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- [00:04]
Jonathan Schanzer
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:10]
Eli Lake
Some drinks and pain, Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst,
- [00:21]
Jonathan Schanzer
hope for the best.
- [00:23]
John Podhoretz
It's Wednesday, June 24, and welcome to the Commentary magazine, Daily Shiva. I am your primary mourner, Commentary editor Jon Pudhoritz. With me with mirrors covered, sitting on low chairs, we have senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:43]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John. Good to be here on Sackcloth Wednesday.
- [00:47]
John Podhoretz
Yes. We have contributing editor and host of the Breaking History podcast, Eli Lake. Hi, Eli.
- [00:55]
Eli Lake
Hi, John. To invert the line from the Big Lebowski, the republic, your republic is over. The bums won anyway.
- [01:10]
John Podhoretz
And contributing editor Jonathan Schanzer Poohbah at the foundation for Defense of Democracies. Hi, Jonathan.
- [01:17]
Jonathan Schanzer
May you find comfort among the mourners of New York and Jerusalem.
- [01:22]
John Podhoretz
Thank you very much. Now we are referring here to the process of what is known as Sheva, that is the morning period, seven day mourning period that follows the funeral of someone who has passed and I'm not quite sure who has passed. We know who lost last time. We know that two sitting congressmen in New York, Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman, lost their races against insurgent candidates from the Democratic Party, Socialists of America, sponsored by Mayor Zoran Mamdani. A third running in an open seat, Claire Valdez won her race. So Mandani scored a trifecta. The three candidates that he championed and sponsored will end up in Congress in November because there will not be any credible Republican Party counterweight to them in these overwhelmingly Democratic districts. And why is this important? It's important to me. I live here. But let me just put it to you this way. Imagine it's October 8th and I say to you, in two years and eight months there will be an anti Zionist Muslim mayor of New York City who will be shepherding three anti Zionist candidates into the US Congress behind him, whose primary issue both in the election in New York City and in the congressional election to represent New York in Washington. And by the way, some states seats won also last night in New York is hatred of Israel, defunding Israel, breaking our relationship with Israel and all of that. Primary issue, not secondary, not like, oh, by the way, I'm also an anti Zionist. You can say that Mamdani won because he talked about affordability. We all now, I think know that that's not true. It's not true because of this result in particular, because the secret sauce of the Democratic Party's insurgent class that is staging a takeover of the party, the way the Tea Party staged a takeover of the Republican Party in 2009 and 2010. The secret sauce is Israel is the word genocide is the idea that we need to fundamentally change the relationship between the United States and Israel to turn Israel into a country toward which we have a hostile rather than a friendly posture. Eli Lake, you began your career covering New York City politics. I believe you did one.
- [04:29]
Eli Lake
I did a stint in Washington covering the EPA for a newsletter. But yes, I was a New York sun guy early on. Yes.
- [04:36]
John Podhoretz
Okay, okay.
- [04:38]
Eli Lake
And covering it.
- [04:39]
John Podhoretz
Okay. So that was, you know, a couple of decades. Yeah, it's a couple of decades ago. But what you do know, and what has been a consuming interest of yours, is the ideological battle between the old left, the Stalinist left, the New left, the anti Zionist left, and the conventional liberal Democratic party of old. So how stands the Union? Eli?
- [05:11]
Eli Lake
It's horrible. And I wanted to say that saying you're factually correct. This was an anti Zionist, you know, campaign. But anti Zionist is too antiseptic for what we just saw. This woman, Daruliza Chevalier Meinhof or whatever her name is, she, on October 8th, was at the rally celebrating October 7th. She was there cheering it on. This was not a matter of no comment. This wasn't, you know, even Mamdani, you know, he wasn't the next day. And even her, you know, so she was there. And when she's asked about it, would you condemn Hamas, which should be the easiest thing in the world, given who they are, given the fact that Hamas torments Palestinians, shoots Palestinians, alleged collaborators, in the kneecaps, won't do it. She will not disparage her revolutionary brothers and sisters. That is insane to me. I mean, and you add that with Adam Hammawi in New Jersey, who was a character witness for the blind sheik, who was the implication in his trial on the first World Trade center bombing, and you look at the direction of these new DSA socialists who are taking over the Democratic Party, Jamie Kirchuk is correct when he says the DSA hates the Democrats more than they hate the Trumpists and the Republicans. Um, it's a five alarm emergency. This is a catastrophe. And of course, by the way, Dara, Liza Chevalier Meinhof, as I am now calling her, she went to Columbia. Of course she did. Columbia's ground zero for all of this. And when you combine that with that horrible incident, listen, Dan Goldman is no great shakes. I hope we get into it. Dan Goldman, in my view, was a kind of an Adam Schiff kind of type you know, resistance figure, and I had plenty of criticisms of him, but that he gets singled out, you know, for supporting genocide because, you know, he didn't read from the exact script. And as you pointed out earlier, that's not exactly our definition of a pro Israel guy. It's a moral catastrophe. And what I worry about is politically right now is that the counterbalance, the natural counterweight, the reason why there should be a big blinking light, don't nominate people who can't condemn hump terrorists, is because you're gonna have a general election ad and they're gonna tie it around the Democrats in the midterms, and that's gonna lose votes for you. But can the Republican Party do that when the Republican vice president is. Is assuring us that the Iranian negotiators, the remnants of this regime that we once were encouraging only a few months ago to be overthrown by the people, are now reasonable and have come to see the importance of working with the international community and so forth. So I don't know who's going to stand up for basic things like, we're Americans, we hate terrorists. Because I'm confused at this point. I don't think we. It's a really low moment.
- [08:50]
John Podhoretz
Seth, the question that Eli raises, I think that is so important here is ordinarily you would say, whoa, Republicans just got a big gift. Look at all this material that they're going to be able to use in. In November against Democrats. Dariel as a chevalier, wiping her hands on the American flag and saying, no cops ever. She doesn't ever want there to be a cop. Other stuff that Graham Platner has said in Maine, all of that, it's like, it's just a huge gift to Republicans. But I don't think so, because I think, yes, it will be very effective juicing Republicans in the places where Republicans are likely to win. Anyway, the story here is the conversion of the Democratic Party into the Democratic Socialists of America Party, and the fact that there seems to be almost no resistance to that. And what you're going to have, like the Tea Party did with Republicans, is conventional Democrats shifting over to the direction of the DSA and Mamdani and everything that the squad began in 2018, going to them to save their hides, the way Republicans went to Trump to save their hides, the way that Republic or conventional Republicans went to the Tea Party to save their hides, rather than getting swept up and destroyed by this new tide.
- [10:32]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, well, this is what I've referred to in the past as the progressive street. Because when Mamdani was asked yesterday again to comment on Dan Goldman being not kicked out of the coffee shop. But you know, told he's not welcome back there anymore, banned whatever his order refunded. Mamdani said something like, well you know, I, I'm, I'm all in for, you know, real political debate, but what we saw yesterday goes beyond that or something like that.
- [11:13]
John Podhoretz
It went beyond, that's all he said, went beyond.
- [11:15]
Seth Mandel
Right there is Mamdani. Just as a lot of these politicians fear crossing Mamdani, what you see from Mamdani is that what they and Mamdani fear is crossing the crazies in the base though the, the, the inmates are running the asylum. And that's, that's really the lesson from last night, which is that if you're too afraid to full throatedly denounce, you know, banning a Jew from your coffee shop in New York, remember he's the mayor, he's the executive, he's not a state legislator anymore. So that's that. One lesson is that the inmates are running the asylum and Mamdani, who looks like he's in control, is riding the tiger. He's, this is, this is, he's got a better grip on, on the, the, the tornado than other people in the Democratic Party, but he's still being driven by this populist mass of anger and anti Semitism. The other thing that I, that I
- [12:26]
John Podhoretz
want to say is that, is it populist? Before you go on, is it populist? Because if you look at the breakdown, according to the New York Times this morning, if you look at the breakdown of the vote and in the district that we're talking about here, that is Lander versus Goldman, an anti Zionist Jew versus a non anti Zionist Jew. I wouldn't by the way, exactly call Dan Goldman the most full throated supporter of Israel I've ever seen. Like we're now talk about like, you know, talk about a soft, you know, I mean it's terrible that anti Semites, you know, use whatever little support for Israel he might have as a weapon against him. But you know, if I wanted somebody in the trenches to be helping me in a fight over Israel, Dan Goldman is the last, not the last person I would turn to, but certainly not anybody that I would think would be a stalwart guy in the fight. But if you look at the breakdown according to the exit polling of who voted, or maybe not exit polling but where location polling in this very large district, it's 750,000 people living in this district. The poorer People in the district voted for Goldman. The most working class parts of the district voted for Goldman. It's the yuppies. It's the people in the West Village. It's the people in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill and Red Hook and people that's who voted for Lander. So we can call this populist, but it's the populism of the educated. College educated, having three jobs in tech to support yourself.
- [14:19]
Eli Lake
But they're not educated.
- [14:21]
Seth Mandel
But downwardly mobile.
- [14:23]
Eli Lake
Yeah, they're downwardly mobile. That's exactly. The point, is that they have useless grand graduate degrees.
- [14:28]
Seth Mandel
College educated, but downwardly mobile is, is what makes up this, this sort of base of, of, of of voters. And I, I would say also by the. The other thing is that I don't
- [14:40]
John Podhoretz
even think they're downwardly mobile. You know what?
- [14:41]
Seth Mandel
A lot of, A lot of them are.
- [14:44]
John Podhoretz
I'm gonna reject this. Now. They may be downwardly mobile because they're 25 years old and their parents own two homes and they're renting. They're sharing an apartment with three other people in New York City. But you know what? Everybody from time immemorial has come into New York City without a lot of money and lived in small spaces sharing them. Whether you were an immigrant or somebody coming in, if you're 25 years old, you should not expect to live on Central Park West. That is not what downward mobility is. It is not.
- [15:16]
Jonathan Schanzer
That's how they see.
- [15:17]
Seth Mandel
In other words, they see.
- [15:20]
Eli Lake
No, I wanna reject. There's a huge difference between this generation of overly educated baristas and others, okay? And the difference is that they have zero job prospects for making any as much money as their parents because they were the ones who decided to get married.
- [15:40]
John Podhoretz
I think it was ridiculous. In 20. Wait, Eli, Eli, Eli. In 2010, there was a 10% unemployment rate. When I graduated from college in 1982, the unemployment rate was 10%. Okay? This idea that they face unique headwinds that are making their lives impossible.
- [16:03]
Eli Lake
I have zero. Maybe I'm making a different point. I'm making a different point. I am not saying that they are more oppressed.
- [16:11]
John Podhoretz
You said they have zero job prospects, and that is.
- [16:14]
Eli Lake
Well, no, no, they have job prospects, but not the jobs that, that they think they're entitled to. And the reason is because they got useless degrees at elite universities that are not going to help them. That's the thing. So they work for, like, nonprofits or they, you know, and they have all these side hustles and everything like that. That's the difference? The difference is, is that there are people who would I'm gonna make it. I'm gonna get a job in publishing. And there was a career path for them. I'm saying, like, what's the career path for the, you know, indigenous anti colonialism studies major other than the 5% that will go to graduate school and get actual jobs at universities? What I'm saying is that this is a product of the kind of bloat of our elite institutions and the failure of those elite institutions that are supposed to be preparing a leadership class and are instead preparing a kind of dilettant, dilettante class. That's the.
- [17:12]
John Podhoretz
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- [18:15]
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- [18:40]
Jonathan Schanzer
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- [18:49]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so it probably doesn't matter what the makeup is of the vote here. What matters because we have, we have different districts. We have a district in which it's not the Lander Goldman district in which the head of the congressional Hispanic Caucus was ousted. By Dariel Isa Chevalier. That's Adriano Espallad, the head of the Hispanic Caucus. That would ordinarily be an impregnable job to be ousted, particularly from your left. That's identity politics. That's supposed to be the. That's supposed to be the glory of the Democratic Party is the way that it has a gorgeous mosaic. So Mamdani's way of defending it or working on it is to say that I believe, saying that she's an Afro Latina, although now I'm wondering whether I'm talking about Claire Valdez. So I'm sorry. I'm very confused about everything. It doesn't matter. What I'm saying is, like, this wave is a real wave. It's a wave in New York City, but it's not, as you mentioned with Adam Hamawi, not just in New York City. And the question is what wisdom Democratic politicians across the country are going to take from this. Chris, the wisest people that I know in politics who get everything right, I'm not gonna say two or three different people tell me that they're pretty sure that Graham Platner will prevail in Maine. And I'm like, really? He seems like when Susan Collins gets going and it's like, no, no, the partisan. We are going back to our partisan corners. Maine is a blue state. She defied gravity. And Platner is a horrible candidate in many ways. But the gravitational pull here pulls the state toward Platner. And if the atmosphere in the United States is the Democratic Party is moving left and Platner is moving left, then he's just part of a new political reality in the United States. He's not an outlier. Part of the way you would get Platner out is to say he can't go into the Senate. He's like a lunatic outlier. Well, he's less of a lunatic outlier now than he was yesterday.
- [21:16]
Eli Lake
So
- [21:19]
John Podhoretz
that's where my concern holds, and that's why I'm sitting shiva and looking at real estate in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. But we will now let us turn to the subject that we were intending to talk about today with Jonathan Schanzer and Eli, both of whom have spent the last many years of their lives focusing on exactly this issue, which is where we stand here on Wednesday with the Memorandum of Understanding and Israel's war with Lebanon and the fight between conversations between Israel, implicitly Israel in the United States and inside Israel about what it needs to do in Lebanon. John, let me just pose it to you like this. So everywhere I turn the line from left to right, and I mean responsible right to left is, America's lost this war. We've lost. And Trump saying, and Trump said last night, what is wrong with you people? The Iranians have no navy. They have no air force. They're in rubble. You know, their defenses are shot. We have harmed them immeasurably. They're coming begging to us. That's clearly not true. But the fact is that Iran is much degraded from where it was on February 28th. I mean, that's undeniably the reality. So if we degraded them and set them back and hurt them and all of that, can we say that they have won this war when all they won is our unilateral retreat from the war, not that they have somehow advanced their own interests? Or is this all just sort of like a chess game in the head of the geopolitical chessboard?
- [23:33]
Jonathan Schanzer
Okay, so I think a couple of things can be true at once, and I think it's important to unpack this. I do believe that the campaign waged by the United States and Israel jointly against the Islamic Republic has done an enormous amount of damage to the regime. And, yes, the navy's gone, the air force is gone. The top leaders, many of them have been. Have been killed. Command and control structures gone. Defense industrial base, eviscerated missiles, missile launchers, all of those things really bad shape. And then, not to mention the. The economic situation in Iran, at least for the moment, fairly dire. The political situation, also dire. All of those things, I think, are wins for the United States and for Israel. The problem was how much it cost us to do this. And here's what I mean by that. And we've talked about this on this podcast lots of times. The US Ran low on air defense, on munitions. We started tapping into our oil reserves in ways that I think were unhealthy. And we've heard reports that, you know, we actually got as low as we've been since the 1980s in terms of tapping those strategic oil, the strategic petroleum reserves. And then on top of that, you have the Islamic Republic holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage and bringing the price of oil to levels that we didn't want to see and essentially holding the entire world hostage because they just weren't allowing these ships to come through. So, in other words, out of weakness, the Islamic Republic finds strength, aided by probably some poor decision making on the part of the United States, where we found ourselves at these low levels and at these crisis levels. Across the board. And that, of course, is all going into the summer months where the President wants to make sure that we have enough oil and that it's not too expensive, and we've got the midterms looming in November. You get a sense of what's going on here. It was a political crisis, and the President needed to get out of it. And so he taps JD Vance to be the guy that runs this. And I gotta say that the negotiations look like we are ceding way too much. The money that we're providing the Iranians is going to allow them to rebuild. The sanctions relief is going to be assigned to the markets that Iran is open for business. And they're going to be able to redirect this cash toward, you know, missiles and proxies and maybe even nukes. And so what we're finding is that with all the good things that we were able to accomplish in the first month of this war, for, I think, reasons that we can all understand, we're losing leverage. What I guess I'm trying to understand here is, is this a good cop, bad cop routine that we're watching between Vance and Trump and that the, you know, the final destination for the MoU will be somewhere in between total capitulation and Trump's threats to return to war? Or, you know, are we actually steering this entire thing towards a complete collapse because of our desperation to open up the strait and to end the aftermath of the war? I just don't really understand the strategy. And of course, you know, the Trump administration doesn't have a policy. There is no Trump doctrine. There never has been. I don't think there will be. So what we're left with right now are a bunch of questions that we can't seem to answer, the administration doesn't want to answer. And everyone is scratching their heads in, you know, in total anxiety. And no one has more anxiety right now than the Israelis. And I'll just, I'll. I'll end the sort of synopsis here. The Israelis are in this impossible situation where the Iranians are, in fact, directing strikes through Hezbollah against them. Because we know the Iranians are in Lebanon right now, and they are directing Hezbollah, they're funding them, they're arming them, and they are giving them the operational direction to attack the Israelis. The Israelis then have to respond. It is. Their doctrine is also, is in the middle of the. Their election cycle. So nobody is going to stand down in the face of aggression from a violent terrorist proxy. And so when they respond, the Iranians who sparked this thing in the first place, then cry foul and say they're going to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. And all that does is give more leverage to the Iranian negotiators in Switzerland. And JD Vance appears to be willing to accede to their demands. So it is this insane knot that feels like it's getting tighter around the neck of the US but also around the neck of the Israelis. And we need a way out.
- [28:23]
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- [28:45]
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- [29:22]
John Podhoretz
When you get momentum, you step on the gas.
- [29:25]
Jonathan Schanzer
That's how you get separation from everybody else. I was at Harvard Law School, I was blah blah blah. I looked up, let me tell you something. There's kids in my neighborhood putting in sheetrock that is smarter than you. AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff. It is never going to disrupt physical
- [29:38]
John Podhoretz
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Matt Ebert
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John Podhoretz
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Matt Ebert
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- [30:01]
John Podhoretz
Eli Today Trump is going to have lunch with the Republican caucus in the Senate and we are also told is going to have a meeting with his defense chiefs to talk about munitions. So the theory that was proffered last night at a very interesting live taping of the Dispatch podcast with Jonah and Steve Hayes and Chris StarWalt and Megan McArdle is that Trump is gonna get it from the senators that for the first time really in his years as president, they are gonna go at him. And there are at least three or four senators who are now not gonna be in the Senate after November, so they have nothing to lose. But that others are gonna say, what the hell did you do here? What's going on? You're asking us to defend something that we can't defend. Give us some room. Tell us what the hell you're doing. If that happens, that's gonna be a very interesting moment in our recent political history, because generally speaking, Trump has had a quiescent Senate and House scared of his anger and his retribution, and he is sitting somewhere in the mid-30s at best, in his approval rating.
- [31:25]
Eli Lake
And.
- [31:25]
John Podhoretz
And they're looking at him as a potential anchor that was going to drag them down, win the House, possibly win the Senate, and then he's got to go. Talk about munitions. And you and Jonathan both have been talking about this munitions crisis for the last six weeks and how we are. There may be real world reasons why we had to. We had to basically stand down, that we were no longer secure in our ability to work our will without placing our forces in severe jeopardy in a way that Trump was not willing to do. The way actually. And usually in war, you kind of understand that your forces are in jeopardy in a war. That's what a war is. It's not just you shoot at somebody and then they don't shoot back. That's what we now think a war should be. But that's not what war typically is. Anyway. What do you make of Trump today? What can he do today?
- [32:29]
Eli Lake
Well, keep in mind, yesterday, the Senate already Republicans, defied him because there was a vote that ended funding for the Iran war, which he was angry about. So he's already losing his grip. I think the way to look at this problem is that in the current moment, right now, Iran has fewer ballistic missiles, fewer short range ballistic missiles than they did at the beginning of the war on February 28th. However, they also. We don't have the interceptors in theater. And if we were to put the interceptors in theater, we would risk provoking the Chinese in the Strait of Taiwan. So even if we manage to protect our own forces, the ability for Iran to do enormous damage by hitting refineries or a desalination plant in Saudi Arabia or any number of things, is just too much. And that means that for the moment, and I want to stress this is, for the time being, Iran really does have the world and America by the short and curlies. That said, these things can change quickly. There was briefly in the war the Israelis put online, and then they took back. I Guess. But there's something called Iron Beam, which is a laser based missile defense. I understand that it's not quite ready to be deployed, but it's coming close. There are other Israeli technologies in missile defense that would solve the horrible math problem that are close. So that right there would change the calculus and would remove the overall advantage that the Iranians have, which is beyond the Strait of Hormuz, which everyone talks about. Oh, it's all about geography. Yes, but it's really this missile problem. So if the Israelis can deploy that, if America can overcome, if we can overcome some of our problems, which we've experienced delays in producing what are known as the SM3s and the SM6s and the SM2s for our patriot missile defense, which are very expensive. There's a problem with the rocket motor, as I've recently been reporting, that we have to. Once we overcome these delays in our system and the Israelis can get their new defense tech online, that would be a game changer. And that's not wishcasting. That could be four months away in an optimistic timeline. But it's not. My point is that the Iranians do not have a forever advantage in this regard. And this is their window. And I think what Trump's real strategy overall is to use his wonderful expression, is to tap the Iranians along. And that's why he likes this 60 days and then we have another 60 days. Because if you are in negotiation, if you're jaw jawing and you're not war warring, then you can get time to solve this problem that we have with our missile defenses. And that I think is the center of it. Jonathan, you were going to say something?
- [35:47]
Jonathan Schanzer
Well, yeah, I mean, I think I largely agree with the assessment and maybe even the timeline. I think the timeline is incredibly disadvantageous to the United States and to Israel and, and to the overall outcome that we're looking for. Because, you know, when you start to look at the sanctions relief that we're about to provide and you look at the cash that we're looking to open up for the Iranians to access, what we actually do is we end up squandering this unbelievable opportunity. The Iranians are in really bad shape right now. They are negotiating from strength because they are holding the world hostage. But they're going to bounce back from this. And the question is, if we let this go for another four months, and I think, by the way, four months is probably very optimistic here. When we think about getting our missile defense back online and ready to deploy, I mean, I think that is incredibly optimistic. I think we're probably talking about a year or more at least, based on what I've heard. And so what we have is this problem that may not be solvable for the moment. Now, I will actually just say in the same breath, I was talking to a foreign diplomat last night, not connected to the Middle east at all, but an astute observer of international affairs. And what this diplomat said was that Iran may actually be in worse shape after things go quiet. In other words, all of a sudden, when, when actually when the war ends, when the Strait of Hormuz opens, this is probably the moment where the Iranian people are going to have their say. It's the moment where the entire region, which has been paying protection for the regime to stop firing, they're going to want to have their moment too. And they've got a lot of money to be able to spend on things that can undermine the regime. And so the peace actually for the Islamic Republic may be scarier than the war or the negotiations that they're conducting right now, which I found to be a really interesting observation. But bottom line, that, that really worries me though is just the expendability of the leverage that we had. The somehow, I mean, with all the options that we have at our disposal, how is it that we just don't have an answer to the Islamic Republic right now? How is it that we don't have the rally allies who are all irate over the fact that the Iranians have shut down an international waterway? Okay, this is a violation of all norms, all international laws. There is no way that this stands under any circumstances in the so called rules based international order. And yet somehow everybody's quiet and it's up to the United States to negotiate a horrible deal with the Iranians in order to open this thing up. Now I understand the US Pissed off the Europeans heading into this conflict over Greenland, and I understand that the Trump administration and the Europeans and even the sort of far right in Europe, they can't agree on much these days, but wow. What we're watching is a collapse of the US Position. We're watching a collapse of the leverage that we had over the Iranians. We're watching a collapse of the order that we supposedly uphold. I just don't understand the strategy right now other than waiting for our munitions to get back online in another year or more.
- [39:21]
Eli Lake
All right, so if I may, and again, I'm giving you the most charitable read, but, and I'm not holding my breath here, if J.D. vance or Trump or our negotiating team can again tap the Iranians along with the promise of the big payday down the line. But they get what the 24 billion for now, I've been told, and you guys at FTD are the best at this, that that's a drop in the bucket for what their broader needs are. So the idea would be that in this negotiation they would get some, but not nearly enough of the economic relief that they need. And that, you know, and again, you would we would be buying ourselves some time. And that right there is, I mean, I think that that's probably the key to all of it, which is that if we and that's why it's useful in some ways to have J.D. vance as, you know, the person who promises the moon and then Trump and we saw this, this week, Rubio somewhat undermining all of that. Rubio said clearly, I think at one point this week that Iran has no place in Lebanon. Thank God. I hope that's the policy. So this is, you know, an opportunity maybe for some strategic ambiguity and deception to convince the Iranians that they've got more than they really have and to make sure that the real economic benefits do not accrue to them in this period when we need to restock.
- [41:05]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so it's worse than that because, and that's, I want to turn to Seth, two things you mentioned Rubio saying that Iran has no place in Lebanon and Iran has no place, you know, is now any nation that sponsors a terrorist group and to commit terrorist acts and fire across borders is not part of the community of nations. And he's saying that. And at the State Department as he is saying that negotiate they are, they're entering the fifth round of negotiations, direct negotiations between Israel and actually Lebanon. Right. What we're talking about here is Israel is fighting Hezbollah, a parasitic terrorist group that has burrowed itself into Lebanon. And the government of Lebanon is now willing, though it's an incredibly weak government. This is a very complicated story, and you can't tell it so easily. Government of Lebanon wishes to embrace this moment as some way of getting itself rid of the Hezbollah cancer that has been bedeviling it now for 40 years and is causing all of this destruction in the south and parts of Beirut. We sponsored that negotiation, and Vance and Witkoff and Jared and whatever are undermining it. In Switzerland, they're creating a mechanism that leaves Lebanon and Israel out of the fate of Lebanon and Israel while the secretary of state is hosting the negotiation between Lebanon and Israel. So that ain't tapping anybody along. That is policy Chaos, that is. I don't even know what to call that, though.
- [43:02]
Seth Mandel
It's worse than that in the sense that. Excuse me, sorry. In the sense that they first drew the Lebanese president Aun out onto the ledge and then they pushed him off.
- [43:17]
Jonathan Schanzer
This is.
- [43:18]
Seth Mandel
This is the problem with, with their. With the way things have gone, is that it's not just the day.
- [43:23]
John Podhoretz
Who is the they?
- [43:24]
Seth Mandel
Oh, the Trump administration. The Trump administration got the Lebanese government to meet with the Israelis at the ambassadorial level and then got the president to say when there's. If and when there's a deal, a real deal, a peace deal, whatever, that's when we'll. We'll all meet Bibi and all that stuff. But the more important stuff that he was saying was Hezbollah are unpatriotic traitors. They got. They get. The Trump administration infused the Lebanese administration with enough confidence that it had their backing, their diplomatic backing, that they went out on a limb and said these things about Hezbollah that, again, in the past usually gets. The person who said it disappeared within weeks. I mean, the. The way that Hezbollah, the Iranians, the Syrians and Hezbollah have all controlled Lebanon since 2005, when they had to, you know, sort of officially unofficially relinquish actual control of the state, they have continued, you know, their campaign of assassination and threats and stuff like that. And, And. And these, and these Lebanese leaders know that. So what we did was we. We kind of drew them out onto the ledge and said, we'll have your back against Iran if you say Hezbollah, meaning Iran is bad and they need to get out of Lebanon. And then we struck up a deal that said Lebanon is really Iran's domain. Yeah, that's. That's what we did. So that, to me, that's the harsh, hardest part of it, is that we almost, you know, we kind of egged on the establishment to first take on Hezbollah before providing them with any means to do so, and then, you know, just let them sort of hang out there on their own.
- [45:29]
Jonathan Schanzer
I would totally agree. And I would also argue that the Israelis are the only leverage that the Lebanese government has. Right. I mean, if the idea is that you want to weaken Hezbollah, you need the Israelis to weaken Hezbollah because the Lebanese government, the Lebanese armed forces can't do this on their own. The only real stick that they have here is for the Israelis to continue to bomb in coordination with the Lebanese government, which has been happening tacitly since the ceasefire after the Grim Beeper operation and after Nasrallah's assassination. The ceasefire that has held tenuously has actually included the Israelis calling in concerns to the United States, the US Coordinating with the Lebanese side. The Lebanese side says, got it. We can't do anything. Go ahead and bomb Israel. This is. I mean, this is actual coordination on military targets between these two governments. And now all of a sudden, the, you know, the Lebanese, they don't have their air force any longer because the Israelis have been removed from the picture. And I would even argue that it's even more complicated now, because if you've seen what has been discussed out of Switzerland right now, the mechanism for governing the ceasefire in Lebanon is now under the auspices of Pakistan and Qatar. Right? These are the two countries that are apparently trying to preserve the peace, or what is supposed to be peace between these two countries. All the while, Hezbollah is attacking. And then every time Israel does, they get slammed for, you know, violating the ceasefire. This is an insane situation that the Israelis are in. It's an insane situation that the Lebanese are in. It's really hard to understand how we are somehow presiding all over this and how we've let it get to this point. So it is. Look, it's a sign that we've lost leverage in these talks. It's a sign that I don't think that we're running the show right now. It really does feel like someone else is. My hope here is that the vice President figures out that this is not going to end well for the US this is supposed to be, I think, an opportunity for him to get some reps, right? He's getting in at bat here to show everybody what his foreign policy would look like. This is not ending well for the US on lots of different levels. He still has 60 days to turn this thing around if he wishes to. But, man, I think, do we need to just set a different tone with the Pakistanis, with the Qataris, and obviously with the Iranians?
- [48:03]
John Podhoretz
I mean, that's science fiction, what you just laid out there. I say it's science fiction because Vance has clearly thrown in his hand with the idea that our most reliable interlocutors here are exactly the people that you're saying he needs to push out of the way and impose an American concord on. And that's precisely the opposite direction that these negotiations have gone in. We are relying on the Pakistanis. We are relying on the Qataris and the Turks. This is insane. We didn't blow our entire defensive munitions cache and go to war in order to restructure the Middle east to the benefit of people who sponsor jihadis, who pay for terrorist organizations and who house and hide their leadership. Why are we doing this? Well, one possible answer is, and I say this with all due respect, that Vance is an idiot. And why I say. I say this with respect is he's a guy. He went to school. He went to law school. He served in, you know, he did PR stuff, you know, in. You know, in the military. He wrote a book. He got himself elected to the Senate. He became vice president. He has had no dealings in the world of foreign policy ever before. He has been handed the most complicated portfolio challenge that I can think of in the last 20 years, dealing with this completely incomprehensible military geopolitical situation in which we dominated and destroyed another country's military. They then pull this trick with their waterway and battle us to a draw with a third country or two third countries involved, Israel and Lebanon because of Hezbollah. This would be devil Clemenceau. This would, you know, I mean, the treaties of the 19th century that the geniuses who created our modern diplomatic world, this is very hard stuff. And Trump just said, here you go. Do it. You take it. He didn't even say to the Secretary of State, who at least has been in the Senate for, I don't know, 16 years, was in the Senate for 14 years and, like, was on the Foreign Relations Committee and ran for president, had a whole portfolio, has a whole worldview that he has been part of and been paying a lot of attention to this. Vance is dropped in, like, a. It's like asking me to, like, defuse a bomb, you know? You know, it's like the thing where someone in a movie, you're like the person with shaky hands, and they're like, okay, you're the one who is gonna have to defuse the bomb. And the clock is ticking, and you have about 72 seconds, and there are six wires you have to cut in this sequence. And we don't even know what that is.
- [51:40]
Jonathan Schanzer
I can't wait to see John podahoric in Impossible 9. It's gonna be great. But look, I think there's another way of framing this, which is the US Found itself in a position where, I mean, we're getting. I mean, the Iranians are holding the world hostage, right? And we have this impossible economic situation. We've got the challenges with our defensive munitions. We've got incredibly skittish Gulf allies that want this thing over. The pressure is building in the United States. You've got, you know, political pressure from the Senate. You can see it now playing out. You can see that the president's hands are tied. There is no way on God's green earth that Marco Rubio wants to engage in a process where he's capitulating to the Iranians and working with the Pakistanis and working with the Qataris for a deal along the lines of what is happening here. I just, I cannot imagine that Marco Rubio would raise his hand for something like this. I don't know why we didn't.
- [52:45]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, but it's his job. It's his job. He's the only one.
- [52:50]
Eli Lake
Okay, there's no, there's a memorandum of understanding that under the auspices of a president notorious for, you know, not making good on his promises and changing his positions dramatically, you know, all the time. So I, in some ways, I mean, I just, I'm very skeptical that we are negotiating a new regional architecture for the Middle east at this moment, which is why I think it's more likely that this is a kind of Fabian strategy, a strategic retreat. I'm not saying he's going to go to war again. What I'm saying is, is that I think he just wants to make sure he's tap dancing his way out of a crisis. And if you're Trump, and again, this is a charitable explanation, but if you're Trump, you could count it as a win that he was. He, obviously, I don't think he was ever gonna put ground forces in. But we don't, we're not, it's not a forever war, so he doesn't have to deal with that. Number two, the economy didn't crash. We didn't end up with a global recession as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. We still, as you, we keep pointing out, we did in two wars, demolish over the course of a year a nuclear program that was perilously close to being able to produce nuclear weapons at an industrial scale that's now off the table. And the United States, but also Israel, importantly Israel, established that it has now this incredible long range ability to swoop in and kill your leaders with no problems. And that itself is a kind of
- [54:42]
Commercial Voice 2
new,
- [54:44]
Eli Lake
that's a new ability that Israel has now unveiled since October 7th. You could say the first was Hezbollah. But all of that is to the benefit. And so what we have now is a very Trumpian move where he is promising the world, and it looks like it's this complete free fall and a catastrophe and these negotiations in Switzerland are selling everybody out and so forth. Meanwhile, what has changed? Israel is not moving out of Lebanon. Israel is still responding to attacks. I was Impressed to see some Lebanese politician the other day still, you know, kind of making, you know, saying the right, these kinds of things. And even his own administration, even Marco Rubio and even at times Donald Trump in his various tweets, seems to be saying that I might change my mind. And even though we know that he can't do it right now, and we're not holding our breath, but, you know, hey, if they don't comply, you know, the war is back on and so forth. So I just would put all that in it as well. Which is why I think this is just an elaborate strategy to convince the Iranians now they're winning and make them think they're gonna get a lot more than they really are. And just like the people who built the casinos in Atlantic City, when the bill comes due on the other side, just like it kind of came to, he's gonna stiff them. And I mean, that's kind of what I'm hoping for.
- [56:12]
Jonathan Schanzer
So look, I think it's obviously, it's an optimistic view of things. I think we could obviously look at the negative view of things. And, you know, there are plenty of people out there that are saying that this is a collapse and the sky's falling. I would just say it's not over. Right. And I mean, I was sort of trying to get at this before that. I still think that the Iranian regime is in for a tough go. They're still in bad shape. Even as they might accrue more cash from this deal. I think their isolation, you know, there may be some deals cut with the Arab states, there may be deals cut with the US and there even may be tolls in the Strait of Hormuz at the end of this. But that doesn't mean that they're gonna be liked. It doesn't mean that people are gonna wanna see this regime survive. And there will be, I think, efforts to bring down this regime on top of whatever concessions are being made. I obviously can't speak to whether there's a long term strategy or to kind of rope a dope the Iranians into thinking that things are okay. And then at some point the bill comes due, as you suggest, Eli. And the US has this master stroke for me, I gotta say, the big concern that I have moving forward and I think, you know, just to broaden this out, we need to get our, our supply chain. We need to get our house in order here, obviously for the building out of munitions. We need. Like that to me seems so important. This, if there's, you know, if you wanna really put maybe a positive spin on this. This is a wake up call because we're entering into a different era of great power competition. We are the arsenal of democracy. We are the supply chain for allies across the Middle east and in Asia and beyond, not to mention just our own needs in the event that we have other wars to fight in the future. This is one hell of a wake up call. We're gonna have to get our act together there.
- [58:01]
John Podhoretz
We're gonna have to make sure we should bring in this piece of data, which is the pilots of the shot down American aircraft reported that they saw a drone pattern, a drone swarm as their attacker that they said looked like a jellyfish, that it was moving in
- [58:26]
Jonathan Schanzer
coordination, all kinds of crazy new weapons.
- [58:29]
John Podhoretz
Look, we've all seen maybe at baseball games or state, you know, we've seen at the Olympic ceremonies that you can take drones and fly them in patterns and they can look like fireworks and they can do all this. The reason I'm bringing this up is to say that we are in a new world. Because even Iran, after two months of whatever six weeks of our battering, was able to launch this very limited attack using drones, but in a new way, in an innovative way. We see, of course, Ukraine has managed to survive, thrive, and has possibly turned the tide of the war with Russia using this drone technology. Hezbollah is now playing with drones flying into Israel. We are in a new world and. Okay, so the thing that frightens me is that Trump is an 80 year old in constant lunatic and you are imputing to him a possible strategy that strikes me as being unlikely because of who he is.
- [59:39]
Eli Lake
Not a strategy. It's his nature, John. His nature.
- [59:43]
John Podhoretz
Well, you said a. You called it a stabia, you called it a safety.
- [59:46]
Eli Lake
Fair enough, fair enough, but you're right. Okay, but what I wanted to say is it's just his nature. He's tap dancing, he's trying to make sure he doesn't make any kind of commitments here. Right?
- [59:57]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so fine. And yeah, his signature isn't worth the piece of paper that it's printed on. And he signed something that doesn't really even count. It hasn't counted because the straits aren't open anyway. So the deal isn't right. The memorandum of understanding is not actually working or is not active. We need to start shifting and moving and playing and I don't, you know, are they fleet of foot? Do they have the capacity?
- [60:28]
Eli Lake
What?
- [60:28]
John Podhoretz
The Pentagon is not at its best. The Pentagon is not an innovative, fast moving operation. It's like the world's largest ship and it takes three years for it to make a circle and turn around. It's not Israel. With this possibility of deploying an entirely new laser based defense system in the air. That reduces the cost, we're told, of intercepting something in the air from $2,000 to $25.
- [61:04]
Seth Mandel
Also, we fired all the generals and
- [61:06]
John Podhoretz
he's firing the generals as we Hegseth is. So.
- [61:12]
Jonathan Schanzer
Can I just, I want to just interject for just a second because I do think it's important to acknowledge that our military is the most deadly in the world. I mean, when you look at the capabilities that we just put on display, okay. And you look at the platforms that we use and you look at the minimal losses that we incurred, the few mistakes that happened were actually mostly, you know, like the Kuwaitis shooting down our own aircraft. Right. I mean, what we just put on display was nothing short of incredibly impressive. What is not impressive is the bureaucratic backlog in the Pentagon. That's what has actually just really been exposed. And we need to be aware of the fact that. Yes, John, all the things that you just mentioned about the drones and the swarms and the FPV stuff that's being used out of Lebanon, these fiber optic cables that are preventing the jamming of the drones as they come into Israeli airspace, which has been innovated out of Ukraine, Technology is moving at a rapid pace. AI is going to actually play more and more of a role in warfare, which is going to be downright frightening. And I actually think that we have an edge there too right now. I'm not saying that we're going to be creating terminators and things like that, but I, I would just say that we are on the cutting edge of all of this. It's us against the Chinese. Our biggest problem right now appears to be, well, it's twofold. One, we can't uphold the order that we are, are apparently presiding over. We can't, we can't uphold international law. We cannot keep international waterways open with the structures and the system that we created, and we're alone in doing that. That seems like a problem that feels like an alliance problem. It also feels like an unraveling of the US Led world order in some way. And I worry about other strategic choke points that could be exploited.
- [63:03]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I want to talk about the world, US world order because Donald Trump is president now. It's June 2026. He will not be president January 21, 2029. And what happened yesterday and what's happening in Switzerland is very Important because what happened yesterday is that the Democratic Party is undergoing a revolution in real time. And we should not. What we should presume is that the nominee of the Democratic Party is not going to be some middle of the road schlep governor or whatever they call middle of the road. It is more likely that it will be a person that emerges from this unholy and evil stew of antisemitism, socialism and anti Americanism. That is the DSA stew and that's on one side. And on the other side, it's more likely than not that JD Vance will be the nominee of the Democrat of the Republican Party party. And the U S led world order is going. The fight is going to be over who destroys the U S led world order faster. That's what we are looking at. And what Trump, in my view, the thing that he ultimately has punted, unless Eli's right, this isn't over and that, you know, this is something that we're going to be the engagement with Iran to change the way the Middle east is working and the way Iran works. This is phase one and that there'll be a phase two. And maybe if there is a phase two, what I'm talking about will happen. But had Trump fought this war to a successful conclusion, the base effect of it on American politics, it's hard to know what it would have been. But it would not have been nothing. It would not have been negligible. He would have scored a foreign policy success with a form of intervention that it would be very hard for even the most radical Democrat to say, that regime is gone. And that's a better thing for the world than that regime being present. Most people, including people who would vote for DSA candidates, would think that of Iran, an extraordinarily unpopular country in the United States, including to leftists, and Trump has therefore made 2028. Unless he follows the ELI strategy and unless that happens, he has made our not retreat, but our inability to project our power is going to be. The argument's going to be how to do it more rapidly and with the most damage to us because that's who is gonna be giving voice to the foreign policy questions that face the country when the country has to decide who its next leader is gonna be.
- [66:15]
Eli Lake
You're hitting on the tragedy of all this, which is that six months ago it looked like we were going to enter a new phase in the Middle east when Iranians were on the streets and before they were mowed down and after Midnight Hammer, which I think everybody has to say was success and we thought that this was the direction of things, this is where things were going. And we thought and people were saying that this is even though Trump, for all of his many flaws, this is this opportunity to really grab greatness and then to then retreat into this negotiation in Switzerland and this collapse on what were long standing US policies regarding the Iranian role in Lebanon and everything else. And for that matter, Iran's right to have missiles, which was negotiated away by Obama. But that was one of the reasons why Trump got out of the JCPOA and all of those things. We thought that the regime was finally really in trouble and it was really in trouble. And I hope that it still is in trouble. And we can't possibly know. But that's the problem, is that the expectations were raised in such a way that even though we can squint and we can say, listen, Trump may very well have actually prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, it's quite possible that one of the results of this is that he prevented that, but he won't get credit for it. Because we thought it was gonna be the end of the regime. And Trump was talking like it was gonna be the end of the regime six months ago. He was encouraging the Iranian people to seize their institutions. So that's the real problem. And you're right in terms of if it's Vance versus dsa, God help us. I mean, what a horrendous choice in many ways. But I think if it is Vance versus dsa, if we're being honest, it's Vance. I mean, you can't vote for dsa. DSA actively hates America. Vance is argument we can't vote for dsa.
- [68:38]
John Podhoretz
We can't vote for dsa. We don't know if America can or can't vote for. That's the issue here. Because Trump is a radical force in American politics. He has created an anti. He has created a counter radical force in American politics which would not have arisen the way it has arisen without him as the originating factor by winning this insurgent election in 2016, which brought about the squad in 2018, which gave birth really to the situation that we find ourselves in in 2026. And therefore, I don't think that we have any reason to believe that there is that, you know, the American people are gonna be. They're rational and reasonable and they won't go. Who knows, who knows how they're gonna feel about if Trump is at 35% in the approval ratings in 2028, JD Vance is his nominee, is the nominee and he is running as on Trump's legacy, he will not be elected president. That is as axiomatic as axiomatic things get. So I don't know where this is going, but that's what we're looking at today if we want to look forward to in American politics. And, you know, I think we got to end it here. So Eli Lake and John Schanzer, our contributing editors, our wise inside outside men, thank you so much for joining Seth and me today. I, of course, am John Pod Horiz. Keep the camel burning.