Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

The US seems to be on the cusp of a negotiated settlement with Iran, a country President Trump promised three months ago he would unconditionally defeat.

Tonight, I'll discuss the war and its consequences with David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

David is the not so elder statesman of foreign policy commentary and analysis, and he has decades of experience on the Iran question along with deep and wide knowledge of America's other adversaries and its friends.

David and I have been in conversation for years about America's unique role in the postw World War II international order because that's our idea of a good time.

And tonight, I'll ask him about Trump's revolutionary approach to global leadership.

David, thank you for being here with us.

Great to be here.

I really appreciate it.

First things first, give me your analysis of the Iran deal that's taking shape right now.

The sound bite is that this was a war of choice and it's a piece of necessity.

Both sides.

That's a pretty good sound.

It is a good sound.

Uh both sides are exhausted.

Uh the economic cost for the US uh at home and in terms of the international economy is growing.

Uh I think Iran is more battered than we sometimes realize.

So it it's been time to to make peace, but it's been difficult to get there.

As we talk, President Trump still hasn't quite made up his mind whether to accept the deal he pushed out today in a in a post on social media.

He's uh listed the the conditions that he thinks he's gotten from Iran, immediate opening of the Straight of Hormuz, a promise never to develop a nuclear weapon, uh somewhat fuzzier language about how the highly enriched uranium that Iran has will be removed.

Um a series of of things that he's going to claim add up to victory.

I think there's widespread skepticism in the United States and around the world whether you can possibly call this a victory given all that the US put into it.

But this is a war that Trump does want to end.

He's been looking for an extra.

I think he's finally got it.

So he he said publicly on this is March 7th right after it started that quote we've decimated the their whole evil empire and then he asked the Iranian people to rise up and said it will be yours to take.

So now, three months later, he's just trying to get the oil moving through the straight of her moves and and yes, he will spin whatever he does into a into a victory story.

But for you, what what what conditions would have to pertain?

What what conditions would he have to obtain in order to make you think, "Oh, yeah, that can count as a legitimate victory."

So the the the the victory that I'd love to see I've been covering the Middle East since the year after the Iranian revolution is for Iran to finally turn away from being this destabilizing revolutionary state to something more reasonable.

It looked before this war started uh Jeff as if that was happening was just of it of its own kind of natural course was old.

He was likely to die soon.

There was factional fighting.

May maybe Iran was getting ready for a transitional process.

The war stopped that.

Um I I do have hope expectation really that over the next 5 to 10 years because of the Iranian people's dynamism.

I've been there a couple times and seen that with my own eyes.

It it will it will turn.

It will become the the modern state that Iranians want.

This is still an unpopular regime.

It will repress.

it will be a kind of what's the right uh comparison.

It's not North Korea.

It would be something very repressive.

But that v victory for me would have been a pathway toward a different Iran.

And I don't see it now.

Right.

You you wrote recently uh in your column looking back on three months of war and blockade.

What's astonishing is how little clarity Israel and the United States had about how to help the Iranian people create this modern post-revolutionary state.

If Trump gets a peace agreement, he will have escaped what had been become a military morass and a strategic dead end.

As one source involved in war planning put it, we have the capability to bomb anything.

But uh what can we do that will change Iranian decisionm?

One of the questions that comes out of this is did we betray the Iranians who had been rising up and had been then slaughtered in the streets?

Did we make promises that we just simply have not kept?

So that that's one one of America's greatest uh defects in foreign policy.

We we we do make promises we can't keep.

The tragedy for me here is in part one of timing.

Iranian people in expectation I think that something was coming did rise up in January and President Trump said help is on the way were coming but the help didn't come until a month later and in that month thousands tens of thousands of Iranians who had stood up were were killed they were slaughtered in the crulest way possible.

So when the moment came uh the Iranian people were intimidated, stayed indoors.

There was a to me a really illconsidered idea of sending a Kurdish militia across the border into Iran after February 28 when the war began.

That was scuttled.

that we now learn that Israel and the United States had talked about the idea of installing a hardline former president Amenad as a a new leader for a post-war Iran which seems like a completely looney idea.

That seemed like a farce.

Those aspects of the planning when you look at them were just so illconsidered.

I'm I'm astonished.

The United States is not good at covert action.

We like to imagine that Israel, you know, the Mossad vaunted intelligence service is better at it.

But that was really poor planning.

It was bad timing.

And so we've ended up in this dreadful situation where it appears the hardliners are in greater control than they ever were.

And and that's what a what a sad outcome.

I I just I still don't understand how decisions were made in the White House and in Israel, by the way, because I think you're correct about that.

The Mossad is very very good tactically obviously, but strategically it seems that they promised that the people would rise up and there would be this revolution and all we had to do is just kind of knock over the first pin.

Never really works that way.

America obviously has enormous military capabilities, but it doesn't seem like the greatest strategic minds were at work here.

So I, you know, military power can do a lot of things, but but it can't force political change.

We learned that in Iraq, Afghanistan.

We learned it again here.

I' I've watched Israel uh misuse military power for for what it thought were political objectives since I began covering the Middle East in Lebanon in particular.

In Lebanon in particular.

In your magazine, there was an absolutely marvelous piece by Tom Nichols that talked about victory disease.

This this idea that victory is dangerous to military planners in the sense you think you can do anything.

It's obvious that President Trump after Venezuela this extraordinary kind of kidnapping operation.

He go middle of the night, grab the leader, uh fly through amazing Cuban defenses and he pull it off.

And after that he thought he could he could do anything.

He did think that Iran in some way would be a version of Venezuela.

I think Israel in the same way after so many successes in the in the long tale after October 7 thought it could do anything and they both learned that that actually wasn't true.

This is going to sound naive, possibly snarky, but they have books in the White House, right?

They they have people who know that the traditional role of Iran in American presidencies is to undo those presidencies, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and so on.

Did anyone in your reporting say in any halfway convincing manner to the president, you know, here's the thing.

The first rule of Fight Club is like, don't get involved with Iran.

Contain it.

Let the people sort it out over time, but don't do this.

And Jeeoff, my my sense is that the int this was not an intelligence failure.

the the warnings were were there from the intelligence agencies, from the military.

Uh the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Kaine, appears to have said to the president a number of times, you know, very directly, sir, you know, we can't assure you that the Iranians won't move into the straight of sir, we can't assure you that military power will have the effects that you want.

And Trump blew through those blew through those warnings.

I I think this is a tough Pentagon uh for military leaders to to stand up to civilians.

Uh and you know, Secretary of Defense, if you'd had Jim Mattis, who you and I know well, former Secretary of Defense, uh deeply experienced general, would he have made a difference in those councils with with the president?

Could he have said, "Mr.

President, don't do this."

I'm not sure he could have.

That's interesting because I was thinking that first term Trump I mean this didn't happen in first term Trump for a reason.

I think uh that Donald Trump is actually has has consistency long-term consistency in his beliefs and one of his beliefs is that the Iranian regime should go and by the way that's not a he's the only person in American public life who believes that the regime is is a is a bad regime and and is an enemy of the United States.

But, uh, he's now free to do things in his own mind that he wasn't free to do before, including, by the way, Cuba.

And so, there's an obvious followup here.

Is he trying to tie off this Iran problem so that he can pivot to Cuba?

Well, I think he'll want to pivot to Cuba for lots of reasons.

One is to get the bitter taste of Iran out of his mouth, to do something Cuba is probably doable.

There certainly is a you know population that's I think eager eager for change you know well the Iranian population was eager for change too.

Yeah they were but but but less so after the the brutal crackdown of of January.

I mean they they want a different regime but people were were intimidated.

Um you know I think a part of this is that is that Trump really does have a grand grandiose idea of his place in history.

You know, he he said at the beginning of this this war, every president since 1979, 47 years, has wanted to do this, has known that the Iranian regime had to be stopped, and I'm going to do it, you know, and he had this sort of, you know, sense, I can do it.

I'm the guy who can who can do it.

And unfortunately, he didn't he didn't have adequate planning.

He, you know, he did the thing that would have made it doable was more careful thinking about the the the politics of this.

You know, obliterating a whole tier of leadership turned out to be a very bad idea because they didn't have anybody to negotiate