Washington Week with The Atlantic

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Just as U.S. airstrikes against Iran's nuclear program seemed all but certain, President Trump found a temporary off-ramp, saying he will make his decision within two weeks.

But Israel might not wait that long.

Despite the uncertainty, one thing is clear.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Tonight, war in the Middle East, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

Tonight, questions about how the war in the Middle East ends.

What we know is that Iran has boxed itself into a bit of a corner.

Since its ally, Hamas, launched an invasion of Israel on October 7th, 2023, Iran has suffered one loss after another.

Hamas has been largely destroyed.

Hezbollah has been dismantled.

Iran's air defenses have been neutralized.

And today, the country that Iran's leaders have sworn for over four decades to destroy, Israel controls the skies over Tehran, bombing nuclear, military and infrastructure sites at will.

One thing Israel has failed to achieve is the destruction of the Fordow nuclear site.

For this, it might need bombs that only exist in the American arsenal.

To figure out what's going to happen next, and if America will join the fight directly, I'm joined by a panel of experts.

Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, David Ignatius is a columnist at The Washington Post, David Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent at The New York Times.

We're also joined by Nancy Youssef, whose last day at The Wall Street Journal is today.

She's our newest staff writer at The Atlantic where she'll cover defense and national security.

So, how do you like them Apples?

NANCY YOUSSESF, National Security Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal: I'm very excited.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Pretty exciting stuff.

David, before I go to our newest staff writer, let me start with you and just give us the current state of play in the actual war in the Middle East.

DAVID SANGER, White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, the state of play right now is the Iranians are not doing terribly well in day seven here.

We're one day past the length of the six-day war, and I would say you probably have several weeks left of this.

At this point, they're down, we think, to roughly a thousand of their long-range missiles.

That means they've lost a huge number of the missiles and the launchers.

They've lost a lot of nuclear scientists.

They've lost a lot of the officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

They've lost use of the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant, one of the two plants that make the fuel that you need to produce a nuclear weapon.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The other being Fordow.

DAVID SANGER: And the other is Fordow, right.

And Fordow is the one that's deep under a mountain.

It was designed to go under there after it was recognized by the Iranians that they were subject to air attack by the Israelis, cyber attack by Israel and the United States, who, 15 years ago, executed a really ingenious attack on the Natanz plant.

And they wanted something you couldn't get at.

And the next two weeks will determine whether or not you really can't get at it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

David Ignatius, Trump has said that he may take two weeks to decide, as much as two weeks to decide.

Is it possible that the Israelis can do the job before then?

DAVID IGNATIUS, Columnist, The Washington Post: So, we don't know what capabilities they have to strike Fordow beyond depending on the U.S. bunker buster bomb.

The Israeli tactical success, as David just described, it has been brilliant that they've managed to essentially wipe out the leadership of the military, the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

There are a whole lot of tests I'm sure they'd still like to accomplish.

I think one of the reasons that they've been rushing is that they have worried that Donald Trump wanted to intervene in negotiations.

Donald Trump wants to find a way to have a new nuclear deal and sort of turn this whole crisis, the heat down.

So, I think that's one of the urgent issues for these Israelis.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

DAVID IGNATIUS: And Israel has to decide, is that in Israel's interest?

What kind of settlement could it accept?

And, you know, how will it destroy the things it can in the time it has left?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

But, Jon, you've talked to the president quite a bit in the last period of time.

He also seems pretty excited about the Israeli military success.

JONATHAN KARL, Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News: He sure was after the first night.

I spoke to him before 7: 00 in the morning on Friday, a week ago, and he was -- I mean, he just sounded jazzed, frankly.

I mean, he greeted me, hello, Jon.

You know, this was excellent.

He was very eager to talk about what a tremendous success it was.

And I asked him, were we involved in any way, because Marco Rubio had said we weren't.

And he said I can't comment on that.

I was like, wait a minute.

Your secretary of state, I mean, he clearly wanted -- he saw success and he wanted to take part in that success.

But, look, he is really conflicted here.

And, you know, he's facing a deep divide within his own movement.

Remember, in his inaugural address, he said, we will measure success by the wars we end and perhaps more importantly the wars that we don't get into.

And he is facing -- he will face, actually, I think, maybe for the first time ever a significant blowback from his prominent supporters if the U.S. gets dragged into a protracted conflict.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to get -- come back to Trump and the decision-making process.

But, Nancy, I'm also very curious to know what they're saying in the Pentagon right now about what the next two weeks could bring.

Did they feel, Central Command in particular, do they feel, CENTCOM, which is the area of responsibility is the Middle East.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Did they feel like, A, the Israelis could do this without their help, or do they feel that they can take care of this quickly?

Because one of the things it seems that Donald Trump likes is quick, neat victories.

NANCY YOUSSEF: So, the first thing you'll hear there is force protection.

There are tens of thousands of U.S. troops based in the Middle East, and so you've seen a movement of assets.

Five destroyers are in the Eastern Mediterranean in part to defend those troops.

So, when you talk to Pentagon officials, I think that's their primary focus.

The fact that Iran is in a more precarious position, the fact that there's some who believe the U.S. has been involved puts those troops in potential harm's way.

NANCY YOUSSEF: Having said that, I think there's division within the Pentagon about the way ahead.

I think one of the most aggressive supporters of moving forward is General Kurilla, who's the head of Central Command and has been a very vocal proponent of moving forward.

So, I think what you're hearing now is sort of multiple military plans being put forth with the intent of not putting U.S. troops in harm's way, not inviting, for example, proxies Iranian proxies in Iraq to come after us forces.

The other factor that I think people don't think about are that I think is very important is during the U.S. campaign against the Houthis just a few months ago, the U.S. used an extraordinary amount of ordinance for missile defense and other capabilities, and I think one of the factors you're hearing from the military is considering what they have in terms of capability, just ordinance, because of how much they've used already this year, not only defending the Houthis, but also providing weapons and support to Ukraine and to Israel.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I have to imagine that the Air Force in particular has been studying the Israeli success in the air and coming to some conclusions about Iran's vulnerability.

Is that fair?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Yes.

I think what they're looking at is, look, when you have air superiority, it opens all sorts of options in terms of what you can do and what assets you can bring in and what defenses you need to put in place.

So, I think seeing Iran's air defenses collapse, as they did, certainly changes the calculation.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Jon, I would note that Netanyahu is trying to make the case pretty strongly that Iran is an American problem as well as an Israeli problem.

Let's watch a bit of your conversation with the prime minister from a few days ago.

JONATHAN KARL: What do you say to those supporters of President Trump, some of his supporters, who say the United States should not be involved in any way?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, Israeli Prime Minister: We're not just fighting our enemy.

We're fighting your enemy.

For God's sake, they chant death to Israel, death to America.

We're simply on their way, and this could reach America soon.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Come back to this point about what Republicans in particular are hearing.

Is that an effective message?

JONATHAN KARL: Well, he also said to me, I understand, the prime minister, I understand America first.

I don't understand America dead, and that's what these people want.

So, he is speaking, trying to speak the language of the MAGA movement from Tel Aviv to try to make the case that they -- I think that fell very flat with Trump supporters.

It's like, who's this guy to tell us, you know, what we're going to do?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But what's interesting and I guess you have to be a certain age to have visceral memories of the 1979 hostage crisis, but they have been chanting death to America for 40-plus years in Iran.

I mean, David, talk about whether Iran poses, in your opinion, a national security threat to the United States dire enough to warrant this kind of intervention.

DAVID SANGER: So, Iran is threatened to assassinate President Trump, other senior officials in retaliation for Trump's order to kill Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force.

I began covering the Middle East in 1980, the year after the Iranian revolution.

And the reverberations that you felt then continue in many ways across the region.

Iran's revolution set off convulsions.

It transformed, it created Islamic fundamentalism in the Sunni world in response.

So, I think Iran threatens stability for America's friends, threatens stability for economic interest in the Middle East.

The arc of that revolution at some point is going to crest and we'll be in a different era.

And that's my biggest question about what's happening now.

DAVID SANGER: Are we're going to see an end of that story that began in 1979 through some kind of fundamental transformation of the regime?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I don't want to necessarily go back to first principles here and ask the question of can America live with a nuclear Iran, but I'll ask it anyway.

Can America live?

I mean, because that's what we're talking about here.

So, can America live with a nuclear Iran?

We kind of can stipulate that Israel probably can't, Saudi Arabia might not be able to live with a nuclear Iran without itself going nuclear.

But can America -- like why should America even be involved in this?

DAVID SANGER: I'd slightly amend the question.

Could you -- can America live within Iran that's just a few screwdriver turns away from a nuclear bomb.

DAVID SANGER: Because if they want, they've taken longer to get to a nuclear weapon than almost any country on Earth.

The North Koreans beat them to it by not only years, more than a decade, right?

It's not because they couldn't have gotten a bomb.

It is because they kept weighing the possibilities here and were thinking about the retaliation they would feel had they raced to the bomb, and the Israelis started coming after the militarily and the United States did.

So, they wanted to sort of play the game of having the capability, but saying they were just this side of the line.

And what's happened in the past week is that game ended and the Israelis moved in anyway.

Now, if the Israelis are successful, if they take out Fordow, if they take out Isfahan, which is where they're storing their other nuclear material and so forth, does that end the nuclear program or does that just set it back and make Iran and other countries resolve that they just have to take their program underground?

Because the Iranians may emerge from this losing the regime, as David suggests, and it could end up freeing the Iranian people.

It could also make them think, had they gotten the bomb earlier, the Israelis never would have attacked.

JONATHAN KARL: Well, the question that is being asked at the White House, and it's a really good one, is what next?

So we get involved.

We bomb Fordow, we destroy that facility, or do we, but we bomb Fordow, what next?

And this is when -- so on yesterday, he met with his -- President Trump met with his national security adviser.

J.D.

Vance is asking these questions.

Marco Rubio is not the Marco Rubio that we've come to know as the extreme hawk on this.

He's raising serious questions about whether or not this will be effective and what the after-effects are.

And then Steve Bannon came in for lunch.

And the Steve Bannon lunch lasted longer than the national security meeting.

And Bannon went in with a series of points.

First of all, don't trust the Israeli intelligence.

You have to realize the risk to U.S. troops, the 40,000 or so troops in the region.

And then will the bunker buster bomb work?

And Trump had just received intelligence at that national security briefing that the MOP might not actually work.

I mean, it might, might not.

It's not -- DAVID SANGER: Never been tested.

JONATHAN KARL: It's not uncertain.

And it was right after that long lunch with Steve Bannon that you saw, you know, Karoline Leavitt come out and say, two weeks.

NANCY YOUSSEF: Could I add one more though, in terms of things long-term and think of, let's assume everything goes correctly.

So many people are talking about regime change.

But what actually follows?

This is not like Syria, where Ahmed al-Sharaa had been there for 14 years fighting internally, planning to take over the country.

We don't have those elements in the country doing that right now.

I think so often when we talk about regime change, maybe it's leadership change.

And does that get you the sort of outcome that you want?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, what do you think?

I mean, look, it can either go two ways, it can get better, it can get worse.

I mean, do you think that there's a chance that if you remove this top layer of leadership, that the Iranian people rise up and throw off the hijab literally, the enforced hijab, and become a more liberal western-oriented country or does it come actually go worse?

NANCY YOUSSEF: I think that's a possibility.

It's what is the leadership that sort of guides that movement.

And to me, there's not an organic sys sort of leader in place to step in.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to read something that, David Ignatius, you wrote this week.

What angers Iranians is that the regime has squandered money supporting anti-Israel proxy forces, such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon rather than spending more at home.

Police were arresting women for not wearing headscarves even as Mossad agents were smuggling in the drones that killed top military leaders Friday.

Again, going back to first questions in a way, probably not a lot of love for this regime among a broad swath of Iranians.

Does that matter?

DAVID IGNATIUS: It matters a lot.

When I've visited Iran two times, I've been struck by how open people are in expressing their dislike of the regime, the rule by mullahs who they don't respect or trust.

What I was citing in the quote you read was comments from Iranians who've been talking to people through this week.

And there is this sense that the regime has been, as one person put it, closing the windows and leaving the front door wide open, worrying about little things, you know, sort of ridiculous ideas about security and ignoring this overwhelming Israeli threat.

And it turns out presence inside the country.

I mean, you know, the Israelis were able to move drones into Iran to attack as the war began a week ago.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Can we talk about that for a second?

I mean, this is why Donald Trump was so excited, vicariously excited.

I shouldn't say vicariously because a lot of American equipment was -- obviously, the Israeli Air Force is American equipment.

But does the fact that the Israelis did this kind of remarkable or continue to do this remarkable operation, does that cause anybody in the Trump administration to have hope that they can continue with that, or that the Iranians are a paper tiger, and therefore not as hard to defeat?

JONATHAN KARL: The decision about -- first of all, I think the two weeks allows them to see, can the Israelis actually do it on their own.

I think the option that they're considering is something that would be quick.

There is no appetite, not from the president, not from anybody on his national security team, and they're all going to support, let's face it, whatever he wants to do, there is no appetite for a long, drawn out conflict with Iran.

If they can get convinced that, hey, just send some B-2s over from Missouri and you're done, you know, so that's the debate right now.

DAVID SANGER: There are a lot of risks to that, right?

JONATHAN KARL: There are a lot of risks to that.

DAVID SANGER: And, you know, there are, short-term risks, B-2 crashes, the penetrator doesn't penetrate as much as you thought and all that.

JONATHAN KARL: Then you have more on (ph) Iran.

DAVID SANGER: Right.

And then there are the longer term risks, which are the Iranians react by going after some of those 46,000 people.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

What does war with Iran actually look like?

Let's assume obviously of there are people who would hope that you drop the bunker busters on Fordow, it gets blown up, the Iranian say, sorry, we ever had a nuclear program.

DAVID IGNATIUS: The illusion is that this is one and done, that this is -- you know, you take a strike, you destroy the program, and that's it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is that fantasy?

DAVID IGNATIUS: It's complete fantasy.

So, you know, the very most optimistic version, the regime is in tatters.

You have chaos in Iran.

Almost certainly the regime change move would be by the most extreme elements of the Revolutionary Guard.

They're organized.

Sadly, the people, the people who want -- desperately want democracy are not -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It reminds me of 2011 in Egypt a little bit.

DAVID IGNATIUS: So, it's like -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You know, the young liberals lead the revolution and then it gets crushed.

DAVID IGNATIUS: So, Jeffrey, what I was struck by from the president this week was that looking at all this uncertainty, you know, about the war ahead, about the situation on the ground in Iran, he decided to step back.

You know, he had -- my understanding is he just -- as of Monday, he was prepared to use the bunker buster.

And he -- after this lunch and thinking about it, he decided.

I don't want to do it.

It's too risky.

It's full of uncertainty.

You could see that in his eyes the sense, you know, of having to really be president.

And so -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Kind of amazing that when the history is written, there'll be a chapter course, and then a man named Steve Bannon came to the White House and everything changed.

NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, it gets to Jonathan's point.

There's the security risks and sort of the tactical risks, but also the political risks that come with it.

And I think over the course of the week, you heard him sort of come to the grips of both of those, that those scenarios where it doesn't go militarily as expected, and that politically, that you saw that exchange between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz, you saw Bannon coming in, that there was a real reverberation in terms of his base and his supporters about this.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Nancy, what does a war -- let's assume for purpose of the discussion that he does drop the big bombs on the Fordow site in the next two weeks, and that the Iranians respond, what does their response look like?

What does this war look like?

We don't share a border.

Iran can't reach America.

It can't reach American forces.

So, what would it look like and what would Trump's response be?

NANCY YOUSSEF: So, at the risk of being a pessimist, I've yet to see a war plan that survives the first moment of contact.

So, whatever planning they have in place will go differently.

So, let's assume that there's a scenario where the strikes don't go precisely or as quickly as presumed.

I think the risk is that Iran has less and less to lose and is willing to take more and more risk.

For example, you could see them mobilizing their proxy forces in Iraq to go after U.S. troops in Al-Asad Air Base, for example.

You could see them more aggressively launching strikes at Israel because, again, they have less lose.

And so, very simply, it triggers the climate of the escalation ladder and where, and I think for many, the fear is that it triggers the start of unintended or unknown consequences.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

And then Trump is in the thing that he's told his followers, we'll never get in an endless Middle East war.

DAVID SANGER: And they've got a significant cyber core that knows how to reach us and has done so before.

And they've got lots -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Do you think they're holding back?

DAVID SANGER: I think they've got some stuff in reserve.

Is it as much as they would like?

No.

Look, they're losing badly at this moment.

But when you press a regime to the wall like this, do we think that they're going to just say, you know, you're right.

We're going to give up all that enrichment and our right to enrich on our soil and we are fundamentally going to surrender to you, because their leadership is going to think that is the end for them.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to go one final subject, which is the pressure that this is all putting on Trump's advisers and cabinet.

I want to play this one quick sound bite of Trump talking about intelligence, if we can just look at that.

REPORTER: What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon?

Your intelligence community has said they have no evidence that they are at this point.

DONALD TRUMP: Well, then my intelligence community is wrong.

Who in the intelligence community said that?

REPORTER: Your director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard?

DONALD TRUMP: She's wrong.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, what's going on here?

DAVID IGNATIUS: So, what's going on is that there is a fundamental split between what U.S. intelligence believes about weaponization.

You know, this is not a question of enrichment of uranium but actually building a bomb.

And what Israeli intelligence believes, there's a very interesting article in The Economist that just came out a few days ago that purports to be an Israeli dossier about weaponization.

It appears that the CIA, other U.S. analysts simply don't believe the material that's in that dossier.

It's a split.

I can't remember a sharp a split between U.S. -- DAVID SANGER: And it is somewhat remarkable.

There was evidence at the end of the Biden administration, which we reported in the Times, that the Iranians were looking for a faster cruder way to make a nuclear weapon.

So, that weaponization process that David referred to, which is turning it in the metal and putting all the command and control into it does not take a year or a year-and-a-half.

But what the president is saying here is that it could be ready in weeks.

And you heard his press secretary say the same thing at her last briefing.

And we just have not heard from the intelligence community in the public testimony or in what people are telling us on the side that that's the case.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Jon, let me end with you.

Talk about Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, who apparently is not being invited to meetings about the possibility of bombing Iran, which is kind of in the Pentagon's wheelhouse.

What's going on?

Are we going to see people forced out of this administration in the coming week or two?

JONATHAN KARL: I don't know in the coming week or two.

But I think one of the issues with Pete Hegseth is actually the parade.

Trump was very disappointed with his big 250th anniversary of the Army parade and thought it was a dud.

It just didn't go right, not happy with Pete Hegseth.

There's also a lot of other issues at the Pentagon, but that was something that really got him upset.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want say right now, you're kidding.

JONATHAN KARL: No, but I am absolutely not.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But the reasons to dump Pete Hegseth, the parade?

JONATHAN KARL: I'm absolutely not kidding.

And in terms of -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And the parade just wasn't kind of more muscular enough?

JONATHAN KARL: You saw it.

I mean, it was -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's crowded.

JONATHAN KARL: It was a fine parade, but the president didn't think so.

Tulsi Gabbard, you know, she was very clear in her testimony that the decision has not been made by the Iranians in the view of the intelligence community.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, we're going to have to leave it there, and we'll maybe talk about the parade next week.

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

For more on the consequences of the Israel Iran War, please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight from Washington.

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