--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whew! Alright, I'm up for it. I'm up for it too. I mean, I don't think it violates any sort of company policies.
--:-- [Sound of a barcode scanning]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Looks like the previous rider has not locked the bike. Nooooo! He's locked the bike first to end the previous ride and unlock to start your ride.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think we might be out of luck again. Maybe there's instructions at mattressfirm.com slash podcast. I doubt it, but I'll bet you get a mattress there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A deal's a deal, right?
--:-- [Sound of a bell ringing]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Wrong. President Trump tipped over a very big domino yesterday. And lying in the balance is everything from gas prices to nuclear war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a few moments, I will sign a presidential memorandum to begin reinstating U.S. nuclear sanctions on the Iranian regime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Up until yesterday, the Iran nuclear deal was an agreement between Russia, China, the UK, France, Germany, the rest of the European Union, and the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not. A comprehensive, long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The deal severely limited how much nuclear stuff Iran could make and keep and included all sorts of monitoring just to be sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And back in 2015, President Obama didn't act like he had solved our decades-long beef with Iran, but he was hoping this deal would open a door, that the United States and Iran could get along somewhere down the road.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This nuclear deal was the Obama administration's biggest move by far. Yochi Dreazen hosts the Worldly podcast. Arguably its biggest accomplishment, period, but for sure its biggest accomplishment in terms of foreign policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was a deal where Iran basically gave up its nuclear program and the West, including the U.S., pulled off all the economic sanctions that had battered its economy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The whole world thought it was working. The U.N. thought it was working. Every ally we have thought it was working.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Donald Trump basically said, I don't care. America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail. And blew up the deal.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: Does blowing up the deal go into effect immediately? Is this something that's already happened? Or is it scheduled for a certain day or what?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the sanctions start to go back into place between 90, 120, and 180 days from now.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: But in terms of the deal, the U.S. broke it. Are these other countries still in it? And how does that work?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, the other countries that signed on to the deal have all said they're going to stay in.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: Yeah. Interestingly, the Iranian government has said that for now it will stay in as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: President Rouhani, who staked his reputation on the benefits of the deal, told the world last night it is not dead and he will continue to work with the other five countries still committed to saving the deal.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: Why was this deal so important? For the White House in the Obama years, they thought this deal would do two things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One is avert war. They felt, as George W. Bush felt, that Iran simply could not have a nuclear weapon.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: That was just a red line that would threaten Israel, threaten Saudi Arabia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they had two ways of trying to stop that. One was go to war, and two, have some kind of deal where there are inspections and kind of very strict benchmarks and a lot that Iran had to do to give up its program.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: The second is that they thought gradually This might be a way for the U.S. and Iran to move closer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump's argument against the deal in part is, hey, none of that happened. Iran is still our enemy. They're still doing terrible things.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: And so the Obama guys, they thought it would avert war, which it's done temporarily, and move us closer to Iran, which it has not done at all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if you're President Donald Trump, why do you finally blow up this deal, this thing you've been promising to do for a while?
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: So, Donald Trump has been blasting this deal even before he ran for president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When it was signed in 2015, he was already tweeting how it was terrible, an embarrassment.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: And then during the campaign, terrible, embarrassment, catastrophe. I'll pull us out of it. I'll tear it up. It is a total and complete catastrophe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ben taking office said I going to tear it up because it awful Yeah And now he finally done so
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: And I think there were kind of three things happening. One think of this like the foreign policy version of Obamacare He didn't like that there was something called Obamacare, tried to blow it up. It failed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Here, he didn't want there to be this thing called the Obama nuclear deal that a lot of people liked. So bye-bye nuclear deal.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: The second is he feels, not incorrectly, that the U.S. allies who to him matter most in the world, which are in some ways the Saudi Arabians, the Israelis, they want out of this deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They hate this deal and they'll love him for doing it. So this is like his gift to those two countries.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: And he says, and this part is accurate, Iran is doing terrible things all across the region, all across the Middle East, and this deal hasn't stopped it and may have made it easier.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Could you give us the quick rundown of what Iran's doing in the Middle East?
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: Iran is keeping Bashar al-Assad in power in Syria, very literally. They've sent money, they've sent weapons, they've sent fighters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they have people fighting for Bashar al-Assad in Syria, helping him basically by this point win the civil war.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: In Yemen, Iran has funded a group that's now fighting Saudi Arabia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In Iraq, Iran is very close to the government of Iraq and trying to pull it away from the United States.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: So when Republicans say Iran, since the deal has just gotten more aggressive, that's true. None that was covered by the deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so what he's basically doing is saying something not covered by the deal that's happening is going to blow up a deal, even though the deal itself was doing what it was supposed to.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: Does the president think he can do better? He said that to the degree that he has a plan B here, it's we'll put sanctions back. Iran will come groveling back to the table.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. We'll hit them with harder terms and they'll have to take it.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: The problem, of course, that there's no sign whatsoever Iran is willing to do that, nor that Europe, Russia, China, who had also sanctioned Iran, would do so again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His core belief about everything is that everything in the world is a transaction. And so here he feels like this deal was badly negotiated.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: He is 100% sure he could do better.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we are on the outside 100% sure that there is no sign now at all that Iran or Europe wants to talk to Donald Trump at all about a new ordeal.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: Trump has also not really been clear about what a new ordeal would be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's talked about making the limits on Iran's program permanent. There's no way Iran would accept that.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: The question during the Obama years that I would always have for people who opposed it was, okay, let's say the deal isn't perfect. What's the better option?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nobody really had a good answer short of, well, eventually their government will fall and things will be fine.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: And Donald Trump yesterday had no plan B.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what's the other half of this? How does Iran feel about what happened over the past 24 hours?
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: So we often as a country think that Iran is just this blob where it has no politics. It's just a crazy theocracy run by these radical mullahs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's false. It has a political system with really deep divisions. It has moderates. It has hardliners.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: And to look at Iran and just think it's monolithic is a mistake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the debate that we had here about is the deal in our best interest? Is it giving up too much to our enemy Iran?
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: They had the same debate, just substitute the word enemy United States for enemy Iran.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there the conservatives said the same thing as what conservatives like Donald Trump are saying here. It was too much of a giveaway to the US.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: It's an insult to Iranian national pride. Why should we give in anything to the United States and its allies?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Rouhani, his foreign minister, they were the ones who said all along, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is good for Iran.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: We get sanctions relief. Our economy will grow. Unemployment will fall.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so now he's been undercut because now clerics and conservatives can say to him accurately, you told us to do this. You told us you could trust the United States.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: And look, we can't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does Iran feel about President Trump versus, say, the country's relationship with President Obama?
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: That he can't be trusted, that he's irrational, that he's biased in favor of the Israelis, that he's biased in favor of the Saudi Arabians.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't think this surprised anybody there. But all the same, it's infuriating.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: Their economy is terrible. Right now their currency is at the lowest point ever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Unemployment among young people is extraordinarily high. They were banking on this, helping their economy, and now it won't.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: I guess we shouldn't forget about the European Union, which also signed this deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, the European Union, they've been feisty, and they've been basically saying the U.S. isn't the only force in the world.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: Do not let anyone dismantle this agreement. It is one of the biggest achievements diplomacy has ever delivered.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we have built this together.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: One of the phrases that we used was they're not an economic policeman for the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They've said we're going to stay in the deal. I mean, they just feel like this was something that the European Union invested in a lot of time, a lot of money.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: The governments were part of the European Union thought this deal was working And now America has said we care we pulling out of it anyway
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why did this benefit the European Union? Why were they involved?
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: This helped their economies Iran is a big country a potentially wealthy country It has huge amounts of oil and natural gas, and this was a way for Europe to get some of that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in fairness, they also thought this was a way of averting war.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: I mean, it is binary, right? Like, if you think Iran can't have a nuclear weapon, and you know they've lied in the past and have wanted to get a nuclear weapon before, you really do have two ways to try to stop it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One is some type of negotiation. One is war. That's it. There's no other choice.
--:-- Yochi Dreazen: What's next?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's next.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, I went to mattresshirm.com slash podcast. I didn't find any instructions on how to lock a motorized scooter in D.C., but I did find that you could use the coupon code podcast tend to get 10% off a mattress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So now I'm looking at this scooter trying to figure out how the heck to unlock it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I got a bell. I got a speedometer that I can't see because it's so sunny in D.C. today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, Sean, could it be that it's maybe just already unlocked?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's interesting. The speedometer's on, which I think means that it's on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you want to just give it a shot?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Give it a shot, I guess.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think you're supposed to, like, take a couple of kicks and then hit this speed thing and see what...
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh! I've got power! I've got juice!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, is that a win for anybody?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, this was a win for Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, who, in the clearest sign when you're trying to lobby Donald Trump, he appeared on Fox and Friends.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow. Which was bizarre and surreal to go from, like, them joking around to, like, and now let's welcome the prime minister of Israel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Working without notes, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, live in Jerusalem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was remarkably strange.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They hate America. They hate America's guts. So I'm very glad, I have to tell you, that President Trump has stood so firmly and so clearly on this issue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You had this weird dichotomy of Israel, which are a winner, Saudi Arabia, another winner, some conservative Republicans, the other winners.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then on the loser side, the much longer list, Donald Trump is a loser because this is an example of be careful what you wish for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He now owns whatever happens. It's only him. He can't blame Obama anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The French, British, Germans, European Union are all losers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People who are worried about war are losers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And more cynically, people who are worried about increasing gas prices are losers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People who don't want to see gas prices go to $4 a gallon, which it may do, or $4.50.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oil prices are already spiking. It's hard to find many winners.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, it really genuinely is hard to find many people who will wake up and think, whew, the world's a better place thanks to Donald Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You say that two of the few winners are Israel and Saudi Arabia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And yet, if this deal goes away, Iran is now capable of advancing all of its nuclear programs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they are close neighbors.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How are they winners?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're gambling that if war comes, the United States will get involved, even if the U.S. doesn't launch the war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And bear in mind, John Bolton, the new national security advisor, believes in regime change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, his view of Iran is that they not only can't be trusted, but that the goal of the U.S. should be to topple their government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our goal should be regime change in Iran.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's been hating this deal even more than Donald Trump has since it was signed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So for the Israelis and the Saudis, they're thinking, if we have to go to war, and they both feel like they may have to, that the US will join that war and would not have joined that war if the deal was still in place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The United States is the only country that's pulled out of this deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does it still hold any value for all those who remain, which is everyone else, to be clear, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, everyone else remains.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I spent a lot of time on the phone yesterday with one of the people who actually very literally helped write the sanctions and helped craft the deal and trying to go through the law of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it was baffling.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Basically by one party pulling out of it in this case the US the deal itself is now null and void
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That said countries can still abide by the terms and act as if it still in place which is right now what happening
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So at least for the moment everyone else who involved in this is still acting like the deal is in place and abiding by the terms
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Legally speaking, by the US pulling out, the deal is now finished.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if you want to be the glass half full, it's that everyone else who's involved in it, at least so far, says they'll keep to it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Donald Trump, he really loves to gamble. And he's gambling that the whole world says this is going be a catastrophe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The whole world has been wrong before. He's been right before. And therefore, he's just going to do it and roll the dice.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Help me with something. So we've got this president ending a nuclear deal with Iran.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And at the very same time, people are saying, give him the Nobel Prize for maybe getting nuclear weapons out of North Korea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do you square those things?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: North Korea is interesting because the timing here is Donald Trump is pulling out of this deal right before he's supposed to sit down and negotiate with Kim Jong-un about a nuclear deal for North Korea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And part of what's so strange is if you're in North Korea, why would you trust that if you make a deal with Donald Trump, that the next president would stay in it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because you've just now literally seen that not happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he is trying to say, this will show the North Koreans that we won't sign a crappy deal, that we're really going to go hard line to the table because here is this deal everyone else liked.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We didn't like it. We pulled out, hey, North Korea, that's how serious we are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it is worth noting that if he were able to go to North Korea and come back with a deal under which they opened their nuclear sites to inspection, closed down some enrichment sites, stopped enriching uranium, people would say, give this man a Nobel Peace Prize, because that would have been unimaginable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Here's the thing. He had that exact deal with Iran. They have opened their sites to inspections. They have stopped enriching uranium. They have shut down an enrichment site.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the thing that would literally bring him, at least theoretically, a Nobel Peace Prize if he got it from North Korea, we had with Iran, and that's exactly what he just tore up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this isn't the first thing he's torn up. The Paris Climate Accords come to mind.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The way he talks about NATO comes to mind.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of these deals that we're reneging on or have already reneged on involve some of our closest allies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does the United States look in the world right now and how is that changing?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think, unfortunately, we could have added more things to that list.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump has insulted the prime minister of Britain. He's insulted the chancellor of Germany. He's insulted the Muslim mayor of London.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's made up attacks in other countries that didn't take place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Europe sees him as somebody who is irrational, who can't be trusted, who's bigoted, who's racist, who's anti-Muslim, and who just makes shit up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When the Iran deal was being negotiated, you had people say, you can't really trust Iran because they're this religious country, they're run by leaders who may not know much about the outside world, who are enthralled to their own conservatives, who are enthralled to a religious group in their own country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now you could say all of that about the United States because of Trump's decision to pull out of the Iran deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that means going forward, if other countries are trying to decide, can they trust the U.S. on topic blank, blank, or blank, they might think no.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If North Korea is trying to decide, can we make a nuclear deal with the United States and assume other presidents will abide by it, they might think no.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If Europe is looking at the United States and thinking, are they a friend or an enemy, they might say they are no longer a friend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These are not abstract, right? These are real and they are tangible and they have impact now and they have impact in the future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yochi Dreazen is the foreign editor at Vox. And he also rocks the mic for the worldly podcast at Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He and his very smart team will break down this news in even greater detail tomorrow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So subscribe, download, listen, rate, review, love.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right, John, I'm really glad that you did not just scoot away without me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I am too. You have the recorder, plus, you know, I just wanted to ride around this circle. It was a celebration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But now, what I think we should do, Luke Vanderplug, is go to Mattress Firm.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, that's the mission that we're on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You want to hop on this scooter?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm game.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. Tandem, here we go. Be careful.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm going to, I think I have to kick off, hit the gas, and then you got to jump on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Run and jump on?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes. All right, here we go.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. I'm moving, I'm moving.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jump on.
