00:00Aaron David Miller senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He worked at the State Department for over
00:05two decades serving six secretaries of state as an advisor on Arab Israeli negotiations. And Aaron I wonder first your
00:14take on the president's claim that Iran would have been successful in developing a nuclear weapon within two weeks to
00:23to a month if we hadn't initiated those B2 bomber strikes in June.
00:28Does that sound reasonable to you? Yeah I don't think it's credible man. Thanks for having me. Look three three
00:35false or unproven claims provided justification for what has been a war of choice. I'm afraid now it's become a
00:42war of necessity. Number one that the Iranians were within two weeks of producing enough missile material to actually make
00:48and deliver a bomb. Number two the Iranians had long range intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States.
00:55Also wrong. And number three that if the president didn't strike
00:58he had information that the Iranians were prepared to to attack American interests or maybe in America America itself. So
01:05no that's that's not a credible claim.
01:07Well now we are in this moment Aaron where the president says that he is talking with Iranians that it's
01:12top officials and not the supreme leader. You yourself have led many negotiations in the region.
01:18How would that be possible? How would that be possible at a time when we've seen many of the top
01:23leadership being taken out in Iran? What would that type of negotiation look like? And what is the possibility for
01:29agreements to be reached and agreements to stick?
01:33Danny thanks for having me. Look I think the chances of any agreement soon are slim to none and I
01:39think slim's already left time. You need three basic elements for negotiations to succeed. You need two parties who are
01:45willing and able. I'm not sure you have that. Number two you need a shared sense of urgency. That is
01:51to say the amount of pain that is occurring because you don't have a negotiation is somehow countered by the
01:58amount of gain if in fact you enter into one.
02:02And number three you need a deal that's doable that both sides could accept. I don't see any sense frankly
02:08on the part of what remains of the Iranian leadership in Tehran or President Trump who has been wandering all
02:14over the parking lot in terms of what this war was designed to achieve and what it can achieve right
02:20now.
02:20I think what you heard from President Trump this morning that said oil prices plummeting, the markets rising, was an
02:27effort to basically find a way out of the ultimatum he had issued that within 48 hours if the Iranians
02:36didn't open the straits he was going to attack Iranian infrastructure.
02:40I think he had to find a way to get to back down from that. He did back down. I
02:44think the Gulf states were pushing hard on him to back down because they knew that the Iranians were not
02:51going to bend in the face of that ultimatum and then would come after their oils in not just oil
02:56infrastructure.
02:57Power grids desal plants. So again I think this is another move in a very dangerous complicated game. It's not
03:07a game complicated conflict that essentially is going to play out over the next several weeks or longer.
03:13One of the problems that the president I think had and that many of his MAGA base have with the
03:23previous deal that we had the JCPOA from 2015 is that they didn't trust the Iranians to declare enrichment sites
03:34which is understandable especially if you don't know exactly how these things work.
03:41If we have a new deal where the president says Iran agrees not to develop nuclear weapons and hand over
03:48its enriched uranium what what could we do what set of conditions could we lay out so that we could
03:54actually trust that they're not enriching uranium or trying to develop a weapon at some other undeclared secret site.
04:00Yeah I know the you know the Iranian nuclear deal that the president walked away from in 2018 was a
04:05highly flawed but it was a functional agreement.
04:07It restrained constrained put a fair amount of time between where Iran is which is now a new a nuclear
04:15weapons threshold state.
04:17That is to say before these strikes it had all of the elements required to actually make a nuclear weapon.
04:24It hadn't made a decision to weaponize this this this war this war of choice could actually accelerate the Iranian
04:33desire its acquisitive desire to actually have a nuclear weapon.
04:38You now have in charge a clear domination by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other hard line elements.
04:48So I think that that that's the paradox here.
04:51The Iranians as far as I'm concerned concerned could could have been developing discreetly secretly elements to weaponize.
05:02Guys that's always the case in the end there are in the in the bottom line guys there are no
05:07good deals with Iran.
05:09There are only deals that are less bad and what the president has done here.
05:15It seems to me is to turn a war of choice into a war of necessity.
05:19He now has no choice but to find a way into a negotiation that will result in significant American compromises
05:29in order to open up the straits.
05:31And that is what this is about now.
05:33It's not about regime change.
05:35It's not about undermining Iran's capacity to project its power abroad.
05:39It's about how do you relieve the global economy from the kinds of pressures and fracture that it's under if
05:48in fact this goes weeks or even longer without a deal.
05:53Of course the irony is is that the Strait of Hormuz was open before this conflict started if that is
05:58now indeed the goal of what the president is trying to do.
06:01And Aaron you hinted at this that in order for some sort of negotiation to be reached there needs to
06:05be urgency on both sides.
06:07There was this Wall Street Journal piece over the weekend essentially saying that Iran believes it's winning the war and
06:13it wants a very steep price in order for it to end.
06:17You were just talking about that the U.S. needs to give concessions.
06:20What might those need to look like in order to get the Iranians to the negotiating table to reopen the
06:26Strait of Hormuz?
06:26I mean I think that's the real problem.
06:28The Iranians are going to want guarantees probably by not just by Trump.
06:32They're going to want them sanctioned by the U.N., the international community.
06:36They'll get the Russians and the Chinese to buy into these guarantees and to pressure the administration.
06:41That's one thing.
06:42Number two, they're going to want reparations for the destruction and damage done.
06:46That's not going to happen.
06:47Number three, as crazy as it sounds, they're going to demand and want sanctions relief.
06:54And frankly, this is a highly transactional president without a strategy.
07:00Again, he's wandered all over the parking lot.
07:02Imagine the extraordinary development of the United States of already unsanctioned 140 million barrels of Iranian oil.
07:12I mean that's head exploding given what we know the administration would like to do is to weaken and fracture
07:18the regime.
07:19In the end, the Iranians are going to want sanctions relief as well.
07:23I don't know what the flexibility is on the part of this administration to provide any of these things.
07:29It seems to me that any constituency that Donald Trump cares about in this country, almost without exception, would breathe
07:36a collective sigh of relief if tomorrow the president of the United States said, you know, I'm done.
07:42Here's what we've achieved.
07:43The war is over.
07:44The real question in the end, Danny, is whether the Iranians will let him out.
07:49And frankly, right now, geography is destiny.
07:53They can shell the Gulf states at will.
07:55And they can decide who gets through the straits.
07:59Iranian oil is getting through.
08:00Oil from China is getting through.
08:02Yeah.
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