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Mediators from Pakistan and Qatar say the United States and Iran made “encouraging progress” during 18 hours of negotiations in Switzerland, where the two sides agreed to a roadmap toward reaching a final deal within 60 days. The talks took place despite Iran on Saturday announcing it was closing the Strait of Hormuz after Israel killed 83 people in Lebanon on Friday. Israel said it would agree to a new ceasefire in Lebanon but is also refusing to end its occupation of southern Lebanon.
“Iran has, through its throttling of the Strait of Hormuz, enormous leverage to produce pain on not just the United States, but global markets,” says award-winning journalist Spencer Ackerman. “We’re going to await how the Iranians will ultimately play that card when it comes to Lebanon.”
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center, says that by demanding the ceasefire extend to Lebanon, “the Islamic Republic focused on creating a rift between Israel and the U.S., and I think, possibly, along with the successes in the war front politically, that was one of the most successful projects that they followed.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Mediators from Pakistan and Qatar say the U.S. and Iran made “encouraging progress” during 18 hours of negotiations in Switzerland, where the two sides agreed to a roadmap towards reaching a final deal within 60 days. Vice President JD Vance headed the U.S. delegation. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf led the Iranian delegation. On Sunday, Vance said the U.S. wants to turn over a new leaf with Iran.
VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: What the president has asked us to do is turn over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran and to extend an outstretched hand that says to the people of Iran that if your leadership is willing to give up being a driver of regional instability, if they are willing to give up nuclear weapons ambitions for the long term, then the United States is willing to fundamentally transform our relationship with that country. That is certainly our goal.
AMY GOODMAN: The talks took place despite new threats from President Trump. On Sunday, Trump posted a message online reading, quote, “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard, just like we did last week, only harder!!!” — three exclamation points.
On Saturday, Iran announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz, after Israel killed 83 people in Lebanon. On Friday, Israel said it would agree to a new ceasefire in Lebanon, but is also refusing to end its occupation of southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah killed four Israeli soldiers Friday.
For more on these latest developments, we’re joined by two guests. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is a fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was previously professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. In the 1980s, he was on death row in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. His latest book, just out this year, is titled The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions. And we’re joined here in New York by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, and writes the Forever Wars newsletter. His latest piece is headlined “Iran’s Forever Leverage.”
Let’s start with you, Spencer. Your assessment of where the U.S. and Iran have come to in their negotiations?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: We’ve reached an astonishing point, a point that reflects how thoroughly the United States has lost this foolhardy war that the U.S. and Israel launched in February. If you’ll remember, back then, there was never any consideration that Iran would close one of the world’s most important economic waterways. Right now, unlike anything the United States or Israel thought it would achieve in this war, that is the main issue driving absolutely everything else, and it’s the main issue that’s prompted the United States to essentially give away the store.
Unlike the JCPOA, the nuclear deal in 2015 that the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, this memorandum of understanding that the U.S. and Iran have signed to kick off a 60-day period of negotiations only in some aspects covers the nuclear file. What it mostly does is lay out a roadmap to a regional transformation that would have been astonishing previously to imagine. The United States is committing in this document, this signed document, to transform its military posture in the Middle East, to end all forms of sanctions on Iran, not in the staggered manner that the 2015 accord did, but, apparently, right now the Iranians can sell oil, make money off of their oil supplies right now. And more fundamentally, the U.S. and Iran are now looking toward a new reality in which Iran’s power has been demonstrated against what had been not just the reigning superpower in the world, but the driving force of Middle Eastern security.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian speaking Sunday.
PRESIDENT MASOUD PEZESHKIAN: [translated] We will not give up our rights to enrichment, and they, too, will be forced to accept it. You all know what the so-called president of the United States was saying. He has made a complete 180-degree turn. He was saying that Iran must surrender unconditionally; Iran has no right to do this, it has no right to do that. Then he gave a speech and said that Iran has the right to do this, it has the right to possess this. In other words, he has reversed himself 180 degrees compared to his previous positions and has accepted that they cannot ignore our rights.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the Iranian president. Can you talk about the U.S. spin? And go further into the details and how what has been accomplished at this point compares to what President Obama accomplished back in 2015.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Right. So, you heard the vice president talk about how Iran has to transform its behavior, how its proxy support for militias, like Hezbollah, has to end. That’s not actually in the MOU. The memorandum itself really puts the onus on the United States to both end its sanctions, all sorts of sanctions on Iran, secondary sanctions, which basically means the customers, the consumers of Iranian oil have sanctions on them, as well. And as well, it makes the United States sort of responsible for Israel withdrawing from Lebanon, which the Israelis are not agreeing to do at this point.
The actual terms itself, we should be cautious on. I would not be surprised if what happened, and the reason why this accord is so tilted in the memorandum of understanding toward the Iranian position, is not only because Iran demonstrated it can withstand the United States in the war, but because the Trump administration needed this agreement so badly to reassure markets, to reassure, in particular, energy markets, and to get that energy flowing, that very likely the negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, just needed to give Iran basically the terms of the agreement in order to show that this process would in fact move forward. But right now what’s ended up is that the terms of this agreement are overwhelmingly tilted toward Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Behrooz into this conversation, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi. You yourself were held in Evin Prison on death row in Iran. You don’t have a lot of sympathy, you didn’t, for the — to say the least, the Iranian regime, now a professor at CUNY, before that at Princeton. But can you talk about how that regime has changed, who is in power right now, what the U.S. has done in changing that regime?
BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: First, thank you for having me again in the program.
I think this was a war that was doomed from the beginning, and it was exactly because of a total misunderstanding of the Islamic Republic power structure. And this misunderstanding and ignorance about the power structure in Iran was partially promoted by the Israelis and American intelligence, and partially, basically, put forward by the mass media in the U.S. The misunderstanding was that, you know, you decapitate the state, and then it falls apart. And the reality, after three or four days of war, basically undermined that kind of understanding.
And the second thing, the second misunderstanding was that — the relationship between the Iranian people and their state. And it is true that there is large segments of society opposing the state in Iran, and they’ve shown their grievances in many different forms, and they were repressed and massacred by the Iranian government. But at the same time, that relationship did not translate into organizing to overthrow the state after the beginning of the war. And we saw that how people rallied around the flag, and despite their opposition to the state, they supported the war efforts that was organized by the Islamic Republic.
And the third issue was the miscalculating the Iranian military power. And I want to borrow from Mao Zedong and his — sorry — his notion of paper tiger. And for many years, Americans thought that Iran is a paper tiger, and they’re sort of seen formidable, threatening and powerful, and while in actuality they’re weak and ineffectual. But in practice, they showed that not only they were not a paper tiger, but they were willing to withstand these attacks and, in a very twisted way, show that Americans seem like a paper tiger more than Iranians.
And last but not least, the Iranians, the Islamic Republic always threatened that if there is a war against them, they’re going to turn that into a regional war and force a global war. And the U.S. administration, President Trump and others, they thought that this is only a meaningless threat. And in practice, they did that and showed a particularly surprising resilience and survived this attack.
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And I think that the way now it’s working, and diplomatically, politically, the Islamic Republic focused on creating a rift between Israel and the U.S., and I think, possibly, along with the successes in the war front politically, that was one of the most successful projects that they followed. And as we see today, that rift between the U.S. and Israel is deepening. And for the first time, we see this kind of political attacks and criticism on the Israeli government that has been quite unprecedented.
And the other thing that the Iranians did, they shifted their position on Lebanon from supporting their allies, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon, to defending Lebanese sovereignty. And I think that was also a very successful campaign and that that’s how we see all those points are reflected in this 14-point memorandum of understanding, which, as Spencer said, this is a document of capitulation on the American part, because this is actually an unconditional surrender, because I don’t see any parts of this agreement that shows any concession on the Iranian part, except their commitment not to develop nuclear weapons, which was a commitment they made more than 20 years ago.
AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Excellent points by Behrooz, as always. I would just want to remind everyone, you know, zoom out a little bit. The war in February began as a way, supposedly, for the United States to extract a stronger position in nuclear negotiations. The United States had launched nuclear negotiations with the Iranians pretextually to bomb them. And now what’s happened is the Iranians have not only withstood that, they have fundamentally transformed the United States’s position in the Middle East.
The Iranians have cratered the air bases, destroyed the radar systems that protected those air bases, and have held at risk the energy and other critical infrastructure, data center facilities, around the Gulf states that hosted the United States’s military presence, made those U.S. allies in the Gulf think very seriously about whether the United States’s military umbrella actually defends them, to the point that in the memorandum of understanding the Iranians have extracted, at least on paper for now — we’ll see how this is implemented — a commitment from the United States to move its military posture further away from Iranian territory.
What that actually means in practice, we’ll have to await. Whether this is, you know, an insincere commitment, we’ll have to await. Or whether this is actually, you know, compelled, as is, on some level, quite likely, as it’s a material reality derivative of the fact that Iran basically destroyed a whole lot of these bases, have now made the U.S. military posture in Iran not the strength that the United States thought, not the anchor that the United States thought it had in the region, but fundamentally a point of weakness, something that the Iranians can leverage against the U.S., not vice versa. That’s a fundamental transformation.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about how U.S.-Israeli relations are shifting? You have Vance saying recently to The New York Times, “You’re” — speaking about Israel, “You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yes, anti-Zionist champion JD Vance, of all things. I don’t really believe that it’s actually sincere. One thing that you always want to look at when you see people on the right criticize Israel is whether they actually support Palestine or not. That’s typically, you know, the critical distinction here.
But more fundamentally, Iran has, in addition to the way that it’s turned the American military presence in the Middle East from a strength to a weakness, so it’s done with the U.S.-Israel alliance. It is placing a wedge between those two allies. Most importantly, the memorandum of understanding that the U.S. and Iran signed talks about the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. As Behrooz pointed out, that is a mechanism to say that unless the U.S. — there’s a major difference of opinion between the U.S. and Israel here, which I’ll talk about in a second, but unless the U.S. compels Israel to cease its devastation of Lebanon, it’s —
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, on Friday, they killed, Israel killed, 83 people alone in Lebanon.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: That’s correct. And then, what did Iran do? Iran ordered the Strait of Hormuz shut. It is using leverage that previously it never had employed against the United States, let alone the U.S.-Israel alliance.
I think if there’s a weakness in the memorandum of understanding in terms of how it places this wedge between Iran and — I’m sorry, between the U.S. and Israel over Lebanon, it’s that it doesn’t mention Palestine, it doesn’t mention Gaza. Israel has killed a thousand Palestinians since the October ceasefire. This memorandum of understanding is silent on that. So, that’s really one weak point that we can look at as a measure of criticism.
But now it’s basically holding the United States responsible, it’s holding the, quote-unquote, “peace” right now, the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, hostage to the U.S. ability to rein in Israel. Whether that actually happens is going to depend, to a great degree, on the difference between, you know, Vance’s interpretation of this, as a proxy for the Trump interpretation of this, and the Israeli interpretation of this. The Israeli interpretation is that right now what it’s done, the MOU has done, is freeze Israeli military positions in Lebanon in place. The Iranian position — and it’s trying to see what the United States will do about this — is say, no, it means the Israelis have to withdraw from Lebanon and cease bombing it.
What we’re seeing right now is that Iran has, through its throttling of the Strait of Hormuz, enormous leverage to produce pain on not just the United States, but global markets. And we’re going to await how the Iranians will ultimately play that card when it comes to Lebanon fully.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, let me put this question to Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, and that is the response inside Iran of everyday people, many of whom are dissidents. I mean, with the first day, the U.S. Tomahawk missile strike on the girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran, that killed at least something like 175 people, mainly primary schoolgirls, has this shifted public opinion in Iran? And are now the Iranian — the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps in charge?
BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: We actually don’t know who exactly is in charge. And the Revolutionary Guards always played a key role in political decision-making and controlling the country’s economy, so that continues to be the case. With how much that has changed, we need to wait and see how the postwar governance unfolds.
Inside the country, Iranians, you know, are in a kind of a waiting mode to see how, for example, this $300 billion reconstruction fund is going to be appropriated, and who is going to be a part of the conversation about its allocation, what projects get priority, and how the government is going to create some sort of context to relieve that economic pressure that people are dealing with every day. And every day, it’s becoming harder and harder for people to survive under this hardship, economic hardship.
And, of course, I think that there are — I mean, Iranians are not in one voice. There are so many different voices. As Spencer mentioned, there are also voices that are skeptical of the fact that the Palestinian question is absent in the memorandum, and also people who are thinking that how can we trust Americans this time, because this happened, this is a pattern, that they agree on some frame of work, they agree on resolving their differences, and in the middle of that, suddenly the U.S. and Israelis change the game and attack Iranians. And I’ve heard many sort of voices inside the country that whether the government, the state should trust this time that Americans are sincere about turning a page and rethinking their relations with the Iranian government.
AMY GOODMAN: Thirty seconds. Spencer Ackerman?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: We shouldn’t think of this as the end of anything. We shouldn’t even necessarily think of it as the beginning of the end. What we have is an inauguration of a new period in U.S.-Iran and, indeed, global relations, because Iran, now that it knows that it can leverage the closure or the throttling of the Strait of Hormuz, will never give that up, now that they know that the Americans can’t transform that equation militarily. We should probably get used to a prolonged period of bombing, retrenchment, closure and so forth. And that’s probably going to look like the scope of the new reality going forward, whatever happens with these negotiations.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for joining us. Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, author of the Forever Wars newsletter. His latest piece, “Iran’s Forever Leverage.” And thank you so much to Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center, imprisoned in Iran in the ’80s at the notorious Evin Prison, on death row there. His latest book, just out, The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions. He was speaking to us from Camden, Maine.
Coming up, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has resigned. We’ll talk to his former mentor, the renowned human rights attorney Geoffrey Robertson, about this latest news and the crackdown in the U.K. on Palestine solidarity activists labeled terrorists. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “War Time” by Feral Foster, performing at the Brooklyn Folk Festival.
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