Loading summary
Transcript50 lines
- [00:01]
A
I'm guest host Waleed Ali and you're listening to 7:00am they're actions that don't exactly scream peace deal. The US launching fresh strikes on Iran this week in the middle of a ceasefire. Days earlier, Donald Trump had said an agreement to end the war was close. Now Iran's threatening to retaliate amid fears things could escalate again. And while Trump insists peace talks are still, quote, proceeding nicely, the president has upped the stakes for negotiators trying to turn a narrow deal over Iran, Hormuz and sanctions into something much bigger, a massive regional reset built around Israel. The Abraham Accords. Today, Middle east correspondent for the Economist Greg Karlstrom on the fragile ceasefire, Trump's bigger gamble and who will blink first in the standoff between America and Iran. It's Thursday, may 28th.
- [01:04]
B
Foreign.
- [01:09]
A
Let's start with these recent US Strikes inside Iran. What is happening exactly?
- [01:14]
C
Well, the American story here is twofold. It seems like two things happened overnight on Monday into Tuesday. One is that Iran seems to have turned on some of its air defense systems near the city of Bender Abbas, the main port city in southern Iran. The Americans would have seen that. They would have seen the Iranian air defense radars essentially lighting up. And they might have thought that Iran was attempting to shoot down either American drones or American warplanes. And so they carried out strikes on these air defenses.
- [01:53]
D
U.S. central Command says that the U.S. military conducted self defense strikes targeting Iranian missile launch sites as well as boats around the Strait of Hormuz. The attacks come as Washington and Tehran continue negotiating and as they they're also
- [02:06]
C
saying that small Iranian naval ships were attempting to go out into the Strait of Hormuz and lay mines in the strait.
- [02:15]
E
We don't have any confirmation, of course,
- [02:16]
C
that either of those things are accurate. Iran has laid mines in the strait before, so it's not entirely implausible. But either way, the Americans carried out these strikes. The Iranians are accusing them of a violation of the ceasefire.
- [02:30]
F
Iran's Foreign Ministry labeled the move a direct violation of the ongoing ceasefire, warning Iran would leave no act of aggression unanswered.
- [02:39]
E
But we saw Iran a few weeks
- [02:41]
C
ago carry out missile and drone strikes on the UAE and other countries in the Gulf.
- [02:47]
E
They don't want to resume the war in full force, but they think there
- [02:50]
C
is still some, I think, utility in
- [02:53]
E
carrying out these sorts of attacks.
- [02:55]
C
I don't think that the truce is about to collapse. It's not the first time that one
- [02:59]
E
or the other party has violated the ceasefire.
- [03:02]
C
But it's A reminder of how fragile this, this all is.
- [03:09]
A
I suppose the worst case scenario is that it might mean that the whole idea of negotiation becomes implausible. That certainly on the Iranian side, but perhaps even on both sides, no one really believes that the other side is trying to negotiate or that negotiations are in bad faith. And so they become just kind of strategic distractions while we do the things that we actually want to do. Would those sort of concerns be misguided in a situation like this?
- [03:34]
E
I think both sides went into these
- [03:37]
C
negotiations two months ago, assuming that the other one was negotiating in bad faith. I mean, that's certainly the Iranian perspective. They feel as if they've tried talking twice before with the Americans in spring of last year and then winter of this year, and both times those talks ended not just in failure, but with Iran being attacked by Israel last summer and then by America and Israel this year. So they think the Americans are entirely bad faith actors.
- [04:07]
E
And then that's also a long standing
- [04:10]
C
view on the American side. For decades now, there's been a reluctance to negotiate with Iran and a feeling that it's pointless to negotiate with Iran.
- [04:20]
E
So they both have their doubts, but at the same time, they both have an economic incentive, if nothing else, to try and negotiate. Right now, America needs the Strait of Hormuz open to try and bring down global energy prices. Iran needs it open to lift this American blockade that is causing economic damage for them. So that will push them, I think, towards at least some sort of a short term agreement that might reopen the Strait temporarily, that might ease some of that economic pressure. I think the bigger concern is what happens if they reach the interim deal that they're talking about now. They buy a bit more time, they negotiate for a few months over a final agreement, and they just can't resolve the substantive disputes between their two sides to get to a final deal.
- [05:08]
C
Do we then end up in a
- [05:09]
E
position where we've extended the ceasefire by
- [05:12]
C
a few months, but it all falls
- [05:14]
E
apart later this summer or in the autumn?
- [05:17]
A
One of those substantive disputes is Iran's nuclear program. Are the parties any closer to coming up with a formulation that will actually satisfy them? Or is this one of those intractable, insoluble points of controversy that it seems a war like this can only ever circle around, but never really solve?
- [05:35]
E
I think on some parts of the nuclear issue, they are closer. If you go back to the two previous rounds of negotiations before the war between America and Iran, the American position was pretty clear.
- [05:48]
B
They can't have a nuclear weapon. It's very simple. They can't have, you can't have peace in the Middle east if they have a nuclear weapon. And they can't have a nuclear weapon. And they've been told that very strongly
- [05:59]
E
they wanted Iran to renounce any uranium enrichment entirely. Iran was not allowed to enrich anything. And the Iranians insisted that they would never give up on what they see as their inalienable right to enrich uranium. Where we're at right now is they seem to have converged on the idea of a time bound moratorium on enrichment. So Iran won't swear it off forever, but it will agree that for a certain period of time, perhaps 10 years, 12 years, they're still negotiating over the exact duration, but Iran would swear it off for a limited amount of time. And so that is a compromise between the original positions of the two sides. So on that issue, yes, they have made progress. On other issues, there are still very big gaps, the biggest of which is Iran's stockpile of more than 400 kg of highly enriched uranium, near weapons grade uranium. America has been insisting for more than a year that Iran needs to export that, ship it outside the country to be disposed of. Iran says we won't do that. We will dilute it to a lower level of purity inside the country, but we will not send this to a third party. And that has been a real sticking point in their talks over the past couple of months. Now, Trump the other day on social media seemed to suggest that he was willing to compromise on that. He said that he could settle for dilution inside of Iran if it was supervised by what he called the Atomic Energy Commission. Now, it's not clear if he meant the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the UN's nuclear watchdog, or if he was thinking of the American Atomic Energy Commission, which is an agency that was actually dismantled back in 1974. We don't know what he meant by that. So it seemed as if maybe he was being flexible on that. But I hesitate to read too much into any one thing that Trump posts on social media these days.
- [07:56]
A
Yeah, that seems wise. But on any version of that, wouldn't that take us back to something like what we had before? Iran, a signatory to a nuclear non proliferation treaty that is subject to inspections, nonetheless has a nuclear program that it wants to try to develop, even if it's on hiatus for a little while? I suppose what I mean in saying that is if an agreement like that were to be reached, what will the war have achieved?
- [08:28]
E
I think many people would argue quite credibly that it hasn't achieved much. The details of this agreement, yes, in many ways they sound not dissimilar to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was the deal that Barack Obama negotiated and signed back in 2015, which, of course, Trump abandoned and then spent a decade calling the worst deal that America ever signed and promised that he would do something better.
- [08:54]
B
I've been doing deals for a long time. I've been making lots of wonderful deals, great deals, deals. That's what I do. Never, ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran.
- [09:14]
E
But many of these provisions sound quite similar. There are places where Trump's agreement could be inferior. I think that's part of why, over the weekend, we saw Trump seem to backtrack, where on Saturday he was saying, we're very close to a deal. It's going to be announced soon, within a couple of days, he was saying, actually, there's no rush and the deal is still being discussed and it's not done yet. I think part of the reason he did that is because he. He came in for a lot of criticism from hawkish Republicans who think he's giving away too much to the Iranians and not getting enough in return.
- [09:54]
A
Coming up, who's more desperate for a deal, America or Iran? Greg, you mentioned the pressure he's facing from Republicans on the home front. Could that be why he's now thrown in this idea of getting a lot of these Arab states around Iran to sign what's called the Abraham Accords, which normalises relations with Israel?
- [10:22]
F
In a lengthy truth social post, the President said he was mandatorily requesting that they immediately sign the Abraham Accords agreements for closer ties with Israel. If they don't, he said it shows bad intention.
- [10:36]
A
This wasn't a feature of any of the rhetoric surrounding the war beforehand. It doesn't seem there'd be any prospect, really, of them signing it here, and certainly not after the war in Gaza.
- [10:46]
F
It was reported to have been met with such a long silence that Mr. Trump asked whether the leaders were all still on the line.
- [10:54]
A
But by raising it as part of negotiations, as something that maybe the opponents of Iran in the region, America's allies in the region, might sign up to their grand bargain will have been struck. Is that the kind of image or message that Trump's going for here?
- [11:08]
E
I think that's exactly what he's doing. I mean, it was remarkable to read how that post of his on social media was worded. He was calling on Saudi Arabia and Qatar to join the Abraham Accords first as part of this broader agreement. Never mind that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are not actually meant to be signatories to the agreement between the United States and Iran, but nonetheless, he's saying they need to recognize Israel as part of this. And then he even lumped in Pakistan. And you can imagine the reaction of the Pakistani government, which has spent the past two months trying to mediate between the United States and Iran, hoping that this would improve their standing in Washington, only for Trump to turn around at the last minute and tell them, well, you need to recognize Israel as part of this. Something that would be deeply unpopular, I think, in Pakistan. It's a non starter with most of these countries and they have told him very clearly in private that they're not going to do it, they're not going to join the Abraham Accords right now, but that's why he's doing it. The hawks in Washington are unhappy about what he's negotiating with Iran, and so he's trying to sweeten the deal by adding the prospect of expanding the Abraham Accords.
- [12:21]
A
I mean, you said that any deal is likely to return things to a situation kind of like the deal that Obama struck with Iran before and that Trump had criticised as being a terrible deal. So perhaps there's not much to be gained on the deal itself if it turns out the way you say geopolitically. If the Abraham Accords are a non starter, what will have been achieved for the US or Israel by this?
- [12:48]
E
Not a whole lot, honestly. I mean, if you listen to Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, or Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, I mean, they will highlight things like the damage to Iran's navy or to Iran's air force. These are not significant strategic gains. The, the navy and the air force in Iran were mostly stocked with museum pieces that, that Iran purchased when the Shah was in power before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Yes, there's been some damage to Iran's ability to produce ballistic missiles, to fire ballistic missiles, but as we've seen over the past few months, it retains the capacity to fire enough to cause extensive damage in the Gulf countries and extensive damage to the global economy. I think the one outstanding question from the war is how bad is the damage to Iran's economy? We've seen Israeli strikes on steel mills, on petrochemical plants, on other things that are central pillars of the Iranian economy. Even government officials in Tehran acknowledge that we're talking about probably millions of people who have lost their jobs either directly or indirectly as a result of the war. So how extensive is that damage and what does it mean for the stability of the regime in the long term? I mean, I suppose that is something in a very abstract way that the Americans could point to as an accomplishment. But the goals that they set out when they went into the war of eradicating Iran's nuclear program, its ability to menace its neighbors, perhaps even trying to change the regime, they haven't achieved any of those things.
- [14:34]
A
And so as for the deal, in some ways this comes down to who's more desperate to strike a deal, who can go longer with the status quo. Out of the two, the United States and Iran, who do you think can bear this current situation longest?
- [14:48]
E
I think they're both desperate, honestly. I mean, I think it's clear that Trump is. With Americans paying $4.50 a gallon for petrol, with inflation ticking up, with voters, including many Republican voters, unhappy about all of this, it's an impossible political position for him. But for Iran as well, this blockade of their ports is having an impact. We are getting closer and closer to the point where Iran is going to have to start shutting down oil production and that risks long term damage to its oil facilities. So they would very much like to have some sort of a ceasefire that lifts that blockade and gets oil exports moving as well. So there's need on both sides. But the Iranian calculus throughout this war has been that they can last longer, not only than Donald Trump, but than the world, because the entire world's economy
- [15:44]
C
is being affected by this.
- [15:45]
E
And I am sure Trump is hearing an earful from American allies in Europe and Asia and elsewhere who are really suffering as a result of this energy shock.
- [15:58]
A
Greg, thank you so much.
- [15:59]
E
Thank you.
- [16:12]
A
Also in the news, Jobseeker is set to be overhauled in what the government has described as the biggest shake up of welfare payments in decades. Unemployed Aussies will be split into three different support tiers. A digital service for people ready to work, a provider led service for those who need to build skills and confidence, and intensive support for people with the most complex needs. Mutual obligations, the requirements jobseekers must meet to get their payment will also be tiered. And inflation has eased from a three year high, falling from 4.6 to 4.2% in April. The result was largely driven by petrol prices, which were brought down by the federal government's cut to the petrol excise, artificially reducing the cost of living. But underlying inflation, which is the main focus of the Reserve bank, rose slightly to 3.4%. I'm Willett. Ali, thanks for listening to 7:00am and I'll see you tomorrow.