White House AI Czar David Sacks is urging the Trump administration to take a victory lap and get out of Iran.
In a new episode of the All-In podcast, Sacks says the US has done enough damage that it’s time to seriously think about de-escalating the situation in the Middle East.
“We’ve degraded Iranian capabilities massively: their army, Navy, Air Force have all been destroyed. This is a good time to declare victory and get out. And that is clearly what the markets would like to see.”
But according to Sacks, he’s hearing whispers that some people in the government, “not exclusively in the Republican Party,” want to escalate the conflict in Iran. Sacks warns that taking an escalatory approach could ultimately lead to a catastrophic scenario for tens of millions of people living in the Gulf States.
“There’s an even worse, I think, scenario from there, which is that the region is very dependent on desalination plants. I think something like 70% of Riyadh gets its water from desalination. I think it’s something like 100 million people on the Arabian Peninsula that get their water from desalination.
I mean, it’s basically a desert, and those desal plants are soft targets. You already saw that there was one desal plant in Iran that got hit. And then it caused Iran, again, tit for tat, to hit a desal plant. I think it was in Kuwait. I could be off about that.
But in any event, if you see that type of destruction continue, you could literally render the Gulf almost uninhabitable. You’re not going to have enough water for 100 million people. And human beings just cannot survive very long without water. So that would be a truly catastrophic scenario. And we’re talking about destroying the Gulf States economically, and then also from a humanitarian perspective.”
Earlier this week, reports emerged that an Iranian drone had damaged a desalination plant in Bahrain in response to the targeting of a desalination facility located in the south of Iran. Officials in Bahrain said the damage did not affect supplies but highlighted that the attack was indiscriminate.
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