How to End the Iran War

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Ravi Agrawal** (0:57)
Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.
So what would it take to end the Iran War? On this week's show, a former lead negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal tells us how he thinks the current talks between Washington and Tehran are going, and how the White House should navigate an exit plan. That's coming up, but first, I thought I'd share my read on things. I was away the last couple of weeks, and I couldn't help but notice that there were repeated news reports that the United States and Iran were close to a deal. It's part of a familiar cycle. Someone in the White House tells journalists a deal is imminent, the story gets published, everyone gets excited, oil prices drop, stocks rise, and then nothing happens. As an editor, I can say this. We should all be more skeptical about these stories and provide the necessary context and history to any administration saying it is close to any deal. There are always two sides, and no deal is done until it's done. Second, given all the recent reports about individuals profiting from betting markets, I'm even more skeptical than usual about premature claims of success. But more broadly, here's the reason why I think it's been so difficult to get a deal. The starting point of the talks seemed to be about getting us back to the same point we were at before the war began, a world in which the Strait of Hormuz is not blockaded. And at the heart of it all, US President Donald Trump is delaying a difficult choice. Either he has to live with an imperfect deal in which he leaves the nuclear issue to another day and just make that choice now and believe that he can sell it to the American people, or he has to be willing to sustain a lot more economic and political pain than the Iranians can. And that is a game of chicken that could take months to play out.
Right now, it is unclear that Trump is picking either of those two options. He is dithering, because neither of those options is great. And he is expressing this confusion by veering between two extremes in recent weeks. He switches between declaring that Washington and Tehran are nearing a breakthrough or threatening military escalation.
But each day that Trump does not make a choice, more dire data points emerge. The latest of these comes from the OECD, a club of industrialized economies, which says global growth could slow to 2.1% this year if there's no Iran deal. Last year, the world grew at 3.4%.
As a reminder, we haven't hit less than 2% growth since the pandemic. And that level of low growth has only happened four times since 1980 That is the scale of the historic decision in front of Trump. That is why he seems stuck.
Okay, time for this week's interview, which is very much on the same theme. I wanted to speak to someone who has experience negotiating with the Iranians and also navigating politics in the United States. Robert Malley was the Biden administration's special envoy for Iran. And before that, under the Obama administration, he was a lead US negotiator on the 2015 nuclear agreement. Malley is not only a critic of the current war, but also of the last several decades of US policy in the Middle East. A criticism he is just as willing to apply to himself and his time in government, as you'll hear in our discussion. Today, Malley heads the Middle East program at the International Crisis Group and teaches at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. He's the co-author of an excellent book with Hussain Agha called Tomorrow is Yesterday, Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel-Palestine. Let's dive in.
Rob, welcome back to FP Live.

**Robert Malley** (5:16)
Thanks so much for having me.