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’re trying to make sense of it all with Marie Harf, a former State Department official who was an advisor to the team that negotiated Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. Marie, nice to have you on.
Sargent: It sure is. It’s a real disaster. So right now we’re up to at least 14 U.S. troop deaths in the Iran war, and the Pentagon is running out of money for it. The White House is demanding another $87 billion.
Harf: Well, where we are now is, it seems like we’re back in almost a full-scale war between the United States and Iran. Since President Trump did something no other U.S. president had ever done—militarily attack Iran—realizing after he did that, that even if you could kill the leadership, even if you could damage their military, the regime would stay in power, they would shut down the Strait of Hormuz, they would cripple the global economy, and they would continue attacking us in the region—President Trump knew he needed a way out.
Sargent: Let’s check out what Trump says when he’s questioned by a reporter. Note that when Trump says Iran might want to surrender, the reporter flatly points out that, well, Iran continues to attack our allies and Iran continues to kill American soldiers, and that sets Trump off. Listen to this.
Trump (voiceover): Well, how would you know there are no signs? Why? Do you know something that I don’t know?
Trump (voiceover): You don’t know what the dialogue is behind the scenes: that they want to meet desperately to try and end it, because they’re getting decimated. You don’t get that when you listen to your fake station, but you don’t know—you don’t know anything.
Trump (voiceover): Do you know something I don’t know?
Trump (voiceover): I will tell you — they want to desperately meet. And until they’re ready to meet in a meaningful way, we have no interest in even meeting with them.
Harf: I think this may be the issue where the fact that Trump is very divorced from reality is most noticeable. Because I think we all know that his team doesn’t give him good information on many subjects. They don’t give him the actual truth. And we have reports that he just gets every day video of the coolest bombs being dropped in Iran. I think he has absolutely no sense of what’s actually happening here.
I mean, he already said he was going to obliterate their civilization entirely, and that didn’t force Iran’s hand. So now we’re back to, I’m going to bomb them again really hard this time. And I think there’s a real disconnect there that you really put your finger on.
The Iranians are very astute followers of American politics. We learned this during the Iran negotiations under President Obama. They can read polls as well as we can. They know that the American people do not support this war. They certainly do not support a return to an even broader conflict with Iran, and that President Trump is very cognizant of the time ticking towards the midterm.
Sargent: Yeah, in fact, Trump said something else that really kind of illustrates this reality distortion loop of his. He said, “Honestly, they haven’t seen anything yet. We’ve been nice. We’ve been nice.” You’ve been inside this beast before. What is he being told, exactly?
None of that has—or, I would argue, will—lead to a stronger position for the United States. Anyone who has ever followed this topic would have told you that if the United States attacked, the first thing any rational country would do is close the Strait of Hormuz. It’s their trump card.
Sargent: I really wonder if he’s intimating that he’s prepared to use nuclear weapons. Do you think that’s what he’s doing?
There’s just this obsession with using the strongest, toughest, most bellicose language they can come up with, like somehow that makes them tougher, more manly, more scary. And the Iranians, throughout their history, have fought wars for decades to stalemates, including with Iraq. Like, they are not scared of Trump tweeting at 3 a.m.
Marie, you now have Trump saying every American death will be avenged many times over by a much higher number of Iranian deaths. Is that tantamount to saying we’re now in an open-ended conflict? Is that where we are now?
This hawkish line that you never give anything to Iran—Republicans hated his ceasefire deal with Iran because it gave Iran everything and got nothing for the United States—coming up against a bad global economy, rising oil prices, and instability in a midterm year. Those are two fundamental principles that Republicans have claimed to care deeply about. Which one do you pick?
Just to underscore your point a little more, the two conflicting forces are: one, you never give in to Iran at all, because we’re strong and they’re weak. But two, if you continue this war, we’re going to get crushed in the midterms, right?
Now they’re coming up against those. And they are realizing that you cannot just drop a bunch of bombs and do a bunch of tough talk on Twitter. That does not lead to a strategic victory for the United States against an enemy with a huge country, so many resources, geographic superiority in many ways.
Sargent: I want to highlight one other thing from the Politico story, because it’s sort of amazing. It goes on to say that all this is casting a grim shadow over the campaign season for the GOP. One Republican is quoted saying this: the war has become “a persistent dark cloud that is souring the national mood, which typically depresses the base of the party in power and motivates supporters of the opposition.” That’s quite a quote from that Republican there.
Harf: You’re exactly right. Look, 28 percent of Americans—only 28 percent—in recent polls said that the Iran war was worth it. And we are how many months in? Not that long into this war. It’s now as unpopular as the Iraq War was after three years, during sort of the height of the insurgency.
This is the consequence of all of those decades of rhetoric, that they pushed a president who is deeply erratic to undertake a war of choice that has had disastrous consequences in the region and, in the United States, for the global economy—that we warned would happen if they did it. And now they have no way to get out of it. And they are led by a man who I think has zero concept of the actual reality on the ground.
Harf: Iran is not going to give him those things. That ship has sailed—the day Donald Trump ripped up the previous Iran nuclear agreement. I think if we can get to a place where there is some sort of agreement on the Strait of Hormuz, that will probably end with Iran making money. It will be open, but Iran will probably charge a toll, which is money in their pockets.
This disastrous policy will have consequences that last for a generation. And there is no easy Iran deal to be had now. There is no magic wand that we are going to be able to wave, in the best-case scenario. And this is far from the best-case scenario.
Harf: I think if Democrats can take the House and the Senate, it would be very helpful. I have no faith or confidence that this administration would actually end the war if Congress did something to try to stop it. This will be very interesting if Democrats take Congress—subpoenas, investigations, defunding ICE.
Sargent: Well, that sounds like it’s the size of it. I guess we shouldn’t have elected a madman, huh?
And it’s like all of these people who fought in Iraq and who now are in the Trump administration learned nothing from the Iraq War. Because we are in an even bigger mess today, with no way out of it. And this is what happens. This is the consequence of Republicans not taking him seriously enough and using him for their own aims. You can’t control him, it turns out.
Harf: Thank you.
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