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.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Trita Parsi from the Quincy Institute, and I beseech you, you guys, you gotta read his book Treacherous Alliance.
It's the US, Iran, and Israel, and of course Iraq stuck in the middle, and 60 years of that, and man, if you think Fool's Errand has footnotes and is well done, forget about it.
Man, you have to read Treacherous Alliance.
Anyway, welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Trita?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us, and listen, I really owe you one for reading John Bolton's book for me.
Somebody even sent me the PDF, but I just ...
One, I don't have the time, but really, I don't have the patience or the stomach for it.
So thank you for reading John Bolton's book for me.
Tell me all of the horrible stuff in there.
Oh, I meant to say you wrote this article at foreignpolicy.com.
John Bolton can stomach Kim Jong-un's North Korea, but not Iran, which the first part of that is news to me, but we'll get to that later, maybe.
But let's talk about Iran here.
I mean, that's really important revelations in Bolton's book, assuming you can believe a word of it, even when it's self-incriminating.
He just thinks he's boasting anyway, so who knows?
But anyway.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the thing.
He thinks this is so great, so I really doubt that he's lying about it.
But I mean, I'm shocked that there's not more shock about the fact that both Bolton and Pompeo and Netanyahu were conspiring behind Trump's back in order to sabotage the very clumsy diplomacy with Iran that Trump nevertheless was seeking.
Both were so accustomed to the fact that someone like Bolton constantly is doing these things.
But there's another aspect of it, which is the reason I wrote that article.
If Netanyahu, who is so in love with Trump and who has stated that Trump is the best president Israel ever has had, and is so close to him and has gotten so much from him, he's gotten the Golan Heights, annexation of the West Bank, moving the embassy.
If he nevertheless had to conspire with Bolton and Pompeo behind Trump's back in order to kill any chance of diplomacy with Iran, well then what that shows is it wasn't anything wrong with the Iran deal.
It wasn't that Netanyahu couldn't trust Obama and as a result of that he was against the Iran deal.
No.
Even with the best possible president from his perspective, the easiest pushover in the White House that Netanyahu has ever experienced, he still felt that he needed to sabotage diplomacy with Iran.
And what that shows in my view is that the problem with the Iran deal was not any of its details.
It was not that it was done with Obama.
The problem with the Iran deal from Netanyahu's perspective was that it was a deal between the United States and Iran.
Because any deal, regardless of its details, from his perspective would be bad for Israel because it would reduce U.S.-Iranian tensions, but it would not necessarily reduce Israeli-Iranian tensions.
It would enable the United States to leave the Middle East militarily, or at least lessen its military footprint there, and stop putting his finger on the scales in favor of Israel when it comes to the balance of power.
So it didn't matter what was in the deal.
As long as there was some sort of a reconciliation or movement towards reconciliation between the United States and Iran, that would be bad news for Netanyahu.
And this has strong implications on what a Trump 2 administration would do, or what a Biden administration would do.
Because what the Obama administration thought they could do is to strike a deal with Iran that would block the paths for any potential movement towards a nuclear weapon, while at the same time keeping Israel and Saudi Arabia somewhat content and happy.
That's an equation I believe has been proven to be impossible to solve.
Either you strike a deal with Iranians and you enable the United States to leave the region, or you go and you put the national interest of Israel and Saudi Arabia ahead of that of the United States, and you continue with this fabricated enmity, or at least at this point, unnecessary enmity between the United States and Iran.
Because the idea that you can please both, or you can advance your own interests at the same time, keep Netanyahu happy, has proven impossible, mindful of the fact that even with someone like Trump, Netanyahu does everything he can to sabotage U.S.-Iran diplomacy.
What exactly did Netanyahu do to undermine Trump?
He was conspiring with Bolton behind Trump's back, in which they were trying to make sure that there would not be a meeting between Zarif and Trump in France during the G7 meeting.
Macron of France was trying to broker something, and Bolton was so upset about it that he had already written his two-sentence resignation letter, and he was going to jump on a plane immediately back to Washington.
He had had his staff prepare the plane so that if he woke up in the morning and he heard that the meeting had taken place, he would resign and leave.
He had earlier on, according to himself, sabotaged an effort by Senator Rand Paul to get Trump and Zarif to be able to have a dialogue.
And by the way, we don't know if the Iranians would have said yes to that dialogue.
They're very suspicious.
Part of the reason why they're suspicious is because they don't trust any diplomacy with Trump as long as Bolton and Pompeo are around him, because they know they're trying to do everything they can to sabotage it.
So we don't know if it would happen anyways, but his mere presence and the fact that he was conspiring with Netanyahu, Netanyahu was trying to get on the phone to talk Trump out of that meeting, but Jared Kushner actually, surprisingly, was the one blocking that, because Jared didn't feel that it would be appropriate for the Israeli prime minister to tell the U.S. president who he should or should not meet with.
And that's in Bolton's telling.
I like that anecdote.
Yes.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's, so again, this is, you know, you mentioned my earlier book, Treacherous Alliance.
This is a longstanding pattern that has been taking place in which the Israelis first wanted to prevent any chance of diplomacy.
And then once diplomacy was happening, they were trying to sabotage it, create impossible goals for it.
And then after diplomacy succeeded, Netanyahu went into even more intense efforts to get it reversed, which he succeeded with under Trump.
According to Netanyahu himself, he is the reason why Trump killed the nuclear deal.
That's what he's been bragging about in Israel.
And now, you know, 20 years ago, just in the chronology here, he'd already withdrawn from the nuclear deal long before any of the events we're talking about here.
Right.
Well, he had withdrawn from the nuclear deal in May 2018.
And according to Netanyahu, that was something that was done because of him, that he managed to convince Trump to do it.
There is some facts that would corroborate that, mindful of the fact that, you know, Netanyahu had that little presentation in which he claimed that he had new evidence again about Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program.
Yeah, Trump's just permanent animus against Obama was clearly the limited hangout there, you know.
Oh, I'm not doubting that at all.
I'm not doubting that at all.
But keep in mind that it took Trump about a year and a half before he pulled the trigger on that.
And there was still a struggle within the administration.
His own desire to kill anything that had Obama's name on it is, you know, without a doubt, I agree with you.
That doesn't mean, though, that it was as easy as that or that it wasn't points of resistance.
And what Netanyahu essentially saying is that he was the one who made sure that those points of resistance were overcome so that Trump could do this.
He may be bragging and exaggerating that himself because of his own domestic political purposes.
But that's a minor point.
The larger point is that we now have a pattern of more than 40 years, actually more than 30 years in which the Israelis have done this.
If you go back 40 years, the Israelis were actually the ones that were trying to get the U.S. and Iran on talking terms because it was a different geopolitical situation back then in the 80s.
But back 30 years ago, 20 years ago, the perception was, well, Iran is an existential threat and Iran has this nuclear weapons program that the Israelis were constantly talking about.
And as a result, what the Israelis were doing was, you know, very not just self-interested in their own interests, but it was actually in the interest of the United States itself.
Now when we go forward and we see that actually once diplomacy started, one of the things that happened was that both the U.S. and Iran recognized that there were ways that they could resolve their problems.
So this type of a completely impossible thing to move that the Israelis had depicted Iran has was not true.
And now when we see that even when a deal was struck, Netanyahu did everything he could to undo it.
And he did it even under a president like Trump.
I think it really shows that we have to reassess what happened even 30 years ago, and that from the very beginning, as I argued in my book 15 years ago, this was not about whether the nuclear deal was an existential threat to Israel.
It was not about whether they trusted the U.S. or not.
It was not about the specific relationship with this president or that president.
This was about the very simple geopolitical calculation that if the U.S. and Iran buried the hatchet, it would be bad for Israel.
The United States would enable itself to leave the region militarily.
It would not any longer automatically be on Israel's side against Iran in all of their small conflicts.
And as a result, it was necessary for the Israelis to keep the Iranian-Israeli, Iranian-American enmity alive.
The best way of doing so was to, at a minimum, first prevent any diplomacy from taking place in the first place.
And if that didn't succeed, sabotage diplomacy.
If that didn't succeed, sabotage whatever agreement that the United States and Iran signed.
You know, it really is kind of remarkable in a way, isn't it, how unnecessary all this is?
I mean, what's the worst case scenario if Trump talked to Zarif?
The chance that he's going to fly Air Force One to Tehran and go shake hands with the Ayatollah and bury the hatchet, or for that matter, make a real deal with Zarif and reenact the Obama-Carrie years over there and strike some grand new deal?
Or go back to the old deal that he already withdrew from because it wasn't good enough because it didn't include missiles and Hezbollah.
Trump was going to back down from that for nothing?
And the chance is that if he had stayed out of it, and just from Netanyahu's point of view, why not just, whatever happens here, I'm sure Bolton and Pompeo can handle it.
You know?
It seems like overkill.
Well, let me put it this way.
If you put yourself in the shoes of the Israelis, because I think one thing we do have to give them some credit for, in my view, is that even though I believe that they have defined their national interest in an erroneous way, or at least Netanyahu has, because there's a lot of people in the Israeli security establishment that were very uncomfortable with this and felt that Netanyahu was risking relations with the sole superpower of the world, the most important ally Israel has, over his obsession with Iran.
And they were very unhappy that he was doing this and felt that this was way too risky.
But nevertheless, if you take a look at it from his perspective, first of all, they recognize quite clearly the Iranians are never going to give up Hezbollah.
It's just not going to happen.
It doesn't matter what type of pressure the U.S. were to put on Iran.
So you're not going to get that.
You're going to get some sort of a deal that probably will make sure that the Iranians will have no way of, you know, theoretically going for a nuclear weapon.
They would have, you know, other types of limitations, but maximum pressure would end.
Sanctions would be lifted.
Iran's economy would be allowed to live up to its full potential.
And the only inhibitions it would have is the incompetence and corruption of the Iranian regime itself.
Under those circumstances, a country of the size of Iran, 80 million people, massive amount of oil, gas, a very talented and highly educated population would grow and would become very, very powerful.
And the balance of power in the region would dramatically shift in the direction that is not of the interest of Israel or Saudi Arabia.
So it doesn't matter what was going to be in the deal.
What the Israelis need is a permanent state of enmity and a permanent state of economic and other forms of pressures on Iran so that Iran cannot grow and so that its balance of power, the region's balance of power, doesn't turn against the interest of Israel and Saudi Arabia.
So from that perspective, I understand the nervousness that Netanyahu has.
But you can also look at it from a different Israeli perspective, a perspective that recognizes that Israel will never in the long run be able to completely dominate that region.
It's a country of six, seven million people.
It's not going to be able to constantly outpower countries like Iran and others, and he has to find a way of seeking some form of accommodation and agree to some compromises.
But compromises is really not what Netanyahu is known for.
It will not be able to annex the West Bank and all of these other things that the Netanyahu government is pushing for if the balance of power in the region shifts away from what it is today.
So from that perspective, you know, they're committed to this.
What I'm mostly upset about is not that.
I'm upset that the United States does not pursue a policy in the Middle East that is actually centered on American interests.
Huh.
Oh, that's odd.
Possibly unheard of in this century, this millennium anyway.
So what might that look like where the Saudis aren't?
You know what?
Let me, sorry.
Let me mention here.
It's really important.
In the spring of 2015, right when Obama was negotiating the nuclear deal with the Iranians, he gave the Saudis a green light to launch this genocidal and treasonous war on behalf of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and their allies against the Houthi government there that had seized power at the end of 2014.
And he did so according to his government, as they told the New York Times, quote, to placate the Saudis.
And the reason why they needed to be placated was because they were very upset, not really at Houthi connections to Iran.
They were upset about the nuclear deal with Iran, which on the face of it, Trita, you would think, wow, John Kerry, in exchange for a little bit of sanctions relief and some of their money that Jimmy Carter had stolen from them back 40 years ago in the first place, they're gravely, greatly scaled back their nuclear program, expanded inspections, locked everything down, double what it was already under their safeguards agreement.
You would think that that would satisfy Saudi security concerns.
Thank goodness our good friends, the Americans, use their strength to force the Iranians to lock down their civilian nuclear program, double extra beyond ever before to make sure it doesn't become a nuclear weapons program, which really could threaten Saudi Arabia.
Right.
But no, that's not how they felt about it at all.
How they felt about it was you're betraying us.
You're going to start tilting back toward the Iranians like it was back in the 50s through the 70s at our expense.
And so to prove that you're not, you're going to help us launch this war of genocide against the people of Yemen and a war of treason on behalf of Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula.
And Obama said, yes, let's do it.
This goes back to what I said earlier on.
This idea that on the one hand, the U.S. can pursue its own interests with Iran, resolve those tensions, avoid this constant being on the brink of war with Iran, enable itself to dramatically reduce the military footprint in the Middle East because the American people want to bring the troops home.
The idea that you can do that while at the same time making the Saudis and the Israelis really happy is a false equation.
It's not going to happen.
You have to choose whether you want to pursue American interests or whether you want to please the Saudis and the Israelis.
Because you saw in that example that you gave exactly how erroneous it is.
In order to make sure that the Saudis would not actually intensify their opposition to the Iran deal, the Obama administration tried to placate them by greenlighting that war, afraid that if they said no to that war, the Saudis would be, well, see, clearly this is not just a nuclear deal.
You're actually going for a pivot to Persia, which is what the Saudis were terrified would happen.
So given what we know now, given that even with a president like Trump, the Israelis would still seek to sabotage Iran diplomacy.
The United States has a choice to make, whether it is Trump too, or whether it's a Biden administration.
Because the idea of being able to placate themselves and Saudi Arabia and Israel on this issue does not exist.
It's a false equation.
And my hope is that the United States adopts a completely region-wide different policy, one in which we clearly define our own interests.
And we recognize one thing, that most of these quarrels in the Middle East, as bad as they may be, as sad as they may be, do not actually affect core American interests.
And if we withdraw troops and we make clear that these partner countries, they're not allies formally, do not have a standing green light from the United States, one thing I think will happen is that many of them will start becoming more reasonable, more realistic, and more willing to agree to compromises because they have no other choice.
Whereas right now they do have a choice.
They can say no to almost every compromise because all they need to do is to lobby the U.S. government and then use the power and the military of the United States to settle their scores.
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Just how narrowly do you define American interests in the Middle East, or how broadly, Trita?
I would say that the key principle- Because by the way, that's what they all say.
No, I mean, tell me someone that can give you a compelling answer as to why the United States should be involved in Yemen because of U.S. national interest.
Oh, yeah.
Well, no, not there.
I've never seen a single person in Washington deal with this.
Well, no, I mean, they do argue that, well, it would be ...
There are some hawks who have argued that it would be an Iranian beachhead, that the Houthis are Hezbollah and we'd have a whole new pseudo, maybe half a regime there in North Yemen that would threaten the Red Sea and Israel and who knows what if they want to.
They do that.
I mean, it's all of these really elaborate, I mean, manufacturing of things, I have to say, because it's very clear to the U.S. intelligence, the Iranians do not control the Houthis in any way, shape, or form.
They do support them.
The Iranians are very opportunistic and they found a way to squeeze the Saudis and that's what they're doing.
What is sad from the American perspective is, as you, I think, alluded to earlier on, the most potent fighting force against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was the Houthis.
The Saudis declaring a war on the Houthis actually helped Al-Qaeda and we've also seen reporting of how a lot of American weaponry has ended up in their hands.
We've also seen how the UAE, while it was involved in the Yemen war with the Saudis, were actually coordinating with Al-Qaeda in order to fight the Houthis.
The bottom line is, that fight does not impact core American interests.
We have an interest in making sure that there's no ability for anything in the region to happen that would attack American civilians or the American homeland.
Maybe it is in our interest to placate the Saudis.
After all, they're the Saudis and what if they're not placated?
That can be a real problem for our whole hegemonic scheme there, right?
You just put your finger on it.
For our hegemonic scheme, I don't think there's nothing in the US interest that says the United States should have hegemony in the Middle East.
It's not worth it.
There's nothing in the region that is important enough that would validate the quest for hegemony in the Middle East.
There's a reason why the Russians and the Chinese are not trying to challenge the United States in the Middle East and seek hegemony, because they're smart enough to know that it's not worth the trouble.
Why would you want to have hegemony in the Middle East?
What's the benefit?
Now, you could perhaps make an argument 40 years ago when the oil was much more important than it is today, but it isn't today.
Forty years ago, you had bad situations, but you had functioning states.
Now you have a bunch of fragile states and a bunch of failed states.
What's the value of hegemony over that?
Look at the French.
They left Libya over their conflict with Turkey.
We don't even talk about Libya any longer.
That country is completely, completely crushed.
There's nothing left.
There's no country there.
You want to be the hegemon of that?
Good luck.
Yeah.
Well, okay, but so what exactly is our interest, because of course, from my point of view, we don't need to have a single ship over there or a single soldier or intelligence officer of any description anywhere near the Near East, never mind the Middle or the Far East.
So what about that?
Well, no, I think we, I would agree with you in the sense that that type of a permanent military presence there is probably very exaggerated, but we have to phase it out.
I think there is a compelling argument to say that it still lies in the interest of the United States that no hostile hegemon takes control over the region and its resources.
That however does not require the U.S. to have hegemony.
It only requires the U.S. to have an offshore balancing capability of being able to prevent that.
So we should actually take advantage of the multipolarity that exists there, because that multipolarity actually ensures that there is no hegemon that emerges that can be hostile to the United States and take control over the region.
But all of these ebbs and flows of small conflicts in the region, first of all, do not affect core American interests, and most importantly, do not in any way, shape, or form warrant the United States to be a belligerent in those conflicts.
We're dragging ourselves into conflicts we don't even understand, that we have no interest in.
And then the argument is, well, we need more troops in order to protect the troops that are in those conflicts that we shouldn't be in in the first place.
Yeah.
So, all right.
I mean, I get it.
That's sort of the Stephen Walt.
I don't know about Mearsheim, but the Stephen Walt, I guess, Andrew Bacevich doctrine is we have our Navy make sure that no one else dominates the Middle East.
But that's it.
I mean, that's about like 80 percent my way, Trita.
But I guess it's all right.
And keep in mind, it's a hard sell in Washington.
And even if it were to go in that direction, it wouldn't be able to be done overnight.
But what I think is important.
I mean, the thing is, in practice, doesn't that mean backing Iraq and Iran against each other in war like we saw in the 1980s?
Isn't that offshore balancing in practice?
No, because I think that would be more of seeking as some form of a negative balance in the region.
I don't think that is in our interest.
I think our interest actually is to have stability in the region because the region is important for global commerce and everything else.
So, no, it's actually good for us to have stability, which means what we should be doing is that we should be encouraging the region to seek its own and build its own security architecture.
The problems that have existed in the past, in my view, is to the extent that that idea even has been discussed, it's still been, well, we should lead it.
America should establish a security architecture in the Middle East.
I don't think we should.
I think we should be strongly encouraging these states to do so and help in any way, shape or form we can.
But for such a security architecture to actually be durable, it needs to have regional ownership.
They cannot own it if we are leading it, if we are building it.
So we need to have a supportive role, which again goes back to the idea that we have to recognize we're not the solution to everything and we shouldn't be everywhere all the time.
And in this specific region, because of a bad history, the best thing we can do is to play a supportive role rather than thinking that we need to call the shots.
Yeah.
I hear you and I understand, too, that you're in D.C. and you can only go so far.
But then again, you know, in that whole Hegelian dialectic of the- This is pretty far, Scott.
I know where you are, but this is pretty far compared to where U.S. foreign policy has been in the last 40 years.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's just like the bumper sticker says, demand total liberty.
You might get to keep some.
But if you're just asking for some, you're likely to settle for a lot less than what you really deserve.
And I guess that's my worry is.
I don't know.
I think that Ron Paul is perfectly reasonable when he told The Washington Post in 2008 that we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
That's it, that we don't need any of this.
We could have we could be a neutral country.
We don't have to be a major power in an international sense at all.
Other than just, you know, big companies trading.
But we don't need to have a foreign military presence of any kind.
We could have a couple of aircraft carriers in mothballs for emergencies.
I don't know.
They're obsolete anyway.
That's and I think that's the real argument that we should be wage and make them justify any of this.
Why should we go on acting like the British Empire, for Christ's sake?
This whole.
Yeah, I think you will have a harder time because if you are making the argument that there shouldn't be anything at all, I think you actually make it easier for the other side to.
Not really.
They're soaking in the blood of more than a million dead people and none of whom needed to die over just the last 20 years.
Never mind what they did to the Timorese, you know?
Yeah.
But but the last 20 years have been, you know, liberal hegemony.
We have to dominate everywhere all the time.
If you are then saying we shouldn't be anywhere at all, I think you will you will lose a lot of folks that at the end of the day could be supportive of an idea of dramatically reducing America's foreign military presence, but are not yet in a comfortable state to be able to go to the position that you're seeking.
But anyway, those are tactical discussions.
At the end of the day, I think it's my job to pull you and your job to pull them.
That's the point.
You know, I mean, look, our Constitution doesn't authorize a world empire, period.
Yeah, it authorizes the U.S. government to be dominant in the states of the union.
And in fact, it says that the national government shall guarantee a Republican form of government to any state in the union, which means regime change if you try to institute a dictatorship in this or that state, but not any state in the world, just the ones who signed up for the compact.
That's the deal.
That's the law.
But anyway, I don't know.
The law.
Isn't that silly?
It's so funny to talk about the Constitution like it's the law.
Nobody believes that.
Happy July 4th, everybody.
Happy July 4th to you as well.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Well, listen, man, you do great work.
And again, I really appreciate you reading John Bolton's book because I just don't want to.
And I think you did find the most important part here where he's working with Netanyahu and even Jared Kushner has to stop him from intervening.
Which I guess, wait a minute.
You know what?
I think we got lost.
It's probably my fault on that anecdote about, you know, exactly how that played out there with with because they did succeed in frustrating the meeting altogether.
Right.
And was it?
Well, the meeting didn't take place.
We don't know exactly why the meeting didn't take place, whether that is because the Iranians were not willing to meet.
I mean, the Iranians have made it quite clear they're not going to meet until Trump first lifts sanctions.
So Bolton's efforts may not have been the decisive factor, but that's not what's important.
What's important is that he conspired with a foreign leader to undermine it.
Whether he succeeded or not is is irrelevant.
What's relevant is that he actually did that task of conspiring with a foreign leader to undermine the president of the United States.
Hey, Israel first.
That's the motto of this government always has been.
And he would have he would have done it with Saudi.
He would have done it with anyone that he thought that he would be able to succeed with.
And again, you know, I think the Saudis are not in any way, shape or form, particularly far away from the Israelis are on this issue.
It's just that they don't have the same pull and the same ability and the same axis necessarily as the Israelis have or Netanyahu has in particular.
So, you know, the way that has ended up is is again, you know, it may not have been because of what Bolton did, but the fact that he engaged in that activity and the fact that Netanyahu was happy to engage in that activity.
What I thought was interesting is that it really cast a very dark shadow on previous analysis of why the Israelis are so opposed to the nuclear deal or why they're supposed to, you know, the Iran deal or, you know, any diplomacy with Iran.
And it was always trying to find something that was actually wrong with the Iran deal.
There was something wrong that Obama had done or said to Netanyahu.
And it was this unwillingness to recognize perhaps it has nothing to do with that.
It just simply has to do with the fact that Netanyahu defines Israel's interest in such a way that it is totally detrimental to it if the United States and Iran reduced their attention.
Yeah, no question about that.
OK, and now I'm sorry, just real quick at the end here, man, by what measure was Bolton good on North Korea?
Well, I don't think he was good at all.
I mean, he was I didn't read those passages as closely, I have to admit, but he did go along.
He did have that handshake with Kim Jong Un.
And the sense one got was that it was a price he was willing to pay in order to get his war with Iran.
I did a search and, you know, on the index and, you know, Iran is mentioned like 700 sometimes in his book.
North Korea is somewhere at 400.
Everything else, the EU, you know, Saudi Arabia, everything else is somewhere around 100.
Things such as, you know, pandemics, I think had two mentions.
Well, and he said that Donald Trump I'm sorry.
Did you mention this, that he he had said in there that Donald Trump's decision to not bomb Iran over the shoot down of the drone, which may have been over the line as a provocation in the first place, there was the most irrational thing he'd ever seen a president.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So those things, again, they were not necessarily new.
We knew about that.
It had been reported.
Now he corroborates them.
What I thought was new is, again, the extent that he and Netanyahu are willing to go in undermining any diplomacy with Iran all the while that he actually nevertheless, yeah, did not resign over the meeting with Kim.
He even shook Kim's hand.
He was there.
The pictures are there.
Oh, yeah.
The pictures are there.
He's actually shaking his hand, which he was totally against it.
He was totally unhelpful.
And as you know, he didn't go along on the I think the second or third trip.
Instead, Trump sent him to Mongolia.
So clearly he wasn't helpful, but he made that that far.
He made that statement about we want the Libyan model for North Korea, which, of course, ended with Gaddafi being shot in the back of the head on the side of the road.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, the priority clearly is Iran on his end, even though there's no one would ever be able to accuse him of being reasonable or dovish on North Korea, either.
But yeah, I like the way you frame that, that that was the price he was willing to pay so that he could still have influence over Iran and try to get a war started there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, he was just saying about that he was trying to get Iran to withdraw, not just from the nuclear deal, but from the NPT and the safeguards agreement to just he'd been caught on tape saying back in 2007.
Isn't that right?
Did you see that?
That was recently.
Right.
Or is that in the book?
I did not see that.
No.
You're saying Bolton did?
Yeah.
You know what?
Honestly, I think it was like just a month or two ago.
There was a story where he had said, you know, officially that he was trying to get Iran to react and withdraw from the treaty.
It was an echo of that same thing he'd said on that call.
That's exactly what's happening right now.
Yeah.
I'll try to find that footnote so I don't sound like such a fool.
Anyway, thanks for your time.
Appreciate a lot.
Thank you so much.
Talk to you soon.
All right, you guys.
That's Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
And here he is in foreign policy dot com.
John Bolton's book reveals the depth of his hostility toward Iran.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
