177. The Real Reason Trump’s Blocking The Strait of Hormuz

0:08Hello and welcome to the Rest is Politics U.S. with me, Anthony Scaramucci. Today I am joined by veteran diplomat and backed by popular demand, Richard Haass, who has worked in four administrations and is now President Emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations. And he has an amazing substack, which I am a subscriber to, called Home and Away. You can find that, of course, on Substack. It's a pleasure to have you on. And I consider you a friend for a long time, Richard. So it's great to have you back on the show. Of course, Caddy is on vacation. God bless her. And just so that I can define our relationship for everybody that's listening and not watching us on YouTube, Richard has a Windsor knot on.

0:52It looks like a Carve shirt. It's probably a Brioni. I am wearing a t-shirt that says, read books, lift weights, fight fascists. Okay. That's my t-shirt for today. But we want to go right to the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. And I heard you this morning on Morning Joe, and I thought you're making a lot of compelling points about this. So tell us where you are on the naval blockade, why you like it, actually, why you think it's a good idea, and tell us what the ramifications could potentially be. Well, if I may, in the spirit of this podcast, be self-referential. I think it's a good idea because it was mine originally.

1:31I came up with it a few weeks ago. What I call that the straight has to be open for all or closed to all. Anthony, I find it preposterous that Iran gets to decide who goes through the strait, who doesn't. And here we are trying to pressure them to essentially compromise at the negotiating table. In the meantime, they're banking billions. I just don't get it. And everybody else, by the way, is unable to export their oil, and it's causing havoc in the world economy. So I wish we had done this weeks ago, better late than never. But the whole idea is to basically say, look, same point. The state's not Iran's to close, or it's not for Iran to say who can use it.

2:15So either everybody gets to use it or nobody gets to use it, including Iran. That's our position. It turns out it's a lot less difficult to do this if we do it in a smart way than it would be to seize and hold Karg Island. This is a lot more efficient than trying to escort individual tankers. So it makes sense militarily. I've spoken to previous CENTCOM commanders and all that. And again, the idea is to essentially incentivize Iran to be reasonable about the strait. It's also to incentivize countries like China, who derive benefit from, obviously, the oil coming from Iran, to lean on Iran. So I want the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Turks, others who Iran has basically created exceptions for, I want them to lean on their buddies in Tehran and say, hey, open the strait for everybody, or we're not going to be able to get the oil and gas that we need.

3:05So that's essentially the argument. Let me say one other thing. What I'd really like, though, for the president to do is say, look, we're doing this blockade. It's a means to an end. It's not an end to itself. And we're open to the idea of sitting down with Iran at negotiations and talking with them about how the strait might be governed going forward. That maybe that we create some new authority, some new group, Iran, maybe the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Bahrainis, whatever, or UAE, and they would all decide how the strait is to be run for the betterment of all the countries that are living on it and dependent on it.

3:39I think there should be the blockade, but also there should be a diplomatic initiative. Okay. So take me through the practical application of this just for our viewers and listeners. So an Iranian tanker heading for China is now coming through the strait and the US naval vessels interdict it and then do what? They block it from leaving the strait, they block it on the exit of the strait, and then let's say they want to keep going, what does the Navy do then? They bomb the tanker or they take control of the tanker using SEAL Team 6? How would it work? Well, I'd hope it wouldn't get to that. What I'm hoping is that tankers would stop short of it, and I would probably do the interdiction, so to speak, well into the Gulf of Oman.

4:26If you think about a map, you have the Persian Gulf, so to speak, or the Arabian Gulf, then you've got the Strait, then you've got the Gulf of Oman. I would do it out there. It's about 200 miles across. You could do it with aircraft and ships. I wouldn't do it in close because in close also gives Iran more military options. But yeah, I would hopefully that they would think twice about it. These chips are expensive. The oil on them is valuable. You've got two options. One is you basically block the a tanker with a naval vessel, or technically you could disable it. You could shoot something very specific out of propeller or whatever.

5:02I'd rather not have it come to that. But if worse came to worse, you could do that. But first I'd go diplomatic, then I'd go blocking, then I would do if I had to some type of shooting. But again, not to hurt the crew, simply to disable the vessel. So you've been at this for over four decades. You've met most of the senior leadership in Beijing. You know the situation in the Gulf. How would the Chinese handle this? It's a good question. To me, it's the biggest question. When I came up with the idea three, four weeks ago, and I wrote about it in Home and Away, my newsletter, that to me was the biggest concern.

5:38It wasn't simply because we have a summit plan with China, but the U.S.-Chinese relationship is arguably the most important relationship in the world at this time in history, the last thing we want is a crisis with China. It's a complicated enough relationship as it stands. So I would talk to them and I would make it clear that they have every incentive to get Iran to act reasonably. This is not Iran's waterway to close. And our goal is simply to make it open. It's not, again, a blockade as a means to an end, not as an end. We're not trying to do this against China. And indeed, we're willing to work with Iran.

6:14So I would sit down with China. And my guess is China has a real incentive to open up the strait. So I don't think it's inevitable that this puts China and the United States on a collision course, literally and figuratively, but I'd obviously consult with them beforehand. I don't know if we did. I fear we didn't, but I would have sent, that's why you have ambassadors and emissaries. I would have sent one to all the countries directly affected to get them to lean on Iran, to explain what you're doing and why. The other thing I would have done is I would have gotten other countries to join this.

6:45I would have talked to the Europeans and the Japanese and the Koreans, other countries that depend on the oil. There's no reason this has to be a U.S.-Iran thing. This should be a collective thing. You know, Richard, the economy, and you pointed this out this morning on the show, the economy in Iran is very, very fragile, was teetering on collapse, protests in January. they're going to lose i mean i'm just going off of estimates in the uh in the public press uh something like uh one to two billion dollars a day they've got 1.1 billion barrels a day going to china let's say this took place you can't get the oil out any other real real way there's no real pipelines coming out of Iran heading to China to speak of.

7:33So workshop for me, what happens to the Iranian economy? I feel like this is the potential kill shot without putting ground troops in. 100%. And allow me a digression for a minute. It's one of the reasons I think this war was so ill-advised because the Achilles heel of Iran was its economy. As you correctly said, I think that's why people were coming out in the streets. The government was beginning to lose the support of the businessmen, the so-called bizarris, the middle class people who own the shops. I simply would have kept economic pressure on Iran. And I actually think if we had done that and never started shooting, I actually think there was a better chance of getting regime change than what we've done.

8:17I actually think we've interrupted the whole process of regime change. That said, the economy was weak then. Obviously, it's weaker now. We ought to keep pressuring them. I don't have a specific answer saying it's nine days or 14 days or 23 days. But every day that goes by, as you say, they're no longer putting money in their bank account. And this is a country that ultimately needs to rebuild it. Think about the history of the Iranian revolution. Towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s, the Ayatollah Khomeini basically agreed to a peace deal. Why? Because he needed to save the revolution.

8:51And he said, this is like drinking poison to me, but I'm going to drink poison to save the revolution. Well, I want to get Iran to that point again. I want them to say, it's really hard to make a deal with these Americans who have done all that they've done to us. But if we're going to save the 79 revolution and avoid a collapse, we have got to cut a deal. So that's why I want to put economic pressure on them. And I think there's a chance it could succeed. Okay. And so the deal gets cut, Richard. We're going to flip over to the negotiations now over the weekend. As we both know, 21 hours of talks, negotiations stalled.

9:25Vice President Vance and his diplomatic team left Islamabad without a deal. But if you put this type of economic pressure on them and they want to keep the regime, as you're saying, do they keep the regime without executing on the nuclear weapons and enriching the uraniums? Is that what you're saying? Is that the red line for the Trump administration? So let me segue it. If I were running the negotiations, I think one of the mistakes we made was putting too much on the table at once. And by the way, anyone who thought we were going to get a deal in 21 hours was nuts. It's not the way these things work.

10:01There's a lot of throat clearing and posturing and all that. So actually, I think the word failures is way, way, way off base. I would have focused on the straight because that's where the urgency is for all the obvious economic reasons. The nuclear, I would have simply said to Iran, we want to negotiate something on the nuclear. We want to get the enriched uranium, the 900 pounds or whatever it is of enriched uranium, either out of the country or we want to dilute the amount of enrichment. There's got to be a very low ceiling on your nuclear program, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're going to negotiate that.

10:34We got time to do that. That's really complicated. We got time to do it. We're just telling you, but don't mess around with your nuclear program. Don't change the status of it. If we see you guys taking steps that looks like you're moving towards a weapon, then we're going to have to break the ceasefire. Other than that, we won't. So I would have basically parked the nuclear, put that aside, set up technical negotiations on that, and I would have focused all the energy initially on the conversation we're having about the strait. And I think that would have been a much smarter way to go. Let me say one other thing, Anthony.

11:05Once again, the Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff approach to negotiations is to promise a Middle Eastern country or entity Disneyland. If you do this, we're going to give you great economic benefit to turn it into Palm Beach. I think that reflects a real misreading of most people in the Middle East, particularly places like Iran. The strongest This emotion, in my experience, having negotiated with Iran more times than I can count, having negotiated with Palestinians for decades, it's not a desire for material comfort. It's a desire to not be humiliated, that they want to have dignity. They want to be able to have pride.

11:47So our whole approach seems to be based on a premise as though these were businessmen who want a deal. But no, that's not what it's about. They want dignity. They feel they've been humiliated by history or by the United States or by Israel. So I think the idea that we can win them over with the promises of great material improvement is probably a misreading of who we're negotiating with. When the Iranian foreign minister says we were inches away from a memorandum of understanding, is that propaganda, Richard? Is that him just saying that to appeal to some people in the West that are adversaries of the president or perhaps his allies in country?

12:27Or do you think he really thinks that they were inches away? And then the secondary question, though, is if you're the Iranians, why would you want to give up the nuclear when you've seen how much of a deterrent that's been for North Korea? It seems like you've got two red lines where no one's going to move over the red line. In terms of whether they were this close to a memorandum of understanding an MOU, I don't know. and a lot depends upon the detail of an MOU. Sometimes you have memorandums of understanding, framework agreements before you delve into the details. And a lot depends upon how detailed they are.

13:04If it simply says we're going to negotiate the following eight subjects, that's not that hard to get because it's a pre-negotiation rather than a negotiation. So quite possibly. The answer is, I don't know. And it sounds to me that the US wanted to accomplish too much in this first round. We were too ambitious. And also the idea that we could impose so many terms, say on the nuclear at this for is nuts. It's not only too ambitious, but at the end of the day, negotiations always reflect what happens on the ground and people's where their heads are at. So Iran coming out of the last, what, five, six weeks, they weren't feeling vanquished.

13:40They were feeling like they'd taken our best punch. We need the end to the war. So again, I questioned some of our tactics. Let me just be gentle. We can come back to that, even if it turns out we were pretty close. I don't see anything that gets in the way of having a general framework agreement, as long as we don't try to resolve too many of the big issues up front. Look, on the nuclear, I think you make a really good point. One of the ironies of this war might be that the Iranians say, hey, this never would have happened if we'd had nuclear weapons. Now, North Korea doesn't get attacked. They look what Russia's done to Ukraine.

14:15They look at Libya. They look at Iraq in the old days. And they say, giving up nuclear weapons can be hazardous to your health. And so I bet there are people in Tehran who are saying, we can't say we're not going to do it or we lie. That's a possibility. So that's why we either need really intrusive inspections, because the bottom line is we can't allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon for any number of reasons, the threat it would pose to Israel. But also, if they start getting nuclear weapons, half a dozen other countries in the Middle East are going to want nuclear weapons of their own. And if you think the Middle East is bad now, just wait.

14:50But that's what you have to negotiate. I don't think we can solve this problem militarily. I do think there's going to have to be a negotiation. Ironically enough, Anthony, it's going to be a version of what Obama did, the JCPOA, the 2016 agreement. There's things you can and should improve on it. It'll be a version of what Witkoff and Kushner rejected in the days leading up to the war. There's going to be some ceiling that's going to have to be negotiated. I don't care what Iran says in the sense of whether they give up certain rights. What I care is what they're allowed to have. Intentions don't matter.

15:22A whole lot of capabilities do. So I would keep the focus less on what they promise and more on what they're allowed to have. When you were on with Cady a few weeks ago, you talked a little bit about the divergence between Israel and the United States. And just address that now that you're looking at the tenets of the deal. Where do you think the Israelis are on that deal and what's acceptable to them and not acceptable? It's a really interesting question because the U.S. and Israel over the last five or six weeks have really collaborated. When you read the New York Times piece the other day by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Bibi Netanyahu's role in essentially persuading Donald Trump to go to war was clearly significant.

16:04I think he pitched things that were wildly unrealistic, but the president was more than willing to buy them. promises of regime change and his potential to be this historic figure in the Middle East. And then militarily, we've really collaborated closely over the last, what, five, six weeks. But I think there is a growing strategic divergence. The U.S. priority is, one, to get the straight open, two, to prevent it from getting a nuclear weapon, and so forth. For the Israelis, what got them involved in this war was the Iranian ballistic missile inventory, and they're worried about Iranian proxies.

16:36So the list of priorities is ranked differently between the United States and Iran. Plus, Bibi Netanyahu is prepared to have perpetual war. Now, it's not clear the Israeli public is, but let's park that aside for a second. But he is. And the United States isn't. We want to get the straight open. We want to have normalcy. At least in principle, we should want to focus on other parts of the world, in particular, the Indo-Pacific. So I think for Israel, Iran is the big strategic consideration. There's no focus on anything else. For the United States, it's a strategic consideration. We've got any number of others.

17:10So I think there really is a strategic divergence here. And what I don't know, you would know better than I would probably, is whether there's resentment in some places in the administration where they feel that the Israelis, shall we say, persuaded them, quote unquote, to go into this war based upon assessments that either were wrong or that were disingenuous because the Israelis knew they would appeal to the president, even though they knew they were wrong. Yeah, listen, I mean, I think the thing is way more complicated than even the press is reporting. I also think that the president, because I know he likes to eat as young, I mean, that's basically what he does.

17:52He set Vance up to fail. And I just want to make the case for that. And if you disagree with me, I want you to push back. He sends Vance there. He knows Vance is not a fan of the war. So he's got to pin him and got to get him to adhere to the idea of the war. But he doesn't give Vance any proxy whatsoever. Vance calls him no less than 10 times in 21 hours. Okay, so that's a leash. Okay, that's not anything other than super control. And then Vance also speaks to Rubio, Hegseth, Besant, and Cooper during the talks. so he's trying to manage five different principles simultaneously and so there's a structural problem there as well and so to me we'll get to the pope in the second half of this show uh but vance is now a devout catholic which you i think you know rubio is also a catholic i feel like trump is making a stooge of jd vance and i think he's gonna really hurt vance coming into the second half of the administration.

18:58What are your thoughts on that? Interesting. See, originally I thought Vance couldn't lose. Let me give you the opposite, that he was being sent over there to negotiate peace. And either if he succeeded, good for him. If he quote unquote failed, then others like Trump would make the decision to escalate. So Vance's fingerprints are not necessarily on any military escalation, though I read just before we did this, that the administration is thinking about resuming armed strikes, which I think is a particularly bad idea. I'm not sure what, if anything, they'd accomplish militarily, but I just don't, again, if there's pressure to be had here in Iran, it's economic, not military.

19:35We're going to run out of targets at the rate we're going. And Vance, you know, the president may have been pissed off at Vance because Vance signaled in the New York Times piece, shall we say, his lack of enthusiasm for the war. And he came out of that story so well that it tends to satisfy the first rule of who leaked whoever comes out of a story best. So the president may have wanted to take him down a peck or two, but I'm not sure if Vance comes off as a big loser here. I don't think you necessarily look awful if you make efforts to negotiate peace. Plus, the ceasefire still has a couple of weeks to go unless we break it, and there'll be more negotiations.

20:09I don't think this is a one and done, one man's opinion. But again, you know the president better than I do. That is definitely what Vance's staff is telling him to make him feel better and I understand that, but there's a streak in the president where he wants Vance to come across as his errand boy. And there's a streak in the president where he wants Vance, particularly after that New York Times article, to be very compliant, very pliant to Donald Trump. And I think that that came across there. And I think that's existential for Vance as we go into the 2028 because he's going to try to separate himself as most candidates do.

20:48Even your old colleague and dear friend George Herbert Walker Bush tried to separate himself from a very popular president, Ronald Reagan. No, you're right. In 1988. But anyway, I want to go to something that's been bothering me about the US involvement in all this. And I want to get your perspective because you're a peacekeeper. You're a diplomat. I think you've been one of the most articulate people on the rules-based society globally and America's role in it. How damaged is American prestige by this? We're 40 days into it. I asked your successor, Michael Froman, the following question. I'm going to ask it to you as well.

21:31Let's say you're a clairvoyant. You're in the situation room, and you can open up your iPad, and you show exactly where we're going to be 44 days after this war starts. And you're in a senior leadership position, so you now have full clairvoyance, Richard. Do you transact on this war? Do you execute this war? No way on God's green earth. No way on God. Okay. Thank you. We are so much worse off. We're so much worse off than we were. Okay. So please explain to our viewers and listeners why we are so much worse off. And by the way, you would have been against it even without the clairvoyance because you understand - I was against it from the get-go.

22:10Right, exactly. But explain to people now, let's say we're in the situation room together and you're being an honest broker of the events and you're saying, we are so much worse off. List all the reasons why. Well, first of all, there was no reason to go to work. Let's just point that out. It wasn't as though Iran was about to do something in terms of some new action or unveiling a new threat. There was nothing new on the nuclear file, nothing new on the strait, nothing new with the proxies. There was nothing new. There was no reason to launch this war. Second of all, as I said, Iran was economically reeling.

22:44If there was a policy to be had, particularly after the people were protesting and then hurt, mowed down by the Iranian authorities, it would have been to dial up the economic pressure. That was the Achilles heel. This made no sense. Why are we, we were, so, I mean, what have we accomplished? We've reduced Iran's conventional military capabilities. Okay. But they will be able to regenerate, you know, one, they've saved some missiles, drones. They've meanwhile gotten control of the strait and they've denied use of it, which has potentially, you know, cataclysmic consequences for the world economy.

23:19We haven't set back their nuclear program. We may have increased their urge to have nuclear weapons. We've weakened American relationships in the region around the world because we didn't consult about this war. We didn't defend our allies in the region effectively. They're all much worse off. Indeed, the entire business model of this part of the world has been put at risk. The president's posts have raised questions about his temperament, his judgment. You can add the list of other characteristics. Oh, by the way, we've used up a lot of our military hardware. We've had to pull forces out of other regions, put them here.

23:55So we've left Ukraine with less of a pipeline of arms, Taiwan with less of a pipeline of arms. So this war is at odds, among other things, with the administration's own national security strategy. Totally at odds with that. It makes no strategic sense. The idea that we're once again concentrating on a part of the world where we shouldn't be concentrating. So yeah, there's a long list of reasons why this is one of the most counterproductive excursions, if I may use the word, in modern American foreign policy. Yeah, because he thought that they were going to have a very quick victory here and they were going to have a move towards secularism.

24:32And he saw himself somewhere on the Red Sea meeting with the new Iranian leader, like he met with the Syrian president. 100%. The Venezuela experience clearly made them think this was going to be quick and easy. Also, when you read the New York Times and other pieces, the lack of expertise or knowledge about Iran is shocking. Either people didn't know Jack, or if they knew it, they were too scared to speak up. Or if anybody did speak up and there's no evidence they really did, it was rejected out of hand because it didn't fit with the model that this was going to be another Venezuela. But anyone who knew the first thing about Iran would know something about Iran's resilience, about what it went through in its 10-year war with Iraq, and so forth.

25:15This is a revolution that was based upon anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. So this, to me, was premised on such a misunderstanding. Anthony, after the Iraq experience in 2003, I wrote a book, War of Necessity, War of Choice. And one of my arguments was, you should only go to war with countries you understand. And we violated that in 2003, and we violated it now with Iran. But it's the lack of intellectual curiosity because none of them even understood what the Mosaic Defense Doctrine was. And by the way, all you have to do is read the presidential daily brief, which they all had access to. I mean, I didn't – and I'll confess to you, Richard.