Letters from an American - Trading Strategy for Ideology

Starting point is 00:00:06 July 31, 26, Courtney Kubay, Monica Alba, Peter Nicholas, Gordon Lubold, Catherine Doyle, and Andrea Mitchell of NBC News reported Wednesday that President Donald J. Trump is exasperated, that the Iran war is dragging on and that his advisors can't agree what to do next. Reportedly, he erupted last week during a meeting with his national security team, shouting expletives at the officials in the room. One of Trump's allies told the reporters that Trump had not expected the war to last as long as it has. There was not a real strategy for how long

Starting point is 00:00:46 or what they should do to get to the endpoint. He did not intend this to be a long-drawn-out war, the person said. Yesterday, the war began to widen as a drone hit a gas storage tanker owned by a U.S. company in Egypt near the Suez, canal. No one has claimed responsibility. And Iran struck at American installations in Jordan. U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces launched strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. At a cabinet meeting at Camp David today, Trump told reporters he intends to hit Iran with heavy

Starting point is 00:01:24 military strikes again to force Iranian negotiators to give in to his demands. We will be hitting them very hard, he said. And you know, at some point they're going to say, we just can't take it anymore. We just want to win, he said. We're doing very well. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegesith did not appear to have a strategy for their war on Iran. Instead, they had an ideology. That ideology elevates individualism over the idea behind the modern American state that government should regulate business, maintain a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and support an international order based in rules rather than in military might. Since the 1950s, opponents of that modern state have celebrated the American individual,

Starting point is 00:02:20 especially the American cowboy, as the figure the American government should privilege and protect. In their mythology, the cowboy wanted not. from the government but to be left alone, to rise through his own hard work, protecting himself and his family from wrongdoers with his gun and his principles. The education, expertise, cooperation, and coalitions on which the modern U.S. stood before Trump were signs not of strength, but of weakness. That ideology seems to have been what was behind the attack on Iran. In 2015, The U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched geranium significantly

Starting point is 00:03:19 and allow inspections in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump maintained it was one of the worst deals ever made by our country. He took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegesith brought this ideology into the Defense Department, which he tried to rebrand the Department of, of war. In 2024, Hegesith published a book titled The War on Warriors, Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. In it, he claimed that the U.S. military was weak and effeminate because its leaders had embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion. His prescription for the country involved getting rid of the Geneva Conventions, which recognized human rights for non-combatants

Starting point is 00:04:25 in war, claiming, they forced the U.S. troops to fight with one hand behind our back. In his confirmation hearings, Hegesith refused to tell Senator Angus King, an independent of Maine, that he would honor those agreements. On September 5, 2025, Hegseth said, changing the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War, was part of his campaign to spread a warrior ethos at the Pentagon. The rebranding, he said, was part of restoring intentionality to the use of force.

Starting point is 00:05:02 We're going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We're going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this war department, Mr. President, just like America, is back. But Trump's war in Iran has illustrated the weakness of that vision. Trump reiterated yet again today that the U.S. has dominated Iran's military. They're being decimated. They have no Navy. They have no air force. They have no anti-aircraft, he said. But for all that, they retain

Starting point is 00:05:46 their ability to choke world trade by controlling the Strait of Hormuz. The very condition previous president's work to avoid through negotiations. An article yesterday by Politico's senior foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Tusi suggests that the cowboy approach to foreign policy has another downside. Tusi called out the extreme attacks of Trump and his aides on the International Criminal Court, or ICC, and wrote that, although the U.S. is not a signatory to that court, former government officials and legal scholars suspect Trump and administration officials are worried about future prosecutions. On July 13th, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the administration intends to dismantle the ICC, brick by brick, if necessary. A press release from the State Department on the same day

Starting point is 00:06:47 said that the U.S. will feature a whole of government response to systematically disable the ICC's ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty. A Republican operative, close to the White House, Bill Cortese, told Tusi that some administration officials are afraid that if Democrats come into power, an unchecked ICC and un-checked ICC, other international institutions are going to unleash a wave of litigation against this administration and anyone associated with it. Tusi notes that during the administration, U.S. law enforcement and military officials have been accused of human rights violations that reach across borders. Notably, on September 2, 2025, three days before Hegsett's maximum lethality, not tepid legality,

Starting point is 00:07:47 speech, the administration began strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Those strikes have killed more than 220 people, but the administration has offered no evidence to prove its claims that those killed were narco-terrorists killed to stop the flow of cocaine to the U.S. Trump claims the strikes have virtually ended drug trafficking by sea, but on July 27th, Alex Horton, Terence McCoy, Samantha Schmidt, and Dylan Moriarty of the Washington Post, reported that according to Pentagon officials and officials from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the strikes have not reduced the cocaine coming into the U.S. Indeed, the dropping price of the drug suggests there is more of it now than there was a year ago.

Starting point is 00:08:38 Instead, the strikes have simply prompted criminal organizations to find new routes. The strikes have also disrupted the law enforcement system in which lower-level participants inform on higher-ups, as the lower-level sources are being pulled back. While the strikes appear to have done little to stop the flow of drugs, legal analysts say they look a lot like former president Rodrigo Duterte's extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers and users. Law professor Charlie Trumbull reminded readers of foreign policy, that in 2017, Trump called Duterte to congratulate him for doing an unbelievable job on the drug problem. Trumbull also noted that Duterte is now behind bars in the Hague, charged with crimes against humanity for trying to get rid of criminals by unlawful means,

Starting point is 00:09:35 including murder. The Trump administration should be concerned, Trumbull warned. On July 25th, the U.S. State Department cheered Venezuela's withdrawal from the treaty that established the ICC and said it welcomed the new Venezuelan government's partnership on American-led efforts to dismantle the corrupt and worthless ICC. It continued, the ICC is neither credible, independent, nor legitimate, and called on all members of the ICC to abandon it. Today, Missy Ryan and Nancy A. Yusuf of the Atlantic reported that in the wake of the U.S. strike on the Menab School that killed 168 people, mostly school children, in the first

Starting point is 00:10:26 hours of the war, the Pentagon is considering reversing some of the deep cuts hegseth made to the staff at the Defense Department. A report by the Pentagon Inspector General found that cuts to the civilian harm protection staff, who worked to protect non-combatants, may have violated laws. Ryan and Yusuf explained that the U.S. military had spent decades building its civilian protections. Leaders understood that battlefield victories were insufficient to win military operations, and that protecting civilians is crucial to public support for those operations. Ryan and Yusuf noted that to reflect this understanding, the Pentagon in 2006, formally added legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance to its principles of joint operations,

Starting point is 00:11:22 defining legitimacy as the legality, morality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken. A U.S. official told Ryan and Yusef that the leadership, of U.S. combat commands uniformly support the restoration of the personnel whose job it is to protect civilians. But Hegseth has not committed to the restoration of the old system, the journalist note. And even if he does, it will have little effect unless he changes his own rhetoric. For his part, Trump appears to be addressing concerns about future prosecutions, whether by the ICC or at U.S. courts, by keeping control of the government after the midterms. Today, Trump disagreed with the assessment of investigators

Starting point is 00:12:13 that a recent cyber attack on municipal water systems in Minnesota was likely the work of Iranian hackers. Instead, he blamed Democrats. We heard in Minnesota there was a cyber attack and they blame it on Iran, he told reporters. I don't think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota, because they're grossly incompetent.

Starting point is 00:12:36 There was a cyber attack of 30 water plants, and I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. There is another piece of evidence this week that the abandonment of education and expertise in favor of a warrior ethos has weakened the U.S. on the world stage. At an international conference on AIDS in Rio de Janeiro,

Starting point is 00:13:02 an official of the U.S. State Department showed a map of Africa on which six fake countries were identified with the names of random real countries, including Nigeria, where several hundred U.S. soldiers are deployed. Reuters identified the image as AI. Attendees took screenshots and posted them online. Whoever created and approved this, slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work. One wrote. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead of Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.

Letters from an American - Trading Strategy for Ideology

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