The Case for Trump’s Global Strategy

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Ravi Agrawal (1:19)

Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policies, Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.

So we have two episodes for you this week. On Friday, we're going to drop my interview with Alexander de Kru, the head of the UN's development agency and the former prime minister of Belgium. He's going to describe how he's helping to eradicate poverty in very difficult conditions in Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan, and beyond. But first, I have a bonus interview for you. And this one is with Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations. Waltz is a decorated war hero with multiple deployments to the Middle East and Africa. After serving in the military, he represented Florida's 6th Congressional District for several years before he was picked by President Trump as his national security advisor. Waltz served in that role for just 101 days. He left it amid the controversy that was known as Signalgate, in which a reporter was added to a Signal group chat discussing US strikes in Yemen.

Waltz took the fall, but he was then named Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, a role he has now been in for more than a year. We caught up on Tuesday, September 29th, right after Iran's foreign minister left New York. Ambassador Waltz and I had a wide-ranging discussion on Iran, of course, but also the UN and how the White House plans to engage with the multilateral body, despite pulling out of many of its entities. We also discussed Sudan, which has been an important part of Waltz's portfolio at the UN. And of course, we discussed Trump's broader foreign policy. I will save my regular take on the week's news for Friday's episode. For now, let's dive right in.

Ambassador Waltz, thanks for joining us.

Mike Waltz (3:19)

Yeah, happy to be with you. Thanks.

Ravi Agrawal (3:21)

So let's start with the Middle East. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi left New York on Tuesday.

He had been engaged in indirect talks with the United States. Can you give us a sense of how those talks went?

Mike Waltz (3:36)

Well, I didn't directly participate in the talks, just to be clear, Ravi. But the Iranians came and made an offer.

The team and the president didn't think it was a very good offer to be candid with you, and the president basically said, not good enough. Essentially, Iran is still illegally trying to hold an international waterway hostage, and with it, the world's economy, mainly Asia's economies, are hostage for their ends to pursue a nuclear weapons program. The president doesn't think that it's acceptable. And 146 nations, a UN record, in fact, have joined us in condemning not only their violations of the UN law of the sea, but their attacks on civilian, innocent civilian shipping, and other civilian infrastructure around the Gulf. So the president, I think, absolutely rightly said, we're not going to unfreeze all of their assets, lift sanctions, lift UN sanctions on an Iranian promise that they'll start to talk seriously about their nuclear program, which is also in violation of numerous UN resolutions.

Ravi Agrawal (4:53)

I'm curious how you're thinking about strategy going forward after the talks of this week, after everything we saw at the UNGA last week. Because critics often point out that so far in this war, many US bases in the region have been damaged, America has used up precious munitions, including more than a third of its patriot interceptors. The global price of oil has soared, which means Americans are now forking out about 40 percent more for gas compared to what they were paying before the conflict. The war is deeply unpopular among the American people.