The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 24 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Speaking to reporters, Donald Trump made a strange claim about Iran. He said no one anticipated that Iran would attack other countries in an effort to widen the war. But in saying that, Trump revealed that he didn’t anticipate it—which is a striking admission about his own lack of foresight.
We think this captures something broader. On one front after another, Trump plainly didn’t prepare for eventualities that most experts fully did anticipate. So how directly responsible are these failings for what we’re seeing right now—that by most indications, the war is getting worse for Trump and the U.S. on many fronts?
Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, has a new piece on the deeper ideological failings that led to this debacle. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Matt, good to have you on.
Matt Duss: Great to be with you. Thanks.
Sargent: So the latest is that over the weekend, Trump threatened to bomb Iranian electricity plants if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Then on Monday, he abruptly postponed that threat, claiming that “very strong talks” are underway with Iran about them reaching an agreement to end the fighting. Iran quickly denied any such talks were underway. Matt, what do we know about where things are right now, and how badly is this going for Trump and the United States?
Duss: Well, we know that this is going much worse than Donald Trump himself thought it would. We know that Donald Trump does not do the reading. We know that Donald Trump has the attention span of a fly. We know that he just makes stuff up all the time. Trump made this threat over the weekend to bomb power plants—which is clearly a war crime, to attack plants that produce power for civilians. And then I think he woke up and saw that the stock market is in trouble, oil prices are continuing to go higher.
And I’ve said, and others have said for a while, that that’s the only thing that really gets Donald Trump’s attention—when he’s sitting there, you know, drinking Diet Coke, watching Fox News, and he sees the ticker going by on the bottom. And he understands that the market is in trouble. So he came out and said, well, we’re going to not do that because we are thinking about ending the war—we’re in talks.
That doesn’t seem to be true at all, but that’s where Donald Trump is focused, primarily, because that is how he believes his presidency will be rated: whether the stock market is doing well.
Sargent: Well, I want to come back to his claims and how things are going in a bit. But first, let’s listen to Trump. He talked to reporters on Monday and he tried to justify his handling of the war this way.
Donald Trump (voiceover): You’re talking about a country that has been evil for 47 years. They’ve been horrible—death all over the world, not just us. Look at the way they attacked unexpectedly all of those countries surrounding it. There was not supposed to be—nobody was even thinking about it. But they wanted to take over the Middle East and they wanted to knock out Israel permanently. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they would have been able to do that.
Sargent: So according to Trump, Iran has been evil for 47 years, yet no one anticipated that they might attack other countries if the U.S. attacked them. Doesn’t quite add up. Matt, is it true that no one anticipated that?
Duss: It is not true at all. Everyone anticipated this. Every one of these countries that Iran has attacked—we should have expected it, whether it’s Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, obviously Israel. This is part of Iran’s defensive strategy. This is part of how they believe they were creating deterrence.
Deterrence in the most basic sense is creating the belief in the mind of your enemy that attacking you will cause more pain than it’s worth, right? Whether we’re talking about nuclear deterrence—the United States and the Soviet Union—the idea is, well, if we attack them, they will attack us with nuclear weapons, and nobody wants that. Iran’s approach was, well, listen, we know that we can’t face off head to head with the United States militarily, but we do have ways of creating pain for the United States and for the United States’s partners across the region. And that was what they hoped would deter the United States.
Obviously, that didn’t deter the United States. The United States and Israel attacked Iran a few weeks ago. And so Iran is following through—they have to follow through, in a sense, if they want to make sure that this doesn’t happen again in the future. So yes, to answer your question, of course people knew Iran was going to do this. Again, Donald Trump does not bother to do the reading.
Sargent: Right. And the reading is really what it is here. So just to be absolutely clear about this—built into Iran’s public deterrence posture is the idea that if attacked by someone like the United States, they would go after these allied countries of the United States in the region in order to create turbulence globally, financially, in terms of energy. That’s really like an understood thing about how Iran would handle a situation like this.
Duss: That’s right. Everyone has understood that this is how Iran would respond. This was not a secret. And that’s the whole point of deterrence—it was supposed to not be a secret.
Sargent: It’s not going to be a deterrent if nobody knows about it.
Duss: That’s right.
Sargent: The whole thing’s so ridiculous. So we’ve seen this dynamic on other fronts as well, preposterously. CNN reported—and others reported—that the Trump team was caught off guard by the willingness of Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, and caught off guard by the global consequences of that. And the global consequences have been disastrous. Like, everybody knew.
I think it’s hard for those of us who are not specialists the way you are to understand how they could have been quite this unprepared. But to return to your earlier point, it is about not doing the reading. Clearly Trump should have—or probably would have—gotten briefed on all this sort of stuff, and maybe it just didn’t penetrate, right?
Duss: And who knows whether he was paying attention. We know again, he doesn’t have a long attention span. He does not like long memos. He does not like to spend lots of time talking through complicated issues.
But we also have to recognize the fact that Donald Trump is surrounded by yes-people. He’s surrounded by ideologues. He’s obviously had people like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and Benjamin Netanyahu in his ear for all these weeks leading up to the war saying it’s going to go really, really well—you don’t need to worry about it, just look at how well Venezuela went. And Donald Trump chose to believe that.
Sargent: There may even be kind of a schism here, where you’ve got the types like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton who just love war and want to have a war with Iran, don’t particularly care what the consequences are—that’s sort of one camp. But then you’ve probably got people internally, like maybe the Joint Chiefs chair, who actually privately warned Trump that this war would be much more difficult than it might seem.
What’s supposed to happen in these situations? If we had a normal president, what would have happened, and how abnormal is the current situation?
Duss: Well, who even knows what’s normal now. But if we had an actually responsible president, I think what they would do is try to address the problem of Iran’s nuclear program through some kind of nonproliferation agreement that puts limits on Iran’s nuclear program to ensure that it wouldn’t obtain a weapon—i.e., exactly what Barack Obama did.
You don’t deal with this problem militarily. You cannot ultimately deal with this problem militarily. That is what many of us have been saying for a very, very long time, including people in the military. And yeah, Donald Trump chose not to listen to those people. He instead chose to listen to hardline ideologues like the people we mentioned.
Sargent: You know, I’m really glad you brought that up. Can you just sum up for people what Barack Obama accomplished with the Iran nuclear deal and why it was good?
Duss: Right. So in 2015, after a lot of effort and multiple rounds of talks between the U.S. and its partners in the P5+1—that’s the term for the five members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany—they had met with the Iranians to try to come to some agreement that would put limits on Iran’s nuclear program, to give the rest of the world confidence that Iran would not obtain a nuclear weapon.
Now, Iran had always insisted it did not want a nuclear weapon and had no intention of building one. Back in 2003, there was some evidence produced that Iran had at one point had a program designed to at least keep the option open. Our own intelligence services believed that they were keeping the option at least open, but that they had not made a decision to obtain a weapon.
So what the agreement—the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—did was, in exchange for sanctions relief, and there were and still are lots of sanctions on the Iranian government, Iran agreed to dispose of a lot of its equipment that could be used to obtain a weapon. It put its nuclear program under the heaviest inspections regime in history—cameras, all kinds of inspections.
It was a multilayered, highly complex, highly restrictive system of surveillance to make sure that Iran could not secretly produce a nuclear weapon. And overwhelmingly, security and nonproliferation experts recognized that this was a good agreement.
And I think not only was it a good agreement for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program—just the fact that the U.S. and Iran were now talking and had at least established some small measure of trust in the area of nuclear nonproliferation meant we could have continued to talk with Iran about a whole range of other issues, like the issues that have been brought up repeatedly over these past weeks: Iran’s support for militant extremist groups in the region, its building of ballistic missiles, its repression of its own people.
There is an alternate history here where the U.S. went down that road and at least tried to continue to talk and address these issues. Would it have worked? We can’t know—it may have worked. But as we know, Donald Trump chose option B, which is to pull out of that nuclear agreement, reimpose sanctions, and put us now on the path we’ve been on, which is toward war.
Sargent: Well, a lot of people said either it’s going to be the Iran nuclear agreement with all the teeth in it, or it’s going to be war. And that’s what has happened, right?
Duss: That’s right. And the opponents of the agreement all the while—the hawkish opponents of that nuclear agreement—just insisted that they didn’t support war, they just wanted a better, stronger agreement. And that was complete bullshit. And many of us have been pointing this out all along. The opponents of that agreement—their problem wasn’t with the Iran nuclear deal, their problem is with making deals with Iran, because their goal has always been regime change.
Sargent: Right, the problem from their perspective was that this might actually work without a war being fought. Isn’t that the essence of it?
Duss: That is really the essence of it. I mean, this would disprove their entire theory of how the world works. And their theory is that American military power is magic and this is how you solve problems.
Sargent: What about at the end of this particular war—if he claims victory and there isn’t any kind of negotiated settlement around the nukes, what does he say exactly? And what has he actually achieved?
Duss: Well, here’s what Trump can say: given that he has been lying about Iran being on the brink of a nuclear weapon, and his administration has been out there lying that Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon, he can just say that now Iran is not about to get a nuclear weapon. That’s actually true—that was true before this war, that they were not about to get a nuclear weapon. But Donald Trump can claim that now because of him, we don’t have to live in fear of Iran triggering a nuclear apocalypse.
Sargent: In the real world, what will he have achieved on nukes?
Duss:In the real world, he won’t really have achieved anything. I mean, Iran’s program was already considerably set back by the bombing last June—once again, not set back as far as Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement did. But he can claim to have done that. That is one potential upside. But I think the downsides vastly outweigh that.
Sargent: Right. And so at the end of the day, we’re saddled with all these immense consequences and the needle won’t even have been moved much on nukes.
Duss: No, on nukes, no. But meanwhile, you have an Iranian regime that is almost certainly going to be more hostile to the United States—that is much, much more hardline. And by the way, you have just demonstrated the huge value of actually having a nuclear deterrent.
You know who looks really attractive to the Iranians right now? North Korea. No one is talking about bombing North Korea because everyone understands what North Korea could do in response. So if anything, this war has just made a nuclear weapon much, much more attractive to Iran—and frankly to any other country that needs an insurance policy against a predatory United States.
Sargent: So just to circle back to where we started—him saying openly that nobody anticipated that Iran would attack all these other countries, it’s like an admission on his part that he failed to anticipate all these unintended consequences of this war, which everybody else did anticipate, including probably some of his own advisors. We’re in a hall of mirrors here. And once you’re in the hall of mirrors, the rules of the hall of mirrors are what apply. What do you think is going to happen? Just play this out.
Duss: Honestly, what I’ve been saying is that this war ends when Donald Trump gets bored enough—or he is disciplined by the financial markets. And I think we did see some evidence of the latter today, when he came out and said, okay, I’m going to give the Iranians more time, not going to go bombing their power plants.
I mean, he clearly has been spooked by the price of oil. He’s clearly been spooked by the stock market. He’s gaming the market with these kinds of announcements, pretending that there are talks ongoing.
But if it gets to the point that he really can’t control this anymore, I think that’s when we could really see him press forward to end this war—which it seems clear to me that he would like to do. He just doesn’t have, in his own mind, a plausible victory narrative yet.
Sargent: And if he does that, he then tells us that he succeeded in getting rid of the nukes that he obliterated already six months ago.
Duss: That’s right—we no longer have to live under the threat of Iranian nuclear terror that wasn’t there anyway.
Sargent: Matt Duss, that really captures the absurdity of all this. Thanks for coming on. Great to talk to you.
Duss: All right. Thanks, Greg.