← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
Bill Kristol
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to Bulwark on Sunday. Very pleased to be joined by Representative Seth Moulton from Massachusetts. We've known each other, I was thinking about this almost 20 years, Seth. That's hard for me to believe. Maybe harder even for you to believe. I don't know.
- [00:16]
Seth Moulton
It is a little bit, Bill. I don't know if you remember that we actually had dinner, we happened to have dinner the night that I got this call out of the blue from Emily Cherniak, founder of New Politics, saying you ought to run for Congress. And it was because I was having, I was really out to see your son and hang out with your son, but you happen to be in town. And so I said, hey, Bill, you're in politics. You wouldn't believe the call I got today. Someone wants me to run for Congress just because I'm a veteran. And your first question was, who are you going to run against? And I couldn't remember the name of my congressman. So I was not very involved in politics back in those days. But here we are.
- [00:54]
Bill Kristol
You had served four tours in Iraq. That's where we first met. And, and then done some stuff in business. And you ran in 2014 against an incumbent Democrat, had defeated him and then held the seat ever since. Very important. I've always thought you were the future, but now you're the president of the Democratic Party, but major role in Congress on several issues, but especially maybe because I pay more attention to it on national security policy. You've been now quite a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, served on the China Committee, the bipartisan China Committee, for the last couple of years. And you've always been actually, I think, very alarmed, but intelligently alarmed, if I can put it that way, about China. And so a lot of experience in the Middle East. So we'll get to, we'll get to the foreign policy stuff. But you've also been a staunch critic of President Trump, had very interesting conversation with secretary of defense this week, which when he testified before House on services, which you can say a word about. But. And then obviously we've had the no kings demonstrations, rallies and the military parade. You're a veteran. I don't even know where to begin. What a week, right? I mean, it's like, what is that Lenin quote that there are some, some decades, in some decades, nothing happens. And in some weeks, decades happen. You know, decades worth of news happens. I butchered a little bit something like that. So.
- [02:15]
Seth Moulton
Well, you didn't even mention a United States senator getting thrown to the ground and handcuffed by the FBI because he asked a question.
- [02:22]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, very good. I know. That was like a unbelievably big story.
- [02:25]
Seth Moulton
First.
- [02:25]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, for a day. And then, then the war began with Israel and Iran. And also, of course, terribly and tragically, a state senator assassinated Yesterday in Minnesota.
- [02:37]
Seth Moulton
First 787 went down, almost 300 people killed. That was also a news story for about six hours before it got taken over by. By other things. So it's been an extraordinary week, for sure.
- [02:50]
Bill Kristol
Say a word about no Kings and the military parade. What was your reaction to the whole. Well, to the military parade. First, since you're a veteran who's such close ties with so many people in the military now and then we can get to the other side of it, the no Kings rallies.
- [03:06]
Seth Moulton
Well, I think a lot has been said quite appropriately about how inappropriate this parade was. A North Korean style birthday parade really, because it was chosen to happen on the President's birthday, although it masqueraded as a celebr of the Army's 250th. But at the same time, it was quite a sense of relief I think many of us felt last night when the President finally spoke. And I mean, he really just droned on. He was like personifying drone technology with his laconic speech. He sounded like he was on sedatives or something. But importantly, he didn't politicize the situation. And that was really unusual for this president, especially in the past couple weeks when he had a very politicized and also wildly inappropriate speech. West Point I heard from a cadet who just said, hey, we were kind of laughing along, but it was ridiculous. And, and then of course, he had this highly politicized speech at for Bragg that really undermines the apolitical institution of our military.
- [04:09]
Bill Kristol
I mean, say a few words about those people. Sometimes I say that and I don't have the credibility. You haven't saying it. And people say, oh, come on, it's always been sort of political. And I try to say, well, sort of a little. Of course you can't. There's not a hugely bright red line. But they've tried very hard, especially in the last, I don't know, 40, 50, 60 years to keep it pretty insulated from politics. Certainly when I was in the White House, Vice President Quayle would visit bases and give speeches. We just went so far out of our way not to be partisan, political, respectful of the previous presidents if there was a reason to mention them, whether they were Democratic or Republican, respectful of members of Congress from. And senators, whatever district or state we were visiting. You know, I mean, we were capable of giving pretty political speeches then as now. You know, the Vice President Quayle was, but that was just the rule and the norm, and it was pretty much. Don't you think?
- [05:00]
Seth Moulton
Absolutely. No. I can't think of a time when another president in American history just politicized a war, a war like this or the military like this. And. And that's exactly what Trump is trying to do. He's never had any respect for what soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen, guardians do overseas, but he's always wanted to politicize the military, to use it for his own political ends here at home. He hired a Secretary of Defense who literally wrote a book on politicizing the military, and that's exactly what he was doing at Fort Bragg. It's exactly what we feared he would do in Washington, D.C. in many ways, he still did, just by having a military par. Paid for his birthday. And I'm sure it's what he'll continue to do on into the future. And it's worth saying, to your point, that I served in the height of the Iraq War, a very politically controversial war. I strongly disagreed with our President, George W. Bush. I voted against him twice. And yet I had to be very careful as a US Marine ever to say anything political. In fact, I fondly remember that during the 2004 election, my first squad leader, one of the most senior guys in my platoon, asked me the day before the election who I was voting for. So the point is, I worked assiduously, even though I definitely disagreed with Bush, to not impose that on my Marines, even though I did, in fact, encourage them to have political debates, because I said, look, you guys are gonna suffer the consequences of this election more than anyone else, so you should vote, you should get involved, you should care about it. And yet I, as their platoon commander, never tried to impose my views on them. You never saw political stickers on pickup trucks around bases. And sadly, that's very different today. It changed under Trump's first term. That's the first time I heard of military leaders actually giving political speeches, because it was sort of just made okay by the commander in chief. And I don't think that's ever happened before in American history.
- [07:10]
Bill Kristol
And don't you think, I mean, Madison Esper were able to mostly, though, hold that barrier, so to speak, that guardrail in the first term. And now, of course, Hegseth, as you say, is explicitly devoted to removing it. I mean, that's what the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the other senior military and the jags and all that was about.
- [07:26]
Seth Moulton
Right, right. Well, one of the questions I asked Hegseth during his hearing with the Armed Services Committee this past week was, why did you fire these generals? And he was completely unable to answer that question. He could not answer even how many he had fired. The first question I just said was, Mr. Secretary, how many generals and admirals have you fired? And he looked at me dumbfounded. The number is eight. You know, it's not like it's 135. Right. It was just eight. Every one of them highly politicized. And yet not only could he not justify or even explain why they were fired, he couldn't even say how many were gone. And when you think about the cumulative numbers of years of service, hundreds represented by that cream of the crop group, it's really incredible. In the top of the list was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, CQ Brown, who so impressed members of Congress on both sides of the aisle that I actually wrote a recommendation for him, completely unsolicited to the president of the United States at the time, saying, you should select this Air Force general to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Bill, you're the father of a Marine. You know how unusual it is for a United States Marine veteran to recommend an Air Force officer for a job. But that's exactly what I did because I was so impressed by him. Absolutely one of the best generals of an entire generation. And Hegseth fired him without thinking why. Because he's black.
- [09:02]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. That is the really terrible truth. And also to send a signal that, you know, they can fire whoever they want and people better get in line and implicitly that they will reward, don't you think, people who will do politicize. I mean, Brown. There was no evidence. What's amazing about the Brown things you say, he wasn't particular. We don't know what his views were on a lot of. I don't know. You. You do know, foul leaders. You talk to him so much privately in the classified settings and so forth, but I don't know what his views were on various aspects of China policy or Middle east policy or military priorities, within the branches, among the branches, and so forth. But there was never pretense that any of those was that he would be not appropriate to carry out Trump's national security policy, whatever that would be. I mean, Dick Cheney fired a couple of generals pretty early in his tenure. Secretary of Defense. I remember this, you know, in the White House then And didn't obviously anything to do with it, but heard about it and, but those were for clear issues that those generalists had raised of what Cheney believed to be, and many believed to be inappropriate behavior. He did it with regret. He praised their service. But he said, I'm sorry, we're going to have to, you know, this general has to end his tenure here. And that was, but that was. There were clear reasons is all I'm saying. With Brown, it was just to just, it was to send a signal.
- [10:18]
Seth Moulton
I guess that's right. Obama did the same thing. He fired General McChrystal. I thought at the time that was a mistake. McChrystal was later exonerated. And I think a lot of people look back on that as a mistake. And yet there was no question why he did it. I mean, he'd have no problem explaining why General McChrystal was fired over this flap in Rolling Stone about the president. So that's what's, what's really frightening. You know, sometimes people ask me, seth, you've been doing this job for a decade now. You know, how would you summarize your work? What do you focus on? On the Armed Services Committee. And if you challenge me to summarize my work in one word, it would be modernization. And I just bring this up as an example of a debate that's very much raging in the Pentagon, in the Department of Defense today between people who really want to quickly modernize our military. These are the folks who want to get rid of the big old heavy stuff and invest in drones, dress in missiles, get rid of tanks because $5 billion tanks can get killed by $5,000 drones pretty easily. Get rid of this old fashioned artillery, invest it in guided missiles. It's exactly what the Marine Corps is doing. And yet there has been a group of people opposed to that. And there's a good debate. Now that might have actually been a legitimate reason to say, hey, we should need to fire some generals. And I'll give credit where credit is due. Hagseth does seem to believe, as most young veterans do in a more quickly modernized military. But actually, CQ Brown was a champion of this. I mean, he was, he wrote an op ed with General Berger supporting what the Marine Corps was doing and leading the way for the Air Force. Those were the two services that were modernizing most quickly, most effectively. And that's the primary reason that I thought it was important for him to be elevated to chairman. So ironically, this is a general who was actually quite aligned with Secretary Hegseth's priorities. So, I mean, there's just absolutely no justification for it. And I think the reason why he was silent is because in that hearing when I asked him, is because he knows that fundamentally he fired him because he's black.
- [12:26]
Bill Kristol
What else struck you about the hearing and about Hexath's answers?
- [12:31]
Seth Moulton
Well, I think the second thing is that he just didn't agree to follow the law. A colleague of mine, Ro Khanna, asked him if he would simply follow court orders with regards to the troops in la and he would. He refused to answer that, which was pretty incredible. There was another moment where he suggested that they had plans to invade Greenland. Remember, this is a founding NATO ally that Denmark, Denmark's territory. And so then a Republican came on and said, I want to help you out, Mr. Secretary. Let's just be clear, you don't actually have plans to invade Greenland. Right? And he just said, well, we have plans for everything. So eventually he said that we do. It was really this incredible moment and the Republican made himself look stupid and the Secretary looked crazy. But it was a mixture of this just flaunting the law, openly politicizing the military that again, Hegseth truly wrote a book on and incompetence. You know, incompetence and lack of accountability. I asked him about the signal gate questions. I asked him very straightforward line of questioning to just make it clear that whatever information he received about these airstrikes must have been classified. At one point he even admitted it. He said, well, anything I received from CENTCOM is classified. And yet he just completely lied about that when it came to putting it on an unclassified platform. But then I asked him next, are you just going to take accountability for it?
- [14:10]
Bill Kristol
For it?
- [14:10]
Seth Moulton
You know, there's an inspector general report that's supposed to come out about this. I'm sure it's already been delayed by the Secretary and who knows if it will just be somehow deleted from the public record. But I just asked him, if this comes out and it says indeed what we all know to be true, which is that you did in fact share classified information that put pilots lives at risk on an unclassified system that we know our adversaries are hacking or trying to hack, then are you going to take accountability? I mean, this is the Secretary who said accountability is back. He said that on day one of his job at the Pentagon and he refused. He has no personal accountability. That's pretty obvious.
- [14:52]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. How did you feel when the President ordered the deployment of the 700? I think it was Marines from 27 to Los Angeles domestic deployment of active duty Marines.
- [15:04]
Seth Moulton
Well, as a congressman and as a Marine veteran, I was alarmed, but maybe it says more with some active duty Marines feel because I heard from several that officers are considering resigning their commissions, that people are openly questioning how this can happen. And it's obviously not what anyone signs up to do in the Marines or to do in the Marines. I mean, you don't sign up to stand off against American citizens any more, by the way, than you sign up to march in a parade. I mean, soldiers and Marines hate marching in parades. That's the last thing that, that we, that we want to do. And obviously this is just completely lost on, on the commander in chief, someone who dodged the draft himself to avoid serving in Vietnam. And of course that meant sending someone else in his place. You know, it'd be interesting to meet that, that veteran or maybe he never made it back. Who took Donald Trump's seat on that plane when he made up a story, concocted false medical records of a bone spur to avoid serving. There was this moment in the president's speech last night where he told the story of a truly heroic US army officer who got shot in the face, lost an ear and a cheekbone and said, I'm short an ear and a cheekbone, but I'm going to keep fighting. And it was interesting hearing the President talk about the bravery of that man and thinking about the fact that he faked a bone spur, a tiny bone spur. He made it up just so that he wouldn't have to serve himself.
- [16:52]
Bill Kristol
How worried are you? If I can ask, and you could be obviously careful what you say about this if you wish, but I mean about the politicization of the military, both in the ranks and especially maybe among enlisted folks, but also among officers. How worried are you about a brain drain or a experience drain from the military? As you mentioned, I myself have had, and I'm not 1, 1000th as close as you are to people. There had a couple of people come see me, just friends of friends, friends of, just friends of friends, let's just say who you know, they, they want to serve, they're proud of their service. Some of them have gotten have on a good track, I would say, to a very senior position, commands in the military. But they are very worried about being asked to do things they don't want to do. And is it better to get out now or is it better to try to do the right thing and be a kind of internal guardrail? I don't know what I advise them to get advice from people like you who know better than I. But I mean, so how worried are you about the actual military? We've got three and a half. It's not like we're finished with Trump's little experiment here, right? We're 1/10, I think, of the way through the Trump term, something like that.
- [17:56]
Seth Moulton
I'm very concerned and I think you've probably hit the nail on the head, Bill, with what's most likely the long term consequence of this, which is that a lot of good people don't serve. I can't tell you how many conversations like the one you just described that I've had over the course of two terms now of President Trump, where young people who say, I've always wanted to serve in the military, I believe in that. Maybe even I respect what you did, you know, Congressman Moulton, But I don't think I can serve under this commander in chief. Now, I'll tell you, my advice is this is a more important time than ever to have honorable, thoughtful, smart officers serving in the military because you might have to, in fact disagree or disobey, I should say, an unlawful order from the commander in chief. And you got to really have your wits about you to do that. So I always encourage people to serve regardless and to go in with enough courage and integrity to stand up for that oath you take to protect the Constitution and not the president, because you could come down to a real moral quandary over that very situation. But of course, you take this to an extreme and there are very clear reasons why the founding fathers said we're not going to have a politicized military, because if one leader or one political party owns the military, then they can enforce force their will on the rest of America. And then you don't have a democracy at all. So there are big picture sort of strategic risks here, and then there are tactical risks. Hopefully we really just have to worry about the tactical risks. But a talent drain in the US Military, especially at a dangerous time like now in the world, is a significant risk in and of itself.
- [19:51]
Bill Kristol
And on civilian DoD, it seems to me, or let's just say the national security establishment in general. I mean, we have Tulsi Gabbard as director of the Office of National Intelligence. I don't know, it's gotta be people thinking about whether they want to serve there, right?
- [20:07]
Seth Moulton
Oh, absolutely. All over the government. You know, I have a very esoteric title that seems very important and yet has no value politically, which is that I'm the senior Democrat now in the House in charge of nuclear weapons and space, as the ranking member of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee on the House Armed Services Committee. And we're dealing a lot with our nuclear weapons enterprise because we're investing in it a lot, we're modernizing it, and it's not going well. And one of the early cuts that Elon Musk and Doge made was to the National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency most people have probably never heard of, but has one of the most important jobs on Earth, which is keeping our nuclear weapons safe. And they were just eviscerated. And you know what? You can't just go on the street and post a sign for nuclear weapons experts. They don't exist. Once you fire these people or once they're just so disillusioned they leave on their own, it's very, very hard to get them back. And so there's been a massive brain drain. Some of it was staunched, some, some people were convinced to come back. But even today, morale is real low at institutions like this because the president, from the president on down, he said, clearly, you're not important. I'm just going to take this, this, this, you know, billionaire carmaker to come in and slash and burn without even knowing what, because that's how unimportant you are. That's the message that this administration is sending to everybody who works for the federal government. And there are going to be serious long term consequences to all of this.
- [21:43]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, no, that's the long term and beginning of stuff is really terrifying in many areas of national security, very, very importantly. But also obviously medical research, something I know you care a lot about your district as your, the environs of your district into Boston and so forth have a ton of people involved in that.
- [22:00]
Seth Moulton
Well, and by the way, you know who's number two? Because Boston's number one in the world when it comes to biotech. Number two is not San Francisco, it's not Austin, you know, it's not Miami, it's Beijing. That's who's nipping at our heels. And when we cut billions of dollars out of biomedical research, we're not only hurting Americans who might be cured of cancer by that biomedical research, because we know millions have in the past. We're ceding territory, we're ceding ground to Beijing when the top students in the world no longer want to come to Harvard Medical School, they want to go to Beijing University. That's a real problem for our competitiveness and for our national security. So in the name of Trump's personal vendetta against Harvard, which, as in this. I personally think he just kind of clearly didn't get in. I mean, he went to Penn. I mean, most people who apply to Penn also apply to Harvard. He probably just didn't get in. He's been carrying this, you know, he's been carrying this resentment for most of his life. So he takes it out on Harvard, canceling billions of dollars of contracts and he's hurting again, not just those Harvard students or those Harvard researchers, but our national competitiveness and our national security against China. We're about to become the only industrialized country that doesn't have the capac MRNA vaccines because Secretary Kennedy just doesn't believe in them for conspiratorial reasons. We invented the technology, obviously. It's saved a remarkable number of lives already. And yet all that talent, all that tech, all that production from a president who says he's going to bring manufacturing back to America while all that biomedical manufacturing is going overseas because of some crazy ideology in this administration that doesn't believe in this basic science. So there are huge issues to this. This isn't just a political game the President is playing.
- [24:02]
Bill Kristol
You know, I think it's so important we should stay on that for a minute because people do often, I think correctly rebut, you know, the particulars of Trump's charges and the legal basis for removing $7 billion or whatever is money from Harvard because he doesn't like, I don't like them either, actually, the encampments on campus and so forth, but, or a few professors at Harvard. But the bigger picture, competitiveness issue and just our natural well being issue is sort of important and maybe not dwell on enough. I mean, the MRNA vaccine was. We produced a fair amount of it here and we sort of developed it here. We also developed it in conjunction with allies in Europe, with, with scientists in Europe. A lot of the stuff we used, if I'm not mistaken, in the first wave was produced in Europe. And because we have a. We had at the time friendly relations with our allies in a sense that we had to share this and that, you know, it was very important that we not go. All go nationalist and mercantilist in this moment of crisis. The world did pretty well, you know, once the vaccine, did a pretty good job of developing the vaccine. And Trump probably deserves some credit for that, actually. Not that he wants to take it anymore and that it was, you know, we were able to address it here and in Europe and elsewhere. And the idea that we could be dependent on China's, well, you know, Good wishes to have the vaccines we need five or ten years from now. I guess that's not a fanciful prospect, unfortunately, if it keeps this policy up.
- [25:21]
Seth Moulton
No, it's not. No, it's, it's, it's not at all. And it could Simply be that 10 or 15 years from now China just develops all the science. They're the ones who have the latest innovations because they've spent a decade attracting the most talented people, investing the most in these facilities. And so Beijing is just number one in the world for biotech. And one of the, you know, one of the, I'm not a biotech guy, but one of the features of this, of this science is that, you know, there's real agglomeration economies, there's real value in just having a lot of knowledge. And so once you're number one, it's hard to displace you. And because all the knowledge, all the data, all the experiments, all the, you know, the innovations are all centered in one place. And that's why there's such an ecosystem for biotech all around Boston. It's not just Harvard, it's mit. It's all these other, other schools and universities and hospitals, some of the best in the world. When you break that up, it's very, very hard to rebuild and get back. And people just don't understand the long term implication of what's going on. I also just want to comment quickly on a caveat you made which is that you don't like the atmosphere at Harvard. By the way, I don't either. I mean, you're speaking with a leading critic of Harvard. We had to set up a whole separate webpage just for all of the statements I issued that were highly critical of Harvard in the wake of the October 7 attacks and the lack ideological diversity on the campus, which has really just gotten much, much worse in the last decade. So Harvard does have some issues to address, some blatant anti Semitism and by the way they're addressing those. But you don't fix anti Semitism by canceling cancer research. I mean that's just absurd.
- [27:08]
Bill Kristol
No, that's very, well, very well said. You know, just I thought we'd get to Moran as well, I'm sure gets Iran a little. So I'm going to. There are other things I wanted to ask you about this, but I will ask you one more thing about this. You mentioned that it's hard for citizens, I mean, who aren't obviously conversant with this field terribly well to really understand some of the medium and long term effects. But I'm sure you're a member of Congress, so you obviously tried to explain it to your constituents. And some of them, as I said, are working this area. So you probably have a slightly easier job than someone who's not in an area where this is a major business and a major industry and major, a lot of people have people know people who work in the area and so forth. But I mean, what about explaining it to constituents? Where are you on sort of the American public's ability to kind of grasp, you know, some of the effects of what's happening?
- [27:55]
Seth Moulton
Well, we can try to explain it sort of intellectually, like with the conversation that we're having this morning, but I think it's really going to hit home for Americans when their basic services are impacted. There are a lot of veterans who are going to start to have trouble getting care at the va. I spent some time on the phone over the past couple weeks with a great Marine from my 2nd Platoon who is having trouble getting seen at the VA even though he's got tumors growing all over his body, something that's not uncommon for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. This is precisely why President Biden dramatically expanded veterans care under his administration and had to hire a lot more people at the VA to take care of these additional patients. But a lot of them are going to start finding lines are longer, specialists are not there, the availability of care is down, the quality of care will go down after that, and that's going to hurt a lot of vets. I mean, imagine how much you could do at the VA with the $200 million that has been spent on the birthday parade and the troop deployment to Los Angeles to date do a lot of good. I say that as a patient of the VA myself because I made a commitment to keep going to the VA even after I got elected to Congress. And this is just one example, right? I mean, people are going to have trouble getting phone calls returned from the IRS when they have issues with their taxes, or they're going to have trouble getting help from the Social Security Administration because so many people have been fired who would normally help them figure out why their Social Security check didn't show up, what administrative error had caused that. That happens all the time and it takes people to sort that out. So I think a, a lot of these vicious cuts that Elon Musk and others in the administration have made won't hit home for a while. It's frightening to think about the people who will die from diseases, whether it be cancer or Alzheimer's or whatever else that just can't get treated because those next treatments, those next cures, are not being discovered and produced by researchers at places like Harvard and other great universities across the country. And then of course, there are the national security concerns as well. This is a tech enabled world with tech wars. And you see that playing out on the ground in Ukraine. Well, we're way behind in drone technology. If you want to go to Walmart and buy a drone, it's almost certainly made in China today. And when you cut the basic research funding in our system, which goes to universities, because that's been the most efficient way to do basic scientific research since World War II, then you're hurting our national security in the future. And it will take a while for those things to hit home. But I do think that over the next just few months and couple years, the cuts that affect people personally with the services they expect from our government are going to start rearing their heads. Maybe it'll take that for people to really wake up to what's going on.
- [30:53]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, that could be. I mean, I'll let you go here and Father's Day, but I can't not ask you this. It's unfair in a way to ask you just only 5, 10 minutes left about Iran and Israel. But I guess maybe the better way to ask it is what should we be looking for? Thinking about what questions should citizens who don't have obviously your kind of granular knowledge of what's going on there, what should we be worried about? What should we be hoping the Trump administration does or doesn't do, and so forth?
- [31:25]
Seth Moulton
Well, I think it's important to just start with first principles here. And I don't think it's even worth debating that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. A country that says that Israel and America should not exist cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. And that's why successive Democratic and Republican administrations have had the policy and worked hard to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. I mean, this is a country that, this was Pride weekend in parts of the world. In fact, I guess there was a 60,000 person pride celebration plan for Tel Aviv over the weekend before the war started. And of course, Iran is a country that hangs people who they deem to be homosexuals, who hangs people who disagree with the regime, who makes women disappear to be tortured just because they put head scarves on. So let's just be clear about that. Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. And then the question you have to ask is, what's the best way to prevent them from getting weapons. And I think there are a lot of people who just assume that if you take the hardline approach and sort of by implication the most effective approach, it's to bomb the nuclear program out of existence. But the key question that people often forget to ask is even if you do that, how long will it take Iran to reconstitute its program? Because we know from history that any country that gets its nuclear program eliminated by military force is going to very seriously consider reconstructing it. And I mean, look, candidly, if I were Iran and, and I, and I wanted to reconstitute my military program, I wouldn't hang, I wouldn't hold back from, from developing a bomb because that might serve as a more effective deterrent should a country like Israel consider this, consider these actions in the future. So this is not just about, you know, eliminating nuclear weapons under Netanyahu, which I'm sure he's thrilled to do. It's about what are the long term implications for the safety and security of our ally Israel. That's a really important question to ask. Another really important question to ask is just what is the end game here? This is a question that we keep asking for Netanyahu with Gaza and Hamas, who amazingly still seems to control much of Gaza. What is the end game? Is it regime change in Iran? I would love to see the regime change in Iran. We haven't been successful at inspiring that. I certainly hope these military strikes inspire regime change in the right direction and don't in fact empower the hardliners, the people who said we can never work with the US we can't negotiate with the west because that's certainly a risk here as well. So while we're always going to stand by our ally Israel and protect its basic right to exist and celebrate the freedoms and democratic governance that Israel represents in the Middle east, it is important for us to ask these long term questions because I don't think there's any American who want another war in the Middle East. We certainly don't want America to get bogged down in a war in the Middle east. Should we be called to support Israel. And at the end of the day, when you look strategically at our national security and remember that we all agree the pacing threat, the most serious threat to America's national security today is China. And it's the risk that they could literally start World War three by invading Taiwan and the Pacific. That's all the more reason why we cannot risk getting bogged down in a war in the Middle East. And so these are important questions for all of us to be asking as we watch what's unfolding there today.
- [35:05]
Bill Kristol
Final question. Do you have how worried are you about the, honestly, the level of strategic thinking at senior parts of the Trump administration? Do you think that, well, people can say foolish things, but at the end of the day, serious people like General Corella, who I think is the commander of sitcom and, you know, will kind of be able to keep things in a reasonably, you know, going whatever the right answers to these different questions are. And there are obviously a variety of reasonable answers of how much we should help Israel or not or, you know, but.
- [35:40]
Seth Moulton
I have tremendous confidence in, in General Kurilla. He's a professional uniform military officer. He's not someone that, that Trump just politically put into that position. We didn't know Israel was going to conduct these strikes. But just knowing that this is a risk and that we obviously need to get rid of Iran's nuclear program. I asked General Kurilla several questions about this. What are the military options? And you went through in detail what they were in a classified briefing we received on the House Armed Services Committee earlier this week. Obviously, I can't discuss the nature of those answers, but you can imagine some of the questions just from the discussion I just had that I asked. And I'll tell you that I left that concerned and it leads to some of my skepticism today and why I'm asking these questions about what is the end game, you know, what are the long term consequences here? Can Iran reconstitute its program after what Israel does? These are really important questions to ask. And General Kurilla has great answers. The question is anybody going to listen?
- [36:49]
Bill Kristol
Anybody in the Trump above him, so to speak, in the leadership.
- [36:53]
Seth Moulton
That's right. And when you watch Hegseth performance before the committee this week, the level of incompetence and the willingness to just completely disregard the truth, that makes you, that makes you really wonder, you know, because even if Hegseth can take a minute to start defending the country when he usually spends most of his time just defending himself from his various scandals, and he does ask these questions, these wise questions. What if he just doesn't like the answer? What if the administration just politically doesn't find the answers convenient, then it doesn't matter so much that General Kurilla is smart and thoughtful in telling the truth.
- [37:34]
Bill Kristol
It's a bit of a chilling but very important answer. And that's why it's so important for you all to be able to do the, hopefully the oversight you can do and also influence policy to the degree you can. Is it totally ridiculous for me to think that maybe responsible members of Congress of both parties could influence this administration in some ways? I mean, it's important to try, right? Even if one doesn't very much dislikes this administration and wishes others were in those senior positions.
- [38:01]
Seth Moulton
Well, you can be sure I'll keep trying though. That's why I'm still doing this job. I remember the, I think the first time we actually met was, was in Saddam's mother's house, which was General Petraeus quarters at the time. And I think we were having hot dogs as we started to discuss foreign policy. It's been a long way since then. But I keep doing this job because I do think it's important. I think it's important for my kids, even though I miss a lot of time away from them because these are questions that could really influence their future. And if we have a big war in the Middle east, if we, God forbid, go to war with China, which could turn nuclear, I mean, that will change the planet. And in some ways there are no more important questions that we can be asking for our kids futures. But that's why this is important and that's why it's important that the Democrats keep doing what we can to hold this administration accountable, but also make sure we make some reforms ourselves to put ourselves in a position to win the midterms and beyond. And it's why we've got to find some political courage amongst Republicans. Cheers to Don Bacon for being the lone example in pretty much all of Congress right now, for being willing to stand up for this and to this administration. Remember, he actually has called for Secretary Hegseth to resign, something that lots of Republicans believe in private, but only Don Bacon has been willing to say in public. We need to find a lot more political courage in Washington to do the right thing because the stakes are incredibly high.
- [39:31]
Bill Kristol
Very well said. And Seth, thank you for everything you've done honestly. And thank you for, for taking this time to be with me and with our viewers and listeners today. And good luck in helping us over the next three and a half years bring us to a safe landing, if that's the right way to say it here after this.
- [39:49]
Seth Moulton
Well, Bill, this is heavy and important stuff. It's a really important discussion, but I always enjoy getting a chance to talk with you. So thanks very much for having me on.
- [39:58]
Bill Kristol
Thanks, Seth. And thank you all for joining us on Bull Work on Sunday.