Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The US-Iran Deal Israel Fears - with Jonathan Schanzer

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

PLEASE FILL OUT OUR SURVEY: https://tinyurl.com/26dwpymb------------------------------------------------------------------------------Upcoming Event Notice: Dan Senor will be delivering this year’s State of World Jewry Address at the 92nd Street Y (92NY) on Tuesday May 13 at 7:30 pm. To register: https://www.92ny.org/event/the-state-of-world-jewry-addressWatch Call me Back on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CallMeBackPodcastTo contact us, sign up for updates, and access transcripts, visit: https://arkmedia.org/Dan on X: https://x.com/dansenorDan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dansenorArk Media on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arkmediaorgSeven years after President Trump scrapped the Iranian nuclear deal, the U.S. is now engaged in direct negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran to try to reach a new deal. Yet the talks in Oman have so far raised more questions than answers, especially as Steve Witkoff has just clarified the administration's objective with regard to Iran’s nuclear program, and as new reporting emerges of possible U.S.-Israel deliberations over military options.  Joining us is Jonathan Schanzer, Executive Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Jonathan has been closely monitoring the negotiations and been in contact with relevant U.S. and Israeli officials.CREDITS:ILAN BENATAR - Producer & EditorMARTIN HUERGO - Sound EditorYARDENA SCHWARTZ - Executive Editor, Ark MediaGABE SILVERSTEIN - ResearchYUVAL SEMO - Music Composer

The ultimate goal is to make sure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon. And if we look at the chessboard, they lost a huge number of pieces. They lost their pawns. They lost their knight. They lost their bishop. We're talking about Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis. A lot of these pieces have been knocked off the board. What they have right now, they have their queen.

The queen is the nuclear program. That's their most powerful piece and they haven't played it yet. Now, no player is going to want to give up their queen unless the king is being threatened. We're talking about the regime itself. Ayatollah Khamenei, if he understands that the regime will be toppled, this is the moment that Iran could decide to sacrifice the queen. This is the choice that Israel wants to put to the regime in Iran. Now the question is, are the Israelis and the Trump administration on the same page?

It's 9 a.m. on Wednesday, April 16th in New York City. It's 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 16th in Israel, as many Israelis are vacationing in and outside of Israel during Chol HaMoed, Pesach. Before we move on to today's conversation, one housekeeping note, podcasting platforms do not share much data with creators. But if We at Call Me Back and arc media want to serve this community We need to understand who you are your age group how you think about Israel how you think about global affairs

What country you live in this information will help us shape call me back as well as the new shows that will be joining arc media So in today's show notes, you will find a link to a two minute survey. We'd be grateful if you could fill it out and send it our way. This is a separate survey from the one we provided almost a year ago. So please, even if you already filled out that survey, we ask you to spend two minutes,

that's all it'll take on this one as well. And please remember to go to the link in the show notes to fill out our survey. Now back to our conversation. Today we will be diving into the latest developments in the US-Iran nuclear negotiations, which have resumed after a seven-year hiatus. Recent talks in Oman were described as, quote, constructive,

one of my favorite diplomatic words, by both sides and there's now a second round scheduled for April 19th. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has expressed cautious optimism. Meanwhile, the US has shown signs of softening its stance and then all of a sudden hardening its stance in the last 24 hours. This raises several dramatic questions from Israel's perspective is military action still on the table Is it still feasible? How would any agreement with Iran be different from the JCPOA which Trump pulled out of in? 2018 what could be a positive scenario for Israel and What could be a positive scenario for Israel? And, of course, we should be minded to how this could also end badly, very badly, for Israel.

Joining us to unpack these developments and make sense of them is John Schanzer, who's executive director at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. John has been closely monitoring the negotiations and has been in touch with Israeli officials and American officials and officials throughout the region. He has expressed skepticism about Iran's intentions, to say the least. He's been focused on the need for full denuclearization,

but he does have interesting analysis on where things stand and where they're going. John, welcome back to the show. Pleasure, Dan, good to be with you. So I wanna just start with having you assess the current trajectory of the US-Iran nuclear talks. What is going on here? What are we watching?

And whatever we're watching, I guess, how is it different than the context for talks that have occurred in previous administrations? Sure. I think the first thing you need to understand is that they're happening after a year and a half of war with Israel. The Iranians activated their rig of fire. It began with Hamas, obviously, on October 7th, and it began to include Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen.

They basically tried to launch a war that could have led to the destruction of Israel, but they failed. And what happened instead was that Israel turned the tables and eviscerated Hamas. We're looking at a terrorist organization that is on the brink of extinction. Hezbollah took a shellacking last fall, the pager operations, the walkie talkies, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah and his successor and a number of other senior Hezbollah officials. This is not a terrorist group posing a significant threat to Israel right now. The Houthis are getting battered as we speak by the Trump administration. The Trump has ordered the US military to just go on an all out blitz of Houthi controlled

territory in Yemen. So the ring of fire is collapsing. And of course that says nothing about what happened in Syria with the Assad regime falling. And what about inside Iran specifically with Israel's military operations against Iran where a lot of Iran's air defenses, as you've talked about on this podcast have been, you know, to quote our friend Rich Goldberg, the Ayatollah has no clothes. The Ayatollah skies are naked right now. The strategic air defenses, the S-300 systems are gone.

There may be one or two according to reports that I've seen that are still active, but we already know the Israelis can take them out at will. That's what happened in the fall of last year. They can do it again. There are some intermediate range air defenses that can be moved around Iran, but they will pose no significant threat to Israel's F-35s or F-16s. So right now, the Iranians are weak. their strategy has failed in the region and now comes the I think Even more important part the US has deployed not one but two carrier strike groups off the coast of Iran We have B2 bombers stationed at Diego Garcia We have the THAAD system the aerial defense system that can intercept ballistic missiles.

Two batteries are now placed in Israel and the region is on high alert. Iran has its back up against the wall. The regime right now understands that one wrong move and Trump could unleash the full force of the US military and not only destroy the nuclear program, but potentially destabilize the structures, the pillars of the regime in Tehran. And so this is the first time we have seen these negotiations take place under the shadow of the full force of the American military. This is leverage.

And the question right now is whether we're going to exploit that leverage or squander it. And I think that over the last several days, we've seen indications of both, and it's made critics uneasy, both in Israel and in the United States. So I want to come back to that, but just look into the totality of the context. Also Iran's economy is fragile, right? The regime is under extreme economic pressure as well. It is. We have the return of the maximum

pressure campaign. Donald Trump reimposed those sanctions. And by the way, they're only ramping up right now, right? It takes months for sanctions to truly sink in and for them to bite. Markets need to to adjust, businesses need to readjust. So it's going to take even a little bit more time, but I suspect that the pressure will only grow. And on top of that, you've got the unrest that has been ongoing inside Iran. At FDD, we've been tracking the protests

and they're happening on a somewhat regular basis here where the people of Iran are still very unhappy with the regime itself. They've squandered their own resources the people of Iran are still very unhappy with the regime itself. They've squandered their own resources on these adventures that have failed overseas. All across the Middle East, Iran is not loved by the region and they find themselves right now with their back up against the wall. So again, right now the US has a lot of leverage and the question is, what do we do with it?

One last contextual point that makes this, since we're having this conversation during the week of Hala Moed, during Passover, why is this night different from all other nights? Why is this negotiation different from all other previous negotiations? The other point, which is a softer element, but I don't think it's inconsequential. I spoke to one Israeli official who was in an official position during the JCPOA negotiations, so they were monitoring closely then, and this person's also in an official position now monitoring these discussions. And he made the point, he said last time we were dealing with direct talks the Obama administration would say to the Israeli government,

what's your alternative, right? If these fail, you say there's gonna be military action, there's gonna be a war, and an international backlash against Israel. If Israel lights up military action that turns into a war against Iran in the wake of failed talks, you Israel won't be able to handle

the international backlash. And this official pointed out, we've just lived 18 months of that international backlash. Post October 7th, we've watched the world completely gang up on Israel. The jackals to quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan are out there, they're flourishing, they've been attacking Israel at every venue, the UN, the ICC, various European countries, international press organs throughout the world.

There's been this backlash against Israel because of the defensive wards had to fight since October 7th. And guess what? Israel's still standing and Israel, despite the complete shattering it has experienced as a result of October 7th, from a security and geopolitical standpoint, it's not just surviving, it's flourishing. Its geopolitical position has never been better. What this official pointed out to me is the fear of backlash is just preposterous. We've experienced the backlash and he pointed

out he thinks there are a lot of countries specifically in the region that wouldn't necessarily join the backlash against Israel if there had to be some kind of military action. Oh look, I agree with that assessment. I think that the Israelis are at a place where they literally have nothing to lose and only things to gain. They've already seen the worst of it, all the condemnations at the UN and some of the countries that have turned against them from Europe. And they've already suffered whatever the consequences are from not even initiating the war, right? They didn't initiate this, they didn't start it, they didn't want it, and they've taken the beating, and they're still

standing. And not only are they still standing, but they're stronger than they were when this all started. Right now, the skies are clear. If they want, they could attack Iran. Now, here's the interesting part of all of this. The only person that I think they're really afraid of right now is Donald Trump. As the Israelis are looking out at the skies over Iran, right? The skies are naked, they can fly in, they can operate at will, and they want to do it. They really would love nothing more than to do it. If Donald Trump says don't, and then they do anyway, that's the one thing that they don't want and then they do anyway, that's the one thing that they don't want to risk.

So they've given Donald Trump the respect that they should. This is the president of the United States after all. And he's given them what they've wanted since the Biden administration left. I mean, I was actually just in Israel recently. I saw some of those 2000 pound bombs, those MK-84s that had been held up by the Biden administration. They're flowing, the Air Force is thrilled. They're getting what they need to be able to rearm,

restock, reload. They're getting ready for whatever happens next. Now what they're doing is they're giving Donald Trump the window that he's asked for to negotiate with his chief envoy, Stephen Witkoff, to see if there is a way to avoid a war. That's what's playing out right now.

Okay. So I want to get to that. Before I do, you've just explained how weak Iran is, and it couldn't be operating and negotiating from a weaker position. That said, what leverage does Iran hold in these negotiations? They hold the potential to make a dash for a bomb. And I think that's what everybody is afraid of. I think we don't have a terrific window

into what's going on right now inside Iran. We hear that within a matter of weeks, they could be able to make a dash for a crude nuclear weapon, which would be a deterrent for Israel or the United States to attack these nuclear sites. And when you say Daesh, what do you mean by Daesh? Daesh is how much time between Iran acting on the decision and the Israelis waking up

to news and finding out, oh my gosh, this thing we've been resisting for now decades, Iran now has this capability. Look, what we hear is that it could take two weeks. I'm not a nuclear physicist. I can't tell you exactly all the formal processes that they would need to go through to get to that place, but they could, as we understand it, within two weeks, slap together a crude nuclear weapon,

not the kind of thing that could attack Israel the next day, but put something together that they would be able to test, they would be able to bear, they would be able to bear their teeth at the rest of the world and say we're now a nuclear power. I think a lot of this also really does stem from the divisions that we see inside this country right now, Dan. That we have two different wings of the Republican Party, the camps that exist within Donald Trump's White House, there are those that

are saying, let's go, let's do this. And then there are those who are saying, no, we got to keep our powder dry. We need to save all of our weapons. We need to save our ability to fight for the Chinese Communist Party. If we do anything at all, that's where they wanna go. So these are the so-called neo-isolationists or the China-Fursters, whatever we wanna call them. And by the way, they get very unhappy when you call them neo-isolationists. I don't know if they even like China-Fursters,

but that's the one side. And then the other side is, we need to take out Iran while we can. The president, I think, is trying to navigate this right now. And so he would like to get to yes through negotiations and to not have the need to engage in a military operation that may or may not go well at the end of the day. And I think that the Iranians know that nobody wants war. Nobody really wants a showdown with the regime and it's

the whole idea of giving peace a chance here right now that I think is the most important card that they're playing. Okay I just want to set some historical comparisons here. If you were to go to October 6th, so you're basically saying before October 7th, before this war was launched against Israel, you had these proxies all in place. You had Hamas in the south, you had Hezbollah in the north. I would constantly hear from Israeli officials that, you know, any action we take against Iran, we have to anticipate Hezbollah operatives, its rockets, hundreds of thousands, etc. that can rain on central Tel Aviv. I mean, you've heard all these concerns. You had all

these proxies in the region, Syria, the Assad regime, the Houthis, there were all these, you know, kind of horror stories. Is that the big difference now versus, I would say October 6, 2023, or even let's go back to 2018 when the US pulled out of the JCPOA? Like, is the fundamental difference the past 18 months? How the ring of fire seems impotent and as you said earlier There are all these US military assets in the region Look, I think that when you look back to October 6th or even the preceding years

The concern always was that the moment that Israel would make a move to strike Iran the moment that Israel would make a move to strike Iran, that it would unleash all of these proxies and they would rain fire on Israel. And those 180,000 missiles and drones that Hezbollah had that they would darken the skies of Israel, they would hit the Demona nuclear facility with precision. They would hit the so-called Pentagon of Israel in Tel Aviv. They could hit the chemical facility in Haifa. They could create mass casualty events.

That doesn't look like it's possible right now for Hezbollah. They still have weapons and they still have fighters, but they don't have commanders. I heard a hilarious quip from a senior Israeli official when I was there two weeks ago, where they said that Naim Qasem, the new head of Hezbollah, the new secretary general of Hezbollah, that they would go to war to keep him in his chair because he is so feckless and he is so weak. Right now they are loving what they see out of Lebanon. The Houthis right now are suppressed.

I'm actually the most nervous about them just because they've got these ballistic missiles that they can fire at Israel and there's a limited number of interceptors, both American and Israeli, that can knock them out of the sky. But right now you've got the US doing that work as we speak. That is terrific news. Hamas, they're able to fire a handful of rockets out of Gaza into southern Israel and they call that a major victory The ring of fire is collapsed and so there's not a lot of risk from Israel's perspective right now and Virtually none from the United States if we're to be frank here So against all of that the US appears to be or was at least a few days ago

But now they may be backtracking on that the The U.S. appeared to be softening its demands, focusing on limiting uranium enrichment levels as opposed to what the Israeli government refers to as the Libya model, which is shutting down the nuclear program entirely and just getting it out of Iran as we did in Libya. So can you just describe what's happened over the past few days so people can understand it seems to be moving day to day in terms of what the U.S. position is on what it's trying to achieve? It is moving day to day. I think the way that I've tried to describe this is that we're watching Stephen Witkoff,

the president's envoy for Middle East negotiations. He is climbing a steep learning curve in front of everyone. It is not an easy file to master. I think the number of people that are working with him right now that have that technical knowledge, there are few. I'm not sure how many he trusts. I don't know how many people

that he's working with right now that truly have a mastery of this file. He's making mistakes. He's saying things right now that do not comport necessarily with where the president is on things. Certainly not where the Israelis are. Certainly not where maybe a large majority of the Republican Party might be. I mean, when he started talking about enrichment at 3.67%, he was invoking the JCPOA,

the deal that Donald Trump campaigned against when he made that first bid for the presidency. And I think within a short period of time, the president probably calls up Witkoff and says, hey, cut it out. Stop talking about capping enrichment. We need to talk about full denuclearization, which is, I think, ultimately what we need to be looking for.

But didn't he put a statement out where he seemed to have clarified? Yes. Okay, so in the last 24 hours, this was 9.52 a.m. on April 15th, Witkoff posted a deal with Iran. I'm quoting here, a deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal. Any final agreement must set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East, meaning that Iran must stop and eliminate, keyword eliminate, its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program. It is imperative for the world that we create a tough, fair deal that will

endure and that is what President Trump has asked me to do. And I think that is a terrific revision. I wish that we didn't have to see a revision. That's not exactly inspiring confidence among those who are watching this carefully and who understand where we've been and where we could go. I would argue two things. Number one is Steven Wichoff serves the president. And when the president says that he wants something, he's gonna go back and clarify,

this is what I'm doing on behalf of Donald Trump. And I think that's what happened. I think Donald Trump said, no, no, no, you got this wrong. We want full denuclearization. And that's what Stephen Witkoff comes back out and says after he creates a flap the day before. But I think there's something that's potentially more important here, which is, you know, Donald Trump, you know, he talked during the first campaign for the presidency,

he talked about how he had read every page of the nuclear agreement, and he saw it as the worst deal in the world. Look, I think we can all probably say that he didn't read every page of it, but he understood in its essence that it was too complicated, right? All these technical things,

snapbacks and one, two, three agreements and sunset clauses, it's too complicated, right? All these technical things, snapbacks, and one, two, three agreements, and sunset clauses, it's too much, right? And when I talk to Israeli officials about this, I hear the same thing. It was too clever by half back in 2015. There were too many moving parts. At the end of the day, it comes down to one thing.

Is Iran trying to build a nuclear weapon? What are we gonna do about it? And I think right now what the president has done is he has forced Stephen Witkoff to go back and revise and basically say that we want the Libya model, which by the way didn't exactly work out well for Libya. It didn't work out for Muammar Gaddafi, but it worked out very well for the rest of the world. What happened back then was Muammar Gaddafi saw that if he did not relinquish his nuclear program that he might get toppled just like Saddam Hussein did. And so he willingly rushed to the United States and said, here, I'm going to dismantle the entire thing. This

program is shuttered. It's not mothballed. It's not set aside for a later date. I'm not maintaining the ability to enrich, I'm giving you the keys to the entire thing and we're going to destroy it. This is, I think, at the end of the day, what Donald Trump wants. I think it's the right thing to ask for. You don't want the world's foremost state sponsor of terror to have the ability to go back and enrich after 10 years or 15 years, which is what we inked back in 2015. It was the worst part of the nuclear deal that we made was it wasn't just that we gave them $150 billion plus in sanctions relief, which was a huge mistake.

And by the way, I think that ultimately ended up subsidizing the 10-7 wars that we've watched play out. But it was that Iran would have another crack at this that won all of the clauses would sunset They could go back to rebuilding that nuclear program it left infrastructure in place Donald Trump is now saying this whole thing needs to go and it's just so much simpler that way I like this approach. Let's not get fancy here. Let's end the program with all of this firepower right now facing the Iranians. They have to know that this is really not a choice.

If they want to continue to exist as a regime, they need to give up the nukes. From Israel's perspective, what's the worst case scenario coming out of these negotiations? What would that look like? It's an ongoing negotiation that revolves around confidence building measures. CBMs, an official that I talked to this morning was saying, this is what we don't want, right? Because you have a window that's open right now. The skies are naked. The Israelis can go in, the United States can go in. They can destroy the nuclear program. If the Trump administration agrees to draw this out and to allow for the Iranians to play for time, they could A. make a dash for a bomb. B. extend the window and then ultimately rebuild back their air defenses. By the way, they could play this out until the

midterms where Trump begins to lose that rock-solid handle that he has on the political apparatus in Washington, and he would find himself weaker politically domestically at home. These are the things that the Israelis know the Iranians will try to do. They're master negotiators, and so what they're trying to do is to put this on fast-forward. They want to get to that end state as soon as possible because they've already seen this movie before. They know the Iranians are wily negotiators. They know that Steven Witkoff could get fleeced.

And this is what they want to try to avoid at all costs. So I think we're going to see more engagement on the part of the Israelis as they try to get Witkoff up to speed. Again, as he's learning this file in real time, I would expect him to make some of these mistakes. But as he goes back and hopefully learns from the mistakes of his predecessors and maybe gets an earful from Donald Trump, hopefully we're going to move in the right direction. And it sounds to me, John, that you are highly skeptical of IAEA inspections and other mechanisms to ensure compliance

if there were to be some new agreement. Your view is all that stuff is just bureaucratic, time-consuming scaffolding that plays to Iran's advantage. Look, I have colleagues that spend a huge amount of time looking at all the technicals and they look at the diplomatic components surrounding the previous deal and what we might get now. I fully respect what they do and I think it's important work. Every detail matters when you get into these negotiations. And that was the structure that we had to play with back then, but it was too clever by half. We ended up getting

so bogged down in these technical details that we forgot what the ultimate goal was. And the ultimate goal is to make sure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon. Israel has to make this demand. The United States has to make this demand and we need to force the Iranians to understand that they have no choice. Now, there was a fascinating conversation that I had with an Israeli official when I was there that surrounded this whole idea of a chessboard, right? And if we look at the board, they lost a huge number of pieces. They lost their pawns, they lost their knight, they lost their bishop.

We're talking about Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, all these different Shiite militias. A lot of these pieces have been knocked off the board. What they have right now, they have their queen. The queen is the nuclear program. That's their most powerful piece and they haven't played it yet. Now, no player is going to want to give up their queen. Right? This is the one piece that you don't sacrifice unless the king is being threatened.

The king right now needs to be threatened. We're talking about the regime itself. Ayatollah Khamenei himself. If he understands that he will be toppled, that the regime will be toppled, this is the moment that Iran could decide to sacrifice the queen. This comes from as close as you can to the top in Israel. This is the choice, the fundamental choice that Israel wants to put to the regime in Iran. Now, the question is, are the Israelis

and the Trump administration on the same page? It didn't look like they were. Now it looks like maybe they are based on the revisions that Stephen Witkoff has made with his public utterances. Right, now I wanna talk about some other geopolitical actors in all of this, one of which is Saudi Arabia. So what is your sense of the Saudis' perception of these negotiations? You know, what role could they potentially play? You know, right before the war broke out on October 7th,

a few months before my colleagues and I from FDD took a visit to Saudi Arabia, they had just inked a deal with Iran. It was a security arrangement, brokered by the Chinese Communist Party. It came in the wake of all of these Houthi attacks and the Saudis had just about had enough of them. The Iranians, we don't know exactly what they offered and we don't know exactly what was brokered with the Chinese. In fact, my colleagues and I were pushing Saudi officials to try to explain to us exactly what they agreed to. But they arrived at an understanding where the Iranians and the Saudis were no longer going to be attacking one another in any way, whether through information operations or

trying to incite the population to rise up against the regime. The Houthis were going to stop firing at Saudi Arabia. There was an understanding that they were going to respect each other's sovereignty. That arrangement has held. And if you look at what's happened over the course of this year and a half, I would have expected the Saudis to be cheering out loud for the Israelis when they took out Iran's defensive capabilities, their air defenses. Saudis hate the Iranian regime. They would have been absolutely thrilled, but I think right now they're quite satisfied

with what they have, which is quiet. Amidst all the chaos that's going on around the region, they've been rather comfortable sitting at home and watching. They've been the peanut gallery throughout all of this, and I think they're happy being that for the time being. Now we have an interesting situation now where it looks like the United States and the Saudis are moving forward for a civilian nuclear agreement. I'm okay with that. Again though, all about that kind of basic fundamental that we were just talking about. Do the

Saudis want a civilian nuclear program or are they toying with the idea of going nuclear if and when Iran goes nuclear, right? This nuclear cascade is what the Israelis have been warning about for years. Right now I think we're in fine shape with them. What I'd really like to see though is I'd like to see the US and Israel, the US or Israel, knock out that nuclear program, really deliver that death knell to the regime, a full defeat. I think the moment that happens is the moment the Saudis say, okay, this agreement that nobody knows exactly what was written back in the spring of 2023, you know what, we're

going to abrogate that now. We're going to join fully with the United States and Israel. We're going to join the Abraham Accords. We're going to be part of this U.S.-led defense architecture in the Middle East. It's worth it for us. I think right now, the Saudis are still not sure, even though Israel's winning, even though the United States has this massive firepower amassed in the region, they are still sitting on the fence. This is what all

of the Gulf countries do. I remember when I first came to Washington, one of the first pieces I was assigned to write, one of the first think tanks that I worked for, they asked me to look at what the Gulf countries positions were as it related to the looming war against Saddam Hussein back in 2003 and none of them threw their lot with the United States. They were all sitting on the fence. The title for my piece was Survival of the Skittish and that title still holds. Okay, what about Moscow and Beijing? I think they're watching right now to see what happens to the oil facilities, because that's really what matters to them.

Now, I will fully see here that the Russians, the Chinese, and the Iranians are an axis. We talk about this right now a lot at FDD. My colleagues and I frame this, I think, very clearly as we call them the axis of aggressors, and they are assaulting three embattled democracies, Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and they're working together. They're sharing resources. They're working together diplomatically. The question that I have, and I think we know the answer to this, is would Russia or China lift a finger for Iran if it got shellacked in a confrontation with the United States or with

Israel. I think we'd see a lot of harshly worded letters at the United Nations. I think we might see them try to help resupply the Iranians much in the same way that the United States has tried to resupply the Ukrainians or the Israelis. I think those are the rules of the game right now. There is though that question. There's gotta be a little bit of doubt in people's minds right now, whether this triggers these great powers, so to speak. I have to say, I'm not sure that Russia is a great power.

We call them a gas station with an army. The Chinese are more of a great power, right? Would we trigger them to do something bigger, scarier? That's the stuff that the isolationists right now, or the neo-isolationists right now that are at the Pentagon or at the White House, this is the doubt that they're injecting into this decision-making process where we watch Donald Trump and Steven Wittkopf and others openly weigh whether it's time to try to finally take out that Iranian nuclear program. I do think there's a tendency to focus on some of the voices that you're referring to

in the senior levels of the administration. And there's a tendency to focus on Donald Trump's history of talking about not only disengaging from certain theaters in the world, but also reticence to use US military force. But I will say, if you look at his first term, the one region and specifically the one country, the one regime against whom he has been willing to use force has been Iran. It was extraordinary for a guy who quote unquote is, you know, allergic to military action in the Middle East used US military power to take out Qasem Soleimani, the most dangerous architect of terror and chaos

and warfare in the Middle East up until that time, during the president's first term. He used US military force to take on, literally kill a lot of Russian security contractors that were in Syria propping up the Assad regime. I mean, I could cite other examples. So you just spoke about the military power he's deployed at the beginning of this conversation in the region right now.

I think there's a tendency to speak about Donald Trump's, the way it's characterized, which I don't necessarily agree with, but Donald Trump's neo-isolationist tendencies. And regardless of whether we should get into a debate about that, I think it's a little more nuanced, even if you do believe that that because there are certain parts of the world where he does seem willing to deploy force in ways that would be out of character of a leader that wants to completely withdraw from the world and completely lay down arms when it is appropriate to use arms I always chuckle when people say well, you know, this is what we know about Trump. Do we really know? I mean, this is a man. Mercurial is a good word to use. The guy can sometimes wake

up and completely change his mind on core issues relating to American national security, right? He will try one approach and if he doesn't like that approach after a day, a week, a month, he will change. This guy is not beholden to policy. We joke that Donald Trump is the first post-policy president the United States has ever had. There's no such thing as a Trump doctrine right now. It's not written out. He is trying something right now, right? He is trying diplomacy with the Iranians and he's using the leverage of the American military. The shadow of the American military is cast across the negotiating table and he's going to try that for a time. And then if that doesn't work, he may do what he's done before, as you suggest, right?

I mean, he will take military action when he finds that there's nothing else left. He's giving peace a chance right now. And I think it's not the worst thing to see happen. The question is, what are the terms of the peace that he's trying to forge? He is saying, I think now finally we've arrived at this through Steven Witkoff's revisions. He's saying full denuclearization, you have a chance to continue to exist, right? We will let you exist, which by the way, maybe not the best thing to see, because the Iranians will rebuild their ring of fire and they will find ways to try to attack Israel again. But they're giving the Iranians a choice. Now, the question is, if the Iranians

spurn him, does he take action the way that he did when he took out Qasem Soleimani on that fateful day? Or do we have some other strategy that Trump has up his sleeve? We're going to have to wait and find out. He does not show his cards. This is the one thing that we can say about Donald Trump. All right, John, we will leave it there. Thank you, as always, for this very quick and focused update, which we needed.

It's fast moving, so I'm sure we're going to rope you into another conversation in the not too distant future, but until then, enjoy the rest of the Chag. You too, Dan. That's our show for today. If you or your organization are interested in sponsoring Call Me Back, we'd love to hear from you. You can reach us at callmebackatarkmedia.org.

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