Perry Bacon: I am Perry Bacon. I’m from The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Elizabeth Saunders. She’s a professor at Columbia University of political science. She focuses on international relations and U.S. foreign policy decisions. So Elizabeth, we were talking earlier and we had a little technical problem, so we’re back now. You had this post on Bluesky where you said essentially Trump’s choices are humiliation or escalation. Explain that.
But when you bring the Strait of Hormuz into it, you really change the game, because the Iranians have this leverage that. And all you have to do is look at a map to see it—no other country can really exert that kind of leverage. And that means that up to a point, Trump can’t really do much. From this perspective, having expended all this military power, he can try to inflict incredible pain, as he threatened to do with those genocidal Truth Social posts. But obviously that’s not good, and may not even work—or would work so well that it would destroy Iran as a country, and that doesn’t seem like a good option.
And so you could say that the Strait is open—as world leaders did on Friday, and it was incredible that they just took this tweet from Iran, which didn’t even say the Strait is open unconditionally—it said the Strait is open subject to the conditions of the Iranian Navy, or something like that. And everybody was just like, yay, the Strait is open. It’s not—it wasn’t—and it’s somehow even more closed again now.
Bacon: What is the thing we’re giving? You said we have to give—so what is the thing the U.S. is going to end up giving?
Bacon: — Barack Obama—
And even though both sides want a deal—I saw this morning, I think it came from the White House, but I couldn’t be sure—but somebody was quoted in The New York Times saying, the deal is moving forward, the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear issue remain big issues. It’s okay.
They overcame a lot of these obstacles on the very complicated issue of nuclear material and enrichment in 2015, but now they’ve also got to solve the Strait of Hormuz problem. I cannot imagine a solution that doesn’t require either a massive commitment of U.S. military force in the long term—I just don’t even know what that looks like, most people don’t think there’s a military solution to this—or some kind of tacit acceptance of Iranian control, which is the humiliation side.
Saunders: Yeah. So they did kill a lot of the top Iranian leadership, even on that first day when they killed the Ayatollah. And so in that sense it was a tactical success, with Israeli intelligence, which is unmatched and incredible in many ways.
If you think back to the old “axis of evil,” right—Iran, Iraq, North Korea is the one that actually got its nuke and has not been invaded. There’s a lesson there, right? So you may have increased the cost of ending the nuclear program, which supposedly was obliterated in June. So why we need the military option to go seize it is mind-bogglingly complicated, and I don’t see anyone seriously trying that.
So it’s clear that the military, which executed—as we were talking about before—executed what it was asked to do, although it made tragic mistakes like the mistaken targeting of the school. One can’t say that the military didn’t do what was asked of it, and that’s our system, right?
The military can offer its advice and say, there’s a lot of risk, or here are three options and we recommend this one—and the president can follow that advice and not do it, or can overrule them and say, I’m doing it anyway. And that may turn out to be catastrophically bad. It may turn out that the military’s advice was wrong—the military opposed the Iraq surge, for example. There’s debate about how successful that was, but clearly it had some effect.
Bacon: You write a lot about how foreign policy decisions are made. So there was an article in The New York Times—it came out a couple weeks ago—that was detailing a sort of behind-the-scenes [account]—journalists call these tick-tocks. So who talked to who about the war. And the article implies that Netanyahu was very involved in pushing us into war.
Saunders: First of all, as I was saying before, I had to explain to my students—when I assigned them this article last week—that it was a different kind of Tick-Tock, not that kind of TikTok. I agree with you. I think that article actually clarified a lot about the role of Netanyahu. The things people knew, and then inferred—some of the details—it filled in the details.
He’s been for it for a long time. This is his dream for 40 years. And what I actually found interesting is that there is a section of that article in which people say there are three or four things that they said—one of them was: if you knock out the regime, either through an initial campaign or if you get them all in a room or whatever it is, the regime will collapse.
And I think it’s absolutely right to say that the Americans make decisions on their own and therefore bear responsibility for the decisions. They can’t just blame this on Netanyahu
They know this war has failed and now they’re leaking that they weren’t involved in it. That’s how I read it. And I don’t deny the objections they raised, but it seemed to me their objections might have been louder after they saw the war than before. It felt like kind of the ass-covering—that’s what I’m getting at. How did—
Bacon: Yes. How did you read that article? Maybe differently than I did.
Bacon: Suggesting it was—yeah, it was [not a] coincidence—
I think we need more politics, not less, in foreign policy—and lots of other kinds of policy that I don’t know anything about—but you want people to want to make good decisions so that they can succeed. Does that make sense? So in principle, I don’t have a problem with it.
So if Rubio says—or Rubio’s—
Elizabeth Saunders: Yeah, in the Rubio part of this. Somebody says, presumably on behalf of Rubio, that he had a lot of objections. Yeah. But he didn’t try to voice them. Now, okay—even in the scenario where you’re in the most crass, totally political space, shouldn’t he be trying to be more like Vance, because the war is a disaster?
And I do think that there’s this idea floating around that Rubio is somehow the least crazy of them, and so therefore can be forgiven—because, thank God, we at least have—I don’t really buy that. I think—and Dan Drezner has written eloquently about this—he deserves a lot of the blame for so much of what’s happened in the diplomacy sphere.
Bacon: Yes. Anything—I think that the political reporter’s view is still that he’s the normal one, because he was the normal one in 2016. But that was a long time ago.
So I don’t know that he’s such a great politician, and even in this space where he’s clearly trying to position himself—I don’t buy the Rubio-as-our-secret-savior narrative at all.
Saunders: I have been thinking about this a lot, because occasionally you will see a bit of news from Cuba pop up. And make no mistake—we’re already inflicting incredible suffering in Cuba. It gets almost no reporting. I think it was the BBC that had a reporter do an incredible piece—it’s appalling what the United States is doing to Cuba right now. And in many ways it’s more civilian-targeted even than some of the things that we’re doing to Iran.
Saunders: We’re blocking the flow of oil, and so there’s no power—like, basically we’ve cut—we’ve essentially done—like Trump threatened to bomb all the power plants in Iran, but he’s essentially turned the lights off in Cuba. And blocked relief efforts. It’s really pretty horrible.
So this could go a number of ways. One, it could be: I’m just done with this. And the military might say, our carriers are exhausted—one of them has been out for almost a record, if not already past the record for a deployment, had a fire—there are reports of not enough food. So the military could go to him and say, look, it is your right to order us to do things, but you should know that this is not great. And he might just take that.
Bacon: I don’t recall that, but okay—Cuba’s next. Like—
Bacon: No, I’ll look that up before we go—yeah, sure. I just don’t remember that.
Bacon: Yeah. That’s unlikely—to see Trump say that—but maybe, yes.
So I don’t know about that. I think a lot depends on how well he thinks he can spin whatever the outcome of Iran is, how long it takes, what the military is telling him—not because I think he’s so great at taking military advice, he’s clearly not but I do think that if the military went to him and said, look, sir, you’re about to have a revolt of the moms who can’t get the care packages to their [kids]—it just—that could present a really ugly problem for him that he just doesn’t feel like he needs.
Bacon: Do we think they said it that directly? That’s what I’m not sure about. Because afterward it seems like they were focused on that, but I don’t know if—all the previews I saw were like regime change, then—but I never saw “oil prices will jump up.” I guess there was—I don’t know, did—
So it’s just implied. And if nobody explained that to him—if the military people said it’s not the military’s job to worry about the price of oil—but it is the job of his political advisors and the Secretary of Energy, who made some claims this weekend about where gas is going to go. If they’re not connecting the dots for him, then that’s also on them. But I don’t—I just don’t know.
Bacon: Let me finish by asking about—so you saw the Pope, the leader of Italy who is a far-right person, Starmer, Macron, the Spanish Prime Minister—we have a drumbeat, more and more people, particularly in Europe—but from the far right to the left, Lula, some people you’d expect but some unusual ones who are criticizing Trump right now. Does that matter at all—like the sort of volume of international criticism? Does that pierce inside in any way?
I have this terrible memory of Pam Bondi in the Oval Office calling him “president”—remember that? Not “Mr. President,” just “president, you did such an amazing job.” It doesn’t seem to have made any difference.
Saunders: So anyway, I don’t think it’s so much that it’s going to change his behavior, but I think it’s changing the Europeans’ behavior, right? They have been trying to walk this very fine line of planning for the worst but trying to keep him on side. I think the real break there was Greenland—we didn’t talk about that one, but that was a really dramatic event in Europe, and—
Saunders: Is that what did—yes, they did. They did. And the subsequent reporting [showed] that Denmark didn’t just send military to do the scheduled exercises—they also sent blood supply, in the event of actual combat. They did the kinds of things that you would do if you expected your soldiers to be taking fire.
If you no longer believe your friend has your back, you make alternative arrangements. I think it’s having an effect. It’s having an effect across the partisan spectrum, as you’ve said. Maloney and Starmer seem to be aligned on this. So I think it’s just accelerating Europe’s detachment from the United States in the security realm. And that has a lot of complicated effects, right? Some people have been calling for that for a long time. Europe’s not ready to do that.
Bacon: Good place to close. Elizabeth, thanks for joining me—difficulties and all—and I’ll see you soon. Thank you.
Saunders: Thank you so much.
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