00:00Let's speak now to Laura Blumenfeld. She's a Middle East analyst and former U.S. State Department advisor.
00:05Laura, thank you very much for your time. In this atmosphere, do you expect talks will continue?
00:13I do, absolutely. You know, J.D. Vance left Islamabad without a deal, but for anyone who's walked the alleys
00:19of the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, as I have,
00:22I would recognize this as his kind of walking out of the shop moment.
00:26He's leaving not because he's not interested. He's leaving because he is.
00:30There's kind of a negotiating, shopping choreography, if you will.
00:35And what he's hoping is that by not chasing the deal, the deal will come to him.
00:40So the question is, you know, is Iran interested?
00:43I think that, you know, that walking out of the shop strategy doesn't always work, especially if the shopkeeper thinks
00:49they have the upper hand.
00:51Typically, in the past, Iran has always felt like they may survive in the battlefield, but they thrive at negotiations,
00:58that they can outfox the Americans.
01:00So the question is, are they going to overreach now and ask for too much?
01:03And will it really drive the Americans in a way that we go back to the battlefield rather than the
01:09negotiating table?
01:10Well, we saw that, you know, it took President Obama two years to negotiate an Iranian nuclear deal.
01:17Will two weeks be long enough? I doubt it.
01:20Do you see any way to de-escalate the growing tensions around the Strait of Hormuz?
01:25Donald Trump says a lot.
01:29Surely that is not helping create the conducive environment for more talks.
01:34Well, for talks, Donald Trump's sort of negotiating strategy, you know, trust is the fairy dust of diplomacy.
01:41He doesn't negotiate through trust.
01:43He negotiates through fear.
01:44That has a really bad sort of kickback from the Iranians because their approach toward America, going all the way
01:51back to Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the revolution in 1979, was that America is like a dog.
01:57If you allow it to make you, if you show fear to that dog, it will lunge at you.
02:02If you stand up firm, America will tuck its tail and turn away.
02:06So on the Strait of Hormuz, talk, yes, might not work, but actions will.
02:13And that's why Donald Trump announced that he's going to lead a blockade, that if Iranians won't allow the oil
02:18ships to pass through, then America won't allow the Iranian ships to pass through as well.
02:23He's kind of fighting fire with fire here and trying to turn it around, because although America might have Iran
02:30by a chokehold in the battlefield, Iran really does have America and the entire global economy, you know, by the
02:37balls, if you will, by threatening the global economy.
02:41So he's trying to turn it around by actions rather than talk.
02:44Is it possible, as Donald Trump has threatened, that the U.S. could actually just walk away from this?
02:51Or do you think they're really committed to see this resolved one way or the other?
02:56Yeah, I mean, the Strait of Hormuz is being held hostage now by Iran.
03:00He can't walk away because he'll end up looking like President Jimmy Carter, where there is another hostage crisis.
03:05And over the years, Trump has really belittled Carter for looking weak and ineffective.
03:09So he absolutely can't walk away.
03:12You know, he's almost approached this war like a doctor performing exploratory surgery, right?
03:19He never sort of announced what he was going to do in the end.
03:21It was probe, cut, excise the malign regime.
03:25But like any doctor, you have to follow the Hippocratic Oath.
03:28Number one rule is do no harm.
03:30If he just walked away and just left it up to unnamed allies to release the chokehold on the Gulf,
03:36on the Strait of Hormuz,
03:37then he would be leaving the situation worse off than when he first entered it.
03:41Thank you so much for your time, Laura Blumenfeld, Middle East analyst and a former U.S. State Department advisor.
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