Bulwark Takes - Trump Is Running Out of Options in Iran

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Andrew Egger and Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) give their takes on Iran’s sweeping new demands, Trump’s response, and why the prospects for a diplomatic deal are fading. They discuss Trump’s shrinking military options, depleted U.S. weapons supplies, and the ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz that's left merchant crews trapped at sea for months.Read more from Mark: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/precision-has-a-price-mlrs-prsm-thaad-patriot-missiles-rockets-iran-war

Donald Trump is dying to get out of this war in Iran, but Iran does not seem to want to let him off the hook. Just days after the president said that we should be moving towards some kind of deal in Iran, this weekend, Iran issued its biggest ultimatum yet. Its largest, most sweeping set of demands, here is Donald Trump reacting to that in the White House just now. Mr. President, in addition to this big announcement, you've also been posting about Iran today opposing their latest demands. You said this last round of talks was Iran's last chance before decapitation. So what now? You'll find that. You'll find that.

Are you still, our massive escalation? Is that still on the table? Well, we have that certainly that ability if we want to do that. Yeah, you'll find it. I am Andrew Eger with the bulwark joined by our military analyst, Lieutenant General Mark Hurtling, to talk about the latest what's going on in Iran. General, can you just walk us through what exactly Iran is demanding as of this weekend and why it is an escalation from what we've seen from them before?

Yeah, Andrew, when this came out this weekend, you would have to say from a common sense perspective, it's laughable. They know that the president's not going to live up to it. So a guy named Mohammed Zolgadar, who's the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. So this is a real guy. This is a diplomat. This isn't the IRGC. This isn't the Ayatollah. He issued a statement that was then later carried by Iranian state media. So it was the real deal. And listed five requirements. and I'll read them for you. The first one was the U.S. lift its naval blockade and sanctions on Iran. Okay, that's something that you could negotiate. Secondly, withdrawal of U.S. military from around Iran, which that one isn't really clear because they don't state which military organizations or countries they're talking about. So the United States has the United States and various allied countries have installations all over, Jordan, Syria, Oman, UAE, Kuwait, especially, U.A, Oman.

So that's saying withdrawal is that something that most of the Muslims have asked for in this area. The third one, pay war reparations. And we saw a couple of things this afternoon where President Trump and the Ayatollah were going back and forth on what kind of reparations there were. And we can talk about that in a second. release all frozen Iranian assets. That's quite a bit of money. And then finally, here's the big one, end attacks on Iran's allies in the regions and threats

against their country and their proxies. So this is now talking Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iraqi PMF forces that have actually been mobilized to a degree in causing more problems inside of Iraq. So you're talking about anyone who is of a shenan. Shia background that's allied with the Iranian resistance, if you will. They said basically the United States can't attack any of them or shouldn't attack any of those. So this is a pretty significant demonstration of what they're looking for. When I first read it, Andrew, I thought, okay, they're poking the bear. They know that the Trump administration doesn't have a whole lot of

options, and the options are getting even less and less by the day. So they're basically showing their hand not only to the United States, but all the other Gulf states that are in the region, that they're taking on a new sense of power. Yeah, this has been the thing that I've been trying to figure out, because correct me if I'm wrong here, my sense of this set of demands is that it is already a pretty significant worsening of the deal relative to the MOU that was, you know, agreed to in a very fragile way between the U.S. and Iran, you know, a couple of months ago now, that in, in far as all of this, first of all, it's more demands, the business of, I believe reparations is new, but as well as Iran suggesting they're giving away less because this is all just, again,

to potentially reopen the Strait of Hormuz and not in a return to the pre-war status quo sort of way, but just to reopen the state of Hormuz in a way that is now administered and told by Iran and Oman, and any mention of Iran's nuclear program, which was the other sort of leg of the stool for the MOU, is just absent from this. So it seems on the one hand, like Iran is asking for more here. Is that basically accurate that this is a... Yeah, this is a power grab. They're not asking for more. They're asking for a lot more. I mean, some of these things are just unreasonable from any country to say something like this. But they also know they have intelligence in a couple of areas. First of all, this coordination council between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan is an

interesting dynamic. The negotiations that Iran has been conducted with Oman off the record, that council in terms of what can and what can't pass through the straits, even though Iran doesn't agree with what Oman is offering, the potential. for the strikes against multiple targets throughout the region that are affecting other Gulf cooperation states and the fact that they know that the president is facing an election in just a couple of months, as well as the reports that, you know, truthfully are, they're rational and logical of the loss of precision weapon systems, that the United States is decreasing having the ability to have standoff weapons.

So the only option you have left from a military force is either continue to deplete the weapons you have, the long-range weapons, or send in the close-in troops, which are going to result in casualties. I mean, anytime you have a war where there's, as I'd like to call the term, coffee breath close with your enemy, you're going to have casualties. And the president can't afford that because he was the guy that promised no more Middle Eastern wars. So they know that the president and his diplomats as it were, if you could call them that, are in a very difficult position in terms of what they can now negotiate, especially with the

fact that the president just keeps insulting Iraq. I mean, that's not diplomacy at all. That's going to turn a foe off quite a bit. Yeah, this is the thing that has been psychologically interesting and maybe even a little confusing to me as I have been watching these sort of statements of bravado and counter bravado from Iran in the U.S. the last few days is you can kind of make a psychological argument, I guess, that Iran knows that Donald Trump is willing to give a lot of concessions to get out of this war. He has shown this since the days of the MOU. And I guess you could construct an argument that it might be useful for Iran to leave him with a bit of a fig leaf here, to leave him with one or two things that he could then take to his people and strut and

strut and crow and trumpet. Look, I got this great deal. I got this great deal. And instead, it seems like Iran is almost leaving him without a single diplomatic leg to stand on in terms of some of these demands. And it really does make you think, like they are really betting that that no matter what they say and do, Donald Trump will not have the appetite for going hot with this war again. And I just wonder, is that maybe too optimistic on Iran's part? I mean, it doesn't seem like maybe at this point Trump, Trump is in fact just spent and just done with this bombardment campaign. And maybe as you suggest, he in fact, under no circumstances would escalate to ground troops. But it does seem like kind of a gamble on Iran's part. Or am I wrong about that? No, you're not wrong at all. It is a gamble.

on their part, but I think they, you know, to use the term that Trump uses so often, I think they believe they hold the carts that they, that the United States will not commit ground forces because if they do, they will have to have a massive number of Army, Marines, Air Force going into this country. And it is, as I'm sure General Dan Kane has told the president and the Secretary of Defense, this is not a country you want to conduct land warfare in. It will swallow up literally hundreds of thousands of troops and equipment. So I think Iran really feels they hold the upper hand in terms of not being attacked by ground forces. Hell, Andrew, I'll reincarnate the fact that Iraq fought an eight-year war against Iran and never won.

with the fourth largest army in the world that they had at the time. So you can see that this is going to be tough with a lot of difficult terrain, a lot of major cities, and 90 million people as part of their population base. The last thing I'll say on that is the president continues to insult Iran and basically call them out for things that he also did to them. I mean, if we were to pick ourselves up and suddenly put on Iranian uniforms and say, why would we be upset? Well, he's killed our supreme religious leader. He's bombed our city for 45 days. Hit that school in the first days of the war, yeah. Yeah, the school, the first days of the war.

He tore up the JCPOA, which was negotiated over an 18-month period of time that showed initial agreement between Iran and the United States, he was working a peace deal and then suddenly pulled out and the next day started bombing them. So I think you could, if you're looking at it from the other side and the continued insults against a culture that sees, I've used the Arabic term before, I don't know what the term is in Farsi, but the Arabs have a term called Wasta, and it means respect for people. when you've lost respect as an Arab or a Persian, you've lost everything. So now I think they're sort of understanding the situation that the administration is in, and they're rubbing Trump's nose in it, quite frankly.

That's my gut feel. Yeah, yeah. It's been interesting to see the president respond to this. Obviously, we played that clip just a minute ago. But let me read a couple of posts that he put up on truth social today, too, basically responding to Iran's demands of new demands of reparations with a corresponding American demand of reparations, basically just saying, you can't bully me. I'm going to, I'm going to bully you right back. So here's the president. I see that the representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran are asking

for compensation for the damage done to them during the last five-month military conflict started because they will not have a nuclear weapon, even though it was never mentioned in any of our negotiations or meetings. But it is an interesting idea because now I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts for which they are famous, as led initially by General Soleimani, including the families of those killed on the USS Cole and thousands of others killed in combat. He says compensation should be paid to the families of the Iranian protesters who have been killed

by their own regime. And then in a follow-up tweet, he says, follow-up post on truth social, I should say. Also, with respect to the Iran negotiations, Iran should be responsible for the damages and death caused to the people of Lebanon. Syria, Yemen, and Gaza, President Donald J. Trump. Is there anything to this other than just sort of I can rattle my saber too? I mean, it just kind of seems like the bottom line here is that any last gasp of hope of a real diplomatic solution is vanishing as the two polls are both moving their demands in opposite directions. I think they are moving their polls in opposite directions,

as you said. But the other issue is how many others will be drawn into this? This is expanding. This isn't just between the U.S. and Iran anymore. As we've seen today, Prime Minister Netanyahu says he won't accept any of the 15 points that were in the U.S. negotiations with Hamas. So Iran now has another reason not to make any deals with the United States because they can't back up something against our key ally Israel to do the things that we've been negotiating on behalf of. So if you pick, if you're, if you're not just looking at this from an American viewpoint, if you kind of see what's going on in the region, you have all of the Gulf states, and we've named them already, but all of them have suffered attacks by Iran. And they

depend in many cases on the U.S. to defend them with with interceptors, air defense interceptors. they're not being defended. They're having hotels hits and bases hit and headquarters hit. And, you know, we're there to be the so-called protector and the allied partner of these individual nations, especially Kuwait. And they're continuing to be bombed. We're supposed to be allied with Israel. And yet Iran sees a wedge between us and our greatest partner in the Middle East because we're not agreeing to the same kind of things. NATO is not supplying any forces to come. comment. Basically, we're now in the true social post you just read. Now the president is basically saying you're going to pay for every death that Iran has sponsored or contributed to over the last 47 years. And I mean, I hate to say this, but as the United States, we don't collect salacia payments. I mean, when I was in Iraq, I had to pay various Iraq leaders when we accidentally killed a citizen or someone of importance in a firefight, we had to pay money with a suitcase full of American cash to the leaders of the tribe so they can distribute it among the family

of the person that was killed. We don't do that. What's the president going to do if a round says, okay, we're going to pay you for all the deaths from the coal bombing and Beirut and all the other places? Where's that money going to go? It certainly isn't going to be paid to the widow. and families of those who were killed in action because of a roadside bomb in Iran, I don't think, unless they say, oh, yeah, we planted that bomb back in 2007 and it killed three of your soldiers. Here's the money for those three soldiers. It's just, it's a ludicrous proposition. And it just shows that the president, I think, is reaching for straws that are nonsensical in many ways.

This message is brought to by soul. Now, if you're anything like me, your day and night routines are not always. routine, whether it's doom scrolling, keeping you up, or just the Sunday scary is keeping you down, bad habits can throw you off your rhythm. Something I found helpful to balance out my bad habits is sold mood gummies. Soles is a wellness brand that makes delicious, hemp-derived CBD and THC products designed to make feeling good pretty simple. Soul's new mood gummies have precise dosing, cleaning ingredients, and formulations designed for predictable effects, so you can choose how you want to feel while staying in control. Soul has three mood gummies with three intentionally crafted

formulas, and all of them have the same great taste. Whatever the moment, there's a soul mood gummy to match. Now, make today a good day and get yourself some soul gummies. Right now, Seoul is offering our audience 30% off your entire order. Go to getsold.com and use the code bulwark takes. That's getsold.com promo code, bulwark takes for 30% off. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk just for a couple minutes about some of the economic ramifications, the Strait of Hormuz, basically. I mean, this has been the thing that ever since the nuclear program ambitions sort of went quietly by the wayside, this has been the thing that Donald Trump has been trying to get by hook or by crook to hang his hat on to say, we can finally end this conflict and call it a win, is some sort of

reopening of the straight. Iran now seems pretty intent on. keeping it bottled up. Ever since the MOU went up in Smitherines, traffic through the straight has crawled or has slowed back down very, very much to a crawl. We have not yet seen the sorts of really out-of-control price movements in oil and gas since the MOU imploded that we saw prior to the MOU. I'm non-economist. I don't have a great sense of why that is exactly, except that there have been new pathways for some of this. There have been different ways that these companies have found to get some of that oil around this chokehold, but we're still spending down our stockpiles quite a bit. There's a question of how much oil we can physically pull

out of our strategic petroleum reserves before the rest of it is actually physically trapped in the ground and nobody quite seems to know where that is. But I also wanted to point to one other headline here, which is just it's something that I talked to a couple shipping experts, it's about months and months ago, but just the plight of the mariners, the merchant mariners who are stuck on these ships in the Strait of Hormuz, some of whom have been there since March.

I mean, that, that, they're just, they're just trapped. And they've, you know, they've got systems now kind of jerry-rigged together to bring food and water to the boats and things like this. But it's basically like they're in prison, right? I mean, there's a guardian piece of reporting in the Guardian today, basically just talking about that. I struggle to think, and this is not my area at all, but I sort of struggle to think of a comparable,

weird, like international humanitarian crisis when it comes to just all these people from all these different countries who are stuck on all of these ships and have been now for nearly six months. And I guess there really isn't going to be any obvious way to clear that up, at least in the near term. Yeah.

And they're not being able to go into ports except a few. But, you know, we did a story in the bulwark about, you know, the USS Abraham Lincoln and the situation they're under with a lot of pressure for sailors having been at sea for 210 days straight. They're running out of not just good food and potential potable water, but they're also running out of things like soap and toothpaste and, you know, the kind of basic hygienicness. necessities that you need. So when you talk about these crews on board, these merchant ships, they're obviously much smaller crews on some of these tankers and ships, but at the same time, they're just sitting there. And their bosses are continuing to pay them, I would think,

for doing nothing. They're waiting to deliver the goods that they've either picked up or waiting to pick up. And, you know, I would like it, somebody likened it to me the other day saying they like to take cruises on cruise ships. And, you know, you compare a cruise ship that goes into a port every other day and everybody sees the touristy stuff versus someone that's sitting out in the middle of 100 degree heat in the Persian Gulf with no wind and nothing to do. You can imagine yourself getting pretty bored after six months just sitting there. And not a whole lot of ships have moved in and out of there. And it's costing money to run those ships. And it's costing money to ensure them against a potential attack like there was last night against the,

I think it was a UAE ship in one of the Omani ports that was hit last night and burned. So yeah, it's it's unfathomable to me. There's a reason I went into the army and not the Navy. I never wanted to be trapped on board a ship like this, but, but I can't imagine the situation of some of these people right now that are still on the ships. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it really kind of makes your skin crawl to think about it. At least it does just for me, just the claustrophobia of it. And, and yeah, I mean, it's, it's a horrible, horrible situation. Well, you know, if I can just comment on the fact we had an article in the bulwark about the, the price of precision weaponry and what that means beyond just the, the, the pleasion of

of rounds and the inability to generate new rounds. And both the president and Secretary Hegeseth are proclaiming that we're building new factories and stocking up the assembly lines and we're going to have replacements for these precision weapons. And what I would say is that's just not true. From my checks of the defense industry, there are no new factories being built from the organizations that build what I would call the big five, and that is the Patriot missiles and the Thad missiles, which are your interceptors for incoming drones and missiles from Iran, as well as the Tomahawk missile, the Atacom's Army missile, and the new precision strike missile, which are all very expensive, you know,

millions of dollars apiece. In fact, the Thad Interceptor, one of them costs, one missile cost about $13 million, and we're using up and depleting many of those. So that's why you see the president in the first clip we played basically in the Oval Office saying, you'll see. Because his options in terms of using military force without depleting, completely depleting these supplies of precision weapons, is to put soldiers and Marines closer to their enemy, the so-called coffee breath close. I mean, if you don't have standoff munitions, which all of these things are, you're going to increase your capability of being attacked by a drone or Iranian missile, or if you don't have missiles to strike deep into

Iran, it's going to turn into a situation much like Ukraine had at the beginning of their war, where they can't reach out and touch the enemy. So the only option you have left is to send actual bodies in wearing uniforms to conduct those attack. And the president doesn't want to do that because, again, to go into Iran, the troop to task that you would be required is probably in the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, considering the fact that when we went into Iraq in 2003, there were about 200,000 forces that went into a country that's the third of the size of Iran. So all of these things are consideration. The president, doesn't have many military options left. His diplomacy has been terrible. He does have the

potential for squeezing economically Iran, but that's going to take a long time and it's going to carry him, I think, into the election cycle, which he doesn't want to do. It's just one mess after another. Well, unfortunately, we're probably odds are going to have plenty more of the Iran war story to chew on over the weeks and, you know, God forbid, months ahead. Thank you, General Hurtling for coming and talking us through all of this. Thanks to you all out there for watching. We hope you will subscribe to the bulwark, subscribe to the feed. Come on over to the bulwark.com. Read what General Hurtling has to offer up on the site all the time. It's great stuff. Thanks. And we'll see you all next time.