Loading summary
Transcript52 lines
- [00:01]
A
This is a bonus episode of history as it happens. It's June 3, 2026. It's been three months since President Donald Trump started his war of choice on Iran, on the mistaken, more like truly insane, belief that bombing that country would produce a friendlier regime and end Tehran's nuclear program forever. The war pushed on a credulous Trump by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a catastrophic failure. It could only end in failure because there is no way to bomb another country's nuclear program of existence. So let's go back to President Barack Obama's historic announcement that Iran had agreed to major concessions after two years of negotiations that began in 2013.
- [00:43]
B
This deal meets every single one of the bottom lines that we established when we achieved a framework earlier this spring. Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off and the inspection and transparency regime necessary to verify that objective will be put in place. Because of this deal, Iran will not produce the highly enriched uranium and weapons grade plutonium that form the raw materials necessary for a nuclear bomb. Because of this deal, Iran will remove two thirds of its installed centrifuges, the machines necessary to produce highly enriched uranium for a bomb, and store them under constant international supervision.
- [01:25]
A
What became known as the JCPOA had its enemies from the start. For instance, Netanyahu delivered a speech to Congress denouncing it not for his stated reasons, which were all lies, but because he's always wanted war, not diplomacy with Iran.
- [01:40]
C
It doesn't block Iran's path through the bomb, it paves Iran's path through the bomb.
- [01:45]
A
Well, he soon got what he wanted, didn't he? In 2018, President Trump pulled out of the JCPOA.
- [01:50]
D
In theory, the so called Iran deal was supposed to protect the United States and our allies from the lunacy of an Iranian nuclear bomb, a weapon that will only endanger the survival of the Iranian regime.
- [02:07]
A
Now, few people know what was actually in the jcpoa, what it accomplished and what it didn't cover. As well as Joe Cirincione, a career nuclear arms expert, the former president of the Plowshares Fund, who now writes the Strategy in History newsletter on Substack. Hello, Joe Cirincione. Welcome back.
- [02:26]
E
Thank you, Martin. A pleasure to be here.
- [02:28]
A
2013, what state were U. S. Iran relations in?
- [02:32]
E
Frozen. Frozen. The great tragedy of U. S Iran relations is that when one side is willing to talk, the other side is not. So in 2003, when the US had invaded Iraq and suddenly there were 250,000 US troops on Iran's border, Iran was very interested in talking to the United States and had a fairly moder president at that time. And they sent a memo to the State Department saying, we're willing to talk about our nuclear program, which was basically a research program at that point. Relations with Israel, relations with Saudi Arabia, funding of proxy groups, the whole schmear. But we weren't interested. Vice President Dick Cheney thought he could run the table. He said, we don't negotiate with evil. We defeat it. So there were no talks then. In 2008, Barack Obama is elected president, and in his inaugural address, he extends the hand of friendship to Iran.
- [03:23]
B
In this season of new beginnings, I would like to speak clearly to Iran's leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy,
- [03:35]
E
saying his hope it's not met with a closed fist, but it was met with a closed fist. The president of Iran at that time was a hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he was busy making the nuclear program a nationalist issue. Mass rallies, talking about it at the prayer Fridays, etc. In 2013, in June 2013, much to the chagrin of the mullahs in charge of Iran, a moderate is again elected President Hassan Rouhani. And he is interested in talking to the United States, and the United States is interested in talking with him. And so by the fall of that year, there are discussions that go on, and we get the beginning of an agreement that came to be known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that bottled up Iran's program for a good 20 years.
- [04:23]
A
Yeah, the supreme ruler Khamenei, who was just assassinated a couple of months ago, he allowed for that outreach with his diplomats. And as you said, a more moderate or pragmatic President Rouhani was elected to talk to Obama. So separating fact from fiction when it comes to the Iran nuclear program and what it was 20 years ago versus what it is now, I mean, that's all very difficult because we're fed so much propaganda. I mean, Bibi Netanyahu has been saying pretty much every day for the 30 years that Iran is this close from having a weapon.
- [04:56]
C
And as long as Iran persists in its dangerous quest for nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, we shouldn't go back to business as usual with Iran. But evidently, giving Iran's murderous regime a clear path to the bomb is negotiable. This is unconscionable. Iran's regime is as radical as ever. Its cries of death to America, that same America that it calls the Great Satan, as loud as ever.
- [05:24]
A
In 2013, when Rouhani reached out to Obama. Where was the Iranian nuclear program?
- [05:30]
E
Well, at that point, they had built centrifuges. They got the centrifuge design from Pakistan, from A. Q. Khan, gave them the design, gave them expertise, maybe even gave them a design for a nuclear weapon. And it was progressing. By that time they had had, oh, they must have had about 15,000 centrifuges in, maybe more, almost 20,000 centrifuges. They had built up stockpiles of uranium gas. They were getting very close to what Netanyahu had warned about. And now, no kidding around, Iran actually was close to having enough, the ability to make enough material for the core of a nuclear bomb. That's where we were at. And it was an urgent issue. And so Obama approached this with the urgency it deserved and he found a willing partner in Rouhani.
- [06:19]
A
Well, what did Rouhani see as the incentive here? Because if your position is, Wally Roman, Iran just wants a nuclear weapon, well then they wouldn't have entered these negotiations to potentially slow down their nuclear enrichment program in exchange for whatever it was, sanctions relief, what have you. So what was Rouhani after?
- [06:36]
E
Well, that's exactly what he wanted. And so this, we treat Iran like it's a unitary actor. But of course it's not. Just like the United States, there's factions inside, there's different points of view, ideological rivals competing. And Ahmadinejad is one of those sort of nationalist isolationists. He wants an economy that's autarkic, it doesn't depend on trade with the west, but for a whole other class of the people, not just, you know, political representative, but the businessmen in Iran, they want trade with the West. They want to open up. They don't think a nuclear program is in their business interests. So in many senses, Rouhani represents that point of view. So that's what he wanted, normalized relations, an end to sanctions. And he was willing to talk about it. Let me tell you one quick story. I had dinner with President Rouhani at the United nations in September, in 2013, right after he was elected. And this was a meeting of foundation presidents. I was then the head of the Plowshares Fund and think tank leaders. And we asked Rouhani because there was rumors already about talk about the nuclear issue. And we asked, well, why not talk about all the issues? Why not make a grand bargain as it's called? And he said in that way, that Iranian's talk, he said, the table will not bear the weight of all these issues at once. So we've decided to start with the most important, the nuclear issue. And we'll see where we can go after that. And that was a sound approach. And that was a sound approach for the politics of the United States, for the politics of Iran. It was realistic, it was in the interest of the United States. They did not want to have a grand bargain talk because the more chips you give Iran, you want to talk about missiles, you want to talk about proxies, well, what are you going to give them in exchange for that? And the US Interest was in getting rid of the one program that threatened our national security interest. That's the nuclear program. And By November of 2013, a preliminary deal was struck. And by 2015, the final deal was.
- [08:29]
A
Yeah, arrived. Yeah, we'll get into what was in the final deal. But yeah, in 2013, when you're dealing with two countries that haven't had normal relations since 1979, there's been so much hostility and mistrust, there's no way you can pile on all those other issues and try to reach an agreement on all of them simultaneously. It has to be one at a time. So has Iran ever actually wanted the bomb? Because the Supreme Leader had a fatwa saying that you cannot have a nuclear weapon. It's a difficult question to answer, but of course it is the most important one because what are we actually trying to prevent Iran from having if it doesn't want to have a bomb? It depends on who we're talking about. Right. As you said, there are factions within the country that probably a long time ago wish they had gone all the way.
- [09:15]
E
Yes, that's exactly right. So I've been tracking the Iranian nuclear program since before there was a program when it was just a research project. I was the Director for non Proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment and I wrote a book called Deadly Arsenals which looked at all the world's supply of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. And the history is very interesting with Iran because when the Ayatollah seized power in 79, he banned nuclear research. He wanted to get rid of the nuclear program that the Shah had started. They were already building a reactor. The Shah had plans for nuclear weapons. He said that was Western technology. We want nothing to do with it. But then Iraq invaded Iran in 81 and there was an eight year war that went on. And nobody helped Iran in that war. In fact, the US Backed Iraq and vetoed a resolution at the United nations condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons. And that's when the Ayatollah changed his mind. He said, well, if they're going to build chemical. We're not going to do that. But let's restart that nuclear program again. He started a program that continued from that point on until about 2003, when US intelligence estimated that the weapons program itself ended. There's been no actual work on a nuclear weapon since 2003, certified as recently as this year by the intelligence agencies. But it kept a hedge. The hardest part of building a nuclear weapon is getting the material. And that's what Iran has been doing ever since then, creating the capability capability of enriching uranium, the capability of building a weapon without ever crossing the line. They thought that would be a deterrent to us or Israeli attacks.
- [10:54]
A
Yeah, the nuclear threshold, it did not work out because just look where we are right now. Of course, attacking Iran has backfired spectacularly. Okay, so that's great context. And you've written an article at your substack. I'll make sure I share a link to this article in the show. Notes to this episode. Strategy and History is the name of your substack and the name of this article or the headline of the article I have open in front of me is Dollars for Dust. We were talking about the similarities between the 2015 deal and a potential deal today. So what was agreed to in the 2015 deal? And let's also talk about how that's being misconstrued now. Cuz that's so much of what's happening today. Well, we can't go back to that deal because et cetera, et cetera. Talking about the critics of trying to reach a deal with Iran, the people who actually just want to destroy the Iran Iranian regime and go back to war right now. Yeah, let's start with the uranium stockpile. What happened to that under the Obama deal?
- [11:52]
E
Yeah, we're talking about this again because Donald Trump's effort to topple the Iranian regime has failed miserably and he's now back negotiating. And when you negotiate, you end up doing something very similar to what Obama did. I mean that's the only way to solve this problem. You've got to try to reduce or eliminate the capability of Iran to make a bomb. And how do you do that? You prevent them from enriching uranium to very high levels. The 2015 deal did exactly that. It was not a flawed agreement. This was not a weak deal. This is the strongest non proliferation agreement I've ever seen. And that's because it forced Iran to destroy two thirds of its program. They had to rip out most of the centrifuges they went from 20,000 to about 5,000. They had to give up its stockpile of enriched uranium. So they had about 8 tons of uranium enriched to various levels. They had to dilute all that down and then ship it out of the country. And they were left about 300 kg of low enriched uranium, 3.67%. You know what you can do with 300 kg of that kind of uranium? Nothing. Nothing. You can't make fuel, you can't make a bomb. It was a token amount just to sort of give them a little face saving. They had to destroy their reactor, the research reactor that could have produced plutonium, another element for a bomb. They had to rip out the center, drill it full of holes, fill it with cement. And they had to promise that they would have intrusive inspections forever. Basically forever. They would have these inspections. And of course they reaffirmed their pledge never to build a nuclear weapon. And there were various time limits on these things. Iran wasn't ready to give up its hedge forever. He wanted to see how this deal worked. But the most important restrictions lasted for 15, 20, 25 years. If that deal had still in place, remember Donald Trump rips it up in 2018.
- [13:46]
D
After these consultations, it is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement.
- [14:00]
E
If that deal had still been in place, we wouldn't be talking about an Iranian stockpile of uranium. There wouldn't be advanced centrifuges. They would be frozen in place. Frozen in place at 2015. Very, very far, at least a year from the ability to make the material for a bomb should they ever break out. That was a really good deal. Trump was an idiot for tearing it up and now he's in the process of trying to recreate it.
- [14:25]
A
Yeah, so it was a year, was the breakout period.
- [14:28]
E
Yeah.
- [14:28]
A
And that was about as good as Obama could get. Right. But as you say, it dealt with HEU or high enriched uranium. The centrifuges, the inspections, also the ambitions or the aspirations of a country. All of that was dealt with within the JCPO A But as you mentioned, there was a sun setting and critics of that deal have said, okay, so within this 15 year period, Iran won't be able to have the high enriched uranium, 90%, et cetera, et cetera. We're going to be inspecting them. They have the limits on the centrifuges, but in the meantime, they're going to build up their conventional missile stockpile, which would be the delivery system for a future nuclear arsenal. How do you respond to that?
- [15:10]
E
Well, that's true. This deal did not deal with all our issues. It dealt with the most important issue, whatever other disagreements are with Iran. They'd be made much worse if Iran had a nuclear weapon. So that was the idea. You do this agreement first, you start to build up relations with Iran as part of this, and you see if there's possibility for other talks, other negotiations on the other issues, most importantly their missile program and their support for militia groups in the region and their relations with Saudi Arabia and Israel. And that was sort of the, the plan. But even if that didn't happen, we had solved the most important issue for the United States. And as it turns out, their missile program never got to the point where they could build an intercontinental ballistic missile. Despite all the fears of this. I mean, going back to the 1999 and the Donald Rumsfeld warnings that North Korea or Iran or Iraq could soon hit the United States with ICBMs. I mean, it just wasn't true. And they don't have that capability. Now. They do have missiles that can fly about 2,000 kilometers, and those are significant missiles. But most of them, as we've now seen in the war, are designed for short range use, and they've used those very effectively against the Arab states. But still, to this point, Iran does not represent a serious threat to the United States and certainly not the imminent threat that President Trump claimed as justification for starting his war.
- [16:36]
A
In my view, countries don't pursue nuclear weapons because they just want to use it at the first available moment. They're doing it for the belief that it'll add to their deterrence. It'll make them a power, a regional power, the equal of the country in that region, Israel, that already has nuclear weapons. You know, before we talk about what Trump may or may not get now, how do you approach that subject about whether nuclear weapons really are a guarantee against future attack? How strong is the deterrent?
- [17:08]
E
Well, you know, nuclear weapons do not prevent conventional attacks against you. You know, look at the US Experience in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese didn't stop attacking US Troops because we had nuclear weapons, even though technically we could have used them against North Korea, Argentina attacks, the Falkland Islands, even though Britain had nuclear weapons. So it's not a foolproof deterrent.
- [17:31]
A
Israel is attacked a lot too, even though it has.
- [17:34]
E
Yeah, nuclear weapons haven't protected Israel from the various attacks. And I had a conversation with the then foreign Minister of Iran, Javad Zarif, around the time of this jcpoa, because I was leading A coalition of groups that were building support for this deal and to protect it against its critics. And so I met with the Iranian officials fairly often, and Zarif said, look, we really don't want a bomb, and here's why. Right now, no foe can attack and destroy Iran. But if we get a nuclear weapon, then we know Saudi Arabia is going to match that capability. Other states will, and then our neighbors, our rivals, will have weapons that could, in fact, destroy Iran. So it's not really in our advantage. And you can think of that as propaganda, but it actually is strategically sound. That is correct. And this war has now provided Iran with what was a theoretical capability, but is now the actual capability to close the Strait of Hormuz. And that is a much more powerful deterrent than a nuclear weapon that doesn't have the costs of the nuclear weapons program. And it could provide a deterrent in the future and seems to be doing it right now to prevent additional U.S. or Israeli attacks or any other nation from attacking Iran. That deterrent is something we just handed to Iran because of the foolish decision to go to war over 100 days ago, almost. We're in the fourth month of this
- [19:04]
A
quagmire, an immediate impact on the global economy. Before we get back to that, though, you made a great point there about Iran and the bomb and this point in the world. Right now, we've reached where proliferation is happening with China, Russia, the United States. And there's a real concern, as we've discussed on past episodes, about other countries seeking nuclear weapons. There is a global consensus that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. That is not the issue here. It's how to go about doing that. I mean, no one, Russia, China, no one wants Iran to have a bomb.
- [19:40]
E
Well, that's right. And that's why all those countries were involved in the 2014, 2015 discussions. This wasn't just the US negotiating with Iran. This was all of Europe. This was the eu this was Russia, this was China. This was an agreement that was endorsed by the UN Security Council. That's why it was a global agreement. And that's one of the things that gave it such strength. Because if Iran were to break that agreement, they'd be subject to international sanctions, not just U.S. sanctions. Nobody would be buying their oil, not just the United States. The U.S. now, of course, doesn't believe in allies under President Trump. It doesn't understand the importance of this kind of operation, is trying to go it alone and go it alone poorly.
- [20:23]
A
Okay, here is an exchange happened actually today. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was being questioned during a Senate hearing. Here is his exchange with New Jersey Senator Cory Booker about where we are in this war. Strait of Hormuz is still closed. What about the Iranian nuclear program? Here, listen to this exchange. It goes about two minutes, and then I want your thoughts on it made
- [20:48]
F
our adversary in a stronger negotiating position. We are the strongest nation on the planet Earth, and we're in a stalemate with Iran. And now we're begging to get back into a deal that you all crashed in the first place.
- [21:01]
G
There's no one begging.
- [21:02]
F
Clearly. This is a.
- [21:03]
D
Senator Booker. Senator Booker, your time's up. Since he's.
- [21:07]
G
I do want to address these points because they go to the heart of the matter. No one's begging for anything here. The Iranians might be begging because their economy is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day that they are losing. Understand, Iran had street protests going on before all of this started. All of those factors, economic factors in Iran are far worse today than they were six months ago ago when those protests were happening. They have hyperinflation. Their currency is completely devalued. They're struggling to make payroll for their government workers. Iran is in a very serious situation. And if it was up to the political class there, and I understand everybody there is sort of radical in some way, but if it was up to the people that actually, like, go to elections and wear the suits and you see on tv, they probably make a deal tomorrow, the issue they're facing is that the Supreme Leader and the IRGC corps are a little bit more immune from those pressures until they can be convinced otherwise. And I think that's the direction that they're moving in. Because the reality. I don't know where you're getting this perception that Iran is stronger. Iran has no navy left. They've lost a substantial percentage of their defense industrial base. Iran has lost a substantial percentage of their missile launchers. And their economy is far worse today, and I mean far worse today than it was six to nine months ago. And they are looking at hundreds of billions of dollars of reconstruction costs just to get to where they were.
- [22:17]
F
Mr. Ruo, you keep telling us how we're winning this war. The President keeps saying, well, the war is over, completely annihilated. The war is not over. And yet the American people see how we're losing at the pump and with their costs, and yet this thing still hasn't been resolved. Every day he tweets out, oh, we've obliterated them. We've annihilated Them they're going to surrender. But yet we still find ourselves spending billions of dollars a week.
- [22:38]
D
Senator, abroad, you wouldn't gone way over.
- [22:41]
F
It would be nice if we had hearings where people.
- [22:44]
D
Thank you, Senator Booker, Senator Scott, Senator
- [22:46]
A
Cirincione, what do you think?
- [22:48]
E
Give the senator a little more time, man, because he was on a roll there. Well, part of what Rubio says is true. The Iranian economy is in dire straits and it has been hurt by the war and it wasn't in good straits beforehand. And the regime is wildly unpopular, no question about it. But Booker is also right. They're stronger now. Before the war, you could say that this regime was on the ropes here. They're massive demonstrations put down only by slaughter of tens of thousands of protesters. A dire economy, a successor crisis, possibly Lumen with an aging ayatollah. But we just gave them a new lease on life. The leadership of Iran is now more radical, more consolidated, more controlled by the irgc, the military component. And they've got the straight up Hormuz closed. And they have shown that at very low cost. Iran spends only about $7 billion a year on its military. We spend $1,000 billion dollars on our defense, a trillion dollar defense budget. And they beat us. They beat us. They took everything the US could punch at them, survived, strengthened, and with drones and short range missiles, brought the Arab economies in the region severe pain. I mean, Kuwait's alone, the liquid natural gas industry has suffered a 25% loss of capacity. That's going to take billions of dollars and years to replace. So no, Iran calculates right now that they can outlast the United States. And I think most experts would agree that that's true, that the rest of the world is now pressuring the US to end this war. What's stopping this war from ending is Donald Trump's refusal to recognize reality. He has lost. He does not hold the cards here. And that means he has to make an agreement where Iran will do some significant things on its nuclear program. It's willing to get rid of the stockpile of uranium again. It's willing to suspend uranium enrichment again. It's willing to do that. But it wants something in return. It wants the ability to sell its oil freely around the world. It wants a non aggression pledge from the United States. It wants some of its frozen assets unfrozen. Rumor is he wants $12 billion to open up the strait again. And so you're going to have to pay that eventually. Trump is trying to create a political reality through his words that his policies couldn't create and he's stuck. This is what it means to be in a quagmire. He cannot win this war and he doesn't know how to get out of it. The deal that we will eventually strike is going to be a humiliation for Donald Trump and he's trying to put that off, but it won't last forever.
- [25:33]
A
That was my next question, because he's stuck. But it's only because of his own ego or sensitivity to being seen as giving Iran something. So I think he understands, although I'm not his psychologist, I think he understands that bombing again, going back to all out combat will not work. But you know, the contours of a deal have been clear for some time now. I know getting to a final deal can be very difficult, but still, to reopen the strait and agree to the things that you just mentioned, Iran actually has offered some real substantial concessions. It's just that what Trump doesn't want to be seen as having to give Iran anything because of the comparisons to the jcpoa, Is that it?
- [26:17]
E
Yes. Iran is willing to make serious, substantial concessions. In fact, they offered them before this war, the few days before the war. On 26 February, they made an offer that surprised the negotiators at those talks, but how good it was, how strong it was. They offered to ship all the uranium out of their country. They offered to suspend uranium enrichment for three to five years. But the negotiators that Trump had deployed, Bushner and Wyckoff, simply didn't understand what they were offering and pooh poohed it. And then they had Benjamin Netanyahu whispering in Trump's ear and the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman saying, no, we can topple them. We can do this. And Trump went for it all. And he thought he could do a three day war. It'd be like a Venezuela operation, except better. And he'd be out of there in three or four days. Well, it's 102 days later and counting and we're stuck in this quagmire. He should have grabbed the deal. Iran is offering a similar deal again. He's just got to, at some point, he's got to bite the bullet or as the Ayatollah once said, drink the poison chalice. When he made peace with Iraq and make peace with Iran, the Omani foreign
- [27:30]
A
minister traveled to Washington to try to get the Trump administration to go along with the Iranian proposal prior to the start of the war. That's how good it was. That's how surprising it was. And instead, we got Saturday morning, we all woke up here in Washington, D.C. looked at our phones and saw a news alert saying that the United States had been bombing Iran during negotiations again, the second time in eight months because of last June when apparently the Iranian program was obliterated. But I guess not. So last thing here, all of the war aims of the Trump administration, none of it, right, none of it, has really been achieved. Isn't really the moral of this story that there is no military solution to the Iranian nuclear situation? This is only a negotiating or diplomatic situation?
- [28:20]
E
That's exactly right. No country's nuclear program has ever been destroyed by military means. And the reason is very simple. It's just too easy to do this. You could destroy machinery, you could set it back, but the knowledge is there. The experts are there, the scientists are there. The only way to convince a country, the only way to get a country to give up its nuclear program is to convince them to do so, to make a deal that's better for them than following that nuclear path. That's what we have to do with Iran.
- [28:48]
B
This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring about real and meaningful change, change that makes our country and the world safer and more secure. This deal is also in line with a tradition of American leadership. It's now more than 50 years since President Kennedy stood before the American people and said, let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. He was speaking then about the need for discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union, which led to efforts to restrict the spread of nuclear weapons. In those days, the risk was a catastrophic nuclear war between two superpowers. In our time, the risk is that nuclear weapons will spread to more and more countries, particularly in the Middle east, the most volatile region in our world.
- [29:37]
A
You're listening to a bonus episode of History As It Happens. And since you made it this far, why don't you take the next step and become a subscriber? Just tap subscribe now in the show Notes or go to historyasithappens.com to sign up. For $5 a month, you'll enjoy ad free listening all of our bonus content, not just this episode and early access. Plus, you can say you're supporting the important work we're doing here. If you're already a subscriber, thank you. And remember, if you refer a friend or family member, you'll get a $25 credit. That's enough to cover five months of your subscription to History As It Happens Premium.