‘You can't do this in 20 hours’: Sherman on peace talks with Iran

[0:00] Let's bring in two top foreign policy experts right now. [0:02] Richard Haas, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, served in multiple Republican administrations. [0:07] And Wendy Sherman, former deputy secretary of state, one of the top negotiators of the Iran nuclear deal during the Obama administration. [0:13] And, Wendy, let me begin with you. [0:15] You see both the president, President Trump, and the Iranian leaders claiming that they're winning this war. [0:21] Now that we've finished eight weeks so far, heading into the ninth week, how do you see this? [0:25] Where do things stand? [0:25] I think, George, that we see a stalemate between the United States and Iran. [0:32] We've just heard about the economic warfare that's going on. [0:36] We have actually a military standoff. [0:40] And, quite frankly, what this requires is really tough diplomacy. [0:46] There's no question that the United States has a credible threat of force. [0:49] But the blockade really blockades ourselves as well as Iran. [0:54] And the United States has to decide what it's willing to do to get back to these talks and really begin some true diplomacy. [1:03] You can't do this in 20 hours in one day. [1:06] This is a very complex negotiation. [1:09] You have to do it with experts. [1:10] You have to be ready to be in for a long haul to get a very complicated job done. [1:16] And the last point I want to make, as others have said, we are creating a situation which is really superpower suicide. [1:25] We have effectively given Russia a way forward to get money for its war against Ukraine. [1:31] We have put ourselves in a weaker position vis-à-vis the president's trip to China. [1:36] And we've put our allies and partners, both in the Gulf and in Europe, in difficult positions because of the decisions we have made. [1:44] Yeah, I want to get more on that in a moment first, Richard. [1:47] Which side has the clock working for them at this point? [1:50] I think it probably favors Iran a little bit more. [1:52] We've seen their resilience, George. [1:54] You know, they're under some pressure given how bad their economy is. [1:57] But we feel the time pressure, what you just talked about, the energy, the fact that the strait is closed, has growing effects. [2:04] And so far, we haven't seen them. [2:05] Stock markets are relatively sanguine. [2:08] Even energy prices, okay, gasoline's up a dollar. [2:11] But the last tankers to have left the region have now arrived at their ports. [2:15] That means now the supply shortages are going to kick in big time. [2:19] And over the next few weeks, you could see gas go up another dollar. [2:22] The idea of $5 a gallon of gasoline is not far-fetched. [2:26] So I actually think we feel the pressure slightly more than Iran. [2:29] And pick up on Wendy's point right there. [2:31] If you look at the global map right now, it appears that China's gaining from this. [2:36] Russia may be gaining from this. [2:37] NATO may be weakening. [2:39] Absolutely. [2:40] And when historians write about this, they're going to say this was an ill-advised war of choice. [2:45] Yes, Iran is conventionally weaker. [2:47] Its military forces are somewhat weaker. [2:49] But the cost, the economic cost, the cost to alliances, the cost to U.S. standing, American guarantees. [2:55] The local partners in the Gulf, they've been hurt by this war. [3:00] So I think history is going to properly be extremely critical about this war, about the assumptions we made going into it, [3:08] that Iran couldn't stand up, that it wasn't going to attack its neighbors, it wasn't going to close the Strait of Hormuz. [3:13] Every one of these assumptions has been proven wrong. [3:18] So we're winning, if you will. [3:19] It almost reminds me of Vietnam, George, the body counts. [3:21] We're winning in terms of the narrow military calculation. [3:24] But in the larger strategic sense, we're losing this war. [3:27] Wendy, you spent a lot of time negotiating with the Iranians. [3:30] What's your sense of who is in charge right now? [3:33] We've heard President Trump talk about the divisions there. [3:35] It's unclear who is leading the negotiations and who they're answering to. [3:40] So there's always been debate inside of Iran. [3:43] We tend to think, because there's a supreme leader, that it's ironclad. [3:47] But it's not. [3:48] It has politics. [3:49] But right now, what has happened is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is in full control. [3:55] The folks that I call the hard, hardliners are really dictating how we go forward. [4:01] Mushtaba Khamenei is probably alive. [4:05] But Vahidi, who is head of the commander of the IRGC, is probably calling the shots. [4:11] Abbas Arachi, who was my counterpart during the 2015 negotiations, now the foreign minister, [4:17] is very smart, very tough, knows every detail of this constant problem that we're facing [4:24] to make sure Iran never has a nuclear weapon. [4:26] And he has bona fides out of the revolution in 1979. [4:31] So he knows how to deal with this. [4:34] And Richard is quite right. [4:36] All the assumptions have been wrong here. [4:38] We have always gamed out that the Strait of Hormuz was a problem. [4:42] We have always gamed out that Iran could hit our partners in the Gulf. [4:47] The administration has not understood that this is a culture of resistance. [4:51] And Iran is not about to give up ever the things that it says is part of its national identity. [4:59] Yeah, and that means the right to enrich nuclear materials. [5:04] The president, and I wonder what you think about this. [5:06] President Trump keeps saying the objective is that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. [5:10] They forswear that that's their goal. [5:12] They say it's not their goal. [5:13] Do you think the president understands that? [5:15] And is he looking for some wiggle room in the negotiations? [5:17] I hope he's looking for some wiggle room, because we're not going to get anywhere if we say that they don't have a right. [5:24] The United States has never believed that the nonproliferation treaty gives that right. [5:29] But President Obama was willing to allow Iran to have a very small civil enrichment program [5:35] under very intrusive monitoring and verification. [5:38] There is a way forward here. [5:41] I could even imagine that we suspend the blockade. [5:44] Iran suspends its closing the Strait of Hormuz during a negotiation for some agreed period to see if progress can be made. [5:54] But quite frankly, unless we are about to try to really engage in tough diplomacy, we're not going to get anywhere anytime soon. [6:02] Bill Burns has laid out in The New York Times editorial op-ed piece that, in fact, we could get Iran to suspend, perhaps, in Richmond for a period of time [6:13] and then maintain a very small program, again, under that intrusive monitoring. [6:19] There are solutions here, George, but they have to be negotiated, [6:24] and we have to have negotiators who have expertise at the table. [6:28] That hasn't happened so far. [6:29] That would be something similar to what President Obama negotiated. [6:33] Richard, you this week laid out three possible courses, either escalation, drift, or some kind of negotiations leading to the deal. [6:39] Which is most likely right now? [6:41] Right now, in the short run, probably drift. [6:43] I think we're going to be stuck with some version of the status quo where the straits are closed, formal talks aren't happening. [6:49] I think, George, though, since escalation makes no sense, neither side would benefit from it. [6:55] We're running out of targets. [6:56] The last thing we want to see is Iran resume its attacks against the energy infrastructure of its neighbors. [7:02] I think at some point, the logic economically, neither side benefits from drift from the status quo. [7:08] I think that pushes us towards negotiations. [7:10] And the sort of thing Wendy talked about is the basics of a deal. [7:13] The blockade, which I argued for, what, five, six weeks ago, was always a means to an end. [7:17] It was to get Iran to lift, or at least temporarily, its control of the strait. [7:21] And the nuclear, we're not going to get Iran zero in the nuclear business. [7:25] What we want to do is have a ceiling on what it's able to do, and we want to be able to inspect it. [7:30] I guess the question is, is President Trump ready to accept that? [7:32] I don't think, well, the answer is, if he doesn't accept that, then we have drift, which means the straits remain closed, [7:38] which is an economic disaster for the world and the United States. [7:41] Thank you both for your time this morning.