The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Eliot Cohen: 3 Things the Consensus Gets Wrong About the Iran War

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Separating Politics from Reality. Is the war going better than we realize?Eliot A. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, the author of the forthcoming book The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics, and a co-host of the Shield of the Republic podcast.

This is going to be, by the way. Forever. About an hour. About an hour is that's okay. This is live from the table, the official podcast of the World Famous Comedy Cellar, available wherever you get your podcast. Dan Adam here, along with Nome Dwarman, owner of the World Famous Comedy Seller with locations in New York's fabled Greenwich Village and Las Vegas, Nevada.

We have Periel Ashen brand. She is our producer. Hello. And she joins us, as always. and with us via Zoom, Elliot A. Cohen, Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins. U.S. Army Reserve, retired. Director in the Defense Department's Policy Planning Staff, author of multiple books, including The Strategist, How to Think About War and Politics,

which will be out with Princeton University Press this fall, contributed to the Atlantic, and author of Three Things the Consensus Gets Wrong about the Iran War, which sounds like something Noam wants to talk about, and I guess that's going to take up most of our programs. First of all, did you say you're, did he say Dan Natterman? Did you give his own name? Yeah.

Oh, yeah, okay. I was spaced out for a second. Sorry. Okay. Welcome, sir. Thanks. Good to be with you. Before we get into it, give us a little bit of a back of a matchbook explanation of why people

ought to take your opinion seriously. What are your credentials here so that people know how convinced to be by you when you, when you tell you. Well, the only way you can be convinced is if you read the arguments and decide. would then make sense. But I've had 40 years teaching this stuff, including at the Naval War College and Johns Hopkins, but I've also been in and out of government, in the Department of Defense, the State Department, and an advisory capacity in the intelligence community. So those are my credentials, but I stand by my words rather than my resume. And you're generally a pro-Israel person

normally? Yes. and you're more like a hawk, more neoconish hawkish. Yeah, you know, I don't like the word neocon because it's a dog whistle for Jew. Uh-huh. And it's, and I don't like dog whistles. If you want to call me a Jew, I am a Jew. I am a Jew. I'm very proud to be a Jew. But use the word Jew.

Don't use the word neocon. But you, what's the word that Bernie Sanders when he does with the Democrats? He's not a Democrat. He caucus. You caucus with the neocons. You caucus with the comment. You know, the thing is, I think it's a stupid label. It really, well, first, I'll tell you, the reason why Bristol added is usually because of the British journalists.

And when you do interviews with them, they really do mean Jew. I mean, but they're afraid to say Jew. I see. But the other thing is the neocons were, they were a real thing in the 60s and 70s. They were sort of the Irving Crystals. It was mainly about domestic policy. It really wasn't about foreign policy at all. And I think it's kind of ridiculous.

people would probably say I'm more hawkish, but like on this war, for example, I've declined to say that I'm either in favor of it or against it, because I think on the one hand, Iran is a serious problem. And on the other hand, I think the Trump administration is largely composed of idiots. Okay, so tell us quickly an outline form. By the way, I agree with you about the neocon thing, especially now that it's become such a stigmatized word. The problem is with a lot of words that are not allowed to be used anymore, and I'll give you a politically incorrect one, Oriental. They get replaced by words which have no precision to them, and you can't ever quite say what it is you were able to say. Like, you know, well, she was Asian. Well, do you mean Indian Asian? It used to be very clear what you meant when you were describing it.

So when Neil Conn, it's a pretty clear, like, a description of where a person's politics are. And it's hard to, it's not quite conservative. It's not whatever. It's not just any Jew. It's a specific kind of Jew. It's a specific kind of Jew, yes. And plenty of them were not Jewish, but now it's come to mean that. All right.

So what, very quickly, what are, and then we'll get, you know, dive deep in, more deeply into them, what are the three things that every, wrong, that everybody's getting about the Iran? war. And maybe this has changed since the new blockade. This is one, and I've been writing almost every week since the war began about Iran with lots of different angles on it. I think the one before this was called Lions Led by Donkeys, and you can guess who the donkeys are. That particular article was really just trying to make three points. First, the argument that this war had uniquely blown up American alliance is not true for two reasons.

First, Trump has done an enormous amount of damage to the European alliance, particularly NATO, but that was before the war, and that was by saying the insane things he said about taking Greenland. But also there's a second point, which is, you know, the United States has lots of allies, and in this particular case,

the Israelis, obviously, who are really a formidable military power in ways people don't fully, even now, I think, take on. but also the Gulf states are very much there. So, you know, it seemed to me that people were making more of that than they should. Second argument that you frequently heard is that this has been a windfall for the Russians and the Chinese. And I say certainly not for the Russians for a couple of reasons. One is, you know, they were the partners of the Iranians and they couldn't really do very, excuse me, do very much to help them at all,

except possibly past intelligence. That's not clear, but they may very well have done that. But other than that, they couldn't do anything to protect them. And they certainly didn't even try. And from their point of view, the worst possible thing, one of the worst possible things that's happening, is they're like 200 Ukrainian experts in the Gulf states helping them with their anti-missile and anti-drone defenses.

If you think about it, the Ukrainians have probably the best defense industry in Europe, certainly the most advanced. So what does any industry need? Well, it needs massive investments. And guess who's sitting on a lot of money that you can invest, the Gulf States? So I don't think it's particularly good for the Russians. The Chinese, it's a little bit more mixed because, as always, when Trump does something they get to look statesman-like. But on the other hand, they haven't been able to do anything about this. And the closure of the Straits of Hormuz does put more pressure on them than it does on anybody else. And finally, I think from the point of view, of Chinese calculations. On the one hand, the United States has used up lots of fancy munitions

and what have you. On the other hand, it's kind of certified to everybody that they're dealing with a somewhat crazy guy who's willing to order a large amount of violence, and that does have some deterrent effect. The third mistake that I think people have made is there was a lot of very silly stuff about the, well, the Iranians are winning this because they've been able to close the Straits of Hormuz. and first, winning and losing are overly simple terms anyway. But more importantly, you know, that's now. We'll see how long that lasts.

I mean, there are serious issues involved in clearing the straits. As has actually now being pointed out, when we close the straits, it's actually much tougher on them because it means they can't export oil, but they also can't bring in food. And, you know, I can go into some of the details on that. But the other thing is they've just taken this terrible shalacking, which has damaged an already crippled economy even further. They lost, as Mitsara, something like by 250 members of the senior leadership. So that scrambled their politics. So, you know, they're winning in the – I think of the piece, I referenced something you guys should appreciate, which is the Black Knight sketch in Monty Python.

And that's kind of how the Iranians often sound to me. That's the scene where he's trying to cross the bridge and he keeps slicing another arm and another arm. There's not like two arms. I think at one point it says, come back here, your pansies, let's fight. Yeah, it just stopped. Now stand aside, worthy adversary. Tis but a scratch. A scratch?

Your arms off. No, it isn't. Well, what's that then? I've heard worse. You liar. Come on, you, pansy. Just a flesh wound. Look, stop that.

Chicken. Chicken. Look, I'll have your leg. Do you for that? You're what? Come here. What are you going to do, bleed on me? I'm invincible.

You're a loony. The black knight always triumphs. Come on, then. By the way, I don't know where to put this in, but last night I had, night before last I had dinner with a very important public intellectual who, you know, I'd have to rate him a zero, on the anti-Semitism scale, a 10 on the pro-Israel scale, a 10 on the reasonably hawkish

disposition as I see it, you know, not like a warmonger, but, you know, not naive. What about on the diabetes scale? And he, and he scared me. He's, he's, he thinks that it's 60-40 likely that this war was a mistake and that, and even more pessimistically, he felt. that Israel and the West may just have to bite the bullet and get used to the idea that Iran will eventually have a nuclear bomb, and we will have to live under some mutual short destruction regime with them. He acknowledges the risk of accidental launches and all this stuff, but he just thinks

realistically this just may be where it's going. So anyway, that's neither here nor there, but I may want to refer back to that. So as far as alliances go, and I had this argument with Peryel a million times, she's probably didn't remember. I always, going back to early days of Trump's administration, there's a famous cliche, you know what it is, no permanent alliances.

Well, that's your Twitter handle. Your Twitter. Yeah, only permanent interests. Our allies are not our allies because they love us. They would prefer that we were nice and tolerable, and they will get a roaming eye from time to time when you threaten to invade Greenland. But in the end, they have to stay our allies because it's obviously always going to be in their interest to be allied with the world's largest democracy.

They'll have to wait Trump out. That's what I'm like, what are they going to do, become allied with China? So it's always a good idea to flatter your host on a podcast, but that's like smarter than 90% of the foreign policy experts. Oh, thank you, sir. Here in Washington, decent. Look, the thing is we're in a period where, Trump is appalling. Again, just terms of what my record is.

Let's all stipulate. I was one of the first never-Trump Republicans. I haven't looked back. I'm no longer Republican, but, you know, I've been engaged in that futile fight for 10 years. No, I think a lot of people, including in Europe, are saying, okay, this is it. We're not, you know, we can't, we can never trust you Americans again,

and it's all over. And I think that's wrong in a couple of ways. First, you know, people over-sentimental. what the U.S. European relationship has been. As I always say to European audiences, begin by remembering that we're the people who left. And there's always been a long tradition of Europeans really not liking Americans, including this is actually sort of an interesting thing.

One of the top zoologists in the 18th century, when the United States becomes independent, would annoy Thomas Jefferson by saying, you know, in North America, everything is smaller and more stunted and less fertile and productive than in Europe. And Jefferson, you know, they used to drive Jefferson crazy. So Jefferson at one point had this guy to dinner.

He said, okay, why doesn't everybody stand up? The Americans were all taller than the Europeans. Monsieur Buffant didn't believe it. So finally, Jefferson brought in a moose, a stuffed moose. which is if you've ever seen moose, it's kind of a big animal. Buffon refused to believe it. So, you know, there's something of a history here. It goes, and you can actually, if you look in the 20th century,

even after World War II, you know, big fights over decolonization. We were pressing decolonization, and the Europeans frequently did not like that at all. There were huge differences over Vietnam, of course. when we talk about deploying intermediate nuclear forces to Europe. There's a history. On the other hand, I mean, I think the point

that you make is basically right, which is, you know, the alliance is based on a combination of interests and values. I don't, you know, you should never, the problem is that they're intertwined. And the problem with most academic political scientists is they just want to

believe that only one is important, either only interests or only values. And that's not true. They're both. It just makes it, truth is it's messy. I think they will wait Trump out. It's going to be a rocky ride. I do think some trust has been damaged,

but even there, you know, not all of that's a bad thing. I mean, I hate to say anything nice about Donald Trump, and I usually don't. But I will say that his bullying, first it was just sort of like what Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates said, except with much worse manners. But secondly, it has goose them to really up their defense spending in a serious way. That's a very good thing.

So I think the alliance will continue, but in a different form, it'll have to be reshaped. And that's okay because it was shaped in the immediate aftermath of World War II. That's 80 years ago. And the Cold War, and the Cold War ended over 35 years ago. So it's time for a rethink. And that'll be up to another, hopefully, saner administration. And we do share their values. Trump notwithstanding, you know, it's very, Trump.

Oh, absolutely. They're the ones arresting people for tweets, right? Like, you know, it's, and there's always, go ahead. I mean, in a way, isn't that, that is some of the difference. So, for example, you know, we believe in protecting hate speech. The Germans really don't. And I completely understand why. And I wouldn't want to have their laws here in the United States, but I understand why they have them in Germany.

But the Brits invented the whole concept of free speech, John Stewart-Mill, and now they're arresting people. They're sliding back. Well, this is part of the story of the decline of Britain, which is, it's appalling. You know, the British, I, you know, I'm an anglophile probably because I never lived there, you know, hence the Winston Churchill books behind me. but Great Britain is in sad, sad shape. I mean, they are really barely a great power anymore and not really. I mean, just here's an example,

which I think I use in one of my pieces. The Israeli Air Force, okay, Israel, this little teeny country with, you know, fewer than 10 million people. Great Britain, former empire that span the globe. The Israeli Air Force, in terms of strike aircraft, is about twice as large, but it's actually more like three or four times as capable if you look at what ordinance they can deliver

and, you know, lots of other intangible things. Britain is pathetic. They've got fewer ships than Italy. They've got two aircraft carriers that don't work. They've got the smallest army they've had since the Battle of Waterloo. I mean, it's terrible. Musically, I think they're still good.

They got James Blunt and... Adele. Adele and David Gray, there's others. You know, the problem is I'm just not up on any of that stuff. I'm not either. Like maybe Morris dancing. I mean, I assume they're still good at that. I mean, we want to talk about Iran, but I've always been like, yeah, we want them to pay their fair share.

But of course, the more they pay, the more they do what we say we want them to do, the more we have to consider them when we make decisions, you know. And there's the part of me, like, I like to go out to dinner with friends. I always just want to pay. Why do I always want to pay? I want to go wherever I want to go. I don't want anybody to give me any golf. I want to order whatever I want to order.

And it's worth it to me, right? For America, I know we pay more than our fair share of this alliance, but we get something for that. We are in charge. When everybody starts paying their pro rat affair share, now all of a sudden, everybody's equal, right? Is that really what we want? No, I think, well, it'll never work out equality for a bunch of reasons.

I mean, the asymmetries are too big. But you're absolutely right. Look, it's like raising kids. You know, you say, I want them to be independent. I really want them to be independent adults until they make a decision I don't like. That's right. And then you don't want them to be independent anymore. Yes.

All right. So, so I think I agree with Iran allies. But let's get to the heart of the matter with Iran. Now, I was, I'm a neocon. wink wink but it's not it's not just about israel i'm general orthodox neocon no not orthodox no deconstructionist neocon um uh uh but i you know i i i'm hawkish on Taiwan i'm hawkish on ukraine i'm hawkish on all and i'm especially hawkish on iran and you can go to a million reasons obviously they are if anybody who hopes to have some kind of settlement ever in the in israel some sort of

two-state solution ever, Iran has to be removed from this equation. So, like, that's, that should be reason enough for most people to understand how important it is. And then I began to read this stuff by Professor Scott Sagan at Stanford. I don't know if you know who he is. And he's written a graduate school classmate of mine. Oh, well, he's written extensively. Is he just on the show, right? A couple of things. And he scared the shit out of me on all the risks of the dynamic of having a nuclear-armed Middle East, and the lack of fail-safs and the likelihood of accidental launches. And he wrote about all the accidental close calls we've had in the first world. And then lab leak weighs on me. It's like it's not actually the bio-weapons,

it's the accident, which was the deadliest event in modern history. And then I saw that documentary Chernobyl, where I saw what a basket case organization, the Soviet Union was, everybody trying to cover safety and integrity with the very final concerns. For all these reasons, why the hell would we ever want to allow Iran to have an atom bomb? And then you have them at their lowest ebb that they're ever going to be. We're not taking that much risk to give it a try. And of course, if we let them up off the mat, they are at their high. highest urgency to get an atom bomb because they saw what happened to them when they didn't have

one. So for all these reasons, I say, yeah, you got to try. So, but Professor Pape says we're turning Iran into a, we've turned Iran into a world power. I modeled this for 20 years. So let's start with that. Is it a worst case scenario? Because everything is a matter of odds. We don't know what's going to happen. 6040, 70, 30. Is there a risk that we are going to turn Iran into? to a world power if this war goes to our worst expectations? That really is bullshit. I mean, really, as a reformed political scientist, I'm really much more of a military historian.

Those are most of the books I've written have been military history. That's just total rubbish. By the way, whenever a political scientist say, I've modeled this for 20 years, that means like I'm making it all up, I mean, I'm not looking at the world as it actually is as opposed to, you know, what my model has to say about it. Look, this is an impoverished country. This is a country where the capital city may run out of water and they may have to move the entire population that has nothing to do with bombing.

That has to do with their incompetence. This is a regime which, in order to stay in power, has to massacre probably 30,000 of their own citizens. You know, this is a country which is going to struggle to have any exports after this. This is a country run by an elite, which is, you know, it is this sort of strange combination of, you know, truly fanatical zealots, some of, you know, who fought in the Iran-Iraq war. And it's also incredibly corrupt. Incredibly corrupt. How do you think the Israelis got all this incredible intelligence on who was, who, first, who all the key people are? and when they're all meeting.

I mean, some of it, I'm sure, fancy technical means of surveillance. But some of it means the whole system is just rotten to the core, and people will rat each other out. Now, you know, in the short term, can they kind of squeeze the Straits of Hormuz? Yes, they can't.

Will they able to do that indefinitely? You know, I don't know. I think it is a sort of dealing with the mining issue and missiles, that's a tactical, technical, problem. We in many ways crippled ourselves over the last 20 years in terms of dealing with that, in terms of the kinds of ships we've bought, and so forth. But they, you know, they are very much on the back foot. You know, they, look, they invested an enormous amount of money in this, an effort in Hezbollah, their surrogates, who, you know, at one point people thought,

okay, the Israelis will never be able to do anything. And then you had the beeper attacks and the walkie-tocky attacks. There were actually there were laptop attacks, by the way, they had exploding laptops. I didn't know that. So you ended up with people

throwing televisions out the window because they thought the televisions were next. These fucking neocons are slippery. They're very cutting, you know? I mean, that's why people are always trying to kill them. Okay, but channeled, let's be fair to Professor Pape,

channel him and, and what do you think he would respond to what you're saying? What would his best... Well, first, he'd probably go into a long defense of his model. Secondly, he is somebody who has always believed he has a long academic track record in this, that decapitation attacks never work, and bombing basically never works. And to put my cards on the table.

So I ran the Air Force's study of the first Gulf War back in 1991. And so I've gotten very, very deeply into some of the things the air power does. And in general, I think it's a foolish thing to try to be categorical about, you know, history shows that air power can do this or air power can't do that. It's a very technology and situationally dependent form of warfare. And, you know, political scientists like to do this. They kind of treat history as like a pile of bricks, and you reach in and you grab the bricks you like and you put together a nice little building and you call that your model. And that's,

you know, it's not really how historians think about the past. And it's not how any sensible person should think about the past. Well, my, my difficulty is consistently that I don't, I'll use the word model. I don't know how to model in a way that's reliable what it means to be jihadist. People call them a death cult. Walter Russell Mead says he doesn't think they would use an atom bomb, that they don't want to be martyrs. And it's kind of a slight shade of paradox here because on the one hand, many people say, we can live with an Iranian nuclear state. They will be rational.

They will not do something ridiculous because they know what would happen to them. and then the same people will say it doesn't matter how many of their leaders you kill they will just keep coming they'll have a new guy right behind who's perfectly ready to sit in that chair that he knows is going to so so it's like on the one hand you're saying well they're

they're all ready to be martyred and you know no matter how many how many people down the line you go another person's going to come and say kill me but then we're supposed to understand but they would never so I don't and I can't view the world through their eyes

and if I could only come to an opinion that I really had confidence in, then I could have a more confident opinion about what I think we should do. Well, you know, the problem is it's hard to have confident opinions about anything political and the nature of wars. It's all about politics. And jihad. I don't understand that. Well, it's not just jihad. I mean, I think the thing is, you know, with Iran, you're dealing with Shia Islam.

And Shia Islam really, the idea of martyrdom is much more powerful in Shia Islam than Sunni Islam because it begins with the death of Ali at the battle of Karbala. So where the direct succession of the prophet of the Prophet's family dies, I think it was Hussein, it dies at the Battle of Karbala. And if you look at the kind of iconography of the Iranian regime, there is a lot on martyrdom, you know, martyrdom parks and all that, all that kind of stuff. So I think they, you know, they do take it seriously. But here's the larger point, which is why, you know, this idea, well, they'll be very rational. It doesn't really make sense to me.

So here's the thing. Is it rational for Iran, like as a normal state, to say, the most important thing in the world is destroying the state of Israel? a country which has nuclear weapons. And after that, you know, we hate the United States. We just hate them, hate them, hate them. Now, if they didn't insist on those two things, Iran could be an immensely wealthy, powerful country. You know, in 1976, I checked the numbers.

The GDP of Iran was four times that of the state of Israel. today the state of Israel's GDP is larger than Iran's GDP and Iran is population of about 90 million Israel something under 10 you know none of this makes any sense whatsoever and I think you know the situation that you have now is the Iranians are on the back foot their air defense system is shot the unpalatable possibility may be that this may just be something you have to do again and again. But, you know, I would not feel comfortable in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons. And neither should anybody else. So here's an important thing. The Iranians were working on intermediate range ballistic missiles. They don't need those in order to hit Israel.

They already have missiles that can hit Israel. Those are the missiles that can reach out and touch capital cities in Europe. And sooner or later, they'll go for an ICB. And the model in many ways, North Korea. North Korea, we basically decided not to do anything to stop it. And there's going to be a very good piece in Foreign Affairs by Victor Cha, who's one of our leading experts on North Koreans, which is going to say, we're going to live in a world in which North Korea has as many nuclear weapons as France or Britain and can range the United States.

And, you know, they're not crazy in quite the same way. I think they're less dangerous, but only somewhat. That's a scary thought. One of the ways I look at it, and I don't know if this is fair, but it just, it is the way my mind works. You think of the most brutal examples that come to mind? Like Sam Harris talked one time about how Southerners used to go out for picnic lunch and watch lynchings, you know, or hangings.

This is a black, like what? Like, how barbaric is that? Then, of course, you have the Nazis in the concentration camps. And yet, none of these holds a candle to me to what I think is true that the Iranians send their own children out to look for landmines. Like, it's bad enough that human brutality could slaughter and turn a blind eye to the suffering and death of someone else's people. But if you are a regime that's ready to send your own children off to die for, and certainly there must be some other way to check for landmines, what are you not capable of at that point?

Like we wouldn't want the Nazis to have an atom bomb, right? Because we know what the Nazis are capable of. But what are the Iranians not capable of? You know, they, look, this is an incredibly cruel regime. So do you know how they usually execute people in Iran? No. They string them up from Ukraine. So it's not like, I mean, a hanging is a brutal thing anyway.

But the way a hanging usually works is you fall through a trap door and the noose snaps your neck. This is just hauling somebody up on a crane. So they're dangling at a high height and they're kind of slowly suffocating and, you know, dying a long death. I mean, if crucifixion was part of their system, they would do that. Or if you, you know, any of the accounts of what it's like to be in the prisons of the Islamic Republic, it is an extraordinarily brutal regime. And, you know, all you need to do is. But there is something, but all that is on one category to me, but when it's your own children,

this is something. Well, is that to confirm that they send their children out to do it? I believe it is confirmed. And they're conscripting 12-year-olds now. During the Iran-Iraq War, you've probably heard of the Bessigis. So this is the sort of militia that they use basically to keep the population under control. So these are not particularly well-trained, but they're armed and the population isn't. During the Iran-Iraq War, they started as sort of youth battalions, and they would...

The B-Gs? B-C-Gs. B-C-Gs? Beseegis, and they would send them out to charge through minefields. Russians do that kind of thing, too, you know. I mean, if you look at what Russian tactics are in Ukraine, I mean, there's just no respect for human life whatsoever. They'll, that's why they call them meat assaults.

So I don't know if this has been addressed clearly, but do you think that they are deterable, like mutual share destruction could work with it, I don't know and brought that up, but I don't know if you would. No, I don't, I think, well, maybe from our point of view, but I don't, certainly the Israelis can't think of them as deterrable because, you know, the Iranian leaders, there are two things. One is they keep on talking about Israel as a one bomb country, which is true. You know, if you had, particularly if they get fusion weapons, you know, one big bomb on Tel Aviv.

That's it. Not much left. But the other thing is that, you know, the, the, the last. language is eliminationist. It's, you know, we want to wipe them out. And I think quite understandably, Israelis, and I think any reasonable person said they should be this way, when somebody says they really want to eliminate you, you know, the history of the Jewish people over the last century or so would suggest that they mean it. Yeah. And they could just stop saying that, right? And you don't need to, like we said this stuff last week too, but anybody who's about our age, we know that if

Saddam Hussein had had an atom bomb, he would still be in Kuwait today. We know that if Putin didn't have an atom bomb, we wouldn't have been defending Ukraine with one arm tied behind our back. Ukraine, who even knows if they would have dared to invade Ukraine? So there's all sorts of bullying. So even with mutually assured destruction, you can still get some mileage out of a bomb, tremendous mileage. Yes, absolutely. That's a very, very important point. And, you know, I think in a way you can see some of that, even without the bomb,

when the Iranians felt that they had, Hezbollah really had the Israelis by the throat. Because remember, you know, the talk, which was true, that the, Hezbollah has like 100,000 rockets pointed at Israel. You know, that this would really inhibit the Israelis from doing. anything. Now, in, you know, in the upshot, the Israelis did not let it deter them totally, although I can tell you, having spent a fair amount of time there, it had a huge impact on their calculations. And it's why they planned as carefully as they did for the operations that they eventually conducted in 24, 25. So now let's get to this blockading of the streets.

I was in touch with, I asked Pape about this. You know, Pape and I have an on again, all again, friendship. I don't, I don't dislike him at all. As a matter of fact, he's a pleasant company. I always want to be respectful to him, although I take your position and he knows that about most of the stuff that he says. But I asked him, I said, okay, so let's say Iran controls the straits, you know, the rest of the world is not just going to sit and take it. They're going to immediately start to, by the way, I think this calculation is correct that if Iran, Iran tolls these ships $2 million per tanker or something like that, this will raise the price of gas between three to five cents. This is not a huge impact on the world economy. It's not like a choking us with gas

prices. But should they try to push that even more or even at that rate, I asked him, well, why won't the Gulf States start building more pipelines to the Red Sea? And then he said, well, then Iran will start bombing those pipelines. I said, well, if Iran starts bombing the pipelines that are being built to the Red Sea, the world is going to have a little bit different attitude about hands off Iran. And at that point, the world will definitely not tolerate it. And at that point, Pape didn't respond to my emails anymore. But then I had a conversation with somebody else. I don't want to say his name, but also respected. And he says, well, I was going to take decades. And then he went down to years for Iran for the Gulf States to build a pipeline to the Red Sea.

And this is a point I want to make to you. they always underestimate what is possible, what people are capable of, and how much invention is motivated by necessity. I remember when Reagan talked about anti-ballistic Star Wars.

It's ridiculous, right? You look at the Israelis when they were never supposed to be able to attack Iran, the page or stuff. When the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up, everybody says, of course it wasn't Ukraine. Ukraine could never figure out how to bomb the North Stream pipeline. It was the Ukrainians. Then Ukraine launched a whole fleet of

Operation Spider Weapon took out 20% of the Russian Air Force. I don't want to exaggerate. Something like that. They will figure out how to build a pipe, in my opinion, they will figure out how to build pipelines pretty quickly. And they'll figure out other places to get oil. And maybe Venezuela will come online. Like Iran is not good. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Iran's plan to choke off the world's energy supply is not going to survive contact either. That's my opinion. So, you know, not wishing to be mean to Bob, because as you say, he is a nice guy. It reminds me of Orwell's famous dictum that there's some ideas that are so silly that you have to be an intellectual to believe them. And that, you know, the notion that you could become a world power by being able to

temporarily block the Straits of Hormuz. It's just, it's, it is ridiculous. Now, you know, there's a larger significance to it as well, though. There are a lot of straits in the world, so like the Straits of Malacca. And the Straits for Moose really is an international waterway. So if the principle gets established that you can basically block off straits and charge tolls in peacetime, not talking about wartime blockades, but about in peacetime, it's, it. That is an awful precedent. You know, a lot of part of what the United States Navy does when it's deployed is something

called phone ops, freedom of navigation operations. So they will go into what we consider international waters, and they'll do it sometimes one or two times a year just so everybody understands, from the American point of view, this is international waters. It's very, very important, actually, in the South China Sea, which the Chinese claim as their territorial waters. And we say, no, no, no, no, no. And so, I mean, the principled issue is very, very important.

And that's why it would be a terrible mistake, not that Trump isn't capable of committing it, to allow anybody to charge tolls in the Straits of Hormuz. I mean, he made one of a number of extremely stupid remarks. And he said, well, maybe we could do this together jointly. Well, that's one of the ways you avoid your neighbor from taking your land in adverse possession is that you use it. You just never just, you have to use it. It doesn't have to be all the time.

From time to time you need to use it just to make sure you. So, all right, look, this is my, and you said you haven't taken a position on the war, but let's just for the sake of argument, pretend that you were for the war. Let's just, one of the constant problems I've had with Trump, and I don't ever deny. I denied Russiagate, but I don't ever deny the general party line, the general never-trumper views of him. But I think that I'm more susceptible to weighing that all against the accomplishments. So, for instance, in the first term, one issue that was very important to me was getting rid of racial preferences in universities, the fact that these Asian kids, you know, were having like just

the most outrageous un-American treatment you could imagine. imagine. Hillary Clinton was president. We were going to have that for the next 50 years, right? So I'm like, I don't know. I know he was a bit much, but it's a pretty good outcome. It's kind of, well, almost it. So I'm worried in this particular situation that if you're for the war, you have to say, yeah, I hate this guy. I'm a never Trumper, but I got to admit, there was not another politician in the United States of America that would have had the balls to do this. So if it's as important as I think it is, maybe you just got to say, okay, I'm pro-Trump. I wouldn't disagree with that. You know, the reason why I have trouble with Trump is because I do think he tries to undermine the rule of law. Yes. And he has no respect for it. And I think it's profoundly, they're profoundly corrupt.

And also, you know, some of the willful damage to our alliances around the world is. is there. But look, we have tried everything else with the Iranians, negotiations, economic sanctions, and it didn't work. Now, are these guys capable of following through? Are they capable of doing this without really damaging alliance relationships? Are they capable of going through with it without coming to a deal, which is actually a terrible deal? That, you know, that I can't tell. That's what gives me pause. But in, you know, in general, what I you know I feel my role is is to try to explain well what is going on why do we think this is happening what do we think likely consequences are because honestly my advocacy

in favor of it or against it is neither here or there on by the way I want you to know I completely agree with you on racial preferences stuff I would also say a lot of the DEI stuff so I was you know I spent 40 years as an academic 34 of them at Johns Hopkins I was a department chairman. I was a dean. That stuff was poisonous for what I think are the higher values of the academy, which are excellent. How about when anybody could accuse anybody in a college campus of sexual, and they have no right to even defend themselves?

Absence of due process. And when people complained about the government interfering with universities, I'm sorry. I remember, you know, when the other team was in charge, people were terrified of federal bureaucrats, I think it was Title IX of the Federal Code or something like that. But the only thing is that the administrators, by and large, were ideologically aligned with the Biden or the Obama administrations. You know, my general rule on these things with Trump is a somewhat outrageous analogy. You know, the Nazis invested an awful lot of money in neonatal care. Now, they did it for a terrible reason. They wanted to, you know, breed a race of Superman, right? But, That does not mean that neonatal care is a bad thing. Right. Neonatal care is a good thing. Well, Superman isn't a bad thing.

That kind of Superman is. By the way, it's almost done. There's a really good interview with Sam Harris and Rahm Emanuel just came out. And he was really knee-deep in exactly what I'm talking about because he hates Trump. And he was just blasting Trump for this and blitzing Trump for this. what an idiot is in the war. And then Sam Harris says, well, what would you do? And he says, well, I would take the Abraham Accords and I would expand them and I would give, you know, incentives.

And, you know, this was right after he talked about what an idiot Kushner was and what an issue. I'm like, yeah, that idiot Kushner is the one and Netanyahu, that these are the idiots that got us the Abraham Accords. As a matter of fact, we all know that famous video of John Kerry saying, if you expect to make a deal in the Middle East, without the palisist, No, no, no, no. So, you know, they're all a bit much to me. Like, and he's shameless. Like, how can you talk about what idiots these people are? And then, you know, they did accomplish stuff that you weren't able to accomplish.

Look, also, since you called yourself out as a neocon, neocon, you know, the truth is the Trump administration took on anti-Semitism in American universities in a way that nobody else has or would. Maybe violated the rule of law when he did that, no? I'm not sure. I don't know. But I can tell you the problem was severe. I mean, when I, look, I'm a Harvard product.

I got my BA and my Ph.D. there. When I followed what was going on there, just reading Harvard's own internal report on anti-Semitism, I was sick to my stomach. Oh, that Claudine Gay stuff was. Oh, my gosh. Don't get me started. All right.

Well, we have a few more minutes, but I'll just, sometimes I like to let the guest say whatever they think is what they wish they were asked. So what's on the top of your head that you most like to get out into the national bloodstream before we let you go? You know, I think it's not a good idea to think about this war in terms of winning and losing. I mean, there are some wars, yeah, where you say, okay, the Japanese lost World War II, although even there, not entirely.

They wanted to destroy the European Asian empires, and they did. But winning and losing is an overly simple way of looking at it. There'll be consequences, it'll be certain effects. There'll be second and third order effects, which we can't judge. So the hardest thing is just to try to parse what's happening and what we think we can see. The second thing that I would want to put out there is, as you think about the war with Iran, it makes a big difference when you think this war started. So I don't think this war started a few weeks ago.

I don't think it started with the 12th day war in June. I think this started in 1979. I mean, the hatred of the United States and of Israel was baked into the DNA of the Islamic Republic from the very, very beginning. And one way or another, we've been engaging with these guys, including violently, for a long time. And, you know, even if you don't have sympathy with Trump, as by and large, I don't. The fact that the Iranians, according to the Biden Justice Department, were trying to kill him should get you concerned. By the way, finish up.

No, I don't know the history of this stuff very well, but I do know that people like Glenn Greenwald hearing what you just said, they say, no, it didn't start in 1979. It started in 1950s or whatever it was when we engineered. You know, I mean. Mostadegh or whatever? Yeah, this is Musa Dagan all. that you know the of course you know the problem with the Glenn Greenwells of these

world is they don't think that foreigners have any agency I mean actually if you look closely at the history of that coup first with the British played more of a role than we did but it wasn't us pulling strings this there were a lot of Iranians really hated Musaddick and there was an internal coup and that happens you know I it's one of my complaints about all the commentators on on any of these conflicts when they happen is it's it's all about us you know we're in like a certain kind of teenager and a romance gone bad, it's all about me. Well, it's not all about me.

It's other people who have agency and who make choices, some of them very bad choices, sometimes good choices. And you need to respect that. But no, I don't accept that at all. Go ahead, Dan. No, so I just also getting back to something Nome said earlier, I mean, if we kill enough of these dudes, will they ever cry, uncle, or are they just going to keep coming in this regime?

So here's the thing. I think the targeted killing, which the Israelis have done a lot, you know, between the 12-day war and this, these people are not simply interchangeable parts. That way it's different from the United States. You know, in the United States, if you bump off pretty much any major general, and I mean this with no disrespect to my friends who were major generals, you can find another major general who's probably just as good. That's not really true in this system.

So for example, you may remember in the first Trump term, we knocked off Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Cuds Force, which is the kind of overseas covert action. He died like a dog according to Trump. He was replaced by a man to Ismail Connie. Connie's just not as good. But the other thing is the way this regime works, it's networks of leaders and, you know, all kinds of family ties and corrupt business ties and so forth. as you disrupt that, you actually disrupt their ability to function. And I think, you know, you're looking further down the road, it seems to me you're likely to have an Iran that's going to be continually gripped by crises because the regime cannot manage the economy. It's clear the population hates them.

They've been terrified and suppressed for now. They won't last forever. They're going to have a huge set of problems to deal with. They may get hit again. And I think, you know, if you were to ask me, what's the most likely thing in the long run, some colonel that we've never thought of will emerge and take power, maybe not overtly changing the nature of the regime, but doing something. I mean, the elite has been disrupted in a major way.

Just losing the Aitou Lamini and having his son, who's probably wandering around without half of his face, as far as we can tell, because he doesn't show up in public and who does not have a, glistening reputation as a high order Shia cleric. That's a major disruption as well. So I think you're good. The elite is being disrupted because remember it is both a political and a military elite. No chance of the Pahlavi dynasty getting back in. No, I think, you know, I heard somebody say, I don't know if this is true or not, but there's something appealing about it. He's doing it just to please mom.

By the way, you guys could probably identify with that. Oh, yeah. I can't actually. But so, you know, it just came to my mind that I believe this is true. I'm always worried about saying something that's not true. Sadat was very influenced by watching Nassar bring destruction down on Egypt. He turned to a more reasonable position because he saw. what his predecessor was capable of bringing to the country.

So it's perfectly reasonable, as you say, that some point, some guys can be somewhat reasonable to say, listen, I hate the neocons, but you know what, this is not working out for us. We've got to be practical. This is just not working out for us. Maybe we could just tone it down a bit, right? Yeah, I believe that.

And by the way, nobody predicted Sadat would come to the fore. And if you looked at his early career, I think he may even have been sort of pro-Nazi, you know, at the time when Rahmell was at the gates or something like that. I may be misremembering it. But yeah, I think that's the kind of figure that will, I think, is likely at some point to crop up and take charge in ways that you just don't anticipate. Oh my God. What a change for the world it could be to take this piece off the board. Everything could change.

I mean, you have Israelis who become so right-wing. people don't many people don't understand it's because of Iran if there was a peaceful Iran Israel would then be ready to take a chance in certain ways

although I don't know if the Palestinians have any interest in that but anyway all right sir this has been a great conversation much better than I don't know you should

did you watch my interview with PAPE no this interview with Pate went so off the rails that really that another podcast did a podcast about our interview with Pape where they basically played the entire podcast they got way more views than we did because they couldn't believe what they were watching

I forget the name of the podcast I said were you yelling at each other no it was pretty cordial I thought I wasn't there I watched it it was filibustering and you have to watch it since you know all right you'll I'll I'll say the question that set it off at least Oh, it all started with, I asked him, I said, you tweeted out here that the war. Someone was. No, no, it was before that. You tweeted out here that the war started because essentially, this is in his words, exactly that, Israel fomented the riots in Iran back in January. I said, Bob, I've been looking for, it was true, I've been looking for two hours to try to find a source for this.

I've emailed people. So, what's your source for that? Right. It was off to the race. It's like my wife when I asked the wrong question. It was really... It reminded me of William... And then it got worse.

William H. Macy and Fargo is, you know, they're asking where... This tells you something about where the American university world is. Yes, yes. And where American political science is. I mean, look, I've been in government. I've been in senior positions in government. You just, you can't go around just making stuff up. Yeah.

You really can't. Not if you intend to be a responsible... leader. What's that book again you got coming out? It's called The Strategist, How to Think About War and Politics. You'll be out in October. I'm definitely going to get a copy. All right, sir, you don't get to New York much, do you? I do, actually. Oh, you got to come visit us, hang out, see some comedy, shit to shit. I would love that. Oh, terrific. So, Peril, you make sure to pass all my information to that. Food half off. Is it kosher? Are you kosher? Yeah.

You are a Neocon. We will get you kosher food. I have a pipeline for that too. All right, Elliot Cohen, sir, thank you very, very much. Pleasure to meet and talk to you. Pleasure for me too. Thank you. Bye, bye, bye.

Thank you. That was good. Two weeks in a row.