Loading summary
Transcript3 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:10]
B
Kube, Monica Alba, Peter Nicholas, Gordon Lubold, Katherine Doyle and Andrea Mitchell of NBC News reported Wednesday that President Donald J. Trump is exasperated that the Iran war is dragging on and that its advisors can't agree what to do next. Reportedly, he erupted last week during a meeting with his national security team, shouting expletives at the officials in the room. One of Trump's allies told the reporters that Trump had not expected the war to last as long as it has. There was not a real strategy for how long or what they should do to get to the end point. He did not intend this to be a long, drawn out war, the person said yesterday. The war began to widen as a drone hit a gas storage tanker owned by a US Company in Egypt near the Suez Canal. No one has claimed responsibility and Iran struck at American installations in Jordan. US And Saudi Arabian forces launched strikes against Iranian backed militias in Iraq. At a Cabinet meeting at Camp David today, Trump told reporters he intends to hit Iran with heavy military strikes again to force Iranian negotiators to give in to his demands. We will be hitting them very hard, he said. And you know at some point they're going to say we just can't take it anymore, we just want to win, he said. We're doing very well. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not appear to have a strategy for their war on Iran. Instead, they had an ideology. That ideology elevates individualism over the idea behind the modern American state that government should regulate business, maintain a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and support an international order based in rules rather than in military might. Since the 1950s, opponents of that modern state have celebrated the American individual, especially the American cowboy, as the figure the American government should privilege and protect. In their mythology, the cowboy wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to rise through his own hard work, protecting himself and his family from wrongdoers with his gun and his principles. The education, expertise, cooperation and coalitions on which the modern US Stood before Trump were signs not of strength but of weakness. That ideology seems to have been what was behind the attack on Iran. In 2015, the U.S. china, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and Iran negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or jcpoa. Under the jcpoa, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump maintained it was one of the worst deals ever made by our country. He took the US out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for an nuclear weapon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought this ideology into the Defense Department, which he tried to rebrand the Department of War. In 2024, Hegseth published a book titled the War on Warriors behind the Betrayal of the Men who Keep Us Free. In it, he claimed that the US Military was weak and effeminate because its leaders had embraced diversity, equity and inclusion. His prescription for the country involved getting rid of the Geneva Conventions, which recognize human rights for non combatants in war, claiming they forced the US troops to fight with one hand behind our back. In his confirmation hearings, Hegseth refused to tell Senator Angus King, an independent of Maine, that he would honor those agreements. On September 5, 2025, Hegseth said changing the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War was part of his campaign to spread a warrior ethos at the Pentagon. The rebranding, he said, was part of restoring intentionality to the use of force. We're going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We're going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this War Department, Mr. President, just like America, is back. But Trump's war on Iran has illustrated the weakness of that vision. Trump reiterated yet again today that the US has dominated Iran's military. They're being decimated. They have no navy, they have no air force, they have no anti aircraft, he said. But for all that, they retain their ability to choke world trade by controlling the Strait of Hormuz, the very condition previous presidents worked to avoid through negotiations. An article yesterday by Politico senior foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Tusi, suggests that the cowboy approach to foreign policy has another downside. Tucey called out the extreme attacks of Trump and his aides on the International Criminal Court, or icc, and wrote that although the US is not a signatory to that court, former government officials and legal scholars suspect Trump and administration officials are worried about future prosecutions. On July 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the administration intends to dismantle the ICC brick by brick, if necessary. A press release from the State Department on the same day said that the US will feature a whole of government response to systematically disable the ICC's ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty. A Republican operative close to the White House, Bill Cortese, told Toucey that some administration officials are afraid that if Democrats come into power, an unchecked ICC and other international institutions are going to unleash a wave of litigation against this administration and anyone associated with it. Tucey notes that during the administration, U.S. law enforcement and military officials have been accused of human rights violations that reach across borders. Notably, on September 2, 2025, three days before Hegseth's maximum lethality not tepid legality speech, the administration began strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Those strikes have killed more than 220 people, but the administration has offered no evidence to prove its claims that those killed were narco terrorists killed to stop the flow of cocaine to the US Trump claims the strikes have virtually ended drug trafficking by sea. But on July 27, Alex Horton, Terrence McCoy, Samantha Schmidt and Dylan Moriarty of the Washington Post reported that according to Pentagon officials and officials from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the strikes have not reduced the cocaine coming into the U.S. indeed, the dropping price of the drug suggests there is more of it now than there was a year ago. Instead, the strikes have simply prompted criminal organizations to find new routes. The strikes have also disrupted the law enforcement system in which lower level participants inform on higher ups as the lower level sources are being pulled back. While the strikes appear to have done little to stop the flow of drugs, legal analysts say they look a lot like former President Rodrigo Duterte's extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers and users. Law professor Charlie Trumbull reminded readers of Foreign policy that in 2017, Trump called Duterte to congratulate him for doing an unbelievable job on the drug problem. Trumbull also noted that Duterte is now behind bars in the Hague charged with crimes against humanity for trying to get rid of criminals by unlawful means, including murder. The Trump administration should be concerned, Trumbull warned. On July 25, the US State Department cheered Venezuela's withdrawal from the treaty that established the ICC and said it welcomed the new Venezuelan government's partnership on American led efforts to dismantle the corrupt and worthless icc. It continued the ICC is neither credible, independent nor legitimate and called on all members of the ICC to abandon it. Today, Missy Ryan and Nancy A. Youssef of the Atlantic reported that in the wake of the US strike on the Manab school that killed 160 people, mostly school children, in the first hours of the war, the Pentagon is considering reversing some of the deep cuts Hegseth made to the staff at the Defense Department. A report by the Pentagon inspector general found that cuts to the civilian harm protection staff who work to protect non combatants may have violated laws. Ryan and Yousef explain that the US Military had spent decades building its civilian protections. Leaders understood that battlefield victories were insufficient to win military operations and that protecting civilians is crucial to public support for those operations. Ryan and Youssef noted that to reflect this understanding, The Pentagon in 2006 formally added legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance to its principles of joint operations, defining legitimacy as the legality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken. A US Official told Ryan and Yousef that the leadership of US Combat commands uniformly support the restoration of the personnel whose job it is to protect civilians. But Hegseth has not committed to the restoration of the old system, the journalists note, and even if he does, it will have little effect unless he changes his own rhetoric. For his part, Trump appears to be addressing concerns about future prosecutions, whether by the ICC or at US Courts by keeping control of the government after the midterms. Today, Trump disagreed with the assessment of investigators that a recent cyber attack on municipal water systems in Minnesota was likely the work of Iranian hackers. Instead, he blamed Democrats. We heard in Minnesota there was a cyber attack and they blame it on Iran, he told reporters. I don't think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota because they're grossly incompetent. There was a cyber attack of 30 water plants and I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. There is another piece of evidence this week that the abandonment of education and expertise in favor of a warrior ethos has weakened the US on the world stage. At an international conference on AIDS in Rio de Janeiro, an official of the US State Department showed a map of Africa on which six fake countries were identified with the names of random real countries, including Nigeria, where several hundred U.S. soldiers are deployed. Reuters identified the image as AI. Attendees took screenshots and posted them online. Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work. One Wrote.
- [13:46]
A
Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.