David Brooks on Iran: Let’s Declare Victory And Get Out Before We Cause Pain All Around The World
David Brooks of The Atlantic and Ruth Marcus of The New Yorker join John Yang on “PBS NewsHour” to discuss the week in politics, including more fallout from the war in Iran.
JOHN YANG, PBS NEWSHOUR: Well, another thing that the American — or a section of the American public is questioning and wondering about is the war in Iran The president has said at the beginning that we had won militarily, that we had pounded the Iranians. And then he says that they’re negotiating. And now he’s sending more troops. What’s going on here? DAVID BROOKS, THE ATLANTIC: Yes, I guess my big picture is that there’s — we are achieving militarily. There’s a curve of the more and more we achieve militarily, the more we degrade the Iranian regime, the more we make it hard for them to build munitions that going on to the future. And that’s all positive. But there’s another curve. That’s the economic pain curve. And the economy is being hit. The stock market is being hit, the world economy. Christine Lagarde, the European — former head of the European Bank, is saying it’s going to be a catastrophe. And so, at some point, these two curves cross. And that’s when it’s time to end the war, for sure. The problem is the downward sloping of the economic curve is exponential. We make incremental progress in degrading Iran’s ability, but the collapse of the economy could go out of control. And so, to me, I think Marco Rubio said today to do two to four more weeks. I’m rooting for as short a time as possible. They can say, we degraded Iran seriously, they’re not a regional power, let’s declare victory and get out before we cause pain all around the world. YANG: Yes, Ruth? RUTH MARCUS, THE NEW YORKER: Ooh, I think you’re way to optimistic in terms of your assessment of the upward military curve. Yes, the regime has been degraded militarily. Yes, important people have been taken out. Does that make us safer or does that make us less safe? Because let’s be clear. We have not achieved what the president told us on night one we wanted to achieve, which was regime change. The regime is not changing. If anything, the regime may be coming more hard-line, more inclined to insist on developing nuclear power, nuclear capabilities. It may be more incentivized to go after nuclear weapons, which is the biggest potential threat to the U.S. And I take it very, very seriously. It may be more incentivized by this latest round of attacks then it was previously, even after June, even after other assaults. And, in the meantime, we are now negotiating to fix something that wasn’t broken when we started, which is access to the Strait of Hormuz. So I do not see the military arc in the same positive light, though I — there have been some achievements — that you do.
