Is Trump surrounded by 'yes men'_ Iran war

0:00The president is sort of barreling ahead on two separate and I think mutually exclusive tracks. One, a diplomatic track where he is trying to get into a serious conversation with the Iranians about ending the war, maybe hosted by the Pakistanis. And then the other, a massive increase in military footprints with the goal towards possibly a ground incursion of some kind into Iran, either on one of the islands or perhaps to go after the nuclear material or perhaps a naval operation to open up the street. And the reality is, I don't think the administration has made a decision about what it wants to do and what it's going to do. So we all look into our crystal balls and try to kind of read TV's. But at the end of the day, when they haven't decided, it's hard for anybody else to know either. Yeah, I mean, you spent many years negotiating the Iranian nuclear deal before Donald Trump walked away in 2017, it does feel, doesn't it, that to save face Donald Trump needs

1:00to achieve something that is bigger than that? What could it be and is it achievable? I mean, what's strange about the question, which is a perfectly valid question, is that he was trying to negotiate before this war started a version of the exact deal that he pulled out of in 2018 that would have reduced Iran's ability to enrich uranium and locked up the nuclear program for a decade or more. And by the way, if that deal were still in place, which we all know it's ancient history, Iran would have been under international monitoring through 2031 to ensure that they were not going to pursue a nuclear weapon. Many years into the future and instead were now at war. So at the end of the day, I think it's going to be hard for him to achieve that because military action can only delay the program. It cannot stop it permanently. Iran has the know how to enrich uranium and ultimately, if it decides to, to produce a weapon. And what I'm worried about is that having pulled out of the deal and then having gone to war,

2:01he is teaching the Iranians what I think is a dangerous lesson, which is that unless you have a nuclear weapon, you are vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. Yeah, so I suppose it does beg the question, doesn't it? You've touched on this already. If the talks fail and Marco Rubio has suggested that that is always going to be a possibility, then there are two options left, aren't there? One, as you've mentioned, boots on the ground, which is something many people in America do not want to see. And then there's another option for Donald Trump to walk away and say, look, the Strait of Hormuz is no longer our problem. It's Europe's problem. We don't need it for our oil. Get on with it yourself. So yes, there is this weird idiosyncrasy that America does not actually export oil through the Strait of Hormuz. So I guess on some level, maybe the president could claim that this is somebody else's problem, maybe the buyers, the Indians, the Chinese, the countries that buy most of the energy that comes through the Strait should be working with Iran to figure this out. But the problem with that argument

3:02is that it is a global energy market. It is a global oil market. And when the prices spike as they have now north of $100 of barrel and probably headed significantly higher, given this massive supply disruption, that is going to impact American consumers as well and American buyers of gasoline at the pump, which is a political challenge for any administration. I lived through this in a White House that faced higher gas prices. This president says he is focused on reducing prices and bringing affordability back to America. And this is going to undermine that agenda, even if it's not American exports that go through the Strait. How much pain can Americans take? They can take a bit of pain at the petrol pump, can't they? But can they stomach seeing American soldiers coming home in coffins? Yeah, look, I think if you're the Iranians, what you're thinking now is we have faced America's largest blow or one of the largest blows America can inflict on us,

4:02which is you have taken out our leader. You have taken out the top echelons of our government. You have bombed our country now for weeks on end. And yes, the United States could go in on the ground, but at this point Iran has suffered quite a bit in the course of this conflict. And there has been some success by the United States. It has degraded Iran's military capability, but for the United States, the level of pain that could be coming could increase significantly. And John, just a final question about President Trump and his advisors. Do you think he is now surrounded just by people who will agree with him? Is he just surrounded by yes, men? So I think there are two problems. One, it's quite clear that very few people want to give the president bad news. There have been these reports that he gets a kind of highlight reel of what's happening in the war every morning by video, the things that we've blown up with our bombs, but not really a strategic briefing about whether our objectives in the conflict are being met.

5:02When the Trump administration negotiates, it's a couple people close to the president who lack any of this expertise locked in a room with some counterparts. And the risk is they miss things. They don't fully understand the text and the implications of what they're negotiating. And by the way, that's not an indictment of them. Nobody could understand all of these details without experts who have spent their whole careers working on these things. And those people no longer work in the US government because this administration decided they weren't necessary.