Trump vs. the Ayatollbooth (Neon Liberalism #68, with Bret Devereaux)

Last month, Donald Trump started a war—or perhaps a special military operation—with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Join Samantha and military historian Bret Devereaux as they discuss the "uncomfortable frontier arrangement" that previously existed with Iran, why Donald Trump blew it up, and what—maybe—the future holds (spoiler: a mess).

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Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:00]**
Welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I'm Samantha Hancox-Li. About a month ago, I was surprised, as all the rest of you, to discover that we were at war with Iran, and a month later, we appear to still be at war with Iran. Or perhaps not war. Perhaps we're just conducting military operations against a foreign adversary, but it's not a war because, you know, maybe that would involve Congress in some way. But regardless, something is happening in Iran, and I haven't talked about it before at all on Neon Liberalism for various reasons. I was on vacation. Very strange time to be on vacation, not going to lie. But to try and understand what happened in Iran, how we got here, and maybe where we might be going, I'm very excited to have on military historian, scholar, public intellectual Bret Devereaux. So yeah, Bret, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

**Bret Devereaux [00:00:20]**
Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's hard to figure out what we're at with Iran, or we were not at war. One is tempted to say we're at special military operations with Iran. I suppose the president prefers the word "excursion."

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:01:25]**
Oh, is that the word that he's been using? Excursion?

**Bret Devereaux [00:01:37]**
Yeah, which you will be surprised to learn is not a thing that exists in law or military conflict.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:01:37]**
Yeah, we are at excursion with Iran. I think that's right. Though, we are at special military operation with Iran. Three days to Tehran. I mean, it is quite striking to me. Maybe you can say a little bit about what's going on here. I was going to ask you a different question, but I think this is a good place to start. What's up with these special military operations? Why is it that we're living in a situation where people, rulers, states seem to keep on wanting to go to war with each other, but definitely don't want to be in a war? What's up with that?

**Bret Devereaux [00:01:46]**
Three days to Tehran.

**Bret Devereaux [00:02:17]**
Yeah, it is an interesting trend. First, I guess I should note, we should throw down a temporal marker here that we're doing this on Wednesday morning on the first of April. What a day. The President's April Fool's Day speech is later today. Who knows what he will say? We certainly don't. My time machine only goes backwards. So I think it's worth throwing that one down.

Yeah, I think part of what is happening here is that war has become a lot more expensive and the returns from war a lot lower over time. As a product of the Industrial Revolution, war is both more destructive, but also you're better off building more factories anyway. And so the result is that very few countries want to totally mobilize for a kind of World War One, World War Two, Franco-Prussian War, American Civil War kind of throw down. But leaders still want to use military force, and so they look for ways to use military force.

And I think in a way, the special military operation in Ukraine -- Putin's idiot war -- is an odd exception, because that is just a straight-up war of conquest. But in a lot of cases, these sorts of interventions are intended as an arm's-length operation, and often what they share in common is the belief that you can use air power to solve ground problems. But if the last hundred or so years of military history have demonstrated anything, it is that you cannot use air power to solve ground problems.

I mean, we've seen this, right? Perhaps the most shining and triumphant example is that just about everybody at this point has tried their hand at bombing the Houthis out of existence. And the Houthis are not an extraordinarily impressive military force, but they were, in fact, remarkably resistant to being bombed. Obviously, people are familiar with the efforts under the Biden administration and then early on under the second Trump administration to bomb the Houthis. It's very easy to follow the Trump administration's efforts in this regard, because they kept sending them to journalists by accident. But a thing it's worth remembering: even before that, the Saudis had spent a decade trying to bomb the Houthis into submission and had achieved functionally nothing.

So it turns out it's very hard. But I think there is this allure that air power provides a politically safe way to engage in these operations where there is no risk of blowback, there is no risk of losing lives, where the whole thing can be kept off of the radar of the public consciousness. And there, I think, there actually is a connection with Putin's war, in that Putin, at least initially, really just tried to depoliticize the invasion of Ukraine, and he's tried, in a way, to keep it depoliticized. Part of why he backed off of mobilization as a means of getting manpower and is instead paying out these extraordinary recruitment bonuses -- because he needs to keep it outside of the political realm or it endangers his regime. Because who wants to die for Pokrovsk?

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:04:42]**
The Ukrainians is the answer. They are very willing. Yeah, turns out it's a very powerful motivator for people. If you show up with a gun and are like, I'm going to kill you, they're like, maybe I'm willing to fight to stop that from happening.

Something that I think is going to be maybe a running theme -- yeah, maybe relevant in this larger discussion, and I really want to keep this in mind, or at least I think this is something we're going to come back to -- is this sense in which states recognize that real war could be extremely costly in terms of their people, in terms of economic treasure, in terms of political capital. But then there are still these forces that drive them to do it and to maybe do it in ways that aren't very productive.

But before I ask you about that, I kind of want to ask you about Iran specifically, and to set the stage. Before the first bombs went off and killed the Supreme Leader, what was the strategic situation of America with regard to Iran?

**Bret Devereaux [00:06:16]**
Relevant.

**Bret Devereaux [00:07:06]**
Yeah, I think this is worth laying out. So it is important not to describe this war -- this war is illegal, but it is not unprovoked. Iran has been provoking the United States for decades. The Iranian regime has missed no opportunity to kill American servicemen deployed within their reach. It continues to try to do so.

But the strategic situation, I would argue, prior to starting this war was, in a way -- actually, well, let me rephrase that. Prior to June of last year, it was, I would argue, fairly favorable to the United States. Iran's proxies -- Iran had built a network of proxies across the region to counter U.S. and Israeli influence. The largest of these is Hezbollah and the Houthis. And Iran also sponsored Hamas but did not fully control Hamas, which blew up in their face in extraordinary fashion. But in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks on Israel, the Israelis had disassembled most of that network. They had hammered Hezbollah. Hamas is hiding in holes. And so quite a lot of that network had been weakened. Iran had put a lot of effort over a long time into building it, and it was gone.

In the meantime, the main American security concern in the region was and remains the Gulf. I think it's important to keep in mind -- and this is often easy to miss, because we have been involved in the region for so long and people have gotten emotionally attached, which is never a good thing to do when thinking strategically -- that the Middle East is not a very important place. The Middle East is a collection of relatively poor countries with stagnant economies that produce very little military power. There is no country in the region that is more than a regional military power. And I think on the regional military power list would be Israel, Turkey, and Iran, and that's about it. None of them are capable of projecting power outside of the region. Turkey's involvement in the region is entirely superfluous to our security relationship with Turkey, which centers around the Black Sea and its connection to the Mediterranean.

And so this just isn't a very important region of the world, except for two things: the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf as major waterways connecting trade, and in particular, for the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, energy production. And so the United States has been very clear since the Carter administration that our concern in the region foremost is that the United States would use force to protect shipping in the Persian Gulf, and we did so in the 1980s as part of the tanker war. We did it again in '91 as part of the first Gulf War, where we intervened to protect Kuwait from Iraq, to secure those shipping lanes and those energy supplies.

All of that makes this war crazy, because this war compromised in its very first moment the one security concern we cared about in the region. The intelligence community has assessed since the 1980s that if the United States went to war with Iran, Iran would close the Strait -- that would be the obvious thing for them to do. So obvious that they already tried to do it in the 1980s, and this was the tanker war. I will note, the intelligence community also assessed that if the United States decapitated Iranian leadership, it would just lead to an IRGC hardliner government -- that is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, for those playing along at home -- and that also happened. So it is a weird situation where you've got to hand it to the CIA and the intelligence community. They nailed it. Rare occurrence.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:11:22]**
Yeah. So I'm kind of curious to hear more about this. You said that this is a region that is just geopolitically not very important, right? For humanitarian reasons, there are millions of people who live there. They are human beings like all the rest of us. But for geopolitical reasons, you think this is mostly not super important, which is interesting to me, because they keep on going to war there anyways. So how do you square those two thoughts?

**Bret Devereaux [00:11:38]**
Of course.

**Bret Devereaux [00:11:49]**
We do. Yes.

**Bret Devereaux [00:11:58]**
I mean, my personal view is that we keep making mistakes, right? I think the 2003 invasion of Iraq was an error, and a lot of subsequent involvement has been -- I think, broadly speaking, a mistake. Obviously, I said the region is unimportant except for the two exceptions. So the two exceptions are fairly large and have led the United States to have a sort of consistent policy. We care about the stability of Egypt because of the Suez. Obviously, that is now connected to the question of the Houthis in Yemen, because that's a connected waterway. And likewise, some degree of managing Iran was always going to be necessary.

But I do think that there is a tendency, particularly on the right, for Iran as an enemy of the United States -- and the Iranian regime is an enemy of the United States, they'd be the first to tell you -- it assumes an almost Manichean sense. You saw this with George W. Bush's suggestion that there was an Axis of Evil, which somehow included Iraq and Iran, two countries that hated each other and had been to war -- real war -- in recent memory, as if they were cooperating against the United States.

There is, in many cases, an awkward case of strategic mirroring, where because all of the liberal democracies are essentially on a single team, all -- at least until last year -- rowing together in a single direction, there is an assumption that all of the autocracies are too. But notice how cheerfully China has let both Russia and Iran now basically hang in their catastrophic wars, and has done nothing to help them meaningfully. The Russians went to Xi Jinping when their oil and gas markets in Europe were cut off, and were like, can you please, please buy our oil and gas? And China was like, sure, for extremely low prices. We will bargain you down into the basement because you now have no other customer. Likewise, China is willing to sell Iran all sorts of weapons, but they're not giving them any, nor are the Russians. These powers all operate on a beggar-thy-neighbor logic. And so the idea that we're also opening some sort of second front against the competition with China or something -- Xi Jinping clearly doesn't think so.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:14:39]**
Yeah, so I think this is an important point, that there are ways in which the Iranian regime is pretty odious, right? And I believe over the last year, they had faced massive uprisings against the regime. I mean, from what I understand, they shut down the internet in the whole country. So it wasn't like one of these well-televised revolutions, one of these uprisings that generated an enormous amount of social media imagery of the revolution, of the regime just butchering people. But by all accounts, they do seem to have murdered tens of thousands of their own citizens in the last year.

**Bret Devereaux [00:14:54]**
And killed tens of thousands of their own people.

**Bret Devereaux [00:15:17]**
Oh yeah, this is an evil, horrific regime. It is destabilizing in the region. So it is both a regime that attempts to damage American interests but is also just deeply odious in and of itself. But of course, I would note, there are actually quite a lot of regimes like that in the world, and we don't go to war with all of them, because you can't go to war with all of them.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:15:44]**
Yeah, I mean, you can, and maybe, as we are experiencing, maybe it's not even a good idea to go to war.

**Bret Devereaux [00:15:54]**
Right? I feel the need to remind folks that the idea that we would pick off these sorts of regimes one by one until there were none left was sort of the cornerstone of neoconservative thinking in the Bush administration, and it went very badly. It was not a good plan. The result was that we overstretched ourselves. We lost the war we needed to fight in Afghanistan, and sort of kind of won the war that we decided we shouldn't have fought in Iraq. And the long-term strategic outcome of that was to leave a giant mess in terms of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which turned into ISIS, which caused a huge crisis, boil-over problems in Syria, a refugee crisis that fundamentally broke European politics for a decade. It turns out that the ramifications were quite bad.

So the idea that we would fight every evil regime on the planet is something that has been proposed, and it didn't work out. Of course, this administration is not proposing that. I mean, they have struggled to propose any clear rationale for this war.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:17:05]**
Yeah, so before we get to Trump, I want to talk a little bit more about this. So you recently wrote an essay about all of this over at your blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. That essay is "Miscellaneous: The War in Iran," and it's a good essay, which is kind of why you're here. But if you're listening, you should read it, because it's a good essay. And the rest of the blog -- really interesting stuff. But anyways, enough of that.

What I kind of want to talk about is this phrase I was really struck by, which is that you say a succession of American presidents have looked at this kind of strategic quagmire of, we don't like these people, they're kind of odious, but also this is a low priority, and so the most we should do is kind of manage the situation, right? And you say the emblem of this, the high-water mark, is the so-called Iran deal that was made under Obama, where they give up their nuclear ambitions in exchange for sanctions relief, basically. And you call this an "uncomfortable frontier arrangement" of a kind that many, many hegemons have had to face at one time or another. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what was our uncomfortable frontier arrangement?

**Bret Devereaux [00:18:00]**
Yes.

**Bret Devereaux [00:18:24]**
Right, yeah, so this is something you see historically quite a lot. It's often obviously most visible with big territorial empires that have very obviously defined frontiers. The United States is a new kind of hegemonic power in that we don't have a ton of overseas territory. We have some. We don't have a ton of overseas territory. We have kind of economic frontiers. And our economic frontier in the Persian Gulf is very obvious in terms of global energy supplies. We don't get a whole lot of oil directly from the Persian Gulf, but it's a global market. So we're impacted by how energy moves through the Persian Gulf, as everyone is finding out with their four-dollar gasoline. Four-dollar gasoline -- although actually, your eyes should be on diesel prices. That's what's going to hammer the economy, because everything moves on trucks.

**Bret Devereaux [00:19:16]**
As empires or hegemons expand, their frontiers grow. As you get bigger, the perimeter gets bigger. And the nature of these empires is that they accumulate quite a lot of security problems, security issues, simply because they have huge frontiers. And it is not in their interest to be at war on all of their frontiers at once. Indeed, generally speaking, empires can't be at war on all of their frontiers at once. They don't have the forces. There's no way to do it.

And so they tend to come to these sorts of arrangements on the frontier, which are often, as I know, uncomfortable. Some of the classic examples of this are actually Chinese -- large Chinese states, which invariably have to their north the vast expanse of the steppe, Mongolia in particular, which is not amenable to conquest because there isn't enough water to do farming. And these are agrarian states, so they kind of can't go there except on campaign, but it's full of people who are rowdy and like to raid them.

And so what do you do? Well, you're going to garrison that frontier, okay? You build a big wall, okay, not a perfect defense. But the best thing you can do is to just buy these people off. Handing the local chief a bunch of money to keep his people in line is a lot cheaper than sending an army to make him do it. And the end result is that doing that, in turn, is a cheap way of ensuring the safety of all of the valuable agricultural land of the south, and you're at a net positive for tax revenues. So this is what you should do.

And the challenge that you see emerge over multiple dynasties is that precisely when you have a weak central ruler who is therefore very concerned about appearing masculine and militarily capable, he does not have the political leverage to say, I'm just going to pay these guys off, because that sounds like losing. It feels like weakness, and he can't appear weak. And so you get this doom spiral where the weak emperor, because he's weak, can't just pay these guys off, so he has to do a big military expedition, which nine times out of ten is a debacle that weakens him further.

You see, as a side note, the same thing plays out in the 230s for the Romans on the Rhine-Danube frontier, where Alexander Severus is a relatively weak emperor. He's got some security problems on that frontier. He's forming up an army, but it turns out the barbarians are willing to negotiate, and if you just hand them a bunch of money, they will go away. And he makes the very logical calculation that that would be cheaper than a war, and so he hands them the money, and they're prepared to go away. And his soldiers mutiny. They wanted the war for the loot. They kill him, and they replace him with one of their generals who immediately embarks upon the war in question.

This fellow is Maximinus Thrax. The taxes he has to raise for the war result in the collapse of his rule in three years. There's a tax revolt in North Africa. The Senate backs another candidate. Maximinus tries to charge back into Italy, but he's so unpopular the cities close their gates. He can't get supplies. His army melts away, and he and his sons commit suicide. It turns out you shouldn't have done the war. It was, in fact, too expensive. And Alexander Severus was right -- a weird thing to say.

This sort of problem emerges in many places, and naturally there are going to be some frontiers where a maximalist response really is worth it. If Iran was located in Mexico rather than in the Middle East, we would probably have to do something militarily about that, because we'd have rockets landing in Texas, and that would be unacceptable. But as noted, it's located in the Middle East, an area where there are significant security interests, but they're very specific security interests. For the most part, we don't care.

And so since the Reagan administration, one American administration after another has recognized: okay, we really just want to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and the oil flowing -- and the natural gas and fertilizers, more than just oil. We want to keep the shipping lane open, and we want to keep politics in the region stable enough.

**Bret Devereaux [00:23:59]**
And then beyond that, we don't really care. And so we'll make whatever arrangements allow us to do this on the cheap, so that we can be focused on East Asia, Eastern Europe, South America, Central America -- all places that matter much more to us, either because they're closer or because they're packed full of wealthy allied countries that are important for our collective defense.

And so the sort of triumph of this approach, yes, the JCPOA. And I will note, in my criticism, I think we overpaid for the JCPOA -- this is the Iran deal. I think Obama wanted the deal a lot, and the Iranians knew it, and so they kind of took him to the cleaners to get the deal. That's how negotiation goes. But I think the metaphor I lean to: if you have a sixteen-year-old kid and they overpay for a car, the solution is not to drive that car back to the dealership and wrap it around a tree. Then you don't have the car or the money. And this is essentially what the Trump administration did.

And people warned in 2017, when he scrapped the Iran deal -- which, as you said, is essentially: we gave Iran sanctions relief, which we knew they would use to fund their network of proxies. This is a compromise. And they did. But in exchange, they would agree not to pursue a nuclear weapon actively. And there was an inspection regime to ensure that that took place. And essentially, they agreed more or less that the deal would sunset in 2025, but I think everybody understood that then we would threaten to blow them up if they didn't renew the deal. This was going to be the modus vivendi moving forward.

And the warning when we scrapped the deal in 2017 was that you're going to put us on a course where the only alternative is a war, because the United States doesn't have a lot of strategic concerns in the Middle East except for the Strait and the Suez. That changes if Iran is a nuclear power. Suddenly we have a lot of expensive concerns, because we have to engage in nuclear deterrence with Iran. Think of how much more difficult North Korea's nuclear program makes the Korean peninsula.

So what we were essentially saying is: hey, Iran, it would be a complete pain in our ass if you developed a nuclear weapon. It would also suck for you, because you'd be Middle Eastern North Korea -- economically, culturally, diplomatically isolated. That would suck. How about we give you some small portion of the deterrence you would get from that bomb in advance, in exchange for you not doing that and not making all of our lives difficult? And we will pay you a bunch of money to get you to accept the deal. And they did, and it worked, and then Trump threw it out.

And here we are, exactly what we expected to see. Because once you remove that deal, you have removed, critically, the deterrence value that Iran got from that deal, and we saw that in the Twelve-Day War, where Israel just starts blowing the hell out of Iran. And again, you can't say unprovoked. Iran did some serious provoking. The Iranians don't seem to have known about the October 7 attacks before they happened. I imagine if they did, they would have tried to stop it. Iran initially tried to stay out of the fight that resulted. Nevertheless, the reason Hamas had the capability to do all of that is because the Iranians were funneling them weapons and money.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:27:40]**
Yeah, so I want to stop you there, because there is, like you say, okay, maybe this uncomfortable frontier arrangement is the best we can do. It's a problem to be managed. But I kind of want to dwell on the fact that there is a genuine discomfort here, right? It's like, oh yeah, you have your neighbor Crazy Joe, and he beats his wife and his kids, and he might have killed one of them, and every once in a while he just shoots a missile at you and kills a bunch of people, but it's too much trouble. His house is way up on a hill, there's all these booby traps, too much trouble.

And so there's that aspect of it that is uncomfortable. But there's also -- you talked about the pursuit of stability in the region, right, which I think has been a watchword for a lot of American presidents. And that's a kind of stability. Yes, exactly.

**Bret Devereaux [00:27:57]**
Yes.

**Bret Devereaux [00:28:29]**
And it's worth noting that stability in the region, yeah, stability in the region means the abetting of tyranny. We should be transparent about that, and that was the kind of Machiavellian trade-off that was made.

I think it is worth discussing just how tough to take Crazy Jim's house is, because if Crazy Jim just had a short fence next door, you would do something about it. So I think it's worth talking about the alternative.

So Iran has sufficient resources that if they make a run for a nuclear weapon, the only way to stop them would be to do a major air campaign like this every year or two, forever. That's obviously extraordinarily expensive. And critically, what everyone has assessed is that they close the Strait every time, causing the disruptions in the global oil market that we're already seeing, and these disruptions are going to get worse. They're going to get worse even if the war ends at five o'clock today, because it takes time for these things to move.

The alternative to that is regime change. What if Iran was a different country? And obviously, in the past, the United States has assessed that regime change -- going in and changing out the government of a country to produce different policies -- was worth it. The reason we have not assessed this for Iran, despite Iran being very clearly a problem for forty years, is that regime change in Iran would be extremely hard.

Iran is a country of ninety million people that is twice the size of Texas. The terrain is not friendly. This is not grassy flatland. It is a mix of desert and mountains and desert mountains. Every time someone suggests that we should just occupy the coastline of the Strait of Hormuz, I encourage them to open up Google Maps, flip it over to Street View. There are a handful of places where you can drop a pin near the Strait of Hormuz, and then I just want you to take the pin and rotate it north. There's about a hundred yards of desert beach before a vertical arid cliff face. Good luck operating in that terrain where they're shooting down at you from that cliff across several hundred miles of coastline. And then you get pulled inland. And there's a lot of inland. It's twice the size of Texas. There's ninety million people. So it's an enormous pain to administer and hold.

This is a country -- I think it's useful for comparison -- twice the population, three times the land area of Iraq. It took half a million troops to invade Iraq. It would take a lot more. You're talking about a land invasion that intended to occupy Iran and set up a new U.S.-friendly government that would probably require the active-duty military force and the reserves and the National Guard -- all of them -- and you might have to do conscription on top in order to arrange for rotations. It would take the largest U.S. mobilization since the Second World War, yes, including Vietnam and Korea.

And so one president after another has looked at their options, and their options were: deal; spend billions of dollars bombing Iran every one to two years; or the largest U.S. military operation since the Second World War. And very logically trended towards deal. And it's so uncomfortable, because it feels like tribute. It feels like, I don't want to have to pay these guys off because they suck. They're terrible to their people. Their regime is awful towards LGBTQ folks and women and all sorts of other groups, and they're an awful influence on the region. And it's like, yeah, but the cost of getting them out is enormous.

And what seems to have happened here, of course, is that our administration seems to have decided that, well, what if it wasn't enormous? What if we could just drop a few bombs and do it? And the answer is that you can't. And everyone knew you couldn't, but Pete Hegseth is very dumb.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:30:14]**
It would take a lot more to do that.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:32:46]**
He's not a very bright man, certainly. So yeah, I mean, I guess I want to kind of ask you this question. We've talked a lot about the strategic situation, the status quo ex ante, what happened, how did we get into the situation. What was the administration thinking? What went on here?

**Bret Devereaux [00:33:07]**
Yeah, and so of course, part of the answer is that we don't really know, because we've gotten conflicting reports from the administration. One of the things that is missing here is that normally when the United States engages in major military operations, there is a period before that happens where the president seeks to explain to the country why this is necessary, lays out the rationale, and usually legally goes to Congress in order to get some kind of approval, as the Constitution requires.

But not only was this an illegal war in that Congress did not authorize it, but there's also no effort to explain it. It happened a week after the State of the Union. Trump had an opportunity where literally the eyes of the whole country were on him to be like, hey, look, we think we might have to do this. And of course, that effort of selling the war to the United States, to the U.S. populace, is also a negotiating tool with other countries, because if the president appears to be succeeding at selling the United States on the idea of a war, if you're the leader of the other country, you're like, oh, they're actually going to do this, maybe I should back down.

But it also builds a reserve of public support, because all war requires sacrifice. You need that reserve of public support to stay in it when the going gets tough. But it means that the causes are generally very clear. They may be good reasons, they may be bad reasons, but everybody knows what they are. None of that was done here, and so the administration has been scrambling to find a reason that would explain what they're doing after the fact.

I think the most parsimonious explanation, the explanation that requires the fewest absurd assumptions, is that some of the early statements by Marco Rubio are probably correct: that the United States was aware that Israel was planning a decapitation strike on Iran. Obviously, Israel's security interests here are different than the United States's, and the U.S. intelligence assessed that if Israel launched that strike, Iran would retaliate not only against Israel but against U.S. assets in the region. That's almost certainly true.

I should note that was not true in June of last year. So that had become true, and the way to understand this: when Israel launched its Twelve-Day War against Iran, Iran initially did not treat the United States as a co-belligerent. It launched swarms of drones and missiles against Israel but largely avoided striking U.S. facilities. It continued to avoid that even as we were shooting down the drones and missiles they were sending against Israel -- we were actively aiding Israel. And you can understand this. The Iranians seem to have been hoping that once the Twelve-Day War is over, they would resume negotiations with the Trump administration that had been ongoing to try and reestablish some kind of a deal.

And then in the middle of that, the United States decided to do a bolt-from-the-blue surprise set of airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in the belief, apparently, that we could get their entire nuclear program and thereby solve the problem. Now, in practice, it's very clear we did not get their entire nuclear program, and critically, their supply of highly enriched uranium appears to be buried under rubble but largely intact, and so long as they have that, they remain twelve to twenty-four months away from a deliverable nuclear weapon. At all times you just need to dig this stuff up and restart the program.

But the result is that this changes the calculus for Iran. After that, you have to assume -- remember, when airstrikes happen, you can't look up and see what's written on the plane flying above you, things just explode. And so for Iran, after that point, you've already been surprise-attacked by the United States once in support of an Israeli offensive. You have to assume now that if a major air campaign starts against you, the Supreme Leader explodes. You have to assume the United States is part of it. And because the attacker is going to be trying to hit your missiles and drones and factories and launch systems, everything you've got is a wasting asset. It's use it or lose it. In those first hours, you have to engage American targets, because you have to assume that the Americans are attacking you too.

So Trump created this situation where Israel could compel the United States into a large military operation against Iran, and a wiser president would have taken the intervening year to tug quite hard on the leash, so to speak, with Israel, which is in theory still the junior security partner here. But the Trump administration did not do that. And so instead, faced with this impending operation, they appear to have been convinced.

**Bret Devereaux [00:38:05]**
And there's a lot of, oh, Israel fooled them into doing this. No, no. I think they convinced themselves, in part because the sort of ultra-masculine -- let's be honest -- fascist ideology that they have thinks that war is good and blowing up stuff is cool, and it's "lethality, man." Insert Colin Jost impression of Pete Hegseth here.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:38:32]**
So I want to ask you a couple questions. One of them is going to be about this through-line of the Trump administration -- how are they thinking about the world? But I do have to ask about Israel first, right? Because we talked a lot about the strategic situation in the Middle East without mentioning Israel ever. And so I guess, what's your take on Israel's strategic picture, strategic role in this region and in this war?

**Bret Devereaux [00:39:09]**
Yeah. Whereas the Middle East is a relatively unimportant place for the United States, it is an extremely important place for both Iran and Israel, because they live there.

Israel, of course, has found itself even more than the United States the direct target of Iran's web of proxies, and is a sort of direct opponent. The problem, of course, that Israel faces is that Israel is a small country with an effective but quite small army. Israel and Iran do not have land borders with each other, and Israel does not have an effective web of proxies on Iran's doorstep.

I do think that Israel's decision-making here has become enmeshed in the personal political fortunes of Benjamin Netanyahu to a significant degree. And it's just important to keep in mind that even before October 7, he was one election away from being in jail. He is still one election away from being in jail, and the only way to delay that one election is to have a war. And so he has sought opportunities.

And then also, he is a political figure who marketed himself as the security candidate, who presided over the greatest security disaster Israel has ever faced. And so you can see his effort. He's trying to find a war he can win to restore his public image. But that is enmeshed with a sort of strategic decision, which really does seem to me that Netanyahu and his inner circle have decided that the American security partnership with Israel has an expiration date, and they are spending it.

It is not clear to me that the Trump administration understood this. It seems now, if you look at the polling in the United States, almost certainly the case that the American-Israeli security partnership does now have an expiration date. I'm not sure that it did a year ago. It certainly does now. It is hard to imagine a Democratic president holding onto this arrangement. Domestic politics aside.

But if you think that there's an expiration date, then the strategic interest is to use the United States while you still have the United States in an almost Godfather-esque settling of family business, to try to finish things. Now I will note, for anyone who has watched The Godfather films, notice how the family business never fully gets settled. I do not think this is a good strategic plan. I suspect that Israelis will wake up to find out that it is no fun at all to be diplomatically isolated. It's very short term.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:42:00]**
I mean, I think there's a level in which, since -- there's a short-termism about it. But I think the October 7 attacks were genuinely pretty nightmarish. And I think since then, Israel has pursued a policy that is destructive of other people, but in many ways self-destructive. They're just -- we're going to blow up everything.

**Bret Devereaux [00:42:25]**
Hmm, well, and this should be very, very familiar to Americans. The United States embarked on a policy after 9/11 that ended up being destructive to a lot of people, and probably on the net quite negative for American security interests. And on a population-adjusted scale, I think people want to understand: the October 7 attacks were orders of magnitude more traumatic for Israel, because it's such a smaller country that everyone in Israel knows someone who was victimized or killed during those attacks. Everybody. So treating it as a national trauma event is significant.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:43:08]**
And I mean, I think you can see this. It did in many ways play out in Syria, right? When Bashar al-Assad goes down, a new government comes in. An Israeli government might have looked at that and said, this is great. This is a time when we can try to maybe normalize relations with our new neighbor. And their answer -- yeah, they have a whole lot of reconstruction of their own country to do. They don't really want to start an external conflict right now. There's an opportunity there. And their answer was, we're going to take this time to blow up everything in your country that we don't want you to have, right? That is not a good way to start a relationship with your new neighbor. And it seems in many ways that that's the strategy they're pursuing in Iran. It's like, why would we make a deal with these people when we can just blow them up?

**Bret Devereaux [00:44:01]**
Yeah, it is a little more understandable in Iran, where you have a regime like the Iranian regime that is never going to make peace with Israel, because of both its own ideological assumptions, but also -- and this is important, I think, for understanding end states -- the Iranian regime's internal legitimacy, not among the Iranian people (it controls them by force), but among the people wielding the guns to do that, is based on its status as resisting American and Israeli power. And so it cannot be seen to surrender to that -- that would imperil the regime. And so you sort of understand it: yeah, the Iranians are never going to play nice with you, so you might as well defang them as much as you can.

I think the problem here for the short-termism, of course, is that you also have to ask, how much defanging is that? It turns out that even the might of the U.S. Air Force doesn't appear to be able to stop Iran from being able to launch drones and missiles, which are significantly cheaper than the interceptors we're using to shoot them down, because apparently we learned nothing from the Ukrainians. Very frustrating. And it turns out that it's very hard to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by military force. Israel doesn't care about that, but the United States does, and so it means that there's a ticking clock on their American support.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:45:19]**
So, one -- there's an article that was recently published in War on the Rocks by Farah Jan. And I think she makes a kind of interesting historical analogy here, to World War One, basically. Quite famously, during the July Crisis, Germany writes a blank check to Austria. The parallels are actually eerie in a lot of ways, where it's like, okay, Serbia's defense minister -- one of their ministers is running his own paramilitary operation that has killed the Austrian Archduke, right? And was it the Serbian government, or was it actually just some guy freelancing, some proxies? They're all dead, so it's hard to know.

And Austria -- this is the weak partner in the German-Austro-Hungarian relationship. Austria-Hungary is very, very clearly the weak partner, but they get a blank check from their senior partner, and that kind of lets them cash it as hard as they possibly can. And functionally, even though Germany is the stronger partner and could have been driving the bus, as soon as they hand out this blank check, they are not driving the bus. They are no longer in control of their own foreign policy in a lot of ways.

And she makes the argument, I think she's right, that as the United States has, especially under Trump, given Israel functionally a blank check and has entangled us with their military operations against Iran, they've kind of allowed Israel to drive the bus in Middle Eastern policy. And as you suggest, maybe their strategic picture and our strategic interests are not necessarily the same thing these days.

**Bret Devereaux [00:47:36]**
Yeah, I think that's true, right? The American interest here is in a kind of managed Middle East that we can mostly ignore because we have bigger problems. The Israelis don't have bigger problems. They live there.

And normally you'd be seeking to establish some kind of compromise in which the dominant partner's interests were considered, especially because it's worth keeping in mind the American-Israeli security partnership incurs significant cost to the United States, even when there is no military activity. Every subtle illegal settlement the Israelis build damages American diplomacy across much of the developing world.

And so yeah, this is a case where I do think that there is a sort of blank-check issue. But I think it's also -- and part of this is me wanting to push back quite hard against dumb conspiracy nonsense. It is worth noting: Trump wrote the blank check. He and members of the administration wrote it. They weren't bamboozled into it. They weren't tricked or manipulated. They chose to write the blank check, and in part, again, I think, for ideological reasons, because writing the blank check was manly and lethal.

And then saying, hey, we don't want to do that is "woke cock nonsense." Sorry if I'm not supposed to use strong language. And you can see that ideology come out just very clearly every time Pete Hegseth opens his goddamn mouth -- that he has no conception of the sort of overall strategic goal. It's like, we're bombing all these targets. We're going to keep bombing. We're doing "lethality." "I witnessed lethality."

And at no point is there any sort of -- does that move us closer to -- that lethality, and it is very gender-coded lethality -- that lethality results in positive outcomes is an ideologically necessary assumption with this administration. And so those other questions are not asked. And we see where that ends, right? Their current metric of success is bombs dropped. They have somehow found an even dumber metric than McNamara's body counts.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:48:32]**
Yes, yes. Please.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:49:14]**
Use as strong language as you want to.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:50:20]**
Yes, so I really want to come back to the Vietnam parallels, which I think are increasingly striking. But I do kind of want to ask you a little bit more about the inner thinking of the Trump administration.

I've kind of laid out my own view of how they've approached this. You've talked about their kind of fascistic obsession with violence. To me, I think there's another through-line here: Donald Trump really made his name -- one of his names in Republican politics -- by opposing the war in Iraq, by talking shit about George W. Bush before other Republicans were willing to do so. And I think that has continued to guide his thinking in certain ways. He is afraid of getting entangled, right? But he still likes blowing stuff up.

And I think this has driven him, and I think especially we've seen this as his domestic agenda has stalled out, as his domestic agenda has become increasingly unpopular. He's turned to these kind of foreign policy excursions, we'll call them, as a kind of spectacle.

And so we've talked a little bit about Midnight Hammer, which is this attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities. There was the kind of spectacular capture of Maduro, which actually did result in regime change in Venezuela, of a kind -- ish. Personnel change in Venezuela, certainly. And so I think he's been attracted to this idea of doing a raid, right? We're going to take American military power, especially air power, as you talked about, and we're going to do some violence to people over there, and we're going to announce that it's changed things in some fundamental way, that we've won this big American strategic victory, but we're not actually entangled.

And I think that kind of thinking drove them to the raid that effectively started this -- the decapitation strike on the Supreme Leader and many of his lieutenants and other important people -- which turned out was not a raid with no entanglements. And now here we are.

So that's kind of my view of the internal domestic thoughts that have been driving the Trump administration. I want to know what you think about that, though.

**Bret Devereaux [00:52:56]**
Yeah, I think there are two directions I want to go from that. The first is just to note, I think you're right, and part of the reason they decided on this raid is that they thought the regime would collapse. Again, that has not been the assessment of the intelligence community for decades, because Iran is not a personalist regime. It is an institutional regime.

The Supreme Leader is not the sole figurehead dictator of Iran. There is a parallel elected government. There is a Guardian Council. There's a Council of Experts that chooses the Supreme Leader. There is the entire web of influence and power that is the IRGC. There is also the regular Iranian army that has guns and wields power in the system, although less than all of the other elements I just discussed. All of these elements are bought in by the fact that their support of the regime gets them preferred access to economic resources. The IRGC owns a third of the damn country. And that means that all of these people, all in this network, have a personal, economic, and social interest in the preservation of the regime. If it were to collapse, they are dead or poor or in exile, or some combination of those three.

And so these kinds of regimes tend to be really resilient to decapitation attacks, something that Americans should understand, right? If Washington, D.C., was nuked in the middle of the State of the Union address and the entire U.S. government was effectively gone, except for, I don't know, the Secretary of Education or something -- the designated survivor -- the U.S. government would not collapse. It would reconstitute itself. It would reconstitute itself quite rapidly. All fifty states would go to their rules for how they select replacement House members and senators. We'd reconstitute Congress and so on, and it would proceed fairly rapidly, because we have an institutional system, not a personal system.

Venezuela had a personalist dictatorship, and so just grabbing Maduro did kind of allow you to just shift, although it's worth noting that what seems to have happened in Venezuela really was a palace coup in which the security apparatus allowed for a change of one leader to another in order to improve their economic fortunes by getting more access to export oil. The United States facilitated a Delcy Rodriguez coup against Nicolas Maduro. There's no set of insiders in Iran that is going to be interested in facilitating that. And there never was.

The hope was that you'd blow up the Supreme Leader and the next guy would negotiate in order to not get blown up, although the complication here is that if you're Israel, you do not want that outcome. So you're going to keep blowing up the next guy, which they seem to have been doing. Israel does not want a negotiated solution. They want regime collapse. Israel would prefer Iran to look like Lebanon. Israel would not like Iran to look like Iraq, with a sort of shaky but kind of sort of functional democratic government. Because the problem is that with ninety million people and a whole bunch of oil, and relatively high levels of education, that's an Iran that would rapidly become a middle-income country. It might still develop nuclear weapons, and then, as Israel, you are Pakistan to Iran's India. And that's no fun. You need a failed state.

But the administration seems to have believed that they could do this raid and then get out. And this is the sort of second direction, because the Strait of Hormuz is the trap. It is not the trap in the sense that Iran was laying in wait in ambush. It is the trap in the sense that you have stuck your hand into the trap and you now cannot get it out.

And the reason: we are used to, as Americans, military operations in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq and, for that matter, Lebanon -- we've done this there too -- where when things kind of go bad and we don't like them, we can just leave.

**Bret Devereaux [00:57:25]**
And our problems do not follow us home, because these are wars out on the frontier. And I will note, the very fact that we could just leave these places might suggest that they were not strategically important enough for a major American intervention in the first place.

We cannot just leave Iran, because a quarter of the world's energy supplies flow through the Persian Gulf, an enormous proportion of fertilizer precursors as well -- urea. This is really important. I think it's been underplayed. In the United States, it will be a mild inconvenience. But in Nigeria, if the price of bread goes up by twenty-five percent, this is going to produce mass starvation and bread riots. We saw this very famously in 2010, where spikes in food prices were a direct cause of the Arab Spring, which -- the follow-on effects were really significant. Again, it destabilized European politics for a decade.

And so there is an economic concern here that ripples back to the United States very directly. And so if you strike Iran, Iran closes the Strait, and then it becomes very hard to extricate yourself without reopening the Strait. And that leaves the administration now -- because they did not think this through, and I guarantee you the Department of Defense did, because again, we've assessed that they would close the Strait in response for forty years; I have no specific knowledge of those plans, but we knew.

But you're now left with a set of really uncomfortable options. If you just leave without a deal, Iran can do two things. They can keep the Strait closed in order to pressure you towards a deal and trigger a global recession. Or they can do what they seem to be doing, which is preparing to accept that your withdrawal has made Iran lord and master of the Strait, and putting in, as Sal Mercogliano calls it, the "Ayatoll Booth" -- that is so terrible -- but essentially saying that Iran gets to decide what ships enter and exit the Strait, which essentially means that Iran has a knife to the throat of all of the Gulf states. Which, as a side note, is why the Gulf states are desperately lobbying the United States not to leave this conflict.

**Bret Devereaux [01:00:13]**
Iran, then, of course, would be in a position to throttle global oil supplies whenever it was convenient for them. Or alternately, the reported fee for getting out of the Strait is two million dollars. If Strait traffic were to return to normal, that would be two hundred twenty, two hundred forty million dollars a day into Iranian coffers, in addition to their oil exports, which they would use to fund their nuclear program and rebuild their network of proxies. It would put us in a strategically manifestly worse position than we were at in January of last year. That's way more money than the Iran deal over time, especially because it becomes impossible to maintain the sanctions regime, because again, they can cut off the supply.

So if you just leave, that's bad. The military solution -- people say there is no military solution. There is a military solution: you raise an army of a million troops and you invade. It's just that that military solution is horrifically expensive.

And then the intermediate solution is some kind of negotiated settlement. The problem with the negotiated settlement, of course, is that it's really easy for the parties to say they're interested in a negotiated settlement. I'm losing my mind with the Wall Street traders who seem to think that every time these guys are like, maybe we should negotiate, that it's real.

To go back to World War One: the countries involved in World War One started suggesting that maybe they should negotiate in 1914, almost the instant that offensive operations broke down on the Western Front. They were like, we should talk this over. But their bargaining positions remained very separate. So obviously the war did not resolve in 1914, or 1915, or 1916, or 1917.

It's a similar position here. Both sides are like, we should negotiate, but their bargaining positions are wildly separate, because the Iranians think they're winning. They are looking at -- among other things, they produced a sizzle reel of the No Kings protest, which is rich coming from a country that murders its own protesters. But they are aware of how weak public support is for this war. And so the Iranian regime is thinking, if we just hold in this for a little longer, if we keep the Strait closed, we can force them to a deal that is favorable to us.

And I think, if you're Iran, presumably what you're looking to do here in the long run is possibly bargain away the Ayatollah Booth in exchange for real security guarantees.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:03:04]**
Real security guarantees spelled "nuclear bomb." Yeah, that's -- at this point you have to, if you're in Iran right now, you're looking at the world situation, and you're like, man, we had this great deal where we gave up our bomb in exchange for some money, but then they unilaterally canceled it, and ever since, they've just been blowing us up randomly whenever they feel like it. What is an actual security guarantee? Well, you notice who's not getting blown up randomly? Kim Jong-un. That guy. He's got his coat, he's got his big hat. He can go wherever he wants to. No one's blowing him up with a JDAM. I want what he's got.

**Bret Devereaux [01:03:08]**
Yes, correct. Yes, that's the security guarantee.

**Bret Devereaux [01:03:38]**
Kim Jong-un, yeah. Crucially, there's a personal element to this that is worth noting. Kim Jong-un, because he has a nuclear bomb, is driving around in tanks with his daughter to set her up as his heir apparent, and no one is doing anything about it. And the new Supreme Leader, Khamenei Junior -- amazing troll to replace Khamenei with Khamenei -- the new Supreme Leader, because he did not have a nuclear weapon, his father, his wife, and his children are dead. The comparison cannot be lost on him.

So now, will the United States sign a deal that says, Iran, you get to have a nuclear bomb? No. We'll just agree not to attack them for two years, and then magically, in those two years, they'll have the nuclear bomb. And presumably the idea is that we will tug on Israel's leash to keep them from mowing the lawn.

I don't know that this will work. I think that we're going to get further conflicts, because Israel is not going to sit around and let that happen. Although my own view is -- Iran is often represented as a regime that is somehow immune to deterrence. That does not seem to me to be the case. I think the logic of deterrence that has emerged everywhere that a nuclear system has occurred would emerge here too. Israel -- their own strategic ambiguity aside -- has their own nuclear deterrent. They do. They've got it. And they have the ability to deliver it to Iran. And so these would be two nuclear-armed states staring at each other, who would then compete through proxies.

And India and Pakistan -- the Israeli option for proxies is really obvious. It's weird, but it's the Gulf states. The Gulf states are their obvious proxies that they would then develop, and that relationship has been emerging.

But be that as it may, if you're Israel, you would much rather prefer that Iran not have that bomb, and for this relationship to be a little more one-sided. You're a lot more secure that way.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:04:46]**
Yeah, I mean, Israel, for obvious reasons, regards that as an intolerable outcome.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:05:19]**
Yeah, there's no question.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:05:33]**
Much like India and Pakistan, yeah.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:05:45]**
That's how it's shaking out. Yeah.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:06:05]**
So one thing I want to ask you about that you wrote about in your essay is why this entanglement is so hard to get out of. You just talked about how neither side -- on the Trump side or on the Iranian side -- they're all trying to escalate to de-escalate, which never works. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that dynamic.

**Bret Devereaux [01:06:26]**
Which never works.

**Bret Devereaux [01:06:32]**
Right? So this is a very sort of human response. You see it in every bar fight in the history of forever, where some dude says something mean to you, and you don't want them to do that, and so you threaten further violence to get them to back down. And occasionally in interpersonal relationships it works, although it usually results in a fistfight.

You see this, as a side note, in the animal kingdom all the time. This is a cat putting their back up and growling to say, back off, because I can hurt you. The problem is that once you actually start hurting somebody, this no longer works. Once those cats resolve to actually try to kill each other, they are going to kill each other, as distinct from play fighting.

"I might bomb you" is a decent threat. "I am currently bombing you" -- you don't have a lot of threat left.

That said, I think ideologically, neither side, for reasons of internal legitimacy, can back down. Trump can't grovel before the Peacock Throne and retain his presidency -- that was the term for the throne of Iran since time immemorial. And I love bringing it out. They don't have it anymore, because they threw the Shah out and everything, but still. That would be a blow to his legitimacy. And likewise, the Iranian regime can't be seen to cooperate with the United States, same reason. They especially can't be seen to do it after we blew up a girls' school.

Yeah. Proper target selection is not woke. You do it so that you can still negotiate if you need to.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:08:20]**
I mean, also, so you don't kill a hundred kids.

**Bret Devereaux [01:08:24]**
Oh, for sure, for sure. But I'm just pointing out that the rules of war don't just exist for the warm, cuddly reasons. They are hard-edged and practical. And it is a statement of how unserious a figure Pete Hegseth is that he does not understand this. But again, you can watch his press conferences -- he doesn't understand it. No strategic vision for getting out of this.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:08:35]**
Yeah, I think that's worth emphasizing.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:08:56]**
I'm really struck, in a way, by how much Hegseth is consumed by resentment and by victimhood, by his own sense of being victimized. Every press conference he gives, he can't stop talking about how we used to be oppressed by the woke. It's like, you're the Secretary of Defense, you're running a war. You have all the power in the world, and you still feel aggrieved that somebody criticized you one time for violating the rules of engagement.

**Bret Devereaux [01:09:31]**
Right? Well, I mean, I think the thing to understand about Pete Hegseth is, obviously, he went into the military out of ROTC. And I think this is something that if you -- I'm a lifelong civilian, but I engage a lot with people who are not. If you were not familiar with this, Pete Hegseth's career doesn't mean anything to you, but if you do understand how these things work, Pete Hegseth is a pretty classic career burnout trajectory.

He goes over there, he does not have a combat billet, and he's then shuffled into the reserves. He is not put forward to go to the staff colleges, and he ends his career at major. This is a guy where multiple superior officers over the course of his career wrote "do not promote" in his file. He was assessed -- the system assessed him repeatedly and said, this guy ain't it. And, win for the haters, the system was right.

But you can see how someone who views themselves as a warrior -- and very obviously in a religious sense, the guy's got "Deus Vult" tattooed on his arm -- took that very personally. And it has motivated the rest of his trajectory. And of course, being the Secretary of Defense means he gets to make all of the bad decisions. But it doesn't mean that the generals have to respect him, and you just have to go look at his speech he gave last year to see that they very obviously don't. They just --

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:11:15]**
Dead silence in that room. You can see, he pauses repeatedly for applause lines. This is a speech that is written for people to applaud to. He delivers it like he's expecting applause, and there is just dead silence.

**Bret Devereaux [01:11:30]**
Yeah, he is not one of them, and he never will be, and they are never going to respect him. And on some level, this is a guy who is looking for his quick, violent, victorious war to earn their respect, to show that he was right and that you just needed to take the gloves off. And obviously, mucking up our strategy in the Middle East is not going to do it for him, and nothing would have done it. Nothing would have done it for him. He's never going to stop being himself, and these guys aren't going to respect him.

Again, remember that he's in a room where everybody in that room got past the rank his career fizzled out at in, like, the first term of the Obama administration, some of them in the Bush administration. And all of them could recognize why he got "do not promote" written in his file. They're like, this is a guy who has terminal Second Lieutenant disease and has never evolved. As you go up the ranks, the concerns you are focused on change. And honestly, being worried about haircuts and waistlines is actually not even the Second Lieutenant's job. That's his Sergeant's job. But this is a classic sort of command failure, a kind of officer culture failure that they all recognize and they all got past, and he didn't.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:12:05]**
Because he's never going to stop being himself.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:13:00]**
Yeah. So I think it's very striking that he appears to have acquired the nickname "Dumb McNamara," which is a great deep cut. He's acquired it specifically because during the Vietnam War, McNamara would talk about, what's our kill-death ratio versus North Vietnam? And it's great, we're killing like ten of them to every one of us, obviously we're winning the war. He's not even listing deaths. It's just, we've dropped this many bombs. We've serviced all the targets. And this is a level -- once the military starts listing its accomplishments in terms of pounds of bombs dropped, you know you're in trouble.

But I think the Vietnam parallels are interesting. They're deeper than just this very appropriate nickname. I read H.R. McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty, and he kind of makes this argument about how did we get into Vietnam? JFK is messing around, and LBJ comes in, and he looks at the world and he's like, man, I cannot be the guy who lost Vietnam. They're gonna crucify me in the press if I lose Southeast Asia. So I can't back down. But I don't want to go in all the way either, because the generals are telling me that to win this war, we're going to have to march to Hanoi, and I can't do that either, because that would be terrible.

**Bret Devereaux [01:14:27]**
Right, right. There are larger geostrategic implications. You would meet the Chinese at Hanoi, and you'd be back in the Korean War problem.

And so there's that aspect of it. And so he does this thing where he's like, we're going to communicate with North Vietnam by bombing them. When they do stuff we don't like, we're going to blow up more of their things, and that'll be kind of like a threat to them that we could blow up even more stuff, so they should back off.

But then, as we're putting more and more assets into the theater, we're also generating more and more targets for North Vietnamese attacks. It's like, oh, we're going to put in some military advisors, but then we're going to put in an air base, but then we need people to defend the air base, and then they're getting shot at, and then we've just got a bigger and bigger and bigger ground commitment.

And so there's this kind of dynamic where LBJ went in with the thought, I absolutely don't want to get in a war, a real war with North Vietnam, and then made a series of decisions that got us into a very real war with North Vietnam. And I see a lot of those parallels with what's going on here, just in ways that maybe I don't need to spell out at this point.

**Bret Devereaux [01:16:06]**
And of course, it's unclear if we'll go that way, or if we're just going to bail again. By the time anybody sees this, we may have already bailed, or we may have seized Kharg Island, or launched or raided Isfahan. Who knows? The administration certainly -- they don't know. I think that's important here. They are still making the decision. It's not that they have a secret plan. They don't know either.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:16:22]**
Yeah, there's an old meme of Trump that I really like -- a QAnon meme, actually, that I think is kind of revealing. It's like Trump is turning to look at you, and the caption is, "Are you enjoying the show? Refill your popcorn, you're gonna love this next part." And I think that really captures some of how he operates, that he likes to keep people in suspense. He really wants the media to show up for whatever his press conference is going to be, because he might say something crazy or announce a new policy, or maybe not.

Which is a huge contrast with, as you've talked about, how other administrations have approached this process, where they don't want it to be a surprise. They want to articulate their reasoning. They want to present it to the public. They want to present it to Congress. They want to present it to our adversaries, so that there's an intelligible logic that people can respond to. Whereas Trump doesn't think that way. He wants to keep you dependent on tuning in and finding out what he's going to say this week, which adds a whole special salt to this quagmire we're finding ourselves in.

**Bret Devereaux [01:17:47]**
Right, right. Just further lack of clarity. And of course, generally speaking, you don't want to do that, because it's really hard to marshal public support in that way. And you can see that this war is historically unpopular. It is historically unpopular in a way that even recent debacles have not been unpopular.

And yeah, it does keep you guessing. Will Trump tack? Who knows? The thing I would just note is that unlike in many other cases, he cannot -- Trump has made a career out of creating problems and then stopping his problem creation and then declaring it a victory. He cannot do that here. He needs the Iranian regime to cooperate in order to tack. And it is not at all clear to me that they will be interested in cooperating, because their fear will be: if we let him chicken out and just leave, we will be back here in a year.

So maybe we should -- and again, the cost for them if we stop bombing, the cost for them of continuing to throw missiles and drones at our air bases in Saudi Arabia and imposing tolls on the Strait -- it's not zero. It's not great for their economy, but it's not crushing. Things aren't exploding anymore. They can start rebuilding. Indeed, they can reconstitute those drone supplies a lot faster than we can.

And so you need them to agree that they think they should back off. I do think that Trump is politically caught in the way that you described for LBJ, in that backing down here really damages his mystique. But he is also a coward, so maybe he'll do it anyway. I don't know.

It's bizarre to just have no sense of where this is going. What I will say is that short of an eleventh-hour miracle where the Iranian regime just collapses, which seems very clearly like it's not going to happen, no outcome puts the United States in a better strategic position than we were at the beginning of this. And that's remarkable, because of course we've spent an enormous amount of money. We've gotten a whole bunch of people killed, including American service members. We have lost some priceless military assets.

I was at the final day of the Society for Military History's annual conference when the news came out that that E-3 Sentry that had been damaged was in fact cut in half by an explosion. I mean, it also is suggestive of their ability to observe that airfield, because they needed to know exactly where the plane was. They dropped their explosive directly on its radar dome, which is where you would want it. So they knew exactly where it was. They weren't just blind-firing. Somebody on the ground, drone observation, something -- they had eyes on that airfield.

But that is literally an irreplaceable asset. We do not make them anymore. The replacements won't be in production until next year. It is a key sustaining asset, and the replacements cost three-quarters of a billion dollars a pop. Now, to be fair, part of that is because there was an effort to kill the program, and so we only ordered two of them, and if we ordered more of them, the unit price would come down. But these are expensive. As someone working in the humanities -- we are spending anywhere from five to fifteen annual NEH budgets a day on this military operation. Staggeringly expensive.

Obviously, the White House wants Congress to give them two hundred billion dollars for this, and a lot of that is recapitalizing munitions and equipment worn down, fired, blown up, whatever. So the cost expenditure here is enormous, plus Americans have been killed. A lot of Americans have also been injured. The administration has been downplaying this, but my understanding is that some of these injuries are really quite severe, that there are a lot of people who are going to go home with a lot less bodily function than they had when they came out.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:19:41]**
Yeah, that's not going to buff out.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:21:20]**
So you would like three-quarters of a billion dollars to do military history research.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:22:01]**
Yeah, let's talk about waste and fraud in the federal government, right?

**Bret Devereaux [01:22:44]**
And then obviously, huge damage across the region. Whole-digit percentages of world natural gas production offline for years, even if the Strait opens tomorrow, because of damage to energy infrastructure. That obviously could continue to get worse.

So we have spent an enormous amount of human lives, of monetary resources, of strategic resources, of international goodwill. We just tanked the economy of every country on the earth. They're going to remember it. And for no reason. To come out of all of that, if we came out of all of that with simply a draw, it would be a catastrophe. But I can't see how they salvage a draw out of this. The Iranian regime is likely to emerge from this conflict materially stronger than when it started, because the new Supreme Leader will be able to say, I fought America and I won. I made them blink. He'll be able to say that. He will be the first Iranian able to say that since the hostage crisis.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:23:52]**
So -- when Russia invaded Ukraine, the full-scale invasion, I saw people predicting that the war would have to be over in a few months, that it was so manifestly stupid, so manifestly costly, that any sane leader would either pull out or get bounced out by his own elites. And my take at the time came from reading history, frankly, not from economic analysis, but just looking at history and seeing that a modern nation-state can sustain stupidity for an astoundingly long period of time. There's a great deal of ruin in a nation.

So I can see, on the one hand, the perspective of, this is insane, this is costly, Trump's going to chicken out, Iran is going to take home a win. I can also see the perspective that we're going to be doing this for the next two years. I mean, Trump was going to make a speech tonight, and maybe, as we said at the outset, maybe he's going to declare an end to the war, or maybe he's just going to declare victory, or maybe he's going to declare a new Trump Steak Line. Yeah, it could be anything.

**Bret Devereaux [01:24:35]**
As Adam Smith says, there's a great deal of ruin in a nation.

**Bret Devereaux [01:24:59]**
A ground invasion? Yeah, it could be anything. The thing is, economists have been saying that the war can't go on longer than some number of weeks or days, because everyone would run out of money, for a hundred years. And what I would offer is a historical parallel, because sometimes it's true -- sometimes countries just run out of gas and stop. It does happen. But you can't bank on it.

And the example I always give is to remind people that the Turnip Winter, when Germans ate food previously thought fit only for their animals, started in November of 1916. The war did not end in November of 1916. It did not end in November of 1917. It ended in November of 1918. There were two years left. Tens of thousands of Germans starved to death in the winter of 1916-1917, and it didn't stop the war. It didn't slow down the war. Germany launched its largest offensives the next year. The Iranians aren't eating turnips yet.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:26:27]**
No, neither are we. And on that cheery note, Bret, thanks so much for coming on. This has been a fun conversation about a topic that you can really only laugh about, because to think about it in a serious way would be too distressing. It is a level of stupidity and destruction for many people around the world that is kind of hard to fathom, but nevertheless, we are going to keep on trying to understand our crazy world here on Neon Liberalism. Thanks for listening, and I hope to see you again next week.

**Bret Devereaux [01:27:05]**
Yeah, thanks for having me.