Bulwark Takes - A Few GOP Senators Tell the Truth About Trump’s Iran Mess (Briefly) | Morning Shots Live

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Andrew and Bill went live at 10am ET on Tuesday to cover the notable deflections over the weekend from a small group of GOP Senators about a potential deal with Iran, the worsening approval ratings for Trump and the war, and the reported potential plan by the U.S. to have Iran send its enriched uranium to Pakistan, Turkey, Russia, or China.Read more from Morning Shots: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trumps-iran-war-was-a-failure-deal-ceasefire-hormuz-nuclear-program-senators-wicker-graham-cruzGet 50% off of a new Bulwark+ subscription for the next year, that’s everything we offer on our website, by going to https://www.thebulwark.com/sanity – this is a limited time offer.

All right. I think we're live. Hello, everybody. Good Tuesday morning. I hope you all enjoyed your long Memorial Day weekend that you are recovering. We're glad you're here with us if you are in any state to stream Bullwork content on Tuesday morning. I'm Andrew Rager, White House correspondent for the Bullwork. This is our editor-at-large, Bill Crystal. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every Monday through Friday, Tuesday through Friday this particular week in your inbox for free. Come into you live on Tuesday mornings to talk about what's going on in the news. The world did not have an extraordinarily restaurant. full Memorial Day weekend. There's a lot to talk about. There's a lot that we could talk about, like the sort of unceremonious resignation of D&I Tulsi Gabbard on Friday that we're not even going to talk about. We're not going to get to it at all. We're mostly going to focus today on the latest in the war in Iran, which it's this weirdest situation, Bill, because we have to keep

talking about it because there keeps being new stuff to talk about and because it's unbelievably important to everything that's going on in the world. And yet, a lot of the stuff that there is to talk about. It just seems like we're spinning our wheels talking about it because the negotiators are spinning their wheels. And this morning, Sam Stein was editing your latest morning shots piece, or he thought he was editing your latest morning shots piece. He was in fact in a document from early April where a lot of this stuff about will the ceasefire hold and who can be trusted in all of this and you know, what's America actually going to get out of it. All of that analysis could have just as easily applied to where we are today. That's how sort of little progress there's been on a lot of

this stuff. But we do have some new stuff to talk about. And it's mostly just about how Trump is going to try to get out of this with the minimum possible amount of political damage to him himself. We'll see whether that's even possible, even if that's his main goal, how achievable that actually is, just given the bind that he remains trapped in, having entered this war without a clear off ramp. But let's just start by setting the stage a little bit with where we're at in terms of public perceptions of the war. The short answer to that is not great. This is from from Nate Silver averaging out to updating today, basically his average of where things are in public approval of the war and disapproval. Again, this is from today. Immediately after the Iran war began, about

48% of Americans opposed the conflict, according to the Silver Bulletin average. That was already unpopular relative to past wars, but things have only gotten worse. Nearly 60% of Americans opposed the war today. In fact, I had to extend the Y axis of our polling average. upward to accommodate the increasing unpopularity of the conflict. And now, Bill, you wrote today about the way that not only is this war unpopular, but the specific strategy Trump is pursuing to try to get us out of this unpopular war as quickly as possible is running into a surprising amount of resistance from congressional Republicans on the hill. So can you just kind of set the stage for folks what the genesis of that or the germ of that conflict is and where

these guys are falling on this matter? Yeah, just a couple of points. I mean, I don't think actually, I mean, I'm older than you, and I've seen a few of these peace negotiations. This is how it often is. Once the president decides at some point, this was true in Vietnam and Nixon, he's going to get out. The other side wants to milk the maximum advantage,

maximum advantage out of the president's desire to stop a war. Or we want, sometimes if we're winning, we want to get the maximum advantage from a war. And so these negotiations go on and there's zigs and zags and promises that are half broken and half kept and mediators come in and go, I don't think any of this is very surprising. Trump has wanted to get out of this for quite a while. We know that from the ceasefire in April, all the threats to open the strait, quickly changed to a blockade of the strait, sort of a blockade of the strait, and then an attempt to pressure the Iranians.

Clearly, that wasn't working. So I think there's been, in a way, as I said today, I think the war is a failure for Trump. People are focusing a little bit too much almost on how the peace deal is a failure. But he doesn't, once he, once the war wasn't succeeding, it was not going to, he wasn't going to get a good peace deal, you know, once the Iranian regime was in place, once they'd shown the ability to close the straight and hike gas prices here and hike energy prices around the world, once they'd shown the ability to attack neighboring countries and not pay a decisive price for doing so, once they had muddied the waters on the nuclear program enough that it became clear they were going to resist simply giving all the stuff over to us or inviting us in to take it.

And once all that happened, and once we were unwilling to use ground troops and to really fight the war in a way that would have been, could have been decisive, but there would have been a whole different war, obviously, than Trump was willing to do. Once all that was set up, I think we're kind of where we are. So we're going to, I think actually we're pretty close to something like a deal, which itself will have a million, or at least dozens of zigs and zags and broken promises and deal unraveling. And this part of the deal isn't what they said it is and stuff. but it's not a good deal for us. And at one point I would make, which I think people haven't noticed that, Iran will have more and more leverage. We think about it this way, Andrew, I mean, a month, two months,

three months and now, we've pulled back from the Middle East, presumably, we've discussed all these memorandum of understanding. There are these stipulations. We're supposed to be working on this. We're supposed to be agreeing to that. Iran decides to push the envelope a little bit, and no tolls, no tolls on the straight of our moves. But maybe that environmental tax really does have to be paid.

What was the other one they had? the sort of navigation fee, so they help us, the hardships, and they privately tell us some governments, you know, you want to get through for earlier, you pay us a little more, frankly, what are we going to do? I mean, are we really in a position at that point to come back in? So I think the degree to which they have the leverage, where we don't, is the key point. And part of that leverage is that the war is so unpopular in the U.S., deservedly so, I would say, given the Trump never explained it, never went to Congress for, it, never tried to get bipartisan support for it. The way they conducted was bound to alienate everyone who wasn't already on Team Trump, you know, the way Hexeth spoke and et cetera.

So I think that's why we are where we are. And then the only other thing I'd add is the new news over the weekend, the sort of peg for my little morning shots piece, was that on Saturday, Roger Wicker, the senator from Mississippi, the Republican chair of the Senator Armed Services Committee, Ted Cruz, obviously Senator from Texas, and Lindsey Graham for that, South Carolina, all for a moment told the truth. I mean, they're all in a non-Trump world or in a pre-Trump world since they were all around before Trump.

they were hawks. They were the kind of people who really disliked the Iranian regime, were very open to military force to dislodge it, were open to using ground troops in the Middle East more broadly. And so they were kind of wanted to believe that Trump's war could become the kind of war they hoped it would become a successful one. They were all friends of Israel also. And for that reason, they also wanted it to succeed.

And on Saturday, when it became clear, I'd say what the outlines of the deal were going to be. I think it was clear already, as I've said, but they wanted to believe, right? There was that moment of shock, and they all three denounced it, or they made one last effort, maybe a better way to say it is, is just sort of surely the president's not going to accept this deal. I mean, that's his aides are misleading him, right, all that stuff. But they told the truth. They said this kind of deal would be a very bad deal and a very bad outcome.

They were right. Wickering crews have been silent, I think, since Saturday. Lindsay Graham immediately reversed himself and is now pretending that this fake Trump nonsense about how Oh, actually, we're just expanding the Abraham Accords. It's going to be great. Everyone's going to join the Abraham Accords, which is beyond ludicrous. It's like that gives Lindsey Graham an excuse to go back, get back on Team Trump. So that's where we are.

That's where we are. But I do think those Republican senators, I don't know, what do you think? It's a moment. I hate to overstate any moment of hope with any of these guys ever continuing to tell the truth or standing up to Trump. But I feel like it's a little bit of a moment for the future where people, are going to look back and say, you know, they said it was a bad outcome. And a few months or now, I'm afraid we're all going to be saying they were right. It was a bad outcome.

Yeah, let's take just a second to kind of walk through some of these specific posts that were made that you're gesturing toward here. Here's Roger Wicker, very, very prominent, you know, armed services focused Republican congressman. He tweets out on Friday, we are at a moment that will define President Trump's legacy. His instincts have been to finish the job he started in Iran. But he is being ill-advised to pursue a deal that would not be worth the paper it's written on. Our commander-in-chief needs to allow America's skilled armed forces to finish the destruction of Iran's conventional military capabilities and reopen the strait. Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran's Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness. We must finish what we started.

It's pastime for action. And then here's Wicker one day later on Saturday. The rumored 60-day ceasefire with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for not. a couple things about this. One, it is not sort of lily-livered, you know, you catch more flies with honey type criticism. That's pretty striking. It would be a disaster to strike a ceasefire like this. It would completely cancel out any gains from Operation Epic Fury. At the same time, you get that classic move in that first post of, you know, if Trump would just listen to his heart of hearts,

I'm really confident he would agree with me. But alas, it's all these viziers. It's the, it's the advisors. There's not a lot of reason to believe this is the case, right? I mean, President Trump rolled the dice with going into this war in the first place, plainly hoping and believing that it would be another decapitation strike, another sort of replication of what he did in Iran last year, a replication of what he did in Venezuela last year, quick, easy win, not a lot of downside, no risk of like this forever war entanglement that we would decapitate the regime, get better new leaders in there who would be willing to cut a deal to stop the bombing. And when that didn't happen, and maybe he just got unlucky, you know, maybe there was some reason to believe if I'm going to steal me on this thing.

Maybe there was a reason to roll the dice on that. I don't know. It doesn't seem like that to me, but you can at least see on the front end why maybe he hoped that was the case. The problem for Trump is he's not the kind of guy who can basically say, look, we rolled the dice on this. We did not achieve the outcome that we wanted. you know, sometimes you get unlucky in these games, and now we need to find a negotiated settlement to get things as close to back, to cut our losses,

take the small wins we've gotten, and get things as close to back to normal as we can. He can't admit ever that things didn't really go according to plan on the one hand, and he can't admit ever that he's really settling on the other hand. And so it's this weird sort of constant situation where this sort of deal to end all deals, like getting Iran to join the Abraham Accords,

is actually right around the corner, right? And we're going to get there. I don't know. Let's move on real quick to a couple of these. Let me just add one thing to what you're saying. I mean, look, it's their real world, it's not just Trump's psychology, though, that's a large part of it. There's real world consequences to what he said. If the war ended four or five weeks after it'd begun, which is entirely possible,

and indeed, perfectly reasonable since nothing, we've made no progress since that. And it would have been a better outcome for Trump, right? Gas prices wouldn't have gone up as much. Energy wouldn't have been as disrupted as much. the cost would have gone down for us, the humiliation in a sense of us continuing to say, oh, no, we're going to prevail, would have gone down. So his psychological inability to cut his losses really caused him more damage.

It's like being in poker, right? You fold early, you lose less than if you fold later. The other point of just make it, we mentioned Trump's war. It is amazing how much this is Trump's war, right? I mean, it's not just that he went to war without having Congress on board, without consulting allies, all the things that I could say normal presidents would have done. But also even within the administration, this was so much, I have to think Trump's war. He was the one who thought Venezuela. We love Venezuela. It went to his head. He talked to Netanyahu.

Netanyahu told him we could bump off the leadership of Iran. He said yes. I'm sure Hague Seth was on board. I guess Rubio was on board. Pretty clear Vance wasn't really on board. But, I mean, I've been in administrations, went to war, in the first Bush administration. You know, there's usually a lot of discussion, a lot of layers of people chiming in. It becomes a kind of the president obviously shapes it ultimately, but it becomes kind of a, you know, a consensus decision within the administration, you might say, of how to do it. And therefore, you have a lot of people who have thought it through and have their own angles on it and then there are meetings. And then someone says, I don't know, like in the first Gulf War with Bush, maybe we shouldn't go to Baghdad. there was a debate about that should be ended early.

But there were people who had been involved in the very beginning and had thought through the different alternatives. With Trump, it's so much, I guess it's true of his administration as a whole, right? I mean, it's so much just his own head that's driving everything. So I think it does, when Nate Silver shows Trump's approval, the approval for the war going down and at the same time, the approval for Trump going down, I think he's particularly vulnerable in a sense,

was it so much his personal gambit. Yeah, yeah. Let me get into one of these other posts. We can probably skip Lindsey Graham. Everyone knows he is both a hawk and a total sick fan. But let's talk about Ted Cruz for just one second here because, again, this is another one that is really pretty astonishing in how strong the rhetoric here. He does the same thing right at the top. I'm deeply concerned about what we're hearing about in Iran deal being pushed by some voices in the administration. It's not the president, it's some voices. But here we go. President Trump's decision to strike Iran was the most consequential decision of his second term. You can say that again. He was right to do so. much more questionable, and we achieved extraordinary military results, including destroying all of their missiles and drones and sinking their entire Navy. If the result of all that is to be an Iranian regime still run by Islamists who chant death to America, now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium and develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the strait of Hormuz, then that outcome would be a disastrous mistake. So again, really, really striking prediction for

the direction that Trump seems to be leaning right now. And the thing I wanted to ask you, Bill, I think there was this conventional wisdom that kind of developed in the early days of the war, right? Like Trump launches this war and Joe Kent goes out and guys like Tucker Carlson are have their hair on fire about how bad this all is. And, you know, there's this sort of perception that there's this sort of MAGA revolt from the MAGA isolationists. But this conventional wisdom then quickly forms that that's all overblown. And in reality, Trump's base is still the Republican base. They're still very anti-Iran. They still love to see America flex its muscles abroad. that Trump has much more buy-in from his people on this stuff than, than, you know, Tucker Carlson or

Joe Kent would give him credit for. Now, the question is, how durable, how sustainable do you think that support is, just given these sort of mounting strategic futility and the possibility of what would, at least under any other administration, would code to a lot of these voters and a lot of these lawmakers as basically American surrender here? I think it's really a good question, and it's important one to keep an eye on going forward, and I'm going to throw it back to you in a minute of some curious for your thoughts. No, on this. I mean, this is a real interesting question.

Does it spill over to other issues? Does it erode his automatic support for all these Republican senators that he's had in so many issues, including on repeated votes on this war powers resolution? Now, I think he was about to lose that majority in the House, and maybe in the Senate he sort of did last week temporarily. So, you know, is this a precursor of things to come? Is this kind of a one-off? We go back to business beforehand, where there are 51 votes for, you know, ICE and for everything

else he cares about and the Republicans have been willing to go along with, sometimes I believe that. But, you know, one thing. Maybe you can pull up that Ted Cruz thing one more time. I hadn't really noticed this one, even though I quoted it in warning shots. How about this thing, including the first epic, we achieved extraordinary military results, including destroying all of their missiles and drones. That's just not true.

I mean, it's like literally, obviously not true because they're literally shooting missiles and drones, firing missiles and drones at us as we speak. And there have been different CIA studies, I guess, that had 70% of their, 30% of their missiles still there or whatever, however many drones. It's kind of unbelievable that they still, even if you're cruising and you're objecting to Trump,

you sort of have to, it's a different way of bowing deeply, right? Well, the military part was great. It's these creepy civilian advisors, I suppose, who are leading you astray. They can't admit that the war, even militarily, was not as much of success as Hexeth claimed. And honestly, it's the military claimed. And that's another way in which I think this kind of gets out to your real question, your question. How much does it erode confidence? If you're a Republican senator and you're slightly concerned about the budget deficit

and you're slightly just concerned about spending and about priorities, and there's a $1.5 trillion dollar defense department request. I don't know. Maybe you don't say anything. Maybe you're all in Trump, and plus you're sort of hawkish anyway in defense. But maybe you also think, I don't know. I mean, do we have 100% confidence in the PTAX department?

Defense Department's going to spend all that money brilliantly, you know? Maybe a little more of a gradual buildup would be good. That's what I really don't know. I mean, part of me thinks, come on, these guys, they'll be back in the fold by the time they've returned to town. a week from now, we're talking a week from today. Part of me thinks, I don't know, this leaves a mark. What do you think?

Yeah, I genuinely don't know. I genuinely don't know which way this is going to go. I am also going to be extremely interested in seeing, it's not as though this is the only thing that the Republican Senate has been sort of feeling more confident about crossing Trump on lately, right? There's been a number of these things, in part because we are now basically through primary season, right?

the Trump's immediate ability to hit back against any of these people. Obviously, a lot of these senators aren't running for re-election this year anyway. But we're kind of getting through the moment in the cycle where Trump has these specific pain points, and we're seeing more defections from these lawmakers on things like his ballroom or things like his horrible, you know, slush fund for J-Sixers, the anti-weaponization fund, where, you know, these guys seem to be discovering some kind of backbone that would have been sort of shocking a year ago. where everybody just kind of had this idea in their minds, that Trump's going to do whatever he wants, and Republicans in Congress will be utterly supine about it.

So as far as the lawmakers are concerned, it will be interesting to see. I mean, they're all kind of leaving themselves some outs here, right? Not all of them. I guess Cruz is basically saying this is going to be a disaster. But, you know, they're trying to win Trump back over now. And if Trump's, you know, soldiers ahead with this stuff anyway and does sort of pull out, that does not necessarily imply that they will continue to sort of clang the bell in retrospect about how bad it was in the same way that they are right now clanging about how bad it will be.

On the question of, you know, not lawmakers, but the base of the voters, I will be interested to see, again, how this one plays out too, because it is often sort of bandied about that voters don't really care about foreign policy. And I guess that's maybe true when it comes to, like, who they're deciding to vote for in any given in any given election, you know, they're not going in there like, this guy's posture toward Ukraine is this way. And that guy's posture toward Venezuela is the other way. But I do think, I mean, if you look back at the Biden administration, the moment that that he started to kind of go off a cliff popularity wise was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I do think that that there are

moments when, when America is sort of shown to look weak or feeble or, or, you know, clumsy on the world stage, that even if people don't have really strong, like, foreign policy views, like ideologically. They just don't like feeling like the president got panced by some little country halfway around the world because it makes America look bad. It makes America look weak. And I think that this is sort of what Trump is really striving. I mean, that's kind of his main, he basically has two main agendas right now. One is, one is avoiding that. And the other is putting the economic picture back together to whatever extent is possible. And the question's going to be, does he even have cards to play on either one of these

things? Right? So we'll see. There is a sort of unstoppable force meets immovable object element to this when it comes to his base in particular, because again, these people are pretty hawkish. They do want to see us beat Iran and not the other way around. They were willing to take Trump's word for a number of weeks that that was the final destination of all of this. And that's why they should be willing to accept all of the economic pain. And if that doesn't pan out, then what's all the economic pain been for. But on the other hand, you know, there's the there's the unstoppable force that is Trump's usual, typical, just sort of full across the board messaging dominance when it comes to just sort of telling these people the way it is and having them believe it. So we're going to find out.

That will be interesting to watch in the public polling as well. I wanted to dwell on the other variable. Sorry, go ahead. Just to obvious point, the variable also will just be energy prices and gas prices. I mean, if they go all the way back down to $3 on Labor Day, then I think, you're you can imagine it going pretty far into the rear view mirror the whole thing and kind of a yeah it didn't work out great but you understand what he's trying to do maybe he'll have done cuba in the meantime if if added if gas prices are halfway between where they are today and where they were before the war but still really elevated if we're having an economic slowdown partly as a result if inflation is up partly as a result again i think that reality gets much harder to to to you know to overcome so that's that's obviously important thing to watch as well Yeah, yeah. You mentioned Cuba. I want to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Let me just say real quick for people who have joined us since we started. I'm Andrew Eger with the bulwark. That's Bill Crystal with the bulwark. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every weekday morning. And we come live on Tuesday mornings on the Bullwarks channels to talk about what's going on in the news. We have been discussing the perpetual war in Iran, the endless war, the forever war that's going on in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump's attempts increasingly strident attempts to get. us back out of it, to the chagrin of some in the Republican Party, to the, you know, leaving enormous questions about what the new status quo is going to be, whether Iran has been weakened by this at all, or whether they're in fact strengthened, whether the Strait of Hormuz

will be reopened, all of this stuff. But you mentioned Cuba, Bill. And this has been sort of astonishing to me is, it really does seem as though Trump's instinct is not to pull out of Iran and, like, really rededicate himself to addressing his domestic problems and like, you know, really going all in on affordability and, you know, making a giant, you know, messaging push around this housing bill that is sort of quietly going through Congress right now with his blessing, stuff like that. But instead, it does sort of look like he's like, well, you know, this Iran one's kind of a drag. Let's find some other new place to sort of throw American power around, see if we can get a slightly better outcome this time in Cuba.

I mean, what's going on there? I don't know people have been really following this as closely, but can you kind of just talk about the pivot we're starting to see? Well, we've been pressuring Cuba, and there's a humanitarian crisis there, and the regime is much, much weaker. It was already weak and weakening and is now weaker as a result of our pressure.

I can imagine it falling. I could imagine us being able to negotiate a Venezuela-type removal of the very top tier of their communist government, I could also imagine the place kind of falling apart into chaos. I don't know if we're going to actually invade or simply assume that we can or maybe do a Maduro-type snatch operation. The indictment of the elderly Castro who's still there, Fidel's brother, I guess he's not technically president, but is still presumably important.

I think he's 95 years old and lays the groundwork for that. We're certainly doing everything to signal that we think of this. Trump thinks of this is another Venezuela. And from Trump's point of view, maybe he's processed it as you know interventions in small Latin American or Central American countries work. Interventions in the Middle East are bad. I mean, you know, and look, Cuba is a tie. I mean, honestly, Iran, any intelligent person knew Iran is always going to be tough. And it's a big country with it's been governed, you know, by a tough-minded group of people.

Even if you bump off the first tier, there's a second and third tier. Cuba is a little different, right? I don't even know how many million people is Cuba, but it's many fewer that it used to be, I think, because of all the exiles and people fleeing. And so, you know, several million people on a small island, a hundred miles from our coast. I mean, presumably it's one. Now, having said that, you know, we had a very bad military adventure in Cuba,

in 1960 one or two. They had pigs, 61, I guess, was 61, I think. And, you know, it's not like it's so obvious that you couldn't have resistance there and problems and so forth if we actually try to use force. But, yeah, I think troop is very chump, Trump, whatever his name is. Trump is very committed to this. And I said, Troop as I was thinking of Trump and Rubio, and Rubio's committed to it.

And I guess, I will say this, though. Look, as an American, I hope that whatever happens, happens without American casualties and if that matter without Cuban casualties. And I hope, God knows, I hope the human people finally have a decent regime there. To make it, a decent regime will take a lot of work and investment on our part. You know, I mean, we have helped other countries make this transition. but it's not going to happen if we just topple one guy, bless someone else and stand aside, I don't think.

You know, it's going to need all kinds of investments and guidance and reassurance to businesses that they can come in and so forth. So none of that is Trump style. None of that is consistent with America First ideology. So he could try to do this on the cheap. And Cuba is pretty close, right? So if Cuba's a mess a year from now, you can get an initial little bit of a burst of enthusiasm of my stuff, but then people look at that too and say, what if there are refugees, you know,

leaving and try to come to Miami and know, how does that intervention look? And then are we going to send people in and we don't have any ID anymore? You know, all kinds of obvious things, questions that would be raised. So I'm worried about that. I'm curious to see how it plays politically. I mean, Congress should authorize the use of force there. I'm just going to say, you know, there's no, Ruby tries to say occasionally Cuba's a national security threat to us. Even he hasn't had the nerve to say it's an imminent national security threat. So what's the rationale for us going in and topping the regime unless, I mean, I'm not against it entirely if we, if we could produce a better outcome, but we should have Congress congressional blessing and not

congressional participation and bipartisan participation, if possible in this endeavor. Anyway, that's not Trump's style. And so I, this thing could go badly too, but he thinks it'll be a big plus. Final point of just, I don't know, history suggests these things can be, even if they go, well, they're not lasting in terms of their effects, you know, I mean, it's people are going to not fine. Yeah. It was, well, the proof is Venezuela, right? That was, I mean, you could look at those Nate Silver's graph of Trump's approval. You're not going to find Venezuela on the graph. You're not going to see a bounce. Oh, that was Venezuela where he went up eight points and then he gave it back. He didn't go up at all as far as I can recall. So, yeah, yeah. No, that's totally true. And look, this is what, what the, the various political imaginations and U.S. policy toward Latin America, really not my bailiwick, not my bag. The only only. thing that I would say is that all of our discussions over weeks and weeks and weeks about the Iran War in particular have just constantly come back to hubris, right? They've constantly

come back to a failure to consider downsides and a failure to just consider the fact that maybe nothing's going to go quite the way we expect it to. And we have seen historically quite a few of these sort of interventions that seem to begin from exactly the headspace you mentioned of a minute ago of like, well, what's the downside of throwing our way to ground a little bit? in Latin America, one giant consequence of which, over decades, has been enormous destabilization of that entire region, giant waves of mass migration south to north into the United States, which is part of what created the material conditions for Donald Trump to take power with this, with this sort of like giant political backlash against mass immigration and these sort of record-setting

border crossings and all of this stuff. And so it's like, you think maybe Donald Trump, of all people, could get it through his head that like, actually, no, there are. are maybe some negative consequences to throwing your weight around in Latin America. Obviously, Cuba's sort of its own case in a lot of these ways, so who knows. But that's the only thing I have to say about any of that. Can I go back and make one other point on Iran? Just I know we already kind of turned the page on it. But I wanted to throw up on the subject of Trump trying to save face with all of this.

I wanted to throw up this one piece from the New York Post. Specifically, I mean, there's been this big sticking point of the Iranian for the longest time. I mean, Trump has been trying and trying and trying to bully these people into handing over the uranium, and it does not appear that that's happening. And so now we're getting these two face-saving options for Iran to dispose of its enriched uranium. And those face-saving options include basically one thing is, well, what if you gave it to Pakistan instead? What if you were to give that stuff to Turkey or Russia or China? Would that be a little bit more amenable to you, Iranians? And the other possibility of, and this is not really an alternative possibility,

but just structural possibility here would be just sort of kicking the can down the road on this and basically saying we will get a ceasefire now in exchange for a reopened Strait of Hormuz and that will kick off these further nuclear negotiations which just gives Trump basically a little bit of economic lifeline in terms of getting the straight reopened, starting to re-normalize energy flows, hopefully,

although the devil's in the details there too, with how much Iran actually intends to restore the pre-existing status quo or whether they are going to be now taking more and more cuts and, you know, keeping more and more ships from going through. But at any rate, get that back into a relatively stable and normalized situation and then turn the page to negotiating on, I mean, they really have drawn a line in the sand on this nuclear stuff, right? They've been saying all along, if this is their, the beginning and ending of their asks, is Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. They can't be allowed

to hang on to this enriched material and so on and so on. But Iran has not budged on this negotiating wise, and it appears that Trump is now the one who's looking for some sort of face-saving out here. It is striking. The idea that giving it to Russia, that's fine or Pakistan. That's really great, you know. And who knows if they give it all and who knows if they don't get some of it back? And, you know, again, there's so many, you know, maybe they let Pakistan ships go through the Gulf if they do swuggle back some of the way. I mean, the degree to which we will have less and less control over this, I should think, after the deal is negotiated.

What everyone thinks of the Obama deal, there were very intrusive inspections and there were. were six parties to the deal, the European countries, I think Russia and China, too. So there were people who did keep going for, you know, there was an actual regime. I didn't like the deal and there were problems with it that was sort of could persist over time, was persisting until Trump got us out of the deal in 2018, wherever that was, in 2017, maybe. But that won't be the case here. It's not like other countries are going to sort of say, you know what, we'll take a, maybe a few will, but I mean, you can't count on it.

So I do feel like, yes, this is face-saving is the right word. word and I even say temporarily face saving. I'd say very much to think about the straight to this one, more focus on the nuclear thing, mostly because I guess the Trump people have made that, as you say, the line in the sand or the red line. But the straightover moves can reopen in a lot of different ways, right? And one of those ways could be genuinely freedom of navigation, freedom of the seas. The second way could be all kinds of side deals, taxes, arrangements, maybe preferential arrangements

for some of which we wouldn't know about. How do we know if South Korea or Pakistan or whoever sends Iran at a different account, mind you, some reconstruction aid. And then it turns out, guess what, their ships go through a little ahead of everyone else's. It turns out they kind of want that reconstruction aid for everyone. I mean, the degree to which they will have continued leverage, especially on this trade, whatever, I assume Trump will at least be able to get it sort of pretty much reopened for now as part of the deal. And so there'll be dozens of ships going through pretty soon, though not right away, right?

Anyway, the degree to which that also is susceptible to monkey around by the Iranians is, it can't be, you know, is striking to me. So it's not a real deal. I mean, again, the Obama deal was a real deal. It was 160 pages. There were enforcement mechanisms. There were snapbacks. There was this. There was the U.N.

There was a lot of, you know, people involved. It couldn't just, it took Trump had to pull us out of it, right, to end it. it wasn't sort of coming unraveled on its own, honestly. These deals all strike me as a type that could be kind of vaguely remembered by history, you know, six months or 18 months from now. Yeah, yeah. Well, we're going to keep following all that. Obviously, all this is still very in flux.

So who knows, you know, if you're not watching this live, if you haven't to be catching up on this video on Wednesday afternoon or something like that, maybe the picture will all be very different. And you'll have to go actually read our words in morning shots to catch up on what's going on with that. But we'll leave this here for now. I just want to spend, you know, we've gone half an hour. We can wrap pretty soon.

But I wanted to spend just a couple quick minutes on this completely unrelated story that we got over the weekend, which was Pope Leo, Pope Leo the 15th, released this papal encyclical on sort of the Catholic Church's position toward AI. And we've been talking a lot about AI. I feel like we're going to keep talking about AI more and more in the weeks and months and years ahead. It's becoming an unbelievably potent political issue here in America. It is already having and is going to continue to have enormous, enormous economic consequences, both good and bad. Let me just quote a little bit from the Wall Street Journal, which is what I include in Morning Shots this morning. Leo is essentially, he's not condemning the technology as inherently evil, but he is basically saying this arms race that we have now, both between countries, you know, this US versus China arms race, as well as the way that this is, this technology is owned by just a couple of incredibly powerful companies here and abroad. is not conducive to sort of hooking this thing up to any particular good vision for the future.

So I'll just quote a little bit. Leo used two biblical images to describe the choice humanity faces. The primary choice is not between a yes or no to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem, he wrote. In the Bible, the Tower of Babel symbolizes a top-down, grandiose project where decisions are driven by pride, profit, and a push for homogenization the Pope suggested in his text. In the rebuilding of Jerusalem, diverse people worked together to rebuild the ruined walls and established a fraternal coexistence within them, he added.

Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed, freed from the logic that turned it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death, he said. It must be at the service of all and of the common good. Okay, so this is just one little political strand in this big fight over AI, right? I mean, there's all sorts of different fights they're taking place against data centers and different regulatory fights that are trying to happen. This is more of a, you know, a moral case from the Catholic Church, from the Pope. I don't really know exactly how it all fits into this, but, but Bill, you are interested in,

in this encyclical little, what do you see as kind of, I mean, is this the Pope kind of spitting in the wind here and it will be important to Catholics and not so many other people, or do you see this as kind of politically significant document and moment? I mean, obviously, it's hard to know. I think it could open the door to real political significance. It itself is more hortatory, and I'd say, you know, the solutions are sort of vague and general, Well, that's not really his role, though, to figure out the legislative solutions. I think, if anything, he understates, though, the speed with which AI is moving,

and probably it's actual substantively what it actually will be able to do very soon. There's still a little bit, I think, of wishful thinking in there about how we can sort of turn it into Jerusalem and not babble, but it is going to be uniform around the world, and it is going to be everywhere, basically, and accessible to pretty much everyone, and pretty hard to control unless there's a real, attempt the way there was with nuclear weapons to seriously control it, which really would suggest all kinds of limitations, both from a national security point of view, but also from a kind of, you know, the way with nuclear power, certain, you know, international organizations, I think we're awfully far from there. So on the sort of substance of that, I think it's an

open, but in a very important way, it opens the debate, it legitimizes the debate. And I think it's comparing it to an arms race is, it does that, right? I mean, we have sort of controlled the spread of nuclear weapons, but that took a heck of a lot of work. and effort and pressure and constraints and laws and so forth and so domestic and international. So I feel like that part of it, he's opened the door to some of that. But I also think the politics of it, everyone I've talked to is involved in, you know, almost everyone I know is involved in real politics in real time this year. And certainly thinking ahead to 28, looking at focus groups, looking at data, polling data and survey data says you just can't overestimate how much. AI is going to be a huge issue, how worried people are about it, both the economic effects,

the effects just on energy costs, the data centers, but also the kind of social effects, and how it's going to change our lives. And they don't know what to do about it. I don't know what to do about it. But people want it, I think, discussed and debated and not simply, and I think the unpopular position is going to be to just roll over for it. I mean, it's easy to denounce people who have questions as Sledites, but in the real world, people look at this and think, this is, you know, once.

at a lifetime, once in a century type of breakthrough technologically, we can't just, you know, sort of just watch it happen because some companies are pushing it. And especially when the heads of those companies, was it the co-head, I guess, of Anthropic was with the Pope. And it was quite eloquent, I thought. And he said, in the Pope's presence, there are things happening that we don't fully understand. And this is where the Pope was saying, well, they're not huge. This is still technology. It's a tool. They're not like humans. And he was saying, I don't know. They seem to have some human emotions. I mean, I do feel like that part of it is going to, is, is just very challenging, honestly challenging. Anyway, I think it's a huge issue and it will be very interesting to see for me,

both the sort of more prosaic political side of it as well as the more, I don't know, philosophical side of it, play out over these next few years. But I think, don't you think we've, I think we hit it, we've crossed the line where it was sort of speculative, sort of fanciful. You know, most people could kind of, I conclude myself on this, weren't really educating themselves about it much, picking up some anecdotes about hallucinations here and about fakes-thus there. And now one does feel like you need to be, people need to, we need to be serious about this. There was a plausible case. It seemed plausible at the time based on what the models were currently able to do and the possibility that they might plateau right around

there. There was a plausible case for a number of years to be made that this was mostly Silicon Valley hype in order to, you know, get a bunch of venture capital money flowing in directions that they liked, and that ultimately this was going to pop, and it was not really going to reorganize or reorient much of the economy or much of society in any way. And I think that that ship has just sailed, and it's been, it's actually sailed in terms of what was knowable about the future long ago. But there is a growing, dawning realization for more and more people that that ship has sailed, as people kind of, you know, update their priors at their own speeds and encounter new information, you know, whenever they happen to encounter it, it's a slow process.

But, I mean, I genuinely just sort of struggle to even summon up, like, metaphors large enough to sort of, like, describe what the disruptions are likely to look like. I mean, it's not, it's like an arms race and all the stuff that comes along with an arms race. And that's not, that's not an invented metaphor either. I mean, like, it is genuinely a national security concern. This is not an invented thing, whether our models or China's models are stronger when it comes to cybersecurity and cyber warfare. like that's a thing these guys have to think about. But it's not just this like international arms race. It's also analogous to like the fight against smoking and, you know, all these education debates and all these environmental debates and all these debates about the way the economy should be structured. I mean, like it's it's such a broad and sort of flexible technology with so many possible applications in so many different areas that it just implicates all of these things at once.

and it's coming, it's like coming like a tsunami toward everybody. And nobody has like a deep well of like preexisting thought that they've, they know how to like what boxes to put it all in and things like that. I guess that's one reason why I do appreciate, you know, the Pope weighing in on this, because he is actually drawing on a pretty deep well of his particular tradition, his, of the Catholic Church's moral teaching and social teaching on, on a lot of this stuff. And I think that, you know, that's a start rather than everybody just kind of being like, well, I saw some tweets about, you know, water usage, and I have this sort of like overarching,

broad-based, vague anxiety about maybe it comes from my job someday. And, you know, like, that, it seems like a step in the right direction in those ways. But again, like, unbelievably gigantic political and social project to figure out what's going on with this. We'll leave it there. We don't, I mean, we've talked about this in the past. We'll talk about it in the future. It's going to be incredibly important politically. But for now, that's fine. Thanks, Pope Leo. I'm going to get around to final. reading the rest of your encyclical. I only read about a third of it today. So we'll, we'll get that. Maybe some more in morning shots tomorrow you can look forward to,

to look forward to that. Bill, let's leave it there. Anything else you want to add on this before I sign us off? Nope, I agree with you. AI will be big, and we'll try to do our best in morning shots to cover it, but there's so many different aspects. It really, people need to, I really do feel this personally. I spent a fair amount of the weekend just reading and trying to read up a little bit out of it. There's so many angles, but even, it's funny, you can, you can still pick up quite a lot pretty quickly. And then, of course, one has to also try it, right, and experiment with it, which I had not done much. I've got to say, I feel bad about that. Have you used it much? I use it more and more. I have like firewalls with like, you know, what I let it touch in terms of

my work product and all these sorts of things. And I'm, and that's the other trick of it is it because it seems so plausible the words that it spits out. You do have to continue to retell yourself this is less trustworthy than it sounds because you can have that as just like a thing you know about it. But just if you are constantly sort of like participating in it and just sort of seeing the stream of reasonable seeming prose coming over you, it's easy to forget. It's easy to forget. No, I actually do have to go back and double check these facts. So you really do have to have like kind of mantras about it. Like it doesn't think for itself. It doesn't know for itself. It's just spitting out words. And a lot of times those words are really useful and helpful for research and for finding other

things. But you do still have to approach it with a healthy amount of skepticism that is, that I have found is more, It requires more work than I would have thought to maintain that skepticism, but you still got to. So that's, I mean, and again, we don't really know, like, maybe some of these downsides do end up falling away, the way other downsides already have fallen away as the models continue to improve. But this is not a known known. Nobody knows to what extent this stuff is baked into the technology as it will always exist. And to what extent that isn't the case. Anyway, we will leave it there, especially because I just got a notification in my headphones that my headphones are dying. so good timing. Thanks, Bill, for coming on talking about all of this. We'll do it again next week. We'll be here next Tuesday on Substack and YouTube. Subscribe to those places if you haven't already. We got a lot more good stuff coming at you. Not just us, all us guys, all us bulwark folks. There's so much good stuff happening on video, happening in text all the time. Thanks to you all out there for watching, and we will see you next time.