Should We Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal? | Joe Rogan and Mike Baker

Nobody wants to talk about Syria. And, you know, Assad, you know, is a butcher. He's still in charge. Why is he in charge? Well, because Russia propped him up. Why did Russia prop him up along with Iran? Right? There's a nasty piece of work there as an axis goes. Russia had no intention of letting Assad go. We should have been able to figure that one out. Right? But we didn't. And in part because we have these impulses that say, well, we're going to do better. And because we're going to create this ability for people to, you know, create their own democracy. Yeah. So, yeah. So anyway, we, Syria is again, one of those places that nobody really wants to discuss or talk about. And we've got attention deficit disorder. Nobody talks about North Korea anymore. Remember, we're all going to get blown up by Kim Jong-un. Yeah. Eh, let's move on. Well, there's pictures of Trump shaking his hands. So we're buddies now. We're good. Yeah, we're all good. All good. Yeah, I mean, the last article I read about North Korea is about how did Kim Jong-un get his Mercedes? Since there's some sort of a boycott or, you know, embargo. Yeah. Well, and that's, you know, that's another part of it is, although we have been, we've been more successful. I will say this. We've been more successful than in the past. And part of that is a technology issue. We've gotten better at imposing and enforcing sanctions than we used to be. And part of that is because our, our ability is to understand the movement of money, tracking transactions is better than it used to be. So the sanctions, as an example, we put on Iran. This is, you know, this is the most difficult time that this regime has faced in Iran. Since the fall of the shawl. And it's because we've gotten better at looking at Russia, China in particular, that traditionally always kind of circumvented the sanctions. We're better at enforcing that. And we're better at working with the EU and pressuring them. Right? I mean, so that's, that's a good thing. But I don't know where that's going. You know, I mean, Iran is kind of flailing about a little bit. They seized the tanker, you know, a British tanker, they actually seized a couple, but they're holding onto one in response to, they were trying to ship a bunch of oil over to Syria, right, against sanctions that exist. Right? So they had a tanker that was taken two million barrels or whatever of oil over to Syria. And the British in the territorial waters of Gibraltar intercepted that ship. That was the beginning of July. And in response, the Iranians have done a number of things, right? But the most recent thing that they've done was they seized a British flag tanker, and they're still holding the crew. And that's sort of an example of their, I don't want to say they're desperate, right, because they've got an ability, I think, to withstand and their control over the population is so strong. But it's an example, I think, to some degree of them flailing a bit and trying to figure out, what are they going to do? What's their next move? And I know people say, well, we shouldn't have gotten out of the deal and we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't have this issue anyway, because, you know, it's Trump's fault for getting out of the deal. But, you know, they, again, I don't have a lot of confidence in them sticking to the terms and agreements of any deal because they've never done it in the past. And there's always been effort and they've always broken the agreements. So I don't know why suddenly they would change their tune. If we can keep the sanctions on hard enough and force them to the table, the only thing they care about is staying in power. If they think they're going to lose that grip on power, they'll come to the table and they'll make a better deal. And that deal would include us being able to access their military facilities and for inspections. Right? We couldn't, we had no access to any of their military sites in that country because, yeah, we didn't make it a condition of the deal. Right? So we basically said, sure, we want verification that you're following the agreements. And they said, well, fuck you. These are the places that we agree to let you look at. That was the, I don't want to oversimplify, but that was the terms of the deal. And so we, any deal that we do with them in the future needs to be able to say, no, we want 100% verification. Because as John Kerry said, that's what you want. You want to be able to verify. So when we heard about it, what we're hearing in the news from the people that are opposed to the deal is that Trump broke this deal and he was foolhardy to do so, that Obama had put in place this deal and that Trump had broken and it sort of leaves us in this terrible quagmire. Right. But what you're saying is that the deal was terrible and that it didn't really give us access to understand exactly what their nuclear program was, what their military program was. So it wasn't a good deal. It wasn't wise to keep it. If the way that you judge the value of a deal, and this is what the previous administration, the Obama administration did was to talk about how it's important that we verify and that we've got verification. Well, yeah, you've got verification of the sites that the Iranians agreed to let us look at. And so, yeah, it was a deal. Was it a good deal? No. They wanted to sign this deal and the Iranians knew it. And so, yeah, I think that that justified saying, no, we're going to redraw this. And even the EU, which has been clinging to the old agreement, even the EU says, well, yeah, we could improve it. We could make it better. But if you just keep things as they were, there's no incentive for the Iranian regime to make any concessions or improve it. So the point being is we're trying to force them back to the negotiating table. And again, given that their self-interest is to stay in power and remain in charge, then with the economy and the condition that it's in currently, if it gets much worse and they feel as if they're losing a grip on the population, then I suspect they will come. They're not going to lash out. Iran doesn't want a... Nobody wants a military conflict. We don't want it. They don't want it. Can they close the Strait of Hormuz? Depending on who you're talking to, a fifth of the world's oil passes through. Yeah, they could close it temporarily or cause some friction, but they don't have the ability to shut down for any real period of time. We've just got too much in terms of leverage over there in our assets. And so, yeah, who knows? But I'm one of those people that says, we shouldn't have done that deal until we got it right. And just saying that we got a deal for the sake of it because you had partial verification doesn't give you anything. We've had partial verification of their programs for decades, and they just keep advancing their program. So do you think this criticism of backing out of the deal that you're hearing from Democrats is basically just a criticism of Trump? Just an opportunity to... Yeah, everything's a criticism. I think everything is a criticism.