Chuck Todd

I think the blockade is intended to get Iran back to the table and to start having a conversation about the straight and about the nuclear deal.

If there is no the question, though, is will the president escalate further if this does not get the deal he's looking for?

Does he then send in ground troops to try to militarily take control of the straight and essentially operate the straight on behalf of the world?

Now, there's also, look, to Monday morning quarterback this war, obviously the total misunderstanding of the power of the straight that the Iranians would have is the initial blunder of this war.

This is the, I swear to you, there's WMDs, right?

This, if you're going to say,

If there was any, like, what is the failure of this administration for going into war?

It is underplaying and under realizing the leverage the Iranians had with the straight.

And had they understood it from the beginning and they chose to do this, my guess is they would have immediately tried to get control of the straight first.

How do you handle David Perdue primarying Brian Kemp?

Then you start worrying about everything else.

It was very difficult because I had already... Because you were part of both, you worked for both of them, right?

But again.

The problem here is the president surrounded himself with sycophants.

And even though we have learned that these folks did not want to endorse his strategy here, they were afraid of telling him the truth.

They were afraid of telling they just danced around the edges of the issues and allowed him to hear what he wanted.

And now we're in this potentially intractable situation that we're in where we may have no choice but to escalate.

because of the initial blunder at the beginning.

Or you're gonna have to cut a deal with the Iranians that leaves the regime in power, legitimizes the regime, gives them, acknowledges their control over the straight, and essentially makes the hardliners like John Bolton are gonna wish they had the Iran nuclear deal.

Because the best thing that Trump can get now