Israel, Iran and Trump’s Incompetence
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Hello, everybody. Welcome once again to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart and I will be the host, the host today.

of your of your podcast as we find ourselves uh in a unbelievably fraught moment in a crossroads of history and i think i want to talk just a very brief moment about uh the president of the united states uh his donald aloysius trump uh you know you hear a lot about his the grifting and the corruption and the meme coin and the uh authoritarian tendencies and the uh

overuse of executive action and his militaristic fetishizing of you know bringing troops into American cities and ripping families apart and just the general moral decay and an abyss that we find ourselves living through but I Boy, I have to say I just don't think we talk enough about the incompetence. I just that like

The just rank shittiness of how they accomplish things and the price we are paying for his inability to... It's as though...

Everything that occurs on the world stage is just another weekly episode of his program. What's this week's episode liberation day and tariffs. Great. Let's, let's do that. Oh, Hey, uh, it's tanking the bond market and everybody is freaking out. Oh, great. Yeah, no, we're, that's the plan. Now we're just going to give everybody 90 days. And then he comes on and goes, everybody's kissing my ass to make deals, but nobody seems to be making any fucking deals.

And so then we just move on to the next episode. Oh, this week's episode is we're going to go in with the military to Los Angeles because that's exploding in chaos and violence, even though it's not. And God, if anybody, you know, has experience dealing with unrest in Los Angeles, it's the people that, that the cops that already live there. And now it's Iran and it's just, Hey,

It's the Iran episode. And I gave him 60 days because I'm the dealmaker in chief and we're going to have a nuclear deal. And this is all going according to plan. And it's utter incompetence. We're in such a bizarro world. You've got me nodding my head to Tucker Carlson videos.

He got, he got Tucker Carlson going, why are we going to war with Iran again? And I'm like, yeah, you tell him brother. Like that's how fucking upside down we find ourselves in, in this moment. And it's all based on one distinct premise. And that is we are being led by someone who doesn't know what they're doing. And out of Doge has a skeleton staff of, uh,

you know, utility infielders that are just out there with eight different jobs each and nobody has any follow through and wherewithal to get things done. And if anything does get done, it will be a happy accident, not because of the judicious plan that was put into place by a fifth level Jedi chess master. That's bullshit.

and the chaos right now on the world stage is a direct function of that incompetence and i mean we're lucky today we've got we've got a great get we're going to talk about iran and everything that's going on and i'm so happy to have our two guests today that can discuss this because they are both uh really well versed in everything that is going on in the immediacy of it and in the past of it so let's let's get to them uh right now

So in this incredibly fraught moment, we're awfully lucky today to be speaking with Ben Rhodes, who's the co-host of Pod Save the World and a former deputy national security advisor to President Obama, and Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international anchor, host of the new podcast Christiane and the X-Files with Jamie Ruhman. Ben and Christiane, thank you so much for joining us. This is such a fraught moment. And Christiane, I want to start with you because

You have just had, you know, we've been hearing from Israel. We've been hearing from the United States. We've been hearing from a variety of sources. You have just gotten off with a discussion with the deputy foreign minister in Iran. So if I could very quickly, Christian, what is the viewpoint from Iran right now?

Well, I'm going to download quickly because I've literally just come off the set. And just to give you a context, it's very difficult. Their internet, because of these strikes, are very compromised. Their phones are very compromised. Obviously, you can see they've been targeted assassination of leaders by the Israelis,

They have wiped out a whole layer of military leadership, and people are scared about using their phones. So just to get this was quite extraordinary. And I didn't ask exactly where he was, and he didn't want to tell me, but nonetheless, in Tehran. I don't imagine he would. Right. So in response to what President Trump has been saying, like,

I demand unconditional surrender, that we could get your Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei if we decided. I might, I might not. He's also just been saying, Trump, I might join Israel on these strikes. I might not. There's just a lot of mixed messages coming out, and I'm not sure what Trump intends. But he said, the deputy Iranian foreign minister, that look,

We do not buckle under threats. And it's very boilerplate Iran commentary. But it happens to be

you know, true based on history. He reminded me how they'd gone through eight years of war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, how the whole world was not on their side and how they emerged without surrendering. And he said the same here. He said, you know, Israel is trying to destroy them and that we will not surrender and we will continue to defend ourselves. But he did say

And I think Ben would be interested in this, that we thought we were going to a negotiation on Sunday, June 15th in Oman. I was and my bosses were headed that way. And then...

Two days before, out of the blue, we were attacked across the country. And he also said that civilian areas were attacked and buildings and infrastructure, as well as the military and nuclear sites. I happen to know this for a fact. I'm half Iranian. I grew up there. I know many of the locations. But importantly, I still have family and friends. So I'm listening to them. And there's a huge amount of panic. And it's very difficult for them right now. But that's the bottom line.

Well, Christiane, I so appreciate that perspective. And we can get into a little later the complicated relationship that so many Iranians have with their government and what's going on in there. But I want to jump in really quickly to go off of what Christiane said. In my mind, this is another example of sort of the impulsive and strange nature of Iran.

Our administration here in the United States, so the dealmaker-in-chief, the most wonderful negotiator that's ever existed in the history of dealmaking and shaking hands, is going to make a great deal with Iran. They've got 60 days apparently to do it because, as you know, the best deals always come with only the amount of time you can make them. And then on day 61, they are attacked again.

by Israel. Do either of you know whether or not the United States was taken by surprise by that attack or whether or not Iran had any idea that this 60-day so-called limitation on negotiations was a hard red line that would be met immediately with widespread

bombing. Do any of you have a sense that this was pure impulse on the part of the Israelis, that this was coordinated, or that the 60-day negotiation was a ruse by which to get the Iranians to drop their guard? Ben, I'll start with you. I just don't believe that Trump was somehow

First of all, I don't believe that the 60-day thing was a firm deadline. And never understood to be that, by the way, right? Yeah, because why would there be a meeting set up with Steve Witkoff? But also the Iranians weren't acting like they were going to be attacked. They were not taking security precautions. That's how some of these people were able to be killed in their homes. If they thought that day 61 was a potential military operation, they would have changed their pattern of behavior more than they did.

I think that Israel believed, and Netanyahu believed more specifically, that they had a window of opportunity where Iran's proxies have been dealt a blow, where Iran's on the back foot, where they'd softened up their air defenses in some of those previous strikes. And he wanted to take this action. And frankly, the diplomacy that Trump was in was a threat to their capacity to take military action against the nuclear program.

And so he does it after the 60 day thing that gives him kind of some pretext to say, I let this diplomacy go. They have not even really presented like what any kind of detailed intelligence case that suggests an imminence of Iran having a nuclear weapon. They've, you know, he said the kind of same things he always does. He's been doing that for about 30 years now, I believe. Yeah. He's playing the hits. It's coming tomorrow. They got it tomorrow. This is the problem is nobody can credibly say that like, if they didn't do this today, Iran was going to do something tomorrow. Uh,

The only thing that was looming was this Witkoff meeting in Oman. And Trump, I think, has been hurriedly trying to get on board with what is happening to him in terms of Netanyahu having changed the dynamic. And he doesn't want to admit that he just got rolled by Netanyahu. And now he's being rolled all the way potentially into joining the war. And we can talk about all the different dimensions of that. I can tell you, John, that as someone who's been in simulations,

of what would happen in precisely this scenario? - When you say binance simulations, what do you mean by that? - It means essentially you war game out what would happen if the Israelis bombed the Iranian nuclear facilities. - So these are sort of AI generated or computer simulated

here's where the casualties would be, here's what would occur. Or people run them, or people kind of run them who know a lot about this stuff. It always leads to Israel asking the United States to bomb this facility. And it almost always leads to regime change in Iran, because it's like, well, why would we stop now? And so we're on the... People have been thinking about this for a long time. And we're on the ride right now. And the question is, can we get off it?

Right. And the facility you're talking about is that one nuclear facility that is buried in a mountain that is apparently can only be reached by United States bunker busting weaponry. Yes? That's right. Fordew, I believe it's called, or? Fordow. And for all the talk about how sophisticated the Israeli operation has been, if you don't blow up Fordow, you've only set the Iranian nuclear program back like a few months.

And so obviously they're going to want us to get the underground facility that only we can hit. We are the only people that have a bunker buster bomb that can get at that facility. The only people who have planes that can drop it. And

And frankly, we don't even know that it would destroy it entirely. That's how deep underground this thing is. In answer to your question, John, about did the Iranians know they had a 60-day deadline? No, according to the deputy foreign minister. Right. Well, I mean, they were all going to meet in Oman. Well, right. On day 63. So what's the point? Ben will remember that it took, I don't know, 18 months to get the, you know, the Obama administration called the JCPOA, the nuclear deal that was a perfectly...

reasonable and manageable and verifiable arms control deal. Signed off on, by the way, by the world's other countries, Russia, China. By the UN, exactly. I mean, this was not a bilateral deal between the United States and Iran. This was a multilateral deal.

Exactly. But the key here, and Ben's alluded to it, is that Prime Minister Netanyahu has never believed in negotiation. Just like he does not believe in a Palestinian state, he does not believe in negotiating security around Iran's nuclear program. He believes in wiping it out and regime destruction, as we've just been mentioning.

But there has been successful diplomacy. They all say, oh, diplomacy failed. But no, in 2015, under the Obama administration, actually it succeeded. And then there was this concerted campaign to topple it. And that's what caused Trump to pull out of it when he was in 1.0. So Trump pulling out of this nuclear deal set the Irans off on fire.

you know, more enrichment. So now they have hundreds of kilograms of 60% enrichment as part of a bargaining technique or to show their capability. But even the American intelligence community and Tulsi Gabbard said it again this week, we do assess that they have not made a decision to go to a bomb or to weaponize. And that even if they did, it would take a number of years. She was slapped around by Trump.

And now she says, oh no, I have no daylight between me and Trump. So it's all very confusing. You guys are familiar with websites, right? Ground News is a website and it's also an app and they're on a mission. They're going to give readers an easier data-driven way to read the news, not the drive you crazy way to read the news. Every day they pull thousands of news articles all around the world. They organize them by story. Each story comes with visual breakdowns of news.

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In 2015, you know, after that deal was signed, you know, when Trump pulled out and I believe, what was it, 2018, I think, when they did that? Yeah. Was that at the behest of Israel as well? Or were there other forces that had asked, or was that merely a knee-jerk reaction to anything that Obama did, I will undo, and therefore I'm going to pull out? Do you know what the lead up to pulling out of that deal entailed?

I would say it was a convergence of those factors, that Trump wanted to dismantle anything Obama did, but that Israel and kind of hawkish types in the US wanted us out of the deal from the day we were in it. I think what's important to note, John, about that is that Trump wanted to find that Iran was not complying with the deal.

And if you recall, he kept asking for that report and his own administration, including, you know, guys like Jim Mattis, you know, his secretary of defense kept saying, well, no, actually, Iran is complying with this deal. You shouldn't pull out. And then ultimately he kind of overruled his more conventional, but still hawkish advisors to pull out. But I think it was, you know, Trump's instinct was, I'm just want to get out of whatever deal Obama was in, because the deal that he was negotiating with Witkoff

Sounded very similar to the JCPOA, the Iran deal. Of course. We wasted a decade on this and frankly led us to a place where we might end up in a war because of that antipathy for Obama.

Christiane, is that your understanding of how things went down? Yes. You know, you could say, if you wanted to be really generous, that Witkoff had come up with another plan, and it was about this sort of consortium whereby they would try to let Iran say that it could still enrich, but maybe not right on Iranian soil, but maybe in an island. Anyways, it was to try to...

Try to thread all the needles to go into another deal that was not exactly Obama's deal, but it was similar. But it had this thing which said Iran cannot enrich. So how were they going to resolve that? Because Iran believes that to be their fundamental international right. And so that was what was being worked out. Especially given that Israel has nuclear weapons and America and everyone else has nuclear weapons and North Korea has nuclear weapons.

Well, that's the thing, John. John, you just hit on something really, really vital. Because one of the unintended consequences, and there are always unintended consequences in a war that is not planned out, in a war that has no exit strategy, in a war that has actually no big strategy other than let's set back or maybe let's have regime change. Right.

Some say that if this regime survives, that they will then, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy that they may, like North Korea, decide to go in secret, to get out of the IAEA, the NPT, the inspections, and actually to become a nuclear power because they've been shown by Israel that their conventional weapons

are useless and the shadow war. Yeah. So, so they could have a kind of a worse negative impact. And I want to step back for a second and talk about the macro idea of risk assessment within this world. The one thing about Israel that I truly do not understand is this idea of they won't live in a world of risk, but we live in a world of risk.

There is no zero risk. It's this idea of if there is one suicide attack that is done by a Palestinian, well, then we must remove Hamas or we must wage war until we are safe. And that just seems like a fundamentally flawed. The United States certainly lives in a world of risk.

Russia has nuclear weapons. China has nuclear weapons. North Korea has nuclear weapons. They have all expressed at different times antipathy towards the United States or a desire to use them, in North Korea's case, against the United States. So this idea that we can create a world where there is no risk, it seems that what they create is a world of instability where everything is at risk.

Yes. And so I just want to get at the underlying fundamental principle that is being deployed here that's causing such destruction in Gaza and all of this death as though you can create a world of no risk through violence. It makes no sense to me. Ben, what is your thought on that larger principle? I think you put your finger on it. There's two things I'd say about this.

Because the first is there's been an Iranian nuclear program for decades and Israel's lived with that. And Israel's done quite well in that world, right? And what we were trying to do is put a lid on that program, make sure they can't get a weapon. The risk is them having a nuclear weapon. Transparency and verification. Yeah. Them having a nuclear weapon. Now, that's a different level risk. But them having a few centrifuges operating, if you have transparency, verification, you got inspectors all over there, you're looking at the whole supply chain.

Like that's a level of risk that you should be able to live with. And my concern is in trying to remove all risk, Israel is creating more risk for itself in the sense of if you remove that government through violence, it doesn't, we saw in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya in the Obama years, you get something usually worse. You either get the IRGC, the worst guys with guns in Iran will be the strongest guys, or you get kind of a failed state civil war in a country of over 90 million people with no plan for what comes next.

You also could get a situation where, you know, even what we've seen in Gaza, do we really think that's going to bring meaningful, quote unquote, peace over time? Or that you can bomb people out of wanting to be free.

Yeah. What if Netanyahu decides he's actually the biggest threat to Israel? Does he have to bomb himself at that point? Well, but this leads to the second point I was going to make, because we can get into like they're creating enemies for the future. One of the things I hate about our discourse on this stuff is if the negative consequences don't happen next week, it's like, well, look, see, that worked. Well, war is usually like the price comes due five years, 10 years out, right? Iraq looked great when the statue fell in Baghdad, right?

But the second thing I think that's important here is they're changing the nature, a country that does what they're doing in Gaza, or a country they've now gone to war in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, that's not healthy. And their society is moving to the far right. I think there's a synergy between what you're doing abroad with violence and the kind of government you have at home.

And so it's not just the risks of their foreign policy. It's the risks of what this is doing to Israeli society and democracy. What does it turn you into? I have people I know who are like hawks and they're like, well, I don't like what Netanyahu is doing with democracy in Israel, but I support all these other things he's doing. I'm like, no, those things are connected. He's consolidating...

What it feels like a far right extremist political system in Israel. And a dehumanization of any anybody that is in you bring up such an interesting point. And Christian, I want to get to this with you. He talks about the unforeseen consequences that royal future events that don't seem to be connected years later. And I want to go back to this because people don't talk about this enough.

In 1953, the CIA, along with British Petroleum and the UK government overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, who was the democratically elected leader of Iran. They destabilized that country, allowed the Shah of Iran to gain control for so-called because he was Western friendly.

Did we not sow the seeds for this entire nightmare ourselves in 1953 to some extent? As you know, that coup was the first of America's many coups throughout the 50s and 60s and even into the 70s. In Africa, Lumumba was killed. In Central America, in Africa,

all over. In Brazil, they supported military dictatorships. It was a dreadful, dreadful time, and it all backfired against the U.S. In fact, it said, and I was there during this, you know, the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, they brought this up over and over and over again. This is one of the reasons that they were motivated to

rebel and rise up against the Shah, and also to essentially blame the United States in great part. Now, we've moved many, many decades on from that. And I think the high point was the 2015 JCPOA, because it's a very difficult relationship. And the United States and Iran were not yet ready to address all the issues. But I can tell you from my own personal perspective, that as a reporter, I met with all these top level Iranians who

for decades, ever since 1995. I was the first into the nuclear plant that was a civilian nuclear plant called Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. I'm the first and the only one to have interviewed almost all the Iranian presidents, including the so-called reform presidents. Over these decades, many, many officials have said to me, background off the record and this and that, and even on camera, that they wanted to make

Peace may be not the right word, but to close the file of conflict with the United States on all issues, on terrorism, on missiles, on nuclear and everything. And they wanted to get into negotiations. But as Ben knows, this was scuttled many times by hardliners in the United States, hardliners in Iran, and hardliners in Israel. So that was never possible. So the JCPOA was the single

The only major negotiation that came out of 40 years of this Iranian revolution. As you know, nobody in the world wants to see a nuclear-armed Iran. Iran says it doesn't want a nuclear weapon. Intelligence says it hasn't got one right now. It hasn't made a decision to get one. There was a time, and again, I was in conversation with a senior Iranian during the post-

9-11 time in Afghanistan. And this Iranian called me in and he said, because, you know, there was the whole invasion of Iraq and all the rest of it based on a fear that they had weapons of mass destruction, which proved not to be true. And we know the backlash. But this Iranian told me, yes,

We did have a serious discussion in the leadership about whether we should weaponize, but then we decided not to because that would make it much more dangerous for us in the region and in our very dangerous neighborhood. So they decided not to, and that's what intelligence says. Since 2003, there's no evidence of that.

So I think that, you know, this is a really difficult situation between Iran, Israel and the United States that requires not Trump saying I can fix it in 60 days or what did he say overnight between Russia and Ukraine or fix Gaza. It requires staffing staff.

experts, technical expertise, and patience to negotiate. He's got one guy. Witkoff must be a platinum miles member right now. He's got one guy. Marco Rubio is doing five different... He's like the Secretary of State, the NSA. I think he's the ombudsman. He's the parliamentarian now for the Senate. They are understaffed. They dozed themselves out of having any ability to carry out the complexity of the tasks that they need to be carried out. And so these are all

shortcuts and it seems like the easiest thing to subvert in the world is peace

It seems like as Ben talked earlier and Ben, I want to ask you this because it's hard liners can easily, if we remember in Iraq, Hans blicks had gone in and they were going to be inspecting all the sites that had supposed weapons of mass destruction. And we had a process in place that would have avoided the chaos and carnage of those 20 years in Iraq, uh, uh, in Afghanistan, all those places. And it was easily subverted. Ben, how fragile is,

Are these moves towards a more stable, peaceful world when hardliners are involved in the room? I think, I mean, there's some, the problem is our politics in this country is so messed up on national security that it was much harder to get the Iran deal through Congress and

than it was to take this country to war in Iraq, right? So- Why is that, Ben, when you say it's harder to get that peace deal through than war? What is messed up about it?

Well, first of all, peace is... We could have a long conversation about all the actors that influence American politics. But I would just say peace is inherently messy, right? Like the Iran nuclear deal, sure. Like it didn't remove the entire Iranian nuclear program. So it's easy to kind of shoot at a target of like, you know, this is a compromise. This is a deal between adversaries. You make peace with your adversaries. You know, these are bad people. Why are you even talking to these people? Well, you know, because you make peace with...

the bad guys, you know, it's not hard to make a deal with the UK. Like even, you know, even Trump could do that. Whereas a war, you kind of promise that it's going to look good and we're going to take out these bad guys. And actually it usually looks good at the beginning of the war, right? Right. You know, at the beginning, it's like, oh, look at the Israelis are killing all these guys. And, and, and, and wow, the Mossad had drones in Tehran. Isn't that cool? Right.

But to your point, the coup in 1953 looked pretty good. It was like, wow, we got our guy back in there. And now that Iranian oil and gas is flowing, there's no concern about them being on the wrong side of the Cold War. Well, 1979, it didn't look good. And so I think that...

The problem is we are so short term in our thinking and our response. And I'll fault the Democratic Party here. You can sense the kind of fear in some of these Democratic politicians right now. It's like, well, if I oppose this Israeli military strike or oppose the U.S. getting involved, you know, I'm not picking a fight with Netanyahu. Will I be called weak? Or maybe this strike is going to look good. And then Trump's going to say I'm weak. Stand for something. If we haven't learned anything for the last 25 years...

we've learned that violence in the Middle East is unlikely to lead to better outcomes. And certainly the violent removal of governments by the United States or Israel for that matter, is going to lead to a better government. Like, I don't know how many countries we have to try that out in before we learn that that is not what works. And so I think

Opponents need to simplify the message. And Chris John will remember, she can attest, when we said in the Obama years that it's either this deal or a war, we were called, you know, how dare you say that? Well, that was the case. Because either you're going to have a deal over this nuclear program, or Israel was going to do something like this and try to get the United States involved in that war. And that's where Trump is now. Trump is either going to join this war, or he's going to try to stop it. And that is such a consequential choice. ♪

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And I think, Ben, you guys saw this in your administration. Netanyahu, as I said, has been trying to do this for decades. No other American president allowed him to do it. Everyone restrained him. He came to Congress and was given the floor to address Republicans practically only to diss the JCPOA. He did that another time. I think he even went to Kinko's and got some bomb charts. He drew little pictures. Cartoon bombs. It's an absolute...

Now successful strategy against negotiations and against getting a deal. And I think that this is, you know, we talk about peace. It is hard, but look at what the US was able to do, for instance, with the parties in Northern Ireland. Look at what the South Africans were able to do after apartheid. Look at any number. Look at Oslo. I know Oslo has not come to fruition and we wish we were back in the mid-90s, but that was, you know, all sides getting together with really

Vested, honest brokers and third parties, whether it was the US, whether it was the Oslo negotiators and the parties on the ground decided to come and they got the help to move towards peace. Bosnia, I mean, it's not perfect, but after I covered that war, there was a US brokered end and a

It's tenuous, but it's not back to war. And so it is possible. Politicians and leaders have to decide whether they want to do that or whether they want to react in this kind of easier way, as Ben was laying out. And whatever you might say about President Biden and about should he have restrained Israel more given what's going on in Gaza, on the day that he landed in Israel after October 7th and the horrors that were committed there,

He told them, don't do what we did in Iraq. Don't go for revenge. Look what happened to us. Self-defense, but don't go crazy like we did in Iraq, because look at the blowback. And it's been severe. Why do you think that politicians are more likely to be okay owning

the years of instability and chaos that occurs from these types of military interventions but they are afraid to own whatever even singular incidents might be the result of peace in other words if you make you know no politician seems to want to make the peace deal

If there might be a suicide bombing that occurs, I'm not suggesting that that's a wonderful outcome, but they seem much more willing to own the years of instability and the long-term deleterious effects of these kinds of interventions than they would have the courage to.

That when you make peace, peace is not oftentimes final idealized serenity. There will be spasms of violence within that. Is that the fear that they have? They don't want to own those outcomes? Or is that not in the calculation? Ben, you know, you were in the room when these things were going on. I'm only saying that in the way of like,

you know, in Israel, the only person when, when they tried to make peace, there were assassinations. Sadat was assassinated. Rabin was assassinated, you know, that that's how things roll. But if you make peace, if you shake hands and then there's a bombing, now suddenly everybody says, see, you never should have done that. But nobody goes back and says, uh, this is a nightmare of instability. Yeah. I think that this has been a huge issue in American politics, uh, for a

for a long time and again it comes back to the point that he's like like lbj um was unwel even though it was evident in 1965 that you know we're unlikely to defeat north vietnam in south vietnam right that the vietnamese people didn't want us there that the south vietnamese government was corrupt

He was afraid of, you know, essentially pulling out and being told, well, look, this guy, you know, he wasn't tough enough to stand up to these guys. And because he escalated, he destroyed his own capacity to do the great society, you know? So in other words, he was more afraid of the much smaller cost. And I think part of the, I think the reason is, John, is that everybody can see that

what the cost is going to be to doing the peace deal. You're going to be called weak by all these people. There's going to be holes in it. But what they don't see is that the costs are usually deferred to doing the war. And again, so I think it interacts with this kind of short-term way in which we think about these things in our politics. If you look at Israeli and Palestinian leaders even, Rabin,

is the only Israeli leader who was like, you know what? Like I've fought in all these wars and I'm going to take this risk.

and make this peace. And guess what? He was assassinated, you know, by a right-wing extremist, right? And so sometimes people are afraid to make peace because the peacemakers have been targeted in some of these places too. So that's a more extreme version of getting criticized politically. But in the US, I just think, you know, this default to like, you know, despite the fact that one other thing I want to say is that every American, I worked for Obama in 08, he ran as the anti-war candidate.

The American people keep telling us through their elections who they want, the kind of leaders they want, or leaders who don't get us into these wars. And yet politicians have not absorbed that lesson, apparently.

And it looks like Trump is struggling. I don't know. But I mean, every time I look around, there's another Trump thing saying, oh, you know, Ayatollah says he won't surrender. Good luck to him. And then, but I wanted to not go to war. I wanted to be the peace candidate. I want the Nobel Prize, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it's just, we're just not sure what's coming out. Yeah. Why is it easier to own war?

Yeah.

I think partly because he was afraid of being assassinated like Assad was, but I also think they missed a huge opportunity. Once Netanyahu came back, it's been no way has there been any effort to make any peace deal. Then I'll say another thing.

People are never incorporated. The Iranian people for 45 years have never been mentioned, not by Israel, not by the West, not by the United States. It's all been about terrorism, this and that. Nobody has thought about the people. We have been so dehumanized, so delegitimized.

Now Netanyahu is saying, "Rise up," using the slogan and saying, "Zan zendigi azadi," woman life freedom. When did you ever care about the Iranian people? Likewise, when did anybody

The entire body politic care about the Palestinian people. And by the way, as difficult as the Iranian people's relationship is with their government, and nobody is making the case that the Aitoul is a great dude and has brought real progress to them. Boy, if you want to get a people to unify with their government, even those that have an incredibly fragile relationship with that government, bomb them.

Well, you know, the deputy foreign minister said exactly that, because I said, you know, people are unhappy with your regime and they have been for a long time. And the rest of the world is watching to see whether this is finally going to lead to the end of your regime. And he said to me, Christian, people may have a lot of problems with our policies, but we

As you just said, once they are bombed by a foreign entity, then they coalesce. Look, I will say that is also complicated. I would say the majority of the people of Iran want a different kind of government. They want freedom. They want to be able to have electricity and heat and travel and pay their bills and all that other stuff.

And some may even be hoping that this Israeli attack will lead to some kind of freedom. But the majority is we're reaching, or those who are commenting online are actually more rallying around the flag at this time. So I think that's something also potential unintended consequence that we don't know where that's going to lead. But I would say leaving out the human equation, the human factor in any of these situations

just proves that actually people don't care about people. They just don't. - Boy howdy. And as you see this, and it brings up an interesting, I wanna talk about one other dynamic, and I so appreciate you guys spending the time with this. So we've talked about Israel, Iran, the United States, the sort of fraught relationship between, I wanna talk a little bit about the Sunni world within this, and more Saudi Arabia as kind of the, and maybe even Egypt as kind of more the central. I am confused.

as to who's whose proxy is is israel our proxy are we israel's proxy is saudi arabia

And that world, because if anybody is going to be pleased, and I know that they have to send out the diplomatic missives stating to the other, but if anybody is pleased in this moment, I would assume it's the Saudi group that is constantly at battle with the Shia. This has changed John a bit. Really? Yeah. Okay. So tell me. MBS has actually evolved on this thing a bit and it gets to your thing about risk.

MBS got spooked a few years ago when the Iranians demonstrated that they could hit Saudi oil fields. And the Emiratis also got spooked when the Iranians demonstrated they might be able to hit Abu Dhabi or Dubai.

And so what the Saudis did in 2023 is they normalized relations with Iran. And I think it's not because they like them. It's not because MBS has any love for this regime. He doesn't. He loathes them. But if this war goes off the rails, right? If the Iranians feel like we have no choice but to lash out, they could bomb Saudi oil fields. They could just become nihilists and say, you know what? We're going to burn it all down with us, you know? And you're going to get sucked into the quicksand of this war too. Right?

And, you know, these guys have a good thing going right now in the Gulf. They don't want to mess with it, you know? So do they now see Israel as more of a threat to that? Then I always assume that they saw Iran as more of a threat, Iran and through Iran, Russia, as more of a threat to their supremacy in the region and would rather surreptitiously work with Israel. That's how it's been. And your mind has that flipped?

I think this latest, so that's how it's certainly been, but I think it's been evolving. And now, given all that Israel's been doing, I actually think that it's beginning to flip in some, not everywhere in the Gulf, like, but I think the Saudis are looking at this and thinking, this is just creating a lot of risk, right? There's more risk in what Israel's doing now than in living with the Iranian regime. And

These guys have large populations of younger people that are completely outraged about the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and children in Gaza. And precisely because they are going to be around for a while, I'm guessing as a young guy, if he's thinking about the risks to his potential rule and legitimacy...

The anger over what's going to happen to the Palestinians, particularly if they end up getting ethnically cleansed and people get in there and find hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and the disorder of what's happening in Iran ultimately begins to pose a bigger threat to him than the Iranian regime. Christiane, you report on this. I think you're right. And I think that something that solidified the Saudi risk appetite was when Trump did not come to their aid. Do you remember after Iran did hit the Abqaiq

the gas field or whatever it was, the energy target during that time. And they're, oh my God, you know, who's our ally here? And notably, back in the October, you know, missile exchange between Iran and Israel, you had all these countries, including Arab countries saying that, hey, we are defending, you know, we're helping strike down Iranian missiles. Today, nada, okay? No action.

allies, not the Europeans, not the Arabs. So Israel is on its own with the United States right now, as far as we can gather. And that goes to the heart of what Ben mentioned, and it's about Gaza right now. Israel, which would have wanted, and Saudi, which would have wanted the normalization deal, cannot

Saudi cannot do it while Israel is still in Gaza, while it's still slaughtering civilians. And every single day we get pictures on our feeds and statistics of children, women and men being killed just at the aid distribution site. I think 140 killed just yesterday within a 24-hour period.

period at these hate sites. It's insane. Yeah. And the settlers running rampage in the West Bank. Guys, you know, for MBS, who is assuming this sort of larger role within as a statesman, not just in Saudi Arabia, but in the larger Middle East, why then is there passivity?

Because it is, look, they could have very easily, the idea that Gaza is being left to be brokered by Israel and the United States clearly is not going to in any way help the Palestinian people avoid this just god-awful carnage that they're living through. Why hasn't MBS and that part of the world been more forceful

You know, they all, like I say, they throw out the missives. That's why in my mind, I think to myself, well, ultimately they must be okay with this.

Well, I mean, look, Benel, but for me, it's been my first question I ask every Arab leader. It's a shameful dereliction of their duty as well, which doesn't mean to say, unlike Mike Huckabee is suggesting the ambassador to Israel for the US, that it's the Arab countries who should give the Palestinians their state. But it does mean that they've never given them, you know, citizenship. They've kept them in, quote unquote, refugee camps.

And they have not done what you just suggested. Use their influence, their strength, and make this... That's what I don't understand. They tried in 2002 the so-called Arab-Saudi Arabia peace plan, and it was rejected by Israel. Which, by the way, could still be in effect. Yes, it's the only one. Why does Israel have a veto on all this? That's what I don't... Why are we continuing to allow Israel purely to have a veto based on their sense of security?

Why is everyone else's security secondary to their sense of it? I think that they, I mean, there's layers to this. You know, there's no love for Hamas, obviously, in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia. Right. Or anywhere. Yeah. Or anywhere. Or anywhere. There's not a lot of confidence in the Palestinian Authority. There's a lot of, but I think one of the reasons, John, is at the end of the day, they believe that the U.S. will back whatever Israel does.

And so why do they want to stick their neck out for the Palestinians? So they don't want to own the peace. It goes back to what we talked about. They won't own the peace. They don't own the peace because but they don't trust Netanyahu is going to make peace. How could they? And so why should they spend a lot of capital? Now, they tried to kind of shortcut this thing with the Abraham Accords where the Saudis stayed out of.

The Emiratis are kind of like, well, let's make this deal. We'll normalize relations, which was not really a peace deal. It's like direct flights and commercial relations because the peace has to be made with the Palestinians, not the Emiratis, you know? Right. I think some people sincerely believe that maybe that would like pull this issue into kind of a broader context where the Palestinians could do economic development. Everything in this region is going to get rich. Well, it turns out, to your point, John, earlier, people want to be free and they want to be free in the places that they lived.

And the Palestinians didn't get anything out of a deal where the Emiratis are making business deals with the Israelis, right? And there's just not an Arab leader that has been able to speak to that or has been willing to go out on a limb and speak to that because they frankly think if they go out on that limb, the U.S. and Israel are going to saw it off at the end of the day. Christiane, I know you have to go. And so we're going to let you. Thank you. What does pulling back from the precipice look like?

in your mind, and how could that be achieved in these next tumultuous days? Well, from my perspective, having just talked to the Iranian foreign minister, so from their perspective, they're one party to this, if it stops, they'll go back to negotiations. He told me, we haven't given up on negotiations. And what does escalation look like on the Iranian part? What do you think they're willing to do

Well, he wouldn't tell me straight out, but they have threatened if the U.S. gets involved and has been laid out. The U.S. has a lot of bases. It has 40,000 troops, I believe, or something like that, personnel in that region. And already, you know... And more right now. We're sending more. Yeah. And, you know, it's considered that Iraq or, you know, militias in Iraq, Iran-backed militias are perhaps the first line of attack on various, you know...

Israeli, American targets, but it's not going to be good. - Right. Ben, your final word on what you think de-escalation could look like and in your mind, how that could be accomplished.

De-escalation involves the United States stepping in and saying, Israel has to stop the military operation and we're going to make a nuclear deal with the Iranians. And the Iranians, you know, get crappy terms and this thing is just kind of put on the freezer. If it doesn't happen, and I think if the U.S. bombs Fordow, to end where Christian started,

There's real meaningful pride in Iran. It's a revolutionary government. It's a government that went through the Iran-Iraq war. So the idea of unconditional surrender, as Trump tweeted, is just not in their DNA. Right. And I think that... Or any countries. Or any countries. And again, we might not see...

Like maybe they go underground with their nuclear program and they pretend like they're making deals, but they pop up in a year or two like North Korea did with a nuclear weapon. Maybe the response comes through an immediate flood of attacks against U.S. service members or oil fields. Maybe it comes later in terrorist actions.

But the idea that this is going to be neat and clean and that they're just going to surrender or that I saw Newt Gingrich post, now's the time for a moderate, inclusive, secular, democratic government in Iran. I'm like, we don't even have one of those in the United States, right? By the way, they had it and we overthrew it. Not in Israel either. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Not in Israel either. Anymore. So the idea that, yeah, the regime change thing is the catastrophic success. Right. If you remove that regime, that's I worry about that more than I worry about. Right. You know what they might do against U.S. troops because it's not because I like the Iranian regime. I don't. But it's the Iranian people that should replace it. You know, and I worry about a failed state in Iran.

And I would like to say... Oh, yeah. Go ahead, Christiane, please. Just a plug for myself and my new podcast. I do this with my ex-husband on this episode, which has just dropped. All the behind-the-scenes stuff. Christiane, truly professional. Well done. That was...

That was cherry. Ben Rhodes, co-host, Pod Save the World, former deputy national security advisor to President Obama, Christiane Amapour, CNN's chief international anchor, host of the new podcast, Christiane and the X-Files with Jamie Rubin, which is talking about this very topic, as Christiane just mentioned. Guys, thanks so much for spending the time. I know it's a really fraught time for both of you. So thanks. Thanks for you taking the time. Thanks, John. Okay. We are going to take a quick break. We'll be coming right back.

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Boy, I want to thank Ben and Christian for being here. You know, you're in the middle of it and you just know that their phones are dinging the whole time because they're in the midst of actually talking to the relevant players within this fiasco and hearing in real time, as Christian was saying on the phone with the deputy foreign ministers of Iran. But the one thing that struck me was the ease in which de-escalation can take place.

And for some reason, that being the moment that's fraught, that peace is more fraught than war in the immediate moment of political gain, whether it's even for the regime in Iran.

whose own people rose up against it time and time again, who they've had to physically put down, whether it was based on the Green Revolution that took place or the Masa Amini, and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, Masa Amini, that sparked so much protest and unfortunately violence within that country. And you see how war is in some ways their answer.

to coalescing their people. It's a stunning kind of realization that it's easier for these so-called leaders to live in war than to live in peace. Anyway, I appreciate both of them taking the time to enlighten us in those issues.

I want to thank our folks, as always, for helping me put on the podcast. Lead producer, Lauren Walker. Producer, Brittany Mamedovic. Video editor and engineer, Rob Vitola. Audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce. Researcher and associate producer, Jillian Spear. And our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Thank you for listening. And we shall see you again next week. The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

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