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- [00:00]
John Podhoretz
The NBA playoffs are here and I'm getting my best in on FanDuel. Talk to me, Chuck. GPT. What do you know? All sorts of interesting stuff. Even Charles Barkley's greatest fear.
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Abe Greenwald
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John Podhoretz
The worst Some preach and pain Some die at first no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best expect the worst welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, May 14, 2025. I am John Pod Horiz, editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald.
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Matthew Continetti
Hi, Abe.
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Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi Matt.
- [01:11]
Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
- [01:12]
John Podhoretz
And Senior Editor Seth Mandel.
- [01:14]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, Seth.
- [01:15]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [01:15]
John Podhoretz
We have just closed our June issue, contents of which should be up sometime today and certainly all by tomorrow with Glory's Untold. Our lead article is by Dan Senor, and it is about the future of American jewelry after October 7th. How to find purpose and clarity in Horror's wake. Very important piece. I commend it highly to your attention. Dan will be on the podcast tomorrow to talk about it. So, speaking of purpose and clarity, President Trump is on his tour of the Gulf and gave an important speech yesterday that I think actually was not about what it looked like it was about. It was not about finding a new way to peace in the Middle East, a new way for our countries to work together in the future constructively rather than destructively. And we should, we don't. We don't need to bomb our way into the future. We can, we can do so with business deals and reconciliation and an understanding of our differences and all of that. So textually, just as was the case, I guess, 16 years ago with Barack Obama's maiden foreign policy speech and his maiden trip to the Middle east in 2009, this was a speech for domestic political consumption, or rather a speech about the Republican Party in 2025. And who will own the future of the Republican Party when it talks about our place in the world? And this was a full frontal, full bore attack on us, or on the neocons or the nation builders or whoever you want to describe it as. The future belongs not to the nation builders wrecked more nations than they built. Trump said. He said that these, these beautiful kingdoms, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, with their gleaming towers and their gleaming. They, they did it themselves. And, and we should respect that. And as opposed to the trillions and trillions of dollars that we spent trying and apparently failing. In his view, though, that is a very strange view of one of the two trying to rehabilitate Baghdad and what he called Kubal, which is of course Kabul, not Kubal. He's right, obviously that Kabul has fallen back into the hands of the Taliban and that whatever money that we have, we spent there on, on, on trying to rehabilitate Afghanistan was lost. It's not true of Iraq, which we could go into in detail, but I don't think this speech was intended for the audience that was sitting there listening to, was intended for, as the own goal of the Vance, Tucker Carlson, Stephen Miller, Michael Anton wing of the Republican Party, putting words in the President's mouth to make him slap the faces of people who believed in a forward looking American foreign policy that both defended America's interests and supported, you know, little things like the idea that human rights are a good thing and that tyrannies are probably not places that we should celebrate and like that.
- [05:08]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I mean, I think a speech can have more than one audience at a time. Certainly the huge group that was assembled in Riyadh to listen to President Trump really liked what they were hearing. Breaking out into applause multiple times. Not just the kind of creme de la creme, I don't know how you say that in Arabic. Of the Saudi elite, But also American CEOs, including Jensen Huang of Nvidia, of course. Elon Musk was sitting right behind Mohammed bin Salman, mbs, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. There were representatives, I think from Amazon as well. Trump noted in his speech that Tim Cook of Apple was not present at this conference. And I think that was intended as a dig at Cook and Apple. So they liked it. They liked the fact that President Trump announced a $600 billion Saudi investment. Now there's some criticism of that number. Axios tried to count up all the fine print in the deal amounted to about 238 billion. But there was foreign direct investment from the Saudis Trump really liked. But then the passage that received. There are a couple passages that received the most attention and the first is the one that you bring up where he talked about how impressed he was by all the skyscrapers he has seen on his trip and how inventive they are and he then made the point that these skyscrapers did not come out of. From American nation builders, they came out from Saudi resources, neglecting the fact, of course, that America has basically defended the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from foreign threats since FDR made his pact with the House of Salman Saudi.
- [06:59]
John Podhoretz
Yes, as he mentioned, he said, had this relationship since FDR met Ibn Saud on the deck of the USS Conway in 1945, right before FDR died, that there was this meeting and such wonderful things have come out of it, you know, like Osama bin Laden and other, other, other creations of the Saudi domestic educational and political system.
- [07:31]
Abe Greenwald
Now, we should say that, you know, after Trump's first trip eight years ago, mbs, the crown prince engaged in kind of a de. Radicalization campaign within the kingdom that's been part of his reforms to modernize, sometimes through force, through, through autocracy, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And so I think there has been advances in that in that regard. But, you know, you talk about a wing that Trump is attacking of the Republican Party. I don't think there's such a wing. I think that he's now speaking what the conventional wisdom is within the Republican Party. He's now stating Trump foreign policy.
- [08:10]
John Podhoretz
So I, I totally agree with you. So that raises the interesting question, which is why make that. Why make this a major element of the speech? First of all, we never bombed Riyadh. We never bombed Abu Dhabi. These were countries. These are our allies. He's going to. Our allies in the Middle east whom, as you say, we were defending and who were implicitly on our side in the wars that we were fighting that he now hates so much and says were so destructive. They were not. We had how many men on American soil, how many men on Saudi soil in 1991 and in 2003, before we went into Iraq, both times, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers launched themselves into Iraq from Saudi soil. Right.
- [09:05]
Seth Mandel
One possible answer to the question is that it's a shot at his own critics that, you know, at the Europeans who think that he's become some kind of rising fascist, autocratic leader and that, you know, he sees things this way. That's one possible answer, is that he just doesn't like that people are making such a big deal about authoritarianism and he thinks they're blowing it out of proportion. Some of that is directed at him. It might be slightly defensive.
- [09:36]
John Podhoretz
I mean, he didn't say that, though. He was talking about what he called interventionalists. Right. That was the term that he used and that he did. So he did not. He, he did not make the point that his problem is with NATO or is with, you know, Carney of Canada or, you know, whoever else. His point was it is neocons that are the bad guys. Now, he didn't write this speech, obviously spoke it. So my question to you, Matt, is why do they care? They have control of the Republican party. They got 90% support in the Republican Party. Even the neocons in the House and Senate are very ginger about saying anything.
- [10:21]
Abe Greenwald
Well, they one, I think this is laying out the Trump foreign policy of the second term, which is different than the Trump policy of the first term. And if you just compare the two speeches, the first speech in Riyadh in 2017 was quite forceful in, in telling the Middle east to de. Radicalize to, to reform. This speech is celebratory, laudatory. You did what I asked. You've, you've built these beautiful cities and now we're going to move toward peacemaking. It's not the Donald Trump that I destroyed ISIS in the first term. I dropped the huge bombs on the Taliban. I actually increased slightly the troops in Afghanistan in my first year in office. This is now Donald Trump the peacemaker. And so he's laying out the course. And you know, from the perspective of the so called restrainers or whomever, the Tuckers, the Koch people who are in the administration on foreign policy, they still think they're under siege, of course, because they have this mentality that they're surrounded by enemies. But I'm speaking more generally within the Republican Party. There's really no backlash to what Trump is saying right now. There are some small criticisms on Iran, which we can also talk about where he talked about Iran throughout yesterday on now Syria, which of course was the huge moment where he said he would be waving sanctions on the new Syrian government. There's some pushback, but it's not pronounced. It's nowhere like, say, the debates that you had in the Democratic party in the 1970s between McGovernites who were dovish and the followers of Scoop Jackson who are much more hawkish. This is, it's just Trump kind of laying out the course of the next four years until events intervene.
- [12:25]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I want to read a passage from the speech. I've come to the Middle east to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world. One based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based on the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap and share common principles, principles of justice and Progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings. I do so recognizing that change cannot happen overnight. Oh, I'm sorry.
- [12:53]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, that wasn't Trump.
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John Podhoretz
That's Barack Obama in 2000.
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Abe Greenwald
Say that, though.
- [12:57]
John Podhoretz
No, here's what Trump said. Here's what he said. You want to know what he said? He said, I love your towers. Yeah, that's what Trump says. I'm sorry that we went around the world trying to promote our ideas about democracy and freedom. Boy, what a mistake that was. Those interventionalists wrecked more countries than they. Than they fixed. So his tone in the. Obama's tone in the 2009 speech was one of apology about America's role in the world.
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Abe Greenwald
This was not apologetic.
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John Podhoretz
It was a little apologetic.
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Abe Greenwald
John, John, just take a step back here. He's voicing the opinion of the American people. There's no. I mean, this is conventional wisdom now that those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were wrong. We may disagree, but that's just conventional wisdom. This is not an apology tour. It's a new Trump foreign policy. Now, I have.
- [13:54]
John Podhoretz
I will read you the passage that echoes what he just said, that echoes Obama ism. Okay. In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US Policy to defense, to dispense justice for their sins. I believe it is God's job to sit in judgment. My job is to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace. What word is missing from this passage? Freedom. Freedom.
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Abe Greenwald
Right. This is Donald Trump.
- [14:32]
John Podhoretz
I mean, he know. This is.
- [14:34]
Abe Greenwald
He's always. He's never used that word. I mean, he uses that word, but not in a foreign policy context. He doesn't think that it's the mission of the United States.
- [14:41]
John Podhoretz
I know it's Donald Trump, so I am attacking Donald Trump.
- [14:44]
Abe Greenwald
I know you are. I could tell.
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John Podhoretz
Whether or not.
- [14:46]
Abe Greenwald
Can I criticize the speech, though, just from this point of view, because, you know, he blames the interventionalists for everything that's gone wrong in the Middle East. But I want to contrast that with the new government that he just recognized in Syria. It wasn't interventionalism that destroyed Syria. It was tyranny. It was civil war. And, of course, an America that did not, despite. I know restrainers think that we were intervening all the time in the Syrian civil war. We were not. We did not go in and end Bashar Al Assad's regime. And the result was a global catastrophe, not just in the loss of civilian lives, not just in this decade long conflict in Syria, but also the migration crisis. Right. That resulted. Look at Libya. Okay, there's an example where Obama used American power to enact regime change in Libya, but rejected any nation building after it result. Libya, that is still war torn, still divided. And again, the migrant crisis. So I think there are ways to point out that there are some flaws in the conceptual architecture of the speech while also recognizing that it's not, it's not like new. This is just, this is just the latest iteration of Donald Trump's foreign policy. What's new is in my view, the heavy emphasis on peacemaking that we've seen so far in this term.
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John Podhoretz
I would just make one quick point about Syria. The Syrian government collapsed. Why did the Syrian government collapse in five days? Because Israel bombed Iran. Israel bombed Iran, took out Iran's defenses, took out Hezbollah. And between those two events in the late summer of 2024, this country sitting in the middle, which was not the target of any Israeli action, it's tyrannical government that sent 5 million people scurrying to Europe on boats, you know, nine years earlier falls like a house of cards in three or four days.
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Abe Greenwald
Turkey also played a role.
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John Podhoretz
Okay, fair enough. But I'm just saying, why did this all happen? It happened because of interventionalism in a. I mean self defense. Israel was acting in self defense, not because it wanted regime, regime change in Syria. Israel wasn't looking for regime change in Syria. Yes, maybe if you go around looking for monsters to slay right as George Washington, you make a mistake. If you're sort of like hunting around the world for places where you can make peace and change governments, that is something that may be a world epic error. But the idea that the United States and its allies cannot be a force for good in making change in the world in a direction that makes it more pacific, more comforting for American interests, more creating an environment for economic cooperation and economic investment and all of that. That's where the Tucker wing writing this speech gets everything ass backwards. We restrain ourselves and Syria. If we say to Israel, no, you're not going to go and take out the air defenses. Israel doesn't take out the air defenses. And guess what happens? Syria doesn't. There isn't a new opportunity.
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Seth Mandel
And the nuclear, and the nuclear site that Syria took out, that Israel took out in Syria.
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Unnamed Speaker
Can I jump in here?
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Abe Greenwald
I gotta say a few things. Go ahead.
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Unnamed Speaker
Also, I want to add that the migrant crisis that was caused by the Syrian civil war is also arguably a result of Obama restraint.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
- [18:48]
Unnamed Speaker
I mean, you know, when you had John McCain calling for intervention early on in the war and in the Syrian civil war and no one heeding it, and then the whole thing blew up and spread across the West. I mean, it completely leaked out, caused this huge mobilization that changed the cultural. The face of the earth. I just want to go back to this point about apologizing. I think he was apologizing and it was scolding. He was scolding America before a foreign audience. Also very similar to what Barack Obama said when he went on his apology tour. They both talked about us going abroad and lecturing other people. Obama said, I'm here to listen, not lecture. Trump said, the great building up of the region is not a result of people, of Americans coming over on beautiful planes to lecture you. I think there is a through line and the administration, whether or not it's conventional wisdom in the US that these wars were mistakes. I don't know why he's saying it over there, and I don't know why. I mean, I kind of do know why, but I think it's stupid. I'll just say that as a fact. The administration is fixated on neocons. We play an outsized role in their imagination, in their heads.
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Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [20:31]
Seth Mandel
And Abe wrote a very good newsletter on this yesterday, and people should go to the website and subscribe, because Abe wrote a whole newsletter column on it, on that obsession. And it's true. It's the neocons under the bed. They have this. You know. But the other thing is that there were a couple things that were pretty hypocritical on another level. One is it's not our. The president's job to look into the eyes and read the souls of foreign leaders. Who's that a jab at? George W. Bush. Who did. Whose eyes did George W. Bush look into? Vladimir Putin's. What does Trump see when he looks into Vladimir Putin's eyes? The big cartoon hearts. I mean, this idea that, like, George W. Bush made some kind of mistake by looking into Putin's eyes. The mistake was that the whole point of that specific comment was that Bush was giving Putin a chance. And Trump walks around saying, look, I've gotten to know Vladimir Putin, and I think he wants peace. So who's looking into whose eyes? That's, first of all. Second of all, I love the stuff about the fancy planes. Like, people coming over here in fancy planes. The guy is, like, about to. The guy is about to accept a $400 million Qatari plane because booing can't outfit the plane that he wants and who knows what kind of gold toilets it's going to have on it and stuff like that. I mean it's just, that's part the whole thing is just like they're so little self awareness and also that he, he can't really. And this is the thing about, you know what he hates about the sort of the D.C. consensus that those that that part of the party hates is that he's part of it. He's doing this, he's doing the same things. He's looking into foreign leaders eyes the same way. He's flying around on fancy planes and telling people what to do. And you should join the Abraham Accords because it would be a great honor to me and these people should do this and Iran should do this of this. And then by the way, nobody should fly in on an American plane and tell people how to do it. There's no way to avoid it when you're the American President to be this kind of world leader. And he can't avoid stepping on his own point numerous times throughout the speech.
- [22:51]
Matthew Continetti
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- [26:03]
Abe Greenwald
I'd like to make two points. The first is to draw a slight distinction between the restrainers in the administration and Trump because one, I don't think they have identical interests and part of, part of that is in John, what you were laying out as America's role in the world and the American power. I think Trump does have a view, an idea of American power. It's just American economic power. He thinks that we can build a better world, but it's through exercising America's economic leverage on which actually our allies are more dependent than our enemies. Since in the case of Iran and North Korea, say we, we hardly trade with them. The same with Russia. So he really does prefer sanctions, tariffs, this economic weight in order to achieve certain goals, certain commercial and, you know, small p Pacific goals in the world, right? But human rights, democracy promotion, the rhetoric of universal freedom, that has never been part of Donald Trump's vocabulary and he's been on the scene for 10 years. So I just take that as a given when I'm listening to him talk. The second point I want to make is what I find disturbing about the neocon talk is that just as neocon often became a substitute for Jew during George W. Bush's term, neocon is becoming a substitute for supporters of the state of Israel in the first hundred so days of Donald Trump's term. And what we saw yesterday was a continuation of Donald Trump's policy distancing from Israel rhetorically. As I've said before, the Trump administration, Trump himself, though sparingly, and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, continually say, we are Israel's supporters, we support the state of Israel, you know, but in our actions, when you look at the direct negotiations with Iran, when you look at the Houthi cease fire, when you look at the direct negotiations with Hamas leading to the release of Adan Alexander. And now for item number four, the unilateral waiver of sanctions on Syria, or at least the announcement that President Trump will attempt to waive sanctions on Syria on the new government of Jelani, who is still considered by the United States to be a terrorist. That was not what Israel was suggesting to the administration, that Israel wanted to continue to use sanctions in order to get some guarantees, conditions based sanctions relief. And Donald Trump again has just said no. So this, this is disturbing for people who support the state of Israel as I do, because again, Trump in the second term is looking less like the kind of pro Israel Jacksonian hawk of the first term and more like a kind of traditionally, quote, unquote, realist Republican president from Eisenhower to Nixon, ford to George H.W. bush and, and those presidents were not as supportive of Israel as I would like and as they ought to have been.
- [29:34]
John Podhoretz
Okay? So not to get into theological distinctions between conservatism and neoconservatism or talk about the history of neoconservatism. There is no real history of neoconservatism per se. Neoconservatism is, has become a tendency. It's not a developed philosophy. The people who were called neoconservatives in the beginning were called that. Hostile. Hostilely. They, they tended after a while to sort of accept the term because it did suggest that there was a difference between them and the, as you say, the sort of the realist Republicans or the realist Democrats or the very liberal Democrats or the very, very isolationist Republicans that they, that they occupied a specific space in the foreign policy realm that was extraordinarily hard line toward the Soviet Union and toward world communism in general. But from, let's say, secular frame, by which I mean that there was, in the 1940s and 50s, there was a very religious framework to conservative anti communism. This was godless communism. You know, in, in an effort to sort of express the difference between the Western civilization or our civilization and Soviet civilization. We amended the pled of allegiance. We added in God we Trust to our money, things like that. That all were intended as a kind of civilizational statement about how we were based in a theological understanding of the world and they were based in the materialist understanding of the world. The neocons said they're bad. They've killed 100 million people in China and in the Soviet Union. They are trying to spread tyranny across the globe. Unfreedom, totalitarianism. They are essentially kind of like they are the reverse image of who we are and we need to stand up to them. And I don't care who they are. If they're Democrats and they're soft like Carter, we're going to slam the crap out of them. And if they are Republicans and soft, like, at some moments it was viewed that Reagan was a little soft. And certainly detente was soft. We're going to slam the crap out of them too. When the Soviet Union fell and everything else, the world changed and things changed. Neo conservatives then said, well, look, apparently freedom won out over tyranny. Maybe what we ought to do is be promoting freedom. And then somebody who was not a neocon, that is George W. Bush, and somebody who was not a neocon, that is his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, kind of went all evangelical with this theme, right? Everything that Trump is talking about here, the attack that he is launching, that, as Abe said, this obsession with neoconism on the right stems from Bush's second inaugural address written by Michael Gerson, when she said, america's purpose over the next century is to spread freedom across the globe. And at the time, and that was even then, a lot of people on our side were like, you're going a little. That's who. You're going a little farther because, you know, we do have to. And this was Jean Kirkpatrick's part of neoconservatism. Sometimes you got to deal with unsavory characters in order to advance your foreign policy aims. You gotta say it's okay to have some relationship with Argentina, even if Argentina is a right wing bastion. That is like doing incredibly mean things to very left wing people in Argentina as a bulwark against communism in the world. Neoconservatism is not an evangelical philosophy. Actually, to be fair, it really is.
- [33:33]
Abe Greenwald
There was more people on the other side of that debate with Jean Kirkpatrick and Charles Krauthammer, though, who were very much supportive of What George W. Bush said in that second inaugural. They, of course, are no longer in the Republican Party.
- [33:47]
John Podhoretz
Right. Right now.
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Abe Greenwald
And Gene and Charles are passed. Right.
- [33:51]
John Podhoretz
But I'm only bringing this up to say that the oddity of the assault of the Conti. And this is where Matt's point about what's going on here. What is neocon shorthand for? And if you're saying it's shorthand for supporting the war in Iraq and we shouldn't have had the war in Iraq, fine. Plenty of people who were not neocons were supportive of the war in Iraq. 77 senators voted for the war in Iraq. Every Republican from, you know, almost every Republican, except the most isolationist, supported the war in Iraq until things went bad. And then it became situational where you were you either gonna back America as times got tough or were you gonna head for the hills because times got tough. The this, that was the default position in 2003, 2004. It's 20 years later, the default vision become the one that Matt mentions that Trump is reflecting in the speech. I just think it's really interesting that his, the people in his ambit who are trying to establish the intellectual framework for the second Trump term really want to do so with by saying their enemy is not left wing Democrats who have terror. He does mention NGOs, right? He did mention the speech. Liberal NGOs, but that wasn't the force of the speech. Is it Soros that's the enemy here? Is it, you know, is it like semidune and Greenpeace and I don't know what other groups you could say that stand against American, what we would consider classic American foreign policy interests. That's not where the juice of the speech is the juice of the speeches.
- [35:36]
Abe Greenwald
The near enemy.
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John Podhoretz
We are here to crush the neocons once and for all.
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Abe Greenwald
Bush legacy. Right, Right. So that's different ways you can read neocon. I gave them one that disturbs me the most potentially pro Israel community. But there's another way, as you say, supportive of Iraq or more broadly, just Bush. Right. Because on every aspect of the Bush administration, which by the way, has not. Which left office in 2000 nine years ago. But every aspect of the Bush administration, whether it was the freedom agenda, right. And global democracy promotion, including the global war on terrorism.
- [36:12]
John Podhoretz
Right.
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Abe Greenwald
Whether it was, oh, pro immigration policy that led to two attempts to enact a comprehensive immigration reform, including amnesty for illegal immigrants. Whether it was the Bush trade agenda, which dealt with bilateral trade pacts negotiated with the president between the president and then Authorized by the United States Congress. Trump has been rejecting all of them since he arrived on the scene. And this speech is just the latest statement of his rejection. What I think is interesting about this speech is, again, he's rejecting it, not from the more Jacksonian posture of his first term, which was, we got into these wars, the American elite didn't think about the fighting men and women. We wasted all these resources, we wasted these lives. And I'm not going to do that again. I'm only going to pursue American interests. He had that in that great line I thought rhetorically about, God sits in judgment. My job is to protect the United States. But now he's more like, I'm here to create peace in the world. That's what I'm about now in the second term. I'm here to make peace. How do you make peace? You make it through these deals. I'm the deal maker now. And you do it through economic deals and leverage. That's a new development. What I think should be a warning to the restrainers is that he still keeps in the back pocket this idea that if he doesn't get his way, then he's not out of. He's not just putting aside any type of armed force. Right. It's just always in reserve. And where you see this, I think, coming to play will be with Iran, because this speech is definitely part of the internal administration debate about what to do about Iran. Trump continues to let these negotiations take place, but he, again, not during the speech, but in a later appearance in Riyadh, said, I want Iran to succeed. I want Iran to rejoin the community of nations, but they have to give up their nuclear program. They have to dismantle their nuclear program. They cannot enrich nuclear material. And what we saw last week in the latest round of negotiations was that Iran is not going to do that. The Iranians are not going to do that.
- [38:45]
Seth Mandel
And so that raises the question, what happens exactly if we get to that point?
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Abe Greenwald
And then there was more news? This is a very important speech he gave in Riyadh. The more news in that speech was then he said, if that doesn't happen, this is in the talk, not in the. Not in the briefing around table.
- [39:01]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [39:02]
Abe Greenwald
If that doesn't happen, he said, then I will have no choice but to exert maximum pressure to bring their oil exports down to zero. Now, what was interesting to me was that I had thought that was current Trump policy to do that, because he. He reimposed maximum pressure at the beginning of his term. He's been sanctioning Iranians, you get these releases every day. So was that a walk back from the threat of military force? Was it simply he didn't want to antagonize the Middle Eastern audience on this trip by saying that we would have to bomb? Is that different, saying he's going to impose even harsher sanctions to crush the economy? Is that different from saying he's going to oppose an Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities? If these negotiations go nowhere, all of this is left hanging.
- [40:02]
Unnamed Speaker
But I just want to say, I mean, I think obviously the exclusion of any hint or reference to the possibility of military action should the Iranians not accept, as he said, his olive branch? Obviously it's a very deliberate choice to leave that out entirely.
- [40:25]
John Podhoretz
It's an odd choice based on Matt's description. And I think you're both right, because. And this is where the restrainers may really not understand the dynamic of the modern Middle east in the wake of Barack Obama. You think the Saudis don't want Trump to bomb, to be part of the destruction of the Iranian nuclear program?
- [40:50]
Seth Mandel
But I, but I think the Saudis don't. I think the Saudis don't want him saying that.
- [40:55]
Abe Greenwald
Yes.
- [40:56]
Seth Mandel
Right in front.
- [40:58]
Abe Greenwald
Especially after he spent 20 minutes talking about peace.
- [41:01]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [41:02]
Abe Greenwald
No, like, within the logic of the speech, it would be hard for him to say, by the way, I'm going to bomb. I'm going to bomb.
- [41:08]
John Podhoretz
Published yesterday in the Free Press on Trump the peacemaker.
- [41:12]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [41:12]
John Podhoretz
And, and, and how this is how he wants to frame this second term. And. Yeah, and of course, the Trump first term was, I'm going to, I'm basically going to destroy. If North Korea raises a, raises an eyebrow at me, I'm going to rain fire and fury down on them. People in Hawaii panicked. They got some weird, you know, notice on their phones that there was a catastrophe about to come. People thought that the nuclear, nuclear war had started. Right. Michael Wolff's book was called Fire and Fury. That was Trump won. Trump 2 is, yeah, I'm the peace. I'm the guy who's gonna bring peace through economic war. Oddly enough, you could say, like, that's how I'm gonna bring. I'm making war to bring peace, but we use economic warfare as my tool. I'm just saying that the question that I wanna ask you is the true believers who are behind the ideas in this speech, do they know that the Saudis want an American anti Shiite coalition? That is one of the reasons that they drew close with Israel privately, quietly, after it became clear to them that Barack Obama, with the jcpoa, had tilted toward Iran and that their only real hope in the region was tilting toward the most powerful other nation in the region. Given the fact that Mohammed bin Salman is not a religious fanatic and has no stake in Mohabism and wants precisely the kind of economic growth and modernization that Matt talked about that classically would follow the pattern of an Ataturk rather than a, you know, rather than Ayatollah Khomeini. I don't know that they know that. I don't. I mean, I also don't know what.
- [43:05]
Abe Greenwald
We'Ve had this discussion before. I don't, you know, I don't pretend any inside knowledge here, but I have detected a shift in the Saudi attitude toward Iran from Trump's first term to his second term. And so you're right. In the first term, MBS would have wanted Trump and the Americans to help construct this anti Shiite coalition, anti Iran coalition. Part of that was the Abraham Accords. And in Donald Trump's final year, there was the chance the Abraham Accords would even include Saudi. The one president we haven't talked about so far is Biden. Right. And I think the Biden term also scrambled the chessboard in the Middle east and may have influenced MBS's thinking to the point where he's like, you know, we don't want to deal with war with Iran. And this, this stuff that's happening in Gaza is, you know, I might be for it because I hate Hamas as much as anybody, but it is definitely not good for me in the internal politics of the region. And so I. My theory is actually MBS position has changed slightly and is much more. Let's just try diplomacy. America, you're withdrawing from the region. There is a new landscape in the Middle East. Israel helped create it, but now Turkey's involved. We're involved with this guy Jelani in Syria. Trump is the peacemaker. That's fine. But we're. We're definitely closing the chapter of not just the Bush presidency, but also the Arab Spring that accompanied the Obama presidency. It's a new Middle east, and we'll just try to find some modus vivendi with a weak Iran.
- [45:12]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah, I had, I had this thought yesterday, a similar thought after watching all this. It was like, what a waste of four years the Biden administration was in terms of the region. I mean, that he spent so much time haranguing MBS over Jamal Khashoggi instead of building on the Abraham Accords. Four years, he could have there's no reason on earth that just because he's a Democrat, he couldn't. You could sell the normalization of Saudi, Iranian, Saudi, Israeli relations. He could have built on it.
- [45:59]
Seth Mandel
He had two and a half years in office before October 7th.
- [46:02]
John Podhoretz
Well, the Biden administration took a huge 180 degree turn on Saudi Arabia in 2022. It had just committed itself to this idea that because of the murder, the admittedly gruesome and disgusting murder of this one guy, that all of American foreign policy had to shift to express our outrage and anger at it. And then when they sort of. The dust cleared after a year and they were like, what the hell are we doing? You know, Saudi Arabia is very important and we have some deliverables we could get from them that might win our senile guy who can't recognize George Clooney a Nobel Prize. Maybe we ought to start turning it around. They thought they were gonna get the Abraham Accords if they just did the right things and made right noises with Saudi Arabia. That Biden would preside over a signing of a peace treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That was a major goal of Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken October 7th, kind of.
- [47:10]
Abe Greenwald
And even before October 7th, they introduced something that Trump had dropped in his term, and that was the Palestinian state.
- [47:17]
Matthew Continetti
Right.
- [47:18]
Abe Greenwald
And, you know, right now, Macron of France is leading an effort to have a declaration of a Palestinian state in the. In the coming months. And I think we should be very worried about the administration, the American administration, being tempted by that. Again, I don't think Trump would be, but the people around him who make it very clear that American interests now diverge from Israel's interests. They would be.
- [47:49]
John Podhoretz
So Trump knows his base. Right. What do we know about Trump? That Trump has this deep feeling about what the boundaries are, even though he is reestablishing new boundaries on matters that they don't. They care less about or compromising their boundaries on issues like abortion and some other things, including taxation. But if there's one thing that he knows about his base, it is that his base is 85 to 90% supportive of Israel and supportive. And the more you get into. Dig down deep. Supportive of things like Israel annexing the West Bank, Israel destroying Gaza. Clear. Depopulate. Doing what Trump said he wanted to, which is depopulate Gaza and build a resort there. Like that is what his base wants. The restrainer. There might be this temptation to say, yeah, in order to get a grand deal in the Middle east, we should endorse Palestinian statehood. His base, not US not me, not, you know, not Smotrich and Ben gvir, his base, his Christian, does not want that and would view that as a red line that he had crossed that they could not support. One of the very few, interestingly enough. Right.
- [49:09]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I mean, it's funny because we always. David Souter died a few days ago, and David Souter, the Supreme Court justice nominated by George H.W. bush, who was a stealth candidate and then became one of the most liberal members of the court for 20 years before retiring. He was kind of the exemplar of the phrase coined by the late journalist Tom Bethel. Strange new respect, right? The strange new respect that Republicans receive once they come to Washington and they go native and they become liberal. Well, Donald Trump is getting some strange new respect lately because of his policy differentiation from the state of Israel. And I can't on Sunday, Thomas Friedman wrote a column that was mind boggling because it to me anyway, because he praised Donald Trump. He said, oh, look, President Trump, you're finally recognizing that Bibi Netanyahu is not our friend and you need to do this, that or the other thing, and you're open to diplomacy with Iran and everything that I like. It ought to bother Trump if he's getting this type of applause from people like Thomas L. Friedman because they do not represent Trump's base. They do not represent the evangelical Christian core of maga. And so that's why I think ultimately he won't fall for it. But it is something to behold.
- [50:47]
Dr. Rob Williams
Hello, this is Dr. Rob Williams, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation. Survivors of the Holocaust have long been the bravest voices speaking out against anti Semitism and all forms of hate around the world, whether it's European antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s or the anti Semitism we see on our streets and campuses today. We'll explore it on the USC Shoah Foundation's new podcast, Searching for Never Again. We'll hear stories that are heartbreaking and stories that are inspiring every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever fine podcasts can be found.
- [51:22]
Seth Mandel
I think also we have to add the Houthis into this because this is one way that he Trump's policy is Biden, like in the discussion of driving the Saudis to a more acceptable position vis a vis Iran, which is that they just saw that he doesn't have the appetite even for an extended air campaign against the Houthis and the Saudis. Yemen is the Saudis have the most to lose outside of Israel, maybe even with Israel in the Picture over the chaos in Yemen. And so from a lot of people in the US and in, in Trump's administration think the Houthis are not worth the trouble. But to the Saudis, the Houthis are a lot of trouble. First of all, the Saudis have been, you know, when we talk about interventionalism, the Saudis have had a policy of interventionalism for quite some time in their neighbor in Yemen. But this is. Yemen is a proxy war between Iran and the Saudis more than it is a proxy war between anybody else.
- [52:39]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's a very.
- [52:40]
Seth Mandel
Missiles that they. Houthis are firing. They have to, They're. They fire missiles over Saudi airspace.
- [52:47]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [52:47]
Seth Mandel
They, I mean, this is, this is a real threat to stability. You know, the peace, the peace angle of this. The Houthis are the big disruptive force for the Saudis.
- [52:58]
John Podhoretz
Look, that's a very, very important and sort of almost original point here, which is Yemen is to the Saudis, I mean, not, I'm making a very weird analogy here, but what Gaza is to Israel, that is to say it's a bordering country with a hostile terrorist group that has partially, you know, that is basically now become the governing force in the country or a lot of the governing force of the country and stands there as a potential shock troop for Iran and has for 15 years. And that's one of the reasons that the Saudis were so freaked out by the Iran deal. And the idea of America tilting, which is, was that would that provide Iran with a green light to do. To do some real interference inside Saudi Arabia, since their ultimate goal would be the toppling of the Saudi government so that the Shiites could take over the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. So that's a real thing. Now I just think MBS is hedging his bets. And if I were him, and if I were he and Biden came in and I was dealing with Biden and with Jake Sullivan and Blinken and all of that in private and in public and everything that had been said, I too would think, you know what? I can't trust that America would do the right thing. And if things go really, really ugly between us and Iran, I better create some openings, deconfliction systems in case of disaster. Right. So that's partially the Chinese brokered understanding between Iran and Saudi Arabia, at least that they wouldn't consider each other mortal enemies, though they probably still are. And I guess Trump is in part saying, you don't need to worry about that anymore. You know, here I am. I love your buildings. You got some fantastic buildings here. Unlike in other places where the neocons. You know, by the way, I went and googled this just to, I don't, I don't want to sort of like get ridiculous about this, but you know, Baghdad, it's a disaster and everything is a disaster. Go Google a picture of Baghdad in 2025. Baghdad is rebuilt. Baghdad is. There are many beautiful gleaming towers in Baghdad now developed by Iraqi developers. The per capita income in Iraq is $3,000 less per year per person than it is in Iran, which is an oil rich country, whereas Iraq is not an oil rich country. So just put that in your head about what happened 20 years after the invasion of Iraq. Was it worth our blood and treasure? You can rule that yourself. Most Americans now think it wasn't worth our blood and treasure. Is Iraq better off? This is the subject of Abe's newsletter yesterday. Is Iraq better off than it was in 2003, with the Hussein dynasty staring them in the face, not just Saddam in power until he died, but then his two psychotic sons taking over after him and, and living in this charnel house of terror and, and cupidity. I, my guess is the Iraqi people would feel otherwise, that they were delivered from, they were delivered from the jaws of hell after, after years of hell because of the war, but that the hell, the hell was due to the originating cause of the war, which is Saddam Hussein, not the United States.
- [56:45]
Abe Greenwald
I completely agree. And I'll say that just to close, I think a real question is what does Israel do it now? If these eras are over, if the global war on terrorism is over and the Arab Spring is over, what should Israel do? And I do think it's important that as of today, Wednesday, May 14 at 9:23am Donald Trump has not said to Israel, don't go into Gaza with the full force like you're threatening once I leave the region. And we have this news yesterday of an attempt on the life of Mahmoud Sinwar. Muhammad Sinwar.
- [57:26]
John Podhoretz
Muhammad Sinwar.
- [57:27]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [57:27]
Abe Greenwald
Muhammad Sinwar, who is Yaquis, the brother.
- [57:30]
John Podhoretz
Of the head of Hamas in Gaza.
- [57:33]
Abe Greenwald
Yes. And who took over the head of the Hamas if that strike is successful, and as of the time that we record this, Hamas has not come out to say that it was unsuccessful, which is noteworthy. If that was successful, that that would be another moment of opportunity for Israel to enact its plan of taking more territory in Gaza, holding the territory, and then going to Hamas. If you want any of this territory back, you have to submit to our demands, beginning with the release of the remaining living hostages, they cannot wait. And I would say this also applies to Iran. You know, as we often say on the podcast, Bibi Netanyahu is an extremely cautious figure. And over the years, the record number of years during which he has been prime minister of Israel, he has not gone after the Iranian nuclear program at least twice. Right now, obviously that has to do with larger forces than Bibi because of the way in which Israeli national security is made, is decided, it's through a national security Council. He is not the commander in chief in Israel like our US President is. Nonetheless, if there's a moment where he is faced once again with, you know, can I take out some of these facilities? If the deal, if the negotiations trail off, they end as they are likely to end sometime later this year. Here is the moment, opportunity. I really do believe he has to seize these opportunities because what we're entering now is a period where under Donald Trump, the United States is just not going to be there. It's going to pursue its own interests. It's not interested in involvement anywhere it may get involved. It got involved in India and Pakistan 24 hours after JD Vance said this conflict was of no interest to us. But it will get involved at an ad hoc improvisatory basis. And so I do think it's up to Israel to really reconceive its strategy now in a, in an era where it just doesn't necessarily have the US Standing beside it at every moment.
- [59:49]
John Podhoretz
Well, right. And look, it has history of this in the last two and a half years. Right. Last two years it had America back away from it six weeks after the war started with, with Hamas. And basically the entire year 2024 was about the psychological management of the relationship between Israel and the United States and how much Israel could and could not do to get itself to a successful conclusion of this war and dealing with whatever mood or fit or state Biden may have been in. And with the Bobsy twins, Jake and Tony, you know, who basically are C level students in foreign policy and diplomacy, holding them back, letting them go, not letting them go, worried about Michigan, all of that. And so at least what the Israelis don't have is that an effective no. Right, Right. That they're gonna be a no. They start at no.
- [60:54]
Seth Mandel
And also. But also not just. Not just not a no. But the big moment in the Obama administration was when the Israeli government was preparing for such a strike. And at the time, I believe Ehud Barak was the Defense Minister. And Ehud Barak was, was a stronger proponent of taking military action than was Bibi, as has been the case. As, as Matt, you know, mentioned, Bibi is more cautious and Obama administration engaged a training exercise that sent American troops to the Middle east knowing that Israel would not start a war with Iran while American troops are sitting there in the middle. So he, you know, he sort of put up this, you know, he's, he, Obama kind of stood in between the two of them. That's the thing that Trump won't do. Trump is not a no going to redeploy American troops to stop Israel from doing something they, they.
- [61:50]
Abe Greenwald
It's more, it's more of a shrug. It's more of you do what you want and maybe, well, I don't care. I don't care.
- [61:59]
John Podhoretz
Kill whoever. Who kill whoever you think you have to build.
- [62:01]
Abe Greenwald
I just find a second recommendation to Israel today. Throw up some new skyscrapers quick. I mean, there are skyscrapers in Tel Aviv, we know, but let's get some really out of the box designs, maybe find out who the Saudi architects were in those and just, you know, get through the blue tape, as Jamie Dimon is calling it now. Get through the regulations. Just put it up quick so that when Trump comes to Israel, you can show him. I'm not saying in Jerusalem. I'm saying make sure he goes to put it in Jaffa, you know, somewhere. Just make sure he goes there and sees it. That's the sort of thing now that every country needs to be thinking about.
- [62:40]
Seth Mandel
That's right. Israel Bauhaus is over gleaming glass.
- [62:45]
John Podhoretz
There's a lot of, there's a lot of gleaming glass.
- [62:48]
Unnamed Speaker
There really is.
- [62:51]
Abe Greenwald
Something new that when he, since his last time there, he could see it and go, wow.
- [62:56]
John Podhoretz
Well, they did, you know, they did rename Bibi did rename this town after, after Trump in 2020, build five towers there.
- [63:05]
Abe Greenwald
This is the five. Yeah.
- [63:07]
John Podhoretz
Make a skyscraper with Trump in the, in the center of it. Something, something like that would be. I think that's absolutely right. But I, by the way, all of this is, is, is, is important to note that the strike on synwar we're already getting, they were hiding under a hospital, so they bombed the hospital. So, of course, our favorite Pulitzer Prize winner from the New Yorker, the Gaza propaganda, the Hamas propagandist who won a Pulitzer for his impressionistic pieces on the horrors of Gaza in the New Yorker, the head of the Edward Said Free Library, by the way, whose name, I can't sum it up again because I'm getting old and I don't want to know his name because I Wish he would be extirpated from history, nonetheless said, of course, look, here's another war crime. You can't hide under a hospital. Sorry, every death in that hospital is on you, number one. Number two, brilliant military plan, by the way, as it turns out. No, I'm serious. I'm not being ironic. So they bomb, they drop a gigantic bomb on this site and everybody in Hamas apparently starts running toward the site to try to help dig out and dig people out from under it. And the Israelis just mow them down as they are running toward. As the, as the Hamas fighters are running toward the hospital to see if they can find their leader. And so does that sound gruesome that I said mow down? Slaughter would also be a word I would happily use or any gruesome, disgusting sounding word. They should all die. Everyone in Hamas should be dead for holding those still 20 people alive and the bodies of those who have to be recovered so that they can get a proper burial. And note that no one in the US Government for the first is saying, ooh, I don't know. Oh, by the way, the starvation line is back. I hope everybody's noticed that they're starving again. Remember a year ago they were starving then, of course, it turned out the population of Gaza grew probably in the last year. And so now there's, now, oh, you know what, there's three Israelis in the, in the military who say that there might be a hunger crisis in Gaza. Good. Let there be a hunger crisis. Let. Let Hamas starve. Hamas has to starve. All that aid was going to Hamas. We need Hamas to starve. We're not responsible, nor is Israel responsible for a single bit of hunger experienced by a Palestinian living in Gaza. That is all on Hamas. Just like hiding in a hospital is all on Hamas. Don't let them get into your head. If you're listening to me, this stuff gets into sentimentalist heads that this really all has to stop isn't that they really are going to be starving in Gaza. If a single child dies of starvation in Gaza, that is the fault of the Sinwar family, not of Israel, not of America, not of anybody but the people.
- [66:11]
Seth Mandel
The moment a member of a Hamas family starves will be the moment that there's a food crisis in Gaza. But if, if only non Hamas are starving, guess whose fault that is?
- [66:27]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, a very, very important point. Anyway, we will leave it there. Back tomorrow with Dan Senor to talk about his remarkable piece which I hope will be up today@comMENTARY.org so Matt has a piece that will be there as well on the senescent ex president and his effort at a rehabilitation tour last week that seems, by the way, to have come to a screeching halt because it did not work very well.
- [66:58]
Abe Greenwald
Now the backlash to the Tapper Thompson book is. Is beginning to start as well.
- [67:04]
John Podhoretz
So.
- [67:05]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, we can talk about that later this week.
- [67:08]
John Podhoretz
Quick detail from the, from the New Yorker piece. That was my favorite detail. That New Yorker has a little excerpt from the Tapper Thompson book Original Sin about the, about the COVID up of Biden's senescence, part of which took place, of course, on the Jake Tapper show, was that George Clooney really knew that Biden was out of it because he didn't recognize George Clooney. Now look, George Clooney is one of the most famous people in the world. If you don't recognize George Clooney, maybe even a person who doesn't know George Clooney could be ruled as having something wrong with them. Conceivably. But that. That was what triggered his writing of the Op Ed. Yeah, that.
- [67:50]
Abe Greenwald
Don't you know who I am?
- [67:51]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [67:52]
Abe Greenwald
But can I just defend Biden here a little? Because I saw the pictures of that, including at the fundraiser, and he had a pretty heavy beard. So you know, you're. When you, when one thinks of George Clooney, one thinks of a clean shaven matinee idol. One doesn't think of a man with a pretty heavy white beard.
- [68:13]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. So by the way, they all very bad travel schedules that week. That was the other great detail is they decided to have this fundraiser on June 15th in Beverly Hills and Clooney had to fly in from Italy because Noah Baumbach and you know what, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, very busy. Biden had to fly all the way across the country and everybody was so busy. But they wanted to have the best detail by far.
- [68:40]
Abe Greenwald
So so far.
- [68:41]
John Podhoretz
Yes.
- [68:42]
Abe Greenwald
The wheelchair discussion.
- [68:43]
John Podhoretz
The wheelchair discussion, yes. If he becomes president again, if Biden.
- [68:47]
Seth Mandel
Well, he wanted to be fdr. He said that himself.
- [68:50]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. Oh, yeah. The one thing FDR never was, if you will remember, shown in, photographed in a wheelchair.
- [68:57]
Abe Greenwald
Pictured in a wheelchair.
- [68:58]
John Podhoretz
That's right.
- [68:59]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [68:59]
John Podhoretz
All right, so we'll be back tomorrow for Matt, Seth and Ava. John Podworth's Keep the Candle bur.