Produced by Rollin Hu

Why Iran Believes It Has the Upper Hand

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

What is the status of America’s war with Iran? If you are trying to follow it through what President Trump is saying, you are going to be hopelessly lost.

Trump — within a single day — veers wildly between saying the war is almost over and that he’s preparing to escalate it dramatically; that negotiations are going great and that there’s no one to talk to; that Iran must open the Strait of Hormuz and that America doesn’t care if it’s closed.

On Wednesday night, in a nationally televised address, Trump sought to finally dissipate the fog and make the path forward clear to the American people and to our allies.

Archival clip of Donald Trump: I’ve made clear from the beginning of Operation Epic Fury that we will continue until our objectives are fully achieved. Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We are going to hit them extremely hard. Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.

Archival clip of Donald Trump: I’ve made clear from the beginning of Operation Epic Fury that we will continue until our objectives are fully achieved. Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We are going to hit them extremely hard. Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.

But it’s hard to say which goals we’ve achieved. Iran seems to think it’s winning this war. Its regime has survived. It has learned how much power it can exert over the world economy by choking off the Strait of Hormuz. It has seen sanctions lifted on its oil and is looking toward a new order where it charges countries to pass through the strait.

Trump actually appears to be abandoning the strait. That, I think, was the most shocking part of his speech — telling our allies it’s their problem now.

The promise Trump made was an end to threats from Iran. He repeated that promise on Wednesday night.

Archival clip of Trump: Tonight, every American can look forward to a day when we are finally free from the wickedness of Iranian aggression and the specter of nuclear blackmail. Because of the actions we have taken, we are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world.

Archival clip of Trump: Tonight, every American can look forward to a day when we are finally free from the wickedness of Iranian aggression and the specter of nuclear blackmail. Because of the actions we have taken, we are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world.

But if you listen to experts on Iran, that is not what they see coming. They see an Iran that has learned quite a lot from this war — and that might emerge much more dangerous.

Suzanne Maloney is the vice president and director of the Brookings Institution’s foreign policy program. She is one of Washington’s leading Iran experts, having advised multiple presidential administrations, both Democratic and Republican, and written and edited a number of books on Iran.

I was surprised by how blunt she was here. Iran, she said, thinks it’s winning this war. And there’s a good case that they are.

We spoke on Wednesday morning, before Trump’s address, but his speech reflected her analysis almost perfectly.

Ezra Klein: Suzanne Maloney, welcome to the show.

Suzanne Maloney: Thanks so much for having me.

I find the state of the war in Iran confusing, even as somebody who has been covering it. I hear Donald Trump talking daily now about how the war only has two to three more weeks in it, negotiations are going great, this is almost over.

And I also see that we’re moving about 10,000 more troops into the area alongside other military assets.

What should I believe here? Which of these should I be tracking?

I think at this point we have to be tracking both the language that the Trump administration and the president himself are using, especially on social media. But we also have to be watching what’s happening on the ground.

Because what we’ve seen even in the buildup to the war is that the president has often said one thing and done something different.

That’s something that the Iranians are well aware of and very much prepared for.

I think he’s probably getting different opinions, and it’s not entirely clear that President Trump himself has decided precisely what he wants to do — other than it’s quite clear that he is trying to bring a close to this war that will enable him to declare victory and to walk away from the conflict.

Last week, the Trump administration sent the Iranians a 15-point peace plan. This was supposed to be the basis for negotiations. What was in that plan?

Well, it was a lot of the same demands that the president and his negotiators had put on the table prior to the war itself.

He wants a durable commitment to no enrichment, to no nuclear weapons program in the future. He was looking for a number of other steps that the Iranians would take to end their support for proxies, to end their ballistic missile program.

These have all been longstanding concerns on the part of the United States. They date back to the negotiations that the Obama administration led that produced a deal that temporarily put constraints on a number of Iran’s nuclear activities.

I think what President Trump is trying to achieve is what he’s been pushing for, throughout both his first and second terms. And he’s not able to achieve that conclusively through military action.

How did the Iranians respond?

The Iranians effectively believe that they have the upper hand at this point in time, so they have indicated that they don’t really see themselves as prepared to negotiate directly with Washington.

They are embittered, obviously, as a result of the negotiations that were taking place in the days before the president launched the strikes, about a month ago — and from the same dynamics that preceded the June war, where negotiations were really just a prelude to military action and, to some extent, a ruse to dupe the Iranians into complacency even as the attack was being mobilized.

It’s a little bit difficult to get direct diplomacy with Tehran in the best of circumstances. This is a regime that has based its ideology on anti-Americanism. It has often — frequently, in fact — refused to deal directly with American negotiators.

So under the current circumstances, where there have been thousands of strikes and many deaths in Iran, including some of the top leadership, they’re not terribly inclined to sit down. Nor are they particularly inclined to compromise with the United States.

Why do they believe they have the upper hand?

They believe they have the upper hand precisely because they were able to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is, of course, the strategic waterway through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas exports pass on a daily basis.

What the Iranians did in the first days of the war was to strike at ships that were passing through the Gulf and effectively persuade insurers and shipping companies and oil companies to avoid the Gulf unless they had some kind of assurance from the Iranians that they could pass.

In the prewar period, there would have been anywhere from 130 to 140 ships traveling to and from over the Strait of Hormuz every day. We’ve seen only a handful over the course of the last month, and that has had a severe impact on oil exports, on prices for oil around the world.

And it will, over time, have a catastrophic impact on the global economy if there isn’t a resolution to this stoppage of the strait.

Go a level deeper on that for me. Why does that give them the upper hand?

They’ve had, I think, more than 10,000 sites attacked by the U.S. and Israel. They’ve had a huge number of senior political and military leadership killed in strikes. They are, militarily, tremendously outmatched.

So yes, they’ve been able to close the strait, sending energy prices, fertilizer prices, other key components of the global economy rising. But so what? That’s pain for them, too.

Why do they seem so confident?

They can afford to wait. They have already suffered, as you know, tremendous losses to the leadership. This has had a terrible impact on Iranian cities across the country.

But, in effect, they have the advantage of time at this point. Every day that the stoppage goes on, the impact on the global economy is magnified, and that will have a direct impact on President Trump’s political standing.

It also hurts all of America’s partners and allies in the region and around the world. This is creating huge constraints in Asia, and that is going to be something that the United States is going to hear from all of its partners and allies when it is engaged in diplomacy — that they’re looking to see an end to this war, too.

So for the Iranians, this is an existential crisis. They’re prepared to wait this out as long as they can. I think that’s the real question now: Who blinks first?

Talk to me for a minute about the timing. Trump, as you note, seems much more incentivized to end this quickly than the Iranians do — at least in the two sides’ public statements.

My understanding is that we are entering a period where the closure of the strait is going to start really biting the global flow of energy and commodities.

We’ve been in a period where tankers that had already gone through were still arriving at ports around the world. But we’re moving into something where you’re going to cease having the landings in Asia of energy tankers that had been needed. In Europe, fertilizer is about to get crunched.

Right now, we’ve been really worrying about futures, and people are pricing things higher out of fear of the future. But we’re about to hit the point where these shortages become material in the present.

So when Trump looks forward two to three or four weeks, if this keeps going, what have been modest price rises can become globally something much more severe. And for the Iranians, they see their leverage increasing very rapidly in the coming weeks.

Is that accurate? How would you complicate that? Talk to me a bit about that question of the coming timing.

I think that’s exactly right. We’ve never had a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz. We’ve never had this length of disruption in terms of oil exports and, as you note, other petrochemicals and commodities that are key to the global economy.

This is something that is completely unprecedented and, in effect, markets haven’t fully priced in the potential impact at this point. Americans are still effectively paying the price at the gas pump that is determined by production in the United States and by supplies on hand.

But we’ve already seen rapid and severe increases in prices of oil and other products in Asia — and they’re closer to the source. As prices normalize over time, as the disruption is priced in, we will be seeing not just $4 and $5 and $6 prices for gasoline at the pump, but much, much higher.

It will play out, as you note, in all sectors of the economy, particularly some of the key sectors that are crucial for the whole affordability debate here in the United States.

Food and commodity prices. Chips are going to be impacted by the limits in the supply of helium. That will have an impact on all the tech that we buy. Everything from our televisions to our cars could be impacted as a result of this.

Prime Minister Modi, in India, compared this to Covid and the pandemic and their impact on global supply chains. I think that is a very apt comparison, particularly if this extends over the course of another month or so.

Are we moving into a period now where the asymmetric balance of the two sides’ weapons are changing? We have done a tremendous amount of damage to Iran. We’ve killed many of the senior leadership, and they have effectively absorbed that.

The question of what we can do next that is worse than what we’ve already done — it’s not impossible to imagine. But all those things, like taking Kharg Island, expose us to much more risk.

Whereas for Iran, the weapon they have been using, which is choking off the Strait of Hormuz, is about to become a much more potent and powerful weapon as shortages become real and material as opposed to notional.

Yes, I think that’s exactly right. From the Iranian perspective, they now believe that they have survived this war. The regime was not taken down even though Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the individual who had been the supreme leader for 37 years, was killed on the first day of the war and a number of other senior figures have been eliminated. And we see this happening on an ongoing basis.

But if regime change was one of the goals of the war from the Trump administration, and, of course, this was something that President Trump’s first messages around this war really highlighted, the Iranians now believe that they have been able to survive and that the regime itself, despite its having been grievously wounded, will remain intact.

That is something that is also quite a threat for their neighbors. We do see this debate happening both in public and certainly in private between the United States and some of its regional partners — the United Arab Emirates, the Saudis, the Qataris and others — who are very concerned about being left with a wounded, embittered and emboldened Iran on their doorstep.

An Iran that still has managed to preserve its missiles and its drones and its capability to fire on its neighbors, and also, by the way, has some stockpile of highly enriched uranium — perhaps buried under the ground in Isfahan, perhaps dispersed at other sites. Whatever restraint they had around their nuclear program is likely to be eliminated, as well, in the aftermath of this crisis.

We may see a regime that would be looking to move very quickly to nuclear weapons capability.

This brings up Iran’s counterproposal. We mentioned the Trump administration’s 15-point peace plan. There has been talk of a five-point plan from the Iranians. What’s been in that plan?

Well, the Iranians would like compensation for the suffering and the economic losses that they’ve experienced during the war. They would like to retain some control over the Strait of Hormuz and effectively continue to........

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