SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
I'm going to read from an unclassified U.S. government memo. Quote, "we have received intelligence that Iran has substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel." The memo describes, quote, "lethal plotting efforts" as reaching, quote, "advanced stages" in the Middle East and elsewhere. This was sent by the director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The U.S. official confirmed that memo to NPR. Meanwhile, President Trump and Israeli officials are both publicly threatening a new round of attacks on Iran. Any of this would break the uneasy stalemate of this ongoing war, which is now in month eight. So we have reached Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser under President Biden to talk it through. Welcome back to the show.
JAKE SULLIVAN: Thanks for having me.
DETROW: Let's start with that memo, these plots against U.S. officials. Do we have a sense of who is being potentially targeted or how serious the level of threat is?
SULLIVAN: Well, first, it is very unusual to have this kind of a memo from the director of National Intelligence to the secretary of state/national security adviser, unclassified, laying out the intelligence like this. And it shows you that the U.S. is trying to set the public narrative on this issue. I can tell you that when I was national security adviser, we also declassified intelligence about threats by Iran against former U.S. officials, members of the Trump administration who had participated in the strike against Qasem Soleimani, the former head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
So this is a familiar pattern with the Iranians that they would seek to target Americans, and that could include, Scott, everything from troops on the frontlines, obviously, who they have been trying to strike at bases in the Middle East, up to and including the most senior officials of the U.S. government. This is a pattern and practice for the Iranian regime and something that we do have to take seriously.
DETROW: I want to talk about the seriousness of the potential threats in a second, but I want to follow up on something you just said about the fact that it's unusual that this would be declassified. You mentioned that the Biden administration did this when it came to Russia, when it came to Iran.
SULLIVAN: Yeah.
DETROW: Sometimes you were trying to influence the other countries at play. Sometimes it can be about domestic politics. What do you think the goal is of making this information public from the Trump administration?
SULLIVAN: I think what they're trying to do is to, A, send a very clear warning to Iran, and they feel that warning will be more effective if it is not only made privately but also made publicly. Because part of what they're trying to say is, don't think you can get away with this and then deny it because we're calling you out in advance.
No. 2, I think, to a certain extent, they're trying to set a rationale for continued military action. And while I strongly agree with the proposition that the United States has to defend its people and deter Iranian assassination plots, I think we have to separate that issue from whether the continuation of this war, which has been dragging on for months with no end in sight, is in the U.S. national interest. And I worry that the administration is now trying to conflate these two things.
DETROW: What do you think, from your now outside view, Iran's capabilities are? I think Iran has surprised a lot of people by its ability to hang on for eight months, but how effective can Iran be attacking the U.S., whether it's at military bases in the Middle East or closer to home?
SULLIVAN: Well, to separate two issues, one is their ability to actually reach senior U.S. government officials and target them. They have made efforts at this, as I said, over several years. They have not been successful in doing that, and that's in part because we have been vigilant in defense. We were in the previous administration. I presume the same thing is true now.
But Iran has retained a substantial capability to hold ships at risk going through the Strait of Hormuz, to hold energy and other forms of infrastructure at risk in the Gulf, and to directly hold U.S. bases across the region at risk where they have done an enormous amount of physical damage and also killed a number of American service members serving in the Middle East during this war. So - and we've tried to degrade that capability, and President Trump, at various times, has announced, we've succeeded in one way or another, but Iran keeps coming back with missiles and drones because they're resilient.
DETROW: And now we're at a point where both Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and President Trump are threatening further attacks. Here's the president the other day on Fox News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And now my question is do I make a deal with them or do I finish them off?
DETROW: What do you make of that in terms of posturing versus seriousness of future attacks?
SULLIVAN: It's really hard to know what to make of it, Scott, because that sentence you just played - you could have played from a week ago, a month ago, three months ago. I mean, President Trump keeps walking up to the line of some major military escalation, then keeps saying, oh, maybe I'll do a deal instead. And we've ended up in this kind of strange stasis, especially over the last several weeks.
I think a big part of this is coercive diplomacy. I think he is trying to push the Iranians to a deal that President Trump feels he could do. And you see a flurry of diplomatic activity unfolding over the last 48 hours, with multiple Arab countries engaging the Iranians. And so my view is that he's keeping his options open, but a large part of why he's saber-rattling so publicly is he would like to shape the terms of a deal.
DETROW: Israel votes tomorrow. The U.S. votes in midterm elections in a week. How much do you think either of these elections will shape what happens next with Iran?
SULLIVAN: Well, one thing that we've seen in the run-up to the Israeli election is the sitting prime minister, you know, has been called out for putting pressure on the Israeli Defense Forces to do something with respect to Iran in advance of the election. So he is clearly chomping at the bit. But I would expect that even if there's a change in government in Israel, the basic consensus in that country - that Iran remains a massive threat and needs to continue to be dealt with - won't really shift all that much.
As for here at home, it's very difficult to say because, again, President Trump keeps making threats about the dramatic things he's going to do but then also keeps floating the idea that maybe he'll just make a deal. So I think the level of unpredictability in the United States right now on this issue is extremely high.
DETROW: That is Jake Sullivan, formerly the U.S. national security adviser, now at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Thank you so much.
SULLIVAN: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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