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Hello and welcome back to the David Frum Show. I'm David Frahm, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be Lord Andrew Roberts, the great British historian and man of letters, and we'll be talking about many subjects, but above all I'll the great duel between Churchill and Hitler and why in our day so many people in positions of public prominence seem to have difficulty figuring out who was on the right side of the Hitler Churchill duel and of the Second World War. My book this week will be a novel Burr by Gore Vidal, which raises some questions about the relationship between art and morality. But before my discussion of the novel Burr and before my dialogue with Lord Andrew Roberts, some thoughts on recent dramatic developments. On the morning of Monday, March 23, the world woke up to this startling announcement by President Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social. I am pleased to report that the United States of America and the country of Iran have had over the last two days very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East. Based on the tenor and tone of these in depth, detailed and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five day period, subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President Donald J. Trump this statement at 7:23am was promptly contradicted by the Iranians half an hour later who said there were no negotiations and no dialogue. Now, neither the Iranians nor President Trump are reliable narrators, so who knows what is true. But it does seem to be genuinely true that President Trump wants to back away from his confrontation with Iran. Interviewed on live television a few minutes after this true social post, he said he was on his way to some kind of he was thinking about some kind of joint owned management of the Strait of Hormuz between the United States and the Ayatollah of Iran. So we've gone from calling for regime change, for calling from unconditional surrender to, to a kind of shared management of this, of the waterway between the United States and Iran. Trump obviously wants out, and he wants out in a way that is going to leave almost all the important questions of the war he initiated unresolved. The Iranian nuclear program, the Iranian uranium stockpiles, Iran's missile program, Iran's threat to world oil supplies by its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. All of these seem to be unresolved as Trump seems to be heading out. This story will have many twists and turns. And Trump, of course, is not, despite his pretenses otherwise, the sole decider here. The Iranians get a vote. As Tom Nichols said in one of our discussions a couple of weeks ago, wars end when the loser decides they're over. In tactical military terms, the Iranians are the loser of this conflict. They have taken much more damage, but there isn't peace until the Iranians say, we're ready to stop fighting. And they seem to have concluded, whoever they is, because the leadership keeps being changed by Israeli airstrikes against the leadership. But whoever the leadership is, they seem to have decided they've taken the measure of Donald Trump and they can outlast him. And if they remain standing and continuing to be firing missiles at the Gulf states, at Israel and at shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, they sort of determine the shape of the outcome much more than the United States, the tactical winner. Why is Trump backing away in this way? I think there's a clue in something he said the day before on March 22nd. Now, everyone who's traveled this weekend or read about travel knows what chaos the airports are in. The airports are in chaos because of the cutoff of funding to the Department of Homeland Security, which is the envelope in which TSA and other airport security agencies are located. There have been negotiations between Republicans and Democrats in Congress over the DHS funding. Some kind of deal seemed to have been within reach that would have severed ice, the immigration agency, and said, okay, we'll keep talking about ICE and the restrictions on ice, but the rest of DHS can be funded so the airports get open. And President Trump vetoed that and said, no, I like this issue. I want to keep fighting over the whole of dhs. I want to keep the airport snarled because I don't want to negotiate about just immigration alone because the Democrats will ask me things like the end of face masking cameras on ICE agents that I, Trump, find unacceptable. I don't want to fight that fight alone because I'll probably lose. I want to fight it in conjunction with a bigger fight over airport funding. And here's what he wrote on March 22 at 8:31pm to explain his reasoning. I don't think we should make any deal with the crazy country destroying radical left Democrats unless and until they vote with Republicans to pass the Save American Act. It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate and that includes giving these same terrible people, the Dems who are to blame for this mess. And so it goes Notice the contrast in tone between the country of Iran and the crazy country destroying radical left Democrats. Trump is most comfortable as a war president in a war against half of the United States or somewhat more than half the United States. Ron Brownstein, a colleague of mine at the Atlantic, has observed very well that Donald Trump is a wartime president, yes, but his war is a war of occupation by red America against blue America. Having to be a leader of the whole country in a war against Iran, that's just not in his nature. And when his polls begin to sag and the price of gasoline goes up, he fears not that something is happening to the American national interest that may or may not be outweighed by the strategic goal of ending the Iranian nuclear program, changing the Iranian regime. Whatever his goals are in that conflict, his most important war is the war at home. And if the war abroad asks of him too much, asks him to act like president of all of America, he just doesn't want to do that. Where he is at home and where he is comfortable is as a war leader of part of America against the majority of America. He can't be a national leader, he doesn't want to be a national leader. He doesn't know what it looks like. And he's only comfortable when he's the leader of a faction of the country against the rest of the country. That may be the fundamental reason, even more than the lack of strategy, the lack of stated goals, the lack of explanation, the lack of congressional authorization, why this war in the Middle east has gone so weirdly and strangely and inconclusively despite all the tactical successes of the American and Israeli bombing of Iranian war making capacity, because he can't lead the nation and doesn't want to and doesn't know how and doesn't like it. He can't speak to the nation about anything to do with a national interest. The only interest he knows is his own personal interest and that of similarly aggrieved people in a struggle against the majority of the country that just wants to get through the airline in an expeditious and efficient way. And so, given the choice between winning the war against Iran and waging the war against the crazy country destroying radical left Democrats, it's that second war, the war against the country crazy, the crazy country destroying radical left Democrats that Trump gives priority to now, those are the Democrats, those are the people whose votes he needs in order to fund the war he wants less to fight. And so it looks like he's going to give up the war in Iran to save the war against the crazy country destroying radical left Democrats and all the Americans who oppose him, the majority of Americans who oppose him and want a President who can speak for America in the way that this President never has, never will, never could, doesn't want to and now my dialogue with Lord Andrew Roberts. But first, a quick break.
