The Great Lie of War | The Ezra Klein Show

Over the weekend, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran, eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.

Within hours, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead, along with much of his senior command. As I record this on Monday, March 2nd, the Iranian Red Crescent says over 550 people have been killed in the bombings, We know of at least 6 American service members killed. There will likely be more as time goes on. There appears to have been a girls' school that was bombed. The pictures from that, the grief of the parents is, it's almost unbearable to look at.

It is a war, that's all.

This is, I just think it's so important to say, it's not all geopolitics. These are people, civilians, their lives, their homes, their children. The attack on Iran came less than 2 months after the United States military captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. In an overnight raid on his compound in Caracas. America has deposed two sitting heads of state, 8 weeks apart. I have seen a lot of commentary accusing Donald Trump of hypocrisy.

We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change wars around the globe, senseless wars.

And now he's changing regimes left and right. But I think this is not quite a policy of regime change. It is not America invading Iraq or Afghanistan and restructuring the government ourselves. Maduro's regime was left intact aside from him. In an interview with the Times, Trump said that, quote, "What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario." He said, "Everybody's kept their job except for 2 people." Trump has called for the Iranian people to rise up against their government. But he's also said he intends to resume talks with the existing Iranian regime. He said he had a few choices for who might lead Iran next, but they appear to have been killed in the initial bombings. The Iranian regime was monstrous, but Trump is not insisting that it be changed, nor is his administration. This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change. I don't think what we're seeing here is a policy regime change. I would call this head-on-a-pike foreign policy. America is proving that we can easily reach into weaker countries and kill or capture their heads of state. We will not be dissuaded from doing that by international law or fear of unforeseen consequences or the difficulty of persuading the American people or the United States Congress of the need for war. On that, we won't even try. We don't particularly care who replaces the people we killed. We will not insist that they come from outside the regime, nor that they are elected democratically. We care merely that whoever comes next fears us enough to be compliant when we make a demand, that they know that they might be the next head on a pike. Trump's belief appears to be that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors and do so without events spinning out of his control. He appears to believe that it was idiocy or cowardice or a laurely respect for international rules that prevented his predecessors from replacing foreign leaders they loathed. With more pliable subordinates. Trump is a man who has not read much history, but who certainly intends to make it. But what if Iran is not Venezuela? What if the Iranian people rise up, as Trump has asked them to do, and are slaughtered by the Iranian military? What if it descends into civil war, as happened in Iraq, where America had troops on the ground, and yet hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed? What if it goes the way of Libya, or Yemen or Syria? Who will pay the cost if he's wrong? Ben Rhodes is a political analyst, a New York Times opinion-contributing writer, and the co-host of the podcast Pod Save the World. He served as a senior advisor to President Barack Obama. He joins me now. As always, my email is reclineshow@nytimes.com. Ben Rhodes, welcome to the show.

Good to see you, Ezra.

So you served in the Obama administration. It was the policy of that administration that Iran could not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Bibi Netanyahu was the prime minister of Israel at that time, been around a long time. He was pushing very hard for America to attack Iran, destroy its nuclear capabilities, maybe change its regime. Why didn't you do that then?

Uh, because we were worried about what the potential costs and consequences of a military action could be, what it could unleash across the region, uh, kind of version of what we're seeing, just a lot of unpredictability. And frankly, we thought that the principal US security interest in Iran was the nuclear program. That doesn't mean we didn't take seriously its support for proxies and its ballistic missile program, but the existential issue to us was the nuclear program. So if you could resolve that diplomatically and avoid a war, that was preferable to the alternative. And a lot of people actually complained that we made that argument. You may remember, Ezra, that it's either a war or a diplomatic agreement, and tragically, And so we, you know, here we are.

What were you worried about would happen? You said a version of what we're seeing play out now, but, you know, if you're in the US, you're seeing reports of missiles being fired in all directions, but it doesn't seem completely out of control, at least at this moment. So tell me, talk me through the scenarios you all considered then.

Well, it's interesting. We did, you know, war games, essentially scenario planning, right, where you anticipate what might happen in the event of a military conflict. Part of what I just say at a macro level is having been through Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya in the Obama administration, we'd just seen the uncertainties that are unleashed in any kind of military conflict in the region. Even in the case where you bombed Iran's nuclear facilities, first and foremost, what we determined is you kind of couldn't destroy the Iranian nuclear program from the air. They know how to do this. They know the nuclear fuel cycle. They could rebuild. And so at best, if you're trying to deal with the nuclear program, at best you could set it back in a very successful strike, maybe a year. And what are the risks that you're taking? You're taking the risk that Iran will strike, as we are seeing now, try to strike out and lash out at US military facilities across the region, try to strike out at energy infrastructure, which could be very difficult for the global economy, strike Gulf allies, strike civilian populations in Israel. You could have a situation where you essentially have a regional war instead of just you bomb the nuclear program and get out. I think inside of Iran, there was just also the question of if the regime were to implode in some fashion, what happens next? The likelihood was that you could have a protracted civil conflict. We've seen all of the unpredictability that can unleash in terms of refugee flows or conflict migrating across borders. We didn't see some path pathway to a quick transition to a democratic Iran or a different kind of stable government there. So when you weighed the risks of a military action against the benefits of setting back the Iranian nuclear program a year, it just didn't seem worth it.

I think Donald Trump believes he has figured something out that has eluded his predecessors, which is that you can change these regimes without changing the regime. You can capture Maduro. You can use air power to kill Khamenei. And what you're going to do next is not insist on democracy, is not insist on rebuilding something you like. You are going to simply insist on somebody who is afraid enough of you that they are more pliable when it matters. That there is— that what you've created is not exactly a puppet, but someone who is inclined to follow your orders when you give them, and that maintains a limit on how involved you need to be. Is he right? Has he figured something out?

I don't think he's right. I think you're right that he believes that he's figured this out, but I think there's a number of flaws with his thinking. I mean, the first thing in the case of Iran is For all the focus on Khamenei, who was a reprehensible leader, by the way, I'm not sure how many years he had left. If we're just decapitating him, time was about to do that. But this is a deep, deep regime with ideological institutions that go far beyond even the Chavista regime in Venezuela. Because what you're talking about is he's sitting on top of this edifice that has been built since the 1979 revolution that includes millions of people under arms. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, the Basij militias that are usually responsible for the crackdowns that we see when there are peaceful protests, the Iranian military and police. There's a lot of depth to this regime. So taking out even the Supreme Leader doesn't in any way change the regime. In fact, if you talk about people that might be afraid, the IRGC has sometimes been more hardline even, certainly than the political leadership that Americans usually see in things like negotiations. Then it's also the case, Trump thinks, I truly believe, he thinks in news cycle increments. I'll kill someone, it'll look like we changed the regime, we got rid of the bad guy, we slayed the dragon here. What happens in 1 year, in 3 years, in 5 years. I mean, I'll be self-critical here, Ezra. You remember the Libya intervention. We did the same thing, essentially. Gaddafi was killed through a mix— well, there was an airstrike, and then he was killed by people on the ground. Terrible guy, reprehensible leader. When that regime was removed, nothing was able to fill the vacuum except for the most heavily armed people in Libya, which were a series of different militias, and that civil war spread across borders, and suddenly that part of North Africa becomes an arms bazaar, conflict is spreading to neighboring states. If the regime itself stays in Iran, I don't think it's fundamentally different just because Khamenei is not there. If the regime implodes completely, I worry about a Libya-type situation at scale, because this is a much bigger country with over 90 million people. Trump, the Venezuela operation, I saw that and it made me worried about this.

One of the things you have heard repeatedly from Donald Trump is an exhortation to the Iranian people that now is your chance. We have degraded this regime. You are being supported by air power. Rise up and take back your country. I think Trump said this will be your only chance for generations. What do you hear when you hear that?

I hear something that is incredibly reckless. And, you know, we already saw when he was, you know, truth-posting "Help is on the way" a few weeks ago, and Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, was similarly saying, "Go to the streets." thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Iranians were killed when they did go to the streets.

By the regime.

By the regime. And you cannot protect those people from the air. I mean, let's say there's an uprising, and let's say all the remaining instruments of the Iranian regime start to massacre those people. Well, we can bomb more regime targets, but at a certain point, you kind of run out of that, and you're just talking about people on the ground with small arms. I'm tremendously sympathetic to the Iranian people and what they've been through. I would love for them to have a different government, but I'll say this as the Obama guy, hope is not a strategy. Just going out there and saying, "I'm bombing your country." I mean, this is part of what's so disturbing to me about this, Ezra, is that they don't have any capacity to articulate an endgame. And so I think people have to recognize, and I had to learn this the hard way through the Arab Spring, just because we want a different government doesn't mean that that's easy to execute. And frankly, I think Iran was changing, albeit not at the pace that we want. The Women, Life, Freedom movement succeeded in some ways. It didn't change the regime, but you talk to people in that region, and The society was changing. Women were starting to go around uncovered. Some of the veneer of the regime had been punctured. Khamenei was old. He was going to die. The capacity for the Iranian people themselves to change that regime over time, even though that's not on the timeline that people want, I think would've been a better bet than just saying, "We're going to drop a bunch of bombs and rise up," because there's just not a formula I mean, as I was thinking about this, everybody's focused on the American regime change-led operations, as they should— Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and that part of the world. It's not just those regimes that have had trouble. Sudan had a popular uprising. Look at Sudan today. Or Egypt had a popular uprising in the Obama years, and Mubarak ended up getting replaced by a more repressive leader. And so we keep seeing in these scenarios that the toppling of an authoritarian government can lead either to chaos or to further repression. And that's my concern.

—there's a profound, I think, confusion in what Trump has been saying, because at the same time that he is saying, "Rise up, Iranian people. This is your moment," he's also saying that he had 3 people in mind to lead the regime after this, but now they're all dead, it turns out, so maybe it's not going to be them. He's also said that he is willing to be in talks with the existing regime. They were playing it too cute before, but he's happy to talk now. And so there is this way in which he is simultaneously signaling an openness and eagerness to see a bottom-up revolt, and also a willingness to cut a deal with what remains so long as they, you know, get the deal they wanted, which is no nuclear program, no enrichment, um, probably no more ballistic missiles program, a couple other things. But, but those two signals going out at the same time seems worrisome to me.

It seems very worrisome because it projects an incoherence, um, to your policy and To your head on the pike strategy, when I hear Trump say that, I hear someone who would like this to be over as soon as possible. But the reality is the Iranians get a vote on whether it's over. What they know, for instance, is US munitions, particularly our air defense systems, are going to run lower and lower and lower. In a way, they may be able to hit more targets the longer this goes. I mean, the best case scenario is 'Cause I was trying to, as someone who's been critical, I want to inhabit the best-case scenarios, right? It feels like the best-case scenario may be a chastened regime that just wants to hunker down and will agree, at least for the time being, to not have any nuclear program that is active and kind of lick its wounds. And maybe that provides some opportunity for that regime to be less repressive. I mean, I guess that's the landing zone here that Trump is trying to meet. But at the same time, we've bombed them twice now in the middle of nuclear negotiations. And so if you have hardliners in the IRGC or in Iranian circles, and they're being told, "Well, let's stop and negotiate with the Americans," they're not going to believe that that they can negotiate in any kind of good faith with Donald Trump. And so I think that there's this kind of strategic incoherence about what the objective of this whole thing is. And that's seen not just by the Iranians, it's seen by the Gulf Arabs who are now, they're furious at everybody. I think they're furious at the United States and Israel for launching this war, and we can talk about that. And I think they're obviously furious at Iran for targeting them indiscriminately, but they don't know What's going on here? What's the goal here? Are we trying to remove this regime? They're wary of removing the regime because they don't want refugees and chaos in their region. What you'd want, I guess, is everybody in the world, the relevant countries in the Gulf, in the region, and Europe, being able to put some diplomatic framework around this so it's not just this Steve Whitcoff and Jared Kushner trying to talk to some Iranian in a room via the Omanis. Shifting goalposts of what he's for, um, make it much harder to put any kind of framework around this.

This gets to something I think pretty deep in the Trump administration's thinking, or lack of thinking, which is it has often seemed to me if there's any global problem they are worried about, it is refugee flows and migration. Yeah, yeah. And they go to Europe and talk about how Europe is ceasing to exist as a civilization, in part because of, you know, Muslim, Muslim integration and immigration. There have been huge refugee flows to Europe from Syria as part of the Syrian civil war. If you imagine a scenario here where you end up a little bit between Trump's imagined options, which is simultaneously you do have opposition to the existing regime and you also have a regime that has become more compliant to Trump himself on things like the nuclear issue, but is trying to hold power and repressing those who are trying to attack it, you could very quickly end up in a significant refugee flow scenario. Iran's a very, very, very big country. You're talking about 90 million people. And how do the states around Iran handle that? How— what does the Trump administration think about huge outflows of Iranians coming after the US and Israel destabilize the, the country? Have have they planned for that? Will they— should Europe and America take these people? Should other— what?

[Speaker:JOSH FARLEY] Honestly, it doesn't seem that they planned for it. I will tell you that in the run-up to this, I did talk to some people I know in the region, in the Middle East, in the Gulf, who were discussing what they were warning the Trump administration about. And one of the scenarios, the kind of worst-case scenario, so I'm not suggesting I'm not suggesting this is definitely going to happen, but I think we have to inhabit this precisely because there was no discussion of the potential consequences. If you have a civil conflict inside of Iran, the economy's already in really deep trouble because of US sanctions, a collapsing currency, so there's extreme poverty there. There are ethnic separatist movements inside of Iran in the Kurdish regions, in the Baloch regions. And so what you could have is an implosion. if there's some kind of uprising and then there's a kind of chaotic civil war, which is not hard to imagine because we've seen that in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the other places where the US has been involved militarily. And millions— I mean, somebody said to me, this is a country that is 4 times bigger than Syria, and remember that refugee crisis. And essentially, the only places to go are in one direction, it's Afghanistan and Pakistan, That's not a particularly stabilizing thing to imagine, huge refugee outflows in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We already have a war, by the way. Pakistan bombed Afghanistan the day before this started. Pakistan could get drawn into this conflict, in part to get refugees away and in part to prevent the emergence of a separatist Balochistan on their borders that crosses their borders. Then the other direction is Turkey into Europe. And you saw Turkey very aggressively being a part of the mediation efforts. This is one of the reasons why. They have a lot of fatigue with hosting millions of Syrian refugees, and Europe trying to keep those refugees in Turkey instead of getting Europe. They will find their way to Europe through Turkey. And so I don't think there's been any real planning for this, and that is, to me, the worst-case scenario of a civil war. War and even fracturing of the Iranian sovereign territory, you'd have huge refugee outflows.

We have not been planning for this. Israel has been planning for some version of this for a very long time. They're a full partner in this operation, which is distinctive about it. What do they want?

I think first and foremost, they want to smash anybody who poses a perceived threat to them, and they've obviously been principally focused on this axis of resistance, right? So Hamas, Hezbollah, other Iranian proxy groups, and then ultimately the Iranian regime itself. Weakening that regime is, in their view, obviously good for their security posture. They're worried about ballistic missiles, they're worried about nuclear program. If I was going to be cynical, and I know this is a view of some increasingly in the region, it's that Israel's okay with chaos, that if there's an implosion in Iran and humanitarian disaster there and kind of chaos, that actually advantages their security situation in a way, because that kind of Iran can't pose a threat to them. And that if you look at Lebanon and Syria where Israel's also been very active militarily. They're just kind of pushing out not just kind of the perimeter, they're literally occupying parts of Southern Syria now. They want this kind of buffer zone in Southern Lebanon. And I think the fears in the region is that they are just kind of methodically, yes, eliminating threats, but also creating a lot of chaos and instability as almost a strategy of giving themselves freedom of action. Whether that involves taking the West Bank, whether that involves, again, extending out buffer zones into Syria and Lebanon. That seems plausible. That seems more plausible to me than they have some plan to support the installation of Reza Pahlavi as the transitional leader of Iran.

What they seem to me to have had a plan for, and I think you have to give some credit to Netanyahu for one of the most remarkable coups of his career was involving Donald Trump in this. Yeah. Yeah. And Netanyahu has very, very effectively pulled Trump in by degrees such that we were supposed to have a very limited bombing campaign on Iran. We were told after that that their nuclear program was obliterated. In Trump's video announcing this operation, he both said Iran was posing an imminent threat and that their nuclear program had been obliterated, which I found a little bit Strange. But Netanyahu's ability to get Trump to do what no other U.S. president has been willing to do is striking. And I think that was, on some level, like, the real plan here. Israel had weakened Iran. It had shown Iran to be weaker than people thought it was. And I think the push was made to Trump that you have this narrow window of opportunity to do what no other president has done, and at least in the way it was presented to him, permanently solve the problem and permanently avenge, uh, you know, previous injuries and insults to America.

I think you are exactly right. Uh, I think it's worth pointing out, I mean, this— we were both in Washington at the time— I mean, this started coming up at the end of the Bush administration in 2007, 2008, when there was a push, uh, for Bush to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. Netanyahu has wanted to do this since I have been in politics. Very clearly wanted the US, not Israel alone, the US to take out the Iranian regime. And every president has resisted this except Trump. We should say, obviously there's people in the United States, the Lindsey Grahams of the world who want to do this as well. So it's not just Israel, but it's a pretty small set of constituencies. The public is broadly against this. And you're right, they brought him in by degrees, and we can even go back back to the first Trump term, where he left the Iranian nuclear deal. That was not something that his advisors were telling him to do. Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, was against it at the time. Not even a huge fan of the Iran nuclear deal, but because he saw if you remove yourself from that deal, you're kind of on a slow-motion movement towards this. In a way, it's funny, Trump likes to say 12-day war, and it's been one war. Since he pulled out of that nuclear agreement, it's been like a slow-motion series of events that led in this direction.

It begins with economic war, begins with sanctions.

Maximum pressure. Yeah, exactly. So you pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, you go to maximum pressure sanctions, you assassinate Qassem Soleimani. Those are all things that happened in Trump's first term. Couldn't get them all the way to bombing Iran itself. Biden clearly, and I've been very critical, as you know, of Biden's Middle East policy on Gaza, He was clearly not keen to go all in with Iran on a regional war. Maybe he was supportive of going after the Iranian proxy groups, not this. Then Trump comes back and they do the nuclear strike. But I think you're right. I think the Israelis saw the Venezuela operation, "Oh, he's getting more comfortable with this and he's getting comfortable taking it to regime change." And they see, and this is where the the continued use of military force without any congressional authorization is connected to this because it's like, okay, there's a president in Donald Trump who is willing to just bomb countries and take huge risks absent any congressional debate or discussion. I mean, we dealt with this in the Obama years. You must inhabit the scenario of a war. If Donald Trump had tried to prepare the American people for this, they would have said no. If he had gone out and given a series of speeches, "Now is the time we must remove the Iranian regime," it wouldn't have worked. And so I think you're right, this kind of vainglorious, "I'm Donald Trump, I will slay all the dragons. We've had these grievances with Maduro, with Khamenei, with the Cuban regime. I'm going to remove all of them." I think that there's a vanity to that that Israel and some of the hawks in this country saw, and they went to him knowing that he was reticent to kind break from his base this much and do this, but they appeal to something bigger than his short-term political instincts, which is, "This will make you an historic figure." I think Bibi Netanyahu has wanted to get an American president to do this since at least when I was in government, and he has.

So one thing that I think is important in that story you just laid out is also there's been a learning about Iran that has been successive. So America pulled out of the nuclear deal, added the maximum pressure sanctions. Iran wasn't able to do very much about that. There was the assassination of Soleimani. There was no significant reprisal for that. You saw Israel decapitate Hezbollah. You saw the, uh, then bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites. And I do think something that has been significant here is a growing sense that Iran was not as fearsome as was believed and did not have the capacity to strike back as had been believed, but that you could do this at low cost, which was not what people thought before.

This drives me a little crazy because I think it's true. But, you know, let's just take Netanyahu. The argument was always that they're 10 feet tall, that, you know, they're absolute maniacs who are on the precipice of a nuclear weapon and they've built this massive axis that is coming for us. And, and I never believed that. I never believed that Iran was as all-powerful. And I certainly never believed that they had offensive, you know, that they were going to launch some preemptive war against Israel. You know, they are interested in regime survival. That was always my assessment, and that even some of the proxy groups were meant— the Iranian doctrine was keep this out of Iran, keep the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon. So part of what used to drive me crazy about the hawkish prescriptions on Iran from inside Washington and Israel is that either argument led to war. If Iran is really powerful, we must take them out because they must be stopped because they're on the precipice of doing something. They're weak so we can take them out. And look, I do think it bears saying, first of all, that we should have a mindset that war is bad and should be avoided. That should be a legal and values proposition, that there are preferable outcomes to war itself. The other problem I have with this, Ezra, is there's an incredible short-term thinking about this because you're also sending the message that, okay, Iran was in a nuclear deal with the United States, they were complying with that nuclear deal, and they then got bombed. Um, whatever Iranian regime emerges from this, I think, is very likely to want nuclear weapons. So this doesn't happen. If you're sitting in Riyadh or even Dubai and Abu Dhabi right now, you're thinking Well, the Americans are my security guarantor, and look at what we just got out of that security guarantee. We got a war that they launched pretty much— I don't buy that the Saudis are pushing for this, by the way. I saw them deny that report, and I think they were very reticent about this. Why wouldn't they get nuclear weapons now? It's like, well, at the end of the day, the Americans are kind We're willing to play with our security or deprioritize it as against Israel's security. Other would-be proliferators are going to think, look at North Korea versus Iran. And so there's these second-order effects, and one of them is nuclear proliferation, where the consequences might not be manifest next year, but I don't know, 5 years from now, I don't think that this kind of action will have made us safer. I'd much rather, if you actually believe in nuclear nonproliferation, It's much better to have that be something you fortify diplomatically than you just remove a regime because it's weak.

I want to pick up on what you just said about the Saudis. There was a Washington Post report that cited at least 4 sources that had knowledge of the conversations and negotiations. What it basically said was that in public, Saudi Arabia has been against this, has denied us use of their bases. In private, Mohammed bin Salman and top people in the Saudi government have been privately pushing Trump to act. This is something that, you know, if you've been around these issues for a while, you've heard a lot about. The Israelis talk all the time about how nobody wants the Iranian government gone like Saudi Arabia. So you don't buy that that is what was happening?

I'm skeptical of it because I was hearing different things. You know, I certainly— you saw Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt, along with Oman, obviously, trying to avert this outcome. The Egypt thing was interesting to me because the idea that Egypt would take that position without Saudi Arabia as a chief sponsor supporting them in that makes me question it. You also see in Saudi foreign policy, you saw a rapprochement with Iran in the last few years. I think Mohammed bin Salman, who I've been hugely critical of— anybody who's listened to me over the years, I have no love for that government— but I think he's principally interested in stability. Now, what I think is quite possible is they were reticent of this. They don't like instability at this scale in their region. They don't like the potential disruptions, obviously, to energy infrastructure. But when they see an inevitability to it, they may have kind of come around and been like, okay, we'll talk to you guys about this. I think the most likely scenario is that they're a bit ambivalent because, again, their security paradigm is stability, stability, stability. And this is doesn't feel a lot like stability.

I'm not saying this is the biggest issue in this moment, but the centrality of Israel in the operation has raised some concerns for me about what this is going to mean for antisemitism. You see the amount of talk on the MAGA right, but elsewhere as well, that, you know, Israel's leverage over Donald Trump, or that, you know, this is all just some kind of, Israeli plot. I wonder a bit about the— there are many ways which Netanyahu looks to me to be gambling. Yes. For short-term position over the long-term sustainability of both Israel's political position in America, but also just the generalized view of the world at a time of very, very sharply rising antisemitism about what is going on here. Uh, I don't know how it nets out or what it ends up meaning, but it certainly has me nervous.

It, it has, it has me nervous too. And, and there's two aspects to that. I mean, the, the one is in the region and one is here. I just say briefly, in the region, like, I was critical of the Abraham Accords at the time, and I was a bit of an outlier, to say the least, about that. Um, because I, you know, Donald Trump framed this as a big peace deal when in fact it didn't resolve any of the conflicts in the region. And look at what's happened since. It's been much more violent. And if you talk to people in the region, they see that, oh, wait a second, this has all been about Israeli hegemony in this region. And that is making the Arab states who were prepared certainly to live with Israel, I didn't think Saudi Arabia had any threat to pose to Israel, but they're increasingly concerned about a dynamic where there's this degree of freedom of action for Israel. So what does that look like? How does that evolve in the long term in the region? I think here, you're right. I really worry about this because, look, this is not me saying Israel pushed Donald Trump to do this. Bibi Netanyahu went out, I think yesterday, and said, "I've wanted this to happen for 40 years, and finally Trump did it, and he's doing it with us too." But the US used to be very careful not to do joint military operations with Israel, in part for this reason. This is a very big break.

This is a huge—

I mean, people need to think about this. Just to do joint exercises was something people calibrated carefully because we didn't want to make it look like that Israel and the United States are one and the same for reasons that go in both directions. But here's the thing is Americans are looking at this and They're seeing that we are in a war that seems like it's something Israel wanted us to do. Seems like the benefits accrue mostly to Israel. The ballistic missile program does not pose a threat to the United States. There is no ICBM from Iran that can reach the United States. So a lot of what we're doing is removing threats to Israel. If it goes poorly, who is going to get blamed? You know, I think that some of that anger will go in the direction of Israel. And I think it's important for us to talk about this because when there's not debate and discussion about it, it migrates to the darker corners. Right. And you're seeing that certainly in MAGA.

Well, I think one reason this has fed conspiracies is it has felt to many people like such a almost inexplicable break from how Trump sold himself. Yeah. So I mean, you have, you know, back in 2023, Trump saying, these globalists want to squander all of America's strength, blood, and treasure chasing monsters and fandoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they're creating here at home. Very on point. JD Vance writes a Wall Street Journal op-ed that year titled Trump's Best Foreign Policy: Not Starting Any Wars. Tulsi Gabbard, of course, sells no war with Iran, T-shirts. Um, now you have Trump kind of start more as certainly conflicts, engagements, like left and right. According to Axios, Trump has now authorized more military strikes in 2025 alone than Biden did in all 4 years. So I think for a lot of people, there has been this, how do you reconcile both Trump and the movement that was around him, right? All the people advising him. With what we're seeing now. I got asked over the weekend by somebody, you know, what was the faction inside the White House that wanted this? Yeah. And I found it actually hard to answer that question. We have not seen a lot of reporting saying Marco Rubio wanted this to happen. You know, JD Vance appears to have not. Uh, yeah, instead we're talking about Israel and Lindsey Graham, who's not that influential anymore. Mohammed bin Salman, maybe. It— I think a lot of people have been very confused with how to, like, how to explain Trump himself taking this risk.

I had the same mental exercise, Ezra, and let's just go through it. If you look at all these polls, it's wildly politically unpopular. And by the way, that continues to hold even though the Supreme Leader got killed. And the Supreme Leader being killed will be the high water mark of this operation, you know. Um, there's not another person that you can kill that Trump can say is a head on a pike, right? Then if you look at the people that want to inherit MAGA, right, who are looking ahead at the Republican Party. Um, JD Vance seems to want to have very little to do with this. Tucker Carlson is railing against this. Um, you know, the Steve Bannons of the world, they're not enthusiastic about this. Um, the Republican Party is not going in this direction. Um, so this is not something that Trump is doing because it's gonna be wildly popular. Military didn't want it.

Joint Chiefs of Staff—

the Joint Chiefs of Staff was clearly putting out leaking out that they didn't want to do this. Marco Rubio is much more focused on this hemisphere, Venezuela and Cuba, which they're trying to strangle through maximum pressure. The Democratic Party is not for this, and particularly the people anticipating the future of the Democratic Party. Who is for this? It's a very small set of constituents. It is basically Israel, and then it is kind of hardline longstanding hawks in Congress or in kind of the national security establishment. By the way, the people that Trump said he didn't like for this.

John Bolton, who he's trying to persecute, is out there defending it.

So it is hard to look at this and not—

Also, wasn't part of the reason he talked about getting rid of John Bolton that he's like, "John Bolton always wanted me to attack Iran," right?

And so it is hard to not conclude that that Bibi Netanyahu and Israel's push for this was determinative in some way. Because again, the only appeal to Trump that made any sense is the one you made earlier where you become a historic figure. I do think there's a part of him that's just like, these governments have been a pain in the ass for decades, right? Cuba since the '59 revolution, Iran since the '79 revolution, Venezuela since the Chavista revolution. I'm going to be the one who finally settles all these scores. There's some of that that is separate from Israel, but it is hard to not conclude that if Israel wasn't— put it this way, Ezra, take the counterfactual. The Israeli government was not pushing for this. Would it have happened?

I want to talk about the ways in which this might not remain limited in the way Donald Trump has either promised the country or I think promised himself. So I see this as Following from the 12-day bombing some months ago, it turned out that didn't do enough. And when it was clear that Iran was racing forward with ballistic missiles, reconstituting a nuclear program that probably was not obliterated in the way Donald Trump had initially said it was, and so we were now involved and Iran was defying him. He— it wasn't just that it was obliterated, that obliteration was a kind of command from him. To them that was gone. They weren't giving up enough at the negotiating table. And also, I think this was meaningful to Trump on some level, was now slaughtering its own people. You know, he didn't like that either. I want to give him credit for some humanitarian impulse potentially here. So now we're involved even more so. Now we have kinetically destroyed much of the regime and its power. But a lot could spin out of control here. So I am very skeptical that the limit Trump seems to think he has put on this is stable. And I'm curious, as somebody with more experience here than I have, what you think of it.

I think you're right. And the Israelis have this— it's not a doctrine, but essentially this terminology, it's called mowing the lawn. Have you heard this? Which is— and again, I hate even using phrases like this when it comes to war and human beings, but essentially the mowing the lawn strategy is that if there's a place that poses a threat, you occasionally just kind of go in and cut the grass. You bomb the threat periodically. And obviously, like, Lebanon would be a perfect case of where the Israelis pursued that strategy.

Well, they always said this about Hamas. How did that ultimately work out? Exactly.

And there is a risk, and this is why I say we have been at war with Iran. The idea that there was something called the 12-Day War and now there's a different war, no, no, that's not how these things work. Once you bomb a country, you're bringing this forever war paradigm to it. And so I think it is quite possible that in the same way that the 12-Day War wasn't the end of the story, if Trump stops bombing Iran in a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, that we're back doing that in a few months because something happened that we don't like. And then you start to get massacres in the streets of Iran, or you start to get refugee outflows, or you start to continue to see kind of waves of random attacks at the Gulf. Are we really going to do nothing? But then if we're getting back and back in, then we're getting pulled into quicksand. We are implicated. You know, we are involved. I mean, the common thread to this conversation, Ezra, is like, we need to just get this short-term thinking that there's such a thing as 12-day wars, or that you solve a problem when you kill the leader. Like, that's not how any of this goes.

I think it is genuinely striking and a break with certainly the recent past, how little public deliberation there is over quite major American foreign policy actions. And, you know, the Bush administration did lie its way into war with Iraq, but it did also spend a long time trying to persuade the country that war with Iraq was worth doing. And we debated how many, you know, how much of the American military it would take. What does it mean to be entering into these kinds of commitments, these kinds of projects, these kinds of risks, without really any public debate, any significant public or congressional deliberation of what might happen. You don't have a bunch of members of the military repeatedly going to Congress and going through scenarios. I don't want to place everything here on process being poor, but it's— but there's a reason that the public and Congress are consulted, because if it ends up requiring more engagement, then you actually need that support.

No, I think process is related to outcome. And if you can't make a case to the American people to sway public opinion in the direction of a war, or make a case to Congress— I mean, the single most important thing you could do to keep America out of more wars is actually require Congress to take a vote, because they're not going to vote for it. Given where public opinion is on this. And so I think it's incredibly corrosive to democracy to have this kind of loop of conflict that is increasingly sidelining Congress and public opinion entirely. I also think there's something even more dangerous, Ezra, which is we keep— I know a lot of people are thinking, when are we going to know how bad it's going to get with Trump? What if the things that you fear are already happening? Like, we already have a president who clearly came back into office wanting the military to be more directly responsive to him than it was in the first term, when the military leadership and even some of the Pentagon leadership stood up to him more and more. We have seen him purge the top of the military general officers. We have seen him address the general officers and say, hey, American cities might be military training grounds. Now we've seen him within a matter of weeks undertake multiple military— I'll just give you a few. We bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. We were blowing up boats in the Caribbean on totally false pretenses that it had something to do with drug trafficking in the United States and potentially committed war crimes. We abducted the leader of Venezuela. We now just killed the Supreme Leader of Iran and are trying to topple that regime, or maybe we're not. These are all things that have happened within 3 months, right? And at the same time, we see the Department of War telling Anthropic, an AI company, that you will be banned from any business of the government if the Pentagon can't ignore your terms of service against mass surveillance of Americans. And where I'm going with this is The ultimate guardrail on democracy is supposed to be the separation between the president and the military as an institution. And if the military as an institution can directly serve the interests of Donald Trump with no public debate about what it's doing, no congressional votes on what it's doing, how many more countries are going to be bombed, and what is that military going to end up doing in the United States if he invokes the Insurrection Act? And that's not to impugn the military, that's to impugn where Trump is taking this. So I think the darker scenarios, it's not just process nerds, like, "We need to have authorizations to use military force, and we need briefings to Congress." It's, no, is the military an institution that just completely serves the whims of the president, or is it an institution that is apolitical, that is equally responsive to Congress and the president? Because those questions are going to matter a lot how the next 2 and 3/4 years of the Trump administration—

Although I think it's important to say, it's not that Congress is being defied. Congress has abdicated. Yes, that's— yes, yes. Mike Johnson is not out there complaining. He is supporting this. I mean, there are many ways in which Trump is a disruptive break with the past, but the escalation of not going to Congress for quite dangerous operations— I mean, that was present in the Obama era. I mean, this is, uh, this has been growing for a very long time.

The thing that, that, that Obama probably, you know, gets the most griefed for in his foreign policy was the Syria red line incident. But what was interesting about that, Ezra, is you have this chemical—

Can you describe what that is? Yes.

So we have this— Obama has said it'd be a red line if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons. Then there's a massive chemical weapons use, and we were preparing to bomb Syria. We were. I mean, I was in meetings. I thought we were going to bomb Syria, and going through strike packages, that kind of stuff. And then Obama makes this decision essentially to say, "I'm going to put this to a vote in Congress. I'm not going to go to war with Syria unless Congress votes to authorize it." Almost immediately, the support for that begins to evaporate in Congress. Even people like Marco Rubio, who are hawks, would not vote to authorize use of military force in Syria. Obama's point was, if Congress, the representatives of the people as envisioned under our constitutional system, don't want to get us into another war with Syria and be responsible for the consequences of whatever happens, then we shouldn't do it. That's how our system's designed. Now, a lot of people have pointed out that we should have done more to stop Assad, and I agree. I'm sympathetic to all those arguments, but I'm also sympathetic to Obama's argument, which is if people don't want the war, we don't have to fight it. And part of what Trump was tapping into in his campaigns was the gap between elites, and particularly national security elites, and public opinion. And it is a crazy gap, Ezra. I've lived at We're at the precipice of it. The conversations and the strategies in both parties of national security elites versus what the American people want their government to be focused on is a deeply unhealthy gap. And all Trump has done is, okay, that establishment is no longer there. It's just him. It's like all of American exceptionalism, all of the apparatus of American power, I called it the blob, whatever you want to call it, this edifice is now just just in one man's head and one man's hands. And that's— instead of solving the problem he said he was running to fix, he's made it worse because it's just up to Donald Trump now.

This gets to the question of whether international law still exists in any meaningful way. No, it does not. What does that mean?

It means it implies in no way to the United States of America, at least. We are completely ignoring it. There is no— I mean, here's how it doesn't exist. In the past, when the United States would do things that, let's just say, stretched the boundaries of international law, you would still show up and make a case. Here's why this was an imminent threat, or here— They don't even bother. And if you look at even— Because the act of going to war violates international law if you cannot demonstrate that there was an imminent threat, that you're acting in some form of self-defense, or that you have to get UN sanction, UN Security Council approval. Absent those things, You're violating international law. But even in the conduct of war, the United States is currently sanctioning the International Criminal Court, which is the kind of preeminent body that is enforcing the laws of war. What message does that send about the conduct of war? Because we're doing that because they tried to indict Bibi Netanyahu for, for war crimes. But if you're basically saying that none of the laws apply to us, um, at a certain point Russia and China say, well, then they don't apply to us either. And if international law on the most important matters of war and peace and the conduct of war, whether to go to war and how you fight a war, if those laws don't apply to any of the big powers, how do apply to anybody.

I've wondered how much the reaction from some of our allies who you might have thought of as more committed to international law has actually reflected a collective recognition that it is gone. So Mark Carney in Canada was very, very supportive of Trump strikes. You know, real support from Australia. Germany was pretty foursquare behind us. And I think this all reflects some of their feelings about the Iranian regime, but I have been struck by the complete absence of outcry from countries that I think, you know, part of their power has become from commitment to these institutions that maintain a kind of collective or multilateral approach to these questions. What have you made of that?

I've been struck by it too. I think part of what Trump counts on is if the people I'm taking out are, you know, don't have a lot of friends, I have more room, right? If it's Maduro, if it's the Iranian regime. I'd say I'm very disappointed in it though. Mark Carney, I was one of many people that thought his speech at Davos was important and interesting and kind of reflective of what's happening and also kind of pointed a path to some emergence of something on the other end of this, that essentially if the middle powers, the kind of more responsible countries in the world that still follow at least some international laws and want some norms around conflict and other things, if they began to kind of stitch together, maybe that could be a place that the United States could rejoin on the back end of Trump. If Mark Carney is going to carve this out though, if he's essentially going to say, "We need rules on trade, but if you bomb Iran, go for it," I think it hugely undermines Mark Carney's own argument. It just makes it seem cynical. It makes it seem like all he's really concerned about is trade, or all I'm concerned about Greenland, because it's European territory, right? I— and I've taken a— you can attest that I've taken a lot of grief for this over the years, but I just believe that if we think that international law and norms are important, they really have to apply universally. Like, we can't just say that, like, well, they don't apply to Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela because we don't like them, you know. The, the United States built this system after World War II because we recognize that if you don't constrain everybody, you are going to have a repeat of what happened in World War I and World War II. You start to create carve-outs, people start to move into those carve-outs, and there's cycles of conflict that lead ultimately to a world war. I think people need to inhabit the reality that we're moving into more than they are. There are no constraints from international law anymore. There is a rampant current trend of nationalism in the world. There are leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Narendra Modi in India, Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. These are nationalists. Nationalism absent international law always leads to more war, and those wars beget more wars.

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

I guess I'd say first and foremost, Iran has paid consequences. We worked on the Iran nuclear deal for 7 years. And the reason I say 7 years is that for several years at the beginning of the Obama administration, we built a multilateral sanctions framework around Iran based on the fact that they were violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, international law. So we didn't say, oh, it's fine, you can violate the international law. We said, no, we got UN Security Council resolutions that became the basis of a maximum pressure campaign in the Obama administration, but it was meant to leverage a change of behavior from the Iranians. You have to kind of come into compliance with international law via nuclear deal in which you are committing to never build a nuclear weapon. You are submitting to intense monitoring and verification of your nuclear program. By the way, we still had other sanctions on them over their support for proxies. I don't like what goes on inside a lot of countries. In the world. There's something peculiar that we are normalizing the idea that that is sufficient basis to go to war in those countries. We don't like it when Vladimir Putin does it. When Vladimir Putin says, "Hey, the elected president of Ukraine was ousted in a protest movement in 2014, in part by people that were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy," I don't agree with that narrative. But how can we say that Vladimir Putin does not have the right to invade that country, but if we see things that we don't like inside of other countries, we have the right to do that? And I think what people see is that if you truly believe in human rights, then you have to apply that normative framework across the board. And a lot of the very same people that are suddenly human rights advocates when it comes to what's happening inside of Iran have nothing to say about what's happening in the West Bank right now, had nothing to say when Jamal Khashoggi was chopped up in the Saudi consulate inside of Turkey, have nothing to say about the fact that el-Sisi, the president of Egypt, has 60,000 people who are political prisoners suffering horrific treatment. So you either have to be universal and consistent, or I have a really hard time listening to your arguments.

I have seen a lot of Democrats, and to some degree I think the international response too, then somewhat paralyzed between their legitimate loathing of the Iranian government and their dislike, distaste for the process of violation of international law, the absence of public deliberation or congressional approval. But I think it has created a kind of muddle in their response, right? Are they saying this should have been done, it's a good thing that it happened, but they don't like that it happened? Are they saying that, uh, the only problem with it was poor process? If Trump had gone to Congress, maybe they would have given him the authority to do it. How do you think Democrats should respond to this? Because right now I've seen many of the leadership really focusing not on was this a right or wrong thing to do, but was the process that led to the right or wrong process.

Yeah, they're saying all the things that you said, and I have a huge problem with this, uh, because ultimately people are not that interested in the process. If someone who doesn't follow this super closely hears a Democratic leader like Chuck Schumer saying, coming out of a briefing about the potential war in Iran that feels imminent, and he says they have to make their case more or something, that— what does that sound like? It sounds like a dodge. What do you actually believe as a political party party. You know, I, I was talking to a friend of mine from the— we do this thing in our Obama group text, Ezra, which wouldn't surprise you, which is, imagine if, right? So imagine if President Obama announced a war on Iran from a vacation property in the middle of the night, uh, on a social media post, made casual remarks about the fact that Americans are going to die, it is what it is. And then within like 2 days, you're already seeing American casualties, American planes falling out of the sky, huge global economic economic disruptions, the Republican Party would've been absolutely unified. Part of the reason Obama had so little room for maneuver is that they as a political party were able to make an argument against whatever the thing that Obama was doing. The Democratic Party doesn't understand that it's not enough to just say, "We want a process vote or procedural vote. We're going to support the Ro Khanna-Thomas Massie resolution that most Americans have no idea what that is." I support it, but it's not going to do anything, and I think most Americans know that it's a vote on whether or not Congress has to authorize something that has already happened, it just makes you look— And again, I'm totally supportive of that effort. This is not a criticism of Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, but the point is, are you for this or against it? And if you're against it, why are you not all out saying that this is reckless, that this is a betrayal of what Donald Trump said when he ran for president, that we don't need more wars, that why are we spending money The price tag of this is going to be in the tens of billions. That's money that could pay for the ACA subsidies. At least. Yeah, at least. There's your healthcare subsidies right now. Our healthcare subsidies are being spent on a war in Iran. Donald Trump is not looking after your interests. He's looking after some kind of grandiose ambitions in the Middle East. This is a very easy political case to make, Ezra. This is the easiest thing in the world that we should be nation-building at home, not abroad.

I saw this after Maduro I think it reflected what happened both in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq, which is that I think that there is a difficulty people have. Maybe they would not themselves go to war for this. Maybe they would not have supported a war for something like this. But when it is against a brutal dictator, on what grounds are you opposing it? Right? Is opposing it supporting the continuation of the regime? And I think that's where a lot of the Democrats you're talking about are getting caught, where some of the world leaders are talking about are getting caught. So, you know, aside from, you know, we can spend money in one place versus another, I, I think it's this quite deep question of what is the difference between how do people negotiate and how do they argue against these wars that are partially demanded or justified on humanitarian grounds. I mean, the Iranian regime, as you mentioned, has killed thousands or maybe tens of thousands of their own people. There were, you know, Iranians marching in the streets, and it was not safe for them to, to do so. I sort of have my answer to this, but I'm curious for yours.

I think my answer to this is that war itself, um, is something to be avoided. And, and that may seem like a, you know, obvious point, but it's not. I mean, to be a little provocative on this too, I think that post-9/11, because we've normalized so much use of military action, because I could argue, Ezra, it is completely insane that we're sitting here and having a conversation about that if we don't bomb a regime, that we're therefore keeping it in power? Does it report to us? And I think what Americans kind of intuitively get better than their political elites, their national security elites, and even some of the kind of media conversation in this, is they get this. They get that war is terrible, war has risks, that even if it's well-intentioned on paper, leads to bad outcomes for both the Americans who have to fight it, the American taxpayers to pay for it, and pretty much the people on the other end of the war that you're saying you're trying to help. We're trying to help the Iraqis, we're trying to help the Afghans, we're trying to help the Libyans. Now we're trying to help the Iranians. And I guess the provocative thing I want to say too is that this seems to happen when the countries in question are brown. A dehumanization since 9/11 where it's like, "Oh, look at this Middle Eastern, the next Middle Eastern country up that the regime does something we don't like. We're going to go and just bomb them." I mean, we killed, if reports are accurate, either the US or Israel, over 100 girls at a school. And it's not really a big story in the United States. And I actually think to tie this back home, I don't think that that mentality, that othering of people who are on the other side of the world after 9/11, I think that othering has come home. I think that the capacity to have the mass deportation campaign that is generally targeting brown and Black people is tied to this dehumanization and desensitization of violence that we see in our foreign policy. Post-9/11, we othered a lot of populations. And if you watch— I mean, I know we're going a little far afield, but I think this is really relevant. I noticed in the Obama administration, like, the othering on Fox, you know, that was once just about Middle Eastern terrorists, but then it's about the people crossing the southern border, and then it becomes one big other, you know. And so I think it should be seen as a pretty extremist proposition that if the United States doesn't go to war with some government in the Middle East, we're somehow condoning everything. I I was really mad about the Jamal Khashoggi thing. At no point did I think we should bomb, you know, Mohammed bin Salman for that.

I agree with a lot of that, and I want to offer maybe one other thing that I think has been threaded through our conversation, and it's sort of my answer to this question, which is war is inherently uncontrollable. Yeah. That the fantasy that we are always offered at the beginning is that we can choose what it is we are going to do, that we can control the situation we are going to create. And as we have developed even more precision weapons and more air power and more drones and more ability to wage war at a distance, the seduction of that control for leaders and for others has become all the more potent. But that the history of this is we do not control it. And as you mentioned, Libya, with Afghanistan, with Iraq, we might think we are helping the people, but if we set off a civil war, you could easily have 70,000, 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 people die in that war. And we have shown no interest in, number one, saying we will occupy the country to make sure that doesn't happen, and nor, as we learned in Iraq, even if we do decide to occupy the country, can we keep that from happening? We— I mean, Donald Trump was one of the people who started trying to withdraw us from Afghanistan, which then completed in the Biden administration. Again, the inability over a very long time to control the outcome of something like this, even when we were willing to put much more of our blood and treasure into controlling it. And so to me, one of the— like, the great lie of war is that you will get what you want out of it. Among the many things that scares me so much about Trump is how blithe he is with that. You don't feel like this has cost him any sleep at all. And if it goes badly, I think he will walk away and say, "Well, I gave you Iranians your chance. You didn't take it, or you didn't succeed in taking it." Yeah.

Well, yes, I think you're exactly right. I mean, one thing I became very aware of over 8 years in the White House, but also in this whole post-9/11 period, is that the US military can destroy anything. Anything, right? It can take out any target set that it has, but it cannot engineer the politics of other countries or build what comes after the thing that is destroyed. We had 150,000 troops in Iraq, and we couldn't stop violence. And look, you know who knows that? The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps colonel who's a total hardliner right now knows that Americans are going to lose interest in this, you know, knows that if we weather this, you know, on the back end, we can potentially do what we want. And there's a callousness in the way that Trump has done this. And precisely because I think war is so uncertain and the cost of war is paid so overwhelmingly by ordinary people, one of the reasons I would like to see Democrats or anybody, frankly, who's concerned about Trump be more outspoken now is I think sometimes they are reticent to speak out because what if it goes well? "It's not just that the Iranian regime is bad, it's that if it goes well, then they'll say you were against this thing." I'm sorry, I'm against this even if it has the better case scenario, because we need to be. If you can't take a position on something as fundamental as whether going to war when you don't have to is a good thing, then what's the point of all this? We could have achieved our objectives on the nuclear issue through negotiations. We chose to bomb this country instead. So I think I think that precisely because war can lead to such terrible outcomes, you have to be willing to take a stance against war itself unless it is absolutely necessary. And this certainly didn't meet that test.

I think that is a place to end. As our final question, what are a few books you'd recommend to the audience?

Yeah, so a few things. I mean, on this last question, From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra is a really excellent intellectual history of for lack of a better way of putting it, people, Global South, or people in decolonized spaces in the 20th century coming up with alternatives to Western hegemony. Then I personally, as someone who's been trying to make sense of what it's like to live in a collapsing liberal order, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, I found myself reading twice since Trump's election, but it's just haunting and beautiful contemporaneous Stefan Zweig was a great Austrian writer writing this, writing in the midst of World War II, his kind of life story. But it's really about the collapse of the liberal order in Europe. And then lastly, a book I read very recently, this last few days, is called Travelers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd. And what she did is she found letters, journals, other contemporaneous accounts of of basically British and Americans visiting Nazi Germany. And, and so what were their impressions? Um, did they see— and, you know, spoiler alert, way too many of them did not see how bad this was going to be or were sympathetic. And all those things, I think, of course, are unfortunately relevant to today. Ben Rhodes, thank you very much. Thanks, Ezra.