Jeffrey Price: Foreign Policy expert on Trump's ultimatum threats of 'hell'

US President Donald Trump has issued threats to Iran in an R-rated speech as his ultimatum to open the Strait of Hormuz comes to an end. 

He has said he will target Iran’s critical infrastructure if the strait is not reopened before Monday.

Jeffrey Price, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, joined Andrew Dickens to chat about what to expect as this deadline rolls around.  

"President Trump is, known to be unpredictable - he's advertised, that his staff has advertised that as a virtue," Price said. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
So the US and Iran continue to trade words. The
President has issued a forty eight hour ultimatum, escalating from
his earlier ten day deadline. He's threatening to unleash all
hell if Tehran doesn't open the strait of hor news
by Monday US time. He called the Iranians crazy bastards.
Iran has so far rejected any peace deal, warning of

(00:37):
serious consequences of attack. So to talk about this, we've
got Jeffrey Price. He's a senior fellow at the Foreign
Policy Institute John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He's
with us. Good morning to you, Jeffrey, Good morning Andrew.
So we've got ultimatums, who've got threats, who've got retaliation,
and we got bad language. Is this spiraling out of control?

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Well, this is I don't want to say part for
the course, but this seems to be the direction this
conflict is going in. I mean, first I want to
say that I'm very relieved the weapons officer of that
fifteen that was shot down was rescued this morning in Washington, time.
So that was a spectacularly successful military operation. I don't

(01:18):
know how that will affect the ongoing diplomacy. It may
be that each side feels like it's gotten something in
the last day, but the escalation in rhetoric is to
me not helpful. But again, I think it was two
weeks ago I was talking to your listeners and there

(01:38):
was a two day ultimatum on the table then and
that got delayed and delayed again. So this may be
just part of the negotiating tactics.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
That's the thing about deadlines. I mean, there a didline.
What happens when that deadline passes? Will anything happen? Or
is this empty woods?

Speaker 3 (01:56):
So it's hard. It's hard to tell for sure. President
Trump is known to be unpredictable. He's advertised that, his
staff has advertised that as a virtue. We will see.
I think the problem here is that the point, particularly
if you look at what President Trump has talked about,

(02:16):
the point is not to hit civilian targets or targets
which will cause civilian suffering. The point is one to
degrade Eron's military capability, but two to change the regime's behavior.
And the problem with you runian regime is you saw
them kill thirty thousand of their own people who are
in protests in January. It's just not clear to me

(02:37):
that hitting this kind of infrastructure is going to get
the result that we need. And what Trump is looking
at now is now the objective of opening the straits
of horror moves. If I were advising him, I would say,
it's not so certain that hitting these targets will achieve
the intended result of opening the straits of horror moves
to traffic.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
Iran is talking about turning the region into hell if
this happens. I mean, how good is the military capacity
have They've been hit pretty hard over the last five weeks.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Well, toe to toe, the United States can clearly take
them down in any particular confrontation. The problem is that
is it even so they have the ability to create
havoc economically, they have the ability to hit, as they've demonstrated,
all sorts of facilities in countries across the Arabian golf

(03:28):
there so they have the ability to do a lot
of damage, particularly economically, and they've already demonstrated that they
can effectively close the straits of horror Moves, which now
becomes a new choke point and a new bargaining chip
in this process.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
So, of course prisident Trump is now looking for an
extra two hundred billion dollars in defense spending from Senate,
specifically for Iran, on top of the one point seven
trillion record budget that he's already got. So it suggests
he's got enough kit to keep fighting for quite some time.
Some suggest that the President has been making all of
this up on the fly. Do you subscribe to that

(04:03):
or do you subscribe to the idea that he does
have a grand plan but he's keeping it hidden with
all these swilling positions.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Well, if he has a grand plan, he could do
a better job of articulating it, because he has put
out a whole different number of justifications for the operation.
I mean, two things are clear. One is that they
the US military has done a spectacular job. They have
trained for these kinds of missions and they're executing them
in a very impressive way. But the political leadership is

(04:32):
struggling to articulate exactly what the endgame is. And the
problem is that the enemy gets a vote and the
Iranians have the ability to change the calculus. I mean,
one of the things that you didn't see so prominently
at the beginning of this operation, which you do see
now is the ability of Iran to control or close
the Straits of Hormuz, which creates a whole nother objective.

(04:55):
So I think it's going to be a little bit
of time before we can close this particular conflict.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
That's unfortunately, jeff The Straits of Hormws was always the
weapon of mass destruction and not the nuclear weapons, and
now we're seeing it come out to play. And I
thank you so much for your time today. That is
Jeffrey Price from the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
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