Art Of The Heel : How Long Will We Be Cleaning Trump's Mess? | Unfiltered w Joel Rubin
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How did the hosts introduce the episode's focus on Trump administration failures and Iran?
Welcome back, everyone, to an unfiltered edition of Truth in the Barrel. I'm your host, Amy McGrath. This week, we are talking about the insane corruption coming out of the Trump administration. We're going to talk about the latest on Iran and why nuclear inspections are so important. Joining me today for this and to discuss his new book about what a democratic foreign policy should look like is national political commentator and expert on U.S. foreign policy, specifically in the Middle East, Joel Rubin. Joel, welcome back.
Awesome to be with you. Really, really excited to be with you today.
Well, there's so much to discuss and I want to jump right in. First of all, we've got to sort of catch everyone up with where things stand with the United States and Iran. There was this peace deal that was signed, I guess, a little over a week now. Over this past weekend, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz again because of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. They said there's a violation of the ceasefire. Meanwhile, our leaders, namely JD Vance, is engaged in talks, continual talks with Iranian officials in Switzerland. The deal that was that, you know, we we. I guess, signed at MOU with them. You've done a lot of analysis on this deal as it compares to the Obama deal. So I want to get your take.
But looking at it, I don't think Iran has given any concessions at all. And the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. What's going on?
Amy, you just about summed it up. Look, this Iranian agreement, I wouldn't even call it a deal, it's certainly nothing even resembling a diplomatic clean agreement, is the culmination, quite frankly, of 11 years of Republican foreign policy focused on destroying President Obama's nuclear negotiations with Iran that culminated in a nuclear deal that was a signed agreement 169 pages worth of detailed structure to ensure that Iran would never get nuclear weapons. So that has been an 11-year process. When Donald Trump ripped up that deal to JCPOA in 2018, he promised. that he would replace it with something better. Where have we heard that before? If you're interested in health care and the Affordable Care Act, something better will just show up.
The new health care plan, we know what it is. It's kicking Americans off of health care. And the new Iran deal is... worse than the old Iran deal. This is after a couple of wars and squandered leverage, and I can go on and on. We right now are basically begging Iran to try to keep the straits open while we figure out how to pay them a lot of money to do it.
Yeah, and we're paying them to do this right now. We're going to talk about that. But J.D. Vance, who's leading the negotiations here, in the past couple of days, reports came out where he seems to be celebrating a kind of a new breakthrough with Iran to restore nuclear inspections. And I laughed at this, Joel. I laughed at this because – and then Trump came on TV.
I never knew there were inspections.
Sorry, go ahead. In an interview, well, nobody's been talking about it. I've been talking about it. But, you know, now all of a sudden, J.D. Vance and Trump are talking. But Trump said that Iran had agreed to, quote, the highest level inspections long into the future, adding infinity. Like, I mean, I like laughed.
What is the current situation with the Strait of Hormuz and the recent ceasefire claims?
And then J.D. Vance said that Iran agreed to let inspectors back into the nuclear sites. Now, Iran, of course, hours after this. What do you think Iran does? The Iranian officials said we didn't agree. There's no discussions on this. But I actually thought this was really significant, not because it's true, not because what Trump said was true or what J.D. Vance said was true, but because a lot of people haven't been talking about inspections at all in this entire process. And they are really, really important to the actual goal of making sure Iran doesn't develop a nuclear weapon, if we really care about that anymore. I mean... I guess I just want to ask you, because you have such an important background in diplomacy and all this stuff.
Why are inspections really important anyway?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How did the hosts introduce the episode's focus on Trump administration failures and Iran?
0:06–3:56
2
What is the current situation with the Strait of Hormuz and the recent ceasefire claims?
3:56–22:50
3
How do inspections verify Iran's nuclear activities and why do they matter?
22:50–33:56
4
What went wrong when the Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA and how did that affect leverage?
33:56–37:43