This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the ...
I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
“Speaking to reporters, Donald Trump made a strange claim about Iran.”
He said no one anticipated that Iran would attack other countries in an effort to widen the war. But in saying that, Trump revealed that he didn't anticipate it, which is a striking admission about his own lack of foresight. We think this captures something broader.
On one front after another, Trump plainly didn't prepare for eventualities that most experts fully did anticipate. So how directly responsible are these failings for what we're seeing right now, that by most indications the war is getting worse for Trump and the US on many fronts.
Matt does executive vice president at the Center for International Policy has a new piece
on the deeper ideological failings that led to this debacle, so we're talking to him about all this today. Matt, good to have you on. Greg, great to be with you, thanks. So the latest is that over the weekend, Trump threatened to bomb Iranian electricity plants
if Iran didn't reopen the straight of Hormuz, then on Monday he abruptly postponed that threat claiming that very strong talks are underway with Iran about them reaching an agreement to end the fighting. Iran quickly denied any such talks were underway. Matt, what do we know about where things are right now and how badly is this going for
Trump in the United States? Well, we know that this is going much worse than Donald Trump himself thought it would. We know that Donald Trump does not do the reading. We know that Donald Trump has the attention span of a fly. We know that he just makes stuff up all the time.
Trump made this threat over the weekend to bomb power plants, which is clearly a war crime to attack plants and produce power for civilians and then I think he woke up and saw that, okay, the stock market is in trouble, oil prices are continuing to go higher and
“I've said and others have said for a while that that's the only thing that really gets”
Donald Trump's attention is when he's sitting there drinking diet coke, watching Fox News and he sees the ticker going by on the bottom and he understands that the market is in trouble. So he came out and said, well, we're going to not do that because we are thinking about ending the war where it and talks, that doesn't seem to be true at all, but that's where Donald Trump is focused really primarily because that is how he believes his presidency
will be rated, is whether the stock market is doing well.
Well, I want to come back to his claims and how things are going in a bit, but first let's
listen to Trump. He talked to reporters on Monday and he tried to justify his handling of the war this way. We're talking about a country that has been evil for 47 years, they've been horrible. Death all over the world, not just us.
Look at the way they attack unexpectedly, all of those countries surrounding it. It was not supposed to, but nobody was even thinking about it, but they wanted to take over the Middle East and they wanted to knock out Israel permanently and if they had a nuclear weapon, they would have been able to do that. So according to Trump, Iran has been evil for 47 years, yet no one anticipated that they
might attack other countries at the US attack them, doesn't quite add up. Matt, is it true that no one anticipated that? It is not true at all, everyone anticipated this, every one of these countries that Iran has attacked, we should have expected whether it's, you know, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, obviously Israel.
This is part of Iran's defenses strategy, this is part of how they believe they were creating deterrence, you know, deterrence, and the most basic sense is creating the belief
“in the mind of your enemy that attacking you will cause more pain than it's worth, right?”
And you know, whether we're talking about nuclear deterrence, you know, the United States and the Soviet Union, we're in a position, you know, nuclear deterrence, the idea like, well, if we attack them, they will attack us with nuclear weapons and nobody wants that. The Iran's approach was, well, listen, we know that we can't face off head to head with the United States militarily, but we do have ways of creating pain for the United
States and for the United States as partners across the region. And that was what they hoped would deter the United States, obviously that didn't deter the United States, the United States and Israel attacked Iran a few weeks ago. And so Iran is following through. They have to follow through, in a sense, if they want to make sure that this doesn't
happen again in the future.
Yes, to answer your question, of course people knew Iran were going to do thi...
Donald Trump does not bother to do the reading.
Right.
“And the reading is really what it is here.”
So just to be absolutely clear about this, built into Iran's public deterrence posture is the idea that if attacked by someone like the United States, they would go after these lesser countries, these allies of the United States in the region in order to create turbulence, globally, financially, in terms of energy, that that's really like an understood thing about how Iran would handle a situation like this.
That's right. Everyone has understood that this is how Iran would respond. This was not a secret. And that's the whole point of deterrence is that it was supposed to not be a secret. Right.
It's not going to be a deterrent if nobody knows about it. That's right. That whole thing's so ridiculous. CNN reported and others reported that the Trump team was caught off guard by the willingness of Iran to close the straight of war moves and caught off guard by the global consequences
of that and the global consequences have been disastrous.
“Like everybody knew, I think it's hard for those of us who are not specialists the way”
you are to understand how they could have been quite this underpaired. But to return to your earlier point, it is about not doing the reading clearly Trump should have, or probably would have gotten briefed on all this sort of stuff and maybe it just didn't penetrate. Right.
And who knows whether he was paying attention again. He doesn't have a long attention span. He does not like long memos. He does not like to spend lots of time talking through complicated issues. But we also have to recognize the fact that Donald Trump is surrounded by yes people.
He's surrounded by ideologues. He's obviously had people like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and Benjamin Netanyahu in his ear for all these weeks leading up to the war saying, oh, it's going to be going to go really, really well. You don't need to worry about it.
Just look at how wealth and his wayllow went and Donald Trump chose to believe that. There may even be kind of a schism here where you've got the types like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton who just love war and want to have a war with Iran. Don't particularly care what the consequences are that sort of one camp. But then you've probably got people internally who like maybe the joint chiefs, the joint
chiefs chair who actually privately warned Trump that this war would be much more difficult than it might seem. What's supposed to happen in these situations? If he had a normal president, what would have happened and how abnormal is the current situation?
Well, who even knows what's normal now, but if we had an actually responsible president,
“I think what they would do is try to address the problem of Iran's nuclear program through”
some kind of non-proliferation agreement that puts limits on Iran's nuclear program to ensure that it wouldn't obtain a weapon, I.e. exactly what Obama Barack Obama did, right? You don't deal with this problem militarily.
You cannot ultimately deal with this problem militarily.
That is what many of us have been saying for a very, very long time, including people in the military. And yet, Donald Trump chose not to listen to those people. He instead chose to listen to hard-line ideologues like the people we mentioned. You know, I'm really glad you brought that up.
Can you just sum up for people what Barack Obama accomplished with the Iran nuclear deal and why it was good? Right. So in 2015, after a lot of effort in multiple rounds of talks between the US and its partners in the P5+1, that's the term in the five members of the UN Security Council
plus Germany, had met with the Iranians to try to come to some agreement that would put limits on Iran's nuclear program to give the rest of the world confidence that Iran would not obtain a nuclear weapon.
Now Iran had always insisted that it did not want a nuclear weapon, and that no intention
of building one back in 2003, there was some evidence produced that Iran had at one point had a program designed to at least keep the option open, our own intelligent services believe that they were keeping the option at least open, but that they had not made a decision to obtain a weapon. So what the agreement that JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action did was in exchange
for sanctions relief, there were and still are lots of sanctions on the Iranian government. Iran agreed to dispose of a lot of its equipment that could be used to obtain a weapon. It's nuclear program under the heaviest inspections regime in history, cameras, all kinds of inspections. It was a multi-layered, highly complex, highly restrictive system of surveillance to make
sure that Iran could not secretly produce a nuclear weapon, and overwhelmingly security
On proliferation experts recognize that this was a good agreement.
And I think not only was it a good agreement for dealing with Iran's nuclear program,
“just the fact that the U.S. and Iran were now talking and had at least established some”
small measure of trust in the area of nuclear and on proliferation, we could have continued to talk with the Iran about a whole range of other issues, like the issues that have been brought up repeatedly over these past weeks. Iran's support for militant extremist groups in the region, it's building a ballistic missiles, it's repression of its own people.
There is an alternate history here where the U.S. went down that road, and at least tried to continue to talk and address these issues, where it worked, we can't know, it may have worked. But as we know, Donald Trump chose option B, which is to pull out of that nuclear agreement, reimposed sanctions, and put us now on the path we've been on, which is toward war.
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Well, a lot of people said either it's going to be the Iran-Nuclear Agreement with
“all the teeth in it, or it's going to be war, and that's what has happened, right?”
That's right. And the opponents of the agreement, all the, all the, all the, you know, the hawkish opponents of that nuclear agreement, just insisted that they didn't support war, they just wanted a better, stronger agreement, and that was complete bullshit. And many of us have been pointing this out all along.
The opponents of that agreement, their problem wasn't with the Iran-Nuclear Deal, their
problem was, is with making deals with Iran, because their goal has always been a regime
change war. Right. The problem, from their perspective, was that this might actually work without a war being fought. That's right.
Isn't that the essence of it? That is really the essence of it. I mean, that this would disprove their entire theory of how the world works, and their theory is that American military power is magic, and this is how you solve problems. What about at the end of this particular war?
If he claims victory and there isn't any kind of negotiated settlement around the nukes,
“what does he say exactly, and what has he actually achieved?”
Well, here's what Trump can say, given that he has been lying about Iran being on the
brink of a nuclear weapon, and his administration has been out there lying that Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon, he can just say that now Iran is not about to get a nuclear weapon. That's actually true. That was true before this war, that they were not about to get a nuclear weapon, but
Donald Trump can claim that now, because of me, we don't have to live in fear of Iran triggering a nuclear apocalypse.
In the real world, what will he have achieved on nukes?
And in the world, he won't really have achieved anything. I mean, Iran's program was already
considerably set back by the bombing last June, once again, not set back as far as Barack Obama's nuclear agreement did, but he can claim to have done that.
“That is one potential upside, but I think the downsides vastly outweigh that.”
Right. And so at the end of the day, we're settled with all these immense consequences, and the
line won't even have been moved much. The needle won't even have been moved much on nukes.
No, on nukes, no. But meanwhile, you have a Iranian regime that is almost certainly going to be more hostile to the United States that is much, much more hard line. And by the way, you have just demonstrated the huge value of actually having a nuclear deterrent, you know, who looks really attractive to the Iranians right now is North Korea. No one is talking about bombing North Korea, because everyone understands what North Korea could do in response.
So if anything, this war has just made a nuclear weapon much, much more attractive to
Iran and, frankly, to any other country that needs an insurance policy against a predatory United States. So, if just a circle back to where we started, if you think about this, him saying kind of openly that nobody anticipated that Iran were to tackle these other countries, it's like an admission on his part that he failed to anticipate all these unintended consequences
of this war, which everybody else did anticipate, including probably some of his own advisors. It's just, it's, we're in a hall of mirrors here. And once you're in the hall of mirrors,
“the rules of the hall of mirrors or what apply, what do you think's going to happen?”
Like, just play this hell. Honestly, what I've been saying is that this war ends when Donald Trump gets bored enough, or he is disciplined by the financial markets. And I think we did see some evidence of the latter today when he came out and said, "Okay, I'm going to give the Iranians more time, not going to go bombing their power plants." I mean, he clearly has been
spooked by the price of oil. He's clearly been spooked by the stock market. He's gaming the market with these kinds of announcements, pretending that there are talks on going.
“But if it gets to the point that he really can't control this anymore, I think that's”
when we could really see him press forward to end this war, which it seems clear to me that he would like to do. He just doesn't have a plausible in his own mind, you know, victory narrative. And if he does that, he then tells us that he succeeded in getting rid of the nukes that he obliterated already. That's right, we no longer have to live under the threat
of Iranian nuclear terror that wasn't there anyway. Matt does that really captures the absurdity of all this. Thanks for coming on, man. Great to talk to you. All right, thanks, Greg. [MUSIC]
