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- [00:00]
Scott R. Anderson
Studies show that 100% of everybody in the world wants to curl up indoors and do nothing because it's so darn cold out there. That's why many people are turning to Bombas, whose pillowy plush slippers and warm merino wool socks have been said to
- [00:12]
Ari Tabatabai
be the most comfortable in the history of feet. Bombas products have been found to boost coziness by up to 1 million percent.
- [00:18]
Scott R. Anderson
Okay, enough fake statistics. But could Bombas socks and slippers really be the Cure?
- [00:23]
Ari Tabatabai
Go to bombas.com audio and use code
- [00:25]
Scott R. Anderson
audio for 20% off your first purchase.
- [00:27]
Ari Tabatabai
Then that's B O-M B-S.com and use code audio.
- [00:33]
Scott R. Anderson
Ben, I'm getting a light beeping on your end. Is that your ankle monitor going off?
- [00:39]
Benjamin Wittes
Not anymore. As of this morning, my ankle monitor has been cut off. I am a free man. As Martin Luther King said, free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I am free at last. And more than that, a writ of habeas corpus has been issued for the release of Lord Lazer and Lady Lazer, both of whom should be back at home within the next couple weeks.
- [01:09]
Scott R. Anderson
I just wish this was the first time today you've compared yourself to Martin Luther King Jr. But I am thrilled and excited to see Mr. And Mrs. Laser back in business. It has been a long.
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Natalie Orpet
That's Lord and Lady.
- [01:25]
Scott R. Anderson
Lord and Lady America. We don't. We don't respect their histories.
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Ari Tabatabai
Don't misgender them.
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Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, exactly. You know, but regardless, they're excited to see them back in business. It's quite a day in court to see this process ended and you properly represented yourself as well and your cause, because I see you're wearing your wonderful. I'm blanking on the name of the shirts now, which I feel terrible.
- [01:45]
Benjamin Wittes
Well, I was going to figure out what the appropriate dog shirt was to wear, and then Nastya pointed out to
- [01:51]
Scott R. Anderson
me, hound dog, obviously McGruff the crime
- [01:54]
Benjamin Wittes
dog, that I shouldn't be wearing a dog shirt because I was going to court to deal with the outcome of a Ukraine protest. I should go in Vyshyvanka. And so I did, and victory was mine, justice was done, and all of my gear is going to be returned to me.
- [02:17]
Ari Tabatabai
Ben, how many Vishyvankas do you have?
- [02:20]
Benjamin Wittes
I don't know, six or eight. I have a lot of dog shirts and a lot of Vishyvanka.
- [02:26]
Scott R. Anderson
One of those I support. It's the important one. I do kind of love the idea of you, however, going to your hearing in a McGruff the Crime Dog shirt. And I think you're the one person who can maybe get away with it because there is like a very, very high chance the AUSA and or the judge involved know who you are and listen to Rational Security or Lawfare or at least aware of Lawfare and Rational Security. So I feel like you're the one person who might get away with without any serious repercussions.
- [02:53]
Benjamin Wittes
Well, I will say, based on the apparel of the median defendant in this proceeding, had I been wearing a dog shirt, I would not have been underdressed.
- [03:06]
Scott R. Anderson
Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough. Worth noting. Hello everyone and welcome back to Rational Security, the podcast where we invite you to join members of Lawfare family as we tried to make sense of the week's big national security news stories. There is one big news story dominating the headlines still for the third week in a row. That is of course, the US and Israeli military operation still ongoing in Iran. Not over yet. For the time being, that is having ramifications in all sorts of corners of the world. And we're going to talk about a couple of those ramifications today with an all star squad of official Rational Security veterans. First up, we have Lawfare public service fellow Ari Tabatabai, who I think is probably the most junior person to be inaugurated a Rat Sec veteran. But you have made so many appearances on it because the world's been such a mess since you started with us. I think you've earned it at this point. So, Ari, thank you for coming back on the podcast. Not from across the world now back here in the US of A. Happy to have you back on.
- [04:06]
Ari Tabatabai
I take no responsibility for the events, but very happy to be here.
- [04:10]
Scott R. Anderson
Also joining us is back on the show after a little bit of an absence, but excited to have her back is law Firm's executive editor, Natalie Orpet. Natalie, thank you for coming back on the podcast as well. It's good to have you back.
- [04:20]
Natalie Orpet
Well, thanks for having me.
- [04:22]
Scott R. Anderson
And also coming back is of course, lawfare co host emeritus Benjamin Wittes, lawfare editor in chief as well, Rational Security co host emeritus. Excuse me, Ben. A free man at last. Happy to have you back on the podcast in shackles or no free at last. If you were not able to make it today, we were going to let you tap your object lesson in Morse code on a spoon on the prison bars through the hallways was plan B. So you were still going to get your voice out there. Don't worry.
- [04:50]
Benjamin Wittes
You know, some somewhere out there there are Rational Security viewers, listeners, viewers who have no idea what we're talking about. And I think that's just great. I think it's great. Leave it unexplained.
- [05:05]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, Google it. Google Go to Dogshore Daily and you'll figure it out on Ben Substack. It's probably where the detailed account is, but regardless, we are thrilled to have such a group together. Talk about three stories, all of which are the common nexus of the ongoing Iran conflict, but trying to tackle a couple of unique expressions and consequences there Topic one for keeping it on the straight and narrow Three weeks into the US And Israel's air campaign against Iran, ship traffic through the critical Strait of Hormuz remains at a virtual stop, sending crude oil prices north of $100 a barrel. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said last week that vessels are safe to sail through the strait, but continued attacks on tankers suggest otherwise. Some neighboring Gulf states, among others, are in turn growing antsy that US Strikes won't go far enough in preventing Iran attacks. What do we make of these developments and how will it impact how other countries are navigating the the broader conflict? Topic 29 to 59 US efforts to secure European support for efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz have fallen on deaf ears, with German officials, among others, describing it as a not our war and far outside the obligations imposed by NATO's Article 5 and other defense commitments. In response, President Trump said that he was disappointed in NATO and once again hinted that he might exit it. It's the latest Nader in what has been a precipitous decline in transatlantic relations over the past three months. How much worse can things get, and what could it mean for the future of the broader alliance and Topic 3 Unlawful Good actually, I should put up at the end because question mark Unlawful good A US Strike on what turned out to be an elementary school in southern Iran in the early stage of the US Military campaign there has put a new focus on decisions by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to scale back rules and processes meant to reduce harm to civilians in armed conflict. Hegseth has called the rules of engagement stupid and has said that he wants to give military commanders maximum authority on the battlefield. He's also repeatedly called for no quarter in Iran and other contexts in order that, if taken literally, would itself be a violation of the laws of armed conflict. Exactly how far has Hegseth unraveled the Pentagon's rules of engagement, and what could the real consequences be in Iran and elsewhere? So for our first topic, let us go to the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway that has become the focus in many ways of the Iran conflict that is very much ongoing, not necessarily the focus of military operations, but the focus in terms of where the rubber is hitting the road, in terms of Iranian push back, I think on the United States and to some extent Israel as well, by exercising control of the state of Hormuz, which it has effectively done, despite claims to the contrary, it's operating essentially a screening mechanism where it hasn't been allowing vessels through. For most countries, it looks like it's worked out a deal with, I believe last time I checked with India, Pakistan and China, where certain vessels have been able to get through without interruption, but otherwise other national vessels haven't been able to get through the kind of pseudo blockade. They're not calling it that, but I'll use it in the colloquial sense that Iran has put up. There's also been some reports of mining being used to block parts of the waterway, which obviously poses a more enduring problem. And of course, repeated attacks against vessels going through of various nationalities that presents a real risk. Meaning that even if maybe the United States, Iran or other people will give assurances of the security, even if it may improve nominally on the ground, until that's perceived by, among other people, maritime insurance underwriters and the people who ensure the vessels that transport oil and other goods through the strait, they are not going to be able to financially likely to be in a position to move through, even though physically safety wise, they may actually be able to do so. This is causing major global economic ramifications. Oil prices have gone up precipitously and are likely to continue climbing as global stocks of oil dribble down. Remember, there's been a really relatively fast moving conflict and those stocks are still insulating to some extent the actual crude oil prices. As they wear down, the oil price is going to continue to creep up even if the status quo remains more or less the same, but also particularly problematic for consumers in Europe and Asia. You're also seeing fertilizer prices creep up and actually fertilizer stocks drop precipitously, something that could have huge ramifications for agriculture in various parts of the world. And relatedly, people, particularly in Europe, are concerned. It could result in, among other things, migratory flows of human beings coming from Africa and other areas affected by this, who, when they're facing agricultural shortages, have in the past sometimes pushed immigration into Europe and other parts of the world, causing political complications and other humanitarian complications there. So, Ari, I think hopefully that captures some of the big dynamics around this. Talk to us about what we know about how the United States and Israel and other countries have been approaching trying to liberate the Strait where it's fallen short, and what we're hearing from the wide range of countries that are affected by this action on the part of Iran.
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Ari Tabatabai
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good kind of scene. Setter, let me take it in three different pieces kind of quickly. So the first one is what's going on in terms of red, right. Like what Iran is doing, what its capabilities are, what it intends to do. The second is what our capabilities are to respond and what we're trying to do. And the third is that international piece that you highlighted. So just as a kind of. Overall, I am a little surprised by the administration's admission that it's not really been prepared for what Iran is doing in the Strait. Because, listen, this scenario of a potential US Iran conflict has been played out in war games and tabletop exercises for years now, for decades. And I'm just talking unclassified here, obviously. And in every single one of those situations, the potential scenario of a closure of the Strait of Hormuz or at least some sort of disruption of the freedom of navigation has been a pretty prominent piece of that. So this has been a knowable no for a really long time. It's been predicted for a very long time. And the fact that we clearly did not plan for it or didn't take it seriously is a little baffling to me. Also, in 2019, 2020, folks may recall that we had a similar, although obviously not to the same extent, kind of tit for tat escalation in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. I'll come back in a second to how we handled it at the time the international peace becomes relevant here. This was in the first Trump administration. So some of some elements that we're seeing today are not ancient history. We don't need to go back to 1980s even to kind of, you know, have an idea of what Iran might be willing to do. This all happened in the first Trump administration. And at the time, the Iranians were already planning to try to bypass the Strait of Hormuz for their energy to export their oil. And they were building toward that goal and obviously have made some progress doing that. So, look, last week, CNN reported that, you know, Iran has not even used 100% of the capabilities it has to try to block the Strait of Hormuz. At the time, it put it at 80 to 90% it's probably lower now. But in any case, they've maintained 80 to 90% of their mine laying capabilities. And that's just talking about mines, not talking about missiles and drones and other capabilities that they have. Clearly, we've been degrading a lot of these capabilities, but we've not fully eliminated them so far. And part of what Iran is trying to do here, as always part of a sort of hybrid warfare strategy, is to use these very cheap ways to kind of harass and respond to a conventionally superior adversary. Right? They are using mines like they do kind of drones, in that these are fairly cheap kind of things that they use. They're not high tech devices that they're using. And we have to then allocate resources, significant resources, to counter these things. So per CRM, per the Congressional Research Service, Iran has about 6,000 mines of different types that they can use and they can deploy again. They're not even close to anywhere close to that. And so there is a lot more that can happen still to continue to kind of disrupt the freedom of navigation in terms of what the US Capabilities are. I think it's important for folks to know that we have been deprioritizing the kind of maritime mine countermeasures mission set as a Navy for a long time, since the end of the Cold War and especially in the past couple of decades. Just last year, the Navy decommissioned essentially half of its class of Avenger vessels and minesweepers. And so now we have a few of them left. They're deployed in the Indo Pacific. And this raises the question, as always, this is the kind of Ari goes on about trade offs portion of the podcast. This, as always, raises the question of what are the trade offs here? Are we willing to kind of repurpose assets that we have Indo Pacific to send to CENTCOM to send to the Middle East. And of course, that comes with kind of policy considerations that need to be taken into account. We do currently have littoral combat ships that are deployed in the region. They're doing some of those kind of maritime mine countermeasure missions at work, but they're not quite the same without going into the kind of rabbit hole of what those capabilities are specifically. So this all brings us to the allies and partners piece, right? We have a capability gap here. We have allies and partners who do have those capabilities, specifically in Europe. And that's partially why I think the administration and the President specifically have been asking allies to step in. We did this again last time. This happened 2019, 2020, with the International Maritime Security Construct, IMSC for short, where the first Trump administration galvanized allies and partners, a number of them, to come and help in the Strait of Hormuz, and they accepted at the time. This time looks very different. We'll get into a lot of this later on, but fewer countries are willing to actually join us in this effort, and we could really benefit from their capabilities. And this is something that I think gets missed a lot, is that there are these niche capab that some of our allies have that we've been deprioritizing, and this is precisely the type of moment where we need them.
- [15:15]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, there seems like a big learning curve on this, that we are seeing the Trump administration experience in real time, in that this is a military operation. They appear to have undertaken with, to some extent, years of advanced planning on the hypothetical level that the United States has done about a conflict with Iran, but in reality, relatively short notice. We know there are concerns about Europeans, about lack of consultation. We know this got ramped up over the course of a few weeks where we saw this mess mobilization take place in the Persian Gulf, then execute. Unlike in the Western Hemisphere, where even you saw this massive mobilization that ultimately culminated in the relatively discrete and limited intervention, if not still very consequential intervention, in Caracas in January, here it has rapid buildup and then rapid deployment of this huge military operation with massive regional consequences that seem so foreseeable. It's really kind of extraordinary that the administration didn't come in with a more concrete plan about how to address this. That said, I also query whether the Europeans aren't catching themselves in a bit of a trap, because I don't really see a way out for them. I mean, here's the way I am thinking about this. I'm trying to figure out what their kind of calculus is here. They suffer very directly from the Strait of Hormuz being closed. They definitely need it to get opened again for a variety of reasons. Oil prices, everybody kind of needs that. I think they're moderately more reliant directly on oil flows through the Hormuz than the United States is. But still the whole global oil economy needs the prices to come back down. Fertilizer much more direct, other things much more directly impact Europe that are going to be a concern. They also are in this situation where the alternative proposal that seems to be on the table about how you get shipping through is in modified version of the earnest will effort that was done during the tanker wars in 1980 and 1988, which would entail having a bunch of shippers reflag their vessels as US Vessels to get the protection from the US Navy. The downside of that is that when you reflag as a US Vessel, the US Gets a degree of regulatory control over those vessels. The plus side is that the United States feels like it can then extend and exercise military authority to extend self defense to you. So if this is what you're doing and you're worried about, well, do we want to give the United States a huge amount of leverage over key shipping assets that are traversing this part of the world and then also involved in other parts of our global economy and global trade? That's, that's not an ideal outcome either. So it does seem to me like a better outcome in this would be if Europe were to participate in some capacity to either escort its own vessels through or perhaps otherwise avoid the need to completely reflag. Maybe some sort of like collective self defense effort or something else like that that they could get on board with that you either with the executive branch or maybe with legislative approval kind of. There's legislation about this being debated in the Hill. I'm not sure what they're holding out for exactly. The one thing I can think of is I think they think maybe that if they were to come in now, it would allow the administration to extend or double down on the broader military campaign, but that if they hold out a little bit, this is the big pressure point in the administration and it may force the administration to say actually, and Israel to say actually, okay, we're going to go to the negotiating table, we're done with our military campaign, let's wind this up and then diplomacy can come in and offer a more lasting solution which will not come from just reflagging vessels and moving it through the Strait of Hormuz. That still leaves the broader conflict. Does that sound maybe right to you or Aria or Natalie, you jump in here if you have thoughts. I just can't really figure out exactly what the Europeans medium term game plan is if they have one. And they may just be still figuring it out because these are all still fast moving events.
- [18:48]
Natalie Orpet
Yeah, I want to add one question on top of that question. I think Ari, you are by far the best situated to respond to this. No pressure, but I wondered also, and this is really somewhat of a factual question, but I had read that Iran is selectively letting ships through and that even with the selections that it's making, it's not totally consistent in two which flagged ships. So I'm wondering to what extent part of the European Calculus might be that if they stay disengaged from the conflict, they might be able to negotiate bilaterally, I should say, or perhaps as a broader political unit with Iran to sort of get some sorts of exemptions and query whether that makes any sense, given that some of the initiatives that Iran is undertaking are things like mines that would be hard to be able to negotiate your way through. But could that be a part of the calculus as well?
- [19:45]
Ari Tabatabai
I think that's definitely part of it. I do think there are just a lot of different considerations floating in the minds of policymakers in Europe right now, in NATO, and among probably regional partners, too. So one is what Natalie just laid out. I think the second piece of it is that public opinion is not particularly pro this, at least what we're seeing so far, pro this intervention in Iran. And I think there will be a lot of pressure on policymakers throughout Europe if they decide to intervene on the side of the United States. Adding to that is the fact that the United States is not particularly popular with a lot of public opinion currently in, in Europe. Right. In light of just kind of everything that's been going on, all the tensions, been dominating the transatlantic relationship. And then I think there is maybe also an element of they want to impose a cost on the United States for its coercion over the past few months. Right. We're just a few weeks after the Greenland crisis, and that may seem like it's siloed in the minds of US Policymakers, but I don't think that is siloed in the minds of Europeans. Right. This was a really acute crisis that I think we're dismissing a little bit on this side of the atl. It was a few months ago. We're used to news cycles just being kind of crazy these days. So, you know, we're moving on. They haven't moved on from that, and I don't think they're going to move on from that. And then you add to that, you know, Scott, you laid out the. The issue of the consultations. A lot of the reason why we do the hard work of quiet diplomacy normally on the front end of events is so that we have support when we are actually in the middle of things. And it's not clear to me that the administration has been doing that work that, you know, they haven't been consulting with the Europeans, with NATO app allies, maybe a bit more so with regional partners. But you can't not do any of that consultation, put them in front of a FATAC company and then come out and say now we need your capabilities. And by the way, we're not even asking, we are demanding. Right. So I think at some point the domestic cost coupled with the fact that it just doesn't seem like if you're Europe, from the European perspectives, if you just say yes to the United States, it doesn't guarantee that next week you're not going to get tariffs, you're not going to get threats of another kind of annexation of your territory, that you're not going to get another war in Cuba or wherever where you're going to be asked to kind of intervene. And so the costs and benefits, I think just don't match up here. But that, I mean, I'm sure there's other considerations as well, but. Yeah. What do you guys think?
- [22:23]
Benjamin Wittes
I think that last point that Ari made is the essential one, which is that there is no safe harbor for Europe and there's no amount of working with the administration that is going to insulate them from the next outrage, the next Munich, the next. And they've figured this out over time that you can kind of love bomb him for a while and you can rope a dope and you can step in and pretend he doesn't mean what he says about Ukraine and about NATO and that, but eventually he's going to get to Greenland anyway. And so if you can't prevent
- [23:12]
Scott R. Anderson
him
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Benjamin Wittes
from behaving like him by being nice, then what is the value of being nice? And the answer is it's not like actually worth having your ships targeted. It's your military assets rather than American military assets getting the United States out of a mess that it did not consult you about getting into. And so what is the value of stepping up for the United States right now? And I, I think the answer is objectively there isn't any. And Europeans, you know, talk like they have potatoes in their mouths all the time, but they're not stupid, you know, and you can, you can make fun of the mush that they sound like they speak in, which from an American point of view is very, you can
- [24:07]
Scott R. Anderson
tell it's lunchtime because Ben's doing all sorts of strange food metaphors that none of us are quite following. These mush, mush eating, potato loving Europeans.
- [24:18]
Natalie Orpet
No, I mean, St. Patrick's Day was yesterday.
- [24:22]
Scott R. Anderson
Yes, exactly.
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Benjamin Wittes
Anybody who has dealt with European diplomacy knows the drive for consensus makes them sound like they're not saying anything because often they're not. And it's very easy to make fun of it. But the fact of the matter is that these are pretty hard headed Diplomats and they know what they're doing and there's absolutely no reason for them to step up for us right now. And so they won't and they're not and nobody should be surprised by that.
- [24:56]
Scott R. Anderson
So I'll say I'm not. I don't. I disagree with the fundamental premise. I still think this is a scenario where the Europeans are going to find themselves hard pressed to stay completely uninvolved. And I think in two to three weeks we're going to see some degree of European involvement. I don't think it's going to be in offensive operations in Iran at all. That's certainly not the case. But we've already seen the European position, like with the UK in particular and to some extent Spain, I believe, although there's still a lot of like, confusion around Spain, exact position where the UK has said, and this isn't at all inconsistent, even though it's been interpreted that way by the press and frankly by the White House to some extent they said, look, we're not going to back this operation. You can't use our bases to do it. Then when Iran started hitting a bunch of other countries in the region and started sending drones at UK air bases in Cyprus, they said, okay, well you can use British air bases for defensive strikes in response to those actions by Iranians now. So how big is the delta between the two? I think it's likely, actually quite substantial if I understand what the UK Is saying, what they think they're allowed to pursue, which is much more specific response to those specific actions. Maybe this is covering up for something less substantial or a narrower delta, more of a greater capitulation to what the United States wants to do. But I kind of doubt it because Darmer is under that sort of domestic pressure. But I think that really gets at the fundamental cost of what this is showing to demonstrate for the United States, which is Europe really needs this straight open. Europe has every incentive to actually help the United States do so, except the domestic politics. Somehow President Trump has made it toxic for their own politics for the leaders of who has traditionally been the United States closest allies to take even relatively limited action that is in their own economic benefit because it is aligned with the United States and this major foreign policy endeavor that nobody agrees with. And frankly, even if they consulted with European leaders, probably European publics would be quite skeptical of this. But at least if they consulted, they would have created the appearance or the sense that they somehow cared and that European leaders may have said, okay, we understand, we don't agree with this, but at least you talked to us. We saw it coming. We thought about ways to square it, and they may have some basis for thinking. They may be willing to take on a little more political risk to participate instead. It's really like, I think, kind of a zero sum loss for all parties involved, except for maybe Iran, for the simple reason that this is going to go on longer. The economic pain is going to get everywhere. The only thing this really drives towards is that maybe this will push the United States and Israel to end their, mostly the United States to end their campaign earlier, which is Iran's main goal. That may be better for the rest of the world as well. But, you know, frankly, the Trump administration's poor diplomacy, bowling diplomacy, has really put the United States in a bad position. When your allies can't do things that are in their own interest, that is a really bad sign about how you've positioned yourself vis a vis the rest of the world. And it just seems like Trump's doubling down because what does he say? He says we don't really need a master all. If you don't need a master all, then why are you talking about it? It's really extraordinary. I feel like it's being understated. How extraordinarily weak a moment this is for the United States.
- [28:03]
Ari Tabatabai
I don't disagree with anything you said, Scott. And I do think that there are scenarios under which we'll see a bit. Perhaps the Euro's kind of leaning in a bit more. And part of that involves the Iranian response. Right. If the Iranian response entails things like hitting Jewish community centers on European soil, that is going to change the calculation, I think, a little bit in Europe. And then to your other point, the president is not wrong that, that they have their economic interests as well. So, yeah, I'm not saying that 100% of the allies will say no, thanks, but I do think that there will be significant caveats and this will be a lot harder than it would have been if the administration had just done the quiet and, to Ben's point, frustrating work of consulting and, you know, making sure that it brought the allies along instead of kind of on the back end saying, hey, we created the this thing. Join the mess or we're going to withdraw from NATO, which, by the way, I think we'll get back to this in a second. He's also threatening to do so. That is not explicitly, but implicitly. So that's also part of the issue here.
- [29:11]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah. The other part that I think also gets lost in this, though, is the Compliance with international law part and what I'm tense to do as an international lawyer, but I think it's true. If you had done this conflict in a different way and framed your actions in a way that, that tries at least to nod towards international legal frameworks, it makes it a lot easier for these European allies to get involved, even if you don't care for the United States. Part of the reason you comply with international law, a big reason the United States does traditionally, is because it helps the rest of the world get on board with what you're doing as legitimate, or at least not as fundamentally illegitimate. Instead, now they just released an Article 51 letter which makes a case under international law of self defense. And for the record, I think there is a case, international law for self defense, it's a lot harder for the scale of military operations they're pursuing honestly. But you look at targeted actions. Israel has a case that it has been in an armed conflict with Iran for a while. It's a case that pushes envelopes that a lot of international lawyers find uncomfortable and I find uncomfortable to some degree. But I do think there's an argument there that is at least credible or not clearly in bad faith. And that is something that states can work around and say, okay, we may not agree with this part of it, but it means that because we understand you're still not trying to kick the rest of the UN Charter system out of bed, we can still play ball with at least around the margins in ways that don't directly involve us. You just don't have that here. That's sort of engagement or now it's coming somewhat very late. I wouldn't be surprised. This Article 51 letter got filed because somebody at the State Department finally said, you know what might help with Europeans file an Article 51 letter two weeks late about why what you're doing is consistent with international law. An argument that was there and has been there this whole time, the exact argument they ended up rolling out for all its flaws, it's better than no argument. But it really, I think, illustrates that sort of problem. So I want to talk more about the European side of this, but let's save that for a little bit because that's our second topic. Let's zoom in a little bit more on the street here. Let's talk about the domestic pressures this puts on Trump. How strong is he feeling those. Ben, I'll come to you first on this and then I'm curious, your Natalie and Ari, your views as well. What are the pressure points Trump is feeling at this point about this broader conflict, because it does seem like the Strait of Hormuz has become the tip of that spear, right? The thing that's really up against his jugular in terms of feeling pressure about this. And that has a lot to do with the economy, a lot to do with midterms, et cetera, et cetera. But how big a factor is that and what are other factors that may be pushing the US Trajectory of the policy in this space?
- [31:42]
Benjamin Wittes
Well, I think the first factor, and of course, I'm speculating here, because we're talking about what Trump is feeling, which involves occupying space in his head, which is always a dangerous thing to do. But based on what he says, I think you can infer a few pressure points. The first is failure. He has gotten used to these lightning blitz things like you snap your finger and there's an overnight raid in Venezuela, and all of a sudden the president of Venezuela is in the southern district of New, and there's a new president of Venezuela who you claim is in the palm of your hand. And for all I know, maybe she is right. And you are used to boats in international waters that don't fight back and you blow them up, and then you say that they were drug boats with Trenda Aragua in them, and they don't contradict you, however much you may be bullshitting. And all of a sudden you've convinced yourself that the military is hyper cautious. And they always tell you you can't do things, and then you do things and it works. And you do this with a country of 93 million people and a fairly serious set of military capabilities, and that is strategically postured in the middle of a highly sensitive and volatile region, and you're surprised to find that it doesn't magically resolve in the direction that you kind of fantasized that it would, and that the hyper cautious generals who were saying, you know, we can take out the supreme leader and a few people, bunch of people around him, but there's this other architecture of the Islamic Republic that is going to be more resilient and they have a lot of missiles. And, you know, so the first thing is that, you know, you, you kind of convinced yourself in this pre Hitler, pre Stalingrad kind of way that you can do anything and everybody will tell you no, and then it'll all magically work because your instincts are that good. And, you know, just as that wasn't true for Napoleon at the end of the day, and it wasn't true for Hitler at the end of the Day. It's not true for Donald Trump at the end of the day. And by the way, he has a shorter LE than either of the other two. And so that's thing number one is just he's not used to things not working. I think a subcategory of that is that when things don't work, they have a way of biting you in the ankle and causing pain. And the Straits of Hormuz is one of those things. Protracted military engagement is another one. Right. Americans don't actually like protracted military engagements, particularly one that they didn't choose and that they didn't want to be involved in in the first place. But, you know, when they're protracted military engagements that involve significant economic pain and acute, like, in a way that people are really sensitive to, like gas prices going up. Right. That's very noticeable. And I think he is responsive to the markets in a way that he's not responsive to just about anything else. Poll data that suggests his positions unpopular, he just denies it exists. But. But market response is very undeniable. And, you know, I imagine, though I don't know this, that he gets calls from people that he cares about saying, hey, my portfolio is tanking. You know, and so I. I do think there's an kind of immediate negative feedback loop associated with the Straits of Hormuz and with protracted conflict with Iran more generally. And then finally, I do think he's very aware that there are midterms coming up that he, like everybody else, must know that he is not likely to do well in, and so that he's playing this game against a ticking clock that does run out at some point and really could end up in a situation in which the Democrats have the capacity to impeach him and they have enough votes in the Senate to make that impeachment painful in terms of a trial. And so I think there's a lot of stuff going on, but it all has its roots in the fact that he thought he could do something quick and lightning. And that is not the way this conflict should have ever been expected to play out or that was ever likely to play out.
- [36:59]
Natalie Orpet
Yeah, I mean, I guess the one response I have to the premise of that, Ben, is that it's a very convenient thing, then if you haven't articulated what the objective of your operation even is, because the option is always open, if you haven't articulated an endgame to just be done with it all and hope that the response is either not so great after you have thrown in the towel that you really suffer a huge cost and see the consequence of having initiated this, or you get to place the blame on someone else, which is, obviously there are lots of candidates that are being lined up for the United States to place the blame on with respect to this conflict. But I think the political pressures are very much there, as you say. But I don't know how much they will be activated if this option remains open to just kind of declare victory on whatever inarticulable goal is put forth. For why we did this, it went great. Look at us. We showed Iran we destroyed a bunch of their capacities. We really debilitated their nuclear program that. Oh, by the way, we had already debilitated with that operation several months ago. But no, really, this time we actually did. Therefore, we're done and we can move on. Gas prices, please return to normal when they don't, because it's not that simple. And there's a delayed response from the market for all the reasons we've talked about. Place the blame somewhere else.
- [38:33]
Benjamin Wittes
So the problem with that, I think, is, first of all, Iran gets a vote whether there's a ceasefire, and the fact that you declare victory and stop bombing things does not mean that the Straits of Hormuz is open and Iran actually has a vote in that conversation. The second thing is if you as Donald Trump, not you as Natalie Orpet, decide that you're throwing in the towel and going home, which is a very attractive option, I'm sure the Israelis are still getting rocketed. And so if Iran does not want to stop, you really risk putting yourself in the position of abandoning Israel, which, though that would not make sorrow, create sorrow in the American left, would create sorrow and anger in parts of Trump's base, and would, by the way, infuriate the Israelis, who actually do have, as Scott says, a long term armed conflict that they rely on our support with respect to. And so I don't think it's quite as easy to turn this off, at least not without some degree of making Iran cry uncle. Iran has to want to turn it off, too. And that of course, raises the question with of which Iran, which is given how little I understand the internal machinations of the Islamic Republic, much less how few of those machinations I think any of us understands now that we've killed so many people and it's not clear who's making decisions, I don't even know how to begin to evaluate that.
- [40:28]
Scott R. Anderson
I think it's a really astute observation and underlooked. Part of this is exactly how you go about getting a Ceasefire for the situation given these dynamics. The one thing I'll say just to add to that, it's again, this is an area where allies historically have been and will be here very key. Europeans have a whole broader range of economic to some extent like cultural ties because they have so much more education transfers and Iranian populations in Europe. They have lots of different levers they can use and frankly lots of different inroads they can used to communicate with different parts of Iran. And of course you have allies like Oman that's traditionally played the role of a major interlocutor with Iran and other than one or two events early in the conflict largely has not been targeted by Iran as I believe so really last time I checked it's been a week or so since I've checked the statement. But last time I checked their foreign minister was very much still urging parties to come back to the table. Presumably will play that role and can help sort through who's in control. But that's the real risk you run when you do things including today. Today or yesterday we got the news that they had killed Ali Larajani, the kind of national security advisor, essentially the person who kind of been in charge of at least people thought was remained of the security apparatus. When you take out so many senior people and security apparatus for organizations like this, they fracture the people holding the guns don't go away. They become decentralized and that becomes much harder negotiated with here. I mean that's always been a critique of a like Israeli military strategies, Israelis for this reason and often complemented with they hit the people in charge. And if it's in an ongoing conflict, it's paired with dramatic targeting across the board to eliminate capacity as well which we've seen in Gaza and Lebanon. Are seeing again in Lebanon now and to some extent I think that's what we're seeing in Iran. But you think of other cases where the United States has tried this, like in Iraq with the Qasem Soleimani killing. What people forget about that is that led to months of hugely spiked hostilities by Iraqi Shia penalty Iran backed Shia militia groups in Iran in Iraq, excuse me, that really destabilized the situation and really precipitated eventually what ultimately became the US troop withdrawal. It was not as much as it liked to be trumpeted to everyone, including like Joe Kent in his resignation letter a few days ago. The Soleimani killing was far from clear to me like a strategic victory because they're not clear to me to actually benefit anything. And a big reason of that as despicable a person as he was. And the big reason for that is because it eliminated the one control valve that you could negotiate with over a lot of these other actors until the IRGC re establishment that was under gave control. And I'm worried they've kind of put themselves in a similar situation here with Iran itself. Ari, does that sound right to you? I mean, how should worried should we be about us having diminished Iran's infrastructural capacity enough that there isn't one Iran we can negotiate with enough at least if we're looking for 100% cessation of the risk against everything from shippers to Israel?
- [43:18]
Ari Tabatabai
Yeah. Before I answer that, I do want to kind of emphasize the point that you guys just made about the importance of allies and partners in all of this. And the, this is, this goes back to the whole notion that, you know, multilateralism is hard.
- [43:29]
Natalie Orpet
Right.
- [43:29]
Ari Tabatabai
Negotiating with allies can be deeply frustrating at times. I can tell you firsthand, I have a few gray hairs from, from that. But it is important because they have things that we don't have. And in, especially in this case, you know, we haven't had diplomatic relations really with Iran since 47 years ago. Sure, there have been kind of direct negotiations at different points, but we don't have a presence really there that is direct. We haven't really had that much of an insight into a lot of things. And we get all of that from allies and partners. And so when you kind of, you know, try to do it the easy way by prioritizing unilateralism, you're kind of given up that. That capacity, that capability. And I think that's really unfortunate in terms of the Iranian regime, I do think, you know, I think it's too early to say on a lot of these things, but the current trajectory we're on, I think takes care of the problem in a cosmetic way, if you will. It's replacing a few individuals at the top up, but the fundamental infrastructure that the architecture that the regime is based on is still there. And I think we talked about this a few weeks ago when we did the kind of big rat sec episode on Iran. But part of the concern is that we are actually allowing for the more radical parts of the regime, which I know is kind of baffling to people because this is already a radical regime, but there are more radical portions of it, elements of it. And those are the people who are now coming out untouched top currently. Now I'm urging caution because we're not at the end of this yet. And the President has clearly indicated that he's willing to kind of keep going until, you know, he deems necessary, essentially. And he'll take, you know, he'll take out or will take out individuals who kind of succeed the people who are being killed. So I'm not sure where the ships are gonna fall by the time everything stops. But. But right now, we are not on a good trajectory in terms of people who are going to be more willing to talk to us, who are going to be more moderate in some of the major issues that we worry about. And then the last piece on the nuclear program specifically, look, the major thing is that the material, the highly enriched uranium that Iran has is still there, as far as we know. Right.
- [45:49]
Benjamin Wittes
Do we know where it is?
- [45:51]
Ari Tabatabai
Not publicly. I don't know what folks have insight into, but no. And that is a problem. And it's a problem that we are probably reinforcing the regime's view now that the previous supreme Leader is gone and is replaced by his more radical and even less kind of more unhinged son, that there will be a decision at some point to resume a nuclear weapons program. And that is fundamentally a really bad thing that is going to just make all of the other issues which we have with Iran even worse, regardless of whether we kind of degrade their missile capability, their drone capability, et cetera, et cetera. The nuclear piece is really the piece that kind of makes everything far worse. And it's not clear to me that the administration has a response to that. Right. It's not even clear that that's really an objective anymore. Or if it is, it's kind of down the list from all the other things. We're more focused on the Iranian navy and the IRGC navy than we are in the nuclear program. And that is just baffling to me because the Iranian naval capabilities are not the things that I am the most concerned about. And I realize that sounds funny because we just spent the past 45 minutes talking about Iran mining the Strait of Hormuz. But fundamentally, the nuclear program is going to make everything much worse.
- [47:08]
Scott R. Anderson
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- [49:53]
Scott R. Anderson
so we've blended our first two topics a bit, but I want to pivot back to the second topic before we run out of time. That's this question of Europe and specifically I want to talk about move a little bit away from the Iran context because I think, Ari, you were the one who pointed out we are still in the shadow of the Greenland debate. And I will say I have been amazed by somebody who's watched us pretty closely for a decade or two at this point point about the shift in tenor of European perspective since Greenland. It's subtle because it does have that mushmouth sort of characteristic that Ben noted. Europeans tend to be fairly diplomatic, generally speaking, particularly when they're approaching things like relationships with difficult relationships with difficult allies, which the United States has become at this point. But it's been pretty remarkable some of the strong coordinate action in regard to Greenland shortly after it and now around Iran, a complicated issue set. I think that many of the states genuinely have mixed feelings about because many of them have recognized Iran is a legitimate problem before and its nuclear program, remember, the G7 backed the limited strikes against Iran's nuclear program in the summer. Did not do it this time. Canada and Australia did, but even then with a little bit of cabining, but the other G7 states didn't. So I'm wondering how far this goes. I mean, and we've heard talk of the idea of a more independent defense Europe repeatedly over the last few decades, more often from Americans than Europeans in many cases because Americans want to lower the burden of defending Europe. At least some Americans do. And this is including many people in President Trump's camp, at least in terms of strategic views. There are a lot of people who share that goal. And that's of course, part of what Trump has trumpeted in the past, getting them to come to 5% defense spending. But in my mind at least, the political rhetoric seems to reflect a real shift in approach that makes me view these things much more credibly and real. It's not just Europe. You also have Mark Carney and Australia talking about Canadian, Australian security cooperation, literally opposite corners of the world, united only by the fact they're commonwealth states and both traditional allies of the United States now facing a slightly different situation. Natalie, let me come to you on this because I know you are somebody who follows European politics to some extent. You know, do you see the same shift in tenor and how far do you think it goes? What are the limits of the Europe's ability to pivot towards Europe for a Lack of a better way to describe it towards trying to develop an indigenous defense capability that can at least, you know, compensate for one that might be less committed or reliable on the US side than it might have seemed, you know, five or 10 years ago.
- [52:32]
Natalie Orpet
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that affect the feasibility of that. I mean, one, and Ari would be able to speak to this component of it better than I, but it takes a long time to build up defence capacity in a logistic sense. And there's a lot of infrastructure in place from NATO that presumably could be sort of translated over to more of an EU structure, but it won't be a fully capable unit yet. Right. The United States is full withdrawal from it would be a major blow and there would just be a long Runway of needing to fill the gaps that it leaves. I think the things that have really dramatically changed though, is more and more people, both on the political side and on the general population of Europe side, believe what the United States is saying and believe that they might leave and believe that they are no longer they, we are no longer a reliable partner and that the sort of values based alliance is just blown up by the total abandonment of the values that everyone thought were the premise of the relationship from the beginning. And I think Greenland was a real, real signal of that to people. I've spoken with a lot of European friends, so this is anecdotal, but also just reading the news, there's just so much outrage about Greenland. And it is, as Ari said, it's not something that is fading from memory the way that it is for Americans. And it's not something that's being written off as like, oh, Trump learned that there are going to be things in the Arctic now and Greenland's really big on a map and therefore Greenland and nevermind, it's complicated. That was a signal of the United States thinks that it is going to just blow up the entire international order by invading a sovereign nation. And I think that represents a fundamental shift that may be the symbol of it or the catalyst of it. But I don't think that that sense of unity over values is ever going to come back, at least certainly not in the short term. Another piece of it that may serve as a limitation but may also be evolving is the difficulties that Europe and the EU always has in becoming a unified unit when it has a lot of political diversity domestically and between nations that are member states of the eu. And there's a lot of really complicated politics domestically for a lot of the countries that make up the eu, but there's been discussion over the course of the last many years of yes, on the one hand there is is sort of increasing power in many countries of far right political parties and that really changes the calculus of how internationalized European countries can think of themselves as. But also there's been sort of speculation and discussion of will that change as Europe sees the costs domestically of Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine? Does it suddenly seem to be the case that oh, maybe there's a point to the need for robust defense and that it's not just that the absence of the United States is bad because there's no longer a security guarantee, but I think there was a genuine belief among a lot of Europeans that the United States security guarantee was not even necessarily as important as Americans assumed that everyone believed it to be because that was representative of a more saber rattling world and the glory of the post World War II international order was going to be that countries would find a different way of dealing with each other than a resort to armed conflict for which the United States security guarantee would be so crucial. So I think it's really difficult to tell whether those domestic pressures that would in limit member states ability to up their cooperation with each other across national borders might shift. If public opinion is changing enough to reconsider how internationalized political leaders are able to be because of domestic political pressures, then maybe there will be more of a move toward meaningful steps toward a European only defence mechanism.
- [57:12]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah. Ari, I want to pull you into one particular part of this that I was really struck by. Mostly because of the seriousness with which it seemed to be offered, although I'm not sure people are willing to accept it. And that is the nuclear vision that we saw French President Emmanuel Macron put forward, which resembles a lot to me kind of what the Eisenhower era nuclear policy of the United States was, which was we're going to forward deploy nuclear weapons then it was US weapons on in Allied bases to some extent I think we found out much later actually on allied planes at times with kind of a dual turnkey sort of activation method. I could be getting the details wrong on that, but that's my vague recollection from recent last 20 years or so revelations. Now in the French model they're saying, look, we might be able to do something like this, have expand French nuclear capacity. So I think that's been a point of tension with the United States and other countries in the past. But France is very much a nuclear power, has at times in the past expressed an interest in expanding its capacity as A nuclear power leaning towards that, but doing it in a way that extends an umbrella around Europe, something that the UK could be in a position to do as well, hasn't been as lean forward on that. That nuclear element is for Europe, I think, essential. That is the essential element. The Americans offer not just nuclear capacity, but nuclear parity with Russia. That's always been the main threat and the main edge the United States offered, or other one. But that's the big umbrella, important one. And that does go away as US credibility falters, even if the capacity remains there. So how would this fit in? I mean, would it be a complete replacement for the US Model? Would it supplement it? And how realistic does it seem to you? In what timeframe?
- [58:50]
Ari Tabatabai
Thank you for bringing this up because I'm about to have a co authored piece in Law Firm soon on this particular topic, so. Yeah, so President Macron laid out, I think, you know, he's been building toward this moment for a few years now, since essentially the beginning of his tenure. And what he laid out in this speech was much more, I think, comprehensive than what he had been alluding to before. It is not as important to know a complete replacement for U.S. extended deterrence. And it is very much supposed to be additive to it. So far, I think eight countries have agreed to partake in this construct that he's offering. And he said that multiple other countries are. There's ongoing conversations with other countries to bring them on board as well. There's a couple of different ways that this could play out. One of them would be, to your point, a kind of a UK France construct. But that is going to be a little more challenging because the UK is much more reliant on the United States and for its nuclear weapons program specifically. So, you know, the autonomy that France offers is going to be fairly different from what the UK would be able to offer. You're correct to point out that the parity piece is not there for France. Right, France. The public estimates are way, way lower in terms of the number of nuclear warheads that it has. It also only has a dyad. It does not have the kind of the triad like the United States does have. But you actually don't necessarily need parity as much as you need the political credibility.
- [60:26]
Benjamin Wittes
You should actually say what the triad is.
- [60:28]
Ari Tabatabai
I'm sorry, I should. I should say what the triad is. Folks may remember a few years ago this was a question in one of the presidential debates and some individuals were not able to define it. So that's essentially being able to use ground air and naval launched nuclear weapons. So, yeah, so you don't necessarily need to match if you're France, the number of nuclear warheads that Russia has. You need the credibility though, to be able to showcase that you will be able to hold Russia at risk if it does use a nuclear weapon. I do think this is an important step forward. I actually think it's a pretty positive step from the US Perspective as well, because having that additive not replacement for US Nuclear deterrence is actually a good thing. And I think it is in line with what both Republican and Democratic administrations have been looking at, which is to not Natalie's point, more autonomy in Europe to be able to kind of take care of European security while we shift our attention to other things. What the other things are obviously a point of debate at this point in the United States. They weren't for a while. But I think a more kind of autonomous Europe is a positive thing. I do think that there are a number of challenges here. One is that Macron's term is going to end next year. He's not able to seek reelection. He's already completed. He's going to be completing his two five year terms as the French constitution allows him to do. According to polls as we speak now, the far right national Rally is well positioned to win those elections. And the National Rally has been much more kind of skeptical, both of Europe, much friendlier to Russia and very traditionally opposed to this kind of construct that Macron, Macron is proposing in terms of not necessarily extended deterrence, but kind of Europeanizing the French deterrent. So unless Macron is able to actually make significant progress toward the realization of this construct, I don't know that France will be able to make that much progress toward it after 2027. I don't think we're going to see the same thing we see in the US now, where every four years we have these wide sweet swings back and forth. But I think that the National Rally is much less inclined to actually take positive steps toward it. So I think part of it is a time crunch right now to make sure that they make enough progress before the elections in 2027. I should add though, that Macron's speech was very well crafted. He was able to actually get quite a bit of support even from the National Rally. And the way he characterized the way that this program would, this project would be implemented. And so he hasn't been getting as much pushback that he had previously. So he did a good job of kind of, you know, making sure that he framed it as A, you know, the French nuclear deterrent will remain a French nuclear deterrent and, you know, kind of talking about how it would preserve command and control and so on and so forth, and, and would not necessarily be looking to kind of diversify that piece of it to European. To other European allies.
- [63:40]
Scott R. Anderson
It's really a fascinating development and like one with the potential to be kind of revolutionary on a lot of different fronts, but something we'll keep an eye on. But we still have a third topic we need to get to, and I do not want to miss out on it entirely. So let us bring our focus to the home front for a little bit before we wind up our time together today. It has been a rough few weeks in a lot of ways for the, the Defense Department, what somebody call the Department of War, but I will not. We have seen both, in one sense, the pursuit of a incredibly effective, from a tactical perspective and operational perspective, military operation, degree of integration with Israeli forces on targeting, intelligence sharing, interoperability. That's extraordinary. A campaign that's been able to wreak a extraordinary amount of damage against a party that was seen as a. Not a near peer by any stretch of the imagination, but a substantial military power. Power and wreak devastating, devastating consequences, particularly in the first 24 hours of the conflict. I've seen reports saying that they hit over 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours, something that really lent itself to be able to quickly eliminate so much of its key military capacity. At the same time, all that tactical success has not led to a lot of strategic success. It's not clear what the administration clearly was trying to achieve when it took this military action against Iran. We haven't got clearly stated objectives. If the objective was to do anything other than aggravate the global economy, trigger responses against allies, against the region. It's clear that they haven't accomplished yet because those have been the big main changes from this conflict. And then we have really, really troubling cases like in the first 24 hours, the fact that an American rocket appears to have targeted a girls school in southern Iran, killing between 150 and 200 Iranian children. I have no doubt this was not an intentional targeting in the context of a choice made by policymaker to deliberate knowing that this was a school. But the fact that it happened is troubling. You know, such things do happen in conflict. But we are getting reports now that this may have happened in part because of faulty intelligence that wasn't fully vetted that may have been fed into some of the AI systems being used to do some of this targeting, which didn't understand the extent to which it was outdated or didn't identify it. And importantly, this is happening in a context where a lot of the mechanism and personnel that are intended to prevent and limit these sorts of incidents, to mitigate some of the harm that is inherent in warfare to civilians have been stripped down and frankly, vilified by the secretary of Defense who has painted them as instruments of weakness. Natalie, I know you've been following this pretty closely. You and I wrote about this a little bit in the context of the second strike on September 2, in the context of the maritime strikes against two shipwrecked individuals, which raises big law firm conflict questions. Talk to us a little bit about what you see as some of the lessons for these past few weeks and what it shows about those campaigns. I mean, how much of what we're seeing can we attribute to those degradation? What are the consequences of it and to what extent maybe what are we likely to see as things go on and as two or three years under the Trump administration if it continues on this trajectory at the Defense Department around civilian harm arm issues?
- [66:55]
Natalie Orpet
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a ton to unpack here, but I'll start with the vilification of the law of armed conflict and rules of engagement, which Hegseth has been making a number of statements about, and ever since his confirmation hearings, frankly, has talked about how law and lawyers are just an impediment that is restricting American lethality. And we're this powerful military that needs to be unleashed so that the United States can realize its full power, et cetera, et cetera. And vilifying lawyers, vilifying the rule of law, thinking about it all that way is disturbing enough, but let me take it back a bit because I think there is among many people, and probably fairly, a tendency to, to roll your eyes at the notion that lawyers are so important and law is so important. And a lot of people think, well, it's war. What does law even have to do with anything? And they think that people like Scott and I are cute in our insistence on the law of war, but the law of war is itself merely an articulation of the idea that war is supposed to be for the purpose of accomplishing an objective right. The rules around, for example, not just indiscriminately murdering civilians is not just because that seems like a humane and moral thing to do. It's also because nobody really wants wars to last forever. And when you kill a bunch of civilians, unless you're really believing that the purpose of your conflict is collective punishment, which, side note, is itself unlawful. But if we're not talking about law here, seems pretty morally reprehensible that you would just indiscriminately kill people because they happen to be of a certain nationality or within certain borders. Even setting that aside, it's pretty bad strategically for trying to ultimately end a conflict. You're just. I mean, this is a very obvious thing to say, but the more you kill civilians and have stories of innocent schoolchildren being murdered, the more you're incentivizing resentment and pushing people toward feeling a sense of justifiable grievance that innocent people were killed. And all of these rules, niceties, whatever, are based on the premise that if there's going to be a war, it should at least be effective, and it's not effective to just indiscriminately murder civilians. So I want to say that as a rhetorical response to the hegseths of the world who think that law is just an impediment, because I disagree with the premise generally, but also the underlying message of that sort of rhetoric is that it should be okay to kill for the sake of killing, because we can't. We can go on these really cool military adventures and conduct these amazing operations and have this incredible technology and interoperability with the amazing capacities of the Israelis and conduct these operations, and they're really cool. That doesn't actually accomplish anything over the long term. This is not Call of Duty. This is international relations over time. So I think that's my little diatribe on that front. The other thing I'll say, and then I'll pass it over to other people, to be a little less of a soliloquy, is, I think that the strike itself seems pretty clearly to me to be a demonstration of what happens when you fire all of the Jags who are in place, both within DoD and at the operational level. DoD made a specific policy change allowing commands to have more authority to conduct their own strikes, their own operations, without having to get sign off from the White House. Which means there are fewer layers of checks on whether an operation, whether a strike is lawful, and whether it is wise, strategically wise, and legal are two separate considerations. Presumably even hegseth would care about the strategic value. But getting rid of lawyers, including only at the operational level, means that there aren't people in place to do things like a legal check on an operation like this. Probably, or at least maybe would have caused taught in the vetting process. The fact that the target was not correctly identified, that it was based on old information, because it would have had to do a pretty involved assessment of the proportionality and discrimination and the other principles of ihl. That's part of the job.
- [72:12]
Scott R. Anderson
So, Ari, let me pull you into here because I know you worked on these issues in your time at the Defense Department. So my sense of it from my limited exposure to some of these issues is that a lot of what the Trump administration has pulled down under Secretary Hegseth has been things that were intended to help reinforce and inculcate a culture, to embed these things. I'm not sure, although I'd be curious about it. How much of the institutional mechanisms really change the checks that are formally in place insofar as you are still having people who are trained under the old system and will still be sensitive to some of these things the same way they were six months ago, nine months ago, but that over time, obviously as new personnel come in, they're not subject to the same training and to some extent to socialization and acculturation that could decline and certainly isn't going to improve, like the way some of the measures the Biden administration put in place, like the center for Accident will come in. Then again, they also have the cultural impact where which is raising these issues is something that is now likely perceived as a career liability for military lawyers and officers and people making these decisions. So how do you balance this? What are the real concerns here? How concerned should we be about these sorts of actions and how does it intersect with operational mission? I'm struck particularly by the hit on this Iranian vessel outside of Sri Lanka, which was not engaged in any sort of hostile activity. I think international law would say you're in an armed conflict with another state. If you buy that in the United States. That's its position with collective self defense in Israel. It's therefore basically in an armed conflict or acting on Israel's behalf. In an armed conflict against Iran, it can target this vessel. But there's a question there about pursuing maximum lethality. Is that wise? Is that prudent? How does it impact with the broader parameters? That clearly seems to me to track some of these other questions, saying, yeah, maybe lawfully you're allowed to have this level of collateral damage, but is that practical? What are the onset effects of that for allies, broader public legitimacy of the conflict? All these other things that we've learned are important for sustaining armed conflicts for the last 30 or 40 years. How does that all end up together? As somebody who's wrestled with this from within government.
- [74:22]
Ari Tabatabai
Yeah. I do think there is kind of an institutional piece to it. And you're right to point out there's also a cultural element to it. Right. The administration has been dismantling different parts of this architecture that we're setting set up, to Natalie's point, not because it was the frou frou thing of pleasing the lawyers and doing the morally correct thing, although it was also that, but because it made strategic sense. Right. General Grankovich, who is the EUCOM commander, I'm going to quote him because he said, I think he really. If you don't want to hear it from the lawyers and from the civilians who kind of did this, hear it from the EUCOM command, quote. What I've observed over the course of studying air power and history is that anytime you attack a civilian population, you usually end up finding that it just hardens their resolve. And we're seeing that already. Like, we. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to characterize the sentiment of 90 million Iranians in a diverse country, but we're already seeing reporting across multiple outlets that, you know, are showing that people who, within Iran who may have been actually kind of sympathetic to this action, who may have seen it as us coming and helping them kind of, you know, free themselves away from their oppressors, are now turning against us because of the civilian casualties, because of the fact that we're hitting cultural sites that are important to them. And so, you know, that was part of the reason why we set up this architecture at the Defense Department department. So that we would have that moral high ground that would allow us to kind of meet our strategic objectives. And all of that is being dismantled. The center for Excellence that you outline is one of them, but there are other pieces of it. In the office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, under Secretary of Defense for Policy, we had this kind of. Was called Chimer, the civilian harm mitigation response that was essentially dismantled fairly early on in the administration, to Natalie's point, the jags being fired pretty early on in the administration. All of these things are institutional, but they're also cultural. They show to service members, they show to the civilian workforce within the department that this is not only not a priority anymore, it's actually, like, bad for your career. Right. It is something that we don't want people to be thinking about, about. And it is part of Secretary Hexseth's kind of ongoing rap about replacing legality with lethality. The trouble, I think, of making policy around Buzzwords like this, buzzwords that are ill defined, like lethality, is that that does not make a strategy. Right. That does not necessarily allow you to meet your operational end goals. And then the last piece is to your point, point, Scott, just because you can't do something, it doesn't necessarily mean you should, even if that's the case legally. Because what we do in conflict can backfire, can come back, and it can be something that adversaries do to us, right? So from the perspective of feeding into propaganda, from adversaries, from the perspective of kind of, you know, showing that we have pushed the envelope, we've allowed this is acceptable behavior, we should not be engaging in those things just because we have the capability to do it. We have the United States military. Military has a lot of capabilities. It can do a lot of things. It doesn't mean that it necessarily should do those things.
- [77:49]
Benjamin Wittes
I just want to put some meat on some of the bones that both Ari and Natalie have articulated here. This is data from a paper that Shane Harris wrote for the Hoover Institution a number of years ago. So During World War II, it took a fleet of 1,000 B17 bombers, bombers with a total crew of 10,000 men, to reliably destroy a ground target in the Axis. A generation later in Vietnam, it took 30 F4 fighter bombers, each with two people flying it, to reliably destroy a target. So that's a 99% decline in manpower. Then comes the invention of precision guided munitions. A single smart bomb could do the work of a thousand planes during World War II. And by the time we went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, one pilot in one plane could destroy six targets. Now, of course, you don't even need the pilot in the plane because you can fly them unmanned or with Tomahawks or whatever. Now, it is easy to dismiss that. You are. You're not carpet bombing cities anymore. So you. It's, it's not, you know, that's a bunch of what, what Hegseth would call jagholes or. But what that really is is lethality, right? If you're not speaking Hegsethian gobbledygook, the ability to not destroy an entire city because you only want to destroy one building in it. That is an increase of lethality, right? It's a decrease of the total amount of death that you have to impose in order to be effective. Now, I want to say that it is wrong of Pete Hegseth and a lot of people like him, him to talk about that as sort of niggling legal compliance that's called effectiveness. And whether you channel, whether you look at the people who don't die because you're being effective, which is the fundamental demand of the law of armed conflict, that you think about the people that you could avoid killing. Right. That you focus on the people who are actually lawful targets. Targets. Or whether you think about that in terms of you're just going to be a more effective military, you're talking about the same thing. And there is something. So, I mean, I share Natalie's kind of visceral allergy to the dismissal of the rhetoric of legality, but I want to focus here on something else. When Hed says contrasts legality and lethality, he's moronically wrong. Legality and lethality are the same thing, if you know what you're talking about. And it's actually nobody who drops bombs thinks the US Army Air Corps was more effective over Tokyo than it is now in Iran. Iran. Nobody. Nobody could think that. And I would argue it isn't even more lethal. We never managed to, you know, kill the Japanese high command. We do manage to take out the Iranian high command. Well, it's just 100,000 Tokyo residents that we're not killing now. And so I. I really think there's something like it is right and proper for Natalie to focus on how malevolent and evil this is. But I also don't want to drop the point that it's stupid and really kind of illiterate about the history of weaponry, the history of what we thought was possible in terms of precision targeting and why we do precision targeting, which is partly because we're complying with the law, but it's partly because we really want to kill the person over here, and we want to make sure we get him and we're good at aiming, you know, like. Like that. That is not. It has humanitarian implications, and they're really, really important, but it's also about effectiveness.
- [82:43]
Natalie Orpet
Yeah. And that's the point I was trying to make earlier with saying that the premise of international law, the purpose of these niceties of law, is exactly that. It's that war shouldn't last forever. And one of the ways to make sure that war doesn't last for generations upon generations is to make sure you don't perpetuate the sense of need to continually combat an enemy and continue to make more enemies for more generations. Generations of people who have watched their innocent loved ones and their children be murdered at schools. And I think that to the effectiveness point, I mean, Ben, you're exactly right. And I think it's wise to situate it in the historical context because it does make it clearer that the ability to do things with precision is better for actually achieving objectives. The other point I was trying to make though, though, is it does concern me that Hegseth's rhetoric suggests she may actually disagree with you, that lethality should mean effectively killing the people you want to kill to as a means of reaching your objectives of the war, and may in fact just mean lethality in numbers. And that's what really concerns me, that whether or not that's what he actually means, that some people are hearing it that way, that it's just, you know, the more killing we can can do, the better, because that's cool. And look at all the cool machines we have, which is obviously not effective. And we have our own very recent example of why it's not effective. The whole reason that the civilian harm mitigation and response policy was put together was that Congress asked or told really the DoD to do so in the 2019 NDAA. And that was in response to Afghanistan and Iran, Iraq, because there was so much killing of civilians by US Troops and the military didn't have any means of counting or really investigating thoroughly civilian deaths. And so they weren't learning from them. And so the deaths continued. And then the United States stayed in a war in Afghanistan for 20 years. And that is where at least I think everyone would agree that that is not an effective use of the military or an effective military operation.
- [85:08]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, it is certainly an important set of topics we will no doubt revisit in the future, but for now we are out of time. But this would not be Rashford's security. Of course we do not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the weeks to come. Natalie, what did you bring for us this week?
- [85:20]
Natalie Orpet
Well, this is quite a tone change from my previous statements. I brought a delightful thing for the people with smallish children in their lives or who are looking for gift ideas for said children, which is a subscription. How to describe it? Cooking kit that my parents gave to my 7 year old son for his birthday. It is called Radish box and every month you get a very cute little box with three note cards containing recipes from a different country or cuisine tradition. It's usually timed for some holiday, so for the Lunar New Year there were Chinese recipes. They also this is really good for little kids. Send along a little tool along with each kit because it's fun to get toys with your kitchen stuff. So I am now in possession of a Dumpling Press for the Lunar New Year for our dumpling recipes.
- [86:21]
Scott R. Anderson
Always useful.
- [86:22]
Natalie Orpet
It's a great way to supplement your own kitchen, but it's been actually really delightful. We have a delicious sticky toffee pudding that I will probably bring into the office tomorrow because it was a gargantuan quantity and it should not be left alone in my home. And it has little along with the recipes, has a little bit of information about the country and the tradition of the cuisine. It comes with an apron where you get to iron on little patches of the country that's once you cook all the recipes in your box. It's very well curated for kids and the recipes thus far have actually been pretty good and very fun to do together. So highly recommend.
- [87:03]
Scott R. Anderson
I love it. I have a little chef at home myself. My 2 year old now has started obsessively watching. On weekends I often turn on cooking videos on YouTube and down in the living room while I'm trying to keep them quiet so my wife can sleep a little bit longer. And my 2 year old's gotten into that now. So maybe, maybe this is in our future. Ari, what did you bring for us
- [87:19]
Ari Tabatabai
this week I am going to continue on the culinary journey, although for adults, I think, although children can also partake.
- [87:27]
Scott R. Anderson
They won't though.
- [87:28]
Ari Tabatabai
They never do so as listeners though. I was in Asia for two weeks and half of that was spent in Taiwan where I had a revelation. I went to a night market and had this bow at one of the indigenous stands there and I bit into it and it was a pork bell bao and it had this kind of pepper on there that was like nothing I've experienced before. It had a little bit of citrus, a little bit of pepper and it just kept unfolding in my mouth. It was incredible. So anyway, I went on a journey. It's called mountain pepper or magao, which I apologize to anyone who actually speaks Chinese for the lack of tones. But I went on a journey to try to acquire said pepper, going all the way way to a farmer's association where they just looked at me like this weird American who's showing up and mispronouncing this thing that is apparently kind of like obscure outside of a certain area. Anyway, I managed to acquire their entire stock of Macau, which I now have in my home and I plan on putting on everything going forward. So here's the Macau.
- [88:32]
Scott R. Anderson
Oh, I'm very curious. I want to check this out. Bring some into the office. I will go next and I'll let Ben have the last word here. I'M going to share a little bit of a tech recommendation because I've got a lot of chat. Jealous looks and nods, mostly from Alan Rosenstein. For my portable tech setup, which I've been doing some traveling lately. I've been going to some conferences, I've been working back and forth in some shops. And I have a kit that I bring with me that I think I've mastered, the portable work office kit. And it's kind of amazing because it fits like in my hand most of the time and if worst case, in a slim bag. So here it is. Two recommendations in particular. I have an iPad, M4 or whatever that's not that interesting, but I do like it. It's cheap, it's easy, you don't need The Pro. The M4 does it all. I found this awesome iPad case that I traded in my old M4 that has a keyboard that separates off. So if you're very tall like me, you can take the iPad and hang it on something, then watch it at like eye level so you can actually use it in a usable way. It's kind of amazing. And a little pocket for the sleeve and like nine different ways to stand it up. This is amazing. When I'm in a conference now, I'd usually just hang it on the chair in front of me and then type in on the keyboard. And I don't have to hunch my neck over like this because I'm too tall. It doesn't actually work. And then this amazing anchor which used to sponsor the podcast occasionally come back to us. Anker, I'm giving you free advertising. It's a great charger, 10K Fusion built in cable charger with a little USB C cable. It's a little handle and you can plug it in the wall. So it's a charger and a battery pack. It's amazing. So I just plug this in. I'm going to charge my iPad right up, take it out of the wall. You don't even have to leave it plugged in. You can plug it in across the room, come back and get it. It's amazing. It's a great portable kit. I'm recommending it for folks out there. Anchor era. Come back, sponsor the podcast. Why not? You can get some free advertising, but for now I'll throw you on great products. And as I've gotten a lot of questions about this, I thought I'd share it with listeners. I'll throw links into the show. Notes Ben, now it is finally your turn. Bring us home. What do you have for an object lesson this week.
- [90:20]
Benjamin Wittes
Well, as you know, Scott, I do consider it a shonda that lots of people in this country are not talking about what I'm wearing. And so every now and then I make a Get Ready with Me video. I think the world doesn't have enough mid-50s kind of male midlife crisis Get Ready with Me videos. And I'm personally on a campaign to fix that problem. And so this morning I got up up and I knew I had my court date and it was, you know, a high stakes litigation. It was going to go all the way to the Supreme Court. And so I did a Get Ready with Me video, edited of course by the fabulous Catherine Pompilio, who edits all of my fashion videos. And you can find it on my
- [91:15]
Natalie Orpet
Instagram, not on Law Fair time.
- [91:17]
Benjamin Wittes
And you can find it on my Instagram page and on my substack. And I will say, you know, please do share it with comments about how cool my sartorial choices are, whether of Ukrainian embroidery variety or of dog shirt variety. You know, it is a terrible thing that there is not more gossip about me me.
- [91:47]
Ari Tabatabai
I love that. Of all of the Lawfare crew, the only one who does Get Ready with Me videos is Ben. It is extremely on brand.
- [91:56]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, and to say that on that on brand note that brings us to the end of this week's episode. Rational Security is of course a production of Lawfare, so be sure to visit lawfaremedia.org for our show page, for links to past episodes, for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information on Lawfare's other phenomena phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it, be sure to follow LawFire on social media. Be sure to leave a rating review or if you might be listening and sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast, among other special benefits. For more information, visit lawfarmedia.org support our audio engineer and producer this week was me of me and our music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan and we were once again edited by the wonderful Jen Patcha. On behalf of my guests, Ari, Ben and Natalie I hi, I'm Scott R. Andersen. We'll talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye. Reddit is where people go for real human advice. When you advertise on Reddit, your brand shows up alongside the most trusted recommendations on the Internet. It's authentic, brand safe and highly effective across your entire funnel, ready to show up where people trust what they read. New advertisers spend $500 and get $500 in ad credit. Terms apply. Start your test today@business.Reddit.com Podcasts valid for new Reddit ad accounts only. Only valid once per business. Additional terms apply. See business.Reddit.com for more information.