Remember Congressman Tom Kaine, the one who disappeared from Washington for almost 4 months with no explanation.

It turned out that he was suffering from depression.

Everyone should be glad that he sought treatment, but his disappearance without telling his constituents anything only in Washington.

And then there's Mitch McConnell, Schroinger senator who hasn't leveled with his constituents or possibly anyone else about the true state of his health.

And the McConnell story reminds me of another politician, Joe Biden, who made believe he had another four years of public life in him, even after it became stunningly clear that he didn't.

I raised these incidents because they illustrate a sad fact of political life today.

Only a small number of politicians seem capable of leveling with their fellow Americans.

The best example, of course, is the most powerful politician of them all, Donald Trump, who can't find it in himself to be transparent with the American people about the state of the war with Iran or about much else.

Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, but I do believe that we used to hold public servants to a higher standard.

Here to tell me I'm right about that or wrong are my guests tonight, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at the New York Times.

Susan Glasser is a staff writer for the New Yorker.

Stephen Hayes is the editor and CEO of The Dispatch and Nancy Ysef is a staff writer and Pentagon correspondent at The Atlantic.

Uh, thank you for joining me.

Um, uh, Peter, how right am I right?

You're so right, Jeff.

[laughter] Very right or the most right.

Okay, good.

I just wanted to check.

Um, so, so, so, um, let me start with, uh, Peter.

Um, it's very hard to understand the Iran war at the moment.

Um, both governments think seem to think that the other government is escalating.

Um, and Trump himself said this week, according to Fox News, that the US would beat the effing [ __ ] out of them.

Um, and by the way, I will note for the record that this is a very interesting question about whether on broadcast television we can use words that are banned by the FCC, even if they're spoken by the person who oversees and appoints the FCC.

That'll be a panel discussion at Columbia Journalism [laughter] starting this [clears throat] fall.

Um, but he he has threatened once again to beat the living daylights out of Iran.

But at a certain point, these these threats seem hollow.

I mean, he's been making a lot of threats, but then nothing happens.

Well, how do you explain this?

Well, look, he doesn't want to go as he doesn't want to get back to the full-scale war that he had at the beginning, right?

The 40 days of bombing and and and strikes that we had for a couple reasons.

One is it didn't actually change Iran's calculus to begin with.

Secondly, of course, it simply threw the world economy into, you know, [snorts] upheaval.

And thirdly, we're heading into an election season when people don't want to be talking about the Iran war.

doesn't want to remind them about it by having a much more robust uh you know assault.

So he makes these big threats.

He hasn't followed through on them.

And it's not clear that anything he can do at this point is going to change Iran's calculation.

They've already come to a conclusion about how they think this is going.

And it's not the way Donald Trump thinks.

This is the nature, Susan, of deterrence.

Deterrence only works if you don't actually do anything.

Once you show your enemy what you're capable of doing or not capable of doing, the deterrent threat dissipates.

Yeah, that's exactly right, Jeeoff.

For years, I mean, literally 15 years, I remember great pieces you write a long time ago during the presidency of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, it was the threat of American military action against Iran that operated as as a constraint, limited though it may have been, against the Iranian government.

Now, not only is that dissipated, but you could argue that while ar that while fearing the possible consequences of a future Iranian nuclear bomb, what has emerged is the present- day actuality of something that is more geopolitically powerful than the Iranians could have imagined, which is the leveraging of their control over the straight of Hormuz.

So put aside the question of a theoretical future nuclear Iran.

What they have is nuclear capacity in a way to blow up the global economy at will and Donald Trump has shown them the path forward to it.

So the idea that they're going to negotiate that away after uh essentially fighting the world's greatest superpower to withdraw very unrealistic which is why I think we're seeing this on again offagain conflict with no real prospect of meaningful negotiated end.

Right, Steve.

I mean, this is a regional confilgration now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it is right now.

I think the concern has to be that it grows to something more than that.

I we had increasing reports over the past several weeks of Chinese support um for uh Iran providing potentially 400 shoulder fired missiles um to Iran.

You've had reporting, credible reporting of the Russians providing more intelligence about the the targeting of US intelligence facilities in the region.

You have uh our allies in the region getting involved in a more offensive way.

You know, I think for a long time it's been as as much of a disaster as has been, it's been comforting to think like he's just going to walk away at some point.

Yes, things are likely to be worse than they were before for the reasons um that Susan suggests, but it it can end.

Now, you think if if you're Russia, if you're China, your interest is in this being elong elongated.

United States is bogged down in this part of the world.

Absolutely.

As long as they're bogged down, they're not messing with our own interests.

Right.

And at the same time, the allies in the region are looking at our sort of incapability of making progress or doing anything to change the trajectory of the war and thinking that they too might have to be more involved.

Right.

And there's another aspect of this is a merger in some way of two different wars.

Um you have the Ukrainians attacking Iranian ships that are moving weapons to R. Explain that.

I mean it it really is a merger of of of different fields of battle.

Yeah.

I mean I I can't explain I can't explain it in any detail.

I would defer to Nancy on what exactly it means.

But I think the fact that these things are coming together in this way and seem to have over the past several weeks.

Even as the president of the United States has very clearly demonstrated that he's just not that interested anymore.

He's getting there's credible reporting that he's getting bored with what he's seeing.

He's frustrated that there are no easy paths to to victory for the United States.

Right.

Nancy, I will ask you what that means in a moment, but I want to read something that you and Jonathan Lamir wrote the other day.

Um, the Trump administration's greatest mistake in the Iran war may be its persistent failure to understand tan's priorities and motivations and how much punishment the regime is willing to absorb to prevail.

Iran's decision Tuesday to launch ballistic missiles at US troops in Jordan was a prime example.

It befuddled Washington.

US officials had come to expect that their actions would drive the war and Iran would react.

But here was t Iran escalating matters just after the United States has suspended its 13-day barrage of strikes against Iranian defenses and infrastructure.

It sounds like you think Iran has the upper hand right now.

Well, as we've been discussing here, the administration has been lurching between economic, diplomatic, and military responses to Iran.

And they're facing an adversary that sees this war as a very threat to its existence.

The Iranian regime is willing to take hits.

It is willing to take escalation.

it is willing to do whatever it needs to do to survive.

And so that gap between the US aims and the Iranian game aims means that Iran is willing to do much more and endure much more than the United States.

The fact that the United States was surprised by the Iranian decision to launch ballistic missiles at a base housing US forces tells me that the United States doesn't understand the the kind of adversary that they're facing in terms of what they're willing to endure to prevail as they see it, which is in this case their very survival.

That's not what the US is trying to do.

the US is trying to do just enough such that this straight remains open and that it can claim some sort of offramp to to get out of the swore ideally before the November election.

In other words, one of the conversations that may not have happened in the White House February or before was how much will we escalate?

How high on the escalatory ladder will we go versus the Iranians?

Is that a fair way of looking at it?

Yes, your enemies will go all the way and President Trump won't even commit troops.

Well, and and you're dealing with an enemy that is now adapting to US tactics.

It's why I think we saw the strikes that we saw.

You have a regime that operates differently than the one before it.

It is willing to take more risks than it was under the previous Ayatollah.

And we have a reg a a government in the United States that doesn't even want to admit that we're back at war.

You know, the the the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff went on Capitol Hill asking for billions of dollars for more money to fund the war.

In their opening statement, they didn't even use the word Iran.

Heath described this as an operation.

The president has addressed the country uh in a national address uh uh during this period.

This was not about the war.

this was about election security and only made a passing reference uh to the war.

And the fact that we're categorizing the troop desk since the resumption of these strikes as something other than in support of operation of epic fury is all part of this effort to not acknowledge that the United States is back at a military campaign minimally against Iran.

I would I would add to that the president has said from the earliest days of the conflict that the United States has already won.

I mean he has said it repeatedly again and again and again and then if you remember when he signed um the memorandum of understanding to the applause of European leaders in Versailles he said at the end in a I love that part in Versail historical echo that's very rich I'm resisting the temptation to go further on that I just at the very end at the very end he says uh oil down stocks up he's announcing to the Iranians and to the world.

He's done.

He doesn't want this anymore in addition to all the things that Nancy said.

So, so Peter, this goes to this this point that I was making about trust in in leadership.

Um historical give us a little historical context.

Can you think of another presidency going back to Vietnam or earlier in which the president himself was not leveling with the American people about the consequences of a war uh in this in this style?

Because I don't I don't feel like he's telling us why he did it, what he will do to win.

Yeah.

I mean, look, there are other presidents who lied to us about war, who have not been fully forthcoming about war.

You talk about Vietnam, obviously.

go back and read the Pentagon papers, you see president after president who was not forthcoming with the American public about what they were doing, what they expected there.

Having said that, this is different in that this was a war that the American public never supported to begin with and the president never bothered.

Vietnam was popular.

It was popular.

He the president's both JFK and LBJ at some point or another explained to the country why it was important that we go there.

What was happening in the world that made that matter?

President Trump has never done that.

To your point, they just had this he just had the Oval Office speech, not about war, but about his own obsession with the 2020 election.

This war started out with more people against it than were for it, which is the only time any war in our history of polling at least that's happened.

And it's only gone down since then.

And he's made no effort, it seems like, to win people over by explaining why it's important.

He's now narrowed his goals, right, which were kind of scattershot at the beginning to two things.

Reopen the straight, no nuclear weapon.

Okay, those are pretty straightforward messages.

That works, I think, for the public.

You hear people interview on the street, they say, "I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

That shows part of his message is getting through, but he hasn't done anything to say why this is important, why it had to be done now, and what we're going to do about in the future if we can't get to where we want to go.

Yeah.

Well, and also, he's not doing anything right now, as far as we can tell.

And again, they're extremely untransparent about what's happening.

but he doesn't seem to be pursuing militarily at the moment or via negotiations uh anything that would ensure that Iran uh was denuclearized in the future.

So to point that out is important.

But you know again this reminds me and this almost sort of inversion of language and you know the the degrading of those service members who did give their lives uh you know for a war that Trump launched on his own with no mandate from the American people.

You know, there's another superpower engaged in a asymmetrical conflict right now that's called a special military operation.

We're now uh years into the Russian invasion of Ukraine that was supposed to last uh a few days, a couple weeks uh uh at a at a maximum.

And you know, Vladimir Putin also refuses to call it a war.

He also uh governs in his own name and not the name of the Russian people or institutions.

And I think what we've seen from the adaptiveness of the Ukrainians is a playbook for the future of military conflict that's already here.

And that's what's so striking to me is that we've seen not just our presidential and you could say our political system that has failed to account for this, but also a national security environment in which the leaders of the Pentagon, even with asking for more than a trillion dollars this year, seem very very unprepared for this kind of uh rapid warfare where cheap drones are no match for our Patriot missiles.

It's interesting because what we're talking about here is escalatory capability or willingness as the key variable for for all of these conflicts, which is to say Ukraine is in a fight for its existence.

They will do whatever they have to do to exist.

The Iranian regime, whether we like it or not, and we don't generally like it for all the obvious reasons, u the Iranian regime wants to save itself.

Here in America, we're worried about gas prices.

Ukrainians would love to be able to have the luxury of worrying about price of gasoline at the pump.

But, you know, and there's another aspect of the the the another variable that I find really fascinating at this moment, which is the lack of planning in war fighting.

One of the most surprising aspects of everything, Steve, uh that that that I've been seeing is that we went to we had a war of choice.

Yeah.

We picked the timing of this war.

Um and we didn't plan for the reduction the the the reduction that would come in munition stockpiles.

And now we're we're we're we're a little bit naked before the world and other adversaries because we simply don't have enough especially of defensive missiles.

uh we don't have enough to to protect America and its allies from other adversaries.

Yeah.

I mean on the path to being alarmingly naked if this were to continue for a long period of time.

Look, I mean this is part of the problem when you have a president of the United States who u makes these decisions not out of strategic considerations but out of emotional impulse.

Right?

I mean I think he wanted to be strong.

He wanted to do in Iran what he had done in Venezuela.

He liked the agilation that he got after the June 2025 strikes when he um you know hit the the nuclear facilities in Iran and that's the reason he makes these decisions.

I think it's there are people who did planning in advance of this.

Um very serious people patriots who did this planning unfortunately it was just disregarded by the person who matters most and that's the commander-in-chief.

Right, Nancy, very difficult question, but what would the United States have to do to win in Iran?

How are you defining winning?

You define it.

That's why you get paid the moderate buck.

[laughter] Well, I'll put it to you this way.

There there aren't great options for the president.

If the one option would be to to declare victory again, say that the Ayatollah is dead, Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon and the US will come back at at Iran should they try to to to get a nuclear weapon again in his in his estimation.

The question becomes will the stock market embrace that thinking particularly when Iran now retains control of the straight of Hormuz.

he could continue to escalate such that um he believes he reaches a point and he signaled by the way in his comments earlier today at the cabinet meeting that this is what he's thinking that he can he can keep escalating to the point that either the regime it sort of tips the regime out of power or it becomes an intolerable level of um destruction for them that they start to capitulate.

He could continue to do economic sanctions or he could try to come back to the negotiation table but in doing so he would have to make some kind of concession to the Iranians in terms of how they read that memorandum of understanding visa v the straight of Hormuz and so I think I don't know what winning is but I also don't know what is a viable option that that gives um that creates an exit ramp or an off ramp for him to declare some kind of victory.

Let me give you a traditional definition of winning in this context, which would be defeating the Iranian regime, seeing its replacement or its overthrow by Western-minded Iranian small D democrats.

Could that be done without large numbers of troops on the ground?

No.

Could it be done with troops on the ground?

Maybe.

It's it's uncertain.

We're talking about a country of 90 million people that as long as the United States has been discussing and preparing for war with Iran, the Iranians have been preparing and discussing the possibility of coming under threat from the United States.

So it would be a formidable task.

It would require hundreds of thousands of troops.

a major US military commitment and politically a commitment from the United States to endure uh economic costs through that time for something they take months or years if if that's the end safe.