00:11Airstrikes have battered Tehran while Iran has kept up retaliatory strikes across the region
00:17this Tuesday. The war showing no sign of de-escalation a day after Donald Trump said
00:22the U.S. had held, quote, very good talks with Iran aimed at halting the hostilities.
00:28The U.S. president said his administration was speaking with an unidentified top person in the
00:33regime, while Iran has denied any talks are taking place, though its foreign minister has been
00:39talking to regional counterparts. Charlie James tells us more what we know so far.
00:46Once again, Donald Trump's ultimatums are shifting. After giving Tehran 48 hours to reopen the Strait
00:53of Hormuz or face strikes on the country's power plants, the U.S. president extended his deadline
00:58for five days on Monday. He insists this is because big progress has been made in talks with Iran.
01:05To determine whether a broader agreement can be reached, we've had very good discussions,
01:10very, very good discussions. And it's only because of the great job that our military
01:15did is the reason they mean business. They want to settle and we're going to get it done, I hope.
01:20Trump claims Iran agreed that they will not have a nuclear weapon, and he surprisingly proposed
01:26joint U.S.-Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. But so far, there has been no confirmation of these
01:32talks from Washington or Tehran. Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan are reportedly acting as intermediaries,
01:40passing messages between the two capitals. But in public, Iranian officials are denying any contact.
01:45Iran's parliament speaker responded online Monday, accusing Trump of lying and looking for an off-ramp.
01:52No negotiations have been held with the U.S., and fake news is used to manipulate the financial
01:57and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the U.S. and Israel are trapped.
02:02Iran's Revolutionary Guard also says it is unwilling to negotiate, and strikes continue on both sides of
02:09the conflict. Iran fired missiles at Israel, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia Tuesday, and Israel says
02:15it will continue attacks in Iran and Lebanon. Meanwhile, U.S. allies, including Turkey and the
02:21European Union, are pushing hard for a diplomatic solution.
02:27Well, we're going to talk more about this now. And for that, we can cross to Barbara Slavin,
02:32distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center. Thank you very much for being with us on France 24.
02:38Do you have any more insight into the nature of these talks and if they're happening at all?
02:45Yeah, well, I've learned through sad experience not to trust what Donald Trump says, but only what
02:53what he does. So, it's entirely possible that there have been no real talks, that this is simply
03:01something the president has said to try to calm the stock market and the oil market. That said,
03:07obviously, countries in the region and around the world are desperate to end the conflict.
03:12And so, it makes perfect sense to me that a country like Pakistan, which is running out of cooking gas,
03:19might be offering itself as a venue for talks with the Iranians. This war was not thought out.
03:27It was, you know, the consequences of it perhaps were understood by some in the intelligence community.
03:36But Donald Trump obviously did not pay attention to warnings that a lot could go wrong. And now he
03:43finds himself stuck almost four weeks in with a conflict which is doing massive damage to the
03:49international economy, including the US economy, and no obvious way out.
03:55And so, what do you think each side might ask for in any negotiations?
04:02Well, the United States is now demanding something that it would not have had to have demanded had it
04:08not started the war, namely free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which has turned out to be
04:13Iran's most potent retaliation for the US and Israeli strikes. Trump, again, said that Iran had to
04:21promise not to make nuclear weapons. Iran has promised that repeatedly. And frankly, it's this war
04:28which might convince Iran otherwise to finally try to make nuclear weapons. On Iran's side,
04:35they're going to demand that they're not attacked every six months by the United States and Israel
04:40and that they receive some sort of financial compensation for the damage that has been done
04:46to their economy, perhaps through transit fees to allow oil tankers, fertilizer cargo, helium,
04:56all these other very important products to exit the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, one can imagine
05:03a deal, but it's not going to be one that's going to reflect well on the United States.
05:09You know, Trump and Israel can say, well, we did a lot of damage to Iranian missile production
05:14facilities. But as we see, Iran has husbanded its missiles and is still firing them at Tel Aviv,
05:23at Dimona, where Israel has a nuclear reactor and a nuclear weapons program.
05:29So they're certainly not acting as though they have, quote unquote, lost this war or are suing
05:35for peace. Well, with that said, who might the US be talking to? I mean, Donald Trump said himself
05:41on Monday, look, we've killed a lot of the top leadership. Iran's parliament speaker has been
05:47floated as a possible contact. But on Monday, he, Kalibaf, was the one who said that negotiations
05:53between the two countries was fake news. Yeah, unfortunately, the Israelis killed the best
06:01interlocutor, a man named Ali Larijani, who was the national security advisor, someone who had a long
06:09background in diplomacy and was also a product of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and had clerical
06:16ties, was linked to all the important institutions in Iran. Kalibaf, the parliament speaker, is kind
06:25of a lesser Larijani. He's an apparatchik. He was head of the IRGC Air Force. He can pilot his own
06:34plane. And he was mayor of Tehran for a while. But he doesn't have the same diplomatic skills that
06:44Ali Larijani had. That said, I mean, he is one of the last men standing. So I suppose it's possible
06:52that he could be an interlocutor with the United States at some point. We still haven't seen the
06:58supreme leader of Iran, the son of the previous supreme leader. We don't know what his condition
07:03is. But there are others around. They've named a new national security advisor who's also an IRGC
07:10veteran. I think what we're seeing is the emergence of a very military dominated regime,
07:19which will consolidate power and reduce the civilian role. And that means the president,
07:27the elected parliament and so on. You mentioned earlier that there are regional players who do
07:33want to see this war come to an end. But there is a report in the New York Times that
07:38says the Saudi
07:39Prince is pushing Trump to continue the war. Do you think that he has legitimate motivations to do
07:47so? Well, I suppose the Saudi dream would be similar to the Israeli dream, to eliminate Iran as a threat,
07:56as a potential threat. I just don't know that it's possible. And I think if the Saudis take that step,
08:02that Iran is going to respond with massive attacks on Saudi oil installations. So I'm not sure about
08:11the veracity of the report, but I think it's rather dangerous. If any of the Gulf countries now go beyond
08:18defending their own countries and actively participate in the campaign against Iran, I think
08:25that could be very unwise. And when does Israel come into all of this? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
08:31acknowledged that Washington thought that a deal was possible to achieve the two countries goals in
08:38Iran. But Israel doesn't seem to have been consulted about this beforehand. Well, I think even for the
08:45Israelis, this war is beginning to have diminishing returns. The Israeli people are exhausted from over
08:53two years of constant war and tension. They're fighting a war in Lebanon again. And, you know,
09:00more reservists have been called up. Israelis are running to bomb shelters repeatedly, despite the
09:08claims of their government that Iran would run out of missiles and drones. That clearly hasn't happened.
09:13So I think even Benjamin Netanyahu would perhaps like to see a ceasefire in this conflict with the
09:21understanding that as long as Iran is hostile to Israel and vice versa, there is no permanent solution.
09:29And if Donald Trump is trying to find a way out of this war, whether it be, as you suggested
09:35earlier,
09:35that he was just trying to cool the oil markets, could it also be that there was a miscalculation
09:42about how long this war would last or about the viability of regime change? I mean, again,
09:47the New York Times reports that it was a Mossad plan to spark regime change in Iran. And that's what
09:52convinced Netanyahu and then Trump. All of this war, I think, was fought on
10:00faulty assumptions. I don't know to what extent some of this was deliberately spun up to get Trump
10:07involved, to get the United States involved in a way that Netanyahu had been trying for decades.
10:13But anyone who knows anything about the Islamic Republic understands that the country is not going to have
10:21regime change during a war fought by external powers, that there are many layers and levels
10:29to the regime's control over the population, that the notion of externally delivered regime change was
10:37always, frankly, delusional. And I hope that when this war is over, people will finally understand this.
10:46I mean, Iran is more than the Islamic Republic. And people there are terrified. They hate the regime.
10:55But they also don't want to be left in a situation where there is no government whatsoever.
11:01So this war should never have been fought. There were diplomatic possibilities. Repeatedly,
11:09Iran made several proposals that were quite reasonable. But because the United States would
11:16not accept uranium enrichment on Iranian soil, I think that's why we've never been able to get to
11:24a resolution under Trump. Of course, the agreement that was reached under the Obama administration
11:29would have prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons for quite a long time under intrusive
11:36monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And Trump threw that away in his first term.
11:43All right, Barbara Slavin from the Stimson Center. Thank you very much for your analysis.
11:49You're welcome. Thank you.
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