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- [00:04]
A
Hope for the best, 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. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast Today. Today is Friday, May 8, 2026. I am Jon Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:38]
C
Hi, Jon.
- [00:39]
A
And social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:43]
D
Hi, John.
- [00:47]
A
We don't understand what is now going on around the Strait of Hormuz, in and around Iran with Trump and Iran. The idea that Trump was peddling yesterday that the ceasefire is still holding while we were firing on Iranian ships, or maybe Iranian ships were firing on us, or we intercepted fire from Iranian ships, seems to redefine the word ceasefire to mean a war. But my head is exploding. There's news this morning that the Iranians have seized a tanker on their own. But then reports followed that that said that the tanker that they seized is an Iranian tanker, thus leading my good friend Noah Rothman to point out that this is like Bart in Blazing Saddles putting the gun to his own head and saying, next one of you moves and the N word gets it. I don't know what's happening. My brain is exploding. I'm confused. And so unless anybody has anything of moment to add, I think we're gonna move away from Iran today to talk about other matters.
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D
Just a note on the love tap introduction of the phrase love tap into armed conflict, which I'm just putting out there as a.
- [02:13]
A
That is not on my bingo card. Trump. Right? Donald Trump referred to the military encounter in the open seas between Iran and the United States as a love tap. I don't even. That's what I mean. I don't know what to say. Now, I didn't mention this to you guys before, and I don't ordinarily do this, but I found myself in an interesting Twitter exchange that I think is valuable to point out for reasons that are illustrative. Not because I'm in a fight with the former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Bush official, and the guy that I've known for many decades and spent a lot of time on MSNBC sets with, but because I think it's illustrative of a weird quality of the realist response to the war in Iran and how establishment foreign policy people are looking at it as they have determined that this was a mistake from the get go. Okay, so here was Richard's original post. Richard Haass's Post, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump launched wars of choice they expected would end quickly and decisively. Both must decide how to conclude them now that their assumptions have proven wrong. And then he links to a substack that he wrote. My response was, that's a disgraceful thing to say in every way. Shame on you. Now, why did I say that? Very simply, because analogizing the war in Ukraine, which was started by Vladimir Putin for the purpose of swallowing up another sovereign country, and Donald Trump's and Israel's war against Iran, which is meant to extirpate an irredentist bad actor on the world stage's ability to, to potentially exterminate another nation and another country, that any analogy between these two is a moral shonda, as we say. Richard has responded to me as follows. Sorry, but neither war was one of necessity and both have turned out badly. Rather than making ad hominem comments, you might try to refute me on the merits of good luck with that. Learn what has gone wrong, or, and this is my favorite suggest, as I have in Home and Away, meaning his own book, his own very mediocre book, how to limit costs going forward. My response was, as I just said, likening a war intended to swallow an entire country with a war to rid a nation that wants to obliterate another with illegal weaponry is a moral stain on you that your accusation of ad hominemry can never wash off. So double shame on you or Richard. Okay, so why am I bringing this up? Because it's one thing to say that this war was a mistake. Maybe it was. We don't. First of all, there's no reason yet to say this war was a mistake. Except that you have already prejudged that the war was a mistake. It's been on for two and a half months. We have wiped out enormous amounts of Iranian weaponry, missilery, the nuclear program, at very little cost to the United States except the cost of the use of the munitions. Very little cost to Israel, you know, with enormous practical benefits in the form of showing the world what we can do when we decide to engage militarily and how we have a next generation military. But let's say it was a mistake because Trump didn't get what he wanted, which was a decapitated regime and a declaration that the nuclear program is over. And he'll never get that. Let's just say that we have no idea that that's where this is going, by the way. In fact, I think it's a 7030 odds that it goes in the way that I would prefer it to go. But even if I were to stipulate that Richard Haass and the people, Michael McFaul and even Neil Ferguson and others who think that this was a terrible miscalculation are correct, the hunger to find an analogy to a war of evil which was intended, which violates all understandings of sovereignty, that it's a war for land capture and physical domination of another territory, with a war intended to create better conditions for the world in the degradation of the power of a bad country, that they want to go there suggests that their dislike of the war has a fundamentally dishonest component. Why would they want to analogize Trump and Putin here? Because they want us to think about Trump and Putin as being the same. Because Trump is a Putin stooge, because Russiagate was real and not a fraud, and because they don't like the fact that Trump is empowering a new generation or a new set of ideas about how foreign policy should work that writes them out of the 21st century. That's how I look at it. I don't know how you guys look at it. I didn't want to do this as a form of solipsistic inquiry, but this was just a kind of crystallized analogy to me. And that he should get all huffy at me saying, shame on you for saying that the war in Iran and the war in Ukraine are the same. I think gives the game away.
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B
Yeah, the whole point is to make Trump Putin. I mean, forget his argument. I mean, by the way, this argument, in some sense, every war is a war of choice, including when you're attacked, you can surrender, you can comply, you can run. You don't have to fight back ever, actually. I mean, every war is a war of choice. So the idea that we chose to do something that was wrong here is absurd. The whole point is to make Trump Putin. It's a stretch. I mean, obviously it's an absurdity, but it lands as an absurdity, I think, even among those who have problems with this war.
- [09:35]
D
It also gives them a very useful way of evading some self reflection on their own strategies and beliefs throughout the last century about how these things should be conducted. So I support the goals of this war. Iran should not have nukes. It should stop being a state sponsor of terrorism. We should make sure that it's ceases to attack others in the region, including Israel, but its Arab neighbors as well. These are all good goals. Whether the strategy the Trump administration has pursued is the correct one, that's worth arguing over. And that's what foreign policy experts and diplomats and war theorists, that's what they can and should do. And there'll be a lot of disagreement about that. But the goals are legitimate. And that's why I think, John, you're absolutely right to suggest that this comparison is just wrong on its face. However, these are the people who don't want to acknowledge that a president did what, what they claimed had been impossible for any American president to do for decades and decades, which is confront Iran militarily. Not with little strikes here, or with intelligence work or with JCPOA agreements or pallets of cash or all of the other ways in which mild forms of appeasement were sold to the American people as keeping us safe. Trump did it another way. They don't like that because there has been success, I think, in his doing that. It has set back the nuclear program. We do need to go further, I believe, to make sure that we obliterate it and that they comply with that, with the terms of whatever agreement we reach. But I think that's why it's easier for them to say, Trump is Putin, Trump is bad. This war is bad, then they don't have to confront the mistakes of their own strategy and policymaking.
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B
Can I just add one point here, which is that aside from the deep moral problems with Richard Haass's claim here, just factually, the war in Ukraine has been over four years of a disaster. We are two months into a success. I mean, yeah, with some weirdness now.
- [11:41]
A
So let's say you were to accept Haas belief, again, shared by, as I said, Michael McFaul of Stanford, former ambassador to Russia, good guy, perfectly decent, pro American, wants American interests furthered, which I would say is true of Richard. Also, Neil Ferguson certainly believes in the Western order and that Iran's bad and all of that, that they think that the war was a tactical or strategic miscalculation because we could not achieve the end that we wanted to achieve without using means that we would never be willing to use, meaning a kind of like, wholesale invasion and takeover of Iran and the occupation of Tehran or whatever, that's an argument, I think, as Christine said, that we can have. But when you start saying that an evil war of choice is the same as a moral war of choice, because I will acknowledge that this was a war of choice, a kind of opportunistic war of choice in which it seemed like the planets were aligned in a way that made this, that offered the United States the safest possible if it were ever going to attempt a military solution. To this problem. February 28th was the day to start doing that for 5,000 different reasons. But it was a war of choice. So maybe it's a tactical mistake, maybe it's a strategic miscalculation. Maybe Trump's an idiot, maybe everybody around him is stupid. Maybe the battle plan was wrong. But immoral, evil, an effort to overthrow the rules based order of, you know, of post World War II Europe and the world. A war in Ukraine that has absolutely no justification whatsoever except the fantastical idea that Ukraine's really part of Russia historically and that it's getting to get its heart back from Kievan Rus, which is obviously a complete and total farce. There is no justification for the war in Ukraine. There are 10,000 justifications for making war on Iran. None of those. All of those don't mean that the war, if it ends inconclusively or indecisively or in a way that looks like a humiliation for the United States, it could still be a mistake. You know, I just hit a milestone birthday. I'm 65 years old. Why am I telling you this? Because sleep is more important to me than ever as it becomes more and more difficult to get a good night's sleep. And that's why I really love the Bowen branch sheets that I have now been putting on my bed. Designed for exactly the kind of rest I need. Signature organic cotton sheets, plush pillows, breathable blankets, temperature regulating comforters. Everything is made to create a bed that truly supports good sleep. Incredibly soft, breathable, built to get better over time. This is the kind of sleep I can't compromise on anymore. And a lot of customers start with sheets, but once they feel them, they upgrade the whole bed like I did. So upgrade your sleep with bowl and Branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bowlandbranch.com commentary with code COMMENTARY. That's bowl and Branch. B O L L A N-D B R-A N C-H.com commentary code COMMENTARY to unlock 15 off. Exclusions apply. I'm going to talk to you about Brooklyn Betting. You've heard me talk about this before. I got a free mattress from Brooklyn Bedding to test it and I loved it so much and my son loved it so much that I got two mattresses, paid for them myself for my daughters. I don't know how I can endorse anything better than that. We're talking about a company. A classic American story. The founder, John, didn't come from some big corporate background. He didn't have a degree. He studied mattresses, bootstrapped the business, built his own factory from the ground up in Arizona. That kind of determination and grit shows up in the quality of the mattresses that my children sleep on and every night. So, look, go to BrooklynBetting.com and use my promo code commentary at checkout to get 30% off site wide. This offer is not available anywhere else. That's BrooklynBetting.com and promo code COMMENTARY for 30% off site wide. Support our show and let them know we sent you after checkout. Brooklyn betting.com promo code commentary.
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C
Well, I think that the larger problem, and first of all, I just want to say I literally, you know, was going to say what Abe already said, so I second Abe's comments. I think the first point is that the terminology here is getting twisted and every war is a war of choice, as Abe said. And also, it just, it's just a signal that the way we're talking about, we've become very euphemistic in the way we're talking about the wars because we're using terms like war of choice and regime change to mean specific things and therefore be good or bad on their own. We're using the terms as a value judgment on the war rather than sometimes it's good to do this and sometimes it's bad to do this, which is, which is, which is a bad trend rhetorically. But the other thing is that I see it as a kind of, you know, a kind of objection to power projection. I mean, during the, the, the two invasions when we, when after October 7th, a lot of people wanted to compare a lot of people who hate Israel, compared them to Russia, but they compared them to Russia because they were on the offense, because essentially they weren't losing. Now, we can argue that Russia was losing whatever, but the point was that they were saying, look, Israel's bombing Gaza, Russia's bombing Ukraine. Two countries that are bombing a different country. And this was supposed to put them in the same category. But really what was happening was Israel was attacked first, was fighting a defensive war, and was crushing its opponent militarily. What you were seeing was not cruelty. What you were seeing was a war in which one side, which didn't pick the fight, was winning. And I feel like there's, there's some of that here, which is that we make the choice as the sole global superpower to take care of Iran's nuclear program, and we have an opportunity, as you said, to do to, you know, to, to, to take action that we've long talked about taking, that everybody even in Western Europe seems to agree, eventually needs to be taken, or at least the goal of ending the nuclear program is widely agreed to by everyone. And it's just the methods we're arguing over. But either way, we're all sort of on the same page that somebody needs to do something and this needs to end.
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A
Okay?
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C
And we're the ones who did something.
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A
But you know where your analogy is entirely precise, because the world accepts, outside of the more radical world and the world that has transformed since October 7, that has moved in a more radical direction, the world accepts that Hamas is a terrible terrorist group and that it did something monstrous on October 7th. Right. We say that, but. Or a lot of people said that's what it's terrible. But similarly, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon, but meaning Iran, everyone agrees Iran can't have a nuclear weapon, but there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. So guess what? They think Iran can have a nuclear weapon. They actually, what they say when they say Iran can have a nuclear weapon is disingenuous. They're willing to do nothing to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapon whatsoever. Similarly, Hamas is terrible and October 7th was terrible and we have to all understand that. But any effort to ensure that it never happens again by extirpating Hamas is immoral or wrong headed or whatever. So you know what? Yeah, they don't really think that what Hamas did was so terrible that it deserves to be destroyed.
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D
Well, in both cases too, I think it's an inability to recognize that we've all been free riders on what Israel has done in both situations. The reason Iran doesn't yet have an operable nuclear weapon is because Israel has assassinated its nuclear scientists, has gone in over and over again, has put a vast intelligence network which we are now tapping into to benefit our own military effort in the region. And similarly with Hamas, everyone in the region we know from behind the scenes, reporting from all the other leaders of Arab countries were like, well, thank goodness Israel's finally taking them out. They've been such a thorn in our side, we certainly aren't going to bring them into our territory. So good on them. It's actually revealed just how much of a free rider the rest of us, including the United States with regard to Iran and the Arab region has been on Israel's willingness to do what no one else wanted to do until now.
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A
Or, or all right, so Iran gets a nuclear weapon. You know what, every effort that America makes to kind of, you know, keep the world order in place in the 21st century according to these people, not according to me, has been a terrible disaster. Iraq was a disaster. Afghanistan was a disaster. I frankly don't understand how you can look at a pacified Iraq 23 years after the invasion of Iraq, after the 30 years of what Iraq was like before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and say that the world is not better off without a Hussein dynasty running Iraq than it was before it. But fine, you wanna call it a disaster because it cost us a lot and hurt ourself. You know, divided us politically, domestically in a terrible way. I'll reckon with that. But the idea that there were no military, geopolitical, geostrategic benefits to the war in Iraq is simply a weird overhang delusion of a practical political fight between left and right or between interventionists and realists, or people who don't believe in intervention. I think it's even lost.
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B
I think it's even weirder that people didn't see the benefit in keeping the Taliban out of power.
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A
Well, that and also that we allowed the Taliban back in power. Cause we tired of being in Afghanistan. Okay? So I'm just saying, even if so these people are like, America's involvements are terrible. The practical consequence of not having American involvement. Even if we take the Israeli free rider thing so we're able to sort of ride on Israel retarding Iran's progress. And by the way, even if you think that the JCPOA was on balance, okay. Because it delayed the Iranians, even if you believe that in the end, when you look at the world this way, what you're saying is America's a bad actor. America does things that make the world worse. So maybe we're not so different from Putin and Ukraine and Russia. Putin's making the world worse. He's gone into Ukraine, didn't have a right. He's mired down, just like we were mired down. I love this also analogy. It's like it's a quagmire for Putin. They've lost somewhere between 600,000 and a million men in Ukraine and casualties of another million that dwarfs what we lost in Vietnam over 12 years. We lost 58,000 men in Vietnam. It was the most egregious and horrible thing of our lifetimes that those deaths came and were for naught geopolitically. And we are still suffering the after effects of that. Putin has done something on a scale, has created an epic geopolitical disaster for Russia on a scale that it was almost unimaginable in any other epoch in history. We've still lost 13 people in this
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D
war
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A
in Iran over two and a half months. I'm not saying that they're crazy and
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C
we're not putting boots on the ground. That's the other thing. We haven't just sent huge. We haven't sent our army just over the border and into Iran and into a quagmire is something you can't extricate yourself from. But we, by definition, the way we've run this war is so we are not in a position to be stuck because we haven't put ourselves into something from which we'd have to extricate. The only question is, should we stop bombing and striking and stuff like that? It's very different.
- [26:00]
A
Also, not to get too romantic or emotional or naive or something like that, but there is something to the fact that Ukraine has survived this unimaginable onslaught in the way that it has survived it over four years. And now with evidence that it is turning the tide of the battle against Russia with the fact that Ukraine is the righteous actor here, Ukraine has the moral right. It not only has to survive in order to not be swallowed up by Russia, it's also right and its knowledge of its moral strength. Here is what has given Ukraine the ability to carry on and not sue for peace. It's not just that. Well, you know, we have our choice and Russia has its. And we're having this fight over it. It's like, you can't take over our country, and it's evil if you take over our country. And we are willing to. To sustain horrible, dreadful losses rather than sue for peace. Which I think is Abe's point about wars for choice. And that's a superpower that provides Ukraine, has provided with Ukraine with the kind of emotional strength to create these ingenious countermeasures to hold the line against a much more powerful and much larger force to fight over every inch of its territory. Every moment of that is backed by the backbone that they are in the right and that they are saving themselves, their families, their posterity, their country against an evil that has come at them. Right, so who's in the right in the war with Iran? We're in the right. How many times have we said, you're not allowed to have a nuclear weapon, give up your program? We even paid them $150 billion to get them to sort of do that, although we didn't really, since they were going to be allowed to restart and have the program right about now, had the JCPOA not been ended by Trump. In the first term, we're in the right. They're bad, they're evil. They support terrorist groups that are trying to swallow Israel. Their national doctrine is that a nation of Jews should be eliminated from the face of the earth. They are evil actors. They're the bad ones. We're the good ones. We're trying to liberate their country, even though that's not what we're saying, from their evil, barbaric totalitarian regime. So to analogize us to Putin is A, stupid, B, morally repulsive, and C, doesn't even get at what happens in wars.
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C
Can I add one thing to that list?
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A
Yeah.
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C
They want us to intervene more in Ukraine. It's not just that they realize one side is wrong and one side is right. They want us. They believe we have a responsibility. You're talking the leader of the Democratic
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A
and the McFalls and B.
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C
Yes, right, exactly. The people criticizing the Iran, by the way.
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A
Right, right.
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C
But I'm saying they. It's, you know, we're. We're talking about our responsibility to intervene consistently. We're talking about, you know, we here, we. We believe we should have done more and can do more and should do more to help Ukraine. We believe that if some, if Iran is doing something that absolutely has to be stopped, we have to take the lead in a coalition to stop it. Because, you know, this is the responsibility. They believe that we have the responsibility to act when we're in the right. And so it makes you wonder how they really feel. I mean, I guess this goes back to John, what you were saying before, but they don't want us to intervene in Iran, even though Iran is very clearly the evil one in this scenario, they want us to intervene in Ukraine, which suggests that if they really believed that Iran was so terrible and that Iran really was a terrorist state and trying to get nuclear weapons and all this other stuff, as in Ukraine, they would want us to participate globally in some sort of coalition that would act.
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A
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C
Okay.
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D
But there's another quote that I think is more revealing of the Richard Haass strategy mind. And it's Harry Truman. Right? Wasn't it? The perfect imperfect action is better than perfect inaction. And when it comes to Iran perfect inaction is the perfect description of what policy had been towards Iran for so so long. At least by the United States.
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A
Right. So just to get back to the, I don't know, slightly complicated point that I'm trying to make. If someone wants to come and have an argument about whether or not this was a tactical or strategic mistake, I'm willing to have that argument.
- [34:49]
D
You have that argument on this podcast all the time.
- [34:51]
A
And I don't think that that is right or I think it is premature, because a lot will depend on how resolute Donald Trump is in pursuing his aims, which I think can almost inevitably achieve success depending on how long, how much patience we're willing to show to get to the point that we need to get to. But I could be wrong and I would be willing, more than willing to say that I was wrong and that this whole thing was a misadventure. But it's a misadventure. It's not a moral calamity. And the hunger to dovetail the possibility of a misadventure with a moral calamity is, I think, a tell about what the people who are making this argument are about. And part of what it's about is I would go to the grander thing and say they were like John Quincy Adams and worried about monsters to destroy. But I don't believe that. Richard Haass was a planner of the Iraq war. Michael McFaul, I'm sure, supported Obama's efforts in Libya. You know, John, you got me too. And against the, and against ISIS and all of that. So I don't think they're like isolationist believers and they don't believe in using US Policy. It's just not their war. They didn't make it. They're not the planners of it. They're not in the State Department and the Defense Department. It's not them, it's somebody else. It's this whole other world that seeks, that has been critical of them and, and the way they've conducted themselves. And this is a war over American influence, over American foreign policy. And what they want to do is discredit the people who think differently from them by analogizing this effort to the effort in Ukraine, Russia's effort in Ukraine.
- [36:54]
B
You know, John, you've just got this whole conversation has got me thinking. I wish history was littered with the kinds of quote, disasters that America commits. Imagine if what we now think of as of history's actual like worst military disasters, if each one of them had taken out a mass murdering regime or removed weapons of killed them, weapons of mass destruction program run by fanatical, homicidal theocrats. That's some misadventures. I mean, which is to say even our misadventures have this sort of incredible beneficial effect.
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A
You know, it's funny that you mention that because about 10 years ago I made the effort. I couldn't get through it, but I made the effort to read the most famous diary memoirs ever written, probably, which are the memoirs of the Duke de Saint Simon, who was a member of the court of Louis XIV. It's an astounding. It's like there are 20 volumes. It's like impossible to get through. But it's an astounding document. Brilliant, thrilling, gossipy and all this. And one of the things that struck me about it as I was reading it is that every year it's like. I can't remember when. It's like spring comes and it's time for war season. They just sort of. They all go. They march off with the people who are in their, you know, are in their area in France or their serfs or whoever. And they go off and they fight a battle somewhere or other to take some territory from England or the Low Countries or I don't even know where, or Andorra or whatever. And then they, you know, and then sort of like it gets too hot and then they come back and they go to court. Like that's what war was for. Most of the human history was. We got nothing to do. You know, there's a plot of land over there we would like, you know, so we're going to go take it. It's not a moral. It wasn't a moral question. It wasn't like a. It wasn't existential salvation. This is what nations in Europe did for a thousand years. They went over here, they came back, they went over there, they came back. Nantes was this guy's property and then it was somebody else's. Avignon belonged to this one and then it belonged to that one. There was no moral frame attached to it whatsoever. You know, is there any moral frame to the world? The greatest literary expostulent of the glories of war, which is, you know, the Saint Crispin's Day speech and Henry V. There's nothing about how England is in the right. In fact, the entire play is structured to make it clear that England's in the wrong. Play begins with the clergy tricking Henry into thinking he has to go seize French territory because they want the assizes. So the whole play is set up where England shouldn't even be doing what it's doing. And yet there's. There's Henry V making the speech that says everyone who is in bed in England. And I shall feel himself accursed that he was not here, because this was the way to express your courage, your manhood, your nation's strength, all of that. No moral, no morality attached to it whatsoever. That's what war was. That's what, as Abe says, when we go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, which may be a terrible mistake, they are actually monsters. There's always an effort to be made to say we went into Vietnam because we wanted its rare earth minerals or its natural resources, or that we did the war in Iraq because of oil or whatever. None of that is true. That is not how America got itself involved in wars in Korea and Vietnam and Grenada and Panama. It was that there were monsters there, and that those monsters seemed threatening to the international order. Maybe we were making mistakes and maybe John Quincy Adams was right that we shouldn't be going abroad looking for them, but they were monsters. And that's not what war was about. War was not about stopping a monster. It was about seizing territory and, like, being bigger. And you're angry at somebody for dissing you. So you take his. You take his lands or something, or religion, which I guess does involve a moral frame. But is it.
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B
And there's this. In the modern world, given technology and the profusion of technology and its spread, if the US doesn't try to take out monsters now and then, that's the end of the world, guaranteed.
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A
I mean, that's a very important point, and one that almost nobody accepts at this moment, including Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump is trying very hard. I mean, he says they can't be allowed to have a weapon. They're not normal. He is so allergic to framing anything morally, except if it involves a personal attack on him. So someone is evil and bad and should go to jail because they're mean to him personally. But he does not like to put things in moral frameworks. Right.
- [42:35]
D
Well, and that's where, in that sense, the strategists of the Haas variety, I guess, we're kind of piling on him. But that sort of general sense of warfare being the last resort, and we can solve this through diplomatic channels and sanctions and all these other ways of negotiating with a theocratic regime like Iran. It also seems to forget the history of the 20th century, where most of the people, most of the innocent people who died, didn't die in war. They died at the hands of their own brutal leaders. Mao, Zedong, Stalin. I mean, we have plenty of evidence that actually moral causes are a useful way of thinking about it. And if anyone thinks that the mullahs in Iran wouldn't do that and haven't been doing a version of that to their own people for almost 50 years, are naive in the extreme. And that's another, I think, direction that Trump doesn't like to go. I mean, he's not a history guy, but he's also not ideological in that way either. And that's the fight against Communism in the 20th century and the fight against people like Mao and Stalin should have left a deeper mark on the American psyche when we look at a regime like Iran, because it isn't just about the nuclear weapon. It's about what that regime stands for and what it represents as part of a broader Islamo terrorist way of thinking about the world and who belongs in it. And I think that's where, that's where it connects as well to some of the more extreme left Islamic terrorist actions of the, of the more recent past, even. Including on American soil.
- [44:09]
A
Right.
- [44:10]
C
Yeah. And even though those not on American soil, you know, on October 7, 2023, that was one of the biggest massacres of American citizens we've seen. Right. Dozens of Iran's, you know, proxies. I mean, there are Iranian, you know, front groups killed, murdered in cold blood dozens of Americans and took other American. I don't remember how many Americans were among the hostages take, but the number is there. Right. So they killed lots of Americans. I mean, again, in history, this is probably near the top of massacres of Americans. It just didn't happen on U.S. soil. And then they took these hostages. Iran was the reason the hostages were not coming back, because Iran has the power to tell its proxies what to do. And so to me, when we look at this situation, the even just the decision to start the clock on this war at when we first struck, you know, about four weeks ago, to me, that's a huge mistake also. And that gets into this other question of this war of choice. When did it begin? And whose choices are we talking about? Iran made a choice three years ago to murder dozens of Americans and take others hostage in a torture dungeon. And we spent years, the next two and a half years working with Israel trying to get them out, trying to get Americans out. And it wasn't until near the end of the war that the last American hostage was out for obvious reasons. For why? Because Iran and its and its proxy that was actually holding them, Hamas, would never want to give up the, the leverage that it has when it takes an American hostage. So again, the fact that the hostages were American was a key point here and key part of the strategy and defining how the war went. The war went on because Iran's henchmen wanted to keep Americans in a torture dungeon. By the way, like three years later, what we're doing is a war of choice. This. I mean, what should. What would they like us to do in that situation?
- [46:42]
A
They would like us to do nothing.
- [46:44]
D
I was going to say appeasement, some form of.
- [46:46]
A
They would like us to do nothing. And they think that America is a net bad actor and they would like us to do nothing. One of those hostages that you mentioned was of course, Hersh Goldberg, Poland. Hirsch Goldberg, Poland, whose parents, Rachel Goldberg and John Pollan, are Americans. Hirsch was a dual American Israeli citizen and he was there and he was, of course, murdered. Rachel Pollan's book on the subject of her grief and the experience is a hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. But here is an astonishing little report which I did not know from my dear friend Abe Socher, who is the editor of the Jewish Review of Books, which you can. If you Google his name, you can find it on JRB's substack. He quotes from Dara Horne's review of her memoir. And then he writes this. When we were working on the piece last week, Dara and I discussed these sentences. I'm sorry, I should have. After we published the piece and it went viral, I picked Goldberg Poland's book back up and was looking at the dust jacket when I was suddenly struck by this. Here is Random House's carefully crafted description of the book on the jacket flap. Quote. On the morning of October 7, 2023, Rachel Goldberg, Poland's beloved 23 year old son Hirsch was stolen from a music festival billed as a celebration of unity and love. And in that moment, her life was forever separated into the before and the after. Over the next 11 months, she and her husband John would work tirelessly. The power of her raw and fervent pleas soon made her the face of the hostage crisis. And When Hirsch and five other captives were executed after surviving 328 days of violence and cruelty, she would also become the face of, of its cost. When in when we see you again, Rachel pours her pain, love and longing onto paper. Da da da da da da da. And then, as Abe says, of course, boilerplate is boilerplate, even of deeply moving and important books. But there are some words curiously missing in this description of a book by an Israeli woman expressing her deeply Jewish grief over the murder of her child by Palestinian terrorists. Here are Four of those curiously missing words. Israel, Gaza, Hamas and Jew. The only hint in the jacket copy that Hersh's death was a specifically Jewish Israeli tragedy is the note in the author bio that Goldberg Poland lives in Jerusalem. Buried in the third paragraph of that boilerplate is Random House's marketing plan at its essence. This is a universal story of trying to live with grief. It is a story of how we remember and how we persevere, how we suffer and how we love. So the very firm that published Rachel Goldberg Poland's book in an effort to make it marketable to the widest possible audience, negates Hersh's Israeliness, negates his Jewishness, fails to name the villain that the villains that took him hostage or the charnel house location in which he was held before he was murdered. That is Random House, the publishing house, Random House. And it is no accident, my friends, that the same week that this discovery was made by Abe Socher, the Pulitzer Prizes gave a Pulitzer for photography to a false photograph of the supposed demonstration of Israel's crimes in Gaza. Which is the famous photograph of the child being held, whose spine. Baby, two year old baby, wherever whose spine was, would you say, sort of exposed. I don't know how quite how to describe.
- [51:03]
D
Because the child looked to be suffering from starvation.
- [51:07]
A
Yeah, right, right. So the photographer's name is Saher Al Khora. Won the Pulitzer for breaking news photography. The photograph is a hoax. The kid has muscular and neurological issues. Elsewhere in the same set of photographs you can see his brother who was perfectly well nourished. The fact that this photograph was a narrative hoax has been well known for a year. There have been dozens of articles about it. The New York Times acknowledged that the kid had pre existing muscular and neurological issues in an editor's note. And the Pulitzer Prize committee based at Columbia University gave this photograph a Pulitzer. So the establishment in the United States, the Pulitzer Prizes and Random House. Random House, trying to profit off a book about the horrors of the hostage crisis, by the way, negating fundamental truths about what happened in Gaza and Hamas. And I'm reminded of a very interesting cultural moment from the 1950s and 1960s involving the diary of Anne Frank. So the diary of Anne Frank is of course the book of the 12 to 14 year old girl living in the attic in Amsterdam having fights with her mother while, you know, and going through whatever it is that she is going through before she is. The diary ends and then she is shipped off to Auschwitz and dies at the death camp. And her father, Otto Frank got the spirited the book Out. Survived. Got the book out, it was published, became an enormous. Is now, I would say, still probably the most famous literary or surviving work about the Holocaust. Most read, probably. And in the late 1950s, a play was the writer Meyer Levin was.
- [53:32]
B
John, can I just add something here?
- [53:33]
A
Yeah.
- [53:33]
B
Didn't Commentary publish the first US Excerpts of it?
- [53:39]
A
I think it did, yeah.
- [53:41]
B
I mean, that's an important bit.
- [53:44]
A
So there was a play the writer Meyer Levin was contracted to write, Turn the Diar Ann Frank into a play. And that commission was taken away from him and given to a different set of playwrights, Hackett and Goodrich, because the idea was that it was not universal enough, that Levin's version of the play was very much based in an understanding of the torture of Jew, that she was a representative Jew of the Holocaust who was murdered for being a Jew. And then the Diary of Anne Frank, the play, which won a Pulitzer and a movie which was a huge hit made by George Stephens, universalized the story so that it deracinated or de judified a lot of the Frank family and the Jewish experience to try to make it into a universal story about what would happen to a family if it were under these circumstances. And of course, it ends with the famous line, I believe in spite of everything, that people are good at heart. And you're supposed to cry and sob and feel like, oh, isn't this just the most amazing positive sentiment from somebody who is about to die? As opposed to the actual effect of these words, which is that even then, even after two years, even after everything, even Anne Frank could not imagine what was about to happen to her and what was happening to her people, which is actually what that sentence should be read as. Nonetheless, it became this drippy, sentimental moment. And Meyer Levin, who was a kind of very interesting character, went crazy. He went crazy, and he spent 30 years grabbing people by the collar and saying, don't you understand what they did to Anne Frank? Don't you understand what they did to us in this? Taking the story of Anne Frank and turning it into some universal tale of the tragedies that can befall a family in a terrible condition, an act of war against an evil foe, as opposed to Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews. This is the representative story of one of those families, and it cannot be removed from the larger context of this effort. Even though it was taking place in Holland, not in Germany, even though it was taking place in a cosmopolitan city and it was happening, even though a family was trying to save the Franks from the Holocaust, they could not be saved because Jews could not be saved from the Holocaust.
- [56:37]
D
That reading as a child, for all of us who read that book as a child, that was the most important takeaway was that they weren't a family in Germany. They were not being turned upon by the people who. They were in a place that was supposed to be safe for them and where people would help them stay safe. And even that wasn't enough. I mean, that, that I just remember reading. I remember reading it when I was around the age that she wrote it. And that was a very powerful and terrifying thing. And I have to say, this is why when people sometimes ask us why we get so wound up when particularly people on the left are so eager to take any sort of declaration against antisemitism and add on all the other isms and talk about how all racism is bad and Islamophobia also terrible. This is why, because it is distinct and it must remain distinct if it's to be understood for what it is.
- [57:31]
C
And they. And they want, you know, what's the quote that everybody always reads from? Quotes from Anne Frank. The number one quote is that in spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart, right? Obviously, she was writing that while she was still alive because that's when she was writing, right? So, like, to take a quote from before, she had been murdered in a
- [57:54]
D
camp as she went to Auschwitz and then was transferred and died at Bergen Belsen. So she saw both of them. I mean, she had to live, right?
- [58:01]
C
And to take. To take a quote from before she was murdered and use it as a kind of like epigraph or something of the Anne Frank story, like, well, after everything that happened, Anne Frank still believed that people were good. No, not after everything that happened.
- [58:17]
D
And Frank unavailable for queen childhood.
- [58:20]
C
And Frank still believed this, this minor, this child still believed that people were good at a certain point. Not after everything that happened, not after the Holocaust. And they want this to be the lesson that you can exterminate 6 million Jews and in spite of that, we're all still okay, right?
- [58:40]
A
Well, more important than that, I think, and I bring this up only because to point out that Meyer Levin, who, as I said, went crazy and he would like, he was the Ancient Mariner and he would grab you by the yell and talk about this as though it were fresh 30 years later, when I talked to him once about it, he sent me a long letter about it and stuff like that. He could not get over it. He could not get over it because a. Was a professional humiliation for him, but that wasn't the issue. He was a famous writer already. It was that something evil was going on here with the de judification of the idea of genocide. And that is something that we can now see a full flowering of in many ways. It was of course the Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who came up with the term genocide in an effort to, to. I think he wanted to promote the idea that what happened to Jews could happen to anyone. So everybody better be on guard about what the conditions were to create the sort of thing where an entire people could be eliminated. But as it turns out, the genocide approach, it's why a lot of us were very much hostile to or worried about the idea of the Holocaust Museum. Because taking the particular quality of the Shoah and saying this could happen anywhere, it won't happen anywhere. This is something that happens to Jews. Historically, over periods of time. There are efforts to eliminate Jews from the face of the earth time and time again. No other people is subject to that historical, you know, historical record. You know, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the Bar Chochba revolt, the expulsion From Jerusalem in 586 BCE, however many times you can count the idea that the Jews should be eliminated as a people, that is not the same as any other people. This is a unique fact and story and we are seeing it again here in the promotion of Rachel Goldberg Pollan's book about a holocaustal effort by an Iranian backed terrorist group whose hope was that they would begin a domino effect where they would invade on October 7. They would kill thousands of people, the Israelis would be paralyzed. Hezbollah would come down from the north on October 8th and start pummeling people from the north. There would be a pincer effect and then maybe Iran would start shooting missiles at Israel and there would be a three front war against Israel that would effectively eliminate it. That was the intent. That was Yaya Sinwar's purpose was to engender a newfound destruction of the Jewish people on a grand scale. Not just to go to the Nova festival and hit those three kibbutzim. He had a much larger purpose than that. So here we are selling a book in 2026 celebrating the great journalistic efforts of 2025. And our leading institutions are working to destroy the facts of our memory and the facts of the recent past for reasons having to do with some poison that has entered the west bloodstream anew, or rather, let's say a chronic condition of a western disease that is now bubbling up anew, which is this antisemitism that takes the form of denying the particularity of the world's hatred of Jews. And I feel that this is a very important element of why Seth is right here about the war with Iran. That this is not just a war of three years standing, it's a war of 20 years standing. I pointed out in Commentary last month that my father was making the argument that we needed to bomb Iran to prevent it from having a nuclear program in an issue in 2008 and went to talk to George W. Bush about it to beg him to bomb Iran then in order to make the point not only that Iran couldn't have a nuclear weapon, but why it couldn't have a nuclear weapon, which is that it can't be allowable for the world to think that the world's only Jewish state can be eliminated from the face of the earth only at that point. 60 years out of the Holocaust. Now we're 80 years out of the Holocaust. And the publisher publishing a book about a murder of a Jewish American kid in the Hamas tunnels is de Judefying and deep racinating and de Israeliizing him. It's beyond belief. We are in a kind of. And to bring it back to Richard Haass, some of these things are not like the others efforts. Other things in the world that are efforts to extirpate other tribes that we might use the word genocide for are not the same as efforts at the genocide of the Jews. And the war in Iran is not the same as the war in Ukraine because one is morally good if possibly strategically foolish and the other is evil and has proven strategically foolish for the evildoer that started it. Okay, have a great weekend everybody.
- [64:28]
C
Can I, can I make a quick wreck? Actually yes, because we're on, we're on the subject of, you know, all this stuff is that I recently and. And I'm almost positive this has not been recommended before but the. I've. I just read the Passenger by. By Ulrich Bowit and it is a. It was written in 1937 right after Kristallnacht in the. In the weeks after Kristallnacht. And it has become a pretty unbelievable relic of time and place because this author, he wrote this book which is about a non Jewish looking. An Aryan looking Jewish in the wake of Kristallnacht who knows who, who, who is coming around to understand he has to get out or he's, you know, he'll be targeted. His name. People know who he is but when they see him on the street they don't immediately grab him and go hey, how'd you get out Jew? You know, or whatever. And he's in a desperate race to get out of Germany. And he basically lives on. On train, passenger trains trying different than going to this city. But because he knows someone in this city trying to this city, he was given a connection in this city, whatever. He ends up essentially living on these passenger trains. And nobody sees him and says, oh, you're a Jew. But he meets along the way other Jews trying to get out. Nazi party members, you know, good Germans, whatever you want to. Whatever you want to call it. And starts sort of slowly going insane. Because he's. After a while, he's not really sleeping. He's like totally living on the train. He has a little. He has some money because he was forced to sell his business to his German partner at a huge loss because Jews were not allowed to own anything and whatever. But the key point is that it's right after Kristallnacht, and it is not 100% clear what exactly is going to happen, but it is clear that something big and terrible is happening, is already underway. Not going to happen, but something is happening. And there's this sort of race to get out of it. His wife is. Is German, so she's not, you know, she goes to live with her brother, whatever. So he's on his own. This is now the author Boshwitz. He and his parents, I think, escaped Germany soon after and they went to England. When England entered the war, the Boshwitzes were held as enemy aliens of enemy descent or whatever it was considered at the time. They were Germans. And, and, and, and Ulrich was sent to a penal colony in Australia. He was put on a boat and he sent to Australia. The book he wrote, this book, the Passenger, was published in 1938 to pretty decent reviews. But he understood as things progressed that he had written something that could be, you know, an absolute diamond here, that he had written the post Kristallnacht book. And so he rewrote it and reworked the manuscript while he was in Australia. And then when the war was over, he was put on a boat back to England. And he had with him on the boat the reworked manuscript of the Passenger to make it the classic that he understood it could be. And he was writing letters home to. To his mother saying, I've got it. I know what we can do with this. I've got the reworked manuscript. You know, this is what the book should have been all along. And it was hit by a German torpedo, sunk. And Ulrich was never seen again, nor was his prized Revised manuscript of the Passenger. So he lived. It's an incredible story. His, his sister. His sister managed to make Aliyah, by the way, and lived the rest of her life in Israel. It's an amazing, amazing story. But he was killed on this boat trying to deliver the Feynman manuscript. Years and years later, German author and translator put together the notes that Ulrich Boshwitz had sent to family talking about how he wanted to improve the book and tried to.
- [68:57]
A
But the book had been originally published.
- [68:59]
C
The book was. Had been originally published, yes. And it was just sort of lost the time. And then this German publisher a few years, four or five years ago came out with a new translation of it. Trying to incorporate, but really just kind of means he just gave it an editing, you know, because, I mean, we'll
- [69:19]
A
never know what was a fascinating story because of these two other books that I've mentioned a couple of times on the show before. The Oppermanns by Leon Fritvanger and Effingers, whose author is Simone Target. I think I may have her name wrong. Both German, written by German Jews. One written in 1933, about 1933. The Operman's, which is like one of the most jaw dropping books I've ever read since it describes in real time. The rise of the eliminationist Nazi regime and the Final Solution even before the Germans had come up with the Final Solution. And Effinger's, which is a historical novel published in 1951 about a German Jewish family from 1880 through 1951. Both books lost to time, as you would say, rediscovered in the early 2000 and twenties and just recently republished. And so here we have a third here in the Passenger. Ulrich Boshwitz, right?
- [70:32]
C
Yes, Ulrich Boschwitz.
- [70:34]
A
So here we go. So now have a really nice weekend. I got three fun books for you to read, download them, enjoy them. They're just also the dialogue.
- [70:44]
C
It is a good book, by the way. It's not a long one, but it is, it is good and it is science and it is interesting and it is, it's, it's very readable. Even though it wasn't, you know, the, the masterpiece that he felt it could eventually be. But he. That was because he understood that we don't have these other books written by a German in Germany. But we did right after Christmas.
- [71:07]
A
We did, but we did. But I mean we had the Operman anyway, so there we go. So again, have a great weekend. Third time I'm wishing you a great weekend. So for Abe, Christine and Seth, I'm John Pot. Horace, keep the camel burning.