Ishaan Tharoor: Look, we began this week with this sense of looming escalation. Trump vowed, in various ways, to really punish Iran for its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. He vowed to destroy a civilization, which some people read as an implicit nuclear threat. There was this question of: Is this a game of brinkmanship that’s just incredibly deranged, or is this the prelude to a more worrying escalation?
It does seem quite clear, from the reporting we’re seeing out of the White House, that Trump is not happy with the way this conflict is going, that there is a lot of internal dissension in MAGA over what’s happened and over the seeming inefficacy of this conflict, the blowback economically we’re seeing around the world, the huge extravagant expenditure that we’ve already seen because of the war. So this is an off-ramp that Trump has got for himself.
He has, in various ways, claimed victory. He’s cast what has happened as regime change, even though there’s no actual regime change. He and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have been touting the astonishing, tremendous tactical military successes they’ve had over the Iranian regime. But none of that seems to have really moved the needle the way in which they thought it would going into this five weeks ago. And now we have this two-week pause where there’s going to be some kind of process of negotiations led by a curious interlocutor.
I don’t think before this conflict we would have thought about Pakistan as a natural intermediary in this situation. But it’s really stepped up in a curious way, and it’s an interesting story there. These negotiations, led presumably by the Pakistanis, are going to take place. We don’t know how well they’re going to go. There are already ... big gaps, even in the readouts that we got from the Iranians and from Trump and the White House. There are significant gaps in what we’re talking about here. The Iranians have, in their supposed 10-point plan that has been given to Trump—I’ve not seen the actual document, but in reports about it—a suggestion that the Iranians want to reserve the right to enrich uranium for a nuclear program.
Trump has already made resoundingly clear that he does not want any enrichment possible in Iran. I don’t know how possible that will be. There are a whole bunch of other points on which they’re going to disagree. The Iranians want to see a full withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the Middle East. They want to see reparations for the war damage the U.S. and Israel have caused. They want to see a whole bunch of other things that I can’t imagine Trump necessarily giving, although what will probably be in discussion—if there are meaningful discussions—will be sanctions relief for the Iranians.
What is not on the table is regime change. What is not on the table is a sense that this war was a prelude to a major reconfiguration when it comes to the sort of security order in the Middle East, or the political dispensation in Tehran. They’ve killed an older Khomeini and a younger one has replaced him. The Revolutionary Guards are as entrenched and consolidated as they have been.
You can find a lot of Iranian dissidents and supporters of Iran’s democracy movement abroad tearing their hair out over what’s happened, because they’ve seen their country really pummeled. They’ve seen civilians get killed; they’ve seen universities get shut down. The famous synagogue in Tehran has been destroyed or badly damaged. UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Isfahan and other places have been damaged. The Iranians have received what’s happened not as an attack on the regime, but as an attack on Iran. Then you have Trump going off on his desire to destroy Iran as a civilization, which is just completely unhinged rhetoric. We get numb to the things that he says, but we can’t be numb to that. So yeah, that’s a kind of long-winded opening here.
Bacon:. Talk about Israel’s role in this. Where does Israel go from here?
Tharoor: Israel is right now pummeling Lebanon, still. This is another one of the gaps in the ... readouts that we got. The Iranians said that a truce with Hezbollah and over Lebanon was part of the agreement. That’s clearly not something the Israelis have agreed to, and while they apparently have agreed to a ceasefire with Iran, they have not agreed to a ceasefire when it comes to their very widespread actions in Lebanon. There’s still a prospect of an invasion of southern Lebanon to dislodge Hezbollah, and you’ve seen really horrifying scenes today in the southern suburbs of Beirut—apartment buildings destroyed, civilians killed. Real damage. There’s a lot to unpack there, but for the Israelis—we’re going to be spending some time picking through the winners and losers of these past five weeks for the Israelis and the Americans, and we have the reporting that suggests the Israelis really goaded Trump into this action, or laid the kindling for this to explode.
They have wanted to do what they’re doing for a long time, especially Prime Minister Netanyahu. We’re seeing that, as far as they’re concerned ... they are “mowing the grass,” in they’re very chilling euphemism that’s always deployed. They see security threats, terror threats, in these various parts of the Middle East around them, and they feel they have the agency and the capacity to just cut them down once in a while. They’re fully aware that those threats are going to grow back up again. They don’t really care about political solutions, but they have security tools to give themselves a sense of protection. That means bombing these places, including heavily populated civilian areas in Syria, in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in Iran. That’s what the Israelis are doing.
I don’t think they’re necessarily happy with the way in which the ceasefire has been brokered—not necessarily with them at the table—but I don’t think you get the Israelis and the Iranians at the table together. There is a sense that there is a divergence between where the White House is now and where Israel is right now, and you’re not necessarily going to get much more enthusiasm from the White House to keep on the kind of tempo that has been in place since this conflict began.
Bacon: What’s the divergence?
Tharoor: The divergence is that Trump desperately wants an off-ramp.
Bacon: I see.
Tharoor: And Netanyahu is fine to just carry on his decapitation strikes. Their intelligence services are all over Iran. They’re going to keep on picking off these various ranks of the regime. Or at least they could. And they also see in the Middle East a range of Iran-linked proxy groups who need to be dealt with.
They have frustrations with what’s in Iraq, frustrations with the Houthis in Yemen, they obviously see themselves locked in an existential conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon—although Hezbollah has been severely degraded since October 7, 2023. We’ll see as these negotiations go along how meaningful they are, what concessions the U.S. makes to Iran—those are going to be points of friction with the Israelis as well. Because the question is: What will the Americans concede to Iran?
Right now we have a status quo where the Iranians could rebuild quite easily. It’s not hard for them to amass more cheap drones. It’s not hard for them to assemble the stockpiles of ballistic missiles that were such a problem for Netanyahu and many politicians in Washington, and that we’ve seen deployed in the last five weeks.
The most crucial thing we’ve learned from this conflict—not just us, but the Iranian regime [as well]—is that for all these years, this talk about their nuclear capacity, their potential threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon, has structured everyone’s strategic thinking about Iran. And for the Iranians, they’ve always denied that they wanted to have one. There was a fatwa put out by Khomeini saying we’re not interested in nuclear weapons. But the prospect of being able to move towards one was always an element of their deterrence.
Now they have discovered—thanks to Trump and thanks to Israel provoking them into doing this through the war—that there’s another deterrent they have. They never exercised it before and they can do it, which is Hormuz. And that deterrent is probably more enticing for them than the prospect of rebuilding a nuclear program and actually weaponizing whatever nuclear capacity they have, because it’s logistically easier. There’s not this whole regime of inspections you have to worry about. You can just say, OK, we’re going to shut down the Strait, and they’ve done it. Now, we’ll see.
They seem to be saying that they’re only going to reopen the Strait—or allow the Strait to be reopened—in coordination with their military. There’s a suggestion that they’re going to try to set up a kind of toll booth. So Iran, sitting in the cold light of day—yes, Iran has been battered, there’s been a lot of civilian suffering that we don’t understand the full scale of. But now you can argue that they are actually strategically in a stronger position than they were going into this conflict.
Bacon: From Trump’s perspective ... I guess they’re going to start claiming regime change in the sense that they killed off the leaders before. Are we going to be debating what the meaning of regime change is, and they’re going to have a definition that you and I don’t agree with? Or are they conceding that the regime did not change?
Tharoor: I think they’re trying to save face. As far as we can tell, there’s no meaningful regime change in Iran. I think the regime change that Trump was hoping for was the thing that everyone’s pointed to in Venezuela, where they’ve removed Maduro, and they’ve brought in Delcy Rodríguez who is a total Maduro apparatchik but has functioned essentially as a kind of client of the U.S.
They genuinely believed that they could find a version of this within the Iranian regime. And that’s not been something that they’ve been able to figure out, and it’s not something that they will be able to figure out, as far as I can tell.
There’s a lot of confusion coming out of the White House about what their actual vision of this was—probably because it wasn’t a very clear vision. They don’t think that strategically. Now ... they’ll try to focus the messaging of victory around the military tactical successes, of which there were plenty, given the sheer superiority of the U.S. arsenal and capabilities.
But especially if these negotiations don’t go well—which they very well may not, these things collapse in a number of days, and then we may be back to where we were before—I don’t think they can, with a straight face, tell anybody there’s been regime change. Beyond their most ardent supporters, who would believe that?
Bacon: You alluded, I think, to—I take it you read The New York Times’s [Maggie] Haberman and Jonathan Swan [piece] about how the war started. You alluded to that a little bit.
Tharoor: Yeah, I don’t have a complete memory of what the piece said—one reads so much in the past 48 hours. But yeah, Netanyahu shows up, Barnea shows up. These are people who understand the U.S. system very well, who have—
Bacon: Let me follow up with one thing about that. In the piece, that idea that the Strait would be blocked—according to the story, JD Vance, the chairman of the joint chiefs, and Marco Rubio all said that would happen, and Trump ignored them.
I’m curious if you buy that. It feels like they’ve been surprised by Iran closing the Strait, but on some level the story hints that everybody knew except for Trump. I don’t know if you buy it or not. I’m curious what you think.
Tharoor: It seems like a story where there are a bunch of people leaking who are trying to cover their ass that are genuinely pissed off about this. But frankly, it was a pretty obvious outcome. I don’t think it takes great foresight to see that this would happen.
I wrote a piece last week on the parallels with the Suez Crisis in 1956, when the British and French, in conjunction with the Israelis, invade Egypt—let’s not do the whole history—but they invade Egypt in a maneuver that the U.S. was deeply opposed to, as well as the Soviet Union. That triggers the Egyptians to shut down the Suez Canal, which then sparked a whole set of crises for the Brits.
There were intelligence agents, officials around the world who were saying, We were telling the British that this is what would happen if you did this, and they went ahead and did it anyway. So a key component of these moments in history that are marked by overreach or hubris is that a lot of us knew it was going to go badly while it was happening, and they still went ahead anyway.
Bacon: Do you think this ceasefire will be lasting? What’s your sense of that? We have no idea? It depends on where things are?
Tharoor: I’m very bad at speculation. When I was asked on Monday, What do you think is going to happen now? I thought things were going to get worse. I really did expect Trump to go ahead and start attacking Iranian power plants.
There’s such a political gap between the two sides, and you don’t really feel like on either side the forces of pragmatism are winning out. It’s complicated. Of course the Iranians aren’t stupid, but they are right now being led by some of the most hardline personalities in this regime. And on the U.S. side, you’re being led by the instincts of President Trump and a very narrow, very small circle of people who have made a bunch of mistakes already so far.
But I was wrong. I didn’t see the ceasefire happening the way it has. I did not see Pakistan emerging as the credible intermediary that it has. That’s quite impressive to me, because you talk to a lot of folks in the Gulf—Arab officials and so on—I don’t think many of them took Pakistan that seriously as a major player. That has to do with all sorts of internal Pakistan-Gulf tensions and all that, but I didn’t see that happening.
Now, there are so many things that could go wrong. You may not have any movement on the massive gulf that already exists right now between the two sides on key issues like enrichment, the status of U.S. forces in the region, or what have you. But you also may have some pragmatism where they focus very narrowly on a couple of things, like the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and some version of sanctions relief for the Iranians. And that could be a good pragmatic win given the hideousness of the context. I wouldn’t want to be overly cynical, but there are many more reasons to be skeptical about this than there are to be optimistic.
Bacon: When I talked to you last time, you were very confident that Trump was looking for a way out, and that you think that’s probably driving this—that there wasn’t a clear path, but ... Trump was not happy with where things were going, and that’s going to create incentives for some path out.
Tharoor: I think he didn’t want to get embroiled in a months-long conflict. He does everything seat-of-his-pants. Big flashy event, and then wants to move on. He randomly bombs a couple of places in Nigeria. He shoots down boats in the middle of the Caribbean. He does this kind of Hollywood-style rendition of the president of Venezuela.
Enmeshing a big chunk of his second term in an incredibly costly, strategically confused conflict in the Middle East, after all the years he spent campaigning against enmeshing yourself in conflicts in the Middle East did not seem like something that Trump wanted to do. Even as much as we can question his state of mind right now and his faculties in general. But no, it seems to me that he obviously wants a way out.
This is an unpopular war in the U.S. The polling is out there showing that. Pew had a poll they published yesterday: Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling Iran, 70 percent of Americans are worried about gas prices. Those are things that register for Trump, presumably.
I don’t think he cares enough about political change in Iran to want to stay the course and commit U.S. forces and money the way you would have to if you really cared about an Iraq-style transformation—which is what some people want to see. I’m sure many in Israel would like to see the U.S. fully supplant the regime and install some kind of friendlier democratic government. But that is not right now on the table at all. And there are a lot of people who understand the situation in Iran better than I do who are quite confident that regime change is not going to happen now.
Bacon: Last question. The president of Spain has been saying a lot of things I agree with—
Tharoor: Prime minister.
Bacon: Prime minister, right, I’m sorry. Is the Spanish population more antiwar than France or Britain or Switzerland? What’s driving that? How did he become the person saying stuff that a lot of people agree with?
Tharoor: You and I, at our time at The Washington Post, talked a lot about what effective center-left politics now look like in the West. Especially in a moment when the centers in general are collapsing. Traditional center-left parties are failing, traditional center-right parties are being cannibalized by the far right, what have you. There are variations of that across Europe, and you can map that onto the U.S. as well.
But what you have in Spain is a curiously successful center-left experiment. A government that has done a lot of interesting things politically—on immigration, on climate policy. In terms of economies growing in Europe, it’s one of the most robust right now, which is very interesting given where Spain was in the previous decade. And then it has very consistently, for quite some time, been more critical of Israel in particular and of U.S. policy in the Middle East than other countries. Partially because it has less skin in the game.
Partially because of its own political views of the center left in Spain. I interviewed Prime Minister Sánchez a while ago; I’ve interviewed Spanish Foreign Minister Albares many times. They’re probably the first major Western European country to recognize Palestine as a state. They’ve called what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide. They don’t feel the obligation to toe a certain Western transatlantic line with the U.S. when it comes to Iran and so forth. It’s led them to piss off Trump. But we find that countries that stand up to Trump often fare better than countries that kind of meekly try to go along or gently persuade him in different directions—like the Brits or the French or the Germans.
Sánchez is a very interesting character, and there is clearly a significant groundswell of sympathy in Spain for the Palestinian cause. I wouldn’t say it’s a unanimous thing—Spain is also an equally polarized society. You have a very ascendant and somewhat scary far-right party in Vox, which is there. Just this weekend you had a major soccer game hosted in Barcelona between Spain and Egypt, and the entire stadium was chanting anti-Islamic things. Let’s not overly romanticize where Spain is.
They have a lot of issues of racism and bigotry and their own skepticism of Muslim immigrants. But the Sánchez government in particular, and a lot of the politics that shape the center left there, is quite robust, quite resilient, and they have figured out a way to be quite interestingly defiant toward Trump at a time when some of their counterparts are not.
And a year from now, you could have a far-right government in France; you could have a far-right government in Britain—not a year from now, but later.
Bacon: Yeah, very similar.
Tharoor: The Spanish—there’s a similar kind of tussle there too, but they’re really sticking to their guns.
Bacon: Final question. JD Vance—in that Times article, other articles—I understand the Lindsey Graham neocon foreign policy. What is JD Vance proposing? He’s opposed to certain things, but he was for the Venezuelan invasion, apparently. What is MAGA foreign policy? What do you think this is going to look like?
Tharoor: I’m not the best person to ask. JD Vance is—I’m curious what you think, but he’s just such an opportunist, and he’s willing to bend himself into whatever shape he needs to cling on to his position and consolidate it. But he has the—
Bacon: Maybe Tucker Carlson, then? When I watched Tucker Carlson—he talked to the Economist editor—I was like, OK, this is something different. I understand the neocon foreign policy—maybe Tucker Carlson is a bad example—but what is this other foreign policy that’s conservative but not neocon?
Tharoor: There is a world around Vance that is more intellectually coherent on this. I’m thinking about the American Conservative guys, some other folks there. There are many in the conservative restrainer community who see Vance as their guy. He has appealed to them because in various moments he has communicated that this is his vision as well, that he doesn’t want the U.S. to be fighting these wars. He’s against the legacy that the U.S. has set up in the Middle East. He thinks the U.S. should be retrenching itself closer to home. That is the most coherent foreign policy that he has articulated over time.
What he has to do right now to keep his job and then also position himself for 2028 is a different matter, and he’s bending himself in all sorts of ways to make it make sense. I don’t know what the actual vision is. I would love to hear your take on it. But I don’t get the sense that any of these guys in Trump’s orbit want to be holding the pot for whatever this past few weeks have been in Iran—I don’t think they want this to be on their legacy whatsoever, and they want to get out of it as quickly as possible.
Bacon: The Times article, it was very much covering their asses. Pretty much everybody but Hegseth said, I had objections in private. But my sense is Rubio’s foreign policy vision is closer to Reagan or Bush. Maybe he wouldn’t call himself a neocon, but: a much more strong national security, the U.S. needs to show strength at all times, that kind of thing.
I don’t have a good sense that if you implemented the Tucker Carlson vision in policy, that would be a break from [that]. That’s not even what George H.W. Bush was doing, because that’s a different era, on some level. So I was thinking out loud about what this looks like if they’re in government, and somebody like Tucker Carlson is secretary of state.
Tharoor: The thing that seemed to me more striking is what Vance is doing right now, which is he’s shown up in Hungary.
Perry Bacon: Hungary, yes.
Tharoor: Ahead of Orbán’s election. He’s basically made it clear that it’s a matter of the interest of the Trump administration—I would not say it’s the U.S. interest, but they think it’s in the U.S. interest—to support this particular guy who is the black sheep of Europe, who the preeminent illiberal right-wing nationalist in Europe, who for the first time in a long time faces potential electoral defeat this weekend. A defeat that many in Europe are hoping will happen because it’ll be a significant moment.
Hungary doesn’t matter as a country—I hate to say that, I hope there aren’t many Hungarians I’m offending in this conversation—
Bacon: In a geopolitical sense, they’re not as relevant—
Tharoor: They’re not relevant. They will never leave the EU because they would be screwed without being in the EU. Yet Orbán spends all his time attacking the EU as an institution. But it is fascinating the extent to which Orbán occupies this kind of conceptual space in the American right-wing imagination.
He is the template for them, because he’s the first example of political and cultural victory. They love what he did to these universities there. ... There’s a model that we’ve seen in Turkey to a certain extent, in India as well, of illiberal takeover of media companies via proxies and cronies. He did that in Hungary. You can argue we’re seeing that here in the U.S. to a certain extent too.
Bacon: Yes.
Tharoor: So he’s this lodestar, this coordinate ... that is fixed for them in their imagination for where the West should be going. And if he loses, that’s a big deal. It’s a big deal because it shows that there’s an exhaustion to this kind of politics. It shows that he had all the advantages—he’s gerrymandered his system to death, he has gotten judges on his side, he has a skewed media environment.
A defeat for him will be a major blow to a far-right international [order] that exists out there, and that Vance very much has positioned himself within. That to me this seems like the Vance foreign policy. It’s allying with Orbán, it’s lifting up someone like Bukele in El Salvador, and saying—
Bacon: As you were talking, I was thinking: can you imagine JD Vance in 2029, campaigning for Farage in Britain? That would be the ultimate example of that.
Tharoor: We’re in this kind of age where these guys are in conversation with each other, where they’re borrowing messaging and politics from each other. The Milei-to-Trump symbiosis is quite interesting as well. There are all sorts of examples, and I don’t think you have a similar version of that on the left. The left is ... a kind of establishment. The center left is still the Western establishment.
Bacon: Tony Blair and Bill Clinton from a long time ago were borrowing, but that was like—
Tharoor: But it’s not the same thing, and there’s a different kind of conversation there. Maybe that’ll change. Vance—everything he’s done foreign-policy-wise has been less about grand-strategy foreign policy, and more about a culture war.
He goes to Munich and he completely dumps on the entire European project. That is also the Tucker Carlson foreign policy. It’s culture war. That allows for a meeting of the minds with the Kremlin, that allows for a shift in how we think about competition with China, and it allows for—
Bacon: A bit of a retreat from the Middle East.
Tharoor: I’m sorry?
Bacon: It allows for some retreat from the Middle East, to some extent.
Tharoor: In theory, you’d think so. Certainly Tucker Carlson now, where he has gone on Israel—that kind of foreign policy would be very different than what we have right now, and probably quite popular, frankly, on both sides of the aisle. At least that’s what the polling suggests.
But it is going to be very interesting if the White House can get out of this conflict now, try to put lipstick on the pig and say, This is what we did and this is great, and put it behind them. They’re not going to feel much of an economic shock here in the U.S. The war has already provoked all sorts of heartache and headache for people around the world who have nothing to do with the U.S. or Iran. A lot of Asia, especially the poorer countries in Asia, has been struggling.
You’ve seen restaurants close down, hotels closed down, airlines scale back flights—real chaos and logistical struggles for hundreds of millions of people because of this war. But the U.S. hasn’t felt that. If they pull out now, the U.S. may be insulated from the worst of it. But we were drifting towards a second Covid, and Trump realized that they can’t do that.
Bacon: Thanks for joining me. Tell people where they can find you on social media and maybe find your writing as well.
Tharoor: I’m still in this liminal space ... I was part of the cull at The Washington Post. I had this newsletter called Worldview at the Post that I no longer write, but I am hopefully finding new spaces for that.
I will be intermittently trying to post stuff here on Substack, but for now I’ve written five pieces already at The New Yorker. Please look me up there. I will eventually get my act together and put something up on Substack so you can follow me here, and I will try to be more present so I can build up my old following again and interact with wonderful folks like you. So I look forward to it.
Bacon: Do you use Twitter? Bluesky?
Tharoor: Yes, I’m very much on Twitter for my sins. IshaanTharoor on Twitter, IshaanTharoor on Bluesky, IshaanTharoor on Instagram, and all the rest. You can find me there.
Bacon: Great to see you. Thanks for joining me. See you soon.
Tharoor: Anytime, man. Thank you.
