Hillary Clinton on How Donald Trump Lost the Iran War

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1:46You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I last sat down with Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2017. Clinton was still working through everything that had gone so badly wrong the year before, how she'd lost the election and how Donald Trump had come to occupy the White House. Trump had campaigned with a chant of lock her up, a threat that electrified so many of his supporters.

2:31Clinton, for them, was not merely a political opponent, but somehow the embodiment of evil. Now, it's been almost a decade, and Donald Trump has, for the most part, moved on to yet other enemies. But Clinton remains very much a power broker in the Democratic Party and a leader of its centrist wing. She's also a voice of authority on U.S. foreign policy. With the Clinton Foundation, she's advocated for bringing down the cost of AIDS drugs worldwide and getting phones out of classrooms. I sat down with Hillary Clinton again this past week to talk about the war in Iran, Joe Biden's doomed campaign for the presidency, and how America might perhaps begin to move beyond Trumpism.

3:14We met on stage at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

3:26Secretary Clinton, in your book, Something Lost, Something Gained, you write about your state of mind after the election of Donald Trump. You describe yourself as someone who remains an optimist that worries a lot. Now, we all worry, but I want to grasp the extent of your agony. And I want to begin with a big question. does Donald Trump and Trumpism represent a real and sustained era of authoritarianism in this country? I really believe that he does represent the threat of authoritarianism, and the people who enable him, who support him, who follow him, have clearly decided that his kind of performance politics, his deliberate cruelty is exactly what they want to see for the country.

4:27Now, the good news is his favorability is in, you know, the mid-30s, but he is doubling down. He's doubling down on his impulsiveness, and it's very worrisome to me. You know, I teach at Columbia University now, of course, with the dean there. It's called Inside the Situation Room. And we talk about the traits of leaders, their behavior, their psychology. And there is a view that is rooted in how people make decisions, all of us, not just leaders, about what happens when someone finds themselves in what's called the domain of loss. It's a psychological concept. And almost counterintuitively, when people feel they are losing, they very frequently take greater risks.

5:24They double down on their behavior. And that's what I'm now worried about because he's lashing out. He's demanding that we accept his version of reality, which is unhinged from the actual world that we live in and the actual consequences of his actions. So I think we have to be extremely vigilant and just ready to push back every chance we get. How has your understanding of his support evolved? You were criticized a lot, probably rightly, for using the word deplorables for many of his followers. But how do you view the evolution of his followers and what it is that they want most of all from him?

6:09Well, first of all, I said only about half were.

6:15So to be fair. Well, are you doubling down on deplorable? I was, you know, I gave a speech, for example, about something called the alt-right, which, you know, the press had no idea what I was talking about. Certainly the public had no idea what I was talking about. But, you know, I was beginning to see this really disturbing rhetoric, racist rhetoric, sexist rhetoric, you know, the kind of authoritarian demagogic claims about our politics. And it worried me. So, you know, I tried to kind of put that into the political debate, but I also did try to, you know, draw a line between those who were following him because of that.

6:57It wasn't a bug. It was the feature. And people didn't take it seriously. People were like, oh, that's just Donald. He's just spouting off. Don't worry about it. I saw something darker, but I was in not the strongest position since I was running against him to make that case. So I was trying to say, look, I understand there are people who believe that kind of stuff, but most of the people, at least half, who are following him, they want change. They are not satisfied with where we are in the country. It was something that I was aware of, and I respect it because people were feeling that, you know, it's hard to succeed a two-term president of your own party.

7:38I knew that going into it. And, you know, people liked and respected President Obama, but, you know, they wanted something that might be a little different. A little different. But they didn't know how different at the time. I don't want to jump too far ahead, but I think it's fair to say that so far J.D. Vance has not covered himself in glory. And Marco Rubio probably doesn't appeal to the base with quite the same, you know, stick-to-itiveness of Trump himself. And I wonder if you think it's possible, and I think maybe this has run through your head, that the Trump family has dynastic ambitions, whether it's Donald Jr.

8:23or someone in the family who might pretend to succeed him? Well, David, you and I think alike. I think, number one, if he could figure out a way to stay, he would. My husband likes to say, if he tries to stay, I'm running again.

8:57But if that's unlikely, which we have to hope it is, I don't get the feeling he's all warm and fuzzy about J.D. Vance. No. I don't think he is warm and fuzzy about nearly anybody other than himself. And who is closest enough to him, and that is possibly a son or a daughter. A son or a daughter. A son or a daughter. And the daughter is thought to be cleverer than the son.

9:29Well, I'm not going to characterize them. It's the blood relationship that matters. So, look, I mean, we're speculating like, you know, we know something, which we don't. I'm not hanging out Mar-a-Lago and sort of picking up the, you know, breadcrumbs of gossip. But I think that... I think you'd like it. Yeah, but given his psychology, given Trump's psychology, he definitely, if he can't do it himself, he wants somebody he can control. And preferably somebody related to him. And that would be, I think, his hope. You've watched Trump over a long period of time. You've debated him three times. You've observed him very carefully, obviously.

10:18Is he disintegrating? I think he is certainly not what he was, you know, falls asleep in lots of public meetings. I mean, poor Joe Biden. I mean, shut his eyes, you know, once or twice. But Donald Trump is like falling asleep all the time these days. But part of that is he stays up all night posting on true social. So he's, you know, he's not he's not getting enough sleep anyway, which is pretty disturbing because I don't think people who are sleep deprived make good decisions on top of everything else. But I really think he has a number of traits that have gotten, you know, more obvious. He doesn't even try to hide them.

11:04You know, his impulsivity, his immaturity, his lack of curiosity about anything going on around him. When he launched the war against Iran and then out of the White House, you hear that nobody told me about the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, nobody told me they could close the Strait of Hormuz. Where is the Strait of Hormuz? You can't make it up. It's like some movie that you walk out of because it's so outlandish. Dr. Strange Love. Yeah, exactly.

11:44Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The day we spoke, the administration announced an agreement, or a memorandum of understanding, to end the war with Iran. We'll pick up right there in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come.

12:09This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking with Hillary Rodham Clinton. While serving in the Senate, Clinton ran for the presidency in 2008. And shortly after Barack Obama won that historic election, he appointed Clinton Secretary of State. She was quoted around that time saying, We have a lot of damage to repair. And she was referring to alliances frayed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clinton oversaw the State Department through the Arab Spring and the beginning of negotiations with Iran, which eventually became the nuclear deal known as the JCPOA. Trump abandoned that agreement in 2018 with fateful consequences.

12:55We're talking on a day where the United States and Iran seem to have signed an agreement to end, at least for now, this war. war, did the United States lose this war? Yes. Yes. The United States has come out weaker. Iran has come out stronger. It's not even an agreement. It's a memorandum of understanding, which we haven't even seen the details of. Now, I started the negotiations that led to the JCPOA, the agreement that President Obama eventually signed. It was an intensive diplomatic effort. We started by getting the UN Security Council to impose sanctions, global sanctions on Iran in June of 2010.

13:43We then, you know, worked to get secret negotiations started through Oman. And those began with several meetings and with a, you know, a plan about going forward, which I handed off to my successor, John Kerry. But these were serious negotiations with high-level people. So when we sat across a table from Iranians, we had our own nuclear physicists there, as did they. We had experienced diplomats, people who had negotiated on many different fronts for many years. That's not the way this administration does its business. You know, the United States doesn't send bombers to Iran because anybody else commands it to, but it's very clear that Bibi Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, pushed and pushed Donald Trump to do this.

14:38It's my understanding that when you were Secretary of State, Bibi Netanyahu made the same case. Tell me about that. Well, you're absolutely right. When I was secretary, it was a constant theme by Netanyahu and his then government, the then defense minister Ehud Barak, the former prime minister. It was relentless. It was a constant push. You know, I remember... What would he say to you? What? What would he say to you? He would basically say, you need to support us in attacking Iran. And so there was a constant argument that we would have. And, you know, I remember one day I was on the phone for hours with Ehud, with Bibi, with others, you know.

15:33And they would say things like, you know, our planes are on the tarmac. And I'd say, well, good luck. I mean, great. Why are you doing this? You're saying you were being played. All the time. All the time. By an ally that receives an enormous amount of aid. Well, of course. And look, Bibi's been obsessed as long as I've dealt with him with two things. Iran, as you know, and his desire to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia. The first formal meeting I had with him in 2009, probably March, at the State Department, it was absolutely, you know, how can we get normalization with Saudi Arabia and how do we totally decapitate Iran?

16:23And he had this view that I think has become very clear in his, you know, dealings with Trump. Number one, decapitate the regime, it will fall. number two, disable the military insofar as possible, the people will rise up. And that was just never our read about what was going to happen, in part because this is a ruthless, theocratic regime that at least at the top levels, the clerical level, has a kind of apocalyptic view of their own importance in the struggle against Israel, the United States, the West, their Sunni neighbors, you know, the whole map that they look at. And they are also a regime that learned, sadly, a lesson from the overthrow of the Shah.

17:30there's a lot of you know analysis about why the shaw was uh finally deposed but one of the arguments is at the end he would not murder his people he would not order the mass murder of the demonstrators in the street this regime has no such compunction so if you have a regime that has already proven, as it did last year, they were willing to kill 35 ,000, 40 ,000 Iranians over the protests that were going on. If you have this alliance between the clerics and the military, they have enough folks in their ranks to keep moving up and taking over. Our take on Iran was absent an effective armed opposition, which we've never seen, and absent some kind of internal dissent, whether like a general who would say, I'm not going to tolerate, you know, this any longer.

18:32But this regime is not, you know, they're not going to be toppled by, you know, appeals to their humanity, to their, you know, better, the angels of their, you know, better nature. So if I hear what you're saying correctly is number one, Bibi Netanyahu bamboozled Donald Trump. And number two, I don't imagine the intelligence changed radically about the state of play in Iran, that the president ignored not only the advice of his vice president and secretary of State, but the intelligence community telling him on the ground this would be a terrible idea. Well, I can't speak to that. I don't know what was presented to him.

19:19You know, I also think coming off the attacks of last June, which I supported, I supported the very specific surgical attacks on the known nuclear weapons sites. I believed that that was a clear mission with very achievable goals. I didn't know whether you could eliminate the program, but I thought you could certainly set it back. Let's stay in the same region for a moment. I know that you're for a two-state solution and see it as the only outcome that any kind of peace can exist. But if I look at the Israeli polity, they don't want a two-state solution, certainly not now. And if you look at the Palestinian polity, which is an even more complicated set of geographies and population.

20:15Two-state solution is not anywhere near the offing there. A two-state solution, which was fought for so hard, but began going out the window many years ago, seems impossible. Am I wrong? You might be, but you might not be. And here's why. I'm going to say something positive about Trump. So hold on. Okay. I've got a grip on my chair right now.

20:47Trump's 20-point plan for Gaza

20:55is actually a pathway to security for Israel, reconstruction for Gaza and the possibility of self-determination however defined for the Palestinians. There are a lot of people who you know reject it because Trump did it but it's the only game in town there's nothing else and I've engaged in some you know kind of track two diplomacy with Israelis, not in the current government, former governments, military, intelligence, political officials, Palestinians, Arabs. So it's a very, you know, it's a very painful discussion because, you know, these are experienced people with lots of scars to show for their efforts over many years, not just on peace, but on security, particularly for Israel.

21:59But I really believe if we took this 20-point plan, which starts with, you know, the disarmament of Hamas, a huge, important step yet to be accomplished, but took all of the 20 points so that it wasn't just disarm Hamas and, you know, maybe do some reconstruction and, you know, build some resorts on the coast. But if you really took the whole approach that is embodied in that 20-point plan, and I know there are people who are working to try to move forward on that, there is a glimmer of a possible path forward. Now, having said that, you are dealing with two peoples that are even more traumatized than perhaps has happened in the past.

22:59You had Rachel Goldberg-Polland on your podcast last week. And I met her during the time when I I was trying to help and support families who were advocating to get the hostages back. And it's, you know, she writes this very moving, profoundly sad book about her son Hirsch. And we've had Mohammed Mawish and Mossab Abutoh who lost multiple members of their family. And I've met with them as well. And did the Biden administration fail to push hard against the Netanyahu government? Did it give too free a reign to the Israeli government during the war? You know, I think it's a very, very hard question to answer for this reason.

23:49As I said, October 7th was a mass trauma event. Clearly, the people who were murdered, the families who lost loved ones, the hostages, 250 plus who were taken into Gaza. a long, terrible trauma. 100%. But Biden came to Israel, and the wisest thing, it seems to me, that he said was, I feel your pain. I understand how horrible this is. We support you. But at the same time, do not repeat our mistakes and act out of prolonged vengeance. He was obviously referring to Afghanistan and even more so to Iraq. the misadventures there, to say the least, and the damage they did and the lives lost there. And I think a lot of people would say that is exactly what Israel went ahead and did by such a prolonged war, and that the United States and the Biden administration, and later the Trump administration, did very little to put a pause to it.

24:57You know, I think that, and again, I wasn't there. I don't know what the internal discussions were. But every time there was a push against Israel to change tactics, to avoid certain targets, you know, the response would be, we know that there are tunnels. Could and should the Israelis have been more careful with civilian casualties? Absolutely. There's no doubt about that. But did they have a response to, you know, what they were trying to accomplish, rescuing hostages, you know, getting access to Hamas leadership and fighters in these tunnels? they did. And trying to walk that line in the middle of a war is very hard.

25:51So I try to imagine myself, I'm sitting, you know, in CENTCOM and talking to the Israeli military. I'm sitting, you know, at the CIA and talking to Mossad. And they are coming back not with, you know, totally unbelievable claims. They're coming back with, here's what our intelligence tells us. Here's, you know, we think if we can get there, get there. Maybe we can, you know, get Senwar. Maybe we can, you know, rescue hostages. And the fog of war was like totally overwhelming. When you hear Ehud Olmer refer to war crimes, when you hear a scholar like, an Israeli scholar like Olmer Bartoff refer to genocide, or even David Grossman, a novelist you know well, do you agree with them?

26:37Again, I am looking at facts. I'm trying to figure out, and I have not reached my own conclusions because I don't have, you know, oftentimes there's after action reports. And the thing I am most critical of is there has been no after action report about what happened leading up to October 7th, on October 7th, and post October 7th. So we don't have all the information I personally would like to see and know about. The original sin is why did October 7th happen? What were the signals that were missed? What could have been done differently? What did Bibi Netanyahu think he was doing having Qatar pay Hamas millions and millions of dollars a month in order, in his thinking, to weaken the Palestinian Authority?

27:32What did he think was going to happen? So I guess my point, David, is I want to know everything I can know. I want to know everything I can about the intelligence failures, the military decisions, before I'm willing to say, you could have done this, or you should have done that, or pass judgment. I received a text today. I received a text today from the best journalist I know in Israel, a very keen defense analyst, and he said, this memo of understanding is the end of Bibi. I think a lot of people have gone broke predicting the political end of Bibi Netanyahu. Are you willing to go broke? You know, he has certainly more than nine lives politically.

28:25But I think this is a real defeat for him. He did push Trump into the war against Iran. We didn't gain anything of real importance, and we may have lost a lot. But that means Bibi also lost, because to go into that kind of alliance and to push Trump to do something that Trump, I'm not sure even understood the implications of. And then for Trump wanting to get out of it, because what did he say a few weeks ago? I'm bored. This is boring. Trying to make peace is boring. So Bibi's left out there by himself. And there are several really serious questions. You know, what he's doing in Lebanon now is to me counterproductive.