Gen Jack Keane: Iran looks like it's ‘SETTLING IN’…

Thank you very much.With that, we bring in retired four -star General Jack Keane, former Army Vice Chief of Staff, now Chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, and Fox News Senior Strategic Analyst.General Keane, always good to have you with us, sir.Thank you.I want to go to something that your organization published earlier this week, which basically says that the IRGC commander, Vahidi, feels that sort of time is on his side, that the status quo, in some ways, works to their benefit.Quoting, it's a favorable situation that advances their objectives, such as solidifying Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz and maintaining the Iranian nuclear program.

And yet we hear from the president that he is trying to get a fire lit under them to get this done.Where do you see that going?

Yeah, well, certainly we're in almost the eighth week now of a ceasefire.And President Trump has rolled up his sleeves.He's got his team focused on trying to get a peace deal here.But I think the people that our negotiators are talking to are indicating to them that they want to make a deal.But I believe there's real tension in the organization of the regime itself, and the military guys really have the leverage.And that's Vahidi, who you mentioned at the Institute for the Study of War, identified as the kingpin here.

And you can see what he is doing to undermine negotiations.For weeks now, His forces have been attacking in the Straits of Hormuz in the Gulf area.As we were trying to ease shipping through there, kind of doing it quietly, we can do that under this ceasefire.It's not a violation of it, certainly, to move shipping in the lane that we cleared.And we've moved a lot of them through there, some 70 -plus.But he's been attacking them, and we've been, obviously, responding to that.

They shot down one of our drones that was flying in international waters just recently.And we went after it.He aired the footage.the command and control system that did that.They fired at the Arab states from time to time, at US bases this week, all undermining negotiations.And then we have this debacle going on in Lebanon.

April the 17th was the beginning of the special ceasefire in Lebanon with terms of agreement.And almost immediately, Hezbollah has violated.So here we are, much less than two months.As we indicated, they have fired rockets and drones 2 ,400 times into northern Israel, over 300 wounded civilians.Many of the towns in northern Israel and villages have had to be evacuated.Israel cannot sustain that, Martha.

Nobody could.We couldn't sustain any attack across our border into our southern towns.Drones from a cartel did something like that.So Israel responded.And they kept coming and kept coming, and then they decided to expand.And as a result of that, what happened?

Hezbollah appeals to Iran after we've killed 3 ,000 of the Hezbollah fighters.Now, remember, this is a ceasefire.And the Israelis are in a defensive mode, only able to attack when an attack is imminent or there's one being executed.Otherwise, they can't conduct offensive operations.But they were pushing out to conduct an offensive operation and go after the stronghold to see if they could finally shut this thing down.And that's when the Iranians told the president they were going to stop negotiations.

So the president got involved and settled a new ceasefire, in my view, It's going to be violated by Hezbollah initially, just as the previous ceasefire has been violated.So who is charging Hezbollah to do what they're doing?The IRGC is.They supervise the proxies.Vahidi has his grip on them.That's the reality of it.

So they are undermining negotiations to be sure and that's the tension in the regime that the administration is facing for sure and absolutely right.The more you drag this out, their idea here is is that if they can drag this out closer to the elections in the United States, and they watch what we're doing here like a hawk.They're very tuned into us.They believe, just like Russia and China believe, that if you ever get in conflict operation with the United States, what you have to do is weaken the political support for that operation with the American people.And that's what this has a lot to do with.So what they're saying to us, we get closer to the election, it's less likely that President Trump would conduct military operations if the negotiations just blow up.

Well, I think that's likely to be a miscalculation as far as I'm concerned in terms of how they're interpreting President Trump So I mean essentially from what you're saying they keep attacking even though we're in a so -called ceasefire We respond defensively to their breaches of this ceasefire and all during this time period They are working to solidify their control of the strait They even have an app now that ships can go on to get permission to you to go through the strait from Iran, so the more they establish that scenario with ships coming through, looking for approval from them, even using this app technology to get approval from Iran, you know, how difficult is it to break that format once they continue to lay it down during this so -called ceasefire?

Yeah, they recognize it exceeded their expectations, frankly, what happened.They seized the Straits of Hormuz largely through intimidation and coercion.and they were able to get control of it.And as a result of seizing the Straits of Hormuz, remember what happened.We went to a ceasefire.And that, I think, emboldened them as a result of it.

They told us that they would go into negotiation with us and work out a deal to open the Straits of Hormuz.That's what enticed us into the negotiations.That didn't happen.And then we slapped a naval blockade on them.But, yeah, they want to normalize.their control of the straits removes as much as possible.

And I would suspect one of the tension points in the negotiation is over the fact that they still want to have some organizational control over it.And that is absolutely hands off as far as President Trump and his team as it should be.We want them.This is international waters, freedom of navigation.They have no right to make any territorial claims here whatsoever.I think at some point here, We're going to need to take a hard look at returning to military action here if we're going to move these people in the right direction.

I think they're settling in to the status quo.

Looks like you're exactly right as usual.We're going to go to Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, speaking right now, but there's so much to continue.We need you here every day, General, so that we can follow this blow by blow.Thank you so much, sir.

Be sure to like and subscribe for all the Fox News latest on YouTube and catch full shows streaming now on Fox One.