All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Trita Parsi, of course, one of the founders of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Check out all their great articles at responsiblestatecraft.org.
And he wrote this book that we wrote a bunch of books, but one of them is one of the most important books I've ever read.
And I beseech you, you got to read this thing.
You're going to love it.
And I want to read it again.
It's called Treacherous Alliance, and it's the real history of the relationship between America, Israel and Iran over the last, say, 70 years, especially the last 40.
And it'll just kill you.
You'll love it.
Treacherous Alliance.
Trita Parsi.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, sir?
Thanks for having me again.
All right.
So you also wrote a single roll of the dice about Obama's negotiations with Iran and then losing an enemy about the success of those negotiations, which was pretty short lived because Donald Trump in the spring of 2018 canceled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a.k.a. the Iran nuclear deal.
And so now Biden came in and he said during the campaign he wanted to get back in it.
But then he's been playing tough guy for the last, what, 10 or 12 weeks here or so.
But then I guess we'll just leave off there.
Tell me the good news and then the bad news.
Well, the good news is that they're back to talking, although they're not talking directly.
They're talking through intermediaries.
Moreover, their good news is that they agree on the issues that need to be defined, although the details of it is where the real challenges will come.
And finally, I would say that perhaps most importantly, the good news is that both sides now appear to be working with the same degree of determination to get this resolved.
That was not the case for the first two months of the Biden administration, in which clearly there was not much of a priority on this issue.
Domestic issues were clearly the priority, and it appeared that Biden did not want to use any political capital for this issue.
Now the U.S. team seems to be pretty eager to move fast, make up for some lost time.
And I think that's going to continue to be the case until we run into the first big point of disagreement.
And then again, at that point, we'll have to see if the two sides have enough political will to overcome those obstacles.
All right.
So I want to focus on the part about both sides seem to be saying that, yeah, it's going just fine and that kind of deal.
And that really is maybe the most important part of all, at least so far, is that they are really trying, not just showing up to.
They are.
And I think it's also kind of interesting to see the tone of the language, how it's changed.
I mean, early on in the in the Biden administration, the language that was used was oftentimes like, well, the Iranians know what they need to do and they must do this and must do that as if it was the Iranians that have caused this problem by pulling out of the JCPOA.
It was clearly Trump's fault that we are in this mess right now.
And that language just seemed to me to be overly aggressive.
That is not what we're hearing right now.
It's very constructive.
It's focused on the problem, focused on how it gets resolved instead of doing any finger pointing or anything like that.
Yeah.
And now it was you, wasn't it?
Like last week, you I hope I got this right, Trey.
I think it was you that tweeted out that I think your words, not a direct quote, but something like the Biden people were admitting that they had fumbled this, that they thought that they could use Trump's maximum pressure and wring out more concessions.
But now they kind of are admitting, at least privately, that, yeah, OK, that was really not a very good idea.
And so they're abandoning that.
Is that really right?
Yeah.
Well, no one told me that they were trying to use Trump's sanctions as leverage, whether they did or not is a different matter.
But certainly no one was saying that to me.
But however, there was an acknowledgement that, look, we we didn't move fast enough and we weren't sending the right signals and things of that nature.
But at the same time, making it very clear that things have changed.
And I think by now we are seeing signs, clear signs that that message that things have changed.
We're serious now.
We're moving fast actually is exactly what we're doing.
But I want to emphasize, no one said that, you know, that we're trying to use Trump's sanctions as leverage.
And even if that was the case, the problem wouldn't have said it.
But it was the fumble part was the paraphrase I meant.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, you know.
But that is what they were talking about, right, that they were trying to go with the Pompeo policy they'd inherited for a while there, wasn't it?
I think more than anything else was that they didn't want to make any movement at all because this wasn't a priority.
And this is me saying it in retrospect, looking back, I think they didn't want to have any movement because they don't want to spend any political capital on it.
And they just kind of needed to be either frozen or move in a way that wouldn't be problematic for Biden.
So they were certainly not going to entertain conversations about lifting sanctions, etc.
And they were also very focused on, you know, all this kind of coordination with Israelis and Saudis and Congress.
And I think the totality of that messaging at the time really ended up being problematic because it kind of set the other side of the message that either this is not going to be a priority for some time, not just for the first two months, or they actually are trying to implicitly use Trump sanctions as leverage.
I mean, I'm saying how it was perceived on the other side.
And that was problematic because I think it made, it created a scenario in which the very limited trust that did exist started to evaporate rather quickly because the expectations were high, both on the European side, on the Iranian side, that as soon as Biden comes in, he's going to fix this, or at least move fast to fix it.
And when that didn't happen, combined with some of that messaging, I think it fueled a lot of speculation about what actually is going on.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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I think that it's not the sanctions, Pompeo's or Obama's or, you know, Trump and Pompeo's or Obama and his crews either.
It's progress that the Iranians continue to make on their nuclear program is what brings the Americans to the table and the Americans, whether they mean it or not, apparently they believe their own BS.
They like to say, yes, our crippling sanctions are good for coercing the Iranians to do what we say, when really what it is is they keep getting better and better at spinning centrifuges.
I think last week they added a new cascade to their system.
And so that's what made somebody at the State Department start squealing and say, we got to do something about this now again.
Right.
Just like last time.
You know, both sides will always try to put forward a narrative that makes it look as if it was their pressure that brought about success, because it's on the one hand signals toughness.
On the other hand, it signals that you are in control of what's happening, whereas in reality it's much more complex than that.
And oftentimes it's actually your willingness to give a concession that gets the other side to become more flexible as well.
But no one likes to brag about giving concessions.
And so the narrative almost naturally gravitates towards some sort of a less accurate but more comfortable pressure intensive explanation of what has happened.
I think the fact that the Iranians moved forward with their program definitely added to the picture.
But if the Iranians had moved forward with their program without showing flexibility for inspections, would we have had a breakthrough?
We wouldn't.
It was their willingness to change and shift and open themselves up not only for inspections, but for other types of restrictions that enabled the deal.
Same thing for the US side.
It wasn't a threat of more sanctions or even the pain of the sanctions.
It was that willingness to be able to change the position, lift those sanctions, accept the Iranian enrichment, etc. that elicited flexibility on the Iranian side.
But as Akron, and I think certainly I do believe that that is a much better way of explaining what happened, particularly when you take a look at the details and the timing, neither side is going to embrace that narrative because it essentially means that a lot of problems are actually caused by both sides being unreasonable and that a lot of solutions come around by people being flexible.
And that's particularly in the United States, in Washington, where there's such a premium of being tough and being a superpower.
It doesn't get you very far.
Yeah.
And now.
So what about those new demands?
Do you think that they're going to start throwing the kitchen sink into this deal and say, we want new limits on medium range missiles and you got to stop backing Hezbollah and stop backing Assad and every other thing on our wish list?
Well, it all depends at what point.
I mean, if the idea is to get back into the deal first, the deal that already exists, and then later on try to have add on negotiations on other issues and those add on negotiations are insulated from the JCPOA, meaning that you can have a negotiation on Hezbollah.
If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, but it doesn't kill the JCPOA.
It doesn't hold the JCPOA hostage.
As long as that is the case, I think it's perfectly fine.
By all means, there should be a negotiation, but we should also have not only reasonable expectations of what can be achieved, but also reasonable expectations on what is required for success.
If we want the Iranians to completely give up Hezbollah, the only actual ally they have, I think the Iranians are going to ask for a dramatic change in the nature of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
I don't think anyone on the U.S. side is going to entertain that.
So if we want to have success, we need to shoot for achievable objectives and then be ready to recognize that to get something, we have to give something.
If we don't want the Iranians to have ballistic missiles, well then perhaps we can't sell $60 billion of weapons to the Saudis every year.
But we can have the expectation of demanding all of these different things and then not do anything in our own policy, no shifts in our own policy, because we've tried that.
It's completely useless.
It doesn't lead to anything.
In fact, it tends to further deplete trust, confidence and the ability to be able to get to a point in which the two sides can talk.
All right.
Now, Sridhar, Benjamin Netanyahu says that this deal threatens Israel with annihilation.
Is there anything to that?
Do you fear that possibly the Ayatollah is just trying to get his centrifuges together to the point where he can actually really break out and get his hands on a nuke and use it against the Israelis or the Saudis or anybody else?
No, I mean, that's complete nonsense.
It's part of the type of fear mongering that Netanyahu is using in order to maximize ideological opposition, not to this deal, but to the idea of a deal with the Iranians.
I mean, the science of this is quite clear.
If we actually want to prevent the Iranians from having a pathway to a bomb, the deal is far superior to no deal.
And it's far superior to anything that Netanyahu has thrown out so far in terms of being a viable option.
What Netanyahu wants to achieve is to make sure that there is no reduction in U.S.-Iran tensions.
Because a reduction in U.S.-Iran tensions, particularly over the nuclear issue, is in many ways the ticket for the United States to be able to leave the Middle East militarily.
And that is something I think that's clearly in the interest of the United States.
Three presidents in a row have promised that this is what they want to do.
But it runs up against a whole set of opposition internally in the United States from those who are benefiting from this military presence, particularly defense contractors, to political opposition because of the political influence of these, of the military-industrial conflicts, as well as the foreign opposition from countries such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, who reap tremendous benefit from this security umbrella that the United States is providing to these countries, for which they pay almost nothing and the entire cost is shorted by the American taxpayers.
Right.
Well, that sure does seem to be the name of the game.
But now, well, I don't know, I mean, I guess it seems like if the president has made the decision that he wants to see this through and get us back in the thing, then it is the same deal with Obama that there's really nothing the Israelis can do about it.
I think there were lessons in 2015, right, about the limits of the power of the Israel lobby.
I think that's true.
But I think there's one thing we have to keep in mind.
By the time Obama really showed the political will to push through on this, he was in his second term.
It was the two first years of his second term.
It also meant that he had gone through and achieved most of the domestic political changes, the big items that he thought that he could get through.
That's not where Biden is.
Now, obviously, he has a tremendous amount of things on his domestic agenda.
And at some point, this is going to come up in competition when it comes to political capital that the administration is going to use.
So I think what we're seeing right now is that there's essentially an agreement and instruction that the United States should try to get back into the existing deal.
By first trying to figure out what is the cost of doing so.
And once we know that, once that negotiation is completed and we know the only way we can get through is that we have to do X, Y and Z, then I think the next test comes to see, OK, is the president willing to do this and do it at this moment where he still has a lot of other things on his domestic agenda that he needs to get through.
So I think in many ways it's different.
I think the Israelis can still create a tremendous amount of challenges and problems for the administration.
So I wouldn't count it out.
I think the manner in which a lot of Republicans are still opposed to the deal for reasons that I don't think they themselves necessarily know, it just seems to have become a bit of a habit at this point, is also problematic.
And I think here the Biden administration should do something that the Obama administration chose not to do, which is to level with the American people that this deal is not just a security deal.
It is first and foremost a security deal in terms of what it does on the nuclear front, but it also prevents a war and it's actually the ticket out of the Middle East.
We needed to check the nuclear program in Iran in order for the United States to be able to check out of the Middle East militarily.
And that I think is a message that will resonate with a lot of Republican grassroots, because as much as they supported Trump for this very reason, they are sick and tired of these endless wars.
And the endless wars is a function of us having an endless military presence there.
If we don't, because we don't need to.
That's how we end the endless wars as well and bring the troops home.
Sounds like a great argument to me.
Let me ask you this.
I'm sure you must have seen this piece by Michael Hirsch.
That's audience.
That's H.I.R.S.H., a former Newsweek reporter writing in Foreign Policy, where he says there's three men in the government, the president, his national security adviser, Sullivan, and his secretary of state, Blinken, who's really his man.
Right.
Like Sullivan was Hillary's man, but Blinken has been Biden's man for decades or so.
These are, you know, right hand guy.
So that these men want out of the Middle East, that they say they want to declare victory over Al-Qaeda and say that core Al-Qaeda is dead and that ISIS is a regional nuisance.
And of course, this is the part that could get us all killed.
Now's the time to pivot to China.
So forget that.
But as far as leaving the Middle East, I wonder, I know that you do have a lot of connections in D.C. and all that.
Are you hearing that, too?
I mean, I'm not one to hope for change here, man.
But at the same time.
It only makes sense.
I just wrote a book about it.
Let's call all this off.
We don't have to do this at all.
And it's even plausible to me that Biden and Blinken think so.
I don't know.
What do you think about that?
I, I, I do hear this and I do believe that on the broader strokes of that argument, there is agreement that the presence is excessive at this point, that it is not called for, mindful of our diminishing strategic interests, that there are bigger fish to fry elsewhere.
But I think when it comes to the detail level, there's still a lot of divergence.
What does that mean when it comes to the counterterrorism presence?
We saw that, for instance, early on, the administration thought that they could leave Afghanistan, but keep a counterterrorism presence, which, of course, is not possible at all.
But so I don't think they're entirely, I mean, the idea that we need to reduce the true presence.
Yes.
That we need to shift focus elsewhere.
Yes.
But then when it comes to the magnitude of that, are we bringing everyone home?
Are we cutting it down with 10 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent?
That's where I think there's still going to be a lot of disagreements and a lot of different things that need to be worked out.
Yeah.
All right.
Well.
And then the other point that you're making that I think is, you know, it's also very, very problematic in my view.
You know, the idea of getting out of the Middle East in order to be better positioned for a completely unnecessary and extremely dangerous Cold War with China is not necessarily a movement in the right direction.
I think there's challenges with China we have to address, but to turn it into a great power competition unnecessarily doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.
And it certainly is not a ticket out of this war.
Yeah.
Boyd, I agree with you about that.
And, you know, I got to tell you, I'm sure you've noticed this.
There's actually all these great articles by people lately saying, yes, you know what?
Let's go ahead and get out of Afghanistan.
Let's go ahead and make a deal with Iran.
Really great articles until you get to the very last paragraph where they say so we can focus on China instead.
Like there's some mass hypnosis.
This reminds me of 2002.
Yeah.
Because we have to stop Saddam Hussein from throwing people in his giant human shredder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sure we do.
But but you're you're with the out group if you don't believe that along with everybody else.
And so.
Well, I mean, again, I think some of it is in the detail.
I think a greater focus does not necessarily mean great power competition doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, we're not going to go in and and defend Taiwan as if it's Arkansas.
But there's those who make it much more explicit.
They say, yeah, the only argument that is valid in terms of leaving the Middle East is in order for us to have a bigger war with with China.
That is quite terrifying, because essentially it doesn't mean that you're in favor of having a much more peaceful outlook towards the world.
It's just where do you want to have your war and what type of war do you want to have?
Do you want to have a traditional war or do you want to have a counterinsurgency war?
And it's I think we have to recognize there's a lot of folks in the military that are sick and tired of Middle East for the simple reason that the Middle East means counterinsurgency.
It's not because of these strategic reasons, it's just that they're sick and tired of doing counterinsurgency because you cannot win that war.
And it's got to be quite tiring not being able to win a war after 20 years.
You know, I swear this is true.
I remember when I was like 15, 16 something years old, wondering if I should really get involved in arguing these political points and whatever in whatever forum, because I thought, you know what, you never know what's going to happen.
You might end a war in the Middle East and just free up resources for a war with China.
Now here I am like 25 years later.
That's exactly what I've been doing is arguing we got to get out of the Middle East.
And now here comes the chorus to say, you know what, Horton, you make a good point.
And then they only want to do exactly what I was afraid could happen.
You know, it sucks.
It really does.
I swear that's true.
That was my hypothetical example of like how doing the right thing could go wrong.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Something like that.
It's just ridiculous.
Let me ask you one more thing and then I'll leave you alone for the afternoon.
Back in, say, I don't know, 2000 something early Obama years, the former government employee couple Hillary Mann Leverett and her husband, Flint Leverett, put out a book called Going to Tehran.
And they argued against the Trita Parsi position.
We can't just do a nuclear deal because if we do, there's still so many differences left outstanding and the Israelis and the Saudis have so much influence, they'll screw it up, which is, of course, exactly what happened with Trump ruining the deal.
Now we're lucky.
It looks like we may be able to get back into it.
But so I wonder if you think that maybe there really is a lesson learned there and that the only way to really solve this problem and put it to bed would be for Biden or at least Blinken to go to Tehran and meet with the Ayatollah and say, you know what?
We know that we can't get away with another 53 coup and we don't want to overthrow you.
But you know what?
We want to resolve this, this and that.
Let's go ahead.
Like Nixon and Kissinger did with Mao Zedong.
They said, let's go ahead and shake hands first and then we'll work out the details after that, which worked right.
At least it worked for 50 years.
Yeah, so there's several different elements here.
To do that first, I don't know if that is what would have characterized the Flint-Hillary position.
Doing a bigger deal is something that I've always been in favor of and argued for, in favor of.
In fact, as late as just a couple of weeks ago in Foreign Affairs, saying that Biden needs to think bigger, let's not just focus on the nuclear issue, but actually have our eyes on some form of a normalization.
But the idea that, at least you emphasize in your question here, that it should be handshake first, I don't think there's anything wrong with that whatsoever.
I wouldn't have anything against it.
I just don't think that's what the Iranians will go for because the imbalance of power between the United States and Iran and the deep suspicions that exist on both sides creates a scenario in which the weaker side, which is the Iranian side, is always going to be more worried about getting screwed over than the U.S. side will be.
And for good reason.
And I find it unlikely that they would, particularly after what happened with the nuclear deal, they signed the nuclear deal and the United States still pulled out of it, that the idea that there would be, for political reasons at home, okay, with a handshake first and then resolving the issue afterwards, I just don't think it would fly over there.
But I think in many other cases, it actually is a better way of doing it.
You just establish the political will and the intent, and then you work out the details afterwards.
But there's still other ways you can do so.
So for instance, even without a handshake, just getting the two sides to agree to what the end state should be and then work towards it, in fact, is what happened with the JCPOA and is also what happened in Vienna.
The first thing they actually had to agree on is whether they want to do a step-by-step or first define the end state.
And after they have done that, they'll figure out how to get there.
They chose the latter.
With the JCPOA, the first thing they both sides needed to know, how's the end state going to look like?
And it was agreed upon that it would be within the framework of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which meant that Iranians would keep enrichment.
And then they worked out the details afterwards.
So that formula, per se, I'm actually very much in favor of.
It tends to be better in cases where two countries are at an extremely low trust level and there's political issues on both sides that make it difficult to go with a very vulnerable step-by-step approach in which there is no definition of the end state.
In other words, Biden would have to be so generous that he wouldn't be able to be that generous for American political reasons.
Right.
Depends.
Depends.
I mean, the challenge to actually cut to the chase and say, hey, let's go for normalization is that it would just have an even bigger freak out in Riyadh and Tel Aviv and elsewhere, and where those countries believe that it lies in their interest to have continued U.S.-Iran enmity.
But at the same time, not doing it and thinking that, OK, we can continue to have like this really intense and ridiculous enmity.
But within the enmity, we're going to have this agreement on this issue.
And the rest of our enmity is not going to affect that issue.
I just don't think that works for the JCPOA to survive, whether you go with it first or whether you go for something bigger first.
Nevertheless, you need to build on it.
It will not survive in a strategic vacuum.
Right.
A very diplomatic way to end the interview.
Thank you, Trita.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
Talk to you soon.
All right, you guys, that's Trita Parsi.
She's one of the founders of the Quincy Institute for International Statecraft.
And the blog there is called ResponsibleStatecraft.org.
Dot com.
Dot something.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSRadio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
