So it's about 1 p.m. Here in Tehran and a ceasefire between Iran and Israel has been in effect for a couple of hours and now what we're seeing on the streets of Tehron here is that traffic is still fairly light it seems as though there's not that many people in the city although more and more people are coming back to the city a lot of people were saying that they want to continue with their normal lives here in Tehran..

My colleague Fred Pleitgen has been in Iran for about a week now. He's been one of the only Western journalists in the country covering Israel's relentless bombardment and Iran's response. He sent me this recording on Tuesday.

Over the past couple of days, especially over the past 24 hours or so, there was a marked increase in Israeli strikes on the center of Tehran. In fact, there was one that hit very close to the building that we were in, shaking that building, the walls of that building. We then went into a shelter and when we came up, we saw a thick plume of smoke over the northwest of Teheran.

As you can hear, it was calm on the streets of the capital when he recorded this. President Donald Trump had recently announced that Iran and Israel had agreed to a ceasefire following the U.S. Bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites and Iran's telegraphed retaliation on an empty U. S. Air Base in Qatar. Both sides accused the other of violating the deal, and Trump got mad.

Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I've never seen before.

Like, really mad. The not safe for work kind of mad.

You know what? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that?

His anger speaks to how hard this all is. Trump may want to end conflicts in short order, whether it's in the Middle East or Ukraine or wherever, but in the end, it's largely up to those doing the fighting. So where do we go from here? My guest is CNN Global Affairs Analyst, Kimberly Dozier. We're gonna talk about why Iran may wanna get back to the negotiating table and if Trump's peace through strength approach can actually work. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind. Stick with us.

Okay, Kim, so just to timestamp this conversation because things are moving very quickly. It's about 1130 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. This ceasefire President Trump announced between Israel and Iran could best be described as fragile at this point. So can we step back a bit because I think it's easy to forget with all that's happened that the U.S. Did drop a number of huge bunker buster bombs on Iranian nuclear sites. Do we know yet what kind of damage they caused?

What's going on right now is the military and the US intelligence community is doing battle damage assessment, which means looking at all source intelligence. They're looking at the satellite images of what looks smashed, but they're also going to be pulsing the area with radar and other frequencies to try to see if the facility in Fordow that was about 300 feet down, looks like it actually collapsed. That can take days.

Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated

You can see though from President Trump's remarks that he made over the weekend that to the untrained observer, it looks like they're smashed.

Yeah, it looks like craters on the surface.

'Yeah, but here's the thing. In the run-up to this action, there were, at least outside of Fordo, lines and lines of trucks caught on satellite. Equipment was getting unloaded out of Fordow, into the trucks, and trucked away who knows where.

If you are just joining us, we're tracking breaking news into CNN. We've exclusively learned that an early intelligence assessment from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency finds that the U.S. Strikes that were carried out over the weekend did not destroy the core components of Iran's nuclear program, likely only setting it back by approximately six months or so. The White House acknowledged the existence of this assessment, but the press secretary, Caroline Levitt said it is, quote, flat out wrong.

The Israelis have been saying that they believe their attacks will only set the Iranian nuclear program back two to four, possibly five years, because though they killed a bunch of scientists and they've smashed a bunch equipment and lab facilities, as long as the intellect remains and the will remains, Iran is a country of 80 to 90 million people. Talented scientists and engineers, they can reconstitute this program. And the question is, what will convince them not to do it? Because right now, for all intensive purposes, they're wondering, you know, if we had had a bomb, would we have been suffering this right now? If we had gone ahead and built even a single nuclear weapon, would anyone have dared attack us like Israel and then the US did?

Right, I mean, this is what I was kind of wondering. Obviously this is about the threat of getting a nuclear weapon and all of this incoming that they've been getting is because of that. But you're saying that they may be even more emboldened at this point to make the weapon so that nobody wants to attack them in this way going forward.

There had been an internal argument inside Iran between the cleric classes, different parts of the military as to whether to continue the nuclear weapons program that was suspended by the Supreme Leader. And the thought at the time was, you know, keep enough of it going so that we have something to negotiate with. We have something to give up when the JCPOA, that Obama era nuclear deal. Runs out in October 2025, just a few months away. So while the US pulled out of it under Trump 1.0, the Europeans stayed in. And all of the sanctions that were taken off of Iran when the JCPOA was initially signed, the Iran nuclear deal back in 2015, they all snapped back in October, 2025. So, the thought was... Keep enough of a nuclear program going so that when the Americans and the Europeans ask us to give something up, we'll give something, we will give it up, but we won't go all the way to building a weapon because that could trigger the Americans to strike us. So that is how the calculation was explained to me. They were like writing this fine line of, it's like if you had all of the parts. To a car laid out, you know, in the garage, but you hadn't put it together. Putting it together is going to be really complicated. But all you've done is you've just got all the parts. The Iranians had refined something like 400 kilograms of uranium to 60 percent enrichment. So they hadn't gone all the way to 90. But you know that was the gas for their car that was, you now, sitting in the of the garage ready to go. Now, a lot of that equipment is destroyed. A lot of the scientists have been killed, but they've got a really deep bench. If the hardliners inside Iran push now and say, look, the only way we're gonna save ourselves from another conflagration like we've been through over the last 12 days is building a weapon, they may win out over some of those... Clerics who had been arguing for moderation, or some parts of the military that had been arguing for modulation. This is the opportunity right now for diplomacy to step in, and that's what various Gulf officials are doing right now, trying to come up with a plan that gives Iran back enough control over its own destiny, a semblance of a nuclear program, but a peaceful One. So it can sort of save face, and they have some tough choices to make. And they may decide that it is simply not worth rebuilding the nuclear program. They might do some semblance of it to, you know, assuage their pride.

I'm Anderson Cooper in Tel Aviv. We have major breaking news this hour. Iran, moments ago, saying it has begun an operation against a U.S. Military base in Qatar.

It's just kind of like Iran did a revenge attack for the US strikes on Qatar, one of its closest allies and neighbors. The Iranians clearly telegraphed when they were going to hit, where they were gonna hit. Middle East officials tell me all the troops were gone.

In a new post on his Truth Social platform, President Trump said that no Americans were harmed and that damage was minimal.

'So Iran did this sort of, almost like theater of- Yeah, just to show it's be-

Well, hey, we did something.

Exactly. So now if you look at their choices on what to do next in terms of running their country, their country needs economic relief. It needs rebuilding of its just regular services. And you can be sure that the Europeans, possibly even Americans will step in and say, hey, we will help you rebuild that to take care of your people as long as you stay away from this. And they are also real realists. So whatever they might say for public rhetoric, they may realize, okay, you know, we kept this program going to try to do well at the negotiating table. It's been taken away from us, but we can still do well at the negotiation table because of what we promised not to rebuild.

On the US side, Trump has been pretty consistent about his overall approach to foreign policy. Peace through strength is what he likes to say time and time again. Obviously the specifics of what that actually looks like vary from conflict to conflict. But I guess I'm wondering, has this approach worked in the past in a real way that like can last for years and years? Like what can history tell us?

I think in the immediate. We're mostly going to see that the fight has been kicked out of people. That said, the Iranian memory is long, just like the Israeli memory is, long. All of the amazing stories of how various Nazi hunters tracked people down decades later. The Israelis tracked down everyone they held responsible for the Munich Olympic attacks. The Iranian will also be plotting.

The U.S. Government is intensely tracking Iran's lethal plotting against current and former U. S. Government officials, including former President Trump.

The last dministration, the Biden administration, revealed that there was an active plot by Iran to try to kill President Trump, who was then running for a second term.

We are seeing increasingly aggressive Iranian cyber activity during this election cycle. In August, the intelligence community reported an ongoing effort by Iran to compromise former President Trump's campaign and to influence the U.S. Election process.

I'm sure they will be reinstating that. As they say, revenge is a dish best served cold. The Iranians don't mind waiting to get their revenge.

So like the actual ramifications of this could be felt years down the line, even if the military action has kind of calmed down in the region for a period of time.

'Exactly. Across the Middle East, successive White Houses siding with Israel in the conflict in Gaza and then in the Conflict with Iran has left anger across the Arab and Muslim world. Some of the Middle-East officials I've spoken to say this is something that they are going to have to be dealing with for some time to come. That while they understand Trump's peace through strength, their publics are very angry. And so it's going to be difficult for them to calm people down enough and tell people, hey, look, now we're rebuilding Gaza. Hey, look. Now Iran's gonna have a peaceful program and the Europeans are helping them build their electricity grid. Something like that has gotta happen before the publics of especially Gulf countries are able to accept any expansion of peace. With the White House and especially with Israel.

US support of Israel. We saw Trump didn't want Israel to strike Iran in the first place, they did it anyway. Trump wanted them to obey this ceasefire, it appears they didn't at first. So where is this relationship right now?

This is a little bit like, guys in the back room in a poker game, it's rough and tumble. I think one of the things I have watched successive administrations, U.S. Administrations not understand is that the Israelis respect strength and a bit of bullying because that can often be how they negotiate real hard bargainers and they take pride in that. And I remember speaking to Israeli officials when I used to live there under the first and then the second Palestinian uprising. Israeli officials would speak with scorn of Americans who came over, who were super complimentary and were very sort of, I don't know, super polite in making demands. The way Trump is speaking is the way Israelis speak to each other in places like the Knesset.

'So when he drops an F-bomb on the south lawn of the White House, they're going to hear that loud and clear.

'Believe me, Bibi is no stranger stranger to F-bombs in his own office. So yeah, they're speaking to each other's language. They're doing just fine. And look, the Israelis are running out of some of their interceptors while some people on the ground in Israel say they've got plenty. Both sides will have trouble sustaining this exchange of fire. So having the US step in right now, it's like breaking up a fight when both sides are exhausted to borrow from one of Trump's analogies. And both sides are like, okay, let's go back to our corners now. That said, I think the Israelis leave this happy and the Iranians leave this plotting revenge for the future.

Yeah, and it's worth reiterating that Iran continues to insist it does not want a nuclear weapon, despite what Israel and the USA. And in the meantime, civilians in both Israel and Iran still kind of caught in the middle of all this and unsure of what happens next. Well, Kim Dozier, thank you for the perspective. I appreciate it. Thank you. One Thing is a CNN Podcasts production. This episode was hosted and produced by me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Podcasts. We get support from Alex Manasseri, Mark Duffy, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Schams Elwazer, Zahra Ullah and Wendy Brundage. We'll be back on Sunday, I'll talk to you then.