The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Now that Donald Trump and Iran have agreed to a very fragile ceasefire, the administration is facing mounting questions about his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lost her temper under tough questioning about this topic. Pete Hegseth also tried to spin about this threat and he too flopped miserably. All this comes as even some of Trump’s own allies are questioning whether he got a good deal out of this fiasco. We think this all reveals deeper failures. Trump and Hegseth sought to show that the threat of overwhelming military force can accomplish literally anything, yet that too failed. We’re talking about all this with a great commentator on national security affairs, Georgetown’s Rosa Brooks. Rosa, really nice to have you on.Rosa Brooks: Good to be here, Greg.Sargent: So we have a ceasefire now, but it’s a little hard to see what we got out of it. The U.S. largely destroyed the Iranian military and killed some of Iran’s senior leaders. The Strait of Hormuz might be reopening, but it was open before the war and Iran’s grip on it appears tighter now. The basis for the new talks seems to be somewhat more friendly to Iran than before. Rosa, is that about the size of it? What’s your reading?Brooks: It’s not even clear that the Strait of Hormuz is in fact open. It sounds as though two ships have gone through as of the time we’re recording this podcast, but that then it reclosed again. So it’s not even clear we have a ceasefire and already there are disputes. The Israelis are continuing to attack targets inside of Lebanon. The Iranians are saying, then we’re closing the strait again because that wasn’t the deal—you’re supposed to stop. The Israelis are saying, no, no, attacking Lebanon wasn’t part of the deal. So this may be collapsing as we speak. It’s a little hard to know.But yes, I think even if it held, it’s not entirely clear what we’ve accomplished aside from killing a lot of people, which we have certainly done. We have eliminated several layers of Iranian leadership. Arguably, remaining members of the Iranian leadership are even more hardline than their predecessors in terms of domestic repression of the Iranian people. So I don’t know that we’ve done the Iranian people any favors. It’s sort of a little too soon to say. We’ve obviously eliminated a lot of Iran’s stockpile of offensive weapons, which is overall probably a good thing. On the other hand, we’ve also eliminated a great deal of our own stockpile of both offensive and defensive weapons, which is definitely not a great thing given that Iran was not an imminent threat and there are a lot of other places in the world where we face ongoing challenges.Sargent: Right. The entire rationale for the war was bullshit.Brooks: Exactly. Yes. Bullshit. There we go.Sargent: Right. Exactly. So, okay. Let’s recall that Trump threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization. He threatened to destroy a nation of 93 million people, which would have of course killed tens of millions of civilians. He threatened to bomb all of Iran’s power plants and bridges—all of this would have constituted massive war crimes. Rosa, can you explain why it’s bad to simply make these threats, nevermind acting on them? The simple act of making the threats is bad. Can you explain why?Brooks: So the idea that any world leader, much less an American president, would threaten to wipe out an entire civilization—those were obviously Trump’s words, not mine—is partly shocking because, as you say, international law and U.S. law draws a very clear distinction between lawful targets in wartime and unlawful targets. And “the entire civilization” is an unlawful target. I mean, that obviously sweeps in everything from cultural sites to every little baby sleeping in its bed in Iran. And that would be a crime against humanity, would be a war crime, it would be genocide. Pick your shocking moral offense and it would qualify. I think that just the shock of having the former so-called leader of the free world saying essentially, we’re going to be kind of like the Nazis, we have no problem with that, we’re willing to wipe out an entire civilization, an entire people, to accomplish our rather unclear objectives—I don’t know if it’s possible to sort of overstate how shocking that is.I also think—and this is frankly a lesser concern of mine—it also further undermines any ability of the U.S. to negotiate in a credible way, because we’re at a point where nobody has the slightest idea whether they should believe anything Trump says. He will go from we’re all pals now, we’ve got a great deal, to I’m wiping out your entire civilization and back again, and nobody really knows why or what is motivating him, frankly.