Is the U.S. Winning the Iran War? With Suzanne Maloney and Mark Dubowitz

0:00 Over the years, Ark Media has become a trusted place where people go to actually understand Israel and the Jewish world. Our Ark Plus members make that possible. When you join Ark Plus, you support our mission and get access to exclusive content as well as ad-free listening across all Ark Media podcasts. Join us at arkmedia.org. And to our members, thank you.

0:24 [Instrumental music] You are listening to an Ark Media podcast. We find ourselves in a situation where the Iranians have been able to erode our regional presence, tie us up in a stalemate that distracts us and hurts our strategic leverage with other conflicts and other interests around the world, whether it's Ukraine or China, and that has passed on significant costs to the American people in terms of our economic position, and it's very clear that the war has not served our interests and that we find ourselves unable to actually get to a diplomatic outcome, which is probably the only solution here.

1:06 The Iranians are digging in their heels because they see in two years' time that President Trump is leaving office. They think a Democrat's going to take the White House, and a Democrat's going to reflect the sort of conventional wisdom that you're hearing, and that is that we are not going to use military force.

1:21 We're not going to continue to impose maximum pressure. We're going to seek diplomacy, and we're going to seek some kind of deal, and if we do, we'll probably give you domestic enrichment, and we'll kick the can down the road, hoping that this can doesn't explode into an atomic weapon. [Instrumental music] It's nine AM on Sunday, October 11th in New York City.

1:50 It's four PM on Sunday, October 11th in Israel, where I am visiting these past few days, currently in Jerusalem. Before we get started, three housekeeping notes. First, on Thursday, October 22nd, just five days before the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Striker Center in New York City.

2:11 I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dalia Sheindlin, and Bret Stephens to discuss what's at stake in the election and what the results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets are still available. To join us in person or to watch online, follow the link in the show notes. Second, a reminder about our new release schedule.

2:30 Our second episode of the week now goes out to Ark Plus members on Wednesday and to everyone else on Friday. So if you're not an Ark Plus member, you won't get our next episode until Friday. And third, if you've signed up for our newsletter, last Friday you got a taste of our Ark Weekly, which is our new weekly newsletter for Ark Plus members.

2:53 Each issue leads with a column from Ark Media contributor Nadav Eyal. Last week, three years after October 7th, Nadav laid out the five questions an Israeli commission of inquiry would have to pursue. Each issue also includes The Good Argument, where we take one hard question and bring you three serious competing perspectives on it. To get Ark Weekly and Wednesday's episode, become an Ark Plus member at arkmedia.org.

3:20 Now on to today's episode. Is the United States winning the war against Iran? Seven months after the U.S. and Israel launched the most recent war against Iran, that was the war that commenced on February 28th, there are two substantially different ways to assess the outcome. The strongest case for American victory is military and economic. Iran's conventional forces have been devastated.

3:44 Its economy is under extraordinary pressure, and American naval operations helped restore, it seems like more than eighty percent of the region's oil exports, neutralizing Iran's most potent weapon, the Strait of Hormuz. The strongest case against victory is strategic. Iran's regime, despite all this pressure, remains in power.

4:07 Its nuclear threat is unresolved, and its ability to threaten its neighbors through regional proxies remains dangerously intact, as yesterday's devastating attack on Riyadh's airport, which killed twelve people and wounded, at current count, over three hundred, illustrates. Meanwhile, negotiations have stalled. Despite the enormous economic pressure on Iran, Iran is showing no willingness to accept Washington's central demands.

4:34 And with the American midterm elections just weeks away, President Trump is facing growing public opposition to the war, rising economic costs, and mounting pressure to find a way out. So who actually has the upper hand? What would an American victory look like at this stage? And perhaps most importantly, will the United States emerge from this war in a stronger strategic position than it was before the first shot was fired?

5:01 To help us make sense of where the war stands, we're joined by two of the leading American experts on Iran and on U.S. foreign policy in Iran. Mark Dubowitz is the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a longtime advocate and strategist for the maximum pressure campaign on the Iranian regime.

5:19 He hosts his own podcast on Iran, which we'll link to in the show notes. And Suzanne Maloney is the vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. She's one of Washington's leading scholars on Iran and has advised administrations of both parties on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

5:38 Mark and Suzanne bring different perspectives to this question, and we're going to put those perspectives to the test. My conversation with Suzanne Maloney and Mark Dubowitz right after this short message. This is the moment to send young Jewish adults on a birthright trip to Israel. Not next year, now, because after three years of misinformation, reality needs to speak for itself.

6:02 Over the past twenty-five years, Birthright has sent more than nine hundred thousand young Jews to Israel. They come back more confident, more connected to each other and to Israel. They go on to build Jewish families, lead our communities, and feel part of a four thousand -year Jewish history that belongs to them.

6:21 Birthright's new goal is to send another two hundred thousand young adults to Israel by twenty twenty-nine, but it takes people like you to make that happen. To help shape that future, go to onetripchangeseverything.com. Suzanne Maloney, Marc Dubowitz, welcome to Call Me Back. Thank you, Dan. Wonderful to be with you, and wonderful to be with Suzanne. Uh, same the same. Thanks so much for having me.

6:49 So Suzanne, this is your maiden voyage on Call Me Back, so you will get the first word. I wanna start with what happened in the last twenty-four hours. The Houthis, we understand, according to reports, the Houthis struck Riyadh's International Airport, killing twelve people and wounding more than three hundred. As of now, according to reports, the airport is shut down.

7:08 I just wanna just, 'cause this, this news is both tragic, seems like a big event, and is a snapshot of this exact discussion we're having. So what does this attack tell us about the state of the Iran war and the ability of Iran and its regional allies to continue inflicting damage? Thanks, Dan. I think it's a great place to start because I think it really illustrates how what was intended to be a fairly short-lived war, taking out the regime and leading to some kind of change in Tehran, has actually led to a situation in which the Iranian regime remains intact.

7:40 It may, by some standards, be in a stronger position today than it was on February twenty-eighth. And the war has breathed new life into its proxy network, which had been decimated in the Israeli and American campaigns in the region after October seventh. And it has also led to a kind of metastasizing conflict.

7:59 Um, despite our efforts to try to contain the damage, we're now seeing that the Gulf State's vulnerability remains high, and that even a, a force as, as limited and small scale as the Houthis can strike fear in the hearts of travelers, of Saudi leaders who are trying to transition their economy from reliance on oil to one in which they are a, a hub for tourism, for finance, for technology.

8:25 And a strike at the airport will make it very difficult and raise the risk premium for travel to the region as a whole. Suzanne, President Trump is saying he's considering American strikes against the Houthis in response. Would that be a necessary escalation, or would it, would it risk drawing the United States into an even wider conflict at this point? Well, I think it puts the president on the back foot.

8:48 He rejected a request from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to, uh, do just that, enter the war against the Houthis with airstrikes last month, and that was, in some respects, kind of a humiliating passage in this entire relationship between the United States and its allies in the region. If the president were to jump in at this point in time, obviously only weeks away from midterm elections, he does risk reinforcing Americans' concerns about not just the extent to which we're in another forever war, but also the impact on their pocketbooks in terms of gasoline prices.

9:25 And that's not an optic that the president, I suspect, would like to have. But at this point in time, given the death toll, given the persistence now of over a week of strikes, uh, that have hit civilian air traffic in Saudi Arabia, I would not be surprised if in fact the United States did take action at this time.

9:43 So Marc, you argue that Iran played its strongest card already, trying to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that ultimately in that test, Iran lost, that America has effectively turned Iran's greatest economic weapon against it through the U.S. blockade, while Gulf exports have gradually, not fully, but gradually recovered. So I just want you to walk through that argument. What's changed in recent weeks that makes you confident America is winning this battle?

10:13 Well, Dan, what's changed is that Admiral Cooper, the CENTCOM commander in the U.S. military, have effectively taken back Hormuz from the Iranians, and we're back to almost pre-war levels of exports of oil and condensates out of that region. And I think it's very important to ask this question about who is winning by looking at who started the war forty-seven years ago.

10:32 The United States has been the target of Iranian terror and violence, as has the region for forty-seven years, and I think the war didn't begin on February twenty-eighth, it began in nineteen seventy-nine, but this current round of the war began last June. And so Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, which are the names for the U.S. operations, are two wars against the Islamic Republic of Iran that is, in Suzanne's words, have decimated its proxy network.

10:58 It's severely degraded its nuclear program. They were on the one-yard line. They've been pushed back significantly. Severely degraded its missile production capability. Those ballistic missiles represented a s- significant threat to Israel, to the region, and ultimately an ICBM program to the United States of America, and its economy is collapsing.

11:16 And the Houthis, I think, are actually a good example of the case that I would make. It's the last potent terror proxy that the Iranians have to deploy. So they played the Hormuz card, they lost it. They wanted to play the nuclear card. They still may play it, and we should talk about it on this podcast, and now they're playing the Houthi card. And of course, it's a serious problem.

11:35 The Houthis are a dangerous terrorist organization, and now we have the United States, the Israelis, the Saudis, and the Emiratis together in a coalition to try and push back against this Houthi threat. But Marc, just this past week with renewed Iranian attacks, I've seen reports that these attacks reportedly push oil shipments way down, below pre-war levels.

11:56 Doesn't that suggest Iran still has considerable leverage here? Well, I think you need to look at rolling seven-day averages, fourteen-day averages, month averages, right? I think the trajectory is positive, and you're gonna see twists and turns in this campaign. But I think they certainly have leverage.

12:12 I mean, they still have ballistic missiles, they still have drones, and as Suzanne said, they're still around. But being around and surviving doesn't mean that they're strategically winning. They're playing their last cards at a time where the regime is very much on its back foot. Its economy is collapsing.

12:27 It's terrified that millions of Iranians are gonna return back to the streets, and its nuclear program has been severely degraded. So that was ul-ultimately where I would put the ledger. We've sharply reduced its war-making capability, sharply reduced that nuclear threat that so many of us were worried about, sharply reduced its ballistic missile production capability.

12:47 We've effectively taken Hormuz away from the Iranians. It's not over, but we've diminished their leverage. And now we're-- now the battle shifts to the Bab el-Mandab and the Red Sea, where the Houthis are c-still capable of creating havoc. And now this coalition of the good needs to deal with this Houthi threat as the last remaining Iranian proxy threat that has any kind of severe implications for the United States and the region.

13:12 Suzanne, Mark has argued, and not just Mark, I mean, I hear this a lot, that time is really now working against Tehran. The Islamic Republic's economy is deteriorating, its oil revenues are under pressure, and the regime faces the possibility of renewed domestic unrest. I don't know if it'll be at the scale of what it was, you know, kinda January of this year, but it could easily hit that or some-- maybe even something more severe.

13:36 So seems to me you see the balance of power differently. So why? What, what makes you think Iran can withstand all this pressure we're talking about longer than Washington and other actors outside Iran and inside Iran can sustain it? It's a great question, and obviously we're all trying to see through the glass darkly with respect to what's happening inside Iran.

13:57 But I would point out this, that we have managed to reconstitute near pre-war levels of oil exports. We have not managed to reconstitute near pre-war levels of exports of LNG, for example. And even the oil that we are, uh, helping to guide out of the Gulf, it costs an awful lot more to do it this way.

14:18 It costs a lot more for the companies, for the producing countries, and for the American consumer and consumers around the world because it effectively requires ship-to-ship transfers. The Iranians have begun to apparently improve their ability to target the passage through dark of night, and we're seeing constraints on supertankers because of the necessity of essentially using multiple ships for every export cargo that comes out of the Strait of Hormuz.

14:45 So I would not say that we are done with the war i-i-- with respect to the status of the Strait of Hormuz. It's also requiring about one-third of the deployed assets of the American Navy to maintain this. How long is that sustainable? We do have other challenges around the world, and it has also required steps, frankly, that are inconceivable from an American president.

15:06 For example, the decision in the past days by President Trump to accept, to request and then accept imports of diesel fuel from Russia in contravention of standing US sanctions and the latest sanctions package that he himself has signed. And so we're at a point where we're taking steps that are morally and strategically disastrous, and that, again, is just one microcosm of the larger erosion of American status in the world and American military readiness that this war has ensued for the United States and for our relationships and credibility around the world.

15:42 The Iranians have been able to hold out. They may not be able to hold out indefinitely. We do know that, of course, the s-- blockade is having significant economic pressure on Iran. But I will say, having studied the Iranian economy and having watched repeated invocations of maximum pressure and steps that the United States takes that it assumes will be a knockout blow to the Iranian economy, that has not happened in the past, and I would suspect that we're going to see our own vulnerability to the rising price of fuel, a significant constraint on our ability to sustain this kind of arrangement that is enabling some of the oil to come out at present.

16:21 The final point I just wanna make is about the Iranian people. And there I think the costs of this war, the choice to go to war on February twenty-eighth, are absolutely catastrophic. Iranians risked their lives and paid an enormous price back in late December and early January. Human rights organizations have documented as many as seven thousand who were killed by the regime when they protested against it at that time. Real numbers are probably quite larger than that.

16:48 But fundamentally, when the president tweeted that the United States would come to the rescue of the Iranian people, he did just the opposite. This war has had catastrophic implications for the Iranian economy, and the people who are paying the price are not those who are in power. It's ordinary Iranians who are going without food, who are going without medicine as a result of this campaign. And let me tell you, I've spent time in Iran, and I-- they remember American misdeeds very clearly.

17:17 If you think that the Mosaddeq affair lives large in the mindsets of Iranians, I can tell you that this is a betrayal on a, an order of magnitude larger than that. To promise to come to their rescue and to, uh, leave them in a state where they are at the, the behest of a regime which has treated them with extreme cruelty and cut off from the world, this is an incredible betrayal by the United States.

17:42 So Mark, you know, I watched those briefings by Admiral Cooper, and they're impressive in terms of the stick-to-it-iveness of the US military, of Central Command, in terms of what it's accomplished against virtually all the expert opinion that was out there, not, you know, the consensus expert opinion in terms of what could be accomplished, how the US could regain its strategic footing in the Strait.

18:02 And then you listen to Suzanne, she paints a picture of where the Iranian people are at, and that is obviously not a picture that we often see in those military briefings from our own military. What is your response to what Suzanne is saying? So a few things. I, I think on the Iranian people, look, it's, it's difficult for us to know, but there certainly seemed to be very strong support for US and Israeli military operations against the regime in Iran at the time.

18:25 And when President Trump said, "Help is on its way," I think the Iranian people really did expect that there would be serious help. Now, to be fair to President Trump, a month later, he launched military operations against the regime, and between the Israelis and the Americans, killed Ali Khamenei, top IRGC Ministry of Intelligence officials, took out, you know, thousands of IRGC and Basij, took out the very people that had been brutalizing the Iranian people.

18:48 I think the missing element of the president's strategy, I've, I've said this time and time again, is that if you do epic fury, which is the military campaign, if you do economic fury, which is the maximum economic squeeze, we should be doing Operation People's Fury. We should be providing significant support to the Iranian people so that when they come back to the streets, and I have no doubt they will be coming back to the streets again, they're not coming back alone.

19:10 We've armed them, we supported them, we financed them, we provided them with communication devices so that they can communicate, mobilize, and maybe these protests will be even bigger this time than they were last time. But I agree with Suzanne. I mean, the economic fury, the brunt of economic fury has fallen on the average Iranian, and the question for us is, is economic pressure enough to break this regime?

19:31 I also think that the more important question from a US foreign policy perspective is what are the alternatives? Now, Suzanne and I have known each other many years. We've been debating Iran for many, many years. The other alternatives that Democratic administrations chose, one was a-- the Obama JCPOA nuclear deal, and the other one was President Biden's attempt to get back into an Iran deal.

19:51 And in both cases, I think the current situation is far better than we would have ended up under both those trajectories. The JCPOA had restrictions, temporary restrictions, which were good, and most of those restrictions would go away actually starting right about now, Dan, twenty twenty-five, twenty twenty-six, and in twenty thirty, all of the nuclear restrictions that were relevant would go away and Iran would take patient pathways to nuclear weapons with a massive nuclear infrastructure, unlimited enrichment capabilities, and it would have a missile arsenal and a missile shield under which it would have immunity against American and Israeli attacks.

20:25 It also would have permitted control over Hormuz. I mean, Ali Khamenei wanted to take control of Hormuz, but not at Iran's weakest point, the way Mostafa Khamenei took it, but when Iran had nuclear weapons, ICBMs, tens of thousands of ballistic missiles, hundreds of thousands of drones, a Chinese Russian-built military, and an economic infrastructure that could withstand US sanctions.

20:45 That's when he wanted to take Hormuz, and he would have taken it permanently. We fortunately killed him, and then Mostafa Khamenei, his son, played the Hormuz card when Iran was at its weakest. It didn't have nuclear weapons. It didn't have ten thousand ballistic missiles. It didn't have hundreds of thousands of drones, and its economy is collapsing.

21:02 The second big mistake, of course, is that President Biden, after President Trump had withdrawn from the deal, put on maximum pressure. And by the way, the Iranians didn't escalate their nuclear program under Trump because they were afraid of Trump. They waited until Biden's election, and then most of Iran's nuclear expansion occurred when President Biden was in office. It's not a partisan point.

21:20 It's just a factual point, and it-- I think it demonstrates that when you're evaluating where we are today, you need to compare it to the alternatives, and the alternatives would, would have given Iran nuclear weapons, a powerful economy, terror proxies, by the way, that we saw their face on October seventh.

21:37 And I think with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, the Israelis would never have been able to do to the terror army the decimation that Suzanne is talking about had Iran had that kind of potent capability. Suzanne, the best-- maybe the best place to, I don't know about settle the question, but try to address the question of who has the leverage is by trying to understand the state of negotiations.

21:59 So Iran is negotiating under significant pressure. In late September, Tehran proposed reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief, unblocking its ports, and releasing frozen assets. Washington rejected those terms, and Iran rejected an American counterproposal in early October. I'm just trying to, like, kind of set up where, where we are right now or how we got here.

22:20 So from your perspective, why have the negotiations reached a stalemate? I guess that's my first question for you, and then I have another one. I think the negotiations have stalemated because ultimately the Iranians aren't prepared to give what the United States wants, and the United States is not prepared to give what the Iranians want.

22:37 The Iranians want some kind of sanctions relief, meaningful, durable sanctions relief, in-injection of opportunity back into their economy. And the United States, from what I understand, wants some sort of a, um, grandiose nuclear bargain that would forswear any possible nuclear industry within Iran, and that is something that the regime has made very clear for decades now that it is not prepared to countenance.

23:02 And so even after an intense military campaign and the, uh, imposition of even more intense economic pressure, we haven't yet seen the Iranians willing to agree to the terms that the president wants. And I think this gets back to the point that Mark made about the decision in twenty eighteen by President Trump during his first term to walk away from the JCPOA. The JCPOA was imperfect.

23:24 Uh, obviously, it was limited to only addressing the nuclear program, as Mark noted, not the proxies, the missiles, and the other aspects that Iran uses to threaten its neighbors and its own people. But what it did do is at least put a constraint on that for a period of time. And by the United States walking away from the deal, the Iranians chose to do the same and over time, as Mark noted, built an industrial nuclear program that was very advanced, that was producing highly enriched uranium and not removing its stockpiles of low enriched uranium.

23:54 They were-- had introduced advanced centrifuges. They were doing many things that the deal would not have allowed them to do. That put us in a position where military action was one of the only alternatives, and I think the Operation Midnight Hammer, as Mark noted, was successful in setting back the Iranian nuclear program in a historic way.

24:13 For the first time in nearly two decades, the Iranians weren't enriching uranium. If we were debating this issue in the aftermath of that war, I would have said that, in fact, the use of military force was necessary and effective. I think the distinction is, in the aftermath of this war, we find ourselves in a situation where the Iranians have been able to erode our regional presence, tie us up in a stalemate that distracts us and hurts our strategic leverage with other conflicts and other interests around the world, whether it's Ukraine or China.

24:43 And that has passed on significant costs to the American people in terms of our economic position, and over time, that is going to be a critical issue here. So I think on balance, it's very clear that the war has not served our interests and that we find ourselves unable to actually get to a diplomatic outcome, which is probably the only solution here.

25:06 Mark, how do you respond? Yeah, I mean, I think the reason, Dan, we're at an impasse is one fundamental issue, and Suzanne has said it. It's called domestic enrichment of uranium. The Iranians won that in the JCPOA from Obama, and the fatal flaw of the agreement were not just restrictions that sunset over time, where all these restrictions on advanced centrifuges and everything else go away, but that the Iranians had the ability to continue to enrich uranium, which is the key fissile material you need for nuclear weapons.

25:32 And nobody has denied the Iranians a civilian nuclear program. I think the Trump administration has said, "We understand that if we give you domestic enrichment, you're gonna build nuclear weapons," and that is the impasse that has prevented a diplomatic deal. If the Iranians tomorrow said, "We're gonna have civilian nuclear fuel like twenty-three other countries.

25:48 We'll have a civilian nuclear program, no domestic enrichment, no plutonium reprocessing," the Trump administration would do a deal in a Manhattan minute and would give massive sanctions relief to Iran. The Iranians are digging in their heels. I think they're digging in their heels because they see in two years' time that President Trump is leaving office.

26:07 I think if Trump had another four years, the Iranians would have a completely different posture. They think a Democrat's gonna take the White House, and a Democrat's gonna reflect the sort of conventional wisdom that you're hearing, and that is that we are not gonna use military force. We're not gonna continue to impose maximum pressure.

26:23 We're gonna seek diplomacy, and we're gonna seek some kind of deal, and if we do, we'll probably give you domestic enrichment, and we'll put some temporary restrictions on you the way we did in twenty fifteen, and we'll kick the can down the road hoping that this can doesn't explode into an atomic weapon.

26:37 So I, I think it's very important to focus on what the stalemate is, and I think it's also very important to understand that the current war was very much about removing Iran's ballistic missile shield. I mean, Suzanne admitted that the June war of last year was a smashing success in degrading nuclear capabilities.

26:55 But what we haven't zeroed in on, on is the other aspect of Iran's deadly capabilities, its ballistic missiles, its intercontinental ballistic missiles. Ali Khamenei's plan was to build this massive missile shield. When you have it, Dan, Israel's not gonna attack. America's not gonna attack. The Iranians can then build nuclear weapons under this missile shield. The second war is about degrading that.

27:16 We've done a, I think, an excellent job of degrading their ballistic missile production capability, and I think we've paid the price temporarily through Hormuz, and yet we're now reversing Hormuz, taking it back. The American economy actually is doing really quite well, and we've paid a price in terms of the temporary surge in oil prices in order to eliminate one of America's most deadly enemies over forty-seven years and also a close ally of China, Russia, and North Korea.

27:42 And in terms of the nuclear program, I take your point that they were building a conventional capability that was a shield to protect any threats to its nuclear program. But what do we know now about the state of its nuclear program and any path to seriously shutting it down? Well, I think there's still areas of concern which are worth flagging.

28:00 I mean, I think we've talked on this show about Pickaxe Mountain, where the Iranians are trying to rebuild their nuclear capabilities five hundred feet underground under a mountain, a nuclear facility that may be immunized against our ability to use the massive ordnance penetrators that were dropped from the B-twos in June that destroyed the Fordow facility.

28:18 So I know that U.S. government, military, Israelis are hard at work trying to figure out solutions for Pickaxe Mountain. But yeah, let's not be under any illusions. The nuclear program hasn't been eliminated or obliterated, as President Trump said. It's been severely degraded. It's been set back. But Dan, you're a big football fan, so you'll appreciate that.

28:35 The nuclear program was on the one-yard line before the war last June, and that's not my words. Those-- That's the words of the CIA Director John Ratcliffe. So they're on the one-yard line. They, they were able to dash to the equivalent of eleven bombs worth of weaponized uranium. They had a fully intact weapons group. A lot of that has been degraded, but again, let's not b-be deluded or naive.

28:56 They still will seek reconstitution, and there's still a lot of reason to go back in and continue to degrade this capability. Suzanne, President Trump recently announced that the U.S. would not attack Iran, at least not attack Iran before the midterm elections, the U.S. midterms. Now, there are-- many have noted, including a, a recent piece in Axios, that president's public statements on these issues often don't match his actions.

29:23 And some analysts have said he's trying to just generate some momentum for the oil markets with these statements. What's your read on his announcement? And if there is renewed fighting, what do you imagine it look, it could look like whenever it would happen? I think you're exactly right to point out that the president rhetoric on escalation sometimes belies his actions, and we've seen more American troops being moved into the region and other assets.

29:48 So I think it's wise to presume that we may find ourself in a new round of escalation precipitated either by the United States or by the Iranians, and I think both are prepared for that and are anticipating that we will not find a kind of long period of quiet. The Israelis also have a vote in this as well, of course, and at least the reporting suggests that the prime minister would prefer that there is no strike or escalation by the United States prior to Israeli elections.

30:16 But we'll see. I think that, you know, we are likely to be in some situation of escalation over the course of the weeks and months to come simply because there doesn't appear to be a real opportunity for a diplomatic breakthrough, and that is what we've been talking about over the course of, of this podcast.

30:33 Um, and I think that is the fundamental challenge, that the two sides simply don't agree. And Mark, uh, obviously has had a long-standing position of critique of the JCPOA. And the extent to which the Iranians were able to retain their ability to enrich uranium. But fundamentally, the wa-- decision by President Trump to walk away from the deal is what enabled the Iranians to resume enrichment and expand enrichment to the point that they were on that one-yard line.

30:59 And so I think we have to be very clear about, you know, what the challenge is. And of course, the most generous agreement that any American president has ever concluded with the Iranian regime was the one that the President Trump signed at Versailles in June, the memorandum of understanding that promised Iran hundreds of billions of dollars of economic opportunity as well as the removal of key sanctions.

31:21 And so the fact that they didn't trust it, I think, was probably wise. But fundamentally, if we're going to compare the diplomatic achievements in terms of managing the Iranian regime, it's not clear that this administration really has a good theory of the case. From what I understand, the negotiators, Mr. Witkoff and Mr.

31:39 Kushner, believed when they were meeting in Islamabad with Iranian officials that this might be the start of a grand bargain, that there might be a new relationship between this regime and the United States. It doesn't strike me that we have the right team with the deep technical expertise that would actually be needed to produce a meaningful a-agreement with the Iranians.

31:58 And so I think that just means that we're likely to continue in this state of no peace, no war, and no clarity, no certainty, and no confidence in what the economic implications of the standoff in Hormuz are, which is why you see the price of oil remaining high and why you're going to see all of that play out in other parts of the American economy.

32:19 And your view, just Suzanne, because you, you know, Mark made that, the football analogy that the program was on the one-yard line, the nuclear program, and you agree with that, and you blame the Trump administration for that. I guess, where do you think the program stands now? Well, I'm not a football fan, so I can't really predict, tell you one-yard line versus ten-yard line, but it was far more advanced than anyone can be comfortable with.

32:41 [laughs] Um, and I think that what we saw with respect to Midnight Hammer is, you know, while the president obviously used hyperbolic language in describing the program as obliterated, it was, uh, the first time in two decades that the Iranians weren't enriching uranium and that the world could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the highly enriched uranium was at least understood to be buried deep underground and that there were eyes on those sites at all times.

33:06 So there wasn't, uh, you know, the imminent concern of a sneak out. Mark has raised the issue of missiles, and clearly the Iranians, um, have built an, uh, industrial capability there as well, and that was a concern and a risk certainly for Israel and Iran's other neighbors in the region. But the way of dealing with that risk in terms of a regime change war that didn't really have a plan for Iranian response, the presumption seems to have been that the regime would simply collapse and wouldn't be able to mount any kind of reasonable defense.

33:37 Um, that obviously didn't prove to be the case. And now we're dealing with the failure once again in the Middle East of an American administration to go into a war without a clear exit plan. That has obviously, you know, had a huge impact on the American people. They're tired of these forever wars in the region.

33:54 And President Trump, in some respects, was prescient in his early campaigns in highlighting that issue, the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan for Americans, both in terms of our economy and in terms of human life. And now we find ourselves in yet another one of these wars that doesn't appear to have a, a near-term end state, either diplomatic or military, and I think unfortunately it's going to play out at the ballot box in the midterms and potentially for the twenty twenty-eight election as well.

34:23 Mark, you wanna respond to that? I think that President Trump, this wasn't a regime change war for him. I wish it had been. I was actually critical of him for not pursuing a regime change war. I think President Trump made it very clear, even though President Trump is rarely disciplined in his rhetoric, that this is a war about severely degrading Iran's war-making capabilities and nuclear capabilities.

34:41 I think the United States has achieved that. I think second of all, the price that we've paid, I mean, again, I wanna be careful here because there have been twenty-two U.S. casualties, and every one of those casualties is a tragedy for families, and we need to mourn our heroes. We've lost twenty-two American soldiers in this entire war.

34:59 So to compare it to the forever wars of Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam and others, I think is a big overstatement. In terms of actual military capacity, I think we've lost something like eighty-one aircraft, half of which were drones. That's about zero point six percent of our entire thirteen thousand strong aircraft fleet.

35:17 Um, again, nothing to compare to previous wars. And in terms of the economy, Dan, our economy is doing pretty well. I mean, yes, oil is up, gasoline is up, but GDP numbers, stock market, you know, by all accounts, the U.S. economy has really persevered throughout this war quite admirably. But cost of living and inflation.

35:35 Well, yes, but I mean, even inflation is better under Trump than it was under Biden. So again, I'm, I'm not making any political points. I'm not a partisan, and I'm certainly not participating in the midterms. Mm-hmm. The Trump administration can make their own arguments. But the economic cost for the United States has been minimal. It's been relatively low in terms of lives and military infrastructure.

35:54 I think on the Iranian side, they gotta be very worried. You know, this is not just my point. I mean, uh, Mohsen Rezai, who's one of the top Iranian national security figures, who's no shrinking violet, and certainly is not pro-America or pro-Israel or pro-FDD, was making exactly my case just a couple of days ago when he said, "We're facing a severe crisis," and the crisis is gonna really hit the ground when the regime can no longer pay its security forces, right?

36:20 If it starts missing payrolls, then you got a problem. If you can't pay two point seven million members of the Basij or a hundred and sixty thousand members of the IRGC, you have a problem. And the Iranian regime has never faced this kind of economic pain before, not during Trump one, not during Obama, certainly not during Bush, not even during the Iran-Iraq wars. I mean, this is severe economic crisis.

36:43 And the question is, is that gonna be enough to topple the regime? I can't tell you, but I can tell you the one thing, and I'll end with this It is always good to weaken your enemy, it is always better to severely weaken your enemy, and it's best to cripple your enemy. And in that respect, we have severely weakened one of our most dangerous enemies.

36:58 And in doing so, and I think this is an important point to remember, we've eliminated the possibility of a multi-front war if China decides to take Taiwan. Because if China decides to take Taiwan, of course, the Chinese were planning for the Islamic Republic to launch an offensive war against the United States and tie us up in the Middle East.

37:16 The fact that we've weakened Iranian capabilities means we are stronger in countering China, and the fact that we've realized that we have a munitions problem and are now engaged in a massive production surge in order to account for that, I think ultimately is going to put us in a stronger position vis-a-vis China than if we had been asleep at the switch the way we were before, and then have found ourselves with a major confrontation in the Taiwan Strait, and then faced a munitions crisis.

37:40 Better to face a munitions crisis and respond to it with respect to Iran, than face one when you're facing off against the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army in the Indo-Pacific. We'll be right back with Mark Dubowitz and Suzanne Maloney after this short message. [whooshing sound] [gentle music] Hi, it's Gabe Silverstein from the Arc Media team. You may know me from Research by Gabe Silverstein.

38:04 Last summer, I participated in a Birthright trip, so I can tell you exactly what they mean when they say, "One trip changes everything." Birthright didn't just connect me with my Israeli brothers and sisters in a spiritual and lasting way. Birthright gave me a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Jew, and where I fit into the Jewish story.

38:23 It's incredible to me that this organization exists, and I know that behind every one of these trips are generous people who made it happen, people like you. Birthright Israel's goal is to inspire and empower a new generation of Jewish young adults. To help make that happen, and to create more life-changing experiences like mine, please visit onetripchangeseverything.com.

38:45 Birthright, one trip changes everything. [whooshing sound] Ever listen to Call Me Back and think to yourself, "This would be so much better if Amit went on a rant about the latest celebrity who said something stupid about Israel?" Or if Nadav ranked every member of Knesset by how hot they are? Tune into our show, Chosen People Problems, for the real news. Yeah, because that's what the world needs, more Jews in media.

39:08 Yeah, like more Jews with strong opinions about things. [beep] I think we should do it one more time. Okay. I don't want to do, "Yeah." Yeah. I can't stand... You could say it, I just don't want to say it. What did I say? We both said, "Yeah." Like we're not-- Why are we doing that? It sounds so [beep] retarded. Sorry for those listening and editing this. It's going to get worse from here, by the way.

39:26 Listen to our [beep] show, Chosen People [laughs] Problems. This should actually be the intro. Okay. [beep] Chosen People Problems. We're like Amit and Nadav, but more so. Please tune in or Dan Seiner will be mad at us. You can find Chosen People Problems wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen ad-free and get access to our weekly exclusive bonus episode by joining Arc Plus at arcmedia.org.

39:50 [whooshing sound] And we're back with Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Suzanne Maloney, Vice President and Director of the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. Question for both of you. I, we're, I mean, I'm in Israel right now. There's increasingly talk, chatter, reports about the possibility of Israel striking Iran in the next few weeks, even possibly before the election here in Israel. What-- I mean, it's all speculative right now.

40:16 I'm just curious what your assessment of that possibility is. I'll start with you, Suzanne. I would defer to Mark on this one. I'm not in Israel at the moment, and I, I don't really have a, a sense of the zeitgeist there. So I, I did just want to say a word, though, about the China factor, which I find quite strange. Sure.

40:33 There's no world in which somehow this war has put us in a stronger position vis-a-vis China. The war has amplified doubts among all of our friends and allies about the value of our security umbrella. Our allies see an America that's been humiliated. Our Gulf partners now s- believe that their survival requires integrating Iran into the regional system in some way, and there's simply no world in which we are in a better position, having significantly degraded our munitions and interceptors through this war to deal with a Taiwan contingency in the near or even medium-term future.

41:08 We have set ourselves back, and we have demonstrated to the Chinese that they can, in fact, withstand the crisis that most assumed they were far more vulnerable to than the United States because they are so heavily reliant on imports of oil from the Persian Gulf region. And now they have demonstrated their ability, both through their strategic petroleum reserves, but also through the electrification of their economy, that they can withstand crises that impose a high cost on the United States.

41:39 The presumption that this somehow benefits our strategic competition with China just strikes me as ludicrous. Well, Dan, let me say something to that. I just had actually on my podcast the Japanese ambassador to Israel, who also previously served as the Director General of the Intelligence Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.

41:57 He was making this argument that I just made, which is really fascinating. He thinks that by sharply reducing the possibility of a s- uh, another front against Iran, we can therefore focus our resources on the coming front in the Indo-Pacific with respect to China. So I, I'd encourage folks to listen to that podcast. I think he makes the argument better than I am. But let me respond to your question about the October surprise.

42:21 I mean, I, I, I've warned in pages of the New York Post now for a couple of months that there would be an October surprise, and we needed to look out for it. But that October surprise would be the one the Iranians would be launching, not the United States or Israel. And so you-- The attacks against Saudi Arabia, you could argue, are part of an October surprise.

42:38 What the Houthis are doing in the Red Sea is an Iranian-backed effort, again, to spike oil prices and diminish President Trump's chances at the ballot box, as Suzanne said. That could be the October surprise. Is it in Netanyahu's interest to launch an October surprise against the Iranians? And if he does, you had asked earlier, what does that look like?

42:56 I think the Israelis believe that targeting energy infrastructure, going after the next 20, 30, 50, 70 members of the Iranian regime, they've got a very rich and deep target bank that they're eager to use. But the real question again is, is President Trump willing to green-light an Israeli strike right before the November midterms? And I'm skeptical that he would. Okay. I guess I wanna end with a question for each of you.

43:21 You can amend my scenario, but let's imagine the war as we understand it, this phase of the war, that the war ends with the Islamic Republic still in power for the foreseeable future, but a severely weakened military. So the regime, the Islamic regime is still in power, but it has a severely weakened military and a nuclear program that has been severely damaged, maybe contained for some time, but not permanently dismantled.

43:49 And imagine that Hormuz reopens, and sanctions are partially lifted, and Iran agrees to some restrictions on its nuclear program going forward, however, you know, verifiable those are. Is that an American victory? Would that be an outcome that both of you could say, "You know, we've gotten the situation, at least for the time being, to a satisfactory place"? I'll start with you, Suzanne.

44:14 I think that that would be a positive outcome as compared to where we are today and where we have been over the course of this war the past seven months. I don't describe it as a victory. I don't think that the price that we have paid is worth what that modest, um, setback to Iran's military power and some kind of an agreement that probably won't be any more, um, durable than the JCPOA proved to be.

44:40 So I think that an end to this war is going to have to be negotiated diplomatically. It's not going to be achieved through military force. It will leave the Islamic Republic in power. It will leave the Iranian people far worse off than they were even before this war began, and it will leave the United States, I think, in a position where we have had to concede to an adversary that seems economically, technologically inferior to the United States, and that, as we've seen in other conflicts, is fundamentally conceding a victory to the Islamic Republic.

45:15 They have done so in other cases. They will use this to, and any opening they get in terms of sanctions relief, as a way to consolidate the regime once again, to reinforce their ideological narrative, and to proclaim a great victory over the great Satan. It would be a tragedy. Suzanne, before I let Mark respond to my scenario, I just have one question, because when Epic Fury got going with a lot of shock and awe, and then it seemed to kind of stall, there was this chorus, and I alluded to this earlier, there was this growing chorus that was like, "Oh, the Trump administration is being squeezed because Iran's leaders, the regime's leaders, understand that the closer and closer we get to the midterms, the congressional midterms in the United States, it's gonna be impossible for Trump to do anything but just make major concessions."

46:06 And the reality is, he hasn't. At least the concessions that were being speculated that many thought he would make, he has not made, and he has basically maintained some kind of squeeze on Iran, on the regime, and kind of gotten creative. I take your point, at the expense of the deployment of a lot of military resources, but the administration has gotten pretty creative about how to keep energy supplies, energy resources flowing, more or less.

46:33 First of all, are you surprised that the administration didn't fold as quickly as many had predicted he would? And do you think the regime miscalculated in that assumption, assuming they were making that assumption? Because many of us, many out there thought the regime was assuming the closer and closer the U.S. got to midterm elections, that President Trump was, like, up against a wall.

46:54 Look, the president did make major concessions with the MOU that he signed back in June. Um, the Iranians obviously didn't trust them, nor should they have, simply because it was far too generous an arrangement. It was almost surreal. They, I think, underestimated the ability of the U.S. military to manage this really complicated situation in the Strait. The Iranian regime underestimated?

47:15 Absolutely underestimated how quickly and how successfully the United States could actually, um, deploy enough force and go through these creative ship-to-ship transfers that the Iranians themselves have utilized as a kind of tool of their smuggling operation over the course of the past eight years, and that that would resupply the, uh, global economy, obviously at a very, very high cost, not just in terms of U.S.

47:38 military presence in the region, but also in terms of the premium, uh, of $30 a barrel or more that's being paid by the companies, the countries, and consumers, uh, as a result of these arrangements. But I think they underestimated that. I don't know that they're playing this for the midterms. The Iranian regime has a lot of antipathy toward both parties.

47:58 They haven't necessarily found either one of them to be terribly amenable to their ambitions and ideological strictures. So I, I don't think that they're quite as focused on midterms as they are on trying to create a new strategic equation in the region. They want to maintain some kind of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.

48:17 They want to ensure that they get real economic benefits as a result of their ability to withstand this war, either from tolling the strait or from some new economic arrangement with the Gulf or sanctions relief or some combination of the three. And so it is that determination on their part to try to change the balance of power permanently. And they have done that in some respects because they've made some of our bases nearly uninhabitable.

48:42 Our military posture in the region is going to have to be significantly adjusted for the long term as a result of this war, and we don't even know what that looks like at this point in time. But I do think that, y- you know, when we look back on this period, it's very possible that the Iranians have, um, overreached. They've done that in the past.

48:59 They did that during the Iran-Iraq War when they rejected an offer of reparations to end the war, that coming from the Gulf at the time. They may have overreached at this point in time, but my guess is that they're going to continue to try to calibrate both escalation and diplomacy in a way that keeps the regime in power, that enables them to net some benefits, and that will be a strategic setback for Washington.

49:21 I was a critic of the MOU, but I have been confident in President Trump's through line on Iran policy since the first Trump administration. I think President Trump understands the danger of the Islamic Republic. He understands that for forty-seven years, US presidents on both sides of the aisle did not confront the war that had been launched against the United States by this Islamist regime, and he understood that it was his responsibility to severely diminish their deadly capabilities, and I think that he has done so.

49:49 And so if that scenario that you painted, Dan, ends up, I think that is a victory for the United States. Now, clearly, that's not a total victory. A total victory is the end of the regime and a replacement with someone-- something better for the Iranian people and better for the region and better for America.

50:04 But to severely degrade their deadly capabilities, nuclear, missile, and military and terror capabilities over a short period of time is a real victory. And again, I just wanna, wanna return back to this because I think it's always important in national security and foreign policy and life, you gotta compare where you are to where you could have been.

50:21 Compared to where we were when President Trump took office last year, compared to where we would have been if we had stayed in the JCPOA and allowed the JCPOA to give Iran these patient pathways to nuclear weapons, the scenario that you just painted is significantly better. Is it total victory? No. Is it victory? Well, maybe it's limited victory, and what really matters is the next president.

50:42 And I like to think the Iranians are right and that it doesn't matter if it's a Democrat in the White House or Republican in the White House, and that the next president, regardless of party, is gonna continue to put the pressure on this regime, not allow it to reconstitute its nuclear missile and terror capabilities.

50:57 And yes, I've, I've always been in support of diplomacy and drive the Iranians to a hard bargain, but not a bargain that allows them to retain these deadly nuclear capabilities that one day they can turn into nuclear weapons. This war is probably gonna continue in one form or another through the entirety of the Trump administration, so I have a feeling I'll be checking back in with both of you to give us your scorecard as we go along.

51:21 Suzanne, Mark, thank you for this conversation. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. [upbeat music] Here in the US, Jewish college students have been carrying their own weight. For years now, they have faced peer pressure and a constant stream of anti-Israel misinformation on campus, online, and everywhere they turn.

51:50 They can keep arguing about Israel from thousands of miles away, or they can do the one thing that actually works: go on a Birthright trip and experience Israel for themselves. They will come back more grounded, more confident, and more connected to who they are. So if you've been waiting for the right moment to donate, this is it, because Israel needs them and they need Israel.

52:11 Go to onetrippchangeseverything.com and make a gift today. Birthright, one trip changes everything. [upbeat music]