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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way. Stitch Fix Online Personal styling makes it easy. I just give my stylist my size, style and budget preferences.
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Seth Mandel
I order boxes when I want and how I want. No subscription required. And he sends just for me pieces plus outfit recommendations and styling tips. I keep what works and send back the rest. It's so easy. Make style easy. Get started today@stitchfix.com Spotify that's stitchfix.com Spotify. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Tuesday, December 2, 2025. I am Jon Bud Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
- [01:06]
Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
- [01:06]
Seth Mandel
And Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
- [01:10]
John Podhoretz
Hi John.
- [01:10]
Seth Mandel
Well guys, the time is upon us. It is December and it is time for me to talk to you, our listeners about Commentary and why I am going to ask you for your support this holiday season. Commentary is a non profit 501c3 organization. We are not profit seeking. We are an ideas based magazine, website and podcast whose purpose is to defend the west and Western civilization. To speak out for the best that has been thought and said in the course of Western civilization, to defend the Jewish people and the State of Israel, and to stand as a bulwark against the forces that would seek to undermine them all. That is what we do here. That is what Commentary has been doing in different forms for 80 years. And we are very proud of this institution and its history and we want to strengthen it and keep it going. For my main goal here is to ensure that we are still publishing and publishing a physical magazine when commentary achieves its 100th anniversary in November of 2045. 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So I'm not, I'm going to be a nag. It's, you know, Judaism is full of nagging. And this is the nag that I will be making of you this month, gentlemen. Steve Woodkoff and Jared Kushner are in Moscow to talk to the Ukrainians. You know what? I'm gonna, I'm gonna call an audible and shift to the news from yesterday. I went the wrong way because we spent half an hour yesterday talking about the kinetic strike on September 2nd in the Atlantic against the Venezuelan drug boat. And the story that appeared on CNN and in the Washington Post last Friday that said that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, had said, kill them all. And therefore, because there were survivors left in the water after the initial strike, there was a second strike, the purpose of which was to kill everybody else who was remaining in the water, which would constitute an unambiguous war crime. And I have to say that the New York Times Yesterday evening around 6 o' clock dropped a story that fundamentally contradicts the story that appeared in the Washington Post and on cnn. Charlie Savage, not known to be a friend of the Trump administration or its handling of legal questions, and a couple of other reporters talked to five sources inside the administration who say that Hegseth never said that, that he never gave that order, and indeed that Admiral Bradley, who is the person who is in charge of the specific mission certainly did not make any such suggestion that they were. We don't know quite what happened with the second go round. If there was a second girl. We don't know what happened. But we now have a complete contradiction. Washington Post says Pete Hexess had killed them all. New York Times says there's no evidence that Pete Hexa said kill them all or was indeed in operational control of the strike on the boat on September 2nd. So that is an important corrective. We don't know what the story is. Congress needs to get involved, and I think we'll get involved in trying to deal with these contradictory accounts. But, but since we spent so much time on it yesterday, we needed to, I think, make this point today and then to discuss the history of false news reports tagging the Trump administration and Donald Trump and the people around him with patently illegal acts that turned out to be hoaxes or flaws or lies throughout the first term. And this, if it turns out that this story is not true, this will be the first story of this term that rises to the level of what Trump came honestly and fairly to call the Russia hoax.
- [08:20]
Abe Greenwald
Is it that, I mean, to my mind that what the Times makes clear is that this could very well be a very large distortion of what happened because there, I mean, the Washington Post story made it sound as if Hegseth saw the boat hit once, saw two survivors and said, finish them. Kill those two.
- [08:49]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, right.
- [08:51]
Abe Greenwald
But Hegseth is not at all apologetic, nor to my mind should he be about authorizing fatal strike on, on the boat. The, the only thing that raised my eyebrow in the Times story where they spoke to, I think five people.
- [09:13]
Seth Mandel
Yeah.
- [09:14]
Abe Greenwald
Was that. So there is a written version off of authorizing the strike beforehand. Lawmakers have asked to see that and the administration has refused to hand that over, supposedly. Let's, let's see where that goes. That would shed more light obviously, on, on this.
- [09:40]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. And also it's, it's the, the, there's been kind of a shifting reaction from the administration, so not to accuse anyone of lying, but, you know, the, the, the public, what are, which version. The public believes. You know, they are very likely to believe the early versions. This was, by the way, one of the reasons that I did think that Mark Kelly and Alyssa Slotkin were, did know, did anticipate this particular case information coming out when they made the video saying to members of the US Military, you don't have to follow illegal orders because it would, that would color the news that they expected to come out. People would immediately associate the term illegal orders with that piece of news. Right. And the. The strikes on the Venezuela boats. I do think that that sort of thing sticks. And that's a. It's. That is. It may be on the media for. I mean, the media has a responsibility to get stories right, full stop. It is also on the administration's communication with the public. And it's, you know, it's initial defiance tempered by, you know, sort of seeming to discover that there are real problems here and that Republicans are not all in on whatever the Trump administration says. And so there's been a shift from, you know, yeah, we ordered a strike to specifics like Hegseth ordered one strike and then went about his business. And the. The person he ordered the strike, you know, the person he commanded to order the strike, essentially piloted it from there and said, looked in at the boat. There's still a boat. So hit it again. But none of that involved conversations with Pete Hegseth. That's the sort of detail that we should have heard right away.
- [11:40]
Seth Mandel
Well, so we don't know what's going on here. And I myself raised the possibility that you just mentioned, Seth, which is that the ad or the video or whatever it was with six former members of the military, Democratic members of the military, saying this odd thing about how you are not obliged under law to follow an illegal order seemed so peculiar, and that it seemed almost as though it was an effort to, as Tom Cruise does in A Few Good Men, do something melodramatic and obnoxious and hysterical to the commanding officer, Donald Trump, to make him say, you're damn right I ordered the Code Red people. Forget this scene. The scene where Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men says, you can't. When he says, I want the truth. And then Jack Nicholson loses it and says, you can't handle the truth. Cruz's character is doing that deliberately. He is losing his cool deliberately as a strategy in the courtroom to throw Nicholson off and make him explode. And the question was, where did this come from? Why is it out there? What are they trying to get Trump to say? And he did. He did react. He said, you're seditious, you know, you're traitors. And a lot of people on the maga, right, have been echoing this idea that they're traitors and all of that. And it just seemed, once we found out about this story, that there was maybe something, a precedent of something preceding it that triggered it. So this happens in September. Maybe the story is going around in military circles that the head of centcom who retired the day after the strike or something, was going around saying, this is not, this was not kosher. This. This was that. When, when the story comes out, oh, boy, it's going to be really bad. And in fact, they didn't say, yeah, damn right, I did it, because they didn't do it like there. You know, Nicholson did order, you know, Nicholson's character did order the Code Red, but Trump and Hegseth may not have ordered the Code Red, so they're not going to stand up and say, order the Code Red now. So, not to use popular culture as a crutch too much, but it does help explain some of the mystifying behavior here, and it does evoke 2019 and the Ukraine issue that led to Trump's first impeachment. Because if you remember, members of Congress were, Were making these weird kind of allusions to a whistleblower inside the administration who knew the truth. But, you know, he needed immunity. I can't remember what it was. It turned out it was Sasha Vindman. But there was some. It was like this, oh, there's a big thing inside the administration, but somebody can't come out and tell the truth until we protect them or something like that. And so there was this kind of cloud of, there's something bad, something bad going on here in Oz. Something very bad going on here in Oz. And then finally, he was given immunity, came to testify, told Congress what Congress wanted to hear, and then they, and then, and then they, and then they impeached Trump. This was almost like some weird version of that. If the New York Times story is true, then Hegseth and Trump are at the, at the very least, or Hexathan is at the very least, not guilty of the charge that was leveled at him in the Washington Post story. It does not absolve him or Trump or the administration of the very real questions about what the hell is going on in the Atlantic, near Venezuela, like that. That's a whole separate kettle of fish.
- [15:46]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, there are, There are people, I mean, and serious people, too. I mean, I don't agree with them, but who think that the entire operation that's been going on there is illegal.
- [15:59]
Seth Mandel
Right. Well, can you, can you elaborate on that? What is it about the operation. Let's. That you don't think is illegal?
- [16:10]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I don't. I mean, they think that it's illegal because it's not authorized. I mean, it's authorized by Trump. But there's, but there's.
- [16:18]
Seth Mandel
Well, I think there are two issues. There's the authorization issue, and then there's the issue of the definition of the, of the, of the casus belli. Right, right.
- [16:27]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. Of defining the narco terrorist as a terrorist enemy.
- [16:32]
Seth Mandel
Right. Or in other words. Yeah. That drug trafficking.
- [16:36]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [16:36]
Seth Mandel
Has a legal definition and terrorism has a legal definition. And there are two different definitions. And you can't elide the two. In American law, we know what a trafficker is and we know what a terrorist is. And they're essentially using. This is the claim. They're using the definition of terrorist by adding the adjective, whatever you would call it, the, the, the, the prologue word narco to say they're terrorists because they're using narcotics to enter our country and poison our people, and they're doing it in order to bring down our country. But there is no definition law of narco terrorism. There is only terrorism and narcotics smuggling.
- [17:22]
Abe Greenwald
And I've got to say, both the.
- [17:24]
John Podhoretz
Federal laws have defined penalties. Right. Andy McCarthy's point throughout this that he's explained very well has been that there are defined penalties for the defined actors in this. And he doesn't see anybody who fits the definition of an actor whose defined penalty would open him up to combat.
- [17:49]
Seth Mandel
And it's important that you mention Andy McCarthy, because who has been on this podcast many times and is a close friend of ours and is known his career, he was the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the first World Trade center terrorist bombing case against the Blind Sheik. So if anybody knows the federal law defining what is terrorism in a U.S. courtroom. And remember, Andy believes that using a U.S. courtroom as a means of fighting terrorism is a mistake, and that these are acts of war that need to be fought not in a courtroom, but by our military. But he certainly has forgotten more precedent than we've ever learned about these sorts of things and is himself not exactly a squish on the use of the US Military or anything like that. He's just looking at what he knows to be the law and saying this is not. This is unlawful or illegal, or at the very least the justifications are. Are false or fallacious.
- [19:01]
Abe Greenwald
So I gotta say, when I see Caroline Levitt defending the administration on this, and she describes the operation and she says it was defensive action and the threat was eliminated. I agree. In the broadest sense, of course, narcotics trafficking into the US is, is, is a huge threat to the country. It kills Americans. That's why I'm, I'm fine with, with, with the operations. It's okay with me. I'm not, I'm not complaining, but there's something linguistically off. Just when you hear that, when you know, because you see the video and you know that this is a strike that the US Chose to, To take. They weren't, they weren't being fired on. We weren't, we weren't taking fire. We were taking out a drug trafficker. And to hear, to hear her describe it as the threat was eliminated, there you. That's where you hear the confusion of the language of war with, with the language of crim. You know, law enforcement, right?
- [20:17]
Seth Mandel
Not to get too philosophically in the weeds here, but as with, even as with, like trans conversations, we have to create a division here between who's. Who's hurt by drug trafficking. Because if you say people under 18 are being. Drugs are being trafficked in America to people under 18 who are considered minors under the law, and therefore this is. You are doing something to people who have no agent, who have no legal agency, and therefore we should come down on you like a ton of bricks. And, you know, like, if we convict you in a courtroom, maybe we can sentence you to death or something. Problem with narcotics trafficking as a foreign policy, to end it as a foreign policy. Aim in itself. It's the same problem with gambling. It's the same problem with a lot of these things. Nothing is being done to the people who take illegal narcotics. If they are adults, they are going out, they are buying them, they are taking them to their house, they are ingesting them. This is an act of adult agency. It's malign. It is illegal. It's illegal because we are trying as a society to protect people from an impulse that is destructive not only of them, but of the society at large. And it's also a weird time for us to be going through this war against drugs that goes kinetic when I don't know how many states in this country have legalized the use of incredibly potent marijuana. Like, we're actually in a drug lucid. We're in a phase in the United States in which the country seems to be moving toward loosening restrictions on the use of nar, on the use of drugs that were formerly considered illegal. And so there is a cognitive dissonance in US flying, you know, having aircraft carriers that are flying planes that are blowing up boats. You know, it's like we seemed societally to be moving in a different direction here. Am I wrong? I mean, I know there's a difference between fentanyl and pot. I don't. I'm not saying there isn't. Although from what I gather about the strength of the marijuana that people are using. It can be as debilitating and you know, even psychosis inducing as other as, as, as harder drugs were in the 60s when, when marijuana was less potent. But something doesn't add up as a national cause.
- [23:03]
Abe Greenwald
Well, there is one other element involved in both the Venezuelan trafficking and the, let's say the fentanyl precursor from China, which is that these are regime backed operations. You know, the, the, the, the Venezuelan government and security services and intelligence are all involved in the, in the trade. And you know, every, all industry in China has happens with the cooperation of the Chinese Communist Party. So in some, and certainly in the case of China, they're, they, they're very hard on drug use within their own borders. So there is an element of an attack on the US here that I think is real on the part of foreign governments. But again, it's a complicated, layered sort of idea.
- [24:03]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [24:04]
John Podhoretz
And we might also be getting into the thing we've discussed before, which is life in, you know, under a government that's governing under a claimed emergency at all times. Right. Which is like, you know, part of this stuff got the, the narco trafficking, the element of the narco trafficking that they're talking about really did get folded into economic policy too because it's been used as justification, at least in part for tariffs. Right. And he said, and he says, you know, we're, we worked out a deal. They're going to, you know, cut, they're going to police fentanyl going outside of their country bor. And we're going to cut tariffs, you know, down by 5% or whatever. I mean he's using that as economic policy, as for foreign policy, and that the tariffs were themselves wrapped up entirely in the, in the question of does he have the power to do this. And his argument was it's a national emergency, I have to do it. It's like Covid, but this. And so, you know, you, he's just used, he's sort of skating along on this. That's his way of thinking. He doesn't necessarily need a declaration of emergency to say he thinks we're in a state of emergency. But he's made it clear that fentanyl smuggling is part of what he sees as emergency policymaking. And so everything associated with that, he sort, you know, he'll go to 11. Now the thing they're discovering is that it's one thing to have these emergency powers within your borders and only have to fight the Supreme Court, it's another to look like you've gone to war. That's a different kind of extension in foreign policy. And that's why they're seeing this bounce back now. I think in part of that, but it is part of the. I think just he's living through an emergency worldview. And, you know, this is part of that.
- [26:00]
Seth Mandel
It's more than that because he is the person who, in the American political discussion over the last 10 years has attempted to harness some kind of weird combination of Jacksonian unilateralism and present day isolationist pacifism. Like, he's not a pacifist, he is a unilateralist. And he does say that every war that we fought since he was a kid was stupid. And he is complaining that too many people have died in the war between Russia and Ukraine and he wants to end it. And he's got this entire body of MAGA that is, you know, deeply concerned about the horrible death toll in the Russia, Ukraine war. Like they care about death tolls in war anywhere else, as far as I can tell. But that is his. Those are his people, the sor of, you know, and we now call them the Tuckerites. But I mean, whatever, those are still his people. He harnessed them. We're going to talk tomorrow with Jesse Arm of the Manhattan Institute about this amazing research that he and the Manhattan Institute have done on Republican attitudes toward things and a real split in the GOP between sort of traditional Republicans and what he called calls new entrant Republicans, where there is a deep ideological divide so severe that you would think that they could not coexist in the same party. But this is the conversation that we're having here. Trump's the one who has harnessed this idea that we fight unnecessary wars and that we need to stop fighting unnecessary wars. And now he is. It's not exactly a war because it's not like Venezuela is coming at us, but he's the one who has initiated kinetic military action against Venezuela, a country with which we are not at war, whose regime we don't like and whose behavior we don't like and whose ideology we don't like and whose. And whose narco trafficking we don't like. But we don't like narco trafficking from Colombia either. And I don't see us going to war with Colombia.
- [28:26]
Abe Greenwald
It's very interesting because if you look, if you think back to Trump's first trip to the Middle east this term, what did he say in Riyadh? He said, we are no longer going to go around dictating to Other countries, how, how their government should run, what form of government they should have and all that. And, you know, here he is putting intense pressure, directly calling for modern to.
- [29:00]
Seth Mandel
Friday. Yeah, by Friday. He has said, get on a plane by Friday. Yeah, this week. Now, if that works, it's going to be amazing. And what's more, it'll be a vindication of exactly the opposite of what he.
- [29:16]
Abe Greenwald
Yes, right.
- [29:16]
Seth Mandel
That in Riyadh, which of course is a classic thing where he wrote, you know, where Stephen Miller or somebody wrote him a speech that was full of the administration's evangelical view that it's anti neocon and doesn't want to go around doing this stuff. And then he practically, in practical terms, is like more neocon than the neocons. Like, it's not even that, you know, we're going to support democratic, you know, movements inside countries and provide them with COVID aid to teach them how to, you know, publish the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and Kazakh and that sort of thing. That's what neoconism is. He's like, I'm going to blow up your boats until you get out of here. Like, that's, you know, that's like taking it to another level. That's, that is, you know, that is, that's rollback. That's not containment.
- [30:05]
John Podhoretz
And so, and also his considering the works and considering the way he's dealt with deadlines. Right. He gave, he, you know, he said about Iran, you know, it's two weeks tops, you know, and then like 48 hours later, he sent the bombers. Maybe if I'm Maduro, I make sure to be out, you know, by Wednesday, Thursday open of business, you know, Thursday 9:00am Maybe I don't take fraught till Friday, close of business. So it makes you wonder if he has something else up his sleeve. What the or else is because in the, in the podcast, he has had in or else up his sleeve.
- [30:41]
Seth Mandel
I mean, you don't think of Trump as a poker player because poker is a, is a game of strategy and not power. And, you know, there's a lot of, you know, you fold a lot. Don't fold. You do. That's not his. That's not. He's more like, you know, a blackjack player who triples down on a bet or something like that. But yeah, I mean, if you're, if, if you look at it as, am I bluffing? Am I not bluffing? Do I mean it? What happens when Friday comes and goes and Maduro's not out of power? What did it mean that I told him to do it on Friday. Now it's not like he came out and gave a speech and he said I told Maduro to leave on Friday. That makes it like a public confrontation where Maduro. But you know, it's leaked to us that he said get out by Friday. So maybe we. This is a good moment to take a break and hear from our sponsor. Hey, John. Here. Okay, no gift cards this year. I'll tell you why don't give a gift card as a present because you can give an aura frame. An aura frame. 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It does appear that the Witkoff approach is to say, let's all make a deal and we can all be friends somehow and there can be, we can build buildings and you can have this and we're gonna make Ukraine stop and you'll get what you got and maybe you'll get a little more, just a little, you know, taste. And Ukraine is now going around to Europe saying, help us. The United States appears to be negotiating essentially against us and on the side of the Russians. What are you going to do to help us if we have to go crosswise of Trump? And I still think that Putin says no. I don't think Putin is going to accept any deal that doesn't give him not only control of every piece of territory at this moment, but more so that he can say he beat Ukraine, he won, it was a glorious victory and he beat Trump. He'll want to walk around saying he beat Trump and beat the west and beat the Europeans and now they better watch out and take care of him a little. Like Hamas, let's say, like there's no, I don't know what his incentive is to end the war, except, you know, that he would want the Russian people to stop dying, which he clearly doesn't give a about. So I do think that there's, is all this is going on and that it could really parallel Hamas and that Hamas negotiated negotiation and they always came to know until finally their sponsors came and said, no, the answer is yes, because we're, we're going to basically expose. You're all going to die. So say yes or we're going to let them kill you. Meaning the political leaders not the people, and not the people in Gaza itself. But there's no one to do that to Russia. Russia doesn't have anybody to say, you better do this or we'll kill you.
- [37:21]
Abe Greenwald
Right. Right. So you have all the obstinacy without the threat.
- [37:29]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [37:29]
Abe Greenwald
And that's, that's the problem.
- [37:31]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. And you also have losers on the US Side, which is the other, which is the other part of this that is really, that, you know, should throw a wrench into it. Right. Which is that there's going to be no deal with Putin unless you. Without a piece of Ukraine, that is a huge humiliation to Ukraine. And so when they've gone around the Middle east, you know, making you trying to turn the peace talks into real estate talks and, or business, you know, proposals that, that hasn't come along with, well, Israel is going to have to give up the Gaza envelope and move back further from, and make that a no man's letter. You know, it hasn't come up with anything like you, you know, we, you have to, you have to lose something tangible. The American ally involved has, has to lose something tangible. But with Ukraine, there's no deal unless Ukraine loses something tangible. And that is why, I mean, according to the Wall Street Journal, which has a, you know, a very long report on the sort of business angles of all this. But one of the takeaways in the article is how little the relevant agencies of the federal government know about what Trump's negotiators are doing until they do it and who they're meeting until they meet them. You know, there's one, in one case, Wykov is meeting with the Russians in Alaska and the Treasury Department learns about it from, you know, from the UK from, you know, from, from, from intel that they got, you know, from Britain or whatever. So that's, that's, you know, that's why they're sort of going around this, because there is a, the federal government is, you know, set up to filter these sorts of things all the way through. And there is no filter right now in, in going around, you know, everybody, including General Kellogg, who is the, you know, supposed to be the special envoy to Russia and Ukraine, the war, and who is leaving his post and who I assume is not going to be replaced or maybe replaced with a mannequin. But the point, you know, the point is that we've entered, you know, this sort of situation where it's like Trump and the inner circle. No, it's not just they're the ones running it. It's, they at times are the only ones who know what they're planning on offering. Everybody else has to play catch up. And because, because this includes a U.S. and Western ally, a potential NATO, you know, ally or whatever, you know, depending on where you, you know, where you sit on what Ukraine should be after the war, but also sitting on the border of Western Europe. Right. Our European allies are right there, you know, and not just Western Europe, I mean, Poland, you know, and others. And so, you know, we're sort of taking, the Europeans see us taking a Europe, very European problem and making hay out of it. The response from the Trump administration to them would be, and not without some justification. I've been telling you since 2016 that you all should put more into your own defense. Europe should bulk up its defense. You guys should take this seriously. You haven't been taking Russia that seriously. And that's why somebody else has to step in and do this. And, you know, it's kind of late to be coming complaining to us now because you, you know, we, we've been at this for years and you haven't done what we said to beef up your own security. Otherwise you can handle it yourself. And if you don't like our deal, then in the future you will make sure you have one in place to handle it yourself. That's kind of the, the debate here.
- [41:28]
Abe Greenwald
If, if eastern parts of the Donbas that, that Russia hasn't even, doesn't even control yet, I shouldn't even say yet that does, doesn't control if that is on offer. I think that is tempting for Putin at this point because of the pace, the slow grinding pace at which the Russians have been getting, getting, you know, moving forward. If you deliver to Putin a region that would have taken him a year more or two years or more, five years more to get, if you just hand it over, I think that may be an offer that he would look at more than once. And it would be more than a humiliation to Ukraine. It would be a travesty. You know, these people there don't want to be part of Russia. And suddenly they would be.
- [42:30]
Seth Mandel
The really complicated part here is that is what Abe brings up, which is that while the Ukrainian effort to turn the war into an offensive counter strike against the Russians or a counter offensive against the Russians failed, Russia's war aims for the last three and a half years have not been secured in almost any way. The amount of territory that they have managed to get under their, into their control is infinitesimal. Like Ukraine's a big country. Like it's, I think in in square footage terms, it's the largest country in Europe. They are on one edge of it, and they. This is a grind like, you know, we haven't seen since the Second World War. And of course, under normal conditions, the Russians would be maybe looking for an off ramp, but they're not, because Putin doesn't have the same incentives that even dictators or totalitarians of the past have had here. This was a war of choice. He entered into it. It was a blunder he's now got. He's invested enormous amounts of blood and treasure, and he needs to come away with something where he can say, the glorious future of our, you know, of our ancient republic, dating back to the 9th or 10th centuries, has been, you know, we are restoring. And Ukraine says, okay, let's end the war. Theoretically, we'll end the war. Here's what we need. Russia never attacks again. We're not having limits on our military. You give us some kind of security guarantee. So if they cross the border, you're going to come in and stop them. Since you're stopping us, we want to go on, but you're going to stop us. We'd like NATO membership. So first, Trump says NATO membership is not on the table. Okay. Second, he seems to be willing to talk vaguely about some kind of a security guarantee. I don't know how Putin accepts that, accepts the idea that the United States holds the blackmail hand over him, saying, you know what, I want to take another bite out of the Donbas. I want to move a little further west. I want to keep going, you know, like there's nothing to stop him. And so, you know, and they're not winning, like, Russia is not winning this war.
- [45:28]
John Podhoretz
But that's a key thing about what's frustrating people about Steve Witkoff. I mean, let me read a quote from the Journal story, which is, you know, they, they mention that, you know, that Ukrainians are fighting hard and, you know, he's asking them to make, you know, what they see as ridiculous sacrifices. Here's the quote. Ukrainians have fought heroically for their independence, said Witkoff, who has tried to inspire Ukrainian officials with the idea of soldiers disarming to earn Silicon Valley scale salaries, operating American built AI data centers. And then one more quote. It is now time to consolidate what they have achieved through diplomacy. So Steve Witkoff saying the Ukrainians, it's time for the Ukrainians to consolidate what they have achieved is, you know, kind of insane, right? I mean, this is what we're saying here is that Ukrainians have lost territory in the war. I don't think that anybody disputes that the size of Ukraine has been reduced and not expanded. Most of that as like a war of independence, like saying, you know, like, well you guys survived, but most of.
- [46:48]
Seth Mandel
That territory was taken before the war. We're talking about Crimea and the Donbas. Most of the stuff that Ukraine is being asked to acknowledge is now Russian territory does not implicate this war.
- [47:07]
Abe Greenwald
Well, there was a big push at the start of the war. I mean Russia gained, gained a lot of ground and then, then it became fighting for every inch poorly.
- [47:19]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [47:19]
John Podhoretz
Well, so, you know, say they have to now's the time to consolidate. What they've gained through diplomacy is, you know, it's just, it doesn't reflect reality. Not because Ukraine has gained the esteem of the world in how they fought, but they, the U.S. behind this is still, still going to be asking Ukraine to subtract something, even if it's not from this war, although likely would be they're asking something of Ukraine and calling it consolidate the gains is making people not trust Witkoff as an interlocutor here.
- [47:56]
Abe Greenwald
But this is, you know, that's a very Trump administration thing to try to talk into existence preferred reality. It happens all the time. And you know, it's like when, it's like when Trump, it's Trump's initial Gaza proposal, you know, that came off the, off the cuff and when they do it each time it enjoys this sort of half, half incepted phase, you know, where it's almost like a thing that is, is really gonna about to happen and then it just, then, you know, reality that the mirage dissolves and then, then you're, then you're back to reality.
- [48:42]
Seth Mandel
I mean, we're in a other weird place, which is that the Witkoff stated or maybe hasn't said it publicly, but what the Wall Street Journal tells us is Wyckoff is talking like Thomas Friedman in the late 90s. Look, we'll make a deal. We'll integrate economically. We'll do a lot of make a lot of deals together, Russia and us. Get them in good. All of that. We've seen this movie before. This was Putin from 2000 to 2008. I looked into his heart, George Bush said, and I see someone I can do business with. Hillary Clinton went over with the reset button. This whole notion that, you know, proper understandable incentives for a guy like Putin is let's knit you into, you know, global neoliberalism and you know, you'll prosper and we'll pro, everybody will just like, be drinking from the same fountain. And that is not Putin's game. Like, how it's a quarter century already. It's time for us and time for. I know Steve Wykoff is, like, basically six months old. Like, he has no idea, never heard of Ukraine. He couldn't spot it on a map. Trump said, do to Ukraine what we did to Gaza. See if you can figure it out. So maybe he's not conversant with this, but Putin's incentive structure is not to become another Western. You know, like, he. He already has $20 billion put away in bank accounts. He's not getting anything more from it. He's already arrested everybody who could be a capitalist. He decided that Western capitalism was eating away at Russia's moral framework. And all this, though that stuff that Wyckoff thinks is the. Is the carrot is not the carrot to him. The only carrot to him is Ukraine. He wants us to say, take Ukraine, or, you know, we'll give you a lot of Ukraine without your having to fight for it. And then, then he can go and do what he wants to do, which is say, I beat you. I beat Zelensky, I beat Western Europe, I beat America. I am the man. And, you know, watch out Baltic States and watch out Poland, because if you displease me, I already have the precedent where the United States is coming in and saying, nah, it's fine. You can go to Ward someplace and we'll let you keep what you will. We'll let you keep what you kill. Well, we're not going to do anything to stop you. Which is why the Ukrainian position is make assurances that Putin goes this far and no farther, or we can't agree to this. I don't know what we're going to do if we, you know, I don't know what's going to happen to Ukraine if the United States literally turns against Ukraine. But that's the situation. Meanwhile, according to the Institute for the Study of War, it is likely that Russia will reject this proposal. And it will reject this proposal because it's not maximalist enough.
- [51:57]
Abe Greenwald
Right?
- [51:58]
Seth Mandel
They want more. The Russians want more. The Duma wants more. The mill bloggers who are, you know, who are the commenters on the war, want more. They think Putin will be. The American proposal is not generous enough to Russia and doesn't make the humiliation of the west potent enough.
- [52:16]
Abe Greenwald
So on this point, John, that, you know, what would happen were we to turn against Ukraine actively and sort of show the world that, you know, the US Is, Is. Will not push back on a tyrant who invades like that. It reminds me that before the operation Midnight Hammer in April, before we took out the Iranian nuclear facilities, we were just about at that point regarding Iran. You know, it had been some 20 years that a succession of American presidents were talking about. There's no, we cannot let Iranian go nuclear. We cannot let them have a weapon. You know, whether by, you know, Bush, Bush talk strikes, Obama did his deal, whatever, you know, and two decades worth of saying that without doing anything started to look like the US Is out of that game. They're not going to and, you know, so important, one of the most important things about the strike is that having done that, it erases the decades of doubt, you know, and it resets the stage for bad actors.
- [53:40]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [53:40]
Abe Greenwald
And we don't want to reset it again in the wrong direction with this.
- [53:46]
Seth Mandel
Let me, let me offer you a fantasy scenario and see how you think this is going to go because again I mentioned we're going to talk to Jesse Arm tomorrow about this poll of Republicans that is so illuminating. The fantasy scenario is it goes like Gaza and Hamas and Iran and Trump's been spending now nine months trying to get the Russians to see reason and he will now present them with a plan that he thinks is incredibly generous. You get what you want. Maybe we'll give you a little more. Though the Ukrainians reject it. We'll try to, we'll try to see if we can make the Ukrainians set a limit to the size of their army, which will make it.
- [54:29]
Abe Greenwald
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- [56:09]
Seth Mandel
Do an ad for something when you're sitting as you're recording the ad wearing the product that you are supposed to endorse. And in my case that is a Quince Mongolian cashmere sweater. That's what I am wearing at this moment and at Quince you can pick one up for 50 bucks when you normally drop $200 or more on the same thing. Plus wool coats that actually hold up to daily wear and still look good. I myself have a quince puffer that I'm wearing over the sweater when I go out on these cold November days. By partnering directly with trusted factories that maintain high standards for craftsmanship and ethical practices, Quince cuts out the middleman and markups. That means premium quality at half the cost of other high end brands so you can give luxury pieces without the luxury price tag tag. So get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with quints. Don't wait. Go to quint.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Quincom Commentary. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com SL Commentary Impossible for them to be a powerful oppositional force should something happen. All of that he sent his son in law, he sent Witkoff, he's doing what he can do. And Russia says no again for the sixth or seventh time this year to him. And a couple of times this year he's gotten angry and said, you know, he obviously wanted to turn on Zelensky and Russia kind of wouldn't let him. Like Russia kept like rejecting what seemed to him to be perfectly acceptable ideas and now they've gone a little further and Russia rejects this. So here's my fantasy scenario following your example of the Israelis and Iran and America. He says the hell with it and he sends Ukraine a huge amount of weaponry and American advisors and people to help them fly the planes and says just do whatever damage you could possibly do. What does J.D. vance? What do the people in his coalition who are resolutely, weirdly oppositional toward Ukraine for reasons we don't need to get into, but for which the word rhyming with Smanti, with Semanti schmemitism might play a large role. They are still. It's all the true Trump. The true Trump wants to end the war. The true Trump is the true Trump. Do they say, all right, that's it, he's now just another tool of the deep state. He's. He's given in. He's given in to the internationalist neo. The neocons have something on him and we're done with him. Or do they try again? This isn't going to happen. So maybe this is a dumb counter, you know, proposition. Or do they try somehow to shoehorn this into maga? Any.
- [59:53]
John Podhoretz
They've always tried to shoehorn pretty much everything into maga. Israel has been the one exception that, you know, a certain wing has not, you know, accepted. But I think that, you know, Vans, the question is, what do these, what do these people think about Vance, right. In this. Because Vance is going to respond. Let's say he, Trump does this. Vance's response is going to begin. I don't know exactly what he's going to say, but I know that the first words are going to be. The president has always said, right, because Vance is, Vance is in the administrator. You know, he's the guy. He's, he's, he is waiting to take a handoff, and he is focused on not fumbling the handoff. And so his response, as it has been in the past, is, you know, but what makes this more complicated than, say, the Iran strike is. The Iran strike was an easily defensible, realist foreign policy move. If you think about it, it. No boots on the ground, no air defenses whatsoever. Israel controlled the skies over Iran at the moment the US Planes were sent.
- [61:06]
Seth Mandel
Right?
- [61:06]
John Podhoretz
Right. So it was an open door to walk through and walk back. Nobody stopped there, nobody got hurt. And that was literally the end of it. Then Trump said, you're done, you know, bb, turn around those planes, whatever. So that was an easier. That was an easier one to make the case. This is harder. It's harder to make the case for, you know, for them, for giving all these weapons to Ukraine and laying out the scenario that you lay out. Because that is, to them, a massively aggressive move. Because part of what they've been arguing is not just as in Iran, this might lead to war and Americans may die and you're going to pull us into a country conflict. But they have been arguing specifically Putin's Going to nuke Europe or you know, they've been arguing apocalyptic scenarios about how there is no limiting principle on the Russian side in terms of a response. And so how are they going to handle it? I don't know. But J.D. vance is going to have to be in it enough to raise the hackles and suspicion of that wing of the party. And, and then that wing of the party is going to be without someone on the inside high up to lean on for this. Right. Where part of the reason the groipers can get away with, what they get away with is because they can, they, they can just pretend that JD Vance is their friend. He doesn't say anything one way or the other, you know, and that's that this, they're going, he's going to be the new. You know, it's like that thing we talked about last week, a couple weeks ago, Nick Fuentes making the two hats make America great again hat or is, you know, America first or MAGA. You know, J.D. if, if Trump does this, J.D. goes into the same bucket that Trump does. And I think that, that just disempowers, you know, this wing because they have no, they have no threat. They can't say, well JD Vance is going to cut you loose when he takes over the party.
- [63:11]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think obviously aside from Vance, every other person in that wing of MAGA will, would lose their mind.
- [63:22]
Seth Mandel
Right?
- [63:23]
Abe Greenwald
They lost, they lost their mind over this successful in and out Israel strike. I mean, you know, as Seth says, it was, we had an open door and it was, it was this perfectly executed quick thing. They, that, that put. The fact that it worked was even worse for them, you know.
- [63:38]
Seth Mandel
Yeah. At what point if Russia rejects this plan, whatever this plan is, it's going to be very interesting to see like what Trump. Is Trump going to be patient with that response? Is he going to let it go and come back in three months with more ridiculous negotiating crap until the Ukrainians have had enough and say we just can't fight anymore, we're just going to have to give in. There's no, you know, that's why Russia would be, you know, you would think sort of like it's like what Abba Eban said. Right. The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. This is actually a huge opportunity for Putin. He doesn't see it that way and he knows better who his audience is than we do. But he's not going to get a better deal from, I don't think he'll get a better deal from the United States than this. Trump is more likely to wash his hands of playing any kind of role in this. Of course, you can't really wash your hands because then there's the question of what do you do about Ukraine? And maybe Seth.
- [65:00]
John Podhoretz
But also washing your hands is a Putin win.
- [65:03]
Seth Mandel
Putin.
- [65:03]
John Podhoretz
Putin's happy for Trump to get frustrated and throw up his hands. He almost wants that more than anything else.
- [65:11]
Seth Mandel
Unless washing your hands means, all right, everything in the pipeline goes to, goes to Ukraine. What do they want? Just give them what they want. We'll sell them what they want. I'll make the Europeans pay for it. How about that? We'll send a bill to the Europeans, Europeans, and then the Europeans will claim they paid for it and we'll say, oh, we took the money for it. And of course they won't have paid us for it and they take the money for it. But you know, as a face saving thing, I don't know, I'm, I'm making stuff up here. So it's maybe that's okay.
- [65:40]
Abe Greenwald
So are they. So, you know. Yeah, that's why it's so hard to even talk about because I've watched the administration zig and zag on this, you know, so much. I mean, the general thrust has been to try to coax Putin into some deal to talk. Very, very positive talks, very promising meeting up, come getting very close, you know, and then, then there have been these few times that Trump has totally turned on Putin and the last one was, was, you know, was a pretty big deal, you know, imposing sanctions and, and lifting restrictions on firing Western American made weapons deep into, deep into Russia and then now. But here we are again. It's, it's, you know, exactly where we were almost a year ago. So I don't know, I don't know if you just keep zigging and zagging or what.
- [66:37]
Seth Mandel
Okay, I'm going to make a quick recommendation of a book I have not yet read, but it just popped into my Kindle today because I pre ordered it. And it's an interesting guy and an interesting writer that I want to praise and see where, where it goes. This is Tim Blake Nelson. You, you. Tim Blake Nelson is an actor. You'll know him as. He was the, he was the real hillbilly in O Brother, Where Art Thou? He is the villain in Captain America with Harrison Ford as the red Hulk. He was on Watchmen as one of the cops. You, he is one of those that guys, you would recognize him. He's a very interesting character, playwright, film director in the 90s ended up almost as an accidental actor by getting cast in oh Brother or Arthur, though he had studied at Juilliard. Anyway, he's written plays. He wrote a play about Socrates and he wrote a novel last year called City or a couple of years ago called City of Blows, which is a sort of a history of Hollywood, a novel about people in different eras in Hollywood that is very good and surprisingly powerful and interesting and funny. And he has a new novel out called Superhero, which is about the making of a superhero movie which again, I have not yet read. But he, of course, as I say, was in, you know, played the villain in Captain America, Red Hulk or whatever the hell it was called. Was terrible. It was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. He was. He was pretty good in it. But. So this is obviously a deep, a deeply informed book about a very interesting cultural topic. He is a wonderful actor. He was in a great movie two years ago called Old Henry, which is about a. Which. Which you can find on streaming, which is about a. A taciturn farmer at the tail end of the beginning of the 20th century and his son who is bored and exhausted by his father who won't say a word and won't do anything. And then some gunmen show up at their door to take over his farm. And it turns out that Old Henry is not who he appears, who he appears to be and is in fact a legendary gunfighter from the Old west who is now, you know, ended up in his 60s trying to save his kid from the life that he led. It's a fantastic movie. Also worth seeing. But. But. So my recommendation today, and we could read it together and see how it goes, is Tim Blake Nelson's superhero. So we'll be back tomorrow. Remember what I said about commentary.org donate and for Abe and Seth, I'm John Pothor. It's keep the camera.
- [70:04]
Abe Greenwald
And Doug.
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John Podhoretz
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Abe Greenwald
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John Podhoretz
Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
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Seth Mandel
Cut the camera.
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Abe Greenwald
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John Podhoretz
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Abe Greenwald
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