MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Tomorrow marks six months since the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran. President Trump said it would be over in weeks. What's happened to Israel? And is anyone winning? Those are a couple of the questions we tackled on NPR's weekly national security podcast Sources & Methods. NPR's Daniel Estrin from Tel Aviv, Hadeel Al-Shalchi from Istanbul and Greg Myre here in Washington joined me to take stock of where we are diplomatically, economically, militarily.
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KELLY: Greg, take diplomacy.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Yeah, that's an easy one, actually. Nothing's happening.
KELLY: It's a short answer, yeah.
MYRE: Yeah, yeah. That's all you need to know, really. You know, things can often - can change quickly, but we really haven't seen intense fighting now for months, and the diplomacy seems stalled. So it's kind of wait and see, attrition on both sides.
KELLY: Daniel, to bring you in here, as noted, the U.S. and Israel started this war together. More and more, it feels like Israel has left the conversation, at least the conversation unfolding here in the U.S., where it's all about the U.S. war on Iran is what we keep hearing. Sitting in Tel Aviv, does it feel that way to you?
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Oh, yeah. Israel has left the chat. I mean, Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has been iced out of the entire process of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. Israel was not in the room. Netanyahu held this rare press conference this summer right as the memorandum of understanding was announced between the U.S. and Iran, and he walked this very, very fine line where he was saying, I've known Trump many years. We often see things eye to eye. There are some things we see less eye to eye. And that's really extraordinary.
KELLY: Yeah.
ESTRIN: It was the beginning of this major shift in attitude in the relations between those two leaders, and we continue to see that unfold.
KELLY: Yeah. It sounds like one casualty of this war has been the once-warm relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
ESTRIN: Yeah, it's fascinating to see it in so many other places, not just on the Iran front, but the U.S. is pressuring Netanyahu to maintain ceasefires throughout the Middle East, and Netanyahu is not fully playing ball. The biggest example is Gaza. Netanyahu is not fully cooperating with the Trump administration's efforts to keep the ceasefire, let alone advance it. He is in a real pickle because he's not doing well in the polls. He's heading to reelection in October, and anything - at least as far as Israeli analysts say - anything Netanyahu can do to heat up the fronts, whether it's Gaza, anywhere else, to keep things hot before elections is something that he wants, and Trump doesn't want that.
KELLY: OK, let's draw a line under the diplomacy and where it stands, and let me shift to where things stand economically because that has been very much front and center in the headlines, at least here in the U.S. this week, because the U.S. unveiled more sanctions on Iran. Here is Scott Bessent, treasury secretary, speaking on Monday.
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SCOTT BESSENT: In the second world war, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign with our allies to target and drive the enemy from its positions, including those in third countries. Today, in that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe.
KELLY: An economic onslaught - although there's still a lot of details we don't know about what this onslaught is going to look like. Hadeel, what is the reaction from Iran?
HADEEL AL-SHALCHI, BYLINE: I mean, let's not forget that even before the war, Iran was not doing so great economically.
KELLY: Right.
AL-SHALCHI: The blockade and the war has made - has exacerbated that. We're hearing that inflation is at almost 90%, for example. We've been talking - NPR has been talking to people inside Iran, and we're hearing things like gas prices, medicine prices, food prices are all going up. People are in debt to their grocery stores, for example.
UNIDENTIFIED IRAN RESIDENT: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: We talked to one woman who said she couldn't buy tomato paste for pasta one time because she owes her grocery store too much money because she's been paying with this credit system. Medicine. A woman that we talked to who's asthmatic can't afford her inhaler anymore. She used to pay $5 for an inhaler. Now it's $15. And of course, all the people that we speak to in Iran usually ask us not to use their full names because they fear retaliation from the Iranian government.
And then we're also hearing about these high unemployment rates. You know, entire companies - you know, tech companies, for example, that, you know, normally would do very well - are shutting down because of trade issues because of the blockade. And when you ask them, like, who do you blame, they almost don't care to blame anybody. You know, they just want - many of these people just want a dignified life.
KELLY: Just relief and dignity, yeah.
AL-SHALCHI: Right, and the relief, exactly. I mean, the woman who is in debt to her grocery store told me, I feel like my human dignity does not exist anymore.
KELLY: I mean, it is fascinating, Greg. We're talking about Iran, a country that, as Hadeel says, is - was already one of the most sanctioned countries in the world, and that has not gotten its leaders to heel and heed what the U.S. would like it to do, so open question to whether more sanctions might change that.
MYRE: Yeah, two things seem to be true here. One, Hadeel is gathering all of these individual stories of how painful the economy is for all sorts of Iranians. And it's also true, for 47 years now, the U.S. has been sanctioning Iran increasingly and to tougher and tougher levels, so why is it going to be different this time? Maybe it will be, but it - you know, it's hard to say for sure, and the Iranian leaders just have not buckled in the past based on economic pressure. It's about them staying in power and pursuing their goals. And just because inflation is high or people are unemployed, that has not changed their behavior in the ways that the U.S. has hoped.
KELLY: That was Greg Myre in Washington, along with NPR's Hadeel Al-Shalchi reporting from Istanbul and Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv. You heard them on NPR's national security podcast Sources & Methods. You can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
(SOUNDBITE OF EMANUEL KALLINS AND STEPHEN TELLER'S "PLUNGED INTO CRISIS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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