Raging Moderates: Trump Spirals as Iran Blockade Triggers Recession Fears (ft. Sen. Chris Murphy)

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0:48What should we make of the Iran war ceasefire announcement and where do things go from here? If anything has surprised me over the last 24 hours, it's that Iran agreed to a ceasefire, and particularly that Iran agreed to a ceasefire after that outrageous message that President Trump put out. I'm Jake Sullivan. And I'm John Feiner. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we break down the latest news on Iran and share our net assessment of where things stand for the U.S. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts.

1:24Breaking news The world is a mess And it seems like it's just getting worse So how do you find a way to move forward?

1:33Chris Murphy:Being hopeful acknowledges and embraces That things are difficult And asks, where can we go from here? Why our future depends on our ability to hope That's this week on Explain It To Me New episodes wherever you get your podcasts

1:58Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.

2:00Jessica Tarlov:And I'm Jessica Charlov. Today we're joined by Senator Chris Murphy from the great state of Connecticut. By the way, UConn absolutely destroyed my March Madness bracket. But anyways, Senator, thank you so much for making the time to join us today.

2:13Chris Murphy:Yeah, it's great to be with you guys. Yeah, we're psyched to be back in a world where it's not just the women's team that is awesome, but the men's team as well. That's right.

2:21Jessica Tarlov:If you aren't already, please make sure to subscribe to our YouTube page to stay in the loop on all of the political news. All right, let's get into it. Senator, with the war in Iran, you've been outspoken about U.S. involvement, calling it illegal and warning it could cost trillions of dollars. It appears the situation is escalating on multiple fronts. The U.S. military has begun enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, though its scope remains unclear with reports that some ships are still getting through, raising questions about how effective or enforceable the strategy really is.

2:52At the same time, negotiations have restarted. Iran is reportedly offering to suspend uranium enrichment for five years while the U.S. is pushing for a 20-year halt, and President Trump is demanding guarantees Iran will never develop nuclear weapons. And the International Monetary Fund is now warning that the conflict could slow global growth, drive up inflation, and even tip the world toward recession as volatility in the oil market ripples through the economy. So given all of this, where do you think we stand right now? And what is your recommendation on a go-forward strategy?

3:23Chris Murphy:I think our instinct is often to apply previous lenses to sort of modern, very unique problems. And so, you know, we look at what the president is doing in Iran, and we look at these negotiations, and we try to apply a conventional rationale. I just don't think that works. I think that we underestimate the degree to which this is just basic incompetence, that we have people who literally have no idea what they are doing, who are applying no lessons from the past, who are drawing on no one who has any experience in doing diplomacy in and around the Middle East. And what you are getting is, you know, just gross incompetence.

4:15Chris Murphy:The latest is this plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The idea that Trump has is that because Iran right now is letting, at the very least, its ships through, if we stop Iranian ships from getting through, then Iran will magically open the Strait to everyone. I think it fundamentally misunderstands the way that Iran thinks about this war. They believe they are winning the war. The regime does not feel any threat internally. And thus, they think they can just wait us out, that the pain on the U.S. economy will break Trump's will before the pain on the Iranian economy breaks their will.

5:00Chris Murphy:Same thing with negotiations. You know, we're trying to find a logical thread of these negotiations. I don't think there's any logical threat. I think this is J.D. Vance, who's never negotiated an international deal in his life, a real estate developer who has no experience in negotiations and a bunch of hangers-on to the president. J.D. Vance was in Islamabad for 24 hours and left. That's not how negotiations work. You have to sit down and negotiate for weeks, especially with a complicated adversary like the Iranians. And the fact that we only are willing to give it 24 hours of negotiation tells you just how nonsensical all of this is.

5:37Chris Murphy:So I think this war is going to drag on for a really long time unless Trump just decides to end it unilaterally, which I still think is the best of a bunch of bad options moving forward. I don't see a big diplomatic settlement. I don't see Iran reopening the strait, absent Trump ending the war. But his pride and his hubris and his ego is probably for the foreseeable future going to stop him from ending it unilaterally. What do you think we should do? Or what, if the White House called you today and said, what outline a strategy given where we are right now at this moment, what would your strategy be for handling the situation right now?

6:17Chris Murphy:Unilaterally end the war. I mean, I'm not saying - Just withdraw. Yeah, withdraw, withdraw. Concede, concede, control the Strait of Hormuz to Iran. So you are there's no military means for us to take Iran's control of the Strait away. So let's just start there. The fastest way to get into a conversation with Iran about how to reopen the Strait is to permanently end the war or the threat of military action. And Trump believes that his threat to restart bombing or this current plan to sort of layer on an American blockade to the Iranian blockade will change Iranian behavior. Again, in the Middle East, there is not a lot of evidence to suggest that escalatory behavior ultimately achieves U.S.

7:07Chris Murphy:war aims. I would advise him to stop the war. And I think that is the fastest way, ultimately, to get Iran to reopen the strait. If they take control of the Strait of Hormuz, and JP Morgan estimates they're getting an additional$90 billion potentially in revenue by charging a tax on any ship to come through, and they basically have what I would argue is more powerful and enriched uranium through control, and we acknowledge and concede control, what incentive do they have to ever give it back and cede control of it? Yeah, I mean, that's the disaster that Trump has wrought here. I mean, let's just go through his war aims.

7:46Chris Murphy:He said he wants to destroy their missile program. There's no evidence we've come anywhere close to that. Destroy their drone program. There's no evidence we will ever be able to destroy their drone program. He wants to get rid of their nuclear weapons ambitions. They retain all of that enriched capacity, and you can't really destroy knowledge. And now you've made them a true global player by giving them control of the Strait of Hormuz. Again, the alternative is to just continue bombing Iran and hope that eventually the destruction that we wrought, the number of civilians that we kill, will cause the Iranians to reopen the Strait.

8:28Chris Murphy:I don't think that that's a likely path forward. And so let's end the conflict and then with our regional allies be in a conversation with Iran about reopening. It may be that Iran is going to toll that strait for the short and medium term. I just don't know right now that there's any way around it. So do you want that to be the reality in addition to spending$200 billion of taxpayer money on a war that likely won't end up with the strait being opened? That sounds like a pretty horrific exercise in fiscal malpractice.

9:06Jessica Tarlov:What do you think Russia and China are telling Iran right now? Because we know what our allies, you know, our NATO allies and also what our Gulf allies are saying about it. But Russia and China have been, you know, close allies, obviously, of Iran and beneficiaries of this conflict themselves. You know, Putin suffered a big defeat in Hungary with the election a couple of days ago. But, you know, he got some sanctions relief, which I'm hoping that Secretary Besant is going to hold to this and put those sanctions back on. But this two week period has felt like a gift to the Iranians that they can essentially rearm and, you know, conference up with China and Russia for the plan going forward.

9:47Jessica Tarlov:So what's your feeling about what Russia and China want Iran to do?

9:52Chris Murphy:I think this conflict accrues to the benefit of both Russia and China. For Russia, these high oil prices and the easing of sanctions on Russia just fills the Russian treasury. For China, I think there's a longer-term play here. for China, you know, they don't really mind that that strait stays closed as long as Chinese ships and Chinese energy move through the strait. And so there's a pretty simple deal for the Chinese and the Iranians to do moving forward, which is that Iran will let Chinese ships and energy bound for China move through the strait, and then China will help Iran rebuild its missile program and its drone program and probably broader destroyed infrastructure when the United States stops bombing.

10:48Chris Murphy:That is just a reality that I think is very sort of hard to confront right now. And it just, for me, makes me pine for the days in which the United States, China and Russia were aligned on Iran policy. I know like right now that's hard to imagine, but that's what existed when we signed the JCPOA. That's the Iran nuclear deal. That was an agreement not between the United States and Iran. That was a deal between the United States, Europe, Russia, China, and Iran. We had the ability to basically build on the JCPOA with the United States, China, and Russia on the same side to confront Iran's other malevolent activity.

11:32Chris Murphy:We gave that up, and now we're in a world where, you know, we ultimately may have to accept that there's a more deeply integrated access, especially between Iran and China, but also between between Iran and Russia.

11:46Jessica Tarlov:Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up the JCPOA because I've been thinking a lot about the sunset clauses, which if if we had stayed in it versus Trump taking us out in 2018, we would be coming up, you know, near the end of the deal. And there was this opportunity to hopefully renegotiate. And I'm curious as to what our diplomatic team besides Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner looks like if we do manage to get Iran back to the table, even in the next year or two before President Trump is out of office and hopefully we have a Democratic president coming in.

12:22Chris Murphy:I mean, I don't know what they're looking for, but when they describe the deal they want, it sounds a lot like the JCPOA. I mean, one of the things they talk about is a firm commitment from the Iranians not to develop a nuclear weapon. Well, that's exactly what the JCPOA said. Iran, in that agreement, promised to never develop a nuclear weapon and gave the Americans and the Europeans the ability to do in-depth inspections every single day on Iranian territory to make sure that they were only pursuing a civilian nuclear weapons program. So if at the end of this, you know, we just get a slightly different version of Obama's nuclear deal, that would be, A, ironic, and B, it would be a ridiculous outcome with a dozen or more Americans having been killed and billions of dollars of American taxpayer money wasted just to come out with basically the same agreement that we had before Trump became president.

13:20Jessica Tarlov:It took 18 months to negotiate the JCPOA. And we're talking about, you know, this idea that deals can be done with these people who are quite emboldened at this moment in like, you know, you have 10 to 14 days to sort this out.

13:34Chris Murphy:And again, I just want to underscore that these guys have no idea what they're doing. I mean, this is buffoonery. Vance flying over there for 24 hours, right? When John Kerry negotiated that deal and the Secretary of Energy, they would sit at these negotiating tables for weeks at a time. And so there's no incentive for the Iranians to really negotiate when they get to see J.D. Vance for 24 hours and then he leaves. So they're not setting up any construct in which there's likely to be a meaningful negotiation. And the Iranians know that. The term I think the best describes it from my vantage point is operational excellence but strategic incompetence.

14:21Do you think that if the president and his cabinet or some members of his cabinet member had consulted Congress, had tried to enlist the help of some Gulf and European allies and said this is a unique moment in time to further neuter their ability to support proxies which have been wreaking terror across the region, to take out additional missile launch capability, to potentially tip over what appears to be a wobbling regime. Do you think, one, would you have been more supportive and clear objectives that said, we're in, we're out, this is a military operation, not a war. Would you personally have been potentially supportive?

15:06And do you think that this might've had a greater likelihood of success and that we wouldn't be in, quote, unquote, this feels like the definition of a quagmire. And I would argue that what has happened here, there is some justification for a military operation, but not getting any support from Congress or our allies basically doomed this from the get-go. Would you personally have been more likely to be supportive of some sort of military action had he enlisted or at least consulted Congress and enlisted some allies?

15:34Chris Murphy:No, because I don't see an objective, at least amongst those that have been articulated by the president, that has a military answer. So you cannot bomb out-of-existence knowledge. So, yes, you can set back their nuclear program likely only for a handful of months, but not much longer than that. What we're learning is there is no way to eliminate their missile and drone program through airstrikes alone. Hegseth goes on TV and he lies. He says, well, we destroyed their missile program. 90 percent of it is gone. That's just not true. It is likely that we've gotten far less than half. And we knew from the beginning that a major military operation was going to cause them to close the strait.

16:18Chris Murphy:And that is the primary reason why both Democratic and Republican presidents prior to Donald Trump had not undertaken a military action of this size. We knew that it would draw them closer to China, ending up in China benefiting. And regime change is not something you can achieve without a ground invasion, as we have now seen definitively. The Ayatollah was a bad guy, but he was a doddering old man, it is now possible that we have put in charge of that nation much more competent, much more provocative leadership. So, no, I don't think that for me there was any argument that they could make that a military campaign was going to end up achieving any of our goals.

17:07Chris Murphy:Yeah, I want their missile program gone. I want their drone program gone. I want Iran to be a democracy, but I don't see any of those being achieved by a short-term targeted military intervention. And you don't worry that if we exit now, we, one, leave our allies sort of naked and afraid. We broke it. They have to fix it. And two, that we suffer from sort of a glass jaw syndrome where despite$1.4 trillion a year proposed military budget, we become the ultimate the paper tiger that a decent amount of pain, or some would argue relative to other conflicts, not that much pain, and we cut and run. You're not, I mean, I think that your arguments are really, I don't know, have a ton of veracity, compelling, hard to argue with around the incompetence that's gotten us here and now.

17:56But if we were to exit, who takes us seriously when we show up with any sort of military campaign and doesn't believe that just inflict a little bit of pain, and they'll run.

18:06Chris Murphy:But who takes us seriously when we respond to a catastrophic mistake with another catastrophic mistake? I mean, you know, this is like trotting out a little league team, you know, in a major sporting event and hoping that if you just keep playing, they'll win. I mean, these guys are embarrassing the United States. This latest move of closing the straight ourself in order to respond to Iran closing the strait, that makes us look like a laughingstock. This is just going to get worse and worse because these people do not know what they're doing. And listen, that argument has been made before, right?

18:46Chris Murphy:I heard our leaders make that argument to Congress on Afghanistan over and over and over again. Give us more time. Give us more troops. That is literally the reason why we stayed in Vietnam for as long as we did, because if we can just escalate a little bit more, if we can escalate in a slightly different way, ultimately the enemy will come to the table. So I just see this quagmire getting worse and worse. I don't disagree with you that this is going to make us look weak, but for us to just continue to perform ineptly, for us to just invent new, bold, strategic mistakes on a weekly basis, that makes us look even weaker.

19:25And what do we say to our allies there? We've inflamed Iran. We've put them in harm's way. And you have to pay more.

19:34Jessica Tarlov:as a result of it, because they're all getting their energy through the strait. Right.

19:38Chris Murphy:But our allies there, maybe with the exception of Saudi Arabia, begged us not to do this. And Saudi Arabia right now is telling us to, at the very least, end this nonsensical plan to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, because what they worry about is that that will end up with Iran and the Houthis activating to close or harass traffic inside the Red Sea. The Saudis see our continued escalation as bad for the region. So I don't know that our allies there are doing much else than hoping Trump ends this as quickly as possible so that they can try to put the pieces back together. It may be that it's going to end up being a sort of broader Sunni-Shia dialogue in the region that might get the strait reopened, it's not likely going to be Steve Whitcoff that delivers this deal.

20:38Chris Murphy:And again, this is also a function of our broader alliance structure being shattered. The success of the JCPOA, of real diplomacy with Iran, was built on the United States and Europe working together. The fact that we can't do any of this with Europe, it greatly deleverages our ability to end this conflict in a meaningful way because Europe is basically running their own play in the region right now.

21:05Jessica Tarlov:OK, let's take a quick break. Stay with us.