Transcript: Trump’s Two Choices in Iran

Trump’s Iran policy has almost no way of succeeding, says Columbia University political scientist Elizabeth Saunders.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Elizabeth Saunders. She’s a professor of political science at Columbia University. She’s been a regular guest talking to us about her specialty, which is how US policymakers decide and work on foreign policy. So we’ve had her on a few times. Elizabeth, thanks for joining me again.

Elizabeth Saunders: My pleasure.

Bacon: So I’m going to go a little bit around the world, not too many places, but I want to hit some various news items that we’ve talked about. When you were on during the Iran war, the US and Israel’s decision—the Iran war we’ve been in, when it started, you talked about, as it started going on, that Trump’s choices were between escalation, meaning really trying to destroy Iran, or capitulation.

My perception is he’s actually chosen, in some ways, a weird third course, which is do not solve the issue, allow gas prices to go up, and kill his political party. That was not an option most presidents think to—most presidents would’ve been constrained by, oil prices are killing my party, I want them to win. He doesn’t seem to care. Even George Bush in ‘06 cared about those basic dynamics.

So do you still see that capitulation, escalation as where things are going, or how do you see how he’s handled Iran now?

Saunders: So I still think his choices are humiliation and escalation. I put everything you just said in the humiliation bucket. And if you believe The New York Times and The Atlantic and other outlets that reported yesterday, he’s had the Pentagon draw up and then rejected a bunch of escalation options that he may or may not use before the midterms, may or may not use after. So escalation is still apparently on the table. We’ve sent another carrier.

And I would just add to that, that the humiliation is a slow accumulation of things, including an underappreciated fact, I think, which is that the United States does not currently have an aircraft carrier in the Indo-Pacific region, which is pretty shocking if you follow US defense policy.

Now, you might say that aircraft carriers might not be the most useful tool in the Indo-Pacific, but if you believe the idea that we have an interest in the Indo-Pacific, and we’ve had carriers there indefinitely, the fact that we are stretched so thin that we had to pull the last remaining one out is a pretty shocking fact.

I think what is new about the Iran war is that there have always been other actors who could shape the way this goes. But now they’ve acted, and Donald Trump is no longer in charge of the on/off switch of this war, right? Say, by some miracle, we get a deal with Iran tomorrow, which is not going to happen, but for argument’s sake, the Houthis will have something to say about that, right? And they are an Iranian proxy with an awful lot of agency, compared to even other Iranian proxies, and so they’ve been striking airports in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia.

So this has unleashed forces that are no longer—Trump’s access to the off switch, which is full humiliation but stops the escalation maybe, is increasingly tenuous, if it exists at all.

Bacon: But a war we haven’t won and that has killed him politically is humiliation in a certain sense, right?

Saunders: Yes. I would say that’s Vietnam. And the midterms in 2006 with the Iraq War I think is only a partial analogy, for a variety of reasons. But I would say that was humiliation, and then Bush chose a course to escalate, to get to some kind of outcome he could declare a victory. And that may still happen after the midterms, which is what Bush did.

Bacon: But Trump has been hinting at escalation for months now, so my guess is he doesn’t actually want to do that, right?

Saunders: Yeah. His credibility is completely destroyed. I think that was when he backed off of his first civilizational threat.

I do want to just make a quick point about this really troubling and strange story in the UK. The bombers that were pulled very suddenly from RAF Fairford, which is a Royal Air Force base in the UK that had been hosting US bombers, and they were very suddenly taken out because of this apparent plot against the base.

And the details of this story are really odd, and it probably means there’s more that hasn’t actually come out. But the UK and the US have said that Iran is somehow behind this in some way, and we don’t know how directly.

Just imagine for a minute if this had been a plot that had blown up. There’s some thought that maybe they were mimicking the Ukrainian attack on Russian bombers, right? They use drones, they blow up some American bombers, and they kill American airmen who are stationed at the base, of whom there are many.

Unless it was by accident, I really have a hard time imagining that would not have provoked a massive American and British response. I don’t think that the reporting on this has even quite grasped—if that had happened, it would’ve been the biggest story in the UK in decades.

Saunders: And would raise all sorts of questions. I don’t think most Americans are aware of just how much damage has been done to our Middle East bases. It’s really shocking. But those are forward bases close to Iran. Psychologically, blowing up a UK air base and killing Americans and British soldiers and destroying bombers, where you’d have lots of media coverage, it’s just a little odd.

And so the reason I say that is because surely Iran, which for all its many evils as a regime, has been very careful about exactly what it has done. And so this would have been crossing a line that is way over the line, right? It’s the equivalent of—the Russians apparently tried to bomb a train carrying Boris Johnson a couple weeks ago. I still wonder if that was a mistake in targeting, because that’s such an escalation.

So if you play the logic through, I’ve never been that worried that Trump would use nuclear weapons, because I just don’t think he would in the end. But there are some things he hasn’t done short of nuclear weapons that he could do.

He would maybe then actually fulfill his civilization-ending threat. So it’s so odd that I do wonder how real it was, or what stage, or who’s really behind it. And so I just find the reporting around it a little strange, given the magnitude of what would have happened.

Bacon: I’m glad you brought it up. I hadn’t really followed it. We talked about Greenland last time I talked to you, and so now we have some kind of security agreement. Was that humiliation as opposed to escalation, what happened with Denmark and Greenland, or something more complicated?

Saunders: I think what it is basically is like asking for your regular allowance from your parents at gunpoint, and then enduring all the costs of having done that, right?

Bacon: Of having used the gunpoint.

Saunders: So I think they got plenty of things out of it that maybe are good, an improvement on the status quo. For example, if Greenland becomes independent, it agrees that all the things in the agreement stay. So there’s no connection between Greenlandic independence and US national security access. That’s a change. From a US national security perspective, one could say that’s a win.

On the other hand, almost everything in the agreement they could have just negotiated without these dreadful verbal attacks, and the fears of real attacks on a US NATO ally. And the cost of that—this is what caused Mark Carney to say we are in the midst of a rupture. The costs of that, the loss of trust, it was way out of proportion. It was unnecessary, and they probably could have gotten it for free.

Bacon: Was Biden pursuing a policy like this? Do we need to have more access to Greenland than we had before, our military and so on? I never understood the rationale entirely.

Saunders: Yeah, it is true that the Arctic is a far more important area than it used to be. I think nobody would disagree with that, because the Russians and the Chinese transit. There are no Russians in Greenland, right, other than undercover. But it is very strategic. It’s the path the missiles would fly, the shortest path.

And so that’s why you got a lot of early warning, and you might want more of that. But this just would’ve been an under the radar issue that was negotiated with Denmark and Greenland. And I wonder if it was because Trump really wanted to be able to say he bought Greenland, right? So he could enlarge. There was never any reason why it had to be part of the United States in order to get any of these things. They’re separate questions, really.

Bacon: One area where he’s been successful in a certain sense would be in South America, the removal of Maduro and the sort of takeover of Venezuela, which appears that Marco Rubio is running the country now. So that policy has actually worked out the way Trump wanted. So I wanted to talk about then the context of Brazil.

In this election, it appears that the Trump allies have finished ahead in the first round. Looks like Bolsonaro’s son is probably going to win the presidency. So in a certain sense, has Trump succeeded in reshaping South America in his way, or is that more where things were going regardless of Trump?

Saunders: So, stipulating that I’m not a Latin American politics expert and don’t pretend to know the details, I think from what I’ve read from commentators, this was very much a surprise. Which means it was probably closer. This is not like a wave. On the other hand, incumbents are just disliked everywhere right........

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