America First (unless Iran...)

Speaker 1 This weekend, the current president of the United States did something no former president of the United States has ever done. He bombed Iran.

Speaker 2 And I want to just thank everybody, and in particular,

Speaker 4 God.

Speaker 1 For a lot of people, it was giving Timu George W. Bush, but the vice president had a counter argument.

Speaker 5 But the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America's national security objectives.

Speaker 1 But are these America's national security objectives?

Speaker 1 Because most Americans aren't interested in bombing Iran, and certainly most Americans don't want a war with Iran, but it sounds like the president might.

Speaker 6 True social.

Speaker 7 It's not politically correct to use the term regime change, but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change?

Speaker 8 Miga!

Speaker 1 Where do we go from here on Today Explained?

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Speaker 1 Today explained, Sean Ramister. I'm here with Josh Keating from Vox.
He's a senior correspondent covering foreign policy and national security. Josh, what did the president do this weekend?

Speaker 6 So on Saturday night, U.S. time, the U.S.
launched airstrikes against Iran's nuclear program.

Speaker 2 A short time ago, the U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime, Fordo, Natans, and Esfahan.

Speaker 6 This ended about a week of speculation about whether the U.S. would join the air campaign against Iran that Israel had launched.

Speaker 6 It was kind of a major about face for a president who very recently seemed very committed to a diplomatic path for dealing with Iran's nuclear program.

Speaker 1 No U.S. president has ever bombed Iran.
Why did Trump go for it?

Speaker 6 It seems like what happened was a combination of factors.

Speaker 6 One, Israel presented some new intelligence that they feel indicated that something had shifted

Speaker 6 with regards to Iran's ability to build a weapon.

Speaker 6 There's been reporting that basically the Israelis believe that Iranian scientists have sort of squirreled away some highly enriched uranium that international inspectors

Speaker 6 didn't know about and had begun discussions on actually building a weapon, on putting nuclear material on a missile. U.S.
intelligence officials, it seems like weren't buying that.

Speaker 10 Last March, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.

Speaker 6 And U.S. spies for the most part seem to be sticking with that.
Trump says he doesn't believe that.

Speaker 4 What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community has said they have no evidence that they are at this point.

Speaker 4 Well, then my intelligence community is wrong. Who would the intelligence community said that? Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

Speaker 7 She's wrong.

Speaker 6 He doesn't care what she said and that he believes iran was moving close to a bomb

Speaker 6 maybe he saw something that really convinced him maybe israel's initial success in this air campaign um the you know degree to which they've been able to

Speaker 6 launch strikes at Iran almost without impunity with very little in the way of Iranian defenses and have been able to absorb the missile strikes that Iran has fired at Israel.

Speaker 6 Maybe that convinced him that it was time to go. This is a president who likes to back a winner and he may perceive that

Speaker 6 this war was going well and he wanted to be part of it.

Speaker 1 He walked down that hallway that many presidents before him have walked down after doing stuff like this on Saturday night.

Speaker 1 This time he was flanked by his vice president, his secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. What did he have to say to the nation?

Speaker 3 There's no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close. There has never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago.

Speaker 6 The speech seemed to indicate that this was a one-off.

Speaker 3 Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.

Speaker 6 We're not exactly sure if that's true.

Speaker 6 The following day, Dan Kaine, General Dan Kaine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that it's clear there was significant damage to all three, but we'd have to wait on final damage assessments.

Speaker 13 BDA is still pending, and it would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.

Speaker 6 He also said that there would be no more strikes

Speaker 6 unless

Speaker 6 Iran didn't...

Speaker 6 Well, he was a little vague about that, actually.

Speaker 6 The implication seems to be that if Iran retaliates against U.S. troops in the region, that there could be more strikes.

Speaker 6 But he seemed to suggest that this was a one-off, that there weren't further military actions actions planned.

Speaker 1 He didn't get congressional authorization to do this, in keeping with a decades-long tradition now.

Speaker 1 Who knew he was going to do this?

Speaker 6 Not very many people. Supposedly, congressional Republicans were given some advance warning.
Just Republicans. Just Republicans.
Congressional Democrats were given very, very, very brief warning.

Speaker 6 The Israelis do seem to have been involved in some coordinating fashion.

Speaker 6 So Israelis may have known more about this operation than congressional Democrats most likely they did yeah wow it's worth noting just a couple days earlier Trump had said that he was going to wait two weeks to make a decision and

Speaker 6 you know a lot of I'll I'll be honest I wasn't sure if he would really go through with this I mean it he didn't even tell you he didn't he no he didn't I was not on those signal chats

Speaker 1 as you mentioned Trump's own director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard expressed skepticism that Iran

Speaker 1 had the capability to build a bomb.

Speaker 1 Here we have the president bombing nuclear facilities. Why is he at odds with his own intelligence staff?

Speaker 6 Well, that's something of a tradition as well.

Speaker 6 I mean, the lead-up to the war in Iraq seems very recent to me, but I'm realizing I'm just getting old, and that seems like a long time ago for other people.

Speaker 6 You know, I mean, in that case, the administration pressured the intelligence community to come up with findings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program that would build a case for military action.

Speaker 14 Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.

Speaker 15 We have not found at this point actual weapons. Does not mean we've concluded there are no actual weapons.

Speaker 15 It means at this point in time, and it's a huge country with a lot to do, that we have not yet found weapons.

Speaker 6 This time, we seem to be doing like a speed run of the lead-up to Iraq. You know, there,

Speaker 6 rather than pressuring the intelligence community to come up

Speaker 6 with

Speaker 6 this,

Speaker 6 you know, favorable intelligence, Trump is simply saying he doesn't believe the intelligence assessments that were given to him, that he believes what the Israelis were saying.

Speaker 6 And rather than, you know, trying to build a case in Congress, making a case to the UN, as we saw in 2003.

Speaker 6 Trump simply kind of ignored those. So it's kind of like we're doing Iraq,

Speaker 6 but much faster. The obvious difference being that in this case, there really was a nuclear program.

Speaker 1 You published a piece on Saturday night immediately after this happened titled, This Time It's Trump's War. You pointed out that Trump had overruled objections

Speaker 1 while shifting his position on taking military action against Iran.

Speaker 1 Why is he kind of going alone on this? Do we know?

Speaker 6 I want to read something that he said in May in a speech he gave in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Just a quick quote.

Speaker 6 He said, he was talking about the sort of legacy of the last few presidential administrations in the Middle East. He said, in the end, the so-called nations

Speaker 16 direct far more

Speaker 16 nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.

Speaker 16 They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.

Speaker 6 Now, I read this, and I think it's a fair reading, that this was sort of

Speaker 6 a castigation, a rejection of, you know, decades of U.S. attempts to remake the Middle East through military action.
And,

Speaker 6 you know, maybe this is just a one-off. Maybe it's just a strike on the nuclear program.
But, you know, Israel clearly sees this as a potential regime change operation.

Speaker 6 And then on Sunday, we saw Trump posting on Truth Social

Speaker 6 that, you know, it's not PC to talk about regime change, but if Iran can't, if the Iranian government can't make Iran great again, then maybe there should be regime change.

Speaker 1 We've been hearing and reading that Trump doesn't have much of like a

Speaker 1 foreign policy ideology for, I don't know, like a decade now. But as as much as he has one, it's America first.

Speaker 1 This is not that. The first person Trump thanked in his speech on Saturday night wasn't the troops, wasn't the pilots of these bombers.
It was Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaker 1 It's feeling a little Israel first out there right now. Is Trump diluting his brand, Josh?

Speaker 6 This is another major shift we've seen. I mean, Trump was basically giving Israel the cold shoulder in the Middle East.

Speaker 6 It was cutting deals with Hamas for hostages.

Speaker 6 It was, of course, engaged in these nuclear talks with Iran that Israel was not too happy about.

Speaker 6 They stopped bombing the Houthis, even though the Houthis continued lobbing ballistic missiles at Israel.

Speaker 6 So it didn't seem like either protecting Israel from its enemies regionally or, you know, appearing to be in lockstep.

Speaker 6 with

Speaker 6 Israeli foreign policy in the Middle East was really that much of a priority for this administration.

Speaker 6 This is a major shift. I mean, and I don't really have a good explanation for it other than this is a president who's shown more than once he's capable of shifting on a dime in foreign policy.

Speaker 6 I mean, he can go from calling for fire and fury in North Korea to calling Kim Jong-un his best friend.

Speaker 6 So there were a lot of people on the so-called America First Right, as well as some on the left, who hoped that this would would be a president who would show more restraint in the use of military force, who maybe wouldn't be as locked step aligned with Israel in the Middle East.

Speaker 6 The theories about where Trump's foreign policy was headed or who was calling the shots a few weeks ago haven't held up very well. And

Speaker 6 I think, you know, observing this president over the last decade or so, that's something we should come to expect.

Speaker 1 The view from Iran when we return on Today Explained.

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Speaker 1 Professor Vali Nasser just published a book on Iran's grand strategy. It's called Iran's Grand Strategy, a political history.
We asked him how long they've been trying to build a bomb.

Speaker 11 Well, it hasn't been developing a nuclear weapon. It has been developing a nuclear program.

Speaker 11 It actually started before the revolution under the Shah. At that point in time, the Shah saw it as a mark of Iran having arrived as a great power.

Speaker 11 But also he saw industrial uses for it. He wanted to develop and modernize Iran.
He needed electricity, and he thought that a nuclear industry was critical for that.

Speaker 11 And I think the Islamic Republic began to think about a nuclear program when they got hit by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war with chemical weapons and the international community didn't do anything.

Speaker 19 According to its own declarations, Iraq used more than 101,000 chemical bombs and munitions during eight years of war, including mustard gas and nerve agents.

Speaker 11 And then they started basically thinking also as a nuclear program as a way of getting U.S.'s attention to sit down at the table and negotiate with Iran about lifting sanctions and de-escalating.

Speaker 11 And every time the U.S. bulked at it, they built the program bigger.

Speaker 20 The idea of Iran having a nuclear weapon is unacceptable. And it's unacceptable to the United States and

Speaker 20 it's unacceptable to the nations we're working with in the United Nations.

Speaker 11 And Obama came to the table, he signed the deal.

Speaker 21 Because America negotiated from a position of strength and principle, we have stopped the spread of nuclear weapons in this region.

Speaker 11 Iran gave up much of its program, not all of it, much of it.

Speaker 21 Because of this deal, the international community will be able to verify that the Islamic Republic of Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 11 And then Trump pocketed those gains and then left the deal.

Speaker 12 The Iran deal is defective at its core. If we do nothing, we know exactly what will happen.

Speaker 12 In just a short period of time, the world's leading state sponsor of terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world's most dangerous weapon.

Speaker 11 So the Iranians then built something bigger, and they were willing to negotiate over it with Trump when this attack by Israel and then the U.S. came.

Speaker 11 So until now, I don't think they made a decision to build a bomb, but definitely the nuclear program had very important strategic value value for them, which is the only way in which they can get out of the chokehold of U.S.

Speaker 11 sanctions, the containment wall that Iran has built around them,

Speaker 11 is to put the nuclear program on the table and say, what are you going to give me for it if I gave up X, Y, and Z?

Speaker 3 And now President Trump says Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.

Speaker 1 But it feels like there are people out there

Speaker 6 with

Speaker 1 different views.

Speaker 1 What is the best understanding we have of what just happened to Iran's nuclear program?

Speaker 11 Well, we have the word that's been put out by the United States that this was a very successful bombing, that they've used upwards of 13 massive bunker buster bombs on this site called Fordo, which is a massive mountain under which Iran has built its plant.

Speaker 22 We devastated the Iranian nuclear program.

Speaker 11 Now,

Speaker 11 in reality,

Speaker 11 unless you you actually put people on the ground, particularly in Fordo, which is this fortified mountain, you really won't know what has been destroyed and how much damage has been done.

Speaker 11 Now, increasingly, there is talk that actually Iran had emptied out these

Speaker 11 facilities of their centrifuges or sensitive machinery, etc. So the facilities might have been damaged, but not necessarily what was in them.

Speaker 11 And most importantly, according to Israel, that Iran had amassed enough fissile material for nine bombs.

Speaker 11 And that's why they were imminently going to get a bomb or nine bombs. And that's why Israel had to do this.
But the vice president just said yesterday that we don't know where that material is.

Speaker 11 It has taken its sensitive material out of these enrichment production sites.

Speaker 1 We know that. We know that they've moved the enriched uranium.

Speaker 11 Well, we won't know anything for sure until we can get in there and we can't.

Speaker 11 But there is evidence. And in fact, even Israelis have said that there were trucks, evidence of trucks moving

Speaker 11 near Fardo, this site in the days before the attack came. And maybe that's also what pushed them to move the attack up when the president said two weeks, they moved it faster.

Speaker 11 So we really don't know what's been damaged.

Speaker 11 And then secondly, we don't know how quickly can Iranians rebuild it because they have know-how, they have engineers, they have scientists, they have capability. So if anything, the U.S.

Speaker 11 has damaged the program, has initiated a war with Iran at some level, but it has fallen short of its claim that it has completely obliterated Iran's nuclear program.

Speaker 5 But what we know, John, is they no longer have the capacity to turn that stockpile of highly enriched uranium to weapons-grade uranium. And that was really the goal here.

Speaker 5 Uranium is not that difficult to come by, John, but enriching uranium up to the point of a nuclear weapon, that is what the president put a stop to last night.

Speaker 1 What would a war with Iran look like? Many of Iran's proxies and friends from Assad and Syria, Hezbollah and Lebanon, Hamas and Gaza, even Russia are either weakened, destroyed, preoccupied.

Speaker 1 What should we expect in terms of retaliation from Iran?

Speaker 11 Well, Iran has enough missiles, short-range missiles, medium-range missiles to hit plenty of U.S. targets in the region.

Speaker 11 Or not hit U.S. targets, go after the oil and energy supply chain, close the Straits of Hormuz, hit tankers, things like that.
So I think an Iranian retaliation will come.

Speaker 11 I don't think Iran is looking to start a bigger war, but Iran also does not want President Trump to think that this was really easy. Let's do it every day of the week.

Speaker 11 So I think this the retaliation will not be so much out of anger or lashing out or revenge as it will be

Speaker 11 to still try to give the U.S. a sense that this is not a good idea.

Speaker 1 Up until just a few weeks ago, it seemed like President Trump wanted to talk to Iran, wanted to consider a deal with Iran. Is that now off the table?

Speaker 11 Well,

Speaker 11 what he thinks about a deal is not what the Iranians understand about a deal.

Speaker 11 I mean, right now he's talking about, I want you to show up and sign a surrender treaty, an unconditional surrender treaty. That's what his definition of a deal is.

Speaker 11 A deal would now be much more difficult because I think Iran's experience with this whole thing means that it has led them to a point where they don't trust in anything President Trump says or does.

Speaker 11 He says, I make a decision to bomb you in two weeks. He does it the next night.

Speaker 11 He says, you know, we have one more round of talks going, and I only am going to go to a military option if the talks fail. And he allows Israel to start the military option before the talks failed.

Speaker 11 So why would Iran necessarily trust a deal with the U.S.?

Speaker 1 A lot of people are scared right now that

Speaker 1 the United States, the world, is about to see another forever war. Maybe World War III, if you're super paranoid.

Speaker 1 Does Iran want that?

Speaker 1 Does anyone actually want that?

Speaker 11 No, I don't know if anybody want that.

Speaker 11 But I don't don't think this World War III is a bit hyperbolic because World War III sort of suggests that there are circumstances in which Russia or China or other global powers can come into this war.

Speaker 11 And I just don't see that. So that's going to be too hyperbolic.
But I think a real costly

Speaker 11 forever war, another Middle East war that is going to look Iraq look like child play.

Speaker 11 And, you know, Israel can start this war, but in the end, the United States will be the one that will own it and will have to deal with it.

Speaker 11 And it's going to cost the United States trillions of dollars. It's going to divert its attention from varieties of other global issues.

Speaker 11 It's going to be extremely taxing. I don't think the U.S.
wants it. I don't think Iran wants it.

Speaker 11 But I think we're in a circumstance where President Trump decided that if he struck Iran, there is no risk of having to then put boots on the ground, which is a huge assumption in my point of view.

Speaker 11 It has to

Speaker 11 basically shoot a bow across President Trump's arrow for him to sort of realize that there is serious risk here, because only then might he back off.

Speaker 11 And so for that reason, I do think that Iranians would retaliate, not out of pride, but out of the desire to warn the president that you shouldn't go down this path.

Speaker 1 Vali Nasser is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His book once more is titled Iran's Grand Strategy of Political History.

Speaker 1 Shortly after we spoke today, Iran said it launched an attack on the largest U.S. base in the Middle East.
That would be in Qatar. As of publishing time, we had no reported casualties.

Speaker 1 Peter Balinon Rosen and Harima Wagdi made our show today. Miranda Kennedy, Laura Bullard, Denise Guerra, Andrea Christensdacher, and Patrick Boyd helped.
This is Today Explained.

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