June 26, 2025 • 41 mins
Middle East correspondent for The Economist Gregg Carlstrom joins Matt to discuss the on-going conflict between Iran and the United States, how it will impact the average American and much more.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is Interrupted by Matt Jones on news radio weight
forty WJS.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Now Here's Matt Jones. Wek everybody.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
It is episode eight of the Matt Jones Show, which
now has a newer name. We've decided to make this
show called Interrupted by Matt Jones. It was suggested a
lot because apparently people say I interrupt much when I
do an interview. Here later on you can listen and
decide if I interrupt. I think I probably do, but
(00:33):
I like the name of it. You guys have been
great supporters of it so far. If you're hearing this
for the first time, go and subscribe. We have had
everybody on, from sports people to political people, and we
will have a lot more. It's been a lot of
fun today. You know, the news in the last week
has been all over the place, and I think it's
(00:54):
easy sometimes for people to not really know what's going
on when it comes to these overseas things. I think
unfortunately we've gotten to the point that all political news
is seen through the construct of do you like Donald
Trump or not. That's really unhelpful because you can like
(01:17):
Donald Trump and disagree with things he does, or you
can dislike him and think some of the things he
does can still be positive, and I think that gets
forgotten a lot. But in order to have your own opinions,
you actually have to know what's going on. And I
don't know about a lot of people listening, but I
probably know less about the Middle East than just about
(01:39):
anything in life. When I was growing up, you learn
about American history, you might even learn European history. There's
really the rest of the world is kind of unknown
to a lot of Americans. I studied Russian politics when
I was in college, and I got to know Russia
(02:01):
pretty well. As I got older, I tried to read
about Asia, but there's still Africa, and the Middle East
is something I just don't know a ton about. But
the Middle East is in the news all the time.
You hear all the names of the countries, but you
don't really understand, at least I don't all of the
history and the background and why things are how they are.
(02:25):
So with all that's happened with Iran and Israel, our
decisions to bomb there, obviously, you can't have gone anywhere
without hearing about Israel and Palestine. I have found myself
keep trying to keep up with it, having opinions, but
also feeling a little uneducated about those opinions because I
(02:48):
don't really know the history of it very well, and
I suspect that there's a lot of you all that
are very similar in that regard. So I decided I'm
going to bring somebody on who can talk about what's
going on but also kind of give it some context.
I was talking to a person who was worried that
(03:10):
the world was going to end, and they asked me
like a very simple question. They said, so, why do
Iran and Israel hate each other? And I went, I
don't really know, Actually I should. I've just always assumed
my entire life that they do. But why do they?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Right?
Speaker 3 (03:32):
I know that Iran had a revolution in nineteen seventy nine,
but I don't really know the history of that, and
I don't know how that affects Israel. So I decide
to bring on someone who could help with all that. So,
as many of you know, I'm a dork and I
read the Economist sometimes in Reds games. If you're watching
this on YouTube, I have a Red sat on. So
(03:53):
imagine me sitting at a twenty twenty two Reds baseball
game when they stink reading The Economist. It's a dorky picture,
but that's what I do. And I saw Greg Carlstrom
as a reporter that covers the Middle East.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Saw him.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
He's got great hair, like not Billy level hair, but
he's got like great hair. And so I thought we'd
have him bond to kind of do all that. And
so for the first time ever, we're gonna talk to Greg.
So let's welcome me, all right. So, in this complicated issue,
I decided to bring on somebody that knows more about
it than a random guy in Kentucky, and so I
(04:29):
brought an expert, Greg Carlstrom. He is the Middle East
correspondent for The Economists. That's one of the magazines that
I will take to Cincinnati Reds games and read during
it and then get made fun of for taking a
magazine to a baseball game. Greg is in Dubai. Before
I ask you a serious question, never been to Dubai.
Everyone says, once you go to Dubai, you won't want
(04:52):
to live anywhere else.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Is that true or false?
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I'm not sure it's true. Honestly, for a few years,
it's true. For a few years. It's very easy, it's very.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
Comfortable at a certain point.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
You know, it's one hundred and twenty degrees outside right now,
So at a certain point, just for that reason, you
might want to go somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, well, okay, fair enough. I can appreciate that. I hear.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Though it has everything, at some point I'll end up there. Greg,
you have been in a Middle East course bot it
for long time, written books on the area. So I
want to ask you. I want to approach this like
my average listener, which is when I was growing up.
I know, I feel like I'm educated about a lot
of things, but I know the Middle East less than anything,
(05:33):
because I don't think it's taught at least where I
grew up in sort of Middle America.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
So let's start with this.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
This is going to sound like a stupid question, but
I actually think it's what a lot of people would
would have Iran in Israel as a starting point.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Why don't they get along?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Just what is the base reason this is such a
long term conflict If you were to say.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
I mean, it's a good question, and it's a question
that honestly a lot of people in Iran have been
asking of late. They're not natural enemies, right, These are
countries that are, you know, a thousand miles away from
each other. They don't share a border, they don't have
a territorial dispute. It's not like Israel and the Palestinians,
where there is a dispute over land, over who owns
(06:19):
what bit of that land, or even countries like Lebanon
and Syria that border Israel, where you know they've invaded
each other and they fought wars over the years. You
understand why they're enemies Iran. There's no natural dispute there.
And in fact, until nineteen seventy nine, Israel and Iran
were not enemies. Actually they had a pretty close relationship,
(06:42):
Israel and Iran. They sold weapons to one another, Israel
bought oil from Iran. What changed was in nineteen seventy nine,
the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That's when the Shah, the monarch,
the king who had ruled previously, was overthrown by Iyeto
la Chromeni, who of course famously, you know, in America,
(07:04):
everybody's going to know the emness crisis, the hostage crisis.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
In nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
I always heard you, and you tell me if I'm wrong.
The Shah was that an American place leader. That's what
people say. Is that true?
Speaker 1 (07:18):
So there was a essentially a coup in nineteen fifty
three that was organized by the CIA. Okay, a guy
named Kermit Roosevelt who worked for the CIA.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Working together with the British.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
There was a whole dispute involving BP, the oil company
and their rights to oil in Iran and the royalties
they would receive from it. And so there was a
very popular Iranian prime minister who basically wanted Iran to
get more money from Iran's own oil. The British didn't
like this prime minister because it would have meant less
(07:50):
money for them, and so they, working together with the CIA,
overthrew this prime minister and that has been you know
that after that Obviously that was a source of anger
in Ira and that was something that many Iranians blamed
the US for.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
Rightly, they were angry at the US.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
And you can sort of draw a line from that
coup to the Islamic Revolution in nineteen seventy nine, which
brought this religious clerical.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Regime to power that's still in power today.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
And that was the percentage of Iranians.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Do you think support like I often wonder because people
would say, well, Americans think this, and they don't. And
I don't know if they realized that fifty percent of
America does not agree with a lot of what Trump says.
What percentage of Iranians do you think support the regime
that is in place now?
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Listen?
Speaker 1 (08:39):
It's really hard to generalize, right, especially because it's not
a country where.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
You can pull people about this.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
You can't call people up on the phone and ask
them do you support the regime or not. People are
not going to be honest because they're afraid of who's listening.
But I think what's become clear, you know, not just
over the past few years, but for probably about fifteen
twenty years now, is that the regime is not popular
with many your audience. There has been wave after wave
after wave of popular protest. You had in two thousand
(09:09):
and nine what was called the Green Revolution. It was
a protest movement over a stolen election, a rigged election.
The regime smashed that, very brutally quashed those protests. You
had a movement a few years ago, back in twenty
twenty two, that started after a young woman was arrested
by the police, taken to a police station for wearing
(09:30):
what they call improper.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Jab or hair was showing.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Basically, she was arrested and she died.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
She was killed by the police.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Her murder started a mass protest movement across the country. Again,
the regime brutally crushed that protest movement. This has been
going on for many years. There is deep, deep anger
at the regime for the religious rules that it imposes
on people, for the way it has mismanaged the economy,
for all sorts of other things. People obviously they don't
(10:00):
have an alternative. It's not really a democratic system. But
you know, we've seen again sort of wave after wave
of popular protests.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
A lot of what we hear is that then when
the Islamic fundamentalists took over, that they had sort of
a get Israel out of the Middle East? Is that true?
Is that really where it starts is then Iran is
almost becomes an aggressor towards Israel or do you see
it a different way?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, I mean they made that a pillar of this
new regime. Right, hostility towards Israel, hostility towards America, hostility
towards the West. That is part of the like the
core identity of this regime. You can't separate it from
the Islamic Republic. And so what did they start doing.
They started arming and funding militias across the Middle East,
(10:53):
like Hezballah in Lebanon, which went on to fight several
wars against Israel. They supported Hannah in Gaza, various other
groups in the region. And they started building both a
missile program to build missiles that had the capability to
reach Israel, as we've seen over the past two weeks,
and building a nuclear program that sort of slowly, slowly,
(11:15):
slowly was moving towards being able to build a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
I think it's hard in America. Anytime Trump gets involved
in anything is it becomes a referendum on him and
not a referendum on the issue itself. So I do
my best to always see the other side of stories.
I have a hard time seeing the quote unquote other
side of Iranian's leadership. You have just said to me death.
(11:43):
They sort of have the death to America, death to Israel.
That their people are brutally, you know, repressed, and I've
heard of many atrocities, you know, funded hes Bliss, funded Hamas.
Is there anything redeemable about group or is it just
one of these things that objectively the world would be
(12:03):
better off if they were not in charge of the country.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Listen, I think objectively the world would be better off,
and I think many many Iranians feel that way. I mean,
it's not just my view or your view, that is
the view of many Iranians. I think the question is
just how do you get there? Yes, and how messy
does it get sort of on the way there. And
the concern for many people in Iran is that, Okay,
I want the regime gone. I want a more open,
(12:30):
more representative political system that doesn't impose all of these
restrictions on me.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
But what is that system. There's not really an.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Organized political opposition inside of Iran or outside of Iran,
so people are nervous that if you try to bring
down the regime there's going to be chaos like we saw,
like we saw in Iraq in two thousand and three,
like we've seen in Libya, like we've seen in so
many places across the region.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
That's the fear.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Again, even for Iranians who really hate the regime, that's the.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
Fear they have.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Okay, So, for as long as I can remember, there
was talk about iron trying to get a nuclear weapon,
trying to create nuclear level attacks. Obama signed an accord
that was a treaty of some sort, again as objectively
as possible. Was it working and was it accomplishing? I
(13:22):
know Trump pulled out of it, but before that, was
that something that the world considered to be working.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
It was working and that you know, that's the assessment
of everybody who signed that treaty, including the United States.
You know, every assessment that the State Department or US
intelligence agencies had before Trump pulled out was that it
was doing what it was supposed to do, which was
to limit how much uranium biron could enrich and to
(13:51):
what level biron could enrich it. So you need to
enrich it to ninety percent purity to have something that
you can use to make a nuclear bomb. The JCPOA
as it was called, that nuclear agreement, limited or on
to three point sixty seven percent purity, which is what
you need for a nuclear reactor for civilian uses nuclear power,
(14:13):
and every few months. The UN's Nuclear Agency, which is
very well regarded. It's one of the few bits of
the UN that is very well regarded and very technocratic
and does its job. Well, they would go in, they
would inspect Uron's nuclear facilities. They would report on exactly
how much uranium it had and how far it was enriched.
And Iran was complying with the deal. Now, the criticism
(14:34):
of the deal was that it didn't do a lot
of other things right. It didn't put limits on some
of the other parts of research that you would do
if you were looking to eventually build a bomb. It
didn't limit those enough. It allowed her on to keep
developing new centrifuges, which are the machines that you use
to spin the uranium really fast to enrich it. There
(14:56):
were some valid criticisms of the deal that way. It
also didn't limit at all Iran's missile program or its
support for proxies for militias in the Middle East. And
that's why a lot of countries in this region, countries
like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, didn't like the deal
because it didn't limit this other stuff.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
But was it doing what it was supposed to do,
limiting their nuclear program. It was until Trump withdrew from it.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Talking to Greg Costume, middle East correspondent for the Economists. Okay,
so Trump pulls out of it. Explain to me how
we get to the point in twenty twenty five where
Israel believes it is now time to take action, let's say,
before Trump gets involved with the initial attacks, etc. Was
(15:44):
was there a triggering point or was it just they
were waiting for the right moment.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
So what happens is after Trump withdraws from the deal
in twenty eighteen, Iran starts violating parts of the deal.
They say, well, America's out of it, we're going to
get out of it as well. So they start enriching
uranium too higher levels. Eventually they enrich it to sixty percent,
which is very close to weapons grade and doesn't have
(16:09):
any civilian use. If you're at sixty the only thing
you can do with.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
That is enrich it a bit further to ninety and
then use that.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Nobody disputes that right like they did that.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
They did that. I mean again the UN.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
There are reports where the UN has gone in and
counted up how much of that uranium there is, and
they had about nine hundred pounds of it enriched to
that level, which is enough that if you enrich it
a little further, you can make ten nuclear bombs with
that amount.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Of enriched uranium.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
That's all documented, so they're doing that. The Israelis say
they have intelligence that Iran was also working on some
of the other stuff that you have to do to
make a bomb, the triggering mechanisms, for example, that cause
that uranium to actually explode to start a fissile reaction.
That is contested a bit. The Israelis say they have
that intelligence, they haven't shared it in public, they have
(16:57):
shared it with their allies, and there are some conflicting
assessments even within the US about sort of how urgent
that threat was.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
But they were gabbered saying it's not is that kind
of where that comes from?
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Exactly exactly Tulsa Gabbard, I think it was back in March.
I was testifying before Congress and she said, you know, basically,
Iran is still about a year away from being able
to make a bomb if they decided to. The Israeli
assessment was that if they decided to make one, they could.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Have done so in a matter of weeks.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
So the timeline was disputed, but nobody was disputing that
Iran was continually making progress towards being able to make
a bomb. It was just a question of you know,
when do they make the political decision to actually take
that last step and put it all together.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Okay, so that's that's helpful. Do you so Israel decides
to make an attack? Now I want to go to
Israel for a second. With net and Yahoo, that's a
figure most Americans. You say, hey, name a leader of
a four country, they're going to be able to name,
like Putin, Kim Jong un, and then probably Netta, who's
very obviously, very well known. I'll ask you the same
(18:07):
question about him. I did the person the iotolin in
in Iran? How popular is he in Israel? I mean
he is all most of us in America. No, as
an Israeli leader? Is he very popular there? Or is
he a Trump like figure there?
Speaker 1 (18:25):
He's a very unpopular figure. I wouldn't even say he's
a Trump like figure. He's probably Trump at least I
ever done.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
He's not very popular.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I mean it's funny because I think he's he's very
popular in America. I think if nothing he moved to America,
you know, he could he could easily win the Senate
seat in Florida or something. But in Israel he's not.
And I think there's there's a few main reasons why.
One is that he's just been in power for a
long time. His first term in office was in the
nineteen nineties, and then he's basically been in power almost
(18:58):
uninterrupted now since two thousand and nine, decade and a half.
I think anybody gets a little sick of their leaders
after that long. But I think two other things that
you know, particular things.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
One is that he's a very divisive politician.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Right, He's very good at sort of finding schisms within
Israeli society, playing secular people off religious people, playing people
who live in the big cities off of people who
live in the peripheral areas. He's very good at playing
on that and sort of exacerbating the divisions in Israeli society.
(19:33):
And then I think the most recent thing is he
was the Prime Minister on October seventh, Right, he was
the man in charge when Israel suffered the worst massacre
in its history, the biggest security lapse in fifty years.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
He presided over that, and he.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Hasn't really taken responsibility for what happened on that day
and for all of the failures that led up to it.
The Army Chief, the guy who was in charge of
the army on that day, he's resigned. The heads of
Israel's security services either have resigned or they've promised once
the war is over, they're going to resign. Nathanielle hasn't
done that. He's blocked efforts to set up a commission
(20:11):
of inquiry to investigate what happened. He's the only person
in Israel who acts as if I had.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Nothing to do with this.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
I was running the country, but I had nothing to
do with this.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
And help me understand some of the Israeli like so
on September eleventh, when America was attacked, America for a
little short period of time rallied around George Wish. There
wasn't the why is it his fault? There was like hey,
I mean he had ninety percent approval for a little
while before. Why why was you think that that went
(20:44):
more blame in Israel whereas we were more kind of
rally around the flag, rally around the leader.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
I think some of it was, you know, George W.
Bush at that point, he'd been the president for what
about eight months since he that's inaugurated. You know, imagine
Bush had been in power for fifteen years when happened
he wouldn't be able to say, well, you know, I
didn't see the intelligence, or you know, I couldn't have
seen this coming. He could plausibly say that in two
(21:11):
thousand and one, but Methanelle couldn't say that. And Netaniell
made it a policy for many, many years to keep
Hamas in power in Gaza, to allow Hamas to hold
power there, because he thought that was useful to have
the Palestinians divided. Where you have, you know, this extremist
group running Gaza and then a different government running the
West Bank. Sort of divide and rule, keep the Palestinian split,
(21:34):
keep them weak. That was Nethaniello's policy. It obviously blew
up in his face, blew up in Israeli's faces, led
to this massacre. So there's a specific reason too, why
why people hold Hi accountable because he's part of why
Hamas was there.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
All right, So the attack occurs, Israel thinks Iran is
about to have the weapon. The Americans getting involved. We've
heard separate things in America about some of the administration,
for some against it. At some point Trump makes the
decision to be involved. There's a lot of people who
do what I do that we are his fans who
were against it. Now a lot of the Republicans have
(22:12):
kind of rallied for it, but it's still sort of
an unpopular decision in a lot of America. What do
you think was the thing that made from what you
hear in your reporting, that made the Trump administration decide,
or at least Trump, yes, we're getting involved. Critics would say,
we do what Israel says. Do you agree with that
or is there something else?
Speaker 1 (22:34):
I think if I had the point to one thing,
I point the Fox News, honestly, I would say yeah.
I mean my understanding of it was that on Thursday
when Trump sort of gave the final go ahead for
Israel June twelfth, the day before the war started, Trump
gave Israel the final go ahead to launch its war
(22:55):
in there. He had some reservations about it. I think
he wasn't sure. You know this, Nathaniel Guy, I don't
entirely trust him. I don't know if this is going
to go well. But he gives Israel his blessing to
do it. He wakes up Friday morning, June thirteenth, and
he seems thirty morning.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, they were it was very you know, did he
want credit. Is that part of you want to be part.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Of the win.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
I think it was.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I mean everyone is saying, you know, Israel has killed
the top leadership of the Iranian army, they have neutralized
Iran's air defense's spectacular success. And suddenly the messaging from
President Trump starts to change. He's much more supportive of it.
He almost makes out like this whole thing was my idea.
And I think over the coming days he warms to
(23:38):
the idea of an American strike on Iran, even though,
as you said, so many people in his own coalition,
in his own base were against that. You know, Tucker
Carlson was against that, Steve Bannon was against that. Very
high profile people in Trump world were against it. But
I think his calculation was this is going well, and
if we can do this in a limited way, I
(23:59):
can those people along.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yeah, and he brought and a lot of them did
not all of them. But it got really popular after
he did it, more than it was before. Okay, So
now I guess the question is did it work? He
said initially universal success. Yesterday there were some leaks that
it didn't work. Interesting enough, I heard one senator say,
(24:25):
these leaks are awful, We're gonna have to find them.
And they're also false, which I find in interesting dichotomy.
How are they both leaks and false?
Speaker 2 (24:33):
What do you think? I mean, what are you hearing?
Did it work?
Speaker 3 (24:36):
Did they get rid of Ron's ability to produce nuclear weapon?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
We don't know, I think is the honest answer to that.
I mean, I think when Trump initially came out, you know,
sort of moments after this happened, and said we've obliterated
Eiron's nuclear program, that was premature. There was no real
assessment of the damage. At the same time, this leak
report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, it's one preliminary report
(25:04):
from one intelligence agency, and it's a bunch of them, exactly,
there's more than a dozen of them. This is just
one and they mark it as low confidence, which means
the people who are writing this assessment don't really believe it.
They don't have enough information yet to say confidently this
is what happened. They're saying, based on some sketchy, you know,
(25:25):
satellite imagery and a few other things that we've heard,
maybe this happened, but we don't have confidence. So I
wouldn't place much stock in that either. I think The
reality is it's very hard to assess from satellite photos
looking down at what happened to a facility that's, you know,
hundreds of feet underground.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
We don't know exactly what happened.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
The assessments are going to take weeks, and we may
not have an independent picture of what happened unless the
UNS Nuclear Agency is able to go in and inspect
these facilities again, which it did on a regular basis
before the war. If they're allowed to go back in,
they might be able to tell us, you know, this
is actually what happened. But otherwise it gets very political.
Right Trump wants everyone to think that this was a
(26:09):
swimming success. He has critics who want everyone to think
that this was a complete failure, and I wouldn't place
much stock in what any of them have to say
right now.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah, I kind of agree with that.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Okay, so we're talking to Greg Costum, middle East reporter
for the Economists. Let me, I'm going to ask you
to give me both like best possible and worst possible scenario.
Every single person I talk to about this iron strike
is I don't care if they were for it or
adamantly against it, is worried about okay, but what's next? Like,
(26:41):
even the people for it are very nervous about what's next.
So give me greg best case scenario. If you're only
looking at American interest, what's the best case scenario if
what's happens next? And then on the other side, looking
at American interest or even world interest, what's the worst
(27:01):
case scenario? So what are the range of possible outcomes
of what's next?
Speaker 4 (27:07):
So?
Speaker 1 (27:07):
I think best case scenario from an American perspective is
you want this to be over, right, you want this
to be a one off strike that doesn't require any
more American military involvement. I think there's not a whole
lot that we can agree on as a country at
this point, but probably one thing is that we don't
want to do any more sort of forever wars in
the Middle East. Right, So how do you get there?
(27:28):
The way that you get there at this point is
with a deal. You want to have some kind of
agreement with or on a much stronger version of that
original nuclear agreement where they agree to not just limit,
but I think give up parts of their nuclear program.
Parts of it probably have already been destroyed, either by
American strikes or Israeli strikes, so there's almost less to
(27:50):
negotiate over. Now, maybe it's easier to negotiate that deal,
but you want them to give up bits of what's
left and to impose very tight restrictions on their ability
to try and rebuild that program. And if they do that,
they get some relief from economic sanctions, they get some benefits,
they get to be not so isolated in return. If
you do that, then I think you don't have to
(28:11):
worry about future conflict. Then you have an agreement that
Iran you would hope would abide by now because they
don't want to go through this experience of getting attacked anymore.
If Donald Trump is the one who makes the agreement,
I think it's likely to be longer lasting because the
Republican Party is not going to oppose it the way
they did the original agreement that Barack Obama signed back
(28:34):
in twenty fifteen. It'll have more bipartisan support. And if
that holds, hopefully you take the issue of Iran's nuclear
program off the table and we don't have to deal
with this again. That's I think the best case outcome here, all.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Right, So worst case outcome, I mean, I remember hearing
people worried, Oh, no, Iran could attack economic ships, they
could close that canal. I mean they they probably can't
shoot weapons that can reach anywhere close to us, but
they could attack one of our bases.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Are those things at all likely?
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Are they just doomsday or scenarios or the fact that
they really haven't done anything yet suggest that's not going
to happen.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
I think they haven't been too likely yet, but there's
a point at which they start to become likely, right, So,
I think the worst case scenario is that Iran doesn't
want to negotiate a deal. They don't emerge from this
war intimidated. They don't emerge, yeah, you know, they emerge thinking, actually,
you know what, the only way we prevent this from
happening in the future we need to build a nuclear bomb.
(29:38):
Because if we have a nuclear bomb, we can deter Israel,
we can deter America. Nobody's going to attack us if
we go nuclear.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
So they start.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Trying to rebuild their program. America then gets drawn into
it's not going to be sort of Iraq in two
thousand and three. I don't think the fear is a
big invasion with tens of thousands of troops coming in,
but it's something more like Iraq in the nineties, where
America had a no fly zone, America periodically was carrying
out bombing raids. America was trying to contain Saddam Hussein
(30:09):
z Iraq in the nineteen nineties. Maybe it turns into
something like that, an open ended conflict with Iran. Iran
at that point starts doing some of this crazier stuff
in retaliation. They can attack oil fields in Saudi Arabia,
which they've done before. They can attack cities like Dubai
or Doha in the Gulf. They can attack American bases.
(30:30):
Maybe they start thinking about blocking the Strait of horm
Moves in the Persian Gulf, which is the waterway that
a lot of the world's oil has to go through.
If they do that, oil prices shoot up. And again
they've done that before, they did that in the nineteen eighties.
So maybe they start doing these things that have real
consequences for America and for America's allies in the region,
(30:51):
and then America has to deal with that. Right if
Iran tries to blockade the Strait, the US Navy is
going to be the one that has to go and
try to reopen it and this becomes a bigger.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
All right, last question on Iran, and then I want
to go quickly before I have to let you go
to the gaza situation. Do you if I'm an everyday
American and I'm driving around on whas or listening on
podcasts and thinking, how is this going to affect my
life beyond people yelling at each other on television, do
you think there is a way it will affect their
(31:22):
life in the short term or no.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Probably not.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
There is There is no risk that you know, Iran
is going to attack to the US. It doesn't have
capabilities to do that. That's not something that anybody has
to worry about. I think the way it affects people's
lives is only if this becomes a bigger conflict in
the Middle East, because that means oil prices go up,
and that means driving around gets more expensive.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
That's so that's the way.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Maybe something happens that causes oil prices to go up.
That's that's kind of the most immediate worry for people
for Americans.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
I think it is. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Okay, so let me switch really quick to the Israel
Palestine Gaza. You know, the I think the way people
feel about this is a lot what news ends up
on their TikTok feeds or on their like I mean
literally what gets focused on sometimes I think drives the narrative.
It's been fascinating to me to watch how much a
(32:22):
cause that's existed for a long time about you know,
free Palestine, Gaza, all of that has become a more
bipartisan issue in recent because of the Joe Rogan's, Theo Vonn's,
Tucker Carlson's, et cetera. It looks to me on the outside,
as someone who knows very little about it, that whatever
(32:43):
people think about the October seventh, well, how what could
you think except it was awful? But about the Palestinian
situation that what I have seen about the food blockades
and various things or blockades with Gaza, it seems off
and not just awful from a humanitarian standpoint, which maybe
(33:03):
it's always been, but awful from a how could we
let this happen? How can this keep happening to these
people and the world not step up? Am I missing something?
Or is that a pretty universal view? In your point
from people who really know what's going on?
Speaker 1 (33:21):
I'd say it's universal. Really, I mean, I'm struck by
exactly what you're saying. In America, where this used to
be a much more divisive issue and people were either
staunchly pro Israel or staunchly pro Palestinian. But even a
lot of the pro Israel people are not a lot,
but some of the pro Israel people that I know
in the US who are revolted by what Israel is doing,
(33:44):
by its conduct in Gaza lately. That's the view there,
that's the view in the Middle East. I mean, there
are countries in this region. There are populations in this
region that are actually more pro Israel than you would think.
Right in places like the UAE and places like Lebanon,
there are people that are very happy over the past
twenty months watching Israel batter Hesbela and Lebanon, watching.
Speaker 4 (34:08):
It hit Iran and weak in Iran.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
But those people too horrified by what it's doing in Gaza,
and that has actually cost Israel some of the support
that it had.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
In this region of late.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
So there's no there's no defense for it right in
the Israeli government and people who.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Does not mean stopped though. I mean, I am again,
I can't believe I'm quoting Theo Vonn because oftentimes I've
never really even been a fit. But I heard him
on with Roe Khanna, the Senator from California, and he
said he said something that I've felt, which is we
are supposed to be the good guy. And I know
that's simplistic. I know a lot of times in history
(34:47):
we haven't been the good guy, but in general America
is supposed to be a force for good. How can
we in the world not be stopping at least this
part of it, this part of not of watching kids
start like, how's the world not stopping this?
Speaker 1 (35:08):
And the thing is the world. I think what we've
really discovered over the past year and a half is
the world can't stop it.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
The Europeans, Arab States, the UN, they have all for
months and months and months now been condemning Israel, calling
for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling for more aid to
be allowed into Gaza, and the Israeli government could care
less about what any of them have to say. The
one country that would make a difference is the United States.
(35:37):
I mean, we are Israel's strongest supporter, We are the
source of Israel's weapons, Israel's military aid, Israel's diplomatic support.
If the US really put its foot down and said
you can't do this anymore, Israel would have to stop
doing it. We saw that in Iran over the past
couple of days. Donald Trump wanted to cease fire in Iran.
I'm not sure the Israeli Prime Minister was ready for
(35:59):
one yet, but Trump told him it.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
Was happening, and it happened.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
If Trump did that, or if Joe Biden before him
had done that, Israel would have changed its behavior.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Why don't they do it? Why didn't Joe Biden do it?
Why doesn't Donald Trump do it? I mean, what is
the case to allow this to keep happening? Because that's
the part. I don't care how liberal or conservative you are.
I don't understand what the case. I get Israel needing
to defend itself. I get the idea of getting rid
of Hamas. That seems like an awful organization.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
What is the case.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Why are we not stopping it? What is the rational
argument on the other side? What am I missing?
Speaker 1 (36:38):
I mean, whatever you're missing, I'm missing it too. I
haven't gotten a rational argument from people. I think, you know,
when Biden was the President speaking to some of the
people who worked for him. The sense that I got
was Joe Biden had this idea in his head of
Israel fifty years ago, right, this was still nineteen seventy three.
For Joe Biden. Israel was this plucky little country surrounded
(36:59):
by much bigger Arab enemies that was fighting an existential
war in nineteen seventy three, the Yom Kiper War. And
he never quite adjusted his mental image of Israel to
a country that is now much stronger, a country that
is now doing awful things to a population under its
control in Gaza, indefensible things, and he just he wasn't
(37:21):
willing to you know, in his mind, he has this
romantic view of Israel and he just wasn't willing to
apply pressure.
Speaker 4 (37:26):
So I think that was part of it for him.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
I think for Donald Trump, I think he's lost interest
in it lately. I think after he was elected, during
the transition between November and and January, he actually was
very engaged on Gaza. He pushed Prime Minister Natanieo to
agree to a cease fire, and that ceasefire took effect
on January nineteenth, the day before Trump was inaugurated. It
(37:51):
happened because Donald Trump pressured the Israeli government in March,
Israel abandoned that ceasefire, Nataniello decided he was leaving it,
and then.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
He was going to resume the war.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
And by then I think Trump had lost interest in
the issue. I mean, there were trade wars and tariffs
and all sorts of other things going on, and without
sustained pressure from the US, Natano did what he wanted
to do. If Trump gets interested again, if he, you know,
after the war in Iran, after the ceasefire and Iran,
if he decides, okay, I want a bigger piece in
(38:22):
the region, start by pushing the Israelis to end the
war in Gaza. Then you can start talking about, you know,
deals between maybe Israel and Syria making peace, recognizing each other,
maybe Saudi Arabia recognizing Israel. Those things start to become possible.
But Trump needs to start by by putting pressure on
the Israelis to end the war in Gaza.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
It's it's so weird to me because I'm not the
Trump fan, as people who listen to this show or
know me are, But it does seem like because he
has this unique ability to keep the Republican Party kind
of have them lockstep that if he wanted, he actually
(39:02):
could be what he always says he is, which is
this transformative peace figure in the Middle East in a
way that a Democrat never could and that maybe other
Republicans wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
He actually has a.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Unique ability to do something that very few people could do.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Do you agree with that?
Speaker 1 (39:23):
Look at what he did last month in May in
the Middle East. Right, America had been bombing the Houthis
in Yemen for about two months. Trump all of a sudden,
one day out of the blue, ends that bombing campaign.
It hasn't succeeded, right, The Houthis are still there, they're
still in power, they're still firing missiles at Israel a
few times a week. But Trump says, you know what,
(39:44):
we don't want to do this anymore.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Israel.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
You guys are on your own. You deal with the Hoothees.
If you want to, you bomb them, but you know
they're not going to hurt us anymore. So problem solved.
The Republican Party got behind that. Imagine if any other
president had said, essentially, we're leaving Israel to its own
the devices.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
You guys fight your own battles.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
It's true that would.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
Have been a huge political issue.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Then after that, Trump goes on his hostage envoy, his
envoy for hostages who are detained overseas, starts negotiating directly
with HAMAS, which is a proscribed terrorist organization in the US.
No president for decades has talked to Hamas. You're not
allowed to do that. Trump does it. He gets a
hostage released who is an American citizen Israeli dual citizen.
(40:26):
Hostage comes home again. Everybody gets behind that. If Barack
Obama or Joe Biden or anyone else had been negotiating
directly with Hamas behind the back of the Israelis, the
Republican Party would have gone ballistic. He can do these
things that you're absolutely right and know what the president
can do.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Well.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
It's a shame that it does that, but it is
a unique opportunity. Sometimes it has to be like, you know,
a Democrat that does welfare reform, or it might have
to be a Republican that one day does gun control.
Like it almost has to be somebody in the in
the in the party that they're in to do it. Greg,
thank you very much. I know you do these high
(41:05):
level interviews with people on details but sometimes I think
it's hard for the average citizen to just get the basics,
and I appreciating you dumbing it down for us here
to do.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
It not at all, And thanks for having me. It
was a pleasure.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Greg Carlstrom, middle East reporter for the Economist,
This is Interrupted by Matt Jones on news radio weight
forty WJS.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Now Here's Matt Jones. Wek everybody.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
It is episode eight of the Matt Jones Show, which
now has a newer name. We've decided to make this
show called Interrupted by Matt Jones. It was suggested a
lot because apparently people say I interrupt much when I
do an interview. Here later on you can listen and
decide if I interrupt. I think I probably do, but
(00:33):
I like the name of it. You guys have been
great supporters of it so far. If you're hearing this
for the first time, go and subscribe. We have had
everybody on, from sports people to political people, and we
will have a lot more. It's been a lot of
fun today. You know, the news in the last week
has been all over the place, and I think it's
(00:54):
easy sometimes for people to not really know what's going
on when it comes to these overseas things. I think
unfortunately we've gotten to the point that all political news
is seen through the construct of do you like Donald
Trump or not. That's really unhelpful because you can like
(01:17):
Donald Trump and disagree with things he does, or you
can dislike him and think some of the things he
does can still be positive, and I think that gets
forgotten a lot. But in order to have your own opinions,
you actually have to know what's going on. And I
don't know about a lot of people listening, but I
probably know less about the Middle East than just about
(01:39):
anything in life. When I was growing up, you learn
about American history, you might even learn European history. There's
really the rest of the world is kind of unknown
to a lot of Americans. I studied Russian politics when
I was in college, and I got to know Russia
(02:01):
pretty well. As I got older, I tried to read
about Asia, but there's still Africa, and the Middle East
is something I just don't know a ton about. But
the Middle East is in the news all the time.
You hear all the names of the countries, but you
don't really understand, at least I don't all of the
history and the background and why things are how they are.
(02:25):
So with all that's happened with Iran and Israel, our
decisions to bomb there, obviously, you can't have gone anywhere
without hearing about Israel and Palestine. I have found myself
keep trying to keep up with it, having opinions, but
also feeling a little uneducated about those opinions because I
(02:48):
don't really know the history of it very well, and
I suspect that there's a lot of you all that
are very similar in that regard. So I decided I'm
going to bring somebody on who can talk about what's
going on but also kind of give it some context.
I was talking to a person who was worried that
(03:10):
the world was going to end, and they asked me
like a very simple question. They said, so, why do
Iran and Israel hate each other? And I went, I
don't really know, Actually I should. I've just always assumed
my entire life that they do. But why do they?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Right?
Speaker 3 (03:32):
I know that Iran had a revolution in nineteen seventy nine,
but I don't really know the history of that, and
I don't know how that affects Israel. So I decide
to bring on someone who could help with all that. So,
as many of you know, I'm a dork and I
read the Economist sometimes in Reds games. If you're watching
this on YouTube, I have a Red sat on. So
(03:53):
imagine me sitting at a twenty twenty two Reds baseball
game when they stink reading The Economist. It's a dorky picture,
but that's what I do. And I saw Greg Carlstrom
as a reporter that covers the Middle East.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Saw him.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
He's got great hair, like not Billy level hair, but
he's got like great hair. And so I thought we'd
have him bond to kind of do all that. And
so for the first time ever, we're gonna talk to Greg.
So let's welcome me, all right. So, in this complicated issue,
I decided to bring on somebody that knows more about
it than a random guy in Kentucky, and so I
(04:29):
brought an expert, Greg Carlstrom. He is the Middle East
correspondent for The Economists. That's one of the magazines that
I will take to Cincinnati Reds games and read during
it and then get made fun of for taking a
magazine to a baseball game. Greg is in Dubai. Before
I ask you a serious question, never been to Dubai.
Everyone says, once you go to Dubai, you won't want
(04:52):
to live anywhere else.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Is that true or false?
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I'm not sure it's true. Honestly, for a few years,
it's true. For a few years. It's very easy, it's very.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
Comfortable at a certain point.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
You know, it's one hundred and twenty degrees outside right now,
So at a certain point, just for that reason, you
might want to go somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, well, okay, fair enough. I can appreciate that. I hear.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Though it has everything, at some point I'll end up there. Greg,
you have been in a Middle East course bot it
for long time, written books on the area. So I
want to ask you. I want to approach this like
my average listener, which is when I was growing up.
I know, I feel like I'm educated about a lot
of things, but I know the Middle East less than anything,
(05:33):
because I don't think it's taught at least where I
grew up in sort of Middle America.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
So let's start with this.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
This is going to sound like a stupid question, but
I actually think it's what a lot of people would
would have Iran in Israel as a starting point.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Why don't they get along?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Just what is the base reason this is such a
long term conflict If you were to say.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
I mean, it's a good question, and it's a question
that honestly a lot of people in Iran have been
asking of late. They're not natural enemies, right, These are
countries that are, you know, a thousand miles away from
each other. They don't share a border, they don't have
a territorial dispute. It's not like Israel and the Palestinians,
where there is a dispute over land, over who owns
(06:19):
what bit of that land, or even countries like Lebanon
and Syria that border Israel, where you know they've invaded
each other and they fought wars over the years. You
understand why they're enemies Iran. There's no natural dispute there.
And in fact, until nineteen seventy nine, Israel and Iran
were not enemies. Actually they had a pretty close relationship,
(06:42):
Israel and Iran. They sold weapons to one another, Israel
bought oil from Iran. What changed was in nineteen seventy nine,
the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That's when the Shah, the monarch,
the king who had ruled previously, was overthrown by Iyeto
la Chromeni, who of course famously, you know, in America,
(07:04):
everybody's going to know the emness crisis, the hostage crisis.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
In nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
I always heard you, and you tell me if I'm wrong.
The Shah was that an American place leader. That's what
people say. Is that true?
Speaker 1 (07:18):
So there was a essentially a coup in nineteen fifty
three that was organized by the CIA. Okay, a guy
named Kermit Roosevelt who worked for the CIA.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Working together with the British.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
There was a whole dispute involving BP, the oil company
and their rights to oil in Iran and the royalties
they would receive from it. And so there was a
very popular Iranian prime minister who basically wanted Iran to
get more money from Iran's own oil. The British didn't
like this prime minister because it would have meant less
(07:50):
money for them, and so they, working together with the CIA,
overthrew this prime minister and that has been you know
that after that Obviously that was a source of anger
in Ira and that was something that many Iranians blamed
the US for.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
Rightly, they were angry at the US.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
And you can sort of draw a line from that
coup to the Islamic Revolution in nineteen seventy nine, which
brought this religious clerical.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Regime to power that's still in power today.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
And that was the percentage of Iranians.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Do you think support like I often wonder because people
would say, well, Americans think this, and they don't. And
I don't know if they realized that fifty percent of
America does not agree with a lot of what Trump says.
What percentage of Iranians do you think support the regime
that is in place now?
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Listen?
Speaker 1 (08:39):
It's really hard to generalize, right, especially because it's not
a country where.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
You can pull people about this.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
You can't call people up on the phone and ask
them do you support the regime or not. People are
not going to be honest because they're afraid of who's listening.
But I think what's become clear, you know, not just
over the past few years, but for probably about fifteen
twenty years now, is that the regime is not popular
with many your audience. There has been wave after wave
after wave of popular protest. You had in two thousand
(09:09):
and nine what was called the Green Revolution. It was
a protest movement over a stolen election, a rigged election.
The regime smashed that, very brutally quashed those protests. You
had a movement a few years ago, back in twenty
twenty two, that started after a young woman was arrested
by the police, taken to a police station for wearing
(09:30):
what they call improper.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Jab or hair was showing.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Basically, she was arrested and she died.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
She was killed by the police.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Her murder started a mass protest movement across the country. Again,
the regime brutally crushed that protest movement. This has been
going on for many years. There is deep, deep anger
at the regime for the religious rules that it imposes
on people, for the way it has mismanaged the economy,
for all sorts of other things. People obviously they don't
(10:00):
have an alternative. It's not really a democratic system. But
you know, we've seen again sort of wave after wave
of popular protests.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
A lot of what we hear is that then when
the Islamic fundamentalists took over, that they had sort of
a get Israel out of the Middle East? Is that true?
Is that really where it starts is then Iran is
almost becomes an aggressor towards Israel or do you see
it a different way?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, I mean they made that a pillar of this
new regime. Right, hostility towards Israel, hostility towards America, hostility
towards the West. That is part of the like the
core identity of this regime. You can't separate it from
the Islamic Republic. And so what did they start doing.
They started arming and funding militias across the Middle East,
(10:53):
like Hezballah in Lebanon, which went on to fight several
wars against Israel. They supported Hannah in Gaza, various other
groups in the region. And they started building both a
missile program to build missiles that had the capability to
reach Israel, as we've seen over the past two weeks,
and building a nuclear program that sort of slowly, slowly,
(11:15):
slowly was moving towards being able to build a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
I think it's hard in America. Anytime Trump gets involved
in anything is it becomes a referendum on him and
not a referendum on the issue itself. So I do
my best to always see the other side of stories.
I have a hard time seeing the quote unquote other
side of Iranian's leadership. You have just said to me death.
(11:43):
They sort of have the death to America, death to Israel.
That their people are brutally, you know, repressed, and I've
heard of many atrocities, you know, funded hes Bliss, funded Hamas.
Is there anything redeemable about group or is it just
one of these things that objectively the world would be
(12:03):
better off if they were not in charge of the country.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Listen, I think objectively the world would be better off,
and I think many many Iranians feel that way. I mean,
it's not just my view or your view, that is
the view of many Iranians. I think the question is
just how do you get there? Yes, and how messy
does it get sort of on the way there. And
the concern for many people in Iran is that, Okay,
I want the regime gone. I want a more open,
(12:30):
more representative political system that doesn't impose all of these
restrictions on me.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
But what is that system. There's not really an.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Organized political opposition inside of Iran or outside of Iran,
so people are nervous that if you try to bring
down the regime there's going to be chaos like we saw,
like we saw in Iraq in two thousand and three,
like we've seen in Libya, like we've seen in so
many places across the region.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
That's the fear.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Again, even for Iranians who really hate the regime, that's the.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
Fear they have.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Okay, So, for as long as I can remember, there
was talk about iron trying to get a nuclear weapon,
trying to create nuclear level attacks. Obama signed an accord
that was a treaty of some sort, again as objectively
as possible. Was it working and was it accomplishing? I
(13:22):
know Trump pulled out of it, but before that, was
that something that the world considered to be working.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
It was working and that you know, that's the assessment
of everybody who signed that treaty, including the United States.
You know, every assessment that the State Department or US
intelligence agencies had before Trump pulled out was that it
was doing what it was supposed to do, which was
to limit how much uranium biron could enrich and to
(13:51):
what level biron could enrich it. So you need to
enrich it to ninety percent purity to have something that
you can use to make a nuclear bomb. The JCPOA
as it was called, that nuclear agreement, limited or on
to three point sixty seven percent purity, which is what
you need for a nuclear reactor for civilian uses nuclear power,
(14:13):
and every few months. The UN's Nuclear Agency, which is
very well regarded. It's one of the few bits of
the UN that is very well regarded and very technocratic
and does its job. Well, they would go in, they
would inspect Uron's nuclear facilities. They would report on exactly
how much uranium it had and how far it was enriched.
And Iran was complying with the deal. Now, the criticism
(14:34):
of the deal was that it didn't do a lot
of other things right. It didn't put limits on some
of the other parts of research that you would do
if you were looking to eventually build a bomb. It
didn't limit those enough. It allowed her on to keep
developing new centrifuges, which are the machines that you use
to spin the uranium really fast to enrich it. There
(14:56):
were some valid criticisms of the deal that way. It
also didn't limit at all Iran's missile program or its
support for proxies for militias in the Middle East. And
that's why a lot of countries in this region, countries
like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, didn't like the deal
because it didn't limit this other stuff.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
But was it doing what it was supposed to do,
limiting their nuclear program. It was until Trump withdrew from it.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Talking to Greg Costume, middle East correspondent for the Economists. Okay,
so Trump pulls out of it. Explain to me how
we get to the point in twenty twenty five where
Israel believes it is now time to take action, let's say,
before Trump gets involved with the initial attacks, etc. Was
(15:44):
was there a triggering point or was it just they
were waiting for the right moment.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
So what happens is after Trump withdraws from the deal
in twenty eighteen, Iran starts violating parts of the deal.
They say, well, America's out of it, we're going to
get out of it as well. So they start enriching
uranium too higher levels. Eventually they enrich it to sixty percent,
which is very close to weapons grade and doesn't have
(16:09):
any civilian use. If you're at sixty the only thing
you can do with.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
That is enrich it a bit further to ninety and
then use that.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Nobody disputes that right like they did that.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
They did that. I mean again the UN.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
There are reports where the UN has gone in and
counted up how much of that uranium there is, and
they had about nine hundred pounds of it enriched to
that level, which is enough that if you enrich it
a little further, you can make ten nuclear bombs with
that amount.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Of enriched uranium.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
That's all documented, so they're doing that. The Israelis say
they have intelligence that Iran was also working on some
of the other stuff that you have to do to
make a bomb, the triggering mechanisms, for example, that cause
that uranium to actually explode to start a fissile reaction.
That is contested a bit. The Israelis say they have
that intelligence, they haven't shared it in public, they have
(16:57):
shared it with their allies, and there are some conflicting
assessments even within the US about sort of how urgent
that threat was.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
But they were gabbered saying it's not is that kind
of where that comes from?
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Exactly exactly Tulsa Gabbard, I think it was back in March.
I was testifying before Congress and she said, you know, basically,
Iran is still about a year away from being able
to make a bomb if they decided to. The Israeli
assessment was that if they decided to make one, they could.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Have done so in a matter of weeks.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
So the timeline was disputed, but nobody was disputing that
Iran was continually making progress towards being able to make
a bomb. It was just a question of you know,
when do they make the political decision to actually take
that last step and put it all together.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Okay, so that's that's helpful. Do you so Israel decides
to make an attack? Now I want to go to
Israel for a second. With net and Yahoo, that's a
figure most Americans. You say, hey, name a leader of
a four country, they're going to be able to name,
like Putin, Kim Jong un, and then probably Netta, who's
very obviously, very well known. I'll ask you the same
(18:07):
question about him. I did the person the iotolin in
in Iran? How popular is he in Israel? I mean
he is all most of us in America. No, as
an Israeli leader? Is he very popular there? Or is
he a Trump like figure there?
Speaker 1 (18:25):
He's a very unpopular figure. I wouldn't even say he's
a Trump like figure. He's probably Trump at least I
ever done.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
He's not very popular.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I mean it's funny because I think he's he's very
popular in America. I think if nothing he moved to America,
you know, he could he could easily win the Senate
seat in Florida or something. But in Israel he's not.
And I think there's there's a few main reasons why.
One is that he's just been in power for a
long time. His first term in office was in the
nineteen nineties, and then he's basically been in power almost
(18:58):
uninterrupted now since two thousand and nine, decade and a half.
I think anybody gets a little sick of their leaders
after that long. But I think two other things that
you know, particular things.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
One is that he's a very divisive politician.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Right, He's very good at sort of finding schisms within
Israeli society, playing secular people off religious people, playing people
who live in the big cities off of people who
live in the peripheral areas. He's very good at playing
on that and sort of exacerbating the divisions in Israeli society.
(19:33):
And then I think the most recent thing is he
was the Prime Minister on October seventh, Right, he was
the man in charge when Israel suffered the worst massacre
in its history, the biggest security lapse in fifty years.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
He presided over that, and he.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Hasn't really taken responsibility for what happened on that day
and for all of the failures that led up to it.
The Army Chief, the guy who was in charge of
the army on that day, he's resigned. The heads of
Israel's security services either have resigned or they've promised once
the war is over, they're going to resign. Nathanielle hasn't
done that. He's blocked efforts to set up a commission
(20:11):
of inquiry to investigate what happened. He's the only person
in Israel who acts as if I had.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Nothing to do with this.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
I was running the country, but I had nothing to
do with this.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
And help me understand some of the Israeli like so
on September eleventh, when America was attacked, America for a
little short period of time rallied around George Wish. There
wasn't the why is it his fault? There was like hey,
I mean he had ninety percent approval for a little
while before. Why why was you think that that went
(20:44):
more blame in Israel whereas we were more kind of
rally around the flag, rally around the leader.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
I think some of it was, you know, George W.
Bush at that point, he'd been the president for what
about eight months since he that's inaugurated. You know, imagine
Bush had been in power for fifteen years when happened
he wouldn't be able to say, well, you know, I
didn't see the intelligence, or you know, I couldn't have
seen this coming. He could plausibly say that in two
(21:11):
thousand and one, but Methanelle couldn't say that. And Netaniell
made it a policy for many, many years to keep
Hamas in power in Gaza, to allow Hamas to hold
power there, because he thought that was useful to have
the Palestinians divided. Where you have, you know, this extremist
group running Gaza and then a different government running the
West Bank. Sort of divide and rule, keep the Palestinian split,
(21:34):
keep them weak. That was Nethaniello's policy. It obviously blew
up in his face, blew up in Israeli's faces, led
to this massacre. So there's a specific reason too, why
why people hold Hi accountable because he's part of why
Hamas was there.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
All right, So the attack occurs, Israel thinks Iran is
about to have the weapon. The Americans getting involved. We've
heard separate things in America about some of the administration,
for some against it. At some point Trump makes the
decision to be involved. There's a lot of people who
do what I do that we are his fans who
were against it. Now a lot of the Republicans have
(22:12):
kind of rallied for it, but it's still sort of
an unpopular decision in a lot of America. What do
you think was the thing that made from what you
hear in your reporting, that made the Trump administration decide,
or at least Trump, yes, we're getting involved. Critics would say,
we do what Israel says. Do you agree with that
or is there something else?
Speaker 1 (22:34):
I think if I had the point to one thing,
I point the Fox News, honestly, I would say yeah.
I mean my understanding of it was that on Thursday
when Trump sort of gave the final go ahead for
Israel June twelfth, the day before the war started, Trump
gave Israel the final go ahead to launch its war
(22:55):
in there. He had some reservations about it. I think
he wasn't sure. You know this, Nathaniel Guy, I don't
entirely trust him. I don't know if this is going
to go well. But he gives Israel his blessing to
do it. He wakes up Friday morning, June thirteenth, and
he seems thirty morning.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, they were it was very you know, did he
want credit. Is that part of you want to be part.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Of the win.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
I think it was.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I mean everyone is saying, you know, Israel has killed
the top leadership of the Iranian army, they have neutralized
Iran's air defense's spectacular success. And suddenly the messaging from
President Trump starts to change. He's much more supportive of it.
He almost makes out like this whole thing was my idea.
And I think over the coming days he warms to
(23:38):
the idea of an American strike on Iran, even though,
as you said, so many people in his own coalition,
in his own base were against that. You know, Tucker
Carlson was against that, Steve Bannon was against that. Very
high profile people in Trump world were against it. But
I think his calculation was this is going well, and
if we can do this in a limited way, I
(23:59):
can those people along.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yeah, and he brought and a lot of them did
not all of them. But it got really popular after
he did it, more than it was before. Okay, So
now I guess the question is did it work? He
said initially universal success. Yesterday there were some leaks that
it didn't work. Interesting enough, I heard one senator say,
(24:25):
these leaks are awful, We're gonna have to find them.
And they're also false, which I find in interesting dichotomy.
How are they both leaks and false?
Speaker 2 (24:33):
What do you think? I mean, what are you hearing?
Did it work?
Speaker 3 (24:36):
Did they get rid of Ron's ability to produce nuclear weapon?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
We don't know, I think is the honest answer to that.
I mean, I think when Trump initially came out, you know,
sort of moments after this happened, and said we've obliterated
Eiron's nuclear program, that was premature. There was no real
assessment of the damage. At the same time, this leak
report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, it's one preliminary report
(25:04):
from one intelligence agency, and it's a bunch of them, exactly,
there's more than a dozen of them. This is just
one and they mark it as low confidence, which means
the people who are writing this assessment don't really believe it.
They don't have enough information yet to say confidently this
is what happened. They're saying, based on some sketchy, you know,
(25:25):
satellite imagery and a few other things that we've heard,
maybe this happened, but we don't have confidence. So I
wouldn't place much stock in that either. I think The
reality is it's very hard to assess from satellite photos
looking down at what happened to a facility that's, you know,
hundreds of feet underground.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
We don't know exactly what happened.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
The assessments are going to take weeks, and we may
not have an independent picture of what happened unless the
UNS Nuclear Agency is able to go in and inspect
these facilities again, which it did on a regular basis
before the war. If they're allowed to go back in,
they might be able to tell us, you know, this
is actually what happened. But otherwise it gets very political.
Right Trump wants everyone to think that this was a
(26:09):
swimming success. He has critics who want everyone to think
that this was a complete failure, and I wouldn't place
much stock in what any of them have to say
right now.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah, I kind of agree with that.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Okay, so we're talking to Greg Costum, middle East reporter
for the Economists. Let me, I'm going to ask you
to give me both like best possible and worst possible scenario.
Every single person I talk to about this iron strike
is I don't care if they were for it or
adamantly against it, is worried about okay, but what's next? Like,
(26:41):
even the people for it are very nervous about what's next.
So give me greg best case scenario. If you're only
looking at American interest, what's the best case scenario if
what's happens next? And then on the other side, looking
at American interest or even world interest, what's the worst
(27:01):
case scenario? So what are the range of possible outcomes
of what's next?
Speaker 4 (27:07):
So?
Speaker 1 (27:07):
I think best case scenario from an American perspective is
you want this to be over, right, you want this
to be a one off strike that doesn't require any
more American military involvement. I think there's not a whole
lot that we can agree on as a country at
this point, but probably one thing is that we don't
want to do any more sort of forever wars in
the Middle East. Right, So how do you get there?
(27:28):
The way that you get there at this point is
with a deal. You want to have some kind of
agreement with or on a much stronger version of that
original nuclear agreement where they agree to not just limit,
but I think give up parts of their nuclear program.
Parts of it probably have already been destroyed, either by
American strikes or Israeli strikes, so there's almost less to
(27:50):
negotiate over. Now, maybe it's easier to negotiate that deal,
but you want them to give up bits of what's
left and to impose very tight restrictions on their ability
to try and rebuild that program. And if they do that,
they get some relief from economic sanctions, they get some benefits,
they get to be not so isolated in return. If
you do that, then I think you don't have to
(28:11):
worry about future conflict. Then you have an agreement that
Iran you would hope would abide by now because they
don't want to go through this experience of getting attacked anymore.
If Donald Trump is the one who makes the agreement,
I think it's likely to be longer lasting because the
Republican Party is not going to oppose it the way
they did the original agreement that Barack Obama signed back
(28:34):
in twenty fifteen. It'll have more bipartisan support. And if
that holds, hopefully you take the issue of Iran's nuclear
program off the table and we don't have to deal
with this again. That's I think the best case outcome here, all.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Right, So worst case outcome, I mean, I remember hearing
people worried, Oh, no, Iran could attack economic ships, they
could close that canal. I mean they they probably can't
shoot weapons that can reach anywhere close to us, but
they could attack one of our bases.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Are those things at all likely?
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Are they just doomsday or scenarios or the fact that
they really haven't done anything yet suggest that's not going
to happen.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
I think they haven't been too likely yet, but there's
a point at which they start to become likely, right, So,
I think the worst case scenario is that Iran doesn't
want to negotiate a deal. They don't emerge from this
war intimidated. They don't emerge, yeah, you know, they emerge thinking, actually,
you know what, the only way we prevent this from
happening in the future we need to build a nuclear bomb.
(29:38):
Because if we have a nuclear bomb, we can deter Israel,
we can deter America. Nobody's going to attack us if
we go nuclear.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
So they start.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Trying to rebuild their program. America then gets drawn into
it's not going to be sort of Iraq in two
thousand and three. I don't think the fear is a
big invasion with tens of thousands of troops coming in,
but it's something more like Iraq in the nineties, where
America had a no fly zone, America periodically was carrying
out bombing raids. America was trying to contain Saddam Hussein
(30:09):
z Iraq in the nineteen nineties. Maybe it turns into
something like that, an open ended conflict with Iran. Iran
at that point starts doing some of this crazier stuff
in retaliation. They can attack oil fields in Saudi Arabia,
which they've done before. They can attack cities like Dubai
or Doha in the Gulf. They can attack American bases.
(30:30):
Maybe they start thinking about blocking the Strait of horm
Moves in the Persian Gulf, which is the waterway that
a lot of the world's oil has to go through.
If they do that, oil prices shoot up. And again
they've done that before, they did that in the nineteen eighties.
So maybe they start doing these things that have real
consequences for America and for America's allies in the region,
(30:51):
and then America has to deal with that. Right if
Iran tries to blockade the Strait, the US Navy is
going to be the one that has to go and
try to reopen it and this becomes a bigger.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
All right, last question on Iran, and then I want
to go quickly before I have to let you go
to the gaza situation. Do you if I'm an everyday
American and I'm driving around on whas or listening on
podcasts and thinking, how is this going to affect my
life beyond people yelling at each other on television, do
you think there is a way it will affect their
(31:22):
life in the short term or no.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Probably not.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
There is There is no risk that you know, Iran
is going to attack to the US. It doesn't have
capabilities to do that. That's not something that anybody has
to worry about. I think the way it affects people's
lives is only if this becomes a bigger conflict in
the Middle East, because that means oil prices go up,
and that means driving around gets more expensive.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
That's so that's the way.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Maybe something happens that causes oil prices to go up.
That's that's kind of the most immediate worry for people
for Americans.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
I think it is. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Okay, so let me switch really quick to the Israel
Palestine Gaza. You know, the I think the way people
feel about this is a lot what news ends up
on their TikTok feeds or on their like I mean
literally what gets focused on sometimes I think drives the narrative.
It's been fascinating to me to watch how much a
(32:22):
cause that's existed for a long time about you know,
free Palestine, Gaza, all of that has become a more
bipartisan issue in recent because of the Joe Rogan's, Theo Vonn's,
Tucker Carlson's, et cetera. It looks to me on the outside,
as someone who knows very little about it, that whatever
(32:43):
people think about the October seventh, well, how what could
you think except it was awful? But about the Palestinian
situation that what I have seen about the food blockades
and various things or blockades with Gaza, it seems off
and not just awful from a humanitarian standpoint, which maybe
(33:03):
it's always been, but awful from a how could we
let this happen? How can this keep happening to these
people and the world not step up? Am I missing something?
Or is that a pretty universal view? In your point
from people who really know what's going on?
Speaker 1 (33:21):
I'd say it's universal. Really, I mean, I'm struck by
exactly what you're saying. In America, where this used to
be a much more divisive issue and people were either
staunchly pro Israel or staunchly pro Palestinian. But even a
lot of the pro Israel people are not a lot,
but some of the pro Israel people that I know
in the US who are revolted by what Israel is doing,
(33:44):
by its conduct in Gaza lately. That's the view there,
that's the view in the Middle East. I mean, there
are countries in this region. There are populations in this
region that are actually more pro Israel than you would think.
Right in places like the UAE and places like Lebanon,
there are people that are very happy over the past
twenty months watching Israel batter Hesbela and Lebanon, watching.
Speaker 4 (34:08):
It hit Iran and weak in Iran.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
But those people too horrified by what it's doing in Gaza,
and that has actually cost Israel some of the support
that it had.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
In this region of late.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
So there's no there's no defense for it right in
the Israeli government and people who.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Does not mean stopped though. I mean, I am again,
I can't believe I'm quoting Theo Vonn because oftentimes I've
never really even been a fit. But I heard him
on with Roe Khanna, the Senator from California, and he
said he said something that I've felt, which is we
are supposed to be the good guy. And I know
that's simplistic. I know a lot of times in history
(34:47):
we haven't been the good guy, but in general America
is supposed to be a force for good. How can
we in the world not be stopping at least this
part of it, this part of not of watching kids
start like, how's the world not stopping this?
Speaker 1 (35:08):
And the thing is the world. I think what we've
really discovered over the past year and a half is
the world can't stop it.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
The Europeans, Arab States, the UN, they have all for
months and months and months now been condemning Israel, calling
for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling for more aid to
be allowed into Gaza, and the Israeli government could care
less about what any of them have to say. The
one country that would make a difference is the United States.
(35:37):
I mean, we are Israel's strongest supporter, We are the
source of Israel's weapons, Israel's military aid, Israel's diplomatic support.
If the US really put its foot down and said
you can't do this anymore, Israel would have to stop
doing it. We saw that in Iran over the past
couple of days. Donald Trump wanted to cease fire in Iran.
I'm not sure the Israeli Prime Minister was ready for
(35:59):
one yet, but Trump told him it.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
Was happening, and it happened.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
If Trump did that, or if Joe Biden before him
had done that, Israel would have changed its behavior.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Why don't they do it? Why didn't Joe Biden do it?
Why doesn't Donald Trump do it? I mean, what is
the case to allow this to keep happening? Because that's
the part. I don't care how liberal or conservative you are.
I don't understand what the case. I get Israel needing
to defend itself. I get the idea of getting rid
of Hamas. That seems like an awful organization.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
What is the case.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Why are we not stopping it? What is the rational
argument on the other side? What am I missing?
Speaker 1 (36:38):
I mean, whatever you're missing, I'm missing it too. I
haven't gotten a rational argument from people. I think, you know,
when Biden was the President speaking to some of the
people who worked for him. The sense that I got
was Joe Biden had this idea in his head of
Israel fifty years ago, right, this was still nineteen seventy three.
For Joe Biden. Israel was this plucky little country surrounded
(36:59):
by much bigger Arab enemies that was fighting an existential
war in nineteen seventy three, the Yom Kiper War. And
he never quite adjusted his mental image of Israel to
a country that is now much stronger, a country that
is now doing awful things to a population under its
control in Gaza, indefensible things, and he just he wasn't
(37:21):
willing to you know, in his mind, he has this
romantic view of Israel and he just wasn't willing to
apply pressure.
Speaker 4 (37:26):
So I think that was part of it for him.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
I think for Donald Trump, I think he's lost interest
in it lately. I think after he was elected, during
the transition between November and and January, he actually was
very engaged on Gaza. He pushed Prime Minister Natanieo to
agree to a cease fire, and that ceasefire took effect
on January nineteenth, the day before Trump was inaugurated. It
(37:51):
happened because Donald Trump pressured the Israeli government in March,
Israel abandoned that ceasefire, Nataniello decided he was leaving it,
and then.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
He was going to resume the war.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
And by then I think Trump had lost interest in
the issue. I mean, there were trade wars and tariffs
and all sorts of other things going on, and without
sustained pressure from the US, Natano did what he wanted
to do. If Trump gets interested again, if he, you know,
after the war in Iran, after the ceasefire and Iran,
if he decides, okay, I want a bigger piece in
(38:22):
the region, start by pushing the Israelis to end the
war in Gaza. Then you can start talking about, you know,
deals between maybe Israel and Syria making peace, recognizing each other,
maybe Saudi Arabia recognizing Israel. Those things start to become possible.
But Trump needs to start by by putting pressure on
the Israelis to end the war in Gaza.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
It's it's so weird to me because I'm not the
Trump fan, as people who listen to this show or
know me are, But it does seem like because he
has this unique ability to keep the Republican Party kind
of have them lockstep that if he wanted, he actually
(39:02):
could be what he always says he is, which is
this transformative peace figure in the Middle East in a
way that a Democrat never could and that maybe other
Republicans wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
He actually has a.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Unique ability to do something that very few people could do.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Do you agree with that?
Speaker 1 (39:23):
Look at what he did last month in May in
the Middle East. Right, America had been bombing the Houthis
in Yemen for about two months. Trump all of a sudden,
one day out of the blue, ends that bombing campaign.
It hasn't succeeded, right, The Houthis are still there, they're
still in power, they're still firing missiles at Israel a
few times a week. But Trump says, you know what,
(39:44):
we don't want to do this anymore.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Israel.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
You guys are on your own. You deal with the Hoothees.
If you want to, you bomb them, but you know
they're not going to hurt us anymore. So problem solved.
The Republican Party got behind that. Imagine if any other
president had said, essentially, we're leaving Israel to its own
the devices.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
You guys fight your own battles.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
It's true that would.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
Have been a huge political issue.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Then after that, Trump goes on his hostage envoy, his
envoy for hostages who are detained overseas, starts negotiating directly
with HAMAS, which is a proscribed terrorist organization in the US.
No president for decades has talked to Hamas. You're not
allowed to do that. Trump does it. He gets a
hostage released who is an American citizen Israeli dual citizen.
(40:26):
Hostage comes home again. Everybody gets behind that. If Barack
Obama or Joe Biden or anyone else had been negotiating
directly with Hamas behind the back of the Israelis, the
Republican Party would have gone ballistic. He can do these
things that you're absolutely right and know what the president
can do.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Well.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
It's a shame that it does that, but it is
a unique opportunity. Sometimes it has to be like, you know,
a Democrat that does welfare reform, or it might have
to be a Republican that one day does gun control.
Like it almost has to be somebody in the in
the in the party that they're in to do it. Greg,
thank you very much. I know you do these high
(41:05):
level interviews with people on details but sometimes I think
it's hard for the average citizen to just get the basics,
and I appreciating you dumbing it down for us here
to do.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
It not at all, And thanks for having me. It
was a pleasure.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Greg Carlstrom, middle East reporter for the Economist,
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