Episode 54 - President Trump’s Iran Deal Announcement

Date: 2018-06-16 | Duration: 4:24

Topics

President Trump’s Contrast persuasion Initial thoughts on the situation

Transcript

[0:11] Hey everybody, you’re probably wondering about this Iran deal, so I thought I would tell you about it and give you my immediate reaction. This will be a quick one—just a quick reaction to the President’s announcement. So, not too surprising; he said he would do it, and he did it. But it’s sort of a pull-out that’s not really a pull-out because obviously he’s willing to renegotiate.

The parts that I liked about it in terms of persuasion—I’ll let you look at my dog—the parts I liked were he drew a picture of Iran after the mullahs, or at least with better leadership, an Iran in which they’re prosperous and respected by the world. So he’s clearly doing his contrast persuasion, and we don’t see it done this well by other people.

[1:12] He draws a picture of this great situation that they have in front of them if they make the right choices versus a crushed economy if they go the other way. I love the contrast part of it. I’m still calling foul on “sponsors of terrorism” because I think they’re bending the definition a little bit, because it sounds like it includes standing militaries. So if they’re helping a militia, or Hezbollah, or folks in Yemen, those are kind of standing armies now. You can call them terrorism, but we usually think of terrorism as the loner with the gun or a bomb. It’s a different kind of terrorism if that’s what they’re talking about. I object to that characterization of it because I think it just adds some noise to the situation.

[2:12] I think he laid out the case. The strongest part of the case goes like this: you can’t let a country that chants “Death to America” have nuclear weapons. If he had only said that and nothing else, I would have been sold. I didn’t need to hear they’re supporting terrorism—that’s good, but I didn’t need to hear it because you had me at “Death to America” plus nuclear weapons. There’s no scenario in which that is a comfortable situation.

So there might be some questions about what trouble they are up to aside from having missiles that we don’t like—which were not really part of the deal apparently—and having the capability to have nukes, which we don’t like.

[3:14] Those two things are good things to make sure that we tighten up. But I’m not buying the “supporting terrorism” unless you give me examples, and those examples have to be not standing militaries. Now, I understand that these standing militaries, at least in the case of Hezbollah, are a direct threat to Israel, so we can’t abide by that either. But if that’s what we mean when we say supporting terrorism, I think we could just say “supports Hezbollah,” and Hezbollah has done X things against Israel since the deal was signed.

So I need some specifics. It does seem to me that the President is credible in this, and he’s probably smart to at least push on the deal and see if we can get something better.

[4:14] That’s all I have for now. I’m going to go to the gym and do something else. Talk to you later.