Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East | Lex Fridman Podcast #473

If we want to avoid wars, we have to have serious deterrence because our enemies need to understand that we will use selective, focused, overwhelming military power when we are facing threats like an Iranian nuclear weapon.

I'm not seeing peace through strength. I'm saying permanent militarism and permanent war through strength.

Do you ever hold our adversaries responsible, or do you just not think we have any adversaries? The easiest kind of nuke to make out of uranium is a simple gun-type nuke. Are you saying that Mossad fabricated it? That's what you're claiming.

Here's the offer: Take it or leave it. Zero enrichment. Full dismantlement.

The Iranians told the IAEA, “You can inspect any 5 out of 10 facilities here. Carte blanche. Go ahead.” And they did, and found nothing.

Experts in Iran's nuclear program, including David Albright, who actually saw the archive, went in there, and wrote a whole book on it, have provided a lot of detail about how Iran had an active nuclear weapons program called the Amad program to build 5 nuclear weapons.

I have to refute virtually everything he just said, which is completely false. I mean, really, everything.

There was not one thing I said that was true. Just one thing. I mean, Iran is a nation over there somewhere. You got that part right. After 22 years of working on Iran, I got that right. But do you know that the population is 92 million?

Okay, give me a pound, dude. There we go. Agreement.

The following is a debate between Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz on the topic of Iran and Israel. Scott Horton is author and editorial director of anti-war.com, host of the Scott Horton Show, and for the past three decades, a staunch critic of US foreign policy and military interventionism. Mark Dubitz is a chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, host of the Iran Breakdown podcast, and he has been a leading expert on Iran and its nuclear program for over 20 years. This is the Lex Freedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. If you do, I promise to work extremely hard to always bring you nuanced, long- form conversations with a very wide range of interesting people from all walks of life. And now, dear friends, here's Scott Horton and Mark Dubitz. Gentlemen. All right. It's great to have you here. Let's try to have a nuanced discussion-slash-debate and maybe even steel-man opposing perspectives as much as possible.

As it stands now, there's a barely stable ceasefire between Iran and Israel. Let's rewind a little bit. Can we first lay out the context for this Iran-Israel war and try to describe the key events that happened over the past 2 weeks, and maybe even some of the deep roots of the conflict?

First of all, thanks so much for having me on. It's great to be on with Scott. I know he and I don't agree on a lot, but I certainly admire the passion and the dedication to stopping wars. That's something we want to talk about.

So let's talk about how we got to this war. President Trump comes into office and immediately lays out that his Iran strategy is maximum pressure on the regime, and that he will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. He makes that clear consistently. I think he made it very clear during his first term, made it clear throughout his career, and thus begins this process with the Iranians, which has multiple tracks. But the one that Trump is most interested in at the time is the diplomatic track.

He makes it very clear from the beginning, in a sort of Oval Office remark, that the Iranians can either blow up their nuclear program under U.S. supervision, or someone is going to blow it up for them. Even though, at the time, we think Netanyahu is really trying to push the president into a military campaign—and I'm sure we'll talk about that throughout the podcast—the president authorizes his lead negotiator and close friend, Steve Witkoff, to begin outreach to the Iranians. Thus begins the Oman round, because it's taking place in Oman, with mediation efforts by the Omanis.

There are 5 rounds of negotiations with the Iranians. Through the course of those negotiations, the U.S. finally puts an offer on the table for Iran. We'll talk about the details of that. The Iranians reject the offer, and we're now into the sixth round, which is supposed to take place on a Sunday.

On the Thursday before that Sunday, the Israelis strike. They launch a rather devastating campaign over a matter of 12 days. They go after Iran's nuclear program and key nuclear sites, as well as the weapon scientists responsible for building Iran's nuclear weapons program. They also go after top IRGC, or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, commanders, as well as top military commanders.

There's still one site that is the most fortified. It's called Fordow. It's an enrichment facility buried under a mountain, about 80 meters deep, encased in concrete. It has advanced centrifuges and highly enriched uranium. The Israelis can do damage to it, but it's clear that it's going to take the United States and our military power to severely degrade this facility.

Trump orders the United States Air Force to fly B-2 bombers and drop 12 massive ordnance penetrators, which are 30,000-pound bombs, on Fordow in order to, as he said, obliterate it—or, more realistically, to severely degrade it. That happens, and then he offers the Iranians, as he's been offering them all the way through, an option: “You can go back to Oman. I told you Oman, and you decided to force me to go to Fordow, but now we can go back for negotiations.”

He forces a ceasefire on the Iranians and gets the Israelis to agree. That's where we are today. We're at a tentative ceasefire that just came into effect, and we'll see now if the Iranians decide to take President Trump up on his repeated offers and join him in Oman for another round of negotiations.

Scott, is there some stuff you want to add to that?

He started with January, right? Trump's second term and the maximum-pressure campaign. Essentially, as should be clear to everyone now, all these negotiations were just a pretext for war.

Trump and his entire cabinet must have known that the Ayatollah was not going to give up all enrichment. That is their latent nuclear deterrent. Their posture has been heavily implied: Don't attack us, and we won't make a nuke. America's position was, “If you make a nuke, or if you start to, we'll attack you.” So it was the perfect standoff.

What happened was that, a few weeks ago, there was some talk about, “Maybe we could find a way to compromise on some enrichment. Maybe they could do a consortium with the Saudis.” And then, no, the pressure came down: No enrichment. Zero enrichment. But that's a red line. Everyone knows that there's no way they're going to give up enrichment, and even now it's probably less likely than ever that they're going to do so.

Sure, they bombed Fordow, but they didn't destroy every last centrifuge in that place. The Iranians are already announcing that they've begun construction on another facility under a taller mountain, buried even deeper. They figured out how to enrich uranium hexafluoride gas about 20 years ago, and they will always be able to.

This is the slippery slope that we're on with these wars. In fact, I saw our friend here on TV the other day, and he almost pretty much implied that, saying, “Well, now Trump has to go in.” We were told it was just Israel doing it. Don't worry. But then, no, Trump has to hit Fordow, or else now they'll break out toward a nuclear weapon.

So, in for a penny, in for a pound, in for a ton. Once we bomb Fordow again and Natanz again and the new facility again, then it'll be decided that, no, as Benjamin Netanyahu said the other day, “You know what would really solve this problem? If we just kill the Ayatollah, then everything will be fine.”

Then we'll have regime change. And then what? Then we'll have a civil war, with bin Laden again in the catbird seat, just like George Bush put them in Iraq and Barack Obama put them in Libya and Syria. We'll have Azeris and Balochi suicide bombers, Shiite revolutionaries, and whoever else all vying for power in the new absolute chaos-istan.

If you listen to the administration and Mr. Dubowitz, they're essentially just implying, “Oh, yeah, mission accomplished. We did it. Their nuclear program is destroyed. Now we don't have to worry about that anymore.” But that's not true.

There's every reason to believe—and we don't know for sure—that it's much more likely now that the Ayatollah will change his mind and say, “Actually, maybe we do need a nuclear deterrent.” That's really what it's been this whole time: a bluff. We have bullets in one pocket and a revolver in another. Let's not, you and me, fight and escalate this thing.

It's the same position, by the way, as Japan, Germany, and Brazil. Two of the three are under America's nuclear umbrella, I admit. But still, they have proven that they've mastered the fuel cycle and can make nuclear weapons. Since nobody's directly threatening them now, why escalate things and go ahead and make atom bombs?

That has been their position the whole time because, after all, they could not break out and make a nuke without everyone in the world knowing about it. That's why, Lex—and I'm sure you can vouch for me on this—if you've been watching TV over the past few weeks, you'll hear Marco Rubio and all the government officials and all the war hawks say, “Oh, yeah, 60 percent, 60 percent. What do you think they need with that 60 percent?”

They're implying, “Oh, yeah, see, they're racing toward a bomb.” But you see how they always just imply that. They won't come right out and say it because it's a ridiculous lie.

They could have enriched up to 90-plus percent uranium-235 this whole time. The reason they were enriching up to 60% was in reaction to Israeli sabotage: first of all, the assassination of their nuclear scientists, and then the sabotage at Natanz. They started enriching up to 60%, just like they did in the Obama years, to have a bargaining chip to negotiate away.

Under the JCPOA, they shipped out every bit of their enriched uranium to France to be turned into fuel rods and then shipped back into the country to be used in their reactors. They’re just trying to get us back in that deal. It is an illusion. It is. And I don’t know exactly what’s in this man’s mind, but it’s just not true that they’re making nuclear weapons.

It has been a lie of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party regime—and, for that matter, the Kadima regime of Ehud Olmert before him—that this is a threat that has to be preempted, when in fact it never was anything more than a latent nuclear deterrent.

Maybe a good question to ask here is: What is the goal for the United States in Iran in relation to Iran’s nuclear program? What is the red line here? Does Iran have this need for a latent nuclear deterrent, and what is the thing that’s acceptable to the United States and to the rest of the world? What should be acceptable?

Yeah, Lex. There was a lot to unpack there, so let’s back up a little bit. Let’s talk, first of all, about the regime itself. The Islamic Republic of Iran came into power in 1979. It has been declared a leading state sponsor of terrorism by multiple administrations dating back to the Clinton administration—by Obama, by Biden, and by Trump—and it is a regime that has killed and maimed thousands of Americans, not to mention, obviously, hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners.

It is a regime that has lied about its nuclear program. It never actually disclosed its nuclear sites. All these sites were discovered by Iranian opposition groups and by Western intelligence agencies. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the UN agency responsible for preventing proliferation, has come out again and again over many years in very detailed reports describing Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

There have been multiple attempts at diplomacy with Iran. I’m sure we’re going to talk about it. Scott mentioned the JCPOA, so we should certainly talk about the JCPOA, which was the 2015 deal that Barack Obama reached with Iran. There have been multiple attempts to actually get the Iranians to negotiate away their nuclear weapons program.

It’s worth mentioning that if Iran wanted to have civilian nuclear energy, there are 23 countries in the world that have it, but they don’t have enrichment and they don’t have reprocessing. We sign these deals called the gold standard with the South Koreans, with the Emiratis, and with others. We say, if you want civilian energy, you can have power plants, you can buy your fuel rods from abroad, but there’s no reason to have enrichment or plutonium reprocessing, because those are the key capabilities you need to develop nuclear weapons.

Now, the 5 countries that have those capabilities and don’t have nuclear weapons are Argentina, Brazil, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan. I think it’s the view of many administrations over many years, including many European leaders, that the Islamic Republic of Iran is very different from those aforementioned countries because it has been dedicated to terrorism. It’s been killing Americans, other Westerners, and other Middle Easterners, and it is a dangerous regime. You don’t want to have that dangerous regime retaining the key capabilities it needs to develop nuclear weapons.

But I want to get back more to the present. You mentioned this was around negotiations out of Oman. Scott was saying that President Trump had said, “Here’s the offer. Take it or leave it. Zero enrichment, full dismantlement.” Well, in fact, that wasn’t the offer that was presented to the Iranians at Oman.

The offer was a one-page offer, and it said you can temporarily enrich above ground. You’ve got to render your below-ground facilities “nonoperational,” and then, at some time in the future—3 or 4 years, as Scott said—there’ll be a consortium built not on Iranian territory. It’ll be a partnership with the Saudis and the Emiratis, under IAEA supervision, and that enrichment facility will create fuel rods for your nuclear reactors.

That was the offer presented to Iran, and that offer would come with significant sanctions relief—billions of dollars that would go to the regime. Obviously, the economy there has been suffering. The regime has not had the resources that it had in the past to fund its—what I call—its axis of misery, its proxy terror armies around the world.

It was a good offer, and I was shocked that Khamenei rejected it. He did reject it, and I think he rejected it because he believed that he could continue to do to President Trump what he had done to President Obama, which is just continue to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the Americans at the table in order to ensure that he could keep all these nuclear facilities, all these nuclear capabilities, so that, at a time of his choosing, when President Trump is gone, he can develop nuclear weapons.

Now, it is a bit interesting to say that Iran has no intention of developing nuclear weapons. Let’s examine the nuclear program and ask: Does this sound like a regime that’s not interested in building nuclear weapons?

They built deeply buried underground enrichment facilities that they hid from the international community and didn’t disclose. They had an active nuclear warhead program called Amad, which formally ended in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. We know that because not only has that been detailed by the IAEA, but Mossad, in a daring operation in Tehran, took out a nuclear archive and brought it back to the West.

Then the IAEA, the United States, and the intelligence communities went through this detailed archive and discovered that this Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had an active program to build 5 atomic warheads. It was a very detailed program, with blueprints and designs, all of which was developed under Amad to build a nuclear weapons program. So, again, it’s interesting to say that he doesn’t have the intention to build nuclear weapons when he actually had an active nuclear weapons program.

We can talk about what happened to that program after 2003. There are a lot of interesting details. When you combine the fact that he has an active nuclear weapons program, sites that are buried deep underground, weapons scientists who came out of the Amad program and continued to work on the initial metallurgy work and computer modeling designed to actually begin that process of building a warhead, and the fact that all of this has been hidden from the international community, it raises serious questions.

He has spent an estimated half a trillion dollars on his nuclear program in direct costs and sanctions costs. One has to ask—and I think it’s an interesting question—why compare the UAE and Iran? The UAE signed the gold standard. They said, “We’ll have no enrichment capability or reprocessing.” They spent about $20 billion on that, and it supplies 25% of their electrical generation.

Khamenei spent a half a trillion dollars, and that program supplies maybe 3% of their electrical needs. In fact, they have a reactor that they bought from the Russians called Bushehr. That reactor is exactly what you’d want in a proliferation-proof reactor: They buy fuel rods from the Russians, they use them, and they send the spent fuel back to Russia so it cannot be reprocessed into plutonium.

I just think it’s important for your listeners to understand some of the technical nuclear history here in order to unpack this question: Did Khamenei want nuclear weapons? What was his goal here? Then we can talk about whether this was the right operation for the United States to order the B-2 bombers to strike these facilities in what, again, was a limited operation, as President Trump has said, in order to drive the Iranians back to the negotiating table and finally do the deal that President Trump has asked them to do since he came into office in January.

Yeah, that is one of the fascinating questions: whether this operation, Midnight Hammer, increased or decreased the chance that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon.

Before you ask any more questions, I have to refute virtually everything he just said, which is completely false. I mean, really, everything. There was not one thing he said that was true. Just one thing. Iran is a nation over there somewhere. You got that part right.

All right, 22 years of working on Iran, and I got that right. But do you know the population of Iran?

92 million.

Scott Ritter

Okay. So, first of all, they were trying to buy a light-water reactor from the Europeans or the Chinese in the 1990s, and Bill Clinton wouldn’t let them. He put tremendous pressure on China to prevent them from selling them a light-water reactor—a turnkey reactor that produces waste that’s so polluted with impurities that you can’t make nuclear weapons fuel out of it.

By the way, to this day, they have never had a reprocessing facility for reprocessing plutonium, even their current plutonium waste from their heavy-water reactor at Arak, to make weapons fuel out of that. They have no plutonium route to the bomb.

Under the JCPOA, Arak, not Bushehr. There’s a difference between Arak and Bushehr. Arak is where they poured concrete into the reactor and shut it down. The reason they poured concrete under the JCPOA—not they, but the Obama administration—was to prevent them from using that reactor to reprocess plutonium.

Scott's exactly right. Bushehr is a heavy-water reactor provided by the Russians, as I described, for the generation of electricity. It's proliferation-proof. Arak is the opposite: it's a heavy-water reactor that was built for a plutonium pathway to nuclear weapons, which is exactly why, under the JCPOA, they literally had to pour concrete into the middle of it to prevent it from reprocessing plutonium.

I think we're going to need a scientist to come in here and split the difference. Or maybe we need to look up some IAEA documents, because I don't believe that Arak ever had a reprocessing facility for its plutonium waste. Under the JCPOA, the Russians would come and get all their plutonium waste, which comes out contaminated and not useful. You need a reprocessing facility to remove all of the impurities.

It could be that I'm wrong about that, but I don't believe that they ever had a reprocessing facility at Arak that they could use to remove all those impurities and then have weapons-grade plutonium fuel, as the North Koreans do. So the Obama administration was very clear under the JCPOA: We are going to pour concrete into the Arak facility, as Scott acknowledged, because we are concerned that Arak can be used for reprocessing plutonium—a plutonium pathway to a nuclear weapon. It can be used, but we don't know if it was used.

Scott Ritter

Oh, we know it never was. There never was any reprocessing of weapons-grade fuel there.

But there was concrete. There's no indication that it was ever used for reprocessing. David Albright, who is actually a physicist and a weapons inspector, goes into a lot of detail about the Iranian nuclear program. He's the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, and he spent decades on this. To his credit, he was one of the deep skeptics of the Bush administration's rush to war with Iraq.

Scott Ritter

That's not true. He vouched for claims that there were chemical weapons in Iraq and later said he was sorry for it.

Again, I mentioned the Bush administration's rush to war based on its claims that Saddam was building nuclear weapons. He did debunk the aluminum tubes, though. He debunked them and was a deep skeptic of the rush to war in Iraq.

You know, the argument today, Lex, which I think is the more interesting argument, is that there are very few people left today who don't believe that the Iranians were building the nuclear weapons capability that gave them the option to build nuclear weapons. I already said that we can debate whether they had decided to, and I'm interested to hear Scott's opinion on this, but the recent intelligence that has come out—that the Iranian nuclear weapons scientists had begun preliminary work on building a warhead—came out from where? Who put that intelligence into the intelligence stream?

Scott Ritter

Israeli claims, not verified by the U.S.

Matthew Kroenig

The Wall Street Journal did verify this. Lawrence Norman actually wrote a piece during the Biden administration, because the Biden DNI had, for the first time in its annual threat assessment, removed a line that said Iran was not currently working on developing any capabilities that would put it in a position to actually deliver a nuclear warhead.

The Lawrence Norman piece in the Wall Street Journal was that there had actually been initial work done on metallurgy and computer modeling. Those were defined terms in Section T of the 2015 JCPOA, which defined weaponization in that section. Metallurgy and computer modeling were some of the initial steps.

The DNI was very concerned under Biden that these initial steps meant either Khamenei had given the green light to nuclear weapons scientists, or that nuclear weapons scientists were trying to get ahead of the boss so they could be in a position to move forward if he decided to do so, and their timelines were therefore expedited. So, again, you've got the DNI under Biden, you've got the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, you've got Israeli intelligence, you've got the Wall Street Journal, and you've got the IAEA asking questions of Iran about its past weaponization activities: Why are you denying us? Who's the dog that didn't bark there?

The current director of national intelligence, who issued her threat assessment in February—Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard—repeated the exact same language from the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, which the CIA and the National Intelligence Council have reaffirmed repeatedly ever since. The Supreme Leader has not decided to pursue nuclear weapons. He has not made the political decision to pursue nuclear weapons.

She testified, in fact, under oath in front of the Senate in March. According to CNN and The New York Times, there was a brand-new assessment put together the week before the attack was launched, reaffirming the same thing. At least in Haaretz, Mossad agreed with the CIA.

I'd like to quote CIA Director John Ratcliffe because Scott brought up the CIA and the intelligence community. I think Ratcliffe had a good way of looking at this. He said, "When you're on the 99-yard line as a football team, you have the intention to score a goal."

What he was actually pointing to is: Let's not talk about this debate over whether Khamenei had given the order or not given the order, because Khamenei knows that if he gives an order, the U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities will pick up on that order, and that will be the trigger for strikes. What Ratcliffe is saying is that Khamenei had built the nuclear weapons capability; he's at the 99-yard line.

Both the CIA and European leaders, as well as the European intelligence community, have said for years that if Iran has that capability and is on the 99-yard line, at that point it's going to be too late to stop them once the decision is made to assemble the final warhead, which, by the way, is the final piece of what you need for a deliverable nuclear weapon.

That's not true at all. They have to resort to a crude analogy about football yard lines because they can't say the truth, which is that they had zero weapons-grade uranium. They were not producing it. They were trying to get the United States back in the deal. They were still officially within the JCPOA with the rest of the UN Security Council, under which they shipped all of their enriched-uranium stockpile out of the country to Russia to be transferred to fuel rods. Their insistence was on their continued ability to enrich uranium.

This goes to one of the things that he at least brought up that deserves addressing. When Trump came into power in 2017, he decided on this Israeli-influenced maximum-pressure campaign, and he said the JCPOA was "the worst deal in the history of any time any two men ever shook hands," and all these kinds of things in his hyperbolic way. That made it very difficult for him to figure out a way to stay in the deal or to compromise along its lines.

But the fact of the matter is, if he had just played it straight and said, "Listen, Ayatollah, we don't have to be friends, but we do have a deal here, which my predecessor struck with you. I don't like these sunset provisions, and I want to send my guys over there and see if we can figure out a way to convince you that we really wish you'd shut down Fordow together, or this or that or the other thing," and tried to approach them in good faith, we would have had a JCPOA.

So, toward peace, we were past the 50-yard line. Donald Trump could have gone to Tehran and shaken hands with the Ayatollah. Dick Cheney complained that we had cold relations with Iran back in 1998, when he was the head of Halliburton, and said, "We can do business with these guys." Donald Trump could have gone right over there and done business. Instead, he gave in to Netanyahu's lies and this ridiculous hoax that they had uncovered all these Iranian nuclear documents, which he pretends are legitimate.

All they did was recycle the fake, Israeli-forged "smoking laptop" of 2005, which they lied about and pretended was the laptop of an Iranian scientist smuggled out of Iran by his wife, containing all this proof of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program. But every bit of that was refuted, including the thing about the warhead, which was refuted by David Albright and his friend David Sanger in The New York Times.

All those sketches of the warhead for the missile were wrong because, when Mossad forged the documents, they were making a good educated guess. They didn't know that Iran had completely redesigned the nose cone of its mid-range missiles and had an entirely different nose cone that would require an entirely different warhead than the one described in the documents. Why would they have been designing a warhead to fit in a nose cone that they were abandoning?

That was refuted. David Albright completely discredited your claims there, pal. Then they later admitted that it was a CIA plant. There was no laptop. Olli Heinonen, who was a very hawkish, high-level executive at the International Atomic Energy Agency, admitted that the intelligence had been brought into the stream by the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a communist terrorist cult that used to work for the Ayatollah during the revolution, then turned on him, and he turned on them and kicked them out.

Matthew Kroenig

Then they went to work for Saddam Hussein, where they helped crush the Shiite and Kurdish insurrection of 1991. Then they became America's, Donald Rumsfeld's, and Ariel Sharon's sock puppets, and later Ehud Olmert's sock puppets, when the United States invaded Iraq and took possession of them. They're now under American protection in Albania.

And these are the same crooks who, just a few weeks ago—you might remember—said, “Look, new satellite pictures of a whole new nuclear facility in Iran.” Isn't it funny how no one ever brought that up again? They didn't bomb it. It was nothing. It was fake.

Just like before, when they said, “Hey, look, here's a picture of a vault door. And behind that is where the secret nuclear weapons program is.” Except it turned out that vault door was a stock photo from a vault company. It meant nothing. They had repeatedly made claims that were totally refuted.

Just like I'm about to refute his claim that they were ever the ones who revealed, for example, Natanz. He was implying that Natanz and Qom were both buried and hidden until revealed, I think you said, by dissident groups. That is the MEK, sock puppets of the Israelis.

But it was your friend David Albright, not the Israeli Mossad through the MEK, who revealed Natanz's facility. Ask him. He'll fistfight you over it. He claims credit. He was first and said, “This is a facility.”

However, they were not in violation of their safeguards agreement with the IAEA. They were still 6 months away from introducing any nuclear material to that facility. And so, when it was revealed, they weren't in violation of anything.

And then, on Qom, we had a huge fight about this at the time. The party line came down from all the government officials and the media that they had just exposed the facility there. Qom is the same thing. In fact, that wasn't true.

The Iranians had announced to the IAEA, “We have built a new facility here, and we are going to introduce nuclear material into it within 6 months. So here's your official notification.” Then, a few days later, they just pretended to expose it, when it was the Iranians themselves who had admitted to it in going along with their obligations under their safeguards agreement. So it's just completely wrong.

Why do they bury them? They buried them for protection, because clearly the Israelis have indicated since the 1990s that they consider any nuclear program in Iran to be the same thing as an advanced nuclear weapons program. You're hearing that today.

For them to have a nuclear facility at all is equivalent to them going ahead and breaking out and making a nuclear weapon. And so, of course, they know that they have to have it buried to protect it from Israel. That doesn't mean that they are trying to get nukes.

It does mean, as I already said, that they wanted to prove to the world that they know how to enrich uranium and that they have facilities buried deeply enough where, if we attack them, that would incentivize them to make nukes. Then we might be unable to stop them without going all the way toward regime change. They're basically bluffing, betting that we won't go that far, considering how gigantic their country is and how mountainous and populous it is compared to Iraq next door.

Now, here are some more things that he said that weren't true. He said, “Iran has been killing Americans all this time.” Well, that's almost always a reference to Beirut in 1983, which you can read about in the book By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky, the former Mossad officer. The Israelis knew that they were building that truck bomb to bomb the Marines with, withheld that information from the United States, and said, “That's what they get for sticking their big noses in.”

That is in the book By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky. And by the way, the Israelis were friends with Iran at the time, all through the 1980s. It was just a couple of years later that Ronald Reagan sold Iran missiles, using the Israelis as cutouts to do so, when he switched sides temporarily in the Iran-Iraq War.

And that was in 1983. If Ronald Reagan can sell missiles 3 years after that, then surely the United States and the Ayatollah can bury the hatchet over that. No one has ever, I don't believe, really proven that Tehran ordered it.

It was a Shiite militia backed by Iran, that sort of proto-Hezbollah, that carried out the attack that killed those Marines. If there's some responsibility for it, then damn them. If there's direct responsibility for that, not just their support for the group, then damn them for that.

But that's still no reason in the world to say that we can't get along with them now, when that was in the same year Return of the Jedi came out.

Yeah.

In other words, just implying the lie. What they're saying is that Iran backed Muqtada al-Sadr, whom they were actually fighting the whole war against. He remains a powerful kingmaker in that country to this day. He was part of the United Iraqi Alliance.

In fact, as long as we're taking a long-form view here, he was the least Iran-tied of the 3 major factions in the United Iraqi Alliance in Iraq War II. The other 2 major factions were Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Council, and they had been living in Iran for the last 20 years. They're the ones who came and took over Baghdad.

Muqtada al-Sadr is Shiite and close to Iran, but he's also an Iraqi nationalist. At times, he allied with the Sunnis and tried to limit American and Iranian influence in the country. He was more of an Arab and an Iraqi nationalist.

The Americans decided they hated him the most, not because he was the most Iran-tied, but because he was willing to tell us and them to get the hell out. America was betting that if we backed the same parties that Iran backed in Iraq War II, they would eventually end up needing our money and guns more than they would need their Iranian friends, co-religionists, and sponsors next door, which of course did not work out.

America has had minimal influence in supermajority-Shiite Iraq ever since the end of Iraq War II. We can get back later in the show to how Israel helped lie us into that horrific war as well.

But the fact of the matter is, it was not Iranians setting off those bombs. It was not even Iranians making those bombs. I show in my book Enough Already—I have a solid dozen sources—

Enough already. Thank you.

I have a solid dozen sources, including Michael Gordon's own colleague, Alissa Rubin, at The New York Times, and many others, where they found these bomb factories in Shiite Iraq. They were being made by Shiite Arab Iraqis.

When David Petraeus was going to have a big press conference, they laid out all the components. All the reporters gathered around, and they started noticing that the components said “Made in UAE” and “Made in Haditha”—that is, Iraq. In other words, there was no evidence whatsoever that these came from Iran.

Then they called off the press conference, and Stephen Hadley, George Bush's second national security adviser, admitted that we didn't have the evidence that we needed to present that. I also quote 1 Marine and 1 high-level Army intelligence officer in there who were deeply involved in Iraq War II, reconfirming that there was never any evidence that these bombs were coming across from Iran, or especially that, even if they were, they were at the direction of the Quds Force or the Ayatollah.

This was all just a propaganda campaign because Dick Cheney and David Petraeus were trying to give George Bush a reason to hit IRGC bases and start the war in 2007. This sounds crazy, but there are 4 major confirming sources for it.

Dick Cheney's national security adviser, David Wurmser, who was the author of the A Clean Break strategy—which we're going to talk about today—was saying in 2007, “We want to work with the Israelis to start the war with Iran, to force George Bush to do an end run around Congress and force him into the war.”

That was reported originally by Steven Clemons in The Washington Note, but it was later confirmed in The New York Times and by The Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman in his book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. This was the end they were going for. They were trying so hard to force a war in 2007.

It was the commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Fallon, who said, “Over my dead body. We are not doing this.” Then, a few months later, the National Intelligence Council put out their NIE, saying that there was no nuclear weapons program at all.

George W. Bush complained in his memoir that, in his story, it was the Saudi king, His Royal Highness Abdullah, rather than Ehud Olmert, who was asking him to attack Iran. But he was saying, “I'm sorry, Your Majesty. I can't attack Iran's nuclear program because my own intelligence agency says they don't have a military program. So how am I supposed to start a war with them when my own intelligence agencies say that?”

This is what Donald Trump just did: start it anyway. He had his man Rubio say, “Well, screw the intelligence. I don't care what it says. We can just do this if we want to.”

So first, let me say: on the cover of Enough Already, “Devastating.”

Daniel Ellsberg, outstanding. Daniel L. Davis, essential. Ron Paul—you are respected by a very large number of people. You have decades of experience in this. The same thing with Mark: extremely respected by a very large number of people and experts.

There's a lot of disagreement here, and we're unfortunately going to leave a lot of the disagreements on the table for the aforementioned nuclear scientists to deconstruct later. So let's not try to have every single claim perfectly refuted. Let's just leave the statements on the table as they stand, and let's also try to find things we kind of agree on and, I know this might be difficult, steelman the other side.

That's the thing I would love to ask you. Maybe give Mark a chance to speak a little bit, but for both of you to try to steelman the other side. People who are concerned about Iran developing a nuclear program: can you steelman that case?

The same thing I said in my opening statement, quite frankly, is that I don't carry any brief for the Ayatollah. I'm a Texan. I don't give a damn about what some Shiite theocrat says about anything. My interest is the people of this country, its future, and what's true.

I don't mind telling you that, even though the Iranians never said, “We're building a latent nuclear weapons capability,” that's clearly what they're doing: showing that they can make a nuke, so don't make me make a nuke. That has been their position.

Their position has not been, “I'm making a nuke so I can wipe Israel off the map.” Their position has been, “Look, if you guys don't attack us, we could just keep this civilian program the way it is.”

Again, there's always the implication that they're just building up this uranium stockpile, but no, they're not. That was in reaction to 1, Donald Trump leaving the deal in 2018; 2, the assassination in December 2020 of the Iranian nuclear scientist Fakhrizadeh, or however you say that; and then, in April 2021, the sabotage at Natanz.

There's a Reuters story that says right after they sabotaged Natanz, that's when the Ayatollah decided, “Let's enrich up to 60%.” Why stop 30% short of 90% U-235? It's because they're not even making a threat. They're making the most latent threat, a bargaining chip to negotiate away.

They're trying to put pressure on the United States to come back to the table. That's not the same as racing to the bomb. That's why Marco Rubio says, “Never mind the intelligence,” because the intelligence says what I just said.

Yes, point made. Let's try, if possible, to keep it to a minute or 2 of back-and-forth. Except, you know, the problem is we're talking about nuclear stuff, which is all very complicated, and most people don't know much about it, which is what the war party is relying on: that people just hear “nuclear,” “afraid,” and “mushroom cloud,” and give the benefit of the doubt to the hawks. So we have to get into the details of this stuff.

Details, 100%. But I like the tension between 2 people with different perspectives exploring those details, and the more we can go back and forth, the better. There's a lot of disagreement on the table. I personally enjoy learning from the disagreement.

I think that was a very long list of claims that he made, though, where I felt like I had to go down the list as much as I could because there was a lot. I think you addressed maybe 1 or 2 claims, and it took 15 minutes. So that's what I'm just commenting on.

Let's do 1 at a time. I like the tension of the debate, of the back-and-forth. That's all. Mark, do you want to comment on some of this a little bit here? Pick whichever topic you want to go with here.

Yeah, there's a lot there. Just a couple of things I think are worth your viewers knowing, because Scott's right: the nuclear physics is complicated, and it's also important.

The Iranians have assembled—they say—about 15 to 17 bombs' worth of 60%-enriched uranium. I think it's always important for your listeners to understand: What does this all mean? Enriched to 3.67%, to 20%, to 60%, and then to 90% weapons-grade uranium—what does this actual process mean?

First of all, obviously, enriched uranium is a key capability to develop a nuclear weapon. It can also be used for other purposes, civilian purposes, and research purposes. You can use it to power a nuclear submarine. So, if you don't mind, I could just break it down.

That's fascinating. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's, again, important just to understand the basics before we jump into the allegations, claims, and counterclaims. If you're going to enrich to 3.67% enriched uranium, that's for civilian nuclear power, right? But when you do that, you've basically done 70% of what you need to get to weapons-grade uranium. So you've done all the steps—70% of the steps—in order to get to weapons-grade uranium.

If you enrich to 20%, you are now at 90% of what you need to get to weapons-grade uranium. Now, why would you need 20%? You may need it for something like a research reactor, and so, medical isotopes. Iran has a Tehran Research Reactor for medical isotopes.

You can, by the way, buy those isotopes from abroad, or you can produce them at home. If you're going to enrich to 60%, then you've done 99% of what you need to get to weapons-grade uranium, and then 90% is, quote, weapons-grade uranium.

By the way, you can use 60% to actually deliver a crude nuclear device. That has been done in the past, but you want to get to, quote, 90%—that's weapons-grade uranium, as Scott's defining it. But just again, to clarify, these huge stockpiles of 60% that Iran has accumulated—this 15 to 17 bombs' worth of 60%—is 99% of what they need for weapons-grade uranium. So I just wanted to explain that.

Yeah, but when you say—you're saying if you include the mining, the refining of the ore into yellowcake, the transformation of that into uranium hexafluoride gas, the driving of it in a truck over to the centrifuge, and then spinning it—this is where we get this 90% number from, right?

In place of 90%-enriched uranium or 80%-enriched uranium, it's 90% of the way on some chart that includes picking up a shovel and beginning to mine, right? Again, I just think it's important to understand the definition of terms.

Once you have 60%-enriched uranium, you've done 99% of all the steps, including some of the steps that Scott's talking about. You've done 99% of what you need to have weapons-grade uranium.

That's just meaningless. Why is that meaningless? Well, as I've already established numerous times here, under the JCPOA, they shipped out every bit of their enriched uranium stockpile. The French turned it into fuel rods and then shipped it back.

That's the deal they're trying to get the United States back into, and they were obviously clearly willing to do that. Again, the only reason they were enriching up to 60% was to put pressure on the Americans to go ahead and get back into the deal. Bad bet. It gave them an excuse to bomb based on the idea that people are going to listen to them.

Pretend that somehow that's 99% of the way to the bomb when you're including driving to the mine, mining it, converting it to yellowcake, and all these other things.

If you have a deliverable nuclear weapon, you need the weapons-grade uranium. Just to repeat, they have multiple bombs' worth of the 60%-enriched uranium, which again is 99% of the steps you need to take for weapons-grade uranium. So they're very close to weapons-grade uranium. It's 1% more that they need to do to enrich to weapons-grade.

The second aspect of a deliverable nuclear weapon is obviously the delivery vehicle, and those are the missiles. According to the DNI and other credible sources, Iran has the largest missile inventory in the Middle East: 3,000 missiles before the war began, and at least 2,000 ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel.

There's no doubt that Iran has the ability, once they have the weapons-grade uranium and the warhead, to fix that to a missile and deliver it—certainly to hit Israel, hit our Gulf neighbors, and hit southern Europe.

They also have an active intercontinental ballistic missile program, an ICBM program, which ultimately is designed not to hit the Israelis or the Gulfies, but to hit deeper into Europe and ultimately to target the United States.

So let's just understand the missile program. I think it's an important part of it. The third leg of the stool—and Scott has already alluded to this, and we've had some debate on this—is that you've got to develop a warhead, or a crude nuclear device. According to estimates from both U.S. government sources and nuclear experts, it would take about 4 to 6 months for Iran to develop a crude nuclear device.

This is something that you wouldn't use a missile to deliver, but you would use a plane or a ship. It would take somewhere in the neighborhood of about a year and a half to develop a warhead, and that's to affix to the missile. So, the 3 legs of the nuclear stool are the weapons-grade uranium, the missiles to deliver it, and the warhead.

I just want to define terms so that when we're having this big debate, your listeners kind of understand what we're talking about.

If I can jump in here on this point too, and I'll turn it back over to you, but I actually have a bit of a correction to make for anyone who's seen me on Piers Morgan or Saagar and Krystal. I actually oversimplified and made a mistake.

I've been off the Iran nuclear beat for a little while, doing other things, and so I'd like to take this opportunity to clarify. I'm going to try to clarify with them on their shows too.

I have an old friend of mine who used to make nuclear bombs, Gordon Prather, and I only just found out that he died 2 years ago.

Unfortunately, he used to write for us at Antiwar.com. He was a brilliant nuclear physicist and H-bomb developer, and he had really taught me all about this stuff. I'm not correcting anything you said; what he said, essentially, is right. I may add a little more detail.

The easiest kind of nuke to make from uranium is a simple gun-type nuke, like the one they dropped on Hiroshima, Little Boy. It's essentially a shotgun firing a uranium slug into a uranium target, and that's enough. They didn't even test it; they knew it would work. It was so easy to make the Hiroshima bomb.

The Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium implosion bomb. It's virtually always plutonium that's used in implosion bombs and in miniaturized nuclear warheads that can be married to missiles, as opposed to a bomb you can drop from the belly of a plane. That's what he was saying, right? So, a gun-type nuke—you can't put that on a missile.

That is by far the easiest kind of nuclear weapon for Iran to make if they broke out and made one, right? But it'd essentially be useless to them, right? What are they gonna do? Drive it to Israel in a flatbed truck, right? They've got no way to deliver that. They could test it in the desert and beat their chest, but essentially that's all they could do. Or they could drop it from a plane, like we did, as Scott said, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yeah. Well, there's a very slim chance of Iranian heavy bombers getting through Israeli airspace.

But anyway, to make an implosion bomb, they would have to do years' worth of experiments, unless the Chinese or the Russians just gave them the software or the finished blueprints or something, which there's no indication of whatsoever. The only people who gave them blueprints for a nuclear bomb was the CIA. Remember Operation Merlin, where they just changed one little thing and gave them nuclear bomb blueprints, but the Iranians didn't take the bait.

Just to clarify, it's interesting in terms of the history of proliferation. Iran's initial nuclear program, which was built on centrifuges, as Scott and I have been talking about, was actually based on designs that were given to them by A. Q. Khan, who was really the father of the Pakistani nuclear program. He actually stole those designs from the Dutch and handed them to the Iranians. He also handed them to the North Koreans, the Libyans, and others.

So they were able to illicitly acquire this technology, or at least the blueprints for this technology, from the father of the Pakistani bomb. I think that's an interesting point.

But, as I said earlier, it was because Bill Clinton clamped down on the Chinese and wouldn't let them sell—or let anyone else sell them—light-water reactors. So then they went to A. Q. Khan and bought the stuff on the black market.

Yeah. And they obviously bought heavy-water reactors from the Russians, which they've been using for electricity.

I want to get to the second thing. I think it's important for listeners to know, and then I want to get to the JCPOA. I was in the middle of saying, though, that when you're trying to make a uranium implosion bomb or a plutonium implosion bomb, it's a much more difficult task than putting together a gun-type nuke. It takes an extraordinary amount of testing.

That's why he repeated, probably unknowingly, some false propaganda about Iran having this advanced testing facility. I think he was implying—correct me if I'm wrong—that at Parchin they were testing these implosion systems, but that's completely debunked. It's completely false.

What they were doing at Parchin with that implosion chamber was making nanodiamonds. The scientist in charge was a Ukrainian who had studied in the Soviet Union at a military university, where they said, "Oh, see, they study nuclear stuff there." But that wasn't his specialty. His name was Dan Leno, and he was a specialist in making nanodiamonds.

That facility was vouched for by Robert Kelley, who told Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor that all that stuff was nonsense—that the facility's implosion chamber could not be used for testing an implosion system for nuclear weapons.

And I know from what Dr. Prather told me that when the Americans were doing this, and the Russians too, they tested all their implosion systems outside. You have to do it over and over and over again with lead instead of uranium in the core, and then you take all this high-speed X-ray film of the thing. It's this huge, drawn-out, incredibly complicated engineering process.

This is probably why, the week before the war, the CIA said, "Not only do we think they're 1 year away from having enough nuclear material to make 1 bomb, we think they're 3 years away from having a finished warhead." That must have been assuming that they would try to make an implosion system that you could put on—in other words, miniaturize and put on—a missile, as opposed to skipping a gun-type nuke that would be useless to them.

It's very important to understand that if they have a uranium route to the bomb, if they withdraw from the treaty, kick out the IAEA inspectors, and announce, "Now we're making nuclear bombs," they can either race to a gun-type nuke that's essentially useless to them, or they can take their ponderous time trying to figure out how to make an implosion system work.

First of all, I'm glad Scott knows about what's going on at Parchin, because the IAEA doesn't, and they've been asking the Iranians—

That's not true. The Iranians told the IAEA, "You can inspect any 5 out of 10 facilities here, carte blanche. Go ahead." And they did and found nothing. Then they made up the lies about the implosion chamber later. And the IAEA—again, Robert Kelley is the American IAEA guy—debunked that in the Christian Science Monitor.

All right. I want to just again put it out there for your listeners. They should just Google the AMAD program and learn about it, because it's detailed in U.S. government documents. Experts in Iran's nuclear program, including David Albright, who actually saw the archive, went in there, and wrote a whole book on it, provide a lot of detail about how Iran had an active nuclear-weapons program called the AMAD program to build 5 nuclear weapons.

But I want to get to the JCPOA, because I actually think that's an interesting discussion for Scott and me to have, because I think there are things that we agree on there and things that we disagree on.

Right. So this is the 2015 nuclear deal that Obama reached. It was negotiated painstakingly over 2 years between 2013 and 2015, and it follows the interim agreement that the United States negotiated with Iran. It was in that interim agreement in 2013 where the United States, for the first time, actually gave Iran the right to enrich uranium.

There were 5 U.N. Security Council resolutions passed, with the support of Russia and China, that said Iran should have no enrichment capability and no plutonium-reprocessing capability because of the fears that Iran would turn that into a nuclear-weapons program. But in 2013, they gave that up.

In 2015, we reached the JCPOA, and under the JCPOA, Iran is allowed to retain enrichment capability and reprocessing capability, with restrictions that expire over time. Scott mentioned these sunsets, and I just want your listeners to understand what they are: essentially, the restrictions that are placed on Iran's nuclear program.

There are some really serious restrictions placed on it, especially in the short term. And Scott's right: the enriched material has to be shipped out, not to the French but to the Russians. There are restrictions on Iran's ability to operate these facilities at Natanz and Fordow. They're not closed; they still remain open, but there are restrictions on what they can do with them.

There's also a restriction on Iran's ability to test and install advanced centrifuges. The reason you'd want an advanced centrifuge rather than the first-generation centrifuge that A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, gave to the Iranians is that you need a smaller number of these centrifuges to produce weapons-grade uranium. The smaller the number, the easier it is to hide, right? You can put it in clandestine facilities without this large enrichment-centrifuge footprint.

So there are restrictions on this advanced-centrifuge R&D. And Iran gets significant sanctions relief as part of this. But the whole assumption here, from both an Iranian and American perspective, is that these restrictions are going to sunset. They're going to disappear over time.

In fact, 2025 is the year in which some of the significant restrictions on Iran's capabilities begin to sunset, and all of them are effectively gone by 2031. In 2031, Iran can emerge with an industrial-scale enrichment capability. They can emerge with advanced centrifuges that they can install in as many enrichment facilities as they want to build.

Iran can enrich to higher and higher levels. They can go from 3.67% to 20%; they can go to 60%. There's nothing in the JCPOA that actually prohibits them from going to 90% enrichment.

I think at the time, the Obama administration's theory of the case was, "Yeah, sure, in 15 years' time—but in 15 years' time, we'll be gone. Hopefully, there'll be a different government in Iran, and maybe we can renegotiate a different agreement with that government that will extend the sunsets."

So that's the JCPOA. The reason that critics of the JCPOA—and I was one of them—objected to the deal is not because it didn't have some short-term, temporary restrictions that were useful, but because if you got it wrong and the same regime was in power in 15 years, that regime could emerge with this huge nuclear program, with the capabilities to develop nuclear weapons at these multiple hardened sites.

Iran, we estimated, would have a trillion dollars in sanctions relief over that 15-year period. If you got it wrong and it was the same regime in power as had been in power in 2015, then you had some difficulties. Okay? I just wanted to lay out the case against the JCPOA.

Now, to steelman Scott’s argument, I think there’s a legitimate argument, because I actually didn’t support the withdrawal from the agreement. President Trump withdrew in 2018. I did a similar version of what Scott was suggesting: I thought that the United States should negotiate with the Europeans—the French, the Germans, and the UK, who were part of the original deal—to extend the sunsets as an agreement between the United States and Europe, and then collectively go to the Iranians and say, “Let’s renegotiate this agreement to extend the sunsets.”

If you don’t want a nuclear weapons program, then you should agree that you don’t need these capabilities, and let’s extend the sunsets for another 15, 20, or 30 years.

Somebody give me a screenshot of this. Give me a pound, dude. There we go. Agreement. There we go. I think he would have gone for it too.

Well, I’m not sure if he would have, but let’s just do a little bit of history. I think it’s useful for the viewers to know the context, especially when Scott and I agree.

Yeah. I’m loving this.

A process was begun by the Trump administration. Trump appointed Brian Hook—or Secretary Pompeo actually appointed Brian Hook, who was the lead Iran envoy—and he began a process of talking to the Europeans.

The Europeans actually rejected this idea. At some point, Trump said, “Look, if the Europeans aren’t prepared to get onside, then I’m out of the deal. I’m out of the deal.”

If you’re interested, I can talk about why I thought we should have stayed in the deal, because I thought it gave us some important restrictions in the short term and certain leverage. But Trump decides to withdraw from that agreement because he recognizes that the fatal flaws of the agreement are, one, giving them any enrichment capability, especially at an industrial scale, within 15 years, and two, these sunsets, under which these restrictions are going to go away and Iran is going to end up with a massive nuclear program.

I think that’s important. We can talk about the JCPOA, the process, and everything else if you’re interested.

Scott Ritter

I’d like to go ahead and quickly accuse the FBI and the CIA of framing Trump for treason with Russia and pushing the Russiagate hoax. I’m trying to agree with my friend here, because that completely ruined Donald Trump’s ability to engage in real diplomacy with Russia for his entire first term. Certainly for the first 3 years of it, he was completely handcuffed. It was terrible, as I’m sure you’re well aware, for the future—now our past and current history—of Ukraine, as well as for this deal too.

Why couldn’t Trump pick up the phone? I don’t know the details here, but I’ll take his word for it that the British, the French, and the Germans weren’t being nice to Trump. They didn’t like him. They didn’t want to do it. Why couldn’t he pick up the phone and say, “Hey, Putin, I need you to call the Ayatollah for me and tell him, ‘Hey, you’d like to see him lift these sunsets too, and this and that’”? Why? Because they framed him for treason. So he was completely unable to engage in real diplomacy with Russia. I bet that he’d agree with me on that one too.

Next, actually, could I just say one interesting thing? Again, I think it’s going to be a later topic, and it’s going to be a provocative statement, but let’s put it on the table. I absolutely agree with Scott. I think it was a travesty that the accusations against Donald Trump as a Russian agent were made. They were completely debunked, but they did, I think, paralyze his presidency for 2 or 2½ years.

I agree with Scott. The idea that you would accuse the president of the United States of being a foreign agent for Vladimir Putin, I think, is unfounded. I thought it was disgraceful at the time, and I thought it was really important. I think Scott did really good work in debunking that.

I would say that just a couple of days ago, I was watching a podcast Scott was on, and he accused Trump of being an agent for Netanyahu and the Israeli government. So I think, again, the accusations that the president of the United States is a foreign agent for some foreign government—we should just put all of that aside in any discussion and say that President Trump makes his own decisions, whether we agree with him or disagree with him. He’s not working for the FSB, and he’s not working for Mossad. President Trump makes his own decisions based on American national security.

Now, I was making a point. That was hyperbole; I was making a point. But he did, in fact—could you Google this for me? I always forget exactly how many hundreds of millions of dollars he took from Sheldon Adelson, who is an American, by the way. Sheldon Adelson said his only regret in life was that he served in the American Army instead of the IDF, and said America should nuke Iran in order to get them to give up their nuclear weapons. He said, “I have one issue: Israel.” And they gave Trump hundreds of millions of dollars over 3 campaigns. That’s not just a guess.

I really hope you’ll think of me in the future.

Scott, first of all, a couple of things. One, there are a lot of people who are friends with Trump and try to gain influence. I believe that Trump, as an American, is making his own decisions. Let’s, for the purpose of this conversation, just focus on that and see what the right decisions are and what the wrong decisions are.

So, Lex, I think you're right. I mean, I think Elon Mus spent what, $400 million helping Trump get elected. And obviously there are a number of philanthropists. I think clearly his son Don Junior has had a lot of influence in who gets selected in these positions in the Pentagon, the NC. I think Tucker Coulson has had a lot of influence. So I think as you say, he surrounds himself with people who have certain ideas, ideologies, policies. The president makes his own decision. I just want to touch on one thing because I don’t want to leave this alone, just out of respect for the victims of Iran-backed terrorism, hostage-taking, and assassinations since 1979. This is the regime that took our diplomats hostage in 1979. Scott says 1983 was really the only thing that happened and throws out a lot of information, certainly some pretty breathtaking accusations that somehow the Israelis knew about this and didn’t tell the Americans. That’s an ex-Mossad officer’s accusation.

Victor Ostrovsky is his name. I know exactly who he is, and he has been widely discredited and has an axe to grind with Mossad. But it wasn’t only 1983. All through the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s, there have been hundreds of attacks, assassinations, and hostage-takings. There are thousands of Americans who have been killed and maimed by the regime.

Can you be specific about what you’re talking about?

Douglas Murray

Yeah, I can give you a whole list, and I’m literally happy to pull it up. Lex, I shared it with you. It’s a long list of attacks all through the 1980s and 1990s. I mean, everything from the Khobar Towers—

Khobar Towers was al-Qaeda. That was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Let him lay it out. All right, let’s hear him. I have my pen in my hand. Go ahead.

And again, according to US intelligence findings, it was actually Hezbollah that worked with al-Qaeda and trained al-Qaeda in that attack at the Khobar Towers. They were kidnapping our diplomats in Beirut. They launched attacks against our soldiers while they were in Iraq.

The notion that somehow you debunked that—

Douglas Murray

No, I don’t think—well, you say you debunked it. You just made your claim. But those were Iran-backed militias, backed by Qasem Soleimani, whom Scott referred to, who was the commander of the IRGC Quds Force, who supplied them with those IEDs, or those EFPs—actually, those explosively formed penetrators.

Well, again, this has all been confirmed by—why don’t you search Alissa Rubin, New York Times, “EFP factory”? Or you can look in the Christian Science Monitor for Operation Iraqi Freedom, where they found these things. It’s easy to find. In my book, you can flip right to “Soda Straws and EFPs,” and you’ll see where I have all my citations for the solid dozen American newspaper reporters who were embedded with American soldiers who found these factories in Iraqi Shia-stan, okay? With Iraqi Arabs working the machines, not Iran.

Douglas Murray

I’d like your viewers to Google not just a couple of sources, but actually Google the US government reports. They did a whole after-action report on the Iraq War—all the mistakes that were made in the Iraq War, and there were legions of mistakes made. But it was very clear that Iran had actually provided the technology, the training, and the funding for these Iran-backed militias to kill Americans.

I mean, I could see Scott's method from Lebanese Hezbollah that got it from the IRA. They didn't even get the technique from the Iranians at all.

Yeah. So Lebanese Hezbollah, as I'm sure all your listeners know, has been trained, financed, and supported by Iran for many years. But they were supported by Iran for the copper core, and that design did not come from Persia.

Douglas Murray

So again, I think we all admit—Scott admits as well—that Hezbollah was trained, financed, and supported by Iran. Hezbollah has been responsible for many of these terrorist attacks. Where does Hezbollah come from?

It's a reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where they went after the PLO and horribly mistreated the poor local Lebanese Shiites until they rose up and created these militias to fight in self-defense. That's where Hezbollah comes from.

Douglas Murray

Hezbollah was actually created by the IRGC before the Israeli invasion. This was the CIA's Bin Laden unit. Michael Scheuer says it was Osama bin Laden and his colleague Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who carried out the Khobar Towers attack.

And who did they kill? They killed 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia under the Israeli-insisted-upon dual-containment policy. The dual-containment policy under Bill Clinton came from Yitzhak Shamir, who had sent his man Martin Indyk to work for Bill Clinton and push the dual-containment policy. That's where that comes from in the first place.

The main reason al-Qaeda turned against the United States was the Khobar Towers attack by bin Laden, and he bragged about it himself to Abdel Bari Atwan, the reporter from Al-Quds Al-Arabi in London. He spent days with him and bragged all about it, blessed the martyrs, and the rest of that. That widely discredits the claim that it was Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah that carried out the Khobar Towers attack.

That was what the Saudi government told the United States. In fact, there's a great documentary about John O'Neill, who was the head of FBI counterterrorism, who told Louis Freeh, “Boss, the Saudis are blowing smoke up your ass about this Hezbollah thing. It was al-Qaeda that did it.” Then Louis Freeh got upset because he used the A-word. He was a very conservative Catholic guy, Louis Freeh, and then refused to listen to another word from John O'Neill about it.

So what we know now from Scott, because he's given a lot of context to how he actually sees things, is, here's who lies to you and here's who doesn't. The U.S. government lies to you. The Israeli government lies to you. The Israelis clearly lie to you—a mendacious bunch. The Saudis lie to you.

But you know who doesn't lie to you? Actually, who doesn't lie to you? Al-Qaeda doesn't lie to you. I didn't cite al-Qaeda or bin Laden himself, or the Iranians. I cited Michael Scheuer, the chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit.

Scott, straight up, I hear you, but you're interrupting. Please, just honestly, how come you're not saying that? Isn't it weird that you just said he trusts Hezbollah even though he didn't say anything about trusting Hezbollah? I'm not calling out the content. I'm calling out the interruptions.

He hasn't interrupted you. It's great. I'm loving the back and forth. It's great, but just a little less talking over each other. That's all.

Yeah. So, I mean, again, the sort of view of the regime in Iran—and I think Scott wisely said at the beginning of this discussion, “I don't have any love for the Ayatollah. I'm a Texan. I don't have any love for the Ayatollah in Iran.” And I agree with him, and I think he's being sincere in every discussion that we've had on every topic.

And yet, despite the fact that Scott doesn't have love for the Ayatollah, it's always about everyone's lying except the Ayatollah in Iran. He's not lying about having a nuclear weapons program. He didn't actually support all of these terrorist organizations that he founded, financed, and supported to kill Americans. It wasn't the Ayatollah and Iran. He's not lying about his deception campaign against the United States. He's not lying about negotiations with the Americans. It's America's fault all the time.

So he's presented all the time in Scott's conception here as a sincere actor who doesn't want to develop nuclear weapons, who doesn't actually want to kill Americans. He is just always a victim of American and Israeli aggression. I think it's an interesting conception. I think let's talk about it.

I mean, I'm fascinated by the conception because it's very contrary to mine. Obviously, it's very contrary to, I think, decades of overwhelming evidence that the Islamic Republic has been at war with the United States since 1979. I don't take too much stock in what people say. I take stock in what they do.

“Death to America,” “death to Israel”—that could just be a slogan. It could be just propaganda. But when it's actually operationalized, then you start to ask, well, maybe it's not just propaganda. Maybe it's an intention operationalized into capabilities.

What we're forgetting here—and again, it's this causal relationship—is that we aggress against Iran, and the Israelis aggress against Iran, and Iran is always reacting. Let's give the Iranians their due, because Khomeini made it very clear when he established the Islamic Republic that it would be a revolutionary and expansionist regime, and that it would expand its power through the Middle East.

And so he built, and to his credit was very successful until October 7th, this axis of resistance, as he calls it, which consists of these terrorist proxy armies: Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Iraqi Shiite militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and certainly support for the Assad regime in Syria. He built a very impressive and deadly axis that he turned against the United States and against Israel, which saw its culmination on October 7th.

I think after October 7th, that was a huge miscalculation for Khamenei, and we've seen the results of what's happened to his axis of resistance through quite devastating Israeli military capabilities over the past number of months. But he has an ideology.

I think where I agree with Scott is that I'm not sure if Khamenei would actually use a nuclear weapon against Israel or the United States, because I don't think Khamenei is suicidal. But I think what Khamenei wants is a nuclear weapon as a backstop for his conventional power.

It's very much the Kim Jong-un model of North Korea, right? I'm going to have nuclear weapons with ICBMs to threaten America, but what I'm actually going to do is threaten South Korea by having massive conventional capabilities on the DMZ that I could use to take South Korea in a week, or destroy it in a week. So the United States and South Korea have no military option.

That's Khamenei's view. He can build up this massive ballistic-missile arsenal that he's unleashed in the past 12 days. According to the United States and Israel, it was going to go from 2,000 to 6,000 to 20,000 missiles. From Khamenei's perspective, he didn't need to drop a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv. What he needed to do was use the threat of nuclear escalation in order to use his conventional capabilities—his missiles—to destroy Tel Aviv.

And you've already seen the damage from just a few dozen ballistic missiles getting through, the kind of damage that he's wrought on Tel Aviv already. That is the conception that Khamenei has. It's a revolutionary regime. It aggresses, and I do think it's interesting. I think we should talk about it.

So, a few things there. First of all, on Iran's pre-2003 nuclear weapons research, the CIA's estimate in 2007 concluded that all research had stopped in 2003. Seymour Hersh reported that the reasoning behind that was mainly that America had gotten rid of Saddam Hussein for them.

In Gareth Porter's book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of Iran's Nuclear Scare, he shows that the major conclusion the DIA had made—that the Iranians were researching nuclear weapons—was based on some invoices they had intercepted for some dual-use materials, some specialty magnets and things that they thought could be part of a secret weaponization program.

Gareth Porter, who's a really great critic of all of these policies and claims, says, “Hey, this was a good-faith misunderstanding by the DIA. They were doing their job.” But it turned out that when America gave the IAEA that information, the IAEA went and verified, and the magnets and all those dual-use items were actually being used for civilian purposes.

And so, as Gareth writes in his book, the only real reason the NIE said that they even had a program before 2003 was essentially because they didn't want to dispute their last mistaken conclusion. So they said, “Okay, well, that was right up until then.” But that was when it changed.

The other half of their reason for accepting that there ever was a nuclear-weapons research program in the country before 2003 was the smoking laptop. I'm sorry, I think I misspoke earlier when I said that the laptop was in 2005. That was just the Washington Post story that had a bunch of material about it. The laptop was in 2003 as well, or possibly 2004.

But it was still all, again, forged by the Israelis and funneled through the MEK cult. It was essentially obsolete and had nothing in it. At least the accusations in it weren't about anything past 2003.

And so there's really no reason to believe that there was actually a nuclear-weapons research program even before 2003, which, again, the National Intelligence Estimate says ended in 2003 and hasn't been restored.

A question—not a comment by me, but a question—just your perspective. So, just so I understand this: the nuclear archive, this massive archive that the Israelis were able to take out of Tehran, bring to the United States, and bring to the IAEA, which contains very detailed blueprints—

It's just the alleged studies documents again. It's the same stuff from the smoking laptop.

Yeah. Let me just ask you, because it's huge and very detailed, and it shows clearly that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program certainly until 2003. Then we can have a discussion about what happened after that. Are you suggesting that that's all been forged by Israel?

Yes. Nothing in this smoking laptop held up.

Not the laptop, but this entire archive that they pulled out. You're thinking of the big photo op with all the full documents behind it. I've seen it. I've seen many of the documents. There are thousands of pages. I'm asking: Is this not what I'm claiming? Is that all forged by Israel? Is that not all about the uranium tetrafluoride and the warhead that the Green Salt Project debunked, and all the same claims that were in the smoking laptop from the Bush years?

David Albright actually wrote an entire book. It's a very detailed book. Your listeners should Google it. It's David Albright and the archive, where he went into detail and confirmed the information in that archive: that Iran had an active program under something called AMAD to develop 5 atomic weapons.

So again, you and I can debate this all day, but this would have been before Natanz was even dug and before a single centrifuge, right? Got all that. I'm just making sure everybody understands. Assuming that was true, we were talking about a piece of paper.

But you—it's not a piece of paper. It's a massive archive. I'm just asking the question: You believe Mossad fabricated all of this as a lie to deceive the United States, the IAEA, and the international community?

That's just my question. My understanding is that there is nothing significant in the 2018 archive that was not already in the debunked claims from the laptop.

But my question is not that it's debunked, because we can argue about whether it was debunked or not. Are you saying that Mossad fabricated it? That's what you're claiming.

Yeah, because the CIA admitted that there was no laptop, and Olli Heinonen admitted that he got it from the laptop. He got it from the MEK, and where did the MEK get it? The MEK got it from the Israelis.

Scott, I'm not asking about the laptop. I'm asking about this huge archive that was sitting in a warehouse in Tehran.

Well, I don't know the truth behind those documents. I don't believe Israeli claims of what they were and where they came from without, for example, reading Albright's book and seeing what he has to say about all of that. I don't take Netanyahu's claims.

Okay. So, what's so significant in there? You say that there's a document that has a plan to make 5 bombs, but isn't the rest of the proof the same Green Salt Project and the warhead for the missile that David Albright debunked, and all the same claims that were in the smoking laptop from the Bush years?

No. So, David Albright, again, is a prominent physicist and nuclear-proliferation expert known for his detailed research and publications on nuclear weapons.

Yeah, he has a bunch of books: Peddling Peril; Iran's Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons; Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1996; and so on.

Folks should read the book on the archive, because David had full access to the archive—all the detailed documents and blueprints—and he wrote a book whose conclusion was that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program.

No, no, no. The conclusion was that they were researching it right before 2003. They had no nuclear material to introduce into a single machine.

Right. They had an active program, meaning they had a piece. They had already built a covert enrichment facility—

No, they hadn't. It was closed. Natanz was empty until the end of 2006, right? They didn't even start spinning centrifuges until they had gotten centrifuges from A.Q. Khan.

They'd built a deeply buried underground facility at Natanz. They were putting in place the component parts for a nuclear weapons capability, and AMAD showed conclusively—unless you believe Mossad fabricated it all—that they actually had the plan to build nuclear warheads.

Again, Seymour Hersh says that it was when they gave up even considering the need for it.

Seymour Hersh is not a nuclear weapons expert. David Albright saw the archive.

Hersh's sources said America invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein for them. That was when they gave up even considering the need for it. Remember, the Iranians held a million-man vigil for the Americans on September 11th. The Iranians hated the Taliban. In fact, the Americans thought Iran might invade Afghanistan earlier in 2001, and they hated Saddam Hussein. So, they had every reason in the world to want to work with the United States after September 11th.

September 11th is a distraction. My question is: Let's not go to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, 9/11, the Iranians, and a million people. Let's just stay on the topic.

You're asking me what I already answered. You believe Mossad fabricated that entire archive?

I already told you I don't take their word for anything. As far as I understand, the accusations in there are the same ones from the laptop that are already discredited, and I haven't read David Albright's book.

You're distracting from me refuting this giant list of false claims that you made previously. Let's all agree you're going to read the book. Maybe, Lex, you're going to read the book. Viewers, you should read the book. I think David Albright has done a meticulous job. It's, by the way, a big book—very detailed, hundreds of pages—and he goes through it in meticulous detail, analyzing this archive, and showed again that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program designed to build 5 atomic warheads.

Iran changed its mind after the neoconservatives lied America into war with Iraq for Ariel Sharon.

Scott Ritter

Yeah, Iran changed its mind after the neoconservatives lied America into war with Iraq for Ariel Sharon.

So, just to clarify: You, Mark, and David Albright believe that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, and you, Scott, are saying they were not before 2003. That's just to summarize what we were talking about.

Scott Ritter

Well, I can tell you that Gareth Porter's book came out in 2014, which is before this archive was supposedly revealed in Tehran. In Porter's book, he shows that the CIA's 2007 National Intelligence Estimate—which said that there was a program before 2003 and that it was halted after America invaded Iraq—was based on the DIA's mistaken but sincere interpretation of these invoices for dual-use technologies, and then the smoking laptop, which was completely fake and funneled into the stream by the Mujahideen-e Khalq, a communist terrorist cult.

The same people come up with 10 major hoaxes. The NCRI—the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which is the MEK—just put out a fake story, what, 3 or 4 weeks ago, about a big secret nuclear weapons site in Iran. Don't you remember? And then nothing happened with that, because it was another lie by the MEK. It happens all the time. So, Lex, maybe we should talk about what happened after 2003. What about this 2007 NIE? What does it mean? Did it mean Iran had now abandoned its nuclear weapons program, or does something else?

They never had a nuclear weapons program. But let's talk about that.

Interesting. According to the NIE, they had a nuclear weapons research program that never made anything at all. You can try to conflate that if you want, but I think everybody can see.

That's not what the 2007 NIE says. What the 2007 NIE says is that—and you are correct, according to the 2007 NIE—Iran made the decision after the invasion of Iraq not to pursue an active nuclear weapons program anymore, because we were putting their best friends in power in Baghdad for them.

The United States had gone in and, in a matter of 100 days, taken down the Iraqi army and put in Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's faction, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose members had been living in Iran for 20 years. That's why you and I did not publicly support the Iraq War, did we? I publicly opposed it as far as I possibly could have publicly opposed it, rather than just working on Iran in 2003.

But you're right: It redounded to the benefit of Iran, that invasion. But that's not actually what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that, in 100 days, the Iranians saw that the U.S. military had taken down the Iraqi army that they had fought an 8-year war with, in which almost 1 million people, as you know, had been killed.

So, they were afraid that the United States was going to march from Baghdad to Tehran. They made a decision to end their active AMAD program. They made a decision to build up the key capabilities they needed to retain an Iranian nuclear weapons option, specifically the enrichment capabilities at Natanz and then Fordow, and at Arak, giving them the plutonium route.

Then what they did was take the members of the AMAD program—the nuclear weapons scientists who had worked on this—and disperse them. So, they were no longer in a formal weapons program. They were put in a number of different research centers and universities.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, whom you mentioned earlier, is, in some respects—I wouldn't call him the Oppenheimer of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. He's more like Leslie Groves, the guy who was actually responsible for the organization, training, and recruitment—the guy who actually ran the program—as opposed to Oppenheimer, the brilliant nuclear physicist.

This is Fakhrizadeh. Fakhrizadeh takes control of this program, and now it is dispersed and unstructured in that sense, because they recognize that if they continued with this, the United States might march to Tehran.

And so the NIE says Iran is retaining the key capabilities—the enrichment capabilities—to give them an option for a nuclear weapon. But we, the NIE, decided—or we have concluded—that they no longer have an active, structured nuclear weapons program.

However, since then, what have we seen? We've seen them actually do what many suspected they would do, which is build all the key capabilities they need so that, at a time of their choosing, they can decide to develop a nuclear bomb—whether it's a crude nuclear device, as you described, or a nuclear warhead. We've had that discussion so far, but just to finish.

Just understand the brilliance of Iranian nuclear deception. I think it's really interesting to get into the mind of the Ayatollah and understand this, because he doesn't want to provoke the United States. He doesn't want to see another Iraq-style invasion, this time of his country. He's building this capability on the enrichment side and on the reprocessing side.

He is framing this as, “I'm only building a civilian nuclear program.” He's taken the weapons scientists who were building and were part of an active nuclear weapons program, and he's dispersing them, putting them under the guidance and direction of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and starting to build out these capabilities. I really admire the way he's played this three-dimensional nuclear chess game. It's very interesting, and I think he made a tragic mistake about 6 weeks ago when he rejected the offer from Trump in Oman and then provoked both an Israeli and an American strike.

But he was playing this game almost perfectly before then in building out these capabilities. I think what he should have done, if I were him, is wait out Trump. I would have waited 3½ years. I would have taken the offer in Oman, which gave him enrichment capability above ground. This consortium that was going to be built in 3½ years would never be built, and even if it was built, he could just say, “I'm not interested anymore,” and challenge the next president, whoever that is, Republican or Democrat, to do anything about it.

I think the political calculation should have been: The next president's not going to do anything about this. I'll then be able to complete my nuclear weapons program. But he challenged Trump. He thought Trump was a paper tiger. He rejected that offer in Oman, and we've seen what's happened over the past couple of weeks.

Two things. First, can you respond to certain things that you heard? Second, can we generally move in the direction of the modern day and try to see what the right thing is now—our analysis of the situation now? We've been staying in the context of history, which is really important, but can we sort of move it forward? But, yeah, go ahead, please. I'm not sure how much time we have.

Scott Ritter

I had kind of hoped to talk about Israel's role in Iraq War II and, for that matter, in Barack Obama's dirty war in Syria that led to the rise of al-Qaeda there. It's all part of America's Israel policy, so I don't want to—I would rather go back before we go forward. But I also need to go back over so many claims that he's made here.

I strongly prefer we go back because there's so much history. We're going to lose ourselves, and there aren't enough hours. We should take certain moments in history that instruct the modern day, but let's not get lost there, if it's okay.

Sure. This is such a fascinating conversation about the JCPOA and the time between then and now, with quite a bit already, too, so we'll be going back over some of that.

Scott Ritter

Oh, no, I mean the modern day. I don't mean the JCPOA. I mean this week. A lot of stuff happened this week, and a lot of stuff will happen tomorrow and next week. Everyone wants to know what's going to happen. What is the worst case? What is the best case? Should we be freaking out? What do we need to understand about today? That's all.

All right.

Scott Ritter

So, there's a lot of things to address here. First of all, something that Mark Dubowitz and I agree about is that there actually is not a threat of an aggressive first strike by Iran. I'm a little surprised to hear him say that, but I'm grateful to hear it honestly.

You may be unfamiliar with this, but I can tell you that anyone in America who drives for a living and listens to AM radio has heard claims that Iran was making nuclear weapons probably 50,000 times over the last 25 years. Over and over and over again, we hear this propaganda. They still don't have a single atom bomb.

The reason why they haven't been able to cobble together an atom bomb using 1940s technology is because they have not tried to. People can flog this dead horse and pretend there's this threat—“Oh, he's going to break out any day now”—but here's the thing about that.

As the Ayatollah well knows, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and now Trump again have all vowed, with all sincerity, that they would bomb Iran off the face of the Earth if they attempted to break out and make a nuclear weapon. Hillary Clinton, when she ran, said they'd be obliterated from the face of the Earth.

Barack Obama did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic in 2012 called “As President of the United States, I Don't Bluff.” Essentially, the interview is him begging Jeffrey Goldberg to explain to the Israelis that he really, really, really means it—that he's trying to negotiate, but if the Ayatollah breaks out for a nuke, “I'll nuke them if I have to.”

No, they never said that. He didn't say that. By the way, no U.S. president ever said they were going to obliterate Iran. A U.S. president said, “All options are on the table.” Anyone can Google her words. She was never our president.

Scott Ritter

No, I said she was running for president.

Yeah, but she was never our president. No U.S. president ever said they'd obliterate Iran. Nobody ever said that. The implication was clear under W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again: They would strike Iran's nuclear facilities if Iran broke out toward a nuclear weapon. America would do whatever it took to prevent that from happening.

So, striking their nuclear facilities—that was always the case. And, to clarify, I'm not talking about nuking Iran. No one's talking about bombing Iran to smithereens or obliterating it or any of that. That's really not true.

That's true. Barack Obama changed America's nuclear posture, because it used to say, “We reserve the right to use a nuclear first strike against any country.” He changed that to say, “No, we promise not to use a nuclear first strike against any non-nuclear-weapon state, except maybe Iran.”

Okay. That's true. All right.

In fact, that was the threat. Netanyahu also did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg back when Ehud Barak was his defense minister—in, I think, 2012; it might have been 2014—where the two of them explained that they agreed with what Obama said, too: The threat is not of a nuclear first strike.

Unlike what every AM-radio audience has been led to believe—that as soon as the Ayatollah gets an atom bomb, he will nuke Tel Aviv and doesn't care if all of Persia is nuked by Israel's 200 nukes in response, that he's trying to cause the end of the world by causing a nuclear war—Netanyahu himself admitted that that's not true.

Yeah, I think it's really important. I agree with you. I'm just agreeing with you, so you don't have to stop me. I know, but I'm agreeing with you, so it's all right.

So Netanyahu told Jeffrey Goldberg that he was not concerned about a first strike, that his only concern was that talented young Israelis would move to Miami—that there would be a brain drain from Israel. Those were his words, “a brain drain” from Israel.

Netanyahu also said—and I agree with this—that conventional forces would have a bit more freedom of action in the region if Iran was sitting on an atom bomb. Neither of them said that there was a threat of an offensive first strike against Israel.

I would point out—and I'm skipping ahead to Trump, but I'm skipping back here again in a second because I've got more things to refute—that Trump just said the other day, when he announced American airstrikes there, that this had neutralized a threat to Israel. He did not even pretend that it was a threat to the United States that he had ended by doing so.

Actually, he said exactly that. You can Google the statement. He said President Trump has said that an Iranian nuclear weapon is a threat to the United States. He said that when he announced his great victory in bombing Iran, which is what I just said, right?

President Trump sends out 20 Truth Social posts a day. So let's look at this whole thing about how I always believe Hezbollah and I always believe the Ayatollah, when in fact I did not quote the Ayatollah, and I did not quote Hezbollah on anything.

I did quote Osama bin Laden taking responsibility for the Khobar Towers attack. He shared that with Abdel Bari Atwan, and anyone can read it. He agrees with Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, who also said that it was a hoax—that it was Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah that carried out that attack.

And again, who did they attack? They killed 19 American airmen, which was al-Qaeda's number-one complaint against the United States: that we had Air Force and Army personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia in order to bomb and blockade Iraq. Again, this was part of the dual-containment policy in the 1990s.

So, Scott, you're saying—

No, wait a second. The fact is, you're sitting here saying, “Oh, I trust them all so much.” What do you think, Lex? What do you think Ronald Reagan meant by “trust but verify”? He meant, “Don't trust, but be polite,” right? That's what he meant.

Verify means we know, with sensors and cameras and inspections, what’s going on. No one can find a quote where I said that we can trust the Ayatollah because he promised this or that or the other thing. I didn’t say that. What I’m talking about is the process: They sign agreements, and then we have inspectors to verify their claims. As anyone can search at IAEA.org, the agency has continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose. The IAEA has now said that it can no longer do this because America withdrew from the deal before this war started.

At the end of the day, let’s just be factually accurate. Anybody who knows anything about a nuclear weapons program knows that we do not have 100% certainty on anything. Scott is making claims here that the Mossad is fabricating, the CIA is fabricating, everybody’s fabricating, but he’s also assuming that we have 100% certainty about what we’re doing inside a country more than 2.5 times the size of Texas. As Scott rightly said, it’s mountainous, incredibly difficult to monitor, incredibly difficult to surveil.

They built underground facilities at Natanz and Fordow without our knowledge. They didn’t disclose it. We finally found out about it. Scott refuted that an hour ago, but the fact of the matter is they did it. They’re there. Both facilities are there.

By the way, you keep saying that I just say, “Lies, lies, lies.” But I have explained exactly what I meant. I’ve cited my sources, and I haven’t just sat here and said, “That’s a lie,” because I don’t like it. I sat here and explained to you exactly how I know who was building those EFP bombs in Iraq, exactly how I know what the IAEA said about the state of inspections here, or what Robert Kelley told the Christian Science Monitor about Parchin, and on and on and on. You sit here like I’m just saying, “Well, that’s not true because I don’t like it,” when, in fact, I’m explaining exactly why your claims are not true—which they’re not.

Just like saying that I said I trust Hezbollah, when anyone can rewind that and break their finger trying to find the part where I said that, because I never did. Now you brought up the DPRK. In 2002, when George W. Bush said that they were part of the Axis of Evil, they were part of the NPT and they had a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Yes, they had bought centrifuge equipment from A.Q. Khan, but they had not used it. It was John Bolton’s lie that they were enriching uranium to weapons grade and violating the Agreed Framework.

John Bolton and George W. Bush, in the fall of 2002, canceled the Agreed Framework deal that Bill Clinton had struck based on this misinformation. They added new sanctions, and they launched what was called the Proliferation Security Initiative, which was an illegal and unilateral claim of the authority to seize any North Korean ship on the high seas if they suspected it of proliferation. Then they added North Korea to the Nuclear Posture Review, putting it on the short list for a potential first strike. It was only then, at the end of 2002, after these four or five major things that the Bush government did to antagonize them, that North Korea announced it was going to withdraw from the treaty and begin making nuclear weapons, which is what it did.

As all the scientists say, every time that they’ve tested a nuclear bomb, it’s been a plutonium bomb. They’ve never tested—not once—a uranium bomb. There’s no evidence that John Bolton’s claims that they were enriching uranium were ever true. Siegfried Hecker, this important American nuclear expert, went and toured their facilities, and all of these things. So, we know quite a bit about what they have. It was simply Bush pushing North Korea to nukes, as Gordon Prather wrote in his last great article for us at Antiwar.com. It was through this exact kind of belligerence, when we already had a deal that we could have maintained.

That seems to be the theme in your analysis. Again, I just want to look at it, maybe steel-man it, maybe challenge it, but the constant theme is the United States, Israel, and the West. We constantly aggress against North Korea, Iran, Russia, and these countries respond to us. They respond to us by building nuclear weapons programs that are peaceful, but we force them to develop nuclear weapons. They don’t actually mean to kill us.

It’s not that I’m saying everything anyone does is a reaction. You’re saying that everything I say is that everything anyone else does is a reaction. But that’s not true. The subject here is what America has done to make things worse rather than better. I’m citing provocations. That doesn’t mean I’m saying that everything that happens in the world is only an equal and opposite reaction to an American provocation. You can’t find me saying that. You can only somehow try to paraphrase me, claiming that somehow or something like that.

But that’s the issue, right? As I said, for example, there’s the Reuters story that says that after Israel did the sabotage—which they bragged about—at Natanz in April 2021, that was when Iran started enriching up to 60%.

So now you’re saying that I’m just denying the agency of the Iranians or something? I said that? No, I’m not. I’m just citing the Reuters news agency saying that this provocative action by Israel caused a negative reaction, by your own lights—a very negative reaction in their beginning to again enrich up to 60% uranium. So, that means, “Oh, I’m just spinning for the Ayatollah,” or, “I believe that no one ever does anything except in reaction to Israel and America,” except that I’m just citing specific examples of where that’s exactly the case.

Donald Trump withdrew from the deal. He could have stayed in the deal and tried hard to make it better. He didn’t. The U.S. government has made numerous mistakes. If this podcast is all about the American government and the mistakes it’s made, we could spend hours on it. Can we please get to today?

Let’s use everything we just talked about and talk about today. Mark, can you lay out the best case and the worst case that can happen now, and Scott, then lay out the best case and the worst case?

So, Lex, I think the best case—and something I’ve advocated for; I’ve been working on this for 22 years—is that the Iranians return to negotiations in Oman, sit down with the United States, and conclude an agreement that peacefully, permanently, and fully dismantles their nuclear program.

They agree to that, which means they shut down any remaining facilities. They give up all the remaining centrifuges and enriched material that they could use to develop nuclear weapons. They let the IAEA in to supervise this. They actually commit to not rebuilding this nuclear program.

What can Trump do to help make that happen?

I think what he can do is say to the Iranians, “Look, I made you that offer last time. You rejected it. Now that offer is no longer on the table, because that offer gave you enrichment temporarily, but I now see the game that you would have played when I left office: to turn that enrichment capability into nuclear weapons. So, that deal’s off the table. But here’s the deal that’s on the table: It’s a 1-page deal. You give up your nuclear capabilities; we help you build civilian nuclear energy.” I think that’s the best case.

And we commit, as we’ve done with 23 other countries, to helping them provide civilian nuclear energy. It seems to me a little fanciful that Khamenei would build a civilian nuclear program under 80 meters of concrete, surrounded by rock, and take all the risks he’s taken. By the way, he faces a risk to his regime. They’ve spent half a trillion dollars to do this, when it makes no commercial sense.

But let’s take him at his word that he wants civilian nuclear energy. Let’s build it for him, as long as there’s no enrichment or reprocessing that gives him the key capabilities that he could use if he decides to build nuclear weapons. That seems to me a thoughtful approach. I think Scott would probably agree with it. It’s proliferation-proof: He can’t build nuclear weapons, and we can do this all peacefully. That’s my preference.

I think the worst case is that the Iranians do what they’ve unfortunately been doing over and over again: rejecting these deals and holding firm that they want to retain this enrichment capability. The only reason they want to retain enrichment capability is the option to develop nuclear weapons. Otherwise, they can have civilian energy tomorrow. It makes much more commercial sense to do that, and the entire international community would help them and pay for that. I worry that they’re going to just remain intransigent at the negotiating table.

If they do that, then what I worry they’re going to do is bide their time. They’ll wait for the opportunity. Maybe it’s not now; maybe it’s when Trump’s gone. They will rebuild this nuclear weapons program, and they’ll be inviting further strikes, further war, and further suffering. I worry that that is the worst case.

By the way, as part of that worst case in retaining the capabilities, the extra-worst case is that they take those capabilities and go for a nuclear bomb. Now, if Scott’s right and the regime has never had any desire for a nuclear bomb, we don’t have to worry about that, because according to Scott, all of this has been fabricated. All of this has been the result of U.S. and Israeli intelligence mendacity, and we don’t have to worry about a nuclear weapon. I personally worry about it, knowing this regime and looking at 2.5 decades of nuclear deception. I worry that they want to retain those capabilities and, at a time of their choosing, develop a nuclear bomb.

So I think if you're responsible and you're trying to think through the various scenarios, you've got to consider an Iranian nuclear weapons breakout as a possibility, and you've got to try to mitigate that. You can either mitigate that at the negotiating table through a full dismantlement deal, or—and that's the least good option, for sure—you’re going to have to go back in there, either the Israelis and/or the United States, and you're going to have to continue to use both covert action and air power to destroy those capabilities.

Can I just dig in further on the worst case? Do you think it's possible for the U.S. to get pulled into a feet-on-the-ground, full-on war with Iran?

Scott Ritter

I think one must never dismiss possibilities because, as I said, you've got to plan against worst-case options. And I think that's what the Israel lobby has in store for you guys. American lives mean nothing to the Israel-firsters. They don't care that Israel motivated September 11 and killed 3,000 of our guys.

You know, I was at the airport yesterday. They had a big American flag with all the red-and-white stripes made out of the names of the dead of September 11 who were killed by people motivated by Israel's crimes in Palestine and in Lebanon and enforcing Bill Clinton's dual-containment policy from Saudi Arabia. They don't care about that.

They don't care about the 4,500 Americans who died in Iraq War II, or the million-something people who died in the Iraq war, or the half a million in Syria, as long as the Shiite crescent is somehow limited. They'll even celebrate openly. I don't know about him, but I know Ben Shapiro and many other leaders of the Israel lobby in America celebrated the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria by Abu Muhammad al-Julani, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria.

Why? Because he's not a Shiite. He's not an Alawite. He's friends with the Shiites, friends with Iran, and friends with Hezbollah. And so that's good for Israel, even though it's the worst thing that you could possibly imagine for the people of the United States of America.

Those sworn loyal to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are ruling Damascus now, their own ISIS caliphate in our era. And this is why they always pretend, they go, “Oh, you know, over there the Muslims, the terrorists, are the greatest state sponsors of terrorism.” It's al-Qaeda that threatens the United States of America. It wasn't Hezbollah that knocked those towers down. And they have us siding with our enemies against their enemies.

And as you just said, I guess time will tell, Lex, whether we're going to have to drop the 82nd Airborne in there, whether Americans are going to have to do a regime change.

I didn't actually advocate regime change. I wish you'd listened and not put words in my mouth. I heard what he said. I forced him to say what the worst-case possibility of a full-on invasion was, as a thought experiment. You can let him finish that, as opposed to making the accusations. Let's just minimize accusations both ways, please. Let's just talk about the ideas. Let's take the most charitable interpretation of his ideas.

Scott Ritter

Well, I'm from the United States of America, unlike him, and I care about the future of this country, unlike him, who's here to serve a foreign power and make their case at our expense.

Scott, next you're going to say that I'm un-American because I'm an immigrant, too.

Scott Ritter

Well, you're just hosting the show. I don't know. Seems like you're trying to be fair. No, it's not about fair. He has an agenda. He's from the FDD. It's not about being fair.

The implication here is that somebody's un-American because of where they're from.

Scott Ritter

I didn't say anyone who's not from here. I'm talking about him.

I think that's a really deeply disrespectful accusation.

Scott Ritter

Can I ask you, does it bother you that when Israel bombed a UN shelter full of 106 women and children in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996, that's what motivated Muhammad Atta to join al-Qaeda and attack our country 22 years ago?

I became a proud U.S. citizen 10 years ago. I'm proud to be an American, and accusing me, or Lex, or any immigrant to this country of being un-American is deeply offensive.

So let me answer Lex's question. Lex, let's get back to your question because I think it's an important question. What are the chain of events that could lead 500,000 mechanized U.S. troops to have to invade Iran, which would be a disaster, and that's something we never want to see again? That's one of the lessons of Iraq. I think Scott has done a good job over the years in demonstrating that we don't want to do that again.

So, is there such a scenario? I think one must never rule it out, because there is a scenario, for example, where the regime collapses and there's chaos inside Iran. I'm not suggesting that'll happen. There are a whole bunch of scenarios maybe we should talk about with respect to the collapse of the regime.

But you could see a scenario where the United States would have to go in there in order to try to secure military, nuclear, and missile assets so that they don't end up in the hands of warring factional and ethnic groups that Scott referred to, because, again, as he's rightly pointed out, Iran is not Persia.

Can't the IDF handle it?

Can I just finish? Just who can handle it, who cannot handle it. I think that it's a potential scenario, which is why I don't think anybody should be advocating for a U.S. decapitation of the regime in Iran.

I have long been on record supporting the Iranian people, providing support to the Iranian people to, at one point, take back their country and take back their flag. It's very much Reagan's strategy that Reagan ran in the Cold War of maximum pressure on the regime, maximum support for anti-Soviet dissidents, while, by the way, he was negotiating arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union in order to try to reduce the number of nuclear-tipped ICBMs that both countries had pointed at each other.

So I think the Reagan strategy of providing support to the people is a far better strategy for trying to get leadership transition, government transition inside Iran. But I think the scenario of decapitation strikes, killing Khamenei, taking out the entire government, could potentially lead to that scenario, and I think we have to be conscious of that. We have to guard against that.

I think Scott's right. If the scenario happened like that, I think the Israelis have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities, and they could go in there and secure loose nuclear materials that you would be worried could be fashioned for nuclear weapons. Scott doesn't seem to worry about these materials. I worry about these materials and capabilities in the hands of anybody, because they're all capabilities that—just the physics of it—you can produce nuclear weapons.

So, best-case scenario: negotiation. We fully dismantle their program in Iran. Worst-case scenario is having to return for continued military strikes that continue to escalate the situation. The worst, worst situation is some kind of decapitation strike that collapses the regime and causes chaos.

There are a whole bunch of other scenarios we can talk about that are embedded in that, but I think if you're a responsible person and a responsible analyst—and certainly if you're a responsible policymaker—you've got to be planning for all of these scenarios and more. Scott, what do you think is the best case and the worst case here?

Scott Ritter

The best-case scenario is that we quit right now and that Trump figures out a way to reorder some paragraphs and get back into something like the JCPOA, which was also signed with the rest of the U.N. Security Council powers.

Can I ask you, is the JCPOA a pretty good approximation of what would be a good deal?

Scott Ritter

Pretty good. It could have been better. As I said at the beginning, Trump could have gone in there and tried to negotiate a better result with the sunset provisions on some of those things. But the concept that America is just going to insist on zero enrichment, zero nuclear program whatsoever, when they have the inalienable right, quote unquote, in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to civilian nuclear material and a civilian program—it's a poison pill. It's meant to fail, just like it was a poison pill meant to destroy the talks here.

Good enough to start a war?

Again, as I quoted earlier, he said on TV last week, “America has to take out Fordow now because now they're more likely to break out toward a nuke.” I think that's exactly right. So there is strong reason to be skeptical, including Israeli and American officials who told The New York Times that they thought the damage was quite incomplete.

Scott Ritter

The IAEA just came out recently. Just a point of fact, sort of interesting. We'll see on the battle-damage assessment, but they actually think the facility was destroyed and that the centrifuges, the sensitive centrifuges, were destroyed.

So, just interesting for the viewers: all the uranium, all the uranium mines, all the aluminum smelters, so that they can't make any more centrifuges. They've already—they know how to make centrifuges.

So at this point, this is why government doesn't work. They make matters worse and create more work for themselves and make things worse and worse and worse. We can make the same criticism about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, making matters worse for themselves and causing them to have to escalate even further.

Now America is in a situation where the danger that Iran will now break out to a nuke is so heightened that now we're talking about, well, maybe we'll have to do a full regime change. And I appreciate you, Mark, saying that we should not kill the Ayatollah, but Benjamin Netanyahu says we should.

He said just the other day that if we get rid of the Ayatollah, that will solve all the problems, which is just crazy. Israeli officials have been tweeting out pictures of them palling around with the son of the Shah, talking about reinstalling His Royal Majesty's monarchy, a sock-puppet dictatorship that's taking back Iran for the people of Iran, giving them over to a bunch of foreign-backed exiles.

Was that what Trump meant when he gave that speech in Qatar, saying we don't believe in neoconservatism and spreading democracy anymore?

He’s just setting up because we’re going to try to reinstall a monarch.

Can you go into the analysis of the best case and worst case? You laid out the best case.

Scott Ritter

Did I hear what the best case was? I missed it.

The best case is a deal.

Scott Ritter

Yeah, that we get a deal, basically.

You guys agree on the best case.

Respect their right to a civilian nuclear program and try to negotiate, as I said, back into something like the JCPOA, which again had them exporting their entire stock of uranium out of the country.

Scott Ritter

He wants no nuclear program whatsoever.

No, no, that’s not what I said. That’s not what I said. Be careful what I said.

Scott Ritter

Well, no enrichment capabilities—entire dependence on other countries to supply their fuel needs.

Can you teach me the difference?

Scott Ritter

Yeah. Let me just step back from this, because we agree on some things and we disagree on a major issue, and then we both agree Iran deserves a civilian nuclear program. See, the Ayatollah is never going to give in on enrichment. We know that. It’s a premise for our whole discussion here. Therefore, what he’s saying is we’re going to have to keep escalating the war until the mission is accomplished.

I’m not sure I said that, Scott. I think it’s again important—the distinction here, right? We both agree that Iran deserves a civilian nuclear program. Twenty-three countries have civilian nuclear programs, and they don’t have enrichment and they don’t have reprocessing. Where we differ is I don’t think Iran should have the Iran standard. I think Iran should agree to the gold standard that 23 U.S. allies have agreed to. They can have a civilian nuclear program, but they don’t get to keep the key enrichment and reprocessing capabilities that they need to develop nuclear weapons.

Do you think that Bill Clinton should have just let the Chinese sell them the light-water reactor that they wanted back in the ’90s?

Yeah. And America, of course, allowed Russia to sell them a heavy-water reactor for the same purpose. But I agree with Scott that one of the ways out of this is, yes, whether it’s the Chinese or—preferably, as an American, I’d prefer the Americans actually sell reactors to the Iranians. There’s a great nuclear industry in this country. Let’s do that. But if they can’t, the South Koreans can. The Russians can. The Chinese can.

I wouldn’t want to have significant Russian and Chinese influence in Iran, so it would be better that it be a Western country that does it. Nevertheless, provide those reactors. They’re proliferation-proof. There’s no enrichment and no reprocessing. You buy your fuel rods from abroad, you put them in the reactors, and you power the Iranian electrical grid, which is in terrible shape because the Ayatollah has spent 0.5 trillion dollars trying to build nuclear weapons and not trying to provide electricity for his people. Let’s help him. Let’s help his people get electricity.

But the key difference in our argument—and it’s a fundamental difference—is that I do not want to give this regime enrichment or reprocessing, because they have shown over time, for whatever reason—whether you believe they intended to, or we were lying about it, or we broke them—it doesn’t matter. What they have shown over the past number of years is that they have gone from 3.67% enriched uranium for civilian purposes all the way up to 60%, which is 99% of what you need for weapons-grade uranium. Since we’ve seen them do it before, we don’t want to see them do it again. So, no enrichment, full dismantlement, full deal, and then there’s a peaceful resolution.

What I worry about is positions that are taken that undermine President Trump’s negotiating leverage in Oman. Can I ask you? You were saying you supported the JCPOA. You were opposed to withdrawing from it. Don’t you think that Trump could have gone over there and negotiated to make it better? And would you agree that it was a huge mistake to withdraw from that, because they were, as we agreed, shipping out all of their enriched uranium, to only be brought back in a form that they could not use to make nukes?

The scientists had decided that if they kicked all the inspectors out, beat their chest, and started making a nuke, it would take them a full year to have enough weapons-grade uranium for a single gun-type nuke under the JCPOA. Right?

Can I ask you a question? You’re right. I’m glad you’ve pointed that out, because I try to take a nuanced position during the JCPOA debate, and I got hammered by the left and I got hammered by the right.

The left hammered me because I criticized the JCPOA. Its fundamental flaw was twofold. One, it gave Iran enrichment capability that would expand over time as the restrictions sunsetted, right? And number 2, the sunsets were going to kick in and Iran would emerge with its industrialized program, which we would not be able to stop.

The nuanced position, which I got hammered on by the right, was that I said, “Go negotiate with the Europeans. Agree on a common transatlantic position to approach the Iranians and say, ‘Look, that deal that we did back in 2015—we think it’s flawed. We want to extend that deal. We want to get rid of the sunsets, and we are going to negotiate a deal.’”

Does that mean we have to give you more sanctions relief? Yeah, probably. The Iranians are not going to just agree without sanctions relief. What happened is the Trump administration tried to negotiate with the Europeans. The Europeans were opposed because they didn’t want to revisit the agreement. We knew the Iranians were completely opposed, and there was no way they were going to do this if the United States and Europe were divided.

A little bit of history—I just think it’s interesting history—it was at that point that President Trump decided to withdraw from the agreement.

But what I’m asking you is, if, say, you were the national security adviser under the JCPOA, where they were still shipping all their enriched uranium out of the country and all that, would you have been advising him not to leave during the negotiations to improve the deal? Would you have been willing to accept some level of enrichment then, as long as we still had the restriction that they were shipping it all out of the country? Or, to you, is enrichment at all always a red line, essentially equivalent to them being 99% of the way to a nuclear weapon?

Look, enrichment capability is a red line. It has to be a red line. And even though it’s protected by the NPT—the right to peaceful nuclear technology—call it a loophole, but they have the right to enrich uranium. There are different interpretations of everything, including agreements. There is a raging debate about whether the NPT actually gives you a right to enrich.

In fact, the Obama administration, even with the JCPOA, was not willing to recognize Iran’s right to enrich, but they were willing to recognize its de facto reality that they were enriching.

Can you explain NPT?

It’s the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is a member of it, and it is supposed to promote peaceful civilian nuclear energy, right? It’s supposed to prevent countries from developing nuclear weapons. I think that’s a basic summary of it, and it mandates that non-nuclear-weapons states have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, plus additional protocols and whatever they have the right to sign.

Scott Ritter

Well, no, they had an additional protocol that they were abiding by, not even enriching at all while they were negotiating with the E3 during the George W. Bush years, before they even started spinning centrifuges.

What the JCPOA really did was add a bunch of additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements and agreements. Iran refused to ratify the additional protocol. I just want to be clear on the facts. It’s really important.

Scott Ritter

At which point in time did they refuse to ratify? Because they did ratify the JCPOA, which was full of additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements and agreements.

There’s an important additional protocol that Iran refused.

Scott Ritter

Which one was that?

The one where they promised not to enrich at all, which they actually did abide by while they were negotiating with the E3 during the George W. Bush years, before they even started spinning centrifuges.

The important point—you asked me what I would advise the national security adviser of the United States, or if I was the national security adviser of the United States, which I guess I can’t be because I’m a foreigner—

I think you could still be national security adviser. Zbigniew Brzezinski sure was.

I think he was taking a shot back at the fact that you took a shot. You know what, Lex? I think that you probably would recognize that there are many people who lobby for Israel’s interests in the United States who clearly don’t care that much about what happens to the United States of America as a consequence, because they care about Israel, which is a different country than America, right? It’s not part of America.

I think an American citizen cares primarily about America. That is a fundamental belief for me.

To make an accusation that they don’t requires a very large amount of proof for each individual.

I don’t care. To pretend that American and Israeli interests are the same requires a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance by those who support Israel’s sponsorship of terror, as though Iran has anything to do with anti-American terrorists.

I don’t know who the “they” are that we’re talking about, but I believe American citizens care about America first. They may discuss other nations and their interests in the Middle East or in Europe, and those interests might align with their own worldview, whatever.

But at the end of the day, if everybody starts a war with everybody else, they’re America first. I’m America first. If there’s a war that breaks out and we have to pick up guns, I’m fighting for America. I’ll take them on a case-by-case basis.

I know immigrants who are absolute superpatriots, who know American history and love and care about America more than their next-door neighbors who are from here.

But that ain't universal. Okay. Let's talk about it case by case, then. That's fine.

Scott Ritter

Well, I think he's clearly accusing me of wanting a worse war with Iran. He entertained the possibility of putting ground troops in there.

Don't take it personally. You've taken personal shots. Let's not do it. You guys are just having fun, and I'm having fun.

Just on the idea, he said that there's a threat from Iranian missiles to America's bases in the Middle East.

Scott Ritter

Yeah, because of Israel and because of this war.

The first time Iran ever fired missiles at an American base over there was in response to Trump bombing them. It's their fault? Is that what everybody thinks? It was Iran who started this. Let's bring it back. What a joke.

Scott, it's a remarkable argument. I want to reiterate this.

Scott Ritter

And then Iran shot missiles at Qatar and Iraq.

Scott, you're a patriotic American. God bless you. God bless the United States. Thank you for allowing me to come to this country and become an American. It's a great country.

Scott Ritter

As a patriotic American, I assume that the United States government, the United States intelligence community, and the United States military have America's best interest at heart. However, we have learned from history—and Scott's done a very good job of detailing this during the Iraq War—that the United States gets it wrong. I don't think the United States lied us into war, but the United States got it wrong. So, I think Scott's right: we must make sure that we learn the lessons of Iraq, but not overlearn the lessons of Iraq.

I would also say this: there are many lobby organizations in the United States. There's the China lobby, the oil lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby, and the Qatar lobby. I live in Washington. I see all these lobby organizations. The fact of the matter is, the pro-Israel lobby, which actually lobbies in support of the U.S.-Israel relationship, is comprised of tens of millions of Christians, Jews, Hindus, and, yes, Muslims who believe strongly in a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.

The reason that relationship has been so strong over so many years, and that this “lobby” has been so successful, is that they're pushing through an open door with policymakers, not because of some nefarious money influence, but because, at the end of the day, the interests align. We counterterrorism together, we counter nuclear proliferation together, and we believe that the U.S.-Israel relationship is a strong relationship. These accusations of dual loyalty and these accusations of “Israel-firsters” that Scott's thrown around, I think, distract us from the conversation, which I think we should return to.

Let's talk about today. We've talked about best-case scenarios, worst-case scenarios, and really worst-case scenarios. So, let's talk about the way forward. I'd be interested in hearing from Scott where he thinks we're going. I certainly don't crystal-ball these things; it's always difficult to predict. But I think President Trump has done a really good job.

He has led this. He has not been at the beck and call of Bibi Netanyahu or Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia or anyone else. He has led this effort. He has made these decisions. This is a man who, throughout his entire career—not just his political career, but many years before that—believed that an Iranian nuclear weapon was a threat to the United States of America, not just to our allies, but to the United States of America.

He's been very clear on the record. He led this campaign since he started in January. He offered negotiations. He got rebuffed by the Iranians in Oman. He put pressure on the regime economically. He continued to offer negotiations. He offered a very good deal—something that I thought was flawed. Lex, I gotta tell you, the offer in Oman that he gave to the Iranians, I thought it was flawed because I think it allowed Iran to retain this key enrichment capability.

The Iranians turned it down. And I think Khamenei, to his everlasting regret, is going to wonder, “Why did I turn that down? I could have gotten the enrichment capability that Scott thinks they deserve, and yet I rejected it. Why did I reject it? Because now look what's happened in the past 12 days.”

I've lost, mostly. We'll see what happens on the BDA, the battle damage assessment. I've certainly lost Natanz. I've lost my conversion facility at Isfahan, which converts yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride to pump into centrifuges. The most important thing I lost at Isfahan is a conversion facility that takes 90% enriched uranium and turns it into uranium metal. Without uranium metal, they don't have any 90% enriched uranium. He just means, hypothetically, if they did have some—the 60% that's 99% of the way to 90% enriched uranium.

By the way, you can make a crude nuclear device with 60% enriched uranium. I just want to put that on the record. But he lost that key conversion facility that turns 90% enriched uranium, or even 60% enriched uranium, into uranium metal. You need uranium metal to fashion a crude nuclear device or a warhead. That's been destroyed.

When I was coming in this morning, I just checked something I thought was interesting. There's been a whole lot of discussion about the fact that 12 or 16 trucks showed up at Fordow in the days before the U.S. strikes and moved something out of Fordow. According to reports just this morning—we'll see if they're verified—I don't trust single sourcing. I don't trust what some reporter just says in their stories, because reporters got it wrong over and over again, especially all the ones who accused President Trump of being a Russian agent.

We'll see what happens. We'll see if it's verified. But according to the reports, most of the material remained at Fordow because the Iranians were calculating that this was the most heavily fortified facility. They were also calculating that President Trump was not going to strike it, because what they had been doing was listening to lots of voices—and we can name the voices, or we can just talk about them as a collective—who they thought were telling Trump, “Don't do it.” And Trump decided on his own to do it.

So, they kept the enriched material at Fordow. If that's the case, it may be that much of it was destroyed. Again, caveat: it's just 1 or 2 stories right now, 1 in NBC News, and let's see what happens over the coming days. But if that's the case, that material may have been destroyed.

One other element that we haven't even talked about at all today, which I think your listeners should be aware of, is that we talked a lot about nuclear weapons development and warhead development. What the Israelis did was take out the top 15 nuclear weapons scientists who had been part of—you remember I talked about that original AMAD program and the development of those 5 atomic weapons. Some of them, who are old enough, come from the AMAD program, which was in the early 2000s. Some of them are younger, and they've been trained by the veterans.

The 15 top guys were taken out. That is akin to January or February 1945, when the entire central team of Oppenheimer gets eliminated 3 or 4 months before the Trinity test, where we explode our first nuclear weapon. I would say significant damage to Iran's nuclear weapons program suggests that we have potentially rolled them back for years. I don't know how many years, and all those technical assessments are still to come, but it's significant damage.

So, the question, as I said, is: have they retained enough capabilities that they've squirreled away, stored in covert sites, or put under deeply buried tunnels to break out to nuclear weapons? That's Scott's concern. It's my concern. I'm sure it's your concern that they could do that. Or have they set back the program so significantly that Khamenei then has to decide, “Will I be inviting another Israeli and/or U.S. attack if I try to break out? And if I do, do I risk my regime?”

Who thinks that if they break out and try to start making nukes now, any hawk supporting this war will take responsibility for driving them to it? So, the suggestion you're making is that we're actually driving them—as opposed to doing the opposite—we're actually driving them to develop nuclear weapons.

That's right.

Can you make the case that—

Yeah. Previously, he said, “Let's take the Ayatollah at his word that he only wants a civilian electricity program.” Well, let's not take him at his word. Again, I never said in this conversation, “Trust the Ayatollah.” He did.

But you said that the Ayatollah doesn't want a nuclear weapons program. Scott, you were very clear about that.

Scott Ritter

What I said about the nuclear weapons program—are you going back on that now? Jesus Christ. What I was very clear about from my very first statement when we sat down was that the Ayatollah was building himself a latent nuclear deterrent, putting Iran in what they call a threshold nuclear weapon state, just like Brazil, Germany, and Japan, so everyone knows they have mastered the fuel cycle. They could enrich uranium up to 90%. “Don't make me do it.” That was his position. Weapons program? Did you ever hear me say anything about believing the Ayatollah when he said he only wanted an electricity program?

This is why enrichment is a red line. It's because if all the enrichment is done overseas somewhere, then it's not a latent nuclear deterrent at all. So, it's a red line for you as well as for me.

We agree, Scott. I'm saying it's a red line for the Ayatollah that he's clearly not going to give in on, and it's a poison pill by the Israelis and the West. They know he's never going to give up enrichment 100% because that's the whole point of it. So, it's just disingenuous to say, “Oh, let's believe him that he wants an electricity program.” He's not saying that.

Scott Ritter

I don't even think that's his official position. Or, if it is, it's with a strong implication, as everyone understands, that it's a latent nuclear weapons capability and a potential actual nuclear weapons capability.

Do you think a deal will have to include enrichment?

Scott Ritter

Yes, that is a red line he won't move off.

And then the thing is, too, just like I was saying before, if Trump had come in in 2017 and said, “Screw this. I hate this deal,” and then gotten on a plane and flown straight to Tehran—or sent his guys and said, “Now listen here, Ayatollah, I want to fix this deal up better”—I think he really could have.

I don't know the details, but I believe Mark when he says that the Europeans were being intransigent on that. And again, I criticize the CIA and FBI for framing Trump for treason, for preventing him from being able to work with the Russians to see if maybe they could put pressure on the Ayatollah to deal with him.

But I think it's clear that when the Ayatollah was willing in the JCPOA to—well, first of all, to sign the Additional Protocol back in the George W. Bush years for 3 years—he didn't enrich anything under that deal as long as he was negotiating with the E3.

And then under the JCPOA, where he's shipping out every bit of his declared nuclear material, he's clearly keeping the ability to enrich, if necessary, to weapons-grade material if a crisis breaks out and he feels like he has to make nukes. But he had no stockpile to get this whole thing 99% of the way there. He had no stockpile.

So even if you count driving and gassing up your truck on the way to the mine as part of this long timescale of percentages, they were much further from a nuke under the deal, which he agrees we shouldn't have even gotten out of.

Can I just say, technically—and I think, again, it's important for your listeners to understand—under the JCPOA, Iran is allowed to keep a stockpile of a maximum of 300 kilograms, as I remember, of 3.67%-enriched material.

They're allowed to continue to enrich, as long as, if they go over the 300-kilogram limit, they have to continue to send that out to Russia to blend down. And so they kept the enrichment capability, the ability to enrich. They did keep a stockpile.

Scott's right: They weren't allowed to go over 3.67% in those early years. They would be allowed to go to 20%, 60%, and 90% as the restrictions sunsetted, but they were able to keep all of those capabilities. I just want to clarify, technically, what the JCPOA actually said and what it didn't say.

Can you comment on the so-called Operation Midnight Hammer now that we can look back at it? What parts were successful, or what parts were a mistake? Was the whole operation a mistake that accelerates the Iranian nuclear program and the incentives for it, or are there some components that actually are a disincentive for Iran to develop the program?

And then maybe you can comment on the same. It'd be nice to get a comment from both of you.

Scott Ritter

I think we really don't know, right? There are some initial battle-damage assessments and arguments and all that about just how much was destroyed, and we don't know exactly what their reaction is going to be.

There were reports of them saying, “Hey, we're already starting up a new facility somewhere else.” There were reports where they said, “Hey, a lot of our centrifuges survived, and we're going to start spinning them up right now,” and this kind of thing. The potential is there. I don't know what the Ayatollah is going to do.

And I think this goes to the larger argument about the apocalyptic threat of the Ayatollah, which Mark has not made but which Israeli hawks often do: that these guys just can't wait to get into a war and all this. But the argument I make is we're not going to use a nuclear weapon.

You interrupt me every time I try to speak, Scott. You're mischaracterizing what I'm saying. I need to clarify when you mischaracterize what I'm saying.

He's not interrupting you every time, but he is sometimes interrupting you. Yes, so try not to interrupt as much. Go ahead, Scott. Don't take it personally. Come on, let's go.

Scott Ritter

Well, look, on the face of it, they blew up a lot of stuff and they made them very angry. So are they going to now give in, are they going to double down, or are they going to hold still? We don't really know.

As I was trying to explain, from the Ayatollah's position, what are you going to do with a problem like the United States of America? They can chant “Great Satan” and all they want. They have no ability to really threaten this country in any way, and they know that America absolutely does have the ability to essentially wipe their civilization off the face of the earth, even without nuclear weapons, just with B-52s, if we wanted to carpet-bomb their major cities.

They know that. The Ayatollah knows he's in a very difficult position. Look at what he did when they assassinated Soleimani. He sent essentially a symbolic strike at an empty corner of an American base in Iraq. It did cause some concussions and head trauma, but he deliberately did that to not cause casualties.

Then Trump let him have the last word. Also, when they shot down the drone—which I think Trump was suspicious that the Pentagon had flown into Iranian airspace—and they demanded strikes, Trump said, “No, it's just a drone. How many Iranians will die at the base you want me to hit? No, I don't want to kill them. I don't want to do it.” Again, he let the Ayatollah get the last word.

The same thing happened again with yesterday's strikes. Iran hit America's Central Command headquarters, the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and also an American base, I think, in Baghdad. I'm not sure about Iraqi Kurdistan. There were zero casualties.

So what's going on there, essentially, is that he's got to do something, and he's doing these symbolic strikes to say, “Hey, you can't do that to me.” But he's also telegraphing, “I can't do anything about you, and I don't really want to fight.” In a way, he's kind of backing down.

And then what did Donald Trump say? Donald Trump again let the Ayatollah have the last word. In fact, he bragged and mocked him, saying, “Hey, thanks, Ayatollah, for giving us a warning that you were about to shoot missiles at our base so we could be ready to shoot them all down,” and this kind of thing. He said, “Now is the time for peace.”

In other words, Trump again let the Ayatollah get the last word. Why? Because the Ayatollah might be a horrible leader if you live in Iran, but he is not perfectly, but essentially, cautious in foreign policy. What's he going to do? Decimate our naval base in Bahrain? Slaughter all our troops in Kuwait? And then what's Trump going to do?

So it's the same people—and I don't include Mark in this—but you hear a lot of hawkish talk about just how easy this has been. These same people talk about what an absolutely irrational, religiously motivated, and therefore crazy and irrational group of people the mullahs are, and why they can only be dealt with with force, when in fact what they're showing is essential conservatism: trying to hold on to what they've got, making a latent deterrent because they know that if they break out toward a bomb, they'll get bombed.

That's why it's so disingenuous when Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, says, “Forget the intelligence. They're at 60%—hey, it's 99% of the way there, close enough for us.” So it doesn't matter if the Ayatollah has decided to make a nuke or not. They're just too close to one as it is, which is really silly because they're not much closer than they've been for 20 years, since the George W. Bush administration. They proved they've mastered the fuel cycle.

That is one of the fundamental disagreements in the room. You're saying they don't really have an interest in developing a nuclear weapon, and I'm more toward that direction than Mark is. They're saying, “Look at us. We're a threshold state. Don't push your luck and force us to make the bad decision.”

That's an implication. They have not said that outright, but clearly the implication is that if we force them, then they will go ahead and make a nuclear weapon. What I mean is, if left on their own devices, they would not develop one. That's the case you're making.

Scott Ritter

Not just on their own devices, but if we were to try to negotiate with them in good faith and try to have normal relations with them, that would disincentivize a nuclear weapon even further.

Okay. Can you comment on the mission—Operation Midnight Hammer—in general?

Sure. A couple of things that Scott said were interesting, and I agree with some of them. The first thing is, I do believe President Trump has negotiated in good faith. He sent Steve Witkoff, his chief negotiator, for 5 rounds of negotiations since he came into office.

The second is, we can keep going around in circles, but the fact of the matter is, I do believe that Iran and Iran-backed terrorist organizations have killed, tried to kill, and maimed Americans and taken them hostage. I think it's important for me, again, to put that on the record.

But where I agree with Scott is—and it's interesting, and I don't know if Khamenei has changed in his thinking—he's 86 years old and has been in power since 1989. There's a little bit of history that I think is really interesting, Lex. It was 1988, and Iran and Iraq had fought this brutal 8-year war, with a million people dead. The United States accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger airliner. The United States offered to pay compensation and apologized.

The Iranians didn’t believe it. They didn’t believe we could accidentally do that. They thought we were going to intervene militarily on behalf of Saddam. So Khamenei, who wasn’t the supreme leader at the time—he was the Iranian president—and Rafsanjani went to Khomeini and said, “Mr. Ayatollah, we’ve got to sue for peace with the Iraqis because the Americans are intervening, and we cannot fight the Americans. We fought this brutal war. We’ll continue with Saddam. We cannot fight the United States of America.”

I think Scott’s right: that perception that there’s no way they can fight the United States of America, because that’s potentially regime-ending—even if we don’t intend for it to be, that could actually happen. There’s a famous line where Khomeini says, “All right, I agree. I will drink the poison chalice. I’ll drink the poison chalice, and I will agree to a ceasefire on pretty tough terms for Iran.”

It’s interesting now, 36 or 37 years later: Khamenei is now going to decide to drink the poison chalice. Does he agree to a negotiated deal with the United States? Does he agree to a deal that President Trump—and Scott criticizes me for this, but that’s President Trump’s position—is no enrichment, full dismantlement? By the way, that’s backed up by 52 of 53 Republican senators and 177 House GOP members, and backed by everybody in his administration, including J.D. Vance, who’s been emphatic about that. Does he agree to that deal, or does he decide, “I’m not going to drink the poison chalice. I am going to take other options”?

I agree with Scott that going after US military bases, except in a symbolic way, would be suicidal. Closing the Strait of Hormuz would be economically suicidal for the Iranians. Forty percent of Chinese oil goes through there. The Chinese have been saying to the Iranians, “Don’t you dare.” By the way, 100% of Iranian oil goes from Iran, through Kharg Island, through the Strait of Hormuz.

Terror attacks, absolutely. That has been their modus operandi for years. I would be concerned about terrorist attacks against US targets and against civilians, potentially sleeper cells in the United States. He’s used terror cells around the world. He’s engaged in a decades-long assassination campaign, including on American soil—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—including most recently when he went after an Iranian-American three times, trying to assassinate her in New York, a woman named Masih Alinejad.

He’s got to be calculating, “What is my play? If I don’t do a deal, how can I actually squeeze the Americans?” Scott’s right: he must be thinking to himself, “You know what? I was literally on the 1-yard line with an entire nuclear weapons capability. I should have crossed the goal line.” If he had had a nuclear warhead, or multiple nuclear warheads, as they had been trying to build since the Ahmadinejad plan in the early 2000s, there’s no way Israel and the United States would have hit him militarily if he had nuclear weapons. Then he would have had the ultimate deterrence to prevent that.

He would be like Kim Jong-un with nuclear weapons. He would then build ICBMs, and he would have the ultimate deterrent to stop that. So he’s got to be thinking maybe now—and I can guarantee you the Revolutionary Guards are thinking about it.

Do you think that might have anything to do with the fact that America attacked Iraq and Libya when they did not have weapons of mass destruction programs?

Can I tell you the Libya example? I think Scott finds it the most interesting one. The Libya example was a big mistake. By the way, Ukraine is another good example of this.

We went to the Libyans and said, “You must fully dismantle your program.” Gaddafi said, reluctantly, under huge American pressure, “Okay, I’ll do it.” The British and the Americans went in there and literally hauled out his entire nuclear program.

It wasn’t really a program. It was just a bunch of A. Q. Khan’s junk sitting in crates in a warehouse. They did not have the capability to make a nuclear program at all in Libya. They didn’t have the engineers, the scientists, or anyone. Gaddafi had bought that junk just to trade it away.

Scott Ritter

Just to be clear, there never was a nuclear weapons program, or a nuclear program of any kind, in Libya, unlike what you just heard.

That wasn’t my point. My point is, he had a nuclear program. We can debate again whether Gaddafi, Khamenei, and all these people really want nuclear weapons, but that’s not the point. The point is, we did a deal with Gaddafi. We pulled out his nuclear program, and then, I don’t know how many years later—but it wasn’t too many years later—seven years later, thank you, Scott, we actually took Gaddafi out. He didn’t have a nuclear program.

We took him out in the Libya operation. Ukraine is another great example. The Ukrainians, after the fall of the Soviet Union—you know this—had the Soviet nuclear arsenal, or good parts of it, on their soil. So we went to them and said, “All right, well, here’s a deal for you: give up the nuclear arsenal right off your territory, and we, the Russians, and the British guarantee your territorial integrity and your sovereignty as a country.”

The Ukrainians said, “Fair deal to me,” gave up all the nuclear weapons, and then Putin invaded Ukraine.

Scott Ritter

That’s not what the Budapest Memorandum says. We promised to respect their security, and the Russians promised to, and both sides broke that promise.

But there’s nothing like a guarantee that America would protect Ukraine’s sovereignty. They gave up those nukes, and they had no ability to use those nukes anyway because they were Soviet nukes with Soviet codes. They belonged to the Soviet military, and the Ukrainians would have had no ability to use or deliver them. They were married to missiles that were made to fly around the world, not to Russia next door.

Scott, my point is—and I think you’ll agree with this—if you’re Khamenei and you’ve seen those two examples, Libya, where you gave up your nuclear program and Gaddafi gets taken down, and Ukraine, where you gave up your nuclear weapons and the Russians invaded twice, you’re thinking to yourself, “The only thing that matters more to me than my nuclear weapons program is my regime’s survival.”

In 12 days of war, the Israelis specifically—because we hit Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz—we, the United States, hit those sites. We, the United States, hit those sites. So, if you’re Khamenei, you’re thinking, “The only thing that matters more to me than my nuclear weapons program is my regime’s survival.”

The gleeful nature, Scott—stop. Take that out. There’s no place here in this room with me for the un-American bullshit. Don’t do that.

Scott Ritter

The implication here, man, is that I’m un-American. I’ve been attacked, just like the Russian hoax, for being a Putin shill. I’m an American.

When you talk about Ukraine’s war with Russia, do you say “we” or do you say “they”?

Scott Ritter

I said “we,” the United States. We actually—

Well, you added “the United States,” but you were just describing Israeli strikes. Israel didn’t strike Fordow, Scott. You talked about the US attack on Iran.

Scott Ritter

You’re speaking to these other people that you’ve heard, who somehow do say “we,” and they talk about, I would say ridiculously, as if—I've even heard some people basically put Israel above us, and they’re American citizens.

Yeah, that’s fucking ridiculous. But none of those people are in this room. There are demons under the bed. I’m sure those people exist. There are ridiculous people on the internet. There are ridiculous people in Congress who can criticize them, make fun of them, say they’re fucking—

Scott Ritter

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been the vanguard of the war party in this country for 25 years.

Well, that’s a different criticism, but I was—

Scott Ritter

It’s an important one.

Douglas Macgregor

Yeah, yeah, but no, you just switched. You just switched.

Scott Ritter

No, no, no, no, no, no. There’s no un—

Douglas Macgregor

You just switched from the un-American discussion to criticizing the policies of that particular institute.

Scott Ritter

Fine. Criticize the policies. Do that. But don’t do the un-American bullshit. Lex, the neoconservative movement is the vanguard of the Israel lobby. That’s who they are. That’s what neoconservatism is about.

Douglas Macgregor

I’m not a neoconservative, so I don’t know who he’s talking about, but I’m not one. Let’s not mix stuff up.

Scott Ritter

There is a massive Israel lobby in America, in Washington, that is inseparable from the American war party.

Yeah, yeah. I’ve talked to John Mearsheimer. I respect him deeply. He is one of the most brilliant people speaking on that topic. Great, great. Let’s just talk about today and nuclear proliferation. You guys have been brilliant on this. I’m learning a lot. Let’s continue.

Yeah, so let’s go back to where Khamenei may be. I mean, he’s in a bunker, 86 years old, thinking he’s going to drink the poison chalice and agree to a deal with Donald Trump and Oman, or is he going to do all of the things that Scott and I are concerned about?

One of those things—and Scott has pointed this out rightly—is that he may decide now to break out for the nuke, or creep out for the nuke. He may decide not to do it now. He may decide to do it in 3½ years, when President Trump is gone.

The important thing is that he’s seen that we, the United States, took out Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan in 1 operation with B-2 bombers, 12 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators, and Tomahawk missiles. If he didn’t think that the United States had serious military power before, he now knows we do.

So, to you, that operation was geopolitically a success?

It sends a message of strength: if you try to build, you’re going to be punished for it.

I’ve said online in the past 12 days, and even before that, “Curb your enthusiasm.”

Curb your enthusiasm related to which topic?

Yeah, just this sort of idea that this has been an unbelievable success, that everything’s great and everything’s going to be amazing, that we’ve stopped the nuclear weapons program, and that this has been a resounding success.

Douglas Macgregor

I’ve just said, kind of, curb your enthusiasm. Khamenei remains very dangerous. The regime remains very dangerous. A wounded animal is the most dangerous animal in the animal kingdom. He retains key capabilities to build weapons.

You demanded unconditional surrender on Twitter again last night, right after Trump said there was a ceasefire. What does unconditional surrender mean?

No enrichment, full dismantlement.

Yes, exactly right. It’s exactly what President Trump—

Well, not regime change. Unconditional surrender in World War II meant the end of the Nazi regime and the Imperial Japanese regime entirely.

Right. But President Trump made it very clear. He made it clear: “I don’t support regime change.”

Well, except for that one a few hours earlier, right? I’ll actually explain that one, because I thought it was—analyze it like Shakespeare.

What is that?

Yeah, yeah. And what did he also mean? “We have 2 countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” What’s that about?

He was angry that Israel was still attacking after he promised they weren’t. He demanded that they turn their planes around. He felt that they were doing it in defiance of their agreement.

But he didn’t say Israel. He said, quote, “the both countries.” He did say, “I demand that Israel turn those planes around right now.” That was how upset he was, I guess.

I guess Donald Trump doesn’t listen to Bibi all the time, does he?

Yeah. I guess he’s finding out they respect him about as much as they respect a Palestinian.

Well, that’s called world leaders. World leaders are interested in their own nation.

That’s right. They fuck you over. Good, important lesson there, everyone.

What does Israel care about?

Douglas Macgregor

Israel.

Every country defends its national interest. I mean, that’s not unusual for Israel or any other country.

Douglas Macgregor

But I think we’re supposed to pretend that, hey, whatever Israel needs, we’re here to serve their interest. If those people exist—if people put Israel’s interest above America’s—they’re un-American.

If people put Israel’s interest first, we fight terrorism together.

Douglas Macgregor

Well, we do.

Well, we generate terrorism together. What are you talking about? But that doesn’t mean you put Israel’s interest above America’s. If you do, you’re un-American.

You know how many American lives the Israeli intelligence community has saved? Ask people in the FBI and CIA who were involved in counterterrorism how many American lives the Israelis have saved because of their intelligence capabilities.

How about when Israel, well, again, bombed that shelter full of women and children and caused the September 11 attacks? That’s what happened. In fact, I don’t know if you know the story, but you could Google this—you like Googling things. It’s on Google Books. You can read *Perfect Soldiers* by Terry McDermott, or you could read *The Looming Tower* by Lawrence Wright. Both of them explain how, when Shimon Peres launched Operation Grapes of Wrath, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Mohamed Atta filled out their last wills and testaments, which was like symbolically joining the army to fight against the infidels, et cetera, et cetera.

When bin Laden put out his first declaration of war a couple of months later, it began with a whole rant about the 106 women and children that Israel had killed with an artillery strike in a UN shelter in Qana in 1996. He said, “We’ll never forget the severed arms and heads and legs of the little babies,” et cetera. It was then that Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh decided that they would join al-Qaeda, and that these Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany, would volunteer for this Saudi sheikh to kill 3,000 Americans to get revenge for what Israel was doing to helpless women and children in Lebanon.

Douglas Macgregor

That, of course, ignores the history of al-Qaeda, which for years before that was conducting operations against the United States.

You guys love pulling each other into history.

They went out with al-Qaeda. Just one second. America’s problems with al-Qaeda are Israel. America and Israel are terrorist states. They were America’s mercenaries that we used in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, and in Chechnya. When they turned against America, they turned against us.

Anyone could read Michael Scheuer’s book. He was the former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit. It’s called *Imperial Hubris*, and it’s about how the number one reason they attacked us was American bases on Saudi soil and the bombing of Iraq as part of Israel’s dual-containment policy. The second reason was American support for Israel in its merciless persecution of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

That’s the most articulate justification I’ve ever heard for al-Qaeda in my life.

But it’s not a justification. I’m not saying that makes what they did right. I’m saying that was how bin Laden recruited his foot soldiers to attack this country: by citing American foreign policies that were directly to the detriment of the people of the Middle East, and specifically our support for Israel.

I’ve never heard a pro-Israel person—actually, I take that back. There’s 1 guy, a liberal from *The Nation* magazine named Eric Alterman, who is the only pro-Israel guy I’ve ever heard say, “Well, that may be true, but I still say we’ve got to support Israel anyway.”

The others will just pretend that Terry McDermott never wrote that book, that Lawrence Wright never wrote that book, and that Mohamed Atta had no motive to turn on the United States except for “Mohamed made him do it.” When in fact, what it was, was the ultraviolence of Shimon Peres and Israeli artillery slaughtering women and children that turned America’s mercenaries against us.

America backed the Arab-Afghan army in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Chechnya, as I demonstrate in my book. And yet, as he correctly says, they turned on us. All through the 1990s, Bill Clinton was still backing them anyway, after they were attacking us, including at Khobar Towers.

What they were doing was a bin Laden plot, not Hezbollah, the Shiites. This was bin Laden getting revenge against us for our support for Israel and for being too close to the local dictators that he wanted to overthrow, namely the king of Saudi Arabia and the president of Egypt.

That is the cause of the September 11 attacks against the United States—not “the Taliban hate freedom,” but bin Laden’s hatred of American support for Israel and America’s adoption of Israeli-centric policies like Martin Indyk’s dual-containment policy in 1993.

I think al-Qaeda hates America, Scott. I think.

Why? You know what? I’ll tell you what. Ali Soufan, the former FBI counterterrorism agent, wrote in his book *The Black Banners* that bin Laden said to him, “We don’t understand why you’re so angry at America. They’ve been so good to us in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and now here in Chechnya. Why do you want to attack them?” He said, “I have a larger agenda that you don’t understand.”

The disagreement between you is clear. I’ve talked to Noam Chomsky twice. Scott, you focus on the criticism. Interview Michael Scheuer, although he’s gone pretty crazy lately. I don’t know, maybe not. Anyway, we’re going into history. We’re learning a lot. The perspectives differ strongly.

Can we look into the—maybe a ridiculous question—but nuclear proliferation? You already started to speak to both of you. If you look 10, 20 years out now, does the U.S. attacking Iran send a message even to MBS, to other Middle Eastern nations, that they need to start thinking about a nuclear weapons program specifically? Just in terms of numbers, do you think the number of nukes in the world goes up in 10, 20, or 30 years?

Look, I think it’s a great question: Will there be more nuclear weapons powers in the future, or fewer, as a result of this decision by President Trump? I actually think there will be fewer, and I’ll tell you as succinctly as I can why.

It’s been very clear from the Saudis, from the Turks, certainly from the Algerians and others, that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, they too want a nuclear weapon. In fact, the Saudis have gone even further and said that if Iran is allowed to retain the key enrichment capability that they had under the JCPOA, then we want that too. If there’s an Iranian standard, we want the Iranian standard. We don’t want the gold standard.

In fact, that’s been the subject of intensive negotiations between the United States and Saudi Arabia for the past couple of years, both under Biden and Trump, as part of the U.S.-Saudi defense and economic agreement that has been underway. It’s very clear that there’s going to be a proliferation cascade in the Middle East if the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, and certainly if they’re allowed to retain this enrichment capability.

I also worry about something we haven’t even talked about in this conversation. The most important area in the world for the United States is not the Middle East; it’s China and the Indo-Pacific. I worry that the South Koreans, the Taiwanese, and the Japanese will say, “You know what? We don’t trust any U.S. commitments to stop nuclear weapons. You failed on Iran. We don’t trust you. We don’t trust your nuclear umbrella. We, too, want nuclear weapons in order to guard our security against China.”

What I hope doesn’t happen, but what I worry about, is this kind of proliferation cascade in the Middle East and in the Indo-Pacific—2 of the most important areas for American national security—which is why I think it’s very important that Iran be stopped.

Now, whether this attack succeeds in stopping Iran’s nuclear weapon program or accelerates it, we disagree. But I think neither of us knows yet. It’s hard to predict. What I think is absolutely certain is that if Iran develops that nuclear weapon and is allowed to retain the key capabilities to do so, you’re going to see 5 or 6 countries in the Middle East, and at least 3 or 4 countries in the Indo-Pacific, asking for the same capability.

And then you're going to have a club of nuclear-weapons powers that will have an additional 5, 6, or 7 over the next 10 to 20 years. What if they don't? What if they're prevented? Doesn't that still send the same message to everybody that they should build?

Oh, I think it sends the opposite message, Lex. I think if they see what has happened, that it's successful, and that it stopped Iran from developing nuclear weapons—and, in addition, Trump was able to negotiate an agreement for zero enrichment and full dismantlement—the message to all these other countries is, number 1, you don't need it. And number 2, if you try to get it, then the United States is going to use American power.

I'm not suggesting the United States is going to start bombing the Saudis or the Turks or the Emiratis. Clearly not the Japanese. I mean, many of them are allies. But I think the United States retains many counterproliferation tools to prevent these countries from developing nuclear weapons, including sanctions, export controls, and many other things.

I also think those countries understand that in the Middle East, despite Scott's focus on Israel, when you talk to Arab leaders, their biggest concern is the threat from Iran. It's not the threat from Israel. They're not concerned with the threat from Israel. That's why you had the Abraham Accords. This is why the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco entered into peace agreements with Israel.

The Saudis will one day, and they'll bring many other Arab and Muslim countries into it. They don't say Israel is a threat. They see Iran as a threat. And so, if you counter that threat, eliminate Iran's nuclear-weapons proliferation and expansion, those countries now no longer have to build nuclear-weapons capabilities to counter the Iranians.

We've also restored our credibility. We don't bluff. We said Iran doesn't develop nuclear weapons; they won't. And now it's the Japanese who have, as Scott rightly pointed out, reprocessing and plutonium capabilities. The Taiwanese, who used to have a military nuclear-weapons program and gave it up, and the South Koreans, who agreed to our gold standard of zero enrichment and zero reprocessing—those 3 countries can now say, “Okay, we rely on the United States, on your word, on your power, and on your ability to actually turn words into action. We don't need nuclear weapons.”

So I say, if successful—big if, big if—if successful, then it's going to be a significant guard against the potential of greater nuclear proliferation, and we will have fewer nuclear-weapons powers than we otherwise would have.

My favorite thing is when you guys point out when you agree with the other person. Anyway, Scott, what do you think? What do you think everything that's just happened over the past 2 weeks does to nuclear proliferation over the next 5, 10, or 20 years?

Well, I really don't know for sure, but I would think that there's a very great danger that it's going to reinforce the lessons of North Korea, Iraq, and Libya, which is, you better get a nuke to keep America out, and you better hurry before it's too late.

For the Saudis, they're not going to do that because they're obviously a very close American client state. So it's a different dynamic there. But for any country that has trouble with the United States or is worried about the future of its ability to maintain its national sovereignty, obviously getting its hands on an A-bomb as quickly as possible has been reincentivized to a great degree.

I'm also really worried about the future of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, with the nuclear-weapons states' promise to respect the right of non-nuclear-weapons states to civilian nuclear energy. Here you have a non-NPT-signatory nuclear-weapons state, Israel, launching an aggressive war against an NPT signatory that was not attacking them and was not making nuclear weapons, with the assistance of the world empire, the United States—another nuclear-weapons-state signatory to the NPT.

I don't really take this that seriously, but it's worth at least listening to: Medvedev, the once and probably future president of Russia, said, “Oh, yeah, well, maybe we'll just give them a nuke,” or kind of implied maybe get Pakistan, too.

For people familiar with Key & Peele, Medvedev is sort of angry Obama for Putin. You know that skit where Obama talks all calm, and the translator—Peele—goes off like an angry Black guy kind of character? He's been going nuts on Twitter. Yeah, Medvedev goes way out, above and beyond. But I think he's probably acting on instructions to talk that way.

It is a real risk that the NPT could just fall apart when it's treated so callously by the United States, which invented it and insisted that the rest of the world adopt it to such a great degree. The greatest threat to the status quo, as far as the nuclear powers go, probably is what just happened: America and Israel launching this war against a non-nuclear-weapons state that was a member in good standing of this treaty throws the whole so-called liberal, rules-based world order into question.

If these rules repeatedly always apply to everyone else, but very often not to us, then are they really the law, or is this just the will of men in Washington, D.C.? How long do we expect the rest of the world to go ahead and abide by that if a deal is a deal until we decide, as Bill Clinton said, to wake up one morning and decide that we don't like it anymore and change it? That was a phrase from the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997.

Maybe we'll wake up one morning and decide that we want to do something else entirely. Is that your Bill Clinton impression?

No, I'll spare you.

Okay, that was pretty good.

Can I respond to a couple of things here really quickly? I'll try to do it quickly. First of all, the notion that Iran is in full compliance with the NPT is just not the case. The International Atomic Energy Agency has made it clear in report after report after report that Iran is in violation of its obligations under the protocols of the IAEA, under the requests that the IAEA has made, and under the NPT. So they are a serial violator of the NPT, unlike all these other countries we've been talking about that are our allies.

Second, this quote, “Iran is not attacking Israel”—that's quite an amazing quote, which kind of ignores, I think, 50 or 60 years of Iranian attacks against Israel, including suicide bombings, missiles, drones, and October 7th. It's indisputable that Iran has been attacking Israel, and they've been doing it for many years through their terror proxies that they fund, finance, and weaponize. Since October 7th, they directly struck Israel with hundreds of ballistic missiles in April and October of last year.

So this notion that, before 12 days ago, Iranians were just playing nice with the Israelis and the Israelis just came out of the blue—

Well, you said, quote unquote, “Iran is not attacking Israel.” So, I mean, it's just not true.

Yeah, they were not in a state of war until Israel launched a state of war. That's the fact. You go, “Oh, well, they backed a group that did a thing.” Yeah, okay, that killed thousands of Israelis—many thousands of Israelis—but that was not ordered in Tehran.

The Wall Street Journal says that U.S. intelligence does not believe that Tehran ordered that attack.

They found out about it. The Journal says that, and so does U.S. intelligence. We can dispute whether they directed it on October 7th.

Everybody knows indisputably that Iran financed Hamas and provided Hamas with weapons.

Just—well, just a second. Iran provided Hamas with weapons. The IRGC and the Quds Force were training Hamas. Hezbollah, backed by Iran, was training Hamas.

There were 3 meetings before October 7: 1 in Beirut, 1 in Damascus, and 1 in Tehran, where the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were together. There was a meeting in Tehran that was attended by Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. At those 3 meetings right before October 7, maybe they were discussing the weather or Persian poetry—I don't know—but it is hard to believe they weren't discussing something.

The fact that they had armed Hamas, financed Hamas, and weaponized Hamas suggests to me that there is pretty overwhelming evidence that Iran has been at war with Israel for decades. Critics of Israel will say that Benjamin Netanyahu has also been indirectly financing Hamas by allowing the funds going into Gaza. America backs Israel, so anything Israel does is America's responsibility, too, under that same logic.

Right. I think you started to make a point disagreeing with Scott about that.

They're not a good member of the NPT. That's all tiny technical violations. None of that has anything to do with weaponization. It's always, "Oh, yeah, how do you explain this isotope?" And they go, "Well, it must have come with the Pakistani junk that we bought from A.Q. Khan." Then later that's verified. They go, "Yeah, well, we want to inspect this." "Let us." And they go, "No." "Oh," and then they do it a year later, and they find nothing there.

Yeah, that's just not the case. The entire history of the IAEA's objections to Iran—your listeners, I know they're not going to do it because it's technical, but just go out and read IAEA reports dating back at least 20 years. You'll see the IAEA meticulously, methodically, and dispassionately outlining all of the violations that Iran has embarked on under the NPT.

Virtually all of those are resolved later. They won't answer this, and then later they do. They won't answer that, and then later they do. Many open files are still there.

I just want your viewers to walk away from this conversation thinking, "Okay, that's interesting. I didn't know that."

I'm going to go fact-check Mark and fact-check Scott and just kind of see what this is all about, right? Because otherwise it's just he-says, she-says, or he-says, he-says.

The fact of the matter is that Iran has been in violation of its obligations under the NPT, under the Additional Protocol it never ratified, and under its safeguards obligations under the NPT. It suggests a pattern of nuclear mendacity.

They abided by the Additional Protocol without having ratified it. They abided by it for 3 years and did not proceed with any enrichment at all, as long as they were dealing in good faith with the EU, until W. Bush ruined those negotiations and closed them down. Only then did they begin to install the centrifuges at Natanz. It's always the Americans who screw things up. You complain they didn't ratify the thing, but they abided by it for years.

So that's interesting: They were in violation of it. But I think a more pragmatic and important disagreement that we already spoke to is, how do we decrease the incentive for Iran to build nuclear programs, not just in the next couple of years, but in the next 10 or 20 years?

Are you mocking the idea that there are a lot of people—there are neocons who say, basically, "Invade everything. Let's make money off war"—but there are people who will say that Operation Midnight Hammer is actually a focused, hard demonstration of strength, a piece of strength that is an effective way to do geopolitics? I mean, there are cases to be made for all of it.

If we're really lucky, yeah.

So it's a big risk, is that your case?

Here's some practical recommendations that I think the United States should follow. I think the first is: Get the Iranians back to Oman and negotiate with them. Again, the deal has to be no enrichment and full dismantlement.

For the reasons we talked about today, Scott and I passionately disagree, but that's fine. This is a reasonable debate. Neither of us is crazy. Neither of us is irrational. What would it take to get a deal with Iran? I say this is the deal. This has to be our red line. Scott disagrees. That's fine, but we've got to get a deal.

In that deal, we've got to provide them financial incentives, right? We're going to have to lift a certain number of sanctions because they're going to have to get something in return. We can argue about exactly how much, but I think our opening negotiating position is no sanctions relief, and then we'll get negotiated down from that. A lot of this is about how you position yourself for a negotiation, how you come in with leverage, and then how you find areas of compromise where you satisfy your objectives.

One is Oman. Two is that the credible threat of military force needs to remain. Iran needs to understand that the United States of America and Israel will use military force to stop it from developing nuclear weapons. If it didn't believe that before 12 days ago, it now believes that, and I think the credibility of that military force has to be maintained in order to ensure that it does not break out or sneak out to a nuclear weapon. I think that's absolutely critical.

Third, I think we have to reach agreements with all the other countries in the Middle East to say, "Hey, listen. We're demanding zero enrichment and full dismantlement from the Iranians. You don't get enrichment, and you don't get a nuclear program that is capable of developing nuclear weapons." Our gold standard is the American standard: civilian nuclear energy, like 23 countries, with no enrichment and reprocessing. We should be consistent—not just with American allies, but also very clearly with American enemies. I think that's the third important thing we do.

Fourth, I think it's really important that we find some kind of accommodation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We can go down many rabbit holes on that, but I think that lays the predicate for a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal that then brings in multiple Arab and Muslim countries.

Finally, we talked about the Abraham Accords. I think we need to start thinking about what the Cyrus Accords would look like. Cyrus was the great Persian king who, by the way, brought the Jews back from the diaspora to Jerusalem. The Cyrus Accords would be an agreement between the United States, Israel, and Iran. That would be a remarkable transformation in the region if we could actually do that.

Imagine a Middle East—and again, I know this sounds fanciful—but I think this is what Trump has in mind when he starts to talk about the things you're seeing in these Truth posts: a Middle East that can be fundamentally transformed, where we actually do bring peace between Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of these countries.

I completely agree with you on Syria. The idea that we are trusting a former al-Qaeda, ISIS jihadist to rule Syria, I think, is a big bet President Trump has made. He's made it on the advice of MBS. We'll see how that transpires and see if Syria is transformed. But the notion that somehow we should just be rolling the dice, lifting all the sanctions, and taking this former al-Qaeda jihadist at his word is a big bet.

If we got the bet right, that is actually a remarkable occurrence, because now, all of a sudden, Syria and Lebanon are brought into this Abraham Accords–Cyrus Accords structure. Then we actually have what I think all 3 of us want: peace in the Middle East and stability in the Middle East.

I don't think we need democracy in the Middle East. I think if the Middle East looked like the UAE, that would be a pretty good Middle East. I think we'd all be pretty comfortable with that kind of stability and prosperity. Ultimately, you could put these countries on a pathway to greater democracy the way that we did during the Cold War, where countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which were military dictatorships, ended up becoming pro-Western democracies.

That's stepping back, maybe a little Pollyannaish, but I think we should always keep in mind what a potential vision for peace could look like.

Scott, as many people know here in Austin, Texas, you're the director of the Libertarian Institute. Let's zoom out a bit. What are the key pillars of libertarianism, and how does that inform how you see the world?

The very basis of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, which is essentially the same thing as our social rules for dealing with each other in private life: no force, no theft, no fraud, and keep your hands to yourself. We apply that same moral law to government.

Some libertarians are anarcho-capitalists. Some are so-called minarchists, meaning we want the absolute minimum amount of government—a night-watchman state. In other words, just enough to enforce contracts, protect property rights, and allow freedom in a free market to work.

There's also, of course, natural-rights theory, Austrian School economics, and a lot of revisionist history. Something very key to libertarian theory was expressed by Murray Rothbard: war is the key to the whole libertarian business, because especially in the United States of America, as long as we maintain a world empire, it makes it impossible for us to have a limited and decentralized government here at home, as our Constitution describes.

I was going to crack a joke, but neither of you has called me an isolationist yet. I was going to joke, "Yes, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Isolation." That same guy, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, said in his first inaugural address, "We seek peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, and entangling alliances with none." That's the true libertarian philosophy.

Think Dr. Ron Paul, the great congressman for many years up there. He was opposed to all sanctions, all economic war against the rest of the world, and the entire state of the United States as a world empire. What's strange now is that anyone who wants just peace as the standard is considered an isolationist, while people who are for world empire and a permanent state of conflict with the rest of the world—economic war, coups, regime changes, and even invasions—are considered normal people.

It's almost like people who want peace should be called “cis-foreign policy,” because now we have to come up with a funny word to describe a normal state of being. No one calls Mexico an isolationist state because they mind their own business. Is there any faction anywhere in America that calls itself isolationist? Even the paleoconservatives, who favor much more trade protectionism and that kind of thing than libertarians, don't call themselves isolationists. They still want to have an open relationship with the world to some degree, when isolation means the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea or some crazy thing like that. No one wants that for the United States of America. What we want is independence, non-interventionism, and peace.

So, to you, “isolationism” is a kind of dirty-word term invented by interventionists and internationalists to attack anyone who didn't want to go along with their agenda. The term itself is used essentially as a smear against anyone who doesn't want to go to war. Can you describe more deeply what non-interventionism means? How much display of military strength should there be, do you think?

Dr. Paul said we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines, which, by the way, for people who don't know, one American Trident sub could essentially kill every city and military base in Russia. Just one. So he's absolutely right about that. A couple of good submarines are enough to defend our coast and deter anyone from messing with the United States of America.

I admit I'm a little bit idealistic about this. I think of that old William Jennings Bryan speech: “Behold a republic where, unlike the empires of Europe, burdened under the weight of militarism, here we have a free country.” And you know what we could do? We could be the host of peace conferences everywhere.

There are frozen conflicts in the Donbas, in Nagorno-Karabakh, in Transnistria, in Taiwan, and in Korea. Virtually all the borders of Africa and Eurasia were drawn by European powers to either divide and conquer their enemies or artificially group their enemies together in order to keep them internally divided and conquered in those ways. There are a great many borders in the world that are in contention and that people might even want to fight about.

I think America could play a wonderful role in helping to negotiate and resolve those types of conflicts without resorting to force or even making any promises on the part of the U.S. government, like, “We'll pay Egypt to pretend to be nice to Israel,” or anything like that. Just find ways to host conferences and find resolutions to these problems.

I think quite sincerely that Donald Trump right now could get on a plane to Tehran. He could then go to Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang, and he could come home and be Trump the Great. We don't have to have the American hyperpower—the French called it the world empire. We have everything to gain and nothing to lose by going ahead.

Donald Trump even talked like this. You might remember when he was first sworn in this time. He said, “You know what? Instead of pivoting from terrorism to great-power competition with Russia and China, I don't want to do that. I just want to get along with both of them. Let's just move on and have the rest of the century be peace and prosperity, and not fighting at all. Why should we have to pivot to China? Let's just pivot to capitalism and trade and freedom and peace. That's America First.”

Yeah, I've criticized Trump a lot, but I think maybe it's just rhetoric. He talks about peace a lot. Even just recently, the number of times the word “peace” is mentioned with seriousness—you get a genuine desire for peace from him. That's just beautiful to see from the leader of this country.

Look, man, there used to be a time when a third of the planet was dominated by the communists, right? So I'm not going to sit here and argue the First Cold War with you. My book's about the second one, and I'm not as good on the first. But since the end of the First Cold War, we have let the neoconservative policy of the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, Rebuilding America's Defenses, and the rest of this American-dominance-centered policy control our entire direction in the world.

It's led to the War on Terrorism in the Middle East. Seven countries we've attacked. It's led to the disaster in Eastern Europe, and it's leading toward disaster in Eastern Asia, when there's just no reason in the world that it has to be this way with the commies dead and gone.

Again, I have to stipulate here: the Chinese flag is still red. It's still a one-party dictatorship, but they have abandoned Marxism. People were starving to death by the tens of millions there. It's probably the greatest improvement in the condition of mankind anywhere, ever, in the shortest amount of time, when Deng Xiaoping and the right wing of the Communist Party took over in that country.

Just one more thing. You mentioned the 2 submarines. What's the role of nuclear weapons?

I would like for America to have an extremely minimal nuclear deterrent and work toward a world free of nuclear weapons. I know that sounds utopian. However, I would remind your audience that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came within a hair of achieving a deal just like that at Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1986. They were both dead serious about it: complete and total nuclear disarmament.

Then Reagan was essentially bullied by Richard Perle and others on his staff, saying, “You promised the American people that you would build them a defensive anti-missile system, the Star Wars system,” which was total pie-in-the-sky technological fantasy of the 1980s. If you're getting rid of all the ICBMs, then why the hell do you need a missile shield anyway?

It is probably the greatest tragedy that ever took place in the world that Ronald Reagan walked away from those negotiations. They literally were within a hair. It wasn't magic, and there was no trust in evil bad guys. This is, by the way, 2 years before the wall came down. This is when everybody still thought the USSR was going to last.

Reagan's plan was that America and the Soviet Union would dismantle our nuclear weapons until we were right around at parity with the other nuclear-weapon states, which all had right around 200 or 300 nukes: France, Britain at that time, Israel, and China. India and Pakistan came later. South Africa only had a few then, but gave up whatever they had.

The idea was that we would get down to 200 or 300, and then America and the Soviet Union, together, would lean hard on Britain, France, and China. “Let's all get down to 100. Let's all see if we can get down to 50,” et cetera, like that in stages. Again, Ronald Reagan we're talking about here. “Trust but verify” means do not trust at all. It means be polite while you verify.

In fact, America did help dismantle upwards of 60-something thousand Soviet nuclear weapons after the end of the Cold War. So it is possible to live in a world where, at the very least, the major powers have a few nukes and potentially can even come to an arrangement to get rid of the rest.

We should also say one more thing, not to be ageist, but most of the major leaders with nukes and those with power in the world are in their 70s and 80s. I don't know if that contributes to it, but they kind of are grounded in a different time. Maybe I have a hope for fresher, younger leaders to have a more optimistic view toward peace and to be able to reach toward peace.

Underlying so much of what we're talking about here is all this enmity, right? But if America could just work—remember when China cut that sort of peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran a couple of years ago, or last year, was it? We could try to double up on that. We could try to come up with ways for Saudi Arabia and Iran to exchange as much as possible.

I know you don't like going back too far in history, but it's important. It's in my book that, in 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski—under whose watch the revolution had happened, Operation Eagle Claw, the disaster of the rescue mission in 1979 after the hostage crisis, and everything—all that egg was on Zbig's face. But in 1993 he said we should normalize relations. We should build an oil pipeline across Iran so they can make money, we can make money, and we can start to normalize.

Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger's right-hand man, agreed. They were both trying to push that. But the Clinton administration went ahead with Martin Indyk, who had been Yitzhak Shamir's man, and inaugurated the dual-containment policy instead, because the Israelis were concerned that America had just beaten up on Iraq so badly in Iraq War I that Iraq wasn't powerful enough to balance against Iran. So America had to stay in Saudi Arabia to balance against them both.

That was the origin of the dual-containment policy. It was Martin Indyk, who had been Yitzhak Shamir's man, who pushed it on Clinton. This was not the Israelis. It was the Kuwaitis who lied that there had been a truck-bomb attempt to assassinate H.W. Bush, which was a total hoax. It was debunked by Seymour Hersh by the end of the year. It was just a whiskey-smuggling ring. It was the same guy whose daughter had claimed to have seen the Iraqi soldiers throw the babies out of the incubators.

He was the guy who, 2 years later, made up this hoax about Saddam Hussein trying to murder Bush Senior. But when he did, that was when Bill Clinton finally gave in and adopted the dual-containment policy because he had been interested in potentially reaching out to Saddam and the Ayatollah both at that time. But instead of having normalization with both, we had to have a permanent cold war through the end of the century with both.

And my argument is simply: It just didn't have to be that way. It's the same thing with Russia. Look at how determined the Democrats, especially, are to have this conflict with Russia, where, to Donald Trump, it's, “Nah, not at all. We could get along with them.”

And so it's perfectly within reason. If Zbigniew Brzezinski says we can talk with Iran and get along with Iran, and Donald Trump says we can get along with Russia, then the same thing for North Korea. The same thing for China. And then who do we have left to fight? Hezbollah is nothing without Iran. We'll just have Scott and me fighting. That'll be the last remaining fight. That's the fun kind of fight. That'll be fun—peaceful fighting.

You're the CEO of FDD, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It's a D.C.-based organization that focuses on national security and foreign policy. What has been your approach to solving some of these problems of the world?

I love the vision that Scott painted. I agree with some of the libertarian instincts that he has, but my view is that America is the indispensable power. Scott mentioned earlier in the conversation the rules-based order that is so important, and the NPT and all these rules-based agreements that are important to maintain.

The rules-based order has been maintained by the United States since World War II. There is no American prosperity to the degree that we have, and there's no recovery of Europe or Asia after the devastation of World War II without American power and the rules-based order that America has led and backstopped.

I think America First is about American power and deterrence. If you want to avoid war, you cannot just believe in some fantasy where all the world's leaders are going to get together in some place and agree to disarm all their nuclear weapons, and we'll disarm our entire military, and we'll have 1 submarine off our coast. Somehow, all of that is going to lead to peace.

I think what has led to peace in the past has been the American forward deterrence of our military and a belief that our enemies think we will credibly use it. If they believe we'll credibly use it, then it's less likely they will challenge us. And if they're less likely to challenge us and challenge our allies, there's less likely to be war.

For me, deterrence leads to peace. Any kind of unilateral disarmament, any kind of fanciful notion that somehow our enemies are going to respect the nonaggression principle that is the core fundamental underpinning of libertarianism—which, in a personal relationship, I think is very important—but remember, these are aggressors. They don't respect the nonaggression principle.

We can spend a lot of time—we did, over how many hours now?—talking about the fact that, in Scott's view of the world, it's America that provokes. It's America that provokes. Then it's not America provoking; it's Israel provoking. And, oh, by the way, America provokes because we're being seduced or paid or browbeaten by those Israelis and, you know, those Jews in America.

I think that whole notion that somehow we are the provocative force in global politics is wrong. The fact of the matter is, we make mistakes. We are an imperfect nation. We have made some serious, sometimes catastrophic, mistakes. But there is a bad world out there. There are evil men who want to do us harm, and we have to prevent them from doing us harm.

To do that, we need an American military that is serious and well supported. We don't need a military-industrial complex that ultimately is going to pull us into wars. We need thoughtful leaders like President Trump who will resist that and say, at the end of the day, “I will use force when it is selective, narrow, overwhelming, and deadly.”

That was Trump's operation just a few days ago. He went after 3 key facilities that were being used to develop the capability for nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the greatest danger to humanity. I totally agree with Scott. A world without nuclear weapons—the kind of world that Reagan envisioned and others have envisioned since—is really the only way we can eliminate the most devastating weapons that could end humankind.

But we have to make sure that those weapons don't end up in the hands of regimes that seek to do us harm and that have done us harm over many decades.

Deterrence, peace through strength. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies is not the foundation for promotion of democracy. We don't believe in this important concept that we have to promote democracy around the world.

I'll speak for myself, because we have many people in my think tank. We're 105 people. We have different views. I don't personally believe that it is the role of the United States to bring democracy to the Middle East or democracy around the world. To the extent we've tried, we failed. I'm not sure the Middle East is ready for democracy.

Iran is interesting because it's not an Arab country, right? It is a different country altogether. Culturally, it's a very sophisticated country. It has a long history. It actually has a history where it has had democracy in the past. It is a country that I think could have incredible potential under the right leadership and under the right circumstances.

I don't know if the right circumstances are a constitutional monarchy with Reza Pahlavi as the crown prince or the shah. I don't know whether it's a secular democracy or not. Let Iranians make that decision.

Have I been pronouncing it wrong this whole time? Reza? You know the guy? I met him.

Yeah, yeah. Pahlavi. Pahlavi.

What were you saying? I thought it was Pahlavi. Oh, wow. No, it's okay. Okay, it's okay. The only thing you've ever gotten wrong is your pronunciation. That's not bad. I've been pronouncing so many things correctly. I think people will give you a pass.

Can I ask you, though? All this militarization has led to a state of permanent war. We've been bombing Iraq for 34 years. We launched a war against the Taliban, who didn't attack us, instead of al-Qaeda, who did. We fought for 20 years, and the Taliban won anyway.

We launched an aggressive war against Saddam Hussein and put the Ayatollah's best friends in power. We launched an aggressive war against Libya based on this ridiculous hoax that Gaddafi was about to murder every last man, woman, and child in Benghazi. Imagine Charlotte, North Carolina, being wiped off the map.

Barack Obama lied in order to start that war and completely destroyed Libya. It's now in 3 pieces and in a state of semipermanent civil war, including—and this wasn't just back then; this is to this day—the relegalization and reinstitutionalization of chattel slavery of sub-Saharan Black Africans in Libya to this day as a result of our intervention.

This was not a direct, overt war, but America, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey all backed the bin Ladenites in Syria and completely destroyed Syria, to the point where the caliphate grew. Then we had to launch Iraq War II to destroy the caliphate again.

I'm not seeing peace through strength. I'm seeing permanent militarism and permanent war through strength.

Point well made. He's speaking to the double-edged sword of a strong military. What you mentioned Trump did seems like a very difficult thing to do, which is to hit hard and keep it short.

We don't know how this ended yet, but even the beginning part is not trivial to do—just hitting one mission and vocalizing, except for one post, “No regime change.” Really pushing peace, making a deal, calling for a ceasefire—that's an uncommon way to operate.

I guess you said that we should resist the military-industrial complex. That's not easy to do. That's the double-edged sword of a strong military.

Yemen—let me say this real quick, and I promise I'll say 1 thing and then I'll stop. You made a good point. I just want to add this. It's a really important point: grassroots effort.

There is no Houthi lobby in America. It was grassroots efforts by libertarians, Quakers, and leftists to get war-powers resolutions introduced in Trump's first term to stop the war in Yemen, which was launched not for Israel, but for Saudi Arabia and the UAE by Barack Obama in 2015.

That's not a first. The Afghan war wasn't about Israel either.

Okay, but this Yemen war was—I thought 9/11 was about Israel.

Well, it was in great part, but the decision to sack Kabul and do a regime change and all that had nothing to do with the Jews whatsoever, other than, well, we had to keep the war going long enough to go to Baghdad.

Oh, okay. So it was Israel's fault.

I was in the middle of saying about the war in Yemen that we got the War Powers Resolution through twice, and Trump vetoed it twice. His man Peter Navarro explained to The New York Times that this was just welfare for American industry.

A lot of industrialists were angry about the tariffs disrupting trade with China, and somehow they substituted Raytheon for all American industry. Somehow, they said industry would be happy if we funneled a lot of money to Raytheon.

That's Peter Navarro talking to The New York Times about why they continued the war in Yemen throughout Trump's entire first term. He had no interest in it at all. The whole thing was Obama's fault. The whole thing was essentially on autopilot.

And what was he doing? Flying as al-Qaeda’s air force against the Houthis, who originally—if you go back to January 2015—America was passing intelligence to in order to kill al-Qaeda. AQAP—the guys who tried to blow up the plane over Detroit with the underpants bomb on Christmas Day 2009, and who did all those horrific massacres in Europe—real-ass bin Laden terrorists.

The Houthis were our allies against them before Barack Obama stabbed them in the back. Why did Trump keep that going when he inherited that horrific war from Barack Obama? Why did he do it? According to his trade guy, so they could keep funneling American taxed and inflated dollars into the pocketbooks of the stockholders of Raytheon Incorporated, right? Military-industrial complex. The point was made.

Yeah, maybe I could respond to that because, again, it’s always America’s fault, according to Scott.

No, no, but Saudi Arabia and the UAE asked Barack Obama for permission to start that war and for American help in prosecuting it, and he said yes and then helped.

I’m going to segue into an answer because I think it deserves an answer. The military-industrial complex is a serious concern, because I think you’re right: The bigger it gets and the more weapons you have, you think the greater the temptation to use them, right? I think that’s sort of the argument. Then there’s also self-enrichment, how much money can be made, and all of that. I think it’s of serious concern to people.

Look, I think Trump is somebody who—it’s hard-pressed to say that Donald Trump is a great advocate of the military-industrial complex, or that he is in their pocket the same way that he’s in the pocket of the Israelis, in the pocket of the Saudis, and in the pocket of everybody. I think the one thing with Trump is that he has learned the lessons of American engagement over the past few decades. I think Scott’s done a good job of laying out the mistakes that have been made, even though we can discuss causal connections and who’s responsible.

Scott, can I finish? Your causal connection is always, “It’s America aggressing, Israel aggressing, and all these poor people responding to us.” Nonetheless, I think Trump has learned the lessons, but he hasn’t overlearned the lessons. He’s not paralyzed by Iraq or Afghanistan or the mistakes made by his predecessors. He understands that, at the end of the day, we need serious American power. We need lethal power. We need deterrence. He’s been very careful and very selective about how he uses American power.

We’ve talked about it throughout this whole conversation. Trump used American power to kill Qassem Soleimani, one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. He killed Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. He refrained from going after the Iranians’ takedown of our drone. He refrained from retaliating when the Iranians fired on Saudi Aramco and took out 20% of our oil, right? He’s been very, very selective about the use of American power.

He did go after the Houthis, who are Iran-backed and were using Iranian missiles to go after our ships.

That’s not true. Those are North Korean missiles, completely debunked by Jane’s Defence Weekly. Nice try.

Yeah, nice try. Anyway, everybody knows that the Iranians have been financing the Houthis. Hezbollah has been training the Houthis, and Iran has given capabilities to the Houthis to develop their own indigenous missile capability.

The fact of the matter is, he did, in a way, go after the Houthis much more intensively than Biden did in order to prevent them from continuing to shut down Red Sea shipping, on which both America and our allies depend as a trade route. He actually did it quite successfully, because after a few days of pretty intensive bombing, the Houthis got the message and they cut a deal with Donald Trump. They’re not going to interfere with our ships anymore. He cut a deal with them.

They kept bombing Israel, which is what got him involved in the first place, and he completely backed out.

Sounds to me like they won and he backed down.

Well, it sounds like, in terms of promoting American national security interests, he did a pretty good job of sending a message to the Houthis and the Iranians: Don’t mess with the United States.

And that gets us to the contemporary reality. He took a decision one day to send our B-2s and our subs in order to do severe damage to 3 nuclear facilities. It was a 1-day campaign. It was selective, narrow, and overwhelming. I think it sends a message to Khamenei. I think it sends a message to regimes around the world—anti-American regimes around the world—that Donald Trump has not overlearned the lessons of the past 20 years.

He is not going to dismantle the US military and dismantle our nuclear program and fly around to all these cities and call peace conferences and hope that these dictators will just sit down with America and say, “You know what? All is forgiven. The United States of America, it’s all your fault. We admit our responsibility, and then we have peace and paradise on Earth.”

I think Trump is much more pragmatic and, in some respects, cynical when he looks at the world, and he realizes the world is a dangerous place. I have to be very careful about how I use American military forces. I am not going to send hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

By the way, you all talk about Israel. The Israelis are one of the best allies we could possibly have. They fight and they die in their own defense. They’ve fought multiple wars against American enemies. They haven’t asked for American troops on the ground. There are no boots on the ground in Israel defending Israel. The best we’ve given them is a THAAD system to help them shoot down ballistic missiles that have aimed at them. Our American pilots have been in the air recently with our Israeli friends shooting down ballistic missiles.

The Israelis have had a warrior ethos: “We will fight and we will die in our own defense.” I would just say, if you’re going to actually build out a model where you’re going to minimize the risk to American troops, let’s find more allies like that, right? I worry about—I’m like Scott—I really worry about China and Taiwan. I really, really worry about that, because the Taiwanese are not capable of defending themselves without US assistance, and we may have to send American men and women to go defend Taiwan. We can have a whole debate about the wisdom of that.

But again, it would be very, very helpful to have more Israels in the world, more countries that are capable of fighting against common enemies and against common threats without having to always put American boots on the ground in order to do that.

So you made a case for strength here. Just practically speaking, why do you think Trump has talked about peace a lot? Why do you think he hasn’t been able to get to a ceasefire with Ukraine and Russia, for example? If you just move away from Iran without getting into the history of the whole thing, why? He’s been talking peace, peace, peace, peace, peace. He’s been pushing it and pushing it. What can we learn about that so far—a failure that’s also instructive for Iran?

Look, I’m not a Russia expert. I’m not a Ukraine expert. I’m sitting in front of 2 people who know a lot more about that conflict than I do.

You are, we should say, banned by Putin.

I am. I have been sanctioned by Russia and by Iran.

Sanctioned?

Yes. Yes. Banned, sanctioned, threatened.

Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, it causes some difficulties.

But anyway, I think the answer to that is that, for Putin, he needs to understand that, like Khamenei, he has 2 options here, right? Option 1, which President Trump has signaled over and over and over again, is: Come sit down and negotiate a ceasefire with the Ukrainians.

I don’t want to get into the details and the back-and-forth about who’s responsible for the fact there’s no ceasefire—Putin or Zelensky. That’s a whole other debate, and I’m sure you guys have a lot of opinions on that. But path 1 is, sit down and let’s negotiate a ceasefire. Path 2 is the United States will use American power in order to build our leverage so that Vladimir Putin understands that he has to do a ceasefire.

Now, I’m not suggesting US troops. Absolutely not, right? What I am suggesting is there’s a package right now of sanctions that has 88 co-sponsors in the Senate across party lines. I think Trump is using that and will use that as a sort of sword of Damocles hanging over Putin and the Russian economy to say, “Look, Vladimir, we either do a ceasefire, or I’m going to have no choice but to have to start imposing much more punishing sanctions on you and on the Russian economy.”

So I think there’s an economic option. I think there’s a military option. I think the biggest mistake Biden made in this whole war—and there are many mistakes, in terms of signaling, not having US credibility, the Afghan debacle, which signaled to Putin that he could invade without any kind of American response—is he went in and tied Ukraine’s hands behind their back.

He actually tied one hand behind their back while they were fighting with the other hand. He refused to give them the kinds of systems that early on in the war would have allowed the Ukrainian military to hit Russian forces that were mobilizing on the Russian-Ukrainian border. I think if he had done that, this war would have ended sooner. There’d be far fewer casualties. I think Putin would then understand, maybe I need to strike a deal.

I’m not a Russia expert or a Ukraine expert. I don’t know what the deal looks like.

Dave Smith

You keep the Donbas, you keep Crimea, you keep larger chunks of eastern Ukraine. That’s for smarter people than me on this issue to decide what the deal looks like. But there’s no doubt today Putin thinks that he can just keep fighting, keep killing Ukrainians, and keep driving forward.

Eventually, he’s going to wear down the Ukrainians through a sheer war of attrition. He’ll throw hundreds of thousands of Russians at this. He doesn’t care how many Russians are going to die. That’s the way the Russians and the Soviets have fought wars for many, many years: just an endless number of Russian bodies being thrown into the meat grinder, and he thinks he can continue without any consequences.

And I worry that, as a result of the fact that we are not showing Putin that we’ve got leverage, it’s made war more likely. It’s made a war more brutal, and it’s going to make a war more protracted.

But increasing military aid to Ukraine, in the case that you’ve described, also has to be coupled with extreme pressure to make peace.

Correct. Extreme pressure to make peace, which Trump hopefully appears to be doing now in Iran. I think the early indicators are interesting. Who knows where the ceasefire goes, but I think it was important.

He slapped Khamenei, but he also said to Bibi, “Enough, enough.” And it’s like, “Okay, now we’re going back to Oman. There’s going to be a temporary ceasefire. Now let’s negotiate.” I think that’s important, and I think it shows that Donald Trump is leading, not following.

It shows that Donald Trump is his own man, not on the payroll of the Russians, the Iranians, or the Israelis, or all these other crazy accusations that have been made about this guy for many, many years. He’s going to give, as they say, peace a chance. He’s going to give a ceasefire a chance, and he’s going to give negotiations a chance.

But I think he’s sending the message to the Iranians—and he needs to send it to Putin—is, “If you don’t take me up on my offer, I’ve already demonstrated that I am serious, and I will use American power carefully and selectively in the way that I’ve done in the past.”

At the risk of doing the thing I shouldn’t do, but just to test the ideas of libertarianism and the things we’ve been talking about, can we, for a brief time, unrelated to everything we’ve been talking about, talk about World War II? What was the right thing to do in 1938 or 1939? What would you do?

Okay, to be clear, World War II has nothing to do with the current events. In fact, many of the horrible policies of the United States, in my opinion, have to do with projecting World War II onto every single conflict in the world.

Okay, agreed. But overlearning, overlearning, overlearning.

But it is an interesting extreme case.

Just to clarify, I’m philosophically talking about at which point you do military intervention. That’s a nice case. Maybe you have a better case study, but that’s such an extreme one that it’s interesting. We’re talking about Germany or Japan? Germany said—

Yeah. So, Japan attacked us and Germany declared war on us. Tough for them. That’s what happens when you declare war on the United States: you get hit.

But that was idiotic on the part of Hitler to declare war on the United States. I never understood why he ever did that. They always said it was just because he was crazy, but what it was is he was trying to get the Japanese to invade the Soviet Union from the east in order to divide Stalin’s forces, which failed. It didn’t work, and it was a huge blunder from his point of view.

I guess philosophically, from an interventionism perspective, you’re saying the United States should have stayed out of that war as long as possible, until it was attacked?

Yes. Look at how powerful they ended up being and the amount of damage that they were able to inflict on the Soviets.

Better them than us. What do you think?

So, look, is this a useful discussion? It’s interesting. I think it’s interesting in terms of libertarianism or isolationism in practice. The 1930s are more interesting to me than what happened between 1939 and 1945.

I think the debate in America was very interesting in the 1930s, when there was a strong isolationist movement, with Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and many—Joe Kennedy.

Joe Kennedy.

Dave Smith

Yeah, Joe Kennedy. They defined themselves as sort of America Firsters. It was very much an isolationist strain.

And Coughlin was a New Dealer, not a right-winger.

Anyway, he was very much an isolationist, talking about America having to stay out of these entangling alliances. “This is not our war.” Emotionally understandable, right? Because you can also overlearn the lessons of World War I. I think they overlearned the lessons of World War I, which was a brutal and devastating war, mostly for Europe, but obviously for the United States as well. We lost thousands of American men and women.

The 1930s was this big debate between those who saw the gathering storm of what was happening with Nazi Germany and those who wanted to keep America out. In some respects, it’s like today, with the contemporary reality with Khamenei, because these isolationist voices were so prominent and so vocal, and in some cases quite persuasive to American leaders.

Hitler calculated that the United States would not enter the war. He could do what Scott says: focus on the Eastern Front, gather his forces, and then do a kill shot on the Western democracies in Western Europe, assuming the United States would not intervene.

You’re right, the big mistake he makes is declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. But he believed all through the 1930s and before Pearl Harbor that the isolationist voices were keeping FDR from entering the war, even while Churchill, the British, the French, and others were imploring the Americans not only to provide material support and weapons, but to help them hold on to the island and defend themselves.

I think Hitler miscalculated in the same way I think Khamenei miscalculates. Khamenei heard the debate over the past number of years. He believed that this sort of isolationist wing of the Republican Party, represented by Tucker Carlson and others who have been very anti-intervention with respect to Iran, was the dominant voice within Trump’s MAGA coalition.

He believed that, as a result, the United States would not use military force. In the same way that Hitler miscalculated the influence of the isolationists on FDR, Khamenei misjudged the influence of the isolationists on Trump, and both ended up miscalculating, to their great regret.

To me, that’s the parallel between World War II in the 1930s, the prelude to World War II, and what we’re seeing in the current reality over the past few weeks.

To make clear, you mentioned there’s a parallel, but mostly there’s no parallel. It’s fundamentally different.

Dave Smith

Absolutely. There will never be a war like that.

It’s a real problem, too, because they always say everybody’s Hitler. All enemies are Hitler, and to compromise with them at all is to appease Hitler. You can never do that.

Dave Smith

Agreed.

And they do that to Manuel Noriega, to David Koresh, to Saddam Hussein, to whoever they feel like demonizing and saying, “Too crazy to negotiate with.” But let’s get real. I think we’re agreed about this, probably, that in 2002, W. Bush could have just sent Colin Powell—the four-star general, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State—to read the riot act to Saddam Hussein and tell him, “Look, man, you help keep al-Qaeda down, and we’ll let you live.” Everything would have been fine.

Dave Smith

And, in fact, just like Saddam Hussein—there’s a great article by James Risen—

I don’t agree. Hang on, hang on.

Dave Smith

Now, there’s an article by—surprisingly, there’s an article by James Risen in The New York Times, and there’s another one by Seymour Hersh as well, about how Saddam Hussein offered to give in on everything.

He said, “You want us to search for weapons of mass destruction? You can send your army and FBI everywhere you want. You want us to switch sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict? We’ll stop backing Hamas. You want us to hold elections? We’ll hold elections. Just give us a couple of years. If this is about the oil, we’ll sign over mineral rights.”

This is James Risen in The New York Times. They sent an emissary to meet with Richard Perle in London, who was chair of the Defense Policy Board and a major ringleader in getting us into Iraq War II.

I don’t know why this is a real mistake. You want to talk about mistakes? Why does he always send his guys to meet with Richard Perle? There was a Saudi businessman—pardon me, a Lebanese businessman, I think—whom they tried to get to intervene as well, who again offered virtually total capitulation. Perle told him, “Tell Saddam, we’ll see you in Baghdad,” when he was attempting to essentially unconditionally surrender.

The same thing happened with Iran in 2003. Right after America invaded, they issued what was called the golden offer, which the Bush administration buried, and they castigated the Swiss ambassador who had delivered it.

In the golden offer, which you can find online as a PDF, they said, “We’re happy to negotiate with you over our entire nuclear program,” which didn’t even really exist yet, “and denuclearization.” They were willing to negotiate with us about Afghanistan and Iraq because, again, they hated Saddam Hussein and wanted rid of him. They were perfectly happy to work with us on Afghanistan and Iraq.

They had captured a bunch of bin Laden’s people, and they were willing to trade them for the MEK.

Douglas Murray

And that included one of bin Laden’s sons and another guy whom the Iranians held under house arrest for years. It was only in, I think, the late 2000s that they were giving refuge to al-Qaeda. The CIA said this was a key facilitation pipeline between Iran and al-Qaeda.

They were willing to negotiate over these dangerous bin Laden people and the MEK, and America refused to negotiate that. It was years later, when al-Qaeda abducted some Iranian diplomats in Pakistan, that they traded them away to get their diplomats back. I think bin Laden’s son ended up being killed not long after that—Hamza bin Laden—but Abu Hafs, too. Both of those dangerous terrorists were released and were involved in terrorism between then and the time that they were later killed, I think within a couple of years of that.

So the hawks always like to say, “Oh, yeah, Iran gives such aid and comfort to al-Qaeda,” and all that. There’s a great document at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point where they debunk all of that.

Yeah.

Douglas Murray

There’s a 9/11 Commission report that people can Google, which talks about the cooperation between Iran and al-Qaeda only in Bosnia, when they were doing a favor for Bill Clinton. Beyond that, the CIA released thousands of pages of classified material that they declassified, showing the relationship between Iran and al-Qaeda. The U.S. Treasury Department, under Obama and under Trump, actually designated a number of Iranian individuals for facilitating al-Qaeda.

These are important facts, but you mentioned Baghdadi and Soleimani in the same breath a minute ago, when they’re deadly enemies. It was Soleimani’s Shiite forces in Iraq War II that helped destroy Baghdadi, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, with America flying air power for them. The greatest error that we’ve made in the Middle East—not the greatest, but one of the greatest—is this conceptual error that somehow Sunnis and Shia don’t work together, and that Iran doesn’t work with al-Qaeda.

I’m not saying you say that, but many people think that. Of course they do work together. They hate each other, but they work together because they hate us more. Can I just say something, Lex? I actually think, stepping back from all of this detail, the more we start to zoom out now, the better.

Yeah, I’d like to zoom out a little bit.

Douglas Murray

Look, I think the lessons for me, over 22 years of working on these issues, are that one must learn about the mistakes that we’ve made in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. One must learn about the mistakes that we made in Vietnam and the mistakes that we made in World War II, so we can make them all over again in Iran this time.

I think what President Trump is trying to do is learn, but not overlearn. I think he understands the mistakes that have been made. I think he’s trying to rectify those mistakes, and he also understands that American power is important. It has been a force for good in the world.

Even though we have made major mistakes, I think there’s a great danger among certain people who believe that no power should ever be exercised, that all American power is a bad thing and a destructive thing. Sometimes people confuse major tactical decisions, whether they’ve been made by the Brits in World War II, by the Americans, or by whoever it is in whatever war, with the fact that there is a strategic reality that we always have to be conscious of: We have enemies.

This is not the Garden of Eden yet. I hope the libertarians create one. I want to go live there when they do, and Scott and I will be neighbors, believe it or not, living in that Garden of Eden together. But there are major threats in this world, and we need to find the right balance between the overuse of military power and the underuse of military power.

If we want to avoid wars, we have to have serious deterrence, because our enemies need to understand that we will use selective and narrowly focused, overwhelming military power. When we are facing threats like an Iranian nuclear weapon, that is a serious threat. It’s a serious threat to us, it’s a serious threat to the region, and it’s a serious threat with respect to proliferation around the world.

With that respect, I think President Trump’s decision to drop bombs on 3 key nuclear facilities was a selective, targeted military action that I hope will drive the Iranians back to the negotiating table, where they can finally negotiate the dismantlement of their nuclear weapons program. I think there’s a nuclear weapons program. Again, we’ve had a 4-hour debate on this, so I’m sure if you want to rewind, you can listen to all our arguments once again.

The fact of the matter is that our unwillingness to use power—if we’re never going to use power—all that’s going to do is send a signal to our enemies that they can do whatever they want. They can violate whatever agreements they want. They can use aggression against anyone they want. I think that puts American lives in danger.

We’ve seen the results of that, where we delayed and delayed and delayed, and we didn’t move. We didn’t move early, we didn’t preempt, and the threat grew. We ignored the gathering storm. I think the lessons of 100 years of American military involvement are that, if you have an opportunity early on, as the storm is gathering, to use all instruments of American power—with the military being the last one you use—then deter when you can and strike when you must, in order to prevent the kinds of escalation and wars that everybody at this table, and I’m sure everybody listening in your audience, is seeking to avoid.

Question for both of you, Scott. If human civilization destroys itself in the next 75 years, it will most likely be a World War II–type scenario, maybe a nuclear war. How do we avoid that? We’ve been talking about Iran, but there will be new conflicts: Ukraine, China, Kashmir, North Korea. Don’t forget North Korea.

There was a time when North Korea was the biggest threat to human civilization. We could have had a deal, except John Bolton ruined it.

That’s the bigger question, not so much the specifics.

I mean, the second time he ruined the Clinton deal of 1994. Then he ruined the Trump deal of 2018.

Douglas Murray

Maybe the North Korean dictator ruined it. Again, one doesn’t want to blame our enemies for their mistakes.

At the second meeting, Trump sent John Bolton to Outer Mongolia so that he couldn’t sit at the table and ruin the deal.

Douglas Murray

But what happened then? The Democrats had his lawyer testify against him while he was at the meeting. They had this huge propaganda campaign that Kim Jong-un was going to walk all over Trump and take such advantage of him. They made it virtually impossible for him to walk away claiming a victory.

Do you ever blame the enemy? North Korea is not your enemy? No, really? They build nuclear weapons and ICBMs that target America.

North Korea is not my enemy.

Douglas Murray

They build nuclear weapons and ICBMs that target America.

It’s George Bush and John Bolton’s fault. I already said that.

Douglas Murray

Whatever fault it is, the fact of the matter is, do you ever blame an American adversary? Or is it always our fault? Do you just not think we have any adversaries?

In fact, what happened was always our fault.

Douglas Murray

See, all you can do is characterize, but you don’t want to talk about the details.

The details are that Stephen Biegun, who worked for Donald Trump, gave a speech and said, “You know what? We can put normalization first and denuclearization later.” I know him very well. Then Donald Trump brought John Bolton to the meeting, and he prevented that from being the message of the meeting.

Douglas Murray

Ruined the deal. John Bolton’s fault. Always John Bolton’s fault. How reasonable does it sound to you, Lex? Give up all your nuclear weapons first, then we’ll talk about every other issue. Does that sound like a poison pill, or does that sound like a reasonable negotiation? Give me a break.

It sounds like the beginning of a negotiation.

They got nowhere because Trump brought John Bolton with him and helped to ruin it.

Douglas Murray

Maybe they went nowhere because the North Korean dictator is a dictator who wants to threaten the United States with ICBMs and nuclear weapons.

Listen, you’re criticizing the sequential decisions made in a negotiation. I’m asking you a serious question after hours of talking, which I must say I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve learned a lot. I think there have been areas of agreement and, obviously, real disagreement.

Here’s the question to you: Do you ever, ever hold our adversaries responsible, or do you just not think we have any adversaries?

This is ridiculous. The topic has been, from your point of view, that it’s all the adversaries, and all America and Israel are trying to do is survive and fix the situation the best they can. I’m refuting that by bringing up all the things that America and Israel have done to make matters worse.

I never said that the Ayatollah is some great guy, or that Kim Jong-un is some hero, or made any kind of spin for their side. Are they a threat to America? No, of course not. As Zbigniew Brzezinski said in 1993, we could have perfectly normalized relations then.

You talk about Iranian support for al-Qaeda. Iran supported al-Qaeda in Bosnia in 1995 as a favor to Bill Clinton, because they were trying to suck up to the United States. That’s why they supported al-Qaeda.

Douglas Murray

Your position.

My position is whatever you say it is, not what I say it is.

Douglas Murray

No, no. I’m just trying to summarize.

You know who’s the last person who told me I need to beware of overlearning the lessons of Iraq? It was Charlie Savage from The New York Times, when the subject was his absolute ridiculous hoax that Russia was paying the Taliban to murder American soldiers in Afghanistan in 2020. That ruined Trump’s potential—which he was floating trial balloons about withdrawing in the summer of 2020—which would have absolutely prevented the Joe Biden-era attack.

Charlie Savage published these ridiculous lies that were later refuted by the general in charge of the Afghan war, the head of CENTCOM, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the director…

He told me, “You know what your problem is, Horton? You have overlearned the lessons of Iraq War II.” But it turned out those lessons were perfectly apt for Charlie Savage’s hoax. It wasn’t true, what Charlie Savage said. You know what he resorted to? He said, “Well, it’s true that there was a rumor I was reporting on.”

Scott, you made it very clear America has no adversaries. That’s called learning the lessons of Iraq, not overlearning them.

All right. So I guess the answer to the question I asked about avoiding World War III is the two of you becoming friends. That’s my goal. If you can try to find the light at the end of the tunnel, one last question: What gives you hope? To what degree do you have hope about the future? What gives you hope about this great country of ours, and humanity too?

Yeah, look, there are a million wonderful things about this country: the land, the people, our culture, and our resources and everything. The kind of society that we could build—not with a controlled system, but with just a pure free-market capitalist system in this country, where people are allowed to own their property, improve its value, and exchange it on the market and build this country up—we would be living in comparatively a paradise compared to what we have now.

If you look at the opportunity costs since the end of the Cold War, all that has been wasted on militarism in the Middle East especially, but also in Eastern Europe and in East Asia, all of that wealth put here could have gone much more toward something like perfecting our society. It’s always an unfinished project, so that we really have something to point to the rest of the world and say, “This is how you’re supposed to do it. Not like that.”

I think it’s crucial that, for all of the problems that Somalia, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan have, the worst thing about those countries is America’s wars there. The worst thing about those places is what we have done to them. So we’re not in much of a position to criticize whatever horrible political practices and cultural things about their societies that we would like to criticize, when the worst chaos that’s happened to them has been inflicted by our country against them, virtually all in wars of choice that were unnecessary from the get-go.

What gives you hope?

What gives me hope? I think, first of all, I have a lot of hope and confidence in the wisdom of the American people. I think Americans understand, at the end of the day, that they need leaders who are about making America great again. I think they elected Donald Trump, who is flawed in many, many ways, but I think Trump is wrestling with some of the questions that we have been wrestling with for the past 5 hours.

I think most Americans know that we have adversaries. It’s just overwhelming numbers of Americans who understand that. They may disagree on exactly who is an adversary and how you rank them, but they know we have adversaries. I think the third thing is that Americans greatly admire the men and women in uniform. I think the institution with the greatest popularity in America still remains the U.S. military, while many other institutions are failing the American people and are reflected in the polling.

I think we’ve got to be very judicious about how we use this incredibly powerful military, because most importantly, it comes down to this: It’s not about weapons and technology. It’s about the people. It’s about the men and women who have sacrificed their lives to serve our country. At the end of the day, if we understand we have adversaries, we’re careful about how we use our military, and we understand the importance of forward deterrence in order to actually confront threats before they become so severe that we end up plunging ourselves into a war—

I agree totally with Scott in terms of how we use our money and how judiciously we must guard it. I agree with how we’ve run up these massive debts, and we have to be—if we’re serious, and conservatives are really serious—they need to stop. They need to tackle these massive budget deficits.

It would be really easy if it was just all about the military and we could just get rid of the Pentagon, and all of a sudden we’d be running balanced budgets. It’s not the case. We have much deeper structural economic problems in this country, and everybody knows that. We’ve got huge challenges as a country.

But I really believe, as I have believed since I was a little kid, that America is the greatest force for good in the world. We make mistakes sometimes, tragic mistakes. We make huge miscalculations, and I think we will be much more clear in how to rectify those mistakes if we stop obsessing over these boogeymen that are out there—the Israelis, the Jews, theians—and we start focusing on our adversaries, which are not the Iranians, because 80% of Iranians despise this regime.

Lex, I feel really bad that in 5 hours we actually haven’t even talked about that in any detail. Many of my friends are Iranian, and they’re beautiful people. Iran is one of the great cultures on Earth. The only place they don’t succeed in the world is inside the Islamic Republic. When they come to America, Canada, and Europe, they’re incredibly successful people.

Eighty percent of Iranians despise this regime, and they long for a free and prosperous Iran. So it’s a big question whether they’re ever going to get there, and who knows the right way to get them there. But at the end of the day, I am convinced that the vast majority of Iranians are our friends.

There is a regime that has been trying to build nuclear weapons, has been engaged in terrorism for decades, and has killed and maimed thousands of Americans and our allies. It’s a regime that has to be stopped. I think Donald Trump, in the past couple of weeks—I would argue in the past couple of months—has tried to play a strategy, tried to figure out a way to offer the Iranians negotiations and a peaceful solution to this, but use overwhelming military power recently against Iran’s nuclear sites in a very targeted way, in order to send a message to the Islamic Republic of Iran that they cannot continue to build nuclear weapons and threaten America.

I hope that things will work out well on this. I’ve always said, curb your enthusiasm, because we still have a lot of pieces that need to fall into place. This is going to be a winding road as we try to figure this out. I’m hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, and I want to thank you very much for having me on the show.

Scott, it was a real pleasure to meet you. I enjoyed the debate. Very lively. I admire your dedication to the issue and your attention to detail, and I think all of that speaks well of you and your commitment and your passion for this.

I am deeply grateful that you guys came here. This was really mind-blowing. Also, that you have—it’s silly maybe to say—the courage to sit down and talk through this tension. I’ve learned a lot. I think a lot of people are going to learn a lot. I’m a fan of both of your work, and it means a lot that you came here today and talked to a silly kid like me.

Scott, thank you so much, brother.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mark.

Thanks, Lex. Appreciate it.

Bam. Thanks, Scott.

For some context, Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United States. But before that, during World War II, he was the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, orchestrating some of the most significant military operations of the war, with leadership marked by strategic and tactical brilliance. It is in this context that the following words carry even more power and wisdom, spoken in 1953:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of 1 modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is 2 electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is 2 fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with 500,000 bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war that is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. And now allow me to add some additional brief excerpts. In 1946, Eisenhower said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can. Only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” In 1950, Eisenhower said, “Possibly my hatred of war blinds me so that I cannot comprehend the arguments they aduce. But in my opinion, there's no such thing as a preventative war. Although the suggestions repeatedly made, none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war.” And finally, an excerpt from Eisenhower's farewell address in 1961 on the military-industrial complex. A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. American makers of plowshares could with time and as required make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armament industry of vast proportions. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against an acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.