After a successful mission—militarily, at least—to capture Venezuela’s dictator last month, U.S. President Donald Trump is keeping the world guessing about whether he’ll launch a second attack within two months, this time on Iran. On the latest episode of FP Live, I explored the military options that Trump is likely receiving from his top advisors, with retired four-star Gen. David Petraeus, who ran U.S. and allied forces in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and later served as the director of the CIA.

Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

After a successful mission—militarily, at least—to capture Venezuela’s dictator last month, U.S. President Donald Trump is keeping the world guessing about whether he’ll launch a second attack within two months, this time on Iran. On the latest episode of FP Live, I explored the military options that Trump is likely receiving from his top advisors, with retired four-star Gen. David Petraeus, who ran U.S. and allied forces in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and later served as the director of the CIA.

Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: Something quite unusual is playing out in the media this week. On Monday, Trump said that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thought that U.S. military action on Iran would be “something easily won.” That spurred the New York Times and other outlets to report that Caine, in fact, has been saying there’s a high risk of American casualties and that a U.S. attack could negatively affect U.S. weapons stockpiles. What does it tell you that this kind of disagreement is playing out in public?

David Petraeus: It tells us that somebody is leaking very sensitive conversations, and that’s interesting, because so far, this administration has been pretty disciplined about this.

What it really tells us is that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is doing his job, which is not to recommend whether to do an operation or not, but to provide options for achieving the president’s various objectives and identifying the risks associated with each of those options. In this case, he’s singling out uncertainty about something called the missile math: how many missiles and launchers the Iranians have left. And, of course, where are they? Because we’re going to have to go after them if we do a large strike.

How many interceptors do we have left? We have used a lot of interceptors; we’ve given a number to Ukraine; we used a lot during the 12-day air war that Israel carried out, which we joined on the final day. Reportedly, one terminal high altitude air defense battery, a THAAD battery positioned in Israel and operated by American soldiers, shot $1.2 billion worth of interceptors because the Iranians were just hammering Israel with those. So there’s a concern about that. There’s a concern that one could get through. About 5 percent of the missiles aimed at Israel did get through. And I think there’s a concern that one could get through and hit one of our bases, a barracks or some location where the soldiers aren’t fully protected.

There’s a concern about proxies in the region, that Hezbollah might do something in Lebanon. And of course, keep in mind that yesterday, we withdrew nonessential personnel from our embassy in Beirut. I suspect we may do the same in Baghdad, maybe Bahrain, other locations which might be targets. The Iraqi Shia militia supported by Iran have said they will take action against Americans, possibly against Israel as well. So there’s a number of unknowns here.

And to be candid, we’ve been both exceedingly good in our military operations and, to some degree, lucky in what we’ve done. The [Nicolás] Maduro operation in Venezuela was much dicier than people realized because we had no one killed. We’ve not had a “Black Hawk down” kind of scenario so far, or a Desert One or Marine barracks blown up, as happened in Beirut in ‘83. All of these have been disasters in the past. And again, sometimes it’s just fortune that determines whether that takes place or not.

Now the Iranians are essentially defenseless against air and missile attack. We believe the Israelis very impressively took down all of their sophisticated Russian-provided S-300 missile defense systems and many of the air defense batteries. Their air force is old—left over from the shah’s days. So if you fly above heavy machine-gun fire, probably 12,000 or 15,000 feet, what they have left should not be able to touch you.

RA: So the U.S. military has been exceedingly good, as you put it, and yet you’re worried because........

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