President Trump sat down with Lara Trump this week and offered his most detailed public explanation yet of the strategic logic behind the Iran campaign, including the revelation that American forces deliberately refrained from targeting the Iranian military proper because it is considered more moderate than the IRGC, and that he views the negotiating posture as slowly getting what we want, with the backstop that if a deal cannot be reached, they will end it a different way.
Steven Bucci, thirty-year Army Special Forces veteran and former top Pentagon official, now visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to unpack the strategy, assess the opposition’s criticism, and address the Russian drone strike on Romania.
On Trump’s comment about preserving the Iranian military, Bucci offered an important clarification that many commentators are missing. The Iranian military proper, meaning the regular army, navy, and air force, is a distinct institution from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is why you hear terminology like the IRGC Navy or IRGC Air Force alongside references to the Iranian Navy and Iranian Army as separate entities. Trump’s statement that he left the military alone because it is more moderate refers to the regular military, not the IRGC. Most of the leadership targets that have been taken out have been IRGC figures. He said the IRGC is a smaller, better-trained, and better-protected organization than the regular military, and that eliminating its leadership has been an ongoing project throughout the campaign even if it has not been fully completed.
He acknowledged the legitimate question of who exactly is sitting across the table in negotiations, given weekend reports that Iranian President Pezeshkian offered his resignation to the Supreme Leader because the IRGC had effectively taken over large portions of the government. If the ostensibly negotiating civilian leadership has been marginalized by the very organization whose elimination is the military objective, the coherence of any diplomatic arrangement becomes questionable. Bucci said there may be negotiating tracks happening at levels not publicly visible, and that he is not willing to declare the diplomatic effort over, but that he remains skeptical a durable deal is achievable with the current Iranian power structure.
He was sharply critical of Congressman Seth Moulton’s assessment that Trump has lost both the war and the negotiation, and that the only remaining options are a full-scale invasion of three hundred thousand troops to achieve regime change or acceptance of what Moulton characterized as unconditional American surrender. Bucci said the invasion framing is a fever dream that no serious person in the administration or the military has proposed, and that Moulton and the Democratic left are guilty of demanding a ceasefire and negotiations while simultaneously calling any actual negotiation a loss. He said the Iranians are hoping that pressure from the left and from what he called the toxic wing of the right will force Trump to back down, and he does not think that is going to happen.
On the oil supply warning from major energy company executives, who told CNBC last week that crude inventories are approaching historically low levels and that models project a spike to one hundred and fifty to one hundred and sixty dollars per barrel once those levels are reached, Bucci said the concern is legitimate and the president is clearly aware of it. He said Trump’s stated indifference to the midterms is not actual indifference but a signal that he will not make decisions based on short-term political expediency when long-term national security interests are at stake, which is precisely what you would want a statesman to say. He said the administration is not ignoring the energy situation but is also not going to respond to it by repeating what he called the Obama move of sending pallets of cash to Iran to make the immediate pressure go away.
On the Russian drone that struck an apartment building in Romania, with former Russian President Medvedev following with a statement that peaceful sleep is over in Europe, Bucci was dismissive of the strategic significance. He said it is a weak-sauce bad-guy move by a military that cannot take Ukraine and has no realistic prospect of prevailing against NATO, and that Medvedev’s rhetoric about frightening European populations is the kind of thing you say when you need to distract attention from a very large failure. He said Russia’s military capability outside of nuclear weapons is not that of a superpower, and that Putin understands any nuclear strike would invite a response his country cannot absorb. He said the Romanians are showing appropriate restraint because escalation is not in anyone’s interest, but that Putin should take seriously how many neighboring countries with historical grievances against Russia would not be adversaries he would want.
On General Petraeus’s observation that the US military has not fully absorbed the lessons of Ukrainian drone warfare, which has accounted for an estimated eighty percent of Russian casualties in the conflict, Bucci said the concern is valid but the conclusion overstated. He said there is enormous ongoing effort across the special operations and conventional military communities to study, develop, and procure drone capabilities informed by what Ukraine has demonstrated. The process has not been completed, and the United States is not yet where it wants to be, but the learning and development are actively underway. He said anyone attending the major service and community conferences will find drone technology occupying a large portion of every agenda, and that Russia should reckon with the fact that not only did it fail to take Ukraine but it has accelerated American development of exactly the capabilities most threatening to Russian doctrine.