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Join us this week as we delve into the heart of Iran's turmoil with esteemed guest Elliott Abrams, former foreign policy advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Gain exclusive insights and expert analysis on the current state of affairs in Iran, exploring the underlying factors, potential ramifications, and possible solutions. Don't miss this captivating episode as we unravel the complexities of one of the world's most critical geopolitical hotspots. We're also joined by Andrew Hale, the Jay Van Andel Senior Trade Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation, who brings his extensive experience in international trade and defense intelligence. Together, we examine the alarming issue of China defaulting on $850 billion of debt, shedding light on the potential global consequences and exploring the economic and geopolitical landscape. Don't miss this captivating episode as we unravel the complexities of Iran's chaos and China's financial challenges. _ Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. He served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the administration of President George W. Bush, where he supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East for the White House, and as Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela in the administration of Donald Trump.Abrams was educated at Harvard College, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School. After serving on the staffs of Senators Henry M. Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan, he was an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration and received the secretary of state's Distinguished Service Award from Secretary George P. Shultz. In 2012, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy gave him its Scholar-Statesman Award.Abrams was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, from 1996 until joining the White House staff. He was a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2001 and chairman of the commission in the latter year, and served a second term as a member of the Commission in 2012-2014. From 2009 to 2016, Abrams was a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which directs the activities of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is a member of the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, and teaches U.S. foreign policy at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.Abrams joined the Bush administration in June 2001 as special assistant to the president and senior director of the National Security Council for democracy, human rights, and international organizations. From December 2002 to February 2005, he served as special assistant to the president and senior director of the National Security Council for Near East and North African affairs. He served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy from February 2005 to January 2009, and in that capacity supervised both the Near East and North African affairs and the democracy, human rights, and international organizations directorates of the National Security Council.Abrams rejoined the State Department in January 2019 as Special Representative for Venezuela, and in August 2020 took on the additional position of Special Representative for Iran. He left the Department in January 2021.Abrams is the author of five books: Undue Process, Security and Sacrifice, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and most recently Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring. He is the editor of three more, Close Calls: Intervention, Terrorism, Missile Defense and "Just War" Today; Honor Among Nations: Intangible Interests and Foreign Policy; and The Influence of Faith: Religious Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy. Andrew is the Jay Van Andel Senior Policy Analyst in Trade Policy in Heritage's Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies. Andrew Hale is currently the Jay Van Andel Senior Trade Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation. A dual citizen of the U.S. and the United Kingdom, he has previously worked for the UK Department for International Trade, in Defense Intelligence, and for Parliament. In the U.S. he has worked for the State Department and for a Member of Congress. _ Connect with us: www.breakingbattlegrounds.vote Twitter: www.twitter.com/Breaking_Battle Facebook: www.facebook.com/breakingbattlegrounds Instagram: www.instagram.com/breakingbattlegrounds LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/breakingbattlegrounds - Transcription Chuck Warren: [00:00:27] Welcome to Breaking Battlegrounds. I'm your host, Chuck Warren, my co-host today, Michelle Ugenti-rita. Hello, Michelle. Hello. We are so fortunate today to have with us Elliott Abrams. He is a man who's been responsible for a lot of the peace and prosperity in our world for the past several decades. Couple decades. He served as deputy assistant to president and National deputy National Security Advisor to the administration of George W Bush, where he supervised US policy in the Middle East for the White House and a Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela in the administration of Donald Trump. He is also a senior fellow for the Middle Eastern Studies for the Council of Foreign Relations. Mr. Abrams, thank you for joining us today. Elliott Abrams: [00:01:09] Sure. Very glad to do it. Chuck Warren: [00:01:10] All right. So let's talk about Iran. Iran sees some tankers, sees a tanker last week. They seem to be causing chaos all the time, sort of unabated. Tell us what our listeners what we need to know about Iran and what do we need to do? Elliott Abrams: [00:01:25] Well, the first thing is just what you said. That is they're causing chaos. They're causing chaos in the whole region. They're basically an enemy to everybody there Yemen, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan. I mean, they're supporting terrorist groups all over the Middle East and they're targeting Americans and they've been targeting Americans since 1979, since the revolution there. And they've been killing Americans for decades. And frankly, we're letting them get away with it. They've been killing Americans. We're not killing Iranians. You know, we just sort of issue strong protests when these things happen. And the lesson that teaches them is, okay, we can get away with it. So at this point, they're really a dangerous country for all of our friends in the region. And, you know, the they continue to use the same to slogans, Death to America, Death to Israel that they've been using since 1979. So what do we do about it? Well, one thing we shouldn't do, maybe we should start with this. We should not get back into the nuclear deal that President Obama negotiated. It was a bad deal the day he did it. Elliott Abrams: [00:02:47] And it's a worse deal now because there were a lot of provisions of it that were going to disappear over time. And they're disappearing because the years have gone by. That was a 2015 deal and it's slowly disappearing. Another thing, here's the thing we should do. If you look at the amount of oil they were exporting, mostly to China. During the Trump years, it was much, much less. Then they're exporting now again, they're getting away with it. In the Trump administration, we made it clear to everybody involved in oil that is, you know, the ship owners, the ship captains, the crews, the insurers, you name it, we're going to go after you. They obviously don't believe that anymore. And the amount of oil that's going from Iran to China is way up and the amount of money they get is way up. They're practically broke at the end of the Trump administration and they've got tens of billions of dollars now. So we need to those sanctions are all on the books. We need to enforce them if we're going to have any impact. Chuck Warren: [00:03:58] We don't seem to enforce anything domestically. Gun laws don't seem to get enforced. Every time you hear about a mass shooting, there's some gun law. They. You know, they broke previously and it's not enforced. We just had on before you, Andrew Hale, or after he discussed the $850 Billion in Debt. China has the United States that they're defaulting on. We're not holding them accountable. Why don't we hold these folks to accountable to laws that are in the books? Elliott Abrams: [00:04:26] Well, I agree with you. And I think in the case of Iran, you know, we can do it. We showed that we can do it by the time Trump left office, their whole national reserves that they could access were down to $4 billion. You know, there are there are a lot of individuals in this country now who've got more money than that, but they're building it up again because we're not enforcing it. Why don't we do it? I think this administration, Biden administration came, came, you know, these are all Obama people. And they came in with the idea that Iran deal called the JCPoA in 2015. It was great. It was perfect. It was wonderful. We just have to restore it. And so, you know, they don't want to make trouble. They don't want to make the Iranians angry by enforcing the sanctions that are on the books, partly because they think, well, you know, we're going to get back in this deal and the sanctions will go away. So why bother enforcing them? Well, we're two and a half years into the Biden administration. There is no thank God, there is no deal with Iran. We should be enforcing those sanctions. Chuck Warren: [00:05:36] If you were to sit down and let's say you're say you're in Iowa and you're sitting down in New Hampshire, you're running for president, you're sitting in the living rooms of people. The question it would seem to me that would be asked is why is Iran so hell bent on causing so much chaos and continually attacking Americans? I mean, it's been for decades. I mean, what is the motivation to do? Continue to do this instead of saying, let's just be normal, let our people have a decent life, we'll have our rules. But, you know, we don't need to be causing chaos. All the time. The ultimate disruptors of the Middle East. Elliott Abrams: [00:06:10] They are they are. Well, you know, it's it's actually a very good question. I think the answer is, first of all, it's not a democracy. You know, it's a theocracy. It's ruled by the ayatollahs. So no one cares what Iranians think. You know, they're not voting for these policies. They didn't vote for this government. So we can't blame the Iranian people. We got to blame the ayatollahs who run the country. And, you know, it's completely ideological for them. First of all, you know, there are Shiites and they believe that the fact that most of the Arab countries and most of the Muslim countries in the world are Sunnis is is evil and they want more power for their brand of Islam. The other thing is they want to be the most powerful country in the Middle East. They are the most powerful country in the Gulf. They have a much larger, more capable military than than the other countries. So what stops them from really dominating the whole region? Michelle Ugenti- Rita: [00:07:12] You made a bold statement. You said Iran is killing Americans and we're letting them get away with it. Yeah, I mean, that's frightening. Why are we letting them get away with it? What's the political motivation to continue to allow Americans get slaughtered like we have over the last several decades? Elliott Abrams: [00:07:29] You know, it's amazing. You know, you just said it. And when you say it, I think most Americans would hear that and say, this can't be right. Right. But it is right. I mean, look, look at the Iraq Iran, look at the Iraq war. I mean. They were feeding all of those terrorists in Iraq. The Pentagon will tell you that Iran killed something north of 600 Americans and wounded and crippled thousands of Americans. But go back further. The Marine barracks in Beirut. Who did that? Iran and Hezbollah did that. Hundreds of Marines dead and we never really respond. And we have what's known as escalation dominance. That is, people say, well, you know, if we strike back and then they'll escalate and then we're in a real war. No, we're not. It's a third rate power. It's a country of 70 million people. They're not insane. They do these things because they think rightly so far they can get away with them. And if they didn't think that, they'd stop and by the way, you know, they kill more Americans than they kill Israelis. And why is that? They attack more Americans. Elliott Abrams: [00:08:43] Why? Because they know the Israelis will hit them. They know every time they hit, they'll get hit back. And we need to establish the same kind of deterrence with Iran or this is going to keep on happening. Another example, hostages. We've got hostages in Iran now. President Trump got several of them out. This was Under Secretary of State Pompeo for nothing. That is, we didn't, you know, pay a ransom to get them out. We negotiated. We pressured and got them out. This administration is negotiating as it should, to get the hostages out, but it looks as if the deal is they're going to be willing to pay something like 7 or $10 billion. So the Iranians learn from that. But this is a good business, right? You take American hostages, you make a lot of money. We're we're letting them get away with it. And I think every president says, well, not right now. You know, I don't want to take this on right now or it's going to get too complicated. But this has been going on since 1979. Chuck Warren: [00:09:45] They sound like coyotes at the border here. Elliott Abrams: [00:09:48] Well, they're you know, look, they're not crazy. They look at this the way any criminal gang would look at it. What can I get away with? What's too dangerous for me? What's the likely punishment? How likely is it that I get caught and punished? And they make their calculation. And unfortunately, we've taught the lesson over the years. They're you know, you're probably going to get away with it. Chuck Warren: [00:10:09] Every teenager has weighed that decision with their parents on something, Right? Right. We all have kids here. They've all weighed that decision. Michelle Ugenti- Rita: [00:10:15] All the time. Chuck Warren: [00:10:16] I think a perfect example of this is when Trump ordered the assassination of I think it was General Soleimani back three years ago. You know, New York Times, oh, my gosh, World War three has started, you know, and they they toss some missiles at some of our bases. But you haven't heard anything since. And. No, you know, look, you just sometimes got to you know, I remember years ago, Lee Atwater told me the way you handle a bully is you punch the bully. If you don't, they'll keep doing it. Michelle Ugenti- Rita: [00:10:44] You have to stick up to them. Elliott Abrams: [00:10:45] That is, you know, it's right. I remember under Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Vance resigned in protest after he tried to free the hostages in Desert One. And somebody made the comment that Vance was a guy who obviously had never been in a schoolyard and didn't know how you behave with bullies. And I think I really do think that's exactly right, that they respect power. What was their real response to our assassination of Soleimani? Nothing. Mich…
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