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- [00:00]
John Podhoretz
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- [01:23]
Seth Mandel
Some die of thirst no way of
- [01:26]
John Podhoretz
knowing way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, June 19, 2026. I'm John Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine offering you your last chance today till midnight. This is Friday, right? Our summer offer. First time subscribers ever, 1995 a year. To subscribe to commentary, commentary.org and the commentary archives go to commentary.org offer hundreds and hundreds of people have signed up. This is the end of it. So commentary.org commentary.org offer didn't really sound like a tongue twister, but I guess it turned into a tongue twister there at the end. Commentary.org offer $19.95 a year. Subscribe Help the podcast read to your heart's content. And when I say read I'm talking about the editorial and polemical contributions of Today's panel Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
- [02:43]
Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
- [02:44]
John Podhoretz
And Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
- [02:47]
Seth Mandel
Hi John.
- [02:49]
John Podhoretz
News came overnight that there is a hitch in the get along of the Memorandum of understanding which we were told is now in force because Trump docusigned it and then he re signed it. But now the Iranians are saying that the negotiations are not going to take place and Vance, J.D. vance, our chief negotiator, canceled his trip to Switzerland for the purpose of negotiating and signing a third time or a fourth time or something or other. And the nominal reason being given is that Israel has not stopped firing on Lebanon. Whereas of course the actual fact is that it is Lebanon that has not, not Lebanon, but Hezbollah, that has not stopped firing on Israel. Four Israeli soldiers and a tank were killed yesterday. You know, a couple days ago, school bus was targeted by a Hezbollah drone. Israel's response is a response. Everything that is going on in Lebanon is a response. I want to. If you take nothing from what we say here today or for the next month, it is that Israel's actions in Lebanon against Hezbollah are purely defensive. They are the result of Hezbollah's targeting of Israel and active measures taken against Israel to which Israel is responding. It is responding in two places, is responding in the south and is responding in the Dahia neighborhood in Lebanon, which is the urban stronghold of Hezbollah. But it is not hitting Lebanon. It is not targeting Lebanon. It is responding to attacks on its border, which after October 7, Israel will never, not do. Israel will never allow any bullet, arrow, rock or paper plane that is fired at it from across a border to go unresponded to. And so if Iran has convinced the administration to add a ceasefire in Lebanon against Hezbollah to the particulars, bill of particulars, that is supposed to make this memorandum of understanding operate. The memorandum understanding is dead in the water if that is the precondition. And this gets us to the rhetoric that is now being adopted by the United States in relation to Israel over the last 24 to 36 hours, because this is a perfect storm. Trump has made it clear that he wants this deal, so clear that the deal is a catastrophe. Its details are horrendous and horrific. And the only people who are defending it, as far as I can tell, are people who are either on his actual or ideological or careerist payroll. We've not seen a single analyst, a single person who understands the history of the Middle East, a single anything, who has anything to say about this deal other than it is a capitulation that it's a cell phone and all of that, unless you are a groiper MAGA person who wants to appear at a conference with your fellow racist Nazi filth. So that's who's defending this. And one of the ways they're defending it is to say, well, you see, now Israel's getting it in the T. Now we're really seeing that Israel's getting it in the teeth because Bibi Netanyahu and his evil cabinet are going to be either are going to be handcuffed. So imagine then that Bibi Netanyahu, the Israelis and the cabinet are not handcuffed, and that they say, as Bibi has now said, that this memorandum of understanding and this idea that the ceasefire includes its actions in Lebanon, if that is what. Israel cannot abide by those terms. It is not a signatory to this memorandum of understanding, and it cannot abide by those terms. Therefore, moving ahead, instead of talking about yesterday, what do we see if the Iranians continue to play this game of saying, we're not going to negotiate with you because of Israel's acts against Hezbollah in Lebanon? Two possibilities, right? Trump says, okay, deal's off, you're negotiating bad faith. This has nothing to do with Israel. Israel has a right to defend itself. Which he is kind of saying. Which he's kind of said. Except he says Bibi goes too far, hits neighborhood, shouldn't hit apartment buildings. Or Does Trump follow J.D. vance as J.D. vance started moving yesterday into full on blaming Israel first for its impoliteness and injustice toward Donald Trump, which was the theme yesterday, that they're ungrateful, he's their only friend, so they better be careful. They better watch it, because Israel has no friends. And so, you know, Trump's friendship is therefore conditional, so they better watch it. And then the idea that anybody who says that the deal is bad, particularly if they come from our neck of the woods, and I mean not only our ideological neck of the woods, but our faith tradition neck of the woods, is giving the game away because we care more about Israel than we care about the suffering Americans and their higher oil prices. So you could have a double front attack, one on Israel and a turn against Israel by the administration and one on Jews that American Jews. That is couched in simply anti neocon rhetoric. It's not Jews, it's neo cons and neocons and neo consciousness. So I've just set the table.
- [09:31]
Abe Greenwald
And Zionists generally, by the way, I mean, they're pretty vicious about Christian Zionists too.
- [09:38]
John Podhoretz
Fair enough. Yeah. But the word neocon is the one that has been dragged out of the, out of the lexicography to play the role of the strawman in this idea that this is not a good deal. So where do you guys think this goes from here?
- [10:02]
Abe Greenwald
I think that depends on what else Iran gets up to while it's stalling or while it's not allowing Trump to claim progress on the deal. If Iran itself blatantly makes a show of violating the ceasefire itself and humiliating Trump, then I think Trump will not necessarily attack Israel for it.
- [10:35]
John Podhoretz
I don't know if Iran has formally said this because I'm existing in the world of social media and seeing things on social media, and so I want to stipulate that for all I know, this is not true. But the Hormuz letter, which is one of these sort of open source intelligence sites that claims to be reporting on what's gone on, though it has been pretty accurate in the last week. It was one of the early possessors of the text of the Memorandum of Understanding says that Iran has closed the Strait. Now, what did Trump say the minute that the Memorandum of Understanding was signed while he was sitting in Versailles signing the Memorandum of Understanding, which is, by the way, a bad look, can we just say you don't want to be signing peace treaties in Versailles since 20 years after a peace treaty was signed in versailles, World War II started. Nonetheless, he docusigned it, they talked about it. The first thing that was going to happen was the strait was going to reopen. If Friday morning the strait is closed. Where stands the Memorandum of Understanding?
- [11:44]
Seth Mandel
Well, I think that the reason they signed it digitally, whatever, is so that they could say, we already signed it. You have to get it. You have to start abiding by the deal. Right. Which is, I think what they didn't
- [12:01]
John Podhoretz
want was they, us, they here being.
- [12:05]
Seth Mandel
Yes, yeah, they are being Donald Trump and his advisors. I think they understood that the way things were probably going to go were the way things went through last night, which is they agree, they say all the same things. They, they, they bash Israel a bit and then Hezbollah baits Israel into firing back at them. The Iranians say we're not going to Switzerland. And so had they waited, there would be no deal to sign whatever and they could close the Strait with no strings attached according to, under the understanding underlying the negotiation so far. Trump, I think, didn't want that. And I see, I think that's the main reason they did this kind of docusign, you know, just download the PDF and you know, take your stylus and, you know, take out your iPad and do, and then upload it to the cloud and then share the document on, on, on Google Docs, whatever, you know, and, but I think the reason they did that was because they understood that they had to have the Iranians down on paper in some way, even if the paper is just, you know, light in a cloud. And so I think that they are not going to take very kindly to if the strait is closed, I think they have the case. They have, you know, they can throw the book at them and say, no, you can't close the street. That is unambiguous. Whereas the question of what Israel can and cannot do in Lebanon is ambiguous. So in that one way, perhaps docusigning the deal, whatever they did, or was an attempt to stop them from being able to stop Lucy from being able to pull a football away like this right at the beginning. But I, and so I think that, so then we get to your question of so what happens then? And you know, I don't know if you're Trump, you've been going around the last few days saying we can't afford to keep bombing. People who say we should bomb them are stupid people. And no matter how much we bomb them, he said the other day, we won't open the straight. So that's in some way there's been a strategic cornering of the Iranians and a self cornering. The Iranians had to sign something. Except that seems to be undone by the fact that Trump has, has been saying out loud there's literally nothing we could do in response that would force them to open the strait. So he has to contend with his own rhetoric now as much as any part of the deal. And if he does go back to it, he has to explain it. He has to be able to say, well, I didn't mean that, you know, whatever, and Trump certainly can do that, but I just think that he's tied his own shoes, his own shoelaces together, and whatever he chooses to do is going to have to be delayed by some kind of intra administration strategy session that can, you know, that can justify whatever it is they're going to do. So there's, I can't imagine there's an immediate response the way there is from the Israelis when Hezbollah does something.
- [15:46]
John Podhoretz
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- [21:08]
Seth Mandel
Well, the MOU is an introduction. The MOU is an invitation to negotiate the deal.
- [21:14]
John Podhoretz
Right? And Trump said he did not want to sign it because it is not the deal. So if it's not the deal, it's not the deal. So Iran's first measure to keep the deal on track was opening the strait in exchange for our standing down. Now they're going to say, we're keeping the strait closed until you force Israel to stop hitting Hezbollah. So we get back to this question, which is how far is Trump willing to go? Is Trump willing to go to the point at which he says to Israel, you can no longer, in my estimation, you cannot strike back against Hezbollah. Now, if he says that publicly, it's exactly the same thing as the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, which is when Trump says Israel stop, Hezbollah won't believe its luck. Trump has said stop. Israel is sent this
- [22:17]
Seth Mandel
headline from Reuters that Israel and Hezbollah are going to have a ceasefire starting at 4:00 today. So that is Israel's way of trying to appease the Trump administration. If Israel agree, this is Israel agreeing to something, presumably, this is, this is the. What the, the pressure on Israel has wrought, which is, you know, it's true, they didn't sign the moa, the mou, and they're not going to sign the main deal and they're not involved in the main deal, so they're not obligated to do anything regarding the deal. Now they're going to agree to a ceasefire, and therefore. But we don't know, but we don't know what any of that. First of all, the ceasefires have always been vague. Second of all, they keep saying, right, to defend themselves about everybody involved. So the sea, what the ceasefire actually means is going to be up to interpretation. 2. So we'll see how much that changes things. But I think it's worth noting that there's two, there's two problems that I saw collect over the, over the past 24 hours. One is that everybody was focused yesterday on J.D. vance's comments that Israel has no friends and therefore it better be nice to Trump and rightly so to focus on those comments. But, but the thing that I noticed in his press conference was he was asked about ballistic missiles, why Iran can suddenly have ballistic missiles when President Trump said before they couldn't. And part of his answer said this quote, it's very simple. You can't tell a country whether Israel or Iran, they're not allowed to have any self defense. So what I noticed was Vance repeatedly equating. Right. There's a false equivalence going on here. Israel and Iran's self defense needs are being put in the same basket as if you know that's reality, as, as if you know, if, if, if the Iranians didn't have ballistic missiles, Israel would just destroy them. And you know, that's the, that's the end of it.
- [24:29]
John Podhoretz
Rather than Vance literally said there are people in Israel who would like to see all, everyone in Iran die, which is the ultimate psychotic projection. Because what is all this about? All this is about preventing Iran from getting the means and the tools to make everyone in Israel die through the launching and explosion of a nuclear bomb over Tel Aviv. That's why we're doing this. Israel does not want 91 million Iranians to die, nor does Israel want Iran to turn into Libya. Another thing that he said, that would be crazy. An extraordinarily unstable Iran is not conducive to Israel having a secure future. Right.
- [25:22]
Seth Mandel
That's the first thing that Vance is doing. The second thing, I want to just read something from Reuters this morning and this is just breaking news from this morning. Here's what it says. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has set up secretive new cells in Iraq to carry out attacks on Gulf countries that host American forces, bypassing established militia networks to avoid detection, eight Iraqi sources told Reuters. Three or four cells, each comprising about 10 elite Iraqi Shiite Muslim fighters, launched at least seven drone attacks from desert locations near the southern cities of Basra and Samawah against sites in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates between April 20 and May 17, three of the sources said. So the new this is, this is breaking news that Reuters says that haven't, this hasn't been reported before the creation of cells that, that are that report directly to the IRGC to attack either American interests or American allies. What Iran is doing is ramping up its post ceasefire, post MoU, post deal threats. In other words, they are preparing for all, for the end of any sort of ceasefire because they understand that there's not going to be a lasting deal and a lasting peace and all that. And so I would say two things. One, Iran's. Look at Iran's behavior, not what they say. They are not in ceasefire mode. They are setting up new terror cells to go after Americans just as they have been setting up new terror cells in Europe to go after Jews in London and elsewhere. The second thing is that this is what makes you wonder what on earth JD Vance is thinking when he makes his comments, when he talks about the equivalence of self defense between Iran and Israel. Israel isn't setting up new terror cells in Iraq to attack American military installations or American allies in, in retaliation for merely hosting American bases. I mean, this is, again, this is, this is why it feels so frustrating. Not because we don't expect there to be some overheated rhetoric when you're selling a deal, but because it has no relation to reality whatsoever. They're setting up new terror cells to go after the Americans. And we have to sit here and listen to this equivalence as if Iran should be allowed to have whatever Israel has because they both need self defense.
- [28:21]
John Podhoretz
Okay, you know what, let's, let's take Israel out of the equation since it's a hot potato and Zionism and whatever. What about Saudi Arabia? Trump said if Saudi Arabia can have ballistic missiles, why can't Iran have ballistic missiles? And he kind of said why can't they have a little uranium? Other countries have a little uranium. Well, first of all, the principle of nuclear non proliferation which has sort of governed the way the west thinks about these matters since Hiroshima and Nagasaki would say, no, Iran can't have uranium, Iran shouldn't have uranium. To the extent that it is possible that we can prevent Iran from having uranium, it shouldn't have uranium. Uranium leads to a country being able to go nuclear and we don't want any country to go nuclear. The nuclear club as we understand it has only grown by one in the last 50 years and that's North Korea. We are not happy that North Korea went nuclear. So Iran is. The effort here is to prevent Iran from going nuclear. Trump is now saying, well, they could have a little uranium. And he's saying they can have ballistic missiles because Saudi Arabia has ballistic missiles. You know why we don't think that Iran should have ballistic missiles because they fire those ballistic missiles at other countries. Saudi Arabia doesn't fire its ballistic missiles at other countries. In fact, the weaponry that we've sold to Saudi Arabia over the last 45 years, weaponry that in 1981, particularly the AWACS system, a lot of people in the United States were opposed to sending to Saudi Arabia on the grounds that it might provide them, even though AWACS were purely defensive, theoretically with an offensive capability. Over the last 45 years, Saudi Arabia has demonstrated that it has no hostile intent except against Yemen. But I mean, it has hostile intent against Yemen because Yemen has hostile intent against it. But it is not an international destabilizer. And Iran is. So of course we don't want them to have ballistic missiles and of course we don't want them to have uranium. Pulling out this card unilaterally, which Trump and Vance have been doing, is a revolution in consciousness. So now accepting Iranian sovereignty means accepting that Iran has the legitimate right to threaten its neighbors with either weaponry that will either be present, meaning ballistic missiles they can buy off the shelf or not, or you know, conceptual, which is the development and potential deployment over time of a new, of nuclear material that can be put on a bomb. I thought we didn't want any of this. What has all this been for? Why did we do Operation Midnight Hammer? Why did we do this? 28th of February, what happened between the 20th of February and now that has led them to the. Iran has every right to have a ballistic missile. Marco Rubio said we went to war. He said four days after we went to war, that we went to war in part because of their short range ballistic missiles, that their short range ballistic missiles represented a threat to their neighbors, their immediate neighbors around the Gulf. And we had to take those out.
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Seth Mandel
So we actually, I mean, and they did also they used them also they fired them at British bases.
- [32:25]
John Podhoretz
And so that was American bases and
- [32:27]
Seth Mandel
an American basis when that happened. Yeah, before, before the British got involved, you know, Keir Starmer was up there saying, ah, well, you know, there's a diplomacy, there's, there's no military solution to this, blah, blah, blah, while Iran was firing, you know, missiles at British bases. So their non involvement. And it was, it was, that was seen as a huge difference, obviously. Right. The US went to war with Iran, Iran was firing back. Iran was just firing these deterrence missiles at European bases who were not making, and not only not making any trouble for Iran, but the opposite. They were trying to, to, to drag Trump back, back off the stage and back out of the war. They were, I don't want to say they were doing Iran's bidding, but they, they, their, their version of diplomacy was in Iran's interest much more than it was in America's interest for this conflict. And yet Iran was firing missiles at them, too. So, you know, this is like when you have, we have certain rules, right? Who, we have certain laws, certain regulations, somebody commits a certain type of crime, a certain type of gun crime, they don't have the same gun rights as everybody else, right? They come out of prison and they don't. You could. Vance. What Vance is saying is, why does that felon not have a right to defend himself? We don't know what he's going to use the gun for. But we do have past behavior that our laws, the whole, the legal system is built around giving someone chances and saying, well, you cross that line, you, you know, you blew that chance, therefore you lose this particular right or freedom or privilege or whatever. And Vance is saying, well, just because they went around and murdered people last time, the last two times we let them have guns, that doesn't mean they're gonna do it this time. And anyway, don't they deserve the right to be able to defend themselves from a home intruder? What if someone breaks into their apartment? Do they not have a right to defend themselves just because they've committed crimes in the past? This is the extent of the ridiculousness of the discussion that we're having over this. That's what happens when you decide that past behavior has no relevance to current policy.
- [34:55]
John Podhoretz
I mean, it has no relevance. Past behavior has no relevance to current policy. This week, past behavior had relevance to this entire effort that was begun unilaterally by Trump in February 2026, without, by the way, I repeat again, any buy in from anybody else in the United States. So everybody else's hands are clean. No one else is responsible for this war except Trump. Congress doesn't play a role. The American people didn't play a role. Nobody played a role. It's him, Hegseth, Rubio, Vance, whoever else is in the administration, Kaine Cooper, they're not the policymakers. And they said the opposite of what they're saying now two weeks ago, last week. So when they decide to go on the attack against people who were defending their argument a week ago on the grounds that we're wrong and only want people to die and want oil prices to be high, when it was Trump himself who said, I don't care about inflation and I don't care about gas prices. I mean, it's funny because there's a piece in the American Conservative just out this morning quoting me on the podcast saying you probably can't win a war without boots on the ground and the American people in a war will have to make sacrifices, and attacking me as a neocon chicken hawk monster. I'm just echoing what their godhead said. I'm not. I didn't. He's the one who said he didn't mind inflation and higher oil prices. Of course I mind higher oil prices, but if the country's gonna go to war, I understand that the war is gonna bite. Right?
- [36:58]
Seth Mandel
Nobody on this podcast ever said, I love the inflation.
- [37:02]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, I support the war, and I think that it's worth the pain. So did Trump, I think, until Susie Wiles told him that he was headed toward political catastrophe with the oil prices being high and that along with some other stuff and his own. Whatever his own internal mechanism is, had him flip the script. But it's interesting, therefore, to watch as we people who were his stalwart supporters are now the enemies who should be, like, thanking him for saving us from high inflation and higher oil prices. It's stunning. And I want to read something that Erik Erickson, not a neocon, right, solid Tea Party down the line conservative, lives in Georgia, wrote just now. The pressure campaign is on. If you are on the right and you decline to salute the President's deal with Iran, you are to be otherized, branded a warmonger, a neocon fossil, a man itching to put other people's sons in the sand. The choice, we're assured, is binary. Boots on the ground or the President's memorandum. That is a lie, and the people repeating it loudest know it is a lie. Start with the alternative they pretend never existed. Israel had a plan to destabilize the regime from within, and the President personally refused to allow it, at the behest of the Turks. That was the Kurdish that was arming the Kurds to come in and provide a front in the north as we were bombing in the south. That's me putting a footnote on Erickson's point here. Erdogan picked up the phone and the option that wasn't a land war and wasn't surrender quickly disappeared. So spare me the two doors. There was a third, and Washington bricked it up to keep Ankara comfortable. Now look at what we took instead, says Erickson. The memorandum reopens the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days only, after which Iran and Oman decide who passes and what they pay. It dangles a $300 billion reconstruction fund with Gulf money. Qatar's prominently already moving toward Tehran. Iran now says Israel must leave Lebanon or the deal is breached. And the grandson of the regime's founder has called the war the lesser jihad, declared that the greater jihad begins now and hailed the agreement as a victory for Tehran. When your adversary calls the deal a victory, believe him and consider the clock. We bombed Iran for roughly 39 days. Then we let nearly 70 days bleed away between the last bomb and the signature, almost twice the length of the war itself. While panic over oil did, Iran did, Tehran's negotiating for it. Momentum is perishable. The president took a campaign that was working, put it in suspended animation, and is now selling the thaw as a triumph. I'm happy to quote this from Eric precisely because he is not a neocon and precisely because 15 years ago, for example, just to show that there's daylight between people, can be between people like me and people like him, we had a huge fight over the government shutdown of 2011, which I thought was stupid and which he saluted. And so, you know, that was a real conflict. What he wrote here is common sense. If you supported the war, you supported the premises of the war. We're still the same people we were a week ago. Now, Vance is another question, right? Because Vance we are led to understand and what Vance has represented in the party since his conversion to restrainer groiper, whatever ism that he was after. He was briefly a neocon when he wrote Hillbilly Elegy and was writing for Commentary. By the way, Vance opposed the war or in some fashion or other. And so we have Vance now representing the view that the war was bad because it raised oil prices and was harming Americans. Well, you know, so resign if you think that the war is catastrophic. Or don't resign, because maybe you're right, because you eventually will get your way. Because your leader is inconstant person who apparently can be pushed off the ledge of the most important thing he will ever do. This, what he did in Iran, is the most important thing. I mean, I don't know what's going to happen in the next two and a half years, but probably the most important thing that he will ever do in his presidency, I mean, I can't think of anything. Go to another war. He could go to war in Taiwan or something.
- [42:45]
Seth Mandel
Cuba.
- [42:46]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, whatever. Okay. I'm just saying it's the most important thing that he will ever have done and he decided to lose it. He can Tweet all he likes that we won and Iran needs this deal and all of that, but you know it's not true. And everybody listening to me knows that's not true. And he knows it's not true. John, if he doesn't know it's not true, then he's crazy. And if he does know that it's. If he knows that he lost and it's true, then he is making a calculation that is the kind of calculation that led him to go bankrupt owning a casino in Atlantic City. Not necessarily the best judgment, not necessarily the best choices. Abe, I'm sorry I interrupted you.
- [43:42]
Abe Greenwald
You know, the way he spoke, the way Donald Trump spoke two days ago, it sounded as if he knows that he lost it, that he lost the war. I mean, he was barely talking about it as if it were some sort of triumph for the US he was saying we could bomb them for a year and nothing will happen and we could keep the blockade up and we'll just start a Great Depression. So he's barely trying to put a
- [44:16]
John Podhoretz
face on this and we have four weeks left of oil, whatever that means. I don't even know what that meant exactly.
- [44:22]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I mean, Vance is the one who, even before his comments yesterday, was going out saying the cool thing about the deal is seeing how it's changing the Iranians behavior, the regime is saying, you know, what we've been doing for 47 years, that's not so good, maybe we should do something different. Complete fantasy.
- [44:46]
John Podhoretz
Unless somebody said it to him at the negotiating table. Because that's what you do at a negotiating table. You try to trick your. They were upselling, they were upselling the paint coating. They were like. Or trying to make you feel bad for them so that you would let the deal go through more on their terms than yours. My friend Andy Ferguson once told me a story about how he was negotiating again, going for the car deal story, negotiating a deal for a car at a car lot. And he was being tough. He was like having a very tough, very tough negotiation with whoever it was, was on the other side at the, you know, Toyota dealership or something like that. And it was just at a time when there was very bad news about the Kurds in Iraq and how they were being. They were being slaughtered. And so in the middle of this negotiation, the guy is across the table from him, takes his glasses off, puts his head in his hands and he says, you know, sir, you know that I am a Kurd, so you use whatever you have to hand. He wanted Andy to like get off the deal point that he was on by appealing to his trauma because his people were being attacked. I mean, again, can you can't blame a guy for trying to, you know, just a question of how you respond to it. And Trump was clearly given to understand that the continuation of the war would be a net political negative for him. But here's the thing. I don't think, I think this is the net political negative. I don't know. We'll see. How do I know? I've been wrong about many things before. I think the 2026 midterms are sort of baked in the cake now, at least in the House. But you say to somebody that high inflation and high gas prices are going to hurt you, so you need to do what you can to bring them down. Some things are lagging indicators, right? So say oil prices, oils, gases at $3.50 a gallon in October. Again, you think people aren't going to remember that it was $5 in May? You think they're not going to remember that inflation and not that they remember. You think they're not going to remember the feeling when inflation was at 4.2% in May? That's. Inflation's not a number. I mean, inflation's a number. We measure it this way. But the inflation measures not only an economic fact for people, but a prevailing day to day, minute to minute fact of how their lives are going. And of course they'll remember. I mean, I hope it comes down. I hope oil prices come down. No, but there's no reason for us to, to have to pay more, more for oil. And obviously what we should be doing is more fracking, more fighting offshore oil fields and building more nuclear power plants. But, and maybe, you know, this will help achieve that. So the next time we may have to do something like this, the effect is even less. As we mentioned yesterday, already you can see in the Middle east, revolutionary efforts are being taken to end Iran's ability to have this effect on the oil market by creating alternatives to the passage through the Strait of Hormuz with overland pipelines or underground pipelines or whatever. And so five, six, seven years from now, Iran will have half the power that it had over international shipping. But that is five, six, seven years from now. And he is who he is today. And my fear here is that. Jews are going to be scapegoated. When Israel is scapegoated, Jews are scapegoated. Is it now going to be the claim of this administration that you can be anti Zionist without being anti Jewish or being Anti Semitic. We have the Education Department and the Justice Department of this administration making exactly the opposite argument in court cases all across the country relating to.
- [49:50]
Seth Mandel
Well, it's even simpler than that, which is without even getting into some sort of ideological debate about what Zionism means and all that. I mean, this is a point that you've made repeatedly over the past week, which is that this deal, this, this, these negotiations have been almost structured as if in mind were the idea that they needed an Israeli scapegoat. Right. That if you were to design what happened over the past week in a way that would make it Israel's fault if it doesn't work out, this is what you would do. And so there's, there's beyond anything they've. That to me, see, the problem is that that to me is a signal. Right? The way they're talking and the way they set it up is a signal. The way Vance is talking is a signal that says, you know, here's the new talking point that's going to go out. This is just so, you know, if this thing falls apart, it's on Israel. And nothing, none of that has been contradicted. It would be one thing if the administration, if the President went out and said, no, no, no, this is, look, Israel isn't even a party to the deal, you know, where they're doing their best and you know, we hope that they show good judgment in Lebanon. But, you know, this is, this is America's war, whatever. But they're not doing that. They're signaling something very specific. And so you don't really need to even get into the kind of details about anti Zionism and stuff like that. To me, this is just the administration is signaling that if, that, if this doesn't work out, it's on Israel. And until it does something to contradict that, the message has already been sent.
- [51:36]
John Podhoretz
All right, so if we give Vance the benefit of the doubt. Let's just try to give Vance the benefit of the doubt. Here's what he said, one of the things he said yesterday. I've seen skeptics of the deal people say the Iranians will never change their behavior. Well, maybe that's true, and if so, they don't get any of the benefits of the bargain. But isn't it worth trying? Isn't it worth seeing whether this incredibly weakened position that the President of the United States has put the Iranians under motivates them to change their behavior? The answer, of course, is yes. That's what this war is about. That's why you go to war like this is to make the Iranians change their behavior partially. You do it by denying them the means to do the things that their behavior would have them do if you didn't try to stop them. The other is that if they're in this incredibly weakened position, you dictate the terms. What terms? Reading this memorandum of understanding with the most generous possible eyes toward the administration, what terms did they agree to that we dictated? I mean, the reopening of the strait is not a term that they assented to. They closed the strait as part of their war strategy. So it's not like that was a preexisting fact that they had control of the strait, and therefore we have now made them change their behavior. They would simply. If they allow it to reopen. And of course, the deal doesn't even require them to reopen it. On day 61, they and the Omanis can start tolling the strait.
- [53:34]
Abe Greenwald
Nor did we get them to pledge not to pursue a nuclear weapon. They've always said that they're not pursuing a nuclear weapon.
- [53:42]
John Podhoretz
Right, Right. So if they're incredibly weakened, which is what I thought, I thought they were incredibly weakened, Vance and Trump are acting like they're not incredibly weakened at all.
- [54:00]
Abe Greenwald
So
- [54:02]
John Podhoretz
did they mislead me? Did I misunderstand the net effect of the bombing campaign? I don't think so. I think they were incredibly weakened. And then Trump choked. And the psychological. The question is, why did Trump choke? And we don't know the answer to that. That's why I keep using the term cell phone here.
- [54:29]
Seth Mandel
Well, they. Because the. The war, according to what. According to the logic of what J.D. vance is saying, the war made no sense. Right. Because J.D. vance, yesterday in his press conference, he said, you know, we have these goals. And he was asked about the goals, including Iran's nuclear program. And J.D. vance said, Iran's nuclear program is crushed. It's dead. It's buried in the ground. They wanted to tomorrow. They couldn't. Now, we said things like this, too, over the course of. Since June 2025, between June 2025 and what was it, the end of February 2026, when we had the strikes on the nuclear sites. And until the beginning of this war or this round, whatever we want to call it, the American offensive, we'd been saying the same thing. The question is what you do then? And what Vance is saying is it makes the war since February, April, whatever, seem, March, seem ridiculous, because nothing has changed on the nuclear situation since then. The deal, this deal could have been on the table at any time. If the move was crush their, you know, as Vance says, crush their nuclear program, bomb them underground, and then if there's nothing you can do further without negotiation, then you go to negotiation. So if I'm following Vance's logic, you go from June 2025 strikes to a negotiation that, that takes Iran at its word, the way this one does and whatever. And everything in between in Vance's mind, was a mistake. And he can't not signal that when he goes out there. And so he may talk about members of Bibi's cabinet personally attacking the president. The truth is that no one has been harsher on Trump's Iran strategy over the past three days than J.D. vance, and he can't reconcile the jump. He wants to cut out the middle and go from June 2025 to June 2026. But there was a year of things that happened in between, and those were the decisions. Those happened because the decision to do them was made by his boss,
- [57:04]
John Podhoretz
by their friends, shall you know, them, in my opinion. And I think we want to, I want to sort of close out on this. Who is celebrating what Vance said yesterday? Well, the most interesting, I think, is Chenk Uyghur. Chenk Uyghur is the leader of the Young Turks, one of the earliest sort of podcast bro, far left. 5 million followers on Twitter, people. Right. Who is the uncle of Hasan Piker now the America's foremost anti Semite or one of America's foremost anti Semites? Cenk Uyghur said this in response to the statement that Vance made about how America is Israel's only Trump is Israel's only friend, so they better watch out. Finally, this is the kind of energy we need from our leaders. I hate to give JD Vance credit, but he's obviously correct here. It's infuriating to see them assume they can boss us around when we're their only remaining ally and they owe us everything. What he's saying here is so obvious and the bare minimum of what an American leader should say. Who are you to attack us politically when we pay for everything and all of your wars? Their entitlement complex is stunning. Isn't it weird that every politician doesn't say this? So that's the othering that's in a weird way, though, he's talking about Israel nominally. That's the othering that Eric Erickson was talking about here. For the record, the United States and Israel have an arrangement under which Israel gets $3 billion a year worth of US equipment and mater that is a domestic industrial support policy of the United States. Every dollar is spent inside the United States buying weaponry and equipment and things that are then sent to Israel. It is a form of industrial subsidy for the defense industry in the United States. And it's going to be gone in three or four years, if not sooner, because obviously the cost of it, the rhetorical cost of it, is not worth it. And Israel is already developing certain types of capacities that are beyond what America can grant it, including, including the expansion of the Iron Dome system, which is really a domestic Israeli accomplishment. Israel owes America everything except its suicide. My niece is married to a man whose father owns a BNB in the north of Israel, about three miles from the Lebanese border. He had to abandon his business for a year, move south in with his relatives near her with a dying wife, cancer stricken wife, along with 100,000 other Israelis who had to relocate from the north of Israel to live in hotels near a lot and apartments that could be found for them. And all of that. Their industry disrupted, their kids schooling disrupted, their lives disrupted, completely disrupted. This is. Imagine Maine having to be depopulated because of. Of. Or I don't know, imagine northern Wisconsin having to be emptied out because of rocket fire from Canada, you know, or northern Washington state because of rocket fire from British Columbia. I'm trying to think of an analogy that will hit people. Israel owes the United States an enormous debt. Israel owes Donald Trump an enormous debt. Israel has rewarded Donald Trump, in some sense, the people of Israel, with a degree of love and support and gratitude that are really quite astonishingly remarkable. They understand what he did for them. They are immensely appreciative of it. But they cannot allow the northern part of their country to live under the Hezbollah shadow. They just went through the experience of a breakthrough at the border in the south on October 7 that led to 5,000 casualties in a day. In a country of 9 million people, Israel cannot accede to the Memorandum of Understandings terms on Lebanon. And so I end where we began, which is will the administration, if the Iranians want to make it as hard as possible for them by reneging on the Memorandum of Understanding or making it harder, whatever, like, just continue keeping up with the humiliation strategy of Trump if that continues, which I expect it will, and that they nominally use Lebanon as the. As the casus humiliation die, Will the administration, will Trump turn on Israel, which, by the way, America is Israel's only friend, According to JD Vance, Israelis are Trump's only friend on the planet Earth. It is the only place on the planet Earth that He has vast majority support in the United States. That number is down in the 30s. Now, if you're a subscriber to the American Conservative or you are, you know, you are a, you're buying J.D. vance's new book, Communion, you probably are part of a crew of people who have a approval rating of Trump somewhere in the 80s or 90s. But you're the only people in America who have that approval rating. That love that Trump showed to Israel has been shown back to him, and he let's see how he likes it when they don't love him as much as they did before. Vance is going to use that to say, you see, they're not your beloved. They're, you know, they're cheating with somebody else or something like that. But it's not as though Israel has not expressed its extraordinary gratitude toward the United States, number one. And that number two, Israel did not contribute in a remarkable capacity to a war that the United States wanted itself to wage, because if it didn't, then Trump went to war because he was seduced into war by Israel and conned by Bibi Netanyahu. Is that where he wants this argument to go? Are we going to end with the conspiracy theory of the gripers that Trump and Tucker Carlson, that Trump was demonically influenced by Israel to start this unnecessary war? Could happen. Okay, we'll be back next week. For Abe and Seth, I'm John Pod Horowitz. Keep the camel burning.