from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, May 14th.

We have an opportunity this morning to talk with someone who served both on the Trump-Iran

negotiating team and also

under President Biden as director for Iran at the National Security Council. It's Nate Swanson,

who is now sharing his views as an independent observer of the U.S. Iran War as director of the

Iran Strategy Project at the Think tank, the Atlantic Council.

And here's the context for his latest article in the news of the last two days.

President Trump made headlines he didn't want to make, we talked about this yesterday,

when he said this about the impact of the war on Americans' finances.

The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon.

I don't think about American's financial situation.

I don't think about anybody.

I think about one thing.

One thing, nuclear weapons.

So, okay, he's asking the country to be okay with the economic pain the war is causing

because the goal of ridding Iran of its nuclear

program is that important to the U.S. and the world. But here's what he said just on April 30th

after the first phase of the war. We didn't go and do what we did. We obliterated that nuclear

capacity of theirs and so they never, they didn't get the nuclear bomb.

They didn't get their nuclear bomb. So you can be forgiven for being confused about whether Iran's

nuclear program has been obliterated, which Trump has said many times, that word, or we should all

be understanding of the inflation he's causing because it's worth

...