Transcription
Welcome to World Affairs and Context, everybody. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome back Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who is a retired US Army officer with over two decades of service, including multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Lieutenant Colonel Davis gained national attention for speaking out about the realities on the ground during the Afghanistan war, offering a perspective that often stood in stark contrast to the official narrative coming from Washington. Daniel hosts a truly great show, by the way, which I watch religiously and highly, highly recommend. I will link it below. Daniel, welcome back to the program. It is so great to see you again.
>> Thank you for, thank you for saying that and thank you for having me back. I appreciate it. It's, it's my pleasure. So, I know everybody's watching what happens next in the US-Iran war. The ceasefire is on very shaky grounds, to say the least, with a new round of escalation brewing. President Trump just said on CNBC that JD Vance is heading to Pakistan, while Iranian negotiators are also heading there. Then, on the other hand, uh, Trump also said that he expects to achieve a great deal with Iran, and in the same interview, he said, but he expects to return to bombing. So, what is your assessment of this current situation in the US war against Iran?
>> Well, listen, I, I was just checking on the phone, just literally one minute before we came on the air here, and at right now, the US delegation team has not left Washington D.C. Uh, JD Vance is still in the White House. Uh, Jared Kushner and, uh, uh, Steve Bannon, uh, were actually flying not to, to Pakistan, but to Washington D.C., presumably for meetings with President Trump, and then it's unclear whether any of them were going to leave or not. Meanwhile, we also have the same thing on the Pakistan side. Uh, they have, last night, there was a whole slurry of social posts among many of the top leaders, uh, on X and and Telegram, very defiant, uh, and saying, "Nobody is going to force us into surrender." I think Pesken made some comments along those lines. Uh, Galibbach, uh, today, uh, is being very cryptic in what he said, not, not saying anything about whether they will or won't go to these negotiations. But other folks that I've talked to, uh, in Tehran, uh, say that there is no evidence that anyone's going to go to Pakistan because they say there's no foundation for it. There's no fundamentals because they said, unless the White House changes its, its negotiating entrance, just its positions, then there's no basis for negotiations. Nothing has changed since the previous, uh, round in, in Islamabad. And if anything, the two sides have hardened. And, and yeah, to your point there a minute ago, I, I don't know that Trump did himself any favors if he actually wants to have a negotiated settlement by making the statement that, "Yeah, I expect to start bombing when the ceasefire period ends on Wednesday." Um, that's, you know, less than, uh, 20 or 12, 24 hours or so for now. Less than that now, actually. So, it's unclear what's going to happen. What we do know is that the US has definitely been spending these last two weeks, uh, restocking, uh, re-reloading, resting up, uh, bringing additional air assets, bringing additional naval assets into the region. We know that Iran has also been very busy, uh, moving things around from one place to another, uncovering from some of their mountain, uh, hideouts and and missile cities that they've had. Some of the, sometimes we've hit the United States has some of the, uh, exit doors where some of the mobile launchers come out, rubble, a lot of that, they have cleared that off, they have repaired that. So now, then their capabilities are higher. Everybody seems like they've been getting ready for the renewal of this. And then now, then we see in just the last, uh, 36 or 48 hours, you've seen a hardening of the diplomatic side of the two sides, and nobody's talking anything about compromise. So, it's hard for me to see how anything comes except for the resumption of this war. Now, how that comes and who's going to start it, that's kind of up in the air, but there doesn't seem to be any movement towards a resolution.
>> It's, it's my understanding that, uh, we're not even sure what US objectives are in those negotiations. Are we pushing for no nuclear enrichment again, or are we actually negotiating with Iran, presumably negotiating with Iran from a rational perspective finally? So, I, I, if, if negotiations do take place, would you expect them to be actual, real negotiations, or is this just sort of buying time until everyone is locked and loaded and and ready to go for the next round of escalation?
>> My guess is that President Trump still has some outside hope that threats will cause the Iranian side to go weak in the knees and to submit. Uh, that's what I think. And if you're, you're talking about what the terms are, uh, a pretty good idea we have is from Jack Keane, uh, who was on Fox News, who was saying that, "Listen, it's, it's zero enrichment. It's no support to the proxies, and, uh, and and no control of the Strait of Hormuz." And those are the primary things. And, and then also later on, they'll talk about no long-range weapons, which basically is everything that they've been saying from the beginning. And there's no way that Iran is going to agree to any of those terms. Those are almost the, the, the mirror opposite claims that the Iranian side says that they said, "Reprocessing is our sovereign right. It's sovereignty. It's like, it's like Iranian soil. There's no way we're going to give up the reprocessed, reprocessed materials we have. We won't go to zero enrichment. Nobody's going to tell us we can't have regional allies/proxies, and the Strait of Hormuz will never leave our control again." That's, that's their entrance positions, and they're, they're literally just incompatible. You, you can't even bring them together. So, I don't know that any side has any hope for doing anything except for returning to, to the conflict, which is, it's not just horrible for the global economy. It could, it's potentially catastrophic because there's already a whole host of, uh, problems that have been baked in, which will take already months to unload, unwind, and to, to fully manifest. And every day that this goes on, especially if it gets into the weeks or into the months, um, you're talking the likelihood, the likelihood of a full-blown global depression along the lines of 1929. Uh, and that is just catastrophic because you're talking about millions of people could suddenly find themselves in starvation. Uh, you know, millions more could be out of work. That causes social unrest in countries all over the globe. And we're not immune to that here. But I don't think any of our leaders are, are thinking that far ahead, which is a big problem by itself.
>> Absolutely. Um, one of the reasons why I've been looking forward to this conversation with you because I really wanted to get your military expertise on an escalation that happened recently. As of April the 21st, the US seized two Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz. And these actions clearly violate several pillars of international law, including freedom of navigation, prohibition on the use of force, and sovereign immunity. So, to me, seizing, and I don't claim to be a military expert, of course, but to me as an observer, seizing Iranian ships during a ceasefire just serves to flex a military muscle and effectively to provoke Iran. Whether there are any true military objectives that the United States achieved by seizing Iranian ships during a ceasefire.
>> Well, now that we have to put that in context, and that comes after Iran had, uh, uh, allegedly fired on two ships themselves right before that. So, I think it was kind of a tit-for-tat situation. Both sides wanting to flex their muscles to say, "We're not afraid of you." And, and look, we just got to just come to the point to where we just acknowledge, uh, very grievously, that the rule of law, that the international law, international rules, those things are out the window. They're, they no longer hold any sway. Nobody's even pretended to to abide by them. No one. Not the United States, not Iran, nobody. And right now, it's, what can we do to succeed? Iran was attacked, and they will do whatever it takes. And, and they've shown that they, they have, I guess, escalation control. So, they, they do not immed, they fired, they warned ahead of time that if we attack them, that they would fire at a lot of these targets. They did that, but then they said, "There's also other things we can escalate to, which we haven't so far, unless you hit us again, then we'll go to the next level." And then I think that with the, you know, the idea that we, we negotiated a ceasefire, which was supposed to include a complete opening of the Strait of Hormuz. The almost simultaneously, President Trump and Foreign Minister Zarif, uh, both announced on social media that the strait was going to be opened. Uh, Zarif said, as long, according to the terms that we have agreed to, then it's open. And then President Trump and his said that it's open for them, but ours is going to stay in place, which is completely contradictory to what was agreed to. And so, naturally, the Iranian side says, "Well, now then our side's not going to be open either." And so, nobody's doing anything except for whatever they calculate that they can use military power or coercion to get what they want. And of course, that is like the worst possible thing you can do because nobody, whether it's an official of a government, a diplomat, or a regular human being, responds well to being trying to be, you know, a finger poked in your chest and telling you what you're going to do. Um, and, and no cooperation at all. No rule of law, no common decency, no nothing. None of that stuff seems to exist right now. So, that, that even lowers, uh, the chances that we have some kind of a mutually beneficial, uh, acceptable end to this. Um, I, I don't know that it was always going to be really hard, but I, I just don't see any, any sus, any fundamentals that would lead anyone to think that this is about to be over or that there's something on the horizon. This great deal that President Trump mentioned to this morning, there's only going to be a great deal if there's a great deal for both sides. If both sides come into this and say, "I'm going to get something that I want, and I'm going to give something that you need," that is a requirement to have a mutually acceptable deal. And that's what you should shoot for. Something that both the Iranians and the Americans say, "All right, I can live with this." And so that they have motivation to abide by their terms. If you get a situation to where one side just says, "You will do this, and that's all there is to it," then the other side is going to say, "Uh, no, I'm not going to do it. Therefore, you're not going to get what you want." Or if I do it, it's going to be under compulsion, and I will cheat the minute that I get a chance. That's something that can't be sustained. And until we change our approach, um, I, I just don't see any prospect that this is going to have a, a long-lasting resolution, no matter what.
>> Earlier in our conversation, you mentioned that it does appear that we are about to escalate, that this is not about meaningful diplomacy that may take place or may not take place in Pakistan. Earlier this morning, I noticed that, uh, flight radars are showing a significant number of US airfare activity heading into the Middle East, and I believe you mentioned that as well. So, what are the signs to watch as a military expert? What signs are you watching that would indicate to you that the US is preparing for strikes on Iran?
>> Well, that, that, that air traffic you mentioned has been going on almost non-stop since the ceasefire began. So, that's just the last 24 hours worth of information you're talking about there. Um, and I can just tell you from, from certain sources I have that are, uh, connected to the folks deployed in the front lines of this, they're ready now. Everybody's ready. Iran is ready. Everything is in place. It's just waiting for a political decision by one side or the other to spark something and trigger it back on. So, from a military perspective, no more preparations necessary. There's nothing else you're going to see because we've already seen it all. Uh, the Iran has not hidden from the fact that they're preparing. Trump bragged again this morning about how he's been preparing and has been for days. So, everybody knows that the militaries on both sides have have gotten reloaded and re-cocked, and they're just sitting there waiting to find out what their political leaders are going to decide. That's where we are.
>> So, the US Congress, uh, voted twice against limiting, uh, the powers, um, against the Iran war, effectively. Who do you think is, is calling the shots in, in the Trump administration right now? Because we know that President Trump's approval rating is, is tanking. It's at an all-time low. The Americans don't want this war. They didn't want this war, and Iran wasn't truly a threat. So, who is truly calling the shots right now, since it, it takes a significant amount of even financial efforts to prepare for a new round of escalation? And I'm just wondering who is truly driving these decisions, do you think?
>> Well, yeah, let's, let's take the first part of what you said there, too, because that's just a, a stick in my craw that that really gets me going. And to talk about the abdication of responsibility by the United States Congress. Our country was predicated and the constitution built expressly. Article one and Article two expressly said there will be a division of powers that the sovereign will not be having the power to unilaterally take this country into war, like was the case in many of the other, uh, world countries of the world in the 18th century. We didn't want that. So, we specifically built in roadblocks between the two and said, "Only the legislature can take the country to war," because it's hard to do. They wanted to make it hard to do so that unless you had a, a significant majority of the people of the country that felt it was necessary, then their elected representatives would vote that way. And then, and only then did the commander-in-chief have the authority to use the militia or the military, as it was known back at the time. And the fact that the Congress has actually voted itself out of power is just reprehensible because not only have they not taken their job to either declare or not declare, they didn't even debate the situation. They refused even to do that. And now, then the only votes they did hold was to hold themselves powerless to not even put any constraints, any kind of guardrails, nothing on the chief executive and the commander-in-chief. And, and that is a literal abdication of their responsibility. So, they have now undone everything that our founding fathers did when they crafted this country, and they have now placed the, the power unambiguously in the hands of a single individual who literally can do anything he wants. Whether it's in Venezuela, whether it's in, in, in Iran, whether it's in, uh, possibly Greenland, whether Cuba here coming up, he, he literally, there's no guardrails at all. And so, that by itself is an incredibly dangerous situation here. And then you get to, to the point to where who is in charge? Well, because of that, it's one guy. It's Donald Trump. That's it. There's nobody else. Now, you can say he's influenced by Benjamin Netanyahu or the Israeli lobby, and there's certainly some truth to that. But the buck stops with him. He has full responsibility because he has full authority. Nobody else can do it except for him. Not the Secretary of Defense, not the, uh, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the leaders of the Senate of the House, only Donald Trump. So, that's where this lies. And we're left to guess is what's really motivating him. And I don't think you can really talk about this too much without also acknowledging that there are some growing genuine signs of cognitive decline that makes it alarming that, uh, his decision-making process is not even where it was in his first term. Uh, and that's the guy who's making the calls of whether we go to war or whether we don't, or whether we have negotiations or not. And that's another problem all by itself.
>> Absolutely, especially given that he has the nuclear button. That, that sort of puts everything in a completely new light. Um, you obviously have immense military expertise. You're a four-time combat, uh, veteran, and, um, I, I just want to ask you, so, based on your assessment and based on your previous experience in the US military, can the United States defeat Iran in a conventional warfare? And we're, of course, not taking the nuclear option into consideration. But can the United States defeat Iran militarily?
>> No. Absolutely not. I'll just categorically state the, the problem, the, the military problem set. Take morality out of it. Even take strategy out of it. Just say, "All right, do we have the military capability to militarily defeat Iran? Like Germany, World War II, you know, something where you marched on Berlin and you took the country, they signed to surrender, or, or going to Japan, for example." Definitely not, because the geography of Iran is such that it's, it's, I mean, it's as big as much of Western Europe, four times bigger than Iran. Iraq, and the terrain is profoundly worse from an offensive position and it gives every advantage in the world. I mean, the whole western half of the country is a series of mountain ranges that it would be near suicidal for any army. I don't care if you had a million men. Uh, the chances of actually going through all those mountains, uh, would just be nearly impossible. So, you can't do it on the ground. You can't even come in from the other direction either, if somehow you said we still had Afghanistan, because even though there is some flat land that you could go up there, it's all very canalized, and so it would make it very easy for the defensive side to channel you into that, and then it's a basically a big kill zone. So, you couldn't do it there either. That then leaves bombing. So, can you bomb a country of 93 million people with that kind of terrain when they have underground systems? Because they foresaw this, and they knew that they had to put, uh, missile cities underground that they couldn't be bombed from the air, and that you can't attack out, even with a nuclear weapon. Some of these facilities are so strong and so deeply buried, even a nuclear weapon wouldn't take them out. So, they will always have a counter-strike capability. Um, so, if you can't bomb them into submission, and you can't go in on the ground, then by definition, you can't win. The only thing that you could do is to put enough pain on them that says, "Okay, then they'll make a political decision to surrender," which is what President Trump has been hoping for. But if you know anything about the Iranian culture and about their history and about their willingness to suffer and their ability to suffer, then you would see that it would be foolhardy to the highest order to ever launch a war in the hopes that you put enough pain on them that they would willingly surrender. There's no reason to think that that was going to be the case. The only other option, the possibility that may have been in their minds is they said, "Oh, well, look at all these protests that are going on, much of many of which we facilitated." But there was definitely an undercurrent because I've talked to some of the, uh, expats who live here in Washington D.C., and they've told me there's a lot of people that really did hate the regime and had been periodically protesting over the years, but it was never enough to rise to the level to where it put the, the country at any actual, the government at any actual risk. And so, maybe somebody thought, "Well, maybe this time it will, and we'll kill enough, and it'll be like, like in, uh, uh, Libya, where we'll, there's enough protests going on. We'll help them. We'll come and bomb some stuff, and then their security forces can no longer maintain control and they'll come up." That was a very different situation in a much smaller country, uh, and a very different population and culture. So, if anyone was thinking that, they shouldn't have, and there was reason to believe they wouldn't. But when we're getting circling back to, is there a military victory? There is not.
>> It, it does appear that we're on the path to more escalation. What are the most likely next military moves from both Washington and Tehran?
>> You know, the, we're just going by what's being said. President Trump has said, and many others have echoed, "We'll go in and hit all their energy structures. We'll hit their bridges. We'll hit their facilities. Anything that they use for economic gain and any way that they can use to facilitate and support their military move forces around, we'll go and we'll take all that out." Now, if, if we just looked at it in isolation, that would hurt Iran. It would hurt them bad. There's no doubt about that. But just even in isolation, they have shown through eight years of war with Iraq that we also supported. Even when the Iraqis used chemical weapons and had mass destruction on a lot of people, it killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, they never buckled under that. So, I don't think that anyone should think even that would work if it was an isolation. But it's not an isolation. And the Iranian side has said, "If you hit those targets, here's my target list, and I'm going to go through the entire GCC and Israel, and we're going to hit these targets," which they're outlined. And so far, when they've said they would hit something, most of the times they do exactly that. And they definitely have the missile capacity to strike and hit the targets they're saying. And these are oil facilities, energy facilities, electric facilities, ships in the Gulf that are stranded, and of course, water treatment facilities, the desalination plants. Iran has said, "If you hit this stuff, you, you make it an existential attack for us, so we're going to make it an existential hit for you as well." And so, that's, that's why it's not in isolation. So, on the surface, it still is not going to cause them to capitulate, but the damage that it's going to cause to the rest of the entire region as a result of our attack here is just cataclysmic. I mean, it could, it could, I mean, it could literally cause, uh, mass migration out of the GCC countries because if those water desalination plants are hit and it takes them offline for any amount of time, they won't have enough water to even survive to drink, to do anything. So, they will have to have massive exits. I don't know how they would pull that off. That's how serious it is. And it appears that Iran is willing to play that card if President Trump plays his offensive card.
>> How much leverage do you think the GCC countries now have to say, "Do not restart hostilities. We do not want to have to be all refugees," because obviously, as you said, everything is on the table if, uh, the war restarts.
>> Well, not, I mean, they have agency. They have the ability now, but, and, and I just earlier today had had lunch with the, a diplomat of a very friendly country to the United States here in D.C. And I, I, it's clear from their conversation that the mentality is, is where it's been for the last like seven or eight decades, you know, since the end of World War II, where it's just been almost just reflexive subservience to the United States. And even now, when you see all this compounding and growing cost to, to doing, letting the United States do what it wants to do is having potential existential threat even on them. They, they haven't gotten to the point, it doesn't appear to where, before something happens, that someone is going to have the stick to stand up and say, "President Trump, no more." It looked like UAE was thinking about it the other day when they were saying, "Maybe we, uh, we can handle our own security from here, so y'all don't need to worry about coming back," or, you know, "It might be a better idea if we start doing business in, in yuan or, or something besides the dollar." That's just kind of musing out loud, but nobody stood up to him. I mean, you can see President Trump is potentially within hours away from saying, "Yep, I'm going to restart this stuff." And, and, you know, it could have those reactions. And at least publicly, we've not seen anyone stand up from any GCC country and tell him no. Now, if this happens, then I think that you're going to, you're going to move across that psychological threshold, and people will start doing that. Uh, because it's, it's clear that, and you said it at the start of the show, this war should never have started. There was never, never an existential threat to the United States. There was never an imminent threat to anything in the United States. It was completely manufactured, as bad or worse than the 2003 Iraq war and the fake weapons of mass destruction. So, they're, they're aware of it. People in the region are aware that it was fraudulent. And if now you go back in again saying, "We have to go back in now," they know you don't have to, and you could, there is a deal on the table that you could have. You just have to basically give Iran something in order to get something, and you're not willing to give anything. But they can see that there is something that you could do, and if you choose not to do it again and start the war back again, that causes them, and I think that there will be a rupture after that, but the cost at that point could be so high. It's just, uh, unfortunate that it takes that before anyone's going to actually stand up and, you know, stand up for their own country.
>> I know many American military families are probably wondering right now if the ground invasion is still on the table if the war restarts. Do you believe it is? Do you think it's one of the options that the Trump administration is considering?
>> Um, I don't think so anymore. I think that what happened with this, uh, this chaotic rescue of the downed, I think it was F-16 pilot when they had the front and back pilots, and they, they had to go and rescue them, and the, the second pilot cost so much with, uh, four MC-130J aircraft, the big, four, four-engine props, you know, the four helicopters, you know, and that wreckage all over the floor. Uh, I think that's, I'm told by somebody who's has some access to the White House. They said that that spooked him, and that he knew that they were this close to having a lot of prisoners of war, which would have just been a public relations nightmare for the United States. And, and apparently, enough people on the inside are telling any, any target on the ground, whether it's Car Island, Kashim, or, or an absurd idea to try to retake some of the nuclear material somewhere in the, those would all incur enormous casualties, uh, and have very low chance of success. So, I think maybe somebody finally got through to President Trump that, uh, this is not a risk worth taking. So, I, right now, I think that we're probably, uh, going to bypass that, unless something crazy happens.
>> What do you think that, what do you think would a realistic off-ramp even look like? At this stage, it seems that nobody's really talking about any, any de-escalation options. The negotiations may or may not happen at this point in time, and the United States delegation would go there anyway with probably irrational, uh, set of expectations. So, what would that realistic off-ramp even, even be at this stage?
>> Well, because we already started this war and now have opened the door for Iran to take physical control of the Strait, which in their first 47 years they had never done and would never, never have done had we not forced them into a position where that's nearly the only card they had to play. But because we did, now you can't get their hand off of it. There's no military path that's going to force them to withdraw their hand from that. So, now, then that's the new reality, and we're going to have to acknowledge that. And so, I think that for the foreseeable future, even if we became sane for a while diplomatically, that Iran is going to say, "Hey, we can talk about enrichment. We can talk about some of this reprocessed material." And apparently, they are willing to say, "Hey, we might be willing to, uh, take this down from 60 and dilute it down to maybe 20, maybe even less than that over some period of time. And, and we may go take enrichment from its current position of 60% maybe down to 3.67%. We may go all the way back to the JCPOA levels in the past. There's a room for that, but I don't think there's any room for them saying, "You can take our reprocessed material, and we're going to just go back to the status quo ante, and the Strait will just be open, and no one's going to do anything about it." I think that they're going to say, "We're going to set up a toll booth, uh, as reparations." Because that's one of the things that they're saying is a non-negotiable right now is they say, "The, the damage caused to us because of the war you chose is now just so great that there's going to have to be reparations." And whether that's in the means of cash that you give us, uh, unfreezing our frozen assets, or we're going to set up a toll booth and we'll collect, you know, whatever $12 million per ship coming through there for some period of time until we feel like we've earned the rest of it. I don't know, but it seems to me that that's, that's one thing that's possible. Uh, but I, you know, will the United States ever admit to that? I, I just, he, President Trump categorically just said, "Nope, nope, nope, nope." When asked that two days ago, won't do it. Absolutely zero chance. So, it doesn't appear that there's any, you know, chance for that. At least not right now. But Trump is the most famous person on the planet. He's changed his mind. So, maybe he'll come to that conclusion later. But if you were asking, are there any actual potential diplomatic off-ramps? And that is one that the Iranians would agree to some stuff more than they want to, I think, but that one, the, the reprocessing, the, the remainder of that reprocessed material in some form, and control the Strait, I don't think there's, they're going to negotiate or bend on those ones.
>> Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, it's always great to get your thoughts and expertise. Thank you so much for joining, and I look forward to having you on again.
>> Thank you very much. Look forward to it. See you next time.