Mark Dubowitz

Energy Wars: America, Iran and the Battle of Hormuz

Mark Dubowitz — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:18:47 GMT

FDD’s Rich Goldberg helped stand up the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council and served in the first Trump administration on Iran nuclear issues. He spent years in Congress as one of the lead architects of the Iran sanctions campaign and served in the U.S. Navy.

His framework for victory is blunt. As he puts it, the strategy is to “squeeze this regime, all of the lifeblood out of the regime financially and destabilize it,” while getting oil out of Hormuz “not by paying any sort of extortion racket.”

Rich says the U.S. is already pulling eight to nine million barrels a day out of the Strait of Hormuz, far above outside analyst estimates. He argues Iran chose to activate its Hormuz leverage at the worst possible moment for itself.

“I think we got real,” he says. “I think we got imminent because the threat was imminent.” He calls Iran’s parallel missile buildup a potential “missile breakout,” warning that thousands of missiles would eventually make Hormuz “a latent threat” the U.S. couldn’t deter.

After Iran: Is Erdogan’s Turkey the Middle East’s Next Great Threat?

Mark Dubowitz — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:18:23 GMT

CFR’s Steven A. Cook is a longtime Turkey watcher who lived in the country and has tracked its politics since the secular era of the 1990s. FDD’s and I investigated Turkey’s role in Iran sanctions evasion, working with the Justice Department on the “gas-for-gold scheme,” a $20 billion cash-and-gold pipeline for the Iranian regime between 2012 and 2016.

Both men see a pattern in Erdogan’s foreign policy. As Schanzer puts it, “If you ask me, the Turks have actually already filled the void of the next Iran.”

Turkey’s rise is not accidental, according to my guests. Schanzer argues Ankara has built a new “ring of fire” around Israel, stretching from Gaza to the Horn of Africa. Cook adds a caveat on ideology: “It’s not really surprising to me what the AKP has been able to accomplish in Turkey, which is the Islamization without it becoming a theocracy.” Together they describe a NATO member acting less like a partner and more like a rival power filling the space Iran is losing.

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Steven and Jon joined me on The Iran Breakdown this week to discuss whether Turkey is becoming the Middle East’s next great revisionist power as Iran weakens.

We also discuss Turkey’s acquisition of the S-400 missile system and its expulsion from the F-35 program; Ankara’s support for Hamas and the group’s base in Istanbul since the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner swap; Turkey’s growing military footprint in Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus; and whether Israel and Turkey could exchange fire within five years.

At the end of the episode, Steven and Jon run through a lightning round on Turkey’s nuclear ambitions, Erdogan’s likely successors, and how they each rate Turkey as ally, rival, or adversary.

The Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary DNA

Mark Dubowitz — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:29:18 GMT

is one of Israel's most important public intellectuals and hosts his own popular podcast, Ask Haviv Anything.

His method is to trace ideas back to their sources. As he puts it, the Iranian regime is not a normal state pursuing security and prosperity but "a revolutionary project" organized around "perpetual mukawama, perpetual resistance."

Rettig Gur's thesis is that the Islamic Republic runs on an engine most Western policymakers misread. "The people ruling Iran today are a cult of redemptive martyrdom," he says, tracing the doctrine through Mao's protracted people's war, Frantz Fanon's writing on violence, and Shia theology.

That is why conventional pressure keeps failing. "When you decapitate the Iranian regime, it's the opposite," he says. "It doesn't generate that kind of calculation of cost that to a Western thinking would seem to make sense."

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The same ideology, he argues, is also the regime's exposure. Its true vulnerability is internal, a population that overwhelmingly "prefers life to martyrdom."
Haviv joined me on The Iran Breakdown this week to discuss why the Islamic Republic's revolutionary ideology is both its greatest strength and its deepest weakness.

We also discuss the intellectual lineage running from Ali Shariati's 1971 "Red Shiism versus Black Shiism" speech to Ruhollah Khomeini himself; the gap between Iran's GDP per capita and Israel's since the two countries started at parity roughly three decades ago; the Woman, Life, Freedom protests and what the word "life" reveals about the regime's core weakness; and Hezbollah's collapse in Arab public opinion after its deployment to Syria on Assad's behalf.

We love hearing your thoughts. Please comment below or email my team at podcasts@fdd.org.