President Trump is angry at NATO again, insulting the alliance as a quote paper tiger for not supporting his effort to open the straight of Hermuz even as he sends more Marines to possibly do that very job.

The war is intensifying in some ways and Iran appears unready to fold, though its offensive and defensive capabilities have been quite obviously degraded by continued American and Israeli strikes.

One question hovering all of this.

If and when the Arab states of the Gulf under Iranian attack themselves join the fight.

Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Idris Ali is a national security correspondent and Pentagon correspondent at Reuters.

Steven Hayes is the editor of The Dispatch.

Vivian Salama is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

And David Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent at the New York Times.

Thank you all for being here.

Let me start by reading you, showing you something that Donald Trump just posted on Truth Social.

It's his conditions.

Uh he he's arguing, it seems, today that most of the conditions for ending the war have been met.

He says that um the goals of America include completely degrading Iranian missile capability, launchers, and everything else pertaining to them.

Destroying Iran's defense industrial base, eliminating their navy and air force, including anti-aircraft weaponry, never allowing Iran to get even close to nuclear capability, protecting at the highest level our Middle Eastern allies.

So David, in another presidency, we would say, oh, the president has issued a statement saying that the war is winding down.

But in this presidency, what he says today might not be relevant tomorrow.

Is the war winding down?

Well, the opening sentence of his statement, Jeff, said as the war is winding down.

That's why I'm asking, but I don't I'm not taking it at face value.

But uh at the same time, you could argue the war is winding up because he is uh sending more Marines in.

He is increasing the pace of the attacks.

And we can talk later about what kind of targets they are hitting.

What struck me about the statement was a few things.

First of all, what it was missing.

You may remember that when the war began in the opening hours, he talked about so wiping out the Iranian government that the people could rise up and take over their government.

that was gone here because he recognizes that if he leaves sometime soon, he's going to be left with a rump Islamic revolutionary guard core, right, center to the state.

Um he softened his language a little bit about the nuclear program, making sure that they couldn't um gain access to it.

Well, that's very different from making sure that all the fuel is out of the country, which was their earlier goal.

And uh you saw suddenly he was saying to the allies um hey the patrolling the straight is your problem not our problem because we don't get oil through the straight you do.

Yeah.

The question is can he actually hand that over.

Yeah.

How do you read this?

I think as a Pentagon reporter we have learned over two now administrations watch what he's doing not what he's saying.

And like David mentioned he is sending 5,000 Marines.

they should be there in a couple of weeks.

The strikes have started to really ramp up.

We've seen about 7,000 targets hit so far.

And so the reality is if he is looking to wind down, he's not doing a very good job.

All the sort of uh tea leaves and and the movements indicate that this is going to get a lot tougher and a lot stronger really.

Are they running out of targets slowly but surely?

Well, it's it's basic math situation, right?

You hit 7,000 targets.

Iran is known to have about at least 6,000 missiles.

They produce 10,000 drones a month.

And so just basic mathwise, he's probably got a lot of targets he could hit.

And you know the one smaller and smaller smaller and smaller.

But the one important thing, right, we talk about the straight of Hormuz mines.

They have about 6,000 mines available.

And at some point you're going to run out of missiles to hit all these small small targets.

A small missile, a small drone can do a lot of damage, right?

Um Steve, you study the um evershifting moods of this White House and this president.

How do you interpret this?

Well, I think David's counsel is wise uh and and we're smart to pay attention to what the president is doing more than what he's saying.

He had meetings with allies today at the White House in conversations that military planners had with allies in the region.

There was no indication before the president's tweet tonight that anything had changed, that there was any move to actually draw down.

at to David's other point on the the war aims.

I mean, we've talked about it here before.

There are he's he's given many reasons, right?

But it was notable that not a word about the Iranian people.

When he gave an interview to the Washington Post 3 hours after the the air strikes began, he said, I will read it, all I want is freedom for the Iranian people.

And he talked about his legacy in conducting this war being that.

And tonight as he's announcing maybe the winding down of the war, not a mention.

But Vivian, to be fair to Trump, we've seen other presidents, both parties, make big promises about freedom for other peoples in the greater Middle East and elsewhere.

And then kind of reality sets in and well, maybe we're not going to change the politics and culture of an entire country.

Absolutely.

So are we is that a refle is the omission a reflection of a kind of sober sobering reality?

I think the omission is part of the fact that he does not know what comes next.

And one of the interesting things about the post that he put on truth social was he can say that we're winding down because he has never quite defined what the endgame looks like, what victory looks like.

And so in this case, you know, he can say it today and then maybe change it tomorrow.

The objectives have also been sort of a moving target.

The president has for a time talked about freedom for uh the Iranian people, but we've also seen that that's not necessarily his mo.

It's not a priority for him in many of the operations that we've seen in recent months with Venezuela, for example.

Even though at one point the administration did talk about freedom for the Venezuelan people, once the mission was done and Nicholas Maduro was in US custody, the focus was economic.

It was we want the oil.

For President Trump right now, there's so much political blowback o over this war.

The military has been strained.

He realizes that they've taken on a lot more than they can chew.

And at this point, he wants to refocus the mission.

Wait, can I ask you about the strain on the military?

That's an interesting point because I I I've been thinking a lot about the fact that Iran is a third tier power.

Uh I mean, America has no true peer adversary.

China is a neareer adversary.

But imagine right now if China made a move across the straight of Taiwan and the US decided, the president decided that we're going to go defend Taiwan.

Continue on this theme.

Are we learning something about American limitations?

Oh, absolutely.

And one of the things that we, you know, all of us have been talking to our sources in government, but also some of our foreign sources.

And one of the things that we have heard repeatedly in the last few weeks is that the reason that presidents past did not do this although many of them would have loved to see regime change in Iran is because the Iranian government always had the ability to weaponize the straits and that was some sort of their superpower here and it was always going to be a losing battle with the US having to fight this military battle also worry about helping to defend Israel if they were to come under attack and then you open this third issue where it's you ensuring safe passage through the straits and making sure that uh you know ships get in and out and defending all of the Arabs and defend not to mention defending all the Arabs which has now opened Pandora's box for the US in terms of um challenges that they're going to be facing not to mention the destabilization of the energy markets and just layer upon layer again they bit more than they could chew and this is something that they're realizing stay on this because it's a really interesting question I mean it we have the greatest military in the history of the planet, the largest and most potent military in the history of the planet.

How much of a strain is this?

Yeah, I will point out Afghanistan, Iraq, the United States came out of those not necessarily winning, I would argue, right?

So, you can be the greatest military force, you can have tactical victories, but until you have a strategy that define is defined, it's not going to make a difference.

You know, look, Iran is, like you said, a third tier at best.

The Chinese are ramping up ship production, missile production.

They have capabilities that Iran could only dream of.

And so if you're struggling against an adversary like Iran, you're really going to struggle against China.

And this is with, you know, 50% of the air force is currently in the Middle East.

That's not currently the case.

David, is the United States actually struggling?

Well, what we're struggling with is achieving our political objectives.

Think about Well, we're struggling in in defining the political objectives even even as that far, but certainly in achieving the few that the president did lay out the night that the battle began.

So think about the previous two American attacks was there was one evening where the air force took out three major nuclear sites within uh Iran and then went home and so the political objective of setting back the nuclear program and the military objective were one for one.

Maduro same thing pulled him out of his bed in Kacus.

He ends up in the Brooklyn federal uh detention center.

Um, again a onefor-one match, but this time what we're trying to do is apply so much military pressure that the government itself would collapse and change.

And we haven't found in history a single time in modern times that you could bring about regime change just from the air.

And that's why all of a sudden there's all this discussion of do we need to put troops on the ground to grab Car Island which is where right or to get the nuclear material out of Isvahan where it's buried down deep and that's why this tends to result in mission creep.

You know we we should be clear though I mean we have had military success.

I mean, if Iran is a third rate power today, I mean, a nuclear armed Iran, and there's certainly room to debate how close they were or how close they were in June, um, would have been a significant threat.

I think we know from North Korea that it would have been a lot easier to manage North Korea and protect South Korea, if somebody had done this back then, right?

So, to me, the way to look at it is short-term success, military success in the short term, which I think we've had a lot.

They're a degraded power.

what the power that they had if they were a third rate they're a fifth rate now I think the real question is what now sort of what comes next in the medium and the long term and you know if you look at a regime that's you know badly uh damaged they've lost a lot of leaders but still in place the besiege militias still have power um they're angrier um you've got that you've shown them that the strait of Hormuz is problematic if they shut it we have uh Arab allies guys who are, you know, not wanting to get engaged offensively but don't want to sit back either.

There are plenty of medium and long-term problems that this definitely no question about the superiority of the American military.

The question is strategy then when the you know the Iranians go in and they start weaponizing the straits is the United States able to do that.

The president has publicly said this was going to take four to five weeks but we could go longer and really what's happening is that we're being drawn in longer because of the circumstances.

I I want to I I just want I I was really struck by something uh Wall Street Journal and other places reported this that um that I this is fairly remarkable.

You're talking about the limitations of air power to result in regime change.

But so you have Israeli dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr dr drones flying over loitering drones as they say loitering over tan and other cities targeting individual militia a siege and and Revg guard uh checkpoints and sites and the Israelis are getting tips from average Iranians uh hey there's a checkpoint over there at the corner of uh Elman Maple uh you might want to take it out.

I mean, that suggests to me that the Iranian society is at a tipping point, that they're that they're that they're pretty pleased that Israel and the US are degrading the the power of this hated regime.

Is that is that a sign that that maybe they are closer to tipping?

They may be.

And it could be that, you know, it takes months or years.

The fact of the matter is Iranian society doesn't have the guns and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard still does.

And the president 30,000 we think in in in a few days time, right?

Uh and that that was actually what instigated all of this, you know, as you pointed out from from from what you read.

So that's the president's first problem.

But his other problem is if you were to rank all of the challenges to the United States, is this the one that you want to be absorbing this much effort into?

Because every administration running up to this for the past 15 years has said it's China that is the number one technologic, military, economic competitor and are you basically handing it to them by lifting the sanctions on Russia?

Are you undercutting the efforts in Ukraine?

No, it's yet another presidency that is suffering the the Godfather dictim.

You know, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

Although this isn't really the same level of pull as it was after the 911 period.

This is a more of a legacy seeking.

This is it's legacy seeking.

It's also opportunistic.

It's also lacking strategy in in some ways.