Why does Iran think it’s won the war?

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:12Iran thinks it has won the war. And this is why.

0:28I'm Gareth Barlow. And it's normal when a ceasefire has agreed for both sides to claim they got what they wanted. And Donald Trump told Sky News in a late night phone call that he'd achieved a complete victory. And his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, backed him up. We control their fate, not the other way around. That's why they came to the table. Iran's defeat is America's retribution for every American loss to Iranian terror. While Iran is opening the Strait of Hormuz, it's coming with plenty of conditions to ensure that it still controls it. As part of the Iranian 10-point plan, which Trump has said is part of the constituent parts of that ceasefire deal, ships will be allowed through in coordination with Iran's military.

1:08The plan also calls for all sanctions on Iran to be lifted and for the US military to withdraw from the Middle East. It pretty much sounds like some huge concessions, if they're agreed to. Well, let's discuss all of this with our defence and security analyst, Michael Clarke. It's an interesting time, Michael. There have been days of relentless bombing campaigns on both sides. And then a hell of a deadline. The risk of the end of a civilisation. And it was all averted at the last minute. And it feels as though there's no victor, really. but it feels as though both sides will claim a win. Why do the Iranians in the first instance think that they have come out on top?

1:50Yeah, they think that they've won this round. This may be the first round in a longer war, or this might turn out to be the war itself. This last 40 days has left the Iranians in a potentially stronger position than they started with. So they'll think that they have done pretty well. So they're still there. They have changed their government from a theocratic government with a military element to a military junta, which is tougher. They have pushed back even further the idea of popular reform. The reformers who were out on the streets in January will not be coming out anytime soon. And then they've faced down the United States.

2:23They've kept up attacks at a lower level than they started with, but they've kept up attacks in the whole region. And not least, the most important thing is they've weaponized the Strait of Hummers. And, you know, Hummers was not a problem to anybody before the war. Now it's a problem to everybody. For the last 40-odd years, the Strait of Hummers has been studied as the obvious pressure point in a future Gulf War. And lo and behold, there it is. It's no surprise to anyone, apart apparently from the man in the White House and his close advisors, who seem to have been surprised by the effect it would have and how easy it is to make the Strait of Hummers impossible.

2:58You don't have to close it with mines or booms or chains or anything else like that. You simply have to make passage dangerous, and then the insurance market closes it for you because the big tankers become uninsurable if they're going to be fired on as they go through the straits. Iran didn't control the strait before this war. It doesn't have legal rights to do so, but it looks as though that's one of the conditions it wants to achieve, is control of the strait. If the United States was to agree to some premise around that, How big a win is this for Iran? It's quite big because then it would give them a grip over the Straits.

3:34It would give them implied rights. They'll talk in terms of protocols and technical difficulties, none of which are true. But they'll talk in those terms to make it clear that only with their agreement will the Straits remain properly open again. But everyone will know that it's by the grace and favor of the Iranians. Whereas the Straits is an international waterway. They have no right over it whatsoever, any more than we, the British, have a right to close the English Channel. We have our territorial waters, but the English Channel, which is exactly the same width as the straits, as it happens, 21 miles, they have no right to close the Strait of Humas.

4:06And if they can make the international world, led by the United States, accept some sort of protocol which gives them some sort of special status to the straits, that will be a huge victory for them going forward into the future. It will be a huge blow to maritime law because there are many straits in the world which must stay open for the good of the world economy. And maritime law was the basis in the 18th century of international law. So it would be a huge blow against some of the foundations of international law, as if international law hasn't been knocked about badly enough already. Talk to me about the American perspective on this.

4:43Donald Trump has flip-flopped over his view on the Strait of Hormuz. Sometimes he says it's not their problem. Sometimes he said he'll make sure it gets reopened. Donald Trump says the Straits are not important to us. And directly speaking, that's sort of true because everything that comes out of the Straits, only 10 % of it goes to the Western world, to Europe, Africa, and the United States or North America. Collectively, 90 % goes to Asia, which is India, China, Southeast Asia. So the United States certainly could function perfectly well without the Straits. And it clearly has been demonstrated by this crisis that it's very important to the world economy.

5:17thereby, United States has a big indirect interest because when the world economy suffers, then inflation in the US goes up and trade goes down, oil prices go up. The United States had put forward a 15-point plan at one point, which had been described as a surrender document for the Iranians. The Iranians in the last 12 or so hours have put forward a 10-point plan of their own, which looks a little bit like a surrender document for the Americans. Everything from, you're going to have to pay Washington to rebuild Iran, You're going to have to get rid of the sanctions. You're going to have to let us operate the Strait of Hormuz.

5:52You're going to have to withdraw all your military from the region. All 40 ,000 of them. This is, it appears, like pie-in-the-sky level kind of politics. How far back from that will the two sides eventually meet? Well, that's the point. Both sides have submitted to the other their maximalist demands. And any sensible person looking at 10 points on one side, 15 points on the other, would say these are irreconcilable because they are, apart from a few minor points. So sometime in the next two weeks, both of those positions have got to be set aside and some new form of words developed, which will allow both sides to back off.

6:26Because of course, the Iranians want to back off. They don't want to continue with this because they think they've won this round. And if they could walk away with this as their victory, they'll play it up. That's what it would be sensible for them to do that. And I worry that they're not going to be sensible because they do also talk in terms of vengeance and natural justice. and they do have a very specific sense of grievance. And the danger is they'll overplay this victory. It's not a huge victory, but it is a victory because they're still there. They'll overplay it and they will waste the opportunity.

6:55But I don't think there's any chance, any realistic chance, of some sort of melding together of these 25 points, 10 on one side, 15 on the other, into something that looks like a viable deal between these two maximalist positions. They're going to have to come up with something completely new, covering nuclear, probably not ballistic missiles, covering the Strait of Hormuz, and possibly some confidence-building measures. So Iran thinks, to some degree at least, it has a bit of a winning hand. Meanwhile, the United States thinks, well, hang on a second, we've won this round as well. And the quote here from the US is, everything we've achieved, everything that we wanted to do militarily, and it was a complete victory, true or false?

7:36True, in the sense that everything we wanted to achieve militarily, they did. It was militarily flawless and politically clueless. That's the point. They achieved all of their military objectives one by one by one. They hit all the targets they wanted to hit. And they didn't translate that military superiority into the political outcome that they wanted. Because all wars ultimately come down to a political outcome. You fight in order to change the politics in some way. And the only way of cashing in on all the sacrifice and the cost and the blood of military operations is that it has to add up to something politically to be safer or to be dominant or to get back something that you've lost years ago, whatever it might be.

8:16And the United States has got so almost nothing out of this politically that it didn't already have at the start. So I don't know how one could say that this is successful as a war, but militarily, yeah, total success. Donald Trump, though, on Truth Social, then saying in regards to the 15-point proposal that the US have put forward, that the agreements and the points in it are good, but most of them have been fully negotiated. Nothing's been negotiated because neither side has sat down in the same room across a table and thrashed out point by point, which is what professional diplomats do. What they've done is they've exchanged texts of their various red lines via the Pakistanis backed up by Egypt and Turkey, who've played a really good role staying awake night after night, and keeping both sides talking.

9:03So what they've done is at the 11th hour, they've agreed a ceasefire to give themselves time. But they're not negotiating in the way that President Trump seems to imply, as if the two sides were working through each point and coming up with compromised language and so on. And that was the point, actually, that our US correspondent Mark Stone made to the president. He phoned him up, the president answered, they had a couple of minutes chit chat. It was a remarkable situation when that phone did get answered. And Mark Stone put it to the president. He said, you know, many of those points, surely the US could never agree to.

9:34And Donald Trump pushed back on that. Do they have it within themselves to meet in the middle? I don't think so. But I think they do have it within themselves, not to get back to the point they were at this time yesterday. They both frightened themselves with the point that they'd come to of an apocalyptic exchange. And the Iranians were up for it. They didn't want to do it, but they were up for creating as much destruction as possible to as many actors as possible and to the world economy in response to what President Trump said he was going to do with all the power plants and bridges and other facilities in Iraq.

10:05So I don't think that both of them don't want to approach that point again in 14 days' time. They'll find a modus vivendi whereby they'll just carry on grumbling at each other in a war that doesn't quite reignite, but is never too far away. That's what I suspect will happen for the next couple of years, probably. Is there an argument, though, that the United States did have awareness that maintaining operations at that tempo, it couldn't do indefinitely, and that actually pauses in hostilities, allow them to regroup and then potentially go back on their re-offensive. I think that's exactly right, Gareth.

10:39I don't know what discussions, of course, will have taken place in the Pentagon, but we know that the Americans were dipping into their stocks they normally keep for operations in the Pacific, which in theory are much more important to them than anything in the Middle East. According to the Wall Street Journal, they sent their whole stockpile of JASM missiles, which is the joint air-to-surface cruise missile, very effective, very good, stealthy, heavy missile, They sent all of their stops via Fairford for their B-1B bombers, also in Fairford and Gloucestershire, right out to CENTCOM in the Middle East.

11:08So they've emptied their inventory of certain things. They've more or less emptied their inventory of Patriot missiles for these contingencies. They're dipping into their contingency reserves, and they wouldn't have wanted to do that for very much longer. And one of the other things that this crisis may have given pause to the military and to all of their Gulf allies to think is that even with all of this attention from the Pentagon on the Middle East, the US couldn't protect them. Against Iran, they still were suffering ballistic missile and drone attacks. Even with everything the US could do and all their US equipment, they were still not protected.

11:42And that message will go very deep into the politics of the Gulf states as they reconsider their security on the other side of this crisis. They'll think differently about their relationship with America. They wouldn't reject it, but they'll think differently about it. Before we walked into the This Is Why studio, there was reports of a wave of strikes by the Israelis against Lebanon. And that leads us to the fact there was conflicting reports. The Pakistanis suggested that the ceasefire included Lebanon and the operation against Hezbollah. Benjamin Netanyahu, a few hours later, goes, no, it doesn't.

12:16Within Beirut, we have seen huge plumes of smoke. The Lebanese ministry says it was the heaviest strikes. We haven't seen the details of those Israeli strikes yet, but they were certainly extensive. And it's a political symbol. Netanyahu is indicating that we're not stopping fighting. This is our war. This may be part of the broader mosaic of conflict, but this is a war we are determined to continue with, whatever it takes, to destroy Hezbollah once and for all, is what they're saying. And they're going to occupy as a security zone all of Lebanon up to the Latani River. And of course, they did that for 18 years between 1982 and 2000.

12:50And it was occupation of that zone that created Hezbollah in the first place, actually. And it didn't do them any good whatsoever. But strategically, they're committing themselves now to an endless war. And Netanyahu has said this. It's now being called in Israel the Netanyahu doctrine, which is that our enemies will always exist. We'll never eliminate them completely. So we have to be prepared to take them on constantly. And his critics say, oh, well, you would say that, wouldn't you? Because you're the one who stays in power and out of prison through endless war. So it suits you. I'm not saying that.

13:24That's what his critics say. What will the military planners of the world, and the United States for that matter, have learned and taken away from everything that's happened since the 28th of February? Interesting question. They're taking away in a different context what they took away, or have been taken away from the Ukraine war, which is the ubiquity of robotics, of drones, of the ability of relatively cheap, essentially civilian technologies to be turned to a military purpose. And if they're turned to that military purpose in enough numbers, they can make a difference. The era of the really expensive weapons platform, it's not over, but the really expensive weapons platform has got to be kept in reserve for the right moment.

14:04The British defence planners are talking about a model, this is the army in particular, talking about a 40-40-20 model. And the first 40 % of the battle will be robots that you don't expect to get back. So one-way drones, kamikaze drones, and you'll hit the enemy with your kamikaze drones, 40 % of your stuff. The next 40 % that goes in after that, you do want to get back. So these are sophisticated drones in an environment that's a bit less dangerous because of your first 40%. So you send a second 40 % and you get those drones back. And then the last 20%, that's the armor, the boots on the ground, the tanks, the armored vehicles, the bits that we used to think was the core of an army is now the last 20 % that moves in after the robots and sweeps up.

14:47That's the model. Of course, it won't be as simple as that, of course, but that's the model. And that model that's begun to evolve in the Ukrainian war has been reinforced in lots of ways, albeit with an air campaign in this war in the Middle East. When Donald Trump is on the back foot militarily, he often then turns his attention and his ire to NATO. There's been no talk of it in the last couple of days when he's on the front foot. And I wonder where that relationship will lie as the dust settles on this two-week pause. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. When he's on the front foot, it doesn't bother him.

15:19When he's on the back foot, he's looking for someone to blame. And the easy group to blame are always the Europeans for all sorts of reasons, some of which are not unjustified. But a lot of it is just ridiculous. And so he easily falls back on criticisms of NATO. Where are we with Europe? I mean, NATO is in deep, deep trouble because the transatlantic link is in effect broken. And people say, you know, could Donald Trump pull America out of NATO? No, he can't. Constitutionally, he can't do it without a new treaty. And he wouldn't get that through Congress. There's all sorts of reasons why it is beyond Donald Trump's power to pull America out of NATO.

15:53Politically, he's already withdrawn from NATO. And NATO is already a Europe-only organization in real sense. Indeed, when his national security strategy of November last year, and then the national defense strategy of January this year, both two very key documents, when they came out, when they talked about NATO, they talked about it as if the US wasn't in it, that NATO for them is just the Europeans. The idea that the United States was the founding member and the Washington Treaty was called the Washington Treaty of 1949 because that's where it was. And the NATO summit this year in June is going to be quite a humdinger.

16:28That's all from Michael. That's all from me. Thank you for listening and I'll be back again tomorrow.