The card Iran played

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 17th of June.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

The G-7 is meeting this week in France amid questions about the future of the Western alliance, the war in Ukraine, and a new agreement with Iran.

But the week’s biggest stories all seem to revolve around a broader question: can the institutions Americans and their allies depend on still do what they’re supposed to do in moments of crisis: from counter-terrorism to diplomacy to international alliances.

EICHER: It is Washington Wednesday and joining us now is political scientist Hunter Baker. 

Good morning, Hunter!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning. It's the best part of the week.

EICHER: All right, well let’s begin with successful counter-terrorism here at home: Federal authorities say they disrupted what the FBI describes as a sophisticated plot that was aimed at the White House’s UFC Freedom 250 event over the weekend. Investigators say the alleged plan involved drones, snipers, and multiple teams of attackers. Reports indicate the intended targets included wealthy political donors and individuals connected with the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC. Authorities say five suspects are now in custody.

And Hunter, if all of these allegations are accurate, I think what stands out is that the targets were not elected officials necessarily—they were people participating in politics. 

So the question is: What does it say when political violence expands beyond government and begins targeting the broader ecosystem of politics? What do you say?

BAKER: Well, it's really that categorization of people as either being on the right side or the wrong side. And if you're on the wrong side, which in this case, it appears to be Trump's side or Trump adjacent, then you are a fit victim for violence of this type.

You know, as I read about this story, it really worries me, because I think about what if it had been successful? I mean, it is a tremendous blessing that it wasn't successful, you know, because that kind of helps us to have confidence that law enforcement is operating and that they're able to kind of figure out these threats and to act against them. 

But I think that if they had succeeded, we would have seen more of it, and we may see more of it anyway, right? I mean, you may think about the original attack on the World Trade Center was what, maybe a decade before the one that actually took the buildings down? So, I hope that this isn't just the sort of the first of something that we're gonna see building waves of.

EICHER: You know, and it's not just politics, it's money. I mean, it reminds me a little bit of the response from the progressive side of Elon Musk's becoming a trillionaire last Friday with the IPO of SpaceX. And just all over social media, "Let's make him the last. Let's not allow trillionaires anymore, that's bad for society."

BAKER: It's one of the ugliest things that I have ever seen, and I, I sort of compared it to other kids being jealous that it was one kid's birthday party, and you know, kind of plotting against him because today is his day. 

Think about what Elon Musk really has done. 

In a period after it seemed that NASA had more or less failed and had significantly scaled back its ambitions, Elon Musk has shown what's possible in terms of the space industry. Making tremendous progress, and you know, kind of showing us that we can be ambitious again. So that's huge. 

I think about the electric car business. I'm not ready yet to have an electric car of my own, but that was a business that was just false start after false start, failure after failure, and he's really done something. If you drive through a city like Atlanta, sometimes it seems like every fifth or every 10th car is a Tesla, and he succeeded in that business where others have not. 

There are other fields of endeavor that he has pursued, and it just feels like he's this one guy who's sort of dragging us into the future, and I think a lot of times in a very positive way. So to me, this effort to try to make him a figure of envy or a target or some kind of evildoer just unveils the worst instincts among human beings that I've observed in quite a while.

BROWN: Hunter, one more question before we move on, what's more dangerous to a republic, corruption or intimidation?

BAKER: It's a great question. They're both tremendously bad. 

Corruption, because you lose confidence in the functioning government. You know, you start to feel that everyone who's in office is untrustworthy, and therefore, what, how can you ever commit? Right? How can you ever really give your heart and your allegiance to this government of which you're a part as a citizen. 

But intimidation is probably even worse, because that implies not just deceit, but also violent repression.

BROWN: Mmhm. Well, President Trump says he hopes the Iran conflict is headed for the rear view mirror. A signing ceremony is scheduled for Friday in Switzerland, followed by 60 days of negotiations, but many of the biggest issues remain unresolved. The nuclear program, sanctions relief, Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium, even parts of the shipping agreement. 

We've spent months, Hunter, hearing the critique. Make the strongest argument for this agreement. What would a supporter say this deal accomplishes that military action alone could not?

BAKER: I think, first of all, that we may misread the situation a little bit. 

So I think about when Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, that was terrible. I think that there were some significant foreign policy experts who knew that that might happen and dreaded it, and indeed it did, and it certainly seemed at first that the Trump administration was caught off guard. I think that they hoped that they could launch a devastating military attack and maybe bring the Iranians to the table right away. 

Obviously, that did not happen.

They shut down the Strait of Hormuz, caused tremendous disruptions in the world energy markets, and you know, however we feel it here in the United States, there are many nations that are feeling it much worse and paying much higher prices. 

So, I think I think that we were surprised there. I think we were caught off guard. 

But that having been said, what has happened is that Iran has been lured into playing their card, and once you've done that, you have redefined reality for all of your neighbors, for the rest of the world. You know, Marco Rubio kind of kept saying they're using a, an economic nuclear weapon. Well, they've done that now, and that means that everybody else can live in that world. Everybody can react, they can build pipelines, they can figure out other workarounds, and they can make Iran less relevant than they are and less threatening than they are. 

It may take time, but that's what's happened, and so I think that Trump is trying to kind of offer them a path back to some sort of normalization, now that their strategy has been revealed, can be seen, can be reacted to, and they've got to decide what the future is going to look like. Are they going to be a permanent pariah state, or is there something more constructive that can be done?

EICHER: Very quickly, Hunter, one year from today: stronger deal, collapse deal, or no meaningful change at all. What do you say?

BAKER: I'm very tempted to say collapsed deal, just because I have said those have said that we're not dealing with rational actors, but I hope that's wrong. I hope that the deal is stronger a year from now.

EICHER: All right, well, let's move on to the G-7. The leaders of the world's largest democratic economies are together for the G-7 summit in the south of France. 

The agenda itself, though, reveals the strains within the alliance: President Trump focused on Iran, of course, and energy security. European leaders pressing on Ukraine. Japan raising concerns on China, and much of the discussion centers on how allies should operate in a world where the U.S. is playing a different role than it has for most of the post-war era.

So, when you look at the summit this year, Hunter, do you see a coalition acting together, or do you see a collection of countries, just as we said here, increasingly pursuing their own interests, but under the same roof?

BAKER: I think that they're really torn. I think that they liked the world where the United States would be sort of the key member of the coalition, but would be really nice and really cooperative, and pick up most of the checks. 

And I think that Trump has come in, and he has been much less nice. He has demanded a lot more deference from the other partners, and he has demonstrated that he's going to get involved in some big stuff and then just expect them to go along. 

So I think they're torn, I think that they kind of don't know what exactly they want to do. Japan, I think, is pretty sure they're gonna go at the hip with Trump and kind of be able to resist China, but the Europeans, the Canadians, they're kind of talking to each other, and you know, "Do we want to kind of break off on this relationship and go it alone more often?"

That's what I see. I see a coalition with strange relationships and kind of an uncertain future.

EICHER: All right, as we go, fill in the blank, Hunter. This is with all apologies to the brilliant minds that put together the McLaughlin Group, that great show, if you know, you know, but fill in the blank for us: The biggest loser of the last five years of geopolitical upheaval is…?

BAKER: The U.K. 

The recent revelation that the people of England, on a per capita GDP basis, are poorer than the citizens of Mississippi is just a stunning revelation, and especially true since the English people had such a different self perception. 

So it's very clear that their decline has been precipitous. I think that Margaret Thatcher made a heroic effort to reverse it and to restore England, but I think a lot of that has been lost.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is Provost at North Greenville University and our regular political analyst on Washington Wednesday. 

Thanks, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

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