Two wars, no clear exit plan. Now what? | Ian Bremmer

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hue. Today, we're bringing you another special episode of TED Explains the World with Ian Bremmer. Ian is president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media. He sits down with Helen Walters, TED's head of media and curation, to discuss the latest on the wars in Iran and Ukraine. All of that and more is coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Conversation of the Day.

**Helen Walters** (0:45)
Hi, everyone. I'm Helen Walters. I am head of media and curation at TED. Welcome to another edition of TED Explains the World with political scientist Ian Bremmer.
Today, we are going to explain the current and future states of the wars in Iran and Ukraine. Ian, as always, thank you so much for being here to help us try to make sense of things.

**Ian Bremmer** (1:05)
Hi, Helen. Good to be back with you.

**Helen Walters** (1:07)
All right. Let's start in Iran, which is now entering its sixth month of conflict with the United States. And in just the last two weeks, we've seen attacks, we've seen counterattacks.
None of the major issues between the two nations seem to be coming anywhere close to being resolved. So what is your read of what is going on, and what should we actually be paying attention to?

**Ian Bremmer** (1:28)
So I guess there are two different components that we need to think about. The first is why it is that the war is still going on, given the clear costs to everyone involved in the United States, around the world, and to the Iranians.
And the second is how might we think about the potential for a resolution. So first, why is it happening? Because we had a memorandum of understanding that was signed between the US and the Iranians, and it was only a matter of weeks before that fell apart.
The issue here is that President Trump and the Iranian military leadership really fundamentally disagree about how much leverage they each have over the outcome. This is very different from what we saw between Trump and Xi Jinping, when he hit out really hard on the tariffs and created a functional boycott, and the Chinese hit back with their own tariffs, and then the critical minerals licensing regime. And Trump realized, I do not want to get into a tit for tat continued fight with the Chinese. This is going to hurt me too much. I need to back away, and I need to ensure stability. The Iranians have hit Trump back pretty hard, hit the Americans back. They've hit them back in blocking the strait, and they've hit them back in attacking targets across the Gulf, both infrastructure targets and American bases.
But the Iranians believe they can continue to do that until they have control over the strait, so they're given that control by the United States, seeded to buy the United States, so that they are able to get a lot of money and determine who does and doesn't go through.
President Trump's perspective is, yeah, they may have been able to disrupt the strait, but I can continue to blow these guys up, and ultimately, they're gonna have to capitulate. So I don't accept that they can continue to wait me out. I need to show them by continuing to hit them harder that they're going to be forced to back away from the deal that was signed in the memorandum, which Trump believes is the Iranians can sell oil, but they don't have control of the strait. The Iranians believe, no, we have control. So that's why we are still seeing fighting.
You note that I'm mentioning fighting between Iran and the US and the blockade. I am not talking about the Houthis. There is a secondary fight going on between the Houthis and the Saudis. The Houthis are an important proxy of Iran. They see that they have more ability to get cash out of Saudi Arabia because the Strait of Hormuz is now shut down. So they're demanding a whole bunch of money. They want $10 billion upfront from the Saudis to ensure safe passage. The Saudis don't want to give them that, but the Americans have no part of that negotiation. The Iranians are telling the Houthis to go, but the Iranians have no part of that negotiation. And as long as the Saudis pay off the Houthis sufficiently, which I suspect they will do, and they have been paying for tens of thousands of salaries in the Houthi-controlled territories of Yemen for the last few months, as long as they up that rate sufficiently, that's not likely to be an ongoing fight. So we're talking about Iran versus the US. The Israelis, for the time being, not a direct part of that war, though obviously they did initially go to war with the Americans back in February. That's why it's still going on.