The Dispatch Podcast - Nat Cons and Gen Z | Interview: David Brog

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, joins Jamie to discuss the October 7 attacks on Israel, anti-Israeli sentiment on college campuses, and his experience organizing national conservative conferences. The Agenda: —Young Americans increasingly support Palestinians —The impact of critical race theory —Brog’s time at the Edmund Burke Foundation —Debating America’s foreign involvement —The future of national conservatism Show Notes: -Reuters/Ipsos Poll: Israel-Hamas War and 2024 Election -ISPU Poll: Religious Groups’ Views on Ceasefire Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is David Brog. He's worn many hats over the years. He is currently executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, which is a organization combating the boycott divestment movement against Israel. He formerly was the executive director of Christians United for Israel. He also served as a staffer in Congress as chief of staff to the late Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter. He also the founder, or one of the founders of the Edmund Burke Society, which puts on the National Conservatism Conference around the United States and around the world, an author of many books. But I brought him on to talk about two issues that I think are relevant to what is going on in the news. One is Christian support for Israel, and we get into discussion of the importance of it and also how it is ebbing in younger generations and why that is. the case. And I also talk to him about the national conservatism and challenge him and press him

on whether there is a unified view in national security conservatism on foreign policy. It's an interesting discussion. I think you're going to enjoy it. So without further ado, I give you Mr. David Brock. David Brog, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Great to be with you, J.V. I want to begin, there's several areas, I think, that will be fun to get into with you. But I want to begin on October 7th. And just ask you, where were you when you first heard about the attacks and to the extent of the attacks?

And what was your initial reaction to what occurred? You know, it was actually, went to visit my mother in New Jersey. And my mother put our little kids to sleep, so my wife and I decided, wow, we can watch a movie tonight. And my wife's Israeli. We put on a movie called Golda about Golda Maire and the 1973 War. And the whole movie is about how Israel is attacked by surprise and almost destroyed. And it's a very, you feel that the movie does a very good job of conveying the stress of that period in history, very powerfully. And this is, you know, we couldn't believe it.

the movie's finishing, my wife's phone is lighting up with alerts. She gets those alerts every time missiles are fired in Israel. Her phone's lighting up with alerts. Before we went to bed, we got word that as many as 20 Israelis had been murdered, woke up, you know, it was up to 80. And then the numbers kept going up from there. And, you know, I think for so many of us, that first week was just, it was never ending new revelations, new details, worse than the prior details. And just like a nightmare you couldn't wake up from. As you mentioned, your wife is Israeli famously if you read your Wikipedia page. You obviously have family in Israel, including your cousin Ehud Barak, the former prime minister.

Has your family okay over there? Have any of them, you know, either been unfortunate victims or potential almost victims in any of the attacks or, on the other hand, or any of them now serving in the IDF? Yeah, no, thank God. No one in our immediate family was harmed. My wife's brother-in-law was called up, but because he's already a little older, they sent him to Hebron, and so he could relieve the soldiers in Hebron so they could go to Gaza. So he wasn't in Gaza, he was serving in Hebron. So everyone was fine, but as you know, when you have Israelis that you know are related to, they're always one step removed from someone who was a victim.

I got to know a wonderful woman years ago when I was a student name, Rachel Goldberg. And recently, I started talking to her husband, John Poland, about a potential effort to help market Israeli startups in the United States. And it was great to connect with John because John told me he's married to my old friend, Rachel. And it was a great, and this is all, you know, a while back. Their son, Hirsch, Goldberg, Poland, is still in Gaza. They believe he's alive, but he's still in Gaza. And that's the story for everyone. Everyone has a cousin, a brother, a friend. And it's felt, as you know, extraordinarily deeply. What do you make of Israel's response so far to the attack?

Well, this is, you know, and a lot of what I do, Jamie, is working on college campuses. And so, and I've been in touch with the college campuses very closely. And I would have told you before October 7th that we have a problem on the college campus because majorities are now more, by poll after poll after poll shows, majorities are now more sympathetic to the Palestinians than they are to Israel. When you look at students on the college campus, what surprised me, what I didn't realize was that not only our majority is more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis, they're more sympathetic to Hamas than Israelis.

And that leap, that failure to distinguish between innocent Palestinians and the Hamas terrorists who engineer the deaths of Israelis and then the deaths of their own civilians as a war tactic, that was a shock even to me and upsetting even. to me. And what a lot of these protesters don't realize is... Well, David, just to be clear, you say you have polling that shows that the college campuses, when you poll Hamas versus Israelis, not just Palestinians before Israelis, that they're more sympathetic to Hamas? No, the polling showed greater sympathy for the Palestinians. I haven't seen polling vis-a-vis

Hamas. But what we saw in the quad of so many campuses was this failure to distinguish, this failure to say, because I'm sympathetic to the Palestinians, this means that when a terrorist group massacres Israelis and invites, you know, through its tactics of human shields, invites and endangers an invasion and endangers its own people, I must go protest in favor of the terrorists, not in defense of the massacred. And so I don't have numbers on that, but this was the public response on campus after campus. And that came to me as a shock and a surprise. I would would have expected better, and I should have known better. I didn't think of even to ask you this.

I actually asked this question at the end of December to two guests I had back-to-back. Harvey Mansfield, the former professor at Harvard and Robbie George, you went to Princeton. Maybe you're a professor at Princeton. I don't know if you had him while you were there, the conservative professor there. How? I didn't, but I admire Robbie. Since you work on campuses and are involved in advocating for Israel and campuses, I wonder if you have a thought on how did a generation of students come up through the school system, get on campus, and in effect, I mean, I don't know if this is the majority, but, you know,

too many seem to be pro-Hamas or sympathetic to Hamas or willing to justify Hamas. How did that happen? I have a theory on this that's informed by a decade now where I've been working on the campuses. I believe this is tied directly to larger political trends in the United States, primarily the rise of critical race theory and the rise of DEI. The insistence that everything must be judged through the lens of race, and that race is the domineering most important factor in interactions between humans and nations. I think this is a wildly false narrative, but this is the narrative that dominates the progressive left on campuses, and the progressive left dominate the campuses. And so what they do when they come to an issue like Israel

is they're not interested in the nuance of it, in learning the facts of it. They insist on taking that round peg of Israel and shoving it into the square box of their critical race theory. And so the dominant narrative of Israel on college campuses is that Israel is a nation of white Europeans who have dispossessed and who oppress a group of indigenous people, of color, the Palestinians. None of that is true, as you know. You know, starting with the fact that most Israelis don't trace their roots to Europe. They actually trace their roots to the Muslim Middle East from which a majority of them fled

for their lives. Israelis are not white. They did not come and dispossess anyone. They came back and built communities to which Arabs migrated and inmigrated in enormously large numbers to take advantage of those economic opportunities. It was only when Arabs started a war of destruction against Israel that many Arab Palestinians fled Israel, a victim of the own war of aggression. And to this day, Arab Israelis have full equal rights with Jewish Israelis.

None of that matters. This to them is literally black and white, the white oppressor Israelis versus the indigenous oppressed of color. That is all they need to know. That is all they want to know. And of course, that thinking drives you to extreme actions. Because the assumption is, if you're white, you can do no good, if you're the oppressed of color, you can do no wrong. And if you can do no wrong, then when you see a poster of a beautiful Israeli child who's been kidnapped, you cannot accept that poster.

You must tear it down because this goes against this embedded ideology that the oppressed Palestinians can do no wrong. person sees it. A Westerner still recognizes that's wrong to kidnap this baby. And they can't, the, the dissonance is too great. And they tear the poster down. Well, the related question then is, or I guess the question that this leads to is, I mean, this is not just the students, as you mentioned, it goes up into the faculty and to the administration. How does it change? What would you, is there a way to change where our elite universities, and it seems to be the more elite, the worse it is, how How does it change? So it's a challenge.

The one thing we do, I work for an organization called the Maccabee Task Force, and we were tasked with finding ways to change this. And so I'll share a bit of good news. And the good news is this, we found a way to change this. And the way we change it speaks to the decency of the very students involved. We found that the problem is that everything's getting siloized. These students on campus live in this progressive left silo. All the social media they consume confirms their prior.

All the media they consume confirms their priors, what their professors teaches them. Teach them confirms their priors. And the anti-Israel narrative that dominates this space is what I just shared earlier. How do you get them to step out and open their eyes and recognize the fact that the reality of Israel is starkly at odds with the anti-Israel narrative

that dominates their silo? You bring a pro-Israel speaker to campus, they're not going to bother showing up and listening. You do a falafel brunch. They're not going to come by to eat the falafel. They'll tell you you appropriated Arab food, although Jewish immigrants from Arab lands have brought this with them. The only thing we found that works is bringing them to Israel and the Palestinian Authority and letting them see the reality for themselves. And this trip, I wasn't sure it would work.

The good news is that this trip changes almost all of them. Less than 1% have come back from our trips, still holding the prior. simplistic, stereotypical views with which they left. The truth changes them, which shows me something, and this is a piece of good news. Most of these students protesting Israel on college campuses are not doing it because they're anti-Semites who drank in their anti-Semitism with their mother's milk. They're doing it because they're basically good people who believe a terribly false narrative, a narrative that if you were, I believed it, we also would be anti-Israel. And if you can change the narrative, you can change their views. So we do this,

but we're fighting such overwhelming odds that it's hard to do this in the numbers it will take to shift majority opinion. So we try our best to focus on leaders and influencers, change them, and through them reaching their respective communities. And while we can do that for Israel, you know, I'm painfully aware of the fact that these students and their worldview is not only anti-Israel, it's also horribly anti-America. And I very much am searching for ways to do for America what we're doing for Israel and teaching these students the truth about America, which is so starkly at odds with the anti-Israel narrative that dominates their sideline.

I'll just say I've seen it firsthand. My wife went to Israel with me for the first time. She's not Jewish. And she's shocked. I mean, just shock when you go to Tel Aviv at the beach and see Jews. and then Arabs and Burkines, our Muslims and bikinis, sharing the same beach.

And it really is against the narrative that, you know, most of the superficial protesters would think that this is even possible in Israel. No, there is a dehumanization of Israelis and into some sort of, you know, war-mongering, racist dispossessors. And so, you know, the great thing is

when you meet, whatever the prejudice is, When you meet the people in the group targeted by that prejudice, the prejudice cannot stand. And it applies to Israelis? It applies to Jews. Well, let me ask you, one of the reasons I had you on, of many different hats you've worn over the years, and one of them used to be the executive director of the Christians United for Israel, Kufai. I wanted to ask you about, so I saw a poll, which I found hard to believe, where it said it was a majority of Americans favor ceasefires, It's an ISPU poll, and it broke it down by religion.

It said white evangelicals, 58% support a ceasefire, 23% not. And I was trying to square it with a Harvard Harris poll, which showed that it didn't go by religion, but overwhelming 63% of the people in this poll support Israel continuing its ground invasion into southern Gaza to root out the final elements of Hamas, continuing the operation. Two and three Americans only support a ceasefire

after Hamas releases all the hostages is removed from power. Do you think there is 58% of evangelicals right now if you pull them in a real poll worded correctly that support a ceasefire? No, I don't think, I think as a general aspiration, you know, and then maybe it was worded poorly. As a general aspiration, sure, they'd like to see peace and then end to bloodshed on both sides.

But I think when it comes down to it, should Israel accept the ceasefire now before they freed the hostages, before they've taken down Hamas, I think majorities of evangelicals would oppose that. We do see a divide, though, and this divide I'm sure you're aware of, just like in the Jewish community, between an older generation of evangelicals, which is still overwhelmingly pro-Israel, and a younger generation that tends to resemble their generation more when it comes to these issues, than they resemble their parents' generation. What dominates is the age cohort more than the evangelical affiliation.

And I think that has to do with the fact that so many young evangelicals go to college and are changed by the college experience in ways their parents aren't thrilled with, but it changes them politically. And so we see a divide there. Evangelical support for Israel among the younger generation is not as strong.

And we see trends going on in the nation as a whole, which are changing the, I think, the central importance of Christian support for Israel. But freeze frame today, I'd be shocked if you saw anything but a large majority of evangelicals agreeing with Israel on the need to free the hostages and dismantle Hamas. Speak to that. That's a really interesting point you just made and something I wasn't quite aware of. So younger generations of evangelicals you see splitting from their parents, are they the same as their age cohorts?

Or is it just within the evangelical world, it's different. than previous generations, but still more pro-Israel than their age cohorts if you were to pull them. Yeah. I've seen different things. My sense is they go in the direction of their age cohort. So as a group, they might still be a little more pro-Israel, but only in comparison to the very non-pro-Israel majority. And what happens, and this happens with Jewish youth too, and you see this now, and lots of Jews are leading the charge against Israel. And that is they go to college, and that's what influences their worldview. And they tend to look with contempt at the outdated and antiquated worldview of the parents who paid for them and who sent them.

And it's unfortunate. But we see that as a dominant trend. And evangelicals are complaining about this on multiple fronts. It manifests itself when it comes to support for Israel. It manifests itself when it comes to love of America. It also manifest itself when it comes to their own religious observance and how they choose to express their religiosity. Some of them secularize. Others don't secularize, but they look for expressions of Christianity, which are a better fit. And so a lot of them will say, you know, I, you know, I don't believe in those mega churches. I don't believe in those old-fashioned pastors. I'm a follower of Jesus. But being a follower of Jesus means compassion. It means being woke. It means

standing up for the downtrodden. And they take a sort of progressivized version of Christianity, much like Jews will take this Tikuno-Lum progressiveized version of Judaism as a way of solving the dissonance in the clash between the values they got from their parents' home and the values they want very much to accept and the community they want to be a part of on the campus. I mean, that leads me to the question, David, is that you have kind of progressive left making the Democratic Party more anti-Israel than it used to be. It sounds like you're saying that the evangelical community, which is probably, you know, maybe even more pro-Israel than the Jewish

community if you were to poll them, becoming maybe more anti-Israel over time if those trends continue. And we'll get to it in a little bit, but there is some fracture within the Republican party over over Israel. What does that mean to the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship? The trends aren't good. The trends aren't good. So, you know, even in this war, you take a step back, Americans overwhelmingly are supporting Israel. And they're supporting Israel's right to defend itself, to dismantle Hamas and free the hostages. So, you know, the numbers are still good. But from here to year, we see them shifting. And the shift is noticeably bad among the young. There have been those who have said, don't worry, they're going to graduate, get mortgages, and become conservatives. I'm skeptical of that. What I see is they graduate and they get elected to Congress and become AOC, or followers of AOC. This is not something that you necessarily abandon over time, especially when it is such a solidified and dominant view among everyone with whom you socialize in reality or online. And so I think the trends are bad on the left and the right.

And, you know, what do we do about it? you know, I think we just have to double down on sharing the truth, shattering the myths that dominate on the left and the right, and sharing the truth about Israel. But I think anyone who sort of sits back and says it's all going to be okay is being naive. What do evangelical leaders, I mean, you're no longer the head of Kufi, so I don't know how often you interact with evangelical leaders, but I imagine you still have significant relationships. What are they saying about this trend? This has to be somewhat alarming to them. So they've been concerned. about it. And, you know, a lot of us have been sounding the alarm. I wrote a big article on this

back in 2012 that got a lot of attention, but it's a trend we've all been seeing. And so there are efforts underway to remedy it. At Christians United for Israel, we started something called the Israel Collective. That was an effort to really reach out to, you know, back then it was millennial, now, you know, Gen Z leaders, influencers, and empower them to share the truth about Israel, you know, and to really challenge the sort of false narrative that if you want to be a follower of Jesus and you want to be compassionate, you must by default be anti-Israel. And that narrative was taking hold in a lot of the leading publications of the evangelical, you know, millennial set and their writers and their influencers. And so challenging it,

an effort named Passages was created to bring young Christians to Israel. But none of that is, I think, enough. Given the overwhelming numbers and given the trends, I think those are good starts. It's not enough. And I think there's complacency among supporters of Israel, especially in the evangelical world, because much like people living in the progressive left silo, assume the whole world is anti-Israel. When you're in a certain silo where all you hear is pro-Israel voices and all you see are pro-Israel voices, It's easy to ignore the looming shift and the difficult reality that a lot of the country is not like that anymore.

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with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your

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You are, am I right to say you're the founder, you were one of the founders of the Edmund Burke Society or Foundation? Yeah, I was one of the founders, you know, along with sort of the principal ideologue of the Edmund Burke Foundation, Yoram Khazani. But I've known Yoram a long time. We've collaborated on lots of things. And yeah, we joined forces to launch Edmund Burke.

So at the first conference, which I attended as a journalist, I wrote down, I think were the four headline speakers, Tucker Carlson, Josh Holly, John Bolton, and Peter Thiel. And my reaction then, which I think has been confirmed by what's happened in the last several years, is that it's hard to unite those four figures, or at least John Bolton doesn't seem to fit within this world of national conservatism. Am I wrong that it's hard to unite these four? You're not wrong. It is hard to unite them. But we started out doing something intentional, I think, at odds with the way politics is going. We didn't try to sort of quickly

narrow the focus in the base. We tried to have a bigger tent and to have a debate on some of these issues that are so important to the future of America. But I would say I see the NAC Kong movement crystallizing, and the way it's crystallizing, I think John Bolton is, in a sense, an odd man out now, but it doesn't necessarily mean there's been a full-on embrace of Tucker's positions. I think what unites those of us who consider ourselves national conservatives is the idea that any United States involvement abroad, be it militarily or a financial support, has to be judged strictly through one lens, the lens of American self-interest, and that the other agendas that may in the past have justified sending American troops abroad or treasure abroad are not

legitimate criteria. And I think that's what unites us. But that leaves room for what I think we're seeing now, which is a very interesting debate between those of us who would define the American interest a little more broadly, who understand that what happens abroad does impact us here at home. We might be wise to make investments in changing the outcome of these events abroad, and those who would divine the American interest far more narrowly to the point where involvement abroad is no longer justified or a concern. I mean, I think a lot of people, who supported any type of intervention abroad over the years would probably argue, you know, you're just not defined, if you oppose it, you're just not defining American interests broadly enough, right?

I mean, I think even those who supported sending troops to Somalia would say that, you know, that if you looked at American interests in a broad way, that this would support it. Now, whether that's true or not, I think all politicians that want to send American troops abroad will try to define it in American interest. I guess I wonder what you would say to those, you know, if they call themselves Nat-Kons or whatever they call themselves in the modern conservative movement, Tuckers of the world, that would say, well, actually, we don't have an interest, for instance, in Israel versus Gaza.

You know, we don't see how that benefits us. And in fact, they would argue that, you know, we might just be stirring up anger. across the region and create a regional war and why are we even involved in this at all? Just a second on your prior comment. I think you're right. There may have been those who tried through attenuated arguments to argue that are involved in Somalia or more centrally Iraq was a direct American interest, but it was a tough argument to make.

And very often in making it ideas of international order and the post-war order, these ideas would slip in, these concepts would slip in. And you wouldn't hear as much about why this is directly in the American interest. And it's, especially if we're sending American troops abroad, you know, patriotic Americans are willing to risk their lives for their country and give their lives for their country. But it's got to be sort of part of the pact in a democratic government that if they're risking their lives and losing their lives, it will be for their country, for the safety of their country, for the freedom of their country. And when that gets too attenuated, I think something sacred is violated. And I think it has gotten too attenuated.

It had gotten too attenuated. And many Americans on the right and beyond get it and saw it. And that's why we're seeing the pendulum swing back. And I think there's a virtue in the pendulum swinging back. But now we should be careful. It doesn't swing too far. to your question about Israel, well, I'm someone who believes what happens abroad impacts us here at home. Developments abroad can impact our safety and security here at home. And I think we have enemies abroad. We need to be wary of. China, first among them. But I'm also someone in this, I think, would Tucker disagree with me. I'm someone who sees a threat from Iran. If you study Iranian history, if you study this regime, you learn very quickly that they mean

when they call America the big Satan and Israel the little Satan. America is the prime enemy. Israel is hated because it's an outpost of America in what they see as their backyard, which is opposite from the way I think lots of people like Tucker might perceive it, which somehow maybe Iran would just love us if we stop supporting

Israel. I wish that were the case. But again, study the regime, study the hatreds of the regime, the resentment of the regime going back all the way to the coup in 56 that put the Shah on the 3rd. thrown into posmosa deck. And so I see them as an enemy. And I see that they planned a terrorist attacks here at home. I fear they've infiltrated lots of agents through the southern border and

there will be more tax here at home. I see that they want to dominate the Persian Gulf, which would have direct negative consequences for our economy and our interest abroad. So when you see that what happens abroad impacts us, this raises a question to enact con like me. What do we do about it? I'm not keen on sending Americans abroad to bleed and die for the safety or freedom of others. And given the state of our economy and our debt, our overwhelming debt, I'm not excited about the idea of sending our treasure abroad either. So what do we do? And I think the answer has to be that we identify allies abroad who share our interests and our enemies are unwilling and are willing to fight these enemies on our behalf. We've been quick to go ahead and

fight shared enemies on behalf of others. Why don't we look for allies who are willing to fight shared enemies on our behalf and then extend them some support if that support makes strategic sense? And to me, Exhibit A in how to do foreign policy in a napcom world is Israel. Israel is an ally on the front lines against an enemy of the United States, Iran, and its proxies. And it is never wanted or asked for American boys to go bleed or die on Israel's behalf. All it has ever wanted is the ability to defend itself by itself. And when it does so, I believe deeply. It makes the world safer for America. And those who are very quick or facile to suggest that this is not in the American interest, I think are just are engaging willful in the issue about history. You know,

you look at Hezbollah. They blew up our Marines barracks in Lebanon. They blew up our embassy in Lebanon. You look at Iran and the way the regime is dead set against our interests in the region. It wants to depose our allies in the region and close this region to us. You look at Hamas and the way they have freely killed Americans and kidnapped Americans. Somehow those American hostages are discounted by those who I think deep in the recess of their mind think, well, they're just Jewish Americans. I find that reprehensible. Any American killed, any American kidnapped is my fellow citizen who's being abused by a terrorist

group. I take it very seriously no matter what the faith, religion, or color of that American. So this is, I think, an area where we need to have a debate on the NACCON right and try to figure out, well, you know, how are we going to make sure our interests abroad are protected when we're not sending our soldiers to do it? I see somewhat of a difference, but it seems like it raises the opening, what you mentioned, of, you know, questioning, well, would Ukraine fall in that same category if you're talking about sending money abroad to an ally abroad to fight, fight an enemy?

Where, I mean, obviously, I think, actually, I would think the NACCON right is generally united against Ukraine. What do you say to that? It took a while to get there, though, Jamie. I think at first there were interesting divisions on the NACON right. between those who perceived Russia as an enemy in Europe and thought that funding the Ukraine to resist their aggression would ultimately serve the interests we have in Europe, and those who felt that, no, Russia is really not an enemy.

It's not a threat to NATO. And remember, the question is, is it a threat to NATO? We have a pact with NATO, which most of us still support, that if a NATO country is attacked, we have to come to their defense. So, you know, the question is not real. There's some in the, I mean, I think a lot in the NatCon, right, that would say they do not support NATO, that they believe we, I mean, that's why kind of John Bolton was an odd man out maybe at that conference, because he may be one of the one speaker there that he isn't actually

wanting to pull out of NATO. Yeah. Well, I think, I, my sense is NATO is still popular. It's the expansion of NATO, especially to include a Ukraine, that is controversial. And I think there was a real debate at first about whether these, these exceptions, expenditures were in our interests. No one would have supported sending American troops there, but the good news is, I think, in response to the excess of Iraq, in response to past excess, the country isn't willing or interested in sending troops, our troops to Ukraine. But there was this

debate over sending our treasure, and at first it was a debate. Over time, though, I think a lot of us have come to see that opportunities for negotiated settlement were missed, and that this is a war that the Ukraine is going to have a very hard time winning. When you look at Russia's advantage in men and material and industrial capacity, by the way, an industrial capacity that should wake all of us up in America about our own military industrial capacity. We're sending shells to Ukraine and the timeline to replenish them is far too long, frighteningly long. When you look at all that, you know, you question now strategically.

So in the abstract, sure, I'd say not quite to the extent of Israel, but we, but we had some interest in seeing Ukraine prevail. But strategically, does it continue to make sense to send this treasure? And I think, you know, everyone would have done it different one. But I think at first, there are those of us who would have done more. But then there were those of us who would have said, now's the time to negotiate. The status quo ante where Russia had control of the more Russian-leading provinces and Ukraine had control of the rest was probably a good dividing line. And there needed to be negotiations along those lines. But now you're seeing, I think, the inevitable skeptical skepticism that's come from ignoring that complex reality, insisting that this victory

was a real prospect, and in funding it to the point where perhaps opportunities for negotiations were missed. Let me close with a thought and have you comment on it. You know, I was one that thought the Tea Party was a real movement that they, you know, there was this mass movement of conservatism against debt. And then we had someone elected in 2016 who, you know, spent just like everybody else and no one seemed and voted, and voters voted for him and didn't seem to care. And whatever the Tea Party, that's not really a thing anymore. That's kind of faded and there is no movement here.

You know, and when Trump was elected, a lot of people saw some of the issues he ran on trade and immigration and said, ah, this is a new mass movement and of ideas. You might call it national conservatism. Steve Bannon calls it something else. They're projecting maybe what they believe onto what this movement was. Do you believe in 10 years from now when Donald Trump is not gone from this scene that there will be a national conservatism or, you know, of American first movement as a significant force or drawing massive support? Or is this just a group of conservative intellectuals who might have had? had Indian-Syncratic views that are differed from traditional conservatism and thought, you know,

with Donald Trump elected, this is our moment, this is the new conservatism. Our time has come, and it really is going to be like the Tea Party, something that, you know, wasn't really a large move. That's a good question. I think some of these changes that Trump has brought will last and will become signature aspects of the conservative movement the Republican Party.

You know, I think there was this, because there's been so much support for these things, but it somehow took the phenomenon of Trump to break through. So when it comes to viewing foreign policy through an America first lens, you know, even if there's differences about what that means, but viewing it through an America first lens and arguing that an intervention, like our intervention in our intervention in Iraq, was putting too many Americans in harm's way and too much treasure down the drain for too little American self-interest.

I think that will dominate the right and dominate the Republican Party for a long time to come. I think securing our border... Just before we go, I mean, you brought up Iraq for the second time, and I just wonder, I mean, did you think that the reason to go into Iraq, whether it turned out to be right or wrong, was not framed in an American?

interest or it was framed to do, I mean, it was obviously an element, like we're going to bring democracy, but that democracy will spread along the region and take away the threat of terrorism that exist in that region, right or wrong. It was framed as a, you know, the reason to go in in our American interest. I think lip service was paid to that. But I wonder the extent to which those providing that lip service actually believed it, because it was a week case. And I think, you know, we saw something similar with the Vietnam War, which is if you win a war quickly, it's so fine, you had a superficial reason why it's in America's best interest. I mean, when we went the first Gulf War, it was about the international order. It was about

one nation should not be able to invade and occupy a neighboring nation, right? Someone had to uphold the international order. I remember that much more than any immediate American interest being discussed. But we won very quickly. And so it was okay. But you look at a war like, Vietnam, where, you know, we're sending our boys to dying jungles halfway across the war. And the abstraction of the domino theory and the abstraction of, well, if we don't do this, you know, it could lead to B, which leads to C, even if it exists as an abstraction, it's too far. It's too it's too attenuated. And to really satisfy those putting their lives on the line that they're doing this for their country and their families back home and the freedom of their nation. And I think

the same applied to the Iraq war. There was lip service paid, but it was weak. It was attenuated. And ultimately, what we heard a lot more of were maybe the real underlying reasons for the war, issues of national order, issues of ridding the world of a bad regime, issues of spreading democracy. Immigration, not only will that dominate. And I remember, it was not long ago that we, you know, we did the autopsy after Romney's lost, and the Republican Party was talking about being more accepting of this. That has been turned on its head. And not only is it going to dominate the conservative movement in the Republican Party, but it may well determine the outcome of this election. Independent voters who are upset about the poorest border may end up voting Republican,

and that could be, you know, why a Republican, why Trump may win the election. So I think that issue will last on the right. And my hope is, too, that as the left has gotten more extreme in its disdain for our country, and it's, you know, sort of trashing the narrative of our country. That another issue is sort of a pride in America and a desire to reconnect with our nation and pride in our nation and our history and to make sure that those who are new to our nation are taught that history and assimilated into our country. I think those ideas, too, will come to define the conservative movement in the Republican Party. So I think those broader things will last. Well, I think the most interesting point to discuss further and perhaps on a future podcast

is how a lot of conflicts around the world might fall into whether they fall in or not to this narrow definition, particularly Taiwan and China. But I think that might be for another episode. David, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. Jamie, it's been my pleasure. And by the way, that issue, I think that's going to be the key debate on the NACCON right for the next decade, that very issue of how do we define our interests abroad and to our interests abroad. It'll be interesting. Sure will. Thank you again. Thank you, Jake. Appreciate it.

You know,