← Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
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This is a Global Player original podcast.
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Some people thought he was preparing to drop a nuke. I never believed that. But many smart people thought that that's what he was telegraphing.
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Prime Minister Netanyahu, who told President Trump that this was a chance to overthrow the regime. They were wrong.
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Pete Hegseth needs to check his language then, because he's been saying the shackles are off. Just pooh, poohing all the things that you rightly say. American forces are trained to respect and to foreign. And welcome to the bonus episode of the X Files. This is where we get to answer your questions. So let's get started. Jamie, I'm going to ask the first one because I think you're probably well positioned to answer it. Many believe, says Tony on email, that Trump was drawn into this war by Netanyahu. With Israel losing global support, especially among young people due to Gaza and Lebanon, what are the chances this backfires long term, harming the US Israel relationship and creating more problems for Israel?
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A
It's a very sophisticated question because it talks about the criticality of having bipartisan support in the United States for Israel, something that has existed for a very, very long time. In our earlier episode this week, Christian and I, Christiane and I talked a little bit about the war in Hamas that against Hamas that President Biden was largely supportive of. I find it hard to believe that a Democratic president in the future will be as support as someone like Joe Biden was in the Democratic Party. I think the Democratic Party has changed in its relationship to Israel, and that is not so much due to the Democrats as due to the leadership in Israel that has taken for granted the American bipartisan system and really only worked closely with Republicans. They've made it very clear going back to the Obama administration, Prime Minister Netanyahu has alienated Democratic presidents over and over again. And he's taken policies that now now pursued policies that now the Democratic Party as a party is not much less comfortable with. So this is going to now be an issue in the Democratic Party. What it happens in the Republican Party, I wouldn't expect to change that much.
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But listen, it's changing a bit, especially young people.
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For some young people who thought that, you know, that this was going to be an administration that wasn't going to get us bogged down in the Middle east, we should say, point out that we are as bogged down in the Middle east as we ever have been. Now we're talking about a naval blockade. That means our navy is going to be focused on the Strait of Hormuz rather than all the other shipping lanes and all the other threats we have in the world. But meanwhile, Israel, you know, this is a tougher call. Israel has benefited from the results of the post October 7th war. The Hamas leaders who launched October 7th made the biggest mistake extremists can make. They didn't predict the overreaction, arguably by, by the Israelis in certain cases inside Gaza, but the reaction that took place that yielded not only the Israelis back in Gaza, but the virtual destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the attack on Iran, the end of the Syrian regime which was supporting them. So a cascade of dominoes was the result of October 7, and Israel has benefited from that. But Israelis don't necessarily feel it. Israelis don't necessarily feel that they've won this war because all that's really happened is the struggle that was going on largely behind the scenes through terrorism has now turned into a full scale war that they're dealing with every day. That hasn't yielded any obvious solution to the Iran problem other than weakening the Iranian regime. Remember the questioner asked about the causes of this war. There's no question that the Mossad leaders told Prime Minister Netanyahu who told President Trump that this was a chance to overthrow the regime. They were wrong. It was a misjudgment. That judgment may have been a factor for President Trump. I don't know. We'll find out someday when the history is written. But certainly it was part of the rationale. And so the U. S Israeli relationship is very strong right now. I think President Trump is in a position to dictate terms of this ceasefire and ensure that Prime Minister Netanyahu abides by it. If he chooses to use that power. President Trump now has that. It will be very hard for Netanyahu to disagree with him. But whether Israel benefits in the long term depends on what the Israel that people want is. The way for Israel to benefit in the long term would be to make a peace agreement with the Palestinians and get all these Arab countries to recognize Israel. And then they would have a safety and a security and a dream realized that their founders want wanted from the beginning. But you're not very, very close to that at all.
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No. And even, even in Lebanon, as you know, when this all started, the Lebanese President Aun had reached out and said, let us talk directly. And the Israelis just, you know, just swatted that away. The Netanyahu government and now apparently they are, this week are going to be having talks in Washington. Representatives of Israel and the government of Lebanon, which is being pounded Lebanon right now, despite what President Trump has said and despite the, the ceasefire. And Jamie, also, is Israel, instead of making peace, is actually continuing its, well, you know, the whole mowing the lawn concept. It's constantly at war, including against Syria where it keeps trying to carve out and its top leaders, the Israelis keep saying, you know, we'll be secure when we have a big piece of Syria and they name it, you know, Hebron, Mount, Mount Hermon, sorry, a big piece of, of, of of Lebanon all the way to the Litany river, all the way, you know, all of this part of Gaza that we have right now and probably a whole load more of the west bank which they are illegally annexing as we speak through settler violence and the Israeli forces just siding with the settlers. It's pretty bad. Now why don't you ask us. You ask the next question.
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Yes, Paul, ON email Even before the ceasefire, the US Reportedly struck civilian infrastructure in Iran, including a bridge and a girls school. How likely is it that Trump or Hagseth could face war crimes charges? And has a US President ever been charged with such crimes?
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Jamie? I don't think a US President has ever been charged. I'm right. Yeah, no, I think you're right.
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Although some, some did. I'll get to that in my answer.
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Okay.
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Okay, go ahead.
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So, so the, for the rest of the question, yes, from day one, the United States, it has been investigated by newspapers and others using all that sort of geolocating, seeing the images of the Tomahawk cruise missile, knowing where the US Was active on that did actually cause the death of all those, you know, 175 plus little girls, school girls in that school in Minab, plus teachers and basically destroyed that. Then the New York Times and other, other, other agencies have been showing, you know, pictures and, and showing essentially the pattern of the US and Israel striking civilian targets inside Iran. Throughout, as I said in the main episode, there have been schools, universities, cultural heritage sites, ordinary businesses, even the Grand Bazaar last week or so before the ceasefire came in, and pharmaceutical companies and the others that have really, really, really damaged a great, great deal of Iran itself, its civilian infrastructure, including energy depots and fuel storage and plants, etc, so it's, and water desalination, I mean it just goes on and on and on. So even before Trump said that he was going to, what did he say? Wipe Iran's civilization off the face of the map that they would never be able to recover, which sent tremors through everybody who really, some people thought he was preparing to drop a nuke I never believed that, but many smart people thought that that's what he was telegraphing. There has been a lot of civilian and infrastructure damage done. So I think that there was such an out, you know, an uproar about Trump's last comment that I mentioned that, that there were concerns in the Pentagon that this could to very undesirable consequences, including war crimes charges. And I don't know, Jamie, whether you clocked that as they were announcing the ceasefire, they were saying, but we could do this and we could do that. But both Dan Kane and Pete Hegseth, I heard them refer multiple times to military targets. And I think it's because of the uproar over, you know, what Trump had said the day before.
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Right. Look, war crimes charges is obviously a very serious thing. I've testified in a war crimes tribunal. We talked about that in an early episode. Madeleine Albright, who I worked for, created the war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in Rwanda. Those tribunals were created for an issue that we call genocide, mass murder. One of the things that happens in the modern era is that everyone is a lawyer and everyone wants to make judgments about what is and isn't a war crime. I think we should realize that the war crimes process is broken, and I can say that with conviction because I was accused of being a war criminal for supporting the destruction.
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Yeah, but you won't charge.
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I know, but, but lawyers who worked for prominent organizations took the view that the United States attack on a Serbian television station, which was spewing out the call to kill Albanians, was a war crime. So a war crime has, has been devolved into almost like a name calling exercise. In terms of the substance of. I do think the, and I think I said this on the program before. We had to face the question of whether Donald Trump's administration was going to escalate to a full scale attack on electrical supplies and civilian infrastructure, which did not happen. And I believe that that was, had it happened the way the President was describing it, that would have easily fallen into the category of war crimes, because you have to measure civilian harm against a military target. You have to have proportionality. All those things wouldn't have applied if we started attacking electrical plants and desalinization plants across the country and the Arabs didn't want us to do so. I don't think that, that I, I didn't think it was going to happen then. I still don't think it's going to happen because I think our military, as much as people who are watching or listening to this program, may have their views about the use of force in our military. They are trained, they go through enormous, careful exercises to make sure that they fit all of the reasonable definitions of what war crimes are before they choose their targets. And that bridge in particular, they're going to have a reason for that. Had they gone to a full scale bombing, that would be a different situation. It didn't happen. I certainly hope it doesn't happen. I would hate to see the United States be pursued for war crimes when the people that the war crimes process were supposed to be going after were the people like Vladimir Putin who started a war in Ukraine.
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Okay, okay, I'm gonna stop you because I have to say Pete Hegseth needs to check his language then, because he's been saying the, you know, the shackles are off, you know, all these, you know, what is, what is it? Rules of engagement, this just pooh poohing all the things that you rightly say. American forces are trained to respect and to believe. And he has. Has a record already of convincing President Trump to pardon two American service people, men who were convicted and jailed for committing war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. So just putting that out there.
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All right, Ines, Inez, Inez, Inez. Forgive me, Inez. If Trump no longer sees the EU as an ally, who would replace it? China, Russia, or Israel? Are shared US EU values like democracy and human rights now at risk?
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We are in a real make or break moment. As to what, you know, who aligns with who going forward, I don't know. Jamie, we've talked about this before. China, Russia, Israel. No, I can't imagine that. Although he's very friendly to them, but really, I mean, I don't know. Is the United States going to associate itself with, you know, as its main ally, as opposed to the EU or NATO, the others? I mean, already the US Is a main ally of Israel, but that's somewhat different. That's more bilateral. And I do think that shared values like democracy and human rights are at risk and have been for many years now. Which is why, as we were speaking in our main episode, it is interesting to see that actually democracy and human rights and all sorts of other important values that we all hold dear have been upheld by the election result in Hungary this past weekend, when Orban, the illiberal Democrat who'd ruled for 16 years was finally thrown out of office democratically by a convincing win by a guy who peeled off from his party, Fides, Peter Magyar, and formed his own party to stand up for precisely these democratic principles.
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It's a question that shows how far we've come that the United States doesn't think about its European allies as its main ally. I don't think we're going to become an ally of China and Russia. I think it is possible that President Trump sees the world divided into spheres of influence, where Russia has certain sphere of influence in its part of the world, China has it in Asia, and we have ours in Latin America. President Trump has said that before. His national security strategy implies it very clearly. But I do think that the ties between the Europeans and the United States are much deeper than just the Trump administration will outlast the Trump administration. And Europe is going to remain our closest ally for the foreseeable future, in my opinion. Opinion. All right. How is Iran? Farsad on Instagram asks how is Iran sustaining its wartime economy given how fragile it was before the war?
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Well, if you're going to ask me, it's very difficult. It, it, it, you know, and as I said, so much of its economy has been attacked by the United States. And remember, it was under very major US and global sanctions and it was getting some money because of the tolls that we were talking about that it was imposing. And I suppose we'll keep trying to impose on Traff Strait of Hormoz and some relief or because of sanctions reliever. I don't know how long they're going to last on its oil that was already out there because of the, you know, because the war against Iran spiked the oil prices. So Iran was given a break from the sanctions. But I will say it's really going to have to work hard at this if it, if it, if the regime wants to stay in power because I think this will for sure be its Achilles heel because the last time the Iranian people revolted and they did, they rose up against this regime started at the end of December by an economic collapse essentially when the real the local currency collapsed and inflation soared. And it just made life un unsurvivable for, for just too many people. And now with all these people, they say a million people have been, you know, have lost their jobs because of this war. It's going to be very, very difficult how this, this government A, rebuilds and B, meets the aspirations of its people. People, while it's still under sanctions, is going to be, I mean, that's a Houdini.
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Absolutely. Look, the Iranians have made some money during the war through the oil that was sent out that President Trump lifted sanctions on. They've made some money from the ships that have gone through the Strait of Hormuz. I think they're going to probably get some economic benefit when this Strait of Hormuz problem is solved. They're going to have some way of using their desire for compensation to be paid back through some mechanism. That it be the equivalent of a toll, some informal arrangement is my suspicion because I don't think anything can be formalized. It would be inappropriate since there's supposed to be Freedom of navigation. Look, Iran has terrible economic problems and they just got a lot worse from this war, unfortunately. They've got a terrible government that's developed, you know, based on the concept of resistance. And they've got a very, very, very angry group of leaders at the, of the IRGC whose leaders have been killed, many of their friends and leaders. They've got a clerical system where the top leaders was killed. There's, there's some angry people at the top. They're going to be fine, those people. In the end, I think, Christiane, you're absolutely right. When and if the time comes for the Iranian people to stand up, it's going to be for economic reasons because the situation they're in is not going to get better, it's going to get worse. And they're going to have the threat certainly for the next two years or three years of the Trump administration of a restarting of this war at all times, because that's all the Trump administration has as leverage is to threaten to restart the war. I don't see them lifting sanctions and coming up with a big agreement. So economically, Iran has got problems, but the Chinese and the Russians have been their friends and they may find ways around it to tolerate, to live through Toler. Tolerably, certainly tolerably for the IRGC folks. Do you want to ask the next one?
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This is Jim on Facebook. Trump's approval ratings are low. Can the Democrats find a moderate, tough minded candidate to sway independents and disenchanted Republicans to win back the White House? So I would just point out to Alyssa Slotkin. She was a, she's a former CIA analyst, she served in Iraq. She is also now she's a senator and she's from Michigan and she knows how to bridge, you know, Republican and Democratic constituencies because her district I think is made up of both. And she is very, very clear about how Democrats should win. And what she's talking about right now is you remember the famous Trump Project 2025? Well, she's doing a Project 2029, trying to get the Democrats to get involved. In other words, she's really thinking about it and trying to get a whole load of. Similarly, think about the tough measures that are required, the discipline that's required to figure out how to win. So I think that that's, you know, that's one person that I've been keeping an eye on because I've been interviewing her a lot, mostly about not just American politics stuff, but American foreign policy, given her incredible experience overseas and at wartime. And she was one of the six senators, I believe, who came out and warned the American military not to follow any illegal orders. All right, Jamie.
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Well, my view is we need to do what's necessary to win. I've been a very bad predictor of who the Democratic primary victor will be. I haven't been very good at that. I no longer trust my judgment to select a candidate and be behind them. I want a winner. I know how important it is for us to win. I know our country needs the Democrats to come back to power. I think we'll have plenty of time to figure out who that right person is after these midterm elections. Tell us something. Will the American people respond in an important way to what's been going on in these last two years? We'll find that out in a few months. Names will come forward. I've always believed that in order to win, we need to appeal to the center and the independents. Some Democrats have a different view. They think we need to inspire people who don't vote by having a much more a left of center candidate who can inspire them? I don't know the answer to that. I'm not going to try to answer it right now. My preference is a centrist candidate who can win back the presidency and return America to the place that it was before. President Trump has done the damage that he's done to my country.
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Okay. And lastly, Sharon on Facebook, why aren't the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia involved in the peace talks between the US And Iran? Iran could have added Qatar as well. My short view of that, Jamie, is because they were all attacked by Iran and they're pretty pissed off by Iran right now. And a sort of Persona non gratas, I think, in, in this situation. But I don't know. I mean, hopefully that those relationships will, will sort of resolve themselves afterwards. Some have suggested that Oman and Qatar could, if there was a whole reworking of the power structure. Russia in the Middle East, Jamie. That the US Will pull out eventually of the Middle east, that Iran and Israel will remain the two powers and Oman and Qatar will go with Iran and the UAE and Saudi Arabia with Israel. How does that sound?
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Look, they're not there because it wouldn't contribute to a successful negotiation. The issue is between the United States and Iran behind the scenes. Obviously, Israel has a role to play and that's up to Donald Trump to talk to them. I think the Trump administration has shown that it has the interests of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia in its mind very strongly. I did believe that the Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE did not want to see a war against infrastructure. And I think that was one of the reasons that President Trump didn't escalate to a war against infrastructure. And I say that here for the questioner to understand that the interest of Saudi Arabia and the UAE were taken into account by the administration in some fundamental way. I think they will continue to be taken into account. Whether that's too much or too little is for someone to say. But I don't have any doubt that their interests will be represented through the United States decision making. The United States wants the Gulf of, you know, the Strait of Hormuz to be open so that shipping can continue. The United States will take the interests of those countries into account. And I think that their presence would not have made it easier to come up with an agreement. Remember, this is a weird negotiation between the United States and Iran that the Pakistanis have, you know, helpfully gotten involved with. But more players at the table wouldn't help us get to yes.
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Oh, and when you think about it, actually, since Oman was the mediator last time when from all accounts, including the Omanis, things were going in a really good direction for for those negotiations, we'd be back at sort of square one. So thank you for listening to the Q and A episode of the X Files. If you have a question for us that you want us to answ, you can find us on all the major social media platforms and on our email. Our handle is at amanpourpod. Our email is amanpoorpodlobal.com so our next main episode is on Tuesday. Remember, you can always listen for free on Global Player. And don't forget, never forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can watch all our episodes, the main ones and the bonus ones you search. Christiana Monpour presents the X Files. And on that note, I am out of here.
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By Jamie Goodbye. This has been a Global Player original production.
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