How Iran became Trump's 'Operation Epic Folly'

0:00A.B.C. Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. Just 40 years ago, racism was legal in South Africa. You were a non-person, you were non-white. I'm Sisson Kim Simong. My dad was a freedom fighter against apartheid, and I grew up as part of a global movement to end that injustice. But I don't know much about what Australians did, so join me as I meet the Aussies who took a stand and helped change world history. A.B.C. Rewind Boycott. Search for A.B.C. Rewind on A.B.C. Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. So once you've started one, how do you end a war in the Middle East? And how seriously, Latika, should we take those predictions that the war will be over in a matter of weeks, if not days? And when the smoke clears, what will have been achieved? And how will the whole region be altered? I'm Geraldine Dune. I'm Latika Burke. This episode, global roaming, brings in the big guns

1:01to talk conflict resolution. My or my or Geraldine this weekend, I thought was another extraordinary even for Trump negotiating tactics laid on the table. Essentially going back to these European allies that he has been producing and denigrating and insulting their contributions in Afghanistan and now saying, well, it's your job to help us reopen the straight of homeless. Astounding. Absolutely astounding. There's no shame. Absolutely none. Look, I've also been looking, you know, I waited to see the new leader, Harmony. But we haven't seen him yet, Geraldine. Have we? No, that he could be, well, is he alive? Is the question I have? Yes, and Iran has now confirmed that Israel killed Ali Larajani.

2:04Now, he was the most senior political figure still standing. So his death is another crippling blow to the regime's leadership. And where is Mustafa Harmony in the midst of all of this? And he issued a statement which was read by somebody else, someone saying he's disfigured whether he was injured in a burn incident on what we're not quite sure. I've also been listening to people like the very eminent Iranian commentator Ali Ansari. He's at St Andrews University and he said on a podcast recently, there'll be no regime change in Iran until the bombs stop. That in fact, while bombs are going, you can't, to come out on the streets or to stand up, you know, to take on your colleagues, is akin to treason and they won't do it. But when the bombs stop, the bombs from Israel and the US. You know, that's really underlying something that I think has happened without us fully noticing. We have gone from looking at the long-term aims and goals for a future Iran.

3:04Remember the first day, Donald Trump was out there saying, go out on the streets. This is your once-in-a-generation lifetime moment to seize control and take back your country, what an inspiring message. But now, if you think about it two weeks and on, what do we have? We have a short-term crisis. We have an energy crunch. We have a military operation. We have a coalition that needs to be assembled to reopen the state of hormones. And we're not really talking about what a future Iran looks like. In fact, I would argue Geraldine. It's now more probable that the regime digs in and has hardened and I guess solidified, certainly defined. And it is not really giving so many public indications, at least, yes, that it will bow down or that it's crumbling. So I think we've now got two different tracks happening in this war. Yes, look, I think there is nothing at the moment that suggests that they're going to crumble, although Trump again says that they are actually quietly asking for some form of ceasefire.

4:04Now, I just don't know whether to believe that. And that's exactly the question that we put to our guests. And we're so pleased to be able to welcome Richard Haas. He is really a veteran diplomat. He's President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. He's a very experienced operator in this whole arena. He chaired multi-party negotiations in Northern Ireland, ahead of the storm on agreement. He was an advisor to Colin Powell in the lead up to the Iraq war. He is a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. So I think there are a few more experienced voices in international relations in the United States. And we're very pleased he found the time to speak to us. Here he is now. Richard Haas, welcome to Global Roaming. Great to be with you. Have a world away. Yes, indeed. Look, President Trump has named this campaign against Iran epic fury. You have called it in some of your writing, epic folly. Why so? Look, don't get me wrong here.

5:05Iran has been and still is a threat to the interests of the United States, the region, the world, including her country. I just thought that the timing of this war was such that it didn't have to happen now. There was nothing new about the threat that was constituted by Iran to justify a war at this time. And it seems to me the way we've gone about it has also created as many problems as it's solved. But a lot of the assumptions that seems to have governed the American policy have been shown to have been wrong to introduce or initiate a war of choice to use my favorite phrase. I would say you have a very high standards in order to justify it. And I would simply say those standards weren't met. Yes, because you do write that wars of choice per se are not a mistake. But they do put great pressure on leaders to demonstrate results that justify the inevitable costs. Now, do you judge that Trump is satisfying that test? No, again, I didn't see any new threat from Iran that was such against America's vital national interest.

6:11Second of all, we had other means. You had other policy instruments. If the goal was regime change, I would have said then, okay, well, we've got time and what we should do is use economic sanctions. You had a very weak economy in Iran. Let's, if you will, make it weaker. If your goal was to do something about the nuclear program, to place a ceiling on it with adequate inspections alike, I thought diplomacy probably had the best chance of accomplishing that. But we didn't go down that path. We didn't give negotiations a real chance. They were rushed. I've actually joined the contrast with what seems to be the unlimited patience and compromise we've shown George Russia. And it's war with Ukraine contrasted with this, where we showed very little compromise and we seem to be in a hurry. And again, if our goal is regime change, it was not something that the opposition was ready for. They weren't organized. They weren't putting forward an attractive, clear agenda. It's not the sort of thing that military force can trigger.

7:11So no, I don't think the president has, has met the criteria. And it's one of the reasons that he's finding domestically and internationally. The United States at the moment is not getting great support. And in terms of comparing it to other follies reaching back, because clearly you're reaching into history. That is what you do. Where would you place it? Well, what obviously comes to mind is the last big war of choice, the United States pursued in the Middle East, which was Iraq in 2003. And again, there was no new threat that was posed. We went to a war for ambitious goals. And what we learned is, again, it's hard to realize them. It's hard to accomplish ambitious goals with military force when your goals involve remaking a society. But if I look at the history of wars of choice from Vietnam to several other parts of what we did in Afghanistan would qualify, it makes you modest, particularly about changing another society.

8:13And it makes you modest about, really, careful about what military force can accomplish as opposed to other instruments of national security. Well, obviously, at least that's what it seems, I think, to me and a lot of others. It was Israel that was deciding that they were not thinking the way you're thinking. They thought this was the time. And clearly, President Trump sort of must have decided, do you agree, that they had to be supported? Clearly, that was part of it. It's always hard to deconstruct. There may have been motives of opportunity. When we learned that the Iranian leadership was co-located. The Israeli concern, interestingly enough, was not nuclear weapons. The Iranian nuclear program had been dramatically set back in last spring in June. I think the Israeli concern right now was their ballistic missile force. But again, just because Israel had determined that a war now made sense, that's their prerogative. It's our prerogative out of the United States to make our own determination.

9:15And it wasn't clear to me that it satisfied the requirements for a war choice at this time. We've disagreed with Israel in the past. They've got different priorities. They've got a different geographical reality than we do. So just because they were pressing for this, again, if I had been advising the President, I would have said to push back and perhaps look to other ways of addressing their concerns. I mean, Richard, that is a point which Trump has addressed head on by saying they've been the Trump team, saying they've been dealing with the Iranians for years. And they believe they've been led down the garden path and the intent to getting nuclear weapons has always been as genuine. Tomorrow, as it was, yes, as it was 10 years ago. So how real is diplomacy and how real was that as an option? The fact that, or the interpretation, judgment that Iran wants a bomb is realistic. You don't enrich large amounts of uranium to 60% for the purpose of turning on lights in downtown Tehran.

10:15So once you'd have no illusions about what the Iranians were up to, that said they hadn't crossed certain thresholds. Militarially, we had taken things about as far as we could last June. We had set back the Iranian program, but they still had large amounts of enriched uranium. And what we didn't know is what we didn't know. What might they have in the way of centrifuges or additional nuclear material? And obviously scientists have expertise and knowledge in their brain. So you can't destroy what you can't identify or locate. And what's interesting, here we are several weeks into the war, and what hasn't the United States done? We haven't gone after the nuclear material. So it's hard for me to say that the purpose of this war was to finish the job on the nuclear side of things. Plus, depending upon who you listen to, that it seems as if the negotiations on the nuclear had some potential promise.

11:15There were only a couple of exchanges, and suddenly the U.S. side, messers with Coffin Kushner, seemed to get awfully impatient. It wasn't clear to me that was warranted. And since there was no new immediate threat from Iran, if I had been advising the President, I would have said, let this play out. Let's see what we can accomplish with negotiations in terms of who controls enriched material, in terms of the frequency and depth of the inspections, and so forth. So we may have reached a point where we would have had reason to give up an inspections. I don't think, if we're a couple of exchanges, we were close to that. And again, there was no need to act now. It wasn't as though we were in possession of some new intelligence would say, you have to act at the beginning of a, or March, or that ship will have sailed. If that had been the case, that's a different conversation. But that was not the case here. We had discretion, and we chose not to exercise it. But what wasn't the intelligence that the Israelis had,

12:17that the leadership were meeting at this one point, at one point in time, and it was this prime, maybe never in a lifetime, again, opportunity to wipe them all out. There was an opportunity to attack a large number of Iranian leaders. But my reaction to that would be two things. What makes you think that to kill 10, 20, 30 Iranian leaders is, gets rid of the leadership? This is a political system that since 1979 has been heavily institutionalized. In the political side, the clerical side, and the military side, they'd also had put into place succession plans. So I thought it showed a real misunderstanding of the nature of Iranian leadership that there was what's called a decapitation. Option plus, if you thought it through, you said, how are we sure that if we kill 10 or 20 or 30 Iranian leaders, what follows will be more willing to meet our requirements. And what we're seeing is perhaps just the opposite.

13:18We're seeing a more defiant Iran, and an Iran that's interested in revenge and so forth. So you can have military operations that, in the narrow sense, are quote-unquote successful. But in the larger sense, when you take a step back fail, and that would be what I would argue has occurred in this instance. But isn't it surely too soon to pass that sort of verdict just yet? Like, do you believe Trump, for instance, when he says that the Iranians are making overtures for some sort of ceasefire? Now, Arasabachi, they're very elegant. Foreign Minister says, no, we're not. But I mean, are you detecting at all that there might be, that the Iranians might be a bit exhausted and do want some sort of off-front themselves? Well, two things. One, I can make that argument. They need to consolidate their new political leadership and the economy's a mess. It was a mess before this war, and now this war has compounded it. So in the long run, the Iranians do need a,

14:20they need time and space to not just repair, but really rebuild. And otherwise, they're going to face a future that is darker and darker, and they're going to lose more and more popular support. So there's that. Now, what they've articulated publicly has been extraordinarily demanding. Things like reparations, no American presence in the region, and so forth. So that's not going to happen. But this is Iran. So, you know, I've negotiated with Iran in my career. I would assume these are opening positions, to some extent, out there for public consumption and regional consumption. So my view would be to take them up on it and say. So what could they offer? What could Iran offer by it that would be, quote, reasonable? Oh, what the obvious thing is a ceasefire. It would be the reopening of the straights, the straights of the straight of Hormuz to traffic. And it would be accepting some kind of a ceiling that could be verified on its nuclear program. Now, those are our requirements. And then the interesting question is,

15:21what are we prepared to offer up to get to those positions? And it would obviously be a ceasefire. Might be sanctions relief. I think would have to be, would have to be part of it. We're not going to, we're not going to agree to vacate the region. And so forth. And the question is, is there a potential negotiation there? We have an incentive because of the economic repercussions of the war. Iran potentially has an incentive not to continue to get pounded. They have an incentive to again consolidate their political authority to get on with their economy. I'm not saying it would work. The alternative is continuing the war and the problem we continue in the war is I think we're a little bit up against diminishing returns. We're running out of military targets to justify the cost. And the efforts, and I simply don't think that by continuing to bomb we're either going to get around to capitulate and accept whatever terms we want. Or I don't think we're going to get closer to regime change.

16:21What in of those scenarios would Israel accept? Aren't there two different wars going on here? It's a good point, but at the end of the day, I believe Israel would accept what the United States wanted. I do not believe that PB Netanyahu who is running for, you know, he's got a facing an election this year. A big part of his political appeal is that he has forged this special relationship with Donald Trump in the United States. I doubt he is going to forfeit that or jeopardize that on the run up to the Israeli elections. The other thing, you know, the old line about Richard Nixon when he was president that only Richard Nixon could go to China to communist China because only Richard Nixon didn't have Richard Nixon to worry about. I would say that is true of Donald Trump. There's no one in American politics, certainly not in the Democratic Party who's going to outflank Donald Trump on this issue. He is safe politically. I did hear a rare admiral Mark Montgomery, very interesting conversation he had suggesting that if the Straits of Hormuz remained in effectively Iranian hands,

17:23the Iranians would claim they had won the war. And the Gulf would believe them. The Gulf would say, my gosh, look, what's happened? And that in effect, the US, the one thing the US and Trump cannot stand is leaving that Straits with all the implications for traffic and so on and so forth and, you know, oil transport of goods. Now, do you agree with that? And I wonder if this is behind the sending of these 2,500 Navy SEALs I think that we've heard of that no one quite knows what they're doing. I do agree with that because that would give Iran enormous leverage. Again, our two objectives at this point have to be to open the straight of Hormuz to a free traffic and to place a ceiling on the nuclear program that's meaningful. So the question is, you know, how do you open the Straits? Well, it's very difficult to cause Iran through minds, through drones, through missiles and the likes, through speedboats even loaded with explosives. They can create an uncertain environment where no one will ensure cargo ships or tankers.

18:30So the question is, how do you do it? There's the main idea out there, which I'm not persuaded as viable, is that there would be military escorts. And the problem is that it would put military vessels at great risk. The straight is only... I've drones in particular. Yeah, talking about 2021 mile wide. By and large, the United States has historically resisted putting its military vessels in their crews in these narrow situations. Because they're vulnerable again to swarms of boats or drones or what have you. I'm beginning to think of other ways we could do it. One obvious question to think about is right now Iran is the only country using the straight as a shipping channel. And it's sending out oil in the question is whether they should be permitted to do that. So I think we've got to think about how we put pressure on Iran. So that's a negotiating plan, isn't it? Or something you would conceivably do if Iran would agree. We can't allow this situation to continue given the economic costs and to give Iran that kind of leverage.

19:35They can't be allowed that kind of a position. And the reason, by the way, it would be unacceptable to their neighbors as well. Richard, what do you make of the damage this is doing again to NATO and to the relationship with European allies? It's a fair question. I think the damage so far has been that the United States has acted unilaterally without consulting its allies. And they are affected by it. They are, if you will, mutilated the gear to some extent. They are paying an economic price for what we've done. I also think they're very unhappy over the fact that we've used sanctions against Russia. Russia has gained through higher oil prices. And a lot of weapons systems, particularly anti-missile systems, that could have gone to Ukraine and principle are being used here. So there's a set, it reinforces the idea that Europe doesn't count for much in American foreign policy, which one could be forgiven for thinking. If you look at what we've done in the national security strategy and the tariffs and all that.

20:37So now the president is a challenger to help deal with this question of providing some mechanism for shepherding tankers and so forth. And what I would do if I were the Europeans, what I hope they do is join that conversation and talk to him about what exactly it would be. How are their interests protected? What should they? Two reasons. The state of Hormuz is open. They are paying an enormous economic price for the moment. They're heavily dependent on the region's energy resources, oil and gas. Second of all, they have a stake in their relationship with the United States. I'm not arguing that we've acted fairly or reasonably in every instance, as you sense. I'm not arguing that. And they also have to ask themselves, what could we get for it? Imagine they said to the president of the United States, we'd be willing to do this. We'd need a return, maybe with Ukraine or with Russia. So that's an interesting conversation. What do you make of the whole discussion around Carg Island, which is that installation at the array where the Iranians main oil exporting installation is?

21:41Now again, Trump has been very interesting about this, sort of saying that I don't want to destroy it, which a lot of people have said that would really send them back to the Stone Age, if you know what I mean. If Iranians, because they have so dependent, but I mean, could he occupy that? And again, I wonder about the seals and use that as an negotiating ploy. The danger of that of either going beyond what we've done, whether it's by attacking energy installations or using other forces to occupy, as I believe it risks Iran going after the energy installations of all of its neighbors. There has been up to now a degree of implicit or tacit restraint. And I do not want to see Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Bahrain and Kuwait gutter and all of them essentially potentially targets. So right now, as bad as this war has been, one of the lessons of the Middle East situations can always get worse. And I don't want to, I don't want to sit in motion, a chain of events where Iran feels there's no downside if it were to escalate.

22:45So that's why I would be extraordinarily careful to doing anything that put the Iranian oil and gas permanently oil facilities at risk. You wrote earlier this year, a stable world order is a rare thing. It usually comes after a great convulsion, but chaos and calamity are not inevitable in moving to a new world order. So where are we now? Well, it's clear where we've come from than where we're going. We had a world order that lasted for four decades during the Cold War. There was certain deterrence. There were certain rules of the road, highly structured bipolar, two centers of decision making world. Then we've now had about what three and a half decades of this post Cold War world with the United States, enjoyed a great degree of what we, we academics, political scientists would call primacy. That primacy though is eroding either because of the rise of others and the proliferation of capabilities, but also because of choices, the United States is made.

23:50Choices to focus on the Western hemisphere more to move back from international institutions to introduce questions about its alliances. So I think we're at an extraordinarily tricky, uncertain moment in history where the potential, I think, for instability is going up. And I can imagine a world of greater conflict, a world of greater proliferation and so forth. So yeah, so in that sense, I'm worried about where we're moving because it seems to me we're moving away from certainly from order. And it's not, I can imagine new ones, not necessarily ones I like, spheres of influence where China has a large say in its part of the world, Russia and Europe. I see enormous downsides there, but I think the bottom line is the United States is introduced a significant unpredictability into the world in ways that I worry how this potentially plays out. I've only been a year of this administration and previous administrations to be fair also introduced unpredictability in Afghanistan, what Obama did in Syria and so forth.

24:58So it's not all on Mr. Trump, but I do think the cumulative effect of everything from where we perhaps overreached in Iraq, where we did too little and some other places. And now the modus operandi of this administration has introduced enormous uncertainty into the world. Thank you very much indeed, Richard, lovely to have you join us. Thanks for having me. Geraldine, I think worry, and I don't want to put a negative or a downer on the wonderful global roaming that we all do, but I do think worry is maybe the word of 2026. I'm in full agreement with Richard House there. I worry deeply about the long-term damage, not just the Trump administration, but this latest war is causing two alliances and the shape of the world going forward long after Trump has vacated the White House. Look, I think we can all worry. I just think there's so much worry around the population. I think there's a sort of almost a communal depression underway, which I don't think is a good thing.

26:02I really don't think it's a good thing. I mean, ironically, he, in his writing, says that, in fact, you can manage change in a way, and he was particularly in his writing, talks about a similar time at the end of the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, when the whole of Europe had been completely convulsed. And then they had to come together, and they set us, something called the concept of Europe, this major sort of multilateral arrangement that operated more or less until World War I, almost a hundred years later. So look, I suppose I think that it's very difficult with Trump. He's so capricious to imagine that he is certainly the, he could possibly preside over anything systematic. I do wonder where the Marco Rubio could his secretary of state. I think I'm still keeping an open mind on where this all goes in this particular war and reporting wars over the years. I think you've got to be very sort of humble in the face of wars. They're extremely volatile things. I'm still watching, but I thought he was very interesting in terms of try.

27:08You know, it's interesting to hear those sort of, I suppose mature overview American voices. I was struck by the almost brutal real politic of when I asked him that question about Europe and how they should respond, and it was pretty automatic. And you can imagine and apply this thinking, I think, to what Australia would do, or the expectations around what we would have to do, should that time or call come, which is of course you're in, because what's the other side of the coin, what's the other option. And it does feel to me watching Trump that he's articulating in a very brutal and crude way, what maybe they think NATO is, which is a bit of a blank check or at least alliances or a bit of a blank check for American military adventures. And that's not where I think the rest of the world is falling after the brutality of Trump and the words of Trump. But I do think the Europeans would be smart to take Richard Hauser's advice there, which is, okay, you want us in.

28:10You need us to help you out in the straight of homeless. Let's talk. Let's do a deal. He's what we need on Ukraine. I think that hard-headed real politic back is probably what the Europeans could do with. Will they? That is the question. That's another episode, Geraldine. And please do send us your feedback. A global dot roaming at abc.net.au. And you can listen at 11 a.m. and 9 p.m. with days on ABC Radio National. And any time at all on ABC Listen. And our thanks to our producers Shane Anderson and Carly Morris. See you later, Latica. Bye, Geraldine. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.