John Bolton

We know how to help cause dissent at the top of the regime.

We know who to look for who might defect, a regular army general, for example, not Revolutionary Guard, but others who could, by increasing the tensions and disagreements within the regime, cause it to fracture and thereby collapse.

Well, it's a tough choice.

Credibility on either side of that discussion isn't very high.

I think the best we can tell from what's become publicly available is that it was Trump that initiated some kind of contact through intermediaries, maybe Turkey, maybe Pakistan, perhaps others.

Iran doesn't seem to have picked up on it.

I mean, this is changing hour by hour, so it's hard to say.

But one thing I think is pretty clear is we're not close to an agreement here.

I'm not saying we can't reach an agreement if Trump wants to, but I don't see that we're close at all at this point.

Well, that thought had occurred to me.

He's done this sort of thing at other times, and it's another piece of evidence how he didn't think things through.

When you go to war in the region that produces 20% of the world's oil and other commodities like fertilizer, there's got to be an impact to it, and that has to be considered.

That's one of the factors you have to take into account.

And it doesn't seem to me that they did that.

They're now, as is often the case with Trump, scrambling after the fact on a day-by-day basis to figure out how to mitigate the problem.

Well, it makes it very hard to carry through to achieve a given objective.

I mean, one thing that Trump has done in the second term is all but eliminate the National Security Council decision-making process, which I'll be the first to say is not perfect, but it's a way of getting all the different agency and department views together to try and get the facts assembled that

would permit a president to make a responsible, well-informed decision, give the president options, giving the pros and cons of each.

Obviously, it's ultimately the president's decision.

But if you go through that sort of process, you can think through contingencies, and often offered by people who don't want to go forward with a particular suggestion.