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Welcome to the beat, everyone. As we begin this week, Monday evening, we're tracking a lot of stories, including the increasing problems with Donald Trump's Iran war, the way he started it, the way he's running it, risks multiplying. Oil prices are up, as everybody knows. And as we begin the third week of a unilateral war. End game very unclear. And Andrew Weissman will also be here later tonight as Trump tries to gut the First Amendment as we know it. That's a story related to the war because they are trying to censor the right of the free press from the Wall Street Journal and the Murdoch empire all the way to other outlets as well. And we're going to cover that without fear or favor here. We are not going to be censored. So I have that report, which is part legal and part just the freedom to do war reporting. Coming up. We begin, though, with how Donald Trump started this war alone, wanted to basically go it alone. This was an operation that did not involve consulting Congress, other countries, Europe, NATO. It was essentially a US Operation with one other country involved, Israel, but not any of the traditional allies that Republican and Democratic administrations have relied on in the Middle east and in general throughout really the last, say, 60 years of post World War II foreign policy. And so going it alone was a choice, just as starting the war was a choice. And we are seeing very quickly how that choice is working. I'm gonna show you the evidence, not opinion, not saying that the news has some monopoly on how to do foreign policy. But just what we're learning about that choice, I could tell you off top as we start the third week of the war, that 13American service members have been killed here, another 200 have been injured. Some of those stories are harder to tell because we get the information as it comes. Pentagon has released information, the casualties, but we don't have voluminous videos or coverage of that. But keep in mind that human toll, it's rising on the other side of the war. Over 2,000 Iranians have been estimated killed. Today. Iran strikes hit Dubai, the area of Dubai's airport, one of the busiest in the world. Iran also hitting the U.S. embassy in Baghdad over the weekend. U.S. officials reporting 15,000 Iranian targets have now been struck. Today, multiple U.S. allies said that if Trump started this alone and wants to go it alone, well, fine. But they are rebuffing what seem like late unstrategic calls by Donald Trump after starting alone to want allies to only come in when he tries to call them in. Some critics say desperately so you see the Times headline Allies Rebuff Trump's Appeal for Help in the critical Strait of Hormuz, which relates to all of these surging gas prices. Those officials include Germany, Japan, Italy and Australia saying they're not helping right now. Now, that doesn't mean that couldn't change over time, but it is how, as I mentioned to you, the go it alone approach is working. Donald Trump acted without allies for the first two weeks, give or take. Now he wants them in and they're saying no. A reminder that even the awesome unilateral power of the United States does not solve all military and economic challenges. Again, that's just the reality out there. There's hundreds of millions of barrels of oil now that are estimated essentially stuck in the Persian Gulf. And the oil industry telling the White House this fuel crunch, which has only just begun, will, if things don't change, it will, quote, likely worsen. Experts also say that Donald Trump's other ideas to deal with this involve more military engagement, for example, the kind of quasi Pentagon capitalist team of escorting oil tankers. And it's not clear how much Americans would really tolerate that effort, expenditure or the risk of American lives just as a stopgap to get some commercial Exxon oil tankers moving around. Then there's the question of sending in ground troops. That's stoking warnings that Trump could be facing, something we've seen from all the way back to early Vietnam to the Iraq surge and a heck of a lot of other stories that if you're watching this. If you're hearing my voice in America or watching on YouTube abroad, just about everybody knows this history. Maybe Donald Trump didn't, but it's called the escalation trap. And it's what happens when you have open ended commitments and you are the bomber or the occupier, whether by air or land. And the other side of the war are people fighting for their country and lives. Trump was warned about the scenario in advance. The Joint Chiefs told him, according to reports in multiple Oval Office briefings. That's kind of one of the most important kind, that Iran would deploy mines, drones and missiles to close the world's most vital shipping layer. So if you're busy living your life and you're not thinking about the Strait of Hormuz all that often, that's fine. But the PENTAGON and our 17 intelligence agencies have laid this out for a long time. And the Journal has the reporting which might make aspects of Trump's leadership look bad, but they have the reporting that he was told this in advance. That's relevant to how the Trump administration's also trying to censor coverage in the Wall Street Journal. We'll get to that. Trump was, quote, frustrated with all this. Now you see, of course, tankers on fire now in the reporting. Trump then asked, well, why can't the US Immediately reopen the state of Hormuz? So that's later, according to the Times, different reporting again, multiple outlets corroborating this. The very thing he was told would happen, it would be hard to just fix, even with our mighty military. He then has to ask about after the fact. This is increasing the scrutiny on the leadership, the competence, the war planning of a self declared wartime president who might have thought that what he did to a small country in the South American landscape could just be repeated anywhere else. And that the warnings he's hearing he either didn't absorb, didn't believe or didn't understand, which is kind of worse, what it really meant, where we were headed and who would pay the price. Today, the President suggests the Mideast attack was some kind of, quote, habit. So we don't need it. But, but we did it. It's almost, you could say we did it out of habit, which is not a good thing to do. You could call that the kind of candor or, or blurting that you sometimes hear. The president, of course, has jumped around on rationales and defenses. Now he's sort of voicing, for whatever reason, a kind of a critique or a negative view of why we did this, because we Just do this every so often. This is a serious matter. But sometimes, as we know, culture and comics kind of wrap it all up together. Saturday Night Live was giving Donald Trump quite the hard time over the weekend, mocking many aspects of this, including something that just about everyone knows about. In contrast to every other major Mideast war we have faced over the last 30 years, this is the only one where there has not been an actual reason, an actual goal shared. Everybody remembers post 911 Afghanistan, which turned out to be a complex endeavor, but the rationale was toppling a regime that had helped terrorists. So they said the Taliban had to go. That's what we call regime change. The Iraq war was sold on wmd. Whether it was true or not, there was a reason. You have to stop the wmd. This war, as of this third week, doesn't have a consistent rationale from the President or the White House. Something that is riscible. Take a look. If you're wondering why I was in the backseat of this random family's car, I'll tell you the same thing I say when people ask about our plans for Iran. I don't know. Pentagon doesn't know. The impression of the Pentagon chief there says the same thing. He doesn't know the president. If he knows, he's not telling and not telling it. As one consistent rationale. I want to bring in our expert tonight. Tom Nichols is a professor emeritus of national Security affairs at the esteemed US Naval War College, also writes for the Atlantic. Welcome.
