What leverage Iran may have as U.S. war continues

0:00 The US-Israel war against Iran is moving fast,

0:03 and America's footprint in the Middle East is expanding.

0:06 President Trump announced moments ago that the US

0:09 launched new airstrikes this time at Iran's Khark Island.

0:13 The Pentagon earlier today said it's sending more

0:16 warships and more military personnel to the region.

0:19 It's been a busy day, so let's get straight to the panel.

0:23 Joining us tonight, Steve Ins ke ep the host of NPR's Morning Edition.

0:27 Mark Mazzetti is a Washington correspondent at The New York Times.

0:31 Felicia Schwartz is a diplomatic correspondent for Politico and Nancy Yousef

0:35 is a staff writer and a Pentagon correspondent at The Atlantic.

0:38 Thank you all for joining us.

0:40 Busy, busy day.

0:41 Nancy, I'm going to start with you because the president

0:43 took toru Social just before we came on air,

0:46 and he announced that the United States Central Command executed one of the most

0:51 powerful bombing raids in the history

0:53 of the Middle East and totally obliterated.

0:55 Every military target in Iran's crown jewel, Khark Island.

0:59 He goes on to talk about how they spared the island's oil infrastructure,

1:05 but that he had, he reserved the right to do so.

1:08 Explain the significance of this strike.

1:09 So Hawk Island is only about 1/3 of the size of Manhattan,

1:13 but don't let that small size mislead you.

1:16 It is the cornerstone of the Iranian economy.

1:19 90% of its oil exports come out of that island.

1:22 And so the strikes on it have two big impacts, both military and economic.

1:28 Let's start with economic.

1:29 By striking the island, you potentially take oil off the market,

1:33 raising already rising Brent crude prices at a time when there's

1:37 a lot of anxiety about oil reaching 150 or even $200 a barrel,

1:42 and militarily the Iranians have threatened that if this island was attacked,

1:46 they would make it hard for oil to leave the region,

1:49 threatening to attack oil production and oil facilities in Gulf partner nations,

1:53 something they've already done that there's the threat

1:55 that they would ramp up those strikes

1:56 with this attack by the United States and also

1:59 a location where there's significant Islamic revolutionary Guard facilities.

2:03 You have um, I mean, it's, it's nicknamed Forbidden Island due to its

2:09 strict security and restricted access there,

2:12 and so it seems they're going after the military targets

2:15 for now based on the president's true social post, right?

2:18 I mean, as you point out, it has a military value for the IRGC,

2:23 but it's also a source of revenue for the IRGC as well,

2:26 and as you note, it's in the Strait

2:28 of Hormuz which we've been talking about all week.

2:31 Its strategic importance to oil exports going

2:33 through there for the whole world economy.

2:35 So the fact that there's more instability in such

2:38 a vital part of the strait only adds to, I think,

2:41 global anxiety about the pace of this war

2:44 and the effects it could have on the energy market.

2:47 Absolutely, and we're going to talk more

2:49 about the Strait of Hormuz, but Felicia,

2:51 the president has been basically proclaiming victory even as we

2:54 continue kind of into the 3rd week of this conflict.

2:58 Why then would he go over aftercard now?

3:01 What's the significance of the timing of this particularly.

3:04 So what we've seen is that Iran has very,

3:08 very strategically taken all a lot of the leverage,

3:11 a lot of the power back in this conflict, like Nancy said, with uh by basically

3:17 essentially shutting off the Strait of Hormuz,

3:20 where about 50% of the world's oil and gas trade moves through.

3:24 And so he wants to take some of that leverage back.

3:26 He wants to say to the Iranians, we can, you know,

3:30 they are still able to move a little

3:32 bit of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

3:33 They, he wants to be able to say, this is, you know, we,

3:37 if we bomb your energy infrastructure totally that will completely,

3:41 it will have huge economic impacts for the Iranian economy.

3:44 So he wants to see if he can kind

3:47 of get the Iranians to allow more traffic through the strait.

3:49 I'm not really sure that's going to work,

3:51 but he wants to kind of change the balance of power, and all of us,

3:54 of course, is coming as the president announces that more

3:58 troops and more warships are going to the region as well.

4:01 What do we know about that?

4:03 It strikes me that the administration is escalating again and again

4:07 and again in a way that also threatens the United States,

4:09 as Nancy was talking, I was thinking about that.

4:12 If you're striking the Persian Gulf,

4:13 if you're raising more uncertainty about oil supplies,

4:16 Iranian oil tankers are among the few

4:18 that are getting through the Persian Gulf right now.

4:20 What you effectively do is raise the price

4:22 of oil and put further burden on the US economy.

4:26 Now you are correct that the military appears

4:28 to be moving another marine expeditionary unit to the Gulf.

4:32 I've traveled with them in the past.

4:33 It's a couple 1000 or more US Marines along

4:36 with helicopters and airplanes and ships and a lot of equipment.

4:39 They're extremely powerful, but a couple 1000 Marines is not very

4:43 many in the context of a country like Iran.

4:46 This is something you could imagine sending them

4:48 to take over an island in the Strait of Hormuz.

4:50 I don't know what the objective is or if one has even been ordered,

4:54 but the president is clearly comfortable escalating

4:57 in a way that entails greater risk for Iran,

5:00 but also greater risk for the United States and the world.

5:03 ness have you gotten specifics on the numbers

5:05 of troops that are going specifically.

5:07 So you, as the Marines refer to it, has two components marines and sailors.

5:12 This mu has 3 ships, about 2400 marines,

5:14 and then another um 2000 sailors or so, so 4000 in all.

5:19 They're kind of seen as the 911 of force of the military

5:22 in that they can go from ship to shore quickly.

5:25 They're trained for a multitude of missions, so you could see we might,

5:29 we've seen them in the past do things like humanitarian missions, evacuations.

5:32 but they could also move, as you note, onto an island.

5:37 They could also support any sort of ground

5:39 offensive in terms of that sort of initial steps,

5:42 but we haven't been told what they'll do.

5:44 I should also note that they are coming from Asia on Anhibs,

5:46 which are very slow moving ships, so it will take somewhere between 10 days

5:50 and, and 2 weeks for them to be in the region.

5:54 So that tells us that perhaps they're being put

5:57 in place to create options down the road in this conflict.

6:00 OK, so that's something definitely to watch.

6:02 So Mark, President Trump went on Brian Kilmeade's podcast this week,

6:06 and he said that he would feel it in his bones when this conflict is over.

6:13 Beyond that, what do we know or what clarity have we gotten

6:16 from the administration on what an end to this conflict actually looks like.

6:20 What would constitute a victory?

6:22 Well, it depends on the day or the hour or the minute

6:25 or whatever interview that the president takes with a different reporter, right?

6:29 What we've seen over the last two

6:32 weeks is the senior administration officials like

6:35 Marco Rubio have gone out every day and said there are very clear objectives.

6:40 We have 3 or 4, depending on the day, to destroy the missile capacity, the navy,

6:45 Iran's ability to use proxies around the region and what constitutes

6:50 victory is decimating these these these um these four objectives, right?

6:54 But then the president comes out and says things like unconditional surrender.

7:00 We will have, you know, the Iranian regim e will collapse.

7:04 We will have, um, you know,

7:05 the United States and President Trump will be picking the new leader, right?

7:10 So it, it has depended on, you know, the whims of the president.

7:15 I can say that the administration is still trying to limit

7:19 the objectives and not make this look like an endless war,

7:22 but it's it's been a mess in terms

7:25 of the messaging of what this actually looks like,

7:28 what an endgame actually looks like.

7:29 It's one of the things Steve, that the administration has insist ed is that Iran

7:34 is essentially cornered now and even as the new,

7:37 um, Supreme Leader, Mujtaba Khamenei has come out and vowed defiance.

7:44 They say that they are very much cornered,

7:46 but at the same time we're hearing of mines being placed in the Strait

7:50 of Hormuz that is severely disrupting the shipping

7:55 lane in ways we've never seen before.

7:58 Does Iran have a surprising amount of leverage in this conflict

8:02 to disrupt the global markets in a way that we never really anticipated.

8:06 Surprising, I don't know.

8:08 I think analysts were aware that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz.

8:11 In fact, Defense Secretary Pete Heckseth, Secretary of War if you like,

8:14 Pete Hegseth said in a news conference this week

8:17 that of course they had plans for this.

8:19 Of course they were aware that Iran could do this.

8:22 Nevertheless, Iran seems to have had considerable effect,

8:24 and you mentioned the mining.

8:26 I don't know if they're going to succeed in that.

8:28 I don't know if they have done it,

8:29 but they haven't really had to do it because the shipping is largely stopped.

8:34 You can't ensure a ship that is going to go through the Persian Gulf,

8:38 and enough of them have been struck that they have a problem,

8:41 and this raises a question for me.

8:43 The president said, I believe, to Axios that he could decide when the war ends.

8:48 I can quit whenever I want.

8:49 That's not a direct quote, but effectively that's what he said,

8:52 and it does raise a question as to whether

8:54 Iran is willing to go along with that.

8:57 In the 12 Day War last year,

8:59 the United States was able to say, we're done, we've achieved our objective.

9:03 Iran will do a retaliatory strike and it's going to be over.

9:05 I don't know if that's going to be the case this time

9:09 because Iran has played this card that has threatened to play for decades,

9:13 and now it's done it and countries around the world are suffering.

9:16 Can I just add, yes, please,

9:17 Iran is behaving very differently than they did last June,

9:20 and that a surprise some people in the White House, as you said,

9:23 it sort of went according to a certain plan where there were attacks.

9:27 There was one night of strikes by the US Iran retaliated.

9:30 It was over, right?

9:31 Iran seems to think this is a far more existential conflict.

9:35 And so therefore they're using the leverage

9:36 that they're that they didn't use the last time, specifically economic leverage,

9:39 and they're also hitting strikes around the Gulf,

9:42 and it also raises the question of even when the war is over,

9:45 they will have this leverage that they've

9:47 already shown that they're willing to use,

9:48 which gives them a certain amount of power in the future.

9:50 I mean, I hear you say agreeing with Mark Felicia,

9:53 do you feel like the White House was surprised, and if so, why?

9:57 We know that for example they were talking to Israel

10:00 quite a bit in the lead up to this conflict.

10:02 You were based in Israel years ago, and you know the country well.

10:07 What's your sense of the information that they were getting and how

10:11 much of a reality check they had going into this conflict.

10:14 I think you know there were Arab diplomats flooding Washington meeting any

10:18 official they could meet with saying it's going to be different this time.

10:22 Iran needs to change the deterrence calculation.

10:25 They're going to respond more forcefully.

10:28 I think there's been plenty of reporting

10:29 suggesting that they did have, you know,

10:31 they should have had access to intelligence showing this kind of thing,

10:34 but I think they Trump has is kind of a vibes president.

10:38 He's really taken a lot of lessons from what happened in Venezuela.

10:42 What happened in the 12 Day War,

10:44 I think Iran and and it's and its history and its

10:47 people's a very different situation than what we saw in Venezuela,

10:50 and, and I think, you know, some of it was like the experts are always wrong.

10:55 The blob always tells us we can't, you know,

10:57 this joking di m in ut ive term people

10:59 use for the foreign policy establishment that, you know,

11:01 they told us we couldn't move the embassy in Jerusalem.

11:03 It was fine.

11:04 Everyone said the 12 Day war is going to be a disaster.

11:06 Venezuela is going to be a disaster.

11:07 So I think, you know,

11:08 Trump has been able to do things that everyone told him he couldn't do,

11:11 and I think some of it was confirmation bias.

11:14 It's a small circle of people, and I think,

11:16 you know, like Steve Wickoff before, uh,

11:18 the talk started, he went on Fox and he said,

11:21 we're just really surprised the Iranians won't surrender.

11:23 I think that's a big misunderstanding of, of the regime and how they operate.

11:27 So I think it was a bit of a just a misread of the situation.

11:31 Nancy, you wrote a story this week, which, uh, which you,

11:35 which was entitled Iran Has the Iran war has 4 stages, and we're in the 2nd.

11:40 Explain to us what those stages look like,

11:42 because it also suggests maybe there is an endgame in sight.

11:45 So there's one on paper anyway, yeah,

11:47 I wanted to write it to him because I think people

11:49 were asking what the timeline is and what are we seeing.

11:52 And so in terms of military strategy,

11:54 it starts with the initial strikes, the initial attacks attacks that we saw,

11:59 followed by sort of trying to control the territory dominated when

12:02 the shift that you've seen in this is rather than using missiles.

12:06 We're seeing more and more aircraft flying over

12:08 Iran in a bid to control the airspace.

12:11 If that goes according to plan,

12:12 it becomes a stabilization plan and then finally a withdrawal.

12:16 The, the phase that we're in right now is that second phase.

12:19 Now, depending on how the stabilization efforts go,

12:21 this could be the longest and the most complicated phase of the war.

12:25 And so when you hear talk about it could be 4 weeks, 6 weeks, 8 weeks.

12:29 Those are sort of the, the phases are

12:30 moving through as they go through their target set.

12:33 And so the question becomes, can they actually stick to that plan?

12:37 Can they hit those targets and what is stabilization

12:40 and withdrawal look like as we've talked about at this table,

12:42 there hasn't been a clear answer for what kind of Iran

12:46 the US would be leaving behind at the end of it.

12:49 There's no clear sign of regime change, at least as of this week.

12:52 Nor is there a sign of some sort of alternative leadership rising,

12:55 so a military plan can achieve a weakened military state for Iran.

13:00 It doesn't guarantee strong governance or stronger post-period more

13:04 in line with um US or Israeli values afterwards.

13:08 The Secretary Hagseth held a couple of press veils this week,

13:11 although the relationship with the Pentagon and the press

13:14 under this administration has been pretty complicated.

13:16 We are the biggest takeaways in your mind,

13:18 what is the message that they're trying to get out

13:21 there to the public through the media on this war.

13:24 I think twofold that they that they know

13:26 what they're doing despite the mixed messaging in terms

13:29 of aims and intent that there is an instate

13:32 that the president will decide the timetable of these strikes

13:35 that we don't need to tell you the details

13:37 of what we're doing because that would compromise

13:39 the operation and that they have um a plan

13:44 in place to, to decimate Iran's military capability.

13:48 What's interesting to me is these press conferences

13:51 have focused on what's happening in terms of strikes.

13:54 They have yet to answer to what end the strikes

13:58 in and of themselves don't guarantee victory, you know, we,

14:01 the US history is filled with examples in which the US achieved

14:05 tactical wins and and loss in terms of the consequence of them,

14:08 and so they haven't answered that question.

14:10 There's been such a focus on how much ordinance we've destroyed,

14:13 how much weaker the drone capabilities is the ballistic missile capability is,

14:17 but it hasn't linked it to the strategic aims yet,

14:19 and, and I think there's been a real focus on the military

14:22 ones because it's the most tangible success they can point to right now.

14:25 That's a great point