MTracey podcast - Beating the Drums of War

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

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Welcome to the live stream. Michael Tracy is in here right now. So, yeah, Tracy is going to join us in a few minutes. He's just finishing something, and he'll be with us soon. So, yeah, a lot that's exciting is going out in the world. The bombing of, you know, there was a big attack on Ukraine that killed something like, I think a dozen civilians, and got basically no headlines. Everyone is paying attention to Iran and Israel lobbying rockets at each other.

It's, you know, it's, you know, the Iran thing is interesting. The Iran thing, we've been hearing about warnings of Iran getting a nuclear weapon or having a nuclear program. for the next, for the last, I mean, since the Bush administration for the last 25 years. I've always thought if, like, the goal of Iran was, you know, as people like Ted Cruz will represent it, they'll say, well, Iran wants to get a nuke and then use it against Israel, and then Israel will be destroyed. And that's like the entire goal of the regime. Well, I mean, it's been, you know, it's been decades now. And they've never developed a nuclear weapon, a reasonable kind of interpretation of their behavior is they might like it as a negotiating ploy, but their ultimate goal is not to destroy Israel. So anyways, I'll bring Michael in here. Michael says he's ready. I'm sending the invite. And so we're in a place where it's hard to negotiate. It's like hard to, you know, I think that diplomacy can actually work, but I think that Iran might have too many

factions within it. I think there are too many spoilers for it to work. So it's kind of this tragic thing where it's like you could negotiate with Iran, but you sort of can't. Hey, Michael, how are you? Hey, how's it going? A lot of exciting things happening, huh? Nah, not really.

What's the latest? Trump said something. He had an interview and he said, he said something, right? He was speaking at the open or the construction site for the new flagpoles that he's installing at the White House? Oh, here, here. You know what I happen at the New York Times? Let me pick it up. And he was asked about whether he's going to join the strikes. Okay.

And he said, maybe I will, maybe I won't, which is about back because he loved to obtain his element prize. It's so stupid. I mean, he's sitting there with these guys and like these yellow like, I don't know, one of these construction or whatever, these working man hats and their outfits, and he's like, oh, you all voted for Trump, the Federal Reserve, you know, they're stupid, I should appoint myself. It's like such

grotesque, it's such a grotesque display. He said he should appoint himself as the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yeah, he's like, maybe I should just appoint myself. You know, we have a, I think he said something like we have a stupid person there. Well, that's kind of funny. It is kind of funny, but it's just like,

The thing with Trump that I've never found it difficult to readily acknowledge is that he continues to be amusing from a pure entertainment standpoint. Yeah, it sort of gets, I don't know, is it getting old? It gets a little bit old. It's old, but like, I just chuckled at the idea that he would say that he would install himself as the chairman of the Federal Reserve. The funny thing was the, what was the funny? Well, I mean, it's kind of, it's also like getting kind of dark because I'll ask him, like, did you, you know, when Biden got careful, I was surprised by his response. Did you see this?

Well, his initial response was very formulaic. Like, the very first thing he said was, we wish President Biden and his family the best of... It was like a tweet, right? It was like a truth. Yeah. But then when he was asked about it more extemporaneously, he basically said he doesn't care that Biden is cancer or something better.

Yeah. Yeah, and he like, he like baches him about the Minnesota shooting. he says, I'm not going to talk to Tim Walts. He starts insulting him. He says, like, he's a loser or like he's a sick guy or something like that. He wasn't always this kind of, like, main spirited. I don't think that would have been Trump like five or six or seven years ago. Well, during the first term, he constantly would bring up Hillary Clinton's emails and things.

Well, yeah, yeah. Just as a foil, so he would be demonizing at every opportunity. Hillary Clinton or Obama, obviously I think that's accelerated to some extent or as you suggest, gotten a bit more vicious and personal just because he views Biden not only as the political opponent that he can use as a scapegoat, which many politicians do to some degree, Trump a bit more theatrically, but he sees Biden as the leader of the regime that was trying to put him in prison. Yeah, I guess that's right. Yeah, I guess that kind of added to the bitterness. Yeah, and people... Which is not entirely wrong, but maybe it's not exactly how Trump imagines it, but like there's a kernel of truth there. I mean, there's not really a kernel of truth there, because Biden himself...

Did the Biden Department of Justice not... Well, the Biden, the Department of Justice, but Biden was not micromanaging. He appointed Merrick Garland, and there's no evidence he said Merrick Garland, you have to prosecute Trump or anything like that. Biden, I mean, there's a New York Times article from 2000. in which Biden essentially conveyed indirectly. Of course, he's not like Trump where he's going to put out a tweet

ordering his attorney general to do something. But signals were clearly sent. Conveyances were clearly made that Biden favored... Well, maybe. Prosecuting Trump over January 6th. Signals. Well, and the other thing, it was one step... And so did the entire, like, democratic apparatus

want Trump to be prosecuted over... But it was one step removed on top of that. It wasn't even Garland. It was an independent counsel. So, like, you have these steps like Biden may be conveyed to Garland, which is not enforceable in any way. It doesn't guarantee anything. And then Garland appoints an independent prosecutor. And that's how you get the prosecutor.

So it's very kind of tenuously kind of divided. Nonetheless, it's true that the Biden DOJ, to extent that we use that nomenclature, prosecuted Trump. Yeah, that's true. Okay. Well, that's like maybe that's just a point. as independent counsel, Jack Smith, who was this semi-fanatical international law, zealot, literally from the Hague at the international criminal court. Okay.

What does that make him? Why does that make him a zealot? It shows that there was like an ideological valence to whom Garland appointed to oversee these Trump prosecutions that suggested it wasn't just going to be within. in the narrow confines of ordinary criminal law. Well, anyways, okay, well, that's a side discussion. Anyway, this Iran thing, where do you see, so where do you see this going? Do you think it doesn't look like Trump is going to hit them?

Well, I mean, he's telegraphing it. Think of what happened the first day that the operation was launched. He seemingly engaged in public disinformation. I know that term gets overused. Yeah. And it's used to collapse a whole. I have stuff into one category, including sometimes political speech on somewhat spurious grounds, but for Trump to have put out a post three hours before the operation was launched or even less,

saying, I've directed my entire administration to focus on achieving a diplomatic resolution to the Iran situation and were committed to diplomacy, et cetera, et cetera, at which point he must have known if he had any foreknowledge at all. that the bombing campaign was about to be initiated. And that public disinformation in a classical sense. And so everything that he's been saying or that the administration has been saying ever since needs to be seen through that prism. And there's a lot of evidence of an acceleration

of U.S. military assets in the region, Tangor, aircraft, positioned, et cetera. And I think maybe the most dispositive factor is that Fox News seems very much in favor of joining the Israeli operation. And that's what Trump is principally influenced by. I don't usually watch the 5 p.m. chat show. Yeah.

But I've been looking at it lately just to get a sense of what they're saying, because it's very likely that Trump would be watching it or similar shows. they acknowledge or at least they gesture at the fact that there is some debate within maga or the America First movement about whether bombing Iran is America First. But they invariably come up with a rationale for why it is in fact America First to bomb Iran and do regime. So they're trying to deny that this is a regime change operation, I guess. Yeah. It seems like what you're saying from Fox is that they are, they are. want the U.S. involved, but like they want to worship Trump more than, so they'll call

Trump brilliant no matter what. They have a slight preference for war, but like the real preference is kissing up to Trump. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what they, what's seemingly going on is they're surmising that Trump is wanting to get involved. Yeah. And so they then have to reason backwards from that to explain how it's interesting. I mean, it's interesting which way it's going. Yeah, it's kind of going in both directions. It's like Trump kind of, well, what was it like when Israel started striking and then Trump was like a little bit like distant from it. Yeah, I wonder what that one or two days was. It was just that bogus Rubio statement that people, I mean, the first statement from the administration after the campaign was launched was that kind of cursory written statement that was put out.

Yeah, no, but it's not just nothing. It's not cursory. It's not completely pro forma. It's like we had nothing to, it was basically we had nothing to do with it. Well, it was perfectly worded. It didn't necessarily mean that there was no facilitation or coordination. In fact, it strongly implied that that was the case if you have any background knowledge of how U.S.-Israeli relations

function. It simply communicated that the U.S. maybe was not like directly, kinetically involved in the initial phase of offensive operations. Didn't mean that there was no, quote, involvement. I don't think that the

U.S. Israeli intelligence sharing apparatus? Was it all a factor? Well, I mean, it was kind of like if that's the statement you would expect if the, you know, I believe the reporting. It makes sense that Trump wants to basically was just watching and would love to take credit if it goes well. And that's basically it. I think Nanyahu is smart.

And I think Nanyahu has kind of played him pretty well. Trump, to extent, want it to be played. It's not like he's very, you know, it's not like he's pro. Iran or anything like that. But it is, it is like kind of, you know, I think the Israelis know that like just because of the nature of Trump's coalition, if like if Israel actually ever gets really in trouble, if like somehow, I don't know, Iran is like surprised we have, we have a nuke or they, or, you know, they have enough things they make, you know, life in Israel very, very hard. Like, they know in the end that the Trump administration is going to be held about, right?

I think Nanyahu can keep pushing. And he knows he can keep pushing. Trump might like it. He might not like it. But in the end, like, he's going to come back and he's going to be on his side just because of Trump's instincts and because of the way the Republicans are. I'm just not buying this narrative that Trump was in any way meaningfully, quote, played by Netanyahu.

Yes, Netanyahu is a Safi operator. When he first came to my minister in the 1990s, actually, he was hailed. Netanyahu was as the first American. American Prime Minister of Israel, kind of as a semi-joke, but just referring to the fact that he spent his formative years in the United States. He went to high school in Pennsylvania, et cetera. He obviously has a very comprehensive understanding of the nuances and subtleties of American politics. And so, yes, he understands the nature of the Trump coalition and how to phrase things or frame things. in public and probably also in private. However, the idea that Trump was just like unwillingly dragged into it,

just to me just doesn't pass the smell test. Trump said in an interview with Time magazine in April, he was asked about the prospect of bombing Iran with Israel, and he said, I'm not going to get dragged into it. And the reporter was like, oh, really? So you're not going to join Israel and bombing Iran? And he said, no, it's that. I'm not going to get dragged into it.

I'm going to go in voluntarily and enthusiastically, and I'm going to lead the pack. I'm sure he probably said, did he not say if they, you know, if they don't negotiate, if we don't come to agree. It's always like, you know, you seem to believe strongly in, like,

Trump's consistency, much more than a lot of other people. It's more in his agency. And, yeah, there was consistency in how these so-called negotiations were structured. Yeah, it was weird. It struck a way that they were, doomed to fail almost by design.

I don't know if Trump had consciously in his head the explicit intention that he was going to structure the negotiations that he, for some reason, delegated singularly to his, like, catch-all envoy, Whitkoff. I don't know if Trump, like, if there was a flash of a thought inside his brain somewhere saying, oh, I want these to fail so we can then join a Israeli operation. But they were structured in a way that made that inevitable because Iran was never going to be able to accede to the fundamental U.S. demand to essentially inflict on itself a huge national scumiliation and forfeiture of sovereignty. So like what are we supposed to inferring?

So explain this. Yeah, this is the interesting part because they had this JCPOA, which let Iran enrich some kind of uranium within Iran, right? Yeah. And then the Trump administration wanted something, the initial demand was something more extreme. than... It's not as though they put out a formal policy paper spelling out what their official demands were. It's always easy,

just like it always with Trump, especially if you're just going to outsource the negotiations seemingly to Steve Whitkoff, who's a New York real estate guy who happened to be on the golf course. But isn't Whitkoff understood as a duff?

This is kind of weird. Whitkoff in the reporting is understood as like a more duffish guy. And I don't buy that. I mean, I think that's part of the facade. Whitkoff has been a huge pro-Israel guy, you know, he's going down to these pro-Israel

gala, literally the night before the Israeli operation was launched, he was speaking at some fundraiser with Miriam Adelson. Oh, really? For United Hatsala, which is like this orthodox, ultra-Orthodox aid organization

in Israel. And he was saying, nuclear Iran is an existential threat. The United States and Israel must unite to combat this threat, whatever the cost, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of these hagiographical profiles of Wittkoff that have been pumped out over the past few months depict him as, I quote, Dove. And his diplomatic acumen has been praised. Oh, he's like the new Kissinger.

He has all this unconventional thinking, and he's a breath of fresh air. He's not from the establishment, so maybe he really knows what he's doing. He's going to shake things up. What is he accomplished? Every diplomatic portfolio that was delegated to him is... emphatically worsened. Yeah. What's going on with Hamas and Gaza?

What's going on with Iran? It's all getting worse. Iran catastrophically so. Yeah. Do you think the, so do you think there's an Israel, like, an Israel, Russia? Like, what's your view of his role in the Russian negotiations? That's the place where I hear the context of he's a dove in these things. Is Russia and Ukraine, is Russia and Israel different?

Or is he, or is he, or is he, um, uh, uh, uh, the same across these areas? Well, I mean, I think I would maybe caution against this oversimplified dub versus hawk framing. It is the case that Whitkoff, okay, so compared to the Biden administration, it is dubbish to even engage in direct negotiations with Russia at all. So we can stipulate that. And it is true that Whitkoff, after he had his succession of meetings with Putin, would come

back and say, you know, these four oblasts have a majority or a plurality or whatever it is of Russian ethnics. Yeah. Kind of gave some credence to potentially acquiescing to some of... Yeah, and I remember Whitkoff had these weird things, like, where he would be like, oh, you know, the one about Putin giving Trump like a portrait or something. And then like the way Whitkoff talks, I don't know if this is reflected in negotiations, the way he talks to Tucker. Yeah, he said, I consider Putin a personal friend now or something like that.

Yeah, yeah. He says this stuff, which is, you know, kind of odd. But that's all, I have understood that to just be Whitkoff musing. Like, what is, is it, has that been connected to any policy change with respect to Russia? No, not really. Pete Hexsaf last week was testifying before Congress. And very few people picked up on this, but of course, because I'm a brilliant genius, I picked up on it.

Who asked about the continuation of Ukraine arms provisions. and Biden in the month before he left office did three rounds of presidential drawdown authority provisions to Ukraine. They're called, which amounted to several billion dollars, a huge outlays of arms to Ukraine. And those are still being dispersed by the Biden administration, by the Trump administration, as we speak, according to Hegsef. So, like, that fundamental element of the policy dynamic has not shifted, even if Whitkoff can, like, go on a podcast and muse about how maybe Putin has certain that we can accommodate. So who do you think?

So somebody is, so I think the part of the idea, intuition here behind this is like, Whitkoff is not a blob guy. He's not a foreign policy expert. I think people assume you see like a guy who is like a. real estate guy who's just Trump's buddy. Like, he's going to be like, whatever, negotiate with Putin. Like, he's not going to have, like, this attachment to Ukrainian national sovereignty and Ukrainian territorial integrity. I think that's why people think this.

True enough. Yeah. But I just don't think it's not, it hasn't amounted to anything substantive yet. Yeah. Well, I mean, I do think that they did. I mean, the idea that they didn't do anything on Russia that was different, like you said, they negotiated. You know, I think that they have these kind of, they floated these kind of.

He loved negotiating for the sake of negotiating. No, but they floated these proposals that were giving more than Biden would have gave at the time, right? Because there was like they would recognize, was it they would recognize Crimea. Even that was on the table, which was never on the table with Biden. Well, that was floated somebody. It's never, that's not the official position anywhere. It's been reported, isn't it that's been reported that this was the deal that they gave them. There was something like recognized Crimea, freeze the lines and then like move on.

That was basically the deal. And I think they realized the Coon wouldn't take it. reported that recognition of Crimea was an official offer. I don't know about official, but it's like that's how you get to official. It's not like you, it's not like you send them doci sign or something. It's like that's how you talk and that's how you do these things. And I think what they found out was Putin wasn't just interested in like freezing the line. And so like there just was a disagreement.

Like what Putin would take and what the U.S. and Ukraine would take, they just didn't match. And that's all there was to it. but we're willing to be selfish relative to Biden. There could be, there could be some significant, I think a little bit overstated, but still significant differences

with respect to Ukraine, Russia. But in the Middle East, it's a whole different story. And that's what we're dealing with now. Yeah. At a clismic eventuality, at least from my perspective, think about what do weikov do?

Remember, when Trump came into office, Whitkoff, on Trump's behalf, in conjunction with Brett McGurke, who was his counterpart in the outgoing Biden administration, came up with this supposed ceasefire in Gaza, and the idea was, oh, you know, I was being berated in Hector, including, you know, behind the scenes and also publicly

by people who were offended that I wasn't sufficiently in awe of the fact that Trump really put the hammer down on Netanyahu and forced him to accept the ceasefire in Gaza. And it did last for, like, a month and a half or something. And then Wickhoff was supposed to have been in charge of extending, at least nominally.

The claim was initially that Wickhoff was going to be very deeply involved in getting to the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, which was supposed to bring about a permanent end to the war. Instead, what they used that period for was to rearm Israel. The Trump administration removed

whatever limited constraints that the Biden administration had in place on the provision of heavy munitions to Israel. And they got out a bunch of hostages, which maybe placated some of the domestic discontent against Netanyahu within Israel. They made sure that they wanted to get out the remaining American-Israeli dual nationals. And then Trump green lit the resumption of the Gaza campaign. in mid-Marsian, it's still going on right now. So where is this diplomatic genius?

Where is the dovishness? In fact, this is all according to the plan that Netanyahu publicly stated when he said that he was going to accept this Trump ceasefire. He said, look, Trump assured us that he's going to accelerate arms to us and that the war is not going to end and we can begin it once more at a time of choosing.

And so that's the mindset around Israel-related issues. issues to Iran. You asked about the enrichment thing. Yeah, the JCPOA under Obama, which, let's remember, was painstakingly negotiated on a bilateral basis for over two years, arguably even longer, not just bilaterally between the U.S. and Iran, but with Russia, China, the EU, et cetera. It wasn't just like this ultimatum. It wasn't the EU. It was Germany, France, and the U.K. The EU as an entity also had a... Was it?

I believe so. Let me check. Yeah, I don't believe so. JCPOA. Let me see here. Yeah, the European Union did. The European Union is a signatory. P-plus five.

In addition to France, Germany, UK on their own. Okay, well, they didn't negotiate. I think they just perform us. Okay, whatever. Either way, it was multilateral, right? and it was a pretty laborious drawn-out negotiation and the thing that they arrived at, Iran could maintain uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent,

which was seen to be for civilian purposes, right? And then, so Trump obviously withdraws on the ground that, in part, it was intolerable to allow Iran to have any enrichment whatsoever. Yeah. And that was an interesting decision. The top of early phase of these negotiations went on TV, a lot of the restraint people who are always kind of, I mean, one thing that drives me crazy is that there's this like cadre of, I guess, right-leaning pundits and journalists who are always trying to interpret everything that the Trump administration does in the most charitable restraint-oriented light. So they're always like grasping for whatever the most generous depiction they can find is of anything that they, and that they're the ones. who are like hailing Whitkoff as this diplomatic master, Whitkoff did go on TV one time and like vaguely indicated that maybe it was possible

that Iran could have this 3.67% threshold. And the very next day, you might recall, you know, there was an uproar among the genuinely hawkish people. The very next day, Whitkoff puts out a statement on his official ex-government account saying, let me clarify, in case anybody's confused, Iran can have no enrichment, and then Rubio, Trump, and Whitkoff proceeded to reiterate that position over and over again. So my thing is how, if Whitkoff is doveish, how is it that he was the conveyor or the point person for a negotiation, quote unquote, which could be very much reasonably seen as pure pretext by Iran to give justification for the eventual bombing campaign, because, Because Israel, which they're saying, and the U.S., which they're saying, can say that, oh, we tried to negotiate, but Iran was too intransigent and they weren't coming to the table.

Yeah. So I think there's a couple things going on here. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, when you talk about Whitkoff, I don't know his connection to Edelson and his kind of Zionist, you know, Zionist, Zionist, I didn't. Going over the years, he hasn't been, like, he's not, he's not a tablo raza. For defense of democracies or something where this has been his lifelong, like, ideological goal. Except he's both been politically involved in Israel-related issues. This is the crowd that he's associated.

So it's kind of like Kushner. He's not like a foreign policy expert, but he comes in with a strong tilt towards Israel. Yeah, Kushner is a good parallel, actually. I think he's probably the equivalent of a Kushner, and Kushner was also hardcore pro-Israel. Yeah, yeah. So I think, yeah, so I think what's going on here is there's these like two tracks of like Iran, kind of what's going on with Iran. So I think that like Ben Rhodes and like Obama types

are most concerned with nuclear proliferation. So if all you care about is nuclear proliferation, I think you got the deal that would prevent nuclear proliferation. I mean, I think everyone in the world, except basically Nanjahu and Trump, thought that this deal was working. Well, the entire Republican Party.

Yeah, yeah, the Republicans and Nanjah. Action Democratic Party, like Schumer and Bob Menendez. Yeah, and then, but then there were, Are these people, and they're, they're, I think the Republicans and then Yahoo, I mean, they probably, it's, you know, like who knows what they believe about nuclear proliferation, they do worry about it. But their main concern is Iran. They clearly don't care that much about nuclear proliferation because they're not even signatories to the NPT. Well, no, I mean, Iranian nuclear proliferation, obviously. But these people dislike the Iranian regime. So like if Obama or Rhodes could have a world where Iran doesn't develop a nuke, but it's still in power. And it basically can do the same thing. It can support Hezbollah. Hasbullah's kind of like died now, but like, you know, it's kind of a sphere of influence. Remember Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, I think at some point that like other people in the region will have to learn to live with Iran.

The idea is like you accept Iran as like a local power. So that's like that's why Obama was attacked as, oh, he's a secret Muslim. That's why he has this affinity for the Ayatollahs. Well, he was attacked for that before that, for the bowing and all that other stuff. But then the, yeah. So that's their perspective. And the perspective of Netanyahu and Republicans, I guess, Ted Cruz and Trump maybe, is the idea that Iran is like the root of all evil.

We talk to these people sometimes. I mean, they really do think like everything in the Middle East like kind of goes through Iran. Iran is like the most evil regime in the world. It's the head of the snake or as Nautil says the head of the octopus. The cat's pedal on an animal analogy. And so if you want, if you, that's your perspective. you'd keep trying to sabotage the nuclear negotiations. Right.

You would keep saying you would make these impossible demands. That's the deal. And so if there's a multilateral, sustainable framework for Iran to continue enriching uranium at a civilian level, but the regime is intact and, in fact, somewhat even legitimized within international structures, that's diametrically against what these people want. They want the overthrow of the regime itself. Yeah. So from that perspective, right.

Okay, so that's where we are right now. And I think Trump, it was probably Whitkoff or people around Whitkoff. You know, he probably didn't, like, who got into Trump's idea in his head that, like, this was the red line. Like, they could not, they could not enrich any uranium within Iran. Like, I was. Okay. And this is actually significant. Whitcomb actually used the phrase red line.

The red line is zero. And Republicans and Trump still have it in their folklore that Obama proved he was this huge weakling because he drew the red line in Syria. and then did not bomb Assad quickly enough after the August 2013 chemical attack. So Trump has always been about, look, when I draw a red line, I'm really going to enforce it. Okay. I miss this. You're right. This is a significant piece of information.

All right. Yeah. So here I'm reading Reuters, a deal between U.S. and Iran-Bustakun agreement not to enrich uranium. What White Cuff said on Sunday. And then he said, it's cut. it's cut off because word is has a has a pain wall now. I have the clip somewhere if I'm saying it's okay. I can get the hell. I don't need the. We don't need the clip. We can just read the words. We have a red line and that is enrichment. We cannot allow even one percent of enrichment capability. He told the week. Okay. Yeah, we don't have to listen to it. We got the words. Yeah, I want to find like the exact quote. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's that's significant because Trump's that Trump keeps, Trump has this idea that if he puts out a red line because he wants it be tougher than open.

Obama and then doesn't follow through, then he shows himself to be weak. And so this is interesting. So, yeah, it was kind of set up for. And he said something like, oh, Ted Cruz and maybe Trump believe this. One thing I think people don't realize about Trump is that when he was first toying with the idea of getting into Republican politics in the early 2010s, he picked a couple of issues that he thought would resonate. one of them was Obama's birth certificate

Another was Iran can't have a nuclear weapon and is evil Like he's been talking about Iran somewhat randomly and Inexplicably since around like 2011 when he was first trying to ingrati himself in the Republican Party going to tea party events going to CPAC etc I actually saw Trump's first CPAC speech believe it or not in 2000 I didn't pay it much mind, unfortunately, at the time, but I did see it. And Trump and Ted Cruz in September of 2015 jointly appeared, even though they were putatively rivals at this point in the Republican primary. They jointly appeared at a party patriots rally at the Capitol in D.C. against the Iran deal.

So it really is a long-stant conviction on Trump's part, which is why it was stupid that so many Trump's voters who are, who think that they're anti-war or think that they voted for Trump on anti-war grounds came out when this happened and said, oh, we've been betrayed, we're so shocked, et cetera, et cetera. We can't believe it. Trump promised peace in the Middle East because he went to Dearborn, Michigan and told the imams that he would bring, quote, peace as a vague platitude that wasn't connected to any policy outcome.

No, you mean, Trump, the administration now is correct. Trump has been unusually consistent on this issue. He instituted a policy in his first term of extreme bellicosity toward Iran. Withdrawing from JCP, POA coming within 10 minutes. He said a bombing Iran in June of 2019 because they shot down a U.S. drone over the Persian Gulf, not the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, or sorry, the Gulf of America, the Persian Gulf, the maximum pressure policy, which is a regime change policy in a sense in that it's meant to impoverish and weaken and destabilize the regime such that a overthrow could happen.

Trump actually, like when there were like smaller scale protest movements that dropped that popped up in Iran, which they occasionally do because there's a cosmopolitan secular sort of contingent of people in Iran who don't like being ruled by an octogenarian theocrat, understandably. But Trump would do what Obama really didn't do. I mean, I don't know if you remember this, but in 2009, there was the so-called Green Revolution in Iran where there was a big protest movement after the election of Abidinijad.

And the Republicans were outraged that Obama didn't court that movement enough to bring about regime change. So Trump did versions of what Obama was criticized for not doing on a smaller scale in the first term, maximum pressure, obviously drone striking Soleimani, et cetera. So these people who thought, oh, we were voting for Trump and we didn't realize that he was bellicose on Iran. Like, these people are in the most ridiculous, distorted information environment of all time because they only consume these dopey podcasts where people say, oh, yeah, Trump's going to dismantle the deep state and military industrial complex. And so now they're all betrayed and shocked.

I mean, yeah. Yeah, it's true. I always thought that Israel would be the one thing where Trump would kind of never waver. Like, I'm not sure Trump would defend Taiwan. Like we said on Russia and Ukraine, you know, he's comparable to Biden at least, I would say, I would argue more dovish than Biden. But I think that there's, you know, this man is surrounded by, uh, concerns. conservative Jews from New York, right? People who are Republican-leaning Jewish and from New York, my God, those people.

Florida, which is one in the same pretty much. Yeah, exactly. Like, those are the people around him. So he was in New York City. He's around, like he has in close proximity to himself, Fox News, the New York Post, the Murdoch media empire, all his friends who are not liberals who are not among New York elites. There are a lot of them. New Cambridge, Rudy Giuliani.

I mean, these people who are the people who are in Trump's actual peer groups, not some anti-establishment 35-year-old podcaster yeah and Giuliani's not Jewish but a very very pro-Israel figure he's in the terms of like the New York cultural milieu he's like functionally Jewish

right yeah these people are kind of functionally Jewish you're same with me by the way so I know these people yeah well yeah so the and then like you have like even if you're from the New York metropolitan area you're like it's sometimes Irish

sometimes Italians and Jews are like interchangeable in terms of Yeah, and then on top of that, his daughter marries Kushner, you know, she converts to Judaism. His children are raised as Jewish. He's, you know, even like intellectuals in the right, like City Journal, Manhattan, so not that Trump reads them or anything, but like it's still kind of this environment where it's like you can never be

anti-Israel, like kind of the Peter Singer, the Paul Singer network. And so this is just like deeply embeddinger. in Trump like Israel is awesome. I mean, apparently he's been meeting with Rupert Murdoch, who's still going strong at like 95. Mike Perlmutter, who is this big Jewish pro-Israel entertainment tycoon who gives him a lot of money. Mark Levin.

Mark Levin, yeah. I mean, I used to listen to conservative talk radio while I was driving in the car. And I would like to listen to Michael Savage because he has sort of a soothing voice, even if he's kind of deranged and tyrannical. And he would tell, like, sometimes I'm using anecdotes and stuff, and it wouldn't just be, like, hardcore partisan politics over and over again. That's what Hannity would do. But Levin, I just could never understand how anybody to listen to five minutes.

He has the most, like, tense, nasally hysterical voice. Yeah. It's hard to listen to it. I don't understand how this person be king of a question. He screeches. He screeches. I mean, it's kind of nuts. Yeah.

And like, I've heard that he goes, he's got a cult following. I've heard that he goes on, if you get on the show. I was actually almost got on Levine's show for my book, actually, which is funny. They told me that Levine had requested like a copy and wanted a signed copy. I guess that's what you do. And that's like something very rare. I've heard that you usually get on the show for that. I don't know, they ended up not doing it.

But I heard that if you get on Levine, it like. When did they find your racist post? Yeah, maybe they probably was around that time. So maybe or maybe some insufficient loyalty to Trump or something. which is probably more likely. But, yeah, but I heard that if you get on Levin, like, his audience on, like, watching Sunday, he, like, interviews an author, and those books just fly off the shelves and will go to, like, The New York Times bestseller.

I was quoted once by Rush Limbaugh on his show. And I got a huge, I wasn't listening, obviously. I wouldn't have known, but I got a tsunami of feedback from it. What would people find, would they would find your email or whatever? Yeah, I got emails, tweets. I think somebody, I'm trying to remember now. I think somebody might have mentioned it in person, actually, like an older guy. I just, it just makes a huge buzz, which is why those places.

And was it different when you got on Tucker? It wasn't the same, I assume, because my mind wasn't that big. I got a lot of, like, subscribers and followers, but it wasn't like the biggest thing that ever happened. It wasn't like a lot of people who checked. Whenever I would be on Tucker, my dad would get a ton of feedback from like fellow

like regular guys who were watching Fox so my dad would get my dad is actually like basically a moderate Democrat or something so he wouldn't be watching really otherwise but people in his like peer group or friends or whatever him with feet so my dad would get more

I would obviously people would maybe maybe but yeah so I guess those old talk radio I guess like Limbaugh's old audience and like Levin's audience which I guess maybe they're not you know the future generations are not you know it's like they're probably dying off but I guess maybe that's like those top radio guys are kind of a different level of cultishness is that it? I just think it's a rock solid loyal audience yeah people who have been listening habitually for years in the car or at work or something and have it as part of their

daily routine and schedule. And so, yeah, they're going to be extremely influential in getting people to purchase products and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, I've been enjoying, have you been enjoying the Levin Tucker feud? It seems like it's like Generation, you know, it's a Generation X versus Boomer thing, where it's like, you know, Levin is just completely like, you know, still in the old early 2000s kind of mode. And Tucker is kind of anti-war and bitter and kind of conspiratorial.

I mean, it's kind of fun to watch. them to watch them fight. Yeah. The clip of Tucker with Ted Cruz. Yeah, what do you think of that? I mean, I thought that was fantastic, actually. I mean, that's a perfect question to ask, and those sorts of questions are not asked nearly enough.

I do think politicians, especially if they're going to be claiming to somehow dictate the governments by force of countries on the other side of the world, if they don't like no basic demographic information about the country, then that is humiliating it, particularly for Ted Cruz. I mean, Ted Cruz has been an Iran obsessive for like 15 years. Yeah. You know, it reminds me. I used to know all about this, but in the run up to Iraq,

I think there was a time when someone basically said they talked to George Bush, and he didn't know that there were Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. He basically said, what are you talking about? I thought they're all Muslims. And this was like, it was like months before. the actual invasion. And so, like, yeah, that's normal. I think a lot of people in Iraq, in America,

who ended up going toward Iraq, they probably had no idea. There were Sudanese and Shia. And that's, like, kind of, like, that became the basis of, like, the split that, like, was the civil war. That was, like, the cleavage in Iraqi society. So it's kind of nuts that they didn't know that.

I mean, that's just kind of, that just kind of always blew my mind. And it's not just like, I mean, I was actually a little bit surprised that Ted Cruz didn't know that. I wouldn't be surprised of some generic Republican who's... I think he...

I would have liked to see him forced to guess because he might have known but just like didn't want to... He didn't want... In case he was wrong. Well, he couldn't even

give like a rough approximation I found. Yeah, but that's like he was probably... Yeah, I guess. You know, I would have said like... I would have said 80 because last time...

So these countries, these third world countries, they're always growing. Like, Iraq was 25 when we invaded or 20. And then I didn't look for years. And then like 10 years later, I looked up like Iraq's population.

I don't know. If you're going to engage in like a new round of regime change Maybe you'd like scan the Wikipedia or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the ethnic groups is interesting because it's only like, it's only like 55% or 60% Persian,

which is like an interesting fact to know, you know, the series are the second, like, what is like what are they kind of like and what do they think and what do they care about? That's like also kind of something you might be interested in knowing. But no, these people don't know. Yeah, there was a shocking story. It was actually like, it was around 2010 or something, 2000. 14 out of 10, that was 15, whatever, somewhere in that range, which in the New York Times where they went to, um, uh, so this is after the Sunni and Shia thing was like, what Bush was before the Iraq war. This is like 10 years into the war on terror. And they go to Republicans on the homeland, like it was like some kind of committee, national security committee and Congress, um, they go to, uh, Republicans or maybe Republicans and Democrats. And they ask him like, is Hezbollah Saudi or Shia? Is al-Qaeda Sunni or Shia? They don't know this. Ten years. into the war on terror, right?

After Sunni-S-S-S split had begun, like, the biggest story in Iraq, the biggest story in American politics, they still didn't know. And so, like bin Laden, like, these people did not know this stuff. And it's incredible, yeah, they are kind of,

like, I've seen people defend them online, like, oh, like, that's what your aid is supposed to know? But, like, then what are you? What are you as a politician? You're nothing, that is it just an age-in-off decision? I mean, again, Ted Cruz actually made this a huge fixation of, of his, that he campaigned for president on.

Yeah. That he's run for Senate several times on, that he's made like a legislative priority. And so it would be one thing if Tucker asked that question to kind of just a generic Republican congressman who is not that immersed in the issue and is just sort of instinctively supporting Trump and backing regime change.

And it's also like, you know, moderate or low intelligence. But I actually think Ted Cruz is pretty intelligent. It was the Solicitor General of Texas. He's argued before the Supreme Court. And so that's why I did find it a little bit surprising.

But all the more welcome that Tucker brought it to the fore. Yeah. Did you see Tucker on a Steve Vannage show? I've seen clubs of it. Yeah, I watched the whole thing. And, you know, I'm a little conflicted. I do, I like Tucker personally still.

And he can do good journalism, as evidenced by the Cruz interview clip or viewing. But the way in which he couched his position on Iran, I think speaks to how, like, if any Republican, despite like certain people in Maga whining that this is more. what I voted for, quote unquote, it shows how feeble whatever opposition they're able to muster really will be and probably inconsequential. Because Tucker goes out of his way to say, look, I love Donald Trump. I'm so grateful he's president. I was with him on election night when they announced that he won Pennsylvania. It was like one of the happiest moments of I've ever witnessed, et cetera, et cetera. So he couldn't have bent over backwards harder to butter up

Trump and then of course he leads into and yet I worry about another war in the Middle East etc but and even that was enough to instigate Trump into attacking Tucker on social there's not going to be any like what if Tucker's in a unique position if he did want to go full anti-Trump he could do so probably and have a big platform yeah he's like sui generis almost most for Republicans if they want to have any hope especially if they want to be in elective office. If they want to have any hope of winning a Republican primary, if they want to be in these like Trump adjacent media circles or professional class circles, they can't, they might be able to like gesture ancillarily at some criticism they might have of like regime change,

wars in the abstract, but they can never directly criticize Trump. Even, even like Tucker's tack is more like, oh, I think Trump is, oh, I think Trump is. might be misled by the people around him. So like 10 years into Trump as a national political figure, he's still constantly being manipulated by Netanyahu, Hark-Lavin, or I don't know, who is it now? It used to be Mike Walts, that's gone. Who is it?

Rubio, I thought Rubio was based. Like, they never can figure out who's always chronically manipulating or tricking Trump. It's never about him as the primary agent of responsibility. And I think that makes the critique feeble and inconsequential. Yeah, I mean, there is this, like, more. Trump and Trump phenomenon where it's like Tucker does this, but Bannon has like really grabbed this lane and Bannon runs for president. It'll be on this. Where it's like you continue to worship Trump. Even Bannon says Trump is going to be president for a third term. Like,

you know, Constitution doesn't matter. Term limits don't matter. Guaranteed. Huh? You guarantee. Yeah, whatever. Guaranteed it. Forecast. Yeah. Exactly. But then at the same time, he like will criticize Trump more than a lot of people unlike substance. So it's like grab onto the cult of personality. but like actually substantively differ with with Trump, which is kind of interesting. And maybe it works. It's never a direct criticism of Trump. Yeah, yeah. How Trump is being done wrong by.

Yeah, of course. No, no, it's weird. It's worship of Trump plus like an independent, like it's like always criticizing Trump's decisions. But like worship Trump and that's like kind of the core. Trump is in the lineage of Washington. It's Washington, Lincoln, and Trump. So that's his lodestar.

I think Trump is. beyond Washington and Lincoln. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if Washington Lincoln can What Bannon actually explicitly says is that Trump is in the Washington Lincoln. Okay. Then we'll take his word. We'll take his word for that. Then they're all, then they're all in the In terms of like, in terms of like seismic generational, civilizational. Yeah. And so it's going to be interesting. I think Bannon probably, you know, I think he's got this lane and there's no lane to be anti-Trump. If Bannon was the same but said Trump can't run for a third term and Trump is like a fool, like Bannon's audience would go away. So it is.

is like kind of this thing because Trump's like Trump fans often don't know much about policy. So like you can manipulate them in this way. You can just tell them things that are not true or don't make sense. And then I think this is like the real like, you know, ideological thing. And I think if Bannon runs for president in 2028, he is like he's going to try to have this lane, which is like Trump did all these things wrong. Not because Trump is bad. Trump is great. But like somebody manipulated him or somebody tricked him or something. And like we are like actually with the base. And a lot of like right. wing like MAGA intellectuals will like this. They'll be like the same thing. They will be like pro-Trump, but then like actually like into this America first and this kind of soft white nationalist ideology. And that can be like, I don't know, that's like a powerful force. That's going to be like the battle versus like the purest, like the Trumps who are like Trump was great and everything Trump did was great.

And then, but the other side is going to be like Trump was kind of wrong because he was manipulated. And I think those people are probably at an advantage because that's more where the base, like the base just cares about Trump himself. But, like, they are more policy-wise with Bannon than they are with somebody like, I don't know, Rubio before he became Secretary of State. Sometimes there are misconceptions about what the base, quote, unquote, consists of. Why is the base only regular viewers of the War Room Rumble show? Is it not, like, Fox News, viewer?

I think that those people are more easily. I think, though, the energy, like, okay, like I showed that poll showing that, like, 72% to 19% people who support Trump, like wanted to help Israel the world with their honor. So, okay, yeah, they're a majority. But it's like, I think that's seen as like a passive majority, while the minority is the minority of people who are like anti-war. I think it's all skewed dramatically by the online ecosystem that you and I are both probably over.

But those are the kind of people who end up shifting policy. That's what I'm saying. It's like those people who are watching Fox are going to die off. The people who are staffers in Washington and are like running like big social media accounts and the people with the momentum on their side and they're pushy they're kind of aggressive and they know what they want. Like that's like I think the trajectory is, is in their favor.

Possibly. I just think that there's like, where is, I, I, I think to me that there's something insubstantial about it or somewhat fallacious about it. If the, this like convoluted reasoning, tortured reasoning constantly has to be done where Trump is absolved of the primary responsibility

for anything that goes wrong or anything that they don't like or any adverse consequences of anything that happens in his tenure. And I just don't think that that adds up to like a coherent program. Like if you're constantly having to balance

valorizing Trump versus some kind of charter. The question is when Trump is gone because when Trump is gone, you're not going to have to keep doing that. You're going to have a story. He's not going to be really gone. what you don't think he's going to be like politically active.

He's going to be like 83. Like who knows how coherent, who's going to be controlling his truth social account at that time, how coherent he's going to be? You don't think he's like commentating on events? Oh, I think he's going to be focusing on trying to pump his meme coin and like going through various scams.

Like I don't think he's going to be caring that much about policy. He's going to care about like naming buildings after him and not being prosecuted and not having like people come. I think he becomes completely kind of checked out ideological. but it's still like a big deal kind of among magus happened in four years i mean there could be world war three and then everything that we say right now i'm not sure that bannon probably i wouldn't expect bannon to run i would expect him to like find a candidate for him to that he he can rally around and like be the brain of or the uh vangali who would that be that like he's gonna

overshadow anyone except vance like he'll overshadow any candidate maybe it'll be vance why not well then it's just Vann. That is just Vans. Yeah, then it's Bannon's not nothing special about Banna. He's just the vice president becoming the successor. Bannon is comfortable hosting his podcast. I mean, I think that that is a good enough degree of influence for him. And people are constantly asking him to interpret everything that's going on in the Republican Party and the Trump administration. So I don't know that he would necessarily personally run for president. Although, who knows, you know, one point I was thinking of that I didn't get to quite finish. is that you said Trump is surrounded by New York Jews or South Florida Jews or whatever. That is true enough. However, I think an under-recognizer appreciated element of Trump's posture toward Israel, both in the first term and currently, is that if he were just sort of carrying forth the preferences of that New York or South Florida Jewish set, it would be more of a conventional program.

like those people would probably comprise the mainline consensus, such as it exists, of the pro-Israel lobby. However, what Trump has done that is sort of unusual and underappreciated is that he's elevated elements, pro-Israel elements that are much more fanatical than would have been seen as Quth like 10 or 15 years ago. For Republicans, for Republican Jews, I don't think so. Like, Republican, I think he's like right where they are. I don't think like Republican Jews are like, you know,

daVish or one of the negotiations with Iran. Maybe, well, think of like what the general pro-Israel consensus among the pro-Israel lobby or Jewish lobby to the set that it existed, like 10 or 15 years ago. It wouldn't really have included elevating people like a Ben-Gavir or a Smotrich. Those people would have actually been seen as somewhat disadvantageous to the public image of pro-Israel position. in an American context because they're genuine messianic fanatical elements.

Netanyahu kept in arms distance from those people for many years until politically necessary for him to incorporate them into his governing coalition. And you certainly wouldn't have had like secular or maybe even, you know, mildly religious pro-Israel Jews in South Florida. joining hands or amplifying or elevating like these hardcore evangelical apocalyptic Christian elements, they might have tolerated them or whatever. But to appoint one of them as the U.S. ambassador to Israel, I mean, Mike Huckabee literally believes in ideology that's centered around as the site of the final God and Gog and Magog biblical war. Right. Well, they had to do politics. So I think there's two things here. There's Israeli politics. You talk about Dan Yahoo's relationship with these far-right people. Yeah, there's that. That's like moved in a certain direction. I think the U.S., like,

the right wing of the Zionist movement in the U.S. is just basically, they're not paying that close attention to like internal Israeli politics. They're just like whatever the Israeli, whatever is pro-Israel at the time, that's what we're going to be. Right. And so that's why like Israel had moved to the right. And these people, I think, are just like whatever's, whatever's in the overturn window of like what's acceptable within Israel. But Trump has host, for example, in July of 2023, he hosted at his Bedminster, New Jersey

Golf Club, a fundraiser for an organization called the Israel Heritage Foundation or some generic sounding name, I can't quite remember, but basically it was hardcore religious messianic fanatics

who have their own little fledgling advocacy organization, and they gave Trump their big, like, Savior of Jerusalem Award. And he expressed policy affinages with them and elevated

them beyond what, like, a John McCain would have done, even though he was obviously pro-Israel, or a Mitt Rodney, or a George W. Bush. Because they would have been to the right of, they would have been to the right of the rightest wing people in Israel. So that's like, that would be kind of weird, right? So they're just,

they're just the right of America is just gloving on to whatever the most right way I think in Israel is. Right. And Trump is like, or an enabler of that. Yeah, I think that's right. Trump himself, nobody really would believe

has an ideological commitment to, quote, Zionism, or he wouldn't do like what Joe Biden did and go on some late-night talk show and say, I've always been a Zionist since I met Goldaubier in like 1973 or whatever it was. And yet, because of his like transactionalism

and maybe cynicism, he does elevate these much more fanatical elements that would have been seen as acceptable, even within more mainstream Republican circles like 10 or 15 years ago. And how has that been made manifest? Well, what was Trump's very first foreign policy proposal of his second administration? First week of February, Netanyahu is the first foreign leader to visit the White House. Trump seemingly out of the blue comes out and says, oh, by the way, the United States is going to take over Gaza

and turn into some kind of U.S. military protectorate and expel all of Palestinian. that's a that's a view that Netanyahu wouldn't have even embraced a year ago. That's the messianic settler vision within Israel that maybe has crossover with certain apocalyptic evangelical Christian element to the United States. And that's the policy proposal. So that's Trump going beyond the conventional pro-Israel consensus in a much more fanatical direction. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's just kind of Trump's instincts. I think there's these cycles that are reinforcing, right? It's like this cycle where it's like this feedback loop where it's like, oh, the Israelis are going to the right, like, leftist, like, protest against Israel. They protest for Gaza. Trump has like these people who are naturally inclined towards supporting Israel. He's got these like Jewish relatives and friends and acquaintances.

And Trump is all, Trump's thing is always like take the most extreme position as like a rhetorical device, right? and go with that. And like, I think, yeah, all that together, like, gives you a very, very, very pro-Israel American foreign policy, yeah. But it's a rhetorical device, right? A lot of people dismiss it at the time as just a negotiating ploy. Well, he didn't actually create a hotel in Gaza.

Well, not yet, but Netanyahu and the Israeli governing coalition incorporated Trump's plan into their own war planning in Gaza. They said that a fundamental new condition for achieving. what they consider to be victory in Gaza is to achieve Trump's plan. So it has a more tangible... Which parts of Trump's plan? That's expelling the Palestinians?

Yeah, expelling all the Palestinians from Gaza and taking it over as a U.S. military protectorate. Wait, that's the Israeli policy as the U.S. takes it over? Yeah, implementing Trump's plan. How official is this? That's what they proclaimed

when they launched this latest phase of the Gaza offensive. It was as of early May. The goal is, explicit goals for the U.S. to meet a couple of goals. Like, they're dismantle Lamas, which was the

always goal since October of 20203, um, X, Y, Z. And then they added a new goal, which is implement Trump's plan. Does it just say Trump's plan? How do they word it?

Um, I could find the official, the statement. Yeah, I'd be interested. This is worth looking up. Let's see. Trump plan, Gaza.

Let's see if I go quicker. There's the Wikipedia page. Arab-Connor proposal. Reactions. So here's reactions. Israel. Trump's plan was metaphor with Benjamin E. He said he was committed to realization

of the plan rejecting Palestinian Authority, Hamas, governance of Gaza. Okay. Netanyalk says, we want to ensure that Trump's plan, quote, we want to ensure that Trump's plan,

my addition, comes to fruition. It's a brilliant plan, so correct, so revolutionary. What's the date on that story? That was May 22nd. Okay, so May 12th, it was announced in a coalition statement like a week or two before, which I'm trying to find me this. Send me this link. Yeah, I see this on Wikipedia, him saying that like February, which could be just him like, you know, in the moment kissing up to Trump, but it seems like it was still. It was more than that. It was more like codified than that. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Okay. So this is, yeah, Michael, I learned a lot. You are knowledgeable about foreign affairs. I learned a lot.

Thank you. Okay. Anything else you want to... So just to wrap up, so like on Iran, are you like out there agitating for regime change or like what's your position? Yeah, I mean, I think diplomacy... Aga isolationist or do you actually believe that that's a good idea? I think that the... I think diplomacy could actually work in like the Obama-up-en-Rhodes kind of. I think that was working. At the same time,

I don't think Israel is going to accept it. I don't think America is going to accept it, at least this administration. And so, like, what are we going to do? Are we just going to have this kind of permanent state where it's like nobody, you know, kind of like Iran is kind of a hostile power and nothing ever changes within Iran? I think that the Israeli strikes on Hezbollah worked out so well that, you know, there's a possibility that you just kind of bomb Iran and you pursue the policy of regime change. The country, the government falls, or there's a civil war or something, and you get something better in the long run. I think that's kind of the answer out of all of this. I don't see any other way. Really? So you don't see any negative ramifications or detrimental, like, consequences of a country of 90 million, which we now know the population size of, descending into civil war or ethnic conflict and the state collapsing?

Yeah, that's potentially bad. I mean, but like, what, should countries that are ruled by brutal dictatorships stay in power forever and you should always worry about what's going to come after? Like, you don't want to just, like, I think it really does depend on the- Why is it your role or the role of some, like, congressmen from Georgia to determine, okay, you know, it's time for this government to no longer continue. Because some of us see ourselves as global citizens who take the interests of the entire world. to account. And yeah, I think that we should care about other countries. I think it's, I think Iran, it's not Iraq where like the only opposition to Saddam was Sunni and Shia Islamis. Iran has a secular middle class population that's willing to die in like large numbers. Like hundreds have died

in these protests and like tens of thousands were arrested in the last one. So these aren't like, it's not like a small faction within Iran wants, wants something different. And so, it's a better situated than like Syria. And look, like things work out badly, like when a government falls, but sometimes things work out great, like the fall of the Soviet Union. In the end, that was better than what came before. So, yeah, I think we should probably pursue policy. I think we should pursue a policy regime change. I think there's no reason not to in the sense that, like, this is a good candidate for that, given, like, all the other countries in the world. Well, I mean, the fall of the Soviet Union was not necessarily a glorious time

for a lot of the people who actually lived in the Soviet Soviet States. Sure, but it was worth that in the long run, I think, for everyone, for most people. Poland is like on its way to being like a first world country. Hungary, you know, all these countries have seen massive economic growth. Like, are you doubtful that the fall of Soviet Union was on net plus?

Well, the standard of living in Russia in the 1990s was much worse. Yeah, it dipped for a few years. It dipped for like a decade. Yeah. And then it went back up. Yeah. So, I mean, if somebody is dying of malnutrition on the street as the government was changed, are they not somebody to be asked to weigh in on whether they find? Yeah, somebody, I mean, like, obviously someone is going to be worse off of like every policy that you pursue, right? You could be like, oh, the person who the Iranian regime is going to arrest and put in

jail. Like, you don't care about that person to that person. They just want, you know, the government gone. Like, yeah, I mean, obviously. Even if you do favor regime change in Iran or regime collapse or whatever, the Ayatollah is 86 years old. He's looking more and more pathetic and feeble, actually, just like ranting and raving and having whoever posts for him on X post these, like, threats that the Zionists are going to be bitter that they ever messed with Iran and whatever. And they never, it doesn't seem to amount too much. I mean, Iran's state capacity obviously has been degraded. The president of Iran last year was killed in a helicopter crash that was attributed to inclement

weather, which I still find odd, but whatever the... Are you saying that they might fall anyway? Well, I mean, he's 86, and they don't have, as far as I know, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, of you know, is there an appointed or known successor to... There are candidates. I mean, there's like two or three... But they're all the same. They're like old bearded guys who are going to be just the pool.

If you want a more secularized government or you want like a gradual transition to a government that's more responsive to popular will, then it seems like that could be in the offing relatively soon. Like maybe not to the dramatic extreme of the entire state apparatus being exploded into oblivion, but maybe with less downside risk than just like collapsing the entire state. So I think that like, I think that is, you know, I think that that's easy. The morality police doesn't even, doesn't enforce aggressively, like the women hijab law and so forth. But regimes can be decrepit and they can be failures and they can have a lot of protests for a very, very long time.

So like, yeah, maybe if they're like actually weak, maybe what they actually need is to be pushed over. Like, you know, the, like, there's a role potentially to play here from the outside. I don't think it's inevitable. I don't care about the welfare or the aspirations of the Iranian people. That's not why they're doing this.

Oh, I didn't say they, no, they don't care about the Iran. Because they want, because Iran is the one bulwark against U.S. Israeli hegemity in the Middle East. What is like, is Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Egypt? No, you, I mean, you, you, you asked me, asked me for, you asked me for my opinion, not like the motivations of what Trump and

Whitkoff are up to. Yeah. So what is about enabling the best selves of the Iranian people by bombing them. Yes, the beautiful women, to free the Iranian women who are inspiring us with their courage in 2019 and 2022. This is something that I think humanity has a stake in. You think Trump and the Maga movement? Do they care?

No. You're constantly railing against the Trump and the Maga movement as like idiots who are elevating low IQ political rhetoric and political thought. And yet now you think that they are smart enough to engineer a satisfactory overthrow of the Iranian government and a new one. Well, if they had to micromanage the process, sure, that would be probably not a great plan. But they, you know, they bumble around and do stuff that's good pretty often. So you think that the U.S. is going to be party to the destruction of government and then just wash his hand to the situation? Oh, yeah. That's what we did.

We did that in Libya. We did that in Libya. We didn't send ground troops into Libya. I mean, like, I think ground troops is a very, very distant possibility in this case. weird for, like, we had Afghanistan, which we went into after 9-11. Iraq was, like, a very weird thing that, like, was still on the heels of 9-11. It was still, like, a year and a half between 9-11 and the Iraq War. And, like, people thought that they were getting revenge for 9-11. Like, polls showed, like, 70% of Americans thought Saddam basically did 9-11. And so it was very,

very unusual for us to send large numbers of troops willing to die in large numbers. Like, I don't think there's any political war for that within Maga, within anyone else. That's why these people like Bannon types keep saying, oh, all our, you know, our young soldiers are going to be dying in this war. Because like that's the way they sell it. Like Trump gets it. Trump gets like that nobody's going to put up with that. So I really, really discount the possibility that we are going to be occupying Iran anytime soon. And so given that, like the question is, what about? I mean, I'm not justing a large scale occupation. But obviously, even in the case of Libya, the U.S. still had some tangential involvement in how the government's, there, the rival governments reconstituted themselves through various, you know, aid or diplomatic efforts and so forth. So it's not as though the U.S. will be strictly uninvolved in every respect in how some forthcoming Iranian government reconstitutes. Yeah. Yeah, and I don't think they need to be. I don't think they should or they would be. I agree with the law involved at all. The point of thing is kind of like a red herring, and in fact,

it's being used by like Charlie Kirkin people as we speak, to say, Trump has been consistent. He doesn't want regime-change wars. He doesn't want endless wars, but this one is good because it's different. It's not like what Bush did or something. And so if you're bombing Iran and it doesn't entail an immediate large-tail troop deployment, that's like within the America first ring. Well, I mean, yeah, Bush's policies were really extreme.

And nobody in MAGA is like, you know, advocating for close. It was like, we go in. We, like, build the schools. Like, literally U.S. soldiers, put the bricks out. I mean, you watch these videos of, like, what they were doing in Iraq. You read these stories. They're kind of crazy. But, like, nobody is advocating that in Iran.

Nobody's advocating that anywhere. Right. It's like, we, like, wrote the kind of- Gaza. Yeah, Gaza. How is that not nation-building? I mean... Yeah, we take over Gaza.

Trump advocated that at Gaza. Trump went to Saudi Arabia and gave that speech that some, like, millennial staffer probably wrote for him where he decries neocons in nation-building. and interventionalism. I don't know why he said interventionalism rather than intervention.

I think you have to take the... And then... If I'm basically calling for a huge nation-building project in Gaza, nobody knows the contradiction

and now they're all betrayed because we're bombing Iran. Yeah. Yeah, you know, anyways, I mean, take the policy holistically, take Trump's, like, outward holistically, right?

You know, this one thing about Gaza, the U.S. taking over Gaza, which I don't think is realistic. Besides that, like, I think that there's, like, basically no hint of, like, Paul Bremer and the coalition provisional authority.

I don't think that's like on the table. So we can debate other things of like the administration might do or whether they're a good idea or not. I think this is kind of like attacking. Just like the World War III thing, I don't think is real. Like, oh, China and Russia are going to be like, you guys try to overthrow Iran, we're going to nuclear war with you. Like, I don't think that's realistic either.

Here's a scenario for you because, I mean, there are reports that like within the next day or 40 hours or something the U.S. could be joining. So here's a potential scenario. the U.S. joins Israel an offensive operation. They try to bomb the Fordo nuclear facility, and it's unclear whether the nuclear facilities are fully wiped out or the enrichment capacity

is fully wiped out. Maybe it's even claimed that there's some other secret facility, like there was an intelligence leak to FOC news that's not verified, I don't think, by anything credible earlier this week, that there was some other secret facility that Iran was enriching uranium at. let's say the Iranian government gets incredibly destabilized.

It's on the version of collapse. Trump follows through on his threat to assassinate Komeni. I mean, the extremism of Trump's threats these past 48 hours is insane. He's ordering mass evacuations of all of Tehran, 10 million people. He's unconditional surrender, which is what Franklin Roosevelt called for from the powers in 1943. He's saying he's going to assassinations. getting ready to assassinate

the Supreme Leader and like meanwhile he was in Michigan in October of last year telling these idiot imams that together will bring teeth to the Middle East there's genuine regime destabilization it's on the verge of collapse and

some of these enrichment capacities are seized by like a rogue actor within the government or their they're in like an unstable situation, some kind of unstable situation where some element gains control of them.

Are the U.S. and Israel going to allow for like some uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear technologies or something? I mean, I'm not... Wouldn't that be an impetus that's cited for why there needs to be some ground element, not an Iraq scale thing necessarily, but some incursion?

I'm not an expert in nuclear weapons development, but I think that trying to build it under conditions of like civil war and like Iran, like U.S. and Israel kind of sending drones and like wiping you out and like hiding it from the world and like not being taken out. Like it's obviously like it requires some deception for Iran to do that as a functioning state. Whether like some warlord who's a who's a descendant of the regime can do that, I don't know if that's a reasonable. possibility. I'm just speculating about some theoretical scenario that might be used to call for some sort of... Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's an interesting thought experiment. Yeah, what kind of... Air strikes. Yeah, what kind of scenario would actually lead to... There's got to be some of those scenarios, right? I mean, they're not... They're not the most unlikely outcome, given how chaotic and unpredictable, a regime stabilization scenario...

I think nukes is pretty much the only, I mean, it has to be that scenario, right? Like, if a lot of people are dying in a civil war, that's not, I mean, that doesn't bring the U.S. into Syria, troops on the, boots on the ground at least. Yeah, WM.M.D. thing. It would be something WMD related. Yeah, I mean, is that going to be a bigger threat with, like, Iran falling apart than having the government we have now? Like, what if you stop now? What does the government do? Like, how do you just don't, like, try to read.

That's why they have to go full. This is why it seems almost ineluctible that regime changed. It would be genuine. If Trump is stopped now, why wouldn't Iran rush as fast as they can to actually develop the nuclear weapons that they apparently didn't have? Yeah, I mean, maybe they're, yeah, right. Like, it would be very weird. Like, we're going to release this podcast, like, within, like, an hour or two after we're done. We could get an alert.

Like, I've been waiting the last day and a half, like, an alert. any time on my phone saying that we're going to work. It's not the most healthy thing. I'm like, yeah. But if like, yeah, if 24, so I just, I did look at the prediction markets. It gave a 63% chance by the end of the month with the U.S. would strike Iran. It would be weird after all this stuff. Now, he can get away with it because everything with him is art of the deal.

So he could change his mind whenever. But yeah, it's kind of a lot of building. Bopping Iran and imposing regime change is just like acquiring the Wollman rink in Central Park in 1980. which is the main case study in the art of the deal. That's the new Talmud for everybody who wants to understand what the U.S. government is doing. Yeah. Anyways, by the time people listen to this, we might be, we might get more.

I thought people are people listening live? What's that? I thought aren't people listening live? No, they are listening live, but then we've been doing this for how long? You still don't know the routine? Yeah, and then I released it as a podcast. Oh, okay, yeah. I knew that.

All right, then. All right, well, Michael, good talking to you. Yeah, next time we talk, we may be at war. All righty, looking forward to it. Bye.