The NPR Politics Podcast - What did the United States and Iran just agree to?

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

In the last day and a half, President Trump threatened to wipe out Iranian “civilization,” then announced a two-week ceasefire. We discuss what we know about the terms the United States and Iran are negotiating, and where things go from here.This episode: senior political correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and national security correspondent Greg Myre.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Frank Ordojonez. I cover the White House. And I'm Greg Miree. I cover national security. And we are taping this at 104 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, April 8th. Today on the show, when it comes to the war in Iran, we're in whiplash territory. In the last day and a half, President Trump threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization, doubled down and then announced a two-week ceasefire. there. Franco, there has been a lot of drama these last two days. Walk us through it. Yeah. I mean, I think we went from Trump's most bombastic threats that I think I've ever heard since covering Trump. And I've covered him for over a decade. I mean, in addition to the whole civilization dying, you know, or the weekend, Trump said that the Iran needs to open the expletive straits to essentially a rocky ceasefire that was announced at really the. 11th hour before he, you know, went through with this scenario, this apocalyptic scenario of bombing bridges and power plants. But for the last 24 hours, I mean, I think you could call it a busy day of dealmaking with foreign leaders and religious leaders and some domestic leaders really trying to put the pressure on Trump to back off these massive threats. And Trump said he agreed to a ceasefire, two-week ceasefire, on the condition that the Strait of Hormuz is

reopened. But I will note that there's reports out of Iranian state media today just in the last couple hours that says the straight remains closed because there is still bombing between Israel in Iran and Lebanon. So there's a very rocky ceasefire. Greg, I want to ask you, do we know what is in this ceasefire agreement or if there even is an agreement? Yeah, I don't think there's really in agreement, other than we saw the post by Pakistan's prime minister, Shabaz Sharif, saying, you know, a two-week ceasefire. And then there were references to, because that's Trump's favorite time frame, Iran will leave the Strait of Hormuz open, and then they'll start negotiating.

But we haven't seen anything, and there isn't even talk, that there's an actual text of any ceasefire agreement. And it was put together so quickly at the last. moment. Now, both sides have lots of things they want to negotiate, assuming this ceasefire does hold for the next two weeks. But the truce itself basically means the shooting is stopped, the killing is stopped, the Strait of Hormuz is supposed to be open. We're still waiting to make sure even those basic things happen. Yeah, and President Trump said that the U.S. received a 10-point proposal from Iran and that he believed it is a, quote, workable basis on which to negotiate.

These 10 points that Iran is talking about, it has now been published on an Iranian media. And it says things that just are literally diametrically opposed to things Trump has said, which is Iran would agree that it has the right to enrich uranium. And Trump says, no, we want all uranium enrichment stopped. Iran wants all U.S. military bases in the region to be removed. I mean, just things that are kind of non-starters or absolutely the opposite of what Trump has been saying. You know, it's just a PR battle that Trump is trying to have over this. And I think it does kind of fit his MO that while there is not, you know, any clarification or anything black and white about what is actually in this, or if there. there is anything at all. Trump is definitely boasting of something that he thinks the public wants or something that's going to perhaps help him or something that he wants trying to project this

into reality when there are really serious questions about whether any of this or much of this is really, you know, fact yet. Well, Trump has long adhered to the power of positive thinking. And in many cases, it has paid off for him. But there are very real tangible impacts that this war has had in the United States on things like gas prices. Today, driving into work, $4.19 was on the sign at my regular gas station for a gallon of regular gas. And until the Strait of Hormuz is open with a free flow of tankers, oil prices are likely to remain elevated. That was a key part of this whole thing, Greg. Do you know what's happening?

Again, a lot of confusion here, and we don't know precisely what's happening. The U.S. and Iran appear to agree that the Strait of Hormuz is supposed to be open during the ceasefire, and then obviously they would try to negotiate that into a permanent arrangement. But one of the points Iran says it once is that it will regulate the Strait in the future. That would be a change. The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway. It's not controlled legally by anybody. And oil has flowed freely through the strait for decades.

There's always been this concern that something like this could happen. You have to go back to the late 80s or the last time you had any disruption in the flow of oil there. So if Iran is insisting on regulating the flow and it's been charging up to $2 million to allow tankers through and it's allowing some friendly tankers through, that's not something that the U.S. or other countries, would be willing to accept. So you've got all of these issues that are just sitting out there and you have this big problem that didn't exist when the war started. And now it's the most urgent and pressing issue. Trump was posed that question about Iran, you know, perhaps, you know, controlling the stray and, you know, even, you know, tacking on tolls for tankers to go through by ABC News this morning. And Trump did not dismiss that idea, but said that potentially

that the U.S. and Iran would somehow work together to kind of monitor who could go through the strait, which just seems like a fascinating idea. The idea of Iran, arm and arm with America, charging tolls for passage of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, which is an international waterway, is kind of mind-boggling. But if you think about the way President Trump has approached this war as being similar to what happened in Venezuela, where there was a short military intervention and now the U.S. is working with Venezuela on oil. I guess you could kind of see how he got there, but it's just an absolutely wild suggestion. And I just don't see there being a lot of trust between these two nations ever. And I think analysts or people who are expert on

foreign policy could easily tell Trump, Venezuela and Iran are two very different scenarios. And what the U.S. managed to pull off in Venezuela was a very effective one-day, several-hour military operation. And they seem to have some level of cooperation. We'll see how that plays out. But that never was a realistic prospect in Iran where you have this Shiite clerical rule who's been chanting death to America for 47 years. So that was just never a realistic prospect. And Iran resisted, as you expected them to resist. And, you know, I just, we've got to be clear here. The war is not over. It's paused. It's a ceasefire. We don't know what's going to happen after, even if the ceasefire holds for two weeks as planned. If these issues aren't resolved, the war could start up again.

It will probably be a little more difficult to do that. But Pete Hague Seth, the Defense Secretary at the said, we're hanging around. We're not going anywhere. We'll be there. And if called on, we'll be ready to jump in again with more military action. There is a reason that we put a timestamp at the top of this podcast. This is a very fluid situation. All right, we're going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a moment. And we're back. This morning, President Trump posted, quote, there will be no enrichment of uranium and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried nuclear dust. Then, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a press conference at said something a little different.

Again, on the uranium, we're watching it. We know what they have, and they will give it up, and we'll get it and we'll take it. If we have to, we can do it in any means necessary. So that's something the president is going to solve for. Greg, President Trump has said making sure Iran's nuclear capabilities were stopped was one of the many goals of this war. It's the key thing he has been talking about. Has that been achieved? No, it is not. We don't have a lot of details. We've seen a couple mentions of the U.S. and Israel hitting nuclear facilities, but no additional details. What we do know from the bombing that the U.S. and Israel

carried out last June, it did do significant damage to Iran's vast nuclear facilities, which are spread around the country in many different places. And the most important element is this highly enriched uranium, about 1,000 pounds enriched to 60%, not quite to weapons grade, but pretty close. This is really the key component. Much or all of it seems to be buried in a nuclear facility around the city of Isfahan, but we don't know exactly how easy it would be to get to that. Even the Iranians can get to that right now, because that place was hit in the attacks last year. What does seem pretty clear is that the program has not been eliminated completely, and this uranium in particular is very, very valuable.

And while we heard all sorts of talk and speculation about a possible U.S. military operation, there was really the feeling that this was just incredibly difficult to go in, tried to dig out a highly sensitive radioactive material buried deep underground, which the Iranians would presumably be guarding pretty carefully. And so we didn't see any attempt to do that. Now it's going to have to be negotiated, but you have the Iranians already coming out and maintaining their old position that they have a right to enrich uranium and showing no signs that they'd be willing to give this up. Yeah, and Franco, maybe we should just go back in history a little bit. There was a deal between the Obama administration and Iran to, tightly monitor and control Iran's nuclear program. When President Trump came into office in his first term, he threw out that agreement. And then back in June of last year, there was Operation Midnight Hammer. The United States bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in a one-day mission

that the president said totally obliterated Iran's nuclear program. And now, he is saying that somehow Iran and the U.S. are going to go in together and take it out and then they're just going to hand it all over to the U.S. Yeah, I mean, I think there are just so many questions, and I think it speaks to what we were talking about earlier, about the mixed messages that we're getting on this. I mean, this is something that Trump campaigned on. This is something that Trump's been talking about it since his first administration saying that he would never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. Well, I think there are big questions about whether he is going to allow Iran to keep that enriched uranium. I think with the quote that we just heard from Pete Hegeseth contradicts a bit what Trump said in his social media post. So I think there are huge questions. Trump in earlier interviews also said that, you know, maybe they would be able to keep it, but we would be able to monitor to them by satellites. But I think what we've also learned over this experience is Trump, I think, may be a little bit more reluctant to,

to take this kind of action before. It was obviously a very difficult past month, I think, over the last few weeks, especially the last few days. We saw Trump getting more and more anxious with, you know, his bellicose language and, you know, the bombastic social media post. It was very clear that Trump wanted to get out of this. Yeah. So, Franco, as you say, President Trump has clearly been looking for an exit strategy, looking for a way to say the goals have been achieved, we're done, we don't need to be there. Is this it? I mean, I think he may be getting an out, but I think this crisis, as we've been talking about, is far from over and frankly, potentially has the potential to get bigger. I mean, the fighting obviously continues in Lebanon.

Israel's goals are clearly different than those of the United States, and it doesn't look like Israel's backing down in any way. Regional partners are still under threat. And again, Iran still has control over the strait. So this is just so far from over. I mean, it is, you know, this is negotiating. As Greg said, we still have two weeks of a ceasefire. I mean, it's just like, it could just very much be a very ugly cycle ahead. In his previous military operations, Trump was able to begin and end them quickly. He really controlled the levers about when an operation would begin and when it would stop. And they worked out pretty. well for him or even in the cases where they didn't. I mean, I think a lot of people have probably forgotten. The U.S. bombed the Houthis in Yemen for about seven weeks last year and it didn't really resolve anything, but at some point, President Trump said, okay, we're calling that off. I don't think that had any real political cost for him. This is different. He can't just walk away from this.

You know, if he does and Iran maintains a closure over the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices will go up, gas prices will go up. The U.S. economy, economies around the world will be hit. There's going to be a tangible impact from this war that has not been resolved at this point. You can't just stop and leave. You're saying Iran controls the gas prices in the United States. Essentially, yes. You know, 20% of the world's oil flows through there. There have been some workaround, so maybe up to 10 million barrels a day are finding other ways out, but that's still a 10% cut in global oil. And Iran is able to do that right now. And if that continues, the pressures are already mounting, and they're going to hit. There's been a bit of a buffer so far. So we've seen oil prices, gas prices go up,

but the buffer by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and moves like this have helped cushion that. That's going to stop at some point. And so Iran can literally say this oil's going through or not going through. That will have a direct impact on U.S. gas prices. Franco, let's talk politics, since this is the NPR Politics podcast. And this is a midterm election year. We know that this war is not popular with the American people, does potentially ending it or having a two-week ceasefire, maybe getting the straight of Hormuz, possibly maybe flowing again, does that help the president's party in the midterms? I mean, I think the answer is yes.

I mean, certainly in the short term, but I mean, I think so much depends on what happens in two weeks in a few days. Does this stick? Does this lead to a longer ceasefire? Does this lead to an ending of the war? I mean, you're already seeing kind of those signs now. The markets, you know, exhaled a bit today. You know, as tensions, you know, kind of eased over the last 72 hours, the Dow Jones, the S&P futures. They both soared on the news of the ceasefire. Oil prices dropped. But again, time will tell. And as we've talked about all these various scenarios, you can easily see that markets are just going to remain volatile. And I think that goes for the American public as well. If the straight is not opened and if your gas prices stay over $4, you know, I don't think people are going to be happy and that's absolutely going to have an impact or at least very likely going to have an impact on the midterms, especially if Trump cannot pivot,

as he continues to say, to domestic issues. Yeah, I mean, the White House has been telling us for how long now since the fall that the president was going to make these midterms about him. He was going to put himself on the ballot and he was going to get out into the country. country and campaign. And it was going to be once or twice a week. And it's been like once or twice a month, maybe. Yeah. It just hasn't happened. It hasn't. All right. Well, what are you two watching over the next couple of weeks? Or should I say the next couple of hours? Yeah, probably hours more than than weeks. But, okay, let's let's be optimistic. Let's say the ceasefire does hold for the next two weeks. I'm going to be looking for signs of what the Iranian government is doing.

It is still functioning, but it's a whole new group of people because so many leaders have been killed in the war. Is it coming up with a coherent approach to the negotiations? Is it going to maintain really hard positions on closing the Strait of Hormuz, maintaining its right to enrich uranium, hanging on to the uranium it has? So we don't quite know how this Iranian government will negotiate and we're getting very limited information out of Iran. So that's the thing I'm really going to be checking. I think that's a real wild card over the next two weeks. I'm going to be looking to see what lawmakers do, especially Republican lawmakers. Are they going to start questioning the administration and asking more specific questions?

I'm also very curious to hear from Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, who is often seen as giving kind of a more measured response and a description of what actually happened. And Rubio has been remarkably quiet. He's been very quiet. All right. Well, we're going to leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Franco Ordonez. I cover the White House. And I'm Greg Myrie. I cover national security. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.