00:00The first question I want to ask you is when you look at this negotiating team, Steve Wyckoff, Jared Kushner,
00:05it looks like Vice President Vance were learning this morning will not be going for the second round of negotiations.
00:10Do you think they're up to the task?
00:13Well, they have the president's trust. So in that regard, they are up to the task, though.
00:17I assume that the Iranians will interpret the vice president not coming as a downgrading of these this next round
00:23of talks, which could be the last round of talks for any time soon.
00:26And so they may pull back on their delegation, which I think it's going to be hard to get a
00:32deal done, at least a deal in principle for that reason.
00:36And then if you're going to believe the president, then the president says the attacks will begin, you know, following
00:41that if the talks fell.
00:42If they don't sign the deal, I think is what he literally said.
00:44If they don't sign the deal on Tuesday before the before the ceasefire, then he's going to go after their
00:49energy, after their infrastructure, after their power plants.
00:52Mr. Secretary, I want to ask you about the chronology here.
00:54So we had the announcement from the Iranian foreign minister that the strait was open on Friday morning.
00:58Then a few hours later, we saw a great deal of confusion sewn, as the president indicated that blockade was
01:04going to stay in place.
01:05That's kind of where I want to go with you, is the role of that blockade going forward here, the
01:09importance of it as you see it.
01:10Is it something that you see as being negotiable here?
01:12Do you think it will be negotiated upon at those meetings in Islamabad?
01:16Well, I think, first of all, part of the blockade with regard to Iran, when the foreign minister came out,
01:21what he did say is it would be – it was lifted, but he mentioned the conditions.
01:25And the conditions, of course, were still that shipping had to follow this new route, which was close to the
01:30Iranian coastline between their islands, and that it would be managed by the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
01:39But that wasn't reported as loudly.
01:41It was just that they had opened it.
01:43And then, of course, there was a lot of friction within Iran with the hardliners saying that the foreign minister
01:48had overstepped his bounds.
01:50It was the wrong message.
01:51And, in fact, they were going to do all those things plus charge tolls, and that caused the counterreaction.
01:56Look, I think President Trump putting the blockade on Iran a few days ago was a smart move.
02:04I think there's no reason why Iran should be allowed to reap the benefits of oil revenues coming out of
02:10the Gulf and sustain its fight while shipping from friendly countries is not allowed to go.
02:15So I thought that was smart.
02:17I think that's what put pressure on the Iranians.
02:19And I was a little surprised that he didn't lift it when they lifted it.
02:22But nonetheless, we are where we are this morning, with both sides clamping down on control of the strait, and
02:28it effectively bottled up at this point in time once again.
02:31And what do you make of the president's renewed threats here this morning?
02:34He says he will go after every single PowerPoint and every single bridge in Iran.
02:38No more Mr. Nice Guy.
02:39Do you consider that a war crime?
02:41And what does it mean for the state as a whole?
02:44David was asking earlier, wouldn't that just lead to a failed state if there's no infrastructure left, there's no power
02:49center left, there's no ability to have a democracy in Iran?
02:53Well, first of all, that's his negotiating style, right, to threaten and to amp up the rhetoric and maybe force
03:00them to step down or at least reconsider their position, the Iranians.
03:04And so he's going back to where he was just about a week ago, I think, in terms of timing.
03:10So that's not surprising.
03:12You know, this question with regard to war crimes, it all depends on how the planners, the targeteers and the
03:18lawyers look at different targets, whether it's a power plant or a bridge or a highway, and how close its
03:26connection is to the military.
03:27So, for example, if you have a power plant sitting on a military base, powering that base, then it's a
03:32legitimate target.
03:33As you get further and further away from such direct connectivity, then it becomes more dubious.
03:38And so I think the military is going to have to work through all those different issues, case by case,
03:43target by target, to come to that final understanding, if indeed that is where the military goes in this next
03:49phase.
03:49I think the thing that has led to a lot of the fogginess we've experienced over the last 36 or
03:5348 hours is just not being able to get a sense of the degree to which what the president is
03:57saying the Iranians have agreed to is, in fact, what they have agreed to.
04:00And you know well the difficulties of engaging in any kind of diplomacy or negotiations with the Iranians.
04:05Of course, you were in the first term when the president pulled out of the JCPOA.
04:08Talk a bit about that, if you would.
04:09But the way the U.S. can verify what, in fact, the Iranians are actually saying they're doing, what they
04:14have done, yes, perhaps this will be haggled out over the table there in Islamabad.
04:19But leading up to it, how do we know what we know, to ask a very basic and cumbersome question?
04:24Yeah, look, it's tough.
04:25I mean, obviously, the president raises expectations with some of the things he says.
04:29Maybe he's picking up spot reports from his advisers, which maybe is missing some nuance.
04:34But nonetheless, the expectation was real or, as the president's been saying, that we're very, very close to a deal,
04:41that it's that they want it really badly.
04:43And then what you hear coming out of Iran is recently as the last 24 hours where the lead negotiator,
04:48Speaker Galibov, has said, yes, progress was made in Islamabad last week.
04:53But we are far from a – there are significant differences between our negotiating positions.
04:59Now, he's the lead negotiator, and I'm paraphrasing, and so – but that shows there's a much bigger gap.
05:06Now, look, I'll also say that what the Iranians say publicly to the West and what they say privately to
05:11their own people are two different things because they're trying to manage the domestic audience.
05:14So it is hard to parse through what's going on.
05:17But when I look at each side's negotiating positions, going back to the 15 points proposed by President Trump and
05:22the 10 points proposed by the Iranians, I just see few areas of agreement.
05:29The big issues, there's a major disagreement when it comes to nuclear enrichment, when it comes to returning the nuclear
05:36fuel, when it comes to what's going to be the future of the Strait of Hormuz.
05:41I mean, when we talked yesterday about what the foreign minister said and what the IRGC is saying is the
05:45new normal they want to establish is that they have sovereignty over the Strait, and they will control and manage
05:50who goes through, and they will impose tolls, much like what happens at the Panama Canal.
05:56And that's clearly something we, the West, cannot tolerate.
06:00So I think this is just going to have to play out over the coming days.
06:03I still see the positions, based on my historical understanding of where both sides are, as too far apart to
06:08get a deal here in the next 48, 72 hours.
06:11Do you think this conflict was a strategic blunder by the U.S., given that Iran has now figured out,
06:16even if it gives up its nuclear program, it has a more powerful card to play in closing the Strait?
06:22At least economically, yeah.
06:24You know, you can't tally the score until the game's over.
06:27And, you know, right now, obviously, we've had considerable progress at the military level with regard to taking down the
06:33military objectives of defeating their navy, degrading their air defense, their air force, so forth and so on.
06:42But at this point in time, at the strategic level, we know that Iran is still refusing to yield to
06:51our nuclear demands.
06:52And that was ostensibly the reason why we got into this conflict eight weeks ago.
06:56If you recall, in Geneva, Whitcoff and Kushner said, look, the Iranians aren't serious on the nuclear issue.
07:01We need to try something different.
07:03And that's when Operation Epic Fury was launched.
07:07I'm sorry.
07:09But would you have greenlit this operation in your time?
07:12If the president came to you when you were running the Pentagon, would you have said this was a good
07:15idea?
07:16Well, this happened at times during my tenure.
07:18I would say, look, these are the things we can do, but wars are unpredictable.
07:22Once you get into them, it's easy to get in but hard to get out.
07:25And I talk about this a lot in my memoir about how we would have these discussions.
07:29And it would be myself and the chairman warning about getting into a conflict without positioning troops in advance, without
07:35being prepared for a ground war and without being prepared for all these other consequences we're seeing.
07:40So that's what I thought that was my job, A, to prepare plans to go to war, make sure the
07:44force is ready.
07:45But B, give my best advice with regard to the pros and cons.
07:49And, you know, there's been documentation about the president's advisors being at various positions on this with regard to getting
07:57it.
07:57But the view is he felt emboldened after what happened last June with Midnight Hammer, with the Venezuela operation, and
08:05was maybe convinced that if he did this operation, decapitated the government, they might fall.
08:10And clearly it didn't.
08:12Let me ask you lastly about Lebanon, which, of course, has been such a crucial issue here.
08:16And we have headlines this morning from Israel's defense minister saying he and Benjamin Netanyahu have instructed the IDF to
08:21act with all force from the ground, from the air, even during the ceasefire, to protect our soldiers in Lebanon
08:27from any threat.
08:28A crucial issue here for the U.S.
08:30It's the degree to which they and Israel are going to be on the same page.
08:32How big a challenge is that going to be going forward here?
08:36Well, Israel clearly has different goals than we have when it comes to both Iran and Lebanon.
08:40And the Lebanon issue has been dragging on for the Israelis as long as Hezbollah has been in existence since
08:45the early 1980s.
08:47So and this isn't the first time that there's been some type of agreement or commitment by the Lebanese government
08:51to disarm Hezbollah, to move them back up north.
08:54So, look, I think Israel clearly wants to go in and push the Hezbollah further north of the Latani River,
09:01disarm them once again, take out their leadership.
09:03But they're playing to President Trump's fiddle right now because Trump wants a deal.
09:08And to get the deal, he had to push them to have a ceasefire with the Lebanese, with Hezbollah, to
09:15be more specific, in order to get the Iranians to back down a little bit.
09:18So I think the question will be is if the ceasefire between the United States and Iran breaks down in
09:23three days, will the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel also break down?
09:28That'll be an important point to watch.
09:29I mean, very quickly, what do you think will happen? Do you think it will break down?
09:35Where the rhetoric is this morning, I see it very hard to get an agreement in 48 hours.
09:40So my sense is the president may be forced to launch some type of military tax to live up to
09:45what he said, rather than kind of yielding or extending the agreement.
09:49But who knows? We'll see.
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