Could Iran be the next 'forever' war?

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0:26Wendy Sherman:Twice before, Iran has been negotiating with the United States in June and in October. And both times we have then engaged in an assault on Iran. There may be a desire for President Trump to end the war with Iran, but there's little in the way of actual talks happening. And little reason for Iran to take American proposals seriously.

1:01Wendy Sherman:It's Tuesday, March 24th, and this is Here and Now Anytime. From NPR and WBUR, I'm Chris Bentley.

1:11Wendy Sherman:Today on the show, the war has been a disaster for the global economy, but a few people are getting rich off it through well-timed bets. Also, denied asylum at America's doorstep, the Supreme Court case that could make it easier for the U.S. to turn away migrants. Before we get to that, though, President Trump says talks are underway in the Middle East and that a deal could happen soon to end the Iran war. But Iran has denied that any talks are happening. NPR has confirmed that there are some back-channel communications between the U.S. and Iran via intermediaries in the Middle East. But there's good reason to be skeptical that the war, now almost a month old, is anywhere close to over, says Wendy Sherman.

2:02Wendy Sherman:She was lead negotiator for the two and a half years of talks that led up to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal under President Obama. President Trump tore up that deal during his first term. Back in February, Wendy Sherman told us about a week before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran that they were likely headed to war. And now she tells Indira Lakshmanan, take everything that Trump says about a possible deal to end the war with a heap of salt. Oh, I think we all wish that a deal was imminent and going to happen. And I do understand as we are speaking that there are some Americans in Pakistan, in Islamabad, trying to get such talks underway.

2:46Wendy Sherman:But I think that we all have to be quite, unfortunately, pessimistic about where this is going. I appreciate the president's wish, but I don't think it's going to be fulfilled. And we see ongoing fighting now. Yes, the president has pulled back from attacking power plants, which would have gotten a return from Tehran by attacking probably desalinization plants in the Gulf, which would have been devastating. So I think, unfortunately, we are in for war for some time to come.

3:20Roben Farzad:Well, I want to dig into your personal experience here. Having been involved in years of indirect and direct talks with the Iranians over their nuclear program, including some of those who are still alive, have not been knocked out by Israeli strikes. As you noted, Pakistan has offered to host direct talks. Do you see that as a realistic path to end this war, given the demands on Trump's side and the demand on Tehran's side?

3:48Wendy Sherman:Well, I would be generous to say there is a wide, wide gulf, no pun intended, between what President Trump wants and what Iran wants, let alone what Israel wants. We are aligned with Israel, but we are not identical in our objectives, though it is not entirely clear what the objectives are of President Trump to come to closure. He says there's a 15-point plan that's been agreed to. My understanding is it's a 15-point proposal that was presented to Iran some time ago. And, you know, Indira, what's important here for everybody to understand is that Iran has become more hardline, not less so because of this war.

4:36Wendy Sherman:So Iran is in for the long haul. After all, during the Iran-Iraq war, when Iran was not doing well, it hung on for eight years.

4:46Roben Farzad:Have you seen what is in the 15-point plan or proposal that Trump has made? Do you know what's in there?

4:53Wendy Sherman:I don't know all the details. I know what's been reported. President Trump has also said publicly. He wants to get hold of the enriched uranium, which is now underneath some rubble, probably at Isfahan in Iran. He wants there never to be further enrichment. He wants their missile program to end. He wants funding of proxies such as Hezbollah to end. And he wants a regime that he can deal with. And I suspect, as he has wanted in Venezuela and elsewhere, he wants some part of the oil proceeds that Iran sells around the world, particularly to China. Yes, the president was quoted as saying that, you know, who's going to run the Strait of Hormuz,

5:42Roben Farzad:that it should be possibly him or him and a new Ayatollah, a new leader in Iran. You outlined what Trump's main demands for Iran are. Iran has resisted all of those, and now it's upped the ante by saying it wants reparation for war damages. So is there any compromise the U.S. could possibly offer to Iran or the two sides just too far apart for a negotiated settlement?

6:08Wendy Sherman:Right now, I think they're extremely far apart. There's always a possibility to negotiate. But two things have happened that make this more difficult. twice before, Iran has been negotiating with the United States in June and in October. And both times we have then engaged in an assault on Iran. And so they're very wary of negotiating with the United States. The other thing I would say is that the United States so far under President Trump has done what I call drive-by negotiations. A couple of hours, largely indirect negotiations, meaning a mediator carrying messages back and forth. That makes it very difficult to get anything done.

6:52So the key question is, how does this war end and what happens to Iran's existing highly enriched uranium?

7:00Wendy Sherman:Well, I think that it can only ultimately end through some kind of negotiation. Whether we are at that moment or not, I doubt. I wish that we were. but we all have to understand that the president has ordered thousands of marines, thousands of sailors, an expeditionary force, further ships to the Middle East. And so that may signal leverage, but it also signals that the president, in fact, may see having particular kinds of boots on the ground to try to achieve some of the objectives in advance of a negotiation. I wish I were more optimistic that this was the moment to end this by negotiation, to declare victory, because indeed, our superb military has degraded Iran's missile program, its nuclear program.

7:56Wendy Sherman:But it has not achieved what I think President Trump hopes for, and it certainly hasn't opened the Strait of Hormuz, which is critical to the world's economy.

8:07Roben Farzad:That's former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. She's now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Thank you so much for joining us.

8:17Wendy Sherman:Thank you, Indira.

8:22Wendy Sherman:Well, the five-day period that Trump claims is open for negotiation between the U.S. and Iran happened to begin right before the markets opened on Monday, and it ends after they close on Friday. It's not hard to see a pattern with Trump's statements lining up with Wall Street's trading hours, but there are also big spikes in more direct forms of gambling on world events that routinely happen around many of the president's public announcements. Prediction markets have insider trading baked into the business model, but that is not stopping millions of people from trying their luck at betting on the news.

9:03Wendy Sherman:Indira has that story in just a minute. Thank you.

9:36Roben Farzad:Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50 % at selectquote.com slash anytime. That's selectquote.com slash anytime. On prediction markets, you can now bet on anything, including what's going to happen next in the Iran war or which world leader might get assassinated. Yesterday, traders bet hundreds of millions of dollars on oil contracts just minutes before President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would postpone threatened strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure. Meaning those extremely lucky traders made a lot of money.

10:17Roben Farzad:But was it just luck? Observers are asking, is some form of insider trading going on? Let's find out more with business journalist Robin Farzad, who hosts Full Disclosure podcast. Hey, Robin. Hey, how are you? Okay, so briefly remind us how these prediction markets work.

10:35Wendy Sherman:You can wager on various binary things. Who's going to win the Oscar? Is there going to be a tornado in Oklahoma if there's a weather front over, I don't know, the Midwest or the South? In this case, it was on attacking Iran and the price of oil. I mean, you can do it in the regulated markets, kind of in the futures trading on the CME, or you can do them in actual prediction markets. So it isn't as neatly monitored and as regulated as it was just five or 10 years ago where the SEC or others could crack down on insider trading. It's kind of leaking like a sieve.

11:08Roben Farzad:Well, OK, let's explain to listeners what happened. This weekend, the president had threatened to hit energy market targets in Iran. Then on Monday, between 6.48 and 6.50 a.m. Eastern time, there was a sudden surge in traders buying oil contracts. Minutes later, President Trump says on social media that he was delaying attacks and oil prices dropped. So why is this suspicious?

11:33Wendy Sherman:Yeah, because that's not a marginal trade. That's, you know, you do something like that with a very binary immediate outcome. There's a complete risk of ruin. If you knew nothing and you're just wagering on that, it's far less probable than just, you know, going on the roulette table and putting something on red or on black. I mean, this kind of beggars belief that these people were just lucky and they did this. And 25 minutes later, Trump tweets out that we're going to give forbearance to Iran and crude oil prices fall, which I think shows the fact that there are people out there that see something, that maybe think that they can get away with something like this.

12:06Wendy Sherman:Because the SEC, which is full of attorneys who make their name, who make their bones, cracking down on things like this so they can become career prosecutors or they can become very highly paid criminal defense attorneys, they would crack down on it.

12:18Roben Farzad:All right. Well, I have to ask. There was a similar story from January. An anonymous trader made a huge bet that Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro would be out of office just hours before President Trump announced the nighttime raid to seize him. That person made$400 ,000. There were accusations of a tip off after that. Explain to me, is anything being done to protect these markets from insider trading to prevent it? And what about the fact that Donald Trump Jr. has an advisory role in Polly Market and Kalshi, the two biggest prediction markets, and their family's company is supposedly getting involved in this kind of thing?

12:56Roben Farzad:We only have 30 seconds left. Just brief answer.

12:59Wendy Sherman:Look, deregulation and lesser regulation and salutary neglect, they're kind of the way of the art form here. You don't have an administration that's, you know, you can't imagine Trump calling people in as like, I want you to go find who these guys are, Kash Patel, and crack down on them. I mean, it's kind of look the other way. And as your guest, McKay Coppens say, we see pendulums of regulation and under-regulation and over-regulation. You can be sure that there's going to be reckoning when the administration on Capitol Hill changes.

13:25Roben Farzad:Business journalist Robin Farzad of Full Disclosure, Robin, we'll definitely have you back to talk about this more.

13:32Wendy Sherman:My pleasure. Thank you.

13:38Wendy Sherman:Well, we've got one more story for you on today's show, but there is always so much more to read and listen to at hereandnow.org. Speaking of betting, we've got a conversation with writer McKay Coppins about his journey into gambling addiction. He wrote about investigating the world of sports gambling, only to get suckered into becoming what he calls a degenerate sports gambler himself. I would take my daughter to choir practice and then I'd be chewing on my fingernails as I watched a Chiefs game on my phone. You can find that whole conversation at hereandnow.org. But when we come back in just a minute, we'll check in on the Supreme Court, which heard a case today with big implications for people hoping to claim asylum in the United States.

14:23Wendy Sherman:Stick around.

14:32Roben Farzad:This message comes from Easy Cater, making it easy for organizations to order food for meetings and events from favorite restaurants, set up meal programs for their employees, and manage food spend all in one place at easycater.com.

14:48Wendy Sherman:Today, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could make it harder for immigrants to seek asylum in the U.S. The justices are considering when asylum claims begin, at the port of entry, or only after a person steps onto U.S. soil. The Obama administration first started blocking some asylum seekers this way, claiming they hadn't fully crossed the border in a legal sense. And President Trump, in his first term, expanded that policy. Biden put a pause on it, and now the second Trump administration wants to bring it back. Michelle Hackman is an immigration reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She's in Washington today for the Supreme Court case, and she talked about it with Indira Lakshman.

15:30Roben Farzad:Asylum is for people fleeing their countries over persecution based on race, religion, politics, or other factors. When they are blocked from applying for asylum at the border, this practice is called metering. Remind us why this started under President Obama. Yeah, so this started actually with an incident in San Diego or south of San Diego and Tijuana where a lot of Haitian migrants showed up at once. And the Obama administration said, we're happy to take these people, but we can't handle them all in one day. And so they set up this policy called metering where they said, you know, I don't remember the exact capacity, but the capacity of the port is to will take 10 a day or 100 a day.

16:15Roben Farzad:and they made other people wait in line. And so that expanded under Trump. I actually remember I visited a Mexican town just south of South Texas called Matamoros, where they were taking about 10 people a day at the port of entry. And people were actually, they'd formed their own line. They had this sort of like notebook where they were keeping the names and what order they were allowed to approach the port of entry because they wouldn't take them all. All right. Well, that's not the same as entirely cutting people off. We know that under international law and the U.N. Refugee Convention, asylum seekers are protected regardless of how they arrive inside the country.

16:52Roben Farzad:So explain to us the legal rationale for turning away asylum seekers entirely if they're steps from U.S. soil. Yeah. So what you're talking about is when Trump took office again a year ago, he was like, you know, let's do away with this idea that we're taking any asylum seekers. He put out an order, basically almost a form of a travel ban, basically saying, you know, the U.S. is in a state of emergency. We just don't have room right now. And so we're not taking any asylum claims at all. So, you know, let alone this issue of if people approach the border, are they allowed to ask for asylum? It's just a much broader issue that we're dealing with now.

17:34Roben Farzad:So it's a step beyond metering. All right. So explain to us, for people who fled their countries fearing violence or persecution, what has happened to some of those who have been turned away? All sorts of things. People, you know, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of migrants who are stuck in Mexico, and the Mexican government is not treating them particularly well either. They've been sort of bused around the country. They're living like sort of in these slum-like conditions in southern Mexico where the government has forced them. There are other migrants who have given up and have gone home.

18:12Roben Farzad:We've also heard reports that migrants are trying increasingly to go to Spain. That's become people's next best hope. Okay, okay. Well, today, Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General Vivek Suri was asked if the Trump administration intends to reinstate the policy of metering that you described if the case goes their way. Here's what he said.