00:00Pakistan has proposed, as we mentioned earlier, a second round of talks between the U.S. and Iran
00:06after last weekend's negotiations in Islamabad ended in a standoff.
00:11Yesterday, our EU editor Maria Tadeo spoke to President Donald Trump's former special
00:16representative to Iran, Elliot Abrams, and started by asking him what would constitute
00:21a good deal for the U.S. in those talks.
00:24The president needs to get a better deal than Barack Obama got in 2015 in the JCPOA,
00:32because he has reviled that agreement, the worst agreement in world history. So he's
00:37going to get better than that. That deal put off for maybe 10 years or so the Iranian nuclear program,
00:46but it said nothing about support for proxies, and it said nothing about the ballistic missile
00:53program. So I think Iran has got to be willing to give on those, or else the president will be
01:01forced to do something more. He's got now the blockade. What he has not done, and might be a
01:07next step, would be taking an island in the Persian Gulf. But again, I think for all sorts of obvious
01:15reasons, politics, the U.S. economy, the elections in November, I don't think he wants to do that.
01:23The question, I think, is who's making decisions in Tehran, and how much responsibility do they have?
01:31And that is a good question. So who do you think that person is? And of course,
01:34this is all playing out big time in the energy market.
01:37Yeah, I don't think there is one person. There was in the late Supreme Leader. He could actually
01:44make a decision, one person, and make it stick. His son, who is now Supreme Leader, may even be in
01:51a coma. We don't know. Even if he is not in a coma, he's not able to enforce his rule.
02:01He's too new,
02:02too young. So I think it's probably a ruling group, a group of three or five or seven or 10
02:10people
02:11who sit at a table. Well, maybe they don't sit at a table because they're afraid a table will be
02:16hit
02:16by a bomb, but who talk to each other somehow and figure out how far can we go here. I
02:24think that's
02:24going to be a real problem. Of course, there's talks now between the Israelis and the Lebanese
02:29government, too, when you talk about the proxies. What is the calculus that Israel is making?
02:36The Israeli calculus, I think, is, look, they were attacked by Hezbollah. They were, and the U.S.
02:42was in a war with Iran, not with Lebanon. And Hezbollah, presumably under instructions from Tehran,
02:49attacked Israel. So the Israelis are pushing back. The Lebanese government, the Lebanese army are doing
02:54nothing. So the Israelis are pushing back. On the Iran front, they will follow President Trump.
03:01That is, when he said— If President Trump says that's a good deal, will they accept it?
03:05You believe they will accept it? Absolutely. Yeah. And what makes you believe that?
03:11Pardon? What makes you believe that? There's many who think Israel will still want to continue.
03:17Yeah. They may still want to, but they won't. They have a very close relationship with the United
03:22States under President Trump. Netanyahu and Trump have a close relationship. In the 12-day war last
03:27year, last June, when Trump said stop, they stopped. And I think they will here, too.
03:33We've heard now the U.S. president repeat it multiple times. NATO did not help. NATO countries say this is
03:38a
03:39defensive alliance. He keeps saying NATO, and the Europeans in particular, it's a paper tiger. What
03:44ramifications in the medium term is this going to have? On the medium term, I would take to be three
03:50years, meaning the Trump years. You've got three years to go. The relationship is not going to improve
03:56much. He won't get out of NATO. I don't think he has the ability to get out of NATO legally.
04:01Under U.S.
04:02law, it takes more than a year, and you need Congress. But the relationship is clearly weakened. To me,
04:09the real question is, who is our next president, and will he try to rebuild that relationship?
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