The U.S.

and Iran at a standoff, with peace talks stalled and Iran maintaining its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, and increasingly impatient President Trump weighs restarting the war.

But neither war, nor sanctions, nor blockade has eliminated the regime or Tehran’s nuclear or missile capabilities.

So, is it time for the U.S.

to reassess its Iran strategy?

Coming up on "Compass Points."

♪ Announcer: Support for "Compass Points" has been provided by... the Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Camilla and George Smith, the Dorney-Koppel Foundation, the Gruber Family Foundation, and Cap and Margaret Anne Eschenroeder.

The Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation.

Upholding freedom by strengthening democracies at home and abroad.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

♪ Announcer: This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Once again, from the David M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, moderator Nick Schifrin.

Hello and welcome to "Compass Points."

It has been more than 6 weeks since the U.S.

and Israel announced a cease-fire in Iran.

But, in public, Iran appears no more willing to give in to U.S.

demands than it was at the height of the war.

Extensive U.S.

and Israeli airstrikes failed to eliminate Iran’s regime or its military and nuclear capabilities, although those are reduced.

And U.S.

officials believe the current naval blockade needs more time if it’s going to produce enough economic pressure on Iran for it to accept America’s terms to end the war.

So, what are the US’s options, and which should the president choose?

Here to help us understand that are Sina Azodi, is the director of the Middle East Studies M.A.

program at George Washington University.

Justin Logan is the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Firas Maksad is the managing director for the Middle East and North Africa practice at Eurasia Group and an associate fellow at the Middle East Institute.

And Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow in foreign defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Thanks very much.

Welcome back, all of you, to "Compass Points."

Really appreciate it.

Let’s talk about the U.S.

options right now.

It seems to me that there are a few obvious options.

The U.S.

and Israel could relaunch the war, whether kind of narrowly to try and reopen the Strait of Hormuz or more broadly throughout Iran.

Something more dramatic, the U.S.

could do some kind of raid to try and get the nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium that is buried in Iran, or keep going, basically.

And that’s a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, hoping that the Iranian position at the negotiating table changes.

So, Dani Pletka, let me start with you.

Should the president restart the war?

Pletka: Sure, he should.

President stopped the war and has repeatedly stopped the war at moments, decisive moments, and has signaled, go, stop, go, stop.

It’s like those nursery school games that you used to play, Duck, Duck, Goose, or when they played the music, and you had to sit down all of a sudden.

That’s what this war feels like.

And imagine to yourself what our military leaders are thinking, our allies are thinking, the Iranians are thinking.

He needs to get to a moment where the Iranians understand that he is going to hang tough, that it is we and not they that control the Strait of Hormuz, and that they need to, for whatever reasons, political, economic, military, survival, that they need to give up the things that we want them to give up in order to get something good from us.

We’re not there yet.

Justin, should the U.S.

restart the war?

Logan: No, absolutely not.

It shouldn’t have started it in the first place, but I guess that’s cheating to say that at this point.

I mean, I think if I can, and we’re in a real dilemma here, right?

There’s not any good options.

The ones that you laid out at the top there are all bad.

And I think what they need to do is to try to figure out how the Iranians are separating the nuclear file from the war, right?

The Iranians have said, "We want a deal to end the war, "and then we can talk about the nuclear file."

Now, it happens to be the case that the last U.S.

strike on Iran last June did sort of entomb a huge quantity of their 60% enriched uranium at Isfahan, among other places.

So that gives you some wiggle room.

This is also not a great option, but I think we’re in the realm of least worst, rather than good, at this point.

Schifrin: So, you know, what do you think?

Does Iran feel like it has leverage right now?

Does Iran have leverage right now?

Azodi: I think that Iranians think that they just won the war by surviving a fight with two nuclear weapon states.

And this is why they are more intransigent.

There are factions in Iran, there are two major factions right now, one that argues that we just won the war, let’s take the win, settle with the United States, you know, on the nuclear issue, political, so on and so forth.

But there’s also another faction, same faction that during the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, argued and chanted with the slogan, "War, war until victory."

These two major factions are pushing and pulling in different directions, the latter camp.

Schifrin: The war until victory camp.

With banners that, you know, no negotiations, no concessions, only war.

I think that this is how they see it.

Their political objectives were achieved, which was to survive.

The U.S.

political objective of the war, which was to do a regime change in Iran, force Iran to unconditionally surrender, play a role in choosing the next supreme leader, those political objectives were not achieved.

Schifrin: We’ll get to those divides for sure and how they’re impacting the negotiations, but, Firas, first to you, where does the region sit?

I know that we shouldn’t lump the Saudis in with the Emiratis, especially these days, and the other Arabs.

But in general, is there a momentum to try and convince President Trump, as President Trump publicly claimed, to stop the war, or at least not restart it and make the deal?

So there’s a, and I just came back from the region, there’s grave concern about what Dany laid out.

A resumption of the military option for fear of what the blowback would mean.

We’ve all witnessed this, that sort of the most punishing of the Iranian response was not against Israel, but it was mostly against these Gulf cooperation countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.

Now some of them, certainly the UAE, is more willing to bear the burden and pay the price if there was a decisive victory on the back end of such a campaign.

But right now, none of them see it.

And in fact, they are just as concerned about yet another round of bombing as they are about a potential deal.

Because from what we all know and are discussing, what a deal looks like would probably be reopening the Straits in return for easing financial constraint sanctions on freezing of assets against Iran.

And some general understanding on the nuclear program, but nothing on the ballistic missiles or the drones or Iran’s support for the proxies.

And that all just means that they’re going to have to be left carrying the bucket of dealing with Iran down the road, and it’s not a good place for all of them to be.

Schifrin: Bad options on the deal, bad military options.

Let’s put it that way.

Let’s go through some of the negotiations.

Let me start with what Iran claims are the public demands, what publicly Iran is saying.

Iran opens the Strait.

The U.S.

ends the blockade.

That’s the first step.

The war ends.

And that includes, by the way, Hezbollah and Israel.

All right.

And this is what Iran says publicly.

Then the U.S.

forces must leave the region, and that’s in all of those Arab countries we were just talking about.

The U.S.

and Israel must pay reparations.

And yes, the U.S.

lifts sanctions and unfreezes assets.

So let me keep that up there for a second.

Sina, the U.S.

forces leave the region.

US and Israel pay reparations.

Those are dead on arrival, right?

And Iran knows that.

So is that even real, or is this just public posturing?

Azodi: It’s just public posturing that we are, you know, we have the upper hand.

We don’t, we are not weak.

We don’t want to appear weak.

But like you said, they know that the U.S.

will not pay, or Israelis rather, pay reparations or damages to Iran.

They just want to look strong.

Schifrin: All right.

So let’s go into what I believe is the actual negotiations, according to my reporting.

And it’s very opaque, I’ll admit, but let’s just try it.

So the first phase, what I think the president has called this week a memorandum of understanding or a letter of intent, would be Iran opens the Strait, the U.S.

ends blockade, and the war ends again, including Hezbollah and Israel.

Now the second phase, this is the rub, right?

Iran would freeze its uranium enrichment for, who knows, 10 to 20 years.

Iran would have to export its highly enriched uranium.

Iranian officials, I’m told, did tell the U.S.

that it was willing to do that to the IAEA.

But today we have a report that we’re going to ask about just now about the supreme leader denying that.

Iran would also pledge not to use underground facilities, and the U.S.

would lift sanction on freezes assets.

So, Dany, if Iran now refuses to export its highly enriched uranium, is there a deal even to be had?

No.

I think, look, the president has, you know, we were chitchatting about this in the run up to this show.

The president has laid out so many different things.

Schifrin: And negotiates in public, which Iranians are not used to.

But to the point that he’s negotiating with himself.

He has said so many internally contradictory things.

But I think the one area that he is not wavering on is the imperative of ending the nuclear program and exporting Iran’s existing stock of HEU, highly enriched uranium.

And no, I don’t think they’re willing to do that, is the honest to goodness truth.

Schifrin: Sina, do you think they’re willing to do that?

And let’s go back to that divide, right, that we see between, call it the political officials and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which presumably the supreme leader is part of on that side.

Can you overcome this genuine divide in the country that is exacerbated by this war?

Officials tell me they’re not meeting.

You know, it’s hard to know whether the supreme leader can really communicate in a normal way.

I mean, how can you get to a deal?

Is there a deal even to be had that Iran can actually make?

I’ll answer the second question first.

[Laughter] Political rivalry and internal competition has always existed in Iran.

They’re notorious for these, you know, backstabbings, throwing each other under the bus.

And the president is right that there’s a lot of fractions in Iran, but it’s nothing new.

But ultimately, if the system decides that they want to have a deal, everybody will comply, just as they did in 2015 with domestic politics.

There were people who were accusing the then President Rouhani of selling the country, giving so many concessions.

But once the late Ayatollah Khamenei approved the deal, the process of approving, ratifying the JCPOA in the parliament was 20 minutes, and then it was done.

Because he had approved it.

But does the communication that we saw between Javad Zarif, who was on the ground negotiating the JCPOA, and the supreme leader via the people that they were talking to, does that exist today?

Do we know?

I think so.

I think it does.

Schifrin: So that’s intact.

- I think... I don’t think that Foreign Minister Araghchi or anyone who’s negotiating would make a decision without getting the approval from Tehran.

They have a framework that they can negotiate with, but any concessions has to be approved from Tehran.

And on getting the deal, I think exporting the highly enriched uranium can be on the table.

Now, the question is what President Trump is willing to do.

His problem, and I think when you pointed out on negotiating in public, is that he’s conflating non-nuclear weapons with dismantling the Iranian nuclear program.

These are two fundamentally different things.

Pletka: So I wanted to ask you, though, because you said something that is completely true for anyone who follows Iran.

You know Iran is made up of these factions.

Iran is not a democracy.

But inside the governing elite, there are massive, massive battles for power.

But in fact, I think we are seeing a difference between pre-war and the current situation, which is that where the clerics and the ayatollah and let’s say the religious were on the top in the decision making, now it looks like the IRGC thinks it’s on the top.

And that could be an even worse outcome for us if we leave it as is.

Do you not see that?

It can go either way.

I mean, for decades, IRGC was on the rise.

They had the media.

They had the military.

They had a lot of money to spend.

The only thing that they didn’t have was a top job because late Ayatollah Khamenei kept everybody on leash.

They wouldn’t move without his approval.

But now the young Ayatollah Khamenei doesn’t have that much influence.

And it’s normal.

Schifrin: But he’s closer to the IRGC, right?

Azodi: He is.

He owes the job to them.

And plus, with any position, once you start it, it takes time until you socialize into the position.

You know your way around.

In that time, IRGC, which was really prosecuting the war, has a lot of influence.

They always had, but now it’s even worse.

Justin, do you think the U.S.

should change its demands in these negotiations?

Well, it’s always difficult to tell what the bottom line is, right?

Everybody in a negotiation, if you’ve ever bought a car, right, you don’t come in and say, "I’m willing to pay this price."

And the dealer says, "I’m willing to sell at this price."

You’re negotiating back and forth.

And so I think Sina rightly pointed out some of those Iranian demands are likely to go away.

And I hope some of the U.S.

demands are likely to go away.

There’s been this weird fixation on zero enrichment, right?

And the president has this mantra that he keeps repeating, Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.

Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.

Fair enough.

He wants the Iranians to profess that they won’t pursue a nuclear weapon, which they’ve done many times already.

So I think it’s very difficult from outside and sort of inscrutable as an analyst to figure out what’s really going on here, because, you know, as Dany’s pointed out, there are sort of two diametrically opposed positions being stated sometimes in breaths right after one another.

Schifrin: Well, as an example, as Dany’s been pointing out, why don’t we take a listen to what the president has said?

And again, what we’re going to show you is just in the last week.

Man: Have you rejected the latest proposal from Iran or where does that stand?

Trump: I looked at it and if I don’t like the first sentence, I just throw it away.

We’re already going tomorrow very big.

I think we’re close to a deal.

I was an hour away from making the decision to go today.

We hit them very hard, but we may have to hit them even harder, but maybe not.

What we’ve done is amazing, and we have them decimated.

Schifrin: Dany, what kind of political problem has he created for himself?

Pletka: I think you phrased the question in exactly the right way.

Donald Trump has created a problem for himself, because he has limited his own options by suggesting we might do this, but then we might do that.

You know, even understanding that the Iranians are going to be playing a lot of very serious games.

These are, forgive me, Sina, bazaaris at heart.

Not to overgeneralize about 90 million people, 90 million people, but these guys are pros and the president has been sending such mixed signals about what he would accept that getting them to a serious point has to be very difficult.

But even worse for our military leadership, everybody keeps saying, "Oh gosh, why didn’t they have a plan for Hormuz?"

Come on.

Of course we had a plan.

We’ve had a plan for Iran for more than 20 years.

The president keeps calling pause.

You can’t win a military battle with a pause every 5 minutes.

Maksad: That kind of flip-flopping, for the lack of a better word, uncertainty reverberates far beyond just the U.S.

and Iran.

Everybody in the region is watching this.

And while about a year ago when the president was in fact in the region, the transactional nature of the president appealed to many of these countries, right?

As many officials said at the time, we’re used to this.

Maksad: Yes.

As we all know how to do business.

And so there was a great appreciation for that.

I think right now it’s a very different take.

They understand that they are going to be left on their own, cannot rely on America, bringing a decisive victory, bringing this to a decisive end.

And that in many ways they’re going to have to deal with an emboldened Iran, at least in the short term.

Pletka: But it’s even worse than that, if you will forgive me for piling on incessantly.

It’s even worse than that because all of the things that are virtues of the Trump administration, kind of the seat of the pants, the difficult decisions, there’s no process behind it.

So our poor allies have no one to go to other than the president in order to say, "What’s next?"

Schifrin: I want to play devil’s advocate in a second, but Sina, you go.

Azodi: And I absolutely agree with what you said.

The problem is this administration thinks that Iranians are a bunch of old clerics who don’t understand how politics work.

They don’t know statesmanship, which could not be farther from the truth.

These guys know how to conduct diplomacy.

The Shia clergy has been doing this for the past 500 years.

This is nothing new.

They keep thinking that they can outlast President Trump.

They don’t think in election cycles.

They think in 5 years, they think in 10 years from now, 20 years from now.

And one more thing, the reason that he got himself into this problem is that he underestimated Iranians’ willingness and ability to fight back.

He thought it’s going to be quick, quick victory, illusions of quick victory, if you will.

It’s going to be end soon.

Iranians are going to put their hands up and say, "Uncle," that didn’t happen, clearly.

Let me play devil’s advocate for a second, though, and I’ll go to you for us.

So regional officials, of course, understand this, but they also realize the opportunity they have to work with President Trump, with a person rather than a process, as you guys have been saying, and that there is an opportunity to reshape the region, that they are actively currently pitching to the president and his advisers that involves India, Middle East, Europe corridor, creating this economic corridor we’ve been talking about for a few years, and that the crisis of not being able to use the Strait of Hormuz could create an opportunity, and that a pitch to Donald Trump, right, that, "Hey, you can help recreate this region "by helping us create economic opportunities "moving north from Saudi Arabia, "north and west in Europe, "instead of going through the Strait," that’s something that they believe Trump is able to deliver, or Trump is able to decide quicker and execute better than they would with the process of another president.

Maksad: Well, first, thank you for trying to bring in the silver lining and highlight the positive.

Schifrin: I try.

I try.

Except I’m going to tell you that I don’t see it.

Let’s start by talking about the region.

First, there is no one GCC.

That has come apart.

It started arguably before the war.

The UAE together with Israel, Abrahamic coalition, I would argue with India farther afield as part of that IMEC corridor, and then Israel and Greece in the eastern Mediterranean.

On the flip side of that, and the lack of any progress on normalizations, the Saudis have went in a different direction.

The Saudis are much closer today to the regional Muslim heavyweights, Pakistan working very closely and coordinating with the Pakistanis, the Turks, and the Egyptians, so you really have the emergence of these two different coalitions.

One of these heavyweights is not only meant to balance against Iran, although they understand that they need the collective leverage to deal with Iran the day after this war ends, but it’s also meant to balance against Israel, because they have their own concerns about Israel, especially after Israel bombed for the first time a GCC country, Qatar, about a year ago, last September.

The UAE is somewhere else together with Bahrain and others who have normalized with Israel, so you have a real divide through the region.

And the construct that you’re talking about, about these corridors, these logistical lines that run up to Israel, whatnot, certainly the Abrahamic coalition, the UAE, India, and Israel have that aspiration, but I think that’s all very much in doubt now in light of the war.

Schifrin: Justin, jump in.

What do you think?

Silver linings?

Logan: I don’t have any silver linings, I’m sorry to say.

No, I think this is, look, everything is possible and nothing is possible, right?

We’ve listened to the president, and he said, "You know, on any given day, "we’re about to restart the war or about to sign a deal."

So he could decide at any given point, "This is good enough, "and I’m going to take it home and sell it."

- And people like us... Schifrin: And isn’t that, from your perspective, not a bad thing?

Logan: Yeah, it’s always look on the bright side of life, right?

Look, we will dissect it, and we will say, well, this is good, this is bad, and this is neutral.

But he has the political capability to sell many different things at home.

So I think it’s inscrutable and sort of infuriating as an analyst, because normally you have arguments and people are leaking details, and you say, "Okay, this is how this all fits together."

And as we all know here, it’s almost like flying blind.

Flying blind simply because, as I’ve said to many people, we’re in the era of the policymaker not policymaking.

And that’s really what we are.

And so, Dany, do you see any silver linings?

I mean, I’m trying to find them here.

Pletka: No, I see lots of silver linings.

First of all, I think we have absolutely no idea what the president’s going to do.

I mean, part of the problem with having, you know, that great image of, you know, the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other.

This is how the president leads his life at all moments.

And there’s always someone whispering.

Schifrin: And it’s often worked.

Right.

And it has often worked.

And you know, look, he does weigh the advice of different people.

And I don’t think he’s, I don’t think he’s, I was about to say, I don’t think he’s capricious.

I can’t say that.

He is capricious.

But, you know, I think he listens to a lot of different perspectives.

But we do have the opportunity to change the Middle East, right?

If this comes out right, and, you know, nothing ever comes out that right immediately.

Maksad: I mean, I was thinking, what was the last time we attempted to change the Middle East and got to a better place as a result of that?

Pletka: I feel pretty good about where Iraq is relative to where it was under Saddam Hussein.

But that’s taken a good 25 years.

And certainly up for debate, which we won’t start now because we only have a minute and a half.

Right.

But that’s the opportunity.

We have a chance to go, we have a chance to turn the direction, or we have a chance to be in a somewhat worse situation than we were before this war started.

Those are the options in front of the president.

There’s not some middle ground here.

Maksad: Can I jump in very quickly?

Because I do want to respond to that.

Do we have a chance?

Sure.

There’s a probability.

Is it going to be the dominant outcome or the likelihood that we, I don’t think we’re going to get there.

I think where we’re going to end up is a diminished American stature in the region, allies and partners questioning our ability to decisively deliver as the regional security partner of choice.

Many questions as to whether China or others can then fill that void and benefit.

I am skeptical of Chinese ability and willingness to fill that void.

But I do see the region coming together in new constructs and coalitions to have a greater agency because they trust America that much less in terms of its ability to defend them.

And if that’s the long term, Sina, you just hit the short term, last word in about 20 seconds.

Given the divides in Iran that we were talking about, is there a deal that they can make, bottom line?

Azodi: I think they can.

I think they want to make it.

But they have to be able to keep their heads up and sell it without looking like they signed an unconditional surrender.

Schifrin: The win-win, as the Chinese would say.

That’s what they want with their heads up, an honorable peace, if you will.

- And I’ll just, very quickly.

Schifrin: 5 seconds.

- OK.

Schifrin: You can take 5 seconds.

That’s it.

This is America’s Swiss crisis.

Just like what happened to the French and the Brits, this is America’s Swiss crisis.

All right.

We’ll leave it there.

Sina, thank you very much.

Justin, Firas and Dany, thank you very much.

And thank you for joining us.

That’s all the time we have for now.

I’m Nick Schifrin.

We’ll see you here again next week on "Compass Points."

Announcer: Support for "Compass Points" has been provided by... the Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Camilla and George Smith, the Dorney-Koppel Foundation, the Gruber Family Foundation, and Cap and Margaret Anne Eschenroeder.

The Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation.

Upholding freedom by strengthening democracies at home and abroad.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

♪ Announcer: This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

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