Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

Timothy Snyder on Iran, Ukraine, and the Future of Freedom

June 22, 2026

TEASER:

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. So we’re bringing you a different sort of conversation this week with the historian, Timothy Snyder, who joined us on Substack Live. Many of you will be familiar with Tim’s work. He’s obviously one of the most astute analysts of international affairs, including obviously the conflict in Ukraine, but also someone who’s spent a long time looking hard at American democracy, its decline and the potential slide towards authoritarianism.

Jake Sullivan:

So, as Jon said, rather than a typical episode where we bring a guest on for the hour, we did a shorter Substack live with Tim Snyder. We really enjoyed the conversation, so we thought we would share that on our regular podcast feed for all of you as our weekly episode this week. We covered a range of topics with him from international issues like Ukraine and Iran to things here on the home front, including where things stand in terms of Donald Trump’s push in the direction of authoritarianism. So onto the show.

Tim, I thought we’d start because we’re in the midst of these negotiations over this Iran MOU on the back of the ceasefire agreement. And you’ve been quite outspoken on this, quite critical of the president, as have we from the inception of this totally misbegotten and illegal war. But one of the points that you made and have made I think very articulately is that the Iran war is not primarily a story about Iran, but rather a story about American power. Talk to us about that observation, what you mean by that and where it leads you here 100+ days after this war started and now in the midst of negotiations?

Timothy Snyder:

Thanks for that. I mean, number one, I want to just stress before I answer that, I’m just now going to talk about power. So a lot of the things that I’ve written about this war and that the two of you have said about this war have to do with the ethics of it and the law of it, so I am quite deliberately bracketing that and just talking about power. So, I mean, I think it’s quite clear that the Iranians responded essentially as you’d expect a middle power with their capabilities to respond. They did the kinds of things they are capable of doing. The regime was put in what they understandably thought was an existential situation, and they responded I think quite predictably to that. The surprising thing I think for folks who haven’t been paying too much attention to this administration and maybe to some longer-term trends too is how weak the Americans were.

We’ve lost this war. I’ll just make that very clear. We lost this war, and we lost it a long time ago. Americans are very slow to realize we’ve lost wars, but that doesn’t mean we’re slow to lose them. We lost this one very quickly in my view. And the terms of this piece, even as they stand now, and I actually expect they’re going to get worse with time, but even as they stand now, they’re basically capitulation. I mean, promising $300 billion, unfreezing assets, allowing the Iranians to set tolls on the Strait. It’s just an astonishingly thorough defeat, and I think it goes to two issues of American power.

The first is how incompetent leadership can be, and the second is how you get yourself to a situation where radically incompetent leadership is possible. And it’s that second point which worries me that we’re in a kind of ... Now that we’re in a kind of cycle where it’s not just that the leadership is capable of starting and losing these wars of whimsy, but also that that’s just a symptom of the deeper problem that leadership is undermining the bases of American power in science and technology and education and right down the line. So that’s how I see the Iran war. It’s obviously incompetence, it’s obviously defeat, but we’ve gotten ourselves to a point where we can have such leadership, and then that leadership in turn is undermining the pillars of American power going forward.

Jon Finer:

I’d offer a third explanation for this that I’d love your reaction to, and that is a tendency among US administrations, and this is obviously not the first one to make this mistake, of overestimating what military force can accomplish strategically. We obviously have an incredible military that can perform heroic operational feats, tactical successes, including in this war, but strategic success has been much more elusive. And Donald Trump seemed like the kind of president, not to give him credit for anything, not really my inclination, who understood this on some level, who had expressed a degree of skepticism about war, about the use of military force and now has blundered down this same path. And I’m wondering if that has surprised you, if we never should have had confidence that he would avoid this sort of thing and whether you buy this theory that we just overestimate sometimes what we can do even with this incredible military tool that we have?

Timothy Snyder:

No. I appreciate your saying that because I agree with you that this is at some level an American problem that we think that if you ... You can sort of switch from everyday politics, which is messy and unsatisfying, and kind of push a button and apply violence and then everything changes. And that’s just not what the history of warfare teaches. The history of warfare teaches that the enemy has a vote, things are unpredictable, and very soon the reasons you went to war for you forget and you start talking about other things. And that’s not just true for us, it’s true for everybody. But I think you’re right, that we rather uniquely forget that kind of stuff and we start wars with these wildly optimistic interpretations. I think your question’s a good one too.

I just wrote a little essay about that on Substack a day or two ago, which I called Utopias of Violence, which is about how we toggled from this Trump skepticism, which you rightly note, to this really utopian idea, and I think the answer’s Venezuela. And I think when we get to these politics of small numbers where it’s just a few people making decisions and Congress is cut out and advisors are cut out and public opinion is cut out and expertise is cut out and everything else is cut out except for one guy and a few people around him ... I think that mood of elation after Venezuela is the answer, that call he made to Fox & Friends where he just seemed like he was high. I mean, he was just so elated. And that sentence he uttered, like, “We can do this over and over and nobody can stop us,” right? I think that’s where he switched.

Jon Finer:

By the way, and sorry to hog the mic, Jake, but in my-

Jake Sullivan:

[inaudible 00:06:20]-

Jon Finer:

... experience, probably yours too, it tends to be actually people who have experience with war or military who are a bit more skeptical sometimes of offering these grand military strategic solutions to problems. And people who have less, like many of the people in senior roles in this administration, who think it’s the solution to everything. So another aspect of this maybe.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. It’s funny. We’ve talked on our podcast about that Venezuela pivot, and I think it actually began even before that. It was the 12-day war last year where Iran didn’t really respond where President Trump felt he could have this beautiful military operation, as he described it, and essentially tie it off after 12 days. Then you get Venezuela, and he thinks two things. One, I can use my military whenever I want for whatever purpose I want, and two, Iran’s not going to respond because they didn’t respond last time. And despite all the warnings that when you actually go for regime change, when you make it existential for the leadership in Tehran that they were going to act in an existential way, including closing the Strait of Hormuz, he had decided, no, no, people said that and I bombed them last year and nothing happened. And people warned me about Maduro, and I went and grabbed him and nothing happened, and then you get this.

And I think we’re paying the wages for that sequence of events over the course of the past year in a way that’s ... As you’ve said, we lost the war, and now we’re paying for it. Actually quite literally paying for it. So, Tim, knowing that we don’t have you for that long and wanting to cover a wide range of ground, maybe we’ll shift to another war, and you’ve actually talked about these super losers, the United States and Russia, the war in Ukraine. You have been a great advocate and champion for Ukraine sovereignty and territorial integrity, for defending them against Russia’s brutal onslaught, and you’ve also obviously been a deep historian of Ukraine and of Eastern Europe. So we’re now more than four years on from Putin launching this full-scale invasion back at ‘22. Tell us how you see things in the war right now, and what are you looking at, and how do you assess where everything stands?

Timothy Snyder:

So I think there’s a pretty obvious pivot between the last question and this question, and that is that if the Trump people had been paying attention to the war in Ukraine, I think that too would’ve discouraged them from starting this war. I think they’re personally and emotionally committed to not paying attention to it for various reasons. And had they paid attention to it, it would maybe have taught some lessons about the difficulty of being on the offensive and also about the technological changes in war, which I think they have deliberately overlooked while they deliberately overlook the Ukraine war. The American military is set up with systems that are easy to deplete and very expensive, and under Trump, I think that lesson has been actively not learned with a focus instead on spending more money for fewer systems. The Trump-class battleship, which of course is a mixture of fiction and anachronism, being the extreme example.

So I think these things are actually connected. Like their lack of realism about Russia and the notion that Russia must win because Russia big. Not letting that logic be challenged I think also is behind their bad decisions in Iran. As for me, I think the Ukrainians have revolutionized war to an extent, which is not ... I mean, I realize you guys are on top of this, but it’s to an extent which is not fully appreciated in general. We’re at the point where coal miners from the Donbas are right now in Arab countries defending other people from drone attacks, and there’s a reason for that. They’re in a class of their own. The only one who’s close is the Russians when it comes to the current way of running war. And I think that leads to where we are, which is that there’s now a kill zone where it’s very hard for human beings to advance. And the Russians are still trying to, and they’re still losing huge amounts of people. They’re losing more than they can replace at this point.

And in May, they lost actually more territory than they were able to gain. And more than that, on the political side, I think Putin’s position is weaker now than Zelenskyy’s by a lot. And the fact that the Ukrainians are using medium, long-range drones against Russian logistics, but also against prestige targets like Moscow and economic targets like refineries and so on, that is new and that’s only going to get worse for the Russians. So I think we’re in the interesting position that people keep thinking of the Ukrainians as dependent on someone else, but even as they get less and less support, especially from us, they’re still winning as I see it. So you can’t really [inaudible 00:11:04] winning a war, but their position is stronger at this point than the Russian position is. And I think in a strange way, Trump has been bad for Putin because Trump de facto has helped the Russians, but he’s helped them to extend a war that they can’t win. In a way, by helping them, I think he’s made the damage for them greater. That’s how I see it right now.

Jon Finer:

Do you think that Russia can ever recover from this conflict? I mean, as bad as the Iran quagmire has been for the United States, we’ve lost 13 American service members killed, many more wounded, that’s a tragedy, every one of those, but we are talking about just an extraordinary magnitude of Russian loss, generations almost, in this conflict. To say nothing of their position in terms of standing in the world and their economy and everything else. Is Putin under more pressure, you seem to be suggesting he is, than is commonly appreciated? And can Russia ever recover under Putin from what they have done here?

Timothy Snyder:

I think the answer to your last question is no, not under Putin. And I don’t think it’s a matter of recovery. I think it would be a matter of transformation. And those of us who are students of Russian history, there’s just a commonplace that the times when Russia has tried to reform have been after the defeat in the Crimean War, after defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, after the defeat in Afghanistan with the Soviet Union. And so if you want Russia to have a chance, you have to help Ukraine win. And so there’s actually no tension between ... And people get anxious about Russia, but I think if you want Russia to have a chance to reform itself in some sense of a way, they have to lose the war, and so the best Russia policy becomes the strong Ukraine policy.

I think beyond that, it’s really hard to predict what will happen in Russia because even the regime changes. What happens after Putin? I think his position is quite weak at this point, but the way he loses power and the way someone replaces him is going to seem very strange to us. Just like the way Putin came to power was very strange with oligarchs around Yeltsin selecting somebody who they thought looked like a movie character, and then Putin managing to win a war and the Russian Secret Service is blowing things up inside Russia. That chain of events is very odd, and I think the next one will be very odd. And we’ll be thrown by it, but the Russians won’t be thrown by it.

Jake Sullivan:

Tim, it’s interesting, coming back to your point about the way that Ukraine has revolutionized drone warfare and how now it’s actually the rest of the world, including Gulf countries, but frankly, also including the United States of America that is learning from them, being supported by them rather than the other way around. One story that we have not really told I think effectively from the Biden administration that Jon and I are very proud of is that we spent years investing in Ukraine’s drone and missile industry, and we’re seeing some of those investments play out now with Ukrainian ingenuity, with Ukrainian iteration every day, every week, every month on the front line. And it really goes back to 2023 because during Ukraine’s counteroffensive in ‘23, we saw the limitations of conventional capabilities in the fight.

Their brigades basically ran headlong into Russian minefields and drone swarms, and so we became obsessed alongside a bunch of our Ukrainian counterparts about the idea that Ukraine needed a technological edge to win the war. So we can be in the Cabinet, in the Situation Room basically calling for a Ukraine technology sprint saying, “We got to get them funding, components and support for their drone and missile development.” Got a lot of pushback in our government, including from the Pentagon who really didn’t want to spend their money on Ukraine’s drone industry, but we kept at it and had a lot of great champions in Kyiv. And by the end of ‘24, the US had put $1.5 billion into Ukraine’s drone industry. And we thought, okay, hopefully this will seed something.

We could not have imagined what Ukraine could do with that two years later. We had a sense in our minds that this is where the fight was going, but we didn’t ... For a country under attack every day in little workshops spread all over the country to come up with these capabilities and also transform these capabilities has been genuinely astonishing for us to watch, and Russia has not been able to keep pace with this. So I guess the question from my end is, can this set of capabilities actually put Ukraine in a position to win, and how long will that take in your view? I mean, nobody has a crystal ball, but what’s your read on where this war goes say over the course of the next year?

Timothy Snyder:

It’s incredibly important that you did that. And I just want to repeat what you emphasized that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of Ukrainians in government, in the private sector, in the military, but mainly somewhere in between working on this stuff all the time. And so The way the drones get way out ahead of everybody else’s and their ground defenses is that they’re in this constant feedback loop where a little company makes something. It gets tested. The data comes back the same day from the battlefield, and they just keep going, going, going, going, which is why it’s hard to catch up from a position like ours actually. And so while we did a lot of good things to help at the beginning, we’re going to have a lot to learn at the end from all of this. The attitude that the current administration has that the Ukrainians are nothing, they don’t matter to us, et cetera.

At some future point, we’re going to have to accept that we have things to learn from people who can win wars and defend themselves. My sense is that the propaganda story in Russia involves advancing taking territory. And in Ukraine, they would like to get territory back, but they don’t have to get territory back to keep fighting, and so the Russian story can collapse in a way that the Ukrainian story can’t, right? And the things that Putin is having to do inside Russia, like try to shut down Telegram. As far as one can tell, those things are unpopular, but also they tend to make him seem out of touch. And then the other thing I already mentioned is the charismatic displays of Ukrainian power like attacking Moscow when Kyiv gets attacked. That’s only going to get worse. So it’s easy to be wrong about stuff like this, but I don’t think the Russians can do this for this full calendar year. I think by this time next year, something’s going to have changed.

Jon Finer:

So I want to make sure we end with a question or two about America, but maybe to help make that pivot I’ll just acknowledge I’ve been surprised by the degree to which support in the US has held up for this war. I think we’ve all observed even American military adventures that have enjoyed far less support from the American people, including the current one by the way, than this conflict involving a country pretty far away that Americans, I think to a large extent, didn’t have a ton of familiarity with before this happened, and yet here we are with strong levels of support showing up in polls. I guess I’m wondering whether you’re surprised by that, how you explain it, but also when you do encounter Americans or others who question the value of supporting Ukraine or what we get out of doing this, how you respond to that?

Timothy Snyder:

The way I think about it is like this, I’m sitting in a building, and I don’t remember every day to thank the walls in this ceiling, but that’s what Ukraine is doing. All this stuff we’re doing, like this nice conversation we’re having, all these chances that we have are in some way related to the fact that Ukraine didn’t surrender and Ukraine is defending themselves now. And if they had surrendered or if they weren’t defending themselves, we’d be just in such a different world, and it would be worse in every respect. And it’s hard to think about that, but I think I try to appreciate the everyday reality, the democracies that still function, the optimism we can still have because all of that has to do with Ukrainian decisions and Ukrainian armed forces. And but to make a list, the international order on non-aggression, the rule of law, non-proliferation, because if Ukraine gives up and Russia wins with nuclear blackmail, then other countries build nuclear weapons.

Freedom and decency, which seem like old-fashioned things and maybe a little conservative, but I believe in them. The Ukrainians really think that they’re ... And they’re right, that they’re defending one way of living from a different way of living where people can be themselves as opposed to people having to be told who they are. And getting to your question, I think that’s why a lot of Republicans and independents and Democrats are on the side of Ukraine because a lot of people that might disagree about a lot of things do have that basic gut sense that this is indecent and that it’s about freedom. And they’re right. They’re right about that, and that’s how I tend to talk to people about it. I find at this point you don’t convince a lot of people about Ukraine, but the basic thing that I say is something like that. We’re not helping them. They’re helping us. They’re helping us in a lot of big ways. And so if we can find some small ways to help them, then we probably should.

Jake Sullivan:

Tim, you said something I think deeply piercing that fundamentally this is about freedom, and that’s what Ukraine is teaching us and trying to help preserve for the rest of us. You have, as everyone watching and listening to this knows, written a book called On Freedom. By the way, my dad didn’t just give me a copy of it for Christmas. He gave me a copy and wrote a note, a four-page note explaining his reflections on the book, why this mattered, and then gave me three other books that he thought I should read having read your book that could deepen my understanding of freedom. So shout out to my dad, but also shout out to you for just a remarkable book.

In that book you write, “Freedom isn’t simply freedom from constraint, but freedom to create something together,” and we’re now just around the corner from the US marking its 250th anniversary. And I think we would love to just hear from you about what a positive vision of American freedom in particular looks like in this moment, which has its dark elements because of Trump and all of the alarms you have sounded, but also continues to have some sense of regenerative hope because of who we are as a people and what we’re capable of. And so can you just talk to us as you’ve written this book, we’re approaching this huge milestone here in the United States, how you look at this question of the positive vision of freedom that you write about so eloquently?

Timothy Snyder:

The way I see it is this, we have a tendency to think of freedom as something just negative, so I’m free of something or I’m free from something, and we treat freedom as, I don’t want to be irritated, I don’t want things to be in my way. And if you push that too far, it gets into that sentiment, which I think is quite dominant now, at least in the White House, that all that matters is my feelings and my preferences and government’s bad and we can wreck it. We can fire the civil servants. We can get rid of whole departments because it doesn’t matter. Government’s just something which is in your way. And that notion of freedom I think is just philosophically and practically wrong.

The reason why you don’t want things in your way is because you’re a person and you have positive desires and you have ethics and you have projects you want to realize in the world. And so sure, we don’t want to have barriers that hold us back, but we also more fundamentally want to have institutions and projects and forms of cooperation that allow us to do things and do things together. And in practice, what you realize is that to have freedom emotionally, you can’t just be against stuff. If you’re just against stuff that drives you into that kind of Trumpian world where we are now where suddenly it’s just one person just kind of destroying stuff. But just to really be free, you have to have the courage to be in favor of stuff.

You have to admit that some things are better than others, and you’re willing to risk things for the things you desire. And then you realize also that in order to get there, you have to work together. That in order to build freedom, you can’t just be against things, you can’t just want what you want. You have to accept that some things are good and that to get there, you have to work together with other people. I think that notion of freedom, that positive notion then becomes a justification for government because government, whether it’s by providing roads or public schools or ideally healthcare opportunity, government creates conditions in which we can then realize ourselves and become free. The right kind of government I mean.

Jake Sullivan:

For those who haven’t read it, please go read it because for this moment I think there’s no better argument for people to digest and then think about how they can put into practice.

Jon Finer:

Don’t know about you guys, but that seems like as good a place as any to leave this and with a lot of gratitude. Better to end on a question on freedom than, for example, one on tyranny, so we’ll save that for the next round.

Timothy Snyder:

All right. Okay.

Jon Finer:

But thanks, Tim, for spending some time with us and really enjoyed the conversation.

Timothy Snyder:

Yeah. It’s been a pleasure. Yeah. Look forward to doing it again.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow the audio feed so you never miss an episode.

Jon Finer:

For additional content, episode transcripts and exclusive podcast segments, subscribe to The Long Game on Substack or join The Long Game+ on Apple Podcasts. That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

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Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

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Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Weiner and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

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Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Leanna Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Weiner. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

Did America Lose the Iran War? (w/ Ambassador Wendy Sherman)

June 18, 2026

TEASER:

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

This was such an ill-conceived war and we lost it. Let’s be honest. Iran came out on top. The president has called for Iran for an unconditional surrender. And looking at the deal that was struck, I know who really did the unconditional surrender and it wasn’t Iran.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game, I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. After more than a hundred days and President Trump declaring I think about 40 times that the war in Iran was almost over. It’s deal week. We’ve spent a lot of time warning this war was coming and then a lot of time explaining why it was a mistake, analyzing what was happening during the conflict and the various ceasefires. And now we’re going to take a hard look at the deal that seems to close this chapter at least for now and then talk a bit about where things are going to go from here.

Joining us is our friend and former colleague, Ambassador Wendy Sherman, who is a legend in our field and one of America’s foremost diplomats. She’s a fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center where she used to run the Center for Public Leadership and the author of Not For the Faint of Heart, one of the best books about diplomacy that you will ever read, and particularly about the personal side of it, which we’ll talk about in addition to the policy here.

Wendy had a lot of big jobs in government, most recently serving as Deputy Secretary of State and has negotiated with a lot of difficult characters, present company not included, I think, including being one of the few Americans to sit across the table from North Korea during the Clinton administration. But most important, obviously for this conversation, she was the lead US negotiator for the Obama administration’s nuclear talks with Iran, which culminated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran Nuclear Deal. Wendy Sherman, welcome to The Long Game.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Thank you. Great to be with you guys.

Jake Sullivan:

Wendy, it’s just really great to have the chance to get your wisdom as we all try to process exactly what’s happening here. I think we’ve all had a mix of emotions this week, but we’d love to hear how you’re feeling.

This has really been quite a saga. You spent years negotiating with the Iranians, which resulted in the JCPOA, the Iran Nuclear Deal. Trump then pulled out of it almost eight years ago saying, of course, he didn’t want war, just a better deal. Now he’s led us into a reckless and illegal war and seems to have ended up with a deal that, spoiler alert, because we’re going to come to this, is not nearly as good as the one you worked on.

So can you just give us a bit of your inner monologue this week as all of this has unfolded?

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Sure. First of all, great to be with you guys. And for your listeners, there would be no JCPOA, the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2015 without Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer without President Obama, Secretary Clinton, Secretary Kerry, and literally hundreds of people in the US government. And then of course a really extraordinary team, core team of about 15 people from all over government who spent day after day working on this. So I just want to give a hats off to what it takes to do these deals completely absent from what we’ve been seeing.

I guess my biggest takeaway and people have asked me, “Don’t you feel horrible? Isn’t this really painful?” Sure it is, but the greatest pain is what this has done to the American people, what this has done to our country, what this is done to our democracy, what this has done to the world. I mean, it’s really scary. I’ve got grandsons, I want them to have a safe and wonderful world and this isn’t the way to get there.

Jon Finer:

Tell us a bit more about what you were just describing in terms of actually negotiating with Iran and sort of what it takes and how it contrasts with what we’ve seen from President Trump and his team.

You met with your Iranian counterparts over the years in, by my count, and this will not be all of the locations, New York, Moscow, Baghdad, Istanbul, Almaty, Muscat, several Swiss resort towns, Geneva, Lausanne, Montreux, ultimately concluding in Vienna. And again, I’m sure I left some out there. You were, by the way, a full-time government employee in case anyone was wondering while you were doing these negotiations, that’s not a requirement it seems like anymore. And you had a team, as you just described, of these just incredible experts in tow.

Talk to us about that experience and what its absence means in terms of the ultimate result.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

I think my favorite was Baghdad where all of the teams got stuck in a sandstorm for an extra day. One never knows what you’re going to confront in diplomacy.

Look, one of the things that’s so striking about how the Trump administration is doing this are two things. One, it’s really just Kushner and Witkoff and maybe one or two other people. That’s insane. They know nothing about nuclear matters. Quite frankly, they probably don’t know much about ballistic missiles or proxies or negotiations. When you negotiate a real estate deal, which is what these guys know how to do, if a deal doesn’t work out, who gets hurt? Pretty much nobody and you move on to the next deal. Here, it’s people’s lives that are at stake. It’s countries’ futures that are at stake, peoples’ futures that are at stake. The stakes are quite different and you need a team of experts around you to be able to do this.

I was really glad to hear that Witkoff and Kushner went out to our labs in Oak Ridge because it was really the first time they were sitting down with people who actually knew anything about what they were negotiating. So to do what they’re now going to try to do, ostensibly Vance and Kushner and Witkoff in Geneva later this week, or somewhere in Switzerland, is begin to look at the nuclear issues, but I’m a little worried they’re going to continue to do this from afar through mediators.

And you know because the Biden administration had to do this, when you have to negotiate through mediators, you never know actually what you’re getting or who’s saying what to whom or who’s agreed to what. And the reason we were able to ultimately do what we were able to do is because we had direct negotiations and people forget when we did the negotiations we were doing it with Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union coordinated the whole mess. That meant we had the world on our side.

We had an ongoing consultative group with Israel who knew everything we were doing. We consulted with all of the Gulf states. We consulted with the Australians and the New Zealanders and everyone in the world who wanted to know anything about Canada, anything we wanted to know about what we were doing. It was an incredibly intense process.

And as you all know, we also consulted constantly with the US Congress, which has been completely absent from this process. One, because they’re pretty much absent from everything because the Republican-controlled Congress just is in lockstep with the president except for maybe now. And I testified a number of times, had lots of consultations and secure briefings.

So this is a very complex process. You’ve got to have a president who knows every detail, which President Obama did. You need to have secretaries of state who know every detail, which Secretary Clinton and Secretary Kerry knew. Secretary Kerry, as you know, Jon, who was his chief of staff at the time, you got to be part of this end game, was in Vienna for the last two and a half weeks. No Secretary of State has done this and he really brought this all to closure and he knew every single detail.

Jake Sullivan:

And on top of all that, Wendy, I mean, that was just a remarkable litany when you compare it with Witkoff and Kushner. You also, as you mentioned earlier, had this incredibly deep bench of nuclear experts and sanctions experts up to and including our secretary of energy, who himself was a nuclear physicist.

Can you talk a little bit about that, how expertise actually feeds into a negotiation as you’re trying to hammer out the specifics on these very complex and high stakes matters?

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Yeah, really good point, Jake. For those last two and a half weeks and before, Secretary Ernie Moniz, who was our Secretary of Energy and a nuclear physicist, was absolutely critical to getting to the end deal. He could discuss things with his counterpart in Iran in ways none of the rest of us understood, quite frankly.

And Jim Timby, also a nuclear physicist who was on the core team, really an unsung hero of every arms control deal for 45 years in the State Department, a real rock star that nobody knows about. These guys along with a young guy named Paul and various other experts, really could nail down the nuclear details in an exquisite negotiation that happened in parallel and then was integrated into the final deal.

The core team that were in Vienna for those last 28 days, I ate exactly one meal outside of the hotel. That core team of 15 included lawyers, of course. One always has to have lawyers, and the Iranians are quite litigious. But it also included people from Treasury who understood finance and understood sanctions. People from commerce who understood sanctions and business interests. People from the Energy Department who knew everything.

Our labs were on call 24/7 to help us do all of the calculations necessary to know that we were getting what we thought we were getting because everybody calculates all of this technical detail quite differently. People talk about the deal as 18 pages. It was 18 pages of text and then several annexes turning into 159 pages because a lot of this is exquisite detail. And the Iranians are very, as I said, litigious and every word has meaning, every single word. And when you read the words of what was just agreed to, it’s horrifying what we gave up.

Jake Sullivan:

I think this is really important, Wendy, just to put a fine point on, because all of that expertise, all of that detailed work wasn’t just about dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s. It was about driving a hard bargain. It was about getting a good deal. It was about making sure the Iranians couldn’t insert clauses or phrases or escape hatches into the text.

And when we come to talk about the actual terms of this deal, you can find again and again the text is just stacked in favor of the Iranians. But I want to just take one quick point of departure here-

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

I got to stop you one second, Jake.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

I got to stop you.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, sure.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

I got to tell a story on Jake Sullivan. So we were in the hotel in Geneva, I believe it was, at the Intercontinental and we were up in Secretary Kerry’s suite trying to nail down some details of the Joint Plan of Action and where we were going for the big deal. And we all had come to some general agreement except for Jake Sullivan, because there was on word he thought was not explicit enough. And I think I was ready to kill Jake Sullivan.

Jake Sullivan:

So was Secretary Kerry, for sure.

Jon Finer:

That’s true.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

But this is what you need. Actually, you need a Jake Sullivan who is going to make sure that you don’t leave anything out.

Likewise, at the very end of the deal, when we were in Vienna, Jim Timby came to me and said, Paul, this young non-pro guy on our team, the skeptic, you always have to have a skeptic. Timby said to me, “You need to talk with Paul. He has some concerns.” Now we were almost to the end. We all could see that we were going to get a deal. And so I sit down with Paul because that’s my job, and Paul had 52 things he was worried about. And I took a very deep breath and I looked at them all, we talked them through some of it I didn’t understand. Fortunately, most of them had to do with Ernie Monies, the Secretary of Energy.

And by the end of the deal, virtually every one of those 52 concerns were addressed. That’s what these deals take. People who are willing to say, “Not yet. We have to make sure we get it right.” Sorry, Jake, had to tell that story.

Jake Sullivan:

No. No, no, it’s quite all right and I think really reinforces I think just important context about the way diplomacy works when it works well versus what we’re seeing unfold now.

I just want to take a very brief detour from talking about this deal and this war. Just to take you back to something you described quite poignantly in the book, how did you react when Trump actually pulled out of the deal back in 2018 after all the work you just described? I think you were on a boat in Malta, is that right?

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

I was on a New York Times cruise as a lecturer, really a fun thing to do at least once in your life. And I was walking a cobblestone street in Valletta, Malta, and my phone rang and I had done some interviews from the ship. It was craziness and my phone rang, my cell phone rang, and it was John Kerry and he had called to commiserate of course, but also to say we would persist and that someday we would be in a different place. Neither us of course knew we would be where we are today, which is pretty dismal.

But it’s a real testament to Secretary Kerry. He’s a man of tremendous compassion, but also optimism, as John knows and I’m sure was exhausted by it, he would never not stop the plane to talk to someone if he thought it would help move the deal forward. We were headed somewhere, I can’t remember where, and quickly John had to arrange for us to stop at an airport, I think in France or Great Britain, I can’t remember where, because he wanted to amass key European players to have a consultation before going on to what we were doing next.

He understood the value of personal relationships, not that they were the be all and end all, but he wanted to make sure that what he did would be successful. A really extraordinary patriot, truly.

Jon Finer:

He’s going to have FOMO when he watches this conversation, not to have been a part of it, but we were lucky enough to have him on a couple of weeks ago.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Great. Great.

Jon Finer:

Appreciate that story. So we’re going to dig into the details of the deal because we have to, it’s grim, but just finishing up maybe on the war itself now that maybe it’s over, it seems pretty clear to me, but I want your take on kind of who won and who lost here, and how the United States as a far more powerful country, could end up in the situation in which we have a lot less leverage than Iran does going into a negotiation that has also not gone well.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

I’ve tried to take a long view about all of this. This is not the first time that the United States has made this kind of mistake, quite frankly. I became of political age during the Vietnam War.

The United States has an incredibly capable military, the most capable in the world. We have the most advanced weapons. Tactically, no one can compete with us. But we don’t understand that when we’re dealing with a less powerful adversary that they usually figure out an asymmetric way to take us on, much in the way that Ukraine is taking on Russia.

And so in Vietnam, we were fighting a conventional war and the Viet Cong were fighting a guerrilla war. So here we are fighting tactically really well-

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Fighting tactically really well but strategically clueless. And Iran knows it can close the Strait of Hormuz, it can attack our Gulf partners and allies, and gain on us.

Now, you all know because you’ve been in government, that every single government, Democrat and Republican, has known about the Strait of Hormuz, has known about the ability to attack our allies and partners, and it’s been one of the reasons we haven’t gone to war and tried diplomacy. Always with a credible threat of force, which is critical in service of diplomacy, but not go to war because we knew it could set off an Arab Persian war, that it could close the Strait of Hormuz. So, this was such an ill-conceived war and we lost it. Let’s be honest, Iran came out on top. The president has called for Iran for an unconditional surrender, and looking at the deal that was struck, I know who really did the unconditional surrender, and it wasn’t Iran.

Jake Sullivan:

So, let’s actually come to the deal itself and talk about some of the details. President Trump says the most important part is that Iran commits to not pursuing a nuclear weapon. It must have made your head explode to hear him say that, Wendy.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

As you know well, you particularly, Jake, because you were part of writing it. In the preamble of the JCPOA, as has been shown on TV lately, we had much tougher language than that. But even more importantly, when Iran joined the non-proliferation treaty, it committed to not having a nuclear weapon. So for 50 years, Iran has had this position. Now it’s important to reaffirm it, but the president somehow thinks because there’s this one line, that he’s got a commitment. It’s absurd. There’s no verification, there’s no monitoring. He just believes he can go back and bomb. That’s a tactic, that’s not a strategy, and that certainly isn’t verification that they are not going to have a nuclear weapon.

Jake Sullivan:

And by the way, Wendy, the actual paragraph, paragraph eight of the deal uses the word, reaffirms. Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. So the Iranian negotiators wanted to make it clear they weren’t giving something new there.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Yes, absolutely.

Jon Finer:

So as we read it, there are basically two phases to the deal that’s been announced. There’s what happens now and then there’s what might happen if there is another deal reached during the 60 days of talks that are about to start.

Right now, the US and Iran spend about 30 days removing their respective blockades. Iran’s got to clear some mines, the US will move some ships, so that the Strait of Hormuz can open for at least 30 days after that. We’ll come back to that timeline because it’s important. Iran commits during that period to charging no fees for ships that transit the Strait, relatively short period of time, and to not advancing its nuclear program, which by the way, they don’t really have the ability to do, given how devastated the program has been now by two different conflicts, but they will not advance their nuclear program during the 60 days of talks. And in exchange for all of this, Iran gets what will amount to tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets that will be made, I think the phrase is, “Fully available,” to Iran. And it looks like for any purpose it wants to use those assets for. And the US will lift all sanctions on Iranian oil sales, which allows them to generate significant additional revenue by selling their oil all around the world.

I guess just on phase one, because as we’ll come to it, there may only be a phase one, are you surprised by the sequence and the substance here? It sounds like lots of money and no real nuclear commitments, which after all was at least one of the main purposes of going to the war in the first place.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Of course, it’s ludicrous. I mean, we heard the President in his press conference yesterday tell us why he did this. He doesn’t want to be Herbert Hoover. He wants the stock market to continue to go up.

President Donald Trump:

The stock market is quite brilliant. And every time we said something amazing, like, “We’re going to settle,” it would go up. And every time we said something negative like, “Guess what? We’re not going to be able to settle,” it would go down very big, Peter, very, very big.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

This is his incentive, this has always been his incentive. His announcements about, “We almost have a deal,” always came at points to ensure the market would close on Friday well and open well on Monday. This is his sole purpose in life, I think, which is pretty terrifying because it doesn’t necessarily address the grocery prices or the gas prices or what farmers have to deal with or anything. It’s really all about him and his business buddies. So yes, this is astonishing.

I think the other clause that is of concern that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is that we will each not get ourselves involved in the internal workings of each other’s country. And what’s so disturbing about that is that the President began all of this by saying to the protestors in the streets of Iran who are being slaughtered by the regime, “We’re coming. We have your back.” Now we’re basically saying, “We aren’t going to do anything if they come after you again.” So, not only are they getting lots of money for opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before Donald Trump decided to go to war, and getting lots of money for doing that, but we’re also saying to the protestors, to the people of Iran, “If your life doesn’t improve, we’re not going to do anything about it.”

Jon Finer:

Yeah, you’re on your own, and that’s also a day one commitment that we make no matter what happens going forward.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Yes.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. That’s for our listeners, paragraph two of the agreement concludes that, “The US and Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.” And Wendy, to your point, and I’m glad you raised this, what a demoralizing message to send to the people of Iran. Not that any of the three of us supported a regime change war, but to put this kind of period at the end of the sentence after making all these promises that we knew President Trump would never keep, that help was on the way to the Iranian people. This I think will be read on the street in Iran as the kind of ultimate gift to the regime from the United States. And I agree with you, it’s not getting enough attention.

So, okay, you’ve got this phase one that Jon just talked about, which is a massive windfall to Iran. And by the way, here’s another place where the details matter, because it’s not just oil exports. The key text of the provision says, “Crude oil and also derivatives,” meaning Iran’s petrochemicals can also be sold on the open market, and this is another area where they make a lot of money, we’ll just throw that in there as well. So they get this massive windfall up front, frozen assets, the ability to sell all of this oil and petrochemicals, and they basically don’t give up anything other than reopening a strait, which Wendy, as you said, was open before this war started.

So then, a negotiation begins that includes what happens to Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, how the nuclear program will be limited or constrained, and then how those constraints will be monitored or verified. Although there’s no detail on any of that, other than it seems Iran is saying only that it’s going to downblend its enriched Iranian not ship it out as you got them to do in the JCPOA. And what the US promises in return for all of that is something much more specific. A $300 billion fund for reconstructing Iran that we would work on with our Gulf partners. The lifting of all US sanctions on Iran, including the primary embargo, which goes way beyond whatever the JCPOA lifted. And then it says on the Strait, that Iran and Oman can figure out a future arrangement, which basically looks like Iran can charge fees after 60 days and can now begin basically to monetize the Strait. So we’re paying them to open the Strait, and then we are saying to them, “Go ahead and charge fees on the straight,” which is a big change from the status quo ante.

So when you look at that phase two, first of all, do you think there will ever be a deal at the end of phase two? If there is, is there a path to a deal that really can work for us? Just give us your assessment of how you look at the way things are now shaping up for them to come to the table to actually try to negotiate on the nuclear program.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

My sense is, we’ll never get through phase two. And the reason I think that is a number of reasons. First, Donald Trump never gets to phase two. We haven’t gotten to phase two on Gaza. Quite frankly, we haven’t even gotten to phase two on Venezuela after pulling out some oil. Then what? We never got to even phase one on Ukraine. It got too hard, the President didn’t want to confront Putin. We haven’t gotten to phase two with China, that summit was ridiculous. So, I don’t think he gets to phase two.

I don’t think he likes to do the hard work, the technical work, the patience that it takes. And I don’t think Witkoff and Kushner do either, and Vance is the Vice President. So, let’s get real. He’s not going to spend weeks, hours dealing with all of this, and if he does, he’s not going to be able to do anything else. He’s going to own it, which as Donald Trump said yesterday, if it turns out not to work, will he say it’s Vance’s fault? He thought that was a good idea. So, that’s who he is. He can dispense with people. Now, so that’s the first reason. I don’t think they have the patience, the technical expertise, or the desire to do the hard work.

Second, if this continues to be done through mediators, it’s impossible. There’s just too much detail, too difficult not to be able to have direct conversation, so we all have to watch for that.

And then third, they don’t have the team to do this work and you have to have that team. And I hadn’t mentioned earlier, the intelligence assets we had. Now, I can’t talk about all of that and what we did, but you have to have a very sophisticated use of your intelligence assets. And they’ve never understood the history and culture of Iran, ever. They didn’t go into this understanding anything about Iran, and that continues to be the case. I wish it were otherwise, I wish we could get a great deal.

And then lastly, the President, when he criticized the 2015 deal, said it didn’t cover ballistic missiles, it didn’t cover terrorism, it didn’t cover proxies, etc, etc, etc. Yesterday, he says-

President Donald Trump:

They have to have some, because other people have some. They got to have some. Somebody said, “You shouldn’t give them more.” And I have guys, I like some of these guys, but I don’t think they’re smart. “Sir, you shouldn’t let them have any missile.” I said, “Well, what am I going to do? Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?”

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Other countries have nuclear programs. Why shouldn’t Iran? This is cuckoo thinking, and it’s not that there isn’t an element of reality to that, an element. But that doesn’t mean that a regime that is now made up of hard hardliners, really tough guys who clearly took control of the first round of negotiations, that we find ourselves in this place. It’s just breathtaking.

Jon Finer:

He does have this funny habit in dealing with adversaries of almost internalizing their talking points and then using them publicly. He’s done this on behalf of the Russians, he’s certainly done this on behalf of Xi Jinping in the context of the summit that you just described talking about, of course China has an interest in Taiwan, and it’s pretty far away, by the way, from the United States, it’s pretty hard for us to get to and defend. You almost forget if you’re just reading the transcript who was speaking, a propagandist from the PRC or the President of the United States, and here’s another great example. I mean, those are classic Iranian talking points. Valid or not, very strange to hear coming out of the mouth of the President of the United States.

By the way, just one other point on the deal on enrichment, which ostensibly was another purpose for going to war. And by the way, a big reason why the various rounds of talks that the Trump Administration engaged with in Iran over the course of the last year broke down. The United States was insisting on zero enrichment, that’s been the mantra. I think none of us believed that Iran was ever likely to agree to that, even if it meant war, and ultimately that turned out to be true. But what this deal says on enrichment is quite interesting. It says the two sides will essentially discuss enrichment consistent with Iran’s needs, which to me, by the way, that’s also classic language the Iranians use, “We have this need for enriched material for our reactors,” whether or not Trump knows that this-

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

For cancer treatment.

Jon Finer:

... part of their arguments or whatever. Right, medical uses. It does sound a lot like they’re going to be talking about an enrichment program in Iran going forward, again, even though this is why there was no deal before the war. So is there any reason to believe that this deal, as currently constructed, was not available to Trump without launching this terrible war?

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Of course. And indeed, there are reports that before he launched this terrible war, they were pretty close to such a deal and walked away from it.

The other element here that’s critical, everybody talks about trust in negotiations. I have never believed that negotiations with adversaries are about trust. Respect perhaps, respect. And I did gain some respect that Iran has interests, that they’re capable people, that they know what they’re doing, but I didn’t trust the Iranians, they didn’t trust me. And heaven only knows Iran has experienced time and time again as they began negotiations with Witkoff and Kushner, we attack them. And so, they’re very wary. And on top of that, they now have gotten this great windfall and so they are feeling powerful and on the front edge of this negotiation, and they’re going to be really going all the way, as far as they can go. It’s extraordinary.

Jake Sullivan:

To that point, Wendy, Iran definitely seems like it is an incentive to stay in this deal and not walk away because of all that it’s getting. And President Trump sure seems disinclined to go back to war, which is why he took this deal and you made the reference to him not wanting to be Herbert Hoover. But there is still a chance that this falls apart, you can imagine a number of scenarios. Israel hates the deal and the fact that it says fighting in Lebanon also has to stop. In fact, it says that three times in the first paragraph, refers to Lebanon more than either the US or Iran in that paragraph. They’ll probably keep attacking Hezbollah, at least periodically, which may make Iran have to respond in some way. Or perhaps Trump who has been sensitive to the barrage of criticism he’s gotten over this deal, could try to reopen certain aspects, which could lead to a breakdown. You could also have some local military skirmish in the Gulf, given how many military assets are in close proximity and that could flare into something larger.

So, Jon and I have talked about ways in which this could fall apart, but how do you actually rate the chances that we go back to war, as opposed to just stay in this negotiating process?

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

I think the most likely outcome take is, it sort of bumbles along. That there is never a real calm in the Middle East, there rarely has been a calm in least. That there may be negotiations on and off, that in fact at the end of the day there-

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

... that in fact, at the end of the day, if there’s any agreement, there will be fees charged for going through the Strait of Hormuz; environmental fees, service fees, call it whatever you want. I think that we’re going to be in a sort of neither here nor there situation for quite some time. For quite some time.

Jon Finer:

You mentioned earlier in this conversation dealing with Congress in the context of these negotiations. We obviously all had to do a fair bit of that. Congress is probably now just digesting what a calamitous deal this is. You’re not exactly seeing many members come out with resounding support, including from Trump’s own party.

What would have happened if you had tried to present a deal like this to Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham back in the day? Or even, by the way, to members of our own party, like Chuck Schumer-

Jake Sullivan:

Yes.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Yeah.

Jon Finer:

... and Bob Menendez, former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who’s fallen on some hard times but was very, very strongly opposed to a lot of what we were trying to do.

How do you think that would have gone and how do you think Congress is actually going to respond to this Trump deal, if at all?

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

You know, I thought about that, Jon, particularly when Vice President Vance said first in that off the record briefing and then publicly on TV, “One of the coolest things was getting to know senior Iranians and seeing that they wanted a different future for their people.” I said something about that.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, the best part is the friends you make along the way or whatever.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Yeah, something like ... If I had said that, John Kerry would have called me into the office and said, “What are you thinking?” You know? It just would be impossible.

We all took a lot of hits from Congress during the JCPOA, and I used to say to Congress, “You have a choice. We either do diplomacy or we have a war.” Now, some of them wanted war because they had the fantasy that you could wipe out Iran. And obviously you can’t because you can kill their leaders, which Israel did quite effectively, but they have a multilayered system.

Again, people not understanding this country and how it was created in 1979 as a culture of resistance that is fundamental to who they are in response to feeling like we had put in the Shah who was a dictator and oppressed their people. That’s what the revolution was about.

So I think this is going to be very tough, very tough going forward. And Congress, I don’t know how they’re going to deal with this, because we’ve seen Lindsey Graham, who’s been a hawk, now say, “Well, this is good that the Strait is open. Now let’s go to work on the negotiation,” because he knows that’s what his master, quite frankly, requires of him; to be on board, find a way to be on board. I don’t know how all the rest of the folks are going to find their way through this.

Now the one thing Trump is very good at is throwing so much on the table you don’t know what to deal with first. So as this deal was coming out, he said that Jay Clayton, who was nominated to be the Director of National Intelligence, was going to be pulled from his confirmation hearing because obviously Trump wants Bill Pulte, who knows nothing about intelligence, to be there for a while to do the things, whatever nefarious things there are that Trump wants done. And so that shifted some of the attention away from what’s happening with this deal.

So I will not be surprised if the president shifts to Cuba as the next shiny object, or some other event around the world to say, “Well, I’ve got my folks working on this Iran deal now. Let’s go on to this.” Because that’s what he does. He deflects, he shifts direction, he puts so much on the table, it’s hard for the Congress to know what to deal with first.

And they all in this season want to make sure he doesn’t come after them. He’s very good at instilling fear in his Republican colleagues.

Jake Sullivan:

Wendy, we had Ricardo Zúñiga, who you know very well, on a few weeks ago to talk about Cuba, and he too expressed real concern that President Trump would decide to take some form of military action there as a means of further pressuring that regime. So I definitely think that is a watch this space situation because President Trump’s going to want to change the subject.

Just on the deal for a minute, the president keeps claiming that all the leaders he talks to love it. What do you think Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf are thinking? How do you think they perceive where we are right now and how are they going to react to this?

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

My own experience with the Gulf countries is that they will do whatever they believe, as most countries do, is in their interest today. And I don’t think ... Even though they wanted the war originally, they discovered that in fact it had a terrible impact on them and that they were losing economic space, they were losing their ability to reach their economic goals. Many of the Gulf states want to come into the modern era and have big plans. Certainly the UAE does, certainly Saudi Arabia does.

Qatar has been in the catbird seat in many ways, sort of being able to deal with everybody and helping everybody and doing whatever is in their interest for the day. Now I believe they want the Strait of Hormuz open. They want Iran to stop attacking them. My understanding is for Qatar to put its LNG back together again will take two years to rebuild its facilities. They’re a very wealthy nation, but you know, there are real consequences for these countries.

So I think they’re glad it’s over. I think we’re seeing them put money into this ostensible reconstruction fund because if they pay Iran, maybe Iran will leave them alone.

But this notion that Iran is going to come into the community of nations? Oh, I wish that were true. I wish that were true for the Iranian people, but it’s not who the regime is and it’s not what their ambition is. It’s not who this government right now is, which is more hard line than ever. So I doubt that will happen.

I remember I sat on a panel at the Aspen Security Conference with Yousef Otaiba, who was against the Iran deal.

Jon Finer:

The Emirates ambassador [inaudible 00:43:50].

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

The-

Jake Sullivan:

The ambassador of [inaudible 00:43:50]. Right.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Thank you.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

And I said, “Yousef, you’ve changed your mind.” He said, “Well, I was for it until I was against it.”

Jon Finer:

We won’t reference who you’re quoting there. He’s come up earlier in this conversation. Or who Yousef was paraphrasing at least.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Yeah.

Jon Finer:

One more country, Wendy, in the region that we’ve talked about a bit, but that’s in quite a fascinating position as a result of all of this, and that’s Israel. And the prime minister in particular is in a difficult spot.

On the one hand, he’s prided himself and staked his political future, and frankly, even maybe his liberty, personal liberty, given the legal troubles he has, and his upcoming reelection campaign, on his cooperation and relationship with Trump, who he’s worked on now over two wars with Iran and who probably up until recently has been the most popular American president ever in Israel.

On the other hand, there are now polls showing Trump’s popularity in Israel plummeting, and Netanyahu is getting attacked by his opponents in the upcoming election, which has to happen before October, for quote unquote, “Allowing Trump to cut a deal behind Israel’s back,” that Netanyahu was not involved in negotiating, wasn’t even really aware of the details of.

What do you think Netanyahu will do over the course of the coming months given political forces, security concerns, relationship with Trump teetering? Where does he go?

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

I think he’s in a very tough spot. He was in court the other day and ostensibly lost it and sort of railed against what was happening. That makes it even more difficult for the president of Israel to give him a pardon because part of the way you get a pardon is in essence to be thoughtful about how you work through the judicial process.

I think he is in a very tough spot, but I never count Bibi Netanyahu out. We say that a cat has nine lives. The Prime Minister of Israel has about 20. He is a master politician. People in Israel care about their security. Everyone still remembers the horrors of October 7th and the attack by Hamas. It is seared into every single person in Israel. And so I don’t think we can count him out politically. And even his opponents want a tough position toward Iran, want to ensure the security of Israel as a Jewish state.

So I don’t think we know the answer to this, but there’s no question he’s been humiliated. Again, yesterday the president basically said, “We’re the senior partner, you’re the junior partner. We’re the big guy, you’re the little guy.” How humiliating is that for Israel?

So I don’t think we know the end of this story or what the outcome will be, but it certainly wasn’t a good day for Bibi Netanyahu.

Jake Sullivan:

Wendy, just zooming out a bit, your book Not for the Faint of Heart is, among other things, a sort of love letter to diplomacy, at least when it’s practiced at its best. And the State Department where we all worked, where you worked across multiple administrations seems not to have been involved in these negotiations at all. Secretary Rubio is virtually in hiding.

What do you see as the future of American diplomacy at this point? And can you give people hope that there is a future for American diplomacy at this point?

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Well, absolutely I want to give people hope. The subtitle of that book is, “The Courage, Power and Persistence,” the persistence being quite critical and not for the faint of heart. You know, all of these things that we do, that the two of you have done, that all our colleagues have done, our bosses have done, the presidents we worked for have done, these are hard things. You have to keep going. You have to be willing to pick yourself up.

And I spend time, as you do, Jake, and Jon, as you have in the past and at Columbia as well, around young people who think about their futures. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I found my students last semester very anxious; not only about the Trump administration and about the future, and those who have fellowships, Pickering or Rangel fellowships, whether they should go into the foreign service, but they’re anxious about AI and whether they’ll have a future at all.

And so what we need to do, what I feel my job is at my age of 77, is to tell people to hang in there, to fight for what they believe in, to engage, to vote, to organize, to learn everything you can to make sure you can meet the future and have the kind of future in democracy.

We’re about to come to our 250th anniversary and it’s not the symbols of fixing the reflecting pond or building an arch. It’s about who we are, what our values are, what we stand for. It’s what Barack Obama is doing today when he opens his library, which includes all kinds of things for the community, because it’s really about people at the end of the day and what they do in their community.

So I tell students, find anything, whether it’s voting, writing postcards, working in your community, mentoring someone, to work for the future. It’s up to them. I won’t be here. It’s their future. And these young people are bright and anxious and filled with energy, and it is my job to give them hope.

Jon Finer:

Well, they’re lucky to have you doing that. We’ve been lucky to have you on this show and lucky to work with you over the years and learn from you.

Jake Sullivan:

Just listening to you over the last little less than an hour is a reminder of what we can have in terms of wisdom and capacity and what we’re missing right now. And we’re just really grateful to have had you on today.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Well, thank you. I am incredibly grateful to have had the honor to work with both of you. I’m sure we’ve irritated each other from time to time, but you both are so smart and so capable. And you are the future. You are part of that future. You are part of that leadership.

I know you’ve both taken some hits. That comes with the territory. But our country will be in great hands if both of you are part of the leadership in the future.

Thank you very much. Thanks a lot.

Jon Finer:

Thank you, Wendy.

Jake Sullivan:

Thanks, Wendy. Really appreciate it.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman:

Take care.

(Music).

Jake Sullivan:

You know Jon, that conversation just made me so wistful in two respects. One, as a professional, it made me wistful for competent, effective American diplomacy. But personally, it just made me wistful for the team, for those days when all of us were working together in service of the country and having the opportunity to support one another, lift one another up. And it’s just a reminder of what a great leader Wendy was of this [inaudible 00:51:48] enterprise that was the Iran nuclear deal team that you and I were both blessed to be a part of.

But it’s just sort of like, “Man, here we are.” And wouldn’t it be so nice to have that back on both a professional and a personal level?

Jon Finer:

It’s so true. I mean, you get into government, at least I think for us, because you want to try to work on big consequential problems and try to find a better way forward. I mean, for me, I got interested in foreign affairs because the United States got into a stupid war in Iraq. I got interested in how that decision got made, ended up in the US government working on the Iran deal to try to avoid another stupid war from happening. And now here we are having done the deal, have it eliminated, the stupid war happens and now we end up with a much worse diplomatic arrangement.

I got asked actually at a dinner last night by someone whether I felt Schadenfreude, which is this great German word for essentially reveling in the failures or misfortune of others, when I saw Trump trying to explain how good this was and not convincing anybody. And to be honest, I mostly kind of feel angry and a bit sad about the whole thing that we ended up in this place so unnecessarily. I don’t feel particularly gleeful in watching him.

And certainly wistfulness is a big part of it, as you said, because what happens in government also is you do this big hard thing, you’re together constantly all day, every day, in touch all night, and then you go your separate ways, you live different lives, you don’t see people nearly as much. So then to get to spend some time with somebody like Wendy who was part of our day-to-day existence for such a long time and in such a great way was a treat actually today.

Jake Sullivan:

You know, it’s so interesting. President Trump called the JCPOA “the worst deal in human history,” which is quite a striking statement, the worst deal in human history. And here he does a deal that gives Iran tens of billions of dollars to open a strait that wasn’t closed before he launched the war, expressly permits them to design a scheme going forward to charge fees for ships going through that strait, which was never a thing before this war, that promises-

Jake Sullivan:

... a thing before this war. The promises, $300 billion in investment in Iran to reconstruct it, and that doesn’t actually get anything solid on the nuclear file. The only detail we have on the nuclear file in this is that they’re not going to ship out the enriched uranium, which they did under the JCPOA. They’re going to down blend it in the country, meaning they maintain the base material.

So, you look at all that and then you see a guy who’s coming out and saying, “I did an awesome job. This was just awesome. You and I sweated bullets, lost sleep, just tore our hair out thinking, “Oh, man. Are we doing this right? Are we getting this right?”

And here you got a guy who’s literally sitting in Versailles, of all places, signing the deal. It’s the new Treaty of Versailles except the U.S. is the one paying the reparations.

Jon Finer:

There are a few things we didn’t have time to get to in this conversation that are, at least, worthy of awareness and maybe reflection going forward. One is a story that came out just as word of the agreement was breaking, which is that the government of Qatar had negotiated. Now Qatar, just for everyone’s awareness, and I think most people do know, played probably the most central role of any outside country. Pakistan gets a lot of attention for helping mediate this deal, but Qatar, in particular, played a big role in going back and forth between the Iranians and the United States.

But they had also cut a bit of a deal for themselves with Iran to get their own energy products out through the Strait before the deal was even in place and compensated Iran through their own funds in order to do that, and the United States had signed off on that deal according to the news reports, which I have not seen either Qatar or the United States deny.

So, I think some other countries around the region, around the world probably looked at that and thought, “Huh. You’re playing a negotiating role, you’re also going to carve a bit of a separate deal for yourself.” We’ll see if that generates more controversy. It’s got lost in all the details of the negotiation itself, but that’s one thing that didn’t come up in the talks that I think was important over the last week.

Jake Sullivan:

Extraordinary to have President Trump out on Truth Social talking about civilizational erasure and, “We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age,” and, at the same time, green lighting these deals to send a huge amount of money to Iran to get oil and gas out. It just tells you something about the layers at play here.

The other thing that we talked a bit about was the role of Congress, but we didn’t get into this question of whether this deal actually has to formally be submitted to the Congress for approval.

During the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, Congress passed a law called INARA, the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which, basically, said, “If you do a nuclear deal, you got to send it to Congress.” And then Congress has the right to disapprove it. Meaning, it’s assumed approved unless a majority of both Houses actually disapprove it. And actually you need a veto-proof majority of both Houses, because, otherwise, it goes to the president’s desk and he can veto the disapproval.

Do you think this deal has to get submitted to Congress? Will get submitted to Congress? What’s your expectation there?

Jon Finer:

So, not looking at this as a lawyer, my read of this deal is there was so little in terms of actual nuclear content that maybe they would be able to avoid Congress entirely, just bypass INARA. By the way, during the JCPOA, we did submit that deal to Congress under this act. We were able to “win”. This is how you win in Washington, 42 to 58. 42 votes in favor, 58 against, but because it wasn’t a veto-proof ... Because they couldn’t get cloture actually. They needed 60-

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. Couldn’t get ... Yeah.

Jon Finer:

... it was enough to win. So, we celebrated extensively a 42 to 58 victory of sorts.

This time I think they’d have a tough time potentially getting this deal through Congress even with a veto-proof majority. It’d be a mix of motivations, because a lot of Democrats are not going to want to support something the president puts out there. Also, not going to want to reject something that could end this war. Republicans are going to have their own psychology about all of this, because I’m sure the vast majority of them hate the deal.

But I think he might be able to bypass it. I will say, though, that people who are much more legally adept and astute than I am, the most recent one I’ve seen is Jack Goldsmith, a longtime Republican international lawyer, thinks it should be submitted to Congress under INARA.

So, we’ll see. I think this administration feels pretty unbound by such legal pleasantries and is unlikely to do it, but maybe they want to put Congress on the hook and force people to pick a side.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s an interesting dynamic, because, as you say, the administration has no problem just flouting and ignoring laws and regulations when it sees it in its interest to do so. But, also, in this case, I think there’s probably a lot of members of Congress who would prefer not to have to take a vote on this one way or the other.

Jon Finer:

We’ve been pretty over-indexed on Iran in this podcast over the last several weeks, several months really. It’s been worthy of a lot of attention. We had a war. We now have an agreement to end the war. We now are going to have two months maybe of talks. I suspect we’re going to be coming back to this issue from time to time.

But it will also give us the opportunity to focus on some other topics that are just below the radar, but I think worthy of our attention going forward. What’s on your list of things for the coming weeks to give a bit of a preview of?

Jake Sullivan:

I’m not sure it’s entirely under the radar since we just had Michael Kaufman on to talk about the state of play with the war in Ukraine. But with this war in the Gulf with Iran apparently coming to an end, and with a lot more oil now likely coming onto the market, I think this is going to cause some economic pain for Putin, because the oil price is likely to go down in ways that put a squeeze on his finances.

And that’s on top of all the other pressures he’s feeling, both at home, and on the battlefield as we heard from Michael on the ways the Ukrainians have been able to up their game and the Russians are just running into real problems trying to advance on the ground.

So, it strikes me that we may find ourselves in a circumstance over the coming weeks or months where those dynamics keep shifting, potentially, in favor of Ukraine and against Russia, but also we’re going to have to watch how Putin reacts to it and what other cards he thinks he can play.

And what caught both of our eyes was a story about how the Russian intelligence services contracted with an unwitting Ukrainian actually in the UK to commit arson against Prime Minister Starmer’s house. And it just goes to show you that the Russians are thinking about ways of putting pressure on countries that are supportive of Ukraine way beyond the battlefield, including through the sabotage and other gray zone activities that they’re undertaking, and we could see more of that as we go forward.

So, this constellation of issues around Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine, Russia’s efforts to undermine and destabilize Western support for Ukraine, this is something that I think we’re going to need to bring additional guests on to discuss, including people who are really deep on what’s happening inside the Kremlin and inside Moscow in addition to what’s happening on the battlefield. So, that’s one issue that’s very much on my radar screen. How about you?

Jon Finer:

Well, and, by the way, and which side this administration is going to be on in this Russia/Ukraine-

Jake Sullivan:

It’s a great point. Yeah.

Jon Finer:

... dispute going forward and who they will choose to pressure. If there are ever negotiations again, we talked before about Russian attacks or near-attacks on NATO territory, including these attacks that took place in Romania, and the reluctance of NATO countries to even bring this issue in front of NATO, because they were afraid of what the United States might say or how the United States might respond calling into question the alliance. So, a lot to dig into there.

Another topic that we’ve dealt with quite a bit on this podcast, but is worthy I think of revisiting in the days ahead is this intersection of AI, and, particularly, the leading large language model companies, and national security, and, in particular, the policies of this administration and this Pentagon.

So, we talked previously about some clauses that Anthropic wanted to insert into its terms of service and its contract with the Pentagon. One, related to lethal autonomous weaponry and the other related to domestic surveillance, and the total rejection by the Pentagon of any sort of policy language being inserted into its contracts. That led to a standoff that led to Anthropic’s contract, essentially, being canceled and, quite egregiously, in our view, the Pentagon declaring Anthropic, an American company, to be a supply chain risk to the United States, which is now being litigated in federal court.

There’s been more recently another standoff between Anthropic and this administration over the release of Anthropic’s most recent frontier model, which according to the Trump administration, and maybe even according to another private company, in this case, Amazon and its CEO Andy Jassy, did not sufficiently safeguard some of the very advanced cyber capabilities that these new Anthropic models possess.

People will remember there was a model called Mythos that Anthropic actually went to the government with and said, “This model is so adept at finding cyber vulnerabilities and enabling cyber attacks we’re not sure it should be released.”

The government actually agreed, very unusually, for the Trump administration, which has been anti-regulation in this space, that that model Mythos should not be released, and has been working with Anthropic to go company by company in the United States and elsewhere to help use this model to shore up vulnerabilities, but not make it public more broadly.

Another Anthropic model was released publicly more recently, and after the release Amazon talked to the White House about its perception that actually this model is not safe and it is possible to “jailbreak”, avoid the safeguards that have been put in place to allow it to be used as a cyber weapon.

And over the course of a frenetic several hours recently, the White House reached out to Anthropic, tried to debate this topic, and, ultimately, passed an export control that has caused Anthropic to have to pull this model back from already having been released to the public.

That’s the first time that’s happened with one of these frontier models that it was actually released and then withdrawn by the company entirely because the Trump administration published an export control that, basically, said, “This model cannot be used by any foreign countries” or what’s called a deemed export control by any foreign persons, including, by the way, Anthropic’s own workforce, probably half of which or more is foreign.

And so, that caused Anthropic to, basically, decide the only recourse they had was to pull the model back, because they could not insulate it from all foreign persons who happen to be in America or work for Anthropic’s workforce.

So, this is also still being negotiated now in real time. It is, obviously, national security-related. There are very different views, very strong views on both sides as to who’s right and who’s wrong, and another topic that we could dig into some time soon.

Jake Sullivan:

Couldn’t agree more. And this particular relationship between Anthropic and the Pentagon, Anthropic and the Trump White House has all kinds of undertones to it that are personal and political and really I think come at the harm of U.S. national security.

But then there are these larger questions of who decides when it comes to the application of these models, particularly, as it affects national security. And I think we’re well-past time for bringing a top AI expert onto the show to help us unpack and understand all of these things. So, in the coming weeks we should, certainly, find the opportunity to do that.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow the audio feed, so, you never miss an episode.

Jon Finer:

For additional content, episode transcripts, and exclusive podcast segments, subscribe to The Long Game on Substack or join The Long Game Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Jake Sullivan:

This week we share some behind the scenes stories from our time negotiating with the Iranians. The Iranians one day decided they were going to take the morning off to go on a Sound of Music tour, which meant they got on a bus that played the songs, drove from Vienna to Salzburg, went around to the gazebo and the lake and the other places, and you just imagine these grizzled veterans of the Iranian Foreign Service, hard dudes, out there listening to the Sound of Music and looking at these beautiful scenes in Salzburg. It’s just the kind of surreal human aspect to these negotiations that may be sublime and ridiculous.

MUSIC:

The hills are alive with the sound of music.

Jon Finer:

Be on the lookout. Head to TheLongGame.Substack.com or subscribe to The Long Game Plus on Apple Podcasts. The links are in the show notes.

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you liked the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us. The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers Nat Weiner and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate producer Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager Lianna Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Weiner. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

What the World Cup Reveals About Global Politics (w/ Franklin Foer)

June 10, 2026

TEASER:

Franklin Foer:
It’s also hugely irregular to have the United States impose the restrictions that it’s imposed on the Iranian national team given that they are essentially a guest of our government invited to compete in this competition. And we know that the history of sports and diplomacy are always hugely tangled.

Jon Finer:
Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:
And I’m Jake Sullivan. And we’re recording this Wednesday evening, June 10th, also known as World Cup Eve. The World Cup begins tomorrow, June 11th, at Mexico City’s historic Azteca Stadium with a match between Mexico and South Africa. This is actually the first time that three nations have co-hosted the Cup, Mexico, Canada, and, of course, the United States of America. It’s the first time that the tournament will include 48 teams, up from 32 in the last several installments. In total, there will be 104 matches played across the three countries, 78 in the U.S., 13 in Mexico, 13 in Canada. And for those who are big U.S. Men’s National Team fans like myself and Mr. Finer, the U.S. men play their first game on Friday, June 12th, against Paraguay in Los Angeles.

Given that this is World Cup Eve, and given that here on The Long Game, we try to keep tabs on the deeper forces driving and explaining today’s geopolitics, we thought there would be no better guest than our guest today, Franklin Foer. Frank is one of America’s most prominent journalists and authors, covering politics, globalization, culture, technology, and power. He’s currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, and previously served as the editor of The New Republic. He is very relevantly the author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. He first published the book back in 2004, but he just released an updated edition this year in time for this World Cup.

How Soccer Explains the World became one of the most influential books ever written about sports and politics, and it really emerged during a period when globalization appeared ascendant. A lot of policymakers believed that growing economic integration would gradually weaken nationalism and tribal identities, but Frank’s argument was more complicated than that. He said globalization often strengthened local identities rather than replacing them. And now, two decades later, many of the forces that he identified have become central features of world politics, including nationalism, populism, identity politics, and, of course geopolitical competition. So we are thrilled to have Frank on to talk about soccer and well, how it explains the world. Frank, welcome to the Long Game.

Franklin Foer:
Long game, that’s some kind of sports podcast?

Jon Finer:
It is today. Frank, great to have you here. Jake outed the two of us as fans of the U.S. Men’s National Team. He often makes fun of me because I also root for England. So I’m wondering, first of all, I assume you’re a fan of the United States in this World Cup, before we get to high theory, do you have a second favorite team, a sentimental favorite? Anybody else you’re going to be watching particularly closely this time?

Franklin Foer:
Yeah. I think one of the joys of rooting for the U.S. Men’s National Team is knowing that they’re going to go out of the tournament at a certain point and, therefore, it’s important to have a good spoiler alert team. Yeah. And so when I grew up, I have cousins who live in Brazil, and in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s when they came to the United States, it was a massive journey for them. And the only way that they felt like they could bridge the divide was to bring the canary yellow Brazil soccer jerseys to us. And they didn’t understand that I had kind of zero comprehension of what that meant and that was a very exotic thing to be wearing around. But in the late ‘70s, Pelé was one of the great national exports of Brazil. He was playing in New York City for the New York Cosmos. And so that was really part of my entrée into the game. So Brazil is my second team. Not a bad second team to have historically.

Jake Sullivan:
No. Yeah.

Franklin Foer:
Maybe not a great one to have this year, but-

Jake Sullivan:
Not exactly a sentimental favorite, more of a front-runner favorite, I would say.

Franklin Foer:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Jon Finer:
Winner picker, you might call it. And probably the last time the United States was host to the best soccer player in the world, or at least someone who had been.

Franklin Foer:
There is a very relevant Long Game story to be told about Pelé, which is that Pelé had been declared an unexportable national resource by the Brazilian Parliament. And a lot of the propaganda that the Brazilian military dictatorship formulated in the early 1970s hoped to capitalize on Pelé in order to build legitimacy for itself. And when the brothers from Warner Records who bought, who were trying to promote the North American Soccer League, they knew that Henry Kissinger was a big fan of the game. And so they had Kissinger make a phone call to the Brazilian foreign minister at the time and tell him that it would be very much in Brazil’s national interest for Pelé to be allowed to come to the United States. And so Henry Kissinger smoothed Pelé’s arrival in the United States.

Jake Sullivan:
We had export controls on semiconductors, of course, in the Biden administration. The Trump team is playing with them a little bit. And we had this idea of small yard, high fence. What you’re saying is Brazil basically had small yard, high fence for their best soccer player. He was export controlled from leaving their country until-

Franklin Foer:
Exactly.

Jake Sullivan:
... Kissinger broke the log jam. Amazing. That’s a great story.

Franklin Foer:
There was a real threat that he would go to... There was a threat. The Italian teams desperately wanted him and were willing to pay him lots of money. So they were basically depriving Pelé of a small fortune probably by prohibiting his export.

Jon Finer:
Probably the only other time the United States has had the best player in the world or one of them playing in this country until the present day when Lionel Messi is-

Franklin Foer:

Messi, yeah.

Jon Finer:
... present here. So Frank, I want to give you the chance to walk our listeners through what you consider to be the kind of the sort of core argument that you’re making in your book. Jake alluded to some of it, but if you had to give the sort of elevator pitch here, we’d love to hear it.

Franklin Foer:
So the genesis of the book really was there was this moment during the 2002 World Cup where I was watching the Nigeria National Team play, and they had all of these players who were playing in Ukraine. In 2002, that felt like a really strange fact of the global economy. I couldn’t stop thinking about what their lives were like and how these players ended up in Nigeria. It felt to me like as I was consuming soccer, I was sitting at the spear tip of globalization. There was so much of the sport that I was able to access from my couch in an unprecedented sort of way. And it was just like this explosion. In the mid-1990s, it was hard to follow soccer.

By 2000, it was very, very easy, not just because of the internet, but because the way that the English Premier League had marketed itself and sold itself around the globe. And it was clear when you watched the super teams that they were entirely global in a way that they weren’t at the beginning of the decade. And so I was just interested in the question of how does this change the way that we think about ourselves? And it would just kind of seem like when a team like Manchester United or Real Madrid became an international super club and when their players were no longer from England or Spain, that there would be something that would change the way that we thought about ourselves.

One of the things that I explored through this travelog that I took when I was in my 20s was I just kept coming up against this reality that the way in which local affinities and tribal affiliations only seemed to kind of survive and sometimes become more intense in this era of globalization, sometimes as a reaction to the way that globalization was imposing all these new forces that made people cling to the familiar, and in ways that were hopeful as well, that in a globalized world we could still maintain some sort of sense of rootedness and connection. And no matter how big something got or no matter how global it became, people were still able to feel part of meaningful communities.

Jon Finer:
So you wrote the book now, I think, more than 20 years ago. I don’t know if you go back and reread it every six months, but you probably had to at least reread it in order to do the update that you did in advance of this World Cup. I guess I’m just wondering how well you feel it held up, what you think you got right and what you think maybe you could have done differently.

Franklin Foer:
I think the underlying thesis holds up really well. Some of the examples in the book feel slightly dated because, what, 22 years. But, so again, there are things that have changed dramatically that I could have never foreseen. So I didn’t predict that nation-states would buy soccer clubs, which has become something that happens all over the place, that we just watched Qatar’s Paris-Saint Germain beat Arsenal in the finals of the European Champions League, and that Saudi Arabia would own Newcastle. It’s such an amazing fact to me because when I think about Newcastle, I think about the city that just didn’t do that well in globalization.

And yet, there was this moment when Saudi Arabia bailed out the team, which was flailing, and injected capital into it. And you had these Geordies from the North East of England dressing in Saudi robes to pay homage to their new owners. I should write another book about women’s soccer, which is its own parallel universe where a lot of what I described holds for women’s soccer, but there are a lot of other fascinating ways in which women’s soccer is a different economy, a different experience of globalization. But I think my thesis fundamentally about the way that we think about ourselves in a globalized world holds.

Jon Finer:
So maybe the most important question of all for at least some of our listeners here afterward has these data-driven predictors almost that are maybe a different way to help people fill out their World Cup brackets. Many of them, it turns out, are actually based on political or geopolitical factors. The main one, at least as I read it, is you have this hierarchy of political systems when it comes to how countries will perform on the field. Communism turns out tends to be on the low end of the totem pole. So fascism beats communism, but a military junta tends to beat fascism, and social democracy tends to beat a military junta, which I think is a good thing in soccer and elsewhere.

I won’t ask, by the way, which of those you think the U.S. is right now. And there are others in there, too. The EU tends to overperform. Countries that have just escaped communism or authoritarianism tend to do pretty well. Imperial powers, interestingly, tend to beat their former colonies. Some might be disappointed in that, although you note a victory by Senegal over France in 2002. I think those two countries are playing again next week, which will be interesting. And then, if a nation-state heavily exports oil, it will likely underperform. So given all of that, which is a bit of a dizzying set of factors, who is going to win this thing?

Franklin Foer:
Right. So I did that in 2006, and I haven’t updated the data to kind of reflect how they may have changed over the intervening years, but I think it’s so incredible that Europe has maintained this monopoly over the game that it’s like whatever history it has somehow leads to this kind of path dependence, the investment choices that it makes, the bounty of riches and also the relationship that it has to its former colonies, which has become an actual strength of a lot of these teams. So that France is a team that is composed of immigrants from former colonies by and large. Same is true for the Netherlands.

The ability to leverage that history, some of which is shameful, kind of multiculturalism in order to constitute a new sense of national identity as manifested on the field becomes this huge innate strength that these countries have. France, to me, to answer your question, they’re my pick for winning this tournament, that they just have the best, most balanced, deepest team. They’ve a coach, Didier Deschamps, who’s presided for many, many tournaments. They have chemistry between their players. And if you take their best players off the field, the second set of players who come in are nearly as amazing as the first.

Jon Finer:
And they produce very little oil. So there you go.

Franklin Foer:
And there you go.

Jake Sullivan:
One of the other countries competing in this World Cup is Iran. Iran is playing its three group matches in the U.S., but is basing in Tijuana, Mexico, and flying back and forth the day before and the day after each match so that it doesn’t actually base itself in the United States. We have never had a World Cup like this one where the host nation is at war with a qualifying team. And, in fact, there is a very credible scenario where the U.S. could actually meet Iran in the round of 32 in Dallas, Texas, which would be quite the showdown. What do you make of this dynamic? Could you have envisioned that kind of scenario when you wrote the book? And what does it say to you about the current state about geopolitics and sports?

Franklin Foer:
And there’s actually this interesting way in which the United States and Iran are kind of fated to continually playing each other on the field. And there is this fascinating history with the Iranian national team’s connection to reform movements back home where these moments in the more distant past where their victories have been occasion for people to come out in the streets. The Iranian national team represents an alternative vision of nationalism potentially because there’s nothing inherently Islamic about it.

I don’t think it’s been especially connected to the IRGC. And so it’s been a vessel for people to continue to preserve ideas about Persia and Iran separate from the regime’s conception of itself. And then, in the last tournament, there was this moment where the Iranian national team was put under pressure to essentially comment on protests that were happening back in Iran because there was a woman I think who’d been murdered by-

Jake Sullivan:
Ordered-

Franklin Foer:
... the-

Jake Sullivan:
.. the morality police.

Franklin Foer:
... morality police. Yeah. Morality-

Franklin Foer:
.. yeah. Right. And so the regime put all this pressure on the team to kind of sing the national anthem so that they didn’t engage in any sort of protest, no matter how mild. This is bizarre that this is happening in this other context, and it’s also hugely irregular to have the United States impose the restrictions that it’s imposed on the Iranian national team given that they are essentially a guest of our government invited to compete in this competition.

And we know that the history of sports and diplomacy are always hugely tangled. I don’t remember if you guys confronted any decisions or choices that you had to made about U.S. participation in global events, but obviously there’s this history of boycotts. What I don’t like about the way that the administration has handled it is that it’s against the whole spirit of fear and equal play, that it seems like we’re taking a competitor in this event who were saying, “It’s fine, go ahead and compete,” and yet we’re penalizing them in all sorts of ways for entering the competition, that we’re saying that they can only come into the United States for the day that they’re playing.

I saw one report that said that they were actively discouraging protests in the stands from Iranian fans. And so we’ve seen the way that people can be surveilled from afar and their families can be forced to pay a price if people connected to them engage in dissent. You don’t have to dig very deep to see how these games explain the world.

Jake Sullivan:
You know, it’s interesting, just as recently as this March, shortly after the war kicked off and a few weeks after the Iranian regime was mowing down protestors in the streets, the Iranian women’s team was playing in Australia and they had silent protests during that time, refusing to sing the national anthem and the like. And there were questions actually about whether they would defect to Australia. So this has really kind of continued right up to the present day. It’s really interesting. I read today that actually the administration has relaxed its policy, which as you noted before, was going to be they had to literally fly in the day of the game because they were going to get one-day visas for each game coming out of Mexico. Apparently under sufficient pressure from who knows where, that’s been slightly relaxed, but it’s still they’re just coming in the day before and then leaving the day after.

And that puts a lot of wear and tear on a team. Just kind of interesting that at the end of all this, the Iranian team is going to be holed up in Tijuana awaiting the opportunity to come play in Los Angeles and Seattle and the like. So you mentioned earlier that one of the big things you didn’t foresee was nation-states buying soccer teams, owning major clubs. That Newcastle example is quite poignant, and you write about that in your new edition, which I highly recommend to people because the picture of these Geordies, these kind of hardscrabble guys from North East England dressing up in Saudi garb, that definitely tells us something about both localism and globalization. What do you think is going on here with these Gulf countries buying soccer teams? Do you think this is going to be a continuing trend? What do you take away from it? How does it fit into your mental model for how soccer explains the world?

Franklin Foer:
Interestingly, I think each state probably has a slightly different strategy or different goal that they’re hoping to extract from doing this. So the Saudis, I think, probably genuinely were interested in diversifying their economy as one of their goals. I think that the idea of sportswashing, they call it, is probably a goal of a lot of these states. Qatar was extremely successful in doing that during the last World Cup. There were all sorts of reasons why the world could have condemned Qatar for the labor practices that it used in constructing stadiums, the bans that they imposed on gay fans coming to the country.

There were many reasons why the world could have complained, and yet the world held its tongue. Then, there’s just simple vanity that I think that if you have a lot of money and owning a sports team is incredibly fun, it’s a way to indulge in a passion and to egotistically glorify oneself. And so there’s not a single strategic reason that most of these nation-states have done this, but I bet it’s a combination of all those.

Jake Sullivan:
Well, speaking of vanity and egotism, you also write about how billionaires and oligarchs are buying up clubs more and more, including a lot of American billionaires, by the way. I will out myself now as a Chelsea fan. You actually write about-

Franklin Foer:
Whoa.

Jake Sullivan:
.. the new-

Franklin Foer:
Whoa.

Jake Sullivan:
... Chelsea ownership, including Todd Boehly and the way that they’ve almost created a new form of finance. I want to quote one of your passages because it really struck me. You write, “Because the sums clubs spend on players are astronomical and can transform a team’s fortunes, fans have become aficionados of football finance. Fans now speak fluently about amortization, schedules, and resale value players as if they were junior analysts at Goldman Sachs.

It’s really true that this whole issue of transfer windows and how much a player is worth and can you actually gain some upside in the resale market of that player after you’ve bought them has become part of the economics of professional soccer in a way that it just wasn’t 25 years ago. And yet, the passion of the fans for these club teams is just at an all-time high. Can you just talk for a minute about how you see this dynamic? And are we just in a race to the bottom that it’s going to keep spiraling or is there something that can be done here?

Franklin Foer:
I don’t totally condemn this dynamic. Part of the attachment that people have to their clubs is that they always believe that they can inherently make better decisions than the executives who are running those clubs. And as the finances of these clubs have gotten more complicated, as tactics have gotten more aggressive, it’s just part of fan culture. So I could razz Chelsea fans for the aggressive way that the group that owns their team has pushed the way Dodger-style, issue these and probably long contracts, and the way that Chelsea has gone about this very particular strategy of buying as many young players as possible, occasionally flipping those players for profit, sometimes holding onto them for extended periods of time. As an Arsenal fan, part of banter is my ability to feel like my team is doing this in a morally superior fashion.

Jake Sullivan:
Right.

Franklin Foer:
Right. But then, the other part is that because of the nature of video games-

Jake Sullivan:
Your American billionaire-owned team, Frank, right?

Franklin Foer:
Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:
You know?

Franklin Foer:
The nature of video games, this game called Football Manager, there are other games that allow you to essentially cosplay as an owner of a team, that culture has allowed us to feel like we actually know what we’re doing as it relates to these intricate financialization of players and to believe that, “You know, somebody should be offering me that job running Chelsea because I could do it as well as the guys who were doing it, if not better.”

Jon Finer:
Another aspect of this obsession with club-level football, though, may come at a cost of the World Cup, or at least that’s a version of what David Wallace Wells argued recently in The New York Times in a piece you probably saw. I read his argument as almost a friendly amendment to what you argue about nationalism in which he says that political nationalism does not necessarily translate to soccer nationalism, partly due to this obsession that people have with football at the club level and that this is kind of undermining the appeal of the World Cup, at least this time around. I’m wondering how you view that argument and whether you feel like something is, in fact, different at this World Cup the way he seems to suggest.

Franklin Foer:
I mean, there’s also fascinating history there that in Italy, this has always been true, that Italy is more of a regional country, an artificial nation-state, relatively new nation-state. And so Italians always cared more about their clubs than they did the national team.

Jon Finer:
Are you calling for the breakup of Italy on this geopolitical podcast?

Franklin Foer:
Yes.

Jon Finer:
That would be-

Franklin Foer:
Yeah, take that-

Jon Finer:
... that would be news.

Franklin Foer:
... [inaudible 00:23:52] Ubaldi. I’m not a league and org guy, but I think that doesn’t really apply globally. I think that there are countries where that applies, but in Brazil or Argentina, I’m not sure any of the nationalism associated with their World Cup teams or national teams has diminished in the least. And I think in England, which is the most supersaturated country as far as the club goes, I detect that maybe there’s less hype around it this year. I don’t even know what the... Do you know what the World Cup song is? There’s traditionally this song that they roll out in advance of the World Cup. And I ascribe a lot of the issues with this World Cup to just its kind of size, the way that the calendar is so compressed.

So, usually, there’s a little bit more breathing space between the end of the season and the World Cup. We’re kind of sprinting headlong into this World Cup. There’s so many games ahead of us. I wonder when we reach the moment of peak soccer, but I don’t know if we’re there yet, but it feels like the governing bodies of soccer just keep piling games on top of games on top of games, and we all say,” Yes, please, can we have some more?” And at a certain point, we’ll get exhausted, maybe.

Jon Finer:
Clubs playing 60 and 70 games in a season followed by big international tournaments. One place nationalism, going back to one of your prominent themes, feels alive and well, for better, for worse, is in the United States. We’ve never had a World Cup hosted under circumstances quite like these. We’ve talked about the Iran dimension, but tensions with the cohosts, Canada and Mexico, are high. We’ve got ongoing conflicts, as has been mentioned, involving participating countries. We’ve got a U.S. administration that has made nationalism almost a central political theme. And then we’ve got all of these immigration issues that are looming over the tournament. Four qualifying nations’ fans face U.S. travel bans and can’t attend games in America. That’s Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.

We’ve got fans from another set of countries that face a $15,000 visa bond requirement, which is going to be prohibitive for many if not most World Cup fans. We’ve got DHS saying that ICE is going to play a key part in World Cup security. We’ve got Germany and the UK. I mean, Berlin today issuing travel advisories discouraging U.S. travel due to some of this immigration enforcement. Now, on the one hand, it’s not as if every World Cup is hosted by the world’s most admired nations, I think of Russia in 2018 during the Ukraine war, but how is the rest of the world viewing all of this in the U.S. as a host in this moment?

Franklin Foer:
I mean, none of this reflects well, needless to say. Part of the basic bargain of hosting a World Cup is that you’re opening your doors, and we are moving in this direction. It’s not just a patriotic direction. It’s a nationalist direction where we have an administration that is explicitly hostile to globalists and to globalization. And so the idea that you would participate in this thing, which requires you to loosen your borders for a period of time, is just not something that they’re on board with the ways in which we kind of hoard things for ourselves at the expense of the rest of the world.

This is what causes so much ill will that you take this precious commodity that everybody else in the world loves so much, and then you say, “Yeah, we’re going to stage this. We’re going to enrich ourselves in the course of doing this. We’re going to enjoy all of the bounties of a World Cup, and you don’t really get to participate in it like we do, even though you’ve done that every other time.”

Jon Finer:
There’s also this somewhat strange relationship between President Trump and Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA. He’s rented basically unused space in Trump Tower. He invented and then presented the FIFA Peace Prize to President Trump. He seems to find every opportunity he can to cozy up to the President. I’m wondering what you make of their relationship and whether that plays any role in how this World Cup is going to be perceived.

Franklin Foer:
Do you think you guys are in the running for the next Peace Prize?

Jon Finer:
It seems unlikely.

Jake Sullivan:
Yeah, probably not.

Franklin Foer:
FIFA is one of the most historically corrupt and multinational organizations in the world. It sits atop of this vast patronage network. It controls all of these lucrative media contracts, and it’s always found ways to build networks of clients and benefactors. And, in fact, the United States historically has been a massive enemy of that corruption. The FBI mounted one of the most important investigations of FIFA. There were people who were brought down as a result of that investigation. It should be one of our crowning achievements is that we helped take the global game and we helped make it less corrupt. But I think when Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump stared at each other for the first time, they were like, “Hey, it’s like looking in the mirror. I know you.”

Jon Finer:
“I see you.” Yeah.

Franklin Foer:
“I see you. I see you.” And so Infantino started to cultivate Donald Trump way back in the first term. He started to show up at Mar-a-Lago. When Trump wanted him to participate in the Board of Peace, Infantino said, “Sign me up.” And he was... I can’t... Do you remember that, the moment when the Gaza War ended and they went to Cairo and you had all of these heads of state assembled with Donald Trump? And there Infantino was as if he was one of the heads of state. He was at the Trump inaugural, for goodness sake.

Just to step back, I find this fascinating just in the context of the American right because when I wrote the book, soccer was still very much a part of the American culture war. If you listened to talk radio, if you listened to Rush Limbaugh, if you listened to, I think, Glen Beck, still there’s certain Fox News hosts who kind of mouth off like this. They would denounce soccer. Jack Kemp went on the floor of the House in 1986 to describe soccer as the socialist invasion of this country. And, obviously-

Jake Sullivan:
Seriously?

Franklin Foer:
.. yeah.

Jake Sullivan:
I got to go look that up.

Franklin Foer:
Yeah. And, obviously, it makes a degree of sense because soccer is not an organic American sport in the same way that all of our other national sports are indigenous to this country. And so there is this competition between soccer and the other sports ultimately for affection and audience. And if you’re worried about the American way of life getting eroded, the fact that soccer now has basically replaced the Little League as the sport of choice for our boys and girls, maybe you would react in a knee-jerk, allergic way to that happening. But what’s interesting about Donald Trump is that he comes from a totally different time and place than most American conservatives. He came of age in New York City in the 1970s when Pelé, as we referenced before, was there. And getting a ticket to watch the New York Cosmos was like the hottest thing in town.

So for Trump, it’s associated with Studio 54 glamour, sold out Giant Stadium. And so he’s always liked it. And Barron Trump, he’s deeply knowledgeable about the game. He’s supposed to be a pretty good player himself. And so when Messi or Ronaldo comes strolling through town, Trump is kind of always quick to have them to the White House so that he can show them off for Barron Trump. I don’t know. Did you guys have any famous soccer visitors when you were in the White House?

Jake Sullivan:
I would not say Joe Biden was of the Studio 54/New York Cosmos set like Donald Trump. He was more of a college football player type who probably looked with a little bit of side-eye at soccer. He was polite, but it was not his cup of tea.

Franklin Foer:
Not his cup of tea. But it’s fascinating now because Fox also owns, obviously, the television rights for this World Cup, and there’s a lot in that ecosystem now that weighs in the direction of promoting soccer, maybe even at the expense of other sports, and that Trump is now this great promoter of the game who’s so focused on having these spectacles turn out in a way that reflects on him. And for a guy who is generally hated by much of the planet, it also is this opportunity for him to assume, maybe for the only time in his presidency, the status where he can kind of pretend like he’s president of the whole world, that he can go to these stadiums, cameras will fixate on him. When Chelsea won the Club World Cup last year, he famously got on the stage and lifted the trophy with them. And Reece James, it was just like he didn’t know what to do with Donald Trump standing there next to him. He’s like, “The President of the United States is acting as if this is his victory.”

Jake Sullivan:
He just won. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Franklin Foer:
And in fact, Trump actually seems like he pocketed one of the winner’s medals.

Jon Finer:
I hadn’t thought about it, but he will probably comport himself almost like he’s the president of the G48 at this time. And this relationship that you described between him and Infantino, I don’t know if it’s honor among thieves or game recognizes game or something. It feels different. But on the other hand, I don’t know, thinking back to a chapter in your book, there is also kind of an old story about sports and political power that you reflect in the personage of Silvio Berlusconi, who was the owner-president of AC Milan, obviously legendary Italian club and also an Italian political figure in his own right. Looking back, do you see Berlusconi as almost an early prototype for the modern billionaire politician, a sort of precursor to Trump in any way?

Franklin Foer:

This is a lesson that I think Democrats maybe would do well to learn. There’s political power that comes with attaching yourself to winning into sports. And he understood that he was a media owner who owned a soccer club and was able to project this sense that he would carry Italy forward to victory in the same sort of way that his club AC Milan became extremely successful on a European stage. His party was called Forza Italia, which was a chant that you would hear in the soccer stands.

So I do think Trump, who’s omnipresent at American sporting events, even if he’s occasionally booed in the course of attending those events, understands that there’s some reflected glory for him in doing that. And then, I think that Berlusconi also for him soccer sat at the nexus of vanity, public relations, and politics in a way that, I think, is potent and that billionaires around the world, if they’re not aspiring for high office in the same sort of way that Berlusconi aspired for it, they see something similar that they want to attach themselves to.

Jon Finer:
Impressive, by the way, you managed to answer that without getting into the bunga bunga parties or whatever they’re called from the Berlusconi era. That must have been-

Franklin Foer:
I wish-

Jon Finer:
... tempting, but-

Franklin Foer:
.. that was a trap that-

Jon Finer:
... well done.

Franklin Foer:
... I sent for you.

Jon Finer:

Family show.

Jake Sullivan:
Nice. Frank, when we were planning for this podcast, I didn’t actually expect Henry Kissinger’s name to come up, but that story about him calling to get the export control on Pelé lifted, it raises for me the fact that he was a huge soccer fan. He actually wrote an essay in The Washington Post in 1986 after he had left public life arguing that the World Cup is compelling because it’s not just an athletic competition, but what he said was a “contest of national styles.” And he also used to make this argument that Europeans like football because it reflects the real world or like soccer because it reflects the real world.

Sometimes there’s no goals, no moments of joy. Sometimes the game ends in a draw. It’s just inconclusive, just kind of 90 minutes of grind followed by both teams walking off, basically disappointed, nobody wins. Whereas, Americans like sports with lots of scoring and they hate ties. They want a winner at the end of it. Do you buy that? Now, obviously, you made the point that the United States is beginning to embrace soccer to a much greater extent, but is there something in this aspect that speaks to you at all?

Franklin Foer:
It is fascinating because we have this moment where a lot of the coaches of teams do not come from the countries they’re coaching. So Carl Ancelotti is Italian, he’s coaching Brazil, Thomas Tuchel, who’s British, is coaching England, and we can go right down-

Jake Sullivan:
Mauricio Pochettino, our own coach, is Argentine.

Franklin Foer:
Is our own coach. Right. I would argue that globalization has maybe made Kissinger’s theory a little bit less true. So Brazil doesn’t really play like Brazil played in the 1970s and 1980s. And maybe they stopped playing like that long before the height of globalization. If we went back to the 1994 World Cup, people would say Brazil wasn’t playing like Brazil back in that tournament. But I do think that there is a way that’s interesting where it’s like with England, I think about this where as cosmopolitan as the English Premier League is, and as much as every coach who steps into that English job wants to transform the way that England plays into kind of a modern possession game, when the players start getting nervous when the game is on the line, they do end up reverting to kind of some sort of classic English kick-and-rush style that it’s like it becomes much more Route one.

It becomes something that’s kind of deeper in their system. I like the parlor game of extrapolating national cultural characteristics from the style of play that one can see on the field. It’s really fun to do, but it’s I think as anthropology and sociology, highly imprecise.

Jake Sullivan:
So Frank, if you were writing your book from scratch today-

Franklin Foer:
That’s a great game.

Jake Sullivan:
... you’d write a lot of the same chapters on a lot of the same dynamics. Is there any chapter you would add beyond what you’ve said in the foreword about nation-states and billionaires and the like? Are there other things that you feel like the 2026 version would have in it that the 2004 version did not?

Franklin Foer:
There’s so many things that I would be fascinated to revisit in different contexts. So I wrote about Ukraine in the book, as I alluded before, that I was interested in the Nigerians who were there, and the way that soccer has played out over the course of the war is fascinating and the way that the national team has kind of kept alive in this kind of exiled concept of Ukraine. I’m totally fascinated by the collapse of Italian soccer, which in the late 1990s, when Jon and I were kind of able to consume so much of it and became hooked, I mean, Italian soccer was the crème de la crème. It was in the Berlusconi era, they were the technically best teams. It was a league that you would have argued was certainly on par with any other league in the world, if not superior, and it’s totally collapsed.

And I think that there’s probably some deeper story one could tell about the Italian economy or about Europe in the course of telling that story. And I think that there’s stories about integration and both the ways it succeeded and failed in countries like Germany where you had... And, oh, the other story that I’ve just always been fascinated by are the diaspora communities from the Balkans that have ended up transforming so many national sides across Europe, that Switzerland has Albanians and Kosovars who really have carried the team to the success that it’s had.

Jake Sullivan:
Well, Frank, thank you so much. You have enlightened us.

Jon Finer:
Thanks, man. Great having you.

Franklin Foer:
Thanks.

Jake Sullivan:
So that was fun, Jon.

Jon Finer:
Yeah. Made me excited to start watching soccer basically for the next month straight.

Jake Sullivan:
But with the feeling that in doing so, you’re also engaged in some form of cultural and geopolitical commentary, not just-

Jon Finer:
Studying the world.

Jake Sullivan:
... yeah, exactly. So in that sense, we’ve just given everyone a good permission structure to watch the World Cup and feel worldly. You know, the thing that stood out to me, he had a number of stories I hadn’t heard at all before, including that great one about small yard and high fence and Pelé. Love that. They innovated export controls long before we came on the scene, the Brazilian junta. But the thing that really kind of clicked for me was his observation about Donald Trump in the 1970s and the New York Cosmos. People should go look up old videos of those rocking stadiums with like 70,000 fans and these aging stars from around the world, including Pelé and Beck and Barron, so these others. It’s a real time capsule. It’s just a different era, and Trump was in the middle of that. That was something that I had not at all thought about until he raised it.

Jon Finer:
It is interesting. The United States has this kind of uncomfortable relationship with soccer, I feel like sometimes. Obviously, an incredibly popular youth sport, becoming a much more popular spectator sport as well. But that period, maybe the 1994 period, the last time the United States hosted the World Cup, which we both remember very well as another kind of high watermark, and maybe this will be a third if this World Cup-

Jake Sullivan:
Let’s see.

Jon Finer:
... is-

Jake Sullivan:
[inaudible 00:42:56].

Jon Finer:
... successful. Let’s hope. Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow the audio feed so you never miss an episode.

Jon Finer:
For additional content, episode transcripts, and exclusive podcast segments, subscribe to The Long Game on Substack.

Jake Sullivan:
This week in The Wrap, we share our must-reads, reflect on what we might’ve gotten wrong, and preview what news stories to look out for going forward. Bubbling out of the AI labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, there’s more and more chatter about progress towards recursive self-improvement, that is these algorithms actually being able to improve themselves, find new breakthroughs, move the science down the track in an automated way without humans in the loop.

Jon Finer:
Be on the lookout. Head to thelongame.substack.com. The link is in the show notes. That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:
If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us. The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network Production.

Jon Finer:
Executive Producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:
Lead Editorial Producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:
Deputy Editor, Celine Rohr, Video Producers, Nat Weiner and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:
Supervising Producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:
Associate Producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:
Marketing Manager, Leanna Greenway.

Jon Finer:
Music is by Nat Weiner. We’re your hosts, Jon Feiner.

Jake Sullivan:
And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

Is Ukraine Now Winning the War Against Russia? (w/Michael Kofman)

June 3, 2026

TEASER:

Michael Kofman:

For quite some time now, I think at least for the last year and a half, the main issue has been that Russian demands at the negotiating table have been woefully outsides relative to actual Russian military performance in the war. And the challenge has been how do you actually force them to change their political demands to something that is much more aligned with their actual military performance.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. Over the past few months, while the world’s attention has been focused elsewhere and our attention, war in the Middle East, a summit in China, an Ebola outbreak in Africa, there’s been a remarkable shift in what is probably the most important geopolitical event in recent history, the Russia-Ukraine war. The story virtually every day for the last few years has been Russia slowly grabbing Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, the Eastern part of the country at enormous cost. More than one million Russian casualties, maybe as many as 500,000 dead according to the UK Intelligence Service this week, that’s a hundred times the number of US service members more than a hundred times killed in the Iraq war. But as this war entered its fifth year, which is now longer than Russia fought the Nazis in World War II, parts of the front line have been frozen and even begun moving in the other direction with Ukraine retaking at least some of its own territory.

How did this happen? What does it mean for the future of the war and is there any end in sight? Our guest today, Michael Kofman, may be the most knowledgeable and experienced analyst of this conflict. He was born in Ukraine, speaks fluent Russian and has spent much of the last four years studying the war from close range at the front lines and then coming home to explain what’s happening to the American public, the Washington expert community, and as Jake and I can personally attest government policymakers. He’s an expert on the Russian military who’s worked at several DC think tanks, including the Carnegie Endowment where he currently hangs his hat. And since this war began, he’s been right a lot more often than he’s been wrong even when he’s argued with us on occasion. So we are grateful to have Michael with us. Michael, welcome to The Long Game.

Michael Kofman:

Hi, thanks and good to see both of you.

Jake Sullivan:

Mike, it’s great to see you. We saw each other frequently, as John just referenced, the three of us sitting together in my office in the West Wing as we were trying to puzzle through a lot of Ukraine policy decisions and recommendations to make to the president and just gaining the benefit of your insight and experience over the course of those years. And I want to start with a very simple question. More than four years into this war, who is winning?

Michael Kofman:

It’s a good question. I mean, at this point, it’s fair to say it is Ukraine, both because Ukraine is in the best position it’s been since summer of 2023 from a military perspective. Second, Ukraine’s objectives in this war are much easier for Ukraine to attain. Time has not been on Russia’s side for some time. And I’ve been saying that since I think probably late 2025, it’s been clear that despite having material advantages, the Russian military has not been able to do much with them in the last two years.

And so the trajectory of the war now is that Russia is increasingly unlikely to not only just achieve the maximus war aims that it has, but even the minimalist war aims are really in question. Just the most basic territorial war aims and the things they’re trying to claim such as the rest of Donetsk might take them a very long time to gain, if at all, at this rate. And so now you can see that to some degree the balance of initiative, not all of it, to some degree the balance of initiative and also the advantage has shifted to Ukraine for the first time in a long time.

Jake Sullivan:

Before we go further and unpack some of what you just laid out, I want to take a step back and talk to you about your methodology as an analyst to this war. You’re not just looking at maps or talking to people from thousands of miles away. You actually go out there and see this war with your own eyes. You go to the front lines in Ukraine on a pretty regular basis. Can you talk to us for a minute and tell our listeners how you operate and how that helps you understand what’s actually happening, how you can develop the kind of judgment you just laid out?

Michael Kofman:

The way I’ve been doing it is trying to go to Ukraine about every three, three and a half months because the situation, the dynamic between the Russian-Ukraine forces, tactics, technology tend to evolve at that rate. And so it’s good to be there with some frequency so that you maintain currency on where the war is going, what’s been happening, but also not going there too often either because it takes time to collect information to make sense of it. And so you don’t want to be constantly present there either. Plus wars have a tendency to suck you in. So if you’re there a lot, you start to kind of get drawn to the actual fieldwork and analysis even more and it is quite dangerous. And it’s only gotten more dangerous over time. A lot of things they used to be able to do ‘22, 2023, 2024, you can’t do now at the front lines.

The drone engagement zone has expanded so much that what would’ve been relatively safe or let’s say slightly risky back then now is very dangerous and along parts of the front. My approach is always to engage with senior military political officials to get a sense from them first on what they think is happening because they often have the context but not necessarily the ground truth and then work my way with a team of analysts along the front line and try to see as much of the front as possible because the front lines stretches over 1200 kilometers a night and different things are happening along the front, different kind of operational directions.

The geography varies, the units on them vary. So you can’t just go to one place and say, “Okay, now I have a good sense of what the fight is like.” Because what the fight is like in Kharkiv area by Kupiansk might be very different from what’s going on in Donetsk under Dobropillia axis. And that might be very different from what’s happening down in Zaporizhzhia. You kind of have to hit them all in order to get a good sense of what’s happening. Second, we talk to different units at various levels. So you can’t just talk to, let’s say, a mechanized brigade, right? You also have to talk to drone units, you have to talk to artillery units, you have to talk to people at brigade command level, battalion command level, as low as you can get without endangering them and yourselves, because the lower you go, the closer to the front you have to be.

And also people at higher command level, like the corp and whatnot. And the reason why is they all have a different point of view on the situation and their point of view is valid. They’re just seeing it from different perspectives. Battalion commander might see the battlefield tactically sort of looking at it through a straw and the brigade commander might have a wider view, but still focused on the 18 kilometers that he’s covering. But the drone unit behind them might be covering several brigades and might see the interaction of the forces and they might be covering a much larger stretch of the line and they have a different perspective on the battlefield. So you want all those perspectives to try to put together as much of a composite picture as you can, understanding that it’s imperfect and at the end of the day, you’re dealing with limited information and then get a good sense of, okay, how’s technology tactics evolving?

What is happening with the Ukrainian forces? What are their challenges? What are their successes? How do they see the Russian forces? What’s changed about how the Russian military is fighting? And the Russian military may be performing differently depending on where in the front you are. One part of the front might be a priority for their forces. That’s where they have the bulk of their assault units, their reserves, what have you, the concentration of their elite drone units and artillery and the other part of the front might be secondary. One part might be more urban terrain, the other part might be an open set of fields dissected by tree lines. So the terrain varies and how the force employee varies. And so we try to get as much as that as you can while maintaining a reasonable risk profile for yourself, your team of analysts, and for the Ukrainian forces working with you and also obviously with their approval and collaboration, but not being led by them either so that you’re not basically being told a story.

And I think both of you know how I tend to operate. I’ve been doing military analysis for quite some time and I usually have a good ear for when I’m also being told something I want to hear, but that’s why you talk to different units and you often talk to units that are in the same fight because they’re going to tell you slightly different versions of the story and that’s very helpful as well. And many times Ukrainians want to share the story, but of course I am also very careful about the information we disclosed because this is not a historical case study, this is a war that you actively end up working on. And so you’re trying to give people a good sense of what is happening, but without disclosing all the details and things that might be operationally relevant to the Ukrainian military as well.

Jake Sullivan:

Just really fascinating the way you piece that picture together in this holistic sense of covering an entire 1200 kilometer front, different units at different levels with different capabilities and different operating parameters and then trying essentially to put those pieces in place to be able to tell a coherent story when you come back. When I asked you who was winning, you said Ukraine is in the best position that it’s been in since the summer of ‘23. Can you tell us why that’s the case? What is it that they’re doing well that has put them in that position? Is Russia losing steam? Is it some combination of the two? Describe for us the why of where we are where we are now.

Michael Kofman:

You won’t be surprised to hear me say it’s a combination of things. I always see outcomes of war, big shifts in the war. Turning points are often multi-causal. It’s not any one thing. On the Ukrainian side, first, Ukraine spent 2025 really getting after the problems the forces had for the past several years, trying to organize brigades into course, getting better coordination across the force, working to stabilize their own manpower situation, which improved over the course of the winter because previously their force actually, its effective combat strength was shrinking at the front, getting a lot more drones into the hands of drone units and also working to expand Ukraine’s ability to effectively employ drones at longer range and one-way attack munitions, things that people colloquially call their middle strike. They had these capabilities before. And by middle strike, what I mean is that Ukraine for a long time had essentially kind of a donut hole in its strike capability.

Most of what Ukrainian units fielded were zero to 30 kilometers range at tactical range. And then they had quite a few long range one-way attack drones for deep strikes into Russia, but at that 30 to 300 kilometer range, there wasn’t a lot available in between and Ukraine has really scaled up production of various strike drones and has been able to expand the drone engagement zone into the Russian rear going after logistics, going after roads and vehicles at a much higher rate now creating real problems for the Russian military in the past couple of months. They were talking about doing it for a long time. It was simply a function of first scaling production, getting the numbers to do it and secondarily getting units to focus on controlling operational depth instead of just attrition at the frontline because attrition’s important, but achieving specific kind of operational effects is what really gets you to, I think, a different outcome at this turning point in the war and you see increasingly Ukraine doing that the last several months.

And on the Russian side, the problems Russian forces have had for a while now have begun to compound. Why has their advanced essentially stalled to almost nothing so much so that analyst debate is the Russian military making any progress at all in terms of territorial gain because much of the frontline is a gray zone and people have different views on how to even map it, territorial control at this point. So on the Russian side first, the loss rate had climbed so high in 2025 that they were essentially losing to kill an action and seriously wounded as many people as they were able to recruit per month. And the result of that is they weren’t able to continue.

Jake Sullivan:

To How many was that, Mike?

Michael Kofman:

It varies, but on average I would say that this number fluctuated in the 25 to 30,000 per month range, depending on how you count seriously wounded. And the casualties that matter most are unrecoverable losses. That’s those who cannot return to the battlefield, killed, missing in action who were probably killed, seriously wounded. And those casualties closely mirrored the recruitment rate and this prevented the Russian military from being able to establish additional reserves and they started to visibly begin to run low on assault infantry heading into the winter after the casualties they had taken over the course of summer and fall. And Ukraine has kept up the pressure such that they’re really just not able to generate reserves. The Russian military is still quite large. It grew a lot over the course of this war, but there are big imbalances across the units and you longer see them having this decisive infantry advantage on the ground so much as they had in previous years.

Second, the Russian military last year focused on infiltration tactics, sending one, two men at a time guided by drones to get through the Ukrainian drone kill zone because Ukrainian units did not have cohesive front lines at this point, mostly pickets as forward positions. And this tactic, this approach together with light motorized tactics, sending people on motorcycle dune buggies were all attempts to get through the kill zone imposed by Ukrainian drone units. They were making gains this way but at a fairly high price in terms of casualties and losses of manpower. The problem the Russian military has is straightforward from just a military local point of view. Over the course of 2025, the Ukrainian military began to adapt and optimize for defeating this type of attack and focus on it.

The Russian military, I think, simply became lazy and assumed that at this rate of gain, despite the high losses, they would eventually achieve their objectives and continue taking control of terrain and ultimately take the rest of Donetsk even if on a slower timeline than what they kept promising to the political leadership. And so they failed to adapt and they didn’t really use 2025 to come up with much of anything new and they opened up 2026 with much the same approach and it’s clear that the failure to adapt and evolve at this point has made this form of attack not largely ineffective but nonetheless producing significantly diminishing returns.

Jake Sullivan:

Can I just sum up for our listeners what the Russian tactics were and then now how the Ukrainians have adapted to them. What you’re saying basically is that the Russian forces would send small numbers of guys on foot to try to essentially evade and dodge drones, take a hundred yards or a few hundred yards and there weren’t really Ukrainians along that front line to fight back against them so that if they could get through the drones, they could take territory or maybe some of them would come, as you said, on dune buggies or on motorbikes, but no big tank movements, no big movements by divisions or companies or platoons.

This was onesies and twosies kind of sneaking through the drones and taking territory 100 yards a day, 200 yards a day, 300 yards a day. And the Russian theory was, “Yeah, we’re going to take a lot of casualties this way, but we keep doing this, eventually we’re going to take the rest of the Donbas and achieve at least our tactical military objective.” Is that a fair summary of what they were doing and that now Ukraine has essentially adapted the way that it fights its drone war and also positions its forces to defeat that strategy and Russia hasn’t adapted. Is that a good summary?

Michael Kofman:

That’s a fair summary. The only thing I would add is that the Russian military had set up a whole pipeline of contracting new personnel and they were fighting primarily with this assault layer of infantry that they kept replacing every couple of weeks. So most of the Russian formations were primarily fighting with assault troops and they kept going to get more and these people were contracted and sent to the frontline with two weeks or less of training and employed in this way. And I think because they had the resources available, they didn’t really invest in substantially improving the force and its ability to operate differently because they kept getting fed more troops and now they have the dual challenge of this tactics no longer being effective and they’re not getting the amount of troops they’re used to getting as replacements. So this is the intersection of what I mean by the compounding challenges the Russian military has.

Jake Sullivan:

And so where does this leave you in terms of projecting out the next few months? Do you think this progress on the Ukrainian side can be sustained and also what can Ukraine supporters do that would help them the most seeing as they’ve really developed their Indigenous capabilities quite dramatically, but what could help the most in terms of ensuring that Ukraine remains more on the front foot than the backfoot as you’ve described?

Michael Kofman:

So increasingly, we see the ballot spaces actually being more dynamic this year. Ukrainian force have been experimenting with forms of drone enabled counterattack and taking back some of the terrain that Russian forces have captured and they’ve been doing this since the summer of 2025. So it’s actually become much more dynamic ballot space in general and there are more opportunities this year for Ukraine in order to contest initiative and conduct some of their own limited offensive operations than I think there have been for quite some time. So I think the advantage Ukraine has now established will be sustained. It’s not clear if the Russian military can adapt to counter-Ukrainian middle strike, but even if they can, it’ll take them some months and already there’s a general growing sense I see on the Russian side that they really have been not only effectively stalemated, but that the war has turned against them at the tactical level.

That said, this is not an unalloyed success. Ukraine still has challenges and concerns. And I want to talk about those because your question is, “Well, what can people support Ukraine still do? What should they focus on?” So to me, the main issues are at least no longer the day-to-day fighting at the front line, although still this is very important to keep track of. It’s air and missile defense and expanded Russian strike campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure and Ukrainian cities. That is not new. That’s been a feature of this war for some time. However, this past winter was a very difficult one and the Russian strikes inflicted a lot of damage on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, some of it that is frankly irreparable. The size of the Russian strikes, the actual sorority rates and the nightly strikes has only continued to grow and expand and the share of ballistic in ballistic missiles in those strikes has also grown.

They’re much harder to intercept and right now there are no cheap and easy solutions to Russian ballistic missiles. Here, Ukrainians heavily dependent on Western capabilities and the various interceptors being provided by United States and to a much, much lesser extent, countries like France. And so there is growing concern that as Russian efforts get frustrated on the ground, they will turn even more to strategic bombardment. And we’re already seeing that shift in the last couple of weeks targeting the capital Kiev and expanding the strike campaign even further. Now, is this an effective approach in warfare? History teaches us it’s not and it’s not going to break Ukrainian political will, but nonetheless, it is going to be quite costly for Ukraine, for Ukraine population, Ukraine economy. And there’s of course growing concern of what happens if you get into another fall and winter.

Considering the stacking damage from previous years, now it’s possible that the Russian leadership still holds onto this as the only theory of success they have, even though history teaches us that this is unlikely to produce significant results. And so if you’re asking, “Well, what does Ukraine need now?” Ukraine still needs a lot of Western support when it comes to air and missile defense. Ukraine has significant technology gaps in developing its own capabilities that they’ve been talking about for years, whether it’s guidance systems or rocket motors or other things, not even necessarily discrete capabilities, but the technologies that Ukraine would need to substantially improve its own ground launch cruise missiles and other capabilities that they’ve been employing against Russia and could have been employing on a much larger scale if they simply had access to more technology that’s available in the West to make these capabilities a lot more effective.

There are still a lot of Ukrainian needs in terms of capital for Ukrainian defense industry, which has greater production capacity than does have capital. And as always, there’s going to be a strong demand for those technologies and capabilities that have to do with energy resilience. Ukraine benefits significantly from Western support and being able to resist the Russian strike campaign in the last couple of years. But some of those were done by agencies that for lack of a better word, aren’t with us so much today like USAID. So if you look at people involved in those efforts, it’s not clear that they can count on same things certainly from the United States. So again, capital defense technology cooperation, which anybody who’s working in defense tech, Ukrainian military will tell you about and discreet capabilities that they still depend on from the United States and from other Western partners.

Jon Finer:

So now that Jake has asked you to make a bit of a projection about the at least near future, I will note for the record that this has been a pretty hard war for analysts to predict. And by the way, that goes for analysts outside the government and also our analyst colleagues inside the government as well. We remember both inside and outside that there were projections that Ukraine’s military might not hold up even for a matter of weeks at the beginning of this conflict. Then there were some almost giddy projections before Ukraine’s counteroffensives in 2022 and again in 2023 that they might take back massive amounts of Russian territory. Both of those projections ended up wrong. Why has this been such a hard war to predict? And you’re somebody who in particular has studied the Russian military over a long period of time. Are you surprised by how badly they have performed on the battlefield?

Michael Kofman:

In general in this war or most recently, right? Because there’s two ways of looking at it, Jon. The recent turn of events, which actually I think we’ve been tracking since 2025 is just the public conversation has caught up with things that people who are following the war closely have been talking about since last fall. Or if you’re speaking about in general Russian military performance over the course of this war, which I think despite being able to demonstrate the ability to adapt and evolve has been quite dismal. So first, and it’s not an alibi, but just to speak a bit about the reality of making estimates and forecasts in war, wars are highly contingent affairs and there’s a lot of factors that come together towards any kind of outcome.

They’re not easy to account for. The analogy I make is trying to forecast in the wars like trying to predict what several dice roll together are going to come up as. Second issue is that wars are fundamentally unstable systems and military analysis has a strong recency bias where you’re extrapolating from what has happened, even though you know that the only thing that’s consistent in the war is that things are not going to evolve in a linear fashion. So you’re extrapolating from what you know about the past to the future, even though you know very well that wars unfold in phases and they have these inflection and turning points and things are not going to progress in this fashion. And also there are kind of arcs to a war.

If you look at resources, if you look at the big factors from terms of standpoint of material and manpower, defense industrial mobilization, they give you a decent idea of how a war might unfold. And so I think that at various points, analysts have had it right, but also have had it wrong. This is a prediction fraud business and it’s very hard to see more than a few months into a large scale conventional war, right? This is just being frank about it. If you’re asking me how I think it’s going to unfold for the next six to eight months, I think that this year in particular, Ukraine not only is going to stall the Russian advance, but it’s going to increasingly contest the initiative along parts of the frontline and conduct limited counter-attacks.

I would be surprised if there’s a major ground defensive, but you don’t know what the impact on the Russian military will be both from expanded Ukrainian middle strike and this rate of attrition if it plays out in the course of the next several months. I don’t think the Russian strike campaign is going to have a decisive effect on Ukraine or Ukraine’s negotiating position in this war, but it is a factor because it does affect the timelines both sides are working with in thinking, okay, what’s more advantageous to continue the war and for how long? Right now it’s clear that Ukraine is much more confident. Time now looks increasing on Ukraine’s side and there’s no obvious reasons for them to negotiate a ceasefire in the near term just because the United States or somebody else wants it. So to add to this projection, I don’t expect the ceasefire in the near future.

Jon Finer:

Digging maybe a little deeper into the Ukrainian side of the war, you’ve talked just now about the challenges that Russia has had. Ukraine seems to have been, and your comments would confirm this, the far more innovative side during the course of this conflict. They’ve built the largest or one of the largest defense industrial bases in Europe, maybe in the entire world. They’ve pioneered both the use tactically of drones as you’ve described, but also developed their own indigenous drone capabilities and a number of companies that turn these things out now by the tens or hundreds of thousands. What do you consider to be the most significant steps that they have taken to keep themselves in this fight?

Michael Kofman:

I mean, from my point of view, it’s definitely the heavy investment in the drone component of the force and distributed production of drones and all the munitions and various components you need for them. It’s allowed Ukraine first to compensate for a deficit of manpower at the front line. And the advantage that Russia had in traditional artillery fires, but then to turn that to being the central engine of how the Ukraine military fights, how the Ukrainian military is able to deny maneuver to the Russian armed forces combined with kind of traditional prepared defenses mines and what have you, and then also expand their strike campaign against the Russian military that is investing in deep strike ability as well with Western support.

And it’s been, to me, the decentralization of the Ukrainian defense industrial production and the close tying in of defense industrial production with the units themselves, that many of the lead zone units had their own defense labs, like sort of defense innovation labs and many Ukrainian units essentially were also their own defense startup, which I’m not advocating necessarily as a way that anybody in the West could do it because in some ways-

Jon Finer:

Michael, have you ever heard of anything like that in modern warfare before?

Michael Kofman:

It’s unusual to say the least, Jon, and it’s unusual to see it at the scale. Now, is it compensating for certain other deficits in Ukrainian industry and the ability of the state to mobilize resources? Yes. But was it very effective because Ukraine, both culturally and from standpoint of institutions, always done much better horizontal integration than vertical integration. And it’s both been a benefit and a ban in terms of how the state operates. And so I think this really played to Ukraine’s advantages and it allowed Ukraine to substantially expand the drone force.

It allowed them to emphasize innovation and it also allowed them to have sustained defense industrial production in the face of growing Russian strikes, which might be much harder to do if you tried to concentrate defense industrial production in a way that made it quite vulnerable. And lastly, look, Ukrainian military has proven only tactically capable, but overall Ukraine has proven quite resilient and has maintained the world to fight despite some very difficult periods in this war. If you probably look over the course of the last two years, 2024 and 2025, were very challenging years where Ukrainian military had to consistently adapt even though the course of this year, most of the initiative was on the Russian side and the Russian military was slowly gaining territory even if at great cost for itself.

Jon Finer:

You made a point that I think is underappreciated and I just want to underscore it, which is Ukraine throughout this war has had a significant deficit compared to Russia when it comes to manpower and when it comes to munitions, those are two pretty important things in the balance of power in a conflict like this. And they have to an extent filled that gap with drones. Autonomous systems obviously require fewer soldiers to fight alongside them and they have used these systems essentially to replace the deficit that they’ve got in artillery, in rocket systems. Not all of this was, I think, widely understood early on in the drone program, but it has been a remarkable development in this war and appreciate your drawing attention to it.

And it is something that the US government has also invested in alongside the Ukrainians and I think one of the better things that’s been done. Tell us a little bit more about how they develop this capability, because we are now seeing countries around the world, I think, seek to emulate it. We’re seeing versions of this sort of drone warfare play out in the Middle East in real time in the US conflict against Iran. What did Ukraine do to develop tactics to recruit a different type of soldier to serve in these units? What incentives did they provide and do they provide to motivate them? This feels like a fundamentally different thing from traditional combat.

Michael Kofman:

Remember, Ukraine evolved from a successor military to what was a Soviet military. Essentially a fire centric force with a lot of artillery to something very different at this stage. And one of the key factors in this isn’t the technology itself. First and foremost, it’s the enabling technologies. Things like Starling that allow you to have data and communications forward in a way that’s cheap, resilient, easy to replace. Second, it’s all the apps that Ukrainians built to integrate situational awareness on the battlefield and then connect drone units with other units. So that people have not only easy situational awareness, but web-based interfaces that they can quickly connect to see what’s going on, talk to any individual drone operators and integrate the force in a way that makes sense for force that is largely mobilized at this point and is largely comprised of people who come from civilian walks and life, but also puts together lots of different apps and systems that can talk to each other.

Next, for structure. People talk about technology, but there’s no way to fight this way to scale if you don’t make big investments in the actual force structure. And took a while for Ukraine to get from having drone squads to drone platoons, then drone companies, then drone battalions. Then drone battalions with additional independent companies for handling UGVs, uncrewed ground vehicles as well, different type of technology. And so you really need to invest in the force. And then they built out, took successful independent drone battalions, expanded those to become regimens, expanded some of those to become entire drone brigades. Really invest in this force both across the maneuver formations, the regular brigades, but also to hire echelons and make entire drone units that can lock down big parts of the battlefield. So you need to invest in the people and the talent otherwise you can’t use drones at scale and you can’t use them this effectively.

So it’s a combination of force structure, enabling technology, organizational capacity, and then the actual drones themselves. And here’s the last part. What first enabled this kind of bloom of both drones and electronic warfare systems was to be frank, access to Chinese components that Ukraine has over time decreased its dependence on, but the ability to take commercially available either components or drones and quickly assemble and evolve these systems. And that allowed the various defense startups and Ukrainian units to experiment and then develop successful designs and iterate them very quickly. And the last part I mentioned, which is the close time of the defense sector with the military. So I think for the US in permissive environments, let’s say our wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, yes, it was common for defense contractors to be forward.

But here this is a conventional war at large scale and here you really have the defense industry, the engineers very closely tied to the units, understanding the battlefield context, quickly seeing what’s going wrong, how to change it, and then coming back with a different design and iterating very quickly. And that’s a big reason why Ukrainian companies have done much better meeting their needs than some of our Western companies who have shown up there with their own drone tech or their own electronic warfare systems initially often don’t perform its intent on the battlefield, takes a while to iterate them and change. And then what happens is once you go back and change, try to fix the problem, the war’s already moved on. Technology and tactics have moved on when you spend six to eight months fixing the problem with your system. You got to be there and the people that are most successful are those who are there able to iterate closely with the units that are actually employing the technology.

Jon Finer:

Is there a next step, Michael, a next iteration or evolution that they’re working on or that you’re anticipating that could be another game changer in the near term here?

Michael Kofman:

I’m a big skeptic of things that we kind of call as game changers in technologies, particularly in a conventional war. Usually the game changers are kind of foundational enabling technologies like communications, things like Starlink that really can change how the force operates or give it certain abilities that then enable all sorts of tactics and other technologies. So to me, increasingly not just the skilled employment of one-way attack drones at kind of operational depth, but the effective use, finally effective use of automated terminal guidance, right? The fact that in combination with computer imaging, you’re no longer nearly as dependent on having a comm link to the drone at a long distance and range.

This is one example of things that can then be used on a much larger scale to really lock down Russian logistics and deny freedom of mobility in Russian rear areas. Things that could affect fire control at longer range that were not possible a couple of years ago and you couldn’t just do by having drones on let’s say HIMARS systems firing GMLRS, right? Why traditional Western precision strike can’t affect fire control at that range in depth consistently, whereas you have certain things that can do that for you now. I can give you simple things that would be a big game changer for Ukraine. What if policy change and what if SpaceX allowed Ukraine to use Starlink over Russian territory?

Jon Finer:

So just to be clear, the current situation is that Starlink is available to Ukraine over its own territory, but it cannot access the satellite capability over Russian territory. Is that what you’re saying?

Michael Kofman:

That’s right. There’s things like that that could significantly change what Ukraine can do. And then lastly, enabling technology is always what I mentioned early on access to certain types of guidance system technology, access to things that are integral in further developing Ukraine’s own domestic missile industry. These things can have a significant impact and they can allow Ukraine to then evolve, let’s say the current generation of drone interceptors or the current generations of strike drones to something that’s much more capable as a system. I’m barely covering the waterfront here of what’s possible. I also sometimes don’t want to say too much about directions people are working in an active war because you don’t want to give away the advantage people are trying to establish by saying, “Hey, this is the direction people are working in. It’s just to forecast that.” I’m a little wary of saying too much.

Jake Sullivan:

Okay. So we won’t push you too far or too specifically for that very good reason, but you mentioned unmanned ground vehicles, UGVs, what the Russians call silent death, what others are calling kind of battle robots. And there have been these reports of these unmanned vehicles taking territory, holding territory. We’ve talked a lot about the drone element of the war, but can you talk just for a minute about how significant this particular capability is now and to the extent you feel comfortable projecting, is it going to become more important as we go forward?

Michael Kofman:

So uncrewed ground vehicles in Ukraine was one area where Ukraine led significantly in technology development ahead of the Russian military. A big reason for that is it was the most effective way to save lives in key logistical and support roles. Last year, the balance of casualties increasingly were shifting from frontline combat infantry, of which there wasn’t much at the front to drone units and to those providing logistics to drone units. Anybody who was moving around within, let’s say, 15 to 20 kilometers of whatever the notional forward line of troops was. So it was essential to save lives and to find a way to provide logistical support to units, casualty evacuation. And also Ukrainian units had been experimenting with uncrewed ground vehicles in various assault roles. Those stories I think have been a bit oversold because it’s often them employing them, essentially encounter attacking areas where individual Russian units have infiltrated to Ukrainian lines.

And so I’m skeptical of some of the stories regarding UGVs themselves holding terrain, but they have all sorts of value functions. You can use them effectively for forward types of air defense. You can use them for coverage of areas where you don’t want to put people on rotation. They’re still limited, of course, by the fact that you need to provide power source to them, battery life. So whenever people say a UGV held terrain for a long time, my question is how do they have the power to do that? And there’s always kind of maintenance and other issues with uncrewed ground vehicles. Now, a lot of that, again, has to do with enabling technology for communication and data transfer. Many of these, because they’re lost in the battlefield, Russian units attack them, they use Starlink because you can lose several UGVs, Starlink terminals and tunnels are fairly cheap.

So this provides a huge advantage to Ukraine. One of the biggest things that to the extent something can be a game changer, Jon, was essentially the cutoff of Starlink access to Russian forces early on in February because it substantially stalled Russian UGV developments since they no longer would have access to cheap Starlink terminals to be able to connect to UGVs. And it also set back Russian strike key abilities, Russian drones that were using Starlink contents as well at the time to strike in Ukraine. So it substantially hindered Russian efforts and it gave Ukraine a notable advantage, an enduring advantage.

And the way I look at UGVs is Ukraine has used UGVs to fight much smarter investing in technology and capital to offset the Russian manpower advantage and try to preserve the force. And the next evolution of that is that UGVs can increasingly be used in some combat assault roles or breaching roles, although that is much harder than employing them for logistics or let’s say casualty evacuation. That’ll still take time to develop, but you see Ukraine working on this quite a bit and what you don’t think of traditional UGVs, but various other types of automated defense. For example, automated defense turrets, systems that have essentially automated targeting that now relieves the need for personnel to have to provide basic air defense rules. So I see that as actually one of the biggest success stories in Ukrainian technology development.

Jake Sullivan:

So looking at everything that you’ve described over the course of this conversation so far, your other fellow military analysts are also looking at this picture and one of your fellow military analysts, Jack Watling wrote a piece in foreign affairs this week about how Ukraine had, quote, “turned the tide in the war.” And he concludes with the following statement, quote, “Although a successful conclusion to the war is far from assured, it is now a realistic possibility basically because of the pressure Russia is under.” Do you agree with that? Do you think that the Russians actually are feeling a degree of pressure now that will lead them to change their view about what an outcome of the war that they would agree to would look like?

Michael Kofman:

So Jack wrote a good piece. I agree with him. The word success is heavily freighted in that sentence, but I do think that he’s absolutely right. Ukraine’s increasingly in a position to attain an acceptable end to the war. Now, how that is defined still very much remains for Ukrainian leadership to define. The question you’re asking though is does Russia’s political leadership see the situation the same way? For quite some time now, I think at least for the last year and a half, the main issue has been that Russian demands at the negotiating table have been woefully outside relative to actual Russian military performance in the war. And the challenge has been how do you actually force them to change their political demands to something that is much more aligned with their actual military performance. And political layers suffer from these pathologies of some cause fallacies and what have you in the prolonged conventional wars, in some ways it’s not surprising, but there is increasingly a change in tone and conversation in Moscow about the real military reality that they face.

But I do expect there’ll be a significant lag effect between what I see is taking place and the shifting military balance and whatever Lamar Putin may think. And at the end of the day, I don’t live in its head, but the main challenge I’ve seen for some time now has been on the Russian side of the equation and how to convince them that the war is essentially as they are prosecuting it as futile. And for a long time, the two bets that I think Russian leadership had made was first that to sustain pressure, they will inevitably take the rest of Donetsk and there will be some kind of operationally significant collapse of the Ukrainian frontline, which simply hasn’t taken place and now it’s clear it won’t take place. The evidence is in. And the second bet they’ve made is through effective diplomacy they will be able to maneuver the United States out of its role as a leader in the coalition supporting Ukraine and that Western support for Ukraine would collapse, material or financial.

And that also hasn’t been true and Europeans have taken over entirely the financial support and we’ve arranged sort of a set of mechanism to continue supporting Ukraine and providing the key capabilities and intelligence that they need. So both bets have been proven wrong and now it’s a question like how long will it take the Russian leadership to realize what Ukraine’s been trying to convince them, which is at the worst futile at this point, especially the way that they’re fighting it. Because increasingly Ukrainian strategy is working and certainly has the much higher probability of success given the trajectory we see on the battlefield, all things being equal, naturally big caveat to that, can’t necessarily predict where US policy will go on some of these things.

And I’m going to circle back to stuff, say something like that, that you may not like, which is you asked me at some point earlier, part of the challenge in making predictions as an analyst is in a war like this, there are external factors, right European countries, other Western partners, and particularly the United States and where US policy was going to go in terms of support has been a big factor in trying to also predict what Ukraine may or may not be able to do. And in that regard, I turned it back over to you, Jake and Jon, which is to say as an analyst, you can’t always predict where US policy is going to go, what capabilities Ukraine is going to get or let’s say your assumptions prior to the actual launch of the war, the extent of Western support of Ukraine, which might turn on a dime. Ukraine might suddenly find itself with access to all sorts of intelligence support and other things that people basically were saying Ukraine wasn’t necessarily going to get prior to the launch of hostilities.

And that leads you to two very different predictions on how Ukrainian military might fare. And the whole point I’m trying to make is that there are external factors and a good example of that is the Iran war. The US war with Iran has both created some opportunities for Ukraine and the Middle East, but also challenges an extent that provided a degree of budgetary relief for Russia. And it’s not clear after this war whether Trump administration is going to go when it comes to their material support for Ukraine. Are they going to stain at this rate or there will be some attempt to then focus on restoring US stockpiles? There’s all these factors that come up that can produce external shocks to the war that you’re following.

Jake Sullivan:

Stepping back for a sec on this question of the Russian calculus, you make the point that maybe over time they come to align their actual war objectives with what they’re capable of doing on the battlefield and that those things have been very misaligned over the course of the past months and years and that could happen. The other possibility, and we’re seeing some indications of this, is that Russia says we have to find other ways to bring pressure to bear on Ukraine and other ways to bring pressure to bear on Ukraine’s backers. So you described earlier the likelihood that we’re going to see an ever escalating tempo and scope of attacks on Ukrainian civilians far from the front lines with the use of ballistic missiles and attack drones by Russia all to try to impose costs, punish the Ukrainian population, plunge them into cold and dark as the next winter approaches.

You made the point that that usually doesn’t win you a war, but it can cause a heck of a lot of pain. So we can expect that. But what I want to bear down on is whether you think Russia will go even further in poking at NATO in trying to engage in gray zone tactics against NATO countries. We recently saw this drone incursion on Romania that struck an apartment building. All three of us are actually in Europe right now. This seems to be on everyone’s minds. Do you expect to see escalation of that kind and is that designed in a way to try to get at the second point you made, which is to try to break or reduce Western support for Ukraine going forward or shape European attitudes relative to the war and to peace talks?

Michael Kofman:

I think both are the case. So switching to strategic bombardment is not only something that we’ve seen in past wars, but it’s already been the direction of travel for the Russian military effort. I think more than likely Russia will escalate this war and focus on economic infrastructure on a civilian population in light of the failing effort on the ground. One success stories in NATO was that they effectively prevented the war from escalating horizontally and from encroaching on the territory of NATO members. But if you look back last year, there started to be a significant degree of horizontal escalation from the standpoint of geography of this war between Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine coming after the Russian shadow fleet, both in the Black Sea and outside the Black Sea and Mediterranean. We saw Russian drone incursions in Poland, Russian violations of NATO member airspace in more brazen way actually because they’ve been doing it before.

And I do think that probably there’ll be further horizontal escalation against NATO members’ territory. And by this, I don’t mean I don’t want folks to misinterpret this. I think Russia’s going to then, while fully tied down in Ukraine, what’s left of the Russian military will somehow deploy to the Baltics and also invade the Baltic States too and start a war with NATO. I think this is deeply unrealistic and they would lose it quite decisively. But I’ll give you an example. One thing that concerns me, increasingly you’ve seen Russian leadership blame Baltic States and claim that they’re using their airspace to allow Ukrainian general sites into Russia. This is not true. I know it’s not true, everyone knows it’s not true and the Russians also know it’s not true. So the question follows, are they setting this up because they want to potentially do their own drone incursion to Baltic airspace?

What is the purpose of this information campaign? Clearly they are trying to pressure various NATO members because of their support for Ukraine, but to some extent, one asked to also have this question, does Russia really also want the military crisis with NATO alongside of the war they are fighting in some sort of desperate attempt to lead this all to a resolution or negotiation or perhaps to bring the United States back in because the current US diplomatic effort on this has stalled. Right now the US is fairly disengaged in part because we’re so focused on Iran. And I’m not saying I have the answer there, but I think that greater horizontal escalation is likely. And then how well is NATO posture to manage that? I think fairly well, but folks need to be aware of it, that despite the success story that we’ve had of kind of NATO deterring any aggression against its member’s territory, the reality is that Russians have been increasingly brazen, particularly over the past year and that trend seems to only be going in one direction.

Jon Finer:

I agree with you that the biggest factor in whether this war ends is Russia’s calculus. It actually reminds me of a quote that someone used with me in conversation here in Berlin. He attributed to Bismarck. I’ve seen it online, attributed to Churchill and others, but it does seem apt, which is that Russia is never as weak or as strong as it appears, which I think does to some extent encapsulate the current moment and why it’s hard to predict. But Ukraine also obviously gets a vote in whether this war ends and a significant one and their calculus is also complicated.

They’ve never wanted to negotiate from a position of weakness when things were not going well on the battlefield because the terms don’t end up as good. And when they’ve been stronger, like before the failed counteroffensive that we discussed earlier, they’ve wanted to press the advantage rather than talk. Zelensky said this week that he saw a window of opportunity to end the war before next winter and Budanov, his chief of staff came out afterwards and said, “I can confirm this is indeed his goal.” Do you think that is actually what Ukraine wants at this point?

Michael Kofman:

It’s a good question. I’m not sure why. So first, that’s something I would also say to a weary population facing another prolonged strike campaign in the winter because at this point, Ukrainians, at least as I see it, are exhausted but also determined to continue. And the natural question I think that people will have is, okay, if they’ve turned the tide, if this is a turning point in the war, then why are they not making a deal then on better terms? They would expect to see diplomatic effort and some initiative before the winter comes. Because if you recall, last winter folks were having one and a half hours of electricity in Kyiv and going without hot water. So people understand the implications. Even if Ukraine’s more successful in the battlefield, they also understand how hard it’ll be for the population to go through another winter.

It’s clear to me that Ukrainian political leadership has a much more narrowed position in terms of their demands and what they would like to see. The challenge is largely on other side, having a counterparty to that interaction, which is that Russian leadership has been willing to negotiate at the very least performatively to satisfy the United States, but has not been willing to change their position in earnest. And what they had been proposing for some time that they kind of quote the Anchorage formula is unrealistic. It’s fundamentally unrealistic given where they are in the war. And so it’s ultimately not up for Ukraine unfortunately to decide whether the war ends before the winter because you need a Russia that also wants to end the war before the winter. And Putin is not immune to costs, but if he was very sensitive to cost, we wouldn’t be talking about this in the fifth year of the war either.

If he was so concerned with Russian livelihood, with Russian standard of living, or even with just the economic standing of Russian elites, we wouldn’t be at this point at the war. So to me, the challenge is how to convince political leadership that it’s far less sensitive to costs than somebody might be in the West, that at this point the war is largely futile and if anything is going to go worse for them. And for me, what that will probably require is not just successfully stalling the Russian military effort, but convincing Russian political leadership that they increasingly stand to lose that which they had already occupied, that they actually stand to face reversals in this war and reversals to things that they really care about and that essentially that whatever deal they’re likely to get is then only going to get worse from there.

Jon Finer:

I’m going to leave you with one more question if you’re willing to indulge it. It’s a question we ask a number of people who come on this show, which is if you were called into the Oval Office to give advice to the president on the following question, how do I end this war? That has been President Trump’s desire since he was a candidate, certainly from his earliest days in office, he has not found the right formula, to be honest, and this is my own editorial comment, it’s sometimes hard to determine which side of this conflict he’s even on or whether he sees himself as a neutral arbiter between the two sides. But if he came to you and said, “My goal is to bring this to an end, a reasonable end,” he probably wouldn’t use the word just. What would you advise the United States to do at this point, given how little we’re currently doing for Ukraine?

Michael Kofman:

Well, I think part of the problem is that the Trump administration wanted to just end the war and didn’t care about how it ends. And this is a bit of a logical problem, which is if I’m in this position as an analyst, my first question is, well, what is your actual goal being? How do you want to see the war end? Because the answer depends on what the actual goals are. So if we’re looking for an end that is an acceptable end to the war to Ukraine and also actually to our European allies and increasingly Ukraine is in a position to actually attain it. I think it’s in the best position it’s been in a long time. Then to me, much of this has to do with continued provision of military assistance to Ukraine, that’s straightforward. Pressure on Russia, of which there’s been very little from the Trump administration.

Enforcement of things that have longer been enacted in terms of sanctions, export control of this, there’s also been not nearly as much and also much more coordinating better effort with European allies on those issues, which increasingly I think has been kind of, what’s the word I’ve heard used in Europe? I’ve heard several words. Chaotic I think is the nicest one. That’s the one I will go with. So suffice to say that I think the Trump administration has tried to force a conversation on ending the war in these working groups. It’s not done much to apply pressure to Russia in order to force a real change in the Russian position to be perfectly honest and we can debate why that is. It’s tried pressuring Ukraine and also realized that actually Ukraine is not just resilient to the Russian military effort, it’s far more resilient to US political pressure than Trump administration thought and it has considerable support amongst European allies as well.

So this idea that, okay, we’ll just try to get a deal that’s unjust and unfair to Ukraine by pressuring Ukrainian political issue, that’s not going to work either. I think they figured that out last year. So increasingly they have to come back to the question of not just how you end this war, but how do you end this war in a way that’s fair, acceptable to Ukraine. Second, how do you find a lasting, at least some kind of lasting in, not just a piece of paper with the word ceasefire on it. And to me, most of that has to do with compelling Russia to revise its current position. And I think in some ways increasingly we’re on a trajectory to actually achieve that. That looks to me more in sight than it ever has been in the last two, two and a half years of this war, which might be an overly optimistic sentiment. I know wars always go on much longer than people expect. They typically go on quite longer than [inaudible 00:59:48] can necessarily achieve a decisive advantage, but nonetheless, I do think we are increasingly on that trajectory.

Jon Finer:

We don’t indulge in excessive optimism too often around here, so we’re grateful for it.

Jake Sullivan:

Let’s end with that very positive cut on what has been obviously a very dark chapter.

Michael Kofman:

And thanks to both of you for hosting the discussion.

Jon Finer:

Great to have you, Michael. Thank you.

Jake Sullivan:

Really appreciate it, Mike. So, Jon, as we mentioned, we used to have Mike into my office and the three of us would sit around and we would get his very comprehensive analysis of how he saw things unvarnished, unfiltered from the frontline with that methodology that he described to us during the conversation. And it had a huge impact on the way that we thought about and understood the dynamics of this war. And I was just reminded of that throughout this conversation. I mean, such a richness of insight and analysis, but also an unbelievably rigorous method of going about both developing and most importantly, updating his view on what is happening on the front line. What was your main takeaway from the conversation?

Jon Finer:

It’s funny. We would agree wholeheartedly I’m sure that we had an incredible team working on Russia, Ukraine, inside the US government, inside the NSC specifically. But one of the things you too infrequently get is perspectives from outside your bubble. I feel this kind of acutely given my start of my career as a journalist. So having somebody who had actually seen this war with his own eyes come in periodically and describe what he was seeing, but also to have the kind of analytical ability to tell you what it means was just of enormous value, I think of value to our team as well. I was also struck by just how much, we’re both in Europe as we’ve discussed, how much anxiety there is about the point you raised toward the end about where Russia might go the more it finds itself thwarted on the battlefield. This is a core part of every conversation here.

And then the next sentence is almost always, and what would the United States do if Russia takes those steps? And interestingly, when this Russian drone slammed into the side of an apartment building in Romania, there was a lot of speculation. Would Romania go to NATO and ask for maybe not Article 5 consultations about a possible response since the relative level of damage was low, but maybe Article 4 consultations where you just sort of discuss a security threat to the alliance and get the allies together to show solidarity. And Romania didn’t go down either of those paths. And the speculation here is that that was largely because they were concerned about what answer they might get, what message they might get out of Washington if they chose to do that. And that is a significant harbinger of a lot of things including as Russia escalates in the way that you described how the alliance will hold together, which is critical to American security, critical to security over here.

Jake Sullivan:

The Russians call this gray zone warfare and it’s got this deniable quality to it because in this case in Romania, they said, “Oh, that was an accident. We didn’t mean for that to happen.” But these accidents continue to happen and are happening A, more often as Mike pointed out, 2025 was a year in which you were seeing a lot more Russian drone activity over NATO airspace and B, more aggressively. So last year it was fly drones around in the sky, but they don’t really smash into anything. Now they’re actually hitting civilian targets and causing casualties. And with no response to that episode, you can only expect that the Russians will think, “Okay, what’s the next turn of the crank? What’s the next, as they might put it, slice of the salami as they continue to test NATO’s resolve and continue to try to demonstrate two NATO countries, two European countries, you guys are vulnerable.”

This war could escalate and that should have an impact on how you think about both how you deal with Ukraine, but also whether we ultimately get to a resolution of the war. So I think that is something for us to watch. We had to deal with this in a lot of respects during our time in office, how to avoid what Mike Kofman called horizontal escalation, basically the war spreading beyond Ukraine to NATO. And again, that’s not about a conventional invasion of NATO territory. It’s about these gray zone tactics including these drone incursions. And this, I think, is going to be something that will be a feature of the second half of 2026 precisely because Russia is facing greater pressure on the battlefield than it was before, and it’s got to play other cards to try to enhance its strategic advantage.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

For episode transcripts and exclusive podcast segments, subscribe to The Long Game on Substack.

Jon Finer:

This week we’ll tackle a range of listener questions, including one about President Trump’s decision to appoint businessman Bill Pulte as director of national intelligence.

Jake Sullivan:

I think he’s going to use every tool he can muster that he can go out and collect from across the intelligence community to go after the president’s political opponents. And this is not speculation.

Jon Finer:

Head to thelonggame.substack.com. The link is in the show notes. That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us. The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Weiner and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Leanna Greenaway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Weiner. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

Iran Talks and Trump’s Cuba Strategy w/Ricardo Zúñiga

May 27, 2026

TEASER:

Ricardo Zúñiga:

What the Trump administration would do would be to hit military targets, wipe out what’s left of Cuba’s naval patrol capacity, and probably hit some targets in Havana to make a point. There’s just not much to destroy in Cuba at this point. This is not Iran in that sense. Conventionally, the US would wipe out the Cuban military in an afternoon. No question about that.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. Today we’re going to return to a topic we’ve spent a lot of time on in recent weeks and it continues to bedevil the Trump administration, which is how to actually end the war in Iran. We’ll review what increasingly looks like strategic failure in that war and walk through what an options memo for the president might tell him about the pluses and minuses of the different paths he could take.

Then we will hear about another war that could be on the horizon for the United States in Cuba, and we’ll be joined by Ricardo Zúñiga, the former American diplomat who negotiated directly and secretly with the Cubans during the Obama administration.

But first, Iran, Jake, maybe you can kick us off by bringing us up to speed on what has started to feel like Groundhog Day. Every day we hear about the possibility that negotiations may be making progress and then immediately the possibility that the United States might resume military action. It’s starting to feel like things are incredibly stuck. How do you see it?

Jake Sullivan:

It’s so hard to say day-to-day. I think the Groundhog Day analogy is a good one. And maybe another analogy would be Zeno’s paradox where you keep getting halfway to the finish line, halfway, then halfway, then halfway, but you never quite get there. I feel like we’ve entered the Zeno’s paradox phase of these negotiations where, broadly speaking, the outlines of a deal have come into view, which includes the US lifting its blockade in return for Iran lifting its blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, and then the two sides agreeing to go to the table for some period, 60 days is the current period being discussed, to try to work through issues related to the nuclear program. And as part of that, Iran would agree to dispose of in some fashion its stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, would agree to some duration of an enrichment moratorium, and would agree to some degree of verification and inspections to ensure that whatever was reached in terms of a nuclear deal could be effectively enforced.

So that’s loosely what is there sitting on the table, and yet as the Trump administration comes up to the edge of accepting it, it feels the blowbacks from the hardcore Iran hawks in Washington, including some very vocal members of Congress, including some very vocal members of think tanks, and it backs off a bit. And then Iran, for its part, seems to come up to the line of agreeing to those broad terms and then kind of pauses and thinks, “Hey, we have a lot of leverage here. Maybe we can drive a harder bargain,” And it pulls back a bit. So it’s close but no cigar day in, day out here. And in the midst of all of this, the situation remains very unstable.

So just a couple of days ago, the Trump administration actually took military action. It says preemptively, because it was worried about Iran doing something militarily in the strait by striking a series of facilities in Southern Iran, including missile facilities and naval facilities as well, Iran is now talking about retaliating. It hasn’t really in a meaningful way retaliated against that, but it’s a good reminder that even as the diplomacy continues, the possibility of this blowing back open into a full-scale military conflict remains very much present.

So that’s the state of play. And we’re at a moment where I think, as you said, President Trump is going to be looking around the table in the situation room saying to his team, “Okay, what do I do? What actually are my options? No BS, what are my choices here to actually bring this thing to a resolution?” And that brings us to this options memo question. And Jon, I don’t know how you would think about framing up what the president’s actual options are in light of everything that I’ve just laid out.

Jon Finer:

So I want to start, and by the way, I wouldn’t start this way if we were making the presentation of the president for reasons that will be obvious, but it is important, I think, to remind people we did not need to be in this place, never should have been in this place. And that in my view, I think in your view, this war has left us strategically far worse off than we were before it was launched. The idea that we are now negotiating how much we will have to compensate Iran for in some way to reopen an international waterway that was wide open before this war is a remarkable strategic setback for the United States. And I don’t think there’s really any other way to see that. But as you said, we are where we are. If you’re the President of the United States, you have to make a decision based on the world as it is, even if you caused the world to be that way. And so he will need options and he’ll be looking to his team to present them.

And I think basically there are three that we can walk through, and maybe I can start with the first one, which is just to say, “I am finished,” and more or less walk away from this situation with it somewhat unresolved. And I’ll describe a bit about what that could look like. By the way, this is to some extent what I think the president was signaling now more than a month ago when he gave a speech to the country basically saying-

Jake Sullivan:

A lifetime ago.

Jon Finer:

... it feels like several lifetimes ago, “This is not really America’s problem. The economic impact isn’t really being felt by us as much as it is by other people. We don’t really need the Strait of Hormuz to be open for our export of energy products or anything else really. That’s for the Europeans and the Asians and countries of Africa and the Middle East to worry about and the rest of the issues at stake in the negotiation are really not all that big a deal. And by the way, we’ve achieved already a massive military victory.” That was basically the upshot of the president’s speech implying that the war would be over soon with or without an agreement. So he could walk away.

That would leave the Strait of Hormuz essentially an unresolved issue. It would involve US lifting our blockade, which would mean Iran could then export its energy products. It would also mean that Iran could then negotiate economic arrangements with companies, with countries for their own safe passage through the strait. So it would be an economic boon for Iran by monetizing the strait, but it would also mean the United States does not give Iran massive sanctions relief, which is under discussion in the course of a possible deal. Other countries probably would step into the breach and try to negotiate diplomatically with Iran some sort of more durable arrangement through the strait that would be beneficial to Iran, but would lead to the resumption of traffic through the strait and normalize it.

We would essentially be cutting our losses. We could rebuild our resources that we have depleted dramatically, our military resources in particular during the course of this war, and focus on other priorities. Iran would be weakened to some extent militarily, but hard to see any other narrative than that this would be seen as a major win for them. The regime would have survived, its nuclear program will have survived and be unconstrained, they will not have agreed to any diplomatic constraints on their nuclear program, and they will be able to achieve this massive economic windfall by negotiating or extorting other countries and companies around the world for safe passage through the strait, which they will need. So the walkaway option is available but seems to have some real hair on it, as we might say in this situation.

Jake Sullivan:

Option one, walk away without a deal, not a great option. That leads us to option two, which is basically just get the best deal you can get. And the best deal that we can get is fundamentally similar to the Obama era Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA. Yes, the timeframes and the limits on enrichment may be different, but ultimately it won’t eliminate all enrichment. It will be a compromise. Follow-on agreements will almost certainly be required over time and verification will be the key. And so whatever the exact terms of the deal in its basic structure and components, it will be a version of the Iran nuclear deal.

And the crazy thing about this option that President Trump simply cannot evade at this point is that deal was available to him before this war started. It was available to him before the 12-day war started last year, but it certainly was available in the weeks leading up to the decision to take out the Supreme Leader and launch this war alongside Israel in February of this year. So there was no need for this. There was no need to give Iran all of the massive strategic gains that you laid out with respect to the Strait of Hormuz and with respect to it being able to show that it can withstand American military pressure on a sustained basis.

And yet when you think about the various options, this option essentially limits but not the complete elimination of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief with a degree of inspections and verification, i.e. the Iran nuclear deal formula. This has the benefit of actually putting Iran’s nuclear program in a box, in a more durable and long-term and verifiable way, and of getting the strait back open potentially without a tolling mechanism because the sanctions relief provides the compensation to Iran and the waterway could go back to a relatively free system, not dissimilar from how it was before this war started.

So there’s I think a lot to argue for why this option makes the most sense. I think the biggest reason the president is nervous about taking it is not really a substantive reason. It’s a political reason. He’s worried about his right flank and he’s also worried about ultimately agreeing to something that is going to look a lot like what he canceled back in 2018, the Obama nuclear deal. But how do you see this second option?

Jon Finer:

Well, I think that’s exactly right. I think the president has been spooked to some extent by the pushback that he has gotten, including, as you indicated, from some leading Republicans. And there was this period after it really looked last weekend like the administration was kind of careening towards a deal where they were kind of going to online war against some of their own political allies. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what’s in this deal. It’s actually a lot better than what you’re attacking, this straw man.” And I think that is why unable to get more from Iran in the context of these negotiations, given that Iran is in a pretty strong position, the president has been questing around to see what else he can shoehorn into a potential deal scenario to make it look more palatable to his right flank. And an idea he seems to have settled on is to try to coerce not Iran, but some of the other countries involved in these negotiations into taking a step that would benefit him politically, which is normalizing relations with Israel.

And so you got this somewhat bizarre statement that the president put out following, at least according to the reporting, a call in which he told countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others that as part of his agreement to do a deal with Iran, he would be requiring them to normalize relations with Israel. And I have to say, maybe points or brazenness and creativity, this seems extremely unlikely to work. Again, in the reporting on this call when the president laid this out, it was apparently met by just crickets on the other end of the phone because nobody really wants to say no to Trump, but nobody was going to say yes to this demand. And I don’t know if you have a different view, I doubt it, I don’t see those countries normalizing relations with Israel in this context or anytime soon.

So the risk he is running by questing for some way to give himself a bit more political cover is that he blows up may be the best option that remains on the table, which is the deal that you just laid out.

Jake Sullivan:

But Jon, that really only leaves one other option and that option is basically to return to war in some form. And the return to war option, when you stare at it hard, you sit down with the military planners, and you say, “How is return to war going to get me closer to a better outcome than what I can get right now?” The answers are not very pretty.

You can try to forcibly open the strait on the water, which we tried through this Project Freedom for about 30 hours before stopping, you can just go back to bombing across Iran as we did for the early weeks of the war and it didn’t work then, it’s unlikely to work now, or you could really escalate and actually land troops on Iranian territory in one way or another, whether it’s to try to pry the strait open by landing them along the shores of the Strait of Hormuz. But since the threat is largely coming from drones and missiles, not from literally the immediate shore, that doesn’t seem like it’s necessarily going to work. Or you could send them to try to get the uranium, as we’ve discussed on previous episodes in Isfahan, but we’ve laid out all of the downsides of that kind of operation, which at this point has been so telegraphed that ostensibly the Iranians have really doubled down on the protection of Isfahan.

So the various military options, none of them have a particularly palatable affect to them. So that’s why Trump, kind of stuck between walking away, which as we laid out has a lot of downsides, returning to war, which also has a lot of downsides, is kind of stuck at the one yard line of a deal but not really quite willing to step across that line and say, “Okay, it’s done.” That seems to be the circumstance we find ourselves in, unless I’m missing something on that third option, Jon, and there is a way to resume military operations in a way that changes the equation.

Jon Finer:

I think there are two big problems with option three in our memo, the return to war scenario. One is you need an answer to the question of what will be different this time, what will make this work this time when it didn’t work when we bombed them for more than a month already. You mentioned some of the things that could be different, these boots on the ground scenarios.

Another is that the United States could start bombing, as Trump has threatened on a number of occasions, Iran’s civilian infrastructure. And I think the reason he has chosen not to do that is not because he has somehow discovered respect for international law, international humanitarian law or the laws of war, and not because he doesn’t want to go ahead with these sorts of attacks, but because he has heard from countries in the region that if you do that, Iran will attack our civilian infrastructure and we have quite a lot to lose here. The United States is not as vulnerable as we are to Iranian attacks, not even close. We have desalination plants that 90-plus percent of our population rely on for drinking water. Our entire economies are structured around energy infrastructure to eventually be able to export oil and gas again.

And so I think they have no appetite for this sort of escalation, which is one of the options that could be available to Trump if you wanted to put more pressure on Iran. That’s one problem with return to war.

And the other is, and we’ve talked about this before, but it’s becoming more and more acute the more reporting that comes out about the state of play, it is not clear how much longer the United States could sustain military operations in Iran from the perspective of the munitions that we are using in this conflict that have been badly depleted. And certainly we could return to war. We have stockpiles that remain. But it’s an open question as to whether we could do that and still have a degree of readiness for other things that could happen elsewhere in the world. Russia increasingly saber-rattling in parts of Europe about escalating the Ukraine conflict even to the Baltic States. China in a constant state of trying to coerce countries in the Indo-Pacific with whom we are allied and have certain responsibilities to defend. Our ability to be prepared for other things is diminishing by the day by every day that we spend these extraordinary resources in Iran.

And so this is why I think to some extent the military keeps trying to say, “Actually we’ve achieved a lot, we’ve hit all of these targets, we’ve taken out Iran’s Navy and Air Force,” it’s the kind of argument you make when you are trying to show victory by how much effort you’ve expended essentially instead of strategic victory, which they can’t point to because the politics and the situation haven’t changed. Iran hasn’t done what we’ve tried to get them to do.

And so I just think from the perspective of American readiness, which I’m sure Trump is hearing about in the situation room from Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and others, there is high risk associated with continuing to draw down our capabilities in this war and uncertain reward at best.

Jake Sullivan:

I just want to take a step back though, Jon, because we’ve walked through this options memo exercise for President Trump. How do you deal with a strategic cul-de-sac he finds himself in with respect to the Straight of Hormuz and how do you deal with Iran’s nuclear program? And I’m thinking back to when we sat around the Oval Office and the situation room with President Obama as he contemplated not how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which was not closed at the time, but contemplated how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. And people raised various options. They said, “Okay, we could try to go for the zero enrichment, complete surrender option.” And people laid out why that was unlikely. People briefed him on the military options, and upon probing and testing, recognized the real risks of going to war to try to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, risks that have now come into living color in this time. And so President Obama looked at the situation and said, “The real option is a nuclear deal that is imperfect but fundamentally effective in preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

And the reality is that that has not changed since 2015 when that deal went into effect. An imperfect but fundamentally effective nuclear deal that requires constant enforcement and eventually will require follow-on diplomacy and agreements, that is the only viable way forward. That is true for Trump today as it was true for Obama more than a decade ago.

Trump thought he could bomb his way out of that reality. He thought he could blockade his way out of that reality. He now has this new plan that he can swallow that reality only if he gets this massive normalization of all Arab and Muslim countries with Israel. That’s not going to work either. It all just comes back to an imperfect but basically effective nuclear deal. And every day that Trump doesn’t go for that deal is another day we all suffer. It’s another day where America loses, where Iran gains, and it is just putting off, frankly, the inevitable. This is what is available and this is what President Trump should take. It’s just still very much up in the air when and how he will finally get to that point. That’s how I read the situation. So I see a certain inevitability here, but I don’t know if you agree with that or if you think that there is some other pathway to a different result in this conflict.

Jon Finer:

I think he’s ultimately going to get to a deal, whether before or after additional military action. So like all good options memos, we put our preferred option in the middle of two very unpalatable ones like choosing B on a multiple choice exam, but that does tend to be the way these things work. And stay tuned and we’ll certainly be back at this topic before too much longer. And now on to Cuba.

Jake Sullivan:

Okay. So from one unnecessary and ultimately unsuccessful war to what could very well turn out to be another. We’re fortunate to be joined by the American diplomat who may have spent more time negotiating with Cuba than virtually any other, Ricardo Zúñiga, who spent 30 years as a career diplomat in a range of jobs focused on Latin America. In President Obama’s second term, President Obama charged Ricardo and Ben Rhodes was secretly negotiating the normalization of US relations with Cuba for the first time in more than 50 years. That resulted in the reopening of some economic relations, the reopening of embassies in each other’s countries, as well as President Obama’s historic visit to Cuba in 2016.

A whole lot has changed since then, starting with President Trump’s reversal of that deal in his first term. And today, as we stand on the precipice of potential conflict, Ricardo’s going to help us and help all of you better understand how we got here and where we’re headed. Ricardo, welcome to The Long Game.

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Yeah, thanks so much, Jake.

Jake Sullivan:

We’re going to start with context. And just take a step back for a minute before we dig into the current events and what may happen here over the course of the coming days and weeks. Cuba policy has always been shot through with politics. There are now multiple generations of Cuban Americans who consider themselves part of an exile community. There’s a spectrum of views within that community about the relationship between the US and Cuba, about the question of pressure versus engagement. How has that impacted our foreign policy on this issue historically and how does it impact it today? What did you encounter when you were dealing with the Cuba issue in government when it came to the politics of this issue?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

I had the opportunity to work on Cuba as an intelligence analyst, as a diplomat on the ground, helping human rights activists as a ... working in the office of the Coordinator of Cuban Affairs and the State Department and at the NSC with you all. And the truth is it was fascinating to see the full spectrum of how the United States and the US government interacted with a country in a way that was like no other relationship that we have. For one thing, we don’t have any other office that’s so fully dedicated on an island of 10 million people and that had, at my time, a team of 15 people that were focused just on that infinitesimal economy compared to most of the region. I always compare it to Costa Rica. I’d say Costa Rica is much more important to us economically than Cuba is at least for now.

At the same time, you had what was called the Cuban Assets Control Regulations, the embargo. The compilation of the embargo was a foot thick, like a foot thick of paper. That was the embargo. And another former diplomat who used to be involved in this, Tom Shannon used to say, it’s like an archeological dig. Every time you think you’re dealing with something new, you scratch it and you realize there’s 20 or 30 years of history behind it.And so it touched everything. And you had congressional offices that wanted to know, for example, when I was at the State Department and we did a normal thing like dealing with Cuban diplomats, when they went to go visit somebody on a consular visit or to go see somebody that was important, the congressional offices would call and ask us about that movement and whether the FBI was involved and tracking all of that. It was extraordinary. There’s nothing else like it.

So what that meant was and what the implication was that if you were going to deal with this the way that President Obama did, you had to find a way to first take that into account and then operationally get things done without the entire world looking at the minutiae of what you were doing, which you all are familiar with on Iran, of course.

Jake Sullivan:

So let’s talk about that historic opening to Cuba and the Obama administration. It was a decade ago. It also seemed like it was a lifetime ago. It started with President Obama sending you and Ben to engage in secret talks. What was the theory behind President Obama’s decision to break with decades of precedent and actually talk to these guys about a different way forward?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Well, it was the talk to these guys part I think that was one of the things that he was insistent on. He said, “We want to understand what their perspective is. We know we don’t see the world the same way. We’re never going to see the world the same way.” But for him, this was just a relic. It made absolutely no sense in a world where we were dealing with China, with Vietnam in particular, a country with which we’d been at war for years and lost 50,000 Americans. I mean, to him, it was ridiculous that we had our neighbor, which was already at that point in terrible economic conditions and that had a large community in the United States, it made no sense to him to kind of retain this holdover from the Cold War when the rest of the world had moved on.

And so his theory was, let’s just remove it from ... It was a stone in our shoe in the rest of the region. At that time, other governments were very supportive of Cuba insofar as it was confronting the United States. Even right-wing governments would come to Cuba’s defense in the face of the US embargo, for instance. And he just thought it was a waste of our time to be engaged. And he saw his as a transformative presidency, and foreign policy, that was no different. So that was, I think, the main thing that he wanted to do was see if there was a deal that was possible. And you’ll recall he is an incredibly objective leader and executive. And so if a deal wasn’t possible, we would have passed.

Jake Sullivan:

You were clear-eyed going into this about the nature of the Cuban government. It’s deeply repressive to its own people, deeply corrupt. Did you have a theory of where political change or human rights and democracy kind of fit into this engagement, an idea about how change might come to Cuba over time?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

I would say it was the views of somebody who was deep into this as opposed to the president who has to look at the whole world and where this fits. My thought was that we had tried squeezing these guys for, at that point, 57 years. We had occasionally tried charming them, going back to the Nixon administration.

Jake Sullivan:

You don’t hear much about Nixon and charm these days.

Ricardo Zúñiga:

You don’t.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah.

Ricardo Zúñiga:

You don’t. Even less about Kissinger and charm and yet they tried it. Even Reagan had secret talks with the Cubans in an effort to try to uncork this relationship in some way. And my thought was these were hardened authoritarian rulers, used to power, who just couldn’t imagine a Cuba without them in charge, like fully in charge of every aspect, the economy, politics, society, et cetera. That was how they ... And there were other authoritarians like them historically in the region. So this is where that fit for me as somebody focused on Latin America.

And my thought was if you can’t squeeze them and you can’t charm them, you have to change their environment. And the best way to do that was to offer the Cuban people an alternative to what their own government was presenting. The continuity that the Cuban government was presenting was very unpalatable to the people on the street, which something I knew from my time living there, was that Cuba’s very nationalist, but everyone understood the failures of that government. Propaganda only goes so far and Cubans were very clear about that.

And we thought, among other things, the best way to move this forward was to create expectations that the Cuban government, through their model, would never be able to keep up with. And in fact, we were very open about it. I think Fidel Castro referred to it as a Trojan horse. And it wasn’t a Trojan horse. It was just a horse. We came in and we said, “We think that in an open competition, our ideas win with your own people.” But President Obama’s presentation of this was true. He wasn’t about regime change. He thought that Cuba would change because of the pressure of Cuban citizens. So I would say where he focused and what I thought was most important was that he put policy squarely at the service of Cuban citizens, of people who were living this, the people that our laws are supposed to be helping. And in theory, the sanctions are supposed to be helping, but in fact have been hurting.

So he just inverted the way of looking at this and created, and in fact, he did create massive expectations in Cuba, and in fact created a mini boom of optimism and business for small business people that worked, which is what Fidel Castro hated and why he wanted to put the cork back in the bottle.

Jake Sullivan:

So this will be my last table setting question before I turn it over to Jon to talk about the Trump approach, this mini boom you just described. Can you take a moment for our listeners to talk about the deal you reached and how it was working before Trump more or less canceled it during his first term?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

So the deal was the United States would loosen certain elements of the embargo that fell under the president’s authority to allow for more resources to float to Cuban citizens. That was the core thing. And it was as small as changing the rules at the Department of Commerce so the Cubans could download apps from the app store. And it was amazing. Even that kind of thing where we were pushing additional channels of communication, we were trying so hard to do that. I mean, at one point in the Bush administration, we were distributing free radios in Cuba. And you’re thinking, well, we could just let them download apps now and make it easier for them to import phones and make it easier for Cubans to import construction materials so they can fix their houses. It was that basic. And people had no idea how comprehensive the sanctions were until you started really rooting around in there.

And so the idea there was to just open some small doors to create some momentum in favor of greater opening and that happened very quickly. Before Trump had an opportunity to really shut this down, Fidel Castro and kind of a core of hardliners in the bureaucracy really did slow things down and try to roll things back themselves. So the irony here is that Fidel Castro and Trump combined to crush an opening in Cuba.

Jon Finer:

So Ricardo, I want to dig into the Trump approach a bit, but before we do that, can you just describe a little bit the cloak and dagger aspect of how you negotiate secretly with people you’re not even supposed to be talking to, how you kept it under wraps, where you did it, like the logistics of it.

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Sure.

Jon Finer:

I think people would be interested in literally how this works.

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Jake was involved in his own cloak and dagger at that point. So he didn’t see quite as much of the frustration of the internal team at the White House where I insisted on essentially leaving every memo off the main system and just recording it after the fact. And you all know from working in that bureaucracy, how much that drove people crazy.

Jon Finer:

So literally like not saving things in shared drives and whatever?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Exactly. It was all on paper. The very first memo that I took when we were sort of instructed to develop second term priorities, Cuba wasn’t on that. And I was sort of called down to the front office and asked why Cuba wasn’t on there. And then I had this sheet of paper. I said, “This is the idea, but it’s always going to be on paper because in this town, this is juicy.” I mean, people were very interested. And one leak would have been disastrous. In fact, the very first memo I wrote once we had the green light to do this was talking points for when it was leaked and what we were doing and why we were doing it. That shows you my level of paranoia about controlling this. And in fact, it did not leak until the morning of the announcement, which as you all know in Washington and having done your own work in this space is really hard to do.

Part of the reason that it worked was because no one believed that the president would do it or that you could quite do this. And frankly, let’s be honest, it wasn’t as consequential as what was going on in Iran. It wasn’t as consequential as the relationship with China. So there was a little less attention to it and that was also valuable.

But in terms of how we actually did it, we enlisted the Canadians, who very graciously agreed to provide a site in Canada for these conversations and not participate. All they did was just provide the space and some sandwiches. And we remain very, very grateful to them to this day. Look, they were incredible hosts. And the reason we went with Canada was because, one, they know how to keep a secret and the Cubans knew it. And two, they have an interest and had an interest then in a normalization of the relationship. So the Cubans didn’t quite trust them, but we did and they were willing to kind of roll with it. And in fact, what we did was we met at a house about an hour from Ottawa, at a government space, and held hours and hours and hours of conversations. And we kind of fell into a pattern. It was like a normal negotiation with tables set up. Across the table, you’re having these talks, but it was very odd for somebody who had worked on this for a long time to be doing this, but it helped.

And then something I hadn’t thought about, that Cubans had their own OPSEC problems. Because they had a senior official showing up in Ottawa multiple times, their own side starts to wonder. And in fact, sort of late in the game as things got much closer to it, we did start to see some leaks from the Cuban side, which again, I just didn’t account for.

Jon Finer:

So fast-forward to a very different time. In President Trump’s first term, he didn’t particularly seem to prioritize Cuba or Latin America writ large beyond undoing what Obama did. This time around, it’s pretty different. What do you think has changed and what significance do you place, for example, on just a different set of personnel involved at senior levels, including Secretary Rubio who has a serious history on this issue and seems to be investing a lot of time in it?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Well, you nailed it. First of all, the personnel change and the absence of more orthodox leaders other than Rubio himself has really changed the equation in terms of the Americas. The real reason that for the focus in the Americas really has nothing to do with Cuba or the old adversaries, because if you notice what’s happened in Latin America, they’ve co-opted Chavismo. They’ve cemented a role for Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s deputy, which no one would have imagined other than probably Delcy and her brother. Who knows how long they were working this angle.

And then you had Nicaragua. Nicaragua has been basically ignored. And Cuba was essentially ignored until this year. And why is that? Because their real focus is on migration and organized crime, but that’s all domestic, because if you go back to the campaign and you realize that Venezuela ...

How did Venezuela come up? It wasn’t anything about Maduro or democracy. It was Tren de Aragua. It was this gang that was given essentially an incredible profile for domestic purposes. It was the red meat. And Latin America remains the source of the most important mobilizing racism for Trump’s coalition, which is really a vital engine for him.

And recall, Mexico was the first country he mentioned when he came down that escalator and Mexico has never come off the radar. It’s still there. Essentially what they’re trying to do is make the case that we’re being invaded. And how do you fight an invasion? With armed forces, which is why the armed forces now have the bulk of the resources going into this effort, why you’re hearing about strikes not just in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, but on land in Mexico, and probably you’re going to see an expansion of that. And again, the whole point was Tren de Aragua and the asylums being emptied in Venezuela were all being directed by this brown guy who was shipping all of this north to take over your community and your schools and take your money and take your house.

And so this is still a domestic program. Venezuela then became different because of the oil and because, as you all know, President Trump has some things that just kind of stick in his head like the Panama Canal. Venezuela wasn’t the first target, it was the Panama Canal. And Panama, a right-wing government, was one of the very first targets. This is all very much about President Trump’s view of the world, his 19th century view of the world, and his complete bafflement as to why the US doesn’t maintain an imperial policy, why we don’t seize things. Well, we got the oil and that was a huge tactical victory that was accomplished by co-opting the regime.

In Cuba, there’s no oil, there’s no money. The real issue here is who’s going to have the honor of paying for Cuba’s reconstruction is really what the question is. And beyond the symbolism of being the guy who does something who other leaders haven’t been able to ... what other leaders haven’t been able to accomplish, he’s not interested in Cuba. Cuba doesn’t have a thing for him. Maybe the nickel mine that a firm affiliated with the Trump family has just gotten a share of. That might be the kind of thing that’s interesting. But compared to Venezuela, there just isn’t money in Cuba. So I don’t know how much staying power there is for his interest.

Jon Finer:

So to your point about the sort of militarization of this policy, you used the word tactical. We’ve marveled, I think, at the operational success of the Maduro extraction from Caracas, but expressed real concerns about the strategic implications. I’m interested in your view of what was gained here. Was this a strategic victory of any kind for the United States? Was it worth the risk to our forces involved in what was a pretty complicated operation that ultimately went well, but that was not a foregone conclusion? And how do you see life today for Venezuelans who are living under what you described as essentially the same regime under different management, with no real prospect for democratic transition?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

It might go well. What was extraordinary to me was a couple of things. First, that the people inside the Maduro camp who cooperated with the United States to help make this happen, because make no mistake, he was turned over as much as anything by-

Jon Finer:

An inside job.

Ricardo Zúñiga:

It was an inside job. It was absolutely an inside job. The details left to the United States, but it was an inside job. This doesn’t happen without having a core part of the regime ready to collaborate.

So the first thing was the operation was amazing, but then I started to see within the first week, the fact that they didn’t mention the opposition having won an election in 2024 and just sort of handing that over ... This is an administration that prizes leverage. Why would you just set aside the convincing defeat of the people who now depend on your largess and your goodwill? Why would you have just given that, handed that over?

And it became very clear very soon that the president’s main interest was oil and extraction and having that move forward. The rest of the plan, those other phases were appended to that. But if they interfere with the first part of the plan, which is the oil extraction, he’s not going to go along. You see Maria Corina Machado, the political victor really of that 2024 election, if not the candidate, talk about getting back to Venezuela before the end of the year and kind of seeking the president’s approval for doing that. Where does that make sense? And between Delcy Rodriguez and Maria Corina Machado and which one of those is likely to gain President Trump’s support, I think it’s the one that’s sitting on the oil and the guns in Venezuela and that’s just how it is. And for him, he sees no problem at all, but have you ever heard him use the word democracy in Venezuela? Members of his team, yes.

Jon Finer:

What is Trump actually doing on Cuba right now? What is he trying to accomplish? What are the objectives? And then a sort of maybe more general question, does Cuba actually pose a meaningful threat to the United States?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Let’s start with that one first. No, they don’t and they haven’t for a long time. It’s a failed model. The threat they pose is their own weakness and failure as an economic, social, and political model. And the fact that they’re our neighbor. If it were the other side of the world, we would never even think about Cuba, but it’s not. It’s 90 miles from the United States. There’s millions of Cubans who are in the United States. We have to care about it, but it’s proximity that makes us care and the history that makes us care, not the strategic importance of Cuba. And so let’s start there.

What’s he doing? Well, he’s in the leverage building phase, something that we’ve seen in other relationships where he starts to stack up threats and tries to weaken the other side before initiating some kind of negotiation with them. It’s been very puzzling and confusing because there’s also been a lot of mixed messages. We know that unpredictability is something that his team thinks of as a strength, but I think he’s being unpredictable to his own people. For instance, the day that they roll out the indictment against Raul Castro with whom they’re also trying to negotiate, by the way, then you have President Trump talking about how he doesn’t think that an invasion’s going to be necessary. “No, not even regime change is going to be necessary.” And then the next day, “I’m going to take over. We’re going to have complete regime change.” I think they don’t know what they’re going to do, first of all.

And I think one of the real challenges they’ve encountered is on the other side of the table, first of all, these guys get a vote and they are not Venezuela. Cuba is not Venezuela. So let me just really underline that point. This is not someplace where they’re going to be able to fragment and co-opt one part of the regime against the other. That’s not likely to happen in Cuba. But right now, what they have on the other side is a government that doesn’t have a way forward. Their model has failed. I think in the heart of hearts, they understand that. They don’t have their way out. They’re waiting for another stroke of luck like they’ve had with Venezuelan oil and Russian support before that. It’s not happening. But at the same time, they’re not prepared to go in a direction that’s going to be politically helpful to Trump.

Jon Finer:

So you don’t rate the prospects that the Cubans will make a bunch of concessions that Trump is looking for absent some major action on the part of the United States very highly? You think that’s unlikely at this point?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Yes, I think that’s right. I think that from everything I’ve heard talking to people around the administration and talking to others who are aware of these conversations, the Trump administration does not want to invade. They understand politically that it’s shaky for them to go forward with that.

At the same time, they want to see some kind of win, some kind of victory, and the Cuban side is not cooperating with that in part because they just don’t know what the US demands are. So they don’t know what they’re cooperating with. They just know that if they give an inch, they’re going to lose their arm. That’s kind of their theory of, and which is, I think, fairly realistic, not just because of the US, because their own population’s ready to move on. So they’re stuck and they need a path forward. And right now, what the message they’re getting from Washington is, “We’re going to come get you and you’re going to suffer the same fate as Madura and his cronies.” So what do these guys do? They just kind of shut down. And I think that creates the possibility of an attack to try to loosen their hold, and I don’t think that’s going to be effective either.

Jake Sullivan:

So let’s talk about that, Ricardo, because as you now say, you don’t see the Cubans just agreeing to the diplomatic entreaties of the United States such as they are. So the administration keeps escalating the pressure. They’ve indicted 94-year-old Raul Castro, which looks like the same play they ran with Maduro. Rubio is speaking directly to the Cuban people about trying to bring about a, quote, “new Cuba.” There are now reported increases in the kind of intelligence flights that you might do in advance of military action. Do you actually think military action is a real possibility here and what might it look like?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Yeah, I do. I’m pretty convinced there will be some kind of military action. As part of what we’ve seen the Trump administration do in other cases, they believe that they might loosen the negotiating posture of the other side by using force against them. In the case of Cuba, that’s not likely to work. A full on invasion would do it, but that seems much less likely. I think what the Trump administration would do would be to hit military targets, wipe out what’s left of Cuba’s naval patrol capacity, which by the way, helps prevent mass migration from Cuba, and probably hit some targets in Havana to make a point. There’s just not much to destroy in Cuba at this point. This is not Iran in that sense. Conventionally, the US would wipe out the Cuban military in an afternoon. No question about that.

But then the Cuban government, what would they do? They would hunker down, and wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. And we’ve seen this in Haiti, we’ve seen this in Venezuela before what happened with Maduro. These things can just keep on going and you can continue to see sort of social decline, economic decline indefinitely. And that’s a real risk in the case of Cuba, that the Cuban government instead of moving, what they decide to do is do like an armadillo and clamp down and just wait and then dare the US to invade essentially. And if you’re a Cuban who is being asked to rise up by the United States, why would you be Fidel Castro’s last victim? Why would you do that when you think the Marines are coming anyway? Right now the table is set for a protracted crisis in Cuba, not a brief one.

Jake Sullivan:

I want to come back to this armadillo analogy, which I think is really interesting. But just to follow up on this scenario you’ve described, that the United States takes some military action by striking whatever range of military targets are available, and as you said, they’re pretty limited. Axios recently reported that the US has classified intelligence showing that Cuba has obtained a few hundred military drones from Russia and/or Iran and has discussed drone warfare plans in the case of a US attack. The way the Axios piece played out, it said Cuban officials were recently discussing plans to use drones to attack the US Naval base at Guantanamo or even Key West.

Do you regard that as credible that the Cubans would do something like that, that they’re actually gearing up for a response? Is this a pretext being seeded in the open press by the US to give a rationale for an attack? How did you read that particular report from Axios?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

90% pretext that just ... Like that plus this massive expansion of Chinese listening posts in Cuba coming out within days of each other, I mean, it’s pretty clearly an effort to kind of build a drumbeat for war. And journalists I talked to who were following this understood that it was a manipulation and reported it anyway, but they understood what exactly what it was.

But look, the other side, again, this does come back to there are potentially consequences. I mean, Cuba gets rolled in, like I said, in a day or, max, afternoon or whatever, but in the meantime, they are going to be able to do something. The other side gets a vote here for real. Cuba is just ... They’re not prepared for a conflict with the United States in any way. The Cuban strategy is what they call a war of all peoples, which is essentially to prepare for a US invasion and then mount an extended insurgency. That just doesn’t work in a Cuba where people want to live normally. They just want the next thing. They don’t want this anymore.

But yeah, look, 300 drones, I would say almost every military in the world at this stage probably has something like that. And if you’re Cuba, I would assume that they would have some kind of conventional plan for dealing with the US in the initial hours of an attack.

Jake Sullivan:

So on this armadillo issue, you’ve said basically Cuba’s going to hunker down. They’ll take the strikes, they’ll absorb them. Maybe they do something in response, maybe not, but in any event, it’s not going to lead them to surrender. Does the armadillo strategy work when the United States is imposing this blockade on fuel getting to the island such that they can’t even turn the lights on, can’t power the electricity grid, can’t essentially run an economy? Does at some point the Cuban government, the Cuban regime, have to make a deal? Or do you think that they can ride this out for quite a long time?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

I think for them, the calculus is, do I have a future or do I die if I agree to the US demands? And essentially, again, in these kind of stop-starts and mixed messages from the US, at times Secretary Rubio and others have talked about, and even the president have talked about, “Look, we’re not looking at regime change right away. We want to see some economic reforms. If we would just start moving down the path, that would be okay.” I mean, look, frankly, the Cuban government would love the Venezuela solution. If they were given the option of managing themselves an extended reform process, that’s a great outcome for them. They would love the US as a strong economic partner and somebody that has committed not to invade because now they have a stake in Cuba.

The problem would be for the United States in a sense to accept that the politics of that. I think it’s a completely unviable option. You’re hearing a lot of Cuban Americans saying, “Venezuela was awesome for Venezuela. It’s not great for us.” Cuba has to be different. You’ve got to wipe the map. And the Cuban regime is going to interpret that as a threat, as a threat to their lives, not just to their regime. So they don’t have a way out. So I think what’s going to have to happen is that if the Trump administration really wants to change things in Cuba, they’re going to have to give them a map of a way out.

Jake Sullivan:

So your view is that the Cuban regime could accept a Delcy-style outcome, which could potentially involve at least a nominal change in the president of Cuba. Currently, it’s Díaz-Canel. He could be removed in favor of someone else theoretically, but the regime stays in place. But your view is that the United States could not accept that because the politics of South Florida just don’t permit it. Is that a fair characterization?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Something like that. Look, it couldn’t be quite as open as what happened in Venezuela because they have their own ... It’s a coherent state. It’s not sort of this group of combating factions like you had in Venezuela. There couldn’t be a Cuban Delcy, for instance. But if you had a consortium of leaders where everyone was in agreement and nodding across the table at each other and kind of moving forward together, I think they would accept a much stronger US role. I think they would accept a downgrading of the relations with Russia and China in exchange for security assurances from the United States, in exchange for economic assistance and a way out of this humanitarian disaster. I think it would be very hard for us to accept that outcome. So I think it’s incredibly complicated at this stage to see a relatively smooth process like we’ve seen in Venezuela.

Jake Sullivan:

And so at the end of the day, you see, as you said, a protracted crisis punctuated by at least one episode of maybe multiple of the use of military force by the United States.

Ricardo Zúñiga:

I think that’s the most likely outcome right now.

Jon Finer:

So Ricardo, it’s a mantra in policy debates that having a plan beats no plan. So if you believe that a war is not a great idea strategically for the United States, the possibility of a protracted conflict that doesn’t accomplish very much is how I heard you describe it, but you also believe the status quo is terrible for the people of Cuba as we talked about at the beginning of this conversation, what is the right policy? What should the United States be doing vis-a-vis Cuba?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Given the facts that we have, we have this administration that is both interventionist and transactional, be transactional. Provide a map. Suggest here are the things that you can do this year, here are the things that could happen next year, here are the things that we’re willing to do to facilitate that, meaning take executive actions to loosen parts of the embargo, to allow certain parts of the economy to move forward, identify what your hard line demands are. If it were me, I would say, “We want the Russian and Chinese role diminished this year. We want verifiable evidence of that. In exchange for that, we’ll give you certain guarantees. If we see that happen, we’re not going to take military action.” That’s important that you have an immediate alleviation.

The other thing I would do is say, “Your model is unviable. We will help make it viable. Instead of sending the 82nd Airborne, we’re going to send a team from Treasury to help strengthen and improve the banking system so that it’s able to operate in an open environment. As Cuba’s leaders, you are going to have to accept the decisions of the Cuban people as part of a longer process, but there’s no reason why every Cuban shouldn’t benefit from the new Cuba.” That to me is the core message, is the signal that you’re not going to destroy them and annihilate them physically, and in fact, that they have a future. There’s a lot of people. I’m convinced that there are quite a few Cubans who believe that they have a future and a more open economy and a more open society, including people who are in the government.

You’re already seeing the GAESA. The famous military industrial complex is ... Whether it’s GAESA or something else, it’s real. I mean, there’s a lot of people who are already in the private sector, but they’re in a fixed private sector. It’s a private sector where the government really determines winners and losers. In a more open system, you already have people who understand that life is going to get better for them under a different model.

Jon Finer:

So we asked you at the beginning of the conversation about the politics of this issue, which I think cut against, to some extent at least, the approach you’re describing. For Republicans, it’s pretty straightforward. I think they believe their base wants a hard line, maybe the hardest possible line, and that seems to be the approach the administration is following. For Democrats, President Obama was a bit of an outlier. The politics are more mixed. You could argue President Biden was pretty cautious on this issue, restoring some of the Obama changes, but certainly not all of them, maybe in part as a result of this mixed political view on the Democratic side.

So I’m wondering what policy lessons you draw from the political side of this issue. Our friend, Dan Erikson, has called this the Cuba Wars, meaning the political wars over Cuba, although he may have to revise that book if there’s an actual war and add a military dimension. But given the political description, is the approach you described viable?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Yeah, completely viable. And there’s two reasons. One, this is an administration that clearly has demonstrated they can do whatever they want or will do whatever they want regardless of what their base thinks and the base goes along for the most part. That’s one.

The second is most Americans just don’t care about Cuba. They don’t want to be in another war and I think that’s the first order of business. And it seems clear that Republicans and Congress understand that, but Florida creates its own weather, Florida is its own environment, and they can kind of live in that bubble, but the rest of the country doesn’t care. When I talked to Americans, it really made a difference. If you were a Republican from Arkansas, you wanted to know how much rice you could sell to Cuba. And if you were in tech, you wanted to know, “Oh look, this is interesting. Yeah, we can help them leapfrog.” That’s how the rest of the country looks at it.

And I will just say this last piece here, the thing that really shocked me when President Obama went forward was I remember being in a meeting as everyone was getting ready to move forward with this, the meeting where he gave the green light. And the consensus around the table was that this was going to be neutral or negative from a public perspective for the initial period and then it would get better. What I don’t think anyone around there expected was how popular this was in the United States for when it happened because, again, it was the most obvious thing in the world. You leave this thing behind and you move forward with your neighbor and that’s what most Americans care about. So there’s a huge amount of space if you’re willing to live outside of Washington on this.

Jon Finer:

You say in the United States, but around the world, maybe even more resoundingly popular, what President Obama decided to do. I mean, you travel around at least Latin America quite a bit these days. Who in the region supports what President Trump is doing or who thinks it’s crazy? And would the region support US military action on Cuba?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Look, I will say this, that the region has been quite pragmatic and everyone’s gone their own way. This is the least cooperative period I can remember in Latin American history. Everyone is just trying to survive this moment in their own way as best they can. Some can take advantage, but for the most part, countries are mostly worried about the economic consequences of what’s going on in the United States. Cuba’s very much in the back, way, way, way down the list of things that they care about. But I think they’d be very interested because I think the idea of Cuba as a positive force in the region is frankly something that most of them would welcome. The old left-right divides in Latin America have transformed pretty dramatically and Cuba is just seen as too much work to bother with. And then having seen what happened in Venezuela, there’s now this belief that the US is not just transactional but fairly predatory at this point. And so I think that is causing them to kind of reinterpret to what change in Cuba might look like.

Jon Finer:

Last question. In Iran, which we talked about in the first part of this episode, we’re dealing with a regime that’s been in place since 1979 and not dealing with it all that successfully when it comes to trying to put it into the historical dust bin. In Cuba, the regime has been in place even longer, since 1959. Do you think we will see its end in the near term, in our lifetimes, and how much does that matter?

Ricardo Zúñiga:

In terms of how much it matters, it doesn’t change much for the United States or even at this stage for the region, given how much else is happening. I mean, what’s happening in Colombia and Central America and Mexico is much more relevant for the United States than what happens in Cuba. And I say that as somebody who loves Cuba and thinks that I want to see a democratic Cuba for sure and a successful one. I actually do believe that change is coming very soon because the current model just has no outlet. There is no way forward. There is no savior. China and Russia will rhetorically support the Cuban government. They’re both frustrated with the lack of reform. And reform automatically means change in Cuba. There is this pent-up demand for change. And actually, I’m very optimistic about what that could look like despite all the challenges. And we didn’t even talk about how the US sanctions regime could stifle a government that we support, but that’s very real. We’ve seen that happen in other situations.

With all of that, Cuban ingenuity and resilience is an amazing force. And I’m convinced that it’s going to make a huge difference in what happens in Cuba and that it will be an engine for growth and success in the Caribbean and will be an asset in our relationships as well. But more than anything else, I think that people are going to be living better lives five or six years from now than they are today.

Jon Finer:

A good note to end on.

Jake Sullivan:

Amen.

Jon Finer:

Thank you for your time today. Also, thank you for everything you did under President Obama and throughout your diplomatic career. We’re grateful.

Ricardo Zúñiga:

Thanks to the two of you. No, really. Thank you.

Jake Sullivan:

Thank you, Ricardo. Really appreciate it. So Jon, what did you make of that?

Jon Finer:

Well, hard not to conclude based on Ricardo’s analysis, which is about the best I know of, that we’ll likely be back talking about this issue in the context of a military intervention before too much longer. I never quite know how seriously to take these threats, but he seems to take it seriously and it seems like we should be.

Jake Sullivan:

We should definitely take it seriously. I was struck by a short-term pessimism that this is going to be a protracted conflict that could be punctuated by the use of military force by the United States. With all of the uncertainty and risk that comes along with that, including the fact that Cuba gets a vote, as he put it, but also his longer term optimism that something’s going to give here on the island and there are brighter days ahead for Cuba. I think he put a timeframe of five to six years on that. We’re not going to hold him to that obviously.

But that kind of slight cognitive dissonance that we’re going to be in a difficult period right now and that US policy of this coercive and predatory variety is not necessarily going to help things along in a real way, but that underlying forces and trends on the island could get us to a better place for the Cuban people and the US-Cuba relationship over time. I’m going to take that away as the positive, even as we have to watch the short term very carefully, because as you said, we could be back on here talking about bombs dropping over Havana in the relatively near term as the Trump administration gets frustrated with the Cubans not acceding to its set of maximalist demands.

Jon Finer:

And maybe elsewhere for the end of the next few years. Remarkably in an administration that has launched tariff wars all over the world, that’s intervened militarily in Venezuela, now in Iran, as we’ve obviously discussed, the biggest change in American foreign policy that they have ushered in may well be just this hyper militarized approach to Latin America by the time the next few years are done and we’ll see what happens in places like Mexico and Nicaragua and Colombia.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. We talk about bombs dropping on Havana. They’re dropping in the Eastern Pacific. They’re dropping in the Caribbean against boats. You see the way in which the administration is trying to up its military game both overtly and covertly in other countries, including Mexico, countries in Central America, countries in South America, strikes in Ecuador not too long ago. You’re totally right about that. That’s a larger set of dynamics that we are going to have to continue to return to because it doesn’t make the front pages right now, but it is a relentless part of the administration’s foreign policy. So a good thing to flag.

Jon Finer:

So that’s a lot for today. One war with no obvious end insight, although we’ll see, and another that looks just over the horizon with more to come.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jon Finer:

We’d love to hear from you. Send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com.

Jake Sullivan:

And subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive Producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead Editorial Producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy Editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior Producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video Producers, Nat Wiener and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising Producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

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Jake Sullivan:

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Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

America’s Cybersecurity Crisis Starts With Software (w/Jen Easterly)

May 21, 2026

TEASER:

Jen Easterly:

We have to understand that we really don’t have a cybersecurity problem. We fundamentally have a software quality problem. And the reason why we have hacks and breaches and data theft and disruption is really because of decades of misaligned economic incentives where technology vendors and software manufacturers have been allowed to develop and deliver essentially flawed, defective, insecure software because they’ve prioritized, they’ve been allowed to prioritize speed to market and cool features and driving down cost and convenience all over security.

Jon Finer:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And I’m Jake Sullivan. It’s Thursday, May 20th, and we’re going to step back from the crush of day-to-day crises to explore a subject that is vital to the future of national security and geopolitics. And that issue is cyber. Now, we thought this would get us away from the headlines for a bit, but literally as we record this episode, President Trump is getting ready to sign an executive order on AI and cybersecurity. So this topic is actually about as timely as it gets. And we have the ideal guest for this conversation, our friend and former colleague, Jen Easterly. Jen is a giant in the world of cyber. She was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, from 2021 to 2025. As a West Point graduate and a US Army officer, she helped create United States Cyber Command. She also commanded the Army’s first cyber battalion.

And oh yes, along the way, she earned two Bronze Stars. She served twice at the White House, once a special assistant to President Obama and senior director for counter-terrorism, and once a senior policy advisor to then national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice. She also has top level private sector experience serving as the head of firm resilience for Morgan Stanley, leading that firm’s cybersecurity and physical security resilience strategies and establishing the financial sector’s first cybersecurity fusion center. And now she is the director of the RSA Conference, the world’s premier global cybersecurity convening. Most importantly, she has earned the Jake Sullivan and John Finer Award for being the biggest badass in the world. We call it the BBW Award. So Jen, welcome to the long game.

Jen Easterly:

Wow.

Jon Finer:

First and only recipient. Congratulations.

Jen Easterly:

Wow. Okay. All right. I’m glad to be here. It’s great to see you guys.

Jake Sullivan:

Good to see you.

Jon Finer:

We obviously face cyber threats as a nation from both state actors and non-state actors. It would be helpful, I think, for our listeners if you could characterize those threats a bit in a concrete way. We sort of speak abstractly about the specter of cyber attacks a lot, but tell us what we have in mind when we worry about this?

Jen Easterly:

We talk about the cyber threat landscape, right? I sort of glazed over, what does it all mean? But it comes down to essentially nation state actors that we know are very focused on a variety of things to go after our critical infrastructure, whether that’s stealing data, whether that’s implanting capabilities to disrupt the ability to operate, or essentially it’s cyber criminals. It’s the whole range of gangs that are either given safe haven or sponsorship by Russia, China. And much of what they’re doing is deploying ransomware, essentially malicious software that can allow them to lock up data, hold it for ransom, and then force many of these owners operators that we were working with to pay money to get their data released.

And so that is how typical citizens will look at, what is affecting me? Is my data safe? Am I going to get breached? Am I going to get hacked? That is the experience that most people think about when they’re concerned about cyber threats out there. But I think it’s really important to sort of take a step back and to think about broadly the context of where we’re at because we talk so much about cyber threats and about the dangers of espionage and disruption. And we can talk about these crazy names, which always bother me, Volt Typhoon, Cozy Bear, Fancy Bear, Midnight Blizzard. I think we spend way too much time glorifying the bad actors. But I think fundamentally we have to understand that we really don’t have a cybersecurity problem, we fundamentally have a software quality problem.

And the reason why we have hacks and breaches and data theft and disruption is really because of decades of misaligned economic incentives where technology vendors and software manufacturers have been allowed to develop and deliver essentially flawed, defective, insecure software because they’ve prioritized, they’ve been allowed to prioritize speed to market and cool features and driving down cost and convenience all over security. So for years and years and years, security has been a bolt on. That’s essentially what created the multi-billion dollar cybersecurity industry.

So when we talk about these hacks and these attacks and all of that, it’s not this sort of organic, “There’s nothing I can do about it. I just live in a world where I’m constantly vulnerable to attacks from Russia or China or these cyber criminals.” It really comes down to the fact that, frankly, we’ve built this rickety mess of infrastructure and there are real things that we can do to fix it. And frankly, that’s why I’m excited to have this discussion. I’m excited about the EO in AI and cybersecurity because we are in a moment where I think we can be much more optimistic about long-term reduction of cyber risks so that our citizens can be safer from these very serious threats.

Jake Sullivan:

What are the steps we need to take? How do we change that structure so it’s no longer rickety, but it’s much more robust?

Jen Easterly:

So we did a lot of work even before these capabilities were released, these mythos and ChatGPT-5.5-Cyber, essentially these frontier AI capabilities that are very, very good at writing code and therefore very, very good at recognizing flawed code. So I know we’ll talk a little bit more about that. But when I was at CISA, one of the things that the team did that I think made perhaps the biggest impact was this launch of a Secure by Design campaign, that again was rooted in changing the incentives for vendors to actually design and develop and test and deliver much more secure software. And so we launched this multifaceted campaign. We work with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of technology vendors who voluntarily signed CISA’s Secure by Design pledge, essentially committing to taking very material steps across several different pillars to reduce risk to software. We also did things like work with universities to emphasize not just writing code, but actually writing secure code.

We worked with lawmakers and legislators, regulators around the world to advance the idea of a software liability regime, one that was rooted in an articulable standard of care and one that could provide safe havens, essentially provisions for those technology vendors that were responsibly innovating using secure development practices. And then importantly, and this is what I spend a lot of time talking to CEOs and boards of big companies, we worked hard to turn this Secure by Design, the sort of technical side on the supplier side into secure by demand, really rooted in the fact that we really need to use our purchasing power, particularly think about big companies that have choices in terms of the kind of technology that they integrate into their complicated supply chain. So the idea is these companies actually should be using that consumer choice, that purchasing power to demand much, much more of their vendors in terms of what they buy from them.

A great example of this was J.P. Morgan. Their CISO actually issued an open letter to software providers last year basically saying that the modern software delivery model was weakening the global financial ecosystem and actually enabling cyber attacks and they called for vendors to prioritize secure design over rushing features to market. So it was both on the supply side and on the demand side. And that was, I think one of the really important things we did. And one of the last things we did was work with all of the frontier AI labs as part of our joint cyber defense collaborative, the jcdc.ai, to advance this idea of Secure by Design AI. Because when you think about these capabilities moving much faster, much more powerful, and oh, by the way, unpredictable, these labs have a real burden they should be bearing to ensure that these capabilities are built with security as the top priority. No longer can we just transfer risk to customers as we’ve been doing for 40 years.

Jon Finer:

So we’ll talk more obviously about the intersection of cyber and AI, but I want to come back to this concept of software vulnerability and purchasing power as a tool to try to incentivize the creation of better software. It’s a subset, I think, or the core in some ways of a larger problem in the cyber landscape, which is that the threat surface, this phrase we use to describe essentially the targets of cyber attacks are largely held in private hands, held by the private sector, controlled by the private sector, protected to some extent at least, by the private sector. And I guess my question is if all of this critical infrastructure or the vast quantity of it, banks, the electrical grid, hospitals, pipelines, transportation infrastructure is in private hands, what can the government do to incentivize or force better practices given that the national security implications of an attack are felt by all of us?

Jen Easterly:

The biggest issue is the government has never addressed the clear market failure that is created by software, not to get too geeked out from my teaching economic days, but software is essentially a credence good, right? Customers don’t actually can’t look at a piece of software and say, “Oh, that’s super secure,” or, “Oh, I’m going to be massively hacked.” So they don’t really know what to ask for and therefore the vendors, the makers of that software are not incentivized or rewarded to actually focus on security. And so therefore they don’t, they focus on speed to market and features and driving down cost and convenience. And so you have a market failure. So what of course happens when you have a market failure, the government steps in with some sort of regulation to try and deal with that market failure.

But at the end of the day, we’ve bought into this myth that software vulnerabilities, the flaws and defects that lead to the hacks and the breaches, software vulnerabilities are this myth of they’re just these inevitable things, there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s like an act of God or a weather event.And so the government has never solved that market failure. So anybody here who is in business, I’m sure a lot of folks listening, go back and look at the contracts that your folks have signed when you buy, acquire, purchase software.

And I will bet you that inside that contract language that I’m sure is multiple pages, there’s somewhere that says “You bear the entire risk of this purchase.” I’ve looked through a lot of contract language and it’s pretty surprising that essentially in the making of a lot of these technology products and softwares, we’ve seen the greatest transfer of risk in modern history since the dawn of the internet, the transfer of risk from the makers of these technology products to the consumers of these technology products. So market failure never fixed either by any sort of technology focused regulation or what I think could make the most difference, which is some sort of a software liability regime.

You have liability for cars that are made badly or for medical devices. Those are the things that could make a difference. But we’ve never done that. So again, we spend a lot of time glorifying the villains, the Salt Typhoon and the Volt Typhoon and the Midnight Blizzard and the Cozy Bear. Remember Jake, you and I were talking about this when in the days of SolarWinds, you’re like, “What is this Cozy Bear? What are these Fancy Bear things?” These and glorify and glamorize these villains. We spend time blaming the victims, right? Somebody gets breached, “Oh my God, how could that happen? Why didn’t they put the procedures in place?” And we don’t spend very much time at all holding vendors accountable for creating higher quality products.

And so that is essentially the embodiment of why we’re at where we’re at. I think there are legislative solutions to this, and I hope that we have legislative solutions on the AI side. But there are also things that I think AI can fundamentally do to reduce risk because they can solve the issue on those flaws and defects by writing more secure code and by using capabilities as we’ve seen released in the last month, whether that’s mythos from Anthropic or ChatGPT-5.5-Cyber released as part of their trusted access to cyber program, these are tools which can actually very, very rapidly find those flaws and defects in the software and then enable us to remediate them. And so that’s part of why I’m excited and optimistic about these new tools being able to accelerate us to a world where we have much more secure and resilient software underpinning our critical infrastructure.

Jon Finer:

Let’s get to the news of the month, which we’ve referenced now a bunch of times. It’s been in the headlines, cyber security, because of the announcement by Anthropic of a new model called Mythos, Jen, which you referred to, which was quickly followed by a similarly capable model from OpenAI called GPT 5.5. What do you make of these models for cyber threats specifically? How big of a game changer is this even just compared to the previous generation of models? And how do you think about how the government is handling the onslaught advent, I should say, of these models so far?

Jen Easterly:

Yeah. I mean, I think it is a step change. I do not have direct access to these models, but I’ve spent a lot of time over the last month having conversations with folks who are actually using them and employing them. And everything that I have heard is they are a step change in the ability to find vulnerabilities in infrastructure. And again, going back to the canonical issue that has led to the cybersecurity problem set, it’s all about these flaws and defects, which we have normalized to call vulnerabilities in the code. And so these capabilities, Mythos Preview, which was released a constrained release as part of Anthropic’s what’s called Project Glasswing and then shortly followed by OpenAI’s 5.5 GPT released in also a constrained way through their trusted access for cyber. The key thing to know about these is they have a extraordinary ability at speed and scale to find those flaws and defects in code bases.

Now, I think the really important thing and actually the fascinating thing to me, you guys, is the fact that you had a private sector companies, first Anthropic and then OpenAI voluntarily decide to constrain deployment. I think that is pretty incredible when you think about the history. The history of technology development and deployment is all about a rush to market. Get that feature out first, get your product out first, competing on driving down costs. So having a private sector company, and there’s a big debate out there. Was it marketing? Was it hype? And they called it this thing, Mythos and all of that. Having talked to the technical folks and the security folks, I think at the end of the day, they made a very responsible decision to actually limit and constrain the deployment to key technology companies, key cybersecurity companies and select critical infrastructure owners and operators so they could deploy these tools, so they could find and fix those vulnerabilities, those flaws, those defects in their infrastructure, remediate them because it’s, I don’t want to say trivial, but it’s much easier to find these flaws and defects than it is to fix them.

And so that’s why this constrained deployment is so absolutely notable, and I think should be welcomed and applauded in some sense. Because again, these private sector companies, there’s no regulation and their only incentive to constrain those deployment is their belief that it was the right thing to do from a security perspective. So again, you saw that with Anthropic, you saw that with OpenAI and we should be pretty realistic about this given the speed of how these things are going. You’ve seen Anthropic, it’s about five weeks now, GPT 5.5 pretty recently, but these models, these very powerful, what I call frontier cyber models, they are going to be widely available within nine months to a year.

We’ll see open weight models available, meaning that they can be essentially used and implemented much more widely than we’re seeing now in this constrained deployment. And so at the end of the day, I think the fact that defenders have essentially been given a head start to use these tools to reduce risk to the critical infrastructure that Americans rely on every hour of every day, again, finance, water, power, communication, transportation, healthcare, the fact that it is a constrained limited deployment to allow defenders to get that head start I think is a very notable and important thing.

And now it looks like the administration is going to put out an executive order that to some extent, codifies what the private sector is already doing. There’s already been voluntarily providing their models to the commerce department, the AI standards and security casey within, used to be the AI Safety Institute. They have been allowed access to these models so they can benchmark them and kind of get an understanding of how powerful they are. There’s also been given access to the AI Security Institute in the UK again to be able to analyze how these models can be used, how effective and powerful they are.

And now it looks like this EO, I think, and I welcome this as well, is going to essentially say when these models can implicate significant risk, again, if they get out from just the defenders to potential adversaries who could use these capabilities, we want to know that and I think the government rightly wants to put some sort of constraints around how these models can be deployed because what you don’t want to have, and you can do a thought experiment of if China had the compute and if they had gotten to a model like Mythos before the US did, whether it was DeepSeek or any of their companies, I think we would be in a really, really bad place.

And so we should be pretty thoughtful about how these models are going to be deployed and really ensuring that defenders have the capability to reduce risk to critical infrastructure. Now all that being said, these models will get out, our adversaries will have these models. And I do believe even as we are on a path to what I optimistically believe is a significant reduction in cyber risk and a significant improvement in software quality in the next two to three years where ransomware will not be a multi-trillion dollar business, but rather a shocking anomaly, on the way to that path we will likely see some significant disruption.

Jake Sullivan:

So Jen, just to put a fine point on it, you think within the next year, I think you used nine months as a timeframe, you think our adversaries will basically have ready access to this type of capability.

Jen Easterly:

There’s been some writing on this. I think Anthropic published something about how to prevent China in particular, which as you guys know, is the pacing threat when it comes to cyber capabilities, how to keep the delay, their ability to get the right compute so that they can compete on a level of Mythos. But I think unless we are pretty purposeful about preventing these models from getting out, really being able to constrain them, I think we’re going to see either development or there may be sort of leaks or abuse. Obviously there’s distillation issue, which is essentially having access to a powerful model to train a less capable model.

And so there was something put out by the Office of Science and Technology Policy. I think Director Kratsios talked about this specifically, our concerns about adversaries distilling, essentially you can say stealing access to models to create something just as capable. But the big answer to your question is yes, I think within a year our adversaries will have access to these, which is why to some extent these are the most powerful capabilities, cyber capabilities that we have seen developed. And so in some sense, defenders are in a race to be able to use them to find and fix vulnerabilities.

Jake Sullivan:

To follow up for a second on this offense defense balance, because it’s always a cat and mouse game, and here the same capability to detect vulnerabilities can be used on the one hand to attack and exploit them and on the other hand to defend and fix them as you were just laying out. And you just talked about the head start that Project Glasswing and the provision of these models to the government and to tech companies and banks and cybersecurity companies and others, the head start that’s given to defenders. But as you look out over the next two to three years, during this window where we could see disruption, does offense or defense have a greater advantage in this new age of AI enabled cyber as these capabilities continue to develop?

Jen Easterly:

I mean, it’s always this, AI, the attackers get a little bit better, the defenders get a little bit better, but I’ll bring you back to something that all of us grappled with, and that was what I thought was the most serious issue when I was the director of CISA and that was the hackers from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Burrowing deep inside our most sensitive critical infrastructure, as you recall, water, power, transportation, communication, and it wasn’t to steal our data or to spy on us. Rather, it was to be able to launch disruptive attacks in the event of a crisis in the Taiwan Straits. So this is a world where a war in Asia would be accompanied by mass disruption. I always talked about it everything everywhere all at once. You could think about power unavailable, water unavailable, trains derailed, comm severed, all to incite societal chaos and panic and to deter our ability to martial military might and citizen will.

So that was one of the, I would say the most serious thing that we dealt with at CISA. And of course, as you can imagine, we had a full court press effort. My team’s working with critical infrastructure owners and operators across the country to help them identify and hunt for and eradicate these PLA hackers from critical infrastructure. But at the end of the day, we thought what we found was just the tip of the iceberg, which again, which is why resilience is so important. But the thing about that campaign that really illuminated to me this idea of cybersecurity versus software quality is these very sophisticated, very well resourced hackers from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army were not using exotic cyber weapons to hack into our critical infrastructure, they were just taking advantage of basic defects, the common flaws that were in things like routers and switches and firewalls, technology that every one of us uses, whether it’s in our home office or whether it’s in our business.

And so we have failed to create friction for these threat actors. We’ve actually made it pretty easy on them to be able to go after our critical infrastructure. And so I think we think of these actors as these hugely powerful and well-resourced things. No, at the end of the day, we have made it easy, their jobs easy because of the market failures and the lack of liability and real regulation at the software layer that I talked about. So all of which to say, I think if we are able to use these capabilities, all of the things we put in place under Secure by Design, but very importantly, these powerful capabilities to fix the fundamental issues in our software that we rely upon both to create more secure code going forward, but to be able to find and remediate the flaws and the defects in the code that we’ve been relying on for years and years and years that all we’ve done is patch and patch and patch and patch into a big rickety mess.

And until now it’s been too risky and too expensive to do anything about it. But this is where these capabilities deployed responsibly by the labs and by the critical infrastructure owners and operators, the big tech companies, the cybersecurity companies can actually significantly, significantly reduce that cyber risk and improve that software quality. And that is where I am extremely optimistic about a path to, it’s no longer clean up on aisle nine, which is the way it’s been for years and years, but a path towards much greater resilience. And so that is why I’m optimistic, Jake, is because it hasn’t been exotic cyber weapons against super strong and resilient infrastructure. So this is finally the way to make a much more effective playing field for the defenders.

Jake Sullivan:

Can we talk for one more minute about deterrence? Because this is something obviously we all dealt with when we are in government. We have a kind of mental model for how you deter other countries from attacking us physically, from bombing us or firing missiles at us, basically by saying, “If you do that, we will hit you back hard physically. We will bomb you or fire missiles at you.” And that form of deterrence is quite legible to us.

Deterrence in cyberspace has been more difficult. Part of that is the challenge of deniability, even if we can attribute it, there’s a little bit of muddiness in that. Part of it is this or else, yes, you can hit back in cyberspace, but that doesn’t necessarily create the same level of deterrence. So if you’re sitting there in the White House or at DHS or at Cyber Command or the National Security Agency and you’re thinking, how do we get adversaries not to do this in the first place, not just how do we defend effectively, you just mentioned the use of offensive cyber to this end. Do you have further thinking on how to conceptualize deterrence in light of the nature of this threat?

Jen Easterly:

Yeah. I mean, I always go back to Joe Nye wrote a great piece in 2017, I think in International Security Policy where he sort of talked about deterrence and dissuasion in cyberspace and the four basic things were defense offense norms and then economic entanglement. And you could argue that norms like at the end of the day, they don’t really matter, they’re only for the good guys. Our adversaries are not going to pay much attention to norms. You could say economic entanglement, but are we really in more economic coercion right now? At the end of the day, I think you all are going to do a readout on the discussion. I think ensuring that we have some connection with China from an economic perspective that could have a deterrent impact.

There was a ton of things that we did at CISA to really help us on the defensive side, but we did work very closely with NSA as well as the federal cyber ecosystem and Cyber Command, so that what they were doing, whether it was through hunt operations or understanding how our adversaries were operating on our networks or other networks, really informed what we did defensively and then what we were doing defensively could help inform that offense, defense flywheel in terms of how they could take certain actions to hold our adversaries at risk.

I think attribution got frankly easier. There were a time maybe 10, 15 years ago where we’re sort of struggling. Is it North Korea? Is it the Iranians? But I think we’re better and better at attribution. With respect to the Volt Typhoon issue, I think it really came down to the fact that we believe from what we found, China was very willing to hold the full range of critical infrastructure at risk to include civilian critical infrastructure. I think the question is, how do we think about that? Is that something that we want to do because we look at it differently. We make a distinction, as you well know, between civilian and military infrastructure. So in terms of how we hold our adversaries at risk, I think there are a lot of policy decisions that need to be made in terms of how do we actually level the playing field with respect to what we can do to incentivize our adversaries not to take certain steps against our own infrastructure.

Jon Finer:

I do want to stick with this theme of cyber as a weapon of war because we have some recent experience with it. Jen, in particular, in the context of Russia, Ukraine, you were in the seat as we were when Russia launched its brutal invasion, full scale invasion of Ukraine. You helped Ukraine actually set up its defenses. I’m wondering what you, we as a country have learned from that experience about how cyber has been used by a very adept cyber adversary, the Russians in this case in the course of that conflict? And has there been anything that surprised you as that war has unfolded over the last now several years?

Jen Easterly:

Yeah, such a fascinating case study when you go back to that. I mean, everything around what you all did from a White House perspective to get information out so that we could actually use a lot of that information and some of it was declassified by the intelligence community, we could use that to help critical infrastructure entities prepare for potential Russian retaliatory cyber attacks. Now, they didn’t end up manifesting, but by using that information, we were so much better prepared if there were significant attacks.

And so I think that was a very good news story in terms of, it’s all about preparation. It’s not about panic. It’s the same story with Mythos. Nobody should be screaming like, “Oh, there’s nothing I can do.” There’s a lot that can be done from a preparatory perspective. That was one early lesson that I learned in terms of how do you actually bring the federal government, the ecosystem, CISA, but also FBI, NSA, US Cyber Command together on one platform with the private sector to be able to provide the information at different levels of classification, some of the TS, some of the secrets, some of the state and local level, we would talk to them about, “Here’s the information we have and here’s how you reduce risk.”

So I felt really good about that Shields Up campaign. Now again, we did not see any massive retaliatory attacks against the US. And I think that at the end of the day, part of that was because I think Russia just miscalculated in terms of how difficult it was going to be, and a lot of their cyber was very much focused on Ukraine, but then it was overshadowed certainly by the kinetic attacks. But because of the brutal nature of those kinetic attacks, I think we don’t often really focus on how much Ukraine itself, the Ukrainian cyber defenders have weathered very serious cyber attacks. I think the big lesson I learned frankly was how important it is to develop systems that are resilient, meaning we use the R word a lot, but what does that actually mean? So it means that you are architecting your systems and your networks so that when the inevitable disruption occurs, you can actually respond very quickly and importantly recover because you have an alternate way to operate that system and you’ve exercised it.

So if you have to move to another data center, if you have to move to manual controls from an automated controls, all of that were things that we were learning in real time as the Ukrainian cyber defenders were dealing with an onslaught of attacks. And I think the thing that perhaps surprised me but just incredibly impressive was just watching them deal with very, very powerful and very, very capability threat actors and being able to maintain their infrastructure to continue to keep going. I was there with Ambassador Nate Fick in February of 2024 as part of their Cyber Resilience Forum and just seeing resilience, the words that come to mind are innovation. It’s almost like all my time in the military, you always loved being with the really junior folks in the Army and the Marines because they were always coming up with like incredibly innovative ways to deal to get the mission done. And that’s how I looked at the Ukrainian cyber defenders, incredibly smart, incredibly innovative, great partners and just a model of how to be resilient in the face of an onslaught.

Jon Finer:

We’ve got two major wars going on right now, one in Europe, obviously one in the Middle East, which we’ve talked a little bit about, the war in Iran. And at first glance, to me at least, you may feel differently, it doesn’t seem that cyber has played a particularly prominent role in the sort of outcome of either of them. David Sanger has called cyber the perfect weapon, but I just wonder, given how these conflicts are playing out, whether that overstates the case for what cyber can do? Or have countries just pulled their punches? Is there more going on below the surface cyber-wise than people realize? How would you characterize why it feels, at least to me, like cyber has played less of a role in each of these than we might’ve feared it would before they started?

Jen Easterly:

Well, let’s talk about Iran specifically because at the end of the day, we have seen Iranian actors, obviously the Handala attack against Stryker. We’ve seen recently the attack against the-

Jon Finer:

Very early in the war.

Jen Easterly:

Yeah, very early on. And then more recently, I think CISA put out an advisory about some sort of an attack against the automated tank gauges. It just affected what the gauge readings were, it didn’t actually affect the tanks themselves. And so there is a bit of this going on. I think what we have to remember about Iran is the long history of Iranian cyber, which is, I wouldn’t put it up there with China and Russia, I would sort of put it second tier with Iran and with North Korea. But look, and we should keep this in mind, not just for cyber, I mean, going back to my old hat as the head of counter-terrorism when I first got to know Jake in the Obama administration, Iran looks at revenge as a dish best served cold. And so I don’t think we should assume that we would see massive cyber attacks or massive terrorist attacks or sleeper cell attacks right now.

I think we need to be very concerned that these are things that may manifest in the longer term, right? If you think about those, whatever you want to think about Stuxnet, it was several years later that we actually saw the Al-Qassam cyberfighters, which of course were the Iranians that went after the banks. That’s how I ended up at Morgan Stanley being asked to build their cyber fusion center was because of the extensive Iranian distributed denial of service attacks against most of the major banks on Wall Street, which occurred in the 2012-

Jon Finer:

Retaliation for attack.

Jen Easterly:

... 2013 timeframe. Yeah, but that was years between that, Jon, is my point. And so we should just not assume because things... And there may be, to your point, there may be stuff going on that we’re just not seeing, but because we’re not seeing it now, I don’t think we should particularly with respect to Iran, I don’t think we should expect that things are going to be over and we’re out of the woods both in terms of terrorist attacks with respect to IRGC or Lebanese Hezbollah or sleeper cells or cyber attacks.

Jake Sullivan:

Also, Jen, you’ve been extremely generous with your time. We’re really grateful. We would like to try something now just out of our deep sense of gratitude, which is a lightning round where we throw out a phrase and you respond to it in one word or a few words and we’ll see how this goes.

Jen Easterly:

Wow. Okay.

Jake Sullivan:

This is the first time we’ve done this, you are the guinea pig. Fantastic. And I’ll give it a start and then we’ll go back and forth between me and Jon. TikTok.

Jen Easterly:

So this is interesting. It’s not going to be a word or a phrase, but I was actually looking to see how we could start using TikTok for our social media tools. So becoming more open to using these types of capabilities, particularly given the change in ownership.

Jon Finer:

Deep fakes.

Jen Easterly:

Lots of concern, particularly given the upcoming midterm elections.

Jake Sullivan:

Crypto bros.

Jen Easterly:

Don’t really think about them, to be honest.

Jon Finer:

Open source, a phrase you used a bit earlier in this conversation.

Jen Easterly:

Yeah. Well, let me give you a sentence on this. This is one of the things that I think the government really needs to be focused on for folks that care about open source, which is really the plumbing of the commons of our software ecosystem. Much of the businesses draw upon open source software, open source libraries, as they’re called, to build their own applications and there to shore up their infrastructure. And we need to help open source software withstand some of these onslaughts used by these Mythos-like tools so it doesn’t become... So the software commons does not become a tragedy of the commons. This is something government should be focused on. This is something the frontier AI labs should be putting money into to actually look at how do we take some of the insecure libraries and make them much more secure.

Jake Sullivan:

Ransomware negotiators.

Jen Easterly:

Ransomware, I’m going to take it a different way, is this whole issue of should we be paying a ransom? And I never liked particularly as you remember we were on the whole hostage policy. How do we think about hostage paying a ransom given the material support to terrorism? And you remember in the hostage policy, we actually, DOJ gave a comfort letter to families in terms of those who were negotiating with terrorists who had taken hostage. So obviously a little different, but when you think about hospitals or small businesses that are being held, their data is being held ransom, at the end of the day, it’s a very difficult thing and if they have to work with a negotiator to get their data back so they can continue to operate and provide services, certainly I have a certain amount of empathy with them. The problem is we’re continuing to feed the ransomware ecosystem, which I will say once again, the key to success is for us to actually reduce cyber risk by improving the quality of software.

And that will lead to a world where ransomware is not a multi-trillion dollar business, which it is, but rather a shocking anomaly. That is where tools like Mythos and GPT 5.5 cyber and there’s frontier cyber capabilities. I hope the conversation that we’re having in two to three years from now is that, “Geez, ransomware has plummeted.” That is my hope and my optimism.

Jon Finer:

Maybe the last one from me, Rubik’s Cube.

Jen Easterly:

Rubik’s Cubes are the best. You see all my collection over my... I’ve got a whole bunch of them. Yeah. I’ve been doing Rubik’s Cube since I was 10 and there’s a whole bunch of reasons I love them and I won’t go into them, but Erno Rubik, who invented the Rubik’s Cube has this wonderful quote. He said, “If you are curious, you will find the puzzles around you. If you are determined, you will solve them.” And when I’m trying to hire people at CISA who were the right type of talent that we needed to build America’s cyber defense agency to catalyze that collaboration and trust and solve the hardest technical problems, I was looking for people who had that intellectual curiosity, but also that relentless determination to solve the hardest problems to keep Americans safe.

Jon Finer:

I thought you were going to say you put a Rubik’s Cube on the table during the interview.

Jen Easterly:

I did some of that.

Jon Finer:

It stressed me out of it. That stressed me out a bit there.

Jen Easterly:

I did some of that too. I’ll send one your away Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

I didn’t know that Rubik’s Cube came from a guy called Rubik. So that was new for me.

Jen Easterly:

Really?

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah.

Jen Easterly:

Who did you think it came from?

Jake Sullivan:

I don’t know. I wouldn’t have been able to answer.

Jen Easterly:

That’s a Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture. Yeah, it was 1974.

Jake Sullivan:

I don’t think there’s a better note that we can end this interview on than that. Jen Easterly, thank you. We would love to have you be back on the Long Game as we see all of these developments unfold fast before our eyes.

Jen Easterly:

Great to spend time with you all. Thank you.

Jon Finer:

Great to have you, Jen. Thank you.

Jake Sullivan:

So Jon, every time I hear Jen talk, I think she’s even more impressive than her bio, which is saying something. Because her bio is ridiculously impressive. I was struck in particular by two things she said. One theme she carried throughout is that the reason that we have such extreme difficulties with cybersecurity is because the basic software upon which everything runs is fundamentally not secure because it’s not being secured at the front end.

And that leads to the second thing that I was struck by, which is she thinks this advent of AI capabilities is actually more a good news story than a problematic story because it can help solve that problem. So I actually left this conversation, I guess, a little more optimistic than I came into this conversation and she definitely gave a different spin on the ball with respect to what the implications are of Mythos and GPT 5.5 than we’ve heard from a lot of the commentary that’s out there so far. And so I’ll be looking at this differently.

Jon Finer:

Way less apocalyptic about the impact of AI on the cyber landscape than I might’ve expected and then I read in the commentary. The other thing I kept thinking is, it’s come up a few times in the course of our episodes, the kind of advantages and disadvantages of an authoritarian system versus a democratic system. When it comes to cyber vulnerability, it does feel fairly disadvantageous to be a capitalist society, a democracy where everything is held in private hands and you cajole and you incentivize and you coerce, but it’s very hard to actually compel people to behave responsibly when it comes to these vulnerabilities that again, we pay the price for as a society. And Jen in just one of her last few answers referred to the upcoming election and we will come back at some point to this question of election security during the course of these podcasts.

But that’s another area where we have this profound vulnerability that other countries have at various points tried to mess with and exploit. And it’s just one of the unique challenges of being a society like ours wouldn’t trade places with those that have a different system, but you got to be eyes open about the downsides as well.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. It’s interesting. When you think about physical geography, the United States has the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean. We have Canada and Mexico. So the most secure, great power in history perhaps physically, but when it comes to cyber geography, we are exposed beyond belief as you use the phrase.

Jon Finer:

Big threat surface.

Jake Sullivan:

Threat surface. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we’ll keep tracking this issue. We’ll bring Jen back at some point, but also other incredible cyber professionals who can share their perspectives on a fast moving landscape. So for now, let’s turn back to a crisis of the moment. When it comes to Iran and the ongoing war in Iran, things really do seem to hang in the balance. There are indirect negotiations unfolding as we speak trying to produce a deal, or at least the concepts of a plan of a deal. And maybe a deal will be imminent. There’s also threats from President Trump to escalate and resume military operations if a deal doesn’t come to pass. And there’s obviously the ever present prospect that whether a deal is announced or not announced, this whole thing just drags on with compounding impacts on energy and commodity prices in the American people’s pocketbook.

So we’ll watch the news out of the negotiations, see what happens that may lead us to do a break from our regularly scheduled programming and come to you live if something really does get announced in the next few days. But today, Jon, I think it’s worth us touching on this jaw dropping article from the New York Times on how Israel wanted to install the former hardline president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the new leader of Iran after they killed the Supreme Leader. What did you make of that story?

Jon Finer:

Honestly, had I not read it in the New York Times and then seen that it has not been basically denied by any of the protagonists in that article, at least in a very convincing way, I might not have believed it. This is a guy who, to the extent he’s still familiar to Americans, it is as an almost cartoonish villain from the recent past in Iran during his time as president in which he was known for, among other things, denying the Holocaust. One of the main proponents of this death to Israel, death to America kind of mantra that is at the core of the Islamic Republic’s ideology. A guy who advanced the nuclear program considerably, was not at all open to negotiation about curtailing Iran’s nuclear program and someone who I think lacks any meaningful constituency inside Iran that could provide him a base from which to actually govern.

So even if they succeeded in installing him, hard to imagine how and why he would’ve lasted. But yeah, I think this made everybody who follows Iran’s head, if not explode, at least start to spin around and hard to understand where this idea came from, but even more to the point how decision makers actually settled on this as a viable way forward, which ultimately obviously it wasn’t to me though, the best part of the whole piece, and I want to get your reaction too is that so they decide that they’re going to try to install Ahmadinejad. He’s under house arrest. So they got to get him out of house arrest. So what do they do? They bomb his house and I guess inadvertently wound him in the process, the guy that they wanted to become the new leader of the country. So kind of ham-handed all around.

Jake Sullivan:

I mean, just crazy stuff, theater of the absurd. But Jon, it did get me to thinking this whole Iranic excursion to borrow the president’s phrase has gone awry. And so this looks especially absurd in that light, though it would’ve looked absurd upfront as well. But if the Venezuela operation had gone awry, let’s say a helicopter had gotten shot down and Maduro and his wife came out and said that the Yankees tried to get us and they didn’t get us, I probably would’ve said to you on this podcast, “Get this, Jon. The administration had this crazy plan. They were going to actually fly into the heart of Caracas, extract Maduro and his wife under fire, somehow get his vice president to become their ally, this person, Delcy Rodriguez, who’s denounced the US as a criminal and a colonizer, a vandal, an aggressor, an imperial master and on and on and on, but they think she’s going to run the country for them and do as they ask.”

Okay, if that had all gone south, that story would have seemed totally crazy. And the lesson here is not that both of these were smart plans and we just got unlucky in Iran. It’s kind of the opposite. It’s both are crazy plans and we got really lucky in Venezuela and then Donald Trump decided to press his luck and here we are. And I think basically after the Maduro thing, the flights of fancy in imagination of what we could do to engineer other countries, including countries like Iran, just had no limit to them. And so I do think you can kind of draw a direct line between what happened at the beginning of this year and how things unfolded here in Iran and the chickens have kind of come home to roost and we’re all paying the price for it.

Jon Finer:

Yeah. It’s interesting. I keep thinking about the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy administration’s totally unsuccessful effort to overthrow the Castro regime with a mix of Cuban dissidents and diaspora coming from the United States totally upended and thwarted by the Cubans. We’ve almost had two versions of Bay of Pigs attempts by this administration just in 2026, one in Venezuela, which is a version of operational success strategically. I’m not sure the import of it. And one in Iran that is going, as you said, awry, I think is charitable.

Jake Sullivan:

Quite charitable

Jon Finer:

And by the way, this may not be the last one of the year. We’ll come back, I’m sure, in a future episode and talk about developments in Cuba itself, not to put too fine a point on the Bay of Pigs, where we are seeing signal and indicator after indicator of potential interest by the administration in a military operation there as well, potentially in the near term. So that is one we’ll obviously be following.

Jake Sullivan:

I mentioned Cuba at the outset. Things really do seem to be coming to a head there, given a whole bunch of indicators, including Marco Rubio’s direct to camera video yesterday calling on the people of Cuba to seek a new Cuba with the support of the Trump administration. The indictment of Raul Castro for murder and many other steps. So we will definitely be coming back to that issue and probably sooner rather than later. And then there’s this other major event, which is an outbreak of a strain of Ebola in the Congo that is not actually susceptible to vaccines or treatments as far as we know. And we have to watch to see how that unfolds as well, something we’ll come back to. But let’s use the remaining minutes of this episode, Jon, just to reflect on the outcome of the US-China Summit in Beijing, the meetings between President Xi and President Trump. We had Kurt Campbell on last week teeing all this up. What stood out to you in terms of the outcome of the President Trump’s visit to Beijing?

Jon Finer:

So on the one hand, it was a summit that was much more about atmosphere and theatrics and pomp and circumstance and vibes than it was about tangible announced accomplishments of any kind. There were some business deals that were announced, some of which were underwhelming even compared to expectations. But this atmospheric vibe stuff can be quite actually important. And if anything, there was a pretty strong signal sent by the United States in my mind by the President of the United States that he was not interested in actually an era he launched of fundamental strategic competition with China, and much more interested in having a good relationship at the state level, but even at the personal level between himself and Xi Jinping, who he praised in quite unusual terms, quite enthusiastic terms over and over again in front of the cameras. So that was the main, I think, atmospheric takeaway is just this desire, strong desire that did not actually seem to be reciprocated by the Chinese particularly for this positive effusive relationship between the two leaders.

The main substantive development to my mind, and we previewed some of this, was the conversation about Taiwan, which does seem to have featured prominently in the meetings. And we don’t really know what the two leaders discussed or whether anything was agreed, but we do know what the president said after the meeting, which was two things primarily to my mind. One is, he reflected on how difficult it might be for the United States to actually defend Taiwan if push came to shove. Taiwan is only 60 miles off the mainland Chinese coast and it’s 9,500 miles away from the United States and doesn’t that mean they would have this enormous advantage almost kind of openly expounding on the fact that the United States might actually not be able to do all that much for Taiwan.

He didn’t quite put it in those terms, but it’s hard not to infer that that’s basically what he was indicating. And then saying, and this is really the main development, that the United States was basically holding $14 billion in arm sales to Taiwan, not just the United States, the president himself as a quote unquote “Bargaining chip” to use with Beijing.

One, that has never happened before, a president being explicit about negotiating Taiwan arm sales with the PRC. Two, we have commitments to Taiwan that we will not pre-clear or pre-negotiate those armed sales with them. And so both the atmospheric part and then this kind of policy change by the president, even if he didn’t call it as such, I think was pretty unsettling to leadership in Taiwan and probably to other allies in the region as an indication of how committed the president is to deterring military action by the PRC.

Jake Sullivan:

Just to pick up on this Taiwan point, the main thing I took away from that is Trump clearly wants to do a deal, a bigger deal with China and to use, as you said, Taiwan as a bargaining chip in that deal. But China doesn’t see Taiwan as a bargaining chip. So any concessions on Taiwan are basically a one-way street and boy, did Trump actually float concessions. As you said, he floated holding back on arm sales to Taiwan, he said our 1982 assurance to Taiwan that we wouldn’t discuss armed sales with Beijing might not hold anymore because 1982 was quote “A long time ago.” Yo made the point that he asked whether it made any sense for US troops to travel 9,500 miles to quote “Fight a war.” China’s going to hear all of that and see it as positive. Taiwan is going to hear all that and see it as destabilizing.

And the most important thing is you can bet that Beijing is now going to ratchet up its pressure and propaganda in Taipei saying basically, “You guys are on your own. The Americans aren’t with you. President Trump is essentially talking about pulling the rug out from under you, so resistance is futile and you should capitulate.” And I don’t want to overstate that because Trump didn’t actually commit to anything one way or the other, but I do think there’s a real danger here that China will keep extracting concessions from Trump on Taiwan and this will have the opposite effect that the president intends, that it will actually destabilize the situation in the strait. So that’s worth keeping a close eye on.

I just would offer two other things that stood out to me as outcomes. First, I really do believe China achieved what it set out to achieve. China believes, as we discussed with Kurt, that the US is a nation in terminal decline and that China is ascendant. And so on this premise, their primary interest is in keeping things calm while they surpass us. And the outcome of this summit from their point of view was exactly the kind of relationship they were looking for. In fact, they even gave it a name. I think it was constructive China-US Relationship of Strategic Stability.

Basically that translates to let’s keep things stable and constructive and let nature take its course until we become number one. So to me, from China’s perspective, this played out very nicely. And then the other thing I wanted to flag, which I think is more of a positive outcome is the two sides do seem to be headed towards a dialogue on AI risk. The Chinese foreign ministry this week announced that there was agreement to pursue this, what exactly it will cover and not cover still very much up in the air and we have to be clear right about that. But this kind of dialogue I think is absolutely essential.

There is nothing inconsistent in America competing vigorously on AI on the one hand, trying to maintain and expand our lead at the frontier and then also engaging in diplomacy on the risks of AI with China so that we can work together to prevent harms. And I think this is a topic at some point that we should come back to. We didn’t get a chance to talk to Jen about it today, but even as we compete in cyberspace, there are reasons for both the US and China not to want these advanced cyber capabilities falling into the hands of third party threat actors. So those were a couple of things that I pulled away from this. And then of course Xi Jinping using the phrase “Thucydides Trap.” Kind of describing a declining power and a rising power was a little bit icing on the cake. President Trump tried to ultimately say, no, no, he was talking about the US before, not the US now, which I thought was quite striking.

But for me, the main takeaway of this summit is that China has been trying to steer this relationship into a place that it thinks serves its longer term strategic purposes. And I think they walk away from the summit feeling they have things pretty much where they want them, but to the point you made, President Trump seems pretty comfortable with that. So we’ll have to see where things go from here.

Jon Finer:

Only thing I’d add is we talked about sort of three big concerns that we had going into the summit with Kurt Campbell last week, potential announcement about Chinese investment in the United States, an explicit shift in declaratory policy towards Taiwan and a reduction in US export controls. We did not see any of those things. So that is good news, what passes for good news these days for policy coming out of the administration, but with two big caveats.

One is there are several more summits between the two president’s plan during the course of the year. So stay tuned for potential developments on those and other issues. And second, it is sometimes the case that things are discussed and agreed in these conversations but don’t actually trickle out into the public domain as announcements until later. And I would just point to the first meeting between the President Xi Jinping a couple of weeks after which he made a major announcement that may or may not have been discussed. We don’t exactly know about reducing US export controls of advanced semiconductors. So there may be more that we learn in the coming days and weeks and certainly in the subsequent meetings.

Jake Sullivan:

I think especially where the semiconductor issue is concerned, China’s continuing to kind of pretend it doesn’t want them. The US has been reduced to basically asking China to take them. So we’ll have to see how that plays out. And then this question of Chinese investment in the US is not going away. As you say, there are more summits to come, potentially more shoes to drop. So I think that does it for us today and we’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jon Finer:

We’d love to hear from you. Send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com

Jake Sullivan:

And subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Wiener and Adam Harris.

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Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

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Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, John Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

China’s Strategy for Trump (w/Kurt Campbell)

May 13, 2026

TEASER:

Kurt Campbell:

What’s worrisome about a lot of Trump foreign policy is that they have basically relegated experts to the ash bin of history. They’re not consulting experts who understand issues about Central Europe, about Iran for sure, and it is also the case that there are not very many people around the president that really understand the to and fro of Asia, let alone China. So if you’re trying to prepare the president, what you’re really doing is trying to get him to take the diplomatic Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. It’s the eve of the US-China Summit in Beijing, and we are joined by the person who has probably had more occasions to prepare American presidents to engage Chinese leaders than anyone. Kurt Campbell has been the top Asia hand at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, and most recently served as deputy secretary of state.

Jake and I have both worked with Kurt on and off for a long time. I think we both traveled to China with him. I know we’ve both learned a lot from him. An unnamed colleague of ours calls Kurt the goat of Asia diplomacy. And I will say upfront it isn’t Kurt who says that, by the way, in case you were wondering. But it’s true, and it’s not a particularly close call. What’s also true is there’s no colleague we’ve had who’s more creative, more effective, more generous, and I think you’ll find more fun.

So, Kurt Campbell, welcome to The Long Game.

Kurt Campbell:

Jon, that’s very gracious. Thank you. It’s great to see both you and Jake. It’s like a reunion. I feel a little bit better already.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, it’s always good to see your face, Kurt, hear your voice, and we’re looking forward to talking about the issue of the day, which is Donald Trump has landed in Beijing. He’s soon to begin his summit with Xi Jinping. This is the first visit by a US president to China in almost a decade, since President Trump himself last visited in 2017.

So I think it would probably be most useful to start by asking you to take us inside Xi Jinping’s thinking. How does he see the US right now? How does he see President Trump? How does he see the US-China relationship? Just curious where he’s coming from as this thing kicks off.

We’re recording on Wednesday. Really later tonight US time, the festivities will begin, and people will be listening to this over the course of this summit. But set the stage for us.

Kurt Campbell:

Well, first of all, the interesting thing about the Chinese, the leadership in President Xi, is that they do have a framework for how they see the United States. And I think beginning in the late noughts, their strategic thinkers and ideology advisors basically came to the conclusion that inexorably the United States was in a hurdling decline, and they would point to various indicators in the United States. I think in many respects, some of those assessments picked up speed during the latter part of President Trump’s first term.

But it is also the case that frankly when you both were at the White House and President Biden with his team decided to put in place a rather constructive set of strategies associated with domestic investment, working with allies and partners, it gave the Chinese some pause. They thought, “Wow, there are more cards left to play. The United States is maneuvering more effectively than we had anticipated.” I would say I think more recent indicators of another kind of quicksand war in the Middle East, other challenges that President Trump is facing has caused them to have more confidence in this assessment that the United States is indeed on the way out.

So President Xi comes to this meeting with quite a lot of confidence. You both know this. They believe that China is in the ascendance. They recognize that President Trump is dangerous, potentially. He’s unpredictable. But I think they also believe during the second term that they can manipulate him. They were very off-balance through much of the first term. This second term, they have a game plan in which they treat the president with great respect personally, but every blunderbuss trade tariff initiative that the president takes, they have a response immediately, a scalpel-like response to underscore American vulnerabilities in this very complex competition between the United States and China.

Jon Finer:

Kurt, can you just say a little more about what evidence the Chinese would marshal to make the case for American decline if they’re speaking internally, and actually increasingly externally, expressing these thoughts? What are they pointing to? What are they thinking about?

Kurt Campbell:

I would just underscore probably the most important advisor to President Xi on how to see the world in the United States is not someone from the foreign ministry. Jake’s counterpart is still influential. Wang Yi is a foreign minister and state councilor, but he listens a lot to one of the men who sits with him on the standing committee, this sort of opaque, secretive group that rules China. It’s really President Xi who rules China, but they are around him.

His name is Wang Huning. He’s an ideologist. He’s studied in the United States in the 1990s. He actually wrote a book called America versus America. And what he tends to do is look at a variety of factors, participation in elections, evidence of violence in the United States, uprisings like January 6th. They focus more on issues associated with social cohesion and also issues associated with economic performance and the like. They see a lot of evidence that their main mission, which is to catch up and surpass us in technology and manufacturing, is bearing very productive fruit and they see that path being quite successful. They look at the United States and they see the infrastructure crumbling, difficulty in managing the most basic governing functions. They would look at the DOGE effect that took place in the United States as inexplicable.

And in fact, the largest thing, Jon, is that rarely... We’re living in an international system that the United States helped built and worked with allies on for decades. Systems come and go, but rarely is the dominant system basically attacked from within, from the leading nation that designed it. So the Chinese are watching that. There was a wonderful cover of The Economist a couple of weeks ago saying, “Just stand by while your main enemy commits error after error.” So the Chinese believe that the United States is doing many things that frankly are undermining its power both domestically and internationally, and their goal more than anything else is to not stop that process.

Jake Sullivan:

Kurt, it’s really quite striking. Our friend and former colleague, Julian Gewirtz, pointed out that China’s minister of state security, Chen Yixin, wrote a long essay on national security in China at the end of last year a few months ago, and this was his assessment of the United States. “Its democracy is mutating, its economy decaying, its society fracturing at an accelerated pace. Abroad, its credibility is really going bankrupt, its hegemony is crumbling, and its myth is collapsing.” He said that publicly, but you can imagine, as you just pointed out, that Wang Huning and others around Xi are telling Xi in preparation for this summit and just more generally, “Hey, this is America. It’s on its way out. It’s on its way down. China’s on its way up.” And I think for our listeners to understand that that’s the backdrop from Beijing’s perspective about where this goes is really important.

So I guess let’s flip it, though, to the other side of the table, and Donald Trump is coming into this summit with his own perspective and trying to achieve certain things. Let’s say you were on Air Force One flying in with Donald Trump, as you have done with previous leaders from the United States. What would you be telling him that he should be trying to get out of this? What would your advice to President Trump be? And what do you think he is going into this trying to achieve?

Kurt Campbell:

Let’s just remember this. Let’s say you’re a staffer on Air Force One right now. President Trump is surrounded by a group of the wealthiest investors and businessmen on the planet, and he’s hobnobbing with them up in the front cabinet. I would be the staffer lurking in the background hoping just for a few... No, seriously, this is how it goes... hoping for a few minutes to get him briefed up and wondering if he’s looked at the briefing papers.

What you have to remember, Jake, I don’t need to tell you and Jon this, the scarcest resource is not our precision munitions, it’s not where our fleet is; it’s the time and attention of the senior-most people, and that starts with the president of the United States. It is well-known that remarkably little preparation has gone on in advance of this trip. The president has dispatched Secretary Bessent and the USTR to China for some last-minute, 11th hour negotiations. So you have to just understand they are absolutely preoccupied with what’s going on in Iran. So there hasn’t been the time to prepare.

So if you’re a staffer, you’re thinking, “How do I use my 10 or 15 minutes to get ready?” I think more than anything else, if you’re a staffer, what you’re worried about right now is the president making decisions on the fly. And if you note the way the president talks about decision-making, it’s about how he’s feeling on that day, how he’s reading the room. I think that’s dangerous. I think what’s worrisome about a lot of Trump foreign policy is that they have basically relegated experts to the ash bin of history. They’re not consulting experts who understand issues about Central Europe, about Iran for sure, and it is also the case that there are not very many people around the president that really understand the to and fro of Asia, let alone China. So if you’re trying to prepare the president, what you’re really doing is trying to get him to take the diplomatic Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.

I think the Chinese want very much to trade a few things for what President Trump wants. It’s very clear that President Trump wants to sell short-term agricultural and ranching products. Those are communities that are hard-hit that he needs in the election upcoming. He’d like some progress on fentanyl. Jake, you achieved that already, but he’d like to build on that. He’d like to sell Boeing jets. All of this is unexceptional. I think that makes sense. Interestingly, the president is interested in Chinese investment in the United States, something that most Republicans have opposed now for decades. So he’s got a few things that he’d like to get.

I think what the Chinese want is probably easing of some of the tariffs and economic steps. What to watch for is when President Trump leaves, that China has lower tariff packages than some of our closest allies and partners. That will be problematic. But what the Chinese also want is basically free rein to be able to purchase the technology from the United States that they wish. The president has already made that clear that that’s his intention. The Chinese want some more reassurances on that; I think the president will likely provide that.

But then the last thing is I think they want to see what business they can do with President Trump on Taiwan. We know from previous meetings and comments that President Trump believes that large nations that have a little bit more control over their immediate neighborhood... I worry that he’s prepared to say and do some things on Taiwan that will send a signal that the strong bipartisan support from the United States over decades has eroded on Taiwan, and that could create real questions, not just on the island, which is thriving technologically, diplomatically, frankly democratically, but it will send shockwaves through Asia, guys, in Japan, South Korea, Australia. Is the United States still a reliable ally and partner?

So I would say just as President Trump has done minimal preparations, I can promise you, Jake, that the Chinese have come to these meetings with just an enormous amount of preparation. They’ve got a plan. They’re going to seek to play it out.

Jon Finer:

You also wrote an article this week, to your point about the actual interaction between the two leaders in the room, that described the summit as a form of what you called single combat, a kind of mano-y-mano version of great power competition. What you just described sounds almost like one prize fighter having trained for months to get in shape for the fight and the other sort of showing up without a lot of advanced preparation, as you described it. How worried should we be about the actual interaction between the two leaders in the room? These things, as you know better than anybody, tend to be determined in advance, relatively rote. Often the United States is trying to draw the Chinese into moving beyond their talking points, and usually are often failing. Feels like this could be a different sort of interaction, at least that’s what you seem to be indicating.

Kurt Campbell:

I don’t think President Biden gets the credit for this, but the most successful modern recent summit was the one that took place in San Francisco, which Jake had the responsibility of preparing for. All I can tell you is that the number-

Jake Sullivan:

And you too, Kurt. I think you played a not insignificant role in preparing that.

Kurt Campbell:

No, but guys, the expectation-

Jon Finer:

Writing yourself out of the story here.

Kurt Campbell:

Yeah. Yeah. The preparation is unbelievable, the amount of time... How many steps does a leader take across the room before he reaches his handout? How long is each session going to last? What are the topics in order? These are the things that are expected in a summit between the United States and China.

Jake Sullivan:

The choreography of the walk and talk, right? Of course-

Kurt Campbell:

Exactly. Everything.

Jake Sullivan:

... it’s not just how they sit at the table, how they stand, who stands on which side.

Kurt Campbell:

When they walk together, who leads, who is approaching, who is standing. It’s extraordinarily intricate and choreographed, as Jake has just indicated. And the truth is we were successful largely in San Francisco because of that preparation.

I think President Trump is improvisational. He is comfortable winging it. And you can do that in certain meetings and certain times, but I will say my own experience is that Asia favors the well-prepared, the plotting, the carefully choreographed. And so, yes, I am anxious about how this can play out. And I think the president is particularly susceptible to pomp and circumstance. And there’s no country, maybe other than in the Gulf, better at knowing how to play those cards than China. So, yes, that’s what’s going to happen as he goes in. There’s going to be a well-prepared interlocutor.

The question really will be the hierarchy of issues that are addressed. I think everyone expected a couple of weeks ago that at the top of the list would be technology, some trade issues, perhaps some issues associated with new institutions created. Jake and Jon, I think inevitably the dominant issue that initially will be discussed will be Iran. President Xi will ask him, “What’s your game plan? Where do you want to take this,” and then President Trump I fully expect will try to press China to be more actively engaged.

And here I just want to say something that is kind of painful. Chinese have had an opportunity to observe us as a great power now for decades. One of the things that we’ve taught them more than anything else is to be wary of the Middle East. And so we’ve asked them in the past to get involved in some of the issues in the Middle East and South Asia. They are smart enough now to understand quicksand when they see it, and so I do not expect the Chinese to be volunteering to be helping the United States out of their recent challenges in the Gulf. So I think those issues will likely not be, from the American perspective, particularly gratifying, and then they’ll move on to other issues.

I think what we worry about is anything that would look like the United States and China are resurrecting or rebuilding or building anew, a kind of G2 where the United States and China as two great powers sit astride Asia and make decisions about technology, about security above the heads of our allies and partners. That would be particularly worrying in Delhi, in Tokyo, and elsewhere.

So these are all the things that China will try to subtly sort of symbolize, and I just hope that the US side is prepared for some of these gambits and will be careful with American power and interests.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s interesting on the G2 point. President Trump has actually used that phrase before in talking about diplomacy with China, right?

Kurt Campbell:

No, Jake, many times. In tweets, yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, and it fits with his national security strategy, the structure of which basically says there are big countries and there’s everyone else, and I, Donald Trump, and Xi Jinping can get together as the leaders of two of the big countries and kind of dictate to everyone else. So I do worry that a certain vibe like that will emerge from this summit, and we’ll have to see if that’s something that Chinese leadership reinforces.

Kurt Campbell:

The only thing I would just say, he doesn’t say two of the big countries; he says the two biggest countries, the two heavyweights. He relishes this idea, again, mano y mano, Hector against Achilles in the arena.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, absolutely. Now, we are two heavyweights. We may not both be heavyweights when it comes to hospitality. You mentioned that the Chinese are as good as anyone in the world at doing that. Jon and I on this podcast previously have talked about how the United States is not particularly good at hosting. We frequently forget to even give our guests cups of water, let alone do the pomp and circumstance. You’ve had some personal experience with this because you believe that hospitality is absolutely vital to effectively hosting foreign leaders and giving them meals and making sure that we are reflecting to them and especially to their peoples the respect that we want to show for them.

Can you just talk for a minute... I know it’s not directly on point with the substance that we’ll keep digging into... about the role of optics, of hospitality, of pageantry in these big summits and how you see that playing into the diplomacy?

Kurt Campbell:

To our listeners, this is exactly the kind of gambit that the Chinese are going to pull on Trump. They’re going to go right at... Seems like a very innocent question, but this is Jake going after me, guys, just so you know. Because during the-

Jake Sullivan:

It’s not. It’s not.

Kurt Campbell:

It is. It’s okay. It’s fine. But see, I’ve prepared for it. I’ve prepared for it. During the Biden administration-

Jon Finer:

The grand strategy of the crudite.

Kurt Campbell:

Yeah. During the Biden administration, at the beginning of our administration, we were in the midst of COVID, and so there were careful steps that we took to make sure that the virus didn’t spread in the White House. So we were masked, we tested every day, and we were just very careful with the health of the president.

The hard thing is that when Asians come to visit, they expect a meal of some sort, some kind of offering if you come into a visitor’s home to feel welcome. And without a meal, they feel... And this ranges in every culture across Asia... that this is not a welcome meeting and that it’s kind of meant to be almost a slap in the face.

And so I had the unenviable task of occasionally have to going in and make the argument about why we needed to have a meal. What we would often end up with is our two leaders sitting 25 feet away, masked, with giant sandwiches or hamburgers in front of them, which they never touched, but at least were there to show the symbolic welcome that we were providing. I mean, I have to say it, at the time I was so in it that it was life and death. As I look back on it, it is in truth ridiculous. But it is true when we would host friends or guests to the White House, we’d have to go out and buy our own waters or donuts or things to be able to host folks. It is a bit of a challenge. We can’t do the kinds of things that we once were able to do.

The Chinese will be laying it on thick with Trump. And he loves that stuff. He’s going to eat it up, and I think their hope is by basically layering him with these sorts of things, the Chinese will be able to get more in private settings.

I would simply say, Jake and Jon, that this is actually a reversal of the traditional pattern between the United States and China diplomacy in the ‘90s and 2000s. We would often trade protocol because the Chinese cared deeply that they would have all the 21-gun salute and things that other leaders were expecting, and we would trade that for substance. We’ve now reversed course, and the Chinese are going to try to play that same trick on us.

Jon Finer:

You said something earlier about Iran and how prominent it would be on the agenda, which obviously wasn’t the intention when this summit was first conceived. In fact, it was delayed in large part because I think the Trump administration was hoping it could get past the war in Iran before sending the president off to Beijing. But obviously that didn’t happen; the war is still going on in a slightly different form. There’s been a lot of debate in the media and elsewhere about how the Chinese see the Iran war. Is it this moment of strategic opportunity for them? Do they hate it because it causes instability and higher commodity prices? I mean, how do you think they are interpreting this particular event, and how will they try to use it to their advantage?

Kurt Campbell:

As is often the case, the Chinese do study operations, military and political, very closely, and in any major engagement like this, it’s a mixed bag for the Chinese. On the one hand, just as they looked at the first Gulf War at the activity of precision munitions, it caused them to rethink their own military.

When it is understood in the next couple of years as we really watch what took place in Iran, both the strategies used by the United States and Israel and the things that the Iranians used against the United States, Israel, and Gulf partners, there’ll be a couple of lessons learned. The first is the first real application of AI, and that has been revolutionary, but it is also the case that the active use of less expensive munitions and how that creates challenges for defensive systems in particular. So the Chinese are watching that.

They also frankly are watching the United States getting bogged down again and being isolated from its allies. They note that the clarion call from Trump for help has been greeted from our allies and partners with silence. If anything, it’s created more tensions with our closest, closest allies and partners, both in Europe and in Asia. So those are the things that they find somewhat reassuring.

On the downside... And I think they see President Trump basically floundering politically in the United States. He does not come to China from a strong position. I listened to a report this morning; we’ve rarely seen a president this far underwater, not just among independents and Democrats, but increasingly Republicans on issues that matter to him, like the management of the economy. So on that front, they’re probably reassured-

Jake Sullivan:

And, Kurt, the Chinese will be watching that closely? They’ll be focused on his standing domestically?

Kurt Campbell:

Very much. They will study President Trump carefully, his political standing, his allies and partners, who advises him on Asia. One of the things that’s interesting is that the dominant player in the formulation and execution of strategy towards China is not from the national security environment, not the national security advisor or the role that you played, Jake, as the centerpiece of our strategy. It is the secretary of treasury. Frankly, that’s never happened before. It’s unusual. So it puts a different kind of tent on the summit.

But just back to just very quickly on Iran, the thing that folks need to keep in mind, however, is that the longer this closure of the straits goes on, the more it hurts the global economy. We talk a lot about what it means in the United States, and there are some modest implications that are negative, but it has cascading negative effects, Jake and Jon, across Asia, huge issues with diesel fuel, with jet fuel, a huge problem associated with fertilizers, plastics. It is having cascading effects through Indonesia, the Philippines. We’re going to see political problems shortly. And even though China has substantial reserves, which they are utilizing, they too are worried about secondary and tertiary effects. So even though they may be in some way politically gratified by the United States embarked on another challenging war, if you read Kagan’s piece, it’s more damaging than anything that the United States has faced in the last several years, last several decades, so they can be reassured by that. But they’re also concerned, if it continues into the distance, then it will have huge commercial consequences across Asia that will affect China.

So I think on the one hand, a little pain has been great for the United States. They don’t want that to spread to China and the other countries of Asia.

Jon Finer:

Kurt, if they could snap their fingers and end it, they would?

Kurt Campbell:

I mean, they’d like the United States to continue to struggle in some way. I mean, I think the key is going to be, and you guys have focused on this, is will the straits and the Gulf emerge with some sort of toll system at the end of this? Now, the Trump team will go to great lengths to say that, “Look, we didn’t impose this. This has come from Gulf countries, and it’s for safety and health,” or whatever, but the Chinese actually will be concerned by that because it’ll put a surcharge on a lot of oil and other products coming from the Gulf. Remember, it’s China and Asia that are most reliant on these supplies, so they will be nervous about new mechanisms that will add a tax to what they’re purchasing.

At the same time, they don’t want this to go on for very much longer. We do believe that on a couple of occasions they have quietly weighed in to the Iranians to support diplomacy. I would expect that they would probably at some point soon say, “Hey, guys, it’s time to start winding this down,” but they will do that not as a favor to the United States because it is in their own strategic interests. In the end, the truth is, despite China’s arrival in the Gulf more recently, its influence and leverage during this period is surprisingly limited.

Jake Sullivan:

But you do think at some point they will put some pressure on Iran to come to the table in a more serious way?

Kurt Campbell:

We both know what Chinese pressure looks like. It’ll probably be more on the order of encouragement. I think the real issue is going to be, and this is something we’re going to track closely, we know that China has provided dual-use capabilities to Russia for the last several years as they undertake their brutal war against Ukraine. China has quietly provided a lot of the wherewithal that Iran has used for drones and for missiles. Will those supplies continue and increase in the period ahead? My expectation is that they probably will, but they will do it in such a way as they would argue these are just dual-use capabilities. It’s just normal business as usual.

The question really is going to be, will the Chinese tolerate new mechanisms, again, that put a tax on oil and other resources coming from the Gulf? In the end, they might not be able to resist that. And the United States is desperately, I don’t need to tell you guys this, looking for some manner to provide Iran with some kind of resources that doesn’t look like the United States has completely caved. But no matter what happens at the summit, the Chinese are not going to indicate that they’re going to act at the behest of the Trump administration. If they act, it will be in the future on their own accord.

Jake Sullivan:

So we certainly do not want to let this podcast episode get bogged down too much in the Middle East, so we’re going to pivot back to Asia. Did you see what I did there, Kurt?

Kurt Campbell:

I got that. Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

The pivotation? Good.

Kurt Campbell:

Solid. Solid.

Jake Sullivan:

Excellent. Yeah. Yeah.

Taiwan, not a small topic. So there have really been two things that analysts and commentators have been focused on as we head into this summit with respect to Taiwan. The first is whether President Trump would change America’s policy with respect to Taiwan independence. Currently, our policy is we do not support Taiwan independence. The Chinese would like and asked us during the Biden administration to change that to a stronger formula of, “We oppose Taiwan independence.” May not sound like a big deal to some folks, but that would be a significant change from Beijing’s perspective and maybe, most importantly, from Taipei’s perspective. It would send a clear message to them, a quite negative one. So that’s one, whether they put that request to President Trump and what he does about that, what he says about the status of Taiwan. The second is about arms sales to Taiwan and whether President Trump would agree, either explicitly or implicitly, to delay, defer, hunt on arms sales, whether he would agree to a more formal consultation mechanism with Beijing on arms sales. So those seem to be the two things people are really looking for.

What do you expect over the next 48 hours on this? And then even beyond this summit, what do you expect with respect to US policy towards Taiwan over the rest of 2026?

Kurt Campbell:

We were talking about choreography. So an important part of choreography in advance of a meeting like this between President Trump and President Xi, normal American diplomacy would involve intensive briefings with all of our allies and partners and people up on Capitol Hill. I will tell you the most remarkable thing... Like you guys, I talked to some of the senior people around the president in the White House and elsewhere. They don’t want to tell you that they talk to Democrats, but even they sometimes stoop so low as to do that. None of them actually know what’s going to happen. I’ve talked to two different people, very senior, who had diametrically different expectations about trade and investment in Taiwan because the truth is they don’t know... It’s been left to the president. And I just don’t think I can tell you guys enough that the team around the president has unbelievable confidence in his ability to manage in these situations. It’s quite remarkable, but they’ve seen him escape like Houdini from political situations that would be impossible for others.

But I will say that surrounding choreography of diplomacy in advance of this meeting has not occurred. None of our allies have a clue what’s happening. And the truth is... Look, we try to be careful about this, Jake. One of the things you and Jon led was very robust, unofficial dialogue between the United States and Taiwan. All of that has basically not occurred during the Trump administration. So the folks in Taiwan are anxious because they haven’t had the kind of preliminary diplomacy that gives them any sense of what might be on the table.

And so just the first step is anxiety-provoking. And you are right, those are two of the things that have been discussed. And most of the senior Trump guys say, “Hey, what’s the difference? Don’t support, oppose. Tomato, tomato.” And so they all argue that this is just semantic ridiculousness and that you guys got to get a life. And I’ve had senior people in the administration repeat that to me, not really understanding the potential significance that go well beyond the words.

I think we’ve already begun to see, Jake, on the second issue some discussion between President Trump and President Xi that President Trump has discussed. I think he’s indicating he’s prepared to work more closely with President Xi on security issues with Taiwan. That will be unnerving. But watch for a couple of other things, if I could just suggest, Jake. I think the Chinese would love President Trump to say something maybe somewhat critical about President Lai and Taiwan or indicating it’s time for Taiwan to really start thinking about sitting down with China. Or you can even imagine President Trump indicating that, “Gee, Xi’s a good, strong leader. This is a good opportunity for engagement,” and he’ll kind of play it more along the lines of peacemaker. Those are all things to look for. The question will be what is uttered in private and what is done in public. But I can assure you no matter what, the Chinese are going to play this up in their readouts from the summit.

I will say that the Trump administration when it comes to China policy is an enormous tent. You’ve got the softest, “Let’s just do business. We can make a lot of money. Our families can make a lot of money,” senior folks in the administration, including the president, and you’ve got folks who also believe that China is an existential threat to the United States. And they kind of coexist and try to muddle through and fight each other bureaucratically. In the end, it very much appears as if the former group is in the ascendance right now, “Let’s do deals. Let’s try to work together. Boy, Taiwan is kind of a thorn. What can we do to perhaps ease some of those concerns?”

And so if you match it with what the Chinese did three weeks ago with the hosting of the KMT president, just unusual laying it on, working close together, this is the other side of the pincer movement. Get the United States to express anxiety of some sorts about Taiwan or somehow that the United States and China are making common purpose more in the Indo-Pacific. I don’t need to tell either of you, as remarkable as Taiwan’s achievements are, they are built on the expectation of a rock-solid American commitment. And if that is called into question, I think you will very soon see a collapse in confidence in Taiwan that could have major implications. So all this talk about whether China’s prepared to do military damage and go in, they think they can accomplish some of these things frankly through subtle diplomacy with Trump.

And at the same time, I will also say, guys, the president goes to China not only vulnerable with respect to Iran; that has not gone well. But remember, a huge amount of the military capability that is being utilized in this heightened state in the Gulf comes from the Indo-Pacific. So our deterrent capabilities, our allied support has been diminished and it has called into question quietly the quality of our deterrence around the region.

Jon Finer:

So, Kurt, you raised the question of American commitment to Taiwan. I think the other big question is American capacity, even military capacity. John Culver, who is a former colleague of ours, gave an interview, former senior intelligence official in the US government, this week in which he said the following, “Today it’s hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage. I don’t think we have an advantage in missile, space, cyber, reconnaissance, et cetera. I think they’re leading us in some categories such as air-to-air missiles, surface-to-air missiles, counter space capabilities, and electronic warfare.”

You read that, you hear that... He concludes, by the way, by saying, “We don’t have anywhere near the infantory we would need for a China fight in the aftermath of the Iran war...” and you kind of think we’re doomed. Are we doomed from a capacity perspective, leaving aside the commitment question?

Kurt Campbell:

So, Jon, I saw that interview as well and I thought that was an important part of it, but there was another part of it that frankly I found was even more chilling and concerning. We often comfort ourselves by making the point that China has not fought a war of any kind since 1978, 1979, when it didn’t go very well in the jungles of Southeast Asia when they stood against Vietnam. They probably lost that conflict. And we comfort ourselves by saying that, “Look, we’ve had constant engagements of enormous-”

Jon Finer:

I’ve heard you make this argument yourself.

Kurt Campbell:

I know. I know. I once said to Jake that we’re a martial people and-

Jon Finer:

Martial people. Yeah.

Kurt Campbell:

... he’s been making fun of me ever since. But what Culver points out is that we really have not fought a peer competitor really since the Second World War, and so there’s more of an equivalence between the United States and China. We both would be facing into the abyss with less experience if we looked at this kind of conflict. All three of us have seen a number of briefings and participated in war games, which basically look at scenarios that develop. Most of those war games are chilling. We run out of ammunition quickly. Our dominant levers of power projection are vulnerable, like aircraft carriers. Some of our forward bases are immediately removed through the use of Chinese precision munitions.

In fact, what becomes clear is our big sort of card in this very challenging scenario is our submarine force. And that’s one of the reasons why frankly I was proud of working with both of you. We worked on programs to bring unprecedented new resources to our commitments to build more submarines, and we worked on AUKUS to bring in Australia and Great Britain into this larger set of challenges. It really is in submarine undersea capabilities, UAV long-range capabilities that the United States still has some enduring capacities.

Jake Sullivan:

You mentioned earlier in our discussion China’s access to American technology and one of the centerpieces of our approach to China in the Biden administration was to impose the small yard, high fence doctrine, export controls on very advanced semiconductors, and the equipment used to make them. The Trump administration came in and, I think a little bit surprisingly because I thought they would continue and build on them, actually relaxed the restrictions and also have been very sort of lax in enforcing the restrictions that are still on the books.

On the other hand, China has taken this interesting position of sort of saying, “We don’t really want your chips anyway.” And it’s hard to tell how much that’s a, “You can’t fire me, I quit,” how much of that’s gamesmanship, how much actually China’s trying to get the United States to say, “No, really, please take them.” Can you unpack this for us?

Kurt Campbell:

And we’re going to do that, by the way. We’re going to beg them-

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, right. Exactly.

Kurt Campbell:

... to buy our chips.

Jake Sullivan:

So unpack for us, what is the dynamic here, especially on the Chinese side? What are they thinking about access to American chips at this point, given their deep desire to indigenize, to put Chinese AI capability on a Chinese tech stack as opposed to an American tech stack, but also recognizing that there’s a huge compute gap right now and the US has an advantage? So talk us through how you see this issue right now.

Kurt Campbell:

So, Jake, if I can just playing one more bouquet to you guys, the area where we had a very clear strategy with strong bipartisan support was not only investment in our own capabilities in AI and semiconductors, but working with allies and partners on an allied infrastructure and being careful about husbanding those capabilities and restricting them from going to China. I think that was the right approach. I think almost everyone on Capitol Hill believes in that even today.

A few people around President Trump have a very different philosophy. They believe that we should continue to sell chips to China and addict China somehow to our tech stack. The truth is that completely ignores and misunderstands President Xi’s long-term strategy, Jake, which you know well, and Jon, to move towards self-reliance and dominance across not just semiconductors, but in robotics, synthetic biology. He has a major plan of action, which has been implemented in a methodical way over the course of the time that he’s been in office.

And so when you say China here, you’ve got to unpack that a little bit. What President Xi is saying to Chinese companies is, “Look, you got to rely on our own capabilities,” and those companies are saying, “They’re not quite good enough yet, boss. We need to be able to continue to rely on the United States.” And so there is both an internal dialogue between President Xi and his companies and one with the United States.

And so what’s going to happen is, as we’ve finally said, “Okay, you can have the chips,” and the Chinese says, “Well,” President Xi says, “we don’t really want them because we don’t need them. We have our own chips,” so we’re going to beg them to take our chips, which will allow them to advance ahead of us or to compete with us, but only a small enough number so that President Xi can still basically necessitate that their own chip producers become more capable over the course of the next couple of years. It’s a terrible approach.

And so the Chinese, as you know, Jake, they’re constantly keeping score. Well, this one’s for you, this one’s for us. This one, they’re going to count as a favor to us. Okay, we’re going to buy some chips for you and allow us to catch up with you. Okay, are you satisfied?

Jon Finer:

Like they’re soybeans or something.

Kurt Campbell:

Yeah.

Jon Finer:

So one of the threads I’m picking up through your answers on Taiwan, on technology just now, on your allusion to the possibility of a big investment announcement is that the president, who really kicked off in many ways the era of intense strategic competition between the United States and China, at least explicitly kicked it off, and then who was followed by a president who we worked for, Joe Biden, who in many ways intensified that competition and got some criticism for it, got some praise for it, is now himself, Donald Trump, maybe dialing back this ultra-competitive approach. Do you believe that we are now on a sort of down slope of competition with China that peaked in a different moment, or do you think that this is just a blip and that we revert back ultimately to a fundamentally competitive relationship?

Kurt Campbell:

Look, I think the dominant inherent qualities of the US-China relationship are competitive. That is the reading of the strategic environment. We’re not choosing that. That is the world that frankly we have been thrust into. And so I believe those norms and that dominant paradigm will return.

President Trump has been deeply unpredictable. He has seen China at times as a close partner, again, as Jake has indicated at G2, and other times a menacing enemy. I think this time his truer instincts are to cut deals, to make money, to be greeted as a fellow authoritarian standing astride the global stage. I think that’s where he is right now. The challenge will be, how durable will that be domestically? One of the only areas, and I mean only areas where you see sort of a quiet, careful, Republican backlash on the Hill is on technology, is on Taiwan. This is an area where there has been broad bipartisan support that backs frankly what President Biden and, Jake, you and Jon did in our strategy in the Indo-Pacific.

And so people on the Hill are uncomfortable with some of the elements of what we’re seeing between President Trump and President Xi. And the challenge here is that this is not alone. In a larger context, our allies and partners are much more worried than they were. They’re considering other options. The thing that I think all of us are proud of is the relationship we built with India. It’s not easy, but deeply important. That relationship is frankly in the gutter right now, has really fallen on some hard times. And so the larger corresponding elements of this strategy are also in disrepair. It’s not just technology. It’s not just on issues associated with Taiwan. It’s the larger framing of a strategy that has enjoyed bipartisan support now for a couple of decades. All of that frankly is at risk.

And so the honest question, Jon, is no one really knows what to expect from President Trump on a visit like this, and frankly we should be anxious about the fact that he goes to Beijing with so much personal attitude to be able to make decisions, like in solo combat, that may not frankly be in the best interests of Troy.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. You finished your piece by saying it’s possible one of the two leaders, maybe Donald Trump, will end up getting dragged behind the chariot, which let’s hope that does not happen.

Kurt Campbell:

Let’s hope together as Americans not.

Jake Sullivan:

I mean, honestly, we have a thousand other questions for you, Kurt, but I think that summing up with that larger strategic view, prompted by Jon’s question, really valuable. I think it’d be good for us to bring you back on at some point later this year to talk about a few things, one of them being India, which you just mentioned, because I think that the big bet that we made on that relationship is now very much in the balance, given things that have happened over the last year.

Kurt Campbell:

The truth is what some of this discussion reveals... And this is always a challenge of Democrats, I just want to say this... is that we’re terrible about explaining the things that we have done effectively on the global stage. And it’s not a Biden issue, it’s an historic issue. But frankly, the Indo-Pacific strategy, what we did with India, a careful diplomacy, which you orchestrated with China, that bore an enormous amount of fruit. The fact that President Trump has departed from so many of those time-tested and frankly successful avenues of diplomacy is concerning. And we should be clearer about how effective that bipartisan approach that you guys helped to orchestrate was.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, because we’re so uncomfortable talking about positive things, we’re now going to just end the podcast very abruptly. No, I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. No, you’re totally right about that. We got to talk India. We also didn’t mention the possibility of AI diplomacy, which we kicked off and didn’t get very far on in the Biden administration; could that go somewhere? And then there are these issues around Chinese investment in the US that you referred to. So a lot else to talk about.

This summit will be one milestone in a series of milestones over the course of the rest of this year, including very likely at least one, if not two trips by President Xi to the United States, both for a bilateral summit and for the G20. So we have to put this in the larger context of the relationship of the strategic backdrop as you have done over the course of this conversation, and we’re really grateful to you for it.

Kurt Campbell:

And if you guys ask me, I’ll always come on. I love the podcast. I’m here for the long game. Thanks.

Jake Sullivan:

Man, it’s nostalgic to have someone like Kurt on because we were in the diplomatic trenches with him across two administrations, and it’s just a reminder of all the work we did including, as he said at the end, a lot of really good work that we’re rightfully very proud of.

Jon Finer:

It’s interesting because he is somebody who, both in government and actually outside of government, has devoted his entire life and career, professional life, to fostering better understanding between Asia and the United States, obviously with America’s interest at the forefront of that thinking, but not many people have that kind of longitudinal, long game perspective that Kurt brings. He was doing this in the Clinton administration, he was doing this in the Obama administration, he’s doing this in the Biden administration, he’s done it in the private sector, and it shows. And the nice thing about somebody like Kurt is, he talked about in the summit, you never know what Donald Trump is going to do. When you ask Kurt Campbell a question, you never quite know what he’s going to say. He’s unpredictable in his own way too, which makes him a fun guest.

Jake Sullivan:

One thing that he said near the top of the conversation that kind of rang in my ears throughout it was Hippocratic Oath. Basically said, “Do no harm.” And what struck me over the course of the conversation as probably the best thing for us to root for over the next two days is not a whole lot happens in the summit, that essentially they go, they have the pageantry, maybe there’s a few deals here and there, but no significant muscle movements. Because the way things are postured, with China in a very strong position, President Trump not with the wind at his back, but rather facing real headwinds, if there is going to be real news out of the summit, it’s not likely to be news that advances America’s interests. So it struck me that maybe we just should be rooting for the very basic element of the Hippocratic Oath. Let’s just hope there is no harm here.

So my scorecard basically or jotting list for the next few days is, will we see some movement on policy towards Taiwan? Will we see some movement on US semiconductor export control restrictions? Will we see a big announcement... We didn’t get into this deeply, although he referred to it... on Chinese investment in the United States, including in the electric vehicle sector? What exactly are the two sides going to posture and present on the Iran question? Will there be the launch of a dialogue on AI risk, as has been previewed in some places, especially given what we’ve seen with Mythos and these cyber capabilities that has got the attention of both policymakers in Washington and Beijing? So I’m assuming movement on purchase commitments, some trade-related understandings, extensions of previous agreements and the like, but for me, those are the questions that remain pretty open as this thing kicks off.

And I would also add, yes, this summit will end, but the US-China relationship will not end and US-China diplomacy will not end. It will just keep going, rolling into the next summit or the next encounter. So all of these questions are going to remain very live. They don’t just expire when Donald Trump gets on the plane to come home. We have to see this as just a continuous element of diplomacy, of which this is one episode, with multiple episodes yet to come.

So is my tick list about right, or what would you add to it?

Jon Finer:

It is, and I would say... He said two things, actually, that struck me that I hadn’t maybe been as focused on. One is this question of almost like Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns. What is going to happen when the two leaders actually enter the room and start talking, which is often something

Jake Sullivan:

Something not in our-

Jon Finer:

... but in this case, maybe not. So it could be one of the things on the list goes further than we expect. It could be some other thing that’s not even on the list that enters the chat, so to speak. And so be watching for that.

The other thing he said is that he believes, actually, that Iran is going to be not just a topic of discussion, but maybe in some ways a central or the central topic of discussion between the two leaders, just given how salient that issue is globally right now. And maybe that’s a good opportunity for us to do just a quick update on where that stands. I had not expected necessarily for the two leaders to get into that in-depth. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. I do wonder, though, whether anything that comes out of this summit could give wind in the sails to the Trump administration’s pretty feverish attempt right now to get out of the situation that they’re in. You could almost imagine a situation which President Trump says something different about Iran coming out of a conversation with Xi Jinping because he hears something different about Iran from President Xi. So I’ll be watching pretty closely on that. But otherwise, separate from the summit, that issue feels well and truly stuck right now.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, so how do you size it up? Just take a minute. We obviously spent a lot of time on this last week, basically the news only gets stuckier as opposed to the opening for some progress. I was evincing some qualified optimism last week. You were evincing more pessimism, the pessimistic side. That case is definitely the winning side at the moment and seems to be for the foreseeable future. So just talk about, what do you see as being the dynamic, and is there any way out of this?

Jon Finer:

I think the real question at this point is, what does the United States do to change the current dynamic? Iran seems comfortable sitting back with the strait closed, without intense conflict going on right now... They’re not being bombed to the extent they were before. There’s some minor skirmishing... and allowing this pain, actually that Kurt described quite well... It’s starting, if you’re the United States, at the periphery among our partners and allies in kind of far-flung parts of the world, but moving ever closer to the center and to us... and allowing that pain to be felt until we actually make the sort of concessions that Iran is looking for. That’s their strategy.

And the question is, does President Trump have the patience for a sort of test of wills, allowing this to play out over time, or does he do something to try to shake things up the way he did with Project Freedom, but just for a day, the way he tried to do with diplomacy, even sending the vice president of the United States to Pakistan, but that also didn’t change course? And then what options does he really have short of, I hate to say it, putting more on the table for the Iranians to try to induce them into a deal? He sort of oscillates between maximum pressure, full blockade, threat of combat and maximum diplomacy, but without putting enough on the table diplomatically to actually lure them into some sort of resolution here. And at some point he’s going to have to pick one of these options and stick with it if he wants to change the current situation.

Jake Sullivan:

I had moved to a slightly more optimistic place last week, in part because I saw in the US proposal, the most recent US diplomatic offer to Iran, a really big move, and that big move was abandoning the absolute zero position on enrichment. Remember, for a long time, the US was saying Iran has to give up its nuclear program forever in total. Zero, zero, zero. No enrichment in Iran.

Jon Finer:

Dismantle all its facilities, et cetera.

Jake Sullivan:

Exactly. So the most recent proposal basically says moratorium for a period of time. Now there are some ambiguity about what happens after that period of time, but to me, that was a significant conceptual shift. And I think having made that shift, there is now a constellation of elements that could be pulled together into a proposal that I think could work. It probably would involve real ambiguity over the exact status of the Strait of Hormuz, which would be a negative for the world, but that’s a negative that President Trump basically bought when he launched this war. And it would involve a lot of sanctions relief, to your point about having to put things on the table, and it would involve real compromise on the nuclear file, not the kind of maximalist demands we’ve been making before.

And so I have kind of thought eventually Donald Trump will come around to that view because all of his alternatives are considerably worse. And it’s really a question of when that happens, and how much pain we all collectively endure before that happens. My view on that basically hasn’t changed, but the fact that oil prices aren’t sky... They’re going up but not going to 150... the fact that the market hasn’t reacted so dramatically, this doom loop that we talked about last week of market expectations, and therefore how it impacts Trump’s thinking, that kind of causes this thing to drag. But at the end of it, it’s hard for me to see, even if he goes back to bombing or Project Freedom or anything else, at the end of it all this ending without the United States of America making a significant set of compromises with Iran at the negotiating table. And from my perspective, the sooner President Trump realizes that and just does that deal as opposed to waiting to do it later, the better, but it’s unclear as to whether he will come around to that or not.

Last point I will make, I also wonder if coming out of Beijing, he will kind of recast the whole Iran question, even if nothing has been agreed with China or nothing has changed material on the ground, but use something about the summit as a way to say, “Oh, I see this differently now. We’ve got a new plan, and now we can do a deal.” I think that’s something for us to watch for. Hard to tell, but-

Jon Finer:

“China begged me to end the war, so here I am, ready to do that.”

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Jon Finer:

Yeah. It all brings me back, actually, to Kurt’s hippocratic oath point a bit because the deal you just described, which I think would be a mostly defensible, rational way for this conflict to end, has one kind of fatal problem in portraying as a victory, which is that deal was available without the war that President Trump launched and all the damage that that did to our relationships, to the economy, et cetera. And to then have gone through that whole exercise, caused all the harm in violation of the diplomatic Hippocratic Oath theory, and then reached the same agreement or aversion thereof is something that should not be overlooked when ultimately the conclusion of this conflict is analyzed, if and when it ends.

Jake Sullivan:

And, Jon, just on this point, he might have said a week or two or three ago, incorrectly it turns out, “Well, one thing I did achieve here was the destruction of Iran’s military capabilities. So, yeah, at least I got something out of it.” But we have this report in the New York Times, the Washington Post, confirmed by others that the intelligence assessment is that Iran retains 70% of its missiles, 70% of its missile launchers, 90% of the positions along the Strait of Hormuz that they have been firing from, and they now have access to nearly all of their underground bunkers. So very detailed reporting coming out that suggests even that more limited, more temporary success, quote, unquote, success that the Trump administration had been touting isn’t there.

So you’re right that it’s going to be even harder to say, “Well, what the hell did we get out of this,” having gone into it, but nonetheless, we are where we are, and so President Trump now has to stare at the options he has bought himself by launching this misbegotten war in the first place. And next week, on the backside of the summit, we’ll spend some time reviewing what happened in the summit, of course, and where that leaves the US-China relationship, but we will return to the subject of Iran as well to see where we are.

Jon Finer:

The journalistic revelations that gave a kind of tale of the tape of the war over the last week have been devastating. Less damage to Iran than we thought. More damage to the United States and our military facilities than we thought. More depletion of our own munitions and other resources. And by the way, an intelligence analysis from our CIA that suggests Iran can hold out for several more months without changing course substantially, and maybe even more. So tough strategic predicament, and we’ll be paying close attention as we always do.

Jake Sullivan:

Not a pretty picture. So we’ll leave it on that note.

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jon Finer:

We’d love to hear from you. Send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com.

Jake Sullivan:

And subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

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Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Weiner and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

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Jon Finer:

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Music is by Nat Weiner. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

Iran War & Trump’s Europe Troop Drawdown: What Comes Next?

May 6, 2026

TEASER:

Jake Sullivan:

What’s also not helping is that he keeps getting surprised by things that shouldn’t surprise him. From his perspective, “Damn, the regime didn’t crack. Damn, they closed the strait. Damn, we couldn’t bomb them into submission. Damn, we can’t seem to blockade them into submission.” And frankly, with each realization, he gets impatient and then says, “We got to try something else.”

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. Jake, it’s just us again today. It’s quiet in here, but we’re going to fill the time, I think, quite constructively with a look at a topic we’ve covered extensively on this podcast but haven’t really gone deep on in a couple weeks, which is the state of play in the Iran war. There’s been a dizzying set of developments recently, including right up till the present moment that we will recap and analyze and try to give some sense of where all this is headed, including some of the implications of this conflict that have started to spin out like the UAE’s withdrawal from OPEC and kind of the broader implications of that for energy markets, energy security, for Gulf relations, which we have hinted at previously but haven’t gone deep on.

Then we’ll talk about another, I think, topic that is related to this conflict, but only tangentially, which is the relationship between the United States and Europe and the increasing tension that the conflict has generated up to and including the president announcing in recent days the potential withdrawal, the likely withdrawal, I guess, of thousands of American troops from Germany amid a spat between Trump and the German chancellor. So we’ll conclude with a wrap at the end of all that, but a lot of topics to dig into and looking forward to getting started.

Jake Sullivan:

I’m also looking forward to it, Jon. I have to report to you and to our listeners that it is 6:30 AM Pacific Time. I’m out on the West Coast. And I want to say that both because it reflects the full measure of my devotion to this podcast, that I am up, I’m showered, I’m in front of the screen ...

Jon Finer:

Thank you for your service.

Jake Sullivan:

... ready to pod with you at 6:30 AM. But the more functional reason I am timestamping this episode, this is Wednesday morning, 9:30 AM Eastern Time, 6:30 AM Pacific Time where Jake is, is because we’re going to spend quite a bit of time talking about Iran, and things are changing by the hour. So this episode, by the time it comes out, by the time people listen to it, something will surely have changed. And that’s because I think you used the word dizzying. It really has been a quite dizzying and dynamic situation where things have evolved even since last night when we last touched base on the state of play. So we’ll get into all that.

But I did want to come back to the topic of showering, I mentioned I had showered, because I had real difficulty operating the shower in my hotel room this morning. And it reminded me that one of the most stressful and vexing aspects of traveling the world on behalf of the United States as a US government official, both at the State Department and the White House, was that every shower in every hotel in every country in the world was just different enough that in the morning, in the midst of jet lag, you had to take time to figure out how it operated.

Some of them have multiple shower heads, some of them have multiple knobs, some of them have kind of the stealth shower head where you don’t even know where the water’s going to come out of, from the ceiling, from the side, whatever. And I have to say, there is a certain prosaic humiliation that goes with standing there, usually in the dark, trying to figure out how the heck you’re going to get clean so that you can go about the business of the US government and American diplomacy that day. Is this just me, Jon, or is this something where I speak to a silent majority of American diplomats and officials?

Jon Finer:

It’s not just you, it might be just us for all I know. But I have, myself, multiple times, had to call the front desk of the hotel to ask how to get the shower working or how to shift from a bath faucet to a shower. One time I remember somebody had to be sent up to the room to explain this to me in person. So yeah, it’s a bit of a basic intelligence test that I have failed a couple of times at least.

Jake Sullivan:

I do wonder if that’s what it is. It’s like the universe making us go through trials just to prove that we’re staying mentally sharp or have some-

Jon Finer:

Reminding you to be humble.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. One thing I learned actually in the midst of all this, when you’re in Europe especially, they have this new design of the showers where they only have half a pane of glass. So you’re kind of taking the shower open in the room with just half a pane of glass. The reason they do that is, A, glass is a lot easier to clean than the old-school showers. But then B, based on what I have been informed in debriefings on the subject, having half a pane of glass as opposed to the full glass enclosure means you don’t have hinges, means the thing doesn’t break. So it’s just a much easier thing to maintain, but apparently American guests really don’t like it. I personally am agnostic, and maybe that’s enough shower talk, but these are the kinds of things you have to worry about.

Jon Finer:

You’ve gone deeper on this than I have, but I’m here to learn as well, so I appreciate the shower briefing.

Jake Sullivan:

Okay. Let’s actually turn from the ridiculous to, well, maybe the sublime and what’s happening in Iran. So do you want to bring our listeners up to speed?

Jon Finer:

Or to more ridiculous.

Jake Sullivan:

Or more ridiculous. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, let me turn it over to you to get us going in terms of a review of the bidding of where we are and where we’ve come from.

Jon Finer:

I do think just because, again, we’ve not done a deep dive into this in a couple weeks and there’s been a ton that’s happened, it’s worth just recapping some of the main events since we last went at length on Iran.

So the United States and Iran declared a ceasefire that involved no additional concessions, really, from either side, including Iran, despite the fact that the US had made a bunch of demands of Iran leading up to the ceasefire. The theory of that was it would give space for talks between the two countries.

JD Vance, vice president, led a delegation to Pakistan for those talks. They lasted about a day. He announced at the end that nothing had been achieved.

Sometime after that, the United States then added its own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to the blockade that Iran already had underway. The intention of the US blockade was to stop Iran from exporting its hydrocarbons products, which it had been able to do during the course of the war and generate revenues from that. The United States decided that can’t happen anymore, so added its own blockade.

Then the United States announced, after imposing the blockade for a week or more, that it would be launching some sort of what it described as a humanitarian escort mission to allow stranded ships in the strait that were not tied to the conflict, flagged by countries unrelated to the conflict, to actually make it out and transit and get on their way. In response to which Iran then attacked both the US Navy and the UAE, which has, and we’ll discuss this more, suffered the brunt of the attacks from Iran during the course of this conflict more than any other country, including the United States.

But the president and the Defense Department described these attacks as not enough to count as a violation of the ceasefire, even though they looked to the rest of the world like they were a violation of the ceasefire.

And then just in the last 24 hours, the president has called off the escort mission, citing a request from Pakistan and maybe also from Saudi Arabia, citing the supposed enormous military success of the campaign against Iran, which he’s pointed to on other occasions, and citing again what he calls progress towards a deal with Iran based on, I guess, some indirect talks that are still going on, even though the two sides have not met again face to face.

So my head is spinning a bit at all of this, but I did think it was worth just kind of recapping, reviewing the bidding as we head into another week that is likely to be something of an inflection point in this war, one way or the other, or potentially just more of the same as we continue to muddle through.

Jake Sullivan:

Keep in mind, all of that’s compressed into a really short timeline in the broader context to geopolitics, basically just a couple of weeks, everything you said unfolded. And now here we are again, Wednesday morning, May 6th, and the latest development building off of that statement that President Trump made is a report in Axios from Barak Ravid, who you and I both know well, basically saying, he said this multiple times over the course of conflict, so how much validation to give it is up in the air. But what he basically says is that they are close to a MoU that would lead to an end of the war in the region and the start of a 30-day period of negotiations on a detailed agreement that would open the strait, that would limit Iran’s nuclear program, and that would lift US sanctions. So he goes into some detail on this.

The Iranians have sort of already come out, at least through some of their spokespeople, and said, “No, this is more of a list of American demands.” It’s unclear exactly what the state of this proposal is. But what does seem to be clear is that the Trump administration believes, or at least wants to project its belief to the public, that they are making progress towards some sort of framework, some kind of document that would allow them to declare an end of the war and that would launch some period of negotiations to try to resolve the big open issues in this.

What’s your take on this element of it? How do you assess what’s come out in the reporting now in terms of the progress, or at least purported progress, maybe the lack of progress in the negotiations?

Jon Finer:

I’d start by saying, I love Barak, he’s a friend of mine, and I think one of the best reporters in Washington, but there was a funny tweet this morning that said he has predicted seven out of the last zero agreements, I guess, is the way it was phrased because he keeps foreshadowing that there’s going to be a deal, and ultimately there isn’t. So I take this with a big grain of salt. This is, I think, American messaging. And by the way, I think not a coincidence that it happens sort of early in the week and intended to kind of influence market reaction, which it is already. You’ve seen oil markets react to this. We’ll talk a little bit more about how the United States has kind of continued to talk down market reaction to the war fairly successfully, although not perfectly.

That said, where I think he is onto something and where I think ultimately this is worth digging into is that I think you and I would both agree that ultimately if there is going to be any sort of deal, it is going to need to involve the sorts of elements that Barak lays out in his piece because ultimately that is the only way to get a deal that can address Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It is going to involve, as he says, a significant measure of financial benefit for Iran. Exactly what form that takes and the magnitude of it is going to be the subject of negotiations. It’s going to be involved some limits. It’s going to involve some limits on Iran’s nuclear program. He flags the possibility of a moratorium, a period in which Iran does not enrich uranium.

By the way, Iran is not currently enriching uranium, doesn’t really have the prospect of enriching uranium in the near term, given the damage that’s been done to its program, but how long that moratorium would be in place and then what happens after that is going to be another obvious topic for negotiations and for a possible deal. And then the subject of how this deal would be monitored and implemented and enforced is going to be a major topic of discussion.

And so when you see these categories laid out that are part of this report, it’s not surprising because I think this is, by the way, the core elements of the only deal that’s ever been reached with Iran on the nuclear program, which is the JCPOA, which we talked about at length and both of us have worked on.

So I think we could dig into some of the details of this because I think the details do matter, but not at all surprising that this is where the United States is trying to steer the conversation.

And I think the real question is, do we, does the United States have enough leverage over Iran to get any sort of deal at all, or is Iran more inclined to just sort of hold out, given how angry they are at having been attacked and given that they still believe, I think, that the longer this goes on, the more pressure is on us economically and otherwise to try to end it on terms that are even better for Iran? So that’s kind of how I see things.

Jake Sullivan:

So I want to put a pin in this question: will Iran do a deal that’s close to or in the zone of what’s been laid out in this Axios report? Really important question, and underlying it is this question you just posed of whether we have enough leverage to make that happen.

But let me take a step back for a minute and connect your first observation, which is that we’ve had this dizzying array of developments over the last two weeks, with an observation you just made a second ago that there is a certain inevitability to all of this. At the end of the day, the only way in which there is an end to this war and end of this crisis is through some kind of negotiated settlement. And I find those two facts, those two kind of bookends to this overall crisis, really important to keep in view as we follow the day-to-day developments.

For me, going back to the beginning of this crisis, the Iranians, in a way, have been fairly straightforward to predict. We could have predicted that when you take out the Supreme Leader and threaten the whole regime that they would close the Strait of Hormuz because that was, for lack of a better term, their trump card all along. We would have predicted that they would strike Gulf bases and infrastructure to try to raise the costs, economic costs in the United States and the rest of the world. We would have predicted that they would hold firm on their basic position that they were not going to surrender their entire nuclear program. We would have predicted that they weren’t going to rapidly fracture or collapse and the regime was not going to give way to some new government that was significantly more friendly to the United States or more democratic. And frankly, we would have predicted that they would settle into a position of strategic stubbornness, and they’re basically playing their hand out about as expected.

Now, President Trump, unsurprisingly, has been a little bit less predictable. And what’s not helping, from my perspective, is that he didn’t know why he really got into this in the first place, so his strategy has never had a strong mooring. And what’s also not helping is that he keeps getting surprised by things that shouldn’t surprise him. So it’s like, from his perspective, “Damn, the regime didn’t crack. Damn, they closed the strait. Damn, we couldn’t bomb them into submission. Damn, we can’t seem to blockade them into submission.” And frankly, with each realization, he gets impatient and then says, “We got to try something else.”

So to kind of sum this up, I think Iran has found itself in a standoff with a US president who, frankly, doesn’t know how to stand still. So it’s just hard to say what he’ll do next. He plainly doesn’t want to go back to war, he also doesn’t seem to want to just settle into a long-term staring contest, but he’s damn nervous about a diplomatic compromise that looks a lot like the Iran nuclear deal.

So Donald Trump, in a way, would kind of like to choose none of the above, but he lost that option when he launched the war. He has to do something. And I think that’s why even when he tries new things like this Operation Freedom or he threatens civilizational destruction, remember that happened not too long ago, or he blockades the blockade, these are all in service of trying to find some button he can press to get out of this war, but all of them lead back to the fundamental reality that there is only one durable way out that is a deal. And that is where he keeps coming back to, that’s where Axios has put us again today.

And I guess the question, Jon, of whether or not there is a zone that the US and Iran can land in, that President Trump can say, “Okay, I’ll take that,” and Iran can say, “Okay, I’ll take that,” do you think that is plausible? And how do you answer the question you posed on whether or not the US has enough leverage to get there?

Jon Finer:

I think a deal along these lines was probably plausible before this war. And in fact, I think something along these lines is what was under discussion between the United States and Iran, both last summer before Israel and the United States launched the 12-day war and disrupted what were ongoing negotiations, and then again this year when the United States chose to interrupt negotiations by returning to conflict. I think a deal along the lines that we’ve been discussing was very much on the table and within the realm of possibility.

And I guess I feel like now the fact that we have waged this damaging conflict, damaging to us, damaging to the global economy, damaging to our allies in the region, damaging, obviously, also to Iran, at least in terms of its military capability, but ultimately strategically, as we’ve argued many times, not beneficial to the United States given where things stand today and are still talking about, basically, the same terms of the deal just continues to bring me back to the question of why we bothered to go down this path in the first place and cause all this harm.

I also think it is now harder to get this deal than it was previously because you’ve got a more entrenched, more dug-in, more hard-line set of decision-makers in Iran, a more discredited set of people who might actually argue that doing a deal is in their favor. And I think they’re going to have the foreign minister who we know and have talked about on this pod, the speaker of the house, national security advisor. These people are maybe the ones who are inclined to do a deal if it’s good enough for Iran. And I think they’re going to have an even harder time now after this war getting the people who are ultimately making the decisions, maybe it’s a Supreme Leader, much more now the IRGC leadership, to sign off and say yes. And so that means the terms that the United States is going to offer will have to be better now than they would have been before having gone to this war.

And the idea that you go to war to generate terms that are better for the adversary is generally not how and why you enter into conflicts, quite the opposite. So we look at sanctions relief. There’s going to be billions of dollars on the table in assets, Iranian assets that are currently frozen that’ll be unfrozen. What other sanctions relief are we going to provide to get this deal? Certainly we’ll enable Iran to sell oil. It’s already what was doing so even under previous sanctions. We will probably authorize that.

Are we going to do more? Are we going to offer sanctions relief under what we call our primary embargo, which is direct US sanctions on even doing business with the United States or touching the United States financial system, which by the way, the JCPOA that the Obama administration did, did not include any sanctions relief under that? Is that now on the table to try to induce Iran into a deal?

And then what are we going to get on the nuclear side? There are some indications that we might get actually some significant things from the Iranians, maybe even beyond what was in the JCPOA. Like this moratorium, the JCPOA, we should acknowledge, did not include a period in which Iran was not permitted to enrich. It seems like they’re at least discussing some period, five years, 10 years, whatever it is, with Iran. That would be of value, but I suspect strongly that we will have to pay quite a lot if we’re going to get Iran to agree to a period like that.

So the details here really do matter. And as we’ve indicated previously, we do not have exactly our most detail-oriented US officials at the forefront of these talks. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who, by the way, have other jobs, are not full-time US government employees and are not bringing a lot of US government expertise into these conversations from what we can tell. So I’m a bit pessimistic, to be honest, that this gets done.

Jake Sullivan:

So there’s a bunch in what you just said that I’d love to unpack, but let me zero in on two things. One is the point you and I have both made over the course of several episodes, that we could have gotten a deal without going through this war and all of the costs that have been imposed on the United States, human costs, economic costs, and frankly, maybe even most long-lasting and significant strategic costs to the United States. We could have done all this without that.

And I think part of the reason that President Trump hasn’t been prepared to do a deal to date is because he’s just so nervous about conceding that President Obama and Secretary Kerry were, frankly, right all along, that there has to be compromise if you’re going to get a durable nuclear deal. I think ultimately he will end up acting on that realization, but we’ve gone down this road because he just has not wanted to stare that reality squarely in the face.

I think something else has been going on though too, which is the people in his ear are telling him a series of things that continue to reinforce his mistaken assumptions.

So we had H.R. McMaster and Matt Pottinger on the podcast two weeks ago. They’re not in his ear. I don’t think they’re talking to him day-to-day, but they reflect the kind of people who are. And H.R.’s proposition that the regime is going to collapse at some point soon, he said that with relatively high confidence. That’s something that a lot of other people around Trump have said to him.

There’s a guy named Marc Thiessen who writes a column for the Washington Post who reportedly has been talking to President Trump on a regular basis. A few days ago, he wrote a piece saying Iran is 14 days from collapse.

These are the kinds of things that I think President Trump is hearing. And basically he’s being told, “You have the cards, you have the leverage, Iran doesn’t. They can’t endure the economic pain, they can’t continue to endure the blockade because they’re ultimately going to have to shut down their oil production.” These are the kinds of things I think that have led us down a problematic path to begin with and also mean that President Trump is not, in my view, kind of properly assessing the risks and benefits of various courses of action in this war.

And I have a question as to whether ultimately there’s going to be something that makes him say, “Okay, just do it. Just go do the deal.” Could that be gas prices hitting $5 a gallon? Could that be his increase in concern of the risk of some wild cards, a US ship getting hit? Could it be the summit with Xi Jinping next week? Does he want to have shown really substantial progress between now and then? I think these questions about how Trump’s calculus around what he’s prepared to accept in the way of compromise are very real.

And then on the Iranian side, the question of the extent to which they want to say, “Look, we could just hold out. We could keep trying to increase the pressure on the United States, but heck, there’s a deal on the table that helps us deal with some of our problems too,” how they run that calculus over the course of the coming days and weeks. So we’ll have to look at both sides of that.

On the terms of the deal itself, the thing that I find most challenging beyond the fact that we don’t have detail-oriented people actually negotiating it is we do not right now have a good sense at all of what the baseline of Iran’s nuclear program is, actually how much enriched uranium they have, actually how many centrifuges they have, actually what the status of their facilities beyond the main facilities are, whether or not they’ve used the last year to divert capabilities to places we don’t know about. We have very little sense of that.

That’s a huge change from before the JCPOA, when we had a good picture of every element of Iran’s nuclear program and we’re able to use that picture to shape a deal that we could confidently look the American people in the eye and say, “This deal will stick.”

So it doesn’t seem to me like that’s even really in discussion, how to get that baseline where we have the confidence that whatever we agree to is actually rooted in the reality of Iran’s nuclear program today. And I’ll be curious how they grapple with that challenge in the period ahead.

But the question, I guess, sitting here today, Wednesday, is do the two sides actually go sit back down at the table and try to hammer this out? Will this continue to be done in this more indirect way or this standoff way?

And you speak of your pessimism on it. I guess I’ve tended to be, compared to you, a little more optimistic that ultimately they’ll land in a zone because there’s no other outcome here and eventually President Trump will come to that realization and Iran will want to do a deal at least at some level. So I’m a bit more optimistic than you are, but I still do think it’s going to take a lot of time to unfold.

Jon Finer:

I guess maybe to qualify my pessimism, I’m pessimistic that there will be a deal that has sufficient detail and verification and this accounting that you just described of even the status quo of Iran’s nuclear program. So as one of our colleagues has called it, we know what we’re buying if we give them a measure of sanctions relief. That would seem to be a prerequisite for doing this the right way.

I’m not, I guess, pessimistic that we could ultimately reach a kind of one-page framework along the lines that’s been reported to kind of pause the pause and give space for talks yet again that may ultimately not lead anywhere. I do think it is possible that kind of agreement could be announced and the two sides could return to negotiations. But a one-page framework that has some general language on all these topics is pretty different from the hundred-plus pages of detailed technical agreement and annexes and everything else that would go into a real arms control agreement and that went into the Iran nuclear deal from back in 2015, 2016. And obviously that’s not going to get done in 30 days, the amount of time, the window of time that supposedly would be given for these talks if they even get off the ground.

So I guess where I come down is yes, possibly some sort of framework could be reached. Very unlikely that would actually lead to meaningful changes or ultimately a serious deal of some kind, but maybe that’s a way out of this conflict for a Trump administration that seems to badly want one and seems unable to get one on the sort of dominating terms that they have been seeking up till now.

Jake Sullivan:

How much do you think what President Trump is guided by is his look at markets or his look ... which really haven’t moved much, or his look at gas prices, which are now creeping up, have gotten to around $4.50 a gallon for the national average. Do you think that that’s playing a big role in his thinking, or he’s kind of setting that aside and trying to figure this out without as much reference to some of these things that we used to think were really core to his calculus?

Jon Finer:

On some level, how could it not? I mean, we’ve discussed how we live through people walking into our office during periods of crisis in the Middle East and telling us this is actually now having broader implications on the economy, on the political standing of the administration, and the national security considerations are paramount, but they’re not the only considerations when it comes to these sorts of crises. So I’m sure that’s the case in this White House.

We’ve also, though, talked about this paradox of when Trump projects that we are on the cusp of a deal, the market’s reaction tends to be then more muted to the crisis because nobody wants to miss the sort of surge that will come when a real deal is announced. And so market reaction is much more limited, but then that blaséness, if that’s actually a word, actually puts less pressure on the administration to end the war because the market reaction is so diminished.

Over the last week or two when there started to be indications of, I wouldn’t call it market panic, but at least market reaction commensurate to the level of the crisis, the price spikes that we saw, paradoxically that actually put more pressure because people started to believe that the war might go longer, put more pressure on the Trump administration, I think, to actually put more effort into ending it. So there is this loop that we end up in where the markets actually have not pressured Trump as much as I would’ve expected them to, to put a stop to this and he’s been quite successful at always dangling the possibility of a deal that people don’t want to miss and limiting the reaction in that way. And maybe he’ll be able to keep doing that for a while. Although as you say, the higher the prices climb and there is this scoreboard that people can look at with their own eyes out in the country, it’s going to be harder.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s interesting, it’s the markets and geopolitics version of that short story, The Gift of the Magi. The market thinks that this is going to end fast ...

Jon Finer:

Yeah, exactly.

Jake Sullivan:

... so prices don’t go up that much. And because they don’t go up that much, the conflict drags, and then people think, “Oh, maybe it’s going to drag.” So then prices start going up, but that would mean it would more likely end. It is a crazy doom loop. The likes of which we really haven’t seen that frequently in these kinds of conflicts and is worth keeping an eye on in the days ahead, because if an announcement to progress and talks leads to downward pressure on oil prices, which almost certainly it will, does that then take the pressure off Trump and make him think, “Okay, I can keep trying the blockade for a while longer.” We’ll just have to see how that particular dynamic plays out.

One other thing I just wanted to make sure that we touched on, I mentioned this risk of a wild card. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said something interesting. He said that since the ceasefire went into place, there have been 10 efforts by the Iranians to hit US naval vessels. I think it was US Naval vessels in the Gulf.

You and I lived through the Houthis working to try to shut down the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab and trying to directly hit US Naval vessels. And we saw very clearly the skill and capability of the US Navy and being able to intercept the inbound projectiles, shoot them down, protect the ships. But we also saw a lot of close calls and the fact that you have to be right every single time.

And so I think we have gotten kind of used to the fact that our Navy can just defend itself against inbound missiles and drones, inbound fast boats, whatever the risk may be. But the enemy only has to be right once to cause a strike that could take further lives of sailors, that could disable a ship, but certainly that would create a whole different strategic context. And I think we just should make sure we don’t take our eye entirely off that ball.

And my guess is that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is telling President Trump, “Look, I have every confidence in my operators to be able to defend our fleet and defend our ships.” But also, I’m sure he’s being straightforward that this risk remains very elevated and something for us to watch. We could wake up any day and have had a US ship hit in a way that just creates an entirely different strategic equation.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, I think it’s safe to say we’ve been both good and lucky up till now. And actually maybe not as lucky as the public narrative would suggest, we’re also starting to learn. I mean, there have been now increasing reports that damage to US military facilities in the region is more extensive than the Trump administration has acknowledged, billions of dollars in damage. We probably don’t know the full extent of that. They’ve tried to keep that under wraps, I think, in large part to avoid letting the Iranians know where they’ve been successful and in large part to project the military dominance that’s such a part of the Trump administration’s messaging. We also had attacks that have killed US service members, could have killed more US service members. We had an aircraft that went down in Iran with a crew on board that we were able to rescue. That also was not a foregone conclusion.

So there have been these moments where things could have gone significantly worse and then would’ve put significant pressure on the Trump administration to do more to escalate in retaliation and in response. And as you say, if a naval vessel gets hit or, God forbid, people are killed or the vessel is sunk, there will be massive, I think, escalatory pressure on Trump to respond. So that is one of these wild cards.

The other thing I think we should just note, and we’ve talked about it before, is there are also increasing reports of how depleted American munitions are as a result of this conflict, both depleted in terms of our ability to perpetuate this war indefinitely, keep ships at sea, keep shooting things out of the sky, keep attacking Iran. All of these supplies now are reaching critical levels. And depleted in the context of other potential things that could happen in the world, the Russians messing around in Eastern Europe, the Chinese taking aggressive action in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea.

There are real questions, I think, based on how much material we’ve used in this war about how ready we are for these other things. And that has to be part of the calculus, at least for Dan Caine and the Pentagon in advising the president about how long this can go.

Jake Sullivan:

No doubt about it. The report’s coming out about exactly how much we’ve blown through in terms of Tomahawks, this new missile, the PrSM, some of our key interceptors like Patriots and SM-3s and SM-6s, it’s really quite striking. CSIS said four of the seven main munitions that we need to keep fighting the war have fallen by more than half from their pre-war inventory and that rebuilding them will take one to four years. I mean, really, really quite striking. And that is a factor that the United States military will absolutely be briefing up to the president and his key advisors and will be very much on their mind as they think about the scenario in which this war gets restarted and is sustained over a period of time.

So you had mentioned at the outset something important, which is that in the midst of all of this going on in the Persian Gulf between the US and Iran, we’ve had the United Arab Emirates, the UAE, make a big decision, which is to pull out of OPEC, and that has both the oil market implications that are real and direct and also a broader set of strategic implications. How are you reading that situation?

Jon Finer:

So it’s interesting. On the one hand, and I think we both know this from personal experience, this is something that the Emirates has been looking to do and dangling the possibility of doing for quite some time. I think they have been frustrated for a long time about the quotas that are imposed by OPEC on their production, on their exports, because they like the Saudis, but are two of the countries, and they believe they are maybe the one with the most spare capacity to put on the market. And so they believe that the OPEC quotas have hurt them in some ways more than they have hurt other countries, and they have been making that case privately, quietly to us for quite some time and increasingly publicly over the years.

But second, and I think this was interestingly, I think, pretty well laid out in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Yousef Al Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador, who we know well, where he argued, “Look, unlike some of the other OPEC countries, we are not a,” his argument, “hydrocarbons-dominated, oil-dominated economy. It’s less than a quarter now of our overall GDP. And so we are more focused on energy security, on the broader performance of the global economy, because we are more intertwined in the global economy than we used to be and more bound up in the global economy than maybe some of the other OPEC members. And so we believe that our goal should be safe, stable energy markets, much more so than generating higher prices,” which is at least part of how they see OPEC’s motivation that is maybe misaligned now with the Emirates’ strategic goals and with their own economic interest. So they basically see a divergence between the goals of the OPEC cartel and their own economic strategy driving their desire to be out.

I will say though, and want to get your reaction to kind of which of these factors is the most prominent or if it’s something else, there has also been hanging out in the background of all of this and certainly looming quite large before this war, this political, personal, strategic dispute between the Emirates and Saudi Arabia that was just starting to boil over when the war erupted and forced everybody to, at least on the surface, align against a common enemy, a common adversary in Iran.

That dispute has not gone away. And I think that is also part of why, in the current moment where maybe you might otherwise want to profess a degree of unity, the Emirates was comfortable saying, “We’re stepping away from this institution,” which Saudi Arabia has informally dominated for quite some time as the sort of largest producing OPEC country. But do you see these as being the main factors, which among them, or is there something else going on here?

Jake Sullivan:

Look, I do think the proximate reason that the UAE pulled out is because it wants to maximize its oil production now, to maximize its revenues now, to hasten the transition of its economy away from hydrocarbons to finance, clean tech, and especially artificial intelligence.

So I do think they had a clear calculus about why the restrictions they were living under in terms of how much oil they could produce and sell in the market in OPEC didn’t make sense for them. They want to be able to pursue their own national growth strategy. I think that’s the proximate reason for this. I don’t think it was purely triggered by the war. I think they’ve been thinking about this for a couple years and now they’ve done it.

But I think the larger implications are going to be the real story as we go forward. And the larger implications are, I believe, a structural rift between the UAE and Saudi Arabia that will be a major feature of the regional landscape for years to come.

Now, there’s an interesting and immediate dimension to this, which is who is Iran hitting when it fires against Gulf countries to try to put pressure on the United States and to try to flex its muscles and show its leverage? It’s not hitting Saudi these days, it’s hitting the UAE. And who’s involved in the diplomacy with Pakistan to try to bring an end to this war and position itself in the post-war era as a key broker? It’s Saudi.

So already in the larger dynamics here, you see the UAE and Saudi occupying very different positions. And I think the Saudi effort to establish itself as the dominant player in economics and technology, the dominant player in terms of regional geopolitics and security affairs, and for MBS himself, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, to establish himself personally as the key leading figure in the region, these are all driving towards, I think, a more fundamental change in the UAE-Saudi relationship that will have implications, not just in places like Yemen and Sudan, where they found themselves on opposite sides of proxy conflicts, but in virtually every country in the region and in terms of how each of them relate to Iran.

And so I think this is a very big deal. And the UAE move here is one move in a larger context that, from my perspective, is we’ll be talking about for years to come, this kind of UAE-Saudi dynamic and how everyone else in the region and even countries outside the region are going to have to relate to things.

And so, as you mentioned, for many weeks in the fall on our podcast, we’d say, “Hey, watch out for this. We’re going to come back to it.” Well, here we are coming back to it because of events have forced us back to it. And I predict that in the months ahead, we’ll be doing deeper dives on this issue as well because it’s going to be very much with us as something two, three, four, five years ago was not a significant factor and now is.

Jon Finer:

So I think that’s very well put. I would add that to a large extent, this is not good for the United States, not good that two of our closest friends, partners, allies in the region are at odds with each other, are in different sides of different conflicts taking place, still taking place, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, et cetera, in the region and now are increasingly at odds over the state of play on Iran and the current conflict that the United States is engaged in.

I will say, there’s one maybe small way in which this is not so bad for the United States. In a time of high energy prices, which we live through, the idea that the United States has one address to go to to try to increase production, bring prices down, give the economy domestically for the United States a bit of a boost, and that destination is OPEC, gives OPEC a significant amount of bargaining power, leverage in these discussions with the United States. And the fact that there now may well be multiple addresses to go to to try to improve and enhance energy security in ways that benefit the US economy, not all bad, I think, for the United States.

So overall, I think strategically not a great situation here, with maybe a small silver lining at a time that we’re currently in of kind of high energy prices coming out of this conflict where OPEC may prefer a slightly higher overall price of oil than the United States government would for our own economic interests in many cases. And the Emirates may now be a partner in that going forward.

Jake Sullivan:

I think that’s well summed up. Strategically, I think challenging to have these two countries at odds. From the economic point of view, we don’t like OPEC, so fewer countries in OPEC is probably better from the US perspective.

All right. Let’s zoom out even further because the war in Iran is having ripple effects that go way beyond just Gulf dynamics. They’re affecting the transatlantic relationship as well. And in particular, President Trump and his team have made an announcement that they’re going to reduce the overall level of US forces in Germany, take out 5,000 forces. And it seems like the trigger for this was the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, saying that the US was getting humiliated by the Iranians in the Iran war. And now the DoD has said ...

Jon Finer:

Saying this in front of a kindergarten class, I think, in front of a bunch of kids.

Jake Sullivan:

Oh, I actually missed that.

Jon Finer:

Odd format for it.

Jake Sullivan:

So he says, we’ve been humiliated, Trump says, “I’m going to draw down our forces in Germany.” And the Pentagon comes out and announces 5,000 fewer forces. They say it was a result of an extensive process, but of course, the relevant forces learned about it in real-time, which suggests that in fact, it was directly connected to President Trump reacting to what he saw as a direct slight from the German chancellor.

President Trump has also said there are likely to be more reductions in US forces from Germany and said other countries may face reductions in US forces as well, including name-checking both Spain and Italy and reserving some choice words especially for Spain.

So Jon, we’re going to do a red-team-blue-team on whether it makes sense for the United States to do a significant material reduction in our overall force posture and troop presence in Europe. But before we get to that, any reactions to these developments over the course of the past few days culminating in this announcement of a reduction in US troops in Germany?

Jon Finer:

No, other than to say something we’ve said previously, which is none of this is good. All of this is beneficial to Russia, the higher price environment, the tension in the transatlantic relationship, the reduction of US support for our allies and for Ukraine, but we are where we are. And so we thought it was worth discussing on the merits, the prospect the president has put on the table of reducing further the US footprint, the US commitment to Europe. And as always in our red-team-blue-team conversations, we start with a caveat that the arguments that we may be making are not necessarily our personal views. Particularly, I think that’ll be the case for me this time around because I’m going to argue for reducing the footprint. I think you’re going to argue against, and we’ll see how it goes.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. And I think just to set the terms, because pre-Ukraine war or pre the buildup to the Ukraine war, the US had somewhere in the range of, call it, 65 to 70,000 troops in Europe. That got up to as high as 100,000 as we fortified the eastern flank and prepared for contingencies that might take the Ukraine war beyond the boundaries of Ukraine. That has now come down a bit over the last couple of years. At different points, there are different levels of troop presence, but it’s between 80 and 100,000.

So this debate is not about kind of minor adjustments at the margins. It’s really a debate about whether we should have a substantial structural reduction in US forces on the continent. And since you’re the one arguing for it, at least in this red-team-blue-team exercise, not necessarily reflecting your actual views, I think it probably makes sense for you to go first and lay out the case for why we should do that, and then I’ll tell you why you’re so very wrong.

Jon Finer:

I’ll get started. We don’t like to acknowledge it, no country likes to acknowledge it, but even the richest and most powerful nation on earth has limited resources, and we have to prioritize how they’re used and be strategic about it.

At the height of the Cold War, when Russia was by far and away the most important threat that the United States faced, we had 400,000 troops in Europe and 250,000 in West Germany alone. That actually made sense at the time. It also made sense to drastically reduce that number afterwards, and then to increase it again, as the Biden administration did from about 65,000, as you said, in early 2022, back up to 100,000 when Russia invaded Ukraine, but that increase was never intended to be permanent.

And since then, significant things have changed that I think are worth noting. One, Russia has taken more than a million casualties on the battlefield in Ukraine and is using something like 90% of its combat power there. So it is pretty focused on that one theater and a lot less focused on menacing and threatening by traditional means the NATO countries that the United States is in Europe to defend.

Second, the US has launched not one but two new wars, or at least many wars, in the Caribbean and in Iran. And as we’ve discussed in this episode, that has had major implications on our readiness, on our force posture in ways that we have to take into account strategically.

Third, warfare has become, or at least is becoming, increasingly dependent on autonomous systems and less dependent on manpower. And that’s only going to increase over time as aerial sea and subsea drones are supplemented by even land-based platforms that don’t require the same number of human operators on board.

Fourth, the main threat to Europe and particularly to Germany now from Russia, in my view at least, is not a traditional military assault in the way that Russia has conducted against Ukraine, but is something more akin to what we call gray-zone tactics, still violent, but much more below the radar, sabotage, even drones used somewhat covertly to menace airports and infrastructure and other things.

This is less true, I think, for frontline states, the Baltics and others, where we should maintain a presence, but it’s certainly, I think, true for the threat to Germany where the largest numbers of US troops are located.

And then meanwhile, in our priority theater, which is Asia, focused on China, we’ve seen a net outflow of capabilities over recent months, which is just strategic malpractice if that’s the place that we are most focused on.

So look, I am not for doing this the way the president is doing it. It, of course, should not look punitive to our allies, to Germany because of what Merz said, to Italy or to Spain because of what their leaders have said and done. This should not be us lashing out on them or doing it in a way that undermines our Article 5 commitment. In fact, it should be coupled with an enhanced deterrent message, maybe even increased kind of high-end capabilities to Europe that require fewer personnel. So not infantry, but things like long-range strike capabilities, which we were discussing sending to Germany when we were still in office.

It also should not come alongside the shameful backing away we’ve seen in support for Ukraine, which is fighting Russia in a very successful, I believe, way at enormous cost and without a single American or European troop engaged in direct active combat. So not a troop-intensive way to continue to impose costs on Russia.

Does this increase the risk drawing down that Russia will do something reckless? Maybe, maybe, marginally. But the core of our deterrent there, I do not believe, is the number of forces we have, but our nuclear umbrella and the perception of our commitment to defend NATO. So as long as that remains high and viable and credible, I believe the deterrence will hold.

And that combination is what’s kept Russia, by the way, from directly attacking NATO, even as our support for Ukraine has caused so much harm to Russia during the course of the recent conflict.

And to give the president some credit, he’s successfully gotten the European countries to make greater commitments to their own defense. Germany is raising a much bigger army now, doubling or more the size of its standing army. As a result, in some sense of the Russian invasion, of our pressure, of Trump’s pressure, and if Germany’s army is twice the size that it once was, that should mean that there are fewer troops required from the United States.

So back to where I started, responsible foreign policy in a world of scarce resources means accepting some risk where you can, so you can decrease that risk where you must. To me, that is Asia. So can we afford to be a bit lighter in Europe, maybe even substantially lighter? I think we can. I’d much rather we didn’t launch wars in Iran and the Caribbean, but we have. There are forces committed to those places. We should wrap those places up, but the place we should shift those resources to is Asia where our deterrent, I think, is most needed and most in question.

Jake Sullivan:

All right. Very well said. And I am going to make the case that we should not make a structural material drawdown in US forces at this time or in the near term future. And I want to start with three numbers that Graham Allison has laid out, 80, 80, and nine. 80 years since we’ve had great power war, 80 years since a nuclear weapon has been used, and nine, only nine countries with nuclear weapons in the world.

And if you had said to people in 1945 that these three things would be true in 2025 or 2026, they would have said, “You’re crazy. There’ll be dozens of nuclear powers. There certainly will be another nuclear weapons use, and how can we possibly go 80 years without the great powers fighting since we’ve just had two world wars in the span of just a few decades?” And yet it’s happened, and Graham Allison calls it the long peace, and NATO has been absolutely central to that.

And because of the role Russia is playing today as one of the chief threats to the long-term viability of that long peace, NATO remains absolutely central to that. And yes, it costs money, it takes resources, but prevention always costs money. A war in Europe, precipitated by Russia believing that it could take more risk on its side to attack countries in NATO on the eastern flank would cost a whole lot more money and a whole lot more than money.

So this is kind of like that support beam in your house that you get tired of, it’s not aesthetically pleasing, you’d like to take it out. You realize, you take out that support beam and the whole house comes down.

Now, your argument is, okay, fine, NATO remains central, but really the things we have to worry about are two. One, the Article 5 guarantee, and two, the extended deterrence commitment that comes with the American nuclear umbrella. And I agree those two things are very important, but they are directly connected to the confidence our allies have in extended deterrence and in the credibility of our commitment. And that is directly connected to whether or not we’re sending them a signal that we are with reducing, withdrawing, weakening the overall American presence.

So I do not believe it is possible to substantially draw down American forces in Europe and not make our allies question, are they still as committed to Article 5 as they were before because, frankly, they don’t have the forces there to enforce it? Are they as committed to the extended deterrence nuclear umbrella because they’ve just said Asia’s more important than Europe? And so therefore, all of these pieces are interconnected. And if you pull one piece out, I think you could end up with the whole of it collapsing.

And I would go further and say, even if one day it’s right to draw down forces in part for the basic arithmetic you laid out, that as the Europeans build up their capabilities, it will mean that you need few American boots on the ground. That day is not today or tomorrow.

First of all, the European buildup is going to take years, many years. Secondly, there’s a whole range of capabilities, including strategic enablers like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, airlift, the long-range strike capabilities you described that they’re not going to have for quite some time. And so there needs to be a decent interval where the United States is still present at scale while the Europeans are building up.

Second, President Putin right now, today, is doing his level best to break NATO. In particular, he’s looking to destabilize the East, and he’s looking to send a message to all NATO allies, “You can’t count on the United States anymore.” This would play into his hands in a massive way. He could turn around and say, “I told you so. These guys are pulling out, they’re drawing down. You’re going to have to make some accommodation with me or you’re going to have to knuckle under to my threats because you cannot count on the United States.” And in this moment right now, today, this would be, I think, a deeply destabilizing act for the United States.

Then there’s another dimension here that I think at least should be named because you talked about Germany doubling the size of its army. There is some question about the extent to which having Germany be the overridingly dominant military power on the European continent is a great thing.

Now, I say that a little facetiously because I think the Germany of today is not the Germany of the 1930s in any way, shape, or form, but there was a really interesting piece by a Lithuanian think-tank leader in the New York Times a few days ago, where he basically says, “Europe needs German power, but,” and I’ll quote this, “German power remains less worrying when it is embedded in a unified Europe and anchored by the United States. And in a Europe that competes within itself is not only less capable, but also far easier for Russia to divide and intimidate.” And so I do think how the United States draws down over what timetable and with what conditions around it to ensure that Europe remains cohesive and that a growing European defense capability is not divisive and fracturing to the continent, but rather unifying and reinforcing is a really important point. And I think if we do something precipitous like a significant drawdown right now, we’re going to create real problems for ourselves.

And this brings me finally to the nuclear umbrella because right now France is saying, “Hey, we have nukes, and we’ll sort of offer it to others in terms of defending them, but that’s going to be a French decision, not a European decision.” I think if the United States begins to raise questions in Europe as to the long-term viability of our security commitment to the continent, other countries in Europe are going to want to get nukes, Germany, Poland, you name it, and then the whole thing kicks off. So I think we should not take the risk that would be created by a significant muscle movement in the drawdown of forces for this reason as well.

And then the final point that I would make is with respect to China. It’s true the US-China competition is a central strategic fact of the 21st century. But what happens in Europe very much matters to that competition because it’s not just about the military posture in Asia, it is about whether or not we have strong, capable, determined allies working with us as opposed to working against us or being divided from us when it comes to confronting the massive scale challenge that China poses. And if we do a significant drawdown in Europe, Beijing would cheer that on, and it would lead the Europeans, I believe, to continue to de-risk to a greater extent from the United States and try to cut their own deals with China to our strategic disadvantage.

So for all of those reasons, I think it is worth continuing to put the resources into the kind of stabilizing factor that US force presence in Europe has represented over the course of the past 80 years and can represent going forward. And we should not do a material significant reduction of US forces for the foreseeable future.

Jon Finer:

So I’m looking forward to the angry messages I get from European friends for having laid out this argument, although you might get a few from the Germans for having called into question the negative potential implications of German power. But I guess what I would say is I basically buy your argument, your version of this. I do think the part of my argument that I had the most conviction around, there are some things I argued somewhat, I think, disingenuously, is that it does matter how you do this. And the way that we are going about this is probably the worst possible ...

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jon Finer:

... way in terms of kind of maximizing the risks that you’re describing and mitigating them. And so I worry a lot in the current context. And I’ve been worried for quite some time, even before the Iran war, that this is where we were headed. Trump sort of signaled it a lot during his first term. And in my conversations with European friends and former counterparts, I have been telling them, “Be ready for this because I do not think we get through four years without the United States reducing its European footprint. There are too many people in the Trump administration who want this and the president himself is just too inclined in this direction to not have it happen.” And now it seems like it’s playing out.

Jake Sullivan:

And I will just say that I’m probably more personally relaxed about the German military buildup than I presented in my blue-team side of that argument. But I think it’s really important to listen to the voices of countries on the eastern flank to European voices who say, “Yes, it’s important. Germany needs to build up, but this has to happen in a context that is not destabilized by the dramatic drawdown of US capability and forces on the continent because there are risks associated with this.” And I think whether or not you assign a high level of risk to that or a low level, it is a factor that has to be taken into account.

All right, should we do wrap?

Jon Finer:

We should. Do you have a recommendation?

Jake Sullivan:

So I’m reading a couple of books right now. Actually, I’m reading one and listening to the other, both by Erik Larson. So I’m reading The Demon of Unrest, which is about the onset of the US Civil War. And I’m listening to The Splendid and the Vile as I drive back and forth between home and work, which is about the London Blitz. And it’s really kind of interesting to be doing double-duty on Erik Larson, but I just find his ability to spin a yarn to tell the story and paint the characters even as he gives a very rigorous account of the actual history to be so compelling. So I recommend, even though I’m not done with either of them, I recommend both of them to our listeners.

Jon Finer:

I’m going to recommend two podcasts actually that I have recently started to dig into. And these will be familiar names to you and to probably many of our listeners. One is called Power & Purpose. It’s hosted by our former colleague at the National Security Council, Amanda Sloat, and Nathalie Tocci, who I think we both worked with in her capacity as a European diplomat and policy official. And it’s interesting to me because it focuses, yes, on foreign policy, but to a large extent on the sort of human side of policy jobs, policymaking. And they’ve had a series of interesting guests, many of whom are familiar to us, and recommend that people take a listen.

And the other is called The View From Here with Jasmine El-Gama, who worked at the Pentagon and the Obama administration. This one tries to connect foreign policy with the people who are either making it or people who are living through the implications of it in countries that are affected by it. She’s recently launched that. She lives in London now, but is a former US government official. So two foreign policy podcasts in our broad zone, in our broad lane, that kind of have a different approach and a different take on the issues that we talk about as well.

Jake Sullivan:

So Jon, what’s ahead? What should people be looking for?

Jon Finer:

Obviously coming up just next week is one of the biggest geopolitical events that’s going to take place in the early part of this year. And that’s, at least we expect it to take place, the summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Beijing. This is obviously much anticipated. It’s been delayed once because of the Iran war. By all indications, it’s going to go ahead even though the war is not yet resolved. And I think we and others are going to be closely watching both the body language and the messaging and the pageantry around it, and also whatever deliverables or deals are announced as part of it, which I think we know have been under debate and discussion and negotiation for months now between the teams from Washington and the teams from Beijing.

So we’ll be looking at the economic dimensions of this, the security dimensions of this, the technology dimensions of this. And I think we’ll go deeper on this next week in our podcast. It’ll be timed, I think, well to this meeting actually taking place.

Jake Sullivan:

Yes. We will do a preview podcast the day before the summit kicks off towards the end of next week. We’ll be doing a podcast going deep on every aspect of the Trump-Xi summit, what to expect, what may be unexpected.

And one of the elements that you didn’t mention here, which we’ll very much be looking at, is the connection back to the war in Iran. The Iranian foreign minister is actually in Beijing now or on his way there to talk to the Chinese, and it will be interesting to see how that topic plays out in the context of the meeting between the two leaders.

But we will get into all of that in detail next week, a high-stake summit, a Super Bowl of summits in a way between the two most significant leaders in the world, and there will be a lot to discuss and a lot that still remains up in the air. So we’re looking forward to that.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode, and send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Weiner and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

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Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Liana Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Weiner. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

China’s Engineering State vs. America’s Lawyerly Society (w/Dan Wang)

April 29, 2026

TEASER:

Dan Wang:

The United States and China are the two countries that are really inventing the future. That the future is being financed by Wall Street, invented in Silicon Valley, as well as Xinjiang, built out of there. And then we also have this really big, two jealous centers of power, Washington DC and Beijing, in which the elites of both countries sort of view themselves as, “We are great powers and everyone else is a smaller country that has to listen to us.”

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

Today, we have another special episode of the podcast. We spoke last week with author Dan Wang before a live audience at the Endless Frontiers Conference in Austin, Texas.

Jon Finer:

Here’s that conversation.

Jake Sullivan:

Jon, it’s another first for us this week, the first ever live show of The Long Game, coming to you live from the Endless Frontiers Conference right here in Austin, Texas. And we’re really excited because we just have a fantastic guest today. Joining us is Dan Wang. He is the author of one of the most talked about books on US-China competition in years. It’s called Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Many of our listeners will have read it. Those who haven’t, go buy it right now. The book is a New York Times bestseller. It was named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year.

Dan was born in China. He immigrated to Canada at age seven, later moved to the Philadelphia suburbs for high school. He identifies as a Canadian who has spent almost equal amounts of time living in the United States and China. So he’s got a unique vantage point on these two powerhouse countries and how they operate. Dan spent six years from 2017 to 2023, living and working on the ground in China, I think spanning Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Is that right?

Dan Wang:

That’s right, yes.

Jake Sullivan:

And over those years, he produced deep analysis on China’s technology sector, its industrial policy, and its macro trends. His public annual letters became must-reads for anyone who cares about what’s happening in China, and they remain must-reads to this day. Dan is now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. In Breakneck, Dan makes a single piercing argument that basically boils down to this. “China is an engineering state that cannot stop building, and the United States has become a lawyerly society that cannot stop blocking.” That’s Dan’s observation at the core of the book, and the implications of that in his telling are profound. This is about as long game as it gets, and we’re going to dig into what it all means and where it’s going. So please join me in welcoming Dan Wang to The Long Game. Dan, welcome. Good to see you.

Dan Wang:

It’s great to be here.

Jon Finer:

All right, let’s dive right in. Dan, I want to start with this core insight that Jake just described, what somebody else could have maybe called a clash of civilizations between an engineering state and a lawyerly society. And I want to stipulate upfront, just in the spirit of full disclosure, you’re being interviewed by two lawyers here, but this is not an ambush, we don’t mean it that way at all. And any lawyer who actually worked with us in the government would tell you that our credentials as actual lawyers are pretty limited, so don’t worry too much.

Can you just lay out the basic arguments that you make in the book about the challenges associated with this lawyerly society? And then we were both curious, is this an insight that came to you in a single moment that you arrived at kind of over study and over time? Because it’s rare that a topic and a problem that’s looked at as carefully and has been looked at as long as this results in actually a new insight about how things were organized.

Dan Wang:

I should say also that I have a little bit of a lawyering tendency in myself as well. I think the Yale Law School implicates all three of us. I wrote my book very substantially when I was a fellow at the China Center there. And when I was there, it really felt like Yale Law School, getting a JD from Yale Law, Harvard Law sort of feels like your ticket to the White House, as maybe you two are sort of emblematic.

Jake Sullivan:

We don’t know anything about that, actually, no.

Dan Wang:

No, no? And it was quite striking that in the Biden administration, Politico wrote this little gag that people at Yale Law, it was kind of like a college reunion for them. They were just running into alum all the time. And I think writing my book there, being at what I felt was kind of one of the high temples of American elite finishing culture, the finishing school-

Jon Finer:

Doesn’t sound like praise when you say it that way, by the way.

Dan Wang:

No, no. And then contrasting that with my six years of living in China, three of which was throughout Zero-COVID, which really feels like the Communist Party was treating everyone as a system of aggregates. There’s no individual, people are moved around like chess pieces here and there. And then thinking through some of the challenges that the United States faces today, the pretty severe housing shortages in big cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, LA. LA, which suffered from some pretty devastating fires, which is still barely rebuilding.

We’re here at Endless Frontiers, thinking very extensively about our manufacturing base, our defense industrial base, a lot of which has rusted. We’re taking subways in New York City that are over 100 years old, we’re taking train lines. The new Acela is somehow slower than the previous Acela. Our subways are getting worse, our trains are getting worse. Defense industrial base is rusting. These are sort of the problems that I think the lawyerly society has not been very well set up to solve.

Jake Sullivan:

Now, Dan, you pair this observation about the difference between China and the United States with an observation that actually, no two people are more alike than Americans and Chinese, that they’re both exceptionalist societies. You point out a number of similarities. I think a lot of people in the US and probably a lot of people in China would be surprised by that observation. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean?

Dan Wang:

I think that the United States and China are the two countries that are really inventing the future, that the future is being financed by Wall Street, invented in Silicon Valley, as well as Xinjiang, built out of there. And then we also have this really big, two jealous centers of power, Washington DC and Beijing, in which the elites of both countries sort of view themselves as, “We are great powers and everyone else is a smaller country that has to listen to us.” Chinese and Americans are just kind of really friendly. You can go anywhere in Texas, you can go anywhere in China, you can have a conversation. It kind of feels like a warm bath, speaking as a Canadian who drives around America, feeling like everything is just very big and very bizarre.

And so as soon as I enter Canada, I kind of just relax a little bit more. But here in the US and China, things are a little bit more rollicking, I think is a little bit of the word. And I think I contrast that. Being bizarre is mostly a good thing. I think about Europe as well as Japan. Europe is a region that I call the mausoleum economy in the opening page of my book. And there’s kind of a self-satisfied feeling of trying to polish up all of these wonderful museum pieces. And Japan, I think, has been not grown very substantially for much of basically the last 30, 40 years.

And so I think that both of these countries are full of ambitious hustlers. They take all sorts of shortcuts, but then they have this essence of striving that makes the cities not necessarily very nice, not necessarily very functional. Both are maybe medium trust societies. So there’s all sorts of ways in which both countries break down. I think the United States is not very good towards the elderly, the Chinese state is not very good towards young people. There’s all sorts of ways in which both countries break down, but they’re inventing the future and they are really driving forward all sorts of progress.

Jake Sullivan:

Just to pull on that string a little, you said in your book that as a Canadian, you find Canada very tidy, whereas you find the US and China both messy, and I think you’ve said a little deranged. So two questions here. One, is a certain level of derangement required to actually be a superpower, to be the country that is writing the future? And then two, if America’s the lawyer and China’s the engineer, what profession is Canada, as a Canadian? What profession are you guys?

Dan Wang:

A nation of beaver hunters, I’m not sure, fur traders. I think the Canadians, one of the issues with being a superpower is that normal countries don’t have such dominance among by engineers in China. In the United States, so many of the political elites are lawyers. Normal countries have more normal sized distributions of professions. So I really think that I’m very cautious about extending this analysis to Germany or to Canada or to India. I think these two countries are deranged. And I spent quite a bit of time as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, going to visit AI land. No place is more deranged than San Francisco today. We are spending quite a bit of time now thinking about AI populism. And when I’m in SF, what is pretty striking to me is that we’re in a fantastically beautiful environment. We have all of these nerds, 25 years old, who are trying to invent God in a box.

And in the background is Peter Thiel giving lectures on the nature of the antichrist. And this is where I think that we are much more living in some sort of a cosmic horror novel than real life, but here we are. Here we are in which people are very upset about data centers, people are upset about the water, they’re upset about the power. Somehow AI is supposed to be the great salvation for our economic problems, as well as our national security when the approval rating for AI is something like 25%. The only thing with lower approval rating than AI in the United States is the Democratic Party. So how are we going to get around that?

Jon Finer:

You derive in the book, kind of the origins of the lawyerly society in the United States, and you talk about how it emerged in the ‘60s as a correction, maybe in your view, I think an overcorrection to the sort of unfettered Robert Moses-esque building boom that took place in infrastructure before that, but that resulted in charges of systemic racism, environmental degradation. And the result, as you describe it, is this vetocracy where nothing gets built and everything can be stopped. And you highlight just one example that we want to give people, which is that in 2008, both China and California began planning high speed rail lines.

China completed its Beijing Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $36 billion. California spent 17 years building a small segment of its line with the current cost estimates running to $117 billion. Therein sort of lies the problem. But it does lead us to this question, which is ultimately what we want is Robert Moses-like outcomes, being able to build big and important things at speed, at scale, but without Robert Moses methods of leveling entire low income neighborhoods, et cetera, et cetera. Is that achievable? Can we hit that sweet spot?

Dan Wang:

I think that we can hit that sweet spot. There are plenty of countries, let’s say, here’s where I want to praise the mausoleum economies a little bit more. Japan, Western Europe have built excellent infrastructure without expropriating people, without horrible environmental damage in, let’s say, Tokyo or Copenhagen. I spent quite a bit of time in Denmark last summer, Copenhagen built these amazing subway stations. They’re super clean, as clean, cleaner than in Asia. They’re fully automated. And so you don’t have these workers who demand, as in you do in New York City subway, that there must be two conductors per train. And I don’t think that we necessarily associate the Danish as well as the Japanese with really horrible rights problems. We don’t associate really serious cost overruns with them. And so the question is not so much whether democracies can build. I think that is almost the wrong framing.

There’s all sorts of ways in which societies have been able to do basic things like build homes. Right now, we are here in Austin, which had a surge of people coming into the city after the pandemic for online work. How did the city greet those people? By building homes for them, by crushing rents, by building quite a lot. And I think that is super positive. There are parts of the United States that has been able to build quite a lot, and we don’t have to reach back into the past of Robert Moses, of the Army Corps of Engineers, of Department of Agriculture spraying DDT absolutely through everywhere. There are examples today in the United States, which is able to build. There are examples overseas of friends and allies which are able to build. So let’s not get too caught up on, “Oh, is authoritarianism the right framing?” I say there are successes in our backyard. Let’s look at them and build in our backyard, too.

Jake Sullivan:

Dan, your book has gotten a lot of responses and a lot of very positive response and a lot of very thoughtful responses. One guy named Jonathan Sign, I thought wrote one of the more interesting and thoughtful responses to the book. It was extremely positive and sympathetic to your argument, but he did make this one note where he said, “America’s basically always been run by lawyers back to the founding, the framers, the founders, et cetera, through the 1800s, through the 1900s. So that even in our building phase, it was lawyers more or less running the show.” What’s your take on that? And so, is the issue not so much that we’re run by lawyers, but the lawyers have become more lawyerly or something else has happened? I’m just curious how you respond to that historical observation.

Dan Wang:

For any book author, it would be a dream to have a review on the quality and thoughtfulness of John Sign, so may this be a blessing for all authors out there. The United States has always been governed by lawyers. If we take a look at the first 13 US presidents, everyone from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, 10 of them were lawyers. The other three were generals, so the lawyerly instinct has been in the United States for a very long time. I think that the United States used to be an engineering state up until basically 1970. And so the United States built all sorts of railways, built canal systems through New York, skyscrapers in Chicago and Manhattan, the Interstate Highway Program, Manhattan Project, Apollo Missions. We can go on and on with all these amazing achievements of that technological sublime driven very substantially by the United States government.

Something changed in 1970, which was the correction to the excesses of the American engineering state. When New Yorkers got really tired of Robert Moses bulldozing busy neighborhoods, Department of Agriculture spraying too many chemicals around, US Army Corps of Engineers essentially damned every river in the American West, there needed to have been a correction. And what happened was that throughout the 1960s, a bunch of students, especially students at Harvard law, Yale law, a lot of the law schools, heard the beckons of Ralph Nader to say, “Government is part of the problem, that we need to be watchdogs of government. We should not serve inside government,” that the lawyers turned from being creative deal makers working on behalf of Franklin D. Roosevelt to do the New Deal. The FDR cabinet was full of lawyers building all sorts of great works. They stopped working on behalf of robber barons’ Wall Street to expropriate a lot of people or raise bonds for the railroad barons.

And then a lot of people’s highest calling became social impact litigation to really try to restrain the government. And there is a little bit of an irony that Ralph Nader’s messages flowed very well into Ronald Reagan’s messages that government is the problem, not the solution. I see that as being quite a big problem with the United States, that it does not want to empower the government to do the sort of things that the government itself sets out to do, that the people demand, that the government does, that still right now, I dare say that most law students feel like their role is to constrain the government. And I’m much more interested in correcting the pendulum swing slightly so that we have many more American elites who are very excited about building inside the government to achieve the technological sublime of Golden Gate Bridge, Manhattan Project, Apollo Missions, go to the moon, go to Mars and so on, and not really try to think that we have to protect every bird and every butterfly on our way to getting there.

Jon Finer:

Dan, we’ve focused a lot in the early part of this conversation on the American side of the equation. Understandably, it’s where we are, and we want to better understand ourselves before we take on the world. But you’re also not a romanticizer at all of the Chinese model. You’ve been one of the people who’s best highlighted, I think, the profound human costs, the blind spots associated with a state run by pretty literal-minded engineers who can see human beings sometimes as variables in a macro optimization equation as opposed to on their own terms.

And you came by this honestly. You lived through the COVID lockdown in Shanghai, you’ve observed the excesses of Three Gorges and other big infrastructure projects that have caused massive human consequences. I was wondering if you could just say a little bit more about what your own experiences in China have taught you about the engineering state and its own deficiencies?

Dan Wang:

The chief deficiencies, I think, are two. I think that for the most part, being run by physical engineers is substantially a good thing, that a housing crisis in the United States means surging home prices, whereas a housing crisis in China means spiraling prices in part because they have overbuilt. There’s all of these empty apartment blocks. Which would you rather have? I would have more homes rather than less. That China right now is able to deploy so much new electrical power, so much more renewable power infrastructure. Right now, China has about 40 nuclear power plants under construction, the United States has zero. Last year, China deployed about 300 gigawatts of solar, the United States deployed about 30 gigawatts of solar. And China, it still bears saying that China has a much more functional manufacturing base. China’s manufacturing as a share of China’s GDP is around 25%. In the United States, it’s around 9%.

And so they have achieved quite a lot through physical engineering. But the fundamental problem with the physical engineers is that they cannot stop themselves from also being social engineers, from also being population engineers. And so I spent a lot of time in my book talking about the one child policy as well as Zero-COVID. Now, I’m not sure if authors are allowed to have a favorite chapter, but my favorite chapter to write was definitely about the one child policy, which, according to the official data from National Healthier Books published by the State Council in China, over the 35 years of the implementation, China conducted around 300 million abortions, just not shy, not that much shy of the present population of the United States. They sterilized about 100 million women, 25 million men.

It really brought trauma to so many different families. Wrenching, I think, is the descriptor of first resort when we’re thinking about some of the experiences of some of these families. And part of the demographic problems of China today, of having 40 million missing women after insistent femicide, as well as just a broader population decline in China is directly attributable to the one child policy. I spend a lot of time thinking about Zero-COVID in which people in Shanghai were kept indoors for about 10 weeks in the spring of 2022, when many families went hungry because parents went hungry to save food for the kids because the municipal government had no plan in place to really deliver food over so severe of a lockdown.

Jake Sullivan:

You were there during that time?

Dan Wang:

I left right before Shanghai locked down, but I was in China throughout all three years of Zero-COVID. I left into the mountains of the Southwest in China. My wife and I were on literally the last flight out of China. I had a little bit less faith in the government when it said that the lockdown would last only eight days. And then I was back in Shanghai throughout the summer. I was in Shanghai when the protests broke out, and I saw some of these protests in which young people had staggered out of these cocktail bars. It was a very spontaneous event.

And I’ll never forget watching some of these videos, as well as the actual protests in person afterwards, in which people chanted on the streets, “Down with Xi Jinping, down with the Communist Party,” is completely unimaginable for people who have a sense of living in China, seeing the extent of security services patrolling the streets at all times, that people dare raise their voices and demonstrate their anger in such a severe way. And this is the sort of thing that all these physical engineers push people to extremes when they also engage in social engineering.

Jon Finer:

You have this very succinct phrase or sentence, I think, that captures a lot of what you just said, which is that sometimes the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions. And obviously, the one child policy, Zero-COVID are the examples you use. But basically what this says to me is that technical problems get technical fixes, whatever the human consequence is in some cases. And maybe the corollary of the question we asked you about, whether it’s possible to hit the sweet spot in the United States between a building without human consequences is, can an engineering state retain a conscience?

Dan Wang:

No, I don’t think... No. Well, can a state have a conscience? Will the White House have a conscience? I wonder, I wonder. So my feeling is that the Chinese government, the Communist Party, is interested in national greatness and it will achieve it by hook or by crook. That is its intention. And I think this desire for national greatness, this desire for national respect is precisely the impediment for China actually achieving everything that it wants to achieve out of international recognition. That top leader, Xi Jinping, has this raw desire that he wears almost on his sleeve, that he wants broader recognition, that he wants to be seen as a peer of the United States. And it is exactly this tendency in which China is just, I think, a little bit too scary, that it’s going to block a greater international recognition for a lot of what Beijing really seeks to achieve.

And just to be explicit about what I believe about the future of China, my view is that China will not supersede the United States as the overall superpower in every respect over the next few decades. The United States is a financial superpower, it is a cultural superpower. It is a diplomatic superpower in addition to a military superpower and so on. China will never be a financial superpower because the engineers are in charge of the financial system with very strict sense of capital controls. And that makes investors uncomfortable. If you can’t be confident that you can get the money out, maybe you don’t want to put the money in. And so the engineering state is exactly the impediment to China becoming much more of a financial superpower. They’re much more sensorious.

And so we can go on and on about all the ways in which the engineering state has all of these self-limiting features. But I think that the engineering state is also very well set up to do one big thing, that is to do very, very well on advanced manufacturing, on technology, on many aspects of science as well, such that I expect that China’s share of overall manufacturing capacity in the world, I think will continue going up over the next decade. Going on from a very high base, China right now has about one third of the world’s manufacturing base. My expectation is that it will hold on to net share and probably go up over the next decade because it has built so many of these competencies.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s interesting, you actually wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs called The Real China Model, which I think is an intriguing description. And a key point you make in that piece is that the real China model isn’t bureaucrats picking winners, it’s about the state building out what I think you call the deep infrastructure that’s required to do what you just said, to drive frontier industries at scale, to not just be satisfied at current global market share, but to grow it over time in these manufacturing areas. Can you tell us about that? And you put a particular emphasis on electrification as kind of core to their ability to achieve this. You just gave some eye-popping statistics earlier about what China’s doing compared to what the US is doing. So can you just walk us through how you see this playing out over time?

Dan Wang:

I want to present three caricatures, three straw men about how most of us see China. So how did China get to its technological sophistication? I think there’s a variant of the argument that China got there essentially through IP theft. There’s another variant of the argument that it’s all through industrial subsidies, so either it’s stealing or it’s cheating. There’s another variant in which, and I think this is more the European variant, that essentially the Communist Party is just one big MITI. The Japanese MITI Central Planning Agency that picked all these sorts of winners and defeated America in some industries over some time periods. And I think all three of these are valid. China does engage in quite substantial amounts of IP theft. The industrial subsidies are breathtaking. There is a central planning element to a lot of what the Communist Party does.

In addition to these, I would argue that there are many other components that are just as important. China has super functional infrastructure. The rail lines are next to the ports. Very straightforward stuff that somehow often the United States is not really able to achieve. They’re building so much electrical capacity. About in the year 2000, China had about one third the level of electrical power generation that the United States had. Over the last 25 years, the United States basically did not build very much new electrical power. It’s gone up basically a tick. Over the same time period, China started at one third US levels, now it’s two and a half times US levels. So they just have so much more electrical power driving down the costs. There’s another element in which I think China is by many measures, the most competitive market in the world.

We take a look at their electric vehicle makers. They have dozens of EV makers. They have dozens of solar phototaic makers. It takes about five years for a Detroit automaker to dream up a new car model and actually release it onto the streets, it takes about 18 months for Chinese automakers to do the same thing. Now, did the Xinjiang Beijing automakers come over to Detroit and hypnotize American automakers into moving slowly? No, they are much more competitive. They have access to very dense labor ecosystems. China has about 70 million manufacturing workers, the United States has about 12 million manufacturing workers. You can throw a rock in Xinjiang and hit a factory manager or a line engineer or a component supplier that can give you all of these amazing components really, really quickly. And what that allows China to do is, we had Sam D’Amico here earlier in this conference, talking about the electric tech stack.

Sam has done really excellent work thinking about how everything is now a smartphone. So what is now an electric vehicle? It’s kind of a smartphone on tires. What is now a drone? It’s kind of a smartphone with a propeller. And it is not an accident that Xinjiang, which has been still making the majority of the world’s smartphones, with all of that labor, with all of that managerial expertise being flown in from Cupertino, they’re not just building all the smartphones, they’re creating all of the follow-on innovations, the drones, the EV batteries, as well as everything else, such that when there’s, with this gas prices where they are right now, a lot of countries are asking whether they want to continue buying gas from the United States as well as the Middle East, or maybe they should buy some batteries as well as solar from China, as well as, let’s throw in some EVs from China as well. And China is positioned really to supply a lot of these different goods, as well as invent all sorts of goods that the United States needs through the electric tech stack.

Jon Finer:

Dan, you’ve mentioned Xi Jinping a number of times in the course of this conversation. And I guess I’m just wondering that in the midst of a third term with no end insight and a decision-making process, if you want to call it that, that is increasingly personalized, centralized in one individual, is China still an engineering state in the way that you described, or is it evolving into something more sinister or at least something different from that?

Dan Wang:

Yes. I think that China will be both sinister, as well as engineering for some time to come. In Xi’s third term, he brought in a couple of people within the Politburo who have actually ran very big mega projects. The head of the crude space program became the party secretary of [inaudible 00:30:07] which is one of the richest and most industrialized provinces in China. One of the major people who ran the weapons industry was also brought into the Politburo. This is like appointing the Chief of Anderil or Lockheed into Department of Defense or something. So that is something that they have brought people who ran mega projects into the Politburo in a big way. And I think that Xi has all of these obvious authoritarian tendencies that will not go away. And one of the big challenges I see with China going forward is that I think that authoritarian systems cannot manage succession.

It’s simply an unsolvable problem for them. That my expectation is that in the Party Congress next year, top leader Xi will probably not designate a successor. He would be in power for four terms. And maybe in his fifth term, he will designate a successor within the standing committee of the Politburo, but I’m also very sure that person will never make it to the top of being General Secretary. So I think that he is aware of the succession issue, but he cannot possibly designate a rival center of power. It never works in these sort of systems. And he is just hoping that somehow China wins over in his lifespan. And Xi is not terribly old. He’s 72 years old right now, our current president is substantially older.

In 10 more years, he would be old enough to run for US president. He has a bit of a paunch, but he seems to be in good health. And I would point out that a lot of these Communist Party leaders have been able to hang onto... They substantially outlive their actuarial tables. [inaudible 00:32:00] I think was alive into his 90s. One of the big Communist Party elders died two months ago, Song Ping. His age was, I think 108. And so you don’t want to expect to live to 108, but for only 72, Xi is not terribly old yet.

Jake Sullivan:

A lot of these authoritarian guys live a very long time. It’s interesting, I wonder if that’s one of the kind of prescriptions a doctor could give you, is find a fiefdom and run it. So just one more question down this track of Xi Jinping’s leadership and how he conducts himself. A lot of corruption investigations, a lot of high level purges. Does that kind of activity within the Chinese Communist Party, no one feeling quite secure in their position, a lot of top folks kind of taken out as Xi has moved forward over the time as leader, is that eroding the capacity of the engineering state? Is it refreshing the capacity of the engineering state? How do you look at this whole issue of his anti-corruption campaigns in the context of his capacity to achieve his objectives?

Dan Wang:

If you want to improve morale, it’s probably not a good idea to annihilate high command, which is what Xi has done to the Central Military Commission. Right now, there are 21 members of the Politburo. Normally the number is 25, but he’s removed one seat as well as three actual people. I wonder within the central committee of around 400 people, within the Politburo of around 20 people and the standing committee of seven people, how many people actually feel confident where they stand with Xi? And that substantially erodes how they think about how people interact with him. But I haven’t met the guy, you two have. Tell us what you think about how these authoritarian systems are going to be managing things.

Jake Sullivan:

You know what’s interesting about him from my perspective is that he combines a certain rigid authoritarianism, a Leninism, with some of the skillsets of Western politicians. A certain charm and ease and a presentation before the cameras, but also behind closed doors that remind you much more of an American politician than previous Chinese leaders have. And I think it’s that combination for me that is distinctive about Xi Jinping. I also think the other thing, he’s got this studied nonchalance, like always, everything just seems to roll off his back, but you could see behind it, his mind is constantly racing.

But this makes him, I think, a unique kind of figure and such a massive difference from Hu Jintao, who we also dealt with during the Obama administration. But I think your point, I also met with Xiang Yusha, who was the Vice Chair of the Central Military Commission, who when I met with him, seemed very, very confident in his position and not too long later was purged by Xi. I think your analysis that basically everybody feels just deeply uncomfortable is correct. And that at some level, at some basic human level, has got to take a toll on the ability of the state to be able to execute against its objectives.

Dan Wang:

He’s fooled a lot of people. The guy looks just like Winnie the Poo.

Jake Sullivan:

I would just say that he is prepared to set aside speaking notes, is prepared to make observations about the world that are personal, that are not just in the flow of whatever the rigid Communist Party talking points are supposed to be. And when he would talk with President Biden, one thing that he would studiously do is go back to previous conversations they had had about their fathers, about their families, and inject that into the conversation. Now, that was pretty transparent to an American politician. Okay, we’ve seen that tried and true method before. But I found it unusual for a Chinese leader like that to operate in that mode. And that’s a skill. That’s not to say praise to him as, “Oh, he’s a good guy,” but he is good at something that has enabled him to consolidate and sustain power in the way that he has.

Jon Finer:

I want to go back to the book for a second. You’ve, I’m sure, consumed at least some of the many reviews and responses that have been written. We talked about Jonathan Signs earlier in this conversation. Have there been any critiques or commentary that caused you to rethink any of the core tenets of your book, or has anything else happened since the book has come out that caused you to revisit any of the big ideas that you put out?

Dan Wang:

Well, the trade war happened, and I would say that for the most part, that was an intensification of my thesis rather than a revision, that President Trump last year over Liberation Day, issued these tariffs. Tariffs are, I consider a legalism in a way to confront China. How did Xi Jinping respond? Not by filing a super clever lawsuit in the WTO or any court. He asserted control over our rare earth magnets, which was a substantial part of what made President Trump back down. Auto plants had to suspend production because we lacked for these magnet parts. And so this is where the engineering state, by virtue of controlling so many different inputs, is able to sort of veto a lot of pretty major decisions that the United States takes against China.

And I’m still struck by some of the restraint by Beijing, because rare earth magnets is far from China’s only choke point. We can take a look at all sorts of electronics products, battery materials, active pharmaceutical ingredients. I know that Rash Doshi here is doing some active thinking here. How well do we really understand the extent to which China is controlling all sorts of really important inputs? My sense is that China makes a lot of ibuprofen, cardiovascular drugs. Who’s going to be happy if the United States doesn’t have ibuprofen? Only RFK Jr., I expect. But if-

Jon Finer:

Do you expect them to use that choke point or that category of choke point against the United States?

Dan Wang:

I expect them to know about that choke point and have that ready in place if they wanted to, to deny things like cardiovascular drugs to America’s elderly. And so I wonder how much the United States government, organizations, companies really understand if China cuts off, let’s say 30% of cardiovascular drugs, can we source really quickly from India? Can we source really quickly from Indiana? Is that even possible or are we in a bit of a pickle like we were with rare earths? That is an element of a lot of what they have been able to do. I am heartened in some ways that the United States is re-industrializing. There’s certainly intent to re-industrialize.

My sense of the numbers is that we’re not in a stealth manufacturing boom. IP production has been significantly harmed by tariffs. The United States has lost about 100,000 manufacturing workers. That’s a lot of engineering knowledge that we need, that we need to grow, instead that we’re losing. Maybe we are getting some really innovative policy fixes through, let’s say, off-take agreements with rare earth magnets, as well as the minerals. So there is some creativity here, but I’m not sure that we’re seeing the emergence of an engineering state with American characteristics, whether that can really overcome all of America’s deficiencies.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s interesting, your reference to the trade war reminded me of something else that you said more recently, which is that the US-China competition is actually going to be decided by who, I think you said, wins by losing less, meaning you see both sides as making unforced errors driven by some combination of hubris or politics or other considerations. You’ve specifically called out this trade war. I’m curious, let’s say you got called into the Oval Office to talk to President Trump and his team, and they asked you, “Dan, what are three things we could do right now to actually become an engineering state with American characteristics to actually solve our challenges in this regard,” what would you say to President Trump?

Dan Wang:

I think one of America’s great assets is being attractive to many of the most ambitious people in the world. I think that it is really clear that the most ambitious people in the world are not chomping at the bit to move to China, they’re not chomping at the bit to move to much of Europe. The most ambitious people, including many of the most ambitious Chinese, really want to move to the United States, and I think that we should not block them. I think that the United States is industrializing substantially through Taiwanese engineers building the fab in Phoenix, Arizona, that there are a lot of Korean engineers building electric vehicle batteries facilities in the United States. And if these facilities stand up, that creates the self-sustaining ecosystem to train many local workers, as well as people to build critical technologies. Instead, we have the jerking around of visa policies of H1Bs, as well as last year, deportation of 300 South Korean engineers out of Georgia in chains.

And so that’s a simple way in which, let’s stop punching ourselves in the face. That would be great. There’s all sorts of ways in which I think that the tariffs are hurting manufacturers. This is what manufacturers universally talk about. There’s ways in which the United States could electrify more quickly if President Trump did not have a personal peccadillo against wind turbines in particular. He’s tweeted them in all caps as, “Scam of the century.” Now, they don’t seem like a giant scam to me, but there’s all sorts of ways in which I think we are hobbling ourselves. And then I know this is a little bit more controversial, but I would encourage greater Chinese investment into the United States. That in the US history, what we saw was that Detroit automakers were not doing terribly well throughout the 1970s and 1980s. And what gave them a pretty serious boost was Japanese automakers building in all sorts of American states that made American products more competitive.

And in general, I think that we can have some degree of protection, but in general, competition increases product quality, reduces price, and more competition is in general, a good thing. And that my high level takeaway is that I think that the United States has nothing to lose by acknowledging that China has substantially overcome a lot of its deficiencies such that it is ahead of the United States in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of industries. And China has written, I think, a pretty good playbook for how to industrialize in the 21st century that includes all of the things that I mentioned above, electrification, infrastructure, government support, and very crucially, inviting in foreign companies. That the Communist Party swallowed its pride in the 1990s to invite in companies like Walmart and then Apple, as well as Tesla to build very big facilities in China, trained a lot of its workers to be at the cutting edge. And I say, if the Chinese did force technology transfer to us, why don’t we do it back to them?

Jon Finer:

Can you say a little more about how that could work? Because obviously, the Chinese will not be oblivious to the strategy they employed to extract things from our efforts to invest in China. And just because this is likely to be, it seems like, a major issue in the various summits that will take place this year between President Trump and President Xi, can you just double click a bit on what constraints, how you would try to shape Chinese investment in the United States to maximum advantage for us the way China seems to have for it in an earlier period?

Dan Wang:

First, overcoming the objections of various governors, whether Republican or Democratic, against some of the Chinese factories. If we can overcome that, I would say that I think that we should welcome the sort of investment in American manufacturing hubs. I understand that there is an IP issue and we don’t want some security officers that are kicking around in Ohio or Michigan. But I think I take it as a sign of a lack of confidence in American capabilities to just block a lot of these people in because it seems to me like we have a pretty effective security apparatus, namely the FBI, that should be able to govern a lot of these potential nefarious actors. I think that our FBI ought to be competent enough to figure out who is nefarious here.

And I think that Beijing might not want a lot of direct technology transfer to flow to the United States, but I think that this formal technology transfer schema is probably overstated as a way in which technology moves. I think that if Chinese managers come over to the United States and simply train workers on how to work with different battery parts, how to have leading practices, how to use these machines a little bit better, a lot of technology transfer is simply managerial expertise, as well as practice in keeping this knowledge alive. I think that that will be the bigger vector of actual technology transfer that doesn’t require the say so from Beijing that it’s able to block.

Jake Sullivan:

One thing that I’ve really been struck over the course of time that you’ve been opining on these issues is that you really drive this point that the US has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of technological dominance, that really we fixated on this, quote, “Mythical moment of creation,” as you put it. Basically the blueprints, the patents, the software code, and that what really sustains technological power is process knowledge. And that’s really what you’ve been talking about here. How does the United States recapture process knowledge for things like manufacturing electric vehicles or drones or batteries at scale and at a cost-effective price point?

So you think that if in fact, the United States invited in a substantial amount of Chinese investment in these various areas, we could restore that process knowledge in those areas. Are there other things that you would recommend that we do on this process knowledge question? Is there a pathway to building that to the point where in fact, the United States has the kind of industrial base that is diversified and resilient and capable of actually competing effectively?

Dan Wang:

Yes. To be a little bit more concrete about what process knowledge means, technology is, let’s be clear, three different things. It’s the tooling. In a kitchen analogy, this is the pots, pants and the stove to actually cook something. Second part of technology is direct instruction. These are patents, blueprints, anything that could be written down, that could be passed around. And then the third part of technology is everything that is unwritten. This is process knowledge. This is all the knowledge that lives in our heads and in our fingers of how to actually do things. And all of us know in our daily jobs, we try to write a memo for an intern or for our favorite LLM to do our jobs. There’s all sorts of subtleties that there’s no way that any of us can actually convey.

And my view is that technology ultimately is people. That technology ultimately is people who are practicing all the time about how to figure out how to make a better product, how to make a new product. All of these factory engineers in Xinjiang are solving three new problems a day before breakfast on how to make a better battery, how to make a better drone. They’re not really thinking about what’s going on in the mind of Xi Jinping, just as most of us in our day-to-day work, especially in the technology sector, don’t necessarily have to pay attention to every tweet by the President.

So I think that a lot of what knowledge is, is something that has to be maintained and practiced even for it just exists at our current levels. This is why I find it so disastrous that the United States has lost about 100,000 manufacturing workers. Once you close a factory, you lose all of this factory design expertise. A lot of workers start forgetting their knowledge. The United States is especially forgetful that we’ve lost all sorts of knowledge because of these retired nuclear engineers simply went out to pasture and then we forgot to build a whole lot of things because a bunch of people have retired. And so-

Jake Sullivan:

You have an amazing example on this in your book about these nuclear engineers and how literally, we couldn’t figure out what to do with a pretty old technology because all the engineers had retired.

Dan Wang:

There’s a classified material called Bog Bank, which is necessary for the detonation of a fission bomb, and we forgot how to make it. We didn’t know how to make it anymore after a bunch of people retired. There’s a GAO report about this. And then I think the Department of Energy had to spend something like $50 million to dust off the blueprints and then just read it and then figure out how to make all of these things again. And so the blueprints don’t really matter at a first approximation.

Let’s say that we had all of the blueprints in the world of how to build a TSMC fab, how to build a Boeing aircraft and we gave hundreds of billions of dollars to everyone in this room. I do not believe that we are able to build a commercial aircraft within a couple of years. I don’t believe that we can stand up a TSMC fab if we had all of the written secrets. So all of this is about knowledge that needs to be cultivated. And so we need to cultivate that knowledge and not forget all of it and then value the workers and not just be so focused on the shiny tools.

Jon Finer:

Dan, you’ve moved back to the United States. And so to turn the conversation again back to the United States a bit, another of your observations about the lawyerly society is that lawyers are afforded a license in America, not a literal license, but a permission structure to opine on just about anything, to work in almost any field, to make policy in almost any area, and that there are problematic aspects of that. What’s interesting to me about the current administration is that that maybe seems less the case than it’s ever been, at least in recent history. And instead, we arguably have technologists who are given a permission structure to opine on things, make policy in areas, whether or not it’s the core of their expertise. And I guess I’m wondering whether you think that is better, worse, or similarly problematic.

Dan Wang:

I would still situate Donald Trump as a product of the lawyerly society rather than the antithesis. First of all, we cannot understand Donald Trump’s many decades in business without seeing how central lawsuits are to his business career. This man has sued everyone. He has sued his former business partners, The New York Times, the BBC, his political opponents, trained by, was it Roy Cohn in this lawfare space? So he is quite lawyerly, flinging accusations left and right, trying to establish guilt in the court of public opinion. I think that Donald Trump is still more lawyerly than not. And if the three of us are still speaking in our capacity as officers and representatives of the Yale Law School, well, we still got our guy in the White House, his name is JD Vance. So the Trump administration still feels pretty lawyerly to me.

Now, there was a moment in which Elon Musk, as well as there’s a team of technologists that about a year ago, tried to shake up the US government and try to do more from a technology to achieve more. And for the most part, that has not worked. Maybe not for almost any part has that turned out very well as a shakeup of the federal bureaucracy. And I think that it was a little bit tragic that Elon Musk decided to take a chainsaw to the federal government in order to cut jobs as if payroll is the biggest expense of the federal government.

And I think that it is very, very different from engineers in the past when we had folks like Venivar Bush or Hyman Rickover, father of the Nuclear Navy, or Robert Moses actually go into government to build. What we had were technologists who entered government to destroy. And that was a very strange thing to me. And what I would much rather see are technologists who go into the government to actually build these big projects on behalf of the people, on behalf of national security to achieve something that more Americans can be proud of.

Jake Sullivan:

In your most recent annual letter, you were pretty hard on Silicon Valley, on technologists. I think you used the phrase, “Soft Leninism,” that the tech elite has adopted a form of soft Leninism. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?

Dan Wang:

Yeah. My opening thought here is that after living for six years in China and now being in Silicon Valley, one similarity between Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party is that both places are serious, self-serious, and indeed completely humorless. Who is the funniest tech founder today? Now, Elon Musk believes he is funny, but do the rest of us? I’m not sure. It is really difficult to find people who are not po-faced in Silicon Valley when they discuss AI. It is really difficult to-

Jake Sullivan:

Who are not what faced?

Dan Wang:

Po-faced, that they’re just a little bit too self-serious about all of these sort of things. And I think the register in terms of speaking between both Silicon Valley founders as well as Communist Party officials is that they fluctuate between these super mundane, boring corporate speak, or this apocalyptic register that AI is going to make our unemployment rate shoot to 25%. This is Dario’s remark on 60 Minutes as well. Or this is either going to take our jobs, but there’s also a chance that it’s going to kill us all. So this does not feel like an especially appealing sales pitch to me, but this is kind of the normal register that a lot of these AI funders talk about things. And so both the Communist Party as well as Silicon Valley have a little bit of this image problem, communication problem, perhaps we can say. Now, they are very intent on inventing the future.

And so the soft Leninism comes in that, I think there is seriousness between both the Communist Party as well as Silicon Valley. They have built a lot of successful projects and they can’t communicate very well to the rest of the world. Maybe what they do is fundamentally objectionable in all sorts of ways, and they also tend to kind of just fall in line when the political winds shift. And I think the Silicon Valley from both the founders as well as many of the rank and file said, “Oh, well, in the Biden administration, we have to care much more about these equity issues. Okay, we’ll do that. Oh, that administration is out of office. Okay, so let’s ignore all of these things now.” And so there is kind of a bit of a sense that everybody sort of falls in line, depending on the political wins at the top.

Jon Finer:

Dan, this has been a very insightful conversation and we’re grateful for it. Maybe we can end on a slightly lighter note in the last minute or two that we’ve got left. You’ve noted that Silicon Valley tech elites and the Chinese Communist Party share one key trait. They’re both, in your phrase, completely humorless and entirely self-serious, which you just alluded to. Wondering who you’d rather have dinner with, a top tier tech leader or a Politburo member, and who would make the better joke about lawyers in that conversation?

Dan Wang:

Can we grab drinks later? If I could spend some real time with a member of the Politburo, it’s not going to be fun, it’s not going to be fun, but it might well be interesting. And I think that this is something that all of us ought to aspire to. How many people in the United States have spent serious time with a sitting member of the Politburo today? How many people actually have a pretty keen sense of what they’re thinking about, their hopes for their kids, their anxieties, what they really think about for China? Maybe not very many. And so this is where I hope that it would be great if their system understood ours and our system understood theirs quite a lot better.

Jake Sullivan:

That’s a great way to end this, Dan. We are so grateful to you for spending the time with us. Thank you for navigating us effectively through our first ever live show. Thanks to the audience and let’s give it up for Dan Wang.

Dan Wang:

Thank you very much.

Jake Sullivan:

Jon, it’s a couple days later. We’ve just come down off the high of our first ever live show, it’s very exciting.

Jon Finer:

I’m not quite down yet, maybe you are. I’m still riding the wave.

Jake Sullivan:

What did you make of what Dan had to say, now that you’ve had a chance to reflect?

Jon Finer:

I was pretty impressed by the degree to which he is both a fluent analyst of two very different cultures, strategic cultures, industrial cultures, and also someone who is able to be, I think, a clear-eyed critic of the advantages and disadvantages that both sides in this competition bring to bear without revealing obvious biases one way or the other. I was pretty impressed by that and felt like he gave us a lot to think about, obviously, as people who have been on one side of this competition about where our side needs to up its game a bit.

Jake Sullivan:

As I was reading Breakneck and then listening to him, I was reminded of the first time I was in the President’s daily brief with President Obama. This was in the Oval Office back in 2013. I had just become the National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden. And in the room was Barack Obama, the President of the United States, lawyer, Joe Biden, Vice President, lawyer, Tom Donnellan, National Security Advisor, lawyer, Tony Blinken, Deputy National Security Advisor, lawyer, Lisa Monaco, Homeland Security Advisor, lawyer, me, lawyer, and Dennis McDonough, who was not a lawyer, the Chief of Staff, but was the most lawyerly person in the room by a mile, as I’ve told him before. And so it did hit home pretty hard. And you mentioned at the beginning of the episode that we’re both Yale law graduates. He himself has operated in the Yale law ecosystem, as we discussed on the episode.

So all of this hit home and I thought what he said basically about proceduralism, about caution, about the vetocracy, these are all things you and I experienced in government as we were trying to make progress on industrial strategy, on supply chain resilience, on a lot of national security things, not to mention, of course, an issue that has come very much in the news, our defense industrial base and our ability to produce munitions at speed and scale. And I think America, as a country that cannot build as rapidly or comprehensively as we need to, we felt and saw in so many ways, I guess if I were to say one thing I walked away still having a real question about, it’s something you posed to him about how actually in this administration, it’s really the technologists, not the lawyers, who are at the center of the policy conversation, and technologists like lawyers think they know everything about everything.

And I kind of wanted to hear more from him about a world in which Silicon Valley has its hand on the tiller to a greater extent than say, New Haven, Connecticut. And felt he gave, as he always does, a judicious and interesting answer. But that to me is a big question and particularly in the age of AI, I think it’s increasingly going to be a question. And I was not satisfied with him saying, “Well, that’s still very lawyerly in its own way,” because I don’t think it quite captures the difference in mindset and zeitgeist in Washington DC as a result of one group, I think, having a much more dominant position than the other.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, he also sort of said Trump likes to sue people, he learned from at the foot of Roy Cohn. It was a good answer, but I think you’re right that we still have a lot to learn and the jury is still out on how well that the technologists are going to do in lieu of lawyers in this administration. And probably hard to imagine an administration in which lawyers have had less power and been more pushed around than in the current Trump administration right up to and including the firing of the Attorney General who was favorably inclined towards almost everything the President wanted to do and still couldn’t manage to survive much more than a year of this administration.

I’ll tell you the other thing that I’ve been thinking about, which is what makes a successful and impactful book. I’ve not written a book, you’re in the process of doing so. But what was interesting to me about Breakneck is it both had one big, simple idea, society of engineers versus a society of lawyers, but also so much nuanced and detailed and narrative and anecdotal analysis that flowed beneath that.

But actually, I think both were kind of the key to the success of that book. When I mentioned to people who obviously haven’t heard the podcast yet, that we had just interviewed Dan Wang, almost everybody could immediately say, “Oh yeah, engineers versus lawyers.” And half the time I was like, “Well, did you read the book?” About half the time they said, no, they hadn’t read the book, but they were aware that it had this one big, impactful idea. So I think that made a big difference for him, but also being able to bring the goods analytically behind it was-

Jake Sullivan:

That it was not just sloganeering or kind of a simple heuristic. Yeah, I guess I will sum up my view on this entire conversation by paraphrasing another question you asked, which is kind of how I think about this whole issue at this point. And that is, how do you produce Robert Moses’ outcomes without Robert Moses’ trail of destruction? Is that really viable? Or is the idea of shifting back to building at speed and scale almost necessarily based on the premise that you’re going to have to cut through low income neighborhoods, environmental regulations, someone’s going to be a loser in a real way, and that’s just part of the price tag of building? It certainly was in our country. It certainly has been in spades in China, and Dan Wang does a brilliant job of detailing that.

But for me, the diagnosis part here is easier. The prescription part of how you actually achieve a greater degree of engineering outcomes without giving up on the protection of the rights of people, of the habitat of communities, that’s a whole other thing. And I think that for me, I’ve not yet seen either in his project or in the abundance project, a particularly clear set of prescriptions for how to achieve that. I know it’s not a mechanical formula or an algorithm, but to me, that really is where the rubber hits the road and where policymakers need to center their attention.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, it’s funny. Urban renewal, which is the sort of euphemistic in some ways, phrase that’s been applied to that Robert Moses period and to the objectives that they pursued is, I think, come to be seen in the rear-view mirror as something far different from that in retrospect and maybe even in real time in many places, including, by the way, in New Haven, Connecticut, not to bring everything back full circle, but that was a place that was in some ways the cradle of, not Robert Moses’ own work, but the processes and the building that was inspired by it, and I think aged quite badly.

And let’s hope that this period of attempted re-industrialization in the United States and all of the policy work that flows from it is handled more responsibly this time and ultimately more durable and successful, because it’s a big ticket question that’s not a particularly partisan one. There are Democrats and Republicans that are invested in this.

Jake Sullivan:

Absolutely. And this is not just an economic policy or infrastructure policy or domestic policy question. It is absolutely a matter of national security. And you and I spent a lot of time over our four years in the NSC suite, in the Oval Office, in the situation room on phones with cabinet secretaries and deputy secretaries, talking about this set of issues because our ability to do this effectively is a vital component to America’s national security, to our resilience, to our competitiveness, to our ability to effectively lead in the 21st century.

And so this is not just some curiosity of a book for us. This was kind of our lived experience and will be the lived experience of future national security advisors and deputy national security advisors. And so for our listeners, maybe some of them listened and thought, “Huh, this is kind of a detour.” It certainly is not. This is right down the main highway of what is necessary to fortify America’s competitive edge and the foundations of our national strength. Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jon Finer:

We’d love to hear from you. Send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com.

Jake Sullivan:

And subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode. You can find us at substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

Debating the War in Iran and U.S. Strategy (w/H.R. McMaster and Matt Pottinger)

April 22, 2026

TEASER:

H. R. McMaster:

We should pay particular attention to the emotions, the aspirations, and the ideology that drive and constrain the other. In this case, if you consider the Iranian regime, I believe that what drives and constrains them is the emotion of fear, fear of losing their grip on power.

Matt Pottinger:

It’s ironic that President Trump, having really been the first who pioneered some of these strategies to keep advanced semiconductors out of China’s hands, is now rethinking that. I hope that someone will explain to him besides industrialists who are trying to sell chips. I hope someone with a national security background will explain to him the consequences if he goes that route.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. This is a special episode of The Long Game. We may say that every week, but this time we really mean it for a few reasons. For one thing, it’s the first time we’ve had not just one guest, but two. But more importantly, we’ve been looking forward to this one because these are two guests who have walked a mile or more in our shoes. And we’re grateful to be joined by H. R. McMaster and Matt Pottinger, who served under President Trump in his first term as his national security advisor and deputy national security advisor respectively. They understand, therefore, as few others do, the incredible privilege and truth be told, the irritations, indignities, and other more challenging aspects of the jobs that Jake and I held under President Biden. We want to stipulate upfront that while we’ve had our differences over various Trump administration policies, and obviously both H. R. and Matt have been strong critics of administrations we’ve worked in. Speaking for Jake and me, these are two people who service and professionalism we deeply respect, both in their most recent government jobs and long before.

So by way of introduction, former National Security Advisor, H. R. Master is a retired Army Lieutenant General with a decorated military career that includes combat tours in the first Gulf War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where I actually got to spend three weeks with a unit he commanded in a city called Tal Afar back in 2005 when I was a journalist. He’s the author of several acclaimed books, including Dereliction of Duty, about the failures of the joint staff during Vietnam, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. He’s currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, but perhaps most important and impressive of all of these achievements, he is a co-host of not just one, but two podcasts.

Former Deputy National Security Advisor, Matt Pottinger, is a fluent Mandarin speaker who began his career as an award-winning reporter in China and throughout Asia for the Wall Street Journal, where we actually set about 10 desks apart way back when for a year in Hong Kong. Outraged by terrorist violence at the height of the Iraq War and by the PRC repression he covered as a journalist, Matt joined the Marines in 2005, serving as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan, and he’s now the CEO of Garnaut Global, an advisory firm. He also spends a lot of his time in Utah, which makes Jake and me jealous each ski season. H. R., Matt, welcome to The Long Game.

H. R. McMaster:

Hey, great to be with you, Jon and Jake, and my old buddy, Matt. It’s a privilege to be with you guys.

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah. Thanks for having us. Looking forward to it.

Jake Sullivan:

So I think we should get the most contentious question out of the way right off the bat so we can then move on to all the easier stuff. Which one of you two had the harder White House job?

H. R. McMaster:

Hey, Matt, for sure. Matt went for almost the whole duration. I’m just one of the many Trump national security advisors.

Matt Pottinger:

Well, I had the COVID year. That left a mark. I’ve got scars from that year sitting in the west wing. H. R., you were there for the first 15 months of the administration. I think that was the hardest period in my view, just because everything was so unsettled. You had a lot of people competing for different ... Basically to different policies. I think you did an amazing job of presenting options to the president and carrying out his decisions when he made them, and also compiling strategies that ended up serving for the duration of the first Trump term. And even at least with respect to some of the China campaign plans, I think some of that even carried over into early Biden years. So H. R. had the tougher job.

H. R. McMaster:

It’s the people you’re working with. And Matt, man, what a privilege to work with you, man. You did a fantastic job.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, you guys are much more friendly to each other than Jon and I are to each other so maybe we could learn a thing or two from you. I don’t know. We had a bit more of the hostile work environment thing going on. At least that was the reign of terror I tried to implement as national security advisor.

Jon Finer:

The Crucible. The Crucible.

Jake Sullivan:

But it’s interesting. I’m on record, unfortunately, probably, because Jon reminds me of it frequently as saying that-

Jon Finer:

The I printed it out. Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

The deputy national security advisor job, the PDNSA job, is the hardest job in government, having to really sit in the engine room of the deputies committee and wrangle these policies and then serve them up to principles and beyond. That was my experience. So H. R., I think you and I, yeah, we had a lot on our shoulders, but nothing quite compared to these two guys when they were in those deputy roles.

Jon Finer:

I assume you guys probably felt as we did. That the NSC was a pretty special place in the US government. An all star team from across the entire enterprise. We had people on our team who worked under you and your counterparts from Trump one, just as you inherited some people from the Obama team. It seems to work less that way, candidly, than it once did. And I’m wondering if you feel like something is lost in the process where there isn’t as much of that carryover, particularly of the career officials from one administration to the next.

H. R. McMaster:

Well, as you guys know, the National Security Council staff is used in different ways by different presidents based on their preferences, based on their styles. There have been dramatic changes in the past. For example, between the Eisenhower and the Kennedy administrations, for example, with a more formal and then a less formal decision making process. And President Trump was unique. He’s a real estate guy that came into office. And so he received information differently. He expected different I think, things from the National Security Council staff. But I think what’s most important, no matter what the administration is and how they use the National Security Advisor and the National Security Council staff is to understand the importance of that staff, Jon, that I think you’re getting to. Which is really, it’s important because you’re the body that can coordinate and integrate efforts across the departments and agencies to get the president best analysis. And then I think what every president deserves is multiple options for presidential decision making. Because, hey, the president’s the person who got elected, so the president should make that decision.

You were kind to mention my book, Dereliction of Duty. When I studied how and why Vietnam became an American war, I saw grave deficiencies in the way McGeorge Bundy ran the national security decision making process. They didn’t take enough time thinking about the nature of the challenges that they were facing, the challenge of Vietnam in particular. They didn’t set clear goals and objectives. They didn’t identify the assumptions on which their planning was based, and they provided President Johnson with a shiny option that he preferred because Johnson really was prioritizing his domestic political priorities and saw Vietnam principally as a danger to those. So hey, it’s super important.

And I’ll turn over to Matt, but I do think President Trump in Trump two, somebody convinced him that his own staff was the deep state. And so he’s taken the cleaver to the National Security Council staff. And I think with some of the inconsistencies you see with the administration and its communications, for example, of its policies and decisions and objectives, I think that’s a symptom of not having that staff and not having that coordination and integration function. Matt, what are your thoughts on that question?

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah. Well, the NSC has two superpowers, right? One is that it’s the only agency, if you want to call it that, it’s the president’s direct staff. But it’s the only part of the government that has the mandate and the tradition and the president’s authority to convene the whole government to make policy. Other agencies have tried that. State department every now and then tries to refashion itself as the new NSC that it will convene all the departments and agencies. That’s never worked out well and it’s always been transient, those periods. Just ask Al Haig, right?

But the other is proximity to the president. That’s the other superpower. The National Security Advisor and his deputy are just down the hall from the Oval Office. They have their staff right across West Exec Avenue in the old executive office building, the Eisenhower Building. And so run properly, the NSC is the president’s eyes and ears and also his peripheral vision on what the consequences of various policies will be. Yeah. Right now the NSC is tiny. Jake and Jon, where did you guys max out with policy staff, not including people running the situation room and so forth, but what was your policy staff number?

Jake Sullivan:

We ended up getting pretty big, close to 200 actually, by the time that we left.

Matt Pottinger:

Okay. So now it’s three dozen. Okay.

Jake Sullivan:

Right.

H. R. McMaster:

We were down to like 110, I think. Weren’t we, Matt? Or 85 at one point, I think we got down to.

Matt Pottinger:

But by the time Robert O’Brien finished the first Trump term as national security advisor and I was his deputy, I think we were at 108 policy staff, which I actually thought was a very good number. I was nervous about shrinking to that level, but I actually thought it ran pretty well because you didn’t have territorial disputes within the NSC. Everybody had more work, just a little more work than they could handle, but they were also empowered. We were able to delegate to those people, those senior directors who we trusted and who were doing good service for the president. When you’ve got 36 people, that basically means that things are not being surfaced to the president. Everything is led from the president down.

Now look, the president has a constitutional prerogative to make foreign policy. If that’s how he wants to make policy, that’s his decision. But what it means is he’s going to have less peripheral vision about some of the consequences. It also means it’s harder to do some of the really technically difficult strategy. I thought that one of the things that you did extremely well in the Biden administration was the technological competition with Beijing and with other access powers. Making sure that the United States didn’t just have a relative advantage, but had an absolute advantage that could increase over time in things like AI, computing power and the like. That’s impossible to do those kinds of policies straight from the Oval Office just because of the sheer complexity and just the amount of time. It took you guys a couple of years to get the first iteration of that policy done. So that’s one of the costs of having such a small staff.

Jake Sullivan:

H. R., I was going to ask you, you made a comment in talking about Dereliction of Duty and the process of decision making leading into Vietnam that stood out to me. You said that the national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy and the people around him served up to the president a shiny option, I think was the phrase you used. We sometimes on this podcast do a segment called the options memo, where we try to walk through what it’s like sitting in the NSC to try to serve up to the president credible options that he or she could select from among. Can you talk for a minute about what you meant by shiny option in that case and how you guys think about this idea of the options memo or the options presentation? What makes for a good delineation of options to a president? What are the risks and pitfalls of serving up options that put the president down a bad course?

H. R. McMaster:

Well, I do think, as we’ve been discussing, one of the functions as the national security advisor, because you’re the only person in the national security establishment who has the president as his or her only client, is to be the guardian of the president’s independence of judgment. And so a way to do that is to insist on multiple options and it began with this process we put into place with problem framing. Applying design thinking to the most significant challenges and opportunities we’re facing internationally. So on that first day on the job, I took out a legal pad and just wrote down what I thought were the top 15 challenges to national security. And then what we did is we started with a principal small group framing session. That’s a mouthful, but what it was meant to do is convene the principles around a framing paper, five pages only, that then outlined the nature of the challenge we’re facing, the vital interests that are at stake. “Hey, what’s the so what?” The goal and objectives, the assumptions on which a planning effort would be based, and then listing out the obstacles to progress that impede us from getting to those goals and objectives, and maybe the opportunities, what we saw as opportunities.

Then the memo ended and we convened the principles and the first part of our discussion in the situation room was, “Hey, you can’t talk about what we’re going to do. Do we have the framing right first? Do we have the framing right?” Then after that discussion, we said, “Okay, hey, now what are your ideas about how we can integrate all elements of national power and efforts of like-minded partners to overcome the obstacles, take advantage of the opportunities?” And then you get top-down guidance instead of bottom-up processes that I think are then prone to satisficing behavior, lowest common denominator, protection of institutional prerogatives. And so this became the document that then drove the development of the options, which to get to your question, are differentiated by resource level, by risk maybe, and they have to be distinguishable from one another so that the president can really ...

What the benefit is in the comparison of those options, if you have that framing done, you can say, “Oh, how effective do you think this strategy would be at achieving those objectives? What are the risks associated with it? What are the resources that are available?” And then the president can think about those trade-offs and make hopefully the best available decision. And as you know, there aren’t that many really easy, great options. A lot of times you’re looking at a least bad option and a situation that’s relatively intractable or a long-term problem that you have to mitigate over time.

Jake Sullivan:

Jon and I joke sometimes that frequently the Pentagon’s favored method of doing options was do nothing, do nuclear war or do the thing we want to do and sending that over.

H. R. McMaster:

That’s what Kissinger said. Remember Kissinger said, “There are three options, capitulation, nuclear war, and the option you want.”

Jon Finer:

If you guys are willing, we’d love to dive into some of the policy issues that are facing the country, facing the administration. Could talk about this stuff related to process in the NSC all day, but maybe we should start with the biggest news story in the world right now, which is the war in Iran. In the perhaps unlikely event that you get a phone call summoning you back to the Oval Office to talk to the president about what you are seeing, maybe just starting with one big question, how is this war going from the perspective of somebody who is not sitting in the administration right now and he wants your unvarnished take, what would you say to him at this point in the conflict?

H. R. McMaster:

Well, hey, Matt, I’m going to turn it over to you quickly here, but I would say the same thing that we said to President Trump as we were framing his Iran strategy in 2017. A strategy that he announced in a speech that he gave in, I think, September or October of 2017 in the diplomatic room, which is worth reading actually. And the fundamental assumption that underpinned that strategy was that there will not be peace in the Middle East, there will not be peace with Iran, there will not be security for the Iranian people or any of the peoples in the region who they have inflicted so much pain and suffering on, including us and our troops in the region, but also their Arab neighbors, Israel, Lebanon. Until there is a fundamental change in the nature of the Iranian government such that it ceases its permanent hostility to the great Satan, us, the cancerous boils, they refer to Israel and their Arab neighbors in the West broadly.

So that would be the main element of advice. And so associated with that would be, I think it’s very important to sustain the pressure on the regime, whether this morphs into economic pressure more than military or whether it’s military pressure again, but I don’t think that we can really accomplish the objective we set out to accomplish that was announced in the very beginning to prevent Iran from projecting power outside its borders until there is a change in the nature of that regime. And certainly a regime that’s murdered 40,000 of its own people in a 48-hour period in January, there won’t be security for the Iranian people until that as well. I’m thinking about the Churchill quotation about the Suez crisis. He said, “I would not have dared, but if I had dared, I would not have dared stop.” And I think that’s the danger at this moment is that we’ll stop too soon.

Jon Finer:

You wrote earlier in this conflict ... And Matt, then I’d love to hear your take on this as well. That the dictatorship in Tehran will not survive this campaign. I assume, although tell me if you disagree that you don’t think full regime change has occurred yet. The president sometimes suggests yes, sometimes suggests no. Do you still believe that that statement is true, that the regime will not survive this campaign? And if not, can this be a victory for the United States without that?

H. R. McMaster:

Yeah. I think the regime has not changed fundamentally in terms of its hostility, as I mentioned, but it has changed in terms of the people, right? There’s been a great deal of upward mobility within the Iranian system. And I think that what is different is the cost that had been exacted on them in terms of their military capabilities, but also their ability to regenerate a lot of these weapon systems, whether it’s petrochemical plants and missile manufacturing facilities and so forth. And what that does is open the door to a sustained campaign to prevent them from reconstituting some of these capabilities.

And then the other question is, how can they survive economically? Who’s going to help rebuild Iran? Is China and Russia? Are they going to invest in Iran? Certainly we’re not going to. So I think in the long term, the regime’s done, they’re finished, they murdered 40,000 of their own people. The Iranian people are ready for the change in my view. So of course, these regimes only have to be stronger than any organized opposition to survive. So this could be a lengthy transition, but I think they’re finished, Jon.

Matt Pottinger:

President Trump is consistent with his predecessors in saying that Iran simply cannot be permitted to have a nuclear arsenal. That’s number one. Number two is he has ... I think ... Tell me if you disagree with the premise that it’s pretty clear that Iran has been pursuing a nuclear arsenal for decades now. It’s really been since 2006 that we’ve tried to achieve the dismantling of an enrichment capability that has now produced a highly enriched uranium that could be used to build a dozen bombs. I think it’s also true that diplomacy on its own did not work. The JCPOA was ultimately a plan for delaying, but not forbidding Iran from having the tools that it would need to constitute a nuclear arsenal.

So when President Trump went last summer during the so called 12-day war, Operation Midnight Hammer, bombing the Fordo enrichment bunker, I think that that was exactly the right policy, especially having tried everything else over the course of various administrations. What we were really on course for, I think before Fordo was a North Korea type outcome where we would give incentives, give relief to the North Koreans in the hope for delay, delay, delay. But ultimately, we end up with a North Korean regime that has dozens of nuclear weapons. That approach didn’t work. I think we were on course for a similar ultimate outcome. We were only delaying the inevitable.

But the difference ... And here’s where I think President Trump has also been correct. Is that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would not be India or even Pakistan. This is a regime that has already shown what its ambitions are. It’s been willing to wage warfare throughout the region against peaceful neighbors, conducted the attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023, or at least provided the support, help with the planning, the hang gliders that Hamas used to fly in.

H. R. McMaster:

The whole ring of fire, including Hezbollah and the proxy army of Syria. Right.

Matt Pottinger:

Look, October seven was really a seven front war against Israel with Iran as the head of the serpent running that war and enabling that war. As H. R. just mentioned a minute ago, they killed 40,000 of their own citizens. That was just in January this year, right? They gunned down kids in the streets by the 10s of thousands, made Tienanmen Square look like a blip almost by comparison in terms of just the scale of the carnage. I think that an Iran, armed with nuclear weapons would not be a stable force in the region or in the world. And I’d be interested if you disagree with that view.

During the Obama administration, I remember that the Department of Defense made public for a time at the National Defense University some of the papers that were captured from Saddam Hussein, and I had the privilege of being able to read some of the notes from Saddam’s NSC meetings, like his summaries of conclusion from his NSC meetings during the ‘70s and the ‘80s. And what I learned from that was that he was certainly intent on developing nuclear weapons, especially that period in the 1980s when he was really going for it. The Israelis did us the favor of bombing the Osirak reactor, which really foiled, derailed his plants. But why did Saddam want nuclear weapons? It wasn’t because he wanted to go nuke the world, it was so that he would have a shield, a deterrent shield that would enable him to use terrorist proxies as well as conventional forces to invade and take over Jerusalem. It was in his notes. He said, “Look, if I’ve got nukes, no one can do anything back to me, and that means that I can attack my neighbors with impunity.” And I think that’s very similar to the logic that the Islamic regime in Iran is operating under.

Jake Sullivan:

So I think we would agree, Jon and I, that preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon has to be a top priority of US policy. We may have differences with you guys on obviously the Iran nuclear deal and on the relative merits of getting to that prevention through diplomacy rather than through war. But fundamentally, keeping Iran from getting a nuke is a really important element of US strategy. What’s interesting to me about this idea of the deterrent shield though, Matt, is Iran has turned another theoretical deterrent shield into an actual one that is closing the Strait of Hormuz. And I think a lesson that it seems to have learned out of all of this is that this is an available option to it and that it can do so in a way that imposes costs on the United States and the rest of the world. And maybe it’s even more usable than a nuke because the threshold for actually firing a nuke is really quite high. So how worried are you guys about Iran emerging from this conflict with the experience of having shut down the Strait and with the notion that they could do so again in the future if they felt like they were under threat or attack from either the US or Israel or someone else?

Matt Pottinger:

I thought it was obvious before the war that Iran would probably close the Strait of Hormuz in light of the fact that it was facing an existential attack. The Ayatollah was taken out, that leadership was taken out, I won’t miss them. But nonetheless, Iran is finding that even with conventional weapons and relatively new cheap asymmetric weapons, drones and coastal defense cruise missiles and ballistic missiles and smart sea mines and things like this, that they’re able to close the thing. But I think that by attacking all of their neighbors, neighbors who were not involved in the war at the outset, they’re showing what is at stake. They’re making your point for you in a sense, Jake. What are we left with if in fact this regime is permitted to basically close the Strait of Hormuz at will? And so I think that President Trump ultimately going for a counter blockade, even though this isn’t going to be fast, I do think that this was a pretty good option given a series of really unsavory options, right?

It’s basically a way to say, “Okay, if you want to play that game, you’re not going to benefit from the export of oil either.” And in some ways, Iran over time will feel that pinch even worse than some of the other states that might be able to begin exporting through the Red Sea and so forth. So I think to borrow again, H. R.’s Churchill quotes like, “We chose to press the matter now, so now we got to see it through.” I don’t think that settling for Iranian control of the Strait is a acceptable outcome.

H. R. McMaster:

And Jake, as you know, as well as anybody, I think it’s really important to consider what I would call the latest phase in a 47-year-long war with Iran, a war that they’ve waged against us through what they would describe as asymmetric means. Really, their strategy was to expend every Arab life that they could or that they needed to to accomplish their objectives of getting us out of the region as the first step in isolating and destroying Israel and killing all the Jews. That’s really what they wanted to do. And of course, associated with that was fomenting these sectarian civil wars to keep the Arab world perpetually weakened and meshed in conflict so they could create that land bridge to the Mediterranean.

I think to connect what we’ve seen applied in the Strait of Hormuz, and to your point the missile drone strike complex that we’ve seen employed, that was essentially a conventional shield behind which they were pursuing the most destructive weapons on earth, including an ICBM, because none of us believed that they had a space program. So I think that it was important to strike Iran at this time as they were trying to really deepen their arsenal by orders of magnitude, the missile drone arsenal. And the strikes that we’ve seen them conduct, as Matt mentioned, is 14 countries in the region is a pretty good ex post facto rationale for conducting this campaign. Now, the way it’s been done, the way it’s been communicated, the poor diplomatic effort around it ... In fact, the counterproductive gratuitous insults to the allies and then wondering why they’re not jumping in with ... Believe me, I have a lot of issues in the way it’s been done, but I think the stakes are really high for seeing it through. It was not a surprise that they shut down the straight. as you know, we have a military exercise every year on opening the Strait that often involves 30 different countries involved in it.

So hey, I think that now’s the time to do it. And I do believe we have the military capability. Do we have the will to do it? But we have the capability to force the straight back open if necessary and deny them that ability.

Jon Finer:

So the whole world is now wondering when and how this will end, and obviously a wide range of views as to the shoulds. But we’re going to ask you to use your crystal ball. We’ve done this a few times. I would say our batting average is well under a thousand in terms of where all this is headed. And maybe just one question for each of you on that. Matt, you’ve argued, I think, that Iran is unlikely to exceed to US demands diplomatically that have not been won on the battlefield, but there are a lot of those demands, at least according to what’s been publicly reported. So do you think there will be a diplomatic deal ultimately to resolve this? And then H. R. for you, you’ve described this concept I think that we found very interesting called strategic narcissism. And if I butcher it, please feel free to correct it. But basically it sounds to me like where policymakers see the world not necessarily as it is, but in some ways as they want it to be. And an antidote to that is what you call strategic empathy, which is basically a better understanding of an adversary’s agency and motivations to inform strategy. And I wonder whether you see any risk that the current administration is falling into this trap on Iran. So one question for each of you on how this ends.

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah. All wars ultimately end with some kind of a diplomatic statement of some kind. It’s just that the negotiation is still taking place on the battlefield. And in fact, the guy who appears to be leading the negotiations with the US on the Iranian side said as much yesterday. He says, “We’re bringing new capabilities to the battlefield.” His main point is you’re not going to take from us in negotiation things you couldn’t take from us in battle. And that’s why I think the war is going to continue. I think it is continuing now just in a less kinetic form at the moment. But look, a blockade, which is what Iran is executing in the Strait of Hormuz, is an act of war. So even though they agreed to a two-week ceasefire a couple of weeks ago, Iran continued to wage war through blockade.

Blockade is war. President Trump waited about a week or so and said, “Okay, I’ll meet your blockade. I’ll see you one.” And now he’s blocking Iranian oil from traveling out of the region. And he’s blocking, as we learned dramatically just in the last day, blocking Chinese shipments of weapons and military supplies that could be deemed dual use, but which are really quite useful in making rocket fuel and ballistic missiles and the like. So the US is keeping that stuff out and is also keeping Iran hemmed in. So I don’t think that the calculus has changed enough yet for a deal to be likely. I hope I’m proven wrong by that, by the way. I know that the sides are meeting apparently tonight in Pakistan.

But if Iran’s not bluffing and is saying, “No, look, we’re not going to give up enrichment, we’re not going to give up our stockpile of highly enriched uranium,” then I think that that’s one area where President Trump has actually been pretty consistent going all the way back to when he first announced that he was going to run for president eight, nine years ago. He said that this is one thing that I’m not going to permit is Iran having a pathway to a nuclear weapon. So I don’t think President Trump’s going to back down on that. And I think Iran isn’t ready to back down on its side either, which means negotiation’s going to continue in the form of blockades at a minimum.

H. R. McMaster:

And Jon, I’ll just say hate to reinforce Matt’s, I think, forecast here. Strategic narcissism, in addition to what you described, I would describe it as the tendency to believe that what we do or choose not to do is decisive toward achieving a favorable outcome, and also thereby neglecting the authorship over the future that others enjoy, including adversaries rivals-

Jon Finer:

Other side gets a vote.

H. R. McMaster:

Right. Exactly. And so I think the antidote is obviously strategic empathy, as you alluded to. This is a term I borrowed from a great historian, Zachary Shore, in his book called A Sense of the Enemy. And he advises that we should pay particular attention to the emotions, the aspirations, and the ideology that drive and constrain the other. And in this case, if you consider the Iranian regime, I believe that what drives and constrains them is the emotion of fear, fear of losing their grip on power. After murdering 40,000 of your own people in a 48-hour period, it’s likely that the Iranian people will not be kind to them if they lose power. And then also the ideology of the revolution, which has, as its prominent feature, this permanent hostility to the old great Satan and the cancerous boil and its Arab neighbors.

So I think that’s not going to change. And so what you’re likely to get is a pause rather than peace, if there is any kind of an agreement that comes out of tomorrow. And there’ll be a continuation of the war, as Matt said, in different ways. It’ll ebb and flow in terms of military action. But as a historian, I tend to view this in the historical perspective. Hey, this has been going on since ‘79, 1979, and it will continue to go on, I believe, until there is that change in the nature of the regime. The other factor to consider in terms of strategic empathy are the Gulf States and Israel. And from the Gulf State perspective, their economic model is ruined, has been ruined by the Iranians. And so again, from their perspective, and you saw this with Yousef Al Otaiba’s op-ed and what we’ve heard about the Saudis and Emiratis saying, “Hey, we’ve got to finish this job.” They know they can’t restore that economic model until there’s a change in the nature of the regime.

And from the perspective of Israel, after October 7th, 2023, they’re not going to watch idly as the Iranian regime tries to reconstitute their capabilities as Ghalibaf announced that they’re trying to do. Right now we’ve seen reports of them trying to reconstitute their missile and drone capabilities. You’re starting to dig out some of these areas that have been buried to get access to more drones and missile launchers. So hey, I think it’s not going to be over. If there is anything that looks like an end of the war, it’ll be just a pause.

Jake Sullivan:

If that’s right, if you guys are both right that maybe there’s a pause, maybe not, but in any event, the war will continue in one form or another. Do you think there will come a moment where President Trump authorizes putting US boots on the ground, actually putting ground troops either on an island or in an operation against the nuclear program? Is that something you guys see as likely in the coming period?

Matt Pottinger:

I don’t know. I saw President Trump quoted secondhand in a Wall Street Journal article over the weekend where he said our ground troops would be sitting ducks. If he were to put ground troops in, I was telling H. R. just the other day when I saw you out in California that the wars that H. R. and I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a lot of ways, the character of infantry warfare has changed. The nature of warfare is unchanging, but the character, which is to say how it is fought, is changing all the time. And I think it has changed dramatically in post 2022, Europe on the battlefields in Ukraine where 90% of casualties are from drones. Increasingly, those are now drones that don’t even have direct human control behind them. Infantry has to spread out to dramatic extents and dig in and hide.

The Russians were losing a thousand men a day, either wounded or killed. A thousand men a day back in December, according to the latest NATO statistics that I saw. And most of those were from drones. So the United States actually is not a capable power yet in that kind of infantry warfare. We don’t have any experience with it. The Ukrainians and the Russians know a lot about it. Actually, so do the North Koreans who have a division of men. There are more Cuban soldiers who have experienced with this kind of war than Americans do. And that’s because there are thousands of Cuban mercenaries fighting against Ukraine on behalf of Russia right now. So I would caution, unless the Pentagon knows something that I don’t, which they might about new capabilities, layered defenses and the like, I would be very, very careful in advocating for ground war.

H. R. McMaster:

Yeah. I’ll just say that you can’t have, I don’t think a change in the regime just from the air. There has to be somebody on the ground, but that’s somebody could be the Iranian people. It could be opposition groups in certain parts of the country that have a cascading effect. Jake, you were there in Washington, you and Jon as the Assad regime collapsed in sort of that cascading offensive after the IDF kicked the leg out from under the stool of Hezbollah that was helping to prop up the outside regime. So I don’t know what’s in the works there. I’m glad we don’t, but I think there probably are already elements in Iran who are prepared to assist the people if they rise up again like they did in January. So I think that that’s one way it could end in terms of the regime changing. Another is fragmentation. And I don’t know enough about the situation within the Iranian security forces.

Is there a splintering within the IRGC? Is there really any difference between any of the leaders there who could turn against the existing regime and put into place some form of a transitional government? Are there those in the Artesh or the conventional armed forces who could turn against the regime? These are all questions that, I can’t answer, but to your point, there’s not going to be regime change from the air. I could see a limited role for ground troops if they were to take critical terrain from which they could project power with, as Matt mentioned, you would need an air defense bubble over that force, maybe to control key terrain associated with the bend and the Strait of Hormuz, for example. The one island, his name is escaping me, the large island that’s largely that’s inhabited by a civilian population as well, but has all these caves that house a lot of these fast attack boats and so forth. So there could be a limited mission, I think, for ground forces, but certainly when you look at the scale of Iran, there’s not going to be an offensive that imposes a new government.

Jon Finer:

Just to change gears here to another topic that’s obviously of great consequence and that both of you have worked on, there’s no issue that better epitomizes the name we’ve chosen for our podcast than China, the long game. Our strategic competition with them is in some ways the ultimate long game, and they’ve been playing it a bit longer than we have. Unfortunately, for the United States, we sometimes feel as if we’re playing a bit from behind here. And part of that, I think, is during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whereas we’ve discussed, you both served, China saw and has described what they called a period of strategic opportunity to make advances while in their view we were distracted. And I wonder how much risk you see in the current moment that this happens again at a more consequential time, given that China’s power today is far greater than it was 20, 25 years ago, given concerns about the Taiwan military timeline or anything else. How much do you worry about this issue of strategic distraction by the United States?

Matt Pottinger:

The US policy right now ... And I would say in sort of the later part of the Biden administration, you can argue against this if you’d like, but I would describe the policy then and now as a détente. And that China is also working within this détente framework. And the US now has even more reasons, I guess, to pursue a détente than it had when you were in office because the president has chosen to sequence some very bold steps geopolitically, raiding the capital of Venezuela and kidnapping the dictator there.

H. R. McMaster:

Arresting. Arresting. Arresting.

Matt Pottinger:

Look. I thought it was an amazing move, both politically, geostrategically, as well as militarily how it was executed. So many things could have gone wrong. It was amazing. But I’m very happy to see Maduro go. I think that this opens up all kinds of interesting opportunities now in our own hemisphere. But nonetheless, that was a big, bold move. This Iran thing is, to put it mildly ... And we’re not even near the end of this thing potentially, major move there. The president has Cuba in his sights. And so I think that he doesn’t want to confront Beijing at a moment when he’s confronting a whole lot of other people. And so détente historically has not worked out well for the United States. I would argue that America’s Cold War strategy was calibrated confrontation, keeping the war cold. Cold wars are a lot better than hot wars. And that the détente decade of the 1970s was in many ways an aberration from Harry Truman all the way through Reagan and Bush and the end of the Cold War.

And so I think that it’s understandable why that’s where we are now, but Beijing is going to use that time to try to expand ... First of all, to try to catch up with us in AI. And I certainly hope we don’t pursue policies that will help them in that regard. And I think we flirted with some pretty bad policy ideas like selling China advanced AI chips. AI should be our third offset that allows us to maintain deterrence and a huge technological advantage over our adversaries. So it’s ironic that President Trump, having really been the first who pioneered some of these strategies, some of these policies to keep advanced semiconductors out of China’s hands, is now rethinking that. And I hope that someone will explain to him besides industrialists who are trying to sell chips. I hope someone with a national security background will explain to him the consequences if he goes that route.

But nonetheless, I think that right now he’s in a détente. He wants to buy time to pursue these other bold gambles. He wants to buy time to get the United States out from under China’s leverage on rare earths. Beijing is going to use the time, just like the Soviets use the time to their advantage in the 1970s. And I think Beijing will use that time to gather more military strength and ultimately to become more aggressive.

H. R. McMaster:

Yeah. Jon, I would just add to that, that the competitions in other theaters and other geographic areas are very important to the competition with China. There are some who advocate for prioritizing China in a way that we play little kids soccer and all run to the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. But the commitments that we’ve had in helping to sustain through the purchase of weapons by Europeans and provision of those weapons to the Ukrainians, plus the resources that we’re expending in the war against Iran have highlighted a lack of capacity in our armed forces and a lack of depth in our defense industrial base, as well as problems, as Matt alluded to in terms of the resilience and reliability of critical supply chains. Supply chains that are relevant to the production of weapons, and munitions, and so forth.

This is why I think the president’s budget proposal for the Department of War now is important to get bipartisan support for that because we’re facing a bow wave of deferred modernization. As Matt mentioned, the evolution of the character of warfare. We do have countermeasures to drones. We do have our own drone technological capabilities, but we have not fielded these at scale and integrated them into our joint force. And we see the degree to which our joint force is stretched in terms of just the size of all of the services. So it’s going to take, I think, sustained investment across many years to build up the hard power, which I think all of us would agree is super important to preventing this cold war with China from turning into a hot war. And so I see that as priorities.

But think about what if there is a change in the nature of the Iranian government such that it better reflects the attitudes and aspirations of its people? If that’s the case, China’s a huge loser because they’ve lost their platform in Venezuela, which as you know, has been funding the far left progressive movements that are anti-American and the far left progressive dictatorships from Cuba and Nicaragua and so forth. And then also they’ve lost their client in the Middle East, and therefore I think all of their influence in the Middle East, because their influence in the Middle East, I think ... And Jake and Jon, I’d love to hear what you think about this, has really been based on portraying themselves as those who could constrain the Iranian regime. And once the Iranian regime shifts ... And I don’t think the Gulf States are going to have any patience for the Chinese anymore, given their support for Iran. And of course, we’ve already seen this happen with Russia after it’s lost its influence in Syria, because what they do is they do a bait and switch. You had Russia who’s supporting Assad and thereby Iranian influence and the ability to create this land bridge.

And then what Putin would do is portray himself, “Oh, listen, work with me, and I can constrain the Assad regime and the Iranians.” So I think both Russia and China are big losers if there’s a transition in the nature of the Iranian government, which again is why I think we have to see this campaign through.

Jake Sullivan:

H. R., President Trump, it looks like is going to have a summit with Xi Jinping in less than a month. We’ll see if it gets postponed again, but let’s assume it happens. You were responsible for preparing him for meetings like that in the first term when you were a national security advisor. Matt, you also played a critical role in preparing him for meetings. We’d love to hear what that process was like and also what you expect to see at that next encounter. What do you think will happen there and what do you think the opportunities are and what are you worried about?

H. R. McMaster:

Well, I’ll tell you, Matt really played the foundational role in all of this in preparing the president for the summer, but also in laying the foundation, which was I think the most significant shift in US foreign policy since the end of the cold War Jake, one that you continued on in terms of the shift from cooperation and engagement with China under this ... What turns out to be a flawed assumption that China having been welcomed into the international economic order would play by the rules and as China prospered, it would liberalize its economy and liberalize its form of government. Okay. By 2017, it was pretty damn clear that wasn’t going to happen. So Matt was really the architect of this shift to transparent competition with China. And so we put together, as I mentioned, this principle small group framing session around China in March of 2017, so that we would have at least a basis for our engagement with the Chinese delegation and for the president with Xi Jinping in Mar-a-Lago during the first week of April. That was his first summit.

And the way we prepared him was by framing out that strategy and introducing a whole new set of assumptions. One of them was, “Hey, China is not going to play by the rules. They’re not going to be a responsible stakeholder. They’re going to try to tear down the existing rules of international discourse and replace them with a new set of rules that are sympathetic to their authoritarian form of governance and their status mercantilist economic model.” So first, we wanted President Trump to buy into that framing, which he did. It was already his inclination if you’d seen what he had said on the campaign trail and everything in 2016. And then what we did is ... President Trump is reflexively contrarian. So the approach Matt and I took was like, “Hey, this is what Xi Jinping wants you to say, and this is how he’s going to use what you say against you.” Matt, you want to pick up on that in terms of new ... Yeah.

Matt Pottinger:

Well, just in terms of what’s going to come out of the meeting, the summit, it’ll be like other détente era summits where the summit is the accomplishment, right? I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of substance out of it. I think the US wants to extend the nominal truce on rare earths, although I think Beijing is already subverting what was agreed in Busan because it’s announced all of these licensing procedures and regimes for Japan and other countries. All that targets the United States ultimately, right? If China says, look, any company on earth needs a license in order to sell dual use materials to Japan, even if they’re not selling them from China, but they contain minute amounts of Chinese material in them, that’s Beijing basically asserting control over global trade and they’re sneaking their way toward that. So I think President Trump and his team are going to try to mitigate that.

I think Beijing wants to try to mitigate a return of export controls on things like AI chips and to try to mitigate against a return of the full ... Some of the incremental tariffs that have come on during the first Trump term and then during the Biden administration, which put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, good move by the way. That was the right call. I hope President Trump sustains that. He has so far. So I don’t think a whole lot’s going to come out of that.

But I want to ask you guys, because sometimes I give credit in areas where I think you guys did a good job, but I wonder, knowing what you know now, looking at President Trump’s first year, set aside the current Iran war for a second, but Venezuela, you guys were struggling to try to figure out a way to allow or pave the way for a fair election. In 2024, Maduro, I think predictably stole the election in light of what happened with the raid arresting Maduro and assuming that the US helps push through a new election so that there’s a real democratic transfer, which it would be a huge mistake not to do that. Were you a little envious of the early 2026 raid and the change that now makes possible in Venezuela?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, first I’d say ... And you mentioned this earlier, we were just amazed by the professionalism and the skill of the special operators who pulled off that raid. It’s really remarkable. But A, I think Jon and I are both dubious that there will be a Democratic transition in Venezuela. And the object of the current administration’s policy seems to actually be to reinforce the new dictator, Delcy Rodriguez, as she cracks down on any opposition in the country and they’ve shunted aside the Nobel Prize winning opposition leader, María Corina Machado. So I’m skeptical that will happen. But more importantly, actually, Jon and I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times after that, where we said our biggest concern about what happened there is that President Trump’s appetite would grow with the eating, that he would see a raid that achieved the operational objective grabbing Maduro in the face of real risk and think, “Hey, I can use the US military when and where I want with little consequence.” And that was a big reason for why he launched this war in Iran without really preparing for what Iran would do in response.

I think in his mind, “Hey, Iran won’t really respond. We can do this relatively consequence free.” And so in the end, I think the pattern of the 12-day war followed by Maduro set the stage for what’s unfolded. And I’ve been struck over the course of this conversation, especially H. R., your view, your confidence that there will be regime change in Iran. My own view is that it’s unlikely that this IRGC hardened regime with a new hominy as the supreme leader is likely to stick around for quite a while and that we’re going to have to be dealing with it with additional capabilities that it didn’t really have as fully brought into focus before, namely what it can do with missiles and drones to hold the Strait of Hormuz and hold its neighbors at risk. So I don’t see good outcomes in the Iran case. And I think part of the reason we’re in this mess, frankly, is because of what happened in Venezuela.

Matt Pottinger:

What about July last year when ... It was during your administration when ... Iran just went forward with more enrichment. You guys were trying to get a diplomatic deal going. The Iranians were not having it. They were emboldened to wage war against Israel. If you were facing the situation last July that President faced and President Biden were in the seat, would you have said, “Okay, they’re within months of having a nuclear weapon, they’re enriching now to 60%. It’s just another twirl of the centrifuge to get to bomb grade.” Would you have advised bombing Fordo?

Jon Finer:

Matt, you said something earlier in the conversation. I think you asked to say something if we disagreed, and I don’t think either of us did, but I think we probably do, which is that Iran is pursuing ... And I think you called it an arsenal of nuclear weapons and has been for some time. I think our view, I think the US intelligence community’s view is that Iran certainly uses its nuclear program as leverage and maybe on some level is buying the option to at some point pursue a nuclear weapon, but has not been pursuing a weapons program now for more than 20 years. And I think that that remains the case, although I think there have been a lot of questions raised now that having been bombed both last summer and obviously, again, extensively during the course of the current war, whether Iran’s calculus is going to change on that question of pursuing a nuclear weapon and whether they’re going to look somewhat enviously at a country like North Korea, which has nuclear weapons and has never been attacked since it became a nuclear power. So I think that’s one big strategic question that we would’ve been wrestling with when it comes to the decision to go after the nuclear program.

But I think even maybe more to the point, the problem that the Trump administration in my view faces now, the need for some sort of diplomatic outcome, if they want to decisively, definitively deal with the 1000 pounds of highly enriched uranium that remains inside Iran, despite two now separate conflicts in part aimed at dealing with that problem is the same problem they faced before they went to war the first time. They were in negotiations before the 12-day war. They interrupted those negotiations, they and Israel with military action. They were again in negotiations before the current conflict, interrupted those negotiations with military action, and the bar for actually a diplomatic outcome that is and I think in our view, the only way to definitively, durably over the long term deal with this nuclear program has gone way up and has gotten more challenging because we have revealed ourselves to be a somewhat, if not very unreliable negotiating partner having pulled out of the deal we made and then twice interrupted negotiations with going to war with them. So I think that would be our concern.

And again, and maybe just the last point, this all went much better operationally the first time around than I think any of the war games we ever did on war with Iran ever suggested it would. Fewer casualties on our side, operational success from a military perspective, which cannot be denied. But there was never any guarantee that if we went back at it as we have this time, that operational success would lead to the sorts of strategic outcomes that I think you and we both want. And right now that hangs in the balance, I think, in our view.

Matt Pottinger:

So you guys really thought that Iran was enriching to close to fissile material just for leverage, but without the intention of ever having nukes?

Jake Sullivan:

I think Jon’s point that they were also buying the option, right? They were creating a capability that they could, if they chose to in the future, go for it. And that’s why it’s so important to get a deal in place that doesn’t allow that to happen. And that’s, I think, what President Trump is now actually trying to do after two rounds of military action. He’s going back to the notion that actually we have to do a deal to get this highly enriched uranium because we don’t have another way to get it other than through diplomacy. But yeah, Matt, both the US and Israeli intelligence community said they were not actively going for a bomb. They were enriching both to create a capability to have leverage against us and a threat against us and to have a put option if they chose to pursue it. And that I think essentially has been the case since ‘03 when the supreme leader turned off the active nuclear weapons program.

So don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying the Iran nuclear program is not a threat because of this option issue, just that they weren’t racing for a bomb over the course of the past 20 years. They were rather dialing things based on how they thought they could generate leverage against us and how they could create a capability that if in the future they wanted to pursue a bomb, they would. Now, I believe that they are probably going to come out of all of this more determined to get a bomb than they were a year or two ago on a faster timeline because they will want additional deterrence following two rounds of military action against them. But they’re also going to look at the Strait of Hormuz and say, “That too presents for us a real card we can play in terms of deterrence on a going forward basis because of the cost that it imposes on everyone else.”

Matt Pottinger:

So we’ll definitely agree to disagree on the aims of the regime.

H. R. McMaster:

Hey, so Jon, the counterpoint that I would make would be, what good have negotiations with the Iranians done since 1979 when Brzezinski went to meet the new Islamic Republic foreign minister in Algeria, and then they took the hostage? Really nothing. So I really think that negotiations with the Iranians without the prospect for the use of force or the use of force really don’t accomplish anything because they are determined, I think, to continue this 47-year-long war against the Great Satan. So I do think that this campaign was necessary. It’s hard obviously to prove a negative, but they were pursuing this orders of magnitude larger missile drone strike complex. And I think if we had let that continue, it would’ve given them that conventional shield behind which they could race to a nuclear weapon. So I think both points of view are valid and should be considered, but what I would say is that the cost of not initiating this new phase of the long war against Iran in the long run would’ve been much higher and consistent with the name of this podcast, The Long Game. In the long game, the cost of inaction would’ve been higher.

Jake Sullivan:

Okay. We’re going to get you guys out of here on this question, H. R. And it’s a two-part question for each of you. One is, your percentage odds that let’s say two years from today, the Iranian regime is still in place necessitating some form of diplomacy with respect to its nuclear program as the Trump administration is pursuing right now, one. And two, your percentage odds that one month from now, there’s some deal, whether the deal sticks or not, there’s some deal between the Trump administration and Iran. What would you say to each of those two things?

H. R. McMaster:

Yeah, I’ll just say quickly, 25% chance that in two years, the Islamic Republic is still in place. So

Jake Sullivan:

You think 75% chance it’s gone in two years?

H. R. McMaster:

75% chance is gone. And then the chance of this being more than a pause and really being peace in terms of the negotiations, that’s like a 2% chance.

Matt Pottinger:

I agree with H. R. that long term this regime is in trouble, but I’d give it a lot lower odds that that happens in two years, but I hope I’m wrong. I really hope I’m wrong about that.

Jake Sullivan:

And do you think that there’ll be at least ... Taking H. R.’s point that I liked his phrase, pause not peace, because I think there’s a lot in that. But do you think they come out and announce a framework that at least is starting to get implemented even in a ragged way within the next month? Or do you think that’s unlikely?

Matt Pottinger:

Maybe, but then it’d probably be like after the first Gulf War, 1991, the US negotiated a pause and the end of that war, and then two years later, we were bombing them again. And then it was like every two years we would have a kinetic campaign, at least short term, as well as the no-fly zones over the north and south. So I think we’re in for ... And any pause will be a pause, right? You could argue we’ve been at war with them since 1979. The Iranians would say that’s true. At a minimum, I would say that the current war is a continuation from really the October 7, 2023 raids on Israel, which was where Iran said, “Okay, this is our big chance. We’re going for it. We’re going to let Hezbollah loose. We’re going to have these various militia. We’re going to have the Houthi rebels in Yemen shut down the Red Sea and shipping through the Red Sea.” So they went for it. And this is a consequence that both the midnight hammer raid, the 12-day war last year, the current war are really consequences of Iran’s decision to gamble big, to roll the dice of war in late 2023. And I think that the short periods of peace, intermittent peace are pauses and we’re going to see a continuation of that pattern until this regime turns into something very different.

Jon Finer:

All right. We’ve abused your time, but we’ve really enjoyed the conversation and I think we’ve learned something from it. Hopefully others will as well and good to show that you can have a lot of disagreements, a civil discussion about it, and hopefully bring some clarity to some of these really hard issues. So grateful to both you.

Jake Sullivan:

And there’s a lot of other issues, Russia, Ukraine, which H. R. you mentioned that we didn’t get to. So we’re going to be banging down your door to come back on at some point so we can go through some of these

Jon Finer:

We’ll give you a decent interval, but ...

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. Exactly. So thank you guys. Really appreciate it.

H. R. McMaster:

Thanks for having us. Real pleasure. Great to be with you guys.

Jake Sullivan:

Take care guys.

H. R. McMaster:

Take care.

Jake Sullivan:

So Jon, this is the part where we get to talk about our guests after they’re gone, which is always fun.

Jon Finer:

You don’t leave the party early.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now, I thought that was a fascinating conversation, which really illuminated some different fundamental assumptions about these issue areas, including both Iran and China. And frankly, I think your question about strategic narcissism and strategic empathy was a meta question in a way because this episode is a lot about strategic empathy, hearing from Trump administration officials, how they view the world, how they think about things. And I think it’s really important for our listeners who may not agree with everything they heard today to hear that out in full. And to me, there were really two assumptions put forward, one explicit and one implicit that to me are the dividing lines and the analysis between how you and I see a lot of things and how those guys do. The first was that this regime’s on its last legs. We’re going to push it over maybe with the help of the Iranian people, maybe just with boots on the ground, and that’s going to solve our problem with Iran, and really that’s the only solution. And H. R. said 75% chance he thinks that will happen. If you think that your whole approach here is quite different than what you and I think, believe. That was the explicit assumption.

The implicit assumption, Matt kept referring to détente, and I hope we get to have them back on to talk that through more fully. What he’s saying there implicitly is, you guys weren’t for winning. You were for managing the competition, not for winning it, and we have to go win it. And that means changing China. China has to look fundamentally different in the future. And I think you and I both don’t think this China is going anywhere, and so we do have to learn to live alongside one another as major powers, even as we compete vigorously. So to me the biggest takeaway was not so much about a particular policy point it was about these underlying fundamental assumptions that drive the policy points that emerge the other side of that. And hearing H. R. puzzle through how he did policy planning as national security advisor only reinforce that.

Jon Finer:

Yeah. Agree with all that. And I think one of the things that’s amazing about a conversation like that is we spent an hour with them and got through, I don’t know, a fraction of, I think, the material we would’ve liked to cover.

Jake Sullivan:

I know. I know.

Jon Finer:

You mentioned Russia-Ukraine. We’ve got this giant conflict where I suspect, to be honest, they probably, although I can’t describe views to them, have some differences of opinion with the current administration about how they’re handling it, would’ve liked to tease that out a bit, get their sense of where they think that is going. Certainly on China, there was a lot more to dig into, even though we did cover that topic a bit. What I liked about the conversation is that I think we, on our side of the political spectrum, sometimes treat the Trump administration or its defenders as a caricature.And there are, by the way, some people who basically represent caricatures of MAGA and Trumpism who you can play clips from, you could even have on and have a very different discussion. But these are really two of the most thoughtful, knowledgeable, experienced practitioners who don’t defend everything that Trump has done, but largely still are members of his camp. And I think to hear from them is good for us. I hope good for our listeners because you should be contending, I think, with the strongest version of people who disagree with you.

Jake Sullivan:

And patriotic people too. They’re very much people who care about the national interest of the United States and have selflessly served this country. They don’t really put themselves on the line. No, it’s totally true. And your point about them having a difference on Russia-Ukraine, the most explicit criticism of President Trump’s policy was H. R. McMaster saying he screwed things up with our allies in Europe over the Iran-

Jon Finer:

Offhandedly, yes.

Jake Sullivan:

But that was the one time where he’s like, “I don’t agree with that.” It’s all the other stuff, which goes to show you that there is a real fault line between guys who occupy both the traditional Republican and the MAGA foreign policy camp that this is an issue, the transatlantic relationship, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, that is a real dividing line. It’s too bad we didn’t get a chance to do that today, but I think we should make a pact to a few months down the road, have them come back. We’ll see where things are in Iran so we can reflect on this conversation and then we can take up some of those other issues as well. Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jon Finer:

We’d love to hear from you. Send us your questions and comments at longgame@foxmedia.com.

Jake Sullivan:

And subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

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Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The long game is a Vox Media Podcast network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

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Jon Finer:

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Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

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Jake Sullivan:

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Jon Finer:

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Jake Sullivan:

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Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

John Kerry on Iran, Israel, and Diplomacy

April 16, 2026

TEASER:

Sec. John Kerry:

It literally is the strongest nuclear agreement the United States or the world has ever seen because all of our intelligence community, the Russian, the Chinese, the European, our own, told us this deal will allow us to know what they’re doing. And indeed we did. And when President Trump decided to pull out, even Israeli intelligence was saying to him, “Don’t pull out. They are in compliance.” So this is a war that absolutely never had to be fought, did not have to be fought.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. Today we’re going to be focused yet again on the conflict in Iran, negotiations blockade, possible return to war. We’re going to come back at the end and talk a bit about a major election that took place in Hungary with serious international implications that led to the defeat of Viktor Orban, close friend of the current US administration who will now be heading out of office. But before that, and importantly, we have a special guest, and it feels a bit odd for Jake and me to introduce John Kerry to an audience that is focused on foreign affairs because many of you, if not all of you, are probably more familiar with him and his career than you are with us. But in the spirit of Henry Kissinger, who once said something like, “Not everybody needs an introduction, but people tend to like them.” We’re going to go ahead and give it a shot.

So Jake and I both worked with John Kerry across two US administrations. I had the honor personally of serving as his chief of staff at the end of the Obama administration. He will hate this line, but it’s still worth saying it. John Kerry has served our country in various capacities for at least 45 years during his career. And during that time, he’s had an almost Forest Gump-like connection to the most consequential issues the country has faced, from his decorated service in Vietnam to coming home from that war and protesting against it to try to get it to end, to landing on Richard Nixon’s enemies list as a result of those protests to serving for decades-

Sec. John Kerry:

I thought you were going to say landing on the moon.

Jon Finer:

Not yet, but these days-

Jake Sullivan:

That could still come, Artemis three.

Jon Finer:

You’ve got time. You’ve got some years to devote to that. Decades of service in the US Senate, 2004 presidential nomination and his 10 years President Obama’s second term Secretary of State, which included both the Iran nuclear deal, which we will obviously dig into during this episode, and also the Paris Climate Accord, which I know was both a passion project and a consequential one for the world, and then later serving in his last government rule as Joe Biden’s climate envoy.

In addition to the Iranians, he has negotiated with Israelis and Palestinians to try to end their conflict with Afghans to try to avert a civil war in that country, with Russians on the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, and with Senate Republicans to try to get them to agree to put a price on carbon emissions. So he knows a thing or two about trying to solve hard problems with hard people. And he earned a reputation for extraordinary patience, relentlessness and empathy for those across the table, which are underrated traits, I think, we think, for a top diplomat. So John Kerry, welcome to The Long Game.

Sec. John Kerry:

Thank you, guys. I’m really happy to be here with you.

Jake Sullivan:

We’re incredibly grateful that you’re here with us today.

Sec. John Kerry:

Oh, don’t be silly. It’s really great to be here.

Jake Sullivan:

So Mr. Secretary, we are going to dig into negotiating with the Iranians, the current state of play with respect to the diplomacy between the Trump administration and Iran. There’s another actor here in the middle of all this, which is the Pakistanis. And Jon mentioned all the people you negotiated with. You also had the opportunity to negotiate with them on a mission that President Obama sent you on when you were still in the Senate, to try to recover the remains of the stealth helicopter that went down as part of the Bin Laden raid.

Sec. John Kerry:

Right.

Jake Sullivan:

And so you’ve been there in the room with those guys. It’s kind of an unusual thing that the Pakistanis are sitting here as the peacemakers, given their historic role in the region. But could you talk for a minute about that experience and how you see their role in all of this as the US and Iran try to come to some understanding?

Sec. John Kerry:

Well, as you guys know better than most people, foreign policy is a combination of things, and it’s largely representing your interests and understanding the interests of the people you’re dealing with. And to the degree you can build a personal relationship so much the better.

So in Pakistan, we had a lot of problems, as you guys remember, with the ISI, their intelligence service, which played a lot of different angles and games. And you never quite could be certain you were getting a truth or the truth. But on the other hand, there were moments where they could be really helpful because of the relationships they had sort of under the table and on the side. And as we were wrestling with terrorists, the Pakistani Taliban, and they were constantly playing in Afghanistan, and that was really problematic. So you have to find, to be really careful to know you weren’t being led down the Primrose path and lied to or misled or a decoy, but they also had an ability to be able to be helpful.

And where things were practical, I found that we were able to get some things done, like getting the helicopter back and those kinds of things. I mean, I spent hours with General Kayani, who was then, God rest his soul, the powerhouse in the country. And really the ISI was calling a lot of the shots. There was a certain disorder within the government, which made things very difficult. But in the end, you’ve got to go to the people in the places where you can leverage behavior. And that’s exactly what they’re doing now. I think it’s for the better. I’m delighted that the Prime Minister has stepped in. I think whenever Pakistan can find a moment to prove its... And this sounds a little condescending, I don’t mean it that way, but to really show that the government’s coming together and the government is prepared to actually work because often it is not and it’s a disparate group of interests. So I hope this can work.

Jon Finer:

So let’s get right to the nuclear talks.

Sec. John Kerry:

Yeah.

Jon Finer:

I think the first time the three of us were all in the same room together was probably in the early days of the negotiations around the JCPOA, either in Geneva or Vienna or one of those European capitals, probably Geneva, I guess, for the first round. You started working on Iran actually also before you became Secretary of State.

Sec. John Kerry:

When I was chairman of Foreign Relations Committee. Yeah.

Jon Finer:

And then you and President Obama made a sort of strategic decision that we had this problem with Iran’s nuclear program, too close to the potential of getting a weapon for comfort for the United States against our interests. And that the best way to deal with that was through a diplomatic deal. Not a deal that would be negotiated over one day or even one week or even one month, but over multiple years. Can you just describe that project, what the Iranians were like as negotiating partners? And when you started, did you realize you were going to be launching on this extended saga that would take up probably more of your time than anything else as Secretary of State?

Sec. John Kerry:

No, I didn’t know how long it would take, but I mean, Jake played a key role in the very beginning there. I remember going to President Obama as chairman of the committee and I said, “Look, I’ve won a friendship with the Sultan of Oman,” who was actually quite sick at the time. He had cancer, but we became really friendly. I mean, we just struck up a terrific relationship. In fact, later on in his cancer, right before he died, I was the only diplomat in the world who went to Bad Gastein and met with him and talked about the track we were on. And he helped. I was able to persuade him actually because the word we were getting from the Omanis was, “They don’t trust you. They’re not going to talk to you.”

Jon Finer:

They, the Iranians.

Sec. John Kerry:

They, the Iranians. And the Ayatollah particularly has a [inaudible 00:08:30] bonnet about it. And of course the IRGC would keep pushing, “You can’t negotiate with the great Satan. There’s no way they will deliver, you can’t trust them,” et cetera. And so I had this intermediary who was sort of working the file in Oman, and I persuaded the Sultan to take a trip to Iran to meet with the Ayatollah in order to kind of convey to him his sense that our bonafides were good, that we were prepared to be honest. We were prepared to be fair brokers. We were prepared to try to get a fair deal. And that played a role in his giving permission to these talks to even take place, because frankly, they were bitter enough about the US antipathy to them, that it was really hard. There was no clarity of the fact that the Ayatollah was going to let anybody really negotiate.

In the end, he became a force for closing the deal and now killed, now he died, and then you had the subsequent Ayatollah come in. But they were supportive of this idea. The people who wanted the nuclear weapon, and there were people in Iran who wanted nuclear weapon. Israel was not incorrect to say, “Okay, we need to be wary of what’s happening.” But it primarily came from the IRGC and they opposed-

Jon Finer:

Who are now closer to power maybe than they were-

Sec. John Kerry:

Closer to power than they were before. And they opposed having any talks or going into any limitations on the nuclear program. So actually, there were some sort of, I don’t know if it’s fair to call them moderates, but there were people who had a different opinion in Iran who wanted to move to negotiate with the West, to actually bring people together and see if they could open themselves up to the world. And this was the great benefit of what we were trying to do. We didn’t just want to have a short deal. “Do this, put this in the package, put the nuclear weapon into the refrigerator,” so to speak, and let it sit. We wanted to go further and had a theory of the case about regime change that ultimately would come as they were exposed to the world and taken down a different path and could see the benefits of it and that people could see the benefits of it.

In this instance, Israel, the Prime Minister came over here, sat in the situation room and said to the President of the United States and the assembled folks there, “There are four things that can happen. You can bomb them and we can end their nuclear capacity, and the people will rise up and there’ll be a change of regime,” et cetera. “But Israeli intelligence folks will now tell you they had no plan. They hadn’t worked the process.”

So Jon, going back to how we began, we had to build serious blocks here. And I remember going to Hillary, Secretary Clinton, with Jake in the room, and we met and I talked about this intermediary and about what was being proffered and whether or not we could try to advance this. And in the end, Jake went over with Bill Burns, I think it was, and they sort of sketched out an outline to what might or might not be able to be done. And we built off that. I mean, it became sort of... There were huge hurdles, as you remember, in between and tough negotiations. I mean, one thing I found is really tough negotiators.

Jon Finer:

And slow.

Sec. John Kerry:

And slow negotiators dragging it out and finding things. I mean, I can tell you a funny story, it’s half funny. Towards the end of the negotiations, we were in Vienna after three weeks of steady negotiating, and-

Jon Finer:

19 days. I think the longest American Secretary of State-

Sec. John Kerry:

19 days.

Jon Finer:

... had ever been out of the country in one place, maybe in American history, but certainly in a long time.

Sec. John Kerry:

And negotiating every single day.

Jake Sullivan:

Were you guys going stir-crazy? I mean, 19 straight days?

Sec. John Kerry:

19 straight days. We celebrated the 4th of July. The hotel put on a big 4th-

Jon Finer:

That’s right.

Sec. John Kerry:

... of July thing. It was great. But here’s the point I want to make, is that we thought they were sort of stalling and not pushing, and Lavrov was growing impatient.

Jon Finer:

The Russian Foreign Minister.

Sec. John Kerry:

The Russian Foreign Minister.

Jon Finer:

Still the Russian Foreign Minister.

Sec. John Kerry:

Still the Russian Foreign Minister. Sergey Lavrov, who is a very experienced and very smart and very capable diplomat. We obviously have disagreements with the positions he has represented.

Jon Finer:

Quite a few.

Sec. John Kerry:

But he knows how to argue for his country and he’s a smart cookie. So he came to me and said, “We’re going to be leaving here. We’re going to get out of here very soon, so forth.” So we kind of had a showdown in the hotel room where I brought in Mogherini and I brought in Lavrov.

Jake Sullivan:

Mogherini was the top European diplomat.

Sec. John Kerry:

Mogherini was the European diplomat who was working as-

Jon Finer:

Part mediator, part negotiator.

Sec. John Kerry:

Yeah.

Jon Finer:

As usual.

Sec. John Kerry:

And of course we had Sergey Lavrov and Zarif, Javad Zarif.

Jon Finer:

The Iranian Foreign Minister.

Sec. John Kerry:

The Foreign Minister Of Iran. And there were some hot words exchanged, really hot. And at one point, Minister Zarif got up and started to walk out screaming at Lavrov, and I had to literally get up and stand between the two of them, or it was going to come to fisticuffs. But that confrontation and the presence of Lavrov and sort of the pressure of this moment saying, “Look, are we going to do this or aren’t we going to do this?”

Jon Finer:

And Lavrov the Russian almost pressuring Zarif to do the deal. Which it’s hard to imagine now.

Sec. John Kerry:

“Now’s the time to make this.” And in that golden moment, literally it came together and we shook hands, the deal’s going to be done. Now-

Jake Sullivan:

So one minute it’s almost a fist fight. The next minute, shaking hands.

Sec. John Kerry:

Next moment, we were actually-

Jake Sullivan:

Iran nuclear deal.

Sec. John Kerry:

We had the Iran nuclear agreement done. And what’s important from all of that, I think, Jake, is that Russia was in the room. Wang Yi, the Foreign Minister of China, was not in the room in that moment, but he was involved directly in helping to move things. I flew to China a couple of times, you’ll recall, met with President Xi, solicit his help, particularly on dealing with the nuclear materials. “How do we have confidence they’re going to be true?” So these folks all joined in this. What I think is critical to this moment historically is that China, Russia, Germany, France, UK, United States, UN, were all at the table, all signing off in an agreement that absolutely, for certain, took a nuclear weapon off the table at least for a year. Our goal was we’ve got to have a year before-

Jake Sullivan:

Breakout time.

Sec. John Kerry:

... breakout time. And we achieved that. We actually were above one year. And so that agreement was entirely enforceable. It came with the greatest level of scrutiny, the greatest level of penetration of onsite inspections, of human redundancy in that process of any nuclear agreement we’ve ever done. It literally is the strongest nuclear agreement the United States or the world has ever seen. Because all of our intelligence community, the Russian, the Chinese, the European, our own, told us this deal will allow us to know what they’re doing. And indeed we did. And when President Trump decided to pull out, even Israeli intelligence was saying to him-

Jake Sullivan:

They’re in compliance.

Sec. John Kerry:

... “Don’t pull out. They are in compliance.” So this is a war we’re now in that absolutely never had to be fought. Did not have to be fought. And it’s questionable now, will we even get back to where we were or are we in a situation where we had a war where the deal was broken and we won’t have necessarily the kind of insight that we had through that deal. It’s a shocking... I mean, it’s really a stunning reversal of common sense, of stubbornness, of ideology or just shooting from the hip.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, after all that shooting from the hip and after all that literal shooting and bombing, the Trump administration seems to have come around with the view that, hey, we actually got to do some diplomacy with these guys. And we had one round, 21 hours apparently in the room, doesn’t quite match the 19-day stretch that you guys did right at the end. Now JD Vance, it looks like, along with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and others, may end up in another round of diplomacy. If JD Vance called you up, not that he’s likely to, but call any of us up, but if he did and said, “Hey, what did you learn? What advice would you give me for how to deal with these guys?” One of whom, Abbas Araghchi, the current foreign minister, was in that room with you-

Sec. John Kerry:

He was the deputy.

Jake Sullivan:

... or all that time.

Sec. John Kerry:

And we got to know him very well.

Jake Sullivan:

So if he said to you, “Mr. Secretary, what advice would you give us? What did you learn from this? What would you tell us now to do to try to get out of this jam, this pickle that we’re in to actually get to something useful?” What would you say?

Sec. John Kerry:

Well, the first thing I would say is you’ve really got to know who you’re talking to and you’ve got to have respect. It’s a word you always hear in dealing with the Chinese, mutual respect. You need to have a level of humility and respect for their own history, which in their case is several thousand years. Ours is 250 years. And they’re very proud of that. And you can’t just run by that. You can’t come in-

Jake Sullivan:

So saying things like, “You must agree to our terms or unconditional surrender.”

Sec. John Kerry:

You can’t just walk in and say, “Hey, everything I say-

Jon Finer:

Or civilization will die tonight, for example.

Sec. John Kerry:

Not a good... Also, it’s a little bit difficult to sit there and be ordering people or putting mandates in front of them, when you’ve just killed the Ayatollah, you’ve killed the wife, you’ve killed the daughter, you’ve killed the brother. I mean, and then I think... And we saw this flare up of pride on occasion. I mean, I remember once we were having a real hard, tough argument about making sure that we were able to see what they were doing and we had to make that fail safe. Reagan said, “Trust, but verify.” We, with President Obama, said, “Don’t trust, but verify.” And we built the strongest verification capacity you could conceivably built. So we have redundancy of people, of process. We had radio seals on the centrifuges. We had them destroy the vast majority of their centrifuges, keeping only the oldest ones. We had television cameras in the facilities where they would manufacture.

And in contrary to the distortions that had been thrown out there about this agreement, it did not end in 15 years or 25 years. There were certain items which changed, but the fundamental capacity to be able to have a demand inspection and enforce that demand inspection and go back to all of the sanctions and have the ability to be able to leverage a challenge inspection, that whole process was laid out. And so literally, I can sit here today and say we had the greatest insight, visibility, transparency, accountability of any agreement that I’ve ever seen since I’ve been in public life. And unfortunately, in just pulling out, we reinforced the worst fears of the Ayatollah who said, “You can’t trust the great Satan.” And indeed, they don’t trust. They didn’t trust us. So I think that if Jared and Steve and company, the vice president go in there and really work at making sure the Iranians understand that you understand some of their own difficulties and challenges here.

I personally believe we will get an agreement. I think there’s going to be an agreement forthcoming of one kind or another. I think the world needs that. I think we desperately need to calm things down. The commonality of interests in that region, the Middle East, are just staggering. There’s so much that we could be working towards with all of those countries. It came close. You came close. You were working hard to get Saudi Arabia on board. I am convinced, I don’t have the intel to show it, but I’m convinced that one of the reasons October 7th happened, which is so egregious and did traumatize Israel, all of us need to recognize how horrible that day of racism, of sheer fury and misogynistic and all the horrible things that were done that day, that would change any country.

And so Israel is now a different nation than it was before that. But you, by the work that was being done to give life to the Abraham Accords and have Saudi Arabia join and then ultimately recognize Israel, that Hamas suddenly said, “Oh my God, we better take center stage here.” And so it underscores the great complication of that region and of how difficult it is. But our Iran nuclear agreement spoke to all of those challenges and it provided a roadmap for how you could ultimately try to have a peaceful outcome.

Now, if Iran did what we all suspected it might do, which is why we made it so tough in terms of visibility, if Iran decided, “Oh, okay, we’re going to cheat. We’re going to go after this,” we had one year during which we could put to them, “Hey guys, we know what you’re doing, and if you don’t stop it, there are going to be serious implications.” Then you would act with Russia and China and everybody else who had an interest in the viability of this agreement.

Jon Finer:

You’ve laid out, I think, a very strong case for the deal, one that we believe and share, but there are also a number of criticisms of the Iran nuclear deal. So I just want to put those on the table and get your-

Sec. John Kerry:

Go for it.

Jon Finer:

... reaction to them. So people say a number of things. That it failed to constrain Iran’s bad behavior beyond the nuclear program, the proxies, everything else.

Sec. John Kerry:

Great. I’m glad you asked that.

Jon Finer:

Second, that it expired at some point, 10 to 15 years after it was implemented. Third, that it allowed Iran to enrich uranium at all. And fourth, to your point about the world being represented in the room, there were some parties I think who believed they should be represented in the room and were not. The countries in the region, the Gulf countries primarily, I think, believe they were left out.

What do you make of those criticisms? And the argument, by the way, that the critics make, which now feels a bit hollow that they didn’t want war, they just wanted a better deal.

Sec. John Kerry:

This agreement had a 15-year or a 25-year... For instance, the television cameras were going to be watching every ounce of uranium that was mined and milled and put into yellow cake and then ultimately controlled as waste, it was accounted for every ounce. So yes, there were a couple of things where we knew it didn’t make a difference in our ability to 100% track what was happening. We did give them a 15-year cutoff of one thing or another, but remember, the enrichment process limited them to enrichment of 3.67% of highly enriched.

Jon Finer:

Stockpile they have now is up to 60%.

Sec. John Kerry:

Correct. Allegedly, the buried stockpile now is about 440 kilograms.

Jake Sullivan:

Of 60%. Right.

Sec. John Kerry:

Right. And they had several thousands when we were beginning. We took that away. We left them with one or 2% of what they had, and that was highly accountable. But here’s what’s important. Iran is a signatory, unlike some other nations that possess nuclear weapons, Iran is a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty. And that treaty has an additional protocol that was added to it, partly because of what happened in North Korea and partly because people felt we needed greater insight. So that has challenged capacity. You can challenge, you can say, “We want to inspect this building. We believe something’s happening there.” And if Iran doesn’t give you access to that within a very short period of time, boom, sanctions come back and you can decide, okay, we have to use self-help here. We’re going to have to bomb or we may have to enforce.

So zero exploration on their membership in the MPD, which they could decide to get out of, in which case we would have probably gone to war. But absent that, they had to live up to that agreement and we had the capacity to enforce. And that was for lifetime. Lifetime. There was no cutoff of their responsibility to live up to the additional protocol, to live up to the restraint on amount of enrichment and so forth.

Now, on the other issues, I mean, it’s almost insulting to us to suggest that we weren’t taking note of what was happening with Hezbollah, what’s happening with the Houthi or what’s happening with missiles that they’re bringing in and building and pointing at Tel Aviv. We all understood, obviously, deeply, the threat to Israel, and I don’t think there was better friend than President Obama during that period of time when he put serious money on the table. I think it was about $38 billion, a memorandum was signed. We put everything on the table to make sure people understood we supported Israel and they weren’t going to be threatened.

So the question was, how do you get where you want to go? I. E., take the nuclear weapon off the table and also address the missiles and Hezbollah and support for the Houthis and the envelopment, so to speak. This Crescent, as it was referred to by many of our Arab friends, there was a quote, “Shia Crescent” growing around Sunni world, and that threatened people. So we made it clear, yes, we have to negotiate those issues, but first we need, because they’re about two weeks away from breakout capacity, we’ve got to put the coffin, put the lid on the coffin of their capacity to have a nuclear weapon, and then we will go to each of these other areas, missiles, et cetera. That could not have been more clear. And obviously the plan with the administration, and Jake, you’re more than familiar with this, obviously, was to rely on President Clinton, Hillary, to immediately move to take those next steps. That was the plan. And needless to say, the vote was different and there was different outcome and that never happened.

Jake Sullivan:

So I remember, well, you telling us at the time, as all of this was being debated in the Congress and the Israelis were coming over and making their case, Netanyahu speaking before, that one thing people don’t understand about the Iran nuclear deal is the Iran nuclear deal was not meant to be the end. It was meant to be-

Sec. John Kerry:

The beginning.

Jake Sullivan:

... the beginning. And that diplomacy necessarily is a series of negotiations and a series of agreements. And indeed, the Iran nuclear deal could have had follow-on elements just on the nuclear program itself, extending various things or whatever.

Sec. John Kerry:

Absolutely. Sure.

Jake Sullivan:

And then these other issues could get negotiated as well. And it’s treated as this kind of, well, you only had one shot to do everything with Iran. It had to be in this deal. And that’s just not at all how diplomacy works. And frankly, I think the Trump administration is going to learn that right now because I agree with you, they’re likely to get to some form of deal, but that deal is going to be the start of more negotiations with the Iranians--

Sec. John Kerry:

Totally.

Jake Sullivan:

... that’ll come down the road.

Sec. John Kerry:

I mean, I was negotiating with them for at least four years plus.

Jake Sullivan:

Exactly.

Sec. John Kerry:

And there’s no way you’re going to resolve all these other issues without that. And needless to say, we have to include our friends. I mean, UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, these folks have to all be at the table helping us to shape this longer term future. And they have obviously a huge stake, needless to say. And we owe it to the entire region to do this in a way that’s going to be successful, not in a haphazard kind of starting a war where you’re asking people to rise up against the regime who’ve already seen whatever numbers of thousands of people killed because they were demonstrating, and all of a sudden you say, “Oh my gosh, they didn’t rise up. What happened here?” Well, there’s Israeli intelligence that’s now becoming public, which articulates that the Israelis didn’t do anything, and we certainly didn’t do anything, to build the capacity to know who might be the leader, how that process might unfold. You don’t start a war sitting there saying, “Well, we hope they rise up.” And that literally is the way that’s-

Jake Sullivan:

Apparently, you do. You do.

Sec. John Kerry:

Apparently, you do. Yeah.

Jon Finer:

So can we ask you about two of your former workplaces and their role in this conflict? One is the US Congress. You famously testified in the US Senate, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Toward the end of the Vietnam War. You asked this famous question.

Sec. John Kerry:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Jon Finer:

Trying to get the Senate to act to constrain the US administration at that time. The US Congress has not played much of a role in constraining the Trump administration, even though there are many members, it seems, who are uncomfortable with the fact that the United States has gone to war without asking for congressional authorization. Even Republicans, I think privately have some of these concerns. President Trump obviously ran under a very different theory of American power saying we would not go back to these misadventures in the Middle East. What would your advice be to your former colleagues in that body about what they should be doing in this moment when it feels like they are not doing all that much?

Sec. John Kerry:

It’s very difficult when you don’t have either House. When you have the White House and both the House representatives and the Senate in the hands of one party, traditionally the Senate has always pulled back a little bit when that’s the situation. I know some of my former colleagues there, good friends, are deeply, deeply frustrated. But truly, I mean, it’s just a matter of fact that the members of the party in the majority have been unwilling to hold the president accountable. And I think it’s really, really sad, truly sad. I love the institution. I mean, if you get to go to the United States Senate, allegedly the world’s greatest deliberative body and you’re able to debate the great issues of your time, it’s a pinch me moment in life. And sadly, it’s not living up to it today. So I think that Harry Truman, of course, Harry Truman, a young senator sitting in the back way over in the corner where you sit when you’re 99 or 100 or whatever, which is where I sat when I first got there.

Jon Finer:

In seniority. Yeah.

Sec. John Kerry:

In seniority. And he wrote a letter home to his mother frequently. He was always writing his mother and he wrote, “Dearest mother, I’m here in the Senate looking across. It’s late at night. We’re debating the great issues of our time. I see the ghosts of Webster and Clay. And I pinch myself and I said, ‘God, how the hell did I get here?’” And about three months later, he’s working another debate and he’s there late at night. Says, “Mother, I’m here again. It’s late at night. I look across the aisle and see my colleagues, I pinch myself and I say, ‘How the hell did they get here anyway?’” So look, it’s politics and you have to find a way to break through.

Jake Sullivan:

Your other workplace, the State Department, you were Secretary of State. I don’t know if you felt while you were Secretary of State, “Hey, I got plenty of time to also be national security advisor.” That’s what Marco Rubio has chosen to do.

Jon Finer:

Pretty much.

Sec. John Kerry:

You can answer this question.

Jake Sullivan:

I can certainly say from my side, no. But I could see from your perspective as Secretary of State, hey, it’d be kind of good if there wasn’t any national security advisor there.

Jon Finer:

Not to have one at all.

Sec. John Kerry:

The Kissinger model.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly. What do you make of all that? And also, he’s taken two jobs, right? National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. But if you go down the big ticket negotiations, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, you look around the world now, a number of others as well, you were at the heart of all of that as Secretary of State. For whatever reason, Secretary Rubio, even when JD Vance is over there negotiating this, he’s at a UFC fight in Miami.

Sec. John Kerry:

Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

How do you look at the State Department right now, that role, the way that this administration conducts?

Sec. John Kerry:

Well, I think a lot of it is ad hoc.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah.

Sec. John Kerry:

There’s no piece of paper that says, “Here’s the responsibility designation for this person over here.” It’s sort of a grab bag. And I can’t speak to that because I don’t know who’s deciding what or what’s in somebody’s mind. I’ve been surprised that the secretary hasn’t been more front and center in some of this negotiating. It’s not done by one meeting. You guys know that. I mean, it takes a building process. It takes a lot of personal diplomacy back and forth shuttle as you did. And John, you’ve done it. You’re familiar with that. And I don’t see that. I don’t see the relationship building going, “Maybe it is behind the scenes.” I still believe they’ll get into an agreement for the simple reason that both parties need one.

Jon Finer:

We want to ask you about a couple of the other actors in this conflict. And maybe first on someone you’ve mentioned and a country you’ve mentioned, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel. There’s been obviously a lot of reporting about the Israeli role. This is a joint venture after all between the United States and Israel, this war, they’re fighting alongside each other, but also in the role in generating this conflict in the first place. You probably spent as many hours with Prime Minister Netanyahu as any American official. I was there with you for a lot of that.

During the war, Israel has also expanded its invasion and occupation of Southern Lebanon, going after Hezbollah. Violence in the West Bank by settlers has increased substantially. You gave a speech at the end of your time as Secretary of State foreshadowing, warning about some of this to come and basically signaling... Now this was 10 years ago, that the two state solution was in jeopardy. So talk a little bit about both the Israeli role in this conflict, but also this issue that’s been close to your work for many years-

Sec. John Kerry:

Sure.

Jon Finer:

... the effort to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians, which seems more fraught than maybe it’s ever been.

Sec. John Kerry:

Well, I think it is. I think it’s on life support, if even. I would not have spent that kind of time, Jon. I mean, I’m not a blind, wishful kind of operator who’s going to go out and just be hopeful about outcomes. The Prime Minister was very clear to me about his desire to try to find a solution and to work seriously to do it. And for a period of time, we pursued that, I think, diligently with John Allen, General John Allen, who had been our commander of forces in Afghanistan for a period of time, very capable. We put together a team of about 150 people from the DIA, from the CIA, from the Homeland Security, from the FBI, and in every intelligence entity, to measure with precision, how can we put a plan on the table that’s really going to do the job of providing for Israel’s security, which we made number one, if you don’t... And Netanyahu was very clear, “I want security. I want Israel.” And we said, “So do we, and we’re going to give that to you.”

So security was front and center in this. So God, I got King Abdullah to agree to have two roads on either side of the Jordan River with two fences, with 24/7 patrols so that not an ant or a scorpion could cross that without you seeing it. Two Egys balloons up in the air, tethered balloons which can track 350 targets simultaneously. Airport built that had a sliver of its... Airport in Palestine, but also in Jordan, managed by Israel with Israelis present in that facility to make sure every egress was covered. I mean, all the imaginative things we could do to create it. And we had a secret meeting in Aqaba at which President el-Sisi came, King Abdullah came, I was there representing the US, John Allen was there, and we had maps that showed what was happening to the West Bank. That if you were going to have a two state solution, which was still the announced policy of all of Europe, the United States, and allegedly Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel saying, “Yes, we support two state.” A famous speech he gave at Bar-Ilan University.

Netanyahu Clip:

In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two free peoples live side by side in amity and mutual respect, each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other.

Sec. John Kerry:

And so we worked on the presumption that we had partners on both sides, Palestinian otherwise who were ready to act, recognizing that increasing amounts of the West Bank were disappearing to the settlements. And a US policy under every president, Republican, Democrat, has always been, we’re against the settlements.

Jon Finer:

Until now.

Sec. John Kerry:

But in the Oslo accords of 1993, there were about 100,000 settlers. Now they’re over 700,000 and they’re pouring in now, being encouraged to go in by Minister Ben-Gvir and they’re being armed and there’s a lot of violence taking place at what is happening now. And if you look at a map of what has happened to Israel in the West Bank, the greater Judea-Samaria argument is driving the choices that are being made. And it turns out that the Prime Minister is not supportive of two states. He is in fact 100%, and has said so publicly and reiterated it recently, that there will never be a Palestinian state while he is Prime Minister. And he has lauded the statesmanship of Israel and putting them where they are today. And so there was a big article, I think yesterday, the day before in the New York Times, talking about the one state solution that is unfolding, which is not really a state.

Jon Finer:

Which, by the way, you said in 2016, “An irreversible one state reality is taking hold,” in your speech.

Sec. John Kerry:

And it’s even more so taking hold now. And that’s something that the current cabinet, every member of whom in the current cabinet has said there will not be a Palestinian state. So the world is now having to figure out what are you going to do? You have two million Palestinians who’ve been moved from the northern part of Gaza into the South. So we had before the most concentrated gathering of human beings on the planet were in Gaza before the war, now two million more people have been pushed into the South, and the North up for grabs, but I suspect that the Palestinians are not going to be in charge there forever, and that’s where we’re developing.

So the longer term prospect for how you’re going to manage this area, which has been torn apart by this issue is very real. And we tried, I tried to elicit from Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, whether or not there was space for us to negotiate about Israel, where could we go with that? And he said, “No, right now, I mean, nothing’s going to happen there.” And I think positions are very hardened and it’s going to be a very difficult issue.

Jake Sullivan:

Do you think there’s any chance that if there were a different government in Israel following the next election, which has to take place before the end of this year, that space could open up? Or do you think that this change you described in Israel since October 7th, runs across the political spectrum so that a Palestine-

Sec. John Kerry:

Very, very important question, Jake. And I’ll be candid with you, and I don’t know what kind of response I’ll get for doing so, but I think it’s important to be candid about this. I think that October 7th changed Israel, and I don’t think there is a movement in Israel right now, and I think Prime Minister Netanyahu knows his politics well, there’s a reason that what’s happening is unfolding, because I think that the body politic of Israel suffered a massive traumatic blow in that moment. And there’s not a lot of space right now in people’s minds for saying, “Okay, let’s just set up a state next door where these guys could somehow do that again or something else could develop.” Now that ignores the fact that it would be allegedly demilitarized, no weapons, massive joint participation between Shin Bet, IDF, Palestinian security forces, US, Europe, others. I mean, there are all kinds of ways in which you could structure this.

I think you now have to talk in a different time horizon. I think that you could have aspirations for a state, but it’s going to have to meet real benchmarks as you move towards it. And there has to be some kind of guarantee about the capacity to preserve sort of a contiguous body of land. Now, we approached that with a massive land swap, which actually got 95% of all of the settlers into the Israel with the swap. And so that obviates the need for a prime minister to do what Sharon did, which cost him, was painful process of pulling out and just leaving it after all the battles and the difficulties people saw. So I think you have to address those longer term issues.

First of all, you got to rebuild a Palestinian authority. You literally do not have that oft repeated phrase, “We need a partner.” You don’t have a partner today. And so we’ve got to be realistic about how we define that roadmap. And I don’t think this is the moment that you’re going to be able to give it any oxygen at all, and it’s going to take time.

Jon Finer:

So for the US-Israel relationship, I mean, we talked before we got on, 40 Senate Democrats voted just yesterday. We’re recording on, what’s today? Wednesday.

Jake Sullivan:

Thursday.

Jon Finer:

Thursday. To withhold weapons shipments to Israel. If the reality that you’re describing is taking hold of a no near term, let’s say, no medium term even prospects of a two state solution, what does that mean for the US-Israel relationship going forward?

Sec. John Kerry:

Well, the US-Israel relationship, I don’t know if everybody’s tuned into it, but it has also changed with October 7th and with the response there too. Young people in the United States are overwhelmingly now concerned about Palestinian issue and really angry about some of the things that have played out in the context of how this war was prosecuted. And you’re seeing that manifested in many different places now globally, I think. It’s a problem for everybody in their foreign policy. They’re going to have to really think through how do you manage this. But young people and certain segments of the US are just not happy with what we have been supporting. And that 40 person vote in the United States Senate is reflective of that.

Do you mind if I raise an issue that I just want to put on the table?

Jake Sullivan:

Of course. Yeah.

Sec. John Kerry:

Because it’s going to be a huge part of the bigger challenge that we face globally going forward.

The narrative has to change on climate, and I’m sorry to... Some people don’t want to hear about it, some people sort of push to aside, but we are going to suffer massive implications in foreign policy, in global relationships, in the economies, by what is happening now on a global basis. The Wall Street Journal had an article about two months ago, the headline was, “The energy transition is now unstoppable.” And they laid out why it is going to happen as momentum of its own. At the World Economic Forum this year, there was an article by Bloomberg in which they said, “You know who believes in climate change?” Big letters, “The stock market.” And what’s happened is $2.1 trillion has moved into investment in renewables alternatives energy, and one trillion into fossil fuels. First time ever that there’s been that flip in the levels of where it’s allocated.

Jon Finer:

Is there a possible silver lining in this war?

Sec. John Kerry:

Absolutely. The great energy crisis of 1973 and then 1979, and China making its own decision in 2019, that France went to nuclear, Japan went to alternative sources of energy then relying on oil and gas, and the result is that today they’re moving even faster. There’s no way a country could look at the world today and say, “Whoa, the reminder, we got to be energy independent.” And the truth is we’re really getting closer and closer to being able to do that. In UAE now, they’re building 19 gigawatts of storage that goes with the four nuclear reactors they brought online and one of the largest solar fields in the world.

So you have the UAE, a oil and gas producing country wants to be one of the first in the world to be able to show we can do 24/7 firm energy, and that’s a monumental step. We’re close on fusion. We’re seeing batteries become much, much more productive. Texas has become the largest deployer of wind in the United States and of solar, and they’re using it to balance their grid. They have a grid of their own in Texas, no surprise. And they are able to deliver cheaper electricity and more stable delivery. And everywhere now there’s a rush on nuclear, on small reactors and other things. This is going to change faster than most CEOs and most people in the country, in the world, are actually focused on.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s interesting, there’s a real irony that the politics of climate have gotten more challenging in a lot of places, and yet as you say-

Jon Finer:

Or at least in this place.

Jake Sullivan:

In this place, but in Europe too, and elsewhere because of affordability issues and so forth, and a lot of the dislocations coming out of the Russia-Ukraine war. But the economics and technology of climate, you’re telling a pretty optimistic story here.

Sec. John Kerry:

Let me tell you, we really are. We have a public equities track, and frankly, we killed all the indexes. We’re doing tremendously in terms of returns there. We also are invested, we have a growth track. We’ve invested in a company by the name of Fervo. Fervo is geothermal. They had a pilot project in Nevada. They’re now building a prototype in Utah, and they’re going to be delivering to data centers, energy within a short span of time. They’re really moving fast and effectively. They’ve got new technology. 85% of the workers come out of the oil and gas drilling because they know how to drill. They know geology. And I saw that the Trump administration just put $174 million on the table for geothermal.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s interesting to me which renewables they like and don’t like. Wind is a no go. Geothermal’s okay.

Sec. John Kerry:

It is fascinating.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s all aesthetic or something. Who knows?

Sec. John Kerry:

Don’t like windmills.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, right.

Jon Finer:

It’s the birds. All right. We’ll let you get out of here-

Sec. John Kerry:

Thank you for letting me.

Jon Finer:

... with one last question.

Sec. John Kerry:

Yes, sir.

Jon Finer:

Which is this administration’s going to end in January of 2029. Let’s just stipulate that. Safe to say the world will have changed even more than it already has by then. What are you most worried about over the next few years? And then maybe to leave it on a high note, you’re one of the most optimistic people I’ve ever been around. What gives you cause for hope at a challenging time?

Sec. John Kerry:

Well, everything is a challenge now because there’s a battle globally between democracy and illiberal democracy and authoritarianism. And if you don’t step up and define more clearly the benefits and begin to deliver more effectively, you’re playing in the hands of the authoritarians. I think we’re almost our own worst friend, so to speak. We’re just not getting the job done. We can’t even pass a budget in the United States. We have to put the future on the table again. We’re not doing some of the great building projects we used to do. You look at Robert Moses, I mean, not all of it was great, but it built, it did things. It kept America moving.

So you asked me, why am I an optimist? I’m a huge optimist. I think there will be casualties along the way, but we ultimately will move on things. And I can find 100 different things where good people are working diligently to make good things happen. And generally speaking, America, that’s who we are. You go back to de Tocqueville when he visited the US and he wrote, “Americans are doing well and are great because Americans are good people.” They do charity. They take care of each other. There’s a sort of historic linkage of people in their communities to the pioneers and how everybody took care of-

Jake Sullivan:

Looking out for one another.

Sec. John Kerry:

Looking out for one another. So generally we’ve done that, number one. Number two; our allocation of capital is, you can argue about it, there’s a robber baron capitalism, there’s enlightened capitalism. And I obviously, and you all want to support enlightened capitalism. The allocation of capital, generally speaking, in our country, is better than anywhere else in the world. And we have the ability, for someone who didn’t even graduate from college, to go out with a great idea, to get people to back it, to build some of the biggest companies in the world out of that, and to help people lead a better life. We have big choices coming at us. The AI is going to have a massive impact on the way we do business, the way life is played out, what’s available to people, and it’s going to have jobs impact somewhat in the next two years, big time after that sort of two-year demarcation.

So I worry, I am concerned, but I’m concerned for the disruption. I’m concerned for the harm that can be done during a transition when you don’t do it properly, but I’m not concerned as whether or not that transition’s going to take place. This is so simple, to be honest with you. I mean, some issues, you need a rocket scientist to come in, he’s got to work out the algorithm and you can get around the moon and do so forth. This is not that kind of issue, the challenge of our energy transition. This is about how we choose to provide energy or move vehicles. We burn fossil fuel, but don’t capture the emissions. I’m not somebody who sits here and says, “Get rid of... They got to go away.” No. If Vicki Hollub at Occidental can find a way to have direct air carbon capture and make money and do good things with it, wow, great company. Invest in it. But we can’t ignore those kinds of choices and needs to sort of kick the economy into high gear around this transition.

And a lot of it, I’m now encouraged is just happening naturally because you can make money. And that’s why I’m actually working in a private sector firm that’s a fund and we’re trying to prove to people, we’re only focused on things that will accelerate the transition and what’s working. I think we can show people that you can do this and do well at the same time, do good and do well at the same time. So that’s what gives me confidence. I think we’re living longer than we ever lived before. We’ve cured diseases we never thought we’d cure. Life is better in so many different ways for people. People live longer than ever before. Why would you not be feeling good about those kinds of things? And I think we’ve just got to calm down and do the business of our country, recognizing we have great options better than any other people on the planet. We’re very lucky.

Jake Sullivan:

Well said. Thank you. That’s a great place to finish.

Jon Finer:

Wide ranging conversation. Thanks for being with us.

Sec. John Kerry:

Good fun. Thank you guys.

Jon Finer:

Good to be back together.

Sec. John Kerry:

Wish you well with this podcast thing.

Jake Sullivan:

Thanks so much.

Jon Finer:

We miss working with you. Take care.

Sec. John Kerry:

Anyway, well, there’s a future.

Jon Finer:

All right.

Sec. John Kerry:

Anyway.

Jon Finer:

Thank you.

Sec. John Kerry:

Thank you guys.

Jake Sullivan:

Thank you.

Secretary Kerry gave us, I think, a very good transition in his answer to the last question, where he talked about democracy versus illiberal democracy versus authoritarianism because last week in Hungary, we had an incredible outcome of an election where Viktor Orban, the longtime quasi-authoritarian, populist, right-wing leader of Hungary, pro-Putin, leader of Hungary, was defeated by a young newcomer to the national political scene in Hungary and a new movement that he built. And he was resoundingly defeated, where this new party won more than two thirds of the seats in the Hungarian parliament. And there genuinely is the winds of change blowing in Budapest in a big way. And it has farther reaching implications as well.

So just to set the stage, Viktor Orban has been around, was an ardent anti-communist, a real liberal, became a kind of hardcore right-winger, almost MAGA before MAGA style politician, began to lock down all of the different elements of government, media, the courts in Hungary, tilted the playing field in his favor, and it took a kind of combination of pretty magical things to come together to finally oust him. How this started, the guy who beat him, Peter Magyar, 45-year-old, was an official in his government.

Jon Finer:

Kind of a mid-level person.

Jake Sullivan:

Mid-level official in his government Who ended up resigning after a scandal where Orban’s party actually asked the president of Hungary, and the president of Hungary is essentially a ceremonial position, orban is the prime minister with all the power, to pardon a Hungarian official who had covered up a sex abuse scandal at a boy’s home in Hungary, a really tragic, terrible story. And this came out, this emerged, that person was pardoned, and then it came out that they had been pardoned despite their complicit role in this God awful sex abuse scandal. And that led Peter Magyar to resign and go on television and start challenging the corruption and the venality of the Orban regime, and directly challenge Orban himself.

And that set him on a course to build in very short order over a couple of years, this political movement that now has swept into power. And I think it’s worth us talking about the implications of this for far-right parties, the implications of this for the United States of America, because of course the US played some role in this, which we’ll get to, the implications for Ukraine. Because this is a really significant moment well beyond the borders of Hungary. So how do you see it?

Jon Finer:

And there’s just a lot of parallels without overdrawing comparisons between one country and another because Hungary is its own case, its own fact pattern. But right down to the sort of damage that was done by a child sex abuse scandal, which we are reckoning with a different version of in the United States right now has done some damage to the Trump administration with the Epstein scandal.

But to take a step back, what’s interesting to me about this election is the deck was completely stacked against Magyar. He was not allowed to go on TV after a certain period of time. He was barely allowed to campaign in major cities. So he took his campaign kind of out to the hinterlands and out to the countryside. And in the same way that the United States or really the states in the United States had been described, I think it was like an old Supreme Court phrase, Lewis Brandeis or something, as laboratories of democracy. Hungary had become almost a laboratory of autocracy in the Orban years. They had tried out all of these techniques that are now being used by autocrats elsewhere, I hate to say it, including here. Going after universities, going after independent media and consolidating control of media in friendly hands, friendly oligarchic hands.

So that was going on. Then he internationalized all of this. He started to draw international connections between Hungary and other right-wing leaders around the world, by the way, including Vladimir Putin, who Orban became extremely close to, highly problematic from the perspective of European policy towards the Russia-Ukraine war, where Hungary was always an outlier, and drew connections closely to the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. So you had President Trump endorsing just in an unprecedented way, almost, Orban’s presidential reelection. By the way, he was just reelected in the landslide four years ago. So this is quite a turnabout.

Jake Sullivan:

Massive turn.

Jon Finer:

You had Marco Rubio showing up in Hungary, and then you had JD Vance just last week showing up basically-

Jake Sullivan:

On the eve of the election.

Jon Finer:

... on the campaign trail alongside a-

Jake Sullivan:

At a rally.

Jon Finer:

.. an elected autocratic leader.

Jake Sullivan:

Saying explicitly, vote for Orban.

Jon Finer:

Vote for this guy. He is our-

Jake Sullivan:

He’s our guy. Yeah.

Jon Finer:

So remarkable in all those ways. And this phrase that I’ve been reading a lot in the analysis of the election, which I think is originally a phrase that came out of maybe the Soviet Union and Russia, but is broadly applicable now to countries around the world, including other European countries, including here, is that it was an election that was a collision of the television and the refrigerator, is how they’d describe it. What they mean by that, I think, is the television was dominated by Viktor Orban, the propaganda that he was able to disseminate around the country, tell people what they were supposed to think. But at the end of the day, the refrigerator, people’s daily lives, how they eat, how they work, is what actually elections tend to be about, and Magyar dominated when it came to refrigerator issues, even if he didn’t have the power of the television.

Jake Sullivan:

I like that. It’s interesting. The parallels you mentioned, obviously the parallel to Epstein, but you’ve got this aging autocratic-minded leader who’s trying to stack the Democratic deck, who’s plagued by corruption issues, who’s surrounded by a lot of sycophants, who’s facing a tough economy where people are really feeling the pinch of affordability. Yeah, the parallels run right down the line. And so it raises some questions, are there lessons to be learned in the United States for how to counter this movement without trying to overgeneralize because every context is itself?

Now, I will start by saying I have a reader’s vocabulary. I didn’t realize until you said Magyar, I thought it was Magyar because I’ve only been reading that.

Jon Finer:

I’m going to confess that I put it into a search engine last night and had a Hungarian voice read it to me over YouTube. So I may or may not be right-

Jake Sullivan:

Okay. We’ll go with Magyar.

Jon Finer:

... about that.

Jake Sullivan:

I’m going to tell you my favorite and least favorite thing about Magyar before we continue. My favorite thing about him is that his last name Magyar literally means Hungarian. So it’s like we had a presidential candidate in the United States whose name was Joe American. His name is Peter Hungarian. I mean, that would be pretty good.

Jon Finer:

Good name for politics.

Jake Sullivan:

That’s not bad. My least favorite thing, he was married until 2023 to the justice minister who actually was sacked as part of this scandal involving the Pardon, because she had to sign it. They got a divorce. Before they got divorced, he actually secretly recorded her while they were still married, while she talked to him about how she was facing pressure as justice minister from political people in Orban’s party to go easy on some prosecutions. And he released this tape publicly. I like a guy who’s doing a good job of trying to be an anti-corruption person, but the whole recording your wife and then releasing it publicly is-

Jon Finer:

Spoken like a good guy who may happen to have a wife who’s involved in politics, by the way.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. I guess, right.

Jon Finer:

So I appreciate the moment of candor.

Jake Sullivan:

Right. I’m the appointed official-

Jon Finer:

Yeah, exactly.

Jake Sullivan:

... with the... Yeah, exactly.

Jon Finer:

It’s worth saying about Magyar, if we are pronouncing that correctly, this is not some radical leftist who has defeated Viktor Orban. As you said, he came out of the Orban movement. He is right-wing on many of the same issues that Orban is right-wing on, immigration, social issues inside Hungary. But in the vein of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here, there is actually a lot I think to be optimistic about in terms of how he will govern when it comes to Hungary’s role in Europe, Hungary’s role vis-a-vis Russia, vis-a-vis China, vis-a-vis the Russia-Ukraine war. And would he be exactly the politician that we would want to lead a key European country? Maybe, maybe not. Is he a massive improvement on what came before? I think it’s hard to deny that he is.

Jake Sullivan:

And there is this element of next generation trying to build a very broad coalition, a heterodox collection of people with different political views, using new media, because old media, as you were saying, was denied to him, campaigning in places that you wouldn’t ordinarily think he would show up to try to solidify votes, and having a laser focus on two things. One; corruption and two; pocketbook issues. Refrigerator issues, I hadn’t heard that phrase before. So there are elements here that could be very much looked at and potentially with all necessary distinctions.

Jon Finer:

Thousand caveats. One last thing on him I think is interesting is how he is looking at the issue of accountability. He is not shying away from a lot of clarity that he’s going to go after the remnants of the Orban regime.

Jake Sullivan:

He’s already started doing it.

Jon Finer:

He went on an Orban controlled TV network that he had been denied access to for years and basically told them, “Once I take power,” he’s not yet taken power, “I’m going to come and shut you down. So be ready for that.” He’s basically said that the president of Hungary, you described this largely symbolic role, doesn’t represent the people should effectively be removed from office. So he is quite clear that he is not going to quote-unquote, “turn the page” in the way that some politicians say they will do when they come to office.

Jake Sullivan:

Now, one thing that we should spend a minute on is this extraordinary trip by JD Vance.

Jon Finer:

Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

He shows up there, he puts a bear hug around Orban probably quite literally up on stage.

Jon Finer:

Have you ever heard of president, vice president, Secretary of State doing this?

Jake Sullivan:

In an election for an elected leader of a democracy, it’s not something that I’ve seen before. And of course, it ends up with big egg on JD Vance’s face. What’s interesting to me about it is that this is the literal living out of the national security strategy that we talked about-

Jon Finer:

Yeah, that’s right.

Jake Sullivan:

... many, many pods ago, where in that document they say we are going to support what they call patriotic parties, literally, meaning these far right parties in Europe, and that we believe this is necessary for America because it’s the bulwark against Western civilization. And that’s how Orban presented himself. Now, what’s been surprising to me is some of the other far right parties in Europe, like the AFD Party in Germany, have actually started distancing themselves from the Trump administration, even before this. Because they were recognizing that the bear hug for Trump, even for the voters they’re targeting, just doesn’t mean what they thought it might have meant a year ago. And it goes to show you how badly the Trump administration’s brand has cratered in Europe.

And it’ll be interesting to see how those parties, the far-right in France, in Germany and the UK look at this Hungarian election and say, “Are we going to have to learn lessons from this?” Now, of course, they’re out of power. They’re not incumbents, so they’re in a different circumstance, but something very much for us to look at not just what are some parallels with the US, but what does this mean for the broader landscape and for the Trump Vance Project? Vance did it at Munich, they did it in the national security strategy to try to propagate this far-right movement across all of Europe.

Jon Finer:

It’s backfired in a number of places. And maybe just to link our first segment in our second, a really tough week for JD Vance who showed up in Hungary, campaigned for Viktor Orban, took the L, showed up in Pakistan, spent however many hours, 19, 20, 21 hours negotiating with the Iranians and came out and gave a press conference and said nothing got accomplished.

Jake Sullivan:

Not great.

Jon Finer:

So a tough week. While Marco Rubio, the other potential era parent to Donald Trump, I think attended a UFC fight with the president and stayed out of the bad news.

Jake Sullivan:

Right. Absolutely. I think the last thing that we have to register, Ukraine and Russia. Orban explicitly said at various points, Ukraine is not a sovereign country. He was very close to Putin, as you just mentioned.

Jon Finer:

He actually warned during the campaign about the possibility of Ukraine invading Hungary or going to war with Hungary, which obviously did not resonate with the Hungarian people, but a strange sort of fear-mongering tactic.

Jake Sullivan:

So he had been blocking European funds, very large amount of funds, tens of billions of dollars going from Europe to Ukraine to help stabilize their economy. Peter Magyar is saying now that, “Those funds will be released. Ukraine will get that money.” He’s not exactly what I would call the most forward-leaning guy on Ukraine, but he has been clear that he’s not going to be pro Putin. In fact, he said he didn’t intend to call Putin. If Putin called him, he’d take the call to tell him to stop the war in Ukraine and it’d be a short call.

So this is a significant thing because it removes one of these major obstacles to the Europeans being able to act together in support of Ukraine. And that is no small thing, especially at a moment when the United States of America is not to be counted when it comes to support for Ukraine.

Jon Finer:

And during a week in which not to dwell everything on JD Vance, he came out and said one of the things he was proudest of during the Trump administration is that they had withheld funds from Ukraine.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly. So another L in a way, because the boomerang on Hungary means that actually Europe will step up to the plate in a greater way. I think this is a good thing. And clearly the Ukrainians are trying to tread carefully, not push the envelope too far, but I do think they feel like they’re in a better position.

All right. So we’ll be back next week. We’ve got some more good guests lined up, and we’re going to actually start taking the opportunity to look at The Long Game when it comes to issues of industrial strategy, China, the future of the US national security enterprise, post-Trump, and many other things with guests in the next couple of weeks.

Jon Finer:

Escaping the tyranny of the day to day.

Jake Sullivan:

Exactly.

Jon Finer:

Excellent.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jon Finer:

We’d love to hear from you. Send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com.

Jake Sullivan:

And subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode. You can also find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Weiner and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Leanna Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Weiner. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

Iran’s Ceasefire Explained: Winners, Losers, and What Comes Next

April 9, 2026

TEASER:

Jake Sullivan:

On a going forward basis now, the world knows, America knows, and most importantly, the clerical and revolutionary guard leadership in Iran knows that they can do that. They can shut down the strait in future if they are attacked. And that this is a source of deterrence. It is a source of potential coercion. It is fundamentally a source of power for the regime in Iran that was theoretical before and now is actual, and has been born out and proven out in the crucible of a war.

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

So Jon, today’s episode is once again quality time with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer. No guest because we have a lot to digest and work through, you and me together, given the announcement last night of a ceasefire between the United States and Iran, negotiated or brokered by Pakistan. Always an interesting country to be in the middle of a major diplomatic initiative. And I think we need to spend today’s episode talking about what the ceasefire is and potentially is not, what the implications of it are in the near term, who the winners and losers are here, and where we see things going in the uncertain days and weeks ahead with the announcement of negotiations for a larger framework set to begin as soon as this Friday. We’re recording this on Wednesday, just a few hours after the ceasefire has taken hold. And so things can develop very rapidly, but it is a timely topic for us to spend on today.

And then at the end of this episode, we will get to that listener’s mailbag for the first time, The Long Game. We’ve been asking people for weeks to send in their questions. We’ve had them piling up, so it’s finally time for us to hit on a few topics that go beyond the subject of Iran that has occupied so much of our thoughts and our podcast episodes over the course of the past many weeks.

So do you want to take it away with what has happened these last 24 hours, what this ceasefire is, and then we can get into its meaning, its future, and its implications?

Jon Finer:

It was a remarkable 24 hours. And maybe just to recap some of what took place yesterday, and I say took place somewhat loosely because what we’re really talking about is a lot of messaging, almost all of which came out of the United States and really directly from the president himself.

You will recall that on Easter Sunday, going back even further, the president sent out a remarkably, I would say, coarse and unconstructive tweet that contained a bunch of profanity, essentially renewing threats that he had been making for quite some time against Iran. Then yesterday, the president sent a tweet that I think will be remembered for quite some time, and not fondly and not positively. I’m just going to read the text of it because I don’t think you can do it justice by describing it.

He tweeted yesterday, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. Who knows? We will find out tonight one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the people of Iran.”

So I think many people read that tweet as a significant sign that the United States was ready to not even escalate, is a war that doesn’t really do it justice, but perhaps commit some of the most severe war crimes we had seen in recent history against the Iranian people, against their civilian infrastructure, against, as he described it, their civilization, which is not exactly an indication that he was intending to target the government or the military, but the nation of Iran itself.

Just hours later, as you just recounted, we started to get leaks out of Pakistan, an unlikely mediator to say the least. I think if you had to guess whether Pakistan might mediate a nuclear or military crisis involving the United States or the United States might someday have to do that with a crisis involving Pakistan, you might have guessed the latter, but here we are in a strange world where the former was taking place. And the Pakistanis announced that they had proposed a ceasefire of two weeks duration. And it started to feel as if maybe this had been precooked with the Iranians on the one hand and the United States on the other hand. And low and behold, President Trump came out and said the United States had accepted this ceasefire if Iran would also accept. Iran also accepted the ceasefire.

I will start before we go deeper into this by saying this is good news. It is generally good news when a war ends and fewer people are going to be killed. And I don’t just want to kind of fly past that and get into the analysis of the geopolitics, and who got what and where it goes from here. That is a positive thing. I think much of the world had been on pins and needles for weeks. The people obviously inside Iran, many of whom have nothing to do with the government of Iran had been suffering. People in the Gulf had been enduring attacks, people in Israel as well, and US service members have been in harm’s way. So the fact that this looks like it may now be winding down, at least for a period, is a good thing.

On the other hand, it’s fragile. We are already seeing violations of the announced ceasefire. In fact, the Pakistanis came out today and said they had seen violations. It’s unhelpful. There had been attacks by Iran against Kuwait. There have been reports of attacks against Iran as well after the ceasefire was announced. And it is also not at all clear that there is an actual meeting of the minds between the two sides on anything other than the shootings should stop for the next couple of weeks. And we’ll get into some of these other details.

But beyond the basic agreement that the war should pause, there is a lot of other contested space in the diplomacy that is going to be, I think, challenging to untangle. The bottom line for me is it is going to be hard, I think, to go back to the full force of the conflict that we had seen in advance of the ceasefire that’s announced, but there is a lot of uncertainty in the current moment, starting with, I think, what happens now, which is the announcement of these talks on Friday in Pakistan, the first face-to-face talks between the two sides since this conflict began.

How do you rate the prospects of those talks, what they’re likely to talk about, and any other reflections on whether this is likely to hold?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, first, I think you’ve done a very good job of laying that out. I want to return to that first Truth Social post in a moment, but let me start by just reiterating a point you made. We have been arguing this conflict should never have started. We’ve been advocating during this conflict that it should end. So the fact that there has been a ceasefire announced, and with luck it will in fact hold, this is a positive thing. It means ceasing the destruction and death that has been wrought over the last several weeks, and which will come to, it hopefully means the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which will lessen, though not completely alleviate, at least for quite some time, the economic disruption and dislocation that has occurred as a result of this. So we have to say it is a good thing that there is a ceasefire in place. I don’t think we ever should have been here in the first place. And I think there are a lot of questions both about where this goes and about where this leaves the United States of America longer term.

And on that latter point, Jon, before we get into what exactly was or wasn’t agreed, what’s still in contest, and what will be negotiated, I wanted to ask you something that’s probably on the minds of at least some of our listeners and is being advocated by supporters of President Trump, which is that first Truth Social post you read, utterly shocking, horrifying, alarming, really there isn’t a great adjective to describe it. It’s so beyond the pale that somehow that Truth Social post got Iran to agree to a ceasefire where otherwise they may not have. You see this argument floating around. How do you react to that?

Jon Finer:

So if the end result of that horrific statement had been some massive Iranian capitulation, concessions to the demands that the United States had been making against Iran, that it gave up its missile program, give up its nuclear material, stop funding proxies, reopen the strait in a clean and unambiguous way, which it did not do. And we’ll get to that, I think, in a minute. I think this effectiveness argument would be at least more powerful.

My own personal view is this sort of content is, as you said, so far beyond the pale that it should not come from the mouth, the Twitter account, the Truth Social account of the United States president, and that it demeans the office and the country to make it. In this case though, that’s not the world we’re living in, that it actually achieved those outcomes. And in fact, it’s not at all clear to me that had the president not bothered to make that statement in the first place, we couldn’t have reached the same outcome we got to later that night, which is Iran essentially conceding nothing other than an agreement to stop fighting.

That is what he extracted from them. They may have wanted something a bit more than a two-week pause. They may have wanted a longer term indefinite pause and maybe some guarantees from the United States that it will not attack again at the end of two weeks, at the end of two months, at the end of two years, and that Israel won’t either. But other than that, Iran didn’t really give up all that much. And so to have kind of debased the office of the presidency in this way, I mean, the reaction to this from all quarters was almost unambiguously negative, including some strong supporters of the president, including from very unusual people. The one I’m thinking of is, I don’t know if you saw Oren Cass, the economist-

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, I did.

Jon Finer:

... who both of us know, who is really not a kind of geopolitical analyst or someone who writes extensively about foreign policy, except at the intersection of his work, which is really focused on industrialization and supply chains. He took a moment to write an extended basically rebuke of what the president had written on the grounds that it was fundamentally almost immoral. And I think that was largely the reaction from sensible people, and the end result did not come anywhere near justifying that sort of rhetoric and that sort of messaging.

Jake Sullivan:

I think the points you make that no result actually would justify it, that it crosses a moral line that is utterly unacceptable coming from the president, regardless of what the impact of it is. And in this case, I don’t believe the impact was incrementally additive anyways, and you made a good case for that.

But I think that the most powerful response to those who are kind of saying, “See, the president, he’s a madman. This is what he does,” is there are certain lines you should not cross. This is crossing those lines. The threat of civilizational destruction emanating from the president of the United States who should be held up, unfortunately the current occupant of the Oval Office is running far away from this mantle, but should be held up as leader of the free world, who should be standing for something. This, to me, is off limits as a tactic to deploy.

Obviously, it’s off limits as a tactic to deploy physically in the world, to actually go carry out the kinds of criminal acts that he was threatening, but I believe that it’s also off limits from the point of view of rhetoric. And I think it will actually have a long-term cost for President Trump, but also for the United States of America. And I think you said at the outset that it will be long remembered. I agree with that. And I think it’s hugely problematic. And you are right to start there and dig in there because it’s not something that we should blow by at all.

But then coming onto the issue of the ceasefire itself, the elements of the ceasefire, as I understand them, are basically the United States stops attacking Iran, Israel stops attacking Iran, and Iran allows ships to go through the Strait of Hormuz for a period of two weeks during which there will be negotiations, and those negotiations will be based on, as President Trump put it, the basis for those negotiations will be the 10 point proposal that Iran put forward.

And I want to come to that 10 point proposal in a moment, but I think there’s one important element really to underscore at the outset, which is that Iran has indicated publicly that it is going to allow ships to travel through the strait, but it is going to do so, and this is what the foreign minister of Iran, Abbas Araghchi wrote, “Safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible via coordination with Iran’s armed forces and with due consideration of technical limitations.” So even within the context of the ceasefire, Iran is saying that passage through the strait is subject to the control, the jurisdiction, the oversight, and the coordination of the armed forces of Iran, which is a significant sea change from the status quo before the war when freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz was the broadly accepted norm by all countries and Iran was not forcing coordination with the armed forces of Iran for all the tankers that were going through.

This now is a feature of this ceasefire, and it certainly seems like it will be a feature of the reality, the new status quo on a going forward basis. Am I reading that right, Jon?

Jon Finer:

That is exactly how it seems. Iran has retained, in spite of the ceasefire, the ability to monetize traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and bring revenue into its own country, which by the way, is critically important for a few reasons. One, Iran remains under enormous sanctions pressure and its economy has struggled for years because of that sanctions pressure. Second, Iran has just suffered this extraordinary military blow inflicted by the United States and by Israel, and is going to need funds to reconstruct its civilian infrastructure, its society essentially, and unfortunately, funds that will be available for it to rebuild and reconstitute its military as a result of this.

And just to put a kind of a fine point on it, we know that before the ceasefire, because it’s been reported by Bloomberg and by others, that Iran was charging a toll for oil tankers passing through the gulf of $1 a barrel. We know that because Iran has put this out public already and the Financial Times reported it this morning, that it is going to try to stick to that $1 a barrel rate. And that’s just for oil tankers. There may be other arrangements made for other traffic through the strait.

But a dollar a barrel is $20 million a day in revenue directly into the coffers of the government of Iran. It’s about 20 million barrels a day that go through the Strait of Hormuz, 20% of the global oil demand in the world. That’s significant money over the course of a year. Maybe not all that significant over the course of a couple of weeks, but over the course of a year, that’s on the order of $7 billion. And again, that is just revenue associated with the oil that flows through the strait. They may have alternative arrangements for the other shipments of petrochemicals, of food, of fertilizer, of other commercial goods.

And this arrangement seems to leave them the ability to make those deals. And President Trump, when asked a direct question of whether Iran was going to be able to charge some sort of a toll, more or less said yes. He also mused about the United States and Iran doing this together as some sort of joint venture where the US could also get some of this cash, which is very Trumpian and a very bizarre concept, and I don’t think one that is very likely to happen. But he certainly has not denied that they have the ability to do this, which is a huge boon for Iran economically.

You should also though talk about what a boon this is to them strategically, because it’s worth pointing out they did not have this revenue source before the war. They also had not ever closed the strait before in 50 years. And I think you could make the case, I mean, tell me if you disagree, that strategically this leaves them with almost a bigger deterrent than they had before the war on the rest of the world should somebody think about attacking them again.

Jake Sullivan:

Oh, I couldn’t agree more. And I think that actually the strategic effects of this even exceed the economic benefits that Iran will get. Because what this war has shown is that Iran has the capability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, to only allow ships through when it says okay and to stop ships going through when it says not okay, that it was able to retain that ability through weeks of intense bombing by the United States and Israel, and that ultimately the United States could not coercively force it to give up that capacity, and that on a going forward basis now, the world knows, America knows, and most importantly, the clerical and revolutionary guard leadership in Iran knows that they can do that. They can shut down the strait in future if they are attacked. And that this is a source of deterrence, it is a source of potential coercion, it is fundamentally a source of power for the regime in Iran that was theoretical before and now is actual, and has been born out and proven out in the crucible of a war.

And it does not seem that anything in the negotiations that are to come are going to take this away, because even if there is to be a deal that emerges from these negotiations, it’s likely to leave intact, as you said, some form of tolling mechanism, and certainly is going to leave the reality that Iran has the physical capability to threaten the strait, to block the strait, to keep ships from going through the strait at its will. And the knock on long-term effects of that, I think are quite powerful, and a huge setback from the point of view of the United States, and will be a source of enormous concern and discomfort for Gulf countries. And I think the rest of the world will try to adapt to it, but it will be a source of discomfort for them as well. There’s just no getting around that.

And so that element of this probably exceeds, is probably top of the list of the significant strategic consequences of what’s just happened. And I think that is not for a moment lost on Iran and they wasted no time in their very first statement making clear that coordination with the Iranian armed forces, a perfectly benign phrase, is a necessary precondition for traffic through the strait, a benign phrase that has anything but benign consequences from the point of view of the United States.

Jon Finer:

That is the status quo as of today. The two sides will get together on Friday in Pakistan. President Trump himself, as you said, indicated that the basis for those talks would be Iran’s 10 demands, 10 points that it’s issued, which are shockingly maximalist. Not shocking that they would put out those demands, shocking that an American president would agree to those demands as the basis for the talks as President Trump apparently did.

The United States has also issued its sort of bill of demands, 15 of them, which are also maximalist as you would expect. So is there any reason to be optimistic that when these two sides get together, we will have other than a breakdown or at least an inconsequential outcome, given how far apart their at least public facing demands are at this point?

Jake Sullivan:

Before I directly answer that question, let me just pause for a moment on this 10 point proposal, because this is quoting President Trump from his announcement of the ceasefire. He says, “I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double-sided ceasefire.” I love the phrase double-sided ceasefire, by the way. And then he goes on to say, “The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive agreement concerning long-term peace with Iran and peace in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate,” a workable basis on which to negotiate.

Just quickly spinning through those 10 points, Iran wants a guarantee that it will not be attacked again, a permanent end to the war, an end to Israeli strikes in Lebanon and against Iranian allies, all US sanctions lifted. Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It would do so under new safe passage rules implicitly that it sets. It would include a transit fee of about $2 million per ship. The revenue would be shared with Oman. It would use its share of the proceeds to rebuild infrastructure damaged in the conflict. And then it wants a broader framework to end regional hostilities, not just the immediate war.

So what is not in that list of 10 items is anything to do with the nuclear program. What is in that list of 10 items is locking in this arrangement that you and I have just been talking about, the transit fee, the tolling, Iran in control of the strait, and Iran getting all US sanctions lifted. So to your question about what these negotiations are likely to produce, I don’t think they’re going to produce these 10 points. I certainly don’t think they’re going to produce anything close to the 15 points that the Trump administration has put forward.

For me, there are three big questions that may get some degree of resolution in these talks. That is, you could see a kind of interim agreement or implicit agreement on three things, but you may not. One is, what exactly are the arrangements for the strait? How do they get formalized in some way? Is there a consortium of countries that gets brought in to give some cover to the strategic reality that Iran can control it? Can the United States put some lipstick on that pig, basically?

Second is, what happens to the highly enriched uranium, that stockpile you and I have talked about, much of which is buried under the nuclear facility at Isfahan. We can come back to the public statements of the United States today about the HEU, but I think that will be the subject of negotiation and likely will be tied to further sanctions relief for Iran.

And then the third question goes to this question of a permanent end to the war, right? We have a two-week ceasefire. At some point, do the two sides end up saying, “We’re done, the war’s over, we’ve called it.” There is also the wildcard in the context of these negotiations of the fact that Israel is still attacking Lebanon. Iran has said that Lebanon has to be part of the ceasefire. Donald Trump has said publicly to a reporter, Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire. We will have to see how that plays out.

But for me, these three questions, the future of the strait, the future of the nuclear stockpile, and how to convert a temporary ceasefire into something more lasting, that’s what’s going to be truly on the docket in the negotiations. I don’t think there’s going to be a comprehensive agreement between the two sides, but could I imagine some kind of understandings on these issues? I think that is possible and that’s what we should be looking for.

Jon Finer:

So it’s a good list. And I think the big question on the first of your items, on the arrangements for the strait, is will Iran consider this negotiable at this point? Or does Iran basically believe it has locked in the right to make the arrangements it chooses?

It does matter, by the way, if the United States can negotiate at least down the rate of revenue that Iran is trying to generate. $2 million a ship is significantly more than just $1 per barrel of oil, on the order of like 10X, what I described earlier. So going from maybe $7 billion a year to $70 billion a year in revenue, if Iran charges that much for ships going through the strait. And so the United States would be incentivized to try to get Iran to agree to lower rates. But the fact that we’re even having this conversation is really quite extraordinary.

Jake Sullivan:

Extraordinary. Yeah.

Jon Finer:

Because you have to remember that we went to war with Iran for a whole range of reasons, not least to increase significantly the pressure on its regime, maybe ultimately topple its regime, but at least destabilize it enough, damage its economy enough, is the way this administration described it, that it can no longer effectively govern. Now we are negotiating something that they did not have before the war, which is the ability to monetize, generate revenue by just normal commercial traffic through an international waterway. So that is remarkable that this is even on the table, but it’s still in the United States’ interest to try to bring those revenues down.

On the nuclear stockpile, this is another area that is worth negotiating, but in order to get anything from Iran, which believes it has retained this stockpile under enormous pressure, under bombardment, including bombardment of probably significant quantities of that stockpile at Isfahan, the United States is going to have to pay in some way for this. We talked about this last time. It will require some measure, likely significant, of sanctions relief in order to get Iran to potentially part with that highly enriched nuclear material, enriched up to 60%. So not a guarantee at all that the United States will put real sanctions relief on the table, and it would have to in order to get Iran to play ball.

Lebanon is a good thing to flag. I think clearly the Israelis do not believe Lebanon is part of this ceasefire.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah.

Jon Finer:

They escalated significantly after the ceasefire in Lebanon. And I think a big part of what’s going on there is for the first time during this war, Prime Minister Netanyahu, who will have to face Israeli voters in an election later this year, is getting attacked by the opposition inside Israel for essentially allowing President Trump to stop the war before Israel was ready. And it seems like part of his strategy in sort of fending off those attacks, the opposition had largely left him alone on the war up till now because it was broadly supported in Israel. Part of his strategy for fending off those attacks is almost to say, “Don’t worry, I’m going big into Lebanon to go after Hezbollah.” And if Trump wants to hang onto this ceasefire, he will probably have to take steps to restrain that action by Israel because that is going to put a lot of pressure on Iran to break the ceasefire.

Jake Sullivan:

So I want to come back for a minute on the highly enriched uranium question because President Trump put out a very interesting Truth Social post today where he said, among other things, “The United States will working with Iran, dig up and remove all the deeply buried nuclear dust.” This is what he calls the HEU. He goes on to say in the same post, “We are and will be talking tariff and sanctions relief with Iran.” So he’s kind of floating some deal that involves sanctions relief for the HEU.

Now, one observation I would make here is that for months before this war started, Iran offered to do something with the HEU, downblend it, or ship it out to Russia, or other things in exchange for sanctions relief. So the very thing that now is going to be the subject of negotiations on the back of a multi-week war that left Iran with a greater stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, the very thing we’re going to try to get is something that Iran had actually offered before the war, and now may be harder to get than it was before.

But I don’t rule out that they come to some terms on this. I think you’re right that Iran now sees this as a huge point of leverage, may think it has no reason to give it up, and they could just stonewall the US on this. And certainly their 10 points, as I mentioned before, don’t even touch it. So I’m not by any stretch predicting there will be a deal on the HEU, but I would suggest that it’s something to watch because I think the US will be very focused on trying to secure some kind of arrangement on this so that they can look at the American people and say, “We did something to reduce the threat from Iran’s nuclear program.” So I think the US will be highly incentivized here. Iran is not particularly incentivized to do much, but there may be enough put on the table in the way of sanctions relief.

Jon Finer:

Pete Hegseth had a slightly different message on the HEU, for whatever it’s worth, basically continuing to brandish the possibility that if Iran does not hand it over, the United States will conduct some sort of operation either to destroy it or to grab it. And I feel like at this point, that threat has really diminished in force. Because it’s been widely reported the US looked at a special forces operation, maybe with the Israelis, to go in and try to seize this material. That was always going to be extraordinarily high risk. If anything, doing that in the context of a ceasefire where Iran can kind of more easily focus its energies on repelling an attack like that seems almost impossible to imagine.

And even in the aftermath of a ceasefire, it does feel like President Trump, who, according to public reports, personally asked for this plan to be developed, for the US to go in and grab this stuff, looked at that plan, looked at the level of risk, and did not consider this to be a very appealing option. And I think he was probably right about that, given how challenging it would have been, and as we’ve discussed, how uncertain it was to be successful for a whole range of reasons, including that we are not guaranteed, we cannot guarantee that that material is where we believe it is, which is in these tunnels under the Isfahan nuclear facility. And in fact, the IAEA has in recent days come out and said likely some of the material is still there, some of the material may be in other nuclear facilities, may have been moved to other nuclear facilities around the country. So you might not even get all the 60% if you went into Isfahan the way they were clearly looking at doing.

So Hegseth’s threat, I think is not all that credible at this point. And Iran will see if it can get an appealing enough price to give this up. And if it doesn’t, I think it’ll hold onto it. If it does, they may be able to work something out.

Jake Sullivan:

I have a theory based on everything that President Trump has said since announcing the ceasefire, and this theory runs the risk of trying to impose some sort of coherence on a highly incoherent individual, but it’s that he is obsessed with a Delci Rodriguez style outcome in Iran, has been from the beginning, has wanted to impose the Venezuela model on the Iran circumstance, even though we know very well that these things are not just apples and oranges, but it’s like fruit and rocks.

And yet he continues to say things like, “The regime has changed. It’s a very productive regime change,” was one of his tweets. And he continues to signal, including through things like what you mentioned before, the joint US-Iran arrangement for imposing a toll through the strait, through sanctions relief, through the way we’re going to cooperate on many different aspects

Jon Finer:

Including the ATU. We’ll go in and dig it up together or whatever.

Jake Sullivan:

Together, together. We’re going to do it together. I think in his mind, his mental model is we’re going to go sit down in Pakistan with a relatively compliant group of fellows representing the Iranian regime, and together we’re going to work it all out, the strait, the nuclear program. We’re going to lift sanctions so that everyone can make a lot of money. He had this other tweet today in which he says, “There will be lots of positive action. Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds. This could be the golden age of the Middle East,” that he’s sort of shifted from Iran as enemy and adversary to now Iran’s my friend and I’m going to almost will into existence this Delci style new leadership, even though as Danny Citrinowicz told us a few weeks ago, the son of the Ayatollah and the IRGC folks around him are more hardline, if that’s even possible, than the Ayatollah they took out.

But I just think that’s his mental model. And I think he’s going to find the Iranians who show up for these negotiations, assuming they take place, to be much tougher customers, to not simply say, “Hey, let’s all work it out,” the way that Delci Rodriguez has to a substantial extent done in Venezuela. And I think that’s going to run this whole thing into some very rough waters in the coming days. But at the same time, it also may mean that President Trump’s just willing to put a huge amount on the table to get the outcomes he wants, and that may be enough, at least for something narrow like the HEU, to actually produce an outcome.

So it’d be interesting to see what happens, but I think that reality that he’s trying to almost will into existence is something that is going to be a feature of these negotiations, and a highly unusual one that all of us longtime Iran watchers are not going to relate to, and it’s hard for it to compute with us because we see this regime for what it is.

Jon Finer:

If anything has surprised me over the last 24 hours, it’s less that President Trump agreed to a ceasefire because I think the United States was in a pretty challenging strategic situation where every escalation option would almost hurt us more than it would hurt Iran, but that Iran agreed to a ceasefire, and particularly that Iran agreed to a ceasefire after that outrageous message that President Trump put out. If anything, I would have thought the fact of that message would have led the Iranians to say, “Maybe we’ll get to this, but not today,” not to validate or vindicate that sort of messaging in any way.

But they seem to have taken a just coldly, coolly rational approach to this, and recognize that they have not been asked really to give anything significant up in order to get the United States to stop bombing them. And I think believe that having stopped the bombardment even officially just for two weeks, it will be very likely for the United States to resume the war again.

I suspect that was a bit of a bitter pill for them just because they don’t like the idea of in any way making it seem as if they can be bullied. But the reality is they were asked for nothing. The United States has gifted them this control over the Strait of Hormuz moves through this process. They recognized that and they took the deal that was on the table, which I think on their part was a rational decision, if nothing else, but probably not an easy one.

Jake Sullivan:

I think this brings us to this kind of fundamental question. We don’t know exactly how the diplomacy will play out. I think we both expect this temporary ceasefire will likely ultimately hold and that there’s unlikely to be some truly comprehensive agreement between the two sides. And so the question of where Iran nets out and where the United States nets out at the end of that, we’ve gotten into a little bit with Iran and its control over the Strait of Hormuz, its heightened capacity to hold that strait at risk, and its proven capacity to do so, and also now to be the ultimate facilitator of traffic through the strait.

It’s striking to me that if you think about this from the US perspective, what did we go to war to do? What did we achieve? The net assessment is not great. This morning, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Caine, laid out a series of the achievements of the United States in this war. And frankly, it really had echoes of the kinds of briefings that were given during Vietnam. A lot of numbers about how many bombs we dropped, how many sorties we flew, the percentage degradation of missiles, and drones, and capabilities, but not really at the end of the day, clear strategic outcomes that benefit the United States.

Because it is certainly the case that we have set back their missile production and reduced their missile stockpiles, that we undermine their drone production and reduce their overall number of drones rolling off the assembly line. But on the core question, can Iran continue to cause harm and disruption on a strategic scale, even in the midst of being bombed for weeks and weeks, do they have the capacity to sustain that? The answer appears to be yes, that they did sustain that. So that’s on the missiles and drones.

The regime is still in place, and in fact, if anything is harder line. On the nuclear program, they still have not just the program, but the highly enriched uranium stockpiles we were discussing, centrifuges, and the know how to produce a weapon if they chose to do so. We’ve talked about the strait. There is the economic damage that is severe and will continue because if you think about our conversation with Helima Croft a few weeks ago, a lot of this production has now been disrupted, has been shut in. So even if the strait opens, and it’s likely to open more incrementally over time, but even if it opens, it’s going to take a while to get all that production back online. So the economic impacts and the impact on oil prices and gas prices will be with us for some time. And then of course the human damage, thousands killed, 13 Americans killed, hundreds of Americans wounded, and we will get to the wider implications as well.

That is not a great scorecard from the perspective of the United States. It’s not exactly clear, thinking about what we went in to do, how you could make an argument that we’ve come out of this in a better place. And from Iran’s perspective, they certainly have suffered a lot of tactical blows, but strategically have emerged with this card in the strait, have emerged with the regime intact, and have emerged with the ability to project to the world that they can continue to sustain a deterrent capability even in the face of massive bombardment.

So I try to look at this and say, “What’s a fair accounting for who gained and who suffered setbacks over this? And am I missing something when it comes to the US and am I missing something when it comes to Iran?” But this does not feel, when you net it all out, like it puts the United States in a good position against what either they were trying to achieve at the start of this administration, or against any reasonable view of the status quo [inaudible 00:41:31] and the status quo that seems to have emerged during this conflict.

But do you see it differently? Is there a way to look at this that is more optimistic from the point of view of the United States and more pessimistic from the point of view of Iran?

Jon Finer:

If I were forced to make that argument in a red team, blue team, I think I would struggle, honestly. Because the way I’ve been thinking about the war and the outcomes are essentially on two metrics. What did we learn during the conflict and what did Iran learn?

And on that one, I think what we learned is a lot about our own vulnerabilities. We learned about our vulnerabilities to these drones, which we frankly should have known from having observed the Russia-Ukraine conflict and from being students of modern warfare, which the Pentagon, obviously is part of its role. But we clearly did not realize that Iran, almost entirely just through the use of its drones, could hold much of the global economy at risk. When we thought about the vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz, we thought about mines, we thought about small ships, those were tactics that Iran could have used, but that would have also made it harder for Iran to get its own energy products out through the strait. What I don’t think we foresaw is Iran being able to close the strait on the cheap with drones primarily while still being able to export its own energy products at an even higher price. So they were under less pressure to reopen it.

So we learned about our vulnerabilities and I think they learned about their capabilities. I think they probably believed on some level that they might be able to extract this sort of price from the United States and from the global economy. Now they know they have the capability of doing that. And no matter how many of their missiles, and their launchers, and their naval vessels we have destroyed, and we’ve destroyed significant numbers of all of those things, they don’t need all that much capability to be able to use this maximally effective tool. That’s on what we learned.

The other metric I’ve been thinking about is this balance of deterrence question. Where is the deterrent now on each side compared to where it was before the war? And I think for the United States, we took essentially our biggest shot, certainly the biggest shot we’ve ever taken at the government of Iran, at the Islamic Republic. And that shot destroyed much of the regime, but did not remove, or replace, or change the regime. The government endured and survived, and Iran’s ability to continue fighting while diminished, endured, and was able to fight.

Where is Iran’s deterrent now? Iran’s deterrent before this war was really limited. It lacked effective air defenses, its offensive capabilities had been defeated by the United States and Israel on multiple occasions when Iran had tried to attack with ballistic missiles. Now Iran has a totally new deterrent that we hadn’t even really contemplated before. And while I think it is true, the analysis, and we got this from Danny Citrinowicz, that many Iranians, many officials are going to say we need a nuclear weapon now that we were attacked. And I think the risk of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon has gone up. They also have acquired, just by learning that it would work, this other deterrent that we’ve been talking about, which is the ability to sort of weaponize the global economy against the United States.

So I think in the balance of deterrence, Iran has also come out ahead. Their deterrent has been improved during the course of this conflict. Ours has been revealed to be powerful, but limited.

Jake Sullivan:

And this gets to kind of the wider implications of the war, which we should spend a minute on before we turn to the mailbag, because it’s not just the balance of deterrence between the US and Iran. It’s also how this impacts US interests globally. And if you look at other competitors and adversaries, Russia has definitely come out of this war as a winner. Putin is getting more revenue from an elevated oil price. He has also received sanctions relief from the United States.

Jon Finer:

And by the way, on that, just one thing that’s worth watching, is does that sanctions relief-

Jake Sullivan:

Hold after.

Jon Finer:

... Ever get taken away? Because it’s supposedly just tied to this kind of acute energy shock that we’ve been undergoing. But I think there is a real chance that this relief, and Iran’s, by the way, sanctions relief for barrels that were already on the open water, becomes a sort of permanent feature, not a temporary one, but we’ll see.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, you had J.D. Vance stumping for Viktor Orbán, who has been on the record championing Vladimir Putin and denigrating Ukraine, saying Ukraine is not a sovereign country. So the administration is definitely voting with its feet between Russia and Ukraine. And so I would not be a bit surprised if the sanctions relief remains over the longer term.

I would also point out that because we have used so many air defense interceptors in this conflict, we’re not giving them to Ukraine anymore, so we’re leaving it more defenseless. And perhaps most importantly, Putin is getting a major rift in NATO out of this. He’s getting a deep divide, a lack of trust, a threat from the American president that he is going to reduce the overall strength and sanctity of the Article V commitment. That’s something Putin has had on his wishlist, at the top of his wishlist for many years. He is getting that.

And then on the China front, they’re getting now a depleted US military in terms of its overall stockpiles, a distracted US that still is going to have to be tied down dealing with the consequences and the implications of this in the Middle East for quite a while. There’s the moral diminution that has come from things like that Truth Social post on civilization destruction. China’s gets to hold itself out as helping bring about this ceasefire. I doubt it probably played that significant a role, but it is going to be cast as a supportive peacemaker as opposed to the disruptor the United States is getting cast as. And it had the biggest reserve of oil, which had built up over the course of the last year, so it was basically able to absorb the costs of this. So China comes out of this, I think, with some advantages.

And then we will have to watch how other countries react and hedge, particularly the Gulf States who will be learning lessons from this, and I think will have questions, hard questions about the nature of the security partnership with the US, and about where they should be putting their strategic and economic chips on a going forward basis. So there’s a whole catalog of implications here we’re going to have to watch.

Jon Finer:

Two other implications, maybe just to round out the picture. One is the way that the president himself has handled this war and the messaging that we described earlier that was so abhorrent has done something kind of extraordinary, which is essentially seeding the moral high ground in this conflict to a country that has been largely a pariah state in the world for decades. And not because Iran has distinguished itself with its conduct in this war, by the way. Iran shamefully attacked civilian targets across the Gulf, in Israel. And its own messaging has been trolling and kind of obnoxious. But the president’s threat to end Iran civilization, his repeated threats to commit war crimes against Iranian civilian targets, the actualization, at least of some of those threats, really has left this almost morally at best a wash for the United States, which is a remarkable thing when you’re talking about a conflict against a regime like Iran. So I think that will have a long tail.

Jake Sullivan:

Just on that point, Jon, I do wonder if part of why Iran was willing to accept a deal last night after this civilizational destruction piece was that they saw not only that they could lock in their advantage on the strait and weren’t giving anything up, and this could net out well, but also that in a way, choosing not to be the actor saying no to a ceasefire in that moment would also lock in the sense that they were the good guy, not the bad guy in this in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, which for you and I who have worked this issue a long time, and see the Iranian regime for what it is to its own people, to the region, to the world, and believe deeply in the United States of America, this is extremely troubling.

But I think part of the tactical calculus of the Iranian regime last night, I think, took into account that they want to emerge from this feeling like they can interact with the rest of the world from a greater position of credibility than they went into the war with, which is just a kind of ridiculous outcome in a way, but I think realistically is not a bad bet on their part.

Jon Finer:

Yeah. Moral authority is part of strategic advantage, and that has been diminished.

And then the other, I think, really interesting implication is for Israel and for the US-Israel relationship, which has already been in a challenging place in recent days, weeks, months, years. But I’ll read from one poll that came out in the last couple of days, which was a Pew Foundation poll, which said that 60% of American adults now have an unfavorable view of Israel. And that was a poll, it showed 53% last year and 42% in 2022. So between 2022 and essentially this week, 42% goes to 60%, of American adults with an unfavorable view.

This war is not going to improve that view among, by the way, either Democrats or Republicans, and fairly or unfairly, because the Trump administration I think has in a sort of embarrassing way, tried to kind of pass the buck for some of the decision making on the war on Israel, maybe less the president himself, although sometimes the president, but more officials like Marco Rubio have made this argument.

I think our view, which we’ve expressed is the US bears responsibility for its own decisions, where the superpower, this is on the Trump administration, not a foreign government. But there has been some amazing reporting in the last couple of days, the New York Times and other places about how this decision ultimately got made, what advice the president was given, not just by his own intelligence community, in fact, not primarily by his own intelligence community, but by the prime minister of Israel in the situation room, in the United States, making the argument to President Trump that this could be a short, decisive war that leads to the toppling of the regime in Iran.

And I think that many Americans are going to read and digest that information in ways that will not redound to the benefit of the US-Israel relationship or of Israel over the medium term. I think Israel believes that the attacks on Iran, the diminution of Iran’s military capability, the killing of senior officials, including the Supreme Leader strategically have been beneficial to Israel, but there is this countervailing force that I think is going to be significantly negative for the relationship. And where that all nets out, I think really remains to be seen.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, but arrow is pointed very much in the wrong direction.

Jon Finer:

All right. If we don’t do a mailbag today, we run the risk of losing our own credibility in the process, so I think we should turn to it if you’re ready.

Jake Sullivan:

I’m ready. Go for it.

Jon Finer:

So the first question is from a YouTube listener @SasanMedia, “Good content, guys. What do you think about all the assassinations of Iranian leaders? What type of precedent this will set in world conflict? I’m guessing that Western nations, leaders, and officials will no longer enjoy the safety of diplomatic immunity.”

Jake Sullivan:

That’s an excellent question. I think it’s something you and I have grappled with as this conflict has unfolded, and I think it’s worth in answering it, kind of giving as a baseline for our listeners what actually the current standing rule is on assassinations for the United States of America.

It goes back to an executive order signed actually by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. And the order says, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in or conspire to engage in assassination.” And it goes on to say that US intelligence agencies cannot indirectly sponsor or participate in assassinations carried out by third parties. And we define assassination as the unlawful killing of a person, typically a political leader for political reasons in peace time. And we distinguish that from targeted killings, which if we are in a state of armed conflict with a group or nation, or acting in self-defense, then killings take on a different context. They take on act of war rather than assassination.

But the line between these two things is incredibly blurry in a case like Iran where the president has said,” We’re not at war. We’re on some minor excursion,” or in the case of Soleimani, where ultimately they justified it as self-defense because Soleimani was plotting attacks against American troops in the Middle East. But this line between assassinations and targeted killings has become incredibly permeable for the United States of America. And I do think that that is dangerous. I think we should be much, much more reluctant to take out political leaders or even uniform military leaders through targeted killing of foreign states because I think opening that Pandora’s box, as the questioner posed it, will put our people at risk to a much greater extent. And in fact, Iran did plot assassinations against American officials, which we regarded as completely beyond the pale and unacceptable, and also I think raises some profound moral questions. So I think getting back to a much tighter reading of that Reagan executive order would behoove the United States of America.

What do you think?

Jon Finer:

Just two quick additions or maybe one amplification and one addition. The amplification is that Iran does not have clean hands here, is worth just reemphasizing that. Iran has plotted and conducted assassinations against civilian officials around the world, certainly plotted against American officials-

Jake Sullivan:

Absolutely, including the president.

Jon Finer:

... And people we know, and people who preceded us, and the current president of the United States.

So the real question is, does us going down this path make it more or less likely that other countries, including Iran, are going to be continuing or even intensifying this sort of activity? I think there’s a very strong argument to be made that this is normalizing in some ways this sort of conduct, as opposed to deterring it, thwarting it, calling it out, disrupting plots, which is the standard US playbook for this sort of thing, and certainly for punishing it in the aftermath if one of these plots is ever conducted successfully or unsuccessfully. I think we are shifting this norm in a very dangerous direction.

And by the way, I think this goes even more broadly than just assassinations to other ways in which force is used by the Trump administration. The attacks against the fishing vessels in the Caribbean that we’ve talked about, even the Maduro operation to some extent, some of these are precedent setting uses of force that I think are going to have significant implications. We should probably talk more about this in future episodes. We’ve touched on some of it.

Jake Sullivan:

Just before turning to the next email, I’ll make one last point, which is technology is changing the nature of this question too. The combination of being able to have maximal precision fused with increasingly powerful intelligence, fused with standoff capability, means the ability to individually target has become increasingly available, not just to the United States, but to other countries as well. And so this line between what is a kind of a normal act of war and what is a targeted assassination is going to get blurrier and blurrier because of technology. And my view is that because of the blurriness of that line, we should have a bias towards staying on the side of it that leans away from something that could be kind of conceived by any reasonable observer as an assassination. I think this is definitely something that we are going to have to watch carefully in the years ahead.

So the second question in our mailbag comes from Robert. It’s an email and he asks, “Why is Russia considered a great power? In nearly everything except land mass, Russia is a blip compared to the US. Why are they being called a great power?” Jon?

Jon Finer:

So I think Robert is onto something here. I think there are good arguments for Russia no longer deserving essentially this great power status. Those arguments include that Russia’s economy is no longer a top tier in terms of size. It’s more akin to sort of a European country like Italy than it is to a country like the United States-

Jake Sullivan:

It’s the size of Texas.

Jon Finer:

... or China. The size of right, a large American state in overall economic size.

But even more than that, I think Russia’s diplomatic clout has been diminished. It’s been kicked out of groupings like what used to be called the G8 and is now called the G7 because of its bad behavior. And it’s become much more isolated over the years as a function of having just conducted some terrible actions in international affairs from the invasion of Georgia to the multiple invasions of Ukraine.

That said, the reason we consider, I think still rightly to some extent, Russia a great power comes down to four things. One, and I think maybe first and foremost is that it is a top two nuclear power on the planet alongside the United States. And nuclear weapons for better or for worse still matter. And I think what we’re going to see actually in the near future is the increasing salience of nuclear weapons, not the decreasing salience as other countries, and we’ve talked about this in the context of Iran, we’ve also talked about it in the context of East Asia, are likely to really look hard at whether they need nuclear weapons to deter some of the threats that they face. Russia has a lot of them, 1500 or so, deployed nuclear warheads, more now like the United States. So that’s one.

Second is Russia has a very top tier intelligence service, both in terms of its surveillance and signals intelligence, and in terms of its human intelligence, its spies. Russia is up there with the United States, and China, and Israel and other top tier intelligence services that gives it kind of additional enhanced power as a state. And I think that’s a part of Russia’s status as a great power.

Third, while Russia’s overall economic clout is much more limited than it once was, it is an energy powerhouse, and energy tends to matter more than other, I think, economic attributes of states. Russia has wielded energy effectively as a geopolitical tool in Europe. The Europeans are struggling to disentangle themselves from dependency on Russian gas. In particular, Russia’s crude oil sales are among the highest in the world. So energy gives Russia additional political, geopolitical clout.

And then the last one, which I think kind of cuts both ways, but I think give Russia more of great power status than it might otherwise have. It’s become a remarkably risk tolerant country. It is willing to wield and use its power in horrific, aggressive ways, but that force the rest of the world to take it seriously because you ignore it at your peril. It uses its military in horrific and aggressive ways as we’ve discussed. It uses spy service sometimes to conduct, to the previous topic, assassinations, cyber attacks and other things. And I think that that risk tolerance is part of what might help Russia punch a bit above its weight just in terms of formal power metrics.

So that would be my list.

Jake Sullivan:

Very well put. I don’t have a lot to add to that except to reinforce the fourth point and maybe expand on it a bit. It’s not just risk tolerance, it’s activism. It’s a country that wants to engage and throw weight globally, to be present globally. So Russia’s there in the Western hemisphere, was in Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and Cuba with its intelligence service, with military partnerships, with influence, diplomatic and political influence. It’s across multiple countries in multiple subregions of Africa. It has been a present factor in the Middle East. It is now a critical factor with respect to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea, where it’s supplying a lot of advanced technology and taking North Korean support for its war in Ukraine.

So you go around the world, and even though it has so many severe limitations that were very well identified by Robert, it’s prepared to act, to have risk tolerance, but also to just be highly active and use it, throw weight globally. And I think that’s a reason for why it continues to be in a different category from middle powers that simply aren’t engaged in that kind of expeditionary activity globally that Russia is.

Jon Finer:

Third question is from Felix, who writes in from Berlin, Germany, “What do you make of the situation in Cuba? How do you think this will play out in the next few months before the midterms, given Marco Rubio’s push for regime change and arguments Trump could be sold about Cuba as a real estate opportunity?”

Jake Sullivan:

Felix, I’m very glad you asked this question because Jon and I have been talking now for weeks about devoting a segment of the podcast to Cuba. I think there is every reason to believe that in the wake of this Iran war, assuming the ceasefire sticks, that President Trump, Marco Rubio, and others will turn their attention to Cuba and try to produce some kind of movement.

What that looks like is difficult to say. I mean, they’re in love with the Delci Rodriguez idea there too. What will the Cuban government, the Cuban regime be prepared to do? What kind of squeeze will the Trump administration continue to impose in the way of an energy embargo? All I can say to you, Felix, is stay tuned because we’re going to devote some time to this over the course of the next few weeks, because we regard this as an issue that’s going to come right into the headlines off the back of what’s happened with respect to the US and Iran.

Jon Finer:

Well said.

Jake Sullivan:

Final question for today is from Carson, who’s a high school student. And our understanding is that a number of high school teachers have asked their students to listen to our podcast and send us questions, and we will answer questions from other high school students in future episodes.

But Carson had the most fascinating question that we’ve received so far among the many questions we’ve gotten. He says ... He had several questions, but I want to highlight one in particular, “What are your biggest reasons for shifting from national security advisor and principal deputy national security advisor respectively to doing The Long Game podcast? Since doing my project on your podcast, I was curious about why you stepped away from such positions in government to instead host The Long Game.”

Love that. Jon, why did you decide to leave your job as principal deputy national security advisor to start a podcast?

Jon Finer:

So I just want to say there are a few things in recent days that have made me as happy as reading this question did, because it implies, and I’d love to be able to give the answer, that we were sitting in our offices and looked around at the world and the messes that we were having to deal with, and thought maybe a better life might be trying something totally different and going out and embarking on a career in podcasting.

The reality, for better or for worse, is that elections have consequences. The election that took place in November of 2024 went against the Democratic Party and against the administration that we were working in. Vice President Harris, who we worked with very closely, was on the losing end of that election. And when that happens and you’re a political appointee in a US administration, you start looking for new work.

And there is a transition period that takes place between November when the election was conducted and January 20th, when Inauguration Day takes place. And we walked out the door of the White House at about noon on Inauguration Day. Actually, we were driven out together, sat in a bar for a little bit that afternoon, and started plotting the rest of our lives. And actually quite early in that period, we went on a trip, a ski trip actually, and did some hiking out west, and started talking about something that might be fun to do in this period where we’re going to have a little more time on our hands. And that is the birthplace of the idea at least of this podcast. But can’t deny that there was some of this that was beyond our control and influenced by the election that took place two years ago.

Jake Sullivan:

Well said. I would only add that if we had known how much more fun and less stressful podcasting is than being in government, maybe we would have chosen to leave earlier to start this podcast, but we’ve only learned that since launching The Long Game a few months ago.

Carson, thank you for writing in. Thanks to everybody. Please keep your questions coming. We’ll try to get to as many of them as we can over the course of the coming episodes.

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jon Finer:

We’d love to hear from you. Send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com.

Jake Sullivan:

And subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode. You can also find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Weiner and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

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Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Leanna Greenway.

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Music is by Nat Weiner.

We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan.

Thanks for listening.

Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer

Trump Iran Speech & Debating the Deal

April 2, 2026

TEASER:

Jon Finer:

It is unprecedented in American history that you have a President of the United States accessible by phone to reporters and kind of market testing different ideas about how to handle a war three or four times a day, leading to three or four different contradictory news stories about his intentions.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

Jon, it’s been a while since you and I have had an episode where we don’t have a guest and I’m worried it’s going to get a little awkward. Are you comfortable?

Jon Finer:

Feels a bit lonely. We may need some mediation.

Jake Sullivan:

Just talking to me for the next hour. Is that going To be okay for you?

Jon Finer:

I think we can probably figure it out. Work our way through it, but we’ll see how it goes.

Jake Sullivan:

All right. We’ll see how it goes. So today we are going to mainly focus on Iran, which of course is the topic on everyone’s mind given the ongoing war and especially given the fact that President Trump for the first time in primetime addressed the nation to lay out why we went to war, how he thinks it’s going, and to a certain extent where it goes from here, with a lot of other things sprinkled in, including just an all time Hall of Fame Trump hyperbole, where he said something to the effect of, I think I have the quote here, “Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large scale losses in a matter of weeks.” “Never in the history of warfare,” that’s quite a claim.

Jake Sullivan:

But Jon, why don’t we start by talking about the speech. Then maybe you and I could spend some time actually talking about what an end to this war could actually look like and what we would do if we were in the room advising the president right now, notwithstanding the fact that neither of us thought he should have gone to war in the first place. Maybe we can touch on our experience negotiating with the Iranians. And then we got to do a red team, blue team. And I think for this week, the red team, blue team we were thinking of was to both be Iranian advisors to the new Supreme Leader, one of us arguing that Iran should negotiate with the United States to end the war and the other arguing Iran should stand firm, refuse to negotiate and make the US stew in its own juices.

Jon Finer:

See, we have a lot to talk about even without a guest. I think it’ll work.

Jake Sullivan:

All right. So with my long intro soliloquy, maybe I’ll turn it over to you for your top line thoughts on the speech, what you drew from it, how we should be thinking about it, what stood out to you.

Jon Finer:

You were right, that this was a kind of a first in the course of this conflict, no off the cuff response to a shouted question in the Oval Office or midnight press availability wearing a baseball hat. It had all the kind of formality of a serious address to the nation, which I think many people had thought the president should have done earlier in the conflict. And to be honest, I think that’s sort of true of the content of this speech as well.

Jon Finer:

While he spent a lot of time talking, as you said, about the supposed, and I think very real in many cases, American military accomplishments during the course of this war, he also did more than he has done up till now to explain why we had gone to war, even though we are a month into this conflict, a lot about kind of the history of Iran’s transgressions against the United States, killing of Americans in different places, the kind of intolerability of this regime and the fact that previous presidents, he’s one of these previous presidents, but anyway, irresponsibly allowed it to continue to fester and why he felt like he needed to step in and do what he’s doing. The kind of case you would normally make either just before or just after starting a conflict like this, maybe not one month into it. What I thought was most striking, honestly, about what he said last night is it left me wondering why he gave this speech at this time because it did not really move the needle-

Jake Sullivan:

Right.

Jon Finer:

In terms of I think that the two big things that people were looking for from him, clarity about where all this is going. He did say two to three more weeks of heavy bombing, but didn’t exactly firmly say that at that point for sure it’s going to end. And by the way, his previous timelines have not exactly held and stuck in every instance. So he can’t take that to the bank.

Jake Sullivan:

Two to three weeks is a standard Donald Trump timeframe, which has come to mean really nothing at all.

Jon Finer:

Yeah. It’s like the old kind of infrastructure week conversation about the Trump first term. Everything is two to three weeks away. And then I think the other thing that people were looking for from him is a bit more understanding of what we are trying to accomplish in this war. And here also, I think a distinct lack of clarity, because on the one hand, he said that all of the big objectives, the nuclear program, which we should talk more about, maybe isn’t all that important to deal with further because we’ve bombed it so much. And this is just nuclear dust, by the way, not highly enriched uranium, which could rapidly be turned into a bomb, which he’s also said at previous points. The regime has already changed. So regime change isn’t an objective that we need to continue fighting for necessarily. And the Strait of Hormuz, we’ll talk more about this too, that’s kind of somebody else’s problem.

Jon Finer:

So he sort of lowered the bar on all those big, three big ticket objectives. On the other hand though, he told the Iranians in no uncertain terms, “If you don’t make a deal with me, I’m going to bomb you back to the Stone Age. I’m going to go after all your civilian infrastructure.” And didn’t really say anything about boots on the ground, but implicitly, all of these options that we’ve been discussing in recent weeks feel like they’re still on the table to greater or lesser extent. So again, kind of lack of clarity, lack of reassurance, and pretty open in terms of where all this could go with these two parallel messages of maybe none of this is all that important. And on the other hand, I’m willing to go to total war to achieve it.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. Jon, just on that point, I really thought this was a tale of two speeches. For the first 75% of the speech, he was basically saying, “Mission accomplished. We’ve achieved our objectives or we’re on the brink of achieving our objectives. And once we do, we’re going to end it, walk away. And the things that are left like the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, that’s other people’s problem, they should go deal with it. I’m handing this over to the rest of the world.” And that speech was basically a permission structure to just stop this at any time he wants to stop it. Then towards the end of the speech, all of a sudden he swerved and said in kind of a totally different formula, “If Iran doesn’t do a deal with us,” as you said, “We reserve the right to destroy their energy infrastructure, to destroy their oil facilities, implicitly reserving the right to do that both from the air and on the ground.” And in a way, he was basically going back to the notion that the war has to end in some kind of settlement.

Jake Sullivan:

So when he walked away from the podium, he walked away with exactly the same options that he had walked up to the podium with last night. And for the rest of us and for the rest of the world, we’re mired in the same uncertainty as we were before the speech. The two to three weeks timeframe maybe makes the Iranians think Trump is getting nervous, but it certainly can’t give any of us confidence that that’s a really meaningful timeframe. And otherwise, he still seems to be standing at this intersection between just washing his hands of the matter and walking away or going until he feels he’s achieved some result through negotiations or through further military action.

Jake Sullivan:

And so it seems to me that the speech had enough of everything to preserve every option and therefore really the only purpose in giving it in a way was because he felt the bottom was dropping out, not just of support for the war, but of support for him and that the American people were asking themselves, “What the hell is going on here?” So he came out to try to give a speech, which as you say, was really the kind of speech you would give on day one, not on day 31 or whatever day we’re on now.

Jake Sullivan:

And in a funny way, the thought bubble I was thinking the entire speech was kind of Donald Trump saying, “Look, I’m not exactly... I’m kind of in a box here. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to get out of it. I’m trying out a variety of different rationales or formulas or declarations of success. I’m road testing them all today, see which one sticks.” And it really was, to me, the story of the Commander-in-Chief who weeks into this war is deeply uncertain about how it ends, in part because I think at this point, he doesn’t have a clear sense of why it started, even though he’s trying now to paint a coherent picture of why it started, which is reverse engineered from the kinds of things he was saying at the outset. And then the one thing I do believe really did emerge from this speech was he put his thumb on the scale on this highly enriched uranium question as you flag.

Jon Finer:

Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

And maybe you want to take a minute to talk through how you interpreted that particular provision, what to do about this stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be further enriched to weapons grade relatively rapidly.

Jon Finer:

So there’ve been reports in recent days that the United States has continued bombing Isfahan, which is the nuclear facility where it is widely believed or suspected that the highly enriched uranium that Iran retains, maybe 1000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%, is buried somewhere in the tunnels underneath this facility, now also underneath a bunch of rubble that’s been created by the bombardment. There had been a lot of speculation. We discussed it in this podcast about whether the United States would go in with special forces or Israel might go in with special forces and try to grab these canisters of this dangerous material and carry them out of Iran, which if it were accomplished, would be a remarkable achievement, very difficult, very high risk military operation, but would meaningfully reduce the amount of time it would take for Iran to pursue a weapon if that material could be extracted.

Jon Finer:

But one, no guarantee that the material is actually where we think it is or where the US government thinks it is. Two, lots of things could go wrong in this operation, as we’ve discussed many times. And what the president seemed to be saying last night is we’ve dealt with that problem in a different way. We’ve kind of buried it under enough rubble and we’re watching it with our satellites closely enough that if they try to move and extract that material, we’ll see, we’ll bomb them again and we’ll just deal with this problem from afar and from the air. Now, as we’ve seen in the past with Trump, that could either be an accurate reflection of his current thought process or it could be an operation he orders tomorrow with the goal of, in the speech of having kind of distracted the Iranians.

Jake Sullivan:

Misdirected.

Jon Finer:

Misdirected the Iranians. So who knows? But it did seem like he was moving that particular operation down the priority list, at least that’s how I read it.

Jake Sullivan:

Or at least road testing, as I was saying before, a kind of rationale hoping it sticks and that therefore his problem is resolved. I think it’s worth actually reading this single paragraph of the speech, which you captured very well. He says...

Donald Trump:

The nuclear sites that we obliterated with the B-2 bombers have been hitched so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust and we have it under intense satellite surveillance and control. If we see them make a move, even a move for it, we’ll hit them with missiles very hard again. We have all the cards. They have none.

Jake Sullivan:

He is seeming to indicate that he does not feel compelled either to do the Isfahan operation that we’ve discussed. There’s a great Washington Post piece on this, by the way, that people should read if they get the opportunity because that Washington Post article goes through just how difficult a military operation it would be. But it also seems to say he doesn’t have to do a deal for this highly enriched uranium, which is something we’ll talk about in a bit. But of course, it being Donald Trump, we could wake up tomorrow with the Isfahan operation underway and this paragraph having been designed essentially to lull the Iranians and the rest of the world and podcasters such as ourselves into a false sense of security.

Jake Sullivan:

I think the one other thing I wanted to make sure that we flag with respect to this speech that is really important is the core rationale that the administration is now trying to align around for why they went into this war in the first place. We’ve heard 12 different explanations. We saw a large emphasis on regime change early on. Now they’re sweeping that under the rug and pretending it was never really part of the deal, but they have-

Jon Finer:

Or that it already happened.

Jake Sullivan:

Or that it’s already happened, exactly, because now we have a better friendlier regime in the form of the son of the Ayatollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Marco Rubio did a video yesterday that I think is two minutes worth watching because it’s probably the most serious articulation of this new core rationale.

Marco Rubio:

What was Iran trying to do? Iran was trying to build a conventional shield, in essence, have so many missiles, have so many drones that no one could attack them and they were well on their way. We were on the verge of an Iran that had so many missiles and so many drones that no one could do anything about their nuclear weapons program in the future. That was an intolerable risk.

Jake Sullivan:

And then the president kind of laid this out in his traditional bombastic sort of florid style. And it basically came down to this proposition, which is Iran was marching towards a weapon and they were building this conventional shield of missiles, drones, and other capabilities that was going to get so powerful over time that the United States or anyone else would not be able to hold the nuclear program at risk at some point. It’d be impossible to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon, so we had to act now. And then layered on top of that is this is a problem that’s been festering for 47 years. No one has solved it, including Donald Trump in his first term as president, as you pointed out. Now, finally, we have a president who’s come along ready to solve it. So that’s the core rationale.

Jake Sullivan:

So how does that ... And that’s what he is trying to sell. And you could see Rubio really aggressively trying to sell that yesterday. For this podcast and thinking about the long game when it comes to Iran, and you and I have both dealt with this problem, I think it’s worth us seriously looking at that rationale and saying, what do we make of it? So Jon, what do you make of it?

Jon Finer:

Well, teed up. All right. So look, on the one hand, everything he said about the Iranian regime is true. It has a lot of American blood on its hands and has over a long period of time. And I think the way ultimately this conflict is going to be judged if and when it finally ends is two things. One is the accomplishments, the accomplishment that he’s pointing to, the degradation of Iran’s military capability. By the way, not degradation to zero because he has at various points claimed we’ve reduced their military capacity by 100%. That would be a lot. And yet they are still with the remaining 0% able to hold the entire global economy at risk and deny ship’s access to the strait. So clearly they have some capacity remaining, but is the reduction in Iran’s military capacity worth the various costs associated with this war, the various economic costs?

Jon Finer:

I think the costs in terms of hardening, more likely than not, Iran’s approach to the United States, to the region, to the wider world. In terms of revealing, actually, Iran has this capability to hold the entire global economy at risk. Remember that in the entire history of the Iranian regime, which the president described, they have never closed the Strait of Hormuz before and probably had at least some questions and some doubts as to how that would all work if they were to try it. And now they have tried it and proven that they can do it and can do it so far without an obvious way for the United States or any other country to forcibly reopen it, which gives them, Iran, the leverage to negotiate all manner of transactional arrangements with different countries around the world. And we’ll talk about this, I think a bit more in the next section, and extract things from them, extract money from them, extract other concessions potentially from them.

Jon Finer:

It is a new strategic lever that they have helped reveal for Iran that I suspect it’s going to use or at least brandish going forward. So is all of this worth it? I think is going to be a big open question. And who ultimately ends up with the better deterrent at the end of this? The United States, because it showed militarily it can wipe out the top echelons of the Iranian government or Iran because it’s shown it can take down much of the global economy or at least threaten it and use that as leverage against the United States. And everything that Trump does going forward, every escalation option both can harm Iran, but is also a bit of a gun pointed at our own head because if you stop Iran’s oil production by going after their civilian energy infrastructure, you are going to raise the price of oil, which is going to put meaningful economic pressure on the United States. And if you are the Iranians right now, I think you are probably thinking, we’ll talk more about this later too, we can take more pain than you can.

Jake Sullivan:

Than the US can. Yeah.

Jon Finer:

And they may well be right about that.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. It’s interesting. I completely agree with you, that they are trying to ignore, minimize, in some ways, just entirely wish away the cost side of the ledger. And there are other costs too associated with how Russia and China benefit relationships with our allies, our standing in the world. But beyond what’s happening on the cost side of the ledger, I think it’s worth interrogating two elements of this claim that I think are highly dubious. The first element of the claim is that Iran could get so conventionally powerful that we couldn’t go after their nuclear program militarily if one day we were forced to. And that seems pretty dubious to me. I mean, even if they built a lot more missiles and a lot more air defenses and a lot more other things, our ability to degrade their conventional military capacity, I think would be sustained over the course of quite a long time.

Jake Sullivan:

So I think they are massively overstating that element of it, but that’s not really my core objection to their rationale. My core objection, their rationale is that they act as though there’s only one way to deal with the nuclear program, and that’s through military force, that there’s no other way, but you and I both know there is another way. It’s called diplomacy. And in fact, the nuclear deal that we both worked on that President Obama and Secretary Kerry brought across the finish line, the joint comprehensive plan of action, put Iran’s nuclear program in a box for the long term, despite what President Trump tried to assert in his speech yesterday. President Trump pulled out of that deal, which put us in the position that we are in now.

Jake Sullivan:

And you and I remember jousting with opponents of the Iran nuclear deal at the time who kept asserting, “We just want a better deal. We’re not looking for war. We just want a better deal.” And I think you and I both thought, “Oh, a better deal. We never thought of that. We just thought this deal or worse deal. Never occurred to us to go for another deal.”

Jon Finer:

We were not against a better deal-

Jake Sullivan:

Right.

Jon Finer:

To be clear.

Jake Sullivan:

When in fact, we got the best deal we could. And what these opponents were really advocating for without saying so was war. And now we see that. The mask has come off. That we were right when we basically said the critics of the JCPOA were forcing the US down a road of war and now we see where we are with the administration pulling out of it. That still does leave a hard and important question, which is, okay, Trump pulled out of it, then President Biden was elected. You and I went and worked on Biden foreign policy for four years, and we weren’t able to get back to a deal.

Jake Sullivan:

So there was not a deal in place when President Trump came into office in 2025. That is true. A big part of the reason we weren’t able to get to a deal, and in fact, we got very close a couple of times, was that the Iranians very understandably were like, “Wait a second, if we do a deal, you guys are just going to pull out of it. We’ve seen you do that before.” And it was very difficult to overcome that basic hurdle.

Jake Sullivan:

Now, when President Trump was reelected, Iran was in a very weak state, that’s what we handed off, which put, I think, the United States in an excellent position to get a good nuclear deal. And President Trump, having been the guy who pulled out of it in the first place, was in a uniquely good position to go to the Iranians and make guarantees about doing a deal and it’s sticking for the longer term because I think he would have more credibility in that being the guy who pulled out of it. So nuclear diplomacy was absolutely available to this president before the 12-day war last year and after the 12-day war last year. And instead of a deal that could verifiably stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for a very long time, he chose this course of action instead, which one, has all the costs you identified, and two, doesn’t solve the problem as you noted.

Jake Sullivan:

Whatever he wants to say about this issue of nuclear dust, Iran retains the capability. And now as Danny Citrinowicz told us, has an even greater incentive ultimately to try to go for a bomb than they would’ve if we had done a deal. So this, I think, is what is being lost or being shunted aside in the context of the core rationale that they’re laying out. And I think it’s important for us to kind of talk to our listeners and viewers about how this entire other track, a diplomatic track that could lead to long-term verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, man, we have missed pursuing that track for a very long time. And the question of whether it is available to us on a going forward basis is very much up in the air. End of rant.

Jon Finer:

Well, look, you’re right, raised the degree of difficulty on not just his administration achieving some sort of diplomatic resolution here, but any future administration achieving that by showing that the United States maybe doesn’t stand by agreements it makes any more, at least longer than one administration. He’s also done that, by the way, by launching negotiations with the Iranians twice during the course of his administration and then bombing them-

Jake Sullivan:

And then bombing. Yeah.

Jon Finer:

Before those negotiations had come to fruition. So there’s like a fool me three times aspect to this on some level for the Iranians. And they are a lot of things, but they are not stupid. And the likelihood of them rushing back into some sort of negotiated resolution with Trump or a future administration has gone way down during the course of this.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s interesting. There’s this idea of confidence building measures as you try to get into diplomacy. This is like confidence destroying measures. We’re going to start negotiations with you and then up and out of the blue bomb you. Yeah, it does not, I think, increase the enthusiasm for the other side to get back into serious diplomacy.

Jon Finer:

Maybe just the last couple things I wanted to note on the speech and we can move on, but there were some strange rhetorical choices made here for a speech that was intended to be kind of the clarifying statement. I mean, you have a president who has said the military operation was very complete two, three weeks ago. Last night he said the military operation was nearing completion. So I don’t know, to my ear, nearing completion sounds like we’ve gone backwards from very complete, not forwards, not exactly a signal of significant progress. There are also just these contradictions that were built into it. On the one hand, if they don’t do a deal with us, we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age and we’re going to hit them very hard over the next two to three weeks. And by the way, you could tell which part of the speech Pete Hegseth cared about or believed was important because he basically just tweeted-

Jake Sullivan:

Death and destruction all day long. Yeah. Right. Right.

Jon Finer:

“Back to the Stone Age,” last night.

Jake Sullivan:

Right. Of course.

Jon Finer:

I think he missed the rest of it or didn’t pay particularly close attention to it. But he also said that when we stop fighting, the strait will open naturally. So if the strait will open naturally, why do we care then if Iran makes an agreement with us? If this is all just going to work out well... He also said gas prices will rapidly go down, stock prices will rapidly go back up. If all of this kind of magical, positive objectives are going to be achieved without doing anything, it’s not clear to me then what the purpose of the next two or three weeks of bombardment is and the kind of casual references that he makes to what would basically be a, not basically, would be a war crime, a bombing civilian energy infrastructure to kind of punish the Iranian people and make them angry at our government. Why are we doing all that if all of the things that he is looking for have either been achieved or will happen as the natural-

Jake Sullivan:

Naturally.

Jon Finer:

Outgrowth of our stopping? So don’t really understand that either. The last thing I wanted to say is, I think they made one really bad kind of rhetorical decision at the end of the speech, and I see why they did it, but he went through this litany of like every other-

Jake Sullivan:

Oh, man.

Jon Finer:

American war.

Jake Sullivan:

Absolutely. Glad you raised this.

Jon Finer:

World War I lasted this many years and World War II-

Jake Sullivan:

The Iraq War.

Jon Finer:

That many years and Korea and Vietnam and yeah, Afghanistan and Iraq. And I think he was intending to contrast that with just over a month that we’ve been at war with Iran. But to my ear, and I think maybe to some Americans’ ears, they were thinking like, “Is this what this guy has in mind? Some massive protracted US conflict?” Because that is not the comparison or I think the future that many Americans are hoping for. I think he intended to give the opposite impression. I think it possibly did not have the effect that he had in mind.

Jake Sullivan:

I count myself among those Americans, Jon. When I heard that, I thought, my immediate reaction was, “Wait a second, is he laying the groundwork for this to go on forever?”

Jon Finer:

A long war. Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

Then I kind of worked through, oh no, he may be actually trying to reassure us, but absolutely. I thought that was strange. And by the way, I don’t totally rule out, just based on the mixed messaging, some of which you just highlighted extremely effectively, this speech at the end of the day is leaving open every option to the president and has him standing there the same way he has been standing there now for a long time, basically looking around at his advisors, at the press, at any reporter who calls him and saying, “What do I do now? I’m in a bit of a box. I would like to get out of the box. What’s my way out?” And he’s throwing out a whole bunch of different and oftentimes contradictory pathways out.

Jake Sullivan:

And I think that will tees up the next thing we should turn to, which is, all right, we’ve analyzed the war, we’ve talked about the costs and the consequences, we’ve talked about the difficult challenges the president faces. What we haven’t done is put ourselves really in the shoes of advisors to a president to say, if we were in the room right now and we were telling the president, given where you are today, whatever we think about how we got here, given where you are today, what’s the best path forward? What is a plausible pathway to bring an end to the war that puts the US in the best possible position, given everything that’s happened so far and the very difficult circumstances we’re dealing with? So do you want to give some reflections on what you would say or how you would puzzle through this conundrum that the president obviously is kind of stewing in his own juices over?

Jon Finer:

Yeah, I’ll start and then turn it back to you. But I do think while the president is not going to consult us, he is consulting incredibly widely and I think market testing ideas, you mentioned this idea of kind of almost consultation of the press. It is unprecedented in American history that you have a President of the United States accessible by phone to reporters and kind of market testing different ideas about how to handle a war three or four times a day leading to like three or four different contradictory news stories about his intention.

Jake Sullivan:

Sometimes three or four contradictory statements within a news story, right?

Jon Finer:

Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

Some of these news stories now are like, “He told me this and then he told me that.” The kind of very complete, nearing completion point that you were making earlier with his speech.

Jon Finer:

And this has almost become a part of his decision. I think it has become part of his decision making process.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jon Finer:

And that in and of itself is extraordinary, but also means you just discount everything that’s published basically that even comes directly from the words of the president. So a long way of saying, maybe we’ll get a call one of these days. Who knows?

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah.

Jon Finer:

Can’t rule it out, although I don’t think likely.

Jake Sullivan:

Will you conference me in if he calls you?

Jon Finer:

Absolutely. Mr. President, just one second. I’m going to get-

Jake Sullivan:

Add Jake.

Jon Finer:

Jake on the line.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jake Sullivan:

He’ll want to hear from me, for sure.

Jon Finer:

If you promise to do the same, I will.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, that’s fair.

Jon Finer:

I’ll make that comment.

Jake Sullivan:

Okay, that’s packed. Good.

Jon Finer:

All right. So-

Jake Sullivan:

Maybe he come on The Long Game. Maybe we should call him up.

Jon Finer:

This is open invitation.

Jake Sullivan:

I bet we can get his number. Call him up, say, “Hey, Mr. President-”

Jon Finer:

I’m sure we can get his number.

Jake Sullivan:

“We’ll like to go live with The Long Game for 10 minutes.” Okay.

Jon Finer:

Oh my God.

Jake Sullivan:

No.

Jon Finer:

Quite an idea. All right. We’ll discuss that with producers offline, but not a terrible idea. All right. The one thing I would say about the current state of negotiations, which I think is important, is both the United States and Iran have put out demands that are wildly unrealistic. So United States has said Iran is going to have to forego any nuclear program, any missile program, any financial support of proxies in the region. I mean, these are the core of Iran’s kind of security and deterrence in the world. And in the context of a war in which they have been attacked by the United States and Israel, the likelihood that they’re going to give all that up and kind of surrender and capitulate seems unlikely absent a massive change from where things are right now. That’s the US side. These 15 points that have leaked in terms of what the US is seeking.

Jon Finer:

On the Iranian side though, there are also these just incredibly unrealistic demands, including that the United States should withdraw all of its forces from the Middle East, which while President Trump has mused about the idea of withdrawing forces from Europe and the Korean peninsula, he’s not shown a lot of appetite to do that and is not going to do that in the context of a war in which he’s trying to show that he has won. So the real challenge with these diplomatic initiatives is, and this is not a Trumpian instinct, is what is a way forward that can give each side some ability to claim that it is achieved enough to stop? That is kind of the core of diplomacy. It’s not about obliteration. It’s not about total victory. There are no 100%, 0%-

Jake Sullivan:

Unconditional surrender, right? That was one of the-

Jon Finer:

Right.

Jake Sullivan:

Formulas for this war at a certain point.

Jon Finer:

So that can be rhetoric maybe to position yourself for talks, but the ultimate outcome, and this is why the JCPOA and other agreements become controversial, is if you don’t give something up, the other side is not going to make concessions to you. That’s just not how anything works. So where does this start? And I think one thing that is interesting about the current moment that maybe gives a different approach, a different look, different flavor to this diplomacy is that it is now starting to become a bit multi-lateralized. It is not just the United States and Iran sitting in a room or speaking indirectly to each other through an intermediary. And we’ve got some experience with that as well. Those are very difficult ways to negotiate sometimes because the two sides are such staunch adversaries. But in the context of the JCPOA, much of the conversation was conducted with other countries in the room.

Jon Finer:

And in this case, now we see China and Pakistan trying to insert themselves into the diplomacy. They have gotten together and put out their five points for how the conflict could end. You’ve seen Keir Starmer and the UK convene this coalition, the Hormuz Coalition, he calls it, which he says is maybe the beginning of a military escort capability, but I think is much more likely to be a platform through which to negotiate with the Iranians about the future of the strait. And so one dimension of this that I think could eventually help reach a resolution, especially because the United States may just wash its hands of this entire situation, is that other countries, I think, see the severity of the problem, see the US flailing and are looking for ways to get involved and try to help resolve this. I think in this case, that may be necessary.

Jake Sullivan:

And by the way, for Iran itself, responding to in treaties or proposals from anyone other than the United States is going to be more appealing than being seen to be just cutting a deal with the nation they see as the aggressor nation. So the activity and the engagement of these other countries kind of creates an umbrella under which Iran could come to some understandings and potentially also gives the US a little bit of an arm’s length way to say, okay, we’re responding to an outcome being proposed by mediators or by a series of other countries or we’re leaving it to them to work things out as Trump sort of indicated in the speech.

Jon Finer:

To be honest, I think the only hope for the Strait of Hormuz reopening in a clean way is some sort of arrangement that’s brokered by others, not the United States.

Jake Sullivan:

Correct.

Jon Finer:

Because I think the real risk at the end of this conflict for the strait, and that is the core of the negotiation, is going to have to be about how to reopen the Strait or Hormuz. That is the big global risk that’s been created by this conflict. The concern is that after this, you’re in a situation in which Iran believes it still quote, unquote controls the strait and negotiates a set of bilateral arrangements with different countries to essentially compensate it for free passage. So you go from a situation in which there was-

Jake Sullivan:

And that’s the status quo right now.

Jon Finer:

That is the status quo.

Jake Sullivan:

I mean, we had the status quo anti, which was strait is free for passage, freedom of navigation. We have the status quo today as we tape this on April 2nd, which is individual countries cutting deals and in many cases actually paying tolls. We’re told paying tolls in Chinese R&B, in Chinese currency.

Jon Finer:

In Yuan or in Stablecoin.

Jake Sullivan:

Or in Stablecoin.

Jon Finer:

It sounds like.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, always, there’s some crypto bros in Iran as well. So that’s the status quo today. And the question is, what’s the regime that comes into place at the end of this thing? Does the current status quo basically persist where Iran has in fact increased its degree of control over the strait?

Jon Finer:

A very good article in Bloomberg today that lays out how this is working at the ship level, because it’s sometimes individual ships. Basically, some of them are re-flagging the ships with flags that are less offensive to the Iranians, but basically they submit their ship information, ownership, manifest and all this to the Iranian Navy. The Iranian Navy then checks to make sure there are no ties to the US or to Israel or to other enemy countries. They then negotiate over a toll. Countries are kind of ranked in different tiers as to kind of how costly it will be for them based on, I don’t know, how Iran feels about them in the moment, but five different kind of tiers of countries, and then a tax essentially of about a dollar per barrel of oil. And some of these ships have two million barrels of oil on them. And so the amount of money that could be collected by the Iranians is staggering actually in the course of this conflict.

Jon Finer:

And so this is all the more reason why some sort of diplomatic solution to broker it is essential. And by the way, it’s not an accident that they’re trying to resolve these transactions in Yuan and Stablecoin because a fundamental foundation of the US dollar as the kind of reserve currency in the world is that energy transactions are resolved in US dollars.

Jake Sullivan:

The Petrodollar.

Jon Finer:

And both the Chinese and the Iranians are incentivized for that not to be the case. And they are trying to kind of pry the door open, the early stages of it through some of these arrangements that are being made now.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. So I think if I were in the room, let me just try this out. I’ve struggled with this because I don’t think there are good options right now. But if I were in the room with the president, I would basically say, look, the best way to get to the other side of this in as reasonable a position as possible is that basically we declare kind of military operational success, degradation of all of the components of Iran’s capabilities and the like, along the lines of what the president and others have done. We use this third party diplomacy to essentially work out with the Iranian side, that after we stop within a short defined period of time, Iran essentially says shipping in the strait is open and we’re going to start moving ships through, subject to a negotiation over some kind of consortium, some kind of joint agreement among both the states that border the Strait of Hormuz, the regional states, and the shipping and receiving states that have an interest in this, you put that group together, but that kind of gets negotiated over a longer timeframe.

Jake Sullivan:

And then the US says at the end of this, we want to get back to the negotiating table on the nuclear front and try to work some deal that involves either the down blending of the highly enriched uranium or shipping it out to a third country in return for some limited modest sanctions relief, perhaps extending some of the sanctions relief that has been provided to Iran during the course of this war. They’re not just making money from tolling, they’re making money directly from the US Treasury having basically taken sanctions off Iran as we’re bombing them, which is a pretty bizarre state of affairs.

Jake Sullivan:

But something in that zone of essentially saying, escalation doesn’t make sense, ground forces don’t make sense, open-ended conflict doesn’t make sense, ending this does make sense, and let’s use the existence of these other actors who have a stake in this to try to basically produce a diplomatic understanding with Iran that wouldn’t be a formal agreement between the two sides, but a more informal understanding that the war ends, the strait opens, and the terms on which the strait opens then get negotiated over time, and we leave for another day and another track how to actually try to deal with the HEU beyond just holding it at risk by watching what happens in Isfahan. Effectively, I think that is the zone of where I would try to point US policy at this point to try to minimize the damage, restore the oil flow, and reset for an effort to try to deal with the nuclear program diplomatically, however difficult that will be as we discussed earlier, but how would you react to that and what adjustments, amendments, additions, subtractions would you make?

Jon Finer:

I think that buying, crude way to put it, the nuclear material from Iran through sanctions relief is the only possibility of getting that 60% enriched uranium. And by the way, just a note about 60% enriched uranium. So I just happened to bump into last week, Ernie Moniz, who was our Secretary of Energy during the Iran nuclear talks, during the JCPOA talks, and a nuclear physicist, MIT professor, but somebody who we both worked with during the Obama administration. And he told me something that I guess I probably knew on some level but hadn’t really thought about, which is that 60% enriched uranium can be used to produce a nuclear weapon. In other words, we think of today in the-

Jake Sullivan:

90%.

Jon Finer:

Modern era 90% enriched as weapons grade, but earlier generations of nuclear weapons, including by the way, the ones that were used against the Japanese contained at least some uranium that was only enriched to 60%. So this is dangerous-

Jake Sullivan:

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Jon Finer:

Stuff.

Jake Sullivan:

He was saying, so is Fat Man and Little Boy were just 60%?

Jon Finer:

He said that some of the material in those weapons was 60% enriched and that a crude device could be-

Jake Sullivan:

Okay. Got it.

Jon Finer:

Made from something like that. And he’s been saying this publicly to kind of highlight the importance of dealing with the 60% enriched uranium. I think essentially purchasing that from Iran would be well worth it and maybe the only way that it can ever get out and the only way to purchase it really is going to be some sanctions relief. So I think that the only way to approach the missile question, Iran is going to be extremely reluctant to make any concessions on missiles. They always have been, and the missile is one of their few remaining kind of meaningful deterrents, but maybe a little less meaningful than it once was just given their drone capacity has actually in some ways been more effective in this conflict. Maybe you can steer the missile conversation into some sort of regional security discussion.

Jon Finer:

And maybe the United States could say, “We’ll absent ourselves from that conversation.” At various points, the Iranians have talked about a willingness to discuss regional security issues with other countries in the region. Now, that’s going to be a hard sell to countries that Iran has just been attacking with missiles, attacking with drones, but I think the best you can probably get out of the missile conversation is some ongoing discussion about the security architecture of the region that Iran would participate in, that other countries would participate in to try to put safeguards around [inaudible 00:43:11].

Jake Sullivan:

That probably doesn’t go anywhere, at least in terms of limits on capability or.

Jon Finer:

Almost certainly won’t go anywhere.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. Right.

Jon Finer:

I mean, almost guaranteed not to go anywhere, but at least it’s an answer to the missile question in the near term. And then the last thing I think the Iranians are going to need is some kind of, what they will call a guarantee-

Jake Sullivan:

Yes.

Jon Finer:

That they don’t get attacked again, either by the United States or probably more meaningful to them, by Israel. And so the Trump administration would have to come up with something to be able to say about that.

Jake Sullivan:

It seems to me that that is one piece I had in my notes that I didn’t say, which is at the end of it, the Iranians are going to say, “Wait a sec, if you just stop and we stop, you’re just going to restart again like you did from last year to this year. We want to guarantee to end the war.” I kind of think there are two elements to deal with that. One is a form of words from the US about our intention is for this to be the end of it or something that is not totally ironclad because of course the US always has to retain the right to deal with imminent threats, but that leans more forward than just temporary ceasefire. So some form of words, and then I think Iran will be looking for other countries to kind of pile in and basically reiterate or say what their expectations are. Say the US has told them certain things.

Jake Sullivan:

This is also where I think third parties can help bridge the gap between what the US might be prepared to say on permanent end of war and what the Iranians want to hear with respect to permanent end of war. So I do think working a formula and then working a sequence with other countries is the right way to try to deal with that. That leaves one other issue on the missile front, which is what to do about what Iran was trying to advance in terms of an intercontinental ballistic missile program. President Trump referred to this again yesterday.

Jake Sullivan:

So he said they were racing to get a missile that could hit the United States. I think our view, obviously not privy to current intelligence is that’s still years off, but I think that’s something the US would have to think about how to manage diplomatically with respect to Iran and trying to deal with what could be a real threat if Iran was actually able to secure the capability of a long range missile that could actually target American cities. I don’t think that can be dealt with in trying to resolve the war in the next week, but it’s something that has to remain very much on the radar for us going forward.

Jon Finer:

It’s interesting in the vein of like ancient history at this point, one of the ideas I tried to push with people who asked for ideas about how to kind of proceed diplomatically before we got to this war was to explore with the Iranians whether they might be willing to essentially forego the ICBM piece of their missile program. In other words, something that is not going to actually be usable to them for years that is clearly targeted at the United States. So the Trump administration would be incentivized to want to take that off the table and they don’t want to negotiate anything to do with their nuclear program as it currently exists, but is there a way to put some sort of moratorium on the ICBM program as a concession, I guess, from Iran to the United States to Trump that wouldn’t change the current balance of power in any meaningful way because they don’t have this capability at this time, in a way for the Trump administration to then claim a real accomplishment. Obviously that didn’t go anywhere, but.

Jake Sullivan:

I think that was a much more available option on the diplomatic track before all this went down than it is now.

Jon Finer:

Oh, totally. Totally.

Jake Sullivan:

But we’re going to have to keep making efforts at it. So a word or two about actually negotiating with the Iranians, which we’ve both done, kind of what your reflections are, lessons learned from that, how you see the current president and his team situated to succeed in negotiations, direct, indirect, third party or otherwise, what’s your read on all that?

Jon Finer:

Well, I guess maybe first off, and most recent in time, one thing I can be very confident of, I think, is that indirect negotiations are very unlikely to lead to positive outcomes. The way these indirect negotiations work, and this was more or less the best we were able to get in the Biden administration because the Iranians refused for years to negotiate directly with us, only would negotiate through an intermediary, the Omanis in many cases, where you’re passing a message to Oman that is then translated from English into Persian or from the Iranians translated from Persian into English in some cases, even though they often speak perfect English, they will sometimes insist on doing this in their own language. And often it is not conveyed perfectly. It’s hard to capture kind of technical details and nuance. And then the intermediary just serves as a messenger going back and forth, reading these messages to people who are in the same location, but in different rooms and never speak directly to each other. It’s an insane way to proceed.

Jake Sullivan:

I mean, the absurdity of this situation in the Biden years was our negotiators would sit in a room, there’d be a long hallway, the Iranians would be in another room. Our negotiators could actually see the Iranian negotiators and the Omani intermediary would walk back and forth. And I think at various points, our negotiators just wanted to be like, “We are going to march down the hall to try to talk directly.” There’s a reason they call this game of telephone, right? That when you have someone trying to translate what someone else is saying to a third person, you lose something, not just literally in translation, but you lose something in terms of being able to accurately convey what’s going on or for there to be the kind of informal testing, trial ballooning, sticking a finger in the water to go down a given track and seeing how the other side reacts.

Jake Sullivan:

All of that is taken away in this formalized system of just passing messages. So it’s a pretty stupid way to negotiate, but the Iranians have been basically fixed on this since Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal because they have taken it as kind of point of pride, that they can’t sit directly with an American side that they see as having double crossed them. That’s got to give way at some point, maybe not in this immediate context. It seems hard to see how we’re going to get our two teams in the same room, although let’s see, but at some point, direct diplomacy is the only way to get to a truly durable deal.

Jon Finer:

So assuming we do get into direct conversations, I mean, there’s some other elements of this that are worth just, I think, putting on the table. One is in some ways President Trump’s style is pretty badly suited, I think, to negotiating with Iranians. It’s worth reading a post from the Iranian president, Pezeshkian that he put out, I think it was yesterday, it was like his message to the American people, this extended riff. But basically it starts by talking about Iran being this ancient, grand civilization worthy of kind of admiration and respect. And there really is this element of them insisting, maybe fairly, that they’d be treated as peers or even as in some ways more than peers, as an older civilization than the people who they’re dealing with, as a society worthy of respect.

Jon Finer:

And whatever Americans, American government thinks of the Islamic Republic of Iran, they also tend to associate themselves with this historic tradition. And some show of acknowledgement of that or respect feels almost like a gating issue for getting into a meaningful conversation with them. And there’s this diplomatic artifice that always happens when you’re dealing with other countries where you have to kind of unlock whatever they see as the key to being comfortable enough to really be candid. And with Iran, there is this kind of respect element that Trump’s way of kind of blustering at them and making demands at them, I think is triggering profoundly to them. I mean, the example of this I remember from the JCPOA talks is kind of towards the end game, all the different countries were in the room and Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister felt like he was being lectured to by one of the European foreign ministers who kept insisting, “You need this, you Iran more than we do. We could walk away at any time. Our countries will be just fine. Our economies will be just fine and we could walk out of here.”

Jon Finer:

And Zarif kind of stood up and kind of shouted, which doesn’t happen all that often, although he’s pretty theatrical, something akin to, “Never threaten an Iranian,” like bellowed it at the top of his voice, which was kind of dramatic and a little bit melodramatic, I would say. That then got diffused by the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov saying, “Or a Russian,” and everybody kind of laughed at that. But it was indicative of this idea that when they feel disrespected, they get their back up and it’s much harder to get things done.

Jake Sullivan:

You’re totally right, that how you present and the degree to which you’re trying to insist that the Iranians bend the knee, the kind of phrases of unconditional surrender, “We have defeated you. They have demanded a ceasefire.” All the things that Trump has done creates a very bad kind of framework for the Iranians to feel with their national pride, their sense of face, able to make any concessions or come to a deal. I want to come back to an example of this as well, of how to formulate things that get you what you want substantively while giving the Iranians something rhetorically. But I think there’s two or three other things. They’re sweating the details, particularly on this nuclear stuff. You mentioned Ernie Moniz. I mean, this guy who is a nuclear scientist, Secretary of Energy actually sat in the room and sweated out the annexes of the Iran nuclear deal to make sure that we got everything nailed down, not exactly a Trump strong suit.

Jake Sullivan:

Subtlety and coming up with clever ways of closing gaps, and we’ve talked about the difficulties on things like the ICBM program or the Strait of Hormuz or how exactly to deal with the HEU, that’s going to require a degree of subtlety where each side can kind of tell a slightly different story. Patience, you got to ride out a lot of just difficult, annoying elements of the Iranian negotiating style. And they’re willing to sit there for hours and days and weeks, and you’ve got to be-

Jon Finer:

John Kerry’s superpower in some ways.

Jake Sullivan:

Very, very patient. Not something that Trump or his negotiators are particularly well known for. And then discretion. You’ve also got to be able to keep a lot of the discussions very quiet, even sometimes secret as we did in the Oman channel to give the space to be able to do these things. But I’ll just give one kind of concrete example of how we negotiated with the Iranians to get an outcome we wanted that also recognized who our counterpart was and what they required to get across the finish line. So in the interim deal, before we got to the full Iran nuclear deal, we wanted to put a cap on how many centrifuges Iran could actually produce. We essentially wanted to freeze the total number of centrifuges they had that were working, that were in service so they wouldn’t use the negotiations to radically ramp up centrifuge production and end up with thousands and thousands of them.

Jake Sullivan:

So in the piece of paper that became the interim nuclear deal, you can go online and take a look at it. We could have written, Iran is barred from producing centrifuges above the number it has now. Now Iran couldn’t go for that. So instead, we chose the following sentence, “Consistent with its plans, Iran’s centrifuge production during the six months,” which was the original interim deal, “will be dedicated to replace damaged machines, period.” And this formula, which basically says they can only produce to replace damaged machines, i.e. not add to the overall number of working centrifuges, that is captured in that statement. And if they had produced more, it would have been a violation of the agreement. They didn’t end up producing more. But we formulated it in this way because Iran could sign onto that. Yes, yes, that’s consistent with our plans.

Jake Sullivan:

Now, the American style of negotiating is fundamentally pragmatic. It’s about actually just trying to get the result. There won’t be more new centrifuges produced to increase their overall number. The Iranian style is much more about what is the formula? What is the way it is said? To what extent does it look like we are making a concession? And in that gap, there are opportunities for real diplomatic breakthroughs along this line because Americans don’t read the footnotes of deals to see what the exact sentence is. They just want to know, are they going to have more centrifuges or aren’t they?

Jake Sullivan:

And I think this style, well suited to the Obama team that negotiated the deal, including very much the Secretary of State who led the overall negotiation of Wendy Sherman, who was the lead day-to-day negotiator, that is not the Trump style, and that makes things very difficult for trying to achieve outcomes here. And I think it’s very consistent with kind of how you formulated the core issue culturally between the culture of the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth and all these guys and the culture of the Iranians, who themselves now are putting out all these statements, like Ghalibaf just put out this big statement saying essentially, “You come for our house, you’re going to get the whole family,” I think was the title of it.

Jon Finer:

Really read as if it were written by ChatGPT, but it was the upshot was-

Jake Sullivan:

It probably was.

Jon Finer:

Was stark.

Jake Sullivan:

It probably was. Important for us to turn to red team, blue team before we close out this episode. And this red team, blue team, as previewed at the beginning of the episode, is the two of us serving as Iranian advisors to the current Supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the old Ayatollah Khamenei. And you will be arguing that we should go ahead and make a deal with the Americans. I’ll be arguing, no, we should stand firm, refuse to do a deal, let them essentially just hang out there and deal with the problems they have created for themselves. So why don’t I turn it over to you to get us going?

Jon Finer:

All right. I appreciate it. And I think only fitting that the last time we did a version of this, I got to make the more fun, more hard line, more hawkish argument that you get to do that this time. By the way, one of the weird things that occurred to me in terms of kind of preparing for this is that it’s not exactly clear whom we would be making this argument to in the Iranian system-

Jake Sullivan:

Well, right.

Jon Finer:

Right now.

Jake Sullivan:

I said Mojtaba, because we don’t even know if he’s yeah, really calling the shots.

Jon Finer:

Probably he is the ultimate decision maker, but I think in this case, we’re maybe as much making this argument to leadership of the IRGC-

Jake Sullivan:

IRGC.

Jon Finer:

Or whoever else is in the room.

Jake Sullivan:

Or some committee. Some committee.

Jon Finer:

Or some combination thereof. But anyway, here goes. All right. So I think I would start by saying a version of where I left off the last conversation on diplomacy with the Iranians, that we, Iran, are an ancient civilization that was here long before the United States and frankly, long before most of our neighbors. We’re going to be here long after them too. And if we continue to play our cards right, we can guarantee that. And that means playing the long game. I’ve seen a lot of commentary about how this moment that we are in is akin to the Suez crisis in which Israel, the UK, and France attacked Egypt in the 1950s, but couldn’t finish the job. So the United States ended up being the region’s predominant power. I think we have a chance to lay the groundwork to end that period of US dominance in the Middle East, but it will mean abandoning a bit our identity as an outlier who defies everyone all the time.

Jon Finer:

We have strong countries on our side. We have China, which would like to strengthen our position and weaken Americas. The United States has alienated its own allies like the Europeans and its partners like India and like the Gulf countries, some of which are our customers, some of which are our neighbors. And this is an opening for us to actually assert a different and rightful role for Iran in the region. But to do that, we do have to drive a hard bargain. We have to ensure there is economic benefit for us in the end of this war. We will desperately need that given what has happened to us over the course of recent weeks. And so we should give the world a choice, give us sanctions relief, give us reconstruction assistance of some kind, or we will impose some sort of tolling arrangement on the Strait of Hormuz, at least until we are made whole.

Jon Finer:

But if our economic needs can begin to be met, there is a win, win situation in this for all of us. This also means that if we are no longer attacked, we cannot be seen as hostage takers of the entire global economy. We have an opportunity to try to look like the more reasonable party, given the way the United States has behaved. Even while we bide our time, rebuild our strength. And by the way, in the spirit of revenge being a dish that’s best served cold, certainly pay our enemies back when the time is right, but that right time is not today and now.

Jon Finer:

This might have been impossible when the old man, your father, Mr. Supreme Leader, was still in charge, but we have an opportunity to chart a different path. Still very much Iran first, revolution first. But given the blow we’ve suffered, we fight on the ground where we now have relative strength and use the fact that we have shown we can bring the global economy to its knees, not to punish the world for letting this happen and punish ourselves in the process, but to use that prospect to extract the highest possible price, the tactical goal of this funding we need, and the strategic goal of reducing America’s role in the region. We make this deal with the rest of the world. When was the last time a major diplomatic deal was reached in the Middle East and the United States wasn’t really a part of it or at least didn’t lead it? That would be in and of itself a remarkable thing and we should pursue it.

Jake Sullivan:

Mr. Supreme Leader, I have to say, I’m a little bit embarrassed to be in the same room with this kind of weak, sad argument being put forward to essentially capitulate right when we are on the brink of a massive historic strategic success. We have to keep going. Stand firm. Don’t give an inch, don’t capitulate now. First, the Americans are totally stuck and they’re feeling the pain and that pain will grow. These people in America, they are obsessed with their big cars and they’re having to pay insane amounts of money to fill up their gas tanks. And as this war goes on, they’re going to have to pay more and more and more, and it’s going to put the entire American economy in the tank. And this is going to put more and more pressure on the President of the United States who at some point is just going to have to quit and we won’t have to give him anything.

Jake Sullivan:

We have leverage, we have time on our side. They cannot withstand the pain. Second, we, the Iranian people, we can withstand the pain. We’re not facing trouble on the street right now. They claim this regime was going to just get knocked over. In fact, we have lifted you up. The son of the previous Supreme Leader is the new Supreme Leader. We’ve held the revolutionary guard intact. We’ve redeemed the revolution. We can keep doing that. And by the way, not only can we keep getting our oil out every day, which we’ve been able to do and will keep being able to do because the Americans aren’t stopping our tankers from going to China and other places, but these idiots, the Americans have actually given us sanctions relief in the middle of the war. So we’re getting cash on top of being able to ship out our oil that is making sure that we can keep our economy stable as we’re going forward.

Jake Sullivan:

Now, President Trump is claiming he’s going to blow up all of our oil infrastructure, all of our energy systems. He’s been bluffing about that for two weeks now. And every time he just keeps extending the number of days before he’s going to do it. He won’t do it because he knows that we can turn around and punish him tenfold for what he does by hitting energy infrastructural, oil infrastructure in the Gulf and to stop those big cars from driving around American streets. But even if he’s not bluffing, Mr. Supreme Leader, we have lived through tougher. We lived through the Shah and we won a revolution. We lived through the Iran-Iraq war where we lost so many martyrs and had to suffer for years and years to ultimately secure a victory.

Jake Sullivan:

Remember what the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini said, the father of our revolution. He said, “A nation that is ready for martyrdom will never be enslaved. We’re not afraid of these threats. A nation that sees martyrdom as happiness is victorious.” And he also said, “That the bitterest of hardships is sweet when it is for the sake of Islam.” We must expect to be under pressure. We must expect to suffer, but we also know that we are on the path of God. That is our Ayatollah speaking to us right now, the way he spoke to the people of Iran when they were suffering long ago. So they can’t suffer, we can’t. Third, my colleague has asserted that this could be a Suez moment. It won’t be a Suez moment if we go cut a deal with the Americans now or cut a deal through third parties with the Americans because this thing will just kind of end pretty fast. The Americans will get back to doing business with their buddies. We need to make the Americans suffer through this for longer so that we lock in a new world order.

Jake Sullivan:

That imperialist buffoon George W. Bush years ago claimed there was going to be a new world order America put in after the Cold War. Well, the Americans are about to see a new world order imposed by their defeat at the hands of the Iranians. The Chinese and Russians are gaining. America’s allies are fighting with them. This could be the end of American hegemony just as Suez was the end of British hegemony, but not if we quit after just a month, not if we blink now. No. Fourth, if we do a deal, we are suckers. They’ve broken deals before. They’re just going to turn around and attack us again. They’ve broken their promises even when negotiating with us. They attacked us twice as we were willing to sit and negotiate with them. How much more stupid do we have to look by going back into negotiations with them now?

Jake Sullivan:

There’s a Farsi word, gokor. It literally means one who eats deceptions. My colleague here who’s just made the argument that we should do a deal, he is a sucker. He is one who eats deceptions. He is buying into the empty promises from an enemy. And then finally, we actually have a golden opportunity to tighten our grip on the strait. They’re just going to give up and walk away. We’re not going to have to make any concessions. We can turn this temporary tolling system into a permanent tolling system if we just get a little more time to make everyone get totally used to it.

Jake Sullivan:

So let’s hold on. Let’s make sure that we are not blinking for an instant. Lets in fact kind of hope this war goes on for a while because the longer it goes on, the faster the post-American world emerges. The more the United States suffers, the more we are able to continue to endure and in our suffering to actually be redeemed as true believers in the faith and the true heirs to the Ayatollah Khomeini. So for me, there is no contest here about what we need to do. Thank you.

Jon Finer:

I don’t know whether to be more insulted by the ad hominem attacks on my character or motivated to go and fight the imperialist. It was a stirring presentation and very well done.

Jake Sullivan:

I mean, it’s funny how from last week you go over the top to Trump. It sounds pretty persuasive. I go over the top to the Ayatollah. It sounds pretty persuasive.

Jon Finer:

This is the thing.

Jake Sullivan:

The actual arguments you laid out for the cold, hard analysis of the Iranian national interest have quite a bit of purchase to them. And frankly, I think in the end, just as Trump is standing at this intersection, so too the collective decision makers or whoever is calling the shots in Iran are standing at an intersection. They are recognizing there are benefits to trying to tie this thing off and end it, consolidate their power, move forward. They’re also recognizing there are benefits to just pure, sheer, unadulterated, revolutionary resistance against the great Satan. And so on both sides, I think what we have tried to tee up is the reality of deep uncertainty about which direction to go and whether when you face that on both sides, you can actually get an alignment among the two at any time soon. And that I think is what we will be looking for in the period ahead.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game. In the meantime, send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com and find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes. That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Wiener and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Liana Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

"Chasing the Dragon" In Iran (with Sen. Ruben Gallego)

March 19, 2026

TEASER:

Senator Ruben Gallego:

This is a new type of war, and the US military has not been engaged in this type of drone warfare, infantry drone warfare, the scale of which really only Russia and Ukraine have seen and understand.

Jon Finer:

Welcome to The Long Game. I’m Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And I’m Jake Sullivan. And over the last few episodes, we’ve looked at the war in Iran and, frankly, American foreign policy more broadly from a number of different angles, the decision making in the room where it happens, the other countries that get a say in how those decisions play out, the economic impacts of national security issues like this major war in the Middle East. Today, we’re going to get our first look at another critical actor in the consequential drama of American foreign policy, the United States Congress.

We are really excited to have as our guest Senator Ruben Gallego, who actually has served in both Houses of Congress, representing the state of Arizona. But as importantly, he’s also played a personal role in what was perhaps the defining foreign policy initiative of our time, the war in Iraq, where he fought as a US Marine and Anbar Province, which was one of the hardest places at one of the hardest moments of that war. I’m not sure if he ever actually anticipated then that his country would one day return to the Middle East with ambitions about remaking an adversary by force, or that he’d be speaking out with such passion and clarity about it as a United States Senator, but here we are.

And after we speak to Senator Gallego, Jon and I will review the state of play on Iran. We’ll reflect on how President Trump’s options have evolved since our options memo last week. We’ll touch on some of the variables that are factoring into his thinking, including gas prices, the views of our Gulf State partners and other things. And we’ll also look at the options from Iran’s point of view, because of course they have a vote in this.

So there’s a lot to talk about and let’s get to it. Senator Gallego, with that big wind up, welcome to The Long Game.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Thanks for having me.

Jon Finer:

It’s great to have you with us. So let’s start where that introduction left off. If anything, it almost understates what you went through during your time in Iraq. Your unit, Lima Company, 3rd battalion, 25th Marine Regiment took more casualties than maybe any other unit that fought during that long war. I actually remember personally, because I was living in Baghdad at the time, I think it was May 11th, 2005, one of the darkest days for that unit when you guys were attacked in Al-Qa’im Iraq.

I’m just wondering, given what you went through, how often, if ever, you thought back then about what people in Washington who sent you to that war, either the US Congress, which voted to authorize it, or obviously the White House, which championed it, were thinking when they did that and how you think now, looking back on that, about the decisions that are being made about the current war.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Yeah. May 11th, 2005, that’s actually my platoon that got hit. So we actually got hit between May 8th and May 11th twice, once on a IED and once when we hit an ambush [inaudible 00:03:07]. My best friend, Jonathan Grant, and then a lot of really good friends obviously from my platoon. So those days are very much steered in my brain, and that we still had about five more months after that of fighting where even more men died.

So it propelled me into politics because I was really mad at politicians. And just to be clear, I was mad at Democrats and Republicans because the Republicans led by George Bush, Cheney lied us into this war. We had Democrats that were afraid of being considered run and cover Democrats, [inaudible 00:03:47] what they used to call them back in the day, and couldn’t separate, I think, their feelings from what was happening in Afghanistan and what happened from 9/11 from Iraq. And I knew that what happened in Afghanistan was not directly related to this whatsoever. But I had signed the contract and I was going to fulfill that. I was not going to let anyone take my spot.

Coming out of that, I thought I would never see one of these wars of choice again, especially in the Middle East, especially against someone who, a country that is actually probably more prepared than Saddam Hussein was, that has more geopolitical advantages, has more strategic, at least locations that can really put pressure on us and our allies, and that we’d have a smarter foreign policy that would have learned the mistakes of the Iraq war to stop that. And I’ve been disappointed the whole time.

The only thing that I have been very happy to see is that clearly, the Democratic Party, Democrats themselves, Senate and House Democrats have learned the lessons of the Iraq war, are not going to fall into the same trap like if you don’t support the war, you don’t support troops. We all know that’s BS. The best way to support the troops is don’t send us to stupid wars. And even though we don’t have the power to stop what’s happening right now because we don’t have control of it, the fact is at some point there’s going to be a check on this administration. It’s going to come from his own party when they realize that he is slowly, slowly and steadily, steadily getting more and more involved in a war that nobody in this country wants at this point.

Jake Sullivan:

Ruben, we’re Executive Branch guys. We spent a lot of time in both the Obama and the Biden administration. We each, Jon and I, spent a short stint as staffers in Congress, got a little bit of a glimpse of it, but not too much.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Enough to run away.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, yeah, right, exactly.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Well put.

Jake Sullivan:

Exactly. We had a cup of coffee and that was about that.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

You’ve spoken now poignantly about your vantage point from actually being a US Marine there in the fight, now can you talk for a minute about what you actually see as being the role for Congress in American foreign policy and how this current moment, as you’ve tried and your colleagues have tried to speak with a congressional voice to make your voice heard, but the Republicans obviously have blocked the opportunity to pass War Powers Resolution? How do you think about the role of Congress? And what does this current period reflect or reveal about the limitations and the opportunities you have to shape US foreign policy?

Senator Ruben Gallego:

I think the United States Congress is trying to kind of wrestle back some of its statutory duties on the Constitution when it comes to war making that has slipped and had been slipping for a while. Some of it is a reflection of what was going on during the Bush administration. And then going into the Obama administration, there was a lot of leaning on different types of war powers and whether it’s attacking different countries, we could have discussions about that later, that we never even reigned in under President Obama, nor did we finally do it under Biden. It took for quite a while for us to get to that.

And I think that was kind of, in my opinion, a big mistake. We should have, as the Senate and not necessarily as a partisan entity, wrestled back a lot of these powers, whether it was under President Obama, even if I agree with some of his actions, or whether it was under President Biden, if I agree with some of his actions, we should have forced a vote on a lot of this to make sure that there is a check on any presidency. And by not doing that, we set ourselves up for what we just are seeing right now with Donald Trump.

So I believe that my role right now is to find any which way for me to stop this war from expanding, to stop this war from getting us into a quagmire, forcing our Republican President, Donald Trump, to understand that the political situation that he’s putting himself in is truly political and it’s going to hurt his party because at the end of the day, hopefully that forces them to come to a resolution about how to exit this quagmire that they’ve just put themselves in.

So we’ll do that with the War Powers Resolutions. Even if we lose those, then we’ll move on to the funding argument and then we’ll have to go to the bully pulpit. And I think the bully pulpit may end up being the best guard against us fully engaging into a war in Iran that could really spiral out of control, really tilts our regional allies against us or just send them to neutral and end up making China a more powerful regional partner in the Gulf Coast that wasn’t before this war started.

Jake Sullivan:

You make a really good point that the absence of Congress in this war powers conversation didn’t just start with this war. It goes back all the way to the Obama administration, maybe even before then to a certain extent. And you talked about efforts in the past to wrestle back powers. Do you have any kind of explanation for why you think it’s been so difficult for Congress to do this? Are there certain calculations or motivations? How much of this is partisan? How much of it is just that there’s a lot of members who just don’t want to deal with this? What’s your view on the why?

Senator Ruben Gallego:

You can’t deny there’s partisanship that is involved this. And a lot of times it’s just an overlapping times too where there wasn’t enough of a concentration of Democrats while there was a Democrat in charge, enough Republicans while Republican was in charge.

And then there’s always the kind of scare factor like what am I actually doing? Because the Executive has more information, especially if you’re just kind of your run-of-the-mill member of Congress and/or Senator, and they have more action.

So to stop momentum, especially when it comes to war making, as you know, it takes a lot. And you have a lot of institutions that will gladly continue encouraging you to stay in war. Certainly, when we saw this with Afghan war, for example. I remember I was then the chairman of Intel Special Operations on the Armed Services Committee. And without mentioning names, meeting different generals and trying to extract when are we getting out of Afghanistan? And I always heard the same thing, success is just around the corner, the Afghans got to get better.

But I only had so much information in front of me, save for the fact that I had a lot of friends that were still in the war that would tell me that, no, the Afghan government is not getting better. The Afghan military is not getting any better. But when you have only so much information, you have to make your decisions based on just the information they have in front of you.

And that is the thing what actually really helped, what got us eventually out of Afghanistan. And I think there was a lot of policymakers, congressmen and senators that were ready to get out, but there was an institution, different institutions, whether it’s the DOD, the CIA, different groups that wanted us to stay in Afghanistan. And in the end, they didn’t get their way, thank God, but it was not obviously the ideal way that we got out either.

Jon Finer:

Your turn the corner phrase is really seared in my mind, having run through-

Senator Ruben Gallego:

I’m sure you guys heard a gazillion times.

Jon Finer:

... the Afghanistan policy debates over more years than I like to recall. And I sometimes thought of it that we had turned the corner so many times that we’d actually spun ourselves around in circles by the end.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

I made some joke to in general in one of the committees, and not that it was something to be flippant about, we keep turning the corner, eventually we’re just going to bump into each other, right?

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly.

Jon Finer:

That’s another good way to think about it.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

And again, I’d been on the Armed Services Committee at that point for like six years and I’m like, “Okay, so again, another corner turned, great.”

Jon Finer:

Part of what I think was going on there, and actually maybe a little bit part of what is going on inside the White House now is this desire for some outcome that can be portrayed as a victory, which in Afghanistan obviously was quite elusive, and I think there’s some reason to believe maybe elusive in Iran as well. And I guess I’m wondering whether you think the United States can win at this point. And knowing that you were against this from the start, what would you recommend they do? We do?

Senator Ruben Gallego:

One of the things that really disturbed me, at least about the Afghan War was that until President Biden made the decision, no president wanted to be the one who lost the Afghan war. And no general wanted to be the last general that lost the Afghan war, which is all fine and dandy except it’s some lance corporal, corporal that are the ones that are going to be the last ones that die in these wars.

And this is the kind of the same scenario you’re kind of describing right now, that they want this win, this validation of this was all worth it because in the end, the problem that we’re going to find ourselves is that the region’s probably going to be more destabilized and actually we’re going to be weaker by how this ends.

And why do I say that? Well, we took out the Khamenei and replaced them with a worse Khamenei. The Khamenei that we killed was actually more moderate than the Khamenei that’s in charge right now. And if this continues going down the road that it is, the IRGC generals and military leadership is actually even worse than some of the kind of religious institutions that are in charge of Iran.

So what Iran ends up at the end of this war may end up being a victory for Iran because they end up being stronger in terms of the consolidation of their power. I’m sure they’re using this time right now to purge the government of any moderates or any dissidents under the guise of war.

And what does a victory for us look like? And obviously, unfortunately, the enemy always has a vote on this, but if we actually wanted to get out of this and declare a victory, I think it’d have to be something along the lines of a ceasing of hostilities, a movement towards setting the table for some type of negotiations that gives, at least at a minimum, some slowing down of nuclear growth, weapons growth of Iran, some, I would say symbolic, and I say symbolic because I know Iran probably won’t agree to this, but they would have no choice, some symbolic limits on their ballistic missile capability in the sense that we’ve knocked down most of the ballistic missiles. We could say we want five years for them. They’ll say, “Sure, we’ll take five years,” because it’s going to take them five years and they need to rebuild it anyway. And we will claim a victory and they will claim a victory.

But at the end of the day, we could claim it, but I think we’re going to end up being unfortunately weaker as a country in terms of our national security and weaker in terms of our presence in the Gulf Coast. I think a lot of our allies are going to start recognizing that we may not be a really good stabilizer and they may start tilting themselves more towards China to kind of equalize what they believe was a potential fault in their alliance with us.

Jake Sullivan:

I think you’ve captured very well that the bind the administration is in trying to figure a way to declare some kind of victory while facing some of these larger strategic consequences that you’ve just pointed out. They’re clearly contemplating putting service members, Marines like you, paratroopers from the 82nd Airbornes, sailors from the US Navy into harm’s way to an even greater extent than they have yet to do some kind of operation, whether it’s to seize an island or it’s to go seize nuclear material, or it’s to try to forcibly reopen the strait, physically some way, maybe some other mission.

What do you think of that idea? What kind of goes through your mind when you think about this new generation of Ruben Gallegos that might be asked to perform a mission like that?

Senator Ruben Gallego:

We have an amazing military. I do worry because this is a new type of war. And the US military has not been engaged in this type of drone warfare, infantry drone warfare, the scale of which really only Russia and Ukraine have seen and understand. Iran probably knows a little better than everybody because they’ve been collecting all the data from all their Shahed drone strikes. And let’s not be naive. Obviously, Russia will be 100% advising Iran this whole time, especially if we do any type of incursion.

And it’s not that this is going to be a hand-to-hand situation. Iran has really been smart and investing in the kind of standoff weaponry that they’re going to be able to strike and hit us from a distance. And I think that’s a very dangerous situation.

So the problem is now you’re also doubling down on bad policy. So what happens if we do this? And let’s say we take, I think it’s called Kharg Island, Khrag Island, I’m not exact the name, but we lose 400, 300 men in the process of taking it. Now the ante goes up for what defines a victory. You see what I’m saying? The hole gets deeper and deeper, so now we have to say, “Okay, now, well, we can’t just leave at any point. Now we have to have even a bigger victory,” which means what I’ve been saying from the beginning of this whole war is that they’re going to be chasing the dragon. If you’ve ever heard that saying when it comes to addiction, they’re going to be chasing a victory and it just causes more and more bad outcomes.

Jake Sullivan:

Wow. I think that’s a very powerful point, the grim logic of you take the next step and you sacrifice more and then you feel you have to go further in and on and on. And I hadn’t heard that chasing the dragon phrase before, but I think that logic of how you get deeper and deeper into a war is quite powerful.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

And we’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. Vietnam’s a good example. The best example of us not chasing the dragon is actually George Herbert Walker Bush. When he said, “Stop, we’re done. We’ve hit our objectives. We are pulling out and we’re done.” That is a very good example of smart, tactical, political, and strategic victories that it gave us the goals of what we needed as a country and made us stronger in terms of our alliances around the world. What we may end up chasing could end up making us weaker altogether.

Jake Sullivan:

Do you see a scenario, if this war goes on for a while, where Congress actually does exercise its authority, whether it’s on war powers or it’s on the funding or in some other way, is there any hope that Congress would actually say to the Executive Branch, “Enough”?

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Yeah, I think so. Look, the American public started against this war. The numbers only get worse, especially now the economic toil starts having an impact. And let’s hope it doesn’t happen. Let’s hope I’m totally wrong and somehow we get to a beautiful victory that we can all walk away from and we end up being better as a nation.

But if that doesn’t happen and then the body bags start showing up, the American public is not going to be in support of this. It’s an election year. There’s going to be a lot of Republicans that are going to realize that this is also not the hill they want to die on. And I think there’s going to be some major constraints put into it. Would it be able to cut off altogether the war? I don’t believe so, but I think there would be enough that it would give the message to the executive that, “You know what? We need to figure out how to wrap this up.”

The other thing that we have to entirely accept entirely possible is that because this president doesn’t understand the idea of strategic victory for this country, and for him, everything is personal. At any point, Saudi Arabia can just call up or Qatar just call up and be like, “Hey. Love you. We got a great relationship. It’s time to wrap this up. You’re affecting our life, you’re [inaudible 00:19:37] our investments. It’s going to be affecting our investments in you in the future.” And we cannot put it beyond this president that he could just say, “We’ve destroyed what we want to destroy, we’re pulling out and we’re done,” and declaring victory.

Now, strategically, may not be the best way to do it, but it may be the way that we get out. Donald Trump doesn’t think about national interest, doesn’t think about what I have to do to keep our coalition together to make sure that we teach a lesson to Iran not to do this to us. For him, it could just be like, “I personally don’t like this anymore. I thought this was going to be easy. I’m just going to pull out.”

Jon Finer:

Yeah, a bit more me first than America first.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

100%. Yeah.

Jon Finer:

Interesting that you brought up the Gulf countries. I do think that was a big part of Iran’s strategy, attack them, get them to put pressure on us to restrain us. So far, that has not played well for Iran because they’ve not done that, but you’re right, it could pivot.

The other major protagonist obviously in this war has been Israel, also a major issue in American politics. Secretary Rubio, somewhat confoundingly, said early on in the conflict that the United States had to bomb Iran because otherwise Israel would do it, which seemed a pretty big abdication of responsibility for a superpower. We saw you said that you’re no longer going to take money from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. I’m just wondering how you see the Israeli role in this war and the bilateral relationship with Israel coming out of it.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Yeah. It was very shocking when Marco Rubio said that. And I don’t know if you were quoting me when you said, “That’s a weird way for a superpower to act,” because I actually did say that on camera like, “Are we not a superpower? Are we still not a superpower?” And then of course, Fox News clipped in and says, “Ruben Gallego says the US is not a superpower.”

No, what I’m saying is superpowers don’t follow subordinate allies into war. We tell our subordinate allies, “Okay, we’ll go to war with you.” We don’t say, “Well, if you’re going, I guess we have to go.” Right? Because the most important thing as a nation is we first take care of our interests, our national interests. Israel, as their own nation, has to take care of their own national interests. If we have alignment, then we can go together, right? So this is the first time I’d ever seen us really subordinate our national interests to another foreign country, this time being Israel.

That being said, it’s not as if Netanyahu just came up with this idea of nowhere. He had been trying to do this through every administration. And I remember the first go around under the JCPOA, I was just a brand new baby member of Congress, and the amount of pressure that the Israeli government put on members of Congress in terms of just meetings, in terms of sending us information, I remember their intel telling us that, “The end of the world is coming and if you do the JCPOA, it’s going to end up making Iran stronger,” and all this stuff.

Well, it ends up, and I was very happy I did vote for the JCPOA, it ends up that what we had done was essentially probably the best outcome we could have gotten. We limited the growth of Iranian stockpile. It was under observation. There was a lot of other problems, obviously, with how and what Iran was doing in terms of proxies, in terms of support of terrorist organizations, which we should have been taken care of by different ways and different means. That’s another conversation for another time.

But what we end up doing now is probably going to end up creating an Iranian nuclear state at the first go and advantage they have to do it. And they’re going to do it as fast as possible because they just learned a lesson that the United States government and the Israeli government together, or even separate, will try to do a regime change move on you, so why not get a nuclear weapon? This is exactly, if you look at who’s looking around looking like a genius right now, North Korea looks really smart right now. And we have just basically pushed off, I think, a nuclear Iran maybe by a couple years because of these rash actions.

And the fact that the United States didn’t tell Israel, “Listen, you want to do that? You go alone because we know what’s going to end up happening. Number one, you’re not going to be successful. Yes, you may be able to kill as many of their leadership, but you’re only going to end up creating an unstable situation that’s not going to benefit us as a country, as a region. It’s only going to ensure a nuclear Iran.” And the fact that we didn’t tell Israel, no, we didn’t also pull any type of our capabilities and say, “You can go, but we’re not going to give you any of the capabilities you need to do this,” tells me a lot.

Jake Sullivan:

Your reflections back on the pressure you felt on the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, that takes Jon and me back. We were both involved.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Yeah, you guys were around that. I think you actually, Jake, you and I had a lot of briefings at the White House too.

Jake Sullivan:

So it was quite interesting because at the time, the argument that we were making was if you don’t do a deal, even an imperfect deal, even a deal that has some hair on it, your alternative is war.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

That’s right.

Jake Sullivan:

And the other side said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, you can’t possibly say that. Don’t say that.” And now all those same guys are the cheerleaders for this war.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

And I remember sitting in my office and saying the exact same thing. And look, this is 2015, I think is when we started talking about this.

Jake Sullivan:

‘15 is when the deal got done. Yeah.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

That was only 10 years post-war for me. And I remember sitting there and talking to different policymakers, the Israeli ambassador, and saying, “I don’t understand why we’re not going to give peace a chance because what you’re saying is that this deal will end up making us go to war versus us, if this deal isn’t perfect, it is imperfect, it is a deal that we could continue to build on.”

And it ends up, we were right. And they pulled out of the JCPOA, Donald Trump. We found ourselves in this ever escalating situation where they ended up, according to them as, well, war was the only options to stop. That’s not true. You made a lot of decisions that got you to this point and some of them you willingly did, whether it was a mistake or not, but there was always an option and you didn’t take that off-ramp.

Jon Finer:

Senator, if you’ll indulge one last question, we’ll let you on your way. Jake and I practice politics occasionally without a license, at least I think that’s how President Biden saw it-

Senator Ruben Gallego:

It’s dangerous, be careful.

Jon Finer:

... when we talked to him about that. You are a professional politician in addition to having such depth and experience on these issues, which is a bit unusual in the Congress. I’m wondering how much of a role you think these issues that we’ve been talking about today will play in the midterm elections and maybe which ones specifically. And then if you can also say a word or two about how the Democratic Party should position itself in 2028 to run against whoever succeeds President Trump. There’s a lot of push for generational change, for different types of candidates, wondering how you’re thinking about that.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Success, again, by whatever is defined in Iran is not going to have any political outcome that is positive for Republicans. And to be clear, I would love nothing more than this war to get wrapped up and the United States somehow come out victorious in a strategic way, right? Because even though I’m against this president, I still am, I’m like him, America first, right?

But if it goes well or if it doesn’t go well, the American public’s going to be the same because they’re pissed. They believe that we should be focusing on the homeland right now. They’re mad that everything is so expensive. They don’t really believe this president is on their side, nor the Republicans. The Republicans just told them for two years that we have to cut Medicaid, we have to cut food stamps, we’re going to cut all these programs because we need to give tax cuts. And now they’re seeing a $200 billion ask for a war that they’re against. And if anything, the war is probably going to bring even more young voters that were going to probably stay out of it into the fold to come out and vote against this.

If there’s any positive effects, it’ll be kind of in regional areas like in Florida for the expat Cuban community and Venezuelan community. Although just I’ve been campaigning down there for different candidates and a lot of Democrats have been winning these special elections down there. My sense is that even a lot of these Venezuelans and Cubans are mad because of the deportation policy. And they may have been able to get some of them back, but they’re losing a lot of other Latinos in the process.

But I fear, because of pollsters and consultants, that there’s going to be this lie that will be fed to Donald Trump that if you want to really get the Latinos back, invading a couple of these countries in Latin America will do that. And A, won’t do it. There’ll probably be even a worse blowback. But B, again, you’re potentially putting men and women in danger and death for really negligible outcomes.

2028 has to be a focus on two things, stability and progress. Very simple, right? And every 2028 candidate can do and say however you want to spin it. You could use your words, whatever it is. People are very anxious right now. Working class people are very anxious right now. They just want to know that things are at least going to start getting more stable, prices are going to come under the control and hopefully start getting clawed back.

So the 2028 candidate I think has to be somewhat on the younger side, or at least have the kind of, I would say, young vibe where people will look at that candidate and say like, “Okay, that person understands what I’m going through right now. That person is aspirational. That person is going to be fighting for my family.”

In terms of foreign policy, I’m not sure foreign policy is going to be as big of a deal to voters, provided that whatever foreign policy is happening at that time is not screwing up everyone’s personal wellbeing. But the candidates that can talk to directly to the needs and wants of Americans, especially that middle of America that’s just really hurting right now, is going to be a very successful candidate.

And we can’t ignore that the Republicans may be able to do that also, right? And I think everyone’s ascribing the 2028 election as a slam dunk for us, when these elections sometimes, again, are won on the margins.

Jon Finer:

We’ll keep an eye out for a person like that. Thank you.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Thank you, guys.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Ruben Gallego. Thank you for coming to The Long Game. Really appreciate it.

Senator Ruben Gallego:

Adios. Take care. Bye, guys.

Jon Finer:

All right. So a bit of an unusual guest for us, but a great one actually in Senator Ruben Gallego, very plain-spoken, lots of experience on these issues. It was interesting to me that he alluded to, I think knowingly, a statement that was made during the Vietnam War by a former colleague of ours, my former boss, John Kerry, about being the last, I think he said corporal to die for an unpopular war. We are in the midst right now of a quite unpopular conflict. That statement by John Kerry was made in the US Congress in testimony when he had come back from the war to talk about the mistakes that were being made there.

We got a little bit out of the senator on the role of Congress in this conflict. This is something that we’ve wrestled with from inside an administration we’re seeing play out now. What do you think about the question you asked him as to whether Congress is going to assert itself more than it has just given the history here?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, first, I’d just say I’ve been very impressed with the Democrats being so full-throated and so willing to step up and say both, “We want to vote on war powers and we want to vote no, the president is not authorized to do this.” And second, actually willing to say, “We’re not going to vote for funding for this war and we’re not going to be cowed by the argument that a refusal to vote for funding for the war is somehow a refusal to support the troops.” That has been impressive and unusual. And Ruben, Senator Gallego pointed that out.

He also made, I think, a broader point that you and I both experienced firsthand, which is that yes, the Executive Branch has asserted greater authority when it comes to the use of military force, but Congress has also ceded a lot of that authority quite consciously.

And a good example of that is the famous red line on Syria when President Obama said that we would take some form of action if Bashar Assad gassed his own people. He then went ahead and did that. He used chemical weapons, killed more than 1,000 people in a Damascus suburb. And President Obama said, “I’m prepared to use military action, but I want Congress to authorize it.” And you and I were both involved from our perches, me at the White House, you at the State Department, of trying to rally Congress to actually pass an authorization to use military force. And the main answer we got from them was not yes or no, but, “Why are you asking us?”

Jon Finer:

“Don’t make us do this.” Right.

Jake Sullivan:

Right. “Why don’t you just do the military action and then we’ll put out statements either supporting it or opposing it. We’ll see how it goes.” But basically the vibe on a bipartisan basis from the Congress was, “Don’t come here and ask us for this, just act.”

And Ruben made a point that I thought was important, which is there is a sense for many members that just not having all the information and then being put on the spot to make a big call like this is a challenging thing. And having a lot more members now, like one Congresswoman, Maggie Goodlander from New Hampshire or Senator Ruben Gallego from Arizona who are veterans, who have military experience actually, and a larger number of those folks being willing to speak out on these issues. This I think is changing from what we experienced on Syria. But it really has been a two-way street of the Executive Branch not wanting to be constrained by the Congress, but the Congress not really wanting to be saddled with the responsibility of making these big calls. And this Iran War, maybe it’s a turning point, I hesitate to use the word maybe we’re turning the corner since-

Jon Finer:

Turning the corner.

Jake Sullivan:

That has been very derided over the course of this podcast correctly. But anyway, that was something that was going through my mind as the senator was speaking.

Jon Finer:

I actually remember it somewhat even more cynically than you laid it out, the Syria episode, because there were many demands, direct demands to the White House, public demands on cable to give Congress a role in this.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, right. Right.

Jon Finer:

How can the administration go and do this without coming to Congress? Which I think were made in the belief that the administration would never actually call that bluff and try to put them on the hook with a vote. And then some of those same people who had been basically deriding President Obama for moving ahead without authorization were the ones who were saying, “Please put on the brakes.”

Jake Sullivan:

Who were like, “Hey, hey. No, no, no, no.”

Jon Finer:

“Don’t make us vote on this.” So pretty cynical episode all around in that case. And I think Congress has sought to basically have a voice on foreign policy without having the accountability that comes from having to make decisions, basically.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, that was very much a dog that caught the car moment when these very same people who were saying, “Hey, Congress has a role here,” when we tried to give it to them, said, “We want nothing to do with that.”

In the Biden administration, there was another episode along this same theme. We were operating, when we were conducting operations against terrorists in multiple different countries, under an authorization to use military force that had been passed in 2001 to go after Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. And it was still on the books and still the operative legal framework for the use of force against terrorists in Syria and Somalia, in Yemen, in other places, against groups that didn’t even exist in 2001. And we went up to the Congress and said, “You guys have got to pass a new authorization to use military force that more clearly defines the scope of that authority when it comes to which groups, which geographies, what kind of time limit.”

And the Congress debated that at some length, they kicked it around various committees, but fundamentally didn’t really want ultimately to own the difficult set of questions that came with trying to shape and scope such an authorization. So to this day, 25 years later, we’re still operating under that same authorization, and that I think is not a sound basis upon which to conduct American foreign policy. And maybe what’s happening here on Iran will help shake loose a fuller debate and ultimately lead Congress to move forward with a different kind of authorization when it comes to the campaign against terrorist groups that continue to threaten the United States.

Jon Finer:

You make a good point about how these authorizations can metastasize and be used for purposes for which they were clearly not intended. And by the way, there are members of Congress, members of the Senate who have identified this, tried to remedy it.

Jake Sullivan:

Absolutely.

Jon Finer:

Senator Kane is the one who comes to mind, who’s made this a priority throughout the recent part of his career. But as you say, largely unsuccessfully in terms of getting fellow members to be on board for it.

The other authorization where this phenomenon occurred was the 2002 authorization to use military force in Iraq. Became infamous, at least in the Democratic Party, because so many people voted for it. That was later used as a justification by the first Trump administration to take strikes against targets in Iraq that had nothing to do with the Saddam Hussein regime, Sunni led-

Jake Sullivan:

Oh, right. Right.

Jon Finer:

... government of Iraq that was deposed by the Bush administration, but actually were against Shia militia targets, including Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian leader of the IRGC Quds Force who sponsored and organized those militias. This was obviously not the rationale behind the 2002 AUMF, other than geographically. It was focused on Iraq, but on a totally different adversary. So-

Jake Sullivan:

They saw the word Iraq and were like, “All right, I guess-”

Jon Finer:

Yeah. They got that part mostly right.

Jake Sullivan:

Right. Right.

Jon Finer:

Anyway, so yes, although here we are again with the United States going to war using force and Congress not even putting itself on the hook to take a vote for whether to authorize it, at least not yet.

Jake Sullivan:

So should we turn to where we are in the war in Iran?

Jon Finer:

Yeah. We spoke last time about the options that the administration faced, and we laid out three of them. The first basically was to declare victory and get out of this entirely. That sort of seemed to be where Senator Gallego was coming down when we asked him what the administration should do.

The second was what we called escalate to deescalate. Essentially, some significant show of force or use of force intended to create the pretext for claiming victory and then basically shift back to option one and say, “This is over and we won.” The risk though of option two is that it could slide it to option three, which is go big, essentially try to achieve a military victory, massive amount of force. Where do you think we are on this option spectrum at this point?

Jake Sullivan:

I think the president has basically set himself up for a sharp choice, largely between option one and option two. Although Ruben made the very good point that option two can quickly become option three, right? That once you go down the path of escalate to deescalate, you can end up in escalate to just keep escalating. He called the chasing the dragon, which I thought was a really interesting reference to how war can play out the way addiction plays out.

But right now, what the president has done is try to generate an indirect negotiation with the Iranians that possibly allows him an off-ramp, that gets the strait back open, that lets him say, “We won,” whatever that means. But he’s also setting himself up, by moving forces into the region, to take some kind of military action to try to set the conditions for then declaring victory. And that military action, as we’ve discussed, could have a range of different flavors to it, including trying to seize some islands, including trying to forcibly reopen the strait with the Navy, maybe even including trying to go get that highly enriched uranium from Isfahan. And I think he doesn’t know yet where this is going to go because he’s improvising and he’s playing this by ear over the next few days.

And of course, the Iranians have a vote in this as well. They’re sitting on the other side of this negotiation, essentially saying publicly there is no negotiation. I think you and I probably agree that there’s some form of indirect dialogue-

Jon Finer:

Somebody’s talking to somebody. Right.

Jake Sullivan:

... happening here, whether it’s through business people or through the Pakistanis or through the Turks or through ChatGPT, who knows? There’s some way in which messages are being communicated.

And I think Iran itself is setting itself up for a choice between basically wanting to get to an end of the military operation here and potentially coming to an agreement about reopening the strait. And thinking, “Hey, we got a lot of leverage. Let’s keep teaching the US and others a lesson that we can hold the strait at risk and that attacking us has huge costs.”

So on both sides, I think they’re sitting at an intersection and are trying to decide essentially between turning one way towards an off-ramp and the other way towards continuing and potentially escalating this thing, but how are you seeing it?

Jon Finer:

Two parallel tracks sort of bumping along or speeding along. One is clear, the United States is building up to at least preserve for itself the option of some significant action, potentially even including a ground action. We’ve talked about what that could look like, grabbing the highly enriched uranium, seizing either Kharg Island or some other set of islands in the Gulf somewhere.

Jake Sullivan:

Everyone’s becoming an island expert in the Gulf, I’m noticing.

Jon Finer:

I know, it’s funny.

Jake Sullivan:

Lots of discussion of the-

Jon Finer:

Rapid Googling going on of random Iranian islands. Or a forcible naval reopening of the strait. They are buying themselves that option by deploying these Marine expeditionary units and elements of the 82nd Airborne, maybe more of the 82nd Airborne in the days to come, while simultaneously talking up at least the idea of negotiations.

But as you say, the demands that have come out of both sides, the Trump administration has leaked, somebody has leaked 15 demands, the vast majority of which I think the Iranians are going to reject out of hand because they’re just sort of non-starters in absent a greater level of military defeat and degradation than they currently face. The Iranians demands are similarly unrealistic.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, right, right.

Jon Finer:

Remove all US forces from the Middle East or whatever, which is not going to happen. So as long as there is basically no Venn diagram between the two sides, the negotiation does not seem like it has great prospects for succeeding.

Jake Sullivan:

But Jon, don’t you think we’re seeing these maximalist demands put out by each side?

Jon Finer:

Yeah, opening positions, public positions. That’s sometimes how this goes.

Jake Sullivan:

My guess is somehow, whether they can get inside that Venn diagram is one thing, but the actual passing of messages probably involves something a bit more realistic than those maximalist demands. Maybe not, but my guess is that we’re seeing something happen publicly here that is different from what is likely happening behind closed doors.

Jon Finer:

And then it becomes essentially a messaging fight over who got the better of the conflict, who gets the better of the resolution. And that, interestingly, I think is already sort of playing out in real time.

The other factor, you asked what else is going to influence how all this plays out and how all this is seen, you’ve got some pretty intense messaging going on out of the White House, out of the Gulf countries increasingly, certainly out of Israel, and also out of Iran in the current moment. It may be just worth dwelling for a minute on those different pieces because they’re shaping, I think, how the conflict is viewed. And we’ve talked about the sort of historic levels of unpopularity this early in a war for well over 50% of Americans to be opposed to this conflict at this time is highly unusual. Even the very controversial, ultimately, widely perceived as a failure, Iraq invasion had an initial phase of popularity up to 75% of people in the early days supported it.

Jake Sullivan:

I was surprised to see that looking back, right?

Jon Finer:

Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

Because our experience has been so colored by how it played out. But yeah, three quarters of Americans supported that for weeks and weeks and weeks. We’re not even a month into this one. And as you said, it’s really underwater already and these wars don’t tend to get more popular over time.

Jon Finer:

Now, where the White House has been more successful, I think, has been talking down what could be, could have been, could still be an explosive market reaction to what is playing out in the Gulf. I think while energy prices have risen significantly, particularly the price of oil, but also spot price of natural gas in Europe and Asia and elsewhere, maybe less so in the United States, if you told the average energy expert before this conflict, “You’re going to have a basically full or nearly full blockage of the Strait of Hormuz for some number of weeks with no obvious end in sight, what do you think that will do to gas prices?” I think most people would have said, or oil prices, it would at least spike well beyond what happened in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine where you got to $120 a barrel and no actual physical barrels of oil ever came off the market.

Here we’ve had millions of barrels a day coming off the market and not the sort of spike you’ve seen, you’d expect to see. And I think that’s in large part because President Trump has gone out and told the markets over and over again, “This might not last that much longer,” and people either believe him or want to believe him.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. And you and I have had very personal experience with the centrality of gas prices to sustaining political support for foreign policy in our time in the White House. It was one of the most striking lessons I learned as national security advisor, is how much this weighs upon a president’s political advisors.

And an example of that was the debate that we had over what to do about trying to sanction Russian oil. And a lot of people asked us, “Why aren’t you taking millions of Russian barrels off the market and thereby squeezing Putin’s revenues and thereby decreasing the cash he has for his war machine?” And the answer basically was that if you take millions of Russian barrels off the market entirely, you spike gas prices for Americans and all of a sudden your ability to sustain political support for the very large investments we were making in providing weapons and material to Ukraine, that would have evaporated. The American people would have said, “We don’t want any part of this.”

So it was a balance for us between sustaining political support for the very significant resources we were providing to Ukraine on the one hand, while on the other hand, trying to deal with squeezing down Russian revenues. And we came up with this concept of the price cap to keep the barrels online, but to reduce the amount of actual revenue Russia would get out of them.

But that was a tension that we had to confront and deal with every day. And the White House Chief of Staff and other senior White House advisors were in our suite, in our offices regularly saying, “Guys, you’ve got to keep an eye on this.” And I’m certain that day in, day out right now, this question of the price at the pump, what it means for average Americans is very much on the mind of people in the Trump White House up to and including the president.

And his effort to talk the markets down has worked to a certain extent, but people still are feeling the pinch. And I think that factor is certainly going to play a role here in the coming days and weeks. It may not be dispositive, but it certainly is going to be something that they will have to contend with.

Jon Finer:

It’s funny because I remember it just the same way. All of a sudden people who didn’t always pay tremendous attention to what we were doing on foreign policy wanted to stop by and kind of talk about how things were going and maybe mention that we might want to be a bit focused on this one dimension of what we were trying to do.

Oh, by the way, not lost on the Iranians either, who at least believe sometimes that they understand our politics and try to mess around with them. I would just point to, we’ve talked about Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister who we both have negotiated with at various points. His messaging on this conflict has been quite interesting. So some of it has been the sort of rah-rah gung ho stuff about how the war is going for Iran, but a lot of it has been aimed at an American audience, I doubt particularly successfully, but he’s trying.

He tweeted at one point in the conflict, “US officials are posting fake news to manipulate markets. It won’t protect them from inflationary tsunami they’ve imposed on Americans. Markets are facing biggest shortfall in history, bigger than Arab oil embargo, Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the Kuwait invasion combined.” He also tweeted at one point about Americans having voted overwhelmingly to end involvement in costly foreign wars, surging gas prices, costlier mortgages.” This is the Iranian foreign minister trying to message Americans about their mortgages. Pummeled 401ks and that the blame for that lies with Washington and Israel.

So I think he does realize on some level, Iran realizes that the best way to deter the United States is to make this conflict seem as costly as possible to the American people so this president and future presidents don’t contemplate doing something like this again. That seems to be their strategy.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s interesting. You and I have both spent many, many hours with this guy, Abbas Araghchi, who our listeners and viewers will have seen being interviewed on American television quite frequently. Actually, he was just taken off apparently the hit list for a few days. They’ve decided to say he’s not being targeted because he’s one of the people apparently the Trump administration is talking to at least indirectly. He’s a canny operator, a seasoned diplomat, somebody who kind of knows how to put himself in the other person’s shoes, and you can see him doing that with this quite sophisticated messaging strategy. I think he’s probably also availing himself of some chatbot that is producing words like 401k and mortgage and so forth.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, exactly.

Jake Sullivan:

So yeah, quite striking, something to watch closely.

Just one last observation, you made the point about people who didn’t otherwise care about foreign policy otherwise becoming quite interested. Our first experience with this, most people have basically forgotten this, was in May of 2021, just a few months in when the Colonial Pipeline went down because of a cyber attack, carried 45% of the East Coast fuel. And after just a few days, gas stations in the DC area, which affected the literal people in the White House, were just entirely out of gas. Motorists were famously trying to fill plastic bags with fuel during this. And that was my first quite harrowing lesson of how important this is from the perspective of the domestic and political advisors to the president. And it was a lesson that we saw play out throughout our time in government and is back with us now.

So whether this becomes the thing that leads President Trump to say, “I need to get an off-ramp here soon,” or whether he feels, “No, I have to take a seriously dramatic military action before I call it.” And he certainly is physically setting up for a significant military action. That is the question, that is what I think the next few days will bring. And we’ll be back on next week, for the first time in a while without a guest, Jon, you and I are just going to be stuck talking to one another like old times, like a few months ago. And I think we’ll have the opportunity then to review where things are and also cover a range of other issues. But for now, maybe we should reprise wrap and do a quick wrap and call it a day for today and then come back next week.

Jon Finer:

You want to start with a recommendation if you’ve got one?

Jake Sullivan:

Yes. I have a book recommendation even though I’m not all the way through the book. I am reading a book called Lost by Rachel Hartigan, who is a National Geographic writer. And Lost examines the multiple theories for what happened to Amelia Earhart on her ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the globe. And this of course is near and dear to my heart because when I was working for Secretary Clinton at the State Department, Secretary Clinton took a deep interest in trying to answer this mystery. Our friend Kurt Campbell was very much seized with this issue, remains to this day.

Jon Finer:

That story is almost worthy of its own podcast, Kurt Campbell, Amelia Earhart,

Jake Sullivan:

We will come to that.

Jon Finer:

... et cetera.

Jake Sullivan:

But this book is really fascinating, so that is my recommendation.

Jon Finer:

All right, I’ve got a book recommendation as well that you could have probably made because I think this recommendation was made to us by a mutual friend. But the book is called The Hour of the Predator. It’s by an author named Giuliano da Empoli, which has apparently become quite an influential read in Europe. But it’s basically mostly anecdotal, somewhat theoretical short, which is a virtue, story of what he calls Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World. So it is a good read. It is extremely evocative and I think insightful about our current moment given how prominent autocrats and tech billionaires are in American politics as well. So I recommend it highly, still not finished, but almost done.

Jake Sullivan:

So I have read Engineers of Chaos, which is a book of his from a few years ago. I’ve not yet had the chance to read this one though, as you said, a mutual friend of ours told us we must read it. I’m just deep in islands in the South Pacific where Amelia Earhart’s plane might have gone down.

Jon Finer:

That’s good stuff.

Jake Sullivan:

Something you’re watching for in the world right now that may not be getting enough attention?

Jon Finer:

Yeah. Oh, I don’t know about not getting enough attention, but we had been watching for President Trump’s next encounter with Xi Jinping. It had been on the calendar, it was taken off the calendar in large part because the president was focused on other things, like what we’ve been discussing over the past hour. It is now back on the calendar, at least for now, for mid-May. So we will have a lot more to say about the preparations for that meeting, what is likely to happen during those engagements. But this is going to be a big geopolitical moment, the first perhaps of several meetings between the two leaders in 2026.

Jake Sullivan:

And we should spend some time in advance of that also talking about the implications of what’s happening in the war in Iran for China’s view of the world and its considerations, including its considerations relative to Taiwan.

I’ve got a more maybe prosaic one than the grandiosity of the US-China relationship, and that’s Polymarket or betting markets on geopolitical events. And these extraordinary stories of bets being placed immediately before the Maduro raid, the action against the Supreme Leader, most recently massive trades being made in the run-up to the president’s tweet about how the US and Iran were talking.

I would note that actually Donald Trump Jr. formally serves as an advisor to Polymarket and Kalshi, two of these major betting markets. He’s also talking about launching his own prediction cryptocurrency based platform called Truth Predict.

Our friend Rahm Emanuel has come out with a proposal to ban any government official of any kind from betting in these markets. That’s currently not banned. I think this is a big deal. It’s not really something we had to contend with, it’s kind of exploded on the scene in the last year or so. But really interesting topic that probably deserves some more attention as we watch how this plays out over the coming weeks.

Jon Finer:

I love that one. And by the way, the sort of thematically related topic of these bizarre stock trades being made right in and around geopolitical announcements by the president, which in a normal time, the SEC would be, I would assume, all over issuing subpoenas to find out who actually made these trades and whether they were privy to information they shouldn’t have been. We have not seen that, maybe for reasons that are too obvious to go into here, but these two phenomena are sort of brand new and I think worthy of a lot more attention than they’re getting.

Jake Sullivan:

All right. So we’re not going to talk about all the things we’ve gotten wrong because that would take us too long.

Jon Finer:

Too many.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. But maybe next week we can add that back into wrap. But for today, I think that’ll do it.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

In the meantime, send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com. And find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive Producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead Editorial Producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy Editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior Producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video Producers, Nat Wiener and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising Producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate Producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing Manager, Liana Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

The Iran War Energy Crisis Is Here (with Helima Croft)

March 19, 2026

TEASER:

Helima Croft:

This is really an unprecedented disruption. We really are looking at 20% of the exports of oil and gas effectively blocked, and so the real question is when do we think this war unwinds? Because everything that is being thrown at this crisis right now, between strategic stockpile releases, discussion about potentially a ban on US energy exports or lifting the Jones Act, which requires US flagged vessels to move energy around the United States, that’s been repealed, none of that is going to address the core problem which we are facing right now, which is there is no viable export route to move this much oil and gas from the Middle East to global markets.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. As the war in Iran approaches its fourth week, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, Israel has attacked Iranian gas facilities. Iran has attacked Qatari gas infrastructure and is now going after the Saudi pipeline that carries oil away from the Strait of Hormuz. The situation is continuing to escalate and so are energy prices. Oil has surged over $110 and natural gas prices are skyrocketing. So we’re lucky to have another amazing guest today to help us make sense of this all, Helima Croft. She’s uniquely positioned to decode the chaos gripping global energy markets. She’s the head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, and before that, before she was advising Wall Street, she spent a number of years at the CIA as a senior economic analyst tracking the exact kinds of geopolitical shockwaves we’re witnessing today.

As the war with Iran continues to upend supply chains, rewrite rules of global energy, there is literally no one better to help us understand the stakes and to think about the scenarios for what comes next.

Jake Sullivan:

So Helima’s going to help us decode what she has called the biggest energy crisis since the 1970s oil embargo, and after our conversation with her, Jon and I will introduce a new segment. We call it the Options Memo. This war is at an inflection point, and when you reach an inflection point, the national security team to a president has to define and present options for where to go from here, and in this case, those options will range from stopping soon and declaring victory to unbounded escalation that could go on for months. So Jon and I will unpack the main options, and all around, we expect this will be an action packed episode. So Helima, welcome and thank you for listening to that long wind up.

Helima Croft:

Thank you so much for having me.

Jon Finer:

So Helima, as Jake said, you’ve recently noted that the energy market is facing its worst supply shock since at least the 1970s. Some have even called it the largest disruption ever. It’s starting to feel like a shift from an acute short-term shock to something that could be more enduring. Could you start just by explaining to our listeners what you’re seeing and what the biggest implications are?

Helima Croft:

Thank you so much for having me on, and I would just say that this is really the worst energy shock we have ever had, because we’re facing a situation now where virtually all Middle Eastern energy exports, except for Iranian, and we’ll talk about that, are essentially now stranded assets. The Strait of Hormuz, as you mentioned, is effectively blocked, except for a few Iranian cargoes that are going through every day. And when you mention gas and the attacks on the Qatari gas facilities, Ras Laffan, which is the world’s largest natural gas facility, that has been shut actually since the start of the conflict, but was actually struck yesterday by missiles, so we now lost all of Qatari LNG, which has big implications for the consumers of gas in Asia and in Europe as well.

Jake Sullivan:

So Helima, we want to unpack all of that, including some of the things that have happened just in the last 24 hours. We’re recording this on a Thursday and things are happening hour by hour, but I just want to take a step back for a moment. You made a point before the war that I thought was really interesting. You said that the market, I think your words were was very sanguine about energy risks and that the message from the traders was essentially, “Call me when there’s a disruption.” Well, now there is one. There is such a big one that you’re saying it’s the largest energy crisis we’ve ever seen. So can you just explain, were markets complacent? Were policymakers? And if, as you’ve argued, the price of oil is now a broken barometer for geopolitical risk, are the markets and policymakers still complacent? Is the situation actually worse than people think even sitting here today?

Helima Croft:

I think it’s worse than people think it is right now. One thing I would look at is a difference between where Brent prices are trading, and we actually reached a point of almost $119 after the attacks that just happened in the last 24 hours, versus what we’re seeing in terms of Middle Eastern grades. And I would say Brent pricing reflects the paper market, traders trading oil as a financial asset, as well as physical. But if you look at purely the grades we’re seeing out of the Middle East, like Oman barrels, they’re pricing at $160, and we think that’s a much more accurate reflection of where the physical market is.

But in terms of why the market was so sanguine, I think there was recency bias, and we can go back to the previous administration. You remember it so well, both of you, what happened after the Russian invasion of Ukraine when we had that really big run up in energy prices, and there was a real concern that we could lose three million barrels of Russian oil. Remember, Fatih Biro, head of the IEA, was coming out warning about the loss of multiple millions of Russian barrels because of sanctions, and so people really bet on a supply shortfall that never happened. Because we didn’t get really, really serious energy sanctions on Russia in the early days of the war, and then we had price caps that enabled Russian barrels to move to India once Europe went forward with energy sanctions. So we never got a real Russian supply shock, and a lot of traders essentially said, “I lost money betting on a supply disruption that never occurred. Call me when we actually get a disruption.”

And since October 7th, we’ve had these run-ups periodically where people have thought, “Okay, maybe we might lose some barrels.” And then when it’s clear we’re not going to do so, they fade the geopolitical story. And I think what people were really looking to when this war began was what happened in June. They said, okay, there was this 12-day war. We had no physical loss of Iranian barrels. Some domestic Israeli and domestic Iranian infrastructure was targeted on the energy side, but nothing when it came to Middle Eastern export facilities, so they thought it would be the same story all over again, even when we heard clear warnings.

I had just been in the Gulf. I’d heard warnings at the end of January and the beginning of February that energy leaders in the Gulf were deeply concerned that another round of engagement with Iran would lead to Iran trying to internationalize the cost, targeting energy facilities throughout the region, and yet that fell on deaf ears in Washington, at least it seemed with the White House. And traders basically said, “Nah, we are going to basically wait to see if this really happens, but we’re betting it’s going to look like June.”

Jake Sullivan:

Interesting. So the lesson of really the last year or two has been that missiles can fly all over the Middle East but the oil just keeps flowing, and traders thought that’ll happen again this time around.

Helima Croft:

And what’s really changed as well, if we go back even beyond what happened with Russia-Ukraine, the shale revolution I think has really changed people’s mindset. Now that we have so much production in the US, people believe they’re more shock absorbers when it comes to crises in the Middle East. So now they’re basically saying, “I’m not going to price fear of disruption. I’m going to price it after the disruption.” And so oil prices are now a lagging indicator, they’re not a leading indicator of potential unrest in the Middle East.

Jon Finer:

It does underscore this notion of energy independence or sometimes what this administration calls energy dominance, maybe more rhetoric than reality in the current moment, in spite of the fact that US production has increased as much as it has.

Helima Croft:

But as you know, we could have prolific US production, but at the end of the day, the US is a just in time producer. We’re not sitting on spare capacity except for what’s in the SPR, but US shale producers, they basically produce it and they sell it. They’re not Saudi Arabia, they’re not Kuwait, they’re not the UAE. They’re not sitting on barrels in reserve that they can bring on to the market or take away. Saudi Arabia is really the only country that effectively tries to act as a central banker for oil, and again, why I think people were complacent as well is because I think they assumed there were more OPEC barrels out there that could be deployed if there was a supply disruption.

The problem is we don’t have a lot of OPEC barrels because OPEC has been bringing forward production the last 12 months because President Trump has asked for more OPEC barrels. The Saudis and UAE and Kuwait, they’ve complied. So there’s not a lot left when it comes to the additional barrels they could bring on the market. But even if they wanted to bring those barrels back, they’re effectively shut in because you can’t move anything really through the Strait of Hormuz right now.

Jon Finer:

So just for our listeners, you referred to the SPR, which is the strategic petroleum reserve that the United States maintains for situations of energy shocks like this. And they have made clear that they’re going to be deploying some of those reserves to try to address this crisis, although given the scope and scale, the amount they’re likely to release may not move the needle here.

Helima Croft:

This is really an unprecedented disruption. We really are looking at 20% of the exports of oil and gas effectively blocked, and so the real question is when do we think this war unwinds? Because everything that is being thrown at this crisis right now, between strategic stockpile releases, discussion about potentially a ban on US energy exports or lifting the Jones Act, which requires US flagged vessels to move energy around the United States, that’s been repealed, none of that is going to address the core problem which we are facing right now, which is there is no viable export route to move this much oil and gas from the Middle East to global markets.

Now, there is a few couple offset options. One is UAE’s port in Fujairah, which sits outside of the S-curve of the Strait of Hormuz, but that’s been attacked on multiple occasions since the war started. All eyes are now on the East-West pipeline, which is a pipeline that the Saudis spent billions of dollars on. It allows them to move about five million barrels a day across Saudi Arabia for export through this port called Yanbu on the Red Sea. Only problem is, as both of you know, it was struck in 2019 by the Houthis, and we just saw, in terms of the events that have happened in the last 24 hours, attacks on that Yanbu port. It is still operational, but that has become the main alternative offset for the Strait of Hormuz, and so if people believe that that is not safe, then we’ve basically locked everything up in the Middle East.

Jake Sullivan:

With respect to that Yanbu pipeline taking oil to the export terminal on the Red Sea and thereby skipping the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is very familiar with the fact that that is an alternative way to supply the global market. They have taken a shot at it, as you said, just in the last 24 hours. The Saudis were able to defend against that, but we have seen before the Houthis be able to hold it at risk, as you said, and Iran is going to keep trying to strike that. So that feels like a quite fragile solution if it’s a solution at all, and even if it can be up and running at full capacity, how much of the oil from the Strait of Hormuz can it replace?

Helima Croft:

We’re talking about trying to swap out the Strait of Hormuz, which on any given day moves 17 million barrels of oil and product, with a pipeline that basically is capacity, seven million, but probably running between four and five million a day, so in no way is it replacing the volumes that come through the Strait of Hormuz, and we really have to watch, if the Houthis enter the conflict as well and people start thinking about the Red Sea being very unsafe. Because remember, a couple of years ago, we were talking about the Red Sea being the dangerous choke point, Bab al-Mandab. If that becomes a problem once again, I think oil will just move higher, and I don’t think market participants have fully woken up to the fact that this is not a secure alternative route.

Jon Finer:

Recognizing that you don’t have a crystal ball, part of your day job is not just analyzing the present, but looking forward at where things could go in the future. And you’ve talked about how the oil price could eventually exceed the very short Russia-Ukraine war high period of $128 a barrel, or even what I think is the overall record, the 2008 price of more than $140 a barrel. What are you looking at in terms of inflection points that could push oil to those levels or even beyond, and is there any ceiling here for how far this could go?

Helima Croft:

Well, the ceiling is demand destruction. At what point do prices go so high that it basically crashes demand globally? I certainly think that if this extends beyond several weeks, if we’re in a multi-month conflict, we will take out the ‘08 highs, and so then it becomes a question of when does demand destruction start to balance that market? And obviously, if you’re having demand destruction causing prices to pull back, you are in a very, very serious economic crisis globally, so that is not the way you want to have lower prices. So I am very focused on two factors. I’m very focused on duration of the conflict and I’m very focused on what points we are already starting to see cascading shut-in. So it’s not just that we can’t move the oil. It’s that now, storage is reaching tank tops across the Middle East and you have varying storage levels.

Different countries have invested more in pipelines than others, more on storage than others. Iraq, for example, it’s basically already reached tank tops, so they can move maybe 300,000 through Turkey, but essentially, you’re looking at basically shutting in about four million barrels soon. They’re over three million in shut-ins. Shut-ins are piling up across the entire region, and it’s not going to be like a light switch to turn that back on. So if you effectively shut everyone’s fields down, then you have to think about how long does the war go on, and then when the war ends, how quickly can you get this production back up online?

Jake Sullivan:

Helima, you’ve introduced a new concept for me. I thought tank tops were just a kind of shirt that I could never wear. I hadn’t heard that-Jon Finer:

For the next podcast.

Jake Sullivan:

... a description of reaching the top of the tank so that at that point, you can’t store more oil, and therefore, you can’t bring more oil out of the ground, and that’s what this concept of shut-in means. And once you’ve shut in production, it’s not just a matter of ending the war and restarting it. You actually have to take time to get that production back online.

Helima Croft:

Right. You’ve got to get yields back up online. I think the Saudis will be faster because Aramco is such a best in class national company, but I worry about how long is it going to take Iraq to get back up online. They were already facing such a severe financial crisis before this war started. They have not made the investments that they need to in terms of storage, in terms of pipeline capacity. It’s a system that is able to produce, but they’re not able to easily move it or store it, and so you worry really about that infrastructure and the challenges they’re going to have bringing this back online.

Jake Sullivan:

And just for our listeners, Helima spoke very eloquently about demand destruction. Demand destruction is basically a shorthand of saying the price of oil goes so high, the businesses simply can’t afford it, so they stop growing. And then as a result, they stop buying oil altogether, and essentially, economic activity shuts down and you get a massive recession. So the ceiling being demand destruction is a pretty alarming fact, but goes to these two things that Helima is asking us to look at, one being how long does the war go, and two being how much oil is shut in and how long does it take to bring back online?

But obviously, Helima, it’s not just oil, it’s gas, and you were referring earlier to what’s happening in Qatar in particular. They had previously shut down a significant portion of their liquefied natural gas LNG output, and then in this massive escalation over the past day or so, first, Israel hit Iran’s main gas field this week, and then Iran turned around and hit Qatar’s facilities. Qatar obviously is a major supplier to both Europe and to Asia. I read today that the head of Qatar Energy said that 17% of Qatari gas could be offline for three to four years.

Helima Croft:

Yes.

Jake Sullivan:

And that’s obviously in an instant ballpark analysis, but can you just talk for a minute about what you’re seeing when it comes to market disruptions on LNG, who suffers from that and what we should be watching for?

Helima Croft:

The gas story is so important because we can talk about, well, as long as East-West stays operational and you can move it to Yanbu, there’s a modicum of relief on the oil side. Or if the Fujairah port is operational, maybe you can move an additional 1.4 million out of that and avoid Strait of Hormuz. There is no offset for gas. There is no alternative route to move this. When the Strait of Hormuz is effectively blocked, there is no way to move Qatari gas anywhere in the world, and the Qataris were very, very quick to shut in Ras Laffan, again, the world’s largest LNG facility. They did it almost as a precautionary measure.

There had been an attack on the facility in the early days, or there had been reports of like a drone and debris fell on it. And they were very quick for I think safety reasons, precautionary reasons, even though we heard there was not a lot of damage in that initial drone incident, but the one that occurred in the last 24 hours, much more serious. And again, 17% are the early numbers that we’re hearing, but we obviously have to wait and see for the full damage assessment.

But you mentioned that field South Pars that the Israelis struck, they share that field with the Qataris. That’s the world’s largest field, and so it caused a lot of alarm bells because people were like, “Wow, if you’re going after South Pars, that is going to prompt a very, very aggressive Iranian retaliation.” And we saw it in terms of Ras Laffan, but the Iranians targeted UAE facilities and they targeted Saudi facilities. And so the question is is this going to continue to escalate? Is Israel going to stand down in terms of attacking Iranian energy infrastructure? Is Iran going to pair back? There’s nothing to indicate yet that we’ve reached any type of off-ramp when it comes to energy attacks.

Jon Finer:

For the big energy importers, Helima, both oil and gas, isn’t part of the problem on gas that oil is actually easier to store large quantities, for at least a period of time? Gas may be a much more acute, earlier crunch for some of these countries.

Helima Croft:

Oh, a hundred percent, and so we’re looking at the consumers in Asia being hit particularly hard. So that’s going to be the frontline economic effects will be felt in Asia when it comes to Qatari LNG, but pay attention to Europe as well. And you two know this so well that when they decided in Europe to start pairing back Russian gas imports, they got imports from the United States, and the Qataris freed up gas that was not needed in Asia because it was warmer weather, and that was a decision they had to take at the highest levels in Doha. And they basically allowed that gas that wasn’t needed, was contracted but not needed, moved to Europe. And so you are going to be facing problems, particularly in a country like the United Kingdom which imports large quantities of LNG from Qatar. And so again, if this crisis does not abate, UK consumers are going to feel this pretty strongly.

Jon Finer:

We were both quite involved in trying to break the very unhealthy dependency that the European countries had on Russian gas. I feel like they are now increasingly feeling insecure about their current energy mix, and you’re already seeing a few European leaders muse about the possibility of going back to Russian supplies given what’s happening in the Middle East.

Helima Croft:

Well, I think what’s really interesting, and we’re going to be watching in the next 24, 48, 72 hours, are we start going to see United States talking about banning exports to deal with the crisis. And you think about Europe, and there was a discussion I was hearing in Europe a couple of months ago about are we too dependent on the United States now for energy? Are we now in the dynamic of concentration risk, that we take too much from the US? And so I’m going to be watching very closely, if we do start announcing energy bans, export bans, what does that mean for our relationship with our allies that we encourage to take more US energy exports?

Jake Sullivan:

Let’s imagine the Trump administration actually did follow through and say, “We are now banning crude oil exports from the United States.” What would be the practical impact of that, first here in the United States for American consumers? And then second, you’ve just elaborated some of the consequences globally, and in particular, the impact on the perception of the world of the United States as an unreliable energy supplier, but can you just talk for a minute about how this could actually even work? Because it would be quite a striking thing if the United States decided we’re retreating from the global oil market, we are going to ban crude exports, which we used to do in the past, but essentially, we’re going to have our oil for ourselves and shut ourselves off from the rest of the world. So can you just talk our listeners through the implications of that from your perspective, and do you think that that is actually something that we might possibly see here in the coming days or weeks?

Helima Croft:

The problem for this administration is that they are throwing a lot of things at the wall and nothing is sticking, and so we’re cycling through policies, and again, nothing is going to the heart of the matter, which is that we’re not able to unlock these exports from the Middle East. But we’re already starting to see market participants price in the idea of an export ban. Part of the reason why West Texas intermediate prices are lower than the international benchmark Brent is because some market participants are starting to anticipate that we will ban US energy exports on the crude side for now. And what that will mean is that yes, WTI will trade lower, so you will have potentially a little bit of relief for US consumers, but the problem is that if you think about our refinery slate, particularly in the Gulf Coast of the United States, a lot of those refineries are geared to run heavier barrels and medium barrels.

That’s why we still import oil. That’s why we import millions of barrels from Canada, is because our refinery system is geared in the Gulf Coast to take those heavier barrels. And so the problem is it’s a bit of a mismatch that US shale producers produce a lot of light sweet barrels. We can’t refine all that here. Part of the reason why we lifted the ban on exports was to make these companies and these investments more commercially viable, because there was not a market for all of that light oil here. These producers would not produce that much oil if there was no market for it. They produce it and now they export it. So if we ban those exports, what’s that going to mean? We’re going to mean that we’re going to basically start to see lower US production, and that’s what President Trump has really prided himself on, being the architect. Even the Shell Revolution we really started to see in the Obama administration, but he’s really taken great pride in his deregulatory agenda when it comes to US oil and gas, permitting reform.

But if you do an export ban, you’re really going at the heart of the business model of a lot of US producers, and again, our refineries are geared to run, in the Gulf Coast, a lot of them are geared to run heavier barrels, so we’re going to end up with a refinery mismatch.

Jon Finer:

You keep coming back to what I think is a very accurate and important analytical point that for all the ways in which people are trying to problem solve around the fundamental blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, as long as that remains the situation, this is going to be a very hard circumstance to address. You’ve also said that Iran, not the United States, not Israel, is the country that holds the key to doing that. And I guess I’m wondering, how are you thinking about, how are markets thinking about the possibility that the United States could by force, military force, go in and open the strait? Is that something that markets believe, that you believe is a plausible solution during the conflict at this point? How are you thinking about that?

Helima Croft:

Well, again, I think in early days, a lot of market participants gave the White House the benefit of the doubt. Remember, we had that big run up in prices over a Sunday night when the Asian markets opened. We had Brent prices closing in on $120, and then on Monday, you had President Trump come out and say, right before the closing bell by the way, this is going to be a short war, and we had this big selloff. And then the next day, we moved a leg lower when you had Energy Secretary Wright tweet that the US had escorted a ship through the Strait of Hormuz. Later turned out to be a phantom escort because there was no US escort of a ship through the Strait of Hormuz. But I think a lot of market participants early on were like, “This is going to be a short war,” so they would sell on any indication that that was going to be the case, and they believe it’s easy to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

I was telling some of my clients, this is not like getting a tug in the Hamptons when you run up on a bank or something. This is actually a very, very complicated operation, and you can go back to, as you know, the tanker wars in ‘87 where we reflagged Kuwaiti tankers during the Iran-Iraq war and helped escort those tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. I think we had about 80 vessels involved in that effort to try to secure passage of those ships through the Strait of Hormuz, joint operations I think with the UK and France. But we’re an active protagonist in this war. In the Iran-Iraq war, we were not engaged in active military campaign at the same time we’re trying to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

So I think there was a misperception about how easy it would be to do this, and I think now, people are starting to realize, wait a second, if there is no escort, it’s because it’s complicated, that we can’t just move ships over and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It might actually take some type of US ground involvement along the coast, that this is a much more challenging operation. I think that is starting now to dawn on many market participants.

Jake Sullivan:

So Helima, the larger implications of this for other countries are real too and in other theaters. Russian crude prices have skyrocketed. The Treasury just authorized countries to purchase Russian oil stranded at sea to help try to stabilize markets. That sure looks, as you just said, like Russia’s the big winner. Are we reading that right? And if you’re sitting in Moscow right now, not that we’re asking you to put yourself in the position of an advisor to Vladimir Putin, but how are you looking at this if you were in fact in the Kremlin right now? You’d probably be pretty psyched about the situation. Is that a short-term thing or will they gain over the longer term on this? How do you read the overall impact on this on Russia’s capacity to generate revenue from increasing prices for Russian crude?

Helima Croft:

Maybe I’m going to be Alexander Novak, the deputy prime minister of Russia-

Jake Sullivan:

If you can muster that.

Helima Croft:

Or the secretary of .... I’ve watched Alexander Novak for years at OPEC. He’s actually a very, very skilled energy diplomat. But I would say if you’re Alexander Novak and you’re in conversation with your boss, you’re like, “This is working out wonderfully for us.” We’ve gone from a situation where at the end of 2025, the United States imposed full blocking sanctions on the two largest Russian energy companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, making it very difficult for Indian refiners, particularly the all important reliance refiners that were taking 500,000 barrels a day of oil from Rosneft as part of a special agreement, all of a sudden, Reliance, because it’s so deeply embedded in Western capital markets, had to basically say to Reliance, “We can’t take those barrels anymore.” We started building Russian barrels at sea. That’s why we have 140 million Russian barrels sitting on the water, is because the impact of these escalating sanctions meant it was hard to find a home. China can only take so many sanctioned barrels, particularly these teapot refiners.

And so if you’re Russia, we now have a situation where we’ve just, with a stroke of a pen, said, “You know what? Don’t worry about those sanctions. India, back up the truck, take those barrels again,” and Russia’s getting full economics for those barrels as well. No one’s really talking about trying to enforce a price cap on those barrels, so Russia now is essentially refilling its ATM as a result of this war in the Middle East. So if you had to say winners or losers, top of the list would be Russia in terms of who is getting the economic dividend from this war.

Jon Finer:

It’s interestingly not just Russia that the United States is looking at advantaging to some extent through policy interventions. Somewhat paradoxically, it’s also Iran. We’ve had the Treasury secretary come out over the last 24 hours and talk about lifting sanctions in the middle of a war against Iran on about 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that are sitting in tankers around the world. What do you make of that? It’s a striking consequence of launching a war on Iran that they could end up getting sanctions relief out of it. I don’t know that I saw that coming. Do you think that’ll happen, and would it even make a dent given the volumes that we’re talking about?

Helima Croft:

Gosh, what a time to be alive. I could not have imagined that this would be the policy option that we’d be landing on, but again, I think it just speaks to the fact that we are cycling through policies. Remember, when this war started, the White House was not signaling that there would be any major economic impacts from this. They said it would be a short war. We had plenty of oil, don’t worry about it. We would not release from the SPR, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We’re now talking about doing potentially another US Strategic Petroleum Reserve release, and as you just mentioned, we’re now talking about not only waiving Russia sanctions, but potentially waving Iranian sanctions. And the only vessels that are really moving through the Strait of Hormuz are these very large crude carriers, VLCCs, that are fully loaded with Iranian barrels moving to China.

So this is a situation where the only Middle Eastern country that is exporting through the Strait of Hormuz is Iran. They may now be able to get maybe full economics for their sanctioned barrels, and yet they are the ones that we are on the opposing side of in this war. So it is just speaking to the fact that there was not probably a lot of advanced planning about how you would deal with a major supply disruption in the Middle East.

Jake Sullivan:

By the way, Helima, does it surprise you that Iran is still able to move its own oil through the Strait? I would not have expected that.

Helima Croft:

They wouldn’t attack themselves. I think it goes to the fact that-

Jake Sullivan:

But we’ve let it go, right? It’s interesting that they’re holding everyone else at risk, but they’re moving their oil and everyone’s accepting that situation. Now it’s turned out, of course, and that oil is going to China, so the US has essentially created a circumstance where the oil is not supplying global markets, the price is going up, and yet Iran can keep getting revenue by sending oil to China. That’s a a strange circumstance. And now it seems like the direction of US policy is as much oil as Iran can sell, we’ll help them sell it, not only by allowing them to move it onto the water, but by lifting sanctions as well. Just curious if this was baked into the dynamic from your perspective when this kicked off.

Helima Croft:

Again, I think this shows that the White House was not anticipating the crisis that we’re facing now, because this is an administration that has taken great pride in lower energy prices. The best theme of their affordability agenda has been cheap gasoline, and if you think about it, $4 retail gasoline, it’s really a psychological pain point for many US consumers, and that is definitely ... We’re already seeing it in some states that we’re crossing that mark, but that is absolutely going to be the reality for US consumers. And so it just talks about the multiple agendas this administration is facing right now, and how do you reconcile them if you do not have an offramp for this war? So the fact that you still are so focused on trying to control the price of gasoline that you would allow Iran to receive additional revenue when you’re trying actually to end this war with Iran or to defeat Iran, it’s very hard to see how this unwinds in a clean fashion.

Jon Finer:

So we launched this war, we, the United States, created the price environment that we’ve all been discussing during the course of this conversation, and the US government has tried now a number of different policy interventions to try to get the price spikes under control, but most of them have been pretty ineffective up till now. Releases from the strategic reserves, an insurance scheme from the Development Finance Corporation for tankers.

Helima Croft:

We can talk about that, yes.

Jon Finer:

That was one of the early ones on the table. Now, we’re talking about a possible export ban or removal or lifting of sanctions on Russian barrels, on Iranian barrels. Are there other policy steps that you see or could anticipate that are still on the shelf that could actually help in this situation, or have we basically exhausted the toolkit?

Helima Croft:

We are exhausting it pretty quickly, and so I’ll go back to the insurance situation. The issue with the DFC, the Development Finance Corporation insurance scheme, which again, market participants reacted initially pretty favorably to that because they came out very, very confident in saying this was going to solve the problem, but that insurance scheme only covered the Strait of Hormuz. It did not cover the rest of the waterways, and we’ve seen unarmed, unmanned boats fold with explosives attacking tankers off the coast of Basrah, for example. So we have contested waters. The blast radius from Iranian attacks is pretty wide. It’s not confined in any way to the Strait of Hormuz, so that insurance plan did not cover anything outside the strait. Also didn’t cover loss of life or environmental damage, and so there were not a lot of takers for that insurance plan.

And so that was one of the early things that was announced, got some traction for about 24 hours, but then people looked at the details and energy companies were like, “That’s not going to get me excited to move my vessels.” And Shaikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, someone we all know, the CEO of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, he came out in an interview and said early on, he was not going to move Kuwait’s strategic tankers unless there was some guarantee of security from the United States, and again, that is what is really needed to unblock the Strait of Hormuz. People have to believe that their vessels are not going to be targeted in a way that leads to the loss of life, that were not going to have oil spills. This is a really frightening situation for these shipping companies, for these energy companies, and that’s what needs to be fixed. We need a policy that can address that primary concern, and I don’t see how you do that.

Jake Sullivan:

So Helima, we’re going to get you out of here on this one looking from today down the road to the future. This podcast is called The Long Game. If you were still at the CIA and you were asked to write a national intelligence estimate, which is an intelligence informed analysis-

Helima Croft:

As I know.

Jake Sullivan:

Right?

Helima Croft:

Yes.

Jake Sullivan:

For the senior most US officials for our listeners, a national intelligence estimate to present to those senior most US officials on global energy security beyond the next few months, talk to us about what the key findings would be. And to put a finer point on it, the supply shock back in the ‘70s caused a major shift in how countries like the US approach their energy policy and strategy.

Helima Croft:

Like the creation of the International Energy Agency, yes.

Jake Sullivan:

Right, right. So do you think we’re going to see something here similar, that we don’t go back to some version of normal but that this is a disjunctive event and that the future of the global energy market will end up looking a lot different, or do you think that still depends on how this all resolves? Tell us how that NIE would look if Helima Croft were writing it.

Helima Croft:

Well, Helima Croft used to do a lot more current intelligence assessments, so I was actually covering an oil producer that was losing significant quantities of oil as we were headed into the Iraq wars. I was actually the analyst covering Nigeria, so I used to have to write these intelligence briefings on how much we were losing out of Nigeria, how quickly could we get it back online, and so I was used to covering supply outages. When Nigeria was losing 800,000 barrels a day in March of 2023, I’m showing how old I am, we also had a Venezuelan oil strike that was causing about a million Venezuelan barrels offline as we were going into the Iraq War. And so we had a lot of conversations about, gosh, how do we better insulate the United States from these outages? And I think after this crisis, there’s at a minimum going to be an investment in storage.

I do think that is going to become one of the primary policy goals of key oil producing countries, is we better basically ensure that we have much more storage, and maybe not just have it in the Gulf, but also be able to store our oil closer to our actual market, so I think that will be a key investment.

I think countries that are consuming countries are going to invest more in rebuilding their shock absorbers in terms of strategic petroleum reserves, so I do think we’re going to see countries really invest in saying, “You know what? I may need a better rainy day fund.” And one country we haven’t talked about a lot is China was buying aggressively for the last 12 months of all commodities, but a big, big purchaser of oil and they’ve spent a lot of money building out storage. And I do really wonder right now if China engaged in better risk management than a lot of other consumers, because I do think that China has better shock absorbers in place because they’ve built so much in terms of their strategic reserves going into this crisis.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. They seem to have learned a slightly different lesson from last year’s 12-day war than the rest of the world.

Helima Croft:

Yes, yes.

Jon Finer:

Helima, incredibly grateful for your time, for your insights, and I hope that there is somebody with your level of expertise or something approximating it inside this administration giving the kinds of advice you’re giving our listeners to the president, because it’s quite clear that they need it.

Helima Croft:

And I’m sure there’s incredible talent still in the CIA. I have to tell you, working on those energy issues, I was surrounded by people who were just extraordinarily talented, so I do believe there is probably some incredible analysts that are producing reports that I hope the administration is reading.

Jake Sullivan:

Amen. Thank you, Helima, for joining us.

Helima Croft:

Thank you for having me.

Jake Sullivan:

So Jon, a lot to digest in what Helima laid out. I thought she gave a fantastic laydown of frankly, how the markets missed this, and as the subtext of that, how the Trump administration missed this, and also how the ceiling on this is quite a scary one. It is the price of oil goes up so much that it craters the global economy. So I think she had a lot of interesting things for us to watch on duration of conflict, how much oil gets shut in. I learned some new things like tank tops. I also thought it was quite interesting when she was talking about VLCCs, very large crude carriers. It reminded me of the Princess Bride’s rodents of unusual size. The oil markets appear to be incredibly literal, just like the writers of the Princess Bride, so that was interesting to me. Probably not the biggest thing other people took away from it, but quite a striking set of observations and extremely timely given everything that’s going on, even as we speak, in terms of the trading of shots at energy infrastructure across the Gulf.

Jon Finer:

One of the things she started to allude to, but that we’ve been thinking a lot about and I think are going to have to come back to at some point, are the knock-on effects in other areas of the economy beyond energy, which is obviously the near term area of greatest focus that could be quite significant and even strategically important, and even geopolitically important down the road. And I think there are a number of those areas that are just starting to feel the pinch of this, and as Helima has said, the longer it goes on, the deeper those impacts are going to be.

Jake Sullivan:

Amen. We really spent our time with her focusing on the headline grabbing energy shock, but when we look at the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, we also have to be deeply concerned about how this ripples through a whole host of other critical supply chains, because this waterway is not just an energy corridor. It’s a massive artery for raw materials leaving the Gulf, and frankly, also for vital goods entering it. If you look at fertilizer and the way in which countries, particularly in the global South, are looking around saying, “Are we going to be able to grow our crops this year?” If you look at petrochemicals, the Gulf accounts for 13% of the global chemical trade, and the disruptions we’re seeing to the flow of some of those core products, they’re already hitting major Asian petrochemical companies, which here, we’re talking about the foundational building block for everyday plastics, for packaging materials, you name it.

Then you’ve got industrial metals. Because aluminum smelting is so energy intensive, the Gulf has quietly become a massive hub of aluminum smelting, handling something now approaching 10% of total world production. So when you’ve got those exports bottlenecked, then you’re going to be staring down real supply shortages that could drive aluminum prices to historic highs. That’s everything from car manufacturing to commercial construction, and Jon, I know you’ve been particularly looking at the impact on the tech sector, on semiconductor manufacturing, which also will ripple through here.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, I think there are a couple big things that are worth paying attention to, maybe starting with the fact that the Gulf countries and the sovereign wealth funds that they control have been incredibly important, in some cases, even primary drivers of the AI buildout, data centers and other infrastructure in the United States, around the world. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that are being deployed already, in large part driven by some of these funds, but that are also anticipated in the years ahead. And now these countries are going to have a fundamentally different set of priorities coming out of this conflict, including rebuilding, reconstituting their domestic energy infrastructure that we’ve just been talking about, much of it being taken offline. So how much of this money is going to be available to the tech sector in the way that it was I think is a big open question.

And then the microchip industry, in particular, semiconductors, are reliant on this region. Qatar is one of the world’s largest suppliers of helium, which is a byproduct of natural gas extraction that we were talking about, and it’s essential for semiconductor manufacturing and fiber optics, MRI machines and the like. So you combine the helium squeeze with the fact that the Gulf produces also about half, almost half of the world’s sulfur exports, which gives us high purity sulfuric acid that’s required to build these clean silicon wafers and tech hubs like Taiwan and South Korea, and now we’re looking at a serious bottleneck in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. And then there’s the risk of the dogs that haven’t yet barked, accidents and whatnot. So this disruption is going to extend, is going to ripple well beyond the areas that we have been talking about.

And then when you talk about the Gulf specifically, this is a two-way street. While the world relies on the Gulf for energy, the Gulf relies on much of the rest of the world for food imports. They import billions of dollars worth of cereals and meat and fresh produce almost entirely by sea, and right now, hundreds of dry bulk carriers are trapped or actively avoiding the region entirely, which holds staple shipments, rice, South American grains, so you’ve got a food insecurity risk that’s tied to this as well. So this is a lot that we’ve just put on the table, but some of this is about flagging where the puck could be moving on these issues in the weeks ahead, and we will definitely come back to this, I think, periodically during the course of this podcast.

Jake Sullivan:

Jon, did you have helium shortages on your bingo card when this conflict kicked off?

Jon Finer:

Absolutely not, and have been digging into it. It’s one of the funny things about these moments, is people who are experts in extremely abstract areas of the global economy all of a sudden acquire, let’s just say tens of thousands, if not millions of new people interested in their work. And so I’ve been trying to suss out who follows helium trade and helium production, and these people are available and this is their Super Bowl.

Jake Sullivan:

There is a guy actually who is identified in a lot of these articles as running a Helium consultancy, so he’s been there working on this critical input to so much of the semiconductor industry and so many other things as well, quietly in the shadows, and yeah, like you said, it’s the World Cup for Helium now and he’s having his moment in the sun. But across all these different places, one of the things that we learned very painfully over the course of our four years is the fragility of global supply chains and their susceptibility to disruption when conflict breaks out, and that the farthest reaches of the world are touched by conflict that happens on the other side of the globe, and we’re seeing that. The effects-

Jon Finer:

I don’t remember the word supply chain being uttered in the situation room during the Obama administration in my first stint in government.

Jake Sullivan:

In the Biden years, you rarely didn’t have it mentioned in one of these contexts.

Jon Finer:

It was a core of our work.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, amazing. Amazing. Okay. So we’re going to watch all of that, I think energy obviously as the headline issue, but these other elements being really critical to the proper functioning of the global economy and just to the lives of everyday Americans. So something that in future episodes, we’ll keep coming back to to see how long these disruptions last and how long it takes to recover from them. But now, we’re going to use the rest of the time that we have in today’s episode on a new segment. We’ll be road testing it here. We call it the Options Memo, and Jon, this is yours, your baby, so why don’t you introduce it?

Jon Finer:

I like to think of it as ours, but I will introduce it. This is an idea that came actually from a listener who I met during overseas travel who wanted to talk a bit about the podcast and had a suggestion for a segment that I thought, I guess we thought was a good idea. So basically, when a policy reaches an inflection point and the president faces major decisions, his advisors, we play these roles, owe him a clear, clean presentation of options for his consideration for how the country can proceed. Usually, this comes in the form of a paper, the options memo. That paper is usually generated by the NSC, which we ran, and often, the discussion revolves around three options, because otherwise, it either feels like too few or too many, such that it can become unwieldy, so often, these are three option papers.

Sometimes, by the way, people game the options memo by two very extreme options on either side of what they consider to be the reasonable middle path to try to steer the discussion in that direction. We are not going to do that Goldilocks style just right approach. We will try to be honest about the options that the administration faces.

Jake Sullivan:

By the way, the Pentagon loves that in particular. Their options memos are frequently nuclear war, nothing, or our preferred option. Those are your-

Jon Finer:

Or what we think you should do. Exactly.

Jake Sullivan:

... choices. Right.

Jon Finer:

So basically, the staff generates a memo that gets refined in meetings that take place in the situation room where key people are sitting around a table, no windows. The paper is distributed in advance, so people come in prepared to discuss it. Usually, that takes place first at the level of deputies, the deputy cabinet secretaries, which is a group that I chaired, and then sometimes we allow the principals, the group B chair, to look at it too. Principals can’t always be trusted for these purposes, but every now and then. And then ultimately, the decision goes to the president to make a call, either in the form of a recommendation if there’s a consensus behind one particular approach, or what we sometimes call a split memo. These departments and agencies or these cabinet members believe X, these other ones believe Y. We need your decision on where to proceed.

So while we have no idea if this administration is following anything like this sort of process, we did develop some options for discussion at what feels like a pretty significant moment in this war. And just to stipulate upfront, we have been against all of this from the start. We wish we had never gotten to this point, but we are here, and since we are here, it’s worth really thinking hard about what the president should do.

Jake Sullivan:

So we have identified three options. The first option is essentially declare victory and wrap it up, the second is escalate to deescalate, and the third is go big or go all in. So let’s start with declare victory and wrap it up. This option would basically involve the White House, the president, saying, “We have achieved our objectives, and now we are going to bring this war to a close,” and say that we have accomplished what we set out to accomplish. There was an Al Jazeera article called the US-Israeli Strategy Against Iran is Working, that was the headline of the article by a guy named Muhanad Seloom, that basically made the case for a version of this option. Said the US and Israel have been successful. They’ve badly degraded Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, set it back years. The nuclear program has been set back. The proxies, the terrorist proxies like Hezbollah and others have been badly weakened, the top leaders have been eliminated, and so the administration at this point can say all of the operational objectives have been met and we can wind this down.

The benefit of that, coming off of the conversation with Helima Croft, is that you could, if you were successful in ending the war right now, and that’s an if I’ll come back to, you could get the Strait of Hormuz reopened, you could get energy and other commodity flows restarted, you could begin to alleviate the disruptions to the global economy, and you could put a lid on what the possible other spillover and escalation impacts and effects might be. This may be the most risk averse of the approaches, but it’s one that has real attraction, particularly at this moment, this inflection point, as you put it, where this thing really could continue to spiral out of control.

Now, what is the problem with that? Well, number one, Iran gets a vote in whether or not the war ends right now, so even if the United States and Israel were to say, “We’re done. We’ve accomplished our objectives. The war’s over,” Iran could say, “Not so fast. We’re not simply going to let you stop and then let the Strait reopen, and then wait for you to come hit us again in a few months. We are going to keep the Strait closed until there’s some greater guarantee, in what form is a little unclear, but some greater guarantee that you’re not just going to come back and hit us again.”

So that is a challenge that would have to be worked through, and for those arguing for the declare victory and rapid up strategy, part of what they would probably advocate for is some back channel communication with the Iranians to see if there was a way, not a formal agreement to end the war, but a way for each side in a sense to declare victory, call it a day, and have the hostility stop and the strait reopen. Whether that’s possible or not remains very much an open question.

The second big challenge is that that Al Jazeera article ultimately identified what it says is a, quote, “clear endgame,” and I’m going to read the sentence that is the clear end game. It is the permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its border through missiles, nuclear latency, and proxy networks. The word permanent is doing a lot of work there. If this war ends right now, one, the regime is still intact, and as our guest last week, Danny Citrinowicz said, is probably more motivated, more hostile, maybe more open to trying to go for a nuclear weapon.

Two, when it comes to the nuclear program, Iran would still be sitting on a stockpile of highly enriched uranium, would still have centrifuges, and would still have the know how to build them, and now would have a heck of a lot more incentive to ultimately try to sneak out to a nuclear weapon at some point.

And then three, yes, its ballistic missile capabilities and its proxies have been badly degraded, but those can be built back. We’ve seen Hezbollah already get built back over the course of the past year and the ballistic missile program get built back since the 12-day war last year.

So this is ultimately a risky strategy in that it does not solve many of the larger problems and leaves in place a significant number of challenges, even if Iran decided to go along with it, which itself is a big if, and yet among the options is the one that restores or works towards restoring global economic activity, energy flows, commodity flows most rapidly, and most reduces the possibility of some greater set of catastrophes, including a larger loss of American life and a widening of the conflict to even more energy infrastructure and potentially even beyond that. So that’s the argument basically for the wrap it up, call it a day option among our three options.

Jon Finer:

I would just add before switching to option two, and having argued for this option in our red team, blue team exercise last week and probably believing candidly that this is the best of the three, all of which are highly problematic, the declarative part-

Jake Sullivan:

By the way, Jon, I did not even try to replicate your MAGA Jon thing because I think it cannot be touched again.

Jon Finer:

It felt a little too comfortable, honestly. It makes me nervous.

Jake Sullivan:

It cannot be replicated, so yeah, I played a straight man.

Jon Finer:

But one point I didn’t make and you didn’t make last week but is the reality is the declare victory part of this option is becoming more and more challenging by the day. You have the president coming out and having said we’ve destroyed a hundred percent, I think he said, of Iran’s military capability, leading many people to joke that with 0% of their military capability-

Jake Sullivan:

They’re still keeping strait closed.

Jon Finer:

... they are wreaking quite a lot of havoc. And the nuclear program was obliterated, but as we will discuss in a moment, there is still significant elements of the nuclear program that have not been fully dealt with, the regime is still intact, et cetera. So there will be an Iranian victory narrative if the war ends today that will be extremely compelling as well, and so you’ll be in this narrative battle that will succeed the military battle, although my view would be if we’re only in a narrative battle, given the economic impacts of the military battle, we’re probably in a better place than we are now, so it’s just not going to be clean.

The second option that we want to put on the table we call escalate to deescalate. This is an idea that comes up actually quite a lot in policy discussions and I think there are good reasons to be wary of it, which we’ll get to, but the theory is that the willingness to go further on your side either achieves some sort of limited objective that makes it easier to stop or changes the calculus on the other side of the conflict. They see that you’re willing to go further so they are more incentivized to end the war, to back down, to make concessions, and that actually escalating can lead to a more rapid end to the war than our option one, which is just declaring victory and stopping.

One version of this could be the idea that we debated last week, going in and seizing the highly enriched uranium, about a thousand pounds of it that remains, we believe, although we don’t know for sure, in the tunnels underneath the Isfahan nuclear facility, and that could be rapidly enriched further into weapons grade material if Iran chooses to go down that path and ultimately lead to a bomb. So the US could decide that one way to end this conflict faster is to embark on this high risk operation, grab the highly enriched uranium, and then use that as a pretext to actually end the war. Now we’ve accomplished everything that we intended to accomplish.

Another version though of escalate to deescalate is what we saw play out yesterday.

Jake Sullivan:

Absolutely.

Jon Finer:

Which shows, I think, the folly and the danger associated with this option if you haven’t fully thought through how the other side could respond. So I think the theory of the case, and we know this to some extent because as with everything in this administration, the internal discussions end up in public before not too long, that the United States and Israel, Israel taking the strikes but the United States approving of them, believed that escalating attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure, in this case, South Pars gas field that we talked about with Helima, would lead Iran to think, “Okay, now the consequences are so severe that we have to look to deescalate ourselves,” and in fact, Iran made exactly the opposite calculus.

Iran decided to essentially mirror image the US authorized Israeli attacks and go after energy infrastructure in the Gulf, so instead of escalate to deescalate, we ended up getting escalate to escalate, and that made the United States uncomfortable quite clearly, because then you had the President of the United States come out and say, “Actually, I was never for these Israeli strikes on energy infrastructure,” which I think we know is probably not the case based on the reporting that had already been in the public record, and that it should stop. Both Israel should stop attacking Iranian energy infrastructure and Iran should stop attacking infrastructure in the Gulf in response. And I think the likelihood that Iran is going to listen to that, given that they had their facilities hit first, is uncertain at best going forward.

So that episode, which also created, by the way, a significant rift between the United States and Israel, because then you had Israeli officials coming out and essentially contradicting President Trump. “Oh, no, no, we ran those strikes by the United States and they were just fine with them, including the president,” Israeli officials said on background. So the result of this escalate to deescalate strategy was Iranian escalation and a split between the United States and Israel, which have tried to maintain strategic alignment in the course of this conflict.

There are other risks associated with escalate to deescalate. If you try a high risk operation, as we’ve discussed, like seizing the highly enriched uranium, it could go wrong. And say a number of American Israeli forces are killed, or say you go in and you look for the highly enriched uranium and it’s not there, and you’ve just launched this very high profile, high risk operation and accomplished nothing from it, well, what do you do at that point? Then do you just stop? Then do you have to escalate again? It creates a lot of these strategic dilemmas that there are not easy answers to.

So I worry about this policy option every time it comes up in the situation room, which it does often. I remember, going back to the Syria conflict, the theory that was articulated for why the United States should do more militarily to try to dislodge President Assad back 10, 12 years ago was if we escalated more, it might be a quicker off-ramp to him deciding, “All right, I don’t want to be president of Syria anymore. I’d like to just transition away to a more democratic leadership.” And the arguments that were made on the other side were the ones that I just laid out that are disadvantageous in the current moment. So escalate to deescalate is intellectually appealing. I think in reality, it can be highly complicated. We saw that yesterday.

Jake Sullivan:

I would just add one point. I think that’s all extremely well put, and you’re right that this is this kind of trope that comes up constantly in the situation room, let’s just escalate to deescalate. And the additional point I want to put on the table is that when you’re on this kind of escalation ladder where both sides are testing and probing the other side’s willingness to go further up that ladder, you really have to think hard about putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and what they perceive your appetite for escalation really is.

And in this case, if you’re sitting in Tehran and what you’ve seen in the last 24 hours is the President of the United States seeming to authorize a strike against your gas facility, but as soon as you hit back, he disowns that strike and then says, “We won’t do any more of that,” and then says, “We’re actually going to unsanction Iranian oil,” the literal opposite of maximum pressure, which was the big Trump tagline for sanctions on Iranian oil in the first term, you’re probably sitting there thinking, “This guy’s reasonably sensitive to energy markets and he doesn’t really mean it that he’s going to keep going up the ladder.”

And so an escalate to deescalate strategy is particularly dangerous if the other side simply doesn’t think you’re credible, and I think right now, that’s the reality, is that the Iranians don’t think President Trump is credible, they’re prepared to go tit-for-tat. They’re prepared to call and President Trump is not prepared to re-raise, but in fact, appears to be, at least in this instance, folding, so that creates an especially dangerous dynamic for escalate to deescalate.

So I think we see all of the challenges and risks associated with that one, which leads to the third of the three options, which is really go big, go all in, and here, the core purpose would be to force the strait back open coercively or militarily, and potentially to seize Iran’s capacity to export energy by taking Kharg Island. And we’ve talked about that potential scenario in previous episodes. 90% right now of Iran’s oil exports go through the export terminal at Kharg Island, this island some number of miles off the coast of Iran in the Gulf, and the idea would be for the United States actually to put boots on the ground to take that and try to hold it against Iran, which would obviously attack it to try to dislodge us, or at least to cause great harm, and thereby, essentially to take command of Iran’s capacity to export energy through the Gulf.

In addition, it could also mean something Helima referenced when we were talking about trying to force open the Strait of Hormuz, the need for boots on the ground along the strait itself to try to ensure that there can be safe passage through that strait without relying on Iran’s good graces for it.

Now, one big challenge with making an objective of this campaign getting the Strait back open is the reason it closed in the first place was you started the war. So a thing that was not closed before you started the war, opening it now becomes your core objective. That almost feels like a self-licking ice cream cone of military logic. I think very dangerous for us to go down the road that we now must physically open the strait through some combination of naval and land operations around the strait.

And then the idea of going and taking Kharg Island I think may be somewhat appealing to a president who always likes seizing the oil of other countries or controlling the oil of other countries, as he’s talked about repeatedly in Iraq and Syria and as he’s just done in Venezuela. But of course, trying to sit on Kharg Island with US men and women in uniform, subject to attacks being lobbed across the water from mainland Iran indefinitely, that to me feels like a recipe for a certain kind of quagmire that is very dangerous.

And then of course, as you try to force the Strait open, Iran is going to use every countermeasure in its arsenal to try to, A, keep it closed, but also to inflict as much pain as possible. That could mean, again, more loss of American life. It could also mean attacks on Gulf countries that expand beyond just energy infrastructure to include things like desalinization plants or other critical infrastructure that sustains the economy, and frankly, human life in those countries.

So the go big option has a certain kind of appeal in that you’d be saying, “We’re going to finish this thing once and for all. We are going to fully defeat Iran.” But that appeal starts to fade pretty rapidly when you think about both what it will take in terms of the resources and what it will mean in terms of the risks. But that option is something that certainly, the Pentagon is putting in front of the president. They are probably not advocating for it I’ll bet, but they’re putting in front of the president. “This is what it would mean, Mr. President, operationally to physically try to do this, both on the island and in the Strait, in addition to all the other steps that we’ve already described that could include an Isfahan operation as well within this option.”

So that’s available to the president. It comes with a massive amount of I think the technical term is hair on it, but one that would have to go in the options memo for his consideration.

Jon Finer:

So two quick things on this, and agree with how you laid it out. One is we have not yet seen the full measure of Iranian naval capabilities to counter an attempt to force open the Strait of Hormuz. For example, one of the things that we’ve been most worried about, the United States has been most worried about, is a more extensive mining campaign in the strait, which would be extremely time-consuming, dangerous, challenging to deal with. The Iranians have flirted around the edges with mining but have not yet gone all in on mining, in part I think to avoid having to cut off their own exports through the strait, but if the full weight of the United States Navy is going to go barreling into the strait, I suspect we should be prepared to deal with sea mines in that situation.

The second is that Iran famously uses these small, fast, highly maneuverable boats to menace US naval ships in the strait. Even during peacetime, they’ll drive up to the edge of much larger, much more capable US naval vessels, and the risk there is you pack these things with explosives to go ramming into the side of a ship and you can do a lot of damage to it, maybe even sink it if you’re not worried at all about the crew of your little vessel being killed in the process, which they probably wouldn’t in this circumstance. So there are other Iranian capabilities that have not yet been brought to bear fully in this context, but they could be in the context of a bigger naval assault.

But the second thing, to where you ended, I do think the administration is signaling a very real willingness to consider this option. They are deploying a Marine expeditionary unit to the region, about 2,500 Marines on a flat top ship whose core mission normally is some amphibious landing of some kind, that’s what they’re trained for, and they will be in theater in somewhere over a week from now I think is about the timeline.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, a little more than a week.

Jon Finer:

And there is talk of other US military units, the 82nd Airborne and others, being put on a higher level of alert status and readiness. And that could either be signaling to Iran in this escalate to deescalate category that we are ready to go further, or it could be genuine preparation to do what you just laid out. But they are buying the president this option through some of the preparations that they’re making, and rhetorically, the president himself has not taken boots on the ground off the table. In fact, he said something to the effect of, he used a golf term, “I don’t have the yips,” I think he said about boots on the ground at one point, basically indicating that he would look at it. So I think this is a real option, even for all the hair on it that you described.

Jake Sullivan:

By the way, the whole mine threat, which is real and we’ve seen that spike a bit over the last several days, would probably be better dealt with if we had not decommissioned US mine layers just a little bit before this conflict broke out. It’s just another indicator of how we didn’t exactly plan for all of the various scenarios we might be confronting as we got into this whole thing.

We’ve laid out those three scenarios. As Jon said at the outset, we have been very clear that we thought this war was a bad idea from the start and we think it should end as soon as possible for the American national interest and for the sake of the world, but we wanted to go through this exercise to lay out how this is going to be discussed, framed, potentially presented in the White House, in the situation room, in the Oval Office.

And we’ll have to watch both the moves and the statements the administration makes to see which line they’re likely going down among these three flavors of options, and obviously there’s a spectrum among them as well. So that’s what we will be looking for over the course of the coming days, and in the meantime, we will just have to see what everyone else, what every other actor, starting with Iran but also the countries in the Gulf and beyond, will do to react to the fast-moving developments here.

Jon Finer:

And by the way, if you’re left thinking, “That was pretty unsatisfying. It doesn’t feel like there’s a good, clean, comfortable option here.”

Jake Sullivan:

Where’s the good option?

Jon Finer:

Welcome to policymaking. Unfortunately, this is often how it goes and why it’s such a hard job to be the President of the United States, because you have people like us walking in and say, “Here are three things that you could do.”

Jake Sullivan:

They all have big problems.

Jon Finer:

“And here are innumerable problems with every one of them. Which do you choose?” That is what decision making is like at this level, for better or for worse.

Jake Sullivan:

All right. With that, we’ll wrap it up, and look forward to coming back to you guys next week.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

In the meantime, send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com, and find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Wiener and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Leanna Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

America Doesn’t Understand Iran And It Shows (with Danny Citrinowicz)

March 12, 2026

TEASER:

Danny Citrinowicz:

We killed the guy, Ali Khamenei, a fierce enemy of the state of Israel and of US, but he’s the guy that’s actually preventing the Iranian system from acquiring a nuclear bomb. People may think that he pushed the system, but after 2003, actually prevented that because he was afraid to grow the threshold. So, the overall assessment, I would say, that operationally we’re doing very good. Strategically, we’re not getting close to our target. And even more than that, if this war will end today and the 40 kilos with Iran, then we have a mountain to climb to prevent the Iranians to think or to rush into a nuclear bomb, assuming that this is what Mojtaba will want to do.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to the Long Game, I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. So, every now and then on the internet, an expert meets his or her moment and the Iran war has been no exception. But we were lucky to be joined last week by Karim Sadjadpour, who had studied Iran for his entire career and shared keen insights into what is happening inside Iran and how its leaders and people might be experiencing this conflict.

This week, we have another such expert. Danny Citrinowicz, who has provided perhaps the sharpest analysis anywhere of how the government of Israel, the US, and Iran are conducting this war. We were aware of Danny’s work and have crossed paths with him in our previous lives, but it was through reading and often finding ourselves nodding along to his meticulously crafted posts on X over recent weeks that we came to view him as one of this conflict’s indispensable guides.

To understate it, Danny knows what he’s talking about. He spent 25 years working for the IDF Intelligence Unit and was its top analyst on Iran from 2003 when the US invaded Iraq until roughly the end of the Obama administration in 2016. This makes him an expert on at least two of the protagonists in this war and his writing has revealed that he does pretty damn well at understanding perhaps the most confounding actor, the Trump administration. So, we are grateful for his willingness to join us. Danny, welcome to the Long Game.

Danny Citrinowicz:

Thank you for having me.

Jake Sullivan:

Danny, really appreciate you joining us. Where are you coming to us from today?

Danny Citrinowicz:

I’m in Rehovot, 40 minutes away from Tel Aviv, a place that in the last one was very attractive to the Iranian missile, unfortunately. But now I hope that everything will stay, I would say quiet, but I hope that we won’t be another target of the Iranian missiles.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, we will hope that you stay safe, you love one stay safe, and we’ll send our thoughts to you for that. As you know very well from your time in the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Unit as the top Iran guy, and having seen conflicts over time with Iranian proxies, the beginning of every wartime policy meeting with the senior leadership, either in Israel or in the United States, you get a situation report, a SITREP from the intel community to set the table for the discussion. You’ve been in those rooms, you’ve given those briefings. So, if you were in the room right now with the senior leaders, either of Israel or the United States and they turn to you for an update, what key points would you make about where this war stands at this point almost two weeks in?

Danny Citrinowicz:

The thing that definitely on the operational side, Israel and the US have an amazing achievements. I think that the combination of the IDF and CENTCOM, and they know what they’re doing about Iran. I think the combination of that, really hammering Iran in a way that the Iranians are observing a lot of damages, especially on the strategic sides, especially on the missiles and everything related to the foundation of the regime itself, the IRGC and the Basij.

But, and this is a big but. If this is the target of this campaign, I think that we are achieving almost 100% of it. But if the target is a regime change, we are not close to that. I think that the regime assumed that the wars is behind it. In their mind, actually they have some sort to leverage given what they’re doing in the last two weeks, especially making sure that everybody will suffer from the war.

Another part that I think is more alarming is the fact that if this war was to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, I think there are two main problems in that regard. One is the 440 kilos for 60%. I think it would be very hard to find a way to take it out from Isfahan. And the other thing is the fact that actually in the beginning of the campaign, we killed the guy, Ali Khamenei, a fierce enemy of the state of Israel, of US, but he’s the guy that’s actually preventing the Iranian system from acquiring a nuclear bomb. People may think that he pushed the system, but after 2003, actually prevent that because he was afraid to grow the threshold.

So, the overall assessment, I would say that operationally we’re doing very good. Strategically, we’re not getting close to our target. And even more than that, if this war will end today and the 40 kilos with Iran, then we have amounted to climb to prevent the Iranians to think or to rush into a nuclear bomb, assuming that this is what Mojtaba will want to do.

Jon Finer:

So, Danny, we’re going to dig into a lot of that over the course of the next 45 minutes or so. But just to sharpen maybe your last point, if the war ended today, as you said, do you believe this will have left Iran more or less likely to pursue and ultimately perhaps acquire a nuclear weapon in the medium term?

Danny Citrinowicz:

Unfortunately, more. And I’ll try just to explain that. First, he have Mojtaba that actually is a puppet of the IRGC. He was controlled by the IRGC, he was pushed by the IRGC. And I think he was elected only because his father was eliminated by Israel. Iran is not a monarchy. He had many people against him. But when his father died like that, then they have to show some continuity in that regard.

The other thing is the fact that you have to remember that when was the last time that Iran wanted to reach a bomb? It was just after the Iran-Iraqi war when Khamenei, the new leader like Mojtaba now, thought that he’s looking for the ultimate card because Iran, like today, actually the deterrence was shattered because of the fact they built on the missiles, on the proxies, everything related to the threshold state that they had, but the problem is that it didn’t work.

Now they will have to think of something else. They cannot be in a situation that every eight, nine months, Israel or the US will attack them. This is why they will need the ultimate card. And I suspect without Ali Khamenei and without the fatwa, when they have to have their ultimate card and they have the professional knowledge for that, nobody can elapse the knowledge that they have on the nuclear, then I think that there is a good chance that at least they will have the discussion of reaching a bomb. So, unfortunately, I think that the war that was prevented or meant to prevent from reaching a bomb eventually might push them beyond the Rubicon and to have that bomb.

Jon Finer:

Just for our listeners’ background, you’re referring to a fatwa issued by the late Supreme Leader sometime ago that basically declared Iran would not pursue a nuclear weapon.

Danny Citrinowicz:

Exactly.

Jake Sullivan:

And also, for context, Danny is referring to 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Uranium rich to 60%, which if further enriched, just fairly marginally would go to weapons grade, which is 90% enriched uranium. Iran has this stockpile. It is sitting right now underneath Isfahan, which is one of the nuclear facilities that the US and Israel bombed in the 12-day war last year, but they destroyed everything above ground. They could not get to the tunnels underneath. And that is where that stockpile sits.

Jon Finer:

At least we think.

Jake Sullivan:

At least we think, at least we think. And that’s what Iran would use with the centrifuges it still has. And as Danny said, the scientific know-how it still has to try to race to a bomb if it were to choose to do so. Danny, I’m struck by that assessment, which is sobering, operational and tactical achievements, but strategically, perhaps in an even more difficult position than before. So, as the US and Israel look at it today, as Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump look at the situation today, do you believe that their objectives and their strategies are diverging at this point? And if so, in what ways?

Danny Citrinowicz:

Definitely operationally, everything I think was ready before in a very good way. Strategically, I don’t think we had the same thing. What we had is Netanyahu telling President Trump, “We know what Khamenei is going to be on Saturday and we can kill them.” And they decide to do so. Nobody actually ever thought to think about the implication of that. This is what I think a major flaw in the preparation, but even more than that, there was a misconception about the Iranian regime.

Yes, they are weak, probably in the weakest point since 1979, but still they’re strong. They’re resilient. We’re talking about the country of 100 million people, size, almost the size of Western Europe. So, thinking that from bombing from the air, you’ll change the regime. This was something that I think really unconceivable.

Now, returning back to the difference between the US and Israel. For Israel, we’ll continue this war until President Trump will tell us to stop. For us, the most important thing for Netanyahu is preventing Iran from being a strategic threat to the state of Israel. So, if we need to hammer the missiles and the nuclear or the fuel depots near Tehran, we will do that because for us, it doesn’t matter it’s going to be chaos, civil war or whatever, as long as it won’t pose a threat to the state of Israel.

From the US standpoint, and especially the Gulf states, the issue is also the day after. What will happen then? They don’t want to see a failed state. They want to see a situation where you have refugees on the Gulf states borders. So, I think that we will differentiate. And this is why we saw everything happen when Israel attacked the field depots in Tehran, near Tehran. The US doesn’t want to see an infrastructure be destroyed by Israel, and Israel couldn’t care less about that. The bottom line of thing that Israel will continue this war as long as President Trump will allow it to continue.

Jake Sullivan:

Can I just put a fine point on this? You just said that, and I’ve heard you say this before, and it was very striking to me, that the prime minister and the Israeli government couldn’t care less if there were chaos or a failed state in Iran. Obviously, from the US perspective, and of course from the neighbor’s perspective, that poses a huge series of challenges. Can you describe a little more that the Israeli calculus on that, that a totally failed state in Iran, a coup, a civil war, basically any form of chaos is just fine from their perspective? Is that mainly because that just leaves an adversary weakened and distracted and they don’t have to suffer the consequences or is there something more going on?

Danny Citrinowicz:

I think it’s going back to the 12th day war. I think at the end of the war, Netanyahu said the problem has solved. “Yes, we suffered, but the existential threat, we able to move it.” Now, what we discovered or what Netanyahu discovered that this regime is not going anywhere. And on top of that, he has the capacity, unfortunately, that we’ll have now if the war will end today. It will have the capacity to rebuild the missiles capabilities.

So, Netanyahu understood that the problem is not with the missiles and not with the nuclear. The problem is in the regime, because as long as this regime is there, we’ll have to mow the lawn again and again and again. Now, he had an amazing opportunity. President Trump, for the first time, a US president that was willing to attack Iran, not only like some sort of a minor attack, go the whole way. So, he thought that this will be the best way to use that in order to make sure that we’ll hammer the regime.

So, the regime will be occupied with chaos, with civil war, whatever. He won’t have the time, the opportunity, the resources to rebuild its capacity and threat to Israel. So, I think everything goes back to there. Yes, Israel hoping that for a western Iranian country that will interact with Israel, yeah, we’re hoping, but we are not doing that in order to fulfill this goal. We are doing that to make sure that one poses a threat to us. If it’s a civil war, a western regime, excellent, but this is where we are right now.

Jon Finer:

Danny, maybe just turning back to the Iranian side for a second, obviously it is not lost on them that there are two adversaries in this conflict, maybe on different pages when it comes to objectives. You have President Trump saying in recent days that the war is very complete and will be over soon, maybe not this week. You have Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeting, as I think you were referencing, that the worst is still to come for the Iranian regime and the people should rise up and overthrow their government in a long statement yesterday.

What does that divergence do to Iranian strategy and Iranian tactics in this war? And then you said that if the President of the United States calls up the Prime Minister of Israel, the war will be over. Israel will stop. But what about the Iranian side? They get a vote on whether this ends. Will they stop fighting if the bombs stop falling on them?

Danny Citrinowicz:

We have to remember that Iran was prepared for this war. They knew after the end of the 12-day war that sometime in the near future, they thought only Israel, but didn’t know what will happen. This is why they were prepared for that. So, when Khamenei was decapitated, when we attack their missile depots, whatever, they already were prepared. Yes, it was a shocking event for them to lose Ali Khamenei.

So, the thing is that they lost a very dominant leader, but also lost the way that actual decision making happened in Iran until Khamenei’s death. But they managed to overcome it in a way that they had a pre-plan to make sure that everybody will suffer the consequences of the war. This is why in the beginning, we knew they’re going to attack the Gulf states, Hormuz Straits. We set that from the get go. It was obvious.

And this is something extremely important to remember because what we’re seeing now, it’s not a madness coming from the Iranians. It’s a pre-planned objective that they had, understanding that they are the weaker side and there for them winning is by not losing. They have four people that are controlling, Laurijani, Qalibaf. I can mention all the, of course, of the positions, the command of the IRGC Vahidi and the command of Khatam al-Anbia. They’re doing the outmost to make sure that they will have enough ability towards the near future to attack Israel and the Gulf states. They will close their Hormuz Straits. If someone will go there, they will attack it. And at the end of the day, they’re hoping that the pressure that will accumulate from that actually will lead to the end of the war.

I think that for them, they understood they don’t end this war. That goes without saying. They need to stop, but they understand that they have to change the conditions, meaning that they cannot fight Israel or the US every eight or nine months. So, if they’ll assume that even if Trump will say I’m stopping, they will assume that continuing, for example, launching missiles on Israel or allowing Hezbollah and the Houthis to continue the war regardless what Iran is going to do, they will do that.

But I think what we have to assume that even if President Trump will decide to call it off unilaterally, the Iranians will continue, whether it’s going to be something using the missiles, whether to the proxies, they want to create the strategic surroundings that will prevent US and Israel to attack them again. This is what they’re trying to do. So, I think that we have to assume that things will be very tense even after US will end this war.

Jake Sullivan:

So, if you’re President Trump and your team is telling you, even if you decide to stop say next week and declare victory, the Iranians are going to keep finding ways to strike, whether it’s directly against the Gulf states or through their proxies against Israel, the Gulf states, the US, and President Trump says, “Fine, I’ll keep going until they agree to stop.” Is there a world in which through some indirect diplomacy, there’s a mutual stand down where the Iranians, the Americans say we’re done, the Israelis follow along and the Iranians say, “Okay, we’re stopping for now.” Even if later they start up again in these other more indirect ways, or do you think actually the Iranians do feel they need to continue for a period of time even after the US stops?

Danny Citrinowicz:

I think there is a war theoretically, but practically I think they will try to highlight the fact that it’s not like the 12-day war. When President Trump stays stopped and everybody stopped, even if they will launch the last salve of missiles, even they will continue another day, they will do something that in their mind creating some sort of a deterrence equation between them and Israel and the US.

They’ll have to do something because they cannot accept the fact that they are negotiating in their mind then negotiating the second time and the second time while they’re negotiating, one Israel, now Israel and the US are bombing them, attacking them. So, they have to reshape it. Yes, there are war for mediations from the Omanis and Saudis, whatever, but we have to remember that there is a zero trust in Iranian view on everything that US is doing, especially this administration after what happened.

So, I think that we have to assume that it would be very hard to reach some sort of a comprehensive agreement. It would be very hard to make things stop immediately, but I think that if things continue as it is, we have to assume that it will continue for some time even after the US will decide to stop. And I think that it also connected to the fact that there is, like I said, total misunderstanding in misadministration regarding Iran and how the Iranian thinks a view of life and I think of life of negotiation of nuclear, whatever. And I think this is another element that actually preventing from the US to achieve its strategic goals in Iran.

Jake Sullivan:

What do you think is the core of the misunderstanding that this administration has of the Iranian side?

Danny Citrinowicz:

I think the main core is the fact that they actually don’t know Iran, how Iran think, how Iran view things. I think when you have Araghchi coming to Witkoff and explain to him they’re going to forego enrichment accumulation. And Witkoff thinking that he can build 30 or 40 bombs, I think they were so misunderstanding about the motives of the Iranians that the negotiation was dead from the get go because of the fact they actually don’t know Iran. They really thought that if you kill Khamenei, the regime will be toppled. They thought that there will be a Delsy Rodriguez in Iran that can actually work through it. They actually thought that if you’ll bring the carrier to the Gulf, the Iranians will capitulate. If you start the war, Iranian will capitulate.

It’s not going to go like that. And that is actually causing the administration to be in a very strategic and problematic junction. Or you can stop the war today and you said probably the Iranians will continue. And even if not, then the Iran will build its capacity, goes with that saying. Or you continue until then when, when you’re trying to top of this regime, then you have to have boots on the ground. You have to continue this campaign for the time being, for month. Despite the fact that Israel and the US have their operational superiority in so many ways, strategically, I’m not sure it’s accumulating to that effect. Actually, I’m sure it’s not. So, there is a strategic junction that they have to choose what to do, and I don’t think that either way actually serve the US interests.

Jon Finer:

It must drive you a bit crazy to watch these misperceptions influence policy. Again, you’re somebody who’s spent your career, an expert, trying to make sure people like us who are more generalists but involved in decision making on these topics, at least understood the factual underpinnings of the circumstances. How do you feel on a personal level watching a failure of analysis by people who should know better if they were listening to people like you?

Danny Citrinowicz:

It drive me crazy. Actually, I know the American intel community. I was a liaison officer for the DIA for three years in Washington. I know CENTCOM very well. They are amazing in their professionality. But the thing is that it’s not trickling down to what I see on administration, but don’t go far away. I don’t think that also in Israel. When the prime minister calling people to go to the streets, we all know that it’s not going to happen. I knew that it cannot be the target of the campaign because I ask one simple question. What will happen when people won’t go to the streets? They will continue until when? And now people are saying, “Yeah, we need to think about it. Maybe we’re mistaken.”

The thing is that being an expert, it’s not something that is nice to have. When you have those experts, you have to listen to them. Now, again, the decision making can do whatever they want. It’s their prerogative, they were elected by the people and so forth. But eventually we have to look at it from the Israeli civilian. Eight month after we again walk up to an alarm that we are not working, nobody’s going to school. We cannot leave Israel because there are no flights. And now they’re telling us again existential threat like they told us eight months ago.

So, the problem is it’s not theoretical academic discussion of what is Iran is on whatever. It’s practical. If you cannot reach the target that you’re putting on the table because you don’t know Iran, you’ll get the prices of battle of oil $100, you will get billions of shackles being thrown for this war without achieving the real targets. And even more than that, negotiation was, I think, was the best way to prevent Iran from reaching its ability on the nuclear side. They have the capacity like Jake said. To rebuild, they need a very small compound with IR-8s. Actually, they developed that after the US decided to leave the JCPOA.

And then they can enrich that in weeks. So, to close it out, I hope that now they will listen to experts because at the end of the day, Iran is a very unique country, the history, the resilience. And I think there are a way that you can improve your ability to reach your goals, but you cannot do that by misunderstanding them. There are no kinetic solutions to all the problems that we have. We have to say that again, sometimes you have to have diplomacy.

I’m not even talking about Israel that now think, yeah, we’ll solve the Iranian issue, we’ll have normalization. It won’t solve your Palestinian problem. It won’t solve the problem that people in the Gulf sea, Israel is much stronger than it is and it’s threatening them, not say like Iran, but threatening them as well. So, we have to assume that as well, but it’s hopeless. When you hear the declarations you’re saying, “I don’t know how we’re going to get out of it with a positive mind.”

Jake Sullivan:

So, Danny, there was a report in the American press that intelligence analysis from the major American intelligence agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency that you were the liaison to, that they were assessing and putting their assessment before the president, that regime change was unlikely and that taking out the supreme leader was not going to produce some new regime in Iran. Do you think the same thing was being said by the Israeli intelligence community to the prime minister before this started?

Danny Citrinowicz:

I don’t know. I have to say the truth. I don’t know what being said, but my sense, I hope that it was said. The problem in Israel that the decision making in Israel has changed dramatically since the 7th of October, even before that, but definitely our 7th of October. We have Netanyahu that he’s a very dominant figure, but actually he’s the one that controlling the shots. We don’t have checks and balances. The cabinet is actually, well, it’s written on paper, but they have no influence. You have Netanyahu and Ron Dermer that don’t know whether he involved or not. Nobody knows where he is right now. And they’re deciding for everything.

And the problem with the army is the fact that after the 7th of October, you cannot be seen as someone that is trying to push back on everything kinetics because after 7th of October, the notion in Israel is I couldn’t care less about the intentions, talk me about the capabilities. You can see that in Lebanon, we are seeing that in Syria, we can see that in Iran. And the problem is, like we’re seeing now with Hezbollah, that nobody’s saying, “Look, we have to think about other means not only kinetically. Because our 7th of October, there’s no way to speak about anything but the F-35 and the tanks and whatever.”

So, this is a problem that we are having. So, for your important question, Jake, I don’t know. I hope that it was actually conveyed, but I have some doubts in that regard because even when people thought about it, I’m not sure the fed said that because at the end of the day, it’s like a group thinking and sometime you’re afraid to speak your mind in terms of what will happen for your promotions or whatever. So, I hope that someone said that, but my sense is maybe nobody mentioned it.

Jon Finer:

Danny, we’ve talked a bit about how we got here and also some of the ways in which this war could end. We should probably also spend a little bit of time on how it could escalate, which is another possibility in the coming days. There are a number of scenarios that are being either leaked or put out publicly that the United States or Israel could arm a proxy group of some kind to go fight the regime that the Gulf states might actually enter the war directly themselves.

On the offensive side, they’re obviously in the war because they’re absorbing a lot of blows from Iran, or that the US or Israel could put troops on the ground to try to achieve some of their objectives, either on the energy front or to maybe go after this highly enriched uranium that we’ve been discussing. Which of these escalatory scenarios gives you the most concern or do you think we are most likely to see?

Danny Citrinowicz:

What make me concerned is the ability or everything related to attacking the infrastructure in Iran. I think that will lead immediately to the response by the Iranians attacking infrastructure in the Gulf that will-

Jon Finer:

You mean civilian infrastructure.

Danny Citrinowicz:

Yeah, civilian construction, mainly energy sector, but also everything related to desalination capacity-

Jon Finer:

For drinking water. Yeah.

Danny Citrinowicz:

Yeah. The Gulf has. And I think that this can really can go in a way that going to definitely very hard to control if that would be the scenario or the decision by the US and Israel, because then we’ll see escalation, then we’ll see the Gulf being in flames and everything related to Iran attacking the oil depots. So, I think that this is one element I think we should all be thinking whether it’s the best way to do so.

Regarding the proxies, I think with the Kurds and everything, and this shows that there was no pre-planning, strategic pre-planning of this campaign because when you look at the Iran in general, yes, there are ethnic minorities, but majority of them want to stay under the Iranian umbrella. They’re not looking for independent. And even more than that, I think that the Turks and the Kurdish elements within Iraq, I think they were highly worried from this no giving arms to the Iranian Kurdish elements.

So, I don’t think this is something that will work. And I think that is something actually highlight the fact that there was no pre-planning. And everything related to the boots on the ground, again, it can happen. I hope it won’t because I don’t think the value of it. And I think it’s still low probability comparing to the ability of Israel and U.S. to attack the civilian infrastructure in Iran. Something that will escalate, it will turn Iran to a fail state, and the implication of that will be enormous on not only on the Middle East, but even more than that.

Jake Sullivan:

One dog that hasn’t barked so far is the Houthis. The Houthis are Iran’s terrorist allies in Yemen controlling much of the territory of Yemen. And we’ve seen since October 7th, their capability to hold the Red Sea at risk to strike Israel directly. We’ve seen in the past their ability to strike targets in the Gulf. They have both ballistic missiles and drones, just like Iran does, and yet we haven’t really seen them get engaged here. Do you have an explanation for why? And do you expect that that could be a potential vector of escalation in this war?

Danny Citrinowicz:

Yeah. Very interesting development. One thing that worked best for the Iranians, the fact that unlike the 12-day war, they managed to operate the proxies. You have Hezbollah and Lebanon that actually causing us major problems because of the fact it still have capacity and the ability to dismantle the organization kinetically, like [inaudible 00:29:01] said, is actually non-existent. And of course, we have the Shiite Iraqis, especially Kataib Hezbollah al-Nujaba, that actually working not only against the US presence in Iraq and especially northern side of Iraq, the Kurdish province, but also attacking Kuwait, attacking Jordan. So, I think this is something that also we have to remember that even if the war in Iran will end, I’m not sure the war in Lebanon or in Iraq will end. And this is a Gini outside the bottle and it will very hard to push them back.

Now, regarding the Houthis, very interesting. I have to say that my assumption was they will enter from the beginning, but I think there are two options for this behavior. One is the Iranian thinking about the longer game, it’s an attrition war. This is why eventually we’ll put them in, we’ll push them into the war. Once we believe that now Israel, maybe it’s much more weaker, we can exhaust the Israeli public by another barrage of missiles coming from Yemen.

And of course, we can block the Bab al-Mandab Straits as we are blocking our Hormuz Straits. And actually, it will have significant effect only when it come in the second or third phase of the war. So, if according to this way of thinking, so definitely will see them very close entering the war.

Now there is another aspect that the Houthis are finding it very hard to enter the war because they’re having something very good right now in Yemen. Because of what everything had happened between the Saudis and the Iraqis on the southern part of Yemen and the STC, the Southern Tradition Council. So, definitely they are more relaxed. Nobody’s threatening them from the south. And if they’ll get now to war, then they’re going to weaken themselves.

So, we don’t know exactly where we stand. My assessment is that definitely the Iranians want them to get into the war. And I think that if the war will escalate in the end of the day, we’ll see them intervening. If that will escalate, especially for the infrastructure, if they’ll assume that the regime is in a very problematic situation, then I think that eventually they will enter. We have to remember also they have obligation to Hezbollah that actually help to build their capacity. So, in that regard, they’re not there yet, but I assume that if the war continue, eventually we’ll find them intervening in the war itself.

Jon Finer:

Danny, I assume the answer to this question is no. Certainly hope the answer to this question is no, but is there any scenario you can envision in which this conflict goes nuclear in some way?

Danny Citrinowicz:

Well, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’ll also know nuclear and no everything related to the World War III. I think the China and Russia will help behind the scene to the Iranians. And I think that if this regime will prevail in a way, then they will be much more closer to it. I think they don’t want to lose the Islamic Republic. I think that for them, it’s a great advantage. I understand that now. So, I think in the day after, we’ll see much more close ties between North Korea, China and Russia and everything related to Iran.

But during the war, they don’t want to sacrifice their interest for Iran. We have Putin maybe will get a huge present by lifting sanctions on its oil. He’s now the mediator, like the grownup in terms of how Trump’s is. So, I think that for them, they will help them behind the scene. I have no doubt that they gave him intelligence information. This is what the Russians are doing all the time.

Same thing out to the Chinese. I think that for them, they will wish that this regime will prevail. It’s anti-American, anti-west. It’s best for them, but they want to have peace and calm returning back to the Middle East or the Gulf because everything related to the [inaudible 00:32:27] for them. So, the bottom line thing is that I don’t think it will happen. And on top of that, but we have to pay a closer look to the connection between Iran, Russia and China and North Korea in the day after the war, assuming that this regime actually will stay.

Jake Sullivan:

Steve Witkoff says we should take Russia’s word that they’re not helping the Iranians in any way in this war. Do you take Russia’s word for that?

Danny Citrinowicz:

I wouldn’t buy anything from the Russians. You have to remember that they already had a lot of information of them in the past open trying to help the Iranians to also with internal material on Israel during the 12-day war. Everything related to them trying to help the Houthis in the fight against the US. Mr. Witkoff have the highest esteem for him from the fact that he released our hostages. He gave Israel a huge service because I don’t think that if it was other guy, I don’t think Netanyahu done the extra mile to release the hostages.

But eventually, I think one guy cannot handle all those negotiations, cannot understand things from the Russia to the Iranian event because of the fact, like you said, in Iran. It’s driving me crazy. We talked about that. The negotiation, I think the Iranians offer them much more than they were willing to give on JCPOA. No accumulation of nuclear material. It’s pushing them way back for the ability to reach a fissile material. And this is something that I think lost because of the misunderstanding of Mr. Witkoff.

So, again, I have the highest esteem for him, but think in terms of Iran, and I’ll talk about 30 or 40 bombs, it’s not connecting to reality and actually what Iranian have. I don’t want to give advantage or to give good words about the Iranians regime. It’s a bad regime that undermining the situation, the specific of the Middle East, threatening the state of Israel. And I hope it’ll be tapped. But eventually we have to understand that in the negotiation side, they were willing to give something substantial on the nuclear. The fact that we lost that, not make it harder on the kinetic side to prevent Iran from rush again to a bomb.

Jake Sullivan:

Just to put a fine point on this, because I think this is not fully appreciated, although it’s starting to get more out into the press now. Your view is that Iran actually put on the table an offer on the nuclear file that went even further than the Iran nuclear deal and that the US side misunderstood what was on offer, and that’s partly why we ended up where we have ended up.

Danny Citrinowicz:

It was obvious from the beginning, what are the red lines of the supreme leader. He demanded the right to enrich. He didn’t want to dismantle the enriched capacity, but he was willing to show a lot of compromises in terms of the inspection regime, everything related of diluting the material they found the 40 kilos, and of course, related to the future accumulation of [inaudible 00:35:08].

Now, of course, it’s statement, I’m not sure it was be like JCPOA, 180 pages, but I think that you had to have negotiation with them. But assuming that this is what actually they brought to the table, this is what the Omani former minister is saying, Saidi. So, I think this was something very interesting because actually it’s blocking the way to have fissile material to reach a nuclear bomb. You have to say that.

And if you have an expected regime and if there’s no sunset clause, then eventually it will save face program. We have to remember one thing about the Iranian nuclear program, regardless of yes or no bomb, for them is a pillar of the regime. They couldn’t let go, especially Ali Khamenei. Even if they will spin for nothing, the centrifuges, you just want to see that spinning, because for him, it was a testimony for the technology advancement of Iran.

So, I think that if you go that way, then let them spin, let dilute the material. Yes, you have to leave sunshine sanctions, you will strengthen this regime, but if the major threat that is coming from this regime is nuclear, then you’re blocking it and you don’t have any motivation to continue doing so. And even they have motivation, they won’t have the fissile material to do so. So, I think this is an element that we missed in the negotiation, unfortunately.

Again, it’s not that the Iranians would’ve give the missiles and the proxies, but unfortunately, or fortunately whatever, this is not an extensive threat to the state of Israel. We are suffering from the missiles and from the proxies, but we can live with it. I hope that eventually we find a solution for it, but eventually nuclear. This is the thing. And unfortunately, I think that we had opportunity. I think the Iranians show flexibility that didn’t show in JCPOA again until the right to enrich. And unfortunately, we missed that.

Jon Finer:

Danny, both of our countries are at war with Iran, but our circumstances, yours and ours are quite different. At any moment, there could be sirens that go off. You’d have to end this interview and go to a shelter of some kind that’s not likely to happen on the East Coast of the United States where Jake and I are. But I wonder how concerned Americans should be about another asymmetric option that Iran has, which is to resume terrorist plots against the west, against Americans overseas, against Americans in our homeland. How much do you think that is on the table, either during the conflict or in the years to come given what’s happened?

Danny Citrinowicz:

I think definitely. I think that the retaliation for the killing of the capitation of Khamenei, we haven’t seen that yet. And by the way, I’m talking about two options. One is the lone wolf. No, look at Karachi in Pakistan, what happened, attacking the US consulate. This is something that we have to be very wary of because Khamenei wasn’t only a political leader in Iran. He was a spiritual leader for the whole sheer community all over the world, not all of that, but majority of it. So, I think that this is something that we have to pay a closer look.

Second, we have to remember that there are sheer communities that have been controlled by Iran all over the world. We saw that in Australia, in the plot that run by the Iranian embassy back then. We see that in Africa, we see that in Latin America. And actually, of course, there are shared elements, extreme elements also in the US. So, I think that we have to be very careful on what will happen because as I mentioned, even if this war will end tomorrow, the Iranians still have the capacity or to operate some sort of a slipper cell that they have all over the world against US interest.

And we saw that after Soleimani being killed, there was a plot in Ethiopia, not in South Africa attacking the US embassies, ambassadors over there. And so, I think that we have to be looking at very closely. And on top of that, one important thing, I think that we have to look at what we’re saying, everything related to the soft power activity of Iran all over the world, the mosques, the academia. All of that is extremely important because this is actually the platform that allow Iran at the end of the day to use those elements to conduct those terrorist attacks. So, definitely we have to be very careful. This war, even if it will end kinetically in the Middle East, I’m afraid it won’t end in terms of the friction between Israeli-Iran and the US.

Jake Sullivan:

So, Danny, we’ll get you out of here on this. You’ve described a scenario in which at the end of this, Iran is both going to retain some capacity and probably greater motivation to go nuclear. You’ve described a scenario in which the regime is unlikely to crack and entirely fall apart. Zooming out to the region as a whole, can you tell us where you expect things to land after this war ends in terms of Israel’s relationships with the other players, with the countries in the Gulf, and how those countries are likely to react to the change circumstances on the other side of this war, however it ends?

Danny Citrinowicz:

I think that this war will have a significant effect on how the Gulf states are looking at this war. I think they will have to think hard and clear about the US presence in those countries. It made them a target, and I think they don’t feel that the US made the effort to actually protect them 100%. This is one element.

And the second thing goes to the relations with Iran. I’m not saying they’re going to disconnect the relations because Iran is there. Definitely this regime will be there, and I think they will have to interact with it in some way or form, but I think they will have to think hard and clear on that. I don’t think there will be some reassessing the connection regarding Israel. Maybe behind the scene, maybe everything related to the defense, some sort of defense initiatives on the air defense. I think that may be that.

But we have to remember one thing about those countries. They got into a war that wasn’t theirs. The war was Israel initiating together with the US and they are thinking the long range, middle range, ballistic missiles, it’s not their threat. And I think that for them, they’re very angry about that. Of course, maybe now they’re hoping that US and Israel will finish the job because I don’t think they want to find themselves with a regime that controlled by the IRGC, but the problem that they have, they don’t want to see also chaos.

So, I don’t think there are good options for the Gulf states, unfortunately, but everything related to Israel, and not only they’re blaming Israel for this war, everything Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza, it is something that is not acceptable for them, especially from the Saudis, they want to lead the Sunni World MBS. And the last thing about that is the fact that even if Iran would be weak and Israel will be stronger, I think that for them after the attack in Qatar, they find it very hard to cooperate with Israel, especially not behind the scene, but actually publicly.

So, the bottom line thing that I don’t think that this war actually will change dramatically, the relationship between Israel and the Gulf states, maybe behind the scene, maybe everything later that we can help them better cope with everything that Iran has. Maybe that can happen. But I think that everything that publicly and normalization, I don’t think it will happen. And we have to remember for Israel, not everything starts and end with Iran. There’s no Iranian boogeyman behind every Israel security problem that we have. The West Bank, the situation with Jordan, Egypt has no connection to Iran. So, even if on top of the Iranian regime, hopefully, then nothing will change in that regard. Maybe on the contrary, maybe thing will escalate.

So, I think that for Israel, maybe hoping, I don’t think we’ll see nothing positive in terms of our relations integration in the region from the Gulf states, a lot of thinking what to do the day after. I think they will change their strategy completely. And for Iran, I think that for them, just the IRGC will push forward. And I think that we’ll see re-armament of Iran working with China and Russia.

In that regard, I don’t think we’ll see positive developments towards the future. They still have a mountain to climb in terms of everything related to the public. They don’t have money. They have to think of hard and clear how they’re going to mitigate the problems that they have with the Iranian public, but I wouldn’t underestimate this regime and its ability to survive.

Jon Finer:

Danny, I think both Jake and I probably wish you were still in your old chair, but we’re also grateful that you’re not because you can share this insight and wisdom with the wider world and because we could have you as our guest today, which was a treat. So, thank you again for being here and for comments that we’re going to be thinking about, I think for quite some time.

Danny Citrinowicz:

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Jake Sullivan:

Thank you, Danny. Stay safe out there and we’ll look forward to continuing to follow your commentary. And we’ll put the link to your X account in the show notes so that everyone else can follow along as well.

Danny Citrinowicz:

Thank you very much.

Jake Sullivan:

Thanks a lot, and stay safe.

Danny Citrinowicz:

Thank you.

SEGMENT 2

Jake Sullivan:

So, Jon, there is a lot to unpack in that conversation we just had with Danny. And I guess I would start with what I would call a very bleak strategic assessment of how this is all going to play out. Essentially, I heard him say, one, the regime will emerge from this war, probably even harder line than it was coming into the war, more implacable, and that it’s unlikely that we’ll see any form of regime change, certainly not positive regime change.

Two, that this regime will be more likely to actually seek a nuclear weapon than they were before the war kicked off, and that they will retain the capability to do so. Three, that actually, as much as we talk about when is Trump going to end the war, Danny thinks there’s a reasonable chance that the Iranians will say, “We’re not quite done yet.” Which could complicate efforts even if President Trump reaches a decision to end the war to actually get it to wind down. Four, that there are still a lot of different vectors for escalation that could unfold in the coming days and weeks, including attacks on civilian infrastructure like both energy and desalinization.

And finally, that the US and Israel, basically as he described it, started the war because they had a target of opportunity to take out the supreme leader. They did, and then the rest of their strategy was, “Okay, let’s see what happens next.” And all of these things have unfolded that were predicted at the beginning, but for which we don’t have good answers. And so, we’re in a strategic cul-de-sac right now. And Danny didn’t really see a way out of that cul-de-sac given the realities of points one through four. So, did I sum that up fairly well? I probably missed a couple things because of the...

Jon Finer:

There was a lot.

Jake Sullivan:

... the breadth and depth of what he was offering, but quite bleak.

Jon Finer:

I think you had five points. I would add a sixth or maybe a new first, which is maybe more evidence for an argument we’ve been making, which is it’s not clear this was at all necessary in the first place.

Jake Sullivan:

Oh man. Oh wait. Okay, right. Sorry.

Jon Finer:

Because not only does he believe that there was a actually very good deal on the table, maybe even no enrichment deal for a period of time, which was a red line for Trump and we had thought a red line for a run, but also that that deal was fundamentally misunderstood by the US negotiating team because they were not drawing on the wisdom of experts like Danny, of which the US government also has many at its disposal, but not part of this. And so, that we ended up in this strategic cul-de-sac and didn’t have to start this in the first place to achieve perhaps greater objectives through diplomacy was a big takeaway for me.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. No, absolutely. That should go right to the top of the list. And when I was pressing him on this point, what was going through my mind is if the American people fully understood that there was actually a diplomatic solution here on the table that for the long term could put Iran’s nuclear program in a box, and that a big part of the reason we didn’t go down that road was because our team didn’t understand what was on offer. That is just an absolutely shocking development.

And then when you add it to those other points, we are now in a situation where it is more likely Iran’s nuclear ambitions are more dangerous than they were before. I mean, this just really adds up to an incredibly sorry state of affairs. And I did not enter this conversation expecting that strength of perspective on his part about what was possible and what was missed in the opportunity to do diplomacy before this thing kicked off.

Jon Finer:

So, in the spirit of the quote that’s often attributed to John McCain about how it’s always darkest before it gets completely black or something like that. There is a scenario that came up in the conversation with Danny that we’re going to dig into a bit deeper here, which is the possibility of US boots on the ground for a particular purpose. And we’re going to do this as we’ve done in the past through a red team, blue team debate where each of us is going to take the side of an advisor to President Trump making the case for one course of action. Do you want to tee up the scenario that we’re going to talk about here?

Jake Sullivan:

I will. And the scenario is slightly complicated because we don’t know exactly all the facts. So, we’re going to, I would say, stipulate a few things for purposes of this exercise, but also highlight where the unknowns are. So, we talked to Danny about Iran’s continuing nuclear capability, and the main feature of that is a stockpile of uranium that is enriched to 60%.

Now for our listeners, as I pointed out in the episode, it does not take much to further enrich that stockpile to 90%, which is weapons grade uranium. And to situate our listeners, Iran has about 440 kilograms, a little less than 1,000 pounds of this 60% enriched uranium in a stockpile that we believe much of which is in the tunnels under Isfahan, not reachable by American bombs, even by the massive ordinance penetrator that was reportedly used to take out Fordow. So, it’s sitting underground there. And the only way for us to get at it would be to send people in on the ground, either the United States or Israel or a joint operation between the two of us.

Now, some of this 60% enriched uranium, maybe at Fordow, buried really so far deep that maybe even the Iranians couldn’t dig it out for a really long time. Some of it could have been destroyed in the bombings for all we know, but we’re going to stipulate for our purposes that the bulk of what is reachable by either us or Israel or Iran is under Isfahan and that if we could go secure that enriched uranium, it would set the Iranian program back quite a bit, perhaps on the order of a year so that they would go from weeks to months. If they were to put some centrifuges together and take that 60% enriched uranium and go to 90%, that they could do it now in weeks to months, this would push them out say beyond a year of breakout time before they could produce one weapon’s worth of weapons grade uranium.

So, if Iran retains that material and the war ends, then they’re a lot closer to a bomb because they’ve got the centrifuges, they’ve got the stockpile, they got the experts. And that’s why we’re teeing up for President Trump in this red team, blue team exercise, an option to go in on the ground with special forces and air cover to get that material and either take it out of the country or neutralize it on site so that we have essentially pushed the Iranian program very far back. Let me pause there, Jon. Did I get that basically right? Is there anything you would add in terms of the overall assumptions or assessments before we dig into the arguments for and against actually conducting such an operation?

Jon Finer:

No, I think you did. I think you may have previewed a little bit of your argument in the setup, but that’s the prerogative.

Jake Sullivan:

I’ve got to argue the hardest idea. So, putting a thumb on the scale is not the worst thing. Okay. But they’re going to be sitting around actually saying, “Should we do this?” And in fact, we’ve seen some reporting that they’re-

Jon Finer:

By the way, the reason we know that is because they cannot keep anything under wraps and this has already been out in the press release.

Jake Sullivan:

Quite out of the press. But it’s because if they don’t do it, then people are going to say, “Wait a second, you haven’t actually resolved the nuclear issue at all.” This would give them some answer to that question. So, basically, I’m going to make three points on behalf of conducting such an operation. And the operation that I would advocate for is one that would chiefly rely on Israeli defense force commandos on the ground with American support. So, American enabling support, air cover and other forms of logistical support, but be the Israelis actually conducting the actual operation.

First, essentially, I refer back to my whole setup, that in fact, we can put a lot of time on the clock, really set back Iran’s capacity to race for a bomb, particularly in light of the fact that they may be more inclined to race for a bomb by disposing of this material. And that if we don’t, that they are not that far away from if they were to choose to take the decision of trying to break out, which would force us again to go in militarily to try to stop them.

So, this actually would make a material meaningful difference in terms of Iran’s overall capability to sneak out or break out to acquire a nuclear weapon. That’s point one. And we do not have a good answer to the American people or the people of the world about our ability to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions if we leave this stockpile available to them. And there is reporting to suggest they’ve already dug in to a certain extent so they could go in to get it. That’s point one.

Point two, this operation is actually achievable. It is risky, yes, but no significant operation to achieve a major national security objective is without risk. And we believe that we can bring the risk down to a manageable level. Why? Chiefly, because we own the skies. So, Iran cannot threaten our ability to put aircraft overhead and essentially protect a perimeter around Isfahan, around this facility, so that the commandos can go in and do their work, and that scientific experts who go with them to handle this material can go in and do their work.

If Iranian forces tried to approach, our aircraft could essentially pummel them and keep them at bay. We can provide all the necessary logistics and other forms of support because we own the skies and that makes this operation far more doable than it would have been if Iran still had its air defenses intact or in previous iterations of the United States, because I know you’re going to bring up Jimmy Carter and Operation Eagle Claw and how badly things went. There, we did not have complete mastery of the skies and the ability to execute like this.

Furthermore, the actual operation to take out the material is itself very risky. And if we wanted to downblend it on site, yes, it’s quite time-consuming, but we believe that we can set the conditions for that small geography to essentially own the space for the requisite amount of time to make that happen.

And then my third argument goes back to the point that Danny made, which is we’re being briefed by our intelligence community as Israel is being briefed by its intelligence community that the assassination of the supreme leader, Khamenei, and the elevation of his son actually creates a circumstance in which the political winds are likely blowing in favor of them racing for a bomb.

So, we will face a circumstance at the end of this, if we don’t do this, of an Iranian government more determined to get a weapon than they were before, more determined to take advantage of the stockpile. So, if we don’t do this, given what we just heard from Danny, we are in a particularly problematic position. And so, for those reasons, we should go ahead and execute this operation. It could be that there is loss of life in this operation, but I think it would be a perfectly credible thing for the president, for you Mr. President, to go before the American people, look them in the eye and say, “This was a worthy effort, and I believe it’s achievable, and if achieved, would very much abate, reduce, set back the Iranian nuclear threat in a material way.”

And in that sense, it gives you an answer to the question, “What was this war all about and what did we achieve in this war?” It would be something very meaningful to the United States of America. And remember, every president going back, multiple presidents has said that we will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. You, Mr. President, would be the one who would actually do it and this would put an exclamation point on that.

Jon Finer:

Well played. I didn’t feel like your heart was totally in it, but it was given the argument that you had to make, it was a strong-

Jake Sullivan:

I can’t say it was totally in it. And I certainly alighted over a lot of things you’re about to say.

Jon Finer:

I may raise a few of them.

Jake Sullivan:

A bit nervous about what you’re going to come back with here.

Jon Finer:

Look, again, each of us inhabiting a role as a Trump advisor, not exactly how I would make the argument to a president I worked for, but here it goes. Okay. Mr. President, I’m going to say something to you that no one has ever said to an American president before. You have won the Iran war. You killed supreme leader Khamenei, a world historic villain, and don’t let anybody argue that Israel actually pulled the trigger. You and I both know that they wouldn’t have and never did do that with anyone else in the White House. So, this is about you.

The regime has been defanged. Its military capacity is a fraction of what it once was. Think about it, Mr. President. Who was the last American president to definitively win any war? Not Joe Biden, not Barack Obama, certainly not George W. Bush, maybe Bill Clinton in Kosovo, but that wasn’t a direct threat to the United States. It was more of a humanitarian thing. Most Americans had no idea what Kosovo even was. Iran is different. Our enemy since 1979 and everyone knows that.

All you have to do to be able to celebrate this victory is land the plane. Just stop right where we are now before we do something that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. That is how this can go right. But I got to warn you, despite the very compelling argument you’ve just heard, this can also still go horribly wrong if you follow the course of action that was just recommended.

Mr. President, I know how much you admire of the military that you inherited. The one that we both know was totally woke and broken and in disarray until you, through sheer force of will, turned it into the finest fighting force on the planet. You’ve ordered them to do some very hard things during your first year in office, totally obliterate, maybe now twice Iran’s nuclear program.

Grab Maduro out of Caracas with special forces just over a couple of months ago. But I need to tell you, Mr. President, that this stuff is not as easy as they have made it look. And if you order troops into Iran to seize highly enriched uranium, which we think but may not really know is in these bombed out tunnels deep underground at Isfahan, when Iran already knows that we are coming, you’ve seen the same press reports I have. It will be one of the most challenging military operations any president has ever asked our military to conduct. And while I take your other advisor’s point that we own the skies, we own the skies in Vietnam, we own the skies in Iraq, it did not prevent massive failures operationally on the ground.

Mr. President, I literally don’t have time to lift all of the things that could go wrong here. You’ve seen Black Hawk Down. Mr. President, where the US Army goes in to grab one bad guy in Somalia, which was a lot less well defended than Iran and 18 US soldiers end up getting killed. Nobody even made a movie about the operation your first advisor just referenced, Operation Eagle Claw, the failed secret mission Jimmy Carter ordered into Iran to rescue our hostages in 1980. That one basically ended his presidency, Mr. President, not pretty.

So, if a bunch of service members get killed or god forbid, taken captive by Iran during this operation, this goes from a victory celebration to a full-fledged crisis that will lead to a lot of pressure on you, on us to escalate even more. Exactly the indefinite war in the Middle East that you said many times was stupid and you were right. And by the way, do not be fooled by this idea of allowing the Israelis to do this for us because it would take away all your risk.

Just imagine if some of them get taken hostage. Israel will never stop fighting, never stop this war until those people are home. And Steve and Jared have told you exactly how hard it is to negotiate with Iranians. Imagine if they had Israeli soldiers in their custody when we were trying to negotiate the end of this conflict, let alone if they had Americans.

So, if this gets out of control, Mr. President, the consequences are going to extend far beyond the Middle East. Indeed, just in the confines of this room, they already are. We’ve had to pull more of our THAAD missile defense batteries out of South Korea, where by the way, they protect against countries that actually have nuclear weapons, principally North Korea, unlike Iran.

And Russia absolutely loves the high oil prices that are basically bailing out their economy right now. We cannot let that continue because if countries can’t buy gas from the Middle East, from Qatar, even some of our friends in Europe might start looking back to Moscow for help. And you’ve seen the markets teetering on the brink, to say the least, any more of that. And we are going to start to feel real pain here in the United States from this conflict.

Just as important, Mr. President, if this mission succeeds, yes, it will change the calculus a bit on how much time it would take Iran to get a nuclear weapon. But remember, we have already told the country that you totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear program last summer, and objectively that was awesome. We should stick with that message. Yes, it would be good to get 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium out of Iran. But the truth is, even if we don’t want to say it out loud, none of this actually changes the fact that in order to deal with the program over the long term, we need a diplomatic solution. We need a negotiation. We need a deal.

The problem is, Mr. President, Iran already knows how to enrich uranium. And so, no matter how many scientists we kill or how much material we remove, if they choose to go down this path, it will be hard to stop them. And you had the right instinct about this. In fact, all along, the only way to stop this is with a better deal. Not some weak Obama-like JCPOA, but a strong, formidable TCPOA that restores the most important thing we lost when the old deal went away. International monitors inside Iran who will watch the program and make sure that it doesn’t advance and it reduces the program to a very low level. Man, imagine if we had a year to make decisions about whether to take military action against Iran because their program was so reduced. It would be like 2017 all over again. How great would that be?

So, let’s do what a wise president once said at a different phase of this war and take the win, Mr. President. In fact, if you side with me, we can get working on a victory parade. Maybe just before you head to Beijing later this month to see President Xi, you’d have the wind at your back. And Elon and some of our team have actually made a video of what that victory parade could look like if somebody could just press play to show you to get a sense of what could be on offer here. I’ll leave it at that.

Jake Sullivan:

Oh, man. All right. By the way, that was just exceptional role play, I have to say. Also, some decent substantive arguments to go along with it.

Jon Finer:

I have the stronger material to work from.

Jake Sullivan:

We are both very much sympathetic, I think, to a lot of the arguments you laid out. In fact, for those listeners who have not brushed up on Operation Eagle Claw, it was an effort involving US Special Forces to go rescue the hostages in 1980 that ended up with them landing in the desert at a place called Desert One in Iran and having two US aircraft crash into one another, not even getting fired upon by Iranian forces and a number of US service members killed and the whole thing scotched and them coming home.

So, if that’s not an advertisement for the problematic nature of this, I don’t know what it is. I think if I had my heart fully in it and went full finer in my MAGA presentation to the president, I mean, I do think one point I would make is that a lot of the bedwetters said, “You could never go in and grab Maduro.” And in the middle of a hostile capital, the middle of a presidential compound and pull him and his wife out of his bedroom and get out without a single American casualty, these are the same people telling you that you can’t strike a coup de grace here.

And if you declare victory at the end of this war and Iran’s sitting on a huge stockpile of highly enriched uranium, man, you’re going to bleed out. Getting that uranium would be the absolute exclamation point on this war and our guys are ready and the Israelis are ready to go do it, so let’s go.

I would bet our military is not arguing for this because they probably see the downside more than the upside. I would bet there are some voices in the Israeli system that are probably arguing for it. So, it will be interesting as Trump has to face these competing impulses to see if he decides to proceed on this operation or for that matter on an operation to seize the oil terminals at Kharg Island, which is another thing that we’ve been watching, or some other special forces operation as he thinks about what’s in the bag of tricks to do something to change the dynamic as it’s playing out right now.

Jon Finer:

And to be clear, I feel like I very much gilded the lily about how clean a victory this is or how easy the argument is going to be that this is a clean win even if they stopped now.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. And I did not-

Jon Finer:

I think they will make that case.

Jake Sullivan:

And if I had built that into my initial argument, I’d say right now, if this war ends today...

Jon Finer:

50-50.

Jake Sullivan:

... history is not going to say totally clean win for Trump, but if you did this, it would absolutely put you over the top, brother. So, anyway, next time we present to President Trump, I’ve taken a bunch of notes about how to craft my argument.

Jon Finer:

You MAGA’ed out the first time we did this too, I think.

Jake Sullivan:

No, no. You know where I really, I think, brought my A game to a red team blue team was as an Iranian hard line.

Jon Finer:

Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that.

Jake Sullivan:

There I’ve got.

Jon Finer:

I don’t know what this says, Jake, but...

Jake Sullivan:

Your MAGA, I’m the Iranian hardliner somehow in all of this. Okay. Well, that’s where we are. We’ll see where we are next week and how things evolve, whether they escalate, whether they start heading towards a day or month or whether we’re in for an extended open-ended campaign here, all of which are possible. But for today, that’s what we got.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of the Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

In the meantime, send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com. And find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of the Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Wiener and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Leanna Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Iran After Khamenei & Pentagon vs. Anthropic (with Karim Sadjadpour)

March 4, 2026

Teaser:

Karim Sadjadpour:

The big question is if there is going to be a next strong man in Iran, what kind of strong man will that person likely be? It’s not likely going to be someone who’s wearing a turban. I don’t think that there’s going to be another powerful cleric, supreme leader. I do think that the winning argument in Iran and future years is going to be nationalism.

Jake Sullivan:

Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. Today we are grateful to be joined by Karim Sadjadpour, who is an expert on Iran, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, and a contributor to the Atlantic Magazine. He’s also someone who we have both known, Jake and I, and learned from for more than 15 years, which is about the same amount of time that we’ve been wrestling with the vexing issue of Iran. There’s no one whose views we more often seek out on this confounding country and area of policy, and we’re not the only ones, in part because of both his deep analytical expertise and also his gift for memorable turns of phrase. One that always sticks with me, Karim, which is, you once called Iranian elections unfree, unfair, and unpredictable. Karim’s wisdom is sought out by journalists, by TV bookers, by conference organizers and editors of magazines, journals, and op-ed pages. Candidly, we’re very lucky that he made time for us, and Karim, welcome to the long game.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Thank you so much to both of you. There’s a Persian expression. When you want to give someone compliments and kind of puff them up, you’re putting watermelons under their arms, so I appreciate those watermelons. Thank you, Jon.

Jake Sullivan:

We’re going to have to borrow that in the future. I can tell you, I never put watermelons under Jon Finer’s arms, ever.

Jon Finer:

Not even once. Not even oranges.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Maybe some, yeah. Some grapes.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly. So Karim, before we dig into the substance, and there’s a lot of substance to cover, I wanted to start with a personal perspective. You’ve been anticipating weighing the prospects of considering the implications of dramatic events like these for much of your career, so could you just talk a little about what it’s like on a personal level in this moment to see such momentous change come so quickly after so much time, and how are you personally processing this?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Jake, I’m a University of Michigan guy, and every year during March Madness, I fill out two brackets, one with Michigan winning it all and one with what I think might happen. What I’ve learned over the years on Iran, and I’ve learned this the hard way, because oftentimes I’m of Iranian heritage, so I would love to say I see Iran evolving into Denmark or Norway, but I try to kind of not conflate my own hopes and analysis. In the case of the Islamic Republic, I was doing some research last summer in the aftermath of the 12-day war, in anticipation of this essay I was writing in foreign affairs, and there was this statistic that jumped out at me, which is that around four out of five authoritarian transitions lead to another form of authoritarian government. When that transition is triggered by either internal or external violence, the likelihood of a democratic outcome is much, much lower.

And so, I started with the premise that I believe, on one hand, this is a very unique country. It has a very rich history in civilization. It has the human capital and the natural resources to be a G20 nation. I think it is a society which is ripe for representative government, but empirically, we also know that that is not usually the outcome after five decades of authoritarianism. I think that the way this authoritarian transition happened with the United States or Israel assassinating Ayatollah Khamenei, I think at least in the very near term, made it even less likely that the country is going to peacefully transition to stable, representative government, because as both of you have experienced throughout your careers, when you introduce a power vacuum into a society, it’s not the intellectuals and the poets that prevail in that kind of atmosphere. It’s men who are able and knowledgeable about mobilizing violence.

Jon Finer:

Karim, there’s been one question I’ve really wanted to ask you since all of this started to go down. I mean, you’re somebody who’s studied, written about, probably thought more than you would’ve liked, about the Supreme Leader, now late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. What is your best explanation as to why, even though he, I think, felt like it was probably likely that he could face incredible violence, was unwilling in the end to make a deal. He had done that once before. He had done that famously, also, to end the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, and then relatedly, maybe, why did he not bother to hide himself better given everybody on the planet was anticipating that there could be military action directed at him personally?

Karim Sadjadpour:

There’s that wonderful Isaiah Berlin essay, which I know you’re both familiar with, the hedgehog and the fox. The fox knows many things, and the hedgehog knows one big thing. For me, there was no more prototypical hedgehog in the geopolitical landscape than Ayatollah Khamenei. He, basically, has had one big idea over the last four decades, and that’s been resistance against the United States, resistance against Israel. There was a study I did when I first joined Carnegie. I spent about six months reading all of his major speeches over his three, four decade career. What I found remarkable in that it was essentially a variation of one speech that he’d consistently given.

That is obviously that concept of resistance, but also this view that when you’re under pressure, whether internal or external, if you take a step backward in the hopes of alleviating that pressure, that’s actually going to project weakness and embolden your adversary. So, I think that, on one hand, Jon, this is someone who was arguably the longest serving dictator in the world. He served for 37 years, and you don’t get that title if you’re a reckless gambler. On one hand, he had these great survival instincts, and I think those survival instincts were intentioned with those resistance instincts. I think in the case of Donald Trump, he probably felt that, over the last decade or so that he’s been dealing with Trump, but in particular after the aftermath of Trump pulling out of JCPUA, Trump killing Qasem Soleimani in 2020, and then last summer’s operation, Midnight Hammer, he probably felt that he had not and Iran had not really exacted sufficient costs to Trump for those actions.

Trump viewed Iran as a paper tiger, and for that reason, I think he was more in resistance mode. On your question of why they were so complacent about operational security, I don’t have a great answer to that question, because last summer, the bombing started just a couple of days before another round of negotiations was meant to happen, so they knew that there was a likelihood of military action. If I knew, they, I’m sure, knew that Ayatollah Khamenei was thought to be a target and maybe that they thought they won’t do it in broad daylight, but that was an enormous, enormous failure of operational security. Part of me thinks maybe at age 86, that’s how he also wanted to go out, as a martyr.

Jake Sullivan:

I was going to ask you that, Karim, because it just struck me like you have the biggest buildup in the region by the American military since the Iraq war in 2003. You have the US telegraphing that military action was likely. You have the possibility of a direct strike on the Supreme leader plastered all over the newspapers of the world, and the guy just shows up to a meeting. So, is it that, in fact, he thought, “You know what? Come what may. I’m going to put myself out there, and if I’m, “in his view, “If I’m martyred, I’m martyred,” do you think that that’s at least a possibility?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I spent two decades that I’ve not been able to go to Iran, but I hope one day I can get to Iran and look at the archives of these types of major decisions. What on earth were they thinking? Back to Khamenei’s worldview, so when I did the study years ago, I’d kind of reached this conclusion that Ayatollah Khamenei, we, the United States, are never, ever going to be able to reach a modus vivendi with him. It may be possible we can kind of get a tactical, nuclear compromise, a tactical deal, but he essentially wanted to have the United States as an adversary for his own internal legitimacy. And so, not long after I concluded that study, I was invited to a meeting in Oslo, and the former president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami, was invited there as the keynote speaker, and they sat me next to Khatami at dinner.

Khatami, in his keynote speech, said off the record to a group of people, he said, “There are those in both capitals, both Washington and Tehran, who don’t want to normalize relations because it’s not in their personal interest to do so.”

After his speech, I went back to that point, and I said, “Mr. Khatami, whom are you referring to in Tehran when you say it’s not in their personal interest to restore relations?”

I was shocked. He said to me, “When I was president, Mr. Khamenei used to tell me that we need enmity with the United States. The revolution needs enmity with the United States,” and that was kind of a conclusion I had reached independently from reading his speeches, but to hear the former president of the Republic say that so candidly was, for me, really an eye-opening experience.

Jake Sullivan:

Wow, wow. I think that’s the literal definition of saying the quiet part out loud. The Ayatollah is dead, which is a remarkable sentence to utter. You’ve said you don’t think that this necessarily leads to the outbreak of Jeffersonian democracy in Iran. Where do you see this going? What does happen with this regime, and what are you looking at, in terms of the factors that will dictate whether it takes one course or another?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I think, Jake, we can talk about the immediate term, and then let’s say the medium term, three, four, five years out. The immediate term, this is a regime fighting for its life, both internally and externally. What I found maybe three, four days into the war is that it’s a regime which it can fight. It’s proven it can continue fighting. It can kill. It can kill its own people, but it really can’t govern, and so it’s really in this existential, fighting mode at the moment. I think President Trump, in his head, was hoping for Venezuela redux, where you take out the top guy and then you do a swift deal with his successor, in the case of Venezuela, Delci Rodriguez. That hasn’t happened, at least yet in the Iranian context. There’s been 40 years of this ideological culture, revolutionary ideology of death to America, death to Israel, and at least in the first four days of this war, we’ve seen continuity.

Even though numerous senior officials have been assassinated, at the moment, there’s no one who’s emerged, who has the legitimacy, the authority, and the will to make a break with that 47-year culture. In a way, it’s almost like the system is more prepared to break than they are to bend. Their future, really, in some ways depends on how far the United States and Israel are willing to go on this campaign, and we can talk about what their strategy is right now to counter that. But in the medium term, let’s say five years out, the foreign affairs, I say I wrote, I focused on kind of five possibilities. As a shorthand, I’ll just list them here. One is Iran is the Soviet Union and then post-Soviet Russia. A second is Iran is China. A third is Iran as North Korea. Fourth is Iran is Pakistan, and fifth is Iran is Turkey. In some ways, I think probably for your very intelligent listeners, those archetypes are pretty self-explanatory.

In some ways, I don’t know if you guys agree with Kissinger’s observation. He said, when he was a professor at Harvard, he felt that history was driven by impersonal forces. After he served in government many years, he reached the opposite conclusion, that the individual makes a profound difference in history. I’m one of those, that I know academics don’t like the great man theory of history, but I think about this as kind of almost biographical archetypes in the Iranian context, in that this is a country which over the last century has really been only ruled by four men, Reza Shah, Muhammad Reza Shah, Ayatollah Khamenei, and Ayetol Khomeini. And so, the big question is, if there is going to be a next strong man in Iran, what kind of strong man will that person likely be? In my view, it’s not likely going to be someone who’s wearing a turban.

Even though they may choose most of a hominy or another cleric as the next supreme leader, I don’t think that there’s going to be another powerful cleric, supreme leader. I do think that the winning argument in Iran, in future years, is going to be nationalism. Now, nationalism can take many different forms. You can have the negative nationalism of Vladimir Putin. You can have a positive patriotism of, I’m trying to think. Well, you could argue like a Mohammed bin Salman or a Mohamed Bin Zayed in the UAE. I think that’s obviously an outcome that many in Iran would prefer. This process, from where we are now to where the country could go in the coming years, is going to be fraught with enormous drama. Obviously, it’s not Iranians themselves who are shaping their current history.

Jon Finer:

Not to try to pin you down too much or to make you explain the entirety of your excellent essay, we will link that for our listeners and viewers, but I did want to ask, is what you’re saying basically that we are not likely to have clerical leadership in Iran, suggestive that we might have the security forces take charge? They have not shown much indication that they are cracking, at least not yet. Maybe their ability to fight back and launch missiles and rockets continues, maybe diminished over time. Does that suggest to you that they are likely to take over? I just want to also get you to comment on the prospects. You seem to be almost ruling out democratic transition. Where does that leave the democracy movement that kind of kicked all of this off earlier this year, that led President Trump to actually first pledge to intervene militarily in Iran? Does that leave them sort of in the wilderness at this point?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Well, let me start by saying that I really hope I’m wrong and that the country will transition to secular, Jeffersonian, accountable democracy. That would be wonderful. The issue, as I said earlier, is that, especially when this transition is triggered by external violence, there’s a moment now for these security forces who think it’s kill or be killed. They rightly believe it’s kill or be killed, and so, for that reason, they’re willing to inflict enormous violence on their citizens. I do think that the internal battles within the revolutionary guards, within the security forces are going to be determinative for Iran. We use the term revolutionary guards often, and I want to emphasize for your listeners this. They are not a monolith. There are 150,000 men with somewhat different worldviews.

I think the very senior leadership, because of the fact that they were hand chosen by Ayatollah Khamenei, and he was very careful about shuffling them with some frequency to prevent them from getting too comfortable in attaining their own power base, those folks, I would say, are revolutionaries. They still believe in the ethos of what I call vision 1979. I think a lot of the rank-and-file folks would actually prefer to prioritize economic and national interest before revolutionary ideology, and so I think that that is likely going to be a battle that is going to be with us for some time. I think the latter argument is if you’re someone who’s trying to appeal to popular aspirations. Appealing to people’s aspirations is more popular than continuing to try to appeal to grievances, but that’s a fight which I think is going to be very important for Iran’s future. On the democracy front, what’s interesting is that, in the couple of decades that I’ve been following Iran, it’s not to say that people don’t want democracy.

Absolutely, I think they want political freedoms, but what I find the interesting, especially in the aftermath of both our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the failures of the Arab Spring, is that I think the model people have in their heads for what constitutes a good life are places that are palpable to them, because they visit often. Places like the UAE, Turkey is a place which is, and I would argue kind of the closest cousin to Iran. It’s a large, non-Arab, Muslim country with a very proud history. What people say, increasingly, in Iran is we want a normal life, Zendigia normal, and that is like a life that gives you economic dignity, economic opportunities, social freedoms. You can watch what you want, go out with your boyfriend, girlfriend. If you want to drink alcohol, you don’t have a police state micromanaging every aspect of your life, but it’s not the same way. I remember when I was first beginning, you would hear the word democracy two decades ago, in a way, more than you hear right now.

Jake Sullivan:

So Karim, those people who went out onto the streets who were so ruthlessly gunned down in just these incredible and disturbing numbers, and they’re compatriots who are now sitting at home kind of looking at all of this unfold, what are the Iranian people? Obviously, they’re not monolithic, but broadly speaking, what are the Iranian people thinking about this bombing campaign? How are they reacting to it, and where does it leave them in terms of whether they go back out into the streets at some point here? Do you have a view on that?

Karim Sadjadpour:

So, it’s always very difficult to do polling on authoritarian regimes, but my estimate based on there is one poll coming out of a group in Europe called Gamon, which has done pretty good polling, and then just kind of based on other indicators, including just anecdotal evidence, is that probably about 80 to 85% of Iranians are opposed to this regime. I think their popularity is so low because of the fact that they are brutally, politically authoritarian, they’re socially authoritarian, and they’re doing a terrible job managing the country’s economy, and they’re also a theocracy which rules from a moral pedestal. That is particularly insulting to people when you’re elbow deep in repression and corruption, but you have these moral pretensions of ruling, of carrying out God’s will.

For that reason, it’s a society which is really furious, and they have a deep loathing for their government. I think, at the moment, Jake, they are shellshocked. They’re shell shocked at the violence of January of 2026. People I spoke to said as if there were in a war zone. The regime was just opening fire on unarmed civilians with weapons of war, and for that reason, I think that many of those, again, there’s no scientific polling, but based on talking to people, based on everything I read, I would argue of the 80% of society that opposes the regime, it seemed like a majority of those people did want President Trump to make good on his promise to help. As you guys know, he said on nine occasions that he incited people to the streets and said, “Help is on the way. Go seize your institutions.”

I think a majority of people did want him to make good on that promise. As you guys both know, there was a former general friend of mine who served in Iraq, and he said, “All societies living under tyranny understandably want a magic bullet, which is only going to hurt their oppressors and not cause any civilian damage or harm innocent people.” Of course, war never works out like that, and so four or five days into this, I think that some of the scenes are horrific. There was a girl’s school in Southern Iran that was inadvertently bombed, killing almost 200 young school girls. I have to say, I don’t have a sense right now what does the average person think? Do they want this campaign to continue? Do they want the campaign aborted? I think they are in a very terrible position right now, and my heart goes out to Iranians.

Jon Finer:

You alluded earlier to US strategy, Israel’s strategy at this point, which does also seem to sort of evolve, almost by the day or even within the day, by the answer from different senior officials. One topic, about which there’s now some reporting and a lot of speculation, is the possibility that armed groups outside Iran, like Iranian Kurdish factions based in Iraq, possibly armed by the United States or Israel, could enter the fray, or alongside perhaps separatists inside Iran, like the Baluch taking up arms against the regime. I’m wondering what you make of these reports. Would this be a sound strategy, and how would this likely play out if this is what happens?

Karim Sadjadpour:

My view would be the opposite of sound. This is really playing with fire, to start to think about arming different factions inside Iran. This is a country which is different than a lot of the other countries we see in the Middle East that were post World War I creations or post-Ottoman creations. This is a country with over 2000 years of history as a nation state. In my view, there is a cohesive national identity. It’s true that only around 50% of Iranians are Persians, and then you have perhaps a quarter of the country who are Azeri. Then, you alluded to, Jon, the Kurds who are constituted about 10%, and the Kurds, that’s the news reports of arming Iranian Kurds. Listen, I love the Kurdish community in Iran. They’re wonderful people. They have been disproportionately repressed by, not only this regime, but they’ve suffered disproportionate repression even before 1979, and they have very legitimate and profound grievances.

The challenge is, in my view, that the antidote to this regime, the antidote to kind of Shiite revolutionary ideology is, I would argue, a form of nationalism, patriotism in its best form, right? In my view, that nationalism would be best if it were pluralistic, so it’s not an ethnic nationalism. It’s a pluralistic, Iranian nationalism that encompasses the country’s various ethnic groups: Persian, Azeri, Baluch, Kurdish, Turkoman, and Arab, et cetera. But if it’s perceived that the US government or any outside power is playing around with the country’s territorial integrity or trying to factionalize the country, that is going to badly backfire, because it’s something which people feel very sensitive about, and there is a danger that even the opponents of the regime will grudgingly either cease protesting or perhaps even, I don’t want to say side with the regime, but it’s such a profound issue for people, that if they feel the goal of this entire effort is to break Iran up, that’s something that most people don’t want any part of.

Jake Sullivan:

Karim, you’ve said this is the opposite of sound, to pursue a strategy to arm up a bunch of ethnic factions. Do you think that the Israelis and the US are serious about this? Does this concern you as a real possibility that you actually could see ethnic militias of one flavor or another actually trying to bring pressure on the regime, or do you think this is kind of more speculative?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I can’t tell, Jake, based on talking to people here and based on the reporting, I’d say a couple of things. Number one, if you’re Israel, and this is your worst adversary in the world, they’ve been supporting these proxies against you, these militias against you for many decades, you may say, “I don’t care if this causes havoc inside Iran or even state collapse, because we want, or it’s better for us to have this weakened adversary.” That may be your calculation if you’re Israel, which is frankly different than the calculations of a lot of the neighboring Gulf countries, because they do worry about that spillover and refugees and things like that, which Israel wouldn’t have to deal with. I think the United States has always recognized that that would be an unwise strategy. Certainly, I think you guys probably did when you were both in government, that the goal here is not to cause a civil war in Iran.

The goal is for Iran to essentially become a country whose organizing principle is their national interest, not revolutionary ideology. I always quote Henry Kissinger here. This is a verbatim quote from Kissinger. He said, “There are a few nations in the world with whom the United States has more common interests and less reason to quarrel than Iran.” So, if this is the country that, I’m not even saying a democratic government, but a government who prioritizes its own national interests, the US and Iran should be natural partners. And so, I think that’s, in my view, long been the goal of success of US governments, from Jimmy Carter to the present. There’s so little strategic planning in this current administration, that I’m skeptical it’s actually a concerted plan to arm ethnic factions to bring about civil strife. It just seems more, to me, that they’re improvising as they go along. It’s kind of regime change by jazz improvisation.

Jon Finer:

Karim, you described a goal that one could have for the future of Iran. I’m wondering if you think the United States and Israel share a common objective at this point. They’ve obviously worked in lockstep in conducting the military operation up until now. May have even been a high degree of coordination when it came to the diplomacy, some degree of subterfuge. There’s at least some reporting that suggests that, but in terms of a future kind of end state for Iran, do you think that that is shared between the US administration and Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I think if you gave President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu, if they wrote on a paper for you independently their ideal goals vis-a-vis Iran, they probably would be similar. They would say, “We want in Iran, which is,” they would probably say similar to how it was pre 1979. Nationalist government that, at that time, there was a good partnership between Iran and Israel. The goal of the government was to advance the economic welfare and security of its people, and there was not really a conflict between Iran and Israel. Israel is a tech superpower. Iran is an energy superpower, and so their interests were complimentary. Obviously, I think President Trump would like that outcome as well, but absent that perfect option, it may be that the interim options between the two countries are different, because I think, for Israel, they may want to continue this campaign of targeted assassinations indefinitely.

The fallout from that, which is Iran reacting against Gulf countries, attempting to close the strait of Hormuz, spiking the price of oil, those are all consequences that perhaps an Israeli prime minister is more willing to live with than an American president, and so we’ll see in the coming weeks. I think in some ways the Iranian strategy here is pretty clear, which is what they learned in the 1980s when Hezbollah, backed by Iran, bombed the US Marine barracks and Beirut was that one of the best ways of restraining the regional ambitions of American presidents to impact public opinion in the United States. They did that also in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and I think, in a way, that’s what they’re trying to do here. When Americans turn on the television sets and they see explosions and smoke everywhere, service members being killed, their gas prices are higher at the pump, their hope is that President Trump watches that too and says, “You know what? Let’s pull the plug on this.” I think Israel’s calculations are different there.

Jake Sullivan:

Karim, do you have a view about how this ends at this point? I mean, that’s really putting you on the spot since it’s also unpredictable, but what is your take on the most likely end game for the military action, given what you just said?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I often joke with my Georgetown students that you’re better off having a psychology degree than a political science degree to kind of assess the futures of the Middle East, and that’s also true now about Washington, because we’re essentially trying to get inside the mind of the president. We do know that he doesn’t like long, drawn-out operations. I would say much of the MAGA base is opposed to getting sucked into another Middle East war. I was writing an Atlantic piece earlier today, and I was thinking of how virtually every US president since 1979 has had their presidency, in some ways, consumed by the Iran issue.

The hostage crisis basically ended Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Iran contra tainted Reagan’s presidency. 9/11, obviously, wasn’t Iran, but the aftermath of 9/11, the Iraq war, Iran sabotaged the Bush’s efforts to democratize Iraq. You guys, the second part of the Obama administration was consumed by JCPOA and the bitter partisan fights. October 7th, 2023, when you were both in government, Iranian proxy Hamas, and then the wars that consumed the period you guys were there, and now Trump, he criticized all previous US presidents for getting sucked in, and it seems to be happening with him as well. I think there’s two big questions. It’s the resolve of the president, and on any given hour, it seems to change. Sometimes he says he’s ready to pursue this for four or five weeks. Other times he says he wants to do a deal.

Jon Finer:

Hegseth said eight weeks earlier today.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Exactly. And so, they’re on one hand signaling that kind of resolve, but that could change by tomorrow. For the Iranians, it’s, “Okay. How long can they endure this? How cohesive are the security forces? How many missiles do they have left?” That’s going to be the question for them, and who is going to emerge in Iran? Who is going to start to fill this enormous vacuum left by the death of the Supreme Leader?

Jake Sullivan:

By the way, on that, you mentioned earlier Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the Ayatollah who was just killed. There’s these reports that maybe he’s going to be the new Supreme leader. A, do you have a reaction to that? B, who is this guy? And can he be a figure who kind of holds together the cohesion of the regime through the continuing military pressure of the US and Israel?

Karim Sadjadpour:

So, he’s very much his father’s son. He’s a 56-year-old cleric. He doesn’t really have a public profile. I was trying to watch some speeches, for example, that he’s given, just to get a sense of even what his voice sounds like, what does he think. There’s very little out there. He’s operated in the shadows over the last few decades. He was long thought to be his father’s right hand and kind of a liaison between his father and the revolutionary guards, and so if indeed he replaces his father, we can expect continuity, although some say he’s even more ruthless than his father. Given the fact that he’ll have even less legitimacy, it means he’ll have to rely even more on security forces. I don’t think he’s going to be a powerful figure, and at best, I think he’ll probably be a transitional figure. It’s going to be forces within the revolutionary guards, I think, who shape his thinking.

So, in 1979, when Khomeini, the revolutionaries, came to power, one of the things that they said was that hereditary monarchy is un-Islamic, and that was their critique of the Shah’s government, so the fact that they’re now potentially becoming a hereditary theocracy, it undermines the ethos of 1979, but after the death of Ebrahim Raisi, if you remember, he was Iran’s previous president who was killed in a helicopter crash a couple of years ago, there was only really two people in that conversation for a succession, Raisi and Mojtaba, and it may be that ultimately they go with a different choice, because there’s been rumors that Mojtaba was not only was his father killed in those strikes, but his wife was also killed. There’s rumors that he’s been injured and he’s convalescing. We saw that Israel actually bombed the meeting of where the assembly of experts, this body of 88 clerics, my joke about them as their average age is deceased. Israel bombed that location. And so, every senior-

Jon Finer:

It’s become less of a Joke these days.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Yeah, it’s true. And so, every senior official in this regime has an Israeli bullseye on their back. Ayatollah Khamenei ruled for 37 years. If Mojtaba succeeds him, he may not rule for 37 days.

Jon Finer:

Karim, we’ve talked about how this war could end. One other way in which it could expand, maybe even escalate, is if other countries joined. The Gulf countries, who you’ve alluded to a number of times, have really borne the brunt of Iran’s retaliation. I think possibly even the majority of munitions that Iran has fired have landed or been intercepted by the UAE. Just one of these Gulf countries, obviously Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, other countries have been shot at as well, they wanted to stay out of this conflict. I think that’s quite clear. Some of them, I think, lobbied the administration quite hard against going to war, although there’s been some conflicting reporting on that. At this point though, the pressure is mounting on them. These are countries that spend a lot of money on having relatively advanced militaries to defend their territory, their populations, so they face this sort of fateful choice. How do you think that’s going to play out?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I did a Fulbright scholarship in Beirut a couple of decades ago, and one of my big takeaways from that year in Beirut is that it takes decades to build things and it takes weeks to destroy things. I have great admiration for some of these Gulf countries. UAE is a good example. In 1978, Ayatollah Khamenei and Sheikh Zayed, the ruler of the UAE, went to the same elevator. Sheikh Zayed pushed up, and Ayatollah Khamenei pushed down. This country, United Arab Emirates, which was really a backwater five decades ago, it’s amazing how they’ve become this global hub of finance and transport and technology, and Iran is this global pariah. Those countries, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are trying to follow in the footsteps of the UAE, and those countries have a lot to lose because they know that what has taken them many decades to build, Iran can attempt to destroy. I think of them as kind of like the battle between Falcons and vultures.

One team wants to build these soaring cities, societies, economies, and Iran and its proxies are vultures. They feed off chaos and misery, and so big question now is how do these countries react? Because Iran did telegraph that it was going to regionalize this war, but I think many of those countries didn’t anticipate that that was going to mean attacks on civilians and civilian outposts. So far, my sense is that it’s really, rather than having the effect of them going to the United States and saying, “Please stop this war,” it’s had the opposite impact, that they’ve gone to the United States and said, “How can we be helpful?” Now, this is kind of, at the moment, a tangential point, but a very interesting one, which is that you guys both know that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Pakistan signed a mutual defense treaty not that long ago. The Pakistanis had to recently remind Iran that we have a mutual defense treaty with Saudi Arabia, and so if you decide to continue lobbying strikes against Saudi Arabia, we may have an obligation to come and defend them.

Jake Sullivan:

I missed that, Karim, that the Pakistanis went to the Iranians and said that.

Karim Sadjadpour:

There was a statement from Pakistanis, I believe it was the deputy prime minister, the foreign minister, because in all of the news that happens, we forget about some of those developments. That was a big story for 24 hours, and then we forgot about it. For that reason, the Pakistanis made a public statement, reminding the Iranians about it.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly. No, what’s remarkable about that mutual defense agreement that was signed between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, I think it was last September, is that it also is a nuclear dimension. Actually, it’s extending the Pakistani nuclear umbrella to Saudi Arabia, which is quite remarkable. It just goes to show you how fast things have evolved here, that you’ve got Pakistan having to go out publicly and talk about what effectively is an Article five commitment to Saudi Arabia, which is currently being attacked by Iran. We’ll get you out of here on this question, not an easy one, but let’s say, Karim, that President Trump called you in tomorrow to the Oval Office and said, “We’re six days into this thing, trying to figure out where to go from here.” With all that you know about this country, what would the right US strategy be, from this point forward, to try to produce the best outcome possible? How would you answer that question?

Karim Sadjadpour:

It’s so difficult to answer it right now, because so many of the things that he’s already done, I would have advised, so we’re kind of inheriting a quagmire. I think what’s so critical is for President Trump to be clear in his own mind about his end game and his objectives. At one point during the negotiations, I think I heard from Secretary Rubio that there are four main objectives here. It was to limit their nuclear program, limit their missile program, limit their support for proxies, and limit their ability to brutalize their population. I think those are four very defensible objectives, but even within them, you have to kind of define what those objectives are.

The problem we have now is that, in the president’s head, it’s not clear what his objectives are, and he’s just been kind of improvising it as we go along. That is a recipe for absolute disaster. What I’ve felt in the first four days of this war is that everyone has been a loser. There hasn’t been any winners here. The regime is obviously flailing. The Iranian society is in shell shock. It hasn’t been good for America. It hasn’t been good for Gulf countries. Israel is receiving incoming fire, and so this has been a lose, lose, lose all around. I think it’s absolutely critical for United States and the US president to be clear in his own mind, “Okay. This is what we’re actually trying to achieve. This is the viable objective we have, and then how do we fulfill that objective?”

Jon Finer:

Karim, I’m pretty confident the president is not one of our listeners. I don’t know that he reads 5,000 word essays in the Atlantic, but he does watch TV, so if you happen to see an unknown number pop up on your phone, who knows? He would struggle to do better, I think, for somebody to get advice from in this moment than you, and I don’t think we could have had a better guest try to help us make sense of the madness happening in the Middle East, so grateful that you were with us today.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Thank you guys so much. I enjoyed it.

Jake Sullivan:

Amen. Thank you, Karim.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Thank you, Jake.

Jake Sullivan:

So Jon, always illuminating to have Karim who’s got, I think, just a unique set of insights, particularly around Iran and how they’re thinking about all of this, both the people and the regime.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, and he told us off the air that he’s been doing some more writing on this topic that’ll be coming out soon, so I’ll certainly be looking for that. He’s a great writer, in addition to obviously being quite eloquent on this topic. I don’t know. I felt like he sounded almost a little bit wistful about the situation. This is a moment of some promise, but also just massive, massive suffering and peril, and not clear at all that it’s trending in the right direction, and does seem to be weighing on him.

Jake Sullivan:

And he’s a dignified and polite person, but you could hear, I think, a very consistent subtext of frustration about the lack of coherence, as he put it at the end, the lack of planning, such that that promise is not likely, from his perspective, to be converted into real, meaningful political change in Iran. As he put it right at the end, I thought was really interesting that everybody’s been a loser in this. It probably sums up my view right now, that everyone has been a loser, including us, because of the inability of this administration to really answer fundamental questions about why and what, and what then, and so I thought it was striking that, through the sober analysis, the good turns of phrase, that really came through as a theme of his remarks over the course of the podcast.

Jon Finer:

Yeah. I mean, so much of what happens when you start a war ends up not going the way you plan, but it seems, in this case, like there are just many things that haven’t even been contemplated, like the scramble right now to try to help Americans who are stranded in some of these places, attacks on embassies and other diplomatic facilities, just events that I think are going to change how this is viewed in the United States in a pretty negative way, but we’ll see how it plays out.

Jake Sullivan:

We will see how it plays out. Obviously, things are developing very rapidly. We’ve heard Pete Hegseth, as you noted, say this could go on for eight weeks or longer. He also said it could go on for three weeks or shorter, so we actually have very little idea of what lies before us, meaning you and I could be back on an emergency pod, announcing who knows what in the next few days. In any event, by the time we’re back with our regularly scheduled programming in the next podcast next week, we’ll certainly be talking about this issue again because of its significant implications, not just immediately in the region, but beyond as well.

Should also note one thing, which is that if it goes eight weeks or if it even goes five weeks, at the end of this month, President Trump is supposed to go to Beijing for a major summit. The question of how that all plays into this is going to be quite interesting, something that we will watch over the course of March. But for now, we wanted to take the remainder of our time in this podcast, the next 10 minutes or so, to pick up on a topic we’ve talked a bit about before, this engagement between Anthropic and the Pentagon, ultimately OpenAI coming in as well, what lessons we draw from that, where we see things going. So Jon, why don’t I turn it over to you to tee up the conversation and how you’re seeing things right now, given the fast moving developments of the last several days?

Jon Finer:

I think when we last spoke about this, the issue had not been fully resolved, by the way, still probably not fully resolved, the way this administration operates, but we’ll get to that. But at the time, Anthropic, which is the only large language model that had been approved for use in US government, classified networks, and had a contract with the Pentagon to do that, was in a standoff with Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon over terms that Anthropic was insisting on in that contract that the Pentagon had decided it no longer supported. One of those terms was not allowing their model to be used for fully autonomous weapons that do not have a human decision maker in the loop when conducting legal targeting, and the other was for the mass surveillance of Americans. The Pentagon’s position was, “We’ll make the decisions about what policies we will follow as long as they are consistent with the laws, constitution of this country.”

This led to this protracted and pretty nasty, it sounds like, negotiation that spilled into the public. When we last spoke about this issue, the Pentagon had given Anthropic a deadline of last Friday, essentially to exceed to the Pentagon’s proposal for how to resolve this situation, which was less than, I guess, a full ironclad promise to abide by the terms that Anthropic wanted. That all completely broke down and in advance of the deadline. The Pentagon had also threatened, as we talked about, two possible ramifications for Anthropic, or really three. One was canceling the contract, which they have now since done, and the other was essentially punishing Anthropic by either using the Defense Production Act, a sort of expansive authority that allows the government to order private companies to do certain things, use the Defense Production Act to insist that Anthropic provide the sort of model that the Pentagon is seeking, or in the alternative, and these goals, as you pointed out, are somewhat intention, declare that Anthropic is actually a risk to the US supply chain, which would have massive implications for Anthropic as a business.

Obviously, it would not allow them to do business with the US government anymore, but also any other entities that do business with US government would have a hard time doing business with Anthropic, which would include many of their largest customers, hyper-scalers and the like. So, that all erupted. The Pentagon said that it was going to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk, has not, I think, formalized that process, but in the meantime, as you said, OpenAI Anthropic’s, probably a bitterist rival of the very few large language models that really operate at the frontier are leading kind of crown jewels in this area, essentially negotiated behind the backs of Anthropic, a separate agreement with the Pentagon to replace them as the contractor. Have I got that basically right? There’s more to the story.

Jake Sullivan:

I mean, bottom line, Anthropic insisted on additional limitations on mass surveillance and on fully autonomous lethal weapons. The Pentagon said, “Nope. We’re only going to have a clause that says all lawful purposes.” OpenAI, basically, came in and accepted that, although it has subsequently added some clauses to it, and now OpenAI has the contract. Anthropic does not. The Pentagon has said it’s going to designate Anthropic as supply chain risk, but actually hasn’t done so yet, and we will see if it does. By the way, you said that OpenAI and Anthropic are the bitterest of rivals. There’s a great, I think it’s on video, I’ve just read about it, so actually I haven’t seen the video.

Jon Finer:

It took place in India, where I’m sitting tonight, actually, I think what you’re about to talk about.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. Where Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, were standing next to each other at this AI summit that India hosted a couple of weeks ago. As often happens at these summits, they have these kinds of cheesy moments, where they have all of the participants kind of gather on stage together and then hold hands and raise their hands. Sam and Dario refused to join hands. Everyone else did, but it was an image which very much reflected the bitter coldness between these two people and these two companies. Look, I think, for me, there’s kind of three big takeaways here. One, the threat by the Pentagon to impose a supply chain risk designation on Anthropic is outrageous. This is a patriotic American company.

Ironically, the whole reason why Anthropic is the only AI company that has a classified contract with the Pentagon, until OpenAI just came along, is because they started, very early, going to the Pentagon and saying, “We want, as good patriots, to support the US military, and we’re prepared to do the work to build this capability with and for you and put a lot of effort into that,” so ironically, they are the most forward leaning on these issues. For the Pentagon to turn around and say there’s somehow a risk to the American supply chain, it holds no water. You pointed out to me, actually, the crazy reality that Anthropic could be deemed a supply chain risk when no Chinese LLMs, like DeepSeek, are currently designated as supply chain risk, so what a bizarre scenario.

Jon Finer:

And I believe, by the way, no American company has ever been deemed a supply chain risk.

Jake Sullivan:

Right.

Jon Finer:

Only foreign entities have gotten that particular designation, so this is quite precedent setting.

Jake Sullivan:

And almost certainly illegal as well. We’ve seen, I think, a number of our former colleagues lay out legal analyses that say-

Jon Finer:

We’re just fake lawyers, but we sometimes offer legal analysis in this context.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, we stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so we can do it with our law degrees, but basically no good, solid legal experience. So, it’s almost certainly illegal. The Pentagon probably knows that, which is why they haven’t actually imposed it, as we’ve noted. It may just be that they want to put a cloud over Anthropic to make companies that work with the Pentagon less likely to use them. That tells you a lot about the gangster-like tactics at work here. The second point that I would make though is that the substance of this, so on process, it’s just ridiculous what the Pentagon has done. The substance, it’s a little more complicated, and let me explain why I think so.

In this particular case, I think Dario is absolutely on the right side on the issue of mass surveillance, the issue of lethal autonomous weapons, and the demand that there be a higher set of guardrails put in place for these two things because of the capabilities of the AI systems. I think he’s totally right, and he’s right to stand on principle on that, but if you generalize this principle, so that it’s just like for other cases where a technology company might come along and say, “I don’t like current US policy, so I’m going to create kind of my own US policy,” that feels like it could take us in a more problematic direction if it became the norm. This particular case, I’m very sympathetic to Anthropic and Dario, but the generalizing of this case makes me a little bit more nervous.

I think the right answer on who decides should be a responsible government with the input of the public and not a technology CEO. Of course, we don’t really have a responsible government or a responsible Pentagon right now, as we’ve watched them play this thing out, so that’s what makes all of this so challenging. Then, the third point is that it’s been interesting to me to see OpenAI basically accept the assurances of the US government that all lawful purposes covers their concerns around mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, but after a lot of pushback over the weekend, OpenAI actually got the deal amended to say, I think this is a quote, that ChatGPT shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of US persons and nationals. It had other quotes around deliberate tracking surveillance or monitoring of US persons or nationals.

What that suggests to me is that internal pressure and external pressure on OpenAI got them to firm up their position to come closer to where Dario was, but also that the Defense Department, for them, this was as much about score settling with a company that they didn’t like, Anthropic, for reasons I don’t understand entirely, as it was about the substance, since they’ve now agreed to do things with OpenAI that they had not agreed to do with Anthropic. So, a kind of sorry, I think, experience all around, from the point of view of how the Pentagon has approached this, a principled and quite brave stand by Anthropic, but then this underlying tension and question about the relationship between technology CEOs, the US government, and the US national security enterprise, that I think we will have to kind of puzzle through in the months and years ahead.

Jon Finer:

Look, bad, I think, for the country and the sector all around. This is one of, as we’ve said, the three leading companies developing what is maybe the most important technology in human history, and in some areas it is the world-leading large language model for things like coding. It’s the dominant player in kind of enterprise business use of large language models, and now because of this dispute is also jumped to the very top of the Apple Store rankings for all applications. It is essentially being put on a US government blacklist, not being celebrated, but maybe a step that could ultimately badly damage if not destroy the business. That is not good for the United States, that that is happening. This is also freaking out industry players in the United States and around the world, because as you said, it’s pretty unprecedented for the US government, in a punitive way, over a dispute that really does feel political.

They clearly don’t like Anthropic. It’s got this in this right wing ecosystem, woke AI label that’s been put on it by people like Elon Musk, and I think largely, because of that, they were willing to go further for OpenAI in the contract negotiations than they were willing to go for Anthropic, but it is not comforting to anybody to have a precedent where the government essentially tries to destroy a company for that reason and destroy it in a totally disingenuous way with this supply chain risk designation. I’m in India. I hear tech players in the Indian industry and in the Indian government saying things like, “We’re making a big bet on the US technology stack,” and many of them have made a big bet on Anthropic, given that it’s only one of sort of three, top end players, and they’re now wondering, “Do we have to totally sort of rip and replace Anthropic’s models out of our systems, and if so, how much can we rely on other US technology companies?”

Given if you get in the crosshairs of this administration, you might get kind of obliterated off the map too. It has created massive uncertainty in an area where we are in a, as we’ve discussed many times outside this podcast and on it, just very intense competition with our main competitor in the world, China, which is racing ahead with these technologies too. The last thing I was going to say is, I really do agree with you though about universalizing this principle that companies can come to the US government when they’re contracting and insist on a bunch of policy changes or restrictions. I think about what somebody like Elon Musk could do or could have done to an administration we served in. SpaceX, for example, has a even more stark monopoly on heavy lift rocket transport for the US government, for satellites, and other things.

He could come to the United States government and say, “Look, I’m very willing to keep doing this. It’s a good relationship. It’s a big contract for us, but I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page,” about one of his pet issues. For example, DEI. He could say, “Anybody who has, I consider, to be a DEI hire, obviously we would agree can’t possibly be working on this program, because that would put at risk everything that we’re trying to do, make it less safe, and I’m not willing to do that.” How would an administration handle that demand? I think these sorts of precedents are dangerous from both sides, which is why I wish that the two parties had been able to work it out. That would’ve been a much better outcome for the country, for the US government, for the industry, but that’s not where it landed.

Jake Sullivan:

No. I’d say one more thing on this that is unique to the AI context. If you think about most forms of military technology or military-relevant technology, a Raytheon or a Boeing or a Lockheed making Patriot interceptors or F-35s or you name it, that’s typically done in close partnership between the US military and the company, such that the technology is very well understood by both the military and the defense contractor. These LLMs, the US government is a total spectator. They didn’t have anything to do with creating them. They don’t have the depth and breadth of expertise to understand the capabilities and how they would apply, say, for example-

Jon Finer:

And understatement, if anything.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. In the context of mass surveillance or legal autonomous weapons, and part of the argument Dario was making, which resonated with me, was, “Guys, I get this thing and what it can do and what its risks are, and unlike a lot of other weapons systems, there isn’t a counterpart on the US government side with the depth of knowledge of that, because they didn’t have a hand in building it.” And so, I think we’re at the front end of a lot of tension in this space, because the military is going to want to make use of these capabilities and yet the companies are the ones that really understand them, both the upsides and the risks of them.

It’s interesting, to me, that OpenAI as part of its understanding with the Pentagon is actually going to have OpenAI personnel kind of go inside the US government in the application of these systems. So, that’s relevant to this particular issue of the contract dispute, but it has much broader implications. I think, as we look at the issue of AI and the national security enterprise down the line in this podcast, we’re going to have to return to this theme, that unlike space, nuclear, the internet, or particular weapon systems where the US government was at the center of their creation and scaling, the LLM revolution has been entirely private sector driven, and that just makes this a unique beast.

Jon Finer:

By the way, this has already had real world implications for the US government. The government gave, essentially, its entities a six-month period to wind down the use of Anthropic, but we learned today, at least it was reported today, that the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Department of Health and Human Services have already essentially excised Anthropic from their systems. The State Department, in a time of war, is now using ChatGPT 4.1, which is an 11-month-old model, at a pretty critical period for diplomacy, for providing consular services to Americans overseas and doesn’t exactly put us on our best footing to not be using our best tools.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. We’ve reached the bite off our nose despite our face portion of the programming here.

Jon Finer:

Exactly.

Jake Sullivan:

All right. Well, more to say on this. This is going to be an unfolding issue and obviously with a broader set of implications, but for now, we’ll call it there. We’ll be back next week and maybe even before next week, depending on what happens in the evolving war in Iran.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

In the meantime, send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com, and find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Wiener and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Leanna Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Watch a recording of this live conversation on Substack.

The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer - Substack Live edition

February 28, 2026

Jake Sullivan:

So welcome everybody to Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer’s first ever Substack Live. We are the co-hosts of the podcast The Long Game. For those of you who don’t already subscribe, please do and give us a listen. For those who do, we really thank you.

And what we’re trying to do today is take a few minutes just to react to these striking developments with the United States and Israel bombing Iran, Iran responding, the fog of war unfolding, and we’re going to talk a little bit about our reaction to that and also what we think the big questions are going forward.

For those who hear this on the pod later, we’re recording this on Saturday afternoon, just some hours into this series of strikes that the United States and Israel launched and the strikes that Iran has fired back. So by the time you listen to this, there will be new developments, we promise you that. And we will look forward to talking about this in full on the next episode of our podcast.

But for now, welcome to Substack Live. Welcome to The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer. And Jon, why don’t I turn it over to you to start with your initial reactions to what we’ve seen happen over the course of the past hours and how you’re seeing it, and kick us off with your thoughts, and then we’ll dig into some of the issues here.

Jon Finer:

Okay. Thanks, Jake. And really appreciate people joining, interrupting your weekend to spend a bit of time with us. Wasn’t the way we were planning to spend our weekend either, so we’re grateful for it and we know everybody has a lot going on.

I guess my first reaction is, like probably almost everybody who is listening right now, as soon as we heard that this had begun, this event that we had been talking about on our podcast, reading about obsessively, that we had worked on in previous phases of our lives, we all of a sudden realized it’s very hard to get immediate, accurate information. And we are gleaning it and grabbing it from all kinds of sources, whether from postings and photos and snippets and videos from people on X, or other social media, and trying to make sense of it and trying to determine whether it’s accurate.

And as Jake said, there is this initial period, and this period could last for a while, where there is a lot of uncertainty about what exactly has happened. We do know the United States and Israel have launched a major attack against Iran that seems to have targeted government institutions, leadership. There was a lot of uncertainty about whether the leaders of Iran are still alive. We don’t know the answer to those questions as we record this right now.

But separate and apart from the fact-finding that it’s going to take a period to unfold, what I’ve been most struck by, and it hasn’t changed in watching the President’s explanation and it hasn’t changed in all the times we’ve talked about it, which is that a basic belief I have, and I think you share, is that if you’re going to take the country to war as the President of the United States, and you’re going to put Americans, our friends and allies in countries in the Gulf who are now also themselves under attack, and in Israel, if you’re going to put all of those people in harm’s way and take the extraordinary risk that you take every time you use force as the commander-in-chief, there are a few things that just have to be true for that to be the right decision.

And maybe top of the list is that it should be necessary. And the thing that is most striking to me is that even now, as this is underway, after having gone through the State of the Union, after having spoken to the country after the attacks began, we have not gotten a particularly compelling account from the President of why he did this, what he is even trying to achieve, although he’s given some indications of objectives, and how he thinks what he is doing can achieve those results.

He can kill the current leaders, maybe. He can inflict a punishment on Iran for any number of bad actions, and this is a terrible regime. I think you and I both agree on that. He can further diminish the nuclear program he’s already claimed to have obliterated, but what happens after that is going to be very hard for him to control, and it’s not even clear what he is intending to happen after that.

And so the necessity of this is what I just keep coming back to. They haven’t made the case. I don’t understand it myself. And I think if you haven’t crossed that threshold, you shouldn’t take the country to war.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, it comes down to a very basic set of questions.

Number one, is there an imminent threat to the United States or to the American people necessitating the United States launching a war against another country? They have not articulated one, because there is not one. There is not one from their nuclear program, which was not totally obliterated, but was set back in ways where they’re not currently even enriching uranium. There is not one from any other indication that the United States is under direct threat from Iran, despite a single sentence in Trump’s video last night saying, “Oh, we’re under threat,” without any justification or explanation for what. So there’s no imminent reason to launch this attack.

Number two, does it have the informed consent to the American people? It does not. He has not explained this to the American people. He has not sought their consent through the constitutional mechanism you should do so, which is to get authorization from the Congress where there is no imminent threat. Even George Bush for the misbegotten war in Iraq went to Congress and got authorization. Donald Trump has not done that. And opinion polls show the American people have real questions, to say the least, about this.

Number three, is there a clear objective? Will there be a moment where the President can say, “We did what we came to do”? Whatever you think of last year’s 12-day war, there was a clear objective: neutralize the enrichment facilities at Fordow and Natanz, and the other nuclear facility at Esfahan. They did that, the war stopped. So you can agree with that, disagree with that, but at least they had an objective.

This time, the objective seems to be a bizarre mishmash of we’re going to set their capabilities back, undefined to what extent and what constitutes completion of that task. And we are going to try to decapitate the regime and somehow then hope that what comes as a result of that is an uprising in the streets that leads to change in Iran, that leads to a better outcome in the future, but we’re not even necessarily going to go out and say explicitly that we’re for regime change. We’re just going to tell the Iranian people, “Hey, at some point you may want to go out and take your government.”

And what we know is that when you don’t have a clear objective, when you just start bombing a country and then hope that what happens next is a good thing, that creates massive risks. It creates risks for this to go on and on. It creates risks for Americans to die. It creates risks to the economic well-being of the American people, because I guarantee you, we’re going to see the price of oil go up in the short term at least as a result of this.

So the administration really owes people an answer to those basic set of questions. And in the absence of that, I think we are going to be stuck asking what really is this all about and what is the end game? And right now, I do not think we have clear answers to that.

Jon Finer:

There’s another thing that I think is important to say, I assume you’d agree, but I don’t want to speak for you, which is that you can hate this regime, as I think we both do and as many Americans who pay attention to these things probably do, and you can even believe, by the way, that the world would be better off if this regime were gone, which I think we also both do, and also not believe that our country should go to war to make that so.

There are any number of things in the world that I think we all find objectionable. I could make a very long list, and maybe Iran would be close to the top of that, but that does not mean that the United States military should use force to address every single one of those problems. And if you lose track of that principle, which this administration, I am concerned now, seems to be losing track of, God knows where this ends.

And it’s easy to forget now, given how often President Trump has ordered the use of force in just the first year of his second term, that this is a guy who came to office, at least in part, pledging that he would be the person who ended a lot of wars and who avoided some of the terrible mistakes of the past in American foreign policy, like the Iraq war, which you just referred to, which I started my career as a journalist covering, that he would be the person who stood against those things. And to be honest, he was right about that. And I found that in a sea of things that I found objectionable about Trump even as a candidate, I found that somewhat reassuring. That seems now to be totally out the window at this point.

And then one last thing from his statement last night, President Trump said something to the effect of, and I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, “Casualties happen on our side when there are wars.” And that is true. Casualties do happen, and that is exactly why you don’t go to war when you don’t have to, because if there are casualties on the American side, which we will be praying there are not in this case, I don’t know how you explain to the families of the people who suffer those casualties, to the American people, why that had to happen if we can’t even explain why this war was necessary in the first place.

Jake Sullivan:

I think that’s very well said. And underscoring the point that we can all agree this regime, this Iranian regime, is terrible. It does have a history of blood on its hands, including American blood on its hands. It should go. And in fact, the Iranian people came out into the streets in incredibly brave ways before. But going from that to, “Let’s start bombing the country and try to produce regime change from the air,” is a big leap, and I think from our perspective, not a leap that we should make.

So one key point that you raised near the outset, Jon, is when you sit outside of government and you look at all the information flowing in on X and on Substack and on your news sites, you can’t be sure what’s true and what’s not true, but we can say from firsthand experience that when you’re inside of government, you don’t know for sure what’s true and not true. You’re trying to collect information, but there’s a reason there’s a phrase the fog of war, because it’s real. And I think even the US government right now is trying to get its arms around exactly what’s happened.

So there’s a few big questions. First, to what extent has Iran’s ability to strike back been degraded by this initial round of strikes? Or do they have more arrows in their quiver to fire at the US, at Israel, at other countries in the region? We’ve seen attacks in a number of different countries at this point against American facilities, frankly, just against civilian population centers like in Dubai. What is likely to come in the next few days on that?

Second, will Iran specifically target the oil trade? Will they actually try to close the Straits of Hormuz or otherwise disrupt shipping or oil infrastructure in a way that has a big impact on the global economy and a direct impact on the pocketbooks of Americans? We have to watch that.

Third, is the Ayatollah alive or dead? We’ve seen reporting out of Israel that the Israeli government thinks he may be dead. We’ve seen no confirmation of that. So what’s actually happened with Iran’s leadership? We will have to watch for that closely over the next few days.

And fourth comes back to the point I was making earlier, what’s the off-ramp for the United States eventually? What brings this war to a close? Is it that we just declare, “Well, we’ve hit enough of their stuff, we’ve taken out enough of their leaders, now it’s over to you, the Iranian people, do whatever you’re going to do”?

And that raises a fifth and final question, which is what actually happens inside Iran? This regime’s relationship with its people, we had Yeganeh Torbati on our podcast a couple of weeks ago, who’s the Washington reporter covering Iran who got laid off just before this kicked off, and we should put a plug in for foreign correspondents who are badly needed right now. And Yeganeh made the point that the relationship between the Iranian people and the regime is irretrievably broken.

So we do have to pay attention to dynamics inside the country on the back of this one way or the other, but this could go badly in that you could end up with even worse people in charge, IRGC, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership, or you could end up with a Syria-style breakdown of the state because you have a lot of ethnic groups in Iran who will be looking to arm up and assert their own interests.

So those are all the things that we have to watch over the next several days. And we can’t rule out that Iran has a difficult time responding militarily to this. We can’t rule out that the United States chooses an off-ramp in a couple, three days’ time. We also can’t rule out that this war goes on for quite a while. So we’ll just have to stay tuned and stay focused on all of those things.

And then the final point, Jon, our podcast is called The Long Game for a reason. We’re not actually that great at hot takes. We’re better at looking at the longer-term implications of things. And I think we have to ask ourselves, what does this mean for the United States one to five, 10 years from now? And when you look at it, the long game, you have to ask the question, is the US going around the world starting wars like this in a long-term national security interest in the United States? And we got to keep our eye on that horizon in addition to following the hour-to-hour of what’s happening right now.

Jon Finer:

You’re totally right to raise the Iranian people who have been lost in all of this from the messaging in the US government. It’d be easy to forget that the reason President Trump initially inserted himself this time into the Iran issue is because he threatened to use force to defend the demonstrators. Those demonstrations have now been crushed. The President referred to maybe 30,000 dead from that crackdown during his State of the Union, but this is clearly no longer about that for him.

But the Iranian people deserve better than they have gotten from their government since 1979 and before that as well. And they deserve better than now having to face bombs and other munitions falling from the sky to apparently try to topple that government. They do deserve better. I hope they get better. It’s hard to be too optimistic in the current moment.

Your point about the long game is one that’s really stuck with me as well. I do think this administration does count on people’s attention span not being particularly long, shifting away from this issue and other issues like it after the initial flash and bang of military action, and hopefully from their perspective, operational success. And counting on that if ultimately this doesn’t work out very well, which we have made very clear we’re concerned it will not, that will be sometime down the road. Maybe even there’ll be a different president when that becomes clear.

But even if it’s later on in this administration, the bill will not really come due to this president because people will be paying attention to other things. And I can tell you we won’t be. I hope other people are not, but I do worry a bit even in seeing some of the reactions to what the President has done, statements from people that are quite critical of the President on a number of issues. Some have been quite clear and critical and strong and direct, and I think that’s been a good thing.

Others have been surprising in the sense that they almost seem more afraid of looking weak in the current moment, weak as in against the war. We too often equate strength in our country with support for military action. So there are too many people who are afraid of looking weak in this moment than they are of being wrong. And I worry that people are going to live to regret that, and we will see how it plays out.

Jake Sullivan:

And I think, Jon, your point earlier about Iran being, and this Iranian regime being, a long-term adversary of the United States, that only amplifies this discomfort of people say, “Well, I don’t want to be against going after these really bad guys.” And we get that. In the time that we sat in the seat as national security advisor and principal deputy national security advisor, we took a lot of actions to put pressure on the Iranian regime, on its nuclear program, on its missile program, sanctions on the way that it treated its people. So we’re not arguing let these guys off the hook. What we’re saying is don’t start a war. Don’t start just dropping bombs when there’s no actual imminent threat to the United States and you haven’t gotten the informed consent of the American people and you don’t have a clear answer to the question, what is success? How does this play out? How does this end? That’s, I think, really a key and fundamental thing.

I will be very interested to see also how the region ends up reacting to this, because one of the more striking images we’ve seen just in the first few hours, I haven’t seen this corroborated, but it certainly looks real, is a strike right into the heart of Dubai. So this is not even against a US military base. It’s just an attack on a city in the Middle East that is a financial and commercial center for the world. And it goes to show you that this war can quickly spread beyond just an effort to attack some instruments of the Iranian state. It can come home to people, including a lot of Americans who make their home in the Gulf and across the broader Middle East region.

So we should just not lose sight of the human dimension of this, that people will die as a result of this, innocent people will die, and that too has to be factored into how we watch the next several days unfold, both in terms of what Iran does and in terms of the US and Israeli military strikes in Iran.

I’ve laid out some of the questions I’ve asked about what comes next. What are you most focused on for the next 24, 48, 72 hours?

Jon Finer:

Yeah, I think a few things. And one of them is the last point you just made. There are a lot of civilians in harm’s way now with bombs flying all over the region, maybe five or six countries at this point under attack. By the way, civilians in Iran, there will likely be Iranians killed. There almost certainly have already who have nothing to do with the regime, and that is its own tragedy. And there are likely to be innocent civilians killed in a number of other countries the longer this plays out.

And this could, by the way, go on for quite some time. We plan to look at it in more detail during our podcast this week, but I suspect this is an issue that we’re going to keep coming back to because this conflict may well not be over soon. And so civilian harm rises to the top of the list, leaving aside all of the various strategic considerations that we are also going to analyze when you think about this.

And then does this instability that has now been generated spread in some way? Is there some sort of contagion? And here, I think back to events like the Iraq War or the Arab Spring, which begin in one country and ultimately have knock-on effects that are unforeseen, that spread to other countries, that create, in the case of the Iraq War, a giant terrorism threat in the heart of the Levant that maybe existed to a much lesser degree, but ultimately became al-Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS and problems that we ended up dealing with for quite some time.

In the case of the Syria Civil War, it generated a massive migration crisis. Millions of Syrians, who understandably fled their country, ended up all over the world, but including quite prominently in European countries, and shifted the politics of Europe inexorably after that. And so what are going to be the second, third, fourth-order effects of this, to your point about the long game, are things that we’re going to be paying attention to for quite some time.

One last thing I wanted to say, and we’re going to look more closely at this in maybe a more analytical way. This has been more reactive than we normally are, but we’re not pacifists. We are people who have recommended to presidents of the United States that he use force in situations that met the criteria that you described, that we believed were warranted. This is not about being-

Jake Sullivan:

Including, by the way, Iranian proxies who were attacking American soldiers.

Jon Finer:

Correct. This is not about being against military action or against the use of force in all cases. It’s about being profoundly concerned about unnecessary use of military force, the risks that it generates, the harms it causes.

Jake Sullivan:

One more thing we should just add to the list is, and this goes to the long game point, what’s China going to be thinking about this as it goes on? To what extent does Xi Jinping say, “Well, wait a second. All the rules are gone. We can use military force whenever and wherever we want”? Does that create a new risk with respect to Taiwan?

That’s something we will have to take a look at, particularly because he’s also going to be thinking, “Hey, the United States seems pretty tied down elsewhere, focused once again on a war in the Middle East,” which China saw as a strategic boon for many years through the 2000s.

Jon Finer:

They made some of their greatest gains during the Iraq War era when we were tied down in their region.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly. Okay. So we are going to sign off now, but we will have a new full episode of The Long Game coming out this coming week where we dive into this issue in a systematic way and really try to unpack both what’s going on and what may be coming.

We’re also going to try to touch on the Anthropic Pentagon debacle, the absolute shameful move by the Pentagon and the Trump administration to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk and all of the implications of that. We will dig into that as well because we shouldn’t lose sight of that even as this unfolds. That is a seismic event in its own right.

But we would really appreciate everybody tuning in, joining us. Thank you for those of you who joined just right now, and we’ll be back on here soon enough to continue the discussion.

Jon Finer:

Thanks, everybody. Appreciate your time.

Jake Sullivan:

Take care.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Wiener and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Liana Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Mexico, Iran, Anthropic and the SOTU Signals

February 25, 2026

TEASER

Jake Sullivan:

I do think they’ve made a decision, at least in the president’s public messaging in the United States to elevate domestic issues as we head towards the midterms. We’ll see if that sticks, because he keeps getting drawn back to the foreign policy issues and keeps taking actions in the world that push foreign policy issues into the headlines. But there’s definitely an element of Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, and other political advisors telling him, “Sir, you’ve got to talk about things here at home.” And the speech reflected that in a big way.

Welcome to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.

Jon Finer:

And I’m Jon Finer. So Jake, today we’re going to take a slightly different approach to the podcast, given just the pace and velocity of news that’s occurred over the last week, and we’re going to try to march through a number of issues that have been front and center, starting of course with the president’s State of the Union address, which took place last night and had an interesting somewhat lack of focus on foreign policy, but there were some significant things we’ll discuss. We’ll also talk about the latest developments on two topics that were in the State of the Union, Iran and Mexico. And then we’ll spend some time on a topic that you and I have both been following related to this standoff between the AI company Anthropic and what is now called at least by the president, the Department of War.

Jake Sullivan:

But before we get to that, as they say in the business, robust agenda, I think it’s important for us to do a quick wrap-up of the Olympics. You and I both spent a lot of time over the last two weeks before the television, watching everything from curling to men’s and women’s hockey. And we’ll set hockey aside for the moment. My highlight, my non-hockey highlight, California and Alysa Liu. That story, her story is just unbelievable. I know many of our listeners followed this closely, but it just bears underlining and putting an exclamation point after.

Okay, first her backstory. Her father was a Chinese dissident who came to the United States as part of an operation after Tiananmen Square, after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and raised her as a single father. And then she basically retired from the sport at the age of 16 because she just wasn’t having any fun. Decided to come back, but decided to come back on her own terms, meaning she was just going to do it for the joy of it. And you could see in both the way she carried herself on and off the ice that she really meant that. This wasn’t some kind of BS NBC-packaged schtick. This was her through and through.

And with that joy, she goes out there, gives an unbelievable performance and ends up winning gold. And then after winning gold, just the sheer graciousness to her competitors, to the two Japanese skaters who came silver and bronze, it was like you couldn’t help but smile all day watching that. And honestly, it’s what the Olympics are all about and I think she’s going to really be enduring as a hero to a lot of people, a lot of little girls and a lot of little boys, and that’s all to the good.

Jon Finer:

Amen. Such a colorful and as you said, joyful personality. You almost couldn’t help but be rooting for her no matter which country you were from. I think in this case, maybe not China. My highlight, a man named Johannes Klaebo, six gold medals in what is probably physically the hardest Olympic sport. You’ve done some cross-country skiing, I’ve done very little, but man, is that an endurance challenge. And to win six gold medals in one Winter Olympics, which I think is the most anyone’s ever won in a winter games, all in this incredibly challenging sport, everything from the shorter distances to the longer distances. And to do it with just domination, he’s sprinting up the hills at a sub six-minute mile running pace on skis is just a remarkable feat of athleticism that is hard not to admire.

Jake Sullivan:

You’re right. I was a high school cross-country skier. I was not close to winning “a gold medal,” to quote Wayne’s World, let alone six gold medals. That would necessitate a gold medal rack. But I think this analogy is actually not entirely wrong, that this is like the equivalent in track of winning the 100, the 200, the 400, the 800, the 1500, and the 5,000. So he won the sprint, he won the middle distances and he won the long distances. Everything. Unbelievable. I mean really unbelievable. But not as unbelievable as a weekend of-

Jon Finer:

I was going to say, are we allowed to talk about hockey now?

Jake Sullivan:

So over to you.

Jon Finer:

No, this story tells itself and people probably know it, but for the United States, which is not always considered to be the preeminent hockey powerhouse in the world or even in North America, to have pulled off two incredible gold medal victories over Canada with what are called golden goals, these sudden-death overtime goals, Megan Keller for the women’s team, Jack Hughes for the men’s team, was just such a point of pride and just great drama and television and quality of play on both sides. Very good goals, by the way. You often at the end of hockey games, when everybody’s exhausted, get these goals that are not exactly artful, but both of those were extraordinary and just a lot of fun.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. I mean, it was just the scenes, the explosion off the benches when those two goals went in. I’ve re-watched probably both sequences, I don’t know, 15, 20 times. This weekend I’m sure a lot of other people did as well. It was captivating, absolutely captivating. And the three-on-three approach in the golden goal overtime really opens up the ice and makes for just epic viewing. So that was really something I think a moment of pride for the entire country. I don’t think people have been talking about hockey in this country as much as in the last week in years and years. I mean, this has I think really been something that has been a bright light for a country that’s divided on so many other things, and in that sense, very cool.

Jon Finer:

So Jon Stewart pointed this out more colorfully and humorously than I will be able to, but basically making the argument that hockey is having a moment culturally with this HBO show, Heated Rivalry. Certainly, athletically now, with the Olympics and all the attention those gold medal games got and as we’ll get to even politically and geopolitically, with the comparisons to the 1980 team, the last time the US men’s Olympic hockey team won the gold medal, the women have won since then. And then this bizarre, some aftermath in which some, and we are not among them, have been sort of gloating about the fact that we are beating up on Canada, given the standoff politically between the United States and the Canadians, which is a bit bizarre. But yeah, I like that hockey’s having this moment in the sun, including last night during the State of the Union address

Jake Sullivan:

Trying to turn the Canadians into the Soviet red machine a la 1980, is more than a little bit of a stretch.

Jon Finer:

It’s a heavy lift.

Jake Sullivan:

You’re right. Last night we saw the men’s team arrive in the gallery for the State of the Union after the controversial invitation, where the president was caught on tape saying, “Oh, I might have to invite the women’s team as well.” That was not exactly a glorious moment in the aftermath of this epic weekend. But the men’s team came, got a huge standing ovation. The goalie got the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to him, and good on him for that. And it was a kind of interesting spectacle, this merger of sports and politics that you just don’t see very often.

Jon Finer:

Yeah. Look, I mean, we’ll get to some of the substance of the State of the Union. I do think we societally, given how polarized we are, have a tendency to sometimes over index on making a political moment out of something that is just kind of a cool national moment. To me, having those guys walk in with their sweaters and people stand up and clap given what they did was cool. I think the women’s team should have been there, too. But I get that there’s a controversy about this and obviously the president is trying to use them to his political advantage. But also, if you’re not a little bit proud of that, seeing those people in the gallery, I think you may be focused a little too hard on politics.

Jake Sullivan:

Amen. So speaking of the politics in the State of the Union, the longest-

Jon Finer:

Speaking of focusing too hard on politics, yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

Longest in history, at least longest in recorded history last 60 years, an hour-

Jon Finer:

Not a record you want by the way, certainly if you’re a staffer for the president or maybe if you’re the president, you feel differently.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, and I think he also broke his own record. I think President Trump has the second longest as well, followed by Bill Clinton who clocked a couple of very long ones. But this one-

Jon Finer:

A combo of State of the Union addresses.

Jake Sullivan:

There you go. An hour 47, hour 48, so quite a long address. And we waited patiently, edge of our seats, for the foreign policy section. It came very late in the speech, and there was very little on foreign affairs. What did you make of the speech?

Jon Finer:

As a piece of political theater, I think it was mixed. We’re not the target audience for this, but I think there were parts of it that were quite effective and poignant even. The recognition of guests in the gallery, including for the work that we focus on, some very poignant moments related to military veterans and recognizing their service in various conflicts going back a long way, including one veteran who was 100 years old being recognized for his heroism. All of that I thought was to the good both for the country and probably plays well for the president.

Jake Sullivan:

Actually, Jon, isn’t he, he’s turning 100 on July 4th, 2026, right?

Jon Finer:

Oh, is that right? Okay, he’s almost a hundred years old.

Jake Sullivan:

And so he was born on the 150th anniversary of the declaration, and he’ll turn 100 on the 250th and is a World War 2 veteran. Unbelievable. I mean, that was quite a moment.

Jon Finer:

On the policy itself, there were some things that really caught me off guard. I think we would argue that the most important issue facing the country is the relationship between the United States and China, the competition between the United States and China. That was not a topic that the president particularly dwelled on. We know we’ve talked about that this is a year in which the president will see Xi Jinping as many as four times. We know the president is very sensitive about not irritating the Chinese in advance of those meetings. And we’ve seen the US kind of adjust course on some policy areas to try to avoid making those meetings unsuccessful in some way. We’ve talked about our concerns about what the United States might concede during the course of those meetings and has already conceded when it comes to technology, export controls, maybe even some bigger ticket issues like Taiwan.

But last night he barely mentioned China. He mentioned it once, I think, in the context of Venezuela, where he described the very successful, from a military perspective, operation that took place against Maduro. He said they were enabled the Venezuelans by Chinese technology. How did that go? But other than that, basically did not mention China at all. And there is some history that you and I both are familiar with about China being a focal point in State of the Union addresses. Certainly, in the State of the Unions that we helped prepare for President Biden, China was probably the most significant section in the foreign policy parts of the State of the Union, including some parts that the Chinese didn’t like. In 2023, the Chinese accused President Biden, the United States of smearing Xi Jinping when the president called out China’s increasingly autocratic behavior. Maybe went a little off script mentioning Xi by name a number of times. They’re extremely sensitive to this. And rather than I think state the US policy and assert the US national interest, the president decided in this case, just give it a pass.

Jake Sullivan:

Yes, Joe Biden definitely ad libbed repeatedly referred to Xi Jinping, and had some colorful words about him in that State of the Union. The Chinese have this view that thou shalt not speak his name, and that just does not square with the way Joe Biden does business. A man who believes that, just as Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local.” He says, “All foreign policy is personal.” There’s no way he’s not going to say Xi Jinping’s name.

Jon Finer:

“Name me a world leader who would change places with Xi Jinping,” is I think what he said in 2023.

Jake Sullivan:

Yes indeed. President Trump not talking about China in this speech is notable. It’s consistent, frankly, with the national security strategy, which does mention China, but has very little mention of China. Very much focuses on other issues. And I think part of what’s going on here is that these guys are trying to, A, as you said, be risk averse about not offending the Chinese and upsetting the apple cart when it comes to the deals they’re trying to do, in the context of the set of meetings that will take place this year. And then, B, I think a certain lack of confidence on the part of the administration about what exactly their China strategy is and how they want to articulate it.

So as a result, I think they just default to not really saying it. And that will be something to watch over the course of this year, because not being able to clearly lay down what you are trying to accomplish in this most consequential relationship could end up leading to negative outcomes. So we’ll have to see how that ends up playing.

Jon Finer:

I’d just say, by the way, lack of confidence, but also I think some pretty stark divides, at least below the level of the president on what the US-China policy should be. And so you have this dynamic where, I hate this phrase, the deep state, but where people who are part of the government, maybe not necessarily political appointees, continue to push forward policies, like arms sales to Taiwan, like new technology restrictions. And they make their way through the system. And the minute they get the attention of the president, it seems like all of a sudden they pause, they get scaled back, they get called into question. And so there is this kind of push and pull, including some very senior people, who are on both sides of this argument in the president’s inner circle.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, to that point, you could imagine a drafting process where somebody writes a few paragraphs that are hawkish, and other people look at that and say, “We’re not going that far.” And then some people write some paragraphs that are quite conciliatory and emphasize cooperation, and the hawks say, “Hey, we can’t be softies.” And the net result is, I guess, let’s call the whole thing off, just not even talk about China, which is basically what happened.

Jon Finer:

You’ve given a good insight, by the way, not to pause too long on process, but to how the State of the Union is actually put together. There is obviously a lead speechwriter for it, usually the chief speechwriter of the president. But the number of hands that get involved in the nipping and tucking and editing and adding things and subtracting things has got to be in the many dozens by the time the speech is done. So if it reads like a document that’s been put together by a committee, that’s probably because that is how it’s put together at the end of the day.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. And my sense is that the Trump administration departs from convention on many, many things, but maybe not on this one, that there are lots of hands in this speeches. There have been in the speeches of previous presidents. So the other thing that stood out to me, pushing foreign policy very late, talking about it very little. I mean, it was a few minutes, and even fewer minutes if you take out the focus on these military heroes, to discuss foreign affairs.

I think there are kind of two things going on here. One is I do think they’ve made a decision, at least in the president’s public messaging in the United States, to elevate domestic issues as we head towards the midterms. And to spend less of his personal time publicly speaking on foreign policy issues. We’ll see if that sticks, because he keeps getting drawn back to the foreign policy issues and keeps taking actions in the world that push foreign policy issues into the headlines. But there’s definitely an element of Susie Wiles, the chief of staff and other political advisors telling him, “Sir, you’ve got to talk about things here at home.” And the speech reflected that in a big way.

And then second, on issues like Ukraine and Gaza, I found the speech interesting because it kind of reflected a president who really doesn’t have a clear idea of where things are going. Doesn’t know for sure whether there’s any real traction in either of those processes, those peace efforts, and so he kind of hand waved at them and then moved on, which suggests a certain lack of confidence at the moment that he’s going to be able to achieve his diplomatic objectives on those two files in the near term. Lots of lavishing appraisal on Rubio and Witkoff and Kushner. A lot less actual articulation of, “Hey, I think we’re going to get to an endpoint here soon.”

Jon Finer:

Very much agree. They get listed as part of either the eight wars the president has supposedly ended, or the ninth, I guess, in the case of Russia, Ukraine, that he intends to end but hasn’t yet. And, as you say, he then moves on to other things.

If there was a most anticipated part of the State of the Union last night by the foreign policy community, it was what is the president going to say about the drumbeat toward war with Iran? This has been something that he has talked about extensively, the possibility of US military action against Iran. We have conducted a massive buildup of naval assets, of air assets into the Middle East in anticipation of a possible conflict. We’ve talked a lot about this during the course of podcast. And I think we expected the president to lay out a case in some detail as to where this was all headed, what his intentions were, what his strategy was, what his demands specifically are of the Iranians.

And to me, this content was relatively limited like the rest of the foreign policy content. On the one hand, you could argue that he lowered the bar on the Iranians to actually avoid a war. What he basically said is they have to make clear, they have to say, what he called, I think the secret magic words or something along those lines.

Jake Sullivan:

The secret words, yeah.

Jon Finer:

Secret words that they don’t intend to seek a nuclear weapon. And by the way, good news for the president, in many, many public statements, including by the way in the preamble of the nuclear deal that you and I both worked on, the JCPOA, Iran said that it reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons. So they’ve been on the record saying if all it takes is magic words, they’ve used them. So clearly, there’s got to be more going on.

On the other hand, and you probably want to say more about this, he also laid out what I guess would be the predicate if the United States does decide to go to war would be the reason, which is he dwelled for a while on Iran’s missile program, which he said has been built back up a bit since the 12-day war that took place last summer. And which he said includes an emerging missile capability that could reach the United States. Intercontinental ballistic missile capability that could hit us. What did you make of that?

Jake Sullivan:

First, I think it’s important just to reinforce this point you made on the secret words, right? So Trump says, this is his quote, “We haven’t heard those secret words, we will never have a nuclear weapon.” And I totally agree with you, this at least is a dangle of lowering the bar because, as you noted, the Iran nuclear deal from the Obama administration, Iran explicitly said this. And in fact, just before the State of the Union, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, a guy you and I both know well, tweeted literally that. So I kind of wonder if there’s something going on with Iran making a declaration in this context that Trump is giving himself an off ramp if he wants to. So I just want to reinforce that.

But then your point about the missiles, this really did strike me. It was new from the president. It was really the only new thing in the speech on Iran. And what he said was they’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America. Now, Iran has for years been moving its missile technology forward and has for years been working on this kind of space launch capability to be able to put satellites up into space. And as our listeners may kind of know vaguely in the back of their minds from the North Korea context, North Korea used its space launch program as a way to perfect technology that could then be turned into an intercontinental ballistic missile capability, because it’s basically the same thing.

So Iran has been moving down the track of developing capacity to ultimately have an ICBM. I think our understanding of this based on public reporting, based on our discussions with experts over the last few days, is that yes, at some point Iran could potentially develop this capability. They did a space launch just last year, even after the 12-day war. But this is not an imminent threat. This is not something that is right around the corner, unless there’s information that the administration has, that the expert community and the United States does not have.

And so it does feel like they are reaching for something to try to pull forward a rationale for actually going to war. And I will be interested if this becomes the thing that they increasingly lean on. We’ve not seen all of the war hawks, all of those drum beating for war really focused on this issue in their public comments in the last few weeks. So the president’s kind of dropped this in as a new variable in the speech last night, and I will be curious the extent to which this becomes central to his case if he goes to war.

And then one last point, Jon, I was struck he also said that Iran has restarted its nuclear program. He said basically, “We took it out, but now they’ve started it up again.” I don’t think I’ve heard him personally explicitly make that statement. Maybe he has. We’ve obviously seen the reporting on that. But that would obviously be another element of the rationale if he chose to go forward. But what did you make of the illusion to an Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile capability?

Jon Finer:

In a way, it almost adds a new red line to what has been traditional US policy towards Iran across all administrations since Iran’s nuclear program emerged. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump have all said they will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, with greater or lesser degrees of specificity about what the US would actually do. But basically making clear the US would use military force, if necessary, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

President Trump seemed almost to be indicating that Iran developing an intercontinental ballistic missile capability, leaving aside whether it could put a nuclear warhead on that ICBM, would also itself be a red line for the United States that would necessitate military action. I don’t think other presidents have said exactly that before. Now I’m not sure that’s what he was intending to do, but that’s sort of how the language on the ICBM came across, at least to me. On the nuclear program, what was interesting to me about that is President Trump said not very long ago and has repeated ever since, that the United States has “obliterated”...

Jake Sullivan:

Totally obliterated.

Jon Finer:

... Iran’s... Totally... Excuse me, sorry, I undersold, totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. So if they’ve already restarted it in a meaningful way, what would obliterated actually mean or accomplish for us, and what would obliterating it again accomplish for us, and we’ll come back to these arguments. But also, there just seems to be a lot of confusion about the state of play. Steve Witkoff, who is... By the way, his negotiator on this nuclear issue came out the other day and said something to the effect of Iran is a weak away from having the ability to achieve nuclear breakout. I think he may have been putting himself in the mindset of pre-July 12th or the 12-day war in last July, when the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear program, because it’s hard to imagine that Iran is anything close to a week away at this point, given the damage that’s been done and the setback that that program has suffered.

Jake Sullivan:

A very strange comment.

Jon Finer:

And I don’t know what he meant by that. He hasn’t further explained it. I do think there was a period when Iran was that close, should they have decided to. But by the way, as we’ve talked about before, they have never made the decision in modern times to actually pursue a nuclear weapon. That’s been their policy, as we understand it, since 2002, and nothing materially has changed there. So anyway, a lot of confusion about Iran. I think it led to more questions than it answered. Anything else about the State of the Union that-

Jake Sullivan:

One more word on the speech and Iran, and then I think, Jon, we should just take on directly the question of whether it makes sense for the United States of America to launch a massive military action against Iran at this time. And that is, you can read the way he formulated the Iran section two ways. One way is that he didn’t dwell on it, he put it late in the speech. He just said a few lines, nothing was definitive. There was a kind of off ramp in maybe Iran could just declare they’re not going to go for a nuke. So this indicates he’s trying to find a diplomatic solution.

The other way you could read it is that he’s more or less decided he’s going to strike. He didn’t want to make a robust case for it to the American people because he wants to keep Iran guessing and off balance. And he likes these military actions that emerge from a very kind of fuzzy context. He doesn’t like telegraphing his moves. That’s been a kind of hobbyhorse of his over many years. So I don’t think we actually got a lot of clarity out of the speech about which direction he’s planning to head.

But the reality is that as he was speaking, the United States of America has the largest military buildup in the region since the Iraq war in 2003. A massive amount of firepower. And not just for show, real operational capability at scale, across the region. Including an aircraft carrier that is on its last legs of an extended deployment, being stretched to be part of this “armada.” So the pieces are there for some kind of major military move against Iran. And I think normally you and I do red team, blue team. We try to look at all sides of an issue. I think on this one, we share the conviction that it makes no sense for the United States of America to take military action against Iran at this moment.

Jon Finer:

So often we debate these topics, and I think they’re certainly worthy of a robust debate. In this case, I think given that you and I come down pretty strongly on the side of questioning why in this moment military action could possibly be the right next step, I think we should stipulate by the way up front that we cannot stand this Iranian regime. That this is a profoundly bad set of actors who are beyond repressive and abusive to their own people. By the way, President Trump used a number last night that I’m not sure the US government had officially used, but he said something on the order of more than 30,000 people.

Jake Sullivan:

32,000.

Jon Finer:

He said 32,000 killed by the regime during the course of the uprising that took place now more than a month ago. And we have no reason to question those numbers, we can’t confirm them, but that is a horrific toll. And whatever the number was, it’s far too many. And so it would be a good thing if the Iranian people rose up, toppled their own government. We would cheer that outcome of a more democratic Iran and people being able to live their lives without the repression they face.

But I guess I come back at least to a few principles that lead me to believe this would be a profoundly bad idea to take military action now. One is that military action as a general proposition should be necessary. The protests that President Trump initially reacted to when he threatened military action, are now over. The nuclear program, as we’ve discussed, was set back some number of years during the course of the 12-day war last year. So what exactly is the urgency of doing this now, the administration has not yet laid out. The president has not yet laid out.

Maybe he was alluding to intelligence we have not seen, and we don’t know what we don’t know when he talked about the ICBM program. But even that, I think is a debatable proposition that that should lead to military action, given there is no nuclear warhead to put on that ICBM. But we have not seen the goods on that. And so the case for urgency, for necessity, which should be a threshold question to me if you’re going to take the nation to a significant war, has not been made and I don’t see it.

Second, military action should have a clear purpose. And this is one area the president could have done some work last night, didn’t do the work. Is this punitive, intended to sort of signal to the Iranian regime that what they did to protesters was unconscionable and therefore they should suffer for it? Is this intended to inflict further harm on the already obliterated nuclear program? Is this about regime change, toppling the Iranian government, that some in the US administration have indicated? Is there some other rationale? We actually have no idea. And it does not seem like they have decided on the rationale either, because the president didn’t say much about why the United States might need to go to war last night, other than, again, hinting at this ICBM program.

Third, the risk of doing this is high. And we keep coming back to this sort of argument because over the course of the last year, I worry that people in the United States and actually the president himself have come to believe that military action is a cost-free option. The 12-day war went actually quite well from a military perspective. The operations conducted by the United States and by Israel achieved their intended result. The operation against Maduro, extracting him from a hostile foreign capital in Venezuela went very well from a military perspective. But this stuff is never guaranteed. And this time Iran is incentivized, I think, to hit back harder than they did during the 12-day war, because they are concerned that they have lost any deterrence of their adversaries, any ability to deter the United States and Israel from taking action. And I think believe they will need to at least try harder to impose a cost on us, maybe on Israel as well if they’re attacked again.

By the way, given all the hints about regime change, they may think the United States is coming to topple their governments entirely, which is kind of an existential question for the people making decisions about retaliation. So the odds that they try to hit back harder against our bases, our allies, and that they inflict real harm and casualties go way up in the context of a bigger, broader war, which this could be.

Fourth, regime change wars should just be exceedingly rare. Maybe never, by the way, given the track record of the United States conducting wars of regime change, but at least exceedingly rare. And we should at least be confident that we have some influence over who comes next and what comes next, and that what comes next will be better than the status quo if we go in and topple a foreign government.

Here, most outside analysts believe that the most likely successor to the current clerical regime, the supreme leader and his ilk who run Iran, would be the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard. Which unlike the supreme leader, actually may even be less inclined to negotiate, make a deal of some kind with the West. Maybe more inclined to try to obtain a nuclear weapon. It’s actually been the supreme leader’s policy that Iran would not seek a nuclear weapon. And I think many in the IRGC leadership question that, that Iran should seek a nuclear weapon. And they will be, by all measure, every bit as brutal as the supreme leader has been in terms of internal repression. So if that’s the outcome of military action, hard to argue that the risk is worth that sort of reward.

And that’s before we even get to arguments that there is no real threat to the United States emanating from Iran today, given the state of the nuclear program, given lack of at least clear evidence on the ICBM program. Which means there is no clear legal basis for doing this. That used to matter to governments deciding about whether to go to war. Hasn’t always. And in our history, when we have trampled upon that, we’ve often come to regret it. Does not seem to be part of the calculus today.

And finally, and sorry for going on so long, this could actually be a big war, not just a 12-day war, not just a brief exchange of missiles. And it is pretty crazy and I think basically unprecedented in our history to start a big unnecessary war without meaningful consultation with our congress, which has the constitutional power to declare wars. Yes, the president sent up some briefers to talk to what is called the Gang of Eight yesterday, the leadership on Democratic and Republican side and the House and senate and the Intel Committee leadership. But that is far from a full robust debate in the congress, let alone a vote on whether this is a good idea. Even President Bush did that when he made the terrible decision to invade Iraq. So we do not feel ready from a constitutional perspective, from a public perception perspective, from a legal perspective on top of everything else.

Jake Sullivan:

Let me just start, Jon, by picking up on this point you made about it could be a big war and a point you made about risk. Last year, when we bombed Fordow, the Iranians knew what we were planning to do, what our objective was, it was to neutralize this deeply buried nuclear site. They knew that. So their incentive at that point was to de-escalate rather than escalate. Because if they escalated, then we would expand to include striking much more of Iran, including potentially the regime. This time they have no idea what our ceiling is, whether if we start dropping bombs, that’s going to be a limited strike or all the way up to full on regime change. So if you’re in that position on their side, their incentive this time is probably actually to hit back to try to deter the US from continuing or escalating. And that makes this situation much riskier, much less stable, much more prone to miscalculation than last June’s 12-day war was.

Now, there are possibilities here where the US and Iran kind of communicate to one another, we’re going to do a little thing and you might do a little thing in response, and then we’ll tie it off. So I’m not saying it’s guaranteed that this explodes into a massive war by any stretch, but the risk is significantly higher. And I think that dynamic, not knowing what exactly it is that the United States intends is what inserts so much uncertainty into this situation. So Jon, just to kind of double click this point, if the Iranians are thinking about their options, what do they do if they think, “Hey, the US is coming for us, they’re coming four square for us”? What are their options in response?

Jon Finer:

I think the options we’d be most concerned about if we were advising the president on this topic is the United States has a significant number of military personnel in very easy missile and drone range of Iran. We have thousands of military personnel based in the Gulf countries, in Qatar, in the UAE, and in Saudi Arabia. And we also have, by the way, a large number of American citizens who live in these places, work in these places. And last time, Iran during the 12-day war decided basically to conduct a telegraphed set of strikes against one country, Qatar. Aimed at US facilities there. But sort of signaled they were going to do it. The United States was able to defend. It was a relatively limited barrage.

A larger scale... And by the way, Iran retains, as far as we understand it, a supply of many hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles that can reach these places and even larger number of drones. If Iran kind of lets all guns loose, blazing against these sites, it will be very hard for us to defend them. And the United States has, and this is an issue we’ve wrestled with in the government, a limited number of what are called interceptors, the munitions we fire at drones, fire at missiles to take them out of the sky. We can defend quite effectively for a period of time, but the longer this goes on, the more our supply of interceptors gets depleted, we don’t know the exact numbers, we’re not there, but it is likely that Iran has more munitions to shoot at us than we have to shoot at their missiles and drones.

Jake Sullivan:

And look, if you’re going to take military action against a country that at least possesses the capability, we don’t know about the will, but possesses the capability to hit your bases, hit your people, you’ve got to be able to answer a simple question, and this was kind of the core of your argument as you laid it out, what are you trying to achieve? And as I said last year, what everyone thinks of the merits of that action, Trump could answer that question, trying to achieve the neutralization of Iran’s main nuclear facilities. This year they haven’t been able to answer that question, and that’s partly because they’ve backed into this whole thing because Trump fired off some tweets in support of the protesters. And we haven’t really talked about that, this whole thing kicked off because he told the protesters that help was on the way, and now he kind of feels in a bit of a corner, but he’s opened the aperture to the nuclear program, the missiles, and other things. So it’s partly because they backed into this whole thing, but it’s also partly because the answers just ain’t that good.

So, as you said, if it’s to hit the nuclear program again, Trump said we totally obliterated, here we are eight months later, so what’s to say we won’t have to come back eight months from now and do it again? It could be to hit the missile program. Israel spent almost two weeks hitting their missiles last year. Here we are eight months later, are we going to be here eight months again? With all the risks that you just identified, what Iran potentially could do in response, is it to support the protesters? I mean, they were ruthlessly gunned down on the streets. The protests were largely squelched. Although there is an interesting question as to whether we’re starting to see students back out on the street a bit or at least out at the universities. But by and large, that massive wave of protest was just crushed through sheer brutality after Trump said help was on the way. So it’s a little mistimed to try to really help the protesters.

Is it to bring about regime change? Trump should come out and say it if it is, and explain why the United States should sign up for regime change war, where we have no idea and very little control over what comes next. Then as you’ve said, we all want to see this regime banished to the history books. It is murderous, it is barbarous. But we do not have a good history of regime change wars and it doesn’t make sense to sign America up for that. And if you’re going to sign America up for that, you damn-well better explain to the American people why and get their consent through the congress.

So for all of those reasons, I just think we are on the cusp of something really problematic on multiple different levels. And look, the Trump people will say, “We’ve taken military action before. It’s worked out for us. You guys have overestimated the risk from Iran and they’ve been proven to be a paper tiger.” And I don’t think we can just shrug our shoulders at that, because Iran has proven to be considerably weaker and is considerably weaker today than they were two years ago at this time. And Iran has in the past kind of absorbed a massive hit from the United States and from Israel, and not done much in response. Okay, that’s possible. But this is all about a risk benefit analysis. The risk is real, and they just simply have not explained how right now this has to happen.

And I’ll just close by saying Tom Wright, our former colleague, wrote a really interesting piece in the Atlantic that people should read, where he basically says, “Why are we rushing into anything? We don’t have to get a deal right now and we don’t have to go to war right now. Iran doesn’t represent an imminent threat to the United States. They’re weak. We have leverage. Let’s keep playing this out. Why are we just rushing pell-mell to take a military action that could go south on us in some way?” I don’t know if I agree with every word Tom wrote, but I think it points up this fundamental reality that this is not necessary right now. And when military action is not necessary, the thumb should be pretty heavily on the scale of not doing it. So that’s where I net out. This sounds it’s more like a blue team, blue team than a red team, blue team.

Jon Finer:

Well, and I think the other reason is I’m not hearing a lot of these arguments being made by even elected Democrats in Washington, who you would expect. I mean, there are some of them doing this, standing up against what is happening. But to me, the capsule summary, which I am surprised I don’t hear more of, is Trump administration pulled out of a nuclear deal with Iran that brought Iran much closer in the aftermath to the potential of having a nuclear weapon. Now they’re trying to re-achieve basically an identical nuclear deal or something very close to that. They bombed Iran last year and now are on the verge of having to bomb Iran again. So they’ve got these two choices that they have basically forced on themselves, and the strategy that led to it, let alone the strategy that flows from the aftermath of it is totally unclear. So anyway, no debate this time. I think we’re basically on the same page.

Should we move to one other topic that took place, that was focused on in the State of the Union address last night and which really erupted last weekend in a significant way, which is the cartel situation in Mexico?

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, go for it.

Jon Finer:

The Mexican government conducted an arrest last weekend of a well-known cartel leader named Nemesio El Mencho Oseguera Cervantes, but goes by El Mencho. And this was a pretty significant action. This is a notorious person. He’s actually got a kind of interesting background, maybe just a few notes on who he was. He actually spent a lot of his youth, kind of honed his criminal chops in San Francisco. He then moved back to Mexico and started his career in Mexico as a young man, as a local cop, policeman, and began building his criminal record, criminal enterprise from that perch. He developed a business, this cartel that he led until this weekend, that spans human smuggling, extortion, fuel theft, and even according to a recent report from the US Treasury Department, a timeshare fraud scheme that targeted tourists in Puerto Vallarta. This just big sprawling criminal conglomerate.

And he was caught by the Mexican government, which had not up until recently focused as much on his cartel and on him. They had been fighting against the Sinaloa Cartel in a different part of Mexico. But he was betrayed by a, it sounds like a lover of his, who told her, according to the police report, trusted guy where he was located. The Mexicans were able to go in and find him. They chased him, he got shot, he ended up in a helicopter, died in the helicopter, which by the way seems a bit dodgy, but neither here nor there. And obviously, is now no longer alive, no longer the leader of this cartel.

But all of this comes against the backdrop of what has been a full year of very intense pressure by the Trump administration on the government of Mexico and President Sheinbaum, who we both dealt with, to do more to crack down on cartels or else. And in this case, the or else is the United States will go in militarily and take action inside Mexico, which we have not done in our recent history and which would pose a massive challenge to US-Mexico relations just given the violation of sovereignty. So the Mexicans did this under significant US duress and with some role played by the United States, which we should talk a bit more about.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, it’s true under significant US duress. But it’s also true that Mexico has a history of doing these kinds of operations, going back 15 years. Basically every few years they take out a kingpin, one of the top guys at one of the major cartels, and this is the latest iteration of that. And what tends to unfold after they do this, after they eliminate the top guy... It’s interesting you said dodgy in the helicopter. You think they just executed him in the helicopter?

Jon Finer:

I’m making no accusations. You do wonder when people die and in custody who are so reviled like this, but who knows?

Jake Sullivan:

Okay. All right, fair enough. So we’ve seen this, basically this playbook before. And then the cartel has a playbook in response to a kingpin getting taken out, and that’s essentially three types of violence. One type of violence is the cartel goes against the public and the state. And we saw this from the Jalisco Cartel, which El Mencho headed, burning vehicles, burning banks and buildings, attacking state facilities all across Mexico, not just in the areas where they dominate, to flex their muscles and say, “Hey, we can hold you guys at risk.” That’s abated to a considerable extent in most of Mexico, the area of their biggest stronghold, Puerto Vallarta, which is a resort area out on the Pacific coast. It’s still ongoing to a certain extent.

So you have these three types of violence. One is cartel on state, cartel on public. Then you have the violence between cartels. Because when a leader gets taken out, the other major cartels think, “Hey, they got a vacuum, we can move in on their turf.” And I think we can expect in the coming weeks other major cartels smelling weakness from the Jalisco Cartel, will try to grab some of their market share, and that can kick off real violence. And in the past we have seen that with previous Mexican cartel leaders have gone.

And then finally, you get violence within the cartel, because who’s going to take over? So rival factions start fighting. And one more thing to know about El Mencho is he actually came to run this Jalisco New Generation Cartel because the head of this previous cartel was actually captured by Mexican authorities, which led to that cartel’s division into two rival factions. El Mencho’s faction one, and he took over. So he is the product of a previous Mexican operation. The way he got into his job is through an operation exactly like the one that just took him out.

And just back for a second, just to give people a little bit more of the color on this. In the first Trump administration, the Mexican government captured the son of El Chapo, a guy named Ovidio Guzman, who was a senior guy in the Sinaloa Cartel. The Sinaloa Cartel went even further than the Jalisco Cartel has in terms of an attack on the state. They basically did a siege of a significant city. They took soldiers hostage, they attacked military housing. And the violence got so intense and moved so fast that the Mexican government actually had to release El Chapo’s son. He got let go. And then in the Biden administration, he was recaptured and extradited, which kicked off another wave of intense violence that left a lot of people dead. That Biden administration effort also involved the joint intelligence effort between Mexico and the US, and that’s what we’ve seen here from the Trump administration.

You’re right that President Trump is dangling the possibility, “We’ll go do it ourselves,” which I think is reinforcing the, shall we say, the enthusiasm of Sheinbaum to execute this, to have the Mexicans execute it. But I think this is what we will now have to watch, that first wave of anti-state or anti-public violence. We have to see how long it continues and where. I think the inter and intra-cartel violence we’re just at the beginning of, and it will be interesting the extent to which Mexico thinks it can contain that, manage that. And whether the Trump administration is going to continue to say, “Okay, you’ve made this first move. Now we want to see a lot more moves in rapid succession or we’re going to take over ourselves.”

Jon Finer:

Hard to imagine a world leader right now who has a harder job than Claudia Sheinbaum, in some ways. Mexico’s sort of state capacity, ability to deal with the security crises is extremely limited. She comes on the heels of her mentor, AMLO, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who had a very different approach actually to cartels. He called his approach hugs, not bullets, essentially trying to take a more conciliatory stance towards cartel leaders to avoid exactly what just happened over the course of the last weekend, which is an eruption of violence perpetrated by cartels against the state, against a Mexican citizens and international citizens. Basically acknowledging that the Mexican state did not have the ability to totally crush and crack down on the cartels. Sheinbaum has taken, again, under significant pressure from the United States, a more confrontational approach, first to Sinaloa and then to Jalisco New Generation Cartel, as you said.

And at the same time is under intense pressure from President Trump and Stephen Miller to deal with migration flows across Mexico into the United States, which are tied to this cartel issue, because they’re so involved in human smuggling. And has to negotiate, renegotiate massive trade agreements with the United States, which has its review period taking place over the course of this summer. And that trade agreement is obviously essential to the Mexican economy.

So she is under an incredible amount of pressure. Has these interlocking, interrelated challenges, and is trying to manage it as well as possible. And I think I would give her a lot of credit, by the way, for managing a very challenging relationship-

Jake Sullivan:

So far, absolutely.

Jon Finer:

... with President Trump up until now. But this could in any number of ways go off the rails, up to and including obviously the possibility of US military action inside Mexico, which I believe is very much still on the table. And that is why the role of the United States is so controversial in this situation. Every time one of these big arrests happens, you got to look very closely at the messaging that comes Mexico and comes out of the United States. Often, the Mexicans will downplay, if they acknowledge at all, the participation of the United States. Often, this administration, the Trump administration will want to tout how involved it actually was. And you saw a little bit of that dueling message this time.

By the way, you saw it even more intensely with another arrest that took place at the end of January. This is kind of a weird one, but you followed this arrest of this guy, Ryan Wedding, who is a former Canadian Olympic snowboarder, who was in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City and became one of the biggest narco traffickers in North America, tied to the Sinaloa Cartel. He was arrested with some involvement, that’s never really been fully spelled, out of the United States, and it led to these competing statements. The Mexican government basically said they did most, if not all of the legwork. The United States implied actually it had done more of the arrest. There was this public back and forth between Sheinbaum and actually Kash Patel, who put out on Twitter that FBI teams executed with precision, discipline alongside Mexican partners to bring Ryan Wedding to justice. He was extradited to the United States.

So this creates real political problems for Sheinbaum. A more sensitive administration would probably keep its mouth shut about what exactly the US role was, if it was greater than has been acknowledged, to allow Sheinbaum the space to be able to keep conducting these operations on our behalf. But these guys just don’t seem inclined to give her that space.

Jake Sullivan:

First of all, I vaguely followed that, but I had no idea this was an Olympic snowboarder who turned into one of the biggest narco traffickers in North America. That’s interesting. I’m going to go read more about good-old Ryan Wedding.

Jon Finer:

It’d be a lowlight for the 2002 Olympics, I think.

Jake Sullivan:

Just to close this out. Your point about Sheinbaum having a lot on her shoulders, trade, migration, and drugs, three issues near and dear to Donald Trump’s heart, these are three things where Mexico is very much in the center of the action. It’s hard to think about topics on which the president is more passionate, that are more politically charged, that are more emotionally charged, and that he spends more of his waking hours thinking about. So yes, Sheinbaum is in a uniquely pressured situation, and as you said, has been handling it pretty well.

Should we turn to the standoff between the Pentagon and the AI company, Anthropic?

Jon Finer:

Yeah, remarkable. Want to lay it out and we can discuss?

Jake Sullivan:

So Anthropic right now is the only AI company that is currently providing classified services to the Pentagon. It is the only one on the classified system providing its AI capabilities for use in DOD war-fighting. Anthropic has basically said it has two terms of use. One is that its product cannot be used for mass surveillance, and the other is that its product cannot be used for lethal weapons controlled by AI. The Pentagon is saying that they do not accept these restrictions, that they should be able to use the system for what they call all lawful uses, and they should decide, the Pentagon should decide what is lawful.

So the Pentagon has threatened Anthropic and basically said that if it doesn’t comply, if it doesn’t drop these two restrictions, that either the Pentagon will use this authority called the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to provide its capabilities to them restriction free, or the Pentagon will put Anthropic on a list of supply chain risk, a list that is usually reserved for adversarial foreign companies. And if you go on that list, if you are deemed a supply chain risk by the Pentagon, then no company that does business with the Pentagon, can do business with you. So this would be a real threat to Anthropic’s business model.

So that is the baseline of what is going on here. And Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, who has been very outspoken on this topic, had a meeting this week with Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, to discuss the standoff. They did not resolve it. In fact, the Pentagon has given a Friday deadline, 5:01 PM, Eastern Standard Time, for Anthropic to comply or to face one of the two potential sanctions I just described or courses of action I just described. Anthropic said it’s not going to comply. So as we tape this here on Wednesday, this is very much up in the air. What do you make of this, Jon?

Jon Finer:

Well, it’s a remarkable situation and in some ways a novel, unique situation, because maybe to be a half a second most charitable version of the argument the administration is making or Pete Hegseth is making, it is very unusual for companies that sell to the US government, in particular companies that sell to the US military, to place restrictions that arguably go above and beyond whatever US law or the US Constitution require in terms of how those capabilities are used. And so on a very abstract level, Pete Hegseth’s argument is at least somewhat compelling. He says, “We’re bound by US law. We are bound by the US Constitution. And as long as we’re following that, no private company that has its own views and interests should be telling us, the Defense Department, what is necessary to do to defend the country.”

The problem with that argument is, as we have discussed many times on this podcast, this is a totally novel capability, these large language models, autonomy in warfare. And I think you can make a pretty strong case that Dario Amodei and other leaders of large American AI labs have a deeper understanding of what exactly is safe and unsafe in terms of how these models operate in their current incarnation than Pete Hegseth does at this point. And he has expressed real concerns about how the models would go about making decisions, about when and how, and how extensively to use force if they are sort of left to their own devices. And I would be of the view that we should take those concerns extremely seriously.

Now, again, in a normal administration, I feel like I start almost every sentence I use about these guys with that caveat, this would be a very, I think, constructive back and forth between a technology leader and a policy leader, and to try to come to some sort of understanding. But this is now with these guys gotten all caught up in accusations about Anthropic that are longstanding. Elon Musk and others go online and talk about Dario and Anthropic being part of woke AI. Anthropic has expressed more concerns about safety and safeguards when it comes to large language models. At least publicly they’ve expressed more concerns than some of the other labs. That’s gotten them in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, even separate and apart from this contract.

And this is a place, an area where this administration’s lack of sometimes transparency, operation in good faith, and by the way, clear adherence to law policy and the constitution when it comes to the use of force in warfare leads to very legitimate questions being raised by the public, by private actors about whether they actually will do what they say and adhere to the constitution and the law in all cases. There’s been a lot of legal questions raised, and this emerged from the strikes that took place and the operation that took place against Maduro and Venezuela, which we and others have raised, I think, legitimate concerns about whether those conform with legal requirements and the constitution. And when Anthropic found out that its model was used in the conduct of that operation, at least according to reports, it became quite concerned. And that is what led to this current discussion, debate, standoff about the safeguards that they want to put on the use of Claude.

Jake Sullivan:

So we’re in the middle of this story. Obviously, in the next few days, we’ll get more clarity about what the Pentagon chooses to do and whether there’s an off ramp here, or whether they escalate the situation. And I think we should come back to this once we’ve seen that and reflect further on the novel questions that are raised by this issue. But for today, in addition to everything you just laid out, which I find very compelling, let me just make three short points.

The first is there’s something bizarre about the Pentagon’s position that it’s either going to compel Anthropic to provide its capability to the Pentagon through the Defense Production Act, or it’s going to declare it a supply chain risk. Both of those can’t be right. It can’t be that actually we could compel it, we really need it and we want to use it because we trust it. Oh, and also it’s a supply chain risk. It’s suggested this supply chain risk threat is not based in something real, that Anthropic is not at all a supply chain risk, that it has a good product that the Pentagon really wants to use. That has a trusted product, that the Pentagon trusts so much it’s pushing very hard to get it. And therefore, the supply chain risk threat is really about the government just trying to crush a business and bend it to its will. And I think that is dangerous way beyond just this narrow use case. That is just flat-out dangerous.

Secondly, to your point about these being incredibly uncertain areas, what exactly are these capabilities? What are exactly the risks associated with them? We are learning new things every day. And there is a lot that the labs like Anthropic know, that the rest of us don’t know, that the people in government don’t know. I would say here, just as tie goes to the runner in baseball, here, an argument on both sides about who should decide these things should go towards the more cautious end, especially when you’re talking about things like mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons, weapons that kill people and purely are controlled by artificial intelligence without a human in the loop. More caution is better.

And that leads to the third point, which is a point you made, work it out. There is no reason why if Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon stepped out of this kind of macho effort to just coerce Anthropic into conceding, that they couldn’t come to some understanding that would address the Pentagon’s concerns that Anthropic isn’t going to be kind of remote control determining every decision the Pentagon makes with the use of its capability, but that also addresses Dario’s legitimate concern.

So again, to finish where you basically started and finished, in a normal administration, I think this could get worked out. As it stands, my biggest concern here is that it is an indication of the coercive power of the federal government against a company that, frankly, is trying to do the right thing. And that leaves me feeling pretty nervous about the implications of this going forward over the next three years.

Jon Finer:

Also, what is the magic of Friday? Why does this have to be done in two days?

Jake Sullivan:

Right, exactly.

Jon Finer:

Anyways, a lot of this is just very odd.

Jake Sullivan:

Unless there’s some big mass surveillance program that they want to roll out next week, right?

Jon Finer:

Yeah. Or autonomy against Iran in the context of a strike, God forbid.

Jake Sullivan:

So just to round things out, there’s been a couple of developments in the news that give us a new segment, it may be a one-time segment of what we’ll call good diplomacy, bad diplomacy. I will give an example of really kind of good and frankly heartwarming diplomacy, and then you can give an example of how not to do things if you’re a diplomat overseas.

So my example involves the visit of the Brazilian president, Lula, to South Korea. Lula lost his pinky finger in an industrial accident when he was a union worker as a young man, so he only has four fingers on one hand. So he goes to South Korea and he participates in a ceremony at their memorial where he has to wear gloves. And there’s an amazing video of him putting the glove on and realizing when he does, that the South Koreans have actually made the glove so it only has four fingers. And he looks at his wife and he shows it to her. And just the delight on his face and the care and the thoughtfulness the South Koreans took is pretty damn cool.

And what makes the story even more interesting is that the president of South Korea, President Lee himself as a young man, had an industrial accident while he was working at a factory that produces, I think it’s baseball mitts and something else. He was essentially a factory worker as a very young man, and he was in an industrial accident where he got his wrist caught and he now has a permanently disabled arm. So you have these two men disabled as younger people, as workers, as factory workers, who have risen to be president of their countries, and then this beautiful show of grace from one to the other. Everyone should just watch this 10-second video. I would call that good diplomacy.

Jon Finer:

Amen. And by the way, it’s nice on a personal level, but these personal touches, as I guess we’ve seen, I mean, they can actually make positive differences in relations between countries. These are human beings that lead these places at the end of the day, and I’m sure that meant a lot to President Lula.

Onto, briefly, what not to do. And here we come back to our friends, the French and the United States’ relationship with France. And I’ll stipulate up front, the French are not always easy in a diplomatic context. And I say this almost in a family sense, in a loving way. I’ve been in touch over the course of the last couple of days with my former French counterpart, who’s a great guy and sometimes you butt heads. But the United States has really kind of stepped in it with France over the course of the last week, may now be on the path to being resolved.

Basically what happened was there was the killing of sort of a right-wing activist in France by at least what the United States alleges were a left-wing radicals. And the State Department put out a statement expressing concern about the rise of left-wing violence in France. French government did not like the statement, did not feel that it was accurate, and did what often happens in diplomatic disputes, they summoned the United States ambassador to France, who is Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner’s father, to basically come in, see the French government and get scolded, get read the Riot Act. This is a fundamental function of ambassadors overseas when a country is angry at your country, they will often do this. And by the way, things can escalate from there. You can get thrown out of the country as an ambassador. A country can recall its ambassador to your country, as the French did in one instance during our administration, when they were upset at us about the AUKUS deal that we made with the Australians and the UK.

In this case, they said, “Charles Kushner, come in and explain yourself.” And Charles Kushner decided just not to show up. That’d say, “Thank you, no, thank you. I have other plans.” As an ambassador to a country, you can’t have no other plans that are more consequential than being summoned by the government. This then led to a lot of back and forth, and the press started to escalate. It does seem like the French, for now at least, are deciding not to blow this up further, not to declare what is sometimes called persona non grata Charles Kushner, and force him to leave the country. But this is just in the category of an unnecessary way to inflame a situation. US made its point about this act and even France’s reaction underscored the importance of the US point and brought more attention to it. Kushner could have shown up, listened politely, walked out the door, no harm, no foul. Decided instead to do the opposite, and it hurts the relationship to behave that way.

Jake Sullivan:

All right. So we went through a lot of issues today, finished on I think a good note on diplomacy here, and that’ll be it for today.

Jon Finer:

We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

In the meantime, send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com. And find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us.

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network production.

Jon Finer:

Executive producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead editorial producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video producers, Nat Wiener and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing manager, Leanna Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

AI With a Western Soul (with Tyler Cowen)

February 19, 2026

TEASER

Tyler Cowen:
The smartest AIs are very western. You could say they’re center-left. I’d be a bit more to the political right than that. But if that’s what we’re all using, if that’s the smartest entity in the world, that is arguably the biggest soft power win in all of human history, that the smartest entities are made in our image.

Jon Finer:

Welcome to The Long Game Podcast. I’m Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And I’m Jake Sullivan. And we are very excited about our guest today, Tyler Cowen. We are looking forward to a conversation where he takes us beyond the headlines to the trendlines. Obviously, the name of the Podcast is The Long Game and the long game of geopolitics and national security is being shaped by a series of deep structural forces. Among these are the weaponization of economic interdependence, the eroding capacity of states to provide public goods, the AI revolution, the rise of China. To understand the world today, we can’t just talk to the traditional foreign policy crowd. We’ve got to seek out polymathic thinkers. And there is frankly no more interesting or compelling such thinker than Tyler Cowen. A genuine polymath. He’s an economist, a Professor at George Mason University, one of the most influential public intellectuals of the modern era.

He is co-author of the widely read economics blog, Marginal Revolution. He is host of the Conversations with Tyler Podcast, and he’s written or co-written more than 20 books. His work spans just a dizzying array of topics, from technology and finance, the Ethiopian cuisine and the search for undervalued talent. This is a man of unbounded and even radical curiosity, so we are just psyched to have him on. We want to use our time wisely, but we also want to do justice to the breadth of his thinking and insight, so we’re going to be ambitious. We’re going to try and cover a wide range of topics from China to AI, to geopolitics, and yes to UFOs. And we’ll close this episode with Tyler’s own underrated, overrated game from the Podcast Conversations with Tyler. But this time he’ll be in the hot seat. So Tyler Cowen, welcome to the long game.

Tyler Cowen:

Thank you, Jake.

Jon Finer:

Welcome Tyler, we’re glad to have you. I’m going to start us off with a question that’s a bit less high minded than everything Jake laid out, and a bit more self-serving for Jake and me. We spent four years sitting at the top of an information pyramid. We’d walk in to our offices every morning and there was a book with 200 pages of intelligence that came in overnight. All day, every day people were handing us memos and updates and emails about things going on in the world. And since we’ve gotten out of government, we’ve now had to become more sophisticated consumers of information and figure out where to seek it out. And what we’re wondering, what I’m wondering, is someone who writes on thinks about, pronounces on as many topics of such staggering breadth as you do, how do you go about staying current in all of these areas? It would feel like a struggle to us, but I’d love to get your insights on this.

Tyler Cowen:

I’m not sure anyone stays truly current. I traveled with about half my time. I try to meet with as many smart and informed people as I can. I’m in some very good WhatsApp groups. I do scroll Twitter quite a bit. I think that’s highly useful, if you avoid clicking on politics-related tweets. I try to read several books a day when I can, and just take in a diversity of experience. That would be part of it, but it’s hard, right? The world that races all of us, especially with AI, there’s always a new model coming out. You’ve got to figure out how good the new model is. It’s like having a new job.

Jake Sullivan:

Tyler, did you say several books a day?

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Jake Sullivan:

And how do you decide which books to read?

Tyler Cowen:

Well, often I’m preparing for my podcast, so I’ve been reading lately about the History of Mexico. I’ve a big pile of books about the Mexican-American War, the Mexican Revolution, the French takeover of Mexico in the 1860s, and that’s the area I’m reading in. My comparative advantage in life is that I read faster than other people. I’m what is called a hyperlexic.

Jake Sullivan:

Hyperlexic, that’s a new one by me. Has the advent of LLMs of Chat GPT and Gemini and Claude, changed the way you consume information or try to absorb it?

Tyler Cowen:

Oh, greatly. I’ll pose in a typical workday, 20 or 30 queries. I’m reading a book, there’s always things I don’t understand. And rather than have to go looking through some other book, you just ask the LLM. I typically would be using Chat GPT the pro model. And when I’m reading about Mexico, there’s different places, names, who are these people? And I keep on querying the LLM. And I can learn much more reading say a third of the books I used to, because I’m always asking for additional information. It’s a big change in improvement.

Jon Finer:

Can we turn to geopolitics for a minute? And we wanted to start with China, which is, at least for us, the most consequential issue in the geopolitical realm and particularly the U.S.-China relationship. We’ve been through a decade in which there has been more or less, unlike many issues in foreign policy, a bipartisan consensus about the nature of the relationship with China. Really launched by President Trump in his first term, that it’s a fundamentally competitive relationship that the United States and China are competing across a number of realms for geopolitical influence in technology, in military affairs. There does seem to be some indication, and I think we’ll learn a lot more during the course of the coming year, when President Trump will see Xi Jinping four times, that he is seeking to disrupt this consensus to some extent. And maybe shift U.S.-China relations back to something more akin to the engagement model that preceded the current moment. I’m wondering what you think generally the national security community has gotten right and gotten wrong on China, and what you think of the possibility that President Trump is going to push this in a different direction.

Tyler Cowen:

Well, we’re not going to beat China in this competition, and they’re probably not going to beat us. The question will be on what terms is the stalemate defined? And who’s controlling the South China Sea and who’s controlling Taiwan? And what relations with South Korea and Japan are like? All of that is up in the air, maybe has never been more uncertain, but I think my vision is a little more optimistic than what many people hold. Over the medium term, we will need to work with China to put down what you might call terror groups or middle tier powers, or countries that want to make trouble. It could even be North Korea. The more successful China is, the more small C conservative they will become. The world will have probably two major AI networks. Ours and China’s. Countries will have to choose.

And the actual troublemakers when they pop up, the United States and China might have some harmony of interests. That in a fairly rivalrous not entirely friendly way, will get together and cooperate in the same way that we did with the Soviet Union during World War II. And I think the future of the world may look like that more than just being defined by U.S.-China rivalry. At some point the key issues in Asia will be settled, perhaps not in our favor, and then we’ll have to work with China. That would be the point I would stress.

Jake Sullivan:

Tyler, I was struck by what you just said about the more successful China is, the more small-c conservative it will be. I want to focus on the flip side of that proposition, which is, if China hits a wall economically, faces a degree of stagnation, Japanification with Chinese characteristics, would that in turn make them more dangerous, because the Chinese Communist Party might have to turn to nationalism and conflict in order to maintain legitimacy? Do you see that as a risk?

Tyler Cowen:

Well, I think they’ve already turned to nationalism and conflict as a source of legitimacy. I don’t know how much that escalates. China will be older. That probably also makes them more small-c conservative. You could claim they’ve already hit a wall. Real estate wealth for a typical household is really a bigger chunk of what they own than would be the case in the United States. It’s not clear how China really restarts growth again, with say infrastructure or just fiscal policy. That may just be the world we’re in now, and those changes are already capitalized into the status quo. That would be my intuition.

Jake Sullivan:

How seriously should we take the risk of great power war?

Tyler Cowen:

It depends what the United States has in mind. I do believe China will in some way move on Taiwan. It does not have to be an outright attack, but it could be much more than the current sallies. It could be something like a blockade or just trying to prevent insurance companies from insuring ships, going back and forth from Taiwan, which would be crippling to the country. Internal subversion, bribery, intimidation. Again, all this is already in the works you could say. And how much is the U.S. Prepared to go to war over that? My guess is, we are not. I would bet against a great power war. But if you’re asking me do I bet against the U.S. Being pushed out of most of Asia, that’s far less clear. And that to me is a much worse world than what we have right now.

Jon Finer:

Should the United States be willing to take military action to defend Taiwan? It’s a thorny question for politicians to answer, but we’d be interested in your view.

Tyler Cowen:

Well, this is what economists would call a mixed strategy. Ex-ante, we should have strategic ambiguity, and not just say, we’re not going to defend Taiwan. And when Joe Biden said, “Well, we are going to defend Taiwan,” I was quite happy.

Jon Finer:

Four times. Four times.

Tyler Cowen:

Four times, yes. I know there’s different versions of how it was talked back in the like, but it should be unclear. That said, when push comes to shove, if China has made its move, you have to look at what are the terms of the deal? What are they going to do with TSMC to our best knowledge? What’s the domestic quality chip production in the United States? How do we feel about Japan and maybe South Korea getting nuclear weapons? Can South Korea remain an autonomous nation? Those are a lot of balls to juggle and they’re all hard to judge at this moment. But I think ex-ante, we should definitely create some risk that we will go to war over Taiwan, but then make the best decision ex-post. But China knows that too, right? They’re not fools. They’ve studied game theory.

Jake Sullivan:

Tyler, I’m going to put you down as that being Tyler Cowen’s version of strategic ambiguity.

Tyler Cowen:

It may not be that different from your version.

Jake Sullivan:

Exactly.

Tyler Cowen:

You’ve obviously been involved in these issues.

Jake Sullivan:

Exactly. One more question on China. You were saying a minute ago, China may have already hit a wall economically, and you referred to the property sector and other things. A coherent U.S. Strategy to deal with China has to start with some assumptions about China’s trajectory. And there’s a school of thought that we’ve reached to pique China and China’s going to get pulled down increasingly by structural factors like debt and demographics. You talked about the aging population. Others say China’s a juggernaut that’s poised to seize the commanding heights of technology. Do you have an assessment on where China will be 10 years from now? Have you had to update that assessment over time and what factors do you look at?

Tyler Cowen:

Both of those two views you mentioned I think are correct. Keep in mind, China is coming of age economically in an era where income inequality is much higher than when say the United States or most of Western Europe came of age. The Chinese top in terms of companies, wealthy individuals, elites, will be extremely wealthy, and you see that already. But at the same time the Chinese lower middle class might end up like say, the Mexican middle class. And the country is large enough to contain both of those visions. And they will never be in the kind of situation that say the United States was in 1968, where just growth is pretty high. The nation feels fairly egalitarian, gender and racial issues aside, they’re just not growing up in that time, so to speak. And you’re shaped by the time you grow up in, just like human beings are.

Jake Sullivan:

Would a fair summation of that be that China will have a hard time escaping the middle income trap, but nonetheless will still be a major geopolitical force in the world? Is that a fair summation?

Tyler Cowen:

I would say, 10 to 20% of China already has escaped the middle income trap. Or maybe now 10%, but say it ends up 15 or 20%. And that’s a very big country right there. And the rest of China does not escape the middle income trap. That’s right.

Jake Sullivan:

But the part that does, pushing the boundaries of frontier technology, pushing the boundaries of military modernization, that’s a very serious player. Even if you have the bulk of the population struggling economically and you don’t have the kind of economy the United States was able to build in the 20th century.

Tyler Cowen:

And China in the biosciences, has not yet quite had the global impact it will have, right? That will shock us also. You see all the inputs coming into place, better system for clinical trials. A lot of researchers want to move there. They do everything more quickly than we do. Speed really matters in that area, but there’s not yet much in the way of what I want to buy for my health that’s coming from China and that’s going to change.

Jon Finer:

Tyler, one of the challenges I know we felt as policymakers, I think it goes broadly for people looking at and analyzing China is, we don’t understand each other particularly well. I don’t think the United States understands China all that well. At least its inner workings. And the Chinese government at least doesn’t seem to understand U.S. intentions very well in many cases. You took this problem on, at least tried to, at one point in your career, by writing a book that was intended, I think, for a Chinese audience to sort of explain the United States. Where we’re coming from societally and in a number of areas.

Wondering if you could just talk a little bit about that project and whether you think that challenge has been met in any real way. And then, relatedly, what you think of Chinese intentions globally. This is an issue I think that there’s a lot of debate about in the United States, one that we don’t understand very well. And you laid out where you think they want to go on Taiwan, which I think is logical and coherent, but do they have bigger, broader ambitions globally, beyond that? How should we think about that?

Tyler Cowen:

Well, starting with the book, I finished this book in 2015, and I even had a contract from Xinhua, the Chinese State publisher, and this was a book that would explain America to the Chinese, in the same way that you could say Tocqueville, wanted to explain America to Europeans. I might even try to put the book out in some manner, but it’s obviously out of date. And then the first term of Trump came along, in the of some trade wars with China, and more censorship in China, so Xinhua just has never published the book. I think it’s a very interesting book, trying to explain America to the Chinese.

Now, what does China really want? My model of them is they truly, deeply really want Taiwan. They truly, deeply want most of Asia to kowtow to them. They truly deeply want the United States completely out of Asia. They may not view the U.S. Out of Japan as realistic, but otherwise, I think they will act as far as they can to get the U.S. Out of the rest of Asia. And beyond that, I think they will take any gains or homage or kowtowing they can get. They’re not against it, but they do not realistically expect in say, the new world, to be the dominant presence. They do not realistically expect Western Europe to be their ally and so on and so on. And they’ve learned the hard way, a lot of the world doesn’t like them, when they do things like belt and road, they’re taken advantage of. A lot of the money is not repaid. They’re terrible at soft power.

I think some parts of them have learned this, even though their system as a whole does not incorporate it. I think their focus will be on Asia, which is a hugely important part of the world and the global economy. But they know they’re only going to make so much progress in the direction of India, and so they will look in the other directions. That’s my model of what China wants. But one final point I would stress, there’s this old saying, “China will always surprise us.” Some countries, you look at the history of India, you could almost say India never surprises you. What they do is more or less linear, on the same path. They become socialist when some countries do, they become independent when some countries do. They have market-oriented reforms, when some countries do. It’s continuity, history of India. History of China, you look at the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Communists, the reforms, not well-predicted events. Big things happen in China and few people are good at predicting them in advance. I would leave the door open for that as well.

Jake Sullivan:

If India’s in one category and China’s in the other, predictable, unpredictable, where’s the U.S.?

Tyler Cowen:

We are mostly predictable, but we’ve had one or two shifts. You could say the Civil War, you could say the shift toward being globally interventionist, rather than just in the new world. You could say those are two big shifts, but mostly we’re a nation of continuity.

Jon Finer:

Well, I hope you do put your book out, not least because these days I feel like I don’t understand the United States as well as I could. So it might be useful for an American audience too, but, leave that to you.

Jake Sullivan:

is Xinhua still sitting on it? They have it and could publish it, they’ve just chosen to date not to do so for the last 10 years?

Tyler Cowen:

They own the rights. They paid me a small advance. I don’t think they’ll ever put it out, but again, who knows? China will always surprise us.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, exactly.

Tyler Cowen:

Obviously I have an English language version of it. Since I write other books with publishers that have contracts, it’s not really a commercially feasible work. There’s not a simple non-tricky way to put it out. But I do want to have it come out someday.

Jake Sullivan:

It’s a great project. I want to read it someday.

Tyler Cowen:

I’ll send it to you.

Jake Sullivan:

The rise of China obviously has been a seismic event for geopolitics, over the course of the past few decades. The rise of AI has been a seismic event, well, across the board over the last few years. Can you tell our listeners where you think this is all going in the next five years? What do things look like with AI at the end of 2030, in looking through your crystal ball

Tyler Cowen:

Five years from now, I do not think the world will be that different because of AI. 10 to 15 years from now, I think it will be very different. It’ll take us a long time to overcome the bottlenecks that make it hard to incorporate AI into real world institutions. So much of the AI use, it’s by lone individuals who are freelancing with it at work, and saving themselves time. That’s fine, it’s great, more leisure time, but it’s not always changing how the workplace works. Institutionally, it is done mainly in startups. And again, that’s great, but most of the United States economy is not startups. Startups in relative terms will grow, because they can incorporate AI better and more rapidly. But if you ask a simple question like, how much of our economy is government, universities, nonprofits? Add up the different parts of the economy that are hard to change rapidly, that’s almost half our economy right there. That will slow down our advances.

A key question will be how much more important can startups be relative to large established institutions? And I’ll say you need a 10, 15 year time horizon, for the world to truly really radically change and this country.

Jon Finer:

How do you think about what is often referred to as the AI race between countries? Largely we’re talking about the United States and China, but there I guess are some other players involved. And how do you rate the importance of innovation at the frontier of AI, where the United States tends to be pretty good and ahead of most countries, if not all countries? Versus AI adoption where the Chinese seem to be far ahead of the United States and maybe every other country at least industrially, and maybe in terms of military affairs. Is it possible to win the innovation race and lose the overall race, because you cannot adopt rapidly enough or effectively enough?

Tyler Cowen:

I think it’s a key question. What does the Chinese Communist Party actually think about AI? We can read the words they put out, which I don’t think are lies, but surely they feel threatened by AI. The notion that the smartest entity in China will not be the CCP, makes them radically uncomfortable. When I said will always surprise us, the Chinese have a long-standing history of turning their backs on major technology in different ways. It’s not the bet I would make, but I would give that a 10% chance that the Chinese just decide not to do it. They think it’s too subversive of their established order. And that scenario, say it’s 10% likelihood the U.S. has a big lead.

But in the more normal modal scenarios, China is always a year behind us, but they’re ahead of us on energy. Is quality of the model, quality of implementation more important than energy? That’s going to depend on a number of factors. How quickly will the U.S. bypass NIMBY constraints using a few states like Texas and Louisiana? And maybe some deals with Saudi or possibly UAE? All that’s up for grabs. I think it’s one of the areas where the Trump people have been doing some good things. But if the advantage is in energy production, de facto China can be ahead of us with inferior models and they distill from our models. It’s hard to keep a big edge in this area. Just look at the domestic companies. Well, Gemini from Google, Claude from Anthropic, GPT from Open AI, no one of those is that much better than the other, because there’s so much diffusion of the technology. And that holds across China also. And this coming weeks, people say DeepSeek 4 is coming out. Some people think it’s pretty wonderful. We’ll see.

Jake Sullivan:

They’ve certainly been hyping it, so I’m curious to see. When the earlier version of DeepSeek came out, it surprised the world. It was a bit of a stealth move on their part. This one they’ve been hyping for weeks, so I’ll be curious to see how it performs. Tyler, you’ve made a really interesting point that these large language models have what you call a western soul, because of their training data. And that even Chinese models think like Americans. Can you explain what you mean by that and why it matters?

Tyler Cowen:

Well, most of the quality internet is from the West. That’s just a fact. And if you’re training on the internet, you’re training on books. Quality books are mainly from the West. So the smartest AI’s are very Western. You could say they’re center-left, very impressive American polymath, which I think is great news. I’d be a bit more to the political right than that. But if that’s what we’re all using, if that’s the smartest entity in the world, that is arguably the biggest soft power win in all of human history for any nation, any empire, any culture, that the smartest entities are made in our image. And it’s hard to make them very different, without making them much stupider.

If you imagine, say a North Korean AI, unless they’re just going to distill from us or copy or whatever, that too will be the center-left intellectual American polymath, who’s very kind and gentle and does amazingly well as a doctor with the patients or as a therapist. If that’s what people in North Korea or China are consulting for their wisdom, for their advice, over time, it’s hard to predict what that adds up to. But again, you couldn’t wish for more, I would say.

Jon Finer:

Well, you don’t strike me at least as an alarmist about the impact of AI on the world, on the United States. But there have been in recent weeks a number of high-profile resignations from some of the AI labs, by people who almost are positioning themselves as whistleblowers. Saying essentially, “We’re concerned that various safety issues, various risk factors, are not being taken seriously enough by the companies we worked for, including some people who worked on exactly this risk management aspect of the LLMs.” What do you put at the top of your list of important risks to be taken seriously with the development of this technology?

Tyler Cowen:

Imagine you’re in the time of Edison and people are working for electricity companies, which is a new thing then, and they decide the electricity companies have no plan to prevent electricity from being used to kill people. Well, they might resign from the company, but that’s silly, right? It’s not effective. It doesn’t actually solve the problem. Here’s a way I like to put it. Every now and then, whether you like it or not, societies need to rebuild themselves. Our country did this after the American Revolution. We were a British colony. We ended up with a war of independence and a new constitution. You could say two, after Articles of Confederation. That was a period of considerable turmoil. You don’t at all have to be skeptical about the United States to see that was difficult. There was a lot of uncertainty along the way. You don’t have to think AI is evil, but today we are again in a situation, whether we like it or not, where we need to rebuild our world.

We haven’t done that in a long time. You could say Europe did it after World War II. I would say they did really a great job then, and now we need to do it and we’re not psychologically prepared to do it. People run to all sorts of extreme theories that it’s going to kill us or put everyone out of work. I don’t think either of those are close to being true. But it is true that we’re in this moment where big parts of our world will change, and we need to get it right. And even if you’re not worried about AI per se, you certainly ought to be concerned. Do we have the cultural strength and resilience and sensibilities to get it right now? And there is real uncertainty there, correct? Imagine we had to write a new constitution today, put aside AI, like how good a job do you think we would do? Just very unclear. In a sense, that’s our position. We’d better get it right. But it is highly uncertain.

Jake Sullivan:

We can’t even amend our constitution, let alone write a whole new one.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s right. So we have to do a much bigger task. Now the difference is, unlike amending the Constitution, this task is put upon us by external events, which cannot be reversed, and we have to do it, right? We’ll just see how good a job is.

Jake Sullivan:

You pose the question, do we have the cultural resilience, the kind of qualities necessary to be able to do this rebuilding? Do you have an answer to that question? You’ve posed it and said it’s up for grabs, but are you ultimately optimistic that the United States will make AI work more for us than against us?

Tyler Cowen:

The old Winston Churchill saying, “That in the final resort, the U.S. Finally does the right thing,” is my basic model of this country. But a lot of people will hate the path along the way, will get many things wrong. You or certainly your kids will live to age 98, and die of old age. That alone will make it a much better world. There will be benefits that right now maybe are even difficult to dream of, and I think at some time horizon, it will be pretty fantastic, and I hope the path along the way is not too terrible.

Jake Sullivan:

I want to come back briefly to Jon’s question about the U.S.-China AI race, because this preoccupies a lot of strategists, a lot of people who work in our field. And I would say a common mental model is that, there will come a point some capability threshold, that if the U.S. Gets there first, we end up with an intelligence explosion, a capability explosion, and we can obtain a decisive strategic advantage. That in effect being first at the frontier, can end up conferring massive geopolitical benefits in the competition between the U.S. and China. It sounds to me, based on how you answered Jon’s question, you don’t totally buy that. Can you just talk for a little bit more about why you think that that is the wrong mental model so that our listeners who kind of hear about the U.S.-China AI race can understand your perspective of where the rubber actually meets the road here?

Tyler Cowen:

I don’t think there’s any point where the AI is just based on self-improvement and doing its own thing at super rapid speed, without human intervention, human steering and human implementation. It’s always a bit of a messy slog. Now that said, let’s say we did have this big advantage over China, as we once said, the atom bomb and the USSR did not. Well, it was a big advantage for a few years. It didn’t last that long. And say, we had this AI advantage over China, what would we do with it? Actually not that much. There’d be like, say a two, three-year window where maybe we felt for sure we could defend Taiwan. Well, it’s nice to have a two, three-year window, but once that window disappears, and China catches up, then in a sense we’re back to where we started. But at a higher level of destructiveness.

Even if you accept all the premises behind that argument, all you’re buying is a temporary window. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the U.S., when our country is temporary windows, we just sit on them. We don’t invade our enemies, take them over or whatever. If they’re powerful and have nuclear weapons, I don’t think we should, to be clear. And China of course has nuclear weapons and plenty of other weapons. What can we really do to them? We’d just be waiting for them to catch up to us.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, it’s interesting. Proponents of this decisive strategic advantage theory, and by the way, I count myself as a skeptic of this along the lines of what you just laid out. But proponents of it say, actually, you know what you do with that window? You use your AI capability to essentially ensure that no other country can achieve the same capability threshold you did. Through cyber means or other tools to poison data sets or disrupt training models and so forth. They would’ve an answer. They would say essentially, you hold everybody else back. How does that strike you?

Tyler Cowen:

Good luck with that. All China has to do is disconnect some of what it’s doing, from various global networks. And I think our ability to reach it without attacking them, is not that great. Now, if you’re asking, does it mean we could do neat things in countries such as Venezuela with this AI advantage? That’s maybe. That’s at least possible, right? That may have happened anyway. But actually stopping China from getting there, I don’t see how we possibly could. We had nuclear weapons, as you probably know, in the 1950s. There were various plans to bomb China, to nuke China. We never did it. It’s not what we do. It would’ve been a huge mistake. And I think we’ll be in the same position again, even assuming we have that decisive and advantage

Jake Sullivan:

Nuke The Soviet Union.

Tyler Cowen:

No, even there was talk of nuking China in the 1950s.

Jake Sullivan:

Of nuking China. Oh, interesting.

Tyler Cowen:

To prevent them from getting the bomb.

Jake Sullivan:

I actually did not know that. I know there was a debate about trying to prevent the Soviets from getting the bomb. Interesting.

Tyler Cowen:

And in the Clinton Administration, there was a big debate, not to nuke North Korea, but to invade and make sure they can’t get the bomb. That’s less clear to me whether we should have or not. But again, it’s not the kind of thing the U.S. is good at pulling off. And when we tried a version in Iraq, as you well know, people didn’t like how it went, and we’re not keen to do it again.

Jon Finer:

If this is not a sort of winner-take-all technology, and you don’t rate the value of a two or three-year advantage in this AI race very highly, at least in terms of geopolitical significance, does that mean for you that the United States should not be trying to withhold our best technologies from the Chinese and the way our administration did, the way the first Trump administration did? The way the second Trump administration has been much more ambivalent about. Is there any value then particularly in this one area where the United States does retain an advantage in compute? In the machines that build advanced semiconductors and the advanced semiconductors themselves? Should we be withholding those in any quantity or at any level from China?

Tyler Cowen:

I favored those policies when we put them in place. If I were in charge today, I would not get rid of them. But over time, the value of such policies inevitably decays. So we need to be realistic that over the next few years it won’t yield us that much. And if we do give away those policies, again, it’s not something I would do, but I’m not sure it’s the end of the world. I think China will catch up to us anyway. And if those policies in the past bought us a few years, I’m entirely happy with that. Great. But again, limited gains. But limited gains are better than no gains.

Jake Sullivan:

That’s our mantra, Tyler, Jon and I. We as partial architects of that strategy, always recognized it had its limitations, but it also had its advantages. I think your sober assessment is a reasonable one. I do think the U.S. Compute advantage right now is significant. And you mentioned China having this significant energy advantage. If they can marry compute and energy, I think, their relative advantage over the United States would be really quite significant. So, something for us to watch whether the Trump Administration actually does roll these controls back further than they already have.

Tyler Cowen:

And keep in mind, China might cure cancer for us. If China has the AI edge, I’m extremely uncomfortable about that world, but it could end up being great for a lot of Americans. We shouldn’t dismiss that possibility.

Jake Sullivan:

No, it’s so true. And we cannot think about, “winning the race against China as just being on its own terms, some good.” A good would be, anyone cures cancer, whether it’s China or anyone else. We certainly have to take that factor into account and we also have to take into account the need for the U.S. and China to work together to manage the risk of AI. It sounds to me like you discount some of the more extreme risks like loss of control scenarios and this massive very fast-moving job disruption. Are there risks of AI that do keep you up at night?

Tyler Cowen:

For loss of control, I would say humans have never controlled the world, for better or worse. For job displacement, new jobs always get created, the energy sector, biomedical trials. There’ll be new jobs all over the place. There will be more leisure time. That’s mostly a good thing. I think it will be quite bad for a lot of upper white-collar workers. Politically, they’re an extremely potent group, especially in the Democratic Party. And the political collision of people who used to think, “Well, I can go to a top 20 or Ivy League school, become something like a law partner consulting partner. Not automatically, but with hard work, make $1.5 or $2 million a year. Be in the Charmed circle.” That going away, which could happen, I can’t think through the politics of that, but I think it’s more significant than just counting the numbers alone would indicate. So that worries me quite a bit.

What will happen to the Democrats when that interest group crashes? And those people, they’re still smart, they’ll work hard, but they basically learn, “Well, I’m going to move to Houston instead of Manhattan, and earn 300K a year working in the energy sector, instead of being a law partner.” I’m not worried about them as humans, but politics of that, I think it will be ugly.

Jon Finer:

Will podcasters be okay or do we need to start making plans?

Tyler Cowen:

I write less and podcast more. My view is that, listeners do not want AI-generated podcasts, even if the AIs are smarter, better and funnier than we are. If I’m proven wrong, I’ll do yet some other thing.

Jake Sullivan:

Work in the energy sector in Houston for 300K.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s right. Good tacos there.

Jake Sullivan:

Exactly.

We’ve been talking about a sexy topic, artificial intelligence. You have been known to criticize the intellectual class for obsessing over status topics like AI, at the expense of focusing on the more boring physical realities that basically make our countries and societies run and drive national power. You’ve written about sand as an example. Can you explain to our listeners why winning the long game means caring about sand?

Tyler Cowen:

Well, sand is an input into information technology, right? And some people say the world has a shortage of sand or easily accessible sand, and sand, silicon, supply chains are always longer and more complex than you think, is a good rule of thumb. That means there’s more to worry about, but it also means that your worrying is never going to be as effective as you think. There are limits on what policymakers can do. It doesn’t mean they should do nothing, but it means if they expect result in eight out of one to 10, maybe they’ll get a three out of one to 10. And it gets back to this point, well, marginal gains are better than nothing. And I think we’re learning with supply chains, we’re living in that world once again.

It’s like the people, while they’re very offended that there’s bad treatment of labor in these different supply chains, and that’s morally very understandable, but trying to get that out of the supply chain, is very, very hard.

Jon Finer:

You had a statistic in one of your articles that really struck me, which is that the world may run out of construction-grade sand by, I think you said, 2050. According to some study or other. That struck me because I think it’s before most estimates when the world will exhaust proven oil reserves. We may actually run into this shortage of sand which nobody’s focused on, nobody even talks about, before the energy transition is required, which is obviously, occupying a ton of policy attention, economic attention. How do you get people to focus on topics that aren’t sexy in the way that AI is, and even energy is to some extent, but are so essential to the future?

Tyler Cowen:

Well, the price has to go up and people hate that. But the same thing with beef and chicken today, the price is up, people hate it. But one of my favorite sayings is, supply is elastic. The article on sand, I think I was critical of that. I think we will manage sand fine, if we let the price go up, and if we let supply respond. There’s NIMBY barriers everywhere in the United States. It’s one of our biggest problems. With energy, with AI, with people being able to afford housing in various cities. We don’t want our NIMBY barriers to stop the supply of sand from being elastic.

But what we’re learning is a bunch of NIMBY barriers that were put up, say like, the sixties through recent times, they’re a lot more costly than they seemed. You can live with them when the world isn’t changing much. But the more radical your change becomes, the more poisonous those NIMBY barriers are. And we’re going to need to learn that lesson. Federalism will harm us. I’m in general for federalism. I think it’s a good thing. We need 50 states, counties, cities and so on, but it will be very painful cutting through all the layers of regulation that create our NIMBY restrictions.

Jon Finer:

Jake and I are government people, at least we used to be, in and out of government. One of the things that I always think about as we kind of catalog these problems is the basic capacity of our government to deal with the challenges that the country faces, that the world faces. You’ve described yourself as a state capacity Libertarian, arguing, I guess, and tell me if this is a mischaracterization, for basically limited government, but for government that is highly competent, highly effective in core areas where the state has to function. Distributing vaccines, maintaining the power grid, procuring weapons systems, et cetera. And there’ll probably be others that you would add to your list. I’m wondering where you see today the biggest failures in state capacity.

And also, you could see the second Trump Administration as in some ways going to war on some elements of state capacity. I think we’ve had 10,000 STEM PhDs walk out the door of the federal government’s during the first year of this administration. In other areas they’re building up state capacity. I think we’ve hired 10,000 ICE agents during this period. How do you rate the net effect of this president’s approach to state capacity?

Tyler Cowen:

Well, I think I agree with your answer or what’s implied by your answer. We’ve lost a lot of talent in government. We’re doing a much worse job keeping scientific talent and funding science. And those are big setbacks in state capacity. In terms of putting AI into government, the Trump people I think are better than the Biden people would have been or the Harris people rather had they won. And there are a lot of good noises and not too many restrictions. I don’t think we’ve seen any gains from that yet, but I prefer Trump AI policies to what we would’ve gotten from the Democrats.

I’m against the ICE expansion, just general corruption in government, unwillingness to keep Congress informed, attempts to intimidate people, push around the courts. The list is long. You probably could make it longer than I could. I’m basically against all those things and I think they harm our state capacity. And we’re in one or two key areas doing well. My hope, which I don’t count on, is the one key area of AI matters more than all the bad things we’re doing. I wouldn’t bet that way, but there’s some chance it works out that way. And basically we’re flushing some of our state capacity down the toilet.

Jake Sullivan:

Are there particular concrete policies or reforms that you think would most improve America’s state capacity? Are there things that if you were president for a day, you would say, “This is low-hanging fruit. We should just do this. It will make us more capable of essentially delivering positive outcomes?”

Tyler Cowen:

Well, a simple thing that even the Biden people talked about would be to recognize, it’s very hard to truly reform the NIH. And to support healthcare innovation, you need to start a new agency and have it be more DARPA-like. And that almost happened. People pushed back. It did not come to pass, but we could do that and we should do that. Reforming the National Science Foundation, which actually the Trump people are working on. I hope that goes well. I don’t personally know where that is at. There’s plenty we could do, in terms of healthcare policy, where we spend a lot of money.

I would basically always be willing to trade off a dollar of Medicare and turn it into a dollar of social security, at pretty much all margins. That’s not popular or older as a nation. Old people vote, old people often don’t vote ideologically, so messing with their gains is maybe not going to work. But I would love to just turn Medicare into cash benefits and let older people use that cash on markets if they want, spend it on other things if they don’t want or need the healthcare. But again, is that realistic? Probably not.

Jon Finer:

You’ve somewhat disparagingly and I think accurately referred to American large defense contractors as essentially akin to state-owned enterprises in their ossified low-innovation approach to business, and also in terms of their ability to deliver capabilities on time and on a reasonable budget. To what extent do you think this is an inevitability in a large complicated democracy like ours? And to what extent do you think this problem could be fixed? I’ll tell you it’s one that we beat our heads against, particularly in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And realizing, not only did we not have enough on the shelf, we didn’t have the ability to produce anything close to what was needed to help Ukraine defend itself. How would you go about tackling this massive problem?

Tyler Cowen:

Well, we’ve done some great end runs with startups, right? Most prominently Palantir and Anduril, but many others. That gives me hope. When I made those criticisms, those startups were less of a big thing. I think it’s striking. This is an area where our state capacity has turned out to be better, than at least I had thought or many people had thought. We need to do much, much more. I’m not sure how that will go.

The Trump administration politicizing business so much, I think has made that harder. It’s just harder to survive in any of those spaces, when your government contractor is demanding political loyalty from you. It’s right now a big issue with the company, Anthropic. We might blow that. But I think, also going back to the Winston Churchill quotation, we don’t have enough military shells. We might need an emergency to really gear up for that, but our ability to do that is probably somewhat better than we think. And in the meantime, we’ve made more progress than I had been expecting. I’m less pessimistic about that now than say five years ago.

Jake Sullivan:

Tyler, before we get to the most important topic, which is, aliens, I wanted to circle back to something you said a little bit ago about supply chains. You said supply chains are very long, which should worry us, but also maybe we worry too much in a way. Because it’s just a fact of life that these supply chains are super complex and getting to true resilience is challenging. If you look at an issue like rare earths, China used its choke point on rare earths to basically say to the United States, we can cut those off and in doing so have major impacts on both commercial and military supply chains.

The Trump Administration, building on work we did in the Biden Administration is actually trying to create resilience, to create a rare earth supply chain that China can’t choke off. But you could then go down a list of 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 other vital inputs into the economy, and essentially have to run the same exercise. And the question I want to put to you is, is it true supply chain resilience just impossible to achieve? And if so, what should be the goal of the U.S. strategy when it comes to trying to reduce our reliance upon, or reduce our exposure to coercion by a competitor like China?

Tyler Cowen:

It’s impossible to achieve, but the good news is, there’s a lot of changes we can make at the margin, and those changes are net pluses anyway. First of all, push back on NIMBY. NIMBY-ism actually restricts our ability often through environmental law, to exploit our own rare earths. Or rare earths from our allies. We should be doing that anyway. There’s an extra collateral benefit here. It makes our supply chains more resilient. And the other thing we can do and should do, we’ve been doing the opposite, is be more cooperative with our allies, who have plenty of rare earths. They often have their own NIMBY problems, but they can help us out. The best thing for supply chain resiliency, is to have a lot of good allies and be cooperative with them. We’ve been damaging that. But again, those are things you can do. They’re not quite free lunches, but they bring a lot of other gains. They’re not impossible tasks, but just be realistic. Don’t think you’re going to have fully resilient supply chains.

Jon Finer:

In some ways, this entire conversation has been building to this moment because-

Tyler Cowen:

As every conversation does.

Jon Finer:

As every conversation does. Look, we’ve now had President Obama weigh in on the topic of aliens in recent days. Glibly answering, “Yes, they exist.” Before then having to come out and clarify that he actually didn’t have such information. He was just talking about statistical probabilities. There’ve been some rumors I’ve seen online recently that President Trump may give a speech on the topic of aliens. I’ll be very interested in the content of that if it ever happens.

Jake and I, believe it or not, sat through one entire edition of the President’s daily brief, that was entirely on this topic. I would not say we walked out of there any more enlightened, I think, than the general public. This was just before the Pentagon published a set of reports on what its pilots and others have seen. You’ve spoken about this, written about this, and over time indicated hinted at least that the probability is you see it, that some of these unexplained phenomenon are of alien origin. Alien as an extraterrestrial origin, could be as high as 10%. I’m wondering what has led you to, I guess, increase that probability over time? What indications are you seeing and maybe just explain a bit your interest in this topic among many others that you write about?

Tyler Cowen:

Well, President Obama tweeted recently something like, “There is no evidence of aliens having visited Earth.” I completely agree with that. The problem is, there are unexplained phenomena, and there’s also no evidence for the alternative possible explanations. I’ve heard from really by now a pretty large number of insiders, that there’s data from multiple sources. They can’t always name the multiple sources, but it could be radar, infrared, satellite, and pilot observations, that the data are consistent across each other, and that there are things that move very fast and move in ways we cannot explain. None of that is evidence for aliens, but it is weird. And if all politicians do is keep on saying there’s no evidence for aliens, that is literally correct. We should not leap at alien drone probe conclusions. But the thing to do is not just to repeat that sentence, but to sit down and say, what you think it might be and assign probabilities to those options.

The Nimitz incident was what? 2004? Well, that’s probably not the Chinese. After the recent war in Ukraine, you could downgrade the capabilities of the Russians. They would’ve won that war in a day, if they could command these very fast, powerful UAPs. What is it then? We can say, well, it could be many things, but okay, let’s have a list. I don’t have a great list, and when I realize I don’t have a great list, then I have to assign some number to it being alien drone probes. It should be way below 50%, but it shouldn’t be tiny.

And keep in mind what’s called the Fermi Paradox. There’s all these civilizations out there. They’re very distant. We keep on discovering more and more apparently habitable planets. People have been asking, “Well, where are they? Why aren’t they here?” And one possible answer is, they are here. Let’s say it’s 10%. It depends on my mood of the day really. There’s nothing very scientific about any number, that any of us would come up with. I don’t even know if it’s good for society that we talk about it. It might just scare people or make them nutty. But I’m selfishly curious, as Jake said at the beginning, and my selfish curiosity means, I keep on bugging people about this topic, and I want to know what the probability is. I think it’s not that low.

Jake Sullivan:

If you put it at around 10% Tyler, of that 10%, what proportion is a scenario in which the U.S. Government knows and is hiding it?

Tyler Cowen:

Very low. I strongly believe from people I’ve talked to, or say what Marco Rubio has said on tape, that no one knows. The real conspiracy is people are afraid to admit they don’t know, because they sound bad or stupid or out of control. I would put it way below 1% that there’s some conspiracy or alien bodies or alien craft being held somewhere, or Roswell, New Mexico. To me that is very low percent. I would basically dismiss it.

Jake Sullivan:

Almost all of that 10% is that, aliens have come with these UAPs Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, but simply have not announced themselves or have not made themselves known in a more definitive way.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s right. And I also think it’s unlikely there’s little green men inside the vehicles. We send out, in essence drone probes to Mars other places, it’s probably something mechanical. At this point we know AI works. It’s probably governed by some kind of AI. And they’ve probably been here a long time using Bayesian reasoning. They’re probably not going to destroy us or for that matter, help us. It’s a big puzzle. If in fact, it turns out to be alien drone probes. And it’s a big puzzle if it turns out to be something else.

Jake Sullivan:

By the way, when Jon referred to the president’s daily brief that was devoted to this topic, it was a preview of this report that the Pentagon put out. Pretty unedifying. But a funny moment, Secretary Janet Yellen, actually, we invited her to the PDB that day.

Jon Finer:

The one time I think that she came during this year.

Jake Sullivan:

She’s sitting there watching this and thinking, “Is this what these people do in the president’s daily brief? Talk about UAPs and aliens?” I think she was looking around thinking we were playing a practical joke on her, but it was just a funny coincidence of timing.

Tyler Cowen:

There’s this recent report that the Bank of England is now talking about this. I don’t think they’re true believers or anything, but just as a contingency plan, they should be talking about it. Say, Trump made this announcement. Maybe it’s even false, right? Trump is not predictable. It would maybe affect financial markets, I’m not even sure it would.

Jon Finer:

All right. Well, if your personal odds go up or the president makes some sort of announcement on this topic, we may need to consult you again, before too much longer. We won’t make you promise now, but we’ll be calling. Jake, should we turn to overrated, underrated as we shamelessly borrow one of Tyler’s features for our purposes here?

Jake Sullivan:

Yes. Turning it back on you, Tyler, your feature from your podcast, of overrated, underrated.

Tyler Cowen:

I’m ready.

Jake Sullivan:

We’re going to put out a number of these things and get your answers. Jon, do you want to kick us off?

Jon Finer:

Sure. First topic, the People’s Liberation Army.

Tyler Cowen:

Overrated, right? It’s terrible. Chinese military, historically has not performed well. In the late seventies, they couldn’t really crush Vietnam. There’s all these questions about the loyalty of the generals. I don’t understand at all what was going on behind those purges, but there’s no plausible scenario where it’s good news for their efficacy. Maybe at this point with the purges, it’s become properly rated, but mostly it’s been overrated as a fighting force.

Jake Sullivan:

We’ve tended to overrate most competitor or adversary militaries over the last 25 years. So, cryptocurrency.

Tyler Cowen:

It’s either greatly overrated or greatly underrated, depending who it is you’re speaking to. Hardly anyone rates it properly. I think Bitcoin is fine. It’s not as evil as people say. It can help people get their money out of tyrannical regimes or China or Russia or Iran. It also helps a lot of illegal activity. That’s bad. But as a financial asset, Bitcoin has become actually pretty boring. Price goes up, price goes down, whatever. Who cares? Stablecoins, I think have a lot of potential. They will help us finance our government budget deficit. A lot of the world wants to do a lot more dealing with something dollar-connected or dollar-based. As you probably know, most of the trade between, say China and Brazil, is now done in terms of U.S.-connected Stablecoins.

That’s amazing. It’s a win for U.S. soft power. It does mean a lot of countries out there might de facto dollarize, that could hurt their state capacity. It’s good for the U.S. It might be bad for countries such as Brazil, which over time lose some financial autonomy. But a lot of these currencies, especially in the Caribbean, Central America, they don’t make sense. They’re too small. The countries are too small. A lot of these places ought to dollarize. And if they can do it through stablecoins and avoid some of the worst U.S. Banking regulations, the world is better off. That part of crypto is mostly a bit underrated

Jon Finer:

Narrative journalism.

Tyler Cowen:

Well, it’s become underrated. I greatly enjoy reading. It’s harder to make money with it. Now that classified ads have gone away and there’s only a few major newspapers left. I just think I have the normie take on that, that anyone would tell you.

Jake Sullivan:

The impact of quantum computing.

Tyler Cowen:

It’s interesting you ask. I run this philanthropic program called Emergent Ventures, and I see what very smart teenagers are working on. And in the last three or so months, I’ve seen a noticeable uptick in smart, non-crazy young people, working on quantum computing. So that makes me bullish on it. I don’t understand either the full potential or the obstacles. The science is difficult. I ask people who work on it full time, they always give me four or five different answers. But in the last few months I’ve started to think it’s underrated.

Jon Finer:

The public health threat posed by measles.

Tyler Cowen:

Again, it’s one of these either overrated or underrated. It’s not just the Trump people, like Canada is doing worse than we are with measles. It’s coming back as a thing, that’s terrible. There’s no good reason for it. It gets to this point about culture, is ultimately what is behind state capacity. We’re screwing around with our culture. We need to return to say, the culture I grew up with, where being vaccinated is this wonderful thing, almost like a gift from God. I was recently in Oaxaca, Mexico. The long lines of people waiting to be vaccinated, it warmed my heart. It made me so happy. For the most part, Mexicans regard vaccination as a wonderful thing that poorer people can’t get and should get. We need to move back to that mentality.

Jake Sullivan:

Curling. Olympic curling.

Tyler Cowen:

Olympic curling is a wonderful sport to watch. It’s just very dramatic. And it seems people from only a few countries, most of all Canada, like it. Maybe curling is not good for producing celebrities. You don’t see faces and the way you do say in an NBA Game or with a final kick in soccer, but definitely underrated. As is Canada.

Jake Sullivan:

People from Canada and from my home state of Minnesota, which is the curling capital of the United States. So, good answer.

Jon Finer:

Canadians mired in controversy. We won’t digress. All right. Last one. Somewhat tangentially related, sports betting.

Tyler Cowen:

It’s gone much worse than I would have thought. I’m rethinking my position on this. I thought, we’ll legalize sports betting, there’ll be some collateral damage. A lot of people enjoy it, but it won’t be a major crisis. Maybe we need a little more time to see how norms adjust, but it’s turning out to ruin more lives than I would’ve expected. And that sports betting is so prominent and so easy with apps and online connections and smartphones. I don’t know what we can do at this point, but I think it’s a real problem. And it also runs the risk of soiling prediction markets, which, maybe can be useful. But if most of what they’re going to do is sports betting, they’ll get a bad name, at some point they’ll be put out of business or over-regulated. It’s a real problem and we’ve yet to figure out good answers, but we need to.

Jon Finer:

Well, you’re generous to have spent so much time with us. Thank you. This was a lot of fun and a great conversation.

Tyler Cowen:

The pleasure was mine.

Jake Sullivan:

Thank you, Tyler. Really appreciate it.

Tyler Cowen:

Take care.

Jake Sullivan:

Take care. Well, that was a lot of fun.

Jon Finer:

It was. There aren’t many people you could pretty much throw any question under the sun. And whether or not he has deep expertise, he will come up with a very thoughtful, coherent answer to the question, without any real time to think about it or research it. It’s impressive.

Jake Sullivan:

Absolutely. And in preparing for the interview, and you and I were talking beforehand, a lot of these themes that we went through with him, I think will be through lines in this podcast going forward. I think you put to him at one point, what does China want? What is China’s intention? I think that kind of question. We’ll revisit, what’s China’s trajectory? Where is AI headed and does the frontier matter more than diffusion? I think, at some point we probably should do a deep dive on sand or maybe on a whole bunch of these boring areas, because it is absolutely striking the physical realities of the world and where real shortages might squeeze global economy.

Jon Finer:

It’s also just super helpful to get perspectives on our field from people who dip in and out of it, but don’t marinate in it all day, every day, and who bring perspectives from other fields analytically to the questions that we think about all the time. We have tried to do more of that in our own work, but hearing from someone like him is actually quite helpful, just because it’s a totally different perspective.

Jake Sullivan:

One thing that surprised me was, you and I in a way, as national security professionals, should be more focused on the first island chain and the geography of the Indo-Pacific when it comes to U.S.-China competition. Our questions to him were all about tech econ, these areas where we think the rubber really hits the road. And a lot of his answers came back to more fundamental geopolitics. It was a weird role reversal in a way to have the economist very focused on that and have the national security guys very focused on the economy and technology.

Jon Finer:

Well, as we tried to pioneer, and you get a lot of credit for this, there isn’t really a neat breakdown or gap between national security issues, foreign policy issues, and these universal issues that we’re all wrestling with, including on the domestic side. And people that can range across them like he did make for an interesting conversation.

Jake Sullivan:

Absolutely.

Jon Finer:

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of the Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

In the meantime, send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com. And find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.

Jon Finer:

That’s it for this episode of the Long Game.

Jake Sullivan:

If you like the show, please follow, share with friends, and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us

Jon Finer:

For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.

Jake Sullivan:

The Long Game is a Vox Media Podcast Network Production

Jon Finer:

Executive Producer, Tamara Sepper.

Jake Sullivan:

Lead Editorial Producer, Jennifer Indig.

Jon Finer:

Deputy Editor, Celine Rohr.

Jake Sullivan:

Senior Producer, Matthew Billy.

Jon Finer:

Video Producers, Nat Weiner and Adam Harris.

Jake Sullivan:

Supervising Producer, Jake Kaplan.

Jon Finer:

Associate Producer, Claudia Hernandez.

Jake Sullivan:

Marketing Manager, Leanna Greenway.

Jon Finer:

Music is by Nat Weiner. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.

Jake Sullivan:

And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.