LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Let's hear now from former President Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan. He helped negotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal during the Obama administration. Jake, good morning and welcome back to the program.
JAKE SULLIVAN: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
FADEL: So as we heard from our correspondent, three U.S. service members have been killed since Friday. The U.S. has been striking Iran for nine straight days. Both sides have hit civilian infrastructure. Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has slowed to a crawl. Does all this escalation feel different from what we've seen before?
SULLIVAN: Well, it feels different in that the costs are compounding. More American deaths, more pain at the pump, more loss of American credibility globally. But it feels very much like "Groundhog Day" in another way, which is that the United States every day is striking more targets in Iran in hopes that it produces a different outcome than we've seen over the course of the past few months. And the answer now is the same as it's been since this war started, which is to get to the negotiating table and try to negotiate a durable outcome to this war because we're just not going to bomb Iran into surrendering. And therefore, I think diplomacy is the vital next step. And I would like to see the administration put more muscle into trying to produce a diplomatic outcome.
FADEL: But that seems to be what the U.S. is trying to do. I mean, when we last spoke, you said neither side wants to go back to full-scale war. Now we're here. You said both sides have incentives to keep talking. Have those incentives shifted? Are they just planning to keep going?
SULLIVAN: Well, it's interesting because I do think it remains the case that both sides are trying to place a lid on how much escalation they embrace. I still think they're trying to avoid a descent into full-scale hostilities where every target on each side is up for grabs. Both sides are trying to calibrate their strikes, at least to a certain extent. Could that change over the coming days? It's possible because anytime you're in an escalation environment like this, a mistake or a miscalculation can lead to full-on war, total war.
FADEL: I mean, if this isn't full-scale war, what is?
SULLIVAN: Well, for example, if Iran decided that they were going to start striking, directly striking, energy facilities in the Gulf, taking more oil offline, trying to hit the pipeline that is crossing Saudi Arabia and still bringing a lot of oil to the market. If the United States expanded its target set in Iran to hit a much wider range of civilian facilities than they've already hit. Right now, you look at the number of sorties per day and the types of targets being hit, and both sides are trying to signal to the other we still want to find an off-ramp, if possible. And we heard some of those signals just last night, both from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and from the Iranian foreign minister. The challenge is that it doesn't seem like the U.S. has put together the type of diplomacy or negotiating team to really get serious about trying to generate an outcome, something more than just a slapdash, two-page memorandum of understanding that fell apart on first contact with reality. They've really got to invest in the diplomacy at this point, in my view.
FADEL: President Trump spoke to reporters on the tarmac on his way back from the World Cup final and talked about Iran. Let's hear what he had to say.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They've got some missiles. They've got some drones. They've got some manufacturing ability - not much. We control the strait. They don't control anything. So we'll see what happens. But we hit them very hard again tonight.
FADEL: The president seems to be saying the U.S. has the upper hand in every way. In your view, does that match reality?
SULLIVAN: It really doesn't match reality. From the start of the war, the focus of the U.S. in its success narrative has been, how many missiles have we taken out? How many facilities have we hit? And Iran's focus has been, do we continue to control the Strait of Hormuz? And even just over the last 24 hours, as your report indicated, Iran has been able to strike vessels trying to move through a route that it has not approved through the Strait of Hormuz, showing that it can continue to hold ships at risk there.
So we're not going to, in my view, bomb or blockade Iran into complete submission here. We need to convert the pressure that we've created into diplomacy. And in this, Iran has a lot of leverage that it did not have before this war started. But the U.S. obviously has some leverage, too. That's what has to lead to a diplomatic outcome that could stick. That's what failed a few weeks ago, and that's what we have to get back to.
FADEL: And the leverage being its control over the Strait of Hormuz?
SULLIVAN: Its control over the Strait of Hormuz is the primary card that it can play today that theoretically it always had, but now it has proved in actuality - it can put down on the table in a way that stops, to a substantial extent, traffic flowing to the global market. It also has leverage in that it can strike American bases and Gulf countries as well. It still has not been completely taken off the battlefield when it comes to missile and drone capability that can cause harm, even the tragic deaths of American service members over the weekend, people who put their lives on the line for this country.
FADEL: That preliminary agreement with the U.S. had a lot of benefits for Iran. I mean, critics would say too many benefits. They may have been - there may have been a financial windfall for Iran. It was allowed to export oil. It was poised to receive frozen assets and a reconstruction fund. I mean, why would Iran continue to escalate and give up those economic incentives and return to fighting?
SULLIVAN: I think what happened with this document, with this memorandum of understanding is there was a crucial paragraph that left ambiguous exactly how much control Iran had over the strait. The U.S. came out and said, this limits their ability to control traffic through the strait. We can send ships close to the shoreline of the other neighboring country of Oman. The Iranians said, no, that paragraph says we get to decide where ships go and when. And that misunderstanding, that difference is what led to the breakdown here.
So the biggest thing that has to happen, in my view, is greater clarity about what exactly the nature of traffic through the strait will look like. And here, I do think that economic sanctions relief, combined with an end to the fighting, could generate enough incentive for Iran to come to the table in a serious way. But make no mistake, because Trump launched this war, Iran is going to emerge from it with more control over the strait than it came into it with. And that is the wages of launching a war that, from my perspective and many others, should not have been launched in the first place.
FADEL: What would it take? I mean, at the center of this are people's lives, people being displaced, thousands of Iranians killed, U.S. service members being killed with no clear strategy on how it ends. I mean, what would it take for the two sides to return to negotiations?
SULLIVAN: So from my perspective, both sides do still have an incentive to try to end this before it just slides into a total forever war. I think both sides want to avoid that. What it's going to take that we haven't seen yet is a true, serious diplomatic effort with professionals on both sides negotiating a real document rather than having this kind of slapdash thing that we saw before, because as we could see, that couldn't stick.
FADEL: Jake Sullivan served as President Biden's national security adviser and helped to negotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Thank you for your time and your insights.
SULLIVAN: Thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF PENGUIN CAFE'S "CANTORUM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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