← Ask Haviv Anything
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Khabiv Anything. Today we're going to be talking about the Iran deal. We are recording on June 16, Tuesday. I'll repeat that a couple of times as we talk to make sure that people know that we don't know much. The administration has not yet released the details, but I have here Matthew Continetti, one of the people I have learned the most from about the American administration, American politics. He comes very much from the conservative side. The American Enterprise Institute also knows a great deal about American foreign policy toward the Middle east and we're going to try and suss out the political dimension within the United States. We're also going to try to talk about and figure something out maybe about the content of the deal, the US Israel relationship writ large, what this war means for American domestic policy and preparation for future wars, and America standing in the globe and building out the American led world order, restoring it, which is something that the Trump administration has been talking about over the past two years. A lot to discuss, far more than we're going to get to. Very glad that he's here so we can so we can talk about it. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that this week's episode is sponsored by Cyril Hazan from Woodmere, New York, who asked to dedicate the episode to the memory of my dad raised in the dark shadow of Babing Yad amid post Second World War rampant antisemitism. He still taught me open mindedness, inclusivity and pride of being Jewish, warts and all. Thank you for upholding these values on your podcast. Thank you so much to Cyril for that dedication. I'd love to also invite everyone here to join our Patreon subscribe to our substack if you want to ask the questions that guide the topics we talk about, that's where we do that. You also get to enjoy monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com askhavenything or khavivgur substack.com Matthew Continetti is here with me. Matthew is the Director of Domestic Policy Studies and the inaugural Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute. He's also a columnist for the Wall Street Journal's Free Expression Newsletter. He's been published in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Free Press, National Review, among many other outlets. And Matthew is the author of three books, including most recently the the Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. Matt, how are You.
- [02:44]
B
I'm doing well, Havi, thanks for having me.
- [02:47]
A
Thank you so much for coming on. We're recording on Tuesday, June 16, and I want to dive right into the Iran deal. No deal. The deal to produce a deal. Trump hasn't just gone all in on this cease. He's now openly mocking Netanyahu. He's talking about how, look, the Israelis don't seem to be able to break Hezbollah. Maybe we just bring in. Right. Ten seconds after saying, after deciding he's not going to be able to break the Iranian siege on Hormuz, he then says he mocks the Israelis for not being able to break Hezbollah. Maybe we should bring in Ashara of Syria. It's a dramatic pivot in tone in the people leading policy in the White House to a completely different direction. And he's already so invested in it, it seems that there's no coming back from this. What do you make of this ceasefire? Did I. Did I capture that sense of abruptness and the sense of the depth of the pivot as you see it?
- [03:41]
B
Well, I first say that when we're talking about Trump, it's very wise to avoid categorical judgments. So the idea that we're not going back from the current tensions between the United States and Israel, and specifically Trump and Netanyahu, I think is overstated. We can always go back because this is Donald Trump and unpredictability is his calling card. On the larger question of this deal or memorandum of understanding, I have to say I'm more nonplussed than I think a lot of hawks are. And about it for a couple reasons. One of. One of which you kind of hinted at, which is it's not clear it is a deal for anything. We haven't seen it as you and I speak today, we're in the midst of a narrative war. We know that one thing that has survived Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring lion is the Iranian propaganda machine and echo chamber, because it's going full blast trying to spin whatever has been agreed to as an Iranian triumph, which I just am very skeptical of. What it seems to me that has been agreed to is an arrangement by which America ends its naval blockade of Iranian ports in exchange for Iran opening up the Strait of Hormuz, and then at the 60 days period to negotiate a larger settlement. But, of course, we've been negotiating a larger settlement over nuclear matters for years with Iran. Nothing happens. So what I think was the bottom line in the best case is that we see the Strait of Hormuz open, oil fall. It already is markets respond positively. And then we continue with the phony ceasefire that has basically been in place since April 8th. This is not a resolution to the crisis. It's not a clear outcome for either party. But I think it characterizes the Trump policy in the Middle East. It strikes me as very similar to the arrangement that secured the release of the hostages. And you had a ceasefire in Gaza, the hostages were released, and then you had this promise for further negotiations and Hamas's demilitarization. Of course, Hamas is not demilitarized. It still Governs, what, about 40%, I think, of the Strip, you know better than I. And we live in this kind of limbic state where the west and the forces of civilization have made some gains, but then the adversaries of. Of everything good are still in power. And just one. Two more comments. The first is, I think a hostage negotiation is the way to think about what's happening in the Persian Gulf. The Iranians took the Strait of Hormuz hostage and it created economic damage, which then kind of transmuted into political consequences, further political consequences for this president. And Trump needed to figure out how to open up the strait. I would have preferred that he used a military solution, but he clearly did not have the will to do it. And even though we had this shadow Project Freedom going on for about two months where some ships were getting out, it wasn't enough. So Trump's short term goal, and he tends to act in the short term, not the long term, his short term goal was to open up the strait, to release the hostage, so to speak. And in order to do that, he did what many American presidents have done. He paid the Islamic Republic money for hostages. In this case, the economic benefits of allowing the free passage of Iranian oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the end of the blockade. The other and most disturbing aspect of the deal is the linkage between Israel's campaign against Hezbollah and the fate of the Strait of Hormuz. And this is the part of the deal, or the memorandum or whatever you want to call it that bothers me the most. Iran. Trump has accepted the Iranian narrative that somehow the fight over the strait is connected to Israel's fight against Hezbollah in Lebanon, when in fact, as you know, Hezbollah is a non state actor. Of course it's an Iranian proxy. America's not party to the fight between Israel and Hezbollah. It's Israel's doing what it does, which is defend its right to exist. And I'm most disturbed by Trump's internalization of the Iranian narrative on this topic. That's that's what I think bothers me the most. And then, and finally, why am I kind of non plussed, whereas so many of my friends are very alarmed. I think what's happening is because of these Iranian narratives are coming out. The Iranian propaganda machine is saying that they have achieved everything that is promised to them in the deal if the Iranians agree to give up the nuclear program. So what they're doing is claiming upfront the benefits that are promised at the end of the 60 day period if there's an actual final nuclear deal. But we all know there won't be a final nuclear deal because the Islamic Republic will never give up its nuclear program. The only way to get rid of the nuclear program is through force, which is what happened in the Night Hammer and Epic Fury. And so that's why I think that at the end of this period we'll be somewhere where we were before in terms of this ongoing clash with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
- [10:15]
A
I think that's the key point. We know so little. It's not so much that I'm, I share with you the less, you know, doom and gloom kind of understanding of what's happening, but it's a little bit schizophrenic in me. In other words, sometimes when I think about the deal and I read what's going on and what's being said, especially by the Vice President, I'm horrified that this is about as bad a buckling of America as possible. If you can't force the Houthis to stop shuttering the Baba Mandam Straits and you can't force Iran to stop blockading oil shipments out of Hormuz. The Pax Americana is dead if you don't have the willingness and the ability to enforce open shipping in these places. Right. And by the way, it's not just the United States, our Gulf allies, you know, America's and Israel's, they were not willing to engage Iran in serious combat operations, even under the umbrella of Israeli and American military operations. And so there's a kind of quiet and an inability to act and an unwillingness to initiate. And that means that whoever's willing to suffer more, whoever's willing to inflict more damage, is going to win this. And then, you know, I have this pension for the last couple of months of thinking about China. I wrote a piece that went a little bit viral on China and I got a lot, a lot of mockery. What do you really think this is about China? Come on, what are you, an idiot? And the simple answer is where is the willingness to be, to take that kind of initiative against Iran? I think that comes from the broader American sense of rebuilding an American led world order, which, yes, is about China, but no, actually the war was also about Iran. Emphatically for the United States. It's all the things all at once because clever people are running big, big institutions. And, and when you look at it from the Chinese perspective, you realize that Iran's mukala or Iran's, you know, martyrdom ethos, resistance ethos, will withstand even the American Israeli bombardment simply because they're willing to suffer. They never have to build anything in Iran. They're not a building kind of regime, kind of, of, of government. All they have to do is suffer, burn everything around them to the ground until the other side, which is responsive to its democratic constituencies, et cetera, until the other side buckles. Look at it from the perspective of a Chinese led counter American world order and you begin to understand, you begin to sort of suss out a Chinese relationship with Islam. China props up these resistance actors that push back against America, while internally in China, with the treatment of the Uyghurs, China will engage in mass social engineering to make sure that any kind of Islamic politics within China never, ever has a chance to coalesce. And so you begin to, you know, so I walk down these pathways in my head and I think, this is a disaster. This is an American disaster. In American terms, this is everything Trump accomplished in Venezuela and, you know, the pressure on Cuba and all this concept of building out American power after decades of American administrations not really believing anymore in American power. And now there's going to be competition for rare earth metals, there's going to be competition in energy markets. And America's surrendering this, like, easily, right? Automatically, like an enemy that should not be able to fight America to a draw in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump didn't even give Operation Project Freedom a chance, did he? Am I overstating it? That's the scenario that's really worth.
- [13:48]
B
I think that's the bleak scenario. I don't know whether that's the scenario that's going to take place. There's a lot to unpack here. The first thing to be said is Donald Trump is the first American president since the Islamic Revolution to unleash the full force of the United States military against the revolutionary regime. And we cannot ignore the military gains that were made. Win cooperation with Israel as part of Operation Roaring lion and Operation Epic Fury, the demolition of the Iranian leadership, the end of the Iranian navy, the Destruction of the missile production facilities, the destruction of the missile launchers, the destruction of the defense industrial base, the setbacks to the Iranian nuclear program in the past two years.
- [14:51]
A
I want to highlight this. I started with. Just because I want you to speak to this. Schizophrenia. I started by saying schizophrenia. Then I look at. I have a list here. I just made a list of the things that we know with fairly good certainty were destroyed. And they are the Isfahan uranium conversion facility. I mean, just piece after piece after piece of really fundamental things. Some of the steel foundries that are required to make more centrifuges. Appointment by Richard Goldberg. Even if Trump gives Iran exactly what the JCPOA gave Iran, it can't actually do most of the things anymore like, you know, centrifuge production at that scale. So sometimes I, so I really do swing between. This is incredibly bleak. American power has been undermined tremendously because they actually went for it and still couldn't topple the Iranians. And this is actually incredibly positive. We pocket these wins and we move forward.
- [15:44]
B
I think.
- [15:45]
A
Where do you stand?
- [15:45]
B
I. Well, I, I think we pocket the wins and we move forward. And in the Middle east, there is never any clear resolution. Just a historic example. After the Marine barracks bombings by Hezbollah, the Reagan administration was shocked, disturbed. Of course, that was also a down point in a low point in Israel, American relations. What happened? Well, Reagan invaded Grenada not long after, shortly after the barracks bombing and the withdrawal of troops, American troops from Lebanon. And the whole narrative changed and American power, which seemed to be on the wane, was maximalized again, maximized again. So I think there's a lot that's indetermined here and we have to just go in with the sense that there's not going to be an easy answer with Iran. We talked about the gains of Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion. Those gains were made after the Iranian economy was already in a tailspin. And I don't see how the Iranian economy, even with the benefit of new oil revenue, if the blockade is lifted and traffic resumes to the pre war flow, is going to recover overnight. They were talking, as you know, about evacuating Tehran due to water shortages last year. This is a regime in deep, deep trouble. So while I would have preferred that we completed the military task, the estimate was that there were two weeks left of targeting before Trump imposed the ceasefire on April 8. And while I would have preferred that we executed a Project Freedom that would have deprived Iran of the Strait of Hormuz, that would have rescued the hostage, so to speak, rather than engaged in a financial transaction, as Trump put it, for its freedom. I think we do have to look at the political context and the strategic context in which Trump decided that he had to go down this route of diplomacy. Now, America is, of course, different than Israel. We have a different political context here. The war was unpopular from the start, and the increase in gas prices, about 50% increase, was a huge shock to the system and empowered all of the opponents of the war, which were in the media, which the Democratic Party, independent voters, Operation Epic Fury, came to them as a shock and they didn't like it. In addition to the gas price issue and the economic problems facing the president, problems that were compounding his base problem, which is that despite promising that prices would fall if he were elected, inflation has continued. And indeed, because of the energy shock, higher prices were eating up all the wage gains that voters had been making. As a president, you never want to be in that position. And Trump's approval was falling. But it wasn't just politics. There was also the case that the Gulf allies, as you mentioned, were petrified. They did not believe that they could defend themselves against Iranian retaliation. And one reason I believe they felt that way is the munition shortage. Not necessarily the. An overall munition shortage, but specifically constraints on our supply of interceptors as well as some of the high tech weapons platforms. So for these reasons, I felt I can understand why Trump went down this path, even though it's the path that is murky and then disappointing. You know, I would also say that what I can explain is the turn against Israel. And there I think that Trump has been listening to the deal makers on his team, to the figures like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and to Vice President Vance, who have been at the head of these negotiations, who have probably been telling the president, look, if you want this strait to open, we need to restrain Israel. And the way to restrain Israel is to stop the attacks on Beirut. Trump's envoy to the region, Tom Barrack, has also been pushing this line. And Trump's adoption of that line, I think, is, is more unsettling to me than, than the possible repercussions of this. You know, open the straight for some economic benefit, simply because we know that when there is daylight between the United States and Israel, adversaries pay attention and anti Semites pay attention, and they exploit that daylight. And that, I think, must be opposed at every turn.
- [21:46]
A
So that. Okay, so that's why you placed, at the very beginning, linkage between the Lebanon arena and the Hormuz deal as central because that's actually about, about the alliance with Israel. Netanyahu is certainly suffering in the polls from, from this moment. The, the. I'm gonna, I'm gonna dig a little deeper into these domestic politics. We hear from J.D. vance that World War II ended in negotiations for some reason and we heard from him that there's a $300 billion fund of some kind for reconstruction. It's not at all clear what he was talking about. Some of it has been just errors or vague, strange, you know, we got to talk to actual Iranians. He says in an interview with I think Jake Tapper. The cool thing is, you know, stuff like that where it's just, he doesn't project a seriousness and an understanding of what's happening. And then when, when you. There was a call with the administration to many reporters who then put out what they heard on the call on, on X and going realize these people don't, don't really know that much about the history of US Iran relations about direct negotiations between the US And Iran, for example, over the jcpoa. They claim there hasn't been direct negotiations between the US and Iran. It's the first time we're meeting each other, you know, and it's simply these things are not correct. And so you, you see that and you start to worry. But then you also, when you listen to Vance's arguments, not, not nitpick these technical things, which I don't think are unimportant, but nevertheless they weren't his point, his point was that Iran will have everything it wants and we'll have normal happy relations. And we don't care about the crazy resistance of theologies, we don't care generally about the ideologies of regimes. But it has to give up the nuclear program. That front loading of the nuclear program question that was in Vance's comments and you mentioned it here and that was emphatically publicly part of the deal. I don't believe it. I don't believe that when they come to negotiate this American administration, the part of it, the pieces of the Vance camp, if they really want some deal, it's not going to be the whole deal. It's going to be something leading up to some kind of a slightly deeper deal than what is basically a 60 day ceasefire, which is what the MoU is. I don't believe that they will literally stand their ground, be willing to walk away. They have projected to the Iranians they can't walk away and so can this administration. Can that camp seriously negotiate with the Iranians anything of value, any deal which isn't just unlocking everything for the Iranians. And the Iranians, of course, won't give up their nuclear program. That's not a thing, as the kids say.
- [24:34]
B
So Trump is Harry Houdini. No one thought he would be elected president in 2016. He was. He spent four years as president getting out of one jam after another while trying to pursue certain objectives, such as sealing the southern border, imposing a trade policy with China. Donald Trump gets out of these fixes. He gets himself into a box, then he finds the way out of it. This is what Americans have been living with for over a decade now. He got himself into the box of the Strait of Hormuz. This agreement is the way out of it. Then he'll find himself in another box. He'll try to get out of that somehow. He always escapes. My point is Donald Trump has walked away from these negotiations before. Donald Trump walked away once engaged in Operation Midnight Hammer. Then there were more negotiations. He walked away from those. We have Operation Epic Fury now. We're going to have another round of negotiations. Now. Do I think that Trump is going to use military force anytime soon? No. However, what I do expect is that at the end of the day, 60 day period, there will be an extension of the 60 day period and we will continue to live in this twilight, just as Israel has been living in this twilight with Hamas, and it will be indefinite. Trump wants to keep the ball rolling. People talk about him as the four dimensional chess player. I don't think that's the way to put it. I think he's a juggler, but he's juggling grenades. And it is true that every so often he drops one and a lot of damage is caused, but he has a remarkable ability to keep them up in the air. I think the fundamental problem here is that Trump went to war in Trump style, in what he calls modern presidential style, not the style to which Americans are accustomed. What do I mean? You look at our previous interventions in the Gulf in particular, but also in the Balkans. Presidents operate step by step. They begin making the public case for war. Not just social media posts, but set piece speeches, talking points on interviews months in advance. While they're doing that, they are persuading the Congress, members of their own party, maybe even some hawks on the in the other party for the action. And as they're taking that second step, they're also building an international coalition. Well, Trump doesn't like persuasion. He likes demonstration. He doesn't ask for. He doesn't ask for Permission, you know, he'll, he'll just go ahead and do something and then see what the consequences are. And so instead of following that three step process, which is what both Bushes used in the Iraq war and of course Trump in the Iraq wars, Trump doesn't want to be like the Bushes. What does he do? Well, Midnight Hammer, he just sent in our B2 bombers and the bunker busters and that was that. In absolute resolve, which was the operation to capture Maduro, Americans woke up one morning and Maduro was in a prison cell in Brooklyn. Epic fury. There was more advance notice, but the people paying attention were people like you and me, not most Americans. In fact, I was struck pretty early on in the war in conversations with people as I traveled around the country who said that it was kind of a surprise to them that this was happening precisely because they weren't paying attention to Donald Trump's truth social posts. They weren't paying attention to the slow buildup of our forces in the Gulf as those carrier groups began entering the region. I was paying attention. I was expecting something to happen. You don't put two aircraft carrier groups outside a country and think that they're just there for tourist reasons, right, to see the sights. But Americans I don't think were prepared. And what you have seen in the aftermath, even as epic fury was preceding the consequences of these choices Trump made, at the outset, the political support wasn't there, mainly because Trump hadn't made the case. When American presidents make the case for force, more often than not the public supports them. Trump didn't really make the case. He just acted. The allies weren't there. That of course, we saw headlines and headlines. I think the allies acted in different ways rather than just kind of apathy or non involvement or resentment over earlier fights this year about Greenland, say, and NATO. Then there were the more kind of, you might even say, axis of resistance oriented states like Spain, which was, you know, actively trying to disrupt America's efforts. In any case, the allies weren't there either. And slowly then to the Congress, the elected officials, they began moving decisively against the conflict. And so we're living in, I think, the aftermath of these poor choices by Trump. As a result, the figures within the Trump coalition and inside the administration who are against intervention for any reason, they became activated and they were able to begin making their case to the president. And I believe they persuaded him that the way out of this current box is through a negotiation and through this tit for tat arrangement on the Strait of Hormuz, where I'M looking at now is do they remain in the president's favor? We're already seeing reports. Again, these are the news junkies that are paying attention to this, but we're already seeing reports that there was a divide in the administration pitting Vice President Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff against figures like Defense Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Mark Rubio, and CI Director John Ratcliffe. So Trump can alternate between these two camps. Right now, he's with the Vance camp, but I think he's facing a lot of blowback now from hawkish members of the Republican Party. And that could mean that in a few months, he drifts back toward the skeptics of negotiations with Iran inside his administration. Again, I don't think that will mean that we're going to be moving to kinetic action before the midterm elections in the United States. But it, it also means that Trump is the backstop, I believe, against any really, really bad nuclear deal.
- [31:58]
A
So that point about those camps, I want to, I want to drill into that a little bit. We have heard repeatedly and often that there's the Rubio camp, the Hawkish camp, and that there is the J.D. vance camp. This is stuff that J.D. vance's people love to tell us, is how the administration has sorted itself out. But then you suddenly find the Jared Kushner, you know, Jared Kushner is on the. In the Vance camp, when you would think Jared Kushner is very pro Israel, very invested in Israel, would be in another camp. And the very fact that Donald Trump can go down the allied with Israel in bombing Iran, as you say, in a way we haven't seen ever in 47 years of this Iranian regime, 48 years, we've never seen this willingness to go kinetic, to attack this regime, to find its weaknesses, to take out the Supreme Leader just bluntly, in the light of day, there is a closeness to Israel with Trump that is unrivaled in the past and a willingness to fight with Israel in deep integration of the two militaries that we haven't seen in the past. And on a dime, he pivots over to the Vance camp on a dime, on a dime. And then mocking Netanyahu and then, you know, talking about Israel having to pull back in Lebanon. Is it possible that that stark division into camps is a dichotomy? We should be questioning that. It's a more complex and sophisticated conversation. There are now rumors that Ratcliffe might be out. There are rumors that Hegseth might Be out again. Maybe these are rumors being put out by the J.D. vance camp. And it's literally just everybody maneuvering. What was that old saying by Churchill about the Soviet Union? That trying to understand the politics of the Soviet Union is like watching dogs fight under a carpet. The only way you know who's winning is by which bodies are thrown out, Right? We don't know who's winning. We don't even know if these are camps. Talk about that. Am I the only one confused by Trump's ability to pivot that way, by how people switch camps so quickly and easily?
- [33:58]
B
And I don't think anyone should be confused by Trump turning from one set of advisors to another. He doesn't operate by ideology. He doesn't have many fixed principles. He's trying to figure out how to maximize his short term advantage. Right. While moving in the direction of what he defines as success. And I think to something we were talking about earlier, he defines success as building American leverage back up against China. And to the degree that the American war machine, in combination with our Israeli partners pummeled the Iranian war machine, that actually is not something that China I think is very happy about. All of that is a digression. First, the rumors you have to reject immediately. I mean, that. Who knows? Who knows? I think that Churchill quote is just right. You can't make any judgments until something actually happens. What I would say is Vance has a moment. Like many vice presidents, he is angling. Like every vice president, he is angling to succeed his boss. Vance believes in a different path for the Republican Party than even the path that Donald Trump has traveled. His Republican Party is more government, it's more isolationist than Donald Trump. He also has fig. He also understands that he needs to win Both the followers of his vision, they're not a significant number of actual Republicans, but they are very, they're overrepresented in conservative media and they do have, I think, a following among younger Republicans, even though young people are not a very important part of the Republican coalition.
- [36:23]
A
Can you name names just so we know who you're talking about?
- [36:26]
B
Well, I'm thinking the media folks. The most famous Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson, yes, exactly. That's. I mean, J.D. vance is Tucker Carlson's friend. J.D. vance has never disowned Tucker Carlson. We learned from the New York Times recently that in the midst of the controversy over the Epstein files in the summer of 2025, J.D. vance suggested to the White House that they have an interview with Tucker Carlson, who was at that point saying Donald Trump was Demonic and opposing every policy he had. Right. So that's, that's the most famous is Tucker Carlson. But there are also figures such as Steve Bannon, you know, the, the kind of, I don't, I want to say the Fuentes groiper people, because Vance explicitly rejects them, so he's not trying to reach out to them. But there's a group of podcasters who are kind of one click over toward respectability than the Fuentes of the world. And Vance wants their support. Megyn Kelly. Right. I mean, Megan Kelly is with, she's closer to Tucker Carlson, the Glenn Greenwalds, all those folks. That's kind of what Vance is trying to keep together. The Sorab Amari. Right. The, the editor of Unherd, the digital magazine. He, he remains close to, to the Vance camp. So he wants to keep those people together with Trump and the Trump Republicans. Now, Trump was able to do that. That's what Trump accomplished. But there has been a fraying of the coalition. No one will deny that. Over foreign policy, yes, for sure. But also because of the economic anxieties that are still present in the United States and the kind of, the inability of the Trump economic policy to get Americans out of the hole they've been living in thanks to inflation, at least as up to this point. So Vance is trying to negotiate these two parties. He wants to keep this coalition together. And that means he'll make comments like he has recently saying that, you know, while we're the United States, as allies with Israel, we have to be aware that sometimes our interests diverge and include. And then he brings up the nuclear issue, which, of course, is the place where Americans coincide. Yeah, right.
- [39:05]
A
They don't diverge at all. We both have.
- [39:07]
B
Both have an interest in denying Iran a nuclear bomb. So the problem with vice presidents, though, is that even as they're auditioning from the job for the job, they are frequently saddled with unwinnable portfolios. And this is a real moment for J.D. vance. Is he going to be able to not only sign this memorandum of understanding later this week and open up the Strait of Hormuz, but will these negotiations end in the Iranians giving up their nuclear program? What might seem like a very ascendant Vance could turn out to be someone who is saddled with a diplomatic process that looks like a failure or has gone nowhere. So this is, again, what can the. The difficulty of analyzing the Trump administration is that everything is always in motion and the objects in the sky rarely land at a place where you can make definitive conclusions. Just on the 300 billion point, I have a theory about where that comes from. That's the same thing that they, the Trump folks were presenting to Kim Jong Un in the first term, saying, look, Kim, if you give up your nuclear program, we're going to have this huge billion dollar and multi billion dollar investment in North Korea. Remember, Trump had a presentation, he showed Kim that was, showed all the beautiful resorts they were going to build on the North Korean coastline. It's the same thing. The Palestinian deal in the first term. Right. That was the whole vision was, oh,
- [41:03]
A
who among us wouldn't say yes to a resort?
- [41:06]
B
Yeah, I'd love a resort, but that's just kind of the bargaining. So, yes, on Kushner, of course, Kushner is a supporter of Israel, but he's a deal maker and sees himself as a peacemaker. So they go into these situations and they kind of deal with the interlocutor as though they're another real estate portfolio manager. And that, of course, is the mistake.
- [41:39]
A
Do they grasp what this regime believes and how much it has already invested in that belief, how much it has sacrificed, how much it exists in this space of what's it called, sunk costs fallacy, which is you've, you've spent so much going in the wrong direction or in the damaging direction that by sheer, just by sheer dint of having invested that much, lost that much, you, you struggled. You will not be able to turn around. You will not be able to admit the scale of the loss that is required in admitting that's the wrong direction. And so people who go too far and put too much into one direction tend to have a very hard time changing, in other words, because it's more damaging and more. That's roughly where the Iranian regime is at now. Now, we heard from Trump sentences like, or maybe this was Vance, I'm not sure, but one of them said in an interview, I think it was Trump, where he said in an interview, you know, I don't believe in regime change. I mean, we kind of got regime change already. These are reasonable people that we're talking to. That's not as crazy as it sounds, because it appears that we now have a real IRGC takeover, that Mujtaba Khamenei is not actually in control in any way. And actually it's not an IRGC working for a supreme leader. There isn't functionally a supreme leader. It really is just a military dictatorship. Maybe, maybe it's not unimaginable. The IRGC is both this radical ideological military and also Utterly, foundationally corrupt and owns 50% of the GDP of Iran, massive industries, and survives and grows its strength domestically through this massive crony capitalism kind of exploitation of the entire economy. So they're so corrupt that maybe they're reasonable. Maybe there's somewhere where you can have that negotiation. I'm not sure you could make that case. I haven't heard anyone in the American administration who knows enough to make that case. I don't know that that's what they're arguing, and I don't think they understand that they're capable, these people, of being both utterly corrupt and also genuinely believing the mass martyrdom ethos of the Mukawa Ma. I keep trying to use the word in English so people start to learn it, but this is that foundational ethos that means they will sacrifice for all time. They will not just die themselves, they actually are willing to die. These deeply corrupt people are still willing to die on the altar of the great redemption of Islam. They will kill their own people en masse on the altar of this. Do they grasp that they're still dealing with this kind of ideological world, or are they genuinely convinced they're just a bunch of deal makers and we're all going to make a deal and it'll all be okay?
- [44:23]
B
I think there are figures within the Trump administration who understand the ideological nature of the Islamic Republic, the fanaticism that motivates it. What about around Vance, as I was about to say? Oh, around Vance, I think the Vance attitude, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but if I had to describe it, it would be, sure, they're crazy. That's why we shouldn't have anything to do with the region. Right. The Trump, Kushner, Wyckoff attitude, and most specifically Trump here, is ideology is bunk. No one really believes anything. Tell me what your interests are and I'll see if I can get a deal. And I'm going to push for the best deal I can. And I'll bluster and bully. I'll walk away. I'll dangle these carrots before you, and we'll see what we can get. And if we don't get anything, fine, I'll try again. That's how Donald Trump operates. So his inability to understand that people are motivated by ideology is, in my view, one of his greatest vulnerabilities as a leader. Because not only does it mean that he marches into these meetings with Putin and with Xi Jinping thinking, yeah, we're, both of us are tough guys, strong men, let's sit Down. Let's hash it out. We can figure this out. We're the two CEOs, when in fact, Putin, as we know, is motivated by this Slavophilic Pan Russian ideology. And Xi Jinping is a Marxist Leninist Maoist who is bent on preserving the party and revising the rules of the world in a way that favors the People's Republic in the same way that Vahidi, the head of the irjc, is. He's a. He's a jihadist. That's what he is and that's what he will be. So Trump doesn't quite get that. And it often. And it's the same thing with Kim Jong Un. He goes in there promising hotels. Kim Jong Un is this Stalinist, you know, Nepo baby, who leads this bizarre hermit kingdom. He doesn't care about hotels. Right. So that's kind of where the Trump approach hits roadblocks. But the other side of it is Trump is happy to walk away. Right. If he doesn't think he's getting what he wants. And he is not averse to the use of force, as we've learned throughout this term and the term prior. What Trump thought would happen, I surmise, is that by agreeing to the decapitation strike at the outset of Operation Epic Fury, there wouldn't be regime collapse. There would be a new leader who would then submit to what Trump prefers, which is regime coercion, not regime change. That didn't happen.
- [47:50]
A
Venezuela. Venezuela.
- [47:51]
B
Venezuela is the key.
- [47:53]
A
That would have been his ideal.
- [47:55]
B
And of course, Epic Fury happened right on the heels of Venezuela. Right. And Trump even said, at some point, he says so much, it's hard to keep track, but at some point he said, well, we actually took out the person that we thought we could count on. I shouldn't laugh.
- [48:15]
A
Was that Larry? Johnny? I think he said that he may have actually even. Yeah, I'm being freaked. Yeah. So now you end up with.
- [48:22]
B
Yeah, so now you end up with this, you know, oh, okay, now what are we going to do? And they pressed on with the strikes. But when it got to the point that the economic hit was rising and the Gulf states were panicking, Trump turns to his friend, the Field Marshal of Pakistan, and says, maybe you're right, let's have this ceasefire. Because he wasn't going to escalate up any further. He wasn't going to hit the electrical generation and the desalinization because Iran had telegraphed that they would then hit the Gulf east. Electrical power and desalinization, and that that would cause huge ripple effects for the global economy. And then to a point you made earlier, Haviv, he wasn't going to deploy ground forces in significant numbers. We had that incredible rescue effort to rescue the downed pilots where ground troops were in Iran. And it was amazing. But I don't. I. We. Well, I know he was not. He could not commit to using ground forces to destroy the missile and drone teams on the coast and to take Kharg Island. And because of that, we are where we are.
- [49:44]
A
I have two questions to finish up. The first one is we learned a tremendous lesson about the future of war. The future of war the Ukrainians already know, others already know. Israel's now experiencing it in South Lebanon with Hezbollah. The future of war is missiles and drones. The Gulf states went through two years of American interceptor production capacity in about two weeks, and Israel used up a very large amount of the rest. And Israel has its own large stockpiles which it burned through fairly quickly. We need much, much cheaper interceptors. We also need to have a missile force and a drone force that can take on that capability that all of our enemies have. The Ukrainians know a lot about stopping these drones. The Israelis are starting to learn in some ways, nobody on earth makes as many or as high quality interceptors as the United States. It is technologically far we learned this. We learned that there's nothing that Iran can buy from China that can match American air power, American cyber, American electronic warfare in the battlefield, and also missile defense. But we also know that we're not producing enough interceptors. Not the Israelis, not the Americans. And America really is the world's producer of interceptors by two orders of magnitude. There needs to be a hundred times the scale, and which means it needs to be 15 times cheaper at least, if not 150 times cheaper. Do you think this administration. And just to explain the reason I'm going into this weird technical question is because this is fundamental. This is like discovering air war in World War II. I mean, this is what's going to decide. D Day would not have been possible if the Luftwaffe was still in existence by 1944. This is what's going to decide the next war. Do you think that's something that the Americans see and understand? Israel's already given the order to build out indigenous production capacities, et cetera. But the Israeli industrial base is a fly next to the elephant of the American industrial base. So do you think the Americans understand that they're going to need vast, massive production and investment in offensive and defensive missiles and interceptors and Drones and that whole system. I know there are programs. My question is, do the Americans grasp that what they need is not to move from. I think the latest patriots, they were making 90. And now the Pentagon gave an order a year. And now the Pentagon gave an order to make 400. Do they understand that they need 5,000 a year capability in the United States?
- [52:18]
B
I mean, I think Pete Hegseth does. I think there are figures in this administration who do. I think Trump probably understands, grasps the needs.
- [52:31]
A
If there was a bottomless well of interceptors, Hormuz would have gone differently. Arguably, yes.
- [52:35]
B
I mean, I want to talk a
- [52:36]
A
little bit about that too, but being kind of interceptor.
- [52:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, but, but the question here in America, as always, is the question always, not just in America, is will and capacity. So start with capacity. Our defense industrial base is not configured to produce the amount of interceptors and drones that America needs to fight these new wars. The Trump defense budgets move in that direction. Not as rapidly as we need, but they do move in that direction. However, then we get to will and I, again, if you ask what disturbed me, we talked about linkage between Lebanon and the strait. The other thing that disturbs me right now is the lack of will on Capitol Hill to pass Donald Trump's $1.5 trillion defense request. And Capitol Hill Congress in the United States is always resistant to changes in military procurement and to revolutions in military affairs. And that includes some Republican appropriators, by
- [53:50]
A
the way, because it's too much money.
- [53:52]
B
Well, because you just mentioned sunk costs. Because these programs have political constituencies. And if you have a factory that's building that very expensive patriot in your district, you don't want to give it up so that some other congressman can represent a district that is, you know, featuring these building the. We just saw it with the unmanned surface vehicle that rescued the Apache pilots recently. Right. So that's the type of nuts and bolts, log rolling and pork barrel politics we have in the United States Congress. But your question is, I think the fundamental question arising from this conflict. Because what Epic Fury showed, it wasn't a revelation. It was an underscoring of what we have seen since 2022 and the Russo Ukraine war. And that is wars in the 21st century are going to be transformed. Humans matter less. These big platforms matter less. And the advantage goes to the defender because the new military technologies are based on the slow, the formulation anti excess access area denial. And what you are going to have are situations like we see in Ukraine where the kill zone stretches for kilometers in either direction of the line of control. You just. Humans or tanks can't operate there because the drones will find them, the robots will find them. We saw it in the Red Sea with the Houthis, where the Houthis were firing very expensive drones at. Sorry, very inexpensive drones at very expensive American surface vessels. I will say, however, as a digression, the Houthis did not become involved in this conflict. And I think the one reason for that is Operation Rough Rider, which was the. America's operation against the Houthis last year, in conjunction with Israeli operations against the Houthis, caused them quite a bit of damage.
- [56:18]
A
It was more successful than I implied.
- [56:20]
B
And, you know, and, and that's. And that. I think that will. We have to think about that when we look at what has happened in Iran too, because again, the echo chamber is so powerful that I think quite a bit of damage has been done to Iran, just as quite a bit of damage was done to the Houthis. Nonetheless, we saw it with the Houthis. We see it now, where the drone and missile teams can deny the Americans access to the strata Hormuz and can bottle up about a fifth of the global energy supply. And now we're seeing it in Lebanon as well, with the adoption of the fiber optic drones and Israel's efforts to disarm Hezbollah, to push north as far as they can to create a buffer zone. This is the. This is the face of war now. And every state, nation, state needs to adjust and adapt. And here, yes, America has fantastic resources and is leading on the interceptors, but Israel has technology. And of course, on the drone side, Ukraine is the arsenal of freedom. And so here again, the Trump administration, I believe, is missing an opportunity to work with the Ukrainians in order to figure out how to. We might see what they've done and adapt it to our purposes around the
- [57:50]
A
world at an order of magnitude lower cost, which is maybe makes it politically easier.
- [57:55]
B
Yeah.
- [57:55]
A
Final question. The anti Israel Twitter ecosystem is a Twitter over the last two days in delight at what appears to be and what many Israelis. You know, every Israeli Netanyahu, Stan, who's bitterly angry that Trump prevented Netanyahu from that final launch of the air force a couple days ago, because that would have solved everything. And I happen to think Israel should have carried out that particular strike. But I'm like you, I don't come to this with some kind of apocalyptic sense that everything has been lost and destroyed, but there are Israelis who do. And translating their tweets and then sharing them has been a favorite pastime of the anti Israel crowd. But it does raise a very serious question. Do you think this is a momentary Trump sort of pivot? Israel needs to stop the Lebanon thing. We're done. We'll come back to it in the future. Why do the Israelis need everything to finish all at once? I, by the way, have argued this is a 20 year war. This is our war with Nasser. We had four major wars with Nasser before pan Arabism and Nasserism collapsed. And we didn't have to fight any more conventional wars against our Arab neighbors. And now we face a war against the particular ideology. Somebody on a panel, some anti Israel person at a university, said to me, you're fighting wars in seven countries. You have seven different enemies. You're bombing everybody. I'm like, actually we're only fighting one enemy. That enemy happens to have infiltrated and built proxies that are not part of those countries. Or they might represent populations, countries, but they don't certainly belong to the national life and politics of the country. We're fighting one enemy that's positioned itself in seven countries, and we will continue to fight that one enemy. And when that one enemy is defeated, and it could be a decade or two, then we will not have to fight any of them. The US Israel relationship is it. It's it. We know among the Democrats, it's in the toilet. We know among young Republicans, it's in a. I don't want to say freefall, but it's in a. It's a slow but steady decline, measurable in the polls. And Trump suddenly pivoting suggests that this last bastion of the US Israel alliance might be no longer for the next two years of the Trump administration, no longer a kind of operative thread that holds everything together. Are you optimistic or pessimistic on this question, both the larger question of American politics and also specifically Trump in the next couple of years?
- [60:31]
B
Well, as I've been saying, Trump's change in tone toward Israel, Netanyahu specifically, is the most concerning aspect of the recent negotiations between the United States and Iran. I don't know how long lasting it will be. I'm trying to think, why does Trump view Israel's defense in the north differently than he viewed Israel's defense in the south? I think one reason is that not only is Lebanon being forced into a conversation where it doesn't belong, a conversation over the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump thus has to or feels like he must deal with it separately, but the situation in Lebanon is not communicated to the American public or the American President in the same way that October 7th and the hostages was. And in fact, I think among Americans, there's some confusion because to Americans who even pay the slightest attention to what's happening in the Middle east and in Israel and around Israel in particular, I think many of them are like, well, hold it. Didn't Israel blow up Hezbollah with those pagers a couple years ago? Why, why is, why is Hezbollah fighting now? And why is Hezbollah seem to have this technological edge now? What's going on there? And so there's a, I think there's a, is an ignorance about what's happening in the north that allows Americans to draw distinctions where they shouldn't between the war on Hezbollah and the war against Islamism and eliminationism on those other fronts. You describe what could change the scenario. Well, the straight could be opened. Trump could get out of this box. I would say that Prime Minister Netanyahu's fate politically could also change the equation if there's a different Israeli leader that might, I think, kind of scramble some people's responses to what's happening. And then, of course, there could be, and I don't wish this for the world, but there could be a terrorist attack or a successful Hezbollah strike that reminds Trump why he is pro Israel and why, and shows that Hezbollah and Lebanon cannot be separated from the larger battle for not only Jewish sovereignty, but Western civilization. That those are, I think right now, are the elements that could change the equation that I can identify. But it's something I'm watching very carefully on the American domestic front.
- [64:10]
A
Yeah. You think the US Israel relationship is a healthy one in 20 years?
- [64:17]
B
Oh, 20 years is far too long to speculate. I think for deep reasons, America and Israel will still be allies in 20 years. I can only focus on the immediate. The left has institutionalized anti Israeli sentiment in profoundly disturbing ways. But an upshot of that is the right has taken on the defense of Israel in a way that is really remarkable and novel. And while that defense coming from the right is under attack by figures who say they're aligned with Trump, say they're conservatives, or say that they're populists or what have you, I still think that some very basic reasons that having to do with the nature of conservatism, the nature of religious belief, the, the kind of built in hawkishness, or if not hawkishness in the way we talk about it, just the reflexive willing to willingness to defend what's right that you find on, on the conservative side of the aisle in the United States. I think that will continue. Remember, we don't know how these political bets are going to go. Right now JD Vance is making a political bet not just about the path to the Republican nomination in 2028 but about the path to the White House in 2028 and there is no guarantee that his bet will pay off. He's been very lucky so far in his political life and the rule in politics is you'd rather be lucky than good. But knowing what we know about the Republican Party as an institution, the direction that Vance is going is one that will not be smooth, let me put it that way. So all we can do as Americans is fight anti Semitism, make the case for Israel as best we can and try to adapt to this new media environment which is just so hostile, not just the Jews, not just Israel, but to really everything that the United States stands for.
- [67:01]
A
Matthew Continetti, thank you so much for joining me. It was fascinating.
- [67:05]
B
Thank you. HAVIV.