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Home » Pepe Escobar: Iran’s Strategy of Attrition Warfare (Transcript)

Pepe Escobar: Iran’s Strategy of Attrition Warfare (Transcript)

Editor’s Notes: In this interview, political analyst Pepe Escobar joins Glenn Diesen to dissect Iran’s current strategy of attrition warfare and its broader implications for West Asia. Escobar discusses the shift in Iranian military doctrine from defense to offense, highlighting the strategic significance of their “underground missile cities” and the exhaustion of American and Israeli air defenses. The conversation also delves into the internal fractures within BRICS, the role of Russia and China in backing Iran, and why the demands for a post-war settlement remain fundamentally unbridgeable between Washington and Tehran. (Mar 24, 2026)  

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction

GLENN DIESEN: Welcome back. We are joined today by Pepe Escobar, a political analyst and author focusing on the greater Eurasian continent. Thank you for coming back on.

PEPE ESCOBAR: My pleasure, Glenn.

The Long-Planned War Against Iran

GLENN DIESEN: So I wanted to ask about Iran, obviously, as the world is looking at shock and horror of what’s happening. And I often think about U.S. General Wesley Clark. He made this comment regarding what happened after the September 11 attack, arguing that they had a plan to take out seven countries — they were going to take out Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan. And of course, the grand finale was Iran. And even Bush thereafter put Iran on this axis of evil.

And why is this so important to the Americans? Because this is a very different target than they had over the past 30 years. Everyone, all the US presidents, it seemed more or less wanted to go after Iran. They all shared the same rhetoric of Trump, but they knew that it would be too much, too big to try to take. But still, Trump went all the way.

What do you see as being the strategic significance here, besides liberating girls and all this, helping protesters, this nonsense?

PEPE ESCOBAR: No, Glenn. This is way more complicated. Iran is the Holy Grail.

Well, I am one of the last old school foreign correspondents on the planet. I was in Afghanistan before, during and after, including 9/11. And I was in Iraq before, during, and after. And I was going to Iran during the 2000s, many times, including at a time when Rumsfeld, the Cheney regime was talking about “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” That was John McCain’s refrain every week, in fact.

So we all knew Iran was the big prize. It always was, according to the Project for the New American Century, according to Clean Break, according to the Zionist influence in D.C. already in the 90s everywhere. So of course, they couldn’t do it before. And the famous Wesley Clark quote — in fact, they got everybody. And of course, the only missing piece was Iran.

So this war was planned — we can say that this war was planned since the late 90s, in fact, not only the past 20 or 25 years, even more than that, the previous millennium.

The Role of Kushner and Financial Interests

And of course, now they found the perfect messenger — what some of my Chinese friends, the scholars, call the baboon in the White House. I love it. The barbarian baboon in the White House. Totally controlled by Zionists, totally controlled, not only by Netanyahu, but the circle around Netanyahu, the International Zionist alliance, which is especially financial. And of course his inner circle, the people who he actually listens to. There are not many.

They are making a lot of money out of this war, and that includes everybody, starting with the ghastly Jared Kushner. This should be an investigation in itself, but obviously, because there’s no more investigative journalism in the U.S., you see this only in fringe Substack accounts, for instance. But how Kushner is profiting — even starting when he left the White House after Trump 1.0, when he got the first $2 billion for his Affinity Partners from MBS directly. Basically, MBS wrote a check for Kushner. And now the price is even higher — $5 billion. He’s getting $5 billion from the Saudis for pushing, of course, the father of Ivanka, let’s put it this way. And the real brains in that couple is not Jared Kushner, it’s actually Ivanka. He is absolutely ghastly — a low life, cheap real estate entrepreneur. But of course, Trump listens to him. That’s very, very dangerous.

So he was the main seller of this war, face to face to Trump, or ear to ear to Trump. And everybody is profiting — Lutnick, Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy, all these people, Bessent, all of them. So for them it is also a free ride financially.

Greater Israel and the Elimination of Iran

The big picture, of course, is Eretz Israel, Greater Israel. And that, according to them, is advancing fast if they can eliminate the only regional superpower, which is Iran, and the only competitor to Israel to be the number one power all across West Asia.

So there was never any planning about that. And they thought it would be a decapitation strike and the whole thing would be over over the weekend, and on Monday we would have “mission accomplished,” the Wall Street going through the roof and all that. So that was the planning.

Trump’s Pause and the Bond Market

When things started to be derailed half an hour after the decapitation strike on February 28 against Ayatollah Khamenei and a great deal of the leadership, they had no Plan B, and they still don’t.

And what just happened a few minutes before we started talking — which is something absolutely extraordinary — when we were all expecting the beginning of the real highway to hell of bombing the electricity grid of Iran, there was Taco Trump, always checking out all over again. And why? Because he looked at the numbers, he looked at the markets, he looked at gold, he looked at the bond market, and obviously panic set in.