Loading summary
Transcript33 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is a much more professional military. You know the odds of something going wrong while we go in and do this, much higher. 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, counselor at the center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, non resident fellow at the Miller center and a Bulwark contributor. And I'm joined by my partner in all things strategy, Elliot Cohen, professor emeritus of strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a contributing writer to the Atlantic. Elliot, I thought we were going to be sitting here sweltering, but it's about 30 degrees cooler than it was yesterday.
- [00:45]
B
Yeah, it is pretty wild. We have a really interesting guest who'll be on in a little bit, but you and I have a number of things to talk about. Maybe I'll start off with my jackassery, but then I also want to try to cheer you up, if I may, which is probably a bootless quest, but I'm a friend so I'll attempt it anyway. So the, the jackassery is Trump endorsing Ken Paxton in Texas at the expense of John Cornyn, long term senator from Texas. And you know, the one handed this is being interpreted as, you know, the show's Trump's iron grip on the Republican Party. Paxton's an enormously unpopular figure with a lot of his fellow Republicans. You know, he does seem to be, he's a crook. His, his wife has denounced him as an adult.
- [01:40]
A
His own staff turned him in.
- [01:42]
B
His staff turned him in. And it's such an interesting act of self harm because it's conceivable that, that Paxton might win, might have won the, the primary without it. But you know, this, people seem to be saying that this is going to guarantee that he beats Cornyn, which, you know, it ticks off Cornyn, who now has nothing to lose by opposing Trump. It has clearly ticked off a lot of Republican senators and the result is, I think you're going to begin, you're going to see more oppositional behavior. You're already seeing some and I think you're going to see more of it in a bit. The, the butterflies and unicorns part of my introductory remarks to show that, you know, there's some things are going well. I want to throw a modest bouquet in the direction of my alma mater, Harvard University, where the faculty, after an enormous amount of wrestling by a 2 to 1 margin voted to set a a quota of 20 A's plus 4 in any class at Harvard. Now, I should say a couple things about this. When I was teaching, I would consider myself kind of soft If I gave 5% A's. The current percentage of A's at at Harvard I believe is like over 65%. At, at Yale it's even worse, like 80%. And it just shows you how standards collapsed. There was an article by an economist at Harvard saying, yeah, well, E10, which I remember taking the introductory economics course. We only get 50% because we economists have standards. And it's just ludicrous. And it is something about the, you know, decline of the university. But I give them credit for doing that, although they have not set any limits on A minuses, which will now become the default grade. So in the spirit of that, I want to say two cheers. Minus for the Harvard faculty.
- [03:51]
A
Ah, yes, the gentleman's A minus is what we'll now have to deal with. You know, I remember both when I taught at sais, but also as a teaching assistant at Yale, you, you know, if you gave someone a B or God forbid, a C, I mean, it was like you had made some damning judgment on their character. And I kept trying to tell students, no, this is merely an evaluation of what you have achieved or accomplished in this course. It's not a judgment on your soul. People didn't believe that. Well, my jackassery of the week goes to the Trump administration for arguing that it does not need congressional approval for the arch to Trump, which is now swollen to 250ft tall, so it'll be by about 150ft taller than the Lincoln Memorial. It will be approaching the height of the Capitol dome. And the argument that it needs no congressional approval is because somebody dug up a 1925 report by the Arlington Bridge Memorial Commission of the day, which was apparently approved by Congress, had a plan for redoing the Memorial bridge, which included four large columns, none of which were meant to be 250ft like the archde Trump, nor were they shaped like the Arch of Trump. But because they've been approved somehow through some transitive property of government, that is retrospective approval for the Trump Arch.
- [05:44]
B
This may be an interesting case to see if the Senate gets involved in this in some way and attest to the proposition that you now have a number of lame duck senators who don't have to worry about primaries or who have been royally screwed over by Trump, who will be willing to exact a bit of revenge. Another one, which I heard from somebody which would be interesting, that there are a lot of people angry at Secretary of Defense Secretary of Defense, I repeat, war, not war. Pete Hegseth over the firing of US Army General Randy George, saying that his preferred successor as army chief of staff, General Le Neve, will not be approved by the Senate, that, that there are a number of Republican senators are going to vote against him because everybody thought that Randy George was doing a great job, which apparently he was. And there'll be a bit of payback, which will be an interesting thing to see.
- [06:41]
A
I'll be keeping my eye on that one for sure. Well, let's turn, turn to the, you know, whether the president's going to taco or nacho. We discussed that last week. But, you know, since, since, since we were together last week, the president, you know, called off an attack that he hadn't approved but was going to happen and has gone back to the negotiating table, allegedly at the instance of our Gulf allies, all of whom unanimously came to him and said, please give diplomacy one more chance. Pakistanis have been actively engaged. I gather that there's paper flying around out there between the Pakistanis and the Iranians with the Egyptians and Turks also getting involved. And Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio a couple of hours ago said he's cautiously optimistic, there's progress being made. He doesn't want to get too optimistic. But, but he thinks it's not out of the question that you might get some kind of agreement. What do you make of all of this? Both the meeting on Monday where this was discussed in house and allegedly there were some perturbations inside the administration about this, but also the negotiation. How do you see all this, Elliot?
- [08:14]
B
Well, so as I think, you know, for the sake of both my reputation and my sanity, I've given up any attempt to predict what Donald Trump will do. I, I think you can say that on the one hand he would rather not go back to large scale military operations. But on the other hand, I, I do think the record thus far, thus far would suggest that he is very serious on the nuclear front and possibly serious on the Strait of Hormuz front. And so that's one kind of big fact, I think. And the other big fact is, I mean, the Iranians have staked out such extreme demands for reparations and all that that I find it hard to see how they could compromise. Now, what I can imagine would be an agreement to have a discussion in 30 days and, you know, that, that, that, that sort of thing. But, but I somehow think, you know, that would be a fragile, that would be a fragile agreement. And I, I Guess I, I certainly find it almost inconceivable that you'd have a really durable accommodation with Iranians. What you might get is a sort of an extension of what is a kind of a truce. But you know, one thing, one important point I think people should bear in mind. The war goes on. A blockade is an act of war and they're blockading the strait and we are blockading them. So people aren't getting killed by and large, although they probably are in Iranian prisons. But the war is still on.
- [09:54]
A
Yeah, I mean, I guess the thing that strikes me is that we've seen the president, I think now six times since this war began, make really big threats on Truth Social only to back off and either not execute them or say we need to give diplomacy more of a chance. But if diplomacy doesn't work, I'm going to hit them so hard I'm going to kill their whole family kind of thing. And I think that that's had the effect, I could be wrong, but I think it's had the effect of conveying to the Iranians what you said earlier. He really doesn't want to go back to kinetic military activity. The longer this goes, every day that goes by it's harder for him because public opinion is getting worse. His standing with the Congress, as you pointed out, is getting worse. We now, you know, Bill Cassidy, after he lost his primary suddenly found his conscience and you know, flipped on the, on the, on the question of a war powers vote. And I think it's had the effect of actually hardening the Iranian position because when you look at, you know, behind this dance of the seven veils that's going on with the mediators and the papers flying back and forth about, you know, what one can tell from what's being reported in Israeli press, which seems to have pretty good sources and some of the Arab press, is that the Iranian, the language is changing. You know, they're putting forth more different language and maybe there's some movement on the margins. But on the central questions, and I would say there are two, one is what happens with the heu? The Iranian position hadn't changed very much. It's basically, yeah, we're happy to down blend the HEU and we'll do it under some kind of supervision by the iaea, which of course is a reversible step. And maybe we'll send some of it out to Russia, but not all of it and we're certainly not sending it to the United States and maybe we'll agree to some moratorium on Enrichment of some X number of years to be determined. That really hasn't changed much as far as I could tell. And maybe there's more going on behind the scenes than we know, but that seems to be their position on the straight. If anything, their position has gotten worse from, you know, from the point of view of the United States, our allies in the Gulf and, you know, and international maritime rights. So if you look at the map they put out of the, know, what the Strait of Hormuz Regional Authority, you know, will look like, it's got, you know, authority over waters that go directly to the coast of UAE and Oman. And I can't imagine that'll be acceptable to our Gulf allies who reputedly, reputedly were the ones who asked for this, you know, pause for diplomacy. Anyway, that's the way it seems to me.
- [13:06]
B
Yeah, I, look, look, I think part of what's going on here is a, it's a psychological phenomenon that, you know, human beings expect tomorrow to look kind of like today. And after you have, as you say, you know, a period of weeks where blood curdling threats, nothing happens. Blood, you say, okay, that's, that's the kind of world we're in. But what you do is you forget your, the shock that you felt when he actually launched a war that went on for 40 days with, you know, massive airstrikes and killing the Supreme Leader and, and all that. You, you know, you kind of normalize that, say, okay, well, that was in the past. In the world we're in is the world of this sort of weird mutual blockade and blood curdling threats that lead nowhere.
- [13:49]
A
No war, no peace.
- [13:51]
B
Yeah, no war, no peace. And so I, I, I think there's a good chance that the Iranians, who, who I don't think are very sophisticated in dealing with him, could find, could talk themselves into something much worse. The other thing which was I, I noticed though, which I think is quite ominous for the future and I think it's, it's going to turn out to be serious. They are talking much more openly about assassinating Trump. So I think one of the key figures in the module has said they're going to put a 50 million euro bounty basically on Trump's head and they're going to launch attempts to assassinate Trump and other certainly senior Israeli figures, but also senior American figures. And I kind of believe them. I mean, they have tried to kill Trump before. You know, they have done incredible and dastardly things. We did kill the Supreme Leader after all, or it probably was probably an Israeli bomb Not an American bomb, but doesn't make a difference. So I think that's, you know, that that sort of thing that may be further down the road, that may be post presidency, but I suspect that we're probably paying a lot of attention to that. So, you know, all that to me adds up to what's going to remain a very unstable kind of position. Let me add one, one thing I know there are other things you want to talk about. I was talking to a couple of former ambassadors who we both know from who American ambassadors to that part of the world who know it very, very well and whose judgment I respect. And one of the things that they were saying was, you know, this. So many assumptions about the Middle east have been turned upside down, particularly since the October 7 attacks with the Israelis then taking out Hezbollah, that in turn enabling the fall of the Syrian regime with everything that implies and large scale Turkish involvement. This war where you have the Iranians lashing out at their neighbors, which is not something we've seen before, not in this way. Open alignment between the Emiratis and the Israelis is that, you know, does that augur things to come or does it just mean that both the Israelis and the Emiratis are in the, the Arabs penalty box and so on. And I think it's, you know, I'll stick by that metaphor that I think I used early on. A war or a series of wars in this case takes the chessboard, throws it up in the air and the pieces come down and they don't always come down in the same place, places that they were before.
- [16:29]
A
Undoubtedly true. And just as I think neither we nor the Iranians themselves at this stage know what the condition of the regime is because I think it's still too early. I think these sort of knock on effects that you're talking about, we don't yet, you know, appreciate either. And it's been, we can see some of the shimmerings. Can you say who the ambassadors were or were you operating House Rules? It was Chatham House Rules. It's a shame because I wanted to make a point which is that it's good to have ambassadors and we don't have them out in the region right now.
- [17:13]
B
Yeah.
- [17:14]
A
And you know, Reuters, I mean it's catching up to shield of the Republic because you and I have talked about this, I think either last week or the week before about the hollowing out of American diplomacy. There's a very long Reuters article about the fact that 109 out of 190 something US diplomatic posts are vacant currently that many of the people who understood and understand the extremely highly technical details of the nuclear file with Iran, who are career diplomats, have been pushed aside by Laura Loomer or others in the Trump administration. And so you have neophytes, you know, essentially trying to deal with extremely difficult technical subjects. So, you know, I'm glad you were able to talk to some ambassadors to shed some light on this in a, in a restricted environment in Washington. It would be good if the administration actually had ambassadors it could talk to who, who actually knew something about the region and could actually help them navigate their way through some of these changes you're describing.
- [18:22]
B
Couldn't agree more. These were, you know, tough minded professionals and NEA had a fair number of those. You know, he didn't always agree with them. I didn't. And I know you, you certain did. But I always had very, very high opinion of their expertise and commitment to the, the national interests. And you're absolutely right. And particularly in that part of the world where, I mean, in any part of the world, language, cultural sensitivity, you know, deep webs of personal connections matter an awful lot. Probably nowhere more than the Middle East. And this is another tremendous act of self harm.
- [19:00]
A
Yeah. And it wasn't just the Middle East. The Reuters, Reuters piece also talks about Bridget Brink.
- [19:04]
B
It's all over the place.
- [19:05]
A
Bridget Brink, who was our ambassador, very capable ambassador to Ukraine, who's now running for Congress in Michigan. I wish her well in that primary, her replacement. I mean, it just, you know, it goes on and on. You know, we've got no ambassador in Russia, et cetera, et cetera. So one other story that caught my eye the other night was the New York Times report that Israel and the United States had a regime change plan at the outset of this war that went awry. And the regime change plan plan was to find what we have speculated, you and I, from the beginning of this, which was that Donald Trump has started this looking for his Iranian Dely Rodriguez. And apparently who was the vice president in Venezuela who he was able to turn to pretty effectively, you know, after Nicolas Maduro was extricated from, from Caracas. So the geniuses who cooked this up came up with former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was, you know, a Holocaust denier, who was the president falsely reelected in 2009, giving rise to the Green Revolution. Hardly a reformist of any kind, but that was who they were putting their money on. And he had fallen out with the regime, was somewhat at odds with the Supreme Leader and others, and was under a form of house arrest. And apparently the whole thing went a bit awry when in the act of trying to create a jailbreak that would get him out of house arrest, they not only bombed and killed his IRGC guards, but wounded him pretty seriously, which apparently soured him on the whole enterprise. Just one final comment. I want to be a little careful of what I say, but I remember reading that a minister of economy in Iran was quoted as saying that trying to brief President Ahmadinejad on the Iranian economy was like trying to teach particle physics to a donkey. And I just, you know, the idea that this was who the geniuses alighted on as a regime change, you know, candidate, just, it, it boggles the mind.
- [21:36]
B
So I take the point. This seems to have been an Israeli idea, at least that's the way it's reported. I think the, and it does seem to be a case of, you know, the COVID action guys going overboard. Although to paraphrase your old boss Don Rumsfeld, in a situation like this, you, you know, you go with the crazed, not very bright, democracy denying criminal that you have, not the one that you want. But, but I think that the, the serious point at the, at the heart of this is you're not going to have a Wilsonian Democrat takeover in Iran. If there is some sort of break within the regime, it will come from somebody like this, that is, somebody who has the street cred in terms of, you know, being revolutionary, rogc, whatever, somebody who has to be something of a thug because otherwise you're not going to survive in that system. But who's really gotten disenchanted with the regime for any of a number of reasons, most of which are probably entirely personal.
- [22:51]
A
That would help if they're, if they help if they're thoroughly corrupt.
- [22:55]
B
Right. And you know, people have suggested that gollybuff may be like this. Yes, but, but, but I think, and here's, I think the key point which you and I would agree that that may very well be how it ends, but unfortunately it's going to have to be an organic process. And the idea that you can engineer it from the outside is, you know, I would take a lot of convincing, I mean, a lot in order to believe that that sort of thing is really possible.
- [23:21]
A
Yeah, I mean, I really think that this, quote, plan unquote qualifies for being pretty much utterly preposterous. Well, let's move on to the next regime change target, which is Cuba. So a federal grand jury has now indicted Raul Castro for his role as defense minister in the shoot down of the Brothers to the rescue aircraft that were shot down in Cuba in the late 90s during the Clinton administration. It should be noted, I think there were some earlier indictments of the Cuban pilots who did the shooting, as well as the commander who ordered it. A lot of people are seeing this as a warning shot to the Cubans that could presumably execute the same. Kind of playbook that we did in Venezuela, that is, say we could use an indictment to send in special forces and spirit Raul Castro out of the country. There's also a carrier strike group now entering the Caribbean, so very reminiscent of the buildup outside of Venezuela in the fall and winter earlier, late last year, early this year. How do you see this playing out? And I mean, let me just be upfront with my fear. Look, the Castro regime is well past its sell by date. It's a terrible regime. There used to be a kind of romantic. I'm old enough to remember when there was a kind of romantic notion about the Cuban revolution.
- [25:15]
B
But, you know, Vinceremo's brigades.
- [25:17]
A
Yeah. People going to Cuba and talking about how great it was because they'd eradicated illiteracy, which is true. That they brought health care to villages that never had it, which was also true. But it was done, of course, at the cost of ultimately destroying the economy, including the agronomy that supports cultivation of tobacco and the manufacture of Cuban cigars. That's a subject for another day. And. But also, of course, the deprivation of human rights to Cuban citizens. Writ large. Number of people executed at the beginning of the revolution and jailed for years afterwards, the crushing of any dissent. So I will not shed a single tear when that regime goes away. Having said that, my fear here is that the playbook is going to be, let's find a willing sort of factotum who we can use to. And Marco Rubio kind of advertised this in the speech he made. Who will help us denationalize the economy. Get the kind of militarized Communist Party elite that controls the economy to denationalize, get out of business or go into business with people we select, you know, through crony capitalism, so that we can return Cuba to the wonderful situation it was in in the 1950s, which brilliantly depicted in the Godfather.
- [26:57]
B
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think this is clearly an act of psychological warfare. What we don't know is whether Trump, after the awkwardnesses in Iran, is rethinking whether the Venezuela blueprint will work here. He may not. I mean, he may not be clever enough to do that. One big difference, of course, is also I mean, I do think Rubio would be very focused on this, and I think his judgment is probably better than that of most of the people in the administration, but that's not saying very much. So I think, you know, you have, you had, you do have all those things. One of the things that worries me is it. It does seem to me Cuba's probably a much tougher nut, even in, under current circumstances, than Venezuela. You know, they had a capable military for sure. Their intelligence services, look, I mean, was it in the 1980s? It turned out they were. They were running all of our agent networks. They've had always. They've had a lot of success penetrating dia, the Foreign Service.
- [28:06]
A
One of my colleagues, Manuel Rocha, size.
- [28:10]
B
I mean. Yeah, no kidding. So I, I think that would be the bigger mistake that could be looming here. I mean, you just get a sense that the Venezuelan regime was kind of weaker and more, More corrupt, less institutionalized with a, you know, the Venezuelan military is not very much. I've never heard of anything about the Venezuelan intelligence services being particularly competent other than just kind of bludgeoning people in the streets. And, and, you know, Cuba does have this very strong history of nationalism, including antipathy to us and Jose Martin and all that, so. Yeah. But again, once again, with Trump, you just don't know. You don't know if he thinks this is all a head game and pressure or they'll. He'll have a plan presented to him. I mean, it does. That part, by the way, does bring us back to the discussion that we've had previously about, you know, what do you do if you're a professional soldier, if you're, say, General Kane briefing him? Because, you know, if, let's say, Trump says, okay, I'd like a plan to do the same thing that we did in Venezuela. You know, the correct thing for Kane to do is say, okay, this is what it would take to snatch Raul Castro, and, you know, here's what we think the casualties would be like and so on and so forth. Is he likely to say, but Mr. President, could follow on after that. Could be something much, much more difficult. You know, that would very quickly take you into political areas and would have you depend on somebody like Rubio, who I think would have the best political judgment of this to say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mr. President, you know, there are a lot of complications here that we didn't have in Venezuela.
- [29:57]
A
I mean, in the first instance, I would hope that General Kaine would say, you know, Mr. President, we got really lucky in Caracas. We had a, you Know, a helicopter that took fire and almost went down with, with, you know, a bunch of our guys and that, you know, would have, you know, the whole thing might have collapsed had it done that. This is a much more professional military. You know, the odds of something going wrong while we go in and do this, much higher. You know, and so you need to be, you need to understand this is a higher risk, you know, mission than the one we did in Caracas. At a minimum, I would hope he would say, yeah, no, look, I think, I mean, the, you know, potential complications here are enormous. You know, especially while we've got all this other stuff going on in the world. It's, I, I just, I have very bad feeling about where it might end up going so. Well, this is one we're going to have to keep an eye on, I think.
- [30:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, I, I have such generalized bad feelings that I can't really, I no longer detect the fluctuations all that much.
- [31:06]
A
Yeah, I know. I, I, I, I hear you. So while we're, you know, talking about authoritarian governments, I, I'm just constrained to mention that a terrible court ruling came down in Turkey which has invalidated the Congress of the People's Republican Party. And Osar Ozel, the head of that party, has now been kind of stripped of his party leadership. And the question is, who becomes the party leader? It's pretty clear that Tayyip Erdogan would like Kilic Daroglu, who he defeated in the presidential election, who was tossed out as the head of the opposition party because of his fecklessness as an opponent of Erdogan's, to return to that job. Nothing could suit Erdogan better. But I don't know that there's a whole lot to talk about here other than the fact that this is just another sign of Turkey's sliding into authoritarianism and kind of one party, one person rule. And it was accompanied by the president this week saying what a great guy Tayyip Erdogan is and what a terrific ally he's been, despite all of the problems we've had with Turkey along the way. And that's been echoed by Tom Barrack, the ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, in a way that I think has been unfortunate.
- [32:30]
B
Yeah. And it raises again the question, in a number of cases, less, including in the United States, what's gonna, what is it going to be like when these aging autocrats really come to the end of the road? Because at the end of the day, they are mortal. You know, with Trump, I think it's, it's easier to foresee because I have enough faith in our institutions that I think he will not be president after two and a half years, but in a case like Turkey, you know, how will he leave power? And, and as these people become more and more sensible of their own mortality, what are the risks that they're willing to take? What are the big things they want to do? Which is probably a pretty natural segue to our, our guest who can talk about this among other things.
- [33:26]
A
Yeah. So before we turn to Mark Bennett's author of a book, searing book about Russia's descent into, into madness as he puts it, and authoritarianism under Putin, let's just briefly talk about Putin's visit to Moscow, to Beijing. I'm sorry, to Beijing. Thank you. I mean, because it's an interesting contrast to Trump. Trump was just there. Obviously this was the partnership without boundaries, Putin and Xi. But you really got the.