The Dispatch Podcast - Taking Maduro: Wise or Foolish?

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Kevin Williamson, Jonah Goldberg, and David French to revisit the Trump administration's operation in Venezuela nearly one week later and discuss the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. The Agenda:—U.S. intervention in Venezuela—Oil, drugs, or immigrants?—Legality of Maduro's arrest—Does international law matter?—The future of U.S. interventionism—ICE shooting in Minneapolis—NWYT: Best cities to live in Show Notes:—Dispatch Debate on the capture of Maduro 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 access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠by clicking here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Dispatch podcast is presented by Pacific Legal Foundation, suing the government since 1973. At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health, from the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led, full-body checkup that provides a clear picture of your health today, and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease and cancer. The healthier you means more moments to cherish.

Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan, live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss U.S. foreign policies, Venezuela, Iran, and the ever-changing world order. We'll also look at the horrific shooting in Minnesota and the many videos that have been circulating on social media. And finally, we're not worth your time.

what cities have the panelists lived in before that they would gladly return to? I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson, as well as dispatch contributor David French, The New York Times. Let's dive right in. Gentlemen, it's been five days since U.S. Special Forces captured Nicholas Majuro in Venezuela and brought him to the U.S. for trial on drug and weapons charges. In the months leading up to his detention, the administration made its case for intervention largely on drugs. They were not on drugs, but the public case centered on Maduro's alleged rule as a drug kingpin.

That you know of, Steve, that you know of. Right. I want to be very careful. In the last several days, however, we have heard from many senior administration officials talking about the rationale for the administration having done what it's done. Whatever criticism one might have, you can't level the criticism that they're not addressing these questions in public. They are, they're talking about them repeatedly. Marco Rubio has said many words since the capture Donald Trump as well.

And to me at least, it seems the rationale has shifted, at least the emphasis on the various reasons has shifted. Donald Trump mentioned oil repeatedly in his press conference on Saturday. He told reporters he briefed U.S. oil executives both before and after the raid about their new opportunities in Venezuela. The Wall Street Journal headline this morning, Thursday, July 8th, reads, Trump team works up sweeping plan to control Venezuelan oil for years to come. Trump himself told the New York Times that that's his plan. And I have a comment here from Carolyn Levitt, the White House spokeswoman. The American energy industry and most importantly the American people and the Venezuelan people are going to hugely benefit from the president's control of Venezuela's oil, which was previously used to fund Maduro's illegitimate narco-terrorism regime.

Kevin, did we apprehend Nicholas Maduro simply because we wanted to control Venezuela's oil? Not simply, I don't think. I think the oil is probably one part of it. He was a target of opportunity, right? We have a lot of complaints about Venezuela. There are political pressures to be strongly anti-Venezuelan. And the oil was part of it. The drug pretext was part of it. The immigration is part of it.

The fact that he is the most notable left-wing autocrat in the neighborhood is part of it. What's almost comical about this is how they will take this 100% propositions. acquisition squeezed 2% out of it and put some sort of legal fig leaf pretext over the 2% as though that's supposed to cover the 98%. So we have this indictment against Maduro on drug charges. And somehow this federal indictment ends with the United States taking over Venezuela's oil industry, which is something that does not necessarily follow in a real obvious way. But I was thinking through it, you know, like Daryndra Modi's BJP has connections to organized crime in India. That's not really in question. Does that mean we can get to kidnap him and take over the Indian IT sector?

Donald Trump has connections to organize crime. Does that mean that the Canadians can come in here and take over or whatever they want to take into the United States? It's just, it's comical adhocracy. It would be comical if it weren't such a serious thing. It's, you know, but it's a bit of this, bit of that. The oil is certainly a part of it, but I don't think the oil is the only part of it, if the oil were the only part of it, there would probably be targets that would be more important than Venezuela, just because there are other places to good oil. But I'm also not sure that they really know what they want out of the oil end of it either. I guess it was Susie Wiles was talking about, or maybe it's Donald Trump was talking about, you know, oil prices going lower. I don't think the American oil industry really wants oil prices to go lower.

And I think oil is like $58, $59 right now, something like that. So it's not an especially high point anyway. and it's not as though this is something that's going to have some sort of immediate effect on things like gasoline prices in the United States or utility prices in the United States that would have some kind of political benefit. So I know that there are oil majors who have outstanding claims from when the fields were nationalized there. They really weren't all that energetic about pursuing them over the years because oil companies pretty much always do business with bad actors. That's the nature of being an oil major, you know, almost outside of the United States, everywhere you're dealing with state-owned, state-controlled or partly state-owned. oil companies. And they're politically pretty grown up about what that means, that you're always in bed with the worst people in the world. This is the nature of the oil business. So I think that maybe

Trump had the oil in mind, but I don't think the oil industry guys were sitting in the background going, you know what we really, really want to do is get back into Venezuela. I mean, they'll take a target of opportunity if there's one there, of course. And I guess Chevron's still been there. Chevron was the big one that never left. But I don't see the energy industry pushing Trump behind the scenes to do this. David, my question to Kevin was, is it the oil? And his answer, if I'm summarizing, was yes, and. My question to you is, is it legal?

Okay, well, that's, the short answer is no. The longer answer is heck no. The longest answer is, but there's no enforceable mechanism of recognizing that. The best thing that's written so far about this is Jack Goldsmith's piece that he wrote relatively quickly after the initial strike. And basically he begins by saying, okay, how are we going to think about the concept of law here? If you're going to think about the concept of law is here is a standard to which Donald Trump must be held or there are mechanisms that require Donald Trump to conform his behavior. Well, that's largely absent, and it's absent in particular because of the unwillingness of Congress to play its role in enforcing our constitutional order. But if you're going to do a substantive

analysis, I mean, Goldsmith is exactly right, for example, when he says this violates the UN Charter. It's not even close to listeners who might be saying, well, why do I care about the UN Charter? Well, that's a Senate ratified treaty that we are, we have said we're going to with that we're going to conform to. And so from the standpoint of American domestic law, a lot of the reasoning that has been used here is, I'll explain it to you and you'll see how specious it is. So this has actually rooted in a 1989 legal opinion by Bill Barr. And now, just to put a pause on that for a moment, I'm very curious as to why this 1989 opinion was even crafted, because this was crafted to justify the Panama invasion.

Operation Just Cause. And we had under classic laws of war, we had the legal justification to attack Panama. The Panamanian government had to clear the state of war against us. The Panamanian government had killed an American Marine, seriously injured another, kidnapped and brutally beaten a third. I mean, we had legal justifications for the use of force. But Bill Barr writes an opinion here in 89 that, wow, essentially is. If we're doing a law enforcement operation extra-territorially, then it is, then you can use, you can use military force to, in essence, to protect the law enforcement operation. So if you're walking in to arrest a leader, well, unlike in the United States where we kind of

have a control of the area, the police don't need F-16s orbiting overhead to execute a search warrant in the United States, but if you're going to execute a search warrant or an arrest warrant in Venezuela or Panama, you might need to have the F-16s overhead to help you. So therefore, it's just more like we're avoiding the whole law of war by saying, well, this is an arrest. It's not actually an act of war. That is absurd. I'm sorry, it's utterly absurd. And just to illustrate to go back to, you know, like Kevin's analogy, does that mean we can just go arrest Modi? Well, Putin, Putin, there's ample evidence that Putin has committed crime after crime after crime. Do we arrest him? In 2003, could Bush have said, you know what? Saddam Hussein tried to kill my father.

I'm going to swear out an arrest warrant against him, and we're going to attach FBI to the First Marine Division and go get it. And we don't need Congress. We don't need the UN. We don't nothing. None of that. It's just absurd reasoning. It really is. And so you've got absurd reasoning justifying it under domestic law. It just clearly, clearly violates the UN Charter. So the answer is it's just not legal, but the political reality is that there's no enforcement mechanism here. There is nothing practically restraining Donald Trump so long as Congress refuses to do it because the Supreme Court has decided for a long time that it's not going be in the business of enjoining a military operation. Now, it will make serious decisions about the

commander chief powers, whether it was the Youngstown Steel in the Korean War, stopping Truman from taking over the steel mills, or whether it is striking down some of Bush policies regarding detainees in the war on terror. But no, neither one of those dealt with the court interfering with actual kinetic military operations. So the reality is by the constitutional standards, the statutory standards, the UN Charter, International Law Standards, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, but there's just nothing to enforce it. There's just no entity in the international or domestic legal system that can enforce this. I have two very brief things I like to add for it for David there. One is that the Russians went to the trouble recently of indicting Vladimir of

Vladimir Zelensky, which I think is kind of comical. So that's their case for the war now, too. But also, that Marine who was killed in Panama was off duty in a private vehicle, and he was fleeing a government roadblock, and apparently we're allowed to shoot people who flee government vehicle stops now. Right. We'll get to that. We'll get to that one. Yeah, in Panama, it was also the case that our troops, which were on the ground there, who were on the ground there, had been subject to verbal and physical harassment for months at that point. This was part of a long pattern. And as David pointed out, Panama had declared war on the United States, not minor detail.

A bit foolish, a bit foolish to do that, I would say. Of course, of course. I want to play poker with those guys and call that bluff. David, I would also add that if this were a mere law enforcement undertaking, as the administration would have us believe, it seems odd to me that they had Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Marco Rubio brief when they described what was happening. It wasn't a Pam Bondi-led brief, the Attorney General. It was all of the others for obvious reasons, I think. So, Jonah, if my question to Kevin was, is it the oil? And my question to David was, is it legal? My question to you is, is it wise? Is it wise taking Maduro?

Yes. Well, I actually have no problem taking Maduro, right? I mean, I shouldn't say no problem. It's the broader context. I have a problem taking Maduro under false pretenses. I have a problem taking Maduro in furtherance of a sort of 19-ssexual. century colonial, you know, idea of seizing resources. I agree entirely with David that it almost doesn't matter whether this is legal or not because it's not justissible. And the founders

envisioned that this kind of thing would be tempered by Congress. And when Congress has decided to gild itself, there's just really not a lot good answers. But, But when Mike Johnson says, oh, I think I was sufficiently notified two hours after the launch of the operation, it kind of like shows you what a farce this whole thing is, right? Because if they'd had, they hadn't had classified briefings, public briefings, they had, you know, press conferences saying that this was all about drug interdiction and the drug war, right? That's why this massive armada is down there. And every now and then, Trump would, like, have a verbal slip up and say, Maduro's got to go. But, like, all of the official explanations for what was going on,

it was about basically the drug war stuff. And then it turns out that that was just more pretext. That was more lying. And that this whole thing, and then, you know, Rubio, too, you know, you got to hand it to him. He really tried hard to make the case that this was a law enforcement. operation. But Trump can't contain himself. He wants to say, we're taking the oil, right? And to vindicate himself for arguments that he made about Iraq, you know, from the first Iraq war to the

second Iraq war, to prove that he's right. And much the same way his stuff about tariffs is a way to prove he was right in his stuff about Japan in the 1980s. And his arguments about Iraq review those, because he didn't oppose either of those wars, but he did argue that the United States should have taken the oil. Is that what you mean by vindication? Right. He, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's a running joke about how sometimes a lot of his stuff on social media, if you just put in, hi, this is donnie from Queens, um, at the front of it, because he sounds like he's calling into a drive time talk radio show makes a lot more sense. He had this idea that was very sort of New York posts kind of friendly, talk radio friendly about like, oh, these guys are,

idiots, we should just take the oil as if you can get a to-go bag for billions of barrels of subterranean oil deposits. And it caused a lot of controversy. He liked the controversy. He liked in whenever you say he's wrong about something, he digs in twice as hard. And so I think psychologically, that's the biggest explanation here. And I think what's happened is Rubio has used the oil argument to get what he wants out of this in terms of a foreign policy, which is ultimately, you know, cutting off the supply to Cuba, because Venezuela provides a lot of oil to Cuba. Stephen Miller has gotten out of it what he probably sold the oil thing to Trump

to get what he wants out of it in terms of displays of strength and various immigration sort of box checking. And in Trump's mind, he was like, okay, I'm going to do this oil thing. And now they're in the situation where they did something I think is, fairly defensible. Maduro was a very bad dude. And, you know, arresting him, maybe not at the expense that they did, is perfectly fine. But is it defensible? Can I push you on this one thing? David just made a compelling case, in my view, that this was illegal. And you're saying, in effect, yeah, I'm okay with it. It's defensible. Do you agree or disagree with David on,

do you disagree with David on the question of legality? And if so, how do you get, get from that disagreement to defensible. So if we're going to argue about what laws were violating, I'm going to defer to David to some extent. But, yeah, I don't actually care that much about arresting a guy who stole an election, who sells drugs, who tortures people, who is not democratically elected, who violated our laws, who gave blank passports to Hezbollah and Amas. I understand that there might be negative consequences and moral hazards to this kind of practice,

but I am willing to say snatching Nicholas Maduro, if it was done as more of an analog to the Panama thing, I'd be fine with it. But that's just not what the... And on that basis, it would be stretching the arguments of what's legal. You're okay if they want to stretch that case or be aggressive with it. I don't want to, like, trigger David and get into a whole sort of extended cinematic universe. You understand what I'm trying to do is to get you to trigger David. Like, that's the whole point. I am much more on Team Sarah on the whole, does international law exist question, than I am on Team David about this.

Which it doesn't mean I don't think it exists. I don't think it's non-existent, but I think Sarah is more right than David on this question. And why not just put a rocket through? bedroom window instead of pretending it's a drug case. That's a perfectly fair point. Like, again, I do not want to defend a hypothetical seizure of Nicholas Maduro against the reality of how this administration has behaved, because I think the way this administration has been largely indefensible.

Do you think Venezuela now has rights if it could ever do it to just go ahead and arrest Donald Trump? What do rights mean? In other words, like, if it's, if it's, if it's. fine and prudent and wise for a sovereign nation to unilaterally arrest the leader of another sovereign nation on the grounds that it's violated the domestic law of our country. I'm just curious. I would imagine Venezuela could swing an indictment of Trump in half a half a second. So is it all just Mike makes, you know, it's all about, it's all about Mike. In the international realm, I mean, I don't want to sound like Stephen Miller, because it might lead me to have to sleep hanging upside down by my hooves or something.

But I think that in the international arena, our national security interests, Trump most of the kind of considerations that you were talking about as a prudential matter, right? and there's a moral hazard to violating international law, which is why I would rather not violate international law. But, you know, when Kevin points out that they were, that Panama declared war on us, those countries are free to do that. And then, you know, you pull on Superman's cape, you're going to deal with the consequences.

My only point is that, look, I've been very consistent about this. I have always been a defender of regime change if it passes a cost-benefit test. If we could get rid of the re-government of North Korea at the expense of $38.50 and one sprained ankle of American servicemen, I think we'd be idiots not to do it immediately. But at the expense of losing a city

in a nuclear exchange or something, not worth it. It's a cost-benefit thing to me. Similarly with China, entirely in favor of regime change in China. I just don't think we can do it, cost-free. And so one of my many criticism of the Maduro operation is that it wasn't frigging regime change. True. Like, all we did was take out one mafia Don and said, well, work with your

underboss. And it makes us moral hypocrites as well as hypocrites about the rule of law and all of these other things. But in theory, I got, I really, if it's truly in America's national interest, as I define our national interest, let's say, then, And yeah, I'm okay with going after dictators who do sell loads of drugs to us and do terrible things. I would have been fine with taking out Saddam Hussein. I think the moral argument for assassinating Hassan Hussein is very – rather than sending all those troops in, was very strong. I think the prudential argument is much greater. That's all fair points, but you have to understand that everyone else gets to think by the same set of rules, right?

And so Donald Trump is a much greater threat to the legitimate national security concerns of Denmark than Maduro was to the legitimate national security concerns of the United States. That's a fair point. Look, and I factor into my cost-benefit analysis, the PR problem, right? The PR problem of our moral credibility, of our leadership position in the world, about the knock-on effects that losing those international norms and laws, which I do think are to our benefit, those would go into my mind. considerations about the cost-benefit analysis. But at the end of the day, it's our our cost-benefit analysis. Well, when those tall, handsome Danish commandos show up and snatch him, I, for one, I'm not going to lift a finger to get in their way. I hear you. I mean, I think about short-term, long-term. You know, the problem that you have is that if you take a very short-term view, I think that getting rid of Maduro, and one of the things I've said again and again since this operation,

Nobody under any circumstances should whitewash this guy. He was horrific. I mean, if you've got a situation where, under your rule, about a quarter of your population has left, that's bad. I mean, that's really bad. But I think of it as a short-term, long-term. There's almost always a short-term yes for things like, well, removing Maduro.

Look at all the things that he's done. But I also think of it as a very decisive long-term, no. because the problem that you have is when you go back to this sort of notion, which is this Klaus Vitsian notion of war is extension of policy by other means, which is kind of the way sovereign states have looked at war for a very long time. That starts to put you in a collision course with other sovereign states. It is the might-makes-right analysis. And what we did after the horrific world wars, at the class of people who, by the time they were running the allies after World War II had been through two World

Wars at that point. Eisenhower had been through two World Wars. Truman had been through two World Wars. They said, nope, nope, how do we create a system that doesn't permit this? And the way they did it was trying to turn back from the Klaus Fitsian view and try to create a world in which you had rooted around just war theory. And the problem that I see with the Trump world is, look, I'm not at naive, of the five permanent members of Security Council, two of them, Russia and China, do not oblige by. They don't care who Thomas Aquinas is. They don't care about just war, whatever. But if three of the five, including the most powerful, maintain and do what they can to maintain a world order governed by much more this just war concept, it is for the almost incalculable long-term benefit of us and the rest of the world that we do this.

And that's going to mean restraining our power sometimes when in the short-term analysis, it would work to our benefit. But I think the long-term effect of the Stephen Miller Imperial Project, spheres of influence, re-embracing Clausevitz, turning our back on Aquinas, is going to be. And we don't have to, you know, I know that history doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes. And past performances, no predictor of future results. But we got just a lot of experience with Mike Makes Right. We got a lot of experience with it. And it's not, and not much of it is good.

Yeah, I would also argue that we have a lot of experience with Might Makes Right. We have a lot of experience with Donald Trump. I mean, to me, is my main objection to what we've seen. And I buy, David, your analysis on legal grounds, although I'm certainly not sophisticated. And now, if I've looked at the other arguments and I find your argument more persuasive than the others, but I guess I have two concerns. One is prudential, and the other is precedential. And for prudential, I guess I don't understand why, and this particularly applies to people on the right who are embracing this, are enthusiastic about this, they can look at this, you know, I think momentous change, huge

decision, you know, in some ways an attempt to, if you take the administration at its word on what it's trying to do and attempt at least to reorder the Western Hemisphere and reassert dominance there, but I think in some ways, whether they mean it or not, a reordering of the world, and you're, you have a charge of that project, somebody like Donald Trump, who spent the better part of January 6th, not the better part, whose White House, you know, was busy peddling bogus conspiracy theories about his election having been stolen five years ago. And the kinds of things that he says in public on a daily basis that are just crazy, I mean, just crazy.

And I think, you know, do we want to, you know, even if we thought that this was a wise or defensible move in the abstract, if conducted by a true statesman, do we want this kind of delicate diplomacy and risky undertaking led by somebody who has the character and the judgment of Donald Trump? And my answer to that is a definitive and very clear, no. The presidential argument, and I'll use this to expand our discussion a little bit into the rest of the world. Donald Trump is seeing enthusiasm from folks on the right about this. He's seeing, you know, very high poll numbers from Central and South America about the undertaking here.

And we know that he loves attention. We know that he loves adulation. If he gets that from something like this, doesn't that encourage him to do this elsewhere? And if so, what should we think of Donald Trump's foreign policy? Should we brace for more steps like this? Because he likes what's happened here. He controls the oil. He got the oil.

He's strong and tough. He's getting enthusiasm generally from his base. He's getting plaudits from folks in the region. Why wouldn't he decide, yeah, I kind of like doing this. Kevin? Yeah, it seems plausible. Just to expand a little on what you were saying earlier, I mean, it's the fundamental problem with having an administration that is this obviously morally corrupt is that they can't even do notionally good things well because they pollute everything they touch. If Donald Trump helps an old lady across the street, there is some corrupt purpose being served. You can be sure of it. If he helps you carry in her groceries, there's some other corrupt purpose being served there. And the corrupt purposes in Venezuela, of course, are fairly straightforward. It's about, you know, just old-fashioned economic imperialism. We're going to steal this stuff and treat it as though it rars.

I think Donald Trump meant to say indefinitely, but what he said was infinitely, which is maybe he mispoke. Maybe he didn't. It's hard to say with a guy like Donald Trump who speaks like he's already had a couple of jokes and is maybe on his way to another one. So, yeah, I mean, certainly the Colombians are paying attention to that line of thought, although they don't, he probably doesn't have to take his radical step there or in Mexico to get what he wants out of those administrations. But when, Kevin, when he was asked about this, when he was asked about the possibility of regime change in Colombia because he doesn't like the Colombian leader either, he said sounds good to me. Right. And that's the thing about this kind of action. Partly it's about, you know, setting an example, right? I mean, that's the whole idea of how we're going to get regime change without changing the regime in Venezuela, right, is by just terrorizing them into doing what we want. And if you can terrorize them into doing what you want, then you can terrorize Colombia and Mexico and whoever else in Denmark and the other NATO countries and whoever else we have to deal with into doing what we want.

And that is, you know, essentially a lawless, thuggish kind of way of doing things. It is a curious time in the world to work on a revival of might makes right. You know, as David was pointing to earlier, we gave that line of thinking up right after World War II when the United States was at the apex of its geopolitical power. There was not a close competitor on the world stage just back then. Now there is. We are not at the apex of our geopolitical power, and we are reviving this doctrine at a time when it is most likely to do us great harm to our long-term national. interests. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. Before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on

elsewhere here at the dispatch. This week on advisory opinions, David French and Sarah Isker discussed the legal arguments underpinning the arrest of Nicholas Maduro and dive into a legal challenge to mandatory diversity and inclusion training. Search for advisory opinions in your podcast app and hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. We are right now on day 10 or 11 of what appear to be real ground-up widespread protests by the Iranian people against the regime. You know, we've seen this before, certainly, and there's no guarantee that it would lead to the toppling of the regime. Although, I think we talk to people who have watched these things closely over the years, there seems to be more momentum and oomph behind this latest than some of the others that we've seen since early in the Obama administration.

But we probably wouldn't be seeing this happening, were it not for the decision of Donald Trump to strike the Iranian nuclear facilities earlier in 2025. So that probably undercuts my argument. I mean, let's say strikes on the Iranian nuclear sites and the sanctions and the, you know, once again applying the pressure that Joe Biden not only didn't apply, but had gone pretty decisively in the other way. I don't think we would be seeing the things that we're seeing. Doesn't Trump deserve some credit for that? Oh, I think that Trump deserves credit for striking the Iranian nuclear facilities. But I think the absolute lion's share vast bulk of the credit to the president to the president. pressure put on the on the Iranian regime right now is the IDF you know we take a yeah a very

america centric view of the Middle East but this has been an Israeli military operate after the after the collapse of intelligence that led to October 7th which I think is even worse failure than right before the Yom Kippur war in many ways the IDF has executed its military operations about as brilliantly especially against Hezbollah and Iran I have issues in Gaza, but especially against Hezbollah and Iran, about as brilliantly as you can. And one of the things that really hurts autocratic regimes is losing a war. Losing a war can puncture your myth of invincibility. It can animate and energize opposition figures. And make no mistake, the credit for beating Iran in that war, it goes to Israel. And we, both the Biden and Trump administration, supported Israel.

And by the way, the Biden administration twice used American military forces to help defend Israel against missile and drone barrages, which was very key, very key in making Iran lose, was that support. And so I do think that Trump deserves credit unreservedly for bombing the nuclear facilities. But I think that if you're going to look at how has the Middle East been remade to the extent that it has, it's an IDF military victory. and it's a very helpful reminder that military strength does, in fact, transform politics. And that's one of the reasons why the might makes right formulation is so alluring. It's so tempting because might can make a massive difference, and that's what's happened in the Middle East.

I agree with you entirely. I mean, certainly Israel deserves the lion's share of the credit for those changes and for the weakening of the Iranian regime. having said that, the tightening of the sanctions, the presidential rhetoric that Trump has used in making clear to the Iranian regime that, you know, there is not going to be a return to the Iran nuclear deal, that this is all about maximum pressure. And the fact, I mean, I don't think you can just mark it down as an asterisk that after the Israelis struck, 10 days later, the United States struck and did what we did because the Israelis couldn't do it.

And I do think that that really matters because it took the conflict that was, and certainly the Iranian regime would like to have imagined it as Israel versus Iran and its proxies, and broadened it in a way that I think sent up, you know, had real implications in terms of what happens on the battlefield, but also sent the unmistakable message that the United States was engaged. And so in that sense, I think, you know, I had the same misgivings then that I have now, for similar reasons, to overlapping reasons, but somewhat different on the specifics, about Donald Trump having done that. I thought it was the right policy in that case. But maybe people who are concerned about Trump doing these things or setting precedents, maybe we're just hand-ringers or bedwitters or what have you. But let me, let's talk about precedence for a second.

the Trump administration's actions in Iran are just different. They're so different from Venezuela. It's even hard to think about them in the same breath. I mean, from a law of war standpoint, from an international law standpoint, here you have an ally under ballistic missile attack on a daily, nightly basis. You have an ongoing and accelerating nuclear program.

So you've got a shooting war ongoing under collective self-defense principles, we absolutely had the ability to respond to that. And so it's just so night a day, and I think the results are going to ultimately end up being night and day. I think that you're going to see that there is something that is more concrete and substantial, and again, for which the Trump administration deserves credit,

where you did it the right way against the right enemy. And I think over time you're going to see better positive knock-on effect. from that versus versus doing it the wrong way. And I'm not going to say it's the wrong enemy with Maduro, but it's weird because they took out Maduro, but they didn't take out the regime. It's still, it's still the same regime. It's still the same street militia.

Because they like those kinds of regimes. That's the character of the regime they like. You know, Steve, I was thinking that these things have a way of not working out the way you expect them to. and I was reading an interview earlier with, I can never say his name correctly, the Crown Prince, the son of the former Shah of Iran, who would like to... Raisa Pahlavi. Yeah, Razapilavi. Who would like to come back and be in power.

And I always noticed him in the news just because, weirdly enough, he's a former neighbor of mine in, in Lovick, Texas, where he was living when the Iranian Revolution happened. And weird historical tribute. But if I were him, you know, and I wanted to come back to power, I don't think he'll be the one that comes in. But if I were, I would say, what do I do first? You know, open up the economy, obviously, get some foreign and... investment in their C to the liberation of women in religious minorities, exile the Ayatollahs, all that stuff. And then so help me, God, I finish up the nuclear weapons program because we're living in a might-makes-right world now. And if you've got nuclear weapons, you can do whatever

the hell you want, apparently. And that's, you know, that's the only reason Russia gets really any deference in the world, the reason they get to play around the way they do, and the reason Venezuela doesn't. And we are creating a set of incentives that are going to make the world much more dangerous in general, but also much more dangerous in a way that specifically diminishes the relative power and advantages of the United States and its military apparatus. Maybe it's because I just finished recording a podcast with Ken Burns that this analogy is in my head. You know, we all know these quotes from John Adams and all these people about how the Constitution only works because on the assumption that we have a virtuous people, or it only works because

George Washington everyone thought was going to be the first president, and he modeled the kind of behavior that we want on a president and yada, yada, yada, all that stuff. The liberal international order was held up in many respects by a might-make-right principle, but we were a good and decent nation holding it up, right? And so we actually had a higher moral understanding of foreign affairs than the state of nature, and we kept that system going backed up by our might, so much so that NATO eventually just basically became us with some service-providing nations around us, right, which is a huge problem because NATO lost its buy-in

and therefore it's say in a lot of these kinds of questions. And so Trump was directionally right in criticizing NATO. Not a new argument from an American president, by the way, right? The problem that we have is, it's sort of, you know, coming on the heels of my point about regime change and taking Maduro, is I want to live in a system domestically, internationally, whatever, where arguments matter, where the person who marshals

the better argument tends to win the policy debate. We don't live in that world because Donald Trump is not George Washington, and his vision of how the international realm should work is one in which if we can get away with it and it makes his ego feel good, we should do it. and no one knows how to do it. So, like, it is entirely, like, if you have, if you flip a coin and if it's heads, a good thing happens and tails, it's a bad thing happens, you don't really give the coin flip or the credit.

Donald Trump is essentially a coin flip thing, right? Like, sometimes, like a monkey running around with a pair of scissors, he'll cut the right thing, and sometimes they'll cut the wrong thing. Sometimes the Chinatown chick-tac-toe chicken makes the right move, right? The idea that we are imbueing with him some sort of grand wisdom, right, of seeing things in a better and more serious way is just crap. It's that everybody knows how to play him. And it's like musical chairs or roulette.

When the ball stops spinning, that's the number it lands on. And sometimes it's a good number. And sometimes it's a bad number. So, yeah, it was good that he bombed Iran because the right people won an argument that and the last people he listened to said the right things to him. to get them to bomb Iran. But, like, the idea that, like, this is just no way to run an international order, never mind a country.

And that's the thing I am so disgusted by about this whole thing. It's not the taking of Maduro. It's not that it's illegal. I mean, those are perfectly legitimate things to complain about. It's that it was all built on lies. Like, the entire thing was just a frigging series of lies, deliberate lies. And everyone is talking about, oh, it's such a. the defenders of this move are basically just saying, I don't care that I was lied to.

And I'm not saying I'm owed full operational details in advance of something. But when you move the largest in Mara in South American history into the Caribbean in the name of interdicting drugs, and then the second you capture, kidnap in Trump's words, kidnap the head of state of another country and say, okay, it's great, We're going to keep the evil torturous regime in place, but we're going to take all of their oil. Forget the policy arguments for a second. We just were lied to. And to forgive that is just, that's the real moral hazard, that Congress doesn't give a rat's ass about being lied to.

And that's the real moral hazard for the American right, because it says, oh, this is so manly. And it's just, it's disgusting. It is kind of tedious that we have to take the time to debunk their arguments, which kind of gives them a kind of courtesy of taking them more seriously than they deserve to be. Yeah, that's what I find so exhausting about this time. Isn't it also the case that while it's been sort of understood that that might makes right in the United States being the mightiest could arguably do what we wanted, in most cases we exercised restraint.

I mean, to David's point in the post-World War II, but I think you can go through. I mean, the big arguments that the French and others who opposed the two, 2003, Iraq war, the big arguments you heard from people on the left here in the United States, was that this was going to be a war for oil. And it wasn't a war for oil. I mean, we didn't do it. We didn't do the things that they said that we were going to do, which is ironic when I hear now people saying, this is just Trump doing the same thing that Bush and Dick Cheney did in 2008.

No, in fact, he's doing the opposite of what Bush and Cheney. We had 20 plus years to take the oil in Iraq. We didn't take the oil. Trump criticizes them for it. But it was that restraint in the sense that, you know, even if might makes right, we were, I mean, I'll use the word benevolent. I don't, our critics, our opponents, our adversaries, certainly wouldn't use that characterization.

But now we're sort of just owning it. And it's might makes right. So therefore, we're going to do X, Y, and Z. And that is my primary concern on the precedent question. I think that period was a lot less might makes right than right makes might, particularly in the immediate post-war years. The United States became an enormously wealthy and dynamic and powerful country because we had the right principles, the right kind of economic ideas, the right sort of national values. It wasn't that we were just this enormous power because the rest of the world had wrecked itself in World War II.

That was the case, certainly. But it was much more a case, I think, of right makes might than Mike makes right. That's just maybe a little side note there, but I think that's a better understanding of it. I love that, Kevin, especially when you look at the state of play in May of 2014. or August of 1945, VE Day, VJ Day. You had, America was the world power, but there was a Soviet Union that was immensely powerful in late 1945. I mean, just the sheer numbers of Red Army troops

on that eastern flank of what came to be NATO was staggering. And they had just carried the, they had just defeated Varemont, the German army, inflicting far more casual. I mean, the lion's share of credit for the defeat of the German army goes to the Soviet Union. Just in sheer numbers, the sheer scale of the warfare.

So you had two competing systems right there, both immensely powerful in the moment. Now, Soviets didn't have the atom bomb until a few years later. But then, as you were saying, in many ways, the reason why we were able to eclipse the Soviet Union over the long course of the war,

the Cold War was our virtue. It was what made people want to be a part of our system versus be a part of their system, what made people thrive and flourish in our system versus their system. And the idea that we can, you know, it's that old statement, I don't want to go cliched. America is great because it's good. If we think that we can become greater by becoming worse, we're going to not just sort of betray the American promise, we're going to betray the reality of American prosperity. And we've become a very large, slightly paler Venezuela. Okay, we're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly.

And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. We don't have a ton of time left, but I want to spend at least a few minutes on this horrendous shooting in Minneapolis that took place. We're recording midday on January 8th. It took place roughly 24 hours ago. we're still learning a lot about the circumstances and what actually happened, but undoubtedly

people have seen the video from various angles of this shooting. And there has been, of course, as happens in these things, a tremendously polarized debate about what people are seeing in the video and what the video means. David, let me start with you. What's your reaction to what you saw in the video, and where does this lead? So there's a couple of things. One is, you know, as soon as the incident happens, you see that the woman is accused of domestic terrorism. When you watch the video that- Accused by the administration, by the White House, by the

spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. Yes. And I believe Christy Noem also said very similar words, very similar things. And you watched the video, and you immediately could tell that that's laughable. The idea that this was domestic terrorism is laughable. So right out of the gate, there's this 37-year-old woman. She's dead. I don't even know if her body's been removed from the vehicle yet,

and she's been called a domestic terrorist by administration officials. Incredibly inflammatory language, incredibly slanderous language. So that is, let's put that in one sort of bucket here. And the other bucket is, okay, well, what about the shooting at, Like, let's, let's, she's not a domestic terrorist. At the same time, she took off in front of some agents. And so there's a lot of analysis of the shooting and people reaching definitive conclusions about the legality of the shooting way in advance of the evidence.

And here's a quick way to tell if somebody is speaking legally, intelligently, or not. If they are making the totality of the inquiry, the second or two of the shooting, the second or two of shooting itself, that's not the way it's to be done. The Supreme Court said in a case called Felix versus Barnes last term, Sarah and I talked about it on advisory opinions at length. It's a totality of the circumstances analysis. And so should he have been there? What was his perception in the moment? At all of these things, it's a totality of the circumstances argument. And so it's very premature to decide the actual legality of the shooting. However, I do not think it's necessarily premature to litigate the morality of the shooting.

Because one of the things that is very distressing to me is this talking point that you're getting that says, well, you got to comply with everything that officers tell you right away in the moment perfectly or you just might die or you could just die. Wow, that's a scary standard in a free society, I got to say. And it's something that has been an issue in a lot of police shootings. looked at police shooting issues with, I've paid a lot of attention to a lot of these incidents over the years. And there is a consistent pattern in a lot of the very controversial shootings. And that is, the police are not giving clear commands in a circumstance where somebody is not

used to being in encounters with the police. And when that occurs, this idea that unless you in a tense situation, are able to respond exactly in a way that is intended by any given officer in any given moment or face deadly force is actually a reason for hundreds of police shootings, hundreds. The Times did a really interesting analysis of this, and it's one of the reasons why police forces around the country are saying don't shoot at moving vehicles, is that part of the reason is that a lot of this confusion has led to a lot of death and it's a very scary thing to say you live in a country that's a free country, you have a ton of constitutional rights, you're a walking bundle of constitutional rights,

but if you encounter an armed agent of the state, you need to snap to instantly, or you just might die, is a very scary thing. And, you know, I remember not long ago, do you remember the Scotty Schaeffler incident? Here you have a golfer who, kind of drives through a police roadblock, makes contact with an officer. It's not as clearly on videos as it was. I'm thinking, could they have just killed Scotty Schloffler in that moment? Is he just lucky to be alive right now?

Because he didn't respond exactly correctly in a roadblock. And so I have major problems with the administration's response. I have major problems with the fact of the shooting. But it's very premature, I think, to make a definitive opinion about the legal. of the shooting. Yeah, look, I'm with David on this. I think, first of all, like, the degree to which people have convinced themselves that watching a video tells you everything that you need to know is really astounding to me.

And, like, you would think after the Rodney King video where everyone thought, oh, this is and then it turns out you watched the previous five minutes and it gives you a different sense of things. I'm not saying the first sense was right, but it certainly didn't feel as right once you watch the bigger video. And moreover, like stuff on video doesn't always reflect from a distance what it's like up front in the situation. I think it is entirely possible that what this cop did was legal.

I can even say that what the cop did, I can imagine that what he did was justifiable. I'm not sure it was, but like I can imagine being in that. position and making a bad decision. And making a bad decision does not necessarily mean, necessarily mean making an evil, you know, premeditated murderous decision. I look at this as, I think you don't have to make a case that he showed very poor judgment. He had cops on the other side of the car in his line of fire. Like he could have just stepped back.

You know, I mean, like there are all sorts of things that I can, I can play Monday morning quarterback on. but I'm perfectly willing to withhold judgment until we know more and all of that. I do think that people who are outraged by it have a plausible set of impressions from it that justifies their outrage. But I would pull it back. We're saying in this group text that we're on, to me, the whole thing feels like an example of that sort of an analog to that scene in Hunt for Road October where Fred Thompson's

on the top of the ship and things are going crazy. And he says, this will get out of hand and people will die. when the administration pumps so much almost eliminationist rhetoric about immigrants, about this sort of mannequin world of these evil people and everybody who has any problem with anything is a domestic terrorist or a traitor or whatever and that they're poisoning the blood and they're hiring ICE agents at a clip where I just don't have a lot of faith that they're training them correctly. and you have the left wanting to cosplay all sorts of resistance kind of stuff all over the place.

The lack of prudential, mature leadership from the administration is, and the way passions are being stoked, whatever the actual correct interpretation of these events, events like this are inevitable under these sorts of certain. circumstances. And when you're arresting moms picking up their kid from daycare, right, when you are scaring the crap out of people who just look, have the, coming the sin of looking Hispanic, you are going to put people on edge. You are going to have unintended, like, I wish the right has been great about talking about dynamic scoring when it comes to budgeting, right? This idea that you get, you don't understand that the exponential growth, that you'll get if you have these free market policy.

I wish we could have a little more dynamic scoring about rhetoric and domestic policy in the way that we talk about things. Like we talked before in foreign policy about moral hazard and possible bad precedents and that. The way this administration talks, going back to all the nonsense about sending the National Garden to the cities, is they want domestic unrest. And you're going to get it if you talk like you'll want it. And so I don't know about the specific case, but that's how I feel about this,

I think this is prelude to a lot more ugliness. Kevin. I think it's a mistake to think of it as a police action at all. It was a road raid engine, that is what it was. You've got these idiots rolling around out there and their tactical gear, but they can't handle a Midwestern city in winter,

and they keep getting their car stuck in the snow, and they're being blocked in and hooted at and hollered at and mocked by these protesters, and they lose their temper. And you've got these two guys running at the car, one of them's yelling at here, cleared the intersection. The other one's yelling at her,

get the fuck out of the car, which is not, What I normally think of is like a lawful police command. That's not like a high level of police professionalism. You got a mass guy reaching for the door. And the other guy's yelling clear the intersection. She starts trying to clear the intersection. He gets off three shots, one through the front, two through the open side window,

gets a headshot on a moving target. That's not a police action. That is a road rage incidents. ICE agents are not authorized to make traffic stops. They're authorized to make immigration stops. They can stop a vehicle if they have, quote, reasonable grounds to believe that there's an illegal immigrant inside, not that someone is breaking the traffic law. If someone's blocking the intersection, which you can do, you can call the

police and have them tow off or arrested or ticketed or otherwise. It's not that they can't take pictures and get the driver and the driver's license in the license plate and all that stuff. Trump came out and immediately lied about it and said that the woman had run the guy over, which did not happen. I've actually been hit by a car before. I know what it's like. It's not something you skip away from the way that guy did. And the problem is, of course, now it's going to be a federal investigation. The FBI is going to be in charge of this. So great, Cash Patel, that's going to work out well.

And if there is a federal charge, Trump's just kind of, you know, pardon the guy. So you really need to get the state and local authorities involved in this because it needs to be a local investigation and a local prosecution if you ever want to actually get any justice in this. Yeah, part of the concern I have is that you could have dual investigations, competing investigations with competing conclusions. And I think the idea that the FBI is going to conduct a serious investigation after the president has already told us what happened and was guilty and what the outcome is. Even if you do think you're in danger of someone who's trying to ram you

with a vehicle, the way to defend yourself from that is not to shoot someone in the head from three feet away. It's to move away. Yeah, that doesn't stop the vehicle as we saw. Yeah. Because you may have noticed the car kept going. Yeah, this is just absolute nonsense. And It's going to end badly. Well, we are going to move as far away from the day-to-day news as possible for not worth your time today. And I'm going to ask the group here, a question that picks up on a discussion that we were having before we started recording. In that conversation, Jonah and I'll come to you first. If you were to move back to a city that you once lived in, what city or town or village or Hamlet?

that you've lived in before, do you miss the most today, and would you be most likely to return to? See, it's funny. I've been thinking about this. I've really only lived for any meaningful period of time in three real cities, New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and then I would grow in Prague because I was there for a little while.

I like D.C. the least. and that's the place I've stayed for 30-something years. I've never liked this city as a city. I just think it is a subpar city. Like Baltimore has really, it's a reason they call it Charmed City. It's seen better days, but it's got character to it. Prague is one of the best cities in the world. I love Prague.

I could walk aimlessly in Prague for days on end. And I love New York, even though, you know, I'm worried about the warmth of collectivism. So really I would love to, like if I had the financial wherewithal in the life circumstances, I'd like to live maybe in any of them instead of Washington, D.C. And I'd throw in places like London as well. But I guess the place where I would be most comfortable to live, I could see myself very easily living in New York again

if I had the right residence. Because I like cities. I'm a city guy. I'm a flaneur, as Kevin and I might say. Joan's view of Washington, by the way, is one of his few unambiguously correct opinions. I have no notes. Kevin, would your answer be Lubbock?

Or something else. Yeah, I like Lubbock. I like my hometown. I don't think my wife would enjoy it very much. You know, if I could do like sort of further out in West Texas, like Brewster County or something like that, I'd be pretty happy about that, I think. I think we got on this because I was just in New York. And I lived in New York for a long time. And I really like New York.

There are kind of three American cities that really work for me as cities. And those are New York, Los Angeles and Miami. Like, you know, Chicago is like all the pain in the ass stuff about New York and none of the cool stuff. I don't know why anyone would ever live there, David French. But if I didn't have four kids, Deli would actually be on the list, I think. I really liked Delhi, and I think it would be an interesting place to live now. I mean, the air quality and stuff is horrible, and there's all sorts of challenges of living there.

And obviously, raising four kids there would not be a thing to do. But places I've lived, as cliched as it is, because it's like everyone's favorite flavor of whatever. Austin's pretty nice. Although, as I've often said, I used to really think I liked Austin. I think what I really liked was being 20. But Austin is still pretty nice. But Austin is still pretty nice.

That matters. That matters a lot, I think. Being 20 was pretty fun. Well, or just generally your family and life circumstances. Yeah, I've got related thoughts on that. But, David, I'll go to you next. Where would you live? Okay.

So some listeners are going to think I've lost. my mind, but let's just sort of say, so here are the, I'm currently, I'm recording from Chicago, so looking at past metropolitan areas where I've lived, New York, Nashville, Lexington, Kentucky for almost a year, greater Balad-Rooz Iraq, not on the list for places I'm really eager to go back to. So, Philly, and of all of these city, these big metropolitan areas, is Philly. I mean, this is... It's a good choice.

That's a solid choice. And here's why I say it. I love the old, the city center colonial part of Philly. It's charming, it's beautiful, it's historic. And so, like, if you can map it out, I would say one of these center city streets, these cobblestone colonial area streets with the townhouse right near Independence Hall. I mean, it's like a happy place. you know, the Museum of the American Revolution. So, you know, and then Philly's got its own unique

city of brotherly shove character. So I like where I am, but I'm going to say Philly of those places. I used to work right off Writtenhouse Square, and it's a great neighborhood, I agree. It's a – Philly was great to me. I like to throw a lot. You know, David, somebody sent me a house listing yesterday, as it happens, for a home on Alfred's Alley. Really? Nice. I'll forward that on to you. Yeah, it was, you know, something like $4 million, so not terribly realistic.

Yeah, they're not chic there in that play part of the country of this city. But it was cool. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty cool. That's interesting. I wouldn't have expected. Charming and beautiful. At first, I thought you were describing Philadelphia sports fans when you were using those words, so I'm glad you were describing instead the old town.

My answer, I mean, I would love to throw people. a curveball or come up with something unexpected. I've lived in lots of, I think, really great places. I grew up in Wauitos, Wisconsin. Love it. I don't think I could live there because the weather is, I can't do the cold any longer. I went to school in Greencastle, Indiana. I also loved Greencastle, tiny town, but fun and actually charming as well. One year in New York City, I enjoyed it, but I was very, very happy to move on. I am not someone who thinks that Central Park is enough green. It was, I drove over the George Washington Bridge on my way out with a buddy from Minnesota in our huge U-Haul.

And I remember this feeling of relief just washing over me. Glad to have spent a year there. I don't think I could ever live there permanently. But my choice and it's obvious, I apologize for playing. a cliche would be Madrid. I absolutely loved Madrid. I think it's a spectacular city. To a certain extent, I think it's hard and not necessarily accurate to describe, you know,

eight million residents of a city using general terms. But having said that, I think Madrid is one of the warmest cities and most welcoming cities you can ever imagine. I mean, when me and my family would try to speak our broken or beginner. Spanish, you know, they were patient, they encouraged us, they welcomed it, they loved it. It was just a wonderful experience. I do think, Kevin, to your point, you know, you liked being 20 in Austin as much as just being in Austin, I think the fact that I had that year with my family, all in one place, doing tons of sort of family-focused activities. I mean, we had,

We built a little social group and we had some really good friends there. But it was mostly my family doing family stuff for that year. And for that reason, it was really one of the best years ever. But I love Madrid. It's a wonderful city. It is a great city. It really. It's underrated.

I know everybody loves Barcelona and I too like Barcelona. I love Seville. There are a lot of great Spanish cities and towns. But sort of power for pound, I think Madrid is. is as great as any place. So I would return there. And maybe, maybe I'll retire there one day. Thanks all for the time. Thanks for talking through what are some, these are some tough issues. These are some challenging times. It feels like a lot is changing and it's good to be able to talk about this with people as thoughtful as the three of you. So thanks and we'll talk to you again next week.

If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And we hope you'll consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join. And if you use my promo code roundtable, you'll get one month free and help me win the ongoing deeply scientific internal debate over which dispatch podcast is the true flagship. You've been meaning to sign up as a member for months now.

Take the time to do it today. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership, no ads, early access to all episodes, two free annual memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. Shout out to a few folks who recently joined as premium members, Andrew Christensen, Mike Preston and Tom Self. We're glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones, from people who choose to live in Chicago. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this

episode possible, Max Miller and Noah Hickey. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.