Trump’s Iran Deal - with Walter Russell Mead

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
Over the past couple of years, Call Me Back has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected, a place for clarity, context, and honest conversations, at a time when those things can seem hard to find. That's what Ark Media is all about, building a truly independent voice, which means no one shaping what we say or how we say it. To help support our rapidly expanding operations, we created Inside Call Me Back, our members-only feed. If Call Me Back has been meaningful to you, and you want to be part of what we're building, I hope you'll join us. You can subscribe at arkmedia.org or through the link in the show notes. To our insiders, thank you.
You are listening to an Ark Media podcast.

**Walter Russell Mead** (0:52)
Look, for the Iranians, they don't believe one single word of the memorandum of understanding. For them, it's an element in the struggle. Sometimes you struggle by shooting things, sometimes you struggle by signing things, but no piece of paper ever written can bind the Islamic Republic of Iran.
That is Trump too. He also thinks that way. So we have two people who fundamentally don't believe in the written word or their own given word, and they have signed a memorandum of understanding.

**Dan Senor** (1:38)
It's 1 p.m. on Sunday, June 21st here in New York City. Happy Father's Day to all the dads listening. It's 8 p.m. on Sunday, June 21st in Israel, as Israelis reckon, with the outcome of the Iran War chronicled in the Memorandum of Understanding, which was signed late last week. It seems like a paradox. Israel and the United States just led one of the most militarily successful campaigns in the modern history of the Middle East. They degraded Iran's air defenses, they set back Iran's nuclear program, they destroyed Iran's Navy, a lot of its conventional military capabilities. They left Hezbollah battered and leaderless. I can go on. By every military measure, this was an outstanding performance.
And then President Trump flew to a G7 summit and signed a piece of paper that, according to the agreement, lifted the naval blockade of Iran, unfroze billions in frozen assets, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and gave Iran 60 days to negotiate its way back to respectability, international respectability, and acceptance. Hezbollah called it a victory. Tehran is projecting confidence in Israel. Well, Israel woke up to the realization that it may have just fought the first war in its history where it won every battle, but might be losing the overall war. So what just happened? And what does it mean? Not just for Israel, not just for Iran, but for every country in the region, in the Middle East and beyond. Obviously, what does it mean for the United States that is now quietly drawing its own conclusions about American power? To help me think through this, I called Walter Russell Mead from the Wall Street Journal back to the podcast. He's a columnist there, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and one of the most serious teachers of American foreign policies and interpreters of Trump foreign policy. There's no one better to talk to when there are a lot of questions in the world of geopolitics. Walter, welcome back to Call Me Back.

**Walter Russell Mead** (3:28)
It's great to be here again, Dan.

**Dan Senor** (3:30)
We always call you when we are perplexed by some of the thorniest questions. So you're going to tie them all up in a bow for us and make it all easy to understand. So we will jump into it. I want to start, Walter, with the basic paradox. Israel and the US, as I said in the introduction, just degraded Iran's air defenses, set back its nuclear program. And as I said, it left Hezbollah pretty battered.
Again, these are all by most military measures. It was an outstanding campaign.
But then we have this MOU that looks nothing like those results. It looks like Iran, the regime, came out with the advantage in this war. How do you square that?

**Walter Russell Mead** (4:06)
Actually, Dan, I think I'd start with the ways in which this isn't really that exceptional.
I mean, since 1948, Israel has been winning wars and then been unable to shape the resulting Middle East situation in the way that it would like to. So it wins the War of Independence, no peace. It wins in 1956, it takes Suez, no benefit. 1967, Six-Day War, no peace.

**Dan Senor** (4:33)
And the War of Attrition that follows immediately after the Six-Day War for something like three years.

**Walter Russell Mead** (4:38)
Exactly. That is kind of the Israeli condition.
Without military strength, without even military superiority over its enemies, it can't survive. But military superiority doesn't give it peace in the region. That's been a fact from the beginning. So we shouldn't be overwhelmed with surprise that something like this is happening again.