NERMEEN SHAIKH: Iran is threatening to escalate attacks in the Middle East after President Trump delivered a primetime address in which he threatened to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages.” Global stock prices tumbled and oil prices jumped after Trump vowed to continue striking Iran, even though he claimed Iran had already been decimated militarily and economically.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [Thanks to] the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump also repeated his threat to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure, which is considered a war crime.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously. We have not hit their oil, even though that’s the easiest target of all, because it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Earlier in the day, Trump spoke at an Easter lunch event at the White House. He gave attendees a preview of his primetime remarks.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And tonight I’m making a little speech at 9:00, and basically I’m going to — I’m going to tell everybody how great I am, what a great job I’ve done, what a phenomenal job. What a phenomenal job I’ve done!

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by two guests.

Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize- and National Magazine Award-winning reporter, the author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and the Forever Wars newsletter, his latest piece headlined “So You Lost A War To Iran.”

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is a fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was previously professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, the author of several books, including Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran, as well as a memoir about his years on death row in Evin Prison in Tehran called Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution. His latest book, just out this year, is titled The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions.

We begin with Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi. Thanks so much for joining us again. Why don’t you respond, overall? Many people were waiting with bated breath to see what President Trump was going to announce in his primetime address, the first one since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. What did you make of what he said?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: First of all, thank you for having me back on the show.

I think it was a very anticlimactic kind of speech. And as we expected, he structured his speech around lies and delusions, I think. And he did not add anything new about what we already have heard from him. And I think possibly the most important part of this speech last night was the timing of it. And this was a speech that one should have expected to hear before the start of the war, because it was mostly about justification of the war.

And my take on it is that it was, in a sense, a kind of admission to defeat in the war of narratives, and I think that they feel, the White House feels, that they need to go back to point zero and to speak about why are we in the war with Iran and what the objectives are and what the end goal is and how we can find an off-ramp to end this war. And so, yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Spencer, I mean, one of the things, as Behrooz just said, it’s not only that Trump seemed to repeat, without any variation at all, various comments he’s made in the past weeks on social media, but some of the key issues — if you could talk about some of the key issues he did not mention, including the surge of U.S. troops, the military personnel who are en route to the Middle East now?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Indeed. Good morning, Nermeen. Good morning, Amy. Lovely to be here with Behrooz especially. We’re going to learn a lot from this conversation.

This was a speech that we shouldn’t normalize, even for Trump. This was a cavalcade of lies on top of the delusions and the incoherence there. But most importantly, as you mention, while Trump is trying to domestically reassure his base — and more, perhaps, to the point, reassure markets — that he hasn’t just plunged the United States and the world into a compounding economic disaster, is that there is an aircraft carrier with 6,000 sailors, three destroyers on its way — it will be the third such carrier strike group committed to this conflict — as well as the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit and elements of the 82nd Airborne that are on their way, for purposes that Trump neither explained nor even really mentioned at all. So, while he is trying to kind of, as he has frequently throughout this conflict, send a message that this is not a forever war, this is not an open-ended conflict, this is not like those other foolish presidents in the Middle East, what he’s doing is entrenching this conflict ever deeper without any mechanism to resolve it.

While Trump emphasized that — or, attempted to emphasize that he has been consistent in his explication of what American goals are in Iran, which he hasn’t — he’s been all over the place. He called, the very first day of the war, for an Iranian uprising to overthrow the Islamic Republic, which hasn’t happened and, frankly, doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen. What in fact has happened is that Iran has changed the entirety of this conflict. It has pivoted this conflict onto its own territory and its own goals, and the United States does not have a military mechanism to redress that, primarily the throttling of the Strait of Hormuz.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Behrooz, you had mentioned that there is a risk. I mean, so, as Spencer said, there are thousands and thousands of troops on their way to the Middle East. You’d said one of the possibilities what these troops would do there is to try to take one of the islands, Iran’s islands, and that not necessarily Kharg Island, which is the only one one really hears about.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: Yeah, I mean, obviously, the taking over of Kharg Island is extremely dangerous and risky, and it would threaten not only the stability of the region, but I would go as far as to say that it would threaten the stability of the entire world order. And we are indeed in that moment that this instability of the world order is at the table, and Iranian side knows this very well, that they hold that card in their hands, and if they can’t compete militarily with the U.S., they can really play that card in a very, very effective way.

My sense is that, you know, the invasion of Kharg Island is highly unlikely to happen, unless — unless the U.S. feels so desperate that there are no other alternatives available to them. There are other smaller islands that are disputed between Iran and the UAE, the two Tunb Islands and Abu Musa, which don’t have oil reserves, but they have strategic significance, and less risky for the U.S. forces to land there and declare that they have invaded that island. But even that would escalate the war to such degree that it would be out of control of any of the players who are now engaged in this war.

AMY GOODMAN: Behrooz, Iran’s president, Pezeshkian, sent a letter to the American people hours before President Trump gave his speech last night, asking if this war is putting America first. Tell us who, where Pezeshkian is. Where does he fit into what’s happening right now?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: Pezeshkian was quite an unlikely candidate to become Iran’s president. He was a member of the Iranian parliament, and when he nominated himself to run again for reelection, the government basically disqualified him from running for the parliament. But a year later, he was qualified to run for the president. So, you get the picture that how unlikely a president he is.

And he is not a key decision-maker in Iran at this point, but he has a very important role in keeping the entire political system on the same level. And he’s a good communicator with the Iranian people. He’s a man of the people, so to speak. And I think that his discourse, his political conversation with Iranians, although he comes across as a very naive kind of politician, but nevertheless, I think he’s opening some space for his political position inside the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Why hasn’t Israel tried to kill him? I mean, they’ve killed so many of Iran’s leaders, one after another.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: Do you really want me to speculate on that? I don’t know. But, I mean, I think, first of all, they’ve tried to kill him. He was injured in June attacks, and he was severely injured, and he was limping for a while after June war, and they did try to kill him. I don’t know how they are keeping him safe at this moment, but nevertheless, you know, Israel did try to kill him.

And I think that he is not in that position of game changer in Iran at this point. Israel and the U.S. are mostly attacking — Israelis mostly are attacking people who are in the position of game changing, like Ali Larijani, or I read yesterday that they attacked Kamal Kharazi, who was the former foreign minister in Iran, and he’s severely injured.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the Supreme Leader Mojtaba is in the country? Do you think he’s alive?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: I don’t know. I don’t know. And I think that it’s possible that they’re playing this kind of game with Mojtaba that, you know, he’s acting as a hidden imam, because that hidden imam has a very significant role in Shia theology. And whether or not he’s injured and he can’t appear in public or this is a political game to keeping him hidden, I’m not quite sure. But we’ll find out soon.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Spencer, just to go back to the speech and Trump’s kind of shifting objectives for this war, one of the things he said is that he terminated what he called the disaster of the 2015 nuclear deal, because it sent billions and billions of dollars to Iran. First of all, if you could explain that? But then he said nothing at all about the fact that just in this week he allowed Iran to sell oil, thereby enabling Iran to earn billions and billions of dollars.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yes. So, let’s peek behind what actually is going on here, because going back to the 2015 deal, one of its primary terms was that Iran would get out from under the sanctions regime that was put in place precisely to have leverage in order to produce the nuclear deal. And that reaped Iran something around a billion dollars’ worth of sanctions relief. That was its own money that the United States had basically frozen. The rejectionists for this deal, the people who would never allow this deal to get to yes, precisely so it would take away the option of attacking Iran militarily, raised an enormous hue and cry about how now this was funding the so-called terrorist regime in Iran.

What Trump has done to reassure the markets after launching this very ill-thought-out war was provide for Iran to sell oil once again. Oil, of course, is a global commodity. It can’t really be throttled in one place or another without affecting the price everywhere. And so, now Iran stands to benefit by the terms of the current price of oil, that Trump and Israel have forced to go up, something like $13 [billion] to $14 billion, vastly, vastly beyond the sanctions relief they got in the 2015 deal.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could also — this was a very crucial point and has been a major issue in the war, Iran using the Strait of Hormuz to retaliate against Israel and the U.S. Last night, Trump claimed that the Strait of Hormuz would, quote, “automatically open” once the U.S. leaves, and simultaneously urged countries reliant on oil from the region to go to the strait and, quote, “just take it.” And he also urged countries, of course, to buy U.S. oil instead. So, your response to that, and in particular this idea of the Strait of Hormuz, which for the longest time he was saying that’s one of the objectives, we have to have this strait open, despite the fact that prior to the war the strait was open, so he’s trying to resolve an issue that the war itself created — and the fact of, you know, the implications of Iran’s effective blockade of the strait, which we’re already seeing the effect in so many parts of the world?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: You can see how even just summarizing the circumstance brings out not just the absurdity, but the tragedy and the horror of the misjudgment that this war is predicated upon.

The most important thing to understand about the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy and commercial waterways, is that Trump has no military way of forcing it open. Everything that he is about to do, the war crimes that he has promised — when we hear both him and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth talk about destroying Iran’s defense-industrial base, what they mean is they will bomb every civilian industrial target that they can find, much as they bombed the girls’ school at the outset of the war, and claim this is some kind of military target. All of this is going to be designed to force enough pain on the Islamic Republic that it opens the Strait of Hormuz back up. That’s because there is no way that the United States has to force it otherwise.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you, Spencer, about the role of Israel. Does Trump’s incoherence — and let’s make no mistake about it, when someone is completely unpredictable, that gives them a great amount of power. But does that chaos serve Israel? And what is the relationship here with Israel fighting this war on so many fronts, attacking Iran, attacking Lebanon, moving higher and higher into Lebanon, and, of course, continuing to kill people in Gaza? And a number of Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank during this time.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Starting around the time of the Israeli assassinations in 2024 spilling out from the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a great deal of people within Israel and within Israel’s support base inside the United States believed that they had an opportunity to transform the Middle East by permanently disabling, or at least structurally weakening, Iranian power, not only in its broader ambience in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen and in Iraq, but now in Iran itself. That’s what Israel was going for. Israel is not simply going for a weakening of Iran. What it was hoping to do was collapse the Islamic Republic and bring Iran into some sort of failed state situation.

Some of the indications from media and from political statements from Israel seem to indicate that they know they can’t bring Trump into that open-ended conflict that would give them the leverage to do that. I think one of the things they’re trying to leverage through that is an overwhelming focus on the front in Iran to give them cover to seize Lebanon south of the Litani River.

AMY GOODMAN: Already they’re up to the — they’re aiming for the Zahrani, north of Litani.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: And they’re killing — I think they’ve killed something like 1,300 people. They’re trying to transform not only the boundaries, not only the shape of the state of Israel, but establish Israel as the only real regional superpower, displacing Iran. I don’t think that will work. I think what we’ve learned is that, for better or for worse — I will leave Behrooz to describe the cleavages within Iran and how the Islamic Republic relates to its own people, but nevertheless, the Islamic Republic has proven not only its resiliency beyond what Israeli and American war planners had thought, but it’s shown that its strategy for defending itself and for inflicting pain on the broader American and Israeli coalition in the Gulf is undisturbed by what Iran and — sorry, by what the United States and Israel have thrown at it for a month.

AMY GOODMAN: And, OK, that is a key question. You’re a journalist, Spencer, so let’s put that question to Behrooz, is: What’s happening to the population of Iran? Also, is the internet still largely out? How do people communicate with each other, with the outside world? But the rifts, the fissures within the Iranian Republic right now, and where does the resistance stand?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: Iranian society has been quite a vibrant society in the past 40 years. Iranian society has always been engaged in a very meaningful struggle to expand civil liberties, to create space for breathing, simply, and for the space for struggle for social justice. And —

AMY GOODMAN: You, yourself, were a part of that —

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: Of course, you know —

AMY GOODMAN: — and ended up in Evin Prison.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: — and that never ended, and it continued. And people gained a lot of grounds and lost a lot of grounds. And one of the — I think one of the most tragic consequences of this war is that this war destroyed that space within which people struggled for this transformation of Iranian society. And I always say that we need to delink this war from the situation of repression in Iran and the question of social justice in Iran. But this war has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the question of, you know, violations of human rights or civil liberties in Iran. It has nothing to do with that at all.

And what this war is doing — and I want to pick up on something that you mentioned and Spencer mentioned at the beginning — that this war is normalizing different kind of conversation about how wars are fought. And I think this is — this war began, I think, in Gaza with the Israelis’ attempt to, basically, openly, blatantly, flagrantly violating all rule-based conditions of fighting a war. And this was a genocide openly done, and even posted on social media, and the world stood silently, and not only stood silently, but also helped Israel to carry out that genocide.

And I think now we witness, and it’s not a coincidence, that Trump openly talks about war crimes from the podium at the White House, and no one actually says anything about it, because he’s openly advocating war crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure, sources of energy, water salination in Iran. And so, I think this is a very, very important point, that we should not allow the normalization of that kind of discourse.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, before we conclude, Behrooz, I’d like to go to comments made by the anthropologist at Johns Hopkins University, Narges Bajoghli, in her recent piece in Foreign Affairs magazine headlined “Iran’s Long Game.” She wrote, quote, “[I]n the Iran-Iraq War, the loss of commanders had created dangerous vulnerabilities for Tehran. To avoid the same result during a U.S. or Israeli campaign, over the past four decades the regime has deliberately decentralized its military command, distributed political authority across regional nodes that can operate autonomously, and cultivated multiple potential successors at every level of the IRGC and the governing establishment.” So, that’s Narges in Foreign Affairs. Could you talk about what the implications of that are in terms of regime change?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: Regime change, basically, is a shibboleth that Trump is using, and it’s totally meaningless at this point. And it’s very clear that the Islamic Republic has created at least four levels of replacement possibilities. And not only militarily they have trained and put in place commanders who can take over in the matter of minutes, but also politically they have given governors of different states full political autonomy. In case of the collapse of the central government, they are in the position of making independent decisions to carry on their political responsibilities. So, the idea of regime change and the possibility of it is so remote. And I think that has become very clear for the Trump administration and for the Israelis, who basically don’t have a plan for regime change. They want a plan for a failed state, not a regime change.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask about another Narges now, Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. I want to ask about Evin, a place you know well.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You were on death row in Evin Prison. Are you afraid that Iran or the U.S. or Israel will bomb Evin, where Narges and so many other dissidents are?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: I think Narges Mohammadi is not in Evin at this point. They transferred her to a different town. But there’s always a fear that — you know, I said that this war doesn’t have anything to do with the question of social justice and civil liberties in Iran. And people who are inside prison are not the, basically, people this war wants to protect. And these are people who are trying to promote and fight on behalf of social justice and civil liberties. So, if they bomb the prison, I think that would be consistent with the way this war has been carried out.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer? Thirty seconds.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: This war is already lost. I don’t know how long it will go on, but Iran has so thoroughly outfoxed the United States that you heard Trump say he is willing to walk away from a conflict he began without reopening the Strait of Hormuz. That is not how winners operate, just to be really frank about it. If the United States leaves the Strait of Hormuz closed or basically throttled in the possession of the Iranians, the Iranians will have reset the terms of the Middle East, and quite possibly with spillage effects on the entire global economy. That is a recipe for returning to war, not ending it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we have so much more to talk about, but we have to end it now. The conversation continues. Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning, National Magazine Award-winning reporter. We’ll link to your newsletter, Forever Wars. And Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, fellow at the Center for [Place], Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Latest book, The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions, everyone should read it.

Coming up, Supreme Court justices appear skeptical of President Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship. Back in 20 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Streets of Minneapolis,” Bruce Springsteen performing at Democracy Now!’s 30th anniversary last week at Riverside Church. On Tuesday, Bruce launched his new tour in Minneapolis and from the stage described the Trump administration as “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous.” Just before we went to air this morning, President Trump attacked Bruce Springsteen in social media.