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- [00:00]
A
Handing the presidency back to Trump was like giving ultimate power to an unstable 11 year old.
- [00:08]
B
Frankly, I think you're being a little unfair to 11 year olds, but
- [00:14]
A
welcome to the Mona Charon Show. So glad you could join me today. I am delighted to welcome my Bulwark colleague Eric Edelman, who is the host of Shield of the Republic, another one of our podcasts. Eric is also the counselor at the center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, as well as a senior fellow at the Miller center and also a former ambassador to Turkey and Finland and a high ranking Defense Department official. So he is the perfect person to talk about foreign policy today. Eric, thank you so much for being here. I want to just start with a reflection. You knew Lindsey Graham a bit. So he just passed away a couple days ago. If you wouldn't mind just giving any reflections you might have on, on his life. He was, he was an important figure, if not necessarily in the end, an admirable one, alas. But rest in peace, of course, and sympathies to his friends and family. But tell us your encounters with him, if you wouldn't mind.
- [01:23]
B
Sure. Well, first, Mona, thank you for having me. It's great to be with you. I'm glad to be able to do a crossover show with you for the Bulwark. I don't want to exaggerate my relationship with Senator Graham. I knew him a little bit. I had the opportunity to travel with him a couple of times aboard the US government aircraft that Senator John McCain would take every year to the Munich Security Conference. Senator Graham was One of the three amigos, McCain, Lieberman, and Graham. Sadly, now the last of those three to pass away. And they were very committed to a lot of the things I'd worked on during my time in government. Strong national defense, concern about proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, all the things that Iran, that I'd spent time on.
- [02:27]
A
Promoting democracy. Right.
- [02:28]
B
Promoting democracy very strongly, the civil war in Syria. And I at the time thought pretty well of Senator Graham, thought that he was impressive figure. I mean, I briefed him a little bit during 2016, although briefing Lindsey on national security affairs was more like kind of listening to Lindsey rehearse his talking points for Meet the Press and then you could kibitz and comment on them. Obviously he kind of took a different path after the 2016 election and chose to become a kind of avatar of Trumpism in that sense. I think he's kind of emblematic of the role that ambition can play in Washington. It's kind of can be very disfiguring because I think Senator Graham, and he said this to me on several occasions when I sat next to him at dinners of various sorts, either diplomatic dinners hosted by foreign embassies here in Washington or at Munich when we would occasionally have dinner with Senator McCain. His ultimate goal was to remain relevant. And that drove, I think, a lot of what he did. Sadly, the last thing he did was actually kind of recurrence back to the more admirable parts of his career, which was going to Ukraine, coming back, pushing for sanctions on Russia, defending the relationship with Ukraine. I'm sure in his own mind, he thought that whatever sort of moral compromises he was making, you know, with Trumpism, you know, were enabling him to, you know, be a force for good with regard to Ukraine or Iran or whatever other issue he was working on. But, you know, it's just, to me, it's a, you know, very sorry, of course, that he passed, you know, at what I regard now as a young age, since he's.
- [04:36]
A
Yeah, same.
- [04:36]
B
Yeah. Whoa.
- [04:37]
A
That's so young.
- [04:38]
B
Younger than I am. And. But just, you know, a sad reflection on kind of Washington today in a lot of ways.
- [04:48]
A
Yeah. Okay. Well, as they said in the Monty Python skits, you know, and now for something completely different, I want to transition to something with levity because we need it in our time. And so just within the last few hours, a statue appeared on the National Mall of a participation trophy. It's very amusing. It's 10ft tall. It's a gold trophy, and here's what it says. Iran War participation trophy. We hereby award President Donald J. Trump this participation trophy for his enthusiastic involvement in the Iran war. While some concern themselves with military strategy, diplomacy, or measurable outcomes, President Trump demonstrated the courage to participate, regardless of the final score. As the recipient of this prestigious award, President Trump joins the ranks of children everywhere who received recognition for simply showing up. So I, you know, hats off to whoever did that. But it now introduces the whole topic of the war in Iran. So as we speak, we are recording this on Tuesday, July 14th, Bastille Day. Actually forgot about that for a revolution that I do not celebrate. So we've resumed shooting now in the Iran war, the truce, such as it was, the shaky truce, seems to be even shakier ended. And so I thought this would be a moment to review the whole thing, how we got into the war, the aims of the war, and how it went. So in February of this year, Donald Trump joined Israel in full on attacking Iran and demanded in the first Few hours unconditional surrender and he put on truth social that he wanted to have a role in choosing the next leader of Iran. Things did not go according to plan. In February he was saying to the Iranian people, help is on the way. And well, actually he had said help is on the way earlier. Now in February he's saying, take over your government. It will be yours to take. By mid June he was saying, well, I never cared about regime change. Let's start with the first few months of the war and what happened leading up to this memorandum of understanding. I'm going to present a statement to you and I want to hear your reaction. Trump tried his madman theory. He tried full on force in a very clumsy and ill planned way and it failed and he was forced to sue for peace. How do you react to that statement? Too much?
- [08:03]
B
No, I think that's close. I would just add a few other things to it, I guess, please. One is that I think he thought that he could use force the way he had with Del C. Rodriguez in Venezuela, that it would be three or four days maybe of bombing that would then allow him to impose change regime. And he may have been told some things by Bibi Netanyahu. There's this New York Times story that I'm sure you've seen about the Israelis cultivating Mahmoudinejad, the former president of Iran, as a potential new leader of Iran.
- [08:41]
A
That was a kind of head spinning side note in all this particularly, and
- [08:47]
B
I'm gonna repeat something I think I said on Shield of the Republic. But a couple of weeks ago, which is when that story first surfaced in the New York Times, the first thing I thought of was reports I read in government when Ahmadinejad was first elected in which one of the economic ministers of Iran was quoted as saying, trying to talk about the economy to President Ahmadinejad is like trying to teach a donkey particle physics. You know, this was not a guy who was ever regarded as the sharpest knife in a drawer. Maybe that's what attracted the Mossad to him as a possible leader. But in any event, I think the President thought this would be easy. It turned out to be hard. The other thing I think that is relevant here is that the normal processes of government are not operating at all in this administration. I'm in the midst of reading the Maggie Haberman Jonathan Swan book and one of the big takeaways of that is that literally all the normal national security decision making processes have been hollowed out. The institutions are being hollowed out. There's a very good semaphore article on the crisis in the Department of State right now that is ongoing. The administration has nominated some, I think, almost 110ambassadorships, although many are vacant because they haven't been confirmed. But only nine have been career appointees, which is one wildly out of whack with any previous administration, certainly the ones that you and I served in. And so there was no analysis of different branches and sequels that this use of military force might take and what were the risks and downsides and how to mitigate the risks. None of that was.
- [10:42]
A
Can I pause you there for just a second? Since people who have not been in government may profit from learning. Just describe a few of the normal procedures that would take place in an administration that was contemplating a war.
- [10:59]
B
I mean, typically what you would have is a presentation of, well, first of all, you'd have a discussion of what are the objectives? What are we trying to accomplish here? And you would have a period of time when different agencies of the government would suggest what they think the objectives are. You'd have a process coordinated by the national security advisor. You'd have meetings at the assistant secretary level, then the sub cabinet level, like the deputies, meetings I would participate in when I was under Secretary of Defense or deputy National Security Advisor to the Vice President. Then you would have a meeting of the principal officers of the government without the president present. And then you would present all this at a National Security Council meeting where the President would preside, and you'd provide alternatives to the President the president would choose. There would be a discussion of what legal authorities were required to accomplish whatever it was.
- [11:55]
A
So they would call in justice. That would be the Justice Department.
- [11:59]
B
Justice Department would be speaking. You'd have the general counsel, maybe of the Department of Defense, depending on if you're talking about war plans. You would have discussion of what congressional consultations need to take place, what public affairs presentation needs to be made to get the support of the American people, et cetera, et cetera. None of these things were done. Yeah, allies, consultations with allies. None of these things were done before February 28th when this was launched. And the result of that, unfortunately, and predictably enough, is when you start to use of military force and you step off the line with that, you know, use. You don't know. It's not linear. You don't know how things are going to unfold. And typically Murphy shows up, you know, multiple times.
- [12:52]
A
Yeah, Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
- [12:57]
B
And so in this particular instance, the fact that for years and years and years, we war gamed the possibility that Iran would shut the Strait of Hormuz. And yet for the first 10 days of the war, almost nothing was done along the coast to take out the coastal batteries and installations that the Iranians had. By the way, this turns out to be a very difficult task. And also the mines, I mean, they didn't hit the mine storage facilities until about 10 days in. So this turns out to be a pretty difficult task because a lot of these coastal installations are, you know, in mountainous or hilly terrain. And as a result, they are, you know, difficult to take out. You can shut them down briefly, but the Iranians can then, you know, clear the debris and move these mobile missiles that they have back out and then strike two oil tankers like they did today from the uae.
- [14:05]
A
I picture Pete Hegseth, you know, marching into the Oval Office and, you know,