School of War - How Trump Decided to Go to War with Iran, with Jonathan Swan

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times, joins School of War to discuss the reporting behind his new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, co-authored with Maggie Haberman. How does Donald Trump make geopolitical decisions? What drove him to join Israel’s war against Iran? How has his thinking on Ukraine evolved? And how does China fit into all of this? 02:23 - Inside Regime Change 05:29 - Trump's View of the World 09:04 - Why Trump Sees Iran Differently 11:25 - Trump's Proxy Strategy 12:44 - Steve Witkoff's Worldview 13:43 - The Principles Behind Iran Policy 14:45 - North Korea vs. Iran 16:15 - Ron Dermer's Prediction 17:58 - Why the 12-Day War Matters 20:48 - Netanyahu's Case for War 25:20 - Trump's Inner Circle on Iran 28:01 - Trump's Turn on Ukraine 30:36 - Trump's Approach to China 31:55 - Taiwan and the China Challenge 33:16 - The Future of Trump's Foreign Policy Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast, or at The Free Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The war in Iran shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, there's been marked escalation in recent days, including the tragic loss of U.S. service member lives over the weekend. Today, we're going to take a step back and look at the president's decision to go to war, how he made that call, and indeed what the process behind this administration's national security decision-making really is, with the New York Times, Jonathan Swan. Let's get into it. It is for war, this Milwaukee and region of the way.

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Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for the New York Times covering the Trump administration. He is the co-author with Maggie Haberman of the extremely impressive new book regime change inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh, thanks so much for having me.

The book is impressive, not just for its contents, which we will get into in a moment, but I just want to congratulate you on how well it's doing. You ran out the first printing. Just on behalf of literature, it's nice to meet someone who's figured out how to sell a book. So well done to you and to Maggie on that. It's defied my expectations, that's for sure. What is your own account of its, I could give an account of its success, but what is your own account of why it seems to be scratching an it?

I actually don't know. I was like super bearish on its commercial prospects because everyone had been telling me that people don't read nonfiction anymore. And certainly politics books have not been selling well or anything to do with Donald Trump. I would like to think that we brought some insight and some reporting that had been lacking and depth in terms of what's going on with this administration. I still think that people are hungry and curious to know how the country is being run. during a very consequential period of time. So I think that's part of it. I also, I think it's a nuanced book,

and I think that what we're seeing now is word of mouth, and I think that people are reading it and finding it interesting, and it's not a polemic that's sort of designed to cater to one side or the other, so I do think it's reaching a broad audience, which I'm happy about. I've personally profited,

even before it came out with some of the excerpts that you folks were running, the one about the February, I guess there's two meetings, meetings in February in the run-up to the Iran War, one with Prime Minister Netanyahu and then a second decision meeting. I thought that reporting, it remains the gold standard. I'm not familiar with any sort of better reporting to help us understand the decision to go to war. I want to get to that. I want to get to the Iran question in the Iran war. But before we do, let me just start

us off. I want to read a paragraph actually from the introduction of the book, because I think it sums up something important and kind of a common opinion about the president. And then I have a question based on it. So you and your co-author, Maggie Haberman, write, a year into his second presidency, Trump and his admirers had become enamored of the concept of the Don Roe doctrine, purportedly Trump's contemporary spin on James Monroe's claims of U.S. dominance in its hemisphere and a bulwark against European meddling. Much ink was spilled trying to fit his various foreign policy actions into a larger Trumpian vision of America's global role. There was some truth to these assertions, but they are also a trap. And you sort of go on to.

describe the way in which people err by trying to assign too much coherence and not give enough of a role to, you know, the situational or transactional nature of Trump's presidency. All well and good. I concede the point broadly that one has to account for, again, the situational aspect of everything for the president. That said, you do say, you do offer that caveat there, that there's some truth to it or there's some room for allowing for patterns. And that's where I want to push you on. And that's why I want to use our time together is in particular on the foreign policy side of the Trump presidency, which a good chunk of the book is about, what are the patterns? What are the principles basically asking you to do the thing that you should say people should avoid?

But what are the patterns and principles? And, you know, take this in any direction you won't. We can pick an issue like Ukraine, which is at its own fascinating trajectory where we start, as you document richly with this extraordinarily cold period of relations. with Ukraine, this warmth towards Putin, now here in the summer of 2026. I don't know if we're in the reverse exactly, but certainly something's changed. So just when you do indulge and think about patterns, what are the patterns that you see? So I remember in the first term of Donald Trump, in the first, say, six months of the presidency, I had a conversation with one of his advisors who was in the room for his sort of first series of foreign leader calls. And this was in some cases

the first time Donald Trump had ever talked to these leaders before. You know, he had no background in government, foreign policy or anything like that. And the question he would ask his briefers before every call was, what is our trade deficit? Right. With that country. And the answer to that question would have a huge effect on how he, his whole approach and mood in the conversation. If the U.S. was being ripped off in his view by the other country, it didn't really matter what the history of the relationship was. He viewed this country as, you know, almost an adversary. If America was doing well against them, he saw it, he was much more inclined to view them in a kindly way. So I always thought about, in the first term anyway,

Trump views the world as not a collection of countries that we have historical alliances with or, you know, the post-World War II order, but essentially a group of countries that owe America money that are ripping off America, taking advantage of America. He doesn't like multilateralism. He doesn't like dealing with large groups of countries. He likes one-on-one. He thinks that's where he has leverage. And he tends to have a lot of, of contempt for smaller and middle powers, particularly when they are lecturing America or not living up to their end of the burden. Obviously, the Europeans are in that category, but also the Koreans and to some extent the Japanese. So Trump, I always think of him as sort of like having a 19th century sort of mindset, which is the big powers. are entitled to divide up the world in certain ways. That's, being a little reductive and a little crude, I don't think it's so simple or so black and white.

And he's obviously in various ways lived up to some of America's allied responsibilities. But I think in the large part, Donald Trump is quite happy with a spheres of influence world. We have a scene in the book where he's talking about Taiwan, and he holds up a little, teaspoon. And he says, you know, this is Taiwan. And his point was basically, why are we, what, we're going to send American troops to fight over this tiny little island that's, you know,

he changes the distance, how far away it is, but basically in China's zone, what we're going to fight over this thing. And, you know, some of his top aides believe, and have told me privately, that if Donald Trump knew that he could secure a steady supply of semiconductors, he would have no problem coming to some arrangement with China, hypothetically, about Taiwan. Many of his advisors believe that. He's not animated by human rights or democracy or any of the sort of lofty concepts that have defined much of American foreign policy in recent history. He is someone who is very, very transactional.

So those are some of the common threads. But the reason I say what we say in the introduction, We write that is, you know, Iran is really instructive because there was a whole group of anti-interventionists, isolationists, whatever term you want to apply to them in MAGA, who I think either deluded themselves or just refused to see what was different in terms of how Trump viewed Iran versus them. He's always had a much more hawkish view about Iran. than they have. And you just need to look at his record in the first term. It's very obvious to anyone who pays attention to that. And so what often happens is people like to say that, well, Trump was controlled by, you know, Israel or led into, and they remove any agency from Donald Trump, whereas the actual story of him going to Iran is Donald Trump as the prime actor and the

prime mover and much more hawkish than his advisors. And the interesting thing about Iran, I would say this has eroded somewhat during the war, but it's the closest thing to a principled foreign policy decision I've seen him make. It's very interesting, actually. And a lot of people have kind of ignored that, you know, often to sort of fit their own worldview or sometimes push their own agenda. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the most fascinating things about trying to interpret this term as distinct from the first term, where for the most part, he's on foreign policy

surrounded by relatively establishment Republicans, which I think, by the way, at the time, gave a bit of a false impression of where he was coming from. I think in this term, where he really is in charge, and he's surrounded by these competing groups, he comes into greater clarity, which you and Maggie Haberman have richly documented in this book. His position, you know, it seems virtually unique to him. That is to say, to the extent that we identify these principles, there aren't that many other people, even in his administration, who are pure stand-ins for him, as opposed to, you know, if there were a president, Marco Rubio, there'd be a big establishment of people who agree with Marco Rubio around him or a president, Vance. Same in the less interventionist direction.

Who, if anyone around the president, is close to being a pure proxy, or is there anyone close to being a pure proxy for his worldview? You know, I was going to say Pete Hegseth, but only in the sense that I think Hegseth is so admiring of Donald Trump and so deferential to Donald Trump that he ends up being more of a pure vessel for Donald Trump than almost anyone around him. So Iran is a good example. Actually, basically no one on his senior team thought it was a good idea to go into Iran. They all had different concerns, different levels of skepticism. You know, Vance was the most concerned, and certainly the, like, he was vocal about it in front of Trump and the others really weren't.

But the closest person to thinking that we should do this and thought it was a good idea was Hague Seth. And I think that certainly when it comes to the view that Donald Trump has, which is our war fighters have been shackled, that we've been politically correct, that we've been too deferential to international law or all of these, you know, norms. and things that have kind of handcuffed us. Hegset is a very, he's very aligned at a gut level with Donald Trump on that. So I think Hegseth's probably the closest, um, version on his stuff. What do you think about Wittkoff as, as somebody who sees the world similarly? I, I don't think Wittkoff has much of a worldview beyond he wants to do deals and he's very optimistic and, you know, the deal is always just around the corner. I think Donald Trump is far more hawkish than Whitkoff on Iran, for example. And I guess I could make a case that

Witkoff shares Trump's transactionalism. That's definitely true. And shares his, you know, doesn't make a moral, much of a moral distinction between Russia and Ukraine, just wants to get a deal. I think he's aligned with Trump in that way. But I don't really think Wipkopf has much of a world view. He's more of a pure real estate dealmaker and has come to these issues even more recently than Donald Trump has. Fair enough. So just sticking with Iran then, to what should we attribute this? You describe it as in a way his more principled views is he seems like on some level much of the time a genuine Iran hawk.

he committed to the notion that Iran should not get nuclear weapons as a policy principle for a guy who for whom policy principles are probably fewer in number than they are with most presidents. Why? Where does it come from? You know, I don't know that I have a satisfactory answer that. Maggie and I have tried to sort of report this out. The best we could we could sort of piece together from talking to advisors and looking at his long record, he's been talking Iran for a long time, actually, before he went into politics. Look, I think many of Donald Trump's views were formed during his formative years, and they really haven't changed that much. And I think being a young man, living through 1979, living through the humiliation of the hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter,

I think that had a very big impression on Donald Trump. I think he genuinely believes these are religious nutcases who can't be allowed to have a nuclear weapon because they would use it. it was interesting. I was talking to one of Trump's advisors, and they were distinguishing North Korea from Iran in Trump's mind. And this advisor said to me, Trump is actually not that worried about Kim Jong-un because he believes that Kim Jong-un just has his nukes so no one, everyone leaves him alone. He doesn't believe that he actually wants to use them, whereas this advisor said, Trump believes that if the Iranians ever got a nuke, they would use it. So it seems to be genuinely felt. Obviously, in his first term, he pulled out of the Obama nuclear deal. And people, you know, people gloss over that.

But a bunch of his advisors did not think that was a good idea and counseled against it. He then authorized the killing of Qasem Soleimani. Again, many people were warned against that. And then I think his feelings about Iran, based on our reporting, deepened during the interregnum, during his years out of power. Remember, he was briefed by the FBI. that the Iranians were trying to kill him, became very personal. And there were the two assassination attempts

over the summer of 2024. Neither of them has been linked to Iran. But it was part of the overall atmosphere at the same time, you know, they're switching planes, decoy planes. The Iranians had hacked into Susie Wiles, his top campaign advisors, emails. There was this overall feeling of under siege,

under threat, and Iran was sort of a focal point. We have a very very, interesting little scene in the book, which I think is quite revealing where Netanyahu's senior advisor, Ron Derma, meets with Trump after the 2024 election at Mar-Alarago. And he leaves that meeting and he tells associates that he thinks there's an 80% chance that Trump joins Netanyahu in a war against Iran. And in fact, he was so confident that that might happen that he convinced his wife to let him stay on in government, because this has been such a long-term goal of dermas to take on this regime.

So let's kind of walk our way through to where we are now with Iran. I'm curious which you think the most important conditioning incidents are for Trump's decision to go to war in the way in which he's conducted the war so far. There's a few obvious ones to throw out there that I'll ask you to sort of reflect on them. Obviously, the success of the Venezuela operation. obviously the success of Midnight Hammer. On some level, I'm always, you mentioned North Korea, the way in which brinksmanship worked by Trump's lights.

I mean, I think you could quibble with it, but by his own lights, brinksmanship with North Korea in the first term, worked and produced by his own lights a good deal. These all seem to me to sort of set the scene for the decisions made in February. I'm curious if you would add or subtract from that or whatever. else you would, what else you would reflect on to talk about this. It's extraordinary.

I mean, because I'm talking about, I mean, he surround Marco Rubio, no slouch in the Iran Hawk department, but as you document, hardly an enthusiast for the decision that it's really Trump makes. Right. Right. I think the 12-day war last year had a huge, maybe has been understated in, in terms of the like everyone points to Venezuela. I definitely think that that gave him this sort of sense of the U.S. military can do

anything. Obviously, it was an incredible operation. When we sat down with President Trump in March, he described it to us as a one-hour war, and I think he was just in awe of Delta Force in the US military and whatnot. So I do think that had a role. But the 12-day war from Trump's perspective, remember, he was so skeptical of this BB Netanyahu operation. He was really skeptical, even right up until the last minute. He was not comfortable with it. He was unsure about it. And then he watches the first night of Israeli strikes and he's watching Fox News. And from his perspective, and I think from most people's perspective, watching it, it was stunningly successful as a military operation.

And he was watching this and nothing, we quote someone in the book who served him the first time. Nothing attracts Trump's attention like success. And so he went within a period of 24 hours, we were hearing from people who were talking to him. He went from being, you know, second-guessing Netanyahu to claim. credit essentially for this operation and saying, you know, I think we're going to drop the big one, get involved. So he started to turn his mind to the bunker busters. And so from Trump's point of view, the US engages, they drop the bunker busters, they

obliterate Iran's nuclear facilities. And Iran's response was so tepid and so telegraphed. And, you know, they fire off a few missiles, no American casualties. So Trump's looking at this and going, wait a second, this regime is a paper tiger. I mean, we just bombed the hell out of their country and this is all they're doing. They must be terrified. So I think it's a combination of that. And then Netanyahu, yes, is a very effective, confident salesman and he definitely sold him hard on this.

I think at a very deep gut level, Trump thought this regime was. just going to fold really quickly. And so even though he'd been briefed about, you know, the risks of the Strait of Hulmoos, the Chamber of Joint Chiefs Dan Cain had talked about concerns about America's supply of long-range weapons. He talked about other concerns, you know, military concerns with the war. Trump felt that those concerns wouldn't play out because the regime would be toppled so quickly and they would just collapse so quickly. And it was a gut, it was really, I think, quite a deep gut decision. So I think those are some of the factors that played into it.

Well, so again, I mean, for me, the most useful passage of all your reporting, just because I spent a lot of time trying to understand what's going on with the Iran War, was your account of these meetings in February that lead to the decision to go to war? I think it's February 11th, right, where Netanyahu comes in pitches. What's so effective about his pitch? Why does he carry so much credibility for the president? And how did he pull that off? Well, it results, frankly, has played a huge role in it.

So Trump was blown away by the – I shouldn't use that word blown away. I'm saying, make a cheap pun. But the Netanyahu – the Israeli operation where they infiltrated Hezbollah's pages and blew up, you know, all those Hezbollah operatives, Trump was just – as many of us were kind of enthralled by this. just incredible execution of spycraft, technology, warfare. And he was marveling, we have a scene in the book, you know, absolutely kind of awe-struck at this. So that built confidence.

The experience of the 12-day war and watching Israel during that war built confidence. So Netanyahu had shown in Trump's mind that he could really execute. And, you know, those two have had an up-and-down relationship, but, I mean, you've, I'm sure you've seen Netanyahu in a one-on-one context or in a group context. You know, he speaks with absolute clarity. There's no room for doubt. It's really forceful. And, you know, it was a very powerful sight in the situation room.

It was Trump facing Netanyahu. On the screen behind him, you had the head of Mossad, you had the generals on the screen. It was the full force of the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus behind him. him, and it was Netanyahu laying out these regime-change scenarios. The next day, the CIA had done an overnight analysis, and they had judged that the regime-change scenarios of Netanyahu's presentation were divorced from reality. They did not think it was realistic that the Kurds would, you know, overthrow the regime, or that Reza Pahlavi or Ahmadinejad were viable as potential replacements. That was all brief to Trump. Ratcliffe, the CIA director, Rubio, all.

all preempties. And Trump actually, you know, to give Trump more credit than is often given to him about this, if you actually read our reporting, as you have, Trump took all of that in. And he said, well, maybe the regime change will work. Maybe it won't. He still thought it was a worthy operation to try to degrade, destroy Iran's ballistic missile capacity, their conventional military capacity, their nuclear sites. And even if the regime change didn't happen. But he He did believe, I think, at a gut level that the regime change would happen. So I'm glad you brought that up because it's been additional really extraordinary reporting just in the last week or so on the Ahmadinejad option in your newspaper in the New York Times with some fascinating details. But, you know, I grant it's easy to sit here now in July with the full benefit of hindsight.

You know, neither of us were invited to that meeting. but you know you you characterize the president as quite realistically considering the possibility that maybe these more dramatic regime change options won't happen. There's some discussion of the Strait of Hormuz, whether on February the 11th or at the decision meeting, which was on what February the 26th. And also in between there were a discussion, yeah. So it's a topic. It's an obvious topic.

You don't have to be Klaus Fitz to look at the map and say, oh gosh, that's, you know, It's happened before, the 1980s, the Straitoform moves is a huge issue. So regime change, high impact but low probability play. Good chance it won't work. And sure, we can slam the ballistic missile. We can differently degrade all these capabilities. Good chance we can kill some senior Iranian leaders as well. But amidst those various probabilities is the possibility that we kill some leaders and we're degrading their capabilities, but they're still in the fight.

And if they're still in the fight, what's going to happen with the straight? What's so striking to me, Jonathan, is how how that possibility, namely the possibility that we're in right now, the reality that we're living in with the straight being now this enormous thorn in the side of American strategy wasn't taken more seriously, even though it was discussed. It's just hard to wrap my mind around sitting here in July. So I think part of it is the people around Trump. you have a group one of Trump's AIDS described this whole period to me as being filled with magical thinking

and it's true that Dan Kane presented risks to Trump but he did so in a very I don't want to say gentle it's probably unfair but he really was trying to be careful not to be seen to be weighing in on one side or the other

even though there are others who believe that Dan Kane thought that it was a very very bad idea to do this. No one besides J.D. Vance really made the case. And you know, you could talk to anyone in those rooms like, you should. I challenge anyone to tell me who was the other person

who vocalized those concerns in a serious way in front of Trump in the room. I can't find the person. So he was surrounded by advisors that weren't really pushing back against him. It was also a tiny group. It was a tiny group. The Treasury

Secretary and the Energy Secretary weren't in any of the meetings until the day. Like, you know the photo, the famous photo that people have been making fun of online? They call it the kiddies table on the night of the war where it's, you know, Trump's in, whatever, it's J.D. Vance, the head of the situation room and it's Bessent, right, Tulsi gabbered. Besides Vance, no one else at that table was in the loop about this war. Tulsi wasn't, she wasn't in the room, Besson wasn't, right, wasn't.

So the two people who would have to manage this massive energy shock, They weren't even in the room. They weren't even in the room. So when you keep the circle very small, you can limit leaks, but you also lose a lot of perspective and expertise. And, you know, I think it's a combination of different advisors that are far more deferential, Trump feeling strongly at a gut level that it was going to turn out a certain way. And people deferring to Trump's instincts and saying, well, he's been right about a lot of things. he's taken big swings.

And they're just a sort of general deference to Trump's own views. And I think all of those things combined to create the situation that we have. So shifting gears to Ukraine said a moment ago, you know, it's been an extraordinary, if not 180. Certainly there's a different atmosphere today than there was a year in change ago. You document the extraordinary, extraordinarily, I'll just call them sort of savage politics, palace intrigue. around Keith Kellogg and who controls the portfolio and how Whitkoff sort of ends up as the lead for Russia. How do we get from the frostiness? I mean, it's more, I mean, really the explosion that happens in the Oval Office with that famous meeting with Zelensky to Ankara,

where Zelensky's successfully cracking jokes with Trump. Trump now, you know, he's sending interceptors to Ukraine that were on hold before. We're in a completely different place. How does that happen. Well, I think it's a version of what we say before. Nothing gets Trump's attention like success. And Trump, I think, and many others around him had completely written off Ukraine. Remember, he said that you don't have any cards. I mean, just totally dismissive of Zelensky. We have reporting in the book early on where it's his first phone call with Putin since the last term. And it's quite a friendly call. And, you know, Trump's basically eager to get past this conflict. He thought it would be quick to resolve and then get on to doing deals between American

companies and investing in Russia. And then he has another call back to back with Zelensky, and the Zelensky call is very tough. He's really like, you don't have the cards. You basically need to just give up, you know, parts of your country and what have you. And I think, you know, a year and a bit later, Ukraine has defied their expectations and shown an ability with innovation and technology to pressure Russia in all sorts of ways that I don't think Trump or the people around him foresaw. So I see it as a story of Ukraine through what they're doing and the success of it, the evident success of it, plus the frustration of Putin continually, you know, Trump would say to people, you know, he's a bullshit artist. He got to a point after a few months, we were like,

this guy just talks sweet and then doesn't do what, you know, what I think he's, you know, what I think he's, going to do. And at some point, that becomes humiliating, even though Trump would never use that word. So I think it's a combination of those two things. And, you know, we are where we are. So your book focuses on the first year of the administration, concludes with these climactic decisions to go to war. You're no doubt planning to save all of your good, more recent reporting for the next book, though, of course, if you want to, you know, trot any of it out, feel free. But I am curious, as we, as 2026 churns on here, the war in Iran is still raging. Ukraine is unresolved.

All these issues are still alive. Any thoughts on what we should be paying attention to that may not be in the general conversation about Trump and Trump's decision making going forward here in 2020s is one of his closest observers? So I just think the China story is so undercover in Washington. I just think it's crazy. And I need to, you know, put my money where my mouth is and really do more reporting on it. But it's amazing to me that China gets away with this test that it's done. And there's essentially no response from Washington whatsoever. I think the China story is very, very interesting.

This is the missile test from the other day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No response, as far as I can tell. I think a very meek comment from the State Department. But Trump, last May, Trump was very, very worried about. about the situation with China with his trade war. He starts a trade war with the whole world on Liberation Day. Most countries don't really retaliate in a huge way.

He pauses tariffs. But China, Xi Jinping is fully prepared for this and uses all tools of leverage, including rare earths. Trump gets quite concerned, and he empowers Bessent to go to Geneva and negotiate an off-ramp with China. Ever since then, Trump has been on this. this very doveish direction with China. He watered down the national defense strategy. There was a

version that had more hawkish language on China. Trump softened the language. It was all about getting a deal with Xi Jinping. So I'm just very curious. I don't do any reporting from the China side. I don't pretend to understand what Xi Jinping's calculus is with regards to Taiwan. But I just think the next two years is going to be fascinating there, because Trump has signaled. pretty clearly that at a minimum, he's very reluctant to defend Taiwan and very willing to view it as a bargaining chip. I think he actually said something like that explicitly in terms of weapon sales to Taiwan as a negotiation chip. So I'll just be curious to see how Xi Jinping uses that dynamic and what he tries to get out of Trump, because I think Trump's very open for business

when it comes to that relationship. Yeah, well, obviously, I'm probably, of the problem here because we're half an hour plus into this conversation. I hadn't even asked really about China. I guess China is also the source of really one of the real moments of failure of Trump policy, which is they really call his bluff on the aggressive trade stuff with their critical minerals gambit and response. And really, the president is forced to back down for, you know, for a guy who, for whom, you know, we spent a lot of time focused on Iran for obvious reasons right now, but he's seen a lot of success in the first year of his presidency and foreign policy. That was a really dramatic climb down that he had to do. It's interesting. I was talking

to a British interviewer, and they were asking me, I'm going to botch it because I don't want to misrepresent it. But the gist of the question was like, how do you play Trump? What's the right way? You know, there's this debate in the UK about do you suck up to him like Kiyosdam did, you know, want to. The truth is, the way you play Trump is you don't be a small power or a middle power. You have to have, you have to actually have some serious leverage. And Xi Jinping did. He's, you know, Trump responds to flattery in the moment, but it's not like there's this buildup of credit in the bank where he rewards you for being nice to him six months ago. Like, the memory is like a goldfish. If you do something he doesn't like, the bank is immediately

rated and he'll turn on you. Xi Jinping just said, no, I have all of these tools of leverage. He was very well prepared clearly, and he brought it to bear. And so the thing that I find amazing about the UK in particular is the only way that they're going to have any kind of ability to deal with the United States is together with Europe. And that whole thing is just not working at all. So I just don't know. If you're a small or middle power, I mean, the Australians are in this position now.

They don't know what to do. They really don't know what to do. They're sort of caught in nowhere. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, if you're asking yourself the question of how do I play Donald Trump, it may be that you're already in sort of a losing cycle there. Right.

If you're in that position. John, there's so much more I want to ask you about, but we're limited on time. The book is called regime change inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. Congrats on its success. I look forward to more reporting from you and your partner. And thank you so much for coming on School of War. Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.