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- [00:00]
A
The American public's just not prepared to walk out one day and find out their ATMs aren't working, they can't get any water, their heat's off, their electricity's off, et cetera. And those things could happen. Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller center of Public affairs at the University of Virginia. I'm Eric Edelman, non resident fellow at the Miller Center, Bulwark contributor, and I'm joined by my partner in all things strategia, Elliot Cohen, professor emeritus of strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and an Atlanta contributor. Elliot, how are you? I'm in the sunshine, but I gather it's raining where you are.
- [00:42]
B
It absolutely is raining. In fact, you may hear rumbles of thunder from outside. It's steamy. And the string beans in our garden have begun attacking our deck. So we're just trying to eat them down. But it's, it's, it's a struggle, and I'm not sure I'm winning. It's good. I've finally been in the same place for two weeks at one time that, you know, that's been a bit unusual for me over the last few months. We recently went to see the Odyssey, and all I'm going to say right now is I think the people who've been saying that there's too much violence, too little sex may have a point. But, but I know we're going to have somebody on who, who actually reads ancient Greek and has a much more nuanced and sophisticated and thoughtful view. So I won't go too far with that.
- [01:30]
A
Yes, well, we'll have to keep our viewers and listeners in suspense. But yes, down the road in several weeks, we will have a mystery guest to help us untangle Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. So I'm going to start with my jackassery, which is the story in the Washington Post that the president, over the weekend when he had his war cabinet meeting in Camp David, kind of began losing it with his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, because of fact that we have munitions shortages. Who knew that this was a problem. This has been discussed in the media for months now that this is an issue. But the is problem. President apparently only discovered it recently. And as you pointed out to me, Hegseth was very quick to throw his deputy under the bus, even though for most folks who follow things at the Pentagon, he seems to be one of the few points of light over there and also working hard to actually solve some of these munitions Problems which are of long standing.
- [02:44]
B
You know, one question I have about that. I'd be curious to know which one you think it is. Do you think Trump was told about these things and either just didn't pay attention or didn't penetrate or he didn't believe it or something like that? And to what extent do you think this reflects people simply not leveling with him and just saying, oh, no, no, Mr. President, everything's fine. I mean, there have now been a number of stories which are quite disturbing, and I think you even see them a bit in the Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan book that people just don't want to give him bad news at all. That's, that's a much worse problem than in the first administration. I mean, who knows? Neither you or I could know, but, but we can speculate since we're podcasters. Which do you think it is?
- [03:31]
A
Well, I think, you know, there's a little bit of both going on. I mean, certainly, I mean, I've just finished this Haberman Swan book, which is really quite equally, in equal measure, both alarming and, you know, kind of terrifying. So, yes, clearly people are walking around amazed, cosseted and not hearing bad news. But in this particular instance, I think it seems pretty clear that General Kane has all along talked about risk, including munitions. But, you know, the question always is also not what people are telling him, but what he hears. And he does seem to have very selective hearing when it comes to some things that he doesn't want to know or doesn't want to think about. And so, I mean, it's fascinating that he's been denouncing the Post story and saying it's not true. I mean, if you want to talk about protesting too much, I think there are at least two truth social posts that deny this story, despite the fact that the journalists at the Post who've done this, I know two of them, and they're very capable journalists, but also saying that anyone talking, anyone leaking about the munitions shortfalls is committing treason, as if our adversaries can't count, as if they can't look at the open source budget documents that tell you, you know, how many missiles of what kind have been purchased and then count up the number of strikes that CENTCOM claims they've executed in Iran. And, and do the math. And of course, your colleagues at CSIS have done a masterful job of documenting. They really have.
- [05:20]
B
So, yeah, so there's, there's nothing surprising. Well, I think we should have more to say about that because I think, I mean, to me, part of the story is Trump really increasingly feeling backed into a corner. But let's maybe let's talk about that when we talk about Iran. So. So my jackassery, I have two jackass. First, you know, at Shield of the Republic, we really, as we look at the world around us, we see a great deal of jackassery, not just in the United States, not just in the Trump administration, although they, they bear the burden of our wrath. But I, I noticed an interesting piece of jackassery in Ireland, country notable for free riding on Western security. For many, many years. The, the executive jet of the prime minister, or as they call him, the T SH Was a Learjet and it was getting long in the tooth, and so they replaced it with a new French jet of the so Falcon for about $60 million and change or something like that. But then they discovered that it has a navigation system that's made by an Israeli defense firm. I think it was elbit. And so they insisted that it be removed. And the problem is now that it's not safe to land in the fog. Now, since I'm sure that Ireland is normally a country that has 363 days of sunshine a year, that won't be an issue. Although I've actually been told that it gets kind of foggy there. And so they're kind of caught by their own stupidity, which seems to me qualifies as Jack Asin. The other.
- [06:59]
A
No more tealings for you.
- [07:01]
B
Yeah, well, I've, I'm afraid that I, although I like tealing whiskey, I've. I've shifted my allegiances really, back to Scotch whiskey and to some extent, some very fine rye whiskeys, which you can now get in the United States. The, the, the other piece of jackassery is the Trump battleship, you know, know, which some people, including some of my colleagues at csis, think will never sail. So this. The Congressional Budget Office just came in with an estimate. It's going to cost about $23 billion per ship. Let me say that $23 billion. These things are about. Supposed to be about two and a half or three times the size, the displacement, to be technical, of an Arleigh Burke destroyer. They will have roughly the displacement of something like an Iowa class, maybe a little bit less than an Iowa class battleship from World War II. Now, this is at a time when really big surface vessels are pretty clearly going to be increasingly vulnerable to things like hypersonics in a world where, you know, overhead surveillance has just gotten better and better and better. And the assumption these things won't be big juicy targets and, and that you'll have plenty of them is really very hard to believe. This, by the way, the $23 billion figures, I think something like about 50% higher than the original estimate. So this is one more act of folly. Unfortunately, like some of the other jackasseries we talk about, there's some potentially quite serious consequences indeed.
- [08:43]
A
So we normally don't talk a lot about domestic politics here. Occasionally we, you know, veer into it. But this week seems like evidence of the horseshoe theory just is abounding around us as the extreme right wing of the Republican Party and the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party appear to be meeting in midpoint in their hostility to Israel in their support for kind of non interventionist foreign policy writ large. What, what say you on that?
- [09:25]
B
Well, I, I, you know, we, we discussed this before the show and you're right, we don't usually talk about domestic politics all that much. But, but I do think this is one where it's, it's worth beginning to think through where some of this is going to take us. So the immediate trigger, of course was the quite narrow victory, but victory nonetheless of Abdul Al Said in the Michigan Senate primary against a sitting congresswoman with a very solid record who outspoke, outspent him by a considerable margin. And there are a couple of things that I took away from that. First, I mean, he ran on a platform that was rabidly anti Israel. When I say rabidly, I mean it. I mean if you look at some of the advertisements and so forth, they make you, even if you're very critical of Israel, they make you very, very uneasy because they felt to me that they were edging over into, you know, typical Jewish conspiracy theories about, about Jews. But, but more deeply, this is another example of where the energy in the Democratic Party is coming from the left. Abdul Al Said is not formally part of the dsa, but he's certainly adjacent. He's got people working with him who are very much from that world. He is willing to associate with some very bad people. Hassan Piker being the absolute worst. You know, one of these guys who believes that we deserved what we got on 9 11. The, their, the energy in the Democratic Party is clearly there. And although they are putting up more of a fight, I think the moderates and centrists, they're putting up more of a fight, I think than the Republicans did over the Tea Party, which was a, you know, a more normal kind of libertarian small government thing. It's not clear to me that they're going to win. It's not clear to me that they've got a real platform and what, what this, you know, what these folks can tap is a demographic of interestingly enough, not minorities so much, not African Americans, not so much Latinos, not so much working class, but white, college educated, middle class, probably downwardly mobile people or people fearful of being downwardly mobile. I think there's a, this drives a lot on both ends of the spectrum this because, and that's a, you know, his, that's not unique to us. I mean that was in many ways the story of unfortunately of a lot of European countries in the, in the 20s and 30s, that fear of downward, downward mobility. And it comes on top of AI
- [12:12]
A
and all Europe and Europe in the post war period. I mean it's the, it's the classic sociological element for Pujadism, for instance, that's right in France.
- [12:23]
B
So the foreign policy implications of this, I mean there's a particular piece of it that's about Israel, which I, like I said, I think is tapping into some very, very disturbing tropes. But quite apart from that, I think what you're seeing here is a consensus between those two ends of the horseshoe, which I would describe as sort of neo isolationist or isolationist that is frequently overtly sympathetic either to Russia or to China or to, or to both. That for sure does not see the United States as playing an important role in the world, whether it's through the use of military power or not, which is running, I think, which is getting fuel from an abortive Iran war and previously from the Afghan and Iraq wars a variety of ways. Some which I think are understandable, other ways which I think is disingenuous. And I, I think unfortunately this is going to be a power to be reckoned with. I mean it's, you know, not everybody in the United States was an isolationist in the early 30s, but the isolationists were very, very powerful minority and they exercised real, real influence. And, and it was part of a country looking inward. So I have to tell you, I'm actually now really quite concerned because I think you have two parties that are pretty dysfunctional.
- [13:59]
A
You're moving closer to me on the doom scale. I welcome this sudden burst of realism on your part.