Transcript: Iran's Ceasefire Explained: Winners, Losers, and What Comes Next
The Long Game - Episode 20
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Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer
Iran’s Ceasefire Explained: Winners, Losers, and What Comes Next
April 9, 2026
TEASER:
Jake Sullivan:
On a going forward basis now, the world knows, America knows, and most importantly, the clerical and revolutionary guard leadership in Iran knows that they can do that. They can shut down the strait in future if they are attacked. And that this is a source of deterrence. It is a source of potential coercion. It is fundamentally a source of power for the regime in Iran that was theoretical before and now is actual, and has been born out and proven out in the crucible of a war.
Welcome back to The Long Game. I’m Jake Sullivan.
Jon Finer:
And I’m Jon Finer.
Jake Sullivan:
So Jon, today’s episode is once again quality time with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer. No guest because we have a lot to digest and work through, you and me together, given the announcement last night of a ceasefire between the United States and Iran, negotiated or brokered by Pakistan. Always an interesting country to be in the middle of a major diplomatic initiative. And I think we need to spend today’s episode talking about what the ceasefire is and potentially is not, what the implications of it are in the near term, who the winners and losers are here, and where we see things going in the uncertain days and weeks ahead with the announcement of negotiations for a larger framework set to begin as soon as this Friday. We’re recording this on Wednesday, just a few hours after the ceasefire has taken hold. And so things can develop very rapidly, but it is a timely topic for us to spend on today.
And then at the end of this episode, we will get to that listener’s mailbag for the first time, The Long Game. We’ve been asking people for weeks to send in their questions. We’ve had them piling up, so it’s finally time for us to hit on a few topics that go beyond the subject of Iran that has occupied so much of our thoughts and our podcast episodes over the course of the past many weeks.
So do you want to take it away with what has happened these last 24 hours, what this ceasefire is, and then we can get into its meaning, its future, and its implications?
Jon Finer:
It was a remarkable 24 hours. And maybe just to recap some of what took place yesterday, and I say took place somewhat loosely because what we’re really talking about is a lot of messaging, almost all of which came out of the United States and really directly from the president himself.
You will recall that on Easter Sunday, going back even further, the president sent out a remarkably, I would say, coarse and unconstructive tweet that contained a bunch of profanity, essentially renewing threats that he had been making for quite some time against Iran. Then yesterday, the president sent a tweet that I think will be remembered for quite some time, and not fondly and not positively. I’m just going to read the text of it because I don’t think you can do it justice by describing it.
He tweeted yesterday, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. Who knows? We will find out tonight one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the people of Iran.”
So I think many people read that tweet as a significant sign that the United States was ready to not even escalate, is a war that doesn’t really do it justice, but perhaps commit some of the most severe war crimes we had seen in recent history against the Iranian people, against their civilian infrastructure, against, as he described it, their civilization, which is not exactly an indication that he was intending to target the government or the military, but the nation of Iran itself.
Just hours later, as you just recounted, we started to get leaks out of Pakistan, an unlikely mediator to say the least. I think if you had to guess whether Pakistan might mediate a nuclear or military crisis involving the United States or the United States might someday have to do that with a crisis involving Pakistan, you might have guessed the latter, but here we are in a strange world where the former was taking place. And the Pakistanis announced that they had proposed a ceasefire of two weeks duration. And it started to feel as if maybe this had been precooked with the Iranians on the one hand and the United States on the other hand. And low and behold, President Trump came out and said the United States had accepted this ceasefire if Iran would also accept. Iran also accepted the ceasefire.
I will start before we go deeper into this by saying this is good news. It is generally good news when a war ends and fewer people are going to be killed. And I don’t just want to kind of fly past that and get into the analysis of the geopolitics, and who got what and where it goes from here. That is a positive thing. I think much of the world had been on pins and needles for weeks. The people obviously inside Iran, many of whom have nothing to do with the government of Iran had been suffering. People in the Gulf had been enduring attacks, people in Israel as well, and US service members have been in harm’s way. So the fact that this looks like it may now be winding down, at least for a period, is a good thing.
On the other hand, it’s fragile. We are already seeing violations of the announced ceasefire. In fact, the Pakistanis came out today and said they had seen violations. It’s unhelpful. There had been attacks by Iran against Kuwait. There have been reports of attacks against Iran as well after the ceasefire was announced. And it is also not at all clear that there is an actual meeting of the minds between the two sides on anything other than the shootings should stop for the next couple of weeks. And we’ll get into some of these other details.
But beyond the basic agreement that the war should pause, there is a lot of other contested space in the diplomacy that is going to be, I think, challenging to untangle. The bottom line for me is it is going to be hard, I think, to go back to the full force of the conflict that we had seen in advance of the ceasefire that’s announced, but there is a lot of uncertainty in the current moment, starting with, I think, what happens now, which is the announcement of these talks on Friday in Pakistan, the first face-to-face talks between the two sides since this conflict began.
How do you rate the prospects of those talks, what they’re likely to talk about, and any other reflections on whether this is likely to hold?
Jake Sullivan:
Well, first, I think you’ve done a very good job of laying that out. I want to return to that first Truth Social post in a moment, but let me start by just reiterating a point you made. We have been arguing this conflict should never have started. We’ve been advocating during this conflict that it should end. So the fact that there has been a ceasefire announced, and with luck it will in fact hold, this is a positive thing. It means ceasing the destruction and death that has been wrought over the last several weeks, and which will come to, it hopefully means the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which will lessen, though not completely alleviate, at least for quite some time, the economic disruption and dislocation that has occurred as a result of this. So we have to say it is a good thing that there is a ceasefire in place. I don’t think we ever should have been here in the first place. And I think there are a lot of questions both about where this goes and about where this leaves the United States of America longer term.
And on that latter point, Jon, before we get into what exactly was or wasn’t agreed, what’s still in contest, and what will be negotiated, I wanted to ask you something that’s probably on the minds of at least some of our listeners and is being advocated by supporters of President Trump, which is that first Truth Social post you read, utterly shocking, horrifying, alarming, really there isn’t a great adjective to describe it. It’s so beyond the pale that somehow that Truth Social post got Iran to agree to a ceasefire where otherwise they may not have. You see this argument floating around. How do you react to that?
Jon Finer:
So if the end result of that horrific statement had been some massive Iranian capitulation, concessions to the demands that the United States had been making against Iran, that it gave up its missile program, give up its nuclear material, stop funding proxies, reopen the strait in a clean and unambiguous way, which it did not do. And we’ll get to that, I think, in a minute. I think this effectiveness argument would be at least more powerful.
My own personal view is this sort of content is, as you said, so far beyond the pale that it should not come from the mouth, the Twitter account, the Truth Social account of the United States president, and that it demeans the office and the country to make it. In this case though, that’s not the world we’re living in, that it actually achieved those outcomes. And in fact, it’s not at all clear to me that had the president not bothered to make that statement in the first place, we couldn’t have reached the same outcome we got to later that night, which is Iran essentially conceding nothing other than an agreement to stop fighting.
That is what he extracted from them. They may have wanted something a bit more than a two-week pause. They may have wanted a longer term indefinite pause and maybe some guarantees from the United States that it will not attack again at the end of two weeks, at the end of two months, at the end of two years, and that Israel won’t either. But other than that, Iran didn’t really give up all that much. And so to have kind of debased the office of the presidency in this way, I mean, the reaction to this from all quarters was almost unambiguously negative, including some strong supporters of the president, including from very unusual people. The one I’m thinking of is, I don’t know if you saw Oren Cass, the economist-
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah, I did.
Jon Finer:
... who both of us know, who is really not a kind of geopolitical analyst or someone who writes extensively about foreign policy, except at the intersection of his work, which is really focused on industrialization and supply chains. He took a moment to write an extended basically rebuke of what the president had written on the grounds that it was fundamentally almost immoral. And I think that was largely the reaction from sensible people, and the end result did not come anywhere near justifying that sort of rhetoric and that sort of messaging.
Jake Sullivan:
I think the points you make that no result actually would justify it, that it crosses a moral line that is utterly unacceptable coming from the president, regardless of what the impact of it is. And in this case, I don’t believe the impact was incrementally additive anyways, and you made a good case for that.
But I think that the most powerful response to those who are kind of saying, “See, the president, he’s a madman. This is what he does,” is there are certain lines you should not cross. This is crossing those lines. The threat of civilizational destruction emanating from the president of the United States who should be held up, unfortunately the current occupant of the Oval Office is running far away from this mantle, but should be held up as leader of the free world, who should be standing for something. This, to me, is off limits as a tactic to deploy.
Obviously, it’s off limits as a tactic to deploy physically in the world, to actually go carry out the kinds of criminal acts that he was threatening, but I believe that it’s also off limits from the point of view of rhetoric. And I think it will actually have a long-term cost for President Trump, but also for the United States of America. And I think you said at the outset that it will be long remembered. I agree with that. And I think it’s hugely problematic. And you are right to start there and dig in there because it’s not something that we should blow by at all.
But then coming onto the issue of the ceasefire itself, the elements of the ceasefire, as I understand them, are basically the United States stops attacking Iran, Israel stops attacking Iran, and Iran allows ships to go through the Strait of Hormuz for a period of two weeks during which there will be negotiations, and those negotiations will be based on, as President Trump put it, the basis for those negotiations will be the 10 point proposal that Iran put forward.
And I want to come to that 10 point proposal in a moment, but I think there’s one important element really to underscore at the outset, which is that Iran has indicated publicly that it is going to allow ships to travel through the strait, but it is going to do so, and this is what the foreign minister of Iran, Abbas Araghchi wrote, “Safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible via coordination with Iran’s armed forces and with due consideration of technical limitations.” So even within the context of the ceasefire, Iran is saying that passage through the strait is subject to the control, the jurisdiction, the oversight, and the coordination of the armed forces of Iran, which is a significant sea change from the status quo before the war when freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz was the broadly accepted norm by all countries and Iran was not forcing coordination with the armed forces of Iran for all the tankers that were going through.
This now is a feature of this ceasefire, and it certainly seems like it will be a feature of the reality, the new status quo on a going forward basis. Am I reading that right, Jon?
Jon Finer:
That is exactly how it seems. Iran has retained, in spite of the ceasefire, the ability to monetize traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and bring revenue into its own country, which by the way, is critically important for a few reasons. One, Iran remains under enormous sanctions pressure and its economy has struggled for years because of that sanctions pressure. Second, Iran has just suffered this extraordinary military blow inflicted by the United States and by Israel, and is going to need funds to reconstruct its civilian infrastructure, its society essentially, and unfortunately, funds that will be available for it to rebuild and reconstitute its military as a result of this.
And just to put a kind of a fine point on it, we know that before the ceasefire, because it’s been reported by Bloomberg and by others, that Iran was charging a toll for oil tankers passing through the gulf of $1 a barrel. We know that because Iran has put this out public already and the Financial Times reported it this morning, that it is going to try to stick to that $1 a barrel rate. And that’s just for oil tankers. There may be other arrangements made for other traffic through the strait.
But a dollar a barrel is $20 million a day in revenue directly into the coffers of the government of Iran. It’s about 20 million barrels a day that go through the Strait of Hormuz, 20% of the global oil demand in the world. That’s significant money over the course of a year. Maybe not all that significant over the course of a couple of weeks, but over the course of a year, that’s on the order of $7 billion. And again, that is just revenue associated with the oil that flows through the strait. They may have alternative arrangements for the other shipments of petrochemicals, of food, of fertilizer, of other commercial goods.
And this arrangement seems to leave them the ability to make those deals. And President Trump, when asked a direct question of whether Iran was going to be able to charge some sort of a toll, more or less said yes. He also mused about the United States and Iran doing this together as some sort of joint venture where the US could also get some of this cash, which is very Trumpian and a very bizarre concept, and I don’t think one that is very likely to happen. But he certainly has not denied that they have the ability to do this, which is a huge boon for Iran economically.
You should also though talk about what a boon this is to them strategically, because it’s worth pointing out they did not have this revenue source before the war. They also had not ever closed the strait before in 50 years. And I think you could make the case, I mean, tell me if you disagree, that strategically this leaves them with almost a bigger deterrent than they had before the war on the rest of the world should somebody think about attacking them again.
Jake Sullivan:
Oh, I couldn’t agree more. And I think that actually the strategic effects of this even exceed the economic benefits that Iran will get. Because what this war has shown is that Iran has the capability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, to only allow ships through when it says okay and to stop ships going through when it says not okay, that it was able to retain that ability through weeks of intense bombing by the United States and Israel, and that ultimately the United States could not coercively force it to give up that capacity, and that on a going forward basis now, the world knows, America knows, and most importantly, the clerical and revolutionary guard leadership in Iran knows that they can do that. They can shut down the strait in future if they are attacked. And that this is a source of deterrence, it is a source of potential coercion, it is fundamentally a source of power for the regime in Iran that was theoretical before and now is actual, and has been born out and proven out in the crucible of a war.
And it does not seem that anything in the negotiations that are to come are going to take this away, because even if there is to be a deal that emerges from these negotiations, it’s likely to leave intact, as you said, some form of tolling mechanism, and certainly is going to leave the reality that Iran has the physical capability to threaten the strait, to block the strait, to keep ships from going through the strait at its will. And the knock on long-term effects of that, I think are quite powerful, and a huge setback from the point of view of the United States, and will be a source of enormous concern and discomfort for Gulf countries. And I think the rest of the world will try to adapt to it, but it will be a source of discomfort for them as well. There’s just no getting around that.
And so that element of this probably exceeds, is probably top of the list of the significant strategic consequences of what’s just happened. And I think that is not for a moment lost on Iran and they wasted no time in their very first statement making clear that coordination with the Iranian armed forces, a perfectly benign phrase, is a necessary precondition for traffic through the strait, a benign phrase that has anything but benign consequences from the point of view of the United States.
Jon Finer:
That is the status quo as of today. The two sides will get together on Friday in Pakistan. President Trump himself, as you said, indicated that the basis for those talks would be Iran’s 10 demands, 10 points that it’s issued, which are shockingly maximalist. Not shocking that they would put out those demands, shocking that an American president would agree to those demands as the basis for the talks as President Trump apparently did.
The United States has also issued its sort of bill of demands, 15 of them, which are also maximalist as you would expect. So is there any reason to be optimistic that when these two sides get together, we will have other than a breakdown or at least an inconsequential outcome, given how far apart their at least public facing demands are at this point?
Jake Sullivan:
Before I directly answer that question, let me just pause for a moment on this 10 point proposal, because this is quoting President Trump from his announcement of the ceasefire. He says, “I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double-sided ceasefire.” I love the phrase double-sided ceasefire, by the way. And then he goes on to say, “The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive agreement concerning long-term peace with Iran and peace in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate,” a workable basis on which to negotiate.
Just quickly spinning through those 10 points, Iran wants a guarantee that it will not be attacked again, a permanent end to the war, an end to Israeli strikes in Lebanon and against Iranian allies, all US sanctions lifted. Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It would do so under new safe passage rules implicitly that it sets. It would include a transit fee of about $2 million per ship. The revenue would be shared with Oman. It would use its share of the proceeds to rebuild infrastructure damaged in the conflict. And then it wants a broader framework to end regional hostilities, not just the immediate war.
So what is not in that list of 10 items is anything to do with the nuclear program. What is in that list of 10 items is locking in this arrangement that you and I have just been talking about, the transit fee, the tolling, Iran in control of the strait, and Iran getting all US sanctions lifted. So to your question about what these negotiations are likely to produce, I don’t think they’re going to produce these 10 points. I certainly don’t think they’re going to produce anything close to the 15 points that the Trump administration has put forward.
For me, there are three big questions that may get some degree of resolution in these talks. That is, you could see a kind of interim agreement or implicit agreement on three things, but you may not. One is, what exactly are the arrangements for the strait? How do they get formalized in some way? Is there a consortium of countries that gets brought in to give some cover to the strategic reality that Iran can control it? Can the United States put some lipstick on that pig, basically?
Second is, what happens to the highly enriched uranium, that stockpile you and I have talked about, much of which is buried under the nuclear facility at Isfahan. We can come back to the public statements of the United States today about the HEU, but I think that will be the subject of negotiation and likely will be tied to further sanctions relief for Iran.
And then the third question goes to this question of a permanent end to the war, right? We have a two-week ceasefire. At some point, do the two sides end up saying, “We’re done, the war’s over, we’ve called it.” There is also the wildcard in the context of these negotiations of the fact that Israel is still attacking Lebanon. Iran has said that Lebanon has to be part of the ceasefire. Donald Trump has said publicly to a reporter, Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire. We will have to see how that plays out.
But for me, these three questions, the future of the strait, the future of the nuclear stockpile, and how to convert a temporary ceasefire into something more lasting, that’s what’s going to be truly on the docket in the negotiations. I don’t think there’s going to be a comprehensive agreement between the two sides, but could I imagine some kind of understandings on these issues? I think that is possible and that’s what we should be looking for.
Jon Finer:
So it’s a good list. And I think the big question on the first of your items, on the arrangements for the strait, is will Iran consider this negotiable at this point? Or does Iran basically believe it has locked in the right to make the arrangements it chooses?
It does matter, by the way, if the United States can negotiate at least down the rate of revenue that Iran is trying to generate. $2 million a ship is significantly more than just $1 per barrel of oil, on the order of like 10X, what I described earlier. So going from maybe $7 billion a year to $70 billion a year in revenue, if Iran charges that much for ships going through the strait. And so the United States would be incentivized to try to get Iran to agree to lower rates. But the fact that we’re even having this conversation is really quite extraordinary.
Jake Sullivan:
Extraordinary. Yeah.
Jon Finer:
Because you have to remember that we went to war with Iran for a whole range of reasons, not least to increase significantly the pressure on its regime, maybe ultimately topple its regime, but at least destabilize it enough, damage its economy enough, is the way this administration described it, that it can no longer effectively govern. Now we are negotiating something that they did not have before the war, which is the ability to monetize, generate revenue by just normal commercial traffic through an international waterway. So that is remarkable that this is even on the table, but it’s still in the United States’ interest to try to bring those revenues down.
On the nuclear stockpile, this is another area that is worth negotiating, but in order to get anything from Iran, which believes it has retained this stockpile under enormous pressure, under bombardment, including bombardment of probably significant quantities of that stockpile at Isfahan, the United States is going to have to pay in some way for this. We talked about this last time. It will require some measure, likely significant, of sanctions relief in order to get Iran to potentially part with that highly enriched nuclear material, enriched up to 60%. So not a guarantee at all that the United States will put real sanctions relief on the table, and it would have to in order to get Iran to play ball.
Lebanon is a good thing to flag. I think clearly the Israelis do not believe Lebanon is part of this ceasefire.
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah.
Jon Finer:
They escalated significantly after the ceasefire in Lebanon. And I think a big part of what’s going on there is for the first time during this war, Prime Minister Netanyahu, who will have to face Israeli voters in an election later this year, is getting attacked by the opposition inside Israel for essentially allowing President Trump to stop the war before Israel was ready. And it seems like part of his strategy in sort of fending off those attacks, the opposition had largely left him alone on the war up till now because it was broadly supported in Israel. Part of his strategy for fending off those attacks is almost to say, “Don’t worry, I’m going big into Lebanon to go after Hezbollah.” And if Trump wants to hang onto this ceasefire, he will probably have to take steps to restrain that action by Israel because that is going to put a lot of pressure on Iran to break the ceasefire.
Jake Sullivan:
So I want to come back for a minute on the highly enriched uranium question because President Trump put out a very interesting Truth Social post today where he said, among other things, “The United States will working with Iran, dig up and remove all the deeply buried nuclear dust.” This is what he calls the HEU. He goes on to say in the same post, “We are and will be talking tariff and sanctions relief with Iran.” So he’s kind of floating some deal that involves sanctions relief for the HEU.
Now, one observation I would make here is that for months before this war started, Iran offered to do something with the HEU, downblend it, or ship it out to Russia, or other things in exchange for sanctions relief. So the very thing that now is going to be the subject of negotiations on the back of a multi-week war that left Iran with a greater stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, the very thing we’re going to try to get is something that Iran had actually offered before the war, and now may be harder to get than it was before.
But I don’t rule out that they come to some terms on this. I think you’re right that Iran now sees this as a huge point of leverage, may think it has no reason to give it up, and they could just stonewall the US on this. And certainly their 10 points, as I mentioned before, don’t even touch it. So I’m not by any stretch predicting there will be a deal on the HEU, but I would suggest that it’s something to watch because I think the US will be very focused on trying to secure some kind of arrangement on this so that they can look at the American people and say, “We did something to reduce the threat from Iran’s nuclear program.” So I think the US will be highly incentivized here. Iran is not particularly incentivized to do much, but there may be enough put on the table in the way of sanctions relief.
Jon Finer:
Pete Hegseth had a slightly different message on the HEU, for whatever it’s worth, basically continuing to brandish the possibility that if Iran does not hand it over, the United States will conduct some sort of operation either to destroy it or to grab it. And I feel like at this point, that threat has really diminished in force. Because it’s been widely reported the US looked at a special forces operation, maybe with the Israelis, to go in and try to seize this material. That was always going to be extraordinarily high risk. If anything, doing that in the context of a ceasefire where Iran can kind of more easily focus its energies on repelling an attack like that seems almost impossible to imagine.
And even in the aftermath of a ceasefire, it does feel like President Trump, who, according to public reports, personally asked for this plan to be developed, for the US to go in and grab this stuff, looked at that plan, looked at the level of risk, and did not consider this to be a very appealing option. And I think he was probably right about that, given how challenging it would have been, and as we’ve discussed, how uncertain it was to be successful for a whole range of reasons, including that we are not guaranteed, we cannot guarantee that that material is where we believe it is, which is in these tunnels under the Isfahan nuclear facility. And in fact, the IAEA has in recent days come out and said likely some of the material is still there, some of the material may be in other nuclear facilities, may have been moved to other nuclear facilities around the country. So you might not even get all the 60% if you went into Isfahan the way they were clearly looking at doing.
So Hegseth’s threat, I think is not all that credible at this point. And Iran will see if it can get an appealing enough price to give this up. And if it doesn’t, I think it’ll hold onto it. If it does, they may be able to work something out.
Jake Sullivan:
I have a theory based on everything that President Trump has said since announcing the ceasefire, and this theory runs the risk of trying to impose some sort of coherence on a highly incoherent individual, but it’s that he is obsessed with a Delci Rodriguez style outcome in Iran, has been from the beginning, has wanted to impose the Venezuela model on the Iran circumstance, even though we know very well that these things are not just apples and oranges, but it’s like fruit and rocks.
And yet he continues to say things like, “The regime has changed. It’s a very productive regime change,” was one of his tweets. And he continues to signal, including through things like what you mentioned before, the joint US-Iran arrangement for imposing a toll through the strait, through sanctions relief, through the way we’re going to cooperate on many different aspects
Jon Finer:
Including the ATU. We’ll go in and dig it up together or whatever.
Jake Sullivan:
Together, together. We’re going to do it together. I think in his mind, his mental model is we’re going to go sit down in Pakistan with a relatively compliant group of fellows representing the Iranian regime, and together we’re going to work it all out, the strait, the nuclear program. We’re going to lift sanctions so that everyone can make a lot of money. He had this other tweet today in which he says, “There will be lots of positive action. Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds. This could be the golden age of the Middle East,” that he’s sort of shifted from Iran as enemy and adversary to now Iran’s my friend and I’m going to almost will into existence this Delci style new leadership, even though as Danny Citrinowicz told us a few weeks ago, the son of the Ayatollah and the IRGC folks around him are more hardline, if that’s even possible, than the Ayatollah they took out.
But I just think that’s his mental model. And I think he’s going to find the Iranians who show up for these negotiations, assuming they take place, to be much tougher customers, to not simply say, “Hey, let’s all work it out,” the way that Delci Rodriguez has to a substantial extent done in Venezuela. And I think that’s going to run this whole thing into some very rough waters in the coming days. But at the same time, it also may mean that President Trump’s just willing to put a huge amount on the table to get the outcomes he wants, and that may be enough, at least for something narrow like the HEU, to actually produce an outcome.
So it’d be interesting to see what happens, but I think that reality that he’s trying to almost will into existence is something that is going to be a feature of these negotiations, and a highly unusual one that all of us longtime Iran watchers are not going to relate to, and it’s hard for it to compute with us because we see this regime for what it is.
Jon Finer:
If anything has surprised me over the last 24 hours, it’s less that President Trump agreed to a ceasefire because I think the United States was in a pretty challenging strategic situation where every escalation option would almost hurt us more than it would hurt Iran, but that Iran agreed to a ceasefire, and particularly that Iran agreed to a ceasefire after that outrageous message that President Trump put out. If anything, I would have thought the fact of that message would have led the Iranians to say, “Maybe we’ll get to this, but not today,” not to validate or vindicate that sort of messaging in any way.
But they seem to have taken a just coldly, coolly rational approach to this, and recognize that they have not been asked really to give anything significant up in order to get the United States to stop bombing them. And I think believe that having stopped the bombardment even officially just for two weeks, it will be very likely for the United States to resume the war again.
I suspect that was a bit of a bitter pill for them just because they don’t like the idea of in any way making it seem as if they can be bullied. But the reality is they were asked for nothing. The United States has gifted them this control over the Strait of Hormuz moves through this process. They recognized that and they took the deal that was on the table, which I think on their part was a rational decision, if nothing else, but probably not an easy one.
Jake Sullivan:
I think this brings us to this kind of fundamental question. We don’t know exactly how the diplomacy will play out. I think we both expect this temporary ceasefire will likely ultimately hold and that there’s unlikely to be some truly comprehensive agreement between the two sides. And so the question of where Iran nets out and where the United States nets out at the end of that, we’ve gotten into a little bit with Iran and its control over the Strait of Hormuz, its heightened capacity to hold that strait at risk, and its proven capacity to do so, and also now to be the ultimate facilitator of traffic through the strait.
It’s striking to me that if you think about this from the US perspective, what did we go to war to do? What did we achieve? The net assessment is not great. This morning, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Caine, laid out a series of the achievements of the United States in this war. And frankly, it really had echoes of the kinds of briefings that were given during Vietnam. A lot of numbers about how many bombs we dropped, how many sorties we flew, the percentage degradation of missiles, and drones, and capabilities, but not really at the end of the day, clear strategic outcomes that benefit the United States.
Because it is certainly the case that we have set back their missile production and reduced their missile stockpiles, that we undermine their drone production and reduce their overall number of drones rolling off the assembly line. But on the core question, can Iran continue to cause harm and disruption on a strategic scale, even in the midst of being bombed for weeks and weeks, do they have the capacity to sustain that? The answer appears to be yes, that they did sustain that. So that’s on the missiles and drones.
The regime is still in place, and in fact, if anything is harder line. On the nuclear program, they still have not just the program, but the highly enriched uranium stockpiles we were discussing, centrifuges, and the know how to produce a weapon if they chose to do so. We’ve talked about the strait. There is the economic damage that is severe and will continue because if you think about our conversation with Helima Croft a few weeks ago, a lot of this production has now been disrupted, has been shut in. So even if the strait opens, and it’s likely to open more incrementally over time, but even if it opens, it’s going to take a while to get all that production back online. So the economic impacts and the impact on oil prices and gas prices will be with us for some time. And then of course the human damage, thousands killed, 13 Americans killed, hundreds of Americans wounded, and we will get to the wider implications as well.
That is not a great scorecard from the perspective of the United States. It’s not exactly clear, thinking about what we went in to do, how you could make an argument that we’ve come out of this in a better place. And from Iran’s perspective, they certainly have suffered a lot of tactical blows, but strategically have emerged with this card in the strait, have emerged with the regime intact, and have emerged with the ability to project to the world that they can continue to sustain a deterrent capability even in the face of massive bombardment.
So I try to look at this and say, “What’s a fair accounting for who gained and who suffered setbacks over this? And am I missing something when it comes to the US and am I missing something when it comes to Iran?” But this does not feel, when you net it all out, like it puts the United States in a good position against what either they were trying to achieve at the start of this administration, or against any reasonable view of the status quo [inaudible 00:41:31] and the status quo that seems to have emerged during this conflict.
But do you see it differently? Is there a way to look at this that is more optimistic from the point of view of the United States and more pessimistic from the point of view of Iran?
Jon Finer:
If I were forced to make that argument in a red team, blue team, I think I would struggle, honestly. Because the way I’ve been thinking about the war and the outcomes are essentially on two metrics. What did we learn during the conflict and what did Iran learn?
And on that one, I think what we learned is a lot about our own vulnerabilities. We learned about our vulnerabilities to these drones, which we frankly should have known from having observed the Russia-Ukraine conflict and from being students of modern warfare, which the Pentagon, obviously is part of its role. But we clearly did not realize that Iran, almost entirely just through the use of its drones, could hold much of the global economy at risk. When we thought about the vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz, we thought about mines, we thought about small ships, those were tactics that Iran could have used, but that would have also made it harder for Iran to get its own energy products out through the strait. What I don’t think we foresaw is Iran being able to close the strait on the cheap with drones primarily while still being able to export its own energy products at an even higher price. So they were under less pressure to reopen it.
So we learned about our vulnerabilities and I think they learned about their capabilities. I think they probably believed on some level that they might be able to extract this sort of price from the United States and from the global economy. Now they know they have the capability of doing that. And no matter how many of their missiles, and their launchers, and their naval vessels we have destroyed, and we’ve destroyed significant numbers of all of those things, they don’t need all that much capability to be able to use this maximally effective tool. That’s on what we learned.
The other metric I’ve been thinking about is this balance of deterrence question. Where is the deterrent now on each side compared to where it was before the war? And I think for the United States, we took essentially our biggest shot, certainly the biggest shot we’ve ever taken at the government of Iran, at the Islamic Republic. And that shot destroyed much of the regime, but did not remove, or replace, or change the regime. The government endured and survived, and Iran’s ability to continue fighting while diminished, endured, and was able to fight.
Where is Iran’s deterrent now? Iran’s deterrent before this war was really limited. It lacked effective air defenses, its offensive capabilities had been defeated by the United States and Israel on multiple occasions when Iran had tried to attack with ballistic missiles. Now Iran has a totally new deterrent that we hadn’t even really contemplated before. And while I think it is true, the analysis, and we got this from Danny Citrinowicz, that many Iranians, many officials are going to say we need a nuclear weapon now that we were attacked. And I think the risk of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon has gone up. They also have acquired, just by learning that it would work, this other deterrent that we’ve been talking about, which is the ability to sort of weaponize the global economy against the United States.
So I think in the balance of deterrence, Iran has also come out ahead. Their deterrent has been improved during the course of this conflict. Ours has been revealed to be powerful, but limited.
Jake Sullivan:
And this gets to kind of the wider implications of the war, which we should spend a minute on before we turn to the mailbag, because it’s not just the balance of deterrence between the US and Iran. It’s also how this impacts US interests globally. And if you look at other competitors and adversaries, Russia has definitely come out of this war as a winner. Putin is getting more revenue from an elevated oil price. He has also received sanctions relief from the United States.
Jon Finer:
And by the way, on that, just one thing that’s worth watching, is does that sanctions relief-
Jake Sullivan:
Hold after.
Jon Finer:
... Ever get taken away? Because it’s supposedly just tied to this kind of acute energy shock that we’ve been undergoing. But I think there is a real chance that this relief, and Iran’s, by the way, sanctions relief for barrels that were already on the open water, becomes a sort of permanent feature, not a temporary one, but we’ll see.
Jake Sullivan:
Well, you had J.D. Vance stumping for Viktor Orbán, who has been on the record championing Vladimir Putin and denigrating Ukraine, saying Ukraine is not a sovereign country. So the administration is definitely voting with its feet between Russia and Ukraine. And so I would not be a bit surprised if the sanctions relief remains over the longer term.
I would also point out that because we have used so many air defense interceptors in this conflict, we’re not giving them to Ukraine anymore, so we’re leaving it more defenseless. And perhaps most importantly, Putin is getting a major rift in NATO out of this. He’s getting a deep divide, a lack of trust, a threat from the American president that he is going to reduce the overall strength and sanctity of the Article V commitment. That’s something Putin has had on his wishlist, at the top of his wishlist for many years. He is getting that.
And then on the China front, they’re getting now a depleted US military in terms of its overall stockpiles, a distracted US that still is going to have to be tied down dealing with the consequences and the implications of this in the Middle East for quite a while. There’s the moral diminution that has come from things like that Truth Social post on civilization destruction. China’s gets to hold itself out as helping bring about this ceasefire. I doubt it probably played that significant a role, but it is going to be cast as a supportive peacemaker as opposed to the disruptor the United States is getting cast as. And it had the biggest reserve of oil, which had built up over the course of the last year, so it was basically able to absorb the costs of this. So China comes out of this, I think, with some advantages.
And then we will have to watch how other countries react and hedge, particularly the Gulf States who will be learning lessons from this, and I think will have questions, hard questions about the nature of the security partnership with the US, and about where they should be putting their strategic and economic chips on a going forward basis. So there’s a whole catalog of implications here we’re going to have to watch.
Jon Finer:
Two other implications, maybe just to round out the picture. One is the way that the president himself has handled this war and the messaging that we described earlier that was so abhorrent has done something kind of extraordinary, which is essentially seeding the moral high ground in this conflict to a country that has been largely a pariah state in the world for decades. And not because Iran has distinguished itself with its conduct in this war, by the way. Iran shamefully attacked civilian targets across the Gulf, in Israel. And its own messaging has been trolling and kind of obnoxious. But the president’s threat to end Iran civilization, his repeated threats to commit war crimes against Iranian civilian targets, the actualization, at least of some of those threats, really has left this almost morally at best a wash for the United States, which is a remarkable thing when you’re talking about a conflict against a regime like Iran. So I think that will have a long tail.
Jake Sullivan:
Just on that point, Jon, I do wonder if part of why Iran was willing to accept a deal last night after this civilizational destruction piece was that they saw not only that they could lock in their advantage on the strait and weren’t giving anything up, and this could net out well, but also that in a way, choosing not to be the actor saying no to a ceasefire in that moment would also lock in the sense that they were the good guy, not the bad guy in this in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, which for you and I who have worked this issue a long time, and see the Iranian regime for what it is to its own people, to the region, to the world, and believe deeply in the United States of America, this is extremely troubling.
But I think part of the tactical calculus of the Iranian regime last night, I think, took into account that they want to emerge from this feeling like they can interact with the rest of the world from a greater position of credibility than they went into the war with, which is just a kind of ridiculous outcome in a way, but I think realistically is not a bad bet on their part.
Jon Finer:
Yeah. Moral authority is part of strategic advantage, and that has been diminished.
And then the other, I think, really interesting implication is for Israel and for the US-Israel relationship, which has already been in a challenging place in recent days, weeks, months, years. But I’ll read from one poll that came out in the last couple of days, which was a Pew Foundation poll, which said that 60% of American adults now have an unfavorable view of Israel. And that was a poll, it showed 53% last year and 42% in 2022. So between 2022 and essentially this week, 42% goes to 60%, of American adults with an unfavorable view.
This war is not going to improve that view among, by the way, either Democrats or Republicans, and fairly or unfairly, because the Trump administration I think has in a sort of embarrassing way, tried to kind of pass the buck for some of the decision making on the war on Israel, maybe less the president himself, although sometimes the president, but more officials like Marco Rubio have made this argument.
I think our view, which we’ve expressed is the US bears responsibility for its own decisions, where the superpower, this is on the Trump administration, not a foreign government. But there has been some amazing reporting in the last couple of days, the New York Times and other places about how this decision ultimately got made, what advice the president was given, not just by his own intelligence community, in fact, not primarily by his own intelligence community, but by the prime minister of Israel in the situation room, in the United States, making the argument to President Trump that this could be a short, decisive war that leads to the toppling of the regime in Iran.
And I think that many Americans are going to read and digest that information in ways that will not redound to the benefit of the US-Israel relationship or of Israel over the medium term. I think Israel believes that the attacks on Iran, the diminution of Iran’s military capability, the killing of senior officials, including the Supreme Leader strategically have been beneficial to Israel, but there is this countervailing force that I think is going to be significantly negative for the relationship. And where that all nets out, I think really remains to be seen.
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah, but arrow is pointed very much in the wrong direction.
Jon Finer:
All right. If we don’t do a mailbag today, we run the risk of losing our own credibility in the process, so I think we should turn to it if you’re ready.
Jake Sullivan:
I’m ready. Go for it.
Jon Finer:
So the first question is from a YouTube listener @SasanMedia, “Good content, guys. What do you think about all the assassinations of Iranian leaders? What type of precedent this will set in world conflict? I’m guessing that Western nations, leaders, and officials will no longer enjoy the safety of diplomatic immunity.”
Jake Sullivan:
That’s an excellent question. I think it’s something you and I have grappled with as this conflict has unfolded, and I think it’s worth in answering it, kind of giving as a baseline for our listeners what actually the current standing rule is on assassinations for the United States of America.
It goes back to an executive order signed actually by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. And the order says, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in or conspire to engage in assassination.” And it goes on to say that US intelligence agencies cannot indirectly sponsor or participate in assassinations carried out by third parties. And we define assassination as the unlawful killing of a person, typically a political leader for political reasons in peace time. And we distinguish that from targeted killings, which if we are in a state of armed conflict with a group or nation, or acting in self-defense, then killings take on a different context. They take on act of war rather than assassination.
But the line between these two things is incredibly blurry in a case like Iran where the president has said,” We’re not at war. We’re on some minor excursion,” or in the case of Soleimani, where ultimately they justified it as self-defense because Soleimani was plotting attacks against American troops in the Middle East. But this line between assassinations and targeted killings has become incredibly permeable for the United States of America. And I do think that that is dangerous. I think we should be much, much more reluctant to take out political leaders or even uniform military leaders through targeted killing of foreign states because I think opening that Pandora’s box, as the questioner posed it, will put our people at risk to a much greater extent. And in fact, Iran did plot assassinations against American officials, which we regarded as completely beyond the pale and unacceptable, and also I think raises some profound moral questions. So I think getting back to a much tighter reading of that Reagan executive order would behoove the United States of America.
What do you think?
Jon Finer:
Just two quick additions or maybe one amplification and one addition. The amplification is that Iran does not have clean hands here, is worth just reemphasizing that. Iran has plotted and conducted assassinations against civilian officials around the world, certainly plotted against American officials-
Jake Sullivan:
Absolutely, including the president.
Jon Finer:
... And people we know, and people who preceded us, and the current president of the United States.
So the real question is, does us going down this path make it more or less likely that other countries, including Iran, are going to be continuing or even intensifying this sort of activity? I think there’s a very strong argument to be made that this is normalizing in some ways this sort of conduct, as opposed to deterring it, thwarting it, calling it out, disrupting plots, which is the standard US playbook for this sort of thing, and certainly for punishing it in the aftermath if one of these plots is ever conducted successfully or unsuccessfully. I think we are shifting this norm in a very dangerous direction.
And by the way, I think this goes even more broadly than just assassinations to other ways in which force is used by the Trump administration. The attacks against the fishing vessels in the Caribbean that we’ve talked about, even the Maduro operation to some extent, some of these are precedent setting uses of force that I think are going to have significant implications. We should probably talk more about this in future episodes. We’ve touched on some of it.
Jake Sullivan:
Just before turning to the next email, I’ll make one last point, which is technology is changing the nature of this question too. The combination of being able to have maximal precision fused with increasingly powerful intelligence, fused with standoff capability, means the ability to individually target has become increasingly available, not just to the United States, but to other countries as well. And so this line between what is a kind of a normal act of war and what is a targeted assassination is going to get blurrier and blurrier because of technology. And my view is that because of the blurriness of that line, we should have a bias towards staying on the side of it that leans away from something that could be kind of conceived by any reasonable observer as an assassination. I think this is definitely something that we are going to have to watch carefully in the years ahead.
So the second question in our mailbag comes from Robert. It’s an email and he asks, “Why is Russia considered a great power? In nearly everything except land mass, Russia is a blip compared to the US. Why are they being called a great power?” Jon?
Jon Finer:
So I think Robert is onto something here. I think there are good arguments for Russia no longer deserving essentially this great power status. Those arguments include that Russia’s economy is no longer a top tier in terms of size. It’s more akin to sort of a European country like Italy than it is to a country like the United States-
Jake Sullivan:
It’s the size of Texas.
Jon Finer:
... or China. The size of right, a large American state in overall economic size.
But even more than that, I think Russia’s diplomatic clout has been diminished. It’s been kicked out of groupings like what used to be called the G8 and is now called the G7 because of its bad behavior. And it’s become much more isolated over the years as a function of having just conducted some terrible actions in international affairs from the invasion of Georgia to the multiple invasions of Ukraine.
That said, the reason we consider, I think still rightly to some extent, Russia a great power comes down to four things. One, and I think maybe first and foremost is that it is a top two nuclear power on the planet alongside the United States. And nuclear weapons for better or for worse still matter. And I think what we’re going to see actually in the near future is the increasing salience of nuclear weapons, not the decreasing salience as other countries, and we’ve talked about this in the context of Iran, we’ve also talked about it in the context of East Asia, are likely to really look hard at whether they need nuclear weapons to deter some of the threats that they face. Russia has a lot of them, 1500 or so, deployed nuclear warheads, more now like the United States. So that’s one.
Second is Russia has a very top tier intelligence service, both in terms of its surveillance and signals intelligence, and in terms of its human intelligence, its spies. Russia is up there with the United States, and China, and Israel and other top tier intelligence services that gives it kind of additional enhanced power as a state. And I think that’s a part of Russia’s status as a great power.
Third, while Russia’s overall economic clout is much more limited than it once was, it is an energy powerhouse, and energy tends to matter more than other, I think, economic attributes of states. Russia has wielded energy effectively as a geopolitical tool in Europe. The Europeans are struggling to disentangle themselves from dependency on Russian gas. In particular, Russia’s crude oil sales are among the highest in the world. So energy gives Russia additional political, geopolitical clout.
And then the last one, which I think kind of cuts both ways, but I think give Russia more of great power status than it might otherwise have. It’s become a remarkably risk tolerant country. It is willing to wield and use its power in horrific, aggressive ways, but that force the rest of the world to take it seriously because you ignore it at your peril. It uses its military in horrific and aggressive ways as we’ve discussed. It uses spy service sometimes to conduct, to the previous topic, assassinations, cyber attacks and other things. And I think that that risk tolerance is part of what might help Russia punch a bit above its weight just in terms of formal power metrics.
So that would be my list.
Jake Sullivan:
Very well put. I don’t have a lot to add to that except to reinforce the fourth point and maybe expand on it a bit. It’s not just risk tolerance, it’s activism. It’s a country that wants to engage and throw weight globally, to be present globally. So Russia’s there in the Western hemisphere, was in Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and Cuba with its intelligence service, with military partnerships, with influence, diplomatic and political influence. It’s across multiple countries in multiple subregions of Africa. It has been a present factor in the Middle East. It is now a critical factor with respect to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea, where it’s supplying a lot of advanced technology and taking North Korean support for its war in Ukraine.
So you go around the world, and even though it has so many severe limitations that were very well identified by Robert, it’s prepared to act, to have risk tolerance, but also to just be highly active and use it, throw weight globally. And I think that’s a reason for why it continues to be in a different category from middle powers that simply aren’t engaged in that kind of expeditionary activity globally that Russia is.
Jon Finer:
Third question is from Felix, who writes in from Berlin, Germany, “What do you make of the situation in Cuba? How do you think this will play out in the next few months before the midterms, given Marco Rubio’s push for regime change and arguments Trump could be sold about Cuba as a real estate opportunity?”
Jake Sullivan:
Felix, I’m very glad you asked this question because Jon and I have been talking now for weeks about devoting a segment of the podcast to Cuba. I think there is every reason to believe that in the wake of this Iran war, assuming the ceasefire sticks, that President Trump, Marco Rubio, and others will turn their attention to Cuba and try to produce some kind of movement.
What that looks like is difficult to say. I mean, they’re in love with the Delci Rodriguez idea there too. What will the Cuban government, the Cuban regime be prepared to do? What kind of squeeze will the Trump administration continue to impose in the way of an energy embargo? All I can say to you, Felix, is stay tuned because we’re going to devote some time to this over the course of the next few weeks, because we regard this as an issue that’s going to come right into the headlines off the back of what’s happened with respect to the US and Iran.
Jon Finer:
Well said.
Jake Sullivan:
Final question for today is from Carson, who’s a high school student. And our understanding is that a number of high school teachers have asked their students to listen to our podcast and send us questions, and we will answer questions from other high school students in future episodes.
But Carson had the most fascinating question that we’ve received so far among the many questions we’ve gotten. He says ... He had several questions, but I want to highlight one in particular, “What are your biggest reasons for shifting from national security advisor and principal deputy national security advisor respectively to doing The Long Game podcast? Since doing my project on your podcast, I was curious about why you stepped away from such positions in government to instead host The Long Game.”
Love that. Jon, why did you decide to leave your job as principal deputy national security advisor to start a podcast?
Jon Finer:
So I just want to say there are a few things in recent days that have made me as happy as reading this question did, because it implies, and I’d love to be able to give the answer, that we were sitting in our offices and looked around at the world and the messes that we were having to deal with, and thought maybe a better life might be trying something totally different and going out and embarking on a career in podcasting.
The reality, for better or for worse, is that elections have consequences. The election that took place in November of 2024 went against the Democratic Party and against the administration that we were working in. Vice President Harris, who we worked with very closely, was on the losing end of that election. And when that happens and you’re a political appointee in a US administration, you start looking for new work.
And there is a transition period that takes place between November when the election was conducted and January 20th, when Inauguration Day takes place. And we walked out the door of the White House at about noon on Inauguration Day. Actually, we were driven out together, sat in a bar for a little bit that afternoon, and started plotting the rest of our lives. And actually quite early in that period, we went on a trip, a ski trip actually, and did some hiking out west, and started talking about something that might be fun to do in this period where we’re going to have a little more time on our hands. And that is the birthplace of the idea at least of this podcast. But can’t deny that there was some of this that was beyond our control and influenced by the election that took place two years ago.
Jake Sullivan:
Well said. I would only add that if we had known how much more fun and less stressful podcasting is than being in government, maybe we would have chosen to leave earlier to start this podcast, but we’ve only learned that since launching The Long Game a few months ago.
Carson, thank you for writing in. Thanks to everybody. Please keep your questions coming. We’ll try to get to as many of them as we can over the course of the coming episodes.
Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.
Jon Finer:
We’d love to hear from you. Send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com.
Jake Sullivan:
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Jon Finer:
That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.
Jake Sullivan:
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Jake Sullivan:
And Jake Sullivan.
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