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On this episode of Inside America, we ask, does President Trump regret the Iran war? I think if we gave Donald Trump a truth serum, he would say he absolutely regrets the war. He thought it was going to be quick and easy. I don't think Donald Trump is regretting this one bit. We still have not yet heard a consistent argument from this administration as to why they went to war. You can't kill every single nuclear scientist who has the knowledge in Iran to build a nuclear weapon. Do you think he listens to the polls? I hope not. But a politician who's looking at the polls during wartime cannot be an effective leader.
Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Selena DS. I'm here with the former diplomat Alan and the political commentator Peter Roth. In a moment, we'll be debating whether President Trump regrets his decision to go to war. It is a deeply unpopular decision with the American public. So, first I went out to ask people here what they think. This is Street Pulse. We shouldn't be at war right now. We should be at peace. What's the endgame? What is the goals that are going to end this? Trump.
People can't see. It's the emperor has no clothes. Americans are tired of war. On the National Mall in Washington, the Iran conflict is just as unpopular as the Vietnam War was in the 60s. It's one reason why a majority of Americans now disapprove of the president. Look at the polls. all the polls that you read, whether or not you believe them or not, what the percentage of error is. Um, but you got to believe people are not happy. So, what are your thoughts? Some military veterans like Paul are questioning why the president is again fighting a foreign battle. That wasn't our war. That was a war belongs to someone else, but we got involved. So, he says Americans need help at home.
The economy need to be better. Um, like I said, social security need not to be touched cuz they trying to mess with our social security. That's one of the things that most people live off and that's our money when we retired. Most of the older people, they depend on that social security for living. That's one of the biggest thing that I see cuz I'm 75. I'm almost 75 years old. You don't look so despite the mounting cost of the war and the economic fallout from it, the president is still popular among his core supporters.
A third of Americans say they still support the president and his make America great again movement. I've got a grandson who once said that he wanted out of America. I said, "Well, honey, you find some place better and you go. And anybody who wants a better place, I'll buy him a ticket. Just don't come back." Well, I also sat down with Jamal Abdi, executive director of the National Iranianamean Council. Here's what he had to say. I think if we gave Donald Trump a truth serum, he would say he absolutely regrets the war uh launching the war. I do not believe that he thought it was going to be this long of a war. He thought it was going to be quick and easy and is now dealing with massive
consequences with sort of no way out. What do you think has been his biggest miscalculation? I think that the miscalculation was probably that he had a deal that was possible before the war. Uh it would have been very favorable, especially considered to what he's looking at now. The concessions that Iran was willing to provide uh in the leadup to the war and this is the second time this happened again, you know, in 2025 as well. There was a good deal potentially on the table. uh Trump's Iran strategy that I think has been so reckless and uh sort of uh high risk threshold actually potentially could have yielded some sort of negotiated solution and instead of actually grabbing that he decided that
he wanted even more and launched this war and now is going to get something I think much less than what was possible before the war started because now the straight of Hormos is the central uh area of dispute. Do you think he regrets being led by Israel? I think that uh he probably regrets taking Netanyahu at his word that this was going to be fast and easy. Uh there were some scenarios that were presented to him that were very pie in the sky. talk of putting Mahmud Ahmedad in charge of the country of having uh Kurdish and separatist forces march through the country to quickly topple it and overturn the regime. I don't know that even the Israelis thought that this was a realistic scenario, but I think it was
enough and it was sort of dramatic and, you know, played well on TV, the notion that Trump was going to install this new president. Uh, and so I think that he probably uh understands now that this was fantasy and that uh those were scenarios that were never going to come about. Uh I don't think it's in his temperament to say that he regrets that decision, but I think there's clearly uh some frustration uh between Trump and Netanyahu now because he feels like he was burned. Do you think the Iranian leadership is watching the domestic fallout here? Are they aware of how unpopular the war is here in the United States? Do you think that is shaping how they respond to these threats by the president?
I think that is very much uh part of Iran's strategy and they are paying attention to these dynamics uh and seeking to exacerbate them. And Donald Trump has proven to be a sort of unwilling but uh helpful partner in that in the way that he is trying to create this reality that just doesn't exist. Uh and people see it doesn't exist. uh and you know Iran is really putting its finger on that and making it hurt I think for the president ultimately I think with the goal of uh not just defeating him sort of tactically on the battlefield, not just strategically geopolitically but also uh striking at the heart of sort of US policy towards Iran by exploiting these political divisions that have now emerged and been exacerbated by this
war. Do you think there is a diplomatic offramp in all of this that both sides can sell as a victory? I think there's always a political solution. President Trump says Iran only understands military force. I think that what the Iranians have at least believe they've learned is that all that Donald Trump understands is military force. And that is why instead of trying to preserve theou for example, Iran decided to enforce it very aggressively and to start launching drones at ships. Uh and some including inside of Iran thought, you know, this is a good deal for us. We should try to salvage this deal. We should try to
use political channels to keep the deal alive. Whereas the winning argument was no, the Americans need to understand that Iran is not a paper tiger and that we are going to uh enforce the hell out of the deal and sort of not let the Americans get away with anything and this is the moment we need to teach the United States uh that Iran is has deterrence. There's a perception that I think informed President Trump's uh decision to go into this war that Iran would not strike back. Are you surprised given the level of anti-war sentiment here in the United States, the level of opposition uh against the war that we haven't seen a big anti-protest movement or anti-war protest movement
here in the United States like we did during the wars in Iraq and Vietnam? It's a different political moment than uh the Iraq war um the Vietnam War. This is a Trump administration that is constantly throwing uh controversies into the media wood chipper, constantly picking fights. And I think people who are watching things don't really know what to react to. It's the, you know, the so-called the zebra camouflage theory of uh if you have one zebra walking through a field, it's easy to pick them out. If you have a hundred zebra running through a field, uh you're just seeing stripes and you can't pick
out one from the other. That's where we are with the Trump administration. Uh just 100 controversies uh and people don't know which one to actually focus on. And so we may see it, you know, depending on how this war goes. If this is a sustained war, if American, you know, service members uh start to uh you know, experience casualties and deaths in higher numbers, if the economy continues to crumble and gas prices go up, this may become sort of the central focal point of the opposition to Donald Trump. But for now, I think there's so many other issues that are happening that it hasn't really uh sort of honed in on this one issue as an area for Americans to, [snorts] you know, step out and push back.
So, with all of that in mind, let's get to my guests today. Alan is a former senior diplomat who was part of the negotiating team for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He's currently a fellow at the Middle East Institute. and Peter Roth who is a political commentator and columnist who is a contributing editor at Newsweek. Welcome to you both. Alan, I want to start uh with you. The war in Iran has so far cost uh US taxpayers $ 38 billion. The Pentagon has asked for another 67 billion. The war seems to be consuming the president's presidency. Do you think he regrets his decision to go to war?
I think so. I don't think it's consuming the presidency, Selena. Actually, I think he's paying insufficient attention to it, but he certainly would like to extricate himself from a war that he thought would go far more smoothly than it has. And so I think now he's keenly focused to the extent he's focused on the war on finding a way out as quickly as possible. One that returns the straight of Hormos to some purs to its previous pre-war uh volume of maritime traffic because that's what he's concerned about the ongoing economic effects of a closed or constricted straight of Hormuz.
I mean Peter, he does seem incredibly frustrated. We've heard exploitive laden rants apparently in the White uh house. He's called the Iranian leadership scumbags and lunatics. He's clearly frustrated. Yeah, but he's also right. They are um they're a repressive group of religious nuts who are murdering their own people. Uh well, the president himself has said he would decapitate or annihilate an Iranian civilization. Well, you know, that's what they're doing to their own people. So, you know, I'm not unsympathetic to the position. I happen to like the Iranian people. I just don't like their government. And I think that they are inflammatory and
they are expansionist and they have designs on taking over the entire Gulf region. But how does continuing to bomb Iran over and over again whilst not really producing the kinds of results the president clearly wants to get. Iran doesn't appear to be capitulating. How is that working? Um well, you know, the nurses at the Iran at the hospital in Tyran went on strike yesterday over working conditions and pay. Um the economy is collapsing. uh operation economic fury which is the piece run by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant which is blocking their illegal oil sales around the world and preventing Iran from engaging in the dollar-driven economy is really having an impact and it may be bringing the government down in a way that the
weapons can't. destroying the weapons are protecting our allies in the Gulf because the Iranians have started indiscriminately bombing civilian targets in Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. They don't want to be dragged into this war, but they may have to they may come to a point where they have to choose. Are we going to side with America or are we going to side with Iran? Because our own domestic security depends on it. I don't think Donald Trump is regretting this one bit. He thinks that this is a war that should have been had 20 years ago. Iran's been at war with America for 50 years. They seized our embassy. They've killed our diplomats. They've killed our soldiers.
They've they've paid for organizations to kidnap journalists and hold them hostage. These are not nice people. And I think if there's one place the president's been weak uh or not strong enough, it's in explaining all of this to the American people. I'm 60 years old. I remember the day the embassy was taken. Most Americans don't know that happened. Alan, um I'll give you a chance to respond there. I mean, Peter made some points that um Iran may not have been an imminent threat, but it's been a constant threat to the United States.
Does that justify the military campaign? Well, Peter made a number of good points. I don't think anyone likes the Iranian government. He's certainly correct that they're brutal to their people and they're not really focused at all on providing essential goods and services that will make the quality of an average Iranian's life better. No argument there. The question is, how does the US deal with that? And does Iran what sort of threat does Iran pose to the United States? Um, we still have not yet heard a convincing or at least a consistent argument from this administration as to why they went to war. There was no imminent nuclear threat. Yes, Iran is a rejectionist state and it's opposed what it sees as
American hegemony. See, I have to disagree with you there. People throw around the phrase imminent threat like we're facing a danger that if we don't act today, they'll do something tomorrow. The Iranians are two weeks away from having enriched uranium that can be used in a nuclear bomb. Well, in fact, US intelligence, its own intelligence suggested that was not true, that Iran wasn't close to developing a nuclear weapon. Yeah, but they have the uranium to fuel one. And that's the key point. And the minute Iran gets a nuclear bomb, the whole situation changes. So the goal here has always been to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
Well, in fact, Alan was on the 2015 negotiation team that secured the nuclear deal, the only nuclear deal that America has had. Um, how difficult was that to get? It took time, but it wasn't that difficult. I mean, we negotiated with our own. So, so if it's not that difficult, why can President Trump not negotiate? Well, no, it was not that difficult then. It's orders of magnitude more difficult now. The Trump administration consistently has not really sought out serious and sustained diplomacy with Iran. They thought that the exclusive
tool of military force could get Iran to capitulate to US red lines. That didn't happen. It probably will not happen. So the Trump administration is faced with a choice. It could continue military escalation until it in essence collapses Iranian society. The downside there, other than it being war crimes, is that Iran will retaliate against Gulf energy infrastructure, which would have global economic consequences. If the Trump administration does not want to do that if it senses, as I personally believe, that military escalation will not get Iran to capitulate, then it has to seek some type of diplomacy. And that's what they're doing now. They've outsourced their diplomacy to Qatar, to Pakistan.
in the case of the straight of Hormuz to Oman and they will give a thumbs up or a thumbs down on the negotiated solution to the straight of Hormuz should the Omanis and the Iranians arrive at one. As for the nuclear issue, it is very unlikely that this administration will get a deal better than Obama's, as good as Obama's, or even worse than Obama's. with all due respect to you because you were involved in negotiating the agreement. The politicians at the top of the food chain gave the impression to a lot of Republicans and Democrats that they were more interested in having an agreement to wave around than what the agreement did. Kind of like Chamberlain with peace in our time at the airport
after the meeting with Hitler at Munich. Um, a number of serious people said that agreement did not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or developing nuclear weapons. It gave us an alert, but it didn't stop it. And really, what really has to be done is stop it. What has to be done is it has to be stopped. The Iranians have to be stopped from getting a nuclear program. They are the only nation on earth that I'm aware of that has promised to use them as first strike offensive weapons if they get them. They promised to use them against Israel. They promised to use them against the United States.
Two points. First of all, I don't think Iran has ever threatened to nuke the US or Israel. I could be wrong. A simple Google search could solve that. More importantly, the US has a tendency, and it's not just this administration, it's every administration, of not dealing with a problem until it's in their face, until it's above the fold of the newspaper, until it's on the nightly news. The best time to stop any country from developing a nuclear weapon is before they learn how to enrich. Because the hardest part about building a nuclear weapon is mastering uranium enrichment. Well, we've waited. We didn't do that.
We waited until Iran mastered enrichment technology. So now it becomes a question not of denying them a capability but of modifying their intention. Unless we choose, as I said, to collapse Iranian society because right now we can bomb Natans, we can bomb Fordo, we can bomb Esphahan, the three main nuclear sites. We did that in June of 2025. But you can't kill or you probably can't kill the every single nuclear scientist who has the knowledge in Iran to build a nuclear weapon. And that's the threat. I'm sorry. Well, you can look up how to build a nuclear weapon on Google. That's not a problem. um the level of sophistication, the level of damage.
I mean, what it can do, magnitudes of sophistication, but you could build a you could look up the history of Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end of World War II and reproduce what they did to some impact and you could put it on a freighter and you could sail it into Baltimore or Charleston, South Carolina or Miami, and before we knew anything, half the city's gone. This is the problem. And you are exactly right that in America we tend not to face up to problems until they're right in our face which is why everyone is now talking about the straight of Hormuz and they've stopped talking about this potential problem of Iran and nukes and there are because it's almost as though it's a new
weapon isn't it? They've managed to weaponize it. They have a new leverage over they've absolutely weaponized it. It is a problem. They are in violation of international law. They are in violation of numerous conventions and the traditions of maritime freedom of the seas. They're holding sailors and ships hostage, but the nuclear threat is still the big deal. But because they don't have a warhead sitting on a rocket, the American media thinks that talking about Iranian nuclear intentions is right-wing paranoia. Okay. Well, it's not just the media because the American public are also saying that uh they regret the war. 676% disapprove.
Show me a warling of it. Um there were riots in the north against the civil war. In the north against the civil war, there were people who fled the colonies because they didn't want to participate in the American Revolution. Okay. But do you think President Trump is by the fact that the American people don't want this war? Do you think he listens to the polls? Do you think the president listens to his falling dis uh approval ratings? Do I think President Trump listens to the polls? I think he's an acutely competent political figure. I think he's aware of polls. I think he has a good sense of where the country is.
Whether that determines what he does, again, who knows? The anecdotal evidence is that he's not overly concerned about the midterm elections. Even though ongoing prosecution of the war could well damage the Republican party's chances in those elections, that doesn't seem to be, as far as I can tell, the driving factor in his decision calculus regarding what to do with the Iran war. All I can say is Lord save me from politicians who are checking their polls in wartime. You don't think uh the views of the American public matter? No. Uh, the views of the American public always matter and they can render their
decisions at elections. But a politician who's looking at the polls during wartime cannot be an effective leader because you have to make hard unpopular choices because fundamentally you are sending young farm boys from Kansas and young girls from Virginia off to die. And nobody cheers that. Yeah. 18 soldiers, 18 US soldiers already. Nobody cheers that. And they should in the war. decision the president has to make. If he's not listening to the American people, then who is he listening to? Is it his gut instinct? Is it his inner circle? Was it Israel? I think it's his gut instinct and it's inner and his inner circle is saying, "How do we solve this problem?" Donald Trump was taking out ads in the New York
paper when you only knew who he was if you lived in the greater New York metropolitan area as I did, decrying how the Carter administration was dealing with the issue of Iran. He's been aware of this problem for a long time and we may have spent we may end up spending hundred billion dollars on this war, but we've probably spent5 trillion dollars over the last 50 years helping secure freedom of the seas in the Gulf and keeping Iran from taking over other countries. I mean, Alan, decades of diplomacy haven't really resolved the tensions between the United States and Iran. So, if the military campaign isn't working and diplomacy isn't working, what pathway or offramp does the president
have? Well, we haven't done decades of diplomacy with Iran. In this in the since the 1979 revolution, we've done about five years of diplomacy with Iran. From 2010 to 2015, I know because I was part of it. Other than that, there's been, you know, the US has tried dual containment of Iran and Iraq. We've tried containment. We've done, you know, there's the sanctions, which has been the primary US government policy against Iran has been sanctions. So the prim primal policy has been sanctions. We tried diplomacy for five years. For three of those years, both sides were interested in a diplomatic solution. We got one that satisfaced. It wasn't the best deal that could have been gotten.
It was the best deal the Obama administration could have gotten. Everybody pretends that the Obama deal was superior to what Trump is doing. And there are a lot of there's a lot of evidence that's not the case. Alan, how much of this do you think is um how much is this about Trump wanting to leave a legacy? I think certainly his a part of his original motivation was he wanted to leave a legacy. He had moved against Venezuela. In his mind, that worked out well. He thought he could do the same about Iran. You know, again, he's not the first president to foolishly enter into war thinking it would end more quickly and more favorably than it did.
He's just the most recent. So I don't, you know, again, again, he's not unique in that regard, but the point is at a certain point you have to modify your course when you realize that the strategy you were hoping was going to work isn't working. And again, the dominant reality right now is that it didn't work out the way he wanted to. Does he escalate or does he just try to find a way to extricate the US from the war? I think he's choosing to do the latter by having the Omanis in Iran come up with some sort of straight of Hormos deal that unfortunately at least in the short term will seed some type of control to Iran. And I certainly agree with Peter that's horrible. That's not a place that's not a happy place for the global
you know that actually doesn't worry me that much because there are sea air rail and road alternatives to using the straight of Hormuz for shipping. It's going to take time to bring them online, but uh and this is why of course the Iranians are telling their Houthi proxies to try and close off the other end of the Arabian Peninsula and shut down that straight. Uh but we'll be able to move goods and services in and out uh within four or five years once they get ports developed and they get pipelines built and they get roads. So this is a small victory for Iran. It's not going to last and it still doesn't address the nuclear question. The biggest issue I think President Trump has to deal with is our friends in the
Arab world don't want to be dragged into a war that looks like they're supporting the interests of Israel and they don't want to be putting their energy infrastructure at risk from Iranian weapons. That's the big cell that Donald Trump has to do. It's not selling it to the American people. It's selling it to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the Amir ofQatar, the Amirs in the UAE, the president of Egypt, the president of Turkey. He's got to get them on board with upping the military action. And the more the Iranians attack civilian targets in their countries, the easier it is for Trump to make that case.
Okay, thanks to you both. That was a lively debate and discussion. Appreciate your time. Peter Roth, Alanire, thanks for coming on Inside America. And that is it for this episode. See you next time on Inside America.
