Delano D'Souza is pleased to welcome Elisa Catalano Ewers, Senior Fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Our guest sees Israeli strategy as driven by a perceived window of opportunity to destabilize the Iranian regime from within. Their approach is not one of immediate collapse, but of calculated and sustained pressure, targeting leadership structures and security capabilities in ways designed to accumulate strain over time. Ms. Catalano Ewers finds many external assumptions deeply flawed, particularly the expectation that the Iranian population can mobilize under sustained bombardment. And te recent targeting of figures like Larijani further complicates the picture. While tactically significant, such actions risk eliminating channels for diplomacy, narrowing the already limited pathways toward de-escalation.