Jake Sullivan

You know, it to me is a damn shame, and you said this in your opening, that it's really hard to know who to credit with their account.

The Iranians say there is no communication.

The president of the United States says there is.

You'd want to believe the president of the United States over hardline clerics in Iran.

But the reality is probably there's some kind of messages getting passed without real conversations happening, at least not yet.

In the times that you had dealt with the Iranians for the JCPOA and then again dealing with them during the Biden administration, how close did we come to physical escalating into war, into bombing?

Four years of the Biden administration, we didn't get them back into the JCPOA.

We didn't do any of those things.

How untrustworthy a regime are they?

Do sanctions work?

Like, it doesn't seem like there are any good solutions.

Well, first, I would just say, you know, Reagan said of the Soviets, trust but verify.

I always said when it came to the Iranians, don't trust and verify.

And you had to do that all the way through.

And when we got the Iran nuclear deal in the Obama administration, it had deep verification built into it.

Inspectors on the ground over every inch of Iran's nuclear infrastructure to make sure they were complying.

Did they comply with that?

Because the scuttlebutt

from a couple of guys is that they didn't.

And that's why.