Pod Save the World - Please don’t bomb Iran

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

Tommy and Ben talk about the escalating trade war with China, the drumbeat for real war with Iran, how the Pentagon is hiding how badly things are going in Afghanistan, and (an)other  fascist visits the White House. Then Tommy talks with author and historian Michael Beschloss about his book Presidents of War.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Sorry, the audio here right at the top is not the best. I'm sitting in a hotel room in Manhattan with a blanket over my head because I wanted to record a quick topper about the story that posted in New York Times on Monday night about President Trump reviewing options of sending up to 120,000 U.S. service members to invade Iran. So that's not good. That's pretty scary for all of us. That is much, much bigger of a force posture than you'd need to do. just protect our troops from, you know, militia forces in the region. And really, it's about the size of the invasion force that was sent into Iraq, which, you know, was enough to get to Baghdad, but certainly not enough to keep the peace. And, you know, it's led to a decade-long catastrophe. So that story really heightened our concern about what seems to be a constant ratcheting up of tensions with the Iranians, what seems like John Bolton and his team seemingly wanting to manipulate. manipulate intelligence and potentially manufacture a pretext for a war with Iran. So it's something we need to watch very closely.

We also talked about the escalating trade war with China. We talked about the way President Trump is stealing money from the DOD budget from real priorities to fund a stupid wall. We talked about how the Pentagon is hiding statistics about the war in Afghanistan that makes it harder for us to realize that things are actually going very badly. And we talked about Victor Orban, a European fascist who has welcomed it to the White House this week. Finally, I did an interview with Michael Beschloss about his fantastic book, Presidents of War. It tracks from the War of 1812 through Vietnam and the way presidents in between have handled the country in times of war. And I learned a ton and I really appreciated his perspective.

So without further ado, I'll take this blanket off my head and throw it back to the conversation I had with Ben Rhodes in the studio this week. Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben, we have a lot to talk about today. So off we go. Here we go. I was reading about this stuff on the Uber ride over.

Which stuff? The China trade and, you know, Afghanistan and my Uber driver was playing smooth operator. Okay. So I'm reading this like very weighty stuff. And in the background, it's just like smooth operator. Yeah, we live in some dark places. So China, the trade wars ratcheted up. On Monday, the Chinese moved to raised tariffs on nearly $60 billion worth of American goods.

That was in retaliation for last week's decision. by President Trump to increase tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. The markets close down like 2% today, but whatever. The S&P is still up 15% on the year. Honestly, I've been kind of shocked at how much markets have shrugged off this trade war to date. But I think my question for you, Ben, is like, how did Democrats respond to Trump on China? Because he's diagnosing problems that are real, but I think that the solution seems off. Yeah, I think what's been telling to me is,

that Democrats are kind of afraid of this because, you know, the party as a whole has been skeptical of free trade, has been critical of China. And so you even see Democrats say, like, you know, the one thing that I give Trump credit for is getting tough on China. When this is like not working, you know, this is spiraling out of control. I will tell you, I did a conversation on Friday with Stacey Abrams, who actually found a better language to talk about this than any Democrat I've heard who's running for president. No surprise. Because, yeah, and I was kind of like, well, maybe you should change that.

But she's like, look, you want to know what foreign policy is, come to Georgia and meet the farmers whose businesses are getting completely fucked. She didn't say that. I'm paraphrasing. Look, that's fair. By what Trump is doing. That his, I think Democrats have had a problem sometimes connecting Trump's recklessness and impulsive nature to real world outcomes. this is the issue that shows that. Trump's reckless approach to this trade war is undeniably hurting Americans. It is hurting American consumers who are paying for these tariffs. The tariffs are not

money that China gives to us, as Trump seems to suggest. It leads to higher prices for you when you go to buy things at your local convenience store. It hurts farmers who are being shut out of the Chinese market. This is a situation where Trump's nature his recklessness, his complete childish and impulsive gamesmanship is really hurting people in the pocketbooks. Never mind the kind of broader question that what he's doing is destabilizing the global economy and potentially could bring about an economic downturn or even a recession, right? And so I think Democrats have to be willing to say, look, yes, we think there's a place to get tough on China. The way you do that is you're smart. You get all of your allies on board with that approach.

you gradually escalate pressure and try to be very specific about what types of concessions you're getting. You don't just say, you know, we're going to put tariffs on two billion dollars worth of Chinese goods and say how tough we're getting. And so I think Democrats have to connect Trump's willful disregard for alliances and his reckless nature to the hurt that Americans are feeling, particularly American farmers, because of this trade war. Yeah, I think part of what seems to bottle us up is I think the way you get a better trade deal with China is, you strike trade deals with a whole bunch of other allies, as you've talked about as part of the TPP. But that creates maybe political squeamishness. I mean, I guess the other problem I have, where the thing I'm struggling to figure out is what the goal is exactly. Because there are a lot of real problems.

There's hacking. There's IP theft. There's concerns about, you know, 5G infrastructure and companies like Huawei. There's military expansion. We're filling in islands to create runways. What problem are we trying to fix with the tariffs? And what is the off-ramp exactly? because these negotiations, senior officials on both sides have been telling us these negotiations

were almost done for well over a year. Yeah. Well, and it's not unlike what we've talked about with North Korea, where they're not specific in what they're trying to achieve. And you might even be trying to achieve lots of different things, but what's the priority list? Yeah. How we're sequencing. We're sequencing this where we want to start by getting them to allow for more market access for certain goods, or we want to start by having them respect intellectual property protections more rigorously. Like, we don't seem to have a map for what we're trying to achieve here. And so we just go to full-scale escalation in ways that hurt us, hurt our farmers, hurt our consumers, put the economy at risk without even necessarily knowing what's the destination where he's trying to lead us

here. And, you know, I think that's beyond problematic. It also seems like he just kind of likes the drama of this thing and the brinksmanship of this thing. And again, he shouldn't be taking us along for this kamikaze mission of proving out tough he is with China without being clear with us, the American people, about what he's trying to get out of that. Yeah. Speaking of proving you're tough with no clear goal or stated outcome. President Trump increased tensions with Iran today. He did this pool spray with Victor Orban, who will talk about later where he talked about

a whole range of things. But he said, quote, if they do anything, they will suffer greatly. That's cool. This comes after the UAE, said four commercial vessels had been sabotaged near the Strait of Hormuz. you're starting to see some reports leaking out. You're already sighing that the U.S. is suggesting that Iran did it without any real evidence. So the New Yorker's Robin Wright has an excellently timed piece today about the U.S.'s history of finding a pretext to start wars.

Ben, you and I have talked about that history before on the show from Remember the Maine to Iraq. Michael Beschloss, today's guest, also talks about this a lot in his book. Yeah. But the big question that Robin Wright talks about is whether Trump and John Bolton are trying to manufacture a war with Iran. So I think maybe let's just debate it for a minute because if you set back and look at Trump's campaign, certainly he ran against wars. He said Iraq was stupid. He criticized his own national security team when they seem too hawkish. There's a report that he's mad at John Bolton for being overly hawkish with respect to Venezuela.

He tried to pull troops out of Syria, Afghanistan. But I do worry that politically for him Iran is different, that he may see a political upside to a military conflict with Iran because it was so. defined as a friend of Obama and because he's probably hearing from Bibi Netanyahu among others that the country would like to be led into this conflict. But maybe I'm too cynical. No, I don't think you are. And look, we've been trying to like jump up and down if you can jump up and down on a podcast and warn people about this forever because you could see this play unfolding where they're trying to get this pretext to have potentially military conflict. And the two

points I make, first, there really is like a Gulf of Tompkin fear here, which is, I remember when we were in office, there was once an incident where there was an initial report that we thought that maybe the Iranians had, like, fired at a vessel or something that we had passing through one of these areas. And after a careful study, it turned out that that's not what happened at all. These are complicated things. We also know you mentioned the UAE vessels. The UAE in Saudi Arabia would like nothing more than for the U.S. to get into a conflict with Iran. So we could even have a situation where they claim that something happened and, you know, the Trump administration jumps to conclusions to support

them and the next thing you know, we're in a reprisal action for that and we don't even know if it happened. So there's really a danger. This is a part of the world where there's a lot of conflict and there's a, you know, there's a lot of congestion in areas like the Straits of Hormuz that we've talked about where there are a lot of naval vessels moving through. And the capacity to just pick something and say this is the pretext is going to lead us to do something is very much there. The According thus far in the U.S. media has been atrocious. In the last just two weeks alone, I don't know how many times I've seen like, you know, U.S. officials say that they have intelligence that Iran is doing X. And we have no idea what this intelligence is. There's no corroboration of it. They're just, you know, beginning to feed intelligence to the press. And as long as it has that kind of sexy feeling of a secret, you know, that's being shared with the media, we're just meant to believe it. I think there has to be much, much more scrutiny. The onus has to be on the Trump people instead of this idea that they can just, you know, pass off that the Iran's are doing something. We saw Bibi go out, you know, I think it was about a year ago,

maybe a little more than you're saying he had new secret information about Iran advancing its nuclear program. And it turned out that that information predated the fucking Iran deal. Right. Right. So, I mean, between Bibi and MBS and the Emirates, like, there are all kinds of people who could gin up the pretext for us. It doesn't have to come from us. That should worry us. And then on Trump, you're right. I mean, the mystifying thing here is that the one insight that Trump tapped into politically is that voters, Democrats and Republicans alike, are sick of these wars. What seems to be dangerous here is that you have John Bolton, who represents the kind of multi-decade ideological impulse towards conflict with Iran in a part of the Republican Party.

And then you have Trump's hatred for Obama. And those two things seem to be converging here. Trump doesn't necessarily want to get into war with Iran, but he hates the Iran deal because it was Obama's deal. He's trying to show he's tougher than Obama. Yeah, he's trying to appeal to certain, like, you know, far-right ideologies. He's certainly trying to appeal to certain Jewish voters who he thinks like this approach with Iran. I actually think that's vastly overstated. Yeah, I do too. But so there's Trump feeling like this might be good politics, Bolton feeling like it's part of his life's work to go to war with Iran.

Trump may be thinking that, oh, I could just bomb the Iranians and, you know, file that away. And again, that's not how this would play out. The Iranians would not just take that. The Iranians would respond, and then we'd feel the need to respond. And we could end up in a much bigger war than we've anticipated quicker than we think. Yeah. And so I don't want to freak out our listeners here, but there are certainly some senior voices at the Pentagon that are versed in how bad a war with Iran would be. Yeah.

Like people like General Mattis, despite being incredibly hawkish on Iran, it seems like he did his best to prevent it. But things in the Strait of Hormuz are on such a hair trigger. it is frightening. There's an example I remember from when you and I were still in the White House. In 2012, Iranian warplanes shot at a U.S. drone. It was a predator drone flying in international airspace. It was not hit. You and I sat unmanned, unmanned drone. You and I were in these meetings in the sit room where some of the options that were floated to retaliate were escalatory to say the least, right? It was treated like an act of war, despite this thing being unmanned. And God forbid something more serious than that happens.

I mean, there's a lot of people that feel the need to deter and respond to and punish Iran in an instance like this, where there's some action that shouldn't have happened or something that might have been a misunderstanding in that region. Yeah. Or, you know, something that could be totally false. So something where it wasn't the Iranians, right?

Well, that's the scariest example. Because, like, take a place like Iraq, right? They've put Iran on notice, you know. If there's any attack by any proxies, I mean, Pompeo used this language in recent days that they hold Iran responsible for anything that their proxies do, right? Putting aside that like this notable escalation of conditions and responsibility on Iran, it feels like they're building to something. But also, it takes a long time to figure out who carried out something, say, inside of Iraq or inside of Yemen, right? And some of them are Iranian proxies acting at Iran's direction.

Some of them aren't. Some of them might be groups that have ties to the Iranians, but they might just choose to do something on their own. And if we're suddenly saying Iran is responsible for that and we're going to respond to that, we've now potentially carried ourselves into a military conflict that the Iranians did not intend to begin. And I think this should be very – there are a few issues that worry me that, like, I'm going to wake up one day with like nine news alerts on my phone, that we've bombed these targets inside of Iran, and then I'm just waiting for the Iranian response. Like this feels like one of those things. And again, I've been a participant in exercises, simulations where you try to play out what might happen.

And nobody thinks that the Iranians are likely to just, like, let's say we bomb a bunch of IRGC targets inside of Iran. Or let's say we bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. There's just nobody who thinks that the Iranians are just going to take that. And so if they respond by bombing our embassy in Baghdad or by firing rockets into Israel or by, conducting a terrorist attack somewhere or by attacking U.S. forces somewhere in the Middle East or by attacking Saudi Arabia, then you have to think we'd respond. And again, as soon as you get on that pathway to escalation with the Iranians, this could become, you know, a very real thing. Yeah. So you and I are clearly very worried about this. What do you think that people

who are activists or who want to lobby Congress should or could be doing right now to prevent a war or at least deter it? I think that, look, if I was in Congress and I've seen, said this before, but I do think people can urge their members of Congress to insist and pass a resolution out of the House. And the Democrats have the votes to do this in the House that says that there should be no war with Iran without congressional authorization. That's a tangible action that Congress can take. It won't be legally binding because I doubt it will get to the Senate. But that matters as a matter of messaging to say, like, this is not authorized without congressional assent. That's one place to start. I think another place to start is.

is, you know, frankly, to be raising the bar on our agency for this. So, in other words, if you are interacting with your members of Congress, if you are at a town hall, you're calling their offices, like, you know, get them to explain. People should have to own, like, when do you think it's appropriate to find ourselves in war with Iran? You know, like, they have to articulate what the point is here. Like, what would necessitate us going to war in another country? because right now it doesn't feel like we're debating what the cost of this would be.

It feels like we all can see it happening. We can all see that the last month has been this insane escalation of tensions with Iran, almost entirely manufactured by the United States. And there's no debate in this country about whether or not it's a good idea to go to war with Iran, whether it's congressional authorized, do members of Congress support it, or get your members of Congress on the record. Now, do they support this or not? you know, ask for responses to write a letter, ask your member of Congress, get on the record.

Do you support a war with Iran? And if so, under what conditions and why? Write your letters to the editor. I think all of us have to kind of be on the media here to avoid a repeat of the Iraq war when essentially the arguments being made by the hawks were kind of taken at face value. You know, and it wasn't scrutiny of those. As was intelligence laundered through as was intelligence laundered. So I think just a lot more awareness and intent. up, a lot more trying to get people on the record. We know from recent experience that members of Congress don't like to say on the record that they want to go to another war because they know it's not popular. They also think it's good politics to bash Iran. Well, you know what? We have to

separate those two things out. Which side of this divide are you on? Or you're anti-Iran politics so much that you're willing to defend the idea that we go to war? Because when that happens, it can be clarifying, right? You'll remember Tommy in 2007 or eight. When McCain gets up at the campaign event and he's like, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, right? Oh, that time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And everybody was like, holy shit, we shouldn't do that, you know? And when Bolton actually, as a private citizen, wrote an op-ed saying bomb Iran, which, you know, big coincidence, that set back their cause, right? When they actually are forced to say that they want to do this, there's a political backlash

against it. And what's happening now is they're allowed to occupy this middle space where it's clear that they want to do this and they're setting the conditions to do it, but they're not owning that position. So I think people, activists need to make this debate clear as to what's at stake and get people on the record. Frankly, I think that can be a deterrent against some members of Congress and others who don't want to go that far. It's so crazy. The McCain cut up there insane. Bum, bomb, bomb. That's a lot. That's a lot. We'll give them credit for at least, at least McCain would own. At least McCain was. Yeah. McCain. Okay. This story is a little lighter.

Laugh until you cry. So in service of President Trump's stupid wall, the Pentagon diverted another $1.5 billion from other priorities to pay for that bad boy. That brings the total cash diverted for the wall to $2.5 billion in addition to money that would come from the National Emergency Declaration. So that's another couple billion over there. So the two biggest sources of funding that were stolen away for this latest round of wall funding.

One, $604 million for training and equipping. Afghan security forces. Two, $251 million to dismantle old chemical weapons. So our next topic on the show is how the war effort in Afghanistan is a mess. But any way you want to get out of there is going to require training and equipping Afghan security forces. So two takehomes I had. One, if your agency is so flush with cash that you can just push around billions of dollars

from one place to another, your budget is too damn big. Two, like Republicans have just completely given up exercising any oversight or common sense on the DOD budget. It is completely absurd that they would allow this to happen. They are confirming for all the world to see that the defense budget at a certain point is like a giant slush fund. Yeah, it is. And like, let's be very clear about this. Because they demagogue it and they say that the military was somehow broken under Obama. I don't remember that. And that we need to, you know, $700, $800, $900 billion a year we're spending on defense. Compare that to, you what we're spending on the things that will actually make us a competitive nation in the future,

research and innovation and education and climate change. But they're showing, first of all, that there's just billions of dollars they can move around here. That, to me, should put a bullseye on the defense budget. And I'd like to see our candidates talk more about this. Me too. Second thing is, even with that slush fund, you know, you could take money away from the, you know, trillion dollars that we have to spend on modernizing the nuclear triad or some fucking wasteful airplane system that we don't need anymore that we spend money on because it's built

in different districts around the United States. But they're picking, I mean, training Afghan security forces, that has a direct correlation to the safety and security of our troops in Afghanistan. Like the whole point is that they're transitioning for these people to be in the lead and we're getting out of there. That to me is incredibly reckless way to approach it. Frankly, yeah, I don't know why the, let's keep us safe from chemical weapons is somehow like a lesser priority in the border. But in general, I think the two things I take away are one, there's all this money sloshing me around the defense budget. And two, even with all this money sloshing me on the defense budget, they're making poor choices about what to rob Peter to pay Paul with. The last thing is I think another idea that Democrats in the House can take up.

And they could do this in the context of the funding of the Defense Department is to say, we won't fund the board. effort unless you come to Congress for an authorization to use military force at the border. You've seen you could bring together there's been this building trend towards Congress asserting its war powers. Well, we have a fucking deployment on the border that they're describing as a crisis. And so let's say we're not going to allow you to spend a single dollar on this unless you get explicit congressional authorization for this mission like we would have for any major military mission. I think that should be on the table to just highlight the absurdity of deploying a bunch of troops to our border as if there's like some fucking war.

war down there when it's a bunch of troops like laying barbed wire and eating MREs and being separated from their families when they should be home in between tours and Afghanistan and other places. So I think there should be much more political heat around the cost of sustaining this military deployment. Yeah, I agree. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois pointed out the Pentagon is now reprogrammed 12 times more money for Trump's wall than for Tyndall Air Force Base, which was destroyed by Hurricane Michael. So maybe we should consider. rebuilding the place. We deem a important security installation where troops actually live. Yeah. One idea. Totally logical. Maybe spend some more money, you know, trying to take care

of service members of PTSD or military families who are suffering hardship. It's ridiculous. Okay, so we mentioned Afghanistan. So the security situation is getting worse, but it's just not a part of the debate, unfortunately. So according to numbers that were released by the inspector general, the average number of monthly attacks in Afghanistan is up, the number of Afghan military and security force casualties is up 31% from the year earlier. And this is all before the spring fighting season starts. And I'm sure that sounds weird to people, but there actually is a fighting season. Every year they announce it.

It's the strangest thing. It's like the Taliban literally announced the date that their spring offensive begins. This year I think it's like April 14th or something like that. So things are bad. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs basically floated. Chairman Dunford basically floated the idea of keeping a counterterrorism force in Afghanistan indefinitely. but here's the thing I really wanted to get at.

The Pentagon has stopped publicizing basic information about how the war is going. So information like the number of districts under Taliban control or Afghan security force casualties, a lot of that as being either classified or not released anymore. And then on top of all of that, the DOD, the Department of Defense, has not held an on-camera briefing in a year. Can you believe that? No. Those guys were briefing daily? In a time when we have people at war.

Right. It's chilling, right? There's an assault on transparency that's happening. It's being led by the White House, right? Across the board. And, you know, we spend all this time, understandably, but, like, debating the Mueller report and that drama. And then the media spends all this time, you know,

covering, like, the new nickname that he has for, like, you know, Pete Buttigieg or some shit like that. And then meanwhile, underneath that, the whole U.S. government is being turned, turned into this like opaque, unaccountable enterprise, right? And look, these are basic data points that have been provided to Congress and the public for years. Years. Like, you, the American taxpayer have contributed hundreds of billions of dollars, or going to trillions of dollars for this war in Afghanistan. You deserve to know, like, how many Afghans are getting killed

in that war and how many districts are under the Taliban control. This is like Vietnam, retro-Vietnam shit where we're saying, like, we can't even tell you how the war is going, just, like, you know, trust us is going well. You have men and women who are still getting killed over there, who are getting injured over there, who at a minimum are separated from their families and fighting over there. You've got billions of dollars being spent in Afghanistan that are not being spent here in the United States, right? And the idea that they want to, you know, shield you from this information tells you everything you didn't know about what that information says, which is that since they escalated this war and it bears repeating, Trump said he'd get us out of this wars.

he's escalated it. One of his only times that he became president, right, is when he gave that speech and sent more troops in Afghanistan. Obama had the troops down going under 10,000. He plused that up to 15,000. The promised drawdown has never materialized. And it's gotten worse. Since he escalated, it has gotten worse.

And this is what we were afraid of, is that our presence is actually a driver of the insurgency and is actually a driver of corruption, the massive amounts of money flowing around to contractors in Afghanistan, the payoffs that are being made, like, we are fueling some of the wrong forces there. And we should insist on total transparency. We should have a Pentagon that can stand up before a camera and tell the American people what is happening in this war that we're in.

And I think the data should suggest that what we're doing isn't working, and it's time to get out of there. And to just say something for the Afghan people, like, I don't think our military presence is helping anymore. but let's talk about what we can do on the civilian side. Like maybe what we should be thinking about is getting out of there and coupling that not with the diplomacy, not just with the diplomacy we've talked about around a peace agreement,

but around what's like a long-term development strategy where we're investing in things that we care about, like girls' education in Afghanistan, or like a non-drug-fueled agriculture in Afghanistan. I just, the current approach is not working. It's not going to get better. It is getting worse. It is time to end the war,

and it's time to move to something else. And we can't make those decisions as citizens and members of Congress without data and information and transparency, particularly around a war. Yeah. And, you know, I'm glad that there is a ongoing set of peace negotiations or talks. Like I know no information about the status or progress they're making. But it's also frustrating to read some official on background state that, you know, the reason he increased the number of troops from 10,000 to 15,000 or whatever is right now, was to put maximal pressure on the Taliban. to push them into talks. And that was the same kind of rationale we were offering when it was 100,000 troops. And it's just never worked over history.

I don't know how like it didn't work a 100,000 troops. It didn't work, right? And so why it's going to work with 15,000 or 20,000 or some airstrikes, it's not. Like, Taliban lives there. Like, they're not disappearing. That's not the approach that's going to do it. And I do just want to say one more thing, but it sounds like inside baseball as briefing. You used to participate in like these meetings we'd have about,

like the Pentagon having to brief people, right? They did an on-camera briefing. And I remember if we were about to do some new military operation, whether it was like a special operation to rescue a hostage in Somalia or going to war in Libya. I remember thinking, like, you know, part of what we had to do in the internal debates to take people in the situation room,

Tommy and I and people with a communications responsibility would sometimes be interesting checks on the decision makers because we'd be like, guys, how the fuck are we going to explain this thing? Yeah. You know, like that had actually a restraining factor. If you removed that, if you knew that, well, we're not going to report this stuff to Congress, or we're going to delay that, and we're not going to do an on-camera press briefing, and we're just going to do stuff and not tell anybody about it, you would do other shit.

Yeah. You know, you would feel unconstrained. I think people need to realize these press briefings are not just about, you know, giving a bunch of Pentagon reporters something to write, that's not the issue. The issue is if the American military and the American government doesn't have to present what it's doing to the American people, they are more likely to do stupid shit, to quote our former boss, Barack Obama. And that should be very worrying to people. Absolutely. And really, you and I got to the point where we felt like even classified operations or covert actions needed to be

explainable in some way because we're just living in a world where everything seems to get out, but to completely eliminate the press briefing. I mean, for God's sake, I remember being with you on the day of the bin Laden operation. People were debating whether Obama should speak about it that night. And you and I were like, guys, we parked the helicopter in Abadabod and we blew it up. I remember, you know, it's actually a good story. So I remember we're in the meeting. Bin Laden's dead. His body is in Afghanistan. We've kind of confirmed as best we could. there was bin Laden and we had a lot of ways to do that, including like his facial recognition, the fact that the women at the compound were yelling Sheikh Osama, everything.

A tall service member who laid down next to him and knew he was the same size. But then it was interesting because a lot of people didn't want to make this public yet. And I remember going to these sit room guys, right, and saying, let us know if you see any press reporting on this. And there was a story in Pakistan, some Pakistani outlet that said a U.S. military helicopter had crashed in a barred. Bada Badabat near their military facility. And I was like, checkmate guys. Right.

Like, if we don't get out and explain what the fuck this helicopter was doing deep inside of Pakistan, somebody else is going to get out and say, you know, a conspiracy theory about it. And that was why Obama had to go out that night and do it. And then I had to go write a speech in like an hour. But it was, again, like, there's a connective point between their resistance to facts and the resistance to briefing and transparency. see, if you can, and this will foreshadow Victor Orban, if you can control entirely the information

flow, you can invent your own reality. You can invent a reality in which the Iranian government attacks some vessels in the Persian Gulf, or we have to stay in Afghanistan and it's working, even though nobody can see why it's working. Or, you know, this is dangerous stuff. This is the slippery slope into, like, authoritarian's making really bad decisions. And we're there now, not to, I'm trying not to be dark here. No, but look, it's just, it's like these things matter. They do. And just a brief aside, I mean, I think that some of the greater mistakes that have been made by governments and Republican and Democratic administrations in the last decade or two is when no one was in the room, when the decision was made, talking about how to be accountable to the public or to explain that decision to the public.

I mean, like everything that's classified, there's top secret, there's code word, there's whatever. but it's all on a need-to-know basis. Someone decides if you need to know it or you don't, and then you get read into the thing. I was often left out of stuff because I was the press guy who talked to the press. I guess the assumption being that press people are more likely to leak. My argument to them would be...

The last people to leak. Well, yeah. You know why janitors don't throw shit on the floor? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, like, you know, you were almost always in these meetings and trying to be a voice of reason. And like, that's where the rubber meets the road

in terms of policy and reality and perception. Well, you mentioned covert operations, and this doesn't reveal. one because we ended up kind of declassifying a set of our drone strikes, but it used to be that we wouldn't talk about any drone strikes. And you and I would sit in these meetings and be like, there's a missile that was fired at somebody and destroyed something and killed some people. Like, that's not secret, you know? And maybe the reason that we don't want to talk about that is that people don't want to have to go out and defend that, you know, and that should never be a reason.

put it this way. If the reason that you don't want the information to become public is that the information is uncomfortable, that's a giant red flag. And to me, this Afghanistan, you know, you could tell. I mean, it's obvious. There's no other reason that it could be public last year or not this year, right, other than the fact that they don't like what that information tells them. That's exactly right. By the way, Ben and I want to have a longer conversation about drones where we try to argue for and against it. I didn't totally get my shit together today to do this, but we should do it.

the day when there's less going on in the world. So today, we're recording on Monday, not Tuesday this week. Trump met with Hungarian President Victor Orban at the White House. We talked a bit about Orban last week and the way he's unwinding democracy and Hungary are really strangling it. But things actually went worse than expected, I think. Trump told Orban, and I quote, you're respected all over Europe, probably like me, a little bit controversial, but that's okay. You've done a good job and you've kept your country safe. Trump's ambassador to Hungary told the Atlantic quote, I can tell you knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years that he would love to have the situation that Victor Orban has, but he doesn't. Wow, Ben, that quote tells you

all you need to know about Trump. Trump thinks that strangling a democracy to death makes you respected and one of his best friend says he loved nothing more to be a dictator. No surprise. This dude is getting a foot rub in the Oval Office today. That's the truest thing at Trump official said. But, unbelievable. Again, I think it's worth Rema – Victor Orban, this is not a close call. No. This guy is an authoritarian. He's illiberal. He's kind of neo-fascist. He is set about ending democracy in Hungary, like taking control of the media. People are not permitted to get information that doesn't flow through Victor Orban's media in most of Hungary. He's packed the judiciary. He's rigged elections. He's basically taken steps to turn this into an authoritarian system. this is really fucking nuts. Like,

this is like, you know, it's the early 30s, and like FDR is like, you know what? I got a great depression going on and I got all kinds of shit home, but it's fucking time

to have Mussolini to the White House, you know, and having fucking Mussolini in the White House and being like, you know what, I really admire those black shirts you wear.

You know, you're really tough on the immigrants. Like, you know what? People may say bad things about you, but like, you really, you know,

showed it to those Ethiopians. Like, that's what this, guy is. He's the tip of the spear of the fucking fascist revival in Europe, a place where this brand of politics leads to very dark places. And Trump is like, yeah, this is great. Like, this is the leader I want to lift up. Of all the Europeans, I want to have here, I'm not going to have Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron or people who run big, important countries

that are democracies. I'm going to have this like fucking thug, you know, because he doesn't like George Soros, like into the White House and talk about what an upstanding guy is. This is insane. Orban's said, we must state that we do not want to be diverse. We do not want our own color traditions in national culture to be mixed with those of others. He's a white nationalist. Color traditions. Like, this isn't subtle. Not subtle at all. Not a lot of economic anxiety in that quote. I mean, and I guess like people say, you know, I was having a conversation with a reporter today about taking this kind of meeting and they're like, well, you know, Obama did, you know, took meetings

with the Saudis and like that's fair. But, you know. No, it's not fair. But like, well, here's a point I try to make to them. And sometimes you meet with bad actors and you push them on the things they're doing wrong. But it's not just that. Because, yes, you sometimes meet unsaved reactors. But, yeah, for one of two purposes. One, if you are swallowing hard because you have some foreign policy interest, right? So Americans have been uncomfortable with the Saudi relationship for some time. But it felt like we had to meet with them because they supplied the oil for the global economy.

Or because, you know, yeah, something like that, right? Or, you know, we don't like China's human rights record, but like, shit, we've got to deal with the Chinese. Like, Hungary? Yeah, no, there's no rationale for Hungary. point is like there's not a, we talk about these tradeoffs in American foreign policy is not like we need the Hungarians to maintain the global economy, no offense of the Hungarian listeners of the pod. Like, there's no tradeoff here, right? So then the only other reason you'd meet with something like this is to press and be like, hey, release these journalists or like, I really don't like

what you're doing civil society. And Trump is meeting with the guy to encourage what he's doing on those things, right? So it's the opposite of that, right? It's taking notes. It's envy. So to me, you can't shrug this off of like, well, Americans always engage unsavory people. They tend to only have to engage them when they absolutely must because there's some other overriding interest or because, yeah, they want to press them on those things. But he's meeting the guy to give him a big foot rub and to give him an adder boy for the things he's doing. It's also worth noting for the nerds out there that the European parliamentary elections are coming up in like a couple weeks. And everybody in Europe has been watching this for months because they're worried what if these far right

parties get like a strong block in the European Parliament and they can like basically grind the EU to a halt. So meeting with Orban, like on the eve of these elections is sending a message. Somebody, probably not Trump, but somebody around Trump who shares his like neo-fascist impulses is smart enough to be like, well, the time to have Orban is before these elections. That's exactly right. And mind you, this is also, the Times, I think, reported this over the weekend that just two weeks before these European parliamentary elections, there's a whole bunch of Russian-linked accounts and far-right groups spreading disinformation about, you know, more democratic or left-leaning candidates. So, you know, the Steve Bannon, Russia worldview, is coming together again in a way that supports fascism and far-right parties. Yeah. And people need to understand that this is like the defining issue of our time, right?

Because these people are either going to win or they're not. And Trump is showing all of his cards about which side of this debate he's on. He's on the side on the side of the people who are trying to roll back democracy. Last thing I wanted to raise, which is a fun one, not really, but it's notable. So the New York Times. Belugas to the Queen? The Blugas of the Queen. The Times over the weekend finally wrote the piece that I feel like you and I have been talking about for months and months and months.

Yeah. Which is that all the big swings Trump has taken on foreign policy, let's say that's Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela are failing. And they're not only failing, but all three of those actors feel emboldened to tell him to go fuck himself. Yeah. You know, you have the Iranian saying, we're actually going to restart some kinds of enrichment. The Venezuelans, you know, Maduro is essentially mocking Trump and the coup failed. And then North Korea is firing missiles into air on a daily or hourly basis that if Iran fired would lead to a military strike.

So, you know, I don't know where each of these issues is going to go. They kind of feel like they are driven by Trump's individual need for good headlines about issue and how he gets there is different. But it's, you know, it was nice to see someone finally put that all together. Yeah, I don't know, you know, if David Sanger's a front of the pod, you know. But, I mean, part of the reason why we keep coming back to the. issues is that this has been unfolding before our eyes for some time. You can now see all the consequences. Maduro is sitting there giving us a finger, North Koreans firing off missiles,

Iranians preparing to restart their enrichment program. And that's been building for some time. And the two problems are, for whatever reason, the media hasn't really held him to account on this. To be fair, maybe because they're pulled in a million different directors of Trump. And Democrats don't like to talk about foreign policy because they want to talk about health care, they want to focus on kind of core bread and butter issues. So actually there's just not a lot of content out there that is highlighting that this is not working. The presumption in American farm policy circles and certainly how the media covers around

policies that like there's tough policies and then there's less tough policies. But like the point here, and toughness is equated with, you know, blustery and pulling out of agreements. And this is highlighting the fact that these regimes have sized up Trump. And they're like, sure, he can pop off, but like, you know, we can tell him the fuck off, right? And just do our thing. And Maduro is not not leaving. And the North Greens aren't giving up the nuclear weapons.

And the Uanians aren't capitulating. And there's no evidence to suggest that if Trump keeps doing what he's doing, they will somehow shift course. And I do think that it's really important that Democrats are other voices, civil society, and hopefully the media. is more rigorous in holding Trump to account. I do want to say I've been pleased by some of the reporters who went along with the kind of Kim Jong-un show. You can tell they're a little pissed about it. You know, you know, I've seen some of these people. I won't name any names, but like I've seen them kind of be like, well, he said that his personal relationship with Kim would deliver,

and this is proof that it hasn't. And that's good. Like, there's now a track record, and there's a record of things that Trump has said that we're going to happen that aren't happening. And people need to keep pointing that out. That's right. Totally agree. that's all I had I mean you got any more queen stories no well I mean nothing that good the one that were you at the state visit party in 2011 at the U.S. ambassadors residents so queen was there

UVIPs were all at the ambassador's residence I was sitting in a press file at a hotel but then I believe we all went out and hung out with a bunch of David Cameron staff because the for a while the interesting thing about this is we're at this event at the ambassador residence and the queen is there she's like the guest of honor right and we get brought into this other room and we all sit kind of like theater style like what is what is going on here and then this woman comes out and just starts singing Broadway songs and it was very strange and I was like what what's going on here and they're like oh the queen loves Broadway musicals what yeah loves loves Broadway musicians do you remember which ones no because I don't know probably not

rent then the other thing is the queen was seated at the dinner next to Tom Hanks I'm like oh that's a nice give to Tom Hanks. We're just trying to reward Tom Hanks for being like Mr. America and everything. But no, it turned out that the queen also loves Tom Hanks. Well, who doesn't? So my insight in the queen is she loves Tom Hanks. She loves Broadway musicals. She does not like it when someone rattles the door when she's taking care of her business.

Do you think she was like, I'm the captain now? And then my last queen said, actually, is that when Obama flew up to Windsor Castle, one of her other residences, because she has a few, to meet with her in 2016, the queen insisted that she be allowed to drive Obama. What? And the Secret Service said no. That has not gone well for the royal family lately. And this went all the way to Obama.

Because to override the Secret Service, you have to go to Obama. He's like, well, she wants to fucking drive, like she's the queen, you know? And so he got off. And instead of getting into The Beast, his only time he got into her car. What kind of car? Like a cool one. Sweet rolls or something. Yeah, it's probably sweet rolls.

Jaguar, are those UK? I mean, I know anybody know here? No, Gaw. Nars you know? Yeah. I mean, I think it's, uh, Jack's got to be, it seems British, right? Like, but then actually Prince Philip drove, not the queen. Well, didn't Prince Philip recently get in a little bit of trouble?

Let's not talk about it. So maybe the service was, yeah, maybe, maybe they had a point. Man, so you have like 8,000 queens. I got a lot of queen stories. I got, I got more queen stories. I got nothing. Like, the only thing I was thinking about is, you remember how the, the men's room right off the sit room, you'd kind of walk in there and like some like secretary defense or something, you know. One time I was like at the journal.

and I was like just sort of doing my thing and Dave Petraeus saddles up next to me and I'm like, how are you sir? And he goes, good, good, you know, if you ever get the chance to be CIA director you should do it, a lot of great authorities. You got a lot of money to play with. It's really great job.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. And I was like, okay, I'm going to wash my hands and you learn a lot of the journal in the West Wing. You really do. So one time, same thing happens to me. I mean, for the male listeners, yeah, these are really close. Like uncomfortably close to urinals.

Yeah. So I'm there and Marty Dempsey settles up next to me, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And I'm just kind of waiting to get through it. And he's like, hey, Ben, I got a really great book you should read by Rachel Maddow. What? And, like, Dempsey had been reading Maddow's book. That's cool. And he's, like, giving basically a plug to this thing.

And he's like, she makes a lot of really good points. And I'm like, this is a different kind of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That is fascinating. He's a great guy. He's a great guy, underrated guy. Like, terrific guy. Truly. Well, now that we've concluded when we used to be cool story time, here's my conversation with Michael Beschloss. On the line is author and historian Michael Beschloss. He specializes in the United States presidency in his most recent book, Presidents of War, is about the eight presidents who took America into major wars and Thomas Jefferson, who refused to do so in the erosion of congressional authority that came from those decisions.

Michael, thank you so much for being here today. Oh, thrilled. Great to talk, Tommy. So you write about how the founding fathers felt strongly that the power to declare war needed to be in the hands of the legislature, not the president. Why was that? Why were they so seized with this issue? Well, they were pretty current in terms of 2019. Our founders were really worried that our presidents would become tyrants and authoritarian. And they looked back at Europe and they saw that the way that happened the fastest was if a king became unpopular, he would, for instance, contrive a reason for a war that would, unite the people and make him a lot more popular. Same thing with dictators.

So when they wrote the Constitution, the one thing they wanted to make sure was that presidents could not get the United States into an unnecessary war on their own. And that's the reason why they gave the power to declare war not to presidents, but to Congress. I found Thomas Jefferson's views on military strength to be especially interesting. Today you hear a lot of talk about a big army, a strong military as a way to prevent or deterred. wars. Jefferson seemed to believe the opposite. Why was that? Jefferson felt that if you didn't have a big military, then people would think twice about wanting to go to war because it would

be harder to win if you did that. And the result was, I mean, it's almost extreme. He believed in having gunboats, for instance, that were almost like, you know, current day equivalent would be little motorboats up and down the east coast of the United States. And these were so pathetic that, you know, and it actually achieved what he wanted, which is that people were very reluctant to go to war because they knew that, you know, those gunboats were not going to help. I want to get into how presidents managed to erode Congress's authority, but there's a lot of great footnotes in this book with some fun information. So this is one I caught on page 94. You wrote, with the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaching, some of

Madison's friends suggested that he takes stimulates in order to emulate his mentor Jefferson's feet of expiring, along with John Adams on the 50th. What the hell, Michael, are these the founding fathers or Motley Crew? What's going on here? Motley Crew, and he didn't even have political consultants because you think that they would think that this would be good for Madison's image, but fortunately, he did not do that, although it sure did help for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, of course, to die on the 50th anniversary. Do we just have a bunch of drug addicts running around writing the Constitution back in the day? Well, we did, and not only at the time of the Constitution. I mean, Andrew Jackson used drugs that he probably shouldn't have. And the same thing was true even in

recent times, I think, as people write about Richard Nixon, they're going to pay a little bit more attention to his pharmacological life. Wow, man, you will learn a lot from this book, people. I highly recommend you read it. So while the founders explicitly gave Congress the authority to declare war, every president seemed to find ways to end run the Constitution and usurp that authority pretty quickly. Right. Who do you think was the first and maybe the worst presidential offender of that usurpation? The worst presidential offender was probably James Polk, who was sort of at the bottom of my list or close to the bottom, because, you know, we had no particular beef with Mexico in the mid-1840s.

But Polk secretly wanted to get us involved in a big war with Mexico, number one, to expand the United States to the Pacific, a million square miles almost, which was a good thing. but also he wanted that new territory to be hospitable to slavery. He was a big slaveholder. And so what he did was he sent our army down to the Mexican border, provoked the Mexicans that had a little border skirmish. And on the basis of basically that fake incident, Polk went to Congress and said, we need a major war with Mexico to march all the way down to Mexico City, which they agreed.

They declared war. And the upside is that we became a continental nation. and it sort of ends versus means. The downside of this is that he did it by lying in a way that was a very bad example for later presidents. Speaking of bad examples, I mean, your book takes us from the War of 1812 through Vietnam. And it was hard for me not to feel frustrated about how needless and arguably avoidable a bunch of these wars were. I mean, you write about how the War of 1812 could have been resolved through diplomatic means, probably should have, but happened anyway. the Spanish-American War was started under completely false pretenses.

Can you talk about some of those examples? And do you think that presidents since that time have learned from that history, or are we doomed to repeat it? Well, first of all, you have to have a president who reads history, which we don't have in 2019. And the second thing is that a lot of these wars nowadays, people look back, they don't realize how unnecessary and failed they were. I mean, even the war of 1812, I think if you talk to most people, they'd say it was probably a great thing to do, Star Spangled Banner, don't give up the ship. But the two war aims that James Madison had were stop the Brits from bothering our ships, and number two, conquer Canada. Have you been to Canada lately, Tommy? I think it's still independent.

Yeah, it didn't work. So the first war we lost was not Vietnam. It was the war of 1812. but this was seen as a great victory and encouraged presidents later on to get into wars that were unnecessary. I mean, one other big example is 1898. There was an American ship called the Maine. It was sunk in Havana Harbor, was blamed on the Spanish. So we had this big war against Spain that went all the way to the Philippines.

Turns out the Spanish didn't sink the boat. It was a boiler accident. Unbelievable. I mean, part of it, you write about how the media had a pretty significant. role in getting the American people into a frothy rage and behind a lot of these wars. I mean, do you think has the media changed considerably since Remember the Maine, or are we still dealing with the same kind of journalism that seems to incentivize conflict, I guess? Well, look at 2003 at the time of Iraq. I think you saw a lot of that, and you saw a lot of that

at the beginning of Vietnam. And what that does is that allows a president to say that anyone who's against this war is a traitor. That's what LBJ said. He said that anyone who opposes my war in Vietnam is against our fighting men. And there was a lot of that said in 2003 during Iraq as well. Yeah. The section about LBJ, for me, I thought was maybe the most fascinating. I mean, I was struck by how many presidents fell victim to the sort of the same dangerously flawed argument, which is basically we have put so much into this war effort that we can't stop now. The suggestion being that the country would be more damaged by the signal that a retreat sends. that are losing a thousand more soldiers.

Absolutely. So with LBJ, I mean, you quote, Senator Richard Russell, warning Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam, quote, would take half a million men. They'd be bogged down in there for 10 years. I mean, that is astoundingly prescient. But even Russell... He was exactly right.

Yeah, but even he goes on to conclude that, quote, I don't know how you can tell the American people that you're coming out. They'll think you've been whipped, you've been ruined, you're scared, it would be disasters. I mean, you hear a version of this logic during the Iraq war when we're told not to cut and run. even today in Afghanistan. How do we defeat that flawed logic? Or where do you think it came from?

You have to have a president who's willing to take the heat for getting out of a war that we do not need to fight. I think the worst moment in Lyndon Johnson's presidency was something I got off of one of these tapes that Johnson made of his private conversations. And it was at the beginning of 1965. It was the time that Johnson was sending the first big numbers of ground troops off to Vietnam and starting the war. and he'd go to these air bases, and these young idealistic kids would get on the transports going off to die, and Johnson would say we're going to win this war, go and nail the coonskin on the wall. And in February of 65, he has this private talk to with Robert McNamara, his defense secretary, who I see is one of the villains of modern history. And Johnson says to McNamara, I can't think of anything worse than losing the Vietnam War,

and I do not see any way that we can win. That was at the beginning of the war. Those kids who were going off to die deserved to know that their commander in chief thought that the war would never be won. Truly. And also, I mean, you talk about wars being waged under false frequencies.

We all know about Iraq and W&D. But, I mean, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Sure. I mean, is it fair to say it was built on a lie or a misunderstanding? How would you characterize it? Well, what happened was there were two reports of attacks on American ships

in early August of 1964 by the North Vietnamese. The second one never happened. It was a false report. And it was on the basis of that false report. Johnson didn't know it was false yet. The Johnson went on TV, said, you know, there's been an unprovoked attack, he said. And actually it wasn't unprovoked anyway because he knew that the American Navy was doing a lot of stuff around there that was covert. But he bombed hell out of North Vietnam that night, which began the rock slide that led to the war in Vietnam.

And he went to Congress and said, give me a resolution. use force in Southeast Asia, passed the House and Senate almost unanimously. A couple of weeks later, Johnson privately found out that that second attack had never occurred. Out of good faith, I think he should have gone to Congress and said, you know, I did this thinking that it really did occur, but you should know that it was a false report. They never would have taken the Gulf of Tonkin resolution back, but Johnson never did it. So the result was that for almost a decade, Johnson and Nixon waged this catastrophic tragic war in Vietnam on the basis of an incident that never happened.

It is infuriating to read. It truly is. To bring the conversation forward to today, so my old boss, President Obama, went to war in Libya without congressional authorization. He sought congressional approval to bomb Syria, but also asserted that he didn't need it. How much of that sort of tortured legal approach to warmaking do you think is derived from actions taken by presidents centuries ago, say, or is it coming from the war? War Powers Act of 1973 that came afterwards. Where do you think this began? I think the pivotal moment was 1950. The South Koreans were invaded by the North. Harry Truman sent MacArthur and American forces to reverse this invasion. And Truman's aides went to him and said, you know, boss, when are you

going to go to Congress and ask for your war declaration? And Truman said, you know, as far as I'm concerned, Congress can go to hell. I don't have to worry about them. Poke didn't worry about them, so why should I? He was an admirer of James K. Polk. You know, here again is an example where he was following a precedent that was not very good. And the reason he didn't go to Congress to ask for a war declaration was it was 1950. It was the time of McCarthyism. He was in the middle of a midterm campaign and he thought that if there were debates on Capitol Hill, they would get into other areas that would be damaging to him. It would be controversial. So the result is that we fought the war in Korea with no war declaration, and Johnson did the same thing on the same following that tradition.

And the result is that here we are in 2019, the last time America ever fought a war based on Congress declaring war, as the Constitution says that you have to, was 1942, FDR in World War II. The Korea section was very interesting. and I came away struggling with how I felt about that war. It did seem like it began because Truman's Secretary of State at the time gave a speech that was misperceived in a lot of foreign capitals. And it was also a very stupid speech because he said, this is Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, who says Korea is outside the American defense perimeter. Well, what would the North Koreans think? But he's basically saying, if you invade the South, the Americans will not defend it. Right. So the U.S. Secretary of State sends this signal that arguably leads to North Koreans invading.

And that he did not mean to send. Right, that he did not mean to send. But then Truman, I believe, talked about the need to send military forces because he thought he needed to back up the newly created authorities of the United Nations if it were to exist as a real body. I mean, how did you land on that decision making? What do you think of that rationale? I think he was right to do that because if he had done nothing, then all those borders. that had been drawn after World War II, you would have had all sorts of countries invading their neighbors and figuring that the Americans and their allies wouldn't do anything. But what I complain about is that Truman did not bother to ask Congress. And my whole point is that wars are fought better if Congress is involved. And if Congress is not involved, presidents have a larger chance

of becoming tyrants because if you look through history, it is in wartime that presidents do things like violate civil liberties, they declare martial law. So if you're in 2019 and you're worrying about Donald Trump going in a very dangerous authoritarian direction, it will be very tempting for him to get us involved in a war in which he can say that anyone against it is a traitor and he can get Congress to be a little bit more obedient than he seems to be able to do now. While potentially citing actions taken by Abraham Lincoln? Absolutely. And that's the problem because we have made war very tempting to an unscrupulous president. I look at the landscape right now, and I worry about Trump invading Venezuela.

I worry about Secretary Pompeo refusing to rule out the 2001 authorization for the use of military force as justification for the war with Iran. Do you think there's a path where Congress could claw back that authority and reassert themselves? There should be, and there was recently a case which should give us a little. little bit of optimism, you know, that you know about, which is that Congress tried to get the United States to basically detach from the struggle in Yemen, you know, with all of its humanitarian atrocities. Congress was not able to get a two-thirds vote, so it didn't happen, but it was a larger vote, including some Republicans, than we might have expected.

One last sort of thought or anecdote. I mean, I think we all feel very removed from the wars. There's no draft. There are drones. We're not talking about the Soviet. enemy with ICBM capability, right? We're talking about al-Qaeda in various places and ISIS. But, I mean, during World War II, you write about President Roosevelt taking this secret trip to meet with Churchill and Stalin, and his ship was nearly torpedoed. Can you tell that story? Well, the president was at risk, and he, you know, it was a very long way to meet Churchill and Stalin. And the result was that not only were large segments of the American public at risk, the president was, too. And the other thing is,

that, you know, especially World War II, that was something that, you know, there was no way that you would not know that there was a war on. It affected every part of American life. Every family knew. The problem is that in recent times, a president can get us involved in a war that is fought by a tiny segment of the American population. And that's unfair. And it also makes it a lot easier for presidents to get the country involved in wars because the sacrifice is not born equally. Right. I mean, I couldn't help but think about presidents who had served, who had, you know, lived through that sense of personal risk or presidents who had children who were currently serving. Do you think that that personal experience changed the way wars were

waged? Oh, I think it did. I mean, the best example of this is probably Dwight Eisenhower, who was one of the most pacifist presidents in American history because he had been through World War II. He was the hero of Western Europe. He had been there on deep. He had been there on Day and all those kids were killed because of decisions that he made. One of the most poignant things I've ever seen is that when Eisenhower was campaigning for president in 1952, there was an audience of ex-soldiers who had fought under his command, and he began talking about what the experience was of sending these kids off to die on D-Day.

And you see the pictures, he begins to cry and puts a hankership over his face. This was something he never became jaded about. The book is called Presidents of War. Michael Beschloss, thank you for doing the show. I wish I had read this in 2008, right before I went to the National Security Council, so I had had this sense of history in my head because it really is an invaluable book for understanding the wars we're fighting today and how we got there. So thank you for writing it. Oh, that is so kind of you, Tommy.

Thank you very much. Thanks. Have a great day. You too. That's it for Pod Save the World. I'll try to think of all the other times. I actually have for next time. I have another queen's story.

Hell yeah. Stay tuned. It involves a mouse, Barack Obama, I know this one. Michelle Obama and some bling. All those elements will be part of the story. Tune in next week.

Yeah.