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This message comes from USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer center, world class expertise, advanced treatments, clinical trial access and personalized care.
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Request an appointment@keckmedicine.org USCCancer or 1-800-USC CARE. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics.
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I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the White House.
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And I'm Greg Myhre. I cover national security.
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And we are taping this at 1:04pm Eastern Time on Wednesday, April 8, today on the show. When it comes to the war in Iran, we're in whiplash territory. In the last day and a half, President Trump threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization, doubled down and then announced a two week ceasefire. Franco, there has been a lot of drama these last two days. Walk us through it.
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Yeah, I mean, I think we went from Trump's most bombastic threats that I think I've ever heard since covering Trump. And I've covered him for over a decade. I mean, in addition to the whole civilization dying, you know, over the weekend, Trump said that Iran needs to open the expletive straits to essentially a rocky ceasefire that was announced at really the 11th hour before he, you know, went, went through with this scenario, this apocalyptic scenario of bombing bridges and power plants. But for the last 24 hours, I think you could call it a busy day of deal making with foreign leaders and religious leaders and some domestic leaders really trying to put the pressure on Trump to back off these massive threats. And Trump said he agreed to a ceasefire, a two week ceasefire on the condition that the Strait of Hormuz is reopened. But I will note that there is reports out of Iranian state media today, just in the last couple hours that says the strait remains closed because there is still bombing between Israel and Iran and Lebanon. So there's a very rocky ceasefire.
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Greg, I want to ask you, do we know what is in this ceasefire agreement or if there even is an agreement?
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Yeah, I don't think there's really an agreement other than we saw the post by Pakistan's Prime Minister Shabazz Sharif saying, you know, a two week ceasefire. Then there were references to, because that's Trump's favorite time frame. Iran will leave the Strait of Hormuz open and then they'll start negotiating. But we haven't seen anything and there isn't even talk that there's an actual text of any cease fire agreement. And it was put together so quickly at the last moment. Now both sides have lots of things they want to negotiate. Assuming this ceasefire does hold for the next two weeks But. But the truce itself basically means the shooting has stopped, the killing has stopped. The Strait of Hormuz is supposed to be open. We're still waiting to make sure even those basic things happen.
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Yeah. And President Trump said that the US received a 10 point proposal from Iran and that he believed it is a, quote, workable basis on which to negotiate
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these 10 points that Iran is talking about. It has now been published on Iranian media and it says things that just are literally diametrically opposed to things Trump has said, which is Iran would agree that it has the right to enrich uranium, and Trump says, no, we want all uranium enrichment stopped. Iran wants all US Military bases in the region to be removed. I mean, just things that are kind of non starters or absolutely the opposite of what Trump has been saying.
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You know, it's just a PR battle that Trump is trying to have over this. And I think it does kind of fit his MO that while there is not any clarification or anything black and white about what is actually in this or if there is anything at all, Trump is definitely boasting of something that he thinks the public wants or something that's going to perhaps help him or something that he wants, trying to project this into reality when there are really serious questions about whether any of this or much of this is really fact yet.
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Well, Trump has long adhered to the power of positive thinking, and in many cases it has paid off for him. But there are very real, tangible impacts that this war has had in the United States on things like gas prices Today. Driving into work, $4.19 was on the sign at my regular gas station for a gallon of regular gas. And until the Strait of Hormuz is open with a free flow of tankers, oil prices are likely to remain elevated. That was a key part of this whole thing. Greg, do you know what's happening?
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Again, a lot of confusion here, and we don't know precisely what's happening. The US And Iran appear to agree that the Strait of Hormuz is supposed to be opened during the ceasefire. And then obviously they would try to negotiate that into a permanent arrangement. But one of the points Iran says it wants is that it will regulate the strait in the future. That would be a change. The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway. It's not controlled legally by anybody. And oil has flowed freely through the strait for decades. There's always been this concern that could something like this could happen. You have to go back to the late 80s or the last time you had any disruption in, in the flow of oil there. So if Iran is insisting on regulating the flow and it's been charging up to $2 million to allow tankers through, and it's allowing some friendly tankers through, that's not something that the US or other countries would be, would be willing to accept. So you've got all of these issues that are just sitting out there and you have this big problem that didn't exist when the war started. And now it's the most urgent and pressing issue.
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Trump was posed that question about Iran perhaps controlling the strait and even tacking on tolls for tankers to go through by ABC News this morning. And Trump did not dismiss that idea, but said that potentially that the US And Iran would somehow work together to kind of monitor who could go through the strait. Which just seems like a fascinating idea.
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The idea of Iran, arm in arm with America charging tolls for of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, which is an international waterway, is kind of mind boggling. But if you think about the way President Trump has approached this war as being similar to what happened in Venezuela, where there was a short military intervention and now the US Is working with Venezuela on oil, I guess you could kind of see how he got there, but it's just an absolutely wild suggestion and just don't see there being a lot of trust between these two nations ever.
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And I think analysts or people who are expert on foreign policy could easily tell Trump Venezuela and Iran are two very different scenarios. And what the US Managed to pull off in Venezuela was a very effective one day, several hour military operation. And they seem to have some level of cooperation. We'll see how that plays out. But that never was a realistic prospect in Iran where you have this Shia Shiite clerical rule who's been chanting death to America for 47 years. So that was just never a realistic prospect. And Iran resisted as you expected them to resist. And you know, I just, we gotta be clear here. The war is not over, it's paused. It's a ceasefire. We don't know what's gonna happen after. Even if the ceasefire holds for two weeks as planned, if these issues aren't resolved, the war could start up again. It will probably be a little more difficult, difficult to do that. But Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary at the Pentagon, said we're hanging around. We're not going anywhere. We'll be there. And if called on, we'll be ready to jump in again with more military action.
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There is a reason that we put a timestamp at the top of this podcast. This is a very fluid situation. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and we'll have more in a moment.
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This is Ira Glass on this American Life. We tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right, because the monkey pressed the button. Surprising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts.
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And we're back. This morning, President Trump posted, quote, there will be no enrichment of uranium and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of of the deeply buried nuclear dust. Then Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a press conference that said something a little
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different again on the uranium. We're watching it. We know what they have, and they will give it up and we'll get it and we'll take it if we have to. We can do it in any means necessary. So that's something the president is going to solve for Greg.
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President Trump has said making sure Iran's nuclear capabilities were stopped was one of the many goals of this war. It's the key thing he has been talking about. Has that been achieved?
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No, it has not. We don't have a lot of details. We've seen a couple mentions of the US And Israel hitting nuclear facilities, but no additional details. What we do know from the bombing that the US And Israel carried out last June, it did do significant damage to Iran's vast nuclear facilities, which are spread around the country in many different places. And the most important element is this highly enriched uranium, about 1,000 pounds, enriched 60%, not quite to weapons grade, but pretty close. This is really the key component. Much or all of it seems to be buried in a nuclear facility around the city of Isfahan. But we don't know exactly how easy it would be to get to that. Even the Iranians can get to that right now because that place was hit in the attacks last year. What does seem pretty clear is that the program has not been eliminated completely. And this uranium in particular is very, very valu. And while we heard all sorts of talk and speculation about a possible US Military operation, there was really the feeling that this was just incredibly difficult to go in, try to dig out highly sensitive radioactive material buried deep underground, which the Iranians would presumably be guarding pretty carefully. And so we didn't see any attempt to do that. Now it's going to have to be negotiated, but you have the Iranians already coming out and maintaining their old position that they have right to enrich uranium and showing no signs that they'd be willing to give this up.
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Yeah, Franco, maybe we should just go back in history a little bit. There was a deal between the Obama administration and Iran to tightly monitor and control Iran's nuclear program. When President Trump came into office in his first term, he threw out that agreement. And then back in June of last year, there was Operation Midnight Hammer. The United States bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in a one day mission that the President said totally obliterated Iran's nuclear program. And now he is saying that somehow Iran and the US Are gonna go in together and take it out and then they're just gonna hand it all over to the U.S. yeah.
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I mean, I think there are just so many questions and I think it speaks to what we were talking about, the mixed messages that we're getting on this. I mean, this is something that Trump campaigned on. This is something that Trump's been talking about since his first administration, saying that he would never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. Well, I think there are big questions about whether he is going to allow Iran to keep that enriched uranium. I think with the quote that we just heard from Pete Hegseth contradicts a bit what Trump said in his social media posts. So I think there are huge questions. Trump in earlier interviews also said that maybe they would be able to keep it, but we would be able to monitor them by satellites. But I think what we've also learned over this experience is Trump, I think, may be a little bit more reluctant to take this kind of action. Before, it was obviously a very difficult past month. I think over the last few weeks, especially the last few days, we saw Trump getting more and more anxious with his bellicose language and the bombastic social media posts. It was very clear that Trump wanted to out of this.
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Yeah. So Franco, as you say, President Trump has clearly been looking for an exit strategy, looking for a way to say the goals have been achieved, we're done, we don't need to be there. Is this it?
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I mean, I think he may be getting it out, but I think this crisis, as we've been talking about, is far from over and frankly, potentially has the potential to get bigger. I mean, the fighting obviously continues in Lebanon. Israel's goals are clear, clearly different than those of the United States. And it doesn't look like Israel's backing down in any way. Regional partners are still under threat. And again, Iran still has control over the strait. So this is just so Far from over. I mean, it is. You know, this is negotiating. As Greg said, we still have two weeks of a ceasefire. I mean, it's just like it could just very much be a very ugly cycle ahead.
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In his previous military operations, Trump was able to begin and end them quickly. He really controlled the levers about when an operation would begin and when it would stop. And they worked out pretty well for him, or even in the cases where they didn't. I mean, I think a lot of people have probably forgotten the US Bombed the Houthis in Yemen for about seven weeks last year, and it didn't really resolve anything. But at some point, President Trump said, okay, we're calling that off. I don't think that had any real political cost for him different. He can't just walk away from this. You know, if he does and Iran maintains a closure over the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices will go up, gas prices will go up. The US Economy, economies around the world will be hit. There's going to be a tangible impact from this war that has not been resolved at this point. You can't just stop and leave.
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You're saying Iran controls the gas prices in the United States?
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Essentially, yes. You know, 20% of the world's oil flows through there. There have been some workarounds, so maybe up to 10 million barrels a day are finding other ways out, but that's still a 10% cut in global oil, and Iran is able to do that right now. And if that continues, the pressures are already mounting and they're going to hit. There's been a bit of a buffer so far. So we've seen oil prices, gas prices go up, but the buffer by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and moves like this have helped cushion that. That's going to stop at some point. And so Iran can literally say this oil's going through or not going through. That will have a direct impact on U.S. gas prices.
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Franco, let's talk politics. Since this is the NPR Politics podcast and this is a midterm election year, we know that this war is not popular with the American people. Does potentially ending it or having a two week ceasefire maybe getting the Strait of Hormuz possibly maybe flowing again, does that help the president's party in the midterms?
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I think the answer is yes, certainly in the short term. But I think so much depends on what happens in two weeks, in a few days. Does this stick? Does this lead to a longer ceasefire? Does this lead to an ending of the war? You're already seeing those signs now, the markets exhaled a bit today as tensions kind of eased over the last 72 hours. The Dow Jones, the S and P futures, they both soared on the news of the ceasefire. Oil prices dropped. But again, time will tell. And as we've talked about all these various scenarios, you can easily see that markets are just going to remain volatile. And I think that goes for the American public as well. If the strait is not opened and if your gas prices stay over $4, I don't think people are going to be happy. And that's absolutely going to have an impact, or at least very likely going to have an impact on the midterms, especially if Trump cannot pivot, as he continues to say, to domestic issues.
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Yeah, I mean, the White House has been telling us for how long since the fall that the president was going to make these midterms about him. He was going to put himself on the ballot and he was gonna get out into the country and campaign. And it was gonna be once or twice a week. And it's been like once or twice a month maybe. It just hasn't happened.
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It hasn't. It hasn't.
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All right, well, what are you two watching over the next couple of weeks? Or should I say the next couple of hours?
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Yeah, probably hours more than weeks, but. Okay, let's be optimistic. Let's say the cease does hold for the next two weeks. I'm going to be looking for signs of what the Iranian government is doing. It is still functioning, but it's a whole new group of people because so many leaders have been killed in the war. Is it coming up with a coherent approach to the negotiations? Is it going to maintain really hard positions on closing the Strait of Hormuz, maintaining its right to enrich uranium, hanging on to the uranium it has? So we don't quite know how this Iranian government will negotiate, and we're getting very limited information out of Iran. So that's the thing I'm really going to be checking. I think that's a real wild card. Over the next two weeks, I'm going
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to be looking to see what lawmakers do, especially Republican lawmakers. Are they going to start questioning the administration and asking more specific questions? I'm also very curious to hear from Marco Rubio, the secretary, Secretary of State, who is often seen as giving kind of a more measured response and a description of what actually happened.
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And Rubio has been remarkably quiet.
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He's been very quiet.
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All right, well, we're going to leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics.
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I'M Franco Ordonez. I cover the White House.
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And I'm Greg Myrey. I cover national security.
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And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics podcast.