148. Can Europe Salvage its Relationship with Trump?

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2:31David:Hello and welcome everybody to this very special live stream from The Rest is Classified. We've just been finishing a two-part series examining what's been going on inside Iran, CIA operations, the issues of rescues of pilots, but in particular, the issue of what an operation to snatch Iran's highly enriched uranium might look like. And to complement those episodes, as well as examine some of the bigger issues about Iran and US foreign policy in more detail, and how the Trump administration might be thinking about its next moves. We're very lucky, aren't we, David, to be joined by a journalist who really sits at the nexus of Washington intelligence and national security.

3:11Gordon:Indeed, we are very fortunate today to be speaking with David Ignatius, who is a bestselling author and prize winning columnist for the Washington Post. He has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for well over 25 years. He lives in Washington, where in addition to doing all of that, he manages to write some absolutely fantastic spy novel. He's the author of a dozen of those. His latest, Phantom Orbit, is an exploration of the modern day race for supremacy in space warfare. One of them, Body of Lies, which is a fantastic book, was made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.

3:47Gordon:And his first novel, Agents of Innocence, I have to say is perhaps the best novel ever written about CIA operations in the Middle East and was on the in-house required reading list that I received when I joined the Central Intelligence Agency as an intern in the summer of 2006. The CIA at one point called that book a novel but not fiction, which is a high piece of praise indeed for a novelist. And David and I also, just in a personal note, shared the same editor at W.W. Norton, the legendary Star Lawrence, before his passing. And David wrote a wonderful piece for The Post after Star died, which I would commend to all listeners who are curious for a peek into the author-editor relationship.

4:37Gordon:The title of that piece, which made me both want to cry and laugh at the same time, was, these editor's notes are poison I learned from every drop. So we share a similar awe and reverence for the man who poisoned us over many books. So with all that said, David Ignatius, welcome to The Rest is Classified. Thank you so much, David. Such a generous introduction. I must say, I've heard for so many years about all the CIA officers who read my first novel, and I've come to the conclusion that you must have all taken it out of the library, the thing that I learned to call it library, because it's never shown up.

5:17Gordon:No one purchased it. No one bought it. They're passing around the copies. Or the Reddit. It's obvious to me that you didn't buy it. But thanks. We did share a great editor and star the lead of my piece about him after he died was all in quotation marks ugh please must we this is the series things he'd written in the margins of my of my bad writing it made me feel better to know that we had received similar treatment from uh from starling uh we are uh unfortunately not here to talk about spy novels which i think you and i could talk about all day, much to Gordon Carrera's chagrin. But we are here to talk about Iran.

6:03Gordon:And I thought, David, the first question I'd put to you just to set up one of the key, if not the key character in this drama, which is President Donald J. Trump. Now, I suspect that many listeners to this, maybe you have a sense that over the past few months, he has been acting rather erratically and impulsively. And I'm curious how you think the president sees his position right now amid the ceasefire and the negotiations that are ongoing in Pakistan. Is Trump a man under pressure to do a deal or how do you think he's feeling about the situation that he's in right now? So the first thing that I've noticed about Trump since the Venezuela operation is that he's just flying.

6:51You know, he's a teetotaler famously, but it's as if he's intoxicated with the excitement and power of being commander in chief. And I thought to myself, there can't be anything quite like it in the world to be astride that massive military power, the ability to operate so stealthily as in Venezuela and he's just roaring with it. He's good at the big boom at the beginning of something and he's good at the big show at the end of something, but he isn't very good in the middle and he isn't very good at the aftermath. I'm just struck by how many of these peace deals that he touts and who's not in favor of peace in our miserable world just don't get finished.

7:46I mean, the Gaza deal, actually, if you look at the particular details, is pretty good. They recruited first-rate people. The person who's the executive director, Nikolai Mladenov, as good as you could find them, at least. I've talked at length with the Palestinian who's there to oversee the technocratic committee, first-rate person. But nothing's happened. I just have a feeling that the follow-up that should be present if Iran is really going to make a transition from this revolutionary country to something different, some kind of managed IRGC-run state capitalism, that it's going to need more work than this team can put in.

8:32David:i mean it's just watching it here from europe where i am david in london i mean the perception is that donald trump has partly because he didn't have clear aims going in to this conflict and they had all these multitude of different aims whether it's regime change whether it's the nuclear material whether these other things you know on the one hand that gave him a kind of flexibility at one point about declaring victory but it's also now making it very hard to see what the end game looks like. I mean, do you think opening the strait, maybe saying there's a nuclear deal, that's what he's looking for now, just to basically get out of this?

9:09Yes. So I think, Gordon, that he wants an exit ramp. I was told that he had come to understand that the deeper you get into this conflict, the more it's like a quagmire. Certainly, he's warned through his career about the danger of that. And now he found himself in one, and he wants out, but he wants out thunderously, victoriously. So you have this weird oscillation between claims that the war's already over and we've won, they're dying for a deal and sending, as of today, I think we have 10 ,000 additional troops heading to the Middle East. So this This undamped oscillation is a feature of Trump.

9:55And I think it's increasingly, Gordon and David, undermining Trump's ability to get the success he wants to have as president. I think the world's really kind of wised up to it. People are sick of it first. Europeans are sick of all this bad-mouthing NATO and crazy talk about seizing Greenland. I think that China's and Russia's of the world were kind of going, yeah, yeah, you know, and some of that too with the Iranians. So I think he wants out. I think he is close to a deal. I got a very detailed readout of the negotiations that took place in the Salamabad, which I published in my column, gosh, the beginning of the week.

10:39And it's turned out pretty much as people said it would. It was a very generous offer on the table from the U.S., surprisingly generous. It's not all that much better than what the JCPOA offered for all of Trump's talk. But it does provide what I'm told Trump negotiators said to Mohammed Galibov, the Iranian representative, would be a golden bridge, that was their phrase, into a new era for Iran. And Iran, as I know, having visited there, perhaps, Gordon, you've been there as well. Iran is poised to be a fantastically successful modern country. It has great intellectual capital resources. It is one of the most civilized cultures I encounter.

11:28So that's been part of the Trump team's pitch. Walk with us into this future. You're going to be superstars. We'll help you. We'll find capital for you. And Ghalibov, who's no stranger to big-time deals from what I know, was pretty receptive to that.

11:50Gordon:David, what do you think the shape of that deal would be? What would the Iranians have to give up and what would they get? First, the highly enriched uranium stockpile that they have. The question is how they give it up and what they were pretty much prepared to offer before the war started was a process where the IAEA would supervise dilution of the stockpile from 60 % down to some very low level of enrichment. So I think that's already out there. Trump seems to want the IAEA to supervise removal of the canisters that contain this material. That would be better for sure. but they seem ready to do that.

12:37Trump has said in the last several days that the Iranians have agreed to no nuclear weapons. Well, that's kind of a crazy formulation because A, they don't have a nuclear weapon. B, they've said for decades under the fatwa of the previous Supreme Leader that they didn't want a nuclear weapon. Nobody believed that, but that's in their official policy. What I think Trump means is that they've agreed to give up what they've always claimed is their right to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear purposes, which is a pathway to a bomb. And my guess, I don't have this hard enough to, I'll just describe it as a guess, is that they're ready to sign on to some kind of international consortium that would include other Gulf countries that would get enriched uranium together.

13:26So they wouldn't be enriching inside Iran that they would have enriched uranium. so they can say, we still have the right to it. We're exercising that right through this consortium. And there'll be various other aspects of the deal, but those I think are the principal ones. And then the straight-up-forward moves. I mean, as of today, they're already agreeing to open it. But the problem is that once you've unshielded that weapon, it's always there. It's like, you know, the guy who pulls back his coat and you see he's got a gun. I mean, Iran going forward is always going to have the opportunity to use its Strait of Hormuz bomb.

14:07It's a better deterrent, frankly, than the nuclear weapon would be. You can't use a nuclear weapon. You can close the Strait of Hormuz again. And this is not the last time we'll hear the Iranians say, you know, unless you listen to what we want and such and such, we're going to close the Strait of Hormuz.

14:24David:which makes it feel like um that iran comes out of this stronger with a more hardline regime maybe having been militarily battered but actually with this new weapon and you know with the potential to use it in the future i mean that is a world away from the regime change that that had been talked about it's it's certainly not a regime change uh it is a leadership change uh i i think it's a mistake analytically to say they come out of it stronger because they really have been battered. Their network of proxies staggers forward, but the damage done to Hezbollah is so enormous that Hezbollah is accepting the Lebanese government negotiating openly with Israel for ceasefire.

15:15And my money is on the Lebanese government moving forward with disarmament in some more meaningful way of Hezbollah. The proxies in Iraq, I think, are on their backheels some. And internally, we haven't gotten every weapon that they possess, but an awful lot of them. So the idea that Iran is stronger, I don't agree with. Because I don't like the regime, I think it's done enormous harm to Iran and the region for the whole time that I've been following and Middle East, good riddance is what I feel about the Iranian regime. My concern is that the process of evolution into some post-revolutionary Iran that is a modernizing player, but also just a less rigid, a more competent regime that's faithful to its people.

16:16I worry that that's been set back. That process was happening. A foreign ambassador who served many, many years in Tehran said to me once, this regime is on a one-way street down toward its end. And I think that's still true, but I worry that the street is lengthened, that weirdly we may have put some time on the clock. The Ayatollah was going to die soon anyway. From everything I know, there was increasing dissension, factional fighting, jockeying for position, all sorts of opportunities for the transition process we all awaited in Iran. That stopped as soon as he was killed. Ghalibov seems like the strong man for the moment, but I'm told by friends in touch with people in Tehran that he's getting a lot of pushback from harder liners.

17:13I've been following Ghalibov literally for 20 years. I wrote my first column about him in 2006. That's how long he's been kind of hanging around, you know, convincing people like me that I'm really a modernizer. But anyway, that'd be my worry. I don't think, Gordon, that they're stronger by the way as I would define that, but I think they may be more durable because of regime cohesion.

17:45Gordon:David, the series we did this week on the pod was looking at the prospects for and how a special operations mission to go after the highly enriched uranium might happen, just to kind of lay out what it could look like. Like, my sense is that a few weeks ago that was on the table inside the White House. Do you think it's still on the table or do you think that it is unlikely to happen? So I think it's such a crazy idea, to be honest. I mean, it is a mission destined for failure. I think it was probably always more talk. You know, special operators always want to do the impossible, and I'm sure there was, you know, chatter and options were prepared and submitted.

18:36But the idea of seizing and securing enough space for, you know, to build a little, you know, mini airport and get the trucks to run back and forth to the site and load the stuff. And meanwhile, you know, entire country's army around.

18:55Gordon:Someone's shooting at you. It just doesn't really seem all that realistic. I mean, I'm sorry. If it were me and I wanted to have a really kind of nasty option, I'd just mine everything in the area and say, okay, boys, you know, you still got the HU. If you try to go get it, you're going to blow yourselves up. And if you get through the mines, we're going to shoot you from the air and just leave it there. But what do I know? Yeah.

19:20David:You're a seasoned observer of the intelligence world and its relationship to politicians. I just wonder, when you look back at how Donald Trump got into this and what he does next, how much does he listen to those voices? And does he have voices around him who are giving him kind of serious advice? Because obviously, Tulsi Gabbard doesn't look like she was in the room, his DNI. Are there people who are telling him what is realistic and what the consequences are, who have an impact and who he will listen to. So you two might well have better sources on this than I, but I'll tell you what my impression is.

19:59First, you worry that this was an intelligence failure as October 7 was for Israel. I don't think so. I think our intelligence analysts, as battered as they are, basically got it right from what I've been told by people who read the assessments from the National Intelligence Council and other analytical work, it was stated clearly decapitation will not lead to regime change. The IRGC will backfill. And that strategy that Trump obviously believed, much as Putin believed that within a week of going into in the Ukraine, the regime would fall. Trump, I think, believed that they would capitulate when faced with this overwhelming, decapitating power.

20:51He was told, sir, not likely. He ignored that. He was told that it was a significant possibility that Iran would strike at the Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates. They don't seem to have, you know, really believed that. I They were shocked by the degree of Iranian offensive attacks. But again, Trump was warned about that. He was warned that the Strait of Hormuz might be closed. So I think the intelligence agencies and General Cain and the joint staff did a pretty good job. I've come away from both Venezuela and this operation with increased admiration for General Cain as a chairman.

21:38And on the CIA, again, this really is, you know, what do I know, Lend? But I am told by a number of people that Ratcliffe has protected enough of the people and capabilities and prevented the sort of crazy, you know, Kash Patel, score settling, house cleaning. A lot of people left because they just weren't comfortable with the situation, a lot of older generation. But, you know, just a last comment, if you're a young operations officer, what could be better than this? You know, you've got two wars, you've got all kinds of crazy stuff that people want you to do. I mean, how cool is that? So I'm sure operations officers think, you know, this is great.

22:29And thanks, boss, for helping us out. And for analysts, this is a terrible time. Their analytical work is ignored. And for everything I know, they're demoralized. But they kept telling the truth. And nobody listened to them in the White House. But that doesn't mean that they were, you know, the fear would be that they would end up producing bad intel to suit their customers. And I don't think that's happened.

22:54Gordon:David, we started this conversation talking about Trump being intoxicated with the use of military power and the promise of it. What do you think is next for him? Is it Cuba? Is there somewhere else that he's going to turn his energies if indeed he does get a big shiny deal with Iran that gives them a golden bridge into a better future? Where does he turn next?

23:24clearly a concern. This is a Florida group that surrounds him. Marco Rubio, most prominently. Rubio is passionate about Cuba. But I think that the Florida-centric nature of this administration means that Cuba, until it's resolved in some way, will always be a big issue. My guess is that he'll make one last big push on Ukraine. And I think he understands that that's the most dangerous issue that he faces and the one where he's had the least success. My fear is that he's going to try to muscle Zelensky into accepting a concessionary deal to Putin. and that would just have terrible consequences. I wrote a column this morning about the looming danger of a Russia-Europe confrontation and the possibility that Trump basically would join Putin in stuffing a dangerous settlement down Europe's throat.

24:35So that's what I think is most likely in terms of a big project and the most dangerous.

24:42David:Yeah, because I think here in Europe, definitely the feeling is that the Iran war has had a significant impact on NATO, on those issues of trust and alliance and reciprocity and the arguments over basing and which bases can be used, whether it's between Spain, but also the UK and the president's criticism of the UK and people are worried, is Greenland going to be back on the agenda? I do think Iran, almost more than Ukraine recently, has contributed to the sense that NATO may be in crisis, actually, and that the relationship is in a really bad way. Europe, frankly, made a mistake in not involving itself more directly in thinking about ways to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

25:30I think there was a moment where European disdain, in particular Stormers, was overdone. I get it. I was in Davos when And Trump was just on a tear, all spun up about Greenland, and people just got sick of it. And they've stayed angry. I remember Alexander Stubb, arguably Trump's, with Mark Rutte, Trump's best friend in Europe, he just had it enough. And so I think it was that that led them to take a very standoffish position on the Strait of Hormuz beyond what was reasonable and sensible. I know that's probably an unpopular view for your viewers, but that's what I think.