Trump's Iran Strikes: Triumph, Stalemate or Setback?

President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran shocked much of the world — but America’s involvement was over almost as soon as it began, and so far, it hasn’t sparked a broader war, like so many feared. So how did we get here? Was the bombing a success? Will the ceasefire between Israel and Iran hold? Is the regime in Iran any closer to collapsing — and if it did, would that be good? Finally, what’s the long term solution to the nuclear issue? Kara gathers a trio of experts to grapple with these questions, and more. Jason Rezaian is the Director of Press Freedom Initiatives and a writer for The Washington Post’s Global Opinions. He was the Post's correspondent in Tehran before he was unjustly imprisoned by the Iranian regime, and he’s the author of Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison. Jim Sciutto is CNN’s chief national security analyst and the anchor of The Brief with Jim Sciutto. He’s also the author of The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China and the Next World War. Robin Wright is a contributing writer and columnist for The New Yorker and a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She’s the author of several books, including The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran, and Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. President Trump's decision to bomb Iran shocked much of the world, but America's involvement was over almost as soon as it began, and so far, it hasn't sparked a broader war like so many feared. So how did we get here? Was the bombing a success? Will the ceasefire between Israel and Iran hold? Is the regime in Iran any closer to collapsing? And what's the long-term solution to the nuclear issue, which is at the heart of all of this? I've gathered a panel of journalists with deep expertise to grapple with these questions. Jason Rezaian is the director of Press Freedom Initiatives and writer for The Washington Post's Global Opinions.

• 0:53Kara Swisher?

  He was a Post correspondent in Tehran before he was then unjustly imprisoned by the Iranian regime. He's the author of Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison. Jim Shudo is CNN's chief national security analyst and the anchor of The Brief with Jim Shudo. He's the author of The Return of the Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War. Robin Wright is a contributing writer and columnist for The New Yorker and a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She's the author of several books, including The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran, and Rock the Kasbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World. This is a smart and thoughtful panel, so stick around.

• 1:47Speaker 01

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• 3:01Speaker 03

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Chloe Mel. We talk all about her taking on the top job at Vogue, finding her personal style, and her favorite lunch order in the iconic Conde Nast cafeteria. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 3:40Kara Swisher?

  Jason, Jim, and Robin, thanks for coming on ON. I really appreciate it.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 3:45Kara Swisher?

  So, let's start with a tweet from, of all people, Donald Trump Jr. He posted, "Destroyed nuclear facilities, no dead Americans, and no forever war with Iran seems like a big win for me. My father has never looked to plunge us into a prolonged conflict, and those of us who know him best knew all along that his endgame was peace, America first." Now, according to a leaked early intelligence assessment, the strikes have only set back Iran's nuclear program by a few months. It's not nothing, of course. It's actually a very good goal. President Trump insists it was obliterated. And they're all pushing back on the intelligence assessments and everything else. Talk a little bit about this. So, let's start with you, Jason, and then Robin, and then Jim.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Thanks, Carol. I've been thinking about this since Saturday night, when this all happened.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  I thought to myself, okay, there's, there's no way, and you know, Robin and Jim know a lot more about these things than I do, but there's no way that we have any kind of assessment of how much damage

• 4:45Kara Swisher?

  Sure.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  we might have inflicted. And, you know, I think this president, if we, we sort of think about it in the business realm, sometimes being first to market with an idea is the most important thing. I think Donald Trump was just trying to control the narrative right off the bat.

• 5:00Kara Swisher?

  Right off the bat.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  And in a lot of ways, it worked, you know, for the next couple of days, every time I was asked about this, I would say to myself, what's the actual intelligence say? And, you know, it takes a few days for that stuff to pan out. But, you know, in the media, we're really good at sort of being super skeptical until moments like this, right? We all line up behind the American position very quickly.

• 5:28Kara Swisher?

  Very quickly. Robin?

• 5:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there's a danger of saying too much at this early stage about how much damage there was, because if President Trump is wrong, he looks like he's overstated, and that the mission didn't accomplish all that it attempted. So, and also, there's a kind of political component of this. The president is at NATO now. He's probably boasting of what the United States has done militarily, as he speaks to the world's largest military alliance. And if the word is out that, well, maybe it didn't quite have as much damage as expected, that's going to undermine the kind of imagery that he'd hoped to craft at this critical meeting. So, you know, we won't know for a while, but I think the

• 6:13Speaker 05

  reality is, the program has been hurt, one way or another, whether it's setback months or years. And the real point of all this was to try to get the Iranians back to the negotiating table, to talk about the core question, which is still as much alive as it was before the bombing. And that is, how do you limit Iran's capabilities and intentions?

• 6:33Kara Swisher?

  Right. Because one of the things is, why overstate it? It sort of reminds, reminds a lot of people of mission accomplished with George Bush, for example. Jim?

• 6:41Speaker 06

  This is, in my view, an entirely manufactured drama. Right? There is an early intelligence assessment. The White House has even acknowledged the existence of that assessment and CNN and others have reported it. It's early. But the truth is that no one, American or Israeli, expected one round of military strikes to wipe out the entire program, or even several days with the Iranian strikes. I spoke to the former head of Israeli military intelligence last night, and he made this point. He said, "That's actually not important." You know, one, impossible to knock it all out. They dispersed it, they buried it, they've been preparing for strikes like this for 20 years.

• 7:22Speaker 06

  What is important is that the US has, and Israel together, have severely damaged. And what is important, and this is the win for Trump, right? He doesn't have to, you know, he actually put himself in a corner by claiming that the whole thing was obliterated. The win is that no US president has done this. They've thought about it, but they haven't done it. And he's delivered quite a dramatic message to Iran, right? That we will come and we will use the most powerful munitions, non-nuclear, in our arsenal to destroy this, and by the way, reserve the right to do so again, right? If you don't come to the table. That's the win here. So, the idea that he used this word obliterated, by the way, I had a security clearance, I've

• 8:07Speaker 06

  read a lot of intelligence supports, I've read battle damage assessments, obliterated never turns up in an intelligence report, right? Because you don't have that certainty.

• 8:14Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 8:15Speaker 06

  And very few military strikes destroy everything in one go. So, the win is, for Trump and from his perspective and Israel's perspective, to Robin's point, they've done deep damage. They've now delivered a sort of ultimatum, come to the table now. And it's become a created drama here, which is classic in Trump world, right? He wants something to be the way he wants it to be, and if anybody challenges that, even his own Defense Intelligence Agency, he's gonna go full-court press against it.

• 8:47Kara Swisher?

  Right. Jim, you said Iranian strikes and you meant Israeli strikes, presumably?

• 8:50Speaker 06

  Yes, of course, Israeli. Israeli strikes.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  One thing I want to just add, though, I think it it does actually buy him some time as well. Right. As this conversation, you know, rages on here in Washington, gives the Iranians a little bit of time to decide whether they're ready to come back and and talk. I think that they probably have to. Um, and, you know, hopefully it gives uh the Israelis a little time to cool off and and think to themselves, well, maybe we don't need to continue uh air raids on Tehran.

• 9:22Kara Swisher?

  So let's go back to President Trump's first term and the core question, as you put it, Robin. In two thousand eighteen, he withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the Iran Deal. It forced Iran to dramatically reduce their uranium stockpile and capped enrichment at three point six seven percent, far below what's necessary to build a nuclear bomb. By May of this year, Iran was two and a half days away from having enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, according to some intelligence assessments. Robin, if the deal were still in place, would Israel have had a viable pretext for attacking Iran? Or is the deal what set us down this path in the first place?

• 9:58Speaker 05

  Well, there would still have been restrictions on Iran's program, not indefinite, not open ended. There were timestamps on each aspect of the deal. But Iran would still only have three point six seven, not be at sixty percent of enriched uranium. I think this is really important to understand why Iran was doing that. Remember, President Trump, as you said, walked away in two thousand eighteen. And for fourteen months, the Iranians actually continued to abide by the terms of the deal. They didn't escalate. In the meantime, the United States imposed more than fifteen hundred sanctions on Iran. And so this, in some ways, enriching uranium, continuing to develop advanced centrifuges,

• 10:42Speaker 05

  was its maximum pressure response to the United States to give Iran some leverage. Now, needless to say, we're all worried about would it cross the political threshold of deciding to make a bomb, which US intelligence said it had not yet done even. On the eve of the Israeli and US strikes. So, you know, I think that, yes, we would have been much safer. We'd stuck to the deal. The Iranians don't have as much leverage this time if they go back to the table than they had two weeks ago. But I do agree that they want to have talks, that they want to have negotiations.

• 11:24Speaker 05

  But my fear is that we're in the same place when it comes to that core question of can Iran enrich that we were before the military action. And that's why I worry about the renewal of hostilities down the road if this diplomacy becomes dead ended or stalled.

• 11:41Speaker 06

  I think also, if I can, you know, it brings up a strategic question. Trump pulled out of a deal that was not perfect by any means. It had sunset provisions, et cetera. But, and this is a big if, you know, had that deal stayed and had Iran stuck to it and had the IAEA been able to maintain its oversight, et cetera, Iran wouldn't have produced as much fissile material as it did outside the deal and therefore wouldn't have been as close to breakout as it was outside the deal. So strategically, exiting the deal got Iran closer, right? And strategically, that did not serve America's national security interests, right? So, you know, that's a question that gets lost in this whole, I mean, you'll hear from

• 12:26Speaker 06

  the president and others, you know, how horrible that deal was. But the fact is, and again, this is an if, had Iran and the US stayed in and all the provisions survived, it wouldn't have been as close, right? And then that boosts the need, if you buy this line of argument for military action. You know, so that helped bring us to where we are today, frankly.

• 12:49Kara Swisher?

  So, Jason, two questions for you. You lived in Iran first as the Tehran correspondent for the Washington Post and then as a prisoner. So how did you feel on Friday, June 30th, when you found out the head of security apparatus that unjustly detained you had been killed? And second, you don't just have sources of literature on you, you have family over there. Over 600 Iranians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes. What are you hearing from them and ordinary people on the ground in Iran?

• 13:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'll take the first part first. In a way, I mean, I've got no love lost for the Islamic Republic, and certainly not for the Revolutionary Guard, their intelligence wing, Help Me Hostage. But I also felt a little vindicated because, you know, for a very long time, I have been, you know, kind of shouting from the mountaintop that despite all of the claims that this system is all-powerful, it probably never was. And clearly, over the last couple of years, a lot of their capabilities, a lot of their top leadership has been taken out by Israel in targeted assassinations and drone strikes.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  Amazingly, you know, strikes there pulled off from Iranian soil. It's quite, you know, an incredible thing to see. And so I think that this narrative that Iran was sealed off and, you know, capable of defending itself, never really been true. I mean, I think Iran's defense spending is less than the Netherlands. Their fighter jets are ones that they bought from us in the 70s. I mean, this is not a, you know, a strong military presence.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Personally, it's terrifying, right? You know, I have a lot of family in Iran. My wife's entire family still is, is living there. Many, many friends. And, you know, when you hear, you know, I don't want to kind of point fingers at our cable news.

• 14:53Kara Swisher?

  You may, but go ahead.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Well, okay, but it's, look, it's not, it's not CNN's fault that, you know, Fred Pleitgen only gets in five days after this all starts, right? The Islamic Republic has tried to kind of keep the world out of its country for a very long time. And so when we watch, you know, the, the coverage of this and we see four different live shots of dark night skies from Israel and one live shot of a correspondent in a bunker who has a telephone, who's receiving SMSs from the Israeli government, like everybody else in the country, that, you know, if you live in this neighborhood, go down into the bunker below your building from this time to this. Iranians don't have any of that. My wife was was born in nineteen eighty four,

• 15:38Speaker 04

  smack in the middle of the eight year war between Iran and Iraq. Her memories of childhood, of early childhood, are of the the bomb sirens. Those don't exist anymore. And and and when President Trump tweets, or when Benjamin Netanyahu sends out a message on satellite television, or or even even on, I'm watching CNN, and there's a thing on the screen that says, hey Iranians, you've been warned to leave your homes. They can't see that. The satellites have been jammed by their own government.

• 16:13Kara Swisher?

  So they don't have any information.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  They don't have no information, right? And nowhere to go and no recourse. And it's just this reminder that, you know, that Iranians don't have a friend in the world. Not in their own regime, not in the United States of America, certainly not in Tel Aviv.

• 16:34Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 16:44Speaker 01

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• 19:47Kara Swisher?

  So Jim, 28 Israelis have been killed by Iranian strikes. But the conflict has boosted Netanyahu's political standing, though not significantly. There are reports Israeli leadership was stunned and embarrassed after getting publicly cursed out by Trump. He said neither they nor the Iranians knew what the, this is what Trump said, knew what the fuck they are doing. It was quite colorful. Nonetheless, Netanyahu has said if Iran rebuilds its nuclear project, quote, "We will strike again." Where does this, where is the Netanyahu-Trump relationship right now and Netanyahu's status?

• 20:18Speaker 06

  Listen, you know, Netanyahu's status in Israel, I would say, is quite strong, right? I mean, here's someone who's, you know, rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated, right? To paraphrase Twain so many times over. And yeah, and listen, you can't contest his record from a military standpoint, right? He has decimated Hezbollah in Lebanon. He has struck at the very core, to the very core of Iran's nuclear program, military leadership, et cetera. And at enormous human cost in Gaza, right, that we continue to watch every day, has done great damage, of course, to Hamas. And from the Israeli perspective, you know, that, that makes it safer from, from its perspective.

• 20:59Speaker 06

  So, you know, domestically, he seems to be in better shape than he was, and that's one thing. With Trump, you know, their personal relationship has not been great. You've read the stories about how, you know, Trump doesn't quite trust him all the time. But I'll say this about, Trump imagines that he can force everyone's hand, right? Whether that be a Netanyahu, trading partners in the trade war, you name it. But strategic interests matter to these countries. And we've seen that with Israel. When Israel determines, you know, Trump has tried to push Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza multiple times. Netanyahu has forged ahead, right? He's bulldozed ahead. And there's not a lot of talk about that, how he's essentially ignored Trump on military action in Gaza.

• 21:42Speaker 06

  Because from Netanyahu's perspective, it's too important to him, right? And he's going to keep doing it. And he'll, he'll take a slap on the wrist, but he forges ahead. And, you know, that's where the kind of rubber meets the road, right? In that, in that Trump doesn't- Have, he's not omnipotent.

• 21:57Kara Swisher?

  He can just curse him out as much as he wants.

• 21:59Speaker 06

  Curse him out, he's not omnipotent. It's kind of like with Putin, he thought the great relationship he had with Putin would bring about a ceasefire. Of course, that hasn't happened, right? Even Zelensky, who got brow beaten in the Oval Office from a strategic national security perspective was like, no, I can't give up. I'd lose my country. So I think it's a, with Israel, as with every other place, that whatever diplomatic or personality magic, or just brute force that Trump imagines he has, it doesn't always win the day.

• 22:27Kara Swisher?

  No, it kind of looks like an old man shaking his fist at the kids on the lawn, essentially. So, Robin, is Iran more or less likely to build a bomb right now? Do they feel threat from Trump? And their stockpile of highly enriched uranium could fit into 10 car trunks, and American officials admit they don't know where it is. How feasible would it be for them to build one if they decided to do it?

• 22:51Speaker 05

  Well, that's the main point. Will it make the political decision to go ahead? It had not done that in the run up to this round of the 12 day war, as Trump calls it. So that's what's so pivotal. Will they continue to have some kind of nuclear program? First of all, they believe they have a right to peaceful nuclear energy. Iran needs it. It has blackouts, rolling blackouts because of, you know, its infrastructure is so degraded, its oil facilities are so degraded. And every country wants a basket of different energy sources.

• 23:28Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 23:29Speaker 05

  So Iran is likely to continue some kind of nuclear program, whether overt-

• 23:33Kara Swisher?

  Energy program.

• 23:34Speaker 05

  Overt or covert, no, but also as maximum pressure. The 3%, 3.67% is all, you know, what the former deal allowed, which is what would be used for a peaceful nuclear program. Whether Iran thinks that it only has leverage, because it doesn't own its airspace anymore, it doesn't have an air force, it's weakened, if not debilitated. And so I think it's quite possible, especially since they moved some of their stuff. But again, is this leverage so that it has some kind of stand at any kind of nuclear negotiations with the United States? Or is this because it wants to advance a nuclear capability because it feels ever

• 24:17Speaker 05

  more vulnerable now? And we don't know the answer to that question yet. But I'd just say one thing, that we also need to look at this- This round of hostilities in the political context. There is no end of this war militarily. It can only succeed, or the United States and Israel can only succeed if there is some kind of diplomatic off-ramp that makes everybody feel as if the Iranians are not going to build a bomb, that there are some kind of guarantees, there's some kind of verification by the UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to go in and be able to count

• 24:58Speaker 05

  every centrifuge and to monitor the stockpile of enriched uranium and to have access countrywide to any suspected sites. So the political outcome of this, at a time, the regime has an aging and ailing supreme leader that people are not going to be happy, they haven't been happy for a long time. And so there are some, you know, does the regime have to negotiate a new social contract with its people?

• 25:26Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I'll get to that in a second. But so from your perspective, they still have not made that political decision, and it's a very difficult one to make, correct?

• 25:34Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  I think there's just, as Robin indicated, there's so many internal Iranian political variables, there always has been, but many more right now, including the, you know, the health of the supreme leader, succession plans, there are obviously factions within the system saying, we needed a bomb five years ago, right? There are others who look at it more realistically, the types of people that, you know, have more contacts with the outside world than the more insular-looking members of the system who look around and say, okay, Israel has a, you know, a large undeclared nuclear arsenal. The United States has a massive nuclear arsenal.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  If we get one or two or five bombs, that's going to set off a nuclear arms race right in our neighborhood, right? Saudi Arabia is going to want one, maybe UAE is going to want one, Turkey is definitely going to want one. And so I think of this, of Iran getting a bomb. You know, a single bomb, deciding to weaponize, you know, coming out, whether they do that publicly or our intelligence tells us that that's happening, that's more of an existential threat for the Islamic Republic than it is for Israel.

• 26:48Speaker 06

  Can I play devil's advocate on that for a moment? And I hear your point, right? One bomb and there would certainly be an arms race and then the question becomes, is it just one bomb, right? But it doesn't take a crazy person to look at the world today and over the last several years and say, what's the difference between the countries that got invaded and didn't get invaded, right? Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and got invaded. North Korea has nuclear weapons and has not been struck, right? Iran wasn't there and it's just been embarrassed militarily, right? It's been struck repeatedly. And it's not just the, you know, rogue states who think in those terms, right? You have a whole host of countries around the world who are reevaluating their relationship

• 27:31Speaker 06

  with nuclear weapons and considering going nuclear, literally, because of the changing landscape and that includes our allies, right? You know, South Korea, there's a public discussion of gaining nuclear weapons because they don't trust the US nuclear umbrella and defence agreement. There's discussion in Japan. You have the German chancellor discussing sharing France's nuclear deterrent because he doesn't trust America's nuclear umbrella. And, you know, sometimes whenever I cover this and people will say, oh, crazy Kim Jong Un, right? You know, he wants nuclear weapons or the crazy mullahs in Iran. You know, there's a reasonable, rational case that you could see that. And I'm not, God knows I'm not rooting for it. I'm just saying there's a reasonable, rational case.

• 28:16Kara Swisher?

  That's a very good point.

• 28:17Speaker 06

  It's not crazy talk, you know, sadly.

• 28:19Kara Swisher?

  Speaking of that, officials in Israel has made clear they want regime change in Iran. Robin, you actually met with the Ayatollah in 1987. You write that he lacked charisma, worldliness and intellectual depth, but he's managed to stay in power since 1981 and even if he's killed, the regime is built presumably to endure without him. Talk about the durability of that. He himself, probably not, but can you talk a little bit about what happens here in terms of at least a power change, maybe not regime change?

• 28:48Speaker 05

  Well, I think for a long time now, several years, Iranians have understood the actuarial tables that the Supreme Leader, now 86, was going to fade from the scene at some point.

• 28:59Kara Swisher?

  Right, biology is undefeated.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. And there's no obvious heir apparent. There's talk that he's kind of named three possible successors, but they are predominantly old clerics as well. I think the question now is what happens within Iran and whether people who've been deeply dissatisfied over the years and have gone to the streets in 2009 during the Green Movement that challenged a fraudulent election result, since 2017 sporadic economic protests over price hikes, and most of all, the 2022 Women Life Freedom protests that spread nationwide,

• 29:42Speaker 05

  that I would guess 80% of the population is unhappy. But there's no obvious opposition inside the country that is viable, and there's certainly no opposition outside the country that is viewed as legitimate from inside Iran. And so we're at a point that the regime is extremely vulnerable diplomatically, politically, economically, militarily.

• 30:06Kara Swisher?

  Biologically.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  Biologically. But remember that the Supreme Leader does have power, but the most important decision-making body inside the country is the Supreme National Security Council, and it varies from 13 to 15 people, some of whom have been killed by the Israeli airstrikes. But they're the ones who charter course and then take it to the Supreme Leader and say, what do you think? And for the previous Iran nuclear deal, I was told by its former foreign minister that the Council would debate it and then agree, and then they take it to the Supreme Leader, and he would agree to 95% of it, and that the questions he asked- were actually not major, big ones. They were kind of the minutia of the deal.

• 30:52Speaker 05

  So I think that the elimination of the Supreme Leader would be a symbolic inflection point. But remember, the regime survived an eight-year war, and I covered that war between Iran and Iraq. It survived when two bombs by an opposition group killed the president, the prime minister, the judiciary chief, 27 members of parliament. It survived a lot. And I think that the idea of regime change anytime in the, you know, imminent future is probably doubtful, even if it's inevitable long term.

• 31:32Kara Swisher?

  All right. So but Jason, you've written that, quote, decimating Iran's defenses and then letting them stay in power to terrorize their citizen, dissidents, and opponents around the world could be, would be a massive failure. Explain why the current situation is so bad for Iranians. And then Rob is noting, probably unlikely, anything more symbolic to happen. Is there any situation which forced regime change would lead to a better outcome for Iranians in the Middle East?

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Look, I think a regime change through bombs hasn't succeeded yet. Right? I'm not just talking about Iran. I'm talking, you know, in our memory. The concern, the biggest concern that I have right now about that scenario is that even if the regime were to fall today, that 20% of people, who knows if it's 20% of people that support the system? Maybe it's 30%, maybe it's 5%. But a portion of that several million people, at least, are the people in the country who have guns. You know, this is a country where, you know,

• 32:36Speaker 04

  normal citizens don't have access to firearms. This isn't America. And there is no way for people to organize. I would argue that one of the things that the Islamic Republic has been most successful at over the years is snuffing out its own internal opposition, either by assassinating them, imprisoning them for very long periods of time, or exiling them to foreign soil. I don't think that the

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Environment is ripe for that kind of change, especially as, you know, Robin talked about the eight-year war with Iraq and the assassinations of their top leadership. You know, this is a country when you go into any city, that any, any street alley, vast majority is named after a kid who was killed in the war that lived on that street. Right? This is a nation that's endured trauma after trauma after trauma. Are they at the end of their rope? Yeah. Do they want freedom? Certainly. The economic situation in Iran for ordinary citizens is at its worst point than it's been since the end of that war.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Can the system kind of limp along for a while? I think it's at the end of its rope. But, you know, if it were to collapse right now, I fear that what could replace it might be something even worse.

• 34:07Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 34:18Kara Swisher?

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• 35:03Kara Swisher?

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• 35:29Kara Swisher?

  I'm Kara Swisher, and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brooke Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:05Speaker 07

  Hey, y'all. It's a stud from [email protected]. We know that you have big questions about the world, and so do we. At Vox, we focus on covering the things that matter in your life and the things that make you curious. Whether that's the big politics questions of the day, climate solutions that might actually work, or hopeful news in cancer or Alzheimer's research. We believe that journalism made for the everyday curious person can make a difference in making a better world. And if that sounds like something you want to be a part of, Vox now has a brand new app, and it brings all of our journalism together in one place. Go to vox.com/app to download today.

• 36:48Kara Swisher?

  So Iran fired missiles at an American base in Qatar in response to America's bunker buster bombs. That move was co-designed to de-escalate the situation while saving face. But while they may be weak militarily and internally, they can still block the Strait of Hormuz or retaliate via cyber attacks, assassinations, and proxy terrorism. Jim, how capable is Iran when it comes to asymmetric warfare? And what sort of response do you expect to see from them in the coming months or years? Even if, even if, as Jason said, they're on their last legs, they're still on their legs, essentially.

• 37:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, one thing I'll say is I think that the telegraphing of those missile strikes on Qatar was really one of the most fascinating. Fascinating developments of the last several days, right? That Iran via Qatar told the US it was gonna fire at it. And therefore, the USA was able to prepare for it. And then the US president tweeted out, "Thanks." "Thank you for the heads up." It's remarkable. I mean, that's a sign of, I mean, it's really a sign of weakness, right? In that Iran had to do something and that, yes, the number of missiles was the exact number of bombs the US dropped. You know, it's all symbolism. But it clearly did not want to pick a fight with the US because it was concerned it would get pummeled, right? If it took shots at US bases or killed US service members in the region. So that's notable.

• 38:07Speaker 06

  And that speaks to weakness. It does have capabilities, though. And Iran has a history of not striking on the day after, but perhaps months later or even years later, right? If you think of the Soleimani strike, when Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani. And Iran did send missiles towards bases and US soldiers suffered traumatic brain injury, et cetera. But it wasn't the big conflagration that many had feared. But years later, right? There was a plot to kill American officials, right? So that can still happen. And Iran has tremendous terror capabilities around the world. You know, you've had this talk of sleeper cells. It also has cyber capabilities. But then the same calculation happens, right?

• 38:52Speaker 06

  If Iran were to set off a bomb somewhere in the US, God forbid, and the US were able to to determine responsibility, right? That's not always clear that you could do that. One can expect, you know, a massive US response. And Iran would have to say, "Could we survive that?" Right? You know, and the final thing I would say is that it's so hard to judge, right? You know, the survivability of these regimes, you know? I mean, look at Russia. I mean, Russia has its own issues, right? Including an ongoing war in which they're basically just sending young men to get chewed up on the front lines. And economic consequences at home, et cetera. But somehow Putin survives. That said, a couple of years ago, you know, Prigozhin, you know, drove halfway to Moscow, right?

• 39:36Speaker 06

  You know, and it wasn't like folks were standing in his way until he turned around. So, you know, sometimes there can be weaknesses that we don't expect. I mean, in 79, the Shah, right? The CIA didn't think he was going to go down and he went down. It's just, it's just really, really, really hard to say. And then who replaces him? Because it's, you know, it's sort of like Russia with Iran. Do you get someone worse? Possibly. You're not going to get, you know, some democratic, or it's unlikely, right?

• 40:02Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 40:03Speaker 06

  Or it's no guarantee at a minimum that you're going to get a democratic hero.

• 40:05Kara Swisher?

  Not the Shah's son, for example, who has been making a lot of noise. Do any of you worry about lone wolf terror attacks or assassinations that can't be tied directly back to them?

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Look, I, I worry about that because there's a history of it.

• 40:18Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  Right?

• 40:20Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  Robbins probably met this gentleman who, shouldn't call him a gentleman, the, the local DC man who was hired by the Islamic Republic in 1980 to, to kill a, a former Iranian diplomat in Bethesda. Right? He's been living in, in Tehran ever since. Helped them set up their English language propaganda channel.

• 40:40Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Right? That's one of many instances of the Islamic Republic doing a targeted assassination on foreign soil. They've abducted, you know, dissidents in third countries and brought them back to, to, to Iran and executed them. That's happened in the last couple of years. That's the kind of thing I, as, as someone who was their long-term guest, worry about. I worry about that. And I think that a lot of Iranians worry about that. But in terms of much larger attacks on US soil, I don't think that that's their MO right now.

• 41:15Kara Swisher?

  So, let's get back to the issue that set off the week's attacks, Iran's nuclear program. J.D. Vance recently articulated a so-called Trump doctrine. It involves trying to aggressively diplomatically solve problems, presumably by cursing. If that doesn't work, he says, you use overwhelming force to solve the problem and get the hell out of there. Multiple administrations have said that verifiable Diplomatic resolution is the way to solve the nuclear issue in the long term. And after the ceasefire took hold, Iran's UN envoy said that, quote, "We are now closer to diplomacy than ever before." Robin, is that accurate? Are we closer to a diplomatic solution than ever before the war began? And is this Iranian regime a partner Trump can realistically strike a deal with?

• 41:55Kara Swisher?

  I mean, he did say, "Thanks," but, you know, that's a far cry from any kind of diplomatic deal.

• 42:02Speaker 05

  Well, the question is, can Trump get a better deal than the Obama administration did?

• 42:08Kara Swisher?

  The original deal, right.

• 42:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, in 2015, which, remember, followed two years of really tortured diplomacy. And it ended up as a document that was 159 pages plus annexes. And the idea that the Trump administration could come in and in 60 days negotiate a new deal that gets down into the minutia of how do you verify, who does it, what are the levels for how long, was just always totally unrealistic. The problem now is, is President Trump going to give a time limit, another 60 days, to work out a deal that's very complicated?

• 42:50Speaker 05

  And with the Iranians now more paranoid than ever, or suspicious than ever about what the US intention is. So I'm worried about the diplomatic process that follows and the patience of the United States. Donald Trump has not shown a lot of patience.

• 43:07Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 43:08Speaker 05

  And remember, he keeps saying, you know, he can end a war in Ukraine in one day or end the war in Gaza, and both of them are still ongoing with no diplomacy that's been effective. And I worry that his patience runs out. And of course, Prime Minister Netanyahu as well, who is, to put it mildly, trigger happy. And so this is where we get into, in some ways, more complicated terrain than we were when they were shooting at each other.

• 43:35Kara Swisher?

  So superficiality and aggression at the same time.

• 43:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, listen, if it's a doctrine, right? It hasn't worked yet, right? Because, I mean, even look in the trade war context, it's not military action that's threatened. It's severe economic pain, which Trump has threatened and imposed on a whole host of countries, but there hasn't signed a deal, right, of any substance.

• 43:56Kara Swisher?

  Nor has it seemed to have the effect he had hoped.

• 43:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, and then the other piece is if that doctrine is a doctrine, he's not applying it to Russia, right? And by the way, no one begrudges a president's attempt to find diplomatic solutions to the many problems we have around this world, right? You want that. But with Russia, Trump imagined again that he could just kind of magically do it out of his special relationship with Putin, and Putin is forging ahead. And what is the pressure that Trump has applied on Russia? You know, certainly not military, and we wouldn't root for that. But, you know, the sanctions that he said he was going to use as a cudgel have never come, and he hasn't mentioned those recently, even past his own two-week deadline. So, at least we haven't seen the substance of that doctrine as articulated by the vice president.

• 44:41Kara Swisher?

  So, Jason, you've written that the US-Iran relationship is characterized by decades of ignorance, mutual hubris, and myopic understanding of Iran by American officials, and that Europeans, on the other hand, have a deeper understanding of Tehran. We're recording this, well, as Robin noted, Trump is at the NATO summit in The Hague. Are European allies best positioned to help breach the chasm between the US and Iran? Are any of them making an attempt to step up? Because they've been notably quiet.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  I don't know if they're in the best position, but they're in a much better position.

• 45:11Kara Swisher?

  All right, so are any of them attempting?

• 45:12Speaker 04

  I would hope so, but even, you know, during the Biden administration, you know, I have pretty good relationships with a variety of European embassies here in DC. One in particular, the Swiss Embassy, that's our protecting power in Iran, has been for the last forty-something years. And the sense that I got from them during the Biden years was they weren't looking to the Swiss to give them advice on anything. Well, you know, the Biden folks knew everything, right? And Trump folks maybe don't know everything, but they certainly aren't looking for advice from. The Swiss on this, as far as I can tell.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  But the last thing that I'd say is that, you know, one piece of this that we've been locked out of Iran's economy by choice for a very long time. The Europeans, Germans, Swiss, Italians, Spanish, have a lot of investment with Iran and a lot of need for Iranian oil. So they're looking at this and always have from a much more pragmatic, self-serving point of view. And I think it's kind of time for us to look at it that way as well, not just out of the military ideological security lens. What's best for America?

• 46:28Kara Swisher?

  Robin?

• 46:29Speaker 05

  That gets to the issue of transactional. And President Trump looks at everything from a transactional point of view. And there is enormous potential for American businesses to get involved. Iran has 92 million people. They're very westernized in terms of their taste in whether it's appliances or fashion, technology. And so, you know, there is the potential for something. The problem is, I think at this point, because the United States has basically had a yo-yo policy, it's going to do a deal, it walks out of the deal, it wants to do a deal again, that a lot of businesses may not be as interested as they might have been before because of

• 47:12Speaker 05

  the fear of what Israel does, or if there's one little hiccup, that there's going to be new sanctions and, you know, the whole idea of rapporteuse avec l'Iran collapses again. So, and the Iranians kind of know that, too. And they want sanctions lifted, they want investment in the country. There are estimates that just in the last four years, it's lost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue from oil. It relies largely on China for smuggled oil. So it's interested in a deal. But, you know, this gets back to it's much more complicated this time.

• 47:52Speaker 05

  And I really worry that this is, you know, as the administration likes to say, this is phase one. I worry that, you know, phase two may not be as, as quick or efficient or straightforward as everybody hopes.

• 48:08Kara Swisher?

  So the conflict in Iran has pushed Gaza into the background for now, but it's unlikely to stay there. On Tuesday, Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians waiting on aid, killing at least 46 people, and the death toll has risen to over 56,000. Counterintuitively, by attacking Iran, Netanyahu may have given himself space to negotiate with Hamas by placating the extreme right wing of his governing coalition. Jim, do you see an opening here? How does this 12-day war affect what happens in Gaza?

• 48:35Speaker 06

  Goodness, it's one of the hardest stories I have to do every day, right? Every day, we will do our best to check in on Gaza. You know, in the last 24 hours, you've had dozens of people last several days killed just trying to get food, right? I mean, they're trying to feed their families, and they're getting shot, right? I mean, it's just heartbreaking to watch. But Israel has really faced no real consequences for how it has conducted the war there. I mean, there's a lot of public criticism, right? Even from Israel's European allies, but the US has not moved and it, no penalty, and Israel has calculated it could keep moving forward till it meets whatever its military objectives are, which seems to, which aren't quite clear, right?

• 49:19Speaker 06

  Even to some Israeli officials who were former members of Netanyahu's government who criticized him and say, listen, we've met what I thought were the military goals, and yet here we are, we're still bulldozing the place. So, and then you have members of his own government who speak quite openly of kicking the Palestinians into the desert. So it's, it's, it's hard to determine the chances of, of peace or some sort of lasting ceasefire when you don't know what the actual objective is. And as you watch events unfold every day, one can reasonably conclude that Israel is not interested in peace there, but wants to continue

• 49:54Kara Swisher?

  To bulldoze.

• 49:55Speaker 06

  Bulldoze, to use an iron fist. And, you know, that's the, the thought occurred to me, as Robin made a point earlier in the show today, that That Israel might, at least the current Israeli leadership, might conclude that forever war works for it. I mean, it'll sign ceasefires like it has in Lebanon, for instance, but when it determines it wants to take something out there, it's going to do it. And that seems to be the footing we're going to be on in Iran, right? Yeah, it's a ceasefire now, but if we see you move one of those trunkfuls of fissile material, we're going to bomb it, right? And that may be the status with Gaza. It's not, it's not pretty, and I don't think anybody would say that openly, but if you look at the events of the last several months and even years, it does seem to be where we

• 50:40Speaker 06

  are, right?

• 50:41Kara Swisher?

  Unfettered, yeah, absolutely, where they don't seem to have a goal, except removing them away from Israel. So, last question. This so-called 12-day war feels like it might be a coda to a tragic and transformative 20 or so months in the Middle East. It began with Hamas's brutal attack on October 7th and was followed by Israel's ongoing siege of Gaza, its dismantling of Hezbollah in Lebanon, American strikes against Shiite militias in Iraq, the fall of the Assad regime, and the American operation against the Houthis in Yemen. So, will the ceasefire hold, and are we nearing the end of the violence and volatility in the region, or are we further from peace than 20 months ago? Let's hear from Robin, then Jim, and you get the last word, Jason.

• 51:24Speaker 05

  No, I don't think, I think the strategic balance in the region has shifted a bit, but I worry, as Jim mentioned, that the goal really in Gaza is to force the Palestinians out. There are very few places to live, the economy's been destroyed. I think that the hardliners in the Netanyahu government really want the Palestinians to leave, to where is a big question. And of course, that follows with, do they kind of escalate that to the West Bank as well, so the Palestinian question doesn't exist. I think the changes in the region, the Gulf countries got our, Saudi Arabia to a certain extent, have come out stronger.

• 52:08Speaker 05

  You know, Iran's allies in the Axis of Resistance are much weaker, but they're Not eliminated. Hezbollah did well in recent local elections in Lebanon. None of these groups are destroyed, the Houthis, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. And remember the cliche, you can't bomb an idea. And there is a sense across the region that there are not democracies in the region and people are very unhappy. But where does it go from here? And if there's no political alternatives, then people turn to, whether it's religion or extremism or terrorism. You know, those questions, those bigger questions have not been resolved by anything that's happened since October 18 months ago.

• 52:53Kara Swisher?

  No alternatives. There's no alternative ideas, right? Or power to do so. Jim?

• 53:00Speaker 06

  Well, listen, I think we should acknowledge that President Trump took a shot at Iran, a significant one, and it did not lead to a massive conflagration, which had always been the concern. It's what had held successive American presidents of both parties back from doing so. That doesn't mean that there won't be blowback that we don't see later, but he was able to take that shot. And Israel, by the way, you know, Israel has. And I remember, you know, just a few weeks ago, months, being in Israel and, you know, all the talk and debate as to whether Israel would strike Iran's nuclear facilities. And again, the same questions and concerns were raised that this would lead to a conflagration. It hasn't. And that speaks to a point Jason made earlier is that, you know, the Iranian regime is not 10 feet tall, right? It appears to be weaker than we imagine.

• 53:44Speaker 06

  Doesn't mean that it's disappearing, right? And it has survived before and may strike back. There's an opening for negotiation, and that's a good thing. But there are a lot of questions as to how that would move forward, right? And one of which is, if you're Iran, do you trust, right? Do you trust a negotiation with the US or with Israel today? You know, US President who brags about having lied about being interested in talks last week as he was planning a strike. And then also just the inherent volatility to Trump's foreign policy, that an agreement you make one day might not hold several months down the line. So how do you negotiate in that environment? Or do you just try to wait it out, right?

• 54:28Speaker 06

  And that's an open question. Listen, I spent a lot of time there, as both Jason and Robin have, and I, you know, no one's rooting for peace more than me. But, boy, how many opportunities have we seen disappear?

• 54:40Kara Swisher?

  Jason? Finished?

• 54:41Speaker 04

  You know, one thing that we haven't really talked about a lot is I think that this idea of normalizing ties between Israel and the Gulf states gets harder and harder with every passing day. I'm thinking a lot about Syria and all the work that's going to be needed to rebuild that country. I don't believe that we've seen the end of, you know, kind of direct conflict between Israel and Iran. I hope I'm wrong, but I think that Benjamin Netanyahu sees an opportunity to go further and probably feels pretty emboldened right now.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  But I think, you know, as America, as an American, I'd like us to do some of the things that we used to do and try and engage with civil society in those countries, whether it's Iran, Syria, and help kind of build an idea of what a better future looks like because that's a step that we haven't taken. We talk about it a lot. You know, our failings on Iran are not partisan. It's a 46-year, actually longer than that, you know, 50-plus-year failing. And it'd be a really great time for us to build sort of a national project to figure out what is it we're going to do long-term vis-à-vis this country that we haven't been

• 56:07Speaker 04

  able to.

• 56:08Kara Swisher?

  Is it chased for that with this particular regime?

• 56:12Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't think so, but I think we have to, you know, help kind of envision what would come next. That's not something that the revolutionaries did in 1979. Remember that the people that ended up in power did so in a really opportunistic, chaotic landscape, and we've been stuck with them ever since. So I think Iranian diaspora, the Iranian people also have a role to play in this, and it would be wise for us to help them find some agency.

• 56:41Kara Swisher?

  All right. On that positive note, I really appreciate. Thank you, Robin, Jim, and Jason.

• 56:47Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 56:48Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 56:52Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Megan Burney, Allison Rogers, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner and Bradley Sylvester. Steve Bone engineered this episode, and our theme music is by Trackademics. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit Follow. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at On with Kara Swisher. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 57:33Speaker 01

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