The Whiplash of the U.S.-Iran Peace Talks

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3:00Hi, Robin. Thanks so much for being here. Hi, Tyler. So we're talking right now on Wednesday morning, and over Memorial Day weekend, reports emerged of a coming deal between the U.S. and Iran to end the war. Trump and his cabinet are set to meet later today to talk about said deal. But during this period where Iran and the U.S. still seem to be in active negotiations, I'm wondering who has the upper hand here. Is it Washington or is it Tehran? Well, there are different ways of answering that question. And the one is that the U.S. clearly has military superiority and has had done huge damage to Iran, eliminating many of its top military and political leaders, damaging its infrastructure.

3:43But what's happened during this war is Iran has developed a new type of leverage, And that's over the Strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world's energy supplies transit. And that has been closed now for months and is beginning to cripple, you know, parts of the world not involved in this conflict. So militarily, the United States clearly has superiority. But, you know, Iran has a lot of leverage now, too. That's Robin Wright, a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Nearly three months into the Iran war, and almost eight weeks into the ceasefire, reports emerged over Memorial Day weekend that the U.S.

4:27and Iran were close to signing a deal that could finally bring the conflict to a close. But those reports were quickly followed by signs that the two sides remain deeply divided over issues like the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the future of Iran's alleged nuclear program, with Donald Trump himself giving mixed signals about how close they are to an agreement. The result has been days of chaos and confusion, along with broader questions about how committed Trump is to securing lasting concessions versus simply extricating the U.S. from a war that has, by nearly every measure, been a mess.

4:59I wanted to talk with Robin about the prospects for a deal, what the conflict has revealed about Trump's approach to diplomacy, and the long - and short-term consequences of the war for both the region and Trump's own legacy and approval at home. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

5:20I want to talk more about this deal that's being discussed and what exactly it even is in terms of the larger sort of negotiations that are happening to bring this war to a formal end. Like right now, the U.S. and Iran are in the process of negotiating a memorandum of understanding. What even is that, and where does it fall in the diplomatic process? Ah, good question. Well, as reported so far, involves a 30 to 60 day extension of the currencies fire, which would open up a window to allow diplomacy on the real issues between the two countries that have been issues now, you know, for decades. top of the list is the nuclear question and how to both ensure that Iran does not take the next step in building a weapon determines what to do with the almost 1 ,000 pounds of enriched uranium, which are now buried deep, most of it apparently near Isfahan, and how to ensure that the stockpile of both Iran's equipment and its enriched uranium either are destroyed or go someplace else, whether it's the United States or China or, as in the past, through Russia.

6:48And there are still issues that have been on the table but don't seem to be dealt with in this memo of understanding, and that includes Iran's vast arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. It's treatment of its own people. It's support for a vast network of proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and the popular mobilization forces in Iraq. And so there's still many, many, many issues that have to be sorted out. The United States, the nuclear issue is the big one. But this one will focus heavily on reopening global trade that's been crippled by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, by the Iranians in the Persian Gulf, and by the U.S.

7:48blockade on ships coming out of the Persian Gulf into the Gulf of Oman. I mean, do you think that the fact that these negotiations regarding the memo of understanding do not include anything about, you know, as you said, Iran's vast drone and ballistic missile arsenal and Iran's proxies, like, should we see that as kind of a gaping hole in the agreement? Or should we really just be thinking of this as like negotiations to start actual negotiations about the real things that prompted Trump to start a war with Iran in the first place? I think it really is an extension of the ceasefire to lay out a set of principles on issues that they then want to negotiate.

8:34So there is still that gaping hole on critical issues. I mean, when you think about what President Trump said in justifying this war, he talked about regime change, you know, as if the entire Islamic Republic, all of its leaders at every level would be toppled, you know, forced into exile, whatever. That's just not on the table. And in fact, we've ensured that the Islamic Republic will endure and with harder line leadership. So that's clearly something that is not on the table and it's not going to be achieved. The memo of understanding really is a mechanism to kind of jumpstart a process, lay out some principles, roadmap, whatever.

9:19But it'll be very superficial. Before we talk more about the different priorities that the U.S. and Iran have in negotiating this agreement, I just want to ask you what your sense is. And I know that this is hard because it's Wednesday morning and I think Trump is speaking with his cabinet right now about this deal and whether they want to move forward with it. But just your sense of whether or not we can expect there to be significant movement today or this week. I mean, right after we get these reports that a deal is reportedly close to being signed, there were more reports that neither party was as close as they were initially to signing the agreement.

9:56And then on Tuesday, I believe, the U.S. engaged in what it described as self-defense strikes in Iran. And so to me, it kind of looked a little bit like earlier stages of the war where we hear about the U.S. and Iran in negotiations and then all of a sudden there are just more strikes. Well, you're right. This is kind of yo-yo diplomacy. And you do see the danger of engagement if the Iranians were, as the U.S. claims, planting mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Or if it was moving, you know, its missile capability closer to Hormuz. The U.S. wants to take out what it thinks are dangers. I think this will, in many ways, any memo of understanding, I think, will probably enrage Republicans who supported the war because it doesn't go far enough.

10:55And it will anger Democrats because it doesn't go far enough. And that's, you know, diplomacy, that nobody's happy with it. And Trump, you know, when he ran for president in 2015, claimed that, you know, the Obama deal was terrible. And, of course, as president, he walked away from it. But it's not likely that he is going to get something that is in many ways all that different from what Obama got. And, of course, Obama didn't have to go to war to do it. Yeah. Let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, I want to talk more about that Obama-era nuclear deal and also just the U.S. and Iran's long-term and short-term goals here.

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13:44So, Robin, I want to go back to something that you just said, which is that Trump might not get a whole lot more than what was agreed to in the first nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, which he unilaterally withdrew from in 2018 and said was horrible. Why did Trump withdraw from that deal and despise it so much? And why is it also so unlikely that this next deal is going to be any better, even though, as you mentioned earlier, the U.S. has had these pretty significant military victories in Iran? Well, there's a fundamental difference among hawks and doves about how to deal with Iran. And Obama's approach was, let's deal with the most immediate and the biggest issue, which was Iran's nuclear program, to ensure that it didn't become the 10th nuclear power.

14:36And then his argument was, once we have done that and established some kind of negotiating mechanism, we can then deal with all the other problems that we have with the Islamic Republic. The parallel process is let's deal with every one of the problems we have. And former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo outlined 12 demands, which were, you know, incredibly extensive and totally unrealistic. But Trump is in that camp, or was when he went into this war, of thinking, well, we'll do things that, you know, force the regime to either change or modify. We'll, you know, stop their ballistic missile program altogether.

15:27They won't have any ability to support extremist groups anywhere in the region, et cetera, et cetera. And so Trump is finding himself pretty much in the camp of, well, let's get a nuclear deal and then we'll deal with the other ones. So I think, you know, in some ways there will be a similarity when we get down to it, even if the MOU in some ways gets a statement from Iran that says, we promise to limit our program, which won't mean very much. So you recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker called The Epic Disaster of Operation Epic Fury, in which you mentioned that Iran is playing the long game here and the U.S.

16:10is playing the short game. Can you tell us more about what those different goals and priorities look like in practice? Is the U.S. playing the short game? Is the thing demonstrating that most, just the fact that Trump seems super focused on the Strait of Hormuz as part of this MOU and not the nuclear program? Like he's just kind of trying to fix the economy before the midterms come up? Yes. And it's really interesting because Iran is a country that's been around, you know, 2 ,500 years and some will say 5 ,000. But anyway, it was the first great empire. And, you know, we're 250 years old. And Iran has sat it out many times, you know, playing the long game, saying, look, it's like playing a game of chess.

16:55Move some peace, but you have a strategy. And the United States tends to be and has been in its recent wars in whether it's Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, thinking it could quickly do something militarily only to not have a political strategy or even much of a military strategy, you know, to end the wars. And so we're back at that same place that the Iranians can wait this out longer, even at a huge cost. And I think we're all struck by, you know, whether it's talking to the people I know in Iran or the pictures we see, that life has a certain normalcy in between the bombardments. And during a ceasefire, you know, people live their lives fearfully, you know, whereas because we have elections in November that could determine so much of what President Trump is able to do as a lame duck president in his final two years, that taking away an issue that is not only important militarily, but has had such a huge impact on the economy and the price of just filling your car.

18:15So, yes, he needs to end this war. And the Iranians want to end this war, but, you know, they want to get something out of all their losses. Yeah, I mean, what is your sense of how long of a game Iran can actually play? If Trump could sort of stomach the economic blow and let's say he didn't care about the midterms or the midterms weren't coming up and, you know, he was just happy to keep the war going for as long as he wants. I mean, could Iran keep doing things as they're being done for a year, two years? Or are we talking about like five or six months? Like what is their limit since it seems like they haven't really shown it to us yet?

18:56That's such a good question because Iran has limits, too, and one of them has to do with oil and its capacity to keep its wells going and to store the oil that comes out of it. It's complicated, but they have to keep movement and their storage abilities are limited when they can't get their tankers flowing to primarily China. And so, you know, it's not easy to just flick a switch, you know, turn your oil wells off and say, OK, we'll start them again when the strait is open and traffic is at full flow. So it has limits when it comes to its oil. And, of course, there's a huge disgruntlement among Iranians, which we saw with those inspiring demonstrations in December and January when the regime cracked down on them.

19:56And, of course, one of the big questions we can't answer at this point is, who's in control in Iran with the death of the supreme leader who was killed on the first day of the war by an Israeli airstrike? Like, who's making decisions? What is their focus? And how are people feeling? Are they ready to get out in the streets? Trump promised to rescue them, and he didn't. And, you know, the future of the Islamic Republic will be decided more by what happens there than anything that we do militarily. So in a minute, I want to talk more about how all of this fits into Trump's larger diplomatic track record and also where we think both the U.S.

20:35and Iran will be after the war does come to an end, whether that comes to an end soon or comes to an end in quite a long time. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

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21:48Robin, in your piece, you raise that there's this overarching trend of Trump negotiating some kind of peace deal or diplomatic breakthrough, and then he actually loses interest in seeing the thing through all the way. Could you take us through some other examples of this that you were thinking of when you wrote the piece? Well, the most obvious one is Gaza. In all the drama last September and October, that Trump had negotiated a peace deal and, you know, there was talk of building a Riviera in Gaza. You know, all those crazy pictures of the casinos and the tourist hotels and so forth. And poor Gaza, you know, is still at war.

22:32Israel is still striking. Hamas still has many of its arms. It controls 40 percent of the territory. You don't see almost anything happening to change, you know, the reality. You know, it breaks my heart when I think of the people who are, you know, innocents in this war and the suffering that they're going through. I mean, having left their homes, living in tents, not having health care, kids not being educated, and the Palestinians tended to be the best educated in the region. You know, the glamour over the Board of Peace, you know, have you heard anything about it lately? Because I haven't.

23:12No, didn't it get stalled in stage one? Exactly. There was this, you know, phase one, two and three, and we're stuck in phase one and at a great human cost. And you have a feeling that Trump just doesn't have interest in following through. He kind of punts. He lets other people do it. And he has the same negotiators, Steve Woodcoff and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, negotiating Gaza, Iran, and the war between Russia and Ukraine. And neither of these is a diplomat. They're both real estate developers. But there's another really important example in one of the longest wars that the United States fought, because actually at an end there's just a truce there as well, and that's North Korea, which is actually a far greater threat to the United States.

24:10You remember when Trump in 2018 had that dramatic meeting in Singapore with Kim Jong-un and Trump extolled at the end of it that the threat from North Korea was over and they understood each other so well and they had this bromance. And Kim Jong-un promised to end his nuclear program and return the remains of more than 5 ,000 Americans who are still MIA from a war 70 years ago. And what happened? Well, Kim built 20 more nuclear warheads and he returned 55 boxes of remains of the, again, more than 5 ,000 Americans who are still someplace in North Korea. And Trump, you know, even tried to revive it when things stalled by walking into North Korea.

25:10And again, nothing happened. So, you know, I have this deep fear that we're not going to get as much meaningful out of Iran because he may lose interest or, you know, something else catches his fancy. You also talk about in your piece how Iran is poised to come out of this war, you know, not just emboldened, but also with kind of like a larger arsenal, given that it now knows that it can essentially control the Strait of Hormuz. And there's even talk of like establishing some kind of, you know, toll on ships that are trying to come through. Can you talk a little bit more about just like the gains that Iran is seeing, you know, in that regard?

25:54So, Ron talks at the beginning about charging fees, up to$2 million a ship, to allow transit through Hormuz. And this is a very narrow waterway that every ship, including American warships that went through in the past, had to notify the Iranian station there, which is, of course, run by Revolutionary Guards. And that was its way of getting some compensation from the war, but also establishing the fact that it controls not Oman or no principle of free navigation. Now Iran is saying, oh, we're not, it's not tolls. We're going to have a fee to cover the environmental costs of preserving the Strait of Hormuz.

26:41I mean, who knows where that goes? but it will want in some way to come out of this knowing that it can do this again and again and again if it wants to, that it has really significant leverage over the United States, over the world, basically. I mean, there are almost 2 ,000 ships stuck in the strait or in the Persian Gulf not able to get through the strait with 20 ,000 sailors who've been stuck there for months with billions of assets on their ships. And it will take months to get all of them processed. I mean, with rippling repercussions on the global economy along the way. And then there's down the road of will ships want to go into the Persian Gulf?

27:28And will there need to be a whole new network developed over many, many, many years at, you know, billions and billion billions of costs of pipelines or, you know, trucking supply lines or alternatives to using shipping. But that's not anything that's going to be solved through the imminent or possible MOU. I mean, even if the U.S. and Iran do reach some agreement that's, you know, extremely restrictive of Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon again, Is there anything stopping Iran from just breaking that agreement and then with the knowledge that if the U.S. tries to, you know, go after its, you know, uranium or engage militarily again, that Iran can just do exactly what it's done with this war, which is establish this chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz and strangle the global economy?

28:25Like, is there anything stopping this exact scenario from happening again post an agreement that looks on its face like it's very good for the U.S. and extremely restrictive of any Iranian nuclear program in the future? Maybe not. We don't know what is covered by the negotiations and what the two sides envision. I've always said that I believe Iran will become the 10th nuclear power, but largely because it's been pushed into doing that. I don't think the Iranians wanted it, but I think they wanted the kind of Japan model where they had the capability if they needed it defensively. Because you remember, in the region, Israel does have the nuclear weapon, and Iraq was building it until the Israelis took it out, and the Syrians had tried.