A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Robert Malley joins us now to discuss how this pause of guiding vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz fits with broader U.S. strategy. He served as U.S. special envoy for Iran under the Biden administration and was also one of the negotiators in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. He's now a lecturer and senior fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.
Robert, I want to read something that you posted on X yesterday - your translation of President Trump's pause. (Reading) I'm backing down because I'm winning so badly. But if that's what it takes to de-escalate and try to seriously negotiate a deal, why not?
Sounds like you don't have confidence in the president's decision.
ROBERT MALLEY: Oh, it's not a matter of confidence in the president's decision. I think what I didn't have confidence was in his Project Freedom, which was this notion that the U.S. would try to militarily open the Strait of Hormuz, which I think was always an illusory attempt and one more of a series of zigzagging policies. So he's presenting it as military success. I think it's pretty clear that it didn't meet its objectives.
My point is, if this is what is needed to then justify a return to more serious negotiations, fine. I'll take it. I think that's what needs to happen. The war needs to end. The strait needs to be open, and there needs to be a way to find a sustainable deal with Iran. And that should have always been the objective, rather than what we heard again the president say, which is Iran needs to capitulate. They're not going to capitulate. There is a road to a deal, and we'll see whether we get there.
MARTÍNEZ: Is the president on that road? Does it sound plausible to you that the U.S. and Iran are really making, quote, "great progress," as he has put it?
MALLEY: So I've been on this program before where those words were already ringing in my ears.
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter).
MALLEY: So I have to be a bit careful. But there are reports - media reports, at least - and some reports from people who are involved in the back-and-forth conveying of messages that some progress has been made that - and what Secretary Rubio said yesterday was significant in the sense that what he's talking about is a framework agreement. In other words, a broad set of principles that the two sides would agree on, which could at least lead to de-escalation, end of any active phase of war, partial reopening of the strait, at least to begin with, even though they will then need much more time to negotiate the details. It was always, again, a fantasy to think that everything could be resolved in a day or two. But at least maybe you could have the framework in place, de-escalate, allow normal commercial traffic or some semblance of normality to be restored and then deal with the tough issues, including the nuclear one.
MARTÍNEZ: So, Robert, I've been looking all morning long at a live tracker of crude oil prices. They opened at $102. They're now under 90. So I'm wondering if - does the market maybe give us a sense of how close this negotiation - or how much progress they have made if they seem to have confidence in it?
MALLEY: Well, I mean, I think the market has been wrong before, and a lot of what we hear is often market manipulation by the administration. Again, I'm not saying that in this case, it's not serious. Some people I talk to say this is the closest they've been - the two sides have been to a deal. So that's very possible, and that would be encouraging. But the market has fluctuated in ways that seem to have no correlation with what's actually happening, partly because we don't know what's happening.
I mean, your last segment - you were speaking about confusion. I think that's not just the word of the day. It's the word of the month because the president says one thing one day. He says something very different the next. And we just don't know whether he's going to stick to his course of action for more than 24 hours. At this point, the odds of a deal seem better than they were 24 hours ago, which may explain perhaps an overreaction by the market.
MARTÍNEZ: That unpredictability of President Trump - you've negotiated with Iranians in the past. Any sense of whether that unpredictability is an effective pressure tactic?
MALLEY: You know, unpredictability can help. It doesn't help if it's so unpredictable that nobody knows whether what the president says one day is going to stick 'cause that's not unpredictability. It's unreliability. And there's a big difference between the two. And don't forget, this is a president who twice before, in the middle of negotiations, ordered strikes on Iran. So you add that to the fact that they can't really follow what the president is saying because it's such zigzag. I don't think it's an asset anymore. I think it's become a real liability.
MARTÍNEZ: One more thing, Robert. Both sides have traded various iterations of multipoint plans. How far has the U.S. strayed from Trump's initial peace plan?
MALLEY: I don't really know what his initial peace plan was. I mean, he is - again, one of the advantages of the way he's proceeded from his point of view is that he's given such a dizzying array of plans and objectives that he could always say at one point that he achieved one of the many versions that he put forward. So we don't - I don't know how close they are. Again, at the end of the day, what matters is that the war ends and people around the world no longer suffer from its consequences.
MARTÍNEZ: That's Robert Malley, former U.S. special envoy for Iran under the Biden administration. Robert, thanks a lot.
MALLEY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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