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Scott Horton Show.
Introducing Kelly Vallejos.
She is the managing editor of the American Conservative Magazine at theamericanconservative.com.
And boy, they publish a lot of great stuff there.
And including this latest one by her, Haley debuts Trump's case for ending Iran nuke deal.
Is this a nightmare?
What is going on here?
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on the show.
I'm so happy to have you here.
And you know what?
I don't like Barack Obama, but I got to say he was Obama the Great for a day.
When him and John Kerry got this deal through.
And you know, the Republicans sort of kind of pretended to oppose it.
But they actually really let it go through to the way they carded and arranged that law for the vote against it and all of that.
The technicality.
They set it up to go through.
And what they did really was they took the single biggest by far fake in parentheses here issue outstanding between the United States and Iran.
And they took it off the table.
And that was the so-called threat of the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
It actually never existed.
But the big lie was that it did and that they were going to kill all the Israelis with it if we didn't stop them from doing it.
And so they signed this deal.
And so I guess first of all, can you talk a little bit about for people who aren't too familiar or maybe they come from another point of view about what exactly is in the deal?
Because it's pretty easy to say, oh, it's a terrible deal.
And they got away with bloody murder and they got all this money.
And I really, really, really don't like it.
Say like if you're the president of the United States.
But what does the deal actually say?
Well, the deal, which was signed in 2015, is between, and I don't think a lot of people know this either, is between several nations, the Permanent Security Council members, Germany, France, England, China, Russia, and the EU and the United States.
So it's not a unilateral agreement that can just be made and broken by Donald Trump.
Though I think it is somehow framed like that in the mainstream media.
But the nuclear deal, which was signed in 2015, basically it holds the Iranians to inspections of their nuclear power centrifuges and specific sites.
It doesn't go any farther than, and I don't have it out in front of me, several established sites.
It does not open it to these military sites that Nikki Haley, Ambassador Nikki Haley, had referred to.
We can get more into that in the conversation.
But it holds them to opening to these inspections to UN inspectors, IAEA.
And if they do remain closed, then we lift the punishing economic sanctions that these coalition members had imposed several years back.
And so they agreed.
The sanctions were lifted.
And for, I believe, eight times since the 2015 agreement, the IAEA has certified that Iran was keeping to the agreement and was not building any nuclear weapons or generating the centrifuges.
And therefore the sanctions remain lifted.
And then they got their own money back, right?
It wasn't American taxpayer welfare.
It was their own money that America had stolen back 40 years ago.
They finally gave them some of it back.
Weapons, a weapons purchase where their money was seized after the revolution in 79.
So anyway, it's a pretty good deal, it seems like.
And that's it's clearly, I mean, Cuba was pretty good, but this was the one best thing that Obama ever did as president.
And now it looks like these Republicans are going to screw it up.
Kelly, is that right?
Yeah.
And, you know, and we want to even go further back.
I mean, discussions were ongoing with Iran and our security council members during the Bush administration.
As you remember, President Bush was getting pushback from his fellow Republicans, the hardliners and the neoconservatives in Congress and in Washington, had great disdain for the fact that the Bush administration was sitting down with the Iranians and in the other countries to come to this agreement.
So this was something that had already been in the works and that the Obama administration had built upon.
So it wasn't, this wasn't out of the mainstream of Washington policy thinking, you know, to get together with the Iranians and work out a deal in which, like you said, that we were assured that they weren't doing one thing and that they were assured that they wouldn't be blocked from economic commerce for the rest of the world.
We just know, like you said, that the neoconservatives and war hawks in Washington absolutely hated any idea that we'd sit down with the Iranians for all host of reasons that go back to the revolution.
And so they see in Trump an opportunity to overturn this.
Absolutely.
And it sounds like the Trump administration is looking for every possible way to do that.
And the next time will come up in October when it's supposed to be recertified to Congress.
Congress had put in, you know, had passed this bill, you know, around the time that the agreement was passed or had come, you know, there was about to be signed by the president that they would have, you know, a say in this.
And so that means every 90 days that the administration has to go to Congress and certify that Iran is following its end of the deal plus other, you know, measures.
And we can talk about that.
And Trump is looking for ways to find, you know, to, you know, find whatever whatever hole or window opportunity to get out of this deal.
All right.
So and it sounds like two major routes there.
The first is demanding immediate inspections, not like in the rules in the agreement, but trying to basically push the rules in order to demand inspections at unrelated sites without evidence.
Like the deal says, you have to at least provide some evidence or, you know, credible suspicion that there's something to find this kind of thing in order to try to say, aha, look, they're being intransigent.
We're trying.
They did this with Iraq, too.
Saddam won't let us inspect his palace.
He must have a chemical weapons factory beneath his bedroom.
That makes perfect sense.
You know, the fact that he won't let us in there is proof that he's hiding something.
Right.
So that's it.
But except this is even more ham handed than that, because it's Donald Trump and Nikki Haley for crying out loud.
Right.
If if the Bush Jr. administration was tragedy, this is farce here.
And they're just so transparent about it.
Right.
And, you know, and so basically they have identified and what I saw in Nikki Haley's speech to the American Enterprise Institute, which is, you know, this is the nesting ground for all of the neoconservative foreign policy elite in Washington.
She chose a for, you know, obvious reasons to what I believe debut Trump's plan to get out of this deal.
And so she comes forward with this, you know, her southern lilt, this reasonably speaking, spoken demeanor with a several points to be made on how Iran is basically violating the agreement.
And what she says is it's not all about the agreement.
It's about these three pillars, one being the agreement, the second being the United Nations Resolution 2231, which was the the resolution that endorsed the agreement.
And so it's a different set of measures that are non-binding.
But in them, they talk about the Iranian if the Iranians pursue other non-nuclear activities like testing ballistic missiles, that would somehow run askance to the agreement.
But there's no there are no measures in it to to bind the U.N. to unendorse or penalize Iran for doing that.
So that's that's left ambiguous.
But according to Nikki Haley, that is one pillar.
But basically, she says the GP, the GCPOA, which is the agreement at hand.
Then there are the U.N. agreement, the U.N. agreement 2239.
And then there's the Congress, which is the third pillars, the Corker-Cardin law, which is the bill that I just mentioned with Congress.
She sees that as a separate measure.
And so that is the Congress must debate and be assured that Iran is not engaging in both nuclear and non-nuclear activities.
So if if all three of those measures are are kept, then we can stay in the agreement.
But if not, if there if even one of them, if there's a there's a concern or a problem or the transgression, then all bets are off, according to Nikki Haley.
And I think this is the direction that the Trump administration will go.
And, you know, you could say that he's basically going to kick it to Congress.
And which will be interesting because there there there is a huge contingent of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who don't like this agreement and would rather see us go to war in Iran rather than sit down and talk to them.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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You know, I always kind of thought that the Republicans were right in a very narrow sense when they accused Obama of being dishonest when he said the choice is either this deal or war, because that was based on the false premise that they ever had a nuclear weapons program that needed to be preempted.
I mean, I mean, even accepting the false premise that it's OK to do that.
I mean, Lyndon Johnson didn't invade China to stop Mao Zedong from getting the atom bomb.
But the the Iranians are less rational than Mao.
I don't know.
But even assuming that premise, it seems like, OK, so if America takes their ball and they go home, then so what?
Right.
We have the entire U.N. Security Council signed onto this deal.
We have an Iran that was already within the nonproliferation treaty and already had a safeguards agreement, has already agreed to the agreed framework forever.
And so the Americans could put more sanctions on them.
But I still don't see why.
I mean, I think America would have to actually attack them and start bombing them in order to get them to finally decide to make nuclear bombs at this point.
Their whole strategy has been, we're not making nuclear bombs, so don't shoot.
Our hands are up.
Our books are open.
So and in such a blatant way that it takes away America's ability to pretend they're threatened.
So far, that's been their strategy.
I don't know why that would change, even if America backed out of the deal.
Right.
And the economic sanctions, I mean, unlike other unilateral sanctions, these have been very crippling or had been very crippling to the Iranian economy because all of these countries were on board.
And so there was this force of a global penalty to Iran.
If we back out and the sanctions are off, we'd have to reimpose unilateral sanctions, which would not be as effective.
Right.
And then, of course, from Donald Trump's point of view would be, I mean, assuming he can think this through at all would be a huge own goal.
Right.
Because that just means we're ceding a lot of American business to our European competitors.
They win.
We lose.
This is the way he looks at things.
Right.
So more for Airbus, less for Boeing.
Who benefits from that?
And meanwhile, again, for a nuclear weapons program that doesn't exist.
Right.
And for a missile program that's not part of the nuclear deal and for support of terrorism, which amounts to what?
Helping Hezbollah kill the Islamic State?
Well, Nikki Haley, she had gone through a litany of crimes that she says the Iranians are guilty for, beginning with the revolution itself.
So she set up a brief as though she was a lawyer conducting a prosecution in court in which the Iranians could not possibly do any good.
They could not possibly be trusted to carry out this agreement because of the revolution and every action that they had undertook globally since, which includes, you know, the accusations of the Beirut bombing, Hezbollah, I mean, all their proxies and different conflicts throughout the world.
And what she didn't realize when she said their tentacles are everywhere, they are in these conflicts throughout the globe, she didn't realize that she was describing the United States.
Right.
And our Saudi allies.
And in fact, I mean, even where Iran is expanding, it's because of the U.S. It's, you know, Bush gave them all of southeastern Iraq and then Obama provoked them into expanding their power and influence even further into western Iraq and into Syria in response to American support for al-Qaeda.
Right.
She she glossed over the Iran-Iraq war and our involvement there.
It was a completely unreflected account, which, I mean, I'm sure pleased the neoconservative audience to no end, because basically she was saying that these Iranians are evil and therefore we can't trust anything they say or do in connection with us.
In connection with this deal.
So therefore, we're going to we're going to find every way to get out of it.
So even if they were complying, the fact that she had brought this litany to the table of their crimes shows should show anybody that the Trump administration is not serious about staying in.
Yeah, they're they're build they're building a case.
Well, you know what, it could have been written by John Bolton himself to hear her speak.
It just it came off.
And like I said, in her her her light, her her her her sort of non-threatening demeanor.
You know, she was a governor.
She's a politician.
She knows how to deliver a speech.
So it didn't come off as John Bolton or even Daniel Plekha, her her neoconservative arch hawk host.
It came off as just a measured, you know, American official just doing her job.
Right.
And yet, I mean, I don't know, I guess at the AEI, it's, as you say, a very special audience there.
But regular Americans ought to think, you know what?
Yeah, Iran and the Beirut bombing in 1983 in Lebanon.
That really was a hell of a thing.
And yet that was in 1983.
Yeah.
And if they have to go back that far for their brief, they can't mention, yeah, Iran took over Baghdad somehow.
So they just leave that out.
They leave that out.
And the Americans covered for Saddam Hussein and blamed the Halabja attack on Iran.
And then they go, Saddam did the Halabja attack.
That's why we have to invade in 2003, even though that was in 1988.
Well, I mean, the speech was remarkable as much as it was remarkable for the well-crafted prosecutorial line.
It was remarkable for all those things, like you said, that were left out.
I mean, she conveniently leaves out that Iran has been helping get rid of ISIS in Iraq right now.
And in Syria, too.
And that's who they're fighting is al-Qaeda and ISIS.
And Donald Trump even said, and I mean, I can see how I really see her as just like Trump, that neither of them even really know what they're talking about at all.
So when Trump had said to the Lebanese president that, yeah, you're doing a great job fighting terrorism like Hezbollah and ISIS, when Hezbollah was part of his governing coalition and had just defeated ISIS on the battlefield and driven the last of them out of Lebanon.
And Trump was like, I don't know, they're all the same to me.
And I don't see why his UN ambassador, I don't believe that she is any more knowledgeable than any of the rest of these people.
And you compare to Bolton, at least he knows who he's lying about.
But I don't think she really knows anything about anything.
You know, that's just my impression of her.
You know, who's reporting on Liz Cheney?
There ought to be somebody following her around all day, every day, man.
I'm just terrified.
Speaking of someone who's intelligent enough to know what they're lying about.
I mean, she to me is just, I'm afraid she may even be as competent as her father, if you take my meaning.
Yeah.
I know she was running for office at one point, but she's in the Congress right now.
She's in the House of Representatives right now.
See, she snuck right in there.
She snuck right in.
Yeah.
See, she did a real ham handed thing.
She tried to steal the Senate seat and in a real ham handed way and had to back down.
But then she just coasted right into the House two years later.
Wow.
Geez, where have I been?
Yeah, look out.
She probably lives in your neighborhood.
What has she been up to?
I mean, she's kind of been taking a low profile.
That's what I think.
But that just makes me worry more.
I mean, it could be that no one wants anything to do with her, but seems like they probably do.
Yeah.
She's the kind of person who says, trust me, I know what I'm talking about, and then says a bunch of stuff.
So compared to a lot of congressmen, that's a leader.
She'll one day be the speaker, I bet.
Yeah, she's on.
I'm looking at her website right now, Scott.
She's on the Armed Services Committee, the Rules Committee and Natural Resources.
So, yeah, that Armed Services, I'm sure that's a nice old perch for her.
I'm sure she's happy about that.
But it's exactly where she wants to be that.
And, you know, the Senate at some point on the foreign affairs intelligence.
And Ms. Haley is going to be our next Secretary of State.
It could be any day now.
Well, that seems like the rumor.
Has Drudge announced it yet?
Because once you see it on Drudge, it's probably going to happen.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I saw somebody on Twitter said, well, it is Friday.
Oh, no, that was about the other guy getting fired.
One of the Goldman Sachs guys is maybe getting fired.
Oh.
So they were saying, well, it is Friday.
So somebody's got to get fired up there.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just an episode of the Trump show.
Right.
Yeah.
He he had predicted the when he said Breitbart was not Breitbart, when he said Abandon was gone.
It happened a few days later.
He he has some he has the moles in there.
So it'll be interesting to keep an eye on him.
But I'm looking at him right now.
And it's all about the the hurricane.
So no hurricanes in Washington yet.
You know what I wonder?
Do you have any insight on this?
What's Donald Trump's problem anyway?
Because it seems to me like, you know, what does he care about this, that or the other thing?
He doesn't have any real reason to have this serious of a grudge against Iran.
And I can see how as a political talking point, he said Obama sucks.
And so therefore, Obama's great deal that he did is the worst deal anybody ever did.
That makes perfect sense when you're running in a Republican primary to do that.
And I could even see Donald Trump talking himself into believing that since he said it a few times.
And that's probably good enough for him.
And yet at the same time, we're talking about a major disruption possible if we were to leave this deal.
And, you know, escalation of tension with a adversary, whatever America's enemy, not mine, but the U.S. state's enemy over there in their struggle for dominance of the Middle East.
And to what end?
You know what I mean?
It's not like the Israelis really have anything to worry about, right?
Everybody just rolled their eyes even when I said it along with me.
So I don't know.
It doesn't seem like Tillerson is saying, yeah, get him.
Right.
Even Mattis, who I'm sure has, they say Mark Perry says has a grudge against him for killing Marines and that kind of thing.
Like, that's understandable.
But it doesn't explain Trump's attitude.
Yeah, I think Trump, to me, I mean, if I may guess at these things, I'm not there.
But I mean, it seems like he's in this internal struggle within the White House.
He's struggling on one hand with the sort of right wing that helped to get him elected, the people like Mike Flynn, who wanted to go to war in Iran, who have been against the deal from the beginning.
And I think that he's surrounded himself with people like Bolton and others who have this ideology in which the axis of evil is still turning and dealing with them was an anathema from the start.
And then on the other hand, with the sort of like the old guard and the more realist contingent on the other side, like the Mattises and the Tillersons and others who are telling him this is a grave mistake to pull out of this thing now.
So it depends, you know, sometimes it depends on which Trump you're talking to one week to the next.
But I don't think it's, I mean, personally, I think that, you know, he will try to make the case, but I don't know how committed he will be to getting out of this deal.
I think we won't know until it actually happens.
And, you know, he is tasked with recertifying it in October.
Because sometimes he, you know, well, not sometimes, he's always surprising in that, you know, whichever way he falls at any given moment, you know, how he's reacting to the different pressures and conflicts within his own inner circle.
We won't know.
You know, what's funny here, too, is how obvious, well, I don't know, to me anyway, it is that Trump could be building on the Iran deal and saying, you know, I know how to make Iran's missiles not a threat.
We'll just become friends with them again.
Right.
Who cares if we're the dominant power in Persia.
Persia belongs to the Persians.
But you know what?
We can get along with them.
Right.
Yeah.
What do we have to have a shawl there?
Come on.
But, you know, let bygones be bygones.
Build on the deal.
Sell them more planes.
You know, we wouldn't even sell them the spare parts for their planes.
They used to just fall right out of the sky on a regular basis over there.
There's a zillion.
There's a whole new market to open up there for business.
And we could befriend them and then not worry about their missiles.
And, you know, or at least not in the most Ron Paulian sense.
But still, he could ratchet down tensions by 10 points and try to negotiate further.
People say, you know what?
The deal expires.
What's going to happen in 15 years when the deal expires?
And then they might make nukes.
Well, we should keep negotiating with them then to keep to extend the deal.
Why not?
You know, these are all reasons why not to take the hawkish approach.
What could this possibly accomplish other than making war more likely?
Yeah.
It doesn't seem like it's going.
Does anybody even think that it's going to make the Iranians comply with American goals, that they're going to scale back their missile program?
Jeez, I guess you showed us with your new sanctions.
We better stop trying to improve our missiles.
I mean, it's crazy.
Well, I seem to be surrounded by people every day who have great advice for Donald Trump, who feel like if he just had the right advice, he would do the right thing.
And, you know, unfortunately...
He could do better than Madison McMaster, I got to say, but yeah.
But, you know, unfortunately, he seems to, you know, the picture that is emerging is that he truly is his own man.
And I believe despite good advice, bad advice, you know, crazy advisors, you know, smart advisors, he's just going to do what he wants.
And we don't really know what drives him.
So, I mean, what you're saying makes perfect sense.
Who knows what makes this guy tick?
I got to say, I'm so glad it's not Hillary.
But every day I just think I can't believe Donald Trump is the president of the United States.
And maybe it's just for so many years, I was so sure it was going to be Jeb was going to be coronated the crown prince or whatever the hell.
But it's just such a funny thing.
It's just, it's unreal.
It's like an episode of The Simpsons come to life really happened.
All right.
Anyway, I'm wasting your time now.
Thank you, Kelly.
Not at all.
I appreciate it.
Well, thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Kelly Vallejos.
Kelly Bocar Vallejos, if I say her name right, at the American Conservative magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
She is the managing editor there.
And this one is called Haley debuts Trump's case for ending the Iran nuke deal.
I'm Scott Horton.
That's my show. scotthorton.org for the archives. foolserend.us for the book. libertarianinstitute.org for my institute.
And follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
All right.
And thank you guys again.
Check out the book, Fool's Errand.
Time to End the War in Afghanistan at foolserend.us.
Phil Giraldi just wrote a great review of it for the American Conservative magazine.
If you want to check that out, foolserend.us.
