Transcript: Trump Has No Idea How To End the War Against Iran

This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 19 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: So I want to start by framing this in maybe a positive way. We’re almost three weeks into this war with Iran. What have we achieved? Any successes? Is there anything you would say is successful here?Matt Duss: We’ve blown up a lot of things. We’ve killed a lot of people—killed a lot of Iranian leaders, including some who, from my understanding, could potentially have helped negotiate an off-ramp and an end to this war. It’s unclear to me that we’ve actually advanced American security at all. I think we’ve done the opposite. Clearly we’ve managed to raise the price of oil. Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz and threatened shipping through the strait, which raises the price of oil even more. But again, if you ask me what we’ve achieved: the problem is that the Trump administration has not really articulated any clear goals here, other than this nonsensical claim that we’re trying to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. Iran was nowhere close to having the capability of producing a nuclear weapon. Our own intelligence services believe that Iran had not decided to pursue a nuclear weapon, even if they were keeping that option open. Unfortunately, I think this war could make that decision for them. So again, you ask what we’ve achieved—I think we’ve achieved, unfortunately, nothing good at all for the American people.Bacon: Even three weeks ago it wasn’t totally clear from the Trump administration why we were doing this at this time. But let me ask: there’s been some reporting that Israel maybe pushed us into it in a certain way. From the Israeli perspective, they may have had actually clear goals—talk about their goals for this war.Duss: Right now, talking about Israel: clearly Israel’s main goal here is to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles, their missile launchers, their missile manufacturing capacity. This is really what is driving this war right now. And this is something I heard from Israeli officials myself when I was in Israel back in October. Iran was rebuilding its missile capacity much quicker than expected, and that was very concerning, because obviously these missiles are a retaliatory measure across the region—but also particularly in Israel, where they did enormous damage to Israeli military sites and in Israeli cities, far more than was reported, given the very strict censorship of the news in Israel. So I don’t think Americans quite understood how damaging these missiles were.But again, these missiles are a form of deterrence—not to defend the use of missiles launched into cities, which is indefensible. However, Iran sees them as part of its deterrence doctrine: if you attack us, we understand that we cannot face off militarily head-to-head against Israel, and we certainly cannot against the United States. However, we do have the ability to create enormous pain in other ways. This has been part of Iran’s strategic doctrine for a very long time: the use of missiles, and the relationships with militant groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias in Yemen and Iraq, to say that while we cannot prevail in a conventional conflict, we have other ways to raise costs for you. That’s the role the missiles play here.Unfortunately, Israel’s military doctrine—backed by the Trump administration, and originally backed by the Biden administration—is that Israel desires and believes it is now entitled to complete freedom of action across the region. Anything that might constrain Israel’s ability to strike wherever, whenever, and for whatever reason is now seen as an unacceptable and imminent threat. And I just want to say: that is an absolutely insane policy. It’s absolutely insane that the Biden administration supported it—though we should acknowledge that the Biden administration did restrain Israel from attacking Iran, and did restrain it from doing a few things the Trump administration has allowed. Even though the Biden administration obviously gave Israel essentially a free hand to obliterate Gaza and commit a genocide there, which is still ongoing. And the Trump administration has pretty much backed Israel in doing whatever it wants.Bacon: Both the U.S. and Israel wanted regime change—or lack of a better way to put it—and that has also not been achieved, right?Duss: I think clearly the Israelis want regime change. It’s unclear what Trump wants. They’ve said so many different things, and it is in character for Trump to just throw out a bunch of different goals and objectives to see what sticks. A few weeks ago he was literally cold-calling journalists to workshop different goals like he’s in some kind of comedy improv group. Because let’s remember, Trump is first and foremost an entertainer. But this also means that no matter what happens, he can always point to something and say: this is what I wanted to happen.