Trump's Iran Strikes: Triumph, Stalemate or Setback?

Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

President Trump's decision to bomb Iran shocked much of the world, but America's involvement was over almost as soon as it began, and so far it hasn't sparked a broader war like so many feared.

So, how did we get here?

Was the bombing a success?

Will the ceasefire between Israel and Iran hold?

Is the regime in Iran any closer to collapsing?

And what's the long-term solution to the nuclear issue, which is at the heart of all of this?

I've gathered a panel of journalists with deep expertise to grapple with these questions.

Jason Rezayan is the director of press freedom initiatives and writer for the Washington Post's Global Opinions.

He was the post's correspondent in Tehran before he was then unjustly imprisoned by the Iranian regime.

He's the author of Prisoner of My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison.

Jim Shudo is CNN's chief national security analyst and the anchor of The Brief with Jim Shudo.

He's the author of The Return of the Great Powers, Russia, China, and the Next World War.

Robin Wright is a contributing writer and columnist for The New Yorker and a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

She's the author of several books, including The Last Great Revolution, Turmoil and Transformation in Iran, and Rock the Kasbah: Rage and rebellion across the Islamic world.

This is a smart and thoughtful panel, so stick around.

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Jason, Jim, and Robin, thanks for coming on on.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

So let's start with a tweet from, of all people, Donald Trump Jr.

He posted, destroyed nuclear facilities, no dead Americans, and no forever war with Iran seems like a big win for me.

My father has never looked to plunge us into a prolonged conflict.

And those of us who know him best knew all along that his end game was peace to America first.

Now, according to a leaked early intelligence assessment, the strikes have only set back Iran's nuclear program by a few months.

It's not nothing, of course.

It's actually a very good goal.

President Trump insists it was obliterated.

And they're all pushing back on the intelligence assessments and everything else.

Talk a little bit about this.

So let's start with you, Jason, and then Robin, and then Jim.

Thanks, Kara.

I've been thinking about this since Saturday night when

this all happened.

I thought to myself, okay,

there's no way, and Robin and Jim know a lot more about these things than I do, but there's no way that we have any kind of assessment of how much damage that we might have inflicted.

And

I think this president, if we we sort of think about it in the business realm, sometimes being first to market with an idea is the most important thing.

I think Donald Trump was was just trying to control the narrative right off the bat.

Right off the bat.

And in a lot of ways, it worked.

You know, for the next couple of days, every time I was asked about this, I would say to myself, well, what's the actual intelligence say?

And, you know, it takes a few days for that stuff to pan out.

But, you know, in the media, we're really good at sort of

being super skeptical until moments like this.

right we all line up behind the american position very quickly very quickly Robin?

Yeah, I think there's a danger of saying too much at this early stage about how much damage there was.

Because if President Trump is wrong, he looks like he's overstated and that the mission didn't accomplish all that it attempted.

So, and also there's a kind of political component of this.

The President is at NATO now.

He's

probably boasting of what the United States has done militarily as he speaks to the world's largest military alliance.

And if the word is out that, well, maybe it didn't quite have as much damage as expected, that's going to undermine the kind of imagery that he'd hoped to craft at this critical meeting.

So, you know, we won't know for a while, but I think the reality is the program has been hurt one way or another, whether it set back months or years.

And the real point of all this was to try to get the Iranians back to the negotiating table to talk about the core question, which is still as much alive as it was before the bombing, and that is, how do you limit Iran's capabilities and intentions?

Right.

Because one of the things is, why overstate it?

It sort of reminds a lot of people of mission accomplished with George Bush, for example.

Jim?

This is, in my view, an entirely manufactured drama.

Right?

There is an early intelligence assessment.

The White House has even acknowledged the existence of that assessment, and CNN and others have reported it.

It's early.

But the truth is that no one, American or Israeli, expected one round of military strikes to wipe out the entire program or even several days with the Iranian strikes.

I spoke to the former head of Israeli military intelligence last night, and he made this point.

He said, that's actually not important.

You know, one, impossible to knock it all out.

They dispersed it, they buried it, they've been preparing for strikes like this for 20 years.

What is important is that

the U.S.

has and Israel together have severely damaged.

And what is important, and this is the win for Trump, right?

He doesn't have to, you know, he actually put himself in a corner by claiming that the whole thing was obliterated.

The win is that no US president has done this.

They've thought about it, but they haven't done it.

And he's delivered quite a dramatic message to Iran, right, that we will come and we will use the most powerful munitions, non-nuclear, in our arsenal to destroy this.

And by the way, reserve the right to do so again, right, if you don't come to the table.

That's the win here.

So,

the idea that he uses this word obliterated, by the way, I had a security clearance, I've read a lot of intelligence supports, I've read battle damage assessments.

Obliterated never turns up in an intelligence report, right, because you don't have that certainty.

And very few military strikes destroy everything in one go.

So,

the win is for Trump and from his perspective and Israel's perspective, to Robin's point, they've done deep damage.

They've now delivered a sort of ultimatum come to the table now.

And it's become a created drama here, which is classic in Trump world, right?

He wants something to be the way he wants it to be.

And if anybody challenges that, even his own defense intelligence agency, he's going to go full court press against it.

Right.

Jim, you said Iranian strikes, and you meant Israeli strikes, presumably.

Yes, of course, Israeli strikes.

One thing I want to just add, though, I think it does actually buy him some time as well, right?

As this conversation rages on here in Washington, it gives the Iranians a little bit of time to decide whether they're ready to come back and talk.

I think that they probably have to.

And hopefully it gives the Israelis a little time to cool off and think to themselves, well, maybe we don't need to continue air raids on Tehran.

So let's go back to President Trump's first term and the core question, as you put it, Robin.

In 2018, he withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the Iran Deal.

It forced Iran to dramatically reduce their uranium stockpile and capped enrichment at 3.67%, far below what's necessary to build a nuclear bomb.

By May of this year, Iran was two and a half days away from having enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, according to some intelligence assessments.

Robin, if the deal were still in place, would Israel have had a viable pretext for attacking Iran?

Or is the deal what set us down this path in the first place?

Well, there would still have been restrictions on Iran's program, not indefinite, not open-ended.

There were timestamps on each aspect of the deal.

But Iran would still only have 3.67, not be at 60% of enriched uranium.

I think this is really important to understand why Iran was doing that.

Remember, President Trump, as you said, walked away in 2018.

And for 14 months, the Iranians actually continued to abide by the terms of the deal.

They didn't escalate.

In the meantime, the United States imposed more than 1,500 sanctions on Iran.

And so this, in some ways, enriching uranium, continuing to develop advanced centrifuges, was its maximum pressure response to the United States to give Iran some leverage.

Now, needless to say, we're all worried about would it cross the political threshold of deciding to make a bomb, which U.S.

intelligence said it had not yet done, even on the eve of the Israeli and U.S.

strikes.

So, you know, I think that, yes, we would have been much safer.

We'd stuck to the deal.

The Iranians don't have as much leverage this time, if they go back to the table, than they had two weeks ago.

But I do agree that they want to have talks, that they want to have negotiations.

But my fear is that we're in the same place when it comes to that core question of can Iran enrich that we were before the military action.

And that's why I worry about the renewal of hostilities down the road if this diplomacy becomes dead-ended or stalled.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think also, if I can,

you know, it brings up a strategic question.

Trump pulled out of a deal that was not perfect by any means.

It had sunset provisions, et cetera.

But And this is a big if, you know, had that deal stayed and had Iran stuck to it and had the IAA been able to to maintain its oversight, et cetera, Iran wouldn't have produced as much fissile material as it did outside the deal and therefore wouldn't have been as close to breakout as it was outside the deal.

So strategically, exiting the deal got Iran closer, right?

And strategically, that did not serve America's national security interests, right?

So

that's a question that gets lost in this whole, I mean, you'll hear from the president and others, you know, how horrible that deal was.

But the fact is, and again, this is an if, had Iran and the U.S.

stayed in and all the provisions survived, it wouldn't have been as close, right?

And that boosts the need,

if you buy this line of argument for military action.

You know, so that helped bring us to where we are today, frankly.

So Jason, two questions for you.

You lived in Iran first as the Tehran correspondent for the Washington Post and then as a prisoner.

So how did you feel

on Friday, June 13th, when you found out the head of security apparatus had unjustly detained you had been killed?

And second, you don't just have sources of liberatory on, you have family over there.

Over 600 Iranians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes.

What are you hearing from them and ordinary people on the ground in Iran?

Yeah, I mean, I'll take the first part first.

In a way,

I mean, I've got no love lost for the Islamic Republic and certainly not for the Revolutionary Guard and their intelligence wing that held me hostage.

But I also felt a little vindicated because, you know, for a very long time, I have been kind of shouting from the mountaintop that despite all of the claims that this system is all powerful,

it probably never was.

And clearly, over the last couple of years, a lot of their capabilities, a lot of their top leadership has been taken out by

Israel in targeted assassinations and drone strikes.

amazingly,

strikes that are pulled off from Iranian soil.

It's quite an incredible thing to see.

And so I think that this narrative that Iran was sealed off and

capable of defending itself has never really been true.

I mean, I think Iran's defense spending is less than the Netherlands.

Their fighter jets are ones that they bought from us in the 70s.

I mean, this is not a strong military presence.

Personally, it's terrifying, right?

You know, I have a lot of family in Iran.

My wife's entire family still is

living there.

Many, many friends.

And, you know, when you hear,

you know,

I don't want to

kind of point fingers at our cable news.

You may, but go ahead.

Well, okay.

But it's, look,

it's not CNN's fault that Fred Blaken only gets in five days after this all starts, right?

The Islamic Republic has tried to kind of keep the world out of its country for a very long time.

And so when we watch

the coverage of this and we see four different live shots of dark night skies from Israel and one live shot of a correspondent in a bunker who has a telephone, who's receiving SMSs from the Israeli government, like everybody else in the country, that you know, if you live in this neighborhood, go down into the bunker below your building from this time to this.

Iranians don't have any of that.

You know, my wife was born in 1984, smack in the middle of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq.

Her memories of childhood, of early childhood, are of the bomb sirens.

Those don't exist anymore.

And when President Trump tweets, or when Benjamin Netanyahu sends out a message on satellite television or even on, I'm watching CNN and there's a thing on the screen that says, hey, Iranians, you've been warned to leave your homes.

They can't see that.

The satellites have been jammed by their own government.

So they don't have any information.

They don't have no information, right?

And nowhere to go and no recourse.

And it's just this reminder that, you know, that Iranians don't have a friend in the world.

Not in their own regime, not in the United States of America, certainly not in television.

We'll be back in a minute.

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So, Jim, 28 Israelis have been killed by Iranian strikes, but the conflict has boosted Netanyahu's political standing, though not significantly.

There reports Israeli leadership was stunned and embarrassed after getting publicly cursed out by Trump.

He said neither they nor the Iranians knew what the, this is what Trump said, knew what the fuck they are doing.

It was quite colorful.

Nonetheless, Netanyahu has said if Iran rebuilds its nuclear project, quote, we will strike again.

Where is the Netanyahu-Trump relationship right now and Netanyahu's status?

Listen, you know, Netanyahu's status in Israel, I would say, is quite strong, right?

I mean, here's someone who's, you know, rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated, right?

To paraphrase Twain so many times over.

And yeah, and listen,

you can't contest his record from a military standpoint, right?

He has decimated Hezbollah and Lebanon.

He has struck at the very core, to the very core, of Iran's nuclear program, military leadership, et cetera, and at enormous human cost in Gaza, right, that we continue to watch every day, has done great damage, of course, to Hamas.

And from the Israeli perspective, you know,

that makes it safer from its perspective.

So, you know, domestically, he seems to be in better shape than he was, and that's one thing.

With Trump, their personal relationship has not been great.

You've read the stories about how Trump doesn't quite trust him all the time.

But I'll say this about Trump imagines that he can force everyone's hand, right?

Whether that be a Netanyahu, trading partners in the trade war, you name it.

But strategic interests matter.

to these countries.

And we've seen that with Israel.

When Israel determines, you know, Trump has tried to push Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza multiple times.

Netanyahu has forged ahead, right?

He's bulldozed ahead.

And there's not a lot of talk about that, how he's essentially ignored Trump on military action in Gaza.

Because from Netanyahu's perspective, it's too important to him, right?

And he's going to keep doing it.

And he'll take a slap on the wrist, but he forges ahead.

And, you know, that's where the kind of rubber meets the road, right?

In that Trump doesn't have, he's not omnipotent.

He can just curse him out as much as he can.

He can't just curse him out.

He's not omnipotent.

It's kind of like with Putin.

He thought the great relationship he had with Putin would bring about a ceasefire.

Of course, that hasn't happened, right?

Even Zelensky, who got browbeaten in the Oval Office from a strategic national security perspective, is like, no, I can't give up.

I'd lose my country.

So I think it's a, you know, with Israel, as with every other place, that, you know, whatever diplomatic or personality magic or just brute force that Trump imagines he has, it doesn't always win the day.

No, it kind of looks like an old man shaking his fist at the kids on the lawn, essentially.

So,

Robin, is Iran more or less likely to build a bomb right now?

Do they feel threat from Trump?

And their

stockpile of highly enriched uranium could fit into 10 car trunks and American officials admit they don't know where it is.

How feasible would it be for them to build one if they decided to do it?

Well,

that's the main point.

Will it make the political decision to go ahead?

It had not done that in the run-up to this round of the 12-day war, as Trump calls it.

So that's what's what's so pivotal.

Will they continue to have some kind of nuclear program?

First of all, they believe they have a right to peaceful nuclear energy.

Iran needs it.

It has blackouts, rolling blackouts, because of its infrastructure is so degraded, its oil facilities are so degraded, and every country wants a basket of different energy sources.

So Iran is likely to continue some kind of nuclear program, whether overt.

Or energy program.

Overt or covert, no, but also as maximum pressure.

The 3%, 3.67% is all

what the former deal allowed, which is what would be used for a peaceful nuclear program.

Whether Iran thinks that it only has leverage, because it doesn't own its airspace anymore, it doesn't have an air force.

It's weakened, if not debilitated.

And so I think it's quite possible, especially since they move some of their stuff.

But again, is this leverage so that it has some kind of stand at any kind of nuclear negotiations with the United States?

Or is this because it wants to advance a nuclear capability because it feels ever more vulnerable now?

And we don't know the answer to that question yet.

But I just say one thing, that we also need to look at this

round of

hostilities in the political context.

There is no end of this war militarily.

It can only succeed, or the United States and Israel can only succeed, if there is some kind of diplomatic off-ramp that makes everybody feel as if the Iranians are not going to build a bomb, that there are some kind of guarantees, there's some kind of verification by the UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to go in and be able to count every centrifuge and to monitor the stockpile of enriched uranium and to have access countrywide to any suspected sites.

So the political outcome of this at a time the regime has an aging and ailing supreme leader that people are not going to be happy.

They haven't been happy for a long time.

And so there are some, you know, does the regime have to negotiate a new social contract with its people?

Yeah.

I'll get to that in a second.

But so from your perspective, they still have not made that political decision, and it's a very difficult one to make, correct?

Correct.

I think there's just, as Robin indicated, there's so many internal Iranian political variables.

There always has been, but many more right now, including the, you know, the health of the supreme leader, succession plans.

There are obviously factions within the system saying, we needed a bomb five years ago, right?

There are others who look at it more realistically, the types of people that

have more contacts with the outside world than the more insular-looking looking members of the system who look around and say, okay,

Israel has a large undeclared nuclear arsenal.

The United States has a massive nuclear arsenal.

If we get one or two or five bombs, that's going to set off a nuclear arms race right in our neighborhood.

right?

Saudi Arabia is going to want one.

Maybe the UAE is going to want one.

Turkey's definitely going to want one.

And so I think of this, of Iran getting a bomb, you know, a single bomb, deciding to weaponize, you know, coming out, whether they do that publicly or our intelligence tells us that that's happening, that's more of an existential threat for the Islamic Republic than it is for Israel.

Can I play devil's advocate on that for a moment?

And I hear your point, right?

One bomb, and there would certainly be an arms race.

And then the question becomes, is it just one bomb, right?

But it doesn't take a crazy person to look at the world today and over the last several years and say, what's the difference between the countries countries that got invaded and didn't get invaded, right?

Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and got invaded.

North Korea has nuclear weapons and has not been struck, right?

Iran wasn't there and it's just been embarrassed militarily, right?

It's been struck repeatedly.

And it's not just the

rogue states who think in those terms, right?

You have a whole host of countries around the world who are reevaluating their relationship with nuclear weapons and considering going nuclear, literally, because of the changing landscape.

And that includes our allies, right?

You know, South Korea, there's a public discussion of gaining nuclear weapons because they don't trust the U.S.

nuclear umbrella and defense agreement.

There's discussion in Japan.

You have the German chancellor.

discussing sharing France's nuclear deterrent because he doesn't trust America's nuclear umbrella.

And, you know, sometimes when I ever cover this and people will say, oh, crazy Kim Jong-un, right?

You know, he wants nuclear weapons or the crazy mullahs in Iran.

You know, there's a reasonable, rational case that you could see.

And I'm not, God knows I'm not rooting for it.

I'm just saying there's a reasonable, rational case.

That's a very crazy talk, you know, sadly.

Speaking of that, officials in Israel have made clear they want regime change in Iran.

Robin, you actually met with the Ayatollah in 1987.

You write that he lacked charisma, worldliness, and intellectual depth, but he's managed to stay in power since 1981.

And even if he's killed, the regime is built presumably to endure without him.

Talk about the durability of that.

He himself, probably not, but can you talk a little bit about what happens here in terms of at least power change, maybe not regime change?

Well, I think for a long time now, several years, Iranians have understood the actuarial tables that the supreme leader, now 86, was going to fade from the scene at some point.

Right, biology is undefeated.

Yes, exactly.

And there's no obvious heir apparent.

There's talk that he's kind of named three possible successors, but they are predominantly old clerics as well.

I think the question now is what happens within Iran and whether people who've been deeply dissatisfied over the years and have gone to the streets in 2009 during the green movement that challenged a fraudulent election result

since 2017, sporadic economic protests over price hikes.

And

most of all, the 2022 women, life, freedom protests that spread nationwide, that I would guess 80% of the population is unhappy.

But there's no obvious opposition inside the country that is viable.

And there's certainly no opposition outside the country that is viewed as legitimate from inside Iran.

And so we're at a point that the regime is extremely vulnerable diplomatically, politically, economically, militarily,

biologically.

But remember that the Supreme Leader does have power, but the most important decision-making body inside the country is the Supreme National Security Council.

And it varies from 13 to 15 people, some of who have been killed by the Israeli airstrikes.

But they're the ones who chart a course and then take it to the Supreme Leader and say, what do you think?

And for the previous Iran nuclear deal, I was told by its former foreign minister that

the council would debate it and then agree, and then they take it to the supreme leader, and he would agree to 95% of it, and that the questions he asked were actually not major big ones.

They were kind of the minutiae of the deal.

So I think that the elimination of the supreme leader would be a symbolic inflection point.

But remember, the regime survived an eight-year war, and I covered that war between Iran and Iraq.

It survived when

two bombs by an opposition group killed the president, the prime minister, the judiciary chief, 27 members of parliament.

It survived a lot.

And

I think that the idea of regime change any time in the

imminent future is probably doubtful, even if it's inevitable long term.

All right.

So, but Jason, you've written that, quote, decimating Iran's defenses and then letting them stay in power to terrorize their citizen dissidents and opponents around the world could be, would be a massive failure.

Explain why the current situation is so bad for Iranians.

And then Robin's noting, probably unlikely anything more than symbolic to happen.

Is there any situation in which forced regime change would lead to a better outcome for Iranians in the Middle East?

Look, I think a regime change through bombs hasn't succeeded yet, right?

I'm not just talking about Iran.

I'm talking, you know, in our memory.

The concern, the biggest concern that I have right now about that scenario is that even if the regime were to fall today,

that 20% of people, who knows if it's 20% of people that support the system, maybe it's 30%, maybe it's 5%,

but a portion of that several million people at least are the people in the country who have guns.

This is a country where

normal citizens don't have access to firearms.

This is in America.

And there is no way for people to organize.

I would argue that one of the things that the Islamic Republic has been most successful at over the years is snuffing out its own internal opposition, either by assassinating them, imprisoning them for very long periods of time, or exiling them to

foreign soil.

I don't think that

the

environment is ripe for that kind of change, especially as

Robin talked about

the eight-year war with Iraq and the assassinations of their top leadership.

This is a country when you go into any city,

any street alley, vast majority is named after a kid who was killed in the war that lived on that street, right?

This is a nation that's endured trauma after trauma after trauma.

Are they at the end of their rope?

Yeah.

Do they want freedom?

Certainly.

The economic situation in Iran for ordinary citizens is at its worst point that it's been since the end of that war.

Can the system kind of limp along for a while?

I think it's at the end of its rope.

But, you know, if it were to collapse right now, I fear that what could replace it might be something even worse.

We'll be back in a minute.

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So Iran fired missiles at an American base in Qatar in response to America's bunker buster bombs.

That move was clearly designed to de-escalate the situation while saving face.

But while they may be weak militarily and internally, they can still block the Strait of Hormuz or retaliate via cyber attacks, assassinations, and proxy terrorism.

Jim, how capable is Iran when it comes to asymmetric warfare?

And what sort of response do you expect to see from them in the coming months or years?

Even if, as Jason said, they're on their last legs.

They're still on their legs, essentially.

Yeah.

Well, one thing I'll say is I think that the telegraphing of those missile strikes on Qatar was really one of of the most fascinating developments of the last several days, right?

That Iran, via Qatar, told the U.S.

it was going to fire at it.

And therefore, the U.S.

was able to prepare for it.

And then the U.S.

president tweeted out thanks, right?

Thank you for the heads up.

That's remarkable.

I mean, that's a sign of, I mean, it's really a sign of weakness, right?

And that Iran had to do something.

And that, yes, the number of missiles was the exact number of bombs the U.S.

dropped.

You know, it's all symbolism.

But it clearly did not want to pick a fight with the U.S.

because it was concerned it would get pummeled, right, if it took shots at U.S.

bases or killed U.S.

service members in the region.

So that's notable.

And that speaks to weakness.

It does have capabilities, though.

And Iran has a history of not striking on the day after, but perhaps months later or even years later, right?

If you think of the Soleimani strike, when Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani, and Iran did send missiles towards bases and U.S.

soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries, et cetera.

But it wasn't the big conflagration that many had feared.

But years later, right, there was a plot to kill American officials, right?

So that can still happen.

And Iran has tremendous

terror capabilities around the world.

You know, you've had this talk of sleeper cells.

It also has cyber capabilities.

But then the same calculation happens, right?

If Iran were to set off a bomb somewhere in the U.S., God forbid, and the U.S.

were able to determine responsibility, right?

That's not always clear that you could do that.

One can expect

a massive U.S.

response.

And Iran would have to say, could we survive that, right?

You know, and the final thing I would say is that it's so hard to judge

the survivability of these regimes.

I mean, look at Russia.

I mean, Russia has its own issues, right, including an ongoing war in which they're basically just sending young men to get chewed up on the front lines and economic consequences at home, et cetera.

But somehow Putin survives.

That said, a couple years ago,

Progozhin, you know, drove halfway to Moscow, right?

You know, and it wasn't like folks were standing in his way until he turned around.

So, you know, sometimes there can be weaknesses that we don't expect.

I mean, in 1979, the Shah, right, the CIA didn't think he was going to go down and he went down.

It's just really, really, really hard to say.

And then who replaces him?

Because

it's sort of like Russia with Iran.

Do you get someone worse, possibly?

You're not going to get

some democratic, or it's unlikely, right?

Right.

Or it's no guarantee at a minimum that you're going to get a democratic hero.

Not the Shah's son, for example, who has been making a lot of noise.

Do any of you worry about lone wolf terror attacks or assassinations that can't be tied directly back to them?

Look,

I worry about that because there's a history of it, right?

Yeah.

Robin's probably met this gentleman who

shouldn't call him a gentleman, the local D.C.

man who was hired by the Islamic Republic in 1980 to kill a former Iranian diplomat in Bethesda, right?

He's been living in Tehran ever since, helped them set up their English language propaganda channel, right?

That's one of many instances of the Islamic Republic doing a targeted assassination on foreign soil.

They've abducted

dissidents in third countries and brought them back to

Iran and executed them.

That's happened in the last couple of years.

That's the kind of of thing, as someone who was their long-term guest, worry about.

I worry about that.

And I think that a lot of Iranians worry about that.

But in terms of much larger attacks on U.S.

soil, I don't think that that's their MO right now.

So let's get back to the issue that set off the weeks' attacks, Iran's nuclear program.

J.D.

Vance recently articulated a so-called Trump doctrine.

It involves trying to aggressively diplomatically solve problems, presumably by cursing.

If that doesn't work, he says you use overwhelming overwhelming force to solve the problem and get the hell out of there.

Multiple administrations have said that verifiable diplomatic resolution is the way to solve the nuclear issue in the long term.

And after the ceasefire took hold, Iran's UN envoy said that, quote, we are now closer to diplomacy than ever before.

Robin, is that accurate?

Are we closer to a diplomatic solution than ever before the war began?

And is this Iranian regime a partner Trump can realistically strike a deal with?

I mean, he did say thanks, but

that's a far cry from any kind of diplomatic deal.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, the question is, can Trump get a better deal than

the Obama administration did?

Aaron Powell, the original deal, right.

Yeah, in 2015, which remember followed two years of really tortured diplomacy.

And it ended up as a document that was 159 pages plus annexes.

And the idea that the Trump administration could come in and in 60 days negotiate a new deal that gets down into the minutiae of how do you verify who does it,

what are the levels for how long,

was just always totally unrealistic.

The problem now is, is President Trump going to give a time limit, another 60 days, to work out a deal that's very complicated and with the Iranians now more paranoid than ever, or suspicious than ever about what the U.S.

intention is.

So I'm worried about the diplomatic process that follows and the patience of the United States.

Donald Trump has not shown a lot of patience.

And remember, he keeps saying, you know, he can end a war in Ukraine in one day or end the war in Gaza, and both of them are still ongoing with no diplomacy that's been effective.

And I worry that his patience runs out.

And of course,

Prime Minister Netanyahu as well, who is,

to put it mildly, trigger happy.

And

so this is where we get into, in some ways, more complicated terrain than we were when they were shooting at each other.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: So superficiality and aggression at the same time.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, if it's a doctrine, right, it hasn't worked yet.

Right.

Because, I mean, even look in the trade war context, it's not military action that's threatened.

It's severe economic pain, which Trump has threatened and imposed on a whole host of countries, but there hasn't signed a deal, right, of any substance.

Nor has it seemed to have the effect he had hoped.

Yeah.

And then the other piece is if that doctrine is a doctrine, he's not applying it to Russia, right?

And by the way, no one begrudges a president's attempt to find diplomatic solutions to the many problems we have around this world, right?

You want that.

But with Russia, Trump imagined, again, that he could just kind of magically do it out of his special relationship with Putin, and Putin is forging ahead.

And what is the pressure that Trump has applied on Russia?

Certainly not military, and we wouldn't root for that.

But

the sanctions that he said he was going to use as a cudgel have never come, and he hasn't mentioned those recently, even past his own two-week deadline.

So

at least we haven't seen the substance of that doctrine as articulated by the Vice President.

So, Jason, you've written that the U.S.-Iran relationship is characterized by decades of ignorance, mutual hubris, and myopic understanding of Iran by American officials, and that Europeans, on the other hand, have a deeper understanding of Tehran.

We're recording this while, as Robin noted, Trump is at the NATO summit in The Hague.

Are European allies best positioned to help breach the chasm between the U.S.

and Iran?

Are any of them making an attempt to step up?

Because they've been notably quiet.

I don't know if they're in the best position, but they're in a much better position.

So are any of them attempting?

I would hope so.

But even during the Biden administration,

I have pretty good relationships with a variety of European embassies here in D.C.

One in particular, the Swiss Embassy, that's our protecting power in Iran, has been for the last 40-something years.

And the sense that I got from them during the Biden years was they weren't looking to the Swiss to give them advice on anything.

Well, you know, the Biden folks knew everything, right?

And Trump folks maybe don't know everything, but they certainly aren't looking for advice from the Swiss on this, as far as I can tell.

But the last thing that I'd say is that, you know, one piece of this that we've been locked out of Iran's economy by choice for a very long time.

The Europeans,

Germans, Swiss, Italians, Spanish,

have a lot of investment with Iran and a lot of need for Iranian oil.

So they're looking at this and always have from a much more pragmatic, self-serving point of view.

And I think it's kind of time for us to look at it that way as well, not just out of the military ideological security lens.

What's best for America?

Robin?

That gets to the issue of transactional, and President Trump looks at everything from a transactional point of view.

And there is enormous potential for American businesses to get involved.

Iran has 92 million people.

They're very westernized in terms of their tastes in whether it's appliances or fashion

technology.

And

so, you know, there is the potential for something.

The problem is, I think at this point, because the United States has basically had a yo-yo policy, it's going to do a deal, it walks out of the deal, it wants to do a deal again, that a lot of businesses may not be as interested as they might have been before because of the fear of what Israel does or if there's one little hiccup, that there's going to be new sanctions and

the whole idea of rapprochement with Iran collapses again.

And the Iranians kind of know that too.

And they want sanctions lifted.

They want investment in the country.

There are estimates that just in the last four years, it's lost hundreds of billions of dollars and lost revenue from oil.

It relies largely on China for smuggled oil.

So it's interested in a deal.

But, you know, this gets back to it's much more complicated this time.

And I really worry that this is, you know,

as the administration likes to say, this is phase one.

I I worry that, you know, phase two may not be as

quick or efficient or straightforward as everybody hopes.

So the conflict in Iran has pushed Gaza into the background for now, but it's unlikely to stay there.

On Tuesday, Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians waiting on aid, killing at least 46 people, and the death toll has risen to over 56,000.

Counterintuitively, by attacking Iran, Netanyahu may have given himself space to negotiate with Hamas by placating the extreme right wing of his governing coalition.

Jim, do you see an opening here?

How does this 12-day war affect what happens in Gaza?

Goodness, it's one of the hardest stories I have to do every day, right?

Every day we will do our best to check in on Gaza.

You know, in the last 24 hours, you've had dozens of people, last several days, killed just trying to get food, right?

I mean, they're trying to feed their families, and

they're getting shot, right?

I mean, it's just heartbreaking to watch.

But Israel has really faced no real consequences for how it has conducted the war there.

I mean, there's a lot of public criticism, right, even from Israel's European allies, but the U.S.

has not moved and

no penalty, and Israel has calculated it could keep moving forward till it meets whatever its military objectives are, which seems to which aren't quite clear, right?

Even to some Israeli officials who were former members of Netanyahu's government who criticize him and say, listen, we've met what I thought were the military goals, and yet here we are.

We're still bulldozing the place.

So, and then you have members of his own government who speak quite openly of kicking the Palestinians into the desert.

So,

it's hard to determine the chances of peace or some sort of lasting ceasefire when you don't know what the actual objective is.

And as you watch events unfold every day, one can reasonably conclude that Israel is not interested in peace there, but wants to continue to

bulldoze, to use an iron fist.

And,

you know, that's the

thought occurred to me as as Robin made a point earlier in the show today that

Israel might, at least the current Israeli leadership, might conclude that forever war works for it.

I mean, it'll sign ceasefires like it has in Lebanon, for instance, but when it determines it wants to take something out there, it's going to do it.

And that seems to be the footing we're going to be on in Iran, right?

Yeah, it's a ceasefire now, but if we see you move one of those trunk fulls of, you know, fissile material, we're going to bomb it, right?

You know, and that may be the status with Gaza.

It's not pretty, and I don't think anybody would say that openly, but if you look at the events of the last several months and even years, it does seem to be where we are, right?

Unfettered, yeah, absolutely, where they don't seem to have a goal except removing them away from Israel.

So

last question.

This so-called 12-day war feels like it might be a coda to a tragic and transformative 20 or so months in the Middle East.

It began with Hamas's brutal attack on October 7th and was followed by Israel's ongoing siege of Gaza, its dismantling of Hezbollah in Lebanon, American strikes against Shiite militias in Iraq, the fall of the Assad regime, and the American operation against the Houthis in Yemen.

So, will the ceasefire hold, and are we nearing the end of the violence and volatility in the region, or are we further from peace than 20 months ago?

Let's hear from Robin, then Jim, and you get the last word, Jason.

No, I don't think the strategic balance in the region has shifted a a bit.

But I worry, as Jim mentioned, that the goal really in Gaza is to force the Palestinians out.

There are very few places to live.

The economy's been destroyed.

I think that the hardliners in the Netanyahu government really want the Palestinians to leave.

To where is a big question?

And of course, that follows with do they...

kind of escalate that to the West Bank as well.

So the Palestinian question doesn't exist.

I think the changes in the region, the Gulf countries, Qatar, Saudi Arabia to a certain extent

have come out stronger.

You know,

Iran's allies in the axis of resistance are much weaker, but they're not eliminated.

Hezbollah did well in recent local elections in Lebanon.

None of these groups are destroyed, the Houthis, the popular mobilization forces in Iraq.

And remember, the cliché, you can't bomb an idea.

And there is a sense across the region that there are not democracies in the region and people are very unhappy, but where does it go from here?

And if there's no political alternatives, then people turn to, whether it's religion or extremism or terrorism, you know, those questions, those bigger questions have not been resolved by anything that's happened since October 18 months ago.

No alternatives.

There's no alternative ideas, right, or power to do so.

Jim?

Well, listen, I think we should acknowledge that President Trump took a shot at Iran, a significant one, and it did not lead to a massive conflagration, which had always been the concern.

It's what had held successive American presidents of both parties back from doing so.

That doesn't mean that there won't be blowback that we don't see later, but he was able to take that shot.

And Israel, by the way, you know, Israel has.

And I remember, you know, just a few weeks ago, months, being in Israel, and, you know, all the talk and debate as to whether Israel would strike Iran's nuclear facilities.

And again, the same questions and concerns were raised that this would lead to a conflagration.

It hasn't.

And that speaks to a point Jason made earlier is that the Iranian regime is not 10 feet tall, right?

It appears to be weaker than we imagine.

It doesn't mean that it's disappearing

and it has survived before and may strike back.

There's an opening for negotiation, and that's a good thing.

But there are a lot of questions as to how that would move forward, right?

And one of which is, if you're Iran, do you trust, right?

Do you trust a negotiation with the U.S.

or with Israel today?

You know, a U.S.

president who brags about having lied about being interested in talks last week as he was planning a strike.

And then also just the inherent volatility to Trump's foreign policy, that an agreement you make one day might not hold several months down the line.

So how do you negotiate in that environment, or do you just try to wait it out, right?

And

that's an open question listen i spent a lot of time there is both jason and robin have and i you know no one's rooting for peace more than me but boy uh how many opportunities have we seen disappear jason finish you know one thing that that we haven't really talked about a lot is i i think that this idea of normalizing ties between israel and and the gulf states gets harder and harder with every um passing day

I'm thinking a lot about Syria and all the work that's going to be needed to rebuild that country.

I don't believe that we've seen the end of

kind of direct conflict between Israel and Iran.

I hope I'm wrong,

but I think that

Benjamin Netanyahu sees an opportunity to go further and probably feels pretty emboldened right now.

But I think, you know, as America, as an American, I'd like us to do some of the things that we used to do and try and engage with the civil society in those countries, whether it's Iran,

Syria, and help kind of build an idea of what a better future looks like.

Because that's a step that we haven't taken.

We talk about it a lot.

You know, our failings on Iran are not partisan.

It's a 46-year, actually longer than that, you know, 50 plus year failing.

And it'd be a really great time for us to build sort of a national project to figure out what is it we're going to do long-term vis-a-vis this country that we haven't been able to do.

Is there taste for that with this particular regime speaking?

I don't think so, but I think we have to help kind of envision what would come next.

That's not something that the revolutionaries did in 1979.

Remember, the people that ended up in power did so in a really opportunistic, chaotic landscape.

And we've been stuck with them ever since.

So I think Iranian diaspora, the Iranian people, also have a role to play in this.

And

it would be wise for us to help them find some agency.

All right.

On that positive note, I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Robin, Jim, and Jason.

Thank you.

Thank you.

On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Rousselle, Kateri Yoakum, Megan Burney, Allison Rogers, and Kaylin Lynch.

Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.

Special thanks to Katherine Barner and Bradley Sylvester.

Steve Bone engineered this episode.

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