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- [00:01]
Seth Mandel
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- [00:49]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, May 27, 2025. I'm John Vaughn Hortz, the editor of Commentary magazine, and once again we have a two hander, because with me exclusively is Commentary senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:07]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [01:09]
John Podhoretz
Abe's on jury duty, Christine's traveling, Matt's teaching. Just you and me, babe. So we have a weekend of hijinks, all involving the, shall we say, flighty foreign policy conduct of one Donald John Trump, who announced this weekend two major developments in the world's most important conflicts. One is apparently he now has come to the conclusion that Vladimir Putin, he doesn't want peace and he's really annoyed because he went in, he's trying to make peace and Putin doesn't want peace and gee, I can't, I don't get it. And then Zelensky doesn't behave well on phone calls with me, and so I'm washing my hands of the whole thing. No one asked him not to wash his hands. No one asked him to wash his hands. He's the one who said he could solve the war in a day. He's the one who's yelling and trying to get negotiations going and all of this. Why, you know, I understand he doesn't want to be committed to the Ukrainian side, and that's a problem in and of itself, in my opinion. Why he decided that he was going to be some combination of Jimmy Carter with the Camp David Accords and Jimmy Carter who wandered around flattering tyrants and totalitarians after his presidency to get them to do things he wanted. I. I don't really understand, but fine. So even in a second presidency, there's a learning curve. He seems to have finally learned that Putin isn't his friend and isn't going to do what he wants just because he talks nice to him. That Putin has national interest and has undertaken this extraordinarily risky and extraordinarily costly adventure and isn't going to end it just because Trump asked him to. So that happened, of course, with the requisite insults to Zelensky who was only the president of a country that was invaded and is fighting as best it can to prevent itself from being swallowed up by, you know, one of the. Historically one of the worst, most imperialist and least justifiable nations in the world in terms of its. In terms of its hunger for territorial expansion. So that's thing number one. Thing number two is Trump announcing on the tarmac or wherever he was in Bedminster, his golf club, that this is real thing. Let's. Let's get it over with. Let's get it done. Enough. Let's get the whole thing done. So you think the Israelis don't want to get the whole thing done? They'd like to get the whole thing done tomorrow. He doesn't.
- [04:14]
Seth Mandel
Somebody had thought of that. End the war.
- [04:18]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [04:18]
Seth Mandel
I mean, what's funny about the Putin statement is that it, you know, when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, after high school, in the Jewish community, especially in the, in the modern North Orthodox community, your class, a lot of classmates would go spend a gap year in Israel out of Yeshiva.
- [04:35]
John Podhoretz
Still do. Still do.
- [04:36]
Seth Mandel
Still do, yeah. Okay. So still do. They go spend a gap year, and I had nephew doing that. Go spend a gap year in Israel. They come back and they go to college, you know, one year afterwards. And the ones who get really religious, super religious, while they're there in Israel, we say they flipped out. So we had friends come back and we'd, like, go over the class list of who flipped out. And that's how he sounds about Vladimir Putin. Like he's not the Putin I knew. He's flipped out. Something's, Something's clicked, you know, a switch has been flipped. I don't know why Putin is doing this, but he seems all of a sudden crazy. He seems all of a sudden to be, you know, not the guy that I took Intro to Chem with in, in high school. He's not the guy, you know, that, that. So, you know, I think that that's kind of what it is, is that he's, he's acting like he knew Putin, but the truth is that he's never really had Putin pegged, at least in the way he's talked about him in public. Right. I mean, we, we've, we've all sat here saying, like, the Putin that you're seeing now is Vladimir Putin, but it's also the Vladimir Putin that we've been seeing all along. We don't know who you miss. We don't know the classmate you think flipped out. We haven't Seen Vladimir Putin act any other way this time?
- [05:58]
John Podhoretz
You know, using. Using, like, almost sitcom analogies the way you did, like the. Oh, my God, how did. Why did that guy flip out? It's like somebody is. Something goes wrong in somebody's house, right? The plumbing goes wrong in somebody's house. The guy, the owner of the house, is like, under the sink, trying to fix the pipe, which is leaking, and he's got a blowhard friend. And the friend's like, no, I'll do it. You don't know what you're doing. I'll do it. Get out of there. Move out of the way. I'll do it. And then he gets under the thing and he takes the wrench and he does it, and then the pipe explodes. Like. Nobody was asking America to solve and end the war in Ukraine. The whole question was, how much assistance were we going to be giving to the Ukrainians and the Europeans to give to the Ukrainians? Could we give them enough to force Russia into a reckoning in which it would say, we've had enough, we're pulling back, we're pulling out. We just spent two. Now it's three fruitless years trying to take Iranian terror, knock the government over, take much of Ukrainian territory. They have. They have. For what they have lost. They have had a wildly unsuccessful war. And nobody anywhere was saying it is the responsibility, job or goal of the United States to be the arbiter who would end this war, freeze it in place so that Putin could claim his gains and. And Ukraine would lick its wounds for its losses, and then the world could go on. This was Trump's own mishigas. It was his own plan, an undemanded plan. Nobody in the world, except the weird people on the far right who have decided to lick the. Under the underso of the. Of the jackboot of Putin, probably because a lot of them are getting paid to do so. Nobody was demanding this. He comes in, he creates months of confusion, conflict. Giving Putin, as he is supposedly approaching a point of ceasefire, a weird red green light. Excuse me. To start droning civilian population sites. And now he's like, well, I just. I don't. I don't know. I don't know what happened to the guy. There is no what happened. He's trying to win a war. He started a war. Started a war to take over as much of Ukraine as possible, if not all of it. Initial purpose of the war was to drive tanks to Kyiv, knock the. Knock over the Zelensky government and rule Ukraine from the capital. That was the plan. The, the tanks got stuck in the mud, which is one of the reasons that people in the west started thinking, hey, you know what? Maybe this isn't going to go the way Putin wants it to. So he's the guy who's like, I can fix it. It's like, do you know how plumbing works? No, it's just, it's a wrench and it's a pipe, and everybody. The water doesn't want to flow and explode out, so I'm going to fix it. And there we are. Here we are after five months of nonsense, and he's washing his hands of it. And not only washing his hands of it, but agreeing. As part of an overall European consensus that all restrictions on the offensive use of Western equipment against Russia are being lifted. There used to be mile restrictions. You couldn't use a French missile to go more than 60 miles or something like that. And now you could fire it at the Kamchatka island, you know, between Russia, Russia and Alaska or something like that. You could, you could, you know, if you could do it 3,000 miles, you're, you're, you're able. The question is whether. What's going to happen now with Ukraine's resupply?
- [10:18]
Seth Mandel
That's, that's an advantage for Russia also, because it's like 80% barren wasteland. It's nine time zones wide, and 80% of it is like, it'll land in.
- [10:27]
John Podhoretz
A field that nobody give it a shot. Right, Exactly. Anyway, so this misadventure in peacekeeping or peacemaking seems maybe to be at an end. I assume it's at an end. It's now right back where it was, which is that Russia is going to try to destroy Ukraine's spirit and fighting spirit until Ukraine has no choice but to concede. And the Ukrainians are going to apparently try to fight to the last man. And this is what it means to be in an intractable conflict in which one country is trying to swallow up the other country and the other country is like, I'm sorry, this is. We're fighting for our very survival. You're not coming in here and taking our homes and taking our lands and taking our freedom. And I know what side I'm on. And maybe you're on the other side. And if you are, you stink. You stink. If you're on the other side, you're immoral. You're depraved, you're wrong. You've betrayed every fundament of what it is to be a civilized person. And I hope that you, when you meet your Maker, you'll be able to explain to him why you thought that it would be better for Russia to prevail than not to prevail. And I just, you know, if, if Trump now says there's no way to deal with Putin, you better shut up about Putin and stop saying he's got wonderful subway stations and that the Jews are somehow responsible for all of this, Tucker.
- [11:58]
Seth Mandel
And also, you can't undo the things that you've done in the past couple months. So, you know, he wants to wash his hands. But you, you know, that that's part of the, you know, the Powell doctrine of, you know, know, breaking it and buying it is, you can't undo things that you, I mean, honestly, it's, it's more like, you know, the Ian Malcolm in Jurassic park who, you know, is trying to explain to people that you cannot observe some, you cannot study something in detail without affecting the way that thing behaves. So what you're studying has been changed because you're studying it. And therefore you can't really ever fully study and observe the original in its original form. You can't go just flip the clock back to before Trump said and did the things he said and did about Ukraine. You can't just undo the damage that's been done. I mean, there's, if you, if you cut off weapons and intelligence sharing for any period of time, that period of time changes the war in a certain way. You can't undo that. It's like giving somebody a head start. If you, if you say, 3, 2, 1, go, and the guy, you let the guy you're racing have a two step head start, you can't ever go back to having started at the same place. You will forever in the race be two steps behind him. So even if it was two days of lapsed intelligence sharing or a week, that week, you can't ever make that up because you, you had Ukraine fighting to some extent, it's too far to say, but to some extent blind. And, you know, the Russians having this, this, the field to themselves in that sense. So you can't undo that. You can't undo, you know, withholding weapons for any period of time. You can't undo the diplomatic damage it does and you can't undo how it changes other people's behavior. How did the world respond to the way Trump was treating Zelensky? Let's say after that Oval Office incident, right? People recalibrate based on that. They have to try to anticipate where things are going. And after that Oval Office and the cutoff of intelligence sharing and all that stuff. And he's still yelling at him in his. In his truth posts or whatever. But after all that, people had to decide where they thought America was going to go, where its priorities were, and they had to adjust accordingly. And all that is things that you can't just erase, so you can't really wash your hands of it.
- [14:42]
John Podhoretz
Well, you can't in part because, for example, this is. This is not a fair. I mean, this is not an appropriate analogy except in the broadest possible sense. But in 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter, who was then president, who had said in 1977 that Americans needed to get over their, quote, inordinate fear of communism and was negotiating the SALT II treaty, which was going to enshrine nuclear warhead superiority. We were already negotiating on the grounds that the Soviets could have more warheads than the United States could at the end of the process. And that was what happened in the SALT II treaty that was sent before the Senate. So that the idea being, well, Russia is part of. The Soviets are part of the international community will have what we have, they'll have what we have. We want to knit them into the international community. Then they turn around and they. They invade and swallow up a neighboring country. Sound familiar of Afghanistan? And Jimmy Carter said, I've learned more about communism in the last week than I knew in my entire life. Now, what was he saying? He was saying I was wrong. I tried to make a deal with them. I try. Thought we could do X, but apparently we should do Y. It seems like a thoughtful comment, except that it was the President, United States, in the middle of the Cold War against the most barbaric regime the world has ever seen. And if it took the invasion of Afghanistan, as opposed to the information that came out in the Gulag Archipelago, six or seven years to teach him that these were bad actors on the world stage. Maybe the world stage needed to be reset with him, kicked out, back to summer stock. So Trump saying, gee, I guess Putin really doesn't want to make peace, has about it a little bit of that quality. Where have you been? Have you been following what happened, what happened in February of 2022?
- [17:06]
Seth Mandel
And the President gets intelligence reports that nobody else gets. He should know every. He should see every curve in the road before anybody else gets there.
- [17:15]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's. Well, that's the worst part, right, is that it's also. He hired all of these people to be his military and intelligence advisors who wanted, rather than telling him the way things are want to tell him what he wants to hear, like Tulsi, Gabbard and others, and who also have pre existing ideological commitments to Putin that we don't entirely understand and aren't telling him the order of battle. He's just using his own eyes to see. What do you mean you're droning a hospital? I thought we were going into peace talks. And now you're killing children for no reason. There isn't no reason. There's every reason. Putin is trying to terrorize and browbeat Ukraine into giving up. And that is a war strategy. And it is an understandable classical war strategy. It's called total war. There is no distinction between civilians. You know, you're not fighting under the Geneva Conventions. You make no distinctions between the civilian populations and, and the military populations. And your purpose is to destroy the heart and soul and civilization of your enemy. It's Sherman's March. It's whatever you want. That is total war. And that is how Putin wants to fight this war. And he had this moment of a couple of months where he was playing footsie with Trump because why not? Trump is really kind of on his side as he sort of understands it. And our vice, our despicable vice president yelling at this, you know, yelling at Zelensky in the White House for being rude when, when Zelensky was saying to J.D. vance, as you're misunderstanding something, which was true because J.D. vance was being a demagogic, hysterical, unpleasant, two faced lowlife. And Zelensky shouldn't have said it because it had a contrary countervailing effect and was, was bad in that, in that regard. And it was undiplomatic of him. But it's like he couldn't believe what was coming out of Vance's mouth. And he thought they were like friends or they were having a civil, they were having a conversation which was okay to be in disagreement. And then Vance said, you should be standing, you should be here on your knees licking Trump's feet, because that's what I do. And that's what you should be thanking him. Thanking him for what? What on earth would Zelensky have to thank Trump for? For siding with Putin, for effectively taking Putin's side in the war, for his own national, for his own country's survival. And then of course, he did make deals with Trump. He made the rare earth mineral deal with Trump. He did say he wanted a ceasefire. He did everything that Trump wanted. And then finally Trump says, all right, I get it, Putin's not, doesn't want peace. But Zelensky's not nice on the phone. Well, you know what? Like, don't. You don't have to yell at both sides. That's fine. Congratulations. Nice of you to be so. In politic. That's who you are. Yes. Trump. You know, you have to take Trump literally, but not seriously. Or seriously, but not literally. I mean, this is one of the more shameful things an American president has done in recent memory, and that's saying a lot because Biden did many, many, many shameful things, and Obama did many shameful things, and Trump did many shameful things in his first term. But to sort of, to analogize, to say, I'm washing my hands of this because Putin wants to win a war. And Zelensky, I don't like his tone. These are, these are similar. Like, it's okay, Putin's killing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and millions of Russians, as far as we can tell. But Zelensky, you know, could, like, you know, Zelensky could, could take a better tone on the phone. Whatever. It's, it's hard.
- [21:11]
Seth Mandel
But also, like, it's also, you should be insulted at Putin. If you're so easily insulted by signs of disrespect, suggestions of disrespect, or insufficient reverence, why wouldn't he be angry at Putin from the beginning? Putin has never, you know, it's true that Putin doesn't, you know, argue with him on the phone or whatever, but everything that he's saying now, everything that Russia is doing is a gesture of genuine disrespect for Trump in, you know, in much worse way. I mean, we don't have to compare them, but you would think it's, it's a lot worse to, you know, to not say please and thank you. It's a lot worse to, you know, to bomb a hospital than to not say please and thank you in the Oval Office. Whatever it is, the, the, it's, it's what it says about how they feel toward Trump, that Putin's actions speak much more loudly than Zelensky's do in the direction of disrespect. Zelensky is willing to be dragged by the lapels to an Oval Office meeting, and then he's willing to be dragged by the lapels out of that Oval Office meeting, cancel his speech at, I don't know, the Council on Foreign Relations, whatever it was, Hudson, wherever he was going to go next, cancel his meetings, you know, whatever he was going to do to shore up support, get back on the plane and leave. Right. He's will and then he's willing to be pulled back to sign a mineral deal. He's willing. Zelensky overall is basically willing to do almost anything except just raise the white flag. Putin is unwilling to do anything. And what that says is that Putin doesn't fear Trump at all. He doesn't expect consequences for his actions at all. And he doesn't really think true. Trump is either capable or willing to hurt him. And that should be more insulting to Trump's pride. That's Putin just kind of waltzing around like he owns the place. Zelensky doesn't do that. Zelensky is in politic and he doesn't know how to be a diplomat. And he, I mean, for the love of God, hire somebody to give you better, you know, advice. But the, but Putin's behavior, right. Isn't that more insulting?
- [23:37]
John Podhoretz
I think Zelensky is a pretty good diplomat. He's got most of the world on his side, except this one guy. And, and the people that Putin bought off who have his ear, I mean, I. Zelensky manages Europe like a, Like a, like a grandmaster. He's made two huge mistakes in the last year, one of which was listening wrongly to Biden, people who said he should go make a campaign, essentially a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania with somebody running for office. But that was ignorance. That was the fault of his ambassador to the US who was impolitic and misunderstood things. And then secondly, I mean, that's really. And then he didn't know that the only thing you do in the Oval Office is smile. And you don't have a conversation in front of the cameras with anybody of any substance. That's not what you do. And you basically give, you know, J.D. vance an opening, you know, to, to, to. To beat you up. So that was his one cardinal mistake. In the end, it doesn't matter that much because it's not like J.D. vance was going to change his mind because the meeting with Zelensky was good. There are bad actors in the Trump camp on this who do want Russia to win. Why they want Russia to win, I don't understand. That's why I lean heavily on the. They have a financial interest thing, because I don't see what possible good it serves for them or anybody for Russia to win this war. I really don't. I mean, I can't. No one, no one can game out an explanation to me why for any American interested in the American, you know, sort of like the American national interest over time would actually want Russia to win this. So you could make the argument that we should accept the Ukraine, if the Ukrainians want to be cannon fodder and have Russia spend the entirety of its military arsenal trying to subdue this country that will not be subdued and end up thereby much weaker than they were before they started the war. We have a kind of horrible interest in that. Right? Like a desperate, depressing, you know, life ending. But you could say Russia will end up weaker, not stronger, because it won't have any weapons left and it doesn't have any money to make more buying or get any more. But even that is a foolish notion because if Russia wins the prestige of winning in the sense that it was able to work its will in this way, in a way that no one has worked their will inside Europe, you know, in the nearly, in the last century or in the last 80 years, that's, you know, very bad.
- [26:38]
Seth Mandel
So, and then time is on his side too. You know, it's, it's not like he's going to be fighting another ground war right then. I mean, the point is that Ukraine is bleeding Russia and you know, and it's happening now. And Russia can't, you know, after Israel bombed some of the Iranian ballistic missile production sites, Iran could no longer transfer ballistic missiles to Russia, which is what it was doing. And, and Russia was firing those missiles at Ukraine. Right. So all this stuff going on now is why it's weakening Russia, because they can't just revivify some ballistic missile program now in the middle of a war. So if they win and the war is over, then time is back on their side. And that's what they're, that's what they're hoping for. Just hoping for the west to lose interest and go away and then just eventually they'll be able to lick their wounds because, you know, what is it? Who's going to, is somebody going to invade Russia? No. Russia is the one who invades other countries. And that's the precedent that you have to not allow to be said that Russia can periodically pick and choose to invade countries and then, and then sit back and lick its wounds and recover until the next time it wants to do this. That's, you know, but I think that people. One thing that really bothers me about the, the sort of pro Russia ish arguments is that we're treated as though we are, we being America, Americans who support Ukraine, we are fooling the Ukrainians into being our cat's paw and therefore we are killing them. We are responsible for the death and destruction in Ukraine because any sane person would just want it to end. Why do you want more Ukrainians to die? Is a question that you hear a lot on social media from this corner of the right. Why do you want more Ukrainians to die? Don't you want the war to stop and Ukrainians to stop dying? Especially if you like Ukrainians so much. But everybody has to understand that if Ukrainians want to fight on, they're going to fight on. This is Ukraine's war. Nobody is telling Ukraine, you ought to keep going, don't stop. And certainly the US isn't sending that signal. It's certainly not now. And certainly Europe would love not to have to deal with this problem. Ukraine wants to fight. We feel we have a responsibility to help an ally. Because we do.
- [29:15]
John Podhoretz
I mean, and that's it. It's not just a responsibility. They're fighting. They don't have a choice but to fight. They fight or they surrender. And the level of the surrender would not just be that Russia would take the 15% more of the territory that they've sort of ended up in control of since over the course of a three year fight in which they've lost a million or more men. The Russians. If you've heard that sound from Babbel before, I bet you do. Babbel is the science backed language learning app that actually works with quick 10 minute lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts. Babbel gets you on your way to.
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Seth Mandel
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- [29:58]
John Podhoretz
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- [30:05]
Seth Mandel
Up to 55 off your Babel subscription.
- [30:07]
John Podhoretz
At babel.com Spotify podcast spelled B-A-B-E-L.com Spotify podcast rules and restrictions may apply. Hi, I'm Anthony Scaramucci and I'd like to tell you about my new show, Lost Boys. It's a limited edition series. It's hosted by myself and Professor Scott Galloway. We're having honest conversations about a topic no one wants to talk about. The crisis that young men are facing nowadays. Our talks discuss why so many young men are struggling to find purpose, connection and identity in today's world. We dig into what's really going on. Politics, culture, loneliness, even rage. And what we can do to help change the narrative. This is a six part series that will challenge your assumptions and encourage you to continue the conversation from the dinner table to the office. Follow and listen to Lost Boys on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to Lostboys men and sign up to get the latest episodes and news. Ukraine, as was the case from 1920 until 1922 or whatever, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ukraine will cease to exist. I mean, this is literally a fight for survival. Saying, it's not a war of choice for them. The war of choice is be a slave or die free. You know, I mean, it's give me liberty or give me death. That is their choice. They don't have a choice. And this bizarre. America centric. America first. America centric. Nauseating. Either idiocy or deliberate. I don't know what you would call it. Demagogy. That seems to think that everything that happens in the world happens because of American domestic political considerations and is all about us and not about them. We were presented with a binary choice when Russia invaded Ukraine, support Ukraine or don't support Ukraine. And we weren't sure where we were on this because remember that Biden offered to fly Zelensky into exile. Now Charles de Gaulle went into exile. You know, when the. When. Essentially when. When France fell to the Nazis and then led some preposterous, you know, for propaganda reasons, we all accepted that the west accepted that the Free French Forces were a material element in the Second World War. And they. They were not. But that was good for propaganda purposes, that France. France was not surrendering, only Vichy. France was surrendering. But, like Zelensky's, like, I can't leave. That's the end of the country. I'm the president of the country. I. I don't need a ride. I need weapons. You know, give me weapons.
- [33:15]
Seth Mandel
Zelensky understands that he's. He's not being offered to be the Polish government in exile. He's being. When he's offered a ride out of Kiev, it's an offer. It means the end of Ukraine. Not like a placeholder where he can gather his guys and the west can sort of.
- [33:34]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, then they can get the rightful.
- [33:37]
Seth Mandel
Rulers of Ukraine or something. But there's no Ukraine.
- [33:40]
John Podhoretz
Right, Right. So this was not our choice. We had nothing to do with this war, except for the fact that when we pulled out of Afghanistan, we gave Putin, in his mind, a green light because it meant that America wasn't going to do anything to stop him. But, you know, this wasn't our choice. It's not our fight, it's not our war. It's their war. And all we need to do is to give them weapons to help prevail. And it is in our interest for them to prevail because we Need Russia to be as weak as possible because Russia is a bad actor. You know, I, how I know it's a bad actor because it invaded Ukraine and invasion, invaded Georgia before that. And it'll invade somewhere else later if it can. And it's bad. And so we need it to be in a box or at least controlled. And this argument that it is otherwise is about us. It's all about domestic politics. It's all about the fact that Alexander Vindman was the whistleblower who got Trump indicted the first time in 2019. I mean, that is the sort of, that's the original sin that a decorated military officer working on the National Security Council joke by the joke is he's of Ukrainian origin. So he, you know, would be for Ukraine just to put a bow on this. And now I'm going far afield. Sasha Vindman is a Jew. Ukrainian Jews are not patriotic Ukrainians bringing their love of Ukraine with them to the United States. Like, you know, somebody, an Irish person who leaves County Cork and then sings, you know, Danny Boy and weeps, you know, on St. Patrick's Day. Jews have a horrible history in Ukraine. Jews got out of Ukraine the way they got out of Russia because Ukraine is inhospitable territory. Even though, remarkably enough, Zelensky is Jewish and has ended up the president of Ukraine in order to prove his independence as a president of Ukraine, as a Jew, he's of course had to be anti Israel to make sure that people don't think that he's some kind of an Israeli agent.
- [35:55]
Seth Mandel
But he also can't. I mean, that's the one reason he also can't stop fighting. Right? He, he can't. The Jew, the Jewish president of Ukraine can't be the guy to say, yes, I'll flee Kiev and say, you know, it's okay that Crane, that, that Ukraine won't exist as a state anymore. He's in a position where from, you know, this Jewish religious, ethnic perspective, nationalist perspective, he, he's trapped. He cannot do some of the things that people are yelling at him to do. He can't.
- [36:29]
John Podhoretz
Right. Anyway, I'm just saying that this whole thing to, as I say, to put, to put a bow on it is all about how there was this line of thought on the right that there was somehow a Ukrainian operation led by Ukrainian staffer Sasha Vindman, who I, who I am not a fan of and I'm not an admirer of, and I think he's a, he's a self righteous, preening dupe and that he, you know, and that he was looking for a way to use his position to take Trump out. And I, you know, and I, I find him despicable, but he wasn't doing this as a Ukrainian op, is what I'm saying. Ukrainian Jews are, are not supporters of Ukrainian nationalism is just to make this clear. Kran was a net horrible negative for the Jewish people over the course of the late 19th and much of the 20th century. And Ukrainians participated in pogroms and Ukrainian Jews hid and they did not study their religion and all of that. So just to, just to put a bow on the whole thing. Anyway, let's move on to Israel, by the way, because that was the second weird event or lot of different things going on between Trump, Netanyahu, Israel, the hostages, Hamas and everything. So just to separate them out, number one, there was a little talk that there was reason to be optimistic about a hostage deal. And even Bibi said to the hostage families he had some hope that there was movement, which when it turned out there wasn't movement, the hostage families who hate him, or a lot of them hate him, said, you know, like, he gave us false hope.
- [38:28]
Seth Mandel
Hello, this is Dr. Rob Williams, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation.
- [38:32]
John Podhoretz
Survivors of the Holocaust have long been.
- [38:34]
Seth Mandel
The bravest voices speaking out against antisemitism.
- [38:37]
John Podhoretz
And all forms of hate around the.
- [38:39]
Seth Mandel
World, whether it's European antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s or the antisemitism we see on our streets and campuses today. Will explore it on the USC Shoah Foundation's new podcast, Searching for Never Again.
- [38:50]
John Podhoretz
We'll hear stories that are heartbreaking and.
- [38:52]
Seth Mandel
Stories that are inspiring every Tuesday on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever fine podcasts can be found.
- [39:05]
John Podhoretz
So it's like, okay, gee, like, I'm sure that's really what he wanted to do was be. Have to go back to and say, I'm sorry, I was wrong about this. It appears that the mediator in this, the person who has been the mediator in this conversation, someone named Bhabha, is now way out over his skis and making claims that he has no right or grounds to claim on advancing the possibility of a deal between Hamas and Israel. Hamas, the Hamas leadership fighting the war in Gaza, whatever that is, whatever remnant of the leadership still lives, has now openly dissociated itself from the people who are living in the Four Seasons Hotel in Doha, who are Hamas and Qatar. That's apparently who Baba has been representing in these talks. And Steve Witkoff, the negotiator yesterday or late last night, or something said, there are no hostage talks, it's over. We've got nothing to talk about. We don't even know if the people we're talking to have any ability to negotiate for Hamas anymore. Meanwhile, Trump and Witkoff and whatever are trying to make a deal with Iran on the nukes. And apparently Trump and Bibi had a phone call on Thursday to talk about the American negotiation with Iran over the nukes. And we're getting a lot of different leaks about what happened in the phone call. And I have no idea what to trust, except the only thing that we can be sure of is that Bibi is saying to Trump, don't, don't believe it. Don't believe it. Don't believe them. They're, you know, just stay firm on the, no enrichment and everything, but don't believe them. And maybe Trump got mad at him or didn't get mad at him or said, I'm just, I'm doing this for you. And it's possible that Trump said, look, and we heard this. Amit Sehgal, the very fine television commentator and columnist, says this morning in his newsletter or yesterday in his newsletter, that Israel is preparing two different possible strikes on Iran, one if the deal fails, and the other, if the deal succeeds, that Bibi is already sort of sending signals that Israel, if it is, can come up with a window in the capability. If the deal with the United States goes through and it features the survival of the Iranian nuclear program, Israel will hit Iran regardless of whether Trump says, we have a deal. Which, of course, is unbelievably risky. You know, America is now Israel's only friend in the world. Not that it had very good friendships with Britain, France and Canada. Like, with friends like that, who needs enemies a lot of the time? But I mean that, you know, they.
- [42:14]
Seth Mandel
Trump and Putin, where was the, where was the Macron that we knew and loved? He flipped out.
- [42:19]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. You know, maybe this is. Maybe this is why his wife slapped him in the face on the plan on the tarmac. The single most interesting incident of the last six months is this image of Macron standing there on the plane. And suddenly out of the, out of the left hand part of the image comes his wife's hand pushing him in the face and him looking as though the most embarrassing and humiliating thing that ever happened to him or to anybody on Earth. So it's a great first thing he.
- [42:51]
Seth Mandel
Does, by the way, is look to the side at the cameras, because a politician always knows where they are. He knows that he's in the view of the cameras and she's not, he, you know, he immediately, he's thinking like, what does this look like? He goes into, into politician mode and then he gives a kind of goofy smile, which was, which was kind of funny, almost endearing. I mean, I think that's probably the only way to play it off is like that, you know, it was like this sort of endearing moment. But yeah, I, I, I don't, yeah.
- [43:16]
John Podhoretz
It was so endearing there. It was, it was about him. Yeah, it was about as endearing as the movie the War of the Roses. Like, that's how endearing it was, you know, that it was really not endearing. Anyway, I don't know. We're going, but, but so Bibi's telling Trump, don't make a deal. Someone's leaking to Amit Seagal that Israel is prepared to strike Iran if the deal is bad. Israel's preparing to strike Iran if the deal isn't made. Bibi said Trump is saying, I've had enough of the war. I said on the tarmac, this should wrap up very quickly. And meanwhile, Israel seems to be wrapping things up fairly quickly in Gaza. It's killing most of the leadership. It seems to have complete operational control of Rafah, which was the headquarters of, of Hamas. I don't quite know what this means. We don't even know what it will mean when the war is over in the sense that, I guess what it'll mean is that the people of Gaza will say they're all dead. So we can come out and take your food now. So where are you on this, Seth?
- [44:29]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, I mean, well, I think, and I think just to go back one sec to the Iran stuff, I think one of the interesting things is that in the, in the newsletter that you mentioned in Amit Seagull's newsletter, he connects it directly to the truce, the so called truce with, or ceasefire with the Houthis in Yemen. And he says, look, look, this morning two ballistic missiles or whatever were fired at Israel by the Houthis from Yemen. So when Israel looks at this and says, okay, Trump struck a deal with the Iranian conglomerate, you want to put it that way, which, you know, the Houthis very much are part of that deal did not include, like it didn't make us any safer. We're still getting the missile. So we still have to deal with the fact that they shoot missiles. So I think, you know, it's in that context is that Trump is not going to, you know, that he, whatever that there's no guarantee that he's going to sign a good deal or a deal that considers anything at all, necessarily from Israel's perspective, which I, you know, which, which is the important part. The other thing is that I think that people are, this was in the CNN piece that said Israel's, you know, we had leakers in the White House saying Israel's preparing for a strike on Iran and it could complicate Bibi's relationship with Trump, blah, blah, blah. But part of that is really just the obvious thing of, of course there are plans. And of course, those plans are constantly being redrawn and revised based on conditions on the ground. Who could possibly think otherwise? Right. Like there's no way that Israel doesn't have some plans in case it fails, believes it needs to strike Iran. Right. Those plans don't mean it's going to strike Iran. People should get a glimpse of the plans that American military planners have. We have a plan for a war with China. It doesn't mean tomorrow we're going to war with China, but you better believe that we have plans for various strikes and in all sorts of contingency plans. This is why we do war games and, you know, and all these sorts of joint runs with allies and things like that. Everybody is constantly planning for what they need to do. So I think there's also a sense of people that people just really enjoying the ability to make trouble for Bibi with Trump, whereas people in the administration are, some people in administration are clearly easily convinced that, you know, an Israeli preparation for a strike means, oh, they're going to do it tomorrow and now you're going to have another war on your hands. President Trump and the Israelis, you know, they've, they've, you know, they've defied you and, you know, all this other stuff. And I think it's a combination of cynicism and, to some degree, ignorance of people reading these reports and not really understanding, you know, how normal all this is. But at the very least, they're expecting the public not to know how normal it is. They tell the public there's this plan and they know that a certain percentage of the public is going to interpret it as, I guess, an attack is imminent. And so that's, that's the stuff with Iran is that they're sort of on two different tracks with the hostages. I, I think that one problem you have is even when he was alive and we don't, we think, you know, I think the consensus is that Mohammed Sinwar is not alive.
- [48:07]
John Podhoretz
Brother of Yaya Sinwar, who? Brother of yaya Sinwar of October 7 and the operational commander of Hamas in Gaza. Right.
- [48:15]
Seth Mandel
And his brother, his other brother, Zakaria. This is, this is like I.
- [48:24]
John Podhoretz
Terrible things. They're like the Emmanuel brothers, except they're not Emmanuel brothers are Zionists and all this. But like one was head of Hamas, one was his deputy, the other was like the head of the Islamic University in Gaza. Very, very eminent family.
- [48:39]
Seth Mandel
Right. I just remember this. You know, there's. There's this show where somebody, somebody loses a part to a Hemsworth that nobody knew existed.
- [48:46]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [48:47]
Seth Mandel
There's a fourth Hemsworth. Yeah. That's how I felt when Zakaria Sinwar turned. There's another Sinwar.
- [48:52]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [48:52]
Seth Mandel
How many Hemsworth Sinwars? But, but so that, you know, we believe that Muhammad Sinwar has been eliminated. Even before he was. There were. There was a lot of talk about how he was in over his head anyway. I mean, he had taken over a rump.
- [49:08]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. It's like, it's like if Fredo took over the Corleone family.
- [49:13]
Seth Mandel
Yeah. At a moment. At a low tide moment also. I mean, at a. At a rut. He doesn't have. He doesn't have the A team anymore either. So it's all scrubs. Right. And he just. So we heard murmurings all the time that one thing that made the hostage negotiations difficult is that Muhammad was like, you know, holed up somewhere in a spider hole like he was Saddam Hussein because he couldn't. Didn't have anybody to try. He doesn't know who to trust. And even within his own organization. And it was hard to get. And then we had reports that Hamas in Gaza has. Don't know exactly what this means, but has broken from its political bureau abroad.
- [49:57]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [49:57]
Seth Mandel
This is the latest thing. Now, the political bureau abroad is who we generally talk to, we being the United States, and obviously who is hosting them. Right. Through intermediaries. But the political bureau are the ones you talk to because it's not like you can just get a Sinoir on the phone for obvious reasons. And so whatever that means. Exactly. That they've broken from them. What it means first and foremost is that the communication lines have been disrupted in a major way. Maybe not completely severed. I don't know that they're not talking at all. But you know, the Hamas that negotiators talk to about these deals are not the ones sitting right now in Gaza.
- [50:46]
John Podhoretz
Which is why Witkoff said yesterday the talks are over. Because somehow it became clear to him that whoever he was talking to was in no position to effectuate a deal and that you were only getting America or Israel to agree to concessions on things, but that you had no realistic assurance that a single hostage would be moved, because they may not even have. As you say, they may not even have communications any longer. I mean, if you have seen the condition of Rafa from. From above, you would understand that we're in, like, 486 BC territory here, in which the only real way for somebody to get a message from one place to another would be for them to run, you know, like the. Like the marathon. The battle. The news of the battle of Marathon, which is where the marathon comes from. The guy who ran 26 miles delivered the message that the Greeks and then dropped dead. You know, that's. You know, and of course, you can't run from. You can't run from Rafa to Doha. There's no. There's no. There's no footpath.
- [51:58]
Seth Mandel
And that's what Sinwar was doing. He was using runners. Yaya Sinwar. Yeah, the first Sinwar brother. He was using runners, and he's gone, too. So I. You know, they might not even be trusting runners. He might literally be just surrounded by, you know, you know, limestone underground.
- [52:16]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [52:16]
Seth Mandel
We don't know. Talking to himself or.
- [52:18]
John Podhoretz
I mean, this is. This is how successful psychological warfare works. They don't know who. If anyone that they're talking to has or has not been turned. Right. They don't know does. Is the guy who was sitting next to me. Is he an Israeli agent or not? And so who knows what's going on down there? Who knows what's going on in the deeper, deepest tunnels? Are they shooting each other in the head? They looking at each other, you know, and, you know, it's the end of Macbeth. Macbeth basically has to have all the other things killed because he can't trust. He knows if it were he, he would be turning on himself. So therefore, they. He has to kill all of them because they're like him, and he would be them, and so he would have himself. He would have somebody like him killed. Like, that's. That's what happens when things degrade. And so the only real question now, it's not that Hamas can live to fight another day, really. I mean, some version of a resistance movement or whatever could be in power in Hamas if Israel gives up the ghost too soon. It really is, is there a modality by which to get the hostages back? The despairing part of this is that if all communications have broken down, there really isn't, because who's gonna Take the hostages back.
- [53:43]
Seth Mandel
And it's a game of telephone. Right off hears something says to Bibi Netanyahu, we're making some progress. Bibi reports to the public or the hostage families were making some progress. But, you know, it was that the we're making some progress wasn't whispered directly into Bibi's ear. It was whispered into Steve Witkoff's ear. And Witkoff then whispered the message that he got to BB and so.
- [54:08]
John Podhoretz
And then the next day, Witkoff said that message was an error. Like. And as I say, I think the story here is that. Is that the. Is that the Suddenly famous mediator, Mr. Bhabha is. Got his own agenda and is. Has been, you know, bullshitting Witkoff and, And BB and BB doesn't know what to. He wanted to deliver a piece of good news to the hostage families who are, you know, who are just for all sorts of understand, for every understandable reason, are. Are, you know, veering between despair and rage and impotence and a desire to lash out and all of that. And this was one moment at which he could say to them, there's a ray of light. And then it turned out there is no ray of light. And so now they're mad at him for giving them false hope.
- [55:02]
Seth Mandel
So, and we should say, like, they're obviously, Bibi Netanyahu would only ever want to genuinely deliver good news if he's promised, right? If he's. If he promises good news, it's not because he's playing games. It's not because he's trying to play psychological games with the Israeli public. It's because he thinks there's a. There's a shot at good news. Otherwise he wouldn't say. He's more of a pessimist and a cynic in that regard. He's not somebody who runs around saying, we're always on the verge of, you know, getting everybody back or whatever, something like that. So it's, you know, it's. He. He had some reason to believe that Witkoff had some reason to believe. And I think that that has kind of shattered everybody's illusions now of how much they can even know.
- [55:52]
John Podhoretz
All right, well, we'll leave it there and hopefully have a more populated podcast for you tomorrow. This is two in a row with just the two of us. Matt and I did one yesterday in which we talked exclusively about the TV show andor. And here we're talking about these two wars. And maybe tomorrow we'll talk some domestic politics. But until then, thank you, Seth. I'm John Pod Horitz. Keep the candle burning.
- [56:36]
Seth Mandel
Sam.