Hurry up and wait: Trump’s choice on Iran

0:28The Economist firms. So why do Indian companies lack innovation and its universities publish little in the way of world-class research? Our correspondent investigates. And 50 years ago today, a cinematic institution was released, and with it, a two-note melody of dread. But half a century later, Jaws might not be the film you remember, and the hero not who you once thought.

1:01First up, though.

1:09For days, the top of the news agenda had been that President Donald Trump was mulling the idea of joining Israel in bombing Iran's nuclear sites. Would he? Wouldn't he? It seems like that's where he likes the news cycle to sit. I mean, you don't know that I'm going to even do it. You don't know. I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do. I can tell you this. Then another familiar move, a delay, conveyed in an official statement read out at the White House yesterday. Based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.

1:49Will he? Won't he? Stay tuned. President Donald Trump was elected on a platform of ending wars. And yeah, big American media outlets are reporting that this president of peace has approved attack plans on Iran. And he has now just taken the agonizing decision about whether to give the order to go. David Rennie is our geopolitics editor and writes Telegram, our column on international affairs. And that decision about whether to go to war is causing a noisy public debate among Donald Trump's most fervent supporters. But it's also, probably more importantly, pulling the president in different directions.

2:29We know that he prefers deals to risking regime change. But he's also been adamant that Iran cannot get a nuclear bomb. David, we spoke to our defense editor, Shishank Joshi, on Monday about the degree to which America might be needed to stop Iran getting a bomb. I guess the question here is about the intelligence, a story we've seen before. Or is Mr. Trump convinced that America may need to become involved, that Iran is in fact close to becoming a nuclear power? Listeners will say this is a movie that we have seen before, right? Claims about intelligence, weapons of mass destruction. There's a couple of bookends to this, I think.

3:06One is people are skeptical about Israel saying that Iran is weeks away from a nuclear bomb because Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that many times before. This time, again, Israel has said that they launched this war based on intelligence, that something new was happening, that Iran had reached the point of no return. And so there is skepticism. But it should also be said that Israel has been sharing its intelligence with other Western countries, probably because they know that they have a job to do to convince them. And some brilliant colleagues of ours at The Economist spoke to actually an authoritative source who really has good information about this Israeli dossier that is being shared.

3:40And there are two big claims that Iran's scientists have hidden away nuclear material that we didn't know about and that they are accelerating their work towards building a bomb. And in particular, they've been working with missile scientists about how to attach a warhead to the top of a missile. That's the kind of the two big claims that have been shared with other governments. And so the read here is that the Trump side of things is convinced them by this dossier. Well, it's Trump world, right? So we're all parsing, in effect, once again, the words of the president, who is the guy who matters more than anyone else.

4:17So skeptics of the rush to war will point to the fact that the director of national intelligence, at least in theory, the most important overseer of the American intelligence machine, Tulsi Gabbard, said in a public hearing in March that the view of the intelligence community was that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. And that's been thrown back at the Americans. But we then had footage from Air Force One where Donald Trump said he didn't care what Tulsi Gabbard thinks. So we're dealing with the usual Merck. There is authoritative reporting from some big American news outlets that some of the American spy agencies are skeptical of the Israeli claims.

4:51But we're also told that President Trump thinks that there are new claims in there. And so we're sort of really in that very uncomfortable place of we have new facts potentially, and there is room for how you interpret them. And apart from the intelligence and trying to figure out exactly what it's telling us, you said that all of this is pulling Mr. Trump in a couple of directions. What do you mean? Well, I wrote a column this week talking to people who had worked on Iran in the first Trump administration to try and get a sense of Donald Trump's worldview, particularly this question of regime change.

5:22Because as one of them actually told me, when Donald Trump left the Obama era nuclear deal with Iran that was meant to choke off Iran's nuclear programs, the JCPOA, and then imposed these incredibly tough economic sanctions that Trump world called maximum pressure. The assumption from allies was that this was basically just a cover for regime change, that America was basically trying to put so much pressure on the Iranian Islamic leadership that they would basically just lose power. There would be some sort of uprising because of economic misery and pressure. He said, this guy who covered Iran policy for Trump in the first term, that no, Donald Trump, you need to believe him.

5:57Donald Trump really genuinely believes that America's record of trying to use its power to reshape the Middle East and to topple dictators and even try and replace them with something closer to a Western democracy has basically been a disaster. And so he genuinely does not want to risk the power vacuum in Tehran that would follow regime change. And he also has very complicated views of war. He sees conflict as wasteful and irrational. He's said many times in public, he doesn't understand why people would go and die in a war for some kind of great cause. He thinks that's kind of dumb. And that doesn't mean that he's a pacifist, though.

6:32He, remember, was willing to kill one of the most important generals that ran had, Qasem Soleimani, with a drone strike during his first term. And so one of the people who worked for him in the first term said to me, he hates war, but he's not afraid of war. And so we're back to this kind of balance in his mind between, frankly, bad choices. His real dilemma is, do you drag America into a war, or do you risk Israel trying to do this on its own, not actually finishing the job in that awful phrase that we hear at the moment. And then I guess the idea is, you know, a maddened but only wounded, half-broken Iran sprints for a bomb using some facilities and material that we don't know about.

7:12But is it safe to conflate these questions of stopping Iran's nuclear program and the question of regime change? Can America make a military intervention at this stage aimed only at the nuclear program without doing anything further to try to mess with Iranian politics? I guess an unsatisfactory answer to that question is that Donald Trump must be hoping that he doesn't have to choose, that he can take out Iran's nuclear program without leaving complete chaos and triggering a revolution in Iran. And there he would certainly be very different in his views from some of his key advisors. Again, in the first administration, we saw one of his top advisors, John Bolton, the then National Security Advisor, absolutely clear that the logic of leaving that Obama-era nuclear deal, the JCPOA, and applying the maximum pressure sanctions, that that was all about regime change, that actually you simply could never trust the Islamic regime in Iran, and therefore only removing them could give you the security that they would never get a bomb.

8:13Donald Trump never went to that place. And John Bolton told me from my column that he was frustrated in the first time President Trump didn't follow that logic to its final conclusion. He didn't want regime change. He just wanted Iran not to have a bomb. I think the one thing we do know is that Donald Trump is very different from other American presidents who finally came to believe that toppling a terrible dictatorship was the best thing to do with American power. What advisors to Donald Trump told me was that he has a fundamentally, what one of them called a club of leaders worldview, that if you've got to the top of the greasy pole and become a world leader or a national leader, he does not care whether you got elected to that job or whether you murdered your way there.

8:53That to him, countries are black boxes, you see the leader at the top and you negotiate with them. So if Donald Trump decides to send the American planes in, and if that then leads to the toppling of the Iranian regime, I think it's safe to assume that there will be deep anxiety in Donald Trump's White House about what comes next, and only maybe rather muted cheers. Is it even certain that American intervention, even at a high level now, really does kill off the Iranian nuclear program and not drive the feverish drive for a bomb after instead. So Jason, if you really want to end on a not very cheerful note, you can make a case that the lesson for Iran, that their mistake was to get close to a bomb but not actually have a bomb.

9:36Because you jump across the other side of the world to Asia, an even nastier regime in North Korea has a bomb, has more than one bomb. It got there without being attacked. And it's probably never going to be bombed by its neighbors, let alone the United States, because it's already a nuclear power. And so that's a real concern, is that this acute crisis in Iran is actually the first glimpse of a new world in which new and really dangerous incentives exist for any number of countries to think, if I can just get a bomb before I'm stopped, that in this dangerous world where the Americans are no longer the global policemen that we used to know, maybe a nuke is the thing that everyone needs to have.

10:15David, thanks very much for your time. Thanks for having me on. Beneath Mr. Trump's will he, won't he is, of course, a question about Iran's nuclear capabilities. Will they, won't they get a bomb? My colleagues over on Checks and Balance, our subscriber-only show on American politics, dive deeply into that question this week. For a lot of people, there are strong echoes of the debate around the Iraq invasion in 2003. The evidence about Iran's capability and intention as a threshold nuclear power is a lot clearer. It's lying in plain sight in comparison to the evidence about Saddam's non-existent bomb program.

10:56This is Iraq war deja vu. We were spectacularly wrong then. It wasn't a cakewalk. It not only mired the United States in a forever war, the United States failed. Checks and balance will be out later today. Stay tuned.

11:40no shortage of highly skilled workers. So why does India find it so hard to innovate? In the past 10 years, India's electronic manufacturing industry has grown almost fivefold. This includes making smartphones, chargers, basically any kind of electronic components that you can think about. Shailesh Chitnis is a global business writer at The Economist. And so for firms that are trying to reduce their dependence on China as a manufacturing base, India is a pretty attractive option. Apple expects to assemble almost all the iPhones that it sells in the US in India by 2026. So that sounds like a pretty promising move in India's hopes to move up the value chain in its manufacturing.

12:27It absolutely is. It's a great opportunity, but there's a catch. For India to be able to actually make that leap and to be a viable alternative to China, it really needs to up its game when it comes to innovation. If you look at the raw numbers, India currently spends around$71 billion on R &D. And that is just to give you some estimates that's less than a tenth of what the US spends and similar numbers for China as well. So very, very low compared to America and China. Its R &D intensity, which is defined as the share of spending on R &D relative to your GDP is only around 0.7%. This is really small.

13:07US by comparison spends almost 3.2 % and China around 2.6%. And both economies are massive. And really, it shouldn't be this way. Because India is in some senses a paradox. Because it has the largest number of software developers in the world, tech bosses in most Western tech firms from Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, you name it, most of them are Indian origin. But its own tech industry has not really participated in the AI boom. India's pharmaceutical industry is huge. It is one of the largest manufacturers of generic drugs in the world. Yet India does not make any novel medicines or has produced very few.

13:48And in terms of research publications, its researchers publish at a prolific rate, but the quantity as measured by various indices are not that great. The ingredients are there, but the output just isn't coming out. And why is that? Why is India lagging? So there are a few reasons for that. First and foremost is the quality of research coming out of its universities is not that great. Quantity is high, quality is not that great. And specifically when it comes to academic output, the industry and academia research collaboration is not that strong, which is typically what you would see, for example, in a really good way in the US with the National Science Foundation and even in tech collaborations with universities.

14:27Private firms in India do not invest that much in R &D. When you look at the numbers in terms of how much of their revenue as a share of the revenue they're investing in R &D, it's really, really small. And so a combination of these two things really holds India back. And so to put some numbers to it, if you look at the top 15 companies in India that are non-financial firms. In 2023, they invested around$6 billion in R &D. Google alone invested$45 billion that year. Those are extraordinary numbers. And are they true across the board of Indian sectors? If you look at the pharmaceutical sector, its R &D spending related to sales is higher than the average.

15:08But there again, it's mostly focused on process innovation for making generics, for manufacturing, and there's nothing to knock it down. That is important. But at some point, you would expect industries to start to move up the value chain, invest in novel drugs. So that hasn't happened. In other sectors like automotive manufacturing, chemical, you go through the list, the numbers are really low. From what you were just saying, it sounds like if there was more money put into R &D, then these firms and these sectors would be able to achieve their potential. That is correct. But with some caveats, it's more money from the right sources as well.

15:43So it's not a matter of government just continuing to invest more money in R &D with the same incentive structures that we have talked about. I think the lopsided nature of low private spending, high government spending, that proportion needs to change. Now to give a model where it can work, there is an example where India does invest in R &D and that is the space program. So India launched and landed a vehicle on the moon. Its space program has been very successful in terms of relative to the dollars that is put in. And one of the reasons, of course, the space organization has been quite efficient, but they've also created a platform whereby other private companies can use the platform to launch satellites, to build on it.

16:22And so it's a really good example of industry and government and research partnership, the kind we're talking about. Now, to be fair, this is a fairly captive industry. It's a very special case space where there are different incentives. But I think that shows that if the incentives are there, there's no reason why it cannot be applied in other areas. What needs to happen for that model to be applied and for India to reach its potential, as you say? I think a few things. So obviously, the knee-jerk reaction always is the government, you need to have more funds from the government. But I think in this case, that is not the primary impediment.

16:55A few people I spoke to, for example, Susan Thomas, who's from XKRD Forum, which is a think tank in Mumbai, what she mentioned was quite interesting, which is the way research grants are given to universities, that needs to change. So today, for example, a lot of it is driven by a fear of failure. If you fail in your research, chances of getting that fund again are not that high. That needs to change. And then secondly, I think there's no excuse for Indian firms not to up their game when it comes to investing in R &D. I think it needs to move away from that mindset of process innovation, service innovation to truly now start to build more innovative products.

17:31And that I think is a bigger mindset shift that needs to happen. But I think it's long overdue. Shalesh, thank you so much. Really interesting. Thank you for having me.

17:53That relentless rumbling music, like a heartbeat gone awry.

18:01Should I do that again? Andrew Miller is a senior writer at The Economist and writes our backstory column. Steven Spielberg's saga of Man v Shark turns 50 today, but Jaws is not the film you remember.

18:22Jaws is a story of two halves. In the first, a great white shark terrorises Amity Island, a pretty New England resort. In the second half, the local police chief pursues the killer shark on the waves, in company with a bumptious marine biologist and an unhinged shark hunter. Like the plot of the film, the tale of how Jaws was made is also a story of man triumphing over nature. In this case, Steven Spielberg, who was then 27. Jaws made his career but only after his choice to shoot on the Atlantic almost wrecked it He ran way over budget and schedule Boats sank when they weren't meant to Actors feuded and drank Yet Jaws became the prototype summer blockbuster and a model for all the big splash action extravaganzas that have followed Jaws isn't the film that many of us remember It's the Macbeth of horror flicks a drama known for lurid violence that's actually intimate and pensive at heart.

19:30Famously, the biggest hiccup on the shoot was the replica sharks. There were several of them, all called Bruce after Spielberg's lawyer. Because they malfunctioned so much, you wind up not seeing the shark until well over an hour of the movie has passed. Flashes of Finn that weren't menacing enough to scare viewers away from seas and swimming pools and even bathtubs But even aside from the curiously absent shark, Jaws is a kind of brooding, contemplative film. We spend a lot of time with Brody, the police chief, in the company of his wife and children. And the moral anchor of the film is a boozy, below-decks chat during which Quint, the shark hunter, delivers a haunting monologue.

20:17And he recalls going down with the USS Indianapolis, a real ship that was torpedoed after it had ferried bits of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And Quint recalls seeing many of his shipmates devoured by sharks. As well as being a quieter film than you might think, it's also a much funnier one. You're going to need a bigger boat.

20:46Jaws is full of comic cameos and vignettes. Some of the laughs are nervous titters, but there's also something profound, I think, about how the funny and the frightening parts of the film overlap. Both kind of hatch from human vanity and frailty, the conceit of would-be demigods made of clay. Watch the film again, and in particular, you may conclude that the real hero of Jaws is not who it first seemed. For generations of fans, the hero was Brody, the police chief. Brody is an everyman who loves his kids and likes a drink and a cuddle with his wife. He has flaws but also a conscience and the guts to vanquish the monster.

21:33Brody was an apt champion in the wake of the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. Rather than covering up his part in letting a child paddle to his doom, he accepts it. These days, I think Brody has a rival for the title of the Hero of Jaws. You dread the shark, but you also long to see him. And you're also kind of aligned with the shark's perspective for quite a lot of the film. Its signature technique is the shark's eye view, where you look up as if from underwater at the legs of the holidaymakers paddling in the sea above you. Let's be honest. When you're looking up at those innocent swimmers, you want some of them to be eaten, because after all, if they weren't, there'd be no movie.

22:21It has to be said that, unlike a lot of people in the movie, the shark is extremely good at what he does. Now, just as you can't lower a shark cage into the same ocean twice, 50 years on, the picture is different, because since the movie's release has come half a century of environmental despoliation, which, as it happens, has been especially hard on sharks. Their global population is thought to have fallen by about 70%. These days, it seems to me that the elemental source of fear in the film, that the ocean is really the shark's domain, kind of tugs your sympathies towards him. The shark, in a way, is really only getting his revenge in early.

23:05Today, it seems to me, the hero of Jaws is Jaws. the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.

23:39Our creative producer is William Warren, and our senior producer is Rory Galloway. Our producers are Henrietta McFarlane, Benji Guy, and Jonathan Day, and our assistant producer is Anne Hanna, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias and Maria Clara Montoya. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for The Weekend Intelligence, an exploration of trauma, war, and pain, as experienced through 48 dentist visits in seven countries.

24:09Thank you.