The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Weiss: Iran Is Not Likely to Forget about the War

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

The Iranian regime may be wounded, but it’s likely to seek revenge for the war at some point, maybe even through sleeper cells in the United States. And with a second round of peace negotiations potentially in the works, Iran could rake in billions in return for pausing its nuclear program. On the more uplifting side, the election news out of Hungary has feel-good shades of 1989, and is a reminder that reality and facts can get in the way of a stubborn authoritarian. Plus, Tim on Trump's Jesus post and how he's losing political allies by the minute. Michael Weiss once again joins Tim Miller.show notes: Michael's Substack ON SALE NOW: Bulwark+ members-only presale for Bulwark Live shows in San Diego and LA through TheBulwark.com/Events Tickets for these shows go on sale for everyone else at noon P.T. April 17 Tim’s livestream Wednesday on Coachella and more  Cathy on how the Iran war looks from Russia 

Hello and welcome to the Bollard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We are going deep on foreign policy today with one of our faves. But before we get there, a few housekeeping notes. And I got to rant a little bit about Trump's bleats. We've got to do a little bit on Trump's bleats. Okay. I go on vacation.

Trump bleats that he's Jesus. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. The first on the notes. We have our live shows coming up. Another round of live shows. I'm going back to Southern California. We are going to be in San Diego on May 20th.

and Los Angeles on May 21st. Tickets are on pre-sale now for Bullwark Plus members. So if you want the good seats, you got to become a Bullwark Plus member. Go to the Bullwark.com slash events to get your tickets today for all the regulars out there who just love my ad reads. Tickets go on sale on Friday. We're working on some fun special guests.

Sarah is going to be there with me. Sam, maybe Wokebill Crystal. It's going to be good. The bulwark.com slash events. And speaking of Sarah, Also reminder, Tuesday nights, we've got the next level podcast, me, Sarah and JVL coming out. We're going to have a whole show on Trump's disintegration. How about disintegration?

Let's do that. We're going to do a whole show on that. So if you want an hour on that, go check out the next level. But here's two minutes. My buddy Harry Sisson posted an analysis of Trump's bleats on Sunday night. I was watching Carol G why this happened. So I didn't get to do it. So I appreciate Harry.

And I'm going to read this for you. here's what Trump was posting and the timestamp 9.49 p.m. He posts the AI Jesus photo, which we're going to get back to. Trump is Jesus with what appears to be a demon over his head. 950, a Trump Tower on the moon. 1010. He posts a meme. 1032, a news clip. 1053 a news clip. 1243 a.m. He announces the Hormuz blockade, which we're going to talk about with Michael Wise. 235 a.m. he posts about Joe Biden. 236, another article on the naval blockade. 237, he posts about Eric Swalwell. 237, he reposts that article about Biden. Maybe he forgot that he posted earlier. He did a double post.

238, he posted an article about his ballroom. 4.10 a.m. in the east, he posts an article on Iran. So, look, I'm a poster. I like to post a lot. That is insane. From 9.49 p.m. till 4.10 a.m. He was posting 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, a dozen bleats. He's up all night. He's announcing blockades. He's announcing military actions near 1 a.m. After posting about himself as God. I mean, it's alarming.

Like, dude needs sleep. The dude needs rest. He's already extremely old. he's already backed into a corner geopolitically and domestically politically. And I don't know. I'm a little worried, I guess. I was saying I'm a little bit of nervous about whether the president of the United States has the mental faculties to be making life or death decisions when he's not sleeping. And he's posting megalomaniacal AI memes about himself in the middle of the night. Like simultaneously to posting about updated. military strategic decisions.

So it's alarming. The good news, though, is it isn't landed well even with his people. And I just want to give you two examples really quick, because they were the most delicious ones for me personally. Number one, Riley Gaines, tied for fifth place in a swimming competition in college, and parlayed that into a career as an anti-trans activist, because a trans person was also competing in the race and had that person not competed,

she would have finished fifth on her own instead of tied for fifth. She wasn't happy about the Trump as Jesus mean and posted this. Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he'd post this. Is he looking for a response? Does he actually think this?

Either way, two things are true. One, a little humility would serve him well. Two, God shall not be mocked. A little humility would serve him well. Donald Trump? Have these people been lobotom? do they exist in the world it's just like all right i mean being for trump is one thing i get at least you can have some respect for the people who are for trump who are like i like that he's a megalomaniac

i like that he's a bigot and an asshole and kind of dumb and i like that he makes the libs cry and i like that he that you know he's all about that cash and he has the gold toilet like okay and not my cup of tea but if that's for you that's one of thing. Being for Trump and wishing he had humility. It's like, what? What? I mean, that's the one thing that he doesn't have any of. It's the one thing he's never going to have, wishing that Trump had humility. And in case he hadn't learned the lesson, Donald Trump was asked whether he does end up deleting the AI Jesus tweet and whether that deletion was in response to the criticisms from people like Riley Gaines. And Trump replied, no, I didn't listen to Riley Gaines. I'm not a big fan of Riley,

actually. Ouch. So things are bad in the mega Christian influencer space. Things are already bad in the mega nationalist, isolationist, America first influencer space. So he's losing allies by the minute. But just the anecdote, it's just one little anecdote, okay? It's one anecdote about a person in my life. But you're looking for these. You're trying to hold on. to them. I was visiting some folks during vacation and asking them, you know, it seems like things are going well. Seems like Trump's losing steam. Seems like Magas losing steam. But like if any, has any MAGA person in your life actually said, you know, I'm off or, you know, you were right about this one? Or I'm having second thoughts. And everybody's kind of like, no, I can't think about

anybody in my actual life. And then I landed home last night and received this text from my friend whose mother-in-law is a MAGA. And she had said, sent him the picture of the meme and with Trump has crossed the line, exclamation point, exclamation point, and he posted it on truth social, he might be the Antichrist. Now that is what I'm talking about. That is the kind of flip that I'm talking about. Not only are we upset about the meme, not only do we think it was a mistake, but starting to have second thoughts about the whole.

whole operation. Like maybe it's possible that Trump isn't just somebody that makes some bad calls every once in a while. Maybe this has been the devil's work from the beginning. Maybe the devil tricked us into thinking that Donald Trump would be our savior. And honestly, if people need that justification for jumping off, then I'm with them, baby. I'm with them. The devil didn't. Trump is the antichrist and we can all move forward to a new future without him with him in hell that sounds great all right we're going to talk about iran hungry and the rest in foreign affairs with our in-house out-of-house expert he's an editor at the insider a russia focused independent media outlet author of isis inside the army of terror he writes on sub-deck at foreign office he's a gold jacket guest on the bulwark podcast it's

Michael Weiss. What's up, man? How you doing? I'm doing pretty good. I'm back from vacation. It's nice to see a friendly face. I was off a single day. And it seems like the podcast was okay without me. Single day at Coachella. I was at Coachella for four days. I just took a single day off the podcast. Oh, I see. Okay. You're a well-traveled man. We'll do some Coachella talk tomorrow night on the live stream, which you can come hang out with me on. I want to talk to you, though, about more serious matters of international diplomacy and intrigue. And I think we should start with Iran. While I was in the desert, J.D. Vance was in Islamabad trying to close.

They brought the closing. They brought the closer. Tim's in the desert in J.D. Vance. According to his own account, he called Daddy Trump more than 12 times during the 21 hours of negotiations to discuss the issues. Also talked to Beebe, a couple times, came away with nothing. And we now have a blockade of a blockade, kind of, the Chinese ship snuck through today or yesterday. I don't know, man.

Where are we at? What's the status with the war in Iran? I don't know. I mean, J.D.'s negative charisma and unlikeability are just highly contagious these days. Wherever he goes, you know, failure seems to stalk not far behind. So what I heard is he did 21 hours in Islamabad. Jared and Steve sort of running shotgun to his little operation. The Iranians played hardball.

They agreed to continue to talk, and I think they're going back on Thursday. The rumor that I heard was that the Iranians called it off and went back home because they didn't trust their communication not to be intercepted from our side, from Pakistan. So in other words, they had to go back to Tehran, consult with the new Supreme Leader, Khamenei Jr., and then come back to with whatever their campaign. counter proposal was, which now I think is a 20-year halt on a nuclear. We want 20, they want five. It feels like you just be in the middle at 12 and a half and call it good.

I mean, Trump will be dead by then. We can just leave it up to the next guy. But that's not how it's working. So, you know, this is one of the sticking points. But, you know, the other thing to keep in mind, at the start of this caper, the only sort of sensible guy to listen to on anything is General Kane, the chairman of the joint chiefs. And he laid out very succinctly, I thought, three operational objectives.

Operational objective, number one, eliminate the nuclear program. Well, obviously, we didn't do that because that's why they're putting on the table five years and we're asking for 20. And plus, they've got, you know, 900 pounds of the stuff buried underground or underneath the rubble. And, you know, Donald Trump was talking about the nuclear dust and sending in commandos to come and exfiltrate it. So that's one that we didn't quite get. The second was the missile capability, particularly their medium range. missiles, which have wreaked havoc all across the neighborhood, hitting GCC countries, being responsible for killing American soldiers.

We didn't quite get all of that U.S. intelligence assessed that, in fact, they have quite a bit more launchers than we reckoned, and some of those launchers have been kept underground. So that's Mark 2. And number 3, you know, their ability to project power in financing and arming manifold terrorist proxies from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas and Gaza to Iraqi Shia militias. That's kind of TBD. Hezbollah's been pretty badly battered by Israel and Lebanon. Remember, that was one of the other questions at the start of the ceasefire. Was Lebanon on the table? Was it not? The U.S. and Israel said it wasn't. The Iranians said, yes, it was. My question, and I don't have a good

answer from anybody, is if we are going to lift sanctions, start to enrich the Islamic Republic, if they are going to simply get rich by charging tolls for tankers that pass through the Strait of Hormuz, that's assuming this hour blockade of their blockade is lifted, are they going to use that money to build schools and hospitals and bridges that we knocked out? Or are they going to use that money to enrich the IRGC and also all of the above missile program, nuclear program? Yeah, maybe kind of a one for you and a three for me type situation, you know? Exactly. So look, I mean, my read of this is we have a very interesting kind of split. You get a lot of pro-Israel mega-adjacent, mega-curious types in the U.S. saying,

Ra, ra, sismabah, we won. Trump really knocked him down and vitiated this terrible theocratic regime to the point where they're now willing to put up or even discuss things that they hadn't before. Israeli security hawks, who I think nobody could consider to be uninterested in the state of Iran or what kind of future threat it might pose to. Israel or the neighborhood are in, shall we say, maybe not high dudgeon, but they're a little more depressed about the situation. They don't see this as a stunning success because I think they too realized that Netanyahu and Mossad chief, David Barnaya, thought this was going to be kind of an easy operation. They legitimately sold Trump, if you believe this New York Times deep dive that came out a few days ago on the idea that you go in, you start pounding them from the air and the Iranians

will rise up again. It'll be that protest movement but on steroids. I know, by the way, we can do some fun stuff with Iranian Kurds. So I met with a senior U.S. intelligence official last week before the announced ceasefire. And it's actually true what Trump said, believe it or not, about the Iranian Kurds keeping all the kit that was provided to them. So the idea was the Israelis ran guns and Starlinked terminals to a group called Pijack, which is the PKK franchise in Iran. Our job was to get our Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds of the Kurdistan regional government, to allow this stuff to transit through their borders into Iran. So that kind of happened.

And it was like 40 guys, and they just kept everything. They did not distribute it evenly to would-be insurgents in Iran, right? So our COVID program for some kind of proxy revolutionary force, that didn't go so well. And we knew that. I mean, we've been war gaming a scenario for taking out this regime for years. And every option that has come back or every result has been rather lackluster. And I think, you know, the dividends of that are, has seen. Now, that's not to say that, you know, Iran is doing great.

Yeah. Like, they think that they've won simply by surviving. They did get a lot of their missile program destroyed. Their Navy is at, you know, the bottom of the sea, although they have a lot of fast boats and assets kind of unsophisticated ways that they could chivvy and do harm to not just tankers, but also the American warships that have amassed this blockade. But did we achieve all of our objectives? Do we have regime change?

No. We did regime decapitation, but we got new guys in charge. Whether they're more hard line than the previous lot, some Iran analysts seem to think that they are, the Speaker of Parliament. He's not a cuddly character. I mean, this is a guy who was going around bashing people over the head embedded with the besiege during a protest movement, what, almost 20 years ago. He's pretty in it to win it, you know, not a reformist. This is not a kind of Gorbachev of Iran type figure.

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Quince.com slash the bulwark. Let's talk a little bit more about just the negotiation status and kind of what's at play here. So the ceasefire, so-called ceasefire, is going to end April 22nd. It's eight days from now. The Pakistani prime minister said, I want to tell you that a full effort is still on to resolve the issues before that time. Tyler Pageer and David Sangreth, the New York Times, reporting that Trump and AIDS obviously won a deal, but they're worried that they'll end up with the deal that looks like Obama's Peace Accord.

I can't have that. On the other side of the ledger from that, you know, I mean, Trump, unlike the Iranian parliament speaker, is not in it to win it, really. And J.D. Vance is certainly not in it to win it. And so the Iranians and the Pakistanis have a counterparty here that, like, particularly in J.D. Vance, like, wants to find a face-saving exit. and the Iranian seem like they might like a face saving exit. So like there are kind of things that cut both ways a little bit as far as whether this will kind of continue or peter out. What do you make of that?

Look, if we kind of zoom out from the 24-7 news cycle, what's going to happen tomorrow or even next week, I think this is the kind of broad strokes of it. We're in for a penny and for a pound. By doing what we've just done, we have wounded this regime. And this regime is not going to forget, and they're not going to just take it lined out. They are going to retaliate, maybe not immediately, but down the line. They will have resources and assets with which to do so. I mean, remember, Iran's ability to project power from the Amia bombing in Buenos Aires in South America,

which that's our neck of the woods, right? That's our sphere of influence, Western Hemps, to the Burgess bombing in Bulgaria, where they blew up a busload of Israeli holiday makers, what, in 2000. something or other. They can do these kinds of operations. In fact, one of the things I've been very worried about and counterterrorism officials have been worried about is, you know, they have sleeper cells here. They have agents in continental United States. In fact, good news is we fired all of our on experts at the FBI and DHS isn't being funded right now. Correct. And the question is, do they lack the capability to do something or have they simply refrained from doing something

provocative or spectacular against us. I use spectacular by the way in the kind of anodyne-hera's sense of a big atrocity designed to get attention. Or have they simply refrained from doing it because they didn't want to provoke us into going all in with a full-scale land invasion occupation kind of thing. That said, as time goes by, they may decide that now's the time to kind of test the waters here and to get our licks in, right? The aforementioned U.S. intelligence official I met with, I kind of painted a scenario for this person and said, this is kind of how I see things going in future. You tell me if I'm wrong. The scenario is tantamount to what the Israelis euphemistically called mowing the grass or mowing the lawn. In other words, every several months when they see

untoward activity, weapons transfers, the rebuilding of something that they feel the Iranians or that some foreign state adversary or non-state adversary should not have, they go in and they bomb. It's not a full-scale war. It's not 12 days. Sometimes it's an overnight operation, but they just do that, right? Here, it's more complicated for the Israelis, because Iran is much farther away than Lebanon, Syria, certainly Gaza. But that doesn't mean that we're not going to help them with refueling or even base sharing rights or perhaps even joining in some operations like this, right? So Iran, right now, it lacks air defense systems. Its skies are completely vulnerable to our air superiority, if not air supremacy. The question is, does that become the status quo? And do the Iranians just

kind of continue to take it as we dole it out to them? And I think the interesting thing here is, you know, in foreign policy, it's kind of easy to set a new normal, right? George W. Bush took a decision. Iran must not get nuclear weapons. And obviously the policies changed over time. We did Stuxnet, we did all kinds of covert operations. The Israelis blew up scientists. They went in and, you eventually exfiltrated the nuclear archive. Obama had the JCPOA, Donald Trump had the 12-day war. Overt. We had people inside the regime.

But there was a concerted bipartisan, multi-year decade, actually, effort to prevent Iran from doing something. My question is, does this now become the new normal? Where every successive administration, so long as this regime persists, has to engage in some kind of kinetic operation, maybe plausibly denial, maybe covert action, you know, on the ground, things go boom in the night, simply taking. keep them from getting back up on two feet again. And this is intelligence official I spoke to, said, this is pretty much how we see it going forward. Yeah. So here's a counterpoint to that,

or maybe not, I don't know, let's let's talk this through. Because the geopolitical element in the region is going to determine a lot of that. I mean, we have reporting that MBS was pushing Trump to not do the ceasefire and I'd want to go finish the job more. So it's not just the Israelis. It's the Saudis, It's also obviously Bibi and the Israelis that want, you know, as much as they can get, I guess, I would say, out of us as far as decapitating Iranian regime and their power. And so, okay, let's say we get into that type of new status quo that you're talking about. They have some kind of ceasefire. It's their conflagrations that sprout up over the next three years while Trump is in power. And, you know, just like we bonded last year and then we came in.

The next year we got to do something. And then next year we've got to do something. I mean, it's not out of the question that both parties then end up having a nominee in 28 that are running on, we need to decouple from Israel and we need to separate ourselves from this. And so I think that that might cause a new normal, right? But it also might cause a backlash here in the country. It's not going to just be the Israelis asking for this.

Now it's going to be the Gulf states as well. Yeah, right. So the Emirates have been very outspoken, interesting. I saw one official quoted in the Wall Street Journal just a few days ago saying, you know, for all the storm and drang about, oh, you know, this is a disaster for the region and, you know, Israeli, pro-Israel opinion in the United States has cratered across both parties, right? He said that we see it differently. We see the new status quo being, we must keep the Iranians down.

And, oh, actually, we want the Americans in more in our neighborhood. And we want the Israelis in more, too, to ensure this. And the level of cooperation, not just by the Emirates and the Saudis, I mean, I don't put very high estimation on these talks between the Israelis and the Lebanese, which Lil Marco is overseeing. He gets the fun profile, right? He doesn't go to Pakistan. He does ultimate fighting. And he's like, stays in D.C. and make, you know, two ambassadors to come to meet together. However, however, I do think that there's a recognition that, as I said earlier, you know, we cannot allow Iran to reassert itself in any way, shape, or form from what it had been able to do up until this point, right? Because now we've gone to war with it. Now it will be seeking revenge. I mean, the Supreme Leader, we killed his dad on day one within hours, right?

With our intelligence, the Israelis bomb the shit out of, you know, not only him, but this sort of conclave. The Axis of Resistance, somebody on Twitter said that they love two things. They, you know, they love death to America chanting that. And they love like all hands meetings. And all hands. Yeah. From an HR perspective, very, very bad decision. They needed to have the dedicated survivor. They didn't learn from the state of the union. There needs to be like a cabinet official, like Doug Bergam that doesn't go. And so you know who's next to the line of succession. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, the new Supreme Leader, Khamenei's son is himself a creature of the IRGC. So the idea that the IRGC has been engaged in the

creeping takeover of the state, replacing the clerics, that's been something that's kind of been in the background for many, many years. Qasem Soleimani, the general that we whacked in 2020 in Iraq, who was the head of the Quds Force, their expeditionary unit, who himself was kind of the architect of these proxies across the region. There's a lot of muttering and speculation that this guy was going to either one day wage a coup or simply take over as a military commander. So now I think we have facilitated that process in killing the previous lot. And the question is, are they going to be, as I say, they're going to be more pragmatic and amenable to some kind of accord with us, maybe some joint racket.

You know, Alex Whitkoff can get into that with the Iranian foreign minister and, you know, crypto farms in Krasnodar, you know, minting stable coins. to charge tolls i mean you know it's possible but yeah i don't see it quite going that swimmingly yeah i mean trump does have the superpower of just being able to this superpower might be waning right now which we'll get to but he has in the past been able to say to his base you know eat this shit sandwich and call it the golden age right like he that is what he was built to do okay and so maybe you can do that again here. The argument against this and for, you know, the peace talks going bad and there being more escalation just does go back to that New York Times report. It's hard to see how they

come out of these negotiations with anything that looks better than the JCPOA. And, you know, anything where the Iranians are making money. Well, they want sanctions relief, right? And any sanctions relief given what it took to cobble into place this sanctions regime over time. I mean, There were some that came with the JCPOA, rather famously or notoriously, depending on your perspective. But, you know, they stand to make billions. And they certainly are interested in making billions right now. So, yeah. But again, you know, there's going to be enormous pressure on Trump not to take, you know, some sham or, you know, Fugazi deal that's going to make him look like, you know, a chump or worse than Obama, right?

You're going to get the FD crowd. You're going to get APEC. You're going to get Beebe himself coming to D.C. saying you mustn't. You're going to get the Arabs, Gulf states, also putting pressure on him not to do this. Mark Levin, Life Liberty and Levin on the weekend, prime time. He has shown, you know, I mean, if you just look at what Tucker is now doing in his social media and his marketing campaign, low IQ hats, right? Putting up on the Daily Caller, you know, old MAGA, you know, all the white, area and blue-eyed Christians, and new MAGA. Yeah.

Practitioners of the Shinto religion, perhaps? No, you know, I mean, it's it's Mark Levin, it's Laura Lumer, Ben Shapiro, and Trump, I mean, basically denounced Tucker, Megan. Well, Tucker said that he was a slave to Israel this weekend. Tucker, you know, that it's hard to live as a slave. Yeah. And it's funny that even in this moment where Tucker is now in full out war with Trump, like even at this late of date, he is still doing. the thing where Trump doesn't have agency himself. Well, this is the thing. You still won't go all the way there to say that it's Trump himself that is bad and flawed. Even now, he has to be a slave to the,

you know, mysterious Jewish forces. The Israelis have been advocating for years, starting with W. Please go in and take care of this for us for years. And every administration has said no. Trump said yes, because in his mind, taking out Iran and not just the nuclear. program. In his mind, accomplishing that which could not be done by Jimmy Carter-on would be his legacy. It wouldn't matter he's been impeached twice. It wouldn't matter that he's, his mental and moral faculties are non-existence. He's comparing himself to Jesus Christ. All the rest of it, the price of gas at the pump, the economy, runaway corruption, war in Ukraine, doesn't matter. I took out the Ayatollah, I destroyed the Islamic Republic. That's me. So yeah, don't, don't

Donald Trump is in the cockpit here. Dark forces on the internet like to think that, you know, the Jews are at once all-powerful, but also kind of weak and pathetic. I mean, Tucker Carlson has announced a publishing imprint, which I thought we controlled the media. How is he able to do this, you know? His first author is Russell Brand, the guy who's been accused of rape and sexual assault who wants to declare how you can become a Christian in seven days. Nice work if you can get it, you know, truly, man. I love this. It's just like which. Which religious huckster do you want to go with? Do you want to take the J.D. Vance, like Winnie the Pooh and the Tuxedo Religious Huckster? I came to Catholicism at the same time. I came to the Church of Trump. That does feel like it's a little bit in conflict, but both conversions happen simultaneously. Or you have the Russell Brand kind of tabloid version, the front of the grocery store version, cheap and easy. Seven days.

Seven days to heaven. You got it. You can sexually assault young girls. But as long as you read my book and you go on the Tucker Carlson podcast. No means yes, according to the Nazarene. And please, you know, sign up for my substack. That's the new state of our public intellectuals. Donald Trump is in the cockpit.

But boy, he is also a pliable and malleable person. And if Donald Trump was in the cockpit and somebody was in the, you know, was riding shotgun, giving him the hard sell on Greenland, we might have been invading nuke. instead. That's all I'm saying. He is very susceptible to what the last person he said, wanted to listen to. It doesn't mean that there's a puppet master or a secret conspiracy, but I just, BB, obviously, foremost, but also MBS and his business partners in the Gulf states got us into this in a bad way. But for all that, I mean, it's important to realize there is kind of a through line with Trump. You know, he's been down on NATO for decades before he

decided to run for president. He's kind of had a soft spot for Russia, to put it mildly, for as many years when he went there to Moscow in 1987. Yoridugin, the former ambassador to the UN, famously paid him that visit at Trump Tower and polished his throne. Oh, yours was the first building we saw coming from the airport and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he went, you know, to the Soviet Union. And God knows what happened to him there. He's been talking about the Strait of Hormuz for many, many years, you know. I mean, I've always said when he threatens military action, people forget that Taco, you know, Trump always chickens out. That was coined by Wall Street analysts and traders over his backing down on tariffs. But he usually does not back down when he threatens to not go to war per se, but to engage in

some kind of military confrontation. For him, it's not about war. I mean, it is war, legally speaking, but he doesn't like sending in troops. He's not in it for the long haul. He would never do a full-scale occupation, which is why, frankly... See things go, boom. Yes. I'm very glad of the fact that we're not sending marine expeditionary units to Carg Island because every Marine I've talked to said, we were going to lose lots of people. It's a killbox, that sort of amphibious assault kind of thing. And it's also people who have no experience doing it in combat because these are young kids, right? These are not veterans from the war on terror. So, you know, if a blockade is sort of the second tier operation, all right, I mean, fine, to see if it works. The Iranians, by one analysis,

stand to lose $435 million a day by not being able to move their oil. You know, China gets 40% of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz. About 13% of it comes from Iran. So I'm very curious to hear what Trump's conversation with Xi next month is going to look and sound like. Can we talk about China on that front just a little bit more? Sure. Because this report is at least one ship that we already have sanctioned because they are taking Iranian oil and violated the blockade, just went straight to the straight and onto China.

that happened over the weekend. Another report out there from CNN that China is preparing weapons shipments to its friends in Iran if the ceasefire breaks down. They've been sharing intelligence with the Iranians, just as the Russians have.

The Russians are keen, not to move it away from China, but I spend more time focused on Russia. The Russians are very keen to, they put on the table, we can send the uranium to us. We will enrich it for the Iranians. So let us do a favor for Trump

in pursuit or in, or in facilitation of our grand reproschman with the United States. You know, lift sanctions on Iran. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But lift sanctions on us too. And let's end the war in Ukraine on favorable terms to ourselves. I just think it's worth sitting on this for a second. Like he is kind of in a corner on the threats to China.

Again, not in the cheap version of Taco, but just in the sense of like kind of like he did with Iran, it's like we're going to end the civilization. It's like, I really don't want to do this. I mean, he's making these threats on China that he doesn't really want to do. I mean, he doesn't want to interdict the Chinese ships like he was doing in Venezuela. It's easy to interdict those ships. And it's in our territory. It matters.

But like the impacts on the American homeland aren't going to be great. If things get dicey in the Gulf, like if we really get into a confrontation with Chinese ships carrying Iranian oil, like that has massive implications. And if he goes back to the Liberation Day style tariffs on China for doing this, that has massive implications when we're already seeing inflation. go back up. He doesn't want a confrontation with China right now. No, and China has been all too happy to watch the United States burn through some of its critical munitions going after Iran. I mean, I just saw a report. You posted this that we fired our entire stunt. Yeah. So the prism is basically the next generation of attackums. It's longer range. It's more powerful. One of the reasons we were able to give Ukraine attackums after this big back and forth about should we, shouldn't we,

is we were phasing them out, right? The prism was the new game in town. And I don't know, I have to talk to my weapons bean counter friends how many we had in our stockpile. There's obviously classified stocks as well. But it seems like in the first few days of this thing, we launched all to say nothing about our expenditure of Patriot missiles. You know, the Ukrainians were staring, mouth the gape, watching us fire Patriot interceptors at fucking Iranian Shahids. when these guys have their own drones that take down shaheds that they've manufactured at scale simply because they needed to. They use shotguns to take down shahids in Kiev, for Christ sakes. So the United States is learning on its feet how to wage 21st century warfare.

And I mean, I'm sorry to say this, the first casualties, fatalities, I'm sorry, that we suffered in Kuwait. That was simply because the military facility, the blast walls that were constructed, were constructed for what purpose, keeping suicide bombers on vehicles out. But they weren't constructed to withstand strikes from drones that could easily navigate their way, you know, better than missiles can. So we've got a lot of updating to do in our arsenal and in our force posture. And I think the Chinese, I mean, they're watching all this on satellite, you know, footage. They've got human assets in play. The Iranians are sharing with them in real time, what they're doing and how we're responding.

and, you know, all eyes shift to Taiwan now, right? Yeah. It was not exactly a far-fetched scenario that in the middle of this thing, the Chinese could have said, well, the Americans are, they're bogged down over here. Let's go do it, you know, in Taiwan now. We're lucky they didn't. On to the Ukraine thing, and then we'll kind of take that back into Hungary. Yeah.

One other thing I saw that you posted, that Zelensky had posted over the weekend, was an announcement that for the first time in war and enemy position was captured, entirely by ground robotic systems and drones without any infantry. A robot entered the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier and took the positions. I thought that was an interesting anecdote that ties to kind of what you're talking about here, about the ways in which we hadn't quite adapted to the changes in weaponry. I retweeted that because it's interesting, him standing there. It looks like the set of Terminator 2, you know, with these kind of fancy robotics.

I want to put an asterisk on his comment. There is a misconception that in Ukraine they can make up for their manpower shortage in relation to Russia with technology. Drones, fiber optic cable drones, these self-propelled robotic artillery systems, whatever. Not true. They need infantry. All wars need to be fought with soldiers, right? whether or not, you know, the heavy lifting in this case was done by unmanned systems, probably there's truth to that. But at the end of the day, you're not going to hold terrain with Rosie from the Jetsons. With robots. You need soldiers in place. Correct. So I would take that with a little bit of a pinch of assault. However, it is absolutely the case that Ukraine is now the world's

leading innovator in military technology. One of the interesting developments, If you're looking at the American Kremlinology of who's on top and who supports what. So J.D. Vance's guy, Dan Driscoll in the Pentagon, who is being considered evidently as a possible replacement for our Chinab artist friend Pete Heggseth. Driscoll has actually become more pro-Ukraine because he's gone to Kiev. He's seen what the Ukrainians have done. And he wants some of that. I mean, our military requires Ukrainian ingenuity and know-how. And it is, you know, it's ridiculous that Trump was shitting all over Zelensky because Zelensky was traveling to the Gulf in the last five, six weeks, cutting deals with the Saudis, the Emirates, the Emirates, for Christ's sakes. You know, it's impossible to tell where Emirati intelligence ends and Russian intelligence begins, according to the CIA. The Emirates are going to the Ukrainian saying, help us. That's a big deal. And that's a net win for Zelensky. You know, Kathy Young did a great piece in the bulwark about, and I said this at the outset. Everybody was like, uh-oh, you know, oil. prices are going to skyrocket. We're now lifting sanctions on Russia. Sure, but, you know, the geopolitical correlation of forces, if you like, actually favor Ukraine here because going to war with a Russian

partner, which was Iran, if not a client state, that's not a good thing for Moscow. And whatever sugar high that the Russians received as an economic benefit from lifted sanctions was mitigated by the fact that the Ukrainians just get bombing the shit out of Russian oil terminals and their energy infrastructure. And also for the first time in, I think, over a year, maybe more, the Russians, their offensive has ground to a halt. They had not taken any substantive terrain on the battlefield. So Ukraine hasn't come out so badly in this war. I'm not saying that's a reason to have done the war. Sure, sure. Let's just have a little sense of perspective here. And Zelensky has done what he needed to do as a statesman, which is cut bilateral deals with partners in the global south that had

wanted absolutely nothing to do with Ukraine. The one country that still won't do anything with him is Israel, because BB is terrified of Trump. To that point, I'm hoping that Pete Hegseth's allies in the Pentagon are not monitoring this podcast, because they're going to be clipping that little bit about Dan Jiscoll to come into Ukraine head and sending it up to the White House, making sure old Donny Trump can see it because Higgs says worried about the kid. I like to sow fit and paranoia where I can. What can I say? Okay. The other thing that is I mean, this was kind of happening anyway, but marginally benefited Ukraine was the result of the election in Hungary. Oh, yeah.

You know, because the blocking of the funds from the EU that Hungary was doing, U.S. trial was like essentially kind of working their way around that anyway, but now officially that there won't be any block on the funds from the EU to Hungary. Talk about that. And then I just give us a bigger picture take on the result. Yeah, I mean, it's nothing short of breathtaking. You know, Orbán has spent 16 years. doing everything he can to foreclose on exactly this contingency, which is to say, gerrymandering up the wazoo. I think today, what two days after the election, was the first interview that the new

incoming prime minister, Peter Mayer, has done with a public broadcast in Hungary. So state media had basically blacked out, had banned all opposition. So this was a guy who just traveled the country, went to six, seven, eight days. different towns and villages in a day, shook hands with everybody, had to go door knocking to make his presence known and to make his policies understandable to Hungarian voters. There were other controversies. I'm very happy to say that I played a part in some of them, including intercepted phone calls between the Hungarian, soon-to-be former foreign minister, Peter Ciarto, and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. These phone calls were what? Siarto feeding Lavrov in real time,

sensitive information or intelligence about EU negotiations over sanctions packages to punish Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, feeding him documents, giving him briefs on the discussion about Ukraine and Moldova's accession talks with respect to the European Union, asking his Russian counterpart, give me talking points I can use in Brussels to dress up a pro-Russian initiative as serving the Hungarian national interests. We showed the transcripts of these calls to Western intelligence and counterintelligence officials, and they said it read like a case officer, Lavrov, handling an agent, Ciarto. And you had chance in Hungary of, you know, Russians go home, Russians fuck off.

Searto is a spy. Yesterday, the new prime minister-designate said, we finally found Peter Searto, because he had disappeared after the election results came in for a day or more. He's in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs shredding documents. related to sanctions. Wow. So he's certainly behaving like a fifth columnist. And, you know, this guy was just, I mean, he was a functionary. He was an agent of Victor Orban, who, you know, himself professed that I am but a mouse to Vladimir Putin's lion, right?

So the end of a Russian satrapy in Central Europe, the end of Russia's sort of backdoor entry into the European Union and NATO is nothing short of extraordinary. And look, let's be clear, the new government, he's led by Peter Mayyar. This is not some ultra-left Marxist, you know, woke conspiracy. This is a center-right guy who in many respects has a border security policy that's even more stringent than the outgoing Fidesge party. I mean, Mayer was himself a loyalist to Orban who then defected from his apparatus and waged this kind of dark horse campaign. But that's a good thing because Hungarians went to. the polls and voted overwhelmingly. This is now a supermajority. So a lot can be undone that has been done in the last 16 years from packing the courts to, you know, giving media outlets to your

preferred cronies and so on and so forth. They went to the polls because the state of Hungary's economy was in ruin. The relationships that Hungary had created with next door neighbors, Poland, Ukraine, but also with Brussels and also, frankly, with the United States, because it was really creepy what Orban has done. I mean, Mayyar has said that, or alleged that CPAC was financed by the Hungarian state. That's kind of a big deal, isn't it? You know, I mean, this kind of nexus between Maga and what was seen as the hub or ground zero of the populist reactionary right in Europe, that's now over. So just bringing the temperature down on some of these interactions is going to be very, very helpful. And, you know, it means that sanctions packages will not be blocked. The Hungarians

will not shake down Brussels for subsidies. The Hungarians will not do the bidding of the Kremlin. And Hungarians may even have good bilateral relations with Ukrainians. You know, Orban was his sole campaign was my opponent is a Ukrainian agent. And if you vote for him, it's World War III. Just a couple other, you know, little points to add to that. You know, David Baer, who's written for us a bunch about Hungary who's over there, you know, was Texan with Bill Crystal and me a little bit over the weekend. I'd just a couple other things on to flag about the importance of this. Manager was locked out, as you mentioned, of all the state media interviews, right? Like Orban had complete control. The independent media really did spring up, though, in Hungary. And like,

it should be mentioned and those folks should be, should be acknowledged. Like, it was a lot of online stuff, but there was, I believe, one weekly paper. And if you kind of look at the districts, like where that was distributed is one of the areas where he overperformed particularly well. That is important in this modern world. Reality and facts can find a way. Maybe it takes too long and it takes time, but eventually stuff gets out there. And I think there's like a lesson for us, obviously, in that as Trump, you know, tries to consolidate control with his friends at the head of these media and technology companies, that this stuff is beatbackable. It is, yeah.

I mean, so vsquare.org is one of the outlets. that was responsible for kind of breaking these stories about, you know, Hungarian-Russian collusion. Shabi Panyi, who's my colleague, had to flee the country because his reporting, exposing this relationship between Sarto and Lavrov, led to Orban and his government accusing Shabi of being a Ukrainian spy. Sure. And there was an investigation open to him. And they had already put Pegasus software on his phones.

They'd already surveilled him. They treated him as an enemy of the people, right? So now, you know, with one vote, this guy, the best investigative reporter in all of Hungary can return home to Budapest and continue to do what he does. And, you know, he said, the first thing I plan to do is report on the new government. You know, I mean, I just want normal politics. I just want to be in a normal democratic state again. So, yes, media played a big role in this. Yeah, to the other point that's trying to make is that manager like, yeah, is center-right conservative.

I loved, I forgot who posted this. I started to give them credit, but I laughed at one point. post on when the results were coming in on social media, which is like in Hungary, these are election results. Center right party, 55 percent, right party, Nazi curious, 38 percent, right party, Nazi enthusiast, 7 percent. And it's like, those are the options. But, you know, Bear was talking about how his campaign was very much infused with like small

liberal values too, like being a center right guy, which is, which is important and different. There was a viral thread going around. I think you shared a bunch of people shared. from a woman Vukhita Timar, who I don't know, but she was talking about the importance of it. She's a Hungarian who lives in Estonia, by the way. Yeah, she was talking about the importance of his campaign and to share out this. Is he a center right person? Yes, and nobody cares. He believes in a democratic state and the rule of law, and his job is to take Hungary back there. He has declared he does not care what one believes in

or whom one loves as long as they love Hungary. And I do think that there are, like, again, like important lessons to that about how about sort of reinvigorating just the small L liberal values. And, you know, we can hash out, you know, marginal tax rate differences later. Well, exactly. I mean. You know, just to put this in American terms, right, and this is not a perfect analogy, because the person I'm about to invoke was never a loyalist to Donald Trump. But if John McCain were still drawing breath.

Sure. and posed a credible challenge to Trump and actually built a coalition behind him to take down Donald Trump politically. Would anybody be batting an eye or questioning the fact that he is infinitely greater a person to be president of the United States? Of course not. So, you know, the choice is not, you know, it's a fascist or a communist. I mean, unfortunately, in European history, that has very often been the choice. But sometimes it's better not to have somebody who's saddled with whatever you want to call. call it the woke mind virus or, you know, LGBTQ ideology or no. I mean, this is a guy who

every Hungarian sort of nationalist cultural conservative can say, yeah, he's fine. And that's what they needed. That's what they needed. And the gays were kissing in Budapest on Sunday, you know, so we could get both. You can have both. Nothing wrong with that. The other thing I wanted to bring up about this as it relates to lessons back home is the importance of optimism and belief and persistence. Yeah. Because the degree to which Orban gamed and rigged their electoral system

is far more advanced than where Trump is here. And part because it's a smaller country, you know, and so it's easier to, you know, control the sorts of bureaucratic levers, part because he'd been in power 16 years, the Hungarian system versus our system. Like, there are a bunch of reasons.

And yet, you know, all of the little gamesmanship he tried to do didn't work in the end, to backfired. It didn't work for a while, but in the end, it didn't work. I get very frustrated sometimes with people in the so-called pro-democracy side that speak in fatalist terms about the way that Trump has broken the democracy. And I definitely think that there's a bunch of stuff that's permanently broken that we're never going back to, but like the ability to win at the ballot box over, you know, more radical proposals that you hear out there, the Hungarian people like demonstrated.

it. Not only is it possible, but it's doable and you can do so in an overwhelming fashion. Well, and also I would say the kind of hiker reality of online discourse really didn't matter. You know, the Russians were thick on the ground in Hungary. At the same time, J.D. Vance was there rallying for Orban, dialing in Donald Trump on speakerphone. And, you know, the GRU, a group I know quite a lot about, They brought in all their political technologists to sow disinformation, to push these conspiracy theories, to blame Zelensky for, you know, blowing this up or the, you know, Mayyar was a Ukrainian spy. And at the end of the day, all of that cynicism, all of that brain rot didn't matter because people, you know, they want more of a better life. They want more income. They want affordability. They want, you know, it's kind of the materialist conception of history. That's what drove this thing, right? And yes, they are exhaustive. by having their country be the focal point of everything wrong in Europe. There is no reason. I mean, Hungary belonged to what's known as the Vichagrad 4. And of the Vichikov 4, I think it's the catastrophic failure of the lot, right? It was, I think, second lowest wages in Europe,

arguably one of the poorest countries, if not the poorest country in the European Union. There is no reason Hungary could not be Poland. Right. Poland will overtake Japan in terms of GDP per capita, I think, next year. Poland is spending will spend 5% of its GDP on defense. There's daily mail headlines about Poles who went to live in work in the UK pre-Brexit, returning to Poland because the economy is better there than it is in Britain. There's no reason Hungary can't have the same thing. So I think for a lot of Hungarians, this is kind of like a Pepsi challenge.

Do we want to live in, you know, Trashkanistan, as Stephen Kotkin once called the post-Soviet space? Or do we want to live in what Rumsfeld, I think quite rightly, once called New Europe, because it is. New Europe, the center of gravity has shifted eastward. So it's center Europe and Eastern Europe. I mean, you look at the Baltic states, you look at Scandinavia, you look at Poland. These are going to be the countries that will define security going forward in the 21st century. Because if Russia is allowed to get back up on its two feet, if it does, God forbid, win. this war, I don't think it's going to win the war, but you know what I mean?

If it's allowed to reconstitute itself, it doesn't suffer a strategic defeat in Ukraine, these are the frontline states that'll be doing the heavy lifting for all of us. Which ties us back to the first topic, which again is why I've just been so gobsmacked by the idiocy of Trump's choices with both the tariffs, but then this war and Iran and the economics. And if Trump was actually just singularly minded on gaining as much authoritarian power as possible, and keeping his popularity as high as possible. And he could have done a lot of what he did at the beginning of the first term. Just keep jacking up the debt.

The next guy can pay that. Just flood the country with as much money as possible. Don't do the stupid tariffs or just do a few of them and call it a big deal. Pick a couple of industries. Pick a couple winners and losers. He ends up in this place where we have like an energy crisis now. We have inflation, economic stagnation. I mean, that is the death now of these guys.

The real tragedy here, the missed opportunity is a Republican president coming in in 2024. There was a lot of capital to work with here. It's a good thing that, you know, we set this new benchmark for NATO 5% spending of GDP on defense. I'm not going to say that he was wrong to do that. His tactics were miserable. He threatened to go to war with a NATO ally annex their territory. He treated another NATO ally as the 51st state. I mean, some kind of colonial possession in waiting.

for the United States. I mean, it's just idiocy. However, you know, Europe stands there waiting to rearm, to invest heavily in its own defense, to take basically post-Cold War security architecture seriously, perhaps for the first time. And they're not doing it because we're encouraging them and saying, you know, we will always be with you, we will always be by your side, but we need you to take on a greater share of their responsibility. They're doing it now because they realize we're going in the opposite direction. We were abandoning them. I was in Stockholm with the former Lithuanian foreign minister and the current Swedish foreign minister on a platform in August of last year. And I said, you know, actually quoting Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of Germany, who had

used this term decoupling from the United States. When I said decoupling, again, not my own coinage, I was citing the Chancellor of Germany. I mean, gasps of horror throughout the room, NATO officials, I think the princess of Sweden nearly passed out. Everyone said, no, we mustn't do this. This is impossible. The United States has to be here. And then after this whole fandango with Greenland, all of a sudden, decoupling is not such a radioactive term.

People are beginning to say, why didn't we do this long time ago? So I want to be very careful how I would say this because this kind of shit that goes viral in a bad way. But there is a way to instrumentalize anti-Americanism. as it exists now, which is really anti-Trumpism in Europe, for the greater good. There is a benevolent form of it. And I am very encouraging of this effort. Me too.

The Europeans should tell us, go fuck yourself. Every time we do something stupid or immoral or unjust or we threaten them. And they should prepare. They should prepare for a world without us. Okay. My old Republicans about to come in for a second. But also you hear the European leaders start talking about, you know, the value of deregulation. And as part of decoupling is making sure they can, you know, stand on their own two feet economically, too.

I'm hearing more of that kind of talk when, you know, you're listening to speeches from Macron, et cetera. When it comes to economic development, getting companies to build there instead of here, et cetera. No, I mean, it's going to be to our detriment in the end. And, you know, I play these kind of weird reindeer games online about, you know, Marco is up, advances down. Marco has, you know, the stink of this whole thing attaches to him. him. He went to Munich. He gave a speech. It didn't go down so well. He went to Budapest. He endorsed Orban, too. But I will say, every European you talk to, meaning Europeans in political power, they know the cut of his gym. Closet Reaganite is what they say. And they don't think he believes it. Well, they know the cut of Vance's Jim too.

More importantly, they know the cut of Vance. So here's what I'll say. If it's Rubio who's the heir parent for 2028 versus whatever Democrat, things are not so bad versus J.D. Vance, you know, who, may get it early if Trump chokes on a cheeseburger in the Oval. Yeah, well, unfortunately, Michael, I think Trump's going to take both of them down with him and it's going to end up being somebody even worse. So we'll save that for another day. That is Michael Weiss. I always appreciate you. Thank you for being able to brief our audience, but also me since I was,

I was glancing at the hungry stuff from the concert. I can admit that. It was like 1989 all over again. What's not to like? Yeah, exactly. I was trying to check out of the Iran war stuff. But I wanted the happy news. Once I heard it was happy news, I did do a little bit of happy scrolling.

But I appreciate the briefing. And we'll be talking to you again soon. All right, brother? Good to see, man. All right. For everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. We've got a new guest. I'm excited about it.

We'll see you all then. Peace. The Devon inside. The Devon inside. Thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Ansela Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.