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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why Lifelock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
- [00:45]
No way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best.
- [00:50]
Abe Greenwald
Expect the worst, Hope for the best.
- [00:55]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, November 21, 2024. I'm John Pod Hordz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Con Eddy. Hi, Matt.
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Matthew Continetti
Hi John.
- [01:12]
John Podhoretz
And Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:15]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [01:17]
John Podhoretz
News broke within the last hour before we started taping this podcast that the International Criminal Court has indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of Israel for war crimes. And I guess we'll delve into this, but they've issued arrest warrants and the one of the leading charges is that Israel they need to be arrested to stand for Israel's war crimes because Israel, quote, used starvation as a weapon of war and intentionally directed an attack against the civilian population. I just want to in terms of the intentional starvation charge, here is the story as of yesterday when it comes to food aid to Gaza. Over the course of the war that began in last October, total amount of food aid trans shift from Israel into Gaza, 1,138,847 tons of food have been sent into Gaza. Land crossings number 1.12 million. That is to say in trucks Ariel 6700 and by sea 9100. So the intentional starvation by Israel of the population of Gaza involves the delivery of I'm not saying it's £1,000,000 of food. I'm saying it's 1.13 million tons of food a ton, being of course £2,000. So this is over a billion tons of food that Israel has delivered into the war zone, where it is fighting a population that is civilian in the sense that it's not at arms with Hamas. But in which we now understand that at least half of the people who invaded Israel on October 7th were not Hamasniks. They were Gazans along for the ride and looking to have themselves some raping and murdering and beheading and setting people on fire and sticking them in ovens fun. So if that's the case, Israel's behavior during this war has about it a slight madness if you think about it, that in no other war in the history of the world would an army fighting against another country that had invaded it and wished to win the war as quickly as possible would be providing material sustenance and food to the population of the area that had attacked it. Israel does this because recognizes that Hamas is in some form an irregular army and that it is a dictatorship that is, that is mistreating the people of Gaza, but has done it. Nonsense.
- [05:12]
Matthew Continetti
Geopolitics, right? I mean geopolitics pushes Israel into the position where it has to feed the population that is trying to murder as many Jews as possible and eventually destroy the Jewish state. And I think we just take a step back and look at the geopolitics of this decision. It comes at a moment where of great peril this lame duck presidency in the world. What happened yesterday at the United nations, another cease fire resolution had to be vetoed by the United States, part of the international diplomatic campaign to delegitimize Israel. And on this floor of the United States Senate, the upper chamber of the Congress of the world's most important democratic power and Israel's most powerful ally, senators had to bat down three anti Israel resolutions in including a weapons embargo proposed by the lunatic Marxist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. And so all of this is happening at once. This moment of the lame duck is being used as a pressure point to condemn and harm Israel at a time when it is trying. Well, I mean Gaza is, is more, more or less over. All that's left is finding the hostages and Lebanon. They seem to be trying to reach some type of agreement in order to end that war as well. But it's, I think it's important to keep in mind the larger picture here, a moment of great peril for the United States and Israel.
- [07:06]
John Podhoretz
There is one other detail. It's an individual detail, but it has very interesting resonance. And Valence Ayelet Shaked, who was Justice Minister in the Israeli government, was heading to Australia for a conference. The government of Australia denied Ayelet Shaked the right to enter Australia on the grounds that her presence in Australia could be disruptive or destabilizing her physical presence because she was once a minister of the Israeli government. So one of the themes that I've been articulating over the course of the last year is this. They're coming after us, you know, sounding like a paranoid. The first piece, big piece I wrote about this for commentary was called they're coming after Us. The second is the they're driving, they're trying to drive us underground. They are trying to raise the cost of being a Jew in the world to unacceptable levels so that we will take off our kippot, we will take off our Jewish stars, we will take off our hostage necklaces. We will not show visible signs of being. We will not talk about it because it's not worth it and because the risk is not worth the reward. The individual targeting of individual Israelis, politicians and non politicians or whatever students on campuses. This is very much an important element of the ongoing effort to delegitimize being Jewish and to make it so that Jews themselves participate in the disarming of Jewry in the sense that we do not show ourselves. And that's the Ayla Shakehead story. The Senate we need to talk about a little bit because the resolution was batted down, but it was not batted down because it was voted. The vote was 95 to 5. 17. 19 U.S. senators, all either Democrats or like Sanders, not a Democrat, Independent, affiliated with the Democratic Party, voted to embargo offensive weaponry to Israel, meaning any weapon I guess that is not Iron Dome where it's not a, you know, it's not an anti, is not a defensive system intended to prevent Israel from being attacked. That's a third of the Democratic caucus in the Senate. That's not an eighth of the Democratic caucus. That's not a sixth. That is a third of the Democratic caucus in the Senate. After a year of this, this is very bad and it's bad not for us. We obviously have our own views on how this goes. It represents a victory on the part of people who are trying to make the case that Israel's self defense in the form of the aggressive efforts to extirpate its enemies, which is a form of self defense. Israel does not want to reoccupy Gaza. It's not going into Gaza for territorial reasons. It does not want Gaza. It pulled out of Gaza 19 years ago. This is all part of the effort to drive Jewish efforts to maintain the self defense of Jews 80 years after the Holocaust and to treat it as, as illegitimate and to say that the 124 countries that are signatories to the International Criminal Court should Netanyahu or Gallant step off a plane and put their feet on the soil of that country, they are therefore subject to arrest.
- [11:24]
Christine Rosen
We need to spend a minute talking about the International Criminal Court which is a completely illegitimate institution but whose indictment of supposed war criminals is often heralded by people in our domestic policy left in the Democratic Party as evidence to justify some of the things like the vote you just described. I would. I've long disliked the icc, but one of the best articles sort of outlining in detail what's wrong with it comes from Matt and my's colleague Jack Goldsmith. I think he was in University of Chicago Law Review. It's called the self defeating International Criminal Court. I think you can find a PDF of it online. But it's remarkable. It just very methodically goes through how in its very founding and structure and mission, it is a self defeating institution with heavy bias towards very liberal NGOs countries that are more extreme in their governance. They have something called the traveling dictator exception. So for example, here they are handing down arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu. But if you're Assad who slaughters his own people on the regular, you can travel anywhere you want. And ICC signatories aren't allowed to arrest you because you killed your own people, you didn't kill anyone else. And so there are all these bizarre workarounds for excusing the genocidal behavior of some of this world's worst actors and on the other hand indicting the only democracy in the Middle east, its leadership, as it fights a defensive war. So it's very important that people understand this does not mean that these, that the leaders of Israel are war criminals just because the ICC says so.
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John Podhoretz
He hasn't tried them yet. Right. And Israel will not, will not subject.
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Matthew Continetti
Nor should they, of course.
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John Podhoretz
Abe.
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Abe Greenwald
I'm sorry John, on your point about the Senate, you described it as a kind of a victory for those voices that want to de arm, disarm Jews and Israel. I don't actually see it that way because if you compare their number, the postals show that the majority of Americans are on Israel's side here. And Israel is in fact winning its wars. What the third of the Democrats prove is it's not a victory, it's a signal of their own demise. They're heading ever amsterdamward. And when you take on that kind of attitude toward Israel and the Jews, you destroy yourself. You begin to destroy your own politics and your own polis. And it's a scary thing for the left that they are devolving into this. But we should emphasize Israel is winning. It's important regional allies see that it's winning. Its prospective important regional allies see that it's winning. And this is kind of a spiraling on the part of the other side. I think they're headed downward.
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Matthew Continetti
I think this is a message that the anti Israel campaign is not going to stop. We had this election just a few weeks ago. The pro Israel party, the unequivocally pro Israel party, put it that way, won the election and it won a trifecta. But we're now in this period, this liminal space where all the anti Israel forces are doing their best. And I think that the vote on the Senate was kind of a window into what an alternative future may have been had Kamala Harris won, had the Democrats won. Trifecta. I think that's important to recognize because that's the direction of left parties in Europe, right, embracing the anti Israel cause. That's the direction of people like Sanders and Maryland's Chris Van Hollen and others who have embraced the anti Israel cause in the Democratic Party. A couple other thoughts. I mean, one on the Senate vote, it's important to note as well that the organization J Street endorsed this vote. Right. And so I've never thought you could call J Street pro Israel. But for an organization to say that it's pro Israel while allowing senators to vote to disarm the state of Israel, encouraging, encouraging is disgusting. It's disgusting act. And they should not be treated with any respect, I think, by the people who love and support the state of Israel. And then a final, just a final note in our politics, for the past couple of years, the word lawfare has been used quite a bit and this concept, lawfare, been applied to domestic politics. But I do think we should take a moment to understand where the term originated. It originated in the global campaign against the Jewish people and against the State of Israel. That's the law fair. And we're seeing it again with this ICC warrant. By the way, isn't Yoav Gallant supposed to be the good cop to Bibi's bad copy? Right. We've had all this, oh, Yoav Gallant, he wants, you know, he wants to do more to get a ceasefire to get the hostages and that terrible BB he arrests, he fires. Gallant, you know, how dare he. What a tyrant Bibi is. This just shows at the end of the day, they're all Jews. They don't care. There's no good cop, bad cop. They want Israel gone and they want Jews underground. And that is the message we should take from.
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Christine Rosen
And what's important for that and the reason that the, this ICC warrants and the Senate voter are connected in a very important way is that the ICC only exists at the because the United States sometimes cooperates with bringing war Criminals into the Hague. So you know, Milosevic after the Balkan wars, they require the United States to cooperate if there actually is someone that the global community believes needs to be tried in this, in this way. So if you have, it's very good news for the anti Israel contingent at the UN and at the ICC to see the Senate vote. I mean, even if it failed, it's a noticeable shift in terms of what the United States and its leadership might be willing to do going forward in the future in prosecuting people for war crimes they did not in fact commit.
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John Podhoretz
Two important points to justify Abe's criticism of me, which I accept. One of them is that if they wanna fight on this, the Senate and the, and the people want to drive the Jews underground, there'll be a fight. Let's, let's have the fight. Senator John Thune, the new, the incoming Senate Majority Leader has said that he will look for ways to sanction the International Criminal Court for its behavior. Now we should understand that we are not a signatory. The United States is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court. We do not recognize its legitimacy. Then we do not participate in its process. And I assume that means we don't give it money. The ICC is a very weird body. It was incepted in 2002. It does not, it is not really connected to any larger international organization. It is not part of the un. It is its own standing thing that was invented by something called the Rome Statute, which is a treaty that people, these 124 countries that recognize its authority have signed. But it's not, it doesn't have the force of law. It, it. There, there's no legitimizing body. So it, it's not administered. I, I assume that the money that it gets is paid by some of these countries or it gets money from other NGOs or something like that. It has a staff of about 900 people and its purpose is to discern international war crimes and that sort of thing. It's new, it's not old. It has no provenance. It's 22 years old. It's done a lot of nonsense in the 22 years that it has been.
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Christine Rosen
Agreement on what International criminal law even is. We should.
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John Podhoretz
Well, there is, I mean there is.
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Christine Rosen
But there's a lot of. Right, there's a lot of negotiation around what that means and in what context.
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John Podhoretz
There is a body of international law, not criminal. There was a body of international law, among other things that we know as the Geneva, as the, as the Geneva Conventions which were first signed in 1849, I think, and have been revised five or six times. And these involve behavior during war. And what constitutes behavior during war that is legitimate for the purposes of what you do to fight a war, to win the war, and what goes beyond that into evil, into sort of evil, immoral, unjustifiable behavior. And that is pretty much the entire body of international law, aside from economic treaties and sort of things like that that are not criminal. None of this is criminal because we don't, we don't all exist under the same justice system.
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Christine Rosen
Well, this is what I should have been more clear in my distinction. It's not that there isn't international law, obviously there's international law. But the International Criminal Court seeks to prosecute people based on a body of what they call international criminal law, to which that's why we didn't sign onto the icc. We do not agree, we have principled disagreements with what they would define as criminal prosecution in many cases.
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Matthew Continetti
Right. And because it's all informed by the ideology of the left. I mean, from the very start, right, the ICC went after Pinochet. That was their big claim to fame. And he was Pinochet, the military dictator of Chile for many years. I mean, he was the anti left target for decades. Right. And so what's the other nation that's the target of the left and has been since 1967?
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John Podhoretz
Israel.
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Matthew Continetti
So the ICC has just moved to Israel and commits this lawfare against Israel like the UN has been doing for decades as well.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Matthew Continetti
So it's. I completely agree that not only should Thune in the Republican Senate next January think through how to sanction this rogue institution, but let's not forget that Elise Stefanik has been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the United nations. And she too will have a great role to play here. The only silver lining in all of this and in this, as I say, very troubling period, is that help is on the way for the state of Israel. I think we can say that.
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John Podhoretz
But this is why I wanted to say that I think Abe was right and that because the American people do support Israel, they certainly support Israel against Hamas. 5 to 1, 80, 80, 20. Every poll you see these numbers change depending on who Israel's counterparty is in a poll. If it's Palestinians, generally, the numbers are more favorably inclined toward the Palestinians and less favorably inclined toward Israel. But it depends on whom you name and who.
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Christine Rosen
But John, you are correct to point out this shift in the Democratic Party because you know who opposed the ICC when it was first brought to a vote in the, in the Senate, Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Christine Rosen
And again, like the, and part of that surely came from their understanding of what the ICC's mission would be in terms of Israel.
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John Podhoretz
Right. So that was, that was 22 years ago. When I say they want to fight, we're going to give them a fight. We're going to give them a fight. And I'm going to tell you who is in big trouble. And I'm saying this right now on this podcast to your face, you probably don't listen, but I'm going to say it to you and you hear me. Jon Ossoff, senator from Georgia, waving your Judaism around like a flag, voting to embargo offensive arms to the United States. Get ready for a primary, buddy, and get ready for hundreds of millions of dollars to be raised by the newly Zionist Jewish community or the, you know, the newly activist Zionist Jewish community to get your ass out of the Senate and to punish you for what you've done.
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Matthew Continetti
We are, Ossoff is in cycle.
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John Podhoretz
He is in cycle.
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Matthew Continetti
And you know, that's why I'm saying maybe rumored to maybe go into that fight is Governor Brian Kemp of the state of Georgia. And there would be no who wouldn't greater satisfaction than my guy, Brian Kemp, you know, the straight talking governor of Georgia, the great state of Georgia, to beat that little twerp in an election in 26, a seat that he only has because of Trump's misconduct during the post 2020 period. And on this issue, the Israel issue in particular, that would make me very pleased indeed. But you know what, I'm still pleased with the results from this election. So you're just, you're making me preemptively excited about 2020.
- [25:21]
John Podhoretz
But I'm just, I'm just saying, Jon Ossoff, we are coming for you. So and hear me now because I know a lot of people who have a lot of money and give a lot of money in politics. And you are in deep, my friend. And your friends at J Street, let's see how they do. Let's see how your friend Soros does in helping you against the onslaught. You know, the race in Westchester in the spring between George Latimer and Jamaal Bowman. Now that was a Democratic primary. I don't know what the circumstances would be in a Democratic primary in Georgia, whether there is any kind of body of opinion that would support an effort to oust Ossoff in that way. Probably not. I don't care because that would Be nice, because it would indicate that sanity had returned to the Democratic Party, at least in Georgia. But you're in for a world of pain. You know, this is a form of herem. The word herem is the word in Hebrew that indicates excommunication, removal from the tribe. And what you have just done, John Ossoff, is to remove yourself from the. As we say at Passover, if you say, what did the Lord do for, you know, for me when you. Or for you when you came out of Egypt? And you exclude yourself from the tribe, God will set your teeth on edge and basically make it clear that had you been there in Egypt when God was redeeming the Jews, you would not have been redeemed. You were not going to be redeemed in November 2026.
- [27:24]
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Give more holiday fun and less holiday worry. With LifeLock, save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply.
- [27:53]
All right, let's move on from the the first time I've ever threatened anybody on the commentary podc.
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Matthew Continetti
I hope the censors don't listen to this podcast.
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John Podhoretz
Fortunately, we don't have censors, unlike. Unlike in Britain, by the way, where you know that the writer Allison Pearson, who wrote the famous novel. I don't know how she does it about, you know, she has been arrested.
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Matthew Continetti
Yeah. Is she not still Ms. Anthony Lane?
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John Podhoretz
She is, yes. She is married to Anthony Lane, I guess no longer the movie critic of the New Yorker, but a writer for the New Yorker and a columnist with the Telegraph. And she was red pilled by Covid and some other things and the educational and I think the Corbyn Labor Party's antisemitism and that sort of thing, but she is very much in the camp of the. What are you people all crazy and pointed out? I mean, I can't remember exactly what she did, but she was sanctioned, right?
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Christine Rosen
It was like a. Didn't she just put something on social media and they.
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John Podhoretz
She did. And I don't remember what this specific subject was, but people are being arrested in Britain.
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Christine Rosen
That's why we have a First Amendment for tweets.
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John Podhoretz
And thank God we have a First Amendment because as we know from what happened in this country from 2018 through the election if we didn't have a First Amendment. The people who thought that it was a good idea to get Trump off Twitter and then help him get reelected in 20. So good work on you. It was really brilliant strategy there. Congratulations. And your use of a suppressant suppression on social media. But those people wouldn't have stopped it. You know, it's saying, well, we just need to make sure that he's banned, banned from social media. They would have, you know, they would have sought to levy criminal sanctions against him for saying things they didn't like.
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Matthew Continetti
Or anybody else, I mean.
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John Podhoretz
Or anybody else.
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Matthew Continetti
Anybody else, I mean.
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John Podhoretz
Thanks.
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Matthew Continetti
That's the thing. Trump can withstand a lot, as we've seen other people can't. One other foreign policy headline for this half of the show, we should note that Putin responded to Biden's authorization of the long range fires into Russia by launching an ICBM at Ukraine. This was an ICBM that had a conventional payload, but it was the first time that Putin has fired an intercontinental ballistic missile during the war. This is clearly Putin's signal to the west to show that he is again contemplating playing the nuclear card. But it's a cautious signal because it's more a message than an actual retaliation using nuclear weapons. Two, just two things about it. One, again, this idea that we're in a very dangerous moment here in the world in between these two presidencies with Joe Biden. Still, the President, Joe Biden, not very active, if you haven't noticed. He's not, he's not really around all that much.
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John Podhoretz
He took two trips. He took two trips.
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Matthew Continetti
One appear in the state of Pennsylvania sometime soon.
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Christine Rosen
The vice president has totally disappeared.
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Matthew Continetti
And yes, and I was about to say the vice President, she is apparently in Hawaii vacationing.
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John Podhoretz
I think she's in the witness protection program.
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Matthew Continetti
The other thing, though, about the ICBM launch, which struck me as this is classic kind of Cold War behavior, where during the Cold War, the two sides, the United States and the USSR were, were constantly sending these kind of messages to one another through their defense and foreign policy moves. So the classic example, of course, is during the 1973 war in Israel, the Yom Kippur war, where in order to tell the Russians that the United States was very much against them resupplying the Egyptians and the Syrians, we raised the nuclear alert level, right? And Kissinger was constantly doing this, ordering the deployment of certain carrier groups and such. Well, here we have Putin sending a signal. And what is missing, from my perspective, is an American leadership that understands that signal and is willing to do similar things in order to show that, you know, it's not just Russia that can play deterrence and escalation, it's also the United States and the West. And so that lack of having a strategic mindset that is aware that these types of defense and military moves, you don't necessarily need to be kinetic in them. You can just show things. I mean, in this case, it was a missile attack on Ukraine, so it was kinetic for the Ukrainians. But it also sent a message to the west we could do the same thing. But we're, we're not. Instead, we're kind of continuing this muddle, too little, too late process that Biden has been engaged in for now, a thousand plus days.
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Abe Greenwald
Yeah. To Matt's point, this is why removing a president, an infirm president, from his reelection race, but leaving him in office was a very scary thing, is a very scary thing, and was a scandal because whatever the results of the election, the rest of the world learned with certainty that the American president's own party doesn't think he is capable of fully functioning. And now we have months during which the rest of the world is going to react to that. This is a horror. It really is.
- [33:54]
John Podhoretz
Can we connect these two things? What happened yesterday between Russia and Ukraine and Israel's effort to defend itself. So Israel, of course, with Gaza winding down and the only incredibly, increasingly tragic fact that there's still no sign of the hostages, which is Israel's now. Great. Whatever. Interest. I was going to say strategic interest, but it's not a strategic interest. It is an existential interest in the return of the captives, that Israel is fighting a very, very serious war in Lebanon to disarm or do what they can to disarm and retard and eliminate the capacity of Hezbollah to strike at Israel and allow the north of Israel to be repopulated as it was depopulated after October 7. We now know that Hezbollah was intending and was stockpiling up for an invasion of the north of Israel and the Galilee. Very much on the model of October 7, except that they would have been a lot more efficient at it because they are actually a sort of functioning military with a lot of weaponry and arms and a station position inside a sovereign country where they weren't supposed to be. They're not supposed to under treaty under the UN 1171. They were supposed to be 20 miles north of the border with Israel. And they're, of course, standing right there on the border with Israel. Anyway, Israel is fighting a war. Israeli Soldiers are getting killed and wounded every day. And what is the United States pressing interest? We need a ceasefire. We have to get a ceasefire. Oh, there's good news. Amos Hochstein is going to go and help with the ceasefire. This fetishization of the word ceasefire that has been axiomatic to the Biden administration from about December or November onward, that a ceasefire is the desideratum, the thing that must be gotten at all cost. We should not want Israel to pursue a ceasefire if it doesn't want a ceasefire. What it is doing there is crippling and destroying an illegitimate terrorist army. It is in our interest to see dismantled and destroyed. Not just Israel's interest. Hezbollah has international tentacles. Hezbollah has struck outside of the Middle east on numerous occasions over the last 30 years, most horribly in Buenos Aires in 1994, striking the Jewish Community center there. But it has operated in Colombia, it is operated in and around Venezuela. It is all over the place. We need it. It is to our interest that it be extirpated. And yet the Biden administration, which shows signs of policy flatlining, simply, you just deploy the word ceasefire like people pop Advil. It's like, oh, ceasefire.
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Matthew Continetti
Also only in. With regard to one of the two hot wars that's going on, I think that is striking to many people as well, the asymmetry. Why is the Biden administration only exercising so much energy trying to get Israel to have a ceasefire in its conflicts? And the word ceasefire with regard to Ukraine and Russia has never been. That's never been mentioned. It's a little bit odd. I mean, if people can find Biden in the Amazon, where he may be wandering around still, maybe that's. He never came home. Maybe that's why I haven't seen him. Once they find him, I think they should ask. It's again, the selective indignation that greets Israel whenever it defends itself is outrageous and speaks of something darker about the world's response to the Jewish state.
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Christine Rosen
But this is also because the left now, of which the Democratic Party in this country and elsewhere is part, cannot understand the broader existential threat to Western values and Western civilization. And the court. Look, we don't agree. We have a First Amendment, the UK doesn't. I feel badly for people who live in the UK because of that fact. But we do share certain fundamental values, civilizational values, and the left has abandoned those in the pursuit of these minority interests, including, you know, the post colonial nonsense that we heard trying to justify what, what hamas did on October 7. But there is this broader civilizational struggle that's going on. It's the people who want to attack Western values are different in different places, but they do share certain assumptions about what the west stands for. And that's what, during the Cold War, was much more clarifying. We had leaders who spoke in those terms, and now we don't. We lack that kind of leadership.
- [39:15]
Abe Greenwald
I want to make another connection between the two wars or sort of contrast. So, you know, there are people who have said ever since Israel was attacked on October 7, Israel is going to have to win the messaging war here. They're going to have to win the media war, the PR war. Right? So the very same people who despise Israel and believe that it is guilty of war crimes here on the left, all the. Here on the American left, they're big fans of Ukraine. Ukraine has all their sympathy. I happen to agree with them on that point. Separate issue, but fat lot of good it's done Ukraine to win that messaging war among this bubble in the West.
- [40:08]
Matthew Continetti
Right, That's a very good point.
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Abe Greenwald
Which position would you rather be in winning your war while a bunch of twerps on campus hate you, or on the verge of losing your war while everyone puts their flag next to their emoji, your flag emoji next to their name on social media?
- [40:29]
John Podhoretz
I mean, that is so important because, of course, you know, we had the year from April 22 to, like, April 23, when at award ceremonies, you know, people, you know, when Hollywood would say, slava, Ukraine. And, you know, and they had flights, flag pins, and they had this and they had that, and none of it had any effect on the actual practical meaning of what it would mean to support Ukraine in the way that would achieve the aim that all of these people who had taken Ukraine to their bosom wished to see. Which was Russia, Russia, Russia's advanced, Russia brought back behind its own borders and Ukraine free of Russian domination, did they lobby? Did they come to watch? Did they complain when the Abrams tanks were denied or the F16s were denied or the arms were. Did they do anything? Did they say anything? No, because it's all performative. It was all very heartfelt, and it was all a lot of nonsense. Because things have two stages, right? You decide these are the good guys and these are the bad guys. And then you say, okay, well, then what? What does that incline you or oblige you to do? During the Cold War, for example, we were constantly in a position where it was totally clear who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. And it was the determination of very serious people that there was only so much we could do for the good guys. We could not intervene in the Hungarian revolution. We could not intervene in Prison Frog Spring. We could not intervene in Solidarity because the enemy was implacable and we were not in a position to dictate or enforce terms. And they were there. The Soviets were there in force, right nearby or actually in country. And this would have been a humiliation for us to sort of play this game of saying, here's what we can do for you. A lot of people in 1956 were heartbroken and horrified that the US did not come to the Hungarian. The aid of the Hungarians, the growth.
- [42:51]
Matthew Continetti
Of the conservative movement. In many ways.
- [42:53]
John Podhoretz
In many ways, the reaction was, yes, this notion, we've been saying that this is an evil that must be faced, and now these people have risen up to face it, and there's nothing that we're going to do. And basically, Eisenhower and. And this nascent NATO said, the risk is not worth the reward. We have no confidence that we can secure a victory that isn't actually going to go harder or that the results of our involvement won't actually make things immensely worse for the people of Hungary. That's a serious engagement with a serious enemy. And Russia is a gas station with nuclear weapons. And had the left said the kind of things that Fred Kagan was saying or that we were saying, or that people with serious interest in the American power and the positive uses of American power, had they joined in, had they issued commissions, had they formed committees, had they gone to their senators and said, you have to go pressure the administration to push for letting Ukraine loose, maybe they would have had a positive effect. It was left to us to yell at an administration to which had no political blowback. There wasn't going to get any political blowback from people like us or the Institute for the Study of War or whoever, because that's not in their base.
- [44:36]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. All the pro Ukraine liberals did said, boy, isn't the Biden administration doing great? Isn't this support for Ukraine wonderful?
- [44:45]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. And how terrible is the right. How terrible is Tucker? How terrible are these people talking smack about Zelensky? And all of that was true, but it didn't have the effect of saying, okay, Tucker's terrible, and these people are supporting, you know, are essentially supporting Putin and Putin is evil, and this is all bad. So then what. So what does that oblige you to do? To spend your own emotional, intellectual, and political capital to pursue the aim you think is so important?
- [45:20]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah. I mean, it's completely missing this response. I mean, the lack of accountability is really amazing to me. I mean, when you think about it, I mean, the Biden national security team will leave office untouched from the team that entered office, despite presiding over this complete collapse in American deterrence. Two hot wars raging deaths of American soldiers, deaths of Americans overseas because of Afghanistan, the Houthi conflict that were the longest naval engagement from the US Navy since World War II, rising tensions with China, and no one has been fired. And not only has no one been fired, there's never been any, it seems to me, like, moments of rethink, like, okay, well, maybe we should try to get. Rush the weapons over to Ukraine faster, or maybe we should change our tack, maybe. Again, why are we only talking about a ceasefire in the Middle East? And it's, you know, Schultz, the German Chancellor had a call with Putin. It was the first call he had had with Putin in two years. Now, I don't think he should have made that call, but again, the idea that there should be some diplomatic process with regard to Ukraine has never even come up in this administration. There's been no kind of talk about changes in strategy over the past thousand days. Contrast that with George W. Bush, where it was clear that the initial war in Iraq was quite a success to change the regime of Saddam Hussein. By 2004, the occupation was not going very well. And so there were different strategies employed and tried to combat the insurgency. Those didn't work. And then eventually, though, Bush brought in a whole new team and adopted the surge strategy, which did work, along with the Sunni Arab awakening in the Sunni Triangle part of Iraq. But that's missing. And it's not just a lack of accountability within the administration. I noted yesterday that the House Democrats have reelected their entire leadership team, so there's no. There's no accountability there.
- [47:46]
Christine Rosen
Lessons not learned.
- [47:46]
Matthew Continetti
Yes. Yeah. Lessons not learned. Okay. And the only kind of underground accountability is in this great war that's breaking out sub rosa between Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi, who, you know, still wants to be the shadow speaker. But Hakeem Jeffries is saying maybe we shouldn't follow you all along. There's this. I think it's part of liberal mentality. John, what you're describing, that's just cannot. We're just gonna speak into the wind, and we don't really care what happens.
- [48:18]
John Podhoretz
Right. But I think now, to tie this to what Abe said earlier about Joe Biden and what the next 10 years of reconstructing the history of this administration, if we actually succeed in doing that, or if everybody who is involved just goes to ground and doesn't actually say what they knew or was up to. We don't know how infirm Biden has been or for how long. And the scleroticism of the policy in Ukraine itself might match the scleroticism in the veins of Joe Biden. And I mean that quite literally, that the inability to move, to make those moves. And Bushes, again, this is. Everyone says he was terrible and Iraq was terrible and everything like that. It wasn't just that they switched strategy a couple. They were constantly saying, okay, the loya jirga didn't work, so we have to move on to Paul Bremer's regency. Paul Brenner's regency didn't work. So we have to move on to the three elections. The three elections didn't work. Now there's a civil war. There were. Donald Rumsfeld resigned, Colin Powell resigned. Like the team switch again. We had change, a change of administration. But some of that could have happened. There were generals left, new generals were appointed. There was a sense that this was an ongoing effort.
- [49:49]
Matthew Continetti
You know, it's like something demanding attention of the president and his national security team. Right.
- [49:55]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. And when things weren't working, you had to change up. And it took, as is often the case in war, it took three years to figure out how to win the war that they had, or four years in some ways, to win the war that they had started. That's not out of bounds for complicated wars. America didn't have the stomach for it. In the end, though, we did actually win that war. I'm supposedly not allowed to say that, but we did.
- [50:23]
Matthew Continetti
I mean, when Obama withdrew the troops From Iraq in 2011, Iraq was a much more stable place.
- [50:30]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. I mean, it's not great. You know, didn't. It didn't turn into the. It didn't turn into the new democracy of the Middle east, but whatever. I'm just saying that you're right and that. So why is that? Why couldn't they shift gear? Because maybe they couldn't because there was a, you know, there was. There was someone at the top who had no capacity.
- [50:53]
Matthew Continetti
And because, I will add, Barack Obama probably didn't want to. That was probably. He was telling everybody behind the scenes, this is fine, don't worry about it. We're doing something exactly according to plan.
- [51:04]
Abe Greenwald
You know, but this is, this touches on something we've talked about before, which is that as we don't know the extent of Biden's infirmity here. But this covers domestic policy too. So much of the White House's energies had to have been devoted to managing him and I mean managing him on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, on a, on a news conference basis, put statements, correcting statements, traveling advanced team like they didn't have the necessary, this is my guess, the necessary bandwidth for policymaking and implementing. They were a full time care team.
- [51:51]
Christine Rosen
Well, I think that's why you did and at some point that that must have dawned on them and that back into the White House you saw Jill starting, you saw surrogates, Biden surrogates more often doing the thing and taking the position that the president usually did anyway.
- [52:12]
John Podhoretz
So yeah, so here we are, Jews under attack, Ukraine having ICBMs fired at it when we just said okay, you can fire 1 missile 150 miles after two and a half years. Yeah, it's a very dangerous time. But I do think we can't let the right off the hook though very quickly. A lot of the oh my God, we're going to be in World War 3 by January is coming not from the non interventionist left but from this peculiar alliance on the non interventionist right now called right. Which is amazing to me that includes Glenn Greenwald who is actually a communist basically who left America because it wasn't Brazilian enough. And it's kind of alliance between him and Matt Taibbi and Walter Kern and the Quincy Institute and I don't else all of whom are saying that are merely allowing the Ukrainians some means of self defense to get them to a negotiating table which is I guess what everybody expects will happen in the first quarter of the Trump administration is itself risking World War Three. And as you know, we joked about this yesterday, but it is, that's really, that's. I didn't really know that people were running under, fleeing under the table in terror of Putin's. I didn't know by the way that Glenn Greenwald thought that Putin was so horrible that he might launch a nuclear weapon. I thought Putin was the greatest and he took in Edward Snowden.
- [54:08]
Matthew Continetti
What would be our fault, it would be America's fault if, if something like World War 3. I mean this is again as you were saying yesterday, a Cold War parallel where the doves during the Cold War, any time America would take a proactive measure to contain or eventually roll back communism would say World War Three is going to break out. World War Three is going to break out. And of course with Ronald Reagan's support for the Contras in his administration against the Sandinistas who are still there in Nicaragua. That was provocative. Reagan's continuance of the deployment of the Pershing missiles, which actually Jimmy Carter had ordered to Western Europe, that as we said, occasioned the nuclear freeze movement in order to prevent World War three. That the lesson always to be drawn is from the hunt from Red October, where Fred Thompson, one of his many great lines, say the Russians only respect strength and so you have to show toughness in order to get them to be in a position where you can have negotiations. So, yes, so this is coming from the right as well as the anti war left. But to me, more pressing at the moment is the kind of just hobbled administration as it kind of slouches toward January 20th.
- [55:50]
John Podhoretz
Okay, well, we'll leave it there. Be back tomorrow. For Matt, Abe and Christine, I'm Jon Pott. Hortz, keep the caliper.