← The Bulwark
The Bulwark
Reckoning With Trump’s Iran Defeat. Plus: The Meaning of Memorial Day (w/ Michael Wood)
00:15:30
Loading summary
Transcript20 lines
- [00:01]
A
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to Bulwark on Sunday. It's Sunday noon, just for people watching the recording of May 24th. Since there's fast breaking news, want to get that on the record. It's Memorial Day weekend. That's why I asked my friend Michael Wood to join, to join us today. He's been on the show a couple times, written for the Bulwark, a combat veteran of Afghanistan, Marine officer, rifle platoon commander, I believe, Purple Heart recipient, went back to Texas after serving and I think he stayed active in the Reserves, but small business owner and family in suburbs of Dallas. And so I thought we'd get some reflections to you on Memorial Day, what it means to you and your peers and more broadly in the context of American history. You've written thoughtfully about that. But then there's so much news on foreign policy, which is also something you follow carefully. And you have an excellent substack that people should go to and subscribe to. Anyway, so I thought we'd talk about what's happening in Iran for a few minutes and then talk more broadly about Memorial Day. So, Michael, thanks for, thanks for joining me today.
- [01:08]
B
It's good to be here. Always a great time to talk with you.
- [01:11]
A
Well, it's good to talk to you. And so let's talk. We're speaking, as I say, at noon Sunday. It seems like this deal is going to happen or some deal is going to happen to, for at least a ceasefire. And, well, they're ready to cease fire, to extend the ceasefire or maybe lay the outlines of the real deal to end this war that Trump launched, what, almost three months ago and which you wrote about very well. I went back and looked at your post from the day of the, I think it was February 28, a day,
- [01:39]
B
it was like Saturday, four hours after.
- [01:41]
A
Yeah, that Saturday. And then you wrote one, I think, the next day. And you were, you said that you were, you viewed the war with deep skepticism. You always want what's best for our country. And obviously you weren't going to root against our country, but you were worried you couldn't see how this would end. Well. And so here we are just almost three months later. Thoughts, thoughts on the ending. Thoughts on the whole, the conduct of the whole war.
- [02:03]
B
Well, this is, I mean, this has been horrible. I think it's gone about just about as bad as, as I expected. And it sounds like whatever peace deal or agreement we have, this, this one might actually stick. But I mean, to be honest, we've, we've heard this a lot. And it Seems like the President and Secretary of Defense have only really been focused on sort of talking down the markets over the past few months, not actually waging and winning the war. You know, I think that, to be blunt about it, I think we're just sort of negotiating our surrender. I think we lost this war. I think it's going to be a giant strategic defeat for us, even bigger than the second Iraq war. Even if, thank God, the body count. Thank God, hasn't been as high. It kind of seems like the President, who is at heart just a media creature, is just looking for something that he can grab onto so that his propaganda machine, Fox News, talk radio and whatnot, can sort of have something to say that this wasn't the, the giant defeat that it is, that it seems to be, you know, it takes a special kind of incompetence to take is still, for all of its challenges, the. The strongest military in the history of the world and so mismanage it that you take a weak pariah country and sort of turn it into a middle power that has to be, you know, sort of respected, which is what he's done with Iran. I mean, this is just, it's just horrible, you know, across the board. However, however Mag is going to try to spin it.
- [03:42]
A
Yeah. I'm struck by your heartfelt how hard. I mean, you served and so you. Yeah. To see the waste of resources, obviously the human cost, but then the real geopolitical cost. And we talk a little bit about a couple of aspects of it. There's the Strait of Hormuz issue, which Iran may well open the strait now, but still they have a kind of leverage they didn't have before. They've shown they can close it and not sure they're going to fully open it as an international water. We don't know what kinds of private deals are being cut and so forth on that side of it. And then the, just the. For all the boasting of Trump and Hegseth, especially their apparent ability to keep some enough missiles and enough military capacity to keep the strait closed and also to do real damage to US Bases and US Airplanes and certainly. And intimidate the region, I think the real reason Trump didn't restart the war, well, part of it is just he was sick of it and he saw it wasn't, you know, he's not a war president, if we can be honest. He's a, he's a bully and all that. Like it's a war talking president, but not a war president. Doesn't quite have the stomach for that. I think maybe that's just as well, honestly, given how he's done it. But also the degree to which he. Yeah, the, the, that there's real, I mean the, the damage they can do to the neighboring nations. I think that was something that. Further damage to energy markets and all that. So anyway, I just. The sort of the straight side of it and then the kind of Iran's military capabilities not being as destroyed as we said they were side of it to talk about whatever strikes you.
- [05:13]
B
No, I mean, it's, I mean there, there are a bunch of different ways you can approach this. I mean, first of all, it, I don't. Despite what they're saying right now, the various Arab leaders and Sunni leaders, I mean, I think they're going to have to come to some sort of accommodation with Tehran now, which, you know, I've got opinions about Netanyahu, I've got opinions about everything. But it really did seem there for a while that sort of the Shiite crescent had sort of been contained and handled. Whether you're talking about Hezbollah in Lebanon to a lesser extent, the Houthis in Yemen, paramilitaries in Iraq. It kind of seemed like the regime very much was on its back foot even before you get to its domestic problems, which, you know, we forget that in January it looked like absent anything that we did that they might actually fall. And now it seems like again, we've mismanaged things so much that it looks like they're countries in the region are going to have to, some have to come to some sort of accommodation with the mullahs in Tehran. Not to mention the fact that, I mean, if they really want to sprint towards a nuclear weapon, which seems to be what they finally settled on in terms of justifying this war, they probably still can. But even beyond the region, it's, it really is concerning that our navy couldn't really get close. They couldn't actually get close to the straight because they were. We were afraid of losing a ship or losing multiple ships and I mean that's got to be communicating things to, to leaders in other parts of the world, specifically China. I think a lot of our capabilities have been, or our lack of capabilities has been exposed minesweepers and I think over the coming weeks and months, once all sort of the, the propaganda disperses, I think it's going to become clear that we really lost a whole lot of assets, both in terms of planes, but also I think our bases probably took a lot more of a beating than, than people realize right now. So Just, you know, across the board. I, I don't want to say that we're a paper tiger, but I think that our deterrence level on other parts of the. The globe has certainly been diminished.
- [07:34]
A
Yeah, that's a sad fact, but I think an important one. And I think it's also, yeah. Just the general sense that we don't, we say things and make boasts and then don't have to. Can't back them up. I mean, that's never a good thing for a superpower, right?
- [07:47]
B
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Again, I mean I, I really hate like everything within me wants me to not say that the United States military is weak, but at some point you have to say like, we're very much not where we need to be in terms of drone capabilities, in terms of anti drone capabilities. And you know, the sort of, the original sin of this war was that Congress was not involved at all. So the extent that, I mean, I don't think there's any sort of oversight right now. This is just, it's just bad across the board, you know, and I, it's not that I'm, you know, especially intelligent whenever it comes to military issues or foreign policy issues or anything like that. I just sort of. In February, whenever this started, it's sort of mathematical that we have such an incompetent president and such an incompetent Secretary of Defense that they were going to mismanage something big and they were so hubristic after Venezuela and it, it seems like that's how it's worked out.
- [08:53]
A
Yeah, I do think the price that we pay around the world, just based on my own conversations with having Hegseth in particular Trump, okay, people sort of discount him at this point and, but to have the actual secd with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs standing by him, though he was personally less protest than Hexith, obviously, but still up there at the Pentagon saying the things Hecseth was saying. I think people in the U.S. okay, we also got used to that. So we discount him and we don't think much of him anyway, honestly, many of us. But for the rest of the world, this is not, I mean, whatever one thinks of the actual performance of some of these secretaries of defense, and we obviously be critic of Rumsfeld, for example, and other people critical of Cheney and back in the late 80s and 90s and, and others under Obama and so forth, I think the degree to which was like this is the United States of America and we're at, it's at war and this is the Secretary of defense and how he thinks it's appropriate to behave. I think people are just flabbergasted.
- [09:49]
B
Yeah. It's a strange thing. If any of our listeners or watchers have any sort of experience in the military, they'll understand what I mean whenever I say that. Oftentimes the executive officer position or the operations officer position is actually more difficult than the commanding officer position because it's the XO and the operations officer that are actually in the weeds that have to really work through problems, whereas the commanding officer is ideally supposed to sort of have a wider vision and other concerns. So in a strange way, like being the Secretary of Defense is a much more difficult job, you would think, than actually being the president. And it's a job for adults. It really is the largest bureaucracy and most complex bureaucracy in the world, again, probably in the history of the world. And we put a Fox and Friends weekend host with a drinking problem in charge of it. And that is horrible, speaking as an, as an American. But also if you're looking at this as an enemy of the United States or somebody who doesn't want the best, I mean, you got to look and say, man, that is one decadent, unserious country. And unfortunately, it doesn't look like we're going to get through these four years without sort of paying the consequences of that, which is what I think is happening in, in the Middle east right now.
- [11:10]
A
No. And it puts people like I think you and me, I don't speak for you, but you know, who are hawks in a difficult place. This is the least important part of it, that we're in a difficult place, but we probably do need to be to build aspects of, build up aspects of the military. We need to be, and I'm supporter of a strong military and of hard power in general. And if we're going to err a little bit, I'd err on the side of spending a little too much on the military, not a little too little. On the other hand, I don't know, this one support a massive defense request that's going to go to Pete Hexath into which he'll be spending money at his discretion, giving contracts to the Trump kids and stuff. I mean, maybe Congress can structure it in ways that they'll try to. I suppose that, yeah, obviously the money gets put into certain compartments and so forth, but pretty hard to limit the administration from using it as they choose. And I don't know, it's really, it can be a dilemma if you're a conscientious, not Only Republican, but I say Democratic member of the armed services. What if the Democrats take over armed services in the House and the Senate and, and take over the Congress and, and their chair, they chair those committees. I don't, it's very hard actually to know what to do I think over the next two years as a responsible, you know, representative.
- [12:17]
B
No, I mean, I, I, I'm, I consider myself a hawk. I've been a hawk on Iran for as long as I've been sort of following these things. I think that I don't know where we're going to get the money. Whenever we have, you know, over 100 of our, you know.
- [12:32]
A
Right.
- [12:32]
B
The debt to GDP ratio is now over 100. I don't know where we're going to get the money, but I, I do think that we need to spend more on defense, you know, maybe Even, you know, 5% of GDP or something like that. But, you know, if I were in Congress right now and somebody were to bring me this budget, I really would be concerned that this is just going to go to Don Jr. And Eric and other corrupt, you know, insider type deals like that. We're in a bad situation. This is, Elections have consequences and yeah,
- [13:06]
A
and the failure, I mean his ability to get away with not going to Congress has many implications. One of them is this though. Congress feels, well, we didn't, weren't consulted on this, so we weren't sort of, if you're sort of more on the dovish side than we are, you think, well, screw them. I mean, honestly. And as I say, you can't quite blame them. They, you know, they tried to get war powers votes. The Republicans consistently denied it them the chance to do that. And so I don't know, I feel like it's, yeah, I'm, I'm worried that the consequences of this both abroad and at home, the second order consequences in a way will be as serious as the immediate ones, which are pretty obvious in terms of Iran, the IRGC being, you know, running Iran and, and, and neighboring nations having to accommodate them and principle of international waterways not quite being upheld and so forth, you know.
- [13:50]
B
Yeah. And you know, if, if you want to sort of start to talk about Memorial Day.
- [13:56]
A
Yeah, let's, let's do that.
- [13:58]
B
One of the reasons why I had such a bad feeling about this is because I think people, veterans of my generation, people who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan. I wasn't in Iraq, I was only in Afghanistan. You know, we, we got a very good lesson in the fact that war isn't just body counts that war truly is just politics by other means. Nobody's improved upon class fits. And so, you know, whenever I was in Afghanistan, my unit, other units, I mean, we had no problem killing bad guys. But, you know, it dawned on all of us who were paying attention that that didn't necessarily lead to political objectives. And in the same way, you know, the, the Secretary of Defense, the President, other cheerleaders for the, for this administration, they talk a lot about, you know, this many airstrikes and this many killed and whatnot. But that's, that's like saying we didn't get as many runs as the other team, but we got more strikeouts in a baseball game. That's not the metric that counts. And yeah, I mean, I, I, I feel like it's the same thing with, with Iran war. We, we were very impressive in terms of the new AI stuff and doing 11, 000 sorties or whatever. What they're bragging about. That's no, that's just the modern equivalent of McNamara standing in front of, of a chart in the Vietnam War and saying this was how many Viet Cong killed it, it didn't really matter. That wasn't the point. And in terms of Memorial Day, you know, I'm thinking about this a lot because I, I feel like they're being.