Transcript: Trump’s Choices in Iran Are “Humiliation or Escalation”

foreign policy decisions. So Elizabeth, we were talking earlier and we had a little technical problem, so we’re back now. You had this post on Bluesky where you said essentially Trump’s choices are humiliation or escalation. Explain that.Elizabeth Saunders: So I think of this as a problem with a giant immovable object in the middle of it, and that is the Strait of Hormuz. We could talk about the nuclear problem—and that problem had been solved diplomatically, Trump undid it. One could imagine a world in which he bombs and bombs, and then the Iranians feel enough pain that they come to the table. But when you bring the Strait of Hormuz into it, you really change the game, because the Iranians have this leverage that. And all you have to do is look at a map to see it—no other country can really exert that kind of leverage. And that means that up to a point, Trump can’t really do much. From this perspective, having expended all this military power, he can try to inflict incredible pain, as he threatened to do with those genocidal Truth Social posts. But obviously that’s not good, and may not even work—or would work so well that it would destroy Iran as a country, and that doesn’t seem like a good option.So that’s a sort of escalatory path. But then the humiliation path—it’s hard to imagine. Both sides do want to come to a deal. It’s pretty clear that Iran has suffered a lot and Trump just wants out, and so that’s good. But the nuclear deal is not really on the table in the same way. The Iranians would have to be given something to agree to the deal, and they’re definitely not going to give up their leverage. And so you could say that the Strait is open—as world leaders did on Friday, and it was incredible that they just took this tweet from Iran, which didn’t even say the Strait is open unconditionally—it said the Strait is open subject to the conditions of the Iranian Navy, or something like that. And everybody was just like, yay, the Strait is open. It’s not—it wasn’t—and it’s somehow even more closed again now.But in order to get to a deal, the U.S. is going to have to give up something, and probably learn to live with at least the Iranian threat looming over the Strait of Hormuz. And to do anything about that would require a long-term military presence. So what’s probably going to happen is Trump is going to sign a piece of paper and walk away, declare a victory. But that is really a humiliation wrapped in what he’s going to try to claim is a bow.Bacon: What is the thing we’re giving? You said we have to give—so what is the thing the U.S. is going to end up giving?Saunders: Sanctions relief, or releasing all this money that Iran has that’s been frozen. And of course Trump himself—and Republicans—screamed bloody murder when—Bacon: — Barack Obama—Saunders: Yeah, and Biden as well, released some frozen funds. But it’s a negotiation, right? You can’t do—you do these arms control deals, which is what the JCPOA—the Iran nuclear deal under Obama—was. And if you want them to give up what they view as regime insurance, invasion insurance, you have got to give them something.And even though both sides want a deal—I saw this morning, I think it came from the White House, but I couldn’t be sure—but somebody was quoted in The New York Times saying, the deal is moving forward, the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear issue remain big issues. It’s okay.That’s like—aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? So these are big fundamental issues. It’s not even just that the JCPOA took 18 months—it is complicated, it would take a long time to hash out the details. On some basic level, you just run into this brick wall of geography. They overcame a lot of these obstacles on the very complicated issue of nuclear material and enrichment in 2015, but now they’ve also got to solve the Strait of Hormuz problem. I cannot imagine a solution that doesn’t require either a massive commitment of U.S. military force in the long term—I just don’t even know what that looks like, most people don’t think there’s a military solution to this—or some kind of tacit acceptance of Iranian control, which is the humiliation side.Bacon: You said the military and political objectives are not aligned here. The military did accomplish, I think—bombing Iran, killing lots of leaders there. But the political objectives were ending the nuclear program and, to some extent, regime change, and those things are probably—the latter particularly—off the table now, right?Saunders: Yeah. So they did kill a lot of the top Iranian leadership, even on that first day when they killed the Ayatollah. And so in that sense it was a tactical success, with Israeli intelligence, which is unmatched and incredible in many ways. But what seems to have happened is they have essentially elevated a younger generation of leaders that are more hardline. And Iran knew this was coming, right—so they’ve prepared. And what you have now is a younger set of leaders and military officials who are in many cases more hardline, and who have now seen what’s happened and realize maybe they do need a nuclear weapon for regime insurance.If you think back to the old “axis of evil,” right—Iran, Iraq, North Korea is the one that actually got its nuke and has not been invaded. There’s a lesson there, right? So you may have increased the cost of ending the nuclear program, which supposedly was obliterated in June. So why we need the military option to go seize it is mind-bogglingly complicated, and I don’t see anyone seriously trying that.And so you have an entrenched regime that is very concerned about the war restarting. You’ve got a president who can’t really make a deal and credibly stick to it, because the last deal—that he didn’t even negotiate—he pulled out of. So it’s clear that the military, which executed—as we were talking about before—executed what it was asked to do, although it made tragic mistakes like the mistaken targeting of the school. One can’t say that the military didn’t do what was asked of it, and that’s our system, right? In our system, the civilians give the military orders and then the military carries them out, unless they’re clearly illegal—which is a very hard thing to determine in war. And so in general, we often say in civil-military relations, the civilians have the right to be wrong.The military can offer its advice and say, there’s a lot of risk, or here are three options and we recommend this one—and the president can follow that advice and not do it, or can overrule them and say, I’m doing it anyway. And that may turn out to be catastrophically bad. It may turn out that the military’s advice was wrong—the military opposed the Iraq surge, for example. There’s debate about how successful that was, but clearly it had some effect.But the civilians are the ones who make the decisions. And so in the end it’s just a very difficult problem to solve with military power alone. And now we’ve brought another problem into it that wasn’t there before, which is the Strait of Hormuz.Bacon: You write a lot about how foreign policy decisions are made. So there was an article in The New York Times—it came out a couple weeks ago—that was detailing a sort of behind-the-scenes [account]—journalists call these tick-tocks. So who talked to who about the war. And the article implies that Netanyahu was very involved in pushing us into war. So we’ve now had a big debate about whether the war is Netanyahu’s fault or not. So what is your sense of that? My view is the U.S. decides policy on its own ultimately, but talk about what your view is of Netanyahu’s role in bringing us to this war.Saunders: First of all, as I was saying before, I had to explain to my students—when I assigned them this article last week—that it was a different kind of Tick-Tock, not that kind of TikTok. I agree with you. I think that article actually clarified a lot about the role of Netanyahu. The things people knew, and then inferred—some of the details—it filled in the details. We knew Netanyahu had gone to DC—that was reported widely, that was not a secret. There wasn’t much of a public readout, so that made people think it was secretive, which it was. What was new in the article—and Netanyahu clearly made the case for war, again, not that surprising. He’s been for it for a long time. This is his dream for 40 years. And what I actually found interesting is that there is a section of that article in which people say there are three or four things that they said—one of them was: if you knock out the regime, either through an initial campaign or if you get them all in a room or whatever it is, the regime will collapse. The Americans did not buy that. And I don’t know—Trump—it’s hard to know what Trump made of that. If they didn’t buy that, it means they just went ahead for other reasons. And so I don’t know that you can really say that Netanyahu said much in that meeting that wasn’t already either known or intuitive once you brought it out in a meeting.And I think it’s absolutely right to say that the Americans make decisions on their own and therefore bear responsibility for the decisions. They can’t just blame this on Netanyahu Bacon: The second part of the article that struck me was—like you saw in the piece—Secretary of State Rubio, the head of the Joint Chiefs, JD Vance—particularly, there’s a whole section on JD Vance—where they have all these objections about the war. My reading of that, as a political reporter, is: these people who want to have other careers are trying to distance themselves—almost like an early version of their memoirs. They know this war has failed and now they’re leaking that they weren’t involved in it. That’s how I read it. And I don’t deny the objections they raised, but it seemed to me their objections might have been louder after they saw the war than before. It felt like kind of the ass-covering—that’s what I’m getting at. How did—Saunders: It felt like they were on the 2028 debate stage litigating this.Bacon: Yes. How did you read that article? Maybe differently than I did.Saunders: Yeah, no, I didn’t read it differently. I think this is how these articles get written, right? There’s a certain amount of it that just comes with the territory. We talked earlier about the articles before the war started where the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—General Dan Caine—made very clear that he—through, I assume, proxies, right, a sanctioned discussion with reporters—that he had serious concerns about the war. Which undoubtedly he did, because everybody who’s looked at this problem for years and years—decades now—has seen the Strait of Hormuz as the thing. Again, you just run into this big immovable object. And all those articles came out like in a flood over the course of three hours—that’s never a coincidence.Bacon: Suggesting it was—yeah, it was [not a] coincidence—Saunders: But some of this is just—the reporters are going to try to reconstruct it, and so then you think about what you’re going to say. So the Vance section clearly was Vance, right? Yes—if that can be a verb. I don’t even really have a problem with it, in the sense—I do think that politics and political incentives play a really important role in constraining presidents if they’re properly aligned. Like, we want politics—and the desire to serve later on—to constrain you from doing stupid stuff. I think we need more politics, not less, in foreign policy—and lots of other kinds of policy that I don’t know anything about—but you want people to want to make good decisions so that they can succeed. Does that make sense? So in principle, I don’t have a problem with it. And I think Vance—even though he was surely burnishing his image, it’s not that hard to see that—he probably—like, that’s pretty consistent with his positioning. And he is stuck with having defended the war and so forth. But to me, I found the Vance part priced in. The Rubio part was what—to me—I really didn’t know what to make of that.So if Rubio says—or Rubio’s—Perry Bacon: —in the Rubio—yes, we’re talking about yeah.Elizabeth Saunders: Yeah, in the Rubio part of this. Somebody says, presumably on behalf of Rubio, that he had a lot of objections. Yeah. But he didn’t try to voice them. Now, okay—even in the scenario where you’re in the most crass, totally political space, shouldn’t he be trying to be more like Vance, because the war is a disaster? So clearly his bet is more that he can’t really cross Trump—and that’s been his bet since he basically stopped criticizing Trump and then joined the cabinet. I don’t know, I find his part of that article more puzzling, almost more dishonest.And I do think that there’s this idea floating around that Rubio is somehow the least crazy of them, and so therefore can be forgiven—because, thank God, we at least have—I don’t really buy that. I think—and Dan Drezner has written eloquently about this—he deserves a lot of the blame for so much of what’s happened in the diplomacy sphere. He’s not even involved in these talks, right? He’s involved in the Lebanon talks, but he’s gutted the expertise in the State Department. There are not State Department people going to Pakistan—at least the first time, according to the reporting. He is definitely culpable, and I’m surprised that he’s not trying to do more anonymous covering of his ass.Bacon: Yes. Anything—I think that the political reporter’s view is still that he’s the normal one, because he was the normal one in 2016. But that was a long time ago.Saunders: That was a very long time ago. Yeah. But the thing that I always think about when people say he’s the sane one—like he’s the one who knows what he’s doing—his campaign was dreadful in 2016. So I don’t know that he’s such a great politician, and even in this space where he’s clearly trying to position himself—I don’t buy the Rubio-as-our-secret-savior narrative at all.Bacon: So the first time you and I talked was after we had invaded Venezuela, then a few Saturdays later we did this thing in Iran. The Cuba thing is in the news still—do we think that’s maybe off the table now, because Iran was a disaster? Or is it all on the table, because Trump wants a win of some kind, and Iran is clearly not a win, and maybe Cuba is easier?Saunders: I have been thinking about this a lot, because occasionally you will see a bit of news from Cuba pop up. And make no mistake—we’re already inflicting incredible suffering in Cuba. It gets almost no reporting. I think it was the BBC that had a reporter do an incredible piece—it’s appalling what the United States is doing to Cuba right now. And in many ways it’s more civilian-targeted even than some of the things that we’re doing to Iran.Bacon: Explain what we’re doing in Cuba, because people don’t know—Saunders: We’re blocking the flow of oil, and so there’s no power—like, basically we’ve cut—we’ve essentially done—like Trump threatened to bomb all the power plants in Iran, but he’s essentially turned the lights off in Cuba. And blocked relief efforts. It’s really pretty horrible. I think NPR also had a piece on that—yeah, I want to make sure I give credit where credit is due. But it’s not breaking through the way the Iran war is, which is also—every time he does one of these cycles of pumping up the markets, it has diminishing returns, right?So this could go a number of ways. One, it could be: I’m just done with this. And the military might say, our carriers are exhausted—one of them has been out for almost a record, if not already past the record for a deployment, had a fire—there are reports of not enough food. So the military could go to him and say, look, it is your right to order us to do things, but you should know that this is not great. And he might just take that.I worry, though, that Cuba is Rubio’s grand project, right? This is what he has been hoping for. And there’s reporting that he was out ahead of Trump on Venezuela and steered Trump away from negotiating with Venezuela before the intervention. So I’m trying to picture the scene in the Oval Office where Rubio—there was also that Truth Social post where Trump said—or maybe it was at a podium, at a press conference—he was like, yeah, Marco wants to do Cuba, I told him we’re going to do this one first, Cuba’s next.Bacon: I don’t recall that, but okay—Cuba’s next. Like—Saunders: I’m pretty sure that’s—yeah. And I will happily—if I was wrong about that, I’d be glad to be wrong.Bacon: No, I’ll look that up before we go—yeah, sure. I just don’t remember that.Saunders: Yeah. So I’m trying to picture this meeting in the Oval Office where Rubio’s—okay—and Trump is—no. If he decides that he’s not going to—like, how’s that going to go?Bacon: Yeah. That’s unlikely—to see Trump say that—but maybe, yes.Saunders: I don’t know. He turns on everyone, right? Rubio’s loyalty is not going to buy him Cuba. Okay. Just look at Pam Bondi. Look at Qatar, right—they gave him a plane, look what he did to them. So I don’t know about that. I think a lot depends on how well he thinks he can spin whatever the outcome of Iran is, how long it takes, what the military is telling him—not because I think he’s so great at taking military advice, he’s clearly not but I do think that if the military went to him and said, look, sir, you’re about to have a revolt of the moms who can’t get the care packages to their [kids]—it just—that could present a really ugly problem for him that he just doesn’t feel like he needs. There’s a way the military could present that to him that actually might get his attention in a way that just saying, sir, what about the Strait of Hormuz—it could tank the global economy, which is true—seemingly didn’t get his attention, right?Bacon: Do we think they said it that directly? That’s what I’m not sure about. Because afterward it seems like they were focused on that, but I don’t know if—all the previews I saw were like regime change, then—but I never saw “oil prices will jump up.” I guess there was—I don’t know, did—Saunders: I think it’s implied. My former colleague Caitlin Talmadge wrote this article—”Strait of Closing Time: Assessing Iranian Threats to the Strait of Hormuz”—and it—some things have changed since then, drones were not really what they are now—but basically, they could mine it. In order to get rid of the mines, or to stop the attacks from the shore, you’d have to basically attack the Iranian shore—it’s a really hard problem. And why do you care? Because of oil. So it’s just implied. And if nobody explained that to him—if the military people said it’s not the military’s job to worry about the price of oil—but it is the job of his political advisors and the Secretary of Energy, who made some claims this weekend about where gas is going to go. If they’re not connecting the dots for him, then that’s also on them. But I don’t—I just don’t know. Nothing surprises me. Would it surprise me if Rubio convinces him to do Cuba next? No. Would it not surprise me if he says no and walks away? And then I don’t know what he’s going to do with this blockade of Cuba—is he just going to starve them to death, which he’s already doing? It’s dreadful all the way around. But I don’t actually know what particular version of dreadful—it’s the madman theory, but all the outcomes are horrible.Bacon: Let me finish by asking about—so you saw the Pope, the leader of Italy who is a far-right person, Starmer, Macron, the Spanish Prime Minister—we have a drumbeat, more and more people, particularly in Europe—but from the far right to the left, Lula, some people you’d expect but some unusual ones who are criticizing Trump right now. Does that matter at all—like the sort of volume of international criticism? Does that pierce inside in any way?Saunders: I don’t think it pierces in the sense of—it’s not going to change his behavior with respect to Iran. He’s already taken action that has had dreadful consequences. So in some sense it’s just—I think also, by the way, Starmer and Macron are also examples of how—to Trump—flattery doesn’t seem to work.I have this terrible memory of Pam Bondi in the Oval Office calling him “president”—remember that? Not “Mr. President,” just “president, you did such an amazing job.” It doesn’t seem to have made any difference.Bacon: Very little yet, right? Yeah.Saunders: So anyway, I don’t think it’s so much that it’s going to change his behavior, but I think it’s changing the Europeans’ behavior, right? They have been trying to walk this very fine line of planning for the worst but trying to keep him on side. I think the real break there was Greenland—we didn’t talk about that one, but that was a really dramatic event in Europe, and— Bacon: They seemed to stop—they did stop that, right? By being so emphatic.Saunders: Is that what did—yes, they did. They did. And the subsequent reporting [showed] that Denmark didn’t just send military to do the scheduled exercises—they also sent blood supply, in the event of actual combat. They did the kinds of things that you would do if you expected your soldiers to be taking fire. So they took it really seriously. It has left a real mark. And I think they are at the point where they’re planning—like, they’re planning for, if not a true withdrawal, a de facto withdrawal from NATO, or not being able to count on the NATO commitment, which amounts to the same thing, right? NATO is just a promise in the end.If you no longer believe your friend has your back, you make alternative arrangements. I think it’s having an effect. It’s having an effect across the partisan spectrum, as you’ve said. Maloney and Starmer seem to be aligned on this. So I think it’s just accelerating Europe’s detachment from the United States in the security realm. And that has a lot of complicated effects, right? Some people have been calling for that for a long time. Europe’s not ready to do that.To me, the most interesting thing about the Iran War in terms of smaller countries is actually Ukraine, because as terrible as this is—in some ways—for Ukraine, for a variety of reasons—loss of American stockpiles, sanctions relief on Russia—Ukraine is now showing that it can sign these arms deals with Gulf [states] to deal with the drones, and maybe with Europe itself. And so the more countries become invested in Ukraine staying sovereign and existing as a going concern geopolitically—yeah, that’s good for Ukraine. So I think the flattery game is up, and it’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.Bacon: Good place to close. Elizabeth, thanks for joining me—difficulties and all—and I’ll see you soon. Thank you.Saunders: Thank you so much.