TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. President Trump has said he'll use military force against Iran unless its government agrees to U.S. demands that Tehran shut down its nuclear program and pledges to never again pursue creating a nuclear weapon. As I record this this morning, negotiations are underway in Geneva between Iran's foreign minister and Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, along with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who doesn't have an official position within the current administration. Are we headed toward a military conflict with Iran? If so, would it be a limited series of airstrikes on select targets? Would the U.S. attempt regime change, resulting in a larger war? My guest David Sanger can't answer those questions, but he can tell us how we got to this precipice and what the consequences might be for the U.S. if the president does use military force. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. For years, his coverage has included Iran's nuclear program and U.S. and Israeli attempts to sabotage it. He's also the author of the book "New Cold Wars."
Although I'm recording this introduction this morning, we recorded our interview yesterday morning. We started with a clip of what President Trump said about Iran during his State of the Union address Tuesday.
(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They've already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they're working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America. After Midnight Hammer, they were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, in particular, nuclear weapons. Yet they continue. They're starting it all over. We wiped it out, and they want to start all over again and are, at this moment, again pursuing their sinister ambitions. We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret words - we will never have a nuclear weapon. My preference...
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy. But one thing is certain. I will never allow the world's No. 1 sponsor of terror, which they are, by far, to have a nuclear weapon. Can't let that happen.
(APPLAUSE)
GROSS: David Sanger, welcome to FRESH AIR. So I'm sure you're waiting to hear more about Iran. So first of all, were you surprised at how buried it was within the speech and how little he had to say about it, considering we might be on the brink of war with Iran? And then tell us what you made of what he did say.
DAVID SANGER: Well, Terry, wonderful to be back on with you. I was a little surprised. I had thought that he was going to set some kind of deadline for the Iranians because the backdrop to the speech, of course, was that he has engaged in one of the largest examples of gunboat diplomacy that we've seen in some time. He's put a huge force of two carrier groups, other ships, fighter aircraft, bombers, refuelers all within reach of Iran. It's the largest buildup of American military forces that we have seen since the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. So it's a huge military pressure campaign. And I thought he would refer more explicitly to that. He didn't.
Instead, what he did was kind of run together a couple of different facts and a few fantasies about the Iranian program. First of all, the problem with the Iranian nuclear program is not that the Iranians haven't said they'll never build a nuclear weapon. They say that every week. They've been saying that for years. The foreign minister of Iran tweeted it out again just before the president spoke.
GROSS: Of course, that doesn't mean you can believe them on it.
SANGER: No, you can't, Terry. And of course, the problem is not what they say. It is the evidence that has been gathered patiently over 20 years about work they did on weaponization, the conversion of nuclear material into actual weapons that could only be explained by either an active or a once-active nuclear weapons program.
Now, for the president, he had a particular hurdle to cross here because, of course, he has said - and said again in that clip that you played - that their nuclear program was destroyed. It wasn't, but the nuclear fuel was buried. And while the Iranians may be trying to reconstitute their ability to enrich uranium, and we've seen some very modest evidence of that, if they don't have the fuel and particularly the fuel that is closest to bomb grade, they can't make a bomb. And there's no evidence I've seen that they are any place close to a missile that could reach the United States.
GROSS: Let me play what Trump said on June 21 in 2025, after bombing three major nuclear facilities in Iran. And Israel had attacked Iran in June in a war that lasted around 12 days, and the Trump administration moved forward with bombing those three nuclear facilities. So here's what Trump had to say June 21.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's No. 1 state sponsor of terror. Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.
GROSS: And then after praising Israel and singling out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the U.S. military for their roles in the strike, Trump said this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: With all of that being said, this cannot continue. There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left. Tonight's was the most difficult of them all, by far, and perhaps the most lethal. But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill. Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes.
GROSS: OK. So Trump seems to be contradicting himself because Steve Witkoff made it seem - one of Trump's negotiators on this. Witkoff made it seem like the bomb is imminent. We - you know, we got to move now. And Trump was saying that, you know, their ability was obliterated. So how do you make sense of this?
SANGER: Well, if it sounds contradictory, that's because it truly is contradictory. The attack on those three facilities - Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan - which were the largest enrichment facilities that Iran had, were incredibly successful because they managed to implode the buildings down onto the centrifuges, the machines that spin at supersonic speed to purify uranium and turn it into bomb fuel, and to bury the stockpiles, most of which were in Isfahan, of what's called 60% enriched uranium. And that is to say uranium enriched to a level of purity that's just shy of bomb grade. And it would only take a few weeks to bring that - maybe even a few days to bring that from 60% up to bomb grade, which is 90%. But the fact of the matter is, the Iranians can't get at that fuel now. It is buried down deep. We have not seen any evidence that they've been able to remove any of it. People are watching this site like a hawk, as you could imagine. And so for Mr. Witkoff to step in and say, well, they're just within a hair's breadth of industrial-grade enriched uranium that you could use for bomb fuel, you might have been able to say that prior to the June attack. You can't say it today.
GROSS: So what is this about? Why are we possibly on the brink of war with Iran?
SANGER: Fascinating question. Because the president has offered four different rationales for the current military buildup there. One of them, the one you heard about the most in the State of the Union address there was the nuclear program. But the precipitating reason for the buildup was that the President promised to come to the aid of the protesters who had been on the streets. And he talked about that a bit last night as well, and he said that there had been 32,000 protesters killed during the uprisings in January. And while there is some dispute about the numbers, that's roughly correct, it seems. And so that would be a second reason to come to the aid of the protesters, though in most parts of the world, the president has not been particularly concerned about the fate of protesters who are going after authoritarian regime.
The third reason he's offered, Terry, has been to stop the support of terrorism with Hezbollah and Hamas. But the fact of the matter is, the Iranians are pretty broke right now. They can't spend the kind of money that they did before, and Hamas and Hezbollah are not really in shape right now to be conducting large operations. And the fourth reason he's mentioned were the missiles. So he sort of jumbled those all together in the State of the Union address. But he didn't really explain at any point what his objective is. Is it simply to set back the nuclear program and the missile program, what the Israelis call mowing the lawn? Is it instead to topple the regime? To basically seize the moment?
Because Ayatollah Khamenei is at his weakest point. The economy is reeling. The military suffered huge setbacks during the 12-day war with Israel. The protesters are on the streets. In which case, the president may be thinking about a preventative war, which is to say a war when you're strong and your adversary is weak. That's different than a preemptive war when you see that your adversary is getting ready to strike you and you strike them first. Preemptive wars are considered relatively legitimate. But preventive war has generally been considered under the rules of just war to be illegal.
GROSS: Especially without the consent of Congress.
SANGER: And it's interesting that in the State of the Union, he did not even briefly raise the question of whether Congress would give him an authorization to use military force, similar to what it provided to George Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq, much less a war declaration. Now, if we were being threatened with imminent attack by another country, on our facilities here in the United States, we would consider that an act of war, and it seems reasonable to think that if we're threatening that against Iran, that too would be an act of war and thus worthy of congressional participation.
GROSS: Well, when you have so many, like, ships and missiles and weapons in striking distance of Iran, Iran would have every reason to perceive that as a threat.
SANGER: They would, and they might make life easy for the president by striking first, right? That would be the easiest thing. I mean, imagine, for a moment, either because of a deliberate act or because of a - some military officer someplace who's getting way ahead of himself or even just an accident, they take a shot at an American warship in the Persian Gulf - right? - where Abraham Lincoln is and so forth. That could trigger something. And so part of the difficulty of putting such a big force there is the opportunity for someone to make a miscalculation is huge. And the difficulty of putting that force together at a cost of hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, and keeping it there is that it's really hard to disassemble. And so if the president was going to decide not to use the force and not to attack Iran, he would have to make the case that he got an agreement, and not only any agreement, but an agreement that went far beyond the one that the United States and Iran reached in 2015 during the Obama administration.
GROSS: The deal that Trump called the worst deal ever, and he pulled out of it right after he was elected.
SANGER: That's right. And you could argue that had he not pulled out of it in 2018, that we might not be in this situation today because the fact of the matter is that while the deal was incredibly unpopular and certainly had some holes in it, and I wrote about those pretty extensively at the time and after, the Iranians were complying with it.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guess is David Sanger, and he's a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF SOUNDRIDEMUSIC'S "FUTURE")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with David Sanger, a White House correspondent and national security correspondent for The New York Times. And we're talking about the possibility of war with Iran.
Well, let me see if I understand you correctly. The way you describe the rubble over the deeply buried uranium in Iran, it sounds like they'd have a lot of trouble moving forward with their nuclear weapons program. So it really doesn't pose a threat right now, and they have no missiles that can reach the U.S. So am I summing that up accurately?
SANGER: That's right. Let's not underestimate their missile capability. It can reach parts of Europe. It can reach American bases throughout the Middle East, and we have a lot of them. And they have hit American bases at various moments in conflicts. These are not nuclear missiles. They are conventional. So there is definitely a threat to Americans in the Middle East. There is definitely a threat to American allies in the Middle East, Israel first among them. And some of the Iranian missiles got through air defenses and antimissile defenses back in June and killed some civilians in Israel. So I wouldn't underestimate the power of their missile program, but they can't reach New York or Boston or any place close.
GROSS: But we're not talking about those missiles. Trump is talking about nuclear.
SANGER: He is talking about two different things. He's talking about nuclear weapons and he's talking about their conventional existing missile force, and he frequently conflates the two. But those are the two different threats - and they are very different - that he is discussing. And by the way, if the Iranians ever made a nuclear weapon - and so far they have not, and it has taken them longer than any country - it probably wouldn't be for a warhead that could fit inside a missile. It would probably be a crude weapon.
The other interesting way to think about this, Terry, is compare it to President Trump's big diplomatic effort - a failed effort - in the first term that dealt with North Korea. Now, what's the difference between the Iranian program and the North Korean program? The Iranians have worked toward the goal of a nuclear weapon, we believe, based on the evidence. The North Koreans got to nuclear weapons nearly 20 years ago, and they have now built up an arsenal of 60 or more. And there's every bit of evidence that they do have the missiles that can reach the United States or will soon be able to reach the United States.
GROSS: While we're talking about nuclear weapons, in one article you asked, like, is the era of nuclear weapons treaties over? Because one with Russia just expired. Can you talk a little bit about where Russia and China are in terms of nuclear weapons?
SANGER: Well, this gets to the central question of whether or not Iran is our most serious nuclear problem right now. And I think you could argue that the fastest-growing program is China's, and the one that you might want to worry about the most is Russia's. So let me just take those apart. When Xi Jinping took over in China, the country had gone through decades of theory of minimum nuclear deterrent. It was created by Mao Zedong. The country had roughly 200 nuclear weapons. It wasn't an arsenal even big enough for the U.S. to wrap into arms control talks. Once Xi came in, he looked around the world and said, if we're going to become a great power, we need to have the nuclear arsenal of a great power. By current Pentagon assessments, they've got slightly more than 600 nuclear weapons now, so they've tripled. They're on the way to a thousand by 2030, maybe 1,500 deployed weapons, which is about what the U.S. and Russia deploy currently, by 2035. And there are no nuclear arms control talks underway with China. And the Chinese say, we're not even going to start such discussions until we've got an arsenal comparable to yours. So that's problem one.
Problem No. 2 is that the last arms control agreement, as you suggested, with Russia expired on February 5. So, Terry, with the Russians, we now have no form of arms control - nuclear arms control - in place for the first time in more than 50 years. And I'm not predicting an imminent breakout of a new arms race, but there are no legal constraints on that right now. And what worries us about the Russian nuclear program is both the development of these exotic weapons - undersea nuclear torpedoes that could hit the West Coast of the United States, not be picked up by normal missile interceptors and so forth 'cause they're running underwater, hypersonic weapons that both the Chinese and the Russians are working on. So all kinds of new nuclear weapons. But more concerning is the fact that President Putin has shown no compunction about threatening nuclear use at various points in the conflict with Ukraine. He hasn't done it.
So there's a lot to pay attention to here, and I'm not sure that the Iranian program is the one that I would put on the top of my list. It's certainly a nuclear concern, but maybe not the most immediate one.
GROSS: Let's take a short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is New York Times White House and national security correspondent David Sanger. Our interview was recorded yesterday. We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL FRISELL'S "GREG LEISZ")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday morning about the possibility that President Trump will order a military attack on Iran, either limited airstrikes or an attempt at regime change, which would lead to a longer, possibly wider war. My guest, David Sanger, is explaining how we got to this point and what the consequences might be for the U.S. if we do get into a military conflict. As I record this introduction this morning, talks are underway in Geneva between Iran's foreign diplomat and Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, along with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who doesn't have an official position in the administration.
So if we do attack Iran because the Trump administration is not satisfied with the outcome of the negotiations, there are several ways that this could go. One is limited bomb strikes against key places, and another is, go for the regime change. In terms of regime change, I mean, what I've been reading - and you might've been the one who wrote this - is that the Ayatollah Khamenei has a succession plan in place and plans on becoming a martyr. So, you know, it's not like you can - you could assassinate him. And, you know, it's not going to change anything. And there's probably a pretty long succession line there.
SANGER: We assume there is. Look, the fact of the matter is the ayatollah is 86 years old. If he didn't have a succession plan prior to...
GROSS: A good point (laughter). Yeah.
SANGER: ...This latest confrontation with the United States, then something is wrong with the Iranian system. What we believe he has done now, though, is build a series of succession plans that go down three or four levels. But the fact of the matter is, there are people on the streets who are sick of this regime, who are outraged by the killings of tens of thousands of protesters, who are tired of not only the economic sanctions but the economic mismanagement. The corruption, the fact that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has gotten rich by running the black market of goods, including oil.
And so no one knows what happens if the president is successful and regime change begins to take place. But one thing we do suspect, this doesn't look anything like Venezuela. So, in Venezuela, he also massed a naval force, and not as large as the one we've seen around Iran. He sent in a Delta Force that pulled Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of their bed and flew them off to the Brooklyn detention center. But the rest of the government stayed in place.
And so far, the administration has been more successful than I would've expected, basically trying to run the government by remote control through the structure that Maduro left. It's almost impossible for me to imagine, Terry, that you could do that in Iran because you would be relying on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which runs the nuclear program, and which has huge economic interests in keeping the status quo to operate the country. And obviously, that does not fit with the president's goal of supporting the protesters.
GROSS: I don't know how relevant it is, but the same general who is running the violent crackdown against the protesters, he's the same person who'd be running the war if there is one.
SANGER: Yes, there is a structure to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and its most elite unit, the Quds Force, which operates those terror operations that I was referring to before. And they would largely be in day-to-day control of both the internal uprisings and responding to the U.S. There have also been, Terry, some fascinating leaks out of the discussions taking place at the White House and the Pentagon that had suggested that General Dan Caine - who's the chairman of the joint chiefs, was appointed by President Trump - while not taking a position on whether or not the president should attack, has warned him that this may not go as easily as Operation Midnight Hammer. That was the attack on the Iranian nuclear sites in June.
Or the operation against Venezuela. That the U.S. could take casualties. That the Abraham Lincoln carrier group that is in the Persian Gulf is vulnerable to those Iranian missiles. And you could imagine what this would look like if it turned out that we lost an aircraft carrier or a destroyer or some other ship to an Iranian missile in the course of an exchange with them.
GROSS: Do you think that the military leaders, including Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are concerned about Trump being commander in chief at a very volatile, dangerous time like this? He isn't consulting Congress, so there's no limits that he's allowing to be put on his power to declare war and to shape the kind of war that it is.
SANGER: Well, first of all, if the military did have those concerns, they would go out of their way to avoid discussing it, even internally, because they have a pretty good idea it would leak. I've spent a number of hours with President Trump in the past couple of months. And, you know, I know I hear from a lot of people, oh, he, you know - I'm sure he can't know, operate the way he once did. I know that he's impetuous and all that. Well, Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
But I didn't see any evidence, in the course of our encounters, that he was substantially different from when I dealt with him in the first term. And I think that in military operations, he's got to have in the back of his mind the recognition that if one of these goes bad in a big way, that that will be the defining characteristic of his second term. It is interesting, Terry, that the countries that he picks fights with are countries that really can't fight back in a significant way. Venezuela would be a good example of this. The more modest military operations he's had in Syria, mostly against terror groups, or in Nigeria or other places where he has just made a show of U.S. air power.
He is very reluctant to put troops on the ground. And that's because of the MAGA fear in his base that we're going to get into new forever wars. And he got elected on the thought that we're not doing this anymore. And so there's a lot of the base that is pretty concerned that he's spending too much time on foreign affairs, but also that he is risking getting the U.S. into quagmires that he can't emerge from. And I think that's one of the biggest limits on him.
But you may remember that during that interview in early January when I went in with three of my colleagues, we asked him, what is the limit on your power? And he said, only my own morality. And we asked him whether or not international law was a limit on his power. And he stopped and he said, well, maybe, but it's really how I define international law. So here is a president who believes that his powers are almost completely unfettered and who isn't asking Congress for more because he is simply asserting he already has these powers.
GROSS: Well, we need to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is David Sanger. And he's a White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIDESTEPPER SONG, "ME VOY ANDANDO (REMIX)")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with David Sanger, a White House correspondent and national security correspondent for The New York Times. And we're talking about the possibility of war with Iran.
Let's talk about who is running the diplomacy, who's representing the U.S. in diplomatic efforts. It's not Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as far as I can tell. It's Jared Kushner, who doesn't even have a position within the Trump administration, but he is the president's son-in-law. And Steve Witkoff, who - his background is big deals in real estate and finance. And Jared as well. I mean, he played a role in diplomacy in the Abraham Accords, but he doesn't have a diplomacy background. And they both have conflicts of interest in the Middle East.
SANGER: So as my colleague, Anton Troianovski, and I wrote about a week ago, this is a fascinating experiment in diplomacy without diplomats. And you're absolutely right, this has not been...
GROSS: I love that headline, by the way.
SANGER: (Laughter) And, you know, Terry, I guess I would say that there are some upsides and downsides of this. The most effective diplomats I've seen in four decades-plus of covering this kind of thing for The New York Times is that the diplomats are viewed as having the confidence of the president. And since all decisions in these affairs go straight to Donald Trump - they're not churning through the State Department bureaucracy or the National Security Council, which has now shrunken to a fourth of its previous size.
I think there are some in the Middle East who are perfectly happy dealing with Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff because they know they can get the president on the first ring and have great influence with him. So that's the upside. The second is they're true dealmakers. As you point out, they both spent their life in real estate, not in diplomacy. And they are looking for compromise.
Now, in a case where you're just trying to get to the middle, that may make sense. In a case like Ukraine or perhaps even Iran, where there are huge human rights issues at stake, that may not be an advantage because in putting together a deal - any deal with the existing regime - they could end up actually propping up the regime. Let's say diplomacy wins here, that they come to an agreement on the nuclear program or the nuclear program alone. I think many of the protesters on the ground are going to say, what you've just done is help cement the current regime in place for another couple of years. Thanks a lot.
GROSS: What about Marco Rubio, the secretary of state? Where is he on this?
SANGER: Interesting question. In the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, President Trump had this line where he said he wanted to praise the man who Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff report to - Marco Rubio. And there was applause for Rubio, who, of course, is not only secretary of state but also national security adviser. And the last person who held both posts simultaneously was Henry Kissinger back in the Ford administration.
The interesting question right now is, is Rubio really deeply involved in the Iran confrontation? Has he even taken a major position on it? Because we saw his fingerprints all over Venezuela. There are many who believe that Marco Rubio - whose family, of course, initially came from Cuba - is deeply interested in trying to bring about regime change in Cuba. He made no secret of that when he was a senator. But we haven't seen him be extremely vocal or particularly involved in the Iran negotiations, though we assume that he is in the room with JD Vance and a few others when the major decisions are being made.
GROSS: What about JD Vance? Is he more averse to foreign intervention?
SANGER: Well, certainly, if you listen to him prior to his election, he was deeply averse to foreign intervention and particularly to the American commitment to Ukraine. Before he was even running for vice president, he showed up at the Munich Security Conference and made the public case for the U.S. to basically pull back from support of Ukraine, and certainly from ever allowing Ukraine into NATO, which was considered at the time to be heresy and today is sort of national policy. So one has to assume that he was deeply concerned about Venezuela. But as we indicated earlier, that wasn't a full military attack on Venezuela. That was a snatch and grab operation to seize the leader. And so I think he was at peace with that. Same thing with the previous attack on the three major enrichment centers in Iran. There were no American troops involved. It was a question of whether you could send B-2 bombers and Tomahawk missiles there and go in, bomb and leave. And there was sort of a surgical precision and a brief time period to that that I think made that acceptable to JD Vance. But we don't know his position on Iran. And while he's been careful not to separate himself from the president, one has to assume from everything that we're hearing leaking out that he is at least raising a lot of questions about how this could go wrong.
GROSS: So let's talk about conflicts of interest because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who are negotiating with Iran, both have business interests in the Middle East. Do you want to run through some of them?
SANGER: Well, certainly, Terry, we've seen investments that came from the Arab states into some of Jared Kushner's businesses. And for Steve Witkoff, whose business is now run by his children, there have also been some investments as well. My colleagues and I brought this topic up with President Trump during our interview in January. And we noted to him that in the first term, he made sure that the Trump organization did not invest in overseas projects because it's rife with opportunities to go influence a president or to get their children involved in business deals that would look like an effort to influence the administration. And I thought the president's answer to us was just fascinating, Terry. He said, you know, you're right. We did that in the first term, and we didn't get any credit for it. So in the second term, we're not even bothering. We're just going ahead with those transactions. And that told you so much about President Trump's mindset here, Terry, because he wasn't saying, we're abstaining from those transactions because we wouldn't want to create the impression of any kind of conflict of interest. Instead, it was a, I did this, and no one rewarded me for it. No one even credited me for it. No one praised me for it. Therefore, let's not bother.
GROSS: Well, let's take another short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is David Sanger. He's a national security and White House correspondent for The New York Times. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OCTOPUS PROJECT'S "THE ADJUSTOR")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with David Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times.
Give us a brief sense of what you think the best-case and worst-case scenario is if we do bomb Iran and whether this could lead to a wider war in the Middle East and what that might look like.
SANGER: Well, Terry, I think, you know, the best case here would be - as the president himself said in the State of the Union, would be to come to a diplomatic outcome here that didn't require any military action, right? And it would be easy to imagine what that would be - a suspension for some number of years of all enrichment activity in Iran, maybe the permission to do a very limited amount for medical purposes, as I described earlier, and a long-term agreement that Iran would get its nuclear fuel from operations outside the country. Maybe build - have an Iranian interest in a Middle East provider of enriched uranium so you were sure it was for energy purposes, not weapons purposes. That would be ideal or the closest to ideal you could be. And the president could argue that he got more than Barack Obama got in 2015. And that really weighs on his mind because having denounced the Obama agreement, if he's going to get - find a way out of this box, he's got to declare that he's gotten more than Obama did.
The second option might be some kind of a surgical strike against the missile capabilities, some other nuclear sites, and maybe some of the military units that have been suppressing the protests on the street. That would leave the Iranian regime wondering whether President Trump was willing to come back for more if they continued to kill protesters on the street. But that would require maintaining that military posture off of Iran for a long period of time. And that certainly does not fit with either our current budgets or our current national security strategy, which barely mentioned Iran.
The third option would be the all-out bombing campaign. The president deciding, I'm just going to go for it. I'm going to go down in history as the president who's solved the Iran problem once and for all. No American presidents dealt with these guys straight up and down since the 1979 revolution, and I'm just going to go do it. And there are some, like Lindsey Graham, in Congress who are basically in the president's ear, arguing that that's the right course to go take. But that's expensive, and the longer you are there, the higher the chances that you suffer some kind of significant casualties or that something goes wrong.
And one would hope that the president's advisers are at least laying out those options. And frankly, Terry, that's what worries me about the shrinking of the National Security Council, because the NSC over history has been all about coming up with scenarios and options and laying out for the president what could go wrong, what are the worst-case scenarios so that you're thinking about them before you act rather than tripping into them.
GROSS: Do you think that this could lead - if we do attack Iran, that this could lead to a wider regional war?
SANGER: I think the concerns about that are a little bit overblown. That was certainly the concern after the October 7 attacks - right? - and that there would be additional attacks that would take place that would bring in the Arab states and Iran. I think the Arab states here are holding back. They do not see an imminent threat from the Iranians. In fact, if you ask Arab diplomats what they think right now, their own belief is that the Iranians are weaker than they've ever been, and probably in a worse position to do mischief in the region unless they are pushed to the wall. And their biggest worry about Iran today is that if Iran's leaders believe that regime change is on the way, then there's no reason for them to hold back if they think this is, you know, the fight to the death. And so their interest is not pushing the Iranians to that point.
GROSS: David, before you have to go, any final thoughts you want to add?
SANGER: The other day, in an interview on Fox News, Steve Witkoff said that the president was surprised that the Iranians had not yet capitulated, and he was wondering when they might capitulate. My own view is you're never going to see them fully capitulate because the governing thought of the current Iranian regime since the 1979 revolution has been to be in opposition to the United States. And so folding to an American president simply isn't going to happen.
And the question is, can we come up with enough face-saving diplomacy here to basically push this problem several years down the road and hope that with an aging supreme leader and a restive population on the streets, regime change happens organically, rather than something that the United States once again tries to bring about? And that's the really - the big debate. Do you push them over the edge because they're weak now, or do you try to create conditions that keep the protests alive and keep the pressure on the current regime until it cracks from within? It's the implosion versus explosion debate.
GROSS: David Sanger, thank you so much for talking with us. I know you've had a lot of deadlines. I appreciate you carving out some time to be on our show.
SANGER: Always great to be on FRESH AIR, Terry.
GROSS: Thank you so much.
David Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times and author of the book "New Cold Wars." We recorded our interview yesterday morning.
If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like this week's interviews with Oscar nominees Stellan Skarsgard and Kate Hudson or with novelist Tayari Jones, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/freshair.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD MEHLDAU'S "MONK'S DREAM")
GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Lauren Krenzel, Ann Marie Baldonado, Monique Nazareth, Therese Madden, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD MEHLDAU'S "MONK'S DREAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
