August 24th, 2026 - Iran’s Regime Is Starting to Crack From Within & Piracy Rises In the Gulf of Aden

I break down the new wars and weapons systems that are totally reshaping our world in my show Cappy Army. But we go beyond simply just telling you what happened in a war, we actually investigate deeper into the why and how. At Cappy Army, everything is informed by my experience as an average US Army infantryman in Iraq and a war correspondent covering the front lines of the war in Ukraine. Just search Cappy Army on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to get weekly open source intelligence reports. And remember to follow today. It's Monday, the 24th of August. Where has the summer gone? It's gonna be winter before you know it. We'll all be singing baby it's cold outside. Welcome to the President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. First up, an apparent argument surfaces inside Iran's government over whether the Iranian regime should negotiate an end to the war or pursue confrontation. I'll have the details. Later in the show, piracy appears to be making a comeback. Somali pirates seize a suspected Iranian shadow fleet tanker in the region's second hijacking in just four days. Plus, Russia targets Ukrainian civilians and then they target the rescuers sent to save them. And in today's back of the brief, Iranian hackers may be opening another front against the West by targeting the UK's energy infrastructure. But first, today's PDB spotlight. After nearly six months of war, Iran's leadership is reportedly beginning to fracture over one increasingly urgent question. Should the regime keep fighting or negotiate a way out in order to start rebuilding an economy in crisis? Iranian President Massoud Pazeshkin said Friday that the war, as he said, must eventually end and that Iran should declare victory and negotiate while it can still claim to be acting from a position of strength. Iran's parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bakar Ghalibov, delivered a similar warning. He argued that military power cannot provide security if Iran's economy is collapsing and its people can no longer afford their daily needs. Now, that's an unusually candid message from two of the most senior officials inside the Islamic Republic. And it's also a direct challenge to the hardliners who, want Iran to maintain its demands, prepare for another round of fighting and resist any agreement that could be portrayed as surrendering to President Trump. Now, Pazeshkin and Ghalibov remain part of the regime, but just how much authority or say they have within the leadership, well, that remains in question. It is possible that the political figures within the leadership, not to mention the clerics, have been sidelined as more IRGC hardliners assume responsibility for the military and security apparatus. Supreme Leader, Mustafa Khamenei, well, he remains a mystery. It's not clear if he's alive and calling the shots, or incapacitated and sidelined, serving as essentially a rubber stamp for IRGC decision-making, or if he's in fact dead. But when senior officials begin publicly debating whether the country can afford to continue a war, it does suggest a deepening divide within the key elements of a regime. And the timing here is important. As we reported last week, President Trump is going to be the next president of Iran. And he's going to be the next president of Iran. Preparing to launch what he calls, quote, economic D-Day, an effort to cut Iran off from nearly every remaining source of trade and money and foreign investment. Trump has warned that any country, bank or business, providing the Iranian regime with an economic lifeline could face severe consequences from the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant was even more direct, saying foreign governments will effectively have to choose whether they are with Washington or against it. The administration is expected to be in a position to choose whether they are with Washington or against it. The administration is expected to reveal the details of that campaign on Monday. As an aside, China is basically Iran's most important lifeline. The effectiveness of this economic D-Day plan rests on whether China decides to cut off their support for Iran or ignore Trump's warnings. Now, we talked at length about this issue during this past weekend's PDB situation report with investigative reporter and all-around smart guy Joshua Philip. I hope you check that out. Of course, Iran's economy was already struggling before the war. The fighting, the naval blockade, and existing sanctions have driven its currency even lower, pushed up the cost of basic necessities, and made it increasingly difficult for Iranian families to afford food and medicine and fuel. Pozeshkin and Kalibov appear to understand where that pressure could eventually lead. Iran's leaders are still haunted by the unrest that erupted earlier this year. Now, mind you, they're not haunted about killing thousands of their own citizens. They seem fine with that. They're just haunted by the unrest that erupted earlier this year. They know that another economic shock could turn frustration over prices and shortages into a much broader challenge to their regime. But the economic pressure is only one part of the regime's problem. Iran may also be losing control of the Strait of Hormuz. That's the waterway that, of course, the Iranian regime has used as its greatest source of leverage throughout this conflict. Approximately 200 ships navigated that Strait last week. Now, that is up from roughly 150 the previous week and only about 40 two weeks earlier. Having said that, the traffic is still just a fraction of pre-conflict volume. Pre-conflict numbers were in the 130 vessels per day range. So, if the reporting is accurate for last week, traffic only amounted to some 25 or 30 vessels per day. Now, much of the reported increase is apparently coming through an Omani corridor backed by the U.S. and authorized by the International Maritime Organization. Iran, of course, rejects that passage route, but tankers are increasingly using it anyway. More than 80% of the liquid cargo vessels transiting Hormuz during the past two weeks either traveled through the Omani channel or turned off their tracking equipment, likely in order to quietly follow that same route. So, while the White House is correct in saying that traffic has increased through the Strait, it remains at only about 20% of its pre-war level, and Iranian forces are still capable of attacking individual ships. Five vessels were reportedly struck by Iranian projectiles over this past week. Regardless, because of the effort to further utilize the so-called Omani corridor, along with U.S. security and intel assistance to the shipping industry, Iran's position does appear to be weakening. For months, the regime's central source of leverage was its ability to threaten the waterway that once carried roughly 20% of the world's seaborne oil. If American-backed corridors allow more ships to pass without Iranian permission, or without paying whatever toll the regime demands, then that leverage does begin to disappear. And that may help explain why Iran's hardliners are becoming more threatening. Mohsen Rezaei, the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, warned on Saturday that any country helping Washington impose economic restrictions will be considered an enemy. Rezaei described a three-stage approach. Iran will first negotiate with those countries, and then it will be a three-stage approach. Iran will first negotiate with those governments. It will then warn them to distance themselves from the U.S., and if they refuse, the regime will target their interests. That threat is aimed most immediately at Iran's neighbors, the countries that Trump needs to close Tehran's smuggling routes, their financial networks, and access to foreign currency. It creates an extraordinarily difficult choice for the Gulf state governments. Cooperate with Washington and risk an Iranian missile, drone, or cyber attack. Refuse and risk losing access to the American finances. Iran will then close Tehran's smuggling routes, their financial networks, and access to financial system. And so, two competing strategies are now emerging inside the Iranian regime. Pozeshkin and Ghalibaf reportedly want to negotiate before the economy deteriorates further, their potential for civil unrest increases, and Iran's remaining leverage disappears. The IRGC and the security establishment, well, they want to frighten other countries away from cooperating with President Trump, even if that means expanding the conflict. Both factions recognize the same underlying problem. Time may no longer be working in Iran's favor. The country's economy is buckling. Ships are beginning to bypass its controls in Hormuz. Washington is preparing an even more aggressive sanctions campaign. And the people responsible for governing Iran can no longer agree publicly on whether the answer is peace or escalation. Coming up next, Somali pirates seize an Iranian-linked tanker as Russia allegedly targets Ukrainian civilians and then the rescuers in a deadly attack. I'll be right back. I break down the new wars and weapons systems that are totally reshaping our world in my show, Kappy Army. But we go beyond simply just telling you what happened in a war. We actually investigate deeper into the why and how. At Kappy Army, everything is informed by my experience as an average U.S. Army infantryman in Iraq and a war correspondent covering the front lines of the war in Ukraine. Just search Kappy Army on YouTube and you'll be able to find out more. And if you're on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to get weekly open source intelligence reports. Hey, Mike Baker here with a very important message about watching out for, safeguarding, and protecting your family's future. Now, it's not a pleasant thought, but it is an important one. If you're the provider for your family, what happens if you're no longer around? Look, things happen. You know that. Life can change quickly. You need to ensure that you can provide for your family even when you're gone. And that's why I want to talk to you about Ethos Life Insurance. That's Ethos, E-T-H-O-S. What I like about Ethos is how simple they make the whole process. Everything's done 100% online. 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And the war with Iran may be helping to create the conditions for that comeback. The latest hijacking happened on Thursday, when six armed pirates boarded the Cebu-1, roughly 130 miles off Yemen, and diverted the tanker towards Somalia. The New York Times reports there were 20 crew members on board, and it's still not known about their condition. But the Cebu-1 isn't just any tanker. The Treasury Department sanctioned the Eritrean-flagged ship last year for allegedly belonging to Iran's Shadow Fleet. That's the network that the regime uses to move petroleum products around American sanctions. Tankertrackers.com says it has also routinely carried fuel to an oil terminal in Yemen, controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthis. So, you have Somali pirates hijacking a tanker tied to Iran, and the Houthis just off Yemen. Just four days earlier, pirates seized the Cameroon-flagged Lutuf off Puntland. It was sailing from Turkey to Mogadishu, carrying weapons, communications equipment, and satellite gear destined for a military training facility. Within hours, a suspected pirate boat that had interacted with the hijackers was hit by a drone strike, killing at least four people. Regional security sources suspect Turkey carried it out, but Ankara hasn't confirmed that. And these aren't the only ships that Somali pirates have gotten their hands on. A Somali ports official noted that pirates are currently holding six vessels and more than 100 crew members hostage. In just the first five months of this year, more than 17 piracy-related incidents were documented across Somali waters and the Gulf of Aden. Now, if you remember when Somali piracy was making daily headlines, you'll know that those numbers are still nowhere close to its peak. Around 2010, Somali pirates were seized, raising hundreds of vessels and costing shipping companies and insurers billions of dollars. It took an international naval campaign involving NATO and the European Union to finally drive those numbers down. For years, that largely worked. What's changed is the environment that these pirates are operating in. The Houthis have already turned the Red Sea into a major conflict zone by firing missiles and drones at commercial shipping. Layered on that, of course, is the Iran war. Fighting and maritime partnership. The Houthis, in turn, have been fighting the Houthis for a long time. While naval assets that once focused more heavily on piracy are increasingly dealing with threats from Iran and its Houthi allies. And regional officials have raised suspicions for years that Somali pirate networks and the Houthis have developed ties of their own. Back in May, Somali pirates hijacked the Togo flag tanker Eureka off of Yemen and directed it through the Yemeni side of the Gulf of Aden towards Somalia. The relationship between the Houthis and the Somali pirates is actually unclear and there's no solid intelligence showing that the Houthis are responsible for the increased piracy activity. If these pirates were simply operating as an extension of the Houthis, hijacking an Iran-linked tanker that routinely delivered fuel to a Houthi-controlled port, that would be an odd development. The concern is that criminal networks already connect Somalia and Yemen, while the war with Iran is making piracy more legal. Oil prices have risen as the conflict disrupts global shipping, making tankers and their fuel, of course, more valuable prizes. Somali piracy was never completely defeated. It was contained. And now, as the war with Iran and the Houthis throws some of the world's most important shipping lanes into chaos, the pirates are returning to the high seas. Keeping an eye on the war in Ukraine, Russia's relentless aerial assault turned a busy shopping center in President Zelensky's hometown, into the site of a deadly strike on civilians and then their first responders. At least 16 people are confirmed dead and more than 130 wounded in the attack on Krivyi Rih. That's a central Ukrainian city about 200 miles southeast of Kyiv. Reuters reports 22 children are among the injured. The first drone hit it around 4:30 Friday afternoon, when the shopping center was busy. Then, just 30 minutes later, another Russian drone came down on the same shopping center. By that point, the people of Krivyi Rih and the people rushing into the building were the emergency workers, who were arriving to treat the civilian casualties. Zelensky accused Moscow of deliberately waiting for emergency crews to arrive before launching that second attack. It's a tactic known as a double tap. Hit a target once, wait for rescuers to respond, and then hit it again. Zelensky called the attack, quote, "absolutely cynical and despicable," saying, quote, "Attacks like these are nothing less than terrorist acts." He urged the rest of the world to hold Russia accountable and promised Ukraine, quote, "will respond definitely." But since then, rescuers have spent days digging through what's left of the shopping center. Nine people remain missing, including two children, while 29 of the wounded are in serious condition. And Zelensky's hometown is no stranger to Russian attacks. Krivyi Rih has been struck repeatedly since Putin launched his full-scale invasion, including an attack last April that killed 20 people, nine of them children. But attacks on Friday weren't enough. They weren't just confined to Zelensky's hometown. Earlier in the day, a Russian drone struck the Kharkiv region, killing two women and wounding two others. Then hours later, another Russian attack struck the southern Mykolaiv region, just east of Odessa, killing four people, including three children. Ukraine's Air Force says it intercepted or electronically suppressed 107 of the 135 Russian drones launched overnight, preventing the toll from being even worse. Just one day before the shopping center in Krivyi Rih hit, Russia subjected Kyiv to nearly nine straight hours of missile and drone attacks. The UN says 54 civilians were killed and another 202 wounded in Kyiv last month alone. Ukraine has been trying to raise the cost for Moscow with its own long-range strikes against Russian oil facilities and logistics hubs, hoping to, of course, weaken Russia's war machine and pressure Putin toward negotiations. So far, there's little indication that it's changing Putin's calculus, especially since the, the Kremlin knows that Ukraine is running dangerously low on critical Patriot missile interceptors. By the way, in a shameless bit of marketing, I'll mention that during this weekend's PDB Situation Report, we spoke at length with John Hardy from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies about Ukraine's depleted interceptor stockpile, the state of America's missile pantry, and related issues. You can catch it and past episodes on our YouTube channel @presidentsdailybrief. Coming up in the back of the brief, Iran-linked hacker, shut down a British power plant, raising fears of a broader Iranian cyber campaign. We'll have more on that when we come back. Hey, Mike Baker here with a word about personal health and weight loss. Now, you probably have heard all about this. Everybody's talking about weight loss injections, right? Because the results are so dramatic. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. So what if you're looking to lose weight, but you're not interested in painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of those, you know, side effects? 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And many thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. I break down the new wars and weapons systems that are totally reshaping our world in my show, Cappy Army. At Cappy Army, everything is informed by my experience as an average U.S. Just search Cappy Army on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to get weekly open-source intelligence reports. I'm Cappy, and I'll see you next time on Wild Alaskan. British officials aren't publicly identifying the facility for security reasons, but they say it was so small, there was never any threat to the country's overall power supply. One British government source put it this way, quote, it's a very small-scale site, less than a rounding error compared to grid capacity. A government spokesman also stressed that Britain has a, quote, highly resilient energy system, adding, quote, we work closely with the energy sector to protect infrastructure, and at no point was there a risk to the wider energy system, end quote. But that's also what makes this attack interesting. Iran didn't need to plunge London into darkness to demonstrate that hackers linked to its regime could penetrate British energy infrastructure and keep an actual power generator offline for four days. This cyber attack happened during the same period that more than 30 municipal water systems in the U.S. state of Minnesota and several other states were targeted in a wave of cyber attacks also suspected of having links to Iran. Now, that American attribution does remain disputed. President Trump has said that the U.S. is not the only country in the world to have links to Iran. The U.S. is the only country in the world to have links to Iran. The U.S. President Trump said in late July that he did not believe that Iran was behind those attacks. That may be more of a political statement than one based on solid intel. Cybersecurity researchers have been warning for months that similar attacks are increasingly hitting vulnerable water and energy systems across the U.S. The director of threat research for the AI company Dataminer told the Washington Post that these kinds of disruptions have been happening since the spring, saying, quote, there have been disruptions in multiple critical infrastructure sectors. Now, the head of intelligence for the American cybersecurity company Dragos said the attacks have generally gone after what he called, quote, very low-hanging fruit. In other words, small utilities with vulnerable systems, controllers exposed to the internet, and in some cases, default passwords still in place. That raises the possibility that the immediate objective isn't necessarily some catastrophic knockout. Going after the low-hanging fruit can still expose, vulnerability, test what works, and prove just how easily poorly protected infrastructure can be disrupted. But now we're learning one of those attacks didn't just disrupt another small American utility. If the British attack is any indication, the Iranian regime's hackers are no longer limiting that threat to American infrastructure. And that, my friends, is the President's Daily Brief for Monday, the 24th of August. If you have any questions or comments, please just reach out to me at PDB, at TheFirstTV.com. And of course, to have an ad-free PDB experience, you can do that. It's very simple. Just become a premium member of the President's Daily Brief by visiting PDBPremium.com. I'm Mike Baker, and I'll be back later today with the PDB Afternoon Bulletin. Until then, stay informed, stay safe, stay cool. you