Transcript: The U.S. and Israel Don’t Have the Same Interests in Iran |
Transcript: The U.S. and Israel Don’t Have the Same Interests in Iran
Foreign affairs journalist Ishaan Tharoor argues that Trump has no good options in Iran and that the United States and Israel’s interests are increasingly diverging in this war.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 30 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by Ishaan Tharoor. He’s a foreign affairs writer, until recently at The Washington Post, where he wrote a great column called “World Views”—a daily take and analysis of what was happening in foreign policy. Ishaan, welcome.
Ishaan Tharoor: Thanks for having me, Perry. Good to be with you.
Bacon: He’s also written some pieces for The New Yorker that you should check out, including one I think published today. Tell us about that one. What’s the title?
Tharoor: It’s “Trump, Iran, and the Shadow of Suez.” It’s a look at the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the very real and interesting echoes of that moment in the current one.
Bacon: I’m going to start back at the beginning here. We’re a month into this. Talk about broad perspective: what do you think? Has anything surprised you about where this war is, from the beginning to now?
Tharoor: Stepping back—I was at The Washington Post for the past 12 years. Every one of those years was a year where at some point I was writing a piece about a potential American war on Iran, whatever the context, whatever the president. This is something we’ve been thinking about in Washington for a long time.
And it’s been a kind of strange scenario, because you always assumed—and everyone who thinks about this in any deep way, frankly, knows—that this is an incredibly complicated thing to do, that Iran is a huge country, a very sophisticated nation with a regime that is entrenched and far more capable than many of its neighbors. And that a war with Iran, you would have assumed, would have required a kind of drumbeat, a set of legitimacy, and a kind of international structure. None of that seems to have happened this time around.
What we saw—especially in the wake of whatever Trump feels he accomplished with Venezuela—is this kind of off-the-cuff mission, obviously done with a lot of Israeli coordination and probably a lot of goading from the Israelis to get involved. And it’s been astonishing, because yes, you’ve eliminated a top rank of leadership—not to any particularly important effect. And of course Khamenei was somebody who was 86 years old and on his proverbial way out anyway, and spoke often of being martyred in his speeches. So this is not exactly the greatest success on that front.
And now of course we’re in this moment where there’s a huge strategic muddle. Trump doesn’t know exactly which way to go—his options are not great on either side. He has Gulf partners who have a degree of influence over the White House, which is quite interesting, and what we’re talking about are states that are both incensed that this war happened and, some of them, quite keen that Iran gets completely neutered at this point, because what Iran has done to the Gulf region in its reprisal attacks has been a huge part of the story. We could have predicted it, but we always assumed that because of this possibility the Americans wouldn’t act the way they did. But they have. The Americans did act this way because, for whatever reason, Trump thought it would be a much easier exercise than it’s turned out to be.
And now going into this week there is a real conversation about ground troops being deployed. The direction of travel in terms of what the Trump administration is doing points to deeper engagement, a further slip into the quagmire, and further escalation. And you have an Iranian regime on the other side that it’s not really clear to any of us is acting all that rationally either—that they’re able to break free from this spiral of escalation themselves. They have probably calculated that they can survive this and make it just so costly for the U.S.—and already the costs are spiking and mounting.
Bacon: Today the president on Truth Social basically threatened to destroy the oil fields of Iran unless they agree to some kind of end to the war. Is that realistic? Is that possible? I guess it probably is.
Tharoor: Look, if he tries to do that, the Iranian reprisals on its neighbors are going to get worse. And we’re talking about a huge percentage of the world’s oil and gas flowing out of this region—critical to economies everywhere, critical to supply chains. And it’s not just oil and gas needs directly; there are downstream things like plastics and fertilizers.
You already have a scenario now where people are worried about crop planting cycles in much of the developing world, because fertilizer factories that need ammonia and gas and so forth are being shut down in South Asia and other parts of the world. That’s a huge effect that doesn’t necessarily compute in the mind of someone in the Trump administration or the average American, but it’s astonishing.
I was in India a few weeks ago and I saw in my grandmother’s neighborhood, in the city of Kolkata, lines for natural gas cylinders for cooking gas. There are some huge global effects already in motion. The Trump administration seems to think that’s fine.
I don’t think other U.S. governments would necessarily have been willing to entertain this kind of blowback. But it does seem that Trump really........