John Bolton on the Iran war that wasn’t

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0:33After more than a week of fighting between Israel and Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump bombed the Islamic Republic. Two days later, he announced a ceasefire. But now we're left with questions about the choices the administration made to get to this moment and where it goes next. Today, we hear from someone who has experience being part of similar high-stakes decisions.

1:00This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times, where we talk about everything happening in U.S. politics, finance, and the economy. I'm Mark Filippino, and this week we're asking, will the U.S. get what it wants from its strikes on Iran? Here with me to discuss is John Bolton. He was National Security Advisor during U.S. President Donald Trump's first term in office and a former ambassador to the U.N. under George W. Bush. Ambassador Bolton, thanks so much for coming on the show. Glad to be with you. Thanks for having me. And also with us is Gideon Rockman, the FT's chief foreign affairs commentator.

1:30Hi, Gideon. Hi. I want to start out by asking each of you to describe the past week, the U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, Iran's retaliation, the ceasefire in one sentence. What comes to mind? Ambassador Bolton, go first. Well, I think this was the right thing for the United States to do, obviously prompted by Israel's earlier attacks, and not entirely sufficient from my perspective, but better late than never. Gideon? I mean, And I think that this is a moment that's been building up for 20 years, and it's finally happened, but we don't quite know yet what actually has transpired on the ground, and therefore we can't really know how it plays out from here.

2:11Gideon, do you think these strikes achieved what Trump wanted? Well, it depends what he wanted. I mean, I think what he often thinks about primarily is, how's this going to look? and I think initially the reaction of the administration and perhaps was channeling what he thought Trump wanted to hear was these Israeli strikes are nothing to do with us. It's their unilateral decision. I then think he thought, well, actually this looks like it's going really rather well and maybe the thing to do is to get involved and to claim credit for it and he's certainly done that. What he sees as the next endgame, I'm not quite sure because, you know, at times he's generally been opposed to regime change.

2:56He then sort of flirted with it over the weekend and said, you know, I know it's politically incorrect to talk about it, but maybe we should. So what does he see or the people around him see as the next step? Do they think, OK, we're done now, Iran's defanged? Or do they see this as leading to maybe a regional diplomatic process? Yes. And, you know, they've, to some extent, deferred to Israeli ambitions here. But what do the, so that means what do the Israelis want is really quite important. What steps do they have in mind? Because I think they've got a clearer, so far, sense of the end game than the White House has.

3:36Ambassador Bolton, what are the next steps in your mind? Well, I think a lot depends on events inside Iran, which are not entirely clear to us at the moment. I mean, I think one question is whether, given that there is a ceasefire, the people come out into the streets. I think the regime is very vulnerable. I think it's as unpopular as it's been since the 1979 revolution for a whole variety of reasons. But now, after these strikes, the people have been clear, certainly since the downfall of the Assad regime, that the Ayatollahs have wasted uncounted billions of dollars supporting the terrorist proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis.

4:18And not one cent of that has benefited the Iranian people. So this is a moment where, as I say, I think the regime is in trouble to begin with. It could be that this is a real opportune moment. On the other hand, I think the Israelis have a pretty firm view. This is far from over, whether with Iran or in Gaza or in Lebanon. I think they're now going to press ahead against the terrorist proxies who have to look at a very real possibility that their chief financier in Tehran isn't going to be of much help to them in the future. Going back to the Iranian regime a bit for a second, there was some reporting from the FT earlier on Friday that suggested strikes may have actually done the opposite.

4:58that they've ignited a certain amount of patriotism as a result. Do you think that's a possible outcome as well? No, I don't. Look, I think this idea that the people of Iran will rise up and support the regime if some evil Westerner attacks them is a kind of myth. I think the people of Iran are actually pretty sophisticated, and they know exactly what we're doing. And one of the reasons for the discontent in Iran is that the young people, 60 % of the population is under 30, the young people see they can have a different kind of life. They just look across the Gulf. And the precision of the strikes, I think, demonstrates that what actually the Trump administration has said is not a war against the Iranian people.

5:40It's really against the regime. So we'll see what develops. I just wish we were doing more to help the opposition, which is short on resources, short on communications capabilities, and they could use some outside help. Gideon, what do you think about that? I mean, I certainly don't want to say, you know, regime change must never come to Iran. That would be a terrible thing to say. You know, it is a dreadful regime and clearly very unpopular and has had repeated efforts, uprisings from 2009 onwards. That said, you know, I do sympathize with those who say, look, the history of regime change in the Middle East has been repeatedly much worse than the West, and, you know, the next thing may be better.

6:24But I do think generally, the more indigenous these things are, the more likely they are to take hold, which is not to say you don't help them at all, but regime change by force from the outside is, I think, less likely to take root. Gideon, I think that's important to have some context here. While the administration may measure its success one way, there's no accounting for how other parts of the world will react. I think we're still waiting for that to shake out a little bit more. Trump announced the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, and he named the conflict the 12-day war. I wonder if you could paint us a little bit more of a picture on what he's referencing in the longer term.

7:02Yeah, and I think it was obviously a reference to the six-day war. I mean, Trump likes slogans. He's good at that. and so I think he was consciously or otherwise evoking the idea that this is a reordering moment in the way that the 1967 Israeli six-day war was where suddenly you looked at the Middle East in a different way and all sorts of new possibilities opened up. I think that is less certain. I mean I can see you know Trump likes making grandilquent claims so he would be attracted to the idea that I've done something massive nothing's going to be the same again etc. But actually, I think the situation we're in is Iran is very wounded, but it doesn't seem to me the way that regional actors will be thinking will have shifted fundamentally yet.

7:48Ambassador Bolton, is Trump right about what he's calling a victory? If not, what do you think the way to achieve that is? no i think what he's doing is campaigning for the nobel peace prize and he thought he thought he'd get it in the ukraine russia war that didn't happen but i think he's looking at the possibility that maybe he can get it here so he wants peace to break out there's reporting in the u.s that he's going to offer iran billions of dollars to help build a civil nuclear program which i think is madness and uh the my expectation there is that iran will save us from ourselves by rejecting it But I do think things have changed in the Middle East because Iran has been so badly weakened.

8:29And I think among the Gulf Arab states, the desire to get past the history and sign more Abraham Accords is very real. So in part, it depends on, really, I think more than anything else, what happens inside Iran. on. Professor Bolton, during Trump's first term, you worked for him as national security advisor, as I said, and you told the president to back out of the Iran nuclear deal. He ended up doing so about a month later. In your mind, what's been the biggest consequence of that decision? Well, I think the deal itself was badly flawed because it allowed Iran to do any uranium enrichment. I always thought that was the first step toward going after the nuclear weapons program as a whole and then going for regime change.

9:15Trump wasn't willing to go that far. And the result was that we had a sanctions regime that did not achieve maximum pressure. In that sense, it allowed the Biden administration to go back to trying to negotiate Iran back into the deal, which they weren't able to do. The fact is some of these agreements are comfort documents that give the illusion of protecting against, in this case, nuclear proliferation, but which really have the opposite effect. Gideon, what do you think about that? The idea that talks won't be effective without regime change, and the thought about backing out of the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal that former President Barack Obama signed?

9:57Look, I think it's one of the ones that historians will argue about. And I've just been at a lunch with some Biden people, ex-Biden people, who put the opposite case. They say Trump may have solved the problem, we'll see, but he created the problem by pulling out of the JCPOA, and they argue, contra Ambassador Bolton, that actually this would have prevented Iran ever getting this large amount of enriched uranium, up to 60%, that we don't know where it is, actually. We're not actually sure what happened to that enriched uranium. Yeah, Ambassador Bolton, I actually want to ask you about that controversy over the remaining enriched uranium that Iran may or may not have.

10:36President Donald Trump said that these nuclear sites have been obliterated. There's this leaked intelligence analysis, both on the American and the European side, that suggests the opposite. The facts are still shaking out, but do you have an inclination of what might be the reality of the situation here? Well, I think it's possible the Iranians tried to move some of the enriched uranium beforehand. You know, there's a kind of argument that says, well, you didn't destroy the entire program, therefore you shouldn't have destroyed anything. That's ridiculous. It's like saying, well, you didn't destroy the entire fleet, so don't destroy half of it.

11:09We are finding out about the facilities that were not previously known. I think that's important. I've worried for decades that a substantial part of the Iranian nuclear program was actually under a mountain in North Korea somewhere, given their close association on ballistic missiles and nuclear matters over the years. And there's also, I mean, to be blunt, a lot of ignorance about uranium and enriched uranium getting loose. If there was enriched uranium at Fordow, it was undoubtedly in a gas form. Well, that's all very interesting, but unless you can reconvert that gas into uranium metal, you can't make it into a nuclear weapon.

11:49And once you get it to the level of enrichment you want, converting it again back into a metal so it can be fabricated into a component of a nuclear weapon, all of which appears to have been damaged, at least as far as the facilities we know. And there's a further paradox where all the people are saying, oh my goodness, we don't know where the uranium is. If we or the Israelis had targeted the casks, as they're called, that uranium hexafluoride is stored in, people would be complaining we've allowed the release of radioactive material in the form of UF-6 into the atmosphere. So, you know, if you don't want to do anything about the Iranian nuclear weapons program, there are plenty of ways to do nothing.

12:30What Trump has done is, I would consider it a first step and certainly something that's long overdue. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about those next steps.

12:48Five is all about CFOs in an AI world. Patrick Villanova at Blackline joins me. CFOs are inherently risk averse. We have to be very prudent when we implement AI. As does Olya Brasi at Highgate. My rule is no human owner means no go live. And Gina Gutsight at FTI Consulting. There's no excuse. You're the CFO. You're signing the name to the financial statements. Listen to The Next Five wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy.

13:21Welcome back, Ambassador Bolton, Gideon. So the next step for Trump, at least on Friday morning when we're recording this, is that the U.S. and Iran are planning to have talks next week. How much good faith is there for the two countries to actually make progress on any kind of negotiation? Because it sounds like based on what we've already talked about, there's not a lot. Look, I think Trump and his negotiator, Steve Whitcoff, are like, you know, the Bobsey twins do nuclear weapons negotiation. The reporting in the U.S. is they're going to offer them tens of billions of dollars to build a commercial nuclear capability.

13:56I mean, this is madness. And the idea that somehow everything has changed for the Ayatollahs, maybe Donald Trump feels very good about the strikes in Iran, but the ideology of the Islamic Revolution hasn't changed. I don't expect this is going to go anywhere because to be truly satisfied that a country the size of Iran was really only engaged in peaceful nuclear activity requires an intrusive presence, whether it's the IAEA or foreign intelligence services, that the IAEA simply will never permit. Right. The IAEA, that's the International Atomic Energy Agency that monitors the development of nuclear energy around the world, including, up until the fighting last week, Iran.

14:41Gideon, do you agree with Ambassador Bolton about the likelihood of successful negotiations? Yeah, that sounds plausible to me. I mean, it's a bit head-spinning that they should, you know, you drop a massive bomb on somebody and then two weeks later sitting down for a friendly chat. But it seems unlikely to me that it's going to go anywhere. And I must say, here in Europe, you know, somebody was saying to me, you know, Trump has got to get rid of Wiggoff. He's not very good. You know, he's been charged with three big negotiations, none of which have gone anywhere. Can we have somebody a bit better?

15:15Ambassador Bolton, Barack Obama tried the JCPOA, the nuclear deal, in his first term. Trump tried more talks. Now he's bombed Iran. If the goal is to have the country not make a nuclear weapon, why do you think we haven't figured it out yet? We've tried peace. We've tried violence. Is there a right answer here? Well, I think part of it is a misperception of the Iranian regime. This is a group of medieval religious fanatics, and it's not just the religious side. It's an authoritarian, militaristic government. And when you're dealing with that kind of ideology, it's not like a Manhattan real estate deal.

15:55You know, if you can't build a building at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, well, maybe you can build it at 56th Street and Fifth Avenue or 55th or 54th. But that's not the way it goes with nuclear weapons. And the fatal mistake of the JCPOA was allowing Iran to have any uranium enrichment capability at all because it allows them to build up expertise quite easily to create a clandestine capability for enrichment and spin it up to weapons grade levels fairly quickly. Gideon, what do you think? What is the right answer here? Look, it was something that people have been struggling with for 20 years.

16:32And as you say, they hadn't really found a right answer. I mean, I must admit, sort of every international conference i went to for the last 20 years there was always an iran session and i've begun to sort of tune it out because it was always seemed to go round and round and round jcpoa negotiations etc but i did have a sort of wake-up moment about a year ago when there was yet another iran session and there was a french guy there who said you know i haven't looked at this dossier for a decade i used to work on i've been doing something else and i just kind of reopened it then boy you know the Iranians have got far further than we ever said we'd allow them.

17:07We, you know, we said we'd sort of have military action long before they got to this state. You know, what's happened? So I think there was this sense that certainly in the last, in recent years, without getting into, you know, whether it was the JCPOA that allowed it or getting out of the JCPOA, that they had got a lot closer than we were ever going to be comfortable with and a lot closer than we had said in the past we would tolerate. I want to thank our guest, John Bolton, is former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump and former Ambassador to the UN. Thank you so much, Ambassador Bolton.

17:41Thank you. And Gideon Rockman, he's the FT's Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator. Thanks so much, Gideon. Thank you. This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we've got a link to that in the show notes. We'll also have a link to Gideon Rockman's Rockman Review podcast there. Our show was mixed by Kelly Gary and produced by Henry Larson. Special thanks as always to Pierre Nicholson. I'm your host, Mark Filippino. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forges. Original music by Hannes Brown. And if you've stuck around this long, I want to tell you something.

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