Is Trump's Iran deal a strategic blow for the U.S.?

0:00Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts. Boston. I think the administration had really no choice but to take the best deal available, but that's very different from saying it's a good outcome for the United States. Reaction to the plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and maybe end America's war on Iran. What did the U.S. really get after all the bombs and bloodshed?

0:49It's Monday, June 15th, and this is Here and Now, Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:58Today on the show, Russia's war in Ukraine has gone on longer than World War I. Where does it stand? Bo said it's trying to get this advantage, any kind of decisive advantage-taking game, and right now Ukraine has the upper hand. Also, Ireland did not qualify for the World Cup, but the Ivory Coast did. One Irish pub in Scotland decided to capitalize on the similarity of the two countries' flags, becoming a Cote d 'Ivoire fan club for as long as they stay in the tournament. We were flooded with messages from all Ivorians all over the world, and we just, we wish this was real. This seems like a great idea.

1:36Turns out they love Guinness in Abidjan almost as much as they do in Dublin. But first, the leaders of the US and Iran say they will sign a deal Friday to end a blockade of Iranian ports and reopen the street of Hormuz. The text of the deal, officially a memorandum of understanding, has not yet been released. And the most difficult part of the negotiation is still ahead. The MOU is essentially a promise to resolve all of the main issues, nuclear material, sanctions, shipping, in further negotiations over the next two months. And whatever reprieve it might bring in the war is tentative, in part because there appears to be disagreement about whether or not the deal with Iran covers Israel's war in Lebanon.

2:25Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told us Israel could complicate or even sabotage negotiations between the U.S. and Iran going forward. I think Israel is very unpredictable at this point. They were preparing additional attacks. The president had to call Netanyahu and tell him not to do it at this moment. And very frankly, because of Israel, I think the United States then rushed quickly to try to nail down the agreement. More from Panetta at hereandnow.org. We also spoke with John Feiner, a former national security advisor under President Biden. He was on the team that negotiated the Obama administration's 2015 deal to limit and monitor Iran's nuclear program, an agreement that President Trump walked away from when he first took office nine years ago.

3:20Feiner spoke with Indira Lakshmanan. So Washington and Tehran are both touting this agreement as a victory, but reopening the Strait of Hormuz is simply where we were before the war started. President Trump cited several reasons for the war. He was going to destroy Iran's nuclear program, end its missile program, change the regime that has oppressed the Iranian people for so long. None of those things has happened. So I have to ask, has Iran just won this war? This is a strategic failure for the United States, Indira, and it gives me no pleasure to say that. As you just laid out on the terms that the administration itself set for this conflict, changing Iran's regime, dealing with Iran's nuclear program in a definitive way, none of that has been accomplished.

4:08And in the meantime, the most important outcome strategically right now is that Iran has learned a very valuable lesson from this war, which is that it has the ability to hold the entire global economy at risk by closing the Strait of Hormuz anytime it chooses to do that. They may have thought that that was an option available to them, but they had never done it in this way. And now they know how to do it. And this is something that the world will be contending with for quite some time. So I think the administration had really no choice but to take the best deal available. But that's very different from saying it's a good outcome for the United States.

4:42All right. John, there's no agreement yet on what happens to Iran's nuclear program. Reportedly, the two sides will take 60 days to negotiate something that took more than two years for the Obama administration's team that you were part of. Is 60 days realistic and has Iran agreed to cease all enrichment of uranium? I think 60 days is very unrealistic in terms of a timeline for negotiating anything with Iran. As you know, and as you just said, we had a framework in place when we started the JCPOA negotiations, essentially a pre-negotiation. You mean the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that was the Iran nuclear deal under the Obama administration?

5:22Correct. When those negotiations started in public, there had already been secret talks that reached many understandings between the two sides, and it was the details that had to be further negotiated. That process of negotiating those further details took almost two years. So the notion that after a very damaging war, damaging to the region, damaging certainly to Iran, damaging also to the United States and to our credibility and inability to achieve these strategic outcomes, this is all going to get a bow tied on it within 60 days seems very, very unlikely to me. And so then the question is, will the talks break down or will they just simply be extended again and again and again, leaving the world and the region in a degree of limbo?

6:04I think that is a very real possibility. Well, Iranian officials say the U.S. has agreed to lift nuclear sanctions and unfreeze$24 billion in Iranian government assets abroad, half of that before nuclear negotiations even begin. Vice President J.D. Vance today denied that. But even if the U.S. is simply lifting sanctions, have we given away our leverage before getting any nuclear concessions from Iran? So we're in this very strange situation where all sides and then some parties that are not even involved in the negotiations, like the Israelis, are putting out details of what is in this deal, but the document itself has not been made public.

6:43So I expect that that will happen over the course of the coming days, and it will clear a lot of this up. But in the meantime, what is very clear is that Iran is going to get a significant financial benefit, some of that upfront, some of that over time for agreeing to end this war. And I would only point out that whatever is ultimately agreed and revealed in this document, there's no reason to believe that that deal was not available to the Trump administration before it chose to launch this very damaging conflict and ultimately unnecessary conflict. I think that Iran was negotiating with the United States before this war.

7:16Very much the same terms were on the table in that negotiation. The president chose to go to war because he thought he could get a better outcome, and it looks like that is going to have failed. John, did the war led by the U.S. and Israel debilitate Iran's nuclear program and disable any weapons or missile capability? It's clear that the war ultimately reduced Iran's ability to threaten its neighbors. Iran's missile production is not what it was before the war. Iran's missile supply is not what it was before the war. Iran's naval forces and air force is not what it was before the war. But all of that is going to be relatively easy for Iran to reconstruct over time.

7:55None of that damage is permanent. And even more importantly, Iran revealed that it can close the Strait of Hormuz without having to rely on any of those advanced capabilities. What they ultimately used to keep the Strait closed and hold the global economy at risk were drones that are very cheap to manufacture, can be fired from hundreds of miles away. And that threat was not halted during the course of this military conflict. Iran still has that ability and could turn it back on at any point. I'm speaking with John Feiner, who was principal deputy national security advisor under President Biden and was on the team from the Obama administration that negotiated the 2015 deal to limit and monitor Iran's nuclear program.

8:36John, this agreement that's just been announced that's supposed to be signed by all parties on Friday in Switzerland is supposed to end the war on all fronts, according to the Pakistani prime minister who was the intermediary. That includes Iran. However, Israel, sorry, that includes Lebanon. However, Israel has been attacking Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon, and Israel is not a party to this deal and has not said, in fact, that they will stop hitting Lebanon. In fact, the prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, and the defense minister have said the opposite. So does that jeopardize this entire agreement?

9:14I think this is one of the biggest risk factors in the days ahead that could, I'm not saying it's probable, but could lead to the unraveling of the deal. It has put Prime Minister Netanyahu in a very difficult position. On the one hand, he has no choice but to try to stay as close as possible to President Trump. Prime Minister Netanyahu faces a re-election sometime before October of this year. And the case that he will make to Israeli voters is that he has been the Israeli prime minister closest to America, closest to the American president, and who got America to do more for Israel's security than any other, including attack Iran.

9:49On the other hand, he is now getting attacked by his political opponents for allowing, quote unquote, the United States to do this deal with Iran behind his back and over his head, a deal he does not want because he would like to continue to be able to attack both Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And that is why you are seeing, in response to some of this domestic pressure inside Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu tried to assert that he is not bound by this deal and that he is going to continue to attack Hezbollah. And every time that happens, there is the risk that Iran launches another attack against Israel and this starts to unravel.

10:22John Feiner, how has this whole war affected the relationship between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has been one of the closest alliances of Trump one and Trump's second term? I think it's essential, as I just said, for Prime Minister Netanyahu to remain close to President Trump. I think that relationship, though, is under very significant strain because President Trump clearly wanted to end this war. For reasons, by the way, that I think are justified. Every day that goes on, the US negotiating position vis-a-vis Iran was getting worse because the economic impact of the conflict on the United States was mounting.

10:59So President Trump identified that, probably didn't want to get criticized in the way he is going to be criticized for doing this deal, but realized every day that went on, he would get a worse deal if he stopped later than if he stopped now. For Prime Minister Netanyahu, it's exactly the opposite calculus. As soon as the terms of this deal become known, the attacks on him will be even more intense inside Israel. And yet he cannot afford a fundamental rupture with Trump. Thank you, John, former deputy national security adviser under Biden and co-host of the Long Game podcast. Thanks, John. Great to be with you, Indira.

11:32We'll follow what happens there. But we are also checking in on another major conflict today, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Peter O'Dowd has more on that story in just a minute.

11:55Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mehrotra Institute at Boston University. On the show, host Kurt Nickish asks the thorny questions necessary for this moment about the role business plays in society. Questions like, why are executives paid so much? Why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And of course, is business broken? Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts.

12:41Shop plans today at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for a three-month five-gigabyte plan required. New customer offer for first three months only. Then full-price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Overnight, Russia launched more than 600 drones and missiles at Ukraine. The barrage set fire to a historic cathedral and monastery in Kiev that is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than World War I. Let's take a look at where things stand after more than four years of fighting now. Rob Lee is a military analyst and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, also a former Marine infantry officer.

13:24Rob, it's good to speak with you. Welcome. Yep, thanks for having me on. So that's quite a milestone. This war in Ukraine has now surpassed the length of World War I. What do you think about the comparison between those two conflicts? Well, there's some similarities in that the war has been quite slow moving for the last couple of years. The last real kind of significant offensive operation was the Kursk offensive by Ukraine in 2024. Instead, we've seen Russia kind of slowly making gains the last couple of years, but at high cost. And now we're seeing potentially a bit of change to that dynamic.

13:57How so? Well, Ukraine has really kind of leapt ahead in the use of drones, in particular what they call this middle strike campaign, where they're operating from 30 to about 200 kilometers beyond the front line. This is really a capacity Ukraine didn't have a year ago. But right now, Ukraine is actively disrupting and striking logistics trucks and targets at kind of greater depths in the occupied areas, as well as in Crimea. And also with other kind of new drones, they are going after a number of targets that really couldn't be struck about a year or more ago. And it's having a really significant effect on the Russian side.

14:29I want to talk more about drones in just a minute. But first, I know you've been on the front lines relatively recently. in Ukraine? What was it like there? It depends where you are. Some directions, the situation is still very difficult. In other directions, some of the Ukrainian units think that they've kind of seen a decrease in intensity relatively, whether there's maybe fewer Russian assaults, fewer soldiers. And I think that it's indicative that Russia is having some issues on manpower. They're not recruiting as many soldiers as they did before. And potentially, they might be struggling to maintain the same level of intensity.

14:59And I think there's generally more optimism now than, say, a year ago. And in some places, Ukraine is pushing back, like in Le Mans and some other directions. And that wasn't really that common in the last couple of years because of manpower shortage on the Ukrainian side. And so the dynamic has improved. You know, I'm curious about the conditions on the front lines. I see that troops are, you know, much like World War I, dug in, in many cases, living underground for months at a time in a trench or in a basement. I mean, what's morale like? What's everyday life like on the front lines? For infantry, it's very difficult.

15:31I mean, as you said, in rotations, it's often you'll be on position for months at a time. In some cases, they've had infantry who spent more than a year without rotation. And essentially, they're underground, right? They're underground in basements or in kind of dugouts they build in tree lines. For the most part, it's drones on both sides causing casualties. So infantry on infantry engagements are somewhat rare. Instead, there's this development of this kill zone where, you know, depending on the part of the front line, it could be 10 or 20 kilometers, you know, either direction, where drones are actively striking targets.

16:00And it's quite difficult to bring up vehicles and other kind of equipment anywhere near the front line. So what happens if you're, say, injured on the front line? From what you're telling me, it sounds like people are pretty isolated out there. Yeah. I mean, it depends on what part of the front line you're on. If you're in an area where the kill zone is quite far past the front line, in some cases, the only way of getting out of there is moving on foot. It's someone dragging or carrying you out of there or some kind of ground drone coming and picking you up. And so it's very, very difficult. Cattle to evacuation can take hours or days or weeks in some cases.

16:33And it's very, very different than what we experienced in Afghanistan. We had a golden hour. We knew helicopters would come and pick us up. And within an hour, anyone who's wounded would be back into a higher level kind of aid station very quickly. I'm speaking with military analyst Rob Lee, an expert on the war in Ukraine. And Rob, let's dig a little bit deeper into these drones. We know they've been central to this war for several years now. But at this moment, it does appear that Ukraine has kind of mastered the technique of drone warfare. How has Ukraine been able to get the upper hand in this way?

17:07So Ukraine for a long time had to compensate for Russian advantages. So Russia had more artillery, they had more ammunition, they had more armor, and obviously they had more manpower for much of the war. And so Ukrainians had to adapt by really going to commercial drones, making them into kind of military or employing them in military roles and just innovating. And so they have, you know, the Ukrainian defense industry scales dramatically. There are a number of companies that just produced drones that did not exist, you know, three or four years ago. And now, you know, with funding from foreign governments directly into some of these companies or in these capabilities, there's been this very impressive innovation cycle.

17:40Every month or so, the cycle changes, new technology are kind of involved, and things, you know, become outdated quite quickly. And it both started trying to get this advantage, any kind of decisive advantage they can gain. And right now Ukraine has the upper hand. Speaking of innovation, you just told me that drones can come to the front lines and pick up an injured soldier. How does that work? So, you know, because it's so dangerous for big vehicles, you know, armored vehicles, they rarely go to the front line anymore. And so now UGVs are sometimes the only way of getting people out of there.

18:10And so there are different types, but there's really active work in developing ground drones specifically for Cauti evacuation. Some of them have a kind of armored little capsule where the wounded soldier can get into it. And you have guys who are piloting the vehicle from maybe 30 kilometers or more from the front line. This is all enabled mostly by Starlink. So you have this kind of really high fidelity connection because of the nature of the kill zone, because it's so dangerous in this area near the front line. They've had to rely on drones for other things, too. And really, this is how Ukraine has been able to hold out despite Russian advances in UAV technology as well.

18:43You've talked about this close-up use of drones. Also, the mid-range use of drones, you know, maybe hitting a supply line behind Russian lines, that's been effective. What about the fact that Ukraine is also using long-range drones, attacking big cities and important infrastructure deep inside of Russia? How effective has that been, and how do everyday Russians feel about drones getting so close to home? Yeah, I think the war to some extent is coming home more for Russians than it did before, both because of the strikes you see in Russian cities, also because Russia has limited internet access in some cases in response to Ukrainian drones.

19:18So there's certainly a feeling that's more. Ukraine is going after a number of targets. Some of these are military industrial targets to go after missile production sites or drone production sites. And of course, also going after the oil industry and the gas industry, trying to reduce the amount of money that Russia has, the amount of money that Russia can spend on defense. Ukraine didn't have this capability in 2022 or 2023. It's really something that's happened the last couple of years. Russia had this kind of monopoly on long-range strike capabilities earlier in the war. And now maybe we don't have parity, but certainly Ukraine is approaching that.

19:50They've narrowed that gap, and the costs are growing for Russia. That does surprise me. Russia has this huge, massive military complex. It, of course, also uses drones to attack Ukrainian troops, but also civilians. Is Russia falling behind? Yes. In terms of drone development, the Ukrainians have long been more innovative. The problem was that they didn't always scale things as effectively as the Russians. So Ukraine will come up with dozens of drones that kind of perform the same mission. The Russians might choose one and just scale that dramatically, and there are kind of benefits to that. But I think really over the last year or two, as these new UAV companies, which were very small and didn't always have people who had a background in business, now these companies are becoming more mature in Ukraine.

20:31And with the proper funding and kind of the realization that drones are so central to the fighting, innovation is being scaled to a much greater extent than before. And, you know, again, Ukraine benefits from having some more innovative kind of military, more innovative society. Plus, Ukraine has a significant number of specialists in engineering and IT fields, high tech fields. And so they really leverage this talent in the defense field right now. And it's really been a really important way of how Ukraine has kind of held off the Russians. The losses for Russia are staggering. 500 ,000 Russians killed so far in this war, over a million casualties total.

21:07Is that becoming an issue for Vladimir Putin? I think we are starting to see manpower problems become a greater issue. I think this year, according to Ukrainian defense intelligence, Russia plans on recruiting 409 ,000 new soldiers or contract soldiers. But they've been missing some of the quotas so far. And so it's not really going to make that number. They did reach their quotas in previous years. They've compensated for problems by providing really significant financial incentives, big kind of one-time payments, which are well beyond the average wage. But, you know, there is a question of how long can that go?

21:38And at what point will Russia have to consider potentially conducting mobilization again? And, of course, if they do, there's significant political risk there. So, Rob, finally, what is the status of this war? We know that Russia likes to make a big push for territory every summer. We've been talking about how Ukraine has opened up this new front with drones. can either side break the deadlock? You know, we'll see. I think the middle strike campaign is interesting in that Russia doesn't have a great solution to it so far. Now that they'll obviously try and scale some kind of countermeasures, but the quantities of drones that Ukraine is using right now are quite significant.

22:12And this potentially sets conditions for Ukraine to go back on offense and potentially to kind of bring up armor again. So I think there are prospects potentially this year, if Russia can't adapt to Ukraine's middle strike campaign, that Ukraine could go back and take back territory. And we're already seeing some localized kind of attacks by Ukraine, but we might see this in a larger scale. And again, if they can deny logistics from getting to the front line, if Russian UAV teams and other units don't have enough fuel or ammunition, right, that could make them weak enough where Ukraine kind of pushed back Russian forces.

22:42So we'll have to see how this year develops, how the middle strike campaign develops. But if it keeps getting worse for Russia, then, you know, there is a possibility Ukraine will be able to push back and go back on offense to a greater extent. Rob Lee, military analyst, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, also a former Marine infantry officer. Rob, thank you so much. All right. Thanks for having me.

23:07Coming up, a World Cup story I guarantee will delight you even if you know nothing about soccer. When life gives you lemons, make poisson yassa? How an Irish pub became a Cote d 'Ivoire fan club when their team failed to qualify for the tournament. The need to go nuts at a watch party knows no international borders. Indira has that conversation after the break.