Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / ‘The Iran Conversation No One Is Having’ with David Frum

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‘The Iran Conversation No One Is Having’ with David Frum · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
How do you get from what was to what is?
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Success does not mean there are elections within 24 months.
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Success means that Iran's capacity to do harm is limited
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and there's a transition, a clear, workable transition path
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to an orderly progress toward something better.
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When you have decades of rule by terror,
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you build up a big supply of vendettas.
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Good day, humans.
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Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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When the bombs started raining down on Iran,
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I could think of one person who I really wanted
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to help me understand what was going on,
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what might happen, what the consequences might be
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in the Middle East and also around the world
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and for American democracy itself.
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That person was David from who had a front row seat
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to the last time America went to war in the Middle East
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and it didn't go so well.
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From was George W. Bush's speech writer.
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Well, one of four speech writers,
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but he wrote a very famous line
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which came to define American foreign policy
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for the first decade of the 21st century.
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It was in George W. Bush's first state of the Union address.
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It was just four months after the World Trade Center towers
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had been turned to rubble and President Bush said this.
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States like these and their terrorist allies
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constitute an axis of evil,
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arming to threaten the peace of the world.
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So this idea of President Bush's of David Frums
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of the rest of the Bush administration
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that America faced a sort of a rogue alliance
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of terrorist states provided the rationale
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for going to war against one of them, Iraq.
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And the way that war went
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and the impact that it had on American politics
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informed a lot of Frums later thinking.
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At the time, David Frum wrote a book with Richard Pearl
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who was another neo-conservative hawk
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and an architect of the war in Iraq in 2004,
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which in fact argued among other things
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for taking immediate and decisive action against Iran
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as well that book was called an end to evil,
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how to win the war on terror.
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But you fast forward 22 years.
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And David Frum is older and wiser and more contemplative.
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He's also one of the most prominent
2:18
and persuasive conservative voices against Donald Trump.
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He's written two books against Donald Trump.
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The first one is called Trumpocracy,
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the corruption of the American Republic.
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The other is called Trumpocalypse,
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restoring American democracy.
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He's a staff writer at the Atlantic
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and he hosts the David Frum show, which is a podcast.
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And as I say, since the invasion of Iraq
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and his time in the Bush administration,
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he's developed a much more nuanced understanding
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of America's role in the world
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and the hazards of intervention in the Middle East.
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So I wanted to get him on the line
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and help me understand the precarious position
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in which the current conflict in Iran
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puts not just the Middle East and the region,
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but in fact, American democracy itself.
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I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one the only, David Frum.
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I do want to talk to you about the domestic concerns
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that you have about what a Trump administration
3:18
might be able to do with wartime powers
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to American democracy and freedom of the press
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because I was kind of chilled to read your eloquent writing
3:25
on that over the past few days.
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But let's start with the big global stuff.
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What's the best case you could make for striking Iran
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if it wasn't the Trump administration?
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Let's suppose that it's like Colin Powell
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and President John McCain in this scenario.
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What's the case for it?
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The best case I've heard is summed up by a joke
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that is apparently circulating inside Iran
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and some of your viewers, listeners may have heard the joke.
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So forgive me if you have, but if you haven't, here it is.
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A foreign agent approaches an Iranian
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and asks the Iranian, are you willing to work
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with the United States and Israel
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to overthrow the community theoretic regime?
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And the Iranian says, I am willing to do so.
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And the foreign agent says, you understand,
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this is very dangerous.
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You could be putting your life at risk.
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And the Iranian says, I do understand that I am willing.
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And the foreign agent says, very good, $100,000.
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The Iranian suddenly looks troubled.
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Chris is teeth.
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He says, that's a fair price.
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So I don't have that money all at once.
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Now, I can't even start this.
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Right.
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So it's a humanitarian case.
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That's the case.
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That's a humanitarian case.
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That's the case.
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The case is that there are many cases.
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But the case that I think that we all find the most moving
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is this great civilization, this ancient civilization,
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this country that has a tradition of constitutional democracy
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dating back to the early 20th century,
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has risen in its millions for freedom.
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And possibly tens of thousands of people died.
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And the president of the United States
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promised those people that help was coming.
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Now, I don't think much of this president,
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and maybe you don't think much of this president.
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But to the people of Iran, he's the president of the United States.
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He speaks for the great American nation.
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And he promised them that he would help.
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And it's hard to walk away from that promise
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even when you know who made it.
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So that's the core of the case.
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There are other cases too,
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but that's the one I think is most immediately urgently powerful.
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Well, that's supposed David that he hadn't made the promise.
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And that we weren't just reacting
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because we backed ourselves into a corner
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and didn't want to lose face about having made a promise.
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We make lots of promises.
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There was a barmer's red line about chemical weapons in Syria.
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There was the promise in 91 to the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein.
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There was the promise in the 50s that Hungarians should rise up.
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You know, history is littered with our broken promises.
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I'm a big believer that the United States should keep its promises.
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And I think those instances you cite are cases where our shameful cases.
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And either the promise should not have been made
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if there was no plan to keep it as Hungary 56
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or the promise should have been honored as it should have been in Iraq 1991.
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But so we have that.
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There was a promise.
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But even in the absence of a promise, we have had a freedom movement
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in a country that is both one of the world's most repressive
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and one of the world's most aggressive.
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And while this current round of the high intensity conflict
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between the Islamic Republic that is the government,
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not the people of Iran and the United States and its allies,
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this round has been initiated by the United States and by Israel.
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There are many rounds before that.
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This has been a long-running, never-seacing conflict,
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dating back to 1979.
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And there was an opportunity, I'm continuing the case,
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there was an opportunity to achieve a decisive outcome,
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to denuclearize the Islamic Republic,
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and maybe even to bring about a better regime
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that is clearly what the majority of the people there want
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are the great majority.
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So that's the case.
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Then you bump into the fact that it's the Trump presidency.
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Let's talk about how you assemble a coalition
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and a plan to do the thing that you want to do.
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If you actually are clear on what you want to do,
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which is to get rid of the regime altogether
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and replace it with something that is more humane
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and also more of a responsible international partner
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rather than just what some people suspect Donald Trump really wants,
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which is just another person who could be equally bad for Iranians,
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but is more compliant with America's wishes.
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Back in the Iraq war in 2003,
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just can you remind us of what the Bush administration did
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as the decision was developing,
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that this was gonna be a thing that they needed to do
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in order to sort of tick the checkboxes of what one does
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before such an adventure?
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Well, this is kind of all timey,
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but President Bush, George W. Bush,
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assembled a coalition, an international coalition of,
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I'm going to forget now, but dozens of nations.
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If I remember this right,
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there are actually more participant nations
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in the 2003 Iraq war than they were in the 1991 Gulf War.
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I mean, some important nations were missing like France,
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but the total number of participants
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was greater in 2003 than in 1991, if I remember correctly.
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Then he went of course to Congress for an authorizing resolution.
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Then he went to the United Nations and asked for a UN resolution,
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which he did not get, but he tried,
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he tried twice actually to get a UN resolution,
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but he had a global coalition,
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he had a congressional resolution,
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and he had one more thing, which is that when the 1991 war ended,
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that is the war fought by HW Bush to liberate Kuwait
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from Saddam Hussein, when that war ended,
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Iraq was bound by a series of UN resolutions
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about governing its future behavior,
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which Iraq had, did I say Iran, Iraq was...
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Nice Iraq, yep.
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Okay, it was wrapped in a series of UN resolutions
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governing its future behavior,
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which they broke through the 1990s.
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And those resolutions were enforced,
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there was a near war in 1994.
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There was in 1998 a very powerful air strike
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by the Clinton administration again,
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because Iraq was in breach of the post 1991 UN resolutions.
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And those resolutions had been breached again.
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And these were all the...
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Just a reminder, what were these resolutions surrounding,
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what were the breaches in the 1990s that Iraq was doing?
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These were about cooperation with international arms inspections,
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both having to do with nuclear weapons, biological and chemical.
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They also had to do with human rights for the Kurds in Northern Iraq,
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that's what nearly caused a war in 1994.
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And so although Bush failed to get a new authorizing resolution
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from the UN in 2003, he could point to a network of previous resolutions
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and argue, not farcically, that Iraq was in breach
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and he was going to now try to enforce those resolutions.
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And were you privy to different factional sort of opinions
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that were operating in the Bush administration at the time,
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as to whether or not it was worth bothering to go to the United Nations,
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certainly going back a second time versus people in the administration
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who thought this is all just fig leaf legalistic nonsense.
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We know what we're going to do anyway, so let's just do it.
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Well, I had a view of these conversations,
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not at the most senior level.
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I was not only a speech writer,
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I had a speech, my portfolio was domestic policy.
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I wrote speeches on trade, on taxes, on education, on farm,
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on high, I mean, I had the entire, there are four writers,
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three of whom did international and I did everything else.
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So I was, when there was a shortage of labor,
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I was called in on the international portfolio,
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but my main job, day in and day out,
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was to write speeches about the farm bill.
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It seemed important at the time,
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but many of my best efforts are lost to the midst of history.
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They were good, I want to say, but they're lost in the midst of history.
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But I did have a good, I mean, I was a special assistant,
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which is the rank below assistant,
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though that's where the White House power structure really begins.
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So, but I was aware of these debates,
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and there was great debate about whether the president needed to go
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back to the United Nations, whether he should go to the United Nations at all.
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But there was no debate about whether he needed to go to Congress.
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Everyone understood, look, you have to go to Congress.
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Sooner or later, Congress is going to vote the money for your war or not.
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And if you don't ask them in advance,
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it's a lot harder to get the money for the war later.
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So it's just, just as a matter even of good housekeeping,
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never mind constitutional and legal principle.
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Of course you have to go to Congress to say,
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do I have your permission to do this?
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It's not quite a, modern presidents have avoided formal declarations of war.
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According to the US Constitution,
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Congress has the power to declare war.
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But that's gone out of style since 1945 for the following reason.
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Once the president declares war,
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he gains all kinds of vast powers over law,
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over the economy, over other things.
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And post-1945, Congresses have said,
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look, we can authorize military force
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without giving the president the full panoply of powers
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that would come from a declaration of war.
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So there's no declaration of war in Korea.
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There is no declaration of war in Vietnam.
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There's no declaration of war in Gulf War I.
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But there are various kinds of authorizing resolutions
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to approve the conflict,
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to give the president permission to carry it
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and to promise him that he would have the funds he needed
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in order to carry on the conflict
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without saying, oh, by the way,
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you also have the power to freeze bank accounts.
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David, this is always something that's a little bit weird
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to non-Americans like myself
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and I wonder what you make of it as a Canadian.
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The ability of a country to essentially go to war
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without saying that it's going to war
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is there, is this ever been tested in court?
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I mean, I'd be interested to know what the Supreme Court has to say
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about an administration carrying on a major combat operation
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over a significant duration
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without getting the approval of Congress
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and just saying, well, we don't have to because it's not a war.
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Like if it quacks like a dark and walks like a dark.
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So I'm not going to pretend to have any kind of activities
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and I can't cite cases,
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but I know it was tested,
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it was tested a lot during the Vietnam era.
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Vietnam had more legal authority.
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Korea, there was no vote by Congress
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because President Truman said in Korea,
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this is at a time of,
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or of course begins in June of 1950,
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it's a time of great hope in the United Nations.
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And the United States has signed a treaty
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with the United Nations that says,
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we will defend countries that are victims of aggression.
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And according to the United States Constitution,
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treaties are part of the Supreme Law of the Land.
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So President Truman's argument in 1950 was,
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we made a, we have a commitment to our UN partners.
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North Korea has violated the UN Charter.
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I am, as a matter of principle,
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not going to ask for declaration of war.
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Also, I don't want to be able to freeze bank accounts
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and have all those powers over the economy,
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that Franklin Roosevelt had during World War II,
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but I am going to war,
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I'm going to fight to enforce the UN Charter.
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And that was something,
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I'm sure it was tested at the time.
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I know that in Vietnam where there was an authorizing resolution,
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the famous Tonkin Gulf resolution,
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that was challenged in court.
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And again, the courts have said that's good enough.
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And there's also the practical question
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that Congress has to vote appropriations all the time,
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to vote for the fun of the war.
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So Congress disapproves the war.
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This is how Congress in the end forced an end to the Vietnam War,
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something by the way,
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one of my first political memories,
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I was very upset and scandalized that Congress did this.
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But they simply said, no more money.
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After the end of U.S. combat operations in Vietnam in 1973,
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Congress cut off assistance to the South Vietnamese,
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and that was that, they didn't pay for it, no fighting.
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I mean, all of this, of course,
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assumes that of the three branches of government,
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the legislative branch is actually functioning
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as an independent branch,
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and not as a lackey of the executive branch,
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as we have at the moment.
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So I suppose it's kind of moot as to whether or not,
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you know, he goes to Congressional.
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It's not moving.
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Trump has a huge, huge problem with the Congressional funding.
15:20
So I saw a report today that the war is costing a billion dollars a day,
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which I have no idea whether that's right,
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but it doesn't sound like a crazy, impossible number
15:31
when you see the ordinance that is being deployed.
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Now, there is money in channels,
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but at some point, at that rate,
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at some point, President Trump will have to go to Congress
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and say, I need another appropriation.
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I don't think there is a funding of majority in this Congress.
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He's got the Republican majority in the House of Representatives
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is hanging by like one or two members.
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There are at least half a dozen Republicans
15:54
who do not want to fund an Iran war.
15:57
So he will need to find Democrats to go along with him
16:00
on funding this war, and the Democrats are saying,
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even those who are broadly sympathetic to a tough approach to Iran,
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say, you didn't ask us first.
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This is going to be in a week or two or three or four, a big problem.
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Congress will say, maybe we would have funded the war.
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If you asked us, you didn't ask us.
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Right.
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And now you're asking for funding and we're not going to do it.
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I mean, that's interesting.
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I hadn't really made that delineation.
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And when I said it's sort of moot,
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I didn't mean that it's not going to cause problems down the track,
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but rather that the Congressional approval for the war in the first place
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was probably moot because it's inconceivable
16:34
that Congress wouldn't have voted for what Donald Trump wants to do initially,
16:38
even if they then had problems with financing down the track, isn't it?
16:42
It does not have a functional majority in the House of Representatives anymore.
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And this is the reason why the February,
16:47
and we're going down many different paths and I hope that I'm not too scattered.
16:50
No, no, please.
16:52
But one of the reasons that the February 20th decision at the Supreme Court
16:55
about the tariffs case was so important.
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Was Donald Trump in his tariffs claim was trying to create sources of revenue
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for the executive, completely independent of Congress.
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And he said, I can declare an economic emergency.
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I can impose a tariff of any amount on any country at any time for any duration.
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And no one can say anything.
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And for the first time since the Stuart monarchs of the 1600s,
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you'll have an English-speaking head of government
17:22
who has a source of revenue that doesn't depend on the legislature.
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Remember the last English-speaking head of government to try it was Charles I
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and the English cutoff is head for it.
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And the Supreme Court didn't cut off Donald Trump's head, but they cut off his money.
17:34
It said, no, no, you can't do that.
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The money comes from Congress.
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It's interesting.
17:39
David French had a good piece, David, about the wisdom that the founding fathers
17:45
of the United States had in taking all the roles of a monarch
17:48
and scattering them through three branches of government
17:52
and scattering them in such a way that each one would need the cooperation of another branch.
17:58
So there were all these checks and balances.
17:59
And it's normal for courts to defer to presidents
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and even more normal to defer to presidents maximally during wartime.
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And the worry about a president who has not been particularly pedantic
18:12
about respecting the rights and liberties of the American people
18:16
and the freedom of the press is that during war
18:19
it's going to be even more easy for him to say, well, I have to make sure
18:23
that we impose these restrictions on people
18:26
and that we prevent them from prevent journalists from asking questions
18:29
of the Pentagon and prevent people from getting within a certain number of feet
18:34
of a polling station or whatever it might be.
18:37
Because this is not just an imaginary emergency,
18:40
like the previous emergencies have been.
18:41
This is an actual war.
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I mean, the other thing that's interesting is the idea of whether or not
18:47
you even the fig leaf of sort of international respect for American respect
18:53
for international institutions before going to war is an interesting one.
18:58
Is it better to be like a hypocrite and pretend that you care about going to war
19:05
and with proper UN authorization, even though you know that you're going anyway
19:10
and you're only using it as a fig leaf?
19:12
Or is it better to not be a hypocrite, but to steamroll international institutions?
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International laws, people talk about it as if it's much clearer thing than it really is.
19:25
So there are two main bodies of international law.
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There's what's called international private law.
19:32
British jet smacks into a Japanese plane on a most really entire Mac,
19:36
injuring American and South Korean passengers, who pays the liability?
19:39
How does the liability get apportioned?
19:41
There are lots and lots of vast body of law that governs that accident.
19:47
And if any of the countries don't like the result,
19:50
then they can go back to the international airline convention or whatever it is
19:54
and renegotiate the rules.
19:55
There's a sovereign back.
19:57
So international private laws is a pretty robust system,
20:00
at least among the developed countries.
20:02
Then there's this thing called international public law,
20:04
which reports to govern the actions of governments.
20:07
And the question about that always is,
20:09
well, where does this law come from?
20:11
And how is it enforced?
20:13
And there are a lot of people in the international legal community
20:16
who dream of a day when academics and international tribunals
20:20
will infect an international public law
20:23
that binds governments over their own objection.
20:25
But there are some real problems with this,
20:29
including that if what ends up happening is that this system of law
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is created by a majority of the world's governments,
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but a majority of the world's governments are repressive.
20:39
Democracies are a minority.
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And so-
20:41
And they also have particular grudges against particular countries,
20:44
like big countries like Israel,
20:46
Julie, sorry, big countries like America,
20:48
Julie countries like Israel, whatever it might be.
20:51
And a lot of it just seems to be so, and when you press hard,
20:54
I mean, so you get these things you'll have on the internet,
20:57
these statements, international lawyers say,
20:58
what they really mean is me and my fellow academics think
21:01
that's the way it should be.
21:03
And what we are,
21:04
but we are ignoring the fundamental principle of international law,
21:07
which is governments are bound only by their own consent.
21:11
And after that, you're into the realm of politics.
21:14
So-
21:15
Just to pause there, just so we don't oversimplify it, David.
21:18
I mean, the binding, the members of the United Nations Security Council
21:26
have agreed to be bound by the condition of the Security Council,
21:30
which is that you don't go to war,
21:32
unless without Security Council authorization.
21:34
I think that's the salient bit of international law
21:36
that people care about when they talk about
21:38
whether or not the Iraq war was legal or illegal internationally.
21:41
There wasn't Security Council approval.
21:44
America had agreed that you need Security Council approval to go to war.
21:48
It didn't get it.
21:49
It went to war anyway, broke the rules.
21:52
Yes, but you always have a right of self-defense
21:54
and you also have treaty laws.
21:56
So, for example, in 1994, in the early 1990s,
22:00
I should say, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arms.
22:03
It inherited a big arms arsenal from the Soviet Union.
22:06
It surrendered that in return for a four-way treaty
22:09
with Russia, guaranteed by Russia,
22:11
the United States and Great Britain,
22:13
that Ukraine's borders would be in violet
22:16
and its sovereignty would be upheld
22:18
if it surrendered the nuclear weapons.
22:20
You know, when Ukraine is attack,
22:22
it doesn't need a new Security Council resolution
22:25
to have the right to get the aid
22:26
that's promised by treaty in 1994 when it's attacked in Virginia.
22:30
So, it's a complicated thing,
22:32
but the idea that countries' rights depend
22:35
ultimately on these structures of international law.
22:38
You know, there's a project to make it seem like
22:42
the country's own democratic rules don't matter very much
22:47
compared to what international lawyers say.
22:49
And that, as you say, is complicated
22:53
and we are trying to move toward a rule in which countries
22:55
are governed more by agreement.
22:59
But the attempt to make things that say,
23:01
if there's not a UN vote is not legal,
23:03
that's just not the way it's understood to be.
23:07
Is it worth paying lip service, too?
23:09
I mean, obviously, the administration that you were part of
23:11
thought that it was, thought that it was important to
23:13
at least try to go to the UN
23:15
and then go back, try to go back to the UN.
23:17
And again, after they didn't get authorization
23:19
from Security Council the first time,
23:21
here you have a situation in which I suppose the person
23:26
who most embodies this kind of worldview,
23:30
for me, is maybe JD Vance, along with maybe Pete Hegseth,
23:33
where it's like, you know, it's the mightest right kind of,
23:36
was it Vance who was talking in these very kind of
23:39
almost messianic, apocalyptic, like,
23:42
millenarian terms about like the fundamental iron law
23:45
of the universe from as long from the earliest days
23:47
is that the powerful, you know, will prevail.
23:50
It's this kind of like, yeah.
23:54
So, well, we don't want that world, I don't think.
23:56
And what, what, I mean, why not though?
24:00
Let's just pause on that because that seems to be part of,
24:02
I think, the ethos of the new rights,
24:04
if they're kind of play acting like fun,
24:07
Trumpy, Maga, like, we are the biggest swinging dick in town.
24:11
Why not just use it?
24:12
Like, why, why, why are we constraining ourselves
24:15
with all of these rules that were made up by a bunch of people
24:17
and, you know, the Hague and Brussels and all that nonsense?
24:20
We can do it, let's do it.
24:22
Here's a very practical reason why you don't do it.
24:25
At any given moment in history,
24:26
there's always one country that is stronger than the others.
24:30
And in the west country was, in the 1500s,
24:32
it was Spain and the 1600s, it was France,
24:35
1700s, it was France, then it was Germany.
24:38
But the problem is if you're the strongest country,
24:40
you're stronger than any other country,
24:43
but you're not stronger than every other country.
24:45
And so the danger, if one country becomes very powerful,
24:49
and it becomes a threat,
24:50
the other countries combine against it and tear it down.
24:55
And that's the story of Napoleon,
24:57
that's the story of Kaiser Wilhelm,
24:58
that's the story of the Soviet Union,
25:00
that's the story of the Nazis.
25:01
The genius of American foreign policy
25:04
is from the moment when the United States
25:06
became the world's strongest country.
25:08
What is that moment?
25:09
1918, 1940, whenever you dated to 1945,
25:13
from that moment, the United States has said, right,
25:16
we are not going to let the other,
25:17
we are not going to give the other countries
25:18
of the world reason to combine against us.
25:20
And not only that, we're going to offer them this deal.
25:23
If you ally with us, you get access to our market,
25:27
the world's biggest market, and you get protection,
25:30
and you got to kind of discount.
25:31
You know, we ask you to pay something,
25:34
but you get much more protection
25:35
than you could ever possibly afford from us,
25:38
at a big discount, and all we ask in return
25:41
is you not combine against us.
25:44
And so you've had, from 1945,
25:47
the unusual event in world history,
25:48
which has lasted from Roosevelt until Donald Trump,
25:51
where the single strongest country in the world
25:53
was also the center of the single most powerful alliance
25:57
in the world.
25:58
Throughout the diplomatic history of the world,
26:00
everything called a grand alliance,
26:02
Churchill wrote books about them,
26:03
was always aimed against countries two through 10,
26:06
against country one.
26:08
The United States has been able to get,
26:10
countries one, then three through 10
26:13
to combine against country number two.
26:16
And that's very, and that's what Vance and the others
26:19
are ignoring.
26:20
They're inviting, they're saying,
26:22
we're going to be like Louis, the France of Louis 14th,
26:24
or Philip II of Spain, or Kaiser Wilhelm,
26:26
or of the Soviet Union.
26:27
We're just going to impose our will
26:28
without regard to the others.
26:30
There are a lot of others,
26:31
and to get, they are more powerful than you.
26:33
I mean, their argument, I suppose, is that like,
26:35
yeah, if the other countries were getting essentially
26:39
a discount because they got our umbrella of security,
26:42
so that they could spend their money
26:43
on their fancy universal healthcare,
26:46
or whatever, without paying for their own defense,
26:48
then America was being ripped off,
26:50
and it's time to knock a few heads together,
26:52
because what are they going to do?
26:52
What's Canada and America and Ireland and Spain,
26:57
or they're all going to get together,
26:58
and they're going to invade the United States?
26:59
Give me a break.
27:00
Yeah, so that's a fair point.
27:02
I mean, let's remember that at the beginning
27:04
of the system, it was not an oversight.
27:07
The Germany didn't have a powerful army anymore,
27:09
and Japan didn't have a powerful navy anymore.
27:11
That was the plan.
27:14
You guys work on what you produce advanced consumer goods
27:17
and leave the provision of security to us.
27:19
That was not a mistake, that was a plan.
27:22
But at this point in history, yeah,
27:24
it's a reasonable thing to say to the Allies,
27:28
you should contribute more to your own defense,
27:30
especially the European Allies,
27:31
who have been kind of free riders.
27:33
But on the other hand, they do pay for other things.
27:38
In the early days of the Ukraine War, for example,
27:41
Americans would complain,
27:42
the United States was giving much more
27:44
to Ukraine's military budget than Europe.
27:46
Well, that's true.
27:47
But Ukraine also has to operate hospitals.
27:50
It has to operate schools.
27:51
It has to operate a pension program.
27:52
And when you combine all those necessary forms
27:55
of civilian spending, very difficult for a country at war,
27:58
the Europeans were supporting that.
27:59
And if you added up the European contributions
28:02
to the Ukrainian civilian economy in 2023,
28:05
to the US contributions to the Ukrainian military economy,
28:08
they're about equal.
28:10
So they were just making a false comparison
28:13
of only looking at the military budget
28:15
and saying, well, the United States gives so much,
28:17
Europe gives so little, they're ripping us off.
28:19
And don't it pay for the hospitals?
28:21
Yeah, and since you've let's follow the thread
28:23
of hospitals and schools and water and public pensions
28:26
and transpose that onto Iran now,
28:29
because one of the big concerns about the Iraq War,
28:35
back in the day, and I remember,
28:37
I mean, I was still in college,
28:40
but I was writing for the university newspaper
28:44
and was on some radio show at the time
28:47
and was talking and saying, look,
28:48
if there was a martial plan for Iraq,
28:51
then I think I would probably lean towards supporting the war.
28:54
This was before the war.
28:55
But without any faith that this administration
28:58
is going to follow through and do a proper rebuilding process,
29:01
I think on balance, it's a bad idea.
29:03
Well, I mean, if one had those concerns before the Iraq War
29:06
in which, at which point there were many people
29:08
in the administration who did really feel
29:11
that you needed to proactively attempt
29:14
to reconstruct Iraq or how much more dire
29:19
are those concerns now where you don't have any boots
29:21
on the ground, you're just doing an air war
29:23
and you don't have any control
29:25
over what happens to the power vacuum that you're creating.
29:28
And look, once the Mullah regime collapses,
29:32
however, robust the civilizational resources of Iran are,
29:36
there's going to be a very uncomfortable period of transition.
29:39
Iran has a series of horrific problems.
29:41
Waters, water's probably the most pressing and urgent.
29:44
They have a tremendous crisis of water in all their cities.
29:47
It's a very arid place to live.
29:49
They're going to need electricity.
29:52
It's a poor country, but it's kind of artificially poor.
29:57
You know, one of my favorite charts about Iran
29:59
is if you start the chart,
30:01
look at income per capita and compare Iran to Portugal.
30:04
From 1960 to 1980, they're the same.
30:08
And then in the 70s,
30:10
a Portugal makes some very good choices.
30:12
They turn to become a democracy.
30:14
They join the European Union.
30:15
They adopt free trade and Portugal's GDP per capita rises
30:18
up and up and up.
30:19
And now in the 2020s, they're fully developed free,
30:22
and not the richest one of them all,
30:24
but they've got the tramways and the hospitals
30:27
and good universities and good colleges
30:29
and K-12 education and pensions and all the attributes
30:32
of a fully paid up member of the first world.
30:34
And Iran is poor today for person than it was in 1980.
30:38
They went nowhere.
30:40
And so Iran has the potential to look a lot
30:43
like a Southern European country,
30:44
but to get from here to there is going to be difficult.
30:46
They're going to need help.
30:48
And yeah, you need to,
30:49
once you start breaking their government as terrible as it is,
30:53
it does keep the water going.
30:55
It does keep the electricity moving.
30:57
And whoever comes next
30:59
is going to inherit all of that responsibility
31:01
in a much more fragmented and battered society.
31:04
So we started the conversation with like,
31:06
what is the best case rationale for going into Iran
31:09
if it wasn't this administration that was doing it?
31:11
Now let's talk about the sort of worst case consequences
31:15
of doing that.
31:16
Like if you're going into a mission like this,
31:18
what are the broad categories of outcomes
31:21
that you want to be thinking about?
31:23
The things I'm most worried about
31:24
are not going to happen in the Middle East.
31:25
They're going to happen here at home.
31:27
And this is, here's the thing I'm single most
31:29
thing I'm worried about.
31:31
So last weekend we had another terrible mass shooting
31:33
in the United States, this one in Austin, Texas.
31:36
And there's now an apprehended alleged shooter.
31:40
And the apprehended alleged shooter
31:42
was photographed at the time of the shooting
31:44
wearing a t-shirt with an Iranian flag on it.
31:47
Now I don't believe for a minute
31:49
that he's in any way connected to the Iranian state
31:50
or as an agent of the Iranian government.
31:53
But if this war begins to dry,
31:55
if it becomes difficult, if Congress won't give money
31:58
to Donald Trump, how hard will it be for Donald Trump
32:01
to say, you know, we have a risk of Iranian terrorism.
32:04
That's not crazy.
32:05
We do.
32:06
The world has been dealing with Iranian terrorism
32:08
since 1979.
32:10
And these traders in Congress won't defend the homeland.
32:13
And we need vigorous decisive action here at home.
32:17
We need to crack down.
32:19
And if newspapers report things they shouldn't report,
32:22
they're supporting the Iranian terrorists.
32:24
We need to fund the Department of Homeland Security,
32:26
give them much broader powers,
32:27
even than the ones they already have.
32:29
We need a lot more secrecy.
32:31
And don't ask me about my deals with the United Arab Emirates.
32:34
That's crucial to national security
32:36
and our protecting us, that you have a permission structure
32:42
to abuse power by people, proven they want to do it.
32:44
And the most alarming thing is, you know,
32:47
Ukraine's not carrying out elections
32:49
because of the disruption of war.
32:51
And I think that's a decision that is justified by the facts.
32:55
But there are people around Donald Trump
32:56
who are circulating plans, the New York Times
32:58
and Washington Post have reported on this.
33:00
These are just in voices, but offering Trump road maps
33:06
to cancel the 2026 elections in the United States
33:08
and use the military to do it.
33:12
That's the kind of thing I worry about.
33:14
Not so much military disaster in Iran, although that's a worry too,
33:18
but that Trump will use this war to crack down
33:21
on liberties at home.
33:22
And that's not a fanciful possibility.
33:24
The way people used to say,
33:25
oh, Obama's going to send the National Guard to Texas
33:28
to take away everyone's guns.
33:30
He wasn't going to do that.
33:31
In this case, we're talking about things that Trump
33:33
has said he wants to do.
33:34
The people around Trump have said he was,
33:35
he wanted to do things that have already been tried.
33:38
And we're talking about a president
33:40
who has tried to push the edge of the envelope
33:43
to the greatest extent possible, you know,
33:45
and then just sort of dare the cook the courts
33:47
to prevent him on so many different levels, you know,
33:51
in terms of prosecuting journalists or whatever it might be.
33:55
You know, there is almost no field
33:56
in which he hasn't tried to test the edges of things.
33:58
So if war then extends those edges
34:02
to a much broader parameter of powers,
34:05
then that is a worry.
34:07
In terms of the election,
34:08
is it in the constitution that the United States
34:11
has to have an election within a certain period of time,
34:13
like in parliamentary democracies,
34:15
where the government is obligated to hold it
34:17
before a certain date?
34:18
We have an even more robust defense than that.
34:20
It's in the state constitutions.
34:22
Ah.
34:23
So the president, this is the thing
34:26
that has been frustrating to Donald Trump.
34:28
He's looking around the laboratory
34:31
for the big Dr. Frankenstein switch, which he can flip
34:35
to say no election.
34:36
And he discovers, no, sorry, that switch is in Sacramento.
34:40
The whole architecture of American elections
34:43
rests on state law, state practice.
34:47
This creates a lot of chaos.
34:48
This is one of the reasons why election lawyers
34:49
make such a fabulous living,
34:51
because it's just, it's a tissue of complicated law,
34:55
but it also defeats aggressors.
34:56
One of the things that happened in 2016
34:58
when the Russians were fooling around
34:59
with American elections is they tried to tamper
35:01
with the American voting process.
35:03
And they were defeated because it's a chaos.
35:07
Because while the law is the states,
35:09
the administration is often counted by counting.
35:12
So, you know, so where do I have the election machines?
35:15
Well, there are 3,000 counties.
35:17
Good luck.
35:18
Go for it.
35:21
Yeah.
35:22
I think there's something like 9,000 separate voting
35:24
jurisdictions in the United States,
35:26
and they all have their own technology.
35:29
Good luck.
35:30
Right.
35:31
So then suppose that the election itself needs to take place
35:34
because these are being organized locally
35:36
and at a state level, and much as Trump might want to,
35:40
there's going to be people are going to be going to the polls.
35:42
What is your, just put some flesh on the bones
35:45
of your nightmare scenario about a wartime president
35:48
using wartime powers?
35:51
Most of our elections are not very close.
35:54
So you don't have to see, to interfere
35:57
with an election in the United States,
35:58
you don't have to fool around in California.
36:00
You don't have to fool around in New York or Texas
36:03
or Nebraska.
36:05
The number of states where election outcomes
36:08
are really decided is a small number.
36:11
So if you can create a crisis in certain districts
36:14
in North Carolina, certain districts in Georgia,
36:18
certain districts in Arizona, that may be enough.
36:22
The problem Trump has in 2026 is he is now so unpopular
36:26
that it may be that the playing field is much bigger
36:28
than it was in past elections.
36:30
But again, you don't have to steal every election
36:32
to swing the balance in the House of Representatives.
36:34
You just have to steal the handful that are close.
36:37
And again, 2026, there may be,
36:41
there may be more elections that are up for grabs
36:44
and there have been in the past.
36:45
But normally it's, I'm going to,
36:46
of the 435 seats in the House,
36:49
the election typically turns on 20, 30 maybe.
36:54
It's amazing, isn't it?
36:55
You're talking about like 5% of the, you know,
36:57
of the seats or something that are determining
36:59
the entire governance of the nation
37:00
and the accountability structure of a president
37:02
who might be breaking the law.
37:05
And just lastly on domestic stuff,
37:06
because I do want to get back to Iran
37:08
and to various outcomes.
37:09
The isolationism of Donald Trump in 2016 versus the,
37:15
I mean, look, I always sort of felt
37:17
when he came back into power a second time
37:19
that at some point he's going to open the train box
37:22
and he's going to assemble the train
37:24
and he's going to go look at how great this train is.
37:26
What am I doing, not using it?
37:28
And he's going to think, I'm an idiot.
37:30
I'm not using this military that I've got.
37:32
And I think in the first term, he just wasn't that interested
37:34
in it, he didn't really think about it.
37:36
And then of course, I mean, you have the power,
37:38
you know, literally to just snap your fingers
37:41
and all of a sudden hundreds of people
37:44
who are far more accomplished than you
37:45
are flying through the night
37:47
towards Nicholas Maduro's compound
37:49
and blasting Cubans out of the, you know, into pink mist
37:54
and you just have to say it.
37:55
Of course, someone with the narcissism of Trump
37:58
is going to find that compelling.
38:00
But can you make a kind of intellectual journey
38:04
from his America first isolationism
38:07
to whatever he's doing in Iran?
38:10
Well, I, somebody asked me a little while ago,
38:15
what about those people who voted for Trump
38:17
who believed him about staying out of foreign wars?
38:20
What about them?
38:22
And my response to the little cynical was,
38:24
if you believed Donald Trump, that's a you problem.
38:26
That's not a new problem.
38:29
Yeah, right.
38:31
So as you said, the story about how Donald Trump
38:38
discovered the term America first
38:40
was he was giving an interview in the summer of 2016
38:43
to David Sanger of the New York Times and other journalists.
38:46
And he began saying things that sounded isolationist.
38:49
And Sanger, who's one of the most distinguished
38:51
and learned national security journalists in Washington said,
38:54
it sounds like you're talking about America first.
38:56
And according to Sanger, Trump sort of blinked and stared
38:59
at what did you just say?
39:02
Said like America first.
39:03
Trump, that's fantastic.
39:07
As if Sanger had just coined it.
39:10
I'm using that.
39:13
And indeed, there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence
39:15
of him using it in his own voice.
39:17
It shows up in some of his ghost written books.
39:18
But so if that's true, but he wasn't an isolationist.
39:22
He always wanted to use power in certain ways.
39:25
What he did was he had countries he liked
39:27
and countries he didn't like.
39:29
And the countries he liked were authoritarian regimes
39:32
with a lax attitude toward law.
39:34
And the countries he didn't like were rule of law countries,
39:38
especially in Europe, but just general Canada
39:40
and Australia he didn't love either.
39:43
And that and he wanted not to be entangled in certain disputes
39:48
but was very ready to be entangled in other disputes.
39:51
And of course, even in the first term,
39:55
that he got into conflicts and confrontations with China
39:59
that we're putting us on the way to great power conflict,
40:02
be free COVID of a kind that people have been worried about
40:06
for a long time.
40:07
And he didn't seem to have a natural system to stop it
40:09
before it got out of control.
40:11
Right.
40:12
But I mean, specifically his antipathy towards Middle Eastern
40:15
adventures going into these so-called shithole countries
40:18
that are ways who complicated and we don't know what's going on
40:21
and getting ourselves messed up and spending
40:23
American blood and treasure like that.
40:24
He would be banged on about that a lot in the primaries
40:27
in the Republican party when he was up against jet bush
40:30
and all that.
40:31
He inherited a war in Northern Iraq and Syria
40:34
against ISIS from Barack Obama and Trump continued it.
40:37
I made it bigger.
40:38
He continued, he did not stop the war in Afghanistan.
40:40
That continued through the entire Trump presidency.
40:43
He was, he killed Kossum Salamani,
40:47
the head of the, I forgot now which you,
40:50
but one of the most elite units in Europe.
40:51
It was the goods, I think, wasn't it?
40:52
That's right, thank you.
40:54
And again, I don't, I think that's probably a good call
40:57
and maybe something that only Donald Trump would do.
40:59
But that's not isolationist.
41:00
That he was willing to intervene.
41:02
They're just what he, he had an instinct
41:08
for avoiding things that were going to bog him down
41:10
and for avoiding difficulty and going for the fast, quick,
41:14
easy win.
41:16
Partly because he did not want to go ask Congress for money.
41:20
So he, he looked for ways to either continue things
41:23
that already were on the books like the ISIS war
41:25
and the Afghanistan war in the first term
41:27
or to do something spectacular and cheap
41:29
like killing Salamani.
41:32
So you take out Hamunae and you take out the,
41:36
you know, whatever is left of the nuclear program
41:39
that you didn't get last summer
41:41
and you decapitate the senior leadership.
41:45
If you're doing a Venezuela model,
41:47
then you just look for somebody who, you know,
41:50
you don't care about the fact
41:51
that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
41:53
is still going to be terrorizing civilians.
41:55
You just find someone who you can work with
41:58
and you say, see, now I'm fucking serious.
42:01
You thought that I wasn't serious.
42:03
Now let's sit down and talk and see
42:04
whether you're going to play games
42:05
the way you have been for the past, you know, years or decades.
42:09
That's obviously not what he's done
42:11
because, you know, apparently they were just meeting
42:14
to try to find a new leader
42:16
and they bombed that meeting as well.
42:19
So you've lost these scores and scores
42:22
of people at the top of the government.
42:24
Then option two seems to be the whole thing,
42:27
what collapses, but everybody rises up
42:30
and somehow forms a new, like what is the opposition alternative
42:34
that does not just default to the Revolutionary Guard Corps
42:39
finding the most vicious individual, vicious and charismatic
42:43
and power-hungry and ruthless individual
42:46
who ends up replacing Khamenei
42:49
and is maybe even crazier or even more jihadist
42:51
or even more committed to secretly sponsoring Western mega-terrorism
42:56
than Khamenei was.
42:59
Like I don't, just lay the landscape of what the options are now.
43:03
I think I know what the Trump people are hoping for.
43:06
What they're hoping is that Khamenei was a fanatic
43:11
and they were fanatics around him.
43:12
But if you kill the top 200 people in the regime,
43:17
that's where your shovel begins to hit the crooks.
43:20
And there are a lot of people down at guy number 201,
43:23
202, 203 who are basically crooks
43:28
and with a little pastisha of Islamism,
43:31
a little pastisha by any but crooks.
43:33
And those are the kind of people
43:35
that maybe you can do business with.
43:36
And I think what the Trump people hope is we find,
43:39
we start saying to guy number 201,
43:42
how would you like to be the supreme leader and live?
43:45
And keep your money.
43:47
And guy number 21 doesn't like it.
43:49
So you kill him and you go to guy number 202
43:51
and eventually find somebody says yes.
43:53
And at that point, you've got a governmental structure
43:58
that is more or less continuous with what you have now
44:01
and what they would, what the better people in Trump,
44:03
what Marco Rubio, who's probably the best of them hopes would happen.
44:07
I think as we get to guy number 202,
44:10
he becomes the new supreme leader.
44:12
He rules through a mixture of more corruption and less terror.
44:17
And then he begins the transition.
44:18
And he also has an understanding that
44:20
if he wants to be a more successful crook,
44:22
he needs to run a richer country
44:23
and that means that Iran needs to reintegrate
44:25
with the rest of the world, a band of the terrorism.
44:28
And you get a kind of gradual transition
44:30
to a more benign form of government.
44:33
And the model here is Greece, Spain, Portugal in the 1970s
44:39
where you go from dictatorship to democracy over a decade.
44:43
So you said like what if man 202 is committed to more corruption,
44:49
but less terror?
44:51
Well, let's suppose that man 203 is committed to more corruption
44:55
and more terror also, but he's not going to tell you that.
44:59
How can you tell the difference between 202 and 203
45:02
and what if you go accidentally go to 203 first, but he looks like 202?
45:06
There's no question there's a lot of wishful thinking in this plan.
45:10
But I think that the premise of the plan
45:14
is that the regime is pretty rotten at this point.
45:16
And the number of true believers is actually by now quite small
45:19
and it's mostly crooks.
45:21
So if you pick a guy from 201 to 210,
45:25
even at random, the odds are very high.
45:27
He's fundamentally a crook.
45:30
And by crook, just to clarify,
45:31
you mean somebody who is more interested in
45:33
lining their own pockets than in doing
45:35
some grand ideological move against the Zionists
45:38
or the great satan or something,
45:40
like basically not a non-ideological hack.
45:45
I read, I don't know this,
45:46
but I read that the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard
45:50
has control about 30% to 40% of the economy.
45:52
They control the construction.
45:53
They control everything of any scale.
45:58
And they control that both collectively,
46:00
but many people have individual companies
46:02
and they will want to keep those companies,
46:03
Marco Rubio hopes.
46:05
And so that they may be willing to do business.
46:07
If the United States has to look at that
46:09
large construction company you have, you keep it.
46:12
We're not asking too many questions.
46:13
And the money you have in the bank account
46:14
and Dubai or Qatar, we're not asking questions about it.
46:17
All we ask is that you govern in a more modern and humane way
46:23
and you reorient yourself more to the west
46:25
and you give up the terrorism,
46:27
which is anyway very expensive.
46:28
I mean, why isn't Iran as wealthy as Portugal?
46:31
If they poured trillions of dollars into empire and aggression
46:37
and if you just stop doing that,
46:39
there are a lot of resources both for the needs of people
46:42
but also to enrich the leaders.
46:43
Yeah, I mean, it's also a corrupt and closed economy
46:46
which doesn't help productivity growth
46:49
versus being a liberal free market democracy.
46:52
But so then the humanitarian justification for the war
46:55
is tempered somewhat by the suggestion that we want
46:59
to dictate a who is just slightly less enthusiastic
47:03
about mowing down tens of thousands of protesters.
47:08
Right?
47:09
No, so again, I'm getting into Marco Rubio's head
47:13
not changing that.
47:15
There's a pretty good track record of transition
47:20
from authoritarian regimes to functioning democracies.
47:23
South Korea, Taiwan.
47:26
And they're pretty good track records of countries
47:30
that remain non-democratic
47:34
but go from more nasty to less nasty, like Vietnam.
47:37
Vietnam is obviously a better place to live
47:39
than it was 20 years ago.
47:40
It's not a democracy at all.
47:42
But most people are materially better off
47:45
and have more freedom to live the way
47:47
and they don't fool around with your personal life.
47:49
They're not gonna hang you
47:51
because they don't approve of the way you live.
47:53
So you're aiming for a liberal Iran
47:55
not necessarily a democratic.
47:57
Yeah, you're aiming for a period of transition
48:00
because one of the things that people know around better
48:02
than I do remind me is we are very aware
48:05
of the highly secular, highly liberal people
48:08
who live in the big cities.
48:09
But there is a rural hinterland
48:11
where people are more conservative.
48:13
There is some basis of support for the Mula regime.
48:16
And those people will make themselves heard
48:18
and you need to just continue.
48:19
You need to not base everything on the hope
48:22
that if you have an election today,
48:23
the liberals in the cities win, they may not.
48:28
Get a human as well.
48:29
If you've listened to this much of the episode,
48:32
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48:34
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48:36
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49:45
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49:46
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49:49
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