Letters from an American - June 19, 2025

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

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June 19, 2025. Just a week ago, the Trump administration was preparing for a sixth round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, scheduled to be held in Oman on June 15. In 2018, President Donald J. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated in 2015 by President Barack Obama, under which the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom lifted economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits to Iran's nuclear program. and the United Kingdom lifted economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits to Iran's nuclear program.

With the U.S. withdrawal, the agreement fell apart. Trump launched a maximum pressure campaign of stronger sanctions to pressure Iran to renegotiate the JCPOA, which lasted through his first term. Back in office, Trump relaunched that campaign in February 2025. Then, in March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that the assessment of the intelligence community was that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. In the same month, Trump said on the Fox News Channel that he had written a letter to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging the Iranians to negotiate, because if we have to go in militarily, it's going to be a terrible thing for them.

Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran would not enter into any direct negotiations with the U.S. so long as they continue their maximum pressure policy and their threats. But Iran's allied militant actors Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon have been badly hurt by Israeli strikes since Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Iran's major ally in the Middle East, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, fell in December 2024. Discussions began in April of this year, and negotiators met for five rounds by the end of May. Israel was not included in the negotiations,

and on Thursday, June 12th, it launched strikes against nuclear and military targets in Iran. The strikes killed a number of nuclear scientists and senior military personnel. Iran retaliated, and the countries have been in conflict ever since. After the strikes, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also became the acting national security adviser after Trump fired his first national security adviser for inviting a journalist onto a signal chat about a military strike against the Houthis, issued a statement distancing the U.S. from Israel's attack on Iran.

Tonight, he said, Israel took unilateral action against Iran. Tonight, he said, Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran, and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear, Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel. But by early Friday morning, Trump appeared to be trying to take credit for the strikes and demanded that Iran make a deal. The next day, Saturday, June 14th, was the day of no-kings protests in which at least

2% of the U.S. population turned out to oppose his presidency, as well as the sparsely attended military parade in Washington, D.C., an embarrassing contrast for the president. The U.S. possesses a 30,000-pound bomb that would perhaps be able to penetrate Iran's underground nuclear sites, which are fortified against attack. According to Alex Horton, Maham Javed, and Warren P. Strobel, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOB, can penetrate the ground up to at least 200 feet. The US B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber is the only Air Force aircraft that can deploy the heavy MOP.

On June 16th, while at the G7 meeting in Canada, Trump posted that Iran, "'Should have signed the deal I told them to sign.'" He continued, "'What a shame and waste of human life. Simply stated, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I said it over and over again. Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran.

More than nine million people live in Tehran with more than 16 million in the metropolitan area. Then Trump abruptly left the G7 and on the trip home he told reporters on Air Force One that he didn't care what Gabbard said and thought Iran was close to achieving nuclear capabilities. When France's president Emmanuel Macron suggested Trump left to work on a ceasefire, Trump posted, wrong, he has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a ceasefire,

much bigger than that. Whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong. Stay tuned. Later that day, he posted that we, a word suggesting US involvement, now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran. And he credited U.S. weaponry with that dominance. About a half hour later, he posted,

we know exactly where the so-called supreme leader is hiding. He's an easy target, but is safe there. We are not going to take him out, kill, at least not for now. But we don't want missiles shot at civilians or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin." As Trump's stay-tuned suggested, his hints that he could bring the U.S. into the conflict monopolized the news. It has pushed the no-Kings Day protests and the military parade to the background, putting

Trump back on the front page. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo interpreted Trump's shift back to Israel as a typical Trump branding opportunity. Israel has got a product ready to go to market, and they've offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it. In the short term, that product offers a quick way to get rid of the Iranian nuclear program, which has long been a U.S. goal. But Trump's flirting with joining a Middle East war has badly split his supporters.

Led by Steve Bannon, the isolationist wing is strongly opposed to intervention and suggests that the U.S. will once again be stuck in an endless war. In contrast, the evangelical MAGA wing sees support for Israel as central to the return of Jesus Christ to earth in the end times. Earlier this month, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, said the U.S. was abandoning its long-standing support for a Palestinian state. Huckabee is a strong supporter of the expansion of Israel's settlements. After the Israeli strikes, Huckabee messaged Trump to urge him to listen to the voice of God. In an apparent reference to Truman's decision

to drop a nuclear weapon on Japan at the end of World War II, Huckabee told Trump, no president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours, not since Harry Truman in 1945. At the unveiling of two 88-foot tall, or 26.8 meters, flagpoles at the White House yesterday, Trump told reporters, who asked what he was planning to do about Iran, I mean, you don't know that I'm even going to do it. You don't know. I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do." He added,

"'Nothing's finished until it's finished. You know, war is very complex. A lot of bad things can happen. A lot of turns are made.'" He told CNN's Caitlin Collins, "'I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven't made a final, I like to make a final decision one second before it's due,

you know, because things change. Meanwhile, in a hearing yesterday at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat of Illinois, pointed out to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the $1 billion mission he led against the Houthis, who do not have a navy, has not restored the ability of U.S. flagged commercial vessels to go through the Red Sea. Instead, it cost the U.S. two F-18 Hornets, which cost $60 million a piece, and seven Reaper drones that cost another $200 million. Duckworth accused Hegseth of blowing through money and said, your failures since you've taken office have been staggering. You sent classified

operational information over signal to chest thump in front of your wife, who by the way has no security clearance, risking service member lives in the process. You've created such a hostile command environment that no one wants to serve as your chief of staff or work with you in any other senior lead Department of Defense leadership roles. But what we should all be talking about more than this, she added, is that you have an unjustified,

un-American misuse of the military in American cities, pulling resources and attention away from core missions to the detriment of the country, the war fighters, and yes, the war fighting that you claim to love. Warren P. Strobel, Alex Horton, and Abigail House loaner of the Washington Post reported yesterday that Hegseth and Gabbard have been sidelined in discussions of whether the U.S. will get involved in the conflict. The White House is also operating without a full complement of professional staffers

at the National Security Council, since Rubio fired many of them when he took over from waltz, apparently with the goal of replacing the think tank mentality of past NSCs with a group that would simply implement the president's ideas. Talking Points Memo's Marshall noted Tuesday that there is really, literally no one in the inner discussion of U.S. foreign policy today, who has any level of foreign policy or military crisis experience at all. Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers

is pushing back on the idea that Trump can unilaterally decide to take the United States into a war. On Monday, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced a measure to reassert Congress's power over the authority to make war. The Constitution explicitly gives that authority to Congress, not the President, but Presidents have chipped away at that power for decades. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent of Vermont, introduced another measure to bar the use of federal funds for military force without authorization by Congress. Today, after Iranian missiles hit an Israeli hospital, Trump seemed to change direction. He issued a statement through White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt, falling back on

his usual tactic of promising something in two weeks. Based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks. Stay tuned. Marshall of Talking Points memo noted today, a through line through the last five months is that uncertainty is Donald Trump's personal comfort zone, where he feels his power is maximized. But in basically every domain in which he operates, uncertainty in itself is damaging

to everyone else involved. ["Dead in Massachusetts"] Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.