00:00Leslie Venger-Murray, president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
00:05Leslie, perhaps this not surprising, Iran demanding a permanent end to the war in reply to the U.S.
00:11Conversations had been happening in the background with Pakistan and others in order to try to achieve a ceasefire.
00:17The reports had been that the odds of that have been slim.
00:21Is there any hope that there could be something of a ceasefire in coming days as we get these threats
00:26from the president?
00:30Certainly, many people are working hard to make it possible.
00:33There's nothing to suggest that it's likely, except, of course, that the ongoing cost of this war to pretty much
00:41everybody involved is extraordinarily high.
00:44And in that dimension alone, there's a lot of incentive to find an off-ramp.
00:48The question is what that would be.
00:50And I think the chief problem, to be frank, is that the U.S. president hasn't really articulated a clear
00:58objective.
00:58We know this.
00:59We've heard it said so many times that we're almost blue in the face.
01:03But it is true.
01:04Because he hasn't articulated a very clear goal, it's very difficult to know what he would accept.
01:11And I think from the point of view of Iran, they've demonstrated, as we know, their asymmetric advantage, that they
01:17are not willing to simply concede to a kind of deal that might have been palatable many weeks ago and,
01:25indeed, that they had been complying with previously.
01:27But the contours of a deal, you know, there is an option, I guess, that the president and those, Pakistan,
01:36Egypt, others who are helping to negotiate with Iran, might find some sort of deal that concedes giving up some
01:47of Iran's enriched uranium.
01:49We know that Iran wants to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
01:56The United States doesn't seem to wish to grant that.
02:01But the U.S. has very little leverage right now.
02:04Iran seems to really have a lot of leverage because it's willing to attack Gulf countries because it's got the
02:13closure of that Strait of Hormuz.
02:16And the U.S. doesn't really seem to have a game plan.
02:20And the president's tweet on Easter, of course, was disturbing and unsettling for many people.
02:27And, well, it frankly seems desperate.
02:29I mean, Leslie, he started out at the beginning of May tweeting that we'll accept nothing less than an unconditional
02:34surrender.
02:36And then eventually he was like, we don't even care if they open the Strait of Hormuz.
02:41Now I guess they do care about that.
02:43But he started saying, you know, praise be to Allah and using swear words.
02:49He says we don't need any help from our allies, but damn them for not helping us.
02:56Is this 3-D chess, as Andy Kessler suggests in his Wall Street Journal piece today?
03:02Or have we just reached a limit of frustration where the president is lashing out?
03:09The president is not only lashing out, and you put it brilliantly, he's also threatening war crimes.
03:15He's threatening to attack civilian infrastructure, power plants, bridges.
03:20Because, you know, most American presidents, even if they were going to, you know, use methods of warfare that would
03:29hurt civilians,
03:30would certainly bend over backwards to make the case for why they were complying with the law of war.
03:37This has been fundamental, foundational to training across the military services.
03:42And we have a U.S. president that is standing up and doing exactly the opposite.
03:47And on Easter Day, he gave his 19-minute speech on Passover, and then he bookended it with his speech
03:54on Easter.
03:54It's incredibly disturbing.
03:55It comes on the back, as we know, of many high-level officials in the Pentagon being fired by Hegseth
04:04for no clear reason to those of us watching from the outside.
04:07And so, yes, the U.S. president is frustrated, but it's certainly no excuse for the leader of the most
04:15powerful military country in the world at a time of war to be using this language.
04:22And the question is, what can anybody do within the United States?
04:28Congress is on spring recess.
04:30We know that they plan to begin hearings when they return in a few weeks.
04:35That's a long time, April 16th, when it comes to the question of war.
04:40And that deadline has now been set by the president for tomorrow night.
04:44He's addressing the nation today at 1 o'clock, apparently.
04:48Well, we look forward to hearing what he has to say,
04:52and hopefully he can elaborate on how much we need to spend on this war
04:57and how we won't have enough money, he said on Thursday last week,
05:01to pay for U.S. child care, Medicare, and Medicaid because of it.
05:06I wonder about the Bloomberg scoop over the weekend regarding air-to-surface missiles, JASM-ER missiles.
05:16Apparently, we had about 2,400 before the war.
05:19Now that we've been firing them for a month, we've only got about 450 left.
05:24And those had been reserved for other regions around the world,
05:28but we're bringing them all now to Iran to use there.
05:32These are the missiles that keep boots off the ground, right?
05:35And if we run out of these, we're going to have to look for other weapons
05:38or maybe put soldiers more in harm's way.
05:42Is that a concern for the Pentagon?
05:44It certainly should be.
05:47I imagine that for those who have committed their lives and their careers
05:52to the service and work in the Pentagon, it certainly is.
05:55I spoke with one high-level former official who said,
05:59you know, we are not equipped, given what you've just cited,
06:03we are no longer equipped to fight a war with the United States,
06:07with its other major adversaries right now because it's depleting its stockpiles,
06:13because of the diversion of its attention.
06:15So there are a lot of big bets, gambles being placed here right now,
06:20which are to say that things in the Indo-Pacific remain calm,
06:26that the war, or at least that the United States,
06:29isn't planning to do much more to support Ukraine right now,
06:32and that Russia doesn't take advantage of that.
06:34It's already benefiting, as we've seen from the lifting of sanctions
06:38on some of the export of its oil supplies.
06:42But yes, the focus by the president and his rhetoric has been
06:47on how much we've diminished Iran's capabilities on their missiles,
06:52on their drones, but we can still see that they seem to have plenty.
06:57And there's been very little discussion of how the U.S. has been impacted,
07:00but it certainly has.
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