Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara. On Saturday evening, the United States struck three Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz. The attack came after Israel had launched its own military campaign against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, prompting retaliatory missile attacks from Iran. On Monday evening, President Trump announced that a ceasefire had been reached, although the agreement seemed to be faltering by Tuesday morning.

Joining me to discuss the ongoing conflict in the Middle East are Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer. Jake Sullivan served as National Security Advisor under President Biden. He has spent over a decade working on nuclear negotiations with Iran, serving in the State Department under the Obama administration, and a deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Jon Finer was President Biden’s Deputy National Security Advisor, and as likewise spent years advising on foreign policy and national security issues within the executive branch. They share their thoughts on the US strikes and what comes next for the region that’s coming up. Stay tuned.

What do President Biden’s two senior most national security advisors think of the US strikes on Iran? Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer join me to discuss the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Jake and Jon, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Jake Sullivan:

Hey, thanks for having us.

Jon Finer:

Good to be here.

Preet Bharara:

So, we have some very heavy stuff to talk about relating to the bombing of Iran, what’s going to happen in the Middle East, the nuclear program and all of that. But before we do any of that, since the two of you were very recently public servants in a very high capacity, I wonder what this experience is like for you. I had my own experience having been forcibly extracted from government and then was an onlooker.

When you see these things happening, significant things, do you pay more attention than an ordinary citizen, less attention? Do you try to game it out yourselves? What kind of spectating do you do given that you also from time to time talk about these things? How does it feel to be on the outside and not knowing what’s going on? Jake?

Jake Sullivan:

I got to admit, it’s been an adjustment, especially with this issue, the bombing of Iran, because both Jon and I have been so close to the Iranian nuclear file going back many years. So, it’s a matter near and dear to both of our hearts preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. So, the first night that Israel started bombing, I actually basically stayed up all night following the news and then realized a little ways through it, there was nothing I could do about it, but just instinct kicked in.

Preet Bharara:

Did you try going to the situation room? I don’t think your pass is accepted anymore.

Jake Sullivan:

No. I didn’t get that far. But there is a certain instinct that kicks in where you start digesting the information, your mind starts racing. As Jon knows, I reached out to him, I reached out to other people, “Hey, what are you seeing? What are you thinking?” And then realized that was all just for basic consumption because there’s no way to convert that into any form of action. But that’s basically been true over the course of this whole crisis. It’s hopefully a level of engagement higher than the average American because if it’s not, I really worry about the average American. So, just putting a lot of time into it.

Preet Bharara:

Can I add to the question for you, Jon? Is there any feeling of relief that it’s not on your shoulders and/or, “Wow, I wish it were on my shoulders”?

Jon Finer:

Yeah. So, I was going to say that is almost a confession in response to the question that you asked.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a safe space here.

Jon Finer:

Because on one level, yeah, this is what we spend our careers preparing for, and you shouldn’t be in this line of work if you don’t want to work on these big consequential issues. On the other hand, it takes a toll and there is a degree of comfort in knowing that it is somebody else’s problem, at least in the current moment as much as you want to have influence and have impact. So, you wrestle with both of those things when you’re out.

And the other thing that’s hard honestly is in government, which I know both you know, people are handing you information all the time. You don’t have to go looking for it when something big happens. In fact, often it’s just more than any person can consume in real time that’s coming across the transom on email, on paper.

When you’re out of government, you got to be an active consumer of information. And some of it is off and some of it is wrong. By the way, occasionally that happens in government too. But going out and having to figure out what is happening is a feeling you have to get used to, again, having had four years in which people would tell you what you needed to know.

Preet Bharara:

So, I’m going to start with my first substantive question, which may be a trick question, and that is, are we at war with Iran? Are we at war with Iran’s nuclear program, both or neither? And obviously, I’m making a not so oblique reference to JD Vance saying, “We are not at war with Iran, we are at war with its nuclear program.” Either of you care to respond to that point?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, I think the simplest way to put it is we bombed Iran and I think if someone bombed us, we would say they conducted an act of war against us. Now since then, of course there’s been a ceasefire called. So, I think for the moment, we’re in this limbo where the real question is what comes next. And I don’t think the administration’s really answered that.

But I think the simplest way to look at this is we dropped a whole lot of bombs on another country in anger. Yes, for a particular purpose, which was designed to destroy or neutralize or set back their nuclear program. But we were attacking that country and I think we have to just be straight about that.

Preet Bharara:

Is this a semantic issue or a substantive one, Jon? Are we at war or not?

Jon Finer:

Maybe to be slightly more charitable than I sometimes feel to the vice president, maybe part of what he’s trying to say, although I can’t be sure, is that we are not at war with Iran as a society and certainly not with the Iranian people. And you see people like a ham-handed way sometimes try to say, “Oh, our fight is not with you as we drop bombs on their country.”

But in this case, I think there’s a degree of truth to it that we believe, and I think our administration believed that a society that has so much more potential than it’s been able to realize has been captured now for decades by essentially a government that is hostile to much of the world and that that’s not the people of Iran’s fault. They suffer and they pay the price for it. So, maybe part of what he’s trying to say is, our fight is not with you. Our fight is with the fact that your government has chosen to spend its resources on this thing that is so threatening to us and our allies.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I don’t know that Trump thinks that way, but he did make a pronouncement before we drop the bombs, if I recall correctly. And it was a wartime demand of how hostilities if they ever began would be concluded. And that would be through unconditional surrender.

So, if we are at war, and if we are in fact at a ceasefire, and I should note that we’re recording this on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 25th, and who knows what will happen between now and the time when people begin listening to this, but is unconditional surrender on the horizon, and do you think that that term meant anything or not?

Jake Sullivan:

I think it was a rhetorical flourish like many of President Trump’s rhetorical flourishes. And we’ve already seen him vote with his feet, because he dropped a bunch of bombs and then he didn’t reiterate his demand for unconditional surrender. He called for a ceasefire. He called for the whole thing to just end.

And then it did end, at least for the moment. And it’s a very good point you make that that’s fragile and it could easily start up again either from the Iranian side or the Israeli side. But basically, I think he’s walked away from the unconditional surrender assertion.

There is a question about what the US demand will be now with respect to the nuclear program. Are they going to go back to saying they need to give up every last ounce of uranium, every last centrifuge, every morsel of that nuclear program? If they do make that demand, I think the Iranians will resist it. If they’re willing to cut a deal for less than that, then I think there may be scope for diplomacy.

Preet Bharara:

Well, Trump said something else preposterous I thought I heard either today or yesterday, that the days blend together when it’s 100 degrees in New York City. So, forgive me. Didn’t he speculate aloud, not very credibly, that now after the bombings have happened, the Iranians essentially would’ve lost their taste for building a bomb and they’re not going to pursue it because of the havoc that was wrought upon them? Did you hear that, Jon? Do you have anything to say about that?

Jon Finer:

So, there’ve been two competing views about this for quite some time. You can caricature it almost as the Israeli view, which is if you hit the Iranian nuclear program, they will realize there is a cost to going down the path they’ve been on and they will reverse course. They will essentially be deterred from rebuilding, reconstituting their program if you take it out.

Then there’s been a view that’s more characteristic of the US intelligence community, which has been that if you bomb Iran, they will realize that countries that don’t have a nuclear weapon are vulnerable to being bombed and countries that don’t tend to get bombed. And you can give a number of examples of the latter and they will conclude they need a bomb and go the other way.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So, which is correct, Jon?

Jon Finer:

I mean, I don’t have the answer for that any more than anybody else does, but I do worry that it is very rational for a country that has had all of its meaningful deterrence, like Iran has a lot of enemies, a lot of adversaries in the world, and it had deterrence it believed against those adversaries. Hamas and Hezbollah were deterrence that Iran had against Israel.

Its missile program was a deterrence that it believed it had against us and against the Israelis, even some of its few friends in the world, Russia, maybe they thought they would have their back. And Syria, at least under al-Assad, all of those deterrence have been shown at this point to be either not very meaningful or no longer in existence.

And so, the incentive at that point to look for another form of deterrence, and I worry here about two things. One, terrorism which they have sponsored a number of times in the past. And two, a nuclear weapon seems to have increased, not decreased. It’s the other side of the coin of what is a good situation that Iran has been strategically weakened.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer. I don’t know if you can answer this question, but I want to ask you both about your experiences and I hope you can answer it. And whether it ever was the case that when you both worked in the Biden administration saying, Jake, as you did a few minutes ago, how close you were to the Iranian brief and file. Was there ever at any point moderate to serious consideration of doing what Donald Trump just did bombing Fordow or some other site to set back the nuclear program? And if so, what were the considerations on both sides of that equation?

Jake Sullivan:

So, the short answer is that we planned for the military option intensively, and we did so throughout the four years and we did so with increasing intensity in the closing months, not because President Biden was just going to go one day and exercise it, but because we had to be prepared for a contingency in which Iran actually broke out, actually tried to sprint for a bomb and then we had to have an option available to the president that he could respond to that.

And in the closing months of the Biden administration, we were looking at Iran that was at its weakest point since the Iranian revolution in 1979. And Iran where on President Biden’s watch. Hezbollah had been basically neutralized so that there was not a threat of tens of thousands of rockets coming from Lebanon in response to action against Iran, where Iran’s air defenses had been taken out and where twice President Biden ordered the direct defense of Israel by the United States and exposed that Iran’s effort to hit Israel with missiles really didn’t have much effect.

So, we looked at a situation where Iran was on its back foot, was in a weak state. And we had ready obviously a military option, but our view was you don’t exercise that military option unless you have to because Iran has forced your hand.

What you do with a weakened Iran is you get a good deal at the table. A weak Iran I think was susceptible to effective, hard-headed American diplomacy and that we could have gotten a good deal that would’ve set this program back not for a couple years, not for several months, but for 15, 20 or even more years.

And frankly, where we sit today is still there. We need to deal so that we can deal with the fact that Iran still has seems to have some enriched uranium seems to have some centrifuges, seems to have know-how. And as Jon said, whether it’s now or a little ways down the road has some motive and intent to want to continue to pursue its nuclear ambitions.

Preet Bharara:

Jon, following up on what Jake just said, those contingencies that you plan for, again, if you can answer this question and you never obviously went through with it, but did they match generally speaking what we saw last week?

Jon Finer:

Yeah. Look, I think the best way to describe what the operative plan was at the end of the Biden administration is what we saw the Trump administration do. It was B-2’s-

Preet Bharara:

Those $30,000 ordnance-busting bombs.

Jon Finer:

30,000 pounds.

Preet Bharara:

30,000. Right.

Jon Finer:

More expensive than [inaudible 00:14:05].

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. What did I say?

Jon Finer:

A little more than $30,000. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Well, are we talking about British currency or we don’t know what we’re talking about?

Jake Sullivan:

Bitcoin, Bitcoin.

Preet Bharara:

I heard someone on television and I was making fun of this person and now of course I misspoke, but I saw someone talking about a 30,000 ton bomb.

Jon Finer:

That big thing.

Preet Bharara:

That is in fact the mother of all bombs at a new scale. Did I formulate a full question or not?

Jon Finer:

Not quite, I don’t believe.

Preet Bharara:

I forgot what I was going to ask.

Jake Sullivan:

You were asking whether it was basically the planes and the ordnance and the targets.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I was being more specific, the same game plan and dropping a number of them on that spot?

Jon Finer:

Yeah. So, I think that more or less matched, and they’re probably different versions depending on the facts on the ground, where Iranian air defenses are still operative and not that would determine things like which angle of attack you take on flying into the country. But all of that would be left to the military to decide. It really did match more or less the way we had gained things out. And the bombs obviously seemed to have hit the target.

The big unanswered question is what actual effect they had once that happened. And here, there’s just a lot of unknowns, a lot of unknowns about whether these facilities are still operative, a lot of unknowns about what happened to the nuclear material that was in those facilities. Because what they would do to break out is take that material and just enrich it a little bit further. So, they have weapons-grade uranium for a bomb.

And then the biggest difference now compared to before that’s more negative is we just have less visibility on all of this because the monitors and inspectors that Iran still had staring at all of this stuff right up until the bomb started to fall from the Israelis a week or two ago now no longer have this material in their site.

Preet Bharara:

So, both of you suggested that the contingency planning you did under Biden and didn’t have to execute on generally speaking reflected what happened last week. Does that include whether it was a plan or impromptu the president of the United States tweeting the intent and location of the target on social media for all the world to see as well?

Jake Sullivan:

I can’t say that that was in the contingency plan.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have any view about that? So, if you two were in office, your respective offices, I don’t know how geographically close to the president and vice president and others you were, and I know Biden wasn’t the type to do this, but if he started to speak in public about the specifics of an action plan, what would you have done? Do you run to the office? Do you get a big cane and pull him off? Do you shut off his social media? What do you do?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, thankfully, we never really had to contend with errant loose social media popping off. And so, I think we may not have had a contingency plan exactly for that.

Preet Bharara:

But you need one.

Jake Sullivan:

Jon and I actually shared an office space down the hall from the president, probably 50 feet away and we were in and out of the Oval constantly. And we would’ve been in and out of the Oval and the situation room in this circumstance alongside all of his senior military and intelligence and diplomatic leadership.

And President Biden in these kinds of circumstances, and we saw him, as I mentioned those two times in ’24, directing a campaign to defend Israel against direct Iranian attack. He pretty much battened down the hatches and he was very conscious about what he would say publicly in those circumstances. Now I would say, the idea that we’d hit Fordow is not exactly a well-kept secret.

So, this was not the same as Secretary Hegseth going out with particular coordinates and times and so forth. But obviously, President Trump has a whole different style when it comes to his wartime communication.

Preet Bharara:

When you folks text now on the outside, you just as a matter of course, include Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic?

Jon Finer:

I thought that was required.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. That’s why national security people.

Preet Bharara:

It’s required if you’re in office. So, here’s a question I have. Why I announced my question? I don’t know because this is a question and answer program, but I do. So, it seems to me the huge question, and you’ve already framed it, is what was accomplished with respect to the nuclear program and peace in the region and peace in the world from this bombing? And the president of the United States has said completely obliterated. One of my questions is, but I have a couple of questions. Is that statement an exaggeration, a mere overstatement, wishful thinking or a direct lie?

Then you have leaks from the intelligence community that it set Iran back just a few months and you have all sorts of other predictions about this from various sources. You’re an average thoughtful American citizen, you want us to be safe. You don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Who on God’s earth are you supposed to believe and why?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, I think you should believe the combined and coherent and presented analysis of the American intelligence community. When we were there for four years, they were professional, they were serious, they took their time to reach a judgment and then they put it out and they also put it out with a confidence level.

So, they’d say, “Here we have low confidence or here we have medium confidence,” and then present what their basic assessment was. And part of my concern right now is there seems to be an active effort from the White House to discredit and undermine the American intelligence community, including calling active duty military personnel, low level losers, which the White House press Secretary did yesterday.

But I think it’s really important to make the point that after a significant military action like this, it does take time to paint a full picture of exactly what happened because you’re trying to paint that picture drawing from a wide range of sources. And that means that I don’t think we’re going to have a full sense of exactly what happened at Fordow, at Isfahan, at Natanz, the major facilities that the United States struck probably for several more days.

And even the report that was leaked to the media from the Defense Intelligence Agency, that would’ve been a preliminary report. And we don’t know exactly what confidence level was attached to it. So, let’s let the intelligence professionals do their jobs and then let’s give serious credence to what they have to say.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So, Jon, I’m going to ask you the tougher followup, which is maybe it’s not tougher

Jon Finer:

I’m used to that.

Preet Bharara:

That’s what you’re there for. So, Jake spoke very favorably and positively about the professional intelligence community. Should we have confidence in their leader or one of their leaders Tulsi Gabbard? And does that affect our confidence level in the work product that they put forth?

Jon Finer:

So, what’s so confounding about the current moment is even President Trump has expressed a lack of confidence in the leader of his own.

Preet Bharara:

Which makes me think I should have confidence. It’s very confusing.

Jon Finer:

Paradoxically. But honestly, it’s hard to know what to make of this and this is why there is a proper degree of stigma about political officials interfering, and this goes back certainly to the invasion of Iraq, but even before that, in the analysis presented by the intelligence community. It should be as objective as possible and then policymakers, politicians should decide what to do with that intelligence.

And it’s not an accident in my view that President Trump really, not just from the beginning of this term, but from the beginning of his first term, has gone to war with the intelligence community. One of the first things he did was start to criticize the analysis that he was being presented in 2017 when he became president. And I think the reason for that is he likes to be the one to tell his administration, the world, the American people, how things are. He doesn’t like that information being presented by a neutral, impartial, extra party.

And I think the problem with the current moment, the most discrediting thing that happened was President Trump going out minutes after the bombs were dropped and announcing the outcome when it is not possible to know the outcome at that time. And so, now we’re going to be in this very hard situation where objective facts will be difficult to come by because so much pressure is on the intelligence community to validate what the president has already said.

Jake Sullivan:

And what the Israelis are putting out right now with respect to Fordow is that they think there was significant damage, but they’re not quite sure exactly how much. So, they’re certainly not toeing the complete obliteration line. They’re saying, “Look, we think we did a lot to set them back, but we can’t say whether we totally destroyed all of the relevant nuclear capabilities that are contained inside Fordow.”

Preet Bharara:

Since you had the file and debrief, I presume you can answer this more in the weeds question. So, as you said, it was an open secret that Fordow was always a possible target even under the Biden administration. It became increasingly likely to be an actual real operational target in the last couple of weeks.

The Iranians aren’t stupid. There are things that were kept within that mountain presumably that are movable and things that are not. And I don’t know enough to know, which is why I have G2 smart guys on and I don’t know if was the most important thing to have preserved and dissipated to some other location was some enriched uranium. And the reports are they had at 60%, which seems to me to be far off from 90%. But people say it’s not that far off from 90%.

Is it the centrifuges? Is it the vending machines that have the soda? Is it the know-how that’s kept on servers? Is it the human capital, the smart people who lead their nuclear programs, some of whom seem not to have escaped? What are the things that are going to inform the intelligence analysis in the coming months as to what needed to have been moved and was in fact movable? Isn’t that the crux of it?

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. And I think getting to a definitive answer on that’s going to be difficult. But basically, the two key elements to producing the material necessary for a bomb, you actually have to build the bomb as well, are the enriched uranium, whether it’s a 20% or 60%, and then centrifuges that can be put in cascades to further enrich that up to 90%, which is weapons grade. It is pretty straightforward to move a stockpile of enriched uranium, hundreds of kilograms of it. You can do that through trucks and you don’t need that many of them. It is more difficult to move an actual fixed cascade of centrifuges.

Preet Bharara:

How big is that?

Jake Sullivan:

Individual centrifuges. You’d have a whole hall basically think about a server farm you walk into with stacks of servers. You’d be walking into a hall with tall cascades with a significant number of centrifuges in them spinning the uranium to enrich it to higher levels. So, that’s fixed infrastructure. You can’t just take that out and move it.

You could move some of the individual centrifuges, but you probably wouldn’t bother because Iran actually has a lot of centrifuges in a lot of different places. And what the Israelis have said so far is we destroyed some of their centrifuge production facilities, but they haven’t said all. We destroyed some of their centrifuges, but they haven’t said all. And we think that that enriched uranium stockpile, whether it was moved from Fordow or not, is either buried under Fordow or is buried under Isfahan is going to be hard to get to we think.

But this leads me to an observation that I’ve seen a couple of other people make, which is we hold diplomacy and deals to a much higher standard than we hold military action. If I told you I had a deal with the Iranians and you said, “Okay. So, what happens with the enriched uranium?” I said, “Well, I’m not sure, but I think it’s buried. But I’m not sure. And I’m not sure if we’ve gotten the centrifuges or not. And I’m not sure if we’re going to get inspectors in again or not, that they’re not in right now. I’m hoping they will.” You’d say, “That’s a terrible deal.”

But somehow, we come out of this round of bombing and say, total success. For me, there’s a huge now what question. How do you deal with all these unknown questions which leave a serious challenge. The Iranians have the material and the know-how to build a bomb over time. It may take them some time and they may hunker down for a while and we’re going to have to deal with that. And the only way in my view to deal with that over the long term is through a diplomatic agreement.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So, I have a layperson’s curiosity about and skepticism of inspections because I don’t know how they work. And if I don’t know how they work, I mean, a lot of people don don’t know how they work. And so, if you could, Jon or Jake or both of you, explain what that means. You have a diplomatic resolution, do a bunch of you folks show up in the country that’s quite large and take it on faith that they’re being shown and presented the actual labs where the centrifuges are.

Everything you said about the secreting and the moving of vital manufacturing processes and materials for the production of a bomb in anticipation of our bombs would seem to also obtain in a diplomatic situation. You said already that it wouldn’t have taken a lot of trucks. I mean how does a person have trust that inspectors are going to get the real scoop?

Jon Finer:

It’s a very good question. So, we basically have three ways of what I would say is verifying Iranian compliance if they were to make an agreement and three ways in which we verified their compliance when they did make an agreement the last time.

One is by the physical presence of human inspectors as you just described. Experts on both nuclear programs generally and the specifics of the Iranian nuclear program who are physically present at the only sites. And there were only two of them under the JCPOA, the deal that we made where Iran was permitted to enrich uranium and they literally physically took stock of what was there, cataloged it, watched it and had access whenever they needed to. That’s one.

Second, there were cameras present in a number of these places. That was another aspect of the deal that was negotiated. Cameras so that the material could be monitored at odd hours when inspectors might not be present. And third and quite importantly, we also obviously track Iran’s nuclear program through our intelligence capabilities, Israel’s intelligence capabilities, and this is not just an idle piece of this. Fordow, the nuclear facility that we’ve been discussing, was actually first identified not by international inspectors, not by the Iranians themselves, but by the US and other intelligence professionals and then revealed to the world by Barack Obama early in his administration.

So, it is credible that we would, and certainly Israel and we are very incentivized if the Iranians were going to cheat and do this work somewhere else, have a very good chance of it, which is why we have some confidence that when we say they were complying, they were under the terms of the deal.

Jake Sullivan:

And just to add a fine point to that. Part of the deal, the JCPOA said if Israel or the United States or any other country went to the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has the inspectors with information that, “Hey, there might be this facility over here that Iran hasn’t disclosed.” The IAEA had the right to go look at that facility.

And so, it’s the combination of access through human inspectors and the technical means the IAEA has and intelligence being supplied to them by American, Israeli and other western intelligence agencies. And that is how you get pretty good verification of whether Iran is complying.

Preet Bharara:

So, the incentive for the Iranians under an inspection deal is we better be upfront because the other guys, Israel, United States and others are monitoring and surveilling and they’re going to know if we’re being bad. So, my question is, what is their understanding of the consequence of lying about a facility under the auspices of a deal wrought by diplomacy that they don’t tell anyone about and that we discover?

Jon Finer:

So, look, I think the most important consequence of all of these, I mean yes, maybe the deal-

Jake Sullivan:

We go to the facility.

Jon Finer:

Yes. Maybe you’re right, they’d be revealed to be liars, which I’m not sure how outlawed they are about obviously in the context of a whole number of lies they’ve told.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So, there’s no additional penalty, it’s just now we get to go to that facility.

Jon Finer:

But the biggest risk that they face in addition to by the way, all of the sanctions pressure, which is what they’ve negotiated under the terms of the deal. I mean we always focus on what the US side of this deal looks like. For the Iranians, the reason they’re negotiating is because they want to get out from under this maximal pressure that has been placed on their economy. So, that will all go back on. They risk that.

And two, they risk exactly what we just saw over the course of the last week. If every administration since Barack Obama has said, “If we see Iran essentially trying to cheat and break out and move in the direction of a nuclear weapon enriching material to weapons grade, we will take military action, use whatever means are necessary to stop that.” Joe Biden said that. Certainly, Donald Trump said that. Now has done that. Barack Obama said that.

Preet Bharara:

It’s an odd circular thing though, isn’t it? Because on the one hand we say military action is blunt and imprecise and the consequences of it are not fully knowable. That’s why diplomacy is better. But then our antidote to diplomacy that doesn’t fully succeed is to do that blunt military assault. Do you know what I mean? Am I wrong to find that oddly circular?

Jake Sullivan:

I think the main reason to comply with the deal is not about trust or the Iranians being good people, the regime being good people who just live up to deals. It’s rather that that would be a violation of the deal and allow for the snapback of sanctions. And as Jon said, the whole reason that they went into the deal in the first place was because was to get out of those sanctions. And so, they have a reason to comply.

And I would point out that this is not theoretical. We had actual real-world experiment of what does Iran do under a deal? And you shouldn’t ask us. We were close to it as the Israelis who would say, yeah, they were complying with the deal in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. They weren’t moving large stocks of uranium from one place to another or creating new centrifuge enrichment capabilities and so forth.

So, you’re absolutely right. There is no perfect solution, neither diplomacy nor war. The question is what’s going to put the most time on the clock with the most confidence? And here, I hear voices coming out of Israel said that the program’s been set back two, three years, some say a little longer. You obviously have this provisional DIA assessment that says it’s been set back six months or half a year, whatever it is. We’ll get other assessments. But 15 years, that’s the number from the JCPOA. Fifteen years the program was put in a box and that’s a big difference.

Preet Bharara:

So, if I know my history, there’s so far to date been one way to get a bomb and that’s to build it. I guess there’s a second way theoretically to get a bomb, you could buy it or it could be given to you. And Former Russian President Medvedev suggested that a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads. Is that credible or is that complete in total BS?

Jake Sullivan:

Medvedev is not a credible messenger in any way, shape or form.

Preet Bharara:

But it sends chills up the spine and it also fuels a lot of Jerry Bruckheimer film plot possibilities. Is it completely outlandish?

Jake Sullivan:

I mean speaking, it chills up his spine, go back through his feet and he talks about nuking England, like sinking it into the sea and not sinking island.

Preet Bharara:

But as once was said of my former boss and has also been said of Donald Trump, just because Chuck Schumer says it, or just because Donald Trump says it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Is it wrong?

Jake Sullivan:

So, there’s really in my view, one serious candidate and I still think it’s a very, very low probability for supplying Iran with a nuclear weapon, that’s North Korea. Personally, I don’t see the Russians or the Chinese or the Pakistanis or the Indians or the Israelis or the Americans or the French or the UK doing it.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, the French, are you sure about the French?

Jake Sullivan:

I’ll leave that to Jon.

Jon Finer:

For the right price, no, definitely.

Jake Sullivan:

But the North Koreans look, I would’ve said pretty much Kim’s not going to want anything to do with this, but of course he has involved himself very directly in the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine. So, can I rule it out? No. Do I think it’s a likely outcome? I don’t, but it’s something that the US and Israel could be very vigilant about.

Jon Finer:

I guess I’d only add to that. One thing that we have not yet seen is Russia actually change its position at all on whether Iran should have a nuclear weapon. Leaving aside whether Russia would actually give Iran a nuclear weapon, its current public position is that Iran should not have one. That is actually quite different from its current public position on North Korea. Russia used to be very much in favor of what we describe as denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, a negotiation that leads to nuclear weapons being removed from the peninsula, meaning removed from North Korea, because that’s the only place they exist.

They have very much softened that position kind of under duress because the North Koreans are providing so much help to them in the war in Ukraine. The Iranians are also providing an incredible amount of help to them in the war in Ukraine. Drones certainly also short-range ballistic missiles, but so far Russia has not in any way altered its position, which is just more evidence that they are unlikely to be helpful here in a number of ways to Iran.

Preet Bharara:

There’s more coming up with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer after this. Can you help laypeople understand something about a term that seems to have a lot of weight and freaks people out and the terms of regime change? What’s the big deal if the president says regime change or not? We just dropped a gazillion bombs each weighing multiple gazillion pounds. There’s an open question of whether we’re at war with Iran. Why so much emphasis and titillation over the phrase regime change?

Jon Finer:

Well, look, the stigma obviously dates back to the war the Bush administration launched in 2003 to invade Iraq. And if you look at the 20 years or so of US foreign policy since then, you can make the argument that the one area of broad bipartisan consensus has been that war was a bad idea and that regime change in general is not a very smart US foreign policy objective.

You look at the Democratic Party twice electing Barack Obama who made an aversion to the invasion of Iraq and to regime change, the one thing that he was really known for in terms of foreign policy before he became president, it was a distinguishing factor between him and Hillary Clinton, who had voted to authorize the war in Iraq. And between him and John McCain who he ran against in the general election.

The only Republican president since then have been Donald Trump, twice, who also made an aversion to regime change and to the Iraq war, whatever he said before the war, which I think was much more ambiguous, a core of his foreign policy. In some ways, Joe Biden was the one exception. He had also voted to authorize the war in Iraq, but came around to a much different view by the time he became president.

What I think is interesting about Trump taking this step is whether the step of actually striking Iran is whether this is in some ways the beginning of the erosion of that consensus. And I think it’s going to come down very much to how this ultimately ends up being perceived successful or not a setback for the nuclear program or the opposite.

Jake Sullivan:

I think there’s also a practical element here, a strategic element to why the administration so publicly and frankly I think directly privately to the Iranians signaled we are not in the business of regime change. And that is because if the supreme leader thinks, okay, regime change is the game, then his calculus for responding hitting US forces, closing the Strait of Hormuz, doing lots of other things changes. If it’s like this is it, this is the witching hour for him, then he’s probably going to be more risk-acceptant in terms of his response.

If he thinks, “Oh, they’re taking some strikes, but they’re assuring me they’re not going for me,” hey, that puts some ceiling on his willingness to take risk. And frankly, we saw a pretty cautious Iranian response. So, I think part of what was motivating the administration’s messaging on this was trying to cap the escalation in a way that kept this thing from spinning entirely out of control. And I think that was probably one of the things they talked about around the situation room table.

Jon Finer:

Other than the president himself who actually minutes after others on his team can answer this.

Jake Sullivan:

MIGA. Right. He had his Make Iran Great Again. Yeah, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I want to understand how public sentiment figures into any of this, if at all. So, you two in the national security capacity, would’ve been briefing the president and gaming out various scenarios in contemplation of dropping of a bomb. To my mind, it is not only not inappropriate, but appropriate for part of the discussion to focus on whether or not there’s broad public support, not as a finger in the wind political exercise, but as a pro-democracy thoughtful consideration of the public’s will. And so, I don’t know if you agree with that. So, that’s point one.

Point two is to the extent there’s a discussion of whether or not the public will be supportive because you want to have support for strategic and other reasons, are you guys raising that as part of your discussion or part of your brief? Is there a communications person? Is there a pollster in the room? Is it the secretary of state? So, A, is that a legitimate consideration, does it come up? And then B, who’s the one who’s making those arguments?

Jake Sullivan:

So, first, President Biden would tell us repeatedly over the course of the four years we were there that taking military action requires what he called the informed consent in the American people. He was very attuned to this. He really felt that a president should not embark on a military operation overseas without a sense that the American people have bought into it in some way.

Now, that doesn’t mean just a snap poll. That’s a bit of an art more than a science. And we definitely don’t have pollsters sitting in the situation room reading out poll results. But I think where the rubber would hit the road on this honestly, is in this question of whether Congress should authorize the strike. Should this be put to the people’s House and the Senate and have them vote on it?

And I think the way we would’ve thought about that is if you’re just choosing to go do this and you have time, there’s not an imminent threat, then it is right and proper actually to have a full debate out and ask the Congress to authorize it. The only thing that would cause the president to have to just act without that would be in response to a reaction to an actual imminent threat because of a breakout concern.

And here the situation’s a bit murky because Israel at first said we had to do it because they were breaking out, but there’s been more data points coming out subsequently that really, we controlled the clock on this thing. And that raises the question as to whether going to Congress to get authorization is the right thing to do. And I think the answer to that question is yes, it would’ve been the right thing to do.

Preet Bharara:

When you say right thing, just to be clear, do you mean that was legally and constitutionally required, or just prudentially the right thing to do? You went to law school, Jake, it’s not an unfair question. You went to the same law school as the vice president of the United States. Don’t try to walk away from your JD, sir?

Jake Sullivan:

I packed away my shingle. I turned to lawyers for advice on questions like this, and that would’ve been, honestly, it would’ve been a real debate. And we had that debate out over things like Libya and Syria in the Obama administration. Frankly, I don’t think they even had the debate this time around. But in terms of what is actually technically legally required in the constitution, I’ll put that to one side. What makes sense in American democracy, go to Congress.

Preet Bharara:

Jon, do you want to disagree with Jake?

Jon Finer:

No. I guess I was only going to elaborate on it to say that this is also a relevant consideration when it comes to doing a diplomatic deal and not because the diplomatic deal that Barack Obama did was formally a treaty that required the advice and consent to the Senate. But Congress chose to grant itself the ability to vote on Barack Obama’s nuclear deal.

And ultimately, Barack Obama had to submit that deal to Congress. It passed. And I almost use air quotes in describing how it passed because it passed with a minority of votes in the US Senate, 42 to 58. They were unable to have cloture, which would’ve been required to disapprove formally of the nuclear deal.

But this is a relevant consideration, yes, legally and to some extent politically, but also because it goes to the durability of the policy that you’re choosing to pursue. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do for Barack Obama to make a deal with Iran and to go forward with it, even though a majority of Congress was not in favor.

But it did mean that that deal did not last its full duration because there was not the full political consensus in our country. We ultimately elected a president who ran at least in part on saying this was the worst deal ever. And he was going to throw it out. And he did.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So, on consequences, would you have also gamed out? I’m sure you did, what the aftermath might look like in the days after a bombing like this? What would you have shored up? What would be the guidance to the intelligence agencies, to law enforcement agencies, to the embassies? And are all those things happening as you might imagine them?

I’m asking all these compound questions because I apparently have left my law degree the door also. But you’re not objecting, so I’m going to plow ahead. But in that context also, you alluded to this earlier, in that context, what do you make of the reports that the Iran counterstrike was intentionally feeble and previewed to Uncle Sam in a way so that they could save face and only look humiliated in the pages of the New York Times? How do you think about all this aftermath stuff?

Jake Sullivan:

So, we spent time basically table-topping and scenario planning for a range of potential Iranian responses, responses, kinetic direct strikes against American forces in the region, strikes against their neighbors, Saudi or UAE in terms of their financial or oil infrastructure, strikes against shipping in the Persian Gulf or even laying mines to close the Strait of Hormuz.

And then we would’ve also planned for a set of contingencies that went beyond the immediate region. Terrorism, as Jon mentioned earlier in the homeland or anywhere else in the world against Americans or Israelis or other westerners, cyberattacks that could be conducted against critical infrastructure in the United States. So, you’d go down that whole list and you would try to make sure that to a maximum extent, you had shields up, you had defenses in place, you had prevention and disruption efforts, and if they did fire a shot in the region against a base that you had the necessary air defense in place.

On the Qatar question, I don’t know, but I think it is plausible looking at how this unfolded, that in fact Iran telegraphed its punch precisely to be able to get the off-ramp that President Trump grabbed and said, “Okay, now it’s over. The whole thing’s over.” That’s similar to what they did back when the Trump administration killed Soleimani back in 2020. So, it’s part of the Iranian playbook.

But if I were still national security advisor, Jon and I were still sitting there in the White House, I don’t think either of us would be going to sleep just feeling totally easy. “Okay. Now it’s all done.” These things have a long tail to them. The response can play out in many ways over a long duration of time and could manifest in terrorism or cyber or other things.

And so, we got to remain vigilant. It looks for the moment like the immediate kinetic response, that part of it is complete for the moment, but the longer tail of the threat from Iran remains and will have to be taken seriously.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have any concern that the flat, overly optimistic statement by the president that everything had been obliterated will act to prevent him from taking forceful action in six months or a year when it turns out possibly that the Iranians are back to being close to producing a bomb, because he will have looked like he didn’t know what he was talking about a year earlier, or does hypocrisy not matter to him? And do you trust that he will bomb again or negotiate again if the necessity were to arise?

Jon Finer:

So, I guess my own view of this is a president who is entirely unpredictable on this issue. He came to office saying over and over again, “We’ve been stupid to get involved in wars in the Middle East. I’m going to end all of this. Going to end the Gaza War. I’m going to end also the war by the way, between Russia and Ukraine and going to make a deal with Iran.” And we’re O for three on those.

And so, what he might do six months from now in this question is anybody’s guess. And one thing that he’s shown a real propensity for is reversing course. Being for a deal one moment, bomb the next and maybe a deal six months from now.

The one thing that I think will keep him honest on this to a degree is the Israelis are going to be hyper attuned to whether Iran’s nuclear program is reconstituting or whether these strikes were ineffective. And the politics of hypocrisy are not going to be the primary consideration for them because it goes to their core security. So, I think it will be harder for him to misrepresent the situation if ultimately it looks dire six months from now because of Israel.

Jake Sullivan:

And when I read between the lines of what’s coming out of Israel in terms of their assessment of what happened at these nuclear sites, what they seem to be saying is, “Look, we can’t be totally sure what happened deep within these facilities. We don’t know. Maybe some of it wasn’t totally destroyed at Fordow. Maybe some of it wasn’t totally destroyed at Isfahan, we’re not sure.”

What we do know is that we cratered the entrances and we created a whole lot of rubble. And then what they don’t say, but it’s kind of implied, if Iran goes and tries to dig its way out at Fordow and Isfahan and bring them back online, we’re here ready to do something about it. So, I think part of the Israeli mindset on all this is they’re prepared to go back again and again if they need to.

Now, from my perspective, that is a pretty dangerous and unstable reality if really the enforcement mechanism from now on is just periodically bombing Iran. And it brings me back again, from my perspective, basic reality. We need to get to a deal that actually puts Iran’s program in a box for a long time. The Trump Administration, the president has said he wants to do that. Let’s do that and let’s see if we can get such a deal that actually resolves this problem in a way that doesn’t have all of these questions swirling around the way that we’re having to parse through this right now.

Preet Bharara:

It fair to say though, in what you’ve just pronounced you are, and tell me if this is unfair, you’re essentially saying that Israel, at least in the way it’s speaking about things, and this may be distorted by the political fortunes and misfortunes of Netanyahu, but essentially the import of what you’re saying is that Israel does not know best what is best for it, insofar as it favored this bombing and favors mitigation by future bombings as opposed to an enforceable diplomatic deal that you described earlier that would give years and years of reassurance as opposed to short-lived assurance. Is that fair?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, I think I’m not going to speak for what Israel’s objectives and purposes are. I’m not going to say I know better for Israel than Israel knows for Israel. What I’m going to say is what I think is best for the United States of America and what I think is best for the United States of America.

Preet Bharara:

Aren’t they aligned, aren’t they aligned with respect to the nuclear capability of Iran? Is there any daylight between Israel and the US on that point?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, just think about what happened as Iran finished its strikes against our air base in Qatar. President Trump goes out and says, “That’s it. It’s over.” He says it to Israel, he says it to Iran. Did the Israelis love that? Probably not. Did they want to keep going? They probably did. So, is there a different perspective about the willingness to continue to use military force on the part of the Israelis compared to the United States, whether it’s President Trump or it’s the Democrats? I think there is a difference. There is in that sense, the calculus is not identical.

The objective deny Iran a nuclear weapon. That is identical. But the means of achieving it, I think there are differences between the US and Israel on the tactics. And that was true under President Obama. It was true under President Biden, and it is also true under President Trump.

But even if I were Israel, I would be thinking right now, yes, we want to sustain a credible military threat. But yes, it also would be good if we could have some agreement in place that gives us the verification and the confidence over things like stockpile centrifuges know-how, et cetera. And now, we will see what happens and how they end up talking about that.

Preet Bharara:

Jon, do you want to add anything to that?

Jon Finer:

Well, I think I don’t want to lose track of, I think an important point that Jake made. People sometimes cavalierly throw around this phrase, “Mowing the lawn.” Well, if we don’t have a deal, Israel will just periodically have to mow the lawn to rush back Iran’s nuclear program. And we should say what we mean by that phrase. That’s Israel dropping bombs on Iran where real people are being killed and where Israeli pilots are put in harm’s way to do that.

And so far, thankfully, there has not been the price paid that we would be worried about in this scenario of, god forbid, losing an aircraft or a pilot ending up on the ground. But there is not a zero-risk associated with an approach and not zero cost in terms of innocent life, even if the targets are military.

And so, a strategy of indefinite in perpetuity mowing lawn sounds a lot more benign than it actually is in the real world. And that’s another reason why a diplomatic outcome where you don’t have to do that is far preferable and should be preferable to everybody.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have a sense of where the American public is? It seems to me there’s a subset of folks who like muscular action. They watch a certain kind of movie. I watch that kind of movie from time to time, but there’s a lot of people who are recoiling from that and there’s evidence of that in analyses of public sentiment.

Do you think, as you must be students of history to some extent, there is less of an appetite for conflict in America at the moment than prior generations? More of an appetite because some people feel a nostalgia for America as the hegemon, as people like to say. Does it just bounce back and forth from decade to decade? Do you have any sense of where, given how much Joe Biden you’ve suggested cared about where the will of the people is generally about these kinds of entanglements?

Jake Sullivan:

My perception, and I say this with humility because there are others who understand American public opinion better than I do, is that the American people are very skeptical of open-ended military commitments without clear objectives and would like to turn the page on those and do not want to get embroiled in the future, particularly at the cost of US blood and treasure.

The American people are more open to lightning strikes, taking out a terrorist leader or hitting a particular clear military objective. I think they’re probably more open to that, but I don’t think there’s a like, let’s just go out nostalgically and look for opportunities to flex our military muscle. I don’t think that there’s a strong impulse for that in the US.

So, I think people will read this situation. A lot of folks might very well be say, “Okay, it doesn’t seem like we got into a full scale war here,” although that story has yet entirely been written. But then also, we’ll have a practical common-sense attitude of like, yeah, it’d be really good now if we could get a deal that gave us better verification and certainty about what Iran has that’s in place for a very long time so we don’t have to think about this problem for a while.

So, that’s my read. I think it’s complex. And a snapshot in time of do you favor military action and so forth doesn’t capture the full attitude that Americans have on these issues. But I think basically, what I’ve just described is probably where the center of gravity is. But with long tails on both sides of people saying, let’s just stay the hell out of it entirely no matter what. And that’s a definite feature of the political debate that really wasn’t there at full volume 20 years ago.

Jon Finer:

I’d just add that an important example of what Jake’s talking about is that notwithstanding President Trump’s bellicose rhetoric and some of the bellicose and antagonistic positions and rhetoric that come out of the MAGA core of his base, a somewhat paradoxical strain that runs through all of it is their anti-war nature, their aversion to these conflicts.

And so, part of what you are seeing in terms of discourse around these strikes is an internal fight inside President Trump’s base between people who think this is terrible. This is against everything that he has stood for previously. And you saw this play out in this celebrated clip of Tucker Carlson interviewing Ted Cruz, but it goes much deeper than that. And others who have either come around to the position that this was necessary, who always believed that. And so, this has been quite divisive inside the Republican Party as well.

Preet Bharara:

Two-part question, short question. When did you each start using “tabletop” as a verb? And two, ballpark figure, how often did you tabletop the acquisition of Greenland and Canada?

Jake Sullivan:

The first one’s a great question, and by the way-

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know that your prior educators would appreciate the verb usage of “tabletop.”

Jake Sullivan:

Very fair. And I think Jon and I could probably produce a glossary of words that we use totally improperly now. And in some cases, annoyingly because a lot of this national security speak can be pretty annoying. In fact, the President Biden would frequently be like enough with the acronyms for crying out loud.

Preet Bharara:

Is that because he didn’t know what they were, Jake?

Jake Sullivan:

No. It’s because he said, he’s like, I will only accept one acronym. It’s NATO. That’s an acceptable acronym. Otherwise, you have to speak plain English to the American people.

Preet Bharara:

I would expect also snafu because that’s a great acronym.

Jake Sullivan:

Fair enough. Yeah. That actually improves upon the words.

Preet Bharara:

If you don’t know it listeners, you should Google it or ask your ChatGPT.

Jake Sullivan:

I had to say on Greenland, we were too busy being good friends and allies with the Danes to start thinking about grabbing their territory.

Preet Bharara:

You were probably more wisely eyeing Iceland, which is a bit lovelier than Greenland.

Jon Finer:

Closer.

Preet Bharara:

Name, notwithstanding. Lovely. I went on vacation there with my family.

Jake Sullivan:

Better tourist and economic development opportunities. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I could talk to you guys for a very long time. Thank you for your time, thank you for your insights and thank you for your service to the country. Really appreciate it. Thanks folks.

Jake Sullivan:

Thanks a lot.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer continues for members of the CAFE Insider Community. In the bonus for insiders, we discuss it’s really like in the situation room.

Jake Sullivan:

Frequently, we’d be woken up in the middle of the night with those updates because something is always happening somewhere.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Because of the fast pace of the news this week, we’re not doing the usual Q&A, but next week, I’ll be joined by some excellent legal experts to talk about the Supreme Court term. Let me know what questions you have for them. Send them to me at letters at cafe.com or write me on socials with the hashtag #AskPreet. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Bluesky, or you can call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.