US-Iran ‘hot war’ still very possible amid peace talk fractures

[00:00:00]Is there a deal between the United States and Iran or not? Well, it seems pretty shaky at the moment. These negotiations are happening in Switzerland. Iran has walked out overnight because of threats made by Donald Trump on social media. JD Vance though says it's going pretty well.

[00:00:18]Let's bring in Mick Mulvaney, former White House Chief of Staff to Donald Trump in his first term. Good to see you, Mick. This time last week I asked you whether this was the real deal. It certainly felt like it, but as we know, a week is a long time in this war.

[00:00:33]>> Yeah, what did we say last week? We said that we hoped it was the real deal, but there were so many ways it could fall apart. You had to sort of wonder about its viability. As it turns out, the Iranians apparently did leave the meeting. I don't think they've left Switzerland yet, but they did leave the meeting and they cited a couple different reasons. As you mentioned, Donald Trump's tweet, but also the fact that Israel hadn't gotten out of Lebanon yet. Well, in the last couple of days, I think Israel lost four soldiers to a to a Hezbollah attack in Lebanon. So, things are still very much a hot war in Lebanon. Israel not a signatory to the memorandum of understanding. You know, obviously going to listen to advice from the United States, but not going to consider themselves bound by those terms. There's a lot of things that we said could go wrong and it looks like some of them are. Again, the conversation may continue tomorrow because the Iranians have not left, but I don't think we're any closer to peace than we were 24 hours a day or 24 hours ago.

[00:01:26]>> think so either. And I don't I'm not one to buy into conspiracy theories here, but I do wonder whether part of Donald Trump's um Truth Social tirade is because there has been so much criticism domestically of the deal done in the last week. Is he trying to perhaps get to a point where he renegotiates?

[00:01:49]>> Yeah, you know, yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think Trump's under a tremendous amount of pressure, which doesn't which sounds sort of strange, but look where it's coming from. Yes, the the sort of the the the neo-conservative right, folks like Senator Lindsey Graham, who were all for the war in the first place, they don't want to see it end right now, but you expect that. But, the criticisms are coming from other places. Ordinary rank and file Republicans who are usually either quiet or in lockstep with the president are raising serious questions about this memorandum of understanding.

[00:02:19]Miriam Adelson's newspaper in Jerusalem attacked the president. For those of you don't know her, she's a big supporter of Donald Trump, financial supporter, has given him hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaigns, and one of the newspapers she owns in Jerusalem attacked him for basically giving up in this in this negotiation so forth.

[00:02:36]Tremendous pressure from various sides against the president of the United States. Doesn't surprise me that he's taking a harder line on his Truth Media social, and doesn't wouldn't surprise me at all if they recalled J.D. Vance, and we end up back in sort of an uncomfortable ceasefire, and maybe even in a in a hot war.

[00:02:55]>> It It doesn't feel like the US has the upper hand right now, and it seems like I mean, what's happening uh domestically? Of course, uh the midterms are in November. That's when voters get to have their say. So, I mean, what is the reaction from voters right now? Not just the the inner circle.

[00:03:15]>> Uh you know, we we don't As I've told you many, many times, sadly, we don't follow foreign policy very closely. So, I don't think a lot of folks are watching the war. They're watching gas prices, and they are down a little bit.

[00:03:24]I don't think, Laura, to your point, this has as much to do with the midterms as people think. When Donald Trump talked about it over the last week uh couple of days, he said he was worried about creating an economic depression.

[00:03:36]He didn't want to be the next Herbert Hoover, the Republican president who led the country into the depression in the 1920s. I think that's a bigger deal right now than the politics of it. The When he said publicly a week ago that he didn't really care about the midterms, I got the sense he was telling the truth about that, but I also got the sense he was telling the truth when he said he's worried about the economy. So, does that portray does that sort of spell weakness? Does it show weakness? I think it probably does. And the Iranians are thinking now time is on their side.

[00:04:03]>> Yeah, and you can't blame them for thinking that. Then throw into the mix certainly the tension we've seen between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.

[00:04:14]Netanyahu commenting for the first time, really brushing it aside.

[00:04:18]I think it's it's it's quite right. And to paraphrase him, he said, you know, some people say that, you know, Trump does everything that Netanyahu wants him to do and vice versa.

[00:04:29]The two look like they're pretty solid because they really need each other right now, don't they?

[00:04:36]>> They are. They are very solid. And folks who said that, you know, Netanyahu sort of pulled the strings to get Trump to go into the war in the first place don't understand how Donald Trump works. So, I I don't expect that happened at all.

[00:04:46]Like there's a bunch of different reasons why we went to the war.

[00:04:48]Netanyahu may have been one of them, but he wasn't calling the shots.

[00:04:51]>> No, he wasn't. But can we just go back to that for a moment? But Netanyahu was certainly a big factor. He seemed to be quite convincing in some of that reporting that we we've seen by Jonathan Swan and the like.

[00:05:03]>> Yeah, but he's a constant. They've been asking for the Americans to do this for probably 40 years. I think one of the differences was the success the Trump administration had in Venezuela and that gave them what they thought was a model to sort of recreate here in Iran. Get rid of the current leadership, bring in new leadership that's more accommodating to the US. I think that had more to do anything with the Netanyahu.

[00:05:22]>> Yeah, right. Okay. So, there's a few other things at play here.

[00:05:28]J.D. Vance leading these negotiations, but it's also, you know, a view to post-Trump, the post-Trump era. J.D. Vance certainly putting his hand up to run for president at the end of this term. Um, Marco Rubio, Uh you'd have to think he'd be in the mix, but he hasn't made those kinds of of declarations. Is this Trump tacitly supporting Vance or testing him?

[00:05:56]>> Yeah, I I think folks read way too much into that. Keep in mind, we've only had a sitting We've only had a sitting vice president elected to president one time in the last 100 years. That was George Bush after 8 years of Ronald Reagan. We have had vice presidents go on to be president later, but never while they were the sitting president. Does Trump want to sort of, you know, play Vance off against Rubio? Yeah, he did that in the first administration with every single member of the cabinet. He manages by that sort of internal conflict. That's That's That's a lot of folks of leaders do that. He He wants to see his his folks sort of compete with each other. So, I wouldn't read too much into the politics of it, but do listen to what he said. What did Trump say over the weekend? If it goes well, I'll take credit. If not, I'll blame J.D. That's not wrong. I mean, that's that's that's the role of the vice president. Doesn't surprise me he's there so that if it goes wrong, Trump can keep distance from the results.