The Ezra Klein Show - Trump’s Head-on-a-Pike Foreign Policy

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

Two sitting heads of state, eight weeks apart. On Saturday, February 28, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran that resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with much of his senior command. This came less than two months after the United States military captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid. The president seems to believe that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors without events spinning out of his control. Is he right? Ben Rhodes is a New York Times Opinion contributing writer and a co-host of “Pod Save the World.” He served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and worked on the Iran nuclear deal. In this conversation, we discuss the ongoing conflict in Iran, how Democrats should respond, and whether Trump’s “head on a pike” approach to foreign policy underestimates the chaos of war. Mentioned: “Push from Saudis, Israel helped move Trump to attack Iran” by Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson, Karen DeYoung, Natalie Allison and Souad Mekhennet “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars” by J.D. Vance Book Recommendations: From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig Travelers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Over the weekend, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran. Within hours, Aytola al-Hamani was dead, along with much of his senior command. As I record this on Monday, March 2nd, the Iranian Red Crescent says over 550 people have been killed in the bombings. We know of at least six American service members who have been killed. There will likely be more as the war rages on. There appears to have been a girl school that was bombed. The pictures from that. The grief of the parents is it's almost unbearable.

to look at. I just think it's so important to say it's not all geopolitics. These are people, civilians, their lives, their homes, their children. The attack on Iran came less than two months after the United States military captured Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid on his compound in Caracas. America has deposed two sitting heads of state eight weeks apart. I have seen a lot of commentary accusing Donald Trump of hypocrisy. After all, he ran against wars of regime change, and now he is changing regimes left and right. We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change, wars around the globe, senseless war. The job of the United States military is to defend America

from attack and invasion here at home. But I think this is not quite a policy of regime change. There's not America invading Iraq or Afghanistan and restructuring the government ourselves. Mardra's regime was left intact, aside from him. In an interview with the Times, Trump said that, quote, what we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario. He said, everybody's kept their job except for two people. Trump has called for the Iranian people to rise up against their government, but he's also said he intends to resume talks with the existing Iranian regime.

He said he had a few choices for who might lead Iran next, but they appeared have been killed in the initial bombings. The Iranian regime was monstrous, but Trump is not insisting that it be changed, nor is he committing the ground forces necessary to change it. I don't think what we're seeing here is a policy of regime change. I would call this head on a pike foreign policy. America is proving that we can easily reach into weaker countries and kill or capture their heads of state. We will not be dissuaded from doing that by international law or fear of unforeseen consequences or the difficulty of persuading the American people or the United States Congress of. the need for war. On that, we won't even try. We don't particularly care who replaces the people we

killed. We will not insist that they come from outside the regime, nor if they are elected democratically. We care merely that whoever comes next fears us enough to be compliant when we make a demand, that they know that they might be the next head on a pike. Trump's belief appears to be that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors and do so without events spinning out of his control. He appears to believe that it was idiocy or cowardice or a lawy respect for international rules that prevented his predecessors from replacing foreign leaders they loathed with more pliable subordinates. Trump is a man who has not read much history, but who certainly intends to make it. But what if Iran is not Venezuela? What if the Iranian people rise up as Trump has asked him to do

and are slaughtered by the Iranian military? What if it descends into civil war as happened in Iraq, where America had troops on the ground and yet hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed? What if it goes the way of Libya or Yemen or Syria? Who will pay the cost if he's wrong? Ben Rhodes is a political analyst, a New York Times opinion-contributing writer, and the co-host of the podcast POD Save the World.

He served as a senior advisor to President Barack Obama. He joins me now. As always, my email, Ezra Klein Show at NYUTimes.com. Ben Rhodes, welcome to the show. Good to see, Ezra. So you served in the Obama administration. It was the policy of that administration that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Bibi Netanyahu was the prime minister of Israel at that time, been around a long time.

He was pushing very hard for America to attack Iran, destroys nuclear capabilities, maybe change its regime. Why didn't you do that then? Because we were worried about what the potential cost and consequences of a military action could be, what it could unleash across the region, kind of a version of what we're seeing. kind of a version of what we're seeing, just a lot of unpredictability. And frankly, we thought that the principal U.S. security interest in Iran was the nuclear program. That doesn't mean we didn't take seriously its support for proxies and its ballistic missile program, but the existential issue to us was the nuclear program. So if you could resolve that diplomatically and avoid a war, that was preferable to the alternative.

And a lot of people actually complained that we made that argument. You may remember, Ezra, that it's either a war or diplomatic agreement. and tragically, you know, here we are. What were you worried about what happened? You said a version of what we're seeing play out now, but, you know, if you're in the U.S., you're seeing reports of missiles being fired in all directions, but it doesn't seem completely out of control,

at least at this moment. So talk me through the scenarios you all considered then. Well, it's interesting. We did, you know, war games, essentially, scenario planning, right, where you anticipate what might happen in the event of a military conflict. And, you know, part of what I'd just say at a macro level is having been through Iraq and Afghanistan

and Libya and the Obama administration, we'd just seen the uncertainties that are unleashed in any kind of military conflict in the region. And even in the case where you bombed Iran's nuclear facilities, first and foremost, what we determined is you couldn't destroy the Iranian nuclear program from the air. They know how to do this. They know the nuclear fuel cycle.

they could rebuild. And so at best, if you're trying to deal with the nuclear program, at best, you could set it back in a very successful strike, maybe a year, right? And what are the risks that you're taking? You're taking the risk that Iran will strike, as we're seeing now, try to strike out and lash out at U.S. military facilities across the region, try to strike out at energy infrastructure, which could be very difficult for the global economy, strike Gulf Allies, strike civilian populations in Israel. And so you could have a situation where you essentially have a regional war instead of just, you know, you bomb the nuclear program and get out. I think inside of Iran, there was just also the question of if the regime were to implode in some fashion, what happens next? The likelihood

was that you could have protracted civil conflict. And we've seen all of the unpredictability that can unleash in terms of refugee flows or conflict migrating across borders. And we didn't see some pathway to, you know, a quick transition to a democratic Iran or a different kind of stable government there. So when you weighed the risks of a military action against the benefits of, you know, but setting back the Iranian nuclear program a year, it just didn't seem worth it. I think Donald Trump believes he has figured something out that has alluded his predecessors, which is that you can change these regimes without changing the regime. You can capture Maduro, you can use air power to kill Khmerini. And what you're going to do next is not insist

on democracy, is not insist on rebuilding something you like. You are going to simply insist on somebody who is afraid enough of you, that they are more pliable when it matters. That what you've created is not exactly a puppet, but someone who is inclined to follow your orders when you give them, and that maintains a limit on how involved you need to be. Is he right? Has he figured something out? I don't think he's right. I think you're right that he believes that he's figured this out, but I think there's a number of flaws with his thinking. I mean, the first thing in the case of Iran is this, for all the focus on Hamene, who was a reprehensible leader, and by the way, I'm not sure how many years he had left. If we're just decapitating him, I mean, time was about to do

that. But this is a deep, deep regime with ideological institutions that go far beyond even, you know, the Chavista regime in Venezuela, right? Because what you're talking about is he's sitting on top of this edifice that has been built since the 1979 revolution that includes millions of people under arms, right? The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the RGC, the Basij militias that are usually responsible for the crackdowns that we see when they're peaceful protests, the Iranian military police, there's a lot of depth to this regime. So taking out even the Supreme Leader doesn't in any way change the regime. And in fact, if you talk about people that might be afraid, you know, the IRC has sometimes been kind of more hard line, even certainly than the political leadership that Americans

usually see in things like negotiations. And then it's also the case, you know, Trump thinks, I truly believe, you know, he kind of thinks in news cycle increments. So, you know, I'll kill someone to look like we changed the regime. We got rid of the bad guy. We kind of slayed the dragon here. And there's no, you know, what happens in one year and three years and five years? I mean, I'll be self-critical here, Ezra. Like, you remember the Libya intervention.

We did the same thing, essentially. Gaddafi was killed through a mixed, well, there was an airstrike, and then he was killed by people on the ground. Terrible guy, reprehensible leader. When that regime was removed, nothing was able to fill the vacuum. except for the most heavily armed people in Libya, which were a series of different militias. And that civil war spread across borders, and suddenly that part of North Africa

becomes an arms bizarre, conflict is spreading to neighboring states. So if the regime itself stays in Iran, I don't think it's fundamentally different just because Chaminé is not there. And if the regime implodes completely, I worry about Libya type situation at scale because this is a much bigger country, right, with over 90 million people.

So, you know, Trump, the Venezuela operation, I think, I saw that and it made me worried about this. One of the things you have heard repeatedly from Donald Trump is an exhortation to the Iranian people that now is your chance. We have degraded this regime. You are being supported by air power. Rise up and take back your country. I think Trump said this will be your only chance for generation. What do you hear when you hear that? I hear something that is incredibly reckless. And, you know, we already saw when he was truth posting, help is on the way a few weeks ago.

And Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, was similarly saying, go to the streets. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of Iranians, were killed. when they did go to the streets. By the regime. By the regime. And you cannot protect those people from the air, right? I mean, let's say there's an uprising,

and let's say all the remaining instruments of the Iranian regime start to massacre those people. We can bomb more regime targets. But at a certain point, you kind of run out of that. And you're just talking about people on the ground with small arms, right? And it just, I'm tremendously sympathetic to the Iranian people and what they've been through. I would love for them to have a different government. But, you know, I'll say this is the Obama guy.

Like, hope is not a strategy. Just going out there and saying, I'm bombing your country. I mean, this is part of what's so disturbing to me about this, Ezra, is that they don't have any capacity to articulate an endgame. And so I think people have to recognize, and I had to learn this, you know, the hard way through the Arab Spring. Just because we want a different government, doesn't mean that that's easy to execute.

And frankly, I think Iran was changing, albeit not at the pace that we want. The women life freedom movement succeeded in some ways. It didn't change the regime, but you talked to people in that region and the society was changing. Women were starting to go around uncovered. Some of the veneer of the regime had been punctured.

Chamini was old. He was going to die. Like the capacity, for the Iranian people themselves to change that regime over time, even though that's not on the timeline that people want, I think would have been a better bet than just saying we're going to drop a bunch of bombs and rise up

because there's just not a formula. I mean, Ezra's thinking about this. Everybody's focused on the American regime-changed-led operations, as they should, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, in that part of the world. It's not just those regimes that have had trouble. Sudan had a popular uprising. at Sudan today, you know, or Egypt had a popular uprising in the Obama years, and, you know, Mubarak

ended up getting replaced by a more repressive leader. And so we keep seeing in these scenarios that the toppling of an authoritarian government can lead either to chaos or to further repression, and that's my concern. There's a profound, I think, confusion in what Trump has been saying, because at the same time that he is saying, rise up Iranian people, this is your moment. He's also saying that he had three people in mind to lead the regime after this, but now they're all dead, it turns out, so maybe it's not going to be them. He's also said that he is willing to be in talks with the existing regime. They were playing it too cute before, but he's happy to talk now.

And so there is this way in which he is simultaneously signaling an openness and eagerness to see a bottom-up revolt and also a willingness to cut a deal with. what remains so long as they, you know, get the deal they wanted, which is no nuclear program, no enrichment, probably no more ballistic missiles program, a couple other things. But those two signals going out at the same time seems worrisome to me. It seems very worrisome because it projects an incoherence to your policy. And to your head on the pike strategy, when I hear Trump say that, I hear someone who would like this to be over as soon as possible. But the reality is the Iranians get a vote on whether it's over. And what they know, for instance, is U.S.

munitions, particularly our air defense systems, are going to run lower and lower and lower. And in a way, they may be able to hit more targets the longer this goes. I mean, the best case scenarios, because I was trying to, as someone who's been critical, I want to inhabit the best case scenarios, right? It feels like the best case scenario may be a chastened regime. that just wants to hunker down and will agree, at least for the time being, to not have any nuclear program that is active and look at its wounds. And maybe that provides some opportunity for that regime to be less repressive. I mean, I guess that's the landing zone here that Trump is trying to meet. But at the same time, like, we've bombed them twice now in the middle of

nuclear negotiations. And so if you have hardliners, in the IRC or in Iranian circles, and they're being told, well, let's stop and negotiate with the Americans. Like, they're not going to believe that they can negotiate in any kind of good faith with Donald Trump. And so I think that there's this kind of strategic and coherence about what the objective of this whole thing is. And that's seen not just by the Iranians, it's seen by the Gulf Arabs, who are now, you know, they're furious at everybody.

I think they're furious at the United States and Israel for launching this war, and we can talk about that. And I think they're obviously furious at Iran for targeting them indiscriminately. They don't know what's going on here. What's the goal here? Are we trying to remove this regime? They're wary of removing the regime because they don't want refugees and chaos in their region. You know, what you'd want, I guess, is everybody in the world is, you know, the relevant countries and the Gulf and the region in Europe being able to put some diplomatic framework around this.

So it's not just this kind of Steve Wyckoff and Jared Kushner trying to talk to some Iranian in a room via the Omanis. but Trump's shifting goalposts of what he's for make it much harder to put any kind of framework around this. This gets to something, I think, pretty deep in the Trump administration's thinking or lack of thinking, which is, it has often seemed to me if there's any global problem they are worried about, it is refugee flows and migration. And they go to Europe and talk about how Europe is ceasing to exist

as a civilization, in part because of Muslim integration and immigration. There have been huge refugee flows to Europe, from Syria as part of the Syrian Civil War. If you imagine a scenario here where you end up a little bit between Trump's imagined options, which is simultaneously you do have opposition to the existing regime, and you also have a regime that has become more compliant to Trump himself on things like the nuclear issue, but is trying to hold power and repressing those who are trying to attack it, you could very quickly end up in a significant refugee flow scenario. Iran's a very, very, very big country. You're talking about 90 million people. And how do the states around Iran handle that? What does the Trump administration think about huge outflows of Iranians coming after the U.S. and Israel destabilize the country? Have they planned for that? Will they, should Europe and America take these people? Yeah. Honestly, it doesn't seem that they plan for it. I will tell you that in the run-up to this, I did talk to some people I know in the region, right, in the Middle East, in the Gulf, who were discussing what they were warning the Trump administration about. And one of the scenarios, the kind of worst-case scenario, so I'm not suggesting this is definitely going to happen, but I think we have to inhabit this, precisely because there was no discussion of the potential consequences. If you have a civil conflict inside of Iran,

the economy is already in really deep trouble because of, you know, U.S. sanctions, a collapsing currency, so there's extreme poverty there. There are ethnic separatist movements inside of Iran and the Kurdish regions and the Bulk regions. And so what you could have is an implosion, you know, if there's some kind of uprising and then there's a kind of chaotic civil war, which is not hard to imagine because we've seen that in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, the other places where the U.S. has been involved militarily. and millions. I mean, somebody said to me, this is a country that is four times bigger than Syria and remember that refugee crisis. And essentially the only places to go

or in one direction, it's Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's not a particularly stabilizing thing to imagine. You know, huge refugee afflows in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We already have a war, by the way. Pakistan bombed Afghanistan. The day before this started, Pakistan could get drawn in to this conflict. They impart to get refugees away and in part to prevent the emergence of a separatist, Balukistan, on their borders. It crosses their borders.

And then the other direction is Turkey into Europe. And you saw Turkey very aggressively being a part of the mediation efforts. This is one of the reasons why. They have a lot of fatigue with hosting millions of Syrian refugees in Europe trying to keep those refugees in Turkey instead of getting in Europe. They will find their way to Europe through Turkey. And so I don't think there's been any real planning for this. And that is, to me, like the worst case scenario of a civil war and even fracturing of the Iranian sovereign territory, you'd have huge refugee outflows. We have not been planning for this.

Israel has been planning for some version of this for a very long time. They're a full partner in this operation, which is distinctive about it. What do they want? I think first and foremost, they want to smash anybody who poses a perceived threat to them, and they're obviously been principally focused on this axis of resistance, right? So Hamas, Hezbollah, other Iranian proxy groups, and then ultimately the Iranian regime itself. Weakening that regime is, in their view, kind of obviously good for their security posture. They're worried up ballistic missiles, a warped on a nuclear program.

If I was going to be cynical, and I know this is a view. of some increasingly in the region, it's that Israel's okay with chaos, that if there's an implosion in Iran and humanitarian disaster there and kind of chaos, that actually advantages their security situation in a way because that kind of Iran can't pose a threat to them. And that if you look at Lebanon and Syria,

where Israel's also been very active militarily, they're just kind of pushing out not just kind of the perimeter. You know, they're literally occupying parts of southern Syria now. They want this kind of buffer the zone in southern Lebanon. And I think the fears in the region is that they are just kind of methodically, yes, eliminating threats, but also creating a lot of chaos and instability as almost a strategy of giving themselves freedom of action, whether that involves taking the West Bank,

whether that involves extending out kind of buffer zones into Syria and Lebanon. And that seems more plausible to me than they have some plan to support the installation of Reza Pahlavi as the transitional leader of Iran. I mean, what they seem to me to have had a plan for, and I think you have to give some credit to Netanyahu for one of the most remarkable coups of his career was involving Donald Trump in this. Yeah, yeah. And Netanyahu was very, very effectively pulled Trump in by degrees such that we were supposed to have a very limited bombing campaign. on Iran. We were told after that that the nuclear program was obliterated in Trump's video announcing this operation. He both said Iran was posing an imminent threat and that their nuclear program had been obliterated, which I found a little bit strange. But Netanyahu's ability to get

Trump to do what no other U.S. president has been willing to do is striking. And I think that was on some level like the real plan here. Israel had weakened Iran. It had shown Iran to be weaker than people thought it was. And I think the push was made to Trump that you have this narrow window of opportunity to do what no other president has done, and at least in the way it was presented to him, permanently solve the problem and permanently avenge previous injuries and insults to America. I think you are exactly right. I think it's worth pointing out, I mean, this we were both in watching the time. I mean, this started coming. I mean, this started coming up at the end of the Bush administration in 2007-2008,

when there was a push for Bush to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities, Netanyahu has wanted to do this since I have been in politics, you know, very clearly, wanted the U.S., not Israel alone, the U.S. to take out the Iranian regime. And every president has resisted this except Trump. You know, we should say, like obviously there's people in the United States, the Lindsay Grahams of the world who want to do this as well. So it's not just Israel. But it's a pretty small set of constituencies.

You know, the public has broadly against this. And you're right, they brought him in by degrees. And we can even go back to the first Trump term, right, where he left the Iranian nuclear deal. That was not something that his advisors were telling him to do. Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, was against it at the time. You know, not even a huge fan of the Iran nuclear deal,

because he saw, if you remove yourself from that deal, you're kind of on a slow motion movement towards this. In a way, it's funny. Trump likes to say 12-day war, and it's been one war, you know, since he pulled out of that nuclear agreement, it's been like a slow motion series of events that led in this direction. It begins with economic war, begins with sanctions. Maximum pressure. Yeah, exactly. So you pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, you go to maximum pressure sanctions, you assassinate the Qasem Soleimani. Those are all things that happened in Trump's first term. Couldn't get them all the way to bombing Iran itself. Biden clearly, and I've been very critical, as you know, of Biden's Middle East policy on Gaza, he was clearly. not keen to go all in with Iran on a regional war. You know, he was supportive of going after

the Iranian proxy groups, not this. Then Trump comes back and they do the nuclear strike. But I think you're right. I think that the Israelis saw the Venezuela operation. He's getting more comfortable with this. And he's getting comfortable taking into regime change. And they see, and this is where the, you know, continued use of military force without any congressional authorization is connected to this. because it's like, okay, there's a president in Donald Trump who is willing to just bomb countries and take huge risks, absent any congressional debate or discussion. I mean, we dealt with this in Obama years.

You must inhabit the scenario of war. If Donald Trump had tried to prepare the American people for this, they would have said no. If he had gone out and given a series of speeches, now is the time we must remove the Iranian regime, it wouldn't have worked. And so I think you're right, this kind of vainglorious, I'm Donald Trump,

I will slay all the dragons. We've had these grievances with Maduro, with Chaminé, with the Cuban regime. I'm going to remove all of them, you know. I think that there's a vanity to that Israel and some of the hawks in this country saw, and they went to him knowing that he was reticent to kind of break from his base this much and do this,

but they appeal to something bigger than his short-term political instincts, which is this will make you an historic figure. And I think Bibi Netanyahu has wanted to get an American president to do this since, you know, at least when I was in government, and he has. So one thing that I think is important in that story you just laid out is also there's been a learning about Iran that has been successive. So America pulled out of the nuclear deal, added the maximum pressure sanctions. Iran wasn't able to do very much about that. There was the assassination of Soleimani.

There was no significant reprisal for that. that. You saw Israel decapitate Hezbollah. You saw the then bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites. And I do think something that has been significant here is a growing sense that

Iran was not as fearsome as was believed and did not have the capacity to strike back as had been believed, but that you could do this at low cost, which was not what people thought before. This drives me

crazy because I think it's true. But let's just take Netanyahu, the argument was always that they're 10 feet tall, that they're absolute maniacs who are on the precipice of a nuclear weapon and they've built this massive axis that is coming for us. And I never believe that. I never believe that Iran was as all-powerful. And I certainly never believed that they had offensive, you know, that they were going to launch some preemptive war against Israel, you know. They are interested in regimes survival. That was always my assessment. And that even, you know, some of the proxy groups were meant, you know, the Iranian doctrine was keep this out of Iran, you know, keep the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon. So part of what used to drive me crazy about the hawkish prescriptions on Iran from inside Washington and Israel is that

either argument led to war. If Iran is really powerful, we must take them out because, you know, they must be stopped because they're on the precipice of doing something, or they're weak so we can take them out. And look, I do think it bears saying, first of all, that we should have a mindset that war is bad and should be avoided. That should be a legal and values proposition that there are preferable outcomes to war itself. The other problem I have with this, Ezra, is there's an incredible short-term thinking about this, because you're also sending the message that, okay, Iran was in a nuclear deal with the United States. they were complying with that nuclear deal, and they then got bombed.

Whatever Iranian regime emerges from this, I think, is very likely to want nuclear weapons. So this doesn't happen. If you're sitting in Riyadh, or even Dubai and Abu Dhabi right now, you're thinking, well, the Americans are my security guarantor, and look at what we just got out of that security guarantee. Like, we got a war that they launched pretty much, I don't buy that they,

the Saudis were pushing this, by the way. I saw them deny that report, and I think they were very reticent about this. Why wouldn't they get nuclear weapons now? It's like, well, we can't, you know, at the end of the day, the Americans are kind of willing to play with our security, you know, or deprioritize it as against Israel's security. Other would-be proliferators are going to think, you know, look at North Korea versus Iran. And so there's these second-order effects, right, and one of them is nuclear proliferation, where the consequences might not be manifest next year. But I don't know, five years from now, I don't think that this kind of action will have made us safer. I'd much rather, you know, if you actually believe in nuclear

nonproliferation, it's much better to have that be something you fortified diplomatically than you just remove a regime because it's weak. I want to pick up on what you just said about the Saudis. So there was a Washington Post report that cited at least four sources that had knowledge of the conversations and negotiations. What it basically said was that in public, Saudi Arabia has been against us, has denied a use of their bases. In private, Muhammad bin Salman and top people in the Saudi government have been privately pushing Trump to act. This is something that, you know, if you've been around these issues for a while, you've heard a lot about. The Israelis talk all the time about how nobody wants the Iranian government gone like Saudi Arabia.

So you don't buy that that is what was happening. I'm skeptical of it because I was hearing different things. you know, I certainly, you saw Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt, along with Oman, obviously, trying to avert this outcome. The Egypt thing was interesting to me because the idea that Egypt would take that position without Saudi Arabia, you know, as a chief sponsor, supporting them, and that makes me question it. You also see in Saudi foreign policy, you saw rapprochement with Iran in the last few years. I think Mohammed bin Salman, who I've been hugely critical of, so this is anybody who's listened to me over the years, I have no love for that government. But I think, you know, he's principally interested in stability. Now, what I think is quite possible is they were reticent of this.

They don't like instability at this scale in their region. They don't like the potential disruptions, obviously, to energy infrastructure. But when they see an inevitability to it, they may have kind of come around and like, okay, we'll talk to you guys about this. I think they're the most likely scenario is that they're a bit ambivalent. because again, like, their security paradigm is stability, stability, stability. And this doesn't feel a lot like stability. I'm not saying this is the biggest issue in this moment,

but the centrality of Israel in the operation has raised some concerns for me about what this is going to mean for anti-Semitism. You see the amount of talk on the MAGA right, but elsewhere as well, that, you know, Israel's leverage over Donald Trump or that, you know, this is all just some kind of, Israeli plot. I wonder a bit about the, there are many ways which Netanyahu looks to me to be gambling for short-term position over the long-term sustainability of both Israel's political position in America,

but also just the generalized view of the world at a time of very, very sharply rising anti-Semitism about what is going on here. I don't know how it nets out or what it ends up meaning. but it certainly has me nervous. It has me nervous, too. And there's two aspects to that. One is in the region and one is here.

I'd just say briefly in the region. Like, I was critical of the Abraham Accords at the time, and I was a bit outlier to say the least about that. Because, you know, Donald Trump framed this is a big peace deal when, in fact, it didn't resolve any of the conflicts in the region. And look at what's happened since. It's been much more violent. And if you talk to people in the region,

they see that, oh, wait a second, this has all been about Israeli- in this region. And that is making the Arab states who were prepared certainly to live with Israel. I don't think Saudi Arabia had any threat to pose to Israel. But they're increasingly concerned about a dynamic where there's this degree of freedom of action for Israel. So what does that look like? How does that evolve in the long term in the region? I think here, you're right. I really worry about this because, look, this is not me saying Israel pushed. Donald Trump to do this.

Bibi Nanyahu went out, I think yesterday and said, I wanted this to happen for 40 years, and finally Trump did it, you know, and he's doing it with us too. But the U.S. used to be very careful not to do joint military operations with Israel, in part for this reason. This is a very big break. This is a huge, I mean, people need to think about this. Like, it was, you know, just to do joint exercises, you know, was something people calibrated carefully because we didn't want to make it look like that Israel and the United States are one

in the same for reasons they go in both directions. But here's the thing is Americans are looking at this, and they're seeing that we earn a war that seems like it's something Israel wanted us to do. It seems like the benefits accrue mostly to Israel. You know, the ballistic program does not pose a threat to the United States. There is no ICBM from Iran that can reach the United States. So a lot of what we're doing is removing threats to Israel. If it goes poorly, who is going to get blamed? you know, I think that some of that anger will go in the direction of Israel.

And I think it's important for us to talk about this because when there's not debate and discussion about it, it migrates to the darker corners, right? And you're seeing that certainly in MAGA. Well, I think one reason this is fed conspiracies is it has felt to many people like such a almost inexplicable break from how Trump sold himself. Yeah. So, I mean, you have, you know, back in 2023, Trump's saying, these globalists want to squander all of America's strength, blood, and treasure, chasing monsters and fandoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc. They're creating here at home.

Very on point. J.D. Vance writes a Wall Street Journal op-ed that you're titled, Trump's Best Foreign Policy, not starting any wars. Tulsi Gabbard, of course, sells no war with Iran t-shirts. Now you have Trump kind of start more as certainly conflicts. engagements left and right. According to Axios, Trump is now authorized more military strikes in 2025 alone than Biden did in all four years. So I think for a lot of people, there has been this, how do you reconcile both Trump and the movement that was around him, right?

All the people advising him with what we're seeing now. I got a sort of the weekend by somebody, you know, what was a faction inside the White House that wanted this? Yeah. And I've had it actually hard to answer that question. We have not seen a lot of reporting saying Marco Rubio wanted this to happen. You know, J.D. Vance appears to have not. Instead, we're talking about Israel and Lindsey Graham who's not that influential anymore. Muhammad bin Salman, maybe.

I think a lot of people have been very confused with how to explain Trump himself taking this risk. I had the same mental exercise, Ezra, and let's just go through it if you look at all these polls is wildly politically unpopular. And by the way, that continues to hold, even though the Supreme Leader being killed will be the high watermark of this operation. You know, there's not another person that you can kill that Trump can say is a head on a pike, right? Then if you look at the people that want to inherit MAGA, right, who are looking ahead at the Republican Party, J.D. Vance seems to want to have very little to do with this. Tucker Carlson is railing against this. You know, the see Bannons of the world, they're not enthusiastic about this. The Republican Party is not going

in this direction. So this is not something that Trump is doing because it's going to be wildly popular with this. Military didn't want it, Joint Chief's staff. Joint Chiefs of Staff was clearly putting out, leaking out, you know, that they didn't want to do this. Marka Rubio is much more focused on this hemisphere, you know, Venezuela and Cuba, which they're trying to, you know, strangle through the maximum pressure. The Democratic Party is not for this, and particularly the people anticipating the future of the Democratic Party, who is for this? And it's a very small set of constituents. It is basically Israel. And then it is kind of hardline, longstanding hawks in Congress or in kind of the national security establishment. By the way, the people that Trump said he

didn't like for this. John Bolton, so he's, you know, trying to persecute is out there defending it. So it is hard to look at this and not. Also, wasn't part of the reason he talked about rid of John Bolton, that he's like, John Bolton always wanted me to attack Iran? Iran, right? And so it is hard to not conclude that Bibi Nanyahu and Israel's kind of push for this was determinative in some way. Because again, like the only appeal to Trump that made any sense is kind of the one you made earlier where you become a historic figure. You know, you finally, I mean, I do think there's a part of him that's just like these governments have been a pain in the ass for decades. Right, Cuba since the 59 revolution, Iran since the 79 revolution, you know, Venezuela since the Chavista revolution, I'm going to be the one that finally settles all these scores.

Like there's some of that that is separate from Israel. But it is hard to not conclude that if Israel wasn't put it this way, Israel, take the counterfactual. The Israeli government was not pushing for this. Would it have happened? I want to talk about the ways in which this might not remain limited in the way Donald Trump has either promised a country or I think promised himself. So I see this as following from the 12-day bombing some months ago, it turned out that didn't do enough. And when it was clear that Iran was racing forward with ballistic missiles, reconstituting a nuclear program that probably was not obliterated in the way Donald Trump had initially said it was. And so we were now involved and Iran was defying him.

It wasn't just that it was obliterated. that obliteration was a kind of command from him to them that was gone. They weren't giving up enough at the negotiating table. And also, I think this was meaningful to Trump on some level, was now slaughtering its own people. You know, he didn't like that either. I want to give him credit for some humanitarian impulse potentially here. So now we're involved even more so.

Now we have kinetically destroyed much of the regime and its power. but a lot could spin out of control here. So I am very skeptical that the limit Trump seems to think he has put on this is stable. And I'm curious, as somebody with more experience here than I have, what you think of it. I think you're right. And the Israelis have this, it's not a doctrine, but essentially this terminology, it's called mowing the lawn. Have you heard this? which is, and again, I hate even using phrases like this when it comes to war in human beings,

but essentially the mowing the lawn strategy is that if there's a place that poses a threat, you occasionally just kind of go in and cut the grass. You bomb the threat periodically. And obviously, like Lebanon would be a perfect case of where the Israelis pursued that. Well, they always said this about Hamas. How did that ultimately work out? Exactly. And there's a risk.

And this is why I say we have been at war with Iran. Like the idea that there was something called the 12-day war, and now there's a different war. No, no. Like, that's not how these things work. Like, once you bomb a country, you're bringing this forever war paradigm to it. And so I think it is quite possible that in the same way that the 12-day war was the end of the story, if Trump stops bombing Iran in a week, two weeks, three weeks, they were back doing that in a few months because something happened that we don't like.

And then you start to get massacres in the streets of Iran or you start to get refugee outflows or you start to continue to see kind of ways of random attacks at the Gulf, are we really going to do nothing? But then if we're getting back and back in, you know, then we're getting pulled into quicksand. We are implicated, you know, we are involved. I mean, the common thread to this conversation, Ezra, is like, we need to just get this short-term thinking that they're such a thing as 12-day wars

or that you solve a problem when you kill the leader. Like, that's not how any of this goes. I think it is genuinely, striking and a break with certainly the recent past, how little public deliberation there is over quite major American foreign policy actions. And, you know, the Bush administration did lie its way into war with Iraq, but it did also spend a long time trying to persuade the country that war with Iraq was worth doing, and we debated how much of the American military it would take. what does it mean to be entering into these kinds of commitments, these kinds of projects, these kinds of risks without really any public debate, any significant public or commercial deliberation of what might happen.

You don't have a bunch of members of the military repeatedly going to Congress and going through scenarios. I don't want to place everything here on process being poor, but there's a reason that the, public in Congress are consulted, because if it ends up requiring more engagement, then you actually need that support. No, I think process is related to outcome. And if you can't make a case to the American people to sway public opinion in the direction of a war or make a case to Congress, I mean, the single most important thing you could do to keep America out of more wars is actually require Congress to take a vote because they're not going to vote for it, given the word public opinions on this. And so I think it's incredibly corrosive to democracy to have this kind of loop

of conflict that is increasingly sidelining Congress and public opinion entirely. I also think there's something even more dangerous, Ezra, which is we keep, you know, I know a lot of people are thinking, when are we going to know how bad it's going to get with Trump? Like, what if the things that you fear are already happening? Like, we already have a president who clearly came back into office, wanting the military to be more directly responsive to him than it was in the first term when the military leadership and even some of the Pentagon leadership stood up to him more and more. We have seen him, you know, purged the top of the military general officers. We have seen him address the general officers and say, hey, American cities might be military training grounds.

Now we've seen him within a matter of weeks undertake multiple. Multiple military, I'll just give you a few. We bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. We were blowing up boats in the Caribbean on totally false pretenses that it had something to do with like drug trafficking in the United States and potentially committed war crimes. We abducted the leader of Venezuela. We now just killed the Supreme Leader of Iran and are trying to topple that regime or maybe we're not. These are all things that have happened within three months, right? And at the the same time, we see the Department of War telling Anthropic an AI company that you will be banned from any business of the government if the Pentagon can't ignore your terms of service against mass surveillance of Americans. And where I'm going with this is the ultimate guard role in democracy is supposed to be the separation between the president and kind of the military as an institution. And if the military of an institution can directly serve the interest of Donald Trump, with no public debate about what it's doing,

no congressional votes on what it's doing, how many more countries are going to be in the United States, if he invokes the Insurrection Act. And that's not to impugn the military, that's to impugn where Trump is taking this. So I think the darker scenarios, it's not just process nerds, like we need to have authorizations for use of military force

and we need briefings to Congress. It's, no, like, is the military an institution that just completely serves the whims of the president? Or is it an institution that is apolitical that is equally responsive to Congress and the president? Because those questions are going to matter a lot how the next two and three quarters of years of the Trump administration. Although I think it's important to say it's not that Congress is being defied. Congress has abdicated. Yes, that's, yes, yes.

Mike Johnson is not out there complaining. He is supporting this. I mean, there are many ways in which Trump is a disruptive break with the past, but the escalation of not going to Congress for quite dangerous operations. I mean, that was president in the Obama era. I mean, this has been growing for a very long time. Well, the thing that Obama probably, you know, gets the most grief for in his foreign policy was the Syria redline incident. But what was interesting about that, Ezra, so you have this chemical weapons.

Can you describe what that is for? Yeah. So we have this, Obama has said it would be a red line if the Saudi regime uses chemical weapons. Then there's a massive chemical weapons use. and we were preparing to bomb Syria. We were. I mean, I was in meetings. I thought we were going to bomb Syria and, you know,

going through strike packages, that kind of stuff. And then, you know, Obama makes this decision essentially to say, I'm going to put this to vote in Congress. I'm not going to go to war with Syria unless Congress votes to authorize it. And almost immediately, the support for that begins to evaporate in Congress. Even people like Marco Rubio, who were hawks, who would not vote to authorize use of military force in Syria. And Obama's point was, if Congress, the representatives of the people, as envisioned under our constitutional system, don't want to get us into another war of Syria and be responsible for the consequences of whatever happens, then we shouldn't do it. That's how our system's designed.

Now, a lot of people, you know, pointed out that we should have done more to stop Assad, and that's, you know, I agree. I'm sympathetic to all those arguments. But I'm also sympathetic to Obama's argument, which is if people don't want the war, we don't have to fight it. And part of what Trump was tapping into in his campaigns was the gap between elites, and particularly national security elites, and public opinion. And it is a crazy gap, Ezra. I've lived at the precipice of it. Like the conversations and the strategies in both parties of national security elites versus what the American people want their government to be focused on is a deeply unhealthy gap.

And all Trump has done is, okay, that establishment is no longer there. It's just him. It's like all of American exceptionalism, all of the apparatus of American power, this, you know, I called it the blob, whatever you want to call it, this edifice is now just in one man's head and one man's hands. And that's, instead of solving the problem he said he was running to fix, he's made it worse because it's just up to Donald Trump now. This gets to the question of whether international law still exists in any meaningful way. No. It does not. What does that mean?

It means that it implies in no way to the United States of America, at least. We are completely ignoring. There was no, like, I mean, here's how it doesn't exist. In the past, when the United States would do things, let's just say, stretched the boundaries of international law, you would still show up and make a case. You know, here's why this was an imminent threat or here, you know, they don't even bother. And if you look at even, because the act of going to war violates international law,

if you cannot demonstrate that there was an imminent threat that you're acting in some form of self-defense, or you have to get UN sanctioned, UN Security Council approval. Absent those things, you're violating international law. But even in the conduct of war, the United States is currently sanctioning the International Criminal Court, which is the kind of preeminent body

that is enforcing the laws of war. What message does that send, you know, about the conduct of war? Because we're doing that because they tried to indict B.B. Netanyahu for war crimes. But if you're basically saying that none of the laws apply to us, at a certain point, Russia and China say, well, then they don't apply to us either. And if international law on the most important matters, war and peace and the conduct of war, whether to go to war and how you fight a war, if those laws don't apply to any of the big powers, how do they apply to anybody? I've wondered how much the reaction from some of our allies who you might have thought of as more committed to international law has actually reflected a collective recognition that it is gone.

So Mark Carney in Canada was very, very supportive of Trump strikes. You know, real support from Australia. Germany was pretty four-square behind us. You know, I think this reflects some of their feelings about the Iranian regime. But I have been struck by the conclusion. by the complete absence of outcry from countries that I think, you know, part of their power has to become from commitment to these institutions that maintain a kind of collective or multilateral approach to these questions. What have you made of that?

I've been struck by it too. I think part of what Trump counts on is if the people I'm taking out don't have a lot of friends, I have more room, right? If it's Maduro, if it's the Iranian regime. I'd say I'm very disappointed in it, though. Mark Carney, I was very disappointed in it, though. Mark Carney, I was one of many people that thought his speech at Davos was important and interesting and kind of reflective of what's happening and also kind of pointing a path to some emergence of something on the other end of this, that essentially if the middle powers, the kind of more responsible countries in the world that still follows at least some international laws and once some norms around conflict and other things, if they began to kind of stitch together, maybe that could be a place that the United States could kind of rejoin on the back end of. Trump. If Mark Carney is going to carve this out, though, if he's essentially going to say, we need rules on trade, but if you bomb Iran go for it, I think it hugely undermines Mark Carney's own argument. It just makes it seem cynical. It makes it seem like all he's really concerned about is trade, you know, or all I'm concerned about is Greenland because it's European

territory, right? And you can attest that I've taken a lot of grief for this over the years. But I just believe that if we think that international law and norms are important, they really have to apply universally. Like, we can just say that, like, well, they don't apply to Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, because we don't like them, you know. The United States built this system after World War II because we recognize that if you don't constrain everybody, you are going to have a repeat of what happened in World War I and World War II. You start to create carveouts.

People start to move into those carveouts. cycles of conflict that lead ultimately to a world war. I think people need to inhabit the reality that we're moving into more than they are. There are no constraints from international law anymore. There is a rampant trend of nationalism in the world. There are leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Xi Jinping and China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Bibi Nanyahu in Israel, Dorendra Modi in India, Taiyip Erdogan and Turkey. These are nationalists. Nationalists. National Absent International Law always leads to more war, and those wars beget more wars. Let me strong man the other side of the case here, which is international law, the international

law that allowed Iran to slaughter its own people, to repress them, to fund terrorist proxies, you know, all throughout the region. You're saying that international law should have restrained Israel and America against a country that had for decades now made one of its rallying slogans death to Israel and death to America and in fact was funding players who wanted to do just that. One of the critiques you'll hear from the critics here of international law is that international law has been used as a shield by rogue regimes, regimes that do not follow its dictates in all manner of ways, but then hide behind it when they find it. when they face the consequences

that they are bringing down upon themselves. I guess I'd say first and foremost, Iran has paid consequences. We worked on the Iran nuclear deal for seven years. And the reason I say seven years is that for several years of the beginning of the Obama administration,

we built a multilateral sanctions framework around Iran based on the fact that they were violating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, international law. So we didn't say, oh, it's fine, you can violate the international law. We said, no, we got UN Security Council

resolutions that became the basis of a maximum pressure campaign in the Obama administration, but it was meant to leverage a change of behavior from the Iranians. You have to kind of come into compliance with international law via nuclear deal in which you are committing to never build a nuclear weapon. You are submitting to intense monitoring and verification of a nuclear program. By the way, like we still had other sanctions on them over their support for proxies. I don't like what goes on inside a lot of countries in the world. there's something peculiar

that we are normalizing the idea that that is sufficient basis to go to war in those countries. We don't like it when Vladimir Putin does it. When Vladimir Putin says, hey, the elected president of Ukraine was ousted in a protest movement in 2014,

in part by people that were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. I don't agree with that narrative. but how can we say that Vladimir Putin does not have the right to invade that country? But if we see things that we don't like inside of other countries, we have the right to do that. And I think what people see is that if you truly believe in human rights, then you have to apply that normative framework across the board. And a lot of the very same people that are suddenly human rights advocates

when it comes to what's happening inside of Iran have nothing to. say about what's happening in the West Bank right now. Had nothing to say when Jamal Khashoggi was chopped up in the Saudi consulate inside of Turkey. Have nothing to say about the fact that LCC, the president of Egypt, has 60,000 people who are political prisoners suffering horrific treatment. So you either have to be universal and consistent or I have a really hard time listening to your arguments. I've seen a lot of Democrats, and to some degree I think the international response to then, somewhat paralyzed between their legitimate loathing of the Iranian government and their dislike distaste for the process of violation of international law,

the absence of public deliberation or congressional approval. But I think it has created a kind of muddle in their response, right? Are they saying this should have been done? It's a good thing that it happened, but they don't like that it happened. are they saying that the only problem with it was poor process, if Trump had gone to Congress, maybe they would have given me the authority to do it. How do you think Democrats should respond to this?

Because right now I've seen many of the leadership really focusing not on, was this a right or wrong thing to do, but was the process that led to it the right or wrong process? Yeah, they're saying all the things that you said, and I have a huge problem with this, because ultimately people are not that interested in the process. If someone who doesn't follow this super closely, here's a Democratic leader like Chuck Schumer saying,

coming out of a briefing about the potential war in Iran that feels imminent, and he says they have to make their case more or something. What does it sound like? It sounds like a dodge. What do you actually believe as a political party? I was talking to a friend of mine from the, we do this thing in our Obama group text, Ezra, which wouldn't surprise you, which is it, imagine if, right? So imagine if President Obama announced a war on Iran from a vacation property in the middle of the night on a social media

post, made casual remarks about the fact that Americans are going to die. It is what it is. And then within like two days, you're already seeing American casualties, American planes falling under the sky, huge global economic disruptions. The Republican Party would have been absolutely unified. And part of the reason Obama had so little room for maneuver is that that they as a political party were able to make an argument against whatever the thing that Obama was doing. The Democratic Party doesn't understand that it's not enough to just say we want a process vote or a procedural vote. We're going to support the Rok-Kana Thomas Massey resolution that most Americans have no idea what that is, right? I mean, I support it, but it's not going to do anything.

And I think most Americans don't know that it's a vote on whether or not Congress has to authorize something that has already happened. it just makes you look, you know, and again, this, I'm totally supportive of that effort. It's not a criticism of Rokane Thomas Massey, but the point is, is it like, are you for this or against it? And if you're against it, why are you not all out saying that this is reckless, that this is a betrayal of what Donald Trump said when he ran for president, that we don't need more wars, that why are we spending money? The price tag of this is going to mean the tens of billions. That's money that could pay for the ACA subsidies. At least. You know, yeah, at least.

There's your health care subsidies right now. Our health care subsidies are being spent on a war in Iran. Donald Trump is not looking after your interest. He's looking after some kind of grandiose ambitions in the Middle East. This is a very easy political case to make, Ezra. Like, this is the easiest thing in the world that we should be nation-building at home, not abroad, you know. I saw this after Maduro. I think it reflected what happened, both in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq,

which is that I think that there is a difficulty people have. maybe they would not themselves go to war for this. Maybe they would not have supported a war for something like this. But when it is against a brutal dictator, on what grounds are you opposing it, right? Is opposing it supporting the continuation of the regime? And I think that's where a lot of the Democrats you're talking about are getting caught, or some of the world leaders are talking about are getting caught.

So, you know, aside from, you know, we can spend money in one place versus another, I think it's this quite deep question of how do people negotiate and how do people negotiate and how do they argue against these wars that are partially demanded or justified on humanitarian grounds? I mean, the Iranian regime, as we mentioned, it just killed thousands or maybe tens of thousands of their own people.

There were Iranians marching in the streets and it was not safe for them to do so. I sort of have my answer to this, but I'm curious for yours. My answer to this is that war itself is something to be avoided. And that may seem like a obvious point. But it's not, like we, I mean, to be a little provocative on this, too, I think that post-9-11, because we've normalized so much use of military action, because I could argue, Ezra, it is completely insane that we're sitting here and having a

conversation about like that if we don't bomb a regime that we're there for keeping it in power, but does it report to us? You know? And I think what Americans kind of intuitively get better than their political elites, their national security elites, and even some of the kind of media conversation in this is they get this. They get that war is terrible. War has risks that even if it's well-intentioned on paper, it leads.

to bad outcomes for both the Americans who have to fight it, the American taxpayers to pay for it, and pretty much the people on the other end of the war that you're saying you're trying to help. We're trying to help the Iraqis. We're trying to help the Afghans. We're trying to help the Libyans. Now we're trying to help the Iranians. And I guess the provocative thing I want to say, too, is that this seems to happen when the countries in question are brown. I think there's a dehumanization since 9-11 where it's like, oh, look at this, the next Middle East,

the next Middle Eastern country up, that the regime does something we don't like, we're going to go and just bomb them. I mean, we killed, if reports are accurate, either of the U.S. or Israel, over 100 girls at a school. And it's not really a big story in the United States. And I actually think to tie this back home,

like, I don't think that that mentality, that othering of people who are on the other side of the world after 9-11, I think that othering has come home. I think that the capacity to have the mass deportation campaign that is generally targeting brown and black people is kind of tied to this dehumanization and desensitization of violence that we see in our foreign policy. Like post 9-11, we othered a lot of populations. And if you watch, I mean, I know we're going a little far afield, but I think this is

really relevant. I noticed in the Obama administration, like the othering on Fox, you know, that was once just about Middle Eastern terrorists, but then it's about the people crossing the southern border. And and it comes one big other, you know. And so I think it's a pretty, it should be seen as a pretty extremist proposition that if the United States doesn't go to war with some government in the Middle East, we're somehow condoning everything.

I was really mad about the Jamal Khashoggi thing at no point that I think we should bomb, you know, Muhammad bin Salman for that. I agree with a lot of that. And I want to offer maybe one other thing that I think has been threaded through our conversation. And it's sort of my answer to this question, which is war is inherits.

uncontrollable. Yeah. That the fantasy that we were always offered at the beginning is that we can choose what it is we are going to do, that we can control the situation we are going to create. And as we have developed even more precision weapons and more air power and more drones and more ability to wage war at a distance, the seduction of that control for leaders and for others has become all the more potent. But the history of this is we do not control it.

And as you mentioned, Libya, with Afghanistan, with Iraq, we might think we are helping the people. But if we set off a civil war, you could easily have 70,000, 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 people die in that war. And we have shown no interest in number one, saying we will occupy the country to make sure that doesn't happen.

And nor, as we learned in Iraq, even if we do decide to occupy the country, can we keep that from happening? I mean, Donald Trump was one of the people who started trying to withdraw us from Afghanistan, which then completed in the Biden administration. Again, the inability over a very long time to control the outcome of something like this,

even when we were willing to put much more of our blood and treasure into controlling it. And so to me, one of the great lie of war, is that you will get what you want out of it. Among the many things it scares me so much about Trump is how blithe he is with that. You don't feel like this has cost him any sleep at all. And if it goes badly, I think he will walk away

and say, well, I gave you Iranians your chance. You didn't take it. Or you didn't succeed in taking it. Well, yes, I think you're exactly right. I mean, one thing I became very aware of over eight years in the White House, but also in this whole post-9-11 period, is that the U.S. military can destroy anything, right? It can take out any target set that it has.

But it cannot engineer the politics for other countries or build what comes after the thing that is destroyed. We had 150,000 troops in Iraq, and we couldn't stop violence. And look, you know who knows that? The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps colonel, who's a total hardliner right now, knows that Americans are going to lose interest in this,

you know, knows that if we weather this, you know, on the back end we can potentially do what we want. And there's a callousness in the way that Trump has done this. And precisely because I think war is so uncertain and the cost of war is paid so overwhelmingly by ordinary people, one of the reasons I would like to see Democrats, or anybody, frankly, who's concerned about Trump, be more outspoken now,

is I think sometimes they are reticent to speak out, because what if it goes well? it's not just that the Iranian regime is bad, it's that if it goes well, then they'll say, you know, you were against this thing. I'm sorry, I'm against this, even if it has the better case scenario.

Because we need to be, if you can't take a position on something that's fundamental, is whether going to war when you don't have to is a good thing, then what's the point of all this? We could have achieved our objectives on the nuclear issue through negotiations. We chose to bomb this country instead.

So I think that precisely because, war can lead to such terrible outcomes, you have to be willing to take a stance against war itself unless it is absolutely necessary. And this certainly didn't meet that test. I think that is a place to end. All this final question, what are a few books you recommend to the audience? So a few things, I mean, on this last question, from the ruins of empire by Pankaj Mishra is a really excellent kind of intellectual history of, for lack of better way, putting it a global south or people in the decolonized spaces in the 20th century coming up. with alternatives to Western hegemony,

then I personally, as someone who's been trying to make sense of what it's like to live in a collapsing liberal order, the world of yesterday by Stefan Schwig. I found myself reading twice since Trump's election, but it's just haunting and beautiful, contemporaneous, you know, Stefan Zruig was a great Austrian writer, writing in the midst of World War II, his kind of life story, but it's really about the collapse of the liberal order in Europe.

And then lastly, a book I read, very recently, this last few days, it's called Travelers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd. And what she did is she found letters, journals, other contemporaneous accounts of basically British and Americans visiting Nazi Germany. And so what were their impressions? Did they see, and, you know, spoiler, way too many of them did not see how bad this was going to be or were sympathetic? And all those things, I think, of course, are unfortunately relevant to today.

Ben Rhodes, thank you very much. Thanks, Andrew. This episode of The Zoclant shows produced by Jack McCordick, fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker and Jack McCordick. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gild, mixing by Isaac Jones, and Amund Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Marina King, Marie Cassione, Kristen Lynn, Emmette, and Jan Kobel.

Original music by Amun Zahota and Pat McCusker. Audio and Strategy by Christine Samaluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times-pending audio is Annie Roastroes.