The Iran war after the midterms

Hello and welcome to the world in 30 minutes, the podcast on the event, policies and ideas that will shape the world from the European Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Mark Leonard, I'm Director of BCFR, and today's episode is about the US midterms and what the results mean for the war in Iran. Earlier this week, Democrats gave Republicans a spectacular dropping and one control of both the House and the Senate. They took Senate seats in states like Texas, South Carolina and Kansas and will have their largest house majority in nearly two decades. Trump was quick to distance himself from the results, arguing that they were not a referendum on him or his policies. JD Vance, however, in a lengthy post on X, admitted that the reason we lost is the war referring to the Trump administration's ongoing war against Iran. Trump himself, however, has said that he would do it again and is said to be considering a new round of escalation, alarmingly Tucker Carlson recently claimed that Trump may be within days of launching a nuclear strike. So here to make sense of what the midterms mean for American politics and above all American foreign policy and particularly looking at the war in Iran and the likelihood of Tucker Carlson's style Doomsday scenario is emerging. We have an all-star cast joining me from Washington, DC. I have Jeremy Shapiro who's the head of our US program and research director at ECFR and head of our Washington office. And down the line from Syria, we have Ellie Geron Meyer who's the deputy head of ECFR's mid-least in North Africa program but also somebody who's been following the conflict with Iran very, very closely. Welcome to the podcast, both of you. Thanks for having us. Good to be back. Hi, everyone. Jeremy, why don't we start with you? Because you probably had a complete absence of sleep and have been kind of following these extraordinary results coming in over the last couple of days. How big was this result? How important was the war? Is JD Vance his assessment correct? The result was big. It was bigger than anyone imagined or could possibly have imagined. Frankly, the Texas has become a blue state, essentially. The Democrats won every state-wide office in Texas and took the Texas State House. And they won in places that were unimaginable even a week ago. And so clearly the result, it reflects a great deal of dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, with their policies and probably with Donald Trump himself. His point that he wasn't on the ballot is belied by the fact that he asked everybody repeatedly over the last month to act as if he was on the ballot. And it's very clear that they did. But I guess in terms of the failure like this has many fathers. But in terms of the relationship of the Iran War, I think we have to be a little bit careful. I think that JD Vance is right that the Iran War was very much responsible for their defeat, but we should understand the mechanism. The mechanism for that was I would say almost entirely the Iran War's effect on gas and diesel prices, which seems to be the single most important variable in any U.S. election. And so the fact that the Iran War had a massive impact on that meant that it had a massive impact on the election. But what it doesn't mean is that the public was inherently against an Iran War, was inherently against bombing Iran or unconcerned about nuclear weapons. It just means that they were fine to launch a nuclear war song as diesel prices go down. Precisely. Precisely as long. If the Iranians hadn't been able to close the straight and hadn't been able to have the kind of effect on gas and diesel prices that they did, I don't think it would have even been a very big issue in the in the midterms. So what happens next, because Vance has been very, very quick to try and distance himself from the war from Trump, he had tried to sue for peace earlier on without very much success. He's also in a kind of tricky situation, but what's your best instinct about what is now going to happen within the Trump administration, within the Republican Party, as far as the war's concerned? I think when it comes to the war decisions, it doesn't appear to me that the midterms will have much impact on that. I know that that's a lot of very popular position right now, but Trump seems oddly disengaged from the midterms and disengaged from domestic politics. It's true that he went out and did a lot of rallies in the last month, but he enjoys rallies and he doesn't really seem all that interested in the results. He's spent the next day talking about his ballroom. So it seems to me though that that doesn't really answer your question very well because I was difficult to understand even before the midterms what he was going to do. My personal view is that he was unlikely to escalate before the midterms and remains unlikely to escalate. But I think that depends on a sort of logic, which is that there is no point to escalation. There is no theory of victory that the US military has been able to present him with and no reason to expect that an escalation would help him either in domestic politics or in the war itself. Unfortunately, that logic just would have prevented him from the previous couple of escalations. So I have to admit, I have certain uncertainty there. And before we go to Ellie and talk about what was actually happening in Iran, I mean, the other thing people are discussing is whether the Democrats are going to launch an impeachment process on Pete Heggseth and will try even defunding the Pentagon in order to stop the war, all the things that a Democratic Congress can do, which would have an impact on this war. Well, it turns out in a development, which is definitely related to the midterms, that the Republicans are going to try to impeach Pete Heggseth because there are a lot of extremely angry members of Congress who don't have jobs come January, but have a moment for the next, let's say, have 20 legislative days over the next two months in which to express their death throws as legislators. And are really, really angry at Pete Heggseth, really, they're angry at Trump too, but they're not able to lash out at him. And they have decided to blame the Iran War for their losses. So I think they're Thomas Massey, a departing congressman from Kentucky, as there are many, is decided to launch an impeachment drive against Thomas Heggseth. It will get a lot of Republican support and pretty much every Democrat in the Congress. So I expect there to be an article of impeachment against him that will pass between now and the end of the year, whether it will succeed in the Senate. I don't know, but I think it's definitely going to happen. In terms of cutting off the budget, I think that that's a lot more difficult. I think the executive just has too many options to shift money around, to hold the government and key programs that really matter to the Democrats like food stamps, hostage. And I think they're going to have a lot of difficulty coercing the executive into stopping this war through using funds. And what would it mean if he gets impeached? Nothing. I would have a massive political impact here. I think people would be deeply satisfied that a guy who is really quite reviled in Democratic circles and quite a few Republican circles and doesn't seem remotely qualified to be Secretary Defense and has fired a lot of very, very qualified military officers was to depart. But I assume Donald Trump would go back to his stable of Fox News hosts who could then run the Pentagon again, and they would be once again, he would demand of them loyalty. And so maybe the next one wouldn't be so into fighting the anti-woke wars within the Pentagon, but I think when it came to big policy issues like Iran, the next person would still be following Donald Trump's guidance. So Ellie, obviously Iranians have been watching the midterms very closely. A lot of people think that one of the key parts of Iran's political strategy over the the last few months has been aimed at making things politically uncomfortable for Donald Trump and in the hope that the mid-term elections would have some impact on American policy. What have the reactions been to the mid-term elections from Tehran? Sure, Mark. Hi, everyone. Let me just piggyback of some things I just heard and reflect on them. One thing is that I have no doubt that it was the price of fuel as the byproduct of the Iran war that was the game changer for the midterms. But I still think that if you look back at every polling that's being done in the US, even going back to the June 12-day war, which was the quick swift in and out military operation from the US, the American public has been consistently overwhelming against military action inside Iran. We've been over this many, many times. If you ask the public about that, they don't like it. Sure, but do they vote on it? No, they vote on gas prices. Sure, but I think that at least for the base of the MAGA that made the switch, at least for some of them, this was an issue. I have no doubt that this is going to be an issue when it comes to the next US presidential elections. The war, the handling of the war, what the democratic game plan on Iran is going to be. It's almost like saying, okay, well, yes, people didn't turn against the Iraq war until they dragged on into one, two, three years. But it was the legacy of Iraq war and the fact that the US went into what was largely a unpopular war in American eyes and world eyes that defined Trump's legacy. And this takes me to the sort of big picture that Iran has in all of this. I don't think they are disillusioned into thinking that the midterms is somehow going to be a switch that puts all the guardrails on Trump. But it's about setting an example of what happens when the US president goes to war with Iran as a deterrent against future, attacks by new US presidents. And it's not just about Trump, I think, for Iran. There's a lot of jokes going around that the US wanted regime change in Iran, but Trump got it in Texas or that the US essentially, the Iranian position on the street of Hormuz created the conditions to so, quote unquote, "carter Trump." They caught it Trump at the end of the day with the outcome of the elections. And sure, even if public opinion doesn't matter, Iran's game plan has for now, and I stress for now, paid off in terms of weakening the political position of Trump at home through Iran's counter strikes against energy facilities in the region and the closure of the street of Hormuz. Now, I think the big question is, where does this all go next? Because while Iran may have created not a level playing field, but at least, you know, played the underdog role in this war, it's clear that from an economic perspective, the country is really suffering. More and more people are being pushed to the poverty line. And I think the big question to Iran will be, will President Trump now pivot to a economic pressure, you know, 5.0 iteration of US policy that we've seen through US administrations time and time again as a containment strategy of Iran, or does he pivot to some sort of a limited deal that creates economic breathing room for Iran in return for a freeing up of the flow of shipping through the street and stopping halting attacks on refineries in the Middle East. Or there is the other option, of course, that actually the results and the current legacy of the Iran War will so inflame Trump, that he will go for the more extreme options in terms of continuing this war options that have been presented to him before. But he has restrained himself from taking them. For example, including attacks against a key Iranian islands in the state of Hormuz that are part of Iran's military operations there, potentially taking some of those islands through a land invasion. There is also the possibility that he returns to a full scale strike against a key Iranian urban centers like the capital Tehran, but elsewhere. There has increasingly been consideration whether the president would use much bigger, the so-called mother of old bomb, inside Iran against certain nuclear facilities that haven't been attacked before. Of course, a lot of our listeners will have come across Tucker Carlson's warning that the most extreme end of the scale of options that could be considered by the president is to use a tactical nuclear weapon against deeply buried nuclear sites that the US has already bombed, but clearly not bombed hard enough. In the President's view, if he goes ahead with this, in order to destroy the highly enriched uranium stockpile that is currently deeply buried as a way for there to be a conclusive end. Of course, that last option would have huge immense dire consequences going globally. To me, it seems still extremely unlikely that that would happen, but I think as an analyst, there's been watching the Iran US War, the fact that we're even talking about the possibility of the US using a tactical nuclear weapon. And this is something that the media is picking up, analysts are talking about it. Things that were only previously discussed behind closed doors shows us, I think, how dire the state of play is here. And with, I think, frankly, the fear is, and I would say this may be the local population level in Iran. The fear is Trump is so unpredictable that really anything is possible. And there's a real question mark in particularly the next two months before Congress is coming in as they have increased the hype of a potential military escalation against Iran. How far would the US President go in order to either have this fireworks blow out finale in Iran? Again, question mark is actually what that means and what really knows, in which the President can claim victory and walk away. Or the fact that he will dig his heels for the next two years of his administration and just be stuck in this revolving door of military attacks, some limited pauses where people pretend diplomacy is underway, but actually the US is just replenishing for a renewed strike. Don't Jeremy, you're staying in Washington. They've been huge amount of debate and speculation from Carlson, from Chris Murphy, from other people about what the President's going to do. What's your sense of where the consensus is now? The consensus, despite my analysis, has changed dramatically since the midterms so since Monday. I think before the midterms, there was a very strong view that there would be an escalation. And in the last couple of days, that consensus has totally turned around. There is some sort of idea that there is a lot, there is a sort of connect because the Meran War played this role in the midterms that the Republicans are in the Trump will now try to de-effisize it. So you can see this, by the way, in the stock market, which is very, very sensitive to a Meran War escalation worries and had been falling in the days prior to the midterm in the belief that there was going to be an escalation. And then the drawing of the Republicans turned that around and it went way back up in the last year yesterday. And generally speaking, the market participants have viewed this as, had viewed the midterms as completely turning this around. I don't know what to do with that personally. I don't think it has much to do with the midterms, but I do agree with the conclusion. I don't think that at this moment, particularly domestic politics has a lot to do with the president's choices on Iran. Obviously, it would have been to his immense benefit, or at least the Republican Party's immense benefit, to have de-escalated in Iran prior to the midterms for all the reasons we've discussed. And he never did that. And I think he's unlikely, let's say his political incentives have gone down because there are no more midterm elections because he is not in an election. in the next two years, and he has demonstrated an impressive lack of interest in what the people think about things like gas prices and the war in Iran, even those amongst his base. So, I think the political, domestic political incentives are not huge, or not that important, let's say. But I think that, you know, everybody likes to say that the president is unpredictable. I mean, he's not perfectly predictable, that's for sure, but he's pretty predictable when it comes to use of force. And by and large, he only uses force when he sees that the risks are very low, and when he can imagine that he can declare victory and get out. This is a very consistent pattern in his use of force. It obviously didn't work in March in Iran, and he's gotten stuck to some degree, to a great degree in Iran. But I would expect that that means that these, what we're talking about in terms of nuclear options and large escalatory options are not on the table. But in terms of things like, you know, sort of another week long spasm in the hope that somehow that will bring the Iranians to a better position at the negotiating table. I suppose that's possible. I don't expect it. I expect it will be more along the lines of the option that Ellie discussed, where they sort of continue the economic blockade, continue to up the pressure, continue to work out ways to get around the streets of Hormuz and to get energy out of the Persian Gulf in other ways, which has been going reasonably well, though slowly, and that that will, and that they will bet on that in bringing the Iranians around in the next several months. Can I just jump in here, two quick reflections, one thing? Once I agree, while I agree that Trump does not necessarily put the dots together between the midterms and what's happening in Iran, I think that other potential Republican hopefuls for the presidential nominee do, and so they will be quite keen to make sure that as far away from the next U.S. elections that they wrap this war up, that's one. The second thing is. But when do they have to do with wrapping the war up? Well, yeah, no, that's, I mean, it's basically going to be whether there's going to be a much more vocal internal pressure inside the White House, and if that will work on Trump, I completely agree with you don't know whether that's going to work on Trump. Secondly, when it comes to the war, I mean, it takes two to tango, right? So the president might think that he's going to have a, you know, four-day burst of attacks against, you know, even more missile launchers and potentially a couple of nuclear sites. But I think the Iranian response will be equally escalatory, and then we'll get back into the whole game of whether we can put a lid on things, and to what extent damage will be wreaked all across the Middle East during that period. So there are a lot of actors at the moment, primarily the Saudis, the Qataris, the Umani's, the Pakistanis that are rushing around in the last two weeks trying to stop this. And what's been interesting, I think pivot at the moment, is to the extent that there's being visits to Beijing, and then the last week and a half to look at whether the Chinese might play a role to put some sort of a stock to a new major respiration round. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that the story of the Iran war has been the US misunderstanding the options and the willingness to use them that the Iranians have, and so that could definitely happen again. But we have sort of settled into a sort of equilibrium where neither side really wants a major escalation. Every once in a while, they sort of shoot at each other in some sort of display of manhood, but that, but we sort of come up with a way of integrating that. So I would expect that if the US did this four-day burst, the Iranians would respond, and then we would get back to the status quo ante on today, I mean that. But there is also Jeremy, the variable of Israel, and what Netanyahu does in this sort of caretaker government period, and questions of whether he would be, you know, significantly pressuring Trump to go back to military confrontation and whether Israel would be sort of let back in for joint operations in a way that have been kept out since that ceasefire was reached between the US and Iran. One of the key things has been that Israel has largely been kept out of the attacks inside Iran since then. But if Israel joins, I think that would be a variable. Interesting. Yeah. This tango dynamic that we've seen at least over the summer between the US and Iran. Yeah, it could be. It does seem as if the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu has not recovered from what Trump feels, the way it's in which Netanyahu misled him into the war in March, April. So it would be difficult for me to imagine even if the Israelis do participate in some sort of escalation that they would be unleashed in that way. So you're right, you're right to focus on it. And one last thing I'll point to in terms of Iranian thinking. So there is a sense in the US, and I think particularly the US Treasury is pushing this line, that okay, we just go back to, you know, doubling down on the maximum pressure campaign economically and that within a matter of months or a year, eventually Iran will come with new concessions at the table. I think that is that mentality really, we need to analyze that and put some checks on that because for Iran, a continued naval blockade is a continued act of war to which they would continue to respond with regular shootouts, which would then drag the US back into some sort of a kinetic action. So a continued naval blockade of Iran, and now we have a attempted land blockade and an air blockade by stopping the air routes to Iran. If that sort of siege mentality from the US continues on Iran, it will continue to hit back, I think, through kinetic action. And so the region will be continually stuck in this very, very high tense moment that we see now. So I think that part of the equation of how far the US will enforce maximum pressure or, you know, operation, economic fury of lost count of how many operations there's been now. It is going to be answered to by Iran, particularly by this new Iranian regime elite that is much more risk-prone than what we knew from the Islamic Republic of Iran over the past four decades. Okay, well, I think it sounds like there's still quite a lot up in the air and the next few weeks are going to be very, very scary and important in terms of the developments around the war in Iran and that the war is likely to have quite a long tail yet, not just in American politics, but in other countries too. And so we'll have to get you both back to talk more about it as things develop. But I think that's all we have time for today, although there is still one thing we have to do on this podcast and that's our bookshelf segment. What's on your bookshelf at the moment, Ellie? Yeah, so I just read a piece in the New York review of books by Ben Rhodes looking at a new book that's coming out crossing the red line that examines what happened in the Biden White House according to Ahmed, the journalist, over the Israel's war in Gaza. The reason I point to this is because I do think that when it comes to looking at the democratic primaries for their nominees for president, this issue alongside with the Iran War is going to play a central role, at least when it comes to foreign policy issues. And that there is likely to be a lot of, I think, tension within the democratic party over some of these issues that are in tell in the book. What about you, Jeremy? I'm reading a book that is about a slightly older conflict than the Israeli-Palestinian one, Athens and Sparta, the rivalry that shaped ancient Greece by Adrian Goldsworthy. It's about, I guess, the first cold, the first global war. And because, I think, in part because it's an analogy, which is so often used in U.S.-China context, I thought it would be interesting to understand. Also, my bookclub is reading it. Or you inspired by Marco Rubio's recent-- Yeah, no, we were reading it before him, and I didn't quite understand all that stuff about the most, but yeah. But anyway, I think that this is, it is a really interesting history, the applicability to the current thing. I'm a little bit skeptical of, but it's a great book. Fantastic. We'll put links up to all those publications in this episode. Show notes and on our website at ecfr.eu. If you've enjoyed listening to us, please do subscribe to future episodes on whatever platform you use to download this one. And while you're there, it would be great if you could give us a positive review and a five-star rating. But for now, from Jeremy, Ellie, and myself, Mark Leonard, it's goodbye. The researcher for this podcast is Anonsunda and the editor of this episode is Maria Faro Sarats.