Speaker 1: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Kylie Cast. I'm Kylie Griswold,
Managing editor at The Federalist. Please like and subscribe wherever
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you'd like to email the show, you can do so
at radio at the Federalist dot com. I would love
to hear from you today. I'm so pleased to welcome
to the show my colleague and a senior editor at
The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson. Today John and I tackle
the war in Iran, so whether you are really confused
by the Trump administration's messaging, or you know exactly what
you think and you have a fully formed opinion, or
you're still trying to figure out what exactly you think
about the war. You are in the right place, John
and I take the war, the messaging, all of it
head on. It's an episode you will not want to miss.
Send it to a friend, save it for later. Without
further ado, Please welcome to the show, John Davidson. John Davidson,
so great to have you on the Kylie Cast. Thanks
for being here today.
Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me Kylie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anytime. So we are now in a war with Iran.
Came out of nowhere over the weekend. Also, we're recording
this on Tuesday, and the news is moving quickly, so
we'll keep that in mind as we go. Things may
change before this podcast is released, but I suspect that
we will still very much be at war with Iran
come Thursday. So, John, can I get just your initial
reaction to the war and kind of how you're feeling
in the days since the weekend when this all launched.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, like a lot of people, I was surprised.
I was surprised because there had been no effort to
prepare the American people for this. We just had the
State of the Union last week on Tuesday, and there
was no real mention of impending war plans with Iran,
no talk of a regime change war in the Middle East,
which you know, we should be clear that this is
a regime change war. Whatever the administration says, however, they
want to kind of parse the language here. From the
moment that they took out the Supreme Leader, I had
told a Kamani on February twenty eighth it was a
regime change war. And then today the news is that
they took out this other group of iranianly that had
gathered to elect for the first time actually elect the
next leader of Iran. All those people were taken out
as well, so, you know, So to answer your question,
I was surprised because there had been no communication with
the American people. There had been no effort by the
administration to get Congress on board or to solicit input
from Congress. It seemed to have come out of nowhere.
And I think, you know, based on what we're seeing now,
the kind of the information that's coming out and the
things that the Trump administration is saying, specifically thinking of
remarks that Marco Rubio and Speaker Mike Johnson made on
Monday that Israel was planning to take unilateral action and
that would mean that the Iranian response would target US
assets in the Middle East. So we just had to
go ahead and go with Israel. You know, I think
it's fair to say that we may have been sort
of led by the nose into this war, and that's
why there was so little preparation done on the part
of the administration to kind of sell this to the
American people, make the case that we have to strike
Iran now, and also very little in the way of preparing,
you know, evacuations for Americans who are now in many
cases trapped in these Middle Eastern countries at our embassies,
at our military bases, also just you know, civilians who
are in these countries for business or whatever. I think.
President Trump was asked about the lack of evacuation plans
today in the White House in his meeting with the
German Chancellor, and his response was very telling. He said, effectively,
there was no time. This all happened very quickly, so
that doesn't like, I don't know that doesn't inspire confidence
in me when I feel like the whole thing was
kind of rushed, and it makes it like it was
foisted upon us by Israel, by our ally who had
their own set of strategic comparatives, who had their own agenda,
and frankly, most of the things that the administration has
said over the past forty eight hours on this subject
haven't inspired a lot of confidence in me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely agree. I want to dig into the
being led by the nose aspect of this, because the
Israel component is obviously a huge one. We're finally getting
what seems like the real reason for why we had
to get involved in this right away, which I mean
maybe days ago would have been considered by some on
Twitter who have been responding very rashly to this as
an anti Semitic conspiracy theory, but now, oh, it's actually
appears to be quite clearly the reason why we got involved.
You wrote a great piece that's up on the Federalist
this week where you use the term chain ganged, that
the US was chain ganged into this war. Can you
explain what exactly you mean by that, and maybe I
can kind of tee it up with this quote from
a New York Times piece that ran on Monday, this
is the lead of the peace quote. Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahoo of Israel walked into the Oval Office on the
morning of February eleventh, determined to keep the American president
on the path to war. For weeks, the United States
and Israel had been secretly discussing a military offensive against Iran,
but Trump administration officials had recently begun negotiating with the
Iranians over the future of their nuclear program, and the
Israeli leader wanted to make sure that the new diplomatic
effort did not undermine the plans. Those plans being plans
to go to war. So obviously, anything we see from
the New York Times we should take with a grain
of salt. And as when we saw this on Monday,
I did take it with a grain of salt, because
it came from the Times, which cannot be trusted to
report the truth accurately. And I mean, these are the
people who wrote just a glowing oh bit for the Ayatola.
And yet then a day or two later we heard
directly from the horse's mouth, so to speak, Rubio out
there and Mike Johnson out there, basically saying the exact
same thing, that, oh, we had to take this action
because Israel's going to take this action. Can you explain
this concept of chain ganging and kind of how how
did this happen?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Right, Yeah, it was actually the same day it was.
It was later in the day that New York Times
piece came out on Monday morning, and later in the
day on Mondays when Rubio gave his remarks, and then
I believe Speaker Johnson gave similar remarks, and then either
last night or this morning, I don't know because I
don't know when what time of day Sean Hannity's show
is on because I'm not a boomer con and I
don't watch, but I saw the clip on X and
Senator Tom Cotton basically said the same thing, you know,
And then we had we had President Trump in the
Oval Office today making similar remarks. So this has now
been repeated several times, very similar language about Israel going
to take unilateral action against Iran and then US knowing
that we that our basis would be targeted in the
Iranian response, and that being something that pushed pushed events forward. Essentially,
that's not a radical thing to say. That's not a
misinterpretation of what Rubio said. And by the way, that
doesn't mean that it was the wrong decision to go
to war. It doesn't mean that President Trump and his
administration won't be able to pull this off successfully. Doesn't
mean any of those things. We're being descriptive here. We're
trying to say, why did we do this? Now? What
were the events that happened that triggered this seemingly sudden
launching of a regime change war against Iran over the weekend.
And so to your question about what chain ganging is
or what it means to be chain gang, this is
a term of art in international security studies that refers
to the power dynamics between a stronger ally and a
weaker ally, where the weaker ally has security commitments and
strategic compare arratives that do not align with the interests
of the stronger ally. And this is something that you know,
scholars of military history and international studies and war studies
have actually kind of looked at and described in the
past how this is, how this has worked out. I
mentioned in my piece that a lot of scholars attribute
a chain ganging effect to the outbreak of World War One,
in Europe, that the European powers had such a complex
web of alliances between them that smaller weaker powers like
Serbia or even in that case Russia, that their actions
compelled the actions of larger, stronger nations like France and Britain,
essentially constraining them and in trapping them in a situation
where they were, to use the term chain, ganged into
a war that they may not otherwise have chosen. And
so this is a phenomenon in internet international relations, in
the power dynamics between coalitions, between allies and military partnerships,
that it has a history. It's something that's been studied,
and I applied it in this case because this is
something that scholars have already looked at in the US
Israel relationship Visa vi Iran and the article that I
cited from a twenty eighteen Texas National Security Review piece
about the twenty eleven twenty twelve dynamic between the US,
Israel and Iran. This is when Iran was hardening its
nuclear program and Israel under then Prime Minister Benjamin Netan
yahoo came out essentially and threatened unilateral military action, created
a war scare that the Obama administration had to respond to.
And that was an example of when chain gang didn't
work because the United States was not drawn into a
war in that case. But it didn't totally fail either, right,
because Israel was able to influence US POL toward Iran
and actually get the Obama administration to do some things
that it otherwise wouldn't have done. Now, again, you can
argue that the Obama administration was wrong. I tend to
think the Obama administration was wrong, and if we had
been much tougher on Iran fifteen years ago, we wouldn't
be in this position now. But the point is that
the dynamic of a weaker ally in this case, Israel
manipulating a stronger ally, the United States into doing things
that the United States might not otherwise do if it
were just pursuing its own national interests is a phenomenon
in international relations, and I think it's one that we
are seeing play out in this Iran war. And I
say that not to throw stones at the Trump administration.
I'm saying that because of what the Trump administration officials
themselves are saying about how this.
Speaker 1: Started, right, right, So, why in your estimation did it
work in this case? I mean, why did we have
to bend to to the desires of Israel? I understand
that there are ally, but they are the weaker ally.
You know, why couldn't you know if Trump and and
Yahoo are in deliberations and BB basically says we're going
to do this, so you know it's your embassies are
going to be hit if you don't strike first. You know,
why can't we leverage our being the weaker ally over
Israel to say, well, if you do this, then we're gonna,
you know, counter measure with this, Like if we knew
about it ahead of time, why did we decide to
strike instead of using our more powerful position over Israel
to try to get something that was more favorable to us.
Speaker 2: That's a good question, and I don't I don't necessarily
have the answers because I don't it's very opaque kind
of what was going on behind the scenes and how
this process played out, And honestly, the boxed communications from
the Trump administration have not contributed a ton of clarity
to how this happened. I think one thing though, I
do know that we know, which is that the Trump
administration from the outset, and this was true in Trump's
first term and it's true now has a very different
approach to Iran and Mid East politics than the Obama
administration or the Biden administration did. So, you know, in
the first Trump administration, one of the first things that
Trump did was get out of the JCPOA, the Iran
nuclear deal, right, he ended that he withdrew the United
States from that. He thought it was a bad deal.
I think that was the right that was the right call.
So from the outset, you have an administration that has
a much more kind of aggressive posture towards Iran, has
much less tolerance for Iran being a nuclear power or
even being a regional hedgemon. Obama's whole idea for Iran
going going into you know, from from Obama's first term,
was that Iran should be the regional hedgemon in the
Middle East and that would that would contribute to stability
and order and predictability in that region. And this was
sort of ben row wads Is, you know, and Obama's
grand idea to revise what previously had been the US
strategic posture towards Iran and the Middle East, which was
that Iran as a pariah state, it's a hostile power,
it's a revolutionary terrorist regime and it's not to be
sort of encouraged in its regional hegemonic ambitions. Right. So
from the outset in the Trump administration, you had a
completely different posture towards Iran. So that is to say,
the Trump administration and Trump himself was more disposed to
go down this road than previous democratic administrations were. They
were more inclined to accept that action. Kinetic action had
to be taken. And we saw this in his first
administration when he took out Sulimane, the IRGC general. We
saw it last June in the Twelve Days War when
we hit three nuclear sites, including the mountain fortress of
four Dough underneath that mountain. And so there's already an
appetite there to take kinetic action against Iran. And I
think in this case the restraint that you might have
otherwise seen in a different administration just just wasn't there.
You know, maybe it was that Trump was just he
just needed he just needed a reason to kind of
be done with negotiations. He felt he's saying now that
he felt that the negotiations were going nowhere. Maybe it
was that, you know, Israel taking unilateral action, you know,
convinced Trump that now is the time. You know, we
just don't know. But but but what is true, what
has been true in the past, is that for the
most part, the United States has been able to avoid
being chain ganged into military conflicts by weaker allies. All
of our allies are weaker allies. We don't have any
peer allies. So this dynamic that I'm talking about, where
there's there's a danger of a stronger ally being manipulated
into taking actions that otherwise wouldn't buy a weaker ally
is something that we, as the United States, as the
military superpower in the world for the last seventy years,
have to deal with all the time with all of
our allies, and we generally have been successful at that.
In this case, it looks like maybe we weren't so successful,
or that we were pushed into doing something, maybe not
that we didn't want to do or that Trump didn't
want to do, but that this wasn't the timeline on
which she wanted to do it. And as I mentioned earlier,
some of these indications like lack of communication, no evacuation plans,
suggest that maybe this was the timeline on this was
pushed up against us, and we were forced to kind
of act in the moment.
Speaker 1: Right, right, So, I mean you got into some of
this in your answer, but do you think it was
actions taken during the Biden administration that that is what
mostly change things between Trump one and Trump two? I mean,
because during Trump's first term he did reverse Obama era
policies and pulling out of the Iran Nuclear Deal and
kind of changing the focus from making Iran the you know,
regional hedgemon to empowering Saudi Arabia to be that you know,
in the Abraham Accords, and all of these things, like
Trump's policy toward Iran seemed to be very effective in
Trump's first term without starting any new wars, without you know,
doing any of these things. And then, you know, even
when we saw these strikes on Iran's nuclear sites in
twenty twenty five, you know, we were assured everything was
taken out, our objective was achieved. This mission was so successful,
it's the most successful mission there ever was. And then
fast forward less than a year later and oh now
we're at war, like what you know, and maybe it
is just the chain gang and that's happening here that
we were kind of rushed into action that we weren't
otherwise wanting to take. But it just seems to me that,
you know, we actually did have a very successful policy
in the Middle East during Trump's for which is why
we saw this historic piece. You know what changed It's
only been a few years, I mean, was the Biden administration.
Did they so so help I Ran and their proxies
in the Middle East that like this had to happen.
Speaker 2: Now, well, a couple of things did change during the
Biden administration. Obviously, you had October seventh, the Hamas attack
on Israel in October seventh, twenty twenty three. That was
that was an Iranian proxy attack, right. Iran was one
of the main sponsors of Hamas, and this was the
biggest action Hamas had ever taken, and it, you know,
triggered a war that is going on still. Right in
some ways, you can almost you can almost see this
as one continuous war from Israel's perspective from October seventh
to now. You also had during the Biden administration the
arming and the missile attacks by the Huthi rebels in Yemen.
These are Sheeite, you know, rebels that are armed with
Iranian missiles. They launched missiles at Israel, they launched missiles
at ships in the region, and that became a real
problem during the Biden administration that these pro these Iranian
proxies were emboldened, they were taking action, and so I
think that changed the calculus somewhat. Certainly October seventh and
certainly the Huthi sort of you know, missile attacks as well.
And when Trump came into office, you know, that had
kind of shifted the landscape in the Middle East. It
certainly had shifted the strategic priorities for Israel, getting back
to this question of chain ganging or entrapment. During the
Biden administration, Israel's strategic priorities changed, and I think that
there was a decision made. I'm I don't have any
special insight, but I'm speculating that based on Israel's action
since October seventh, that that that was the point at
which Israeli leadership decided, we can't tolerate this Iranian regime
any longer. This this we have to deal with this
once and for all. It's too great of a risk
to allow the Iranian regime to persist in its in
its funding and arming of proxies in the region in
its pursuit of nuclear weapons. And so you had you
had the operation last June that where Israel and the
United States took out most of the nuclear facilities. And
then I think, but but, and here's where the communication
part comes in. I don't think that that was ever
going to be the end of it for Israel. And
yet the Trump administration communicated to the American people to
mollify I think at the Maga base that's very suspicious
of regime change wars in the Middle East. No, this
was just these were just perfect air strikes, perfectly and
totally obliterated the nuclear program and one and done, you know,
and you don't have to worry about a protracted engagement
in Iran. We destroyed it. Everything was perfect. I think
they overplayed their hand there because any reasonable person, you know,
you and I were not necessarily like, you know, nuclear
proliferation experts. But it doesn't take an expert to say,
you said eight months ago that their nuclear program was obliterated,
that it was that not just their facilities, but their capabilities,
their enrichment facilities, the future of their program is destroyed.
And they said that over and Trump said that over
and over. He said it essentially every month up until
a few weeks ago, was saying this about what about
the operation last June. Well, then if you come in
and then tell us, oh, Iran was only a couple
months from from having immunity in its nuclear program because
it was protected by all these short range ballistic missiles,
I'm sorry. Someone in the administration has to address the
disconnect there in the messaging from last June and all
of last year to what they're saying now. And it's fine.
Just tell me the truth. Just explain it in a
way that makes sense. I am maga like I'm pro Trump.
I want to support the president. I want our foreign
policy to succeed. I think Iran was a malign actor.
I think the regime was illegitimate. I think we should
have taken action against their nuclear program a long time ago.
But make it make sense, communicate in a way that
doesn't insult my intelligence. I think that's all a lot
of us are asking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the messaging has been the most infuriating
part for people, because you know, before you had the
Rubio admission, we heard numerous reasons rationales for the strike.
It was regime change. It was freedom for the Iranian people.
It was nukes even after you know, we were previously
assured that Operation Midnight Hammer was such a wild success. Meanwhile,
not even from the administration. But then you have Senate
Republicans out here Ted Cruz saying he's not aware of
any intel indicating that Iran was close to getting nukes again,
at the same time that Tom Cotton is claiming that
Iran has posed an imminent risk to the US for
forty seven years. Make that make sense. Then you have
Lindsey Graham, classic warmonger, you know, comparing Trump and net
Yahoo to Roosevelt and Churchill. I mean, he's not even
worth taking seriously in any way on this. And then
you have the White House COM's team tweeting out and
Our Review or National Review articles basically saying that Rubio
did not say what he did say. And it's been
kind of frustrating too, because you know, I have a
lot of respect for Pete Hegseth and what he's doing
at the Department of War, but I was frustrated by
the press conference he game this week because it all
seems so condescending to very reasonable questions that conservative media,
we're asking of him that are exactly the concerns that
are on Americans minds. How long can we expect this
to last? What are the risks? How many troops are
we planning to send there, what's the manpower, what's the cost?
I mean, these are like very reasonable accountability questions the
American people who have been burned by decades of war
in the Middle East have and the response from the
administration has been either confusing, contradictory, or condescending kind of
at every step of the way. And that's been really frustrating,
I think for most of the people watching.
Speaker 2: Yeah, did you not hear my remarks? Yeah, I did
hear your remarks, and your remarks are the problem. That's
where the confusions coming in. Secretary hegseeth, we did hear
your remarks. We've all heard what the administration has been saying,
and you know, and again, you know, so much of
this is speculation now, but it seems like it seems
like Trump is he he you know, because of Trump's
ego and because of his personality, he is not going
to want anyone to say that he was forced into
anything that he was, you know, led to act before
he was prepared to act, or that he was not
the initiator, So any suggestions, you know, So even if
it is the case that he was, you know, his
hand was somewhat forced. Even if it is the case
that the timeline was pushed up and we we were
responding to Israeli actions, and that's what that's why this
war started when it did. I don't think Trump is
going to allow that narrative to take root because it's
going to make him look weak. And so, for better
or for worse, I think that he is trying to
take ownership of the initiative here and say no, if anything,
And he said earlier today in this in this White
House appearance with the German Chancellor, in response to a question,
he said, no, if anything, I forced Israel's hand. Okay,
that doesn't make sense based on what everyone else in
the administration is saying. It also doesn't make sense based
on how this is playing out.
Speaker 1: But also does it make sense based on what Trump said,
because you know, his reason and for not evacuating people
ahead of time was that, oh, this all happened so quickly. Well,
if you were the one calling the shots, it wouldn't
have happened too quickly for you to evacuate Americans.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, yeah, exactly, you know. And and maybe that's
just how it's going to be, and that Trump is
going to want to take ownership of this and and
this is the new, consistent, unwavering line from the administration.
Fine that that that's fine, But my concern about it
is that if we need to be honest with ourselves
about what an America First policy means when it comes
to our foreign policy, and I don't think that it's
an America first foreign policy to be forced into major
armed conflicts in the Middle East outside of a timeline
of our choosing, in a manner of our choosing, and
in a way where we are totally prepared and the
administration is prepared to explain what it is that they're
doing to the American people in a way that makes sense. Uh.
And I actually think that the botched communications around this
may become a problem, has the potential to become a
real problem for the administration going forward if they can't
figure out how to communicate in a way that is consistent,
makes sense and you know, sort of gives some some
dignity to the average intelligence of the American voter or
the Maga Republican right. Don't insult our intelligence and condescend
to us the way Secretary Hegseth was doing in his
press conference. Just answer the questions truthfully, answer them consistently,
give us responses that make sense. Don't torture the English
language by saying that Iran has been an imminent threat
for forty seven years. That is that is George W.
Bush neo con stuff. I have no patience for that
kind of that kind of thing, and I think that
people are understandably frustrated by it, so that you know,
they have a chance to kind of write the ship here,
but they need to do it quickly. And they also
need to make sure and assure a nervous American public
that this isn't going to be something that drags on
and on for months or years that involves hundreds of
billions of US tax dollars and a whole constellation of
NGOs that we have to send in there to kind
of reconstruct the country. That is not what we've signed
up for. And frankly, some of the other things that
the President has said about the Iranian people just kind
of rising up and taking over are completely divorced. I'm sorry,
completely divorced from reality. That is not how regime change happens.
That is not how revolutions happen. That people don't just
rise up in sort of a peasant's revolt. So they
need to stop saying things like that. I'm sorry, it's
just it's very frustrated.
Speaker 3: College under employment is at crisis levels. Almost half of
recent college grads are working in jobs that do not
require a college degree. We have not seen numbers like
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get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you brought up George W.
Speaker 2: Bush.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about some of the
some of the analogs here. So we talked about October
seventh a little while ago, and I think it's safe
to say, you know, Trump gets a lot of credit
for his efforts during his first presidency and even many
during the second. Here, I think it's safe to say
that like October seventh wouldn't have happened if Biden were
not in office like we had. We had a lot
of foreign policy successes during Trump's first term that I
think we're so weakened that there was we were not
only were we funding both sides of that conflict and
you know, like enabling and emboldening Iran during during October seventh,
but but you also just had like no Threa whatsoever
from the United States during that period because we were
sell And it was.
Speaker 2: The funding too. It was that the Biden administration released
huge amounts of funding to the Iranian regime and a
lot of a lot of those funds went straight to Hamas.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, So you know Trump gets a lot of
credit in that regard, Like if he had won in
twenty twenty that you know, October seventh may never have
happened and we may never be in this position. So
you know, of course he's being forced to react to
things that we're not. We're not his fault here, But
that said, you know, does Trump get the benefit of
the doubt here? Like I I obviously lived through much
of the War on Terror and just the the war
in Afghanistan troops over there, but I was not you know,
politically sentient, shall I say, during the WMD lies and
all of that, Like I don't have like personal firsthand
knowledge of all of that. Are are the excuses from
the White House recalling those types of things, like is
this completely different from that? Is it the same? Another
another line I've heard from the White House is like,
you know, Iran is not Iraq, that this is not
the same, Okay, but it's also not Venezuela, And like
the Middle East? Is this idea that this is completely
different from Iraq, that we can just we can just
waltz in, do regime change, get rid of their nukes,
and walk out and everybody can just be unscathed and
fine in a week or a month's time. Just seems
to be so divorced from reality to me, And I
just I'm curious, like, is Trump going full George W.
Bush here or does he get the benefit of the
doubt on this?
Speaker 2: Like what are we looking at? So what happened with
George W. Bush in the first Iraq War? Gather around children,
I will tell you of the before times. I was
in college at the time, and I was I was
pretty dumb, so you know, it's not like I had
a great beat on things at the time. The Bush
administration put forth this huge effort to make a case
not just to the American people, but on the world stage.
Right at the u N. Cole and Powell presenting this,
you know, to the United Nations, the evidence of weapons
of mass destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime. There was a
there was a big push to sort of make this
Cassis belly that Iraq had WMDs and that after nine
to eleven a rogue terror regime could not possess weapons
of mass destruction. There was you know, they tried to
make a case that there was all these connections to
al Qaeda inside the Iraqi regime, and then you know,
they sold the war on that basis, right. It was
a huge effort leading up to the invasion of Iraq,
and once we got in and there were no w mds,
or at least there were no WMDs, you know, of
the kind that they had told us there were. And
this was you know, the CIA was involved with this
is George Tennant, the director of the CIA at the time,
famous phrase to President Bush was the the intel was
a slam dunk on WMD's And then, of course it
all turned out not to be true. And so what
the administration had to do because we had already committed,
we'd already toppled the regime. We had affected regime change.
We had a massive army in Iraq, ground forces. We
had a civilian administration appointee who was basically sort of
in charge of Iraq. He disbanded the Iraqi military, which
in retrospect was a huge mistake. And so they had
to come up with a new like in the moment,
a new justification for why we were doing this. If
there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, why
have we invaded the country, Why have we decapitated the regime?
What is the purpose of our mission here? And they
had to cobble together a new justification for it, and
that was this Neocon nation building all people's yearned for
democracy clap trap that justified are ongoing nation building efforts
in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Uh. You know, for years
and years and years after that, that was not you know,
that was not part of the initial rhetoric to sell
the Iraq War to the American people, that the Iraqi
people were yearning for freedom and that and that you know,
there there was talk by Rumsfeld and some others, I
believe that we would be greeted as liberators, which was
a complete fantasy, right and totally misunderstood. Uh, you know,
Middle East political uh, societal dynamics. But but the but
the justification that we have to make you know, the
Middle East safe for democracy and we that the Iraqi
people deserve you know, freedom, and and they're gonna be
it's going to be just like the United States, and
they're gonna have elections. That was all post facto justifications
that were cobbled together once it became obvious that there
were no weapons of mass destruction and so so in
that sense, you know, so you asked about, you know what,
what are the similarities is you know, we keep being
told this is not Iraq uh and and and it's
not in that in that sense, it's not like in
contrast to it to the Iraq War. The Trump administration
has made no effort to communicate anything to the to
the American people ahead of time. They haven't tried to
sell this on anything. Uh. They you know, barely told
us about it before it started happening. So so it's
unlike Iraq in that sense. And maybe it is just
a case that President Trump does not feel that he
needs to explain or justify these things beforehand, because it
all works out in the end. Like with Venezuela or
with Operation Midnight Hammer last June, and maybe that will
happen again this time, and Trump is just sort of
the golden boy and everything works out for him. However,
these these uh, these kinds of things tend to take
on a life of their own. Events spiral out of control,
things don't go go according to plan. The other thing
about about this conflict is that you know, Iran is
is a is a big country. You know, it's it's
not Venezuela. And to your point, it's not Iraq either.
It's a big country. It's not as fract just of
a country as Iraq was. Iraq was a was a
was a cobbled together kind of a false country that
was created at the aftermath of the Two World Wars.
It was it was ruled by Saddam Hussein's sort of
like a tribal group. Uh. There were a lot of
other ethnic groups and tribal coalitions in Iraq. It was
a very it was a very unstable conglomeration of peoples
that made up this and that still make up the
nation state of Iraq. That is not quite the same
in Iran. It's it's much more of a cohesive nation state.
There's more of an ethnic majority there, or at least
in an ethnic plurality there. And it's not it's not
simply the case that we're going to be able to
sort of, I think, really control what sort of regime
takes charge in Iraq. And maybe the Trump administration doesn't
care what kind of regime takes control as long as
they're not a revolutionary terrorist regime bent on acquiring nuclear weapons,
you know, And and maybe that's as good as it
gets in this part of the world. Again, it remains
to be seen. I'm not I'm not I'm not instinctively
against our our aims here in in taming the the
Iranian regime, in changing it, in ensuring that it can't
threaten the United States. But I think that there's a
lot of unknowns, and I don't have confidence that the
administration sort of has a real plan for what comes
after this series of strikes, however long they.
Speaker 1: Last, right, right, Well, especially because it all happened so quickly, John,
we could we couldn't have done anything to prepare for this.
Speaker 2: Evacuate anybody, right right?
Speaker 1: Is there anything to be learned here about, like the
role of embassies or other US presence in the Middle East, Like,
should we be taking any lessons about this? Would it
be as easy to be chain ganged by a weaker
ally if we didn't have people just kind of permanently
stationed in the Middle East that are such easy targets
for terrorists and the Iranian regime, Like, like, what what
should we take away from that?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And what can we do?
Speaker 2: How exposed we are? Right?
Speaker 1: Right? Like has the has the train totally left the
station on that or like is there a world where
we actually could change the status quo as it relates
to our presence in the Middle East?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a larger question about American hegemony, uh,
and and the unipolar world versus a multipolar world. You know,
the reason that we have military bases all over the
world is because after World War Two we were the
global hedgemon, and especially after the Cold War, you know,
and so you kind of have to take a uh
kind of have to choose a strategic road, so to speak. Right,
you know, if you if you want a unipolar world
where under American hegemony, then you are going to need
US military bases all over the world. You know. One
of the reasons that we have a military and this
this gets lost in the discussion about NATO and our
European allies who are totally kind of militarily incompetent. They
don't they don't really have military's capabilities to speak of anymore.
That's not that's that's a feature, not a bug of
the post World War two system.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The idea is that by imposing American hegemony on Europe,
you prevent a general European war from breaking out again,
You make it impossible for something like World War two
to happen again. And so, you know, the response on
the other side of the aisle to that is like, well,
we you know, we don't want to spend our tax
dollars and our military resources put policing Europe in perpetuity forever.
And that's you know, and you can make that argument,
and that's sort of like that's the other sort of
strategic road that we go down, that is sort of
a fortress America doesn't matter. What happens in other countries,
doesn't matter, you know, what happens in the Middle East
or other regions. We just need to take care of
our own and not quash small wars as they come up.
In these other parts of the world and conceive of
American interests narrowly. And I have some sympathy for that
view after you know, twenty years of nation building and
sort of neocon interventionism in places like Afghanistan. You know,
it's just like in say, it's like the worst place
in the world that we could have spent twenty years
in untold trillions of dollars trying to turn that into
something other than what it is always going to be.
So all that to say, it's a larger question our
exposure in these different parts of the world, our exposure
in the Middle East because of all of our embassies
and our military bases in personnel. There is part of
global US hegemony and maintaining that as as a strategic
framework for how we interact with the world. The US
led kind of rules based international order, right, And I
think that there's you know, there's room to debate whether
that has has been a good thing for the American people.
And I think that that, in the end is the
standard by which we need to judge all of these
stress strategic options. What is best for the American people,
If global American hegemony serves the interest of the American people.
If it creates prosperity and success and peace for the
American people, then I'm all for it. To the extent
that it doesn't, then I see no reason to maintain
that order and that strategic posture for the sake of
NGOs and international bodies and institutions that have little interest
in the prosperity and peace and security of the American people.
Speaker 1: So let's talk perception of the American people, because I mean,
I don't trust a whole lot of the polling coming
out about who thinks what about the administration and their
actions right now, because it's also it's meant to shape
public opinion, and it's just also too early to know.
But if past is prologue, then the longer this carries on,
the less appetite people will have for it, because that's
just how war works. But it also seems, I mean,
which is to be expected, that there is far far
more appetite for this in the Acela Corridor and in
the Beltway than there is in any of the rest
of the country, specifically among younger Americans, who I think
are so tired of hearing about war in the Middle East.
I mean, you've got You've got boomer cons who just
this is what they live for. But then you have
a lot of other people who are like, Hey, I'm
over here trying to buy a house, and we're you know,
talking about freedom for the Iranians. Like, what the heck
is going on? Can you just speak to maybe some
of that generational divide? But even more than that, I mean,
we have midterms coming up this year, and I would
love to get your take on what you think the
implications of this will be in November, because the way
I'm looking at it, there is a whole lot of
potential political downside and not a whole lot of upside,
And so you know, like what's the political calculus here?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I tend to agree with you. I you know, like,
what concrete material improvement will ordinary middle class working America
can see in their lives as a result of US
toppling the Iranian regime and taking out its missile capabilities
and destroying its navy. I can't think of one. And
even if there even if there were one, I doubt
that that is going to sort of be like what
voters are thinking about when they go to the polls
for the midterms, right, They're not going to be going
to be like, oh man, that Iran war, that was awesome.
I'm voting. I'm voting for the Republicans. You know, it's
just the downside seems like there's a lot of potential downsides,
and again, you know, it remains to be seen, right
because we're only a few days into this. The downsides
seem like, the potential downsides seem great, The potential upsides
from an electoral perspective seem elusive, hard to articulate. My
preference would be for this Trump administration to have had
a laser like focus on domestic issues. I think that
the coalition that elected Trump was reacting to what they
saw in the Biden administration, and among the Democrats, I
think that having a laser like focus on deportations and
immigration reform and securing the border and cracking down on
the abuse of our visa system and our asylum system
is a major concern for the people who voted for Trump.
The economy, you mentioned young people not being able to
afford to buy houses. I think there's a reason that
like boomer cons get excited about like these foreign kind
of adventures because they've they've kind of made it like
the economy is built around benefiting them, and not so
much younger Americans who are trying to start families, who're
trying to get established, who are trying to sort of
enter the middle class and be self sufficient, and maybe
even you know, sort of put some money away and
do all the things that Americans would like to do.
And so it is the case that administrations can be
distracted by things, or that attention can be I mean
not even you know, let's say you don't even want
to use the word distracted. There's only so much attention
and effort that can go towards certain things. And a
lot of times in any administration, the thing that gets
done is the thing that enough people within the administration
are focused on. I think that's one of the reasons
that Venezuela happened. It's not that it was the number
one thing on anyone's agenda. It was that it was
on enough people's agenda that it got done. And so
when you embark on something like what we've embarked on
here in Iran, nobody knows where this is going, nobody
knows how long this is going to last, nobody knows
how much it will cost nobody knows what the fallout
is going to be in terms of US involvement in
the region, but I do feel pretty confident in saying
that the administration is focused entirely on Iran now, and
that is unfortunately to the exclusion of other domestic priorities
that I think are way more important to Republican voters
and are going to be way more of a motivating
factor in the midterms, especially if god forbid, you know,
we have a large number of casualties, or we have
some sort of terrorist attack where civilians are killed, either
here or abroad. That's going to sour people on this
really quickly. And so if there's a huge risk involved
in committing so much attention and concentration and resources to
something where the upsides, at least from an electoral perspective,
are pretty elusive, it's pretty hard to see what the
upsides are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there are very clear issues that are
top of mind for the American people. Obviously the economy, obviously, immigration,
also apparently elections. I mean, there was one thing that
Americans really wanted the Senate to just get done. They
had the Save America Act. They you know, they could
utilize the talking filibuster and actually make some progress on this.
And it seems that the only things, you know, the
only things the Senate has actually worked hard on, are
doing interventionist messaging for the Trump administration. That's mixed messaging
and you know, getting all excited about war and doing
all of the work they possibly can to extend the
enhanced Obabacare subsidies a couple of months ago. I mean,
it's like anytime there's an actual priority that Americans are like, hey,
this is an eighty twenty issue, or this should be
able to get done, it's like there is no effort whatsoever.
And it's just so frustrating when you had actual tangible
things that could represent real wins, like you know, policy aims,
campaign promises, these types of concrete things, and instead, now
all of the oxygen has once again been sucked out
of the room by something that not only is not
going to help Americans, but it's actually kind of a
middle finger to Americans who actually have priorities that they
want to see done, and it's just Nope, nope, we
don't have time for that. We got we gotta do
war with Iran. So and whether you even see the
merits of that or not. It's like, we have problems
in our own country, you know, that people care about,
and just to not see any movement on that is
is incredibly incredibly frustrating for a lot of Americans. On
the congressional point, I'm curious what you think just about
even like the constitutionality of this kind of military action.
I think, you know, essentially declaring war on Iran seems
to me to be very different than like targeted drug
boat strikes or like even the Madureau operation. Do you
think that this was above board?
Speaker 2: Was it?
Speaker 1: Were we wrong not to have congressional approval here? Like
it seems to me that this was a bigger declaration
of war than some of the other actions the Trump
administration has taken.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I sort of mixed feelings about that. I think
that Okay, since you know, World War Two, we've kind
of been a in a situation where, uh, the executive
has broad latitude to use the military, uh to protect
American interests and and and to take action overseas as
it sees fit. And and so I think that that
fits within that broader sort of post World War two framework.
You know, obviously, if Trump had gone to Congress to
seek a declaration of war against Iran. Excuse me, he
wouldn't have got it, and I don't think you know,
maybe the only administration that would have, you know, would
have been able to secure an actual declaration of war
since World War Two was the George W. Bush administration
in the wake of nine to eleven. Interestingly, in that case,
they didn't even ask for a declaration of war. That
was the au It was an aum F, the Authorization
for the Use of Military Force. That was that that
sort of stayed in effect for many, many years. I
believe it's actually still in effect. And that was sort
of like a half measure short of a declaration of war. So,
you know, in some ways, the just the way that
the United States has conducted foreign policy since the end
of World War Two has rendered this a bit of
an academic debate with not a lot of real world applications.
I know that the Democrats sort of use that opportunistically.
You know, every time the Republican administration does something overseas
with the military that they don't like, they say, ah,
this is illegal. There's no you know, congression. But of course,
you know, Obama can go ahead and drone American citizens
all over the world, and Democrats won't say anything, right,
So it's a very cynical talking point that I think
is deployed to some extent on both sides. Democrats seem
to do it more often than Republicans. But but in
this case, I just think the the fact is that
was never going to happen like that. Even if this
had gone perfectly and the Trump administration had made a
case to the American people and had prepared US for
imminent action against Duran, I still don't think that Trump
would have gone to Congress to ask for a declaration
of war, and short of some more basic like structural
changes to the way our three branches of government operate,
I don't I just don't see that that any president
in either party is ever going to do that in
you know, in the current environment that we're in.
Speaker 1: You brought up terrorism a couple of minutes ago, and
we saw this mass shooting over the past couple of
days in Austin that seemed like potentially had links to
like Islamic terrorism. It's hard to know exactly. We're not
getting great information and it's a little bit mixed, but
he at least had indications that you know, he had
a sweatshirt that was like pro Alla and some other
things that indicated that maybe this was like a pro
Iran attack. Who knows, but I think it's raised some
questions for me about what we might be looking at
in the near future efforts to do refugee resettlement. Yeah,
like you know, things like that. How can we make
sure that we do not open the floodgates to a
bunch more unvetted foreigners. You know, we got a lot
of nonsense rhetoric from the Biden administration about, you know,
during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, how there were all of
these vetted immigrants, all these vetted refugees who were resettled
here that turned out to be an absolute load of dunk.
How can we ensure that this does not does not
result in the exact same thing, where we're just opening
the door to more terrorism.
Speaker 2: It's very hard to see how it doesn't. I mean, remember,
just not that long ago, it was one of those
Afghan refugees unvetted who attacked the National guardsmen in Washington,
d C. It was a December or January not that
long ago, and that was part of this wave of
people that we just led into the country because of
the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think it's a major problem.
Anytime there's major geopolitical upheaval in the Middle eastt it
triggers waves of refugees. In to twenty fourteen twenty fifteen,
the Syrian civil war triggered the ongoing migrant crisis in Europe.
The Muslim population of Europe for over the past ten
years has exploded largely because of these waves of refugees
that came out of the Middle East during this period
of intense civil war in Syria. So the idea that
we're going to go in and decapitate the regime that
has ruled for a half a century in Iran and
it's not going to have second and third order effects
in the forms of migrant crises, refugee crises, unvetted people
making their way out of Iran into European countries, into
the United States. Potentially, we already know during the Biden administration,
if something like fifteen hundred Iranians were apprehended at the
border crossing into the country illegally, of those, seven hundred
and fifty or so were released into the country. Those
are only the people that we know about, because of course,
there were hundreds of thousands of what they call known godaways,
which are people who crossed the border illegally of unknown origin.
We have no idea who these people were. They were
not apprehended and they got away. And that's also not
counting all of the So there's the known Godaways, and
then there's also what they call the unknown Godaways, which
is just the number of people who crossed, who evade
detection and we were not even aware that they had crossed.
In other words, they weren't picked up on a camera,
they didn't trip a censor, they were able to cross
into the border. And there's hundreds of thousands of those
as well, and ICE and CBP have a way of
calculating those things as well, so you know, so there's
there's you know, these are real concerns, and these again,
these are the kinds of things that you would hope
there would be some kind of like public discussion of
there would be an effort by the administration to mollify
the legitimate fears of the American people, especially after, as
I said, we had one of the Afghan refugees, you know,
attack our national guardsmen in the nation's capital just happened.
There's every reason to be concerned about that happening now
when we know from from from the Biden administration era
of the illegal immigration wave that came in that there
are Iranians, There are Iranians who were on the terrorist
watch list that came in. There are people from all
all kinds of other Muslim majority countries on terrorist watch
lists that came in. Todd Benzman, who now works for
Tom Homan and the Trump administration, during the you know,
he wrote a bunch of articles for us about this
very thing, about people who are on these watch lists
who are being apprehended at the border under the Biden administration.
So this is another thing that you can't just hand
wave it away. This is a real security concern, and
unfortunately it's something that we, you know, have to take
into an account when we launch these kinds of actions overseas.
And I hope the administration has taken it to account.
They haven't talked about it much. They haven't talked about
a lot of things very much. So, you know, I
hope that there's some there's someone in the White House
or someone in the administration who is at least preparing
Trump and the other principal officials in the administration to
rise exist accepting, you know, wave upon wave of Iranian
refugees in you know, a month or two. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that also just adds fuel to the fire
of why the condescension not only from the administration but
also from people who are just instinctively pro strikes like this,
Why that condescension is so frustrating for Americans because it's like,
you're not a roob for asking questions about the potential
second and third order effects of this. And you know,
it's similar to pharmaceuticals where it's like it has all
these side effects. No, those aren't side effects, those are effects.
Those are just things that are going to happen if
you take this like and you know, it's not that
you can bomb bomb another country, take out another leader,
and then act surprised when there's a refugee crisis, like, No,
this is actually foreseeable. So we need to know that
American interests are being considered here because it's not just
going to be contained over over there, like we are
going to feel the effects of that because of the
second and third order effects that are predictable in a
situation like this, and so the refugee implications are are
just one of those many things, And it would be
really great to get a clear, non condescending answer from
the administration and from people who are hawking the war
on this as to why why you know that's not
a concern here. So John, before I let you go,
you know, media coverage of this whole thing has been abysmal,
from how the Iahtola is being, you know, harolded as
this wonderful man with a nice smile and a bushy
beard and all the rest. And of course, you know,
we're only days into this and everybody already has an
exact fully formed opinion on everything. I love our colleague
Chris Bray's approach, which is that I'm about a week
away from starting to have an opinion on this. I
love that, and I think more people should be that way.
But just practical takeaways for Americans who are listening to this,
who either have a strong opinion or don't know what
to think about this yet, how can they stay sane
and not look stupid as they navigate conversations about this,
as they take public positions on this. I know El Parnell,
one of our colleagues at the Federalists is a really
great article on this, but just practically like people not
look insane and not come out with a gut reaction
that's going to look that's not going to age. Well,
shall we say?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think it's important for people to remember you
don't have to have a super strident opinion about the
Iranian war, right. You don't have to be super passionate
about it. You don't have to pick a side, you
don't have to weigh in on it. You know. One
of the great travesties of social media and the Internet
in general is that everybody feels like they have to
sort of, you know, have an opinion and broadcast the opinion.
And that's simply not true. For one thing, not everybody's
entitled to an opinion, right. I tend to think you
have to earn your opinions, right if you want them
to carry any weight. And so it's okay to sort
of reserve judgment. It's okay to wait and watch and
see how things unfold. And I think that's especially true
in this conflict. Since there really was no public debate
about this before it happened, we haven't been kind of
like in a discourse about Iran and what to do
about it, you know, leading up to this action. I
know that there's been a broader discourse has been going
on for many years about what to do about Iran's
nuclear weapons. But this isn't something that you know, we
were all kind of talking about and debating, and the
ground had not been prepared for this. And so it's
okay to take a breath, to take a beat, and
to watch and to wait and to assess, you know,
what you think of the arguments that are being made,
of the statements that are coming out of the White
House and the administration. I myself, you know, we commentate
on this stuff and cover this stuff for a living.
I'm trying to be measured in my response. You know,
you may not seem like that from the headlines of
my pieces, which I don't always write. But uh, but
but but it's it's okay to not have a super
strident opinion about this, and it's okay to change your
opinion too, based upon like what happens. I think that
the the tribalism in our society, understandably so, uh, is
such that everybody feels like they have to kind of
you know, make a super strong statement or be in
a camp on every issue that comes across the wire,
and especially when it comes to foreign conflicts like this,
especially when it comes to these major military actions, the
better part of wisdom is to is to be conservative
in your temperament towards what is happening. Part of the
reason for that is because in an environment like this,
there's a huge amount of propaganda, there's a huge amount
of efforts to manipulate public opinion. There's a lot of
false information out there. Social media makes it a million
times worse, right, because you're seeing video images, you're seeing clips,
you're seeing footage that may be taken out of context,
You're seeing things that may be generated by AI and.
Speaker 1: Paraphrases of what people said instead of actions exactly.
Speaker 2: It's very easy to be kind of led down the
garden path, so to speak, in a situation that has
always been the case. I think it's even more so
now because of social media and because of our hyper connectivity.
And so that's just to say, caution is even more warranted,
and conservative disposition is even more warranted than it might
have otherwise been in previous American wars, Like you know,
in two thousand and three when we invaded Iraq. You know,
thank god, there was no smartphones and and no real
social media, right there was there were blogs. Uh you know,
how how how harmful could they be? So so that's that,
that's that's my you know, that's my general advice is
to just be conservative in your statements and in your opinions. Uh,
it's okay to with whole judgment. I may not know
what my real opinions are about this war for weeks
or months and and and and I think that's okay.
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Catch John in a decade if you want to know
what he thinks about Yah, that's right. Well. In an
effort to cut through the propaganda, go follow John on
Twitter for his day to day takes on the Iran war.
Go follow The Federalist on Twitter as well, and be
sure to read John's great article on The Federalist how
Israel chain gang the Trump administration into war against Iran? John,
thank you so much for being on the Kayla Guest today.
It was great having you.
Speaker 2: Thanks, Kylie.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's
episode of The Kylie Cast if you haven't done so
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