Strait Talk Everywhere But the SitRoom: Episode 23

In this episode of Alternate Shots, John Ellis and Richard Haass dissect a ceasefire that exists mostly on paper and a war that has created more problems than it has solved. The Strait of Hormuz has gone from highway to choke point, while what to do about Iran’s nuclear efforts and its support of proxies remains as much of a question as ever. Along the way, they critique a decision-making process dominated by a president that contains little in the way of process, expertise, or analysis. Fortunately, they end with their fearless and probably baseless predictions for this week’s Masters golf championship.  

Hosted by John Ellis and Richard Haass

News Items on Substack

Home and Away on Substack

Produced by Dale Eisinger 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome back to Alternate Shots. I'm John Ellis. I'm the founder and editor of two Substack newsletters. One is called News Items, the other is called Political News Items. You can find them both at news-items.com.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hi, I'm Richard Haas. I put out uh what used to be a weekly newsletter called Home and Away. I just checked, and uh it now seems to be twice a week. I just put out my uh tenth newsletter devoted to the conflict in Iran. So uh more away than home these days.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

So tell us about the one you just posted. I I just read it. It's not a uh upbeat assessment of the truce or ceasefire arrangement, but give us your top line.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Look, the good news is that we're discussing ceasefires rather than the kind of devastation that the president was threatening, because it wouldn't have ended with Iran. It would have spread to the region. The ceasefire hasn't taken hold. Iran hasn't opened up the straits. They're blaming it on Israeli operations in Lebanon. There's also reports of Iranian attacks against several of its neighbors. I think it it's another indication, John, is if anyone needed one of how difficult this process is going to uh be. But I think people came around to the ceasefire simply because further escalation didn't serve American purposes politically, economically, militarily. And I think Iran was not looking forward to getting pummeled. And it's possible, I don't have proof for this, but I think there's a possibility the Chinese weighed in. That the Chinese didn't want to see this war not just continue, they didn't want to see it widen. They were worried about the economic consequences of that. And my guess is they may have weighed in with the uh Iranian. So, anyhow, we're it seems like we're going to Islamabad with or without a complete ceasefire, with or without an open strait of uh Hormuz, and that's where they'll have to tackle, you know, and we'll talk about it, all the tough issues.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

So when I start news items every morning uh since the war began, I have a little checklist that I put the stories into, and it goes like this. Number one is nukes, number two is the Strait of Hormuz, number three is regime change, number four is proxies, Hezbollah, et cetera. Uh, number five is ballistics, missiles, and drones, and then six is Trump political. So, you know, let's go through the list. Where do we stand on nukes?

SPEAKER_00 2:21

The war's changed very little, John, about the disposition of Iran's nuclear program. It was the reason the president cited as much as any for the war. But again, militarily, most of the work against Iran's nuclear program was carried out in June, the so-called obliteration. They still have that amount of a significant amount of 60% enriched uranium sitting around under the ground, under the rubble in Isfahan. Ultimately, these negotiations that will start up in Islamabad will have to address whether that has to be shipped out of the country or reduced in its uh enrichment intensity, what if any uh other nuclear activities Iran would be permitted, what kind of inspections regime would take place, and so forth. John, it's exactly the same issues that were front and center for the Obama negotiated agreement, I think it was 2016, the so-called JCPOA. It's always the question of uh what Iran is permitted, what is the ceiling, whether they're allowed to enrich uranium, if so, to what degree of concentration, how much of it, what kind of inspections you have, and so forth. So I think those issues will come to the fore again. It's exactly what uh Messrs, Whitkoff, and Kushner were negotiating on the eve of this war. What that doesn't tell you is other activities that might be going on in our in Iran and unknown places, whether there's other material, other centrifuges. Obviously, you've got scientists walking around who have know-how in their their brains, but it's going to probably require both sides to compromise in these negotiations. You'll have to have uh the United States move away from zeroing out anything and everything Iran's permitted to do, and Iran would have to accept meaningful constraints. So I think that will be the uh negotiation. It'll either work or if not, you'll have a situation where the United States and Israel will articulate certain red lines, and if Iran were to get close to them across them, then I they would they would use military force. So we would have that kind of a situation. So it's preferable this be negotiated. And unlike, by the way, then the Obama agreement, I think it's essential these be open-ended agreements. There shouldn't be any so-called sunset provisions. The only other thing I'd say about the nuclear program, John, and it's ironic, is this war may have actually increased the belief in certain parts of uh Tehran that Iran needs a nuclear weapon. That this war might not have happened if they had, say, been in the position of North Korea. So one of the big questions I have going forward is whether negotiations stand much of a chance given what Iran has just experienced.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Aaron Ross Powell Item number two of obviously is the major change in the status of things, which is prior to the war there was something approaching free and safe passage in the strait, and now Iran controls the strait. What's the status of how's that going to be worked out, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Well, I would think it's unacceptable that the Strait of Hormuz become the Iranian Strait of Hormuz. Too much leverage and too much revenue. What I've been talking about and proposing, and I think is a chance of happening, is some kind of a new authority that would govern the uh operation of the strait. It'd be Iran, Oman, and maybe a half other dozen other local countries. And they would set the terms of use. Possibly there'd be a fee that would be shared or divided among them. This would give uh Iran a stake in the openness of the strait, but it wouldn't be exclusive. And that's I think the best you could hope for. I don't think we're returning to the status quo ante. I think Iran has learned that it enjoys, shall we say, considerable leverage here. But uh the real question is if it refuses, whether we're prepared to put pressure on them. As you know, what I we've talked about on this podcast is my idea of a blockade in the Gulf of Oman that essentially we say, look, the strait's going to be open for everybody or close to everybody, including Iran. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it might.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

I'm surprised that the Haas plan hasn't been adopted, I guess, by the Trump administration.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Yeah, and also it's so preferable to either scourting individual tankers, which is a logistical nightmare, or an attacking with ground forces Carg Island. And I do think the principle that this ought to be open to everybody is is an appealing one. Obviously, the Europeans and the Asians, you know, who import oil from the region have a stake in it. So yeah, I'm I'm actually disappointed that the idea didn't gain more traction, but you never know. It could come back if uh if we can't negotiate our way to an acceptable arrangement for the strait, all these questions will come back into play.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

So regime change item number three, the Ayatollah, the senior Ayatollah dead. The son, according to the Times of London, is incapacitated and hospitalized. So the IRGC is the de facto government, but the Trump administration is negotiating with the IRGC, so regime change is done and over, correct?

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Traditionally, regime change has meant something more systemic. What we have is a shift in leadership emphasis, that if clerics are still in place, their their role seems to be more symbolic. The military, the IRGC, seems to be running the place. I would say more broadly, you know, regime change was never a serious option, and certainly not using you know largely air power. And if anything, I think I'm prepared to argue the regime may be more entrenched. The fact that they've been so able to repress the opposition and they have stood up to the Americans. We made this a civilizational kind of competition or contest. So I actually think the chances of regime change over time have been set back by this war. The only thing that would change that, John, would be whether, once again, through its own mismanagement, the regime puts itself under enormous economic pressure. And you know, that we'll have to say.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Right. Proxies we have the attack today, a drone attack on the east-west pipeline, which the Sauds have built to essentially uh avoid the need to go through the Strait of Hormuz. It can only carry so many barrels of oil, so it's not a perfect solution. Presumably the Iranians, or perhaps the Houthis working on behalf of the Iranians, knocked out of transfer station of the East West Pipeline. It's unclear because nobody's there, but presumably the East West Pipeline has been shut down. The message given is we can hit you if we want to. The ability of proxies to continue the war, essentially, is a serious concern, is it not?

SPEAKER_00 8:36

It is. And one of the problems facing a peace negotiation that seeks to make proxy behavior central is whether the proxies have a degree of independent action. They're not a party to the process, and obviously Iran supports them in various ways with financial aid in the past and training. But I don't know under the new arrangement in Tehran, with the new leadership, I don't know, given the evolution of the Houthis and others, to what extent one could honestly claim or that they are a degree independent. And it complicates things because to the extent they continue to act, the question is they can't be allowed to act with impunity. So how do you maintain a ceasefire if there's a terrorist attack against Israel coming out of Lebanon or from Hezbollah, or there's an attack, as you say, on pipelines, we just can't let that stand. So it it it's it's it's one of the many reasons that it it's hard at times to imagine a comprehensive agreement coming into existence that ties down every aspect of this contest. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

The uh ballistic missiles and drones item, I guess, we reported today, I think, in the telegraph, that Pakistan estimated that Iran had 15,000 ballistic missiles remaining for use, if you will, and uh forty-five thousand drones ready to go. That being the case, the American assertions of decimation of capability of uh ballistic missiles and drones seems untrue. Given that that was a key part of certainly Mr. Netanyahu's concerns. How does how does that figure in these negotiations?

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Well, you're exactly right. And if there was a Kaza spelli from the Israeli point of view, if however you say Kaza spell eye in Hebrew, it was the ballistic missiles. But it's really hard to see how you write into an accord a a kind of a prohibition there. Maybe it can be a limit, I don't know. Drones are even harder. Every basement is a potential drone factory, and the numbers are large, these are really cheap. I mean Ukrainian show on that. The the ability to produce large numbers of effective and expensive drones is near unlimited. So I would think the emphasis then has to be less upon capabilities than behavior. And you you you have the emphasis, if you will, on non-use, on ceasefire rather than on, if you will, an arms control approach which puts an emphasis on inventories. I just don't think that's realistic. At some point, let me just make a larger point, John. You know, we've already been through five issues nukes, the straight, regime issue, proxies and ballistic missiles and drones. To build an agreement that resolves each one of those is adding it's making this so ambitious. And at some point you may have to say what matters most. And uh for example, I would say what matters most is the nukes and the straight. And I would put the emphasis there. And it might be in some of the other areas we can't wrap that into the agreement, or there may have to be some informal understandings there. It just may be too much. If you have to solve everything, you may end up solving nothing.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Aaron Powell I mean the reality is that in two weeks it's all but impossible to even you know arrive at some kind of diplomatic language that satisfies both sides on nukes alone, but nukes and the strait is sort of triply difficult, it seems to me. So you wrote about this in home in a way that a lot of this is gonna have to be informal agreements that don't get published in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

Is that realistic or or can you it's realistic in the sense that it's possible, it might be less demanding than a formal, signed, sealed, and delivered text, but it also doesn't give you as much. There's gray areas, and also if you say there are red lines, it opens up the possibility of retaliating or using military force where you observe behavior that you that you deem unacceptable. So the problem with uh informal arrangements, if you will, is that they are less likely to prevent the resumption of some level of uh hostilities. And there's this trade-offs here. The most desirable outcome is also the most most difficult. And so my guess is it and you could also end up, John, to really confuse things with a mixture of some things that are formal and some things that aren't. And the question is how do you insulate the areas you can agree on from the areas you can't? And I expect at some point that'll be the issue. Imagine you have an agreement that looks pretty good, and then the Hezbollah does something, or the Houthis do something, or what have you, or there's some activity in the nuclear area that Israelis or Americans deem to be inconsistent with either an agreement or just simply unacceptable, full stop. The question is how do they respond to that, which the Israelis would understandably see as existential in a way that doesn't restart everything. And that that could be the challenge down the road. And it's already going so long. One of the problems of that is people who are hoping to go back to a Middle East, which enjoys the kind of Dubai lifestyle where you have all this wealth and safety, and expatriates can live and you can invest in expensive data centers and the like. Might be very hard to bring back that that version of uh reality.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Well, I think we should talk about the president. There was a quite extraordinary piece written by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swann that appeared on the New York Times website yesterday, I guess in the paper today. I don't see that.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

In the hard copy today, it was on the website yesterday, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Right. And you wrote about this in Home and Away, but the decision-making process, if you will, revealed a lot, and given your experience of having actually been in the situation room when issues of war and peace were on the table. Tell us what your impression of the Trump administration I guess, I don't know, national security groups decision-making process. What what did you make of the piece?

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Well, I'd almost removed the word process from your question. Okay. I don't mean that as a cheap shot. I am struck by simply how unstructured it was. And you had very few people in the room who had relevant background who seemed to really know much about uh Iran. You also had very few people in the room. I was struck by how dominated it was by the president. It was the most top-down process, quote unquote, I'd ever witnessed. Usually the national security process is much more bottom-up from the interagency and all this. This was it started with a half dozen people and ended with a half dozen people. I've never quite seen uh anything like it.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

Quite like it.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Yeah, I mean, it's just I think um the Israeli presentation was really questionable. So many of the claims they were making, it looked more like advocacy than analysis. And the president was persuaded, which was unfortunate. And I think it says a lot about his frame of mind going into this after the Venezuela experience and so forth. I think he was predisposed to doing something big, and he was taken clearly by the Netanyahu argument that he, Donald Trump, could accomplish something in ending this revolution in Iran that uh every president since Jimmy Carter had failed to do. The reticence of all but one of those assembled at the article is accurate and it seems to be was was noticeable. The one exception. There are those. I know this is cynical, John, so it's good you're sitting down. But there are those who think the person who came out best in the story might have been a source.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

The Lyndon Johnson rule.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

Yes. But Mr. President, if you still go ahead and do it, I I will be there for you. I will uh support you. But if I were if I were still teaching at the Kennedy School, which I did 400 years ago, John, I would actually take this article, bring it into the classroom, and use this as an a to start a conversation about how do you run, how do you design and operate a decision-making process. And I actually think a lot of the don'ts can be found in here, but the lack of uh analysis and so forth, uh, lack of there's no red teaming, there was no challenging. And clearly this is a political political, I mean, uh I'll be curious your view on this. You don't have you don't have to have spent your life in the sit room to feel this way, but the political culture, there was so little challenging of the president. And that, you know, I don't know if it's one of those places where if you're you're you you speak truth to power, you lose your job or you lose your access. But that was my it wasn't in the article, but that was my my takeaway that one way or another, no one was willing to challenge the president, even when he seemed to be going making you know truly consequential, risky decisions based upon a pretty flimsy presentation.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Aaron Powell The thing that struck me about it is it and this may be unfair, but it didn't seem like anybody in the room actually knew anything about Iran. Yes. Number one. Number two, there were two flacks in the meeting, the communications director and the press secretary, whose knowledge of Iran we can say confidently is zero. And then the third piece was the reticence of General uh Kane, who I mean, you know, he stayed in his lane, quote unquote, and perhaps spoke privately and personally with the President Trump advising him that he didn't think it was a good idea. And we know that he was a source for the articles that appeared just before the war broke out, in which, you know, the the stories read that the Pentagon wasn't exactly on board with what was about to happen. But it it's striking to me that, as you say, there were no uh there were no uh uh confrontation or no uh contrary views presented and the people I don't I mean, did you ever sit in a room where people knew so little about what was being actually discussed?

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Yeah, because there wasn't one reference to the Iran-Iraq War or to the revolution of '79, or when when Pibi was talking all about regime change, no one said, well, hold it, what about this institution and that institution? I mean, Messrs. Whitkoff and Kushner had just spent a lot of time with the Iranians. They're not even unless I missed it, though I read the piece twice, they're not even mentioned other than being there in terms of offering any insights, quote unquote. So I don't know what the director of uh the CIA put forward other than saying he thought the Israeli presentation was farcical, which was refreshing in its uh Yeah uh one of my rules of foreign policy, I I I wrote it at the time of the Iraq 2003 war, was that you before you invade a country you ought to know something about it. And we basically violated that rule in 2003, and I get the sense that we may have violated it again here.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Aaron Powell I read a piece this morning by Wolfgang Munshaw, who's the sort of lead writer for Eurointelligence, which is a great newsletter about all things Europe. And he concluded by saying the West is broken. Is that is that a fair assessment, or do you agree with that assessment?

SPEAKER_00 19:15

Aaron Powell By that he means the Western Alliance system, NATO, and all that. I think it was pretty broken before this. I'm not sure if that yeah, this made it a bit worse or highlighted it. But NATO, like any alliance, depends upon predictability and confidence and reliability. And I would say that was pretty well weakened or shattered long before this, but this just brought it again into stark relief. When historians write about the demise of NATO and the transatlantic relationship, this will be another dot in the uh historical narrative. But my my own sense talking to Europeans, John, is they they're pretty much, as they look at Russia and they look at the future, certainly over the next three years and possibly beyond, they're not they're not counting on us. They assume that they are pretty much on their own for most contingencies.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Given our enormous uh discipline, uh we are at minute 29, uh, so we have to switch quickly to sports. You predicted in your uh most recent missive home and away that Cam Young would be the winner. Is that because you're a member of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club and you you root for the home team, or do you actually truly believe that?

SPEAKER_00 20:22

It is partially that. He was the strongest American golfer in the Ryder Cup, which is a high pressure competition with a lot of these same golfers. It was it he went did he win the players or something the other day?

SPEAKER_01 20:33

The players two weeks ago.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Uh so he plays well. Plus he's got the he and Hideki have the coolest swing with the paws at the top, and I just find myself fascinated by their by their swing. So and I I I I try but fail to recreate it in my own miserable excuse of a golf game. So I would I would I just I can't help but root for him.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

Me as well. I mean and I think you know, given your golf swing and given mine, I don't think we have any trouble crushing the Schmidt. So I think we're it's our rider cup, John. I think it's 12 and 1, and one is you know, dubious. So we'll end on that. Uh thank you all very much for listening, and we will see you probably in a week's time. We can revisit all these subjects, and that's it for alternate shots.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Have a good week. Enjoy the golf this weekend.