Mike Pompeo and Michael Doran on the Iran War

0:00What you're about to hear is a live recording from March 4th, 2026, the 5th day of the Joint American-Israeli War against Iran. To help the tick-foot community understand the context and the strategic underpinning of events, I gathered two of our most trusted guides to this unfolding crisis for a conversation that went into the new cycle and beyond it, into the theory of the campaign, what comes next inside Iran, and what this moment means for American power, and for the American right. The recording of that event is this week's broadcast. Welcome to the Tick-foot podcast, I'm your host Jonathan Silver. You'll hear my framing introduction to that discussion, and also my welcome to the Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Mike Durand, and the former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can discover more big ideas and in-depth analysis

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2:04Here now is my discussion recorded live on Wednesday, March 4th with Secretary Mike Pompeo and Mike Duran. Welcome everybody, thank you for joining us. At 1.15 in the morning on February 28th, more than 200 Israeli Air Force jets took off from bases across the region bound for Iran. They were joined by American B2 and B1 bombers in the full weight of the U.S. air and naval power in the Middle East. Not long after in Tehran, the Iatola of Iran was killed, along with dozens of the most senior figures of the Islamic Republic, operations epic fury and roaring lion had begun. Five days later today, the Iranian missile arsenal is measurably degraded. The regime is in a succession crisis, Hezbollah has entered the war from Lebanon, Kurdish militias have crossed the border from Iraq, a U.S. submarine has sunk in Iranian frigate in the Indian Ocean, the straight of Hormuz has been effectively closed to tanker traffic, the Middle East is in a different place than it was a week ago.

3:04My name is Jonathan Silver, I'm the war in our stern senior fellow here at Tick-foot, and our series of live online events covering operation epic fury is generously dedicated and sponsored by the Stern family. Tick-foot as many of you know is an educational institution and think tank were dedicated to putting the great ideas of the Jewish tradition into conversation with the broader inheritance of the West and that includes thinking hard about strategy and defense. Our aim is to form a rising generation of Jewish leaders who are proud of America and take our inheritance seriously. When history moves this fast and the stakes for Israel and America and the Jews are this high, we believe that we have an obligation to think carefully and publicly about what's happening and what it means, and to do that I've invited two of the most clear-eyed strategic thinkers on these questions. Everybody knows Michael Duran, he's the senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and we're very honored to have Secretary Mike Pompeo. He served as the director of the CIA and is the 70th Secretary of State, where he was

4:05one of the architects of the maximum pressure campaign against Iran, and that set the stage for everything that we're now watching unfold. Gentlemen, welcome. Great to be with you. Secretary Pompeo, I want to start with you and the architecture of the maximum pressure campaign, the JCPOA withdrawal, the Ascension's architecture, the case that economic coercion was the right instrument, we're now five days into a shooting war, and I want to ask what that earlier foundation that you built shows us about the trajectory where we are now, and what kind of problem Iran actually is. Well, first of all, it's great to be with you. It's always good to be with my friend Mike Duran as well. President Trump did in his first term that was drawn from the JCPOA, which I have to remind folks, most all of the key terms of that agreement would have expired on their own by this point. They were limited in duration, and it seemed, you know, when it was created, it seemed like a long time off, but most of those provisions would have already expired. They would have been free to build their missile program with full sanctions relief today. We should be mindful that that was a path that would have led us to a much worse place.

5:09Look, our theory of the case was, starve the beast, deny them wealth, deny them resources, we'll make it harder for them to fund their proxies, whether it's Hezbollah or Hamas or the Houthis or the PMF, the Hush-Toshabi in Iraq. And it worked. We were pretty successful. We enforced the sanctions pretty vigorously. We were down to less than half a million barrels a day, transiting out of Iran in their ghost fleet, and we had them down to less than three billion dollars of foreign exchange reserves. They were struggling to make payroll and do all the things that had led to the nefarious activities that we've all suffered under in the West for 47 years. Then there was the Biden-interregnum, four years where they again rebuilt their coffers and rebuilt their capacity, leading to what happened in the, I'll call it the next turning of the page, which was, of course, October 7th. So LaMani was gone, but the capacity of the Iranian regime to cost trouble remained. And now President Trump has, along with Prime Minister Netanyahu, taken on a deferred liability,

6:10right? A risk that had been sitting on the world's balance sheet for a long time, unrecognized. You can now see some of that cost, American servicemembers now, six, I think, killed, Israelis that are at risk, missiles flying all throughout the Middle East, and now, frankly, into Europe. They have a very welcome effort to actually reduce risk and make the world safer. And I would argue, and I don't know if Mike will agree with me, I think he may. The world is actually safer today, now, call it 110 hours into this phase of the conflict, the end of the 47-year conflict, then we were just a few days back. Come on, Mike. Yeah, I totally agree. The world is a much, much safer place. And Israel and the United States are operating as one army. President Trump made history last June when he went to war with Israel. But that was a kind of, like a relay race, where the Israelis did the first legs, and

7:12then the United States came in for the last leg. That was separate and sequential activities. Now, they are one integrated team. We're both stronger as a result of that. So in addition to all of the setbacks, all the reduction of Iranian capability that we've seen, we also have a new model of cooperation between the United States and Israel. And I think that also makes us stronger. I want to come to the strategic logic of President Trump trying to produce what is undoubtedly a massive behavior change in Iran without a JCPOA structure on the one hand, but also without the kind of troop commitment that the United States saw in the Iraq years. A lot of people are speaking about the Milosevic model. And I want to ask you, Mike, what you think makes that model apt, where that model breaks down? And analogy that then 78 days of air power, no-ground invasion led to a kind of government transformation.

8:15Is that model apt here? Does it illuminate something? So I feel like my job in this situation is to be the accountant when talking to the executives in the firm who are excited about the new startup they have, and they have plans to build here, build there, and they see their product is selling. I'm the accountant who comes in and says, this is all great, but look, you've only got this much money in the bank account. To switch metaphors, I'm here to remind everybody that there's gravity. And at some point, you can fly very high, but at some point, you've got to come down. And I want to do that without being negative about what's happening, because I think we open on the right note here. This is all fantastic. It's going exceptionally well. Iran is permanently weakened. I think this is all true. But we know in the Middle East, recent history has taught us that these regimes can suffer

9:19catastrophic defeats militarily and yet not go away. They don't go away. Israel and the United States have always had a problem of translating military victory into lasting political change. And that's the question that we have to be having in front of us. I don't, by asking it, I don't want to have suggested that I think that anyone is doing anything wrong. But that is the million dollar question here. Is how is Donald Trump going to leverage all of this military success into a lasting change in the behavior of the regime? And I think the theory here is that we're going to create regime transformation. We're taking out the top levels of the regime. And we're putting it under so much pressure that an elements within the regime will emerge who will be more pragmatic and more willing to cut the deal with the United States that it wants. It remains to be seen if we can get there.

10:20I mean, we may end up when this is over. There's three scenarios that I can make up more, but they're kind of three key ones. One is the one I just said. We force the emergence of a pragmatic element in the regime that can hold the regime together and cut a deal and hold the deal. The second one is Saddam Hussein, after the 1992, he's defeated a little bit chasinged in terms of what he does, but not willing to cut any deals. And so just remains under sanction. It holds on to power, but is not really cooperative in any way that matters. And the third is a civil war that they remain under pressure. We continue to degrade capabilities. They have to be the Iranian leadership right now, cannot even know what's happening to it. There's so many things happening on so many, coming out from so many directions simultaneously, so many people have been taken off of the game board, that they have to be confused.

11:28They're going to just revert to their usual standard operating procedure, which is to hunker down, say no to everything the Americans put forward, and they'll have capabilities taken away from them. And before they know it, the whole thing will collapse and then will be in civil war. I think those are the basic scenarios. Matt, you said to that. Look, I think Mike's laid out three likely scenarios. Maybe you could shade each of them. But what is important to remember, and I think President Trump, and I think Prime Minister Netanyahu as well, gets this, in order for them to re-enter the world, that is for sanctions to be lifted, for them to be able to re-engage in a serious way, this is not going to happen if they continue down this path, right? They may well hunker down, hang out, we may stop, we can't keep two carriers there forever. So the context may change, but the Iranian regime is fundamentally altered, and it's someone who was a practitioner, right, as Secretary of State. It is very subtle in the case that you solve problems permanently.

12:29And so what you do is you reduce risk and manage problems. And I think we've already come a long way down that, and it doesn't mean there won't be challenges between here and the next decade. But we fundamentally reshape the Iranian regime's capacity to reach, and that means to threaten and to bully and to get their way and to deny the West its economic capacity to influence and shape them. But second, I think you see the Gulf Arab states fundamentally going to go to a place that's very different, right? The Emirates had an embassy in Tehran, right, they were all hedging because they didn't think the United States would do precisely what it has done. And so I think you will see an altered Middle East that I hope directionally had even further down the path of what we had begun to shape with the Abraham Accords, which I do think fundamentally just alters the nature of what's taking place in Iran. And then one last thought, it's so easy to get caught up in just talking about Iran and without thinking about the broader Middle East. But even more broadly than that, this was the flagship carrier for the Chinese Communist

13:33Party in the region. That's what enabled them to influence and shape Saudi behavior, Omani behavior, cuttery behavior. This was the tool that the Chinese Communist Party had used in the region, in the same way they'd used Venezuela in Latin America. And those have been demonstrably proven not to be their partner of choice. And so I do think this reshapes the Chinese capacity to get discount oil and the Chinese ability to impact and shape the Middle East for an awfully long time as well. They will have been chasing and diminished in the eyes of the Gulf Arab states. And we cannot underestimate what that means for Western civilization as we move out of the intense conflict period in the next weeks to a very different world than we had on October 6th, or even just five days ago. Secretary Pompeo, I do want to widen out and look at the region and then look at America's great power competition with China in a moment. But I do want to just linger on Mike's point that the political consolidation, which this

14:37military action has made possible, I think it requires some kind of large-scale Iranian uprising. Do you think that that's likely to emerge? It's hard to know. I remember being a young soldier, a young armor officer in Germany in October of 1989. No one knew when the wall would come down. It literally came down. It was like, oh my gosh, the wall came down. Well, we've been working at it an awfully long time. And so you can't know the moment. Do I suspect that there are many inside of Iran and he, we saw this just weeks ago that are looking for that opportunity and trying to find a way where they think they can't just, they're not just going to be martyr. They're actually going to get him. I think that's true. We ought to make sure that we do everything we can to facilitate that. There are many tools. It's not about putting the, there's no requirement to put the 82nd airborne in and around Tehran. There are many tools that are available to us to facilitate and increase the probability that something like that happens. One can never predict or model how that will actually take place.

15:39Mike now looking at the region itself and the achievement of the Abraham Accords. One of the drivers of the Abraham Accords was that the Israelis and the Gulf states came to share a perception of the Iranian threat. If that threat is now neutralized as a result of joint American and Israeli action, does it undermine the Abraham Accords or strengthen them and make them more likely? I'm not sure how to think about it. This is like a kaleidoscope and you, you, you turn it. Just a little bit and all of the elements in relationship with each other changes dramatically. I was just thinking as Secretary Pompeo was, was talking, by the way, I agree with everything that he said. When I said I'm, I'm reminding everyone that there's gravity. I think that we are in a better place automatically. There's no doubt about that. I still, I'm trying to understand where this is going to go and how good of a place we're going to be in. One of the things that struck me, I had a conversation a while back with an Israeli who told me about

16:42the, you remember that the Israelis hit, I think his name was, was Zahidi and the commander of the Kudz force in Lebanon and Syria in Damascus and the consulate. It led to the first huge barrage of, of Iranian missiles and drones against Israel. They, they hit him, it turns out I didn't know this. It was, they hit him by mistake in the consulate. They didn't know it was a consulate and they didn't know that it was, that they considered it part of the embassy complex. It was a violation of international norms and it led to this massive Iranian response. They did it by accident. It was a mistake and they triggered this response that they weren't expecting but the response, the massive response of the Iranians had a surprising impact on them because they

17:42weathered it with really, you know, no problem. I mean, it caused damage. Some people died but the, but everyone went to their shelters and it wasn't, it wasn't the horrible, horrible catastrophic experience that they had told themselves it would be if Iran was ever to do this. And that then sort of, it, it, it broke a barrier of fear that had, that had been deterring them in, in the past. And I think, I think something like that is going to go on now. Everyone, Iran has given the world its absolute worst. It's not pretty. I mean, don't want to, I don't want to minimize it but it's not that bad. It's not that bad. I think that the, I think that the Saudis, the Qataris, the Emirates, the Kuwaitis, they're all going to say, okay, these guys are done. They're done. And as Secretary Pompeo was saying, we're going to have Iran under sanctions after this.

18:45We're going to have all kinds of levers. They're going to know that if they, that if they cross our red lines, we can, we, we and the Israelis can continue to strike them at will. I think they'll, they will continue to be a challenge and a, and a problem if they stay, if they stay in power. But it's going to be a fundamentally different Middle East. It's not going to be the wonderland that we want it to be. But it's going to be fundamentally different. And I think that that does open possibilities that I wasn't able to imagine just a, just a couple of weeks ago. One of the things that I learned, you know, I, I assume it's true or I read in the Washington Post, so I'm not completely true, certain, certain about it. But that it is that Muhammad bin Salman has been, has been telling Donald Trump to do this. And all I've heard from Saudis for the last, since October 7th is no normalization with Israel until, until there's an irreversible pathway to a two-state solution.

19:45All I've been hearing from them is, let's cut a deal with Iran. We have to get along with Iran. I don't think they, my Saudi interlocutors themselves know that their leader has been saying that Donald Trump do it, do it, do it. So that, that tells you that what Muhammad bin Salman has in his mind for his country, where he wants to go and so on, is going to be something that they can't imagine and that he hasn't been telling us. It's going to take time for the dust to settle. The conflict in Gaza will have to get past that. But I think, once that's done, there are all kinds of permutations that will become possible that we weren't able to imagine before, because the fear factor of Iran is going to be gone. Though, just because the fear factor has gone, it was, that's my point, is that it served also as one of the factors that drove together the Saudis and the Israelis. And without that fear factor, one wonders what other kinds of considerations could drive them apart. It's certainly possible. It's certainly possible.

20:46It did seem to me in talking to my Saudi friends that when the Biden administration was talking about, was, was sponsoring normalization and proposing normalization, but it was conditioning the normalization on the, it was, it was offering the Saudis an enhanced defense relationship of the United States, and it was conditioning that on normalization with Israel. The Trump administration came in, lifted the conditions. And the Saudis no longer felt that they, that they had to, you know, eat a bug in order to get the, the special relationship with the, with the United States. That combined with the, all of the emotions that the war in Gaza evoked in the Saudi population created a different attitude. I'm, I'm just being a little bit humble, a little humility. I don't know exactly where this is going to lead. I can argue it square or round, but I think we're going to have options that we didn't see

21:49before. And let's not forget now that Donald Trump has shown the, the Middle East that the United States and Israel are marching in lockstep. You know, when the, the, the, the, the, we've had a number of points and before the June war and then before this, where we saw some, some tension or some, some appearance of tension between the Israelis and the, and the Americans. And it wasn't obvious that they were really planning the new Middle East together. I think that's pretty obvious now. And everyone is going to realize, I think everyone is going to realize that if you want to be part of the American order, you have to accept Israel. So, good day, Pompeo. I want you to, um, inhabit for us if you can. What you think Chinese war planners and Chinese strategists would have concluded from the sudden appearance of, of, uh, these two operations and these two militaries working together. It seems to me that there are just times when the United States military has got to project overwhelming force to just sort of remind our competitors what we're capable of.

22:55And I, I wonder how you think it might have looked from China. You know, perhaps you said that better than, than I could have, uh, deterrence depends on the consistent or at least intermittent application of overwhelming power and the demonstration that you've got the, you've got the thing in the holster, right? That you can actually pick it up and the damn thing's going to go. And what the Chinese leadership is thinking is two, four, one, is Xi Jinping is asking the same question that Vladimir Putin would have had to ask is, why did you lie to me about our weapons systems capabilities about American decadence and decay about the decline of the West and its temerity. It's, it's, um, that they've become wussies, um, right? This was the model that was projected by Vladimir Putin that caused him. And by the way, he had, he had a decent reason to believe it, right? He had a, a very different president of the White House that wasn't, that, that had walked away from Afghanistan and it had, uh, had greenlit, uh, an idea of weakness. And I think what you see, both in the activities that took place in the aftermath of October

23:577th, the June strikes operation, Midnight Hammer. And now this is, you demonstrated both American capacity, along with our Israeli partners, of course. Um, but you've also seen American will. That is, you've seen a leader who was prepared to actually say, no, this matters to America. By the way, against an enormous part of his own domestic political base, right? So he said, you know, uh, internal politics be damned. I'm going to go do the right thing for America. And, uh, has no demonstrated the capacity to do that. So I think, I think the Taiwanese are feeling a lot better today. I think the Japanese are feeling a lot better today. I'm sure the Filipinos are thinking, boy, my goodness gracious, I did pick the right partner in this post night, 75 year world post world war two 75 years on model where we're all trying to figure out what the world's going to look like. I actually picked the right partner. And I think that is a demonstrably good thing for the United States. I'll give you one more, uh, set of folks who have been watching this closely. And, you know, when we, when we, when I think when most Americans think about, uh, Muslim populations, they turn to the, uh, Middle East, but we shouldn't forget that the

25:00largest Islamic populations in the world sit in Southeast Asia, whether that's Malaysia or Pakistan, um, huge, huge Muslim populations. I'm confident that they too have seen their Muslim brothers kill their fellow Muslims. And that has to upend their, the, I'll call it the radical clerical establishment, who has always said, no, the evil doers are those, are those Jews and those Christians. And when it turns out that it is, uh, the Iranian regime that has now killed more Muslims over the last five days, uh, than any, than anyone from the West. And so they are probably fundamentally rethinking their relationship with China in, in important ways as well, that will definitely diminish Chinese capacity, influence and shape that part of the world as well. And looking at our interpretation of events, what do you make of the fact that China did not really want to get involved, did not want to offer or advance material support to the Iranians? How do you interpret that? It's physics. There was literally nothing they could do. What do you, there's, there's, there's no capacity to do air-to-air refueling and drop the Chinese equivalent

26:01of the 82nd Airborne into defensive positions around Eshfahan, right? The just, like, the only ones that can pull that off are the Israelis and the Americans. Uh, they can actually project power into a region over sustained period of time. The Chinese Communist Party can't, can't do that. The, the, how the Russians couldn't take down the Ukrainians, right? These are just fundamentally different set of capabilities at both the volume and the training and organizational infrastructure required. Think about this. The, the, the Iranians haven't yet. I pray that it remains so, launched what everybody feared would be not a bunch of missiles firing into American embassies, but a cyber attack that would take down massive amounts of Western infrastructure. I am confident without knowing that they tried. They've literally pulled out every tool in their kit bag that's, that's overt. I am, I'd be shocked if they had pulled out some of these less overt options. And those two have failed. And the Chinese Communist Party could have done that as well. And yet they chose not to, for I think, uh, prudential reasons, Mike. I think it's, um,

27:06typical of the Chinese in this part, in this region to hang back, um, and, uh, to be, um, rather, you know, like a, um, like a jackal. Uh, there are a little bit opportunistic, uh, about, uh, about how they behave with everyone, um, in, in the region. Uh, they haven't given nothing to the Iranians. Remember last, uh, in 2024, October 24, 24, the Israelis took out the, medium-range ballistic missile, um, production capability of the Iranians. These are the missiles, the solid fuel propellant, um, uh, missiles. These are the ones that are causing the, the Israelis, the most difficulty. And the Israelis took out these mixers that are a key part of, of, um, uh, of building the missiles. And the Israelis told me that they, they had taken them offline for at least a year. And they were very confident of that. But in fact, the Iranians put, put it back into production, uh, within weeks or, or, or, or short number of months.

28:11And came back with an intention to, uh, to build their arsenal much bigger than ever before. That was one of the catalysts for the June war because the, uh, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his security establishment identified the growth in the, um, Iranian arsenal as an existential threat in and of itself, in addition to, or separate from the existential threat from the, from the nuclear program. Uh, all of that, thanks to the Chinese. And there, there are only two entities in the world that have a, um, um, anti-ship ballistic missile, which is, uh, which is a weapon that is only designed to do one thing. And that's the sink in American aircraft carrier. And those two entities are the Houthis and the Chinese. The Chinese are also sending targeting data to the Houthis about how to, uh, how to do this. They're helping the Iranians get component parts for their missiles, uh, some of the chemicals they need to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to manufacture the fuel for

29:12the missiles and, and so on. So they're there. But one step removed. Of course, they're also buying all of the Iranian oil. I mean, they're the sole customer of the Iranians at, but they're, they're, they're, they're buying it at a great, uh, at a great discount. So the, they're absolutely indispensable to the Iranians at this point because they are their link that they need that, the Iranians need them for their, for their missile system, but they're not getting, the Iranians aren't getting near what they would like to see from the, the Chinese. And the Chinese are not, uh, are not going to put, um, any major interest on the line, uh, to, to save them. They'll be there, uh, when the, you know, once, uh, to pick up, to help them pick up some of the pieces at a discount to the Chinese when the whole thing settles. But that has to send, uh, as Secretary Pompeo was saying, that in itself sends an incredible message to all of the allies in the Middle East, our allies who have been hedging toward the Chinese, um, in the last, uh, in the last

30:12decade. I don't blame them, by the way, for hedging toward the Chinese because our own policy has been so, um, uh, unreliable as we've shifted, you know, from one administration to the, to the other. And the, the, the Obama Biden effort to, um, accommodate the Iranians has put our allies and, uh, you know, in, um, in danger. I don't blame them for hedging, but I think the, the, the, the, the hedging is going to shift back toward us now. Secretary Pompeo, one of the things that, that I learned from this last week is just how much leadership matters. And that President Trump took this decision invites the question of why this didn't happen 20 years ago, but it's, it's easy for those of us on the right to be critical of President Obama and President Biden, your approach that they took. But for all of the people asking on one side of the political aisle, why now, meaning why not wait until there's an imminent threat? I suppose that my question comes from more from the other side. Why did it take us so long? Because it's hard. The moment has to be

31:15right. You know, lots has transpired even since the first Trump administration, right? Um, this, this was, this was not only, uh, there was not only an imminent risk, uh, to, uh, Israel and US force, but there was also a weaker on. So the opportunity presented itself in a way that, with, that had much more clarity, uh, than previously was the case. I'm confident. I know I wasn't in the room, but I'm confident. I know what the Defense Department told President Trump about the risks. I heard these same briefings, uh, before the Soleimani strike, I heard the same briefings before we moved our, uh, embassy to Jerusalem. Right. World War III. This is to Mike's point earlier about this fear factor, right? This is, this is what the professional, uh, intelligence and defense community has thought for a long time, right? That this is going to be costly. We don't know how it ends. The, the risk exceeds the benefit. Uh, and I think President Trump concluded that the risk was lower today than it was even during his first term. Uh, and, and second, uh, that the benefits, uh, that would have creed because the risk was so high, uh, because as Mike said, they were talking about

32:19hypersonic anti-ship missiles, um, that the risk had hit this, this pinnacle that this was just the right timing. And then finally, your point's well taken. Um, we did have an October 7. That I think reset the mindset for lots of, uh, Americans and lots of Israelis. That is, we now understood the full price of accommodation, right? The situation with Hamas and Gaza and Hezbollah in the north, there'd been this, this model that had developed over a not extended period of time that says, fine, you're going to do what you do, but we've got sort of a, we've got a, um, a notice of a Vendai that keeps our people safe. And it became clear in October 7th that that was no longer the case. And so I think these things all came together to create this, um, this both necessity and then opportunity and then human beings do matter. Uh, Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump are different characters than many of those who preceded them. And I think they jointly concluded that this made sense for their, each of them independently for their own countries. Secretary Pompeo, you mentioned something before about how in part of his, his decision-making

33:24calculation for proceeding with Operation Epic Fury was that he was going to have to upset some of the people, President Trump would have to upset some of the people in his own base. And I want to come in and bring in the domestic American set of questions, which are inevitably part of selling a massive operation like this to the American people. The question of Israel and the Jews in the Middle East has inserted itself right into the center of the Republican coalition. Where do you think that stands now, you know, so many days after this operations begun? You know, I guess I have a slightly different take. I don't think it put itself in the center of the Republican coalition. Um, I, I think it identified that sliver that's been there for a while. Right. Anybody remember, Pat Buchanan? Right. So in some sense, in some sense, the Tucker Carlson nuttiness, the anti-Semitism that sits with Candace Owens and, and these, these, these people who just, I don't understand, I can't understand them and we should reject them wholeheartedly.

34:25Um, that's all we, it's been there. It may have been more latent and I think this rips the, the mask off, but to some extent. Um, second, if you, you know, there's this thing that people call the MAGA movement. Um, sign me up. I'm part of that too. Uh, and yet I think what the president did was fantastic. And when I think of MAGA, I think about people who, um, believe Washington causes more problems than it solves, I think of lower tax. I think of, I think of the traditional Reagan model. That's most of what, uh, MAGA folks would stand up for. We don't, we didn't like open borders. Uh, right. And then there's this other piece. There's this piece that is truly isolationist. Um, that's not the Donald Trump that I worked for, for four years. I, I never, I never saw that. Um, I saw someone who, who talked about peace through strength, who, who didn't want to go to war and didn't want to put big forces deployed for extended period times. Those are all true things who wanted out of Afghanistan after 20 years because he thought that the cost succeeded the benefits. Um, but you know, it's interesting. He didn't pull out of Afghanistan. This is what people forget, right? Like, no, he understood that you couldn't do what President

35:26Biden did. Uh, and so I, I think President Trump, uh, understood that most of, most of the folks who have traditionally been supporters of the Republican Party, uh, are, are deeply cognizant of the need for American to lead, uh, America to lead around the world. And President Trump talks about it in a way that's different than President Reagan did or, frankly, than the way I often do. Um, but I'm confident that he understands it in the same way that I do. And so he'll lose, he'll lose a handful of folks. He lost a vote from Senator Paul today on the War Powers Act. I'm going to guess he's not going to last to lose two seconds sleep over that this evening. Uh, the, I don't know how many other Republicans voted today, but the rest of them all voted, uh, to do what, uh, President Trump will lead was righteous and, uh, they would, they would concur with that. Mikey, you've been one of the most astute students of this surge in anti-Jewish, anti-Jewish opinions as an organizing force. As Secretary Pompeo says, not necessarily new,

36:26not unprecedented, but resurgent in certain corners of the right. How do you think the war changes that? I feel more comfortable talking about my aspiration for how it will change it. Because, uh, well, I want to see, uh, I want to see Tucker Carlson dethroned. I mean, the, the, the weirdness of the, um, of the, the, the second Trump administration is the way Donald Trump has surrounded himself with these people inside the administration and, and then write, you know, with Tucker Carlson adjacent to the administration. JD Vance is, uh, or, uh, Tucker Carlson's son is working for JD Vance. JD Vance and, and Don Jr. are, are celebrating their friendship with, uh, Tucker Carlson and, uh, Quincy Institute and, uh, uh, um, I'm drawing a blank on all of the, the, the, the restraintest, um, uh, think tanks that have, uh, manned the administration, um, give the impression that the, the ideas that these people have are endorsed by Trump, by his family,

37:30into a certain extent they are, um, that they're endorsed by JD Vance and that they have been elevated and put at the center of policy. But then he goes out and he behaves like this. So he's clearly the agenda that he's projecting through those associations and the agenda that he's actually following are, are really very different and, and, and contradictory. Um, so I, I, I, I, I think I'm, um, I'm probably being too hopeful when I think that this will get it all sorted out. I think this kind of, uh, uh, this kind of dissonance inside the administration is going to continue. You don't have, I mean, take an issue like, um, China. First Trump administration, with Secretary Pompeo, with Secretary of State, had a coherent messaging at a very high level about China and the American competition with, uh, with, with China. It's very hard today to figure out on the basis of the high level messaging, what the China policy is. I think you can find it

38:32in terms of the vector of the behavior of Donald Trump, what he does rather than what's being said. But on China and on the Middle East, there's a, there's a lot of dissonance and you can grab hold of different elements of the administration or different statements by the administration and build a case that something very different from what's actually going on is, is, is, um, is happening. I, I, one of the roles I play these days is, uh, we get here at Hudson Institute, you know, we get lots of foreigners coming in, particularly from Europe and they come in and they're completely, their heads are spinning. They can't begin to make heads or tails of, uh, uh, of what's going on. I think that's a real weakness of the administration, uh, actually. I hope after this, uh, after this war, there'll be a little bit more coherence to it, but I, I think that, um, and I would like to see Tucker Carlson really, I, I would like to see him, I, I would like to see him become an embarrassment to JD Vance. I would like to see Donald Trump, uh, um, attack him, not just

39:34call him Kookie from now and then, but real, now and then, but really make him off limits to everybody in the administration. I think once he's unplugged from power, he will look a lot less influential and a lot less, um, uh, attractive to people. Um, I don't know that, uh, I don't know that that will actually happen, but I can hope. I just had one thought there because I think that's it. Those are all really good points. I think it's important. I think the, um, I think the administration has been too muddled there. The other place you see this plainly is in Europe, right? You talked about the Europeans coming in their heads are spinning. I get why their head spin, right? When you talk about, we're going to invade Greenland and the 51st state in Canada, but I get it. I, having, having served with the guy, uh, I think I know what he's trying to get at in each of these, right? And, and, and I think Mike and I would both agree to know those, those objectives are good. We would, we would, we would each argue that the rhetoric is counterproductive and that is in part because you do have this noise out in the base that picks up, uh, certain pieces of this thread. Uh, that's true in the conflict in Ukraine. Like, I've been critical of President

40:34Trump's administration and, and President Biden's, like, we, we could do the same thing. We could do the same model in Ukraine without even having to fly. We could give the Ukrainians the tools they need to punish Vladimir Putin in ways that would be really important for American security and they, they've chosen to date not to do that. But if you look at the actions in what it went out 14 months into the second Trump administration, if you look at the actions and what's actually been delivered to them, it's actually pretty good. And Putin didn't invade, uh, Ukraine on President Trump's watch. First term or this one, right? These were both Democrat administrations, uh, that refused to provide defensive weapon systems into Ukraine. Uh, I wish that the messaging were better and more consistent, um, because I think that does matter. It has a strategic impact of its own, wholly apart from the actions. But if you look at the threads of activity they've taken, I think on, on the world stage and that, that goes for Europe and China and now certainly in the Middle East, I think you see a president that looks very different from, uh, the Quincy Institute or the restrainer model for, uh, how American security is best delivered. Let me just ask you one final

41:38question. Take full works with a lot of high school students, a lot of people who aspire to careers in public service like yours. And I want to just ask you, you know, what it's like to be in the room when a big decision like the decision to go to war is made. What are the factors that your a decision maker like is looking at? Obviously, it's the president, it's the commander in chief's decision. But you're there and you saw everything and, and we're able to help shape the decision making when you're in office. Just give us a sense of what, what that's like. You know, goodness, at three thoughts. One, first of all, fairly suspect for myself. I always felt inadequate. I always felt like, um, I, I am advising a person who's going to go out and make a decision, it's going to impact tens and hundreds of thousands of lives in American security. And so as a person of faith, I always, I always took a breath and reminded myself that I was praying that he was with me. Second, what it also constantly reminded me was, uh, if you're waiting for that moment to get

42:39ready for that moment, your way, your way past yourself by date. Um, so I would tell young people, study, work, learn, take on ideas, challenge yourself every day because you will walk into that room when you get those chances. And it won't just be the situation room. Uh, it could be a decision that you make at your synagogue. That's really important to the people. It's the decision that you make for your family and how they're going to live their lives, right? All of these things, um, work hard, prepare mentally. Be, be, be, be someone who studies history, be someone who tries to recognize, um, that they're, they're not the smartest person in the room, build a team around you that can help in the moment, prepare you to get in that vehicle, drive downtown and tell the president of the United States, here's what you think. And then last, I think it's important for all of us. And I think Mike, Mike Durin did this perfectly today. He's one of the most brilliant scholars on this set of issues that you will encounter. But man, he almost, he answered almost every question by saying, I don't know. Right. So he was incredibly humble. And so I always,

43:39when I was advising the president, said, Mr. President, here's my, here's my best judgment. And then always presented where I thought, here's what we really know. And here's the things we think. And here are the, here are the things I believe and why I believe them. So I tried to, tried to deliver my recommendations with candor about the absence of certainty surrounding each of those and the risks that were entailed in what it was I was recommending. And I think when, if you did that, if you, if you realize there was a higher, higher authority, if you did your homework and got ready for that moment, and then we're sufficiently clear about what was, what was known and what were the things that you just believed so that the decision maker, the person who in the end owned it. I didn't own it. President Trump owned it. We'd always know that he was getting Mike's best guidance, right? What Mike could possibly deliver best, then you will have done your job as, as best that the Lord permitted you. Those, those were the things I took into them. And then you'd walk out. And as the decision was made, you would, especially if he took your recommendation, you would hope, oh my goodness. I hope I gave him

44:45a really good set of options and that we got to the right place. And then lastly, once a decision gets made, you know this, Mike, you would know this too, execute the shit out of it. Now it's go time. And now you can see you've got to go deliver against the things you said could be done. And so I was always mindful that when I walked out, it was really now that real hard work began to actually deliver against the commitments that you'd asked the president to make. I just want to add, there's one thing I think really helps. And I think that students can study this and start thinking about it. When I went to work in the White House from academia, and I had never had an executive position anywhere. I had never had to think about, you know, making an executive decision more than, you know, what, which house to buy and how much to pay for it and things like that. I remember when I was sitting at my desk in the White House, you know what the president thinks about a lot of high level, about a number of, you know, really high level issues. But when you work in the White House, there are a lot of sort of second level issues that are not

45:49important enough to take to the president, but are actually very important. And you have people from all over the world in the American system who are asking you, what's our position on X? What's our position on Y? And you basically have to make it up. I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but you don't make it out of nothing because you're trying to serve the president and serve as agenda. And you're trying to make sense of it in terms of what you understand the president's inclinations to be. But in the end, you're the guy who decides. And the first time that I was asked these questions, I just froze. I don't know what our position, I don't know what it should be. And then as I got into the position and did it more and more, I got more and more comfortable with it. But what I realized happened over time is I developed a picture of America. And I had a strong sense of what the American interest is. And I got comfortable talking for

46:49the president, but also talking for America. And I think it's one of the most important things that you do in those jobs or that you acquire is this sense of the American interest. And you can confidently stand up. And I can confidently stand up and say Tucker Carlson is not in the American interest. It's not just that he's a bigot. He is taking us in the direction. This is cancerous. What he is what what what what he is saying. And that's because I have a vision of the country. And I think that's what I think Donald Trump. Donald Trump's flaws. Everyone is you know, everyone is aware of what what they are. But one of the things that I think he has that a lot of people respond to, especially people around my age and older is he has a vision of America. There's a he knows what he wants America to be. And if you listen to him, you can see you can understand what that is. He has a vision of renewal. He doesn't want to tear it down. He wants to

47:50he wants to he wants to renew it. And a lot of us can get behind that that project. Even if we don't necessarily love the way that he's expressing it. This conversation was recorded on March 4th, 2026. Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we'll adjourn.