This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 30 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by Ishaan Tharoor. He’s a foreign affairs writer, until recently at The Washington Post, where he wrote a great column called “World Views”—a daily take and analysis of what was happening in foreign policy. Ishaan, welcome.
Ishaan Tharoor: Thanks for having me, Perry. Good to be with you.
Bacon: He’s also written some pieces for The New Yorker that you should check out, including one I think published today. Tell us about that one. What’s the title?
Tharoor: It’s “Trump, Iran, and the Shadow of Suez.” It’s a look at the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the very real and interesting echoes of that moment in the current one.
Bacon: I’m going to start back at the beginning here. We’re a month into this. Talk about broad perspective: what do you think? Has anything surprised you about where this war is, from the beginning to now?
Tharoor: Stepping back—I was at The Washington Post for the past 12 years. Every one of those years was a year where at some point I was writing a piece about a potential American war on Iran, whatever the context, whatever the president. This is something we’ve been thinking about in Washington for a long time.
And it’s been a kind of strange scenario, because you always assumed—and everyone who thinks about this in any deep way, frankly, knows—that this is an incredibly complicated thing to do, that Iran is a huge country, a very sophisticated nation with a regime that is entrenched and far more capable than many of its neighbors. And that a war with Iran, you would have assumed, would have required a kind of drumbeat, a set of legitimacy, and a kind of international structure. None of that seems to have happened this time around.
What we saw—especially in the wake of whatever Trump feels he accomplished with Venezuela—is this kind of off-the-cuff mission, obviously done with a lot of Israeli coordination and probably a lot of goading from the Israelis to get involved. And it’s been astonishing, because yes, you’ve eliminated a top rank of leadership—not to any particularly important effect. And of course Khamenei was somebody who was 86 years old and on his proverbial way out anyway, and spoke often of being martyred in his speeches. So this is not exactly the greatest success on that front.
And now of course we’re in this moment where there’s a huge strategic muddle. Trump doesn’t know exactly which way to go—his options are not great on either side. He has Gulf partners who have a degree of influence over the White House, which is quite interesting, and what we’re talking about are states that are both incensed that this war happened and, some of them, quite keen that Iran gets completely neutered at this point, because what Iran has done to the Gulf region in its reprisal attacks has been a huge part of the story. We could have predicted it, but we always assumed that because of this possibility the Americans wouldn’t act the way they did. But they have. The Americans did act this way because, for whatever reason, Trump thought it would be a much easier exercise than it’s turned out to be.
And now going into this week there is a real conversation about ground troops being deployed. The direction of travel in terms of what the Trump administration is doing points to deeper engagement, a further slip into the quagmire, and further escalation. And you have an Iranian regime on the other side that it’s not really clear to any of us is acting all that rationally either—that they’re able to break free from this spiral of escalation themselves. They have probably calculated that they can survive this and make it just so costly for the U.S.—and already the costs are spiking and mounting.
Bacon: Today the president on Truth Social basically threatened to destroy the oil fields of Iran unless they agree to some kind of end to the war. Is that realistic? Is that possible? I guess it probably is.
Tharoor: Look, if he tries to do that, the Iranian reprisals on its neighbors are going to get worse. And we’re talking about a huge percentage of the world’s oil and gas flowing out of this region—critical to economies everywhere, critical to supply chains. And it’s not just oil and gas needs directly; there are downstream things like plastics and fertilizers.
You already have a scenario now where people are worried about crop planting cycles in much of the developing world, because fertilizer factories that need ammonia and gas and so forth are being shut down in South Asia and other parts of the world. That’s a huge effect that doesn’t necessarily compute in the mind of someone in the Trump administration or the average American, but it’s astonishing.
I was in India a few weeks ago and I saw in my grandmother’s neighborhood, in the city of Kolkata, lines for natural gas cylinders for cooking gas. There are some huge global effects already in motion. The Trump administration seems to think that’s fine.
I don’t think other U.S. governments would necessarily have been willing to entertain this kind of blowback. But it does seem that Trump really believes the ideal scenario is a kind of Venezuela-style situation where they’ve decapitated an element of the regime but can make accommodation with the rest—and he has said repeatedly that Iranian oil should be what we get. It’s almost a twenty-first-century colonial conquest. And how realistic that is, especially now when you’re threatening to destroy that infrastructure—I think it’s quite delusional.
Meanwhile, while all these threats are being proffered and there’s all this bluster and a lot of smokescreens, the reality is that Iran is making more money from its oil than it ever has, because the U.S. has had to unsanction a tranche of Iranian oil. The Russians are making more money off oil shipments than they have in recent times. It’s a completely confused and muddled mess.
Bacon: You’ve mentioned Venezuela a couple of times already. Is that what you think happened here—that Trump overlearned from Venezuela and from Israel, where things seemed so easy that he thought he could do it again?
I assume Marco Rubio and the people around Trump are not dumb. So did Trump expect this to play out the way it has? Did his team expect that this would be like Venezuela, where you install someone you like better in essentially no time?
Tharoor: I think there’s a coterie of people around him whispering in his ear at Mar-a-Lago who genuinely want thorough regime change in Iran. Rubio would probably be one of them. Lindsey Graham is definitely one of them. And of course his Israeli interlocutors would be happy with that to a certain extent. There are probably some Gulf interlocutors who, in their heart of hearts, have no love for the Iranian regime and would love to see it go—whether they would have counseled this kind of action, probably not.
But now that we’re here, a month in, nobody has any love for the regime that’s in place there. I think Trump was goaded into this by people who really wanted regime change and probably told him: oh, we can just do it quickly, we can do it simply, the way you did Venezuela—where you don’t have regime change really, but you have this kind of easy success story to tell.
He is trying very hard to tell the success story all the time now, and nobody really buys it. Because of course you’ve traded one Khamenei for another—his son is still there. The Iranians have inflicted all sorts of damage on the oil infrastructure of critical U.S. partners in the region, and on civilian infrastructure as well.
You have a scenario now where the Iranian regime is going to be more repressive at home—it’s entrenched, it doesn’t look like it’s losing that much of its capacity to control its own populace. There’s no uprising on the cards at this moment. Trump’s idea that we would support Iranian Kurdish militias operating out of Iraq has been shot down by other regional partners—the Turks have been furious about that—and so that’s another Pandora’s box that people don’t want Trump to open.
So how Trump actually achieves regime change is a very difficult, tall order. It’s probably going to require American boots on the ground and a significant loss of American life. And we don’t even know the full extent to which the Iranians have actually hurt American interests and military assets in the region—we have to scrape from satellite imagery and all that. Just in the last day or so they hit an American base in Saudi Arabia with incredible precision and efficacy. The costs are mounting.
There’s a lot we don’t know about what’s happening in Iran, given the lack of access there, the communication barriers, the internet blackouts. But we also don’t really know the extent to which Iran has hit other places. The Israelis control information about what targets get hit there. The Gulf states are very secretive about the extent to which they have suffered certain losses and damage. And we don’t have a full picture of what American bases have gone through. We know that some had to be evacuated—which really raises a huge question: if you have all these bases in the Middle East and you can’t adequately man them at this point, what is the point of having this footprint? What is the point of doing any of this?
It’s a really fascinating moment for America’s place in the region. And most of the signs point to Trump doubling down, tripling down, and deepening the American commitment and engagement in a pretty damaging war.
Bacon: Talk about the Israeli role here. There’s been some debate from the beginning—some people argue we’re the biggest country in the world, we have the biggest military, we’re the superpower, we decide our own policy. Others say we were goaded into this.
I’m not sure how much it matters, but I think it does get into the question of motivations for how we got here. Do you view us as having been pushed into this war by Netanyahu, or not quite, or something in between?
Tharoor: Prime Minister Netanyahu has been pushing for this for the better part of three decades. He has been staunchly opposed to this regime. A big part of his political pitch domestically is that he is the statesman who can confront Israel’s preeminent regional nemesis. And he has spent a lot of political capital trying to focus the global conversation on Israel’s rivalry with Iran and the threats Iran poses to Israel—rather than the real question in Israeli politics, which is: what do we do about the Palestinians? What do we do about the West Bank and Gaza and the lack of self-determination there for Palestinians? He has for many years prioritized the Iran question effectively to obscure the Palestinian question. So this has been part of Netanyahu’s political modus operandi for a very long time.
Now, it is surprising to me the extent to which the Israeli line has been picked up by people within the Trump administration—the idea that this had to happen, and had to happen now. Supposedly, almost a year ago, last summer, when the U.S. went in for the 12-day war, which was at least relatively neatly wrapped up, the U.S. had supposedly degraded Iran’s nuclear capacities in such a way that we wouldn’t have to worry about this kind of threat. But of course not.
The easiest way to reckon with Iran’s nuclear capacities was the nuclear deal that existed—which Trump, with a huge amount of Israeli support, unilaterally scrapped. And then of course that triggered Iran’s rush to enrich again, at levels that would give it the fissile material necessary to make a weapon. Of course, Iran has maintained throughout that it doesn’t want to make a weapon, but this is geopolitical leverage that the Iranian regime thinks it needs. And from a rational point of view, you can understand why.
So yeah, the Israeli role here—it’s interesting because going into this conflict, yes, the U.S. and Israel are fully aligned in wanting to degrade this destabilizing, problematic Iranian regime. There is a very keen desire in Washington and in Jerusalem for a different political dispensation in Tehran. They would love to see regime change.
But at a certain point U.S. and Israeli interests diverge, and I think it’s really important that we start recognizing that—and I think we are now. For the Israelis, it doesn’t really matter what happens next. They just want a more enfeebled, weakened Iran. If they feel threatened by it, they will go in again. And the very chilling euphemism that is used constantly is that they “mow the lawn.”
They feel some threat and they hit targets in Lebanon, in Syria, within the Palestinian territories, and now in Iran. And they will be very happy to do that again. They don’t really care if the Iranian state disintegrates into some kind of Libya-style mess. They don’t really care if the regime remains and represses its own people, frankly, because they can just keep hitting it.
Whereas for the U.S. there’s a huge risk. There’s a debate about whether we care about prestige, but this is another potentially Iraq-war-style debacle.
Bacon: Our public is more against it than the Israeli public is, I would assume, right?
Tharoor: Yes, for sure. I haven’t seen the recent Israeli polling, but the U.S. public is massively against it. This also contravenes—and I’m sure you’ve had a lot of conversations about this—the internal MAGA narratives around using American power on the world stage. The internal right-wing discussion about this is going to be interesting in the months to come. We know that JD Vance is tying himself into a pretzel trying to figure out how to justify this. And it could lead to fissures within the Trumpist MAGA world in the weeks to come.
And of course also for Trump, there’s the relationship with the Gulf powers and the Gulf states—he cares so much about his ties to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar especially. And those countries—it’s complicated, because there are different positions in each country and different sets of interests—but they are all incredibly scarred by what’s happened so far.
The very rosy visions of what they represent in the world, as these oases of development, prosperity, global trade, and tourism, have really taken a huge credibility blow. And it is in America’s interest—not just Trump’s interest—to have productive relationships with these countries. It is in America’s interest not to have Iran disintegrate and produce an even more unstable mess. It is less in Israel’s interest. Israel could care less. Israel now enjoys a kind of regional hegemony—it can functionally do what it wants, when it wants, undergirded by a U.S. that does nothing to restrain it.
Bacon: My concern is that I don’t see the path out of this. Trump has to win everything, and there’s no easy path to defeating Iran except through massive casualties.
Tharoor: We’ll see what kind of negotiation process gets underway—the Pakistanis are currently the ones holding the baton on this. The sense we’re getting is that there’s a huge gulf—metaphorically speaking—between the Iranian and American positions. The Iranian calculation is that Trump is more desperate for an off-ramp than they are. And so what kind of arrangement that leads to, we’ll see.
There’s a very strong chance it can go many ways, and I’m not one to feel confident speculating about this. You could see America deploying ground troops in some kind of operation that really escalates things. You can also see Trump still trying to figure out—
Bacon: Or is more destruction of Iranian infrastructure and oil fields more likely than putting troops on the ground? Is that what we’re looking at?
Tharoor: Look, people are being killed. Schools are being hit. Civilians are dying. Hundreds of civilians have already died because of U.S. and Israeli strikes—that’s already on us. And I think you have to not lose sight of that.
The Iranians have also hit civilian infrastructure in other parts of the region. People are dying. Lives are being completely thrown into chaos. People in countries far away who have nothing to do with us or Iran are suffering much more than the average American. All of that should be front of mind—as human beings, you should be thinking about all that.
Bacon: I’m glad you said that.
Tharoor: But I think if the U.S. goes in, there are going to be body bags, there are going to be troops coming back draped in flags. Whether Trump is willing to accept that—it’s been put to me by some that he is not able to countenance that—but I have a hard time imagining how you have any kind of effective strategic campaign without that risk. And the question is: at what point has Trump shown any actual strategic acumen in any of this? I don’t think he really has. It’s very hard to tell.
Bacon: Last question. We talk about America losing standing in the world. That may well be true. But does it mean anything? Trump doesn’t care what the world thinks. Should the rest of us care? The world does not like this war. European countries do not want to join in. The prime minister of Spain is really attacking us. The Canadian prime minister doesn’t want to defend it. The world does not agree with this. Does that matter?
Tharoor: It depends on your opinion and what you care about with respect to the rest of the world. You can see the Trump presidency—especially the second term—as this kind of rolling “emperor has no clothes” moment, where the scales have fallen from the eyes of even the U.S.’s closest allies about what the U.S. represents on the world stage. We’ve talked so much about the rules-based order, the international liberal order, the postwar order—I’ve written so many obituaries for it.
And I think this is a moment now—I write about this in my New Yorker piece today—where some of the U.S.’s closest friends, forget about the adversaries, forget about what the Chinese are saying or what the Russians are saying—some of the U.S.’s closest friends now see the U.S. as a revisionist power, a disruptive force on the world stage, and one of the leading accelerants to a broader erosion and collapse of the international system as it was. Whether we’re okay with that really depends on your political persuasion and what you think about the U.S.’s place in the world and what you want for the world more broadly.
But I think this is a profound moment. The Suez Crisis in 1956, which I wrote about, was of course this moment where the British and French resented a nationalist Egyptian government nationalizing the Suez Canal. They went in with Israeli support, the Egyptians blocked the canal, created an economic crisis—and then of course both the Soviet Union and the United States under Eisenhower came down really hard on the British and the French. It was this moment of humiliation, and for the British especially, and the French, this moment of reckoning with their loss of empire, their loss of prestige—and also a bookend to a certain historical chapter of close to two centuries of European colonial dominance.
And obviously there are huge reasons why that’s not the case now—there is no external Eisenhower to mediate against Trump. But this may be recognized in the years to come as the bookend moment for a certain idea of American power on the world stage. Or the opening of a new idea of American power on the world stage—which is, as the political scientist Stephen Walt has put it, a kind of more overt predatory hegemon. I think that phrase definitely applies to the way Trump talks about things: his desire for natural resources, his disinterest in the United Nations, his contempt for international processes—
Bacon: “Predatory hegemon.”
Tharoor: That’s the phrase, yeah. It’s in a Foreign Affairs essay—your folks should check it out.
Bacon: And when Biden came into the presidency he kept talking about “America’s back” and so on. But without predicting who’s going to win, it’s going to be hard for President Newsom or Whitmer or Buttigieg to say the same thing. Having two terms like this—after the first you could say it was an aberration, but after the second you have to say maybe this is where we are now. The rest of the world has to evaluate us based on the fact that we’ve now had two terms of this kind of foreign policy.
Tharoor: This is the interesting thing to watch in the months to come when it comes to the Democratic conversation. I think there’s a great temptation to want to do Restoration 2.0—to go to Munich, go to Davos, go wherever, and say: America’s back, we’re with you, we never really left you, whatever. But now the rest of the world doesn’t care anymore.
The rest of the world doesn’t want to hear that. The rest of the world—including the U.S.’s genuinely closest allies, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and others—is eager for a different dispensation in Washington. But they are never not going to hedge against what Trump did and what Trump has done in terms of changing their own strategic calculations, impacting their economies, and disrupting their politics. That is not going to change. And this is the brave new world we’re all in now.
Bacon: And we’ll end there. Ishaan, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. Thanks to everybody who tuned in. Bye-bye.
Tharoor: Thank you, Perry.
