The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Walter Russell Mead: Weighing Action vs Inaction in Iran

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Featuring Walter Russell Mead, this conversation dives into one of the most dangerous questions in the world right now: what happens if Iran gets the bomb—and is it already too late to stop it?  From the real stakes behind the Strait of Hormuz to the risk of a global oil shock, nuclear proliferation across the Middle East, and the limits of deterrence, Mead breaks down why the situation is far more complex—and more urgent—than most people realize.  The discussion explores whether war with Iran is avoidable, how U.S. politics and leadership shape these decisions, and why history suggests the cost of inaction could be far higher than we think. Mead addresses several important questions:   What happens the day Iran gets a nuclear bomb? Are we already too late to stop Iran? Would a nuclear Iran trigger World War III? Could one chokepoint crash the entire global economy overnight? Is doing nothing the most dangerous option of all? Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal and the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft with the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He has authored numerous books, including the widely-recognized Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. His most recent book is titled The Arc of A Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. His recent piece in WSJ https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-is-surprisingly-good-for-the-world-b97e7b8e?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqecxWBrLmx573zbVo7yOBqntjzcRpFCYAQSv7RM5rosCy_YOIAMNCb6yOB0apk%3D&gaa_ts=69cddce9&gaa_sig=HpttmDViumH2cVRMuhAJiCGUkqg0x4FrdbN2ie-VtdgjgeCKjr5ZV_oW2JJzRYiKuyr-Nf6aGXt22IgzXXwylQ%3D%3D Walter Russell Mead on X: https://x.com/wrmead?lang=en

This will be the only technical problem we have. I promise you. Welcome to Live from the table, the official podcast for the world's famous comedy seller. Walter Rutgersel-Meed is the Ravenel B. Curry, the third distinguished fellow in strategy and statementship at Hudson Institute, the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft with a Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

He is the author of several influential books and also authored a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal called Trump's Foreign Policy is surprisingly good for the world. Thank you so much for joining us. Okay, what an honor to meet you, sir. We have wanted you on this show for such a long time. Really, thank you very much. Today is Passover.

Last year at Passover, this is just like a little personal question, then we'll get to the heart of the matter. Last year at Passover, I had two very dear friends of mine over, neither of them Jewish. You probably know who they are, Coleman Hughes and Michael Moynihan. You know, Passover, I'm always trying to make it entertaining. for the kids and try to do a little bit as little as possible of like the mumbo jumbo that they find excruciating so last year at Passover I asked both Coleman and Michael I said you know you guys

are such strong advocates of Israel and the Jewish people it obviously comes from an emotional place as well and I asked them each to explain you know what it is about this cause which attracted them and moved them and I I don't have a recording and I won't go into it, but both of them spoke off the top of their heads so beautifully. And I can see... Sorry. I'll take that again from the top. No.

And they... It's okay. And they... And I saw my kids really engaged by it. Now, you have written this book, The Ark of a Covenant, the United States, Israel, and the fate of the Jewish people. You obviously spend a lot of time thinking about this issue. you seem to have, maybe you would deny it, maybe it's just, you know, just business as usual. You seem to have an affection for the cause.

So I thought I would ask you, especially because today's Passover, about that. What is it about Israel and the Jewish people that interests you so much that you devote so much of your time writing about it, thinking about it? Okay, well, that's a tough question to answer because it, The decision to write a book is, for me at least, is a big decision. And it usually means I'm looking for a subject where, number one, I'm not quite sure what I think yet. And I want to study more. Excuse me, my phone just keeps some. This is.

Oh, don't worry about it. It's set. That's the alarm I get when there's a missile strike at in Israel. I got so far the last time I was there. so good healthy reminder in a way anyway um look writing a book for me is a big complicated decision because they all take a long time this one took longer than than most but it needs to be a subject that first of all i'm interested in second i'd like to know more about i'm not quite sure how to think about it and third i do have to have a sense that a lot of other people are interested in it and that a lot of

people are wrong about it. You know, all of those things need to come together. And this is one of those subjects. Everybody on the planet thinks they have a total understanding of the history of Zionism, the relationship of Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism, what American foreign policy is and should be toward Israel and what they think about Israel. But in 99.98% of the cases, that those convictions rest on urban legends more than they do on a real understanding of the history.

That's as true as some of the pro-Israel stuff as it is about a lot of the anti-Israel stuff. There are a lot of urban legends here. And so that kind of made the book really interesting to me. But obviously beyond that, the story of the return of the Jewish people to create a Jewish state. in Israel that the whole drama of 19th and 20th century Jewish history in the West, the connection of Jewish history with American history. And then the fact that through my life I've just been blessed by having a lot of great Jewish friends and teachers down the years, all of this kind of comes together,

maybe with my own sense from a Christian background. And my dad was an Episcopal priest. I spent a lot of time reading the Bible when I was a kid. We had a sacred studies teacher in my Episcopal boarding school who was a fanatic about scriptural trivia. And we used to get tested on the aites in the Bible. He loved theites in the Bible, you know. You know, Hittai the Gittite or whatever, you know,

just on and on and on. So I spent a lot of time studying that stuff, and it gets a grip on your imagination. It has a grip on mine. I was only going to ask one, but I will ask one follow-up. Is there something that comes to mind as how the Israelis or the Jews are most misunderstood? Well, I do think there are a lot of people who look at this really mysterious return of the Jews to the Holy Land. you know how did that happen and what they they see or think they see is aha you know the Jews with their awesome power got together and twisted everybody's arms they used their space lasers they

used their you know zillions of dollars in lobbying control and so they just forced the world to accept the creation of a Jewish state without really understanding that in Jewish history Zionism was the orphan stepchild that nobody, you know, people most educated, prosperous Western Jews hated the idea of Zionism when they first heard it. And, you know, they, it was in a sense only, only when all the other plans for Jewish survival and flourishing in the, you know, in the 20th century fail. That is, you know, plan A among liberal secular Jews was we want to be French just like any other Frenchmen.

We want to be German like any other German. We want to be English like any other Brit. Jews are not a nation. We, you know, we don't have a national destiny. That was the educated enlightened Jewish vision. Then you had the sort of more religious Orthodox vision, which is, look, all we want, just let us leave our lives in peace. We don't bother you, you don't bother us,

we eat our food, we pray our prayers, we live in our neighborhoods, and you just leave us alone. Well, both of those dreams failed. And Zionism was the kind of, you know, well, even socialism comes in before Zionism. It's like, hey, let's build a new world in which, you know, like John Lennon's imagined there are no, countries, there's no religion,

there's, you know, we're all the same, we're just people, there's no Jews in John Lennon's song of Imagine. It's all in the past and irrelevant. So all three of those dreams, the secular liberal dream, the Orthodox

religious dream, and the socialist dream, they all failed. And Zionism was what was left. And Zionism really only succeeded in the Jewish community because it was of all the visions for Jewish survival,

Zionism was the only one that could attract a critical mass of support from non-Jews. Anti-Semites, by the way, and not just phylo-semites. Kaiser Wilhelm I'm the second was an anti-Semite, but he thought it was a great idea. He actually belonged before Balfour, Kaiser Wilhelm was the first leader of a Western country to actually take steps to try to create a Jewish state in the land of Palestine. Yeah. To the anti-Semites, it was a win-win idea.

Exactly. And to the phylo-Semites, you know, hey, it seems nice. And then there were a lot of Christians who liked the idea of a Jewish return to the Holy Land, in some cases for humanitarian reasons, in some cases, sentimental reasons, and in some cases for doctrinal reasons. But a lot of things go into it. But when Herzl's pamphlet was published in Vienna, it met with like universal detestation and ignoring. Herschel's own newspaper refused to use the word Zionism

until Herschel's actual obituary. They just, you know, they weren't in. interested. And you had, you know, sort of a few hard scrabble, poor Jews in the Russian empire who were interested in it. But the powerful Jews, the rich Jews of the West thought it was a terrible idea. And their wealth and power would have, even had they been willing to use it, wasn't sufficient to gain this ground. Sometimes I said to people while I was writing the book, Don't blame Israel on the Jews. All right, maybe someday, if you're happy with this interview,

we'll have another interview. We can delve more into that, talk about how, to what extent the Arab population was not sufficiently considered, all those great issues because, or important issues, because you're quite an expert on it. And, you know, the Israeli side is not perfect after all, far from it. Okay, anyway, so let me get to the, to the Iran thing. I want to try to get this right. You know, at various times in my life, I found myself comparing situations I was in and arguments I was hearing to a black hole.

And like, you know how a black hole is supposed to bend space and even time? Like, early on, I'd have like a business situation that involved money. And people would make the most ridiculous arguments, things which they would see in a second made no sense if they were on the other end. And I say, you know, money, is like a black hole. It bends all logic. And on this Iran thing, I feel like I'm in a black hole that somehow, I made a little just lizard, that Trump derangement syndrome, this overcorrection to the Iraq war, anti-Israel bias, rising anti-Semitism, the desire to have approval on social media, that this, this is like kind of the mass that is creating these.

gravitational forces such that I mean every American president in my lifetime every Western leader felt it was absolutely necessary to prevent Iran from getting an atom bomb Bill Crystal you know who's now against the war he wrote a column in the weekly standard where is it on one of the world's most dangerous regimes further along to a row further along the road to acquire the world's most dangerous weapons, we believe sanctioned, sabotage, and the threat of military force can better constrain the Iranian regime's nuclear weapons program than this bad deal. But we will also say openly that if it comes to it, air strikes to set back the Iranian nuclear weapons program are preferable to this deal. He was referring to the JCPOA. Today he's against the war.

And what I'm seeing now in the argument, the black hole evidence is that tacitly, everybody's seeing. to be saying that it's okay if Iran gets an atom bomb because I think everybody understands that if Iran escapes this situation, next stop is Adam bomb? Should they be able to accomplish it? So and I've had a few interviews where I tried to get people to tell me, okay, fine. I understand why you think the war is costly. What do you think about Iran getting a bomb? And they will not answer me.

They will not speak about it. So I'll start with you. what happens if this war fails? Do you think Iran will get a bomb? And what will be the consequences of that to the world? All right. Well, I certainly think, yes, if the war fails, Iran will get a bomb. And, you know, the consequences,

consequences are different from what most people think they are grave. But it would, I think the consequence, I am less worried that a nuclear Iran would attack Israel directly, because deterrence really is a factor. And while you may believe that you're willing to go to heaven as a martyr yourself, it's different from kind of pulling down the pillars of the temple with your whole country in it. and I think there's so I'm not sure and you can say well they're insane

yes but you know the how sane are the North Koreans and they don't you know deterrence has a certain hold what it does do is it is it means that the US is deterred

from trying to deal with say an Iranian attempt to close down the Straits of Hormuz as we see it happening now and it also So, you know, it will set off a very fast arms race in the Gulf with everyone from Turkey to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and I assume also Egypt getting their hands on nuclear weapons. That, in turn, I think, leads to a nuclear weapons proliferation cascade.

But the most serious thing from the American point of view is that, it would formally give Iran something like a veto power over what goes in and out of the Straits of Hormuz. Now, this is, you know, a lot of people will, can follow the argument this far. But I've been surprised to see how many people don't really think that's so important. You know, that that is worth, maybe it's worth a few air strikes, but is it worth a, a, of a tough war. Right.

Well, I'll just interject there, you know, they should, many of these people are very, very strong advocates of our defense of Ukraine. And it should be very obvious to them how paralyzed we are to fully defend Ukraine simply because Russia has an atom bomb. Yes, but again, you know, is how important are this, is the Strait of Hormuz? in a way that's kind of how important is the prevention of another country from being whether it's Iran or anybody else any country being able to stop the flow of oil and other commodities from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world you know that's and and is that an

American interests and what kind of an American interest is it I think that's really where a big piece of the debate lies the other piece of the debate would lie is is it practical to actually win a war with Iran? You know, Iran is four times the size of Iraq. It has double the population. Yes, there have been demonstrations and so on against the regime, but it still seems not to be short of people who shoot other Iranians down in the tens of thousands if needed. So, you know, so they're the two elements of the case that people make.

And the first element for me that is really kind of important is this straight, where for the last 50 years, it's been a key, 50 years, 80 years, it's been a key element of American foreign policy that we don't want anybody else in control, with that ability to stop the flow of oil. and people say, well, now, okay, America, and what they think is, well, we got that, that comes from the 1970s, when the U.S. was needed to import a ton of oil, a lot of it from the Gulf. And so now that the U.S. doesn't need to import oil anymore, therefore, why should we fight for the Persian Gulf? Let Japan, let Europe, let the places that need the Persian Gulf, fight for the Persian Gulf. Why is America the global Patsy doing this for a lot of countries? A lot of other countries. And that, I think, is where a lot of this is coming from. I mean to interrupt you. If you're, I've no, go ahead. Go ahead. So the first question that comes to my mind is that obviously China depends on the health of the world's economy for its economy, right? This is kind of like, but the,

when America gets a cold, China gets the pneumonia or whatever. Wouldn't China lean on Iran to keep the straight open so that, because it's, or another way put it, isn't it absolutely against China's interest for its ally to be, you know, messing with the economy of the world? Well, in that case, you have to ask yourself, again, from the standpoint of American, skeptical of the war, why are we fighting a war to help China? to keep oil prices low for China. Right?

Why am I paying $4 at the pump in the hope that we can allow China cost-free to get cheap oil forever? What exactly is the connection between that and American interests? And so I think you have a lot of people thinking in those terms. Now, I happen to think that is the wrong perspective. Okay. But I think you do have to start by understanding

that there really, you know, there really is a case, right? Now, I would, my argument is, again, I look at, we were actually concerned about the oil in the Gulf before we were using it to any extent. In the 1950s, when we were worried about Nassar being the ambitious local power that hoped to be able to take over the oil states with this pan-Arab nationalism, we were worried about any potential cut off of oil supplies to Western Europe because cheap fuel for Western Europe helped make the Marshall Plan work,

which then built up Europe against the Soviet Union. So we didn't need that oil then, but strategically it mattered to us. Now, I would say today we're seeing a test case of what happens when that oil. oil is cut off. I don't think many people like what's happening to the stock market or the bond market, although it goes up and down depending on what Trump says on any given day. But the potential for $200 a barrel oil to set off economic crises in Europe and Japan and then therefore financial and economic crises in the United States, I think is real. And I asked myself, do I want Iran to have the ability to blackmail the world by threatening to shut down the Strait of War and

the answer is no I do not and I don't think anybody else should let me just visit the question to deterrence for a second because this is something you know like people like Sam Harris they take the the notion that Iran is a jihadist martyrdom death cult culture very seriously If I understand what you're saying, you think that the Israeli hyper concern about Iran getting a bomb and using it against Israel is a bit overblown or the word that comes to mind is paranoid. That's a harsher word that I want to use, but I'll use it for now. That Israel doesn't have to worry as they seem to. Right. I would say that the real worry is a little bit different.

that with a nuclear Iran, Israel also, you know, could, would Israel be deterred from attacking Hezbollah if Iran had nuclear weapons, et cetera? You see, it's not, what nuclear weapons give Iran is not just, hey, we can drop a bomb on Tel Aviv anytime we're in the mood, but it's more, how does that change the playing field in the Middle East? And I think it changes it very much to Israel's disadvantage.

Okay, let me, I'm sorry, But this is a part I always a glitch on, and maybe it's just not answerable, which is that at the point where you conclude they're deterred, that they wouldn't do that because they know what would happen to them, then why would it worry you when you're going after Hezbollah? Because you've already determined, well, they wouldn't use the bomb. So in some way that what you're saying implies that, well, they might use the bomb. Well, the deterrence works both ways. So during the Cold War, there were a lot of things that we did not do and that the Russians did not do

because the existence of the nuclear war weapons deterred us as in Ukraine today. So there are lots of ways that when your adversary has nuclear weapons, there are just certain paths that just under other circumstances you might consider doing it, but under these circumstances, you wouldn't. So if you take out a leadership strike that takes out the Iranian government, what's your guarantee that, you know, they don't do like one nuke on you, right? Et cetera. And dirty bombs are an issue also.

What's you take? We had this guy, Professor Scott Sagan on. I don't know if you know who he is. Very, very smart man, in my opinion. and he has studied all the reasons why accidental explosions and dynamics which cause nuclear exchanges based on bad information such that we've had close calls in America and the Soviet Union, he thinks that if the entire Middle East were to start becoming nuclear, that the risk of calamity rises to a level that the world should not be tolerant. of. I don't think the nuclear, you know, nuclear proliferation of the Middle East would be a good thing

at all. I think it's very worrying. And then you have to ask yourself, you know, the Egyptian government of today would probably be a pretty responsible nuclear power, but what will be the Egyptian government in five years, et cetera? So there are lots and lots of moving parts here and non-proliferation. You know, I mean, the U.S. originally tried very hard to keep Israel from getting nuclear weapons on exactly this grounds. That's why they killed Kennedy. Oh, you finally admitted it.

Perry L. Wants to ask question. You're muted, Periel. I know. I thought that we learned from October 7th that deterrence was not, sufficient enough to make someone like Hamas or in this case Iran not do the thing well it doesn't it may not deter a terror attack

but it deters a nuclear strike that would be the point okay and so you know it's been clear for a very long time that neither the PLA the PA or Hamas is deterred from supporting terror because Israel has nuclear weapons.

And from a Hamas point of view, it does seem unlikely that Israel would use nuclear weapons against Gaza or, for that matter, the West Bank. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. No, not that they would use nuclear weapons, but that I think Israel thought for a long time because of how much more powerful they were than Hamas, that that would have deterred Hamas

for making the kind of attack that they did. did on October 7th? Well, I think, again, what happened was through a series of real mistakes, Israel didn't have the power, you know, the point of the power is not to scare Hamas, but to stop Hamas, which means that I don't care if it's a religious holiday, the border posts need to be guarded, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And Israel, frankly, let its guard down. And Hamas took advantage.

So yes, in one sense, as long as Israel was actually guarding the frontier with greatly superior power, nothing like that happened. But they will vigilantly watch and see if you let it slip. I see. There's a couple of things I'm never quite sure of. You know, the kind of the almost conventional wisdom, certainly in the pro-Israel camp, is that, yep, Sinwa knew what was going to happen to Gaza and he went ahead with it anyway. And I remember thinking that way back in 9-11, I said, you know what, I don't know if Bin Laden, I'm just making it now, if Bin Laden actually really thought this was going to succeed as it did. It was just like you're fantasizing, you're in an unrealistic kind of life, and then all of a sudden it happens and oh my God, it's real.

But I don't believe bin Laden expected to be spending the rest of his life in a cave on a dialysis machine, you know, waiting to be killed. and somehow I'm not convinced that Sinwar actually knew what was going to happen to Gaza and decided to do it anyway. Do you have any feel for that? Well, first of all, nobody knows the future, you know, and that, you know, our friends and our enemies and even ourselves, none of us really know the consequences of our actions. So at one level, this is obviously the case. I think to understand the thinking of Sinwar and the Iranians and some others, We have to look at this notion of the kind of ideology of resistance,

where, you know, which is very different. I mean, if you think about the early Zionist movement, it was a national movement. Their goal was to build a state. And so even when they were under British rule, they were putting together what could someday be their central bank. They were putting together all of the institution so that when the moment came, they would have a state ready to go.

And they were willing to make all kinds of territorial compromises because they'd rather have a state on a small patch of land than no state at all. Okay, that's not really the core of the Palestinian movement, which is much more based on rejection of 1948, rejection of of Israel, there is a nationalist wing, you know, but it's not strong enough. Otherwise, they would have accepted Clinton's approach on the West Bank, et cetera, et cetera. This isn't everything we want, but it's a good start. And once we have our state, we'll be able to maybe revisit the territorial question 10 years down the road or whatever. So resistance, when resistance is the center

of what you're doing. The idea is, you know, as long as you continue to fight, there's hope, there's existence, you're not necessarily fighting at every moment for a concrete goal because your ultimate goal of, say, the destruction of the state is just almost unimaginably distance, right? And in the same way for Iran, you know, the sort of creation of a global Shia empire, you know, that's not very realistic. That only happens in a kind of religious, almost apocalyptic setting, right? But nevertheless, behaving as if and taking the next step and just demonstrating to the world that you're still there, they haven't crushed you, they haven't destroyed you.

That holds your movement together, holds the people together. And the Palestinian experience has been, basically from their point of view, the whole world wanted them to just disappear in the 40s and 50s. We just don't want to hear about them anymore. But by resisting, they forced themselves onto the world's attention. And so from their point of view, resistance hasn't gotten them what they want, a state, or the defeat of Israel. But it has built the Palestinian movement, made it. it a global cause celebra, right?

And they're haunting the dreams of Israelis, even if they're not able to destroy the state in the coal light of day. So, you know, I think from that ideological and emotional and cultural perspective, I think both Iranian and Palestinian action and Hezbollah action makes more sense. do you okay we'll move away for this but you know just so i had um compared going back to this accident and miscalculation uh i compared this to covid in the sense that you know we're so worried about the biological weapons but in the end it was likely the lab leak which became the most deadly uh event in modern history that it's the miscalculation and then and this also applies

to like this notion of deterrence yeah if everybody can game it out perfectly then maybe deterrence will hold them but the miscalculations are all that they're the norm that's you have to expect miscalculations especially if this is going to be the status quo of the world for the next 50 years hundred years maybe forever right i'm just presuming that maybe in the future something changes but something i feel like something terrible is going to happen but the arguments I'm hearing today, if you were to bring them to bear in the 60s, we would then conclude that the Cuban missile crisis was much ado about nothing. What are we worried about? What are we worried about nukes in Cuba for? Like, you know? Yeah. Well, I think there were a lot of people in the Kennedy

administration who kind of secretly thought that. But it's also the case that, I mean, you know, things change and you deal with the you don't deal with the threats as they'll exist 20 years down the road but what you have now right and you know 20 50 years look I think the one thing we can be pretty confident of in the 21st century is that human beings are going to develop a lot more ways to kill each other en masse and that these new weapons of mass destruction cyber weapons you know you You could take out a country's medical system, hypothetically. You could sort of open the floodgates on the three gorges dam in China. You know, one can think of just all of these things that in terms of the magnitude of deaths and destruction would eclipse what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And obviously the biological weapons. And unfortunately, in both biological and cyber weapons, arms control.

is a much more difficult thing to think through than with nuclear weapons. But stopping proliferation has been imperfect and not 100% successful. But in the 80 years since 1945, we've substantially slowed the cascade of proliferation. Cyber and biology are just much more volatile. And how do you, how do you, you can't very very, whether or not somebody is building a you know some kind of a new disease in in a in a laboratory somewhere in the way that you can at least especially with satellites have some idea whether somebody has a nuclear program or not so so yes we are we are headed into

a world that in some respect seems faded to become more dangerous yeah and we're getting complacent to it all let's get to the get back to to Iran again. We talked about the straight. If oil goes up to $200 a barrel, won't an alternate pathway for this energy then come online? I know there is already a pipeline that goes to the West, if I have my geography right, how long will the world tolerate it before they just find another way to get the Gulf State oil to Europe and Asia? Well, the Houthis haven't yet started closing off the Red Sea, which they're perfectly capable of doing, or have been in the past. And pipelines are kind of vulnerable to drone attacks and missile attacks.

So I am not so sure that, I mean, I think certainly people will try to find alternative methods, but I'm not sure you can count on them. And more to the point, the Iranians have started talking about striking the desalinization plants with missiles in is no actually in the gulf states right israel would be hurt by desalinization strikes but israel they would have drinking water okay i think there's some arab cities that without desalonization plants in a very small number of days would would run out of drinking water in is I read a little bit about it. Israel has redundancy and is kind of planned for this vulnerability. So they wouldn't be so easy.

Now, in the future, these Arab countries are certainly going to be planning more about that. But in the moment, Iran really has a lot of options. Now, obviously, one can strike back at Iran. But Iran is a fundamentally stronger country than an oil well, sort of an oil well on a beach. which is not a bad in a desert on a beach. There's not a bad way to describe strategically where some of the Arab oil states are. Go ahead. No, the desalinization risk alone, wouldn't that bring the Arab states even closer to Israel than they already are?

Is this going to bring that alliance cement? I think it's, you know, again, they'll take different, you know, different people will have different calculations. So far, it appears the Emirates have become much more anti-Iran. Others, what one hears, and we don't

know, but that behind the scenes, the Arab leaders are generally telling Trump they want him to take a tough stand with Iran. Again, that doesn't necessarily help in American politics. Well, oh, all the rich Gulf oil shakes want our boys to go

fight and die to protect their wealth that's not the strongest argument you could carry into a public that's not a great one no but come on the poor Saudis if we don't help them right tough so you know your your son died but you have the enormous satisfaction of knowing that the emir of Kuwait is richer than ever yeah yeah so but in any case some will some will move toward the U.S. and Israel, some will say, come on Iran, isn't there some way we can cut a deal? What will the Saudis do? What will this? That's the, they're the biggest one up in the air. You know, if I knew what the Saudis were doing, I wouldn't be talking to you. I would be down. I would be with my Bloomberg terminal making like amazing.

A polymarket. Polymarket. Yeah, I mean, believe me, I would not waste my time podcasting. But I think the logic for the Saudis is still to be anti-Iran rather than pro. You wrote, the result is a war about Iran. The result is a war that is more necessary than Doves thought and harder to wage than Hawks supposed. I think that's exactly right. But if Trump has to throw in in one direction or another, what would you advise? cut bait, or would you say, you know what? It's harder than we thought, but what the risk that lies in the balance to the future is overblown of the human race, the future of civilization,

where this is going, we have to do what we have to do. We have to give it more effort and more resources, maybe even ground truce. Would you go that direction or not? Here's what I would do is I would, first of all, say, okay, Mr. President, you want my advice? Listen, there's a ton of secret documents I have not seen. And I need to know, you know, I need to understand like, okay, what does the Pentagon actually think would happen if what's our best assessment on the Iranian political situation? You know, in other words, neither you nor I really have the information to make the best decision on something like this.

I say that all the time. I don't know what they know. you know i can i can based on what i know i can tell you what i think but i don't know right exactly and so and and so in that sense it's you know it becomes just a couple of guys spouting off at that point but i would say that that i think when people look at trump um they are they may under there two things they may be underestimating one is the degree to which the behind the scenes strong support for the Gulf of the Gulf Arabs for a tough course with Iran speaks to Trump. Sometimes I say to folks that the Gulf Arabs speak Trump's language more fluently than some

other countries and can reach him in an effective way. And that's a possibility. At the same time, Trump is somebody who remembers the hostage crisis of 79 and remembers all of the things that have happened along carries a great, I would say, hatred of Iran based on what Iran has done to the United States over the decades. And I think younger commentators may be underestimating the psychological weight of that on Trump. But at the same time, we should all remember that for Trump, everything is political. And he's looking at managing his coalition at home as much as he is looking at what's happening internationally, which is what a leader in a democracy has to do.

If you lose power, then all of your plans fall apart. So you have to be considering the domestic impact. And the domestic impact so far is not great. Trump is at the lowest point he's been in the polls. midterms are coming. Gas is now over $4 a gallon and who knows where it's going to go. The stock market, you know, if you're retired right now, your stock portfolio is going down and the price of everything you buy is going up, that's not the happiest combination

for a president who's under 40% in some polls looking at a midterm. Well, we had Robert, we had Robert Pape on here yesterday and he said, thought ridiculously, the opposite of what you're saying. He said the political reality is why Trump is going to continue on with this war and put ground troops in or something like that. And what was this, what was the argument? You know what? Can I, can I, let me just take a second here and bring it up.

So the argument stemmed from his tweet. He had a tweet which said, a deeper question is emerging. Is this war in America's interests or, and in boldface, someone else's. That's where this gets dangerous. So I said to him, well, clearly you're talking about Israel there when you mean someone else's interest. And he said, no, whatever would you make you think that? I was talking about MAGA's political interest. So, and then he went on to some sort of nonsensical answer as to why.

But it was everything that you said about the Republicans and the midterms and power and all this stuff, except in his calculation somehow, this is why Trump was going to put ground troops in. But I think he was just covering up the fact that he meant Israel all along. Who knows? But also, you know, I mean, I do think that so far, Maga has stuck with Trump on the war, at least according to the polls. No one else has, but Maga has. And they'll stick with him when he cuts bait, too. Maybe. But, you know, being a loser is not great for Trump's image. And so, you know, so he'll.

he will need to find, and now, of course, he reacted to the 2020 election, he still denies that he lost. Right. So maybe he'll, you know, sort of go into that kind of thing on the Iran war. But, you know, Trump is easily the least predictable president in the history of the United States. War is the least predictable of all human activities. And so you put the two together.

and trying to predict the course of events here, I think we should be honest and recognize our own limits here. You know, it's interesting you say that about Trump and being a loser because I had always wondered if his election denial was some sort of primitive understanding that he had, that nobody will rally around a loser. You can rally around, I was robbed. you can't rally around. I lost fair and square. And if he had conceded defeat, I wonder if he would have been able to create the psychological environment that he needed

to get everybody to rally to him yet again, which seemed impossible to me and he did it. Yeah, no, I think that he regained control of the... He'd lost control of the Republican Party right after January 6th. And you saw lots of people sort of condemning him, and it looked like maybe that was just going to be the end of the whole thing but Trump managed to rally from that low point to regain a kind of a mastery of

Republican politics so we should not again Trump I compare Trump sometimes to Napoleon not that he's writing the code Napoleon you know that the people will be looking at Trump's empire style 200 years from now is a kind of maximum of high taste or something like that. But that Trump has capabilities that his opponents don't. He has a better feel for MAGA public opinion. He's comfortable with thinking and acting outside the box. And Napoleon in the same way, he had the French Revolutionary Army was just more motivated

than the Austrian armies that he was. fighting and so on. That meant they could like go on night marches that the Austrians would their army would collapse if they tried. So that means Napoleon could plan on popping up in a place where no one expected him to be because actually the risk of him doing that was lower than the risk of the Austrians doing that. I think some of this went into Trump's calculation on the war, that his ability both to spend the domestic politics and manage that in his own inimitably unconventional way, but then also his ability to respond to whatever the changing dynamics of the international situation are in a war, that those two things made a war in Iran

less risky for him, not without risk, but less risky than for him. for conventional politicians. So, and I think probably that is still a factor in how he is evaluating things, that he's, he's the great Houdini, at least in his own mind, and so he can get out of traps other people can't get out of. Yeah, I got two more questions for you before your go. One is a follow up on this. So do you think that in some way this, we're in this situation because Trump got carried away

with himself in some way. As you say, he's the great Houdini. His gut just turns out to be right all the time. He did the impossible in Venezuela. And then also, you know, he doesn't want to look like he tweeted out probably, like some sort of barstool like eruption. People of Iran, you know, don't worry, we'll be there for you or we, whatever the exact words.

And now he doesn't want to look like he, you know, hung them out to dry. and it's just a lot of personal, psychological reasons. And then Netanyahu, perhaps being persuasive is part of that story. How do you see all that? Well, yeah, and I think, I mean, I don't think we should, we should deny. To me, I think the real strategic thing that happened was that the real the protests and the protests, sorry. Yeah.

Yeah. The first thing was that the Israelis realized this and then Trump did. which is that the Iranian ballistic missile program has advanced to the point that it actually is as dangerous as the nuclear program, not in that, you know, it can do what a nuclear bomb can do, but it can do so much that you might get to the point where Israel would be deterred from attacking Iran because Iran would have such power to destroy Israeli targets with ballistic missile. missiles. They're obviously not quite there, but they're getting close. If they'd had 10 times the missiles they have, Israel might look a little bit different today. And in the same way, those missiles could be enough to deter the U.S. also from dealing with the Iranian nuclear program.

And once you've built a barrier that protects your nuclear program, then you move and you get the nuclear weapons and no one can do anything about it. Then you put the nuclear weapons on top of the ballistic missiles and the world has changed. And so I think that the sense that the missile program is the new nuclear program and that the clock is ticking on the one hand, but that on the other, after the losses of the last couple of years, Iran is more vulnerable than it would otherwise be, created a sense of opportunity. And if we talk, if we if we use language like Israel was very persuasive. I think we overlook that they actually had

a case to sell here. Right. That makes sense from Trump's point of view. They were not flim-flamming him or that sort of thing. They were pointing out facts that would register in his mind. To end it up, let's just go back,

kind of back to the beginning. Talk a little bit about if you can, you know, wax wise, wax some wax with wisdom. about the costs and the risks of inaction in history and here. So, for instance, we know the risks of our inaction were in World War II. And by the way, in World War II, kind of like now, we were paralyzed by this World War I experience, like we're sort of in some way paralyzed by our experience in Iraq,

even though, I've said this before on this show, that the rap on Iraq was that, you know, quote, unquote, Bush lied. There were no WMD. There was no terrorist network. But actually, everything that we thought was worth going to war for in Iraq, we know with 100% certainty and more is true in Iran. And I've kind of done the counterfactual. What if we had found a very advanced nuclear program in Iraq and we had found an extensive terrorist network? would we be saying in retrospect we should have never gone to war in Iraq or would be saying

thank God we went to war in Iraq we did exactly what we set out to do problems and no problems you know I get but I would say if you if you think you have to relitigate the Iraq war in order to build support for an Iran war no yeah it's not going to go it's not no I'm just saying so but estimating in action we we we could have easily gotten rid of bin Laden and Clinton decided not to do it. And, you know, that became the turning point for the next 30 years. What are we estimating the cost of inaction here? All right. Well, again, let me come back to this core point. You never know what the future is. Right. So a lot of people are saying, boy, you know, America was so stupid in the 90s. You ignored Afghanistan

as the Taliban was coming together. And then you have 911. Right. But what we were actually paying a lot of attention then was getting the nuclear weapons out of the former Soviet republics well who knows if we'd ignored that and focused on Afghanistan Afghanistan might have looked as peaceful as pie and you would have had terrorists taking over you know Kazakhstan with nuclear weapons or something and everybody say what idiots you were you know so so these counterfactuals and stuff are really hard to say but I I do think that over the course course of the 20th century, American inaction was more expensive than American misaction, even if you throw the Vietnam War into that misaction loop. Economically, in terms of lives lost,

in terms of what happens globally, you know, to me the great case is, suppose Teddy Roosevelt had been able to say, truthfully, to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1905, say, listen, Bill. Look, the United States of America, the American people understand that the balance of power in Europe is essential for our security. And if any country, much as we love you in Germany, any country tries to upset that balance of power, we will do what needs to be done to preserve it. And if the American people at that time had been willing to support the military and the diplomatic posture necessarily put teeth into that. I don't think we would have had World War I, which means we would not have had fascism, at least not as we did. I doubt we would have seen

communism take power any place, or World War II, or the Holocaust. So yes. Now, that was, it was completely impossible for Roosevelt to have done that. But believe me, I think if he'd had the opportunity, he would have, just as FDR would have been much more forward-leaning in 19-20. if he thought he could have gotten the political backing for it. So, yes, American inaction has been far costlier than American action. I remember feeling this way when I say, why is Biden not being more bellicose with the Russians when we see them, you know, trying to decide whether to go into Ukraine? Like, bluff, say something.

put some people there, put some tripwires. Like, why not? He's like, like, right this way, you know. As long as there's a minor incursion, we'll be okay with it. So I guess, so we agree on this and I'll let you go now, that if we're going to stop Iran, the costs will never be cheaper than they are now, but the costs will be more significant now than the Hawks had supposed. But after this, if we allow Iran to get up off the mat, they know one thing.

We can't ever let this happen to us again. And the way to do that is to have an atom bomb. And there's just no, like, to me, it's like either we decide we're going to let them have a bomb or we do what we have to do to stop it. Yeah, I think Iran's regional and even global ambitions of this regime are on such a trajectory that I think coexistence for the United States and Iran in this way is not tenable. One or the other of us is going to have to give up something

that we consider vital. But again, you know, just is Trump in, Iran may be in worse shape than it's ever going to be again. Part of what you have to think about on the American side is what about our politics, our leadership, you know, this may be the moment of opportunity from the standpoint of Iranian weakness. Is it the moment of maximum opportunity from the standpoint of American unity, strength of purpose, diplomatic standing?

Yeah. The history much more questionable, much more questionable. So we don't know what's going to happen. I hope to God and on Passover, I pray that this ends quickly and this ends well. Yeah. And I guess, look, nobody saw Sadat coming, right? And so you just, you don't ever know. No. This new leadership, we don't really know. Okay, sir, it's been such an honor to meet you, to speak to you. I'm such an admirer of yours as all the people who I respect are also admirers of yours. So I really much appreciate you coming on the show. I don't know if you ever get to New York.

I'd love to have you come to the club. enjoy comedy. I don't know if you enjoy it. But, you know, you're a very, as they say, you're a very big fish and we're a very small outfit here. And so I just, I can't thank you enough. Well, great. Well, thank you. And I'd love to come and hear some comedy some night. So we'll be in touch when I'm going to be in New York. I'll have Perry L. set it up. Okay, Walter Russell, meet, everybody. Read him regularly in the Wall Street Journal. Happy Passover, sir. Bye-bye. Same to you. Thank you.

All right, are we? Yeah, right. Okay, great. Goodbye.