David Faris talks about the issues examined in his recent Nation Magazine article, “Why Ending the Iran War May Be a Never-Ending Story.” As Trump’s “excursion” veers into quagmire territory, he may just try to walk away amid a host of new distractions.
DAVID FARIS: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
SCOTT HARRIS: I wanted to just read off some of the latest news because every hour it seems, I know we’ll be drilling down on this, but it seems that there’s such erratic rhetoric coming out of Donald Trump specifically and his administration generally that it’s really overwhelming. But here’s the latest. With Iranian officials in Qatar for talks on ending the war in Iran, President Trump issued conflicting signals on Monday over how much progress had been made in the negotiations, vowing that any deal would be great and meaningful or there will be no deal. Nearly every vital aspect of a potential peace deal remains unclear, including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program and missile stockpile; whether the agreement would cover the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and whether Iran would continue to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz, nor was the timing certain. Trump said that his negotiators were in no rush to close the agreement.
He also called on countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia to sign onto the Abraham Accords to normalize ties with Israel as part of the initial agreement to which they are highly unlikely to agree. Lots more here, but it’s confusing. And just before we went on the air, my teammate here told me that the US had launched missiles on Iran at a missile site. That I can’t confirm. I’m just saying that minute to minute, you really can’t figure this stuff out. So professor Faris, I did want to kick this off by really talking about the uncertainties, the objectives that are not clear and the end game of this conflict as they change from day to day. As you observe the Trump regime’s erratic handling of peace talks here with the Islamic Republic of Iran, where do you think the situation stands today?
DAVID FARIS: Well, I mean, I think the situation stands, it’s about the same as it’s been for about six or seven weeks—which is that the president took the United States into a war with deeply delusional objectives. Discovered pretty quickly that they were not going to achieve those objectives, at least not the way that they thought they were and discovered to their horror that Iran has a source of leverage over not just us, but the entire global economy that no one in Washington seemed to have thought through very well, even though it’d been war games within the Pentagon for decades and yet they all seemed really taken aback that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed this whole time. And so Trump went guns blazing into this war, thought it was going to be this kind of Venezuela scenario where they deposed the top of the regime and replace it with somebody more compliant, only to find that they have inadvertently put people who are even more hardline into power in Tehran who are I think, pretty justifiably in no mood to compromise right now. Right?
I think from Iran’s perspective here, the United States has clearly bitten off more than it can chew. The president is embarrassing himself on a daily basis, seems to have no idea how to get himself out of this situation without making concessions that he himself has spent the better part of a decade making fun of in terms of the kinds of concessions that were made to Iran and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that was negotiated by President Obama. So we’re in the muck and mire here and what’s happening this weekend does seem to be moving a little bit faster than things had been before, although the New York Times is reporting airstrikes on Iranian missile launch sites in the Persian Gulf.
But I think that the basic problem here is that the President Trump and his team have no serious expertise on board at all about Iran. They decimated the state department, there are no seasoned negotiators taking part in these talks and that what they want cannot really be delivered. And it can’t be delivered without a really dramatic escalation of American military action that Iran knows that Trump won’t do.
And so they’re in this place where they know that they need to make certain concessions to Iran. Is that tolls on the Strait of Hormuz? Is that a shorter timeline of suspension of enrichment activity? It’s like, who knows, right? Because we’re not in the room here and neither you nor me nor anybody else listening to this program I think believes the word the presidents says anyway, also for good reason. And so we’re just full of uncertainty and there’s this consistent pattern where the president claims that we’re about to wrap things up, the strait will open, we’re getting everything we want. The Iranians have agreed to all this stuff. And then the markets move and the stock market jumps and oil prices fall and then it turns out to not be true at all. And we seem to be in that part of the cycle where Trump’s claims are colliding with the reality on the ground.
And the reality on the ground is that the Iranian regime is emboldened and is not going to fold their hand here without getting pretty significant concessions out of us that Trump … I just don’t see how he’s going to sign off on that without looking completely ridiculous, right? And so that’s kind of the pickle that we’re in right now. And I don’t really see much having shifted in the last week or so that would change that basic dynamic.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. I know we’ll get into ways he may walk away from this conflict that could be even more damaging. But before that, I just wanted to get your comment as you mentioned—the lack of expertise in this administration in terms of those who are engaging in talks with the Iranians. What do you make of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner and his golf buddy, Steve Witkoff as the go-to guys for solving this global problem? (Both chuckling.) It seems crazy on the face of it. These guys have no experience in any of the diplomacy that’s necessary to reach some kind of competent agreement.
DAVID FARIS: Right. No, I mean, this is like why you develop a long-run seasoned diplomatic corps, people with cultural expertise, people with language expertise who speak Farsi who know a little bit about Iranian customs and history. And instead of sending those people who’ve largely been fired anyway, again, you send your son-in-law, you send a real estate developer that you play golf with and you send the author of Hillbilly Elegy. And then you’re surprised that you walk away with nothing. I mean, I make this joke all the time, but I’m married into an Iranian American family and I have way more experience negotiating with Iranians than these people do. You know what I mean? They have no idea what they’re doing and you could send me, I could do way better. But I think the bottom line is they have a very inexperienced team. One, they have no trust, which is actually an even bigger problem because the Iranians have been attacked now twice in the last year while they were conducting negotiations.
The Iranians have been asking the Pakistanis to escort them back and forth to Islamabad because they’re afraid that we’re going to murder them on the way back from the negotiations. The level of mistrust and distrust is so significant that the Iranians who are conducting these negotiations really fear for their personal safety. I think that they fear with good reason that the president might just decide to bomb them on their way back from the last meeting. Or may decide to start airstrikes as they just did while negotiations are ongoing. And so you have this large sort of like background lack of trust that stems from Trump canceling the JCPOA and kind of plunging into this in the first place. And then you have this like more near term lack of trust that’s based on the events of the last year. And when you add all of these things together, you have a very inexperienced team of people who seem to have other interests, right?
Their real estate interests seem more important than anything else that’s going on here. You have a bunch of delusional objectives like, “We’re going to get six more countries to sign onto a peace agreement with Israel.” You’re linking issues to this that don’t need to be linked to it and you yourself can’t decide what acceptable terms are. I actually think that Trump had agreed to a memorandum of understanding over the weekend and then he took a bunch of flack for it from like Ted Cruz and Roger Wicker and some Republican senators and decided he had to start talking tough again and here we are.
So it’s like you can’t even get through a whole weekend with these people being on the same page with the same goals. At 5 p.m. on Friday are our goals and objectives and strategies the same on Monday morning at 9 a.m.?
And generally the answer is “no.” And it’s really hard to make a deal with people like that. I mean, I don’t know what the Iranians are going to do because they really don’t trust anything that we say.
SCOTT HARRIS: There’s a long-standing description of Donald Trump, which I think sums it up. “If you pet him, he’ll follow you home,” meaning that the last person who speaks with Trump is going to be very influential in what he does next. I want to reintroduce you, David.
We’re speaking with David Faris, professor of political science at Roosevelt University and author of several books including, The Kids Are All Left: How Young Voters Will Unite America. Professor Faris, there are lots of theories as you said a moment ago as to why Donald Trump launched this war on Iran. There’s evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu talked Trump into waging war in Iran as an easy win. Trump may have been convinced that his success in kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro back in January with few repercussions could be repeated in Iran, against all evidence. But now the entire world is suffering higher energy and fertilizer prices. A lot of commodities that go through the Persian Gulf are no longer coming to where they’re destined. The whole global economy has been upended. Why do you think Trump joined Israel in launching this war?
DAVID FARIS: I mean, I think it’s part of the dynamic that you just mentioned, right? Where it’s like there was a big New York Times story about this where Netanyahu visited the White House and laid out his scenario about what he thought could happen and how this could all be over in a few days. You take out Khamenei and you wipe out the senior leadership. People will rise up if you think back to his video he released in the middle of the night wearing a baseball hat, always classy. It was clear that he thought, you took out the top of the regime, Iranians will rise up and take the reins of the government and this thing will be over in 48 to 72 hours.
And Netanyahu had convinced him of that. I don’t think it was all him. I mean, there’s people on Trump’s team that wanted to believe these things, that did believe these things. You have a whole wing of the Republican party that has spent the better part of 20 years advocating for war with Iran. I mean, these are the same people that beat the drums against the JCPOA in 2014, 2015. There’s been a contingent of warhawks in the Republican party throughout the 21st century who have wanted to use military force against Iran and thought that it would be more effective and more efficient than trying to negotiate. And at the end of the day, those people had Trump’s ear and they got him to act.
And Trump loves nothing more than to take credit for something that he sweeps in at the last minute to do. And I think that he thought he could just have one of these moments like, “Oh, well, five presidents have wanted to get rid of this regime. I did it. Five presidents have wanted to rid the world of a threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. I got it done.” He was talked into it. The problem is that a normal person, like a person in possession of some degree of modesty and humbleness, normal people know that they can be wrong about things. Trump isn’t capable of that sort of internal transformation. He’s not capable of looking at a situation and being like, “Wow, man, I was really wrong about this. I screwed up. I got us into something that’s going to be tough to get out of and I’m going to have to eat some crow here. I’m going to have to make some concessions to Iran that are going to be painful. Kind of embarrassing, but if I do it now, we can all move on in time to not get completely clobbered in the midterms.”
And unfortunately for Trump and for all of us and for the GOP, he just doesn’t have that ability. He’s still in his office, stewing, thinking like, “Man, I’m just one clever move away from coming out of this with everything that we wanted.”
And he just has not accepted that that’s not possible. And one of the reasons he hasn’t accepted that it’s not possible is he surrounded himself with nothing but sycophants, bootlickers and people who believe rightly that their jobs depend on telling him exactly what he wants to hear at any given time and that anybody that walks into his office and is like, “This is a pretty bad idea, man,” is not going to have their job for long. And that’s the dynamic that he has put into motion with the personnel choices that he has made and his governance style. There’s just a lot of variables and a lot of Trump pathologies coming together at the same time to deliver what looks like a pretty comprehensive humiliation to the United States with a lot of knock-on effects people aren’t really thinking through right now.
But the fact that the U.S. military can be at least stalemated like this by a third-rate regional power has like really, really significant implications for American global strategy, not just in the Middle East, but all over the place. And those discussions haven’t even started in there yet. They’re still focused on like, “Can we get gas back below $5?” “How many seats are we going to lose in the Senate?” I mean, I think that there’s a recognition inside the White House that they have created a political crisis for themselves.
What I don’t think that there’s been an acceptance of is that diffusing that crisis in a way that can mitigate some of the political damage is going to require at the best case scenario is signing some kind of deal that looks exactly like the JCPOA, right? That’s the best case scenario for them—a return to the status quo on Feb. 27 with some sort of like mid-range agreement with Iran that looks a lot like the thing that he spent most of his political career trashing. And that’s going to be really hard for him to accept.
It’s going to be hard for him to get called on publicly. He just doesn’t have that kind of personality, right? And that’s why every time the Times and all these outlets are like, “Strait of Hormuz.” There was an analysis in New York Times this morning that said, “To get the Strait of Hormuz open, Trump had to do X, Y and Z.” And I was, The Strait of Hormuz is not open, guys. We keep falling for this same maneuver, which is fundamentally designed to move markets and perceptions and narratives and not to actually bring the conflict to a close, which is what really needs to happen here before the economic damage gets out of hand.
SCOTT HARRIS: And you mentioned the JCPOA, the nuclear deal negotiated by John Kerry, former secretary of state and senator under Barack Obama, that took what, two years to negotiate? You can’t imagine that, as you said, Trump threw away in 2018.
Donald Trump has an outsized ego, if not megalomania. I think it’s quite apparent. And it seems that in his second term, he’s focusing on building his legacy, putting his name on Washington, D.C. government buildings. He wants to put his picture on passports, the Kennedy Center, he wants to build his golden ballroom and the “Arc de Trump” or whatever he’s calling it. Do you think Trump’s priority right now is feeding his ego? And it certainly could be one of the reasons our nation is engaged in this war and it seems as this war becomes ever more unpopular and the economic consequences grow worse, that Trump becomes ever more dangerous.
DAVID FARIS: Yeah. I mean, he’s kind of a cornered animal right now. I mean, he’s a lame duck, right? He’s not going to be running for office again in 2028. He can read polls, right? He may have people in the room that are telling him not to believe them. But he can see that his average approval is down in the mid-30s at this point, maybe mid- to upper-30s, the lowest it’s ever been for him outside of the post-Jan. 6th period. The interesting thing about Trump right now, he’s governing someone who has already lost Congress. He’s governing like a second term president who’s facing a hostile Congress and who really only has freedom of maneuver in foreign policy and who really can only do these kind of symbolic gestures and big projects or something or starting wars. And he’s effectively given up on governing the country or making any kind of significant changes here to benefit the people that voted for him.
And he’s focused, as you said, he licensed his name to an airport in Florida over the weekend. I don’t know if you saw this news, it’s really incredible stuff. It really is straight out of the cult of personality, like authoritarian playbook. I mean, this is what true authoritarians do, right? They’ll have to be able to make the shopkeepers put a picture of themselves up on the wall or else they’ll be arrested, this kind of stuff, right?
This is Trump’s deepest instinct, to be worshipped. That matters to him, loyalty and worship. And I think fear are much more important to him than what happens to the Republican party. He does not care. The only way that he cares about the Republican party’s state in November is how it could redound on him. “If we lose, I’m going to get impeached or if we lose, I’m going to get investigated.” “If we lose, eventually they’re going to come after some of the things that I’ve done in the past year or so to enrich myself and my cronies and my family.”
But he fundamentally doesn’t care on a basic level whether Republicans are governing the country next January. And I think people in Congress, you see some frustration spreading among the ranks of at least Senate Republicans who just watched Trump kind of stab John Cornyn of Texas in the back by endorsing Ken Paxton, who’s just a dramatically weaker general election candidate, but also you know, like a criminal.
It’s not just that he’s a weaker candidate, he’s a criminal and people in the Senate are like, “Bro, I got to work with this guy for the next 20 years if he wins. It’s just either we lose or you’re forcing me to work with someone that everybody hates.” He’s just such a galactic narcissist and it has worked for him in some ways for so long that I think that he’s incapable of adjusting because he’s been using this playbook forever and getting away with it. I mean, he tried to overthrow the American system of government in December, January of 2020 and 2021, and then got elected four years later. So he has a lot of reason to believe that he can get away with anything.
But with Iran, he has run into a variable that cannot be manipulated or moved or bullied with his social media account. He can’t primary the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) and he can’t intimidate them with Truth Social posts and stuff like that. He’s met his match and because he’s met his match, he’s in a tailspin. And just every day for the past 11 weeks, it’s really clear he just doesn’t know. He can’t bring himself to pull up on the lever to pull himself out of that tailspin. And we’re all paying the price.
I sold out my car today. It was a nightmare. It’s really bad. Prices are way up and this is just the beginning if this thing doesn’t get resolved soon. I wish I could say to you that I think he recognizes the really weak position that he’s put himself in and he’ll do what he needs to do to get out of it. But I just don’t see any evidence that we’re that much closer to that ending than we were a week or two ago.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said. We’re speaking with professor David Faris here on Counterpoint this evening on listener-sponsored WPKN in Bridgeport. Professor Faris, you wrote in your recent Nation commentary about the possibility that Trump may try to just walk away from this conflict if he’s unable to negotiate a peace deal and declare a victory of some kind and attempt to save face with a propaganda campaign to boost his poll numbers. Whether or not that could be successful, it’s another question. But what do you think the consequences of this war, however it ends—what are the consequences for the United States, the United States and its standing in the world?
DAVID FARIS: Well, it’s catastrophic. I mean, in terms of the United States and its foreign policy as we have understood it for the past 75 or 80 years—for all of its flaws and warts and inconsistencies and hypocrisies—that foreign policy as we know it is over. I mean, we have so comprehensively alienated our allies in Europe that NATO is … I mean, NATO is a thing that exists on paper at this point.
I don’t think anybody in NATO believes that the United States would come to anyone’s aid in the event of a real conflict. It’s not clear that they would come to our aid. Well, we’ve destroyed one of the greatest alliances in history and we’ve also destroyed the equilibrium in the Persian Gulf. We had all of these sort of like supplicant monarchs eating out of our hands believing that we were the key to their security, only to discover that not only would we take actions that would directly undermine their security, but that we were actually incapable of undoing the damage that we had done.
And I think that’s probably the most shocking thing to many of our allies. Now, I’m not a fan of a lot of these countries, okay? These are horrific autocracies that have very terrible internal practices. I don’t really see much of a moral difference between them and the government in Iran anyway, but in terms of the foreign policy that we had 15 weeks ago, I don’t see how any of that comes back.
If you’re the United Arab Emirates, if you’re Qatar, if you’re Oman and you see the greatest military behemoth in human history incapable of using the most expensive Navy in the world to clear a single shipping channel that you yourself are responsible for screwing up in the first place, it’s just hard to … It’s like you can’t unsee some of this stuff, right?
It’s not just that we’re untrustworthy, that we can’t be trusted to stick by an agreement, that we can’t be trusted not to attack people while we’re negotiating with them. It is actually the revelation of pretty stark American military vulnerabilities and weaknesses that I think a lot of adversaries are taking note of. If we watched our bases in the Middle East get effectively destroyed by pretty not sophisticated Iranian missiles, right? How are we going to protect our bases in the Pacific to defend Taiwan? If you can take out an American military base with a few barrages of mid-level missiles, where does that leave us in terms of this global strategy? Where does that leave us in terms of the reserve power that’s supposed to keep … We’re responsible for making sure that the global shipping happens in an unproblematic fashion.
At least all sorts of things that people took for granted about America’s role in the world and about the role that we play in the security strategies of dozens of countries. You just can’t count on those things anymore. I mean, we have been revealed to be an emperor with no clothes. We cannot subdue a single, again, mid-level regional power that we outspend by a factor of about 100 to 1 that has been sanctioned to within an inch of its life, barely has any real money to spend on the military at all.
And they’re stalemating, at worst, drawing the greatest military power in the world to a stalemate with like $7,000 drones. So there’s all sorts of really, I think, pretty significant implications for American power. Now, do I think it would be all bad for the United States to have a little less freedom of maneuver to do whatever we want to anyone in the whole world?
Not necessarily, no. I think that you could see some changes to American policy and American attitudes in the world and the kinds of things that we’re willing or able to do to people. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world that we don’t get to do those things anymore.
But it’s a massive humiliation for Trump and it’s going to be whoever takes over in Washington next is going to be looking at a very, very different landscape and it’s a landscape in which all of our adversaries look at us and think, “We didn’t think we’d be able to get away with this thing, but now maybe we could. If the Iranians can take on the United States, fight them to a draw and extract concessions from them, what can we get away with?” I mean, that’s what’s going to be going through the minds of a lot of world leaders in the next 10 years or so.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Well, that’s something to consider—the pros and cons of that change in our world and it’s a good place to leave our conversation and maybe talk about that topic next time we can get you on here, David. Appreciate it.
DAVID FARIS: That would be great. Yeah. I enjoyed being here. Thank you.
SCOTT HARRIS: Would you like to leave our listeners, I know would refer them to the Nation article that we’ve been talking about titled, “Why Ending the Iran War May Be a Never Ending Story” that was in The Nation magazine on April 29. Would you like to leave any other resources out there for us?
DAVID FARIS: Sure. I have a website that I just launched called Bluetopia, which is on Beehive. It’s kind of like a alternative to Substack and I’m also on Bluesky. So david.faris@bskysocial. And so I probably post my thoughts there fairly often and I’ll post links to my articles at The Nation in there, too.
SCOTT HARRIS: All right. Well, much appreciation for you spending time with us and your insights that shared with us tonight on Memorial Day 2026. Appreciate it.
DAVID FARIS: Well, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thanks, professor Faris. Goodnight. Bye-bye.
DAVID FARIS: All right. Take care.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s David Faris, professor of political science at Roosevelt University. And this is Counterpoint. My name’s Scott Harris.
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