Friday Focus: The hidden cost of a deal with Iran — and the Pope sounds the alarm on AI

So we can bemoan this regime. Um, um, 80% of Iranians do bemoan this regime and are frankly, many of them, really disappointed to see what has come out of this. But you can't change it from the outside. [upbeat music]

Welcome to the Friday Focus Podcast for the 29th of May, 2026. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, Chair of the Munk Debates, joined remotely by Janice Gross Stein, my co-host. Hey, Janice. How's it going?

It's going well. The sun is shining, um, after what it seems like day after day after day after day after rain, so it is all good.

It is all good. Let's talk about, uh, this again, um, ping-pong week of, uh, of negotiation between Iran and the United States. We can start to unpack some of the details as we go, but just to begin at a kind of 30,000-foot level, Janice, it seems as if we could be on the cusp of a deal which at the end of the day looks really more like an extension of the ceasefire for a period of time, where both Iran and the United States clearly have interests in, um, letting the, uh, stopper out of the pressure valve that has become the Straits of Hormuz. For Iran, that means they're not getting imports into the country, into their ports, uh, causing a lot of inflation. Uh, they're also not getting their oil out, which in a matter of weeks could start damaging permanently their oil fields.

Yeah.

Here, Trump's interests and the Ayatollahs are aligned insofar as, uh, he's facing, uh, higher gas prices at home going into the summer driving season. It all seems, Janice, like a big can-kicking exercise on the part of both of these protagonists with the big, difficult issues, most notably Iran's nuclear program and the future of the Straits of Hormuz, delayed and deferred until later. D- do I have that right?

You have it right, but let me just put a slightly more optimistic spin on this, Rudyard, uh, and I'm gonna start where you started. Uh, both of them are running out of time, uh, and that's why I think we are closer to what we would call a framework agreement. But that framework agreement is a little more in it. Um, a- and they're fighting about the details of how you open the Straits of Hormuz, but they're, there's an agreement that they're gonna open the Straits of Hormuz, right? Uh, so that's progress. Secondly, they're arguing fiercely about Iran's nuclear program, but what they've ... There's a consensus now, this one less written down, that Iran will reiterate its ritual statement, "We will not, we will not..." Okay, uh, I don't have to finish the sentence on that one. But beyond that, that they are going to turn over, to turn over or, um, reduce, um, the enriched ur- r- nuclear uranium so that it cannot be used to break out for a bomb. They're gonna do it one way or another. Iran is insisting that it be done at home, inside Iran, um, with inspectors. The United States wants it shipped out. But buried in all that noise is that one ton of enriched uranium is gonna be, um, no longer available as enriched uranium to allow for a breakout to the bomb. The, so the, there's not nothing there, um, in both cases-

It's a pretty thing, though, Janice, is it not, for the President of the United States? I mean, he started this war with