Former US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan Talks US-Iran Peace

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Joe Mathieu** (0:07)
And we turn from outside the White House to someone who is familiar with the inner workings and has advised a president on national security issues. The former national security advisor to President Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, is joining us now here on Bloomberg TV and radio. We appreciate your time, sir, and welcome to Balance of Power on this day that I believe brings us to 172 days since the war with Iran began. We now have experts telling us here, press openly describing this as a quagmire. If you were still advising the president as to options to end this quagmire, which ones are realistically left?

**Jake Sullivan** (0:45)
Well, the best option is obviously not realistically available, which would be to go back in time and not start this war in the first place because President Trump really has put the United States in a strategic cul-de-sac with no clear way out. Really, when it comes down to it, if you stare at it squarely, there are two bad options. One is to keep this war going with all of the costs to the global economy and all of the risks of escalation and further casualties. The other is to cut a very, very bad deal.
And really, Iran is just simply upping the price for that deal with each week that goes by, adding new demands to what it would require to open the Strait of Hormuz. And I think this is the horns of the dilemma that President Trump is locked on, is that to get Iran to actually step away from keeping the strait closed, which it largely is right now, despite what he says, the United States will have to pay a very steep price, I think, in terms of frozen assets, I think we're going to have to take a look at the results of the past few weeks. We've had a lot of protests in terms of sanctions relief, and potentially in terms of something the president previously agreed to, a very large fund for the reconstruction of Iran. And at some point, the president, I think, is going to end up having to bite the bullet and do a bad deal.

**Kailey Leinz** (1:56)
Jake, it's great to have you with us on Bloomberg. I'm sure that you gamed out a lot of scenarios involving Iran in your time at the White House. Did the United States, did this administration underestimate this enemy?

**Jake Sullivan** (2:11)
There's no doubt about it.
The notion that you would conduct a regime change war, you would kill the top leader in Iran, and Iran wouldn't react by throwing everything it had back at the United States, would have been debunked immediately by any serious person in the intelligence community. So the president should have known, and I think did know, from his intelligence community that Iran would look at closing the Strait of Hormuz, would look at hitting US infrastructure across the Middle East, would look at attacking neighbors in the Persian Gulf. And Iran has done all of those things. And the minute the president decided that he was going to launch a war, the end goal of which was the removal of Iran's regime, which is existential for those leaders, they were going to respond in an existential way. Okay, and so I think it was not just predictable we would end up where we are, but it was predicted by a lot of people going back to the beginning of this conflict.

**Joe Mathieu** (3:08)
Well, of course, the president says it wasn't just about a decapitation at the top of Iran's leadership. He says repeatedly and still does to this day that the goal is to have a denuclearized non-nuclear Iran. And when you couple that with the president's statement on True Social Today that no talks with Iran are ongoing or scheduled. Can you reach that end game on the nuclear program without negotiations on it?

**Jake Sullivan** (3:34)
There's no way. At the end of the day, the only path to verifiably blocking Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is a deal that includes intrusive inspections in Iran. That is something Iran would have to agree to. That requires diplomacy. It requires negotiations. I do find it interesting that you had Jared Kushner out saying, there are talks ongoing, and then you have the president 24 hours later saying, there are no talks ongoing. These two things can be squared by the definition of what talks are. Informal contacts outside of the administration, a ways of passing messages back and forth. Maybe that's what's unfolding and that's what Jared Kushner is referring to.
But at the end of the day, there is simply no substitute for the United States sitting down with Iran, whether it's with mediators or just simply directly, as we did back in the Obama administration, and coming out with the terms of a deal that does, in fact, put a lid on Iran's nuclear program for the long term. But we've gotten so far off course of that because right now the main point of friction is not actually the nuclear program, whatever President Trump says, it's getting the strait open.