The Iran Breakdown with Mark Dubowitz

Riyadh is pressing Washington with a blunt message: don't leave the job half-finished.
Saudi Arabia publicly condemned the strikes — and privately urged Trump to launch them. Now MBS faces the question he's long telegraphed: if Iran gets a bomb, the Kingdom follows. With IAEA inspectors locked out, is that still a signal — or active policy?
Bernard Haykel, Princeton's foremost scholar of the Arabian Peninsula and author of the forthcoming book, The Realm: MBS and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia, joins Mark Dubowitz to break down what Riyadh wants, what it's willing to do, and what Washington still misunderstands about the man running the Kingdom.

No tanks. No invasion. No march on Tehran.
Instead: a methodical campaign to dismantle Iran’s war machine — missiles, drones, command networks, and the economy keeping it all alive.
But can you break a regime by breaking the system that sustains it?
Urban warfare expert John Spencer joins Mark Dubowitz to unpack the real logic of this war — from the “neurological” battlefield to the fight over Hormuz — and what victory actually looks like when there’s no surrender to sign.

Iran isn’t just under pressure. It’s under siege.
Its currency is collapsing. Its ports are constrained. Billions are bleeding out as war damage mounts and oil revenue tightens.
This isn’t sanctions as usual. It’s economic warfare—aimed at the regime’s ability to survive.
The question now: Does this force Tehran to the table… or push it toward something far more dangerous?

Back in January, the regime carried out the deadliest crackdown in modern Iranian history.
As it gunned down protesters in the streets, it launched a parallel war online. A coordinated campaign to turn a domestic uprising into a so-called CIA–Mossad plot — rewriting the story in real time and pushing that narrative deep into Western discourse.
The January crackdown and the narrative battle that accompanied it aren’t isolated incidents. They set conditions for the war that followed, shaping global perception before a single American fighter jet took flight.
So, was all of this just another page from the regime’s standard propaganda playbook? Or is information warfare now a core pillar of its survival?

For years, Washington has leaned on sanctions to contain Iran’s most dangerous capabilities.
Tehran’s drone and missile programs didn’t just survive under pressure, they adapted, scaled, and in many ways thrived, fueled in part by Western-made components slipping through global supply chains.
The result: a procurement network that’s harder to disrupt, more resilient, and still very much intact.
Now, Tehran isn’t just building for itself. It’s exporting the model — arming Russia in Ukraine, supplying proxies across the Middle East, and even laying the groundwork for drone production in places like Venezuela, putting parts of the United States within range.
So the question isn’t whether sanctions work — it’s whether we’re hitting the right targets.
To break all of this down, host Mark Dubowitz is joined by Kerri Bitsoff — a former senior official at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) who has been called a ‘secret weapon’ in the fight against Iran's weapons procurement.