pressure tremendously. the iranians are responding in various ways. does it worry you that this kind of escalation spiral without a clear exit strategy, without a clear ramp that people can take, could lead to miscalculations? >> absolutely. i am, frankly, terrified of that possibility. i do believe that ultimately both the iranian government and our administration and our military do not want a major military confrontation. but as you say, once you start getting into tit for tat and the tits and tats are a symmetric, a military strike versus cyber responses versus across the middle east by iranians proxies against american assets and american personnel, this has every possibility of going out