Israel Batters Iran; Will Trump Join In?

Summary

Summary of "Israel Batters Iran; Will Trump Join In?" – Commentary Magazine Podcast Release Date: June 16, 2025

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Introduction

The episode, hosted by John Podhoretz, features Commentary Magazine's Executive Editor Abe Greenwald, Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti, and Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. The primary focus revolves around Israel's aggressive military actions against Iran, the potential involvement of former President Donald Trump, and the broader geopolitical and domestic ramifications of these developments.

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Israel's Decisive Strikes Against Iran

[01:15] John Podhoretz initiates the discussion by detailing Israel's intensified military campaign against Iran. He highlights Israel's strategic objective to dismantle Iran's nuclear capabilities and its offensive assets aimed at Israel. Recent actions include strikes on the Natanz nuclear facility and other ancillary sites, marking what Podhoretz describes as "possibly the single greatest military raid in world history."

Notable Quote:

"It's possible that this is the single greatest military raid in world history. It certainly is in the top 10 so far."
— John Podhoretz [05:50]

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Amit Sehgal's Analysis on Israel's Military Success

[01:11] John Podhoretz shares insights from Amit Sehgal, an Israeli analyst, emphasizing the magnitude of Israel's achievements:

• Full Operational Control over Iranian airspace.
• Destruction of one-third of Iran's missile launchers, rendering a significant portion of Iran's missile arsenal ineffective.
• Targeting the command center of the Quds Force, crippling Iran's external military operations.

Notable Quote:

"Israel's already struck the facility at Natanz and various ancillary facilities... it is simply a mind boggling achievement."
— John Podhoretz [05:30]

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Strategic Implications and US Involvement

The conversation shifts to the potential role of the United States in this conflict. Abe Greenwald raises critical questions:

1. What will America do?
2. What else does Israel have up its sleeve?

He notes that while Israel focuses on military targets, the broader implications for Iran's political and military leadership remain uncertain.

Matthew Continetti adds that Iranian missile launches are predictable, allowing Israel ample time to activate defenses and shelters.

Notable Quote:

"Israel can also the, the, the Iranian launches are telegraphed pretty far in advance as far as Israel is concerned."
— Matthew Continetti [06:06]

John Podhoretz invokes Occam's Razor to argue that Israel's actions are the result of long-term planning dating back to 2005-2006, rather than complex false-flag operations.

Notable Quote:

"We are talking about details, things, objects, intelligence, assets, all of that that have been cultivated and developed and hardened and all of that for how many presidents is that?"
— John Podhoretz [10:12]

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Trump's Position and Potential Actions

The hosts discuss former President Donald Trump's stance on the conflict. Christine Rosen points out that Trump signaled his willingness to support Israel more robustly, possibly leading to political backlash.

Notable Quote:

"And then he's going to face certainly some political blowback for that."
— Christine Rosen [09:28]

John Podhoretz criticizes Trump's inconsistent messages, noting his initial support followed by reluctance to fully engage.

Notable Quote:

"You know, Trump's problem here is this is sort of his Frankenstein's monster, this reluctance to get involved."
— Matthew Continetti [32:40]

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Long-Term Consequences for Iran and Regional Stability

Christine Rosen and John Podhoretz discuss the potential collapse of the Iranian regime, comparing it to historical precedents like Libya and Syria. They debate the aftermath of such a collapse, weighing the risks of chaos against the elimination of one of the world's most nefarious actors.

Notable Quote:

"The elimination of that regime would have this one positive consequence, which is..."
— John Podhoretz [21:33]

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Domestic Turmoil and Rising Political Violence

The conversation pivots to alarming domestic events, including the attempted assassination of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers by an individual impersonating law enforcement. The hosts express concern over a resurgence of political violence and lawlessness.

Notable Quote:

"The assassinations are back. Efforts to kill people who have views that you don't like to make a statement."
— John Podhoretz [73:14]

Abe Greenwald highlights a series of violent incidents across the country, reflecting a deeply divided and volatile political climate.

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Protests and the Erosion of Peaceful Assembly

The hosts critique recent nationwide protests branded as the "No Kings" rally, questioning the accuracy of claims regarding their size and impact. They argue that modern protests have devolved from peaceful assemblies to confrontational and sometimes violent encounters with law enforcement.

Notable Quote:

"Someone was shot in Utah at one of the rallies in Utah. And then apparently someone drove a vehicle into a crowd in Culpepper, Virginia."
— Abe Greenwald [76:07]

Christine Rosen emphasizes the importance of peaceful protest, reminding listeners of the constitutional right to assemble without resorting to violence.

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Conclusion: The Future of US Foreign Policy and Domestic Stability

The episode concludes with a reflection on the shifting landscape of US foreign policy, particularly in relation to Israel and Iran. John Podhoretz advocates for a clear and assertive stance against regimes like Iran's, while Christine Rosen underscores the need for clarity in America's global leadership role.

Notable Quote:

"If you love America as we do, kind of love Israel because we love America for the... ideas of freedom and the God-given rights of every individual."
— John Podhoretz [61:34]

The hosts collectively stress the urgency of decisive action to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear capabilities and the importance of maintaining domestic stability amidst rising political violence.

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Key Takeaways

• Israel's Military Prowess: Israel has executed significant strikes against Iran's nuclear and military infrastructure, asserting dominance over Iranian airspace and missile capabilities.

• US Role Uncertainty: Former President Trump’s stance oscillates between support for Israel and reluctance to deepen US involvement, raising questions about America's future role in the conflict.

• Potential Regime Change: The possibility of Iran's regime collapsing poses both opportunities and risks for regional stability, echoing historical precedents.

• Domestic Challenges: Renewed political violence and confrontational protests highlight a deeply divided American society, with concerns over the erosion of peaceful political discourse.

• Future Implications: The episode underscores the need for clear and assertive US foreign policy to combat nuclear proliferation and support allies, while also addressing internal societal tensions.

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This detailed summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from the podcast episode, providing a comprehensive overview for those who have not listened to the original content.

Transcript

[John Podhoretz]

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[Abe Greenwald]

Hope for the best, expect the wor.

[John Podhoretz]

Some preach and pain some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, expect the worst welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. Today is Monday, June 16, 2025. I am John Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.

[Matthew Continetti]

Hi John.

[John Podhoretz]

Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi Matt.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi John.

[John Podhoretz]

And social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi John.

[John Podhoretz]

A truly momentous weekend of news both here and abroad. And I guess we will start with the continuing barrage of Tehran and sites in Iran by Israel, which has decided this weekend to press the button on the mission that it has been planning for two decades and do whatever it can to take out not only the Iranian nuclear program, but Iran's offensive capabilities toward Israel altogether and its senior military leadership, possibly its senior political leadership, and who knows what happens to the malacracy with the question that is going to be raised every minute from now until whatever happens to move us to the next phase of the Middle east, which is will the United States either lend or come into the war, or lend Israel the equipment that will make it possible to destroy the underground nuclear facility at Fordow, which is where the heart of the program is. Israel's already struck the facility at Natanz and various ancillary facilities where they convert uranium into uranium metal and all kinds of stuff you can go read about at a far more literate fashion than I can express it. But I did. Before we start, want to read to you guys from the redoubtable Amit Sehgal, an Israeli analyst who has an absolutely necessary newsletter you can sign up for called It's Noon in Israel. You may hear him on the Dan Senor Call Me Back podcast. Here is his summary of where we are as of this morning. Monday morning, Israel has attained full operational freedom over Iranian airspace. Just let that sink in. It is simply a mind boggling achievement. Israel has destroyed one third of Iran' missile launchers, the IDF spokesperson said this morning. This is crucial no matter how many missiles Iran has, and it has thousands. If it can't launch them toward the Jewish state, the missiles are useless. Israel said today that it struck the command center of the Quds Force in Tehran, a special branch within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that operates outside of Iran's borders. For the first time in history, Israel is set to issue an evacuation warning for buildings in Tehran. Don't forget this is the same tactic the IDF uses in Gaza and Lebanon, evacuating buildings that house military targets and then bombing them. Yesterday the IDF struck an Iranian refueling airport at Mashad Airport in eastern Iran, 1400 miles from Israel's borders, marking the deepest strike in Iran since the war began and possibly the furthest ever carried out by the Israeli Air Force. We received confirmation that Israel killed the Quds Force head of intelligence and his deputy, both of whom were responsible for providing assistance to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and militias in Iraq. So that is the, that is the litany of the military, some of the military successes just in the last 24 hours because Amit does one every day. So he had discussed the other things that I didn't even mention that if you were following the news this morning, you heard the strikes at Natanz, the strikes on all of these other ancillary nuclear facilities and the like. It is possible that this is the single greatest military raid in world history. It certainly is in the top 10 so far. And Israel of course sustaining damage from Iranian missiles, incoming Iranian missiles, particularly last night. Brutal, much heavier, much more destructive missiles. But 10% of the Iranian attack is making it through the defenses, which means that 90% of these missiles are ending up either destroyed or harmless. And you know, the more that Iran fires the missiles off, the fewer missiles they have later. And as they fire the missiles, Israel gets a more precise sense of where the missile launchers are and then can go and get the missile launchers, which I mean mentions in his newsletter this morning. So the longer this goes on though, the more destructive it will be for Israel, the more precise Israel, the more Israel's ability to render impotent the Iranian counter strikes are, becomes right.

[Matthew Continetti]

And Israel can also the, the, the Iranian launches are telegraphed pretty far in advance as far as Israel is concerned. So it gives Israelis enough time to sound the sirens to get to the shelters and so on.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think right now there are two questions you alluded to. The first, John, what will America do? And the second question is what else does Israel have up its sleeve? It, the targets are very interesting. I mean when you think about the stated goal of the attack of the operation is to end the Iranian nuclear program. Most of the targets, it seems to me, are militarily related. Right. The campaign has expended a great amount of effort destroying the Iranian air defense system, so that basically Israel owns the skies over Iran, a lot of effort destroying the missile system, so that Iran, Iran's claws are kind of being, you know, filed back. Obviously, Iran is still dangerous. There's a lot of command and control targets. So the amazing operation on the first night that basically took out much of the Iranian general staff, or just the news yesterday that they Israelis took out the head of intelligence for the Quds Force and his deputy, the reported planned strike on the Ayatollah Khamenei himself that was, according to the press, called off by President Trump. But when it comes to the actual nitty gritty of the nuclear program itself, there have been some targets. There was the main facility at tons that I think has been pretty much destroyed, but for now still seems relatively untouched. And there are many other targets across the country related to the nuclear program. And I wonder whether we have yet to see what the IDF's plans for the actual nuclear program are, because so much effort is being expended on basically reducing the capacity of Iran to defend itself and to retaliate against Israel. While also, it seems, and Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, alluded to this yesterday, undermining the foundations of the revolutionary regime itself.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, and there was that interesting signal over the weekend reported in a couple of news outlets, where Netanyahu signaled with America's help, this could be done more swiftly, like we could, we could have more control over this nuclear problem in a few days or it could take many weeks. And I think that was an extremely clear message to Trump, who has been not exactly dithering, but is not yet, you know, he said all the right things on the one hand, but on the other hand, if we're going to give them those weapons or we're going to assist, as you say, John, in any way, that's going to have to happen sooner rather than later. And then he's going to face certainly some political blowback for that. So whether or not he's willing and able to do that, Netanyahu sent a pretty good signal to the president who likes to talk about peace and dealmaking still with regard to Iran, that that's one way to perhaps get the regime to the table more quickly, I have.

[Matthew Continetti]

To say, because there's been a lot of analysis and kind of semi speculation about coordination between us and Israel. In advance of the strikes and who knew what, when and what was a feint and what was an actual accurate statement of policy or intent. Now when I hear these things, I'm thinking, all right, is this the case? Is this for a particular audience, Is this a feint? Is it good cop, bad cop? I'm wondering about what game, if there's a game, is going on with all these messages.

[John Podhoretz]

So let's play Occam's razor, right? Occam's Razor is try to figure out what the straight line explanation is for what's going on and assume that that's probably closer to the trut then an incredibly complex set of false flags and things like that Israel set in motion in 2005 and 2006 the building blocks of this incredibly lengthy, incredibly determined, incredibly detailed effort to make sure that Iran would not get the bomb. These trucks, trucks that ended up having launchers on them were driven into Iran through Syria 19 years ago. They were pre positioned almost a generation ago. That was the beginning of this effort. So we are talking about details, things, objects, intelligence, assets, all of that that have been cultivated and developed and hardened and all of that for how many presidents is that, how many presidencies, how many presidential terms is that? 2006. Okay, so, so that's, that's one detail which is that Israel has a fully operational plan here. And that plan is way more detailed, I think, as Matt indicates, than just these last couple of days. According to Amit Seagal on Dancing Ours podcast, we're at stage three of a ten stage plan. So there are seven stages to go. And apparently the planning was enhanced. First good thing I've heard about this was enhanced by AI, by which I mean that as they were doing the war planning, they were running 10 billion scenarios through simulations to see if we do this, what about that? How do we eliminate this, what do we. The sequencing. That happened again, I think I said this on our last podcast, but we were, we were asking questions in the, I guess Thursday night when we first started hearing about this, we started asking questions like why are they hitting Tehran first? Well, apparently they were hitting Tehran first because the plan was if you can silence the military leadership, you can delay the deployment of the ballistic missiles that were going to be fired at Israel because nobody would be there to give the order to put the missiles on the launchers and send them out. That there was a day long delay. Early scenarios in Israel indicated that they expected that there would be 500 to 4, 000 casualties the first night. If they went full bore at Iran and Iran was able to go full bore back with, with a response because their air systems would be overwhelmed. Iran would launch a thousand missiles and you know, 150 would get through at least, and there would be terrible damage. So they did this thing which was to retard, slow down the Iranian ability to respond. And then as happens in the reverse of the Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. They start executing the plan. And it appears that Iran's defenses, strategies, ability to, to sort of diffuse its, its military equipment and all of that were way weaker than Israel even knew. And so we had a preview of.

[Abe Greenwald]

It six months ago, when A year ago.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. April. It was April.

[Abe Greenwald]

No, 16th. Israel struck in October, I think.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

Offenses.

[John Podhoretz]

Iran struck Israel in April for the first time in April 2024. And it was a much less effective attack than Israel expected it was going to be.

[Abe Greenwald]

I thought you meant about the actual Iranian air defenses, which is Israel.

[John Podhoretz]

Israel took those out. Right. In October. But. Right, so the Iranians first hit Israel for the first time in the history of the Middle east after the assassination of this Iranian leader in Beirut in I guess March of 2024. And then Iran went at Israel and they knew it was coming and the Biden administration participated in helping defend Israel and all of that. And Israel went, huh, I think they're a little weaker than we thought they were. Well, remember, they're not as good as we thought they were. And that began a boulder rolling down the hill, which is if they're, if, if they're not this, if they're this. Not especially competent, maybe there's a real opportunity here for us to go this alone.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, I mean, remember that was the time of our infamous Frappuccino debate where you and I were arguing over whether Israel would retaliate.

[Christine Rosen]

The official term is the great Frappuccino debate.

[Abe Greenwald]

That's how the historians will record it. So, you know, last year and this year I do think are very different. Last year it was a tit for tat between Israel and Iran. You could tell that both sides were calibrating the initial response to that April unprecedented strike by Iran on Israel for the first time in the history of Israel. Iran attacking Israel directly was relatively minimal. Right. They did the Israelis unveil that new kind of missile that, that could avoid detection, but that was about it. Then you had the larger retaliation in October where Israel did in the extraordinary operation basically defang Iran's air defenses. This, this is different. This is a real war And I think the big surprise of it is that the initial response by Iran was not what people anticipate. It was not the thousand missile barrage. It was certainly not a omnidirectional barrage from Iran, from the militias, from Hezbollah, from Hamas and from Yemen. I mean, Hezbollah is the dog that's not barking. And I think in a remarkable fact that more people ought to be paying attention to, Hamas is, it seems to me, basically on its last legs right now. Yet the Houthis are still there. You know, they're tough cookies. And certainly they're still there because the United States decided not to continue its bombing campaign. So they have fired one or two missiles, I think.

[John Podhoretz]

More, more, more, more than they. But, but they've been disabled. Like none of them is hit. But yeah, they're.

[Abe Greenwald]

And then you have Iran where you have this remarkable fact where like you say, John, the Iranians are in this position where when they launch the surface to surface missiles, the Israeli Air force takes out the launchers almost immediately because they have dominance over the skies. And so their, their capacity to, to attack Israel is being lessened with every day. Now, it doesn't mean that it's not deadly. And there have been casualties in Israel, I think up to 20 now as we're recording this podcast, fatalities. And it's terrible. And I do think this difference between Israel and Iran is so important, the difference that Israel's targets have been connected to either the military or the intelligence branches or to the nuclear program, to some political leadership. That's it. Whereas when Iran fires on Israel, it is indiscriminate, aimed at civilian populations. And that just shows you right there, the differences between these two regimes and why ultimately, if the result of this is the end of the Iranian regime, that would be an unalloyed good for the world, no matter what follows it.

[John Podhoretz]

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[Matthew Continetti]

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[John Podhoretz]

And maybe this is something we can do over the coming weeks. Spell that part of this story out. The geo the question of what the 21st century could look like with the mullahs gone and that destabilizing sinkhole that has been there since 1979, causing war after war and conflict after conflict. What happens if it disappears? Now there's all this talk about how well, you know, could devolve into a civil war and that could be terrible because it'll all be chaos and all of that. And I, you know, and yes, that's obviously true and that would be unfortunate because chaos is bad and all of that, but Iran has been the world's, maybe next to Putin or more recently, but has been the world's worst actor. In my lifetime. And so the disappearance of that regime or the ending of that regime, which will have ancillary negative consequences in all kinds of ways, we can anticipate will have this one positive consequence, which is, yeah.

[Christine Rosen]

Two things to bolster that very important point. One is what Trump himself said in an interview with the Atlantic over the weekend, where he said he was asked about, you know, Iran's nuclear weapons and support for Israel. He said, it doesn't even. Israel or no Israel, Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. They cannot have one. That's a very clear and powerful statement, and it's a real strong signal to some of the people in his own coalition who don't want to support Israel. The second thing is that how many of Iran's neighbors in the Middle east who claim to support, Claim to hate Israel and hate the US have allowed the Israelis to use their airspace? There's more of these countries announcing the opening of their air. Which tells you something.

[John Podhoretz]

This is a very important point because among the many things that happen when. When war or attacks or the use, the incredibly judicious and clever use of military armor, whatever armaments, creates new conditions in the world that are positive, not just negative. Everyone has spent 20 years focusing on the negative of our invasion of Iraq and what happened, right. Israel takes out Iran's defenses in the fall of 2024 after having taken out Hezbollah's leadership and a lot of its fighting forces in the Beeper operation. And what happens in the wake of that, that was not anticipatable. The collapse of the Syrian regime and what is happening right now, that guy Alshara, the new head, he was. He's like, Israel. You fly right over us. And you know what? You have a complete road map. Like, Syrian roads are open to Israeli ground equipment. If they need to bring in, you know, missiles that they can fire more short range, they can drive through Syria into Iran, stand in Iran and shoot them from the surface, you know, surface to surface. This is unthinkable. And that. Okay, so. And. And what do we know? Look at. Look at who was compromised over the course of the last 20 years in Iran. That we have the intelligence, or Israel or the west has the intelligence that it has. How do we know this guy isn't an Israeli asset? The new head of the new head of Syria, he's acting like he's an Israeli asset. I mean, I'm just saying, yeah, the.

[Abe Greenwald]

World ties to Turkey. You know, Turkey armed him. But you never know, right?

[John Podhoretz]

But you never know. And you know, you know what people.

[Abe Greenwald]

Have about the motivation. It's good he made the right choice. And I think the point is it's another prediction made by Tucker, Carl Carlson, or Chatsworth, as Mark Levin has taken to calling him Charles Worth. Chatsworth. Chatsworth, yeah. Chatsworth is my favorite part of it that's not happened. So, look, we're in early days. It feels like it's been going on for longer than it actually has. But what was Tucker Carlson's prediction in that scurrilous attack on World War 3? He said within a week, thousands of Americans would die. So far, the casualties, I have to say, on both sides have been relatively minimal. I mean, about. Yeah, a few hundred people on the Iranian side, again, mainly connected to the military or intelligence. And then, of course, these terrible civilian deaths in Israel, which are a couple dozen.

[John Podhoretz]

But. Civilian deaths in Israel. And this is really important because it goes to things that Israel may have learned from Ukraine, among other things. As long as people go into the shelters, not a single person has died in a shelter. Right. That didn't happen during the blitz. Right. In the blitz, there were subway tunnels got flooded, underground tunnels got flooded and people drowned. Shelters were hit. So far, every death in Israel and injury in Israel comes from people who did not get, for whatever reason, did not get into the shelters or the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Missile had a direct hit on where they were sheltering. Some safety. Right.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. Right. So I bring this up only to say that this is an air war. No one's going in on the ground anywhere. As yet, though I don't imagine that there will be much in the way of, you know, infantry exchanges. And that's where things get horrendously brutal. And the fact that Israel's air defenses are so incredibly potent that they can take out 90% of the incoming. And. And we are resupplying as we speak. We saw there was indications last night of American aircraft sent, you know, flying off to Israel to resupply what is likely the air defense system.

[Christine Rosen]

But there's a. But there is an internal. Some reporting suggests there's an internal debate with Elbridge Colby and others at Defense about how quickly and how swiftly and how much to continue that resupply.

[Abe Greenwald]

Before we get to that, though, can I just finish the predictions that Tucker Carlson has made that are not coming true? And that is. So the first one is the thousands of deaths within the first week. The second one is $30 gasoline. Right now, the average price of Gasoline, according to AAA, is $3.14 across the country.

[John Podhoretz]

That's what I paid yesterday.

[Abe Greenwald]

And you know, it probably will go up a little bit. But I will also tell you right now, as I'm checking, premarket, oil is down from where it was on where it closed Friday. So it's at about $72 a barrel. So. And then, as Christine mentioned, the prediction that soon Russia would come in on Iran's side, possibly North Korea, possibly China, according to Tucker Carlson's fantasy world, that's not happening. We do know that Putin called Trump on Saturday and asked him to help end the war, even kind of reiterated Putin's desire to mediate an end to the conflict. And the way that was state that readout that Trump posted on True Social was covered by the media, I thought was very revealing because Trump wrote on Truth Social, putin thinks the war should end, and so do I. And that was the way it was covered. But they left out the last clause of the sentence where Trump said, I also told Putin his war should end. And of course, Putin's war against Ukraine is not going to end because Putin doesn't want it to end, just as this war between Israel and Iran is not going to end until Iran surrenders, until Iran says, okay, fine, we're going to give up our nuclear program. And that's not happening based on everything we can see from the senior Iranian leadership up to and including the ayatollah. And this is why the question of resupply is so important, because as of now, 8am on June 16, Trump, Trump has done nothing to restrain Israel. He has said on Sunday, yesterday again, he said, I'm ready to have a deal, just like I struck a deal between India and Pakistan, just like I struck a deal between Egypt and Ethiopia. Then he brought up a Serbian border dispute years ago that people had all forgotten about. So, yeah, he's always in a position to have a deal, and he wants to strike a deal. But then after posting that on Truth Social, on his way to the G7 in Canada, he stopped. And what did he say again? He goes, well, I'd like to have a deal, but, you know, sometimes just have to let them fight it out.

[John Podhoretz]

They got to fight it out.

[Abe Greenwald]

They got to fight it out. They got to fight it. And meanwhile, our destroyers are helping Israel shoot down the incoming projectiles. And there's this indication, as John said, that perhaps we're going to resupply the munitions. So right now, Trump is. He's walking this tightrope. He is. Wants to support Israel. He believes it is what's happening is necessary because he continues to be against an Iranian nuclear bomb. But he also does not want America to become directly involved. And the fight, as Christine says, is over. This question, this is why. This is why. It's one of my two questions. What will the United States do? And I just, before I relinquish the floor, I just want to say that I think of Nixon's comments of a help of a pitiful helpless giant years ago describing the state of American foreign policy when, when he got, when he got into office. If we're just sitting back and we're not going to assist in what would be a huge boon for non proliferation, for counterterrorism, for, for. I mean, I know people in Washington these days don't like talking about this word, but I'm going to use it anyway. For freedom. It does say something about the political culture of the United States that we cannot take. We can. It is a two bomb project. We have the B2s, we have the massive ordinance penetrators. Two bombs at the end of fordow. That's the end of the war.

[Matthew Continetti]

You know, but this is something. Trump's problem here is this is sort of his Frankenstein's monster, this reluctance to get involved. Right. Because he's the one who's been preaching not about Israel, but about, you know, America's involvement abroad and unnecessary involvement and that's been sort of let out of the barn. And now he's had to, he even responded to Tucker, you know, through truth or through the press, saying, look, I'm the one who decides what America first means.

[John Podhoretz]

You know, True.

[Matthew Continetti]

And this.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, but I want to, I just want to point here. Yeah, please.

[Matthew Continetti]

When I first heard that Trump was saying in the midst of all this, look, Iran, there's still a deal. There's still a deal to be had. I was, I think, oh, no. But then I was thinking about it. This is different from other deals because the deal to be had would require Iran to give up enrichment. So it's not a deal that ends up in this dumb stalemate. It's a deal that would achieve Israel's end by another means.

[Abe Greenwald]

In America's.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yeah, in America's.

[Christine Rosen]

Right, well, right. His entire, his entire foreign policy language is, is mediated through deal making, business language. But it's still a foreign policy. I mean, we, we might prefer to use the old term.

[John Podhoretz]

We made a deal at Appomattox.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, that's the thing.

[John Podhoretz]

I'm not joking. Like deals come at the end of wars that are won also. You know, I mean, and some of them aren't good. Or you could. We Can. We've spent, we literally spent 100 years arguing over whether the Treaty of Versail was, you know, the cause of World War II or not. But that's. Deals take place in all kinds of circumstances, not just ambiguous circumstances about who's in the upper hand and, or can sit around.

[Christine Rosen]

But the weakness of the deal making framework is that it doesn't take on board these, like what Matt said about freedom, about existential risk, about purpose and meaning of a nation and what it stands for.

[John Podhoretz]

So I want to go back to the Occam's Razor thing that I did at the beginning because I lost myself in some other, you know, blatherskite. Here's the thing. According to all sources, the plan that Israel had to strike Iran, this plan was ready to go around April 14th. And that was when we started getting the leaks in the New York Times about Israel's war plan. And that day, or the day after, Trump and Netanyahu had a conversation and Trump said, I'm writing to the Ayatollah to see if we can make a deal. And Bibi said, you're the president, do what you have to do. And Trump said, but I'm gonna give him two months. I'm gonna give him two months and then we'll see what happens. And on day 61, Israel struck. So the Occam's razor says Israel strikes in October of 2024. It sees the weaknesses, it has all these pre positioned assets. It has been making these plans for 20 years. Bibi says, let's. Bibi says to his, you know, shin. But everybody, the people who are involved in these planning, we're going to go ahead, let us set the table so that when we press the button, we go and they're ready to go. And he stopped because Trump said, stop, I'm going to negotiate with Iran. And Trump I believe is the one who put the two months. It's not that. Bibi said, okay, I'm only giving you two months and then I'm going now. Yeah, Trump, Trump did it in the letter and he said I'm six, six days of negotiations. So Trump did not green light or not green light or whatever. This is a, this is a fundamental misunderstanding. Israel said, we're ready to go. Trump said, I'm going to take two months to see if I can get Iran to give up its enrichment. And Bibi said, you're a great man, do whatever, whatever. And then Day 60 came and went and all that talk was going on the week before day 60 about how the Iranians were being more and more recalcitrant because probably at the table, Witkoff was saying, hey, Israel's ready to go make a deal, you idiots. And the Iranians are like, no, we're not going to make a deal with you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So Trump gets annoyed because he's like, hey, I'm giving you a way out.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, that's what he was.

[John Podhoretz]

Way out.

[Abe Greenwald]

He was saying that. And I think your timeline's right. I will say this. I think Trump maybe forgot about the two month deadline during the negotiations. And I believe that Netanyahu reminded him of it in the phone call last Monday.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

And the President was like, yeah, of course I was right. Two months, that's all they should have. And sure Enough, on day 61 is when the attack happened.

[John Podhoretz]

And Trump himself evoked day 61 in.

[Abe Greenwald]

One of those truths, immediate heat, because I think it was on his mind.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, I gave him 60 days. And on the 61st day, Israel struck. Now, I bring this up only to say that there is this whole discussion of whether or not there was some in Israel, they were good cop and bad cop and Israel there. I don't, I think it's a much simpler story than that, which was like, I have, we have the gun cocked. The gun is cocked. We're standing at the door ready to kick the door in. We'll wait until you say, until you know. But you, you're the one who was put, the, who was started the ticking clock. And when, when the clock goes to zero, we're going to push the button. I mean, I do think like a Mission Impossible movie.

[Abe Greenwald]

The one thing left out of the story is this intelligence that Iran was accelerating its weaponization.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

And we got hints of that in the week running up to the attack as well.

[John Podhoretz]

It also suggests that the 60 day deadline meant something entirely different to Iran.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yes.

[John Podhoretz]

From what it meant to Trump, which is that Trump was like, I'm giving them six days until Israel attacks. And they're like, okay, it is. We got to rush, we got to do it, do that. Every. People have been talking for 20 years about how long it would take them to break out. There were moments at which, in the course of this discussion of Iran's centrifuges and everything, some people said it would take them a year to get to weaponized uranium, some people said it would take them a week and all of that, apparently it was around 65 to 70 days. And so this is why, this is.

[Christine Rosen]

Why Fordow's destruction is so important, because if the regime somehow stays in power, if, you know, this active conflict ends and they have even a little bit of the pieces of whatever enrichment technology they need and one or two scientists, they will go right back to work on this. And that's the part of the story that I think both Israel and the US are not quite telling yet to wait and see how the conflict emerges. But that's, that still remains a danger.

[John Podhoretz]

I would also like to point out, I would like to make a case to the restrainer, like to the actual people who are foreign policy real genuine foreign policy realists who aren't just anti Semites in wolf's clothing or pacifists or you know, non anti interventionists in, you know, pretending to be serious people, the long term positive consequences of America. Look, I can see every reason why it would be immensely helpful to Israel to get the B2 and to get the bomb and to fly the plane themselves and destroy for it would be the ultimate statement that Israel though it can borrow equipment the way Lend lease meant that the United States was lending equipment to Europe before World War II, you know, that Israel can do it itself.

[Abe Greenwald]

I just read there, the renting the B2 to me is something I've been thinking a lot.

[John Podhoretz]

Trump would love that.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, it might appeal. That's why it might appeal to Trump's deal. But yeah, the idea of an enterprise rent a car for strategic bombers is not something I really had on my bingo card. But I support it nevertheless.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, but here's what I would say is that, is that Israel has demonstrated that it can destroy the most militarily, what we believed was the most militarily powerful, the most militarily advanced force in its region, take out or like completely wound it and damage it in three days after a raid, whatever it was eight months ago that took out their air defenses. So Israel has demonstrated that it is, you know, the tough hombre of the world and you know, basically the, probably the, aside from ours, the best military on the planet, you know, without let up. So it would be good, it would be good as a final statement and the Zionist statement that we, you know, we'll do anything to make sure that nobody threatens us like this again and the Jewish people again. However, for the United States and this is the message the restrainers, the low cost, high return of us bombing Forda is it establishes the precedent, which is you want to develop nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet, we're just going to fly a plane over and drop a bunker buster bomb on wherever you're doing it. We've done it once. Took us a day, took us a night, flew right back. You don't even have the capacity to hit our B2 because it's 30,000ft in the air. You know, I mean, unless you're China or something like that, and you. Maybe you have, and maybe when space weaponry starts, this is going to be a little harder, but don't do it. So every time some country starts coughing or buying yellow cake or doing something, all the United States will have to do is say, for now. Well, you know what? And you know, it's nothing to us. Like, we droned people. We droned thousands of people during the Obama administration who were threats to US Individuals. This is. These are just military sites. We don't care. We'll just, goodbye, go.

[Christine Rosen]

And also. But it's better than that, to turn Abe's phrase, not to be the perennial optimist on the podcast, but it also returns us to an era where the United States was extremely clear about who its enemies are and says it and acts on it. And I, And I don't say that in a Pollyannish way. It has been decades since we've had that kind of clarity, and we need it again, particularly. And this is the message to the restrainers like Colby, who claim their worry is about Asia. It's a very important message to send to China, which is our. Which is our enemy a little bit now, but is emerging as the. The power that we will spend the next many decades fighting. And those messages are clear. They also allow for the American people to have clarity about what we stand for in the world, which I think has also been muddled in the past decade or two.

[John Podhoretz]

You know that I agree with every single word you said there. But even if you don't want to frame the future of American foreign policy in those terms, I am giving you the most naked form of rail politic there could possibly be, which is. It is a matter of us. No, no, we should. And that's why I want to keep talking about this. But it's just a matter of us lifting our pinky to destroy your millenarian ambitions, whoever you are, anywhere on this planet. One plane flight, we resupply in the air, we drop two bombs, we go home, and our pilots have breakfast with their families. So when we raise our eyebrow at you, you stand down. That is not ideological. That is not. We're doing this for freedom. If you don't like those messages because you think they commit us to a. To a far too long course, I'm. I Understand that.

[Matthew Continetti]

I. Yeah, there's another practical benefit here too. You know, you sometimes hear the restrainers at their most cynical say things like, even a nuclear Iran is not a threat, it's not a direct threat to the U.S. first of all, it's not true, but let's pretend it is. It is a threat to the US in the following way, in that Iran with a nuke can now blackmail us in terms of its behavior. It can block the Straits of Hormuz without us being able to do anything about it. It can mess around with China without us being able to do anything about us over a barrel once it has that bomb, as we see with Putin, once it has that bomb. So the idea that, that it's not in our interest to prevent Iran from attaining this weapon is just preposterous. Even if you take out the millenarial aspect of it.

[Abe Greenwald]

You know, I floated the enterprise rent a bomber option, but it just occurs to me that we don't even need to take credit for it. We could just do it. And all of a sudden Fordow's there at one moment and then Fordow's not there the next. And of course everyone will know who did it. But Trump has always said that he does. You know, he likes the element of surprise. He like just make it a demonstration. I think if there is the concern within the administration in the, in the restraint corner, which is large, it's like two and a half corners actually in this administration. The concern is it's not just a two bomb project, it's if we enter the war, then we are going to enter it for real and it will end with the end of the malaccracy. But if you take my skinny plan option now, you just take out Fordow, you let Israel handle the rest of the, you don't have to claim credit. The whole world will know and we'll see what happens on the ground. We have these extraordinary images now verified by the New York Times, as it said self importantly in its site this morning of the, of the incredible traffic jams of people leaving Tehran. And you know, the dog, another dog that's not barking is the Iranian people themselves, who. I've seen all these photos of Iranians just kind of sitting back and watching, you know, they're, they're not, they're not. There are of course pro regime demonstrations that, you know, that, that the regime helps organize. And there are, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, there are true believers in this regime and Iran is a large country. Remember Ahmadinejad his base was not in the cities, not in the places we talk about. His base was in the rural areas. Right? So it's a big country, it's a big deal. But I have been noticing though, that many Iranians are just like, okay, let's ride this out. Let's see what happens. And the further it goes on, I think the more internal pressure on the regime will, will increase as well.

[John Podhoretz]

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[E]

Commentary hi, I'm Anthony Scaramucci and I'd like to tell you about my new show, Lost Boys. It's a limited edition series. It's hosted by myself and Professor Scott Galloway. We're having honest conversations about a topic no one wants to talk about. The crisis that young men are facing nowadays. Our talks discuss why so many young men are struggling to find purpose, connection and identity in today's world. We dig into what's really going on. Politics, culture, loneliness, even rage. And what we can do to help change the narrative. This is a six part series that will challenge your assumptions and encourage you to continue the conversation from the dinner table to the office. Follow and listen to Lost Boys on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to Lostboys Men and sign up to get the latest episodes and news.

[John Podhoretz]

Part of the argument that America is going to get involved over. Involved in the war is an argument that is not being made by people who are supporters of the war. This is very important because I'm saying, right for now and nothing else.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right? Right.

[John Podhoretz]

It's Tucker who's saying, yes, everybody. You know, then we're gonna. And then we have to do regime change and then we're going to be doing.

[Abe Greenwald]

They are fixed.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

Like a bayonet on Iraq.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

They see everything through the prism of Iraq. Iraq was 20 years ago, right there. No, no one is. I mean, what will happen, in my view, is Iran. The worst case for Iran and the Iranian people is that it turns into Libya or Syria. Right, Right. But in neither case did America become involved. We. We did become involved in Syria, I will acknowledge. But that was simply to destroy ISIS and to prevent ISIS from creating this caliphate, the second caliphate.

[John Podhoretz]

But I'm now going to declare on behalf of the neoconservative remnant, and I'm going to say this very plainly, I don't give a what happens in Iran after the mullahs fall.

[Christine Rosen]

There goes our PT rating.

[John Podhoretz]

I like, look, the Iranian people, we hear they love Jed, they like America, they hate their regime and all of that. And, you know, they. They want democracy and they, Scott, you know, and the young people and all of that, and mazel tov to them. And they should go off and make a great country. If they do, I don't care. I don't care. And I'm speaking now for the warm hungers. Leave it in rubble. Let them do whatever they want with it. That was. This was a different story in both Iraq and Afghanistan in part because we were dealing with a different set of. Of foreign policy ideas about civilizational responsibility.

[Abe Greenwald]

Coming off the 90s. Right. You know.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, right. And all the idea was, you know, you break it, you. You can't just go there, you know, to destroy Al Qaeda and leave. You broke it, you buy it. Right. Colin, Colin Powell's Dr. Iraq, which is like, you know what? Well, that was always. That was the one thing. And look, I was a believer in that experiment. I'm not going to say otherwise, but that was an arguable proposition. In fact, the Bush administration did not want a nation Build in Iraq after Iraq, after Saddam fell, the idea was they were going to. They were going to have a loya jirga. They were going to, you know, have a bunch of tribes get together. And this guy was going to come from abroad, Ahmed Chalabi, and we would empower him and he would rebuild the country and we would give him logistical support, but we were not going to stay there and build a nation and make it have elections and all of that. We were going to do a handoff, and it turned out that wasn't going to work. Wasn't so simple. And there were complicated reasons why it wasn't so simple. But this idea that the purpose of our future is nation building is a weird amalgam of, I would say, Clintonite foreign policy. When Clinton became a hawk on foreign policy, his way of softening the blow to his post Vietnam Democratic Party was to say, don't worry, I'm a hawk. We're gonna spend 48 days bombing Bosnia in order to do what it is, whatever, but we're gonna be so nice afterwards. We're just gonna be so nice. And the one prevailing advantage, I would say, with Trump now being president, aside from everything else we could praise him for over this weekend, is he doesn't care about being nice. He doesn't want to go around being nice to the Iranians.

[Christine Rosen]

This is actually. Sorry to interrupt, but this is an important point in terms of responding to the restrainers as well. It's to say it's not just that we bomb and walk away and don't care, because actually, the American people, I think, in general, do care how we leave a country that we've had any sort of military involvement in. But it's to say it's not. It's like it's Europe's responsibility to deal with this threat. It is the country's responsibility to rebuild. That's a restrainer message. It's saying, we're not going to send. We're not going to put our troops in harm's way to fix this mistake. We help. We. We did what we came here to do to protect our own interests, and now you rebuild. Maybe we help fund that, but we don't send troops.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, dilate. Dilate on that for a moment, because the. Israel is acting exactly as Elbridge Colby wants our allies to act exactly as if. The theory of the case is that America is too constrained to take on a global leadership role as we have since the Second World War, Therefore, we must rely more on our allies. It's an updated Nixon Doctrine, where Nixon, again, responding to the Vietnam era, said, we're going to let our allies take the lead. We'll supply them, but they're really going to enforce the civilizational norms in their neighborhood and of course, fight communism at that time as well. Well, what is Israel doing? Israel is doing exactly what we want it to. And I will give Colby credit. He has praised Israel for being a model ally in the past, but he must also recognize that, that our model ally is doing what is right and what is necessary in its operations against Iran and its terror network. And so we should be helping them as much as possible here right now.

[John Podhoretz]

Let's also talk about the relative, the astonishing circumstances here. Israel is a nation of 9 million people, right? Roughly the size, depending on how you calculate what it has. At one point it was the size of Rhode Island. Now it's the size of New Jersey, something like that. Iran is a nation of 90 million people. That is the size of Texas. No one's saying after Israel devastates Tehran and blows up for now and does this and does that and does natons and all of that, that it is now Israel's obligation to go in and rebuild Iran from the shattering blows that have been delivered to it. That is nonsensical. Israel has been in Iran's crosshairs for 20 years. Iran has been threatening Israel militarily for 20 years. Iran has empowered and armed terrorist groups on its northern border, you know, sort of like, you know, sort of jammed into the southern center of its country and has been playing footsie and games on the West Bank. Israel has been threatened. Israel has now, Israel has been attacked by Iranian proxies, you know, thousands killed in and injured after October 7th by an Iranian proxy, and they have finally decided to fight back. And no rational person on the planet says, okay, Israel now, now that you've, you've broke it, you know, you, you broke it, you bought, you know, you pay for it. Israel didn't break Iran. Iran broke itself. Iran.

[Christine Rosen]

And to Matt's point, they're striking military targets which, which should not be rebuilt in the first place. They're not targeting civilians.

[John Podhoretz]

Right? I mean, the central issue with the United States and where not the restrainers, but maybe the people who have a different view of the projection of American power than I do about Iraq and Afghanistan that it was. We're so big and so powerful that not only should we go and take these countries out, but because based on the unique circumstances that the world faced at the end of World War II, we need to go in and transform these countries and make them nice. And we had to do that. There was a geopolitical restrainer, rail politic reason after World War II for us to save West Germany and to save Japan, and that was that we had this adversary in Soviet Russia, totalitarian Soviet Russia, which was, even as that was going on, attempting to foment revolutions in Greece and, and in Turkey and in Iran, by the way, in order to create a new set of conditions in which they would be the dominant power in Asia and in Europe. And so we weren't just doing this out of the goodness of our hearts. Right. We were doing it because we actually were in a grand power game against the Soviets. We have no incentive. No one is going to be arguing the Republicans aren't going to be pushing Trump to help rebuild Iran. The Democrats aren't going to be pushing Trump to help rebuild Iran. That this case, that we are getting ourselves into a quagmire because of our conscience and our desire for freedom and all of that is simply ahistorical and wrong.

[Abe Greenwald]

You gave me a great idea. I'm full of ideas this morning. But I have a way that we can square the circle and make Barack Obama happy as well. And that is we find the great, great nephew of Mosaddegh. We find him and we somehow say, you know, give him money or whatever, and he can run for office in the new Iran.

[John Podhoretz]

Against Pahlavi. Again against Pahlavi. Race between the restored royal family, no.

[Abe Greenwald]

Boots on the ground. But what is Obama going to say? Because, you know, Obama thinks that American foreign policy took the wrong turn in the Mossadegh coup. So we just do that. And so he can be happy, the Iranian people can be happy and the world can be happy that there's no longer a theocratic jihadist genocidal regime with nuclear programs and a possible nuclear bomb.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, so let's talk about Obama in 2010, because this is an interesting thing because we're now in 2025. So I was watching, I was up very early this morning and I had on MSNBC's Way Too early, which is their 5 to 6am program. And I am now going to do.

[Christine Rosen]

Something, just call it why.

[John Podhoretz]

I'm going to do something terrible here because I'm going to say that I was listening to a very, very interesting person who was in the Obama administration in 2010, I think on the National Security Council, a woman. And I didn't get her name. And I was just trying to search to find her name. So I don't know who she is. But she was very interesting and very balanced and she was giving a very interesting overview. And she said, look, here's one of the things we know the Israelis were prepared to strike Iran in 2010. I know that because we were trying to figure out every way we could to stop them. Now think about that for a minute. So Israel says, you know, we're going to do, we're going to go, we're going to strike Iran and you know, get rid of their nascent nuclear program. And it was the policy of the President of the United States to stop our ally in the Middle east threatened by an irredentist millenarian regime that had declared its interest in wiping Israel off the map. Their focus was how do we stop them? And I think this is one of the reasons that Obama hated Netanyahu so much that I think they had a conversation. I've said this before on the podcast, but I think that this is the case that Bibi said to frankly to Obama, I may have to go and hit the Iranian nuclear program. It's my life. We never again. We have to do this. This is my mission. We have to do this. Here's the problem. I don't know if I can succeed. I could really fail. We've never flown this far. We don't have refueling, we don't have this, we don't have that. I could flail and make a huge mistake. We've made some mistakes in the last four or five. Like we didn't see the Lebanon war coming. Let's face it, we're not perfect. But I may have to do this and I could fail and it could be a catastrophe. You, a couple of bombs and you, and they're done. So I'm just crazy enough to do this. If you want to make sure that I don't send the Middle east into a paroxysm of disaster that you think is coming, why don't you do it? I don't care who does it. I don't need credit for having done it. I just need Iran to be non nuclear forever. And Obama, put in a corner by Bibi, hated him more than he hated any. Imagine this, 200 countries in the world. The person that Obama hated the most on the planet was Benjamin Netanyahu. You know why? Because he said if, if you are doing what you are doing, you are going implicitly to say that it is okay for Iran to have a nuclear bomb. And sure, five years later, that is what Barack Obama did. He agreed to the JCPOA and under those terms, if we hadn't pulled out of it, and if everybody followed all the terms and all of that, in three years, Iran would legally, under the terms of our understanding of international law, been allowed to be a military nuclear power. So no wonder he hated him now. I just think that this is so the Mosaddeh example is very interesting. Matt on Friday said this mission by Israel puts the final stake into the heart of the Obama vision of the world that we have now spent 15 years trying to cope with, including at the border and everywhere else. The citizen of the world, America is just a player in the world and all of that and everything has been about cleanup. People think that we've been spending 20 years cleaning up Bush's mess. We have been spending the last decade or more since 2010. You could say the Tea Party election of 2010 was the beginning, cleaning up Barack Obama's mess and Joe Biden's mess. If you think Biden was the sort of skipped third term of Obama.

[Abe Greenwald]

The auto pens mess.

[John Podhoretz]

The auto pens mess. Anyway, I just think we find ourselves in an interesting position here in which the history of the 21st century is being rewritten and not I don't mean like erased, like Orwellian rewritten. I mean that or the understanding of where we or how we got to this passion is being rewritten. And one of the things that Israel has done, which I think Christine alluded to, is Israel has made it clear again to the west, as I think Ukraine did too, but would have much more powerfully had things gone better for Ukraine and had we not been so pusillanimous in failing to supply Ukraine with the goods that would have helped it to really, really, really take it to the that military power applied by a force for order rather than disorder and for the good working order of the planet rather than for naked self interest and the advancement of tyrannical policies and tyrannical goals is a real net positive thing and can be a real net positive thing. And that more than anything could be world altering.

[Abe Greenwald]

Can I just have one point related to that? I do think that there is a very good piece by Richt and Ray Takei in the Journal over the weekend where he said that what's happening now between Israel and Iran is the end of the era of nuclear diplomacy, which actually goes back further than Obama's presidency. They pinpoint the origin of, in the in kind of our contemporary times with the framework between the Clinton administration and North Korea in 1994, which of course did not prevent North Korea from continuing its nuclear program. And now North Korea is a nuclear power. The Iranian diplomacy that Obama launched with his negotiations seems to have completely failed with what we know now in stopping Iran from its weaponization. And as we were saying earlier, Iran seemed to be accelerating its weaponization program in the run up to the Israeli strike. There's only one way to stop these regimes from obtaining wmd, and that is through force. And Israel did it in Osiraq, Israel did it in Syria. America did it in Iraq. No matter what you think about the Iraq war, the following statement is true. Saddam Hussein will never have a nuclear weapon. And as a result of the Iraq war, Muammar Qaddafi voluntarily gave up his nuclear weapons program. But that wasn't through diplomacy. That was because Gaddafi was scared and decided, you know what, it's not worth the trouble. And if this succeeds in Iran, it might take a long time depending on what America does. It could go very quickly if America decides, let's do it. But if this operation succeeds now, the lesson will be all clear, which is that there's only one way to do this and you have to do it early. The longer you wait, the more difficult the problem becomes. But there is no other option.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, so we're going long, but we need to talk about the other domestic events over the weekend. Obviously the most important being the assassination or attempted assassination and attempted assassination of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers by a man posing as a law enforcement officer, captured, I think overnight. Vince Bueller. His name can't really be Bueller, can it? I can't, I.

[Abe Greenwald]

Anyway, some variant of that.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. Okay, so in our diseased present day culture, of course, instantly upon learning about this, there were efforts, you know, preliminary efforts to claim him or negatively claim him for the bad, the other bad side. Right. Like instantly it was, you see, he's, he was on a panel, he was on a board appointed by Tim Walls aboard. So that means he's a Democrat and he's, you know, he's antifa. And then of course the left going, what are you talking about? Look at him, he's like, you know, he shot two Democrats. He's, his manifesto apparently is an anti abortion man. If he had a list of people he wanted to kill, all of whom were abortion providers and Democrats. So don't think that it's probably, you know, your idea that he's some leftist going at leftist targets is insane. I think that appears probably to be more, more true than not. But of course the larger question is, are we entering in with the begin the first Salvo really being 2017. The shoot, the shooting at the congressional softball game, which was Gabby Giffords before.

[Christine Rosen]

That, I would put it.

[John Podhoretz]

Gabby Giffords was shot bias.

[Abe Greenwald]

He was a paranoid schizophrenic.

[John Podhoretz]

He was a paranoid schizophrenic. The guy who shot up the congressional softball game was a based.

[Abe Greenwald]

Woke, whatever, you know, like he was a Bernie.

[Christine Rosen]

He was a Bernie guy.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. So that, and then you have, we're talking now about not events like the anti Semitic events, but, but actual direct assaults on politicians and political figures. Two assassination attempts of Donald Trump after I think 40 years of. 40 year period in which there had been no such activities. And after that weird, horrible time between 63, you know, and 81 when, when presidential candidates and presidents and stuff were being shot and killed or shot and grievously wounded. And then that kind of ended. And then. So now the question is, is this reemerging and is our culture of, you know, unbelievably ugly combat on often relatively small bore issues, you know, that don't quite rise to the level of, you know, I mean, if he's fighting that, if he's shooting two state senators because of their votes in the state House, I, you know, we're now in a. And of course, Josh Shapiro, this, the setting on fire of Josh Shapiro's mansion.

[Christine Rosen]

Threats against Supreme Court justices as well, even though they're not elected officials, have also been politically.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yeah, right, yeah, right.

[Christine Rosen]

Nancy Pelosi's husband. That is.

[Matthew Continetti]

I don't think it's the beginning. I think, I think we're clearly. Well, in it.

[Abe Greenwald]

We're in the era.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[John Podhoretz]

And I think the main problem here is that there's nothing to be done.

[Matthew Continetti]

And United and the United Healthcare CEO, I mean. Right.

[John Podhoretz]

But again, that wasn't.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, they're all ideological project, political partisan one. But it's always a piece.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

This is, this is. We live in an era of political violence.

[John Podhoretz]

The assassinations are back. Efforts to kill people who have views that you don't like to make a statement, again, not to pull it. I mean, I grew up in that era. You guys are a little too young to have. I mean it was like a fact of life that every year or two, you know, and then, you know, two people took shots at Gerald Ford 18 days apart. George Wallace was crippled during the 72 campaign. Obviously RFK was assassinated by a. In the first act of Palestinian terrorism outside of the Middle east by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian activist who opposed his support for Israel. And on and on and on and on. So the thing is, as I look at this, I don't just don't understand how there is any means, law enforcement means to interdict this or stop it. And it's like what we need to do is have a national consensus where we just stop doing these things. But every impulse, every indication, every. The spirit of social media, the way people communicate now, just like inclines people to a greater degree of emotional violence or rhetorical violence.

[Abe Greenwald]

A lot of mental illness in our country.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, that too, yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

And there's a lot of weapons in our country. And we don't know the full facts of this guy. The more you learn about his life, the more mysterious it becomes. He had some kind of security company. It's not clear whether he had any clients yet, but the security company advertised his police like vehicles. He impersonated a police officer when he committed the assassinations. But he was also a minister of some sort with ties to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

[John Podhoretz]

You can watch a sermon. You can watch him deliver a sermon on YouTube. He's. He's speaking and there is a woman translating what he says into French so that the audience can hear it. An evangelical speech about letting Jesus into his heart. When he was 17, he had two.

[Abe Greenwald]

Residences, one with his spouse, but then was renting a home with a friend in Minneapolis, I believe.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

It's all just very odd, quite frankly. But I agree with, with Abe. I mean, we're in this era and, you know, this happens. And we can segue briefly to the other topic because, you know, this, this happens like every day now. And whether it's murder or it can also just be lawlessness. And so during the no Kings protests over the weekend.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

In Portland, once again, it descended into lawlessness. And in Los Angeles, there, once again, there were worries that that protest was going to spin out of.

[Christine Rosen]

And someone was shot in Utah at one of the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Someone was shot in the rally in Utah. And then apparently someone drove a vehicle into a crowd in Culpepper, Virginia. So this, this phenomenon is, if anything, intensifying. Right. And that's why I think, I think our political elites sent the right message. Bipartisan. As soon as the event happened in, in, in Minnesota over the weekend, Republicans and Democrats said, this is awful. This cannot happen. We cannot do this. This is Tim Walls, the governor, and it's President Trump saying it. That's all they can do. Along with, you know, the ruthless application.

[John Podhoretz]

Of the rule of law, one of the two major political parties now is effectively endorsing the Idea that it is okay to be lawless against a federal law enforcement agency if the aims of the duly elected president of the United States, who made the issue that that law enforcement agency is dedicated to a centerpiece of his campaign, and he won, and therefore can claim to have some form of mandate for carrying out the policy that he is carrying out. If. If the other party basically says it is okay to interpose yourself between those law enforcement officers and the people that they are, they have been tasked with bringing to justice, that's not unrelated to this. It is all delegitimizing the proper application of political authority. Delegitimizing it. Saying that it's not you. You are allowed to contest it, which you are. You're allowed to say it's terrible, but you are not allowed to get in the middle of it and stop it and act like you're a hero, because you're doing that. And that combined, you know, so if that becomes a legitimate form of protest, as opposed to what we were all told from the 60s onward was, you know, passive resistance was the way to go, because you were not stopping anybody from their jobs. You were expressing yourself simply by your presence. That's not what's going on anymore. And you know that scene in Portland, some of these moments that you saw in some of the protests over the weekend where people were literally walking up to cops and riot gear who had those. What do you call those transparent shields, like, plastic shields were coming up to them and, like, cursing out their mothers or what, you know, and they're just these guys standing there, and then a couple of them just couldn't take it anymore and just, like, bopped, you know, the person who came over to them who would then be like, somebody in the NBA. I mean, there's this piece of footage, this guy who, you know, walks up and then, you know, like, says something awful to one of these cops. The cop hits him a little bit with the. With the shield, and then the guy does a 200, you know, like in peanuts, like, does a head overhead somersault on the ground as again, like an fba, like a. Like an NBA guy trying to draw a foul or make sure that the official gives them the foul so he can go to the free throw line. I mean, that's funny, but it's not funny at all.

[Matthew Continetti]

But I just want to say, John.

[John Podhoretz]

They'Re not just them.

[Matthew Continetti]

It's not just that they're yelling nasty things at them. They're getting too close. I mean, you can only get so close to an Officer who's, Who's there to keep.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, and this is the irony that a lot of these people are protesting what they think is. Is the Trump administration's trampling of constitutional rights of illegal aliens. Read the First Amendment language. You are. You have a right to peaceably assemble. Peaceably was put in there for a reason. That means there are still restrictions on what you are and are not allowed to do to protest anything that the government is. Is trying to impose. And that's where it drives me crazy. We talked about this during the George Floyd summer as well. You have every right to be as loud and proud about your views as you want to in this country. It's our great strength. You are not allowed to attack law enforcement.

[Matthew Continetti]

They seem to think that, you know, like, riot cops are like Buckingham palace police, like where, you know, you can get next to them and make them smile.

[John Podhoretz]

Right? Yeah, yeah.

[Matthew Continetti]

You know, that does. It doesn't work that way.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. And they're also human. I mean, that's the point. That's why the baiting stuff is so. Why New York City's cops are so astonishing. The level of training that New York City cops get. Because for a year and a half up at Columbia and stuff like that, those protesters, all they wanted was for a cop to take out a stick and hit them over the head like that. The goal of the encampment protests and those protesters was to get the cops to start swinging the batons. And here in New York, the training is astonishing. And they remained calm. They were a lot less calm in some other places, though. I think there were no real acts of violence. But, you know, at Emory University, they did that thing where they lifted that professor up who was screaming and carried her off. Right. And then they. And then they carried her away. But I'm just saying that, you know, all across the country, if you have, you know, protests in all 50 states and all of that, you got these guys, they're. They're kids, you know, they're 23, 24 years old. They've never, you know, they've written traffic tickets and stuff like that. They're did rural, you know, nothing is going on. It's a powder. That's the powder keg stuff, is whether you get somebody to completely lose his cool in a really heightened circumstance, which is exactly what the protesters want. And all of this is about delegitimizing the regime in some fashion or other, which is all what an anarcho syndicalism leftism is about, like, let's make the regime show the world that it's evil. And, and, and of course then you get all the celebrations of this ridiculous no Kings rally, which. Congratulations, it worked.

[Abe Greenwald]

The organizers.

[John Podhoretz]

Thank you so much. I really didn't know you were going to.

[Abe Greenwald]

Organizers say it was the largest protest in American history with 5 million people nationwide. And I'm sorry, I just don't believe it.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, I don't believe it because I believe the 3 1/2 million from the Women's March. You felt the Women's March. Wherever you were in this country, you felt the Women's March.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, there were large crowds, mainly in blue strongholds, right. In. In the cities that constitute what Christopher Caldwell is called the liberal archipelago. But I cannot see those crowds mounting to a million people, much less 5 million. And there were smaller protests. I mentioned Culpepper, Virginia is a small town that's, you know, over an hour from Washington, D.C. in Virginia. But those protests were typically like 30 people max. You know, in the small towns, they're.

[Christine Rosen]

Wealthy DC types who have vacation homes.

[John Podhoretz]

Since the first, the spin wise, it's the first 50 state protest. Never before has there been a 50 state protest, which is like congrats. So really, congratulations.

[Christine Rosen]

Tell me across America, once a word.

[John Podhoretz]

Hold on.

[Abe Greenwald]

You mean you need 100,000 people per state to get to 5 million and I just don't.

[John Podhoretz]

That's not what I saw.

[Abe Greenwald]

I saw a lot of. I saw a lot of boomers.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

Who were hate Trump. And the messaging was all over the place. It wasn't just we don't want a king. It was like keep Medicaid going or abolish ice. Right. So it was, it was what we know. We know that at least 50% of the country hates Donald Trump, hates MAGA, and wants to see its values imposed on the nation rather than Trump's call to a more traditional understanding of what it means to be America. And they all came out on Sunday, on Saturday also.

[John Podhoretz]

Here's what I want to know. Finally, were they registering new voters? Were they creating a system, rallying points? No, but I mean, the Women's March began a political process that helped Democrats win 40 seats in 2018, without question, and ignited an opposition and had a practical political effect over time.

[Christine Rosen]

But this is actually where this, what we've slipped into this perform these performative political acts. That is a very thin line that many people are find easy to cross over into violent action. I think there's that because there's no. They're not doing anything. The purpose is the protest itself.

[John Podhoretz]

It's right.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think they need to up their poster game. I mean, I was really.

[John Podhoretz]

No, they were lame.

[Abe Greenwald]

It was late. It was like literally poster board or.

[Christine Rosen]

Cardboard maker on Amazon marker.

[Abe Greenwald]

Some people were writing little messages on 8 and a half by 11 sheets of white paper. I mean, what happened to the era of printed tees? It used to be every time the Democrats and the progressives had a cause, almost within 12 hours they'd have these nice graphic tees that all say the same thing or display the face of the hero, or they'd have the SEIU graphic placards. I looked at the no king. It was very diy, you know, I.

[John Podhoretz]

Know, by the way. And even diy like, you know, if a family goes to Disney World, they make up a shirt so that everybody can spot everybody else. You know, continent, family, 20, 25. For the record, we don't wear the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Shirts at Disney World.

[John Podhoretz]

You go, yeah, but we did one anyway. You know, you gotta totally auction one.

[Christine Rosen]

Of those at our next roast. So if you did make them, I.

[John Podhoretz]

Don'T know where they are, but. But yeah, we did anyway. But it's like, you know, there's a Mickey and then you put Goofy on it or so like and you do it through Etsy or you do it through one of those sites and it takes two days, right? Yeah. Show a little, show a little, you.

[Abe Greenwald]

Know, cleverness and you was long in the making. You have plenty of time. But yeah, I don't. It was a, it was a. Look, they. There are a lot of people that disagree with the direction of the country. They let themselves be heard and as you guys said, we still don't have a king and life goes on. Oh, and guess what? Just finally Trump's military parade happened and we woke up the next day and it's the America we know. And in fact, most people who watched the parade really liked it as a celebration of the United States military on its 250 birthday.

[John Podhoretz]

And it was very hard to watch the parade you live in. You had a hard time watching the parade. It was almost impossible to find footage of the parade. Even Fox, which dedicated the evening to the parade, most of the time that was spent was spent on pre on packages that they did celebrating the military's 250 year history rather than it wasn't.

[Christine Rosen]

Designed for broadcast television, which is ironic because it was a, you know, Trump usually is better at that. There weren't that many television worthy moments and the weather was very bad for like, I think a lot of local turnout or even near Local turnout didn't happen because of the weather. Yeah, it was. I mean, it is what it is. It wasn't dramatic either negatively or positively, I think.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. So what can you do that's. The military is 250 years old.

[Abe Greenwald]

The army.

[Christine Rosen]

Army is the army.

[John Podhoretz]

Army. I want to say there was a point. One thing I learned that I did not know is that when the U.S. army began in, obviously in 1775, for the first couple of weeks there was one member of the US army, and that was George Washington. 1. There was a single member because everything else was state militias and all that. So pretty good.

[Christine Rosen]

Patient zero.

[John Podhoretz]

That was the best army we ever had.

[Abe Greenwald]

Made it all worth it.

[John Podhoretz]

The best army we ever had. And of course, I do. You know, just thinking today, just to. And on a slightly higher note, thinking today about the United States and Israel and Trump and everything and where we are and a story in Jewish Insider, which was an interview with various Biden and Harris officials over what they think is going on in Israel. The for anybody who believes in the survival of the Jewish people in the state of Israel, the blessing that was delivered to this country by the denial of a term in the White House for Kamala Harris and her team, who would have done everything possible, just like Barack Obama in 2010, to make it impossible for Israel to do what it is doing right now, which is, as I said in our blog post on Friday, the vindication of Zionism. That is that that Jews need to take control of their own future and present, prevent their own destruction. And the only way to do that is to have a land in which they can not only in gather and practice our faith and live an ordinary life, but also defend Jews against the depredations of more powerful actors and all of that. And that there was this force that almost, you know, came came close to being president and having the presidency in 2025. And if those IA IAE and numbers are correct, you know, at some point this year, Iran would have become a nuclear power with Kamala Harris as president. And, you know, again, the history of the history is contingent. Elections matter. Things like this matter very, very much. And thinking of George Washington and the American history that George Washington wrote, that letter that he wrote, if you've never read it, to the Truro synagogue in which he welcomed the Jewish people to the American experiment and said that we all should have the right and power to sit under our own fig and olive tree. One of the most beautiful pieces of rhetoric outside of Abraham Lincoln, that any American president has ever spoken or written. And that's right at the beginning of the American experiment, that, that, that this is a land that is friendly to Jews, safe for Jews. That's been called into question in the last couple of years. And, and I don't think that we're not a country that's, I think this is still the greatest boon to the Jewish people the world has ever seen, the United States. But that Israel faces an existential moment and that we find, despite everything that we've talked about for 10 years, that Trump is, you know, doing, using slogans like America first that have a terrible provenance in terms of, you know, in terms of the safety of Jews, or that he, you know, has dinner with Nick Fuentes or that he, you know, plays footsie with Kanye west, or however that when push comes to shove and when things really matter, he represents the America that believes that Israel not only has a right to exist, but is our friend, our ally, the only democratic country in the Middle east and a country that more than any other on this planet resembles America. And if you love America as we do, kind of love Israel because we love America for the, for the notions, for the ideas of freedom and the God given rights of every individual that precede government and precede society and precede everything else. And that is, that is Israel's message as well. And so here we are effectively, whether or not we are active or not effectively in this fight with Israel at, at its, at one of its key moments in the, you know, Its almost 80 year history. So it is a blessing to be an American today. And for Matt and Christine and Abe, I'm John Potter. It's Keep the candle Burning.