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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hope for the best.
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A
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, June 18, 2026. I am John Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:46]
C
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
- [01:51]
A
And joining us today from Free Expression, Wall Street Journal columnist and honcho at the American Enterprise Institute, and Commentary, longtime friend Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt. Hi, John. So, Matt, today is not only we're not only gonna talk about the ongoing capitulation to Iran, but a very interesting event in American cultural history. The opening of the Obama Presidential center on the south side of Chicago, which is not a presidential library. No, it is a presidential center. Four buildings connected to provide us with the context of the life, times, history and mythology of one Barack Hussein Obama plan designed and executed by one Barack Hussein Obama. You have some thoughts about this building which has come to be known as the Obama Lisk?
- [03:02]
B
Yes. Well, I have fewer thoughts on the building which I know you have thoughts on, than I do on the man to whom it is dedicated, Barack Obama. And this is an occasion, it seems to me, to revisit Obama's legacy, which in my view is a legacy of woe. And I wrote about this in the pages of my newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, yesterday. But I wanted to take a little time to dilate on it before we begin the wailing over the Trump Memorandum of Understanding. It's always good to have some comparative perspective so Obama, of course, entered American Life in 2004 with his there's no red America, there's no blue America speech. So it's been now 22 years as Barack Obama as a presidential figure. He's one of very few presidents since 1900 who have won two terms with more than 50% of the vote. In fact, only Eisenhower, Reagan, and FDR did that. So he has a pretty big accomplishment in that regard. He remains popular. He left with a high approval rating, and people look on him fondly even today, or at least some people. I'm not one of them. You think about the way in which Obama entered the campaign in 2008. The hubris was astonishing. When he won the Republican, rather the Democratic nomination, he said that this would be the moment when the seas stopped rising, when he won. A few days before he won the general election in 2008, he said, we are just a few days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. Two months into his presidency, he gave a speech at Georgetown University where he said that he was going to lay a new foundation for America and our social compact. And as a candidate, he likened himself to Ronald Reagan, who he said had changed the trajectory of America, unlike other presidents such as Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, whose wife was his major opponent in that primary race. But I think if you look at the eight years of the Obama presidency, and even if you concede he changed the trajectory of America, he changed it toward decline. And whether that's foreign policy of restraint and kind of a openness to working with dictatorships, retrenchment, his defense cuts during his presidency, which are one of the major contributors to the munitions shortages that have affected the conduct of the recent Iran war. Of course, his daylight with Israel throughout his presidency, which not only I think increased the danger to the Jewish state, but also kind of showed the way forward for the anti Zionists and anti Semites in the Democratic Party, who have now flooded the zone, so to speak. Then there's this domestic policy, Obamacare, which was, despite all of his speeches in favorite, very unpopular. He did it anyway. Obamacare has basically changed beyond recognition today. And so it's slightly more popular than it was during his presidency. But it's just worth remembering that all the promises Obama made selling Obamacare, such as that if you liked your plan, you could keep your plan, or that the premiums would not increase, were total lies. And the way in which Obama pursued Obamacare with kind of this blithe disregard for actual voters really did set the tone, I think, for the presidentialism that Democrats complain about today when it's Donald Trump, but it's really Obama as the origin of this attitude and of this kind of, kind of amassing of executive power. And the way that Obama continued after his reelection where he promised Medvedev, who was the stand in for Putin, that he would have more flexibility in his second term. Then he backed off his red line in Syria, Russia, entered the Middle east for the first time in 30 years. He signed the Iran deal. Of course there's another Iran deal today, but that Iran deal, the infrastructure was in place, the nuclear infrastructure was in place, just for starters, as was the Iranian defense industrial base.
- [07:59]
A
Can I back up to Obamacare? Because as you were speaking, I looked this up. So of course, what was the promise of Obamacare? It was going to close this gap between the insured and the uninsured in the United States. The number of uninsured. There was a preposterous number thrown around in 2010 that there were 43 million Americans uninsured, which was not true. It's kind of lunatic number. In fact, according to every piece of data we have, around 10 to 11% of Americans at any given moment in 2010 were uninsured. That number after 16 years of Obamacare is 8%. So think about what this means for a minute. This was the most, the largest domestic political issue of the decade, maybe until immigration came along. The largest. Immense amounts of rhetoric talk, everything. You know, this is a big effing deal, said Joe Biden. All sorts of stuff happened. And it's a nothing burger. It had a tiny based on what it promised. And I'm not even talking about what distortions it entered into the market and everything else. Just, you know, it promised to essentially end the uninsured in the United States and it did.
- [09:30]
B
Universal healthcare.
- [09:31]
A
Right. Universal health care without being single payer. And that did not. And that did not happen. So his key domestic political achievement was like a piece of fireworks that didn't really open. Or like when you draft the greatest baseball player in college and then he comes into the majors and he hits 240 and then ends up retiring after seven years.
- [10:04]
B
Yeah, and he could get away with it because of course he had a fawning media and then, you know, I don't want to sell Obama's political talent short. He's a smooth operator. I mean there's no question about it. And he knew how to function in the media environment and he definitely had a secure base that allowed him to not only be reelected, but to maintain his support despite the backlash. And that's where I just want to end my little rant, you know, in 2008, while he was still running, he dismissed the opposition to him within the Democratic Party. By the way, he wasn't even speaking about voters in general as people who cling to guns and religion. The bitter clingers, they're called. And it was just an early warning sign of Obama's snobbery and condescension and his kind of detachment and above it all attitude. Well, the bitter Klingers grew in number and they have been growing in number ever since. He said that almost 18 years later now. And first we had the Tea Party revolution, right, in 2010, which again, he dismissed. He did nothing to try to assuage. He pressed ahead with the health care. He ran a very populist, kind of economic, not cultural populist, but kind of Elizabeth Warren campaign in 2012 against the 1%, the wealthy Mitt Romney. Then we had the fights over immigration in 20, 20, 13 and 14, the border crisis. The Republicans had a huge election in 2014. Picked up many House seats. They had already controlled the House, but then they picked up nine Senate seats and flipped the Senate. What did Obama do after the election? He expanded his immigration amnesty for the dreamers to the parents of the dreamers, despite saying multiple, many times that he lacked the authority. It was another kind of just, you know, middle finger to the opposition, thinking that, you know, somehow he could exploit kind of the movement of the Republican Party toward nationalist populism. And what happened? Donald Trump wins in 2016, and then after Trump loses in 20, and we have Obama's third term essentially in the presidency of Joe Biden, Obama swoops in in 2024 and still is accusing all of his opponents of false motives and false consciousness. And it reached the height of absurdity when he was lecturing a group of black male voters that, you know, he knew that the reason they weren't really on board for Kamala Harris wasn't the inflation, wasn't the immigration. It was that she was a woman. And all of a sudden the bitter clinger is, as I say in my piece, have become racially integrated, Right? So, you know, you're going to have George W. Bush and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton at the opening of the Obama list today and Thursday. It's open to the public on Juneteenth Friday. You're going to have Bruce Springsteen and Bono there, but you're not going to have Barack Obama's actual legacy, which is Donald Trump, who has dominated American life for the past 11 years.
- [13:48]
A
Let's talk about two parts of that legacy you're mentioning, the policies and the political fallout and all of that. The most important thing that happened, legislatively or not anti legislatively, that has had long lasting consequences that are destructive of the Republic in my view are the thing, the door, the Pandora's box that he opened when he said, I have a pen and a phone and if I can't get legislation through Congress, I am going to essentially use executive orders as a substitute for legislation. Similarly, in the same, you know, two year period, Harry Reid, who was the majority leader of the Senate, pushed through a change in the filibuster so that judges could be confirmed without going through the complicated process of needing 60 votes before they could get 51 votes. And at the time that happened, that was another break with precedent, break with traditional. And Mitch McConnell, Reid's opposite number, then the minority leader of the Senate said, don't do this, you are going to regret it. You are going to regret opening this Pandora's box because once you do, I'm unconstrained. You think you have power now. I'm as constrained as you under this system. You end this system and I'm gonna use it to my advantage when I get power. And and indeed that's exactly what happened to Democratic screaming and crying and caterwauling was that McConnell followed his lead, followed the lead of Harry Reid and revolutionized the way in which we choose not only regular judges, but Supreme Court justices and held that seat that Scalia, you know, held the seat that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died in.
- [15:57]
B
No, Scalia had died. Scalia died in 16.
- [16:00]
A
Right, for 400 some odd day or 380 days or something like that until the election and until Gorsuch was named. Okay, so that's number one. So number two again, this opening of the executive order Pandora's box that we see now having ruinous consequences in Trump's seizure of it. And most importantly, with the tariffs and the imposition of these tariffs through deeming by the president now found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, creating a gigantic economic complex message and things that shouldn't be happening at all. And so Obama's legacy as president not only is that he ended up opening doing things that led to Trump getting elected his opposite number, but also Trump using tools that he built to do things that Obama of course hated more than anything else that could possibly ever have been done, including ramped up enforcement against illegal aliens. So he opens his Obama lisk in A world that he created, that is his Frankenstein monster that he created and then was unleashed on the world and ended up destroying everything that he liked and creating new problems that he never even anticipated.
- [17:39]
C
Yeah, I think he did it in other ways still. When I look back on the Obama years, the things that strike me most are it's when this unanimity of the establishment narrative became all oppressing. Everything Obama said about a given policy, whether it was Iran or Israel or Obamacare or or immigration, became the unquestioned narrative. And if you questioned it, you were a crank or a racist or something. And that sense of oppression built up and built up and built up and also contributed to the backlash. That plus Obama brought this infusion of radical players and networks pulling from academia and NGOs into our politics, into our legitimate institutional politics in a way that hadn't been done before. And they stayed there. And I think these two things came together. The unanimity of the message and this radicalism to frame in this framing of our country that we had to understand as our country in a certain way that people just grew thoroughly sick of. And we live now in both the backlash to it and the remnants of it.
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A
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- [21:43]
B
You know, one thing I didn't mention in my piece was Obama's political instincts were good for Obama, but they were terrible for the Democratic Party. And there was a fantastic essay in a magazine called Commentary, co authored by John Pot, Horace and Noah Rothman. These two writers who tracked the demolition of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama. Not just losing first the House and then the Senate by considerable margins during those eight years, but it was during Obama's tenure that Republicans gained a majority of governor's mansions and even more significantly, they gained a huge number of state legislatures and just state legislative seats. And so Obama's and you could maybe that will happen with Trump by the end of his second term. But it was just a terrible track record and Obama's kind of tin ear for politics, which again he seems to be, he was immune to the consequences of personally, but that doesn't mean others were not. It also extended to the presidential realm. I just want to say, you know, there was a moment in 2016 when Obama had a choice. He could have said to his vice president, Joe Biden, you know what, Joe, I know you've been wanting to do this your entire life. Now is the time to run. Rather than do that. He said, joe, it's Hillary's turn. And guess what happened? You had the two most disliked candidates in American presidential history, Hillary Clinton going against Donald Trump. But at the end of an eight year presidential tenure, everyone you know, the bias is toward change. And so the person that they felt at least represented change won the Electoral College and won the election. In retrospect, that may have been one of Obama's worst political choices because there is only one person who has defeated Donald Trump and That's Joe Biden. And a Joe Biden in 16 would have been a much more healthier and stronger candidate than a Joe Biden in 2020, much less the Joe Biden in 2024. And that gets the second, I think, huge political error that Obama made in presidential politics. Part A is Obama did not exercise, it seems to me, the, the influence he could have to force Biden not to run for a second term. After those midterm elections in 2022, which went better for Democrats than expected, there was a moment where Obama, just as he had intervened in the 2020 primaries, could have gone to his former vice president and say, Joe, you know, for the good of the party and it's time to have an open primary and see what can happen. Harris can run in that primary. Maybe she'll win, maybe she won't, but let's just have it. He did not do that. Now, I don't know whether he was pressuring behind the scenes, maybe, but clearly it was not enough because Joe Biden decided to run and like some high pressure system offshore, just kept the weather pattern stable so that he was the incumbent. And then when Biden was exposed to the world as the farce that he was in that presidential debate and then subsequently a couple weeks later withdrew from the presidential race, first time that had happened since 1968, that incumbent withdraws from his re election. Obama and his spouse Michelle Obama quickly endorsed Kamala Harris. And I know the logistics of setting up a primary or a mini primary with 107 days left to go before the election were very hard. They're probably in the real world, very few options. But Obama didn't have to do it that quickly. And that gave the Democrats Kamala Harris, who I think practically every Democrat now, especially after they've had a few drinks, will admit was not the best choice to face Donald Trump in 2024.
- [26:09]
D
I want to say a couple things about the Obama, Biden relationship and Hillary and what it said about the Democrats and Democratic Party. First of all, I have to take my victory lap because on July 5, 2015 I wrote a column in the New York Post and the headline is, it's time for Joe Biden to jump into the 2016 race. And these were all points that I made, which is that voters were attracted to Trump's, to the idea that Trump connected with the working class and all that. And Joe from Scranton may have been an act, as I say in the piece, but it was an act that was believed and it worked. Democratic voters and far and Wide American voters, they didn't see Joe Biden throughout his career as a plausible president, but for this particular moment he was the guy that fit what voters seem to be looking for. The other thing is that it has a lot to do with, I think that the ramifications of that of Obama choosing Hillary over Biden also had a lot to do with what we think of Biden because the Joe Biden in 2015, 2016 was in much better shape than the Joe Biden of 2020. It wasn't. Doesn't sound like it's that far apart in history, but we all remember that Biden while he was in office as vice president, still had the spring in his step that he always had. He went through terrible tragedies and you know, he deteriorated after that. And there's no way to know what Joe Biden would have really been like in January of 2017 had he taken the oath of office. But our opinion of Biden probably would be very different. The other thing is that I think Obama's constant opposition to Biden being his torchbearer led to Biden a lot of Biden's refusal to listen to people around him when he was president and clearly couldn't do the job. Obama was trying to literally at one point physically shuffle him off the stage. We do remember that. But that was representative of the wider point that Obama was trying to do that. And I think the reaction from within Biden world and especially from within Biden himself was well, for eight years he's been trying to shuffle me off the stage. Now for eight years he's been telling people I'm in no shape, I don't have the fitness for this. I, I can't be the guy. And I think for Biden after a while you just stop listening. It's not, there's, there was no. Biden wasn't thinking. Well, now I guess he has a point. There was no credibility, I guess is what I'm saying. On, on, on Obama and I think Obama pushed Biden and the party in that direction. And the last thing I'll say is it was also a very, it was also an indication of what the left, the real progressive left would think about Biden and why he isn't celebrating Obama. Excuse me, why Obama isn't celebrated as a progressive hero when he was in office. Progressives now talk about and they did at the time too. But the fact that they believe that his, his settlement with Wall street after the financial crash of 08 and the follow ons in 09 that he was too light on Wall street, that he didn't send people to jail, that he let them get away with fines that they could easily afford, and that he didn't really go after Wall street the way a progressive would have gone after Wall Street. And the Hillary stuff follows similar lines because Obama turned out to be a very establishment authority in the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton with the establishment views, not the. Not the goofy Joe Biden who sits on women's laps in biker bars. He's not going to be the guy. It doesn't matter if he can connect with normal people. We' interested in connecting with normal people. Were interested in the structure of the Democratic Party. And so it was the more corporate type candidate. Again, I don't want to sound like, like Bernie Sanders myself, but from a progressive perspective, it was the establishment candidate in all those ways. And they had rules set up with superdelegates that made it almost impossible for anybody to pass Hillary in that regard. And so the complaints of the primary process being rigged, we're not without some merit. And so Obama did set in motion things that made progressives see their party going off an establishment cliff and need a reaction, a far left reaction.
- [31:03]
A
It's not just that. I mean, because. And we should, we should move on, but it's not just that. It's that progressivism as we understand it now was formed by Obama ism. That's not to say that it's an outgrowth of Obama ism. It is a stew created by the failure of Obama to build an enduring Democratic Party as represented by the thing that Matt mentioned, which is that they lost 1,000 elected seats in the United States in the votes in the United States at the state, local and federal level. 1,000 fewer elected Democratic officials in 2017 than had been in office in 2009, opening up a gigantic hole for new people to start filling. And those new people were now in a newly radicalized atmosphere because the Republicans had chosen a radicalized candidate themselves. And the idea was you, you have to fight fire with fire. And all the concessions that progressives might have been making on the grounds that this is the way we can get mainstream success and get as much as we can on our side. That argument was no longer relevant or active.
- [32:27]
B
And I know we want to move on, but I just want to add to that, with Obama too, you had this change in the Democratic Party from the kind of classic Democratic Party nationalism. You know, we're the party of the working people. We're a rainbow coalition, but we're all Americans. To on one level, post nationalism, right. Obama declaring himself a citizen of the world. Obama's speech in Berlin as a candidate. But then on another level of sub national ethnic and racial identity, which became more and more a focus of the Democratic Party throughout Obama's tenure and was radicalized in its own way by BLM and the way that the Obama administration approached the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, for example, the attitudes toward Muslim immigration and Islamic right. Obama's administration continually downplayed any religious dimension to the jihadist attacks that began spiraling out of control after Obama withdrew from Iraq and kind of desultorily fought ISIS for the back end of his presidency. And so that part of the Democratic Party and that part of Progressivism remains, but now it's even become more radicalized and it's turned into the Democratic Socialist of America party. Right. So and always I blame Obama and I rest my case.
- [34:07]
A
Okay, just to complete here, I just want to quote from Michael J. Lewis, a longtime commentary contributor who is the architecture critic of the Wall Street Journal, in his review of the Obama Presidential Center. Remember, not a library. Right? Not a library. If you've ever been to a.
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B
The library is digital.
- [34:25]
A
The library's digital.
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B
It's a digital library.
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A
And the papers are in Washington.
- [34:29]
B
Yes. You can access them online.
- [34:32]
A
Yes. Okay, here is what he quotes one of the architects as saying. He wanted his design to be embraced by living Americans. This is their Washington monument, he said. And this is Michael writing. But that sublime monument was raised by a grateful nation decades after that president's death, as were those to Lincoln and Jefferson. This is a vanity project. And although it slipped in under the radar in the guise of that most innocuous of architectural objects, the Presidential Library, it turned into something that would be recognized by Cheops, Trajan and even Ozymandias himself. It is a living memorial. It is a memorial to a living person. It is the God. It is Obama creating his own Godhead. And that is a suitable monument.
- [35:30]
B
Look on, look, with an NBA grade basketball court. There we go on the complex.
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A
Okay, so we have avoided our agony and our pain too long, dancing on Obama's political grave. And now we must regrettably turn to the subject of the horrific failure of the United States at this current moment. What I want to do to talk about Iran and what's going on with the Memorandum of Understanding, which has now been, Is now in, apparently is now in force, because it was either it was semi digitally signed and then it was signed at Versailles and not Trump signed it at Versailles, but it was also a docusign. I don't know what the hell.
- [36:29]
B
Yeah, and Pakeshian or Pizeschkian, the President of Iran also signed it.
- [36:35]
A
Right. Okay, so Trump, Yesterday at about 4:00', clock, gave a press conference, and he spoke without taking a breath for 42 minutes before he took a question. I'm just gonna quote some of the things that he said and then have you respond to them. Look, if we had kept bombing, dropping bombs for two weeks, three weeks, two years, you would never have seen the straight open. You would never have seen the stock market at these levels, unlike what all those tough guys say. Okay, so his line is that the war that he started and was fighting was ineffectual once Iran decided that it was going to close the Strait of Hormuz. Okay, is this really. Then he says later, if they don't abide by the rules or the Memorandum of Understanding, various other things, we'll just go back and bomb them again. But he just said that bombing doesn't work because they closed the Strait of Hormuz, and nothing that we ever could have done would have gotten them to open the Strait of Hormuz. And it's very important that the Strait be opened so that the stock market can reach really high levels. So how could he go back and bomb again since he has already established the precept that the bombing has no effect over whether or not Iran opens or closes the strait?
- [38:17]
B
Okay, well, I think that the chances of him going back to bombing before the election are about as close to zero as you can get. The election, of course, is just a few months away. And what happens after that? Who knows? 2. With Trump, of course, the madman theory of international relations always applies, and you really don't know what he would do. And, of course, he remains the only president since the Islamic Revolution to attack Iran directly and to destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
- [39:00]
A
Right, but he also. Yes, go ahead.
- [39:02]
B
But I think that what you're getting at is this straight. I think Trump was very blunt here. This MOU is a de Escalation agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz. Trump gains economic benefit in that oil is already below 80%. That's Brent crude, which is usually higher than US oil. As he said, the stock market is going up and gas prices are going down. That economic benefit could result in political benefit for Trump and the Republican Party in the midterm election. The Iranians get benefits, they get economic benefits, and they get regime security, which is, above all, what they want. Why did we get into this place we got into this place. It's clear. He just said it. You just quoted him. He was not willing to step up the escalatory ladder. He was not willing to force open the Strait of Hormuz through military means. Interestingly enough, they were conducting the kind of shadow Project Freedom throughout the blockade, and many ships were getting through, escorted or protected by our naval and air assets, but not enough to get back to the pre war traffic and not enough to generate the economic and potential political benefits.
- [40:41]
A
Okay, so let me quote him again. Let me quote him again later on in the press. He said, you're right, Matt, because he said the blockade was working beautifully. The blockade was more powerful than the bombs. We have tremendous leverage. So the blockade was working.
- [40:59]
B
Yes.
- [41:00]
A
So now we don't have the blockade.
- [41:02]
B
But I think he went on to say it was not sustainable because. Do you have the Herbert Hoover quote?
- [41:07]
C
Yes.
- [41:08]
B
Ready? Read that one.
- [41:09]
A
Hold on. There were two. He mentioned Herbert Hoover twice. Once at the beginning and once at the end.
- [41:15]
B
I feel like I'm one of those ASL interpreters that kind of. Stand next to the speaker. You read it and I'll interpret for the audience.
- [41:22]
A
Hold on. I'm trying to find the. The Hoover quote. Where did it go?
- [41:27]
D
Could you act it out, Matt?
- [41:28]
B
I don't have the skills.
- [41:31]
A
Look, you didn't want your favorite president to be Herbert Hoover, right? And then he said the one president I did not want to be, the late, great Herbert Hoover. Now this is funny because he. His policy last year, domestically and in terms of how we were supposed to handle the world, was a Herbert Hoover policy, which was tariffing the planet. Herbert Hoover never bombed that way.
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B
He did sign the Smoot Hawley Tariff into law. Yeah, yeah.
- [42:08]
A
And Herbert Hoover never bombed anybody. Herbert Hoover didn't lose a war. Herbert Hoover went in, he's saying, disarmed. If I had kept going, there would have been a massive depression.
- [42:19]
B
You know what I love about this? I don't love this quote, but I'm just saying what's fascinating about this quote is, you know which other president said he wasn't going to be another Herbert Hoover? George W. Bush, who in his speech announcing the tarp, said in order to prevent a depression, he had to violate his capitalist principles. And I heard the echo of George W. When Trump said, look, I'm not going to be a Hoover. But why is Trump saying it? He's saying because the major oil firms came to him. We know, and said, we don't understand why the price of oil is lower than we expected. Because we're going to run out of inventory pretty soon, and then it's going to spike. I will say, personally, I actually am skeptical of that claim because it was remarkable what was happening. Various things were happening. China was pulling back on its oil consumption. We were getting some of the tankers through. As I said in the shadow Project Freedom, there was a lot of rerouting of oil through the pipelines. And then, of course, as we now know, Iran was still being able to sell some oil through other channels as well. So even though I can sit here and say I don't really believe what the majors were saying, if you're the President of the United States, it's harder to do. Right. And so, yes, the blockade was working. The question was, was the blockade economically and politically sustainable? Trump decided it was not. And because he was not willing will able to go up the escalatory ladder and perform the type of military operations that I supported to open the strait and to deny the Iranians the blockade weapon, he was compelled to enter this negotiation.
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A
Okay, Abe, but can I just. Yeah.
- [44:18]
C
I just want to say what strikes me about this speech. I mean, or. But this part of it, you know, he's out there saying, okay, they had us licked. Which I think is a terrible thing for American president to say. And it's also letting everyone know that if Iran chooses to close off the strait at any time again in the future, there's nothing that this president is willing to do about it. He's saying the blockade is not sustainable and that any military action that he's willing to sign off on wouldn't change the circumstances. So he's sort of announcing that they have this tool going forward that we can't do anything about.
- [45:06]
B
But I will say this. Don't you believe this tool will be rapidly diminishing in power?
- [45:15]
A
Yeah, but he doesn't. The issue is not what we think.
- [45:20]
B
But forget about what Trump says for a second, just the reality of it. Don't we all assume that the window created by this ceasefire will result in every single oil company, fertilizer company, state monopoly, beginning plans and implementing plans to reroute traffic?
- [45:44]
C
Sure.
- [45:45]
D
They already are.
- [45:46]
B
They already are, and they're going to continue it.
- [45:48]
D
So what might be. There's a limited amount, but they will, if they can. If they can reroute 20% of it. That's enormous. It doesn't replace the Strait of Hormuz, but it will make the Strait of Hormuz. You know, it will make it. That will make sure the Hormuz Again,
- [46:05]
A
five years from now, right? Five years from now, Iran will no longer have a whip hand with the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe, maybe five years, it will.
- [46:15]
B
It will just hurt less is my point.
- [46:17]
A
Right. Okay. The problem with bringing that up in this context is, as Abe says, the Iranians know what his red line is, and his red line no longer exists, because unless they say it's, oh, we're going to have a parade and roll out our nuclear weapon on our ballistic missile nan. And then that's his only red line left, is if they show that they have a nuclear weapon, because he's already
- [46:55]
D
said they can roll it out on a ballistic missile.
- [46:59]
C
They can.
- [47:00]
D
They can roll it out on ballistic missile if they want. They just can't roll out the nuke is the problem. But the ballistic missiles suddenly are not.
- [47:06]
A
That's a whole other. Okay, so here's what he said is every time we said anything. Hold on, where is this? I didn't want to see economic catastrophe if you'd kept this going. Notice if you'd kept this going. Anytime we talked about peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket.
- [47:26]
B
That's true.
- [47:27]
A
You know, the stock market is more brilliant. Every time we said something amazing, it went up. And every time we said something like, we're not going to settle, it went down. Okay, so all Iran has to do is do anything that makes the market go down, and Iran has the leverage. So who has established deterrence at the end of this war? Iran has established deterrence against the United States.
- [48:00]
B
Iran deterred Trump. Iran deterred Trump. I agree with that.
- [48:03]
A
Yeah. Okay.
- [48:04]
B
So can I say why? Can I say why? He is saying why all of a sudden he became interested in the economic constraint despite supplying Democrats with lines where he said, you know, I don't care about the economy. I love inflation. Right. But he said, right, why? I went back to. And we're reading the quotes from yesterday. I went back to the original speech announcing Operation Epic Fury. This is what he said. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime. That included the missiles and missile launchers. Missile launchers more important than missiles, the Navy, the ability to fund the proxies, and the nuclear program. Now, I believe that Operation Epic Fury made progress in all four of those fronts. Not as much as I would have liked, but considerable progress. And then he ended this way. The hour of your freedom is at hand. Addressing the Iranian people, when we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. Let's see how you Respond, the goal. Trump's goal was never regime change. Even though he's since bragged that he accomplished regime change. Trump's goal was eliminating Iran's ability to menace the region and us the world. Then he left it open that regime change is a possibility. Let's see how you respond. And well, the ceasefire's in effect now, but the Iranians people have not come to the the streets. 32,000 of them were just murdered by their own government a few months ago. But that didn't happen. So once that failed, all of a sudden the stock market looks a lot more attractive and the gas prices want. You want them to come down because the war at home is unpopular. Why is the war unpopular at home? And I want to add this too. This is another mistake that Trump made. I think very early on, Trump failed to build a political coalition in support of this intervention. I wrote about Trump's war leadership for the Wall Street Journal about a month into the conflict. And I said what was unusual about it was that unlike other war presidents, Trump didn't build up congressional support, Trump didn't build up international support, and Trump didn't build up consistently make the case to the American people. Now he rejects all that because that's the way other presidents do it.
- [50:55]
A
But guess what?
- [50:56]
B
We're seeing the price of such rejection now because the war was unpopular immediately, Congress was about to rebuke him on war powers. I mean that vote in the Senate was crucial. After of course, he begins going after members of his own party like Bill Cassidy. And then the allies didn't come through at various levels. Whether it was just being kind of the recalcitrant cigarette smoking French or the actively anti western Spaniards. There were different levels, but they didn't come through. And of course he just rebukes them. So those mistakes piled up. And then there were other metrics of war leadership that I thought were important too. One was to define a political outcome. Now what's interesting is I just said what he defined as the outcome, which was a military outcome, not a political one. The second metric of war leadership is are you going to give your generals the commensurate amount of force necessary to achieve that outcome? Now he did with going after the missiles and missile launchers, Navy, the defense industrial base and the nuclear program. But he didn't do it with Project Freedom to open up the Strait. And he certainly didn't do it to actually set the conditions for regime collapse because he was never interested in that. And then the third thing was, the third metric was, are you willing to keep fighting? He didn't do that. And the fourth was, can you connect this war to broader American ideals and principles? That's not in his. That's not his bailiwick. So we can just look at that, and we can see that Trump as a war president came up short.
- [52:44]
A
Okay, some more quotes, because he's saying that the. Only that the people. He creates this interlocutor at various points in the speech. I don't know who this person is.
- [52:58]
B
It's a you, John.
- [53:00]
A
You. It could be me, but it's not. It's a stupid person, according to him. And the stupid person says to him, please, sir, please keep dropping bombs. Those are the stupid people. Okay, but here's the thing. What the stupid people don't understand is that Iran now has a new group of leaders. I think they're very smart. They're far less radical. I think they're really good. They love their country. This is the regime. This is still the Islamic Republic of Iran.
- [53:38]
D
They love their country so much that they want to kill everyone else in it and have it all to themselves.
- [53:43]
B
Impoverish everybody.
- [53:45]
A
Yeah. So he's saying that. So, not to make this about me, really, but J.D. vance was on Megyn Kelly's show, and the whole thing was about how I chicken hawk me, complaining that we wouldn't put boots on the ground because I don't understand, you know, military sacrifice, and I just want us to warmonger and have boots on the ground or something like that. But I'm not the war planner. He freezes the war in place. He says in this speech that there was no more point in dropping bombs, that they had bombed everything that they could bomb. And he said in this talk yesterday that he didn't want to hit more civilian infrastructure because there are 91 million people there, and he didn't want them to starve or have their desalinization plants destroyed so that they wouldn't have water to drink. So he didn't want to do that to the Iranian people. So I guess this is the only possible outcome. If you're saying that the strategy that you employed, which was to try to get your end from the air, and that the Iranians managed to hold it together with chewing gum and bailing wire long enough to not collapse, to have the IRGC find its way into managing, to continue the regime going, and then coming up with the closing Hormuz strategy. So all Iran had to do was survive the initial onslaught and figure out a countermeasure. There was no Military countermeasure, right? They couldn't hit us, couldn't reach us, nothing. So they closed the Strait of Hormuz. That's it. They closed the Strait of Hormuz. And he's saying, yep, well, you know what? That was a smart play. Wow, you punctured my balloon. That was the hole in my Death Star. You found the flaw in my plan. I had the machinery that was going to destroy your regime, but Luke Skywalker got into the little thing there and managed to drop the little bomb in and, and blow the whole thing up. Now, if I'm reading this right, as a sort of psychological matter, then yeah, he really shouldn't have gone to war at all. Because the net result at the end of this, even though we've degraded their military capacity, we've degraded their missiles, we degraded their nuclear program and all that, although we'd done that in 2025, is countries now know that the most belligerent war mongering person that we've had in, in the presidency ever, practically, maybe Teddy Roosevelt, but ever, has about six weeks of it in him before he chokes. So who's gonna come in later? Who's gonna be tougher than him? Who's gonna come in later and hold the line and say, you can't do this and we're gonna make you pay if you do X, Y or Z? Nobody. What lesson is the world gonna take from this behavior? So the reason I brought up me
- [57:16]
B
and Van, I think one lesson they'll take is if you have access to a major strategic choke point, you better invest heavily in anti access and area denial weaponry so that you can hold that hostage like Iran did. Now, there are only so many choke points. One is the straits in the Red Sea, which I am never able to pronounce, but which the Houthis held hostage after October 7th and up until the spring of 2025. Now, we in Operation Rough Rider pounded the Houthis. And the Houthis, interestingly, never entered this conflict because I think a lot more damage was done to them than certainly the media reported. Now, it was at tremendous cost to us, not in lives, but in money, because we don't have the type of cheap interceptors and drones that we need. But what we, we've seen this if you have, and this is why China, I think, will take somewhat something of a lesson here, because the Taiwan Strait, perhaps the most important strategic choke point in the world, is also susceptible to this type of warfare. And so this is a major lesson of the conflict.
- [58:33]
D
Okay, so you it makes another point, though, that Matt brings up, though, which is that these proxies, it strengthens the proxies and it weakens. It's not just the Red Sea shipping route. It's what happens to Yemen now that Trump turned out to be a paper tiger. What happens to Lebanon, what happens. What happens to Iraq? All these countries with Iranian proxies that are undermining them and destabilizing them, they all come out ahead in this, too, because Iran is got money is fungible, and they're going to. They're going to get it. They're going to get money, they're going to get weapons, they're going to get diplomatic support, and they're going to be, you know, less. And there's going to be less fear among them to take shots at, you know, American ships or whatever.
- [59:23]
A
But I think we need to move on because we're like at the hour point, we need to talk about Trump and Israel and what he is saying about Israel, because it gets to the proxy point here. The Iranians insisted on putting Lebanon into the deal without Israel being a signatory. As of this morning, Prime Minister Netanyahu has said, we are not bound to the terms of this deal. They cannot be just yesterday or the day before yesterday. They're flying drones from Lebanon into Israel. Israel's entire posture toward Hezbollah is defensive. Israel does not want to control territory in Lebanon if it doesn't have to. Israel does not want to fire a single shot into Lebanon if it doesn't have to. Israel wants to get back to par and move on with its life. And Hezbollah is engaging Israel, and Israel cannot allow that to happen because Hezbollah is five miles from the Israeli border. And Trump is saying Bibi's just knocking down apartment buildings willy nilly. And, you know, he's great. I love him. He's a great guy, but he's a little too passionate. And you know what? This is not good. And this is gonna get worse and worse because once the memorandum of understanding is signed, right? And then it's gonna be, well, we're negotiating. It's 60 days worth of negotiations. So you can't judge how it's going until we hit the 60th day. But Israel is gonna have to be in this conflict with Hezbollah if Hezbollah doesn't, you know, cry uncle and stop fighting or if Iran doesn't tell Hezbollah to stop fighting. And so all the attention in conversation about what is going on in the Middle east is gonna start focusing on how mean Israel is being to poor Lebanon, which Trump said was once the most beautiful place on earth. And they've just been treated tragically badly. Not by Israel. Israel is not treating Lebanon badly. Lebanon has been occupied by, by an Iranian proxy that controlled 25% of its territory, is in its government, and controls an entire neighborhood in its capital city. Lebanon is being attacked by Iran. Israel is defending itself against Hezbollah, not against Lebanon. And Trump is going to turn on B. I believe Trump will turn on Bibi in the next 30 days.
- [62:11]
B
This is the worst part of the deal, in my view, is the linkage between Lebanon and the strait. Neither Lebanon nor Israel is a party to the conflict or party to the negotiation. Certainly Israel participated in the war, Operation Roaring lion, but they were not at the, at the negotiating table. Israel has the right to defend itself against Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an occupying army. As you say, it's the cat's paw of Iran. And so it's, it's a strategically bad, a huge mistake to link them in this way. And the cost of that is, is damaging. Now, of course, Trump, you know, is more concerned about America and his political position and the economy than he is about Israel's right to self defense in this case. But I would just say this about the conference, press conference last night. Trump lives by the David Mamet rule. Always be selling. And when he's selling something, he will say anything. And he can come across as a bully to the people that he believes are obstacles to the deal. In this case, he thinks that Israel's defense against Hezbollah is an obstacle to the deal. Once you're past this point, once the deal is signed, we really don't know where he'll go next because he lives in an internal present. Right. So that's why I think the turn against BB here is the worst part of what's happened. But I'm still not convinced that it's going to be as dramatic or as permanent as you're suggesting, John.
- [64:12]
A
Good. I'm glad to hear it. Okay, Matt, you have a recommendation and you should make it before we go
- [64:19]
B
on for three, especially since you're happy at what I just said. I'm going to make it. I like to recommend a book. The book is called the Infinity, Demis Hassabis, Deep Mind and the Quest for Superintelligence. It's by the journalist Sebastian Malaby. It's probably the best nonfiction book I've read so far this year. Demis Hassabis is, I hope I'm pronouncing that correct, is the founder of DeepMind, which is Google's AI laboratory and in telling his life story, Malaby is telling the story of AI development in general. And it's presented in language that I simple caveman pundit can understand, which I find very helpful. But it's also told with a narrative verve that's reminiscent of Michael Lewis's best books. So if you want to catch up on what is going on in this most important sector of the economy, I truly recommend the Infinity Machine by Sebastian Malaby. And interestingly enough, Hassibas was at a dinner last night with your favorite president and other AI poobahs, such as Dario Amodi of Anthropic. And I think Sam Altman of OpenAI was there as well. So it's a great primer for what may be the most important technological development in centuries.
- [65:57]
A
Matt Kanye, thanks for thanks for being here. See you next week. For Abe and Seth, I'm John Podhoritz. Keep the camel bur
- [66:07]
B
sa.