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- [00:00]
Eli Lake
Foreign. Expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for
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John Podhoretz
the best welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, May 15, 2026. I'm Jon Pothorts, the editor of Commentary magazine. Sometime today, the contents of our June issue will be available for your perusal@comMENTARY.org you can't read all of it unless you subscribe, so it's time to subscribe. Though I will remark that we're gonna be offering a special subscription deal next week, so you could also wait until next week. But I'll just tell you a little bit about the glories inside this issue, which is led by a remarkable piece by a pretty remarkable writer, a British historian who teaches in Japan. His name is Mike Burke. He's written a couple of things for us before, but this is it's called the Covenant and the Wooden Box, and it is about Britain's betrayal of its Jews and the system that that has led to this betrayal and how it reflects the larger decline of England and Britain as a civilization. I am very proud of this very original piece. Other remarkable and unusual pieces in this issue include new contributor Zohar Atkins, who has written a piece about martyrdom and about how the difference between pretty much between Jewish martyrdom, Christian martyrdom and Islamic martyrdom or modern political martyrdom, which is to say that the martyr. Of antiquity, martyrs that we celebrate and that we remember forever, their deaths are about their deaths. And the modern political martyr, of course, is using his own death as a means to kill as many other people as possible, how this happens, how martyrdom was perverted in this way. Very unusual piece, very original, and as I say, I'm very, very proud of it. And many other things. Adam White on Justice Scalia, Jay Lefkowitz on Sarah Isger's book on the Supreme Court, Rick Marin Talking about Jay McInerney, the author of Bright Lights, Big City, his novel 40 years after the release of that legendary book, centered pretty much in the same place and in the same way and just about how different the world has become in a world after Bolivian marching powder. So that's some of the highlights of that issue available later today@comMENTARY.org Let me introduce our abbreviated panel. Today we got, of course, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
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John Podhoretz
And Commentary contributing editor, host of the Breaking History podcast, columnist for the Free Press, Eli Lake. Hi, Eli.
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Eli Lake
Hi, John.
- [03:35]
John Podhoretz
So I don't quite know what to talk about today because there's a lot of little bits of things. I did note that the summit with XI is over and that Trump's final tweet from the summit involved his envy for the really wonderful ballroom that Xi has at his disposal and how this just double time reflects the importance of his ballroom, which we now have a inaugural date of, apparently of September 2028. So he really, really wants to get a couple of events on in that ballroom before he. Before he leaves office. That would seem to suggest that this summit did not produce much of note, I believe, which is probably all to the good, because, I don't know, whenever in my life history, whenever they came out of a summit and they announced that they had achieved many things, I didn't like any of the things that they achieved. So this might therefore be a wildly successful summit from my perspective, since I don't think this is the right way to get deliverables or to conduct. It's fine to have face to face meetings and create trust and relationships between people, even of differing ideological tendencies and all of that, but that's where I am. Eli, where are you?
- [05:04]
Eli Lake
I could tell you, John, I wrote many, many years ago when I was a State Department correspondent in covering Madeleine Albright in her plane when we went to China. Or maybe it might have been Colin Powell, but when I was there, I wrote something for UPI at the time about the Great hall of the People, and I found it underwhelming. I mean, it's Enorm, but it's Qinzi. Anyway, so make of that.
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John Podhoretz
So you're saying it's not so great?
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Eli Lake
No, I just found it to be like, you know, whoa, this is supposed to be like the, you know, I mean, when you're in Beijing, you do feel like you're in the center of the universe. So I should say it feels like you're in an imperial city, but the actual Great hall of the People, I remember thinking, this is it. It was kind of like chintzy materials. I don't know. I mean, I just did not. I was not blown away, like, I might be if I was in, say, the refurbished Mar a Lago or something.
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Abe Greenwald
I think in terms of the summit itself, though, I think Trump just loves these trips. He loves the fanfare that greets him when he lands on exotic soil, and he loves to tout his friendship with foreign leaders. For him, it's almost like one of the perks of the job. Like, you know, as you were kind of saying yesterday, John, I think it was yesterday. In a way. This is a Sort of break from the. From the war, and he's got to go back to the war. And this is like, you know, for him, it was a. It was a. It's a sort of. It's a pause that he clearly enjoys. I mean, he loves going through the Middle East. He loves this. So to me, it was mostly about sort of watching Trump get along with people as an event in itself, which I do think there is this enduring danger in that Trump seems to think that that translates into political leverage or diplomatic leverage, and I think he's mistaken about that in a general sense.
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Eli Lake
Well,
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John Podhoretz
summits used to be one of the ways that presidents and foreign leaders could dominate the news for a week because they were not just photo ops, but were working groups broke out, and they have lower level members of the delegation talking to lower level members of the other delegation on matters like trade or this or that and come out with different kinds of things. And there was usually some major individual issue that was under discussion, like the SALT Treaty, the START Treaty, the this, the that. Of course, most famously was the moment in 1985, I think, or in 86 at Reykjavik where Ronald Reagan said to Mikhail Gorbachev, why don't we just get rid of all nuclear weapons? Why don't we just get rid of them? Just let's agree to get rid of them? A very interesting gamble moment that nonetheless seemed very weird and frightening at the time in some ways to those who worried about the aggressive intent of the Soviet Union. But I think clearly was a statement not only of Reagan's own hatred of nuclear weaponry and his belief that we needed to move beyond mutual assured destruction and the idea that the only way to preserve safety on earth was to threaten the annihilation of the earth, but also maybe an understanding on his part that we had already won the Cold War, even though Gorbachev didn't know it yet, and that basically they were on the way out and that this was a kind of magnanimous gesture, not a supplicatory gesture, that we could say we could get rid of all our nuclear weapons because you're. We don't need them anymore. To, To. To. To make sure that you're second best or that you're gonna fall to pieces. I don't know. This doesn't seem to have had a particular agenda. And that's where it is. Just Trump meeting xi, you know, maybe.
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Eli Lake
Well, there is a. There is a parallel.
- [09:48]
John Podhoretz
Okay.
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Eli Lake
I think, yeah. In the 1980s, when Reagan is winning the Cold War, the consensus position among the foreign policy Establishment, the cultural elites, even people who wrote science fiction, was that the Soviet Union was going to be around forever and that if anything was imperiled, it was the American experiment. This was a de facto assumption. The reason why the anti nuclear movement, the no nukes movement, peaks in the 1980s is precisely because of this assumption that there's no chance that there would no longer be a Soviet Union. And in 2026, the Foreign Policy establishment, the cultural elite, the sort of sense in the air is that America is incapable of winning a war, that Iran is winning preposterous proclamations like that of people like Robert Pape, but also the New York Times and these stories that you talked about this week on the show, that Iran is going to be coming out as a potentially fourth major world power, that Iran has won. And yesterday we had that, you know, the appearance of Brad Cooper before, I think it was the Senate or the House Armed Services Committee, where he goes through all of the military damage that has done. And it turns out that some of the assessments that were shared about the missile stocks, you know, at least that's not what, you know, you would think, you know, that the commander of CENTCOM would, Would know. It's his. He's, he's conducting the war. He's, he's commanding a lot of them.
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John Podhoretz
I mean, Cooper went before that, but went before the, you know, the Congress and in sworn testimony, you know, said in sworn testimony that we had destroyed 90% of the missile and drone capacity of Iraq, thus completely contradicting the New York Times story.
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Eli Lake
Yeah.
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John Podhoretz
And he's. Not only do we have every reason to trust his veracity, but that's sworn testimony. Like, he's, you know, he could be like, yeah, he could, he could be convicted for perjury, you know.
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Eli Lake
Right. But I mean, just to get back when Ronald Reagan had that famous quip, what are you gonna do with the Cold War? What are you. We win, they lose. And I'm sure we all remember it's a famous Reagan story, but that was seen, I mean, today we listen to that and we're like, oh, sure. But at the time, that was seen as evidence that he was. I mean, remember all these stories? I mean, you were, you're older than me, but I was, I was, you know, like an adolescent. But I mean, in the 80s, it was normal to talk about President Reagan as if he was a kind of an apocalyptic personality that believed in the end times and would be fine with a nuclear war. And like, there was all this stuff and it was all predicated on the assumption that there's nothing you could do about the evil empire. And some ways we're dealing with it. When we look at this Iran conflict, it was like there's just this view that there's nothing you can do about it. You can take out their leadership, you can take out their weaponry and they're not going anywhere because we stink and they're fine.
- [13:17]
John Podhoretz
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Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. I think part of it is that we look at the control that these regimes have over their own people, and we sort of project that sort of outward from them and almost take on a sense of being their subjects as well. When in reality, I think when you have any sort of authoritarian regime, it tends to sort of set a timer on the life of that regime because centralized control and other aspects of authoritarianism create tremendous inefficiencies that cannot be managed in the long run.
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Eli Lake
Well, I would slightly tweak that thesis because there was a kind of optimism that comes after the victory in the Cold War, best expressed by Francis Fukuyama's End of History. The thesis and the idea that There is no competition to free market, democratic forms of government. And that eventually, if we just include China and Russia into the global order and we trade with them, then eventually we'll create a middle class, and eventually they will reform and they will organize their societies like us. And that was wrong for now, but it doesn't mean it's wrong by 2075. I mean, it just means that it did not happen on the timeline that many people believed it would have happened. And now it has become replaced in some ways with this pessimism that this system is going to be lasting forever. But in fact, the same principles that people generally, I think we, the three of us, believe that human beings, de facto kind of setting, is that they would like to live in freedom, and that the harder you press down and you deprive people of their freedom, the more eventually they're going to resent and it will come up in surprising ways. And the other thing we know, based on the sort of Soviet model, is that these regimes look imposing and permanent right up until the moment that they collapse. Because I would say in 86, you still thought, you know, Gorbachev was just starting perestroika. You didn't know that it was gonna end the way that it ended. I mean, who would have predicted in 86 that three years later the Berlin Wall would come down and Soviets would be returning from Eastern Europe? Nobody would. So we just have to accept that there's.
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Abe Greenwald
John, you're muted.
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Eli Lake
Oh, yeah, no, no, we just.
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John Podhoretz
I was just gonna say, my friend Peter Robinson famously wrote that Reagan tear down this wall speech in 1987. Reagan delivered it in Berlin in 1987. Did he think that the Berlin Wall would fall in two years? No. Did anybody think the Berlin Wall would basically be hacked to death, literally, by hundreds of thousands of people on either side who would take pickaxes to it in November, December of 1989? Of course not. The whole point, rhetorically, was that it was fanciful, that it was that you were making this, like, world historical ask to tear down this wall. And in fact, it wasn't Gorbachev who tore down the wall. It was forces well outside of Gorbachev. We're talking about this, by the way, the day after. We now have every indication that one of the world's most enduring communist regimes is about to collapse. Got news yesterday that the CIA director, John Ratcliffe took a trip to Cuba, met with the Cuba. The Cubans have announced that they. They have no oil. They have no oil because the Maduro regime no longer exists. And. And in Venezuela, and they were supplying Cuba, it's both its closest ally. And it's sort of like the father of its revolution, you know, sort of like giving your grandfather, you know, money, you know, was giving it oil. We stopped that upon the, you know, upon the end of the Maduro regime. And it took. When was Maduro? Five months ago, Seven months ago. I can't even remember when.
- [22:42]
Eli Lake
Beginning of January.
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John Podhoretz
Beginning of January. So five months and Cuba's done. Literally. Think about it. I mean, they basically are suing for peace. And now we're talking about essentially Maduroing Raul Castro, the brother of Fidel, who is the nominal head of government at the age of 94. We're looking to secure an indictment on grounds that he participated in events that led to the murder of Americans. Which means that we're gonna Maduro him. We're gonna fly into Havana and arrest him. Only this time, I don't think we need to use the discombobulator. They're just gonna let us know.
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Eli Lake
Will he survive the flight?
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John Podhoretz
I don't know. 94 year old.
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Eli Lake
It's very hard to fly. Yeah, I mean, like a boat.
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John Podhoretz
It's 90 miles to Miami, remember.
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Eli Lake
Right. We should take a moment because we. This is the commentary podcast, so we should take a moment to just point out that a little over 10 years ago, 15, not quite 15 years ago, Ben Rhodes was the Obama administration's envoy to the Castro regime. And that the assumption of the Obamas and benroads. And he's incredibly proud of this in his first memoir. And it's a bit of an irony, right, that then he goes on to write all these books about the problem of authoritarianism when he is responsible for trying to normalize relationships. Was one of the most ghastly authoritarian regimes in the world. But the assumption was that, yes, the Cuban system will be around forever and that there's nothing we can do about it. And, you know, I'm hoping change. And here we're gonna. We're gonna fix it. I much prefer.
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Abe Greenwald
And we should stop punishing it.
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Eli Lake
We should stop punishing. I much prefer the Radcliffe style of diplomacy, which I imagine is a bit of a godfather offer.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Eli Lake
And so, you know, that's the other thing. And, you know, we've talked about this before, but the irony is, is that the rap on Trump was that he didn't believe in kind of traditional American values when it came to foreign policy, that he was transactional and would. Would employ kind of uber realism. Was actually kind of fond of authoritarians. There was some truth to that. But at the same time, it's under Trump that we're actually seeing the potential in Venezuela and now Cuba and hopefully Iran getting rid of three ghastly illiberal authoritarian regimes. And there is a potential for, you know, on the 250th anniversary of our great republic, to plant the seeds of representative democracy. Wonderful.
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Abe Greenwald
I think, you know, I just want to point out on this Trump issue, it's so interesting because I think part of what happened is that the idea
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John Podhoretz
of
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Abe Greenwald
toppling authoritarian regimes, or not even toppling, or just sort of being opposed to authoritarian regimes and America being on the side of liberty, that became so over identified with neoconservatism, when in fact it was a generational outlook about the United States and its place in the world. And Trump doesn't have to be a neocon. No one has to be a neocon to have sort of grown up and lived their life, sort of marinated in that sense of the world. And he retains that sense of things. He doesn't articulate it particularly well, if at all. But I mean, it's still there in the mix of who he is and how he sees the United States.
- [26:30]
John Podhoretz
Right. As opposed to a Ben Rhodes, who. It's not just that Ben Rhodes doesn't thinks that Cuba will last forever and we should stop punishing it and all of that. He likes Cuba, or rather, let's put it this way, he thinks that alternate forms of government around the world that are not American and that have their own ways of being are just as legitimate as ours. It's Obama's line about how we think we're exceptional and Greeks think they're accept. Everybody thinks they're exceptional. There's nothing magical about American exceptionalism. This is just a national tendency. And what did Ben Rhodes stand for? He stood for make accommodations with. With Cuba, a country that has been one of the foremost violators of just conventional civil rights for three generations. And we have millions of Americans of Cuban descent who are here because they were saving themselves or their fathers or grandparents were saving themselves from living a life in shackles, who know all too well what it's like there. He wants to make a deal with them. He wanted to make a deal with Iran, again, one of the world's worst regimes, because we're not so great, really, when all is said and done. And Trump sometimes has echoed a sentiment like that. He did say on the super bowl with Bill O'Reilly in 2017, when asked about why he wasn't harsher on Putin, it's like, what are we so great look at our history. I think what's different here about Trump? And you're saying he marinated in a kind of understanding of freedom. Here's what might be the genius of Marco Rubio and Scott Besant and others without really knowing it, he has been presented deliverables or potential deliverables. He wants to do things and rack up scores. So Rubio says, let's squeeze Venezuela. So they do the naval blockade, the stuff around Venezuela. It all dovetails with the anti immigration stuff. And then somebody says, you know, we can run. This mission was literally drop into, into Caracas, pull him out. He's under, he's under indictment in the United States, a fugitive from justice. We'll go, we'll just, we'll go arrest him, yank him out like a tooth. And Trump's like, how do you do this? It's like, here's how we do it. And he's like, okay, go ahead. Similarly, the Israelis go to him and say in 2025, say to him, we got this whole plan deal with the Iranian nuclear thing. You know, like, let's soften them up and you can come in and deliver the final blow if things go well during the 12 Day War. And he's like, okay. And then he sent the bombers on the 37 hour mission to blow up Fordow and try to destroy the program. And similarly, the Israelis come to him after two months of the uprising in Tehran and elsewhere and say, there's a meeting on 28 February. We can decapitate the regime. Deliverables. These are things that he could do. The Cold War was, how do you play a long, long, long game? Holding the line that will finally, in the words of George Kennan's 1947 telegram that became the article that made containment the sources of Soviet conduct. If you can hold the the Soviets fast within their borders, their regime will begin to collapse under its own contradictions.
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Eli Lake
Right?
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John Podhoretz
But that's a long game. It took 42 years from the publication of that article till the wall fell. And Kennan himself lost faith in his own argument and became a believer in accommodationism. Trump isn't a long game player. But if he's marinated in the idea that it's good America wins and these commies lose, and then you say, hey, or Islamists or monstrous totalitarians, you go, hey, we got it. It's epic fury. It's midnight freedom. It's whatever the Venezuela operation was called. And now it's, you know what? We can Do. If we cut them off of their oil, if we cut Cuba off of their oil, this country, 66 years off our shores, one of the greatest burrs in the saddles of the American regime in history, they're just going to collapse like a house of cards. And that is literally what is happening. If I had said to you in 1990, you know, when I was growing up, Cuba was a major issue in the United States. I can't even tell you how central Cuba was in the United States. Cuba was to the left what the Palestinians or the Gazans or something are to the far left today. A unique cause of hope and martyrdom and all that, like central to them. And now it's like an all Sauron people go there to play poor tour. They go there to look, to have like a look at how poor people can be under communism before they, before the regime collapses and the developers go in and make it nice again. I mean, you know, so it's sort of an amazing set of circumstances. But the thing that made Trump different, and not just that he's willing to do it, but also lots of circumstances have come together to provide his people with the opportunity to say, we can take out the Venezuelan regime, we can take out the Cuban regime, and we can take out the regime in Tehran, and we can take out Hezbollah on Hamas.
- [33:00]
Matt Ebert
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- [33:34]
John Podhoretz
When you get momentum, you step on the gas. That's how you get separation from everybody else. I was at Harvard Law School. I was blah, blah, blah. I looked up, let me tell you something, there's kids in my neighborhood putting in sheetrock that are smarter than you. AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff. It is never going to disrupt physical blue collar trade skill. And the guy just looked at me
- [33:52]
Matt Ebert
and he said, it's bloody impossible.
- [33:54]
John Podhoretz
So I asked him this question. I said, it's impossible.
- [33:57]
Matt Ebert
Unless that's. Podcast with me, Matt ebert, watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [34:12]
Eli Lake
There's an ancillary point here. Too, which is that the critics, especially the new right critics like Tucker, are trying to make an argument that Trump has betrayed his campaign promise of ending endless wars and not getting us into endless wars, and that he has adopted the foreign policy of the Blob, which for them is the primacists or the neocons, plus the liberal internationalists. But that's just not true, because there were neocon flourishes to George W. Bush, like his second inaugural address and some of what he said about Operation Iraqi Freedom. That is true. And those were regime change, wars. But for the most part, when you're talking about Cuba, Iran, Bush, the Republican Party was mainly focused with, I mean, your late father accepted here, which made, I think, the case for military action. The view of, like, the focus of Republicans in the Obama years was sanctions. It was economic warfare, it was pressuring the regime. I know this because I have been covering the Iranian democracy movement now for like a quarter century, and nobody, except for Rick Santorum cared for the most part. There were a couple members of the House who, because they had Iranian American constituencies, you know, worried about this kind of thing. But for the most part, it was always focused on until fairly recently, you know, maximum pressure, sanctions and things like that. When you look at Cuba, what did the Bush administration do on Cuba? What. I mean, it was always about whether you had the embargo or not. Nobody was thinking beyond that. Was there something we could do to try to push these guys over? And even. And so the. So there's a little bit of a weird thing going on, which is that if Trump is to adopt his most ambitious moments, like when he says help is on the way to the Iranian protesters, that is not giving in to the Blob. That's actually a maverick move that none of his predecessors would even dare think about doing. And bombing Iran is a maverick move because nobody would have taken out Soleimani in the first term. So these are things, because we know we covered the Iraq war, John. I mean, you remember all this. There was a huge issue. Everybody knew where the IEDs were coming from. They were coming from Iran. Everybody knew that the Iranians were playing this disgusting game where they were supporting all these Shia militia groups and they had a kind of nod and wink policy with some of the Al Qaeda people that came through their territory. That was Iran became off limits, maybe for political reasons, maybe George W. In his heart, would have loved to have expanded the war, but he realized the market wouldn't bear it. The politics of it were too difficult. Whatever it was, what Trump is doing is not a return to the blob foreign policy that Tucker and I mean, ironically, Ben Rhodes likes to claim he's against. This is a new thing. He's doing something very different. I think it's important to point that out.
- [37:12]
Abe Greenwald
Excellent point. I just want to add to it a sort of little mini chapter there, which is that certainly after the Obama administration and the jcpoa, their Iranian nuclear deal, that they struck the most hawkish. Generally speaking, there were exceptions, and I didn't think this was a good idea, but it's a fact, nonetheless. The most hawkish voices in foreign policy started saying, we're not talking about bombing, we're talking about getting a better deal. This deal is terrible. We need a better deal. A better deal. Which I always thought was stupid, but nonetheless, that was the center of the discussion moving forward. That's not what Trump has done here.
- [38:03]
John Podhoretz
That was Bibi's. The famous speech that apparently has destroyed the American Jewish and America's Zionism and all of that. Bibi's speech before the Congress in 2015 that so angered Obama and meant that Bibi was lining up with the Republicans and Israel becomes a partisan issue. His whole speech was about the better deal. He was like, this is not a good deal, but let me lay out for you what you could do that would be a better deal. You're right. There was no. The person who said Bomb Iran was my. And John McCain, of course, sang Bomb Iran to the tune of a Beach Boy song. But that was Barbara Ann. Barbara Ann, right. But, yeah, that was my. My father's point in 2007, 2008, was, they're beginning to develop nuclear weaponry. Stop them at the start, the way the Israelis did in Iraq in 1981, and they won't start up again. So nip it in the bud. It was a preventative. It was a sort of prophylactic preventative measure. It wasn't like a world revolution. We were gonna invade Iran and take it over or whatever. And that's not even Trump's thing. I think the key thing here is this idea that if you're. It is a thing that you can do, and that is defined. When Trump announced the war, when Bush announced the war on terror in 2001, I think definitionally, as I see it now, he made an enormous mistake. He said, this is the war of many lifetimes. We're gonna be fighting it in the open, we're gonna be fighting it in secret. Some of it you'll see in public. Some of it you won't see at all. And that's how we're gonna do it. And we're gonna. It's like, what. What are you saying? Like, what do you mean?
- [40:03]
Eli Lake
Don't also go to the mall? Ending war and go to the mall.
- [40:08]
John Podhoretz
Right, But I mean. But I mean, what kind of a. I mean, he said, this is our mission, our moment. And essentially he was saying, this is the new Cold War, which, again. But if you had told Americans in 1946 that we were gonna be fighting a war against Soviet Union in. In public, in private, with proc. You know, this way and that way, developing new weapons systems with two proxy wars in which 100,000Americans would die and all of that, you think they would have signed up for it? They would have said that that can't be right. That's not the way to go. So if we've learned anything, and maybe Trump has learned this with his animal cunning, if you want to make change, have a very specific idea about what the change is and how to affect it and try to do it fast. And obviously, he's now fighting his own impulses because the Iran thing looked like it was going to be fast. And then Iran decided to play it straight of Hormuz hand, which is also interesting, because when you said, why didn't George W. Bush move on Iran when it was fighting basically was at war with us in Iraq. Iran was killing Americans in Iraq, therefore, act of war. We weren't doing anything to them. I think it was this idea that the world oil market, that the shock to the oil market from the world's fourth largest exporter of oil, this is the life'sblood of the West. And the ramifications were just too impossible.
- [41:49]
Eli Lake
Pre fracking revolution.
- [41:51]
John Podhoretz
And it was pre fracking, and it was pre. Yeah, so. And it was pre a lot of things. But he really did not think that. He thought basically that oil was, like, mad. It was like mutual assured destruction. Iran implicitly could act at will in Iraq because we were tied up with the Iraqis, but also because we could not take it to them without doing damage to the world economy, without doing terrible damage to the world economy. Trump had a different hand here. I mean, there's some damage and our gas prices are up and inflation is up. But I mean, before fracking, before the last 20 years would have been a catastrophe, we would have been in a catastrophic situation with oil going up five times in price or something like that. And therefore, we never would have done this in the first place. So circumstances change, and the choices that Leaders can make change with them. Obama, in a weird way, therefore, was very linear, conservative and unimaginative because his form of imagination was saying, hey, what if we try liberal political science, accept that we did terrible things in trying to interfere with regimes in the 50s and 60s, go apologize for it. Try to make them understand that it's a new world in which we don't really want to do those things and all of that. I mean, I suppose that was a, that was a new approach.
- [43:37]
Eli Lake
No, no, Clinton is the first to apologize. He is the first to apologize for Mosadda. And also he. And I have mixed feelings about this. Well, I don't even have mixed feelings as a journalist. I like that he declassified a lot of files having to do with Pinochet and the junta in Argentina, but he did that. But that was the instinct that. The instinct that you're identifying starts under Clinton and then it's gazillion under Obama with his speech in Cairo talking about America. But it gets to something deeper in some ways, because what you're talking about is a worldview that we are in decline as a country and that our military and that when we act on the world stage, we are a blundering giant, that we inevitably lose these conflicts. Everything is Vietnam, everything is Iraq. And yes, Obama made sure that, you know, the raid that ended up killing bin Laden was a big part of his 2012 campaign. But keep in mind, when Obama is prosecuting the war on terror, he's prosecuting a war against non state actors. And the idea that we can take on a nation state is something that is kind of implicit in Obama's strategic thinking. That is there's no point, we can't do it. And that's the but. And that's the residue that we're hearing now on the Iran war. And I'm not saying, I mean, we don't. I can't read the future, but my view is, yes, I'm nervous. I hope we don't leave with Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz. That would be, I think, a defeat and a loss and bad. However, I'm not sure that the Iranian regime is going to stick around. I think they are facing enormous pressure and that's still true.
- [45:18]
John Podhoretz
Well, let's talk about deliverables in this sense and the ability to improvise in place. So we like this about Trump. Clearly, people don't like it about Trump. And the jury is out. History will tell whether our bet is right or their bet is right. But we do have A very simple analogy to now and prior administrations. The Biden administration supported Ukraine against Russia. It told Russia not to do it. It did whatever it could, using its intelligence to explained to Russia that we knew what they were up to. NATO was going to have a cow. Don't spare yourself, say don't do it. And then he did it. So it's not like Zelensky had a deliverable the way Rubio said, we can extricate or whoever, Special Forces said, we can extricate Maduro and bring him home and that'll be an operation. But that first couple of weeks in Ukraine when it became clear that the Soviets had made a terrible blunder, that their battle plan was incredibly flawed, that they had gone, the Russians, excuse me, the Russians, I apologize that they had made a terrible blunder and that therefore the NATO commitment of resources and to the, you know, to fight this first war on the European soil in 80 years and all of that, this wasn't just like for moral purposes. Something new was happening here. The Russians had overreached and there were real signs of this. And what did America do? It withheld. It did not say, oh, you know what, look how they're doing, look how well they're doing. They want Abrams tanks, let's send them Abrams tanks. They want this, let's do this. Let's bring some people over and train them. Biden, a supporter of the war in Ukraine, was unbelievably hesitant to commit American treasure, not even blood, but American treasure of any kind or any, you know, to Ukraine. We spent a year on this podcast screaming about this insane unwillingness just to sort of like send stuff because he was worried that the Russians would drop a nuclear bomb or something like that. We don't even know why he didn't do it. I mean, maybe it's cuz he was, you know, senile and couldn't remember that he had said it in the morning. We don't even know. But, but his people didn't look at the world, look at the balance of forces that we were seeing with Ukraine's ability to resist the Russian advance and say, you know what? This is a real opportunity we have here.
- [48:17]
Eli Lake
Well, you know, and it gets to something else too, which is that if you talk to Biden, people like Jake Sullivan, they will tell you that they did really well, that they're proud of how they released intelligence before the invasion even though they failed to deter Russia. They're proud of the fact that they managed to get Sweden and I guess like Norway to join NATO as A response. They're proud of the sanctions packages and everything like that. And they will give you a story about how they rose to the moment when in fact, the real story is they failed to deter Russia and they restrained a capable ally when it maybe could have ended the war sooner. We don't know. It's a counterfactual. Right. But that's a problem in some ways, because the alternative to Jake Sullivan and the Biden foreign policy guys is Matt Duss, who advises aoc. The alternative is to get Mamdani's, you know, running the Pentagon in the State Department in a Democratic administration, which would really be disastrous because as much as I don't like the Biden foreign policy and I think it was weak, that is a very different kind of foreign policy than one that is grounded in the idea that, that Israel is the most evil state in the world and that America stinks and that there's nothing we can do and that we should actually have peaceful coexistence with monstrous authoritarian regimes like China. And that is where the party is headed if they win in 2028. And so one of the problems is that they, you know, the other side of the Democrats on this are still delusional. They think they did a good job and they didn't. And that's why, you know, we're really in a pickle right now.
- [50:08]
John Podhoretz
Well, they're, they're, they're, they're giving in. They're not, it's not just that.
- [50:11]
Eli Lake
I agree. They are. Well, they are giving in.
- [50:13]
John Podhoretz
They are, they are making common cause with Meher Batar, this foreign policy group.
- [50:20]
Eli Lake
He served, by the way, in the Biden administration. He was the, he had a very important job.
- [50:24]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, he did. And so he, this guy who is essentially, basically not a Hamas neck, but is a, but is a, is a believer in the Students for Justice in Palestine person, is going to lead essentially the version of the, I don't know what you call it, the foundation for Defense of Democracy, whatever, some Democratic foreign policy group that is going to be making the unofficial foreign policy of the Democratic Party in exile or the shadow Democratic Party foreign policy. And the people who ran Democratic foreign policy for both the Obama and the Biden administrations are essentially acceding to the takeover of that effort by people like this, which is a much larger story. I'm just saying that I think the one thing that Trump's creative chaos does suggest, and there are many ways in which it's bad, but the one thing is he responds to changes in incentives, and it's Very, very hard for presidents to do that because the entire structure of the government is calcified.
- [51:40]
Eli Lake
Yeah, well, but that's a strength and a weakness, John. I mean, this is. This goes.
- [51:44]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah.
- [51:45]
Eli Lake
This gets to a little bit of the monkey's paw element of the Trump presidency, which is that the good stuff that we've been discussing in this conversation is important. And in some ways, I think about it, like, if you get the results, if you get Cuba, Venezuela, Iran in his second presidency, is it worth the politicization of the Justice Department? Is it worth the kind of pointless fights that he picks with our allies over Greenland? Is it worth a series of things that I think we would hear at Commentary would agree
- [52:25]
John Podhoretz
are
- [52:28]
Eli Lake
unfortunate violations of norms and protocols, what we expect from a president and what kind of that are important to the essence of our republic. I don't believe that the war in Iran is illegal. I think the War Powers act is problematic. You can go through that, and there are important constitutional arguments on either side. But then there's a principle that when you're gonna do a big war like this, you should make the case to Congress, you should try to bring the American people along for your own good, for your own political. I mean, I don't know if it would have worked in this environment, but just for that. And so the way that he did it, I don't want that to be the new way that presidents decide to go into major military conflicts like Iran, so things like that. So that's the sort of the other side of it that isn't great. But again, if he gets the results that we're talking about, then is it worth it? I'm inclined to say that maybe it is. I mean, it's a hard.
- [53:25]
John Podhoretz
I think, first of all, if he gets the results that you're talking about, it's unquestionably worth it. And I speak as somebody who believes that there are probably terrible, incredibly corrupt things going on with his family and the Witkoff family and the Lutnick family. I don't like any of this. And I think a lot of it is gonna come out and people are gonna go to jail. And it's really bad. And a lot of what Trump has done is really bad. And I'm not saying it isn't. And I'm not gonna. What about by saying that the door was not opened by Trump? The door was opened.
- [53:57]
Eli Lake
Absolutely.
- [53:59]
John Podhoretz
Really, by the Obama and Biden administrations. The door was opened to the violation of all these political norms in the Obama second term by Harry Reid Killing off the judicial filibuster. And by Obama saying, I have a pen and a phone and I'm just gonna start making laws with executive orders. And the reason that Mitch McConnell said, don't do this, Harry Reid, cuz you're breaking norms. And now norms are gonna get broken all over the place. You think you can do it just once and get it, keep everything else in place? That's not how it works. And McConnell was right. And then when he was in power, he did it. And Obama says, I have a pen and a phone and I'm gonna make sure that I normalize all of these illegal immigrants. And then Trump uses executive orders, 10,000 executive orders after him. So this is a tendency, this antinomian tendency. Trump has accelerated, and then Biden accelerated it from him with the COVID emergency stuff, the CDC controlling rents in the United States.
- [55:11]
Eli Lake
How did that happen?
- [55:13]
John Podhoretz
So all of that is terrible. Both parties are responsible. Trump is arguably a little worse.
- [55:20]
Eli Lake
I would say that, as you know, I was furious about the politicization and the weaponization of the FBI and the Justice Department in the first Trump term and enduring Biden. And then I would say that what Biden's done is, in some ways it's not so much worse. It's like what Trump has done. It's farcical. It's farcical. I mean, the second indictment against James Comey is ridiculous. It's a ridiculous thing. And I can't stand James Comey. I want him banished from polite society. But the point is, is that when you do that, you're playing with the reputation of the Justice Department before other courts, before our court system. You're, you're, I mean, Andy McCarthy talks about this, and that is a big thing to lose.
- [56:04]
John Podhoretz
It's a very big thing. And I'm saying, like, the reason that I'm. What about, you know, what about in this is.
- [56:11]
Eli Lake
Oh, I know you're not.
- [56:12]
John Podhoretz
What about it in this sense, which is, which is the norm. Breaking is now the norm. So that's gotta be broken. Yeah, I don't know how that happens. We are now entirely dependent on the courts to prevent a lot of things from happening. And in that sense, because Congress doesn't act and whatever. And in that sense, the system is holding because the courts are in fact holding. Even though some courts make decisions I don't like, like they allow, they protect Mohammed Khalil, who should have been. Whose deportation should have happened the day that Mark announced it. Yeah, right. But I mean. Or, yeah, but I'm Saying there are all sorts of things the courts do or don't do that. But are they? Is our system of checks and balances holding? It is. It turns out that one party is basically being one player and the three is being forced. Although it's not just that the Senate's. A lot of stuff happens that gets stopped by the Senate, psychotic appointments to things that get frozen out by the Senate. Dozens, if not hundreds of Trump appointees who have not gotten through to confirmation because they are basically mental cases who need to be put in insane asylums. And the Senators sort of quietly make it clear to the White House personnel office that this is not gonna pass muster and they kind of disappear. So even there, some of this is holding. But yeah, the proof of it. Yeah, go ahead.
- [57:56]
Abe Greenwald
If we get to this, you know, the idea of. Are the results worth it? So since the norm breaking is the norm, if you look at what. So what did Obama's norm breaking yield us? A nuclear deal. No, no. Yeah, right.
- [58:16]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [58:17]
Abe Greenwald
But a nuclear deal that protected and preserved Iran's nuclear program. What did the Biden years, for all his norm breaking, yield us? Catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. I would argue the invasion of Ukraine. And so now norm breaking is the air we breathe. If it in this stretch, in this era we're in, if during the second Trump term, we get the end of the Iranian regime and the Cuban dictatorship. That's extraordinary. Yeah.
- [59:03]
John Podhoretz
Again, if I'm right, that the thing about Trump is that he responds to deliverables plans, that he can see how they work, how they function. And so he's willing to risk things that no president has ever before him been willing to risk. If that works. This is a transformative presidency, and history will not look at it and say, but he was mean to the FBI director who did basically try to figure out a way to get him to, you know, be 25th Amendment out or thrown in jail or whatever. And he was really mean to him, and it was terrible. No one is going to care about that. But if these things don't happen, if we lose in Iran, then everything is on his shoulders. It's not just he failed in foreign policy and he was corrupt and he corrupted the system and the entire MAGA worldview. And a lot of the Republican Party, you know, that has existed in the last 10, 12 years, is going to look like, I don't know, the Dixiecrats. I mean, it's going to look really bad. It's going to look really bad and everything. The whirlwind. The whirlwind will come for him and he'll deserve it. So he's played a high risk game. The rewards will be enormous in terms of his reputation and the changes to the United States. But that's one of the reasons why he has to win in Iran, because he is everyone, not just the people who hate him now, but everyone will believe that this presidency was a catastrophe and that it represented a new low. So he's going to have to finish his deliverable here.
- [61:02]
Eli Lake
Well, you know, I mean, we've talked about this all the time. We text about it. This is like our constant, we come back to it. But I actually think if we had to, if I had to bet, I'm not 100% sure, but I, I just think his animal cunning will prevent him from taking a bad deal and being perceived to be a loser.
- [61:21]
John Podhoretz
Look, it's pretty clear he's not going to take a bad deal. I don't, you know, he is not going to as to a bad deal because if he was, he could have done it already and gotten himself out of it and he just rejected yet another deal. So, like, I don't know where this goes. I mean, you know, so don't. I'm saying I do think it's a possibility that this, this goes belly up and will be a terrible reputational problem for him and for the United States and for people, future presidents and what they attempt to do. Another reason why he really needs to win it and why even the people who hate him should want him to win. Because like, the consequences of him losing are not just to him, you know, they are.
- [62:10]
Eli Lake
I want to point out the one thing, I mean, just kind of circling back to the Xi summit, I've been working on a profile of a senior Trump administration person. And I can say this because it was on the record, but one of the things that came up in our interviews was what China has done to help Iran. And the assessment from this person, who is by no means on our side of the kind of Republican ideological divide, was that China has done the bare minimum. And there was a lot more that China could have done if it wanted to prevent the war, if it wanted to freak us out, it could have, even if it didn't intend to launch military action against Taiwan through the straits, it could have scrambled jets, it could have done a lot of things that would have made us very nervous. It could have sent far more. It could have sent money to Iran. It could have done a lot more. It sent some precursor chemicals for missile fuel. And, and it helped or at least Elements of the Chinese regime helped in targeting, using satellite imagery. And that's not great. But given the capabilities that China has and the power that it has, it could have done far more to help Iran. And it didn't. And that right there, I think also might tell us something.
- [63:33]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, they're waiting to place their bet.
- [63:37]
Eli Lake
Well, that's. But that's interesting to me, which is that we, before we perceived that the regime was wobbling. And this is, you know, and apparently so did China. You know, I mean, so that's an. That's. And China, by the way, would maybe have better information than we did. So that's that. I'm just throwing it out there. Do we have any recommendations, John?
- [64:08]
John Podhoretz
You don't have a recommendation? Do I have a recommendation? I'm trying to think of an appropriate recommendation. Appropriate.
- [64:17]
Eli Lake
I have a recommendation that I recently rewatched that came out in the 2000 teens, which is the movie Whiplash with J.K. simmons. Yes, I think it's a great movie and I love it because it's about a big thing and a little thing which is greatness and whether people, you know, driving someone to the brink of exhaustion and despair. Is it worth it if you are molding, you know, as they always say in that movie, the next Charlie Parker. But to me, it was a Great Movie and J.K. simmons is just a really wonderful actor who I think he just becomes this. And it's the irony of the movie, though we'll say one more thing about it is jazz is this medium is a genre of improvisation, of spontaneous creativity. And the entire movie is about a jazz orchestra which is about relentless precision and almost. And so that's another part of it which I really liked. And it's a great character study. Did you like that movie, John?
- [65:26]
John Podhoretz
I adored that movie. J.K. simmons won an Oscar for it. It is the story of a kid, of a teenager, a teenage drummer, and the abusive relationship that he has with his instructor and how they dovetail because he himself is an obsessive lunatic and so is his teacher and who is torturing him and also ensuring that he is possible of achieving greatness. And this portrait, as you mentioned, is very flavored. The director, writer, director is Damien Chazelle who then made La La Land after this. And it's interesting because it's like this character study, teenager character study, but it is filmed like a thriller. It's filmed like a 1970s conspiracy thriller. It's dark, it's cut in a very suspense filled way. And it's really about a Guy and his drum set.
- [66:33]
Eli Lake
And there's a wonderful line in it. There's a wonderful line in it that the worst two words of the English language are good job. Whereas you should never be satisfied and you should constantly be trying to get better. And it makes me what is the cause. You've been reading the Odyssey, right? It's the Greek idea of arete. The idea of whatever you choose to do, do it to the highest level of excellence. And you know, that's also, I mean, I recently saw Marty Supreme. That's another concept kind of in Marty Supreme. The whole thing is that this guy is obsessed with ping pong and he just is going to will himself to be the best at it.
- [67:11]
John Podhoretz
Another great movie and very much influenced by I believe and sort of. That's right, Whiplash. But I will say this one thing. I want to make one point. And then the father of the drummer, the drummer played by Paul Rudd.
- [67:25]
Eli Lake
Not Paul Rudd, Paul. Paul Reiser.
- [67:27]
John Podhoretz
Paul Reiser. And I want to pay tribute to Paul Reiser, one of my favorite actors.
- [67:31]
Eli Lake
Oh, he's great.
- [67:32]
John Podhoretz
40 year career, mad about you Remember him from what first diner?
- [67:39]
Eli Lake
Yes, he's raining hates the word nuance.
- [67:43]
John Podhoretz
He was a stand up comedian, became an actor, sitcom star, all of this. But has had this late in life role as a character actor often on these weird sci fi shows like he was on Stranger Things and he just did a turn as an old lizard like PR guy on the Boys, the Superhero, the very violent crazy superhero satire show in which he plays like a press agent from the 1970s who is the sleaziest, slimiest person who has ever existed and that he is able to do that. And simultaneously, not simultaneously, but also have been this figure of sustained impotent sweetness in Whiplash, where he plays this loving but clueless father of this drummer who has no idea of the depths of despair and horror that his own son is descending into as a student, but just wants to hold his hand and watch movies with him and stuff like that. He's an absolutely wonderful, glorious actor and also the star of my favorite least seen show of the last 10 years. So I can now push that. Red Oaks on Amazon, which is a show about a Jewish country club in New Jersey in the 1980s. And Paul Reiser plays there, plays the shark like dominating member of the club who is a Wall street guy who is up to. No, who is up to very many shenanigans. Extreme Wall street shenanigans. It is a great show. He is fantastic on it. So
- [69:37]
Abe Greenwald
I love that show as well. And I remember you characterized its tone as Philip Roth meets John Hughes, which I think is perfect.
- [69:48]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, it was.
- [69:48]
Eli Lake
Can I ask you, John, since we have this moment, is Chalamet. He's the movie star right now of the moment, right?
- [69:56]
John Podhoretz
Timothee Chalamet is the only. He and Zendaya who are actually in Dune together. He and Zendaya are now the two performers under the age of 50 who have. Who fit the category of old time movie star. They're in movies. They open movies. Chalamet is now really probably the only actor who can open a movie, meaning that if he's in it, audiences are going to go see it for him. And he's in character studies like Marty Supreme. He's in science fiction blockbusters like Dune. He's in musicals like Wonka. He's a phenomenon. He's only 30 years old, and he did give the best performance last year, without question, Marty Supreme. And it's a crime that he didn't win the Oscar, but he's got like 60 years to win Oscars as far as.
- [70:50]
Eli Lake
Let me ask you this because I was thinking about this because, you know, since COVID it's been nothing but negative news. If you listen to the Glop podcast about the future of movies, which we all love, but I don't know, I feel like after watching Marty Supreme, Hollywood's still capable of putting out some stuff that isn't.
- [71:08]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, but that's not a Hollywood movie. That's not a Hollywood movie. That's a movie made by a. By a. By a hedge fund, okay? Funded production company that's not, like, out of development. This is a movie by a guy, and Marty supreme is great. And it made $100 million, and that's amazing that it made $100 million, but it's still the case that 40% fewer movie tickets were sold last year than were sold in 2020.
- [71:43]
Eli Lake
I just want them to stop making superhero movies. I mean, I'm fine with some of them, but.
- [71:46]
John Podhoretz
Well, you know, they're not going to. Even though they should, but they're not going to, so. But anyway, movies are done. Movies are over. Don't worry about it, all right?
- [71:53]
Eli Lake
Just give me some rom com.
- [71:56]
John Podhoretz
More years. They're going to be movies. Well, there certainly aren't rom coms. There haven't been.
- [71:59]
Eli Lake
I know. That's what I want to go back
- [72:00]
John Podhoretz
to the era things on horrible things on Netflix. Anyway, I'm sorry to report this, okay? Abe is a bad example, because Abe not only doesn't go to the movies. But basically, I think he stops watching anything after 1969.
- [72:18]
Abe Greenwald
Sometimes I actually. You really don't want to hear my thoughts on Marty Supreme.
- [72:24]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I don't. I do. But we gotta go.
- [72:27]
Abe Greenwald
We can save them.
- [72:28]
Eli Lake
Can I just say one thing? Cause it just came through my transom. I just want to congratulate my wife, Nika for finally signing the deal for her third book with Yale University Press. It just came through. Mazel tov, Nikki. Mazel tov.
- [72:43]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. That is amazing.
- [72:44]
Eli Lake
Terrific. I'm very happy for her and it'll be very interesting. We'll talk offline. But, John, she does get into some things having to do with commentary and art criticism.
- [72:54]
John Podhoretz
Okay. By the way, next week we will be Monday Dan Cenor supposed to come on and Tuesday is pub date for Noah Rothman's book Blood in Progress, originating from an article in Commentary. So Noah will be on to talk about Blood in Progress. Eli Great to have you.
- [73:14]
Eli Lake
Abe, thanks for having me, as ever.
- [73:15]
John Podhoretz
And for the Commentary podcast family. Keep the candle burning.
- [73:45]
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