Printer? I Hardly Know Her!

Pod Save America - Pod Save America

Pod Save America tackles the deteriorating U.S.-Iran relationship amid the expiration of a fragile ceasefire agreement, criticizing Trump's

Key takeaways

• Iran exploited the ceasefire window to expand missile production, bolster proxy forces, and prepare for potential escalation.
• Trump's strategy is described as 'nothing'—avoiding action while making increasingly absurd public statements about claiming control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Main topics

• Expiration of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement
• Trump's ineffective foreign policy approach toward Iran

Notable quotes

"We control it with the blockade." – Trump, misrepresenting actual control over the Strait of Hormuz.

Conclusion

The episode concludes that Trump's foreign policy in the Middle East is defined by

Transcript preview

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Speaker 6 (2:04) Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Speaker 8 (2:07) Tommy Vitor. Speaker 6 (2:08) On today's show, the Iran ceasefire officially expires just in time for Iran to potentially escalate the war. We'll talk about Trump's strategy of doing nothing, his decision to take out his frustration on South Korea, and his reaction to Jon Ossoff saying that all the president wants to do is, quote, travel with Natalie. We'll also check in on the Senate map. specifically why Mary Paltola rejected Kamala Harris's endorsement and whether a stolen pen might help flip Texas. Then Tommy talks to Brian Poindexter, the union iron worker taking on Max Miller in Ohio. Before we start, just a reminder, if you haven't subscribed already, please consider subscribing to become a friend of the pod. You get ad-free episodes of this show and all your favorite cricket shows. Ad-free. Plus, you get a whole bunch of subscriber-only shows, like our secret extra episode of Pod Save America called Only Friends and Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer and Terminally Online. You get access to a bunch of great Substack newsletters. And, you know, you get to support independent pro-democracy media. So, crooked.com slash friends. Go subscribe if you haven't already. Okay, let's get to the news. August 17th is Lovett's birthday. And the day that the MOU of Versailles officially died. Speaker 8 (3:25) Happy 50th, man. Boy. Yes. It's a big one. Speaker 6 (3:30) You don't look a day over 48. Speaker 7 (3:31) Oh, nice. Thank you, guys. This lighthearted ribbing. That's what friendship's all about here on my birthday. Now it's going to be in the history books. I ate a cupcake over the sink. This morning before coming into work. Speaker 8 (3:45) Why'd you do that? Because it's Monday. Speaker 7 (3:48) And Speaker 8 (3:48) it's your birthday. Why'd you bring it in? Speaker 7 (3:50) What? I put a candle in it. Speaker 8 (3:52) Okay, that's nice. That's nice. Speaker 7 (3:54) Was Ari there at least? No, Speaker 6 (3:56) no, no. Singing Speaker 7 (3:56) as well or just you? Did Pundit? Friends brought over cupcakes yesterday. Okay. I just ate a leftover one on the sink in a shameful way to celebrate the day. That's Speaker 8 (4:03) all. Speaker 7 (4:03) There's Speaker 6 (4:03) nothing Speaker 7 (4:03) wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that Speaker 8 (4:05) at all. It sounds tasty. Speaker 6 (4:06) Okay, well, happy birthday. Love Speaker 7 (4:08) it. Speaker 6 (4:08) Thank Speaker 7 (4:08) you. Speaker 6 (4:09) So the MOU died, but it never really lived. The 60-day ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran wasn't much of a ceasefire. In fact, five Americans were killed during that time, and it led to zero diplomatic progress on opening the Strait of Hormuz or the fate of Iran's nuclear program. The Wall Street Journal has a big story about how intercepted communications show that Iran actually used the last two months to prepare for a bigger, longer war. including churning out more missiles and drones. Trump has used the period to pretend the war wasn't happening. And on Monday, he said that he's not in a hurry to end it, that Iran should raise, quote, the white flag of surrender. And he told Fox News that he's considering, quote, bombing the shit out of Oman if they get in the way. He expanded on all this during a press avail in the Oval on Monday. Speaker 2 (5:02) Last week you said that you would soon declare the Strait of Hormuz to be a territory of the United States. Could you elaborate? Well, Speaker 1 (5:08) I just think it's Speaker 2 (5:08) a Speaker 1 (5:08) great idea. Yeah, I mean, we control it. We control it with the blockade. We have a blockade. We control it with a blockade. And I like the idea of declaring it a territory. Why might you do Speaker 2 (5:20) that? Speaker 1 (5:20) We have total control over the Strait. Now, they can be a nuisance. They can put a mine in the water, and people don't like having mines hit their billion-dollar ships, you know, et cetera. Speaker 2 (5:29) This morning you said you would bomb the ass out of Oman if they got in the way of reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Would you say you're out of patience with Oman as strategic... I don't think they'd behave Speaker 1 (5:39) very well, but we'd handle them very easily, just like we do others. Speaker 6 (5:43) Correct me if I'm wrong here. Didn't the MOU sort of set out that Oman was going to help mediate talks with Iran about opening the Strait? Speaker 8 (5:53) I think Qatar was the mediator, but Oman is who he – the Iranians and Omanis have been negotiating a deal where they basically control the Strait of Hormuz and charge fees. So apparently that's why he's mad at them. Weren't they – aren't Speaker 6 (6:07) we allies with them in some ways? Speaker 8 (6:09) Yeah. We don't – we shouldn't be bombing them. That should not be on Speaker 6 (6:11) the table. Speaker 8 (6:11) That's what I was Speaker 6 (6:12) wondering. Speaker 7 (6:13) Yeah. No, we don't want to bomb them. Yeah, they're sort of – Oman is like, ugh, we can't deal with these despotic, irrational – religious authoritarian zealots, so we'll have to just deal with Iran instead. Speaker 6 (6:27) So I think most of us had forgotten that the MOU even existed. It seems like there's a pretty concerning gap between Iran's strategic thinking and what an Atlantic piece the other day called Trump's new strategy of nothing. Tommy, what do you think about where we are right now? Speaker 8 (6:42) That journal piece was interesting because it just got at the fact that the Iranians had a strategy. They had a plan for those two months. They don't trust Trump. They don't trust him for good reason because he pulled out of the JCPOA and because the US and Israel kept bombing them during talks. So they installed a bunch of hardliners, increased their military capacity, had conversation with proxy groups and prepared them for more fighting while we did fuck all. So Trump just has no path forward. He knows if he restarts the war, it'll cost him politically. There's no way to bomb your way to victory here. He is completely stuck. So he just does these press avails where they get increasingly ridiculous. Like now we're going to declare it a U.S. territory like the Gulf of America. We're back to that kind of path forward. Speaker 6 (7:28) And as a way to pretend that we control it when we don't. It's also interesting that he always – he talks about the naval blockade as if – That's what keeps – is keeping the straight open even though the straight is not open and we don't control it. But he's somehow trying to confuse people by saying that the naval blockade that we have of Iran Speaker 7 (7:47) is what means that we control the straight. He just doesn't want to deal with it. He doesn't want to deal with it because he doesn't like – there's no – he doesn't like his options. He doesn't like the option of escalation. He doesn't like the option of accepting a deal that's worse than the Obama era deal. if that's even on the table at this point. So he just wants everyone to stop talking about it. And when it comes up, oh, that, we're in control of it and we won and it's good and they lost and they're crazy, but we'll see. And then onto the next topic. Like it just, there's no strategy. He just doesn't want to deal with it. He wants to focus on the ballroom. Speaker 6 (8:22) I thought the journal story was interesting, too, because I think we've been talking for a while about how this could just end up being like, you know, Iran just keeps controlling the straight and we all just kind of muddle along and Trump doesn't know what to do. But it sounds like they were talking about the various ways they could escalate the war and what they're thinking about preemptive strikes, sabotage of undersea internet cables in the Gulf, stirring unrest in Kuwait and Bahrain and possibly ground operations in Kuwait. Speaker 8 (8:48) What the Iranians want to avoid is a scenario where every six to 12 months the U.S. or Israel bombs them. Whether it's regime change, decapitation strikes, hitting their missile sites, hitting their oil and gas infrastructure, they want to increase the cost so that the U.S. and Israel think twice about doing this. And the strategy they've hit on for doing that has been pretty smart, which is bombing all these U.S. military installations in countries like Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. and increasing the cost not only for us but for those other countries in the Gulf. And, you know, they've executed it pretty well and it seems to have been pretty effective. And so you're seeing like the Emiratis seem to be cutting side deals with the Iranians to create an off-ramp. And I think others are pretty soon going to be looking to do the same thing because like they don't want a nonstop constant war. Speaker 6 (9:37) I mean, a Tehran defense analyst close to the government, the regime in Iran, told the journal that the main war in the Iranian view has not yet begun. So that's something to look forward to, huh? Speaker 7 (9:49) The other part of it too is having U.S. bases, having the U.S. military present was meant to be kind of a bulwark, a defense. Like look at the security provided by Americans being on our soil. But now it's been the opposite. It's drawing all these attacks. And then, you know, oh, but the U.S. is our partner. But it's a completely unreliable partner, Oman, we have a trade agreement with. And we're threatening to... bomb them off the face of the earth. For reasons Speaker 6 (10:17) we can't quite understand. Speaker 7 (10:19) Yeah. The only, I understand why Iran would want to signal that they'd be willing to escalate, but I can't imagine they're particularly unhappy with a status quo that looks like this either. Yeah. I mean, I think it's Speaker 8 (10:34) deterrence. I think they're trying to prevent getting attacked again. But we just have to remember the Iran-Iraq war lasted for eight years. And it was like grueling and, you know, millions of people died. And the Iranians, they live there. That's where their country is located. It's on the Strait of Hormuz. Like they know that Trump is going to give up and move on and get distracted and do something else. And they're not going to. And so that's just, you know, they think they're playing for time. Speaker 6 (10:59) Well, here's Speaker 8 (10:59) one thing Speaker 6 (10:59) that's distracting him. The biggest news out of the Oval Office event was Trump confirming that he ordered the Pentagon to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea, which were scheduled to start on Monday. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump said he thought the exercises were too expensive and a danger to, quote, his very good relationship with Kim Jong-un. In the Oval on Monday, he hinted that he's spoken to Kim in the last couple of days and made it clear why he's really pissed at South Korea. Speaker 1 (11:27) When I called recently the president of South Korea, who I like, I think he's very nice actually, when I called him I said, would you like to give us a little hand? We don't need help with Iran, but if you'd like, give us a hand with Iran. He said, no thanks. And I said, we have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next door neighbor, and you're not going to help us on a very easy military operation? in Iran. We can't go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they're not there to help us. Speaker 6 (12:03) Tommy, can you explain what's going on with the joint exercises and whether this is a big deal? Speaker 8 (12:07) So we have a lot of troops on the Korean Peninsula. It's 28,500. and have had a mutual defense treaty in place with the Koreans since like the 1950s. And so we do these annual exercises. There's actually two. There's one in the spring and the one in the late summer. And they are basically drills to deal with the threat from North Korea. And they've been described to me by experts as actually pretty important because there's a lot of turnover, especially in the South Korean military. And so you need to have people like... have some experience doing these things and also battlefield tactics are constantly changing. The North Koreans just sent a bunch of troops to the front in Ukraine to fight on behalf of Russia and so they're learning how to use drones and electronic warfare and all these sort of modern systems and tools that you need to just understand. So the North Koreans understandably I think hate these drills because they view it as a pretext to some sort of invasion of their country and that's kind of been the status quo. Something triggered Trump over the weekend. I don't know what it was because he tweeted a photo of himself with Kim Jong-un out of nowhere. Is that? As one does. And then the next day he said he put out this post about wanting to scale down the exercises but put out the statement like as the exercises were about to start. So to the extent you're scaling them down, I don't think you're saving a lot of money because like – The military hardware is going to be in place. The message, as you said, was basically like, if you won't help us with our little nonproliferation problem, we won't help you with your little nuclear weapons problem on the Korean Peninsula. I don't think that is a particularly rational way forward, but it's, you know, Trump and it's filled with peak. He also said that the North Koreans had been respectful. They're unthreatening and respectful. This came a couple of days after the North Koreans fired a ballistic missile off into the ocean. A couple of times. They're like Speaker 6 (13:48) second test in under a week. Speaker 8 (13:50) Yeah, they've done like I think 11 or 16 of them this year. So it's not the most respectful move. And Kim Jong-un's position when it comes to resuming talks with the United States, with Trump, is that we first have to recognize them as a nuclear state. So that's a pretty strident position in my view. So again, I think it's like a combination of this old hobby horse where he doesn't know why we – you know, have troops on the Korean peninsula. He doesn't think it's worth the cost. Plus he's bitchy that South Korea didn't help us with this stupid war with Iran. And now maybe it's an effort to get diplomacy going with the North Koreans. Although I don't know why. He also said in that oval that Kim had gotten back to him. Yeah. Or implied. No, he finally Speaker 7 (14:29) did outright say, yes. Speaker 8 (14:30) But he did one of these little teasing pauses first, right? Speaker 7 (14:33) Yeah. Like it's very, well, they won't talk about like, you know, Iran has some kind of a strategy. The U.S. has now involved itself in this newest quagmire in the Middle East. If the president were focused on the U.S. and its long-term strategic imperatives, and that was his main goal, and all that was on his mind was the good of the country over time and our allies, you might want to signal something like what is happening in the Middle East has absolutely no bearing on our ability to protect our allies. in Asia, right? That we are able to wage whatever war we're waging against Iran while maintaining protection for South Korea, while protecting Taiwan, while continuing to kind of perform the role that the U.S. performs as a kind of defense against sort of Chinese aggression. Like that would be something that a traditional foreign policy of either administration would signal, right? But instead he's like, oh, because of the war in Iran. Our relationship with South Korea is worse than ever. We are less likely to protect them, right? And oh, because we got this ship out there for so long, we're gonna take another ship that's in the Pacific and we're gonna send that over to Iran because we actually are gonna tie these two conflicts together and that makes us weaker in both places. Terrific. I think that's great. I don't want any more microchips from Taiwan anyway. I'm Speaker 8 (15:54) all Speaker 7 (15:54) set. Speaker 8 (15:55) So the Koreans are suffering because of the war in Iran because they get like 60, 70 percent of their oil through the Strait of Hormuz. So we're screwing over all these countries in Asia to begin with. Speaker 6 (16:05) It's also like how could you not help us in this war that we decided to launch on our own? Without telling you. Without telling you. for no good reason and has accomplished absolutely nothing but has hurt the rest of the world. Especially you. And Speaker 7 (16:18) by the way, where I said even in this sentence, we don't need your help. It's like Korea's coming over for dinner and Trump's like, you don't need to bring a thing. Where's the fucking wine? Speaker 6 (16:31) So as you mentioned, the Navy pulled its last carrier out of Asia to relieve the... USS Abraham Lincoln, which he was also asked about in the Oval. This is the aircraft carrier that's been in the Middle East since November. And the conditions have been so horrible. There was also reports that at least two sailors tried to take their own lives by jumping overboard. When asked on Friday whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said, no, no, no, not nearly long enough. Speaker 6 (17:05) Here's how he responded on Monday in the Oval. Speaker 6 (17:25) Fake news story. So Pete Hegsath said the situation had been completely misrepresented and the commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Brad Cooper, visited the ship over the weekend and wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the stories about shortages of food and water were old news and had been addressed. Which is a Speaker 7 (17:41) different statement. Very Speaker 6 (17:42) much so. So it seems pretty clear they're in damage control mode here. What do you guys think about this story? Speaker 7 (17:47) How Speaker 6 (17:47) bad is this for them? Love it. Speaker 7 (17:51) Having a ship full of people slowly losing their mind because they're on one of the longest deployments ever I think now maybe the longest deployment ever of a ship like this. Yeah, Speaker 6 (18:01) they're they're going for the record set by the Gerald R Ford and 326 days right in Vietnam. So they're so close. They're so close. Yeah, Speaker 7 (18:09) sort of a worthy record to beat and Speaker 7 (18:14) It matters that it's not a war that was approved by Congress, that the majority of the country wishes we weren't fighting, that has no real goal, that has no sign of ending. I mean, one thing if it was a grateful nation asking these service members to sacrifice on behalf of a cause that we all collectively endorsed, sort of a grave decision to send people there for months on end. But that's not what happened, and they know that. right the people on the ship are aware of the fact that this is unpopular they don't know why the they're there uh and it's awful um and then you have hegseth caring more about the press and trump pretending it's not happening and it's disgraceful uh and trump has never had a lot of respect for people who serve in the military sometimes he pretends to but he finds the whole thing a bit embarrassing and confusing i think he finds the idea of people sacrificing themselves and giving something of themselves without ego, showing discipline and a sense of purpose and mission, kind of embarrassing to him because he's never experienced those feelings. And it comes out over and over and over again. So the Speaker 8 (19:19) Lincoln's been at sea more than 250 days, but no port call in 200 days, I think, because the Iranians hit the base that they Speaker 7 (19:27) would have used in Bahrain. So they've had to just... be out at sea. Speaker 8 (19:30) They've had Speaker 7 (19:30) two days off, I guess. Two days they've been at calm. Speaker 8 (19:32) Yeah. And so, and that was on the way out there. And they've had food shortages, the plumbing's all messed up, they're having mental health issues. And the jobs on that flight deck are incredibly dangerous. I mean, they've flown something like 10,000 sorties, I think, off of the deck of that. that ship. And imagine you're on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. There's jets buzzing in, there's airplanes, there's rotors, right? Like you're doing this for weeks at a time with no days off. It's very risky. And like, then you hear the secretary of defense lie and just say, nah, there's no issues on that boat. And then you go down to like. wait in a 15 minute line, use the bathroom and you see mold everywhere. And then you hear President Trump say, no, no, the deployments aren't too long. They should be longer. They're not long enough. So like like politically, this probably won't be all that damaging, like big picture. But it is one of the hidden costs of the war that people aren't talking about. And for the sailors on that ship and for their families and for the people who actually understand what's going on, to have your presidents like belittle your service like that, to have the secretary of defense just lie about the conditions you're living in. It's really messed up, you know, and these guys can't even call home half the time for operational security reasons. They're just isolated on the ship. Speaker 6 (20:43) And it is a lie that they're telling. And we know that because the sailors and Marines have, you know, anonymously, because they don't want to get in trouble, have been complaining about this. And, you know, Tapper, Jake Tapper on CNN was talking to the wife of one of the service members who had to listen to the president say that and listen to Hicks say that. And she was like, they can't show some empathy. at all for this. She's like, just take some accountability for what's going on with your military, your ships, and your war. It's your war. It's infuriating. Care packages aren't getting there in time. They can't get toiletries on the boat. It's just like, it's inexcusable. And you're right. The lying is the worst part of all of it. Speaker 7 (21:30) Pod Save America is brought to you by ActBlue. If you're listening to this podcast, we don't have to tell you how high the stakes are in the midterms and in 2028. 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