95. Trump, Iran & The Ceasefire Collapse: What Happens Now?

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0:35Hi, everybody. Welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Kathy Kay. I'm down in Nashville, Tennessee, home of country music. For any of you listening from Nashville, it is great to be in your town. Loving it down here. And Anthony, back home. A rare move. I am back home. The bombs are flying. I'll be back in the air shortly, heading to your beautiful country for the Chalk Book Festival or the Chalk History Festival. So I'm going up there with fellow podcasters, James Holland, Aleister Campbell. That's great. Tony Pastor. It'll be fun. In the meantime, we're back having done our emergency podcast on Sunday, again, talking about Trump and Iran because things are moving so quickly that we decided to do something a little different.

1:18For those of you listening, you're hearing this as a regular podcast, but we're also doing this as a YouTube Live. Join us. We'll be taking your questions later. We're going to do a separate episode of questions for founding members. You can become I'm a founding member at therestispoliticsus.com. And we'll be looking at questions specifically about Iran because we've had so many of them since our episode on Sunday. Thank you all for listening to that. Thank you for sending us your questions. And then, of course, we'll be back as well on Sunday with our regular Q &A. But this is going to be a kind of update on where we are with Iran.

1:50Anthony, I know you've been speaking to people in the White House. I've been speaking to former senior defense officials and to a member of Congress so we can tell you what the mood is in Washington. But let me, shall I just kind of bring you all quickly up to date as we're recording this on Tuesday morning East Coast time. So Trump has declared a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on Truth Social. And then Israel accused Tehran of breaking that ceasefire within hours. This follows Trump ramping up the rhetoric, floating the idea of regime change in Tehran while his allies insist that that's not the mission and people in the White House separately have insisted that is not the mission.

2:31Iran's parliament, meanwhile, has voted to approve a plan to shut the Strait of Hormuz. We can talk about that as a retaliatory option, which would be the most critical oil choke point on the planet. And then we may get into the New York Democratic race, because I do think that's important in the second half of the podcast. New Yorkers heading to the polls in the mayoral primary that's turned into a fight, really, for the kind of national soul of the Democratic Party. I'll just give you a very, very quick timeline. And then I want you to listen to what Donald Trump has said within the last hour, leaving the White House for the NATO summit in Europe.

3:06Just after 6 p.m. yesterday, Eastern Time, Donald Trump announces that Iran and Israel have agreed to a ceasefire. At 1 a.m. Eastern Time, Trump officially declares that the ceasefire is in effect. At about 2 a.m., Israel says it's agreed to the U.S. ceasefire proposal. Iran said it would stop attacking if Israel did the same last night. But before the ceasefire took effect, both countries exchanged heavy fire overnight. And the reports from Iran at the moment are that people in the north of the country are still hearing the sounds of explosions. So it doesn't look like the ceasefire is holding.

3:43And here is what Donald Trump said, leaving the White House just about an hour or so ago. We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that? So, President of the United States standing outside the White House drops the F-bomb on Israel and Iran, lays into both Iran and Israel, but particularly Antony seemed really pissed off with Bibi Netanyahu and Israel breaking this ceasefire deal. What are you making of where we're standing right now? I like that Trump, by the way. I don't dislike that. You think that's a good look for the president of the United States to be saying, don't know what the fuck they're doing?

4:28Nah, that guy is the guy I grew up with in Queens. That's the guy that I grew up with. He talks like that, by the way. And by the way, he never really talks like that in public. He's a machine gun cursor. He talks like that in private. A lot of presidents swear. Joe Biden was a swearer, too. Yeah, of course. I mean, come on. So the reason why I like that about him is he's expressing the frustration. And whether you like Trump or dislike Trump, there is a strategy. So just give me a minute on this. And I'd like you to react to this because I've got this from sources inside the White House and I want to give them their fair due.

5:07I want at least people to hear what they're thinking. We can criticize it if we want to, but let's share what they're thinking. So point number one, hitting those nuclear power plants, whatever we want to call them, the enricher facilities, it was to take the risk off the table of a nuclear Iran. This is how they're framing it. This is how the White House sees it. Okay. That's how they're framing it. We don't want regime change. We don't care about a regime change. We don't want a forever war. We don't want to go to war with Iran. But Iran has been flexing for 30 years that they want to annihilate Israel, which is a very strong ally.

5:44And they've been using proxies throughout the region to hurt American soldiers, as the president pointed out in his speech. They've hurt the Israelis. Hamas is one of their proxies that attacked Israel on October 7th. So whether people like it or not, Israel has been at war with Iran, not direct kinetic war, but through proxies for a decade and a half, possibly more. And so the president is trying to take the nuclear threat away. We can debate whether it was the right thing to do or not. But again, I want you to hear their point of view. Moreover, they've then gone to people in Moscow and they've gone to people around the world, adversaries and allies, and said, if we take the nuclear threat away, maybe we can bring Iran back in some way, shape or form into the family of nations.

6:31And oh, by the way, the Saudis have tried to do that reasonably successfully. And the messaging to Israel is, lay down your arms, get them to lay down their arms, and see if, this is a wild thing to say, but are you ready for it? See if we can bring them into the Abraham Accords. If the Saudis can normalize with them, and the Saudis can normalize with Israel, is there enough connection to get the whole region to calm itself down. And so the euphoria in the White House last night was, okay, this is the start of a ceasefire. Now, I tweeted out there may or may not be a ceasefire because it's a very rough neighborhood.

7:13I'm in that neighborhood all the time. And obviously, as I've said to people, I have visited the war zones and I understand the tribal conflicts and I understand the ancestral hatred. And I understand that children on both sides have been murdered, Cady. And a result of which you're going to have a lot of hatred going. It's sort of a Northern Ireland situation to apply context. And so why the president is so frustrated, he's coming out of the White House and he's saying there is a historic opportunity here to have peace. Okay. It's not clear to me that Iran, you're the Brit. How do you say it?

7:50Iran or Iran? How do you say it? We say Iran. Iran. Okay. So we're going to use the British. I'm going to do my best. Okay. So Iran, See, I think they still have the access to the bomb. Okay. And I think they've got 400 kilograms of uranium. That's the flaw in all of this. Yeah. They got tipped off by the Russians. The Russians had to move their tech people out of there where they're going to drop the bomb. They got tipped off by Donald Trump tweeting. Of course. Honestly, we're bombing you. And again, I'm going to talk like a very practical person. Them having the bomb and Israel having the bomb, hopefully from a quadratic equation cancels itself out.

8:25but just the notion symbolically that the world perception is that they don't have it now maybe we can get to the negotiating table that's their messaging that's his frustration and by the way when he says because i know this son of a bitch really well when he says do you understand that that's him lecturing you like you're a child okay that's him yelling at ivanka trump in like 1987 you know what i mean when he's like screaming at her because you know she made a mess in the How dumb do you have to be? Right, right. Do you understand that? So that's him. Okay. Now, again, you could like or dislike the guy.

8:59I'm just letting you know that's him. And I got to give these guys credit because I get a lot of things wrong. And I'm willing to admit that if you can get to a ceasefire, and I'm not saying you're going to because of the ancestral hatred, but if you can get to a ceasefire and six or 12 months from now, they're talking about an economic deal. Germany's our friend, Katty. We were going after each other 80 short years ago. This is a little bit deeper. This is a little bit more tribal. It's a little more ancestral. But you know what? Like Northern Ireland, it's time for peace. And it's time for people to recognize that we'll be way more prosperous if we pull ourselves together.

9:41All right. So that's anyway, that's from the White House. I just wanted to share that and get your reaction to it. That's exactly what I have been hearing, that there is this separation, certainly in the president's mind, as I said on Sunday, between airstrikes and full-blown war. And I think listening to members of Congress and Iran experts, and I spoke to a couple yesterday, I spoke to somebody very senior from the first Trump administration, from the defense side. There is more optimism as we are recording this. And I am very careful about sounding overly optimistic or overly pessimistic when we don't have all the facts at our disposal, which we still don't yet.

10:20But there is certainly more optimism today that this could give the chance for a ceasefire. There are carrots on the table should Iran want to take them and come to the negotiating process and do away with its uranium stocks. Now, that could be a point of contention. It could be that America and Israel will have to give something on that and allow Iran some uranium enrichment capacity. I think the strikes against the Air Force base in Bahrain last night, the fact that absolutely no one was hurt, the fact that the Iranians signaled that that's what they were going to do, signaled through the Qataris and warned them that this is what was going to happen.

11:03And it was clearly kind of perfunctory. There was some feeling in the White House last night, I'm told that that made them think, well, if this is the best Iran has, they really are depleted and that we are dealing with a very weak opponent here. There are a couple of things I think that we need to be careful about. One is the concern that I have heard from Iran watchers in Washington, D.C. and from this senior Defense Department official, former Defense Department official, which is that what has happened to those uranium supplies? It's not the bomb. They don't have a bomb yet. It's not like the Iranians have the uranium and they've put it onto a missile.

11:41That hasn't happened yet. They're still about a year away from that, even if they have enriched uranium to weapons making capacity. But this Defense Department official said to me, listen, you could hide that stuff in a two kilogram can. This is not difficult to hide. They got a heads up from Trump because of his truth socials. They got a heads up from the Russians, quite possibly. And the understanding, and we even heard that from members of the Trump administration, including the vice president, is that this has been put somewhere and we don't know where it is. So they still have highly enriched uranium in Iran.

12:15The proposition that you are laying out would entail of the Iranians regime, not the people, but of the Ayatollah and the people around the Ayatollah and the clerics, that they fundamentally change, that they fundamentally change their ambitions and that they take that enriched uranium and they say to the IAEA, okay, here it is, dispose of it as you will. We will leave ourselves without this defense that we saw as fundamental to our national security. Maybe that's possible. Maybe it's possible that they will say, we'll go into the Abraham Accords. We will align ourselves with the great Satan and the little Satan in the United States and Israel.

12:57And we will forsake all of the things that we came into power to uphold in 1979. It's quite a big ask. It's quite a big cultural and political ask. There's someone on the live feed that's saying, I brought up Germany, but there was regime change in Germany in order for us to become allies. So maybe it's not possible. I know it's a rough neighborhood. When a ceasefire was announced last night, I said, okay, that's going to be very tenuous because these guys don't trust each other. So there's no trust in the equation. There's also hurt and there's also violence. Again, imagine, God forbid, one of your kids killed in a terrorist attack or an Israeli bombing.

13:42And now you're sitting there saying, okay, I want my vengeance. I want justice for my family. And you have to transcend all of those atavistic human emotions. And you have to almost have a transcendental moment in your life, like a Mandela, where you have to put down the hatred, the ancestral hatred, and you have to say that you're going to have peace. I know you're not necessarily buying that. I just think hard, cold self-interest is generally, you know, the pessimists in the Middle East have not been wrong over the last 40 years, and Iran has been part of that problem. So the idea that Iran is suddenly going to change, or the clerics going to suddenly change, it's possible that there is still regime change.

14:28We Iranians coming out, pouring out into the streets in protest since these attacks on their country. In fact, the opposite, I'm told, is true, is that in the last week or two, Iranians have kind of rallied around the Iranian flag and the leadership. So this could have consolidated them. I think the point of optimism now is actually not about Iran. What I understand people are watching more closely is Donald Trump's relationship with Bibi Netanyahu. And here's a couple of posts that Donald Trump put out this morning since this ceasefire was broken. One, Israel, do not drop those bombs. If you do, it is a major violation.

15:01Bring your pilots home now. And then just to make sure that everybody understood, Israel is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home while doing a friendly plane wave to Iran. Nobody will be hurt. The ceasefire is in effect. Thank you for your attention to this matter. I'm loving this thank you to your attention to this matter, which is like the kind of subcommittee on agriculture. But anyway, there's the president to the United States, making it very clear to Bibi Netanyahu, I did what you wanted me to do, but don't expect me to get dragged into this further. And don't think that you've now got me in your pocket.

15:35And that's what I'm hearing. And the source of the optimism that I'm hearing is as much about the Iranians' so far failure to respond and the implementation of a CIFAR as it is about, it's even more so about Donald Trump taking on Bibi Netanyahu. And if he carries on taking on Netanyahu this way, then I think the kind of cascading beneficial consequences of events in Iran, potentially even addressing the issues of Gaza, because this is a big distraction from what is happening in Gaza at the moment, which is terrible, where IDF forces are shooting at people who are trying to get food. If that could also be folded into this, then there is some optimism.

16:16And again, pessimists always win in the Middle East, but there is at the moment a little bit of optimism that you could have some kind of realignment that the Middle East is due for. It has to depend on very cold, hard interests. I think you're making a very important point. And so I want to add a little bit of an exclamation point to it, because that is also rhetoric coming out of the White House. The White House is saying, Mr. Prime Minister, we did exactly what you asked us to do. We took out those nuclear sites. You're going overboard in Gaza. You're hurting your brand in Gaza. You're hurting the country.

16:50You're hurting your country now in Gaza. We did take out the nuclear risk. You've gotten your pound of flesh in the retribution that you provided after October 7th. You got to pull out of there now, and we got to get to some type of structured peace. That's the messaging. And by the way, I always want to be objective here. People know how I feel about Donald Trump. That messaging, I am in support of. You said to me, it's 12 months later, Trump took out the nuclear sites. We have a constructive peace in Gaza, and we're going to have a international community rebuild, help to rebuild Gaza. And there's some type of structured ceasefire, and there's some inspections maybe going on and some trust on both sides, that's a win for the world.

17:42That's going to reduce tensions and will lower oil prices. It'll increase economic activity. And some of this look is Bibi Netanyahu has incredibly powerful political incentives to keep this going, to stay in office, to stay out of jail. The White House also knows that. But let me just say something as a market participant. This is my 36th year of getting things right and wrong in the stock market, Caddy. The market is telling you that this is going to get resolved favorably. Okay. And so take a look at the treasury market. Take a look at the stock and bond market. Take a look at the cryptocurrency market.

18:21The market is telling you that these two sides, and maybe you're right, maybe the military is exhausted in Iran. The 93 million people that live in Iran versus the 8 or 10 million people that live in Israel, they've been vanquished by sanctions, multiple decades of sanctions. And maybe the Russians can't help them right now because of what's going on in Ukraine. And I'm sure the Chinese are trying to help them. But the Chinese have their own problems. And so this could be a historic moment where the needle gets thread. And I will say this, the Saudis, and I'll give them some credit here, the Saudis are working very hard on this behind the scenes, not just in Washington, but in Tehran and in also, believe it or not, Jerusalem, to try to get this to calm down because it's in their interest too.

19:16They have their own problems. They're trying to transition from a post-oil economy in Saudi, and they want the fighting to stop. Okay, you got to give MBS credit for this. So there's a lot going on in the region where people are pushing now for peace slightly different from, let's say, 10 years ago when the pessimists were really winning. The other thing, I think we're in a very different situation. You're right. We're in a very different situation than we were a year ago with Iran massively depleted. We still don't know a couple of outstanding things that are worrying people. One, as I mentioned, are those uranium stockpiles.

19:51Where are they? And what could they do with them? And the second is how much control Ayatollah Khamenei has over the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which is basically a military. And are they all in lockstep with an 84-year-old leader? Or would some of those hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers feel they wanted to do something different if the country looked like it was about to have a change of regime? So there are still outsounding issues. There are still things. And we are, look, guys, we are always prone to being impatient. And nobody is more impatient than anyone sitting in Washington, D.C.

20:26And the temptation to call this thing after only three days is very, very strong. But I can warn you that the Iranians have a longer time frame and they are more patient and they will have strategized as well. As you said on our podcast on Sunday, they're not dumb. They knew this could happen and they will have plans of their own. Can I say something cheeky before the break? Because I've done the calculation. Yes. The ceasefire lasted 0.007 Scaramucci's. I'm going to put it in the chat so everybody can see it. Okay. Anthony, that is 007. That makes you kind of James Bond. Yeah. Well, not me. Not me.

21:03The ceasefire is kind of James Bond. And I just want to point out to people that, you know, I'm not that great in math and it took a while to really go through when the ceasefire was supposedly happening and then when the first bomb dropped. But I got it at 0.007. Okay, we can take a break. Scaramooches. We're going to take a break and come back and talk about the politics of this.

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22:39OK, I think it is worth talking about the politics of this, both from the Republican side, from the Democratic side. But I think most importantly is the issue of Congress, Anthony. And we talked about this on Sunday. You've got AOC saying that Donald Trump should be impeached. I can't find another Democrat who agrees with that position, who's in the kind of, you know, center of the party. Certainly, they are not happy that Congress was not briefed in the way that Congress is usually briefed in this kind of situation where the president before a strike like this would go to what's called the Gang of Eight, which is the leadership of both the House and the Senate on both sides and the heads of the intel committees.

23:26And those people were not told. Now, the White House would say that was for operational security reasons, but the raid on Osama bin Laden, the Gang of Eight was briefed beforehand. And you would think that you could trust eight people to keep that together. It's interesting talking to people in the military, how they do say the people I've been speaking to and the people in the intelligence community that I've spoken to over the last couple of days have raised this with me, and I hadn't really expected them to, saying, look, it is better in these situations to go to Congress if this is going to go any further.

24:03The president had the right to do this, although even that is debatable. He's calling this under the War Powers Act. The War Powers Act gives the president the right to strike. If America is being attacked, clearly it wasn't, or if America was about to be attacked. And that's where we have to kind of, they'll be digging into the intel. It doesn't look like America was about to be attacked. The president does this anyway. The War Powers Act gives him 60 days to operate. But the advantage of going to the people, which is effectively Congress in this situation, which would approve this because he has majorities in the House and the Senate, is that you then, if the situation were to demand more from the American military, you have the population on board.

24:46And I think there are people in Congress, sensible people in both parties in Congress who are saying it would be good for the president to lay this out calmly, the rationale for doing this. Do you think there is anything there in the failure to go to Congress? I mean, and I'm not talking about the raw politics of this, we can get into that in a second, more in the sense of whether it would have been better given the stakes. And look, we're talking at a time where the stakes don't, it looks like this has played out, right? It looks like this has worked, but we need to wait much longer to know whether this has really worked.

25:21Would going to Congress have been a better move in some form, in the talking to the gang, giving the gang of eight a heads up? So, I mean, yes, of course, it would be a better move because it's more in line with how we've done things in the past, and that would be a better move, and Trump likes breaking norms. Tim Kaine, the senator, and the former vice presidential candidate, was on TV last night discussing a re-litigation of the War Powers Act, which basically he wants the Senate and the House to reignite the War Powers Act. So we, just for people's benefit, we let the War Powers Act go after the Vietnam War.