Brett Meiselas

It's a really incredible interview.

But the thing that Rhodes said that I think really sat with me

was that there was this kind of pact that has been made between the united states and the middle east and that's that the united states would be there to help provide defense and the middle east would provide energy uh to the united states and this was sort of the unwritten agreement uh that

kind of let the entire global economy work as is.

But when these countries in the Middle East got attacked by Iran, the United States was nowhere to be found.

Now Donald Trump has the nerve to make demands of these Middle Eastern allies, and I assure you they are not happy about it.

They're not going to go into something like that that will enrage the people, enrage their followers.

It would be political suicide for them to even consider that

it's a non-starter so we're going to see where these things go i gotta say like at this point i would prefer trump to make a bad deal than no deal at all i hate to say that but i actually saw senator chris murphy uh talk about this over the weekend then chris murphy said something that i basically agreed with he said and i took the quote right here if this deal with iran is real i will welcome it because every day this war goes on america gets weaker

priority is to end the war now but make no mistake these are iran's terms our nation emerges humiliated the deal is basically this we give iran billions to get back to where we were before the war and reports suggest the deal might codify iran's right to control the straight what a disaster this whole thing was i mean i i essentially agree with the point that he is making there

And Donald Trump has really backed himself into a corner in this whole situation because at this point you could do one of two things.

And Ben, I feel like you've said this numerous times, but you could either be serious about negotiations and get in the room and actually

be willing to engage in diplomacy and give up concessions which in this case given everything that's happened given the devastating losses taken by the united states the us would have to be giving up stuff we'd have to be making concessions to iran whatever those concessions would be would be up for negotiation but there has to be some give and take that's just what negotiations are in general and if you don't want to do that then

guess your strategy has to be to just bomb them into oblivion the way that donald trump keeps saying that he wants to destroy them and hope that they surrender but we've learned from all the analysts that they have no desire to surrender that's not the way iran works and so now he's stuck basically in between these two parts and uh and i think this also like kind of negates the whole fact of like going back to the objectives in the beginning of the war

what Donald Trump pitched this war as and what Donald Trump pitched the Iranian people going back to February when they were taken to the streets in protest of the Iranian regime.

And Donald Trump said, take to the streets, we would have your back.

Right now, these negotiations and this whole war has nothing to do

with overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran and replacing them with some sort of regime change like they said they would.

It was this whole position as this whole, we're going to save the Iranian people from this regime.

All they've done was it brought them closer together.