The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 9 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.
Now that Donald Trump and Iran have agreed to a very fragile ceasefire, the administration is facing mounting questions about his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lost her temper under tough questioning about this topic. Pete Hegseth also tried to spin about this threat and he too flopped miserably. All this comes as even some of Trump’s own allies are questioning whether he got a good deal out of this fiasco. We think this all reveals deeper failures. Trump and Hegseth sought to show that the threat of overwhelming military force can accomplish literally anything, yet that too failed. We’re talking about all this with a great commentator on national security affairs, Georgetown’s Rosa Brooks. Rosa, really nice to have you on.
Rosa Brooks: Good to be here, Greg.
Sargent: So we have a ceasefire now, but it’s a little hard to see what we got out of it. The U.S. largely destroyed the Iranian military and killed some of Iran’s senior leaders. The Strait of Hormuz might be reopening, but it was open before the war and Iran’s grip on it appears tighter now. The basis for the new talks seems to be somewhat more friendly to Iran than before. Rosa, is that about the size of it? What’s your reading?
Brooks: It’s not even clear that the Strait of Hormuz is in fact open. It sounds as though two ships have gone through as of the time we’re recording this podcast, but that then it reclosed again. So it’s not even clear we have a ceasefire and already there are disputes. The Israelis are continuing to attack targets inside of Lebanon. The Iranians are saying, then we’re closing the strait again because that wasn’t the deal—you’re supposed to stop. The Israelis are saying, no, no, attacking Lebanon wasn’t part of the deal. So this may be collapsing as we speak. It’s a little hard to know.
But yes, I think even if it held, it’s not entirely clear what we’ve accomplished aside from killing a lot of people, which we have certainly done. We have eliminated several layers of Iranian leadership. Arguably, remaining members of the Iranian leadership are even more hardline than their predecessors in terms of domestic repression of the Iranian people. So I don’t know that we’ve done the Iranian people any favors. It’s sort of a little too soon to say. We’ve obviously eliminated a lot of Iran’s stockpile of offensive weapons, which is overall probably a good thing. On the other hand, we’ve also eliminated a great deal of our own stockpile of both offensive and defensive weapons, which is definitely not a great thing given that Iran was not an imminent threat and there are a lot of other places in the world where we face ongoing challenges.
Sargent: Right. The entire rationale for the war was bullshit.
Brooks: Exactly. Yes. Bullshit. There we go.
Sargent: Right. Exactly. So, okay. Let’s recall that Trump threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization. He threatened to destroy a nation of 93 million people, which would have of course killed tens of millions of civilians. He threatened to bomb all of Iran’s power plants and bridges—all of this would have constituted massive war crimes. Rosa, can you explain why it’s bad to simply make these threats, nevermind acting on them? The simple act of making the threats is bad. Can you explain why?
Brooks: So the idea that any world leader, much less an American president, would threaten to wipe out an entire civilization—those were obviously Trump’s words, not mine—is partly shocking because, as you say, international law and U.S. law draws a very clear distinction between lawful targets in wartime and unlawful targets. And “the entire civilization” is an unlawful target. I mean, that obviously sweeps in everything from cultural sites to every little baby sleeping in its bed in Iran. And that would be a crime against humanity, would be a war crime, it would be genocide. Pick your shocking moral offense and it would qualify.
I think that just the shock of having the former so-called leader of the free world saying essentially, we’re going to be kind of like the Nazis, we have no problem with that, we’re willing to wipe out an entire civilization, an entire people, to accomplish our rather unclear objectives—I don’t know if it’s possible to sort of overstate how shocking that is.
I also think—and this is frankly a lesser concern of mine—it also further undermines any ability of the U.S. to negotiate in a credible way, because we’re at a point where nobody has the slightest idea whether they should believe anything Trump says. He will go from we’re all pals now, we’ve got a great deal, to I’m wiping out your entire civilization and back again, and nobody really knows why or what is motivating him, frankly.
It’s one thing to add a level of strategic uncertainty into your negotiations to keep your adversaries on their toes, but when you just become this erratic actor who, might have a temper tantrum, you might be in a happy, happy, happy, happy mode, and no one has any idea what will put you in which state or keep you in that state—we become a threat to the entire world, frankly.
Sargent: Well, it’s not just the madman theory of how to do this stuff. It’s also the pathological liar theory, I guess. That’s supposed to keep people off balance or something. Trump and the White House are now facing intense questions about this threat, as they should. Karoline Leavitt lost her cool with a reporter who pointed out that Trump threatened to destroy the Iranian people, not its government—which was absolutely correct. That’s what Trump did. Listen.
Reporter (voiceover): How can the president claim that America can ever have the moral high ground if he’s threatening to destroy civilizations and not casting wars as fights against other governments?”
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Andrew, I think you should take a look at the actions of this president over the course of the past six weeks and the actions of our brave men and women in our United States military, who have essentially taken out the military of a rogue Islamic regime that has chanted death to America for 47 years, that has killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers over the course of the last five decades. The president absolutely has the moral high ground over the Iranian terrorist regime, and for you to even suggest otherwise is frankly insulting.
Sargent: What’s really insulting here is this garbage answer from Leavitt. Rosa, note how she simply elides the part of the question about Trump’s threat to attack the Iranian people as if that didn’t happen and just pretends that Trump was only talking about the regime. It’s just disgusting. What did you make of it?
Brooks: I mean, look, Leavitt is the kind of a young woman I hope my daughters will not become, which is to say that she is also perfectly comfortable lying through her teeth. And I think the single nicest thing one could possibly say about Donald Trump is that he lies through his teeth and he just says whatever random, insane, offensive thing comes into his tiny little brain at any given time. And the result of that is that it’s not actually clear that Trump gave a millisecond thought to the distinction between the people versus the regime, or that he has any understanding or interest in the fact that it sort of matters.
The nicest thing you could say about him is maybe he didn’t actually mean it. Maybe what he meant was regime, but he certainly said entire civilization. That is what he said. And the ridiculousness of Leavitt acting as though this is so offensive and so mean-spirited to raise any questions about lovely President Trump’s words is just bizarre in this context. We’ve got one person who threatened a civilization and her feelings are hurt.
Sargent: Yeah, exactly. Leavitt kept raging about this as well. Listen to this.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): The insinuation by anyone in this room that Iran somehow has the moral high ground over the United States of America is insulting, considering the atrocities that they have committed against our people and our military over the past five decades.
Sargent: So Rosa, I think we should take on the substance of this directly. Yes, the Iranian regime is horrible, but that doesn’t give us license to threaten and perpetrate mass atrocities ourselves. Can you talk about this basic point?
Brooks: Yeah, I mean, and of course that’s not what the question was. The question wasn’t who’s more horrible, the Iranian regime or Donald Trump, which is, that’s a really tough one, frankly. But that wasn’t the question. The question was about U.S. leadership and U.S. moral standing in the world and in general. Iran does not have any ability to be a global leader or have any influence whatsoever or have any moral standing precisely because the Iranian regime has done terrible things, including to its own people over many decades. It’s not clear to me why we would want to join them in that exclusive club of asshole nations, frankly.
But the world went through the 20th century—and neither of us were born during either of these periods—but two cataclysmic world wars that left tens of millions dead, both military and civilians, and devastated huge swaths of Europe and in the case of World War II, other parts of the globe as well. Humanity had hoped that as a species we had maybe learned a little bit about why it is not a cool idea for great powers to threaten to obliterate entire civilizations, because that way lies not just madness, but that way lies reciprocal cataclysm.
And there is a sort of basic reciprocity in international affairs, which is that—you keep your promises, I’ll keep my promises more or less most of the time. Doesn’t have to be, you know, people cheat on the edges and so on. You know, you don’t obliterate my population, I won’t obliterate your population. And that’s the way the world keeps itself from blowing itself up and destroying humanity itself. And Trump seems to have sort of missed this fairly basic lesson of human history, which is that you go in that direction and all hell breaks loose.
Is that what he wants? I sometimes think, listening certainly to people like Stephen Miller, that that is what they want. And I think there is a strand of evangelical Christians who think, awesome, let’s bring on the apocalypse, and they’re cool with tens of millions of people dying. I think most of the rest of us would sort of prefer that that not happen.
Sargent: Well, there’s a lot to say about Pete Hegseth’s theology in this. Hegseth also offered his own spin, by the way, on the threat to annihilate Iranian civilization. He said Trump’s threat is what got Iran to the table to negotiate. He said, “That type of threat is what brought them to the place where they effectively said we want to cut this deal.” Rosa, that’s just bullshit as well. Iran was negotiating with Trump before the war. There are other problems with this nonsense. Can you explain what’s wrong with that line?
Brooks: There’s so much wrong with it. It is hard to know where to start. I mean, for one thing, as you just said, it didn’t seem as though this particular threat had any real bearing on what the Iranians did. The Iranians were already good and upset and generally distressed and to some extent looking for a way out of it. It wasn’t even clear what the Iranians were planning to do. It’s still not clear, right?
And I think one of the problems with the strategy we’ve had of, like, let’s continue to kill every layer of Iranian leaders is that you run out of people to negotiate with and the people who are left may or may not have any authority to do much of anything. So you end up getting contradictory mixed messages. And we’ve certainly seen that from the Iranians. So it’s not particularly clear what, if anything, they had been willing to agree to or offer, or what, if anything, they then did agree to offer. There’s not a lot of transparency on any of this and there’s no particular evidence that Trump’s latest craziness did this.
But I think both from a moral perspective and from a strategic perspective, again, threatening to wipe out whole civilizations is both deeply, deeply immoral and offensive—regardless of whether you’re a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, whatever you are—deeply morally offensive to any sensible human being, but also just again, as a strategic matter, it’s terribly dangerous. The risks of mistaken escalation, especially when you’re dealing with an ally that has at least some degree of nuclear capabilities that we have not eliminated, just is wildly foolhardy.
Sargent: Well, there’s no doubt about it. I want to switch gears here. Some of Trump’s biggest allies are not happy with the outcome that Trump achieved here. Fox News host Mark Levin said the Iranian regime is “still surviving.” MAGA personality Laura Loomer said this: “The negotiation is a negative for our country. We didn’t really get anything out of it and the terrorists in Iran are celebrating. I don’t know why people are acting like this is a win.” And Lindsey Graham, who’s a very staunch Trump ally, was clearly not happy with how things turned out. He put out a very long tweet in which he essentially said about the Iranian proposal to end the war—which seems to be the basis for these talks—he said, I’m going to review it at the appropriate time. He certainly wasn’t willing to say that it was a positive.
And perhaps most tellingly, what Lindsey Graham also seemed to be skeptical of was what’s going to happen to all of the highly enriched uranium that Iran still has. Graham said this must all be controlled by the U.S. and then he closed with “time will tell.” Clearly, Lindsey Graham doesn’t seem to think that we’re going to end up in control of the nuclear situation the way he’d like. What do you make of all this? This is some pretty serious criticism from his top allies.
Brooks: You know, they’re—for once, this is the broken clocks. Even broken clocks are right twice a day—theory of life, like every now and then Laura Loomer is going to say something sensible. Tucker Carlson and so forth. I mean, no, they’re, they’re appropriately highlighting the fact that, as we’ve discussed, this isn’t a win for anybody. I mean, the U.S. is now worse off than we were before this began and Iran is now worse off than they were before this began. You know, which of us is more worse off than the other is a question that I think we may not know the answer to for years to come.
Sargent: Rosa, just to close this out, I want to clarify that we’re recording this on Wednesday late afternoon. So by the time people hear this, the fragile ceasefire could already be in tatters. We don’t know from where we’re sitting. It looks pretty shaky, but it’s still kind of alive. Rosa, how do you see this playing out over time?
Brooks: I think there’s a very real possibility that Trump, if he can find something that he really feels like he can call a victory, that he declares victory and says, okay, we won, we’re going home. And that clearly would be best for the world. Not a great outcome, but a better-than-the-alternative outcome.
It also remains perfectly possible that he will be so incensed that he will follow through on some of his more insane and illegal and immoral threats and that we will have an utter catastrophe in the region, which will spread around the globe and translate not only into chaos in the global economy, but terrorist attacks around the globe for decades to come. That’s still a very real and very frightening possibility.
Sargent: I think the big takeaway from that is that his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, which is basically a threat to kill millions, is absolutely very much alive right now. Rosa Brooks, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Brooks: My pleasure.