Trump Team in CHAOS as Iran War BACKFIRES BADLY

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]All right, let's start with Iran.

[00:00:01]So this US-Iran ceasefire is kind of holding, right? But there's 900 lb of highly enriched uranium still sitting in Iran. Strait of Hormuz is closed. Huge parts of the global economy are just paralyzed and there's seemingly no end in sight. Other than that, it's good. On Saturday, Trump canceled his negotiating team's trip to Pakistan. We're going to listen to a clip from him explaining why. Probably heard that we canceled the trip. We have all the cards. We're not going to spend 15 hours in airplanes all the time going back and forth to be giving a document that was not good enough. And uh so we'll deal by telephone and they can call us anytime they want.

[00:00:39]Again, we have all the cards. They have no military left, practically. They have no leaders left. We don't know who the leaders are.

[00:00:46]Nobody knows who the leader I don't think they know who the leaders are, very importantly. We're not going to be traveling 15-16 hours to to have a meeting with people that nobody ever heard of. Traveling takes too long, too expensive. I'm a very cost-conscious person. They are fighting with each other. There's tremendous infighting.

[00:01:03]They're probably fighting for leadership in many cases.

[00:01:07]I think they're fighting not to be the leader because we knocked out two levels of leaders. But I'll deal with whoever we have to.

[00:01:14]Interestingly, immediately when I canceled it, within 10 minutes we got a new paper that was much better. They offered a lot but not enough. I love this idea that the the cost we're all worried about is like JD Vance's Ryanair ticket >> [laughter] >> to Islamabad. Axios reported that Iran has offered a more limited deal. Maybe that was referencing there. They would reopen the Strait of Hormuz if the US ends the blockade and ends the war. It punts all the nuclear talks down the road. That's nothing. Yeah.

[00:01:39]>> Feels like a problem. I suspect this is kind of going to be the kind of deal Trump ends up being forced to take. But interestingly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio came out of his post-Iran war hiding, wherever his witness protection program he's been in since he went to the sticks on Capitol Hill and was like, "Israel made us do it." And then ran away and then didn't speak again for months. But here he is on Fox News over the weekend kind of on the kind of deal we just described. Let's watch.

[00:02:05]>> If what they mean by opening the straits is, "Yes, the straits are open as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission, or we'll blow you up and you pay us." That's not opening the straits.

[00:02:14]Those are international waterways. They cannot normalize, nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it. The straits is basically the equivalent of an economic nuclear weapon that they're trying to use against the world. And they're bragging about it. Yeah, yeah.

[00:02:32]That's exactly what's happening, Marco.

[00:02:34]Yep. Seems like they're doing it.

[00:02:35]>> what? They weren't doing that before the war.

[00:02:37]>> Yeah. Also, it sounds like they have a lot of cards as described by Marco Rubio. So Ben, as we all know, there's nothing in better in life than when you have like shitty plans, like some shitty dinner, and it gets canceled. So Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, he used that time he got back to fly to Russia.

[00:02:51]He went to see Vladimir Putin. He told Russian state media that Iran is standing up to the world's greatest superpower and that the US has requested to talk because it has not achieved a single one of their goals and that Iran is considering whatever they put forward. Putin said, "We'll do everything that serves your interests and the interests of all the people in the region in order to ensure that this peace is achieved as soon as possible."

[00:03:11]Also, I'm sure you caught Ben, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz weighed in saying that "an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by the so-called revolutionary guards." That nation being ours.

[00:03:23]>> Yes. On Tuesday, Trump posted this weird message on Truth Social. He said, "Iran has just informed us that they are in a state of collapse. They want us to open the Hormuz Strait as soon as possible as they try to figure out their leadership situation, which I believe they'll be able to do." I love that idea of some Iranian officials calling Trump and like, "Uncle sir, you did it. You got us."

[00:03:42]I think that message was sent 1 minute before the stock market opened. So congrats to everybody who had some futures trades put down. So Ben, two things. I'm curious what you make of Araghchi's trip to see Putin and the Russian role. Like Russia could be trying to facilitate a deal.

[00:03:56]Putin could be trying to sell some weapons. Either way, he seems to be saying, "I'm here. I'm a player in this.

[00:04:01]You got to deal with me, too." And then on the end game, like the Trump administration seems to think that their leverage is keeping the blockade in place long enough so that Iran Iran runs out of storage for its oil and basically has to shut down its wells and kill off its own industry. It's not clear how long that would take, how much storage capacity they have left. And ultimately, this is a game of economic chicken that will crush Asian economies, poor countries, the Iranian people, but probably won't matter to the IRGC because they will enforce their will at gunpoint. So I don't know. I don't get it. But what do you make of this play? I think it we just have to name, because sometimes our media is incapable of doing this, what a complete abject failure, catastrophic decision this was by Donald Trump. And that he can't spin his way out of that. On the eve of the war, he was talking about regime change and near destruction of the nuclear program entirely and getting Iranian people rising up. And none of these things have happened.

[00:04:57]>> wanted to pick the next supreme leader.

[00:04:59]>> He He said got you know, Ghalibaf, the speaker of the parliament, he he Remember we were describing him as hot, you know, just like >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. America's hot, you know, like he's a hot option. The he he he clearly has decided because he's been so humiliated and he's failed so miserably and was led down a rabbit hole by Bibi Netanyahu that was so destructive, he's just trying to grasp This is a man, Donald Trump, that like 10 days ago we did an emergency podcast because he told the world that there was a deal. And that the straits were open forever and they were going to get rid of the dust and all these things.

[00:05:33]>> Right. None of that was true. Right. And so like it's hard to even Now he's clearly decided that his narrative is going to be their leadership is so disrupted they don't know who's in charge. Their foreign minister is the same foreign minister that was meeting with Witkoff and Jared before the war.

[00:05:49]>> And he's in in Russia. How is this guy saying that there was regime change when Abbas Araghchi is literally the same guy showing up representing the same regime with the supreme leader's son. And then they start dunking on how hurt he is.

[00:06:01]Well, he's the supreme leader.

[00:06:03]And and he's 30 years younger than his father was. And then the IRGC is calling the shots and even little Marco has to acknowledge that they're running the Strait of Hormuz. So we need to just create some space to just This is not sane. This is failing, right? Now, let's move on. Like what happens now? I think you're right. This is hurting everybody at this point. Like it's hurting the United States. Like it it it is hurting our economy. It's hurting the Iranian people. It's hurting the global economy.

[00:06:30]Everybody wants out of this war. And the question is who is just going to decide that they can spin Like Iran won this war. Like the IRGC like like status quo ante now controls the Strait of Hormuz.

[00:06:43]And if the big concession they have to make down the war is opening up an international waterway that was open before the war, like I think that they take that position. Donald Trump is just trying to figure out how to spin his way out of it that it's a win even if he doesn't get them to like make a whole bunch of concessions at the negotiating table.

[00:06:59]And if you look at Putin, he can smell that this is a humiliation of the United States. He's trying to insert himself into this. He's trying to kind of play the role of peacemaker. Trump is the crazy man who starts wars now.

[00:07:09]>> Did you see that the Russian some Russian superyacht worth like a half a billion dollars just kind of cruised through the Strait of Hormuz this week or this weekend? No IRGC left it alone.

[00:07:17]Yeah. Putin's flexing. This is Putin and Xi are looking at this and they're like, "This is going to have geopolitical reverberations for a generation. The Gulf countries are splitting apart and hedging and going to move in the direction of Russia and China. The Iranians like their you know, their their closest ally in the region now controls the strait. That's a you know, Russia and China want that waterway open. So like I think they're probably telling the Iranians like, "Hey, can we wrap this thing up?" But at the same time they're going to be thinking about how can we take advantage of the fact that the United States was just revealed to be incapable of collapsing the Iranian regime with military power.

[00:07:53]Yeah. When your when your opponent shoots himself in the foot, it's a good time for a road race. Yeah, so the Axios a couple of like data points to back up what you're saying. Axios has a report out this week that Trump aides are concerned he's getting drawn into a frozen conflict where the US will just be forced to keep a ton of military assets in the Middle East to enforce this blockade while the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for months and harms the global economy. Like, yeah, guys. Yeah, that's what's happening. Reuters had a report that the US intel agencies are studying how Iran would respond if Trump just declared a unilateral victory.

[00:08:23]>> I think what's going to happen.

[00:08:24]>> Definitely what's going to happen. And I think they want to know if like these guys will kind of walk away and let it be or if they're going to dunk all over them. I guess we'll find out.

[00:08:30]>> Thanks for watching this excerpt of Pod Save the World, the show I do every week with Ben Rhodes where we talk about the biggest issues in national security and foreign policy. Please subscribe to Pod Save America here on YouTube. If you want to hear the rest of this episode of Pod Save the World, go to the Pod Save the World YouTube page and subscribe there, too. We really appreciate it.