Astead Herndon

What you're saying, you briefed him or you were in discussions about that exact possibility.

I guess the other possibility here is that the administration just doesn't share your goal of full regime change, that they might be seeking some sort of off-ramp or have a different sort of objective.

Do we have any sense of what that other objective could be?

Yeah, that's the question I was going to ask you from a sense of someone who, again, wanted to see some of this happen, but necessarily does not seem that the Trump administration maybe shares your conviction to see this all the way through.

There's a sense that they want to make this around four to six weeks, not necessarily the timeline that a full regime change could take.

Is it your position that if they are willing to kind of see that all the way through, they shouldn't have started this in the first place?

More from John Bolton in a minute.

We're back.

It's Today Explained Saturday, and I'm with Ambassador John Bolton.

I'm going to ask about a couple of recent developments.

Trump announced that he, you know, over the weekend that he was going to pause strikes on Iranian power plants for five days, claiming that the U.S.

and Iran had had very productive conversations.

Iran's foreign ministry immediately said that there had been no dialogue.

I guess the obvious question here is, you know, who should we believe here?

Is the Trump administration making up dialogue that doesn't exist?

I know some people have speculated that this could be some form of market manipulation by Trump.

I mean, is the biggest factor about whether this war continues or ends the stock market?

I've heard you say in other places that Trump is not a strategic thinker, a transactional thinker.

That seems obvious from the public perspective.

But from your perspective of someone who was in the White House, who was making kind of national security pitches or trying to strategize with the president, what was the impact of that lack of strategic thinking?