PBS News Hour - Full Show - What's next for Iran war as energy disruptions escalate and regime digs in

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

The day after the U.S. and Israel began the war with Iran, President Trump said the strikes would last four to five weeks. Now, as the war begins its fourth week, Iran's regime is severely weakened, but is still retaliating. Compass Points moderator Nick Schifrin discusses where the war goes from here with Michael Doran, Miad Maleki, Vali Nasr and Dana Stroul. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Displays of defiance. The U.S. and Israel target Iran's regime with no end in sight, eliminating powerful leaders. But Iran vows to keep up the fight. President Trump confronts domestic pushback, after atop, albeit controversial, counterterrorism official, resigns in protest, and international resistance of his demands

to help reopen the strait of Hormuz. Tonight, where does the war go from here? Coming up on Compass Points. So, and welcome to Compass Points. The day after the U.S. and Israel began the war with Iran, with Iran, President Trump said the strikes would last four to five weeks. Now, as the war begins, its fourth week, the Iran's regime is severely weakened, but is still retaliating against Israel and its Gulf neighbors. The Strait of Hormuz is largely closed, and oil prices are spiking.

And President Trump's top counterterrorism official resigned in protest to the war, contradicting the president's claim that Iran posed an imminent threat. Across the region, it appears there is no end in sight. To talk about where we are, I'm joined tonight. by Michael Duran. He served on President George W. Bush's National Security Council staff and is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Miod Mali Malki is a former Treasury official in the First Trump administration and is now a senior advisor at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Vali Nasser is a former State Department official in the Obama administration and is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University SICE and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And Dana Stroll was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East and the Biden administration, and is now the Director of Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Thank you, all of you.

Welcome. Really appreciate it. Let me begin with what are the stated goals of the ongoing military campaign. The U.S. military is very specific. It says it's targeting Iranian missiles, Iranian drones, and the Iranian Navy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

says the Israeli campaign is targeting Iran's leadership, armed forces, domestic security. services in order to, quote, undermine the regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove the regime. Dana, let me start with you. Where are we? And how close are the U.S. and Israel to achieving these goals? Well, I think there's a difference between where we are operationally and where we are strategically. And it's important to unpack that. At an operational level, both CENTCOM, the part of U.S. military that's leading this campaign in the Middle East and the Israel Defense Forces assess themselves to be ahead

and really on track ahead of where they thought they would be in executing this campaign. They report high percentages of missiles, missile launchers, drones, the industrial capacity to reproduce these things, the nuclear program, the Iranian Navy, decapitation strikes. So they think they're doing pretty well. At the strategic level, I think if you ask most Americans, if you ask a lot of people across the Middle East,

if you ask consumers in Asia and Europe, this doesn't look like winning, whether it's the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the fact that missiles and drones are still attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure across the Middle East, and that you still have an Iranian regime very much intact that shows no signs of backing down. This doesn't look like we are on track to complete this in four to six weeks. Mike, do you see that operational versus the strategic divide as well? I do. I'd try to strike a little bit more optimistic note, I think. in round five or six, maybe seven. Out of how many? Do you?

Ten to twelve. Okay. And I think we are gonna win it, but it is, this is a grind at this point. There's a race going on. The Iranians want to cause as much power, as much pain to Donald Trump as they can, economically, politically, through control of the Strait of Hormuz. And they also want to make us run through our interceptors. If we have the interceptors and if President Trump has the will, he'll see you.

them through, he'll see them out, he'll outlast them, and we'll win this. Vali, is that how you said if the U.S. has the will, it can win? Well, I think this right now is a test of endurance, whether Iran will break first, or whether the United States will get exhausted first. And I would say that the U.S. goal is actually a little bit more complicated because it wants to walk a fine line between changing or transitioning regime but not necessarily forcing a collapse of the state. Israel may be very well. willing to contemplate collapse of the state. Iranians, on the other hand, are looking for building leverage to bring the United States to the table. And so I think both sides are escalating in the

hope of breaking the other side. And I don't see either side really right now having a clear path to get there. Miyadh, no clear path to victory for either side, but specifically Iran trying to find leverage. And is it succeeding? I think it's a tactical level, there's been major success. you know, we've degraded their drone capabilities, their missile capabilities, their naval missiles that have been targeted, their speedboats that are used for mining, they've been targeted and demolished. I think a strategic level is too early to judge. I think what really is important here is, you know, we came out of, you know, Iranian regime

was facing significant internal pressure. You know, they had to kill their way out of the demonstration they were facing in January. President says 30,000 plus killed. Over 30,000. I think that number is probably much. larger than that, and the actual number is much larger than that. I think what's going to happen is after the dust settles, you know, Iranians are under bombardment right now.

I think what's going to happen domestically is going to really help us understand if strategically we had a win here or not. Domestically, meaning whether people rise up, whether the government still has control on the ground, that kind of thing. Absolutely. We've seen major attacks this week on energy targets across the region. Israel hit the Iranian side of South Pards. it right there. That is the world's largest natural gas field spread across Qatar and Iran,

but on the Iranian side it provides Iran domestic energy. Dana, to your point about trying to hit the parts of Iran that is controlling its own country. In response, Iran attacked Qatar's main facility for processing and exporting natural gas. Now these are some of the world's most important energy hubs. Vali, is this a new phase of the war, an accelerated phase of the war? How should we see this? Well, it isn't a new accelerated phase of the war, but actually is the kind of the war that Iran from the beginning was going to fight. And he had telegraphed that he would do that.

It wasn't going to fight the war on terms and in the battlefield of U.S. and Israel's choosing. It cannot win there. It was always going to go after the global economy because that's where the leverage is. And what it proved yesterday is that if U.S. escalates in the Gulf, they can escalate as well. And currently, the U.S. really does not have a way of escalate. whether on the Straits of Hormos or taking Kharg Island or bombing Iran's energy facilities without actually protecting the Gulf and the global economy's energy resources.

And that's why I'm saying that despite tactical advantages, it's not very clear that the U.S. actually will get its way unless there's a sudden, you know, unforeseen event that either causes the collapse of the Islamic Republic or a major change in the war or vice versa, that something happens in the Gulf that really changes the calculation for the U.S. Mike, does the U.S. not have a way to escalate? I think we have ways to escalate. I think that's what the attack on the South Pars field was all about. Actually, it's not an... And to that point, the president said he didn't know about it,

but U.S. officials tell me actually that this was discussed before it. Of course he knew about it. He's saying he didn't know about it in order to protect his escalation option, which is what he put out in a truth social posting to the Iranians. If you continue, they're the ones that actually wasn't an American escalation because the Iranians have hit, they've hit water desalization

plants, they've hit hotels, they've hit airports, and they've hit energy infrastructure. So it's actually just countervalue targeting. I mean, we're now hitting the kinds of targets that the Iranians have hit, and signaling that we can go, we can do more if we want. So I take a different view on this, maybe slightly different, which is I think that Trump had to back down. I agree with you. He knew. The U.S. and Israeli military. operations are so joint at this point. There's no way in which that South Pars Israeli strike would have happened without the U.S. military knowing, and Trump and Netanyahu are talking every day. So he knew. Why did he back down so fast? I think because he wasn't prepared for how fast the

Iranians escalated. That was an escalation cycle. First of all, the Iranians have been attacking energy infrastructure in the Gulf long before yesterday. But what we saw is that they were willing to expand the aperture of their strikes every time Israel has taken strikes against energy infrastructure. And the difference between Iran, a terrorist state, and the United States and Israel, is that we're actually not trying to collapse and cause chaos in the entire country of Iran, or trying to preserve the country of Iran for the Iranian people. If you take out oil infrastructure, if you destroy it, that is punishing not only the regime, the Iranian people. And I think given the fact that what we can see with the way the Iranians retaliated,

and today there's reports about Haifa strikes and Yanbu, which is a port in Israel, right, is a port in Israel and then more Saudi infrastructure, is that the Iranian regime is willing to throw it all, all on the table right now. And I think Trump is not prepared for that sort of escalation. We've watched his administration try to backtrack on manage escalation. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think President Trump has been very clear that targeting Iran's energy and energy sector and oil and petrochemical sites is not a part of the campaign. I think President Trump wants to maintain Iran's oil production and potentially in future the flow of Iranian oil to market outside China. Iranian oil, the facilities refiners really belong to the Iranian people, not to the regime.

And I think President Trump understands that. Now, out of this escalation Iran has caused in a strait of Hormoz, Iran's own economy is the main victim of it. I mean, Iran's, the most part of its budget, you know, 90% of this oil is going out of the Persian Gulf, out of Strait of Hormoz. All these countries in the Persian Gulf, they have other ways to move oil out or to generate revenue. So the war Iran continues to de-escalate straight-of-ermos and kind of disrupt the flow of

commerce out of straight-offermost, its own economy is going to be getting the hit more than any other economy in the straight-offermost, and I think President Trump understands that. I would just add to that. I mean, first of all, in their view, they're fighting for survival. So everything else is secondary. The future of the economy of the country, you have to survive the short run before you can think the long run. But I think the dilemma the U.S. has, I think, to Dana's point, is that this is not the kind

of what President Trump was planning for, and not the duration. Of course, the United States can continue to escalate, and on a force can win. But the cost of it, and particularly the collateral damage, is now getting more and more. And the problem is that the United States cannot protect the Arab countries from the collateral damage. So it makes sense for Iranians to actually take the madman cart away from President Trump. That, you know, you cannot predict what we do, and we're going to play for broke. So yes, you can escalate, but ultimately it may be. maybe your advantage to come to the table.

And I think that's a very risky bet they're doing, but that's the game they're playing. Mike, let me get you to respond. But let me show you what that question of whether the president was ready for this or not, expected this. At least in public, the president has said he's been surprised by Iran's strategy. So take a listen to what he said this week. And also how the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard

and director of CIA, John Rackcliffe, responded to questions about Trump's surprise, at least in public, about Iran strategy. They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked. Are you surprised that nobody briefed you ahead of time, that that might be their retaliation? Nobody, no, no, no, no, no, the greatest exodus, nobody thought they were going to hit. The president says nobody knew, and my question is, did you tell him? The comments that you talked about, I had not heard.

What I can tell you is that Iran had specific plans to hit U.S. interests in energy sites across the region. This has long been an assessment of the I.C. That Iran would likely hold the Strait of Hormuz as leverage. So Mike, talk about that. I mean, can we assume that both statements be true, the president's statements, but also what the IC knew all along? Every statement by Donald Trump is designed to have an impact at that moment. Maybe he's thinking about oil prices. Maybe he's trying to reassure the markets.

Maybe he's trying to de-escalate. I think he's keeping open the escalation option. I think our position here is much stronger than the Iranians. They're hurt by the South Pars hit. They have a tool to cause us pain. They absolutely have it. But they're like a decrepit guy who has been lifting weights with one arm for 20 years. So he's got a big muscle on his right arm, and everything else is totally decrepit.

Now, he can use that muscle. We can't deny it to him immediately, but we're going to. The muscle is the drones and the missiles. And it's going to take time to break the back of those teams. They've shown some surprising resilience. I think you have to give it to them. It's impressive. But we don't have to sit down and negotiate with them.

We can't negotiate with them. They are a terrorist regime that's holding the 20% of the world's energy market hostage. There's only one answer to this, which is we have to win it. Dana, respond to that and also go into what we were talking about before a little bit. There are diverging U.S. and Israeli goals here, right? So first of all, there's always going to have to be a negotiation. No war ends when the fighting just stops. There's some sort of diplomacy, there's some sort of political process.

So I think whether or not it makes sense and is in the U.S. interest to have that negotiation now is different from, are we ever going to negotiate? I would point out here one challenge with these continuous decapitation strikes of civilian leadership in Iran is that at some point there's going to be nobody left to negotiate with. We're going to have to talk at some point. And number two, just to frame out the intelligence picture here, developing military options if the Iranians would not negotiate in a meaningful way on the, their nuclear program, on their missile program, on their support for terrorism, has been something

that at least the past six presidential administrations have looked at this problem set. And generally, there was an, and I just want to be clear, this was very clear, if the United States directly attacked Iran, we assumed that there would be a huge Iranian retaliation because the regime would interpret that to be an existential threat. And the risks were that the regime would double down on pursuing a nuclear weapon capability. that the regime would unleash its missile and drone arsenal, not just at Israel and not just at U.S. forces in the region, but the whole Middle East, all the countries that host U.S. military bases, absolutely,

and civilians and civilian infrastructure, that they would activate their terrorist network across, that this was all very well understood. We, and I think President Trump looks at the past year and a half of where there have been direct Israeli-Iranian confrontations, right? April 2024, October 2024, and last summer in the 12-day war, where Israel and Iran had a direct confrontation, and the United States was obviously playing a supporting role, but was not directly involved as a co-combatant, which is what we see now. And that's why we're seeing

this kind of Iranian retaliation. So whether or not President Trump listened to the briefing, I don't know that any of us know, but just to be clear, everybody in the intelligence community and the military community understood the risk. The difference here is that President Trump was willing to take that risk, and now we see his team wrestling with the implications. Now, let's just unpack something very quickly. I think during the 12-day war,

you had Israelis being in charge of the operations. U.S. went in and with B-2s, and we targeted nuclear sites. The Gulf states came out really opposing that operation in 12-day war. They were openly against the operations. They were not shy to speak against even the U.S. part of the campaign.

Now, let's not forget even the analysts who were following the conflict very closely, we were surprised when Iranians that started targeting civilian targets in the Gulf. You know, we were all thinking that Iranians going to leave the Gulf states out and use them as a way to de-escalate, to engage in negotiations

and some political off-ramp from the strikes from the campaign. So it was a surprising moment when we saw Iranians starting flying drones and missiles into hotels in the UAE. Although the Supreme Leader, Ali Jhabmanet, the old Supreme Leader, did tweet in English on February 1st, this is going to be a regional war. I mean, the Iranians did.

They did that last June, too, though. And then they... That's the tweet, by the way, in the... And then they didn't make good on it. Okay. But actually, they said this explicitly, even on a tour that the Iranian Foreign Minister had in the Gulf, that this is exactly what they would do if the war started. So you have to assume that even those Gulf leaders

didn't tell Washington what Iranians were telling them very directly. Now it's one thing to say this is a bluff and we don't take him seriously. They're just saying it's another thing to say that they didn't say it. Well, I think even Iran's foreign minister, Arachid, was surprised. He came out and said some of these RRGISC commanders are operating without orders from the headquarters.

That was only about. That was only about Oman, but not necessarily about... But Peschkin apologized to the whole region and then had to backtrack. So there was an element of surprise. So that's, yeah. I want to bring in how this war started and what we have seen basically become a domestic controversy this week. And that's the single highest profile of public resignation in protests that we've seen, frankly,

many years, but certainly during the Trump administration. And that's Joe Kent, the director of the national. National Counterterrorism Center, writing, quote, Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. And he went on Tucker Carlson to say this. Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon? No, they weren't, you know, three weeks ago when this started, and they weren't in June either. We always assessed that they were either several months or a year, two years away from actually being able to develop a nuclear weapon. Now, Kent's controversial, but Dana, you were the most recently in government.

He says two years away from being able to develop a nuclear weapon. Does that sound about right? I don't know because I don't read intelligence anymore, but I think it's important to disaggregate two separate issues. Iran is a threat to U.S. national security and the Middle East, period. They've been pursuing an illicit nuclear weapons program. It's well documented in UN reports, in other kinds of reports. The Europeans are concerned. There's been sanctioned.

I mean, we had an Iran nuclear agreement. This is a problem. Iran has funded, supported, armed, and directed terrorists across the Middle East. Hamas, Hezbollah, militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen. let me finish because it's really important. And then the missile program, right? Missiles and drones, which they've been testing out on Ukrainians via Russia for years. Problem.

Whether or not they were an imminent threat at the minute that President Trump started this war, I think that is an area for debate. And Americans and members of Congress have not heard a compelling articulation of the imminence of the threat three weeks ago. But that doesn't diminish the fact that Iran is a threat. In fact, here's what Tulsi Gabbard said about the nature of that threat, whether it was imminent or not during the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing this week. Was it the intelligence community's assessment that nevertheless, despite this obliteration, there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no?

It is not the intelligence community's responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat. Okay. That is up to the president based on a volume of information. No, it is precisely. that he receives. It is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States. Mike, is this debate important? No, and yes. We're in the middle of a war. Debating about how it began right now, how does that help us? The question is, we're in the middle of it. Are we going to stop it now? If we, if we decided that there wasn't an imminent threat, are we going to stop it now and say, hey, mistake.

We have to win this. And I think any attempt to undermine our confidence in what we're doing is really counterproductive. But I actually do think it was an imminent threat. They were digging in Isfahan. They were going to dig up the enriched uranium. It was one of the three sites that the U.S. and Israel bombed last summer. They were going to get a hold of the enriched uranium. And they were going to put it deep underground where we couldn't get to it.

And they were rebuilding their missile program. Their missile program is as much a threat to the United States as their nuclear program is. Although the intelligence community has said that only if Iran decides to go an ICBM, and even by then it would take them by 2035. No, it's a threat to all of our bases in the region. We're seeing it right now. Regionally. Think of it, yeah.

Think of what's happened in the last 20 years in the Middle East. Think about our campaign against Saddam Hussein and how we totally controlled the skies. They're capable now with their drones and ballistic missiles of over. overwhelming the air and missile defenses of anyone in the world, including us. So all of our bases are vulnerable to them. And we're seeing it right in front of us. Both their willingness to hit, their willingness to hit water desalienization, their willingness to hit hotels, airports,

their ability to hit any American military base, and to hold hostage the energy supplies to the world. It's absolutely intolerable. Yeah, Wali, looks like last word so, because we got about 30 seconds left. I would say quickly, first of all, I think, yes, the proxies were always a threat, but they were diminished hugely after Israel took out Hezbollah. In fact, the very fact that Israel could attack Iran the way he did without giving a second thought to Hamas or Hezbollah meant that it really didn't matter as much.

Secondly, Iran's nuclear program was, yes, it was damaged enormously, according to the U.S., and whether or not they could dig in and get that out, it was not proven. And secondly, the United States had a pathway according to the Omani Foreign Minister and now the British National Security Advisor to actually take that enriched uranium out.

The only thing is actually the missiles, but it doesn't say why this was urgent in February 2020. Because missiles, as Daniel has pointed out, you know, has been a decades-long problem Iran's largest ballistic missile inventory. All right, we're out of time. Really appreciate all of you.

Thank you very much. Dana Stroll, Bali Nasser, around me and Maliki. Thank you very much. And that's all the time we have. Thank you for joining us. I'm Nick Schiffen. We'll see you here again next week on Compass Points.