00:00Joining us now is Elisa Ewer, Senior Fellow for the Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations along
00:04with Steve Yates, who is Deputy National Security Advisor to Dick Cheney, is now a Senior Research Fellow for China
00:09and National Security Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
00:12Welcome to both of you. Elisa, let me start with you and the level, I want to get to the
00:15NATO allies, the call to them in just a moment, but I want to start with this dissonance that we've
00:19been focused on this morning.
00:21That is the president talking about the prospects of winding down this war while floating the notion that there could
00:27be an invasion of Karg Island in the coming days.
00:30Not saying yes or no either way, but the specter of that still still looms large.
00:34How do you see the timeline of this war as we approach the start of the fourth week of it
00:38being colored by what the president has said and posted here in recent hours?
00:43Good morning. Thank you for having me.
00:45And I think the president has said it numerous times over the course of the last three and a half
00:50weeks that the war would wrap up soon, that this was a relatively easy and successful operation.
00:59And what we're seeing, I think, is that the Iranian regime has certainly raised the costs of the war, made
01:08it a little bit more difficult for the president to claim success.
01:11It's unclear to me whether this is simply another announcement by the president to maybe change the subject or even
01:21to continue to confuse both the regime and others about what he intends to do or whether this is real
01:30and he's looking for an off ramp.
01:32As you say, there are Marines coming into the Persian Gulf this weekend, additional resources and assets have been mobilized
01:42as well.
01:42So all of these kind of send confusing signals as to the president's intentions, whether he's looking for an exit
01:49ramp or or really not intending to declare success quite yet.
01:54And Steve, I want to revisit something we were talking about in the last block.
01:57I'm wondering if you can help us understand the policy goals behind this latest OFAC waiver, because the vast majority
02:03of this Iranian oil is already pre-purchased or called for by China.
02:07So the U.S. has just given a strategic competitor a big discount on energy, given Iran up to $14
02:13billion in revenue while at the same time bombing that country.
02:17And none of that oil is likely or not enough of that oil is likely to hit the market at
02:21large to make a difference in oil prices.
02:23So what are we doing here?
02:25Well, I think one of the gravest errors in all the analysis I've seen basically for three weeks is to
02:31try to draw long-term conclusions from short-term events and basically heavily weighting the public relations analysis rather than
02:39what are the facts on the ground and what is changing.
02:43It's completely consistent to try to demonstrate that some things will move and that we're a reasonable negotiator if you
02:51will back down and basically engage.
02:56Iran's, what's left of its leadership, has chosen not to negotiate several times.
03:03And so basically they are terrorizing the Straits at this point.
03:08They don't control the Strait of Hormuz.
03:10They control the ability to fire upon people who deign to use it.
03:15Right. So understanding all that, why issue a waiver that makes it easier for them to sell some of this
03:20stuck oil?
03:21I'm sorry. I didn't hear the question.
03:23I say, right. So given all that, why issue this OFAC waiver?
03:26How does that help take down that regime?
03:30Well, the regime is already heavily damaged.
03:35And of course, there are remnant capabilities that can lash out.
03:39They, after all, demonstrated, much to the dismay of analysts who said it wasn't possible, that they had a missile
03:46capable of going multiple thousands of miles in the direction of Diego Garcia,
03:50which means it could also reach continental Europe and have the same kind of terror effect that many people said
03:56there was no imminent threat of existing.
04:00So what's happening is in three weeks, the regime has been heavily degraded.
04:05International markets have experienced a shock.
04:07There are a lot of things that need to happen to manage that shock.
04:10But it's really not a good look for NATO to act as if a disinterested bystander in international markets and
04:20freedom of navigation on the seas.
04:22That is, I think, where President Trump is correct.
04:24When you have numbers that are together moving cargo through there,
04:29Iran won't have this just be targeting only the United States or Israel as the prime contenders in what needs
04:36to happen with the free flow of resources.
04:39All right, Lisa, Steve doesn't want to seem to answer that question, so I will ask it to you.
04:44What is the policy goal behind this OFAC waiver?
04:48I think this is part of the assurance campaign that the administration has undertaken to try and calm markets.
04:55Its steps so far have not worked, right?
04:58Markets have responded over the last 10 days, especially quite acutely to the war.
05:05And so pronouncements on lifting sanctions on Russian oil, which we can talk about in a moment,
05:12what that means for NATO, agreeing to underwrite insurance for those who are trying to transit the straight.
05:21Escorts were talked about.
05:24Now this OFAC license, these are all steps to try and stabilize markets and bring the price down.
05:31That's not how markets have been responding.
05:34It's also unclear how this license exactly is going to work.
05:39As you indicated, this is oil that's already loaded in tankers, has buyers, has destinations.
05:46What I would add on the kind of risk that the regime has placed the straight under, what's different, I
05:54think, from the way we have looked at this problem set before,
05:57is that we always assumed when the regime would make good on the threat to close the straight,
06:03that it would come from a high cost to the regime itself, meaning it couldn't move its oil either.
06:10But what we're seeing is that Chinese tankers, Indian tankers, are moving through.
06:17And so Iranian oil is moving.
06:20It's everything else that's stuck inside the straight that is not moving.
06:25Steve, when you think about the relationship between the U.S. and NATO, the relationship between the U.S. and
06:31European allies,
06:31you talk about long-term consequences and short-term events here.
06:35The rhetoric from this administration in this term and, indeed, the term before it, during the first term of the
06:39Trump administration,
06:40has been somewhat adversarial toward those long-standing alliances, those multilateral alliances.
06:46I'm curious, as you look at this now, do you think that it was at all a misstep on the
06:51part of this administration in Israel
06:52not to try to rally those allies earlier in advance of these strikes?
06:56In other words, they're making this in treaty now for these allies to come in and help patrol the Strait
07:00of Hormuz.
07:01Is this something that could have been worked on or agreed to before these strikes took place now three weeks
07:06ago?
07:08Unequivocally, no.
07:09There was no circumstance where there was going to be any get from these alleged allies going into this.
07:17Another one of the framing errors has been sort of talk about disregard for allies.
07:22Well, Israel is an ally of the United States.
07:25So are the Gulf allies that are part of the Abraham Accords.
07:31And there's been a broader problem here, and Europe has been a part of it.
07:34The United States and past administrations, including the one in which I served, was a part of the problem
07:39in assuming that the only way to deal with this protracted problem of four-plus decades
07:45was to basically negotiate some kind of settlement where we pay a lot to the regime in Tehran.
07:52And then we would negotiate some kind of appeasement to allow this terror to continue.
07:58I think at some point that cost becomes too high and risky action has to be taken.
08:03I don't like necessarily every element of this action,
08:06but there was no chance that the governments in the major capitals of Europe were going to sign on to
08:12this.
08:12For decades, they had been on the side of the deals like the JCPOA and others,
08:17which did not keep the cork in the bottle.
08:20Alisa, quickly before I let you go, there's a clip circulating where the NATO Secretary Mark Rutte
08:24is asked by a journalist why Europe doesn't just say to the U.S.,
08:28OK, you want us to patrol the strait, this is what we want in Ukraine.
08:32And you see his face, and he kind of goes, oh, that's actually a good idea.
08:37Is it a good idea? Should they do that?
08:42Europe always has leverage, I think, in the alliance that it may not use to the best effect here.
08:48I mean, I think you have to remember that this relationship is under a lot of strain.
08:52It wasn't all that long ago that we were talking about Greenland.
08:56So the unpredictability of the administration's approach on a number of important policy issues to Europe
09:03is part of the equation here.
09:06So could Europe turn this into a discussion about what it needs from Washington?
09:12Sure.
09:13But I think the fact that there's such a lack of trust and discomfort with the unpredictability of President Trump's
09:20approach
09:21feeds into whether or not you can trust that that conversation can produce what Europe might need.
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