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Hope for the best, expect the worst. Some preach at pain, Some die of thirst the way of knowing Preach where it's going Hope for the best, Expect the worst, hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, March 30, 2026. I am John Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary Magaz. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi, John.
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Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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C
Hi, John.
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Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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D
Hi, John.
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And joining us today with one of his weekly updates on everything terrible that's going on in the Middle east, our contributing editor and Pooh Bah at the foundation for Defense of Democracies, Jonathan Schanzer. Hi, John.
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E
Hi, John.
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A
John, so much has been brooded about since we did our last podcast on Friday. You were not on that podcast, but Trump saying he wants to take the oil. Trump saying that the Straits of Hormuz are already open. Trump saying that we are going to make sure the Straits of Hormuz are already open. Trump saying that Rubio saying that we will never leave until we, you know, make sure that the Straits of Hormuz are never threatened again. Marines arriving, major assaults on Iranian military targets, including like the Ministry of Defense and other places, and gigantic booms in various places suggesting that new sites have been found to remove ballistic missiles and drones and drone factories and things like that. I'm sure I'm missing five or six toxic happenings, theoretically.
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C
Toxic happening, not happening. Carg Island. Carg island was in there somewhere, too.
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A
Well, so we're going to take Carg Island. We may take Carg island, we may not take Carg Island. So meta question is all of this smoke and the fog of war and creating deliberate possibility, infinite possibilities for deception, digression, trying to get misdirection, trying to get the Iranians to take their eye off the ball about where we're really going? Or is this also we're still in the position where Trump and the administration are getting all their ducks in a row, so if they decide to move, they have everything that they need at hand in the right place, in the right set of circumstances? I think it feels the latter feels the likeliest of explanations to me for this flurry of talking points. But you're smarter than I am, so please tell me.
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E
I don't know if I'm smarter than you, but I read more on this. I guess we could probably leave it there. Let me try to back up and just put this into an understandable context. The first thing to understand is that there is the military part of this war, the war that Israel and the United States are waging against the Islamic Republic of Iran, destroying its military assets, its defense industrial base, its ability to attack its neighbors in the future, its ability to have a nuclear program in the future. All of those things are getting destroyed. Right? The Israelis and the United States have done an enormous amount of work to reduce the threat of the Islamic Republic. It's not zero, and it probably will never be zero. But you can see the degradation of this regime in ways that are real and tangible. And it's interesting also because the Israelis are actually dropping the pace of their attacks right now from something like 400 a day to maybe about 150 or 200 strikes per day because they're also now working pretty hard in Lebanon. And the United States has dropped the pace a little bit because we just sent the Gerald Ford to Suda Bay in Greece for some repairs from a laundry fire, if you can believe that.
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B
That's.
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E
It wasn't the Iranians. It was just somebody didn't change the, like the lint thing or whatever happened, or there was an electrical problem and so they've got to go back and fix.
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You got to clean that lint filter, I guess. I don't know exactly what happened, by the way.
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E
There were some injuries, and that obviously is concerning. These are not the injuries that you want to in the middle of a war on an aircraft carrier. And so it's all just kind of, you know, I mean, it's not as bad as it could be, but it's obviously concerning then what you have. So that part of the war is going incredibly well. Okay? The military part of this, even with some of the setbacks and the issues and the two fronts with Israel and all of that. The other side of this is the asymmetric economic war. This is the war of the weak that the Iranian regime is waging. This is the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks against Israel and against all of the Arab states, and those continue apace. The Israelis are suffering about, I don't know, 10 or 20 missile strikes per day, which is not as bad as it could have been. And I think the Israelis projected far worse. The Arabs are taking it on the chin because it's a lot of short range stuff and drones and things that they're not prepared to defend against. And it's having a real world impact on oil, on natural gas, on the Hormuz, all of that stuff. And that the Iranians know they're kind of chicken winging us and the Israelis. It's getting more complicated now because over the weekend, the Houthis got back into the act and they started firing from North Yemen into Israel. The minute that Israel or the United States start to return fire, which they have not done yet, you could actually see the shuttering of the Bab El Mandab, which is the strait leading into the red Sea, where 20%, or, sorry, 12% of the world's trade transits.
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Okay, hold on, let's stop there, because everybody now is like, Strait of Hormuz. Strait of Hormuz. Strait of Hormuz. So the Strait of Hormuz is in the north of the, of the, of the water channel between the Indian Ocean and the, you know, essentially the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. And it's a little area that goes around a corner there by Iran. And the Babamanda is further south toward Yemen, and is another sort of theoretical Africa and Yemen. Right.
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E
And it is the thing that if you basically just go straight up through there and through the Suez Canal, you've hit the Mediterranean and now you're delivering all your goods to Europe, and the Europeans are happy. So the Europeans right now are about to get cut off from trade after already having a massive amount of their oil cut off. You can get a sense of where this crisis could be heading. Now. That's kind of the card that the Islamic Republic is playing in response to the beating that it's taking militarily. And it is a beating. So now the question is, what's Trump doing in response to all of this? Because he can't leave the region with these two crises brewing. And so he's talking about going in and sending more troops. He's talking about diplomacy, he's talking about doubling down on the military. He's left every possible option open. And it does seem like every statement he comes out with, it's like there's another option that we're looking at.
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But.
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And that one's going really well, too. So the military part's going well. The deployment of additional troops is going really well. Diplomacy's going really well. All of it's going great from his perspective. Look, the only thing that I can say here is who was it that said that you should take Trump seriously? But not literally. It was actually who it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's sort of the way I look at this right now, too. I mean, I kind of get the sense that the media, every time Donald Trump speaks, it's like a cat with a laser pointer. You know, it's just, you know, just trying to look in every possible direction and cover every story. And, you know, Donald Trump has not tipped his hand yet as to which strategy he is pursuing exclusively, because right now it looks like he's doing them all in tandem. And I don't disagree with the approach. The question is, at some point he is going to have to choose a path and which one will it be and will it be the wise one? And this is the thing that has me getting a little bit of heartburn right now because I just don't know what the calculus looks like. I'm glad the Iranians don't know it, but I would love to have at least some indication. Of course, the moment he tells it to the American public is the moment that the Iranians know it too.
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C
I have a question about that because over the weekend a lot of the stories I was reading and hearing were about ground troops, ground troops, ground troops with very little context. I've misspoken said last week it was the 101st Airborne, it was 82nd Airborne that was sent. That only adds 10,000 more troops than we already have in the region. So we have around 40,000, I think. And then this add, now we're up to about 50,000. What is your sense about whether what that troop amounts to suggest about the policy going forward? Is that a capture at Carg island, hold it for a little while and then, you know, renegotiate, or is that a open the Strait of Hormuz level of troops? I mean, it's actually quite small considering it's like a quarter of a million when we started the Iraq war. So what, what's your thoughts on what the strategy might be with the sending of those more elite units?
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E
Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, elite units, you know, smaller forces. I think there are a couple of objectives here that I would look at that appear to be kind of on the table. One is obviously Carg Island. This would be shutting down pretty much all of Iran's oil exports, like something like 90% of it, which would give us enormous leverage with the Islamic Republic. Of course, it also would put a bunch of our troops on one small island that could be targeted by the regime, which makes me like a little nervous. There's the other part of this which is the idea of escorts and convoys through the Strait of Hormuz region. And look, these are things where you're basically surrounded by the Islamic Republic, or at least you've got a whole coastline that could be populated with fighters that are equipped with shoulder fired missiles. And you could imagine our vessels taking significant incoming fire. And that I think also makes me nervous. There's also the other part of this which is the reason why Donald Trump got into this in the first place. At least, you know, that's what we're led to understand, which is this question of those 440 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, which according to Israelis and to outside experts, is enough for something like 11 bombs. And you could still see the Iranians try to use this for a dirty bomb or some other kind of announcement that they're a quasi nuclear power. So there's lots of different ways that I can imagine our troops being deployed. Again, not hearing much from Donald Trump, not hearing much from Pete Hegseth about the specifics of the operations, which, again, I mean, I think Donald Trump's kind of maximum flexibility approach to policymaking, look, it's driving all of us crazy.
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A
Look, the Wall Street Journal. So the Wall Street Journal is something I forgot to mention in my very haphazard opening. Wall Street Journal reports no surprise since we've been talking about, like, since the day the war started, that the US Is considering. So it's a leak in order to float it out into the public or to the Iranians considering a mission to go and seize the nuclear material, which is theoretically buried under hundreds of feet of rubble either in Isahan or one of these other.
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D
Is it Isfahan?
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Isfahan. I'm sorry. And so we're saying they have enough for 11 dirty bombs. They can't get to it. As far as we're aware. If we get to it, we're going to have to like, blast our way in to get to it. And then it can't simply be carried out in canisters by hand. It's too dangerous. So you'd actually have to degrade it. I believe, if I understand this correctly, on site, you would have to do something to reduce the weapons grade material to material that is not weapons grade for security safety reasons, but that it is on their minds. And it's been on my mind and I think probably on everybody's mind who wants this war to end conclusively. That a picture of us with Trump standing, just like Bibi Netanyahu standing in front of the nuclear files that were purloined out of Tehran in 2018, standing and saying, here it is. You know, it's not like a rock. We went in, we found the nuclear material, we took it out of there. We have it now. We're going to give it to the IAEA or somebody or some international force or maybe not, but here it is. This is why we fought the war. We have it, we did it, they're toast, they're done. We're humiliating them in public. And I thought that was interesting because the risk of that Mission may not be worth, maybe wildly out of proportion, but the reward would be inestimable somehow if you could do it. And they do want people to think that they are thinking actively of doing it.
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E
They I it's still on everybody's mind. When you speak to senior Israelis, when you speak to senior administration folks, they're all basically saying the same thing, that this is out there, it's bothering them, it's concerning them. And that this would be maybe one way of kind of putting a bow on this and saying, you know, mission accomplished. Dare I say that? And I got to say,
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I still
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don't understand how it would get done. You put, I don't know, a thousand troops, special forces in this area, everybody knows where they are and they become subject to an immense amount of drone attacks and mortar attacks and short range missiles and possibly troops. And this just sounds nightmarish. I think the idea of trying to get the regime to capitulate first seems like the play. But maybe I'm missing something. But again, I just need to point out here that the lack of clarity provided by the administration, they've been so disciplined in not sharing things that they don't want to share. People are not freelancing and going out there and leaking things. And so it has led to an immense amount of speculation on the part of our media and a huge amount of anxiety among those that are watching this war and hoping for, you know, the right conclusion.
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C
But it.
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A
They say it cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. The fact that it is threatening the Strait of Hormuz, a threat that can't really be shut off unless they go away ever. I heard General Eshel on your podcast or streaming? Streaming podcast just before this podcast was on at the foundation for Defense of Democracies. Say, look, you can't ever once the threat of the Strait of Hormuz is an active thing as a possibility, you kind of have to like take very radical measures to make sure that it stays open permanently. And the only real way to do that is to remove the regime that would threaten the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.
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B
I have a question for Jonathan Schanzer related to what John just said. Jonathan, you've talked about a theoretical phase two to all of this. After the US Leaves, having done whatever it considers the goal Having achieved whatever it considers the goal. Israel, the Mossad working with the Iranians to help effect regime change. My question is, if Trump. If US Administration is talking now with some remnant of the regime, if that's true, that. That Trump considers the right people, what does that do for the prospects of this possible phase two?
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E
Okay, so, I mean, I think a couple of things that you guys raised, which are all excellent points. One is, you know, just this question of messaging. Let me just address that briefly. There is. There is a limitation to how honest anybody wants to be right now in this administration for a couple of reasons. One is the divisions within the party itself. Right? You've got the isolationists and the interventionists, and the isolationists are grumpy. And so Trump doesn't want to say regime change. That's like the dirty term. And nobody wants to say that out loud. And so he's just kind of pretending like regime change isn't ultimately what he wants, while also saying the regime change is already what he has. And so the disconnect there is. I mean, it's loud. The dissonance. You can hear it. And then there's the other part of this, which is, yes, in years past, in wars past, you would have generals getting up on television and making announcements about the achievements that were made and the achievements that were going to be made. And this is our plan. And in today's day and age of disinformation and misinformation, and in an era where countries just don't capitulate and they don't surrender, and this is something that I'll be exploring in future pages of commentary, you cannot come out and just say, we're doing this and look how great it all is. It just doesn't work that way. So there's a lot of things that are being left unsaid by our officials, by the president, by our Department of War, and by the generals. And then comes this next part, which is, I think, Abe, to your point, the confusion of all of this. As you know, I think there will be intelligence operations to try to bring down the regime. They're probably ongoing right now. Right. The idea that I would be absolutely blown away by our incompetence if we were not bringing weapons and cash and communications and intelligence and other tools that the people of Iran need in order to bring down the regime. And so, yeah, no matter what happens, I think you're gonna start to see more activity on that front. I have to say, though, I am surprised that we haven't seen more on this front. I've seen videos here and there of drive by shootings or things that have happened where there have been minor altercations between the Islamic Republic's, you know, repression apparatus and people on the streets. But it's not significant, at least not yet. And look, I think I've said it before on this program and certainly elsewhere, I am concerned about the lack of unity and coordination on the part of the people of Iran. If this is the key to kind of, you know, a regime change or a shift in the dynamic that would signal something more permanent, this is a problem. So whatever the administration thinks it's doing by reaching out to so called pragmatists looking for the Iranian Delsey Rodriguez and all of the things that I think we've all been hearing about which seem like maybe they're not coming to fruition, it's the people that ultimately I think are the guarantors for some future Iran without the thugs that are in charge. And I have yet to see a clear indication that they are ready for this moment. And that's why I think phase two is probably they're working on it right now. Again, I would be shocked, it would be intelligence malpractice if they weren't doing this. But I have yet to see signs of any of this starting to work.
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Something I think may be worth spending five minutes on. But that sunk in with me over the weekend is that my concern, and I think that of many others, has been that Trump will end this prematurely because of his political concerns and the concerns about this war dividing the Republican Party and concerns about the midterms, sort of dual political concerns, its effect within the party and its effect on independence. It's true, he does say a million different things, but Then we can watch what's happening on the ground where we know that Special forces are moving into the region and the President is considering both sending them in to extract this uranium as, as we mentioned, from Isfahan and also seizing Carg Island. If reporting is accurate, he's doing both of those things. We're also, we were also hearing there may be this artificial deadline that he wants to wrap things up by the time he meets with Xi in May. That had been concerning to me as that means Iran just has to make it. They just have to survive until this meeting with Xi. I am increasingly confident that the President is going to see this through. And I was somewhat reassured by his comment that if we take Karg, we're going to have to be there for a while. And I think the options he's considering, I don't think he's signaling to the Iranians that he's going to get out of this early. What I see is an attempt on his part to extend a hand for diplomacy on the one hand, but he did say they have to get rid of their uranium, he's not moving the bar, and on the other continuing to ratchet up military pressure and make things painful for them. So I just am increasingly reassured that he's not going to cry uncle and turn around. I could be totally wrong, of course, but I think he's going to see this through.
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A
Okay, can I offer my agreement with you in this sense, which is that the only way I see him turning tail at this point is if he becomes convinced that he was sold some bill of goods and that he's got to cut his losses and run. And I think first of all that would be soul destroying for him because that would mean a kind of acknowledgement in his own head that he could be played for a fool. And I don't mean by Bibi, by the way, I mean by the panoply, by Rubio, the panoply of ideas in December and January, particularly in January, that would have led him to believe that this was a moment that you'd simply could not pass up, that it was a sort of geopolitical set of circumstances that meant that you could knock this regime over at relatively little cost and that he was going to go for it. But I don't think that there is anything here. What there is is the shadow threat to the Strait of Hormuz and nothing else. There's no threat to the homeland. There's been no terror wave here. There's been no terror wave in Europe. Israel is absorbing the blows that Israel is absorbing with absolute equanimity and not that that would be his tell one way or the other. The Arab states, the Gulf states, are absorbing the blows with relative equanimity.
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Hard for them, pressing him to stay
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the course and pressing him to stay the course. So only if he's like, well, you know what, my options stink here. And I've done everything we can do with planes. I don't want to put people on the ground because that's too dangerous and my options stink. But I just don't see that in what he is doing, is saying, I got 50 things I could do. We could take car, we can go in and blast through the, you know, blast through the mountain and get the nuclear materials. We're negotiating with people that you don't even know about. The regime is already over.
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D
Then we're killing them when they don't do what we want in the negotiations. Which he essentially said, right.
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A
So the people who are panicked about CAR panicked about oil prices, panicked about the global situation and the pain to Europe and the pain to South Korea and Japan in terms of rising oil prices. And like, our colleague Stephanie Roberts is in Australia and is reporting to me about how, you know, basically they don't have any oil and, you know, things have gone up like, you know, fourfold at gas stations in Australia. So, like, that's a place right there, part of the sort of Western alliance in some sense that is really suffering from the fact that oil has been choked off from them and they're already dealing with it. But I'm just saying, like, I don't see any evidence that his resolve isn't stronger, not weaker. And that. And that particularly the talk about Karg. So the people who are panicking are people who don't want this war, who didn't want this war, would like to see him humiliated or want to talk down him as a political actor because they don't like him and they think he's stupid and he makes terrible choices. But they wouldn't be for it if he had been incredibly clear about the virtues of this mission and the purpose of this mission and how we were going to do the mission. I'm not talking about independent voters here. I'm just talking about the world of elite opinion. That wouldn't have made the ABE made this point in a newsletter last week. That wouldn't have made the slightest difference. It wouldn't have rallied Democrats. It wouldn't mean that Richard Haass, ex Major Domo of Foreign affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations wouldn't be saying we shouldn't have done this and what's our purpose and what's our goal. He knows what our goal is. He knows what our purpose is. He hates Trump. He doesn't like this because it's making his friends in Europe mad and upset and nervous and scared and worried. And so Trump, there's no public diplomacy game that Trump could play that will win over elite opinion. But Christine, maybe this is a chance for you to talk about what it would mean if he remains in polling with this unbelievable Republican support. And Kristen Soltis Anderson has a thing in the New York Times today about how Republican support for Trump on this war is increasing as the war goes on, not decreasing, which I think is very interesting and actually is a proper response to real world conditions. It is the world of people who say we're pummeling Iran, Iran is doing nothing to us. And boy, they're really in the catbird scene. Boy, I wish I were Iran right now. They're winning.
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C
Yes.
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D
One other thing real quick I'd love for you to respond to, Christine, is we're seeing all these stories. There's one in Politico this morning. I think there's one in the Washington Post that's like, oh my gosh, you know, Trump really is putting Republicans in a bind for the midterms because affordability and oil prices are up and independence, they hate the war. But what I don't think these people are grappling with at all is what if he pulls this off in two months and the regime does fall? Aren't Democrats then in a real bind? Isn't he then and Republican candidates and the president can run a bunch of ads about the historical change he's brought. Nobody seems to be grappling with that scenario and what the political implications might be. And that's an interesting thought to me.
- [35:07]
C
Well, this is where I think the Trump administration is missing an opportunity in the domestic political context. The anxiety about strategy and tactics for the war, as we've just discussed, there's actually a benefit to keeping everybody in the dark and certainly the Iranian regime in the dark. There isn't, it seems to me, any benefit in him not assuaging the anxiety of the American people about the trickle down effects of a war that we are hopefully winning. And I think that's where him saying, look, you probably have these fears about rising oil prices. You're reading these stories about this. You're wondering about the price of fertilizer and how that will cost with your food. Inflation's Ticking inflation and interest rates might be ticking up. He, in 10 minutes in. Whether he wants to do it on a truth social post or in, you know, some off the cuff remarks should be reassuring the American people that's part of the job. He's not. He can do it. He's done it in other contexts as president. I think that's where, regardless of what Republicans think and support him in doing with the war, he does and should, and the Republican Party certainly should care about independent voters and just about the general mood. His approval ratings are quite low overall. He could do that. And it's curious to me that he doesn't because all he has to do is say, I acknowledge your concerns about these three things and I'm aware. All he has to do is acknowledge the awareness when he's pressed on those sort of things, as he was, you know, before about affordability issues, he sort of brushes it off. That, I think, is bad politics, even if it's just sort of something that's baked into the system when it comes to Trump. So I think it's a missed opportunity for him to reassure the public in some ways about some of these potential domestic problems down the line, because they will come up.
- [36:53]
B
How
- [36:56]
A
does he reassure them?
- [36:57]
E
Let me tell you what he does
- [36:58]
C
that talks about them a little bit.
- [36:59]
A
I don't think that reassures them. And he talks about it every day, just doesn't do it in a formal speech.
- [37:04]
E
But actually he was really.
- [37:05]
A
He literally talks about it every day, single day, twice a day from the, from the, you know, walking back to the press quarters on Air Force One, standing outside when he, before he gets on the helicopter. I think I've said this before. He has talked more as a commander in chief about the war that is being fought than any commander in chief in history has talked about the war as the war was being fought. I just don't think that that's talking
- [37:32]
C
about the potential impact domestically for Americans. That's separate from what is going on with work.
- [37:38]
E
Let me just say, every time this guy opens up his mouth right now, it's actually remarkable. And there was a tweet by an Iranian leader, I want to say he was the speaker of Parliament over the weekend where he basically said that Donald Trump keeps opening up his mouth in order to calm markets, and that's exactly what happens. In other words, Trump just comes out and says, well, this thing might be over in a week. And all of a sudden the price of oil drops by like, you know, you know, by five bucks or whatever it is. This guy continues to message in ways that are designed to kind of keep a lid on the bubbling over of this crisis. He's doing this on a very tactical level. It's not like, okay, guys, I understand your concerns and let me make you feel better about it. He just simply says one thing about the trajectory of the war or what we're going to do next, and the next thing you know, markets get calmer, the price of oil drops, and then it will pop back up again. But all he needs to do is come out and say it again, that, hey, we got this, it's going to be fine, don't worry about it. And this is the game that he's playing. It's just about keeping a lid on numbers while he continues to pursue the war that he wants to pursue. Before I forget, I also, I just want to talk about the problem or the question of premature evacuation, as we might call it. I gotta say, I've got just two quick thoughts on this. One is he is thinking about his legacy right now. He is not thinking about reelection. Right. I think he already assumes that he's going to take a little bit of a beating in the midterms. I don't think he's thinking about the. He's not thinking about this like a kind of a retail politician right now. He's thinking about, okay, what am I going to be able to look back on when this term is over in two and a half years? What do I have to show for it? And I do believe that it is a victory in Iran and changing the Middle East. I think that's where he's decided to go all in. And I mean, let me just say, presidents have tried this and have failed, but he's, you know, he's taken a pretty significant step here and he's taken a huge risk for me. I actually think that the challenge of ending the war sooner probably comes down to this debate in one month's time where the Democrats force his hand on war powers. This, to me, feels like actually his greatest restraint and probably the reason that he should be starting to come out and talking about things in the way that Christine suggests. If he's trying to win over. I don't know if he can win over a Democrat right now, but if he's trying to win over the Democrats to be able to continue this war in the way that he envisions, he's not done a great job thus far and he's got three and a half weeks, constitutionally.
- [40:30]
A
Can I just point out, though, constitutionally, The Republican Party and conservatives have not accepted the constitutionality of the War Powers act, which has not been formally challenged in the Supreme Court. And should the War Powers act be invoked against him, he will sue. He will say that this is war, Khan say is an unconstitutional encroachment on the presidential president's powers and will freeze the case. So you're right that the clock is ticking on the War Powers Act. I don't think you're right about the political consequences. Not the political consequences, the actionable consequences. Like does this freeze the war in place because they invoke the War Powers Act?
- [41:15]
C
Well, he needs money, though. He does need Congress to spend some money for that.
- [41:20]
A
Separate and technically not the War Power Act. But that's separate and apart from the War Powers Act.
- [41:26]
C
Right. But it is crucial to being, especially if this is something where you have, we have to continue to maintain a pretty heavy presence in the region and troops on whatever it is. If we're, if we're securing the strait, we're securing Carg island, it's going to take more money and that he has to get from Congress. That's a constitutional issue. That's very much settled.
- [41:43]
A
That is absolutely true. But I'm just saying that the ticking clock represented by the 60 day trigger in the War Powers act is very much up for challenge. He does not. It has been the line of every administration, I believe, including the Obama administration administration, that the War Powers act is an unconstitutional encroachment on the executive branch's authority and therefore they won't take it lying down and it won't be the thing where they go, okay, you know, sure, we'll come to you, Please authorize our war if they're not going to do it. So that's just a structural matter. It'll be a very interesting moment if in fact it is invoked, number one, which won't be so easy because, you know, House would have to agree to bring it to the floor as well, not just the Senate. And so I don't know. Not that they have the Senate either. So it's very confusing to me how the War Powers act plays. I just want to say one thing which is when we think about great wartime leadership, right. The signature great wartime leadership is Winston Churchill and how he spoke to the British people like they were adults because of the circumstances of World War II. And he rose to the occasion. He became the greatest leader forever, including or Lincoln. The thing is that when Churchill spoke like an adult to the British people, Britain was losing the war. Britain was being pummeled lost. Dunkirk was being, you know, then came the Battle of Britain and the war raids over London and Britain was losing. They were losing. And he had to say, take heart, we will never surrender. We are here. Zelensky, who I think is a pretty remarkable wartime leader in Ukrainian terms, has through the thing, but saying we are under unprecedented threat because they were. And therefore he had to rally the people to seriousness and a seriousness of purpose. We are not losing this war. We are, honest to God, not losing this war. There is a threat to the Strait of Hormuz which has yet to be triggered. We are not losing this war. We are winning this war. The obligations of the President of the United States in talking about it, therefore have a different valentine. I mean, I don't know what it is, but it can't be. I understand. You know, I'm very grim. Things are. This is a grim set of circumstances. I mean, it could be very serious. It could be something like that. But it's not like, have heart, don't worry, the sun is just about to, you know, we're going to take some tough blows, but in the end we're going to come out the better for it. That wouldn't even be the right rhetoric to describe what's going on now. I don't actually know what the right rhetoric is. That's why I asked you how he would. If you're saying all he needs to do is acknowledge that there are tough times, that won't help, how is that going to help with them? You think independent voters are going to go, oh, he understands, but he feels my pain. Yeah, please, that's not going to matter. He's doing what he can in Jonathan's, I think, estimation, which is he's trying to talk the markets down. He's doing whatever he can to flood the world market with oil to keep oil prices down. He's letting the Russians take a tanker of oil to Cuba instead of lowering the blockade there just so there's free flow of oil. He's emptying out the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. He's letting the Iranians sell oil. He's not blockading Iranian ships just so there's oil. As much oil as possible in the markets, which it has a domestic. He's doing in order that Americans will not feel as hard blow at the pump and so that their 401ks and their stock market portfolios will not go through horrible gyrations or a huge downturn. So he is making the steps. It's not like something you can announce somehow. Don't worry, I'm talking the market down. I'm making announcements. We do something, we make announcements over the weekend to, to make it sound good so that when the market's open on Monday morning, there isn't a crash. He can't.
- [46:03]
B
That's almost something he would say, but then the.
- [46:07]
A
Eventually, if the right interviewer asked him the right question, he would probably say it. Yeah.
- [46:11]
C
The question is, what is the tolerance level of the American people? And it could be limitless. I'm just asking this as an honest question. What is their tolerance for? Not just the anxiety, but the inconstancy and the mercurial back and forth. I mean, maybe he calms the market three times. Can he calm it four times, five times, six times? The. You're asking people to. And you're also asking for oil futures. You're asking for trust in a context that's very war specific. But people judge Trump's reliability and trustworthiness in a broader context. So, you know, he's sticking his name on. He wants to put his name on currency. He's doing, you know, ballroom things that people hate about him. His bombast. And I'm not including myself in all of these, but I live in D.C. and I'm sick of seeing his glowering face all over federal buildings. And when I was at the Kennedy center, having to see it on the screen, like, I'm sick of that. It's just, it's ridiculous. It is not crucial to the functioning of the Republic that those things be tackled. But I think it's crucial for us to understand the context in which people are judging him with the war is tempered by the fact that they are. They think he might be a little too disrespectful of some constitutional limits and of certain ways of doing things. And again, this is going to be an ongoing tension until he leaves office. We had all these crazy, no Kings ridiculous protests over the weekend. So I would just say when I. When I'm talking about the domestic political audience, I'm talking about how people. How much trust are people willing to give Trump and for how long for this conflict, which is technically not a war. It's not a war. It's not a declared war. It's an excursion. So as troops are sent, as things ramp up, as he signals, I think, appropriately, that we might have to stay a little longer. How long? I'm just curious how long the public is going to go along with that and trust him.
- [47:59]
B
Okay, I have two points I want to make. One is to address what Christine Just said, I know the war is not popular. There's no question as to how long the people who oppose this war will tolerate it. I would say until it actually starts to go bad. See, this is, I think, how you know that it, that it is in fact going so well. We've seen what real anti war fervor in this country looks like. We saw it at the end of the, the Bush years because the war had started to go very bad or the wars. There were a lot of problems and zigs and zags and turnarounds in fortune, and there were very large tragedies that America really got sick of seeing that is not happening. So that is why. Are people really furious about this war? No, they're furious about the Trump, the emperor. They're furious about all the other things. This is not like the Bush lied people died, Halliburton, no blood for oil. You know, that was what real sort of anti war fervor in this country looks like. And we're not seeing that. So I think so long as this war, God willing, goes as well as it's going, whether or not the media lie about it or not, I think there's not going to be that kind of mass movement that really rallies against it. I just want to say one other thing. I don't want to lose sight of Eliana's earlier question about what the opponents of the war would do in the event that Trump wins this thing. They will say the world is worse off for it. They will have no problem saying that. They will say it's a more chaotic place. They will say Trump has now given the okay to every other leader to invade for no reason at all, to do whatever he wants for future presidents to declare war without going to Congress to do this, to do that. I mean, their ability to make up an alternative reality. When this war started, I started reading articles in the New York Times and elsewhere, long essays saying, you know, the Iranian regime was just about to become reasonable. They were this.
- [50:36]
E
We.
- [50:36]
B
There was this. We were on the precipice of a miraculous moment where they were going to start talking like a responsible country. They were going to, they weren't going to enrich their uranium. They were going to visit. And by, by initiating this action, Trump has destroyed this miracle moment that we were on the verge of. So they will make up anything. I'm not saying it's going to work, but that is, that's what they're going to say.
- [51:05]
D
Well, I don't disagree with you at all, Abe. I just think That's a debate that Republicans across the country would welcome having and that would be had on quite favorable terms to the administration and Republican lawmakers. And it's a better debate than oil prices are up and, you know, we're in the middle of an armed conflict that, you know, war of choice and all this stuff. Like, I'd welcome that debate.
- [51:33]
A
Okay, I want to just make. I don't want to repeat a Republican talking point. I really don't. I do think independent voters are important. I think elite opinion is important because elite opinion is really the only opinion that matters when you're talking about the specifics of fighting a war, whether or not people, the vibe is that the war is good or bad. Among people who really aren't paying much attention to anything outside of their own immediate ambit. It is important, and it's unfortunate that we are where we are. But he's got close to 90% support among Republicans. And the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are at parity in the United States in terms of the overall population of the United States. So his numbers are terrible. Among Democrats, it's like 2080 against the war, but it's 9010 with Republicans for the war. And that is not dismissible because when bush collapsed in 2007 and 2008, it was because he lost Republicans, he had already lost Democrats. By 2008, he was at 30% in the polling because 20 to 30% of the Republican Party had decided or more had decided that they had an unfavorable view of his performance as President Trump, according to Kristen Soltis Andersen. Is it Kristen or Kirsten? It's Kristen, right? It's not Kirsten.
- [52:55]
C
I have no idea.
- [52:55]
B
Kristen.
- [52:56]
A
Okay, I know her. So it's embarrassing that I'm even asking that question. I didn't want to. His approval rating, the war, support for the war is increasing among Republicans, not decreasing. So the fact is he is not suffering the blows that you might expect. And that, to be fair, I think we thought that he would suffer. We thought that the Republican Party was a more mixed, more new rightish, more woke rightish force, and that the people who were represented by the podcast, pros and everything like that actually had a greater level of support in the Republican rank and file then in fact, we are discovering that they do, which is very heartening to me because I don't want them to have any support because they're also anti Semitic scum and they should all drop dead and drown in a sewer. But aside from my deep emotions here, the fact is that they are garnering their support. To the extent that they have support, it's decreasing, not increasing. And at CPAC, the straw poll at CPAC had support for Trump at 96%, while people like Tucker and everybody like that are now saying Nick Fuentes are saying don't support Trump anymore. Or, you know, you have problems with Trump or Megyn Kelly expressing her disappointment with Trump. So that is a very important fact. The country is incredibly polarized. And the part of the country that's polarized toward Trump, which is half of the people who affiliate with parties, are overwhelmingly on his side. And that's one thing, one point I wanted to make before we move on about the Iranian people and the revolt that hasn't happened yet. It is really not the case that regimes fall because people go out into the streets and start dancing and singing. I mean, that happened in Egypt. Kind of happened in Egypt because Mubarak in 2011 could not get the army to turn on the people or they had had enough of him or something. He'd been in power for 40 years and was old and his son was corrupt, and they didn't want his son either. It's coups. It's when the regime looks weak and is going to fall. And it's the question of whether or not people inside the regime who might be people that we're talking to or might not be people that we're talking to say, this is my chance. I am Macbeth. I am going to take out. I am going to take out the king. And then they do. They try and they fail. And then somebody else does it. And then somebody else does it. I don't think that what we should be imagining is that, you know, Reza Shah Pahlavi is going to be put on the shoulder. Reza Pahlavi is going to be put on the shoulders. He's going to arrive on a boat and then he's going to be lifted and carried into the center of Tehran on the shoulders of 10 million Iranians who will be excited to restore the peacock throne. I think what's going to happen is the regime will collapse internally the way the regime where the regimes collapse internally. You're not going to get unconditional surrender of the sort that we got where the Nazi regime literally just disintegrated. Once Hitler committed suicide, there was no Nazi regime anymore. It was over, it was dead. Or imperial Japan, which sort of existed, but then the emperor surrendered and America took over as a regent. Right. I mean, that's not going to happen in this circumstance. But you could have everyone turning on everyone else and people deciding that maybe what they should do is curry favor, or what they really need to do is not focus on the external threat from the United States and Israel, but to try to secure their own power inside the country, which might mean saying to the Americans, here, come give me a $10 billion bribe. I will show you the way into Ifsaan again. Did I pronounce it right this time?
- [56:52]
E
Isfahan. Yeah, close enough.
- [56:54]
A
Why am I. This is. I am. Okay. Yeah. So I'm just saying, I think the hope. The hope that this was gonna be some kind of a people's revolution in a country of 90 million people, it was a little naive because history does not record that that is the way that regimes fall.
- [57:13]
E
But, yeah, can I just.
- [57:15]
B
Revolutionary, first of all.
- [57:17]
E
I mean, again, and I've said, you know, I just need to foot stomp this. The people of Iran are very divided, very fractured, and the idea that they will somehow just come together, I think has been unrealistic. There's still ways that they can come out, but I would not expect this to happen in some unified, dramatic fashion. I think, as you suggest. What. You know, it just really. It's hard for me to escape this one thing. You know, we've just talked for an hour about whether we're doing okay or whether we're not doing okay. And, you know, how is Trump faring? And this country is still licking its wounds from the last two wars. We are still fearful that we don't have what it takes to win a war in the Middle east, maybe to win a war in general. And I don't think it's any surprise that this country is not exactly 100% comfortable with the projection of power abroad. I know it's always. We've always been ambivalent as a culture about this, but this is what we're wrestling with now. What's so interesting to me is that we're dealing with a guy that not too long ago was bragging that he was the guy that didn't have a war during his term, and now he's just brought a war, you know, a big one, possibly the biggest one that we've seen in a long time. And the country's still wrestling with this inside his own party. Externally, we're all wrestling with this right now. But I think, look to the broader point. I think so far it's going okay. We need to fix the economic element, the asymmetric element of this war. If we can do that while still fighting that military component, that major thrust of the war that we began, that's, I think, where it ends. And maybe, I mean, bring down the regime as you just described, John, and maybe you don't even need to deal with the economic asymmetric component of this. But I think the nerves that are coming out about the war in general, I think that's really the big story right now, not the war itself.
- [59:26]
A
Okay, thank you.
- [59:27]
C
I agree with that. Yeah, that's, that's, I like how that's framed.
- [59:29]
A
That's, that is really, really well framed. And again, by the way, no matter what goes on here, and this is why the war may have to continue because of, and Marco Rubio said this this morning, because the threat to the Strait of Hormuz is now open ended, the regime kind of has to fall now. I mean, I've said the regime had to fall from the beginning. So I'm not saying anything different. But the only way to close off the existential threat to the continued threat to the Strait of Hormuz is to end the political organization that sees this as its only shot. There is no way to do that without removing them. So I think we are inexorably moving without Trump announcing that we're doing regime change without nation building, which he could do if he read Jonathan Schanzer's brilliant article in the current issue of Commentary. Regime change without nation building. Everyone who's screaming about the Strait of Hormuz is implicitly supporting the idea that the United States has to win this war because there is no way to reopen the Strait of Hormuz fully without anxiety, without insurance rates going up 80% from now until doomsday, unless the regime is removed. Maybe that's our fault. Maybe you could say, this is terrible. He opened this Pandora's box and now it can't be closed. Of course it can be closed. It'd be closed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is only 47 years old, being eliminated, and a new regime, meaning a new constitution, a new system, all of that which remembers France has had five since 1945. France has had five different constitutional republics since 1945. It's not as though constitutions aren't rewritten and regimes revised on the go. It does happen. This would be a much more extreme version of that, but you know otherwise. So the more you say, what has Trump done with the Strait of Hormuz? This is a nightmare, the more the only answer is we have to get out the regime so that the Strait is no longer threatened. Am I, do I Jonathan, do I see another? Is there a realpolitik world in which that answer is not the answer?
- [61:52]
B
No.
- [61:52]
A
I'm not even talking about ideologically. I hate Iran. I don't like its existential threat to Israel. I think it's a monstrous regime and it has a millenary and monstrous ideology that has been hostile and monstrous to its own people and it's disgusting and it should be removed for the moral health of America. But if I didn't believe any of that and I was just like a straight on rail politic er who cared nothing about human rights and nothing about religion and nothing about the Jewish people, I would still say double time. The regime has to be removed because the threat to the Strait of Hormuz is a power play that has to be answered and defeated.
- [62:27]
E
My colleague Behnam Ben Taliblu, an Iranian American, since the Strait of Hormuz crisis erupted, he has been going back to one refrain. The only way out of this crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is through. And by that he means bring down the regime.
- [62:45]
A
I do with all this apocalyptic talk or not, because it's actually, in my view, the opposite of apocalyptic talk. I do want to offer people in our commentary recommends a delightful palate clearing sorbet in the form of a new television series that you have not heard of, likely because it is on a relatively minor streaming service called MGM plus, which you can subscribe to through Amazon. As a tile, the show is called American Classic and it stars Kevin Klein and Laura Linney. It is a sitcom. It's a There are eight episodes, six have already aired, and it is about a grandiloquent Broadway actor considered the greatest actor of his generation, but someone to whom the New York Times critic is hostile, opening in King Lear on Broadway, getting a really bad review, and then drunkenly assaulting the New York Times critic at Sardis. And that clip going viral and him having to retreat because he's been put on leave by the show because of this horrible publicity. Literally at the same moment that he hears that his mother has died in his hometown of Millersburg, Pennsylvania, so he has to go home for the funeral, but really he's going home to lick his wounds. And he is the most vain, most superficial, most hilariously clueless portrayal of an actor practically in the history of the planet by Kevin Kline, who peerlessly can do this sort of thing. And he goes home and decides that he is going to save the town theater, which is where he emerged from and which is owned by his. Was owned by his parents and is now run by his brother and sister in law. And this show is Imagine Schitt's Creek mixed with Waiting for Guffman mixed with Northern Exposure mixed with one of my favorite movies made by the same director, which you've probably never seen, called Soap Dish with Kevin Kline as a similarly clueless actor. It is hilarious, it's touching, it's brilliantly acted and it is really worth the subscription to watch this thing. I haven't laughed at an American sitcom in years. Like I've watched. I haven't like actually laughed out loud the way I've laughed out loud at this because it's a farce. But it's also grounded. It's real. You understand what's going on. There's a bit of left wing politics I just want to alert you, but not much. And so that's American Classic on mgm. Possibly a classic. If I were an Emmy voter, everybody on the show would win the Emmy next year. I'm not and, and the Emmys don't listen to me. But this is a show that maybe in a year or two will end up on Netflix the way Netflix leases older shows. And I think if that were to happen, it would be one of those things that would explode the way Ted Lasso exploded or Schitt's Creek exploded or other shows exploded. Anyway, that is American Classic on MGM with Kevin Klein. Subscribe. You will love it. And if you don't love it, there's something wrong with it to I'm just saying.
- [66:06]
C
So.
- [66:06]
A
John Shanzer, thank you so much for joining us as ever. And for Eliana, Christine and Abe, I'm John Pod Horowitz. Keep the candle burning.