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Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drink champagne Some die at first the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. Today is Friday, March 27, 2026. I'm John but Horowitz, the editor of Commentary. I want to do a little advance scheduling notification. Beginning next week is the Jewish holiday of Passover and an observance of Passover and our travel schedules. There will be no podcasts Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of next week. So we will have podcasts Monday and Tuesday and then we will go dark until the following week. So please plan accordingly. Don't think you're gonna be able to go into your fallout shelter and have three episodes next weekend to listen to the podcast on, but you can always go back and listen to some of our classics. I just don't know what those are because we record so many that I don't even remember what we talked about yesterday. So I will endeavor not to repeat what we said yesterday. With yester that is executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
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B
Hi John.
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And our social commentary columnist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
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C
Hi John.
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I'm a little punchy today. Didn't get a lot of sleep last night. We did not talk much, if at all, maybe not at all about the war yesterday so we could do some war talk. And I think everything is now bifurcated as follows. Either Trump is buying time, does not expect the Iranians to make a deal, and is getting ducks in a row for a major push to bring the conflict to a conclusion and an understandable and clear conclusion with American Israeli victory, or he's looking for an off ramp, or he's just improvising while the world is panicking and freaking out over the threats to world shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the games that the Iranians are playing there, or there's another option and my I'm trying very hard to analyze this without wanting to give priority to my priors, which are if you're going to do this, do it, finish it. Let this be the first war that we fought in 35 years that comes to an unambiguous conclusion. And that conclusion does not have to be defined as regime change, because that I never thought needed to be the end of this war. Just leaving the regime in tatters so that it will collapse of its own weight later on this year. Something like that. So to the extent that you can look at Trump and discern that he is following a path to that goal. That's what I would like to believe he is doing. And I don't see any reason to think otherwise really based on what's going on over the last two months and what he is like. But a lot of people don't agree with me and I acknowledge that and acknowledge that there's a lot of panic and he's worried about oil prices and the Republicans who have to get elected in November are terrified of inflationary spirals and of being tagged with yet another unpopular war and all of that. So I am going to go with my prior because I don't see any reason to get off my prior based on the available evidence. But Christine, you are not, you may be in a slightly different place.
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C
I don't know, I was going to say you should say, like get off my priors, like get off my lawn. No, I'm actually more reassured in the past few days and less panicked. I don't fall into the camp that he doesn't know what he's doing and he's just flying by the seat of his pants. I think he's signaled more frequently in recent messaging about a timeline in his own mind, which is not for this to be a forever war by any means, but maybe a few more weeks. And you know, he's been inconsistent on that. But it's war. You can't actually say we're done on this date. So I, and I think that the fact that he's making this diplomatic push, I don't think he thought the Iranians would accept the 15 point plan when he presented it. But the point is to say we're giving you one more chance. We'll even send JD Vance if you want to negotiate with him rather than with Witkoff and the other guys. And if they, as they likely will reject even that effort. That's why the troop movement said that's why the Marines are there. That's why the 101st Airborne is there. And there are hopefully options in place to do the things that I think in retrospect, hopefully we'll see as the accomplishments and goals of this campaign. Freeing up the Strait of Hormuz, getting concessions and, or destroying with by obtaining their nuclear material and having such chaos among the IRGC that if and when the people have a chance to come back onto the streets and they're not out there now because they will still be slaughtered, it's unsafe or they might be killed because the IRGC does set up in civilian areas, if they can come out and seize their government, they will. But I do think Trump has always been clear that that's not part of the process for us. It's getting rid of the ayatollahs, freeing up the strait again and making sure that their missile and nuclear programs are toast. So in that sense, it's actually, there's quite a lot of positive things on the side of the Trump administration and the US And Israeli campaign now. And I'm less concerned about the uncertainty because I do feel he wants this to wrap up. And I have actually, I will give him a lot of credit for being steady here. I don't think he has been flip floppy and he is getting pressure from his coalition and pressure from Republicans about prices which will continue to rise. The average gas price in the nation now is about $4 a gallon. So he's going forward. He wants to see this completed. And he, I think he said the other day, I don't get bored. And that to me was a signal of, I'm on, I'm focused on this. That's good. So we'll see. I think we. It's going to be the next few weeks that really decide whether he's able to accomplish those goals. War is complicated. He might not make those marks, but it strikes me that that's the plan. I have a clearer sense of it.
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Yeah, I agree. And I think that he shows no sign, even though there's plenty of reports that say Trump's. Trump's getting fed up. He's ready to. He's ready to wind this down. He's looking for an easy out. He's found himself in a trap. That's not at all how he's acting. He doesn't project any of that. And I don't think he's come this far, gone out on such a limb, taken such a big swing with so many risks in order to leave this in some sort of inconclusive state. Whatever the ending will be, I don't think it's going to be another sucker's deal with a bunch of lying mullahs. That's not what the end's going to be. I don't know what it is going to be. I'm with you. You know, it could be the total annihilation of the regime. It could be that he really breaks them and that they give up the fissile material and everything else. I don't know. But when you talk about priors, I think a lot of what's happening here in the forecasting is about the media casting their priors onto this. And that's why they're saying, Trump knows this is a disaster. He knows there's no way out. That's what they think. Trump knows better than anyone exactly what's happening in this war. And it's not too hard to see if you don't have that filter of failure on that incredible things are happening in this war. Trump sees all of that, more of that than we do. He knows what the next thing is. So there the media is acting as if he's responding to what they see. That's not what he sees. He's looking at successful campaigns and operations.
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C
I would also add that negative polarization has made it difficult to even have discussions about is this a good strategy? Are these tactics working on both sides? People who want to see this war won and people who really don't want to see us at war at all. And the media factor plays into that. And, and he enjoys the combat with the media. He enjoys teasing them, he enjoys the mixed messaging, enjoys calling them fake news media. That's part of his style. But I think, but I think our job, regardless of what we think about Donald Trump or whether or not, you know, we, is to analyze whether the campaign's going well and not and try to remove that filter because we, and this is why people love us and hate us. You know, there's lots of stuff we like that Trump does. There's lots of stuff we don't like. And that's actually how we should approach politics. It's been so long since we, we've managed to do that since Trump entered the room that I sort of long for those days and we might return to them at some point. But sending Vance to me was kind of the interesting thing that the Iranians supposedly requested him. So we'll see if he ends up going.
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This message comes from NPR sponsor Paramount and the new original series the Madison, Taylor Sheridan's most intimate story yet. The Madison follows a family raised in a world of digital distraction. The forced by tragedy to truly see one another and come together. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell. The Madison new series, streaming now only on Paramount. So your colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Elaine McCusker, former top Pentagon budget official, tallied or has been doing a running tally of losses in the war, American losses in the war. This overwhelming bombing campaign being responded to by the Iranians with drones and missiles. Obviously, we're not seeing hand to hand fighting or battlefield fighting. And the article that appears in the Wall Street Journal this morning on the US Military assets damaged or Lost in the Iran war is a real Rorschach test. Because I can imagine that you would read this and say, oh my God, look what's happen. Ukrainians are scoring a lot of hits and doing a lot of damage and costing us a lot of money. Or you can say, oh my God, it's been almost four weeks and this is all the damage that's been done. This is the entirety of the damage that has been done in a four week war. So that is. We've lost more than a dozen MQ9 Reaper drones. They cost 16 million each. They're not made anymore. So they're older generation drones. So to replace them, you got to buy a more expensive new drone for $16 million. By drone, we're talking about an actual full aircraft, not like one of those things that people use to take photographs over the beach, but it is piloted remotely. So it's a pilotless plane. And you know what's interesting about this? You look at it and go, oh my God, nine have been shot down or have been lost. We don't really know what it means that they've been, I don't think they've been shot down, but like they slam into buildings or they, you know, something happens to them or they don't run well or something, you know, because there's a lot of flying going on. Is that a lot of loss or a little. I would say that in historical terms, in the course of a war, imagine that these are horses in the 19th or 18th or 17th century, and I told you that the Union army lost nine horses in four weeks. You would be like, okay, that's nine horses. The horses don't cost $30 million. Similarly, we've got a, a bunch of these things that have happened are that we're using aircraft that are now outmoded or aren't made anymore. Sort of like what happens if you have a 1972 Dodge Dart that runs fantastically well, but then you throw a gasket and the last Dodge Dart was made in 1981 and you have to somewhere on Earth find a part for it or replace it entirely. So that's true of this drone. That's true of the KC135 strata tanker, which hasn't been made since the 1960s and various other things. So interesting. Yeah, just add to this, we have
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B
a drone problem in that our drones have not been very good. This was discovered when we sent them to Ukraine to help them. So we finally sent them a bunch of drones and the Ukrainians are like this doesn't work. This isn't what is this? And that it was the problem with our drones that inspired their drone innovation. And it's why they had to up the game and they have. And it's why we also need their help.
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C
We should add, we have lost 13 service members and several hundred wounded, some quite gravely wounded. And that, that's another aspect of when this conflict ends. I hope that this administration acknowledges that service and has, when they've brought the bodies home.
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So like this has, they've had, they've had. And we will lose more.
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C
We will lose more if there's marines go in. I mean, this is, this will be a bloody battle if they try to seize Kharg island or something.
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But again, Warshock, test wise, if I said to you the United States and Israel engaged in a major war against a nation of 90 million people with the fourth largest army on ear and had lost 13 service members in whatever it is now, 24 days, 25 days, you would say, wow, again, in other times in history, you would say, well, that's really quite remarkable how little loss of life there has been thus far. But if your standard is there should be no damage, there should be no losses, there should be no casualties, which appears to be a kind of odd set standard, where this article, which is fine, it says, what have we lost? It then points out that there was a fire on the USS Gerald Ford, the aircraft carrier, which has nothing to do with the war. The fire didn't catch on fire because if anything that happened in combat, it was sort of like some weird catastrophic error and bad things happen on the ship. Like a lot of the bedding got went up in flames and so they didn't have mattresses for the several thousand people who were on the aircraft carrier, that's not a loss of war. That's not a loss in war. So I still look at these things and say that what we are doing, we are doing with extraordinary efficiency at an extraordinarily low price point. But since we don't usually calculate these things this way, you look at it and you go, my God, look, all of this trouble. The big thing that happened, that has happened on the Iranian side was this hit on this oil facility in the Gulf that has apparently taken it offline for what might be two years. Major oil processing facility that it hit with a drone. We've had a couple of important buildings on US military bases that have been hit by drones that has caused the relocation of the personnel from those buildings to other sites. So it's not cost free. And I'm not saying that it's cost free, but it is. Again, what is it that you expect? Unless you just say this war, Anything that happens in this war is bad because I don't like the war. So therefore, any loss, any loss of a plane, anything like that is something that we cannot abide. I can sort of understand that as a. As a theme. I don't think it's a very serious way to analyze how things are or are not going. And the place on earth that is suffering the most damage also psychologically, is Israel in this sense, which is that, you know, my family, my sister, yesterday or the day before, literally went in and out of shelters 9, 10, 11 times. So you can't get work done, your sleep is interrupted, your family sleep is interrupted, your kids aren't going to school, your workplaces are largely, you know, wildly unproductive. You're physically uncomfortable. And, you know, it's a lot of. I don't even know if they're scared. It's more like, here we go again, down the stairs into the shelter. Okay, there's the all clear. We'll go back upstairs. Okay, it's time to go downstairs. And day after day after day. And so it's very wearing. And obviously this comes after two and a half years of war in Gaza, but 90% of the Israeli populace is supportive of the war effort. So the place that is taking it the hardest, relatively speaking, is a place in which there is no controversy over whether the war should be fought. There are political controversies in which people are trying to come at Netanyahu's right as there is a political election campaign underway, because there will be an election in the fall. So his rivals are saying he's doing it wrong. This has gone wrong. That's gone wrong. And why aren't we fixing the conscription law? Because, look, we're at war and all that and trying to make hay out of it. But the nation is united in a very uncanny way about this. Uncanny particularly.
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B
And this goes, by the way, just for the Gulf states, too. I mean, who aren't used to being hit and, you know, suffering all sorts of attacks. And they have been, and they're saying, get it done, finish it. Don't go wobbling.
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Right?
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One of the other things that I. And I think one of the reasons Elaine's piece is sort of giving this roster of things lost and my other colleagues, colleagues in foreign defense policy at AEI have for very long time, long before this war, been talking and urging the military to come into the 21st century to upgrade a lot of its systems and its, and its warships and its planes. And obviously now drone warfare is huge. And so I one of the weird silver linings of any battlefield experience is to see where you have gaps in your military. And obviously China is watching and noting where we have gaps in our military. And this is actually an opportunity, when this war comes to its conclusion, for the country to come together and unify over upgrading our armed services and making sure that we do have the most cutting edge technology. We've seen some of that used here and there in Venezuela and whatnot. But there is a real deficit of some stuff that we need to rebuild. We need to spend some more on our defense and bring it into the 21st century. And there are a lot of interesting startup companies working on new kinds of technologies that can deliver to the military in much quicker timelines than some of previous contractors used to do. So there's actually a real opportunity going forward to modernize our military. But hopefully the American people will understand that. And that's been, I know, a lot of the work of some of my colleagues in sort of seeing the costs of each conflict.
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A
So another interesting Rorschach test involves how we are talking about the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranian efforts to close, control or close the Strait of Hormuz. And this has led the economists and various other places to issue the very peculiar opinion that Iran is in the catbird seat and is somehow winning this conflict simply by dint of the fact that it's threatening the Strait of Hormuz or threatening ships going through the Strait of Hormuz so that either they're not going there or the insurance companies won't allow them to go there or whatever. And I say this is weird because yes, okay, they're playing this card that they have to threaten world shipping, but it's their only card. So does that mean they're winning? And then this argument now is they win if they don't lose, which I don't want to discard that and say that's ridiculous, but in no way could they be said to be winning. They're not winning every day. Every thing that they have in their domestic possession is being degraded and degraded and degraded facilities, places like that. If you think about like a country, it's the size of Alaska and you know, they have stuff all over the place and intelligence is being developed on the fly as they go about where there might be an arms depot, there might be an armory. Like, think about how many Armories there are in the United States alone. If you were actually going to have air superiority over the United States and you wanted to take out American military materiel, a lot of places to go hit that you may not have mapped on a map. And that's what's ongoing. It's not like they're just, oh, I'll fly over and drop a bomb in this unpopulated area just to drop a bomb. Israel doesn't. And we don't have unlimited resources to do stuff like that. So their position's getting worse. But they are threatening the Strait. And then you get these little inklings of either they're trying to make it clear how threatened the Strait is and what's gonna happen, or they are getting very confused about what it is that they're doing. And there's a lot of conflicting messages inside Iran because this morning two container vessels from China were turned back from crossing the Strait. Now, that's a big deal because we've heard that the Strait isn't really closed. They're letting some ships in. Supposedly, they said to Trump, you can have ten ships go through. China is their closest ally. China is their main military supplier. That's where they're getting. That's where they got their ballistic missiles from. China, Russia and Iran signed some kind of a mutual defense and friendship treaty six months ago or something like that. They're not going to let Chinese oil tankers go through the Strait. How are the. What. What is Xi Jinping going to think about that?
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C
Well, this is actually. This larger. This is actually one of the ways, I think it would be helpful for everyone to think about victory versus defeat with this particular conflict, because it is about geopolitical realignment in a way. And my. One of my colleagues, Hal Brands, has the COVID story in Foreign Policy issue this spring, and he looks at that, he's sort of like, what will the world look like after Donald Trump? Trump exits the scene. What will have shifted? And he offers three really interesting scenarios, possibilities. And I highly recommend people read it and he doesn't. He's not taking a position on any one being better than the other or. But he does feel like one, one or two might be more likely scenarios long term. And they all involve what the message will be to China at the end of this conflict if we do well and we reopen the Strait and we're once again showing that we have the ability to. To eliminate a terrorist regime in that region, that sends one message to China and to Russia if we don't, if we back off. If we leave some sort of mullet in charge and things kind of, we just have to go and mow the lawn there every 10 years, that's a different message. So it's a really useful thing to think of this in terms of Russia and China and Iran together and what they want geopolitically and what our goals are geopolitically in the 21st century. So Hal's piece is great on looking at some of the scenarios, but I'm
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just saying think about this, that they need China like China is if they're going to survive after this war, if they are left standing, they're going to need China to help them rebuild what's been lost and broken and maybe help them rebuild physically with, you know, some version of the Silk Road initiative and whatever. And so I look at this and again, I'm not. I don't. I don't speak Farsi and I'm not, you know, listening to broadcasts about this or whatever, but I'm looking at this and saying somebody in Iran said we need to make sure the chips don't go through that aren't directly bringing goods to Iran, which is what they're allowing through. And it doesn't matter whose ship that is. And somebody else is going, what, are you crazy? Don't the Chinese ships have to get through? We need to maintain our relationship with China. We don't need to be alienating China right now. Like, that's nuts. If they thought that the ships weren't going to go through, they wouldn't have steamed them there to have them turn back this morning.
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B
I gotta say, this is, to me, another example of if you look at the regime's conduct in the run up and during this war, they don't, you know, there's a lot of talk about rational actors and not rational actors. They're not act. They haven't acted very rationally beginning, I mean, depending how far back you want to go. But let's begin with the taunting of Witkoff and Jared Kushner about all the uranium they had to make 11 bombs. This was their way of avoiding an invasion or an attack, and then going to the fact that they respond to the US And Israeli strikes by hitting all of their other neighbors. Now, I know there's some thinking behind that, that this would get them to say, you know, to plead with us to say, but that's a kind of wacky approach to this. And now you're right. And now you have them seemingly alienating China. They're not. This is very poor Statecraft at the
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A
least you'd think, right? And then we look at it, or people in the west look at it like I say the Economist or others, and they say, ah, it's nine dimensional chess. Like they, they, they are using this card, which is the Hormuz card, and it's really successful because they're really scaring people and people are worried that there's going to be $200, you know, oil, you know, $200 a barrel oil and 10% of global shipping goes to the stray of Hormuz and this is gonna be ended. And now they'll have a whip hand forever. And what did we do getting into this war in the first place? It's such a calamity. But that all presumes a kind of perfect knowledge that if you do X, Y happens and not that you have a regime that is obviously in dire straits with leaders being killed and tertiary and tertiary figures taking over major governing institutions and military commands and things like that, who may not be all that experienced and aren't geopolitically savvy necessarily. You know, their best diplomats that we are aware of or their most skilled were killed in the war, particularly Ali Lajani. So maybe they don't know what the hell to do. Maybe it didn't occur to them to say, call China on Wednesday and say don't send, I'm sorry, we can't let your ship through, or can we talk about this? Can you wait a couple of days or can we do it quietly without anybody noticing or something like that. Maybe it didn't occur to whoever is the one now that the IGRC commander who was in charge of the blockade strategy was killed on Wednesday. Maybe there's no one to make that call. But you don't look at that. Again, this is simply a matter of common sense. Not that I, you know, maybe they are playing nine dimensional chess, but it's like that just doesn't seem like a sound strategy to like interfere with China shipping when they're your only important ally left on the planet, basically. And they are an important ally. They're the second most powerful country in the world with the second largest military in the world. And so you're gonna need them. I mean, if it's not, I could be wrong, granted. But I mean, I'm just saying, if
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B
it's nine dimensional chess, they're the worst nine dimensional chess players ever. Look what they've brought down on their heads, literally, with this. I mean, so it's a nine dimensional chess where the chess Team keeps dying and being replaced. You know, the easiest thing for the Iranian regime to do regarding the west, the US Is like what it did with Obama. Pretend. Pretend that it's not going to be belligerent, pretend that it will play ball, pretend that it didn't even do that,
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A
you know, but, you know, I think they took those two years of negotiations with the Obama administration that led to the JCPOA in 2015, and they're using that as a guidepost, which is to. To say that they were extremely unreasonable in the negotiations. They made very few concessions, and it was the United States that was so eager to get this deal that it kept bending and bending and bending. If the deal started with, don't ever get a nuclear weapon, and then it ends up within 10 years, you get a nuclear weapon, they won that negotiation. That's why so many of us were so hostile to it.
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C
And a lot of cash. And then we threw a bunch of cash at them.
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A
Too much at the. Too. Exactly. So if you're looking to the Iranian past to say, how should they deal with Americans? Even if they understand that Trump is a different kind of actor, they don't really understand that Trump is a different kind of actor. They're not really down in the innards of American society. The idea that people have these wildly sophisticated interpretations of how our leaders differ. They think we're all infidel, weak, creeps, whatever, Western corrupted, and we don't know how to make deals, and they're the great masters of the bazaar.
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B
I don't know.
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A
They'll do the way.
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B
Because why the assassination plots, particularly regarding Trump and why? Yeah, I mean, if they. I think they do view him uniquely, by the way. I think that's another irrational move on their part. That.
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A
I don't mean that. I don't mean that they don't view him. I'm saying that in the end, they think it's sort of like, you know, America's a strong horse or America's a weak horse. America, in the end, doesn't stick to it. They didn't finish the job in Iraq. They didn't finish the job in Afghanistan. They gave us. They let us continue the nuclear program when we had made a deal with them. They released effectively $150 billion into our hands as a sweetener just to let us do what we were doing already without any consequence. So given our history, let's use that as our model as opposed to going with a model we don't really understand. And up until the moment at which the bombs began to fly in February. They didn't know, and we didn't know that it was going to happen. We didn't know it was going to happen. So they double time, didn't know. The only thing they knew was that they had been hit during the 12 Day War and that Israel had demonstrated astonishing new capabilities over the last two and a half years. That made Israel way more of a threat and way more of an existential threat to them than in fact, they might be to Israel. That was news to them. I mean, it certainly would be news to them that if they unleash the United States military on them, they're in for a lot of pain and suffering and all of that. And they probably no one could have calculated the success of the assassination and decapitation campaigns, but they look at 21st century history and say, if we could just wait them out, we'll wait them out, whether that's a victory, because they could wait us out and we could end the war without the regime falling, which, again, I presume that will happen. But they've never been in this situation in which, so they're like, the joke, of course, I made two weeks ago and then everybody, I don't want to claim ownership of this, but everybody followed me, was that they're like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Like, every time, you know, every time we confront them over the course of these four weeks, we cut off an arm, we cut off a leg, we cut off the other leg, we cut off the this. And they're going, tis but a flesh wound. And you know, haven't you. Well, they're jumping around on one leg. Well, so the jumping around on one leg is the Strait of Hormuz. And this is one thing maybe we could talk about, which is there's our reaction illustrator Hormuz. There's the world's reaction illustrator for Hormuz. I think Trump's reaction illustrator Hormuz. I don't like the way he talks to our allies. I don't like the confrontation with. I really don't. I think it's self defeating and I don't like it and I don't see the value of it. But when he says, hey, you know what? The Iranians are threatening the Strait of Hormuz, and unless we do something about this, they could, in theory, continue to threaten the Strait of Hormuz at will forever, given what's happened here. And you know what? Only 1% of our oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz. But Europe 60% of your oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz. So you know what? You help us come here and help us eliminate this threat to the Strait of Hormuz. We appreciate the fact that we started this war, and therefore the Strait of Hormuz is a part of a battlefield that we opened up in some fashion. But this is way more important to you in weird ways than it is to us. Then people say, yeah, that's fine. You're just being a nationalist there. If this gets closed off, there'll be an inflationary spiral. Gas prices will go way up. Americans will suffer at the gas pump. Inflation will go to 5%. That's really terrible. And all of that is true. But the catastrophe is going to be to Europe and to some extent to Japan, South Korea.
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C
It's already much more of a crisis in Asia already because that's where most of that oil was going. It does have. It will bring pressure quickly on America's farmers, whom Trump, I think, is addressing at the White House today because of fertilizer price increases. And we're getting into planting season, and that's going to be a problem for us here at home. I think if when Trump went back to the. Went to the Europeans for that, ask John if he'd added that phrase that you did at the end, which was, we understand that we own this conflict, but we want you to be part of helping us maintain the straits viability. He didn't add that. And I think the allies don't trust him, and they probably shouldn't because he's very mercurial and he says one thing and does another. And I think the Europeans right now aren't in any sort of mind to pitch in here. Even. Even if they, as you correctly say, they will be feeling the pinch, the price increases. So that's one area where I, like you, disagree with how Trump approaches our allies in Europe. And repairing that breach is going to require more than him just pointing out that they will be affected by it.
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A
Well, he pointed out he attacked them like he's.
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C
Well, in the case of the UK Where, I mean, he has squandered a really important relationship and allyship there that I think will have generational consequences if it's not repaired. So that is on him. He owns that blowing up of it. And I know a lot of people in the MAGA coalition applaud that because they think NATO was a waste of time anyway. But again, long term, when we're thinking of this geopolitically, that is not necessarily a wise strategy. We too will need to have people on our side of the geopolitical battle ahead, particularly with China.
- [39:37]
A
I mean, if you think about rerun the last year and then maybe a couple of years during the first Trump term, the United States says, we are going to take out the Iranian regime in some fact, either take them off the chessboard or do regime change or something like that. If he is friends with Macron, even politicians that I dislike, he's friends with Macron, if he's friends with Starmer, if he's friends with Carney, and he's like, okay, we need you. It's a whole other ball game the last four weeks. I'm sorry they need to be dragged into this because they're like, you have been our nightmare. You have been Europe's nightmare in some ways for the last decade. You make our lives unpleasant. You attack us, you criticize us. You talk about taking Greenland, you yammer at us, you say we're worthless and all of that. Our politics, particularly in Canada, largely revolve around rejecting you. Now, you need us. You need our help. I can't just, like, turn around and give you my help, you know, politically, it's unsustainable right now for me even to do that. Should they? Yes. Do they have every reason? Given the geopolitical circumstances? Yes. Will they? Probably. They're going to do more than they're doing now. And then he'll claim that his bullying was helpful. But the global situation for the United States and Israel during this war would have been immeasurably enhanced if he had not imperiled these relationships. And I'm sorry if I sound like a wimp, because I don't think that there's any reason to have poisoned those relationships in the way that he poisoned them. It pleased him. He thinks NATO's a sucker's game and all of that. It's not. He's wrong. It's stupid. It's a stupid opinion. NATO is the most successful alliance in the history of this planet and has paid back its value to the United States a hundredfold for whatever it was that we have spent. Do we have. We effectively subsidized the welfare states of Europe because we have the largest army. And they don't have to pay for their army. Maybe doesn't mean they would have built. They would have had a giant army if they didn't have to spend the money on social policy. These are European countries and they're very statist, and they would have spent that money anyway, in my opinion. So it's Just that's a fallout, and it's a real fallout. And this task ahead of us over the next month would have been made easier or not even have been that much of a task at all had he not done those prior things for which he does just as he deserves, I believe, unbelievable amounts of credit for the gamble that he is taking here. He should take some licks for the way in which he has actually made it harder for him to succeed at this gamble.
- [43:16]
C
Quick break. This surprised me. The most useful advice I get now doesn't come from experts. It comes from regular people on TikTok. What works, what doesn't. No filters. Download TikTok and see for yourself.
- [43:32]
A
Okay, here's a question that none of us is a budget master of, but that I want to ask, and then we can wrap up. So Trump announced last night that he was going to arrange to pay the air traffic, not the TSA agents, excuse me, who have gone without pay as a result of this partial government shutdown. Which sounds great, except I believe it is both illegal and unconstitutional for him to do so. There is no way for him to spend money that Congress has neither authorized nor appropriated. That's how shutdowns were work. You can't really find money in the couch cushions. That's also not the way it works. If you find money in the couch cushions, they're supposed to go into the general treasury if you find extra money. And some people are comparing this, so I think it's the wrong comparison, but nonetheless, to the Biden cash grabs like the student loan guarantee, those unconstitutional efforts to provide help. But is it. Am I right? Like. Or should he do it anyway because in the end they're going to get paid?
- [44:41]
C
Yeah. I mean, it struck me as just being a temporary political tactic to insert himself into the ongoing negotiations, which wrapped up at 3am in the Senate last night with a vote to fund everything again, taking out Border Patrol and ice, removing those from the discussion, but then funding the rest of dhs, which includes tsa. It's going. It's in front of the House today. It'll probably pass at some level because all of the representatives and senators want to take their Easter break and go back and raise money for their campaigns. So they have this incentive. They have watched the chaos and weirdly, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats really got anything they wanted. It was almost all political theater in the end. And. And I think it was just Trump saying, well, I'm going to pay him. If you don't. I mean, he can't. You're absolutely right about the constitutional issue, but it's already funded. A lot of this funding is already earmarked. So it was just a kind of strange throwing his hat in the ring, although I think it was smart politically because it shows that he's recognizing the chaos and travel disruptions that people have experienced. And again I say it, Congress should pass a law that says TSA should be paid regardless of what's going on with budget negotiations. All of this goes into reconciliation. They've got to do reconciliation again with the budget and that's going to be the mess it always is. But the problem should the House act wisely today before their recess should be technically solved and those folks will get paid as as they should have been this whole time.
- [46:09]
A
So what? What? So the obvious way to do that is you name them core essential personnel and therefore they're paid. So that's how the federal government works. And the fact no one thought about it because they're not like, you know, frontline workers.
- [46:25]
C
You know, they're not air traffic controllers
- [46:28]
A
and they're not like, you know, FEMA or something like that. Like they're not there as emergency until it turns out that they are, you know, because you can have air traffic controllers bring planes in and sending them out and all that until the cows come home. But if people can't get on the plane because they're five hours in the airport, that's pretty bad. But here's what's interesting about this. Way more suffering in the United States. There's been way more suffering over the closure, a partial closure of the Department of Homeland Security and these lines at particularly at Bush Airport in Houston. Then Americans have suffered from the war. Let's just pull back and say you said what has affected you the most if you're an American, like something like 10 million people have been affected in weird ways by what's happened with tsa. I know the number sounds crazy, but if you sort of ancillary, if you do all kinds of regressions, it's like 10 million people, people suffer that much from the war so far. It's a funny thing that we're talking about this war and this war is being fought and it is in fact so distant from the day to day experiences of the American people with the exception of gas prices going up. But We've lived for 50 years with gas prices fluctuating like crazy. It's not like people haven't taken it in the gas price one week you can go to the gas pump and it's 80 cents more a gallon. That happened, that's happened three times this decade already.
- [48:15]
C
There'll be some other trickle down in that fertilization, not just with fertilizer. I mean, prices for lots of other things will rise more.
- [48:23]
A
And we're already haven't yet. That's all I'm saying. There's no direct pain. Right.
- [48:28]
C
I mean like there's uncertainty though, which can cause market anxiety and pain in that way.
- [48:33]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [48:34]
C
And evidently there's lots of people gaming the stock market. There's evidently some, some stories circulating of questionable trades just before various public statements by the White House, which is.
- [48:46]
A
No, this is the worst. Like we can't even get into this because this is something we could spend two weeks on.
- [48:52]
C
Well, it's a difficult story to confirm or even report out, but it is questionable trades.
- [48:57]
A
We are going to find out over the course of the next few five years that many things that will shock the conscience have happened as a result of the fact that trading markets have opened and gambling has opened in areas that were not previously subject issues of this sort of thing. And I'm talking about the super bowl and not just any individual baseball game, but the Super Bowl. And yeah, like, you know, of course the nightmare scenario is you have a Secretary of State whose wife is. I'm making this up. You have a secretary of X whose wife develops a $10 million gambling debt, loses $10 million in online poker and he's gotta make that money up somehow and he's got some Bitcoin and he goes into Polymarket because he knows that, you know, we're gonna hit Hormuz and it'll take a couple of years for that to come out. You think it's not gonna happen?
- [50:10]
C
Of course, there was a story about a reporter being threatened by people who'd placed bets about the outcome of the war. I mean, a journalist, they wanted this journalist to rewrite their story because they had placed bets on things going one way rather than the other.
- [50:26]
A
Yeah, but I'm now saying that bets will be placed by the people who are making the decisions.
- [50:34]
C
That is the question about this story
- [50:36]
A
with the oil futures, like Insider.
- [50:39]
C
It's like there's already a question of whether that is indeed happening. And again, this has to be reported out very responsibly because right now there are just little signals, a little bit of smoke coming out of that storyline. And, but it, but it would not surprise me if that was some version of that was going on. I mean, we have legislation to rein in some of the members of Congress, who've spent their entire careers building a stock portfolio of questionable provenance based on inside information. So
- [51:08]
A
it has to happen.
- [51:11]
C
It.
- [51:11]
A
Like human nature dictates that it will happen. Like, it's inevitable that it will happen. And if it doesn't happen here, it will happen in Brussels or it'll happen in Paris or it'll happen in Beijing. I mean, you know, I mean, it's gonna happen.
- [51:27]
B
I'm sure it's happening somewhere to an extent that's gonna blow everyone's mind. I agree with you, but it shouldn't. Just in the sense that if you're in Congress or you hold a prominent position in the White House, it's very easy to get rich after you. After you're done, you know, you're on third base. You're somewhere between third base and the home plate already when you get out of there, like, you don't need to game anything. So.
- [52:01]
A
Right. I should point out, I want to. I want to give a shout out to Noam Bloom, our producer, who points out, since we talked about this at the beginning of the show, that these reports about the craft that we've lost largely these drones, these nine drones. Then of course, we had, weirdly enough, a plane shot down by friendly fire from Kuwait. But that in the first Gulf War in 1991, which was considered then the most militarily lopsided victory since Agincourt or maybe ever, that war where we kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, we lost 75 aircraft in that war, 52 planes, 23 helicopters. That war lasted two and a half months, I believe. I think it's sort of like it started January, something 15th and ended March 1st. I could have this. I'm not looking it up, but I mean, it was. We are now four weeks into this war, and we've lost a tenth of the materiel aircraft that we lost in that war. So just to offer a perspective on just how overwhelming our military advantage has been in this conflict. So we'll be back on Monday. I hope everybody has a wonderful weekend. Baseball is back, so that's exciting to me. And, you know, the Yankees won seven to nothing, so that was thrilling. And Aaron Judd struck out four times, so that was less thrilling. But he is still the best player in baseball, so I'm sure he'll come back from his debut deficit. And I just want to give a shout out to my people, the Jewish people, because the Yankee pitcher who produced a shutout starting the season, Max Fried, nice Jewish boy, played in the Maccabia games as a teenager. And so Jasakoach to Max Fried and very happy to. It's always an exciting thing when a Jewish person does well in sports. Cause as you know, that's not really our field. So we'll be back on Monday for Christine and Avon, John Pothor's Keep the Candle Burning.