What Trump Didn’t Know About Iran

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2026

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Trump administration miscalculated how Iran would respond to this war. And the United States, Iran and Israel were brought to the brink of war in the first place because of a whole series of misjudgments and miscalculations going back decades. Ali Vaez is the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. He was involved in the negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal, and is in fact himself a nuclear scientist. He’s also an author of “How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare.” In this conversation, Vaez explains how over 47 years the United States, Israel and Iran came to one another as threats, and why so many efforts to thaw relations failed. It’s the briefing on Iran that Trump should have received before he decided to go to war. Mentioned: How Sanctions Work by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Book Recommendations: Persians by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones The Mantle of the Prophet by Roy P. Mottahedeh Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The I have found myself struggling to describe the war President Trump has chosen to enter into with Iran, the strange lightness
0:39.8	with which he seems to have chosen this. I would say the war is spiraling out of control,
0:45.3	but there's never real pretense that it was under control. I find it hard to say Trump's plan
0:50.9	for the war is failing because it is not clear there was any plan at all.
0:56.3	There was a decision to strike. There was perhaps a belief that Iranians would rise up and
1:02.1	overthrow their government, as Trump invited them to do. But there appears to have been an almost
1:07.8	opposite belief held by the same people at the same time,
1:11.6	that the Iranian regime included senior figures who might take power and make a deal with America,
1:16.6	much as Delsi Rodriguez did in Venezuela.
1:19.6	To the extent America imagined who those leaders might be, there was no policy to identify and empower and work with them.
1:26.6	Quite the opposite. Trump himself has said the leading candidates were killed in the initial attacks.
1:31.7	We are so used to American wars failing
1:34.1	because of the presence of bad assumptions
1:36.4	and bad information and bad plans.
1:39.3	We're less used to what this appears to be,
1:41.9	an almost absence of planning or information at all.
1:46.2	There's almost a pride this administration takes in it. Trump appears to believe that it is not
1:50.8	his job to know about the world. It is the world's job to know about him. He acts, the world
1:56.8	reacts, to do the work of planning, learning, building coalitions, considering consequences,
2:02.8	all that is beneath him, beneath his superpower. But now we are at war, and any better future,
2:11.6	will require fuller understanding of how America, Israel, and Iran got to this place. So I want to have someone on who could describe that history,
	...

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