Transcription
We just don't know what Trump is thinking and who he's talking to and what they're saying to him. You know, it's just very hard to figure out what's going on from statements made by people who are supposed to be close to him.
The second point I'd make to you is that Netanyahu may have been very optimistic before the meeting, but it's clear that he was not feeling very optimistic when the meeting ended, right? And uh that's why there was no joint press conference and that's what explains the truth social post that Trump put out.
Now you say what's going on here? Look, this is very simple. There is no military solution here. It's just that simple. If you look at the Israeli demands and you think about using military force to achieve those demands, there's no way he can do it. And I imagine that Trump understands that, that he can't use force to get what he wants. He also has to surely understand that if he does use force in pursuit of that very ambitious agenda that Netanyahu has presented to him, that he's in a forever war. And Trump's Trump's standing in the polls is plummeting. There are a number of polls now out that show that uh uh a majority of people uh think that uh or I don't know if it's a majority or plurality, but more people uh than not think that Biden did a better job than Trump is doing. uh he his his ratings are going down steadily and the last thing he needs at this point in time uh especially with the midterm elections coming up in November is to get into a forever war and there's no plausible story anybody can tell as to how you avoid a forever war if you attack Iran. Uh so I think what's happening here is Trump is beginning to back off. He understands there's no war-winning strategy available to him.
Now, there there was uh another true social this morning. I think Gary had it up there a second ago. Uh where I I don't know if he's just hedging or or what, but Trump announc retweeted or re retrod uh this Wall Street Journal article that came out I think it was last night. Pentagon prepares second aircraft carrier to deploy to the Middle East. So according to this article, they have received prepare to deploy orders uh to join that carrier strike force. Now when you talk about the Abraham Lincoln that's already there and all the other ground uh uh well all the other air power that's on bases in the area along with the missile strikes and lots of other uh air defense that's been sent to allegedly 20 different US bases in the region. I mean that's a lot of firepower. you're now going to move a little bit more into there. Does this imply that Trump is still thinking about using it? Do you think that we're past the danger point or is he still thinking about it?
There's just no way you can answer that question, Danny. Uh I mean, who knows what's going on in Trump's mind and what he'll ultimately do. Uh my sense is, as I said to you before, that he understands uh that military force is not the way to go here. uh and I would imagine that he's threatening to move another carrier into the region uh in large part to get coercive leverage over the uh o over the Iranians in these negotiations. Uh it's quite clear if you listen to the Turkish foreign minister speak that uh that the negotiations or at least the initial round of negotiations between the Iranians and the Americans was quite promising. uh who knows how it will end. It will end. But the fact that they're having these negotiations and he told Netanyahu that he insisted that the negotiations continue and as I said when you realize there's really no military option here. Uh it is hard for me to see how Trump would be foolish enough to attack, but then again with him you can just never tell. uh you know toward that end uh we actually showed on the show yesterday a sound bite from the Iranian foreign minister Minister Iraqi uh who himself was saying yes I think that there is some room for negotiations on the nuclear capacity law especially on the reprocessing not to zero but he said to five and 20% maybe something just for research etc but he seemed to really be trying to help Trump out by saying you know I think that with President Trump we can come up with a better deal than Obama got, something better than the JCPOA, which of course Trump needs to have a face- saving outcome. And it seems like the Iranians really are trying to help him reach a negotiated settlement. How do you see that?
I agree with you completely. Uh, look, the deal here, the only deal here that works, not a great deal, but it's the best of a bad lot, is the JCPOA uh uh plus some sort of raw prommont over time with the Iranians. That's the best deal that you can work out. But as you point out, the JCPOA uh uh in its past form will not do much good for Trump because he dissed the JCPOA and he pulled us out of the JCPOA. So, he has to be able to make the case that the deal he gets is an improvement on the JCPOA. That'll be tough to do because all of the pro-Israel forces uh will argue that Trump is caving in and he's duplicating what Obama did. But he'll go to great lengths Obama and the Iranians will help him if they can uh to fashion a new version of the JCPOA that doesn't look exactly like the JCPOA. And then I think if that does happen and you could uh improve relations between Iran and the United States, uh that would go a long way toward putting this problem to bed.
Well, you know that one of the reasons why it's going to be hard to get into that bed uh is because of Trump himself. because when he got out of the JCPOA in 2018, he specifically said he was going to negotiate a better deal and said he would include the long-range missile issue. This is 2018 and right before this round of negotiations where the US met in the Middle East with Iranian uh negotiators, Marco Rubio specifically said this has to include four things. It has to include the nuclear uh enrichment issue, the proxy issue, the long range missile issue, and that they can't kill their own protesters, etc. And he said, "If if you don't talk about those four things, then what's the point of talking? And if now then they come out and not only is he not going to add the piece in that he mentioned in 2018, but neither the one Marco Rubio just a couple of weeks ago, how is he going to find a good put lipstick on a pig like that one if he only gets an enrichment issue?"
Well, I mean, the Israelis clearly want three things from these negotiations, and they know they won't get them, which is why they're not interested in negotiations. But the three things um and this is repeating what you said in good part are number one for Iran to stop supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. Number two uh to put an end to long range ballistic missiles or ballistic missiles that can hit Israel, right? And number three to end the nuclear enrichment capability. Trump is now negotiating on simply one issue which is the nuclear enrichment issue. And just to put that aside for a second, you want to understand it from the Israeli perspective, the ballistic missile threat after the 12-day war last June has become from their perspective an existential threat. They understand full well that Iran now has the ability to do a huge amount of damage to Israel with its ballistic missiles. And that if anything, what's going to happen over time is that Iran, for all the obvious reasons, is going to significantly increase the size and quality of that ballistic missile force, which is going to leave Israel increasingly vulnerable. And then to go to the subject of Hamas and Hezbollah. The fact is that Israel has not defeated Hamas and it has not defeated Hezbollah. It badly wounded both of them. But as almost always happens in these cases, both Hamas and Hezbollah are reconstituting their forces. So those two threats remain in place. Iran continues to support them. Iran continues to build ballistic missiles. And the Trump administration or President Trump himself has taken those two issues off the table and he has reduced the negotiations or he has agreed uh to reduce the negotiations to talking about nuclear enrichment. And when you get to nuclear enrichment, what the Israelis want is zero nuclear enrichment. And what Trump is talking about doing is fashioning some sort of agreement that leaves Iran with a nuclear enrichment capability. Hopefully a greatly reduced nuclear enrichment capability. But nevertheless, they will survive. Their nuclear enrichment capability will survive. And from an Israeli perspective, this is terrible news. So, you can understand why the Israelis are deeply committed to flushing negotiations down the toilet bowl and getting the United States to attack Iran. But Trump again understands uh I think that uh attacking Iran is not going to solve these three problems.
Well, President Trump may may be coming to understand that. There's certainly many in the United States that do understand that. you being one of the foremost. But the question is, will Israel just uh clench its teeth and just accept whatever Trump's going to do? Or will they potentially try and spawn something that's going to that's going to force Trump's head? That that is not just an a theoretical possibility. last night, even though there wasn't a comment by um Benjamin Netanyahu, there was an interview by former Israeli ambassador uh Herzog uh who implied in his his comment here that maybe that is on the Israeli radar.
From Israeli standpoint, any deal with Iran should be a strong one because the Israel believes that the US has strong cards. Iran is as weak as we can remember and Israel would like to see any deal effectively block Iran's pathway to a nuclear bomb. That means shipping out all the 60% enriched uranium non-enrichment on Iranian soil and intrusive inspection. But uh on top of that, Israel also would like to see the inclusion of the Iranian missile program in any deal, mainly limitations on the number and on the range of Iranian missiles who could threaten Israel and Europe. And to the extent that that is not included in a deal, and President Trump by the way made reference to this when he talked about the deal, but if it is not included, at a minimum, Israel would like to maintain its freedom of action against that emerging threat.
So you mentioned it, he talked about the the long range missile. We want the freedom of action. Does Israel, as far as you can ascertain, have the military capacity on its own to attack and disre defeat the Iranian longrange missile capability?
No. That's why they want us to do it. And we don't have that capability either. I mean, he talks about how weak Iran is, and this is the conventional wisdom in the mainstream that as a result of the 12-day war, um, Iran has been greatly weakened. It's vulnerable. uh and now we have a window of opportunity and we should take care take advantage of this window and eliminate all these threats that emanate from Iran. This is nonsense. I mean first of all the Israelis cannot knock out their ballistic missile force. Uh and furthermore if Israel is to attack Iran, Iran is going to pound Israel with ballistic missiles. Uh we know what happened in the 12-day war and what's going to happen this time is going to be worse because the Iranians have a huge arsenal of ballistic missiles and they learned how to use them in the 12-day war. And furthermore, the Israelis don't have the defensive missiles to shoot down all those incoming uh ballistic missiles from Iran. So the truth is that Israel has no military option here. Or to put it slightly differently, Israel has no viable military option. Uh, and as I said before, if you look carefully at this, both the United States and Israel have no meaningful military operation. We can try to slam Iran, we meaning the United States and Israel, but the end result is you're going to end up in a forever war. Uh, you're not going to solve this problem over the long term with military force. The only hope is to do it diplomatically.
Now, uh, do you think though, better question, to what degree do you think that Netanyahu may calculate that, yeah, I can't do it alone, but this is the best opportunity we're ever going to have, and if we don't do it now, we're going to lose this. So, I'm going to strike and then, you know, look over at the United States and say, "Oh, no. They're they're attacking us. I need your help to try and draw us in." Anyway, do you think that there's a chance of that?
Well, what is this is when you say this is the best opportunity, what does that mean? There's no opportunity.
Well, there's no there's no viable military path, which you're articulating here. But in the minds of many, and you're going to see an example of this in a second, they think that diplomatically and politically, this is the one chance where they have the people are making the willing choice to do it. Whereas before they wouldn't and afterwards they calculate they wouldn't. But that requires a a viable military operation that you're talking about it doesn't happen. But I don't know that that's going to be stopping some people and that's why I worry that they may take this strike anyway.
Well, it it may not stop these people uh you know the Israelis or even President Trump from attacking. But I want them to tell me what the story is as to how we have a happy ending uh given the Israeli goals. uh h how do we use military force? We meaning the United States and Israel or Israel alone uh to achieve uh that menu of objectives. How do we do it? And I've not heard anybody tell a plausible story about how you can do it. Uh and uh as I said to you, I think that and I underlined the word think. I think this is what President Trump now understands. And I think it's reflected in the truth social post that he put out yesterday. And it's also reflected in the fact that there was no press conference uh after the three-hour meeting in the White House. Uh so I mean that's my bottom line on this.
Yeah. And and certainly we'll see how that goes on. But I I think it's pretty clear that Netanyahu is definitely not going to give up on his effort. But there's also another uh aspect from the United States that I I want to talk about next because uh in in recent in the recent last say 101 12 days especially you've had uh Mike Pompeo, Lindsey Graham, Victoria Coats, uh Rebecca Grant and Jack Keane have just almost been falling all over themselves on social media and on classic media coming out and saying that there can't be any negoti Kudlo was another one. Add to that from Fox News. They have been saying no negotiations. Let's don't have any because it would be a loss to succeed in that because it'll only buy time for the regime. And so they're all together saying yes, we need to continue going on there. Now political that that's one thing, but one of them being Jack Keane. I'm going to I'm going to show you some comments from that he made just last night also after this meeting. And he's going to say some things here which I think are are symptomatic of this whole chorus of people and whoever's behind them that's that's they're kind of all singing from the same sheet of music here. And I wonder if you can address three separate things that he talks about because I think it's really important to try and identify what their thinking is and why they don't connect it with any kind of reality that recognizes that we could harm ourselves greatly if President Trump eventually listens to them. The first one here we're gonna see a president sorry Jack Keane says that by the way when you look at Netanyahu and uh and President Trump it's the same as looking at Churchill and FDR. It reminds me of the Churchill Roosevelt interaction. When Churchill was in the war, Roosevelt was not. He was providing physical, material support to him to be sure, but also moral support and also intellectual support and how to cope with it. These two men truly have a relationship, a partnerships that's joined by common interest, security of Israel to be sure, but also stability and peace in the Middle East and the fact that there is an adversary, an enemy there, a diabolical enemy that wants the destruction of Israel and have had nuclear weapons would likely use them.
Okay. Three things I want to talk about there. First of all, really Churchill and FDR for Trump and Netanyahu. What do you say?
No, I mean this is crazy. This is, you know, just part of the propaganda campaign and Jack Keane is one of the principal players in that propaganda campaign. Anytime there's a possibility of the United States fighting a war uh anywhere uh but especially when it involves Israel, you can rest assured that Lindsey Graham, Jack Keane, and others will be trotted out to make the case uh for going to war. These guys have never seen a war they didn't want to fight. Uh and
or they didn't want somebody else to fight. They aren't going to fight.
Yeah. Exactly. Uh so that that's that's the one thing. So it's like let's use this imagery that that has this high and lofty intellectual capacity as he oddly enough said there. But the second one is I think that again back to your propaganda kind of thing and trying to manipulate words. It's a diabolical enemy. not just a bad guy, but a diabolical enemy. It's kind of that whole good versus evil. It's black and white, and you can't negotiate with evil, so you have to go and kill it. What do you think of that aspect?
Well, you know, I I think again this is hyperbole hyperbole that goes along with the propaganda campaign, but if you actually look at what's going on in the Middle East, uh leave the United States aside, just what uh Iran and Israel's neighbors are thinking. It's quite clear that almost all of Israel's neighbors uh except for the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, view Israel as the principal threat in the region and not Iran. The Saudis and virtually all the other countries in the Middle East, except for the UAE, are begging the United States not to attack Iran. Iran was supposed to be their mortal enemy. Uh the Saudis are supposed to live in fear of Iran. But actually what's happened is they don't want the United States or Israel to attack Iran. And the Saudis are actually talking to the Iranians and trying to reassure them that the Saudis are on their side. Furthermore, relations between the Saudis and Israel and virtually all the countries in the Middle East um have soured somewhat. They fear Israel. They think that the United States and Israel are a dangerous tag team. Uh so you have this very interesting situation where if you think about it, Israel's overall situation has deteriorated significantly. Its relations with other countries in the region except the UAE uh have gone south. I don't want to overstate the case, but they have gone south. And furthermore, the Israelis, you know, who got the United States uh to go to war with them against Iran last June, uh are now in a position where they're really feeling the heat, where they don't think that they solved any meaningful problems last June. And in fact, now realize they have a bigger problem than they realized back then, which is the missile threat. can't get the United States uh to use military force to solve the problem. So, the situation is not looking good for Israel. Number one, and furthermore, to the extent that countries in the region think that there is a diabolical threat out there, it doesn't appear that at this point in time that diabolical threat is Iran. And if anything, it looks like it's Israel.