U.S. President Donald Trump says he is considering restarting major combat operations in Iran after the breakdown of the memorandum of understanding between the two warring countries. According to veteran U.S. diplomat Robert Malley, who was a lead negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal under President Obama, predicting what happens next is an impossible task.
“I’ve come to the point where any sentence that tries to predict where we’re going and that has the word Trump in it is a fool’s errand,” Malley tells Mehdi. Still, building on his experience as both a lead negotiator with Iran and as President Biden’s Special Envoy for the Islamic Republic, he says “if you were an Iranian leader today, you certainly would be thinking more concretely about whether or not to develop a nuclear weapon than you have in the past. It would be a logical thing to do.”
Malley, who describes the U.S. war with Iran as “the first worldwide globalized guerrilla warfare,” says U.S. strikes on the Islamic Republic are “violating the laws of war,” and adds that the outcome of the conflict would be “worse than where we would be if the [2015] deal was still being respected.”
The former peace negotiator also spoke about other Middle East conflicts and accountability for them on home soil, including:
Why Lebanon’s peace agreement with Israel “will be stillborn”
How the U.S.’s relationship with Israel and the Middle East needs to change
Why there needs to be more accountability for former Biden officials who fueled the genocide in Gaza
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