Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
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 U.S. on many fronts?
Matt Duss: Great to be with you. Thanks.
Duss: 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 that produce power for civilians. And then I think he woke up and saw that the stock market is in trouble, oil prices are continuing to go higher.
That doesn’t seem to be true at all, but that’s where Donald Trump is focused, primarily, because that is how he believes his presidency will be rated: whether the stock market is doing well.
Donald Trump (voiceover): You’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 attacked unexpectedly all of those countries surrounding it. There was not supposed to be—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.
Duss: It is not true at all. Everyone anticipated this. Every one of these countries that Iran has attacked—we should have expected it, whether it’s Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, obviously Israel. This is part of Iran’s defensive strategy. This is part of how they believe they were creating deterrence.
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. So yes, to answer your question, of course people knew Iran was going to do this. Again, Donald Trump does not bother to do the reading.
Duss: 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—it was supposed to not be a secret.
Duss: That’s right.
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 unprepared. 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?
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 it’s going to go really, really well—you don’t need to worry about it, just look at how well Venezuela went. And Donald Trump chose to believe that.
What’s supposed to happen in these situations? If we had a normal president, what would have happened, and how abnormal is the current situation?
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 yeah, Donald Trump chose not to listen to those people. He instead chose to listen to hardline ideologues like the people we mentioned.
Duss: Right. So in 2015, after a lot of effort and multiple rounds of talks between the U.S. and its partners in the P5+1—that’s the term for the five members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany—they 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.
So what the agreement—the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—did was, in exchange for sanctions relief, and 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 put its nuclear program under the heaviest inspections regime in history—cameras, all kinds of inspections.
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 nonproliferation meant we could have continued to talk with 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, its building of ballistic missiles, its repression of its own people.
Sargent: 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?
Sargent: Right, the problem from their perspective was that this might actually work without a war being fought. Isn’t that the essence of it?
Sargent: 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?
Sargent: In the real world, what will he have achieved on nukes?
Sargent: Right. And so at the end of the day, we’re saddled with all these immense consequences and the needle won’t even have been moved much on nukes.
You know who looks really attractive to the Iranians right now? 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.
Duss: 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.
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, in his own mind, a plausible victory narrative yet.
Duss: That’s right—we no longer have to live under the threat of Iranian nuclear terror that wasn’t there anyway.
Duss: All right. Thanks, Greg.
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