➡ Evan DeMarce from Trend Journal interviewed Professor Mohammed Marandi from the University of Tehran. They discussed the current political situation between Iran and the Trump administration, comparing it to a scene from a movie where a conflict escalates unexpectedly. Marandi criticizes the Trump administration’s handling of the situation and accuses Western media of bias. He also discusses Iran’s military capabilities and the country’s readiness for prolonged conflict, and expresses skepticism about negotiations with the U.S. due to past experiences.
➡ The article discusses the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran, suggesting that Israel might be content with a divided Iran. It questions the U.S.’s preparedness for the conflict and criticizes its intelligence. The article also predicts that the war will have a significant economic impact on the U.S., potentially leading to a crisis. It concludes by suggesting that the conflict could ultimately weaken the U.S.’s influence in the Middle East and strengthen Iran’s position.
➡ The Zionist regime’s policy of violence in Lebanon is weakening its own support base, which could eventually lead to its downfall, according to Professor Mohammed Burandi. He shared these views during an interview with the Trend Journal, where he also expressed his appreciation for their work.

Hello, my name is Evan DeMarce. I’m the executive editor of the Trend Journal. I’m happy to be joined with Professor Mohammed Marandi from the University of Tehran today. Professor Marandi, thank you for joining the Trend Journal as always. It’s a great pleasure. Thank you for having me. There is a famous movie here in the United States, a Bronx town, and it’s with Chaz Palminteri. There’s a scene in a bar where these bikers are acting up, smashing beer bottles. And Chaz Palminteri’s character who’s in a suit, he’s with his fellow mobsters. He walks up to them and he says, hey guys, if you don’t straighten up, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.

And one of the bikers is the head biker goes, sir, sorry about that. Yes, we’re going to be fine, but we apologize. Please don’t kick us out. Chaz Palminteri’s like, hey, you know, you guys spoke to me like gentlemen. And he goes back to his friends and he goes, hey guys, get these. He tells his bartender to get them another round, goes back to his friends. Second later, these bikers smash a bottle of beer again, go crazy and pour liquor on the bartender and see Chaz Palminteri get up and he walks to the bar door and he locks it and he goes, now you guys can’t leave.

That strikes me as something that’s happening right now with the Trump administration in Iran. Does that sound like something that you would agree with? Yes, except for the fact that the Iranians are not the mafia. They’re the good guys. And Trump is the mafia and they’re the bad guys. They’re the Epstein class. But I agree. The Trump regime miscalculated big time. And we could tell from the very beginning when Trump said that I didn’t think they would attack US assets in the Persian Gulf. And also, I think Western intelligence agencies and Mossad showed their incompetence because they were constantly giving out numbers of Iranian missiles, if you recall, in the past, which obviously were completely inaccurate.

And that was something that I was saying for quite a long time, that the numbers that the Western media and Israeli media threw, of course, sources and the Mossad and CIA and MI6 and so on. Those numbers were just ridiculous and Iran’s capabilities are far greater than what is claimed. And we’re seeing that play out today. Iranians are hammering the Israeli regime. They’re hammering US assets and striking targets across the region, which are being used against the Iranian people. And there is no doubt that the Iranians obviously have been able to hide their capabilities from Western intelligence agencies and their intentions from Western intelligence agencies.

So now Trump is stuck. He has launched a murderous war. Western media being captured and being owned by the oligarchs has been trying to demonize Iran and delegitimize Iran in the eyes of ordinary Americans and Westerners. But the fact is that they’ve been carrying out atrocities since they won. And today we had the International Quds Day rallies across the country, which I’m sure many people have seen online. They won’t see it in the Western media for the most part. And in Tehran, we had millions of people on the streets, millions. Even though a lot of people are not in Tehran, they’ve left because of the war.

The government encouraged people to leave. But people can watch the footage online and they bombed the demonstration. And I posted it online. They bombed the demonstration. And one woman was murdered. Yet, Western media is silent. I mean, this would normally be the top news story in the world, that missiles are launched at protesters. I mean, they pretend and lie that the Iranian government guns down peaceful protesters, which is nonsense. But here, they find missiles at peaceful protesters. And yet the Western media is silent. And that just shows how bankrupt they are. So these actions, these crimes have united people even further.

They’ve made the global community, the international community, people across the world, sympathetic towards Iran. They’ve delegitimized themselves further, even though what they’ve done in Gaza and Lebanon has already delegitimized them. But on the battlefield, they failed. Iran is firing missiles and drones 24 hours a day. And also, no oil or gas leaves the Persian Gulf without Iranian consent. And this is something that Trump and Netanyahu, this is a crisis that they’ve created for the world. Zionists don’t care about anyone but themselves. They don’t care about the American people. They don’t care about the Indian people. They don’t care about the Europeans or people across Asia or Africa or Latin America.

We did not want this war, but we are fighting for our survival. They imposed this war, and now they’re trapped. And the only way out is for Iran’s conditions to be met. And those conditions are linked to the security of its allies across the region. It’s linked to Iran’s long-term security. A piece of paper is not going to work. Facts on the ground have to change. Conficit regimes in the Persian Gulf is our family dictatorships. If they last, Iran will make sure that they are no longer a threat to Iran, and they will pay compensation for what they’ve done to the Iranian people.

So it’s quite clear that Trump is stuck, Netanyahu is stuck, and the Epstein class is stuck. And I think this war will continue for the time being. Iran is prepared for war until after the midterm election. I’ve heard one Iranian official say that Iran can fight for 10 years with the missile stocks that it currently has. So it seems as though, at least from some people in Iran, that the war could last much longer than even the midterm elections, if need be. Do you think that that’s an accurate statement? Without a doubt, Iranian factories that produce those drones and missiles are all underground.

The reason why Trump is so angry and so vicious in his bombing of peaceful protesters and his bombing of schools and hospitals is because he’s failed to destroy Iran’s military capabilities. So he’s taking revenge. He and the Zionist regime are taking revenge on ordinary rockets. What does Iran want? So right now there’s been rumors, some reports in the US, that the Trump administration has sent some overtures potentially through Oman to contact Iranians. Let’s sit down and talk again. You mentioned before that the US would need to meet Iran’s terms. But can you tell our viewers what Iran wants right now? What’s the off-ramp look like? Well, I did sort of allude to it before.

The US has sent many messages, but the problem is that we can’t trust the United States. We’ve negotiated three times in recent years. The JCPOA, they tore it up, trumped it. We negotiated before the previous war, eight, nine months ago. They secretly conspired and attacked us, like the Nazis who carried out a blitzkrieg attack in Europe. And then this attack as we were negotiating and the Omani foreign minister was saying progress had been made. So negotiating with the United States is useless. Any paper signed by Trump is a worthless piece of paper. So any agreement ultimately will have to be an agreement where facts on the ground change.

When Iranians watch people like Trump and Hegseth, Trump called Iranian leadership scumbags in a post on Truth Social yesterday. You hear Pete Hegseth’s bellicose language towards Iranians and what the US is doing and how we’re leaving almost a scorched earth behind. What does that do to the average Iranian? How do they receive messages like that from the Trump White House? No one in Iran cares about Trump or Hegseth. But what Iranians do find very fascinating is that Trump can say that he can destroy Iran and make sure that it ceases to exist and can never rebuild the nation.

And Western media is indifferent. And it reminds me about what happened a few weeks ago when he lost the Supreme Court case and he was angry in the press conference and he said, I’m allowed to destroy countries but I can’t impose tariffs for a single dollar. And then no one in the Western media said anything about destroying countries. The lack of morality across the board in Western media, whether in the Guardian or Breitbart, whether in the New York Times or Sky News, is evident for everyone to see. And it shows that Western media is the same as these Western regimes.

They’re all controlled by the same class of people, the Epstein class, of course. So that is what is important. Otherwise, the garbage that the U.S. Secretary of War says, I mean, he’s a drunkard, and Trump, he’s not terribly sane, is not surprising to Iranians. What is surprising is that even the opponents of the Trump regime, not the empire, because they’re not opposed to the Guardian and the Independent and the New York Times, they’re not opposed to empire. But they’re opposed to Trump. When it comes to Iran and the people of our region, they are equally sinister.

I watched an interview with, I know you know him, Professor John Mearsheimer, yesterday. I think I forgot what Joey was on. But he said that Israel’s plan B, he thinks that they would have preferred a quick regime change to get a pro-Israel, pro-American government in Iran, quickly, day one. That would have been maybe the ideal. He said it’s clear that Israel would be almost equally content with fracturing Iran. Now that we passed the initial opening strike, that could have been very well a decapitation strike, certainly it killed the Ayatollah. But now he’s saying that given that the war is extending and it looks like there’s no one in sight, Israel would be very content with a fractured Iran.

When you hear something like that, how likely is it that Iran becomes a fractured state similar to something we see in Syria and what looks like is happening right now in Lebanon, how that keeps getting bombed by Israel. So do you think Iran is vulnerable to a similar fate? No. If anything, Edmund, if anything, Iran is growing much stronger. And those proxies in our region are growing weaker. And Iranians are discovering their power. And so if anything, I don’t think any borders will change, but if they change, Iran is going to be bigger. When Trump’s making these decisions, is it him being naive? Is it him not knowing the region? Is it surrounding himself with sycophants that have no concept about Iran’s power? How is it possible that the White House was so unprepared for this result? We saw Hegseth today at a press conference, and he insisted to reporters that the US knew that Iran would try to take the Strait of Urmuz hostage.

He said the US knew about this, and yet here we are. Iran controls the Strait of Urmuz without obviously going into details. How is it possible that with our intelligence, with Israel’s intelligence in Iran, how could we get into something so cavalierly? Well, they don’t have good intelligence. Of course, Iran hasn’t taken the Strait of Urmuz hostage. The regimes in the Persian Gulf region, these Arab family dictatorships, they gave the United States many bases. They allowed the United States to conspire against Iran, to attack Iran, to use their airspace, to use those bases, and to use their territory to attack Iran.

So they’re all complicit. And so if Iran halts their ships in the Strait of Urmuz, they should have thought about this before helping murder Iranian children. But I don’t think that Mossad intelligence is any good. As I said earlier, they had no clue about the number of missiles and drones Iran has. And from what Trump himself said when he said he didn’t think that they would strike the Persian Gulf, it’s clear that their understanding of Iranians’ military plans were deeply flawed. So it’s either that Western intelligence agencies were ignorant about the facts on the ground, or that the Israeli first source who controlled Washington were hiding the facts from Trump and misleading him to push him towards war.

It could be both. It could be a mix of the two. But it doesn’t put Western intelligence agencies in a good light either way. Professor, where does this leave the U.S. influence in the Middle East? Do we see the U.S. now starting to eventually pull back from the Middle East? Or do you think that a war like this would make Washington want to strengthen its foothold in the Middle East? What do you think will be, of course no one knows for sure, but where do you see this leading? Do you see the U.S. backtracking and reconsidering its deployments and bases in the Middle East? Or do you think that the U.S.

will say, hey, this is incentive to make sure that we keep flooding the zone, keep building bases? What do you think happens in the long run? I think the U.S. would like to strengthen its foothold to the detriment of the American people, because it’s only increasing costs and hurting ordinary Americans more. And it’s destroying the U.S. image even further in the eyes of people across the world. But I think what will happen is that the United States will ultimately be forced to withdraw. No one should underestimate, and I know you know this better than I, Edmund, because of your journal and your expertise.

So I’ll be cautious about speaking too much about the economy. But no one should underestimate the economic impact that this war is going to have on the United States. And I’m not talking about the military expenditure, which is far greater than what they say it is. Bringing all these forces here and the logistical problems and the costs to sustain the war. All that aside, but the economic implications that the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz has, and the fact that the economies in the Persian Gulf region, these Arab family dictatorships, are all falling apart, and they are bound to the U.S.

And the United States extracts huge amounts of wealth from these countries because they milk them. So these tiny countries are never going to be what they were before. And so the United States, at multiple levels, is going to be hurt. And the longer this war lasts, the worse it is going to get for the American people. And at some point, I think it’s going to create an economic crisis. Of course, if the war expands, it will definitely create a depression far, far worse, I believe, than 1929. But even as things stand, the global economy will suffer immensely in order that this war lasts the worse it gets.

And I think that will make it unsustainable for Washington. And I think ultimately, this will bring an end to the Trump presidency. Whether he stays in power for now until the rest of his term is irrelevant. But I think, on the other hand, the Iranians emerge stronger because the Iranian people are extremely united, and the world has rallied behind Iran. And I think after this war, many powerful countries across the global majority will want to have close relations with Iran. My last point, Professor, is back when the Iranian president took office, over a year ago, maybe over a year and a half ago, we wrote in the Trends Journal, that one of the things that Israel needs to do is present its neighbors as menacing, and as adversarial, and as unpredictable.

But anyone who knew about the new, well, he’s not new anymore, but the Iranian president knows that he’s a doctor. He wanted better, more stable relations with the West. And we wrote that Watch Israel try to spark a war because they can’t have what looks like a tolerant, stable government in Iran. They need to make Iran look dangerous and menacing, and here we are. So that’s generally what the Trends Journal does, is we try to analyze. Are you still there? I think you might be frozen. I hear you loud and clear. Okay, I thought I was so profound that you were looking into the camera with a fixed gaze.

But yeah, that was our point. We wrote it in the Trends Journal when he first took office. We put a trend forecast and we said, watch for Israel to try to stir tension because he’s a moderate and he’s someone who reached out or at least considered dealing with the West. And that can’t be tolerated by Israel because Israel needs to make its neighbors look, as I mentioned, aggressive and dangerous and tyrannical. Do you agree with that statement? How much of that statement do you agree with? I think I agree, although I would argue that President Raisi, the former president who died sadly in the helicopter crash, he was very much a moderate.

We had nuclear negotiations and we had almost reached an agreement. Joseph Borrell, who was the EU foreign policy chief at the end said, Iranian demands are reasonable and we thought we had a deal. And ultimately, Biden did not accept it. And that was probably under pressure from the Israeli regime. So Iran has always been reasonable, but I think that you’re correct that President Pazish Khan did send clear signals. And of course, the Israeli regime does not want peace in our region and does not want normalization between the United States and Iran. The Israeli regime wants war, death and destruction.

It does not care about the American people. It will sacrifice the American people very easily. But I think it is ultimately happening. I think you’re breaking up at the moment, Professor. Do you hear me? Where did you last hear me? What was I saying? We were talking about Israel’s approach to the region. They don’t want stabilized region. They want the war and want the conflict. That’s where you started to just break up a little bit. Can you just repeat a part of that? So the Israeli regime does not want stability in the region.

They want war and conflict. And they don’t care about the interests of the American people or the interests of the Indian people or the Europeans or anyone in the world. And they don’t care about what’s happening in the Strait of Hormos. Of course, I think in the long run, the Israeli regime will suffer the most because as the United States is weakened, ordinary Americans will blame the Israeli regime for this war. And so will people across the world. And that makes things worse for this apartheid genocidal regime. The United States and Qatar, they all work together to destroy Syria.

That’s why they’ve tried to undermine Iran. That’s why they’re constantly killing people in Lebanon. And so on. So that will always be the policy of the Zionist regime. But again, I think that in the long run, by pushing for these policies, they are destroying their own support base. And that, I think, will ultimately lead to the end of the regime at some point. Professor Mohammed Burandi, thank you for joining the Trend Journal. As always, please stay safe out there. And it’s always great to hear your perspective on what’s going on over there. Thank you very much for having me.

It’s always a pleasure. And thank you for all the great work you do. [tr:trw].

See more of Trends Journal on their Public Channel and the MPN Trends Journal channel.