← The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer
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- [00:00]
A
Wharton Professor Ethan Malik says that with AI, his students are doing a semester's worth of work in just a couple of days. In Moloch's classroom, AI is required. I'm Henry Blodgett, and this week on Solutions, I talk to Professor Malik about how he's radically transformed, how he teaches and how he continues to test the boundaries of what AI can and cannot do. Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett to hear our conversation.
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B
It is unprecedented in American history that you have a president of the United States accessible by phone to reporters and kind of market testing different ideas about how to handle a war three or four times a day leading to like three or four different contradictory news stories about his intentions.
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A
Welcome back to the Long game. I'm Jake Sullivan.
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B
And I'm John Finer.
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A
John, it's been a while since you and I have had an episode where we don't have a guest and I'm worried it's going to get a little awkward. Are you.
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B
It feels a bit lonely. We may need some.
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A
Is he talking to me for the next hour? Is that okay for you?
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B
I think we can probably figure it out, work our way through it, but. Well, we'll see how it goes. All right.
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A
We'll see how it goes. So today we are going to mainly focus on Iran, which of course is the topic on everyone's mind given the ongoing war and especially given the fact that President Trump for the first time in primetime addressed the nation to lay out why we went to war, how he thinks it's going, and to a certain extent, where it goes from here with a lot of other things sprinkled in, including just an all time hall of fame Trump hyperbole where he said something to the effect of, I think I have the quote here. Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large scale losses in a matter of weeks. Never in the history of warfare. That's quite a claim. But John, why don't we start by talking about the speech? Then maybe you and I could spend some time actually talking about what an end to this war could actually look like and what we would do if we were in the room advising the president right now, notwithstanding the fact that neither of us thought he should have gone to war in the first place. Maybe we can touch on our experience negotiating with the Iranians. And then we got to do a red team, blue team. And I think for this week, the red team, blue team we were thinking of was to both be Iranian advisors to the new supreme Leader. One of US Arguing that Iran should negotiate with the United States to end the war. And the other arguing Iran should stand firm, refuse to negotiate, and make the US Stew in its own juices.
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B
See, we have a lot to talk about, even without a guest. I think it'll work.
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A
All right, so with my long intro soliloquy, maybe I'll turn it over to you for your top line thoughts on the speech, what you drew from it, how we should be thinking about it, what stood out to you.
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B
You were right that this was a kind of a first in the course of this conflict. No off the cuff response to a shouted question in the Oval Office or midnight press availability wearing a baseball hat. It had all the kind of formality of a serious address to the nation, which I think many people had thought the president should have done earlier in the conflict. And to be honest, I think that's sort of true of the content of this speech as well. While he spent a lot of time talking, as you said, about the supposed and I think very real and in many cases American military accomplishments during the course of this war, he also did more than he has done up till now to explain why we had gone to war, even though we are a month into this conflict. A lot about the kind of the history of Iran's transgressions against the United States, killing of Americans in different places, the kind of intolerability of this regime and the fact that previous presidents. Irresponsible. He's one of these previous presidents, but anyway, irresponsibly allowed it to continue to fester and why he felt like he needed to step in and do what he's doing. The kind of case you would normally make either just before or just after starting a conflict like this, maybe not one month into it. What I thought was most striking, honestly about what he said last night is it left me wondering why he gave this speech at this time because it did not really move the needle in terms of, I think that the two big things that people were looking for from him, clarity about where all this is going. He did say two to three more weeks of heavy bombing, but didn't exactly firmly say that at that point for sure it's gonna end. And by the way, his previous timelines have not exactly held and stuck in every instance. So he can't take that.
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A
Two to three weeks is a standard Donald Trump Trump timeframe, which has come to mean really nothing at all.
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B
Yeah, it's like the old kind of infrastructure week conversation about the Trump first term. Everything is two to three Weeks away. And then I think the other thing that people were looking for from him is a bit more understanding of what we are trying to accomplish in this war. And here also, I think, a distinct lack of clarity, because on the one hand, he said that all of the big objectives, the nuclear program, which we should talk more about, maybe isn't all that important to deal with further, because we've bombed it so much. And this is just nuclear dust, by the way, not highly enriched uranium, which could rapidly be turned into a bomb, which he's also said at previous points the regime has already changed. So regime change isn't an objective that we need to continue fighting for, necessarily. And the Strait of Hormuz, we'll talk more about this too. That's kind of somebody else's problem. So we sort of lowered the bar on all those big three, big ticket objectives. On the other hand, though, he told the Iranians in no uncertain terms, if you don't make a deal with me, I'm going to bomb you back to the Stone Age. I'm going to go after all your civilian infrastructure. And didn't really say anything about boots on the ground. But implicitly, all of these options that we've been discussing in recent weeks feel like they are still on the table to greater or lesser extent. So again, kind of lack of clarity, lack of reassurance, and pretty open in terms of where all this could go, where with these two parallel messages of maybe none of this is all that important. And on the other hand, I'm willing to go to total war to achieve it.
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A
Yeah, John, just on that point, I really thought this was A Tale of Two Speeches. For the first 75% of the speech, he was basically saying, mission accomplished, we've achieved our objectives, or we're on the brink of achieving our objectives, and once we do, we're gonna end it, walk away. And the things that are left, like the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, that's other people's problem, that they should go deal with it. I'm handing this over to the rest of the world. And that speech was basically a permission structure to just stop this at any time he wants to stop it. Then towards the end of the speech, all of a sudden he swerved and said in kind of a totally different formula, if Iran doesn't do a deal with us, as you said, we reserve the right to destroy their energy infrastructure, to destroy their oil facilities, implicitly reserving the right to do that both from the air and on the ground. And In a way, he was basically going back to the notion that the war has to end in some kind of settlement. So when he walked away from the podium, he walked away with exactly the same options that he had walked up to the podium with last night. And for the rest of us and for the rest of the world, we're mired in the same uncertainty as we were before the speech. The two to three weeks timeframe maybe makes the Iranians think Trump is getting nervous, but it certainly can't give any of us confidence that that's a really meaningful timeframe. And otherwise he still seems to be standing at this intersection between just washing his hands of the matter and walking away, or going until he feels he's achieved some result through negotiations or through further military action. And so it seems to me that the speech had enough of everything to preserve every option, and therefore, really the only purpose in giving it, in a way, was because he felt the bottom was dropping out of support for the war, but of support for him, and that the American people were asking themselves, what the hell is going on here? So he came out to try to give a speech, which, as you say, was really the kind of speech you would give on day one, not on day 31 or whatever day we're on now. And in a funny way, the thought bubble, I was thinking the entire speech was kind of Donald Trump saying, look, I'm kind of in a box here. I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to get out of it. I'm trying out a variety of different rationales or formulas or declarations of success. I'm road testing them all today, see which one sticks. And it really was, to me, the story of the commander in chief who weeks into this war is deeply uncertain about how it ends, in part because I think at this point he doesn't have a clear sense of why it started, even though he's trying now to paint a coherent picture of why it started, which is reverse engineered from the kinds of things he was saying at the outset. And then the one thing I do believe really did emerge from this speech was he put his thumb on the scale on this highly enriched uranium question, as you flagged, and maybe you want to take a minute to talk through how you interpreted that particular provision. What to do about this stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be further enriched to weapons grade relatively rapidly.
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B
So there have been reports in recent days that the United States has continued bombing Esfahan, which is the nuclear facility where it is widely believed or expected, suspected that the Highly enriched uranium that Iran retains, maybe 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60% is buried somewhere in the tunnels underneath this facility. Now also underneath a bunch of rubble that's been created by the bombardment. There had been a lot of speculation, we discussed it in, in this podcast, about whether the United States would go in with Special Forces or Israel might go in with special forces and try to grab these canisters of this dangerous material and carry them out of Iran, which, if it were accomplished, would be a remarkable achievement. Very difficult, very high risk military operation, but would meaningfully reduce the amount of time it would take for Iran to pursue a weapon if that material could be extracted. But one, no guarantee that the mater is actually where we think it is or where the US Government thinks it is. Two, lots of things could go wrong in this operation, as we've discussed many times. And what the President seemed to be saying last night is we've dealt with that problem in a different way. We've kind of buried it under enough rubble and we're watching it with our satellites closely enough that if they try to move and extract that material, we'll see, we'll bomb them again, and we'll just deal with this problem from afar and from the air. Now, as we've seen in the past with Trump, that could either be an accurate reflection of his current thought process or it could be an operation he orders tomorrow with the goal in the speech of having kind of distracted the Iranians, misdirected the Iranians. So who knows? But it did seem like he was moving that particular operation down the priority list, at least that's how I read it.
- [11:31]
A
Or at least road testing, as I was saying before, a kind of rationale, hoping it sticks and that therefore his problem is resolved. I think it's worth actually reading this single paragraph of the speech which you captured very well. He says the nuclear sites that we obliterated with the B2 bombers have been hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust. And we have it under intense satellite surveillance and control. If we see them make a move, even a move for it, we'll hit them with missiles very hard. Again, we have all the cards. They have none. He is seeming to indicate that he does not feel compelled either to do the Isfahan operation that we've discussed. There's a great Washington Post piece on this, by the way, that people should read if they get the opportunity, because that Washington Post article goes through just how difficult a military operation it would be. But it also seems to Say he doesn't have to do a deal for this highly enriched uranium, which is something we'll talk about in a bit. But, of course, it being Donald Trump, we could wake up tomorrow with the Isfahan operation underway, and this paragraph having been designed essentially to lull the Iranians and the rest of the world and podcasters such as ourselves into a false sense of security. I think the one other thing I wanted to make sure that we flag with respect to this speech that is really important is the core rationale that the administration is now trying to align around for why they went into this war in the first place. We've heard 12 different explanations. We saw a large emphasis on regime change early on. Now they're sweeping that under the rug and pretending it was never really part of the deal or that it already happened. Or that it's already happened. Exactly. Because now we have a better, friendlier regime in the form of the son of the Ayatollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Marco Rubio did a video yesterday that I think is two minutes worth watching, because it's probably the most serious articulation of this new core rationale. What was Iran trying to do? Iran was trying to build a conventional shield, in essence, have so many missiles, have so many drones that no one could attack them, and they were well on their way. We were on the verge of an Iran that had so many missiles and so many drones that no one could do anything about their nuclear weapons program in the future. That was an intolerable risk. Then the president kind of laid this out in his traditional bombastic, sort of florid style. And it basically came down to this proposition, which is Iran was marching towards a weapon, and they were building this conventional shield of missiles, drones, and other capabilities that was going to get so powerful over time that the United States or anyone else would not be able to hold the nuclear program at risk. At some point, it'd be impossible to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon. So we had to act now. And then layered on top of that is this is a problem that's been festering for 47 years. No one has solved it, including Donald Trump in his first term as president, as you pointed out. Now, finally, we have a president who's come along ready to solve it. So that's the core rationale. So how does that. And that's what he is trying to sell. And you could see Rubio really aggressively trying to sell that yesterday for this podcast and thinking about the long game when it comes to Iran. And you And I both dealt with this problem. I think it's worth us seriously looking at that rationale and saying, what do we make of it? So, John, what do you make of it?
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B
Well, teed up. All right, so look, on the one hand, everything he said about the Iranian regime is true. It has a lot of American blood on its hands and has over a long period of time. And I think the way ultimately this conflict is going to be judged if and when it finally ends is two things. One is the accomplishments, the accomplishment that he's pointing to. The degradation of Iran's military capability, by the way, not degradation to zero, because he has, at various points claimed we've reduced their military capacity by 100%. That would be a lot. And yet they are still, with the remaining 0%, able to hold the entire global economy at risk and deny ships access to the straits. So clearly they have some capacity remaining. But is the reduction in Iran's military capacity worth the various costs associated with this war, the various economic costs? I think the costs in terms of hardening, more likely than not, Iran's approach to the United States, to the region, to the wider world, in terms of revealing actually Iran has this capability to hold the entire global economy at risk. Remember that in the entire history of the Iranian regime which the President described, they have never closed the Strait of Hormuz before and probably had at least some questions and some doubts as to how that would all work if they were to try it. And now they have tried it and proven that they can do it and can do it so far without an obvious way for the United States or any other country to forcibly reopen it, which gives them, Iran, the leverage to negotiate all manner of transactional arrangements with different countries around the world. And we'll talk about this, I think, a bit more in the next section, and extract things from them, extract money from them, extract other concessions potentially from them. It is a new strategic lever that they have helped reveal for Iran that I suspect it's going to use or at least brandish going forward. So is all of this worth it? I think is going to be a big open question. And who ultimately ends up with the better deterrent at the end of this? The United States, because it showed militarily it can wipe out the top echelons of the Iranian government. Or Iran, because it's shown it can take down much of the global economy or at least threaten it and use that as leverage against the United States. And everything that Trump does going forward, every escalation option, both can harm Iran, but is also a bit of a gun pointed at our own head. Because if you stop Iran's oil production by going after their civilian energy infrastructure, you are going to raise the price of oil, which is going to put meaningful economic pressure on the United States. And if you are the Iranians right now, I think you are probably thinking, we'll talk more about this later, too. We can take more pain than you
- [18:31]
A
can, than the US Can.
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B
And they may well be right about that.
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A
Yeah, it's interesting. I completely agree with you that they are trying to ignore, minimize, in some ways, just entirely wish away the cost side of the ledger. And there are other costs, too, associated with how Russia and China benefit relationships with our allies are standing in the world. But beyond what's happening on the cost side of the ledger, I think it's worth interrogating two elements of this claim that I think are highly dubious. The first element of the claim is that Iran could get so conventionally powerful that we couldn't go after their nuclear program militarily if one day we were forced to. And that seems pretty dubious to me. I mean, even if they built a lot more missiles and a lot more air defenses and a lot more other things, our ability to degrade their conventional military capacity I think would be sustained over the course of quite a long time. So I think they are massively overstating that element of it. But that's not really my core objection to their rationale. My core objection to their rationale is that they act as though there's only one way to deal with the nuclear program, and that's through military force, that there's no other way. But you and I both know there is another way. It's called diplomacy. And in fact, the nuclear deal that we both worked on, that President Obama and Secretary Kerry brought across the finish line, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, put Iran's nuclear program in a box for the long term, despite what President Trump tried to assert in his speech yesterday. President Trump pulled out of that deal, which put us in the position that we are in now. And you and I remember jousting with opponents of the Iran nuclear deal at the time who kept asserting, we just want a better deal. We're not looking for war. We just want a better deal. And I think you and I both thought, oh, a better deal. We never thought of that. We just thought this deal, or a worst deal never occurred to us to go for.
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B
We were not against a better deal,
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A
to be clear, when in fact, we got the best deal we could and what these opponents were really advocating for without saying so, was war. And now we see that the mask has come off that we were right when we basically said the critics of the JCPOA were forcing the US Down a road of war. And now we see where we are with the administration pulling out of it. That still does leave a hard and important question, which is, okay, Trump pulled out of it, then President Biden was elected. You and I went and worked on Biden foreign policy for four years, and we weren't able to get back to a deal. So there was not a deal in place when President Trump came into office in 2025. That is true. A big part of the reason we weren't able to get to a deal, and in fact we got very close a couple of times, was that the Iranians very understandably were like, wait a second, if we do a deal, you guys are just gonna pull out of it. We've seen you do that before. And it was very difficult to overcome that basic hurdle. Now, when President Trump was reelected, Iran was in a very. We. That's what we handed off, which put, I think, the United States in an excellent position to get a good nuclear deal. And President Trump, having been the guy who pulled out of it in the first place, was in a uniquely good position to go to the Iranians and make guarantees about doing a deal, and it's sticking for the longer term because I think he would have more credibility in that being the guy who pulled out of it. So nuclear diplomacy was absolutely available to this president before the 12 day war last year and after the 12 day war last year. And instead of a deal that could verifiably stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for a very long time, he chose this course of action instead. Which 1 has all the costs you identified, and 2 doesn't solve the problem. As you noted, whatever he wants to say about this issue of nuclear dust, Iran retains the capability and now, as Danny Sintrinowitz told us, has an even greater incentive for ultimately to try to go for a bomb than they would have if we had done a deal. So this, I think, is what is being lost or being shunted aside in the context of the core rationale that they're laying out. And I think it's important for us to kind of talk to our listeners and viewers about how this entire other track, a diplomatic track that could lead to long term, verifiable limits on Iran's nuclear ambitions, man, we have missed pursuing that track for a very long time. And the question of whether it is available to us on a going forward basis is very much up in the air. End of Rand.
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B
Well, look, you're right. Raise the degree of difficulty on not just his administration achieving some sort of diplomatic resolution here, but any future administration achieving that by showing that the United States maybe doesn't stand by agreements. It makes any more, at least longer than one administration. He's also done that, by the way, by launching negotiations with the Iranians twice during the course of his administration and then bombing them. Yeah. Before those negotiations had come to fruition. So, you know, there's like a fool me three times aspect to this on some level for the Iranians. And, you know, there are a lot of things, but they are not stupid. And the likelihood of them rushing back into some sort of negotiated resolution with Trump or, you know, a future administration has gone way down during the course of this.
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A
It's interesting. There's this idea of confidence building measures as you try to get into diplomacy. This is like confidence destroying measures. We're going to start negotiations with you and then up and out of the blue bomb you. Yeah. Does not, I think, increase the enthusiasm for the other side to get back into serious diplomacy.
- [24:16]
B
Maybe just the last couple things I wanted to note on the speech and we can move on. But there were some strange rhetorical choices made here for a speech that was intended to be kind of the clarifying statement. I mean, you have a president who has said the military operation was very complete two, three weeks ago. Last night, he said the military operation was nearing completion. So I don't know, to my ear, nearing completion sounds like we've gone backwards from very complete, not forwards. Not exactly a signal of significant progress. There are also just these contradictions that were built into it. On the one hand, if they don't do a deal with us, we're gonna bomb them back into the Stone Age and we're gonna hit them very hard over the next two to three weeks. And by the way, you could tell which part of the speech Pete Hegseth cared about or believed was important because
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A
he basically just tweeted death, destruction all day long.
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B
Back to the Stone Age last night. I think he missed the rest of it or didn't pay particularly close attention to it. But he also said that when we stop fighting, the straight will open naturally. So if the strait will open naturally, why do we care then if Iran makes an agreement with us, if this is all just going to work out well? He also said gas prices will rapidly go down, stock prices will rapidly go back up if all of this kind of magical positive objectives are going to be achieved without doing anything, it's not clear to me then what the purpose of the next two or three weeks of bombardment is. And the kind of casual references that he makes to what would basically be a. Not basically would be a war crime, bombing civilian energy infrastructure to kind of punish the Iranian people and make them angry at their government. Why are we doing all that if all of the things that he is looking for have either been achieved or will happen as the natural outgrowth of our stopping? So don't really understand that either. The last thing I wanted to say is I think they made one really bad kind of rhetorical decision at the end of the speech, and I see why they did it. But he went through this litany of, like every other American war.
- [26:14]
A
Absolutely glad you raised this.
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B
World War I lasted this many, many years in World War II, the Iraq War that many years, and Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq. And I think he was intending to contrast that with just over a month that we've been at war with Iran. But to my ear, and I think maybe to some Americans ears, they were thinking, like, is this what this guy has in mind, some massive protracted US Conflict? Because that is not the comparison or I think the future that many Americans are hoping for. I think he intended to give the opposite impression. I think it's. It possibly did not have the effect that he had in mind.
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A
I count myself among those Americans, John. When I heard that, I thought my immediate reaction was, wait a second, is he laying the groundwork for this to go on forever? Then I kind of worked through, oh, no. He may be actually trying to reassure us, but absolutely, I thought that was strange. And by the way, I don't totally rule out just based on the mixed messaging, some of which you just highlighted extremely effectively. This speech, at the end of the day, is leaving open every option to the president and has him standing there the same way he has been standing there now for a long time, basically looking around at his advisors, at the press, at any reporter who calls him and saying, what do I do now? I'm in a bit of a box. I would like to get out of the box. What's my way out? And he's throwing out a whole bunch of different and oftentimes contradictory pathways out. And. And I think that, well, tees up the next thing we should turn to, which is, all right, we've analyzed the war, we've talked about the costs and the consequences, we've talked about the difficult challenges the president faces. What we haven't done is put ourselves really in the shoes of advisors to a president to say, if we were in the room right now and we were telling the President, given where you are today, whatever we think about how we got here, given where you are today, what's the best path forward? There's basically been one guy in Republican politics who's argued for regime change in Iran for years and for America to take a proactive military role in making it happen. Ambassador John Bolton, President Trump's former national security adviser. But now even Bolton says Donald Trump is messing it up. As far as we can tell, he did. No preparation of the opposition actually inside Iran. No coordination, no effort to see what they would do, no effort to support them, to provide resources, money, arms, if that's what they wanted. Telecommunications. Just. Just no coordination at all. And they don't seem prepared for it. How Trump lost the Republican Party's biggest Iran war Hawk today, explain every weekday and on Saturdays, too. In 1984, Apple launched maybe the most consequential computer ever. It was. It's not a good computer, particularly. There was actually a lot wrong with it. But the Macintosh had all of the right ideas about what computers would become, and it kind of changed everything. This week on Version History, our chat show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history, we're telling the story of the Macintosh and why, again, despite not being very good, it managed to change everything Anyway, that's version history on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts. What is a plausible pathway to bring an end to the war that puts the US in the best possible position, given everything that's happened so far and the very difficult circumstances we're dealing with? So do you want to give some reflections on what you would say or how you would puzzle through this conundrum that the President obviously is kind of stewing in his own juices over?
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B
Yeah, I'll start and then turn it back to you. But I do think while the President is not going to consult us, he is consulting incredibly widely and I think market testing ideas. You mentioned this idea of almost consultation of the press. It is unprecedented in American history that you have a President of the United States accessible by phone to reporters and kind of market testing different ideas about how to handle a war three or four times a day, leading to three or four different contradictory news stories about his intention.
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A
Sometimes three or four contradictory statements within a news story. Right. Some of these news stories now are like, he told me this, and then he Told me that the kind of very complete, nearing completion point that you were making earlier and this has almost
- [31:18]
B
become a part of his decision. I think it has become part of his decision making process. And that in and of itself is extraordinary, but also means you just discount everything that's published, basically that even comes directly from the words of the president. So a long way of saying maybe, you know, maybe we'll get a call one of these days. You know, who knows? Can't rule it out. Although I don't think likely.
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A
Will you conference me in if he calls you?
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B
Mr. President, just one second. I'm going to get Jake on the line. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If you promise to do the same.
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A
That's fair.
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B
I'll make.
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A
That's a pact. Good. All right, maybe, come on, the long game. Maybe we should call him up.
- [31:55]
B
This is an open invitation.
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A
Call them up.
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B
Say, hey, I'm sure we can get
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A
a number to go live with the long game for 10 minutes. Okay.
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B
Oh, my God. Quite an idea. All right, we'll discuss that with producers offline. But not a terrible idea. All right. The one thing I would say about the current state of negotiations, which I think is important is both the United States and Iran have put out demands that are wildly unrealistic. So United States has said Iran is going to have to forego any nuclear program, any missile program, any financial support of proxies in the region. I mean, these are the core of Iran's kind of security and deterrence in the world. And in the context of a war in which they have been attacked by the United States and Israel, the likelihood that they're going to give all that up and kind of surrender and capitulate seems unlikely absent a massive change from where things are right now. That's the US side. These 15 points that have leaked in terms of what the US is seeking on the Iranian side, though, there are also these just incredibly unrealistic demands, including that the United States should withdraw all of its forces from, from the Middle east, which while President Trump has mused about the idea of withdrawing forces from Europe and the Korean peninsula, he's not shown a lot of appetite to do that and is not going to do that in the context of a war in which he's trying to show that he has won. So the real challenge with these diplomatic initiatives is, and this is not a Trumpian instinct is to is what is a way forward that can give each side some ability to claim that it has achieved enough to stop. That is kind of the core of diplomacy. It's not about obliteration. It's not about total victory. There are no 100% surrender.
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A
Right? That was one of the formulas for this war at a certain point.
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B
So that can be rhetoric, maybe to position yourself for talks, but the ultimate outcome, and this is why the JCPOA and other agreements become controversial, is if you don't give something up and the other side is not going to make concessions to you, that's just not how anything works. So where does this start? And I think one thing that is interesting about the current moment, that maybe gives a different approach, different look, different flavor to this diplomacy, is that it is now starting to become a bit multilateralized. It is not just the United States and Iran sitting in a room or speaking indirectly to each other through an intermediary. And we've got some experience with that as well. Those are very difficult ways to negotiate sometimes because the two sides are such staunch adversaries. But in the context of the jcpoa, much of the conversation was conducted with other countries in the room. And in this case now we see China and Pakistan trying to assert themselves, insert themselves into the diplomacy. They have gotten together and put out their five points for how the conflict could end. You've seen Keir Starmer and the UK Convene this coalition, the Hormuz coalition, he calls it, which he says is maybe the beginning of a military escort capability, but I think is much more likely to be a platform through which to negotiate with the Iranians about the future of the Strait. And so one dimension of this that I think could eventually help reach a resolution, especially because the United States may just wash its hands of this entire situation, is that other countries, I think, see the severity of the problem, see the US Flailing, and are looking for ways to get involved and try to help resolve this. I think in this case, that may be necessary.
- [35:50]
A
And by the way, for Iran itself, responding to entreaties or proposals from anyone other than the United States is going to be more appealing than being seen to be just cutting a deal with the nation they see as the aggressor nation. So the activity and the engagement of these other countries kind of creates an umbrella under which Iran could come to some understandings and potentially also gives the US a little bit of an arm's length way to say, okay, we're responding to an outcome being proposed by mediators or by a series of other countries, or we're leaving it to them to work things out, as Trump sort of indicated in the speech.
- [36:34]
B
To be honest, I think the only hope for the straight of Hormuz reopening in a clean way is some sort of arrangement that's brokered by others, not the United States. Correct. Because I think the real risk at the end of this conflict for the strait, and that is the core of the negotiation, is going to have to be about how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That is the big global risk that's been created by this conflict. The concern is that after this, you're in a situation in which Iran believes it still, quote, unquote, controls the strait and negotiates a set of bilateral arrangements with different countries to essentially compensate it for free passage. So you go from a situation in which.
- [37:16]
A
And that's the status quo right now.
- [37:17]
B
That is the status quo.
- [37:18]
A
We had the status quo ante, which was straight is free for pass freedom of navigation. We have the status quo today as we tape this on April 2, which is individual countries cutting deals and in many cases actually paying tolls. We're told paying tolls in Chinese rmb,
- [37:37]
B
in Chinese currency, in Yuan, or in Stablecoin. Or in Stablecoin.
- [37:41]
A
Sounds like, yeah, always there's some crypto bros in Iran as well. So that's the status quo today. And the question is, what's the regime that comes into place at the end of this thing? Does the current status quo basically persist where Iran has in fact increased its degree of control over the strait?
- [38:00]
B
A very good article in Bloomberg today that lays out how this is working at the ship level because it's sometimes individual ships. Basically some of them are reflagging the ships with flags that are less offensive to the Iranians. But basically they submit their ship information, ownership manifest, and all this to the Iranian navy. The Iranian navy then checks to make sure there are no ties to the US or to Israel. Israel or to other enemy countries. They then negotiate over a toll. Countries are kind of ranked in different tiers as to kind of how costly it will be for them based on. I don't know how Iran feels about them in the moment, but five different kind of tiers of countries and then attacks essentially of about a dollar per barrel of oil. And some of these ships have 2 million barrels of oil on them. And so the amount of money that could be collected by the Iranians is staggering. Actually, in the course of this conflict. This is all the more reason why some sort of diplomatic solution to broker it is essential. And by the way, it's not an accident that they're trying to resolve these transactions in yuan and stablecoin because A fundamental foundation of the US Dollar as the kind of reserve currency in the world is that energy transactions are resolved in US dollars. The petrified, both the Chinese and the Iranians are incentivized for that not to be the case. And they are trying to kind of pry the door open, the early stages of it through some of these arrangements that are being made now.
- [39:36]
A
Yeah, so I think if I were in the room, let me just try this out. I've struggled with this cuz I don't think there are good options right now. But if I were in the room with the President, I would basically say look, the best way to get to the other side of this in as reasonable a position as possible is that basically we declare kind of military operational success. We degradation of all of the components of Iran's capabilities and the like along the lines of what the President and others have done. We use this third party diplomacy to essentially work out with the Iranian side that after we stop within a short defined period of time, Iran essentially says shipping in the strait is open and we're going to start moving ships through subject to a negotiation over some kind of consortium, some kind of joint agreement among both the states that border the Strait of Hormuz, the regional states and the shipping and receiving states that have an interest in this. You put that group together, but that kind of gets negotiated over a longer timeframe. And then the US says at the end of this we want to get back to the negotiating table on the nuclear front and try to work some deal that involves either the down blending of the highly enriched uranium or shipping it out to a third country in return for some limited, modest sanctions relief, perhaps extending some of the sanctions relief that has been provided to Iran during the course of this war. They're not just making money from tolling, they're making money directly from the US treasury having basically taken sanctions off Iran as we're bombing them, which is a pretty bizarre state of affairs. But something in that zone of essentially saying escalation doesn't make sense. Ground forces don't make sense. Open ended conflict doesn't make sense. Ending this does make sense. And let's use the existence of these other actors who have a stake in this to try to basically produce a diplomatic understanding with Iran that wouldn't be a formal agreement between the two sides, but a more informal understanding that the war ends, the strait opens, and the terms on which the strait opens then get negotiated over time and we leave for another day and another track how to actually try to deal with the heu beyond just holding it at risk by watching what happens at Isfahan effectively, I think that is the zone of where I would try to point US policy at this point to try to minimize the damage, restore the oil flow and reset for an effort to try to deal with the nuclear program diplomatically, however difficult that were will be, as we discussed earlier. But how would you react to that and what adjustments, amendments, additions, subtractions would you make?
- [42:38]
B
I think that buying a crude way to put it, the nuclear material from Iran through sanctions relief is the only possibility of getting that 60% enriched uranium. And by the way, just a note about 60% enriched uranium. So I just happened to bump into last week Ernie Moniz, who was our Secretary of Energy during the Iran nuclear talks, during the JCPOA talks, and a nuclear physicist, MIT professor, but somebody who we both worked with during the Obama administration. And he told me something that I guess I probably knew on some level but hadn't really thought about, which is that 60% enriched uranium can be used to produce a nuclear weapon. In other words, we think of today, in the modern era, 90% enriched as weapons grade. But earlier generations of nuclear weapons, including by the way, the ones that were used against the Japanese, contained at least some uranium that was only enriched to 60%. So this is dangerous.
- [43:38]
A
Oh, I didn't know that. He was saying so Fat man and Little boy were just 60%.
- [43:43]
B
He said that some of the material in those weapons was 60% enriched and that a crude device could be made from something like that. He's been saying this publicly to kind of highlight the importance of dealing with the 60% enriched uranium. I think essentially purchasing that from Iran would be well worth it and maybe the only way that it can ever get out and the only way to purchase it really is going to be some sanctions relief. So I think the only way to approach the missile question, Iran is going to be extremely reluctant to make any concessions on missiles. They always have been. And the missile is one of their few remaining kind of meaningful deterrents, but maybe a little less meaningful than it once was. Just given their drone capacity, has actually in some ways been more effective in this conflict. Maybe you can steer the missile conversation into some sort of regional security discussion and maybe the United States could say we'll absent ourselves from that conversation at various points. The Iranians have talked about a willingness to discuss regional security issues with other countries in the region. Now that's going to be a hard sell to countries that Iran has just been attacking with missiles, attacking with drones. But I think the best you can probably get out of the missile conversation is some ongoing discussion about the security architecture of the region that Iran would participate in, that other countries would participate in, to try to put safeguards around,
- [45:12]
A
at least in terms of limits, almost certainly.
- [45:14]
B
I mean, almost guaranteed not to go anywhere, but at least it's an answer to the missile question in the near term. And then the last thing I think the Iranians are going to need is some kind of what they will call a guarantee that they don't get attacked again, either by the United States or probably more meaningful to them by Israel. And so the, the Trump administration would have to come up with something to be able to say about that.
- [45:38]
A
It seems to me that that is one piece I had in my notes that I didn't say, which is at the end of it. The Iranians are going to say, wait a sec, if you just stop and we stop, you're just going to restart again like you did from last year to this year. We want a guarantee to end the war. I kind of think there are two elements to deal with that. One is a form of words from the US about our intention is for this to be the end of it or something that is not totally ironclad because of course the US Always has to retain the right to deal with imminent threats. But that leans more forward than just temporary ceasefire. So some form of words. And then I think Iran will be looking for other countries to kind of pile in and basically reiterate or say what their expectations are, say the US has told them certain things. This is also where I think third parties can help bridge the gap between what the US Might be prepared to say on permanent end of war and what the Iranians want to hear with respect to permanent end of war. So I do think working a formula and then working a sequence with other countries is the right way to try to deal with that. That leaves one other issue on the missile front, which is what to do about what Iran was trying to advance in terms of an intercontinental ballistic missile program. President Trump referred to this again yesterday. He said they were racing to get a missile that could hit the United States. I think our view, obviously not privy to current intelligence, is that still years off, but I think that's something the US Would have to think about how to manage diplomatically with respect to Iran and trying to deal with what could be a real threat. If Iran was actually able to secure the capability of a long range missile that could actually target American cities. I don't think that can be dealt with in trying to resolve the war in the next week. But it's something that has to remain very much on the radar for us. Forward going, going forward.
- [47:34]
B
It's interesting in the vein of ancient history at this point, one of the ideas I tried to push with people who asked for ideas about how to proceed diplomatically before we got to this war was to explore with the Iranians whether they might be willing to essentially forego the ICBM piece of their missile program. In other words, something that is not going to actually be usable to them for years, that is clearly targeted at the United States. So the Trump administration would be incentivized to want to take that off the table, and they don't want to negotiate anything to do with their nuclear program as it currently exists. But is there a way to put some sort of moratorium on the ICBM program as a concession, I guess, from Iran to the United States to Trump? That wouldn't change the current balance of power in any meaningful way, because they don't have this capability at this time, in a way for the Trump administration, then claim a real accomplishment.
- [48:32]
A
Obviously, that was a much more available option on the diplomatic track before all this went down than it is now. But we're going to have to keep making efforts at it. So a word or two about actually negotiating with the Iranians, which we've both done, kind of what your reflections are, lessons learned from that, how you see the current president and his team situated to succeed in negotiations, direct, indirect, third party or otherwise. What's your read on all that?
- [49:09]
B
Well, I guess maybe first off and most recent in time. One thing I can be very confident of, I think, is that indirect negotiations are very unlikely to lead to positive outcomes. The way these indirect negotiations work, and this was, was more or less the best we were able to get in the Biden administration because the Iranians refused for years to negotiate directly with us, only would negotiate through an intermediary, the Omanis. In many cases where you're passing a message to Oman that is then translated from English into Persian, or from the Iranians translated from Persian into English. In some cases, even though they often and speak perfect English, they will sometimes insist on doing this in their own language. And often it is not conveyed perfectly. It's hard to capture kind of technical details and nuance. And then the intermediary just serves as a messenger going back and forth, reading these messages to people who are in the same location but in different rooms and never speak directly to each other. It's an insane way to the certainty
- [50:19]
A
of this situation in the Biden years was our negotiators would sit in a room, there'd be a long hallway, the Iranians would be in another room. Our negotiators could actually see the Iranian negotiators and the Omani intermediary would walk back and forth. And I think at various points, our negotiators just wanted to be like, we are going to march down the hall to try to talk directly. There's a reason they call this game of telephone, right, that when you have someone trying to translate what someone else is saying to a third person, you lose something, not just literally in translation, but you lose something in terms of being able to accurately convey what's going on, or for there to be the kind of informal testing trial, ballooning, sticking a finger in the water to go down a given track and seeing how the other side reacts. All of that is taken away in this formalized system of just passing messages. So it's a pretty stupid way to negotiate. But the Iranians have been basically fixed on this since Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal because they have taken it as kind of point of pride that they can't sit directly with an American side that they see as having double crossed them. That's gotta give way at some point. Maybe not in this immediate context. It seems hard to see how we're gonna get our two teams in the same room. Although, let's see. But at some point, direct diplomacy is the only way to get to a truly durable deal.
- [51:47]
B
So assuming we do get into direct conversations, I mean, there's some other elements of this that are worth just, I think, putting on the table. One is, in some ways, President Trump's style is pretty badly suited, I think, to negotiating with Iranians. It's worth reading a post from the Iranian President Pezeshkian that he put out. I think it was yesterday, it was like his message to the American people, this extended riff. But basically it starts by talking about Iran being this ancient, grand civilization worthy of admiration and respect.
- [52:22]
A
And.
- [52:23]
B
And there really is this element of them insisting, maybe fairly, that they be treated as peers or even as, in some ways, more than peers, as an older civilization than the people who they're dealing with, as a society worthy of respect. And whatever Americans, American government, thinks of the Islamic Republic of Iran, they also tend to associate themselves with this historic tradition. And. And some show of acknowledgement of that or respect feels almost like a gating issue for getting into a meaningful conversation with them. And there's this diplomatic artifice that always happens when you're dealing with other countries where you have to kind of unlock whatever they see as the key to being comfortable enough to really be candid. And with Iran, there is this kind of respect element, that Trump's way of kind of blustering at them and making demands at them, I think is triggering profoundly to them. The example of this I remember from the JCPOA talks is kind of towards the end game. All the different countries were in the room, and Jabad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, felt like he was being lectured to by one of the European foreign ministers who kept insisting, you need this, you, Iran, more than we do. We could walk away at any time. Our countries will be just fine, our economies will be just fine, and we could walk out of here.
- [53:52]
A
And.
- [53:53]
B
And Zarif kind of stood up and kind of shouted, which doesn't happen all that often, although he's pretty theatrical. Something akin to never threaten an Iranian. Like, bellowed it at the top of his voice, which was kind of dramatic and a little bit melodramatic, I would say. That then got diffused by the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, saying, or a Russian. And everybody kind of laughed at that. But it was indicative of this idea that when they feel disrespected, they get their backup and it's much harder to get things done.
- [54:20]
A
You're totally right. That how you present and the degree to which you're trying to insist that the Iranians bend the knee, the kind of phrases of unconditional surrender, we have defeated you, they have demanded a ceasefire. All the things that Trump has done creates a very bad kind of framework for the Iranians to feel with their national pride, their sense of face, able to make any concessions or come to a deal. I want to come back to an example of this as well, of how to formulate things that get you what you want substantively while giving the Iranians something rhetorically. But I think there's two or three other things. They're sweating the details, particularly on this nuclear stuff. You mentioned Ernie Muniz. I mean, this guy who is a nuclear scientist, Secretary of Energy, actually sat in the room and sweated out the annexes of the Iran nuclear deal to make sure that we got everything nailed down. Not exactly a Trump strong suit. Subtlety and coming up with clever ways of closing gaps. And we've talked about the difficulties on things like the ICBM program or the Strait of Hormuz or how exactly to deal with the heu. That's going to require a Degree of subtlety where each side can kind of tell a slightly different story. Patience. You got to ride out a lot of just difficult, annoying elements of the Iranian negotiating style. And they're willing to sit there for hours and days and weeks and use John Kerry's superpower in some ways, very, very patient. Not something that Trump or his negotiators are particularly well known for. And then discretion. You've also gotta be able to keep a lot of the discussions very quiet, even sometimes secret, as we did in the Oman channel, to give the space to be able to do these things. But I'll just give one kind of concrete example of how we negotiated with the Iranians to get an outcome we wanted that also recognized who our counterpart was and what they required to get across the finish line. So in the interim deal, before we got to the full Iran nuclear deal, we wanted to put a cap on how many centrifuges Iran could actually produce. We essentially wanted to freeze the total number of centrifuges they had that were working, that were in service so they wouldn't use the negotiations to radically ramp up centrifuge production and end up with thousands and thousands of them. So in the piece of paper that became the interim nuclear deal, you can go online and take a look at it. We could have written, iran is barred from producing centrifuges above the number it has now. Now, Iran couldn't go for that. So instead we chose the following sentence. Consistent with its plans, Iran's centrifuge production during the six months which was the original interim deal will be dedicated to replace damaged machines, period. And this formula, which basically says they can only produce to replace damaged machines, that is not add to the overall number of working centrifuges that is captured in that statement. And if they had produced more, it would have been a violation of the agreement. They didn't end up producing more, but we formulated it in this way because Iran could sign onto that. Yes, yes, that's consistent with our plans. Now, the American style of negotiating is fundamentally pragmatic. It's about actually just trying to get the result there won't be more new centrifuges produced to increase their overall number. The Iranian style is much more about what is the formula, what is the way it is said, to what extent does it look like we are making a concession? And in that gap, there are opportunities for real diplomatic breakthroughs along this line, because Americans don't read the footnotes of deals to see what the exact sentence is. They just want to know, are they going to have more centrifuges or aren't they? And I think this style well suited to the Obama team that negotiated the deal, including very much the Secretary of State who led the overall negotiation and Wendy Sherman who was the lead day to day negotiation. That is not the Trump style and that makes things very difficult for trying to achieve outcomes here. And I think it's very consistent with kind of how you formulated the core issue culturally between the culture of the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth and all these guys and the culture of the Iranians who themselves now are putting out all these statements. Like Golubov just put out this big statement saying essentially, you come for our house, you're going to get the whole family, I think was the title of it.
- [59:02]
B
It's really read as if it were written by Ch GPT. But it was. The upshot was probably.
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A
It probably was.
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B
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Visit lifelock.com podcast terms appreciate important for us to turn to Red Team Blue Team before we close out this episode. And this Red Team Blue Team, as previewed at the beginning of the episode, is the two of us serving as Iranian advisors to the current Supreme Leader, Mojtibah Khamenei, the son of the old Ayatollah Khamenei. And you will be arguing that we should go ahead and make a deal with the Americans. I'll be arguing, no, we should stand firm, refuse to do a deal, let them essentially just hang out there and deal with the problems they have created for themselves. So why don't I turn it over to you to get us going?
- [60:36]
B
All right. I appreciate it and I think only fitting that the last time we did a version of this, I got to make the more fun, more hardline, more hawkish argument that you get to do that this time. By the way, one of the weird things that occurred to me in terms of kind of preparing for this is that it's not exactly clear whom we would be making this argument to in the Iranian system right now.
- [60:59]
A
I Said Mosh Shabbat, because we don't even know if he's.
- [61:01]
B
Yeah, really, probably he is the ultimate decision maker. But I think in this case, you know, we're maybe as much making this argument to leadership of the IRGC or whoever else is in the room or some committee, you know, or some combination thereof. But anyway, here goes. All right, so I think I would start by saying a version of where I left off the last conversation on diplomacy with the Iranians, that we, Iran, are an ancient civilization that was here long before the United States and frankly, long before most of our neighbors. We're going to be here long after them, too. And if we continue to play our cards right, we can guarantee that, and that means playing the long game. I've seen a lot of commentary about how this moment that we are in is akin to the Suez crisis in which Israel, the UK and France attacked Egypt in the 1950s but couldn't finish the job. So the United States ended up being the region's predominant power. I think we have a chance to lay the groundwork to end that period of US dominance in the Middle east, but it will mean abandoning a bit our identity as an outlier who defies everyone all the time. We have strong countries on our side. We have China, which would like to strengthen our position and weaken Americas. The United States has alienated its own allies like the Europeans and its partners, like India and like the Gulf countries, some of which are our customers, some of which are our neighbors. And this is an opening for us to actually assert a different and rightful role for Iran in the region. But to do that, we do have to drive a hard bargain. We have to ensure there is economic benefit for us in the end of this war. We will desperately need that, given what has happened to us over the course of recent weeks. And so we should give the world a choice. Give us sanctions relief, give us reconstruction assistance of some kind, or we will impose some sort of tolling arrangement on the Strait of Hormuz, at least until we are made whole. But if our economic needs can begin to be met, there is a win win situation in this for all of us. This also means that if we are no longer attacked, we cannot be seen as hostage takers of the entire global economy. We have an opportunity to try to look like the more reasonable party, given the way the United States has behaved even while we bide our time, rebuild our strength, and by the way, in the spirit of revenge being a dish that's best served cold, certainly pay our enemies back when the Time is right, but the that right time is not today. And now. This might have been impossible when the old man, your father, Mr. Supreme Leader, was still in charge, but we have an opportunity to chart a different path still very much Iran first revolution first. But given the blow we've suffered, we fight on the ground where we now have relative strength and use the fact that we have shown we can bring the global economy to its knees. Not to punish the world for letting this happen and. And punish ourselves in the process, but to use that prospect to extract the highest possible price. The tactical goal of this funding we need and the strategic goal of reducing America's role in the region. We make this deal with the rest of the world. When was the last time a major diplomatic deal was reached in the Middle east and the United States wasn't really a part of it, or at least didn't lead it? That would be in and of itself a remarkable thing, and we should pursue.
- [64:39]
A
You know, Mr. Supreme Leader, I have to say I'm a little bit embarrassed to be in the same room with this kind of weak, sad argument being put forward to essentially capitulate right when we are on the brink of a massive, historic strategic success. We have to keep going, stand firm, don't give an inch. Don't capitulate. Now, first, the Americans are totally stuck, and they're feeling the pain. And that pain will grow. These people in America, they are obsessed with their big cars, and they're having to pay insane amounts of money to fill up their gas tanks. And as this war goes on, they're gonna have to pay more and more and more, and it's gonna put the entire American economy in the tank. And this is gonna put more and more pressure on the President of the United States, who at some point is just gonna have to quit, and we won't have to give him anything. We have leverage. We have time on our side. They cannot withstand the pain. Second, we, the Iranian people, we can withstand the pain. We're not facing trouble on the street right now. They claim this regime was going to just get knocked over. In fact, we have lifted you up, the son of the previous Supreme Leader, as the new Supreme Leader. We've held the Revolutionary Guard intact. We've redeemed the revolution. We can keep doing that. And by the way, not only can we keep getting our oil out every day, which we've been able to do, and we'll keep being able to do, because the Americans aren't stopping our tankers from going to China and other places, but These idiots. The Americans have actually given us sanctions relief in the middle of the war. So we're getting cash on top of being able to ship out our oil. That is making sure that we can keep our economy stable as we're going forward. Now President Trump is claiming he's gonna blow up all of our oil infrastructure, all of our energy systems. He's been bluffing about that for two weeks now. And every time, he just keeps extending the number of days before he's gon do it. He won't do it because he knows that we can turn around and punish him tenfold for what he does by hitting energy infrastructure, oil infrastructure in the Gulf and to stop those big cars from driving around American streets. But even if he's not bluffing, Mr. Supreme Leader, we have lived through tougher. We lived through the Shah and we won a revolution. We lived through the Iran Iraq War, where we lost so many, many martyrs and had to suffer for years and years to ultimately secure a victory. Remember what the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini said, the father of our revolution? He said, a nation that is ready for martyrdom will never be enslaved. We're not afraid of these threats. A nation that sees martyrdom as happiness is victorious. And he also said that the bitterest of hardships is sweet when it is for the sake of Islam. We must expect to be under pressure. We must expect to suffer. But we also know that we are on the path of God. That is our Ayatollah speaking to us right now, the way he spoke to the people of Iran when they were suffering long ago. So they can't suffer. We can't. Third, my colleague has asserted that this could be a Suez moment. It won't be a Suez moment if we go cut a deal with the Americans now or cut a deal through third parties with the Americans, because this thing will just kind of end pretty fast and the Americans will get back to doing business with their buddies. We need to make the Americans suffer through this for longer so that we lock in a New World Order. That imperialist buffoon George W. Bush years ago claimed there was going to be a New World Order America put in after the Cold War. Well, the Americans are about to see a New World Order imposed by their defeat at the hands of the Iranians. The Chinese and Russians are gaining. America's allies are fighting with them. This could be the end of American hegemony, just as Suez was the end of British hegemony. But not if we quit after just a month. Not if we blink now, no, fourth, if we do a deal, we are suckers. They've broken deals before. They're just going to turn around and attack us again. They've broken their promises even when negotiating with us. They attacked us twice as we, we were willing to sit and negotiate with them. How much more stupid do we have to look by going back into negotiations with them? Now, there's a Farsi word, golkor. It literally means one who eats deceptions. My colleague here, who's just made the argument that we should do a deal, he is a sucker. He is one who eats deceptions. He is buying into the empty promises from an enemy. And then finally, we actually have a golden opportunity to tighten our, our grip on the strait. They're just going to give up and walk away. We're not going to have to make any concessions. We can turn this temporary tolling system into a permanent tolling system if we just get a little more time to make everyone get totally used to it. So let's hold on. Let's make sure that we are not blinking for an instant. Let's in fact, hope this war goes on for a while, because the longer it goes on, the faster the post American world emerges, the more the United States suffers, the more we are able to continue to endure and in our suffering, to actually be redeemed as true believers in the faith and the true heirs to the Ayatollah Khomeini. So for me, there is no contest here about what we need to do. Thank you.
- [70:15]
B
I don't know whether to be more insulted by the ad hominem attacks on my character or motivated to go and fight the imperialists. It was a, it was a stirring presentation and very well done.
- [70:28]
A
I mean, it's funny how from last week you go over the top to Trump, it sounds pretty persuasive. I go over the top to the Ayatollah, it sounds pretty persuasive.
- [70:38]
B
This is the thing.
- [70:39]
A
The actual arguments you laid out for the cold, hard analysis of the Iranian national interest have quite a bit of purchase to them. And frankly, I think in the end, just as Trump is standing at this intersection, so too the collective decision makers or whoever is calling the shots in Iran are standing at an intersection. They are recognizing there are benefits to trying to tie this thing off and end it, consolidate their power, move forward. They are also recognizing there are benefits to just pure, sheer, unadulterated revolutionary resistance against the Great Satan and so on both sides. I think what we have tried to tee up is the reality of deep uncertainty about which direction to go and whether when you face that on both sides, you can actually get an alignment among the two at any time soon. And that, I think, is what we will be looking for in the period ahead.
- [71:35]
B
Well, that's all for today. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Long Game. In the meantime, send us your questions and comments@longgameoxmedia.com and find us on subset@staytuned.substack.com the links are in the show notes. That's it for this episode of the Long Game.
- [71:59]
A
If you like the show, please follow, share with friends and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us for
- [72:06]
B
updates and more analysis in your inbox. Join the community@staytuned substack.com the long game
- [72:12]
A
is a Vox Media Podcast Network Production
- [72:15]
B
Executive Producer Tamara Sepper Lead Editorial Producer Jennifer Indig Deputy Editor Celine Rohr Senior Producer Matthew Billy Video producers Nat Weiner
- [72:26]
A
and Adam Harris Supervising Producer Jake Kaplan
- [72:29]
B
Associate Producer Claudia Hernandez Marketing Manager Leanna Greenway Music is by Nat Weiner. We're your hosts, John Finer and Jake Sullivan.
- [72:39]
A
Thanks for listening.