The Iran war is in a kind of state of suspended animation.

On Thursday, US forces actually struck Iranian targets after two US destroyers were attacked in the straight of Hermuz.

But President Trump called this US response a quote love tap and said that the exchange of fire did not represent a break in the ceasefire even though ceasefires in general don't include two waring parties firing missiles at each other.

What we can take away from this episode is that Trump, who initiated the latest round of fighting in the 47year-old war between Iran and the US, would like to do something else.

Now, I'll talk about this confusing situation, as well as some large domestic political developments with Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at the New York Times.

Jonathan Lamir is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MS Now.

Amna Nas is a co-anchor and co-managing editor of the PBS NewsHour.

and Vivian Salama is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me.

I'm going to thank you for staying up late.

I appreciate it.

You're outing me as an old person.

I'm not outing you as an old person.

I just think we, you know, the NewsHour audience needs you to be rested.

That's right.

Um so I appreciate you being here.

So let me start with you, give you the first question.

Great.

Um uh the so am I wrong to say that the Iranian regime has won this war first by surviving and second by maintaining more or less control over the strait of Hormuz.

I mean that is their main leverage point right now and I think it depends on who you ask who's winning or who's losing.

Certainly you can't say the United States has won the war as President Trump has said.

And look the president has become sort of an unreliable narrator to all of this.

Right.

As you mentioned, he calls these strikes a love tap.

He said it's a diversion, a military incursion.

We are at war.

And I think we need to be clear about that in whatever this state of a ceasefire actually is.

And I think we need to look at what we've actually seen happen rather than what the president says is going to happen, which was a punishing US bombardment.

The Ayatollah killed his successor put into place and the Iranian foreign minister told me as a continuation of the ayati.

So that wasn't really a regime change, but we've also seen a throttling of the Iranian economy.

The president says it's going to [ __ ] them soon.

And now we have a new analysis that suggests that the regime could actually last months in this new phase of sanctions and the blockade on their economy.

So Vivian, if if it does la it does only last for months and Trump has the staying power to see through the throttling of the oil economy, wouldn't that then count as a victory for the United States?

It depends how you measure victory, right?

I mean, politically he is suffering.

The longer this war goes on, the more that he and sensibly the GOP suffers.

Um, you have midterm elections later this year, and they could really take a shellacking if they do not uh have the ability to uh lower oil prices, lower gas prices specifically, and just uh moderate the the impact of this war.

But even just the depletion of uh assets, military assets, um the the sort of mental state of the country in terms of having to go to war at a time where a number of people, especially some many of Trump's supporters did not support this war.

All of that has a cost ultimately and so President Trump is and the GOP will have to reckon with that moving forward regardless of whether or not there is an end date to this war.

So the question here is is staying power.

John, uh, you just wrote in the Atlantic today, quote, "Trump is left with a vexing question.

How do you end a war when your opponent won't budge?"

And while Trump grasps for an exit, the hardliners in Tran have used the war to tighten their grip on power.

Iran seems hellbent on pulling off something it's historically done well, humiliating an American president.

So to win here, does Iran just have to outlast a person with an historically limited attention span?

Yeah.

And President Trump is very ready to turn the page.

As one former adviser told me, he's bored of this conflict, but also because it's not, the word they used was literally bored.

Bored in part because it's not going the way he thought it would.

He thought this matter of days and matter of weeks at most, and it would be a resounding victory like he says we saw in Venezuela.

That has not been the case.

And instead, he's been made to look sort of weak on the global stage.

Already Iran has even if the war were to end tomorrow, which it will not, the Iran has more control of the straight of it was now than it did at the start of the conflict.

They have shown they can shut at any time and the pain that would accompany that to the global economy.

As Vivien said, the president is in a tough political situation here at home.

Gas prices are up.

His poll numbers uh are down.

Very few of the US military goals have actually been accomplished there in Thyron.

And the president is looking for desperately for an off-ramp, some sort of deal here.

And that's why in part we see him continuing to extend the ceasefire even with incidents like this week where clearly, you know, there was hostilities, but he won't escalate.

He keeps pushing it further on.

Right.

I'm I'm very interested in how Iran is responding to his idiosyncratic methodology here, but I'm also interested in in understanding how China is understanding this.

China's clearly watching this very closely, right?

And you're talking about how the Iranian economy continues to chug along while there's other countries like China continuing to buy that oil.

This also really complicates the president's upcoming visit to China.

There's a lot of other conflicting narratives and issues that they have to deal with at a time that the US and China have other things that they need to be talking about that deal directly with the US economy.

That's a real challenge for the president.

Right.

And Vivian, from a defense standpoint, obviously the US is uh depleting its stocks of weapons that could be used theoretically to defend Taiwan.

So China has to be looking at that.

China is definitely looking at that.

Um realizing also military assets that had been stationed in the Asia-Pacific that had been shifted to the Middle East so that it could support the war effort in Iran.

a number of um you know just diverted interests that China sees as a door opening and its intense interest in securing its position in Taiwan.

Um especially since President Trump has not been sort of orthodox about wanting to outwardly defend the sovereignty of Taiwan even though officials tell me that privately the administration's policy hasn't changed.

He hasn't really been bullish on that because he's so keen to maintain good relations with China, perhaps um extend some sort of a trade deal with China.

And so he's looking at the economic the trans transactional opportunities with China less so than say the future of Taiwan all the while this war in Iran is going on and it really opens the door for China to do what it wants to do.

Peter stipulating that it can go anyway and that Iran could collapse tomorrow and and etc.

The the story is not done.

stipulating all that of who in the White House now has a realist view of what's going on or realistic view of what's going on in terms of the the the duration the impact on America's global standing the weapon the the the the depletion of assets etc.

What's the fight inside the White House?

Well, I have to believe Dan Kaine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs has a pretty realistic view of this thing.

He told them from the beginning it wouldn't be as easy as the president said it was.

He's getting the numbers.

He's the he's getting the numbers and he's the one who told the president even before the started that the Iran could take the straight of Hormuz and create problems.

The president brushed it off according to reports saying well that won't happen.

They'll collapse before that happens and even if they do you guys can take care of it.

Obviously that's not the case.

You have to look at JD Vance who said from the beginning he didn't want this war.

He didn't think it was a good idea.

He has stuck to that even as he has been publicly supportive of the president and participated in these peace talks.

But I think that his point of view looks a little stronger in some of these internal uh discussions at this point.

But he doesn't have an out for them either.

I don't think that any of them has the clear path to a resolution of the war that allows the president to claim victory.

Given the things that Jonathan just outlined, given the intelligent reports we've seen saying that they still have most of their ballistic missiles, they're still as close to a nuclear weapon as they were when the war started, and they have increased control over the Strait of Hormuz.

What does that look like?

Right, John?

When did the president decide that he was done?

He's been done for a few weeks now.

I mean, I I mean, the war's only even gone on for a few weeks.

Well, the as you say, a legendary short attention span.

He thought this would be days.

Um I mean, he's looking for a deal even now.

Washington awaits a response to a from Iran on a one-page memorandum, which at best is like kicking the can down the road.

It just extends the ceasefire further.

They're they're nowhere near any sort of negotiation.

And it's not clear that Iran is incentivized to deal with him right now.

That they think, yes, maybe there will be economic pain, maybe the people will suffer.

Well, the the RGC running the place don't really care about that.

They feel like this is a moment to make a stand and they're they are making the president of United States look weak.

And Jonathan and I have actually written together that uh you know, President Trump explored an offramp weeks ago, but of Gulf allies in particular had been extremely alarmed at the situation that he would have been leaving behind had he pulled out a few weeks ago because it's right on their doorstep.

Stay on that.

if if he continues in the pattern that he's he's going in in the direction he's going which is finding any reason in the world not to re-engage and even when he has to re-engage calling it a love tap uh where does that leave Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Qatar Israel for that matter all of them have been shown the very harsh realities of their vulnerabilities with the closure of the straight of Hormuz and the inability for them to export oil which is their the primary uh generate a fund generator for their for their economies and so this has been an eye-opening experience for them but beyond that even if the straight of hormuse were to open tomorrow they still have to reckon with the fact that Iran's nuclear program is still an open question and that is not going to be solved anytime soon there could be a migrant flow at any moment because of the battering that Iran has taken they're right there on their doorstep Bahrain is less than 60 kilometers from Iran they have a very real uh the a very harsh reality in front of them after this war ends of what the future of Iran looks like in the region as a whole.

One more question on this, Peter.

I assume this is the subject of your next book in 2029 or whatever, but you try to answer it now.

Pre-order now, but pre-order it.

Yeah.

Uh uh but uh how did this happen given and answer in 12 seconds if you can.

How did this happen?

In the sense that Iran is very good over the last four decades, almost five decades of messing with American presidents, the Iraq war, which was extremely well planned.

Yeah.

Compared to this, how how do they just drive right into this culde-sac?

I think what you see here in in his second term is a president who feels more comfortable with power and bolden to do the things he didn't do in the first term.

Remember in the first term he launched a strike against Iran over a relatively modest uh incident and then pulled back 10 minutes before the bombs were to hit because he just felt uncomfortable about it.

This time he feels comfortable.

He's emboldened by Venezuela.

He thinks that worked out really well.

He's emboldened by the strikes last June which did seem to work out pretty well.

He did it for 12 days.

No damage much damage anyway to America or its allies.

And in theory, according to him, he obliterated the nuclear program that we now had to go back in and do again.

So I think he felt emboldened.

think he felt um empowered and I think they obviously misjudged the the total cost of how this was going to work out.

Jeeoff, I'll say one more thing because a former US negotiator with Iran put it to me this way.

There's two different pain [ __ ] right in Iran.

They are fine to cause pain to their own population.

That's not an issue for the regime.

Here the president has to deal with surging energy prices, low approval numbers, and midterms in It's interesting.

Our definition of pain is gas at $450 or $5 a gallon.

Their definition of pain is mass death.

But even there the regime does not care about mass death on the part of their their people.