Trump Accidentally Admits to Epic Iran Blunder as War Takes Worse Turn

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This is the daily blast from the new republic produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host Greg Sargent.

Speaking to reporters, Donald Trump made a strange claim about Iran.

He said no one anticipated that Iran would attack other countries in an effort to widen

the war.

But in saying that, Trump revealed that he didn't anticipate it, which is a striking

admission about his own lack of foresight.

We think this captures something broader.

On one front after another, Trump plainly didn't prepare for eventualities that most experts

fully did anticipate.

So how directly responsible are these failings for what we're seeing right now that by most

indications, the war is getting worse for Trump and the US on many fronts.

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, has a new piece

on the deeper ideological failings that led to this debacle.

So we're talking to him about all this today.

Matt, good to have you on.

Greg, great to be with you, thanks.

So the latest is that over the weekend, Trump threatened to bomb Iranian electricity

plants if Iran didn't reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Then on Monday, he abruptly postponed that threat, claiming that very strong talks are

underway with Iran about them reaching an agreement to end the fighting.

Iran quickly denied any such talks for underway.

Matt, what do we know about where things are right now and how badly is this going for

Trump in the United States?

Well, we know that this is going much worse than Donald Trump himself thought it would.

We know that Donald Trump does not do the reading.

We know that Donald Trump has the attention span of a fly.

We know that he just makes stuff up all the time.

Trump made this threat over the weekend to bomb power plants, which is clearly a war

crime to attack plants that produce power for civilians.

And then I think he woke up and saw that, okay, the stock market is in trouble.

Oil prices are continuing to go higher.

And I've said, and others have said for a while, that that's the only thing that really

gets Donald Trump's attention is when he's sitting there drinking diet, coax, watching

Fox News and he sees the ticker going by on the bottom and he understands that the market

is in trouble.

So he came out and said, well, we're going to not do that because we are thinking about

ending the war.

We're in talks.

Not that doesn't seem to be true at all.

But that's where Donald Trump is focused really primarily because that is how he believes

his presidency will be rated is whether the stock market is doing well.

Well, I want to come back to his claims and how things are going in a bit.

But first, let's listen to Trump.

He talked to reporters on Monday and he tried to justify his handling of the war this

way.

He's talking about a country that has been evil for 47 years.

They've been horrible death all over the world, not just us.

Look at the way they attack unexpectedly, all of those countries surrounding it.

It was not supposed to, but nobody was even thinking about it.

But they wanted to take over the Middle East and they wanted to knock out Israel permanently.

And if they had a nuclear weapon, they would have been able to do that.

So according to Trump, Iran has been evil for 47 years, yet no one anticipated that

they might attack other countries if the U.S. attacked them.

Doesn't quite add up.

Matt, is it true that no one anticipated that?

It is not true at all.

Everyone anticipated this.

Every one of these countries that Iran has attacked, we should have expected whether

it's Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, obviously Israel.

This is part of Iran's defensive strategy.

This is part of how they believe they were creating deterrence.

Deterrence, in the most basic sense, is creating the belief in the mind of your enemy that attacking

you will cause more pain than it's worth, right?

And whether we're talking about nuclear deterrence, the United States and the Saudi Union were

in a position, nuclear deterrence, the idea like, well, if we attack them, they will attack

us with nuclear weapons and nobody wants that.

Iran's approach was, well, listen, we know that we can't face off head-to-head with the

United States militarily, but we do have ways of creating pain for the United States and

for the United States' partners across the region.

And that was what they hoped would deter the United States.

Obviously, that didn't deter the United States, the United States and Israel attacked Iran

a few weeks ago.

And so, Iran is following through.

They have to follow through, in a sense, if they want to make sure that this doesn't happen

again in the future.

So, yes, to answer your question, of course, people knew Iran were going to do this

but, you know, again, Donald Trump does not bother to do the reading.

Right.

And the reading is really what it is here.

So, just to be absolutely clear about this, built into Iran's public deterrence posture

is the idea that if attacked by someone like the United States, they would go after these

lesser countries, these allies of the United States in the region in order to create turbulence,

globally, financially, in terms of energy, that that's really like an understood thing

about how Iran would handle a situation like this.

That's right.

Everyone has understood that this is how Iran would respond.

This was not a secret.

And that's the whole point of deterrence is that it was supposed to not be a secret.

Right.

It's not going to be a deterrent if nobody knows about it.

That's right.

The whole thing is so ridiculous.

So we've seen this dynamic on other fronts as well, preposterously.

CNN reported and other supportive that the Trump team was caught off guard by the willingness

of Iran to close the straight of Hormuz and caught off guard by the global consequences

of that and the global consequences have been disastrous.

Like everybody knew, I think it's hard for those of us who are not specialists the way

you are to understand how they could have been quite this unprepared.

But to return to your earlier point, it is about not doing the reading clearly Trump

should have or probably would have gotten briefed on all this sort of stuff.

And maybe it just didn't penetrate.

Right.

And who knows whether he was paying attention, we again, again, he doesn't have a long

attention span.

He does not like long memos.

He does not like to spend lots of time talking through complicated issues.

But we also have to recognize the fact that Donald Trump is surrounded by yes people.

He's surrounded by ideologues.

He's obviously had people like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and Benjamin Netanyahu in

his ear for all these weeks leading up to the war saying, Oh, it's going to be going to

go really, really well.

You don't need to worry about it.

Just look at how well thin his wail went.

And Donald Trump chose to believe that.

There may even be kind of a schism here where you've got the types like Lindsey Graham and

Tom Cotton who just love war and want to have a war with Iran.

And particularly care what the consequences are.

That's sort of one camp.

But then you've probably got people internally who like maybe the joint chiefs, the joint

chiefs chair who actually privately warned Trump that this war would be much more difficult

than it might seem.

What's supposed to happen in these situations?

If he had a normal president, what would have happened and how abnormal is the current

situation?

Well, who even knows what's normal now, but if we had an actually responsible president,

I think what they would do is try to address the problem of Iran's nuclear program through

some kind of non-proliferation agreement that puts limits on Iran's nuclear program

to ensure that it wouldn't obtain a weapon, i.e. exactly what Barack Obama did.

You don't deal with this problem militarily.

You cannot ultimately deal with this problem militarily.

That is what many of us have been saying for a very, very long time, including people

in the military.

And yet, Donald Trump chose not to listen to those people.

He instead chose to listen to hard-line ideologues like the people we mentioned.

You know, I'm really glad you brought that up.

Can you just sum up for people what Barack Obama accomplished with the Iran nuclear deal

and why it was good?

Right.

So in 2015, after a lot of effort in multiple rounds of talks between the U.S. and its

partners in the P5 plus one, that's the terminate five members of the U.N. Security Council

plus Germany had met with the Iranians to try to come to some agreement that would put

limits on Iran's nuclear program to give the rest of the world confidence that Iran would

not obtain a nuclear weapon.

Now, Iran had always insisted it did not want a nuclear weapon, it had no intention

of building one.

Back in 2003, there was some evidence produced that Iran had at one point had a program

designed to at least keep the option open.

Our own intelligence services believed that they were keeping the option at least open,

but that they had not made a decision to obtain a weapon.

So what the agreement that JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action did was in exchange

for sanctions relief.

There were, and still are, lots of sanctions on the Iranian government.

Iran agreed to dispose of a lot of its equipment that could be used to obtain a weapon.

It put its nuclear program under the heaviest inspections regime in history, cameras,

all kinds of inspections.

It was a multi-layered, highly complex, highly restrictive system of surveillance to make

sure that Iran could not secretly produce a nuclear weapon.

And overwhelmingly, security and non-proliferation experts recognized that this was a good agreement.

And I think not only was it a good agreement for dealing with Iran's nuclear program, just

the fact that the US and Iran were now talking and had at least established some small measure

of trust in the area of nuclear and non-proliferation, we could have continued to talk with Iran

about a whole range of other issues, like the issues that have been brought up repeatedly

over these past weeks.

Iran's support for militant, you know, extremist groups in the region.

It's building of ballistic missiles, its repression of its own people.

There is an alternate history here where the US went down that road and at least tried

to continue to talk and address these issues where they've worked, we can't know.

It may have worked.

But as we know Donald Trump chose option B, which is to pull out of that nuclear agreement,

re-impose sanctions, and put us now on the path we've been on, which is toward war.

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Well, a lot of people said either it's going to be the Iran nuclear agreement with all

the teeth in it or it's going to be war and that's what has happened, right?

That's right.

And the opponents of the agreement all the all the while, the hawkish opponents of that

nuclear agreement just insisted that they didn't support war.

They just wanted a better stronger agreement and that was complete bullshit.

And many of us have been pointing this out all along the opponents of that agreement.

The problem wasn't with the around nuclear deal.

Their problem is with making deals with Iran because their goal has always been a regime

change war.

Right.

The problem from their perspective was that this might actually work without a war being

fought.

That's right.

Isn't that the essence of it?

That is really the essence of it.

I mean, that this would disprove their entire theory of how the world works and their

theory is that American military power is magic and this is how you solve problems.

What about at the end of this particular war if he claims victory and there isn't any

kind of negotiated settlement around the nukes, what does he say exactly and what has he actually

achieved?

Well, here's what Trump can say, given that he has been lying about Iran being on the

brink of a nuclear weapon and his administration has been out there lying that Iran was about

to get a nuclear weapon, he can just say that now Iran is not about to get a nuclear weapon.

That's actually true.

That was true before this war, that they were not about to get a nuclear weapon, but

Donald Trump can claim that now because of me, we don't have to live in fear of Iran

triggering a nuclear apocalypse.

And in the real world, what will he have achieved on nukes?

In the world, he won't really have achieved anything.

I mean, Iran's program was already considerably set back by the bombing last June.

Once again, not set back as far as Barack Obama's nuclear agreement did, but he can claim

to have done that.

That is one potential upside, but I think the downsides vastly outweigh that.

Right.

And so at the end of the day, we're saddled with all these immense consequences and the

line won't even have been moved much.

The needle won't even have been moved much on nukes.

No, on nukes, no.

And meanwhile, you have an Iranian regime that is almost certainly going to be more hostile

to the United States, that is much, much more hard line.

And by the way, you have just demonstrated the huge value of actually having a nuclear

deterrent.

You know, who looks really attractive to the Iranians right now is North Korea.

No one is talking about bombing North Korea because everyone understands what North Korea

could do in response.

So if anything, this war has just made a nuclear weapon much, much more attractive to Iran

and, frankly, to any other country that needs an insurance policy against a predatory

United States.

So it's just a circle back to where we started.

If you think about this, him saying kind of openly that nobody anticipated that Iran

would attack all these other countries, it's like an admission on his part that he failed

to anticipate all these unintended consequences of this war, which everybody else did anticipate,

including probably some of his own advisors.

It's just, it's, we're in a hall of mirrors here.

And once you're in the hall of mirrors, the rules of the hall of mirrors are, or what

apply.

What do you think's going to happen?

Like, just play this out.

Honestly, you know, what I've been saying is that this war ends when Donald Trump gets

bored enough or he is disciplined by the financial markets.

And I think we did see some evidence of the latter today when he came out and said, okay,

I'm going to give the Iranians more time, not going to go bombing their power plants.

I mean, he clearly has been spooked by the price of oil.

He's clearly been spooked by the stock market.

He's gaming the market with these kinds of announcements pretending that there are talks

ongoing.

But if it gets to the point that he really can't control this anymore, I think that's

when we could really see him press forward to end this war, which it seems clear to me

that he would like to do.

He just doesn't have a plausible in his own mind, you know, victory narrative yet.

And if he does that, he then tells us that he succeeded in getting rid of the nukes that

he obliterated already six months ago.

That's right.

We no longer have to live under the threat of Iranian nuclear terror that wasn't there

anyway.

Matt Duss, that really captures the absurdity of all this.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Great to talk to you.

All right.

Thanks, Greg.