David E. Sanger

Thanks, Rachel.

Great to be here.

Well, the president uses that phrase, obviously, to cover a wide range of things.

But he wasn't talking about a nuclear deal.

He wasn't talking about a missile deal.

He wasn't talking about a deal that would actually get to any of the substantive issues that led him to attack Iran along with Israel, joining in with him on February 28th.

What he was talking about, really, was a sort of memorandum of understanding, to put it in the real estate world of... Business terms.

Right, business terms of Donald Trump, that basically said that they would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a process that would probably take 30 days or so by the time you demine it and figure it out, and then use the time...

Secretary of State Rubio said, up to 60 days to negotiate on the real issues of substance.

So this deal was really just a way to get back to the status quo at the time the war started, not really to go solve any of the fundamental questions.

Well, when the war started, there was free commerce rolling through the Strait of Hormuz.

The closing of the strait was a result of the war.

It was not a cause of the war.

The Iranians had never closed the strait before.

And what did they discover, Rachel?

They discovered this was an enormously powerful weapon that they had, that they had never flexed before.

They discovered that even facing the world's biggest military force, one they clearly couldn't compete with on the battlefield, they had an enormous ability to disrupt the world economy.

And this has been the largest disruption of energy supply in modern history.

So suddenly the question came, why would they reopen this in a deal with the president over the weekend?

And the answer is that really both sides are suffering right now.