Future Outlook and Open Source Intelligence

The region has been thrown into upheaval. It's changing. It's going to be realigned . An initial deal to end the war. It's a long way from Trump's early days promise that there would be quote no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender . So where if nearly four months of war left the Middle East? We're tallying the winners and the losers from this conflict. That's ahead. On sources and methods from NPR . I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It is june eighteenth , which is a Thursday, which means we must be diving into the week's biggest national security stories with the NPR reporter s out there covering them this week with so many threads to tug . We have not one, not two, but three of NPR's finest with us. NPR national security correspondent, Greg Meyer isa on assignment in Tel Aviv. Hey there, Greg. Hi Mary Louise. We have NPR International Correspondent Jane Araf in Beirut. Hi Jane. Hi Mary Louise. And welcome back to NPR International Correspondent , Aba Trui who is in Cairo this week. Hey there . Hi . Hi. So it is about it's a little past twelve thirty so between noon and one PM here in D C, that's about seven thirty PM for all three of you, is that right? That's correct. Yep . All right. And the reason we wanted to bring all three of you together is because the U. S. and Iran have signed a deal. Now this is a very preliminary deal. It is short on details. Indeed, it is short on pages, just three , not even quite three . What it does is extend the ceasefire between the US and Iran . B , it reopens the Strait of Hormuz and C, it opens negotiations for a final peace deal. So this is a beginning to try toing end the war . President Trump has been trumpeting this agreement. He was at the G seven in France . On Sunday, we reached an agreement with Iran that achieves everything we set out to accomplish, everything, and much more , ending the current conflict, reopening the Strait of Hormos , and preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon. That's what was all about. That was about ninety nine percent Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Bear in mind that before the war, the Strait of Hormuz was open, and bear in mind that before the war, Iran didn't have a nuclear weapon and insisted it was not building one , so this deal gets us back to where we were. And in fact, if you go back to february twenty eighth , when President Trump announced the U. S. and Israel were attacking Iran , the goal sounded somewhat different. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime , a vicious group of very hard , terrible people. Today, of course, Iran is still led by a Nyatollah named Haminay . So among the questions in my head , who won ? Who lost? What ripple effects has the war had in the region. Greg, I'm going to let you kick us off briefly explain I am holding this three page a memorandum of understanding signed by the Presidents of Iran and the United States. Tell us a little bit more detail what's in it. Yeah , the big one is really the reopening of the Strait because it can happen quickly. It will have an impact. People can see if it's working. And if it's not working, then that throws into question every other part of the deal. Now from that , again, everybody there may be some logistical issues. Iranian mines are still there, a backlog of ships , but it seems like people will be working to find solutions, not problems. From that flows Iranian oil. So Iran would be able to sell its oil openly in the world. The US is going to give them a waiver to do that. So that's a huge immediate gain for Iran. Iran has promised not to build a nuclear weapon . Again, something that they've done for a long time in the twenty fifteen agreement and even before that . And then we're going to have these sixty days of negotiations where you get to the hard stuff . And foremost among those issues will be the fate of Iran 's nuclear program and these thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium. And President Trump said Iran can't have any enriched uranium, but will he allow some ? So I think we could see some relative calm in these early days and a reopening of the strait, but we're going to hit some very hard issues very quickly. Yeah I will note it does say this is This is extendable with mutual consent. So if they feel like things are going well, they want to keep negotiating. There's nothing to stop them from keeping talking. But you give a great segue to a question I want to put to you, A ya, you're one of the all of us on this call trying to track what is happening inside Iran from outside Iran . But as we start to tick through , who emerged stronger, who emerges weaker after these nearly four months of conflict take a run . I mean, where to begin with Iran ? They went head to head toe to toe with the world's most formidable military , the world's superpower , the strongest military force in the Gulf , with a fifth fleet naval in Bahrain with air bases in almost I think every country in the Gulf . And so for them to be able to walk away with demands that have been met criteria that they did not bend on, including billions of dollars that will be coming their way, not just from the lifting of sanctions, but from funds and from overseas bank accounts to be able to insist that Israel comply with their demands in Lebanon, to be able to insist that the United States lift its naval blockade in tandem with them opening the Strait of Hermus, which by the way, they said would take thirty days , give or take to fully open, whereas the US Naval blockade has to be lifted on their ports immediately . I mean, it's just so many different ways in which this country has shown itself to be able to , in their own words, become a superpower. They call themselves a global superpower in some of their statements now. And I think what's really fascinating is also the way in which their propaganda machine operated and their media messaging in this war, whether it was the Lego videos that I think almost everyone who's been online has seen at some point the trolling that they were able to do to just tap into the culture, the just trending viral stuff online, the trolling of Trump through their official accounts, their unofficial accounts, the amount of statements they were, always just it, always felt like they were a few steps ahead of even the Gulf countries, the Gulf Arab states and their messaging . So they certainly come out being able to suggest so that they're stronger than they were when they started, I think. So that's one way to look at it, that militarily they've survived. You're saying diplomatically and perhaps in public messaging and rhetoric, Iran has actually perhaps emerged stronger from this. I do want to note one of our other colleagues Dur,i Basrkerin, who is based in Istanbul, she's been getting Iranians on the line from inside Iran telling their reaction to this tentative deal . And she raises a point feels worth injecting. She spoke to one woman. This is a retired bank manager asked NPR, please don't share my name out of fear of repercussions for speaking to foreign media . But she this woman inside Iran told Duri she was reacting to this initial deal. This was a woman who had joined anti government protests and she said let's remember this deal . Again, it's preliminary, but it doesn't reflect any of the protesters' demands. And she said, our hope was if the US and Israel were going to bomb. With all of the hardships that that brought to our lives, we hoped it would topple the regime. There was the massive inflation and the high cost of living, the strange and overwhelming hardships and the lack of food . These are the things we endured in the war, and we were willing to endure twice as much, several times as much, just so they would go away. They mean existing leaders within Iran's regime, which, again, just to note, Eye, there are quite a few things that haven't changed in Iran despite these months of war. I think that just yeah, goes to the point of what I was trying to say, which is that this regime is more entrenched now than it was maybe before. There were risks to it being toppled before this war began. There were those massive protests. They had to literally shut down the internet during some of those protests in order to contain them. They killed thousands of people. But even with small revolutionary guard speedboats and drones and pretty cheaply made drones and some missiles, they've been able to keep the world's oil hostage this entire time. Greg, let's shift to where you are and Israel .ably Not , the US and Israel launched war on Iran together. Israel's signature is not on this memorandum of understanding. It is signed by the president of Iran, the president of the United States, the Pakistan i mediator who helped broker the deal , Israel has not gotten everything it wanted from this war. Far from it, Mary Louise. In fact, just the opposite. I mean, every day you look in the papers and the media , and there's some variation of this headline, good deal for Iran, bad deal for Israel . You can start militarily where they wanted to continue the war. They didn't want to stop the war . Now they're being told on a second front that they need to stop fighting in Lebanon where the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to keep fighting against Hezbollah. It's a It's a broadly popular war in this country as well . And Israel was not part of the negotiations . In fact, they were requesting a copy of the memorandum this week before it came was disclosed and apparently they couldn't get it . They were they were shut out to that degree. And on top of that, we've seen President Trump speak as harshly toward Benjamin Netanyahu as, maybe we 've ever seen a U. S. president speak towards an Israeli leader say I was very angry with him. He almost undermined this deal by striking heavily in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon at a time when we were close. He needs to take it easy. He raised several kind of completely out of the box suggestions. Trump's saying, maybe the Syrians could go in and deal with Hezbollah . You know, stuff that was just kind of what could go wrong with what could go wrong there? Yeah , well Syria spent decades controlling Lebanon. So I'm not sure the Lebanese would welcome Syrians back even if if it's it's a different government at this point . But the Israelis are really trying to figure out which way to go here . We still have Netanyahu saying we're not leaving southern Lebanon. There's still some shooting going on there at a reduced level , but Trump is the only real ally they have. So they can't completely walk away or go against Trump because they don't have anybody else supporting them. And yet they feel that Trump has given them orders that they are really struggling with right now. I think it's so fascinating too that Netanyahu and Trump entered in this war together . It was Prime Minister Benjamin 's conversation with President Trump that led to this war in the midst of negotiations between the United States and Iran on their nuclear program in February . And this war has driven a wedge between these two leaders, these two men in the span of under four months. And as somebody who closely watches the Middle East, it's very clear to me that Israel's interests are not always or even most of the time aligned with America 's interests, whether that's the war continuing for so long in Gaza at such a high human cost, including a man made famine, that was never in America's interest to continue that for so long as it did , but now we're really seeing how this Iran war also drove a wedge between them when they had entered into this war and lockstep together. One last one to you, Er . You're in Cairo today. You are based though in Dubai, that's where you live. Briefly sum up where this leaves the Gulf States. Many of whom are US allies. I think all of whom are US allies, and the US is their main security partner and their main technology partner . And they've invested, according to Trump, trillions of dollars in the United States . When I look at the United Arab Emirates, I look at Saudi Arabia, I look at Kuwait, we look at Bahrain, we look at Qatar. These are the main five countries that were hit quite hard by Iran's counter attacks not just on U. S. bases that killed US soldiers , but also that killed civilians from shrapnel in these Gulf countries that decimated , you know, at times airports, travel, tourism. The idea of Dubai being a safe haven, a place where you could come, have money , have a good time and just be completely unbothered and untouched by the world's problems, including the Middle East that no longer exists. All right, we're going to take a break when we come back. The view from Leban and more, that's ahead on sources and methods from NPR We're back and Jane Araf, youa are up You're in Lebanon , which has been dragged into this war. Israel of course has been fighting Hezbollah, that has complicated U. S. diplomacy with Iran. I know you have been on the move. Just give us a little taste of where you've been reporting from what you're seeing, what you're hearing . Well, it's a lot of southern Lebanon because that's where most of the fight is. That's where the border area is with Israel and Israel is fighting Hezbollah, Iran backed Hezbollah. So it's incredible devastation . When we go out there, a lot of times what we're covering is the aftermath of Israeli strikes. How do you get there? You're in a car on, the you ro're ad, you can drive. We can drive . It has to be carefully plotted because a lot of the airstrikes actually do happen on the roads and some of the roads around the places where fighting is can be dangerous as well. But as you know, we take managed risks because that's where we have to be to actually report on what's going on. So even when we're there , it's it feels a bit precarious sometimes . When we're going to these places, you know, a lot of these strikes, whether they're airstrikes or drone strikes or artillery , are in residential areas. And so when we get there a lot of times, there's still bulldozers that are trying to clear out rubble to get some of the remains that are there to capture some of the bodies And we attend a lot of the funerals as well . There have been an incredible number of people killed in this war on the Lebanese side, three thousand eight hundred, according to the Ministry of Health in Lebanon. And six hundred of those at least are women and children . So it's a very different picture from Beirut. I mean, here in Beirut, you can sit here and you can hear the dr ones and it's really annoying. But we were in the city of Tyre, for instance, a few days ago, and we were in one neighborhood that was still under threat by Israel And the drone was flying so low that the policemen we were with got really scared and said, We have to leave here because you know here it's annoying, there it's deadly. And it's just kind of part of a feeling that you get that the South is increasingly disconnected from the rest of the country. So circling back to our central question of who are emerging as winners, losers in this war , Lebanon . It's complicated. I know . It's complicated . And I think that's shorthand for it's got such a complicated history, right? Small country . It has a system set up where top posts are divvied up according to religion . And what this war has done, in some sense is kind of upset what was a precarious balance. It didn't always balance by any means. This country has been through a lot of wars . Some of them through Israeli invasions, some of them through some civil war. But really, what this has exposed is just a huge disconnect between people and politicians who feel that Hezbollah is the only thing standing between them and being permanently occupied by Israel and others who see Hezbollah as part of the problem . So I have a big picture question which I'll throw to you, Greg, and Jane and Eye, feel free to jump in. But I mean all three of you have covered wars in the Middle East for a long time. Greg, are you from where you are purged right now in Tel Aviv? Are you seeing a fundamental realignment in the region as a result of this Iran war of twenty twenty six? Or is it too soon to say? I think it's in progress, Mary Louise. I mean, I really go back to the Hamas attack on october seventh, twenty three that just ignited this firestorm in the region, and we've been working our way up the escalation letter from Israel and Hamas fighting in Gaza to Israel and Hezbollah fighting in Lebanon to Israel and Iran fighting and now the U. S. joining in a twelve day war last year, a three month war this year. And it just has gone up up and and up over the past three years and it's rattled the region. It's shaken every country in the region . Now we're at a point where we're trying seeing this effort to try to stop this and since work your way down that escalation ladder that the U. S. and Israel not going to attack Iran and vice versa under this agreement. Trying to sort out the Israeli presence in Lebanon , Gaza is still there as a festering soar . So the region has been thrown into upheaval. It's changing. It's going to be realigned. Every country has to rethink itself , whether it's, you know, Israel carrying out powerful military operations, but not getting any political gain from it, or from Iran and its proxies being hit and weakened, but still surviving. But is that still a viable project? Does Iran want to continue to support these proxies? Is that the way forward? The Gulf States having to reevaluate, can the U. S. protect us, you know, are we a safe, stable place that people want to invest in and come take a vacation in. So everybody is going through this transition . We haven't come out on the other side yet. Although you do keep flying in and landing just as a peace deal or some sort of ceasefire is announced. So maybe you will be some bizarre, yeah, some bizarre locked. Every time I come in here, there's a ceasefire, but it never seems to last. . Well, off the back of what Greg was saying about Gaza being a festering soar . It is very much like an open wound . And you can't have an open wound and not expect it to affect everything around it and the entire body and the body being all these other countries in the region. It's kind of like trying to say that you can have a fire raging in your backyard, but come, look at my front porch and look at how beautiful my front yard is, right? Dubai is a thousand miles away from the Gaza Strip. But what we saw from the Hamas attack on october seventh and the war that Israel launched on Gaza is that being unresolved did lead us to where we are now with the war in Iran. And I think across the region, Mary, Louise, this has just injected such a blanket of uncertainty over governments, over people. I mean, for so long, the thought was the US will help keep us safe. The U. S. will help make us rich . And that is just not a feeling that most people have these days. Time for another quick break . When we come back , our correspondents share the next big story on their list, plus OSYNT, open source intelligence, ahead on sources and methods from NPR. We are back with Abitra, Jane, Araf, and Greg Meyery talking through this three page memorandum of understanding that the Presidents of Iran and the U. S. have now signed . My question to each of you is , what story do you want to do next? As we all try to figure out where this is going, who do you want to talk to? Where do you want to go as you track this next phase? Who wants to start? I can start. The story I want to do next is not a story I'll be doing next. The story I want to do next is peace breaking out in the south in Lebanon, people coming back to their villages bunny to reconstruct it, but it's the day after the agreement between the U. S. and Iran, and there are still attacks going on. There are people being killed. There are people killed today. There are attacks going on between Israel and Hezbollah and vice versa . So yeah, I fear that we won't be able to move on from this for a while. For me, I mean, ideally we'd be seeing all of us being able to go into Gaza and being able to finally report from there . If this is a real ceasefire and the war is truly over, then let us in . We've all been demanding that for two years now. Now this is an unprecedented lock down on journalists outside of a conflict zone. So at Ledus into Gaza, I would love for us to be able to go in there, meet our producer, our reporter, Anasbaba, and to be able to also interview people, see on the ground what's happening, and ideally even report from Rafa, Egypt of aid coming and going and people coming and going, that would be the ideal next story if this is really the beginning of a real peace in the region. Greg . The U. S. has fought three wars in this region, three major wars in the last quarter century . None of them have turned out anything like they were predicted by the US presidents who launched these wars. In Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran, three countries that border each other, all in the same little region , all turning into being much more difficult, much more complicated than anticipated. The U. S. has this overwhelming military power, but it's not translating into political and strategic outcomes that the U. S. wants. Why is that? One analyst I've already spoken to, I thought he phrased it quite well. He said the U. S. has been showing an imperial appetite with the interest of a tourist that it just wants to come and act quickly and expect that this overwhelming military force will lead to the outcome at once . And either that is an overreach or simply not matching the means needed to do it . And you know, has the U. S. learned learned any lessons from this, but it's happened three times in the last quarter century now. All right, I'll throw mine in the mix. I would love to report from a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Feels like we've all been talking about the strait over and over and over and trying to describe what is happening and what is not happening there. And it's not going to be tomorrow and I don't know how we're going to pull this off, but I would like to get on a boat one of these days out on the water and make my way across the Strait of Hormes and see what we shall see. I'm going to start leading us toward Ocean. Greg, I'm going to let you go first. I have no idea what you're about to tell me for your OSIM. I will note you've probably been following. There is all kinds of news breaking on your beat here in DC. I would be remiss if we didn't just mention in passing, this is a change of gears, but the drama over President Trump scuttling his own nominee to lead U. S. intelligence. This is Jay Clayton. Jay Clayton was supposed to have a confirmation hearing before the Senate intelligence committee on Wednesday . Then Trump yanked it, postponed it, told Clayton not to appear. It's postponed till we don't know when. We don't know what's happening. So there is all kinds of tum ult and uncertainty over the leadership of the U. S. intelligence community and the eighteen spy agencies that make up that intelligence community. So you must be happy to be there in the relatively calm, restful and quiet Middle East. Yeah, I'm trying to follow that from here, but boy, oh boy, it's seems crazy. I have the feeling we will still have chaos for you to cover when you get back to DC. All right, with that, what is your ocean? Yeah, so I was going through the West Bank on Tuesday and I was driving down a sort of very empty road. I saw a sign that pointed to an Israeli Jewish settlement there called Ma ouun , and I just had this instant flashback. I had just arrived in the region. I was based in Jerusalem at the end of nineteen ninety nine, and I hadn't even unpacked my suitcase. And I went out to the West Bank and the Israeli government, the military, was tearing down a settlement, an unauthorized settlement. About eight or ten guys had put up little tin sheds on a hilltop in the West Bank, trying to start a settlement, as is often the case in a place called Maoon. It wasn't even a place. It was just a big empty hilltop . And so the soldiers , they tore down these tin shacks, some of the guys, the settlers were on the rooftop . They had to drag them off, you know, it lasted an hour or two as they tore all this down. And that repeated itself several times over the next couple couple years . The settlers would go there, try to set up the place in Maoon, get torn down. So I'm driving on the road and as we go by, somebody says, Yeah, that's Maoon. It's now a big subdivision. eight hundred people live there , permanent houses. They kind of farm and this just shows you what happens over time . And a small very committed minority of settlers kind of get their way . And this they began at a time when the Israeli government was trying to limit the settlements or try to prevent new ones. And now you have a government that is absolutely supportive in backing settlements and throwing money at them and providing protection with the military . And so it was this twenty five year flashback to what was an empty hilltop is now a large community in the southern West Bank. Wow , all right. Jane, you're offset . Yeah . There's a village in southern Lebanon and it's really beautiful. You know, a lot of these villages are, it's one of the border villages and it's called Yaroon. So we've been through it and we've seen it, you know, a lot of it destroyed. The church has been demolished, for instance. But then after the ceasefire, Israeli forces came in with bulldozers and they started bulldozing a lot of the private homes, saying that Hezbollah was hiding there without providing proof . So we tracked down some of the people whose homes they were. Some of them were in Beirut and we sat with them we. And sat there , well they tried to scroll up satellite images that they were paying for because that's the only way they would know if their homes had been destroyed. And then I talked to some of the former residents, the landowners who are in the US because there's another Lebanon out there. There are millions of Lebanese and they left here during the Civil War, and a lot of them went to the U. S. and they made good . So these were two brothers who own a contredact and company in upstate New York. Their houses had been destroyed . Their houses were in the Christian sector, and they said there was no Hezbollah there. We had security cameras, et cetera. And then one of them started talking about how he's angry as an American because he pays taxes. He says, I'm a law abiding taxpaying American, and then he segued into I voted for Trump and now I feel really stupid . And it was just an indication of the ripple effect of all this and the unintended consequences. Wow And of all the places to find a Trump voter and start interviewing and there you are there we are, Eyah . I've been , you know, watching closely the Gulf and Iran throughout this war. And one thing that caught my attention was that at the World Cup this year , the Iranian players when they first arrived to their opening match , they were all wearing these golden small lapel pins with the word one like with one six eight on them minub to represent the attack by the United States on this school that killed one hundred sixty eight people at the beginning of the war, almost all of them school children, elementary school children, as we know. That investigation is still ongoing . But I think the soccer, the football players wearing that at the World Cup is just another way that Iran has tried to keep that incident, which was the deadliest single strike of the war in people's okay, that's something to watch for when they next take the field for their next match. I had not noticed that. Thank you . All right, I'm going to do a big old pivot, a one hundred and eighty degree pivot and actually end us on a note of humor and a little bit of hope . My Osen is a spy caper, a very silly spy caper . Greg, as you know, well because we have talked espionage fiction on this podcast. I'm always on the lookout for new espionage fiction . And my producer, Elena Burnett, flagged the new novel by Paul Rudneck, it's titled The Tuxedo Society . The plot of the Tuxedo Society is about this elite top secret LGBTQ spy unit, so this all gay team and they're out and about in the world thwarting global threats. There's chase scenes and there's gadgets and exploding grenade power bars and yoga mats that turn out to be guns , and so forth. I interviewed Paul Rudneck about the book for All Things Considered and I want to play just a little taste of it. This is Rudneck telling me about how delightful it was too bright. What is essentially a complete parody , a very good natured send up of the spy genre. If you think of the opening scene of any Bond movie or the Born movies where suddenly a guy in a tuck shows up and the whole scene erupts. People are falling off scaffolding. People are cartwheeling off the pyramids and the guy at the center of it stays cool as can be, unruffled. One of my favorite moments in any of those real set piece scenes is when someone like Jason Stadam appears from underwater in a wetsuit, which then after he kills all of the various ninja figures, he unzips the wet suit , steps out in a perfectly uncreased tuxedo, takes a martini glass, and enters the Schmench Chateau I just have such envy of that moment, especially the dry cleaning aspect . Especially the dry cleaning aspect. So I will send you off into the rest of your day with that with that image, shaking in the martini and walking into the French chateau with your perfectly dry cleaned and pressed tuxedo. Can't top it. All right, I have been speaking with NPR, Greg Meyery, Jana, Rafe and Ea Batrai. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Thanks as always. Sure thank Mary se. And a note before we go, if you're looking to spend less time scrolling social media for news and more time understanding the news and what's going on , let me recommend the wide collection of newsletters available from NP R. You can get a morning news digest or the latest in politics or pop culture or whatever you like, delivered straight to your email inbox. No dooms scrolling required. You can check out the full lineup at nprot org slash newsletters. That is it for today's episode. Thank you for listening. I'm Mary Louise Kelly and we are back next week with another episode of Sources and Methods from NPR.