The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Trump strikes Iran without a strategy

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

Rudyard and Andrew try to make sense of Trump's decision to start a war with Iran so contrary to the premise that created the MAGA movement and opposition to America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How did we end up at this point? And how will this war affect the upcoming midterm elections? Andrew thinks Trump persuaded himself that strike would be easy - just like Venezuela - and thus he has no clear strategy. What is the long term goal here? In the second half of the show Rudyard and Andrew turn to Canada's response to this unfolding conflict, specifically Carney signalling support of the US offensive. What is the calculation going on in the background? How are his goals domestically for bolstering trade informing his foreign policy? And finally, what role should Canada have - if any - in this region-altering conflict? Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to full episodes of Munk Dialogues with Andrew Coyne. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The degree to which he and the people of random seemed to have thought this through, again, overruling the objections of their senior military people, was let's bomb them and see what happens. Welcome to the Monk Dialogues with Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne. Andrew, great to have you in the studio. Good to be with you. So much to unpack today, another weekend, another international crisis. Let's begin just first by focusing on our area of expertise here, which is politics. We're going to leave the military strategy and other commentary to different experts. But I want to tap into your close observation of the Trump presidency.

Andrew, this decision to start a war with Iran seems so contrary to the original premise that created the MAGA movement, the reaction against the failed wars of Afghanistan and Iraq. it featured nowhere in the president's 2024 re-election campaign. What has happened? How have we ended up at this point? Well, first of all, you should never look for consistency in Trump's positions on anything. They can swing wildly within a 24-hour period. If you remember, during his first campaign in 2016, in the course of one debate, he took three

different positions on abortion, you know. So he's not tethered to anything. people, I think, mistakenly, whether they were critics or supporters of him, associated him with sort of isolationism. But even the America First Movement of the 30s wasn't really isolationists. They were kind of quasi-sympathetic to the Nazis. And in Trump's case, he is pro-dictatorship. He's pro-American or his own maximum discretion to do whatever they like.

and that can manifest itself as a refusal to engage in overseas events, or it can manifest itself as reckless adventurism. The peace president has now attacked, I believe it's seven countries in the space of a year. So it's no surprise in that sense because he shouldn't be surprised at anything Trump does. But yes, if there were MAGA followers who supported, for him and for the movement was premised on the idea that he would keep America out of military adventures or out of foreign wars, quote unquote. They're certainly feeling duped. How much of it was really based on that ever? I'm not so sure. I think it just seems me that's far too

programmatic, to policy-based. So much of Trump support is vibe-based. And so his stance against foreign wars, I think it was much more to do with, and the elites that run them. I think it was them smart fellas got us into these things, and they weren't so smart after all, were they? That was his appeal. So now when he does it, you see all the MAGA people, well, I shouldn't say it. You see a lot of the MAGA people lining up behind him. This is yet another fracture in the MAGA movement. So there are people certainly taking issue with this. I saw Sean Davis, the publisher and editor of the Federalist, who is almost always 100% lines up with Trump attacking this. So that's interesting and, frankly, good to see.

Yeah. The midterm elections are not that far off, Andrew. His poll numbers prior to the strike were just hovering around 40%, some having him below that. You know, some important losses in the last few months in different congressional state races. how does this, if we accept the argument, which I do, that he's not a programmatic thinker, how does this align with any of his immediate political objectives? It seems so completely contrary to what political necessity would say, which is not having a war of choice six, seven months out from the midterm elections.

Yeah, I mean, he does a lot of things that really are inexplicable from the standpoint, even of rational self-interest. If you think his electoral self-interest or his power self-interest rests in trying to win the mid-term elections, and for one reason or another, he keeps suggesting that he doesn't really care what happens or he'll approach that vote in by other means.

Maybe he thought that this would be such a smashing victory for the United States that everyone would rally around. He achieved an impressive breakthrough that no other president had been able to do. I would not second guess that possibility for one second. He had generals and other military advisors saying this is not going to be a walk in the park. We have not necessarily thought this through. There's all kinds of ways this can go wrong, some of which are being realized already. And he either dismissed them or in some cases fired them.

So, you know, he tends to believe what he wants to believe, and I could well imagine that he persuaded himself, this will be easy. This will be like Venezuela. We'll just go in there and knock them down. That seems to be the level of planning. So you said you didn't want to talk military strategy, but that fills into the politics of it. If you go into something like this with no clear rationale, with no clear strategy, with no extra strategy, any of those things, some of the things, some of that. going to filter out to the public. And when you look at this, I half expected to see a rally around the flag phenomenon. No, but two-thirds of Americans according, or more three-quarters

are opposed. Yeah. Or uncertain. And they've only just begun against a massively unpopular foe. Yeah. So you'd think, naively, that politically this might be a winner for him, but it's clearly not. And I think it's, frankly, the early portents are not good for the success of this war. What maybe isn't surprising is there was no UN Security Council meeting to try to get legitimate international sanction for the war. There was no congressional vote. There was a last-minute briefing of the so-called Gang of Five, the senior members of Congress who were kind of read into national security issues, no address from the Oval Office.

behind the resolute desk. What is this, Andrew? What are we seeing? This is the Imperial Presidency Times 10. You know, the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War, Bush Senior, Bush Jr., in both cases, congressional resolution passed. Bush, senior, sought in one UN approval. The United States is the only country who's ever asked the UN for permission to go to war, by the way.

Bush Jr. tried and failed on the last resolution but had 16 previous resolutions of the Security Council all passed under the war power, the force provision of the UN Charter. Because Hussein was in violation of the ceasefire that had stopped the original Gulf War. The pretexts that have been lined up for this war, which vary with differing statements from differing parts of Trump's administration, have ranged from everything from they have nuclear, they're weak away from getting nuclear capability to they're about to attack us to, you know, four to five different other things. Again, contrast that with even the second Gulf War.

Yeah, it's true that Hussein turned out not to have developed, reconstitute his nuclear program. Every Western military intelligence agency thought he had, his own generals thought he had. There's some of events even Saddam thought he had. In contrast, nobody believes. Nobody believes that Iran is anywhere close to a nuclear capacity, and they should never be allowed to get close to it.

But the clear and present danger, the imminent threat, there's just no evidence even to begin with. So the Iraq war was previously the high water mark of military adventurism, so quote-unquote the United States, compare that to this. It looks like, you know, a multilateralist dream. Bush Jr. had 49 countries lined up behind it. Who does Trump have lined up behind this?

Israel. Oh, and Canada. Yeah. And Australia. And that's about it. We'll talk about that in the back half of the show exclusively for Monk members and donors. Objectives. Do you have a sense, Andrew, what the objectives of this war?

because it always seems that that in some ways is a sine qua non of a president of their responsibility to communicate a set of objectives, if anything, to the troops, but also for their own political purposes, to lead a country towards a goal. What are the objectives? Is it regime change? Because one moment on the weekend, it sounded like it was regime change. Defense Secretary Pete Higseth this morning seemed to take that completely off the table. I'm confused.

Do we know what an objective is here? We don't. As I say, they've outlined half a dozen different ones, none of which makes sense, even individually, so they don't make sense compared to each other, combined with each other. If it was regime change, they haven't thought that through,

regime change to what? You know, Trump casually throws off these things saying, well, rise up, Iranians, take your country. how you're up against a regime whose military is intact who's the revolution of gar is intact has shown a willingness to slaughter tens of thousands literally tens of thousands of people in days in days so if you have some plan to go in there with ground troops and mow down the Iranian military fine but obviously that's not anywhere close to being conceived of so he just the degree to which he and the people of random seem to have thought this through, again, overruling the objections of their senior

military people was let's bomb them and see what happens. That's, you know, again, we keep running into this with Trump, that these kinds of explanations, if they were applied to any other administration, you'd say, come on, that's simplistic. Nobody makes up their mind that way. Nobody conducts international affairs that way. With Trump, you always have to factor this in, that it's entirely possible, that it's as stupid and idiotic as it appears. And we've seen no evidence that they've thought this through beyond anything.

There was an interesting question, I suppose, to be had of if you simply knock out Kamani, does the regime collapse on that? The best advice that I've seen is people saying, that is not the nature of this regime, there's so many disparate power centers, there's so many layers of people they can bring up, yes, it would cause you temporary disarray, and we'll see how crippling it is. But the notion that the regime would just fall as a result of that, I think there's a high degree of skepticism, and there's certainly no evidence of what considered acts the United States is going to do following this. So some combination of Trump's desire to be at the center of attention, the center of the action, some pressure from Israel, maybe some pressure from Saudi Arabia, there's been some dispute about what exactly they were advising Trump on this. But, you know, it doesn't seem to be a considered

coherent rationale for this. It seems to be a cluster of why not. Let's give this a try. See what happens. Which is just reckless in the extreme. Two final questions. Our last show, we talked about the Supreme Court's ruling on tariffs and the extent to which, while not completely de-fenestrating Trump's tariff powers, it was a clear rebuke. Are we seeing Andrew in the

this war, and is it a coincidence that the war is happening mere days after that Supreme Court decision to the extent to which this is an area where the president and arguably a majority of the Supreme Court would give him incredible latitude to act independently of, in this case, of Congress, not that the court would approve that, but the president would approve his ability to ignore Congress. Are we seeing Trump transfer, I guess what I'm getting at, is, his desire to be at the center of every conversation, of every news cycle, to a different toolkit, a toolkit that has now gone beyond tariffs. You've mentioned he's attacked seven countries now. He's indicating this war potentially will last weeks. That's his timetable, not the

Iranians' timetable. Who knows what theirs is. Are we seeing, Andrew, what I'm getting at here, is a phase change and a different moment in. in the Trump presidency, a switchover to a different regime? I'm not sure I'd say a switchover so much as an escalation of previous trends. It is, I mean, there are people who will draw a direct connection between this and his desire to impose a dictatorship to, you know, mess with or cancel the midterm elections. And again, that may sound far-fetched. You can't say that with Trump.

Supposing, for example, you get amongst Iran's weapon, in this is they launch a terrorist attack using a sleeper cell in the United States. Does anybody think that's implausible? I don't think so. The defense against that now is led by people of the caliber of Pete Hegesith and Cash Patel and Pam Bondi. That's who's running the home defense in the United States. You mean that guy who was chugging beer in the Olympics in the post game? And the guy who chugs everything else in other circumstances. So you've got the front line or home defenses of the United States are being run by idiots. So it certainly accentuates the chances that Iran could break through on that.

Well, if you've got a major attack in the United States, would you think implausible that Trump would say, well, this is an emergency? It's unsafe to have the midterm election. Something along those lines. Or we certainly need armed military posted outside of ballot boxes, which de facto might intimidate some people from voting. So, you know, the reckless and unbounded use of force internationally is of a peace with the reckless and unbounded use of force domestically. As various congressional people have been reminding us, there's a reason why Congress was given the power of a wars. I grant that that's been elastisized by various administrations. People say this isn't really a war. This is a war. Well, Peg Hedith called it a war this morning. Yeah, and Trump has as well.

When you mobilize that number of people, but there's a reason why, even whether you want to get into the specific constitutional vision, but as a general principle that you should be consulting to Congress, is you're mobilizing the population for a very difficult and dangerous task, and you should be able to persuade those people that if they're going to put their lives in the line and their tax dollars on the line for something with such incalculable potential consequences for the economy, for the peace of the world, et cetera, that you should get some kind of buy-in on this.

And you should be consulting with Congress, if not getting their approval. You should be talking to the public with a, as you said, a national televised address, all these things that wartime leaders do. To just be sort of announcing this in the middle of the night with an eight-minute video clip, then you're there, neither you nor your officials are then seen for 48 hours afterwards, while all hell is breaking loose in the Middle East. is just the opposite of that approach. And what it means, therefore, is there's fewer guardrails

and fewer barriers against ill-conceived foreign adventures, which this looks more and more like with each passing hour. I would say video clips on a social media platform owned by the president and his family. I mean, when you start drilling down to this, it just gets wilder and wilder. Let's end on this, Andrew. We've talked on a number of these shows about,

I think, some increasingly credible evidence that the president's, psychological condition has declined over the course of this last year. There certainly seems to be a sharp compare and contrast versus his administration today versus the first term. That may be partly the cast of characters around him in the first term, who limited some of the worst behavior, but I also wonder, Andrew, if we have to read into our analysis a view that this is an individual who is increasingly maybe unmoored, impulsive. I mean, impulse control and the lack of it

is one of the symptoms of people often at an advanced age under acute pressure who are beginning to break. Look at that press conference or whatever it was today where it was supposedly they had the families of the service members who were killed in this operation present. And Trump sort of briefly mentions their grief and then goes on to talk about his ballroom at length.

And this is the first public engagement he's had, I think, since the war began. Any other leader, you would absolutely be saying he's lost it. It's completely off his rocker. So, yeah, you have the most powerful military in the world under the command of somebody who is clearly has grave mental difficulties, and he's surrounded by advisors who may not be clinically insane,

but who have fanatical, delusional beliefs about American power, about the purposes of power, who are simply giving him, you know, egging him on in all the wrong directions, some of whom are then backed by tech bros running these fantastic empires who have absolute millinarian belief systems about how democracy should be structured. It's so insane. the situation that we're in. We, the United States, the whole world, you know, we didn't get a vote in this, and yet we're all basically hostage

to the whims of this megalomaniac. It cannot be exaggerated. And we're not talking about the Epstein Files. And we're not, you know, for now, for now. I mean, it's still going to come out eventually. Yeah. But for now, you know, instead of people talking about the Epstein Files, they're talking about is he going to blow up the world?

Yeah. And what's the state of his business? mental and physical health. Yeah. Andrew, let's press pause on the first half of the show there. We're going to reconvene on the back half with our monk donors. Monk donors get access to all of our premium and audio video content, 72 hours in advance of the general public.

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