Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, April 10, 2026

0:00 Jeffrey Goldberg: Earlier this week, Donald Trump  threatened to annihilate Iranian civilization.  

0:06 Then he said he would work with Iran to collect  tolls at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz.  

0:11 What will he say tomorrow? Nobody knows. If you're having trouble keeping up with  

0:16 the president's ever shifting understanding  of Middle East reality, welcome to the club. 

0:20 Tonight, how Trump went from apocalypse  now to apocalypse possibly later, next. 

1:55 Good evening and welcome to Washington Week. Earlier this week, President Trump claimed,  

2:00 quote, total and complete victory over Iran,  100 percent, no question about it, he said.  

2:06 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth added,  Operation Epic Fury was a historic and  

2:11 overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital  V, military victory. Epic Fury decimated Iran's  

2:18 military and rendered it combat-ineffective  for years to come. Iran's Supreme National  

2:23 Security Council had another view, quote, the  enemy in its cowardly, illegal and criminal  

2:29 war against the Iranian nation, has suffered  an undeniable historical and crushing defeat. 

2:35 So, that's obviously not true. But are Trump and  Hegseth right to claim victory for themselves?  

2:41 If it's truly a victory? Why is Iran in at least  partial control of the Strait of Hormuz? And why  

2:46 are the anti-American theocrats who have been  in charge of Iran for 47 years still in charge? 

2:52 To figure all this out, I'm joined tonight by  Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic,  

2:58 Kareem Sadjapour is a contributing writer  at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the  

3:01 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,  Gillian Tett is a columnist and a member of  

3:06 the editorial board of the Financial Times and  head of King's College Cambridge, and Nancy  

3:11 Youssef covers the Pentagon for The Atlantic. Welcome to all of you. Welcome direct from King's  

3:18 College. Thank you for being here, Gillian. Gillian Tett, Columnist,  

3:20 Financial Times: Delighted. Jeffrey Goldberg: Glad to see you. 

3:21 Karim, sorry to do this to  you, but who won the war? 

3:25 Karim Sadjapour, Senior Fellow, Carnegie  Endowment: So, Jeff, this war, I think,  

3:27 is going to take decades to assess the full  impact. It's going to be with us for a long time. 

3:32 Jeffrey Goldberg: It's a cop out, by the way. Karim Sadjapour: Well, I would say a snapshot  

3:35 of today is that Iran was -- has been  so far the strategic winner of this war,  

3:41 and that when President Trump launched this war,  he had big ambitions. He was going to totally  

3:48 destroy Iran's nuclear program again, totally  destroy its missile program, destroy its proxies,  

3:54 and perhaps even implode the Iranian regime. And six weeks later, the regime is still around  

4:01 and they've managed to shift the conversation  about the war because no one is talking anymore  

4:05 about the nuclear program and their missiles or  the regime going away. Everyone is now talking  

4:11 about the Strait of Hormuz. This is a regime which  came to power in 1979, taking American diplomats  

4:16 hostage. Now, it has the global economy hostage. And so whereas before President Trump was asking  

4:23 for Iran to commit to total surrender, now we're  asking for Iran's cooperation to end this economic  

4:30 blockade of this critical global economic artery. Jeffrey Goldberg: And speaking of which it,  

4:35 Jon Karl -- our friend and colleague,  Jon Karl, from ABC spoke to the president  

4:39 earlier this week. The president said, quote,  this is in relationship to -- relation to the  

4:44 Strait of Hormuz. We're thinking of doing it,  running the Strait of Hormuz, as a joint venture.  

4:49 It's a way of securing it, also securing it from  lots of other people. It's a beautiful thing. 

4:55 Gillian, we started the week with a threat  of annihilation of Iranian civilization,  

4:59 and now we're running a toll  booth together, in his mind, with  

5:05 the Iranians. How do you make sense of this? Gillian Tett: Well, I think the best way to  

5:09 make sense of it is to recognize that Iran and  America have different definitions of winning  

5:14 and what losing is. So, for Pete Hegseth and the  American government, it's all about destroying  

5:21 the military infrastructure inside Iran, lots  and lots of bonds. For Iran, it's been about  

5:26 showing that they can destroy the global economy  and have a sense of power as a result of that. 

5:31 So, in some ways, they're almost talking past each  other in terms of what's defined as a victory.  

5:36 Because clearly, yes, the pentagon's, right,  they have destroyed a lot of stuff, not enough  

5:42 to actually entirely render Iran's military  capabilities gone, but they have destroyed a  

5:48 lot of stuff so he can claim victory, but Iran  has also destroyed parts of the global economy  

5:54 and show that it can do more going forward. Jeffrey Goldberg: And let's assume what  

5:58 they're saying is true for the purpose of the  discussion, and there's a lot of evidence to back  

6:02 this up. How did this come to pass in six weeks? Anne Applebaum, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Look,  

6:06 I think it came to pass because the president  lives in a different world from the rest of us.  

6:14 So, his idea of what's true and what's not true,  what's reasonable and what's not reasonable,  

6:20 his memory of events is very different from  everyone else's. He doesn't remember what he  

6:25 said three days ago. He doesn't remember what he  said 24 hours ago. When he talks to journalists,  

6:31 he does message testing, you know, to see, I'm  going to try out this explanation for the war,  

6:35 or that explanation for the war. You  know, he doesn't think strategically. So,  

6:40 he doesn't have a long-term view. He doesn't  have a geopolitical theory, and there are  

6:45 people around him who do, but he doesn't. What he's interested in at any given moment is,  

6:50 am I winning and is this a victory? And whether  it was Netanyahu or whether it was somebody on  

6:57 his own team, we don't fully know, but someone  told him this is an easy victory in Iran. He  

7:02 went there, it didn't work out. Now, he's  looking for some other thing he can declare  

7:06 that will make him look like a winner again. Jeffrey Goldberg: You studied him for a long time.  

7:09 If Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine, the chairman of the  Joint Chiefs, or Admiral Cooper, who runs CENTCOM,  

7:15 if they had gone to him and said, this is not  only not easy, what you've planned out here is  

7:21 a fantasy, do you think he would've listened or  was he so committed to the idea of winning in Iran  

7:26 that he would've gone forward no matter what? Anne Applebaum: I can't read his mind. I don't  

7:30 know. But it's possible that, you know, he  does listen to whoever has said -- whoever  

7:35 has been most forceful to him in the last ten  minutes or in the last hour-and-a-half. And  

7:41 it's possible that had someone said, this is a  disaster, it's a huge mistake, Mr. President,  

7:45 don't do it, maybe he -- you know, maybe not. I mean, it sounds like from all the reporting  

7:51 that we've seen, including in The New York Times  and elsewhere, it sounds like nobody around him  

7:56 was willing to say it in those terms. I mean, some  people said, well, there's this danger or that  

8:00 danger, but nobody really said, don't do this. Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Nancy, let's talk about  

8:05 the exact situation in the strait right now  and the exact status of Iran's forces, naval,  

8:11 missile, so on. I mean, the Pentagon, it says  that most of the Iranian navy is sunk. Most of  

8:15 the facilities that produce Shahed drones are  destroyed. Most of the facilities that produce  

8:20 missiles, ballistic missiles, are destroyed. I mean, on -- if you're just cataloging what's  

8:25 been blown up, it seems like Iran is mostly  neutralized as a regional military force. Is that  

8:32 fair? And is that a relevant issue at this point? Nancy Youssef, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: So,  

8:37 the data that we've gotten from the Pentagon  is quite limited. I'll give you an example.  

8:40 General Caine, the chairman of the Joint  Chiefs of Staff, stood up at the podium  

8:43 and said the United States has destroyed  450 ballistic missile storage facilities,  

8:49 but he never gave the denominator. Is that 450 out  of 500 or 5,000? So, while there has been impact,  

8:56 we don't know the scope and scale of it. The U.S. did successfully take out most  

9:00 of Iran's navy. But what the war showed  us is that the Iran did not need the navy  

9:04 to close the strait. What they needed were  ballistic missiles and drones and fast boats,  

9:09 enough to intimidate shipping companies and  their insurers from transiting that strait. That  

9:15 was the impact that they had through this war. And so military capabilities can do some of the  

9:21 work, but it can't answer the strategic outcomes  that the U.S. was trying to achieve. And what we  

9:26 saw is that the Iranians used their asymmetric  warfare capabilities to leverage that towards  

9:34 a new kind of gain for them, a new form  of leverage in the form of the strait,  

9:38 and they continue to hold it. So, you were asking where we are right  

9:41 now. Because of the strikes we've seen in Lebanon,  the Iranians has said we're not going to open the  

9:46 straight until that's resolved, and that we've  only seen about a handful of ships go through. 

9:52 Moreover, I think we're seeing Iran say  that because we have shown this leverage,  

9:56 it is now instrumental in the negotiations that we  either are going to solidify our ability to make  

10:02 money off of it financially, or we're going  to see the lifting of sanctions such that we  

10:08 can benefit economically in some other way. Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Let's talk about the  

10:13 negotiations. Let's talk about this two-week  period. It turns out now, it seems, that J.D.  

10:19 Vance is the man on the spot direct from Hungary,  and we're going to talk about Hungary in a second. 

10:26 Kareem, you just wrote in The Atlantic, quote,  both Trump and Tehran, for different reasons,  

10:31 have looked to Vance to end the war. White  House reporters who speak with Trump regularly  

10:36 believe that he's already moved on from the  Iran war, recognizing that it's a political  

10:40 loser and doesn't intend to return. When toppling, the Iranian regime  

10:44 appeared within reach to him, Trump wanted the  credit, now sensing the war's unpopularity,  

10:47 he is content to let Vance own the outcome.  There's a fascinating development. Will  

10:53 you -- let's talk about why J.D. Vance is going  to Pakistan to negotiate a peace deal with Iran. 

11:02 Karim Sadjapour: So, what's interesting, Jeff, is  despite the fact that we were just fighting a full  

11:06 blown war for six weeks, if these talks happen  between Vice President Vance and Iran's Speaker  

11:11 of Parliament Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, this will  be the most senior in-person discussion between  

11:17 America and Iran since the 1979 Revolution. And the Iranians actually have requested to  

11:23 negotiate with J.D. Vance for a few reasons.  Number one, they believe he's from the anti-war  

11:28 wing of the MAGA party. He didn't approve of  this war the same way some of his peers did.  

11:35 Number two, you know, they believe that he  obviously has ambitions to become president,  

11:40 and so he is highly incentivized to wrap this  up as quickly as possible. And number three,  

11:44 if he becomes president, he will ostensibly  abide by any agreement he signed. 

11:49 But in my view, there is virtually zero chance  that we're going to reach a settlement in the  

11:54 next two weeks. Remember, it took the Obama  administration almost two years just to get  

11:59 a nuclear deal with Iran. And now we're not  talking just about nuclear. We're talking  

12:03 about the Strait of Hormuz, missiles, proxies  and a two-week period. That's an impossibility. 

12:10 Jeffrey Goldberg: Gillian, if I were cynical,  and I'm not, but if I were cynical -- 

12:14 Gillian Tett: You're a journalist.  You're paid to be cynical. 

12:15 Jeffrey Goldberg: I would say that Marco Rubio, a  potential contender for the Republican nomination,  

12:23 and J.D. Vance, a potential nominee for the  Republican nomination, Marco Rubio is sitting  

12:29 there going, oh, this is great, J.D. Vance  should go negotiate an impossible thing. 

12:36 I'm not trying to say that this is merely  quotidian politics but give us your own  

12:41 assessment. Is J.D. Vance being set up here? Gillian Tett: Well, it's fascinating because,  

12:45 yes, it is something of a poison chalice  in this way. As you say, certainly,  

12:49 Marco Rubio probably feels pretty good about not  being in Pakistan right now. But as Kareem said,  

12:54 it was indeed the Iranian regime who identified  J.D. Vance as being the best person they wanted  

12:59 or the key person they wanted to speak to.  They did so very cleverly, very candidly. 

13:04 And, you know, the best I think we can hope  for these talks is not so much a peace deal,  

13:10 but at least an on-war state of affairs, where,  in a sense, you end up with something like a  

13:16 frozen-ish conflict where everyone agrees to  take a deep breath for a while and then lives  

13:20 with ambiguity for some time. And, of course,  the Iranian regime in Tehran is absolutely  

13:27 skilled at living with ambiguity. It's almost  an art form within the Iranian culture. I mean,  

13:32 Kareem would say this better. Karim Sadjapour: Absolutely. 

13:34 Jeffrey Goldberg: As you're talking  about this, I'm thinking, Anne,  

13:37 that -- how did the Iranians, who've lost most  of their military, somehow create a situation  

13:45 in which they picked the American negotiator? Anne Applebaum: Because they understand modern  

13:52 warfare better than Donald Trump and better  than many people in the administration. They  

13:56 understand that with a few tools, with cheap  drones, with cheap mines, they can inflict a  

14:03 disproportionate amount of pain on -- in the U.S.,  on allies, on Asia and on the entire world. And  

14:10 that gave them an enormous amount of leverage. And it's a lesson -- if you've been watching the  

14:14 war in Ukraine, you would've understood this, but,  of course, Trump not interested in watching the  

14:18 war in Ukraine. If you've been paying attention  to the way weapons development has worked,  

14:22 you would've understood this but they don't care  about that either. You know, they're focused on  

14:25 other things. But the Iranians understood  that with a very small amount of leverage,  

14:30 they could hit this chokepoint. And that's  given them the ability to say, right,  

14:35 we want the vice president and we want him now. Jeffrey Goldberg: Nancy, inside the Pentagon,  

14:42 is there a belief that the president  will, if this fails, order troops to  

14:50 seize land around the strike, that he will  actually pull the trigger on ground troops,  

14:56 or is Kareem correct in saying that Trump has  basically just moved on from this already? 

15:01 Nancy Youssef: Well, we've gotten mixed  messages about it. I mean, General Caine  

15:04 and his presentation kind of gave a list of  all the strikes and all the way down to how  

15:08 much coffee was consumed during this war, sort of  signaling through the statistics he was providing  

15:13 that we're at the end of this, not in the middle  of it. And then a day later, the president says,  

15:19 we've got our resources there, we've got all  these great weapons we're going to load on if  

15:23 we need to. So, there's not a very clear message. I will say though, there are logistical challenges  

15:30 that come with it. United States expended a  tremendous amount of munitions, particularly  

15:34 in air defense, throughout this war, and that is a  factor in terms of thinking about how you operate  

15:40 militarily. The USS Gerald Ford, the aircraft  carrier, damaged, its crew's been out for almost  

15:46 ten months, headed towards potentially an 11th  month deployment. They were supposed to be home  

15:50 by Christmas. There's a huge amount of aircraft  in the region right now. And so keeping a force  

15:57 there comes at a cost to the United States. Going back in comes at a cost to the United  

16:02 States. And I would add, it's not clear how  doing more of the same kinds of strikes leads  

16:08 to a different outcome. Because what we saw is  an Iranian strategy of saying if we can just  

16:13 endure these strikes, we can outlast  the patience of the American politic. 

16:18 Jeffrey Goldberg: Gillian, give us the view from  London. The normally very careful prime minister  

16:23 has expressed to high degree of frustration based  on its economic pressure that this is causing  

16:30 frustration about the president. Give us the  view of Trump at the moment inside not only the  

16:40 pulse of power in London, but on the continent. Gillian Tett: Well, I think extreme frustration  

16:44 would be the best way of explaining  it, because there's a recognition,  

16:47 as one senior British official said the other  day, that the Iranians understand the Americans  

16:53 much better than the Americans understand  the Iranians. And that's an imbalance,  

16:57 which is critical right now. President Trump  cannot understand how a nation cannot fight just  

17:02 for money, that is well beyond money, that's a  key point. And that's one of the biggest problems. 

17:06 But there's also a sense that in Europe  as a whole, they're going through the  

17:11 five stages of grief about the rupturing of  the transatlantic alliance. I think they've  

17:16 gone beyond the shock and denial and that even  the bargaining into some inching towards some  

17:21 kind of exceptions about how they remake NATO. And in the U.K., they're trying to work out,  

17:26 you know what all this means. Are they  going to get closer to the European Union,  

17:30 which is certainly what Keir Starmer has  indicated, or will they try and maintain  

17:34 some form of bridge with Trump or not? One of the very interesting things that's  

17:39 got almost no attention to-date is that, behind  the scenes, the British have been playing quite  

17:43 an interesting role, not just in Ukraine, but  also in the region, Strait of Hormuz. Because  

17:49 of British had been so involved in Ukraine in the  drone side, they have been the ones linking up a  

17:55 lot of the Ukrainian drone experts with the  Gulf leaders who actually want some support  

18:00 on that. And that's really a very significant  way they've been helping behind the scenes. 

18:04 But without the Americans, by the way, another  area is the British have very strong capabilities  

18:08 in minesweeping that arguably they're some  of the best in the world, if not better than  

18:12 America. Because guess what? Britain's an island.  We care about this. I'm both American and British. 

18:18 So, again, they are trying to create this  coalition of the willing right now that  

18:22 will go ahead and help to try and break the  deadlock in Hormuz, even if NATO doesn't move.  

18:28 But it's a very difficult juggling act and  the signs are that Prime Minister Starmer is  

18:33 facing a lot of criticism at home around this. Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. And President Trump  

18:38 has suggested he will punish NATO members who  haven't helped in the Gulf against Iran. Give  

18:45 us the sense of the health of the relationship  between the U.S. and its various NATO partners. 

18:49 Anne Applebaum: It's a very strange moment,  because, on the one hand, actually U.S and NATO  

18:56 allies are cooperating an enormous amount. A lot  of those strikes and the flights that are going  

19:01 into the Middle East are coming from European  bases. Actually, the plane that crashed -- the  

19:05 American plane that crashed in Iran took off  from a British base. The intelligence logistics,  

19:12 everything is being done with the cooperation  of Europe. And nobody's crowing about it or  

19:16 shouting about it, but that's true. And so on the level of logistics and  

19:22 those kinds of contacts, everything  is pretty unchanged. But Trump has,  

19:26 in his frustration at being unable to be the  winner as he likes to be and being reluctant to  

19:33 blame himself or his decision, or the Russians  who are helping the Iranians. He's looking for  

19:39 scapegoats. And he's landed on Europeans. And, you know, for Europeans, you know,  

19:46 no insult is for free. I mean, they've  been insulted, they've been tariffed,  

19:50 they've been attacked. And there does come a  moment when people do start to say, you know,  

19:54 what are we getting out of this relationship? Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. 

19:59 Anne Applebaum: You know, we're still  cooperating, we're doing we're doing quite  

20:02 a lot. And with the exception of one or two  countries that have a -- Spain, for example,  

20:06 has blocked flights into the Middle East. Jeffrey Goldberg: And they might very well  

20:10 lose some American bases because of that. Anne Applebaum: And it might make the Spanish  

20:14 prime minister a lot more popular than he was.  I mean, so another thing that's happened is,  

20:17 you know, these are democracies and they  have public opinion and people don't like  

20:22 Trump and they don't like the war. And you're  beginning to see political leaders saying,  

20:26 right, I can do well out of attacking the war  and out of attacking the American president. 

20:33 Jeffrey Goldberg: Let's -- I want to get  to Hungary before we finish, but, Kareem,  

20:36 one question about -- I guess it's a psychology  question, as which we're in a period where nothing  

20:40 seems surprising anymore and yet Trump's  threat to annihilate Iranian civilization  

20:47 was quite shocking over the past weekend.  How was it interpreted in Iran? Did they  

20:53 understand it as a bluff or did they take it  -- they didn't obviously take it very seriously  

20:58 because they didn't seem very scared by it. Karim Sadjapour: That was a huge gift to the  

21:02 Iranian regime. Because if you remember what  got Trump into this conflict was when Iran  

21:09 was massacring its people last January. Trump  promised on nine occasions that help was on  

21:14 the way. And a lot of Iranians wanted to --  wanted him to make good on that promise. And  

21:19 to go from help is on the way to we're going to  destroy Iranian civilization in three months was  

21:25 just a propaganda gift to the regime, which has  been saying all along, this is not a war against  

21:30 Islamic Republic, it's a war against Iran. Jeffrey Goldberg: Nancy, in the Pentagon,  

21:34 quickly, did -- was there a reaction to  

21:37 that level of bellicosity? Nancy Youssef: Yes. I mean,  

21:41 that -- when it came out, there was almost a  rumor starting, like what is he talking about?  

21:45 What would Caine, the chairman, do if he was  asked to use nuclear weapons? Like just led to  

21:51 a spiraling of scenarios of possibilities  because that's not the kind of rhetoric  

21:57 that you hear from the American president.  They're used to hearing that from adversaries,  

22:00 like ISIS, not from the American leadership. Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Just listen to  

22:06 me -- listen with me for one minute to Vice  President Vance talking about -- talking in  

22:12 Hungary about the upcoming election there. J.D. Vance, U.S. Vice President: You should  

22:18 never have a foreign head of government  or a foreign head of state threatening the  

22:23 foreign -- threatening the head of government  of an allied nation. It's preposterous. 

22:28 I've also been told that the vice president of the  United States coming and saying that Viktor Orban  

22:33 is doing a good job and as a helpful statesman to  the cause of peace, that's foreign influence. But  

22:38 what's not foreign influence is when the European  Union threatens billions of dollars withheld from  

22:45 Hungary because you guys protect your borders.  That's apparently not foreign influence. 

22:50 Jeffrey Goldberg: Gillian,  what do you make of that? 

22:52 Gillian Tett: Well, it's certainly a statement  that's caused a lot of consternation across the  

22:55 European Union and the U.K., because there is  a sense that America's increasingly interfering  

23:00 with elections. And, frankly, it's a  pretty shocking statement because that  

23:04 is not what the European Union was doing. It  was linked to the corruption issues. I mean,  

23:08 the Financial Times did a big investigation into  that. And that's why funding was potentially  

23:13 being withheld. It was around corruption. And the interference or attempted interference  

23:19 in the election in Hungary has been so blatant  that I suspect perversely it may have the  

23:25 opposite reaction. And as we just heard from  Anne, European politicians are learning that  

23:30 it actually pays to be standing up to President  Trump and that makes them more, not less popular. 

23:34 Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. And you're an expert  on, among other things, Hungarian politics,  

23:38 someone has to do it. I'll give you  the last word on this. That statement,  

23:46 it was fairly remarkable in many respects,  including the idea that the vice president is  

23:52 in Hungary nearly campaigning with Viktor Orban. Anne Applebaum: Well, he went to a campaign rally. 

23:58 Jeffrey Goldberg: He was literally almost standing  there. And then he's talking about the absurdity  

24:03 of foreign interference, how bad a foreign  interference is. What did you make of that and  

24:08 how is that going to affect the upcoming election? Anne Applebaum: It was stunning hypocrisy,  

24:12 actually stunning, you know, that he would start  talking about the E.U. interfering, which is  

24:16 baseless and untrue, even while he's interfering.  And it's all in the cause of the leader in Europe,  

24:23 who is the most pro-Russian, who has worked  -- who has also worked closely with China,  

24:28 who was helping out Iran, in fact, at an earlier  stage. You know, this is a country that has worked  

24:34 against U.S. security interests, against European  security interests for, you know, years and years  

24:40 now. It's a leader who has occupied, you know, the  -- taken over the state in an illiberal way. You  

24:50 know, why is United States supporting Hungary? Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Well, we'll be talking  

24:55 about this next week, I think. But we are  going to have to leave it there for now. I  

24:59 want to thank our guests for joining me, and  I want to thank you at home for watching us. 

25:03 For more on what China has learned from  the Iran War, please visit theatlantic.com. 

25:08 I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Goodnight from Washington.