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00:00I'm wondering if we've heard any updates from the White House. You know, we had this Truth Social post, very
00:05bullish on potentially reaching a deal from the president last night.
00:08And so far, it's been a little bit quiet this morning. Any inclination that this is real and that officials
00:13are going to be able to get something across the line in time for us to announce before Monday morning
00:17starts?
00:19You know, we've got a holiday weekend. So, of course, Tuesday is another big day. But we've not heard anything
00:25since last night.
00:26You know, this Iran deal has been very complex. And what we saw White House officials and a lot of
00:33White House allies yesterday do was they started batting down criticism from within their own party about contours of a
00:41deal that nobody really knows what's in it.
00:43A lot of criticism we've been talking about, I mean, not only from very strong allies of the president, including
00:50Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and others, but even from Mike Pompeo.
00:54A strong statement from Roger Wicker, yeah.
00:56And a White House official got into a spat with former Secretary of State under Trump, Mike Pompeo, who had
01:02been the person when I was covering him, who was the advocate of pulling out of the original Iran nuclear
01:07deal, basically saying this is not far enough.
01:10Either finish the job or why did we do it in the first place?
01:13That's exactly it, including Senator Lindsey Graham.
01:16I mean, we saw a spat between Senator Ted Cruz and Alex Brucewitz, who is an important White House ally.
01:22That only raises more questions about what is in the deal, where are the conversations now, and where is the
01:30administration's red line about what they're able to accept?
01:34I think, you know, very rarely do you see this sort of widespread criticism of conservatives, of their own allies
01:41that they've been working with on Iran.
01:44Jamana, let me ask you a basic fundamental question here is, what are we talking about?
01:49I look at the Wall Street Journal this morning.
01:51The agreement, if completed, wouldn't achieve Trump's main goal of preventing Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon.
01:57We, you and the two of us, have talked about this over many weeks, the evolving rationale for this conflict
02:03in the Middle East.
02:03But so central to it, and the refrain we've heard over and over again from the president is, Iran can
02:07never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
02:09Now it seems, again, from the reporting that we're piecing together this morning, that might not be fundamental to this.
02:14That might not be a core tenet of this 14-point plan that the president is talking about.
02:18Look, it goes back to what we've been discussing over the course of the last three months, which is, what
02:23exactly were the U.S.'s military objectives here?
02:25And they seem to evolve and change over the course of the war since the ceasefire.
02:31But more recently, President Trump has been reiterating that the main goal was to ensure that Iran would not go
02:36on to develop a nuclear weapon.
02:38Does this MOU or this framework that's going to be announced address that?
02:42We simply don't know because we don't have the details yet.
02:45But what has emerged is another central issue that didn't exist before the war, and that is the fate of
02:51the Strait of Hormuz before the war.
02:53Remember, ships were passing through unconditionally.
02:56There was no concern at all about this key maritime passage.
02:59And here we are three months later.
03:01Iran have identified that this is a key point of leverage that they are going to continue to have over
03:07Gulf states and over the global economy.
03:08And they are using that leverage to extract concessions from the U.S. on what it would appear to be
03:15economic sanctions, on some relief, on the acid sun freezing and so forth.
03:20And that is just being addressed in the first phase of these discussions as they're being widely reported.
03:25The nuclear file, which is central to why the U.S. entered into the war in the first place, is
03:31going to be deferred to later.
03:32And we don't even know at this point what exactly Iran are committing to.
03:38And judging by, again, what news outlets are reporting, Iran are only making verbal commitments at this point that they
03:44will not go on to build a nuclear weapon.
03:46Again, there seems to be a lot of difference between the various timeframes that the U.S. are pushing for
03:51versus what Iran are willing to accept on their suspension of uranium enrichment.
03:57And then, of course, the fate of that highly enriched uranium stockpile, with various reports, again, over the last couple
04:04of days, saying that the new supreme leader is saying that under no circumstances will that highly enriched stockpile actually
04:09ever leave Iran.
04:11Another option is for that stockpile to be diluted.
04:14And by the way, this is just the nuclear file.
04:17We're not even talking about the proxies that Iran fund around the region, which is a clear point of consideration
04:23for Gulf states and for Israel.
04:25And the other point is the ballistic weapons that they're still sitting on.
04:30And yes, the U.S. and Israel have managed to inflict a lot of military damage and industry damage, but
04:36Iran still have the ability to go back and rebuild over the coming years.
04:40And I think this is going to be a key point of concern as we think about the long-term
04:45effects of this war in years to come.
04:47Kevin, I do want to pick up on what Jumana was talking about, what we've talked about as well.
04:52And that's these disconnects already from the messaging we're seeing from these two governments, especially when it comes to two
04:57things.
04:58One is the strait and the other is the nuclear program.
05:00New York Times is reporting two U.S. officials said that Tehran has agreed to give up a stockpile of
05:05highly enriched uranium.
05:07But three senior Iranian officials said the deal said nothing about the fate of Iran's nuclear program.
05:12And that's something that's going to be negotiated within 30 to 60 days.
05:16Critics of the way these negotiations have been going even before now have pointed out there has been a sequencing
05:21issue.
05:22If the U.S. wants to do this in stages, it has to give up its leverage, which is the
05:26blockade in the strait, in order to get to those nuclear talks.
05:28At which point, why would Iran agree to any of this?
05:32Well, look, I think this has been a problem all along where these negotiations have gone on in, you know,
05:39there were nuclear talks.
05:41They were then cut short by the attack.
05:44So I think we have a massive, massive trust problem on both sides.
05:48We clearly have very different messaging to, in many cases, I think domestic audiences that about what is in the
05:55deal and what isn't in the deal.
05:58I think the best way to probably think about this is this may well be a brief ceasefire, whether that's
06:03one month, two months.
06:04You know, 60 days is the number that seems to be the most solid at this point.
06:09It's unclear if there's any movement whatsoever on any of these key issues we've been talking about.
06:15So it doesn't mean that there's a peace deal.
06:18It just means that there may be an agreement not to shoot at each other for a little while
06:21and maybe allow at least some ships to go through the strait and at least temporarily ease some of the
06:26pricing pressure that we've seen in the oil markets.
06:28That may be what Trump is trying to do there.
06:32Look, there's also an outside case that, you know, the U.S. is going to put down what it thinks
06:38the deal is and let Iran reject it.
06:40And then the hawks in the administration will say, well, now it's time to, you know, go to strike again.
06:48But it is very clear that Trump is feeling the pressure, the political pressure to get out of this conflict,
06:53to stop it.
06:54He wants to he wants to be done with it.
06:56And so if this arrangement, this MOU, this 60-day plan gives him a way out, he may well try
07:04to seize it.
07:05Sophia, let's talk more about this kind of potpourri of pushback, these posts of pushback from members of the president's
07:10own party.
07:11I'm curious if you think that those are entirely grounded in principle, if that's how you read those,
07:16or incumbent in them is this awareness that the midterms are right around the corner.
07:21We've got to get through these runoff in Texas this week.
07:24But there's increasing agita among Republicans about what this will mean going into those midterm elections.
07:31And I'm curious, when you see that level of pushback, again, does it have to do with longstanding principle
07:35or does it have to do with the fact that the political realities are becoming so difficult for Republicans in
07:39particular?
07:41Well, I think the president is the person who's really feeling the political realities.
07:46I think the people that you're hearing from are people who have principles when it comes to Iran.
07:51And I think what they're reacting to is this elephant in the room of, are we in a better spot
07:57now than we were before the U.S. struck Iran?
08:00And I think most of them are still inclined to support the president's decision to strike Iran in the first
08:07place.
08:07But I think as they've seen the events unfold, they're seeing, OK, they've still got their nuclear stockpile.
08:14They've still got their uranium.
08:17And then Iran has realized that they've got this new leverage point of the Strait of Hormuz.
08:23And I think the energy prices, somebody like Susie Wiles in the White House has been concerned about energy prices
08:29even before the Iran war.
08:31That has exacerbated Susie's concerns.
08:34It's exacerbated the concerns of everybody in the administration who cares about whether Republicans will hold the House.
08:42And, you know, so that's kind of where we are.
08:45And Trump in particular, he said when he came back from his visit to China, he said, look, Americans don't
08:53want another war 5,000 miles away.
08:55So he's very cognizant that he kind of needs to come out of this and show the American people that
09:03it was worth it.
09:04And that second part of was this worth it is something that his own allies are questioning right now.
09:10Giovanna, I'm wondering how Gulf allies feel about that same question because you brought up the other big outlying thing
09:16that I've seen in none of the reporting from either side about what's in this deal.
09:19And that's the ballistic missile program, which obviously is degraded but not put out.
09:24And defensive stockpiles are degraded around the Gulf from trying to counter those incoming munitions, especially at the start of
09:30the war.
09:31The other thing is our colleagues have put together on Bloomberg.com, and if you have a terminal, a very
09:35interesting graph on what the state of play was before the war and after the war.
09:40And one of the ones that goes from green to red is the Strait of Hormuz, right?
09:44Before it was open, it wasn't an issue.
09:46Now it's under Iran control or U.S. blockade.
09:49And then there are also talks and rumors of Oman and Iran possibly collaborating on a toll system.
09:55Is there any guarantee that if Iran doesn't like this deal in six months to a year, it has this
10:02tool it didn't really know it had before, and it can close the Strait again?
10:05Doesn't it seem like the state of play has fundamentally changed no matter what is in this deal?
10:09Yeah, I do agree with you.
10:10And I think we will look back at this moment, at this war, as a game-changing war for the
10:16region, and namely because Iran have discovered that they have, number one, this huge point of leverage around the Strait
10:22of Hormuz.
10:23And already on the back of that, you're seeing Gulf countries look to diversify away and avoid passing through the
10:31Strait of Hormuz.
10:32UAE just announced that they're building another land pipeline that should be completed by 2027 to help transit more of
10:40their oil.
10:41And so the countries that will stand to recover more quickly are the ones that exactly have the ability to
10:48bypass the Strait in coming years, not the case for the likes of Iraq and Kuwait, for example.
10:52But the other thing that you mentioned is often overlooked.
10:55It's not just about the Strait of Hormuz.
10:56Iran has also demonstrated that they can cause a significant amount of both psychological damage and infrastructure damage just by
11:05sending over these low-cost drones.
11:07And while, yes, most of them have been intercepted, the UAE interception rate very, very high, that's not to say
11:13that some of them didn't penetrate through the air defense system and cause a significant amount of damage, which we're
11:19still going to be processing and dealing with in the coming months.
11:23So I think there is most definitely a concern in the region that having a hostile and angry neighbor on
11:30your doorstep is not an outcome that anybody would have wished for, especially because so many of these economies are
11:36building up these visions that are underpinned by them being an oasis of stability in a region that tends to
11:44be quite unstable.
11:45And I think what's happened over the past couple of months is that assumption has been challenged.
11:49And that is why, to come back to what you were saying, you have seen this shift in sentiment in
11:55the last couple of weeks or so in that all of these Gulf states, including the UAE, who have been
12:00the most hawkish, have actually been pushing for a diplomatic solution because the risk of another escalation is so high
12:06and it challenges that economic stability that they've been working so hard to build.
12:11Does it solve all the problems?
12:13Absolutely not.
12:14But it is the more palatable option out of the two options right now.
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