Did Trump Surrender to Iran?

25:41They're not going they're not going to go back to war. But everyone knows that. And the fact that they would try to sell a report on the idea, well, we might go back to war. Right. And obviously, just to remind people, this is also the president that very adamantly campaigned on the fact that we would not engage in forever wars. Right now, they insist that this is not a forever war. It's a couple of months. He said, hey, you got to be patient with me. It's taking a little longer than I thought. But unfortunately, absent any real breakthroughs here, we are coming into a very long-term cycle of warfare.

26:17Tell me, let's shift the camera a little bit to the area where you've worked so hard and at so much risk, the Persian Gulf region and the greater Middle East. In your estimation, how does the outcome look from a Saudi point of view, from an Emirati point of view, from a Qatari point of view, from the point of view of other governments in the region? Almost as soon as the text of the agreement started to circulate, I started hearing from Gulf officials, in particular because there's a clause in there that talks about this$300 billion fund for reconstruction of Iran, and it says regional actors will contribute to it.

26:48And I heard from Saudi officials, I heard from Qatari officials and Emirati officials who were like, hell no, we are not going to be funding any reconstruction. They are absolutely dreaming. And I said, didn't they consult with you guys before putting this in? And they said, no, we haven't seen any of this text. This is the first time we're seeing it. They said, we've been consulted in the process, but we haven't seen the text. And so that was actually a surprise to a lot of them. And they are adamantly refusing. They were refusing to take part in this war to begin with. If you recall back in February, when all of this, when the discussions about possibly launching more on Iran began, Gulf allies who are host to U.S.

27:26bases not only insisted they didn't want to take part in the war, not only insisted that the U.S. not use the bases in their countries as launching points for this war, some of them even were reluctant to allow flyover rights for U.S. military jets because they did not want to be seen as assisting the U.S. or Israel in this war. And so you flash forward, you know, they came to a point where in the first couple of weeks, Ayatollah Kemenai was killed. And, you know, they were really taking out the senior leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The Gulf countries I spoke to and my senior sources there were like, okay, look, it's begun.

28:11At this point, there's no turning back. And at this point, they need to just finish this. They need to make sure that that nuclear program is decimated. They need to make sure that the really, really radical leadership is gone. And amazingly enough, now we're flash forwarding a couple months, much of that hasn't changed. The Gulf allies still believe that Iran is, while weakened, it is still a threat to their countries. They believe that the Ayatollah, the mullahs are still capable of dictating and really wreaking havoc in the region. They also believe that there's probably deeper grievances against them because they were seen, even though they were hit very hard, even though they were seen as not wanting to get involved in this, they believe that the Iranian government sees them as sort of an extension of the U.S.

29:04and Israel. The Emiratis, who are probably the most hawkish of all the Gulf countries, actually feel like enough wasn't done that they still want to see more leadership taken out. And this is one of the big concerns that even And Republican hawks have, you know, they share the Emiratis view where they say you have very similar circumstances to Venezuela here where we do not have regime change happen. And the same players are still involved. And if the same players are still involved, especially in the case of Iran, you have the same destabilization force and the same potential for no change in behavior.

29:39And so, again, we went through all of this. I interviewed Vice President Vance a few days ago before we're sitting here talking. It was in connection to his book. But I threw in a couple of non-book related questions right before we hung up the phone. And one of the things I asked him, I said, you were obviously the biggest skeptic. And yet here we are, we are on the cusp of having a deal, was it worth it? Was the economic pain worth it? Was the decimation of U.S. munitions worth it? You know, even the losses of lives of the service members that were killed, was it worth it to you? And he said, sorry, I got to go.

30:22And he hung up the phone. It was the end of the call. I salute him for that, because that's not an outright lie. Like, that's an evasion of the question. It wasn't just that the United States paid a lot of money for this outcome. It was that it was beaten. It was beaten. Four dozen aircraft, some of them manned. As you said, the service members dead and the Iranians. And the question was, would Iran still be shooting? Who was shooting last? And the United States gave up on this war with the Iranians still shooting. And the United States gave up on this war with the Iranians in control of the Strait of Hormuz and with a treaty that leaves them forever in effective control of the Strait of Hormuz.

30:57Do the regional governments know that? They must. They know that the Iranians are still, yeah, that the Iranians are still somewhat empowered. How does this look from the Israeli point of view? They invited the Israelis, pushed the war, invited the United States into the war, but they then became in a position of dependency on the United States. The Americans have abandoned them and are now, and President Trump is now saying one disagreeable thing about the Israelis after another and about Netanyahu personally. They must feel left in the lurch as much or more than anybody in the Persian Gulf. I would say that more than the Iranians right now, the Israelis are the wild card in this equation.

31:33And that is because the administration, while it has really pressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adhere to the terms in terms of a ceasefire, but also remember the text includes Lebanon as well, where the Israelis have launched not only strikes, but have taken territory in the south, that they are trying to rein him in and try to build on the ceasefire with maybe a more lasting peace. But they offer the caveat that this does not include, first of all, withdrawal from Lebanon, and this does not include Israel fighting back in self-defense. And so that, for me, leaves a major question mark because the entire premise of Israel launching this war was because Netanyahu argued that it was in self-defense, that Iran posed a threat to Israel and that Lebanon, well, Hezbollah specifically poses a threat to Israel.

32:37And so they have to do this in response. And so a week from now, two weeks from now, five months from now, if Israel decides Iran is threatening them, do they launch a full-scale attack again without the US at this point? That is a big question, and it can easily happen. And we have seen, although for the most part, Netanyahu will coordinate with Washington and will coordinate with President Trump and almost get permission in these cases. We have seen in recent years that he has not done that. It has aggravated Trump and it has really caused a friction in the relationship that we were not expecting in a Trump term.

33:19Here's another Iranian win that this agreement now creates or whatever we call it, this piece of paper creates a situation where Iran can order its Hezbollah proxy to hit Israel. And then one of two things happens. Either the Israelis take the punch, exposing themselves as weak, as revitalizing Hezbollah, which had been so damaged by Israel. In no world. In no world. Or the Israelis do something, and then every time they do something, President Trump, who always needs to blame somebody else for his problems, they widen the disparity between the government in Israel and the Trump administration and President Trump personally.

33:53So you either hit Israel and get away with it, or you drive a wedge between Israel and the United States. Either way, Iran and Hezbollah win. Either way, the United States and Israel lose. And as President Trump is demanding that Israel adhere to an agreement that not only do they not sign, but they weren't allowed to read. It is so plausible what you're describing right now. And obviously, Benjamin Netanyahu's political future is the big question mark. because so long, but as so long as he is the prime minister of Israel, I do not see him pumping the brakes. He is sort of the darling of the right wing in Israel and believes that this is Israel's moment, greater ambitions of territorial gains, but also eliminating what is perceived as the regional threats.

34:40Iran was the big elephant in the room there where, you know, this war was. And so he is the wild card in particular. It's not so much the Israeli government as it is Benjamin Netanyahu. So long as he is feeling emboldened enough that his political future even hangs on the ability to carry out these goals, territorial gain, eliminating these threats, perceived threats in the region. That is going to be the big question. Before the war began, various Middle Eastern players made huge financial investments in important people in the Trump administration. Steve Witkoff and his family, Jared Kushner, hundreds of millions of dollars from Emiratis, from the Saudis, the Qadaris sent a jumbo jet.

35:32But how, in your estimation, how much of what the United States has done in the region, especially since February 28th, but even before, is affected by the fact that the key players have accepted these vast sums of money? Something that is just so astonishingly shocking. And even if you don't think it's affected the players, what do people in the region think? I could probably spend the rest of your show talking about this topic. Go ahead. It's important. So, look, there is there's one thing that President Trump and a lot of these Gulf sheikhthams have in common, and that is that they operate in a very transactional way.

36:08They're less ideological than they are transactional. They're also wealthy, very wealthy from their oil riches. And that has made them a very natural partner for President Trump, both in his first term, but especially now in his second term. And over the course of that, remember, Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law, in the first term was the Middle East envoy, if you will. I mean, his title was something else, but let's just let's just call him that. And he was the one that was going around negotiating, including the Abraham Accords, which objectively were just an extraordinary effort where they got several countries to normalize relations with Israel, several Muslim and Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel.

36:50Saudi Arabia was the big one that they were aiming for. They did not succeed in that, neither did the Biden administration. But in the course of that time, Jared Kushner, who I did a profile of Jared in 2024, just before the election for the Wall Street Journal, very long one, about his business, but also interviewed him about potential conflicts of interest if his father-in-law were to be reelected at that time. And he, it was an on-the-record interview, obviously. And he insisted to me, said, you know what? The bottom line is I'm not breaking any laws and anyone who wants to suggest otherwise can come at me.

37:27And so that is the approach of the second Trump administration. You have ethical violations over here and you have law-breaking actions here. And they like to swim in the middle. They don't really care so much about the ethical element of it. They think that those ethical rules were written by the establishment, they're archaic, and they don't apply to the common sense approach of doing business, either domestically or in foreign policy matters. And so that transactional relationship that Jared Kushner has with the Gulfies, he's very close with a number of them, particularly Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, who is about the same age is Jared, they bonded.

38:14They talk on WhatsApp all the time. He has that kind of relationship with all of those leaders from his first term where he was trying to get diplomatic deals. And that continued into the firm that he established, the equity firm that he established, where he then continued those relationships in order to get access to their countries and other countries as well to do business deals. Of course, as President Trump went to get reelected the second, this second time around in 2024, or the third time he tried to get reelected, then the question became, you know, this is, this is a violation of ethics.

38:50What you call a conflict of interest problem, I call a business model. Right, right. And so that is, do the people in the region think they're okay with that? Oh, they love it. They don't care. No, no, they don't want these dreary Jimmy Carter, I can't accept a free sandwich from you types. They want someone who says half a billion dollars, bring it on. It won't affect me. No, sir. I won't be thinking about that half billion dollars of yours in my pocket at all when I talk to you. Foreign direct investments, keep the money flowing. Remember that those foreign direct investments into their countries are existential for them.

39:28Yes, they make a lot of money off of their hydrocarbons off of their oil. But the desperate effort by all of those countries, having lived in that part of the world for a time, they have been on a desperate mission, and I wrote about this early in the war, to diversify their economies. Dubai had a little bit of an edge because of the fact that it was seen as this glitzy liberal place on the Gulf, and so it did so with retail, with tourism, things like that. While Saudi Arabia did not have that, it definitely did try to lure investments of different kinds. And Jared Kushner kind of represented the kind of investments that they in the earlier years were trying to lure.

40:09Now they're trying to kind of do what Dubai is doing as well and liberalize in the process of doing so. This war exposed exactly why they've been trying to do that, because the minute that the Iranian bombs started flying, although they've been very lucky in the sense that the hits to their country have been minimal, exception being Qatar, which got hit pretty badly. It's gas reserve, it's gas got hit pretty badly. Tourism slowed down to almost a screeching halt. Retail was not selling because people weren't going out to the malls while they're seeing pops and explosions in the air. And they started to see, and of course their, their oil is not getting out either.

40:46And so they started to see the real vulnerabilities of their economic models. And so go and try to talk to a Saudi right now or an Emirati and tell them you shouldn't be doing business with Jared Kushner because that's a conflict of interest. They're going to be like, okay, sure thing. Well, might they say, wait a minute, we paid good money for American protection and we didn't get it. We paid good money to have influence over what your Iran policy was. But they did get it. They did get it. I'm going to push back on that. Their country, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, especially, I mean, I've been talking to friends constantly, friends with young children, are you guys okay?

41:22Are you doing okay? They say, it is miraculous, the effort. I mean, all those fancy gadgets they bought from the US, they worked. They were not getting hit. What about their investments, their more personal investments in Kushner and Whitcoff and Trump? Do they feel they have a return on those investments that they made in what you call conflict of interest? And some people might apply even harsher language to. In theory, I think in the short term, there's definitely some irritation and some bad blood, but their hope is that we snap back after all of this is done. Even if tensions kind of remain at a simmer, as long as there's a ceasefire, then they can snap back and go to the way things were.

42:03That might be naive. That might be naive. I don't know a lot of people who are desperate to go back and hit up the malls in Dubai right now while things are still uncertain. And so that might be naive. However, I do think that they believe that it could snap back. And I think that the jury will be out until we see what happens in the coming months and years and whether or not they really are able to snap back. If they can't snap back in the way they did, then I think you're going to have a recalibration of the relationship. But I will say this. I lived in the Gulf during the economic crisis of 2008.

42:39I moved there in 2008. I moved to Dubai. I was in the region already, but I moved to Dubai and Abu Dhabi in 2008, 2009, and I was there until 2012. There was a sense that Dubai was done, that the whole Gulf was done, that this effort to, you know, all they had was hydrocarbons. That was the only thing that kept them going. And everything else, all these other efforts and real estate and tourism and retail, all of that was just a cake dream, that it wasn't going to work out. That's not what this part of the world is for. And obviously it all crumbled so fast after the economic crisis. And so everyone thought they were done.

43:18They bounced back. They bounced back even stronger than before. It took a few years, but they did. And so I think they are hoping that the lessons learned from sort of that crisis might propel them this time around and that they're more equipped this time around to bounce back after this conflict. But obviously, a war is different than a financial crisis. So we'll see if people really do want to go back. I'm going to be very interested in watching that. I want to keep focusing on this question, though, of the fact that, I mean, it's so astonishing. It's so incredible. We're used to it because it's been a decade of this, but no previous generation of Americans were ever used to this idea that the people who are making policy for a region are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy people, governments, investments that don't look very market-based at all.

44:02Even if they were market-based, it would still be disturbing, but they look either like bribes or like extortion. I mean, if you're in Abu Dhabi, if you're in Dubai, if you're in Qatar, and you know that your American counterparty is on your payroll, how does that make you think about the United States? I don't think they care. I really don't. I think they see this as the way business is done. And if you talk to Jared Kushner or if you talk to President Trump, even they will tell you that in certain parts of the world, this is how things are done. Yeah. This used to be one of the parts of the world where things were not done that way.

44:39And they argue that it set the United States back, that it is not a realistic approach to doing business in the world, in some parts of the world especially. and drawing a line in the sand between, you know, ethical conduct and unethical conduct was not beneficial to the United States. Yeah, I think I find that argument more interesting. The question is, he is accepting money. Is that detrimental? And when someone says, no, it is not a problem that he is accepting money, that's an interesting argument. But when someone argues that it is not a problem that I am accepting money, that's not an argument.

45:21That's just a grab. I mean, I'm not saying that you're wrong. I'm saying the Trump administration has need. You're saying that the people who are accepting money see no important problem in them accepting the money. Yeah, they think that as long as they're not breaking the laws. As long as they're not breaking any laws, then everything's social, right? Right. Well, and one of the reasons they're not breaking laws, of course, is because the laws don't apply to the president and the laws are not enforced against his family. So even if they are breaking the laws, who's going to do anything about it?

45:53That's right. Yeah. Oh, man. I have to salute your years of coverage of this region and your deep expertise and your knowledge of the players and your great work for the Atlantic. It is so important, and I'm so grateful to have you as a colleague. Thanks for talking. Likewise, David. Thank you so much.

46:20A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto the David Frum show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

46:57It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

47:08Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Vivian Salama for joining me today on The David Fromm Show.

47:43As I mentioned at the top of the show, my book this week is Anne Patchett's Bel Canto, a novel published in 2001, touches on powerful themes of community, loss, and grief. It's a book that won all kinds of accolades when it was published in 2001, all of which it deserves. I found it a very touching and affecting book, except for an ending that really troubled me. And the ending is what I'm going to discuss today. So if you haven't read the book and you don't want a spoiler alert, govern yourself advisedly because I'm going to reveal the whole plot and the surprise ending in order to discuss both.

48:16So here's the story. It's based on a true incident that took place in the middle 1990s in Peru when terrorists seized the residents of the Japanese ambassador to Peru. That terrorist seizure was ended with a police raid that killed the hostage takers. So the story in Bel Canto is similar but not exactly the same. It takes place in an unnamed South American country that is seeking foreign investment. In order to get the foreign investment, they have invited a Japanese businessman and his entourage to come to a dinner at the home of the vice president of the country, where they will wine and dine the Japanese businessman and try to entice his corporation to invest in the country.

48:53The Japanese businessman doesn't like to travel and doesn't have serious plans to make the investment, but he is an enormous enthusiast for opera. And in order to win him, to woo him, the country has also invited the greatest soprano of the age, Roxanne Koss, to come at vast expense and sing six songs after dinner for the delight of the businessman and to get him to the dinner to discuss the foreign investment. Everything goes beautifully. The flowers, the night is beautiful, the flowers are beautiful, the settings are beautiful, paintings are there from the National Art Gallery in the home of the vice president.

49:25There is one hitch at the beginning, which is the president of the country, who's supposed to preside over the event, he bails. And the reason he bails is because the president is an addict of a soap opera. And that night's episode is an especially exciting one. And he doesn't want to miss the exciting episode. So he doesn't show up. With the result that when terrorists burst in through the air conditioning ducts to seize the president, he's not there because he's home watching a soap opera. And so as a very unsatisfying consolation prize, they take prisoner all the other attendees. the vice president of the country, the Japanese businessman and his entourage, the opera singer, many other people.

50:05And the novel unfolds what happens next. Now, the novel doesn't have surprises exactly about the plot. We learn early on that almost all the hostage takers will be killed. With that knowledge, we watch over weeks the formation of a new kind of community among the hostage takers and their victims. It's a community that becomes quite intimate in a lot of ways. Now, this community begins with enormous inequalities of wealth and standing. The guests at the party are corporate executives. They are ambassadors. They are wealthy people from the host country. They are all kinds of people. They are important people.

50:41They are wearing tuxedos, and the women are wearing ball gowns. The men have expensive watches. The hostage takers are from the most impoverished classes in the country. Many of them are very young. They speech Quechua, not Spanish as their first language. Some of them are illiterate. But gradually, this new community forms, and they're bound together by two connections. The first is the Japanese businessman has brought with him his translator, a man named Jen, a uniquely gifted person who's able to learn languages at the drop of a hat. He speaks not only his native Japanese and English and Spanish, but also French and Russian.

51:16He has some Czech. He learns languages, again, the way you would learn the solution to a crossword puzzle. And he forms a kind of multilingual node that connects people through the miracle of language. And then Roxanne Cost, the great singer, she begins to practice to keep her scales going. And her music becomes a bond that unites them. Art and literature become the bonds of connection through this seemingly unequal community. And as the community develops, we discover among the hostage takers unsuspected skills. One of the young boys turns out to be quite gifted as a chess player. Another has a beautiful voice and receives singing lessons and may be on his way, possibly, to a great career in opera of his own.

51:58And as the community develops, even more intimate relations form. There are two love affairs that break out. One between the Japanese businessman and the opera singer, Mr. Huzakawa and Roxanne. And the other between Jen, the translator, and one of the young girls who's among the hostage takers, Carmen. Jen and Carmen fall in love, the opera singer and Mr. Huzakawa fall in love. They actually are able to find ways to spend the nights with each other. The women have all been released early from the hostage-taking situation. The staff of the house has been released early. And so we have all the men, the hostage-takers, the hostage-taken men, and then a couple of women among the hostage-takers and the opera singer.

52:39So it's a very unequal community of men and female, but just enough that love can sprout. And so it does between the Japanese businessman, Mr. Hasakawa, and the opera singer, and between Jen and Carmen, the hostage-taker. Then comes the police raid, which is described with vivid brutality of just mowing people down, no attempt to take prisoners. Bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet. And one bullet, the same bullet, kills both Mr. Hosokawa and Carmen. Mr. Hosokawa actually is trying to shield Carmen at the moment of the police raid, and the same bullet kills them both. Thus wrecking the symmetry of the two love pairs.

53:14The opera singer loses her lover, and Jen, the translator, loses his lover. and that's the end of the main part of the book. And then comes the epilogue and it's some months later and we're in the city of Luca and Jen and the opera singer are getting married. They have fallen in love after the loss of their mutual counterparts. And it's really, just as the violence of the hostage taking is shocking, to me, this ending was terribly shocking. Now there's a big lively dispute about how to read this ending. The book has been around for a quarter century and many people have had the same kind of shock reaction to it.

53:48And one move to deal with the ending is to say, you know what? The love affairs were the product of a highly abnormal environment, the intense pressure of the hostage taking. And as soon as the hostage taking ended, well, of course, the love affairs were exposed in their unreality and a new pairing could form very naturally. Another is to say that there's a kind of sardonic or cynical move practiced by the author where she is casting doubt on the reality of any human connection, apart from these more metaphysical realities of art and literature. They're real, but human beings are not. But I found myself wondering whether the author maybe believed, as a lot of people do, that human life is kind of dispensable and that human beings fill roles in each other's lives.

54:34And when one of the roles is vacated, a new person can be invited in to fill the old role. There wasn't something actually in a novel that had so much heart, something kind of heartless about the ending. Did the author understand that or did she not? That's the thing I'm left haunted by and wondering about. And maybe the power of this work of art is that an ending that feels so curdling after the power of the intense experience we've lived through with the hostages and the hostage takers, maybe that's a way of jolting us and asking us, well, do we accept this ending? Because maybe what you just want to do if you're, and if I ever read the book again, is read all the way to the epilogue and stop there and leave the story as tragedy rather than with the appended marriage and happy ending attached so awkwardly to the very end.

55:23Anyway, I do recommend the book. Don't miss it. But if you're like me, you may want to skip the epilogue. Thanks so much for joining me today on The David From Show. Thanks to all of you who share the program and like it and communicate the word on social media. As ever, if you're minded to support this program and the work we do, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic, where you'll see my work and that of all of my colleagues. See you next week here on The David Fromm Show. Bye-bye.

56:13This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grying. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto the David Frum show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

56:58not just the obvious stuff but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe how we talk to each other how we see ourselves and our neighbors if you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online Galaxy Brain is worth your time it's thoughtful, surprising and a little unsettling in the very best way find it wherever you listen or watch