Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The situation’s moving rapidly and Trump is dramatically confusing matters with his unchecked derangement. So we’re trying to pin down what’s really happening with Ariane Tabatabai, a former Defense Department official under Joe Biden, who’s now at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Ari, nice to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s quickly summarize. Earlier this week, Trump was saying a deal with Iran was imminent, within a day or two. Then a U.S. helicopter was shot down. Trump said Iran did it. He launched limited strikes to retaliate. He’s now also said Iran is taking too long and that it will pay the price.
Tabatabai: I mean, that’s the perfect summary of where we are. We’ve had two parallel tracks that have been ongoing. One is on the diplomatic front, where the United States and Iran have been negotiating on how to sustainably end this conflict and then kind of pave the way for further negotiations on other issues of interest, including Iran’s nuclear program, which is one of the main reasons why we’re in this conflict to begin with. We can come back to this.
There’s been reporting over the past 24 hours that we even may have struck some Iranian water supplies, which I should also pause here and let folks know—this is a country that has deeply struggled with water shortages and droughts, and they’re about to enter very, very hot months over there. So if that is actually the case—and it seems like U.S. Central Command has neither said yes or no—that would be pretty troubling, in addition to some of the other things we’ve seen over the past few months in this conflict.
Sargent: Just to clarify for people, once again, Trump is very clearly saying that he’s going to escalate now. And by the time people listen to this, that may have happened or it may not have happened.
Donald Trump (voiceover): You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over—you know, I can say it now. Something you didn’t know. Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil? Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran—until right now.
Tabatabai: Yeah, I mean, it’s really hard, as you know, to try to make sense of what the president might be trying to say here. He does have a tendency to kind of use verbs for other verbs. And so it’s really hard for me to say exactly what he meant. I think there’s a few different ways to read the statement.
There are a few questions to me here, though. One of the key questions is, we’re talking about this diplomatic track that seems to be slowly but surely maybe progressing. It’s clearly not going as fast as Trump would like. These things tend to take time. And again, we’re just a few months away from the midterms. But the surest way to reopen the strait would really be to get a deal, right?
We’ve had U.S. service members who’ve been killed or injured in this. And of course, our bases and other infrastructure are being targeted throughout the region. So this is putting a Band-Aid on one of the many issues that is cascading out of this conflict. And it is not a sustainable Band-Aid. It is one that we can maybe continue for a bit, but ultimately there needs to be a more sustainable solution here.
Ari, so obviously Trump is absolutely desperate to make it look as if he’s in total control of the Strait of Hormuz and the situation more broadly. But what I’m having trouble understanding is what he means.
Tabatabai: It doesn’t.
Tabatabai: I don’t know. And if it is happening, is it happening on the scale that he says it is? I don’t know. Again, this is somebody who talks about drug prices going down 600 percent. So if you’ve bought any Advil recently, you should really be getting some money back.
And I think it’s kind of part of this narrative that he has about this conflict where he keeps talking about Iran’s military being completely destroyed. Last year, after the summer operations against Iran’s nuclear program, he said that basically their entire nuclear program had been obliterated. And that was not the case, because we are here again.
And the piece that I think is really something folks should understand is that we, the United States, are spending billions and billions of dollars sending very expensive, sophisticated weapon systems, munitions, missiles, platforms to fight what was, even before this war, not a particularly sophisticated military. Iran’s military is not China’s military, it’s not Russia’s military even. They weren’t known for having large, expensive platforms.
Sargent: Probably not. We should note, by the way, that the headlines on the inflation spike are really tough for Trump. The Washington Post says this: “Inflation heats up to highest point in three years, fueled by Iran war.” The New York Times: “Inflation jumps as Iran war intensifies price squeeze.” Politico: “Inflation surges to three-year high as Iran fighting drags on.”
Tabatabai: Yeah, I mean, look, I’m not an economist, but I also have to go get gas every day—well, I don’t get it every day, but I have to get gas. And so I see the prices keep going up. And again, we are in a midterm, we’re really in the depths of the midterm season at this point. We’ve had primaries throughout the country.
So it’ll be really interesting to see, if this conflict continues, how it shapes people’s attitudes as we go into November. My organization, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, has been doing some polling on the attitudes of Americans about this conflict. It is not a popular conflict, as you can imagine.
But again, and this is something that many of us in the analytical community had said for years—once you start a conflict, you don’t always end it on your terms. In fact, you rarely end it exclusively on your terms, because the adversary gets a vote as well. And he’s discovering that in real time now.
I want to get into how hard all this is to defend. Let’s listen to an exchange in Congress where Representative Amelia Sykes questions Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
Chris Wright (voiceover): Yes, I hope so.
Wright (voiceover): I love ending Iran’s ability to have a nuclear weapon. I think that’s existential for us.
Wright (voiceover): I love ending Iran’s—
Wright (voiceover): No, I would prefer lower inflation.
Wright (voiceover): He’s an entertaining, hyperbolic guy who’s done tremendous leadership.
Sykes (voiceover): So why would the United States be taking out millions of barrels of oil from Iran?
Sykes (voiceover): Mr. Secretary, I understand this might be an uncomfortable line of questioning and you don’t want to do it, but you are not answering my question. So I’m going to ask you again and I’m going to hope that you will answer it honestly. Did you know that the United States was taking millions of barrels of oil from Iran?
Sykes (voiceover): So do you think that the president is lying based on the audio that you just heard? And I will send it to you in case you say you didn’t hear it.
Sargent: All right, that is some mysterious stuff. As far as I can tell, parsing it—it’s really convoluted and crazy—but I think Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted that Trump basically made the stuff up about the oil being transferred out and said he thinks what Trump really meant was that the blockade, the U.S. blockade, was keeping the oil from getting to the market. Can you make any sense of it?
They’re not supposed to be yes-men who just stand there and say, yes, sir, you’re correct about everything you’re doing. They’re supposed to bring their best expertise of their agency or department they represent, and they’re supposed to help the president make a better set of decisions. And that has not happened, which is how—
And it seems like that viewpoint was not represented, which is how we’ve now had multiple administration officials, including the president himself, say, no one knew that this would happen. No. Everyone who’s worked on this issue knew that this would happen.
Sargent: Just to pick up on the point you made there, here Chris Wright very visibly does not think of his job as telling the truth to the president or to the American people. He clearly understands his job as being sycophant to the president. It’s very clear.
And yet this is kind of how the administration treats Congress—an atrophied Congress that has frankly not stood up to this administration, even as it’s made bad decision after bad decision on a host of issues. And for things that we’re going to be really, frankly, paying the price for for years to come.
Our ability to have a good story to tell internationally is how we get a lot of things done that directly impact people every day. We’re going to be paying the price of these facilities that are being targeted, of these defense systems that we’ve spent billions and billions of dollars buying that are now being damaged and destroyed. We’re going to potentially see huge implications for recruitment and retention in the military.
Sargent: Just to finish this out, what’s going to happen now? Granted, we don’t know whether by the time people are listening to this, Trump will have bombed Iran again. Maybe he will have completely obliterated it by tomorrow as he’s been threatening to do by the time people listen to this. Maybe not, I don’t know. But understanding that things are in, let’s say, flux—what is the most likely set of scenarios to unfold from here?
And I think he’s just kind of stuck here, because on the one hand, Iran again gets a vote. On the other hand, any deal with Iran will be problematic for him, will be extremely divisive within his own base. He obviously doesn’t care what Democrats or independents think, but he cares what Republicans think. And many Republicans will be very opposed to any deal with Iran.
So for Iran, winning is not about winning militarily. It’s about standing up and not losing to the United States. And I think that is a really bad recipe here for a situation that continues in a way that is problematic for all of the people of that region who have to live with the missile attacks and drone attacks and unpredictability, frankly.
Tabatabai: Thanks so much for having me.
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