The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump looks like he’s all set to take us to war with Iran. After a period in which he seemed to want to negotiate with Iran, Trump has now tweeted that he wants Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” The New York Times has a deep dive into Trump’s deliberations on this, if that’s the right word, and the findings are extraordinary. We’re drifting into war with Iran even though our own intelligence assessments don’t appear to support the case for it. And Trump was influenced in his thinking on all this by what he saw on Fox News. Meanwhile, some prominent MAGA figures are aggressively warning Trump against taking the plunge. Today, we’re really fortunate to be making sense of all this with foreign policy veteran Matt Duss, who was a longtime advisor on the Hill and is now executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. He has a great new piece for Foreign Policy magazine on what’s about to happen. Matt, thanks for coming on.
Matt Duss: Thanks, Greg. Great to be here.
Sargent: Last week, Israel started bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and killing its senior leadership. Trump seemed to want to try to negotiate with Iran, but all indications are that he and his senior team basically gave up on being able to stop Israel. Now he’s just tweeted that he wants Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” and tweeted that “We know where exactly [Iran’s leader] is hiding. He’s an easy target, but we are not going to ... (kill!) [him] ... now.” Matt, Trump is talking about Israel and the United States as “we.” What happened over the last few weeks? What’s the current situation?
Duss: Well, yeah. As you said, Trump more than seemed to want to cut a deal with the Iranians over their nuclear program. He very much was invested in this. He had his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who had engaged in multiple rounds of talks with Iranian negotiators. I think Trump famously announced these talks a couple months ago in an Oval Office meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, who seemed none too pleased about that announcement at the time. From all reports and also from what I’d heard just privately from folks who were close to the talks, there were still some ways to go but there was a real interest on the part of the Iranian government and on the part of Trump and his team to get to an agreement.
I think things started to go badly once Trump publicly endorsed this idea that any agreement would have to end Iran’s domestic enrichment capacity. This has always been a red line for Iran, even though they have submitted to some intense restrictions in the past, including on Obama’s nuclear deal. Iran has always maintained that it does have the right to enrich under the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty. I think that is what stalled these talks and finally ultimately wore Donald Trump’s patience out. In that New York Times piece you mentioned, Netanyahu is someone who has long thought that military action is the only way to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. And Americans started to realize that Netanyahu is going to do something—with us or without us. Initially, the response from Marco Rubio once the attacks started in Thursday evening D.C. time really put distance between the U.S. and the attacks. But by morning, Trump had watched what was going on, was impressed by it, and so decided to support it.
Sargent: So I want to talk about this New York Times TikTok. It’s kind of amazing. [It] takes us up to the present moment. A couple key nuggets here: One is that Trump believed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was trying to draw him into a Mideast war. He seemed wary of that. But then he soured on the Iranians during the negotiations, as you said. He seemed to have decided, according to the Times, that the Iranians were playing him, and now he’s more favorable to joining with Israel and going to war. It seems as if Trump’s only way of understanding this is looking at how it makes him appear. Is he getting played by the Iranians? Does he look strong enough? Are there any actual deliberations on Trump’s part here that you can discern?
Duss: Not really. As the cliche [goes], and I think it’s a cliche because it’s kind of true, Donald Trump believes the last person he spoke to. And for whatever reason, Benjamin Netanyahu and others close to Netanyahu and people inside Trump’s administration who side with Netanyahu, or at least with Netanyahu’s argument, have told him that you are being humiliated by these Iranians. They are not negotiating with you in good faith. And they’re making you look like a sucker. And that, as you said, seems to have soured Trump on the negotiations. Again, from what I’ve heard, those negotiations were progressing. They were not easy, but it seems to me that there was commitment on both sides that could have gotten to a deal.
Sargent: Right. It really does seem like he’s really easily manipulated by some really nefarious people. Someone’s whispering in his ear that you’re looking like a chump. And all of a sudden he’s like, You know, forget it. Let’s go.
Duss: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s true. Also, while he’s ignorant and emotionally unstable and a huge liar and a narcissist—all of those things are true—that does not absolve Trump, of course, from this decision. He’s easily manipulable, but this is on him. That is where we are now. He has engaged the U.S. in a new war in the Middle East, and he seems to be on the brink of going just all in.
Sargent: And there’s something really deeply troubling here if you connect the dots in the Times report as well. As everybody knows, Trump shot down his own Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard the other day. She had said the intelligence community didn’t believe Iran was actively building nuclear weapons. Trump rebuked this saying, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having them.” And yet, Matt, the Times also reports the following. I want to read it, “Senior administration officials were unaware of any new intelligence showing that the Iranians were rushing to build a nuclear bomb.” So what is the basis for Trump’s conclusion that Iran is very close to having nukes? Where is he getting it from?
Duss: No, he’s just getting it ... He’s getting it from himself. He’s decided that’s what he believes. He’s getting it clearly from Netanyahu. And when I saw what he’s saying now, what I saw echoes of [is] let’s remember in 2017 in Helsinki when he met with Vladimir Putin and was asked about U.S. intelligence reports that there had been Russian interference in the 2016 election. And Trump was like, Ah well, Putin, why would he do that? I believe Putin over my own U.S. intelligence analyst. And that’s what we see here. He’s been convinced by yet another right-wing authoritarian leader to disbelieve the assessment of the entire U.S. intelligence community.
Sargent: Well, Matt, let’s have a little comic relief here for a second. The Times also reports that after Israel’s bombing started, he saw—meaning Trump saw—on Fox News that Israel’s military strikes were being portrayed as “genius” on Fox. And then at that point, Trump started claiming more credit for this in phone calls with reporters. Then he started leaning toward joining Israel in war against Iran. Matt, can that be real? The great antiwar Trump, [who] hates foreign entanglements, ran against Hillary Clinton and against Kamala Harris as the antiwar candidate, [is] literally getting led into war because he thinks it looks totally cool and awesome on TV. That’s what that says.
Duss: Yeah, unfortunately, I believe that completely. Had this war not gone well in the first 24 hours, I think we could be in a very, very different place. Had there been different coverage, had there been more pushback from his own party, from the media, I think Trump would be in a different place right now. Unfortunately, as you said, Fox News was always going to back this. Members of his own party—which still remains extremely hawkish—people like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton have been praising this. So the people he’s hearing from right now have convinced him that this is a good idea.
Sargent: Right. I want to read Trump’s quote again, “I think they were very close to having them.” Trump’s own officials are not concluding that, so he had to get it from somewhere. And I think you’re exactly right. It’s from Netanyahu. It’s from Tom Cotton. It’s from Lindsey Graham. Those are the people who are telling him that this is what he should believe.
Duss: Right. And of course, our intelligence, the U.S. intelligence community, has pretty much the same assessment going back to 2007 when we saw that national intelligence assessment first declassified. There was weaponization work that probably took place before 2003, but there’s no evidence that Iran has continued that work or that they have made a decision to pursue a nuclear weapon. That assessment has not changed. But of course, we see this with the Israeli government a lot on a whole range of things like spreading disinformation, making claims that don’t actually pan out. But by the time people realized that those claims were BS, the Israelis have already moved. And that’s, again, what we see here.
Sargent: Well, you had this great piece making the case against the U.S. rushing into war. Can you recap that argument for us?
Duss: Sure. The point I make there is that Donald Trump did campaign as an antiwar president, especially in the last few weeks of the 2024 election. And as you noted, even in the 2016 election, people remember that famous primary debate in—I think it was—2015 when you had a dozen candidates up on stage and he just came out and said that the Iraq War was a disaster. All of these wars are not making us safer. They’re a huge waste of money. And that was scandalous at the time—on that stage only. Everyone in the rest of the country was like, Yeah, that’s right that the Iraq War was a really stupid thing to do.
And he also campaigned in that way in 2024 where the Harris campaign really seemed to lean into a defense of the militarist status quo, refused to distance herself from Biden’s war, his support for the war in Gaza. And Trump was able to get to her left, essentially, by saying, There’s war everywhere. I want to end these wars. I want to make peace. And even if that’s not true—and of course, it’s not true; Trump is lying about that, was lying, as he lies about so much—the fact is he correctly understood that there was a big constituency in this country that wants the U.S. to stop making war and start making peace. And they were willing to believe him.
I’m not going to say that’s why he won the election, but it’s important to understand that there is a constituency in this country—a very large one of both parties and independents—that believe that we’ve been wasting money and lives and resources and attention on these military interventions around the world over the past 20 plus years. And there’s now an opportunity for Democrats—one Democrat, even a group of Democrats—to move back into that lane, [to] say, This is what we’re about. We’re about keeping our country safe, but not going into war all over the place because Trump has created that opportunity for them. And I really want some Democrat to take it.
Sargent: Well, that brings me to the final question here to close this out. In your piece, you point out that a number of Democratic senators have made a pretty forceful case against going into Iran. Where do you think the Democratic Party will come down here? I’m somewhat hopeful that we’re not going to see a rerun of the run-up to Iraq, in which a lot of Democrats rolled over for George W. Bush. We don’t have a September 11 this time, which made a lot of Dems feel like they couldn’t oppose war. Bush was more popular than Trump is now, and Trump is just so profoundly and obviously unfit that I think the calculus will be different. Am I being too optimistic here? Where do you expect Democrats to land?
Duss: No, think the calculus will be different in terms of the number of Democrats who would support it. And as I note in my piece, there are people like Chris Murphy, who’s long been a great voice on foreign policy, but one person I was really pleasantly surprised about was Senator Jack Reed, who’s the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He gave one of the best and clearest responses to this attack on Friday morning. He called it “reckless.” He called it “aggression.” And that is absolutely correct. This is not self-defense by any definition. This is not a preemptive attack by Israel, because there was no evidence whatsoever that Iran was preparing an imminent attack against them. So I think hearing from someone like Reed who has [been] seen as a leading national security voice in the caucus, in the Senate—that does give cover for other Democrats to take similar positions, even if they’re not going go as far and speak as boldly as Reed did, although I hope they would.
Yesterday, Senator Tim Kaine announced that he would introduce a war powers resolution, which is a way for Congress to constrain the president from going into war without authorization. So that will come to a vote in the next few weeks. But even though I don’t think we’ll see a rerun of Iraq, in the next few weeks, Trump could do a lot of damage. If he was to decide to join with the Israeli attack, to send B-2 bombers dropping 30,000 pound bombs on the installation at Fordo, regardless of what Congress does, Trump could create a new reality that could be pretty catastrophic. And then we’d all be faced with what to do there.
Sargent: So how do you see this unfolding? How deeply is Trump going to draw us into this?
Duss: Yeah, unfortunately, I think Trump seems to think that he could get involved and end this satisfactorily fairly quickly. And I think that’s an illusion. If the goal here is to just diminish or come close to destroying Iran’s nuclear program, first of all, I don’t think that’s something you could do in just a few days or even a few weeks of bombing. That would take a long time. But then you actually need boots on the ground, either in the form of U.S. troops or other troops accompanying inspectors, to determine that you have done enough damage to the nuclear program.
But another scenario is that the regime starts to crumble. There are factions within the regime that take up arms against each other. There are a number of scenarios here that end up with U.S. troops in Iran, whether or not Trump thinks that’s a possibility. So again, the next few weeks, what Trump decides to do—these are going to have enormous consequences that will probably outlast his presidency.
Sargent: Matt Duss, it was so good to talk to you. That was really illuminating stuff, and folks should pay attention to what Matt has to say on this going forward because it’s going to get really effing hairy. Matt, thanks for coming on with us, man.
Duss: Alright, thanks, Greg.
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