The Great Lie of War

Over the weekend, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran.

With an hours, itola al-Hamadi was dead, along with much of a senior command.

As I record this on Monday, March 2nd, the Iranian Red Crescent, this is over 550 people

have been killed in the bombings.

We know of at least six American service members who have been killed.

There will likely be more as the war rages on.

There have been a girl school that was bombed the pictures from that.

The grief of the parents is almost unbearable to look at.

I just think it's so important to say it's not all geopolitics.

These are people, civilians, their lives, their homes, their children.

The attack on Iran came less than two months after the United States military captured

Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid on his compound in Caracas.

America has deposed two sitting heads of state eight weeks apart.

I have seen a lot of commentary using Donald Trump of hypocrisy.

After all, he ran against wars of regime change, and now he is changing regimes left and right.

We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change wars

around the globe, senseless war.

The job of the United States military is to defend America from attack and invasion here at home.

But I think this is not quite a policy of regime change.

There's not American baiting Iraq, Afghanistan, and restructuring the government ourselves.

Maduro's regime was left intact, aside from him.

In an interview with the Times, Trump said that, quote,

what we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.

He said, everybody's kept their job except for two people.

Trump has called for the Iranian people to rise up against the government.

But he's also said he intends to resume talks with the existing Iranian regime.

He said he had a few choices for who might lead Iran next,

but they appear to have been killed in the initial bombings.

The Iranian regime was monstrous, but Trump is not insisting that it be changed,

nor is he committing the ground forces necessary to change it.

I don't think what we're seeing here is a policy of regime change.

I would call this head on a pike foreign policy.

America is proving that we can easily reach into weaker countries and kill or capture their heads of state.

We will not be dissuaded from doing that by international law

or fear of unforeseen consequences or the difficulty of persuading the American people

or the United States Congress of the need for war.

On that, we won't even try.

We don't particularly care who replaces the people we killed.

We will not insist that they come from outside the regime

nor if they are elected democratically.

We care merely that whoever comes next

fears us enough to be compliant when we make a demand

that they know that they might be the next head on a pike.

Trump's belief appears to be that he can decapitate these regimes

and control their successors and do so without events spinning out of his control.

He appears to believe that it was idiocy or cowardice

or a morally respect for international rules

that prevented his predecessors from replacing foreign leaders

they loathed with more pliable subordinates.

Trump is a man who has not read much history

but who certainly intends to make it.

But what if Iran is not Venezuela?

What if the Iranian people rise up as Trump is awesome to do

and are slaughtered by the Iranian military?

What if it descends into civil war as happened in Iraq

or America had troops on the ground and yet hundreds of thousands

of Iraqis were killed?

What if it goes the way of Libya or Yemen or Syria?

Who will be the cost if he's wrong?

Ben Rhodes is a political analyst

on New York Times' opinion contributing writer

and the coast of the podcast Podsave the World.

He served as a senior advisor to President Barack Obama.

He joins me now as always my email as a client show at nytimes.com

Ben Rhodes, welcome to the show.

Good to see you, Ezra.

So you served in the Obama administration.

It was the policy of that administration

that Iran cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapon.

Maybe Netanyahu was the prime minister of Israel at that time

been around a long time.

He was pushing very hard for America to attack Iran,

destroy nuclear capabilities, maybe change its regime.

Why didn't you do that then?

Because we were worried about what the potential costs and consequences

of a military action could be.

What it could unleash across the region.

Kind of a version of what we're seeing,

just a lot of unpredictability.

And frankly, we thought that the principle US security interest in Iran

was the nuclear program.

That doesn't mean we didn't take seriously.

It's support for proxies and it's ballistic missile program.

But the existential issue test was the nuclear program.

So if you could resolve that diplomatically and avoid a war,

that was preferable to the alternative.

And a lot of people actually

complain that we made that argument.

You may remember Ezra that it's either a war or a diplomatic agreement.

And tragically, here we are.

What were you worried about what happened?

You said a version of what we're seeing play out now.

But you know, if you're in the US,

you're seeing reports of missiles being fired in all directions.

But it doesn't seem completely out of control at least at this moment.

So talk me through the scenarios you all considered then.

Well, it's interesting.

We did war games, essentially scenario planning,

where you anticipate what might happen in the event of a military conflict.

And you know, part of what I just say at a macro level

is having been through Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya

and the Obama administration,

we just seen the uncertainties that are unleashed

in any kind of military conflict in the region.

And even in the case where you bombed Iran's nuclear facilities,

first and foremost, what we determined is you couldn't destroy the Iranian nuclear program

from the air. They know how to do this.

They know the nuclear fuel cycle.

They could rebuild.

And so at best, if you're trying to deal with the nuclear program,

at best, you could set it back in a very successful strike maybe a year, right?

And what are the risks that you're taking?

You're taking the risk that Iran will strike as we are seeing now.

Try to strike out and lash out at US military facilities across the region.

Try to strike out at energy infrastructure,

which could be very difficult for the global economy.

Strike golf allies, strike civilian populations in Israel.

And so you could have a situation where you essentially have a regional war instead of just,

you know, you bombed the nuclear program and get out.

I think inside of Iran, there was just also the question of if the regime were to implode

in some fashion, what happens next?

That the likelihood was that you could have a protracted civil conflict.

And we've seen all of the unpredictability of that kind of unleashed in terms of refugee flows

or conflict migrating across borders.

And we didn't see some pathway to, you know, a quick transition to a democratic Iran

or a different kind of stable government there.

So when you weighed the risks of a military action against the benefits of, you know,

what, setting back the Iranian nuclear program a year, it just didn't seem worth it.

I think Donald Trump believes he has figured something out that has eluded his predecessors,

which is that you can change these regimes without changing the regime.

You can capture Maduro, you can use air power to kill him any.

And what you're going to do next is not insist on democracy,

is not insist on rebuilding something you like.

You are going to simply insist on somebody who is afraid enough of you

that they are more pliable when it matters, that way you've created is not exactly a puppet,

but someone who is inclined to follow your orders when you give them.

And that maintains a limit on how involved you need to be.

Is he right? Has he figured something out?

I don't think he's right. I think you're right that he believes that he's figured this out.

But I think there's a number of flaws with this thinking.

I mean, the first thing in the case of Iran is this, for all the focus on Hamine,

who was a reprehensible leader, and by the way,

I'm not sure how many years he had left, if we're just decapitating him.

I mean, time was about to do that.

But this is a deep, deep regime with ideological institutions that go far beyond even the Shavista regime

in Venezuela, because what you're talking about is he's sitting on top of this edifice

that has been built since the 1979 revolution that includes millions of people under arms,

right? The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the RGC, the Basis militias that are usually

responsible for the crackdowns that we see when they're peaceful protests, the Iranian military

and police. There's a lot of depth to this regime. So taking out even the supreme leader

doesn't in any way change the regime. And in fact, if you talk about people that might be afraid,

you know, the RGC is sometimes been kind of more hard line, even certainly than the political

leadership that Americans usually see in things like negotiations. And then it's also the case,

you know, Trump thinks I truly believe, you know, he kind of thinks in news cycle increments.

So, you know, I'll kill someone to look like we changed the regime, we got rid of the bad guy,

we kind of slayed the dragon here. And there's no, you know, what happens in one year and three

years and five years? I mean, I was, I'll be self-critical here, Ezra, like you remember the

Libya intervention. We did the same thing, essentially, Qaddafi was killed through mixed, well,

there was an airstrike and then he was killed by people on the ground. Terrible guy,

reprensible leader, when that regime was removed, nothing was able to fill the vacuum except for

the most heavily armed people in Libya, which were a series of different militias. And that civil

war, you know, spread across borders and, you know, suddenly that part of North Africa becomes

an arms bizarre, you know, conflict of spreading to neighboring states. So, if the regime itself

stays in Iran, I don't think it's fundamentally different just because Hamina is not there.

And if the regime implodes completely, I worry about Libya type situation at scale, because

this is a much bigger country, right, with over 90 million people. So, you know, Trump,

the Venezuelan operation, I think, I saw that and it made me worried about this.

One of the things you have heard repeatedly from Donald Trump is an exhortation to the Iranian people

that now is your chance. We have degraded this regime. You're being supported by air power,

rise up and take back your country. I think Trump said this will be your only chance for generations.

What do you hear when you hear that? I hear something that is incredibly reckless and

you know, we already saw when he was truth-posting help is on the way a few weeks ago.

And Reza Palavi, the son of the depot Shah, was similarly saying go to the streets.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Iranians were killed when they did go to the streets.

By the regime. By the regime. And you cannot protect those people from the air, right? I mean,

let's say there's an uprising and let's say all the remaining instruments of the Iranian

regime start to massacre those people, we can bomb more regime targets. But at a certain point,

you kind of run out of that and you're just talking about people on the ground with small arms,

right? And it just, I'm tremendously sympathetic to the Iranian people and what they've been through.

I would love for them to have a different government. But, you know, I'll say this is the Obama

guy. Like, hope is not a strategy. Just going out there and saying, I'm bombing your country.

I mean, this is part of what's so disturbing to me about this, Ezra, is that they don't have any

capacity to articulate an endgame. And so I think people have to recognize, and I had to learn this,

you know, the hard way through the Arab Spring. Just because we want a different government doesn't

mean that that's easy to execute. And frankly, I think Iran was changing. I'll be at

not at the pace that we want. The women life freedom movement succeeded in some ways. It didn't

change the regime, but you talked to people in that region and the society was changing. Women

were starting to go around and covered some of the veneer of the regime had been punctured.

Hamine was old. He was going to die. Like the capacity for the Iranian people themselves

to change that regime over time. Even though that's not on the timeline that people want,

I think would have been a better bet than just saying, we're going to drop a bunch of bombs and

rise up. Because there's just not a formula. I mean, Ezra is thinking about this. Everybody's

focused on the American regime change led operations as they should. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya,

and that part of the world. It's not just those regimes that have had trouble. Sudan had a popular

uprising. Look at Sudan today, or Egypt had a popular uprising in the Obama years and

Mubarak ended up getting replaced by a more repressive leader. So we keep seeing in these scenarios

that the toppling of an authoritarian government can lead either to chaos or to further repression.

And that's my concern. There's a profound, I think, confusion in what Trump has been saying,

because at the same time that he is saying, rise up Iranian people. This is your moment. He's

also saying that he had three people in mind to lead the regime after this. But now they're all

dead. It turns out, so maybe it's not going to be them. He's also said that he is willing to be

in talks with the existing regime. They're playing it too cute before, but he's happy to talk now.

And so there is this way in which he is simultaneously signaling an openness and eagerness to see

a bottom-up revolt and also a willingness to cut a deal with what remains so long as they get the

deal. They wanted, which is no nuclear program, no enrichment, probably no more ballistic missiles

program, a couple of other things. But those two signals going out at the same time

seems worrisome to me. It seems very worrisome because it projects an

incoherence to your policy. And to your head on the pike strategy, when I hear Trump say that,

I hear someone who would like this to be over as soon as possible. But the reality is the

Iranians get a vote on whether it's over and what they know, for instance, is US munitions,

particularly our air defense systems are going to run lower and lower and lower. And in a way,

they may be able to hit more targets the longer this goes. I mean, the best case scenarios,

because I was trying to, as someone who's been critical, I want to inhabit the best case scenarios,

right? It feels like the best case scenario may be a chasing regime that just wants to

hunker down and will agree, at least for the time being, to not have any nuclear program

that is active and look at its wounds. And maybe that provides some opportunity for that regime

to be less repressive. I mean, I guess that's the landing zone here that Trump is trying to meet.

But at the same time, like, we've bombed them twice now in the middle of nuclear negotiations.

And so if you have hardliners in the RDC or in Iranian circles and they're being told,

well, let's stop and negotiate with the Americans. Like they're not going to believe

that they can negotiate in any kind of good faith with Donald Trump. And so I think that there's

just kind of strategic and coherence about what the objective of this whole thing is. And that's

seen not just by the Iranians, it's seen by the Gulf Arabs who are now, you know, they're furious

at everybody. I think they're furious at the United States and Israel for launching this war.

And we can talk about that. And I think they're obviously furious at Iran for targeting them

indiscriminately. They don't know what's going on here. What's the goal here? We try to remove

this regime. They're wary of removing the regime because they don't want refugees and chaos,

you know, in their region. You know, what you'd want, I guess, is everybody in the world,

this, you know, the relevant countries and the Gulf and the region and Europe being able to put

some diplomatic framework around this. So it's not just this kind of Steve Warkoff and Jared

Kushner trying to talk to some Iranian in a room, Vee of the Omanis. But Trump's shifting

goalposts of what he's for make it much harder to put the kind of framework around this.

This cuts to something I think pretty deep in the Trump administration's thinking or lack of

thinking, which is it is often seem to me if there's any global problem they're worried about.

It is refugee flows and migration. And they go to Europe and talk about how Europe is

ceasing to exist as a civilization in part because of Muslim integration and immigration.

There have been huge refugee flows to Europe from Syria as part of the Syrian Civil War.

If you imagine a scenario here where you end up a little bit between Trump's imagined options,

which is simultaneously you do have opposition to the existing regime and you also have a regime

that has become more compliant to Trump himself on things like the nuclear issue but is trying to

hold power and repressing those who are trying to attack it. You could very quickly end up in a

significant refugee flow. It runs a very, very, very big country. You're talking about 90 million

people. And how do the states around Iran handle that? What does the Trump administration think about

huge outflows of Iranians coming after the US and Israel destabilize the country? Have they

planned for that? Will they should Europe and America take these people?

Yeah. Honestly, I it doesn't seem that they plan for it. I will tell you that in the run-up

to this, I did talk to some people I know in the region, right, in the Middle East, in the Gulf,

who were discussing what they were warning the Trump administration about and one of the scenarios,

the kind of worst case scenario. So I'm not suggesting this is definitely going to happen,

but I think we have to inhabit this precisely because there is no discussion of the potential

consequences. If you have a civil conflict in South Iran, the economy is already and really

deep trouble because of, you know, US sanctions, the claps in currency. So there's extreme poverty there.

There are ethnic separatist movements inside of Iran and the Kurdish regions and the blue

regions. And so what you could have is an implosion. You know, if there's some kind of uprising and

then there's a kind of chaotic civil war, which is not hard to imagine because we've seen that

in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, the other places where the US has been involved in the literally.

And millions, I mean, somebody said to me, this is a country that is four times bigger

than Syria. And remember that refugee crisis. And essentially, the only places to go or in one

direction, it's Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's not particularly stabilizing thing to imagine,

you know, huge refugees and Afghanistan, Pakistan. We already have a war, by the way. Pakistan,

bombed Afghanistan, the day before this started, Pakistan could get drawn in to this conflict.

They do, you're in part to get refugees away and in part to prevent the emergence of a separatist

boogastan on their borders, across as their borders. And then the other direction is Turkey into

Europe. And you saw Turkey very aggressively being a part of the mediation efforts. This is one

of the reasons why they have a lot of fatigue with hosting millions of Syrian refugees in Europe,

trying to keep those refugees in Turkey instead of getting in Europe. They will find their way to

Europe through Turkey. And so I don't think there's been any real planning for this. And that is,

to me, like the worst case scenario of a civil war and even fracturing of the Iranian sovereign

territory, you'd have huge refugee afloos.

We have not been planning for this. Israel has been planning for some version of this for a very

long time. There are full partner in this operation, which is distinctive about it. What do they want?

I think, first and foremost, they want to smash anybody who poses a perceived threat to them,

and they're obviously been principally focused on this access of resistance. So Hamas,

hisbola, other Iranian proxy groups, and then ultimately the Iranian regime itself.

Weakening that regime is, in their view, kind of obviously good for their security posture.

They're worried about blister missiles, worried about the nuclear program.

If I was going to be cynical, and I know this is a view of some increasingly in the region,

it's that Israel's okay with chaos, that if there's an implosion in Iran and he may turn

disaster there and chaos, that actually advantages their security situation in a way,

because that kind of Iran can't pose a threat to them. And that if you look at Lebanon and Syria,

where Israel's also been very active militarily, they're just kind of pushing out not just kind of

the perimeter. They're literally occupying parts of southern Syria now. They want this kind

of buffer zone in southern Lebanon. And I think that the fears in the regions that they are just

kind of methodically, yes, eliminating threats, but also creating a lot of chaos and instability,

as almost a strategy of giving themselves freedom of action, whether that involves

taking the West Bank, whether that involves extending out kind of buffer zones into Syria and

Lebanon. And that seems more plausible to me than they have some plan to support the installation

of Reza Pahlavi as the transitional leader of Iran. I mean, what they seem to me to have had a plan

for, and I think you have to give some credit to Netanyahu for one of the most remarkable

coups of his career was involving Donald Trump in this. Yeah, yeah. And Netanyahu is very,

very effectively pulled Trump in by degrees, such that we were supposed to have a very limited

bombing campaign on Iran. We were told after that that the nuclear program was obliterated in Trump's

video announcing this operation. He both said Iran was posing an imminent threat and that

the nuclear program had been obliterated, which I found a little bit strange. But Netanyahu's

ability to get Trump to do what no other US president has been willing to do is striking. And

I think that was on some level, like the real plan here. Israel had weakened Iran. It had

shown Iran to be weaker than people thought it was. And I think the push was made to Trump that

you have this narrow window of opportunity to do what no other president has done. And at least in

the way it was presented to him, permanently solve the problem and permanently avenge

previous injuries and insults to America. I think you are exactly right. I think it's worth

pointing out. I mean, we were both watching the time. I mean, this started coming up at the

end of the Bush administration in 2007-2008 when there was a push for Bush to bomb the Iranian

nuclear facilities. Netanyahu has wanted to do this since I have been in politics very clearly.

Wanted the US, not Israel alone, the US to take out the Iranian regime. And every president

has resisted this except Trump. We should say, obviously there's people in the United States,

the Lindsey Graham's of the world who want to do this as well. So it's not just Israel.

But it's a pretty small set of constituencies. The public has brought the against this.

And you're right, they brought him in by degrees. And we can even go back to the first Trump term,

right, where he left the Iranian nuclear deal. That was not something that his advisors were

telling him to do. Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, was against it at the time. You know,

not even a huge fan of the Iran nuclear deal, but because he saw, if you remove yourself from that

deal, you're kind of on a slow-motion movement towards this. In a way, it's funny. We, you know,

Trump likes to say, 12-day war and it's been one war, you know, since he pulled out of that

nuclear agreement, it's been like a slow-motion series of events that led in this direction.

And against what the economic war begins with sanctions.

Maximum, yeah, exactly. So you pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, you go to maximum pressure

sanctions, you assassinate the Qasim Soleimani. Those are all things that happened in Trump's first

term. Couldn't get them all the way to bombing around itself. Biden clearly, and I've been very

critical, as you know, of Biden's Middle East policy on Gaza. He was clearly not keen to go all

in with Iran on a regional war. You know, he was supportive of going after the Iranian proxy

groups, not this. Then Trump comes back and they do the nuclear strike. But I think you're right.

I think that the Israelis saw the Venezuelan operation. He's getting more comfortable with this,

and he's getting comfortable taking into regime change. And they see, and this is where the,

continued use of military force without any congressional authorization is connected to this.

Because it's like, okay, there's a president in Donald Trump who is willing to just bomb countries

and take huge risks, absent any congressional debate or discussion. I mean, we dealt with this in

bomb years. You must inhabit the scenario of war. If Donald Trump had tried to prepare the American

people for this, they would have said no. If he had gone out and given a series of speeches,

now's the time we must remove the Iranian regime, it wouldn't have worked. And so I think

you're right. This kind of vein, glorious, I'm Donald Trump. I will slay all the dragons. We've

had these grievances with Maduro, with Hamane, with the Cuban regime. I'm going to remove all of them.

You know, I think that there's a vanity to that that Israel and some of the hawks in this country saw.

And they went to him knowing that he was reticent to kind of break from his base this much and

do this. But they appealed to something bigger than his short-term political instincts, which is

this will make you an historic figure. And I think BB Netanyahu has wanted to get an American

president to do this since, you know, at least when I was in government and he has.

So one thing that I think is important in that story to slide out is also there's been a learning

about Iran that has been successive. So America pulled out of the nuclear deal,

added the maximum pressure sanctions. Iran wasn't able to do very much about that.

There was the assassination of Soleimani. There was no significant reprisal for that.

You saw Israel decapitate Hezbollah. You saw the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites.

And I do think something that has been significant here is a growing sense that Iran was not

as fearsome as was believed and did not have the capacity to strike back as had been believed.

But that you could do this at low cost, which was not what people thought before.

This drives me a little crazy because I think it's true. But let's just take Netanyahu.

The argument was always that they're 10 feet tall. That, you know, they're absolute maniacs who

are on the precipice of a nuclear weapon and they've built this massive axis that is coming for us

and I never believed that. I never believed that Iran was as all powerful.

I certainly never believed that they had offensive, that they were going to launch some

preemptive war against Israel. They are interested in regime survival. That was always my assessment.

And that even some of the proxy groups were meant, the Iranian doctrine was keep this out of Iran,

keep the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon. So part of what used to drive me crazy about the hawkish

prescriptions on Iran from in South Washington and Israel is that either argument led to war.

If Iran is really powerful, we must take them out because they must be stopped because they're

on the precipice of doing something or they're weak so we can take them out. And look, I do think

with bear saying, first of all, that we should have a mindset that war is bad and should be avoided.

That should be a legal and values proposition that they're preferable outcomes towards self.

The other problem I have with this, Ezra, is there's an incredible short term thinking about this

because you're also sending the message that, okay, Iran was in a nuclear deal with the United

States. They were complying with that nuclear deal and they then got bombed.

Whatever Iranian regime emerges from this, I think, is very likely to want nuclear weapons.

So this doesn't happen. If you're sitting in Riyadh or even Dubai and Abu Dhabi right now,

you're thinking, well, the Americans are my security guarantor and look at what we just got

out of that security guarantee. Like, we got a war that they launched pretty much, I don't buy

that the Saudis were pushing for this, by the way. I saw them deny that report and I think they

were very reticent about this. Why wouldn't they get nuclear weapons now? It's like, well, we can't,

you know, at the end of the day, the Americans are kind of willing to play with our security,

you know, or deprioritize it as against Israel's security. Other would be proliferators are going

to think, you know, look at North Korea versus Iran. And so there's these second order effects,

right? And one of them is nuclear proliferation, where the consequences might not be manifest

next year. But I don't know, five years from now, I don't think that this kind of action

will have made us safer. I'd much rather, you know, if you actually believe in nuclear

non-properation, it's much better to have that be something you fortified diplomatically than

you just remove a regime because it's weak. I want to pick up on what you just said about the

Saudis. So there was a Washington Post report that cited at least four sources that had knowledge

of the conversations and negotiations. What it basically said was that in public Saudi Arabia has

been against us, has denied a cease-of-the-basis in private Mohammed bin Salman and top people in the

Saudi government have been privately pushing Trump to act. This is something that, you know,

if you've been around these issues for a while, you've heard a lot about the Israelis talk all the

time about how nobody wants the Iranian government gone like Saudi Arabia. So you don't buy that

is what was happening. I'm skeptical of it because I was hearing different things. You know, I

certainly, you saw Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt, along with Aman, obviously, trying to avert this outcome.

The Egypt thing was interesting to me because the idea that Egypt would take that position without

Saudi Arabia, you know, as a chief sponsor, supporting them and that makes me question it. You also

see in Saudi foreign policy, you saw a rapprochement with Iran in the last few years. I think

Mohammed bin Salman, who I've been hugely critical of, so this is anybody who's listened to me over

the years, I have no, you know, love for that government. But I think, you know, he's principally

interested in stability. Now, what I think is quite possible is they were reticent of this. They

don't like instability at this scale in their region. They don't like the potential disruptions,

obviously, to energy infrastructure. But when they see an inevitability to it, they may have kind

of come around and be like, okay, we'll talk to you guys about this. You know, they're, I think

they're the most likely scenarios that they're a bit ambivalent because again, like their security

paradigm is stability, stability, stability. And this doesn't feel a lot like stability.

I'm not saying this is the biggest issue in this moment, but the centrality of Israel in the

operation has raised some concerns about what this is going to mean for at the summitism.

You see the amount of talk on the mega right, but I'll swear as well that, you know,

Israel's leverage over Donald Trump or that, you know, this is all just some kind of

Israeli plot. I wonder a bit about the, there are many ways which Netanyahu looks to me to be

gambling for short term positions over the long term sustainability of both Israel's political

position in America, but also just the generalized view of the world at a time of very, very sharply

rising anti-Semitism about what is going on here. I don't know how it nets out or what it ends up

meaning, but it certainly has me nervous. It has me nervous too. And there's two aspects to that.

One is in the region and one is here. I'd just say briefly in the region, like I was critical

of the Abraham Accords at the time, and I was a bit outlier to say the least about that,

because Donald Trump framed this as a big peace deal when in fact it didn't resolve any of the

conflicts in the region. And look at what's happened since. It's been much more violent. And if you

talk to people in the region, they see that a way to say this has all been about Israeli hegemony

in this region. And that is making the Arab states who are prepared certainly to live with Israel.

I don't think Saudi Arabia, like me, on any threat to post Israel, but they're increasingly

concerned about a dynamic where there's this degree of freedom of action for Israel. So

what does that look like? How does that evolve in the long term in the region? I think here,

you're right. I really worry about this because, look, this is not me saying Israel pushed Donald

Trump to do this. Beeping in, yeah, when I think yesterday and said, I've wanted this to happen

40 years. And finally, Trump did it, you know, and he's doing it with us too. But the US used to be

very careful not to do joint military operations at the Israel and part for this reason.

That's a very big break. This is a huge, I mean, people need to think about this. Like it was,

you know, just to do joint exercises, you know, was something people calibrated carefully,

because we didn't want to make it look like that Israel and the United States are one in the same

for reasons they go in both directions. But here's the thing is Americans are looking at this. And

they're seeing that we are in a war that seems like it's something Israel wanted us to do.

Seems like the benefits accrue mostly to Israel. You know, the the both-signal program does not

pose a threat to the United States. There is no ICBM from around the Commission of the United States.

So, so a lot of what we're doing is removing threats to Israel. If it goes poorly,

who is going to get blamed? You know, I think that some of that anger will go in the direction

of Israel. And I think it's important for us to talk about this because when there's not

debate and discussion about about it, it migrates to the darker corners, right? And you're seeing

that certainly in mega. Well, I think one reason this is fed conspiracies is it has felt to many people

like such a almost inexplicable break from how Trump sold himself. So, I mean, you have, you know,

back in 2023, Trump saying these globalists want to squander all of America's strength,

blood, and treasure, chasing monsters and fandoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the

havoc they're creating here at home. Very on point. Uh, JD Vance writes a Wall Street journal

update that you're titled Trump's best foreign policy not starting any wars. Tulsi Gabbard, of course,

sells no war with Iran t-shirts. Now you have Trump kind of start more as certainly conflicts,

engagements, left and right. Akron Axios Trump has no authorized more military strikes in 2025

alone than Biden did in all four years. So I think for a lot of people, there has been this,

how do you reconcile both Trump and the movement that was around him, right? All the people advising him

with what we're seeing now. I got sort of the weekend by somebody, you know, what, what was a

faction inside the White House that wanted this? Yeah. And I found it actually hard to answer that

question. We have not seen a lot of reporting saying Marco Rubio wanted this to happen. You know,

JD Vance appears to have not, you know, instead we're talking about Israel and Lindsey Graham,

who's not that influential anymore. Mohammed bin Salman maybe. I think a lot of people have been very

confused with how to, like, how to explain Trump himself taking this risk. I had the same mental

exercise as well. And let's just go through it. If you look at all these polls, this is wildly

politically impopular. And by the way, that continues to hold even though the Supreme Leader got killed,

and the Supreme Leader being killed will be the high watermark of this operation. You know,

there's not another person that you can kill that Trump can say is a head on a pike, right?

Then if you look at the people that want to inherit MAGA, right, who are looking ahead at the

Republican Party, JD Vance seems to want to have very little to do with this. Tucker Carlson

is railing against this. You know, the sea vans of the world, they're not enthusiastic about this.

The Republican Party is not going in this direction. So this is not something that Trump is doing

because it's going to be wildly popular. They'll start in a wanted joint chief staff.

Joint chiefs of staff was clearly putting out leaking out, you know, that they didn't want to do

this. Marco Rubio is much more focused on this hemisphere, you know, Venezuela and Cuba, which they're

trying to, you know, strangle through the maximum pressure. The Democratic Party is not for this,

and particularly the people anticipating the future of the Democratic Party. Who is for this?

And it's a very small set of constituents. It is basically Israel. And then it is kind of hardline

longstanding hawks and Congress and kind of the national security establishment. By the way,

the people that Trump said he didn't like for this. John Bolton, so he's, you know,

trying to persecute is out there defending it. So it is hard to look at this and not,

it wasn't part of the reason he talked about getting rid of John Bolton, that he's like, John

Bolton always wanted me to attack Iran. Iran, right? And so it is hard to not conclude that

bibine now and Israel's kind of push for this was determinative in some way. Because again,

like the the only appeal to Trump that made any sense is kind of the one you made earlier where

you become a historic figure. You know, you finally, I mean, I do think there's a part of him that's

just like these governments have been a pain in the ass for decades, right? Cuba since the 59

revolution in Iran since the 79 revolution, you know, Venezuela since the Shavista revolution.

I'm going to be the one to finally sell all these scores. Like there's some of that that is

separate from Israel. But it is hard to not conclude that if Israel wasn't, put it this way,

Israel, take the counterfactual, the Israeli government was not pushing for this. What did it have

happened? I want to talk about the ways in which this might not remain limited in the way Donald

Trump has other promise of country or I think promised himself. So I see this as

following from the 12-day bombing some months ago, it turned out that didn't do enough.

And when it was clear that Iran was racing forward with ballistic missiles reconstituting

nuclear program that probably was not obliterated in the way Donald Trump had initially said it was.

And so we were now involved and Iran was defying him. It wasn't just that it was obliterated.

That obliteration was a kind of command from him to them that it was gone. They weren't giving up

enough at the negotiating table. And also I think this was meaningful to Trump on some level

was now soldering its own people, you know, you don't like that either. I want to give him credit for

some humanitarian impulse potentially here. So now we're involved even more so. Now we have

kinetically destroyed much of the regime and its power. But a lot could spin out of control here.

Yeah. So I am very skeptical that the limit Trump seems to think he has put on this is stable.

And I'm curious, as somebody with more experience here, then I have what you think of it.

I think you're right. And the Israelis have this, it's not a doctrine, but essentially this terminology.

It's called mowing the lawn. Have you heard this? Which is, and again, I hate even using phrases like

this when it comes to war and human beings. But essentially, the mowing the lawn strategy is that

if there's a place that poses a threat, you occasionally just kind of go in and cut the grass. You bomb

the threat periodically. And obviously, like Lebanon would be a perfect case of where these

Israelis proceed. Well, they always said this about Hamas. Yeah. How did that ultimately work out?

Exactly. And there's a risk. Like, this is why I say we have been at war with the like the idea that

there was something called the 12-day war. And now there's a different war. No, no. Like, that's

not how these things work. Like, once you bomb a country, you know, you're bringing this forever war

paradigm to it. And so I think it is quite possible that in the same way that the 12-day war wasn't in

the story, if Trump stops bombing Iran in a week, two weeks, three weeks, they were back doing that

in a few months because something happened that we don't like. And then you start to get

massacres in the streets of Iran, or you start to get refugee outflows, or you start to continue to

see kind of ways of random attacks at the Gulf. We're really going to do nothing. But then if we're

getting back and back in, you know, then we're, you know, getting pulled into quicksand, we are

implicated. You know, we are involved. I mean, the come thread to this conversation as well as like,

we need to just get this short-term thinking that they're such a thing as 12-day wars, or that you

solve a problem when you kill the leader. Like, that's not how any of this goes.

I think it is genuinely striking and a break with some of the recent past. How

little public deliberation there is over quite major American foreign policy actions. And,

you know, the Bush administration did lie its way into war with Iraq, but it did also spend a

long time trying to persuade the country that war with Iraq was worth doing, and we debated

how much of the American military it would take. What does it mean to be entering into these kinds

of commitments, these kinds of projects, these kinds of risks? Without really any public debate,

any significant public or commercial deliberation of what might happen, you don't have a bunch of

members of the military repeatedly going to Congress and going through scenarios. I don't want to

place everything here on process being poor, but there's a reason that the public and Congress

are consulted, because if it ends up requiring more engagement, then you actually need that support.

No, I think process is related outcome. And if you can't make a case to the American people to

sway public opinion in the direction of a war, or make a case to Congress, I mean, the single most

important thing you could do to keep America out of more wars is actually require Congress to take

a vote, because they're not going to vote for it, given where public opinion is on this. And so,

I think it's incredibly corrosive to democracy, to have this kind of loop of conflict that is

increasingly sideline in Congress and public opinion entirely. I also think there's something even

more dangerous, Ezra, which is we keep, you know, I know a lot of people are thinking,

when are we going to know how bad it's going to get with Trump? Like, what if the things that you fear

are already happening? Like, we already have a president who clearly came back into office,

wanting the military to be more directly responsive to him than it was in the first term,

when the military leadership and even some of the Pentagon leadership stood up to him more and more.

We have seen him, you know, purge the top of the military general officers. We have seen him

address the general officers and say, hey, the American cities might be military training grounds.

Now we've seen him within a matter of weeks, undertake multiple military. I'll just give you a few.

We bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. We were blowing up boats in the Caribbean on totally false

pretenses that it had something to do with drug trafficking in the United States and potentially

committed war crimes. We abducted the leader of Venezuela. We now just killed the Supreme Leader

of Iran and are trying to topple that regime or maybe we're not. These are all things that have

happened within three months, right? And at the same time, we see the Department of War telling

anthropic and AI company that you will be banned from any business of the government if the

Pentagon can ignore your terms of service against mass surveillance of Americans. And more I'm

going with this is the ultimate guardrail and democracy is supposed to be the separation between

the president and kind of the military as an institution. And if the military of an institution

can directly serve the interests of Donald Trump with no public debate about what it's doing,

no congressional votes on what it's doing. How many more countries are going to bomb,

and what is that military going to end up doing in the United States if he invokes the

Insurrection Act? And that's not to impune the military. That's to impune where Trump is taking this.

So I think the darker scenarios, it's not just process nerds like we need to have

authorization to use military force and we need briefings to Congress. It's no like is the

military an institution that just completely serves the whims of the president or is it an institution

that is apolitical, that is equally responsive to Congress and the president? Because those

questions are going to matter a lot. How the next two and three quarters years of the Trump

administration. Although I think it's important to say it's not that Congress is being defied.

Congress has abdicated. Yes, that's yes. Mike Johnson is not out there complaining. He is supporting

this. I mean, there are many ways in which Trump is a disruptive break with the past. But the

escalation of not going to Congress for quite dangerous operations. I mean, that was president

in the Obama era. I mean, this has been growing for a very long time. Well, the thing that the

Obama probably gets the most grief for in his foreign policy was the Syria Red Line incident.

But what was interesting about that as well is you have this chemical weapon. Yes. So we have this

Obama has said it'd be a red line if the sovereignty uses chemical weapons. Then there's a massive

chemical weapons use. And we were preparing to bomb Syria. We were. I mean, I was in meetings.

I thought we're going to bomb Syria and going through strike packages, that kind of stuff.

And then Obama makes his decision essentially to say, I'm going to put this to vote in Congress.

I'm not going to go to war with Syria unless Congress votes authorize it. And almost immediately,

the support for that begins to evaporate in Congress. Even people like Marco Rubio who were Hawks

would not vote to authorize you, the military force in Syria. And Obama's point was,

if Congress, the representatives of the people as envisioned under our constitutional system,

don't want to get us into another war of Syria and be responsible for the consequences of

whatever happens, then we shouldn't do it. That's how our systems design. Now, a lot of people

pointed out that we should have done more to stop Assad. And that's, you know, I agree. I'm

sympathetic to all those arguments. But I'm also sympathetic to Obama's argument, which is

if people don't want the war, we don't have to fight it. And part of what Trump was tapping

into in his campaigns was the gap between elites and particularly national security elites

and public opinion. And it is a crazy gap, Ezra. I've lived at the precipice of it,

like the conversations and the strategies in both parties of national security elites versus what

the American people want their government to be focused on is a deeply unhealthy gap.

And all Trump has done is, okay, that establishment is no longer there. It's just him.

It's like all of American exceptionalism, all of the apparatus of American power,

this, you know, I call it the blob, whatever you want to call it, this edifice is now just

in one man's head and one man's hands. And that's, instead of solving the problem he said he was

running to fix, he's made it worse because it's just up to Donald Trump now. This gets to the question

of whether international law still exists in any meaningful way. It does not. What does that mean?

It means it implies a no way to the United States of America, at least. We are completely ignoring

it. There was no, like, I mean, here's how it doesn't exist. In the past, when the United States

would do things, let's just say stretch the boundaries for national law, you would still show up

and make a case, you know, here's why this was an imminent threat or here, you know, they don't

even bother. And if you look at even because the act of going to war violates international law,

if you cannot demonstrate that there was imminent threat that you're acting in some form of self-defense

or that you have to get UN sanctioned, you know, UN Security Council approval, absent those things,

you're violating your national law. But even in the conduct of war, you know, the United States is

currently sanctioning the International Criminal Court, which is the kind of preeminent body that

is enforcing the laws of war. What messages does that send, you know, about the conduct of war?

Because we're doing that because they tried to indict bibi nanyahu for war crimes. But if you're

basically saying that none of the laws applied us, at a certain point, Russia and China say, well,

then they don't apply us either. And if international law on the most important matters,

war and peace in the conduct of war, whether to go to war and how you fight a war,

if those laws don't apply to any of the big powers, how do they apply to anybody?

I wondered how much the reaction from some of our allies who you might have thought of as more

committed international law has actually reflected a collective recognition that it has gone.

So, Markarni in Canada was very, very supportive of Trump strikes. You know, we all support from

Australia. Germany was pretty four square behind us, you know, I think it reflects some of their

feelings about the Iranian regime, but I have been struck by the complete absence of outcry

from countries that I think, you know, part of their power has to become from commitment to these

institutions that maintain a kind of collective or multilateral approach to these questions. What have

you made of that? I've been struck by it too. I think part of what Trump counts on is if the people

I'm taking out don't have a lot of friends. I have more room, right? If it's Maduro, if it's

Iranian regime, I'd say I'm very disappointed in it though. Markarni, I was one of many people

that thought his speech at Davos was important and interesting and kind of reflective of what's

happening and also kind of pointing a path to some emergence of something on the other end of

this that essentially if the middle powers, the kind of more responsible countries in the world that

still follows at least some international laws and want some norms around conflict and other things,

if they began to kind of stitch together, maybe that could be a place that the United States could

kind of rejoin on the back end of Trump. If Markarni is going to carve this out though, if he's

essentially going to say we need rules on trade, but if you bomb Iran, go for it. I think it hugely

undermines Markarni's own argument. It just makes it seem cynical. It makes it seem like

all he's really concerned about is trade or all I'm concerned about is Greenland because it's

European territory, right? You can attest that I've taken a lot of grief for this over the years,

but I just believe that if we think that international law and norms are important,

they really have to apply universally. We can't just say that like, well, they don't apply to

Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela because we don't like them. The United States built a system after

World War II because we recognize that if you don't constrain everybody, you are going to have

a repeat of what happened in World War I and World War II. You start to create carve-outs,

people start to move into those carve-outs and there's cycles of conflict that lead

ultimately to a World War. I think people need to inhabit the reality that we're moving into

more than they are. There are no constraints from international law anymore. There is a rampant

trend of nationalism in the world. There are leaders like Donald Trump in the United States,

Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Bebe Nanyan in Israel, Dorendra Modi in India,

Taip Erdogan in Turkey. These are nationalists. Nationalism, absent international law always leads

to more war and those wars begin more wars. Let me strongman the other side of the case here,

which is international law, the international law that allowed Iran to slaughter its own people to

repress them to fund terrorist proxies all throughout the region. You're saying that international

law should have restrained Israel and America against a country that had four decades now made

one of its rallying slogans, death to Israel and death to America and in fact was funding

players who wanted to do just that. One of the critiques you'll hear from the critics here

of international law is that international law has been used as a shield by rogue regimes,

regimes that do not follow its dictates in all manner of ways but then hide behind it

when they face the consequences that they are bringing down upon themselves.

I guess that's a first and foremost, Iran has paid consequences. We worked on the Iran nuclear

deal for seven years and the reason I say seven years is that for several years of the beginning

of the administration, we built a multilateral sanctions framework around Iran based on the fact

that they're violating the nuclear non-pliferation treaty, international law. So we didn't say,

oh, it's fine, you can violate the international law. We said, no, we got UN Security Council

resolutions that became the basis of a maximum pressure campaign in the Obama administration

but it was meant to leverage a change of behavior from the Iranians. You have to kind of come

into compliance with international law via nuclear deal in which you are committing to never

build a nuclear weapon. You are submitting to intense monitoring and verification of a nuclear

program. By the way, like we still have other sanctions on them over their support for proxies.

I don't like what goes on inside a lot of countries in the world. There's something peculiar

that we are normalizing the idea that that is sufficient basis to go to war in those countries.

We don't like it when Vladimir Putin does it. When Vladimir Putin says,

hey, the elected president of Ukraine was ousted in a protest movement in 2014,

in part by people that were funded by the national government for democracy. I don't agree

with that narrative. But how can we say that Vladimir Putin does not have the right to invade that

country? But if we see things that we don't like inside of other countries, we have the right

to do that. And I think what people see is that if you truly believe in human rights,

then you have to apply that normative framework across the board. And a lot of the very same people

that are suddenly human rights advocates, when it comes to what's happening inside of Iran,

have nothing to say about what's happening in the West Bank right now.

Had nothing to say when Jamal Khashoggi was chopped up in the Saudi consulate inside of Turkey.

Had nothing to say about the fact that LCC, the president of Egypt, has 60,000 people

who are political prisoners suffering horrific treatment. So you either have to be universal

and consistent, or I have a really hard time listening to your arguments.

I've seen a lot of Democrats, and to some degree, I think the international response too, then

somewhat paralyzed between their legitimate loathing of the Iranian government.

And they're disliked this taste for the process of violation of international, the absence of public

deliberation or congressional approval. But I think it is created a kind of muddle in their response,

right? Are they saying this should have been done? It's a good thing that it happened,

but they don't like that it happened. Are they saying that the only problem with it was poor

process if Trump had gone to Congress, maybe they would have given him the authority to do it?

How do you think Democrats should respond to this? Because right now I've seen many of the leadership

really focusing not on, was this a right or wrong thing to do, but was the process that led to it,

the right or wrong process? Yeah, they're saying all the things that you said, and I have a huge

problem with this, because ultimately people are not that interested in the process. If someone

who doesn't follow this super closely, here's a Democratic leader like Chuck Schumer saying,

coming out of a briefing about the potential war in Iran that feels imminent, and he says they

have to make their case more or something. What does it sound like? It sounds like a dodge.

What do you actually believe as a political party? I was talking to a friend of mine,

we do this thing in our Obama group text, Ezra, which wouldn't surprise you, which I said,

imagine if, right? Imagine if President Obama announced a war in Iran from a vacation property

in the middle of the night on a social media post made casual remarks about the fact that Americans

are going to die. It is what it is. And then within like two days, you're already seeing American

casualties, American planes falling into the sky, huge global economic disruptions.

There were a public and party would have been absolutely unified, and you know, part of these

in Obama had some little room for maneuver. He said that they as a political party were able to

make an argument against whatever the thing that Obama was doing. The Democratic Party doesn't

understand that it's not enough to just say we want a process voter procedural vote. We're going to

support the Rokana, Thomas Massey resolution that most Americans have no idea what that is, right?

I mean, I supported, but it's not going to do anything, and I think most Americans don't know

that it's a vote or whether or not Congress has to authorize something that has already happened.

It just makes you look, you know, and again, I'm totally supportive of that effort.

There's not a criticism of Rokana, Thomas Massey, but the point is, are you for this or against it?

And if you're against it, why are you not all out saying that this is reckless,

that this is a betrayal of what Donald Trump said when he ran for president, that we don't need more

wars, that why are we spending money? The price tag of this is going to be in the tens of billions.

That's money that could pay for the ACA subsidies. You know, yeah, at least, there's your healthcare

subsidies right now. Our healthcare subsidies are being spent on a war in Iran. Donald Trump is not

looking after your interest. He's looking after some kind of grandiose ambitions,

and at least this is a very easy political case to make, as for like, this is the easiest thing

in the world that we should be nation building at home, not abroad. You know, I saw this after

Maduro. I think it reflected what happened both in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the

Warren Interak, which is that I think that there is a difficulty people have. Maybe they would not

themselves go to war for this. Maybe they would not have supported a war for something like this.

But when it is against a brutal dictator, on what grounds are you opposing it, right?

Is opposing it supporting the continuation of the regime. And I think that's where a lot of

the Democrats you're talking about are getting caught, where some of the world leaders are talking

about are getting caught. So, you know, aside from, you know, we can spend money in one place versus

another. I think that's just quite deep question of how do people negotiate and how do they argue

against these wars that are partially demanded or justified on humanitarian grounds? I mean,

the Iranian regime, as you mentioned, has killed thousands or maybe tens of thousands of their own

people. There were Iranians marching in the streets and it was not safe for them to do so.

I sort of have my answer to this, but I'm curious for yours.

My answer to this is that war itself is something to be avoided. And that may seem like a

obvious point, but it's not like we, I mean, to be a little provocative on this too,

I think that post 9-11, because we've normalized so much use of military action,

because I could argue Ezra, it is completely insane that we're sitting here and having a

conversation about like that if we don't bomb a regime that we're therefore keeping it in power,

but does it report to us? And I think what Americans kind of intuitively get better than

their political elites, their national security elites, and even some of the kind of media

conversation in this is they get this. They get that war is terrible. War has risks that even if

it's well-intentioned on paper, it leads to bad outcomes for both the Americans who have to fight it,

the American taxpayer has to pay for it, and pretty much the people all the other end of the war

that you're saying are trying to help. We're trying to help the Iraqis, we're trying to help the Afghans,

we're trying to help the Libyans, now we're trying to help the Iranians. And I guess the

provocative thing I want to say too is that this seems to happen when the countries in question

are brown. I think there's a dehumanization since 9-11 where it's like, oh look at the next

middle eastern country out that the regime does something we don't like, we're going to go and

just bomb them. I mean we killed, if reports are accurate, some either the U.S. or Israel,

over 100 girls at a school, and it's not really a big story in the United States. And I actually

think to tie this back home, like I don't think that mentality, that othering of people who are

on the other side of the world after 9-11. I think that othering has come home. I think that

the capacity to have the mass deportation campaign that is generally targeting brown and

black people is kind of tied to this dehumanization and desensitization of violence that we

see in our foreign policy. Like post 9-11, we othered a lot of populations. And if you watch,

I mean I know we're going a far feel, but I think this is really relevant. I noticed in the

Obama administration, like the othering on Fox, you know, that was once just about middle eastern

terrorists. But then it's about the people crossing the southern border. And it comes one big

other, you know. And so I think it's a pretty, it should be seen as a pretty extremist proposition

that if the United States doesn't go to war with some government in the Middle East,

we're somehow condoning everything. I was really mad about the Jamal Khashoggi thing.

And no point did I think we should bomb, you know, Muhammad Salman for that.

I agree with a lot of that. And I want to offer maybe one other thing that I think has been

threaded through our conversation. And it's sort of my answer to this question, which is

war is inherently uncontrollable. Yeah. That the fantasy that we are always offered

at the beginning is that we can choose what it is we are going to do, that we can control the

situation we are going to create. And as we have developed even more precision weapons and more

air power and more drones and more ability to wage war at a distance, the seduction of that control

for leaders and for others has become all the more potent. But the history of this is we do not

control it. And as you mentioned, Libya with Afghanistan with Iraq, we might think we are

helping the people, but if we set off a civil war, you could easily have 70,000, 100,000,

200,000, 300,000 people die in that war. And we have shown no interest in number one saying we

will occupy the country to make sure that doesn't happen. And nor as we learned in Iraq, even if we

do decide to occupy the country, can we keep that from happening? I mean, Donald Trump was one of

the people who started trying to withdraw from Afghanistan, which then completed in the Biden

administration. Again, the inability over a very long time to control the outcome of something

like this, even when we were willing to put much more of our blood and treasure into controlling it.

And so to me, one of the, the great lie of war is that you will get what you want out of it.

Yeah. Among the many things it scares me so much about, Trump is how

bley he is with that. Yeah. You don't feel like this has cost him any sleep at all. And if it goes

badly, I think he will walk away and say, well, I gave you Iranians your chance. You didn't take

it. Yeah. Or you didn't succeed in taking it. Well, yes. I think you're exactly right. I mean,

one thing I became very aware of over eight years in the White House, but also in this whole post-Natal

period is that the US military can destroy anything, right? It can take out any target set that it

has, but it cannot engineer the politics of other countries or build what comes after the thing

that is destroyed. We had 150,000 troops in Iraq, and we couldn't stop violence. And look,

you know who knows that? The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Colonel, who's a total hard

liner right now, knows that Americans are going to lose interest in this. You know, knows that if

we weather this, you know, on the back and we can potentially do what we want. And there's a

callousness in the way that Trump has done this. And precisely because I think war is so uncertain,

and the cost of war is paid so overwhelmingly by ordinary people, one of the reasons I would like

to see Democrats or anybody, frankly, who's concerned about Trump be more it's spoken now, is I think

sometimes they are reticent to speak out because what if it goes well? It's not just that the

Iranian regime is bad. It's that if it goes well, then they'll say, you know, you were against this

thing. I'm sorry, I'm against this even if it has the better case scenario because we need to

if you can't take a position on something as fundamental as whether going to war when you don't

have to is a good thing. Then what's the point of all this? We could have achieved our objectives

on the nuclear issue and do negotiations. We chose to bomb this country instead. So I think that

precisely because war can lead to such terrible outcomes, you have to be willing to take a stance

against war itself unless it is absolutely necessary. And this certainly didn't meet that test.

I think that was supposed to end. I also found a question, what if you box you recommend to the

audience? So a few things, I mean, on this last question from the ruins of empire by Pankaj

Mishra is a really excellent kind of intellectual history of for like a better way of putting it

global south or people in the decolonized spaces in the 20th century coming up with alternatives

to Western hegemony. Then I personally as someone who's been trying to make sense of what it's

like to live in a collapsing liberal order. The world of yesterday by Stefan Schweig, I've found

myself reading twice since Trump's election, but it's just haunting and beautiful contemporaneous,

you know, Stefan Schweig was a great Austrian writer writing this, writing in the midst of

WWII his kind of life story, but it's really about the collapse of the liberal order in Europe.

And then lastly a book I read very recently this last few days is called Travelers in the Third

Reich by Julia Boyd. And what she did is she found letters, journals, other contemporaneous

accounts of basically British and Americans visiting Nazi Germany. And so what were their

impressions? Did they see in, you know, spoiler or way too many of them did not see how bad this

was going to be or were sympathetic? And all those things I think of course are unfortunately

relevant to today. Thank you very much. Thanks, Ezra.

This episode of The Soclanches Produced by Jack McCordock, fact checking by Michelle Harris with

Kate Sinclair and Mary March Locker and Jack McCordock. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld,

mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sohuta. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's

production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rowland Hu, Marina King, Marie Cassion,

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