TED
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Hi everyone. I'm Helen Walters. I am head of media and curation at TED. Welcome to another edition of TED Explains the World with political scientist Ian Bremmer. Today, we are going to explain the current and future states of the wars in Iran and Ukraine.
Ian, as always, thank you so much for being here to help us try to make sense of things. >> Hi Helen, good to be back with you.
>> All right, let's start in Iran, which is now entering its sixth month of conflict with the United States. And in just the last 2 weeks, we've seen attacks, we've seen counterattacks. None of the major issues between the two nations seem to be coming anywhere close to being resolved. So, what is your read of what
is going on and what should we actually be paying attention to? >> So, I guess there are two different components that we need to think about.
The first is why it is that the war is still going on given the clear costs to everyone involved in the United States, around the world, and to the Iranians.
Um and and the second is uh how might we think about the potential for a resolution. So, first, why is it happening? Because we had a a memorandum of understanding that was signed between the US and the Iranians, and it was only a matter of weeks before that fell apart.
Uh the issue here is that President Trump and the Iranian military leadership uh really fundamentally disagree about how much leverage they each have over the outcome. This is very different from what we saw between Trump and Xi Jinping. When he hit out really hard on the tariffs and created a functional
boycott, and the Chinese hit back with their own tariffs, and then the critical minerals licensing regime. And Trump realized, I do not want to get into a tit-for-tat continued fight with the Chinese. This is going to hurt me too much. I need to back away, and I need to ensure stability.
The Iranians have hit Trump back pretty hard, hit the Americans back. They've hit them back in blocking the strait, and they've hit them back in attacking targets across the Gulf, both infrastructure targets and American bases.
But the Iranians believe they can continue to do that until they have control over the strait, until they're given that control by the United States, seated to by the United States, so that they are able to get a lot of money, um and determine who does and doesn't go through.
President Trump's perspective is, yeah, they they may have been able to disrupt the strait, but I can continue to blow these guys up, and ultimately, they're going to have to capitulate. So, I don't accept that they can continue to wait me out. I need to show them by continuing to hit them harder that they're going to
be forced to back away from the deal that was signed in the memorandum, which Trump believes is the Iranians can sell oil, but they don't have control of the Iranians believe, no, we have control. So, that that's why we are still seeing fighting.
