Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 2/2/24

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The U.S. retaliates against Iranian assets after three American soldiers are killed in Jordan.

Will Iran and its militias back down or is this the beginning of a new phase in the decades-old confrontation between the US and the Islamic Republic, next.

Good evening and welcome to WASHINGTON WEEK.

U.S. forces are in the midst of a multi-pronged attack against Iranian targets in Syria and Iraq.

This attack, among the most telegraphed in recent memory, comes days after three soldiers, Sergeant Kennedy Sanders, William Rivers, and Breonna Moffett, were killed in a drone attack at a border post in Jordan.

The Middle East was already boiling and President Biden seems loath to escalate, but he also felt that he had no choice.

Will this attack successfully dissuade Iran and its militias from targeting U.S. forces?

Joining me to discuss this tonight, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, Susan Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker, Lara Seligman is a defense reporter for Politico, and Nancy Youssef is the national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

And I should note at the outset that Peter and Susan are married, which all of you at home know because you've all read their books, which they write together, which are excellent.

Nancy, let me start with you.

Just give us the latest on these retaliatory strikes.

Where are we right now?

NANCY YOUSSEF, National Security Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal: So, just a few hours ago, the United States launched a series of strikes on seven locations using 125 precision munitions, hitting 85 targets.

And this was their response to the death of those three service members that you mentioned on Sunday.

There were a couple of things that were different this time from some of the past strikes we've seen from the United States.

One, they were targeting Iranian paramilitary forces and we heard some more about strikes -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: As opposed to non-Iranian militia?

NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right.

That's right, that they were mentioning that they were going after Iranian paramilitary forces.

And we heard a little bit about their targets, and it's clear that based on the list we have so far, that they were going for logistics, essentially supplies provided by Iran to Iraq and Syria, in an effort to take away from their capability to do future strikes.

Where before we heard about warehouses, it seemed that they went a little - - they escalated in terms of the targeting, maybe command and control centers, where the computers were, where some of the planning might have happened, more advanced targeting of the kinds of capabilities that they need to do the kinds of strikes that they've launched against U.S. forces.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Lara, let me ask you this, because you were just at the Pentagon.

What do they think?

What do the United States military think it's achieving right now?

LARA SELIGMAN, Defense Reporter, Politico: Well, I think that a lot of what's achieving is symbolism.

I think that the president really telegraphed this week that there was going to be a response, that there was going to be a multi-tiered response, and this is really the first phase of that.

So, I think the symbolism is really big here.

They used long-range bombers that they flew from the United States.

They used the bombers when they want to send a signal of force.

I think they also are signaling that President Biden isn't going to stop, and I think there may be additional strikes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How many do you -- do you have any sense of how long this is going to go on?

LARA SELIGMAN: My guess is days, probably, I don't think it will be weeks.

And I also don't think that they're going to strike inside Iran.

And I don't think they're going to strike assets that we've heard about like Iranian naval vessels.

I think that would be too much of an escalation.

But it's interesting that they've escalated to the point of actually hitting the Quds Force this time.

That's important.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Tell us what the Quds force is.

LARA SELIGMAN: The Quds Force is this specialized branch of the IRGC, which is the Iranian militia.

It's very specialized in terms of it's the primary group that does covert action outside of Iran.

And, of course, it was, General Soleimani was in charge of the Quds Force for a long time.

He was the man the President Trump killed in a 2020 drone strike, and that led to a lot of tension in the area.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Susan, what would be the consequence of the U.S. actually attacking inside Iran?

SUSAN GLASSER, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Well, that would certainly define escalation, wouldn't it, Jeff?

I mean, you know, this is something that's been talked about.

What you heard in the immediate aftermath, in fact, of this deadly attack on the U.S. service members the other day, was immediately, you know, the large number of Republican hawks here in Washington demanding exactly that, saying strike them inside Iran, we should do this, do it now, you know, some senators beating their chest saying, you know, hit Tehran.

I think the U.S. military, right, they have a very different approach, which is to calibrate in response to what is the perceived attack that they're reacting to.

And this would be seen, I think, as something really going beyond that.

But here we are instead in this cycle once again.

It must feel so familiar to you as a longtime observer of the region, like, you know, again and again and again.

And, you know, the worry, of course, is that we're really not achieving much of anything at all, simply continuing a really deadly game.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I want to come back to that question in a minute about what America, or what President Biden thinks he's achieving here.

But, Peter, let me just ask you this, and I recognize that this question is speculative.

You don't have sources to the best of my knowledge in Kata'ib Hezbollah, which is the organization that we know of, the organization that launched the fatal attack.

But there is some talk that they themselves might have been surprised that they killed American soldiers, and that Iran realizes that, whoa, you know, in our little endless game, that Susan is referring to, this went too far.

We didn't actually mean for soldiers to die.

There have been plenty of attacks since October 7th, but this is the first.

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Exactly, they've had 160, 165 attacks or whatever since October 7th.

None had managed to successfully kill an American up until now because we have actually pretty good air defenses.

We've shot down a lot of stuff.

We have hardened targets.

They're not able to actually get to our folks.

And our people in the administration will say, look, this is not a fundamentally different attack other than the fact that they got lucky.

And they got lucky in a sense that we had an American drone coming back to that outpost in Jordan at the same time.

There's some discussion that perhaps the air defenses got confused and therefore the enemy drone managed to do something that had otherwise -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Their drone was drafting behind the American drone.

PETER BAKER: Exactly.

So, we don't know that they intended to escalate to the point of killing Americans, and that's part of the calculation here.

Does Iran want a wider war?

The intelligence and the administration agencies are saying, no, they don't think they do.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, Nancy, I want to stay on that for a second, because Kata'ib Hezbollah, all these militias across the Middle East, from the Houthis to Hezbollah, to Hamas in Gaza, have connections to the IRGC and for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence as well.

But we don't fully understand how much control day-to-day, month-to-month, the Iranian regime has over these groups.

Can you give us any insight about what this group that started this latest round of escalation, what this group was hoping to achieve?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, I think broadly what Iran is hoping to achieve is for the United States to leave the Middle East.

That's the overall objective in these strikes and that they're using these proxy groups to do it.

And so what the U.S. is doing in response is they are trying to do one of two things, either to make the cost of trying to drive the U.S. so high that they stop doing these attacks or that they lose the capability to be able to continue to do these strikes.

And I think we're seeing more of the latter, that the U.S. is trying to do enough strikes so that they don't have the capability to continue this campaign in an effort to drive the U.S. out of the Middle East.

And the challenge is by not going after Iranian leadership directly and going after the proxy forces, is that enough for them, because they're not paying the cost in Iran.

It's proxy forces in Syria, in Yemen, in Iraq who are paying the cost for these strikes.

And so what you're seeing the U.S. do is, I think, slowly escalate in terms of the types of strikes that they're doing.

We started with one facility.

We're now at seven.

Going after openly now Iranian paramilitary members in these countries is an effort to take away the capability and hopefully disincentivize.

But in terms of the objective, the objective is to drive the Americans out, to make the cost so high for the Americans that they decide to leave the region.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, Lara, you're an expert on the American response and the American presence in the Middle East.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this level of attack or retaliatory attack is not going to degrade the Iranian capabilities to any noticeable degree.

Am I wrong?

LARA SELIGMAN: I don't think so.

I think that Iran has many ways of resupplying their proxies in the Middle East in not just Yemen and Iraq and Syria, but all around the world.

I think they have many ways of doing that.

So, I do think that, again, this was more of a symbolic effort than anything else.

I think the idea is to show Iran that we're not going anywhere.

And I think, as Nancy said, that this is one of Iran's goals, is to push the U.S. and pressure us to leave the Middle East.

While at the same time, we also saw this week that Iraq actually started discussions with the U.S. about potentially withdrawing troops.

So, it's a very interesting coincidence that this happened at the same time.

But I don't think -- I think this is now the worst time, and the administration knows that to withdraw troops from either Iraq or Syria.

I think we're going to stay there for the long-term now.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to talk about the contrasting approaches to around Donald Trump's and Joe Biden in a second.

But one of the mysteries, at least to me, about this attack is that it's so foreseen.

I mean, we've been talking about it.

An official Washington has been talking about it for days.

I saw this quote from Nellie Bowles in the Free Press who wrote, it's a funny quote, the key to military strategy is to announce it loudly and clearly a week or two ahead of time.

That's what it said in The Art of War, I'm pretty sure.

I mean, there's a lot of talk about -- well, we spend days basically telling the Iranians, leave those sites.

We spend days telling them, oh, we're not going to hit Iran.

So, at what point does this symbolic gesture become futile?

I mean, what am I missing about the way they're calibrating the way they talk about this in the administration?

SUSAN GLASSER: Yes, calibrating is the right word, Jeff.

I think that's exactly what you're seeing here from the Biden administration.

First of all, let's put on the table the political reality, which I think you have to look at.

Right now, for President Biden embroiled in an existential fight, as he has defined it for American democracy against Donald Trump, the last thing he wants right now is to be engaged in a broader war in the Middle East.

This is, first of all, we can talk about it more, one of Donald Trump's main talking points, right, this idea that he was the guy who somehow withdrew the United States from foreign conflicts and didn't start any new wars.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

But let me just throw something into your mix here.

Donald Trump also is the guy who ordered the killing of Soleimani.

SUSAN GLASSER: Exactly.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, he wants to -- he's in isolationist except when he wants to punch the Iranians.

So -- SUSAN GLASSER: Exactly.

And by the way, you raised the premise, okay, did we lose something by telegraphing so loudly for days and days and days that we were going to take this action?

Recall back to 2016, this was one of Trump's main gripes about the U.S. presence in Syria, that we were too loudly sort of telegraphing what we were planning to do in terms of taking out the Islamic State, which he then promptly took credit for once the operations that had been planned in the previous administration were carried out at the very beginning of his tenure.

But, again, the politics of this, I think, are perceived as quite dangerous and risky for President Biden.

He obviously has a long-term challenge with China on his plate.

He's got the ongoing war in Ukraine that he pledged to support Ukraine for as long as it takes, and yet he's embroiled in a big fight with Congress to get them to step up and follow through on his ask for $60 billion in additional assistance.

He's got a whole world of challenges at a moment in time when Americans are extremely inward-looking and not having the appetite for a broader conflict in the Middle East.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, let me focus this a little bit more.

So, from the -- and I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second.

China is a near peer adversary of the United States in many respects, many defense respects.

Russia now is kind of second tier.

Iran is third tier.

So, to play devil's advocate, you talk about how bad it would be for Biden's re-election campaign to have a war with Iran.

But we've been in a cold war, and sometimes it's gotten a little hot, with Iran for 45 years.

There's no upside for the Biden administration to actually take on our historic adversary in the Middle East that is supporting all kinds of terrorist groups all over the world?

PETER BAKER: I mean, look, remember, Iran may be third tier, but Afghanistan was a hundredth tier, and look what they did.

I mean, you know, I mean, it doesn't have to be a truly incredible military to give us a lot of problems if we decide to take military action that becomes excessive, right?

And I think that Biden understands the zeitgeist of the country is not to get too involved in these wars.

And the Trump side of the political spectrum agrees with that.

Now, the hawkish parts of the Republican Party are out today, of course, criticizing him for taking too long, for being too weak, for not going after Iranian targets in Iran, and that's all legitimate debate to have, but they're not completely in agreement themselves, the Republican side of where they want to be at this point.

What haven't heard Donald Trump say, I would have hit them hard, or you've heard him say they wouldn't have hit us because of me if I was there, but he hasn't talked about what he would have done.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, speaking of Donald Trump, he posted on Truth Social the following.

This attack would never have happened if I was president, not even a chance, just like the Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel would never have happened, the war in Ukraine would never have happened, and we would right now, and this is where it goes to 11, we would right now have peace throughout the world, instead we are in the brink of World War 3.

Now, put aside the hyperbole, explain any of you -- because this is a $64,000, explain Republican foreign policy right now.

SUSAN GLASSER: If you put aside the hyperbole, Jeff, you're not left with an awful lot in - to dissect.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It starts off in a kind of a modulated way and then it unmodulates.

But -- SUSAN GLASSER: You're right.

This is the question right now, which is, what is Republican foreign policy?

They are a party divided.

And part of the dynamic that we've seen for eight full years now is that there is a fundamental -- not only a conflict, but actually incompatible worldviews between, you know, what you might call the old Republican foreign policy represented now by Mitch McConnell and, you know, some of -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Tom Cotton.

SUSAN GLASSER: Yes, exactly, the sort of hawkish foreign policy that, you know, inevitably invokes Ronald Reagan's name at least a million times.

You know, that world is the declining, but still influential part of the Republican Party.

You see Nikki Haley representing some of those views in the Republican primary campaign, but it's really -- it's on the downward slope.

The ascendant views are those of Trump's, what you might call, a sort of neo-isolationism, very muscular rhetoric, but at the same time, Trump very wary of military conflict.

You know, he loves nothing more than to brag about how he practically personally assassinated General Soleimani, but at the same time was very conflict averse.

And we all remember very vividly when Donald Trump ordered a series of strikes on Iran and then pulled them back at the last minute.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You wrote a lot about that, in fact, at the time.

Talk about that, do a little comparing contrast on these approaches.

LARA SELIGMAN: Yes, it's really interesting because Trump team has -- in this last week, they've said this wouldn't have happened under Trump's watch because look what Trump did.

He killed Soleimani and that restored deterrence in the Middle East.

They are missing many, many facts that happened along the way.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But to be fair, the Iranians immediately after Soleimani were kind of shocked that the United States actually assassinated their leading terrorist sponsor general.

LARA SELIGMAN: They did almost immediately launched strikes on Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq and they injured more than 100 soldiers.

And soon after that there was another actually deadly strike on a different base in Iraq and they killed two U.S. service members and a British service member and that was really shocking to us as well.

And since then they've continued these attacks on a lower level but these attacks have not stopped in the Biden administration either.

And, in fact, I think personally that the Biden administration wants rather than a war with Iran, I think they want to get back to the status quo, which is little attacks, which we know are not going to go away.

There's no way of stopping them as long as the U.S. is in the Middle East, but they want to go back to the status quo.

And at the root of that problem is Israel and Israel's campaign in Gaza.

And they know that this escalation in the Middle East is not going to stop until those operations stop and that I believe is what they really want to focus on before so to get that over.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Nancy, pick it up there.

The Biden team, until this past week, has been working mainly on both helping Israel defeat Hamas, but defeated in the way that the Americans want them to defeat it.

How does this, what we're seeing right now in Iraq and Syria, how does that play into those efforts?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, because if you're the U.S. and you want to mitigate the risk of escalation, the key to it is some sort of agreement on Israel.

Now, you could argue that Iran is exploiting what's happening in Israel to continue its campaign of trying to drive the Americans out.

But either way, between what's happening in the Red Sea with the Houthis and Iraq and Syria and the amount of resources that it has taken to defend the U.S. presence in the region at one point, two aircraft carrier strike groups, we've had destroyers there, that the resolution of that issue at least allows you to look at some sort of longer term reset in terms of what the U.S. force posture should be at the region.

Right now, you've had sort of a surge of air defenses, a surge of naval assets in response to this.

And in some cases, like the Houthis, they have said that once there is a ceasefire, they will stop.

And so I think for the Biden administration, the ceasefire is key.

And in terms of figuring out how to defend the United States presence long term, once that's resolved, it allows you to really figure out what your force allocation will be going forward in a more enduring way that you can start to move some of those resources out potentially and have a more sort of balanced presence in Europe, in Asia where there are also threats that the U.S. wants to address.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

You know, that brings up an interesting point about a country we don't talk about in the last three months, nearly as much as we used to, Ukraine.

And, I mean, there's obviously dramatic events taking place in Kyiv right now.

The very popular general in charge of Ukrainian armed forces seems to be on his way out, very adversarial with President Zelenskyy.

Susan, again, sorry, like a hard, synthesizing question.

But how does the American ever, the Biden administration's uphill effort to convince Republicans to keep and stay in the fight, how does all of this affect that?

SUSAN GLASSER: Oh, I think it absolutely does.

First of all, ever since October 7th, right, we've been in a dramatically different situation, which is that while the world has metastasizing crises, there's still only one president, there's only one White House National Security Council and this has been a consuming, consuming struggle.

And the extent to which the U.S. is now facing the prospect of escalating involvement in the Middle East, I think that is yet another point of distraction from Ukraine.

And, you know, right now, again, making the case to the American people about why it is the U.S. is engaged in these battles.

It's a really hard election year fight, frankly, for anyone and certainly someone who's running against Donald Trump.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, right.

Stay on Trump.

You two wrote a great book about Trump that dealt a lot with foreign policy.

I have to ask because there are a lot of people who believe this, and there's a there's a plausible argument to be made that Trump is the -- it takes the crazy -- the so-called crazy Nixon approach to foreign policy, which is, you know, Henry Kissinger deployed this with the Russians said, look, I'm saying, but the president I work for, he's crazy, you don't know what he's going to do, right?

And Trump's argument, not articulated as such, Trump's argument is nothing bad happens in the world when I'm president because everybody is so scared of me because I'll do anything.

I mean, is there some utility to that?

It comes back to this question about why do we telegraph what we're going to do so far in advance?

PETER BAKER: Yes.

Look, I think there is something to that in the sense that foreign leaders, and particularly our adversaries, have said that they don't know how Trump might react to things.

And they have calibrated their responses and their actions on the international stage in part to that unpredictability, that volatility.

But he also, of course, wants to give himself credit for everything that happens or doesn't happen in the world while he happened to be there.

The fact that Putin didn't invade Ukraine during his watch may only be because Putin didn't need to invade Ukraine during his watch, right?

Why did Putin invade Ukraine to keep them from going to the west?

Well, Donald Trump made it very clear he didn't want Ukraine in the West.

He considered Ukraine to be an enemy.

He thought that they were trying to dislodge him from the presidency.

He made that very clear.

And he certainly wasn't going to help them move into NATO.

So, Putin had already achieved what he wanted to achieve in that sense with Ukraine before Biden comes to office.

So, you can make that argument.

But, of course, Trump is going to make it easy for the American voters to simply say, I'm the guy who brought you great peace and nothing bad happened on my watch, which, again, is a misreading and certainly a rewriting of history, but does raise some interesting questions.

NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, you know, what's interesting, Peter, is we're seeing right now arguably that Putin is making a calculation in terms of the way ahead in Ukraine that if Trump is re-elected, that maybe I'll be in a better negotiating position, maybe the alliance will and Constitution for this war won't last through the year, that that combination allows me to actually get a better deal.

So, in some ways, there are foreign policy decisions being made precisely because they think they know what Trump would do if elected.

SUSAN GLASSER: Well, here, I have to say, like I agree with you that there's no -- it's literally zero incentive for Vladimir Putin to stop fighting any time before November, because he would have someone in the White House who has never believed, by the way, in the legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent state.

Donald Trump has not only said that, he said that to the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, in the Oval Office itself.

The only place where I disagree with you slightly on that is that there's no negotiated deal that Vladimir Putin is looking for.

Vladimir Putin is still looking to achieve a form of victory in Ukraine.

And as difficult as we might see that scenario, I believe that it's highly, highly unlikely, even with Trump in the White House, that you're going to see some kind of Paris peace talks and Vladimir Putin negotiate a long-term settlement.

He has outlined the extinction of Ukraine as an independent entity, and he is pursuing that goal, unfortunately, I think.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, in our last seconds, I want to ask you this, and we saw this in the Obama period.

We've seen this in almost every presidency over the last 30 or 40 years.

Presidents come in, they get sick and tired of the Middle East.

They think there's a way out, and there's no way out.

Is Joe Biden learning what President Obama - trying to pivot to Asia?

You got Ukraine, you've got Taiwan, you've got a million things.

PETER BAKER: Every single time, every single time you think that you can do it differently, that you can focus on China, that you can reorder the Middle East, in fact, through these normalization agreements.

You don't have to pay attention to the Palestinian dispute.

You can move on.

And every time the old Middle East comes back and says, wait a second, we're not done yet.

And it has trapped each president in different ways time and time again.

We saw it with Bush.

We saw it with Obama.

We saw it with Trump as his own character.

But we're certainly seeing it now.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, we'll probably see it in the next presidency as well.

Unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.

But I want to thank our panelists for joining us and for sharing their reporting.

And for more on the Middle East crisis, be sure to check out theatlantic.com.

And tune in Saturday to PBS News Weekend for a look at the unique measures scientists have taken to save coral reefs.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.