Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Ian Bremmer:

I think that the memories of the people that are actually involved in this have cognitive dissonance. They’re skewed towards heroic courage in being the one person that is telling Trump the truth and the hard message, when in reality is they are sugarcoating it. They’re glazing the guy.

Preet Bharara:

Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara. My guest this week is my good friend, Ian Bremmer. He’s a political scientist and the president and founder of Eurasia Group, one of the world’s leading global risk firms. Ian joins me this week to discuss the latest in the war with Iran. That’s coming up, stay tuned. Ian Bremmer, welcome back to the show.

Ian Bremmer:

Preet, good to see you.

Preet Bharara:

Are you familiar with the show? Do you know how this works-

Ian Bremmer:

Well-

Preet Bharara:

… since you’ve been on before this program?

Ian Bremmer:

… I think it’s a different microphone that you’re using since the last time I saw you. And you were wearing a blazer, and I had brought a blazer, but-

Preet Bharara:

It’s summer.

Ian Bremmer:

… now that you’re all low-key-

Preet Bharara:

It’s summer.

Ian Bremmer:

You’re a leprechaun today, which is kind of nice.

Preet Bharara:

Are you about to introduce some PBS program?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. Do you consider that a moss green, by the way? Is that what you’d call it?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know if it’s a moss green or not, but now you’re making all the people who only listen to this on audio feel bad.

Ian Bremmer:

It’s not a Kelly green. It’s more-

Preet Bharara:

If you’re painting … If you want to see Preet in a T-shirt, go to our YouTube channel.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a little clingy.

Preet Bharara:

And if you want to see Ian with a lot of buttons undone on his shirt, also go to our YouTube channel. Are you going to plead the Fifth this morning, because as I’m talking-

Ian Bremmer:

No.

Preet Bharara:

… to you, Dr. Fauci is invoking the Fifth Amendment repeatedly, which is interesting from a lawyer’s perspective.

Ian Bremmer:

What do we think about his journal? I mean, I can tell you the first time I met him.

Preet Bharara:

I haven’t followed it closely, so you tell me what you think.

Ian Bremmer:

I have not seen any of the excerpts yet. I assume that he is enormously oriented towards promoting his own image and brand in ways that you and I would find rather discomforting.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s why I don’t keep a diary. I just keep all the self-promotional strategizing in my head.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, that’s probably right. That’s probably right. I’ve never been in someone’s office that was more oriented towards creation of a shrine to oneself as I was the first time I visited Fauci.

Preet Bharara:

When one visits your office, which I have, which is a beautiful office here in lovely Manhattan, got a lot of puppets. Yours is a shrine to the puppets.

Ian Bremmer:

But it’s not a shrine like … There definitely is a lot more focus on-

Preet Bharara:

Hold on, hold on. Since you opened the door, there’s a wall of magazine, photographs and covers of Ian Bremmer.

Ian Bremmer:

That’s true, but that’s in the back. That’s just where I hang out. It’s not where the guests … The guests just have-

Preet Bharara:

That almost makes it worse.

Ian Bremmer:

It’s probably worse. Yeah, you’re right.

Preet Bharara:

That probably makes it worse. Do you have mirrors on the ceiling, too? Do you always want to see-

Ian Bremmer:

They come out. It’s remote-controlled-

Preet Bharara:

… reflections of yourself?

Ian Bremmer:

You know-

Preet Bharara:

All right. We need to get to business because people complain that we banter too much.

Ian Bremmer:

Do they? I though that people complained that-

Preet Bharara:

Some people do. It’s mostly my wife.

Ian Bremmer:

… at the beginning of our thing.

Preet Bharara:

Mostly, my wife.

Ian Bremmer:

Is that true?

Preet Bharara:

Can you talk about Iran?

Ian Bremmer:

Okay. We can talk about Iran if you want. Sure.

Preet Bharara:

There are many things that I’m confused about. I’m a person of average intelligence. Many people who are smarter than I am.

Ian Bremmer:

That’s why you don’t keep a diary. Yet again, don’t bullshit your people.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s mostly a literacy problem.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, okay.

Preet Bharara:

We had a guest on last week, who very, very smart, young journalist who talked about us being in … We all are now in the post-literate world. Nobody’s reading books. So I could probably keep a diary. Nobody would read it since we’re post-literate.

Ian Bremmer:

If you made it into a podcast, it’d be fine, the-

Preet Bharara:

But what I’m confused about as there’s lots of things that are attacks on your time and energy, including in the news. One day you hear we’re in a ceasefire. Then you hear there’s been some skirmish. Then you hear there’s talks. Then you hear we’re back into war.

So from my perspective, as somebody who watches quite a bit of news, what is the status of play? Ceasefire, no ceasefire? What do these words even mean at this moment?

Ian Bremmer:

One of the things that’s been remarkable since the ceasefire has ended is just how much restraint we have seen from the Americans not to escalate too much, not to create strikes that might tip into a unrestrained, all-out war that the Americans can’t defend against with too much damage.

Preet Bharara:

Wait, strikes by whom?

Ian Bremmer:

By the Americans.

Preet Bharara:

I’m confused again.

Ian Bremmer:

Why?

Preet Bharara:

I thought the Iranians didn’t have any wherewithal to make any strikes.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, if what you want to talk about are the various inconsistent-

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about it all, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That’s a level of incoherence that is not going to help us. If you want to talk about … And we can spend a moment or two on why it is that Trump is particularly inconsistent and incoherent on this issue. But I was responding to your earlier question, which is, what’s going on?

And what’s meaningful is yes, the strait is now blockaded yet again, which means oil prices are going up. And yet, despite all of the American threats that, “We’re going to take the nuclear. We’re going to hit Pickaxe Mountain. We’re going to send troops. We’re going to destroy infrastructure. We’ll take out more leaders,” none of that is happening.

That the last two weeks have been remarkably restrained in the targeting that the Americans have done against almost exclusively military targets, no major civilian casualties, don’t go after leadership, don’t do anything that is going to lead to big American casualties or that’s going to lead to the Gulf states having massive civilian or energy infrastructure getting hit.

So it is the Americans that really don’t want this to get out of hand. They do want to force the Iranians into a better compromised position, and the Iranians continue to say no. Just in the last 24 hours, the Omanis were trying to float a position where Iran and Oman would share some level of control and fees for managing the strait. The Iranians rejected it. They want control themselves. They believe they’re in a much stronger position.

The United States stopped attacking over the weekend, and then Iran and its proxies … We saw some Hezbollah strikes in the last hours against IDF troops in Southern Lebanon. We saw Iraqi Shia militias supported by Iran with some strikes against Saudi Arabia energy targets. And we saw the Iranians launch a few rockets against U.S. base in Jordan. All of these were not precipitated by American or anyone else’s strikes.

So the Iranians in a sense are acting like the party with greater leverage, certainly with greater confidence in where the outcomes are headed.

Preet Bharara:

On the question, we don’t have to talk about the inconsistencies.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay.

Preet Bharara:

But as far as you know from experts in your own reading, what is the capability of Iran? Are they capable of launching and striking in a way that is significantly more than nuisance?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. Yes, they are.

Preet Bharara:

And does Donald Trump know that, going back to the other issue?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, he knows it, but he’s frustrated by it.

Preet Bharara:

The spirit of the question is, as you write, which I think is a very important thing about understanding how Trump deals with any and all policy, ordinarily a question like, does the president know some basic fact like X or Y, would be a silly question because he doesn’t get accurate information because people are afraid to tell him the full truth.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. So I think that that is a relevant question about the memorandum of understanding, that I think that the MOU was presented to Trump as if it was a bigger win for him than it actually was or than the Iranians perceived it. I think that his brief on the MOU is, “We got what we wanted. They’re not getting anything. They don’t get any money. They don’t get 300 billion. They don’t get anything like that unless they negotiate on the nuclear file, and now the strait’s going to be open.”

And the Iranian belief of what they signed was that no, they’re controlling the strait and they don’t charge anything for 60 days, but all the ships will go through the Iranian side of the strait. So then when it didn’t, and when 75% of the ships either went through the Omani side, went through the middle where the mines are, but you can find your way around them or went through dark with their transponders off, the Iranians said, “This is not what we agreed to,” and started shooting at ships.

So this is a case where Trump did not have an adequate understanding of the situation on the ground or in the water, and that caused problems. When it comes to Iran’s military capabilities, certainly in the early weeks, Trump thought that all of their stuff was being blown up, they’d have no capabilities. He doesn’t think that anymore.

Preet Bharara:

But that’s what he thought because that’s what he was told. And was he told that by people who knew better or by people who thought the same?

Ian Bremmer:

I don’t have confidence. I wasn’t in the room and the conversations that I’ve had with people that were are not clear on that point. I’ve had a number of conversations where people tell me that they were tough with Trump, and then you see what they actually said, and it was, “Oh my God, you’re doing such a great job.” And then maybe one sentence at the end that he would probably ignore or not pay attention to.

So I think that the memories of the people that are actually involved in this have cognitive dissonance. They’re skewed towards heroic courage in being the one person that is telling Trump the truth and the hard message when in reality is they are sugarcoating it. They’re glazing the guy because they feel like they have to.

I mean, I’ll give you a example. I’ll give you an example, Preet. Last Monday, Trump came out and said that we were going to charge … “We, the Americans, we’re going to charge all the ships going through a 20% toll.” No way to actually execute on it, no way to enforce it, no agreement from anybody in the administration, no agreement from any allies. It was, on its face, impossible.

It undermines Trump’s credibility, his negotiating position, his ability to get to something useful with the Iranians. It was self-defeating on every front. And you and I can say, “Well, I mean, he’s Trump. He says whatever he wants.” I know, but if you have capable advisors, at a minimum they need to stop the president from doing things that are that immediately self-defeating. The next day, he had to actually say, “No, we’re not doing that.”

Preet Bharara:

It’s funny. In leadership circles, it’s a difficult thing. You know, I worked for a senator for a number of years. And he, to his credit, had a policy, like a lot of senators did. I don’t know if you know you can do this.

When you go and speak on the floor of the United States Senate, you have a certain period of time to correct your statement. So you can get up there and you can accidentally say, “Ian’s a fool,” which of course would be a huge error and counterfactual.

Ian Bremmer:

I thought you were going to come up with something more interesting.

Preet Bharara:

I’m trying to keep it-

Ian Bremmer:

Like, “All Oompa Loompas should be executed.” That would be interesting.

Preet Bharara:

And then my recollection is there was a little room in the Capitol, where I as a staffer could go and just correct the statement. And then later, if you look back, unless C-SPAN was recording the member at the time, there would be no record of the bad statement-

Ian Bremmer:

How much time do you have to do that?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t remember. This is actually a good thing to refresh my recollection on. But even then, but obviously, I didn’t do it without consulting with the member and the chief of staff. And even then, when it was a known policy and that’s the thing you want to do because you don’t want to get things wrong.

And most commonly, it was some misstatement of fact. Right? Something about the budget or something about how many judges had been confirmed and you just want to have the record be correct. And even then, it’s a little daunting to say, “Hey, you keep quoting that. That’s not Marbury. That’s a different case,” whatever. Now imagine the environment that’s set in the Trump White House.

So my question to you is, are you able to assess the intelligence and quality of tactical ability on the part of the Iranians at this moment given that this must be the B team because the A team was all killed, or maybe even the C team?

Ian Bremmer:

It’s the B team, yeah. And it is a different … I mean, we say it’s the same regime, but the reality is it’s the military in charge now. The theocrats, really are not.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So how smart are they being, tactically and strategically? Are they playing their cards correctly, or what are we up against?

Ian Bremmer:

I don’t know that the answer to that question matters very much because it’s not as if they have a lot of nuance to their strategy. It is, they’re in a much, much weaker position in terms of their economic capabilities, their military capabilities, their diplomatic capabilities.

Preet Bharara:

But they’re exercising restraint too, right? Because you said earlier that they’re capable of inflicting substantial damage. They’re choosing not to do that. So at least they’re not being haphazard.

Ian Bremmer:

Right, but they’re in a spoiler role. I mean, what they’re trying to do, they’re showing that … Number one, they’re showing that they can survive, that they can tolerate pain.

Preet Bharara:

That’s the most important thing.

Ian Bremmer:

That’s the most important thing they’re doing. And number two, they’re showing that there will be costs and consequences in continuing to hit and hurt them. And they’re doing that most effectively, directly with missiles and drones, which they continue to have and operate in large numbers, and that can get through U.S. defenses.

And they’re using, on average, you’re seeing two to three dummies for every drone that’s being launched. About 10% of what’s being shot out is actually getting through. And that’s what’s leading to all of the damage that they’re doing. They’re trying to have influence with their various proxies around the region in a similar manner. And I would say that they have some influence in that regard, but it’s much less than what they can do with their own forces.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, about two minutes ago, you gave me a great new option on how to answer a question, which I don’t think you were trying to avoid. I think you were being sincere, but I will use it in an insincere way, which is when asked a question you don’t want to answer, I will now say the following. I don’t think the answer to that question matters very much. So let’s move along. No, I like it. No, it’s a smart formulation and it’s kind of-

Ian Bremmer:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

… it kind of takes the questioner aback because, “Wait a minute, but I asked the question.” I think it is important. No, no, I’m complimenting you.

Ian Bremmer:

No, I know, but you’re complimenting me with a lawyer technique and I’m a political scientist. So that’s not-

Preet Bharara:

It’s all the same stuff.

Ian Bremmer:

No, it’s so different. Lawyers are all about the rhetoric.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk about restraint? So this is going to be another rhetorical question.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay.

Preet Bharara:

Restraint in some circles is a normative term, meaning that there’s some integrity, or not always, but some moral dimension to exercising restraint. That’s not the kind of restraint you’re talking about here. It’s purely tactical on the American side, because there have been a lot of civilians, including young people killed in Iran. Does a restraint have anything to do with that, or no?

Ian Bremmer:

It is hard for me to talk about restraint with a moral dimension as applied to the President of the United States. I’ve never seen him deploy a moral dimension to his decision-making. The transactional nature of how he makes decisions seems overwhelmingly, the independent variable. But I do think there are others around him that have degrees of moral restraint.

And I think that some of the more extravagant options that would be available to the United States, I think that people recognized it was a real problem when a whole bunch of young girls were killed in a targeted strike that was mislabeled, that they thought it was a military target. It turned out it was actually a girls’ school and over a hundred kids dead.

And Trump had to do his best to avoid that and say, “Well, we don’t know. And it’s probably the Iranians, and the investigation’s not done.” But I think people around him were deeply uncomfortable with that reality. I think when Americans come back in caskets and the president and his entourage have to go to Dover, Delaware and welcome them home and talk to the families, I think that’s a very serious and grave thing to do. And I think that there is a level of moral restraint that comes from deploying American troops.

I think the surprise in all of this is that President Trump himself, one of the reasons he was elected, and there are many reasons he was elected, but one of the reasons was that he was running consistently on, “I will not start new wars. I will not get us entangled in new wars.”

And this is a man who saw that Iraq and Afghanistan went on for decades and cost immense amounts of blood and treasure, ours and our allies’ and our adversaries’. And for what? And also, on the back of poor, underprivileged Americans that couldn’t find a way out.

And Trump knows this because he used his privilege to avoid the draft, to avoid having to serve for the military. And so he was telling a bunch of other people, “I could do that because of my family and connections. I could argue bone spurs. You couldn’t do that. And I’m not going to send you to war. I’m not going to expose you and your family and your community to those decisions.” And now for the last six months, he’s been caught up in this extraordinarily stupid war, purely of his choosing. And it’s an irony of this administration.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Ian Bremmer after this. I’m going to compare. I’m glad you mentioned this because what’s been ringing around in my head is another example of a President of the United States in a different context and at a different time making a very flat declarative three-word statement. And that was George H. W. Bush, but he didn’t just say no new taxes. And I wonder if this changes it at all or makes it worse. He said, “Read my lips.”

Ian Bremmer:

Oh yes, he did say, “Read my lips.”

Preet Bharara:

He said, “Read my lips. No new taxes.” And he got-

Ian Bremmer:

Now, he compare … He had very thin lips. So his lips were objectively hard to read. I always thought that was a bit of misdirection.

Preet Bharara:

But I have the power of hearing and so I actually heard. And he got crucified. I know you’ll hate the rhetoric. And now that I know, Ian that you hate lawyerly or sort of English student discussions of rhetoric, I’m going to heap a lot more rhetoric questions into the interview this time and for all future times, and actually when we get together socially as well.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay, fair enough.

Preet Bharara:

Now that I know you don’t like it. I think it made a material difference. If Donald Trump-

Ian Bremmer:

I think he said that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, Donald Trump said, “No new wars,” but it’s like, whatever. He didn’t say, “Read my …” It didn’t have the same dramatic primetime defining emphasis as it did for George H. W. Bush. That’s my theory political scientists should weigh in. So how does he get away with having that promise, or is he not getting away with it because of his tanking poll numbers?

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, I think he would get away with it if it was successful, because he says so many different things and the exaggeration is so immense that even his most stalwart supporters can find ways to wave it away in a way that you would. I mean, his shamelessness is extraordinary.

Preet Bharara:

Prices are down. Ian, I don’t know if you know the prices are down.

Ian Bremmer:

Prices are down. Which prices?

Preet Bharara:

Eggs, gas. I believe Donald Trump has said in recent days, counterfactually that prices of various products are down, which is not true.

Ian Bremmer:

You know, it is true that U.S. is suffering from less inflation than a lot of the people predicted in the markets from this war. And it’s certainly true that gas and oil prices are a lot lower than anyone expected given the nature of the war because the Chinese have taken five million barrels less.

Preet Bharara:

But it’s higher than it was five months ago.

Ian Bremmer:

But I mean, we looked at this, just GZERO did a couple of days ago. And I think the figure was just in gas that the average U.S. family is paying $700 this year more because of the Iran war. That you’ve got gas prices right now over four bucks. It’d be 3.38 if it wasn’t for the war. That was as of, I think Monday. I mean, those costs are very direct and clear.

Preet Bharara:

How about tariffs? How much is tariffs?

Ian Bremmer:

I don’t have that at my fingertips. But again, an environment where the actual cost was a lot lower than expected, that the Americans have come out better than people thought.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think, not to overgeneralize, but since you mention it, because I sort of anecdotally and I’m not a political scientist, social scientist, and I’m not very good with numbers, Ian, but there’s a sort of … Maybe this is partly for political reasons, but not always. There’s a kind of catastrophizing about every kind of policy on the other side that you don’t agree with.

And I’m no lover of Trump’s impetuousness and I think he isn’t prepared and I think he’s not thoughtful, but people say the sky is falling and it’s not … Right. What do you make of that? Is that a real phenomenon? Is that recent or has that always been true?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. I mean, I think it is greater when you have more political tribalism, when you have less bipartisanship, when people are watching only things that they already agree with. I mean, the social media, the cable news phenomenon, the blogosphere, all those things. Yeah, it’s more so now.

But even in that context, the Iran war has been, by a long margin, Trump’s biggest policy failure. And part of the reason that he has been unable to end the war is because he can’t accept the loss that it would imply from his war goals. Even with his ability to communicate and exaggerate and misdirect, he’s been unable to just say, “We’ve got to cut and run,” which would be the right thing to do.

Preet Bharara:

Well, the other option is, and when you talk about restraint, and Trump famously lectured Zelenskyy about not having the cards. He does have a card. Shall we call it the Trump card?

Ian Bremmer:

What is it?

Preet Bharara:

Ground troops, which he cannot use.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. I mean, he’s talked about it a lot. He can take Kharg Island, take the oil.

Preet Bharara:

Is there any scenario in which he gets desperate and he goes back on that?

Ian Bremmer:

Not from my discussions with the senior military brass. They have clearly briefed him about just how long-term catastrophic that would be, about what the costs would be of holding it, about the vulnerability of the troops in that position going forward.

I mean, this is a guy who, he really … The problem, the reason why we’re still in the war is because Trump has the view that he will be able to end the war once he proves to the Iranians that, “I will beat you up harder.” And so internally, he floats things like, “Well, why don’t we just kill this group of leaders so we get the C team and then they would actually cooperate with us?” Or, “Why don’t we hit Pickaxe Mountain and show them that we can get at their nuclear stuff?”

So he’ll go at those solutions, but he’s not like, “Why don’t we put 15,000 troops on the ground that we’re going to have to keep there forever?” He really doesn’t like that option. It has not been hard to get him away from that.

Preet Bharara:

In other contexts, including ones that I understand better and I have personal experience with, including the executive orders against law firms, those kinds of things, Donald Trump’s experience in life has been, notwithstanding bankruptcies and a whole slew of failures, but his experience has been, “I’ll punch you in the face.”

And there’s a Yale professor who’s written in defense of his tactical prowess about this, “Punch you in the face and then you bend the knee.” I did not know that the face bone was connected to the knee bone, but apparently there’s some connectivity there. And that has worked for him again and again and again and again. Is that what’s going on here? He just figures eventually, except when it hasn’t.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, in foreign policy, it did in Venezuela. It has with some smaller countries on tariffs, for example, Japan and South Korea being the most notable. Worked, punched them in the face, they bent the knee. China, punched them in the face, they punched back. He had to then suddenly engage with Xi Jinping as an equal and he had to back down. The Europeans on Greenland, the weak Europeans. He hit out hard and he had to back down.

And now on Iran, the Iranians have hit back and he’s had to back down. Now, he’s not willing to accept a full backdown because he doesn’t yet believe that the Iranians have as much leverage as the Iranian leadership believes, and that misalignment of understanding is leading to continued conflict. But there’s no question that we have seen plenty of occasions where Trump is forced to himself bend the knee, because he can throw a really big punch, but it turns out he has a glass jaw. He can’t take one, and a lot of people have learned that.

Preet Bharara:

I guess, what I’m trying to impart is assess the quality of the decision-making, given the various examples of this because as we know in life, you can make a bad decision, but if it turns out by happenstance or good fortune or serendipity that things work out okay, people will say that was a virtue. And if a good decision goes bad, people will think one way about it and the reverse is also true.

How unreasonable, other than the fact that it was a stupid war and we didn’t need to do it, but how unreasonable was it for Trump to think that this could be a quick war and the punching in the face would result in the bending of the knee? Is it the height of unreasonableness or is it not too unreasonable back in the time?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. Yeah. Scale of one to 10, it was probably a nine.

Preet Bharara:

Because it was knowable that you take out all the leadership team, you obliterate to some extent their capabilities and they would persist?

Ian Bremmer:

He basically, forced them into an emergency situation where they had to break glass and pull lever. They always had the ability to shut down the strait. They never did it because they were concerned that if they did, that they’d get hit back and their regime would get obliterated. So instead you go and obliterate their regime and you’re like, “Okay, this is all we got left.”

Preet Bharara:

Did they talk about this strait? Do you have any insight into what the discussions were like about that foreseeable eventuality?

Ian Bremmer:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So when they were talking about that, what was the internal response to how they were going to deal with that, and what the consequences of that would be? Did they think, “Ah, it may not happen, or we won’t get to that because they’re going to bend the knee quickly”?

Ian Bremmer:

If you get to the point that you’re shutting down the strait, you’re shutting it down for everyone. So the Iranians don’t get that money either. So the point is that it was a mechanism of, in a sense, deterrence that limited the level of conflict that you had. Right?

I mean, it was a smaller version of having nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. It’s a smaller version of economic interdependence in trade, so you can’t blow each other up. I mean, this is what the Strait of Hormuz is all about. And I mean, the U.S. military and the CIA have done as many sort of war game scenarios around the strait as they have for the Strait of Taiwan, for example, and military exercises there and how things could blow up. And so, I mean, this was not surprising to anyone that has any experience in the region.

Preet Bharara:

We’re talking about the role of politics in this. I want to get to the midterms in a moment because I want to push you a little bit on a couple of conclusions you have. But if Donald Trump were himself facing reelection in November of this year, how do you think he would be prosecuting this war differently?

Ian Bremmer:

I think he probably would’ve … We would’ve already been out of it.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think he would’ve done it in the first place?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. Yeah, because he was so confident that this was going to be a repeat of Venezuela. And his own experience with the Iranian regime was, “They talk big, but they won’t do anything against us.” That was his experience when Qasem Soleimani, he assassinated, ordered that at the end of his first term.

Preet Bharara:

“Speak loud, carry a small stick.” I think that was TR. I think that’s what he said.

Ian Bremmer:

The 12-day War that Israel started and he got involved in. So he had two significant experiences with the same regime that, you use the military, they back down. And then he was coming off of this extraordinary Venezuela win, which is truly a win. It’s a big win for Trump. I mean, credit to him for doing it. And the Venezuelan people will have better opportunities as a consequence. I think it’s definitely a win, but it doesn’t apply to Iran in the slightest.

And I’ve spoken with a number of Republicans in the House and Senate who have told me their view is, “This is our problem. He sees the midterms as our problem, not his problem.”

Preet Bharara:

The reason I said what I said was he still seems to care about it quite a bit. He keeps pushing the SAVE Act. He’s heavily involved in who to endorse in local races. Do you buy that line from the Republicans?

Ian Bremmer:

Sure. I mean, but frequently he’s endorsing people who are less likely to win.

Preet Bharara:

But he doesn’t believe that.

Ian Bremmer:

I don’t know. I don’t think he cares. I think it’s about loyalty to him. It’s about, “I’m not going to let this person who was disloyal to me still be in place.” That is more important than who wins the actual election. “That person was bad to me and so I’m taking that person down.” That is the relevant point. Remember, that’s what happened with the Georgia by-elections after the 2020 elections. He loses.

Preet Bharara:

Future President Jon Ossoff can testify to that.

Ian Bremmer:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

Is Trump behaving in ways big or small or not at all like what he is, which is a lame duck president?

Ian Bremmer:

Is he behaving that way? No, I don’t think so. I think he is being restrained increasingly in that way, but I don’t think that he is behaving that way. I think that he’s angry about that. So he’s continuing to try to fight the power. I mean, he’ll find another mechanism to put tariffs on and the Supreme Court will have to come down and say, “No, you’re not going to do that.”

He does not come across as someone that is preparing to get rid of power, to leave control anytime soon.

Preet Bharara:

I’m so confused as to, given the postures of both sides, the political considerations, the strengths and weaknesses, and the cards that can and cannot be played by both Iran and the United States. I, as an average non-foreign policy expert, citizen of the United States have no idea how this is going to come to an end. Can you sketch one out?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. I think that first of all, there are limitations in how many Tomahawk missiles the Americans have available, how much offensive firepower and ability to defend Patriot interceptors and the rest. And so if the U.S. wanted to keep going at the pace of the last 11 days, I guess, of strikes, I’m told that they could plausibly do that for about two months.

So that’s one limitation, is just the military that they can deploy against the Iranians in the field without doing massively greater damage.

Preet Bharara:

But that’s a withdrawal scenario prematurely before-

Ian Bremmer:

That’s one way. A second way would be Trump decides that he’s won, announces that he’s won. “I’ve done all the damage.” Maybe he hits Pickaxe Mountain even though it doesn’t do very much and say, “I blew up the nuclear. I got rid of the nuclear file.”

Preet Bharara:

Right. That’s all he has to do. When the Mueller report came out, he said it exonerated him. So he can say anything he wants.

Ian Bremmer:

Right, and then the Gulf states would be forced to negotiate directly with the Iranians in outcome. So he would wash his hands of a compromise, but they would all be paying off the Iranians to get their stuff out and to not get hit, which the Saudis are already doing, paying tens of thousands of salaries in Houthi occupied areas. The Saudis have been doing that for months, and now the Houthis want more.

So that’s another way out. I think that both of those things are more likely than a substantial escalation of the war, one that really blows up the energy economy of these countries, forces millions of refugees with desalination plants that are blown up, that kind of thing. I think that’s quite unlikely. I think much more likely is more economic pain. And then the Iranians defacto end up with some level of control over the strait.

Now, that is the near-term outcome. The long-term outcome is once you use, once you break glass and pull lever, whether it’s the Chinese with critical minerals or it’s the Iranians with disruption of the strait, countries around the world react. And they’re like, “I’m never going to have that level of dependence on these guys again.”

So I mean, in any baseline scenario, the strait becomes 50% less important to global transit by 2030 because you’re going to build out all of these other infrastructure pathways. Overland Iraq, Syria, for example. You’re going to develop pipelines, expand East-West Saudi Arabia to Yanbu. Same with the Emirati pipeline that avoids the strait.

You will build up radar capabilities and drones that can strike not just Shaheds, but also incoming ballistic missiles at scale and inexpensively that will harden the defenses of the Gulf states that right now are very soft and penetrable. All of those things will reduce Iran’s ability to extract and extort protection money for their leverage. So the Iranians are correct in their understanding that they need to make hay while the sun shines right now. This is their opportunity to get leverage, not a year from now.

Preet Bharara:

As you speak, I wonder, is that a theme of this era, that alliances can’t be trusted, that self-reliance and self-sufficiency and self-dependence is the greatest and most important path to survival and prosperity and growth?

That’s true with European countries who worry about the threats that Donald Trump makes about withdrawing from NATO, about how to deal with Article 5. That’s true with the strait, as you’re talking about. So is interdependence eroding? And either way, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Ian Bremmer:

I think it’s a bad thing in the sense that it creates much more instability. I think that, for example, the Chinese and the Americans are, despite the stability of the relationship, are decoupling their strategic interdependence in every way.

So you now have, just yesterday, the Americans are like, “We’re no longer going to allow Chinese robots in the United States.” The United States cut off advanced semiconductors from China. The Chinese will build their own. When you’re interdependent, you have a mutual need for both countries to perform reasonably well because if you get angry at each other, it causes both of you pain.

If you get rid of that interdependence, your ability to tolerate substantial pain on the part of the other goes way up. You don’t care as much about each other. And I worry that that’s going to happen with humanity, that if suddenly our principle relationships become intermediated through algorithms and with AI models that are oriented towards making us happy, but aren’t telling us to engage more with our friends, our families, our communities, or God forbid, people outside that, then we’re becoming decoupled from each other as human beings. That’s much more dangerous. Right?

So I think that the decoupling trend, the independence trend, in the same way that it’s not healthy for a class of billionaires in America to believe that they did that themselves, that it’s all about how brilliant they are, and they didn’t need any help, and they didn’t need a system around them, and they didn’t need society to give them those opportunities. And they’re not fortunate, they’re just brilliant. It’s just meritocratic, that that’s a bad position for society to be in. It’s also bad when you create that kind of individualism for countries. At the macro level, it creates bad behavior.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a quip and I wish I had it at my fingertips, and it’s about how cats are like libertarians. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Ian Bremmer:

I don’t know. It probably was an Ayn Rand thing.

Preet Bharara:

It was not an Ayn Rand thing.

Ian Bremmer:

It must have been.

Preet Bharara:

No, because I don’t think so.

Ian Bremmer:

I’m just going to stipulate that she’s the worst.

Preet Bharara:

It’s something about how cats think they’re totally self-sufficient and they don’t understand that there’s an entire earth of infrastructure that supports them.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Ian Bremmer, my most frequent guest. Come back soon.

Ian Bremmer:

Love you.

Preet Bharara:

Love you too, brother.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Take care. My conversation with Ian Bremmer continues for members of the Insider community.

Ian Bremmer:

Bibi is very plausibly not going to be prime minister after elections in Israel on October 27th. Never count him out because his tactical survival instincts are extraordinary, but he’s not looking like a winner to Trump right now.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to staytuned.substack.com. Again, that’s staytuned.substack.com. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about Katie Phang’s lawsuit seeking the release of the Epstein files and the court cases that I would jump at the chance to take on.

Now let’s get to your questions. This question came from Ben in the Stay Tuned Substack chat. “Can you provide an update on Katie Phang’s civil lawsuit against Todd Blanche over the Epstein files, particularly the possibility that Blanche or the Justice Department could face sanctions?”

Well, Ben, thanks for the question. As you may know, Joyce and I recently had Katie Phang on the Insider Podcast where she discussed the lawsuit at length. If you haven’t yet, you should go listen to that episode. Just head to staytuned.substack.com.

But for anyone who missed our conversation, to bring you up to date, Katie sued Todd Blanche in his official capacity as acting attorney general, alleging that the Justice Department had failed to do its duty. She argued that as a journalist, she was suffering both informational and economic harm because DOJ’s withholding and redaction of records prevented her from fully reporting on the Epstein files.

That’s a fairly novel theory of standing. And the Justice Department, of course, challenged it. But Judge Emmet Sullivan concluded that Katie Phang had standing to bring the case, and was likely to succeed on the merits of her claims. So he granted her request for a preliminary injunction.

So for the record, Katie isn’t seeking monetary damages. She’s asking the court to compel the Justice Department to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act by releasing records, removing redactions that are not legally justified, and publishing the redaction log required by law.

On June 25th, Judge Sullivan ordered DOJ either to release a specified group of records with fewer redactions, or explain why the information should remain concealed. DOJ responded that it had complied with the law and that the disputed redactions were necessary to protect victims and other sensitive information. But Katie and her lawyers dispute that explanation and argue that some redactions appear to conceal the identities of alleged perpetrators or other powerful people rather than protecting victims.

Her team then asked Judge Sullivan to hold Blanche in civil contempt and impose a fine of $1,000 per day until DOJ complies with the court’s order. But on that request, the judge has not yet ruled. And that brings us to the latest development. It appears Judge Sullivan will not accept DOJ’s explanation of the redactions at face value.

So on July 25th, he ordered the department to submit the disputed materials for what is known as an ex parte in camera review. In camera just means the judge will examine the documents privately, outside public view, and ex parte means he may review them without providing the documents to Katie Phang or her attorneys. He also ordered DOJ to produce the documents and supporting records by July 30th at 3:00 PM, which is today.

So the sanctions question remains unresolved, but Judge Sullivan is now examining the records himself. And who knows what he’ll decide? We, of course will keep watching this case closely. Stay tuned.

This question came as an email from a different listener named Ben. A lot of Bens around. “Are there any current, pending, or likely future cases against the administration that make you think, ‘Boy, I’d jump at the chance to hand this loss to them?'”

Well, Ben, that’s a wonderful question. There’s a lot of cases along those lines, I suspect. But your query reminds me of something I discussed with David French when he joined me on Stay Tuned a few months ago. He had written the following in the New York Times. “There are times when I miss practicing law because right now there are a few more important posts for defending the rule of law and the integrity of the American system of justice than on James Comey’s defense team.”

I found that to be a very arresting statement. David elaborated when he joined the podcast.

David French:

I love what I do. I absolutely love what I do, but I also, when you are in court and you’re in front of a judge and you’re in front of a jury, you really are on the front line of the defense of the rule of law.

There’s just no substitute for this sort of sense of purpose. It’s the sense that, look, somebody has to stand up there and deliver the argument as best they can, and take all the slings and arrows in response, and sort of stand in as the shield for your client. That’s one thing I love about the practice of law. I love the practice of law.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve thought about those words a lot. After Donald Trump fired me in 2017, I stepped away from practicing law for about five years, but returned to it because I missed it. And I agree with French. There is simply no substitute for that sense of purpose, if you have it in your bones and in your blood.

Most recently, as many of you know, I am very proud to represent Senators Adam Schiff and Elissa Slotkin in matters involving the Trump Justice Department. Fortunately, knock on wood, so far, neither investigation has yet resulted in criminal charges.

An attempted charge, as you may recall, was made against Senator Slotkin and five other members of Congress, but that ended in reportedly, zero votes in the grand jury. I would also have been honored to defend James Comey against the charges arising from his 8647 seashells social media post, but Jim is already in exceptionally capable hands.

My friend, the legendary courtroom lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald jumped at the chance to defend his friend, and in fact came out of retirement to do so. I might’ve also enjoyed the chance to represent Jim’s daughter, Maurene Comey in her lawsuit alleging that the DOJ unlawfully fired her because of her family name and perceived political affiliation.

So many cases, so little time. In any event, to go back to your original question, there is no shortage of really important matters involving institutions, organizations, universities, former public officials that I wouldn’t gladly and proudly join forces with other lawyers to represent.

One of the things we know about this administration is, although they’re sort of an enemies list, it is unclear when the hammer will drop, and on which person, and on what charges. So instead of picking one hypothetically, let me just salute all the people who individually, or as part of their law firms, or part of nonprofit organizations in which there are a burgeoning number are defending the rule of law as they defend their clients in the way that David French said, because I believe to my core that although in these cases, lawyers are representing individual clients, on individual claims, on individual allegations, before specific judges on specific charges, they’re doing a service for the rule of law generally, and in upholding the Constitution generally, and making sure that we are all safe, free, and equal, generally. And for that, I salute you.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Ian Bremmer. 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.

You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also 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 now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The audio and video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.