The Dispatch Podcast - Why Trump Is Snubbing South Korea

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Mike Nelson, and Kevin Williamson to discuss President Donald Trump’s decision to scale back military exercises with South Korea, his “good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” and the U.S. munitions crisis. The Agenda: —Scaling back South Korea exercises —Trump’s “relationship” with Kim Jong Un —Abandoning Japan —The U.S. munitions crisis —Southern lane of the strait —NWYT: The end of Colombia House mail-order club Show notes: —North Korea missile barrage —Oil drilling in Greenland The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠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

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss President Trump's decision to scale back military exercises with South Korea, his, quote, good relationship with Kim Jong-un, unquote, and the U.S. munitions crisis. And then, not worth your time, the end of Columbia House's mail-order CDs. I'm joined today by dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg, national correspondent Kevin Williamson, and dispatch contributor and retired special forces. officer, Mike Nelson.

Let's dive right in. Gentlemen, I want to start in South Korea, or actually in Washington, D.C., true social, Donald Trump's post about South Korea from August 16th this past weekend. Kevin, I'm not going to read the whole thing like I would if it were a people exclusive,

but I do want to give you proper context for this. So this is Donald Trump's post from August 16th. Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has long ago agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America, as usual, but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that, and he's speaking here of North Korea, to a country that as long as Donald J. Trump

has been president, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce the joint military exercises. While somewhat unrelated, question mark, I recently asked the president of South Korea if they would like to join us in the denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran and they said, quote, no thanks, unquote. Thank you for attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. That tweet has set off a flurry of activity. Substantial reporting on Donald Trump and what led him to make that post-diplomatic back and forth with U.S. Allies in the regions, people weighing in on what it means, what the implications are, what have you. Jonah, let me start with you. When you saw that tweet, what was your initial reaction and has what we've seen over the past several days, changed anything as it relates to your initial reaction.

We should also just add, I don't know if you saw, but the wires are reporting this morning that North Korea has launched a barrage of ballistic missiles towards the sea as a sort of ha-ha response to all of this, and the Japanese are quite upset about it. Anyway, this morning being Thursday morning when we're recording this, and I should point out if we're providing additional context, that there were past missile firings before these exercises were to have gotten underway. Back to you, Jonah.

Yeah, so when I first saw it, I was like, I mean, I find Wag the Dog kind of explanations of things to be kind of lazy a lot of the time. But I find them unavoidable with a lot of the things that Donald Trump does because he is so clearly media narrative driven. and cares so much about changing the subject and all of that kind of thing. I don't necessarily think it's the primary explanation for it,

but it's always the first thing that pops into my head when you get hit with one of these sort of surprise, dumb things, or I guess on occasion some surprise, not necessarily dumb things. I think that along the lines of that part of the explanation, he has a memory of his North Korea summit that most of us do not share. I'm just going to go out on a limb. He thinks it was a wild success. He thinks it proved that he was a titan of statesmanship.

This is back at the end of his first term. First term. And he thinks everybody remembers it that way. He likes summits. He likes the visuals of summits for the same reasons like the Soviets always did. And I think he wants another one. So that's the media narrative part of it. The more significant part of it is he's pissed off at the South Koreans for saying no to him about helping out in the Strait of Hormuz

and with Iran, I don't blame the South Koreans for not wanting to do that. I mean, hey, we've got this war that clearly didn't go according to plan. We don't know how to get out of it. You want to take some of the load from us? I mean, like, we never asked you about it before, but just come on in. But I think that that impulse on his part, you know, it's this weird thing. You get a lot of people, including a lot of supposedly intellectually and philosophically sophisticated nationalists, the sort of NACCON crowd, who will talk to you for very,

very, very long time about America first is just a logical thing for a serious country to believe in that everything has to be first and foremost about putting ourselves first. And yet, whenever any other country puts their own self-interest ahead of Donald Trump's interest, it's this act of great treachery and betrayal and selfishness and proves that alliances don't work and whatnot. And I think that that's part of what's going on here. And then lastly, I'm sure Mike or Kevin can pick up from here. But I was like, oh, yeah, that pivot to Asia thing? I guess that's not really a thing. But, and I think it's very embarrassing for the people who've defended so much what this administration has done as an argument for, you know, reorienting towards confronting China.

Trump's foreign policy has been a boon for China and the Iran fiasco is just simply the latest example of it. Mike, I want to actually spend some time in the actual language of this presidential post because I think it's revealing in ways that I think require us to spend a little time on it. As I said, North Korea had test fired some missiles before these exercises and before the president's statement. We do not see any reference in the president's statement here about North Korea test firing these missiles, which one might take to be the root of the problem, given the kind of regime that North Korea is, the kind of dictator that Kim Jong-un is. But instead, the president says that these exercises are costly, that the exercises themselves

are, quote, inappropriate and hostile, effectively accusing both the United States and South Korea of hostility. And then made the curious comment that North Korea has been, quote, unthreatening and respectful, given his relationship with Kim Jong. He regularly refers to his relationship with Kim Jong-un and believes that the five-ish hours that he spent with Kim Jong-un, as Jonas says at the end of his first term, give him sort of a window into the relationship and the way that Kim Jong-un runs his country. Let me just ask you a factual question. Is it the case that North Korea has been unthreatening and respectful to the United States in the region since Donald Trump became president at the beginning of his first term? Absolutely not. North Korea represents a threat not only to our interests in the region,

to our two key strategic allies there, South Korea and Japan. And North Korea is actively engaged or has been actively engaged in a war that we are trying to influence the outcome on the opposite side. They've sent troops to go fight in Ukraine on Russia's behalf. They are our adversary, if not our enemy, and they have been a part, an active part of the axis of resistance that is lined up to try to counter U.S. interests all over the world. As Jonah said, I think there are a couple things going on here. Four different things that kind of align at once. And all of them are indications of things that we've seen from the president before.

Number one, he looks at our relationship. He's frustrated with the South Koreans because he looks at everything transactionally and thinks that they owe him obsequiousness and obedience in whatever we happen to be doing at the time. He looks at North Korea too fondly, based on his personal connection and the fawning praise that Kim Jong-un had sent to him. He misunderstands the nature of coalitions and alliances. He doesn't understand that these exercises are also in our interest

because if we do have to fight in Korea or in Asia, we will have to practice the interoperability with our South Korean allies that we rehearse in these exercises. And he also, going back to what Jonah said, I think he is looking for a win. He has this fond memory of his, quote-unquote, great success with North Korea in the first administration. He seems to be frustrated by what's going on

in Iran. And it's not so much maybe a distraction away from that, but it's his own distraction. He's trying to do something that makes him feel like he's returning to the glory days, getting the band back together from Trump One. And all of it indicates American withdrawal from our leadership that we've enjoyed. As Jonah mentioned, the Pacific Pivot. We've already seen a withdrawal from our presence in Europe, causing our European allies to question how resolved we are to maintain the status quo in Europe. We've already seen through the conduct of the war in Iran, another language, a great deal of questions about what our future of providing security in the Middle East is going to be. And now there are a lot of questions about what's going to happen in Asia.

We've seen it not only with this, but with some of the language about standing up for Taiwan. So, again, the president seems to have a lot more friendly language for those countries and dictators who are obvious enemies or adversaries of the United States and harsh language for our allies. The Iran thing frustrates me because he does not see the value in building coalitions in advance. He went alone, and now he thinks people owe him. Yeah. And not all of those interests align if he had built those coalitions in advance prior to going into the war.

I mean, people forget his administration has been very critical of George W. Bush and its conduct of the Iraq War, but they forget that we spent months building the coalition of the willing, which was still diminished. But we did have other countries that went along with us, and he spent a lot of time building that coalition to get the Brits to go along with us and others. So, you know, of course, the president doesn't see the value in the prep work, and that's, this is the end result. And he's also publicly announced many times that we can do this alone.

Right. He said many times we already won. Yeah. Let me push you a little further, Mike, on one of the things that you said, just to help bring us, those of us who've not served in uniform, to some level of understanding this. What good are exercises like this? I mean, if you look at this from a distance, it's like, what are they actually doing?

There's no live fire. How much good can it really do to walk through something like this? So we used to do these kinds of things all the time in all our theaters on a regular basis. One of the more famous ones was an exercise called Reforger, which was the return of forces to Germany. The idea was, this was back in the 80s, in the event of a war between the Soviets, we have limited forces on the European continent. They would slow the Soviet advance as we could flow additional forces onto the continent to then counterattack. We practiced the whole thing. That included not only what our forces in Europe were going to do, but also the actual

movement and flow of forces from the North American continent to Europe. In Korea, we used to do an exercise called Team Spirit, which was primarily an air exercise between our Air Force and theirs, to practice how we would defend. U.S. forces in Korea have a slogan, fight tonight, which means we have to be ready at a moment's notice. We don't know when the North Koreans might start a war, so we have to be prepared to work with our South Korean allies at any moment. They rehearse these things all the time. There is infinite value in rehearsing the systems by which we coordinate with our allies, as well as identifying some of the friction points that could play out when this happens live. Now, to quote former President Eisenhower, plans are nothing, planning is everything.

This helps identify the kinds of challenges that could come up in the future so that we anticipate them and can react to them in real time, rather than just sitting on our hands and waiting for the next attack like we were unprepared at the beginning of World War II. like we were unprepared at the beginning of the Korean War with Task Force Smith, and like we were unprepared at the beginning of Vietnam with the fight in the Yadran Valley. So in the next fight, you know, we've seen the pace of warfare accelerate. We might not be able to take those initial licks and recover and remobilize. We have to be ready for when the fight finds us that we don't choose.

Kevin, President Trump was asked about this yesterday in a brief gaggle that he did with some journalists. I want to play that clip and then ask you. about sort of the second beyond the practical implications of canceling exercises or limiting exercises like this, sort of the broader messages that this sends, particularly as it relates to U.S. allies. Today you said North Korea has something like 57 nuclear weapons. They've been expanding their nuclear program. Is your goal in trying to engage with Chairman Kim still denuclearization?

And what makes you think you could be successful now when you weren't? Well, I don't want to talk about that, but I do have a good relationship with Kim Jong-un. as you know, you've seen. He didn't like Biden. He didn't like Obama. He didn't like anybody, but he likes me. And I like, you know, I just got along with him very good. We had great meetings.

We speak. And I think our nation and I think other nations, frankly, whether it's Japan or South Korea, they're a lot safer if I'm president of somebody else's president. Again, a lot to discuss in that clip. I want to point out first that the question was about a reference that Donald Trump had made in an earlier public comment about North Korea having 57 nuclear weapons. That's news. Again, it's coming from President Trump.

We don't know if it's true or not. He says lots of things that aren't true. But if it's true, that would be tremendously significant piece of information to share with the public. Second, the follow question there was about denuclearization, which has been the goal of the United States foreign policy, both parties going back. decades. And President Trump seems to have, with a shrug of the shoulders, sort of given up on that as a foreign policy objective. You could make the argument that it was no longer a realistic foreign policy

objective, but it had been a bipartisan foreign policy objective. And then finally, Kevin, he talks about how U.S. allies are safer because Donald Trump is president. And he talks about that in the context of Kim Jong-un. You wrote a terrific piece about U.S. alliances a few months ago. We talked about it on this podcast, I wonder if you would give us a look at sort of whether that's true. Our U.S. allies comforted by the fact that Donald Trump is president. What are the implications of canceling or limiting exercises like this on alliances, both directly in the region and more broadly? One of the things that we have to, I think, deal with in a more forthright way, is the problem that in our major conflicts in the world, Trump is not on the United States side. He's essentially

on the other side. His sympathies really are with the autocratic regimes more than they are with our allies and with our way of doing things. You add that to his incompetence and you get this really very unstable mix. And people think that when I refer to Trump as being dumb and incompetent in these sorts of things that I'm just trying to be insulting, which I'm sure it's fun to insult the guy now, but his stupidity is a geopolitical factor and we have to keep it in mind. And let me tell you what I mean by that. So if he is trying to change the subject away from Iran, and are foundering there, we have to deal with maybe the fact

that the number one buyer of Iranian oil in the world right now is China, and we have two allies in that area that are really very helpful to us, Japan and South Korea, both of whom we are now pissing on from a great height, partly with the North Korea stuff,

partly with some other things. We've just announced sanctions against the head of the International Criminal Court, who's a Japanese national, and this is going to be a diplomatic problem between Japan and the United States. And we usually keep an aircraft carrier over there in Japan just to kind of sit on China. And we are dispatching that to the Middle East

now because we are in trouble over there because Pete Hagseth has never managed a logistical train more difficult than getting a full keg of beer to the Delta House at Princeton or whatever it was he was doing during those years. So we are in kind of a mess over there. We've got Japanese media reporting this morning that the Russians are getting ready to invest a tremendous amount of money in building a oil refinery in North Korea that will produce up to 300,000 tons of aviation. fuel and diesel a year, which is obviously partly a commercial lifeline for them, but also partly a military investment. So we're not really making our allies safer, contrary to what Trump says in that particular statement. And there's a reason that we're not making our allies safer

because he doesn't care about making our ally safer. He holds most of our allies in contempt. He sees them as being weak or as being freeloaders or as being, you know, at best, subordinate second bananas who are not being obsequious enough. and praising his administration enough. And it is interesting to me that for a guy who lies all the time, he's never got very good at lying. And he's never got very good at hiding the truth. And Trump responds almost exclusively to personal relationships,

flattery, vanity, perceived insults and things like that. And Kim knows how to work him, apparently. And he's facing all of the big strategic decisions on his personal relationship with this guy. who is, you know, the head of arguably the worst government in the world, certainly this kind of psychotic torture state that is millions and millions of people to horrible, horrible conditions, but he knows how to, you know, say nice things to Trump from time to time and keep the United States off his case for that reason. So we've got a huge challenge in that part of the world that isn't really North

Korea so much. I mean, North Korea is a challenge, but it's a relatively minor challenge. It wouldn't be on the map at all, if not from nuclear weapons, which is why we should care about proliferation and denuclearization and things like that. Although, as I've said before, I'm in some ways mildly pro-pro proliferation in some instances. I think Japan probably ought to have nuclear weapons, and that would give the Chinese something to worry about for the next 20 or 25 years. That would be a pretty good investment for us, I think. And I think the Japanese can probably be trusted to be reasonably responsible with those things,

and they are a pretty good ally, especially when we are not dramatically abusing them in humiliating public ways. So we are allowing ourselves to get our position upended by Trump's relationship with this little pissant nobody in North Korea while we are seriously jeopardizing our position, not only vis-a-vis China, but also in the Middle East, because, again, these people are incompetent and they don't know what they're doing, and they're driven by non-strategic considerations. So just go add just two quick things on this. One, sort of like I was saying before about Trump and how he undermines the intellectuals. intellectual defenders of nationalism by actually not understanding, you know, national interest for anybody in any other terms other than his own personal interest.

He also kind of be clowns a kind of left-of-center forum policy that conservatives used to mock relentlessly, right? The whole sort of, oh, John Kerry should be president because he's got these personal relationships with people all over the world kind of thing. Yeah. And, you know, you would get serious nationalist-oriented people. you know, like John Bolton, who would say personal relationships are great, but like you have to look at the underlying national interests of things,

because you're not going to get a lot of countries' leaders to do something flatly not in their national interest that could, and in some countries, get them killed if they went along with just because they're your buddy. And Trump throws all of that away, and everyone thinks he's like invented this idea of personal relationships between leaders when it is a form of foreign policy argument that we've been contending. It's not always stupid. It's probably good to have relationships, right? It's good to have friendships at a certain level. But those friendships are important for the purposes of persuasion.

Trump likes to talk about it as if, well, you wouldn't dare do that to me because I'm strong like bull, right? And no one would like, you know, defy me. And it's, first of all, it's been proven wrong over and over and over again, right? I mean, like, he says he has a great relationship with Xi, hasn't bought us in it very much. He says he has a great relationship with Putin, and that was going to allow him to end the war in 24 hours.

Hasn't turned into much. He never got anything actually out of North Korea from that first summit other than the photo ops that he thought were awesome. And then there's the second thing, you know, you talk to people in Trump world, or you talk to people who talk to people in Trump world, and the serious people, the sort of Elbridge Colby types,

you know, the people who were supposed to respect, who are, you know, supposed to be doing these really serious things and having really serious thoughts. What they'll say is that we're not anti-ally, but we want allies that can pull their own weight. Allies that can, like, deliver and be power multipliers for the United States. Within the four corners of the page of that argument, that's a solid argument. But the countries that they list as those kinds of allies are Israel, Poland, South Korea, and I feel like I'm missing one or two. but Hungary.

And the thing is, talk to the people in Poland. Go ask Radak Sikorski. The Foreign Minister of Poland, who used to be a National Review contributor and met him a few times. Ask him whether he thinks America is really, you know, getting Poland's back. Ask the South Koreans this week

if it really feels like them being model allies really pays off for them. Ask Bibi Netanyahu, who's like trying to figure out how in the world he can salvage a re-election bid when Trump wants Israel to sort of go along with this bogus Gaza peace deal. It's another one of these, don't take them seriously, don't take them literally, take them hypothetically.

If that's what Trump meant by this sort of like we want allies with who can punch above their weight and who can help out thing and he actually acted that way, that would be a defensible defense of their foreign policy. But it's not actually how he sees. It's like when we talked about the national security strategy, you know, defense department, And we talk about this. Whenever these things come out, it's like party platforms. You're like, how seriously should we take this thing?

You know, at least it tells us what the administration wants people to believe that they believe. And, you know, like, so at least at the level of rhetoric, it's kind of important. Was it within 24, 48 hours of that thing being released that he just started, you know, like, I don't think I mentioned Venezuela in there, whatever it was. It was like he started doing things that made it clear that not only had Trump not read the national security strategy. he hadn't been briefed on his own national security strategy. Yeah. Because like none of this the theoretical stuff matters to these guys.

It's whatever, you know, whatever, who the last person whispered in Trump's ear is, tell some, you know, so now he's out there tweeting stuff about making the Strait of Hormuz's U.S. territory. And he thinks it's hilarious and great because someone got in this ear a long time ago that the only way you get recorded in history is a great president or a great leader is if you acquire new territory. And he constantly talks that way, whether it's Canada, Greenland, Strait of Hormuzer. moves, Venezuela. Which is why we're back on Greenland this week, by the way. With this U.S. oil company

that's going to be drilling wells there, apparently without approval from the local government there. And Trump tweeting out, you know, his new Greenland dank memes and nat back in the news. So that's terrific. It's interesting that, you know, these other countries that we deal with, they often have nationalist leaders of their own. And of course, they have their own national honor and their own national interest. Trump seems to care a lot about the opinions of the anti-American nationalist leaders, Putin, these guys. The Prime Minister of Japan is a pretty nationalistic leader, too, who is actually pretty pro-American. And with this sanctions issue, we were just really, really putting her in a hard position. And she was asked, you know, how are you going to respond to the Americans on this?

And her administration was forced to put out this really, really weak, mealy-mouth response because they're afraid of doing very much more, which is going to weaken her position, and ultimately empower anti-American forces there, rather than pro-American forces, or at least empower forces that are less likely to be vocally pro-American when. matters. Well, we've put Japan in a bad spot before. Bridge Colby went over there and encouraged them to take a stronger stance against China. They released a statement saying they were going to stand up against China, and then the president berated them for it, saying that they were being unhelpful to his discussions with Xi. Going back to the model allies thing, we withdrew forces or announced a withdrawal

forces part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, which is meant to be a deterrent to the Russians from Poland. And we originally, after the outrage, the DOD came back and said, no, this was just a hiccup in the rotational forces are reviewing it, we're going to reimpose them. We have not done that. So the model ally who is spending more than anybody else in NATO, who's doing more to prepare for the Soviet threat, is being left in the lurch. And going back to Jonas' point about the interpersonal connections, I think it's important to remember, you know, there's this popular consensus that World War I, the world prior to World War I was a tinderbox that was just waiting for the spark and that the assassination of the Archduke was that spark. Ferguson and Wars of the World

points out that the markets didn't hiccup after Archduke Ferdinand's assassination. Everyone believed that these interpersonal connections of these cousins were going to sort it out, that the royal families who all knew each other and were relatives were going to sort it out. And instead, we got one of the world's largest conflagrations.

So going back to the 57 missiles, I know the president just says things off the cuff. And it might be true and it might be untrue. And either one is a problem because he might not think it's a significant thing, but we have just told the North Koreans, or they assume what we believe their inventory is. If we are wrong, they believe they've fooled us. If we are right, we have given a way that we have means of collecting on them. Either one is a problem, and they show the president's carelessness

with national security. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we will be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September, September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in.

First, before we move on to the substance, Kevin, have you ever, been in charge of the logistics of getting a keg to a fraternity party because I can tell you as the one-time social chairman of the Zai chapter of Sigma Chi fraternity, that is really hard. And I do think I could be Secretary of Defense having done that successfully at repeated parties over the course of two semesters. How many push-ups can you do in a roast teeth? I mean, what's the time interval between them? But if you need a keg a beer, I was pretty, I was pretty, I was pretty sysheap. getting that. We should also point out just a matter. Bridge Colby, the person we keep referring to Elbridge Colby is the deputy undersecretary of Defense, Under Secretary of War in the Trump administration's

parlance. He is a sort of leading actual and intellectual on the new right and was thought to be the sort of the architect of this supposed pivot to Asia, which is not happening. And a leading restrainer is, I think, the phrase that we're supposed to use. Restrainer, right. And it got to, walking around with a name that sounds like a villain from an Iron Rann novel. Back to the, what the hell is an Elbridge? We get gerrymandering from an Elbridge, right? That's true. That's true. Elbridge Jerry. Oh, Gary. Back to Mike's point. It's not just the case that when the president says something like they have 57 nuclear weapons now, that he's revealing something. What it is and how the North Koreans will hear it is one thing. Certainly, if we were working with liaison intelligence services who

helped provide some of that intelligence, they will hear that and perhaps be less inclined to help us learn these things in the future. But also, the Iranians are paying attention to this. And they look at the president of the United States paying such sort of public deference to a hostile dictator. I mean, we have been engaged in rhetorical hostilities with the North Koreans for years as they have built up their weapons programs. And the main lesson that the Iranians have to be taking from this is, we need nukes. This is what you get. If you have nukes, we have deference. The president talks about them in this way. If we're looking at the big picture, I'm sort of a global level, and you think about where we are in this war with Iran. And Jonah, you brought up the wag the dog scenarios.

There is a lot of public speculation that that's what the president was doing here. And I'm with you. I don't like to engage in that speculation. I thought usually it was unfounded when Republicans accused Bill Clinton of doing this or Barack Obama doing this. I thought it was unfair when Democrats accused George W. Bush of doing this because I think there was some just basic assumption that as much as they cared about their own political standing, they cared at some level about what's good for the United States. It's harder, just candidly, to give that benefit of that out to this president, having seen

him act the way that he's at. acted. And also, there's reporting, right? I mean, like, going back to his first term, there's, like, Maggie Haberman and other people have reported, if he goes more in two or three days without seeing his name in the front page of the newspaper, he does something to get his name on the front page of the newspaper. Yes. There was a wag the dog theory that he started the Iran war to change the subject from affordability, you know, and like, here we are. Well, even if it's not about changing the subjects, I mean, I've mentioned this before on this podcast, but if you go back to June of 2025 and the strikes that he participated in after the

Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities, I think there's a very solid case to be made based on conversations that I had and a lot of reading that I think we all did, that one of the main reasons he decided to join in was because he was envious of the attention that Benjamin Netanyahu was getting for having done this and looking strong and looking bold. And when he was taking, there was a morning when he took a series of phone calls from reporters. They called them up early in the morning, and this is after the Netanyahu strikes. And he went on and on about how strong BB went and how great this was. And I think there's a reasonable conclusion to be drawn that that was at least a factor here. But I wonder, as we think about this, I mean, you know, we've talked about how two and a half

years left, slightly less than two and a half years left of Donald Trump's, at least constitutional time in office. How much of this lives beyond Trump? You know, I think it was the case that in the first term, our allies could look at things like this and say, like, wow, this was this sort of convulsion of electoral insanity in the United States, and at some point, things will go back to status quo ante, and whatever disruptions there have been in these alliances will smooth them over after a while. now you have things like this. You haven't seen many Republicans come out and support the president rhetorically in his saying of these things. But Kevin, how much of a lasting impact does this have?

I mean, I think there's a cascading effect on a number of different fronts. But how much, just in terms of our allies, are they worried that this outlives Donald Trump? Well, I think they worry that it outlives Donald Trump because it will outlive Donald Trump because this is part of a broader bipartisan attitude. Now, I think one of the few saving graces of having a personality like Trump's is that a lot of the drama of this period will stick to him rather than to the country. So when we think about our relationship with Cuba, for example, we really think mainly about our history with Castro. When we think about our relationship with China, on the other hand, we don't really mainly think about our relationship with Xi. Because our relationship with China has been complicated and will be difficult, irrespective of whoever the guy. at the top is. So I suspect that when Trump goes, if Trump goes, we'll see about that,

since Steve brought up the constitutional limits issue and the non-certainty of his leaving office, I think that our allies will look at that as a moment of opportunity and a chance to, gosh, I hate the word reset, just because of the way it's been used in the U.S.-Russia relationship, but they will be looking to push that big, that big red misspelled reset button. They'll be looking to push, and there might be an opportunity for that. But, you know, a lot of the economic nationalism stuff, this was the theme of Barack Obama's presidency. There's a reason Joe Biden kept those tariffs. The idea that the United States should be filling potholes in Schuigan rather than spending money policing the South China Sea or the Middle East or investing in our military capabilities around the world is very much a bipartisan issue.

You particularly hear that around election time, but it's also it's something that goes on. between elections as well, the kind of, you know, Joe Biden Midwestern blue-collar branch of the Democratic Party to this extent that it still exists very much, thinks in terms that are certainly legibly Trumpian, if not quite as, you know, vulgar or toxically expressed most of the time that every dollar we spend on this stuff, it's money that's not being used to fund a Social Security check or a welfare benefit or an infrastructure project here at home. So we do tend, I think, nationally to undervalue these relationships and to resent our

outlays on maintaining these capabilities more than we should. That's particularly true of the populist elements in both parties and both of the major political tendencies. So if our allies want to successfully reset that, they're going to need to do some bipartisan outreach, they're going to need to do some educational work on helping people to understand that trade is good for the United States. United States, that having a big U.S. footprint in the global security order actually really does serve American interests because it gives us lots of choices and alternatives and capacities for

dealing with crises and emergencies, both of the military and economic nature, which we will be continually facing for the next, you know, thousand years or whatever our foreseeable future is. Thousand years, this is the most optimism I've had from Kevin in a long time. Well, we're building a million-year granite seal for the landing zone at the White House. So we have an optimistic outlook. Yes. Thanks, Mike. I was doing my very best not to talk about the granite seal and the repairs at the White House and the new hell of bad that the president is so taken with.

But I'm glad we made at least passing mention. Well, if we're mad about the cost of doing military exercises with the South Koreans, it might be worth thinking about all the money we're spending on ballrooms and redecorating. and all these first lady projects that Trump spends his days busy with. So just very quickly on that point, because something when Mike was talking about, was saying about replaying greatest hits from the first term in North Korea, it also explains in part why, I mean, just yesterday on Wednesday, he took the press on a big tour through the construction site, right?

He is falling back on stuff that he is confident. He knows how to talk about, that he feels like he's got expertise, that he can withstand follow-up questions on, right? And that's like construction and how he's about the lifespan of grass, about the shape of flagpoles, right? And I was just to say,

I think that makes sense in a political way, in a psychological way. It's also just in a medical way. It's like old people, they start doing that. It's like old people start moving the conversation to things they've been obsessed with for 50 years, you know, It happened with my parents, you know, just like this is their comfort zone.

This is their muscle memory. And I think it's happening a lot with Trump and not just for political reasons. The next time I hear Jonas say, as I've been arguing for 30 years now, I'm going to remind him of this part of the conversation. And nurse, let me tell you another thing about Napoleon III. This Jello sucks. I'm going to bring in Napoleon the Third everywhere we can. Mike, before we move on to Not Worth Your Time today, I want to ask you. about the continuing coverage of the depletion of U.S. stockpiles.

I think it's sometimes hard, even if you sort of read all of the reporting on this, to have a proper understanding of what it means and how significant this is. There was a very good summary published by the Council on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Munitions, what they are calling the U.S. munitions crisis. And they get fairly specific referencing a study done by the Deputy Assistant, Secretary of Defense for forced development and emerging capabilities in the Biden administration. But they got specific about some of these. So let me give you a few of the things that they reported. And then I want to ask your reaction. This is mostly with respect to the weapons we've

used in the context of Iran. The author here says the numbers are eye-opening. More than 1,500 Patriot Air Defense interceptors have been fired so far, with fewer than 830 interceptors remaining in the entire U.S. inventory. Roughly 40% of the 452 terminal high-altitude area defense, Tad ballistic missile interceptors available at the war's start, have been fired, leaving fewer than 280 in the arsenal today. The stockpile of Tomahawk cruise missiles has fallen from about 3,000 at the start of the war to approximately 2,000 today, a decline of about a third,

stocks of missiles for the attackums, Army tactical missile. systems, as well as stocks of precision strike missiles, have been nearly exhausted and finally roughly 25% of MQ9 Reaper drones have been shot down or lost. Can you help put that in context for us? How much does that matter? I will point out that the study also found that more of our sort of old school traditional weapons are intact. Those stockpiles are intact. But the question is if we're not using them in this conflict, will we be using them in future conflicts? Help us understand what this means. Well, so this is a bad indicator of obviously some of the more exquisite weapons that we have on hand

that we have relied on so heavily for this conflict. And it speaks to the way that the president and the secretary have chosen to try to fight this war from a distance, to try to reduce risk as much as possible. The Atacom's missiles, the prison missiles that we've talked about as an offensive capability are long-range strike capabilities that are meant to use for standoff, not mentioned in your lead in from CSIS, also the Jasm's, which is an air-launch standoff munition. We've used a lot of those. And then a lot of our force protection, the interceptors that we talked about, obviously the Patriots

and the Thads. One note, if you remember, Secretary Rubio, when the administration finally kind of coalesced on reasons for why now, he came up with this rationale that they were starting to produce missiles that would outstrip our ability to maintain them or offset them with interceptors. Well, now we've made that problem worse because of our use of interceptors against not only the ballistic missiles that they fired, but also some of the drone capabilities that they fired against us and our allies. So this is, it's a blinking red light, but it's a particularly a blinking red light for the way we've chosen to fight this war. As you pointed out, a lot of our old traditional

munitions are relatively intact. And we saw, with the outset of the Ukraine war, that while we've talked a lot about innovations in drone technology that the Ukrainians have used against the Russians. Early in the war, one of the key munitions that they needed were 1-55 artillery munitions, regular, unguided, indirect fires, right? Which, you gotta go to a shout-out, that's how I started my career in the Army as an artilleryman.

So, you know, still the king of battle. If we fight the next big one, so to speak, it's going to require a layering of all these capabilities, not only these exquisite munitions that we lead the way in, not only innovations in the smaller but technically innovative drone technologies the Ukrainians are leading the way, but also in the old grinding ways of fighting wars that are ugly and brutal and cause a lot of casualties. And the president, once again, we have taken 18 killed in this conflict, and all of those are tragedies, and he has tried to resist those as much as possible because he does not want to pay the costs of a war that he chose to enter into.

that has meant that we have depleted these munitions in a significant way. And while we've talked about, you know, these existing conventional munitions being well-stocked, it's important to also point out that we've seen the strain on our naval forces, the carrier strike groups that one of them, because one was stationed in the Caribbean Sea as part of Operation Southern Spear, the counter-drugboats, that took us a while to start the war against Iran, And as opposed to time when the protests were taking place, we had to steam a CSG back into the Middle East

because, just like we've done in the Pacific now, we had withdrawn the CSG that had carrier strike group that had traditionally been there to maintain stability. We've seen that ship when it first got there was under significant strain, the USS Roosevelt. Now the USS Lincoln has been under strain, widely reported. Part of the problem is the DoD has countered stories about the strain with just claiming everything is a lie.

We saw Admiral Cooper come back from visiting the Lincoln and say that while the situation seems to be ameliorated now, it was significant about a month ago when these stories were originally reported in the DOD claim they were all lies. This is significant because some of our overseas logistics hubs were struck, and it shows the difficulties in power projection, which returns to the importance of maintaining our alliances, maintaining our presence in foreign countries, maintaining good relationships with those foreign countries that host our forces. and we're doing more to hinder those. So this is not just a blinking red light because of our diminished precision munitions and our more exquisite munitions. It's a blinking red light for the way that we would need to fight wars in the future

and we are unprepared on multiple fronts. And it seems obviously we're a long way from these two-war capability that guided our thinking or strategic thinking through much of the Cold War and beyond and well beyond. I don't want to go all like 1980s Tom Clancy novel here, but on the 57-19,

missiles thing. One of the things the government sometimes do is put out 10 different versions of a report with different details in each one, particularly very paranoid governments, see which one leaks and then kill all those people. Right. Any chance that we just screwed up like our entire intelligence gathering apparatus in North Korea? I think that's highly possible. I mean, North Korea is incredibly paranoid. It doesn't even have to be accurate. We've seen that Kim Jong-un will kill people, you know, by strapping them to artillery pieces and blowing them apart. So I think that's highly likely that he purges people. And it's funny that you mentioned Tom Clancy, because I believe he's the one who coined the phrase for that term,

the canary trap. Yeah. Not great. Just because it hasn't come up, we should also just at least acknowledge there are reports that the U.S. has managed to open up a southern lane in the Strait of Wormuz and there's more oil getting out than has previously been recorded.

I'm open to correction about that, Mike, if you are nuanced about it. But like, it sounds as if the Trump administration has stumbled backwards into a status quo that is putting more pressure on Iran, then they can put on us for the time being, and that could change for sure. It doesn't help that we threaten to bomb them on because they're working out their own side deal with the Iranians or anything like that.

But it's just a fluid thing. And one of the things about a bull in the china shop is that sometimes the bull in the china shop does stuff you like or works out something convenient, you know, sometimes the millionth monkey banging out of a typewriter produces something interesting. So all I'm saying is that the Strait of Ormoo moves. oil supply thing looks less dire than I think it did the last time we talked about all of this. I agree that we are finally in, I think, the best of all potentially bad options. This is still going to cause economic strain and maintain high prices for American consumers. But yes, the president,

at least in his most recent communication, I think it was yesterday, so Wednesday, saying we are going to reimpose or use maximum economic pressure to strangle Iran as much as possible. and use our ability to flow through the straight as best we can, I think that is the best of all possible outcomes, that it just locks in for the long-term kind of grinding economic toll against them that will still have pain for us, but we can endure it greater than they can. I do think at least what was available in open-source tracking, I believe it was nine ships made it through the straight yesterday, so Wednesday. So we're at about, again, some may turn their beacons off, some may be surreptitious.

That's the claim. They're claiming there's like 10. million barrels a day are actually making it through this southern path. Right. It's, I don't know. It's hard to know. Right. So what is openly reported is about 10% of volume compared to pre-war. So let's just assume it's better than that, even if it's 50%. That's good news compared to where we were. Still not great. Like I said, still going to incur greater prices for American consumers. But again, that is probably the best way forward, rather than trying to bring about regime change from a distance or impose some kind of toll that the Iranians,

are willing to endure through military force, especially as we're diminishing our munitions. And on the flip side, the Iranians are now reporting a Wall Street Journal thinking about expanding, going more on offense against us and doing more stuff in the homeland. So it can all get worse. Homeland, Europe, elsewhere.

Right. Yeah, and what it implies, certainly, is that there is no quick end. I mean, the president has kept saying that he wants this to be over, his political advisors are to taun him. We need some progress before the mid-term. that's plainly not going to happen.

And this approach suggests a much longer term strategy, maybe a better longer term strategy, because I don't think there was much of a strategy before then. But the president did announce on Wednesday that we would hit Iran with an, quote, economic D-day and called it promising the most crushing economic operation ever against Iran. There are two things to be said about that. One, he says things like this every day, so it's hard to know whether to take them seriously or not.

And two, my first reaction upon seeing this is, why haven't we been doing this since day one of this conflict? Are we just now going to push them as hard as we can on economic terms? Lots of outstanding questions. We will definitely be going deeper on those questions and Iran generally in a subsequent dispatch podcast episode. running out of attackums, we're running out of jasms, we're probably running out of stacombs. You're making me hungry. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles.

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Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. So not worth your time today. We've had an uncommon number of references on this podcast during this discussion so far to the 1980s. And this is not planned. Kevin says he doesn't want to go all 1980s in Tom Clancy on us. Joan was talking about replaying those old greatest hits from the Cold War. Mike mentioned back in the 1980s when the U.S. military was engaged in exercises called

reformer. Well, there's other news, sad news related to the 1980s that I hate to bring you now. Kevin, I could have used a People magazine piece to bring you this news, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to instead rely on NPR reporting about the demise of Columbia Records. I don't know if any of you have seen this, but Columbia Records, for those who are really much younger than we are, Columbia Records used to have these deals where for one penny you could order sometimes it was eight, sometimes it was 10. I think the most common number was 12 tapes or records, later CDs. Apparently they went through in an effort to stay in business over the past decade. They also did DVDs after having abandoned music, but it's no longer in operation.

They announce that they are going to be shutting down. So my question to each of you, and I will say in advance of asking this question that I do it with some hesitation since Mike has already announced that he thinks Aba was a better band than the Beatles. I don't really want to bring that up, but we're going to invite Mike to participate just as well as the others. Kevin, did you participate in Columbia Records ordering? And if you did, what would have been a typical Kevin, Williamson order in the late 1980s. And if you did not, what would you have done if you had participated? Gosh, I don't want to sound like Mr. Hipster. I was too cool for that. But in the late 1980s, I don't think the stuff I was listening to you could have got from the Columbia Record Club, probably. Sounds like Mr. Hipster had a too cool for you. I know, I know. But that sort of 80s hardcore punk music I was listening to doesn't really, didn't really happen in the Columbia Record Club.

Someone in my family did order from that, though. I don't think it was me. It might have been my older brother or someone, but at the age of like nine or ten when they were not authorized to be making financial decisions. And getting it undone, as I recall, was sort of like canceling a gem membership,

you know? It took an act of Congress, I think. It was like getting into West Point. You had a senator send you a recommendation. Some other sorts of things like that. So no, I don't, I'm sorry, I don't have a whole lot to say about this other than the model of sign up for this thing now. And it looks like a really good deal, but it's going to be with you for the rest of your life has not exactly gone away, has it? Right.

It has become now how every business operates, including ours. We allow people to cancel their subscriptions if they want to. We do not make it hard for people to cancel their subscriptions. It is true. We do not. That has been a guiding principle. Yes. Wait till Declan has his way.

Yeah. Aba, huh? Gosh, I'm suddenly on Pete Hexeth's side about everything. You guys really are. So you have to, Kevin, you have to give us at least the name of a band or two. Even if you couldn't get them on Columbia, because now people will be wondering, what were these hardcore punk bands Kevin was listening to back in the 1980s? Well, as I have written a few times that people always push back against this, even though I'm

obviously right about this, the best rock and roll album, ever. made was the bad brains eye against eye, and it still remains unsurpassed. It is, it is far and away the best rock album ever made. So a lot of the stuff I was listening to back then were a lot of it was kind of Washington, D.C. base around this label called Discord Records, which was associated with bands like Minor Threat, and later Fugazi, both featuring Ian McKay. Sort of black flag, Henry Rollins is sort of in that part of that universe, and I still listen to that stuff a whole lot, even though Henry stopped making music. He's still doing his spoken word tours and things. but no longer doing music.

I like some of the older punk stuff I was listening to then, you know, the clash, kind of the more, you know, more familiar stuff that you might have seen on MTV, that sort of thing. I actually, you know, there's this like sort of a standing joke like, you know, I saw Husker Do opening for whatever back in the wind. I actually did see Husker do in Lubbock, Texas

at a place called the Virgin Club, I think it was. And it was some ungodly ticket cost for, for me anyway. I think it was $20 or something, which was just unheard of to get into a show in Lubbock. But, no, I was pretty involved in music, that point. For various reasons, I happened to be someone who owned a PA, and so people who organized touring punk bands to come to Lubbock sometimes had to borrow my gear to have them play shows on. In fact, I just read that someone from, one of the women from L7 just passed away, and I believe

they played a show on my gear in Lubbock when they're in their very early days. So, yep, that was me back then. Kevin is a gearhead least surprising revelation of the podcast. Jonah, did Columbia records ever have to come after you and try to get payment for the other thing? The deal was you'd get these 12 for a penny, and then you'd have to commit to buying, you know, whatever it was, six. Five a year. This is why Jonah doesn't live in New York anymore. He had to leave. That's right. I mean, he is in hiding. He lives in this one-bedroom apartment that no one's ever heard of. Yeah, he's still hiding out from the Columbia Mafia. He can finally come out of

hiding now. The best thing about this news is I'm going to stop getting these texts and phone calls from these people. You know, you still owe us for that Jay Giles band out of. Yes, Jay Giles Band. There The first record I ever bought was a single of a Jay Giles band's centerfold, 45s back then still. So I would say Jay Giles Band was like that was, so I was very influenced by my brother's taste in music. And so it's very difficult for me to say what I was getting that wasn't sort of a little earlier than it should have been my age stuff because my brother was more interested in, you know, he was a couple years older and he had his own eclectic taste. but I would say a typical Columbia House package for me would be the kinks. Yes. Jay Giles Band.

Love the kinks. Maybe the Ramones. Probably the last one I ever probably would have gotten from it would be something like not sort of Peter Gabriel like first solo kind of thing. In dire straits. That was probably the end of my era of doing that kind of stuff. but like early era would be like Billy Joel kind of stuff. I was never a Springsteen guy because that came from Jersey

and New Yorkers know what to think of Jersey. And, you know, I'm trying to think. I feel like there's an obvious one. Like I remember I really didn't listen to the Beatles very much until like late high school. I didn't listen to the Stones really until college. I had just a really completely random taste in music. Mike, I come to you with great hesitation.

were you ordering, on the one hand, Fugazi and on the other Abba albums? Well, since everyone wants to hate on my Abba opinions, I guess you could say to defer to Kevin's that you don't want to hear it, which is a minor threat song. So I actually, Aba is an outlier. I just happened to think they're a great band that did disco music in the 70s. But it's funny you mentioned Jonah getting the Ramones. My first Ramones record came via Columbia Music House.

It was part of my initial tranche before I got hooked and had to constantly like send back the record to get my money back because they sent me like napalm death or something I didn't want at the time. I was not yet into napalm death. But I was a member. I do remember it being... Ain't no way Columbia since you napalm'd death. They did. Well, because you had to like specify your genre.

Really? And so I signed up for metal thinking because I was into Guns of Roses that I was going to like what they... I was a middle school kid. And they sent me all kinds of crazy stuff that I at the time did not have an appreciation. Now I feel like this is a huge missed opportunity. Gosh. Well, I mean, again, they did not carry Discord

because Discord famously did not put UPC symbols on their records. But I do have to defend myself a little bit. I will point out, I'm going to show you something. This is Brian Baker, bass player for minor threat, who you said you love. And later, guitar player for Bad Religion,

my favorite band, wearing an ABA T-shirt. So there you go. Oh, my God. That's unbelievable. Bringing it all around. That's right. Hell of a guitar player, Brian Baker.

He is. I have two of his picks right over there on display that I got from the bad religion show. My ears are still ringing from seeing bad religion in 1992 or whatever it was, but I still don't think that excuses the opinion. And I say this as somebody who didn't disagree with you on your broader point on the Beatles in a previous not worth your time discussion. Early Bee Gees before they did disco were actually pretty cool. I think it's okay for Abbott to be on the list. It can't be super high. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's no need to argue now that all is said and done.

So that's a novel lyric, by the way. You're making all these references that we are, that I'm so proud to say, I'm not picking up on any of them. Yeah. But, you know, in fairness, in the 70s, you know, KISS was making disco albums, too. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I have to clarify, I grew up in Europe for eight years when my dad was in the army over there. Abba permeated my youth.

It was on in stores, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. I mean, I guess I'd give you a little. I mean, you think about what the soundtrack of World Vision is. If you grew up in Europe, it's that crap all over the place. And Ob is actually kind of hardcore compared to some of the crap. They won Eurovision. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For Waterloo. Nobody with early hip-hop, no run DMC, Eric B and Rakim, none of that. I was a public enemy fan, certainly. Public enemy, yeah, public enemy. Ice tea. So. I didn't get into Rout. until Dre dropped the chronic in 92.

And so by then, I was past my Columbia Records days. Ice tea, yeah, I listened to a lot of Ice-T. It is funny to see him doing like catheter commercials or whatever he's doing. Age is cruel to us all. It is. Well, I do think Columbia Records is still coming after me somehow. My friends and I used to order each other records and sign them up. So we'd send them 12 just by filling out the form.

and we got each other in a bunch of credit trouble because we'd order them the albums. The albums would come and then Columbia would go after them forever. Maybe not the best, but we were teenage boys. What do you expect? That's it for today. Thank you all for joining us, and we will see you next time. And finally, if you want to support what we're doing here,

you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. Speaking of support, here's a shout-out to a few folks who recently joined as founding lifetime members, Laura Edney, Ted Timmons, and Rob Word. Glad to have you aboard. One quick note, we're ending our founding lifetime membership offer at the end of August.

If you're interested in supporting the dispatch and enjoying a lifetime of dispatch editorial goodness, please join us as a dispatch founding lifetime member today. 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 from people who like Abba. That's good to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible.

Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer.

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