Will Trump blink? Will he claim victory in Iran without achieving any tangible wins Considering Iranian leadership isn’t budging an inch against Trump’s threats, it’s a toss up.
Steve Cook, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins Jen to unpack the various negative impacts that will result from the ongoing war in Iran. Importantly, Cook notes how China is certainly looking at us for lessons on what not to do, and how Europe has determined that the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner.
Steven Cook is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations specializing in Middle East and Africa studies. He is an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S.-Middle East policy. Dr. Cook is the author of multiple books.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. We are delighted to have back with us Steve Cook from the Council on Foreign Relations. Welcome, Steve!
Steven Cook
Hey, great to be back with you, Jen.
Jen Rubin
You know, every day, we spend time trying to figure out what part of a statement that Donald Trump made is actually true. Because he keeps saying, we’ve got a done deal, or we’re gonna attack them, or they’ve agreed to everything. Is he just trying to bluff them into a deal, as if Iran is simply going to agree because Trump said it? What is the strategy behind that?
Steven Cook
Yeah, I think this is, the Iranians are a group of people that Trump has never confronted before. And, they are going to stick to their positions no matter what. They have taken a lot of damage. And they haven’t capitulated on the battlefield. And in the negotiation, I guess it was now a week and a little bit ago, in Islamabad, they weren’t willing to capitulate at the negotiating table. So, none of the president’s usual kind of stratagems have worked. He threatens escalation, they say, bring it on, he says… and now we’re at the point where he… I think he’s trying to, you know, Roy Cohen the Iran conflict, where he says, they’ve agreed to X, and then they feel that they have to go along with it, but they’re an adversary, and he generally is successful doing that with friends.
I mean, he’s able to do that with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, because Prime Minister Netanyahu’s beholden to him. It works with much weaker countries who are not in conflict with the United States, because they really have no other choice. The Iranians, they’re gonna fight it out. We’ve eliminated everybody in Iran who would have, at least theoretically, you’d think, might have been interested in making a deal. And now we’ve got the hardest of the hardliners, and they’re not susceptible to the president’s rhetorical strategy here.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. John Bolton, who I don’t always agree with, said something that I totally agree with, which is, every time Trump does this, he conveys desperation. And the Iranians can smell blood in the water, pardon the phrase. And they know they have him on the run. So, I think they’re right, I think he is desperate, and I think they’re also right. Why should they give anything up at this point? Trump probably, most likely, doesn’t want to go back to war. He can read the polls, he can read the gas prices. And what else is he gonna do? Just kind of stamp his foot? So, if you’re from the Iranian standpoint, what would be the best outcome? That Trump just packs up and leaves? That he gives them some kind of diplomatic recognition? What’s the best case scenario from their standpoint?
Steven Cook
Well, I think the best case scenario for them is, they get him wrapped around the axle of a negotiation on… nuclear issues, missiles, which much of which has been, you know, the manufacturing, much of which has been destroyed, proxies, but in exchange for sitting down, they get sanctions relief.
Why is that happening? I mean, these plans that keep floating up and percolating up that have been leaked from various different places, most recently, the Israelis, have leaked this plan. For the Iranians, it’s about sanctions relief. Then they can negotiate forever, forever, and ever and ever. But Trump will say, look how wonderful, we won, it’s a new regime, and so on and so forth. So that’s the best-case scenario for him.
Meanwhile, for the Iranians, meanwhile, the Israelis would be quite concerned about sanctions relief, the Emiratis, quite concerned, the Saudis are all quite concerned about sanctions relief, but Trump, now having gotten himself into it and desperate to get out of it, you could see, would be willing to do that, and then leave the details to others. Isn’t that the way he does stuff?
Jen Rubin
And this would be the worst of all possible worlds, both before and after the JCPOA, because at least we had the sanctions there, or alternatively, we had measures to control the nuclear program and now we would have nothing. And, oh, by the way. What about the Strait of Hormuz? Is Iran ever giving that up?
Steven Cook
I keep saying this over and over again, and, you know, because the president keeps juicing the market by saying one thing and then the other, none of which is really true, is that if the Strait of Hormuz opens. And I don’t think it’s gonna be open for quite some time. I mean, I’m talking 3, 4, 5, maybe even 2 months, that is gonna be the result.
The result will be that the Iranians have some say in the operation of the Strait of Hormuz. When previously they didn’t, it was notional, it was theoretical, that they could, or they could try to close it, but because the president thought that this thing would end in 3 days, and he would find his Persian version of Delcy Rodriguez, I don’t think that the contingencies for the Strait were as front and center for the military as they might otherwise have been. So now the Iranians have this tremendous amount of leverage, almost better than a nuclear program, because they stand to potentially make money off of it. Why would they give that up?
Jen Rubin
Right, so now they have two points of leverage. A nuclear program that they’re gonna race to the bomb, and the Strait of Hormuz. So they come out much better than they arguably were, aside from, obviously, tremendous damage, they’re gonna have costs. They’re going to be able to recoup that if they’re charging a billion dollars or so per tanker.
Steven Cook
Again, and they, you know, these are the hardest of the hardliners. They’ll eat dust before capitulating to the United States. So they’re not gonna give it up, they do smell desperation. I think the theory, if there is one, or at least people who are kind of backfilling for the president, will say you could do this because this regime is so weak.
They’re not likely to survive for a long period of time, and, you know, they won’t enjoy the sanctions relief because the Iranian people will ultimately rise up and bring them down. That’s possible, that should be among our range of possibilities, but it also should be among our range of possibilities that the Iranian leadership enjoys the sanctions relief, have been willing to use heavy-caliber weapons against their own people, and have the President of the United States in a pretty desperate position, so that they may very well hang on.
So, again, there is the possibility, and we’ve discussed this before, I think, that this thing ends, and the United States in a worse position than it was then before it started.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Now, some of our Gulf State allies are coming with their hand out and saying, you know, we’ve had to spend a lot of money here, we’ve had a lot of damage. We’d like you to help us out. Now, I don’t know if Trump is going to do that or not, but that points to another consequence of this, which is the Gulf states are not really thrilled with us at this point. We dragged them into a war, they took a beating, and at the end of the day, they’re not going to get anything, and worst of all, the Strait of Hormuz may be in Iranian hands.
Steven Cook
Yeah, this is not a good outcome for them at all. I mean, whether they were for or against the war remains kind of an open question, you know? Right. John Hudson had that interesting piece in the Washington Post early on in the war that suggested that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman lobbied vigorously for the campaign.
Regardless, they’re now left with a situation where they could be left in the lurch. That’s why a subsequent article was demonstrated that they wanted President Trump to finish the job. They don’t want to be left with an Iran in control or partial control Strait of Hormuz, and the means to threaten them physically with drones and missiles, and they’ve certainly been threatened and taken a lot of damage.
The Emiratis have as a contingency. I don’t think that they’re in a real problem, but they’re exploring the idea of a currency swap. that’s usually done with the Fed, and the Fed is likely to say no, because the Fed, basically gauges these things and weighs a swap on how it would affect the US economy. And since the Emiratis aren’t really that big a player in terms of trade. None like that happened, so they’ve gone to Treasury which they did with Argentina.
But right now, it’s not really interesting. The country in the Gulf that really has suffered the most is Bahrain. And Bahrain, not having a lot of resources to begin with, has taken a tremendous amount of fire. The Iranians believe Bahrain to be part of Iran. And they just don’t have the same kind of capacity as either the Saudis, or the Emiratis, or the Qataris, for that matter. So, I can imagine if there’s positive noise coming from the Treasury Department about the Emiratis, the Bahrainis will be right behind them. You know, all of a sudden, we’re helping out a whole host of countries that we think of as wealthy countries.
Jen Rubin
And you have to appreciate the irony that Trump is so mad at the Europeans, because from his standpoint, it’s take, take, take. Now he has a whole other set of dependents who have their hands out because of his bungling.
Steven Cook
Which, going back to the 1980s, all of those countries, he had demanded they pay for their security. These old, you know, New York Post and New York Daily News ads that he took out in the 80s, saying that, you know, all these wealthy countries should pay the United States, and that’s… that’s been his message in his three runs for president. We may end up, actually, he may be leaning on Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary. to throw these guys a lifeline. The ironies are astounding.
Jen Rubin
The only people who may be more upset than the Gulf states, and those people who understand American geopolitics. are the Israelis. they are not in a good position. Now, they’ve made some headway in Lebanon at the cost of enormous casualties and damage. But the regime is still there. The regime has lots and lots of missiles, which they have learned they can be replenished. There is no sign that they’re giving up their nuclear program. And they have the strength. So what does Bibi say to his domestic audience, look what I got you? They’re also in a slightly worse position.
Steven Cook
Right, I think that the… I think the Israeli government could probably live with the outcome in Iran. And the kind of cold calculations of, you know, Israeli security establishment, we have destroyed, you know, X amount of Y, and we, you know, and the Iranians can’t do Z for 5 years, that buys us time, those kinds of calculations that are being made. Lebanon, I think, is a different story. Because, right before Trump declared the ceasefire, the Israel Democracy Institute released a poll that showed 80% of Israelis supported the operations against Hezbollah. Then INSS, the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, released another poll that showed not quite as many, but 65% of Israelis supported the operations against Hezbollah, because Netanyahu has said we’re gonna do this after Hezbollah fired on Israel, after the Ayatollah was killed in the opening round, that that’s it, we’re gonna solve the Hezbollah problem.
And for some Israelis, they’ve come tantalizingly close. Yes, the damage to Lebanon has been tremendous, and the Israelis talking about occupying Lebanon is a very, very bad idea. But they did enter into this town, Bint Jbeil, that was a stronghold of Hezbollah, and then they’ve suddenly been pulled back. So there’s a lot of frustration in Israel today across the board. There’s lots of, support, both for the operations against Iran and Hezbollah, and what’s happened is, Netanyahu has done a lot of work to try to spin this, but it looks like if the elections were held today, he would be 11 seats short of the majority that he needs to become the president.
That doesn’t necessarily suggest that his opponents have the 61 seats, minimum 61 seats they need immediately, but he was looking to capitalize on Iran and for those things to carry him back to the Prime Ministry.
And after all, this is Iran in particular has been what Bibi has talked about since he first became Prime Minister in 1996. You know, two weeks, the window is closing, this is all the language of Netanyahu run, you know, Israeli governments over many, many years. So, the Israelis are in a very uncomfortable position. One Israeli friend of mine said to me. is there anything that we can salvage from this? We essentially lost this. For all of the tactical brilliance of the IDF, they’re gonna lose this. I mean, and one other point on this is that, you know, the president made a big deal about, a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, but Hezbollah said, we’re not a party to it, Israel keeps hitting Hezbollah, and there’s supposed to be some meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon. I was burning up the WhatsApp this morning, and either people are ignoring me or getting… there’s no date yet. Which means, again, the president is saying things that aren’t actually going to happen.
Now, he’s able to get the Israelis to stop, because I said before, Netanyahu’s beholden to him, and so you can declare a ceasefire before the security cabinet has an opportunity to debate it, and the Israelis have to abide by it, but I don’t think we’re getting much further in Lebanon.
Jen Rubin
And that’s another negative for Bibi, by the way, because Trump forced him to stop when he didn’t want to. See, this idea that he has Trump wrapped around his finger, not.
Last question I want to ask you, I wrote about this today. The big winner in all of this, from my standpoint, seems to be China. The reason being that they are chomping at the bit to make all kinds of economic and other deals with our allies who are disaffected. We have screwed up the region. They’re going to be more than happy to be the reconstruction crew that comes in. They are dominating the green energy field because we have ceded ground to them. And what’s more, they seem normal, and stable. And reliable, and we seem like a bunch of clowns! Beijing is pretty happy about where things have landed.
Steven Cook
It’s amazing when we’ve made the CCP look, like, professional and competent and non-ideological, because we’re, like, six ways till Sunday. I mean, it’s crazy. The president is out there saying things that everybody knows are not true.
I do think, in a way, I think on an economic level, certainly the Chinese have, an advantage here. They’ve had an advantage for a while because they have state-owned enterprises that can bid, you know, 40% at a discount on what American and other Western firms can bid. But I do think, like that period of time, like 10 years, where both Democrats and Republicans talked about pivoting away from the Middle East, and going to Asia, and that we didn’t really have strong interests in the Middle East, that, you know, Emiratis, Saudis. others, Israelis kind of hedged their bets with the Chinese, but it was mostly on economic stuff.
I think the Chinese, they want to learn the negative lesson from us, which is, don’t get wrapped around the axle of regional conflicts. you want to be neutral on these things, because otherwise, you get bogged down in a region that is critically important to you, but it saps your power, and so on, and we see this kind of thing happening with the United States. I don’t get the sense, and again, I don’t speak Mandarin, I don’t read Mandarin, I talk to people who do. And so this is secondary. I don’t get the sense that the Chinese want to replace the United States as the provider of security. the region. They do want to rebuild Bahrain. the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. The last thing I’ll say is the most interesting thing that happened last week, to my mind, is when the Italian Prime Minister and Trump had a falling out over the Pope. Coincidentally, the Italian delegation happened to be in China, negotiating an economic and trade, you know, cooperation agreement. The Chinese practically bear-hugged the Italians, as if to say. about those crazy Americans? You’ve got it! We’ll be your friends, we’ll be reliable, don’t worry. Not that suddenly Europe is going to be in the pocket of China, but when you think back. I think they had made some progress in getting the Europeans to begin to stand up to China. That, I think, is gone. They really have to play both sides at this point, because the Americans are so undependable!
Steven Cook
I mean, to say the least, I mean, I would suspect that after this, Trump, you know, maybe it’s Cuba, but I think he might say, we’re done with NATO, and I think that the Europeans have come to the conclusion that the United States is totally unreliable. But can we go back to one thing? I’m not an expert on this, but I have to say this. I mean, of all the things, of all the things, why would you pick a fight with the Pope? That seems to be, politically, the dumbest thing that you could possibly do. The Pope!
And then lecture him! Then lecture him about theology. I mean, that’s his one job. And so, like, it just seems to me totally crazy. It’s totally crazy. And it speaks to where we are, which is why, if you’re an Italian prime minister, and you’ve been close to Trump, but you’re objectively observing the geopolitical environment around you. you see a president of the United States basically disintegrating, an administration around him saying very nasty things about the Pope, and about Europe, who are… Whether you like it or not, whether you agree with Pedro Sanchez or not, these are the people who share our values the most. and who… and it’s a core interest of the United States for Europe to be whole, prosperous, and free. These people don’t, in the administration, don’t seem to care about this at all. Europeans are gonna have to play a multipolar game here. It’s not just about the United States any longer. And it’s our own fault. It’s our own fault.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. This is completely self-inflicted. So, last question for you. If you have to bet. It seems like they’re going to Islamabad. I guess the Iranians are showing up, at least as of this moment. Is anything gonna happen this week, or everyone’s gonna go home?
Steven Cook
You know, I’ve been impressed that the… not impressed in a, like, wow, I want to be like that, but impressed that the Iranians have not come off their demands, which have been the same all along. And they firmly believe that Trump is gonna blink. So, that’s the variable here. Is Trump going to blink?
And if he does, how is he going to spin it? all things being equal, he sticks to where he is, we’re still gonna have the problem in the Strait of Hormuz, which may, as the Iranians have threatened, move to the Bab al-Mandab, which their allies, the Houthis, had done post-October 7th, 2023. So, I’m gonna stick to my guns here and say I’m not hopeful that anything real will come out of Islamabad. These are really big issues that require lots of time, lots of attention, lots of patience. This administration doesn’t have it, and the Iranians believe that they’re winning.
Jen Rubin
I think that’s right, and the only logical or possible alternative I see is one little piece of paper with something at the top saying, we’ll agree to talk in the future by Trump, I won! And that’s it.
Steven Cook
Well, we’ll see where the markets are. You know, that could be the thing that he does, you know, because it’s been clear he’s been juicing the markets with the things that he’s been saying, and market players fall for it every single time.
Jen Rubin
It is a fascinating story of utter and complete self-own and incompetence, but great for people like you, so…
Steven Cook
I hate that bad news is good for me. I have a smile on my face, I generally have a sunny disposition, but it really does gnaw at me that bad news is good.
Jen Rubin
Yes! I know, I know. Well, as always, Steve, it’s a pleasure. Thanks for coming and sharing your knowledge, and I am sure we are g
