Thomas Friedman on the Clash at the Core of the Iran Deal

I'm Dan Waken, an international editor for New York Times Opinion. When President Trump signed an initial peace agreement with Iran last week, in some ways it didn't seem like much of a deal at all. The biggest problem remained unresolved, what to do about Iran's nuclear program. Vice President J.D. Vance was just in Switzerland to meet with the Iranians, trying to come to a lasting agreement. They've given themselves 60 days to get it done. It's worth noting that the Obama nuclear deal took over a year and a half to negotiate. To discuss the latest, I'm here with my colleague, opinion columnist Tom Friedman. Hello, Tom. Thanks for joining me. Dan, great to be with you. Before we get into this week's news, I want to go back to something you wrote in a column soon after the war started. You wrote, quote, The timing of the end of this war, will be determined as much by the oil markets and the financial markets as by the military state of play in Iran, unquote. So here we are, with Trump nervous about high gas prices in the midterms. We have the same Iranian regime basically in place, but now with a younger leader, and an Iran well aware of the power they hold over the Strait of Hormuz. Given all that, what kind of negotiating position is the U.S. in? And what are your hopes for the outcome of this negotiation? Well, to your question, Dan, I would say that Trump ended this war with a taco trade, the famous taco trade described by Wall Street analysts, Trump always chickens out. And in the end, Trump basically calculated that he had to end this war now in order to get oil prices down in time for the midterm elections. And so what I predicted early on, that oil prices would determine this war as much as events on the battlefield, I think really played out. He basically, I would say, sold out the state of Israel and the Arab Gulf states for the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Trump understood if gasoline prices and food prices kept soaring, as they've been since the start of this war, there would be a very high likelihood that he would lose those states. And if he loses the House, and if he loses the Senate, less likely, but a possibility, Trump would then be exposed. to impeachment over the way he has enriched himself since he's become president. So there's a link between all of these things. And the reason we know this, Dan, is because Trump told us so. He said he was not going to be Hubert Hoover and preside over a recession. I want to talk a bit about how the negotiations have been going. I know there are conflicting reports depending on who you listen to, whether it's U.S. officials or Iranian officials. But as a matter of fact, I want to talk a bit about how the negotiations have been going. So, Tuesday morning, what do we know for certain has happened so far? There's been a memorandum of understanding assigned by the parties to forge a ceasefire in the war that will allow for the opening of the Straits of Hormuz and for Iran to sell oil for dollars and begin to repair its economy. This is a prelude for. The Middle East is a funny place. It's kind of the opposite of Washington. In the Middle East, people lie to you in private and tell the truth in public in their own language. In Washington, people tell the truth in private and lie in public. And so, we already saw a demonstration of this rule just in the last 48 hours where Vice President Vance came out and said, hey, the Iranians have promised to let in nuclear observers from the National Atomic Energy Commission. And the Iranians said, no. We've offered no such thing. And so, I think this is going to be an ongoing problem for the administration. Whether the Iranians did it in private in English, they're clearly contradicting it in public in their language. And, you know, there is a bit of divine justice here. You know, I'm thinking about Vance. I mean, this is a man who sold his soul, his every principle, to be vice president to Donald Trump. And it's like the Greek. Gods have punished him by making him responsible for ending a war that he opposed, started by Donald Trump. And Donald Trump, a president who has said, if things don't go well, it's going to be J.D.'s fault and not mine. Absolutely. So, you're really only going to be able to see what is true and what is memorex, you know, what is not true, on the basis of what you see happening on the ground. And so, I tend to discount all of these public statements. At the end of the day, there are some very large, powerful forces at play, Dan. One is the one we alluded to earlier. Donald Trump needs this war to be over politically. Bibi Netanyahu's interests are just the opposite, the prime minister of Israel. His interest is that the war goes on for his politics because he needs to show that he is a war prime minister because the end of war brings for him— a whole Israeli investigation and election over how you have conducted all of Israel's policies since the Hamas invasion. And Iran is divided, I believe, between revolutionary guards who'd like to see the war go on because they benefit and they gain power the more there's kind of tension with the Americans and the new politicians who've emerged in Iran after the previous generation was decapitated who may have an interest actually in the war. So, these are kind of the hard realities I'm looking at. And then how they manifest themselves on a daily basis, I think you're going to see a lot of contradictory behavior. So, it's going to take us a while, Dan, to see what is the real signal in the noise. Speaking of hard realities, one of them is that the U.S. has promised to unfreeze Iranian assets. That means a flow of dollars to the IRGC as well as a flow of oil income now allowed under the MOU. What are the implications of that? Well, I want to take you to 30,000 feet, if I could, Dan, to really understand what is the clash that's at stake here that we're watching. And I describe it as a clash between Kushnerism and Khomeinism, okay? So, what is Kushnerism? Let's go back to the Hamas-Israel war and the ceasefire agreement. And after that agreement, in Davos this year, Kushner made a presentation to the Board of Peace, that Trump had created to oversee that ceasefire. And it was a presentation of what he called New Gaza, a city built for coastal tourism with 170 towers, areas for residential buildings, industrial complexes, and data centers. Because Kushner's view of the world, basically, is people just want condos and hotels and beachfront property, and girls just want to have fun. And he really doesn't have any deep. understanding of the kind of passions and grievances that have motivated people in this region for centuries, okay? Opposed to him is Khomeinism. And Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's religious leader who succeeded and toppled the Shah, who very early on after the revolution said, we didn't make this revolution to lower the price of malice. In other words, we really believe what we say. We're trying to create. We're trying to create an Islamic republic based on Sharia law, where women will be covered and be under the rule and thumb of men. And we want to spread this ideology around the region. And what you're seeing is really here a clash of which of these two ideologies, you know, is going to predominate. And Trump keeps saying, look, I wiped out the old leadership. So the new leaders will buy into Kushnerism. But we haven't seen that with the new leaders. Yet at all. Now, let me say that I'm actually glad there's a Kushner out there. Basically saying to the two sides, I don't know anything about your history. And you know what? I don't care to know anything about your history. Because it's just a bunch of grievance-driven people who have been turning this region into the Stone Age. And I'm going to paint a different vision. And I'm actually good with that, you know? Whether it's realistic or not, you kind of need someone out there doing it. But whether he has any buyers for what he is selling is something that's going to take time to see. And that's how I'm sort of looking at the future. Who's going to win this story? Jared Kushner, who knows none of the history and doesn't care about it because he thinks the future can bury the past. Or the followers of Khomeini, who know only the history and insist that the past must always bury the future. future. Would you extend Kushnerism to President Trump himself? Oh, I think Trump is a variant of Kushner. You know, my answer would be this, Dan. I see Trump as a different kind of character in this play. So Trump 1 was, we know, surrounded by buffers, and Trump 2 is surrounded by amplifiers. And so what we've been seeing in Trump 2 is that everything he does is a no-bid contract. To me, Dan, there is a parallel between Trump's failure to clean up the Persian Gulf and his failure to clean up the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial. And because both, to me, are failures of a commander-in-chief, because both were done in their own way through no-bid contracts. And no-bid contracts, which don't allow any other bidders than the one the president anoints, always get you in trouble. So in the case of the reflecting pool, we know that the National Park Service bypassed competitive bidding and gave the $1.7 million contract to a firm called Greenwater Services, which happened to be run, shock, are you sitting down, Dan, by a Trump campaign donor, but not any Trump campaign donor, one who had been convicted twice, once for bribery and once for some other campaign donation shenanigans. And what happened? Instead of turning the money over to Trump, he turned the money over to Greenwater Services. And he turned the money over to Greenwater Services. Instead of turning the reflecting pool blue as the way Trump wanted for the 4th of July, it's turned into an algae of green blooms that have basically wrecked the whole scene. Now, why do I compare that no-bid contract with the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran? Because in a way, Trump approached it, too, in a kind of no-bid fashion. Let's go back to the reporting of our colleagues Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan from the key decision-making in the situation room at the White House. Trump invited in Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. He was in the situation room. It was a no-bid moment where Netanyahu then brings onto the screen the head of the Mossad, and the Mossad tells Trump that through aerial bombing, they can decapitate, decapitate the regime and trigger a popular uprising in Iran. And of course, none of that happened. Trump didn't even have in the room his energy secretary, his treasury secretary, and his own experts, the director of the CIA, called the Israeli idea farcical, and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, called it bullshit. But Trump went with his gut, with his no-bid contract with Bibi Netanyahu, and the result has been the Strait of Hormuz has been turned from blue into green, red, and white, the colors of the Iranian flag. No-bid contracts get you in trouble, whether they're in the mall or in the Gulf. So, Tom, tell me about how you think the situation in Lebanon fits into this whole story. Well, one thing that really worries me about this agreement is basically how the Iranians have maneuvered Trump into linking the opening of the Straits of Hormuz with the fate of Iran's proxy militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. And basically, Iran says that if Israel continues to try to destroy Hezbollah, we will choke off Hormuz going forward. And that is a terrible linkage because Hezbollah is simply an extension of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And one has to ask, hey, Iran, what the hell are you doing in Lebanon? What right do you have to protect a non-state, illegal armed militia in Lebanon from Tehran? And the fact that Trump has that kind of linkage where the Iranians can say at any time they want going forward, Dan, hey, if Israel doesn't stop beating up Hezbollah, then we're going to choke off Hormuz again. And I find that very troubling, most of all for the Lebanese people who so want to be done with this, who are ready to make peace with Israel. You also have to ask, like, what's going on inside Israel now? You know, driving in this morning, Dan, I'll speak very personally. I was listening about the primaries going on in New York and elsewhere, in which there's kind of a competition now to who can bash Israel the most. When you think of where Israel was 15 years ago in America and where it is across these 15, 16 years that Netanyahu has been in power, it's one of the greatest disasters for the Jewish people. Because Netanyahu's policy right now is that we're going to kill our way to peace. We're going to not stop in Lebanon until we've killed all of Hezbollah. We're going to take over the demilitarized zone in Syria. We're going to remain in permanent war against Hamas. And people in my right-wing government, says Netanyahu, basically engaged in a project of quiet ethnic cleansing in the West Bank to drive as many Palestinians as they can into Jordan and turn Jordan into a Palestinian state. Think for a second, Dan, what Israel is sacrificing, if it actually had a different policy, one of at least trying to forge a two-state solution with the Palestinian authority, albeit a reformed one. We wouldn't be having the primary we're having in New York today, where it's a competition of who can bash Israel the loudest. Israel could have normalization with Saudi Arabia. Israel could now have peace with Lebanon. It could have peace with Syria. And American Jews and Jews all over the world have to stop and think what this government is trading away by not having an attempted approach for peace with the Palestinians, how they are imperiling the future of Israel and the future of Jewry all over the world. So let's turn to what President Trump has called his central goal, which is eliminating Iran's nuclear capability. What do you think the chances are that a deal to do that will emerge that would be any better for the U.S. than the deal struck by the Obama administration, known as the JCPOA? Well, let's go back since I covered that administration. Actually, the morning the agreement was signed, I got a call very early from the White House, 3 a.m. that morning, that President Obama wants to see you in the Oval Office that day. And I came in. And I had the first interview with him about the JCPOA. And I will tell you, I'd just broken my shoulder. And I was on OxyContin. And I was like really in pain. But my head was clear enough to understand this, Dan. Iran is a wicked problem. In fact, Iran is like the definition of a wicked problem. And a wicked problem is a problem that defies any kind of easy solution. So what was President Obama's approach? President Obama said, this is a wicked problem. So I'm going to cut through all the wicked thicket of this and try to identify what is the single U.S. interest. The single U.S. interest is that Iran not be able to amass enough fissile material to ever build a nuclear bomb that could threaten the region, trigger nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, and one to even threaten American interest. And I'm going to strike it. deal with them, that it will be grounded in the most stringent inspections, that will keep them away from a bomb for at least 15 years, if not more. And who knows, in those 15 years, Iran might change. That was the simplicity of Obama's approach, okay? Now, Trump tore up that agreement. I'm sure he never read it, you know, but he tore it up out of his, I think, a hatred and jealousy of Obama and said, I'll deliver you a better alternative. Of course, he didn't. And in the intervening period, Iran amassed enough fissile material for nine or 10 bombs that it could assemble actually very quickly. And that's what kind of brought us to this place. Now, Trump's approach was, oh, this is easy. This isn't a wicked problem. It's just a question of will, of toughness, and you need a genius like me. And so what did he do? You know, he relied basically on, on Netanyahu and Netanyahu's Mossad director's analysis, which is that we could actually, if we topple the regime, we'll quickly trigger a popular uprising. You know, Dan, I've been covering the Middle East basically almost, you know, my whole adult life, almost 50 years. I've actually learned something observing the Mossad. If you want someone assassinated in Beirut or Tehran, Dan, call the Mossad. If you want to understand political, political and social trends in Beirut or Tehran, do not call the Mossad. Okay. Because the same reason they're good on the first, they're bad on the second. What is that? They've penetrated these regimes by relying on people who are turning against their own country, who are spying for you. In other words, they're people who hate the regime. And because they hate the regime, what do they do? They exaggerate the weakness of the regime. And so there's a lot of complicated, contradictory tugs and pulls at work here. And you have to be just incredibly humble, I think, on the one side by saying everything Trump is doing is wrong. Look, there is a part of me that, I mean, there's a big part of me that I'd like to see this work. You know, I would love to see this Iranian regime changed or reformed because nothing, I think, would improve the Middle East more. Both the lives of Iranians and the opportunities for Lebanon and for the Middle East, I think, would improve the Middle East more. And so as much as I detest Trump and what he's doing to American democracy, I'm not sitting here saying I hope he fails because if he succeeds, that would be a great thing. It really could be good. And I think you have to, as an analyst, hold out that possibility that you could be surprised by what happens here. And so I've got a lot of people who are saying, well, I don't know. I don't that sort of on one side of my head. And on the other side, I'm watching a president who may have big ideas, but I don't trust has an administration behind him that can implement anything, that can follow up anything. When you've got, you know, one day it's the vice president leading the negotiations, not the secretary of state or the national security advisor, who is the same person in Rubio. There's no government bureaucracy behind them. They've destroyed all that. He doesn't believe in any of that. We operate on his gut. He's tweeting left, right, and center contradictory things. No one in this administration trusts each other because they're all worried that he will shoot them or tweet them in the back. And so I'm saying you've taken on this big project, but who here has the competence, the patience, the focus to actually do what Obama did, which is negotiate a detailed agreement and then deliver on it. And frankly, Dan, I'd have a lot of sympathy for Trump in this situation because the end project is one I'd love to see for the future of the region, which is a different Iranian regime. If he had had one ounce of humility and dignity to cut Obama some slack for the difficulty of what he was trying to pull off. You know, and where I began, this was a no bid war. He didn't enlist the American people. He never did. He never did. He never gave a speech really detailing what this was about. He relied on a no bid contract from Bibi Netanyahu and the Mossad. And now he's gotten himself in trouble. And now he's turned over delivering on this no bid contract to his vice president who opposed the war to begin with. What do you think the significance is of Vance leading the negotiations and not the secretary of state, Marco Rubio? That October war. Back then, you had Henry Kissinger who was running everything for Richard Nixon, a president deeply sophisticated about foreign policy. And if you remember the story of the 73 war and the negotiations that followed, Dan, Kissinger had one hand on the dial of weapons supplies to Israel, which he was actually dialing up and down to make sure Israel won the war. But if you think about the negotiations afterwards and what would be required to create a disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria, Israel and Egypt. And so the same single character, someone deeply steeped in the history of foreign policy, was controlling the dials of the military and the dials of diplomacy at the same time. What do you have here? Okay. You had basically a president, again, relying on the intelligence and predictions of a foreign power, overriding his own military, overriding his own military, overriding his own military, overriding his own military, overriding his own military, who told them Iran could take over the Straits of Hormuz, could actually attack our Arab allies. But Trump thought that the regime would collapse before they could ever do that. Okay. Now the war, now he's trying to end the war by turning over the diplomacy to his vice president who opposed it, who has no real experience in that part of the world in the diplomatic sense and has no team, the kind of vast team you need to do this. Meanwhile, Rubio, the secretary of state, far as I can tell, is in a witness protection program, trying to stay as far away from this thing as he possibly can. And what's happening today when I got up in the morning, the man Trump named to take over the directorate of national intelligence from Tulsi Gabbard, Bill Pulte, who comes from the housing industry, whose experience in foreign policy, I believe, is the breakfast menu at the International House of Pancakes, okay, is over at the directorate of national intelligence as we speak, firing intelligence analysts. So this whole thing, Dan, it's just so not serious about such a serious situation. And it forces me, at least, as an analyst, okay, on the one hand, to hope somehow against all hope that they find their way through this, that in the end, Kushnerism does actually defeat. Because it will be better for the world and better for everyone. But at the same time, saying to myself, if you rely on clowns, you get a circus. And I just don't see this team pulling this off. But I really deeply hope I am surprised. This reminds me of a lovely literary moment in your last column, in which you quote from The Great Gatsby. And it's the line about Tom and Daisy Buchanan. And the quote is, they were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness. And then the passage ends, they let other people clean up the mess they had made. You compare the situation now in Iran and in this war with that passage. So my question is, who's going to clean up this mess? How will it get cleaned up? And that's what I'm worried about, because they not only have broken something, but they've broken something in a vast area that now has so many different shards, Dan, so many different empowered actors, Israel, Hezbollah, the Lebanese government, the Iraqi militias, the militias in Yemen, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards inside Iran, the politicians who've succeeded them. There are so many moving parts here. If Henry Kiss were alive today, he would be deeply challenged trying to navigate a way out of this. And we do not have Henry Kissinger today. And we have no one to clean up the mess. What worries me is that Trump, who has no patience, who's bored, who just wants to declare victory and move on. Do you remember during the war when Trump tweeted, open up the straits, you crazy bastards? You know, and I just read that and thought, like, it's the Middle East, Jake. It's Chinatown, baby. You walked into Chinatown and you broke up the whole neighborhood. And now you're screaming at people, you know, open up the straits, you crazy bastards. It's Chinatown, Jake. Good luck. Tom, this has been a real pleasure. Thanks so much. Always, Dan. Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon