president Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran last night but shortly after both countries accused each other of violating the terms of the agreement those terms by the way are still very unclear but the rockets flying drew the anger of President Trump this morning who called out both countries telling them to hold their fire it demonstrates just how fragile this ceasefire actually is meanwhile a NATO summit is being held in the Netherlands today and tomorrow where our allies together with President Trump will discuss their defense spending and how they'll prepare for the impact of the US strikes on Iran meanwhile at home the Trump administration has postponed two separate intelligence briefings scheduled for today with all members of the House and the Senate top aids to the president were scheduled to hold those briefings including National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard CIA Director John Radcliffe and the Joint Chief's Chair Dan Kaine now Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called the postponement outrageous evasive and derelict so to say there are many questions still hanging in the balance is an understatement michael Bole associate professor of political science at Ruckers University sat down with us earlier today to help once again explain the nuance of all that's happened so far michael so great to have you back with us today obviously we we know a lot more and a lot has changed even since we spoke to you yesterday first we see the president come out last night with this announcement that there was a ceasefire what if anything do we know about the terms of that deal well we know very little about the terms of the deal other than it was negotiated in part with Qatar and in part with a kind of back channel to the Iranians to get them to agree the substantive terms of what it actually means when we say we have a ceasefire is really unclear as a matter of fact the White House announcement came out before either party acknowledged there was a ceasefire and now they have subsequently done so so I think one of the things I would be worried about with the ceasefire is that President Trump clearly wants an end to the war the question is the devil is in the details so what are the terms of the ceasefire for example uh is Israel allowed to strike back against an Iranian proxy like the Houthis um what happens if there are terrorist attacks elsewhere that are potentially attributed to Iran is that sort of seen as a resumption of the war so there are some real specific sticky questions that I don't think we have an answer to yet simply because the president announced it with almost no detail also as you said you know this feels pretty fragile um we already saw both sides accuse the other of violating the terms we know that there were missiles fired from both sides after there was this announcement from the president how tricky is it to ensure that this continues in the days and the weeks to come i think it would be advantageous to think about whether there's some external party like the UN for example that might be able to kind of mediate and the ceasefire agreement and ensure a degree of compliance because at this point the US wouldn't be trusted to do so i mean what we saw immediately was that there were missiles launched from Iran into Israel but then Israel actually continued a fairly heavy bombardment of Thrron overnight and in part what that was trying to do was create facts on the ground they knew that there was a 12-hour window between the announcement of the ceasefire and it taking effect so what they wanted to do essentially was to destroy as many missile launchers as they could some of the military command and control infrastructure and weaken Iranian capacity before the ceasefire takes into effect the problem with it is that when you have a tenuous ceasefire that sort of action looks provocative and that's why President Trump is so angry this morning saying essentially that both of them need to knock it off um but this is sort of built into a ceasefire if you give me 12 more hours to fight both sides are going to continue to take their last shots until the very end and certainly Iran doesn't want to look weak given that it was pretty decisively beaten in the context of this 12-day war do you believe there is a real path to diplomacy with the US involved given that Iran has already said they they don't trust the US right now because uh we fired on them in the midst of negotiations is there a clear path to diplomacy here there is a path but it's not an easy path so Iran has actually signaled that they're willing to go to Geneva under European offices and talk to the United States kind of behind closed doors it's worth pointing out the US and Iran without formal diplomatic recognition don't directly speak so they speak through intermediaries it's not clear to me that they would be willing to give a lot of concessions to the United States or to Israel in the position that they're in i mean they've just been basically defeated in the war their military infrastructure is weak and it's politically costly for them to give a lot to Israel after Israel just beat them in the war so it's not clear to me that there is a very sort of obvious path to diplomacy i think the White House is hoping that this is essentially um close to a sucker punch right that Israel hits Iran so hard that Iran essentially throws up its hands and says "No more nuclear weapons that's it we we would like to have a new path forward certainly that's what the White House wants it's not clear to me that a weakened regime that has been damaged as badly as they have been damaged and is at threat from their own people from an uprising is going to simply then give in to fairly generous terms to Israel or to the United States so I would imagine they're going to keep talking in Geneva but I wouldn't bet the the farm that there's going to be a lot coming from it we know that the White House was scheduled to have an intelligence briefing with both members all members of the Senate as well as the House those have both been postponed it's gotten a lot of push back from Democratic lawmakers what typically comes out of those intelligence briefings what do we learn especially about what you know came of the attack so there's been a decay in the degree to which presidents of both parties have been willing to brief Congress for national security issues this is not unusual though in this case I think the Trump administration is taking it even one step further than previous administrations have done there is a real problem we have in this country about sort of the designation of war powers to what extent should Congress be read in on on an operation like this normally after an attack like this the United States executive branch has to read out to the members of Congress at least some basically military technical details now when you get to the question about what is left with Iran's nuclear weapons program that is kind of high military and that is read into the gang of eight in the Congress but not to your average rank and file member of the Congress so there will be a briefing with a degree of information that's provided but everything you provide to the Congress you have to assume will be leaked right so the most sensitive stuff is going to be reserved for a much smaller briefing to me the interesting question is going to be whether the white first the Trump administration decides to follow that in any meaningful way in other words do they give any substantive information to the congress and secondly what the Democrats choose to do with it because the Democrats are now mobilizing around concerns about sort of reinvigoration of the War Powers Act to stop presidents from simply doing what President Trump did which was bombing without an authorization of war and then more or less denying congressional scrutiny from it yeah there's a lot that we're going to continue to follow including where we go from here and whether or not Iran has the capability to rebuild any of their nuclear uh capabilities that were attacked but Michael Bole thank you as always for such great insight thank you