AMY GOODMAN: As the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran enters its 33rd day, President Trump is preparing to address the nation about Iran tonight. On Tuesday, Trump said the war could end in the coming weeks.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: What happens with the strait, we’re not going to have anything to do with, because these countries, China — China will go up, and they’ll fuel up their beautiful ships, and they’ll leave, and they’ll take care of themselves. There’s no reason for us to do it. We hit them hard. We got rid of a lot of — a lot of the radicalized lunatics along the strait. But if they want something — but I would say that within two weeks, maybe, two weeks, maybe three. We’re hitting them very hard. Last night, we knocked out tremendous amounts of missile-making facilities. We — as you probably read or wrote.

REPORTER 1: We’ll be gone in two or three weeks? Is that what you mean?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Excuse me?

REPORTER 1: Pardon me for interrupting. We’ll be — the U.S. will be gone or done with the war in two or three weeks?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think we — two or three weeks.

REPORTER 2: That three weeks, if it is three weeks — 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’ll leave. … When we feel that they are for a long period of time put into the stone ages and they won’t be able to come up with a nuclear weapon, then we’ll leave. Whether we have a deal or not’s irrelevant.

AMY GOODMAN: While President Trump’s talking about the war ending, The Washington Post reported Sunday the Pentagon is preparing for ground operations in Iran if Trump chooses to escalate the war. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports the United Arab Emirates is pushing for a plan to open the Strait of Hormuz by force.

To talk about the state of the war, we’re joined by Ali Vaez. He’s the Iran project director of the International Crisis Group. He also serves as senior adviser to the president of the International Crisis Group. He is co-author of a new piece in Foreign Affairs headlined “The Iran War Has Escaped Its Authors.”

What do you mean, Ali Vaez?

ALI VAEZ: It’s good to be with you, Amy.

Well, of course, this war started as a war of choice. The president went into this conflict with a high degree of wishful thinking that it would be a quick win: By decapitating the Iranian political system and by the shock and awe of initial U.S. and Israeli attacks, the Iranian system will quickly capitulate. We know that CENTCOM had warned him against Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, and he had dismissed those warnings and had said the Iranians would surrender before they would get a chance of closing the strait. And now we’re in the second month of this conflict, and it has become a war of necessity for him, because, unlike what he said yesterday, leaving this conflict without opening the strait would be a humiliating defeat for President Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the latest what’s happening? First of all, you have this whole issue of President Trump claiming regime change. And I want to play a clip to talk about what this means as the U.S. and Israel kill one group of Iranian leaders after another. Talk about what that means and where you see this leadership right now. Can you hear me, Ali?

ALI VAEZ: Yes. Sorry. I thought you were going to show the clip.

Yes, look, the regime in Iran indeed has changed, but it has changed and become a much more radical regime. It is still, of course, the Islamic Republic. It is not a fundamentally different political order. But its leadership is now in the hands of the most hard-line elements within the Revolutionary Guards. Anyone with a degree of experience and a degree of moderation or pragmatism has been eliminated, so you’re now left with the Revolutionary Guards, which is designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization, in charge of that country. Even individuals like the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, that the president believed could potentially play the role of Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela and make deals with the United States, is a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards Air Force.

And this entire strategy is based on a flawed understanding of how the Iranian system functions. This was never a totalitarian system similar to North Korea or to Syria in which it’s a pyramid sitting on its head, and if you remove the head, the whole thing will collapse and unravel. This was always a multicenter political structure with overlapping authorities and competing agendas, which in a time of crisis would actually ensure the durability of this political system. And that also means that there is no one, like the speaker of parliament or whoever else remains at the end of this war at the helm, would be able to do a deal with the U.S. that would be politically compromising for them, because there are other power centers, and they would check each other out. So, this is why, in fact, what he has created is a much more radicalized and militarized political structure in Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaking on Monday.

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: Some of the previous leaders, who are now no longer on planet Earth because they lied to the United States, and they strung us along in negotiations, and that was unacceptable to the president, which is why many of the previous leaders were killed.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Ali Vaez?

ALI VAEZ: Well, let’s remember that it was the United States that withdrew from a deal with Iran in 2018 under President Trump’s first term in office, not the Iranians, who were complying by their obligations, as verified by the U.N. nuclear watchdog. And the amount of time that the Trump administration in its second term has spent with Iranian counterparts negotiating, five rounds in 2025 and three rounds in 2026, Amy, if you put it all together, is less than a week. And if that is considered prolonging negotiations, I think probably the Trump administration doesn’t have a good sense of how dealmaking is done.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the thousands of paratroopers, U.S. military, that are being brought into the Persian Gulf area, and the significance of what this means, the possibility that Kharg Island — and the significance of it — would be invaded, or islands nearby, and what it means for President Trump to say he may end the war before he controls the Strait of Hormuz — he has also said he wants it called the Strait of Trump — and he might pull out of NATO if they don’t help.

ALI VAEZ: Well, this is typical mixed messages coming from President Trump, that it’s unclear that — what is it that exactly he wants? On the one hand, he threatens Iran with war crimes, destroying its energy infrastructure, flattening cities and civilian infrastructure, if the strait is not opened. And then, on the other hand, he says it’s somebody else’s problem, and if NATO doesn’t help, the U.S. would withdraw from NATO. So, typically, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road would take you there.

But reality is that we are now at a critical juncture that the president would have to decide. And we’ll see if he makes a statement along these lines in his speech tonight. But he either has to exit this war and accept that he hasn’t been able to achieve most of his strategic objectives, because the regime is still in place, it is still firing rockets and drones and missiles towards U.S. bases, U.S. allies in the region, even at Israel, with much more efficiency and precision than was the case at the beginning of this war, it still has a pathway to nuclear weapons, because it still has almost half a ton of nuclear material that is unaccounted for, and the strait remains in control of Iran — or the president would have to double down on escalation in order to try to open the strait.

And there, the options are really unattractive. If he puts boots on the ground on any of these islands, U.S. troops would basically be sitting ducks for Iranian attacks from the mainland. And as we have seen in the case of the Red Sea with the Houthis, these attacks can happen from deep inside the mainland. And what is the U.S. going to do? Go further and further inland? This would be a Vietnam scenario. You start with air power, then you start with limited boots on the ground, then it becomes mission creep that lasts for months or years.

Or if he goes after Iran’s energy infrastructure, then the Iranians would torch the oil and gas facilities in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, in the UAE, and that would push up the price of oil to above $250 a barrel, resulting in a global economic meltdown and a political fallout for President Trump in an election year.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about at what point destabilization of the region breaks down the Gulf alliance? And talk about the position of each of the Gulf countries. The UAE has just said it may get involved with the military response. The word is that Saudi Arabia has been pushing Trump to continue the attacks on Iran. Talk about what’s happening.

ALI VAEZ: Well, typically, the Gulf countries are not on the same page. They are sort of on a spectrum. And on the one hand, you have countries like Oman, who would like to see this war end as soon as possible on mutually beneficial terms. Then you have countries like Qatar and Kuwait, who understand that at the end of this war the U.S. is going to leave and be occupied with other crises in the world, but they have to live with Iran for centuries to come, and so they don’t want a zero-sum approach here, but they want a situation that is stable. And then you have Bahrain, the UAE at the other end of the spectrum, who are much more hawkish on Iran and want Iran to be defanged in a way that this cannot happen again. And what that means exactly, they haven’t really clarified, because the Houthis right next door in Yemen, which are a ragtag group of rebels, have not been defanged after years of Saudi and Emirati attacks on them, so it’s unclear how a country of 92 million could be defanged.

Then you have the Saudis kind of in between these two camps, because the Saudis have been involved in mediation efforts by the Egyptians, the Turks and the Pakistanis, that now China is supporting to try to resolve this crisis. But at the same time, I think they share some of the Emirati concerns about a situation in which Iran would feel emboldened at the end of this conflict. And especially if it remains in control of the traffic in the strait, it gives it some sort of coercive leverage that will be very uncomfortable for the Saudis.

So, they are on a spectrum. But at the end of the day, they also have very limited agency. This is a decision that President Trump will probably make without much consultation with them, and they are the ones who have to live with the consequences.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think it’s most important for President Trump to say tonight, given he has said things right across the spectrum?

ALI VAEZ: Well, look, undoubtedly, he is going to put out a narrative of victory. He is going to talk about sinking the Iranian Navy, which was never a threat to begin with. Iran had a Third World navy with no possibility of power projection. Iran’s capabilities has always been asymmetric, its underwater drones as mines, its cruise missiles that pose a threat. And those are the reasons that the strait remains closed. He will talk about killing the leadership of Iran and changing the regime. But again, as we discussed, none of that really means much.

I think the most important thing would be to see if he has a set of realistic strategic objectives and if he can match the ends and means and he can basically define what an off-ramp would look like. If he is still seeking set of maximalist demands that would amount to Iranian capitulation, that is just simply not on the cards. And it means that this conflict can go on for much longer. And the longer it goes on, the higher the cost and the risks for everyone.

AMY GOODMAN: Ali Vaez, I want to thank you for being with us, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. We’ll link to your new piece, “The Iran War Has Escaped Its Authors.” Ali Baez is speaking to us from Geneva, Switzerland.