Richard Haass, Senior Counselor with Centerview Partners & President Emeritus at Council on Foreign Relations Talks Retaliation From Iran
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. We efforted Richard Haass yesterday. We were unable to get him. We have him today, and we extend out here commercial-free for you in a conversation with the President Emeritus, the Council on Foreign Relations, and of course, Senior Counselor with Centerview Partners. But Paul, far more than that, the single best clarity is

before the attack. I put out on Twitter and LinkedIn Ambassador Haas's essay in the Financial Times of, it's forever ago, Richard, it was three or four days ago, wrote a jewel of short clarity of what to do, what to hope for. If you wrote that essay now, how would you change it? Well, good morning, Tom, and thank you. Look, the United States faced difficult decisions in the

Aftermath of the Israeli actions, we chose the path of acting, in this case to do an intense but idealistically or optimally narrow military strike against Iran. What's so interesting to me, if I had to say one thing at this point, if you think about this crisis over the last 10 or so days, the first week was dominated by Israel.

uh it deciding in the aftermath of october 7th the weakening of iran's proxies it was going to act against the iranian nuclear program and more broadly against the iranian political leadership then the united states decided this was the moment to set back the iranian nuclear program but now initiative has passed to iran for the first time in this crisis it's the iranian leaders who control as much as anybody how this unfolds from this point on and that's what's different

If I were writing today, indeed I will be writing later today, that's what's different. For the first time since this phase of the crisis began, decision-making, if you will, is in the hands of Iran more than Israel, more than the United States. Ambassador Haas, and I want to make clear here that Richard Haas redefined the international relations debate with the invention of the internet at the Council on Foreign Relations. John Bellinger at CFR, Richard Haas,

writes a blistering essay with his legal expertise. Does President Trump have the authority to strike Iran? From where you sit with all your work back to Northern Ireland, did the president have the ability to act from the executive branch or did he need to use a different process with Congress? - The president had the authority like all of his predecessors. If you look at the history of modern American foreign policy,

initiative in foreign policy has decidedly passed to the executive. I mean, Tom, what was it, 60 years ago, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote his essay and book about the imperial presidency. This is nothing new. Congress virtually never, ever fulfills its constitutional obligation to declare war. And we have used military force hundreds of times.

in the absence of anything so formal. So I just flat out disagree with that kind of a narrow legalist interpretation. That said, if I had been advising President Trump, I would have said take a page out of the book of President Bush the father, Bush 41.

Do things internationally with building on the International Atomic Energy Agency scathing report of Iran. Do things with the Congress. Do things with the American public. If you're going to use military force, people should come to conclude that you tried to do diplomacy and at the end of the day, you reluctantly had to use it.

It also, by the way, would have helped this president with his MAGA base. So I think he should have gone about this differently. But did he, under American political tradition, did he possess the authority to do what he did? Absolutely. Richard, as the world awaits some type of response from Iran, do we have any good information as to their capabilities today, from just their military capabilities and to their leadership, because Israel has dealt a blow to their leadership? What should we expect?

No, they're both good points. I actually think they're unlikely to retaliate. My reading of the Iranians is they're focused on regime survival. In some ways, this is the second great

difficult period crisis for Iran's leadership since their 1979 revolution, the first one being a decade later during the Iran-Iraq war. So my guess is they're going to focus on regime consolidation. Down the road, they may focus on reconstituting their nuclear program. We have no idea how much of their nuclear program is intact.

But I think it is difficult for the Iranian leadership to act. They're trying to stay off the net because they don't want to give signals for Americans or Israelis to target them. They obviously have lost control over the airspace of their own country. Their proxies are much diminished. So I don't think they have very good options. That said, they can still lob missiles.

at the 40,000 American soldiers in the region. They can play havoc with shipping. It doesn't take a lot to drive insurance rates up. They can do asymmetrical warfare using cyber or terrorism. So they actually have lots of capabilities. You don't have to compete with B-2 stealth fighters in order to be militarily effective. But I just think the Iranians right now,

their priority in the short run is not to retaliate against the United States. - Richard Haass with us. We continue with Ambassador Haass. Paul Sweeney and I welcome all of you across the nation, are continuing that coverage here. A difference this morning, the markets are open. We will consider the markets.

across the arc of the show. We thank Goldner Montevalli from London for being with us, Germano Bersacci from Dubai, and we continue here on YouTube and on all of our commute, our audio and radio affiliates as well, and we say good morning. Paul? Richard, for many observers, the American strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran was a

bold strike, a surprising strike. Does that have an impact in other parts of the world? I'm thinking about Ukraine and Russia, thinking about China. How do you think those actors are viewing this? It was surprising more in the tactical rather than strategic sense. We've been talking for years that we weren't going to let Iran

gain nuclear weapons or even get close to them. What was surprising, perhaps tactically, was when the president talked about his two-week last chance for diplomacy to work. That turned out to be a feint or a ruse. So I think it was surprising tactically, not strategically. I think the rest of the world took note, both that the United States acted

as well as how effectively the U.S. military looked. What was brought together was quite extraordinary. My guess is the Russians probably have liked this crisis. Any time they like when energy prices go up, they like when the United States expends munitions in other parts of the world. That means we don't have to give to Ukraine. People aren't talking as much about Ukraine. I thought it was quite interesting at the G7.

that Ukraine almost seemed to be something of an afterthought. So the Russians have to like that. My guess is the Chinese are probably concerned about on the opposite side of the coin as a massive energy importer. They don't much like instability.

in the Middle East, but all of them have to be happy. I would think that the United States is once again involved in the Middle East. That means we have less bandwidth, less ability to focus on say East Asia or Taiwan or on helping Ukraine. - Richard Haass with us and folks, I can't say enough about this is a book you can throw at your smart aleck kids, the college brats, their home from Oberlin. And you throw this book at them and you won't hurt them because it's beautifully brief.

Bill of Obligations. I can't say enough about Richard Haass' cry for citizenship in America. I can't, again, can't say enough about it. I'll put that out on Twitter and LinkedIn as well. Part of our Bill of Obligations, Richard Haass, is to have a coherent

foreign policy. We can go back to clash of civilizations, staggered as a Zecaria in a post-American world, Robert T. Kaplan coming up in a bit, maybe with a Kissingerian realist theory. What's the Haas theory you observe at the State Department right now? Well, State Department, there's very little to observe. It's actually a sad story over the last decade or two,

of the weakening of an institution, the hollowing out of the foreign service, more broadly, the hollowing out of our interest or capability in terms of diplomacy, in terms of the whole mission of the Agency for International Development, the whole promotion of democracy and American values around the world. We have dramatically weakened one of the principal instruments of American national security. We've then compounded it, Tom, with the hollowing out of the National Security Council.

This is an administration, I would argue, that is, in some ways, has put itself dangerously dependent on a top-down approach to foreign policy where the president does things, and quite honestly, the rest of the administration falls in behind. I don't see an awful lot of ground-up analysis. But I do worry about what's been now more than, what, a decade and a half of the weakening of the diplomatic instrument of American foreign policy and national security.

Richard, some folks are even discussing probably a small chance, but still discussing regime change in Iran. How do you think about that topic? A couple of ways. One is I find regime change in the category of wish, not a strategy. If Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, or Donald Trump said to their generals, I want regime change, they wouldn't know how to implement it. Regime change is not something you can design an operation to bring about.

Colin Powell used to say the military instruments do two things. They destroy and they kill. Regime change is not on the menu. So that's one thing. Second of all, you never know if you can bring it back. You also never know what comes of it.

What would follow this regime? Is it necessarily something that you want? For all you know, nuclear materials, which clearly still exist in Iran, could get into the hands of all sorts of groups. That might be in the be careful what you wish for. So I take regime change as unserious foreign policy. If it comes about, it's going to come from within Iran. It's not going to come, if you will, from Israeli or American bayonets. Do we underestimate, Ambassador Haas, the military violence,

of the theocracy in Iran. The news flow to me, Ambassador, with respect to my colleagues, is so simplistic. Ayatollah, theocracy, the people of Iran. What's in between them? And the answer is a harsh dictatorship, right? You've got that. You've got all sorts of citizen groups that are

listen to them, the so-called the guys who used to come out with the sticks and beat up on the green movement protesters. And then you've got formal authorities, military and so forth. So this is a regime that has tools, if you will, Tom, of repression.

in addition to what it can do as a more traditional military, in addition to its proxies. But this is a system that's been in place now for more than half a century that has instruments of repression and coercion. Paul, I remember exactly where I was in the shock of the hostages. Are you ready? Yep. A country road.

in Pittsfield, Vermont, on a cold, cold November day, walking down the road, trying not to slip in my two-tone Tony Llama cowboy boots. And we were in shock as a nation over the failed hostage event. Yep, absolutely. Richard, give us the point of view of Israel here. A lot of folks are saying this might be a special time for Israel to kind of reset the Middle East as it takes care of, you know, many of...

what it perceives to be its enemies, including obviously Iran most recently. Can Israel change its position in the Middle East or the balance of power in the Middle East? Well, I would argue Israel has much improved its strategic position, mainly through the weakening of Iran's proxies, Hezbollah first and foremost, Hamas secondarily, then through regime change, what we saw in Syria.

Israel has improved its position against Iran, but hasn't resolved it. By that I mean Iran remains hostile to Israel, has capabilities, and again, we don't know how much of their nuclear components survived.

For all we know, a lot of them were parked in undisclosed locations. So Israel is not out of the woods there. And even more, Israel's not out of the woods dealing with Gaza or with the three million Palestinians in the West Bank. And I think that's still the biggest strategic question.

So Israel has the Iranian dimension and still has the Palestinian dimension very much. Richard, I have one final question. Paul and I in our broadcast yesterday, Paul, please help me. I agree that we were thunderstruck by the acuity and concision of our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I was blown away by his report, Richard Haass. You're the grizzled veteran. What did you think of the press conference of our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Tom, he was impressive. General Carrillo, the head of Central Command, is impressive. Let me just make a larger point. When I look at American society, I think there's two great pools of talent.

One is in the American military. The professionalization there is awesome. And the other is something you guys, you all deal with all the time, which is the best of American corporate leadership. These are people who know how to run big operations and do it in a really responsible, accountable way.

So I'm not surprised when I see great talent in the military rise to the top. It is a meritocracy. These people are tested and they are responsible for large numbers of lives. So I find the post-Vietnam American military is quite an extraordinary institution.

Richard Haas, thank you so much. The Centerview Partners and, of course, his definitive work at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ambassador Haas backed decades to the diplomacy of a Northern Ireland solution. The data that matters for your investments. The entire auto sector is higher today. And analysis on the companies making news on Wall Street. Tesla's been a stock that's been in focus. Shares have really been all over the map this morning. Listen to the Stock Movers Report from Bloomberg. Let's talk about...

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