Transcript of Mearsheimer & Kelanic: Strangling Iran’s Economy

But what about Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan? I mean, don’t these Iranian trading partners — aren’t they also vulnerable to Trump’s threats?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Let’s just take Turkey. If you’re Turkey, you know that there’s this country out there called Israel, and Israel has its gun sights on you. And the last thing you want to do at this point in time is see Iran go under, because you understand that as soon as Iran goes under, the Israelis will turn their gun sights on you, Turkey.

And we all know that the Israelis and the Americans are joined at the hip. We know that these are two genocidal states. If you’re Turkey, the last thing you want to do is see Iran go under. So you will either overtly or surreptitiously help the Iranians.

The fact is that most people around the world and most countries around the world are rooting for the Iranians. We like to think we here in the United States do — we’re the good guys and the Iranians are the bad guys. The fact is, I believe that most people on the planet think the opposite. They think that the United States and the Israelis are the bad guys. And most people, I believe, are rooting for the Iranians.

Sanctions, Inflation, and the Iranian People

TOM SWITZER: Let’s bring in Rose in here. Rose, the Iranian people are already contending with sky-high inflation. Very high unemployment. They’re struggling to afford basic goods. I mean, the currency has taken a real hit, particularly in the last few weeks. And Trump is betting that putting Iran in a tighter economic stranglehold, that will succeed where the military campaign failed. Plausible?

ROSEMARY KELANIC: No, not at all. For all the reasons that John laid out and for the many historical examples we have where economic strangulation either didn’t work or took years and only happened in combination with a massive ground war that also depleted the forces and the strength of the combatants, and ultimately the ones that gave up. So I’m thinking of World War I Germany, for instance.

But no, Iran is an extremely nationalistic state. The population, many of them don’t like the regime, probably most of them don’t like the regime. But they understand that you go to war with the regime you have, not the regime you wish you had, right? And so they don’t like the regime, but the regime is the one thing standing between them and the United States, and they are going to support their government, right?

They also are outgunned and outmanned in terms of being able to rise up against the government. It practically never happens, right? Like the sort of implicit theory of economic strangulation is usually something like you make the people suffer, they suffer enough that they finally overthrow the government, and then you magically get a new government in power that gives in to what the attacker is doing or what the coercer is trying to do. That almost never happens, right?

But the Iranian government has been extremely good at repressing its population. So even if they did try to rise up against it, it would be very difficult to do so. But the Iranian people know, they understand that they’re not just fighting the United States, they’re fighting Israel. And part of the plan all along that Trump himself has admitted to was to smash Iran as a functioning state, not just to undo the regime, not just to bring some magically pro-American regime into power, which isn’t — doesn’t exist, right?

But this idea that you would get the Kurds, you would arm the Kurds and get them to rise up against the government, that you would play Iran apart in a way similar to Syria — Iranians, you know, Iran is a multiethnic state, and Iranians in Iran are very afraid of the centrifugal forces that could pull apart the country if the government is weakened.

So all of these things mitigate against the population rising up against the government. Most likely, they will endure the economic hardships and pay the price for it. And there will be no change from the Iranian government in terms of their policy as a result of this.

China’s Resilience and the Limits of US Leverage

TOM SWITZER: Okay, but what about, Rose, Trump’s economic D-Day threats towards trading partners of Iran? I mean, could China be badly hurt if the war disrupts its trade with Iran or its access to Iranian oil?

ROSEMARY KELANIC: It could be, but again, there’s sort of two factors. One, China’s actually weathered this crisis way better than most people thought it would, in part because it has humongous oil stockpiles that it is almost certainly drawing down from surreptitiously, that we can’t observe it very well, but they’re almost certainly doing it. They’ve cut their imports, but they’re not suffering economically by any indicator that we can see. So they’ve been able to weather it.

They also have massive investments in EVs. They’ve been de-risking from petroleum for decades, not because they were worried about Hormuz, but because they were worried US naval power closing the Strait of Malacca. And so they’ve been able to weather this disruption really well of their oil.

But even aside from that, China can retaliate against the United States in major ways, right? They’re a major trading partner of us, and they’re a major trading partner of the rest of the world. And they have the ability to strike back in ways that can make it uncomfortable or painful for the United States. And so this administration is remarkably unstrategic in terms of thinking about, you know, if we do action A, everyone else will react with actions B, C, D, and E that will end up hurting the US more than it’s worth it to us to take action A.

TOM SWITZER: So just to clarify your point then, Rose, that Trump then won’t be willing to risk instigating an economic war with China right now. Beijing has some degree of leverage here. It has enough oil to withstand the loss of Iranian crude. I mean, I suppose you could also make the point that China could also squeeze US critical mineral supplies. John, your thoughts?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I agree completely with Rose. We have 500 billion dollars in trade annually with China. We’re going to punish the Chinese because they continue to have economic dealings with Iran? I don’t think we’re going to do that.

You remember after Trump came into office in January 2025, he levied all those tariffs on the Chinese, and the Chinese quickly reminded him how much leverage they have over our economy. Trump backed off. He played nice with the Chinese, and he’s continued to play nice with the Chinese. The idea that we have coercive leverage over China or even over Russia is a laughable argument. The UAE is an interesting discussion, but China and Russia, that’s not an interesting discussion.

This is the problem that the United States faces. It’s alienated so many countries around the world. It presents a threat to so many countries around the world that it’s hard to get them to cooperate, to put pressure on Iran to work out some sort of deal.

Just think about the JCPOA, which Obama crafted and got signed in 2015. He was able to do that because he had a huge amount of support from the Europeans and from the Russians and from the Chinese. Everybody was interested in working with the United States to shut down Iran’s nuclear program. Now you have a completely different incentive structure on the part of the Russians and the Chinese, just to name two countries. The Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, and the Iranians have all come together in a loose balancing coalition against the United States, which they all view as a mortal enemy.

You saw recently where President Trump tried to play kissy face with the North Koreans, and Kim Jong-un wanted nothing to do with it. And the next day fired a couple missiles into the Sea of Japan just to remind President Trump that he’s playing hardball, and he’s not interested in being co-opted by President Trump.

So the idea that we have all these friends in the world that we can work with to put pressure on Iran is exactly the opposite of what the case is.

TOM SWITZER: Do you think, by the way, John, that China might feel emboldened as the US withdraws military assets in the Western Pacific? I mean, they were largely meant to project power in Asia. I think of this USS George Washington, the aircraft carrier that’s been shipped to the Persian Gulf to make way for the — to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I’ve never thought that the USS George Washington or any aircraft carrier mattered that much in East Asia for purposes of containing China. Those ships would be sunk to the bottom of the Jolly Roger very quickly if they tried to get involved in combat against China.

But there are a lot of other things going on. We’ve pulled THAADs and Patriots out of Japan, South Korea. We were supposed to sell Tomahawk missiles to the Japanese, and we told them we can’t give them those Tomahawk missiles or sell them those Tomahawk missiles anytime soon. And we have not done that much to improve our containment policy or containment capabilities in East Asia.

So I think the Chinese would be in a better position today than they were a year ago if they were interested in taking military action against the United States and its East Asian allies. But I don’t see any evidence that the Chinese feel that the balance of power has shifted enough that now is the time to invade Taiwan or get tougher in the South China Sea. But we do have to be very careful here because there’s no question that we’ve weakened our capabilities in East Asia.

The UAE’s Role

TOM SWITZER: Okay, back to the economic warfare angle. Rose, just getting your thoughts on the UAE. You know, it is Iran’s most important regional trading partner, yet it has preempted the American move here by moving to restrict transactions with Tehran. Do you agree with John? I mean, or could this be a serious blow to Iran?

ROSEMARY KELANIC: I tend to think it’s even probably less a serious blow than John suggests. I mean, cutting off trade from the UAE, yes, it would hurt. But Iran is a very, you know, they’re a very self-sufficient economy by necessity and have been for decades because of various US sanctions regimes that have been put on them.

And I just don’t tend to think that trade cessation by the UAE is going to matter all that much, especially because there’s not a land corridor. It’s not the same thing as, say, Pakistan or Iraq, right? I tend to think that Pakistan matters a lot more because there’s so much possibility of moving goods across borders between those countries. And actually, there’s a very thriving oil trade between Iran and Pakistan, an illicit black market smuggling relationship that authorities on both sides have tried to clamp down on for years and have been unable to. So there’s just this really porous border that’s extremely long that can be a release valve for Iranian oil and many other things.

So I tend to think the UAE matters less, probably. But I think ultimately this is all in some ways splitting hairs, because I don’t think trade and economic difficulty is going to be the thing that actually makes the difference in terms of what the government of Iran does.

TOM SWITZER: There’s a New York Times report just a couple of days ago, Rose, saying that cutting Iran off from the UAE would deprive Iran not only of a major market but of “a crucial gateway to the world economy.” Would you disagree?

ROSEMARY KELANIC: I just think that it tends to be overstated. I’m not disagreeing with reporting, but I don’t think that the economic benefits of trade with one small, albeit wealthy country, is going to be the difference in what Iran does, especially when they have other countries that they can turn to that are much bigger, more powerful, that are more proximate to them, et cetera, et cetera.

TOM SWITZER: John?

The Blockade and the Strait of Hormuz

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Tom, let me ask Rose two questions that are closely related because she’s an expert on this whole question of the flow of oil in and out of the Gulf. I’m wondering, Rose, how many Iranian tankers do you think are getting through the US blockade these days? And furthermore, how do you think about the Iranians’ ability to cut off the flow of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz? The administration likes to hint or even say that they’re getting lots of tankers and cargo ships through, when all the data seems to indicate the opposite. I’m just curious what you think about both of those blockades and how effective they are.

ROSEMARY KELANIC: So, I don’t have my own spy satellite, right? So take it with a grain of salt. A lot of what’s going on is unobservable by the public, and a lot of it is probably unobservable even by the US government, but I do think all indications are that Iran has a very difficult time getting around the US blockade. The US blockade is extremely effective in preventing oil from leaving Iranian ports. I think that that’s just indisputable.

But the US blockade has come and gone and come again. And in that interim month or so where it was lifted, Iran snuck out — or they didn’t even have to sneak out, but they got out large volumes of oil, right? They had it all ready to go. As soon as it was lifted, they sent oil out. And so they have enough oil on water that they don’t have an immediate problem in terms of selling oil and getting funding from doing that, right? So they’re in a very strong position, I would say, because the blockade was taken down.

In terms of Iran’s ability to stop oil coming out of Hormuz, the upshot of the war, as I see it, is it’s shown that Iran can’t completely close the strait and the United States cannot completely open it. And so they’re fighting over how much the US can get through and at what cost.

We’ve seen claims from the Treasury Department that the US is getting as much as 10 million barrels a day out, or on good days 15 or 20. There was some Axios reporting suggesting this. Nobody in the industry takes those numbers seriously. I don’t take those numbers seriously. But it does seem like they’ve been pretty good at getting 3 to 5 million barrels a day through, which is not nothing. It’s enough that it extends the timeline before the buffers run out.

Can the US scale it up to get even more out? I think it’s pretty difficult because of what the operation they’re doing is, right? They’re doing it at night when it’s hard for Iran to see ships. So that closes the window for how many they can get out, right? They have to stagger them because they’re trying to avoid detection by Iran, etc., etc. And so that’s going to keep limits on how much you can just get out in one night, especially because it can take several hours for a tanker to cross Hormuz. This is a tricky, narrow passageway. Their AIS is not on, etc., etc. So it’s a slow, tedious process.

I would be very surprised if they could get 10 million barrels or more ever through the strait. So the question is really, is the US willing to keep doing these shuttle missions that are really risky? So the Apache that was downed several months back, it was engaged in these shuttle operations according to Reuters reporting. We didn’t lose the pilots, thank goodness, but we could have.

And then more broadly, we know that the Navy is extremely depleted. We know that there’s been strains leading to supply difficulties for the USS Lincoln, for instance, right? We don’t know how much of that is attributable to the blockade versus the shuttle operations, but it does not seem that the US can keep up these operations indefinitely. But they have managed to extend the timeline before buffers run out.

The really tricky thing is it’s hard to know: are we seeing slack in the market because the US is actually getting more than 5 million barrels a day out, or are we seeing slack because China is releasing some unknown number of barrels each day into the market? And there’s something there that we just, we can’t see, as outside observers, what the composition is of that slack. Does that answer your question?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, thank you.

The UAE’s Financial Role

TOM SWITZER: John, I was just going to put this to you. This is the Iranian dissident journalist Mojtaba Pourhossein, quote: “Nearly all of the regime, the Iranian regime’s economy, is dependent on the UAE network.” And the inference from that is that trade cutoffs potentially are more damaging than sanctions because their effects are immediate. So to the extent that’s true, wouldn’t that hurt Iran?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, when you look at the UAE-Iran relationship, economic relationship, there is the whole issue of trade which Rose was focusing on, but there’s also just the financial dimension to it. And the Wall Street Journal had an editorial that said 80 percent of the currencies that flow into Iran go through the UAE.

And furthermore, if you look at the financial mechanisms that the Iranians use to work around the economic sanctions that the United States and other countries have on Iran, they depend heavily on mechanisms inside of the UAE. So the upshot of the Wall Street Journal article was that, yes, trade matters here, but it’s those financial flows and those financial instruments that are more important.

This is one of these cases where I find it hard to judge what the real effect is here, because I just don’t know enough. And it may be the case that this really matters. But again, the question you have to ask yourself is, what happens if this kind of economic pressure from the UAE begins to work in a serious way on Iran? The question you want to ask yourself is, what do you think Iran is going to do?

And you could even generalize and say, what if the United States just begins to push the Iranians to the edge of the cliff? What are they likely to do? And by the way, the same question comes up in the case of Russia-Ukraine. Let’s assume that all of our support to Ukraine over time pushes the Russians to the edge of the cliff. Do you think that the Russians are going to throw their hands up and surrender? Do you think the Iranians are going to throw their hands up and surrender? I do not think that for one second.

And we have manifest evidence that Iran has a significant military capability here. It has ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. It can wreak havoc in the Middle East. It can basically wreck a handful of countries that the international economy depends heavily on. And we already see all sorts of stresses and strains in the international economy. And what happens if the Gulf is in flames as a result of these policies that we’re putting on the Iranians?

So, Rose was saying before that the administration is not very good at strategizing. And I think there’s just no question about it. One of the things I learned as a kid, and I think this comes from playing sports, is that you understand that the other side has a retaliatory capability. If you punch somebody in the face in a boxing match, that person doesn’t fall to the tarp and that’s the end of the fight. That person fights back. You’re playing football, whatever, there’s an opposing side. It is going to respond to what you do.

And when you do strategy of this sort, you want to think about what are the consequences of taking step A. Is the other side going to retaliate in this way? Is it going to retaliate in that way? Is it just going to surrender? And I think if you sort of play these things through, what you see is that we never think about what the other side will do once we smack them up the side of the head.

And this gets back to the start of the war on February 28th, right? Rose wrote an op-ed that was based on assessing what the other side would do if we were to go to war against the other side, Iran in this case. But the administration, President Trump in particular here, thought he could just whack the Iranians. We could launch the shock and awe campaign, decapitate the regime, that’s the end of it, it’s all over with. It hardly ever, if ever, works that way.

Looking Back at the Twelve-Day War

TOM SWITZER: Mind you, you did say, though — and by the way, I’m sorry for droning on like the pub bore, we give Rose a lot of credit for her prescience — but you yourself, John, were on this program and elsewhere well before February 28th pointing out that Iran had the capacity to use its ballistic missiles to cause mayhem across the Sunni Gulf allies and also to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. But you’ve said that you think that Trump actually wanted to shut down the twelve-day war in June last year because he was pretty sure that Iran was going to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. So he had these instincts before. Why didn’t he use that cautious judgment before February 28th?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, before I answer that question, I just want to make one quick point about me and Rose. There’s no question that we were both right, but all I would say is you didn’t have to be a genius.

ROSEMARY KELANIC: Yeah, right, that’s fair.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And by the way, many of Trump’s advisors, his key advisors, agreed with me and Rose. J.D. Vance, the head of the CIA, Secretary of State Rubio, Vice President, probably the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff too.

TOM SWITZER: Exactly.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: So it was Trump and the Israelis who were the anomalies here. But anyway, yeah, I think the whole question of the twelve-day war — this is the June 13th to June 25th, 2025, conflict — and how it ended, is fascinating when you think about us entering the war on February 28th.

The reason the war was shut down was for two reasons. One is, you said Trump sensed that the Iranians were thinking about shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, and he did not want that to happen. So we put an end to the war. The other thing that was happening that has direct relevance for this war is that the Israelis and the Americans were running out of defensive missiles that could shoot down the incoming Iranian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. And we understood that we had limited numbers of these precious, precious munitions, as did the Israelis. So it was the Israelis who wanted to shut the war down.

Yeah, I argued at the time that the Iranians would have been — were foolish to shut the war down. Iranians should have continued the war, right? This is the last war. And anyway, we went to war, and President Trump just ignored what happened in the Twelve-Day War. And those same two sets of factors have been of enormous importance this time. And again, that’s no surprise. You don’t need to be a genius to understand that.

Trump’s Threat Against Oman

TOM SWITZER: And Trump has said some rather unconventional things this past week. He posted a map — I’m sure you both saw this. He posted a map with a circle around the Strait of Hormuz labeling the area, I think, something like “new US territory.” And Rose, what did you make of Trump’s threats to bomb Oman? Now let’s be clear here, Oman is a US ally that had been, or has been, acting as a mediator to end the war against Iran. What’s going on there, Rose?

ROSEMARY KELANIC: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think this is a statement of real policy so much as it’s an expression of frustration by Trump without thinking through the consequences. I think it’s very unlikely that the US would actually bomb Oman. But I think Trump also doesn’t understand how when you make comments like that, it just shows how erratic you are, how you can’t be trusted, right? How no deal is ever final with this guy.

And I think that the Iranians learned that. They learned it, they suspected it for sure after he took the US out of the JCPOA, but they learned it in the Twelve-Day War and they learned it again in the MOU in terms of, you know, one day we’re signing this thing that basically is giving Iran some authority over the Strait of Hormuz or tacitly agreeing to that. The next day we’re trying to smuggle oil through the Oman corridor, which is against what the MOU language said we would do. We were supposed to consult with Iran, quote unquote. And he doesn’t unfreeze the assets, all these other sorts of things.

So it just undermines his ability to negotiate at all because no one can take seriously a single thing the man says. His own government can’t take it seriously.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah.

TOM SWITZER: Well, John, I’ll put this to you. This is Alan Eyre. I’m sure you’re familiar with his work. He’s a former US diplomat who played a very important role in the Obama nuclear deal negotiations with Iran in 2015. You just mentioned that. Now, he says Oman became a target of Trump’s rage this week because he’s upset with Oman for the same reason he’s upset with South Korea. Neither have solved this problem. John?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, I mean, Trump is flailing around. He’s desperate, and he should be desperate because he has got himself into a war that in my opinion, he’s guaranteed to lose and will eventually be seen as the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history.

My view on what’s going on with Oman is if you look at the memorandum of understanding, this is the June 17th memorandum, and you look at Article 5, which is the key article on who controls the Gulf — it says in the sixty-day negotiating period that Iran is responsible, just Iran, for what happens in the Gulf, or in the Strait of Hormuz. But after the sixty-day period, it will be negotiated between Oman and Iran, and there’s no mention of the United States.

TOM SWITZER: That’s right.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: So what’s been happening recently is that the Omanis and the Iranians have been negotiating about control of the Strait of Hormuz, and the Americans have been left out. And the Americans’ great fear is that the Omanis will work out a deal with the Iranians that prevents the United States from surreptitiously ferrying, or helping to move, these tankers and cargo ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Because the Omanis by themselves have a vested interest in working out a deal with Iran.

Virtually all the Gulf countries at this point in time just want to put an end to this war for obvious reasons, and they’re willing to play ball to a large extent with the Iranians. But of course, given that President Trump is moving towards an economic D-Day with regard to Iran, the last thing the Americans want is Oman playing nice with Iran. So I think this is in large part what was driving Trump.

Could Iran Launch an “October Surprise”?

TOM SWITZER: And meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has reported in the last few days that America’s allies in the Gulf have shared intelligence indicating that Iran’s leaders are preparing to, quote, “widen the war and raise the costs for the US.” And it goes on to note that Iran’s leaders are increasingly talking about offensive operations on enemy territory. So, Rose, what if Iran is planning what political junkies call an October surprise before November’s midterm elections? You know, that Tehran actually launches attacks on Sunni Gulf states just before Americans vote. Is that really plausible?

ROSEMARY KELANIC: Not particularly, no. I mean, it’s not plausible that Iran will expand the war if Trump doesn’t hasten to give in to some of their demands, right. Iran doesn’t want to be in this blockade limbo indefinitely. They don’t want Trump to set the tempo and pace of this war. They want to take back control and pressure Trump to back down from the blockade.

But I do think it’s a little far-fetched to suggest that they’re going to wait till October to do that, and then do it right before the midterms, and that that would somehow magically pressure Trump or produce a Democratic Congress that would actually do something to constrain Trump. I think both of — neither of those things is likely to happen.

And so, you know, it’s possible. I have seen speculation about Iran being involved in ground operations in Kuwait or other places. I think that that’s very far-fetched because Iran doesn’t have the military power to really engage in offensive and sustain offensive operations. So I think that commentators have difficulty sometimes understanding that Iran is not a bug to be squashed easily, but they’re also not ten feet tall, and they don’t suddenly dictate everything that happens in the region, right? They have serious power and they have serious limitations, and they can retaliate, but they can’t really take and hold territory, and it would be pretty foolish of them to try to do something like — okay, so you both — I do think that — yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

TOM SWITZER: As I was saying, Rose, you and John both agree that Iran thinks it’s winning the battle of the wills with Trump.

ROSEMARY KELANIC: Um, yes.

TOM SWITZER: Let me follow on from that and put this to John. John, this is the retired General Jack Keane, where else but Fox News. He’s a regular contributor there. He says Iran’s leaders may think that if they launch an attack before the midterms, before November, quote, “there’s a good chance that the Democrats will take control and maybe stop funding the war.” How do you see this so-called October surprise, John?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think that if you go back to the beginning of this war, it was clear which country had the offensive military capability and was willing to use it, and that was the United States of America. And Iran was very defensively oriented in its approach to how to deal with the United States militarily. The idea of Iran initiating an offensive strike or initiating a military strike against the United States or a Gulf state was just not in the cards. We were in the driver’s seat.

So there was the forty-day air war at the start of the war. And then later, this is in July, we had the tit-for-tat campaign. And it was the Americans who were driving the tit-for-tat campaign. And this took place roughly between July 8th and the end of July. And then the tit-for-tat campaign ended.

And the administration — this is the Trump administration — has made it clear, I’m actually quite surprised to hear them say this explicitly, “we have no interest in using military force. We don’t want to go back to fighting.” If you just think about where the United States is today, it’s quite remarkable. We’ve given up on the military option.

TOM SWITZER: Well, they know they’ve got extreme munition shortages.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Of course, of course. That plus the fact that it hasn’t worked.

Okay, yes, but what’s happened on the other side is twofold. First of all, the Iranians have come to understand that their missile and drone capability is quite formidable. And furthermore, what’s happened over time is that the hardliners have moved into positions of power in Iran. So this General Rezaei, who is the head of their Supreme National Security Council, is a supreme hardliner. And he’s the kind of guy, contrary to Rose, who might just be willing to use military force because he thinks that the Iranians have some powerful cards to play here.

I think it’s unlikely that the Iranians will initiate offensive operations unless they absolutely have to. But I don’t think they will be that hesitant because, again, the inclination to use military power offensively has shifted from the American side to the Iranian side almost completely. It’s really quite remarkable if you think about where we are today.

TOM SWITZER: But could the Iranians calculate that the US intends to attack them after the midterm elections anyway, making it in Iran’s interest to resume fighting when it could do maximum political damage to Trump before November?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, because we don’t have the munitions, as you pointed out. Yeah, it’s going to take us years to replace those munitions first. And second, and even more importantly, we have no effective military option here. We’ve tried every trick in the book.

Calls for a “Final Decisive Blow”

TOM SWITZER: Well, I know you, Rose, and I are on the same page here, but Rose, let me put this to you. This is Mark Thiessen. He’s a neocon from the American Enterprise Institute writing in the Washington Post just the other day. He says he’s calling on Trump to launch, quote, “a final decisive blow against the regime.” This is the quote from Thiessen: “If Trump were to launch a quick and lethal attack on Iran’s leadership, economic, and energy infrastructure, and nuclear facilities now, he could credibly declare victory months before the midterms.” Rose, what’s going on there?

ROSEMARY KELANIC: Delusion. Delusion is going on there, right? If there was a decisive overwhelming blow, the US would have done it already. We wouldn’t be six months into this war without having tried it.

And the idea that we’ll go after the leadership — we went after the leadership. They came up with a new leadership. And the new leadership is, you know, they’re even more militarily entrenched, right? I mean, we often see during wartime a military government take power over the civilians, right? And we’re seeing that in real time because we killed the civilian leader that had the most sway, right? The elder Khamenei, right? And now we’ve got folks who are career IRGC officers who are in control of the government.

And when you have career military officers driving the show, they tend to be more offensive-oriented, less willing to compromise, less willing to negotiate, etc., etc., etc. They’re not quite a military junta, but it’s moving even more in that direction, right? So if we try to take out these guys, we will probably come up with worse guys as a result.

And, you know, it’s just mind-boggling. But Trump, at this point, has a lot of incentives to gamble for resurrection, right? He has lost at the casino, and it’s really tempting for him to think, “oh, I just — if I just roll the dice one more time and I get lucky and I have this massive knockout blow, then that’s going to be the thing that wins back the pot at the casino and I can go home.” And it just — it’s a fallacy, but it’s really hard to convince a policymaker that, no, there’s not some lucky roll of dice or some massive blow or some escalation that’s going to solve this problem, because they’re always going to be thinking like, well, what if I had just stayed on a little longer? I could have won this thing. And it just never works that way.

TOM SWITZER: I saw, Rose, a poll — I think it was a Reuters/Ipsos poll just a day or so ago. Trump’s approval rating is 33 percent. It’s extraordinarily low.

ROSEMARY KELANIC: Yeah. He’s losing even some of his own audience in that case.

Hardliners in the Driver’s Seat

TOM SWITZER: Yeah, indeed, indeed. Now, John, I just want to push back to you just because, you know, we like to do this where we try to keep each other honest. You mentioned how the regime’s become more extreme, but the president and the parliamentary speaker, they have said just yesterday that the country, Iran, needs to focus on ending the war and shoring up its crippled economy, pushing back — this is the Wall Street Journal‘s interpretation of their intervention. This is the news story: pushing back publicly against hardliners who are taking a more defiant approach in this standoff. And this is the Iranian parliamentary speaker, I’ll put this to you, John, quote: “No matter how much military power we Iranians have, if our people are struggling and the country lacks financial circulation and economic growth, we will not achieve progress.” Now, surely that’s a sign of economic distress that the Iranian leadership is well aware of.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: There’s no question about that. But what you want to ask yourself is who’s driving the train here? And the answer is they’re not driving the train. The president or the speaker of the parliament, they’re not driving the train. And the hardliners are — people like General Rezaei — and they fully understand, I think quite correctly, that there’s no negotiating with the United States.

I think the softies, the president and the speaker, are wrong. I think when you’re dealing with the United States of America and Israel, you don’t make any compromises. You make it very clear that you’re playing hardball and that you’ll fight to the death. Otherwise, the United States and Israel will take advantage of you. You want to remember, the United States and Israel are an existential threat to Iran, as Rose described it before. They want to destroy Iran. And the idea that you can compromise with the United States — I would never compromise with the United States if I were an adversary of the United States. I’d play hardball for as long as I can.

And by the way, if you look at the June 17th Memorandum of Understanding, that was a deal where there were some provisions that both sides agreed to upfront, but then everything else was supposed to be negotiated in the sixty-day period. The Iranians now say there’ll be no negotiations. We want every one of the things that we asked for up front before we’ll open the strait. Going back to the June 17th memorandum, they were willing to open the strait and then negotiate on all those issues that they are now demanding have to be settled before they open the strait.

The Iranians have learned that you can compromise with the United States. They compromised in the June 17th memorandum, and who walked away from that memorandum? Not the Iranians. The United States did.

Yeah, I think number one, the hardliners are in the driver’s seat, and that’s really what matters. And number two, I think from Iran’s point of view, not from our point of view, I think you don’t want to make any concessions at this point in time.

What Should Trump Do?

TOM SWITZER: Okay, well, Rose, if John is right and the hardliners are indeed in the driver’s seat, and they want reparations, sanctions relief, those frozen assets unfrozen, what does Trump do?

ROSEMARY KELANIC: Trump needs to end the war, right? Regardless of who’s in the driver’s seat, Trump needs to end the war because this war is lost already. And the longer we continue it, the worse the situation gets, the more oil buffers are exhausted, the more our own stockpiles are depleted, the more carrier maintenance is deferred because we have too many carriers operating in these high-tempo missions, etc., etc.

So Trump needs to end the war, and he needs to recognize that Iran has authority over the Strait of Hormuz. They have control over it. I actually have a piece coming out tomorrow in the New York Times making this point — that we have to just cede control of Hormuz to Iran. Not because it’s a good outcome, it’s a bad outcome, but it’s not worth it for the US to keep fighting Iran to get oil through Hormuz when Iran can instead impose a toll. Everyone pays their own way. The US is not fighting to provide this global public good of free access to Hormuz, and we end this war and get out.

And it would be a humiliation, and it would set a bad precedent. But it’s not a precedent that any other country is likely to be able to take up because Hormuz is just completely unique in terms of the geography allowing Iran to shut the thing down. Plus, it’s important for global oil markets and the lack of other waterways, other transit routes that are immediately available.

So we need to think longer term about this. If the US can do other things, like instead of pouring more assets into this fight that we’re not going to win, what if we took some of those assets and we put them into encouraging de-risking from petroleum in the US economy? We encourage EVs. We do what China has done that has allowed them to weather this crisis so well. That would be a way better use of our money. And then Iran having leverage over Hormuz in 5 years or 10 years just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter because we’re not relying so much on oil. And so the Persian Gulf just doesn’t matter. That’s the long-term way to think about this problem, not trying to chase US credibility or resolve or all these other things that we’ve already lost in this conflict.

TOM SWITZER: John, concluding thoughts?

Closing Remarks

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I would just note to you that there is talk these days that the Trump administration has been thinking about — not clear how seriously — but they’ve been thinking about using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. And I think that when you —

TOM SWITZER: Sorry, where have you read this, John?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Oh, it —

ROSEMARY KELANIC: There —

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s been in a number of news outlets.

TOM SWITZER: I’ve missed this completely.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican congresswoman, yes, she’s raised this issue. And nobody in the Trump administration has said we’re not going to do that. I want to be very clear here. I’m not saying that the Trump administration is seriously considering using tactical nuclear weapons. But again, when countries are desperate, when they are about to suffer a humiliating defeat of the scope that we’re facing in Iran, to go back to language that Rose used, you sometimes gamble for resurrection. And this is, I think, going to take people inside the administration to at least think about maybe using tactical nuclear weapons. I don’t think we will, but you don’t want to underestimate how crazy the United States might be moving forward.

TOM SWITZER: Well, on that disturbing note, we’ll need to cheer ourselves up and read Rose’s op-ed piece in the New York Times tomorrow.

ROSEMARY KELANIC: Thanks. Yeah, Rose — I’m not sure either, but I know better than nuclear weapons.

TOM SWITZER: No, seriously, Rose, it’s great to see you again. Thanks so much for being on the program. And John, as always, great to see you too.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Thank you for having me, Tom.

ROSEMARY KELANIC: Thank you.

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