Is Iran beating Trump in his own war?

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0:32This is a Global Player original podcast. If they do anything to stop the flow of oil or goods within the Strait of Hermuz, they will be hit by the world's most powerful military 20 times harder than they have been hit thus far. That is Caroline Levitt, Donald Trump's spokesperson in the White House yesterday. today. That's all well and good. But why has the world's most powerful military shown itself to be singularly incapable of stopping attacks in the Straits of Hormuz? The bigger question is, who now controls this war? Donald Trump wants it to be over. But is Iran now pulling all the strings?

1:14Welcome to the News Agents.

1:20the news agents it's john it's emily it's lewis and uh as we were saying there uh so much of the focus on the war is now about who controls and whether anyone can control against the iran the highly strategic strait of humus as we've been uh talking about for the last two weeks where so much of the world's oil and gas flows. Three ships were hit in the last 24 hours by unknown projectiles in the Straits abutting Iran. Two of those ships have sustained damage. Another, which the Thai Navy has identified as a Thai bulk carrier, has caught fire, forcing the crew to evacuate. Meanwhile, the US Department of War has said that it has eliminated 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the straits.

2:07That's despite the fact that Donald Trump had initially said there had been no reports of Iran placing mines. And meanwhile, the Israeli military is saying it has begun a wide scale wave, whatever that means, of strikes on targets in Iran and Lebanon, as at a time when Iran is itself launching missiles and drones across the Gulf, including towards Israel. It is a funny way of showing, as Donald Trump said, what just yesterday or the day before, that this war was very nearly complete. Yes. And what you've got at the moment is Donald Trump trying to lower the oil price by saying this war is very nearly complete.

2:45And almost as if in a pantomime, you've got Iran saying, oh, no, it's not. And Iran has launched its most intensive bombardment since the beginning and has shown just how easy it is to close the Straits of Hormuz and just how difficult it is for America to defend it. And there was a really interesting, I was listening to the news yesterday, late afternoon, I hear a breaking news snap and it is that the US Energy Secretary has said that a US warship has successfully kind of escorted an oil tanker through the Straits of Hormuz, only to delete that tweet about 10 or 15 minutes later. And so you can see oil price goes down on news that American military is escorting, goes up again once that tweet is deleted.

3:33And I think the fact of the matter is that they may have sunk these 16 mine laying vessels, but you could have a rickety old Dow with a couple of mines on board and you throw them over the side. You're calling a rickety old Dow. I'm calling you a rickety old Dow. You can have a rickety old Dow, throw a couple of mines over the side and you have mined the Straits of Hormuz. Yeah, I think Iran is playing with Trump now because they've realised that the thing he cares most about is the price of oil. That all the stuff that was talked about before, whether it was regime change, helping protesters, liberating the Iranian people was complete bullshit.

4:09And actually the thing that will motivate him one way or another is the price of oil. And now we've heard from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in other words, the kind of body of police that control the whole regime, that it will determine the end of the war. And they are talking about pushing up the price of a barrel of oil to$200. dollars. So all they have to do, frankly, is not bomb other countries in the Middle East, which you could argue didn't particularly work out in their favour. It created a lot more enmity without actually hurting America, or particularly Israel, who has the Iron Dome defence system.

4:53But all they actually have to do is disrupt what is coming through the Hormuz Straits to push Trump into the arms of Putin, great, so we get our oil from Russia now, or to make people at home see just how little respect they have for what Trump is trying to achieve in Iran and the Marines. Just a brief addition to that. I mean, Donald Trump's the art of the deal is you don't show weakness and vulnerability because that's where you pounce. And he did. And Donald Trump has shown weakness and vulnerability over his concern about the oil price and the Iranians have pounced. I think this embarrassing episode now sort of really changes the character of this war, because obviously what we've seen over the course of the year so far is Trump reveling in the sheer muscularity of his power.

5:40And we saw that in Venezuela and we saw that at the start of this war. This could now actually become there is a there is a risk, I think, that not only is nothing really achieved by the war, which is kind of, I think, where we thought it was going. But actually that America becomes highly embarrassed by the war, that it becomes a point of foreign policy embarrassment for the United States. Not least because, I mean, one way of literally measuring who the superpower is in the world is basically any given moment in kind of modern global history is who controls and regulates and controls sort of access to the seas, who keeps trade around the world flowing.

6:19That used to be the British Empire. And then after the Second World War, it became the United States. They basically made sure that they kept sea and shipping lanes open. If the US can't do that, if it can't, it's shown that it can't do that. And not only can it not do that because Iran is, you know, deeply, deeply powerful, but it can't do it because it can't even stop the Iranians basically firing off a few drones and a few missiles, which leaves this crucial shipping lane exposed. Then I think it does become a real question and a real question around actually American power in the world and a proper sort of expose of its hollowness as a superpower.

6:56Yeah, and an addendum to that, this pincer movement, as reported in the last few minutes by CNN, is that Russia is actually giving Iran specific advice about drone warfare to help it in its war against Israel and the US. In other words, Russia helps Iran with drone warfare. Iran then closes the Hormuz Straits. It pushes up the price of oil. Then America turns to Russia to get the oil. You've got this perfect economic and physical warfare sort of, you know, vicious circle, which is that Russia ends up being the biggest benefactor in all this, because suddenly America is turning to Russia for its oil as Russia is helping Iran.

7:40You see, what we are seeing at the moment is the enormous power of the US military to bomb from the skies. And you go back to the Keir Starmer kind of quote from the very beginning of this, when he says you can't exercise regime change from the skies. Yeah, you can do all that bombing and they've got freedom. The air defence systems of Iran have been shot to pieces. America controls the skies. It does not control the Strait of Hormuz, which is the key battleground in this. And it cannot control the Strait of Hormuz. It just takes one iradian speedboat to go out and cause absolute pandemonium. And if people fear that their ships are going to be attacked, as three have been this morning, then that is why so much is at stake on this particular thing.

8:26Forget Tehran, forget Isfahan, forget all the other places that have been bombed. The Straits of Hormuz is the Trump card that Iran has. Listen to Newt Gingrich, a Trump supporter, talking on Fox News. Look, there are three huge challenges that this administration has tackled. The first is that, and they should have frankly moved on this on day one, they have to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. Yes. I don't care what it costs. If they can't keep it open, this war will in fact be an American defeat before very long because the entire world, including the American people, will react to the price of oil if the straits stays closed right now so that was newt gingrich the former speaker of the house just as kind of an aside the person he was talking to the presenter of the show uh larry cudlow who was going yes yes was the director of trump's national economic council uh in the first term so there you have two people who are pretty solid with trump saying you've kind of what on earth's going on this is what i mean i mean you know there's just such a paradox or sort of disconnect here right between as ever between trump's rhetoric and the reality on the ground trump has launched a war he's killed the supreme leader been replaced by a younger version of himself he's declared victory while simultaneously allowing what is at best a regional power to close the most strategically important waterway in the world right and so and and as you say john not um with sort of great military might not with a superb kind of world-class military arsenal at its disposal but using drones which probably cost like a fraction of 1 % of an American Navy warship, right?

10:13So the US is basically, what it's showing at the moment is, and I think this is why Trump's really got to get control of this, is that right now what it looks like is that it can destroy things all day long, can do that endlessly, but it cannot guarantee the flow of oil. The flow of oil and American power guaranteeing the flow of oil is literally the thing that the post-war order and American power is based upon. And look, if this goes on, I mean, he wouldn't be the first American president to be humbled in Iran. Right. Jimmy Carter's presidency never recovered as a result of the Iranian hostage crisis.

10:46Right. He wouldn't be the first president. It wasn't Carter's fault in that case, but he wouldn't be the first president to launch a foreign military adventure and for his presidency to founder upon it. Yeah, I mean, the Carter thing is really interesting because that goes back not just to the hostage taking, but to the fact that he didn't realise how unstable the Shah of Iran was. You know, in 78, the year before he was actually turfed off, he talked about Iran and America being the closest of allies. They celebrated together. He was invited over. They thought that he had decades to go. You know, this was a regime he couldn't see being undermined.

11:24And I think it's a very similar thing that America, maybe the West, quite often undermines what's actually going on in Iran because we don't go further than the surface and understanding it. I mean, to the point about oil, we're now hearing G7 nations saying, yep, we need to have a sort of collective release of oil from reserves. This is what we're going to do now. We're going to go to try and sort of dig out from behind the radiator, as it were, to cope with the soaring oil prices. they haven't got very much in reserves. The place that's got all the reserves? China, right? So once again... They're always on top, aren't they?

12:00Well, they think about these things. You know, there is something... And I hope this doesn't come across as, you know, a sort of celebration of, you know, enemies here. It is not that we think China's doing great. It's not that we think Iran's doing great. It is just that they tend to think about things in a more strategic way, clearly than the Trump administration has, right? And when China tells you that they can keep going for months and months and months on their oil reserves and the G7 is looking around, sort of desperately trying to put another 5p in the gas meter, it tells you where we are.

12:35Also, all the Iranians have to do. I mean, the objectives are so different, right? I mean, Trump set profound objectives for all of this. He set the bar so high. He basically said, not just the Ayatollah, but the whole regime has to go and change. He said that at the very start. All the Iranians have to do is survive. All they have to do is survive and expose, at least for their own propaganda and rhetorical purposes, the emptiness of American power. And that will just be a massive win for them because they can then probably use this to fortify themselves in place for longer. To that point, you know, it does strike me that obviously when we talk about the Iranians, we talk about the IRGC, the regime, the poor Iranian people who we spent so much time thinking about at the beginning of this year, who Trump indeed encouraged to rise up.

13:18You know, we've had this story that's been taking place in Australia, just left in the sort of middle of it all with the Iranian women's soccer team sort of basically sending out SOS hand signals saying we don't want to return back to Iran. And Albanese, the PM, has just stepped in and said we will offer sanctuary. We'll offer sanctuary to any of the women who don't want to go back. I mean, just a microcosm of the kind of the awfulness of what is going on right now, that these women are having to choose between their own safety and possibly their family's safety. if they don't return, it doesn't even scratch the surface of how impossible the situation is for normal Iranians, you know, who would like to be on the streets protesting, who would like to see America coming to their aid, who frankly is looking up and saying, great, you bombed 160 of our little girls to death on day one.

14:06And what have you done since then? Nothing. I think if you take a long view of America's military entanglements, you know, since the Second World War, that for every lifting of Nicolas Maduro, which was a brilliant, brilliant operation, where they kind of know American casualties or one kind of slightly injured. Although even then, they're basically done in Iran, which is, it's just that his deputy's taken over. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure. But it was a very impressive military operation, the way they were able to get Maduro, get him out, take him to New York. You look at the blunders. You look at what happened, you know, when America, the most powerful armed forces in the world, was in Vietnam.

14:45And they couldn't fight against the tactics of the Viet Cong with their guerrilla warfare and hiding underground and in tunnels and popping up and attacking American bases. And Trump knew all that. I mean, Trump literally stood for 20 years, long before actually 2015. He was talking about these kinds of wars and how much it had been, you know, the administrations of past governments that had pulled American people into these terrible entanglements. And now here he is without clear strategic aims, without having thought through what the likely consequences would be. And it may well be it's looking like the regime in Iran will survive, that it looks like it still can has the power to close the Straits of Hormuz.

15:27It's shown the world like that. And it's shown the world that power. And what is Donald Trump going to do? We seem a very, very long way from Saturday's demand from Donald Trump of wanting unconditional surrender. And meanwhile, as well, the reputation of America continues to take a battering. I mean, Emily just mentioned, and I think we should talk about it a bit more because I think it probably hasn't received as much attention as it should. The bombing of that girl's primary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab. I mean, that was on the first day of the war. And there's been lots of kind of fog of war claim and counterclaim stuff about it.

16:00But let's just like rewind and think about where we are. We've got an American president being asked whether he is responsible for the murder, the bombing and murder of 165 people in a school, most of them girls aged between seven and 12. Iran said it was the Americans. Trump said it was Iran, that their missiles were inaccurate. And a preliminary U.S. assessment, though, leaked to CBS News, has concluded that the U.S. was likely responsible for this bombing. And Trump has been asked about it in the last 24 hours. You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war.

16:37But you're the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn't say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this? Because I just don't know enough about it. I think it's something that I was told is under investigation. But tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have tomahawks. They buy them from us. But I will certainly, whatever the report shows, I'm willing to live with that report. So the Pentagon says that it's investigating. Democratic senators have called it appalling, demanded answers.

17:12but you know some of those senators talking about war crimes being involved of their own government it is amazing isn't it because you would think i mean it's donald trump well i'm just expressing an opinion you're the president of the country if your opinion is based on zero evidence that you think it was iran who blew up this school because one of its missiles misfired um really what are you saying why aren't you waiting for the inquiry and then you get caroline levitt defending him well it's just the president expressing his viewpoint he's entitled to do that well all the evidence is pointing in one direction and that it was an american tomahawk cruise missile that slammed into that school killing over 100 looks like it was out the assessment or the analysis has been done suggested it's probably if anything outdated intelligence that the building the school sat adjacent to a former irgc base but one that local officials say has been abandoned for over a decade.

18:07So it's one of those mistakes that happens in war, but at the most appalling cost. And those mistakes are always appalling and terrible and can never be worth it. But in these circumstances where the aims remain so opaque, it feels even more tragic. I'm so surprised that a former weekend Fox News host with an alleged drinking problem made a mistake like that. I mean, who could have guessed? But it is to the bigger question, which is, you know, the world rushes to believe so much of what Trump says because of his position without ever sort of stopping to think about whether, A, he makes most of it up, B, he ever checks the intelligence he's got, C, he has a plan.

18:52I mean, it is a real lesson, isn't it? And I know we're going to talk about this more with our own prime minister in the state of UK politics vis-a-vis Trump right now. But it's a real lesson, isn't it, in how quickly so many people of kind of great intellectual heft rush into the sort of language of war, the militarisation of war, the idea of strategy just because it comes from a US president. Nobody steps back to think has anything that he's done in the past eight years made any sense? Look, you talk about Hegseth being the former Fox News host and all the rest of it. And I really think there is a serious element to this.

19:32We covered on the US edition of the newsagents, Hegseth's address to the most senior commanders in the US military. They'd all been brought in from around the world. They turn up at Quantico, the US Marine headquarters. And Hegseth stands on stage and says, you know, and it's all testosterone. It's you've got to do more press ups. You've got to be fitter. You've got to shave off your beards. You've got to look like men. By the way, I'm going to fire all the black ones. Yeah. By the way, I'll fire all the black ones. And anyone who's woke, you're out. And you can't fight a war on testosterone. Wars are bloody awful things and you need to work out what you're doing.

20:08Well, as Iran is kind of showing, right, with the minimum, as you say, the minimum amount of hardware, you've completely crippled America. Exactly. And so I just think that this kind of the macho nature of what we have heard from Trump and what we have heard from Hegseth may look great in the first 24 hours or the first 48 hours when you are doing all that you want to do. But then Iran fires back and you think, oh, shit, what? They're going to fire back. They're going to close the streets of all moves. Bloody hell. I didn't know that was going to happen. Why was nobody, nobody in your war cabinet thinking about that?

20:49Right, we will be back just after this talking about how all of this is impacting our own politics and how quite a few of those, as Emily was saying, who were cheering for war loudest 10 days ago are much quieter now. Stay with us.

21:07From a range of trusted voices and award-winning journalists. Good morning, I'm Nick Ferrari. It's time to get to your calls. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, and they have no leadership. We could call it a tremendous success right now, or we could go further, and we're going to go further. There is absolutely no pleasure to be derived from predicting almost to the letter how this sorry saga would unfold. The Conflict in the Middle East. Follow it live on LBC. Listen on our free global player app or the LBC app. Apple Vacations, where your story starts.

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22:15The newsagents. Prime Minister. Mr Speaker, we are not increasing the cost of petrol. We're absolutely clear in taking the measures that are necessary to deal with the impact of the conflict in Iran. We're dealing with that with other allies. We're taking the necessary action. But the best thing that we can do, Mr Speaker, is to work with others to de-escalate the situation. And Mr Speaker, as I said to the House last week, I took the decision that we should not join the initial US-Israeli offensive against Iran. The leader of the opposition attacked me for that decision relentlessly. She said that the UK should have joined the US and Israel in the initial offensive strikes.

23:04Mr Speaker, then yesterday, in the wake of the economic consequences, the Leader of the Opposition totally abandoned her position. She told the BBC, I never said we should join.

23:28she she told the BBC I haven't said we should have gone in with the United States that is the mother of all you turns on the single most important decision a prime minister ever has to take whether to commit the United Kingdom to war or not for the last few weeks maybe even months, Kemi Baden-Ock's been on something of a role at PMQs. But today, the Prime Minister kind of crushed it, actually, by simply reminding the country, or at least Parliament, of her U-turn, that she had been the one urging him, demanding him to be at Trump's side. And suddenly, it wasn't looking like such a great idea. I think what's so interesting about this is that, You know, we talked in the first half that it looked like, you know, Donald Trump had launched this attack, hadn't thought through the risks, the consequences, what it might do to public opinion, what it might do to oil prices.

24:29And here we have opposition politicians so keen to score a kind of win over Starmer for his kind of rather nuanced position and not backing America that they go all in and say, we've got to back America. we've got to be right behind them and then they see gradually over the course of the last 10 days that ah maybe starmer has a point maybe we should be worried about oil prices maybe the americans haven't got a clear plan and are now trying to get back on board with starmer and not surprisingly the prime minister i think in what was his most self-confident performance in a little while was having none of it and battered kemi badenock around the park a bit the thing is i mean it's not just badenock i mean badenock did say at the start i mean people remember last week the prime is this question.

25:15She was very bellicose. She was accusing the prime minister of weakness and so on. She told LBC that we're in this war, whether Keir Starmer likes it or not, before telling the BBC I think yesterday, I haven't said that we should have gone in with the US and with Iran. There has been a clear shift in position, but she is not alone. I mean, so many of so much of the right wing press and commentators in particular were slamming Starmer last week. They were saying he had consigned us to complete irrelevance. They were saying that he had destroyed the relationship with Washington. These people, by the way, who are constantly telling us how important it is that we exercise our sovereignty with regards to the European Union and Brussels.

25:53The moment that a Prime Minister, British Prime Minister, even puts the most slender of distances between himself and Washington, apparently is just a sign of complete supine weakness. Nigel Farage is actually the clearest case. The Prime Minister referred to him in one of his answers later on as well. On the 28th of February, Farage posted on X that Starmer needs to change his mind on the use of our military bases and back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran. Days later, he was saying the gloves need to come off. We need to accept we're part of this with the Americans and the Israelis.

26:24We have to get rid of this regime. But as we were saying yesterday, by the 10th of March, at a petrol station in Derbyshire, he reversed his position entirely, saying Britain should not get involved with the conflict and stated that we don't have the military capacity for it. So that is a hell of a long way to move. The key phrase being at a petrol station in Derbyshire. Well, quite so. And you know what, though? And the thing is, is that Starmer, as we've been saying for the last 10 days, like the consequence of this was so predictable in two regards. One, it was so predictable that Trump would have no clue what happened next, as you were saying, Emily, that like, you know, most American presidents don't really have a clue what happens next when they start these things, let alone Trump.