The Dispatch Podcast - Iraq Syndrome | Roundtable

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

There’s a growing fog over what exactly American forces accomplished in Iran on Saturday—and whether regime change is still on the table. Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg and Mike Warren to discuss the intelligence-gathering process and why Iran is just not the same as Iraq, as well as New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. Will Mamdani’s victory be good news for the Trump administration and for Florida’s real estate market? The Agenda:—Iran, Saturday to today—Intelligence, national security, and institutional trust—Vietnam Syndrome turned Iraq Syndrome—Where the wind might be blowing on Iran’s regime change—Why NYC’s mayoral race might be good for Florida real estate—Campaign advice—Summer sips and the speculative history of Orange Crush Show notes:—Mike Warren for The Dispatch: “What the Iran Strike Reveals About MAGA’s Future”—Jeffrey Goldberg on The Remnant—Kevin Williamson for The Dispatch: “Yes to Regime Change in Iran”—Jeremiah Johnson for The Dispatch: “Mamdani's Big Apple Upset” The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss Iran and Israel. Are comparisons to the Iraq war and Iraq intelligence fair, or do they overstate things? Then we'll discuss Democratic Socialist Zoran Mamdani's surprise triumph over Andrew Cuomo in the New York city mayoral primary. Finally, not worth your time. We'll discuss what we're drinking this summer. Just a housekeeping note, we recorded this discussion a date earlier than normal, and it might not reflect the latest breaking news. I'm joined today by Mike Warren and Jonah Goldberg. Let's jump right in. Gentlemen, good morning. Good morning, Steve. Hello. I like the schoolmaster beginning to the

everybody has to say, good morning. Yes, Mr. Hayes. We should tell people we're recording on Wednesday morning for breaking news purposes, schedule purposes, harmonic convergence of the planets, a whole bunch of different reasons. Right. I want to start with Iran. Mike, it's been four days or so since the U.S. ran a series of attacks on Iran's nuclear site. A lot of back and forth about whether those attacks were affected. and the extent of the damage that those nuclear sites took. Can you bring us up to date on what's happened since those evening attacks on Saturday night and where we are today?

Right. So Saturday night, we launched this attack on these three nuclear facilities. Listeners to the dispatch podcast will sort of be up to date from the previous episode of the roundtable on kind of what happened over. the weekend. But at the end of it all, it appeared that these three sites were bombed to smithereens. Whatever that means, we still don't know. But the claim from the administration was that they were destroyed. And this was a big sort of victory for the United States, for Israel against Iran's nuclear program. And the president suggested that that was going to be, that was going to be it. And there was a, I believe, Monday evening, there was what the president described as a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Iran. After Iran had retaliated a pretty perfunctory retaliation on launching some missiles at a American base in Gutter, which was a little ironic because Gutter is considered a

an ally of Tehran, the government of gutter appeared to have gotten a heads up about that attack as well as the United States. This is all the indications were that this was a face-saving response from Iran, and of course, all those missiles were intercepted, no lives were lost, no casualties at all. And then the ceasefire commenced. You had this moment where sort of, I don't know, what was six or eight hours between the announcement of the ceasefire and the actual commencement of the ceasefire in which there was some additional back and forth between Israel and Iran. And Iran launched an attack basically just outside the window of when the ceasefire was supposed to take place. Israel responds. The president gets really upset about this, drops an F-bomb on the White House lawn before he heads off to the G8. He seems to be pretty frustrated with the, he seemed to be frustrated, at least, with the status of this war. He seems to be looking for it to all be over. And for the attack on Saturday to sort of have been the last real strike. or the last real effort. Since that's sort of back and forth right after the ceasefire was supposed to begin,

I mean, as far as I can tell, it's basically been quiet. But here we are. The question, I think, at this point, is now a question of analyzing what that Saturday strike actually did. And we could talk a little bit about this. I'm a little reticent to read too much into these leaked intelligence reports. But there is a question now, I guess, about how far back those attacks set back the Iranians and their nuclear weapons development program. It was initially suggested that it had been obliterated, this intelligence report from one intelligence agency leaked to the media, suggested that it had not been set back as far as the administration maybe had initially claimed or initially hoped. I just think there's a lot, there's still a lot of fog clearing before we know what happened, but, but now we're in the analysis phase of this.

I think that's a good wrap up of the past several days. Jonah, Donald Trump is at NATO summit. He was seated next to the Secretary General earlier today. He was asked a question about the intelligence and just how effective it was. You remember the evening of these attacks, the president came out and his supporters came out, his cabinet secretaries, and said this was executed perfectly devastating attack, destroyed everything, there's nothing really remaining, declared victory, and said this was, you know, one of the most successful strikes in the history of mankind.

Now, Trump was asked about this this morning, and I want to read what he said, at least part of his response to a question about the state of the intelligence. He says the intelligence was very inconclusive. The intelligence says we don't know. It could have been very severe the damage to these nuclear sites. That's what the intelligence says. So I guess that's correct. But I think we can take the we don't know.

It was very severe. It was obliteration. What is not clear about that, Steve? Come on. That's the quote. I mean, I think in the president's own mind, you know, again, somebody who said early that this was a tremendously successful attack, he doesn't know. He's hearing these intelligence updates. As Mike mentioned, we had this leaked assessment from the defense intelligence agency suggesting that, in fact, it was not as devastating as the president's early rhetoric might have had us believe. Do you have any sense, Jonah, where we are? And if not how long, it'll take us to. to get a real battle damage assessment? Yeah, we should also say that the DIA thing, on its own terms, said it was low confidence, right? Right.

Which is sort of code for, this is our first best guess with limited information. And our former colleague in Friend Clon Kitchen had a good post on Twitter this morning explaining how BDAs work, battle damage assessments work, and you've got to put together a whole bunch of different ingredients, right? You have to do the signals intelligence

where you listen to what the Iranians are saying amongst themselves, discounting for the possibility that, A, the Iranians that you're listening to may not actually have perfect information either because it's chaos and fog of war. And B, that they may assume you're listening, so they may say things that aren't true. And then you do satellites, and it's best to have human eyeballs on things, but that's very difficult in a country that you do not control the ground on. And so, who knows?

I actually suspect that the DIA report is wrong and that the damage was worse than that. Just in part from the experts I've been paying attention to, they talk about how those centrifuges are very delicate machines. And like you don't want to bump into them when you're walking down the hall because they're, those are so finely calibrated. And I just kind of feel like a dozen bunker buster bombs

might, you know, shake them a little bit. But again, I do not know, right? So I'm also deeply, deeply skeptical. You hear a lot of Democratic politicians and, you know, similarly situated journalists talking about how we have no idea what happened to the enriched uranium that may have been carted off by truck. It is 900 pounds, right, 400 kilos, whatever it is. I don't do metric. And I believe that we don't know.

I am deeply skeptical that the Israelis don't know because if the Masad doesn't actually have a team that is dedicated solely to trucks that go in and out of Fordo, I would be shocked, right? And so like the New York Times, Mark Mazetti and like 35 other people on the byline had a good piece doing the TikTok of how this all happened. and they make a pretty good case, or they are pretty suggestive that Trump really made things more difficult for the military by blabbing about a whole bunch of stuff and signaling that this was actually going to happen.

And so I think Trump may deserve a lot of blame for the fact that some of richer uranium was moved prior to the attack. At the same time, I don't think that that uranium is just in the wind now. I would be very surprised if the Israelis don't have eyes on it. So I think it's one of these things you've just got to sort of wait and see. My theory about the Trump and the obliterated thing is in part, you know, he always cares more about the headline and the stagecraft of things than the substance. So that's sort of baked in as part of Trump's approach of this. But I also, you know, we've talked about this a couple times before around here. I was talking to Jeffrey Goldberg on The Remnant about this, no relation.

I think if you listen to Trump this morning from NATO, he also had this bit about how he was comparing it to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said the last thing I want to do is compare this to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I think it's a lot like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? And insofar, and his point was that it just knocked them out of the war. They're never going to try this again.

And I hope that's true. I don't, the whole case for a regime change is that you can't think that's true because these guys believe they're on a mission from God to have a bomb and destroy Israel. And so I'm skeptical of that, but that's at his position. Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at is I think a lot of it is Trump's natural PT Barnum spin stuff and all of that. But I think there's an element of it that comes from his sort of Norman Vincent Peel prosperity gospel upbringing where he's trying to convince himself. He is trying to self-actualize and bring

his desires into reality. So like when he says, my estimate of my net worth depends on how I feel that day, he wasn't kidding. He like, that's how he sees the world. He thinks that he can will the reality he desires into being. And I don't think any of us can completely fault him for that view, given how successful he's been with this nonsense. And so when he keeps saying, I think it's been obliterated, I think part of what he is saying is, I really want that to be the case. And if I keep saying it, like the January 6 guys are all patriots, all that kind of stuff, it will become true. And the kids call that manifesting. Yeah. And I just, I don't think that's a, I don't think that's a great thing in a commander in chief. But I do think it's something that we should keep in mind.

He shapes the reality among his followers. And they hear him say it. And they hear him say for three, straight days, supported by Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance and all of these others, that this place has been obliterated, that the threat is in effect over, that Iran and Israel are going to make nice with one another. They believe that, and as often as not, they don't then get contradictory information. So they're either not seeing something like this leaked DIA assessment, or if they're seeing it, they're seeing it as yet another leak from what politicized intelligence community meant to bring down Donald Trump. And I think your, you know, Joni, your, your invocation of January 6th is spot on because that is a scenario in which, I mean,

you know, literally we have what, more than 40,000 hours of video of these people wreaking havoc in the Capitol, attacking police officers violently, destroying the building. And there is now this sense among a certain percentage of Trump supporters that they were the victims and that this really wasn't that bad. And, you know, they're patriots. And Trump does have this sort of uncanny ability to shape reality in our, you know, siloed information economy so that his people believe what he says. The other example, I know I've mentioned this one before, was the back in the first term when the House of Representatives passed the Obamacare repeal and Trump then had a ceremony at the White House celebrating the end of Obamacare right right it hadn't passed the

Senate it hadn't done anything but they literally had the Marine Corps band playing songs they had a press conference a big celebration everybody congratulated one another on the end of Obamacare well Obamacare never ended but for for people who wanted to hear that that message that Trump had come in and done what he said he'd do, they were very receptive to it. And I think reality catches off, but sometimes it doesn't have the effect that we might like. So there's another angle, which I just think we should put a pin in. The Trump administration bootstrapped all sorts of legal arguments for using the Alien Enemies Act for immigration stuff, on the argument that Trend de Aragua was essentially the Hezbollah of the Venezuelan

government, that it was a proxy organization that invaded in the United States and has at war with us, and therefore we are justified to do all of these things, including deportation of people who have no association with a trend of Aaragua. And the National Intelligence Council put out a report saying, eh, not really true. The trend of Aragua is Venezuelan, and the government kind of likes that it's screwing with us a little bit, but they're not. agents of the government, all that kind of stuff. And they fired the two top officials for this along the lines that you were talking about how,

oh, they're their enemies, their deep state enemies screwing with our messaging and undermining the president. But they also happen to be telling the truth. And like, that is my concern here is that whatever the motivations of the people who leaked the DIA assessment about Fordo was. I am concerned that the word is going to go out, that you better not produce any intelligence products that contradict Donald Trump's manifesting. And that is how you really undermine national security. This is also a failure of the leaker, you know,

whoever leaked this initial DIA assessment because, I mean, just everything you guys have just discussed is contained in Carol. Leavitt's statement to CNN when CNN was the first to break the DIA's thing. And let me just read it real quick because it just sums everything up. This alleged assessment, alleged assessment, although they did acknowledge that the assessment was real in the sense that it existed and that they had seen it. But put that aside. This alleged assessment is flat out wrong and was classified as top secret, but was still

leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear. clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran's nuclear program. Everybody knows what happens when you drop 14,000, 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets, total obliteration. And I'm with you, Jonah, that I think actually this assessment's likely to be incorrect, but whatever the goal of the person who leaked it was, maybe to, maybe it really was to sort of undermine

Trump or to sort of to demonstrate that he was sort of talking bigger than what the assessments were going to reveal. It seems to have, it's likely that it's going to backfire

on them. Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of these, you know, if you look back at the last 20 plus years of interplay between elected officials and the intelligence community in these kind of leaks, I mean, my I guess my own view is a pox on everyone.

You know, you have a leaker like this where I agree with our former colleague, Clon Kitchen, it's really early to do any kind of exhaustive, definitive battle damage assessment. And Clon, you know, pointed out that any such assessment would bring together signals intelligence, human intelligence, you know, circumstantial evidence that we get from liaison intelligence services, all of these things that's hard to imagine we have sort of in an instant. And you just have to understand that that's why these are labeled low confidence assessments when they're made. They're asked to give an early guess as to where we are.

That's what this is. And then it's leaked and people make more of it than ought to be made more of it. This happened during the battle over Iraq War intelligence repeatedly, where the famous one was, you know, sort of a footnote from the State Department's INR intelligence agency that called into question some of the reporting on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons. Now, they turned out to have been right, but this was used by critics of the Bush administration, the Iraq, were to say, hey, the intelligence community knew that Saddam didn't have these weapons of mass destruction and therefore the policymakers lied about it because see it on this one footnote by the State Department, they raised questions about the legitimacy of this. So I think we can sort of spin ourselves round and round until we actually know. One thing I do expect that we will hear

more about in the coming days and I'm interested in your reaction to any of this. You know, I remember reading, I think it was Bob Woodward's third book about the Bush administration. And it was a look back on the Iraq war and the intelligence. And Woodward was famously pretty well sourced in the U.S. intelligence community. And he opens one of the chapters with a very colorful interview that he does with an anonymous U.S. intelligence source. When Woodward asks, how many human intelligence assets did we have in Iraq on the ground before the war started? And the guy says something, and this is, I'm paraphrasing from memory here, says something to the effect of, you know, you can count them on one hand and still give someone the finger or something like that. Real, and the subsequent analyses done by the Senate Intelligence Committee and others of Iraq pre-war intelligence suggested that we were really blind on human intelligence sourcing in the days leading up to.

the Iraq war. And just in conversations I've had with people who understand the state of our intelligence about Iran, its nuclear programs, its proxies, the way the IRGC works, we are, I don't know if it's quite that bad. We lack human intelligence sources on the ground in Iran. And that will have potentially profound implications for just how much we know. Now human intelligence sources are good for many reasons and also unreliable for other reasons. They're problematic, but some of the best intelligence comes from human intelligence. If we don't have, if it turns out we haven't had the kinds of human intelligence sources on the ground as we undertake something as consequential as these attacks, do we risk going through sort of the same size?

where people are saying, look, this is the U.S. government telling us that we had this information that we knew this stuff. And it turns out to have been either thinly sourced or maybe not true. Is this potentially yet another moment where we see decreased faith in institutions as a result of this? If, and again, all of this is conditional, right? A big if, if it is in fact not the case that we obliterated these things and, you know, Iran was not racing for a bomb. Mike? It's a worry that I have in just about every aspect of government and civil society these days is a lack of faith in institutions. And if we just think back to what it was like in the months and years after the invasion of Iran,

in 2003 and just the chipping away at trust for for very good reasons and in some cases in many cases for unfair reasons but regardless you know and and this was in a at a time when you know the country was you know 9-11 was still a very very real and vibrant memory for Americans where, you know, the president was viewed as someone, as someone in general trustworthy. I mean, his, you know, his approval went up and down, but nobody except the most anti-Bush partisans thought that he was just a liar out of, you know, out of habit in the way that we know that Donald Trump is. So I think there is, you have this added element of the person at the top being someone that just everybody knows. And even, I mean, I guess take out the most pro-Trump partisans there are.

Like, even a lot of his supporters would probably understand that, yeah, the guy fudges stuff. Like, they would probably admit that. You add that to a sort of what I think has happened since in the last 20 years, which is, just with, I think, the proliferation of the internet, the way in which I think bad, you know, bad foreign actors have infiltrated social media in various ways. There's a lot of noise and a lot of bad information, misinformation, whatever you want to call it, that taken as a whole undermines and continues to undermine trust and institutions. Because our takeaway from all of this in the next week's, months, years, is that the intelligence community or the disagreements between the intelligence community and the White House and the communication of that was incorrect. People were lying about it. I mean, it is just a continual decline.

We're just going to be that much further down the graph on the chart of lack of. of faith in these institutions. Throw it on the pile is what I say. Like it's another data point. You know, it brings me no pleasure to say that. Yeah. So I agree with the broader thrust at the point. I agree with everything that Warren says about the general omnibus lack of faith

and trust institutions and contempt for experts and all that stuff. That's a real problem. This very well could feed into it. I want to push back on an embedded assumption in the original question, because I just wrote a column about this, just had a long talk with Jeffrey Goldberg about this. When we were growing up in Washington, every single time there was any talk about military engagement, you could count on the New York Times to use the word quagmire and talk about Vietnam.

And I looked it up 20 years ago. I'll read, I reprinted it in the column I just wrote this week. Three weeks after we started dropping bombs on Afghanistan, which was on October 7th, 2002, Johnny Apple, who was like, you know, the dashboard saint of foreign correspondents at the New York Times, wrote an essay for the New York Times, a military quagmire remembered, Afghanistan as Vietnam. And then he writes, like an unwelcome specter from a happy pass, Apple wrote, the ominous word quagmire has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.

Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? And then moving forward, this is me. Over the next 12 months, the newspaper ran nearly 300 articles, 300 articles with the words Vietnam and Afghanistan in them. The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, ran articles mentioning Iraq and Vietnam and at an average rate of more than two a day. Now, the reason I bring that up is, like, if you watched the Sunday shows, as I did this week, The good news is, you know, Papa Bush thought he had purged the Vietnam syndrome with the first Gulf War.

He was wrong because it came back with the vengeance during the second Iraq war in Afghanistan. But Bush the Younger purged the Vietnam syndrome and replaced it with the Iraq syndrome. And we now have this obsession with, is this Iraq again? And it's not just on the left. It is definitely not just with the elite media. It is also with Steve Ben and Tucker Carlson and all those guys too. and everyone is doing anti-Iraq war cosplay and so many of the assumptions and comparisons I mean Kristen Welker I don't mean to signal her out but like she was clearly trying to get

J.D. Vans to sort of buy into the idea that we went to war in Iraq with false intelligence and we're doing it again because there was no one Tulsi Gabbard said and Senator Warren affirmed that the intelligence hasn't changed about whether or not the Iranian program was imminent where they had an imminent bomb. Let's concede that that intelligence doesn't exist, that Trump

is lying, just straight out lying when he says, I think they were very close to having a bomb. As I said last week, Jimmy Crackhorn and I don't care, right? We have every right to bomb the crap out of Iran for the thousands of Americans they've killed over the last 40 years and the fact that every week they scream

death to America, and they, but more importantly, whatever the validity of that intelligence was about whether that it's imminent or not, and, you know, Bibi Netanyahu claims they have new intelligence, he's also been saying for 30 years, they're minutes away from a bomb, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. I don't, again, it doesn't matter because no serious person, any, on any side of this debate, it literally means you're unsurious if you deny that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. So any comparison to Iraq fails immediately there. It also fails immediately when people start talking about occupation and boots on the ground and all these kinds of thing. And when Tucker starts raising all of these fantasms about how thousands of

Americans are going to die in the first week, where, how, who, what Americans? There are no Americans in Iran, right? It is just the Iraq war, we can debate all day long about good idea, bad idea, Where were the mistakes? Where were the failures? I stand by passionately that the real intelligence failure was not understanding how to do phase four. It wasn't the WMD stuff. It was how do you stand up a new government? How do you deal with a society that had been so compartmentalized and deracinated by a terrible dictator? And we completely screwed that up. And that gets to your point about not having human intelligence on the ground. We don't really know a lot about the Iranian society. and what comes next if the regime topples and all that stuff.

I think that's all perfectly legit. But the people who want to make it sound like, you know, it's a little bit like Watergate syndrome for journalists, right? Is they all want to be Woodward and Bergstein, right? And they always like, what did they know and when do they know it and all this kind of stuff? And that's fine to a certain extent. But in another way, if all you're doing is saying, oh, it's Iraq all over again, you're going to miss some really important distinctions that are both good for Trump and

bad for Trump or irrelevant to Trump, but important to this actual issue. It is just not a replay of Iraq in any serious way, except, as Warren pointed out on the editorial meeting the other day, they do share three out of four letters. Thank you for revealing my very deep entrenching analysis, Joe. It's the smartest thing Mike has said since he's come to the dispatch. Let me push back a little bit, Jonah, because I can imagine people listening would say, yeah, okay, so Johnny Apple was maybe a little premature. Three weeks in, early to call it a quagmire, you know, definitely sort of hearing echoes of

Vietnam where they may not have existed then. On the other hand, we were in Afghanistan for nearly two decades. We left with an inconclusive and embarrassing exit. Some of the intelligence there was wrong. Our handling of the post-war period was fraud and sometimes ill-informed. Point to Iraq. There was mission creep. There were, there was bad intelligence.

There were times when our political leaders did say things that we later could show were not true. I mean, if you want, I mean, I take your point, and I think I basically agree with you. But if you want to look for things where there were parallels, you don't have to. really nitpick to get there, right? I mean, Iraq was the same way. No? I mean, sure. If you want to say, well, Vietnam, we screwed up Vietnam and we screwed up Iraq and

then provide places where you can put comparisons from column A and column B, that's fine. But like, very few, let me put it this way. If you were kind of trying to do the debatification and, uh, uh, and, uh, and rebuilding of Iraqi civil society, you say, who do we have who's really good on this kind of stuff? But they have to be people who studied Vietnam. You think, that's kind of stupid, right? I mean, like, Iraq and Vietnam are just very different countries. Afghanistan and Vietnam are very different countries. And we all understand in our bones the problem with generals fighting the last war. And that's a real problem, right? It's like you are institutionalized. You have your

your priors are set by your experience. It's a real problem, and it's also just a part of the human condition. I get it. But we seem to think that that's not true for intelligence analysts, TV show hosts, pundits, columnists, podcast bros, right? And it's also true of them. And my only point is, yeah, I get it. Faulty intelligence.

We can have faulty intelligence on both sections. We've had faulty intelligence in every single military conflict in American history, because faulty intelligence is part of the equation of gathering intelligence. And we've had dishonest politicians since the word politician has existed. So, like, that's a thing, too. But my point is, if you're just going around looking for this to be like Iraq, that is going to constrain your understanding of the scenario of the situation in ways that are not helpful, whether you're pro-bombing Iran or anti-bombing Iran.

Because it's just Iran is not Iraq. Iran's a much bigger, richer, more serious country. And the idea of occupying it is no one's talking about that, except the people who are trying to scare us out of doing something about Iran. They say, oh, it's like Iraq again, because they want you to think, we're going to send a quarter million troops to occupy Iran, which nobody is talking about. Yeah, you do get to the point where you impose this framework and then people look to fill in the gaps based on those parallels. I think that's an entirely fair point. On the other hand,

Mike, if you look at what Jady Vance was saying in his appearances on the Sunday shows, this is not a regime change. We're not talking about regime change. Nobody's talking about regime change. We should be clear. This is a quick in and out. We said we were going to hit the nuke the nuke sites. We're going to take them out. And then we're done. And then they can figure it out. We're not interested in regime change. Literally that didn't last six hours. Donald Trump tweeted later that afternoon, regime change the phrase is a little politically incorrect, but why wouldn't we want to change regimes there? Miga, make Iran great again. We talked about this a little bit with the group earlier this week that we had to talk about this. Where do we stand on this question of regime change? Is it still being debated in the administration? Does it seem like this is something that we're likely to see the Trump administration push after having ruled it out early. I mean, whatever I tell you could change between the time we're recording and the time this posts. This is the problem with the way that this has been conducted.

Really since even before Israel's first strike now going on nearly two weeks ago, even before that there was a sense that the president was sticking his finger up in the air and trying to see where the wind was blowing. Could he get in the right position? Was he going, you know, he didn't love getting involved in this, but once he saw that Israel had really struck quite a blow, like get out in front of this parade and say, I've been leading it the whole time, you know, was he annoyed by hearing J.D. Vance say no regime change and thought, I'm the one who makes these determinations.

and so I'll just, I'll zag where J.D. Zigged, if only to assert, you know, my dominance and the decision making, or does he, you know, does he actually have a slightly more sophisticated view? I think, why would I close that option off for me? I don't know. And it seems to me that everybody in the administration is just trying to play catch-up to where Donald Trump is at any specific moment. But the question of regime change, I mean, like with the intelligence for these strikes and whether or not the blows were as effective or as obliterative, if that's a word, as Donald Trump has claimed, I think we just have to see. These last couple of years have revealed to the world that Iran as a strong military power in the region was a facade or was a bit of a mirage or was something of, I won't use the phrase paper tiger, but it's been, that idea has sort of crumbled a bit as its proxies have been destroyed or decimated and as its responses to.

these kinds of things have been seen as pretty pathetic. We don't know internally what things are like, as Jonas said, in Iran. The analysts are going, well, many of whom I trust and read to figure out what's going on. They have a general idea. There is opposition to the regime. It seems to be split. And maybe they hate each other, the different opposition groups more than they hate the regime. the regime is weaker to us on the outside than we thought.

Perhaps it's weaker now to the opposition groups than they had previously thought, you know, go back to the economic riots from a couple of years ago. I mean, there's all kinds of indications that something like that could happen. And so my question is, what does Donald Trump do if he does see an opportunity? if there is a moment like the Israeli bombing that makes it seem like he could be somebody who gets in front of the parade and says, yeah, I did lead the regime change in Iran if it looks like it could be good. I think that's the situation that we're in now and it doesn't give me a lot of comfort.

But as an, you know, as analysis, I think we're just, we're all just watching it the same as Donald Trump and seeing which way the wind blows. Yeah, I largely agree with that. The only thing I'd push back down a little bit is, well, two points I'd make. One is Iran has been really good at murdering and imprisoning people who could lead democracy movements, uprisings, you know, that kind of stuff domestically. They're also really good at, you know, removing the eyes of young women who don't wear a hijab or throwing acid in their face, right? So, like, someone in the economist was making this point is that the economy has been so bad for so long that there's a really a profound amount of alienation and people are just trying to look after themselves and their own families. And there's less of the sort of civil society connectivity that you need to get like a solidarity movement.

So, I mean, I think it's a very depressing thing. I wish it were otherwise. But I'm, I am more skeptical that we're going to get that kind of, you know, Iranian Persian spring than I would like. And the second point, I just, it's worth just closing loop on this when Walker was grilling Vance on Meet the Press about has the intelligence changed about the imminence of the, how close they are to Obama. The answer he should have given is, look, that's not the relevant intelligence. The relevant intelligence is people have talked about doing this for 30 years. But in the past, the intelligence said it would be,

too difficult because Hezbollah and Hamas would be activated and they would attack Israel and our allies in the region and they would attack our bases. And because Fordo was too well protected and Iranian counter-aircraft systems were too sophisticated that it wasn't worth trying if you couldn't succeed. So the intelligence that changed, we saw on TV. Israel took out Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel took out basically the entire anti-aircraft system in Iran so that all of the scenarios about how to do this had assumed that we wouldn't or that Israel wouldn't have complete air dominance. And now the intelligence is Israel has complete air dominance. And so what was once a really difficult attack is now a much more different proposition. And again,

I could not care less about how close to a bomb they were as a justification for doing this, because the second they have one, it's too late. And if you know that they're developing one, if you know that they actually believe what they say, which is death to America, if you know that they are committed to literally murdering six million Jews in Israel, and you say, well, you can't go after their system until you're sure they're about to have a bomb. What the hell is that? This is actual nuclear deep anti-proliferation stuff.

Not all the cookie-pushing, you know, stuff at the State Department and clever conversations, Geneva are in hotel lobbies around clever cheese. This is like actually how we're stopping a real bad actor from getting a nuclear bomb. And it may not have been successful. Yeah. But it's just, I just, that the Iraq syndrome thing is, is weird and this obsession with the procedures. of disarmament and statecraft and, oh, we left the JCPOA and all these kinds of things. It's like they care more about the paperwork than what the paperwork is supposed to achieve. And what it's supposed to achieve is stopping around from getting a bomb.

Hopefully this worked. I don't know if it did. It may not have, which is why I was nervous about this happening. It only makes sense to do if it's successful. If it's not successful, it makes things worse. and that may be the case, don't know, but the intelligence that changed is the one that's obvious in front of everybody's eyes. Yeah, I think the problem is reporters, journalists didn't have any, they had to ask these questions because of the way that both Netanyahu and Trump made the case over the past month, right? I mean, they were saying, Netanyahu was saying, look, the imminence argument is now upon us, that we're here in effect.

We've been warning about this, now we're here. And Trump adopted that argument repeatedly. And it was in tension with the kinds of things that D&I Tulsi Gabbard was saying in her congressional testimony, whether the Trump administration will admit it or not. I think there was a very good case to say we can't get to the point where it's imminent. We can't wait to that point. That's why we need to do what we need to do. And as you say, Jonah, the changes on the ground are what provides this opportunity. We could only kill that snake when it's really close to biting your.

kid when it's just like five feet away you can't do it that would be outrageous we're going to take a quick break but we'll be back soon with more for the dispatch podcast during the volvo fall experience event discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures and see for yourself how volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute this september leased 2026 xe 90 plug-in hybrid from five hundred and ninety bi-weekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. With the RBC Avion Visa, you can book any airline, any flight, any time.

So start ticking off your travel list. Grand Canyon? Grand. Grand. Great barrier reef? Great. Galapagos? Galapago? Switch and get up to 55,000 avion points that never expire. Your idea of never missing out happens here. Conditions apply. Visit rbc.com slash avion. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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Let's return to our discussion. So a few weeks ago on this podcast, during our not worth your time segment, we discussed Zoran, Momdani, who was the Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate in New York City who had proposed, among other things, socializing the grocery stores in New York City, having city run grocery stores. I think we all got a good chuckle about that. It was a fun and entertaining discussion. And he has now won the Democratic primary in New York City. And that may not be, I would say, that is not his most radical proposal for governance of New York City.

Jonah, you are a longtime New York City resident. You've watched its politics for decades. What does it mean that he prevailed here, both in terms of what it tells us about the voters, but also in terms of what it might mean for the subsequent general election and the possibility that he will be mayor? Yeah. So first of all, great, great news for the Florida real estate market. You're going to see a lot of people kicking the tires. I get in the hell out of Dodge. That's if he actually looks like he'll become mayor. I, let's back up. What he did was really impressive. This was ranked choice voting with a lot of different people on the ballot. And he got a near, like, what was the number 40s? 36% is like near majority. Like it was decisive. He crushed... 43.5, I think.

Okay, so he, but he crushed Cuomo. And I, uh, these numbers won't mean a lot to, um, everybody out there, but just directionally, I think it's interesting. So upper west side, where I am from, Cuomo won by, uh, four points. Uh, upper east side, Cuomo plus 16. And then Bedford-Stuyvesant, Mondani... plus 43, Crown Heights, plus 25, Astoria, plus 52, Williamsburg, plus 33, Bushwick, plus 66. I mean, he just racked up massive numbers in these places, in a huge turnout.

And what are the differences, if we're not, if you're not familiar with New York City, I lived there for a year. So, Upper East Side, Upper West Side. Upper East Side and Upper West Side, I know everyone wants to think they're just all Jewish, but they're not. But a lot of Jews, a lot of, but also just a lot of upscale New Yorkers up there. And then those other neighborhoods, there's a lot of difference between them, you know, like obviously Harlem is blacker than Chelsea. But the rest of those neighborhoods are higher numbers of young, minority, lower middle class, middle class people, right? And that's where his strengths were. And so Cuomo, I believe, still has the ability to run in the fall because he maintained status on another ballot line, another party line.

And Eric Adams, the current, I'll just say it. I'll throw it in for you, journalist stickler guys, allegedly corrupt mayor of New York. Eric Adams is running as an independent. he apparently will have pretty solid support with the African-American community still, so in a multi-way race, you know, a plurality wins, so that could still matter. But Cuomo may not actually run. He was so shell-act here and so humiliated, so I don't know where that plays out. What I do think is that, first of all, it is amazing to me the degree to which New York

looks at Chicago and says, I got to get in on that action. and decides to lean into the dumbest kind of hard left politics. Because Chicago's mayor, Brandon Johnson, is equally radical. Equally radical. It's completely screwing up the city. Lots of, I don't even say white flight. I just middle class flight, right? And we're at a moment where because of Zoom and email and electronic trading and

a thousand other things, the need to be physically in New York, is less than it has ever been. And you got this guy who is, I'm not, you know, John Podorts will make a very passionate case, our friend editor commentary, that he is a straight up anti-Semite. But you have to do it in like four steps to get there.

And so I'm not going to bother with all that. He is passionately anti-Israel. He's also a defund the police guy on October 8. So the day after the October 7th terrorist attacks, while Jews were still being killed in Israel, Israel. And they hadn't actually found, you know, they hadn't finished putting away the the hostages yet. Manami put out a statement condemning Israel for its attack on Gaza with no mention of the attack on Israel. That's the kind of guy is he started at Bowden College of all

places, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. He's one of the, he is a campus radical occupier type who's charming and has a good Instagram account, who has a good Instagram account, who has profoundly stupid ideas about economics and no experience on how to run a government or an administration. And it looks like he's got a non, you know, non-trivial like 50-50 chance of being the next mayor of New York City. And that, I think, will be disastrous for New York City. And also, I should point out to our friends who are more on the sort of bulwarky

side of anti-Trump stuff, this is fantastic news for the Trump administration, that they will have a sort of, you know, Muslim version of AOC, who's a defund the police guy and pro, you know, pro-Ghasa, pro-Hamas demonstrator type who wants socialist grocery stores and free public transportation and rent freezes and all of these things, um, as they want, have him as a straw man, as a human straw man, as a whipping boy, as a poster boy, it is like the Democratic Party has a death wish. And also like New York City has a death wish. Yeah, Mike, I want to get to the broader implications for Democrats. Because I think, you know, Mamdadi did some things that were very unconventional as he campaigned. Some of them turned out

to have worked. I mean, this was a successful campaign. And I think national Democrats would do well to pay attention to some of the particulars. But I want to read, speaking of John Pod Horitz, something that he tweeted out about Mamdani's campaign political director, just to give people a sense of just how radical this sort of world is here. The political director tweeted out the following about Luigi Mangione, who was the assassin of the CEO of United Healthcare. He wrote, Mangione is one of the few entities not rejected online, which is considering how harmful he deemed social media. And while his remarkable good looks hardly hurt, anyone who thinks

his acclaim is rooted primarily in aesthetics is missing the point, probably on purpose. He's adored not only because he dared to target a leader of one of the most vile, self-enriching industries darkening our society today, but because he dared to defy the stasis of nihilistic rejection. The question is not whether he was right or wrong, it's how many others he has shaken loose. Here you have, I don't think you need to do a lot of deep interpreting. Here you have somebody who's a top advisor to the person who just, who just won the Democratic primary. And to many Democrats are saying, hey, look to this guy. This is who we should be listening to. This is who we should emulate. His political director, in effect, justifying and rationalizing the assassination

of a CEO. And unwilling to take a side about the question of right or wrong, right? Right and Yeah. Incredible. Incredible thing to say. Is it unfair for us to look at that and say, boy, this is, you know, when you combine that with some of his policy views, this is a step, a massive step in a truly radical direction in New York City. And potentially for Democrats more broadly. Yes. Potentially, that could be the case. Now I can't recall exactly how you framed your question. But let me start by saying that. that the first thing I thought of when I saw this on Tuesday night and the sort of shock you were hearing from kind of center-left Democrats that this happened, if anger at Andrew Cuomo, we can talk about that, but all of these things was it reminded me a lot of how Republicans were talking in the run-up to Donald Trump in 2013,

2014, you know, there's a, there's a parallel. I mean, the parallels are hard to make cleanly. But, you know, it reminded me a bit of the way that Eric Cantor, who was at the time, the majority leader in the House of Representatives was knocked off by a pretty radical Tea Party who would eventually kind of morph into a populist Trump type. Dave Bratt was his name. He ran on immigration, yeah. Yeah, he ran on immigration, not on, like, Tea Party stuff, but that was all muddled back then. And just the sort of rising tide on the right where people were tolerating and sort of even cheering on things that were sort of horrifying. And I see a lot of that in Mamdani's victory and the people surrounding him, the people supporting him, the people supporting him. man, the things that he's endorsed, the things that he proposes for the city of New York. A couple of cautions, I would say, is I don't know, not because it's not possible,

but it just remains to be seen whether or not Mamdani is a Brandon Johnson. This is the mayor of Chicago, the full bore, you know, progressive person of the public sector union. and they're sort of champion. And who is, by the way, extremely unpopular in Chicago right now and is running that city extremely poorly. I think it remains to be seen whether that's Mamdani in reality or if this is a pose. I mean, we have to take seriously what he's said, what he's proposed. On the other hand, he still has to win a general election. this was a Democratic primary.

I'll be interested to see if there's, if he does feel the need to moderate, particularly if Adams really lays into him on some of the, like, to fund the police stuff, which, by the way, a lot of that stuff that Mamdani said was from back in 2020 when this was very in vogue in democratic circles and it's very not in vogue now. And he doesn't, he did not really talk

about this in his campaign. He focused, Mamdani, focused a lot on economics and making things more affordable. So all of that is to say, I don't disagree with Jonah's concern about what this might mean for New York and what it might mean for the Democratic Party. I just, I kind of want to wait and see how the rest of this election goes. What is Curtis Sluo, who is the, I guess he's the Republican and maybe has the Conservative Party line as well, as the founder of the Guardian Angels. What does he do? Does he stay in this or do a lot of his voters to stop Mondani go with Adams as the better, as the better more electable choice?

I don't know. I think we haven't talked about this, but if you want to point the blame at people, Point the blame at Andrew Cuomo and the Democratic Party establishment that rallied around him, knowing everything about all of the baggage that Andrew Cuomo brought to this. The disdain that Andrew Cuomo seemed to have for campaigning for the job, a job that he doesn't even, he didn't even really seem to want to want. I mean, say this for Zora Mandani, he ran like he wanted to win. And guess what? He won. Like all of that sort of stuff. It's the same way that people denigrate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I personally find her politics, you know, distasteful and nothing close to mine. But she's really good at politicking and at running and winning elections. and you do have to wonder at what point do legacy establishment Democratic Party types realize they've got to kind of wake up to modernity here and you can't just lean on I'm a Cuomo and I've done this all before and step aside and you're not going to you're not going to vote for this this crazy guy well it turns out the crazy guy who went and knocked on people's doors and crazy guys are so hot these days. They really are. Pick up on Mike's point about Andrew Cuomo. How in the world was Andrew Cuomo the default choice of the sort of establishment centrist Democrats? And do you think that Mamdani is now the frontrunner to be the next mayor of New York? Yeah.

Again, I wouldn't have been surprised if he won, but I thought it would be much closer, go to a second round, all that kind of stuff. That would be surprised that it became a two-person race kind of thing. But, like, the Democratic Party of New York is a mess, but it's still a one party down. So it matters that you're the nominee of the Democratic Party. I take all of Mike's points are well taken. There's another aspect of this, I think, is worth just keeping in mind. A lot of the stuff Mandami talks about doing, first of all, don't, won't, can't work. And I mean that as a conservative who believes in Friedrich Hayek and all that kind of stuff,

Like, we know that rent freezes do not have the desired effect, right? All those kinds of things. But more importantly, many of the things that he's proposing are things a mayor cannot do, right? And this is one of my problems with, I've written this column many times now about how Republicans and Democrats talk about how when they're running for president and primates, they talk about all these things they're going to do on day one that are literally unconstitutional and impossible to do. on day one, if at all, right? You know, like, Kamala Harris, when she was running, she would talk about how on day one, we're going to repeal Donald Trump's tax cuts.

On day one, we're going to get the guns. All this kind of stuff, really? Day one, huh? Like, you got, okay, you got eight hours. You're going to get this done. Like, what are you going to get through Congress? Who's, what bill are you going to repeal? Like, it's like not possible, right?

And that's part of my problem with the incredibly stupid times we live in is that politicians talk about stuff that sound awesome. We're going to give everybody free ice cream and it's going to make you lose weight. I was like, okay, that sounds awesome. It's like, we don't know how to do that and we can't do that. And so it is not necessarily that he's going to turn that if he wins and he turns that he's going to turn New York City into Pyongyang or something, right? That's not my concern.

But he will fail. And one of the lessons we have learned in our politics these days is that when populists fail, and they fail often, they never say, gosh, my ideas were wrong. What they say is, oh, the deep state, the Jews, or the billionaires, or whoever it is. Just a generic they. They stopped me from doing all of these things that would be. so easy, right? Trump always goes around saying, oh, it'd be so easy to do all of these things. And then when he fails, he says, they stopped me. Bernie Sanders says, it'd be so easy to do all of this, you know, nationalize the means of production. But the only thing stopping us are

these millionaires and billionaires that are to stop us from doing these things that would work and would make you richer and happier. And that fuels even more populist resentment, distrust, and institutions because populist demagogues are incapable of admitting they were wrong because to do that for a populist means that you're also admitting that the people who voted for you were wrong. And that is just not the business model. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly. While other money managers are holding, Dynamic is hunting. Seeing past the horizon, investing beyond the benchmark, because your money can't grow if it doesn't move. Learn more at Dynamic.

we're back with the dispatch podcast but before we get back to our conversation i want to let you know what's going on elsewhere at the dispatch this week on advisory opinions sarah isker and david french discussed the circuit court's recent rulings on a spa banning biological males on louisiana schools trying to keep the ten commandments in class and on the feds nationalizing the national guard search for advisory opinions in your podcast app and make sure you hit the follow button now let's get back to our conversation. So we're going to wrap up with a not worth your time that may or may not be related to the stupid politics that Jonah mentioned right now, the frustrating moment, and the fraught debates we're having nationally. Do you, either of you all have a new drink

for the summer? Do you find yourself when you're at the end of the day or Jonah first thing in the morning trying trying something new or are you just going to your old standbys I mean this is a this is a loaded question so to speak the readers may know that I've I wrote about Tiki cocktails for the dispatch a couple of months ago and so far I have been every time I've gone down to my home bar to make something I've been trying to make something I haven't made before so I've been making a lot of new fun

festive tiki drinks for me and my wife and right I mean right now the the drink that's jumping out to me is I've been making several different versions of the zombie which is a classic tiki cocktail

and what's in a zombie it depends I mean this is the this is the joy of of making these. I'm in particular a fan of one of the originals, and I'm going to pull up the recipe right here on my phone, one of the original recipes from Don the Beachcomber.

And he used lime juice, lemon juice, pineapple juice, passion fruit syrup, three different kinds of rum, bitters, sugar syrup, shake it with crushed ice, pour it in a tall glass, garnish it with mint, and as every teaky restaurant and bar has on their menu, every customer is limited to two because they're quite strong. Jonah? So when it comes to my choice, hard alcohol is no.

In part because, well, occasionally I'll like, you know, a Mai Tai kind of, like, fruity kind of thing. I'm not a big sweets guy, sugary guy. And so like sugary drinks are special. occasion thing for me. That said, I have, and I don't know if I'm supposed to be embarrassed about this or not. We'll tell you. Yeah, I'm sure. But I'm not sure I trust your, your assessment. Yes, you should be. I know he's already judged me. I find I'm drinking more rosé, which I think is, it's a good cold summer wine. Rosea can be good, yes. And basically this is like,

although last night we had massive fantastic steaks. But for the most part, we're eating lighter. It's so friggin' hot in D.C. And like rosé with seafood and stuff, it's just great. And it's, and you don't feel guilty drinking it, you know, the way I do with milk glasses full of scotch. That's just a good image. I don't, so I don't really drink hard alcohol either or rarely. I'm much more just a wine guy.

Now, and I agree with you, Jonah. Rose is good. A good crisp sauvignon blanc, I think, is good. The surprising entry, though, for me is an orange crush, which we made for a graduation party a few weeks ago seemed to have gone over pretty well. I'm not sure really how to make them, but we just guessed.

And I've since paid a little more attention to orange crushes and learned that orange crush was, I think, voted on by the Maryland state legislator and made the state drink of Maryland. And it seems really to be a thing. My question to you guys, and I really genuinely don't know the answer to this, is is it the case that orange crust has been sort of a mid-Atlantic Maryland thing for a long time? Or is this one of these fatty things that just became a thing recently, and now everybody seems to be doing it? My very quick research on this, which amounts to going to Wikipedia and looking up what's in an orange crush, suggests it was invented 30 years ago in Ocean City, Maryland. So it really is a Maryland. It really, truly is a mid-Atlantic Maryland. And apparently there's a, again, this is off from Wikipedia, there's a debate or about whether it was John Carney, the governor of Delaware at one point, said that it was made more famous and, quote, perfected in Dewey Beach, Delaware.

And so is it more of a Delaware? I mean, it's also the official state cocktail of Delaware. Right. I'm learning now, too. Yeah. And, and I mean, you can't get more mid-Atlantic and also kind of, like, low-grade, like, silly and pathetic than, like, a fight between Maryland and Delaware. About shore drinks, yeah. About what they drink at the shore, yeah.

I did find it refreshing. You can load it with ice, which I, which I liked, because it's so. It's a great R.M. song, too, Orange Crush. And it was the term referring to the 1970s Denver Broncos strong defensive unit. That is definitely true. And you could also make an argument that it's what... I know Joe just knew that. Google Orange Crush, you read all the results.

Who were the members? Who were the members of that? I couldn't possibly tell you. It also could be a description of what Donald Trump did on Saturday in Iran. There you go. There you go. Operation Orange Crush would have been awesome. With that, it's too early to have one now. But we hope that you're staying cool wherever you are.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Dispatch podcast. We'll be back with you soon. Thank you.