Evening Edition: What U.S. Intervention In Iran May Look Like
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Wednesday, June 18th, 2025. I'm Eben Brown. Will the U.S. strike Iran? Whether it does or doesn't, the shape of the Middle East is changed, thanks to Israel. So Iran is about as isolated as you can possibly get, and certainly the most isolated and vulnerable and broke. This was the time. This is the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. ♪

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Calls for the U.S. to join in the airstrikes against Iran are growing, and just as loud are the calls against such a move.

Fears of involving the U.S. military in another protracted foreign conflict have stirred up discontent in many circles. But Iran, or more accurately, the regime of the Islamic Republic, has been a source of instability for the better part of 50 years.

And their goal, as they openly state, is the destruction of both Israel and the United States. Iran is behind the terrorists who have wrestled control through a number of Arab countries, and Iran is the instigator of the October 7th attacks. And according to the Israelis, they were on the cusp of a nuclear weapon to be used alongside another attempted invasion.

So Israel struck first. It is not the first time Israel struck first. It does have a 1967 vibe about it. Katie McFarland served President Trump during his first administration as Deputy National Security Advisor when the policy of maximum pressure was devised. We spoke with her earlier in the day. This one is different in the sense that Israel has systematically, carefully, sequentially gone about eliminating all of the potential threats

So for example, one of the reasons Israel could never attack Iran or would be reluctant to attack Iran for the last really 30 years is because Russia had given Iran very advanced state-of-the-art air defense systems. So that had to be taken out. And Israel did that. But that wasn't the first thing that Israel did. Israel then sequentially took out Hamas, Hezbollah. Remember the exploding pagers in people's pockets? Yeah.

It targeted the senior leadership, political and military leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah. The United States took out the Houthis. Israel then took out as the final step, once the proxy armies were done, then Israel took out the air defense systems. And that was the remaining final piece of the puzzle. And so once those are gone...

then Israel could own the skies. And so all those things in place, then Israel launches this simultaneously

brilliantly executed attack to decapitate the Iranian leadership, the military leadership, not yet the political leadership, but the military leadership. And in addition has taken out whatever missile batteries were in, you know, missile launchers that were in Iran. So not only has Israel removed the ability for Iran to take out attacking Israel forces, whether it's drones, whether it's, you know, aircraft,

whether it's missiles, but he's also taken out the ability for Iran to attack Israel.

In early days, the Iranian missiles were able to overwhelm the Iron Dome, not completely, but a few got through and caused damage. But now the estimates are that Iran maybe only has 200 missiles left, and that's easily enough for the Iron Dome to deal with. It was thought that Iran might have 2,000 missiles. It does not.

I don't mean to interrupt, but it feels almost as if Iran is a bit of a paper tiger after all these years, that they were not as perhaps strong as they were feared to be. Is that accurate or did the Israelis really just pummel them?

I think a lot of people believe the Iranian bluster. I think the Iranians themselves believe their bluster. But Iran was a formidable force a year ago, and they certainly were a formidable force in the Obama and Biden administrations because they had the political ear and sympathetic ear of the Biden administration, and particularly the Obama administration, not of Trump, obviously. The other thing that sort of happened simultaneously, Israel's doing the military stuff. What's the U.S. doing?

Indirectly, we're weakening Iran and it was called the Mass Maximum Pressure Campaign, which we, when I was at the NSC in Trump 1.0, we developed this and we realized we couldn't just do one thing. We couldn't just do military, political, economic. We would do them all together, all at the same time, squeezed sequentially all around Iran. And what President Trump did was we had sanctions against Iran's ability to sell oil. We had sanctions against Iran's ability to use the international banking system.

We went to countries and said, "Don't do business with Iran." And so the Iranian economy, because oil and natural gas, but particularly oil exports are the only way they fund everything. I mean, who buys Iranian computers or who buys Iranian cars?

Nothing. So oil, it was all about oil. And then the second thing was that as President Trump's energy policies came in with the abundance of American fracking of shale oil, shale gas, by in his first term where he

Drill, baby, drill. And then particularly now, drill, baby, drill, the price of oil has come way down. So when President Trump took office, the first time oil was about $140 a barrel at points in the Obama administration. Trump bought it down to $40 a barrel. So Iran's income stream was cut by two-thirds.

Biden comes back in. Biden has the Obama policies. Oil goes back up. Iran has probably $100 billion of extra money that they use to supply Hamas and Hezbollah. Trump is bringing the price back down. So again, Iran has no money.

It has no proxies. It has no air defense system. And then Iran's pals, right, China and Russia, have stayed out. Russia's preoccupied in Ukraine. And China only gets involved if there's something in it for China. And so China doesn't see that there's anything in it for China. So Iran is about as isolated as you can possibly get.

and certainly the most isolated and vulnerable and broke, this was the time. Yeah, there's been a lot of discussion in the term which makes a lot of Americans a little uneasy, and that is the term regime change. And I think that they draw up the image of Iraq and the idea of tens of thousands of American troops going in to try to instantly pop up a Jeffersonian democracy after overthrowing a despot.

It doesn't have to look that way, does it? I mean, and Iran is not Iraq. I kind of tend to think that we don't have the potential for the sectarian violence like we saw in Iraq, right?

Well, there are several reasons why, I mean, the forever war isn't going to happen, whether it was in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya. You know, we knocked over dictators and then we tried to boss them around and tell them what kind of government they want. President Trump has been vocal. I mean, one of the first speech he made in Trump 1.0 and then the speech he made.

when he went to the Middle East in Trump 2.0 was, "We are not going to tell you how to run your affairs. You can choose your own government. You can choose your own leaders. You can worship your own God in your own way. That's your business."

And so it was a signal to everyone that we are not going to be the Bush Republican Party. We're not going to be the Obama interventionists. You know, you figure it out. If you want regime change, that's up to you. It's not up to us. And if you want a regime change, you want a new government, that's up to you. We're not going to force this down your throat. So that was number one. We went into it. And then President Trump also for 40 years has talked about no more forever wars. I mean, going back to Vietnam, no more forever wars. And so what's going to happen now? Are there there are no U.S. troops on the ground?

There's no ability for Iran to go after American forces, even in the region, unless it's a one-off, maybe terrorist attack. You know, small potatoes. There's no way that Iran can launch some big missile barrage at an American aircraft carrier. So I think it's very different than the interventionist, neocon approach of the liberal Democrats and the neocon Republicans. This is a Trump approach, which is no boots on the ground, surgically from the air,

Regime, that's all your business. If you want to change your regime, that's fine. But you've got to assume that, okay, so I've been in this situation room with President Trump in a situation like this, where he's now going around the room and he's asking the Secretary of State, Defense, Intelligence, what are you hearing?

"What are your capabilities?" So he's asking Pete Hegseth, "What capabilities do you have in the Middle East? How vulnerable are they?" He's asking Marco Rubio, "Is negotiating dead?" He's asking the intelligence chiefs, "What do you think is going on in Iran right now?"

You've got to assume that he's also talking to the Israeli government and saying, "Masad, you guys have the best intelligence. You have so thoroughly penetrated the Iranian military and government. What do you think is going to happen?" So it's not just taking out Fordow and the Bunker Buster bombs. It's what do the Iranian people do? Do they have an internal coup? I mean, to me, if it was... I'm taking bets. I think there's a group around the Ayatollah who says, "Okay, the Ayatollah is 86 years old and dying of cancer. He's going down with a ship."

But do we want to do that? And so is anybody reaching out, say, through a third party, through Qatar, saying, we're willing to talk, just don't destroy our country. And that's the next thing Trump will look at is he's reduced the risks of any kind of American involvement. I don't think he's made the decision yet. He's going to see what Israel is capable of doing.

But the big question is, what happens the day after? Which is your point? You know, when we boss them around and install our own leaders. No, it's going to be up to Iran. But who? Katie McFarland is our guest. She was a deputy national security advisor for President Trump in his first term. We're discussing Iran and Israel and what the U.S. should do on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. Please like and subscribe. We'll have more straight ahead.

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And we talk about the American involvement. The Israelis have responded to this notion of the Americans dropping the big bunker busters on the Fordow facility of saying, look, we're prepared to destroy that facility in our own way. It's going to take us longer, meaning the Israelis. It'd be a bit more dangerous. And I think the calculus is if the Americans flew the B-2 and dropped that thing, it would be kind of over much more quickly. But...

You know, is that really something the United States should do or should they keep out of it and and put up only that defensive edge, you know, to protect the incoming, you know, protect from the incoming fire? A lot of that will be the calculus of risk. You know, every military engagement has a risk.

If they can, if President Trump in his own mind is minimizing the risk of the United States either going wrong, retaliation, whatever, you know, other countries in the world coming up against us and chastising us for that, he'll take that into consideration. But if he can reduce the risk to almost nothing, you know, like you say, over and done.

And if there is some sense that the other countries in the region, remember, President Trump will be talking to all the leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. These are guys he just saw a month ago, right? These are his pals. And so he's now talking to them and maybe they're publicly issuing, oh, this is so terrible. What are they saying in private? They're private. They're probably saying, go get them. You know, Iran has been a curse to all of us for 40 years. Get it done. The other interesting thing is that China and Russia are absent.

These are Iran's big pals, right? Russia's preoccupied in Ukraine and China gets Iran's oil, but I don't think China wants to risk being involved in any way. So again, Iran is isolated, has almost no ability to retaliate other than maybe a one-off sleeper terrorist cell somewhere in the world. And if it's ever going to happen, this is when it happens.

This would, should it happen, and it comes to an end for the Islamic regime, this ends 46 awful years in Iran, which began with attacks against Americans. It's something that kind of went unresponded to for quite a long time.

Yeah. So I was in the Pentagon in the Reagan administration when the terrorist groups funded by Iran, Hezbollah, blew up the Marine barracks. I was also in the Pentagon when my militant, the guy who'd worked for me, a Marine colonel, went to the region and was captured, tortured and taken hostage and killed.

Again, by the same Iran-funded terrorist groups. So Iran has been at war with us for, as you say, 46 years. When people say, oh, we can't possibly risk another war in the Middle East. No, we're not going to risk another war in the Middle East, but we might end the war in the Middle East because they've been at war with us going back to the late 1970s when they took Americans hostage. Right.

All right, Katie McFarland, former Trump deputy national security advisor. Thank you so much for being with us on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. Thank you so much.

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