This Isn’t Going the Way Trump Thought. Vali Nasr on Iran’s War Strategy

But Iran is not fighting to knock out Israel and the US. It's rather trying to drag them into a much longer fight. And it believes that in, in time, it is they who will get exhausted because their strategies depend on short and quick.

And I've tried so hard for the past couple of months to understand where this administration is coming from. What is the logic behind all these decisions?

I mean, what we're seeing is $10,000 drones are shutting down multi-trillion dollar economies. Iran has turned energy into a battlefield. So when it goes after LNG in Qatar, LNG terminals, it's really targeting Europe and it's targeting global inflation. I think, you know, Rania, for Iran, this is a battle. This is the last battle. Either they will all go down because if Iran goes down, then Hezbollah will go down and Houthis will go down, or that they actually come out of this war creating certain deterrence against Israel and the United States by making him realize that war with Iran would be costly.

Hello everyone, I'm Rania Khalek, and this is Dispatches. The war on Iran continues to intensify. Oil markets are rattled. A vital shipping corridor has been disrupted. Hundreds have been killed. The Arab Gulf states are now war zones. Meanwhile, President Trump's timeline for this war has shifted from a few days to 4 to 6 weeks to as long as it takes. The stated goals have also changed from deterrence to preemption to a regime collapse to vague promises of a better Middle East. How does this end? What exactly were Trump and Netanyahu trying to achieve? What's Tehran's game plan and how has it shifted from prior Iranian policy? Joining me now is Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins, former senior advisor at the US State Department, and author of Iran's Grand Strategy. Vali Nasr, welcome to Dispatches on Breakthrough News.

Thanks for inviting me. Good to be with you.

Well, it's a pleasure to have you on. You are so knowledgeable about everything we're going to be talking about, and I have so much I want to ask you. And I think a good place to start, you know, I don't even want to say latest developments because this is going to go up later today. And by the time it goes up, who knows what more insane things will have taken place. But, you know, we've seen decapitation strikes. We've seen expanding missile exchanges, attacks on US bases, attacks on civilian infrastructure across Iran, and now indications that, you know, the war may go on for a lot longer. From your vantage point, what is so far the real damage to Iran? Because if you listen to the American and Israeli authorities, you would think that Iran is like about to collapse.

I think to some extent the assessment is correct that there's a lot of damage done to Iran, a great deal of bombing of also urban areas. You hear from people in Tehran that they're petrified. They're taking videos of of explosions going off middle of the day, very similar to what you would expect in Beirut and is happening right now. But I think the scenario of collapse, imminent collapse of the Islamic Republic, I don't see it right now, although I don't want to say that it may not happen. But I think the Islamic Republic had prepared itself for this war. It had prepared itself for the fact that it will be bombed exactly in this manner. It had even prepared itself for decapitation. It could not prevent it from happening. Although I would say the manner in which the Supreme Leader died, to me, suggested that he knew it's coming and he wasn't trying to avoid it. He was not trying to be in a bunker exactly when we were in the window of likelihood of being attacked. And so, but he had organized the system in a way, the state in a way that it would survive without him. And can carry on without him. So the collapse of the state from the top, in other words, by decapitation, in the case of Iran does not work. And in fact, Iran also looked at the case of Hezbollah and has prepared for that. That's why they haven't named a new supreme leader yet, because they saw that immediately Nasrallah's replacement was also assassinated. So it takes a lot longer and a lot more bombing and damage to— you have to decapitate many more layers before you actually force the state to collapse from the top. And you also need— Israelis and Americans have to do a lot more from below to also force basically a situation where you end up like Libya or Syria, where the entire state collapses completely and you have mayhem. We're not there. It doesn't mean that we may not get there, but we're not there. For Iran's part, they understand this strategy. I think they've prepared for it to the best they can. They think that Israel and the United States' strategy is to knock out Iran very quickly, knock out its state, and then Israel can then mop up by aerial bombardment the way that it did with Hezbollah missiles after the killing of Nasrallah, or did with Syrian military after the collapse of Assad, you know, bomb every element of Iran's military industrial infrastructure. But Iran is not fighting to knock out Israel and the US. It's rather trying to drag them into a much longer fight. And it believes that in time, it is they who will get exhausted because their strategies depend on short and quick. That Iran's use of missiles is designed to deplete air defenses in Israel and across the Gulf. And it's a danger, I think, that actually Iran's largest attacks will come later after those air defenses have been depleted. It is also following a strategy of not fighting on the limited battlefield that Israel and and the United States defined, which is the narrow corridor between Israel and Iran, and then, you know, American ships and Iran, but actually to fight across a much larger terrain. So Iran has expanded the war deliberately to the Gulf countries, not because it sees them as adversaries or supporters of the US. The excuse is that the bases are there, but largely because it's casting a shadow of risk over the Gulf, which will be enormously impactful on the global economy, on price of energy. Iran has turned energy into a battlefield. So when it goes after LNG in Qatar, LNG terminals, it's really targeting Europe and it's targeting global inflation. So it doesn't want to fight on the turf and the battlefield that US and Israel want. It wants them to fight Iran on its battlefield. And I think this has actually perhaps confounded the situation for President Trump because he didn't expect this to be this messy and this costly and that it impacts stock prices, energy prices, and varieties of things going forward. I think, you know, Rania, for Iran, this is a battle, this is the last battle. And in fact, this might parlay even into the psychology of Hezbollah, that, you know, either they will all go down, because if Iran goes down, then Hezbollah will go down and Houthis will go down, or that they actually come out of this war creating certain deterrence against Israel and the United States by making them realize that war with Iran would be costly. And that the United States has to take deal-making with Iran much more seriously. So they are in a situation, they're in a corner, their back is to the wall, they're desperate. And that's always very dangerous when you're dealing with an adversary that is desperate and they're trying to shoot their way out of that corner. And that's their only basically way going forward.

I mean, yeah, there's so many threads I want to pull at there about what you said. But before I kind of get into asking you to elaborate on some of those points, I also did want to ask you, because yesterday we heard this from several people in messaging. Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth both refused to rule out sending US troops into Iran, which sounds wild and perhaps that's just rhetoric. But we also heard a similar kind of messaging from Israel's Benny Gantz, who said that he also, literally same words, wouldn't rule out US or Israeli boots on the ground in Iran. How seriously do you think we should take that? And let's say there is some possibility that could happen if that threshold were to be crossed. How fundamentally does that change the trajectory of this war?

Well, I think for now this is grandstanding because I think there's a frustration, particularly in Washington, that Iran is not capitulating. And I think Iran is not even accepting ceasefire now because it doesn't see it as beneficial. It doesn't think that it has exacted enough costs from the United States to actually reconsider another war with Iran. And so they are escalating rhetoric. We're going to invade you. We're going to think about regime change. The bigger waves are coming. But I think in reality, you could say that whether Hezbollah or Revolutionary Guard will actually welcome a land invasion because they are much more of a disadvantage fighting the United States on the air. Let the US come into Iran. The geography is in their favor. You know, ultimately, you know, it's a much more difficult, expensive proposition for the US. If the US thought that the missile war was going to be easy and quick, and now all of a sudden saying, oh, well, maybe it's not easy and quick, we need to put boots on the ground, then that actually is going to be even more difficult and costly for the US. That basically turns the war into something much, much bigger. And I think those kinds of threats are actually counterproductive because I think the region as well as the global economy has no confidence that this means a quick end to this fight. It means that actually you're now looking at a much, much longer fight. And all the calculations about markets, energy prices, inflation, midterm elections, everything goes up. I have a sense that President Trump is talking tough, but is actually really looking for an off-ramp at this point in time.

I mean, given what we're seeing across the region, I could imagine behind the scenes that would be what is happening. And it also seems like there's a little bit of a crack in messaging as well. We've heard almost every day you see a different justification, a different rationale by this administration. The most recent one we heard from Marco Rubio yesterday that made big, big headlines, where he basically argued that Israel was determined to strike Iran and that because the US would then inevitably be targeted in a retaliation by Iran, the Trump administration had no choice but to preemptively strike first. And I'm just curious, What do you make of that rationale and of also the shifting rationales that we've been seeing over the last 4 days?

I mean, it's a convoluted, you know, explanation that he thinks will probably sound right to many average Americans or his own Republican base. But it's actually astounding. First of all, the idea that in the middle of negotiations between Iran and the United States, Israel could just take it upon itself to attack Iran. And the United States would have no say in whether, when, and if Israel attacks Iran is already an admission that, you know, we just have no control. And secondly, basically it says the imminent threat from Iran is not an actual inherent imminent threat. The imminent threat is only because Israel is attacking them. So if that's the case, isn't it cheaper and easier that you prevent Israel from attacking Iran than going to a multibillion-dollar dangerous war? To deal with that imminent threat. So all of this tells me is that they went into this war without thinking it through, without actually having a rationale about why a war of this size at this point in time was necessary. They never explained it to the American people. They never socialized the idea. And then all of a sudden are caught in a situation that is getting out of their control and is far more complicated than what they anticipated. And now they find that they have to actually explain something to the American people after the fact. And they're coming up with all kinds of excuses. I mean, if you looked at the president's State of the Union, he talked about Iran less than 4 minutes, 3 minutes in a 1-hour and 48-minute speech, which means that he thought it's a non-issue, right? I don't need to tell American people anything. I don't need to prepare them for anything. And now all of a sudden, 59% of Americans are disapproving the war. That number is likely to go higher. The stock market opened today on March 3rd with 1.5% lower. Across the world, the stock markets are falling and the price of gas is going to go up. Inflation is going to go up. He's looking at midterm elections. And so, you know, and this is exactly what Iran is looking to do. Iran doesn't need to deliver a knockout punch to the US. Iran can only, can very easily just create a complicated situation for President Trump domestically. And then at some point, the president is likely to offer something substantial to Iran in order to stop the war.

Yeah, well, speaking of the misreadings of Iran, the lack of preparation by this administration, There was this New York Times report that was sort of giving us an inside view. I'm sure you probably saw it about the Trump administration and the floating of various scenarios of what their options were. And, you know, specifically if Ayatollah Khamenei were killed, one of the more supposedly pragmatic options that the CIA had kind of given to Trump was that perhaps an IRGC faction might take power and then potentially strike a deal with Washington provided their economic interests weren't disrupted. And, you know, I don't know, maybe that is a serious strategy. You know, you're the Iran expert here, but is that a serious strategy or does that perhaps reflect the maybe fundamental misunderstanding of the IRGC by this administration?

I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding. But also I would add to it, we're in a space in Washington where the president is not challenged. And I'm not sure that, you know, the scenarios he's given is actually the scenarios that truly are diverse enough. In other words, nobody says that there is a scenario here that this will be a catastrophic war because he doesn't want to hear that. And so you're giving him versions that all sound like this could end up being nice. This can end up being the right one because, you know, that scenario may be realistic. But then in a normal circumstance, you would counterbalance it with a scenario that says a really nasty side of IRGC may take over. And Iran may become much, much worse, or we may end up in a very long war. Why I think that scenario is wrong, because people think about IRGC like they think about other militaries around the world. And IRGC is not that. This is an organization that was born in the revolution, that its leadership has been handpicked by Ali Khamenei, that the people who are controlling IRGC are committed to the idea of resistance, to Moghabama. Many of the younger commanders that are now rising are veterans of the Syria war, not even the Iran-Iraq war. And they have a very— yes, they are nationalistic and they are revolutionary in that sense. And also, these campaigns of decapitation you have to see what's the psychological impact on them. You would say that it turns them, you know, that makes them petrified and they look for a deal. Well, that hasn't worked with the Hezbollah either, right? You know, much closer that mindset isn't there that because Nasrallah was killed, because all of the commanders were killed, that now somehow they're going to become behave like Ahmad Shahra does. They're going to wear a tie and come out and shake hands. It's not happening. So you're not actually breaking them down that way. And secondly, actually, all the generals that Israel keeps killing are the more pragmatic generals. People who are replacing them are the more nasty ones. And even I would say that even about Khamenei. I mean, Khamenei was committed to Mughabama, would not talk to the US, followed the strategy that has ended up Iran being here. But he also had certain cautions. Like he decided that he wasn't going to respond to Haniyeh's killing in Iran with something much bigger. And there was criticism of him in Iran, not specified by naming him. But after the June war, it was openly said by right-wing Iranian commentators that the mistake was that we didn't draw blood when Soleimani was killed. And we didn't act much more aggressively when Haniyeh was killed and after Nasrallah was killed. You know, they were criticizing Khamenei with showing certain degree of restraint. Now, you would say that the new order that's taking over is no longer, might act much more viciously. I mean, the current, the new revolution commander of the Revolutionary Guard that has now taken over is far more hardline than the one who was killed in Khamenei's office. A few days ago. So if this is the strategy of trying to, you know, create space for a regime transition, I'm not sure the US is necessarily executing it in the right way. And also part of the other part of the problem is that the US may want regime transition. I'm not sure its partner wants regime transition. His partner wants what's happening to Hezbollah, a complete breakdown of the organization politically, but also militarily. It wants Iran to be either a broken state or a non-entity in the region for decades and have absolutely no military capability. And so they're not looking for a faction to take over and for the Islamic Republic to to sort of become more pragmatic moving forward. So I think that's also part of the problem. I do think that, you know, when the war stops, there is a possibility for the Islamic Republic to go in a different direction. After all, the leader that had been in charge for 36 years and his imprint is on this system, on this confrontation with America, on moghabama, on resistance, With him gone, of course, the next leader may take Iran in a different direction. But that all depends on how this war ends. And also what's on the table. I mean, even in Lebanon, you could see, yes, there are internal debates within Hezbollah. But it also, a lot falls on the United States and Israel about how they influence those debates within Hezbollah. You're going to continuously pound them. And there's no exit strategy, then, you know, they're going to basically remain in that mode. So, you know, I think these kinds of scenarios ended up actually encouraging the war, but they were not real challenges to the president to think through the decision.

Yeah, it sounds like there is some daylight in that case between what the Israelis and what the Americans actually want to see as like an end goal here. When you talk about their partner, of course, you mean the Israelis wanting to see a destabilized, collapsed Iran that's like broken up into different zones, whereas the Americans would perhaps like some sort of transition, even though they don't really seem to understand how to get there. But I do want to talk to you a bit about Iran's shifting strategy, which you've mentioned a few times in this conversation. And I want to ask you about Iran's shift towards what's called this decentralized mosaic defense strategy, which is this kind of like sustained lower volume attacks that don't need to get like permission. But you can actually explain to our audience what exactly that means. And also, if you could also explain what that shift tells us about Iran today.

Well, I mean, the Islamic Republic from the get-go was not built to be popular. It was built to survive. And in its first year, large number of its leaders were assassinated or were killed in bombing attacks. As the revolution was settling down. And so over time, the Islamic Republic actually grew as a complicated multi-nodal state where ultimately the authority lies with the Supreme Leader or the Vali Nasr under Khomeini. But operationally, it is very decentralized. There's a lot of decision-making is made by different factions or different institutions. And after the June, we saw the result of that in the June war when Israel killed 30 Revolutionary Guard commanders and the Revolutionary Guards continued fighting. And after the June war, this was done even more. Khamenei and the guards and the government, everybody created multiple redundancies and delegated operational decision-making further down and across the system. So that the death or the elimination of one person does not paralyze the system. And in that sense, it's very, very different from Arab dictatorships, which are highly dependent on one person, right? And decapitation becomes, you know, a paralyzing moment. We saw Khamenei died, the system is working and is moving forward. There's no sort of, we're going to stop. And I think the way it's working with the Revolutionary Guards is that the goals of the war are there. They all know the strategy. They all know what they need to do, and they don't need to meet because then they could be decapitated, is that different field commanders are basically in charge of carrying out what are the protocols and what are the goals. And similarly, within the civilian structure inside. And so the decision is, was that when we, when the war starts, we're going to take it to global energy and we're going to take— we're going to cast a shadow of risk on the Gulf, which then impacts a much broader set of global energy. In other words, hitting Amazon AWS data centers impacts Silicon Valley, impacts all the stocks on the stock market which are investing in NVIDIA and data chips and AI, etc., that LNG will impact Europe, that hitting refineries will impact oil prices. But you don't need to give the commanders okay for every target, right? So you have these units that are basically carrying out the war on their own at much lower levels. And taking them out is not easy from the air because they're not as recognizable So the only thing the Israelis and Americans now focus on is not decapitation. I think has gone as far as it can go. Yes, you can keep killing. You can kill Larijani. You can kill Ghalibaf. You can kill other people. But I don't think this actually will really change things. Is that to actually try to hit missile launchers and production facilities and, you know, Iran's subterranean missile cities, as they call it, where they have stockpiles of missiles. But then the question is, will they identify all of them? Will they identify, be able to take them all out? And if Iran has prepared for that as well, it means that, you know, this is going to take a lot longer.

Yeah, it is interesting. You said in a recent interview that most countries, if you had killed, you know, 30 top commanders, wouldn't be able to sustain a war effort, whereas we're watching Iran have— they have a very different threshold for the survival of their system, which we're witnessing right now. And I mean, think, you know, even before we started recording, I saw news breaking that the Israelis had struck the Supreme Council gathering where the Iranians were meeting to select a new supreme leader. I mean, I don't know. You know, sometimes the Israelis claim things that aren't true. That could or could not have happened. But it seems like if the pattern holds, that won't impact Iran's ability to continue this war either?

Well, at some point it will. I don't want to say that there is no tipping point here. There is, but it's much more than you would have for other countries. You would have thought that if you killed Saddam Hussein or you took out Bashar Assad or you killed Gaddafi, the whole system collapses. That's not the case in Iran because Iran has been designed to avoid that exact scenario. No, I would take it that Israel is trying to do as much decapitation as possible to try to achieve that point. And partly it's because they're already locked into that strategy. It's the strategy that worked with Hezbollah. It's the strategy during the June war. And it's the strategy right now as well. So they're going to persist in doing that. But exactly because they are persisting in it, Iranians are also reacting to it by further and further dispersing their ability to be impacted by the ability of Israel to impact Iran and give it a decisive blow very quickly.

And, you know, this is the first time we've seen Iran, you know, having to like fight a war on its own soil. I mean, obviously last year, the 12-day war as well. But, you know, for years, Iran relied on this forward defense doctrine where they have these partners like Hezbollah, like the Iraqi faction, like Ansar Allah in Yemen, that helps keep the battlefield away from its own territory. But now that that war has come directly to Iran, I'm just curious your thoughts on it. Well, especially now that Hezbollah's basically entered this war and, you know, the Houthis say that they will, the Iraqi factions are signaling, you know, that they're ready. But realistically speaking, you know, these groups can't do what Iran can do itself. They don't have the weapons that Iran— they're not actual states like Iran is. And Iran does appear to be handling this confrontation so far. I think it's exceeded expectations by what most people would have thought was possible. But all that's to say, do you think this war marks an end to that need for forward defense?

I think forward defense was de facto over for Iran in April of 2024. 'Cause when Israel hit Iran's consulate in Damascus, Iran made a decision that Hezbollah would not respond. Maybe Hezbollah's calculation was that the Lebanese population and even the Shia population would not support Hezbollah starting a war with Israel at that point, or that Iran ultimately calculated that it now had to respond to Israel directly. So once it went down that path, it meant that the forward defense was no longer defense. It no longer was presenting Iran with options to restrain Israel. It also showed that Israel was no longer restrained by fear of Hezbollah or Hamas when it hit the consulate. And then when Hezbollah collapsed with the pager attack and then with the decapitation, Then I think Iran understood that you cannot reconstitute Hezbollah to what it was, right? In other words, and also even if you did, that strategy was no longer going to restrain the Israel that came out of the Gaza War, super confident in its abilities, no longer willing to be restrained, willing to take many more risks in order to achieve its security goals. And so I don't think Iran thinks that it can go back to where it was when it controlled Syria and Lebanon, and that Israel actually would be restrained in its desire to attack Iran by fear of what those forces could do to Israel. So Iran is now looking for deterrence in other things. It's actually primarily its missiles, and then it's its ability to essentially inflict pain on the global economy. And that's why it's not giving much consideration to what the Gulf states think about this. You know, in other words, this is not about, you know, animosity towards the Gulf states. It's a strategy of survival in which the only way they think they can get the United States to see deterrence in attacking Iran in the future, that's if they survive this war, is by considering the economic costs of the war. Iran cannot inflict direct economic costs on the United States by attacking it. But it can inflict economic cost on the US by, by putting its finger on the security of the Gulf, right?

And so I'm— so I actually want to ask you a question with regard to the Gulf, because I've heard a few of the more sort of bombastic, um, hawkish voices, uh, in Washington, people like Lindsey Graham, talking about this potential for the Arab Gulf states to actually join in a coalition with the US to, to, you know, attack Iran directly because, because they're being attacked by Iran's missiles right now. And he actually put it in terms of to help the US liberate Iran. But, you know, all that's to say, I'm curious what your reaction is to this idea we're hearing from voices like that about the Arab Gulf states potentially getting involved. Because, you know, I understand, as you've, as you've laid out, Iran's strategy with the Gulf states and targeting them. But at the same time, it is a bit of a gamble, right? Because, you know, they could potentially enter into something more directly in this. I'm not sure how possible it is, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

It would be a huge gamble. I mean, first of all, what Lindsey Graham is imagining is a coalition of willing, like when we went to Iraq, where most of the Arab countries who participated were just symbolic. I mean, in reality, Israel and the United States don't need any more jet fighters. Or any more missiles to attack Iran. It's not like the Gulf countries or Europe will bring a kind of additional necessary required military firepower. But if the Gulf countries come in, I think the Houthis will definitely come in. And then they would have to fight on two fronts, not just against Iran, but actually against the Houthis. The second issue is that you know, if they come in, they better hope that this regime goes. Because otherwise, whatever scenario remains, the shadow of risk that Iran has put on the Gulf will not go away. I mean, what we're seeing is $10,000 drones are shutting down multi-trillion-dollar economies. Right? And so, and I don't think, contrary to Senator Graham's bravado, that the Gulf has any confidence in that the US knows what it's doing and where this is going, or that the US is actually committed to defending them in the future when the war is over, or that the US actually is able to deal with the problem that is created. Right? It's one thing if the US would say that I'm taking Tehran tomorrow and I'm just going to finish this, right? There's never going to be a threat there. The risk is going to go back to zero. That they— the US cannot promise. So US is only promising them greater instability. Either the Islamic Republic survives and is going to be a menace, or Iran is going to collapse into being a much larger version of Syria and Libya, which is also a menace, which means that the shadow of risk stays there. And so I think the Gulf is caught between a stone and a hard place. They don't like what Iran is doing. They're greatly threatened by it. They would like to react to it, but their options are not there. Even if their heart is with US and Israel, I think the choice they make if they enter would be a huge gamble. As I said, they have to gamble on the fact that the Islamic Republic will fall. Not into chaos, but into another order. In other words, America and Israel are able to deliver order in the short time period.

You know, I woke up this morning and one of the first things I saw was this announcement by the State Department saying American citizens living in the following countries should leave immediately. And it was a list of 14 countries across the Middle East. And it's just, I mean, I think at this point maybe we've become a little bit numb to just how insane this has gotten. But I mean, this is completely unprecedented. It will reshape the region, I think, forever. Whatever it looks like after this, no one's really sure. And then you see, I saw a report, I think I saw you sharing it earlier, that suggests that US troops are being told that this war is about You know, or they're being told something about the apocalypse or bringing on Armageddon, just some really loony, crazy stuff. And I've tried so hard for the past couple of months to understand where this administration is coming from. What is the logic behind all these decisions? Where are they going? And I don't know. I mean, I could be wrong here, but it just seems like there's complete short-sightedness. There's no real goal in the distance. And they're just going on idiocy and lunacy. I'm not— maybe there's something I'm missing, but do you see— can you make sense of what the Trump administration is doing right now? What is it that they want ultimately out of the situation they've created in this region?

I mean, first of all, I wouldn't say administration or the US government. It's only one man.

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, this depends on what's going on in his head. Yes. Okay. This Armageddon call is like the version of pep rally by the Secretary of Defense. I mean, he thinks like he's making this into a historic moment for himself and for the US based on, you know, his own beliefs and ideas. I think the decision to evacuate the embassies is because they're afraid of a Kabul scenario or a Benghazi scenario. And so they're trying to take their embassies out of harm's way, or people in the embassies. But all of it telegraphs to the region that the US has bitten more than it can chew. And it wasn't prepared for this outcome. And therefore, it really doesn't know where things are going. It's not a vote of confidence in the US's ability to defend the region and defend its own people and actually have a plan that gives the region a sense of calm and security. So it's going to aggravate all of the insecurity in the region and the insecurity in the global markets. That the US would send a message like this. I think, you know, the president went into this war based on, I think, false assumptions that he had about it being easy and quick. That it's a historic moment for him, that he's gonna be the president who's going to solve the Iran problem that has nagged the United States and the Middle East for 47 years. That, you know, if either the Iranians come to the table in Geneva, don't bicker about details, just sign a blank sheet of paper of surrender, capitulate, as Steve Witkoff said, or that we're going to get it through war and the war is going to be easy. I'm going to kill the Supreme Leader. And then there's going to be a different leadership there who's going to be willing to sign whatever I put in front of them. And then the Iran problem is done with very quickly. And now he's all of a sudden realizing that there are layers and layers of complexity and danger here. That he never thought about. And actually his administration does not have the capacity or the expertise to deal with or to actually present him with a realistic scenario, right? I mean, the only person who's capable of doing that, I think, is either his vice president or his secretary of state. But both of them have also survived not by challenging him, but by basically following the line. And so I think he's finding himself now in a mess of his own making that very soon he has to explain to the American people, why did he start this war? Why was there an urgent threat that is actually credible more than saying that we will start, Israel will start a war that will create the threat and therefore we need to go to war. I mean, that's not credible. And he has talked about urgent Iranian threat, or old grievances like they took hostages. That's all true, but why now? Right? Why February was the month where you needed to do this? Right? And so I think, you know, Trump's calculation from here on is going to be highly personal as he's confronting this. So I wouldn't look for policy or logic here. Because there was no policy or logic other than his desire to go to war, and obviously being egged to go to war by Bibi Netanyahu. But Israel's objectives are very clear. And it's supported by across the political spectrum in Israel. They're longstanding. They have convinced their own people, their own media about what those objectives are. And they have been extremely good at basically convincing Washington to give them the bandwidth and support militarily to actually execute their strategy. So, but Washington decided to go to this war on a whim, not as an outcome of a process. And so I wouldn't look for a clear direction here. I think they're reacting to events which they didn't anticipate. So they've already lost control of how this war goes forward.

And so just as we wrap here, I guess what I'd love to end on is, you know, okay, so Iran is not going to accept any kind of ceasefire that doesn't, you know, have raised the cost for the US and reestablish— I think they're looking also not just to survive, but reestablish some sort of deterrent so that this doesn't happen again in like 6 months or in a year. And then you've got the US, which, you know, or Trump, we shouldn't be saying, I guess Trump at this point, who really can't politically afford to appear to back down without some sort of, I don't know, victory narrative or something, something that makes him look good. And then Israel obviously is committed to, you know, ongoing escalation for the foreseeable future. So where does that leave us? How does this end? Is there any space for an off-ramp or is that just in the garbage at this point?

Well, I think the president already wants an off-ramp. I think Iran is not offering it. I think President Trump is perfectly capable of claiming victory over anything at any point in time. And maybe it will be believable, will not, but I don't think he's actually really hindered by that. And he can always claim victory in the fact that he killed the Supreme Leader. He can always claim that he obliterated Iran's missile program, that he basically— he can claim many different things when he decides to do that. I don't know when the off-ramp is, but I would look First, for signs of much more light between Iran and Israel— sorry, between US and Israel. Because Israel's agenda is for a longer war in which they, with the support of the United States and with participation of the United States, they would achieve all of their war goals, which is either to force the collapse of the Islamic Republic or to seriously downsize it, to remove Iran as a credible regional player. and also to take away its nuts and bolts of its missile program and essentially undermine or damage or eradicate Iran's military-industrial complex, or at least significantly downgrade it. The US, I think, may not be willing to go that far, regardless of what it says. So at some point, this could end up being a much more open fissure between the desire to keep the war going and Trump's desire to see an end. And then when that becomes much more real, I think then the US will really look for an off-ramp with Iran. And it's going to look to these very Gulf states and Turkey and maybe other international actors to actually intercede with Iran and persuade it to lay down its weapons. But then he will have another problem, which is a trust problem. Problem, which is, would Iran actually trust— how would Iran trust the United States, right? And that's a challenge that he would have at that point.

Well, Vali Nasr, I want to thank you for joining me to break all this down. I really, really appreciate your analysis, and hopefully we can get you back on at some point in the future.