Trump has lost the Iran war hawks

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So for 20 years, there's basically been one guy

who was always known as the Iran War guy

in Republican politics.

For years, even decades,

Ambassador John Bolton has argued

that America needs to push for regime change in Iran

and take an active military role in making it happen.

But now the Trump is doing just that.

Ambassador Bolton says he's actually going about it all wrong

and making a big mistake.

So how did Trump lose the Republican Party's

biggest Iran war hawk?

Let's find out.

And, Ambassador Bolton, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thanks for having me, glad to be here.

Ambassador, I would love for you to just run through your credentials

for a second.

We're going to be talking about, obviously,

the growing war in Iran.

But I want it for you to give our audience just a sense

of how closely you've been tied to this for a while.

Well, I've had the privilege to serve

a number of senior U.S. government officials

going back to the Reagan and first Bush administration,

second Bush administration.

I was under Secretary of State

for arms control and international security.

Then I was U.S. Ambassador to the UN.

And I served in the first Trump term

as a national security advisor for 17 months.

I was his longest serving national security advisor.

Yeah, and obviously that's the part

that we really want to focus on.

I think you've become known

as one of the most prominent American

advocates for military action in Iran

over a set of decades.

And this war is a sense,

something that you've argued for long

through your career.

But in recent weeks, you've emerged as one of the sharpest

critics of the Trump administration's actions

and how it's conducting this war.

I wanted you to walk me through your critiques.

Where do you think they went wrong

from the perspective of someone

who wanted to see this happen?

Well, when I support is a policy of regime change in Iran.

And I've held that view for many years

because I don't think there's any chance

the current regime will change its behavior

on two critical fronts.

It's not going to give up its pursuit

of nuclear weapons, which threaten Israel,

the United States, really, the whole world.

And it's not going to give up on its pursuit of terrorism.

It's supportive terrorist groups like Hamas,

Hezbollah, the Houthis, Shia militia in Iraq

and conducting terrorist operations around the world.

And I think we've got decades of evidence

that their behavior's not going to change.

So when you're confronted with that kind of threat danger

and behavior isn't going to change,

the alternative is change the regime.

I think the regime is in its weakest position

since any time after it took power in 1979.

The economies of mass, the young people

or they can see they can have a different kind of life.

Two-thirds of the population is under 30.

The women are enormously dissatisfied

since death of Masiamini, ethnic groups are dissatisfied.

So to me, conditions are ripe for regime change

as a policy to succeed.

And the question is, what role can the United States play?

And here, I think Trump is badly misplaced his hand

from the beginning, unfortunately.

Doesn't he? Tell me how.

Trump initially did nothing to prepare the American public

for the steps necessary to affect regime change.

Normally, when a president is going to take a dramatic action

like Trump has, you explain that to the American people.

You make the case why it's in our national interest

to seek regime change, to avoid the threat of nuclear weapons,

to avoid the continuing threat of terrorism.

You don't have to say anything about what your specific plan is.

You don't have to talk about timing,

but you have to be respectful of our citizens

and make the case to them that this is in their interest.

I think he could have done it.

I think there's a very compelling case.

He didn't do it.

A corollary to that is you need to prepare Congress,

certainly on the Republican side to get their support.

But on the Democratic side too,

I think there are a number of important steps

that Congress is going to have to take

and instead of leaving them in the dark,

it doesn't mean they would agree with you necessarily.

But at least you've stated your case to them

and it's part of making it to the American people.

The other aspect, one other aspect the Trump failed on

was consulting with allies.

Normally, try and build an international coalition

before the war starts,

not after it is kind of a second idea.

He obviously didn't do that.

I mean, we've got very close ties with Israel.

I think our military planning and preparation

has been seamless as far as I can tell.

But there are plenty of others,

not just the NATO allies,

but the Gulf states in the region

who are obviously affected by this,

our allies in the Pacific,

Japan, South Korea,

and others who get most of their oil from the Gulf.

And this may be the most important of all.

As far as we can tell,

he did no preparation of the opposition actually inside Iran.

No coordination, no effort to see what they would do

no effort to support them to provide resources,

money, arms, if that's what they wanted, telecommunications,

just no coordination at all.

And given that Trump's made it pretty clear,

he's not going to put boots on the ground in any major way,

the opposition was always going to have to have a major role

in overthrowing the regime.

And they don't seem prepared for it.

I hear that.

I guess the question then becomes,

why is this happening now?

I mean, my working theory is that Trump got a little trigger

happy after Venezuela and has ignored the different

context that has taken place here

or has simply underrepresented the differences

from country to country.

I guess my question is for you then,

like, why do you think this is happening

out considering he didn't take those steps of preparation?

Honestly, I don't have the slightest idea

why he changed his mind from the position

he took in the first term.

I and others tried to make the case to him

then that regime change should be our policy

and he didn't accept it.

There were plenty of the centers and we had this debate

and he wanted to go after the nuclear program

and make sure it never got started.

But he did that through economic pressure,

what he called a maximum pressure campaign.

It said publicly, in fact,

he was opposed to regime change in Iran.

So why does happen now?

I just, I'm at a loss for an explanation, is anybody?

Just I can't understand it frankly.

I would love for you to slow that down for me.

I mean, take me through those moments

in the first Trump administration.

When you were arguing for things like regime change in Iran,

where's the argument against it?

Some of the things we've seen now,

the possibility of retaliation,

the possibility that Iran would control the

straight of our moves.

Are we seeing the realities of what that debate was?

Well, those points were obviously mentioned.

They're sort of a first reaction by any regime

like the Itole is in Tehran

to try and use the straight of our moves as a pressure point

and to retaliate against its competitors

and adversaries in the region,

the Gulf Arab states as well as Israel.

So Trump was aware of the possibility

that this was a likely retaliatory action?

Absolutely.

I mean, really, you can't miss it.

It's if you know, if you look at geography,

it's obvious that both attacking the

Gulf Arab states and closing the straight of our moves

or some of the first things Iran would consider.

So considering that, I guess I keep going back to,

do we know why there wasn't a plan in place

or the administration seemed seemingly surprised

by some of these actions?

I mean, Trump said that nobody expected

Iran to retaliate against neighboring countries

when you're saying you briefed him

or you were in discussions about that exact possibility.

Yeah, I mean, it was something you had to consider

and there were certainly people who didn't want

to seek regime change who made those points.

I mean, I think the military side of the current campaign

shows good planning and good preparation

for some objective, whatever it is.

I might only surprise, really,

is that they didn't act earlier against the possibility,

the closures, the straight of our moves.

That was a possibility from day one.

And I would have thought there would have been,

in addition in the early days,

to trying to take out retaliatory capabilities

like Iran's ballistic missiles,

that one retaliatory capability that needed neutralizing

was their capacity to close the straight.

And yet, we were a couple of weeks in

before that really started.

I guess the other possibility here

is that the administration just doesn't share

your goal of full regime change.

That there's, they might be seeking some sort of off-ramp

or having a different sort of objective.

Do we have any sense of what that other objective could be?

Well, you know, in the course of events

since March 1st, they've given

half a dozen or more different alternative objectives.

And I'm not sure which is which on a given day.

But I do think it reflects the lack of strategic planning.

And fail you to think through what would happen

when you undertake a military operation this big.

I mean, I think one danger now that they're not thinking about

is what is the likely future,

if you leave a badly wounded regime in place in Tehran.

But one that's determined to recover.

Rebuild the nuclear program.

Re-re-finance and arm the terrorist groups.

And now see palpably what the power to close

the straight of Hormuz can do.

I mean, that in a sense could make a more dangerous regime

by rebuilding what's left of it and would have argued

if they weren't prepared to see regime change through.

They shouldn't have started this to begin with.

Yeah, that's the question I was going to ask you.

From a sense of someone who, again,

wanted to see some of this happen,

but necessarily does not seem that the Trump administration

maybe shares your conviction to see this all the way through.

There's a sense that they want to make this around four to six weeks,

not necessarily the timeline

that a full regime change could take.

Is it your position that if they aren't willing to kind of see that all the way through,

they shouldn't have started this in the first place?

Right. I mean, four to six weeks might have been a good estimate

of the Pentagon's initial campaign.

But the military action alone was never going to cause regime change,

or at least it would have been a lucky event had it had it done.

So this has to come from inside Iran.

It's the people, the opposition, the ethnic groups, the young people, the women

that have to have to figure out how to actually accomplish it.

And it's clear they were badly intimidated in January

when the regime killed 30 or 40,000 protesters, literally,

and machine gun them in the streets of Iran simply for protesting against the regime.

That needed to be taken into account.

That's why I contact with the opposition, disorganized though it is.

But contact with figures inside Iran who could say,

we know how to get things moving again at the right time.

We know how to help cause dissent at the top of the regime.

We know who to look for who might defect a regular army general, for example,

not revolutionary guard, but others who could, by increasing the tensions and disagreements

within the regime, cause it to fracture and thereby collapse.

More from John Bolton in a minute.

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We're back. It's today explains Saturday, and I'm with Ambassador John Bolton.

I'm going to ask about a couple recent developments Trump announced

that he either over the weekend that he was going to pause strikes on Iranian power plants

for five days, claiming that the U.S. and Iran that has very productive conversations.

Iran's foreign ministry immediately said that there has been no dialogue.

I guess the obvious question here is, who should we believe here as the Trump administration

making up dialogue that doesn't exist?

Well, it's a tough choice, credibility on either side of that discussion isn't very high.

I mean, I think the best we can tell from what's become publicly available

is that it was Trump that initiated some kind of contact through intermediaries, maybe Turkey,

maybe Pakistan, perhaps others. Iran doesn't seem to have picked up on it.

I mean, this is changing hour by hour, so it's hard to say.

But one thing I think is pretty clear is there's no, we're not close to an agreement here.

That's saying we can't reach an agreement if Trump wants to,

but I don't see that we're close at all at this point.

I know some people have speculated that this could be some form of market manipulation by Trump.

I mean, is the biggest factor about whether this war continues or ends,

or continues or ends, the stock market?

Well, that thought had occurred to me.

He's done this sort of thing at other times and it's another piece of evidence how he didn't

think things through. You know, when you go to war in the region that produces 20% of the world's

oil and other commodities like fertilizer, there's got to be an impact to it and that has to be

considered. That's one of the factors you have to take into account. And it doesn't seem to me

that they did that. They're now, as is often the case with Trump, scrambling after the fact

on a day-by-day basis to figure out how to mitigate the problem.

I've heard you say in other places that Trump is not a strategic thinker, a transactional thinker.

That seems obvious from the public perspective, but from your perspective of someone who was in

the White House, who was making kind of national security pitches or trying to strategize with

the president, what was the impact of that lack of strategic thinking?

Well, it makes it very hard to carry through to achieve a given objective. I mean, one thing that

Trump has done in the second term is all but eliminate the National Security Council decision

making process, which I'll be the first to say is not perfect, but it's a way of getting all the

different agency and department views together to try and get the facts assembled that would permit

a president to make a responsible, well-informed decision, give the president options,

giving the pros and cons of each. Obviously, it's ultimately the president's decision.

But if you go through that sort of process, you can think through contingencies and often offered

by people who don't want to go forward with a particular suggestion. They'll say, well,

here's this problem, here's that problem. That serves a useful purpose because if you can't answer

the problem that they're posing, that it means you may have a problem with the underlying

strategy, with substance, with timing, with all kinds of things. Now, again, I'm not saying the

NSC decision making is perfect or that it can't be abused as a source of delay, but if a president

sits around in what they used to call a bog set, a bunch of guys sitting around talking and makes

decisions on the fly, then you risk making decisions that have ramifications that nobody thought

through because there was never a process to do that. I'm hearing you that we should

someone see the lack of planning that has manifested in this war as a result of the change in

process or the collapse in process from the first Trump administration to the second.

Yeah, I mean, making Marco Rubio both Secretary of State and National Security Advisors

of another piece of evidence there with all due respect to Marco, these are two completely

separate jobs, but what has happened, I don't blame that on anybody in the government other

than Trump. He just didn't like, he thought he was being constrained by the NSC that somehow we were

trying to, I speak for all these other cabinet members, that we were trying to force him in one

direction or another. Obviously, each member of the NSC has his or her own views, but it's the

clash of views that can benefit a president, so he can see what the stronger case is, what aligns

more with his preferences, what the better plan is, all of these sorts of things, I think are

generally enhanced by discussion. If you don't have much discussion or it's not well informed

discussion, you're not getting the benefits. Yeah, fair. In 2024, and a new forward for your book,

you call Donald Trump unfit to be president, you warned that his second term would be worse than

the first, that it threatened NATO, Ukraine funding and would embolden China and Russia. It seemed

to go beyond ideology. I wondered when was your personal break with Trump that went from a view

thinking that, you know, maybe this isn't a strategic thinker, it's a, hey, the actual second term,

risk of greater, the risks are greater than the first. One lesson Trump derived from his first

term was that he didn't like a lot of people around him with ideas about which way to go. He wanted

people who basically would say, yes, sir, when he came up with an idea. And I think in his

search for decision makers, at least in the national security space, he got what he wanted.

And I'm not saying there's not discussion and disagreement between people, but I think

really wanted Trump wanted discussion about the best ways to do what he wanted to do. Not really

what he should do. He thought he knew that. He thought he learned that in the first term. And I

think that helps contribute to the chaotic nature of the decision-making we see now.

I did want to ask though, you know, considering how clear I'd you've been about Trump's unfitness.

You still also refuse to endorse Kamala Harris going into the 2024 presidential election,

considering the chaos that has ensued, considering the reality of some of the foreign policy

decisions that have come from the second term of Trump. Do you look back and wonder if that was a

mistake? Well, I don't think she would have been a good president either. I wrote in Mike Pence

because I thought he would. Now, obviously, there was no way he was going to win or no way

anybody other than Trump or Harris would have won. But I just didn't think that either one of them

met the standard I thought was appropriate. Do you look back and there could have been some

benefit of maintaining the floor of even the process of national security? Some of the things

you're talking about Trump broke down feel unique to him. Yeah, well, I think that's probably true.

I must say I didn't foresee that things would be so chaotic in the national security space. I

thought a lot would depend on who we nominated. And I think we know the answer to that now.

But I live in Maryland, so my vote basically doesn't make any difference anyway.

Has any of the last three weeks shaken any of your convictions? I mean, you have been someone who

has obviously advocated for regime change in Iran. But we have not seen the uprising from

Iranian people that maybe some folks wanted or expected. What if regime change simply is impossible

or is not kind of the desire of Iranians? Is there any moment that could prove that to you?

Well, I don't think people who know the situation inside Iran really thought that the people would

go out in the streets for weeks for a long time after the attacks began because they had been

in the streets basically in an economic protest in December and January. And that had ended with

people being seen. And that has an intimidating effect as you can imagine. And I think

it is the case that Trump and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs have all been saying to Iranians

stay indoors during this bombing campaign. What they should be doing is working on pulling the

regime apart at the top, working on senior regime officials who may be thinking, you know,

government is going down. I don't want to go down with the ship. And there's an appropriate time

to come out in the streets. And what you're looking for is a time when much, if not all of the

military, isn't about to say, we're not going to fire on our fellow Iranians. We're just not

going to do it. Which is why I think the attacks on the revolutionary guard and the besieging

militia inside Iran are so important. And I think just looking at targets over the past several

days, it's pretty clear that the structures of the IRGC and the besiege really are still heavily

targeted. And there are a lot of targets there. So there's more work to be done to weaken that

capacity of the regime to harm its own citizens. You warned France 24 that Trump could quote

be ready to stop the war at almost any moment. That sounds like him fighting an off ramp to

clearing success. Do we know what that would look like? Well, and for Trump, it almost doesn't matter.

He's capable of declaring victory contrary to reality. I think he's got a real problem now,

as does the rest of the world with this closure of the Strait of Formus. I think it is practically,

as a practical matter, impossible for him to declare victory. Why did so obvious that this

threat to our economy and the global economy is still in place? I suspect that's one reason

why these talks suddenly materialized and why he did make that announcement two hours before

the market opened on Monday morning. I had heard some questions that maybe the US was going to focus

its next offensive campaign on securing the Strait of Formus to try to seize it independently.

Is that a possibility? Well, I've heard that idea before that one thing you want to do is

take the position. It's a very narrow strait as everybody knows, 21 miles at its narrowest,

and it's surrounded by high ground on both sides. So if it were feasible, and I don't know the

answer to this, but if it were feasible to control the heights on much of the Iranian side

to eliminate people firing shoulder-held rockets and short-range missiles,

then that would make sense. About a week or so ago, we bombed positions on the heights with one

of our bunker buster capabilities because we thought there were anti-ship missiles stored there.

So that would be the reason to go in, not to seize a lot of territory. But if it's defensible,

just to make sure there's nobody close to the strait itself who could launch these missiles.

I wanted to ask about Joe Kent Trump's own national counterterrorism director who recently

resigned saying that Iran posed, quote, no imminent threat to our nation. I know that you have

argued that a strike did not require an imminent threat, and you have argued for that for a while,

but I wanted to ask you about his assessment. Is he wrong that Iran did not pose an imminent threat

to the country? Ask some administration officials have suggested?

Well, I don't think there was an imminent threat from Iran itself. I've always said when I asked

the question, how soon could Iran get nuclear weapons about 72 hours by sending a wire transfer

to the central bank in Pyongyang, North Korea, and having North Korea deliver one of their warheads?

There's no evidence that was in play now, and I do think that the 12-day war last summer

did substantial damage to the Iranian nuclear program. We did not obliterate the program,

as Trump said, but there was substantial damage, not enough to stop it, and there's clear evidence

that kick-axe mountain, and at other sites, the Iranians have tried to start new efforts or repair

the ones that were damaged. I did want to end on a kind of question about the public. At least 60 percent

American people opposed this war and the Trump administration, as you said, has really made no

effort to kind of curry public favor, explain to the public why this is happening, did not obviously

make that case to Congress. You've criticized that failure yourself, but one question I have is like,

is that not enough for this war to kind of be unjustified in itself? How much does public

opinion play a role when you're in those discussions about what to do militarily as you've been?

Well, I think any president takes public opinion into account, and that's one reason why

it's just fundamental sort of politics 101 that if you're going to undertake something,

it's difficult, risky, dangerous, you need to go to the people and convince them. I'm not saying

you ought to look at polls and decide, well, if it's 5149, I'm not going to do it, but when your

commander-in-chief, your hand is strengthened when you have more popular support, when you have

more vigorous support even from your own party on Capitol Hill. So I don't think this is

rocket science here, it's just good politics to work to make sure that you go into a conflict in

as strong a position domestically as you can, because until you achieve victory, you often go

through some very difficult times, which I think Trump is now experiencing, and they don't have

to be as hard for him as they're going to be because he didn't do his homework. I want to end on

this question, the administration would say that Iran is weakened militarily, fundamentally,

that their leadership has been eliminated in a unique way, that they have sped up a succession

crisis. Is that to you achieving the objective of regime change? No, not at all. Just this morning,

there's a report that the regime has selected a new Secretary of the Supreme National Security

Council held by Ali Larajani, who was killed a few days ago, and this guy is reported to be

an old-time revolutionary guard hardliner. So if he's the new National Security Council Secretary,

that's an indication that he's probably even more hard-lined than Larajani. To the extent the

regime can rebuild, and that's simply a matter of getting oil flows out through the

straight of Hormuz. I have no doubt that I'll be back to an assertive nuclear weapons

and ballistic missile program, and lining up their terrorist surrogates again.

It sounds like even though you've got what you wanted theoretically, it may not end up,

it doesn't necessarily leave us in a better place, even under your own framework.

Well, I think if you are going to go after the goal of regime change, you have to know what you're

getting into and be resolved to work your way through it in order to achieve it, and if you don't

think you can achieve it, then don't start it, try something else, and it's clear Trump hasn't

done many of those things, and that's why he's in the conundrum that he is in himself and now.

Ambassador Bolton, we really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you very much for having me.

That was former Ambassador John Bolton. This episode was produced by Jesse Ash.

It was edited by today explained executive producer Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Andrea Lopez

Cruzado, and mixed by Shannon Mahoney. Thanks as always to supervising engineer and David

Tadassure and Christina Vales, our head of video. Every Saturday, we'll be in your video and

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