>> We're at a Mexican standoff with the Iranians, which means we're gonna have to negotiate some kind of arrangement that's not just in our interest, but also in their interest to get them to release the chokehold on the strike.

Hello, and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer.

You know that warning on a car's side mirror that says objects are closer than they appear?

President Trump's path to ending the Iran war suffers from the opposite effect.

He believes the off-ramp is much nearer than it really is.

And as the conflict lurches toward its third month, things have settled into a very uneasy status quo.

A ceasefire is holding, despite Trump saying that it is, quote, "on massive life support" earlier this week.

But the U.S.

blockade of the Strait of Hormuz isn't working quickly enough to force any real concessions from Tehran.

They're betting that President Trump has little appetite for renewed war, especially now that he has declared Operation Epic Fury over.

Time, the mullahs believe, is on their side.

And they may be right.

U.S.

gas prices are climbing steadily towards $5 a gallon.

Shortages are looming, and the odds of a global recession are going up.

America's adversaries can't get enough of it.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Iran war has become a strategic gift.

Higher oil prices are pumping money back into the Russian economy, just as the Kremlin was facing mounting pressure over Ukraine.

Patriot missile systems once intended for Kiev, now protecting Gulf infrastructure instead.

And then there's China.

This week's Trump-Xi summit got more complicated for the White House Chinese officials, becoming increasingly assertive in negotiations over trade, critical minerals, and fentanyl cooperation.

Beijing also understands President Trump needs Xi Jinping's help pressuring Iran, stabilizing the strait.

That gives China leverage, and Xi knows it.

The problem for the White House is that a president who promised quick victories now looks trapped in a costly conflict with no clear exit, while his two biggest rivals grow more confident by the week.

Joining me to break down the ripple effects of the Iran war, Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute.

She has decades of experience serving in the Pentagon, State Department, and in President George W. Bush's National Security Council.

Don't worry, I've also got your puppet regime.

- Vladimir, stop the war in Ukraine.

- No.

- Okay, China, stop stealing our stuff.

- No.

- Okay, Brazil?

- Stop it, Donald.

- I love you.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

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- Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

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Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is investing in the future, working to create an impact in advanced recycling and in emerging technology companies that will help shape tomorrow.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... - Kori Schake, thanks so much for joining us today.

- It's a great pleasure.

- You and I have seen each other many times over the years, but maybe at no point with so much geopolitical uncertainty driven by the United States.

Highline, before we dig into it, tell me how you think about the war in Iran right now and its impact.

- Well, I think the war's enormously consequential because we didn't have to do it.

The president chose to do it and is doing it badly and is now calling into question America's trustworthiness as an ally, America's ability to accomplish strategic objectives, and America's ability to use military force effectively.

I think it's extraordinarily damaging to American stature and the wellsprings of American power.

- I mean, there've been wars of choice that have gone badly in the past for the United States, but perhaps I've never seen one where I've been so confused about what the aims of the war actually are.

I mean, it seems to me that almost every week we've got a different explanation for what the purpose of this war has been, at least from President Trump, if not from the Israeli Prime Minister.

How would you characterize it?

I think that's exactly right, Ian.

The administration began with extraordinarily ambitious objectives, not just regime change in Iran, but that we would get to select the next leader of Iran and that we would force their capitulation on a very wide-ranging set of objectives.

The president's lack of discipline, not just messaging discipline, but discipline in the choices he's making, has confused the situation and made negotiations more difficult, made public support more difficult, made allies trying to align their policy in support of us much more difficult.

- Are the allies trying to align their policy in support the US right now?

Do you think that's the case?

Yes, I do.

I think, in particular, European and Asian allies also worry about a nuclear-armed Iran.

But the president's so petty and vindictive if, when not being consulted, they don't immediately align their policies to his, that it's making it harder for allies who also have domestic politics to navigate to support what the president's doing.

So, I mean, the war goals were very broad at the beginning.

I mean, Trump did talk about regime change.

You're right.

And he did talk about taking the oil as well, which you didn't mention.

But I mean, every once in a while, that's come up.

Certainly, the war goals have narrowed substantially, I assume in large part because the war hasn't gone so well, and the Iranians have been more capable than the president at least had anticipated.

The one war goal that has remained at least present has been on the nuclear file, where you say the allies are all aligned.

If going forward, Trump were to focus on the nukes, what should he be trying to accomplish?

Well, he should be trying to establish the state of the Iranian nuclear program, right?

We don't have inspectors in the country, we don't have any reliable basis for understanding how much damage has been done, whether centrifuges are still functioning, for example.

So an absolute requirement is understanding the status of the Iranian nuclear program and then constraining it in transparent and reliable ways.

- The president of the United States unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA, the original Iranian nuclear deal that had been constructed with both allies and adversaries with the intention at least of constraining that nuclear program.

Do you believe that the ultimate outcome of this war is likely to be better, worse or the same on the nuclear front as what the US had withdrawn from?

Well, I'm genuinely concerned that the outcome of the war could be worse than the JCPOA left the Iranian position in, because Iran has now both demonstrated and remains in control of passage in the Straits of Hormuz.

And that's an enormous strategic advantage, one that had never been tested or put in play before this war.

- Accepted, I'll get to that.

I wanna talk about the Strait, but I'm thinking specifically about the nuclear point right now and what kind of nuclear capabilities the Iranians might end up with.

Well, so the one of the main drawbacks of the JCPOA was the sunset clause.

And it's a 10-year close of the deal, right?

Yeah, it's relative short duration that precipitated the end of the deal.

But now we have no deal, we have no inspections, and we have given the Iranian leadership every incentive in the world to race as fast as they can to nuclear possession, which might have been the only way that they could have prevented the current, um, state of war between Iran, Israel and the U.S., and evidently also some of the Gulf states.

- Do they really have that incentive?

And I ask in part because the Israelis have certainly shown that whenever the Iranians, whether they're developing advanced centrifuges or they've got nuclear scientists or they're moving towards a program, the Israelis are more than happy to hit them and keep hitting them hard.

So, I mean, do you really feel like the incentive is overwhelming for the Iranian government to move to a nuke now, when they hadn't directly passed that threshold over the past years?

I do, because if Iran already had a nuclear weapon, the stakes go way up for a potential attack on the country.

And so that's the incentive to move fast and get across the threshold, because that could well stay the hand of the US and Israel and other countries.

- Okay, let's talk about the straiy.

The Iranians long had potential influence over the strait, but it had never been actualized.

Now we're in a very different position.

The Americans have a blockade, but the Iranians have the ability to disrupt.

If you were advising the president right now, a role that you've had in the past, what would you be saying to deal with that reality?

Well, first of all, we should never have played ourselves into this position.

Understood, but here we are.

Easily anticipatable that the Iranians would make a move against the Strait of Hormuz, and we should have taken, in conjunction with the attacks on Iran itself, we should have taken steps to pre-deploy forces so that Iran wouldn't have such an easy play to make.

Now where they are, I mean, the distant blockade is a smart American reaction.

That is, we can prevent Iran from benefiting from having control of the straits, but we're not willing to escalate, which would be a substantial escalation, and force openness of the strait.

We can't make commercial providers run the risks of going through a potentially mined or potentially attack-prone strait.

And so we're at a Mexican standoff with the Iranians, which means we're gonna have to negotiate some kind of arrangement that's not just in our interest, but also in their interest to get them to release the chokehold on the strait.

- So in other words, pay the Iranians off.

You don't believe that further escalation in this environment is the right choice for an American president?

Well, I think the president's choices have left us in the situation where the obvious plays are either dramatic escalation, which would require answering the question of how do we believe this escalation will prise the straits out of Iran's grasp when 37 days of intensive military operations against Iran didn't produce capitulation?

So dramatic escalation or humiliation, accepting that Iran is now in control of the straits and we have sacrificed free passage in international waterways.

I think the president is fulminating against allies because he realizes he's painted himself into that position.

And now I think his best move is drawing out negotiations for months on end and hoping that the economic consequences to Iran of keeping the straits closed are more damaging than they are to us and everybody we have externalized the costs of the war onto, including our closest friends and allies.

- As you and I are talking, President Trump is on his way to China.

I'm wondering, given the influence that China has, commercially and otherwise, with Iran, and they just had the Iranian foreign minister in Beijing.

Do you believe it is wise for President Trump to engage proactively with the Chinese on the Iranian file on the Strait of Hormuz?

And if so, what do you believe his position should be?

I do believe that the president should be engaging the Chinese to persuade the Iranians to settle for less than they are demanding.

But it's also an important measure of just how much President Trump has lost in starting the war in Iran and pursuing it in the way he has, that he's having to go appeal to China, America's most powerful potential adversary, for assistance in delivering us from a problem of our own creation.

What he should ask the Chinese for is the return of freedom of navigation, because that would strengthen America's hand in the argument for Taiwan's status quo to be sustained, something that the Chinese do not want.

But the Chinese need to get oil through the Straits of Hormuz pretty urgently, and so there might be a deal to be made there.

I want to ask about Putin for a second.

At the beginning of the war, there was a view that the Russians were benefiting.

Energy prices, commodity prices, certainly a lot higher, suspension on sanctions.

But it doesn't look that way on the ground in terms of the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

And I'm wondering, after this Victory Day celebration, if you can call it that, where almost no leaders showed up and almost no military celebration was happening, how should we think about this war four years in?

Well, I think it's a strategic mistake of historic proportions that Russia precipitated the war by invading Ukraine.

And it's also incredibly heartening to see the toughness, the grit, the resilience, the innovation of Ukrainians in protecting their sovereignty.

You know, I really like the way the former British Admiral Tony Radakin put it, if you put a snail on the Ukrainian-Russian border in 2022, it would have made more progress into Ukraine than the Russian military has made.

The sand is running through the hourglass for both Ukraine and Russia.

They are both struggling with recruitment and retention.

They are neither getting to fight the war the way they wanted to fight the war.

And you see more rapid innovation by Ukraine, but more enduring, persistent adaptation by the Russians.

Still, I think the economic strains on Russia begin to show.

Ukraine's ability, its demonstrated innovation of striking deep into Russian territory and targeting Russian energy facilities, that could be a war-winning advantage for Ukraine.

So the Russian choice to try and collapse Ukrainian independence is actually not only the genesis of Ukrainian nationalism in many ways, but it's also the destruction of Russia.

So look, you've focused a lot on the military of the United States, its relations, civilian political military relations.

I do wonder now that you've seen this administration deploy the military very effectively in a more targeted way in Venezuela, much less effectively at least to date in Iran.

And we're also starting to see a lot of overstretch, systems being moved out of the European front, out of the Asian front to reposition in the Middle East.

Talk a bit about America's superpower militarily and how that is looking perhaps to both allies and adversaries around the world.

Well, what I think we are seeing is brilliant military operations that for lack of strategy, don't add up to successful accomplishment of political objectives.

And that has to be a worrisome sign to America's friends because it undercuts the value of American military prowess that we can't win wars with the military alone.

Second thing, lesson I think everybody's taking is a worrisome demonstration of just how shallow the American defense industrial base is and how necessary to build out into a common U.S.

and allied defense production base in order to restock our own shelves and their shelves of needed munitions.

And I think a third lesson is the demonstration that the United States made a reckless set of choices on Iran and could make a reckless set of choices on the security of allies.

In fact, has made a reckless set of choices that is affecting the prosperity and the security of allies.

You know, we've just cut Germany's GDP growth in half because of the increased cost of energy.

So we are externalizing the costs of choices we made onto allied shoulders, and that has to be a major breach of trust with America's allies.

And, I mean, allies for a long time, particularly in Europe, but also Canada, also Asian allies, they have not been involved in a true burden sharing of collective security.

They've not spent as much on defense.

Now they are, but increasingly I see a lot of those allies saying, well, as we're spending, we're gonna spend a lot more on ourselves and not spend on American military industrial complex as they had been.

How does this choice look to you and to the United States long-term strategically?

- Well, I worry that the erratic and vindictive behavior of the Trump administration towards our treaty allies and our close friends is causing them to want to create an international order that shields them against American influence.

We benefit so much from being the center of an international order that makes us prosperous and secure.

And allies are calling that into question because we have called it into question.

You know, even in the way you've posed the question, Ian, is an undercurrent of belief that defense spending is the only contribution allies make to defense, as opposed to facilitating American military operations, permitting American military bases, overflight, support, provision of weapons.

We don't station troops on foreign bases just to protect those allies.

It is a fundamental enabler of American global power projection.

And stabilizing Europe and Asia is not just good for Europe and Asia.

It's good for the United States, too.

These are our investors.

They are places where we invest.

They are places that we care about being secure.

And so calling all of that into question, causing allies like Canada that we have a 3,500 mile border with to question whether the United States is a threat to them is collapsing the international order that not only we built, we built for our own benefit.

Okay, Kori, you're bumming me out.

Give me something positive you're thinking about right now in terms of where you think the global order's heading.

Well, I do think America's adversaries, even as they are benefiting from America's reckless choices, I would still rather have the American president's hand than Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or the Iranian leadership's hand, because the wellsprings of American power, our system isn't necessarily good at having it right, but we're pretty good at getting it right, fixing our mistakes.

And America's mistakes are fixable in a way that I think Russia's and China's and Iran's are not.

Kori Schake, thanks so much for joining us today.

It was a pleasure.

And now to Puppet Regime, where we pay tribute to the great naturalist, Sir David Attenborough, who just turned 100 in a way that only we could.

Roll that tape.

The greater North American alpha male asserts his power with extravagant displays of dominance.

against weaker rivals, he carries the day.

- Boo!

- But when challenged by other alphas, his vocalizations quickly change.

-Vladimir, stop the war in Ukraine.

-No.

-Okay.

China, stop stealing our stuff.

-No.

-Okay.

Brazil-- -Stop it, Donald.

I love you.

Open the strait!

- No!

- Okay!

- Further north, a cunning old scavenger prowls, driven by a compulsive need to test the boundaries of neighboring territory.

- Won't stop, won't stop.

Can't stop, won't stop.

- Careful now, Siberian tiger.

Your luck might one day run out.

Others take a different approach.

Biding his time, allowing rivals to exhaust or isolate themselves, this aspiring alpha waits for the entire ecosystem to shift in his favor.

In this wilderness, stillness itself is dominance.

Others, less territorial, attempt the exhausting task of maintaining cordial ties with all predators simultaneously.

- I am single.

I'm ready to mingle.

- Nearby, a small group of European mammals attempts to appear unified.

- Okay, we must form our own new herd.

Yeah, and as natural leader of this herd, I think that we should... Wait, wait, why do you get to lead the new herd?

As the largest of the animals... Ragazzi!

- Giorgia, please, look, nobody likes you.

Look who's talking, you are French.

Ragazzi!

- But they remain divided, unserious and highly sensitive to sudden movements by larger predators.

And so the fascinating rituals of power and influence continue, each species certain that it alone has mastered an environment that belongs to no one.

That's our show this week.

Come back next week and if you like what you've seen or even if you didn't but you're already used to settling in life, why don't you do something truly unsettling and check us out at GZEROmedia.com [music] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is investing in the future, working to create an impact in advanced recycling and in emerging technology companies that will help shape tomorrow.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... (upbeat music)