Washington Week with The Atlantic

Jeffrey Goldberg: Earlier this week, Donald Trump threatened to annihilate Iranian civilization.

Then he said he would work with Iran to collect tolls at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz.

What will he say tomorrow?

Nobody knows.

If you're having trouble keeping up with the president's ever shifting understanding of Middle East reality, welcome to the club.

Tonight, how Trump went from apocalypse now to apocalypse possibly later, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

Earlier this week, President Trump claimed, quote, total and complete victory over Iran, 100 percent, no question about it, he said.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth added, Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V, military victory.

Epic Fury decimated Iran's military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come.

Iran's Supreme National Security Council had another view, quote, the enemy in its cowardly, illegal and criminal war against the Iranian nation, has suffered an undeniable historical and crushing defeat.

So, that's obviously not true.

But are Trump and Hegseth right to claim victory for themselves?

If it's truly a victory?

Why is Iran in at least partial control of the Strait of Hormuz?

And why are the anti-American theocrats who have been in charge of Iran for 47 years still in charge?

To figure all this out, I'm joined tonight by Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, Kareem Sadjapour is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Gillian Tett is a columnist and a member of the editorial board of the Financial Times and head of King's College Cambridge, and Nancy Youssef covers the Pentagon for The Atlantic.

Welcome to all of you.

Welcome direct from King's College.

Thank you for being here, Gillian.

Gillian Tett, Columnist, Financial Times: Delighted.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Glad to see you.

Karim, sorry to do this to you, but who won the war?

Karim Sadjapour, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment: So, Jeff, this war, I think, is going to take decades to assess the full impact.

It's going to be with us for a long time.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's a cop out, by the way.

Karim Sadjapour: Well, I would say a snapshot of today is that Iran was -- has been so far the strategic winner of this war, and that when President Trump launched this war, he had big ambitions.

He was going to totally destroy Iran's nuclear program again, totally destroy its missile program, destroy its proxies, and perhaps even implode the Iranian regime.

And six weeks later, the regime is still around and they've managed to shift the conversation about the war because no one is talking anymore about the nuclear program and their missiles or the regime going away.

Everyone is now talking about the Strait of Hormuz.

This is a regime which came to power in 1979, taking American diplomats hostage.

Now, it has the global economy hostage.

And so whereas before President Trump was asking for Iran to commit to total surrender, now we're asking for Iran's cooperation to end this economic blockade of this critical global economic artery.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And speaking of which it, Jon Karl -- our friend and colleague, Jon Karl, from ABC spoke to the president earlier this week.

The president said, quote, this is in relationship to -- relation to the Strait of Hormuz.

We're thinking of doing it, running the Strait of Hormuz, as a joint venture.

It's a way of securing it, also securing it from lots of other people.

It's a beautiful thing.

Gillian, we started the week with a threat of annihilation of Iranian civilization, and now we're running a toll booth together, in his mind, with the Iranians.

How do you make sense of this?

Gillian Tett: Well, I think the best way to make sense of it is to recognize that Iran and America have different definitions of winning and what losing is.

So, for Pete Hegseth and the American government, it's all about destroying the military infrastructure inside Iran, lots and lots of bonds.

For Iran, it's been about showing that they can destroy the global economy and have a sense of power as a result of that.

So, in some ways, they're almost talking past each other in terms of what's defined as a victory.

Because clearly, yes, the pentagon's, right, they have destroyed a lot of stuff, not enough to actually entirely render Iran's military capabilities gone, but they have destroyed a lot of stuff so he can claim victory, but Iran has also destroyed parts of the global economy and show that it can do more going forward.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And let's assume what they're saying is true for the purpose of the discussion, and there's a lot of evidence to back this up.

How did this come to pass in six weeks?

Anne Applebaum, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Look, I think it came to pass because the president lives in a different world from the rest of us.

So, his idea of what's true and what's not true, what's reasonable and what's not reasonable, his memory of events is very different from everyone else's.

He doesn't remember what he said three days ago.

He doesn't remember what he said 24 hours ago.

When he talks to journalists, he does message testing, you know, to see, I'm going to try out this explanation for the war, or that explanation for the war.

You know, he doesn't think strategically.

So, he doesn't have a long-term view.

He doesn't have a geopolitical theory, and there are people around him who do, but he doesn't.

What he's interested in at any given moment is, am I winning and is this a victory?

And whether it was Netanyahu or whether it was somebody on his own team, we don't fully know, but someone told him this is an easy victory in Iran.

He went there, it didn't work out.

Now, he's looking for some other thing he can declare that will make him look like a winner again.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You studied him for a long time.

If Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or Admiral Cooper, who runs CENTCOM, if they had gone to him and said, this is not only not easy, what you've planned out here is a fantasy, do you think he would've listened or was he so committed to the idea of winning in Iran that he would've gone forward no matter what?

Anne Applebaum: I can't read his mind.

I don't know.

But it's possible that, you know, he does listen to whoever has said -- whoever has been most forceful to him in the last ten minutes or in the last hour-and-a-half.

And it's possible that had someone said, this is a disaster, it's a huge mistake, Mr.

President, don't do it, maybe he -- you know, maybe not.

I mean, it sounds like from all the reporting that we've seen, including in The New York Times and elsewhere, it sounds like nobody around him was willing to say it in those terms.

I mean, some people said, well, there's this danger or that danger, but nobody really said, don't do this.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Nancy, let's talk about the exact situation in the strait right now and the exact status of Iran's forces, naval, missile, so on.

I mean, the Pentagon, it says that most of the Iranian navy is sunk.

Most of the facilities that produce Shahed drones are destroyed.

Most of the facilities that produce missiles, ballistic missiles, are destroyed.

I mean, on -- if you're just cataloging what's been blown up, it seems like Iran is mostly neutralized as a regional military force.

Is that fair?

And is that a relevant issue at this point?

Nancy Youssef, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: So, the data that we've gotten from the Pentagon is quite limited.

I'll give you an example.

General Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood up at the podium and said the United States has destroyed 450 ballistic missile storage facilities, but he never gave the denominator.

Is that 450 out of 500 or 5,000?

So, while there has been impact, we don't know the scope and scale of it.

The U.S.

did successfully take out most of Iran's navy.

But what the war showed us is that the Iran did not need the navy to close the strait.

What they needed were ballistic missiles and drones and fast boats, enough to intimidate shipping companies and their insurers from transiting that strait.

That was the impact that they had through this war.

And so military capabilities can do some of the work, but it can't answer the strategic outcomes that the U.S.

was trying to achieve.

And what we saw is that the Iranians used their asymmetric warfare capabilities to leverage that towards a new kind of gain for them, a new form of leverage in the form of the strait, and they continue to hold it.

So, you were asking where we are right now.

Because of the strikes we've seen in Lebanon, the Iranians has said we're not going to open the straight until that's resolved, and that we've only seen about a handful of ships go through.

Moreover, I think we're seeing Iran say that because we have shown this leverage, it is now instrumental in the negotiations that we either are going to solidify our ability to make money off of it financially, or we're going to see the lifting of sanctions such that we can benefit economically in some other way.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Let's talk about the negotiations.

Let's talk about this two-week period.

It turns out now, it seems, that J.D.

Vance is the man on the spot direct from Hungary, and we're going to talk about Hungary in a second.

Kareem, you just wrote in The Atlantic, quote, both Trump and Tehran, for different reasons, have looked to Vance to end the war.

White House reporters who speak with Trump regularly believe that he's already moved on from the Iran war, recognizing that it's a political loser and doesn't intend to return.

When toppling, the Iranian regime appeared within reach to him, Trump wanted the credit, now sensing the war's unpopularity, he is content to let Vance own the outcome.

There's a fascinating development.

Will you -- let's talk about why J.D.

Vance is going to Pakistan to negotiate a peace deal with Iran.

Karim Sadjapour: So, what's interesting, Jeff, is despite the fact that we were just fighting a full blown war for six weeks, if these talks happen between Vice President Vance and Iran's Speaker of Parliament Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, this will be the most senior in-person discussion between America and Iran since the 1979 Revolution.

And the Iranians actually have requested to negotiate with J.D.

Vance for a few reasons.

Number one, they believe he's from the anti-war wing of the MAGA party.

He didn't approve of this war the same way some of his peers did.

Number two, you know, they believe that he obviously has ambitions to become president, and so he is highly incentivized to wrap this up as quickly as possible.

And number three, if he becomes president, he will ostensibly abide by any agreement he signed.

But in my view, there is virtually zero chance that we're going to reach a settlement in the next two weeks.

Remember, it took the Obama administration almost two years just to get a nuclear deal with Iran.

And now we're not talking just about nuclear.

We're talking about the Strait of Hormuz, missiles, proxies and a two-week period.

That's an impossibility.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Gillian, if I were cynical, and I'm not, but if I were cynical -- Gillian Tett: You're a journalist.

You're paid to be cynical.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I would say that Marco Rubio, a potential contender for the Republican nomination, and J.D.

Vance, a potential nominee for the Republican nomination, Marco Rubio is sitting there going, oh, this is great, J.D.

Vance should go negotiate an impossible thing.

I'm not trying to say that this is merely quotidian politics but give us your own assessment.

Is J.D.

Vance being set up here?

Gillian Tett: Well, it's fascinating because, yes, it is something of a poison chalice in this way.

As you say, certainly, Marco Rubio probably feels pretty good about not being in Pakistan right now.

But as Kareem said, it was indeed the Iranian regime who identified J.D.

Vance as being the best person they wanted or the key person they wanted to speak to.

They did so very cleverly, very candidly.

And, you know, the best I think we can hope for these talks is not so much a peace deal, but at least an on-war state of affairs, where, in a sense, you end up with something like a frozen-ish conflict where everyone agrees to take a deep breath for a while and then lives with ambiguity for some time.

And, of course, the Iranian regime in Tehran is absolutely skilled at living with ambiguity.

It's almost an art form within the Iranian culture.

I mean, Kareem would say this better.

Karim Sadjapour: Absolutely.

Jeffrey Goldberg: As you're talking about this, I'm thinking, Anne, that -- how did the Iranians, who've lost most of their military, somehow create a situation in which they picked the American negotiator?

Anne Applebaum: Because they understand modern warfare better than Donald Trump and better than many people in the administration.

They understand that with a few tools, with cheap drones, with cheap mines, they can inflict a disproportionate amount of pain on -- in the U.S., on allies, on Asia and on the entire world.

And that gave them an enormous amount of leverage.

And it's a lesson -- if you've been watching the war in Ukraine, you would've understood this, but, of course, Trump not interested in watching the war in Ukraine.

If you've been paying attention to the way weapons development has worked, you would've understood this but they don't care about that either.

You know, they're focused on other things.

But the Iranians understood that with a very small amount of leverage, they could hit this chokepoint.

And that's given them the ability to say, right, we want the vice president and we want him now.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Nancy, inside the Pentagon, is there a belief that the president will, if this fails, order troops to seize land around the strike, that he will actually pull the trigger on ground troops, or is Kareem correct in saying that Trump has basically just moved on from this already?

Nancy Youssef: Well, we've gotten mixed messages about it.

I mean, General Caine and his presentation kind of gave a list of all the strikes and all the way down to how much coffee was consumed during this war, sort of signaling through the statistics he was providing that we're at the end of this, not in the middle of it.

And then a day later, the president says, we've got our resources there, we've got all these great weapons we're going to load on if we need to.

So, there's not a very clear message.

I will say though, there are logistical challenges that come with it.

United States expended a tremendous amount of munitions, particularly in air defense, throughout this war, and that is a factor in terms of thinking about how you operate militarily.

The USS Gerald Ford, the aircraft carrier, damaged, its crew's been out for almost ten months, headed towards potentially an 11th month deployment.

They were supposed to be home by Christmas.

There's a huge amount of aircraft in the region right now.

And so keeping a force there comes at a cost to the United States.

Going back in comes at a cost to the United States.

And I would add, it's not clear how doing more of the same kinds of strikes leads to a different outcome.

Because what we saw is an Iranian strategy of saying if we can just endure these strikes, we can outlast the patience of the American politic.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Gillian, give us the view from London.

The normally very careful prime minister has expressed to high degree of frustration based on its economic pressure that this is causing frustration about the president.

Give us the view of Trump at the moment inside not only the pulse of power in London, but on the continent.

Gillian Tett: Well, I think extreme frustration would be the best way of explaining it, because there's a recognition, as one senior British official said the other day, that the Iranians understand the Americans much better than the Americans understand the Iranians.

And that's an imbalance, which is critical right now.

President Trump cannot understand how a nation cannot fight just for money, that is well beyond money, that's a key point.

And that's one of the biggest problems.

But there's also a sense that in Europe as a whole, they're going through the five stages of grief about the rupturing of the transatlantic alliance.

I think they've gone beyond the shock and denial and that even the bargaining into some inching towards some kind of exceptions about how they remake NATO.

And in the U.K., they're trying to work out, you know what all this means.

Are they going to get closer to the European Union, which is certainly what Keir Starmer has indicated, or will they try and maintain some form of bridge with Trump or not?

One of the very interesting things that's got almost no attention to-date is that, behind the scenes, the British have been playing quite an interesting role, not just in Ukraine, but also in the region, Strait of Hormuz.

Because of British had been so involved in Ukraine in the drone side, they have been the ones linking up a lot of the Ukrainian drone experts with the Gulf leaders who actually want some support on that.

And that's really a very significant way they've been helping behind the scenes.

But without the Americans, by the way, another area is the British have very strong capabilities in minesweeping that arguably they're some of the best in the world, if not better than America.

Because guess what?

Britain's an island.

We care about this.

I'm both American and British.

So, again, they are trying to create this coalition of the willing right now that will go ahead and help to try and break the deadlock in Hormuz, even if NATO doesn't move.

But it's a very difficult juggling act and the signs are that Prime Minister Starmer is facing a lot of criticism at home around this.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

And President Trump has suggested he will punish NATO members who haven't helped in the Gulf against Iran.

Give us the sense of the health of the relationship between the U.S.

and its various NATO partners.

Anne Applebaum: It's a very strange moment, because, on the one hand, actually U.S and NATO allies are cooperating an enormous amount.

A lot of those strikes and the flights that are going into the Middle East are coming from European bases.

Actually, the plane that crashed -- the American plane that crashed in Iran took off from a British base.

The intelligence logistics, everything is being done with the cooperation of Europe.

And nobody's crowing about it or shouting about it, but that's true.

And so on the level of logistics and those kinds of contacts, everything is pretty unchanged.

But Trump has, in his frustration at being unable to be the winner as he likes to be and being reluctant to blame himself or his decision, or the Russians who are helping the Iranians.

He's looking for scapegoats.

And he's landed on Europeans.

And, you know, for Europeans, you know, no insult is for free.

I mean, they've been insulted, they've been tariffed, they've been attacked.

And there does come a moment when people do start to say, you know, what are we getting out of this relationship?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Anne Applebaum: You know, we're still cooperating, we're doing we're doing quite a lot.

And with the exception of one or two countries that have a -- Spain, for example, has blocked flights into the Middle East.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And they might very well lose some American bases because of that.

Anne Applebaum: And it might make the Spanish prime minister a lot more popular than he was.

I mean, so another thing that's happened is, you know, these are democracies and they have public opinion and people don't like Trump and they don't like the war.

And you're beginning to see political leaders saying, right, I can do well out of attacking the war and out of attacking the American president.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let's -- I want to get to Hungary before we finish, but, Kareem, one question about -- I guess it's a psychology question, as which we're in a period where nothing seems surprising anymore and yet Trump's threat to annihilate Iranian civilization was quite shocking over the past weekend.

How was it interpreted in Iran?

Did they understand it as a bluff or did they take it - - they didn't obviously take it very seriously because they didn't seem very scared by it.

Karim Sadjapour: That was a huge gift to the Iranian regime.

Because if you remember what got Trump into this conflict was when Iran was massacring its people last January.

Trump promised on nine occasions that help was on the way.

And a lot of Iranians wanted to -- wanted him to make good on that promise.

And to go from help is on the way to we're going to destroy Iranian civilization in three months was just a propaganda gift to the regime, which has been saying all along, this is not a war against Islamic Republic, it's a war against Iran.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Nancy, in the Pentagon, quickly, did -- was there a reaction to that level of bellicosity?

Nancy Youssef: Yes.

I mean, that -- when it came out, there was almost a rumor starting, like what is he talking about?

What would Caine, the chairman, do if he was asked to use nuclear weapons?

Like just led to a spiraling of scenarios of possibilities because that's not the kind of rhetoric that you hear from the American president.

They're used to hearing that from adversaries, like ISIS, not from the American leadership.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Just listen to me -- listen with me for one minute to Vice President Vance talking about -- talking in Hungary about the upcoming election there.

J.D.

Vance, U.S.

Vice President: You should never have a foreign head of government or a foreign head of state threatening the foreign -- threatening the head of government of an allied nation.

It's preposterous.

I've also been told that the vice president of the United States coming and saying that Viktor Orban is doing a good job and as a helpful statesman to the cause of peace, that's foreign influence.

But what's not foreign influence is when the European Union threatens billions of dollars withheld from Hungary because you guys protect your borders.

That's apparently not foreign influence.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Gillian, what do you make of that?

Gillian Tett: Well, it's certainly a statement that's caused a lot of consternation across the European Union and the U.K., because there is a sense that America's increasingly interfering with elections.

And, frankly, it's a pretty shocking statement because that is not what the European Union was doing.

It was linked to the corruption issues.

I mean, the Financial Times did a big investigation into that.

And that's why funding was potentially being withheld.

It was around corruption.

And the interference or attempted interference in the election in Hungary has been so blatant that I suspect perversely it may have the opposite reaction.

And as we just heard from Anne, European politicians are learning that it actually pays to be standing up to President Trump and that makes them more, not less popular.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

And you're an expert on, among other things, Hungarian politics, someone has to do it.

I'll give you the last word on this.

That statement, it was fairly remarkable in many respects, including the idea that the vice president is in Hungary nearly campaigning with Viktor Orban.

Anne Applebaum: Well, he went to a campaign rally.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He was literally almost standing there.

And then he's talking about the absurdity of foreign interference, how bad a foreign interference is.

What did you make of that and how is that going to affect the upcoming election?

Anne Applebaum: It was stunning hypocrisy, actually stunning, you know, that he would start talking about the E.U.

interfering, which is baseless and untrue, even while he's interfering.

And it's all in the cause of the leader in Europe, who is the most pro-Russian, who has worked - - who has also worked closely with China, who was helping out Iran, in fact, at an earlier stage.

You know, this is a country that has worked against U.S.

security interests, against European security interests for, you know, years and years now.

It's a leader who has occupied, you know, the - - taken over the state in an illiberal way.

You know, why is United States supporting Hungary?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Well, we'll be talking about this next week, I think.

But we are going to have to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I want to thank you at home for watching us.

For more on what China has learned from the Iran War, please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight from Washington.