特朗普寻求伊朗冲突退出策略

Joining us now is Ian Bremmer. He's the president and founder of Eurasia Group and g zero media. Ian, it's nice to see you. I'm wondering, you know, as you look at kind of this rocky start that these talks have had, what do you think the biggest priorities for The US need to be?

And can they get done everything they wanna get done? Not only those 14 points, but we heard vice president JD Vance talking this week and talking about how the end goal seems to far, surpass what's on that paper. Can they get there at any point, do you think, if the MOU is the starting point?

No. And I'm not sure Trump really cares, to be honest with you. I mean, his back was against the wall. You heard that The United States faced economic catastrophe, and he didn't wanna be Herbert Hoover if they didn't end the blockade. That is certainly my understanding of where they were, but it was very interesting to hear Trump admit that because it shows a lot of leverage on the part of the Iranians just how much The United States does not want to return to military conflict, just how much how important it was for this off ramp to be taken by president Trump. Now this war has completely failed in terms of being able to accomplish any of the war goals that president Trump put to the American people back when he launched the strikes on Iran four months ago. And I think he wants to put this behind him. I think he wants Iran out of the headlines. It took years for the Obama administration to negotiate the original Iranian nuclear deal, the JCPOA. Trump would want the nuclear agreement to be substantially tougher than that, and he has considerably less capacity to force the Iranians to the table to accept it. Not to mention the fact, as we just saw from Israel, that the ability to undermine this agreement just by starting fighting again with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is part of the memorandum, which The United States has no jurisdiction over. So, I mean, it's sixty days. Trump has already said that that's a soft, not a hard deadline. It'll be extended. I'm sure there's gonna be continued engagement and negotiations between The US and Iran. But as the strait is reopened, as the ceasefire continues to hold, that is going to be sufficient for Trump to move on to Cuba, move on to the Western Hemisphere, talk about some things that are much more positive for him than Iran, which has been the biggest failure of his administration by a very long margin. Ian, I wanna stick with Israel if I could, and the president sat down with Axios, in recent hours, talked to them about the status of these negotiations and what's happening in in The Middle East broadly. Let's take a listen to what he had to say in that interview. If it weren't for Donald Trump, Israel would have been eviscerated. Your relationship with Netanyahu's It's good, but we have to keep them a little bit, sane. Are you gonna be able to control Israel from attacking Lebanon?

Yeah. I will be. I mean, I wonder. They have a lot of respect for me, and they do as I say. You know, I wanna ask you about, Israel not being party to this memo of understanding, which we we knew about kind of going into it before it was signed. But, of course, going back to February, this this was a war that was launched by The US in concert with with Israel. So as you look to some signs of progress, the potential for progress here in these negotiations, it seems to my mind at least very problematic that one of the parties to the initial start of this war is not party to that, to that memo of understanding. Do you agree?

Of course. I mean, again, there was no way that The United States could have gotten the Israelis to sign on despite the fact that Trump says that Israel does what he says. They're a sovereign country. Hezbollah does more of what Iran says because Hezbollah is operationally controlled in terms of military decisions by the Iranians. That is not true of Israel, which is not only a sovereign state, but also has a prime minister facing elections in October with a very restive Israeli population in the country's north that has been facing lots of these strikes from Lebanon, from Hezbollah. Now Israel presently is occupying a significant piece of Southern Lebanon, but they don't control all the territory that they would need, to feel comfortable, about that occupation. And as a consequence, they're going to continue to fight. Furthermore, Lebanon and Hezbollah, they want the Israelis out of that territory that Israel has no interest in moving away from. So the likelihood that we see ongoing strikes in the coming months as Israel's elections are coming up is, I would say, virtually certain. It's not 50%. It's more like 90 or 95. And if the Iranians wish to use that to delay, to extend, pretend, as we say, their engagement in these nuclear talks, it is certainly within their right to do so. So, look, the other fact is that there are a lot of other countries that aren't signatories of this agreement. None of the Gulf states are signatories of this agreement, but they're going to want to engage directly with Iran to figure out how they can ensure that they don't get attacked by Iran going forward, and that they can use the straight going forward, so to the Chinese, so to the Indians, so to the Europeans, all of whom have a stake in stability, all of whom have a stake in engaging with Iran, none of whom are gonna be negotiating directly with the Americans on this sixty day deal. So a lot of the action that we're going to see in terms of Iranian diplomacy in the coming months is not gonna be dictated by JD Vance or Jared Kushner or Steve Whitkow. It's gonna be dictated in Doha and in Abu Dhabi and in Riyadh and by the Chinese and the Europeans and the Indians. And and that, I think, shows just how much leverage the Iranians have and shows why I have so little confidence that you're going to get, an ultimate agreement on the disposition of Iran's enriched uranium stockpiles and their willingness, to limit their uranium enrichment going forward. We wanna pick up on nuclear, but before we do, I do wanna ask you about another glaring omission from these 15 points, and that is nowhere in there does it talk about, the ballistic weapons program, which, as you mentioned, the Gulf allies, obviously, that's what they are incredibly concerned about because those are the weapons used to hit Dubai, Abu Dhabi, you know, everyone in the region. And, the president was asked about that very issue, at the g seven and had a pretty surprising response. If other countries have them, it's a little bit unfair for them not to have some. A ballistic missile is not the same thing as what we're talking about, what we're talking to. But if Saudi Arabia and Qatar and they all have some, I would say in relative proportion, I think it's okay. That's what I mean. Now JD Vance was also asked about those remarks and the program in general, and his argument was The US has done a lot to take out the missile launchers, which he said, you know, it's not about the bullets. It's about the thing that fires them. But what is your assessment of the capacity of Iran's ballistic weapons program, and what can be done to assess that threat as well as the threat of Iranian proxies, which is what people in the region US allies in the region are really concerned about?

Well, it turns out that Trump's assessment of what he thought he could get out of Iran and what was and what was not acceptable was was significantly greater when he thought he was winning the war. And when it appeared clear that he wasn't winning the war, that he couldn't achieve his outcomes militarily, that the Iranians were not going to capitulate or engage in full surrender as he told American allies and the American public that they were about to in the first weeks of the war, then suddenly his war goals changed. And what was acceptable from Iran changed. We saw that in terms of Trump saying suddenly that they could have ballistic missi