A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
For more on this, we called Holly Dagres. She's a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She also writes The Iranist newsletter on Substack and spent her early years in Iran. So, Holly, with the midterms, just a few months away, how sophisticated is the Iran's regime understanding of the political pressure on President Trump?
HOLLY DAGRES: Well, I would say very much so. As the report noted, Iranian state media is monitoring very closely the U.S. elections, every word, every Tweet or Truth Social that the president puts out. And, of course, we have the Iranian foreign minister who is a fluent English speaker and got his Ph.D. in the United Kingdom, who I assume is also doomscrolling in the way that the president and Vice President J.D. Vance is. So they're monitoring everything because they understand that this is a very key moment for their country because of this existential threat. And so they're trying to maximalize their leverage in this moment and also in some ways hurt the president, in a different way, one that doesn't require kinetic action.
MARTÍNEZ: We just heard Hadeel Al-Shalchi mention the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, how that damaged Jimmy Carter's reelection bid. Is this a much different situation, though, because President Trump is not going to run for another term, and maybe he's not as concerned as maybe another president would be when it comes to Republicans keeping hold of things in the midterms?
DAGRES: Well, to your point, the president, if he was on the ballot, I think it would matter to him more. That being said, the optics of this election alone, if the Republicans were to lose the House and the Senate, the optics of it would make his presidency not look good. And just overall, when I look at the bigger picture, we make a lot of comparisons to President Jimmy Carter in the context of Iran. But I think the one thing that the president's worried about most, and he said this, is that he's worried about being compared to President Herbert Hoover, who is the Republican that was synonymous with the economic collapse after the Great Depression.
And so while this war, it's unclear how it's going to continue. The fact that Iran has been able to close the Strait of Hormuz and impact the global economy, cause rising gas prices here in the United States - and then there's this growing inflation here - I think that worry of what the U.S. economy will look like if this war drags out, that's really problematic, and what the optics will look like for the Trump presidency as it moves forward.
MARTÍNEZ: Do you think the Trump administration is as savvy as Iran is about the Iran regime and as deliberate?
DAGRES: I would say, unfortunately, the Iranians, especially when you have somebody like key negotiator Abbas Araghchi, who has had the Iran nuclear file for decades and worked alongside as a deputy foreign minister in a previous government, they have a really good read on U.S. thinking on Iran. And unfortunately, when I look at the terrain of the Trump administration, we have his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and one of his close friends as key negotiator, Steve Witkoff. They don't have a real deep read on Iran. And, of course, because of these firings over the years, they've fired some of the best and brightest on Iran. And as an Iran analyst myself here, I can say they've not been consulting many of us here in Washington either. So I think that there's an uneven advantage on this playing field at this juncture.
MARTÍNEZ: How much do you think that informs the way Iran negotiates with everything?
DAGRES: Well, I mean, I would say, because there's so much experience with somebody like Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, I think that if they really understand how to really push the buttons of negotiators - I remember, famously, in former negotiator Wendy Sherman's memoir, when she negotiated under the Barack Obama administration what became known as the Iran nuclear deal, she noted that at some point they had even made her cry. So, I mean, for me, there's a lot of maximalist demands being made in this moment because there's this recognition here that this is an unpopular war in the United States.
It's impacting the U.S. economy. And this has become effectively a strategy-less war. There's also these reports, as we know from the past week, about these interceptors running out. So, you know, all of this is sending a message to Iran that if we hold onto our maximalist demands long enough, we're going to get the deal that we want out of it. But it always has the option, of course...
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah.
DAGRES: ...Because we're dealing with a mercurial president like Donald Trump, that actually could backfire on the Iranians.
MARTÍNEZ: Holly Dagres is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Holly, thanks.
DAGRES: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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