Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Elizabeth Saunders: I wish I could say it’s a pleasure to be here, but I seem to be only invited when things are truly terrible. So we have to stop meeting like this.
Reporter (voiceover): Deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure violate the Geneva Conventions and international law.
Reporter (voiceover): I’m with the New York Times. Zolan from the New York Times.
Reporter (voiceover): Are you concerned?
Reporter (voiceover): Are concerned that your threat to bomb power plants and bridges amount to war crimes?
Sargent: So it’s worth clarifying something here. Trump is threatening to bomb all power plants and bridges in Iran, as opposed to merely targeting ones that might be connected to military uses in some way. Elizabeth, threatening to bomb all power plants and bridges is a clear and unequivocal threat of a war crime, right?
But I think in terms of intention, and declaring openly that his goal is to bomb as many bridges—and I mean, he can’t literally bomb every power plant and bridge in Iran, it’s just too big—the fact that he’s saying that probably means it’s going to be indiscriminate. And that is clearly a violation of the law of armed conflict, of basic morality. I could go on. I’m no expert in international law, but it’s not—it also, you don’t need to be to see that that is just horrifying.
Donald Trump (voiceover): If you think it’s OK for people that are sick of mind, that are tough, smart and sick, really sick—ideal, you know, from a policy standpoint, from any which way you want to say mentally—these are disturbed people. If you think I’m going to allow them, and powerful and rich, to have a nuclear weapon, you can tell your friends at the New York Times, not gonna happen.
Saunders: I think that this particular exchange—including the attack on The New York Times—it’s like we’ve reached some sort of Trump norm-busting singularity, right? Like, there’s so many things that are wrapped up in this little exchange.
Sargent: Punchbowl News had an interesting report that said this about Trump and the war: “We’re beginning to see tension and perhaps a breaking point with some Republicans.” For instance, Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah says he won’t support additional war funding without Congress formally voting on the war.
Saunders: I don’t know if I would say it’s too optimistic. I would never bet on Republicans constraining Trump. But I think that there are reasons to think first that it’s more likely that he will follow through this time on his threats in a way that is a serious breach of everything that’s come before. And that that will prompt some kind of Republican reaction. I doubt it will constrain him ahead of time. But if he does actually try to bomb Iran back into the Stone Age, it’s hard to imagine there’ll be no Republican pushback.
Now look, one of these institutions is Congress. It’s beyond comprehension at this point that Congress is not stepping up here. Our lawmakers should have to go on record about this right now. They should have gone on record about the entire war. There should have been a vote authorizing or not authorizing Trump to go to war against Iran. And I think it’s bad in and of itself if lawmakers are spared that act, spared of having to take a position on these things. And here they’re not holding any votes and Trump is threatening war crimes on a mass scale.
It is true that we ought to have Congress authorizing war, but the system we have evolved concentrates all the power in the president and we essentially delegate it to one person. And that’s the world we live in now. So as a political scientist, sort of, I agree with you, but I also, like, we have to deal with the world we’re in now.
Saunders: Well, I’m not one for hyperbole, but as I think about the effects already that this war has had on Iran and the civilians in Iran—that’s where I start. And clearly there will be casualties, further casualties for the U.S. military, and we can’t discount that. And then also in the Gulf, right? All these different Gulf nations. You are now talking about a further devastation of Iran through attacks on civilian infrastructure and in retaliation likely attacks on infrastructure all across the Gulf. Desalination plant attacks could result in a massive humanitarian disaster in the Gulf. And then you think about the price of oil and jet fuel and fertilizer, and that could end up impoverishing millions far from the battlefield.
So when you think about the global effect of what Trump is talking about and the likely retaliation it would invite from Iran—I mean, it’s just, if he does this, that’s what they will do. The effect to me seems just beyond anything I can even wrap my head around. The Iraq War was absolutely devastating in so many ways. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is still devastating in so many ways. But just the sheer number of things that will reverberate from this, on top of the immediate human toll and civilian toll from the fighting, is kind of unfathomable.
Saunders: Yes, it is awful. And as I said in my thread, this is part of why I am more terrified than I was in any of the previous national security crises since 2017 that Trump has been involved in. In part because in the previous crises, he may have said things and tweeted things, but there were forces bearing down on him that restrained him. Some of those were his advisors in the first term. Some of those were structural things. The geography of North Korea and South Korea is just constraining in ways we could talk about another time.
So it’s not clear that Iran will agree to something that Trump can declare victory over. Let’s leave aside that Israel might not agree to walk away if Trump decides to walk away. So then you’re into a situation where Trump would have to basically walk away and leave Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf nations and Israel are not going to like that. And it’s a humiliating defeat.
And when I hear people in the media talk about it, that’s how they talk about it. They literally say there’s no overlapping agreement that can satisfy both sides. Like, that to me is like, they’re talking in game theory models. They get it. Like, everyone gets it that there’s no way to move forward here to find a peaceful bargain that satisfies both sides.
Sargent: So basically, either Iran doesn’t give in and Donald Trump has to accept a humiliation that he can’t spin his way out of, or he reduces Iran to rubble and tries to drag it back to the Stone Age.
And I think you can’t ignore Iran’s response in this. They’ve been quite rational in their dealings with Donald Trump since he pulled out of the JCPOA. They constantly calibrate their response. I mentioned this in my thread. They telegraph when they’re going to attack—before this war, they would telegraph when they would hit U.S. bases so that they could be, you know, evacuated and so forth. If he goes through with the threat he made over the weekend and reiterated today, they have no incentive to hold back. They don’t.
Sargent: Well, hopefully Republicans will finally step up if and when it comes to this, but God knows we’ve been disappointed so many times before that there’s absolutely zero reason to expect it. Elizabeth Saunders, thank you so much for that grim assessment.
Sargent: I will try.
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