The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Trump is trapped but lacks a military strategy in Iran

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. The U.S. is ramping up its military presence near Iran as negotiations fail to yield any compromise from the regime. We are now in a Middle East standoff which finds Trump trapped. Is a strike inevitable? What are the costs here besides a regional war and where is Iran's defense going to come from? Janice worries that Trump does not have a military strategy beyond the first few days, and this is a conflict that could go on for weeks. In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice discuss the light strike option that would try to force Iran to come to the negotiating table. If the Ayatollah decides to become a martyr, we could end up with a ruling class of militant revolutionary guards; a group of younger, more radicalized men that will be more willing to use force in the region. Could Trump's actions in Venezuela give us insight into his designs on Iran? And finally, with approaching midterm elections, a MAGA base that doesn't want war, and the potential of skyrocketing oil prices, does Trump need to TACO, climb down, and agree to a bad deal?Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He does not have a military strategy that can reach his goals. That's the issue. What do you do when the Iranian elite will not back down even as the military assault goes on? He's planning for the first few days. This could be weeks. Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast. Ready Griffiths here, chair of the monk debates, joined by Janice Gross Stein, founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Janice, how are you?

It's miserable here in Toronto. You're at an undisclosed location in the United States. We're not going to give it away in case Homeland Security swoops in to check on an irksome UFT professor in America's nation's capital. Am I right about that? Yes, you are. Let me just tell you what I did in the middle of everything else is going on. I took time to watch the women's gold medal. Okay.

final and I think after two crushing defeats one of the World Series and one in the women's hockey I think it's time for a win don't you yes and we are recording this before the men's team men's hockey team goes off for its basically elimination round it's been exciting hockey I like the the three-on-three overtime I wonder if the NHL should do that it's like it's fast It's dangerous. You see them just gaining their hearts out on that three-on-three-fourtham. Did your blood pressure go out, mind it?

Yeah. There's a lot of cheering here in the office. So tense. And then a big letdown. But we will see. Connor McDavid, the nation is on your shoulders. Talking about nations on the brink in a little more serious vein, we have, Janice, a lot of news as the week goes on,

that President Trump seems to be incredible. increasingly, I would say, maybe trapped by two factors. One, deployment of the largest amount of U.S. air power to the Middle East since the Iraq war, the invasion of Iraq. And second, a Iranian regime that seems to continue to be drawing some lines here that are contrary to what the opening position demands of the president were in terms of uranium enrichment to start. was supposed to be the easy one to take off the table, and then we haven't even gone on to ballistic missiles and support for proxies, which were other elements of the administration's demands on

Iran to avoid a military attack. So where do you think we are as we end the week? So we're in a standoff, as you rightly just said. I think for Ayatollahamini, we're still, as of Friday the decision maker on all of this I think he would rather die as a martyr than compromise what

he considers to be the essential security of Iran. The ballistic missiles will prove I think to be the toughest. The Iranians do not have an air force. They don't have a function in nuclear weapons program

right now. So this is their own defense and I was always very very skeptical, Richard, that they would back down on that. But they haven't backed down on anything. The Iranians, that's the real key. They haven't given Trump anything. And I agree with you, the word you use trapped, they have moved the most massive arsenal into the Middle East. There's, you know, the last time there was anything like this there was 20,

years ago and there were ground troops there, which there are not now. So you could just imagine, but everything's been pulled from everywhere else. So that everywhere else, this is a huge concentration in this part of the world. They can't sustain that. They cannot leave this there for very little. So we are going to, this either has to explode into war, which I don't think Trump really wanted when he started all this or Iran has to put something on the table. There's no indication that's going to happen. We're really short of time right here. I think we're in the countdown now. Let's talk a little bit about Iran. It's a regime that I loathe.

But, you know, the enrichment of uranium for under, under the guidelines that the international community has set out is a right that Iran enjoys. Now, we can talk about why they have stockpiles enriched at much higher levels that are unnecessary for civilian use. That is all a real and live conversation, obviously a big focus of this standoff. But on just a purely kind of legalistic, formalistic basis. Yeah. Iran has this right. And the Americans are saying, no, you don't. You have to get all the enrichment out of your country. You can't have any centrifuges, it seems. I don't know, you've got to give it all to Saudi Arabia. Donald Trump's favorite friend, MBS, I guess gets the entire Iranian nuclear

program for free. So under the NPT, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, everybody has their right to enrich for peaceful, for peaceful purposes. That's that. That's the key. Well, you don't enrich to 60% for peaceful purposes. That's the real key. And the Iranis have done that and more for years. So, an alternative solution here would be enriches of 3.5%, which is what you need, or 5% for medical isotopes and allowing the inspectors back in to verify. That offer is not the name. A regional consortium, okay? the Emirates, the Saudis, which in fact, you know, the Egyptians could control this enriched material and the Iranians. And the site could be on Iranian soil as long as Saudis, Emirates, Egyptians were had access and could inspect. Iranians said no. So it's difficult,

and this is what Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, says, it's difficult to reconcile why Iran for a decade has enriched at the levels which are suitable only for military purposes. You don't need to do that for peaceful purposes. Agreed. Agreed. And it's clear that they want optionality, the threshold to go to an atomic bomb because that itself is a deterrent. That itself is a different kind of force projection, a threat that they can hold over the region, a threat that they can hold over Israel. But, Janice, Israel has nuclear weapons.

There are reports it has 60 to 100 potentially powerful hydrogen bombs that I'm sure can launch from planes, from ships, from who knows? Maybe they have the full triad. Maybe they have submarine-based launch capacity. We don't know. They have advanced missiles. Again, to test the Iranians, to test the regime, but there is the rest of the world, Janice. I guess that's what I'm getting at here. is on this show, I think it's important for us to like push our brains out of, you know,

the bubbles that we exist in, which are primarily Western media and understandably a Western, you know, perspective on this issue to the rest of the world, Janice, and how they look at this and the extent to which China and Russia, well, they're not going to come to the defense of Iran, there were joint exercises in the Straits of Hermos this week between Iranian, Russian and the Chinese, the Chinese Navy. And I guess I'm mentioning all this just to like, what are the costs here beyond simply the failure of an agreement, the risks of a regional war? What are the costs in the kind of international court of public opinion in terms of what the United States is doing and how it's being perceived by the rest as opposed to the West?

You know, so let me just pick up on two points, Frederick, that you've just raised. You said the Iranians want to be a threshold of nuclear power because it's a deterrent. Well, the Israelis have a nuclear weapon more than one, as you rightly said. It did not deter the Iranians from launching 500 missiles at Israel over the last two years. So I think we have to take a step back from this argument that nuclear weapons deterred. And, Janice, just to support you on that point, Russia has 3,000 nuclear weapons, a large strategic global force that could destroy the planet, and they're getting oil refineries blown up,

Heimar missiles sent on to Russian territory, you know, with geospatial targeting from U.S. intelligence. It's not a deterrent. It's not working. It's not working regularly. Just first of peace, and I tell you it is raising all kinds of, of eyebrows, but functionally, nuclear weapons don't deter attacks against the homeland by smaller powers. They just don't. That's the strongest anti-proliferation argument I think we can make.

Secondly, the public mood, the public international mood is very confused right now. So the worst, the worst timing for Iran to do what it did, which is frankly, you know, massacre. what we understand to be. We don't have hard numbers. We really don't, but we know it was a large number. 30,000. I think the regime says 3,000. I think you'd multiply that by 10.

So we know this is, some people are claiming this is the worst massacre. Yeah. Ever in a period of time. It was apparently up to 72 hours. They have lost the normal supporters who would say, this is a unilateral exercise of force by Donald Trump. You know, the Europeans, the Canadians, we're not going to get that kind of opposition this time

because of what happened. In the Gulf, we've watched a double game being played. The Saudis are saying, one thing in public, they're saying an entirely different thing in private. The Emirates will not come to the defense of the Iranians. So where is the defense going to come from in globally? it's going to come, I would imagine, from the Russians and the Chinese, of course, and from some of the other members of the bricks who are leading spokesperson. But it's going to be much more muted than you would normally expect.

And I think Donald Trump's counting on that. The biggest issue for Trump is he does not have, and that's what, you know, raising Kane, his most important general is telling him, He does not have a military strategy that can reach his goals. That's the issue. What do you do when the Iranian elite will not back down, even as the military assault goes on? He's planning for the first few days. This could be weeks. So let's say goodbye, Janice, for our complimentary listeners, viewers,

because I want to spend the back half the show with our monk members talking about what are rumors of a kind of light strike package that. the president is supposedly looking at, the risks of that, and whether, you know, a bigger regional war, in a sense, is inevitable. And how this all feeds into American politics, the midterms, inflation. Let's dig into that in the back half of the show for our Monk donors. And if you want to get the back half of Friday Focus and the back half of my weekly conversations with journalist Andrew Coyne, all premium podcast content here at the Monk debates,

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