David E. Sanger
speaker
1,917 appearances
16 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 23 Jul
David E. Sanger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
bases in the Arab world that they can strike because they're relatively nearby.
Right.
What they're doing is sending a message that they can still target their Arab neighbors, that there's a price for hosting the United States.
You know, as one former official put it to me, for years, the Iranians sort of kept a blind eye to the fact that the U.S.
was keeping all these bases in the Arab world.
And now they're outright attacking them.
I think that's right, Rachel, but I think it goes deeper than that.
Coming off of the funeral services last week for Ayatollah Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war, I think that the message from the Iranians was, we went up against the world's biggest superpower, and we survived.
And then they tried to go buy us off with some kind of agreement to give up our nuclear program and give up control over our own territory.
And we're going to show them that we're not just motivated by money, although obviously the Iranians would love to be able to sell their oil on the open markets.
But that this is about pride.
It's about nationalism.
It's about showing that a larger power, an imperial power in the minds of the Iranians is not going to push them around.
And I think you could argue that.
that that was something the administration missed from the beginning.
They viewed this fundamentally as the equivalent of a real estate deal, that everybody's going to act in their rational economic interest.
And in fact, the administration was up against a revolutionary government whose ideology has been hinged for 47 years on direct opposition to the United States.
That's right, Rachel.
But I think they also understand one other thing.
President Trump has said publicly a few times, he just let it slip.
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