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00:00This is something that we've seen in terms of the past six weeks of this war, these longstanding demands of
00:06the U.S.
00:07You talked about the fact, and Tim talked about the fact, that perhaps it was unreasonable to believe that in
00:1221 hours of negotiating here in Islamabad,
00:15we were going to see an agreement to end this war.
00:21Diplomacy takes time.
00:22That's something that when you talk to people who have spent their careers at the State Department or in foreign
00:27policy at the White House, National Security Council,
00:30these kind of deals take time to develop and to craft.
00:34The JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Agreement during the Biden administration, that was a two-year painstaking negotiation.
00:44And these negotiations typically involve a kind of a give and take.
00:49Each side has to make some concessions to get to an agreement.
00:52And so when you look at the demands from the Trump administration, it's not apparent, at least not publicly apparent,
01:00what they are conceding to Iran as part of these negotiations.
01:03And they are really maximalist demands from the Trump administration that have not changed significantly since before,
01:10since Geneva and the last round of talks in February, before President Trump decided, along with Israel, to strike Tehran.
01:19So that is a big question is, you know, in terms of this kind of there's this idea of ripeness
01:24theory,
01:25that you get peace agreements when both sides are ready, both sides are exhausted and are ready to make peace.
01:30It's not clear that either side or at least that the Iranian side is ready to make peace here.
01:36And of course, the Strait of Hormuz, they've shown an ability, demonstrated an ability in recent weeks to control it,
01:41to impact global markets and to affect a great degree of pain on the U.S. and on Western Europe.
01:49And so the question is, will they continue to use that leverage going forward?
01:52Yeah, that's a very good question.
01:54As Eric just reminds everybody, there's a lot of distance between these two sides when it comes to what each
01:58one is looking for.
02:00Jeff, I want to bring you in from Washington and get the Washington perspective.
02:03When you joined our show on the weekday, Bloomberg Business Week Daily,
02:06you mentioned that success in Pakistan would look like just the fact that these two parties even got together.
02:14Maybe you had the most realistic view of what a successful weekend or a successful day looked like.
02:18Do you stand by that?
02:20Was this a success because the U.S. and Iran spoke?
02:24Well, you know, it's not my job now to determine whether it was successful or not.
02:29What I think I said, you're right, is that the fact that they were getting together was seen as a
02:33success by both sides,
02:34but the stakes were high in terms of coming away with something.
02:37And Vice President Vance returning to Washington now without anything to deliver in terms of a successful deal.
02:45And also, I think notably, not a willingness or at least a verbal declaration that they're going to continue high
02:54-level talks is certainly a blow.
02:57And I think what it raises for me in terms of questions next is what does President Trump now decide
03:03to do?
03:03He had created himself a little bit of an off-ramp here with the two-week extension from his threats
03:11to bomb civilian infrastructure
03:15and basically just put it all on the vice president to come home with some kind of an agreement after
03:21talks this weekend.
03:22Now he doesn't have that.
03:23So does he come back and say, all right, we're going to re-up those threats?
03:28Or does he say, okay, we don't need a deal, which, by the way, he has said repeatedly while then
03:34couching it with other threats?
03:36Or does he decide to go back to a military campaign?
03:40Nuriya, I want to turn to you because one of the big outliers was Israel was not at these talks.
03:46There's also the Israeli front in Lebanon, which the U.S. said wasn't a part of the talks.
03:51And then Iran and Pakistan said should be part of the talks.
03:53And they kind of asked Israel to tone it down a bit.
03:57But you've spoken to President Trump recently on the phone.
03:59President Trump was in Florida with Marco Rubio at a UFC gig.
04:02Just talk to us about where the White House is and where the relationship between the prime minister and the
04:07president is at this time.
04:08So I think Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump, they're very much cooperating on this entire situation.
04:15But after the ceasefire, Prime Minister Netanyahu did not want to do a ceasefire with Lebanon.
04:20Right, he said it was a separate issue.
04:21He said it was a separate issue and a separate, I would say, skirmish.
04:25This is the term that he used.
04:26And then President Trump speaks with him last week and he tells him, you need to low-key.
04:32And President Trump tells me that on a phone call.
04:34And then not a long while after my phone call with President Trump, my interview with President Trump, Prime Minister
04:40Netanyahu obeys.
04:42And he says, I'm going to start negotiating with Lebanon.
04:46But he does not end that, again, skirmish.
04:49He continues with the blows.
04:51But he goes low-key.
04:54I mean, he's not doing that in Beirut.
04:55It's more like going on southern Lebanon.
04:58And we should say Hezbollah keeps on launching rockets at Israel.
05:03Israelis are in the shelters in the past three days, even after the ceasefire with Iran.
05:08And this is a part of the talks in Pakistan because President Trump says, I want those talks in Pakistan
05:14or the talks with Iran to be successful.
05:16This is why I need Israel to low-key, to finish that thing with Lebanon, even for the short term,
05:23so that I can continue and have a successful deal with Iran.
05:26And this is why it's so important for President Trump.
05:29So, Eric, I want to bring you back in here after what Nerea said about what Israel is doing, because
05:33I guess my question is what it means for negotiators and how they're going to resolve this.
05:40Is anyone still in Pakistan?
05:41Are there delegations from the U.S. still there?
05:44Folks who have been on the ground or will be on the ground trying to hash this out?
05:49Or is everybody completely going back to their own countries?
05:55Tim, at this point, our understanding is that everybody, all of the high-level negotiators from the U.S., have
06:01left for Washington.
06:03We saw reports that they were at a refueling stop not long ago in the Rammstein base in Germany.
06:10And that confirmation that Vice President Vance, as well as Special Envoys Steve Wyckoff and Jared Kushner, have all left
06:19Pakistan.
06:20But this is an important point as to what Jeff was just mentioning, which is that President Trump has said
06:26he doesn't need an agreement here.
06:28But at the same time, Iran has shown an ability to cause this pain for the American economy.
06:35And President Trump needs to respond to constituencies, to voters.
06:39There's his election in November, and he has to be responsive to those constituencies in a way that certainly the
06:45regime in Tehran, repressing, killing tens of thousands of protesters, is not responsive to its citizenry and to its constituency.
06:53And so that's a challenge for a political challenge for President Trump, is the domestic political dynamic, the impact of
07:01this war, and those kinds of considerations.
07:03So that's something that suggests a lot of analysts I've been talking to have been saying that they don't think
07:08that if this peace negotiation that we've seen begin in Pakistan this weekend, if this fails, that they're necessarily going
07:16to just automatically go back to the military option.
07:19There are political considerations here as far as how he goes forward, the promises by both President Trump and Vice
07:26President Vance to avoid the kind of forever wars that they criticize from their predecessors.
07:32And so there's that political pressure to not necessarily go back to exactly the place that we were one week
07:38ago.
07:39Jeff, I also want to ask you, the other thing that was missing from any of the vice presidents, I
07:43think he took like three questions, it was a pretty short press conference.
07:46We played almost the whole thing.
07:47Literally, yes.
07:48He didn't mention the straight, which seems like a big deal, and we've got some sound of the president talking
07:54about it on Friday that I want you to listen to really quick.
07:57The straight will open up.
07:58If we just left, the straight's going to, otherwise they make no money.
08:02So the straight's going to open.
08:03But what we have is no nuclear weapon, but we'll open the straight anyway.
08:08Don't forget, we don't use the straight.
08:09Other countries use the straight.
08:11So we do have other countries coming up, and they'll help out.
08:15But we don't use it.
08:17It won't be easy.
08:18It won't be, I would say this, we will have that open fairly soon.
08:24Jeff, give me your read on the fact that the president was not at these negotiations, was at a UFC
08:29fight, and seems to just be saying he's moved on from the straight, the straight will handle itself.
08:35I think that regional allies would probably dispute that.
08:38Do you think the president is trying to move on from this?
08:43And is there a worst-case scenario for Europeans and some of our Asian allies that the U.S. could
08:48leave without resolving the straight, and it could be in an even worse situation than it was before this conflict
08:53started?
08:54Absolutely.
08:54I think that scenario is highly possible.
08:56But I don't think it's only worst-case for Europe.
08:59I think it's also got major economic and political ramifications for the United States, despite the fact that the president
09:07plays down or likes to emphasize that the U.S. doesn't use that waterway for a lot of its energy
09:14needs.
09:14The U.S. is connected to the global economy.
09:17And if the rest of the economy and the rest of the world is affected by it, then it's going
09:22to have ramifications here, too.
09:23And those ramifications turn political if the gasoline prices in this country stay high.
09:29So the president has been giving mixed messages about the Strait of Hormuz, just like he's been giving mixed messages
09:34about the war generally, about whether he needs a deal or whether he doesn't, about whether he's going to strike
09:40again or whether he's not.
09:41And that's just how Donald J. Trump operates.
09:45It makes it difficult to figure out if you're an analyst or if you're a reporter or if you're the
09:49market.
09:50And I think those are the questions that we'll have to try to get answers to in the coming days.
09:55But I don't think it's as simple as he's trying to make it in that quote.
09:59In fact, I think one of the biggest pieces of political damage to him could end up being people concluding
10:05that things are actually worse for the United States as a result of this war,
10:09both in terms of the Strait of Hormuz and in terms of the lack of visibility on Iran's nuclear program
10:17going forward.
10:18Nuriya, just 20 seconds.
10:19The appetite for Israelis for a conflict such as this to continue, what is it after being mired in conflict
10:25for almost three years?
10:26Israelis want this issue to end.
10:29They want the Iranian nuclear weapon to be resolved.
10:31And, you know, my first phone call interview with President Trump after the war started, he told me no other
10:36leader could have done that.
10:37And I think that's true.
10:38History proves that.
10:40And now he has the mission to try and solve this, maybe forever, potentially forever.
10:45But the Iranians are lying in the negotiating rooms.
10:49And this is why Witkof Kushner and J.D. Vance were not, I would say, pleased with the way they
10:56acted in the negotiating room.
10:57And this is why they had to wrap it all up and say, we're leaving a draft here.
11:03And we're not going to continue negotiating face to face.
11:06You have to give us a full answer and then we're going to try and see where it goes.
11:10And I feel like President Trump wants it solved.
11:12I think that he's hands on.
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