How to End the Iran War

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0:16Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Lives.

0:25So, what would it take to end the Iran War? On this week's show, a former lead negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal tells us how he thinks the current talks between Washington and Tehran are going, and how the White House should navigate an exit plan. That's coming up, but first, I thought I'd share my read on things. I was away the last couple weeks, and I couldn't help but notice that there were repeated news reports that the United States and Iran were close to a deal.

0:57It's part of a familiar cycle. Someone in the White House tells journalists a deal is imminent, the story gets published, everyone gets excited, oil prices drop, stocks rise, and then nothing happens. As an editor, I can say this, we should all be more skeptical about these stories and provide the necessary context and history to any administration saying it is close to any deal. There are always two sides, and no deal is done until it's done.

1:29Second, given all the recent reports about individuals profiting from betting markets, I'm even more skeptical than usual about premature claims of success. But more broadly, here's the reason why I think it's been so difficult to get a deal. The starting point of the talks seemed to be about getting us back to the same point we were at before the war began, a world in which the Strait of Hormuz is not blockaded. And at the heart of it all, U.S. President Donald Trump is delaying a difficult choice.

2:04Either he has to live with an imperfect deal in which he leaves the nuclear issue to another day and just make that choice now and believe that he can sell it to the American people, or he has to be willing to sustain a lot more economic and political pain than the Iranians can. And that is a game of chicken that could take months to play out. Right now, it is unclear that Trump is picking either of those two options. He's dithering because neither of those options is great.

2:37And he's expressing this confusion by veering between two extremes in recent weeks. He switches between declaring that Washington and Tehran are nearing a breakthrough or threatening military escalation. But each day that Trump does not make a choice, more dire data points emerge. The latest of these comes from the OECD, a club of industrialized economies, which says global growth could slow to 2.1% this year if there's no Iran deal. Last year, the world grew at 3.4%.

3:10As a reminder, we haven't hit less than 2% growth since the pandemic. And that level of low growth has only happened four times since 1980. That is the scale of the historic decision in front of Trump. That is why he seems stuck.

3:30Okay, time for this week's interview, which is very much on the same theme. I wanted to speak to someone who has experience negotiating with the Iranians and also navigating politics in the United States. Robert Malley was the Biden administration's special envoy for Iran. And before that, under the Obama administration, he was a lead U.S. negotiator on the 2015 nuclear agreement. Malley is not only a critic of the current war, but also the last several decades of U.S. policy in the Middle East,

4:04a criticism he is just as willing to apply to himself and his time in government, as you'll hear in our discussion. Today, Malley heads the Middle East program at the International Crisis Group and teaches at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. He's the co-author of an excellent book with Hussain Agha called Tomorrow is Yesterday, Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel-Palestine. Let's dive in.

4:33Rob, welcome back to FP Live. Thanks so much for having me. So every week now, there are reports that we are close to a deal, and then we're not. Big picture, what do you make of the ongoing talks between Washington and Tehran? Well, first, I'd say this is really every day is Groundhog Day, but the groundhog is very sick because it is bringing us in all kinds of directions. Every day is the same craziness. I mean, you just mentioned it. Within a 24-hour span, the president can say we're on the verge of a deal.

5:04He doesn't need a deal. He doesn't want to talk to the Iranians. He's talking to the Iranians. He's going to escalate. He's going to end the war. We're just going to walk away. So, you know, to measure where we are today, we'd have to measure the president's mood minute by minute, and that wouldn't be a very productive way. So I think we should take a step back. Big picture, both sides, you would think, have an objective interest in ending at least the Strait of Hormuz portion of this war. So for the U.S., it's pretty evident, self-evident, that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is costing it economically and obviously politically for the president and his party.

5:38I mean, just today, all executives are saying that if this goes on for a few more weeks, we could see a spike in the price of oil at levels that would really make today look like a very easy phase of the economic hardship. So from his point of view, it would seem to make perfect sense. Let's just open the Strait of Hormuz. And from the Iranian point of view, you know, they could always close it in the future, but opening it now means that they could try to get some more revenue. They haven't been getting any revenue, so they would still have the deterrence of being able to close it, but at least they would start putting some oxygen back into their economy,

6:08particularly if it were wedded with some form of economic relief, which would be their demand. And then, you know, deal with the nuclear issues and other issues further down the road. So we always seem to come to the edge of that deal, and then something pulls it back. You know, I don't want to put all of the blame on the U.S. side, because God knows the Iranians can be very hard to negotiate with. But in this case, it seems, as you mentioned, Ravi, that the president is torn between this desire to end this phase, which is really costing him, but he hates appearing weak.

6:39People are whispering in his ear all the time, you know, a little more pressure, you're going to get them to buckle, you're going to get them to surrender. He's always been somebody who has affinity for the language of force. And so to give up now, when he thinks he may be close to a bigger achievement, doesn't seem to be prepared to do it. Given the gulf in trust and the amount of mistrust, it just makes everything that much harder. So I think we are close, but close in this instance could be very far away. Now, you know this so well, but negotiations, I think, always begin with maximalist goals.

7:11And I'm curious what you see as the minimal goals both sides absolutely must have in order to reach a deal.

7:20I mean, the minimalist, minimalist goal is what I think I just mentioned, more or less, which is the United States needs to know that the Strait of Hormuz is open to regular traffic so that the price of oil starts declining again and the energy prices start declining again. I think that's the minimal goal. You can't, I don't think, I don't know what else. But in other words, Rob, that is the status quo pre-war, basically. Listen, I should have started by saying not only this war is illegal, both domestically and internationally, not only was this war unjustified, but in some ways the war is completely

7:51counterproductive for the reason you just put your finger on, which is the main goal of the war today is to undo the impact of the war because it's to open the Strait that was not closed before the war began. So it is obviously absurd. And that may be one of the reasons why the president hesitates, because he knows what critics will say. We went through all of this to get back to a situation that not just is a situation that existed before the war, in some ways worse, because now Iran has used and knows that it could use again, and the rest of the world knows that it could use again, this ability to close down the Strait of Hormuz.

8:22But at a minimum, that's what the president needs. If he doesn't get that, he does nothing. I think at the minimum, what the Iranians need is the end of the blockade, the end of the war. I mean, some kind of end of the war. So they don't, but I don't even know what that means. But they keep insisting on it, end of the war in Iran, end of the war, Israeli war on Lebanon. And some measure of economic relief, they probably know they're not going to get that much simply in exchange for opening the Strait of Hormuz. But whether it's some economic toll system or a system in which ships that cross through the Strait of Hormuz have to pay a fee for environmental whatever that, you know, some

8:56reason, or sanctions relief, access to some of their assets that have been frozen in Qatar elsewhere, they're going to need some economic benefit because otherwise they're really going to face a calamitous economic situation. And we really should spend some time on how much they have paid economically, no matter how this war ends. It's going to be very hard for them to make up all of the economic loss that they've incurred. So they're going to need to have something upfront to justify them going back to a situation where the Strait of Hormuz is no longer closed. You mentioned Israel and Lebanon there.

9:27How important a piece of the puzzle is it for Iran, but also the United States? I mean, it's telling that Iran has been trying to tie a broader ceasefire with Hezbollah into a larger U.S.-Iran deal. But then as a result, there have also been all these growing tensions between Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, which are emerging now into the public sphere. Yeah, it is very important, it appears, for the Iranian regime to have a linkage to Lebanon, at least for the first phase.

9:58In other words, at least to get a memorandum of understanding of something with the United States. Many reasons for that. Obviously, Hezbollah has been a core partner of Iran. It's important for Iran to show that it is not fighting the struggle only for itself, but for the broader axis of resistance or what remains of it. It could score some points in that way in saying we're fighting for broader Arab cause, not just for our own interests. But yes, they want to preserve Hezbollah as much as possible as an asset, just as it served them in the past. They wanted to serve them in the future. So I think right now, and we've seen it, I think you have to take them at their word

10:30when they say that without some cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, they're not prepared to agree to deal with the U.S. Now, you could define what a cessation of hostilities means. Does it mean no attack on Beirut? Does it mean no further expansion of Israel's occupation? I think there could be some wiggle room there. But certainly you can't see the intensity of Israel's current fighting in Lebanon at a time when, if Iran is going to enter a deal with the United States. I think the other question, and this is a harder one, is if they do get a deal with the United States, if there's a memorandum of understanding and Iran starts getting some

11:03economic benefits, what will they do each time, as I suspect it will be inevitable, that Israel will claim that there's some threat emanating from Lebanon and they will strike Lebanon? Will that be a cause? Will that be a justification, a trigger for Iran to say all bets are off? I don't know. I think that's going to be harder. But right now, in order to get into this deal, I think Iran has made its position very clear. I must admit, clearer than I would have expected. And that is one of the reasons why President Trump had that, what now has been confirmed by both sides, a pretty difficult conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu in which he told

11:36him, you know, you've got to stop, you're effing crazy if you think you're going to strike Beirut, and it appears to have had some effect. Although, one of the most perceptive things that President Trump said in recent days or weeks is when he said that ceasefires in the Middle East mean that the fire is a little more moderate than it was before. And that's what we're seeing, including today in Lebanon. It's not as if Israel has stopped firing in Lebanon any more than it stopped firing in Gaza. We haven't talked about the nuclear angle much so far. And I wonder how important you think that is in current talks, or whether both sides

12:13realize this is way too complicated to get into right now, and we need some sort of a first phase deal before we can get to that point. And as you mull that, Rob, I'm also curious, you know, where you fall now on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which you helped negotiate, critics of the plan would say that it was so flawed that it brought us to this point. But obviously, on your side of this, people would argue that we're at this point precisely because we pulled out of the agreement.

12:46I mean, as I said earlier, one of the ironies is that right now, all the focus is on the Suero Firmus, not so much on the nuclear file, which purportedly was why the war was launched in the first place. Although there too, there's an irony because President Trump had claimed that he had obliterated around the nuclear program last June. So irony or paradox and illogical point after illogical point. But it is interesting right now that the focus doesn't seem to be so much on the nuclear file for the reason you give. It's going to be a very complicated deal to negotiate. And it's not sort of the most immediate threat.

13:17The most immediate threat economically and politically is the threat of Hormuz. Now, I think for President Trump, and again, it's one of the reasons why that memorandum of understanding, which always seems to be just an inch away that becomes elusive, is that he hears the critics. He knows what people are saying, which is if he gets this deal and it doesn't touch the nuclear file, then you may never get there. Whereas now with a blockade, he has some leverage. And so he keeps saying, of course, we're going to have to deal with the nuclear file. And so he wants something up front. Now, if all he wants up front is an Iranian declaration that they'll never seek to pursue

13:50a nuclear weapon, it existed in the JCPOA, he could get that again. If what he wants is some commitment by Iran that they'll negotiate the disposition of the highly enriched uranium that is somewhere under the rubble, the 60% enriched uranium of which they have about 450 kilograms, he probably could get that if it's vague. Iran promises that it will negotiate a way to dispose of it. And it promises that it will negotiate constraints on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. That, I think, is in the realm of the possible. If he wants something more specific, I doubt he'll get it because then Iran is going to

14:23ask for upfront sanctions relief. Because let's not forget, you know, come to the JCPOA in a second, but you don't have to be in Iran or in their shoes to understand that they can't trust anything that comes out of the president's mouth anymore. He's the one who violated the JCPOA in 2018 or withdrew from it, even though Iran was complying with it. And twice in the last year or so, he struck Iran in the middle of negotiations. So for them to make any tangible concession on the nuclear file, they won't do it until they have tangible upfront concessions on the economic sanctions file, and the president

14:56doesn't seem prepared to give it. So that's why I'm very doubtful that as a first phase, you're going to get anything detailed on the nuclear front. And by the way, and I think former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote this piece just today. I don't agree with much that's in the piece, but she says the focus should be on the Strait of Hormuz, the nuclear issue, the military strikes have done enough damage. If Iran starts trying to dig up this highly enriched uranium or reconstitute its nuclear program, you have American eyes and ears, Israeli eyes and ears.

15:26They probably will be able to detect it. So even though Iran, and again, it is one of the outcomes of this misguided, misbegotten war, the Iranian regime is more eager probably to get a nuclear weapon than at any time in its history. It also knows that it's under greater surveillance than at any time in its history from Israel and the United States. And so it might be very difficult for them to reconstitute their program. So that's not sort of the most immediate issue. And I can imagine you get a deal and then you postpone the nuclear negotiations, whether

15:57you ever get there, whether you ever get to a deal, who knows. But the United States and Israel make clear that if Iran is about to reconstitute their program and they detect it, they will bomb again. Now, on the issue of the JCPOA, in a way, you set it up almost too easily because I don't see how anyone could argue that where we are today is proof that the JCPOA was flawed because there is no JCPOA because President Trump put through from it in 2018. We certainly wouldn't be in the position we're in today had the JCPOA been complied with by both parties.

16:29Iran would not have enriched uranium at this level. The IEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, would still be there monitoring all of Iran's activities. So we'd be in a vastly different situation than we're in today. Now, you know my position. I think that was about as good a deal we could have achieved at the time with the focus being on the nuclear program. I know the criticism, and I think the two most pertinent criticisms, and I think we have to take them on board. One is it was time limited. In other words, by 2030, the most constraining of the provisions on Iran's nuclear program

17:04would have expired. And secondly, that it didn't address Iran's missile program, its drone program, its support for regional partners and proxies. Yes, that's fair. I would say we now have had a real-life counterfactual experiment with maximum pressure campaign. That was the case under President Trump in his first term. I would say the Biden administration, we could come to it, also maintained the sanctions after it first came into office. What did we see? Iran expanded its nuclear program. And if anything, it escalated its activities in the region.

17:37And then we had the second counterfactual. What about military strikes, which was supposed to be the weapon that was going to really take care of these issues? We haven't taken care of the nuclear issue. You still have quantities of enriched uranium in Iran. If it wanted to, it could reconstitute its nuclear program. It doesn't need the vast program it had before. If its goal is to build a nuclear weapon, it could still continue to do research. And I think most experts would say that if Iran started today and wanted to get a nuclear weapon, we're probably in the same number of months as we were before the strikes.

18:10In other words, anywhere between nine to 12 months, maybe a little bit more. So military strikes certainly have not taken care of the nuclear program. And certainly you haven't done anything to deal with Iran's regional access. Yes, military strikes may have weakened Hezbollah, may have weakened Hamas considerably, but they haven't disappeared. And give them time, they'll reconstitute. Look, and we may end up with some version of the JCPO further down the line, which at the very least would vindicate some of what you're saying. Rob, you've been talking a little bit about the voices in Trump's ear.

18:43In other words, maybe the hardliners who were telling him to worry more about the potential of Iran getting a nuclear weapon or to see Iran as a model enemy. I want to talk a bit about the opposite side of that. So the hardline faction in Iran that may be willing to sustain any amount of pain to watch Trump suffer, the United States suffer, the region suffer. And you've been in the position of having to think about that faction. How do you bring them on board when you're trying to reach a deal?

19:18So I don't know how to answer that question other than to say, you know, we do have one experiment. And again, I think the comparisons with the JCPOA could be exaggerated because we're in a very different world today. But at least that was a time where the Iranian system managed to build a consensus over a certain outcome. When I hear today American officials complaining about how difficult it is to get an answer from the Iranians, I'd say, number one, that may be also one of the unintended consequences of this bombing campaign, which is you have gotten rid of the top echelon of the Iranian

19:49leadership. And now you have Iranians who have to, in order to reach a decision, they have to find ways of communicating that are extremely difficult. I don't even know how they reach any decision since they are very leery of getting together. They can't really communicate electronically. So the mere fact that they can reach a decision is pretty remarkable, I'd say. The Iranian system, and this has been true throughout, it's a divided system in which the Supreme Leader is kind of the arbiter in chief with his own voice, but he tries to build a consensus, tries to see where the center of gravity is, and that becomes a decision.

20:22And if the divisions are too wide, the decisions get postponed or don't get made. And there is a view, and it is a stronger view today than it was before the war, which is never trust the U.S., right? And secondly, we are in a position now where we can inflict greater pain on the U.S., or at least the kind of pain that the U.S. will find it harder to sustain because they don't have our resilience. And they'll say, let's keep holding. And when they read articles that say within two weeks, the price of oil could go up to $150 or $200 a barrel, I'm sure they're thinking, why don't we hold on?

20:53I mean, so what, they'll bomb us, yeah, we'll incur greater damage, but how much more marginal damage could they inflict on us? Whereas every day that goes by, the marginal damage that we're inflicting on the world economy, on America's economy, on President Trump's party's political prospects, that is increasing by the day. So I'm sure there's a line, it's maybe not just a hard line, it's just people in Iran, in the Iranian regime who are saying, if we hold off a little bit longer, our leverage is going to increase, and America's eagerness for a deal is going to increase as well.

21:24You ask me, how do you bring them on board? I do think in this respect, the Iranian position seems to have been pretty consistent about what they want in the memorandum of understanding, and what they're prepared to do further down the road. One of the ironies of this war is that we have the institutions, the United States, we have a process, we're supposed to have a degree of predictability, and the Iranians, according to cultural stereotypes, it's sort of a one-man show, the supreme leader, and they're the ones who are unpredictable, quote-unquote, the man-mullers.

21:54If anything, since the beginning of this war, the Iranians have been pretty consistent, predictable. They've had institutionalized decision-making, it could take time, it could be frustrating, but they do have a mechanism to reach decisions. The U.S. side? Unpredictable, chaotic, whimsical. What institutions? I'm not sure that the National Security Council or the State Department as institutions are playing any role. And so you ask me, how do you bring the Iranians on board? It is quite remarkable at this point when you compare the two, which is the more personalized,

22:25unpredictable, de-institutionalized system. It's the American one.

22:32And we'll be back in a minute with more of Foreign Policy Live. Remember, you can catch these conversations live and on video on foreignpolicy.com. Subscribers get to send us questions in advance, in addition to a range of other benefits, including our magazine. Sign up.

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25:09AquaTrue even comes with a 30-day best tasting water guarantee. That's AquaTrue.com, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com, promo code FPL. I want to step back a little bit. You wrote a great piece in the New York Times when the war began with Stephen Wertheim. And in it, you made the case that there is a structural problem in how the United States sees Iran, and that war was a, quote, logical conclusion of decades of policy.

25:44Talk about that a bit. Yeah, and I'd say logical, not inevitable, right? And I do think it took a president like Trump, as we say in the piece, to bring us to this war, which is a catastrophic and legal war. But the point we're making is, since 1979, basically, Iran has been defined as almost the devil on earth. Again, this is not to take their defense. They've done plenty to kill Americans, destabilize the region, and to hurt their own people. But the U.S. has built them into this threat in which Democratic and Republican administrations

26:16alike have normalized two things. Normalized the use of sanctions in a way that is really harming the Iranian people. And I think, again, you don't have to be an expert to just look at the situation in Iran over the last several years since sanctions were imposed and say, who really has suffered? Is it the regime? The regime finds ways to circumvent sanctions, as every regime does. It's not great for them, but some of them benefit quite a bit. It's the people who suffer and who suffer significantly, particularly when a regime is prepared to sacrifice the well-being of their people.

26:49So we normalize sanctions, even if it means devastating an economy. And we've normalized the possibility of the use of force because every past president has said, we keep the option of force on the table if we can't reach an acceptable agreement with Iran. Iran, you know, you sort of make it possible for people to imagine that Iran is this existential threat, a threat that has to be dealt with either by starving its people, devastating the economy of its people. And if that doesn't work, the use of force is always there as an alternative.

27:19And so President Trump, and he's done this. I mean, how many times does he say, I'm the only one who was prepared to take care of a problem that all my predecessors were describing in these existential terms? That they're sort of the evil regime that we have to get rid of and we're prepared to use force to get rid of it. And he said, yeah, you were prepared to, but you didn't do it. I was prepared to, and I acted. And it is true. None of the, even the JCPOA didn't address the problem of Iran as it's been defined. So if you define a problem in those terms and you legitimize and normalize tools as it

27:53did, it's not that much of a leap to say, well, what else do we have but military force to tackle it? Again, I'm not saying that if we'd had a President Harris, that we would have a war. That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying that the ecosystem, the mindset, remember what President Obama said when he was running for the presidency, speaking about the war in Iraq, he said, we have to not only end the war, but end the mindset that led to this war. And there is a mindset that looks to the Middle East, and this goes back far, far earlier than President Obama or even the Iraq war, that looks at the Middle East through a certain

28:26lens, which makes things like crippling sanctions and the use of force, use of force, including in the so-called war on terror. I mean, we could go on and on about how normal the use of force has been in this region, almost always without due regard to the consequence on civilians. But it's become normalized. And so I do think there needs to be an introspection by Democrats. If they ever come back into power, well, they will, I suspect, to look at what they've done also to contribute to this legacy of an over-militarized understanding of the Middle East.

28:56Rob, you speak so eloquently of the structural issues and in a bipartisan sense. And, you know, you could say this for Washington writ large and the debate that we were all privy to, but you've also served in government multiple times. And why is it so hard from within to shift these structural issues in the direction that I suspect you're describing here? Why is that hard? Why were you unable to do that when you were in office and increasingly senior roles?

29:28Fair point. And I address it a bit in the book that Hussein Aghanai wrote to Tamar's yesterday. I mean, it is, the book in that sense is a self-indictment too. You know, putting myself aside, I do think there are some structural constraints that any president faces. President Obama probably is the best example to me because I think he came into office really determined to turn a page in America's relationship with the Muslim world writ large. He said in his speech in Cairo early on, I think he profoundly believed it because of his background, because of the experience that he'd had living overseas, and also his witnessing

30:01the calamities that some of America's interventions and policies in the Middle East had created. But there are constraints. And I'll mention two. One is the constraints simply of habit. You have this sort of strategic habit in the region. You have a whole system that you've built. There's a great book by Mark Lynch called America's Middle East, The Ruination of a Region, in which he looks at the whole system of the Middle East now for decades has been built around a certain American presence, a certain American policy towards the region. And if you start playing with it, you call a lot of things into question.

30:32Even the JCPOA caused huge tension with Saudi Arabia, huge tension with the United Emirates, huge tension with Israel. That all comes at a short-term strategic cost. I still maintain it was the better long-term calculus. But in the short run, it's a headache. Imagine a president doing the same today or changing policies on some other issue in the region. There'd be blowback from countries with which we've built now over decades in alliance. I think we have to rethink some of those. I think we have to disentangle ourselves from our over-involvement in the Middle East. I think we have to demilitarize our presence.

31:03But all that comes at a strategic cost, at least in the short term. And one thing I've learned from spending time in government, but every president now, long-term, looks more short-term. In other words, the horizon is not eight years. It's probably not four years. It's at least two years because you have the midterms. And it's probably less than that because of social media and the role of public opinion. And so, so quickly, presidents look at the reaction to what they're doing and they sort of get stymied. And it's easier to stick to the status quo. Again, one of the themes of our book is there's no stronger power of attraction, of gravitation,

31:38than the power of the status quo. And that applies not just to the U.S. The other is the domestic politics. And of course, we can't evade that. Any kind of shift that I'm talking about would come with real, immediate political blowback. President Obama experienced it. And, you know, I do think he was, he had the courage to say, I'm going to overcome that opposition, not just from Republicans, also from Democrats to the JCPOA. But, you know, you could do that once, you could do it twice. If you start breaking too many taboos, you get in trouble. I want to say one thing about President Trump, you know, I don't often give him credit.

32:10He doesn't seem to care about the laws of political gravity that I mentioned. And he doesn't seem to care about breaking taboos. Notice what he said the other day. We're now talking to Hezbollah. We didn't even know that they could talk. Now, it's a bit odd because it really, you know, the U.S. has not wanted to talk to Hezbollah. So I don't know what he meant by that. But he seems amazed by the fact that why weren't we talking to these people? They have power. They're the ones who could make rain or sunshine in some instances. So, of course, we have to talk to them. He says he wants to meet with the new supreme leader of Iran.

32:40I mean, he does have that capacity. And I do hope that a future administration, Republican or especially Democrat, will understand that some of the conventional wisdom and the fear that administrations have understandable of breaking from that conventional wisdom, some of them, once you break them, you could live with it. The political cost is not so stupendous. President Trump is a bit special in that respect because nobody in his party dares challenge him and the Democrats are not really going to criticize him for opening channels with enemies.

33:10But I hope that that's a page that a future administration could take, at least that page from President Trump. I've often remarked that if you could marry his unconventional side, his willingness to break taboos, his obliviousness to political constraints with a strategic vision, a heart, a sense of what's right and what's wrong, I think you'd have quite a powerful president. Unfortunately, at this point, you have at best half of that marriage. I'm enjoying this part of the interview as we zoom out a bit. And I'm curious that, you know, if we have some sort of a phase one deal along the lines

33:46of what we've been imagining, what does it mean for the broader region? I mean, and let's just talk about the Gulf countries for a minute, which have sustained so much in terms of economic damage, hits to their civilian infrastructure, to energy infrastructure. Global GDP this year has already contracted from initial projections, but for the Gulf especially, we're looking at steep contractions. What does all of this look like for them?

34:17And will they be reassessing how they think about the United States or even Israel as partners? So first, just on your first point about the region, even whether there's a first phase deal or not, one of the reasons why military force and whatever has been applied by Israel and the U.S., they have failed in terms of their own objectives, Hezbollah is still there and Hamas is still there and the Iranian regime is still there, is that what we're seeing now is basically a manifestation of decades upon decades of festering unresolved conflicts,

34:47the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The very question of Israel's acceptance or not by the region, the question of Lebanon's sovereignty, but also the internal balance of power between Shiites, Maronites, Sunnis, the question of Iran's relation with the Gulf, Iran's relation with the West, of the region's relation with the West. I mean, so these are all the problems that we're seeing, we're seeing the impact of and the consequence of today. So to think that military power, however lethal, however unconstrained, however illegal, is going to be able to put to rest decades of these festering unresolved problems.

35:20That's the height of hubris and the height of illusion. So I think we are nowhere near resolution of all those problems. And certainly military power may postpone their re-emergence, but it won't resolve them. On your question about the Gulf, here's one of the other ironies of this conflict. Gulf countries, and I'm going to generalize just as you did, obviously there's quite a few differences among them, they've made two strategic bets. One is a longstanding, the other one is a more recent bet. The longstanding bet is America's security umbrella. Almost all the countries have American bases.

35:52They have a strong security partnership with the US, which has survived real differences, differences over policy towards Israel, towards Iran, towards the Muslim Brotherhood, but they kept that security umbrella. And the second more recent strategic gambit was, let's see if we could improve our relations with Iran, some countries like Qatar and Oman had already done it, but then you have the others, Saudi Arabia, UAE in particular, that decided, you know what, maybe we can't change the fact that we live next to Iran, so let's see if through economic ties and better diplomatic

36:23engagements, we could at least buy ourselves some calm on that front. Well, you know what, what did the war show? Is that both bets failed and failed miserably. The American security umbrella didn't help the Gulf. I mean, if anything, you could say that the presence of American bases was, if not the reason, a justification, a pretext that Iran used to bomb those countries. And when the US needed to defend itself or choose who else to defend, it prioritized its own security and Israel security. And so many Gulf countries were left carrying the bag and wondering, well, how did we, how

36:56did President Trump get us in this mess, not protect us from the mess? And now what? And the Iranian gambit, of course, that goes without saying it, failed miserably because even countries like Qatar that had invested for a long time in better relations with Iran had served as a mediator and, you know, trying to do its best to avoid war. They were bombed, as were all the other countries in the GCC. So both bets have failed. Now, if you're sitting in the Gulf and those both, those two bets fail, you would think the large role conclusion would be, let's revise them. And yet, paradox that I'm referring to is that when the war ends, when the dust settles, what

37:30options, what alternatives will these countries have? They have no alternative to an American security umbrella, at least in the short term. I was just traveling there and some of them are thinking, you know, maybe we could build a closer relationship, security relationship with Europe because they are more impressed with how Europe came to their help than the way the US did. But that's going to take time. Europe first has to take care of its own defense. It's not about to be able to export its very partial umbrella to the Gulf. So I think you're going to see, if anything, a redoubling of security ties with the US and with Iran. Geography is not going to disappear.

38:02You know, some of them may revert to a more hostile relationship with Iran. But even what I hear from them is they understand they're going to have to resume a dialogue with Iran and see whether there's some way to reach a new modus vivendi. It's going to be a more distrustful one. It's going to be a more cynical, skeptical one. But they're not going to be able to escape it. So maybe in the future, they'll find ways of circumventing America's security umbrella. Maybe they'll find ways of circumventing the Strait of Hormuz. And there's all this talk about building pipelines and other things. But even then, Iran could hold them at bay because there's no reason why Iran couldn't

38:33bomb those other gas and energy outlets. So I suspect at the end of the war, you're going to find all of the problems that I mentioned earlier that have been crisscrossing the region now for decades. All those problems will still be there. The security relationship, the fraught security relationship, the imperfect security relationship, in some ways, the counterproductive security relationship with the US will still exist. And attempts to improve relations with Iran with all the frustration, all the setbacks, those two, I suspect, will find a new lease on life.

39:03A last question, Rob. Given everything we've been discussing so far, if you were still in your old job and you had to recommend to President Trump some way of getting out of this war quickly, given all the economic pain for the United States, but also for the world, what would you say? First, I always hesitate to answer that question because I would always say, as you know, I would never have gotten here in the first place. Historians are going to have a field day trying to figure out why this war was launched in the first place. And maybe psychologists would be better placed than a diplomat or political scientist.

39:36Being where we are now, I think just opening the Strait of Hormuz, the way I described it earlier, end of the blockade, opening the Strait of Hormuz, some form of economic relief for Iran, I mean, it won't be anything near what Iran would like, but at least something, because otherwise, what benefit would they see in this deal? It's important for the US, it's important for Iran, but it's mainly important, I think you just referred to it, because we're now in a situation of no war, no peace, and countless innocent victims. Because people around the world, you know, we could focus on the Gulf, we could focus on

40:09the US, you know, they have means of surviving this. But think of middle or low income countries that are facing absolutely astronomical energy prices, the shortage of fertilizers. I mean, this is a war that has made so many innocent bystander victims. The US, you know, people here, they pay a little bit more at the pump, President Trump is getting a dip in the polls. You saw a vote in the Congress yesterday, War Powers Resolution vote in the House against the continuation of this war. So I think, you know, it's true, there's a price to be paid, but the US will survive.

40:43And Rob, with this plan, you're assuming Trump can sell it, you're okay with leaving the nuclear issue unresolved? You said, can the President sell it? The beauty, in some ways, the absurdity of Trump's method is that he could paint up is down, down is up, successive failure in a way that he, his followers, his psychophants will buy and echo and sell. So yes, he could declare victory, almost regardless of the outcome. Just by the way, I'd say he could resume bombing, almost regardless of the cost. He does have that ability to do it. And I do think the nuclear issue, you know, people worry, then what incentive will Iran

41:15have to negotiate the nuclear issue? You know, they will have an incentive, because even with the kind of economic relief that I'm talking about, the economic damage that Iran has sustained already, that it's sustaining every day is huge. I just don't know how the regime is going to be able to satisfy, address even partially the needs of their people. I mean, in some ways, right now is the better days for the Iranian leadership, because they're in fighting mode, they're resisting the aggressor, they could tell their people, we're defending our dignity. Once the war is over, they have to turn to, how do we get food on people's table?

41:46How do we get them to live a normal life? So they're going to need still a deal. Maybe it won't be right away. Maybe you're going to even have to wait for the next administration. But the nuclear issue, I think that could probably wait. And right now, I do think the focus needs to be on avoiding a collapse in the world economy that may not affect the US, at least not right away, but could affect many countries around the world who have nothing to do with this war, nothing to gain from it, and just a praying for it to end. We'll have to leave it there. Rob Malley, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. And that was Robert Malley, former US Special Envoy for Iran, and lead negotiator on the

42:262015 Iran nuclear deal. Lots more coming up. You can watch all of our conversations live on our website. That's foreignpolicy.com slash live. And email us at live at foreignpolicy.com. We'd love to hear from you. This year, 193 countries are electing a new Secretary General of the United Nations.

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