Iran has tens of thousands of missiles and drones left and keeps producing more, Antony Blinken said, which is why he does not believe the war ends with more American missiles.
The president says Iran is begging to make a deal. Blinken said the begging looks like projectiles aimed at US bases, the Houthis closing the Red Sea Corridor, and a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz — and that the reason the war has not ended is that ending it would look like a loss.
"There is not a good military way out. Diplomacy is the way you've got to go."
Blinken was US Secretary of State for four years, spent two and a half years negotiating the Iran nuclear agreement inside the Obama administration, and was in Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan and Bahrain within days of October 7.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 24 minutes of audio, 18 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 arguments that matter.
👤 Guest: Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State from 2021 to 2025, previously Deputy Secretary of State and National Security Adviser to the Vice President, now writing a memoir
🎙️ Host: Joe Mathieu, Bloomberg's Washington correspondent and host of Balance of Power
📰 Published: 15 September 2026 on Bloomberg Talks (Bloomberg Podcasts)
🔴 YouTube | 🟢 Spotify | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 24 min | ✅ Time saved: 6 min
Key Takeaways
The immediate goal in Iran is not the nuclear program — it is getting shippers and insurers to use the Strait of Hormuz again
The nuclear file is a separate negotiation, and he said so twice
There is no military solution short of invading Iran, and Iran still has tens of thousands of missiles and drones
Their launchers sit several hundred miles inland, not only along the coast
Iran escalates sideways while the US escalates upward, and sideways is the stronger position
The US paying a toll on the Strait of Hormuz that nobody calls a toll is one of the two outcomes he expects
A Pentagon inspector general report put $184M of damage on US diplomatic facilities in four Gulf states, the host said
Gulf partners are now seeking their own deals with Tehran
He wants government experts embedded with the AI companies to look at every model before it is released
The AI safety conversation belongs on the table when the president meets Xi, and Cold War arms control is his precedent
A data center needs a local bargain on power prices, water and jobs before it needs a federal one
He says the president is calling the wrong leader about oil prices — Zelensky rather than Putin
The Israeli newspaper report that Qatar's prime minister called him on October 7 to free civilian hostages is fiction, he said, because there was no such call
1. Listen to the Wizards
Mathieu opened on the argument running through Washington: the people building the most advanced AI models say it is time to slow down, while the president says whoever wins AI wins. He asked whether the president or the chief executives are right.
Blinken's answer was that the two positions do not have to conflict, and that the industry's own warning is the signal to act on. He named the statement from Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk and called it a flashing red light.
"This is like the wizards telling you something's rotten in Oz."
His measure of the pace is capability, not spending. "We're seeing a doubling in capacity on the frontier platforms." That is happening every several months, and he said Moore's Law is out the window as a description of it.
The case for rules is that every comparable risk is already regulated. "We regulate the airplanes flying in the skies. We regulate the nuclear power plants producing power for us. We regulate the stuff that we put into our bodies through pharmaceuticals."
He said the necessity is now evident to nearly everyone, although the president seems to disagree, and that rules can be written without setting back either innovation or the competition with China.
He called it a good thing that the Treasury Secretary is meeting his Chinese counterpart, and said he suspects AI will be front and center on that agenda.
2. An AI Deal With China
Mathieu asked whether an AI safety framework should be on the table when the president meets Xi Jinping the following week. Blinken said it should, and started with the domestic side.
The argument that a framework hands China the win, he rejected outright. He said there is a shared interest despite profound mutual suspicion in both directions, and that the suspicion does not make agreement impossible, only hard.
His precedent is arms control. Decades of it during the Cold War with the Soviet Union show these things are possible, he said, without minimizing the difficulty.
The mechanism he wants is people inside the companies: a partnership between the private sector and government that embeds experts to look at every model before it goes out, done in a way that does not hold back innovation.
The scope he described runs wider than Washington and Beijing — all the companies, China, the world, and then the communities that host the infrastructure. "We need a new social compact."
"If you're building a data center, we've got to make sure that the electricity rates aren't going to kill the community, that they're not going to lose out on water, that jobs are not going to go in the wrong direction, that there's upskilling, and the community benefits."
He also put the question the other way round: whether an autocratic state wants an AI running loose either outside its control or inside it in ways it cannot control.
3. Why Treasury, Not State
Mathieu noted that the AI channel to China is running through the Treasury Department and asked why the State Department is not leading it.
Blinken said different administrations organize this differently and that he would want both departments involved, with Mathieu putting it to him that AI has entered statecraft.
He described the Biden administration's sequence as three steps. The White House worked intensively with the frontier platforms and obtained voluntary commitments on security, safety and trust. The State Department, working with Treasury and Commerce, then took those commitments around the world.
The results he claimed from that are the G7 signing on and the first-ever United Nations General Assembly resolution on AI.
On the agreement that only humans, not machines, decide on nuclear weapons — which Mathieu credited him with getting from Xi — he confirmed it was real but incomplete.
"Look, it was certainly a real agreement to the extent that that's what he said, but as Ronald Reagan said many years ago, trust but verify."
The missing piece is verification machinery, which he called difficult and necessary in the same breath.
4. Not a Doomer, a Realist
Mathieu raised Elon Musk's claim that AI could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons and asked whether that squares with a career spent on nuclear diplomacy.
Blinken said the potential is real, and that hearing it from Musk, Altman and Amodei is a reason to act rather than only to listen.
Mathieu said the White House would call him a doomer for it. He rejected the label on the grounds of what he thinks the technology can do — solving problems that were previously unsolvable, scientific breakthroughs, curing diseases, educating people.
"I'm not a doomer. I'm a realist. And I think we all need to be realists."
Asked whether signing an AI security framework with China should be a goal, he said yes, with a caveat about who writes the rules. China matters, but the object is setting rules and norms for the entire world, and he wants the US in the driver's seat.
His reason is that the seat does not stay empty. If the US is not doing it, he said, China will be, in its absence.
"And as they say, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."
5. Iran's Way of Begging
Mathieu moved to the war: the president says Iran is begging to make a deal, Iran says ignore the president's mixed messages, and Blinken negotiated with many of the same people for four years. He asked who is bluffing.
Blinken answered by describing what the begging looks like. "They have an interesting way of begging, if that means launching more projectiles at us, at our partners, getting the Houthis in the act to pull down the Red Sea Corridor along with the Strait of Hormuz."
He said the position is difficult and of the president's own making, and that nothing Iran has done was a surprise. Every past administration, including the first Trump administration, examined what would happen if Iran were pushed far enough to face an existential threat to the regime, and knew the answers: attacks on US forces, on US bases, on US friends in the region, and closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
His read of why the off-ramp has not been taken is presentational rather than strategic. He said the president has wanted to take it for months under pressure from markets, from munitions in short supply and from the midterms, but a diplomatic agreement by definition gives Iran something, and that looks like a loss.
"This could and should be over tomorrow."
What ending it requires, he said, is a two-way negotiation with something in it for Iran, because the war has let Iran demonstrate a chokehold not only on the US but on the global economy.
6. Vertical vs Horizontal
Blinken's explanation of why the military track is not working turned on a distinction between two kinds of escalation.
The US has escalated vertically — more missiles at the same target. Iran escalates horizontally, going at US forces, US partners, US bases, bringing in the Houthis and closing the Red Sea Corridor. He called that a real advantage for them.
The only military answer he can see is a full-scale invasion, which he called a disaster in the making. The reasons he gave are geographic: thousands of miles of coastline along the Strait of Hormuz, and launchers sited not only on that coastline but several hundred miles inland, which is the range Iran's systems have.
The arsenal is the other half of it. "They have tens of thousands of these things left." For all the damage done, he said, they still have a lot and they keep producing more.
"There is not a good military way out. Diplomacy is the way you've got to go."
7. The Pentagon Report
Mathieu cited a new inspector general report from the Pentagon, which he said shows strategic inventory shortfalls — a shortage Blinken had predicted months earlier — and about $184 million of damage to US diplomatic facilities in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He asked what that does to the diplomatic corps.
Blinken read it as a signal to allies rather than a facilities problem. "Well, it's sending a message, unfortunately, to our partners in the region that they can't necessarily count on us when it comes to coming to their defense."
The consequence he described is already visible and widely reported: Gulf states looking to talk to Tehran and possibly cut their own deals. These are countries with no love lost for the Iranian government, he said, and they are doing it because they have seen that the US cannot necessarily defend them.
He added that the war has strengthened the hardest of the hardliners inside the Iranian government.
8. Two and a Half Years
Mathieu asked whether it helps or hurts to have real-estate professionals at the diplomatic table. Blinken answered with what he thinks a negotiating team actually needs.
He allowed that political appointees from varied backgrounds bring useful skills. The question he posed is how those skills get married to genuine expertise on complicated issues.
His example was his own team on the Iran nuclear agreement — Jake Sullivan, Bill Burns, Wendy Sherman, John Kerry and himself — with detailed technical experts around the table at all times.
The timeline is his argument against speed. "And it took us two and a half years to get the agreement that we reached with Iran that set back its nuclear program and put it in a box such that if Iran had chosen to break out of that box, it would have taken it more than a year and we could have done something about it to stop it."
He said President Trump tearing up that agreement is why the situation is where it is now. Mathieu noted that Wendy Sherman had recently told the show it would be impossible to find a deal as good as the original one today.
9. Shipping Before Centrifuges
Pressed on what "ended through diplomacy tomorrow" actually means, Blinken narrowed it to one objective and pushed the nuclear question out of the frame.
The near-term goal is commercial confidence, not nonproliferation. "It's to get back to regular, normalized shipping so that people have confidence, the shippers, the insurers, everyone have confidence that things can move freely through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea."
He called the nuclear program a separate problem and a separate negotiation, and said so twice.
Asked what it will cost, he named two forms of payment. Iran is likely to get a toll on the Strait of Hormuz that is not called a toll, or sanctions relief, or some combination of the two — and he tied the president's hesitation to having to acknowledge that.
On the nuclear file he set a lower bar than the original agreement: getting some of the enriched uranium out of Iran and some limits on the centrifuges, which he described as a whole other piece of business.
The reason to move first on shipping is the price at the pump, and he made the point with a passenger's anecdote. An Uber driver with a large diesel SUV told him what filling the tank costs now.
"He said twice what it was before this war started." Blinken's comment was that there is no margin left and you cannot make a living that way.
10. No Call From Qatar
Ahead of the third anniversary of October 7, Mathieu asked about a report in an Israeli newspaper — which Blinken had publicly called complete fiction — that Qatar's prime minister called him that night to broker the release of civilian hostages.
His denial was about the call itself. "Well, first of all, no call. I was in the region. There was no call." He allowed that there were calls, but said what the report claimed was and is fiction.
His account of what did happen puts the conversation in Doha a few days later. He was in the region almost immediately after October 7 — Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan and Bahrain. In Qatar, the foreign minister and prime minister told him Hamas had made an outreach about talking.
He said that was good news to him because Americans were among the hostages, and that the Qatari side was having trouble reaching the Israelis. He went back to his plane, called very senior Israelis, told them Hamas was at least ready to talk, and said they needed to designate someone immediately. They did.
The distinction he insisted on is what was actually offered. There was no offer to free all the hostages or the civilian hostages — only an offer to talk, and a need for a channel to do it. If Hamas had wanted to release the civilian hostages, he said, it could have done so at any time.
Asked whether any hostage release proposal was put before him in the first 72 hours, he said not that he saw.
On a separate report by the same paper that the UAE president warned Benjamin Netanyahu days in advance, he said the US did not hear that. He is not aware of any report reaching them specifying a place, a time or a means, while allowing that people may have spoken generally about heightened tensions and risks, and that he cannot speak to what the Israelis heard.
11. Calling the Wrong Guy
Mathieu turned to the Russia sanctions bill in Congress and the Democratic worry that it hands the president more authority to impose tariffs while prices keep rising. He asked whether it should pass anyway.
Blinken would not give a yes or a no. He said he is focused on what increases pressure on Russia to come to the table, that he is hopeful something productive comes out in the wash, and that whether this is the right mechanism is a separate question.
He noted that the president had promised to end the war within 24 hours of taking office, and that rather more than 24 hours have passed.
What he called the world upside down was the president blaming Ukraine for higher oil prices, because Ukraine has been striking Russian energy infrastructure, and saying he had raised it with Zelensky.
"He's calling the wrong guy. He should be calling Vladimir Putin and telling Putin to stop going at Ukraine's energy, to stop going at Ukraine's civilian infrastructure, to stop going at trains, civilian trains that are carrying people in and out of Ukraine." He added that no airports are functioning in Ukraine.
The short-term deal he sees available is a mutual stand-down by Russia and Ukraine on attacks against each other's energy infrastructure. The president appears to think he has achieved that; Blinken said it is not what anyone is seeing.
On where the price pressure is actually coming from, he was blunt: the Gulf, not Russia and Ukraine.
He said Russia is under tremendous pressure right now and that this is the moment to reinforce it, with the object of a bargaining table and an outcome that secures Ukraine going forward.
12. Ukraine's Own Patriots
Mathieu put the criticism of the Biden record directly: long-range missiles, F-16s and Patriots were all slow-walked, and he asked whether managing escalation cost Ukraine the war.
Blinken's first move was to locate the decision. "Only one person bears the full responsibility. That's the president of the United States." President Biden had to balance doing everything possible for Ukraine against a direct conflict with another nuclear power.
His counterfactual is that there would be no independent Ukraine now without what was done starting before the Russian invasion, and he said he is proud the administration stood with Kyiv at every step.
On the specific weapons, he said no single system would have decided it. "I don't think there's an individual weapon system that would have been necessarily dispositive in any particular moment."
The questions behind each decision were practical: giving a country a tank or an F-16 is not the same as that country being able to operate and maintain it. He said he was personally leaning in on getting Ukraine everything it could possibly get, both to hold off Russia and to create pressure for a negotiation.
Asked whether Ukraine should be licensed to manufacture its own Patriot interceptors, he said yes twice, and gave a supply reason: there is a worldwide shortage.
"Ukraine can, and I believe eventually will become, a critical contributor to defense of democratic countries." He cited its drone industry, which he said he saw firsthand repeatedly, as the evidence that the same could be true of defensive interceptors.
13. Running on Biden's Record
With the primary season ending that day, Mathieu asked about the split in the Democratic Party over Israel and whether Democrats can run on the Biden foreign policy or have to run from it.
Blinken said the party needs its own forward agenda and that he hopes parts of the record serve as a foundation rather than a platform.
The two principles he claims for that record are domestic strength and alliances. He cited historic investments in infrastructure, in ships and science, and in clean technology, and said the strength of alliances and partnerships was the key to showing strength abroad.
On specific policies he deferred to the candidates, and said a battle of ideas inside the party is what should happen until there is a nominee.
He reached for Will Rogers to describe the state of it: "I'm not a member of any organized political party." The rest of the line is that he is a Democrat.
14. 7M Jews, 7M Arabs
Asked whether it will be the next president who has to solve Gaza, Blinken answered with the demographic fact he says any settlement has to start from.
His framing is a pair of refusals that cancel each other out. To the crowd that wants Israel gone, he said it is not going; to the greater-Israel crowd that wants the Palestinians gone, he said they are not going either.
"There are 7 million Jews. There are 7 million Arabs. No one is going anywhere." Until that is reconciled, he said, you are part of the problem rather than the solution.
The solution he named is the one he says nobody believes in anymore. "A secure Israel, a sovereign Palestine." He wants a renewed groundswell of support for it, in those countries and in the United States.
He drew a line between policy and existence: opposing Israeli policies is legitimate, opposing the existence of the state is not.
On Gaza specifically, he said he handed over a day-after plan covering how to secure, govern and rebuild the territory in a way that would let Israel withdraw entirely, and said he hopes it is returned to.
Bonus Insights
Asked whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called on his expertise, Blinken said they had extensive conversations during the transition but none since the invasion or the initial strikes.
The memoir announced about 20 months ago is due in the fall of 2027, and he said it will cover everything he saw and worked on across 30 years, three administrations and his time on Capitol Hill, October 7 included.
Mathieu's framing of the day was that the war with Iran is stretching on, oil prices are at their highest since the invasion began, interest rates are at their highest in years, and all of it sits against an argument over a technology some believe could end humanity — "It's just another Tuesday."
Blinken's bottom line is that the war ends at a negotiating table rather than on a battlefield, that the first thing to buy back is freedom of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz rather than limits on centrifuges, and that the same instinct applies to artificial intelligence: write the rules with China now, because the alternative is China writing them alone.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Patriot interceptors (He says Ukraine should be licensed to manufacture them, because there is a worldwide shortage and its drone industry shows it can build at scale)
F-16 (One of the systems critics say the Biden administration slow-walked; he said no individual weapon system would have been dispositive)
Haaretz (The Israeli paper whose report of an October 7 call from Qatar's prime minister he called complete fiction, and whose separate report said the UAE president warned Netanyahu in advance)
Uber (His illustration of the affordability problem — a driver with a diesel SUV told him a tank now costs twice what it did before the war)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA) (Took two and a half years to negotiate and left Iran more than a year from a breakout; he says tearing it up is why things stand where they do)
The UN General Assembly's first AI resolution (The diplomatic result he claims from the Biden-era push, alongside G7 agreement and voluntary commitments from the frontier platforms)
The Pentagon inspector general report on the Iran war (The host's citation: strategic munitions shortfalls plus about $184 million of damage to US diplomatic facilities in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE)
Blinken's memoir (Due in the fall of 2027, covering 30 years and three administrations, October 7 included)
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