal, is what we were told, and all the all the uranium that's been enriched was buried up under rubble, et cetera. That sounded fine. I mean, that was an airstrike. We had the opportunity to go. I didn't really have any problem with that. It was an aggressive move, but it wasn't what we did February 28th of 2026, which was literally go ahead and wage war. So in that regard, um it's it's a massive gamble. And I think the justifications need to be there. So I I'm juxtaposing what has been stated from February 28th going forward, but I did hear the president's address last night. If he was focusing on their nuclear ambitions more than anything else, regime change, it seems to me, seems to be something that would be nice, but I don't know that he that's he's really saying that's the reason anymore. And while it's it's a justification, don't get me wrong, that their nuclear ambitions and stopping their nuclear ambitions is absolutely a justification for going to war. However, you're kind of putting all of the trust into one person, and that's President Trump. You're he you're basically having to say, this guy is looking out for our best interests. We can completely trust him. He's our commander-in-chief. And there's absolutely a deficit of trust. You know, you're talking about a president who currently has, you know, maybe a 35% approval rating. The country's not behind him, and and different than say even the second Gulf War with uh George W. Bush, even that war, there was a lot more justification. Now, we found out later that some of that justification was not true and just completely made up. But a case was made to the American people, Congress was involved. Here, in the typical unorthodox fashion of President Trump, he didn't ask for anybody's permission. He didn't get uh a war resolution or a use of force resolution from the U.S. Congress. He didn't do any of that. He just decisively decided he's gonna start bombing Iran. And it it doesn't look like anybody's gonna push back on him. And I say anybody, the Republicans control the Senate and the House, they would have to push back. The Democrats have tried to push back, but they're in the minority party. They really can't do much about it. And one of the things that I think is intriguing about the way that the president has handled this is if he had simply gone to the Republican-led House and Senate, I think he would have gotten uh a war resolution. I really do. They've got the majorities, and then he could have actually boxed the Democrats in as, you know, not wanting to contain RAN, et cetera, et cetera. But he didn't choose to do that. I think that's probably a political mistake, but it's very in line with his unorthodox style of I'm in charge, I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want, and everybody else can figure it out later. But it is a stretch of presidential power, specifically the commander-in-chief powers. He has really, with this action, stretched it in a way that I've never seen anyone do before. Usually there's lawyers involved giving legal justification. There's a case made publicly to the American people. Just think about the address on April 1st. That address could have happened in mid-February, a couple weeks before the attack. It didn't. He waited a full month, I think it was 32 days after the attack to lay out his case. He he put the cart before the horse. So I think it was a mistake. I don't think it's the right way to do it. Now we're in it, and we're gonna have to see where it plays out. Um, so far, and I don't want to minimize this in any regard, there's been uh at to date, uh, I'm taping on April 2nd, there have been 13 American soldiers that have been killed. Uh it's unfortunate if one American soldier dies anywhere, that's a terrible thing. But this is a war. And so as wars go, that's a very low number because we don't have troops on the ground in Iran now. And that is the big thing going forward. And I'm sure I'll there'll be some follow-up in my next quarterly summary, uh, probably this year in July of what happens next. I I told my wife, I don't think President Trump is gonna send significant ground troops into Iran. I really don't. But he might. If he does, I think that would probably be a mistake. I I think it could go very badly. And I don't think you're gonna get regime change in the way that we've think we're thinking about it. You know, the Ali Kahmini, and I'm not, I honestly don't know how to say the name precisely, but the supreme leader, who's the the religious leader, but the all-encompassing political leader of the country was killed during the strike, as was probably most of their senior leadership. They're just gonna replace him with people who, quite frankly, are probably just as radical and just as fundamentalist as people at the top, if not more so, even more radicalized by the killings of the leadership. So I'm not hopeful at all that we're gonna be able to strike a deal with anybody. I think they're gonna be, they're just going to say, uh, hey, come invade us. Because we've seen how that goes when the United States, or really when Russia going into Ukraine, we've seen how that goes. It doesn't go well trying to, you know, occupy another country. And it would, I don't think it would go well in Iran. There's no evidence at all, historical evidence, to show me that sending ground troops into Iran is going to go well, or that even if we knock out their leadership, that we'd be able to install a government that's gonna be reasonable. I'm just not, I'm not buying any of that. And, you know, just so I to summarize my thoughts on the decision to go in Iran, I think it was a huge gamble, massive gamble. Maybe it pays off. I'm very skeptical because gambling in general is a hard way to make a living. I'm very skeptical that it's going to pay off. But there's probably an opportunity if President Trump were to pull back now. I'm talking about in the month of April, basically declare victory, say we've knocked out everything we wanted to knock out, et cetera, and just say we're leaving. There's maybe an opportunity for him to try to declare victory. However, though, there have been economic consequences. So let me move in to that part of the summary. The economic consequences, of course, that the price of oil, the stability of the price of oil, has fluctuated wildly now. Oil has gone up to over$100 a barrel. That, of course, affects, and this is on a daily basis, it's up, it's down. I think it reached as high as$119 a barrel, which is very high historically. Um, all of this comes down to the fact there's a war going on in the Middle East, but specifically the Strait of Hormuz, where maybe 20% of global oil supply comes from. And so when you choke supply with anything in a market, it's going to cause a price reaction to go up because the futures market doesn't know what's going to happen. There's instability, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I'll say this. I, this is maybe a very entitled way to look at the world. Gas prices don't affect me in a big way. I make enough money that I, whether something's$250 a gallon or$450 a gallon, it doesn't change anything about my behavior. But I'm atypical in that regard, I would say as an American. Most Americans care very much about gas prices. And I've known people in years past who would drive around the city looking for the cheapest gas price, or they'd get an app, you know, where can I save a nickel on my gas? I'm not price sensitive like that. I got to get from A to B. But it's been clearly to the American public, it's been a big shock. And so there are consequences for this. And that's not even talking about the tertiary effects on fertilizer, semiconductors, agricultural inputs, any type, you know, decisions on capital deployment. You know, it's something as simple as like maybe somebody wanted to do business, uh, took a business trip to Dubai, you know, they're canceling it. You know, there's there's real economic consequences here. My recollection of the president's uh address on April 1st was that this is all short term and it's all going to be great later. Again, I'm very skeptical. I want the best for our country. And if if somehow this really stops Iran from ever having a nuke or it puts holds it off 10 years longer, I would be for that. I I think it, I don't think it will. I don't I don't think we've been given all the truth here, but I don't know. I don't have any national security briefings, I don't have any code clearance. So let's go back to you know the fundamental questions and I'll move on to my next topic of what's been in the news. We I think what we're really trying to do is stop Haran's nuclear ambitions. I I will say no president has ever just nailed this before. President Obama, and I was a big fan of President Obama, negotiated uh with the Iranians, and and we had inspections going on. I think I if I could get him on the show, I'd love to hear his perspective now. I most people had big concerns about whether or not it was going to work. But it he would, I think he would say, and his people who who negotiated on his behalf would say it was working until President Trump ended it all. And then, of course, you had to do something different. But you you do want to stop their nuclear ambitions. There's no question about that. I think regime change is just hoping and wishing. I I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon. It's it's not just like a cultural thing for them, it is a religious doctrine that they're operating under. So the person that you replace uh the supreme leader with, I don't think it's gonna make any different decisions uh because he's reading the way his reading of Shia Islam isn't gonna change just because of us. The big question is, are we gonna send in troops? And when is this thing over? And as of taping today, I really have no idea. I will say these type of things tend to go longer than you think they're gonna go, and they tend to be more expensive than you think they're gonna be. So we shall see. That was what dominated the headlines in the first quarter of 2026. But let me talk about a couple other things that I think have relevance. I think that are things that are remarkable or at least noteworthy. The first, to kind of go to the other side of uh the political spectrum, I want to talk about the No Kings protest. And I want to start by saying I'm not a protest guy. Like I don't go to protests. The only one I remember, honestly, the only one I remember going to was in President Trump's first term. He did the Muslim ban. So this would have been uh, you know, February 20 uh 17 type time frame. And he did the Muslim ban, and there was a protest against that at the Capitol, uh the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock. I went to that protest. I went specifically because I was concerned that people of uh the Muslim faith who lived in Arkansas who would show up would think that no one had any concern for them whatsoever. And I wanted to show up for that purpose. Like I literally just wanted to be the white guy there, middle class white guy there, to show that like not everybody believes in what President Trump's doing here. I really don't remember going to any other protests. I've been to a lot of political rallies for and against, but not like a protest. So the No Kings protest is not something that I went to at any point and not something I intend to go to in 2026. However, that does not diminish the fact this was a really big deal. Millions of people uh globally, not just in the United States, although this is the epicenter of it, were part of these protests. And I think to encapsulate my understanding of what they're protesting, it's an overreach of executive authority. So something like going to war with Iran without making the case, without going to Congress, I think that would be an example. But there's a dozen other examples of what President Trump has done that are probably an overreach of executive authority. The way that the things that ICE has has done, the two uh killings in Minneapolis would be on the list, civil liberties in general. So I want to kind of just encapsulate the No Kings protest by saying this is one of the largest coordinated protest movements in recent U.S. history. Like it's a big deal. Um, having said that, it doesn't change the political reality. So I hope that the people who went to these protests are gonna vote in November because that's where it actually matters. Elections have consequences. There was a vote in 2024, and that's why President Trump is in office, is because the majority of people voted for him. He got the popular vote and he won the Electoral College. It was an undisputed victory. So I'm not a protest guy, but I want to I want to say that that the protests were significant in numbers and in scope. And I would just hope that it turns into actual political uh, you know, consequences in the November election. So next I want to talk about the economy and the labor market. And I think, you know, I'm more into politics and policy than the average bear. But I think for most people, you know, things like gas prices resonate in a big way. But I think just the job market in general, you know, that's the thing that's always going to be consistent. So let's take a quick look at that. So there's a lot going on there with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has, I think, probably been politicized recently, but we got to go with the numbers that they're giving us. And the numbers they're giving us from a historical perspective are not good. Okay. So if you look at December of 2025, which we get those numbers in January, we had 50,000 net job creation. That's anemic. In January, we had 130,000 uh uh new job creation net. That's like okay. And there's a little bit over the winter, you gotta be a little careful. You can have um, you know, winter inclement events that can certainly affect it. I get all that. But then in February, we had a net negative of 90,000. So when you look at it, basically in three months, we created 40,000 jobs. That that's not good. It's not good for any metric historically, et cetera. So This probably has a lot to do with why President Trump has a 35% or thereabouts approval rating. The economy in general isn't, isn't on fire, right? It's not from a jobs perspective, at least, which I think is what resonates most with people is do I have a job? Do I feel like I have job security? And I don't think things, you know, I don't think under any metric that you would utilize that that's going that well. So you definitely give a loss to the Republican majority when it comes to job creation in the first quarter of 2026. Next, I want to talk about just government dysfunction, which was also something that I talked about from the fourth quarter of 2025. We had a long government-wide shutdown at the in the fourth quarter of 2025. Well, guess what? We kind of got into 2026 and we didn't have a huge government shutdown, but we had a limited government shutdown with the Department of Homeland Security, which also runs the TSA, which uh is how you get through airport lines. And while I traveled and in March, uh I take a trip to Las Vegas to watch March Madness basketball every year. I just love it. Um, my trip was very no problem. Like I, XNA, which is my airport in Northwest Arkansas, Vegas airport, I had no issues whatsoever. I did ask um one of the TSA folks uh when I was going through the line. I knew the answer, but I said, Are you guys getting paid? And he, it was like, nah, it's been 37 days or whatever the number was at that time. He knew it. And I just thought, you know, wow, thank you. And I did say thank you for working and not getting your check. Look, the Democrats have their points to be made of why they wouldn't fund it. They're basically saying, we don't like what happened in Minneapolis, what's going on with ICE, and we're gonna exert our power. That's that's very understandable. Um, it's from a political standpoint. I can't say they got any issue with that. It's what they have to work with as the minority party. And they gave several opportunities for uh for the Republican majority to fund everything but ICE. And that didn't happen in the first quarter. Now, again, as I'm taping this, uh, by the time you hear it, you may say, well, wait a second, this has all been resolved. They're on April 1st. And by the way, don't ever hold a presidential address on April Fool's Day, and don't ever try to make big news on April Fool's Day. But be that as it may, there was some indication that the Republicans had agreed to some type of funding uh for DHS, which includes TSA. So, so we'll see, but I think it just goes back to you know our to the to the reality that our government is not doing well. It it is it is um overly partisan, it is not functioning properly. That's a theme that I probably could have had in every quarter of 2025, but I certainly did in the fourth quarter of last year. So more of the same, if you will. So I none of that's all that positive, but I do want to conclude or bring toward a conclusion in this episode something that I actually gives me a tad bit of hope. And that is called the Kids Online Safety Act, COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. So basically what's going on here is this is a bipartisan effort, and that's kind of the breaking news part of this. The Kids Online Safety Act is, to my knowledge, the first attempt of the United States Congress to really regulate social media, specifically and its effects on teenagers. And so one of the big things that it would do is create a duty of care. And that that is a common standard in the law. You know, a doctor has a duty of care. Everybody's, you know, any type of professional's got a duty of care. And that means that these companies have to take reasonable steps to prevent and mitigate dangers to minors, which I think would be defined as 16 years and under from harmful content, sexual exploitation, bullying, et cetera. And those are real issues. And I'm I'm guessing, I don't have a lot of quotes on this, but I'm guessing you're seeing this happen uh because Democrats and Republicans have children, right? So, like they don't, they're not seeing this as a partisan issue. Now, there's been attempts on this before, and it didn't get done. It was reintroduced in this most recent Congress. So maybe this is an opportunity, maybe they'll actually pass something. Maybe the policy side of this is so strong, and the and the morat uh moral uh component of this is so strong that we've got to do something. And and we all know stories of negative things that have happened, especially to young people uh using and utilizing social media. So I hope they do something. You know, some of the bullets that are being talked about as some default safety settings that would, you know, you'd have to, I guess, take the default off, probably be parental involvement in that. Better tools uh, you know, being forced upon these companies, hopefully trying to limiting, limit the addictive nature or the at least the addictive features, some auditing, transparency, restriction on marketings. I think what's significant here is, and if this is if it gets done, and that's still way, you know, to be TBD. But if this gets done, it does show that it proves out that our Congress, even in an election year, even in a highly polarized situation, can pass something that's going to make some sense. Now, as a capitalist, I think, you know, some people might say, oh, let the social media companies do whatever they want. That's not what a radical moderate says. A radical moderate says we need reasonable uh regulation if there's harmful effects from anything that's going on with any product, it can be a chemical factory spewing pollution to the air. You you need to regulate it. And certainly with social media companies. And as an adult who use has used social media now for, you know, I don't know, close to 20 years, uh, I understand the addictive nature of it, you know, and I'm 56 years old. So you can't expect people who are 14 years old, 12 years old, to have any comprehension of the possible effects. It's like any type of drug, like alcohol or marijuana. You got to have some regulations of it so that that are protective in nature. And uh, kudos to the U.S. Congress for actually doing something. And and and we'll see if they pass it. And I'll I'll uh it really snuck up on me. And that's why I brought it up in this quarter, is it really snuck up on me. I was not expecting to see anything positive come out of this uh congressional year in 2026. But maybe, maybe this will will be part of that. Maybe it'll lead to something, quite frankly, might be the only bipartisan bill of any substance that gets passed in 2026. So we talked about the war in Iran, big gamble. We'll see where it ends up. I I support our troops. I absolutely think we need to limit Iran's nuclear capability. And if we could wipe it out, that's great. No Kings protests. Let's see if these people show up in November. If they do, I think that those protests would have actually been concrete and substantive and made a difference. I don't think the economy is doing that great, really. You look at the jobs numbers. Certainly we've got government dysfunction, but maybe we maybe we do something positive in 2026 by passing uh the Kids Online Safety Act. So, folks, for this quarter, the first quarter of 2026, we we we made it through. Uh, I think there's a a lot of undetermined things, uh, a lot of risk with this war in Iran. I hope it turns out well. Very skeptical that it will. But for this week, that's been the POV F P O B.