Is Trump Rewriting “America First” Into Forever War? (ft. Tim Snyder)

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1:00Welcome to Region moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlov, and I'm so excited to be joined today by historian Tim Snyder, leading scholar of European history and authoritarianism, an author of, on tyranny, 20 lessons from the 20th century. Tim, it's so nice to have you. I'm glad to be with you. It's perfect timing. I want to talk about present stuff, but there's so much of what's going on these days that I feel like if you're not grounded in the history of it, you're going to totally miss the real realities, which I feel like the administration is trying to hide from us. In today's episode of Region moderates, we're going to talk about what history can teach us about Trump's war in Iran and what the Texas primary might be signaling for the midterms ahead. Before we get started, if you aren't already subscribed to the Region moderates YouTube channel, please do that. We're five days a week now. It's very exciting. Let's get right into it. Trump built his brand opposing these regime change wars, very proud of the fact that he opposed the Iraq war, actually, though I think he liked it before he opposed it. But either way, he's been mocking democracy building and promising America first. And yet now, after U.S. strikes in Iran

2:01and open calls for Iranians to overthrow their government, he is the fourth American president in the past century to frame military force as a mission of liberation. I want to start off by just asking you what is history tell us about what happens next? Yeah, I mean, before I get to that, I just want to say it's very hard when talking about this, not to make it more coherent than it is. So you just presented a fairly coherent description of what Trump thinks that he's doing, right? And that's sometimes he says that. And then sometimes he says other things, right? Sometimes he says like, yeah, we're here to liberate. And sometimes he says, well, actually, we just wanted to put the next bad guy in power. You know, and so like, I can tell you what history says, but I think the lessons of history in a way are deeper in this case because there's just much less coherence in the present, right? So the first thing that history tells you is that wars are always unpredictable there. If you want to have, if you want to make life more unpredictable, start a war, the second thing that history tells you is that war changes politics, but it doesn't necessarily

3:05change politics in the way you expect. So Iran will be different, but probably not the way that people would like for it to be different. And the third thing that history tells you is that the other side has a vote. So you may have a story about how you were expecting this is going to go and you may tell that story to yourself and to your people. But once you start a war, the the enemy has a vote. And they will do things that you don't like. They will do things that you don't expect. And you can't stop them from doing all of those things. So those are the basics. I like it. And I guess for the purposes of having to write an intro, you always do kind of make Trump more coherent than he has been. So I appreciate you snapping us back to reality. There are a few things that you mentioned that I want to touch on by the enemy part I want to go to first because something that I've been talking about with Scott, and also my work on Fox is that Iran is not reacting in the way that it seems like we expected them to. Maybe Israel thought that they would do this,

4:06but at least from the US perspective, reporting is that we have been trying to get back to the negotiating table to some degree. And that Iran is dug in and looking at this as, you know, we could go 16 and 90 days. Will we win this, quote unquote, win this war? No, but we're going to make you spend a lot of money. And we're going to totally deplete your munitions. How do you think about Iran's reaction to what we've done? Gosh, that's a great question. Because one of the things which has struck me most is that our people, the people who run our country don't really seem to understand that other people, the people who run other countries who are in other countries, aren't always going to do what they say. And I think this is just like a basic foreign policy problem for Trump in general, is that he's used to intimidating people. He's used to intimidating his own people. He's used to intimidating Republicans. He's used to primary in them. He's used to this stochastic terrorism. He's used to people. He's used to cabinet meetings when people who otherwise might be powerful just cow-tow to him.

5:08And I don't think he really understands. And I'm afraid that Hegseth also doesn't really understand that other people have their own ideas of what's right and wrong. And other people can have a sense of dignity. And even if we don't like these other people, and we oppose what they're doing, and even if we're right to oppose what they're doing, they still have their own sense of how the world works. So there's this basic difference between the foreign and the domestic that I think is catching up to them. I think that with Venezuela, after Venezuela, he was on a visible high. And now he's trying to basically feed the addiction by doing something else. And then what was supposed to happen was that this was supposed to already be over. I can't help but think of Russia and Ukraine. I really think that our guys also thought this was going to be over in three days. And now, you know, they were, so going to negotiations, they were confused during the negotiations that Iran just didn't give us everything we asked for, which is a mistake about what negotiations are. And now they're confused that Iran doesn't negotiate

6:11when we want them to negotiate. And you know, it's not really humanly that surprising. Whatever you think about the Iranian regime, and I think the absolute worst of it, you can't expect people when you killed their leader, when you humiliate them, to do then the thing that you want them to do. That's just an unreasonable expectation. And it's just completely discrediting that this is, you know, that this is the only plan that they had. Yes, to all of that. And it leads me to what I think has been become the central question about the motivation to do this. And that this is our relationship with Israel. And how the timing of this all unfolded. So clearly we were going to do something. We've been building up our military presence in the region for a couple of months now. Donald Trump said help is on the way to the Iranian protesters right before I think 30,000 of them were murdered by the regime. But there's a lot of reporting about the timeline, you know, coming to light of what Israel's plan was

7:13and what our plan was and how in my estimation and what Secretary Rubio said on take one, not since he's kind of been trying to cover that up. That basically we were going to do this. But Israel said we have to do it now. And so we had to go along with their timeline. Is that your understanding of this? And how do you see the different motivations of the U.S. versus Israel? I mean, as a historian, I would want to be really cautious about that. Like the, the age, for example, I mean, it started to sound like a like the patent that I probably am. But we're still debating why the first world war started at this point, right? And so what we have now is like a smattering of sources and it'll be a long time, I think, before anyone actually has any certainty about this. I mean, my gut feeling is that there were several powerful forces at once. One would be that Prime Minister Netanyahu has always wanted precisely this war. He's wanted, he's wanted a war to humiliate

8:14and to disempower Iran for a long time and has made no secret of it. Another force, which is there in the background and I think perhaps hasn't been played up enough is the tremendous financial connections between the Gulf Arab states and Mr. Trump personally and his family. But also our negotiators, Whitkopf and Kushner, it is very strange to be in negotiations before a war and to send people out who are deeply financially connected to essentially the other side, right? Because there's a deep structural rivalry between Iran and the Gulf Arab states and we essentially are on one side of that rivalry. But we're also being paid by one side of that rivalry and I'm not saying that's the immediate cause but I am saying that it would be weird to overlook that factor. And then for me, the third part of it is most likely American domestic politics. And again, this just comes from Trump. I mean, insofar as he has been coherent about this. It's been with these gestures that now we're in some kind of exceptional situation

9:15and therefore you can't vote against DHS funding and therefore we have to consider the Iranians a threat to our future elections et cetera. I think that's what he's going for. And then in his mind, I think also is the desire, as I said before, to have some kind of quick victory. I can't really join people in imagining that there's some notion of US national interest here because they haven't actually expressed any kind of US national interest. So I'm not going to like, I'm not going to supply something which they haven't themselves supplied. Yeah, it's definitely the talking point to sure that Iran has been an imminent threat for 47 years and they're obviously super bad guys. But you're going to have to do better to justify something like this, especially when there are going to be boots there are already boots on the ground but there are going to be more. Sort of interrupt it like for that 47 years thing. I mean, we were delivering birthday cakes, to the Iranian leadership in order to help them deliver arms to the contras within those 47 years. Like the idea that we were at war with them

10:17while we were delivering the birthday cake so they could help us fund the contras, that's like, it's just kind of absurd. And if we were at war within the entire time, that means all the Republican presidents who are engaging with them, including our recent negotiations, then that would all be treason if we were at war with it. So it's like the whole thing is just, it's absurd to the point where you don't know whether you should just like dignify it by mention it or whether you should like go to the effort to point out how absurd it is. I always like to go to the effort, but I'm a cable news beast. So I understand it's important and that's where they've been running to make this case. I mean, there hasn't been a cogent foreign policy speech or any attempt really to make the case to the American people which we have seen before in regime change wars. Do you feel like we are heading towards another regime change episode or they understand enough about American and frankly Western appetite for that to try to hold it back?

11:17Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I think I was having a good conversation with Janice Stine yesterday. It was a political scientist and a specialist on the Middle East and the point that she made was that the regime has already changed, not that it's been a regime change, not the type of regime, but the regime itself will in some way adapt to the war. So in that sense, it's already happening, but whether that means that we end up with an even more hard line fundamentalist government than we had before, we don't know. What we have done basically is break stuff and when you break stuff, it's going to change a regime in the sense that something's going to happen, but you don't know what it's going to be. And the point I would make here is that if you actually are serious about making a country a different sort of country, then you can't just use missiles for that. Like that's the wrong premise. It's never happened that people have just with missiles changed a political system.

12:19You have to invade. And I'm not just be clear, I don't think we should. But you have to invade. You have to occupy the country. You have to oversee institutional changes like elections. And you have to have a robust set of policies to support the economic development of that country. And the Trump people, A, or not thinking of this, B, couldn't think of this, C, lack the attention span, and D, spent the first few weeks of the administration, defunding and eliminating all of the American institutions, which would have been appropriate for that kind of task. So for all these reasons, it's not a war of regime change in the sense that we're going to see it through or have some idea or care about democracy because obviously these people don't care about democracy. It is a war of regime change in the sense that by throwing a lot of essentially random violence at Tehran, we're going to get something different. It's just that we don't know what that's going to be. And it's not even necessarily going to be better. What do you think happens to the people of Iran? There's a lot of talk about, rise up and take control

13:21of your government. These are people in the streets and flip flops. I'm not sure how that's supposed to happen without the aid that you talk about. But how are you thinking about the future of the everyday Iranian? This is the kind of question where there's a variety of views even among the Iranians that I know here in Toronto or NLA. And it's hard to know how they're experiencing this. But what I would say is that we haven't broken the control of this regime over public space. On that first night, there were some public displays of hostility to the regime or rejoicing that the Supreme Leader had been killed. But that was all quickly put down. And the guys on motorcycles with the guns are still the ones who were controlling the streets in Tehran. The other thing that I want to make is a point I want to make us to do with sequence. And you pointed that to the chronology earlier. I just want to draw attention to what it means. The right sequence of events would have been you put the boats in the Persian Gulf.

14:22And then you say, don't harm the protesters. But we did it the other way around. We said, don't harm the protesters, and then come any killed, whatever it was, thousands, tens of thousands of them. And then we assembled the flotilla. So I'm not saying that like that makes it our fault. It's obviously the responsibility of the Iranian government. But if you were trying to protect protesters, you would have done it the other way around. And now, whatever our intentions were, we're left with a situation in which we know that thousands or maybe tens of thousands of the most active courageous Iranians are now dead. They were killed by the regime. And this indiscriminate, the kind of war that we're now waging, it's not clear to me that this is in any way protective of perhaps the more democratic or civil-minded or pluralistic parts of the, it's not clear to me that it's protecting them personally in any way. And it's not clear to me. I just don't know whether it improves their position politically. That I don't know. That's a question for Iranians.

15:22Yeah, no, it's a really good point. And you do see those mixed responses. And you know, everyone has a friend who's texting them how they're feeling about it. And there seems to be a lot of internal conflict. Not that anyone misses the itola, but that they're not sure, frankly, what American intervention in this case means. Because they've seen this movie before, right? What do you make of the internal divisions here in the United States within the Republican Party over this move by the president, some of the loudest, MAGA or America first representatives are calling this disgusting and vile. We didn't sign up for this, etc. The Neocons falling in line. But it does feel like a moment of real disruption to the traditional MAGA coalition. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I see it as a kind of ritual humiliation, right? You endorse Trump and whatever you do,

16:24he finds a way to humiliate you. Like even if you endorse him on the most basic thing, which is no more wars, no more wars in the Middle East, no more forever wars. And then one fine day, he explained to you how, in fact, yes wars, yes wars in the Middle East and very precisely yes forever wars. And forever wars are not only they're good, they're possible and they're winnable. And it's like, I see it as a kind of humiliation. And so there's a point, there's a point beyond which like, logically, I can't really say I understand it because I don't understand the politics of humiliation, right? Like I don't, I don't understand why it is that people like for the president or their leader to humiliate them. I just don't personally get that. So I can't judge to what extent this is going to break people off. I think it may, if it goes on for much longer. And I think the president, for the reasons you were talking about before, is stuck in a situation where this will go on for longer, right? Like I think, I think of Venezuela is in some sense something he got away with, right? It wasn't actually popular except in Florida maybe.

17:25But he got away with it because nothing went terribly wrong. It was kind of all over. And so Americans being who we are, like we forgot about it pretty quickly. I mean, not you, not me, but you know what I mean? Like we're a nation that moves on very quickly. Whereas with Iran, I don't think he's going to have the freedom to move on. I don't think he's going to have the freedom to tell the story or end the story the way he wants. I also want to mark you the thing that I'm really worried about. Or I'm worried about many things. But one of them is the risks of anti-Semitism connected to all of this. Because when you, when you're the administration and you yourself float the idea as the Secretary of State did that, you know, we had to do this because Israel is going to do it and then Iran was going to retaliate. And so therefore we had to go first but we did it because of Israel. Like when you'd float that idea and in fairness, the Secretary did walk it back to a great extent. But when you float these kinds of ideas, you're, I mean, really nilly whether you want to or not, you're feeding the part of the MAGA base which says, you know, Israel's in charge of everything. So this is the thing that worries me

18:25about like about MAGA is that yeah, some people are splitting off. But the, some of the, some of the guys into this mostly guys who are the most articulate about this are articulate about it and what seems to be to be an anti-Semitic way. It's also clear that this, that this war, I mean, people have to take responsibility for their own views and their own expressions. But it's clear that this war is making it easier for people. Also on the left to express that, or people who think they're on the left anyway, to express anti-Semitic views. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because this is something that I've been struggling with myself. And I've been talking about Secretary Rubio's comments and reading the reporting and know about the relationship obviously between Steve Woodcoff, Jared Kushner and Netanyahu, and I really worry that we are heading kind of towards the end of the Jewish-American left as we know it because of the way this relationship exists at this point with Trump at the, at the top of this tip of the spear, I guess.

19:29Basically, this is the first time right that we've seen that most on the left sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, for instance. And when Secretary Rubio makes those comments, yes, it inflames the Tucker Carlson's of the world, but it also inflames the left on it and just says this is Israel's war and we're fighting it for them. And I'm curious as to what you think, I guess, of the future of a pro-Israel American? We're watching all these democratic candidates like the Seth Motens of the World have to say, you know, I'm not going to take any APAC dollars. A lot of people saying, you know, there was a genocide committed in Gaza, etc. It's a very tense moment for American-Israeli relations. Yeah, and it's not the first one. It won't be the last one. I don't feel that I myself, like I'm the person who's going to judge all of this for American Jews, but I do have a couple of thoughts. And I think you actually mentioned something which is really important, which is Donald Trump being in charge,

20:32so to speak. So I'm thinking there was a mayor of Vienna who was essentially the inventor or one of the inventors of modern anti-Semitism. He was called Carl Lueger. And he said, I decide who's a Jew. And that, like Trump reminds me of that. I mean, not just because he does it. Like he actually does it. Like he says, like, Schumer's not a Jew. Schumer's a Palestinian, right? But not just in that literal sense, but in the sense that Trump has been allowed to decide what anti-Semitism is. And I think that, like for me, that's kind of the original sense. And all of this, that because it's hard enough, you know, if you're, if it's hard enough for Jews in the US to decide when they're going to call anti-Semitism when they're not, it's hard enough to say when the criticism of Israel goes over the line so that it's actually a general condemnation of Jews. All that's hard enough. And my view is, since you ask, that the president makes this much harder by himself saying, this is anti-Semitism,

21:32this is anti-Semitism, this is anti-Semitism. I think that's made things much harder and much worse. And I guess my second point would be Vagaza, which I think was a horrible crime. And but my point is though, I think we blew it on free expression there. And that, you know, whether you think the students are right or whether you think the students are wrong, you gotta let the students protest. It almost always turns out, incidentally, you know, historians point, the students almost always turn out to be right, if not after five months, after 50 years, pretty much the students always turn out to be right. But whether you think they're right or wrong, we blew it on free expression. Like we should have let them protest. We should have let them do what they wanted to do. Because by allowing the president to define all of that as anti-Semitism and as a reason to close down campuses and freedom of assembly, we went down a route which is then hard to come back from. So those are my thoughts. I mean, and in general, you know, what I think is that America and Israel are very similar. You know, the main political figure in both

22:32are somebody who is in the case of the United States, somebody who's been convicted of a bunch of crimes. In the case of Israel, somebody who would be convicted of a bunch of crimes if he weren't prime minister. They're both in situations where their democracies are in peril. They're both in situations where politics is highly polarized. And I think, you know, the, the, the, it's not an easy way out, but like maybe the one simple approach should be to say, these are both countries that, you know, you can love, but like you need to love them in a way which means you have to improve them a lot because they have both done things which are devastatingly horrible in the very recent past. And loving one of them, loving the other one, I think involves acknowledging that and then starting from the premise that we're not just going to apologize for things, we're going to make them better. I'm glad you're raising this, though, because it is incredibly hard and I have a feeling, and it's going to, it's going to come up on the next presidential, I have a feeling. Definitely, I know that many campaigns are already thinking about it, I'm going to say all eyes, but a lot of eyes, obviously, on Josh Shapiro who is a devout practicing Jew

23:33and how he's talking about anti-Semitism and the relationship with Israel. I think that's the case. I think it will also show up in the midterms, too. I mean, we've already seen primary races affected by the APAC factor, like in Tom Melanowski's race in New Jersey congressional primary. Let's take a quick break, stay with us. Welcome back. Yesterday was a big election day, especially in Texas. James Talleriko prevailed in the Democratic Senate primary over Jasmine Crockett, who has conceded. It was a huge turnout day in Texas, North Carolina, as well, smashing records, Latino voters, very much back in the fold, young voters. I'm curious as to how you are thinking about the midterms, both from how Democrats are going to do perspective, but also putting on your student of authoritarianism cap,

24:37how worried should we be about having free and fair elections here? The thing that I found interesting was the Arkansas State House election, where I, like, you know, did not expect that to be your answer. No, no, where, I mean, well, just because it was state level Arkansas and it was a flip or Republican seat was flipped to a Democrat. And that for me was just, I mean, it was just one notable moment in a general trend. So I think the Democrats are going to do extremely well in November. I think by their nature, it is difficult for Democrats to say we're about to have, you know, we're about to enjoy a crushing victory. That's not really, maybe it shouldn't be, but like that's, that's not the way Democrats usually talk, but I think that all the trends are in their favor. And the polling is in their favor. And the by-elections tend to show this. I mean, not just winning, but winning. And not just a, like, blue wave. I think like the blue wave thing is probably an adequate to describe this.

25:37I mean, it's more like, you know, tsunami. Yeah, like blue, I don't know. Yeah, like something different, right? Because it's not just the normal midterm or disappointed kind of thing, which is about to happen. And that leads me to your second question, which is how worried should we be? I don't think we should be worried. I think we should just be active. And I does connect back to the Iran, the Iran question. I really think that for Trump, you know, this is a trial balloon. And it's all like, can he, can he make it stick that somehow Iran is going to interfere in our elections and therefore we have to federalize them? And there's a way to make that not stick, which is to ridicule it from whatever angle and to make sure that judges and journalists are aware of how fatuous and embarrassing all of this stuff is. But I do think that like whether it's Iran or whether it's Cuba or whether it's something else by the time we get to the fall, he's going to make some sort of play like that. And the important thing is like to be able to I roll it, to be able to laugh at it, to make it to make sure that no one is going to accept

26:38that we have to have armed people at polling stations because of some country in some other hemisphere, right? Like that, that just has to be laughed out of school so it doesn't happen. So I don't think we should be worried. We should be engaged in a campaign to make sure it doesn't happen because he's telegraphed that this is what he's trying to do. And so it's not about worry. It's not about like watching it. It's just it's what no, and this is regardless of what party you're going to vote for. And I mean, if you're in a Republican state and you're a Republican politician, it's actually not in your interest for elections to be federalized. It's not in your interest for this stuff to be taken out of your hands forever. It's not in your interest for everybody to regard your electoral victories as illegitimate. You know, that's just not in your interest either. I mean, and that's even before I speak to like patriotism and citizenship, it's not really anyone's interest for any of this stuff to happen. But I want to think, I want to hear what you think, what you think we learned yesterday. I think we learned that 2024 was a bit of an aberration and that democratic enthusiasm

27:41means what it's supposed to this time because we actually did have an enthusiasm advantage in 2024 and got lucky that a lot of casual people stayed home because Donald Trump would have won by even bigger margins. So I think we saw a rebuilding of the coalition with Latino voters and young voters. I think we saw, which is a very important lesson for the future of democracy, that the GOP's gerrymandor play failed in four seats in Texas. And I think that that's very important. To your point about Democrats are not interested in boasting. And I'm that way too. I'm very cautious, cautiously optimistic, but cautious about it. You know, we took a very big swing on redistricting with Prop 50 and Gavin Newsom's campaign. And now that's happening all over the country. And I think that the results last night bear out actually what the people have been clamoring for. A democratic approval is down because people want us to fight harder.

28:42Not because they necessarily hate our set of policies. And I think that last night's results were very indicative of that sentiment and also candidates coming through who are those kinds of fighters. I think it was all to the good. I'm curious to see what Trump does about John Kornman versus Ken Paxton because Ken Paxton race would be very messy. Good for cable news coverage. But those were kind of my big takeaways. And I just as a last question for you. So you are no longer here in the US. You live in Toronto now. What does the world outside of here think about what's going on here from your vantage point? Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's one of the reasons why I like living abroad is because it helps. You get a little bit of distance on like the everyday American stuff. And you hear from people who are

29:45who have sometimes more of a distance. But I have to say, I guess two things. The first is that we have a lot, there are a lot of people who care about us and who worry about us. I put it that way. Like there's a tendency you know from the president downward to define everybody as our enemy at the moment. Right? Like the Canadians are enemy and the Mexican everybody is our enemy. But that's not how the Canadians see it like the Canadians in my day to day interactions with them. And it varies a little bit from conservative to liberals up here but not much honestly. The thing that they express is concern. Like sympathy and concern. Right? Like that's the thing. And I don't that's maybe something that doesn't come through. And that's true of our European friends. I've spent much of this year so far in Europe. And it's true in Europe too. Like people get angry and people have to react to things that Trump does.

30:46But mostly it's like sympathetic concern. You know, like we wish this wasn't happening to you. And that I think is the thing which is like it never rises to level of newsworthy. Right? Like that people actually are worried about you and they care about you as opposed to just that they're angry or they have to react to something. But I think there's much more that out there in the world than we recognize. Like there are a lot of people who for whatever reason in their lives have become sympathetic to the United States or care about the United States or believe that cooperation with the United States has been good for everyone. So that's the first thing I wanted to say. I mean, the second thing I wanted to say is that the charismatic politics of Donald Trump doesn't work past American borders. So there are people in the European far right or in Russia or whatever who like Trump. But nobody only Americans experience his charisma. Like no one else really gets it. So there are people who are afraid of what he might do or but no one no one is caught up in his charisma

31:48the way that we are. Like that's like that's an American TV program that only works in America. And so it's I realize it's kind of a hard thought experiment but like imagine that you you know, you cross the line and then suddenly like Trump is just this guy. You know, and like it and and it's not that people are harder on him in other countries. It's just that they don't feel the appeal right like his stage craft, his magic, whatever it is. It just doesn't apply and so you're kind of so so that people are just more puzzled more of the time and they're puzzled by how the charisma works like why it works on us like why anybody believes any of this stuff. That's mainly I mean those are the those are the those are the main things that I experience. And then of course there's like the fundamental concern that they're like people don't want America to be strong generally. The way that Trump is talking about I we fight wars against small countries and then claim we won. They want America to be strong in the sense of supporting rules and making the world more rather than less predictable.

32:50And that's not I mean that's a reasonable aspiration for us and a lot of people around the world. Not everybody not a lot of people in that America have never experienced anything like that. But it's a reasonable experience expectation from us that we could do that we could do something like that. And so in general you know in the rest of let's call it the West there's this there's a concern that because we are we are choosing to be unpredictable the world has become much more unpredictable something like that. Yeah those are very interesting points and resonant with me. I did my PhD in England and a lot of those sentiments I we are talking about an ivory tower you know group of people but Trump not translating I think is something we don't talk about enough because foreign leaders have figured out how to behave with him how to cow tow to him. I think Mark Karnney is one of the best frankly having figured that out but you can tell that they're thinking like I'm not going to pay 1999 a month right to subscribe to the streaming surface

33:52to watch this guy. Tim Snyder it was such a pleasure to have you. Thank you for joining me. Really glad I could thanks for the conversation.