Jeffrey Goldberg: It seemed inevitable earlier this week that President Trump would be ordering military strikes on Iran, but then he pulled back after getting pressure from Israel and America's Arab allies to hold off.

But that doesn't mean he won't attack Iran next week or tomorrow, or right now for that matter.

Very often, unpredictability is a useful leadership tool, but we're in a whole other reality now.

President Trump doesn't recognize the guardrails that were visible to previous presidents, and self-restraint isn't his specialty, which is why Denmark is preparing for the defense of Greenland.

Joining me tonight at the table to discuss all of this, Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, David Sanger, the White House and national security correspondent at The New York Times, Nancy Youssef is a staff writer at The Atlantic, Nick Schifrin is the foreign affairs and defense correspondent for PBS NewsHour and the moderator of the new program, Compass Points, that debuts this weekend on PBS.

Welcome all of you.

Thank you.

Nick, big weekend, big weekend here at PBS everybody.

The juggernaut, new juggernaut is coming your way.

We'll talk a little bit about what you'd be talking about on Sunday.

But let me just start, David, with you and get a little -- get a sense of what this current state of play in Iran is.

David Sanger, White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, Jeff, two completely separate dynamics underway here.

One, a rotting regime, increasing frequency of these protests.

We've all been through this before the protesters come out this time in much larger numbers.

It wasn't just students.

It was the middle class.

It was people protesting the devaluation of the riyal, and so this sense of heightened crisis.

But some things are the same, the protesters still have no guns, no arms, and the Iranian regime does.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And they use them at ferocious pace.

David Sanger: And they did use them at a much more ferocious pace here.

And you've got to think that any regime that's got to try to shoot its way out of this isn't going to last forever, but may last for a while.

And then the other side of this, as you were suggesting in your opening, Jeff, is the president who said, we're going to come to the rescue of these protesters.

But, you know, this is not an operation like taking out three nuclear sites, as he did in June.

There, you had defined targets.

You could go in, you could bomb, you could bury the uranium, and you could leave.

If you are in a situation where you're trying to support protesters, you need to know what it is you're trying to do, regime change, trying to promote democracy, trying to just stop the killing, and we never heard that from this White House.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Let me read you something.

This is an extraordinary Truth Social post by Donald Trump, even by the extraordinary standards that we're getting used to.

I greatly respect the fact that all scheduled hangings, which were to take place yesterday, over 800 of them, have been canceled by the leadership of Iran.

Thank you, exclamation point.

Donald J. Trump, president of the United States of America.

I mean, it has this kind of very dark, almost Monty Pythonesque, all the hangings are off.

The truth is that they didn't stop the hangings.

But, Nick, talk about this for a minute.

The - - is this just evidence that Trump is trying to find himself an off-ramp from this and is using what might be bad data as an excuse?

Nick Schifrin, Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent, PBS NewsHour: Well, the U.S.

military officials who I talked to earlier in the week did predict that the president was going to attack Iran and then -- Jeffrey Goldberg: We were all.

By Wednesday, it seemed like we were all, this is the night it's going to happen.

Nick Schifrin: Right, exactly.

And then by the afternoon, or whatever it was, suddenly it wasn't.

And one official told me, yes, he's looking for an off-ramp.

So, what's the explanation?

Well, perhaps there was this idea that, oh, maybe if they don't hang a protester, and there was one specific protester who the activists were all saying going to be hang tomorrow, if they don't hang that protester, then, okay, they're moderating somehow.

But I think, clearly, that, as you said, right, Israel and the Arab states were not into a U.S.

strike.

You know, Nancy's been reporting, and we'll talk more about the idea that the U.S.

military didn't have the assets that he wanted.

And all of that meant that the president was looking for an off-ramp to award that, frankly, all of his advisers said wasn't an easy win, right?

You didn't have a Caracas option in Tehran.

You didn't have a way to take all these protesters and let them, or create an extra momentum so that they could overthrow the regime.

And given that was the answer and given that the pressure that he was on diplomatically, there was no easy way to choose any option and actually get what he wanted, assuming that we actually even knew what he wanted.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Nancy, let me ask you two questions.

One is jumping off something of that nature.

You said you wrote earlier this week, until last fall, commanders in the Middle East could count on having an aircraft carrier strike group nearby, that was either in the Persian Gulf or could reach it quickly.

Not this time.

The USS Gerald R. Ford, which had been closest to the Middle East, left the shores of Europe last fall for the U.S.

pressure Campaign on Venezuela.

It would take at least two weeks for the Ford to move back within range of the Middle East.

You've been writing about the overstretched quality of the military.

Is that the reason that we didn't have the strike that they had been promising on Monday and Tuesday?

Nancy Youssef, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I think it's certainly a factor.

And one evidence of that was that the USS Abraham Lincoln, one of two carriers operating now, is moving from the Western Pacific to the Middle East, which would signal that they needed the presence there.

Remember that the carrier gives the military a lot of options in terms of its defense of its forces there.

It also allows them to launch strikes from there in a region where allies were saying, we don't want you to launch strikes from our country.

We fear that.

The other thing that moved out of the Middle East was drones.

And so you lost a lot of the capability -- Jeffrey Goldberg: What do you mean, moved out of the Middle East?

Nancy Youssef: So, those drones that were in the Middle East went through the Western Hemisphere as well, and so we lost the carrier, we lost air capabilities.

And so when you're talking about striking a regime on its last gasp that's already threatening the U.S., threatening its allies, you want the most defenses you can in the region, and a lot of the ones that they're used to having weren't there.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Jon, was it a mistake then, from a strategic standpoint, to focus on Venezuela, which does not pose as much of a threat to American interest as Iran clearly does?

Jonathan Karl, Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News: I mean now you have what moved into Venezuela and you're now moving assets out of the South China Sea to the Middle East, which is counter to what we've been told that they're trying to do, which is focus on the real threat.

They see ultimately long-term threat from China.

But, look, in terms of how this all turned around, you have a couple of factors.

By the way, one, the Iranian foreign minister went on Fox News, which was a very interesting move.

And it was the Iranian foreign minister who announced -- I mean, in announced, it was with Q&A with Bret Baier, that there were going to be no hangings.

We're not -- there are no hanging scheduled.

So, Donald Trump learned that by watching Fox News at 6:00 on Wednesday -- Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, the Iranians know and has to know how to communicate directly to the president.

Jonathan Karl: And there's another thing.

Tucker Carlson has been at the White House twice over the past week.

And we know what Tucker Carlson, you know, feels generally about not getting involved in the Middle East and not doing anything that would remotely something that the Israelis would favor.

I mean, Bibi Netanyahu was at Mar-a-Lago in mid-December encouraging Trump to take another military strike at Iran this time over the ballistic missile program.

And, you know, it did look like he was moving in that direction.

And now I think there's this whole -- you know, Trump is not particularly strategic on this stuff.

It's very much in the moment.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to go to David in a minute to talk about the Israelis who were telling him this week, please don't have a strike on Iran, but in December, we're talking about something else.

But, Jon, you've hinted at maybe the largest question.

Can you make it all make sense?

Jonathan Karl: Well, look, he went and said, help is on the way, to the Iranian protesters.

Time after time, over the last -- mostly over the last ten days or so, he has been encouraging the Iranian protesters.

And at the same time, the ayatollah has come out and the ayatollah called him a tyrant.

I mean, that's really something.

The ayatollah called him a tyrant and called for him to be overthrown.

So, it's -- I mean, you can kind of see that.

Trump's got all of these factors going on.

He's feeling strong.

He's feeling like he's the most powerful president ever.

He's just taken Maduro out of Venezuela.

He's pushing around Denmark over Greenland.

He feels he has the power, but he truly -- I think he still does not want to get dragged into something.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But, look, I'm asking you as my friends.

I'm just on the hunt for coherence.

And the way you're describing just the movement of aircraft carriers, I have to imagine that there are people in the United States Navy who said, oh, we're not going to be near China.

We're going to the Middle East.

Oh, sorry, we're going to the Caribbean.

Nope, we're going back over.

David Sanger: If you're in the hunt for coherence, you're covering the wrong administration, okay?

But -- Jeffrey Goldberg: But this is the only administration we got.

David Sanger: It's the one you got.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's what we got, right?

Jonathan Karl: You cover the administration you have.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

You go to war with the administration you have.

David Sanger: You read the National security strategy that they turned out back in November and it talks about -- Jeffrey Goldberg: In which the main enemy is England, I think, if you read it carefully.

David Sanger: Well, there's a lot of discussion of Europe.

But the main focus suddenly is the Western Hemisphere.

So, yes, we could fit Maduro into that and we could fit the run for the resources there.

But all of a sudden he's getting involved in an uprising in Iran, setting out red lines.

Imagine for a moment that Barack Obama had said, we are coming to the aid.

Jonthan Karl: Help is on the way.

David Sanger: Help is on the way.

You will remember that in -- Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, he did, in effect, issue a red line, said to the Syrians.

David Sanger: For Syria -- Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

David Sanger: -- and which became one of the rallying calls of what he did wrong in foreign policy, right?

He doesn't believe that.

He believes to this day that that was a fine moment.

I think he said that to you in one of your interviews.

But it was certainly part of the Trump critique of that administration.

And so the president is feeling emboldened, but you'll notice that he pulls back when it looks like he could be in a confrontation with a nuclear-armed country, China or Russia, or get involved in something on the ground that he can't control.

And that's what these uprisings were.

The critique of Obama was you set the red line and then they crossed it and you did nothing.

David Sanger: That's right.

Jonthan Karl: And that's where you're in the position.

You're seeing Trump do it.

He set a red line.

It's clearly been crossed.

What's he going to do?

Jeffrey Goldberg: And there's a -- go ahead, Nancy.

Nancy Youssef: I was just saying, can I add to that list?

He doesn't want anything protracted either.

I mean, since Christmas, which was less than a month ago, the U.S.

has conducted strikes in Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But one and done.

Nancy Youssef: That's right, all one and done.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

And the bombing of the Iranian nuclear program was literally take off from America, fly halfway around the world, drop your payload, come back to there, never touch ground.

Nancy Youssef: The only exception was Yemen, which went on for several weeks and was inconclusive at best in terms of outcomes.

So -- Jeffrey Goldberg: But they declared victory anyway, right?

Nick Schifrin: I think with Iran, we also have to remember if we're going to give the benefit of the doubt here that, you know, at the bare minimum, right, he was given three options.

You can help the protesters by giving them a signal, by hitting the people who have been killing the protesters, so, hey, we know who's killing you.

Second option was, we're going to go wider, take out the IRGC, take out the besiege forces, try and destabilize the regime.

Jeffrey Goldberg: IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard, that's the core of the -- Nick Schifrin: Right.

Or, three, go after the missiles that we do expect Israel at some point this year to try and go after again.

But neither of the -- all three of them did not really achieve any one goal, right, did not achieve any one victory, as he put it, you know, to CBS.

David Sanger: Because most of the weapons he was looking at were weapons.

And it was only when they were discussing dropping Starlink in, you had something that made sense, or broadcasting in Persian language back in something that they were dismantled.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we dismantled that.

I want to keep moving a around the world a bit but, David, answer that one quick question about what the Israelis want and what the Arabs want right now, because that's going to give us a fairly big clue about what's going to happen next week or the week after on Iran.

David Sanger: So, the Arabs want some stability out there.

And while the Israelis ultimately, as Nick said, want to go after those missiles and so forth, they are not in the position right now to go do anything to which the Iranians might respond with missile attacks of their own.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Got it.

Nick Schifrin: And there was a U.S.

assessment this week that the Iranians would launch a larger strike against a U.S.

strike.