The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

President Donald Trump looks like he’s all set to take us to war with Iran. After a period in which he seemed to want to negotiate with Iran, Trump has now tweeted that he wants Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” The New York Times has a deep dive into Trump’s deliberations on this, if that’s the right word, and the findings are extraordinary. We’re drifting into war with Iran even though our own intelligence assessments don’t appear to support the case for it. And Trump was influenced in his thinking on all this by what he saw on Fox News. Meanwhile, some prominent MAGA figures are aggressively warning Trump against taking the plunge. Today, we’re really fortunate to be making sense of all this with foreign policy veteran Matt Duss, who was a longtime adviser on the Hill and is now executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. He has a great new piece for Foreign Policy magazine on what’s about to happen. Matt, thanks for coming on.

Matt Duss: Thanks, Greg. Great to be here.

Sargent: Last week, Israel started bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and killing its senior leadership. Trump seemed to want to try to negotiate with Iran, but all indications are that he and his senior team basically gave up on being able to stop Israel. Now he’s just tweeted that he wants Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” and tweeted that “We know where exactly [Iran’s leader] is hiding. He’s an easy target, but we are not going to … (kill!) [him] … now.” Matt, Trump is talking about Israel and the United States as “we.” What happened over the last few weeks? What’s the current situation?

Duss: Well, yeah. As you said, Trump more than seemed to want to cut a deal with the Iranians over their nuclear program. He very much was invested in this. He had his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who had engaged in multiple rounds of talks with Iranian negotiators. I think Trump famously announced these talks a couple months ago in an Oval Office meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, who seemed none too pleased about that announcement at the time. But from all reports and also from what I’d heard just privately from folks who were close to the talks, there were still some ways to go but there was a real interest on the part of the Iranian government and on the part of Trump and his team to get to an agreement.

I think things started to go badly once Trump publicly endorsed this idea that any agreement would have to end Iran’s domestic enrichment capacity. This has always been a red line for Iran, even though they have submitted to some intense restrictions in the past, including on Obama’s nuclear deal. Iran has always maintained that it does have the right to enrich under the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty. I think that is what stalled these talks and finally ultimately wore Donald Trump’s patience out. In that New York Times piece you mentioned, Netanyahu is someone who has long thought that military action is the only way to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. And Americans started to realize that Netanyahu is going to do something—with us or without us. Initially, the response from Marco Rubio, once the attacks started, in Thursday evening D.C. time, really put distance between the U.S. and the attacks. But by........

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