When news alerts went out that the US sent missiles to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, debates began about how deeply the US would continue to wade into the conflict between Israel and Iran. After days of panic, President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire between the two countries. But it was Trump himself who, in his first term, stopped US efforts to limit Iran’s nuclear program. Robert Malley was the lead negotiator of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal under then-President Barack Obama. To give context to the latest developments in the region, Malley joins WITHpod to talk about the the 2015 deal and its unraveling under Trump’s first administration. Malley is also a lecturer at Yale University and the co-author of the upcoming book, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine.”
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Robert Malley: As the dust is still settling, we’re in a situation where the Iranians probably want to bomb more than they did in the past. We know less about what they’re doing than we did in the past because we don’t know where they put the high-enriched uranium. We don’t know how much they have been able to hold onto. So, greater aspiration, less visibility is not a good combination.
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Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
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I’m speaking to you on June 25th. And the reason I make the date is because I want to tell you what’s happened so far, which is that the U.S. sent a number of bombers to bomb nuclear sites in Iran. We did this after the Israelis had started a military operation, attacking Iran with missiles. Iranians had retaliated against Israel. At first, it seemed that Trump was telling Netanyahu not to attack Iran. Then according to the reporting, he was watching Fox News where they were super psyched about what Netanyahu was doing. He got jealous of all the credit Netanyahu was getting, he then mobilized U.S. forces to do it.
In fact, they had to kind of use a bunch of misdirection because he was being so sort of straightforward with people about what he was going to do. The mission dropped these MOP bunker buster bombs on these deep nuclear sites. As I speak to you now, it’s unclear whether they obliterated, as the president says, those nuclear sites, or they did minimal damage setting back the program just a matter of months.
Also then, the president unilaterally declared ceasefire on social media and got very angry at these Israelis who in the last six hours before the ceasefire went into effect sent an enormous barrage towards Iran, which is something they’ve done numerous times when there’s been announced ceasefires, they do a sort of huge show of force in the waning hours that they can. Iran also retaliated in the waning hours. He cursed at reporters because he was so frustrated and he says he thinks the peace between the two, who have been fighting for thousands of years, will last forever. And the reason I give you all that is because when you hear this it’s possible the war has started again. It’s possible we bomb them again. It’s possible that there’s a negotiation happening between the U.S. and Iran. I have no idea, nor does really anyone else who’s not living inside Donald Trump’s head. And I don’t even think he knows.
All of this has been very confusing, and I set all this context forward because I want to talk about Iran, the U.S., and the nuclear program with some context, because what seems irrefutable to me is that whatever was done or not done to the nuclear program, the deal that had been negotiated by the Obama administration and entered into with Iran, which involved monitoring and limits on uranium enrichment was doing a better more transparent job of stopping Iran from moving to a nuclear weapon than what came after, which was Donald Trump, unilaterally tearing up the deal, the Iranians going back to enriching lots of uranium and now a hot war between Israel that the U.S. joined.
So I thought a great person to talk to would be the guy who was the lead negotiator on that deal. The person who sat in the room across Iranian counterparts with members of the American diplomatic core and security apparatus, a guy by the name of Rob Malley who, by the way, has just a totally fascinating story himself. He’s also got an amazing book that’s going to come out this fall that I’m actually reading advanced copy of called “Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel, Palestine.” That’s a co-authored book. I want to have him back when that book is out, but today we’re going to talk to Rob about his experience with the Iran nuclear deal and how to understand what we’ve seen and how to maybe go back in time and understand what that deal was and what was lost. So Rob Malley, thanks for joining us.
Robert Malley: Thanks for having me, Chris.
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Chris Hayes: I want to get into this, but I, first, you were on my show the other night and I guess in the lead up to it, I just like gave you a quick Google and I was like, wait, what?
Robert Malley: I never do that.
Chris Hayes: I fell down a rabbit hole. Your background is totally fascinating. Can you tell me about your parents, because I think that’s a big part of this story, and your formation and how you ended up becoming a peace negotiator as sort of full time?
Robert Malley: Yeah. So thanks. And again, you plugged the book and I tell more of the story in the book, but my father was an Egyptian Jew. He was born in Cairo. His parents were from Aleppo, Syria. So he was a Jew, but he also was a very big believer in nationalism and big believer in the Palestinian cause. And so, as a Jew in Egypt, at that time, he had limitations because of his religion and he had his convictions, which he couldn’t really put into practice and so he became a journalist, moved to the U.S. where he was a correspondent for a number of Arab newspapers at the United Nations, which had just been formed in 1945. And he continued his journalism as an outsider to the U.S., an outsider to Egypt because he was Jewish, but an outsider certainly to Judaism, but more specifically to Israel because he was an ardent, as I said, support of the Palestinian cause.
He moves to France from where he gets expelled because of his political views, which is pretty rare. I mean, now we see that the U.S. is deporting foreigners because of political views. But in the early 1980s, have an American journalist expelled from France because his political views, that was pretty unusual. And so, I grew up in that background, my mother also Jewish, but from Eastern Europe. And as I say in the book, the first Palestinian I met happened to be Yasser Arafat because my father knew him, and then the second time I met him I was an advisor to President Clinton on Arab Israeli affairs.
How I landed in government, students ask me because they’re interested in the career and I say just serendipity or bad luck as it may be because I’ve had it pretty. If you look at Google or Wikipedia, you know that my career has been checkered and full of controversy.
Chris Hayes: Can I ask, so your father is an Egyptian Jewish man who is a fervent anti-Colonialist, Arab nationalist and anti-Zionist basically, but Jewish.
Robert Malley: Yeah. Right.
Chris Hayes: Sort of wild —
Robert Malley: But then moves to America and becomes anti-American, which is —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robert Malley: — also and then moves to France and is anti-France.
Chris Hayes: Your mom is from New York, right?
Robert Malley: From the Bronx, yeah.
Chris Hayes: From the Bronx, which is where I’m from, and from a family of Ashkenazi Jews who come to the U.S., but she was working for the Algerian National Liberation Movement, the FLN at the U.N. where she —
Robert Malley: Right.
Chris Hayes: — met your father.
Robert Malley: So that’s right. That’s how they met because she volunteered.
Chris Hayes: That is wild, dude.
Robert Malley: It is wild. So they meet while she is working for the Algerian delegation and he’s covering it.
Chris Hayes: The FLN. She’s working for the FLN, a Jewish New Yorker.
Robert Malley: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah, she’s another character in the story. It is pretty crazy, yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, I think, you then get a Rhodes scholarship, you go to Yale Law, you have a very impressive set of credentials. You have this very unique background. You speak a number of languages, as I understand it. You are raised sort of in a way, I think very few people are kind of across the Jewish Arab divide, if we want to call it that. You end up getting involved in Israeli, Palestinian negotiations in Camp David.
Robert Malley: Right.
Chris Hayes: And then you were in Barack Obama’s law school class at Harvard. Is that right?
Robert Malley: I was and I knew him. I can’t say that we were close friends, but I knew him well enough that when he ran in 2008, I served as an unofficial advisor. Got kicked out of that position because in my real job, which was working for a nonprofit organization called The International Crisis Group, whose goal is to talk to all parties in conflict. And so, yes, I had spoken to members of Hamas. I never hit it, but opponents of Barack Obama made a big issue of it during the campaign. So I was asked to leave the campaign and only in the second term, I think when the president and his administration felt less politically vulnerable, did they bring me in to work on the Middle East more broadly.
Chris Hayes: So you were one of the people that negotiated the deal with Iran. Will you just take me through, like, what were the goals of that negotiation? What was your brief when you went into it, of what the U.S. wanted out of that diplomacy?
Robert Malley: So it was very clear what the president’s guidance was. I mean, first let’s sort of take a step back. He was convinced that there were only two options with Iran. Either Iran was going to get a bomb or we were going to have to bomb Iran. We could debate whether that was really the only two options, but he saw that and he was under a lot of political pressure to make sure that Iran would not get a bomb. And he didn’t want, particularly, after the experience of Iraq, to be the president on who’s watch and yet another conflict in the Middle East were to be unleashed.
So, he wanted a deal and a deal that would take care of Iran’s nuclear program, put in a box for a significant period of time. So what he told the team was, I want a deal that for at least 10 years would put Iran at least one year away from the possibility of acquiring a bomb, if they were to violate the deal. So from the day they violate the deal to the day that they could potentially have a bomb, we’d have a year to take whatever action, political, diplomatic, military to stop them. So those were the criteria.
So, in some ways it was as easy in negotiation as I’ve participated in. Not that it was easy because the president laid out very, very clear criteria in terms of reference and he wanted nuclear experts to validate the deal. He knew that Secretary Kerry, Wendy Sherman, myself were not nuclear scientists. He brought in his Secretary of Energy, Ernie Moniz, but also a team of nuclear experts who would say at the end we would vouch the fact if it were in place for at least 10 years Iran would be at least one year away from the possibility of having a bomb with the most intrusive transparency measures ever negotiated in peace time. So that was the goal. It was achieved.
Again, I know the critics of the deal, but I don’t think the president never hid what the goal was. It wasn’t to make Iran a friend of the United States. It wasn’t to end everything Iran did that the U.S. had objections to. It was take care of this problem for a significant period of time. And by the way, he would say, I know this doesn’t necessarily resolve it forever unless the Iranian regime changes, but this will give time for my successor, my successor’s successor to negotiate a follow-on deal or to choose whatever course of action they want to.
Chris Hayes: If that’s what the U.S. wanted, what was your understanding in these negotiations of what the nature of the Iranian program was and why they had what appeared to be a kind of sort of liminal program, right? Like they say, it’s for civilian purposes, ostensibly it is. It’s clearly there to give them an option to possibly pursue a weapon. It’s how much that’s happening or not is a matter of debate, their intelligence assessments. But it’s a little hard for me to kind of read what the Iranians are up to because it feels a little like they’ve been caught like between first and second base, and now they’ve been picked off. It’s like —
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you’re either a nuclear power in which case you’re North Korea and it’s too late, no one can do anything or Pakistan, which is a different regime, but, or you’re trying to get it and everyone in the world is really focused on you not getting it. So what was their logic here?
Robert Malley: So, and I think now they may look back and say that they made a mistake. Either they should have gone for it or not gone for it at all. They got caught in the middle, which when they were most vulnerable, but I think to put yourself in the Iranian mentality, not to defend it, but I believe strongly and you mentioned my background, if you don’t put yourself into people —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, totally.
Robert Malley: — you’ll never understand how they’re acting.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They came out of the Iran-Iraq war, which is one of the most devastating wars in the 1980s and they were subjected to a barrage of rockets, chemical attacks. Virtually no country in the world sided with them. Every country, including countries that were at war or at odds with each other were backing Iraq. And they felt, at the time, that they had been caught, basically, in a position of vulnerability and they swore that they needed to have their own self-reliant strategy of defense, which involved funding and arming militias outside of Iran, but also building a nuclear program, which by the way, would also have been the Shah’s project to have the nuclear program.
Now, I think any nuclear expert would say, given the size of their program, it had no legitimate civilian justification. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have a need for nuclear energy. Fossil fuels are not going to be endless. So yes, that made some sense. But the way it was constructed, it was pretty clear to anyone that it was a hedging strategy.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robert Malley: To be in a position to acquire bomb if they wanted to, we know that at least until 2003. Well, until 2003, they were also engaged in a weaponization project to study how it could be done. It stopped in 2003. I think all intelligence agencies agree with that. So their strategy was to keep this as a leverage, to keep it as a hedging option, and then maybe to negotiate. Well, to negotiate limitations on it in exchange for concessions from the U.S. So it ends up being probably one of the most dramatically miscalculated enterprises one could think of, but you can understand what they were doing. They wanted it in their back pocket.
Now you said something very important, which is, I think, if I were the Supreme Leader of Iran, which fortunately I’m not, I would say, I could imagine over the last several years, a moment, what I would say to myself, I need a nuclear bomb. Libya gave it up. Khadafi was toppled. Saddam Hussein didn’t have it. He was toppled. The North Koreans have it and they have been spared. So, with Iran’s experience —
Chris Hayes: Look at Ukraine too. Ukraine had weapons, which were given up as part of the deal in early 1990s and look what happened to Ukraine.
Robert Malley: And look at how much we’ve debated how much can we go after the Russians given the possibility so.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Right.
Robert Malley: But, and so I think now as people know, he issued this fact where this religious edict against any effort to acquire bomb. My conviction is if he had a way to go from today to acquiring a bomb with nobody knowing it, doing it overnight, sort of like that, he would’ve done it, but he knew he couldn’t. He knew that there was a period of months during which the U.S., Israel, others might know that he was doing. And that was when he’d be exposed to maximum danger. So he had this hedging strategy. He couldn’t really use it. And we were trying to put it in a box so that it would be even further away from his mind.
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Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Now, part of the hedge, my understanding, the version of Rob Malley on the other side of the table, the Iranians, that they seem willing to give up. I mean, in the end they were, right? They’re willing to put their program in a box in exchange for something. What’s the something they’re looking for?
Robert Malley: They’re looking for sanctions relief. I mean, the devastating crippling sanctions, that’s one of the legacies of the Obama administration for better, for worse. We could have hours long of conversations about the ethical and moral and political value of sanctions, which I think have been wildly overused, but it is true that Iran wanted those sanctions lifted because it was really hurting their ability to be developed economically. I think where we have it often wrong is we think that the threat of sanctions and the imposition of sanctions is enough to get a country to surrender.
That was what, certainly, President Trump thought, and also some others, some Democrats have thought over the years, just maximum coercion, sanctions, threat of military intervention, Iran is going to give up what they have. Again, put yourself in their shoes. It’s precisely because they feel that vulnerable that they’re not going to give up their one asset just because of coercion. They’re going to want something in exchange.
Chris Hayes: It’s interesting that you raise the Iraq-Iran war as this kind of originary trauma. Obviously, it starts almost immediately —
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — after the 1979 revolution. I think there’s 600,000 or 700,000 fatalities on the Iranian side, or even more than that. I mean, it’s like —
Robert Malley: I mean, so the estimates are to a million, yes.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. It’s just a truly shocking charnel house. I mean, it sort of exists outside of, I think, American consciousness because it was just like, oh, two countries over there are fighting, but really one of the bloodiest and most brutal kind of modern wars. It’s interesting you understand it sort of in relation to that, as opposed to Israel. And Israel, obviously, is an undeclared nuclear power. Everyone knows that, but no one says it. They’re not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Iran is a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty. How much is it about Israel, I guess, is the question? The Israelis think it’s all about them. And again, I understand why they do because it’s a regime that’s, implacably hostile to them. No question, both in actions and words. But how much do you think it was about Israel?
Robert Malley: It’s hard, hard to disentangle, right? I mean, they do have this ideological foundation of being anti-Israel, anti-U.S. It’s been sort of the raw material on which the revolution has sought to prosper for a long time. Whether the reason they developed a nuclear weapon or tried to develop a nuclear weapon years passed was because of Israel or because of just their sense of encirclement because it’s not just Israel. I mean, Iran, as I said, during the Iran-Iraq war, well, Iraq was being supported by the United States, by the Gulf countries, by Europeans, by Russia. So, you’re talking about a country that really was almost on its own.
And then in later years it has the United States at its border in Afghanistan, in later years still in Iraq. So, to some extent nuclear powers that are surrounding it from both sides, Pakistan, India. So I don’t think it’s only about Israel. The Israel piece certainly matters as an ideological component of the revolution, and this is where you hear Israelis and others say two things that are very hard to sort of put together. On the one hand they say that Iran is a fanatical irrational regime, which could use a nuclear weapon against Israel if it had one. On the other hand, it’s rational enough that it’s going to give into pressure, to coercion, to threats. So, pick one. It’s one or the other. They’re not both rational are going to give into rational arguments about the pressures, but also so irrational that they would basically commit suicide by using a nuclear weapon against a power that not only could retaliate in kind but has allies that could retaliate several times fold.
Chris Hayes: So, in hindsight, the negotiation seemed clear, right? You want a verifiable inspections regime with hard limits on the kinds of things that would be necessary precursors for weaponization, which is enriching uranium to 90%, which is weapons grade. Civilian use of uranium is around 5%. This is the big delta. That’s a thing that the International Atomic Energy Administration can monitor if they’re allowed to. And in exchange they want sanctions relief. So that’s sort of the trade here. How hard were those negotiations?
Robert Malley: I mean, they lasted for a very, very long time. They started before I joined the Obama administration, and they lasted for a long time because every issue you said is so technically complicated. What are the steps they need to take to be a year away from the possibility of acquiring a bomb? What are the steps they need to take so that it’s so visible, so transparent that we would know early enough and the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency would know well ahead of time that they were trying to break out?
And the sanctions relief, again, which turned out to be extremely complicated because we once described this as a spider web. The sanctions are so interrelated that you could take one off, two off, three off, but if the others remain you can’t really benefit from anything. So that took a long time. A lot of distrust. People always say, you’re naive, you’re trusting the Iranians. I think really that’s not a fair accusation because there were so many layers of guarantees and of transparency and monitoring. So, people liked to, again, if you looked on Wikipedia, they like to depict me a bit as a dogmatic or one-sided fanatic. I really do try to listen to my critics.
And I think on the JCPOA, those who say it wasn’t tight enough, I think nuclear experts at the time, objective ones, recognize that it did do what it said it would do, keep Iran away from a bomb at least for a year, for 10 years.
I think the fair criticism is what about the out years? What happens after year 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 by 2030? So five years from now, had we still been in the deal, the constraints, many of the constraints would’ve been off. But again, the question is if you have 10 to 15 years, can you try to either build a better relationship with Iran? And if that proves impossible, negotiate another deal, a deal that would continue. As it happens often in arms treaty agreements, you have follow on agreements all the time.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. SALT II, yeah.
Robert Malley: Exactly. So again, I take the criticism. I think it was really often issued in bad faith because now we see those same people who are applauding military action, which it’s not putting back Iran’s nuclear program by that much or by much more.
Chris Hayes: Well, so here’s my question to you. If we’re dealing with a bunch of rational actors here, right? With different motives, different institutional bearings and different experiences that color, but fundamentally rational actors. The U.S. a rational actor, Iran and Israel a rational actor. Now, so what happens is the deal finally gets announced and ironed out. It’s very clear it can’t be a treaty because it won’t have the votes, the constitutional votes for which is 66. Is it two-thirds, a treaty? I think it’s 66 in the constitution.
Robert Malley: Yeah. Yeah, two-thirds.
Chris Hayes: So you need 66 votes. There’s no way they’re going to get 66 votes. Now, part of the reason they’re not going to get 66 votes is that the Israeli government hates this deal. And the Israeli lobby in the U.S., which is a fairly strong lobby, particularly on these issues is going to lobby against it immediately. And in fact, you even get very high profile Democrats like Chuck Schumer, current Senate Minority Leader, and Robert Menendez recently reported to prison, who are staunch opponents of the deal. Why are the Israelis, why do they hate this deal so much if it does what you say it does?
Robert Malley: So, again, I try a lot of time trying to understand the Israeli perspective. I think they have convinced themselves that any remote possibility that Iran could acquire a bomb would be an existential threat. Some Israelis have challenged that, but I do think if you had played out this deal, it did mean that Iran would have greater economic resources, no doubt about it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robert Malley: And they could use those resources in all kinds of ways.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robert Malley: And I don’t think either President Obama or his team were naive in thinking that none of that money would go to supporting Hamas, as well as the Houthis —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robert Malley: — ballistic missile program. I mean, those are always priorities. So even under sanctions, they spent a disproportionate amount of their money on what they consider to be their national security objectives. But sanctions or no sanctions, they would do it, and without sanctions they’d have more with which to do it. So I think Israel didn’t like the prospect of an Iran that would be more normal, have more international economic transactions with Europe, with the U.S. perhaps, that given their relationship with Iran was something they considered a threat and they did what they could to undo it.
Chris Hayes: Right. And so, that’s interesting. So from the U.S. perspective, if you’re single mindedly, like they cannot have a nuclear weapon. There’s a whole bunch of issues we have with them. Let’s put those aside for a moment. Let’s work on this and let’s get to yes on this, and then you do, do that, right. And it’s pretty transparent and they’re not enriching uranium. And from the Israeli perspective, it’s like they have encircled us with what they call the access of resistance. They’re helping Assad in Syria and his civil war. They’re funding Hezbollah right to our north. There’s money from them flowing into Hamas. They’re also helping the Houthis, right. The Saudis also view them as fundamentally opposed to their interest and encircling them. And for a bit of time, there’s a kind of Saudi-Iran proxy war being waged in Yemen.
So from, from the Israeli perspective, it’s like, if you get rid of the nuclear threat, but you trade this sort of money/a pathway to something that looks like normalization, that’s very, very threatening to them.
Robert Malley: Yeah. In some ways I think Prime Minister Netanyahu was caught on by his own argument. He’s the one, you remember, he had this cartoonish picture —
Chris Hayes: I remember, yeah.
Robert Malley: — of Iranian bomb and saying, if you enrich at over 20%, whatever. So they made this nuclear issue into the —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robert Malley: — of the Iranian threat.
Chris Hayes: And then you called the bluff.
Robert Malley: Exactly. And so, then Obama comes and says, I’m taking care of it for you. And they say, well, what about all the rest? So, Obama made the argument. Yes, we get all the rest, but imagine all the rest with the nuclear bomb. So we’re going to at least take care of that problem. So I do think to that extent, the Israelis were a bit caught up in their own argument. I mean, they weren’t able to block the deal despite all their efforts in the U.S. They had more success when President Trump was in office.
Chris Hayes: Right. So, I mean, what ends up happening is this becomes a huge issue on the right. And not just the right, among some Democrats, and particularly for APAC and for lobbyists on the Hill. And Trump says he is going to rip it up if he gets elected. He gets elected. At first, it looks like maybe he’s not going to do it. I think he’s kind of counseled not to, but then he does.
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Then you’re the envoy in the Biden administration. And my understanding is there are some talks about getting the band back together.
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That end up not going anywhere. I mean, I feel like I don’t really need to know much to understand why I didn’t go anywhere, because why would anyone do this a second time? But what was the second time around like?
Robert Malley: So first, I don’t want to jump over too quick. I don’t want to spend much time, but the decision by President Trump to withdraw from the deal, there are many people here, and some Democrats, as you said, who believed in his theory of the case, which is maximum pressure, what he called absolute, trying to bring the Iranian oil exports to zero, getting everyone to abide by those sanctions. That would lead Iran to give up its program or to give up its network of allies and come to the table and surrender. It didn’t happen. And it is so clear, when you look at the graphics, of how, and I think you’ve shown them.
Chris Hayes: We shot it on my show. Yeah.
Robert Malley: Right. How Iran’s nuclear program, it’s level of enrichment, number of centrifuges, research and developments, everything exploded gradually, but since 2018. So that theory of the case, I think, we really need to put to rest. Now you’re asking about the Biden administration. It’s still a bit raw. As you know, and out of fairness, I was suspended in 2023 for reasons they are still unclear to me, but my sense is both sides, both their Supreme Leader and our Supreme Leader, President Biden, were okay with the deal, but not desperate for one. And they could live without, and they felt that the other side needed it more than they did. I think they were wrong on both counts. I think both needed it more than they thought and both overestimated how much the other one wanted it.
So we started a bit slowly. We started late. We started talking even about, well, we need a deal that’s going to be longer and stronger, which were talking points from the Republicans, but we kind of endorsed them. But at one point I think, the White House decided, yeah, well, let’s try to get it. We never got there many reasons. I think there’s one reason and you just alluded to it, which maybe we never were able to overcome. If you are the Iranian leadership and you know what happened in 2018, and you’re saying to the Americans give us a guarantee it won’t happen again, and they asked us that constantly.
Our answer was indirectly, because they wouldn’t speak to us directly. We can’t give you a guarantee. There’s nothing in the U.S. law that will prevent a future president, even if we made it a treaty, which we can’t. We’ve seen a future president could rip it up. And I think they were wondering whether President Trump himself may not be the successor. So I don’t know. Looking back, I’m not sure what it would’ve taken for them to agree to dismantle their program once more, agree to these intrusive inspections and then sign on to the deal only to see it sort of Lucy and the football happen to them.
Once again, I think in that sense they may have made a mistake because if the deal had been reached early on, at a minimum, they would’ve been able to benefit from some of the sanctions relief. And then if the deal was torn up, the deal was torn up. But I think there was a combination of factors, as I say, sort of tepid views on both sides, divisions and both teams, both the American team and the Iranian team. And I thought not early on, but it dawned on me at some point that if neither side really wants it, we’re not going to get there.
Chris Hayes: I’m very curious. I have never been part of high stakes international negotiations. So, what’s the room like? Will you just take me through a day of the Iran negotiations? Like literally, it’s a hotel room in some third country, there’s 10 people —
Robert Malley: Depends which negotiations, 2015 or 2021. They’re very different because the Iranians —
Chris Hayes: Okay. So the ‘15 ones —
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — were directly with the Iranians.
Robert Malley: Right.
Chris Hayes: Right. So what were those like? Where were they and what was a day like in those negotiations?
Robert Malley: Those were in Vienna. And I think, I now teach and this is something I always find fascinating to teach. People are interested in diplomacy because in order for the U.S. to negotiate with Iran first, you needed agreement within the U.S. team, and it wasn’t a given. I mean, not everyone had exactly the same view yet. Some people whose memories of Iran were only of Iran backing and funding and giving weapons to Iraqi Shia militia that had killed Americans. So, they were not at all happy about the notion of sanctions relief.
So you had to bring all the American team together. Then you had to get the Americans on the same page as the Europeans, our allies, but some of them had different views, the French, the Germans and the U.K. You also had to bring in the Russians and the Chinese because they were part of what’s known as the P5+1, the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany who were negotiating with Iran. You had to make sure Congress, and Democrats in Congress in particular, not too far field. You had the Israel factor. You had the Gulf Arab factor. They at the time were not in favor of a deal. And only at that point, you then face the Iranian.
So it was a multi-layered negotiation. I’m sure the Iranians had their own. They had their own factions. The people at the tables tended to be quote, unquote, “more pragmatic” than the ones back home. So the mere fact that it happened in some ways is a miracle, but I think it went to the bottom line of what was missing in 2021. Obama felt strongly, we need this deal or we’re going to go to war. And the Iranians felt strongly if we don’t have this deal and they thought this deal would last, our economy could be in shamble. So the mathematics of the deal, the geometry of the deal worked, the physics of the deal worked in 2015, ‘16. There were shouting matches that Secretary Kerry had with the Iranian foreign ministry at the time, Javad Sharif, people walking out of rooms, throwing their papers, pens flying.
Chris Hayes: I mean, wait, to say more about that though, so again, you’re in a room, you’re in a hotel room somewhere or you’re in a —
Robert Malley: Yeah, it was in Vienna. There’s this one hotel, the Coburg Hotel. We were there nonstop for actually a month. So there were other —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robert Malley: — negotiations before, but the bulk of it was one month, basically from —
Chris Hayes: Is it one room with a big table?
Robert Malley: So, as I just described the different layers, but when we met one on one with the Iranians, it’s one room with one table there on one side, we’re on the other. Most of the talking is between the leadership, John Kerry and Javad Zarif. And Javad Zarif could get very emotional. Part of it was choreographed and jump up and have coughing fits and leave the room, but that was that.
Chris Hayes: Wait, you sit there taking notes.
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: How many does each team have?
Robert Malley: I’d say there were probably four or five, and then were the technical teams that were meeting at the same time because I’m the nuclear expert.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robert Malley: I’m not a sanctions expert. So you have Treasury Department and nuclear physicist meeting with their Iranian counterparts at the same time. It really was a five-ring circus and give a lot of credit to Wendy Sherman. She was the political director at the time. And just to herd these cats, and by cats, I mean the U.S. team, and then get all the others online. That was not an obvious thing, but I don’t put too much stock in the notion that it’s a matter of personal chemistry. I think if natural interests dictate that you’re going to get a deal, you’re going to get a deal.
But the chemistry between Secretary Kerry and the foreign minister of Iran, they had many fights, but they had sort of a basic understanding. Secretary Moniz and nuclear expert, Ali Salehi, who was his counterpart on the Iranian team, both had gone to MIT. So they would trade stories about professors they knew. So none of that is to say that we were chummy buddies and we knew that everything was going to be fine, but that did help. What helped more than anything, I think, as I said, was a decision at the top that it was worth their national interest to take the obvious risks that both sides were taking to reach a deal.
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Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: What was your reaction when the deal got ripped up in the Trump administration?
Robert Malley: So I think we saw it coming. It wasn’t as if President Trump was hiding his card.
Chris Hayes: No, he said he was going to do it. I mean.
Robert Malley: He said he was going to do it. It was almost surprising that it lasted sort of a year or so, but then he was surrounded by people in his administration at that time, initially, as you said, by people who were a little more reluctant to tear it up. The Europeans were telling them, no, no, no. Let’s try to negotiate some added aspects to the deal that are going to address your concerns, but let’s not rip it up. I really didn’t know what would happen then.
I did suspect that President Trump would want to do his own deal. He didn’t like the fact that it was an Obama deal. Maybe he could do his own and it could be different from the JCPOA, obviously, but the basic trade off, limitations on the nuclear program, lifting of sanctions. That’s going to be true no matter what the deal looks like. And so, I thought maybe he could do it as long as it was with his big signature at the end of the document.
Chris Hayes: And it looked like that was the avenue he was pursuing this time around.
Robert Malley: Sure.
Chris Hayes: I mean, Steve Witkoff, his sort of personal Envoy is like a New York real estate dude with no, I think, formal experience in state-to-state international negotiations. He’s flying to the Gulf to Oman when the Israelis started launching their missiles at Iran. Where do you think the actions of the last few weeks leave us, leave the region?
Robert Malley: So first just the comments because you’re absolutely right. I mean, Steve Witkoff in some ways was making more progress than one would’ve expected because he came at it without any of the baggage and the sort of conventional thinking. He was open-minded.
Chris Hayes: Also, he had —
Robert Malley: And so some —
Chris Hayes: He didn’t have to do any cat herding. I mean, the thing about the way that administration works —
Robert Malley: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — it’s like a personal dictatorship, so.
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s like the Supreme Leader. So, he’s not running an interagency process. He’s not getting —
Robert Malley: Right.
Chris Hayes: — buy in from the people at (inaudible) at state and blah, blah, blah. I know —
Robert Malley: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: — how these bureaucracies function, the thing you were just describing.
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So it’s just like, you’re making a deal with the boss’ guy.
Robert Malley: And I’d say this. I mean, this may be controversial. I think the aspects of the Trump presidency that we need to, if not emulate, think about more is that he was not captive to the foreign policy establishment. He wasn’t captive to the whole sort of democratic conventional foreign policy thinking, which leads to a lot of the assumptions about Iran and assumption about what we can and cannot do and who he can talk to and who he can’t talk to. President Trump is above all that. I mean, he feels like he’s indebted to nobody. He’s the king, as you say and so only what he wants. What he wants is what is his movement, right, that’s what he says. America first is whatever I say it is. The flip side of that, I mean, if his instincts then were sort of, let’s try to do something that’s good for peace, good for whatever, but what he falls back on, if it’s not the foreign policy establishments are his instincts, his ego, his narcissism, his delusions of grandeur. So I think we need to take from his presidency the capacity to overcome some of those cobwebs and those conventions that I think have haunted the Democratic Party for too long and have a more progressive foreign policy. But it doesn’t follow an individual’s instinct —
Chris Hayes: No, Well, a great example of this —
Robert Malley: — but something else.
Chris Hayes: — was direct negotiations with Hamas for American hostages.
Robert Malley: A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
Chris Hayes: It was insane to me that Biden didn’t do that.
Robert Malley: Yeah, so. We’ll come to that when we talk about the book, but so coming back to what I think happened and where this lead us, I’m not a psychologist and I think you’d have to be a psychologist to really understand where President Trump was going. I think, it’s sort of seat of the pants. I think he wanted a deal. If he could get one, he would want it to be quick. He wanted to be clean. And if Steve Witkoff could have gotten that, he would’ve. He got a bit bored with it, right.
Chris Hayes: He doesn’t want to do a lot of work is a key thing here. Like, he’s not going to put his nose to the grindstone for five months on something.
Robert Malley: No. Exactly. And so, that’s why he said two months, which was always unrealistic. The Iranians are not surrendering. They are not going to give up their right to enrich, which is what they were being asked to do at some point. And then he was getting countering pressures from the MAGA movement, from others in the Republican Party, from Israel, and he was presented with this option, which is you could be the first American president to do what nobody else dreamt of, which is to actually get rid of the nuclear program by using this amazing bomb, the first time it will be used in war time, extraordinary, and your hands will then be much stronger to get the Iranians to surrender in the way you want them to.
And I think at that point, it just became knowing that Israel might do it anyway, and he didn’t want to stop them. That became the more tempting option. I mean, where we are today, it’s not odd because all three sides are claiming victory, right? Iran is saying we stood up to the great and we’re still standing. And for all their delusions of regime change and getting rid about nuclear program, we still have it and we’re still here. Netanyahu can say, he’s the first prime minister of Israel actually went after this nuclear program, which has been defined as an existential threat and managed to bring an American president to attack the program. That’s a huge victory. I know there’s controversy, but I think it’s clear to say that the nuclear program has been set back.
And President Trump could say, I’m the one who both went to war, constrained Israelis, and then got a ceasefire. The problem is when you have three countries or entities that are so opposed to one another, each one thinks that they won, at least one of them is wrong and I’m afraid that one of them is going to find that out.
Chris Hayes: That seems right. I mean, you talked about you’re not, obviously, a technical expert on this stuff, but there are a bunch of technical questions now about what the bombs did and didn’t do.
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: How far it’s been set back. I saw an Israeli intelligence assessment that said that Fordow, which is one of the three. It’s Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan was inoperable. Yesterday there was a leaked defense intelligence agency, low confidence assessment saying that basically a temporary setback of about six months in terms of the timeline of weaponization. There’s a question about where all the highly enriched uranium went. There’s a question about whether there are facilities that are even deeper, underground, or adjacent. How much do you know about that and what would you even be looking for to understand the status of the program?
Robert Malley: So, I mean, it is very murky. I’d say, as the dust is still settling, we’re in a situation where the Iranians probably want a bomb more than they did in the past.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robert Malley: We know, right, and that would make sense, right. We know less about what they’re doing than we did in the past because we don’t know where they put the enriched uranium. We don’t know whether they have or how much they’ve been able to hold on to. So greater aspiration, less visibility is not a good combination. Now, that being said, I don’t want to claim that they’re very close to bomb. No doubt. Even if Fordow and Natanz are not fully eviscerated, it’s going to be very hard for the Iranians to dig out from under that rubble, see what’s happening. And doing all that, and the, the Israelis are going to be watching every step they take.
Chris Hayes: Watching, yeah.
Robert Malley: So, I do think a military option was the wrong one for all kinds of reasons. It doesn’t fully take care of the problem. It leads to all kinds of uncertainties and unpredictable outcomes that I think we’re going to live with, not just in the coming days, weeks, but also months and years. So I think that it was the wrong option to take, but I’m not going to say that I expect Iran is going to get a bomb anytime soon. I think as the president said, it’s probably not foremost on their mind, but I think we have planted the seed, as you’re saying, of a regime that thinks, you know, at some points we may have to do it because nothing else has worked.
Chris Hayes: What do you think about the broader context here is, you know, my understanding, my read of the Israeli mindset on this is basically goes like this? October 7th was a wake-up call. We can’t tolerate threats on our border from anyone. We are going to destroy Hamas, which, as of yet, not actually happened, which I think even Israeli intelligence and political leaders will tell you is the truth.
There’s a memo that Donald Rumsfeld writes, I want to say, maybe on September 11th or maybe a day after. It’s a famous memo where he says, clean it all up, things related and not, and that becomes essentially the seeds of the U.S. war in Iraq. There’s a sort of similar logic you can see here, which is, this is a wake-up call and they have had spectacular military intelligence successes against Hezbollah. Hezbollah is probably weaker than it’s been in a long time. The Assad regime, which is an antagonistic regime next door, and a sheer regime that’s, well, Alawite regime, but Shia and sympathetic, the Iranians and backed by them, has fallen. And the Iranians are looking weaker than they’ve ever looked. And so, from their perspective, from just a strategic perspective, it’s like when you got the enemy on their back, you kick them in the head.
Robert Malley: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, my good friend, Matt Duss, who I’m sure you know, came up with his expression, knowing Gaza, what Israel’s been doing now for decade plus is what they call mow the lawn. Every time they thought that Hamas would rear its head again, they would mow the lawn and take care of it. We saw what happened on October 7th. But as Matt Duss says, we now have a regional mow the lawn strategy, which is anytime, because they have such superiority, complete mastery of the air, complete mastery of land where they want to, anytime they see even the potential of a punitive threat, they’ll take care of it and they’ll take care of it preventively, preemptively, everything that international law says you shouldn’t, but that’s not their preoccupation right now.
So I think we’re going to see that in the West Bank. We have seen it and not enough attention to be given to that, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, despite the fact that we now have a regime in Syria that says we have no hostile intentions towards Israel. They still are going after it to weaken it as much as possible, and Iran.
Chris Hayes: They bombed Syria before it had a government. They took preventative —
Robert Malley: I mean —
Chris Hayes: — bombings against Syria —
Robert Malley: Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: — before there was even a government to be at war with.
Robert Malley: Right. I put myself in every kind of shoe, I get it from Israel’s perspective.
Chris Hayes: Oh, totally. Yeah. No.
Robert Malley: When else they’re going to have this opportunity?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robert Malley: I mean, my complaints go more to the U.S. under the Biden administration. My expectations of Trump were not as much and of the Europeans, that’s a different issue. But I mean, the fact that Israel had this appetite, and an appetite was only going to get greater because of what they suffered, really suffered on October 7th. That was a trauma that they still haven’t gotten over, but also because they saw how much success they could have. So, when was this going to come again? I think others had the responsibility to try to think longer term and they failed.
Chris Hayes: How do you think about your relationship to the region as the son of two Jewish Arab nationalists, I guess, and someone who’s worked across the divide and has been a negotiator for the great American hegemonic empire, which has done a lot of pretty nasty things in that region. Not all, but some. How do you assess, I don’t know, like, how do you feel emotionally about all this? Or are you such a professional and you’ve done this for so long that there’s like you’re distanced enough from it?
Robert Malley: No, I don’t think I’m distanced enough from it. I mean, and it’s not just now. I mean, frankly, anyone who’s worked on the Middle East now for, I don’t know how long and whether it’s Israel, Palestine, or the rest of the region, it’s been almost one heartbreak after another. And the notion of a new generation now of Arabs, Muslims we’re going to grow up with this image of the United States, this image of Israel, this image of the west is not something that I think anyone could look at and be complacent about. I mean, you started with my father, which I appreciate. I’m not my father. I don’t have the same view he had —
Chris Hayes: Totally, yeah.
Robert Malley: — and I think he was quite stunned and as you said, I mean, maybe stole the words in his mouth, how could his son be working for the evil empire? But I took from that. I think I could understand not perfectly, but better than many of my colleagues how it looks from the outside, how some of our actions, whether we could still take them, but let’s not pretend that we could come up with these moral arguments that they’re going to believe in. And of course the double standard between Russia, Ukraine and Gaza, and again, things that we could talk about when we talk about the book.
But I think a sensitivity to that is something that sometimes is lacking. And that for my upbringing, it is maybe easier for me to get. Again, you reach whatever policy conclusion you want to, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that the image of the U.S. that you want to project is the one that’s being received.
Chris Hayes: The trauma that you talk about, which I think is kind of not separable from everything that followed, I mean, Netanyahu has wanted to do this for 20 years, he’s on the record. The Israelis did bomb the Iraqi nuclear facilities when Saddam was saying they had them. And I think, to be honest, probably a good move, like that probably ended up being the right thing. I think the Israelis certainly seen that. There are a lot of people who think, yeah, that probably bought the world some optionality that was then sort of destroyed by the American invasion. But I guess I feel like that trauma is a little, the trauma in the sense of existential peril ends up being at the core of Israeli action and then kind of American political action because the people that feel that trauma the most powerfully are the folks that are working the hardest on the Hill to support Israel in a mission that they view totally, I think, uncynically, right? Like they all believe it’s existential and that’s part of the power and the force they are mobilized.
Robert Malley: Yeah. I mean, listen, and I don’t want to claim that I can understand either the Israeli psyche or even our psyche but I do think as you say, it’s almost hard to disentangle to what extent the feelings of existential threat are genuine, and then to what extent they become sort of manipulated and operationalized in order to achieve other goals, and one bleeds into the other. And so, I —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robert Malley: — hear from Israelis who I take very seriously, who are serious people. And as I say, they speak about Iran as an existential threat. And the contradiction I pointed to earlier, an irrational actor when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons, irrational actor when it comes to the threat of the use of force and of sanctions, but also a country, which is an existential threat, but also a country that you could dispose of in basically a week. I mean —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robert Malley: — these contradictions live in Israeli minds. I do think there’s some in Israel who are very cynical about this. And others, that’s what you’ve been grown up to believe in. You don’t really know anymore what is truth and what is fiction. I do think that applies very much to us. There’s some dogmas that if you want to be part of the grand priesthood of American foreign policy, you can’t question. I hope that that change that has begun to change at least with some members of Congress and with the younger generation, certainly on campuses, but there is this sort of this collection of dogmas that if you dare question them, you risk no longer being invited in the room and people want to be in the room in order to have some impact.
So, but I think those are all great questions about how much of this is genuine. How much of this has become politicized.
Chris Hayes: Where do you see this leaving Iran? I mean, you’re not specifically like an Iran expert, but you did spend a lot of time working on this and being the Iran envoy.
Robert Malley: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, they are a much weaker regime now, in terms of projection of force abroad. I think for a very long time, everything that I’ve read and from people I trust who are not just kind of propagandistic like regime change, obsessed neocons. Like, it is a decrepit regime inside, like it’s amount of support. I was even talking to a journalist, is very interesting, who was talking about the difference between like Chinese state minders and Iranian state minders and how like the Chinese state minders like take their job seriously and like are part of the ruling party and also want like want to do their job. And the Iranian state minders are like, you could be like, let me do my thing for a day and then you’ll still collect a paycheck. They like, let you do it. There was like a real difference in just like the vibrancy at the ground level of just sort of regime control. And I wonder where you think this leaves the regime.
Robert Malley: So I think we have to think in phases short and long. I mean, people who thought that the Israeli strikes on Iran was going to lead to an uprising. Obviously, they had that wrong. I mean, there’s a lot of anger, you said it, from the people against the regime, but when you’re being bombed by another country —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robert Malley: — and they’re bombing, not just nuclear facilities, but hospitals and killing civilians. I have a lot of friends, Iranian-Americans who live here, very anti-regime, but their family members back home were saying what the hell’s going on and we’re becoming more nationalist. So I think there’s that. It doesn’t necessarily translate at all into support for the regime, but support for Iran (inaudible) Iran.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robert Malley: I think longer term and we could think when I just talked about the Iranian people, I think there’s going to be a reckoning at some point. I mean, think of a regime that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars since the revolution on what? On a nuclear program, ballistic missile program, air defense, and alliance with Russia and China, proxy militia or militias like Hezbollah. All that is up in smoke and what do they have left to go for?
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Robert Malley: So, that reckoning will come.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robert Malley: When it comes, I don’t know. And again, people who talk about regime change around the corner, first of all, when it comes from the outside, we have a terrible record at doing it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robert Malley: And even the inside, I mean, you have a regime that seems to be prepared to kill and die to survive. I’m not sure that the people right now want to go through that. At some point, the regime will collapse. I think this is not the kind of regime that is made to last forever, but I don’t know when that time will be, and it itself is thinking very long term. I’m sure right now, this is just one scene in a very long movie in terms of its relationship with the U.S. and with Israel. And at some point they’ll be thinking, how do they make sure that the next stage of the movie is more than liking.
Chris Hayes: Robert Malley was the lead negotiator for the 2015 nuclear deal. He’s a lecturer at Yale University. He’s got a book that will come out this September called “Tomorrow’s Yesterday: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel, Palestine.” It’s out in September. It’s co-authored with Hussein Agha and I would love to have you two gentlemen back on the program for that book. It was great to have you, Rob. Thanks so much.
Robert Malley: Thanks so much for giving me the time. It’s always good to be with you, Chris.
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