Abe Greenwald (7:05)

Hi, Abe.

Jamie Kirchik (7:06)

Hi, John.

John Podhoretz (7:07)

Aforementioned social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

Seth Mandel (7:11)

Hi, John.

John Podhoretz (7:12)

Senior editor Seth Mandel.

Abe Greenwald (7:13)

Hi, Seth.

Noah Rothman (7:14)

Hi, John.

John Podhoretz (7:15)

And a voice heard on this podcast and a name familiar to everybody who reads has been reading over the past 20 years. And now in succeeding Matthew Continetti, our new Washington commentary columnist, Jamie Kirchuk. Hi, Jamie.

Jamie Kirchik (7:32)

Hi, John.

John Podhoretz (7:33)

I do want to get to the job numbers quickly because, like, for the last couple of days, it's been like, ooh, the Trump people, they're really preparing for some bad job. They're there, they're going to say it's because of the disruptions and the snowstorms and it's really the job numbers very frightening and it's going to be very bad. And it's all about how AI Is eating or lunch or whatever and the tariffs. And now the job numbers come out for January and 133,000 new jobs, like twice what was expected, twice what the job growth has been over the last couple of months. And I have one large thing to say, which is that we have a $33 trillion economy now with 330 million people participating inside the continental United States in all economic activity in the United States. And I don't know, maybe this is a weird thing to say because it's just an effort to describe things, but I don't know if economics works anymore. I don't know that macroeconomics, we've talked about this over time, but I don't know that anybody has any understanding of an economy this vast, this complex that involves manufacturing services, government employment, private employment, temporary employment, seasonal employment and a per capita income in a country this large that is I don't know what it is. Is it four times what China's is? With five times the number of people, we have an economy. It's not quite a third again, as large as China's but something like that with China has five times the number of people that we have. So we have this incredibly productive economy that is the largest in the world, remains the largest in the world. And we're all yelling and screaming about how terrible everything is and how AI is going to kill us and all that. And I just think then these things come out like these job numbers, and you're like, well, that doesn't fit the larger narrative that everybody has been proffering. I think we're right to talk about the spiritual narrative. We talked about yesterday, about whether Americans feel like they're flourishing or whether they feel like there's any hope for the future. But I just. I don't even know whom to turn to right now to explain to me what happened with these job numbers. The fact is, there's no one. There's no one that I trust or I think can explain to me why, in the face of the tariffs, in the face of this, in the face of that, nonetheless, job growth is good and we have 96% employment, which is another way of saying we have 4% unemployment.

Jamie Kirchik (10:19)

The question does still remain, how much better would things be without the tariffs? That is the sort of lingering, I.

Abe Greenwald (10:28)

Think.

Jamie Kirchik (10:30)

Way to actually frame. If you have a problem with tariffs, as I do, that's the issue. There are other good engines of growth that are sort of masking what the tariffs would be, are doing otherwise.

John Podhoretz (10:49)

But even that. See, here's the interesting thing. So you mentioned that, right? And you say the things will be so much better. Trump has his own version of this, which is, it's the Fed. It's all the Fed. If Kevin Warsh does the right thing, we could grow. He literally said yesterday, the day before yesterday, if Kevin Warsaw will grow by 15%. Just to make it clear, unless you're China moving from Communist feudal economics to a more open system, there's no Such thing as 15% growth in the history of the planet. That won't happen in part because we do have a mature economy that can't grow. That. That's because we already at. We're already at near full employment. So that doesn't make sense anyway. But I mean, so that's. So you were saying, okay, well, you know, the tariffs are bad. They cost. According to the Tax foundation, they've cost every American household $1,000. Right. So essentially, there's been a net tax increase of $1,000 per household in the United States in the year 2025, but that hasn't. So maybe, yes. Without that, who knows how the Economy could be or not. Or maybe, you know, maybe this is all being floated by the construction of these massive data centers which supposedly are there to fuel AI, which is supposed to end up destroying tens of millions of jobs later. I don't know. That's what I'm saying. Like, nobody knows. Nobody understands.

Seth Mandel (12:24)

Two, two, two things. On the tariff point, though, Congress has finally roused itself from its slumber and is starting to do its job again. And there's push, pushback now on the Trump tariffs from Congress that, that process has started. We're waiting to hear what the Supreme Court rules, which will be a very important decision with regard to whether it was even constitutional for him to use these emergency powers in this way. So there's still that uncertainty remains. And the other thing, I would just caution in being too enthusiastic about these numbers, the revisions process. John, I agree that it becomes difficult to trust any of these numbers or projections because the revision process over the years, particularly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been so massive. The swings, you know, I think in 2025, the administration was claiming half a million jobs would be created. That was Revised down to 100,000 something. So. And the last time the head of BLS gave numbers to Trump that he didn't like, that person was fired and removed from their job. So I would say cautiously optimistic about jobs is a good way to be. I was happy to see that among the jobs eliminated were a lot in the federal government. So the downsizing of the number of, you know, federal government jobs, that's actually a plus if you're a conservative who likes smaller government. But I. And there were also some construction jobs added. But health care was the big growth area for jobs. So long term, I think this AI question remains an open one with regard certainly to white collar workers, information workers.

John Podhoretz (13:51)

I'm just saying. All I'm saying is that even the bls, even the way. One of the reasons these revisions go crazy is that BLS doesn't know how to collect job data. So it collects job. There. There are two different ways that the federal government collects job data. There's the household report, there's the employer report. They wildly diverge. And, you know, it's understandable. The federal government doesn't have a national database of workers. You know, it does, actually. It has social. It has the only national database in the country, which is the Social Security system. But of course, nothing is reported to the Social Security system except who. What, whom the Social Security system pays out to, either in the form of retirement benefits or in the form of disability benefits or, or survivor benefits. But so there's no way to track people at a national level, you know, with kind of like big data. All there is is they send surveys out to people and they collect information and it's a poll essentially, and the poll is inaccurate. And then they try to purify it over time and kind of get it down, fix it based on some other things. But, you know, we don't know how many people are employed. There was always that line in the 2000 and tens that the unemployment rate, the real unemployment, was double what we were being told by the government. And I can't remember why that was, but I mean, that was a respectable opinion to have. That wasn't a conspiracy theory opinion that BLS was playing games with the numbers. It was just that things are reported that aren't right or a lot of people move in and out of the workforce and their movements are not measured or people drop out of the workforce and don't look for work and therefore they're not counted in employment or unemployment numbers, that kind of thing. But I just think in general, this economy is so huge. You know, it's like five times the size that it was 40 years ago. US economy is almost five times the size that it was forty years ago. Think, think about that alone and how we're still collecting data. We probably, they still. Bls, they probably still have 1990s machines. I'm not joking. Like, half the federal government has old computers, like with 300, with 386 chips in them because they invented software that they haven't figured out how to port from those machines to other machines. And like, I don't know, you know, I don't know how that's, how that's gonna work. So anyway, I'm just saying I don't trust anybody about anything, which seems to be the general attitude that everybody has about everything. But in this case, I just think it's. It's an impossible ask to know how the economy is like a snapshot of the economy. Our economy is just too big, too complicated. Our country is too large. It has too many time zones and weather patterns and all of that. One thing is good for Texas, that would be terrible for Maine. You know, odd weather, whatever. Okay, so I'm gonna get you a.

Seth Mandel (16:58)

Refurbished Commodore desktop and that's gonna calm.

John Podhoretz (17:01)

Everything down because that's it. And you have to connect with a phone line that doesn't exist anymore. Okay, Jamie Kirchik, your first piece as Washington commentary columnist is called the Chutzpah of Yoram Hazoni. You don't know what chutzpah means? I'm not gonna translate it. It means nerviness. But. Okay, all right, I'm translating. And let me just set the stage quickly, which is Yarrow Pazoni, of course, a commentary contributor of. For many years, until we had a really decisive ideological break around 2015, he and I personally, and then he with the magazine's general philosophy, has been leading this national conservative conference that comes out of his Edmund Burke Foundation. And though oddly he lives in Israel and is. Was a. Came to me when I first started publishing him and I was the first major person to publish him in the Weekly Standard in the mid-90s. He had been an aide to Bibi Netanyahu when Bibi Netanyahu was the finance minister of the Israeli government along sick transit Gloria Mundi. The two people in his office were Yoram and Carolyn Glick. So if you know who Carolyn Glick is, you will know how interesting this is. Carolyn now back working for Beebe. And Yoram wanted to then wanted to run an institute where he would translate the great works of Western philosophy into Hebrew or works appraising capitalism and denouncing socialism. Hayek Tocqueville, stuff like that. That was sort of his intellectual project in the 1990s. This has now moved to the project of affirming American nationalism, I think as a way of suggesting that one of the things that America and Israel have in common is that we're both nationalistic and particularistic. So Israel has a particularist interest in expansion in the west bank would be his view. And America, of course, is particularly nationalistic, which is very hard lift. So that's your complicated story, complicated issue. But what he did now dovetails with this whole question of whether or not the rise of antisemitism over the last two and a half years, how seriously we need to take the rise not only on campus and with Gaza support and all of that, but the rise on the right largely personified by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. So, Jamie, this speech, you Basically take a 2 by 4 and smash your arm about the face and neck for 1800 words.

Jamie Kirchik (19:58)

Yeah.

Christine Rosen (19:59)

So when the whole Kevin Roberts mishigas started within days, Yoram flew to Washington to basically do damage control for the Heritage foundation and to help them. You know, Kevin Roberts had spoken at these national conservative conferences. You know, I went to the first one in Washington. Tucker was a headline speaker. So Yoram was very invested in this sort of part of the right. And a couple Weeks ago, I should say in December, actually, he gave a speech, a very strange speech, where on the subject of anti Semitism on the American right, he had really nothing negative to say about Tucker, Candace Owens. All of his hatred was reserved for what he described as liberal Republicans. And included in this liberal Republican grouping were people like Mike Pompeo, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, presumably the, you know, assembled people here on your screen, National Review magazine, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, basically anyone who was making a fuss about just how nasty and dangerous and un American, frankly, what Tucker and Candace are doing, that's who he reserved his hatred for. And to me it's just a very clear example of someone being unable to have any sort of self reflection and to look at the mirror and say, you know what? I'm the one who screwed up here. I'm the one who thought stupidly that assembling a coalition of European style blood and soil nationalists would be good for the Jews. That was a dumb idea, Yoram. Maybe I should apologize for that. No, he's incapable of doing that. And so he's lashing out at everyone else and accusing us, for some reason I can't understand, of being the root of the problem here.

John Podhoretz (22:00)

The phrase that you highlight or you don't go into deep detail, but the phrase that caught my eye in the speech, and that is kind of amazing, is his denunciation of the quote, extremely high level of incompetence by the entire antisemitism industrial complex. So I guess we're part of the.

Christine Rosen (22:23)

By the way, is a term, is a term you usually hear from like anti Semites.

John Podhoretz (22:27)

Yeah, it's like Mearsheim, it's like John Mearsheimer or, you know, or Jewish anti Semites, like Max Blumenthal or something. Yeah, so there is, so there is Yoram Hazoni, like echoing the, you know, the rejectionist idea. The idea. So if Yoram's project, as I believe it is, and I have various issues with this, is making the world safe for Israeli expansionism. He himself lived on the west bank for many years, was in a relatively dangerous area of the West Bank, a settlement called Ailey, where he had neighbors whose kids were murdered at the Herodian on the west bank and believes that Israel should, as a religious Jew believes that the West Bank, Judea and Samaria should be part of Israel and historically biblically given to Israel. You know, he's an Orthodox Jew given to Israel by God or to the Jewish people by God. This is obviously a controversial opinion, to put it mildly right now in Israel There is an effort to liberalize laws for the purchase of land on the west bank as part of the opening salvos of the next campaign for prime minister, which the election will. Or for, you know, the next Israeli national election, which will either take place in September, October or November. Nobody really quite knows what it is. But one of the first salvos is an effort to, as I say, liberalize the ability of Israelis to buy land on the west bank, which apparently the Trump administration is annoyed about, or we're told they're annoyed about. Who knows if they're really annoyed about it? But whatever. So there is a. So he has a project.

Noah Rothman (24:25)

And his ideal administration being annoyed about something with Israel, by the way, usually means that someone in J.D. vance's office told Axios that Trump is annoyed.

John Podhoretz (24:36)

That's exactly right. So, you know, okay, so as I say, Yoram has this project, and the project, weirdly, because of course it means what he wants to is make common cause with the hardest blood and soil conservatives on the right. Blood and soil conservatism, meaning you are an American because you sink deep roots in the American soil, in the American land. This is not the general thesis of what it means to be an American, which is that this is a nation founded on an idea. Most of the people who are here are descendants of people who came from elsewhere. And, you know, 90% of people who live on American soil, or maybe 80% of people live on American soil who were not brought here in chains, come from somewhere else. And so the idea that you can only really be an American if you've been here a long, if your great, great, great, great, great great grandparents were here, is a kind of violation of the historical facts of the United States. Anyway.

Christine Rosen (25:42)

Yeah, And John, this is the main plank of his intellectual project, as should have said earlier, is to deny the universalism of the American founding and of the American idea. He wants it to be as national because that's Israel. Israel is the Jewish state, okay? America is the global state. It's the apotheosis of human achievement and state making. We are. We are everyone from around the world. And in his book, the Virtue of Nationalism, he divides all political thinkers into two camps. There's the nationalists, who are good and great and virtuous, and then there's the imperialists, who are awful.

Noah Rothman (26:20)

People who want.

Christine Rosen (26:21)

To go over and take over the world. And in that latter group of imperialists, he includes the European Union, Nazi Germany, and, wait for it, Charles Krauthammer.

Seth Mandel (26:31)

See this? Okay, I was so glad you dove a little bit into his intellectual history because I'm curious if you would say a little more. You you note that he's part of this counter enlightenment project.

Christine Rosen (26:42)

Yes.

Seth Mandel (26:42)

Which I see as an effort to put up a scaffolding, an intellectual scaffolding about around a bunch of terrible ideas of which antisemitism is a main plank. How much of his anti enlightenment approach is legitimate? Or is it just an intellectual cover for what he wants to do, which as you say is have this blood and soil conservatism become dominant.

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Christine Rosen (30:06)

I mean, I'm not a history, I'm not a historian of sort of American intellectual history, but this did seem like a pretty radical novel book when it came out, and there are actually some quite good reviews published of it in Commentary and other publications at the time that sort of pointed out Peter Berkowitz has written extensively on this for various publications, really pointing out where Hazoni is wrong in so many different ways. And you talk about chutzpah. It's not only the chutzpah of, you know, an Israeli Jew lecturing American Jews on whom they should be allying with politically and whom they shouldn't be talking. It's just like an Israeli at all telling Americans, you know, how we should run our political affairs. It's like, you're an Israeli citizen, you know, like, stay in your lane.

John Podhoretz (30:54)

I mean, it's also, I believe.

Abe Greenwald (30:56)

Go ahead.

John Podhoretz (30:57)

Sorry.

Jamie Kirchik (30:57)

I just want to say it's also the chutzpah. It's like from our perspective, you got us into this.

Abe Greenwald (31:03)

Yes, that's the.

John Podhoretz (31:07)

I mean the intellectual project, which is complicated. You liken, I think, very wisely to the 1619 project, which is, oh, here's an alternate actual history of the American founding. We don't come out of the Scottish Enlightenment and John Locke and ideas about human freedom and the universe.

Christine Rosen (31:25)

Here are these philosophers you've never heard of that I've discovered. And I know, actually.

John Podhoretz (31:32)

Two 16th and 17th century pamphleteers named Fortescue and Selden are the founding fathers of the United States. So when someone ever plays that game with you and does you know what, here's someone no one ever heard of and has ever mentioned before, that's actually where X or Y comes from. That Is that is the revisionist history impulse that everybody has to. It's so tempting, it's so seductive to say, oh, there's actually the story behind the story, the Gnostic truth behind the seemingly flat fantasy, myth making of, you know, sentimentalist hogwash about America. In fact, we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles and that this should be a Christian nation. Why does he want America to be a Christian nation? Because then Israel can be a Jewish nation. And no one can say nay about the idea that Israel, which has had a very controversial path over the last 30 years, trying to claim that constitutionally and legally that it is a Jewish state, which it is not defined as in its own laws, it is not defined as a Jewish state. So the idea is if you wrote a constitution, you would write a constitution that would define Israel as a Jewish state, which is again, one of his great intellectual projects. Now, I don't want to get really deep in the weeds here, but the complicated part about this is that Judaism is unique among all thought traditions. It's obviously not a thought tradition, it's a religion, it's a faith. But in that it is particularist and universalist at the same time. There is nothing like it. So it's particularist because God promised, promised the Hebrews a land and it was going to have this shape and form and that they would build and that they should live according to laws that he laid out for them and that are not necessary for people who are not them to live by, but that those laws involve an understanding of humankind in which all men are created equal. So the idea of human equality as we understand it is a biblical idea. It comes from come only from Jewish thought. But its most powerful expression over the last 3000 years is Jewish thought. So even though you get a state in which you can live according to Jewish law as laid out in the Torah and then by the Talmud, but you also have the tradition that grants the world the idea that all men are created equal and that we are all made in God's image. So saying that, you know, what would be really great is to convince Americans that America is a blood and soil nation, taking that part of Judaism and then denying the universalism of Judaism, which is the one part of Judaism that actually applies to people outside our faith. You know, you don't have to keep kosher. If you're listening to me and you're not Jewish, but we're supposed to keep kosher. You know, you don't have to keep the Sabbath from Friday night to 25 hours into Saturday night. But you know, you don't have to do that. We are obliged to do that according to God. But you don't have to do that. But you know what? We're all equal. We're all made in God's image, including non Jews. So which part of that tradition do you actually want Jews to espouse when they are talking about the gifts, when they're talking about our faith related to the 99.9% of people on the planet that do not espouse our faith? I think you want to go with the liberty stuff just as a practical self defense measure. You know, I mean, and so Yoram's game is a, and I think in the end, Jamie, you call him a moron and you call him a moron even though he's a very brilliant guy because he has now ended up walking himself into this like bramble that he can't extricate himself from in which by the nature of the philosophy or the ideas that he is espousing, he has to defend the world's worst or America's worst anti Semites against Jews who are spending their lives defending the Jewish people against anti Semitism. It's an astounding twist. And maybe I don't want to make.

Abe Greenwald (36:29)

Too much of it.

John Podhoretz (36:30)

Yoram is not a major figure in the world, but it is. You can see how all of this disruption of the last three years or two and a half years since October 7th, the kind of intellectual poison that is introduced to the bloodstream. So why don't we talk about Carrie Prejean Bowler.

Seth Mandel (36:51)

I was going to just push back on your claim that he's not a major figure, he's not a well known name. But what he does is quite despicable because he provides intellectual cover to, to some very well known people who can point him and say, look, even this Jewish guy's on our side of this. You know, like you don't listen to the Jews who are complaining about anti Semitism. We've got Yoram to remind us that actually we, what we're doing is, is just so. I think he's really pernicious as an, as an intellectual.

Christine Rosen (37:17)

As I say that, I say that in the piece. He's basically the right wing version of the left wing Jew who makes excuses and apologizes for their anti Semitic comrades.

Abe Greenwald (37:28)

Right?

Christine Rosen (37:28)

There aren't that many of them, but Yoram I think now is really the most prominent among them. I compare him in my piece. I compare him to Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf from the Plot Against America, who you might remember Philip Roth novel who basically is like, he becomes the rabbinical advisor to Charles Lindbergh, President Charles Lindbergh.

Jamie Kirchik (37:49)

I just want to point out one sharp irony in what he's doing and what he's done here, which is that what do his friends Candace and Tucker say about American Jews and Zionists? That we don't care about America, we only care about Israel. That's what they say about Ben Shapiro. That's what they say about everyone. Isn't Yoram's project here a announcement that he couldn't care less what happens to America? Let it go, let it, let it fall into the hands of these anti Americans who cares about the Diaspora Jews too, as long as this secures a Jewish Israel?

John Podhoretz (38:37)

Well, what I've described as his project is not something that he acknowledges as his project. So he is like a fair enough stumblebum Straussian, right? He is like a. He's got an esoteric project and an exoteric project meaning. Leo Strauss, the philosopher, claimed that great philosophy is written on two levels. That philosophers, since the killing of Socrates understood that if they revealed their true intent or their true ideas in a world in which the world was governed by monarchs and tyrants and people who. And churches and all of that, that they would be killed. So that these books are written in lapidary fashion in which there is a narrow and thin reading that you can do of them, or you can dig in the way the Talmud digs into the Bible and you can find the true meaning. And so Yoram has a Straussian project, which is, I'm saying what he wants is to secure intellectual support in America and the west for the annexation of the west bank and the creation of what people call Greater Israel. But that's not what he says he's doing. What he says he's doing is understanding nationalism and trying to make a bond between Israel and the rest of the conservative world by saying we're nationalists and you're nationalists, we're this and you're this, we're all the same. But in fact that is disingenuous because obviously we know that right wing European nationalism is the thing that nearly wiped the Jews off the planet. And therefore we really shouldn't be all that supportive of the idea of the revival of blood and soil European nationalism. It's not quite. It's almost not living memory anymore, but it still counts as living memory. Murdered 6 million people. Like that's not a good path for us to go on. So you need to make up a Way to go down this road. So I should say it's not like he says, this is why I'm doing it. I'm telling you, it's why he's doing it. And I'm right, because I've talked to him about it, and I talked to him about it standing on the west bank at his house in 1996 or 1997. So I know that that's what he wants. So I'm happy to tell you 30 years later that I assume that his project has not changed, but I can just. That's where we are. And. Yeah. And then. So you have Kevin Roberts. Oh, the other great point you make, Jamie, is that he was like, this is all gonna end. You know, there's momentary. It's a momentary, momentary spasm of concern about what's going on at the Heritage Foundation. Everything.

Christine Rosen (41:24)

Heritage is gonna fix this. Heritage is gonna fix this. I know these people. They're good people.

John Podhoretz (41:28)

Yeah.

Christine Rosen (41:29)

And then last I checked, 60 people have left over.

John Podhoretz (41:32)

60 heritage. And I believe two thirds of the board has resigned.

Christine Rosen (41:37)

Yeah. Right.

John Podhoretz (41:38)

So, I mean, Roberts is.

Noah Rothman (41:40)

They have. They have. Mostly they've. They've gone to, like, this Mike Pence project as, like, the Polish government in exile.

John Podhoretz (41:49)

Right.

Noah Rothman (41:50)

Like, they're going to return when, you know, Kevin Roberts is dislodged. And.

John Podhoretz (41:55)

Yes, yes. Well, Kevin Roberts and Mike Howell and a couple of other people are in the bunker, shall we say, are remaining in the bunker. So, anyway, that's Jamie Kirchik's, the chutzpah Yoram Hazoni, available right now. First thing that is available from the March issue on our vertical on the right side of the Commentary homepage. So go there, read Jamie's piece and be enlightened. As we read it, Bibi Netanyahu will likely have met or will be meeting with Marco Rubio. Bibi has come to Washington clearly, to have some. To try to figure out what is going to happen with the United States and Iran. And he's right to have come here in concern because there's been this bizarre morph over the last six weeks of relating to Iran. Right. So he said, don't kill the protesters. Kill the protesters. You're, you know, protesters have heart. Don't give up. Help is on the way. Don't kill protesters. Now we're going to make a deal on nuclear materials and ballistic missiles. So we've gone from a. An impulse to try to help topple the regime, which was toppling, to strengthening the regime in some fashion by weaving it into an international. Into A treaty deal with us that might be more favorable to our treaty interest than the 2015 deal, but it's nonetheless us saying, well, you know, these are people that we can make a deal with as opposed to people who like, try to say, assassinate Donald Trump, which was one of the last things I heard about them was they tried to take Trump out.

Noah Rothman (44:00)

Well, even simpler than all that is the fact that Iran's leaders say, no, we won't do these things that you're asking us to do.

John Podhoretz (44:09)

Right.

Noah Rothman (44:09)

I mean, when you read about this, you read news stories. One story says Donald Trump tells Bibi Netanyahu, we want a good deal, you know, we'll only accept a good deal. We think, you know, it's possible, whatever. And then the next story you read has Iran's, you know, foreign minister saying, well, or president even saying, well, we're obviously not going to stop with our ballistic missile program and we're obviously not going to give up nuclear enrichment. So that's the whole entire, that's literally the whole ball game. That's not even, that's not even an exaggeration. That's the only things that we have left to talk about are the ballistic missiles and nuclear enrichment. There's literally nothing else to do. And so, you know, that's what's confusing about it is that maybe, you know, maybe they are having behind, you know, behind the scenes talks in smoke filled back rooms or whatever that are progressing in some way. But what the public sees is the Iranians laughing at, you know, America's gullibility. Essentially the Iranians are, you know, kind of poking us in public. That's really, that's a really bad look too. And it's a really bad look for, and it's, and it's, it's a, it's an ominous note on which to start the negotiations when the Iranians feel like they have this free hand to kind of troll us in public, when we all know that they're not kidding about their refusal, that if this is not really a negotiation tactic, they will not give up these things in the end anyway. And they're sort of like Babe Ruth pointing at the, at the outfield wall, saying it. From the beginning it looked, the whole thing looks bad too.

Seth Mandel (45:58)

Well, you also have the vice president who's traveling. Where is he? Armenia, Azerbaijan. He sent out, he, he said yesterday, I think it was, if the Iranian people want to overthrow the regime, that's up to the Iranian people. What we're focused now is the fact that Iran can have a nuclear Weapon. There's a lot of messaging in that statement, and it goes entirely against what Donald Trump was saying just a few weeks ago about support for the people who were trying to topple the regime. And we do know that the regime is still executing people who were part of those protests, which, of course, was the sort of strange red line that Trump drew. So I. Seth's absolutely right that they're. They're really poking the bear to see if there's any. Going to be any pushback there. But within the administration, you have a lot of mixed messaging. And I know Witkoff and Kushner met with Netanyahu last night, and then, you know, obviously Bibi's going to meet with Trump later this morning, but he's got to be wondering where. I mean, I assume he's here to figure out what's happening with this administration's plan going forward. Trump the other day talked about sending another carrier group. So that's a lot of different messages coming out of the same administration we've talked about. That kind of confusion before is not necessarily being a strategy so much as being a lack of decision making going forward.

John Podhoretz (47:15)

Where I'm puzzled is that this entire thing is of Trump's making. I mean, granted, look, horrible things. You know, the Iranian people rose up in the last week of December. The rial was worth nothing. You know, it's like Nazi. It's like Weimar Germany, where, you know, it's like a billion rials to the dollar. Suddenly, you know, the money, their money is worth nothing. The security forces seemed a little wobbly. And, of course, the regime had been humiliated by Israel in the United States in Operation Midnight Hammer, you know, when. And so was still, you know, reeling from that experience. And so there were these uprisings that were of a scale, size and geographical nature that we had not seen before. They were rising up to do something about the regime. The regime faced choice, which was, does it essentially allow itself to collapse or does it do the most ruthless possible thing to crush the opposition? And we were watching while it was happening. So what happened? Trump said, don't. Don't do it. Don't kill them. We're gonna. We're gonna help. You did. I was a little jaw dropped by that when it happened, because it seemed like a very dangerous and provocative thing to do based on American historical experience, which is when these things happen in places like China or Hungary or something like that. Over the course of, you know, the post war period, the idea that America was going to come riding to the rescue had had horrible Ancillary consequences for the people who were rising up against their tyrant tyrants and tormentors, which is that they thought that the cavalry was going to come over the hill, and in fact, it wasn't. And one thing that we learned was, don't make promises to brave people who are up against unbelievably savage forces that you can't keep, because then they just become like they're just cannon fodder. And Trump did exact. Trump, it now appears, did exactly that. He raised the possibility of this. He then is now negotiating with himself. He's been negotiating with himself for a month. The problem, John, the Iranians didn't ask to come to the table. We asked the Iranians to come to the table because Trump is trying to get himself out of the promise that he made to topple the regime. But who told him to make the promise to topple the regime? Just. Just to be clear, we're as interventionist in the idea of regime change as anybody left on earth is. We weren't calling on him to topple the regime. I mean, I would be thrilled if he decided unilaterally to topple the regime, but, like, I. I didn't think that was within sort of like the ambit of what America would be able to do in January of 2026. That's a big lift when other stuff is going on.

Jamie Kirchik (50:39)

John, I. There's a problem here, to my mind, is that Trump doesn't have an Iran policy. He has a Russia policy. I think it's bad policy, which is to try forever to lure Putin into peace and to try to pressure Zelensky into accepting a bad deal. Obviously, the administration had a Venezuela policy, which was to build up this military force, extract Maduro, and deal with the second in command from the US There is no Iran policy. His one Iran policy was, they can't get a nuclear weapon. There was Operation Midnight Hammer, and that was it. Now he started vamping, you know, improvising, and this is what has led him into this trap of his own making.

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John Podhoretz (53:41)

So I don't know what's going to happen. The Ukraine policy you mentioned, which is, it's too detailed to get into now. But I mean we are, we are doing bad stuff on all on, on three fronts as far as I can tell, you know, and thus kind of muddying the, muddying the record of the administration's foreign policy successes in its first year. So having destroyed the Iranian, having done what we did in Operation Midnight Hammer either like fatally compromised the Iranian nuclear program without taking out all the, without obviously assembling ballistic missiles is a different thing. You can't really take that out unless you do something to interdict the supply chain of the, you know, missiles that then are assembled inside Iran. So that was a great trial. And now we seem to be pushing Ukraine into elections while the Russians are using America's clear determination to figure out a way to cut off the Ukrainian regime, to torture the, the Ukrainian people in entirely new ways. You know, like making their, making their lives in winter just absolutely beyond intolerable. Thus, I mean, why we, I know that Trump and you know, like people like Vance think that or Tucker thinks that, you know, Zelensky is a cockroach. But like what did the 45 million people in Ukraine do to deserve the America turning a blind eye to these absolutely horrific policies aiming at civilian targets which we supposedly don't think is cricket.

Abe Greenwald (55:39)

Right.

John Podhoretz (55:40)

So we're going there. So we're trying to create a political crisis inside Ukraine for Zelenskyy. And now there seems to be. The effort is to move on to phase two of the 20 point Trump.

Abe Greenwald (55:54)

Plan for Israel and Gaza.

John Podhoretz (55:57)

That seems to be about trying to figure out a way to get Hamas to agree to move on to phase two by letting them keep small arms. Why are we negotiating with Hamas? What I don't understand. Hamas is defeated. Why are we negotiating with Hamas? It's like, why are we negotiating with the Iranians whom we crushed six months ago? This is when you say we don't have an Iran policy. Trump's bizarre fetishization of deal points is weirdly Obama. Like, it's almost like, let's sit it. Or like, you know, better to jaw jaw than war. War. Whatever, whatever it is. Like, can anyone. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe this is all temporizing because better stuff is going to happen and they're just trying to get all the forces sort of lined up for knocking over the Iranian regime, which is like, I mean, he love.

Noah Rothman (57:07)

He loves to, he loves the idea that he pushed somebody into a corner and they had to agree to a deal. That's, that's the, that's when you merge the Trump art of the deal with, you know, Trump, the tough guy. That's, that's like all the, all the personality characteristics that he wants people to think he has can be combined into this, you know, one like Voltron, Donald Trump, if you can get them to not only, you know, beat them up, but then get them to agree to a deal that's favorable to, you know, Trump's side. That's, that's everything in the world. But, you know, this is not, this is not possible in the current circumstances in either of the ones that we're talking about. There, there is no deal on offer or will be on offer with Iran. There's no deal to be had with Iran. This just has to be understood when it comes to Hamas. I mean, there is a deal if he wants it, because Hamas will sign a deal that says we get to keep AK47. But, you know, that's not what usually, that's not usually what people think of when they think of small arms. Like, I'm, you know, am I letting the guy keep, you know, a cricket pistol so, you know, in case of a home invasion, mom actually letting an internationally funded militia that just held Americans hostage for two years keep a fleet of AK47s or whatever. Like, this is, this is not, none of this is very convincing. But also Hamas Must be salivating over all of this. And I don't really know why you would drive them into the corner and then let them out of the corner. So unless Trump has some sort of genius move that he's got planned, he's. He's doing the first half of what he thinks, you know, what he wants. Push them into a corner. But the. Make them agree to a bad deal is, you know, for them is not going to happen in either case.

Jamie Kirchik (59:07)

But look, just as he went out of his way to say to the Iranian protesters, keep protesting. Help is on the way, he went out of his way to say, if Hamas doesn't disarm the easy way, we'll do it, or Israel will do it the hard way. We will.

John Podhoretz (59:28)

We'll.

Jamie Kirchik (59:29)

We'll unleash hell on them, whatever the hell is. And now in both cases, here, here we are.

John Podhoretz (59:36)

Well, look, Israel, I mean, reports this morning are that Israel is planning or is, you know, letting it known that it may launch a major military strike on, on Hamas this week because of activity in and around tunnels the same week that they reopened very restrictively, but reopened the crossing between Rajah and Egypt. So Israel isn't sitting on its tush in regards to this. And of course, there's also the political matter of this coming election that I mentioned earlier that Bibi needs. Bibi's great calling card and political strength is his strength, projection of strength and the idea that he's the person, ultimately, that's the only one you can trust to deal with Israel's security. And he is not going to surrender that unless, you know, on the altar of Trump's temporizing, unless there's a really good reason to do that, like, this is his political future survival at stake. So I don't think we have any idea what's going on here in relation to that. All we know is that the word deal is poison. I mean, his, you know, he wrote the book, right, that made big bestseller, the Art of the Deal. So he loves the word deal. Everything is a deal. This is a deal. That's a deal. Well, you can't deal with genocidal maniacs, and you can't deal with a regime that not only wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, but will literally take its security forces and have them slaughter 30 to 40,000 people in 48 hours inside their own country. Like, that's not. Like, those aren't people you can deal with. Those are only people you can either isolate or you can say are a general threat to everybody. And need to be taken out, because the message that they send to the world that this is acceptable is too dangerous for us to allow to survive.

Noah Rothman (61:46)

Well, we should note the connection between the two of them, the Iran and Gaza, the Hamas and Iran connection, because if both of them are going to be allowed out of the corner or back up off the mat. Right. Israel. What Israel fears is, you know, the. Like. Like the Michael Jackson music video for Thriller. Like, you know, the. The climbing out of these zombies, climbing out of the earth and stalking around again is this. This idea of a regional battlefield that tries to encircle Israel in, you know, the Ring of Fire, as they called it. But the other day, Israel busted a terror cell in the west bank that had connections to both Hezbollah and Hamas. So you have to remember, from Israel's perspective, they're still fighting Hezbollah and Hamas, even within areas that are not run by Hezbollah or Hamas, that. That Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran's proxies, until they're dead, they're a regional problem. And they're a problem that keeps sneaking closer to Israel and will always keep trying to sneak closer to Israel. And they're still battling it right there on the home front. So they don't see it as, you know, the Iranians far away are on their knees. They see it as, hey, we just busted a Hamas, you know, Hezbollah, you know, connected terror cell in the West Bank.

Seth Mandel (63:12)

Well, and this is also where I think his approach, the deal making, the sort of boardroom. I'm dominating the boardroom at every meeting sort of approach. This is why it falters so severely in foreign policy, which is much more complicated, as many more moving parts. And I was reminded again of the whole. Remember, the Board of Peace was supposed to resolve a lot of these issues. It just became another performative thing that he's done, demanding money from all these countries, denying entry to Canada because he got offended and very personal. The executive committee is Witkoff and Kushner, and he's gonna just use it to do what he want, whatever it is he wants to do. But he likes that. He. He. And I think in his mind, Trump believes I'm doing something. I have the Board of Peace now. We'll get it done. And it's like a board meeting, and then he leaves the board meeting and it's out of his mind, and he's moved on to the next thing, and it's incoherent overall. And I think that's the frustration we're saying. It's not that sometimes the right decision ends up getting made, and we and the United States exerts its power in a way that's better for the world. That does sometimes happen. Operation Midnight Hammer is a perfect example. But it's the overall incoherence which puts a our enemies and our allies on edge. And I think it's probably something that Netanyahu is going to want to confirm on a few specific points when he's in the White House later today.

John Podhoretz (64:29)

Can I just conclude today's podcast by noting that Today is the 40th anniversary of one of the greatest moments in human history, and I say that guardedly. Symbolic moments in human history. Forty years ago today, Anatoly Shachuransky, then now known as Natan Sharansky, was released from his captivity in the Soviet Union and flown to Berlin, where. Where he was basically freed on the tarmac at this air base in Berlin. And the Soviet guards who had flown him said, okay, what you're going to do is you're going to get out of the plane and walk straight onto the next plane, which is going to fly you out of Berlin. Get out of the plane. And Sharansky, who is the greatest human being that I've ever met, known, got out of the plane, and then he walked serpentine from the Soviet craft to the plane across the tarmac because they told him to walk straight. And it was the last thing that a Soviet official was ever going to say to him. And he had spent nine years in jail, many years in solitary confinement, building memory palaces and playing chess against himself in his head not to go crazy, because he would not negotiate over the price of his soul with this regime for the inestimable crime of wanting to depart the Soviet Union, where he was a prisoner, and move to Israel, where he could be a free man. And the last thing that he did was walk serpentine. Jamie, you're Mike's. Jamie, your mic is off.

Jamie Kirchik (66:32)

Sorry.

Christine Rosen (66:33)

Not to be a pedant.

John Podhoretz (66:34)

Yes.

Christine Rosen (66:34)

It wasn't on the tar. It wasn't on the tarmac in Berlin. It was at the Glenicke Bridge.

John Podhoretz (66:39)

Oh, excuse me.

Christine Rosen (66:40)

That connected East Berlin to West Berlin. It's the famous Bridge of Spies. The Bridge of Spies. The Bridge of Spies.

John Podhoretz (66:45)

The Bridge of Spies. That's right. So I'm really sorry. Anyway, I don't know where.

Christine Rosen (66:50)

Former Berlin resident.

John Podhoretz (66:51)

Right. So anyway, this was the last moment of his. This was the moment at which he became free. And the first message that he wanted to send was, as a free man, you had no power over me. As it turned out, to begin with, I would not allow you to break me. And I am now going to make this joyous trip on foot by myself to my freedom. This is a story that he tells in his absolutely wonderful memoir, fear no Evil, which we could make today's recommendation, as we have made it the recommendation before and just 40 years ago, and that maybe today Trump could be infused with a little Sharansky indomitability and put the taco down and be the leader and the man that he is at his best. So, Jamie Kirchuk, thank you for joining everybody again. Jamie Kirchuk, new Washington Commentary columnist, read his piece the Chutzpah. Yoram Hazoni, read Christine Rosen's piece on the evil of empathy and everything else in the March issue as it appears today and tomorrow on the commentary.org website. And for Christine, Seth and Abe, I'm John Pot. Words keep the candle burning.

Abe Greenwald (68:19)

Sam.