The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: at this point, what is Iran's incentive to negotiate?

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

The Trump administration finds itself in a trap. They can't declare victory and go home unless the Iranians agree to conclude this war, and the Iranians at this point have no incentive to strike a deal. Trump and the American public don't have the stomach for a long war, and thus Iran can win by not losing. How should Canada respond to Trump's provocations? Andrew believes there is a madman in the White House who wants to impose his will on us in various ways. The government in Ottawa needs to be planning for the various ways we will be facing highly unconventional tactics from this U.S. government. And if things really break down after the midterms, and America descends further down the path to dictatorship, there will be knockoff effects to neighbouring countries that Canada would be wise to prepare for.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.

The latest thing that you see the American saying is, well, the war aim now is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war began. It was only closed because of the war. So you really get the sense that the Iranians at this point feel like they're in the driver's seat. They're having the temerity to issue conditions on which, you know, be willing to cease hostilities. And as I say, Trump has got himself now in a real trap. President Trump's behavior becomes more erratic with each day as the Iran war escalates. To help break it all down and understand how we should be thinking about this moment, it stakes for Canada a real pleasure to reconvene with columnist of the Globe Mail,

Andrew Coyne, a regular contributor here at the Monk Debates. Andrew, great to be in conversation with you. Good to be with you. It's been a couple weeks since we last talked. In fact, it was before this war. broke out. Give us your top line reflections, Andrew. What have you taken away from the last 20 odd days of, I think what only can be characterized as a kind of shambolic prosecution of a war by this president and his administration? Yeah, I mean, they came into it with no clear

objectives, no evidence of any plan or strategy. And lo and behold, they've been utterly taken by surprise or he has by things that were obvious to everyone, that Iran would respond to being attacked by the United States, by attacking its neighbors in the Gulf states. It would respond by essentially closing the Strait of Hormuz, which it doesn't really have to do in any, you know, 100% seal-proof way, but merely by making it hard for ships to get insurance, merely raising the prospect. Trump has on various occasions said, oh, nobody advised me this. I couldn't possibly have expected this. It's pretty clear that everybody advised him to this. He either just wasn't listening or he's incapable of taking it in or once again that he's just flat out lying.

Now all those things are possible. But they have now put themselves in a fix, a trap, which is, you know, people are counseling and why don't you just declare victory and go home, but he can only do that if the Iranians agree that the war is over, and the Iranians at this point have no particular incentive to do that. All they want to do is continue to squeeze the world economy via the Strait of Palmos, via the great increase in oil prices. That is bound to have consequences for Trump's personal popularity, among other things, And what the Iranians have clearly shown is, once again, that Trump did not understand what he was dealing with,

thought that they thought that they could, the Americans, at least Trump thought they could just remove the regime via aerial bombardment, or that they could cause the structure of power to collapse if they took out the top guy, Ayatollah Khomeini. And neither of those things has proven to be the case. have obviously been considering what they would do for a long time in this event, have hunkered down, have taken the worst that the Americans and the Israelis can throw at them. It doesn't mean they're winning in a military sense of causing a lot of damage to the American and Israeli forces, but as it's often been said, they win just by not losing. They win to the extent they can just continue to prolong this conflict

because they know that Trump and by extension the American public doesn't really have the stomach for it. Nobody knows why they're there, what they're hoping to achieve. Some of the announced goals of removing Iran's nuclear weapon capacity, which supposedly had already been moved by the strikes last year, they're not even talking about those anymore. They're not even talking about regime change anymore. The latest thing that you see the American saying is,

well, the war aim now is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war began. It was only closed because of the war. So you really get the sense that the Iranians at this point feel like they're in the driver's seat. They're having the temerity to issue conditions on which they'd be willing to cease hostilities. And as I say, Trump has got himself now in a real trap. Yeah. Andrew, you know, are many conversations over the last number of months, I think you and I shared a common worry, which was the president finally creating a crisis

that wasn't entirely of his own making. I mean, if you look at all the other geopolitical blowups that he's had from China to Ukraine to Greenland, they were all, in a sense, own goals. And he could reverse them because he was the primary. actor in each of those dramas. What do you think we're seeing now from a president when a do-over isn't available to him? And to what extent are you worried that this is something new for him to be in this position? And I guess the pressure of that, how he reacts to that, I mean, these next few days, will be critical, won't they?

Yeah, I mean, he's clearly weighing over his head. As you say, in other situations, he might make a mess, but he could talk his way out of it or retreat his way out of it. War has a tendency to impose a certain finality on things, a certainty on things. You can't just lie your way out of it.

They tried, of course. They were lying about who was responsible for bombing that girl's school at the beginning. They lied about the number of casualties. the Americans take and they've, you know, he lies every day multiple times, nothing new there. The difference is he's stuck. He can't pretend that, that, that he's won anything. So there are kind of, it's, it reminds me a bit of when, you know, Trump or other members of the MAGA movement have been dragged into court where there are methods of detecting whether you're lying

and penalties imposed for it. It's not just the free-for-all that the rest of society, has become. And they always look very disconcerted by that. They don't seem to know what to do in that case. And it's clear he doesn't know what to do here. It gives contradictory answers, sometimes five times within the same conversation. People say, you know, we need other countries to step up and help us into the normals. No, we don't need any help. The war is already won. We don't care if we win or not. Define victory. He's just basically trying to talk and keep the ball in play. The latest thing, of course, was first of all, threatening that if Iran didn't clear the stratophromos, they would bomb Iran's electrical plants. They didn't do that in the end. Iran called his bluff. And so instead,

he said, I'll put it off for five days and we'll see what new excuse he makes then. But I think he probably must have, one of the things that does seem to cause Trump some pause, if it's not, you know, disrupting the world order or causing thousands of deaths, it's when the markets react for a period. And what you saw happening in the makings of on Monday morning wasn't just world oil prices skyrouting, but financial markets, and particularly the bond markets, are really cratering. So that may have put the fear of God in and in where nothing else would. Yeah. Andrew, let's revisit some of the president's audities over the last week or so, because maybe they go to something else you and I have worried about,

which is really what his mental state is. As you say over the weekend, he threatened the bombing of civilian power plants in Iran, which in fact would be contrary to the Geneva Conventions and a war crime if undertaken. Then we have this flip-flop Monday morning, and you correctly diagnosed right before markets open. Yet at the same time, we have reports that the – the mobile airborne division is now on the move, 3,000 troops into the region. Marines have been moving from Japan and the U.S., similarly into the region.

What's going on here, Andrew, is this just simply optionality that his advisors and others obviously are creating for him, or is there a danger here, Andrew, that this is simply out of control at this point, and the president either is unable or unwilling to make a decision before possibly events overtake him and overtake the region? It's very worrying because of the president's state of mind. He's profoundly ignorant of all things, including military strategy. He's constrained by no principles of morality or law or even rational self-interest. whether he's literally barking mad, who can say,

but some of the people around him are clearly egging him on or certainly not giving him good information. It does seem on occasion that he just simply doesn't know what's going on, that people are fearing to give him bad news, which is always one of the weaknesses of any autocratic state, and Trump is his own kind of autocratic state, whether or not he's succeeded so far and imposing it in the United States. So it really is worrisome that you just don't know how far he could go.

People are, it's not out of the realm of speculation or possibility that, you know, as when you can't figure out what else to do, that he could even use tactical nukes. I would not pull it out. And so certainly, yes, short of that, he's now sending thousands of Marines there. I'm no military strategist, but everything I'm. read or heard says they are facing a virtually impossible test. Certainly you can't just invade a country of 92 million people surrounded by mountains with a force of 5,000 or whatever it is. Can you and secondly, could you go in and take out the enriched uranium and do that in a

safe way that doesn't result in that being exposed to the elements or what have you? That seems is very dubious. You hear talk now of either using it to force open the Strait of Hormuz. Well, that's extremely difficult when you're talking about the kind of dispersed, low-level military weaponry that we're talking about. When you, in a war of drones, these cheap drones, thousands and thousands of them, it's very hard to knock them all out. All you need to do to stop the ships from going through the Strait of Hormuz is sink one of them and the rest of them get scared off. perfectly legitimacy. At one point, Trump was accusing the shipping industry of being frightened,

of being scaredy cats because, you know, they didn't want to drive slow-moving boats full of volatile material through a war zone. So it's hard to see how that's going to work. And then finally, people talk about it, they'll use it to take out Card Island, where, you know, whatever it is, 90% of the Iranian oil supply, eliminates from. Well, again, I'm no military strategist, but what one hears is, okay, maybe you can force your way in and take it over with whatever loss of life is involved. But then you've got to keep it. Otherwise, you're just back to square one. Keeping it means resupplying it. You know, it, I heard Lindsay Graham, his his fluffer in the Senate, saying, well, you know, we took Iwo Jima. We can take guard island. Iwo Jima took 36 days and cost, I think it's 7,000 American lives and 19,000 wounded. Is that what he's proposing? Because you want to bring about an abrupt end of the Trump presidency.

That would I think would do it. Andrew, there's another oddity of the president of the last few days has been floating this idea that the Straits of Hermuz would be shared between him, not the United States. he often obviously speaks in the first person. And the Ayatollah, he mentions not Iran, but the Ayatollah, that they would share the Straits of Hermos together. There are reports today as we go to air that the president is saying the Iranians have given him a great gift. It's all just, I mean, so bizarre to think about how that would both entrench Iran,

it would seal the fate seemingly of the very Gulf states that have lavished him with a half-billion-dollar airplane and billions more for his sons and various family businesses. Again, Andrew, I go back, and I know it's just speculation, but, I mean, is the president in some kind of extremists? Like, is this an individual who has simply run out of oxygen and is now, I don't know, in some state of disassembly. Because I mean, these ideas are just so utterly bizarre, and yet I feel like we have to talk about them because they seem to go unmentioned or unchallenged by a lot of the media, frankly, by certainly the American political establishment, anyone on the right of center. All of this just seems to get a giant pass, and I don't understand that. Yeah, we've grown so used to the sheer

volume and craziness of Trump's fantasies, whether they're knowing lies or just delusions, it's hard to know. In Trump's case, I'm not sure he distinguishes, in his own mind, truth from falsehood. He's been lying so constantly for so long, I think it could be very easy that you would ultimately just lose track of what's true and what's false, not to cut them any slack in that regard, because it's hugely dangerous. So we've had a series of these falsehoods, several times a day, not least in this conflict. I mean, yesterday it was, what was it? It was we've had productive discussions with Iran.

They've agreed to our 15 conditions, none of which showed any evidence of being remotely true. There's just no reason whatsoever to attach any significance in a truth sense to anything comes out of his mouth. The only reason to pay any attention to it is to as some kind of indicator of his state of mind. And as you say, he gives every evidence of, if not making it up as he goes along, of scrambling, of trying to just keep the ball in play, just keep saying things that can move the news cycle along while he tries to buy time and tries to figure out, or his people try to figure out what to do next. That's obviously a hopeless way to conduct the military campaign. but from the start this thing, you know, people who ought to have known better, I think, including the prime minister, including the, at least briefly, and including the leader of the

conservative party, signed on to this thing on the basis that, well, Iran's regime is an odious regime that, you know, oppresses its own people and threatens its neighbors, all of which is true. But before you go launching wars as the solution to that, you better at the very least have a clear sense of what you hope to achieve it and how you're going to achieve it, what the likelihood is of your military attack succeeding, what your plan is for what results from it. And when you don't have any of those in place, when it's clear you don't have any of those things in place,

it's not just a matter of sort of legal niceties to say, you know, you go to Congress to ask for permission, you go to the international community. It doesn't necessarily have to be the Security Council, but some kind of broad consensus of the international community, because that way you have to lay out your case, that way you have to show that you've thought this through. When it's just one guy and his insane advisors planning this,

then people should properly be skeptical to say least, especially when it's this guy. So I really think it was a terrible error of judgment for people to have signed on this on the basis that they liked the idea that the Iranian regime would be gone without any clear sense that that's in fact what would happen or what would consequences if it did yeah it certainly doesn't uh look that way right now the regime in fact looks stronger than it did in the first week or dug in more radicalized um probably with more

incentive to try and get nukes than it had before with no incentive certainly to why would you negotiate with trump you know we've talked about why would candidate since you can't you can't be assured that he'd keep any promises he'd make. Why would Iran? You know, they negotiated with him before, and in the middle of the negotiations, he lost an attack. Yeah. So it's not to defend or have any sympathy for the Iranian side, but just in a cold-blooded sense, what is their incentives to negotiate? Yeah. I want to get to Canada at a moment, because you're really good on the domestic consequences of this war. But before we do, I guess maybe you can send some frustration my voice, Andrew, where is the accountability? I mean, the Republican-controlled Congress is indicating

that they are willing to vote yes for an appropriation for this war, up to $200 billion, one-fifth of the entire annual budget of the U.S. military. I mean, what the hell is happening in America? Like, I mean, this is so symbolic. It's so, it's so, as you say, just poorly thought through The president seems erratic at best bonkers most of the time in his public appearances and utterances. Men and women of the military are dying in this war that he is leading as commander-in-chief with no clear objectives. And now maybe some strange sense that, I don't know, he and his family are going to co-own the Straits of Hermuz with with the Ayatollah of Iran? I don't know.

I just don't understand, Andrew, where is the backlash? Where is the outrage? Where is, in the face of this just rank, ranking competency, some kind of counteraction? Yeah. I mean, there's some,

but not nearly enough. It's a very large question, but it is the question, because Trump's various syndromes are a given. I don't think anybody should, be under any illusion anymore about what he's about. The problem is that the political process in the United States has broken down. The institutional checks and balances that many of us studied in school and many of us

admired for their seeming ability to consider all kinds of eventualities and prevent a crazy person or a dictator from taking power, those checks and balances aren't working. They aren't working because ultimately Republican voters aren't willing to desert to the party when they mess up like this. Even today, I mean, Trump's approval rating in some polls is in the 30s and some polls is in the low 40s, 40% of the public signing on means that's like 80% of Republicans. Yeah. Even today.

Yeah. So they do polling on is the war popular? No, the war is deeply unpopular and we're only just three weeks into it or whatever. but it doesn't translate into Republicans being willing to really punish the party by deserting it. Independence, Democrats obviously are nearly 100% opposed. But when that's the case, when members of Congress are not only fearing the loss of their seats, but fearing in some cases for their lives, then something has really broken down. When you have such degree of division in alienation in America,

when a large section of the public is so disaffected with the ordinary norms and traditions of government in the United States that they're willing to elect and then continue to support a madman, then you've got a problem that goes far beyond Donald Trump and will linger even after he's gone. I mean, once he's gone, that will be a huge blow to that movement, to that way of thinking, but it won't go away. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is a president who has reversed himself on one of the two key planks of his entire political career, which was no foreign wars and no return to the Middle East. So again, just— Reversed himself on everything, but this one is particularly— Right. Right. So, I mean, just before we get to Canada, I mean, just it seems to me I have a worry that the lack of a counterreaction to this, the inability of the political system to express the— requisite amount of approprium and disdain for the president and what he's doing and just to call it out

for what it is, doesn't that end or should create some concern about the midterms? And in the context of whatever crisis could unfold around that, if there's no reaction to this, then why should we expect that if there is some set of grotesqueries that are committed in the context to the midterm that we're going to have any kind of, you know, significant pushback from those either. Yeah. I mean, it's it's very clear that Trump is preparing to fix and or ignore the election result. He'll do his best by various means, including, you know, voter restrictions, to try to tilt the balance in his favor. And if he doesn't get the result he likes, I don't think there's any guarantee that he or significant members of.

of his party would accept the results. So we're heading for, I think, a real crisis point of the midterms. And as I say, I don't want to be unfair to the framers of the Constitution. I don't think anybody could really anticipate somebody this abnormal, somebody so completely unbound by any convention, including the convention that obey the law. As I like to say, you know, Richard Nixon was a crook when nobody was looking. But when the Supreme Court said you had to hand over the tapes, Nixon handed over the tapes, Trump would not quite clearly. So when you have somebody who's that radically outside the norms of any kind of normal human behavior, it's very difficult to know exactly what to do. It certainly makes clear, it seems to me, that there's going to need to be significant political reforms after this to make it harder.

I guess you can't make it impossible to, but to make it harder for anybody like that. to do anything like this again. I mean, we're basically kind of reenacting the American Revolution. If you look down the list of complaints and grievances in the Declaration of Independence, a lot of them are basically being restated here. And out of that experience, the Americans enacted these very strict guarantees of liberty, et cetera, well, they're going to have to revisit some of these questions. And if you ask me, the rest of the world, the democratic world, is going to have to impress upon the Americans that they're going to have to do something like this to be readmitted to the councils of nations that they've deserted.

If some subsequent administration wants to come back in and be a useful partner, that's great. But if anybody's going to make any concessions to them or go out and a limb for them, they've got to know that it's not going to be reversed because a few electoral college vote switch in Wisconsin. So I think there's going to have to be a very frank discussion. once the Trump regime has collapsed or been defeated or whatever happens to it in the end, the rest of the world is going to have to impress upon the Americans. You've got to clean up your act. We can't live with this kind of America.

We don't get a vote in your elections, but we have to live with all the consequences. And, okay, that's your decisions. But if you'd like us to cooperate with you the way we did before, then we have to have some assurances that this is never going to happen again. Yeah. So just in our final moments to bring this back to Canada, you and I talked previously about the Supreme Court striking down the president's emergency tariff powers. I at the time expressed a concern that the president would then move on to another scope of his powers that this Supreme Court has really left untrammeled. and that is his powers as commander chief, his ability to use the U.S. military to pursue whatever Kakamami scheme he comes up with.

So, I mean, here in Canada, how do we look at this, Andrew? Is this a new phase of the Trump presidency? Is this the expression of a new potential set of threats facing us? or is it something else, is it maybe, in fact, the turning point of this presidency where defeat in the midterms looks bigger, not smaller. And as David Fromm, our mutual friend has, I think, wisely expounded, it's kind of hard to cover up or avoid the consequences of a blue wave at the midterms. and the loss of not just Congress by one or two seats, but the loss of the Senate and a significant Democratic congressional majority. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I put even that past Trump.

You may be right. There may be a point at which even he can't try to get away with that. Let's hope. I do think I don't at this point take seriously any prospect of what you're suggesting of military assault on Canada. He has been talking about maybe Cuba would be next. But, you know, what happened with Iran clearly was he thought it would be like Venezuela. All you needed to do was, you know, take out the top guy and then you could cut a deal with what remains.

Very clear that's not the case, and he's suffering the consequences for it. You know, Venezuela was controversial. Greenland was so controversial, and that's a, you know, a bunch of acres of. snow, but he ultimately backed down that, and we're now learning that the Europeans were supposedly anyway, prepared to defend that with troops. Iran is hugely controversial, but it's clearly an odious regime like Venezuela's that people have very little sympathy with. But to talk about attacking Canada, you know, G7 country, a respected democracy with 5,000 miles of border, even Trump, I don't think is that crazy.

couldn't get people to go along with it. I do worry about non-military coercive tactics, and I think we should be thinking very carefully about what that might entail, whether it's interfering with the financial system or doing something with the Internet or what have you, all kinds of potentially crazy things that are, I think, within his ambit. And look, his modus operanda is to keep changing the subject.

Yeah, exactly. He wants, he's going to want another crisis, once this crisis is over. Absolutely. Remember, we've gone through however many minutes we've been talking, we haven't even mentioned the fact that he isn't just under the shadow of credible accusations of being a child molester. And he succeeded in pushing the Epstein files off of front pages, out of the speculation,

and we keep treating each new crazy thing it says about the Iran War as being actually worthy of discussion. So he succeeds in spite of himself. We let him do it in spite of ourselves because we just don't know how to react to somebody who lies with this volume and with this shamelessness. We're not equipped as a species, frankly, to deal with us. We have not ever witnessed this kind of behavior

by anybody in high office, and it's disarmed us, and it's made it impossible for people to know exactly how to respond. I think eventually he will run out of gas, and maybe the midterms will be the point at which, you know, the coyote runs off the cliff and discovers gravity. But I'm not even sure of that. Thank you for listening to the first half of our monk dialogue with Andrew Coyne. To get access to the full episode right now,

consider becoming a monk donor. For just $50 a year, less than a dollar a week, you will get 72-hour advanced access to all of our premium podcasts, including Friday Focus, with Janice Gross-Stein. You also get our live streams of mainstage debates and all kinds of other great perks and privileges. Simply go to our website,

triplew.munkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com and click on the join button on the top right-hand corner of the screen. Again, that website, triplew. com. The monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk

charitable foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.