ormer United States Marine Robert Brown joins me for a very personal episode of Niro on Iran. Robert is an old friend I first met in Odense and later again in Malmö, and he’s followed the U.S.–Iran story from both inside and outside the military. We start with who he is, his time in the Marine Corps and how it feels to live inside the machine and try to walk away from it, before moving into how Marines are actually taught to see Iran. From there we get into the big, uncomfortable questions: Reza Pahlavi and the idea of a ‘strong Iran,’ the morality of being a Marine when you know you’re part of a system, and the blunt strategic question – when you zoom out from tactics and look at long‑term behavior, does Washington really want the Islamic Republic and the IRGC gone, and what happens to the whole regional order if Iranians actually win?