Jeffrey Goldberg: It's been a week since the United States and Israel went to war with Iran.

We know that the military campaign is very effective, but the question for President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu remains, why did they attack and why now?

Tonight, a close look at the decision to go to war and an examination of America's strategy to the extent that there is in fact a strategy, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

It was just last week that President Trump launched a war against Iran after telling Americans that he was opposed to new wars, especially new Middle East wars.

Thanks to the U.S.

Navy and the U.S.

and Israeli Air Forces, the Iranian regime is practically leaderless and on its back foot.

But the commander-in-chief of American forces has yet to explain to a doubting public the rationale for the war.

To discuss where we are, I'm joined tonight by Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, Karim Sadjapour is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Nancy Youssef is a staff writer and a Pentagon correspondent at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me.

It's only been a week.

It feels like a year.

Peter, why did Donald Trump go to war against Iran?

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: It's a very good question.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you very much.

Peter Baker: And it only has about six or eight answers depending on which one you want to pick at any given time.

Jeffrey Goldberg: What is -- what -- if you had to explain in ten seconds, why did we go to war now?

Peter Baker: It's a very good question, and the truth is we don't know the answer, right?

They have given us multiple versions of that story all week.

He went for it now because he had a feeling, according to his press secretary, that something bad might happen, that Iran was going to attack.

He went to war because the Israelis were going to go to war anyway, and therefore they decided they had to go with the Israelis, because, otherwise, there would be retaliation against American forces.

That was Marco Rubio, the president, said that they needed to go after the nuclear program, which, of course, he had already told us was obliterated.

And we had to go after the ballistic missile program, which intelligence tells us is not yet the threat that he said it was.

So, why now is still an open question, right?

I think a lot of reasons are he felt emboldened by Venezuela and he is becoming increasingly comfortable with power as he goes further into a second term.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan, the Venezuela, without success in Venezuela, this wouldn't happen?

Susan Glasser, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Well, I mean, Donald Trump told The New York Times now he's given about 80 million quick phone interviews this week.

And one of them, and multiple of them, he called Venezuela, the, quote, perfect scenario for what he now has in mind in Iran.

And I think that's really notable because he began this conflict overnight, last Friday night, saying that actually regime change was more or less the goal of the U.S.

operation.

Within a couple days, you saw his top official saying, no, no, actually, it's not about regime change.

Trump sometimes says it is, sometimes says it isn't.

But his version, Jeff, of regime change looks something like Venezuela, I think, which is basically abandoning the democratic opposition in Venezuela, which the United States has supported and saying, well, we're going to take out Nicolas Maduro but leave his entire apparatus of repression of his own country intact and go with his vice president.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Nancy, Venezuela and Iran, obviously very different countries.

Iran is a much more complicated military and strategic target.

Fair?

Nancy Youssef, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Fair.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you.

Go on.

Nancy Youssef: Well, look, Iran is bigger than Venezuela and Afghanistan combined.

Iran has a ballistic missile capability.

It has a sophisticated drone capability.

It has the ability to pose a threat to every ally and partner in the region, and it is off the Strait of Hormuz, which is where one fifth of the oil transiting through the waters goes, which means that it poses a threat to world global economic markets as well.

And so its ability to present economic threats, to present security threats to the Gulf regions, to present security threats to Israel, and the complexity of its defenses means that it could potentially pose a threat for a sustained period of time, that while the president talks about this being a campaign that lasts weeks, the second and third order effects could reverberate throughout the region.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Karim, I want to read you something that Trump posted today.

He wrote on Truth Social, there will be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender, all capital letters.

After that, and the selection of a great and acceptable leader or leaders, we and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.

Iran will have a great future.

Make Iran great again, parentheses, MIGA, close parenthesis, quote, thank you for your attention to this matter.

So, Karim, it was -- there's confusion about this.

It was either Trotsky or Rosa Luxembourg or possibly Peter Baker, for all I know, who said before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible.

After it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.

This will be the last time I quote Trotsky on this show, by the way, just noting for the record.

What are the chances that Trump gets his successful revolution, something that we can't necessarily picture at this moment?

Karim Sadjapour, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment: So, that quote is also attributed to Hanna Arendt, so many potential authors of it.

So, this, in my view, is a very high risk, high reward gambit from the president tonight.

He used the word gambit deliberately.

This is a big gamble.

Iran is a country which is ruled by one of our worst adversaries, the Islamic Republic that came to power in 1979.

My view is there's probably no country on earth with a greater gap between its rulers and its citizens than Iran.

You have a government that acts like North Korea, a society that wants to be like South Korea.

So, if you're able to change the leaders in Iran and empower the people into some kind of a representative government or, at a minimum, a government which represents its own national interests rather than this revolutionary ideology of 1979.

That would be a geopolitical game changer for the United States and huge victory for President Trump.

And I do think, you know, he's posted this as well, that he aspires to visit Caracas, Havana and Tehran before his presidency is over.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Big goals.

What are the chances that something as clean, I used that in, you know, in quotes, but something as clean as what happened in Venezuela happens in Iran, that somehow there's a leader or somebody near the top who actually doesn't believe that America is the great Satan and wants to have a relationship with the United States?

What are the chances of that happening without full scale civil war?

Karim Sadjapour: At the moment, it looks unlikely.

You know, Delcy Rodriguez, the number two to Maduro, was a very powerful person in the Venezuelan system.

And when we assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei, that was kind of the political equivalent of a bunker-buster.

He was Iran's longest serving dictator, perhaps one of the world's long, longest serving dictators, 37 years he had been in power.

And so that left a vacuum, which no one can quickly fill.

And at the moment, I would argue there's no single Iranian official who has the legitimacy, the authority, or even the will to break with 47 years of ideology.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You stay on this for one more moment.

You're one of the world's leading experts on Iranian leadership, among other things.

Khamenei's son has the possible credibility to do this?

What do we know about him and the way he sees the world?

Karim Sadjapour: So, Khamenei's son, his name is Mojtaba.

He's a 56-year-old cleric, and he's long been his father's right hand, and he's kind of a liaison between the senior clergy and the Revolutionary Guards.

Now, there's a body called the Assembly of Experts.

It's 88 clerics.

My joke about them, their average age is deceased, a lot of old men.

Jeffrey Goldberg: They don't have to retire like the College of Cardinals, they just go on, yes.

Karim Sadjapour: Exactly.

And so in theory, they're the ones that are supposed to anoint the next supreme leader.

I spoke to a source in Tehran who told me that because his father was assassinated, his wife was also killed and his mother was also killed.

Mojtaba Khamenei's stock rose after that.

But, Jeff, my view is if he indeed is anointed as supreme leader, his father ruled for 37 years, he may not be alive for 37 days because there will be an Israeli bull's eye in his back.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Would he -- is there any indication of his thinking -- does he have any thinking that's different than his father?

Look, his father, like his predecessor, the founder of the leader of the revolution, the originator of the revolution, Khomeini, believed in basically three pillars, as you have written in The Atlantic and elsewhere, the hijab, death to America, death to Israel.

Is there anybody in that system who is a reformer, let's say a Gorbachev-type of figure who buys some of the ideology, but in a softer way?

Karim Sadjapour: So, Mojtaba Khamenei, I would, say is a ten out of ten ideologue.

There are some folks I would describe as eight out of ten ideologues.

One of the guys who's kind of administering the country now politically is a guy called Ali Larijani.

He is a hard man.

He was -- he oversaw the massacre last January.

He is not at all a democrat, but he's one of the people who perhaps believes that to save the regime, to save the revolution, we may need to compromise.

And the model that someone like that has in mind is not Gorbachev, but China's Deng Xiaoping to start to prioritize economic, national interest before revolutionary ideology.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

So, for people who are reporting on this week, have you heard from the administration anything as cogent as what Karim just articulated, which is to say, anybody inside the administration who says, look, here are the following eight people who could run this country and we're focused on this one and we think maybe this will work?

Peter Baker: Here's what we heard.

We heard the president of the United States get on the phone with my colleague, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, from The New York Times says, we've got people who I'm looking at who might be the next leader.

And the next journalist phone call he made says, there were people we were looking at, but it turns out we killed them.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Peter Baker: So, this is the level of organization they have when it comes to thinking about what comes next in Iran.

There was no plan, there's no organization and there's no thought given to how to actually create an atmosphere in which they could have a different regime.

And at one minute he says, the people should rise up.

The next minute, he says, no, we keep the same regime, but with other people.

Nancy Youssef: I think the confusion too for the American public is that, militarily, the Pentagon says that the plan is going well, that they're able to weaken their ballistic missile capability, that they're able to go after their nuclear programs.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And these things are true.

Nancy Youssef: And they're true.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Nancy Youssef: But those tactical successes don't lead to a strategic success.

So, I think that's part of the confusion that the American people are suffering, because how do you tie a weakened state to one that can have people rise up or be governed in its own way?

And there's never been any doubt that the military could do this.

They are -- they have the resources to do these kinds of things.

They don't have the ability to change things on the ground by themselves.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan, our Atlantic colleague, Tom Nichols, makes this point frequently that there's a -- the gap between American military capability, which is pretty extraordinary, and Israeli alongside it in this case, and the level of strategic planning is so large as to be dangerous.

Talk about that a little bit when you have a military that can basically you push a button and figures out a way to get something that seems impossible done.

Susan Glasser: Well, that's right.

I mean, look, the fantasy of the sort of the transformative event via air power with no American boots on the ground, you know, this has existed not just for the Trump presidency.

There's not a good record of outcomes that produce sort of, small D, democratic leaders and transformation when you do something like that.

But I have to say, listening to this conversation, all of us here covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And, you know, I was on the ground in Southern Iraq on the day that Saddam's forces left the southern city of Basra.

And, you know, you see these two things coexisting.

And remember the Bush people spent a lot more time both preparing the groundwork for this war and, you know, thinking about what would happen there.

It turned out not enough but -- Jeffrey Goldberg: They had a theory.

Susan Glasser: They had a theory.

But more importantly, we had no idea.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Susan Glasser: So, within literally hours of Saddam's government leaving and the forces disappearing, you know, we had overwhelming military superiority.

It didn't take that much of a fight, and yet there's huge crowds in the streets, there's huge political activity and the American and British officers we spoke with had no idea what they were doing there.

They didn't know what the goal was.

And that was, again, even before the insurgency Iraq began.

When you see these clips playing over and over again right now of Donald Rumsfeld, he's being asked right before the invasion of Iraq, how long is it going to last, and he says, well, it could be six days, it could be six weeks.

It certainly won't be six months.

That's the clip that I've seen circulating.

I mean, you know, Donald Trump says it's going to be four to five weeks.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But Trump is different than a typical American leader in a lot of ways, including the way that -- I mean, Nancy, there's a reasonable chance that Donald Trump on Tuesday comes out and declares victory, we've won.

You could say, look we've destroyed for a second time the nuclear facilities.

We've taken out 80 percent of the ballistic missiles.

I'm done.

And we also know that he has a short attention span.

So, I mean, what are the chances that by the end of -- by next Friday, by next weekend, we're going, oh, yes, I remember the war that we had in Iran, in the same way that we talk about Venezuela in the past tense?

Nancy Youssef: There is a chance.

Because, look, this war, the preliminary estimates is that it's costing $8 billion a day.

It is draining air defense capability.

It's putting a huge strain on the force.

And he has set the groundwork to say that any military campaign is successful because it's a weaker Iran.

And if it doesn't go well after that, he can say I gave the Iranian people a chance and they didn't take it.

And so he created an exit ramp for himself in terms of his narrative around this.

But that doesn't mean that there won't be second and third order effects on the ground.

He can't stop the economic impacts of this going on well beyond the military campaign because you will not see ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz until they are confident that the security situation is stabilized.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Nancy Youssef: So, he can stop it on one level, but he can't control all the timelines that are related to it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Karim, I have an impossible question for you.

What is the Trump doctrine?

I mean, what have -- how would you define Trump foreign policy based on what we've seen in Venezuela, Nigeria, possibly Ecuador now, and Iran, and maybe in a theater near you very shortly, Cuba, how do you - - how are you thinking about what category does this fall in international relations terminology?

Karim Sadjapour: Well, if I had to summarize it in one word, I'd say improvisation.

I think that he wants big victories, obviously big dramatic victories, but very short-term thinking and totally improvised hour to hour his -- the way he articulates his endgame can change.

And what Nancy mentioned now is important, Jeff, because what Iran's strategy is right now, its retaliatory strategy, is to actually negatively impact American public opinion.

They're trying to spike the price of oil.

There's some service members who've been killed.

There's explosions happening in different places throughout the Persian Gulf.

And they want Americans to look at their television set and say, what's going on here?

How do we get ourselves into this situation?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Karim Sadjapour: And they're hoping American public opinion is going to restrain these ambitions that Trump has.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You have written about the long and sorry history of the American presidency and the Islamic Republic.

Talk about that for a minute and talk about whether your own sources inside the administration recognize that Iran has the capacity to undo American presidencies.

Karim Sadjapour: So, from 1979 when the revolution happened to the present, by my count, Iran has consumed at least five American presidencies.

So, the revolution and the hostage crisis ended Jimmy Carter's presidency.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Karim Sadjapour: Iran Contra tainted Ronald Reagan's presidency.

9/11 was not Iran, but then when George Bush launched the Iraq War, Iran sabotaged the Iraq enterprise for President Bush, you know, consuming his presidency.

Then we go to Barack Obama and the nuclear deal, the JCPOA, which consumed the second half of his presidency.

Joe Biden, October 7th, 2023, that was an Iranian proxy, Hamas, that invaded Israel and then two years of wars with Iran, and now President Trump.

And so I do think when you listen to the president's own language, he's hoping to be the guy that ends this 47-year nuisance of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

And I do think, as we've all said, that he has a short attention span to try to do that.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Peter, it's interesting though.

It has been a stalwart enemy of the United States and has undone the U.S.

in various ways.

Peter Baker: Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's not the worst theory in the world to say, let's just deal with it once and for all, right?

Peter Baker: It's certainly true that there are plenty of reasons why the United States would want a different regime in Tehran, no question about it.

And he outlined them in that eight-minute video he put on air in the middle of the night when the strikes started.

What he didn't explain is why now.

And I think you could have come out and said, look, because it's been 47 years, it's now time to finally deal with it.

Okay, maybe the public would've accepted that, but he did nothing to lay the groundwork for that.

He did nothing to convince the Americans this is necessary to do now.

Because if you sit there and say, look, they've been a thorn in our side for all these years, they've killed these people, they've been, you know, a malign force in the neighborhood, a lot of Americans say, okay.

And then so why now?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

I want to -- I'll come back to you, Susan, but I want to talk about one thing, Pete Hegseth.

You mentioned the deaths in this war so far.

Six Americans have been killed so far.

It's a small number relative to other wars of America in the Middle East, but it's still six too many.

Here's Pete Hegseth.

I want you to watch this for a minute talking about this just the other day.

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense: This is what the fake news misses.

We've taken control of Iran's airspace and waterways without boots on the ground.

We control their fate.

But when a few drones get through, or tragic things happen, it's front page news.

I get it, the press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan, this is out of the norm for the way defense leaders speak about wartime casualties.

That's probably an understatement.

Susan Glasser: I think it's fair to say it's an understatement, Jeff.

You know, when you accuse people of getting themselves killed because they want to make Donald Trump look bad, you know, I would wonder what he would say when he looked the families of those people in the eye.

And, you know, as your colleague, Nancy, has reported, you know, those folks in Kuwait were killed by an Iranian drone.

And there are real questions about whether the American military was actually prepared for this kind of drone warfare that we've seen previewed on the ground over the last four years in this horrible conflict between Russia and Ukraine, in which Russia has been fighting with Iranians supplied drones that are exactly the drones that are now being flown against American targets and allied targets all across the Gulf right now.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Susan Glasser: So, it's not only a fairly shocking statement, but, in general, if you look at the performance of Pete Hegseth this week, what you've seen is war as video game.

And, in fact, the White House literally released a video in which it, in his place (ph), what you could only call sort of, you know, pounding music and, you know, sort of war porn, images of targets being struck.

And I think it's a pretty shocking moment, I think, for many people who see this power being wielded.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Nancy, last word to you on this.

I am curious to know what you're hearing from inside the Pentagon, still a Pentagon correspondent, even though they kicked you and your colleagues out of the Pentagon.

What are the generals and flag officers, other flag officers saying about this?

Nancy Youssef: About that moment in particular, there was a real stun silence about it.

We all remember Robert Gates, for example, asking for news clips about the fall and sitting in the plane, you'd watch them cry over the loss of these men and women.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Former secretary of defense.

Nancy Youssef: That's right, because the secretary of defense gave the order to send them in harm's way.

And a lot of generals still carry pictures, even in retirement of people who've lost in their command.

So, it was painful to hear.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we're going to have to leave it there.

We'll be talking about this next week, of course.

I want to thank you to our guests for joining me, and thank you at home for watching us.

For more on the president's fluctuating Iran strategies, please read Karim's latest story on theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight from Washington.