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Foreign.
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See full terms@mintmobile.com today the end of the war in Iran and why Everybody Lost at the end of February, the US And Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, striking hundreds of military targets, killing thousands of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and assassinating Supreme Leader Khamenei. Cyber attacks produced a near total Internet blackout across the country. This was, the president's defenders claimed, a clear and unalloyed success, the latest display of a decapitation strategy that had already included Trump's kidnapping of the Venezuelan president. If all went well, some commentators said, we were looking at a new paradigm for the extension of American power. But it hasn't worked out that way. First, the Revolutionary Guard kept elevating new leaders like some giant, bottomless theocratic picture PEZ dispenser. Second, Iran struck back and the war became a quagmire, and the stated purpose of the war became a moving target. Trump said the strikes were about regime change. Marco Rubio said the attack was mostly about getting ahead of an expected Iranian retaliation to an Israeli strike, which made it sound weirdly like the US had been dragged into this war by Israel. Other officials said, no, no, this is about reducing Iran's regional power. No, it's about stopping Iran from building a nuclear weapon. No, it's actually about seizing natural resources. By June, the US had achieved none of that. Much worse, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a critical tendon of the global economy, with mines, drones and threats. It produced a calamitous historic reduction in oil and gas flows, a 95% drop in crude shipments a 99% decline in liquefied natural gas. This devastated economies across Asia, and it cost Middle Eastern countries hundreds of billions of dollars. And so, four months after the first bombs fell, Trump has signed a ceasefire. That he signed it in Versailles, the site of a famous surrender has been lost on few people. Karim Sajadpour of the Carnegie Endowment called this framework a bundle of American inducements so lopsided that it reads as if Tehran wrote the plan unilaterally, end quote. Iran got military and economic concessions and de facto acknowledgment of its control over the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for promising to stop pursuing nuclear weapons, a promise it has made many times before and ignored many times before. The deepest irony is that Trump famously withdrew from Barack Obama's multinational agreement to limit Iran's nuclear program. He called that the worst deal ever negotiated. But many experts say this deal is clearly weaker. And unlike Obama's deal, this one leaves Iran in possession of something it didn't have before, which is effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for 20% of the world's oil and natural gas, which we've just handed over to the regime that we tried and failed to destroy. Today's guest is Karim Sajadpour. Our subject is the end, or so it seemsof the Iran war. Why has the Trump administration signed, even proposed, a deal that looks like surrender? Is this just a temporary embarrassment for the president, or is it a legacy shifting disaster akin to Trump's Katrina? And how will the world remember this war in 10 years, if we remember it at all? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Karim Sajadpour, welcome back to the show.
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Thank you so much, Terry. Great to be with you.
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B
So the president just signed a framework to end the war in Iran, with negotiations to follow. Help us read this memorandum. What is the most important thing that is in the agreement, and what's the most important thing that's not in the agreement?
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Well, Derek, if any objective observer reads this document, they will come to the conclusion that the war did not go well for the United States because of the 14 main bullet points in this memorandum of understanding, really only one demands anything from Iran, and that's some nuclear concessions. But the rest of those 13 points either favor Iran, or they're just kind of boilerplate diplomatic language. So you can tell just based on that document what the outcome of the war was. Now, I think from the vantage point of the Trump administration and their negotiating team and Vice President Vance, my sense is they're not really even focused on the text of this mou. Vice President Vance said as much that we have gentlemen's agreements. I think they're really conceiving of these negotiations and that document not as a potentially narrow non proliferation nuclear deal. They actually are hoping for a broader transformation in the U. S Iran relationship, but kind of a grand bargain of sorts. I'm very skeptical that they're going to be able to achieve that.
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Two points of the memorandum that I want to dive into a little bit more deeply and both of them you can think of as kind of weapons in possession or potentially in the possession of Iran. One being its ability to control the strait and number two being its bomb grade uranium. Let's just do one and two, in that order. What is this memorandum? What does this framework say about the degree to which Iran is no longer allowed to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and thereby shut down the global flow of hydrocarbons? Like what? What specifically is in this framework to open the strait and ensure that it remains open for the foreseeable future?
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A
That is one of the weakest points about this memo because certainly in my reading of it, what it says is that for the next 60 days while these talks are being negotiated, the Strait of Hormuz should be open for business. Back to status quo ante. But beyond that 60 days, there are no reassurances that the Strait of Hormuz goes back to being an international waterway. And you know, if indeed the outcome of this war is that the Iran retains administrative control over the Strait of Hormuz, that's an enormous defeat, strategic defeat for the United States. And certainly all of the statements from senior Iranian officials imply that they continue, they plan on maintaining their control over the strait. For the Iranian regime, control over the Strait of Hormuz is both kind of a fixed revenue stream that could be potentially in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, depending on how they want to try to turn that into a fixed revenue stream. And it's also a deterrent against future US and Israeli coercion. We've seen even the last 48 hours that they've threatened that if Israel attacks Lebanese Hezbollah, they're going to close down the straits. So I fear that this is now a new tool in Iran's pocket and they're gonna continue to try to play it right.
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The irony from my perspective is that the US at least one of its stated goals was to shut down Iran's ability to possess a superweapon in the form of a nuclear bomb. But in the process of trying to shut down their access to that superweapon. We accidentally introduced them to access to this other superweapon, which is the ability to insert a toll booth on the Strait of Hormuz or even shut down, flow through the strait entirely. And countries that will be paying that toll, a lot of them disproportionately, are the countries that neighbor the strait and are on the Persian Gulf, whether it's Qatar or the UAE or the Saudi Arabia. How are these Middle Eastern countries responding to a memorandum that you say might, after two months, give Iran the ability to tax these countries whenever they want to send their stuff through the strait into the Persian Gulf and out into the world?
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So Iran's control over the Strait of Hormuz, as you said, Derek, is most of all an existential economic threat to the neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf in different ways and to different degrees. So Saudi Arabia is an example of a country which has access to not only the Persian Gulf, but also the Red Sea. So they've diverted a lot of their oil resources through. Through the Red Sea, and then the Bab El Mandab. And so far, Iran's Yemeni militia, the Houthis, haven't yet gone after Saudi exports there. And we can talk about that. The United Arab Emirates is another country which has suffered a lot from this blockade, but they also have alternative routes that can bypass the strait. Arguably, the country that suffered most over the last four months has actually been a country which is a friend of Iran, which is Qatar, which shares this enormous natural gas field with Iran. And there's at the moment no other way for Qatar to get their lng, their liquefied natural gas out of the country. And so they really haven't had any revenue over the last four months. And, you know, some people would argue that for that reason, it's been somewhat of a conflict of interest for Qatar to be one of the chief mediators between America and Iran, because, you know, for them, they really wanted any deal because, you know, they've been hurt the most economically as a result of this. Also, you know, Bahrain, Iraq have been really damaged by this. And so those countries are the ones that stand to lose most. But as everyone now knows, also the bulk of the fuel, the energy, the natural gas, the fertilizer that goes out of this trade and is destined for Asia and for China in particular. And so, you know, China, in my view, doesn't want an outcome in which Iran is dominating this trade either.
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B
That's interesting. Just to hold on this before we get to bomb grade uranium and nuclear weapons. What do you see as the most significant long term second order effects of Iran continuing to possess this kind of control over the Strait of Hormuz, if in fact it does hurt the countries that you said and it pinches off access to Eastern Asia, in particular China, what do you see as the long term consequence of Iran now discovering that it has this geopolitical power?
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Well, all of those countries we talked about, Derek, are already making alternative plans to not be dependent and not be held hostage by Iran. And so we're going to see, and we've already started to see enormous investments in kind of a post Hormuz energy logistics whereby you're trying to bypass building pipelines to some degree. I think there's going to be major investments in alternative energies. And so our friend Ian Bremmer has pointed this out that even though Trump is, you would argue, is not a green friendly president, one of the impacts of this war a decade from now may be that we will actually see a surge in alternative energy usage because of this energy crisis which he created with this invasion of Iran.
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I'm looking at what's not in the deal. There's no halting long range missiles, there's no demand to stop support for proxies in Lebanon and Iraq. This puts on the table the question of the disposal of Iran's near bomb grade uranium. But the outcome there is left up to future negotiations which are ongoing. I mean, when you and I first talked about this war four months ago, we were talking about regime change in Iran. We were talking about the possibility of a liberal democratic Iran coming out of these attacks. We weren't saying it was likely, but we were trying to represent the goals that the Trump administration was putting on the table four months ago. I'm looking here at this thin gruel. I mean, there is nothing that the President initially said he was going for. Is there any coherent view of American interests that says this is a good deal for America?
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So I think the best way to judge the MOU and just judge the success of the war is to compare the MOU to Trump's speech the night in which he launched the war. Because he set out very clear objectives there. He was going to further obliterate a nuclear program which he had claimed to have obliterated the year prior in the 12 Day War. But he said he's going to raise Iran's missile production down to the ground. Iran's regional proxies would essentially be defanged. And then, yes, he opened up the possibility that this war could, in fact, unseat the Iranian regime. And unfortunately, as we've talked about, none of those outcomes were achieved. And he's potentially ceded this incredibly important card, the Strait of Hormuz, to Iran. And so that is also something which our regional partners are very dismayed about, the fact that the question of missiles and drones is not even part of the negotiations. Many of them will tell you. Listen, we don't, we don't fear that Iran is going to nuke us, but they are using missiles and drones against us on a daily basis. They've launched perhaps upwards of 5,000 attacks, missile and drone attacks on their neighbors. And that's, as I said, not even part of the conversation. And so that, I think, is going to be something that those countries are going to have to contend with because the United States is out of Iranian missile range, but they certainly are not.
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I want to move our focus, the next few questions, to American politics. And what within American politics might have driven Trump to accept this deal? I mean, what is your understanding of why an administration that is on the record seeking military goals as extravagant as regime change would go to Versailles to sign something that was so transparently defeatist? Obviously, the irony that it signed in Versailles, that's a joke that's been made many times. But why do you think Trump did this deal knowing that there were recorded words of him on television that would allow Democrats to hit him on this deal over and over again?
- [16:44]
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Well, as always, Derek, I think in the case of Trump, he says the quiet part out loud, which is he said, I think, on two occasions that he didn't want to be Herbert Hoover. You know, he didn't want to be the president overseeing another economic collapse, another depression, and he felt, he feared that the war was taking the United States in that direction. And, you know, from the outset, you know, I argued that the Iranian regime knew it could never defeat the United States and the battlefield, so it was going to try to defeat the United States in the living room. And how do you do that? You spike the price of oil. You set off explosions everywhere. So when Americans turn on their television sets, they see chaos and violence. When they go to fill up their car with gasoline, prices have doubled. And unfortunately, that has been a successful strategy for them going back decades. And so I do think for the president, one very difficult thing for both President Trump and now Vice President Bance to try to reconcile is how do you make the argument that four months ago, this regime is so dangerous that it requires a massive US Military confrontation. And four months later, the very same regime spent a slight personnel change, but no change in their internal or external conduct, nor their ambitions. How do you then justify that that very same regime should get massive economic concessions? I don't think it's something which is easy to reconcile.
- [18:27]
B
It's hard to look at this deal and not remember that Trump called the Obama Iran framework one of the worst deals ever signed. And now you look at this deal, which doesn't necessarily seem particularly different. I mean, what are the major differences between the deal that Trump has just signed and the deal that Trump has called the worst deal ever that Obama signed over a decade ago?
- [18:50]
A
So we don't yet have a firm Trump deal. We have a deal on paper, but that deal hasn't yet been executed. But I would say there's a couple distinctions and then the broader macro distinction. The couple distinction is that for President Trump, and by the way, Derek, this is now, I think, going to be Trump's metric for success, that he did better than the Obama nuclear deal, the jcpoa, that's potentially sellable on one point, which is that the Obama nuclear deal, the jcpoa, allowed Iran to enrich uranium at a very low level. And what the Trump administration is hoping for is that Iran will agree to a long term suspension and enrichment of uranium. President Trump initially said forever. He wants them to suspend enrichment forever. I think that number has dropped now to 10 years. Even that is not clear whether or not he'll be able to achieve it. But he may well be able to achieve a few years suspension because Iran is going to need to rebuild its nuclear facilities. So that's one point in which it could potentially be different. The other point, you know, which is very important for Trump that he's spoken about, is to get the quote, unquote, nuclear dust out of the country, the stockpile of Iran's highly enriched uranium. Now, Obama's nuclear deal also achieved that. But here is the big difference in my view, Derek, which is that Obama's nuclear deal didn't come on the back of a war which potentially cost American taxpayers over $130 billion according to some estimates. And so the costs to the country were negligible compared to what Trump has done. The second major difference is that President Trump, as you alluded to, Derek, said Obama's deal was the worst deal in the world because it provided Iran $1.7 billion in cash relief. The numbers we're now talking about are in the tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars that the Trump administration has vowed to potentially offer Iran. Now, what they argue is that we're only going to pay upon performance. But there's already evidence that Iran has been getting billions of dollars in sanctions relief. They're able to sell their oil again. So in my view, there's really no comparison here. When you compare Obama's 2015 nuclear deal and this MOU, which is just a deal on paper, there's not significant non proliferation upside for the United States and it's cost American taxpayers significantly more. And Iran will get significantly more economic concessions as a result of this deal.
- [21:49]
B
Obviously, Democrats are going to say that Trump has surrendered, but it's not just liberals who say that Trump has surrendered. That's what's particularly interesting to me. You have Israelis, people close to the Israeli government and writers and commentators in Israel saying this is effectively surrender. You have Republican commentators like Ben Shapiro who are saying there is nothing that we initially said we were fighting for that we get with this new framework. Is it too simplistic to say that Iran has simply won the war?
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A
You know, the critique of the conservative commentators and the Israelis that I've read is that, you know, they would argue that the United States obviously prevailed militarily in this war. It did enormous damage to, to Iran's military industrial complex, but it was a political capitulation on the part of the president. And, you know, one person you didn't mention is Ted Cruz, who will likely be a 2028 candidate. And I expect that, you know, a lot of those folks are going to go after J.D. vance in the Republican primaries on this issue.
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B
And how they're gonna. This is exactly where I wanted to go. Let me, let me try that again. And how exactly are they gonna go after J.D. vance? Because this is exactly where I want it to go. I think what we're going to see is that if this deal is seen widely among even Republicans as a failure, well, they can't attach that sense of failure to the President himself. I mean, he is still in charge of the Republican Party. And in many ways, the Republican Party is a cult unto Donald Trump. So someone has to be the fall guy here. And it seems like J.D. vance, I think Trump even might have sort of somewhat jokingly said he was prepared to make JD Vance the fall guy. This didn't go well. A lot of people are pointing at him. Can you explain to us exactly what approach JD Vance, what philosophy JD Vance is espousing right now on his media tour to explain this framework and how you think it might be attacked within the Republican Party.
- [23:58]
A
So I think one thing that seems central to J.D. vance's foreign policy view is this idea that America needs to get out of wars in the Middle east and forever wars. So I suspect he's banking on the idea that ending this war is going to be popular with the American public. At the same time, I think that's right, that the American public doesn't want to be involved in wars in the Middle East. I suspect at the same time, American public doesn't like to lose wars in the Middle east against anti American adversaries. We saw that with Joe Biden when he pulled out of Afghanistan. On one hand, I think probably a large chunk of the population wanted us to end the war in Afghanistan. But the humiliation under which that war concluded really hurt Joe Biden's public support. And, you know, I suspect the idea of providing an Iranian regime with billions of dollars in incentives, a regime whose official ideology, official slogan remains Death to America and death to Israel is not going to be terribly popular. And you're right, Derek, that President Trump did say on two occasions, he said, if this deal succeeds, I'll take credit. If it fails, I'll blame J.D. vance. Now the other way in which I think this is going to be relevant to our internal politics is the question of Israel. And it seems to me that J.D. vance is making a calculation that Republican voters or Republican primary voters are no longer as committed to the US Israel relationship as they once were. His public comments, Vance's public comments about Israel have been extremely critical, saying that America is basically Israel's only ally and therefore Israel should practice gratitude. And so I think that is going to be a line of attack from his Republican primary competitors. And I've heard this from my Democratic friends as well, that the upcoming midterm elections are going to be a real litmus test on popular views on the U. S. Israel relationship.
- [26:18]
B
It's funny because it almost seems like two different administrations went into this war and finished this war. The administration that went into this war was an administration that was almost neoconservative in the George W. Bush tradition. We had just knocked off the leader of Venezuela. We were feeling really proud of ourselves. We wanted to puff up our chests and decapitate the leadership of Iran. The people who supported that effort were often folks who embraced the neoliberal, excuse me, the neoconservative label 20 years ago. But the administration that's ending this war is an isolationist administration led by JD Vance, who has for years now been very critical of America's military adventures. Abroad is so desperate to get out of the war that he's giving billions, tens of billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars to Iran, saying, please, please, just let us end this war and open the strait and let us go home and bring down inflation by a tick. So that's one big irony here. The second point that I wanted to make is in addition to this irony, that we started this war to stop Iran from getting access to the superweapon of a nuclear bomb, but ended the war by showing Iran that it had access to this other super weapon, which is shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. There's this other irony, which is that I remember a few days after the war started, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that we did this because Iran was about to be attacked by Israel and they were going to retaliate, and the US had to get ahead of that retaliation, which very weirdly made America seem like the Robin to Israel's Batman. At the beginning of the war, a lot of people hated it, and so the administration came up with a lot of other justifications for the war. But now you've got J.D. vance going around on television and on podcasts, essentially just driving the bus over Israel, saying the US Cannot just do Israel's bidding indefinitely. Again, very strange to remember that this is the same administration that said everything it said just four months ago. It brings me to this question. Do you think it's possible that the biggest loser of this war in the short term is Israel?
- [28:21]
A
That could well prove to be the case, Derek. I always say that these kinds of wars, their impact is often measured in many years, if not decades. And so we're taking a snapshot four months into it. But certainly at the moment, you know, Israel is, I think, very demoralized by the outcome of this war and by political trends in the United States. And one of the big questions is that have is American public opinion, especially younger generation public opinion, permanently shifted on Israel? Is this related to the person of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and with some new leadership in Israel, the state of popular perceptions of Israel, both in the United States and globally, could it change? But your first point is absolutely right, Derek, that at the very beginning of this war, the people who were most excited about it were those who are the most prominent supporters of Israel and the most prominent Iran hawks. Four months later, it's exactly the opposite. It's the most prominent apologist for the Iranian regime and the biggest critics of Israel, who are oftentimes kind of borderline anti Semitic, are the ones who are most supportive of this meu. And so that is just another reflection of the fact that I called Donald Trump the Jackson Pollock of grand strategy. There's really no great coherence there. He doesn't have any fixed foreign policy principles.
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B
I want to broaden the scope here and think about this war in the context of another major military aggression of the decade. In the last week of February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia believed it had the military capability of toppling that regime in days or weeks, and today it is obviously engaged in a protracted war due to, among other things, Ukraine's drone capabilities. Four years later to the week, in the last week of February of this year, the US attacks. Iran believes it has the military capability of toppling that regime in days or weeks, but finds itself engaged in a protracted war due to, among other things, Iran's drone capabilities. And I can't get over this. Even if it's a cosmetic coincidence, that the two great powers of the second half of the 20th century have both found their military superiority stymied by a drone wielding enemy, that feels like a significant development to me in terms of the lessons that it will teach great powers in the future or lesser powers in the future about the ability of drones to dictate the shape of war. And I wonder what you make of this apparent coincidence that might be more than a coincidence. I mean, will we remember this period, do you think, as the beginning of an era where drone power changed the calculus for war?
- [33:04]
A
It's a great question. And first, let me start with, I think, an additional parallel between the Russian war in Ukraine and the US War against Iran, which is in both cases, it was a war of choice by Russia and by the United States. And for Ukraine and the Zonic Republic, Iran, it was a war of survival. And so for that reason, you saw in the case of both Ukraine and Iran, these were countries that had 10 out of 10 resolve. For the Ukrainians, it was obviously a national issue. For the Islamic Republic of Iran, it's a regime survival issue. You know, this is a regime which is incredibly unpopular. And last January it just had massacred thousands of its own citizens to stay in power. And, and they knew that if they lost power now, it was kill or be killed. And so they had 10 out of 10 will 10 out of 10 resolve. And what we saw in this war, which resembled the Ukraine war, is that the weaker countries have figured out cheaper and asymmetric means to respond to a stronger military power. In the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I think their military budget is something like 1% that of the United States. But they figured out that with $20,000 drones, you can take the global economy hostage. They were attacking $100 million tankers filled with hundreds of millions of dollars of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz. And as I said, they, they took the global economy hostage. They also, with cheap drones and missiles, inflicted enormous damage on their neighboring countries. And the logic there was they hoped that countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Qatar would go to the United States and say, please end this war, because our economy, this is an existential threat to us. And the other big lesson here is that I did a Fulbright scholarship in Beirut a couple decades ago. And my big takeaway from that year was that building things takes decades. Destroying things takes days. And in the case of Iran and its neighbors, you have countries like Saudi, uae, Qatar, they're trying to be hubs for, for international transportation and finance and technology, data centers, AI that requires stability. And stability is expensive. It takes years to be able to build. But what we've seen within stability is it's incredibly cheap, it's $20,000 drones, and it's very quick. And so positive lessons were learned from that outcome in the Ukrainian context. And in fact, America's Gulf partners are now forging new security relationships to learn from Ukraine. But, you know, the negative example was learned in the Iranian context that, you know, these cheap asymmetric weapons can prevent this, the world's greatest military power, the United States, from prevailing in these wars of choice.
- [36:36]
B
I want to move to the near future. We've been using the words memorandum and framework and understanding because this is a war that is not over. We have an agreement about how the war might end officially in several months after final negotiations are in place. Help us understand what's on the table for these negotiations. What's left to be hammered out? And given the prevailing winds right now, how do you think they will be hammered out?
- [37:05]
A
So what Vice President Vance announced in his recent visit to Geneva and his closed door meeting with Iranians is that they are going to start to commence technical discussions with the Iranians. Now. The US Team so far hasn't brought technical experts to the table. And so on paper, the plan is to try to come to a technical agreement on the nuclear issue in the next 60 days. The likelihood of that happening is extremely low if you keep in mind that the jcpoa, Obama's nuclear deal, took almost two years to negotiate. And so then, Derek, we go back to the question of the psychology of President Trump. I used to joke always with my Georgetown students that to understand the Middle east, you're better off studying psychology than political science because oftentimes, so often the Middle east has been shaped by the ambitions and manias of individual men rather than the national interests of those countries. And likewise, if you're trying to understand how America is thinking about these negotiations, it's really, how is President Trump thinking about these negotiations? And, you know, how does it impact his internal politics, his legacy? And so if he feels that Iran is essentially just stonewalling and they are not willing to make any meaningful compromises because they believe they prevailed in this war, there's a big question of what he chooses to do. I've spoken to people who are journalists who speak to Trump on a daily basis and also some of his aides, and they will give you different predictions about what he will choose to do. Some of the reporters I speak to who speak to Trump frequently say he's done with this war. You know, as he indicated, he doesn't want to be over Hoover. He's done with Iran. He wants to do other stuff. Some of his aides say the opposite, that if he feels that Iran is not willing to make any meaningful nuclear compromises, it's not willing to give up its, quote, unquote, nuclear dust, its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, it's not willing to suspend enrichment and do the kinds of things that Trump needs to be able to say he did better than Obama. Those aides say he may well go back to blockade, the naval blockade of Iran or potentially even bombing Iran. And Lindsey Graham has said as much as well. And so, you know, we can't predict what's inside the president's head. But I do think that Iranians are not going to make it easy for them for President Trump. I've spoken to some of the negotiating, the mediating countries, and I've asked the negotiators, is the Iranian regime trying to do anything to make it easier for President Trump to sell this deal at home, given he said the Obama deal was the worst deal in history? And they said not at all. They're not interested in doing any favors for President Trump. So I am not optimistic we're going to see a quick resolution here.
- [40:32]
B
So you think this could be a quagmire, that you could have a war that is lukewarm and then hot and then cold again and then lukewarm, and then there's another bombing campaign in order to get, you know, Iranian negotiators back to the table. But this is just not something that's going to end in the next few months because you don't have enough of the Revolutionary Guard motivated to put that signature on a deal that could plausibly be on the table in the next two months?
- [40:59]
A
Well, unless it's that the Trump administration just decides to capitulate and offer what will almost universally be be perceived as an extremely bad deal for the United States, a good deal for Iran. And that is certainly a possibility, as I've said, you know, people who speak to a president frequently say he's done with this war. Now, the other caveat is what happens with Lebanon. And there's a big point of contention about Lebanon between Iran and Israel, and it's over the question of the word sovereignty. So the Iranian regime says that, and this was, I think, the very first point of the MoU, that Lebanon must be a sovereign country. What Iran is trying to say is that Israel shouldn't attack Lebanon, should respect Lebanon's sovereignty. Now, the Israelis say the same thing. Yes, Lebanon should be a sovereign country, and therefore Iran shouldn't be operating militias within Lebanon, Lebanese, Hezbollah, that are launching strikes on Israel. So there's a big dispute about the word sovereignty. And so long as you see Hezbollah launching strikes on Israel from Lebanese soil, I don't think President Trump is going to be able to restrain Prime Minister Netanyahu from responding. And there's the danger that Iran will say, okay, you've just violated the mou. We're going to block this trade of Hormuz.
- [42:32]
B
Again, I think I have a prediction about what's going to be in the final document, but I want you to tell me if this is a plausible one. I think the president is, as you've alluded to, powered much more by interpersonal competition and envy than he is powered by any sense of geopolitics or philosophy. What he wants is to be able to claim numerically, objectively, that this deal is better than the deal that Obama signed that he called the worst deal ever. So why isn't it implausible that they essentially just get on the piece of paper a number that is better than the 3.5% enriched uranium number that the Obama deal technically allowed, but with very little enforcement mechanism, so that the deal itself could essentially both be bragged by Donald Trump as being better than the Obama deal, but also be so toothless that people in Iran feel like we can sign this deal and it doesn't even matter? It might as well be a child scribbling on a piece of paper. It has nothing to do with, with any enforcement mechanism, whether it's, you know, transnational, like UN or national, like, you know, one particular country coming into Iran in order to inspect our nuclear facilities. Why is it implausible, essentially, that we get a deal that's a little bit of a fiction that allows Trump to go on the campaign trail and say, this is better than Obama?
- [44:02]
A
So that is certainly a plausible near term outcome, Derek. And I think certainly America's partners in the Gulf would be potentially okay with that outcome. If it indeed keeps the Strait of Hormuz open and, you know, it ceases hostilities for the near term, that's a decent outcome for them. The Israelis will obviously take enormous umbrage to that outcome, and it will be interesting to see how this impacts Trump internally. Will some of those key senators accept this outcome? People like Lindsey Graham's and Tom Cottons and Ted Cruz's? Or will they essentially be looking beyond Trump to the primaries of 2028 and start to sharpen their knives and go after Vance for this? How will Marco Rubio react to an outcome like that? You know, he's on the record opposing that kind of outcome. And so I suspect if I had to make one prediction that, and it's not really a bold prediction, but I don't think that this war and the potential deal that follows it is going to be popular for any politician associated with it.
- [45:30]
B
I agree. I think this war forces attention and attention on this schism that's existed in the Republican Party for the last few years, but hasn't had a litmus test like this. Either you are of the George W. Bush more neoconservative school that says that America needs to flex its power in order to make the Middle east safe for Israel and take the battle to Iran, or you are the sort of person who believes that America is better off embracing a more Jacksonian isolationist position that puts the American consumer way, way, way above international concerns. And so, therefore, the second that it looks like Iran is starting to put pressure on the global price of oil and drive up inflation for Americans, we're out. The deal no longer looks good for us. Those are entirely different philosophies that, in fact, do not cohere when you're forced to answer one question, which is, should we invade Iran and try to topple their regime? And so I'm incredibly interested to see not only what the final language of this deal looks like, but the Republican Party thinks about itself as the author of this deal. I mean, this will have been a war started by the Trump administration, ended by the Trump administration, signed by Donald Trump himself and negotiated by the vice president. And yet, as you said, I don't think it's going to be a very popular final document among that wing of Republicans, precisely because Trump wants out. And if you want out, then that's not a lot of leverage. What's something that we haven't talked about that we should talk about? I mean, in terms of what could happen, what we should look out for in the next few weeks and months? I mean, to a certain extent, this war has gone very much like you and I predicted four months ago, which is to say we talked about four ways the war could end. Beginning with the most optimistic for the Trump administration, which was regime change, and ending with the, we said, most probable outcome, which is a kind of muddling along someone in the big Pez, dispenser of the Revolutionary Guard takes over at the top. And you essentially deal with a state that is very much like the state that came before those first bombs. So I think we've seen this war somewhat similarly and somewhat accurately. But what should we look out for for the next few days and weeks? What's going to happen next?
- [47:48]
A
I think one of the big questions that is yet to be determined, Derek, is how. How does Iran regroup internally? Because this is a regime which is very good. It's shown itself to be very good at resistance against the United States. It's very effective at repression. You know, it's been perfecting the science of repression for 47 years, killing and imprisoning thousands of its citizens. But it's a regime which is terrible at governance. And so it's, in my view, not a foregone conclusion that there's been a quote, unquote, rallying around the flag effect. That is what many argue, that the regime now has newfound popularity among its citizens. That certainly, I think they've benefited from the tremendous nationalism of Iranian citizens in the near term. But that could well prove to be a sugar high six months from now, one year from now, when and if the war has concluded and the daily indignities of life rise to the fore again. Remember, this is a regime which is dealing with 70% inflation, triple digit inflation when it comes to food items. And there's probably no country on earth with a greater gap between its citizens and its government than Iran. And I think the lesson they've taken away from this war is probably the wrong one, which is, I think they believe that revolutionary ideology isn't this albatross which has driven the country to wars and to economic malaise. It's in fact this lifesaver which has helped keep the country afloat amidst popular uprisings and war. And let's double down on it, but that's not going to get Iran out of the morass that it's been in for many years. So it's long been my view, Derek, that perhaps the best parallel for this regime is the Soviet Union. It's a regime which is not suicidal. It wants to stay in power. And therefore, from the vantage point of the United States, it can be contained. It's not Nazi Germany. So the containment approach, the containment doctrine, I think, applies to Iran, but at the same time, it's a regime which has shown itself incapable of putting economic and national interests before revolutionary ideology. This is what JD Vance is trying to test now. He says that behind the scenes, it's a regime which is Fundamentally rethinking its revolutionary ideology, its approach towards the United States. I don't doubt that some folks may have said those things from behind the scenes. There's no public evidence that they are rethinking that. If you look at the top men ruling Iran now, none of them, or very few of them, are people you would describe as pragmatists aspiring Deng Xiaopings. And so I think the big question for the future, looking in the years ahead is what emerges within Iran internally. And unfortunately, as I said, they probably learned the wrong lesson from this war in more than one way. One is that revolutionary ideology prevailed for them. Number two is that you win concessions from the United States not by compromising, but by punching back hard, by closing the Strait of Hormuz, by attacking your neighbors with missiles and drones. And that is certainly a dangerous outcome as well.
- [51:30]
B
Economic warfare works. That seems to be the clearest lesson of this conflict for Iran. We were attacked, we were demolished by a salvo of missiles that's among the largest like 12 hour salvos in world history. And we ended the war on terms positive to us because we sent so many $20,000 drones after liquid natural gas refineries and other pieces of economic infrastructure for other Middle Eastern countries along the Gulf and along the Strait. I mean, economic warfare worked. That seems to me to be the clearest lesson here. And it's hard to think how economic warfare works is a good lesson for a country to learn if you want it to become more peaceful in the future. I mean, it seems to me, very last question. I'm sure I'm not a military historian. Maybe there are many wars that end where historians collectively feel like there was no winner and everyone was a loser. But right now it really does feel like this is one of those wars where everybody is a loser. I mean, Iran, even if the regime remains intact, lost their supreme leader, lost thousands of Revolutionary Guards, lost tens of billions of dollars, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity on top of the dozens, hundreds, thousands of civilians, innocent civilians that were killed in Iran, the Middle Eastern countries around the Strait. Surely they don't think that they've won this war. They suddenly have to pay this tollbooth tax to access the Strait of Hormuz. Eastern Asia definitely doesn't feel like it. Whatever the opposite of a jackpot prize is, is what they won from this war. Israel can't feel like it won this war. It's more alone than it was before February 28th. Now that you have the vice president saying that it's American foreign policy to no longer allow Israel and its geopolitical interest to walk the dog of America's military. Trump certainly isn't a winner. His approval rating is down. Vance has the knives out for him. The Republican Party can't feel like a particular winner. You don't want to say like the Democratic Party is a winner for something that's this terrible, but it seems like the only group that you can almost conclusively and objectively say won something from this terrible military engagement are Trump critics who are now looking at someone whose popularity and strength in the party has been obliterated by this whatever 4 month misadventure. Am I right to see that one conclusion of the war is that basically everybody lost?
- [54:02]
A
You know, I wrote Derek the very first week of the war in the Atlantic that this appeared to be a war in which there would be no victors. Everyone loses, as you said. I thought over the last four months that perhaps there was one big winner, which was Vladimir Putin in Russia, and that he's experienced a massive cash windfall. But he's not doing well on the battlefield for different reasons in Ukraine. So he's not a great winner either. The reality is that whoever becomes president after President Trump, whether it's a Democrat who opposed the war or a Republican, unfortunately Iran is, so long as the Islamic Republic of Iran is ruling Iran, they are going to remain an adversary. Their whole identity is premise on hostility towards the United States. And in some ways, Vice President Vance is testing out what the preferred approach of many anti war Democrats is, which is let's try to transform this relationship by showering Iran with economic incentives. And you see that up until now they haven't reciprocated to that. So I don't think that there are any silver bullets that resolve the Iranian challenge to the extent I think there's a framework which works. It's what Ronald Reagan did with the Soviet Union, which was, you know, he contained them, he did do arms control deals with them, he countered their attempts to spread their ideology. But he did something which I don't see really in either party right now, which is he also relied heavily on American values and on democracy. And he denounced the Russian system, the Soviet Union he advocated for. He said that the most powerful force in the world is the human heart's yearning for freedom. And that's something which I see really absent in both parties. And I do think it's pertinent here because ultimately, as I said, we're not going to ever resolve the U. S. Iran conflict until we have a government in power in Iran whose organizing principle is its own national interests rather than, you know, this antiquated, hateful, revolutionary ideology.
- [56:29]
B
Kareem Sajadpur, thank you very much.
- [56:32]
A
Thank you. Great to be with you. Darcy.
- [56:40]
B
Sam.