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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody, just a quick update before we jump into the recording we recorded Monday morning from 9:30 to 10:30. And in the hours after the recording, there was some additional activity. There were reports of Iranian strikes on the uae and Admiral Brad Cooper of CENTCOM told reporters that Iran had opened fire on US Warships and commercial vessels today. So that is not reflected in our conversation here, but the main contours of the conversation remain the same. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll return to the Iran war and discuss the ever changing rhetoric from the Trump administration. Is the war effectively over or should we settle in for something longer as President Trump recently suggested, invoking Vietnam for context. We'll also discuss the state of the negotiations with Iran and the Trump administration's attempt to extend the 60 day congressional authorization window requirements of the War Powers Act. And finally, not worth your time, the Philadelphia 76ers restricting access to Knicks fans. I'm joined today by my Dispatch colleagues, Kevin Williamson, Mike Warren, and Dispatch contributor Mike Nelson. Let's dive right in. Morning, gentlemen. Welcome. We're recording this at about 9:30 on Monday, May 4, and there's news this morning out of the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state media claim that an American warship was struck by two missiles after the crew ignored warnings about entry into the strait. The the United States, however, says no US Warships were struck. The White House has rejected another proposed peace deal from Iran. And following reports that this weekend that President Trump is getting antsy, he's sour about the lack of diplomatic progress. Frustrated by the continued blockage of the strait, concerned about slipping domestic US Support, the president put a statement out on social media Sunday afternoon telling the world that the US Will begin helping ships unable to traverse the strait as a, quote, humanitarian gesture, warning the regime that it best not interfere. Mike Nelson, you've got a piece up this morning and I want to go further into depth on your piece and your argument a little bit later. But just off the news of the past 18, 24 hours, it feels to me like we are potentially sort of in the proverbial calm before the storm. Am I right about that?
- [02:57]
B
Well, I don't know if we're in the calm before the storm or if we're in the outer rings of the storm itself. But what we're seeing, I think, is a disconnect between what the President and the White House are overtly trying to present and what the Iranians are communicating back in their actions within the last 12 or 24 hours. We have the announcement of Project Freedom, which seems to be euphemistically named. It sounded originally like a military operation to try to escort ships through the strait. Number one, it's probably not named that because we've just declared or attested to Congress that the war is over to try to skirt the war powers timelines. In clarifying it, some of the administration and the DoD officials have said it's no, it's more of a coordination cell that communicates to international shipping when and where things are clear. Since then, we've had two incidents. Now we had international ship that UK maritime trackers are reporting called the Minuan Falcon. Ironic on Star War Day that could not run a blockade and may have been struck by an Iranian missile. And then we have the Iranian claims of having struck a US warship, which CENTCOM has denied. We saw something similar in the past when there was an attack on one of our CSGs that was defeated by the US Navy, but that CENTCOM had not disclosed for some period of time. So there may be somewhere in between where the Iranians have attacked a US warship, but the attack was unsuccessful. Regardless, it shows that they are not taking seriously our communication that the strait is going to be open, that they had better not interfere. They are sticking by their initial communication that the strait is closed and it will remain closed until the US agrees to withdraw our blockade, one of their preconditions that they've demanded as part of their 14 point plan that, as you mentioned, was at least in part rejected by the White House.
- [04:43]
A
Kevin, you wrote last week that the Trump administration's failure to keep the strait open was a sign of weakness. You wrote the Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway under maritime law. But the Trump administration insists on treating the strait as though it were a sovereign Iranian territory, doing so for reasons ranging from incompetence to political cowardice. What would you have the administration do given that this is an international waterway?
- [05:12]
C
Well, wind back a little bit for context that this is an illegal war that Congress hasn't authorized, and so they probably shouldn't be doing anything at all. But let's just set aside that nicety for the moment and pretend like this is a legitimate thing that's going on there. You know, it's a profoundly silly thing, I think in some ways that the Iranians close the strait and then the Trump administration says, we're going to blockade your blockade. So now we're both closing the strait. And the whole question isn't who can close the strait, but who can open the strait. The Strait of Hormuz could be closed by essentially any country that had any sort of meaningful naval power. As I argued in the Peace shoot, there are probably private organizations that could close the Strait of Hormuz if they really wanted to, because it's a fairly vulnerable choke point. So the problem, of course, is that if you want to keep the strait open, you not only have to control the water in the strait and on both sides of the strait, but also the land north of it and probably some of the land south of it, although the land south of it tends to be. Those are U.S. allies that are more or less reliable, although their control over their own territory isn't always absolute. And that is a major military undertaking. And it's not the sort of thing that can get wrapped up in 60 days. We'll get back to the pause, I guess here they're 64 days, 3 hours and 7 minutes, or whatever the clock officially says, according to the White House of the time, they have to do this stuff. So there's no way to do that without doing the things that the Trump administration has historically said it doesn't want to do, which is involve itself in an open ended conflict in the Middle east in which there will be an indefinite commitment of US Troops and resources for a project that doesn't have any obvious endpoint in sight, because as soon as you abandon the project to keeping the strait open, then whatever party in there wants to close it can close it. And so the Trump administration has been essentially telling the Iranians that we want you to do this hard thing for us. We don't want to come in there and do the difficult thing of keeping it open. So you tell us what you want and we'll think about what we can give you, and then you can decide whether this rate's going to be open or not. And that essentially amounts to a concession of Iranian sovereignty over this international waterway, which is not something we should be conceding. So you can stay out of it in the first place, because the strait was open before the war, before we launched this illegal war in Iran, not necessarily undesirable, by the way, but certainly an illegal war. But before that, the strait was open. The strait is closed as a result of this campaign. And now the point of this campaign that resulted in the closing of the strait, apparently, is to get the strait open. So we are really chasing our tails here in a way that doesn't make very much sense.
- [07:45]
A
Mike, the president, in his statement, referred to this Project Freedom more than once, I believe, as a humanitarian Gesture. What's your best understanding of why he's framing it that way and does it relate to this pause, so called pause. The administration, just for background, and we'll get into this a little bit deeper, has made the claim in letters to Congress on the 60th day of the war of the conflict that it does not need to seek congressional authorization for this military action because of a ceasefire that started on April 7th. And because there has been no continued kinetic military action from April 7th onward. The count, the clock as it were, stops counting on that day. So we have not yet reached the 60 day threshold because there hasn't been fighting over the past three weeks. Is the President using the words? I mean, he's not very clean or consistent about this. Shortly, within hours of them having said we don't have to do this because we're not really at war anymore, the President talked about being at war with Iran. Is the use of the phrase humanitarian gesture some attempt to further get around these reporting obligations or seeking this authorization, or is it best understood as something else?
- [09:10]
B
As far as I know, this rationale was never communicated before Secretary Hegseth's testimony last week where he offered it as a reasoning for why the President or the White House did not need to seek congressional approval or not notification just to get that 30 day extension on the War Powers Act. I don't know if it had been bandied about within the White House legal team before that, but we know that was the first time it was said the White House in their statement in their letter to Congress. Actually, I think took it a step further. It wasn't just we have hit pause on the stopwatch as though this were, you know, some kind of game. They claimed that the war was terminated, that it was over.
- [09:46]
A
Right.
- [09:46]
B
So I think they took it a step further. I do think the communication of humanitarian regarding Project Freedom does two things. Number one, it nests with that kind of narrative that we are no longer at war. And this is something else which, you know, on its face is obviously false. But I think the other thing too is there is this communication from the White House that this is a European problem, it's an international problem. They are the ones who benefit from trade through the strait. It's not our issue. So. But we can all see from the rising price of oil internationally that it is an American economic problem as well as being a European one by communicating this is humanitarian relief for these crews that are stranded in the Persian Gulf. It's not helping the Europeans facilitate trade. It's just rescuing those Crews. I think that it doesn't reinforce the idea that we're doing anything to help the Europeans. And I think that's a long running theme in this administration. You even saw it from Vice President Vance during Signalgate in what was not supposed to be disclosed communications. His objection to Operation Roughrider was not that it would benefit us in opening deterring Houthi attempts on the Babel Mendeb. It was that the Europeans might benefit more from it than we would. And that was offensive. So I think there is a certain amount of this that is. It's not reopening European trade, it's rescuing these stranded crews, and therefore not of necessarily direct economic benefit to the Europeans.
- [11:16]
A
Yeah, Kevin. Mike makes the point that the White House and the administration has communicated that the war was, in fact, over. And so it was really making an argument that goes beyond the way that I discussed it in this pause. And he's, of course, correct to point that out. But it's also the case that the President of the United States has. I mean, I've seen lists with dates corresponding the number of times the President of the United States has declared the war over, effectively over, sometimes without the qualifier. As we pay attention to the rhetoric of this, and we've talked about this a fair amount on this podcast, there is this temptation, I think, to ascribe meaning and strategic thinking to the rhetoric that we see coming from the President, thinking from others, because that's the way that we've treated these things before. And in past administrations and past campaigns, there has been strategic thinking. Might have been flawed strategic thinking, might have been really foolish strategic thinking, but there has been strategic thinking that leads to the rhetoric that we're seeing from top administration officials, and most especially the president. One gets the sense that is not happening here. And that's probably the kindest way that I can put that. Which isn't to say that there's not strategic thinking taking place in the administration, certainly at the Pentagon, but when you see the President say the war is over, the war is not over, you know, we're pausing. This is a ceasefire. We don't have to go to Congress. It feels much more like this is sort of continuation of ad hoc decision making by the President based on who he's angry at at the moment or something he's heard in his last conversation, rather than sort of a broader strategic frame. Is that. Am I being too uncharitable?
- [12:57]
C
No. You know, sometimes when I say things like this, people think I'm just trying to get a rise or express my displeasure with the administration. But I think just as a matter of fact, and the most important fact to understand about this administration is that Donald Trump is adult. He's just not a smart person. He's a dumb guy. He's an unserious person. He just says the first thing that comes into his head. And then he's got people around him of various degrees of competence and incompetence who try to mop it up. We elected this idiotic game show host president twice. Now he is almost 80 years old. He's not getting better with age. He wasn't super smart when he was in his 40s and 50s. And he just, you know, runs around saying stuff. There's no point in overanalyzing it. He's just a guy. He's like a third grader who like, did you break the vase? No, no, no. The imaginary invisible chickens in the kitchen did that. You know, he'll just say the first thing that comes into his head and that's it.
- [13:50]
A
Mike, there have been moments when you can sort of discern changes in the President's rhetoric or rhetoric coming from the administration seem to last longer and seem to have more purpose or suggest more purpose than perhaps Kevin and I are giving them credit for. There was for a long time the President saying, in effect, this is easy. We destroyed them, we decimated Iran, they have no more ships. The war is effectively over. And then about two weeks ago, and we discussed this, at the time, it felt like there was an abrupt shift to the President counseling patience and talking about these things taking a while, taking longer than Americans are accustomed to, citing Vietnam. Yeah, at one point he mentioned Vietnam and said this 19 year conflict, I think was the way that he described it. And it wasn't just the President. Pete Hegseth said the same thing in his congressional testimony last week over two days. And they talked about sort of Iran as a threat, the need to eliminate the threat. They spoke of the objectives of the war that I think some of which were sort of post hoc rationalizations for doing what the President wanted to do, some of which they did articulate at the beginning, which you've said on a number of occasions. But there was this shift from this is easy, the war's over to hey, everybody, sort of, this could take a while. We might be doing this for a while. Do you have any sense of what led to that consistent and administration wide shift, or was it just the case that the President said something? Everybody fell in line until the President says something else.
- [15:33]
B
Well, I think first of all overall in this campaign and the rhetoric that supports it, the President is, to a certain extent, a victim of his own perceived success with previous military operations. And I would argue that Venezuela, despite the fact that the President believes it was complete within one period of darkness, is actually unresolved in terms of what we're going to do politically with that country and the people there. But in his perception, this major problem that had plagued America for 20 years was dealt with, you know, a quick decision and something very simple, and that he could replicate that kind of success elsewhere. I think what we're seeing across the board with his fluctuating messages and, you know, perceived or at least demonstrated frustration with, number one, how the war is going and how American perceptions of the war are going are his coming to terms with the fact that this is very different from Venezuela, and it's not an immediate fix. It's a much more complicated situation. And he's not doing what I believe he should be doing, which is to say to the American people, which he never did upfront, this is clearly why we're doing it. This is clearly the conditions that we will accept and those that we will not. And it's going to be difficult and painful to accomplish those. Instead, he still is retaining his level of rhetoric that this is simple, this is easy. They're secretly telling me they want to give in to everything that we've asked for. But why aren't you more patient with me? If you gave the Johnson administration patients in Vietnam or the Bush administration patients in Iraq, why aren't you giving me patients with this? My counter is that the administration is actually arguing they're their best argument against them. If two months is not so long to be patient and see benefit, two months is also not too long for an administration to be consistent in what they're trying to accomplish, how they're going to accomplish it, and what they're asking the American people to do. And they haven't been able to do that. Secretary Hedseth famously, a couple times, has said pointedly to Democratic congressmen and senators, you remind me of the kinds of people I was countering in the Iraq war who naysayed it and said that we weren't going to succeed. And then we'll immediately turn around and say, this isn't a stupid war like the Iraq war. Well, which is it? If the Iraq war was stupid and flawed from the onset, then those people who were naysaying him were correct. Now, I would argue that. That we eventually corrected our path in Iraq, achieved what we were trying to achieve. But his arguments are not consistent. They seem to want the tolerance and impatience of the American people and their political opposition without ever presenting why they should be given the benefit of the doubt. And right now we have a situation where the President faces basically three choices. Accept defeat, except that he was not able to achieve what he wanted. To absorb a certain amount of economic pain through the long term imposition of this mutual blockade and see who blinks first, or accept additional costs in terms of American blood and treasure by escalating the military effort. Those are really his three choices and he wants to choose none of the above.
- [18:39]
A
Yeah, Mike, I want to get back to that. And Kevin, I want to ask you about that, but before I do, your piece today on our website from Unconditional Surrender to Please Make a Deal gets at some of the rhetorical inconsistency that we're talking about. And I wonder if you could walk people through the argument you made in that piece, with particular attention being paid to how the Iranian regime is receiving these messages and what indications we have, if any, that the regime intends to make a deal, that they are willing to sit down with their US Interlocutors and actually discuss something that might represent some kind of a diplomatic compromise.
- [19:20]
B
One thing we should keep in mind is the Iranian regime is, and has been for the duration since 1979, full of liars. Right? They are not presenting honestly what they're trying to do in the region, how this is affecting them. So we should not take at face value that they are not feeling pain, but they are much more disciplined in how they are presenting the way they are willing to endure this conflict as of yet. The President when they imposed their blockade in the Strait, the president very quickly started spiraling and showing that this was a pain point for him, that he did not want this consistent imposition and blockade of 20% of the world's energy supplies being held up because it was causing him domestic and economic pain. The regime, despite the fact that they have taken significant casualties not only among their military but among their leadership cadre itself, that they have had depleted portions of their military stocks that they accumulated and that they are facing domestic upheaval that started in January and may spark up again. Additionally, this now mutually imposed blockade is causing them economic woes in an already weak economy. So there is pain being exerted on the Iranians, but what they are presenting outwardly is a very disciplined message that they have no interest in coming off of their maximalist demands. Their 14 point proposal that they just submitted over the Weekend looks a lot like the same proposal that they had submitted in Islamabad and that they had submitted before Islamabad. They are not coming off their demands. Now. That's not to say that they expect to get all of those, but they expect those as a starting point from which to negotiate. All of which are not advantageous to us. Meanwhile, the president is very clearly communicating in words and actions how willing he is to jump when the Iranians demand. They did not show any clear indications that they were going to have a second round of communication or negotiations in Islamabad. Yet he was very quickly and loudly pronouncing that he was going to send Jared and Steve Wyckoff, that he was going to send the vice president. We were dancing to their tune and we remained doing so. So I think that the president needs to kind of tighten up not only his message for the Iranian people, but also for the American people that this is not going to be that simple. And every time he communicates that the Iranians are secretly back channel telling us that they're going to give into everything we want, they know he's lying and it gives them additional leverage to understand that he is impatient for a deal.
- [21:48]
A
So I wondered, Mike, when we saw this shift from the president and it was again a shift in rhetoric that seemed to last for a couple of weeks really until I would say this weekend that you had the President of the United States in his spontaneous gaggles with the news media, you had Pete Hegseth in congressional testimony, you had other administration figures, Mike Waltz and others on the Sunday shows all suggesting that this was going to be a longer undertaking, that people better be patient, better be ready to support it. I wondered whether that wasn't exactly the kind of shift that you are talking about. And the first thought that I had was, was that it was reminiscent, at least in some respects, to the kinds of arguments that the Bush administration was making in that case, after three plus years in Iraq, when the Bush administration was arguing for the surge, making sort of the psychological, the argument that could have the psychological effect on the enemy of saying we're willing to take casualties, we're willing to suffer through this, we are going to escalate and we are going to win regardless of what happens here. So, you know, you better not assume that you can get cute with your negotiations or tweak us by laying additional minds in the strait. We're serious about this, we're long term. Was that at any part of this thinking or am I again guilty of ascribing strategic thinking where it doesn't necessarily fit?
- [23:14]
B
Well, I think it may have been, but so to use your analogy that you just pointed to with the Iraq war surge and how it might be analogous to our current situation, I think it's important to draw the distinction between the Iraq war surge and the Afghan war surge. Both were demonstrations of additional commitment to the conflict, but one, the Iraq war demonstrated, we are not going to withdraw. We're not going to give into the pressure that we're feeling from this asymmetric conflict that's being exerted by the Iraqi insurgency. We are in this for the duration. And that allowed the Sunni population to see that the Americans were serious about the conflict and to make a perceptional and directional shift in the direction of the country. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, President Obama announced, I am committing additional forces and I'm going to tell you exactly when I am going to withdraw them because I have no interest in this war in the long term, and sent exactly the opposite message. So the president may feel like he is changing direction and communicating strength, but then within 24 or 48 hours he is demonstrating, I'm totally willing to make a deal. I am interested in ending this as quickly as possible. There is no perception that he is willing to sit back and say, great, I guess we have this mutual blockade. It's going to be painful for both of us and we're going to see how long it takes until one of us blinks. The Iranians don't believe that and neither do the American people. Most likely they all believe that this is going to shift very quickly. And I think that even now, when he imposed the mutual blockade, that was a good move. And then he started showing a little bit of weakness or flexibility this weekend. On Friday, when he immediately rejected the 14 point proposal, that was a good move. And then 24 hours later, he said, well, there may be some stuff that we can work with in there. So he continues to soften his hard approach to the point that it's completely unusable.
- [25:02]
A
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- [28:49]
D
It's hard to know exactly why the President made says one thing at one particular time during the day or the week. But I do think the political pressure is real. I think it is not something that is, you know, ephemeral or you're just hearing from, you know, Democrats who are trying to use it as an issue in the midterm elections. I think that the polling is out there, both public polling and also in private polling that the White House is certainly aware of. And I am sure that Susie Wiles is, is in some ways expressing to the President that it's not popular and that the follow on effects are pretty clear to people. Not just gas prices, but all other kinds of input prices that Kevin can read chapter and verse on the ways in which petroleum factors into so many input prices for businesses and other places within the economy where the effect on higher petroleum prices means costs will rise across the board. I was in Iowa just a couple of days ago. For a couple days I was covering, I'm covering a Democratic primary there for Senate. I was around a lot of Democratic groups. So, you know, take that with a grain of salt that there's a lot of, you know, distrust of this president from Democratic voters. But these were two Democratic candidates for the U.S. senate who are both talking about in a, they're in a competitive primary and they're not differentiating themselves over, you know, the question of the Iran war. They're both pretty adamantly against this war and speaking out, not just, you know, about the foreign policy elements of it, which you might expect from Democrats to have a different view on foreign policy from a Republican president. But they're talking about the effects of this on the cost of not just gasoline, but in Iowa, a big ag state, they're talking about the cost of fertilizer going up. And important point that someone made to me recently is that the growing season is now and so people are buying fertilizer right now. The effects of say the tariffs, but now and now this closing of the Strait of Hormuz weren't in effect last growing season, but they are in effect this growing season and there's just a lot of anxiety about that. So in a state like Iowa, where there's a competitive Senate race, but in other places across the country, maybe less ag, but more, more of those, that high cost of gasoline, this is something that a lot of Democrats are saying is a big problem and a Big part of their message about why Donald Trump and the Republican Party are not working for their voters, not working for the American people. You have to think that is something, of course, that Donald Trump is considering. And I don't know much I've talked about. It's hard to sort of put ourselves in the minds of what the Iranians are thinking about our domestic politics. They don't exactly have, you know, the, a perfect window into it, and their, you know, view might be warped, but they do know that there is a midterm election coming up in the United States. They do know that there are electoral concerns that the President and his party have. And you do have to wonder if that's a part of their negotiating strategy. Just wait this out and know that Donald Trump doesn't want to have a war that keeps on going for the next several months. I don't know if that would save Donald Trump to sort of find a way to negotiate himself out of this quickly, but I think they know, the Iranians know that there is political pressure here at home.
- [32:14]
A
Kevin, do you accept the framing of the President's options that Mike Nelson laid out for us just a moment ago? In effect, option 1, accept defeat, or in the sort of characterization of, of the Trump administration, be happy with the military gains that we've achieved thus far and the war pullout, move on. Number two, sort of long term pain, mutual blockades, settling in for what would be a much longer term fight. And then number three, sort of escalate to win if this, if these, if this shorthand works for you, Mike Nelson, with all the risks that escalating to win might involve. Kevin, do you buy that as essentially the three options? And if you could set aside your, you know, your, your concerns about this being an illegal war and the President came to you and asked you for advice, what advice would you give him?
- [33:07]
C
So Steve is asking the theater critic if Mike Nelson has adequately framed the situation.
- [33:14]
A
Look, Kevin, you are the one who's pointed out that a lot of this is theater, so there's nobody better to ask that question.
- [33:21]
C
My, my background in theater criticism has served me well, well, for the last decade of not writing about theater. Yeah, I think that's essentially right. C.S. lewis has this riff about what to do when you're on the wrong path, when you've taken a wrong turn somewhere, which is you have to turn around and get back on the right one. And going backward may feel like it's regress and it may feel like it's retreat, but it's actually the only way toward progress and advancement. And if my phone rings and it's John Barron asking me if I have any advice to pass on along to his boss, Donald Trump, what I would tell him to do is to go to Congress, lay out his war aims, what he thinks we need to do to get them, and ask for their support and commitment to get that done. Because, you know, whether this is going to be pursued and whether it's worth pursuing and how it's going to be pursued is, as Mike suggested earlier, going to be a lot different, depending on what our actual goal here is, which seems to keep changing. So if the goal is regime change, that's one thing. If the goal is to make sure that the Iranians never have ambitions to launch a nuclear program again, that's a different thing, but actually probably involves regime change as well. There's something very close to it. And Hegseth, by the way, going in and saying that, well, we obliterated their nuclear program, but now we have to make sure that we don't. They don't have any ambitions. We're fighting their ambitions now. So we're dropping physical bombs on a metaphysical entity, on their ambitions. I don't know what you put in the coordinates to bomb an ambition, but you've got to go out there and do that somewhere. If our goal now is just simply to try to normalize traffic through the straight up Hormuz, that's a whole different issue, and that's a different set of obligations. It doesn't require necessarily regime change, but it does require kind of buying them off or beating them into submission where they don't want to mess with that anymore. So you've got to pick one, I think, and once you've picked one, then you've got to think pretty carefully about what it takes to get that done, whether the American people are likely to support it, which I don't think they probably are, and then go from there. But I don't think there's any way to do that from, you know, we're in the problem of you can't get there from here, you can't get there from where we are right now without going back and doing the things that should have been done from the beginning. And Trump, of course, is unlikely to do that because, one, it's just the right thing to do, and he's always resistant to doing the right thing. And second, it would be a sort of admission of defeat, or if not defeat, of limitations on his supposed omniscience. You know, we're dealing with a delusional person here. You know, Donald Trump walks around apparently talking to people about how he's the most powerful human being who's ever lived and a bunch of ragtag nobodies in Iran with some drones or, you know, thwarting his grand man of history ambitions and not to get into Jonah's territory here with the Hegelian stuff. Although if you haven't listened to that edition of the podcast, you should definitely go do it. It's not something that I can see him doing. And so the most likely thing seems to me just like this sort of extended quagmire. They keep doing what we're doing, improvise from day to day. And I think that the threat of an ass kicking in the midterms is diminishing every day. Just because it's now baked into the calculations. They assume they're going to get the crap kicked out of them and that there's not much they can do about it at this point. So why hurt the President's fragile ego and vanity if it's not actually going to make things any better politically to try and go do the right thing. And of course, lecturing Donald Trump that, well, this is, you know, the decent, honest, patriotic thing to do, you may as well be yelling at your dog, you know.
- [36:45]
A
Well, you know, your discussion of our efforts to bomb ambitions reminds me how far we've traveled from J.D. vance's speech at the 2024 Republican Convention where he said that people will not fight for abstractions. Seems like we're there, but we can fight abstraction.
- [37:03]
C
We'll fight against abstraction.
- [37:05]
A
Right, Right. Mike Nelson, I want to ask you about the 2025 Tony Awards and the happy, maybe happy ending and the best musical. No, I'm not going to actually ask you that. I want you to go deeper into your own framing here and not, I'm not going to put you in the Oval Office with the President and ask you to give him advice, but thinking sort of the long term best interest of the United States at this point. If those are the three options right now, set aside the political implications, set aside, what's the best thing for the United States to do right now? Is Kevin. Right. That sort of the best thing is to walk back so that we can walk forward and make progress. Which of those three choices right now would be best for the United States in five years, 10 years, 20 years?
- [37:54]
B
Well, we've brought up a similar example a couple times throughout this conversation, and it's a model that I think the President can look to but as Kevin just pointed out, he is not personally predisposed probably towards this. Talking about a midterm thumping, to use the victim at the Times framing of it. In 2006, the Republicans took a thumping, as George W. Bush put it, and he, President Bush fired Secretary Rumsfeld, but then also recommitted to the surge. You know, the Iraq war was incredibly unpopular at the time. There was Harry Reid was calling for us to withdraw en masse. I do think that the president, and again, this works against character, against his history, but he should make the case that this is a whole of government approach, including, you know, members of Congress to whom he has not been predisposed to go to, to make the case. He needs to make the case to the American people. And I do think that of the three options, probably the most likely to succeed is to the long term settling in for economic pain. As I laid out in a piece for the Dispatch a while ago, the ground based options or the escalatory options do not necessarily guarantee success either. And they come with significant risk to our own forces. The cost of blood to achieve even victory with those would be significant or could be significant. So I do think that, as we've said, the Iranian regime does have a fragile economy and imposing long term economic pain for them, making, you know, striking that already fragile economy, I think is probably the most likely avenue for success. Of course, again, you know, like you said, we're paying 425 for gas right now on average. That's going to go up with the summer travel season. And the president is already facing, you know, we're already seeing polls that for the first time the Democrats are pulling higher at better in the economy than the Republicans are. As Kevin said, a midterm thumping is already baked in the cake. And so the president, I think would be better to make the worst the least bad option for him in terms of the outcome of that.
- [39:58]
A
Yeah, he's just not given over to long term thinking in that respect.
- [40:02]
D
And can I say real quick, Steve, on that point, I think Mike Nelson is right about that. And yet this cuts so much against Donald Trump's sort of his message in 2024 and the perception that was going to be from the voters who put him back into office, that was going to be what he, what his whole entire purpose is. And I think in some way Trump still thinks of himself as bringing in the golden age of America. And there's a real ego problem here. Shocking, I know, about Donald Trump. I do think that while that midterm thumping is maybe baked into the cake for all of us observers. I just, I wonder if Donald Trump is in a position where he's just really trying to have it all and he's going to keep making bad decisions about how to proceed, not taking Mike Nelson's advice because he thinks he can do it all and that he still is doing it all. And more bad economic news is just gonna put a lot of pressure on him to find what he might think is an easier way out.
- [41:05]
A
But if the midterm thumping is baked in, and I agree that it is, it's baked in for people like us. It's baked in, I think, for a lot of the people who are, you know, making prognostications about where this will end up. It's certainly not baked in for Republican candidates around the country. I mean, they are not conceding defeat. They are out raising money, they're putting up new ads, they're fighting on. I mean, I think they're having to change the terms of the fight. If their argument was six, eight months ago, the president of the United States has brought back, you know, $2 gas and, you know, prices are coming down in general, even if they aren't coming down as fast as we'd like them, they're not as high as under Joe Biden. They can't make those arguments anymore. Mike Warren, so you talked a little bit about what you're hearing from Democrats on your recent trip to Iowa. At what point do Republicans say sort of enough like, this guy's failed, this is not what we signed up for. You know, we didn't sign up for this kind of war. And yes, taking on the leading state sponsor of terror in the world, but the costs are too much or I don't agree with the president on the way that he's handling the economy. You've seen some softening, I would say, of Republican support, certainly, but you're not yet really seeing anyone bailing him. Even on this question of war powers. You have most members of Congress who were willing to speak out on it more or less say, I defer to the president.
- [42:34]
D
I just think that's going to be the case. I mean, we've talked here about how Republicans, and there's a rationality to it, which is there's no benefit in stepping out right now, particularly if the midterm route that we expect is baked into the cake. Well, we gotta stick with the president. There are still a lot of primaries over the next couple of months. You want to be on the right side of the president because he does have power in those primaries. Not as much as he used to, but he does still have power and he can make your life miserable. I mean, if you're waiting for some kind of principled departure from Trump among elected Republicans, you're going to be waiting a long time. Steve. I do think, however, voters are, even Republican voters, you look at that soft support. I mean, yes, it's like, what did you say, four out of five, something like that. Republicans support the president in this war. I think that's pretty soft, a pretty soft support. And you can see that in a lot of these states. I mean, I mentioned Iowa, but you can look at it in other states, whether it's Maine or Georgia or other states where there are competitive North Carolina, there are some competitive Senate races, governor's races in those states. And the Republican enthusiasm is down. I imagine the midterm elections will be, have the potential to be a clarifying moment in the way that 2006 was for George W. Bush. As Mike Nelson pointed out, I don't think Trump will necessarily be affected by that route. But I do think Republicans, particularly because this is the last term Trump can't run for president again, they're gonna be looking at the future. They're already looking at it. And I think they'll start to say a little more about they're ready to move beyond Trump. But it's, you know, this is the power that he has over his party, which is that nobody is really willing to step out cuz he bullies them back into line.
- [44:24]
C
Mike Warren says Trump can't run again. Apparently he thinks he's a federal judge now and he has opinion.
- [44:31]
A
Anything is possible. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up@thedispatch.com join and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month for free. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership, no ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and much, much more. All right, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Before we get to today's Not Worth youh Time, I do want to make sure that we stop and get recommendations from our panelists on things they've read in the Dispatch in recent days that they would recommend most strongly to our readership. Kevin, let me start with you my
- [45:29]
C
friend George Weigel on Pope Leo, the pope you don't have to think about all the time. I thought it was a really interesting essay. George knows this stuff, of course, better than almost anyone. And I like this idea of Leo as being the Swiss president of popes. You don't even have to think about them. You don't really even know who they are some of the time. And one of my little mantras that I try to always remind people, particularly my right wing Catholic friends, is that the president isn't the country, the pope isn't the church. You know, there's more to this stuff than the the guy in charge and the guy in the top office. And I think it would be good for the Catholic Church to have a pope they didn't have to think about as much. And I hope that one day in the near future we will also have a president of the United States that we don't have to think about all that much.
- [46:13]
A
From your lips to God's ears, as it were.
- [46:16]
B
Mike Nelson, so out this morning from Michael Soblik and Grant Romley, is there a China strategy behind the Iran war? We've talked a lot about kind of the failed thinking or flawed thinking that has gone into the conflict within the CENTCOM region, but they take a broader view and look at what the implications are for America's approach to China, not only misunderstanding the import that China places on Iran as a partner and a trading partner, but also whether that this has any kind of deterrent effect against China as they look at a potential future confrontation with the United States. And I think it provides an extra to the theater perspective that is lacking in a lot of the conversation.
- [46:56]
D
Mike Warren, Alan Jacobs has a terrific piece from this weekend about AJ Liebling. Liebling War Just looking back at maybe perhaps the greatest war journalist, certainly one of the best war journalists writers among war journalists. And it's just a terrific, well written piece about this, this legend.
- [47:16]
A
Speaking of terrific well written pieces, my recommendation is Today's Wonderland from Kevin Williamson, which looks in some depressing depth at our debt and deficit issues and continued challenges on that level. And I'm going to actually read a sentence from Kevin after he gives a sense of exactly the trouble that we're in and why it's of growing concern. He writes, the bosses here at the Dispatch have asked me to keep their profanity to a minimum. So I am not going to write in plain English what it is that we are. Let's just say that it is a problem we have not ducked, which we, we appreciate the restraint. Kevin. This is a family outlet and a family show.
- [48:06]
C
Not to this is not me putting myself in the same camp at all. But just when Liebling comes up. He had one of my favorite boasts in the history of journalism where he said about himself there's nobody good who's faster and there's nobody better who's fast.
- [48:20]
D
I like it.
- [48:21]
A
That's good and you are fast, that's for sure. I've told the story about your drafting of our most recent editorial from several months back. Meeting about it ended at like 11 and I think we had a draft by one something like that Pretty the
- [48:37]
C
Liebling standard is something to aspire to anyway.
- [48:41]
A
So finally today I want to talk a little bit about the NBA. For those of you who don't know the NBA National Basketball association, something that used to be sport I watched regularly. I was passionate fan of my Milwaukee Bucks and growing up this is in the post Kareem Abdul Jabbar Milwaukee Bucks era with stars like Brian Winters, Marcus Johnson, Bob Lanier and others. But I don't much watch the NBA. So for not worth your time, I think we're doing you a favor just to let you know that the NBA playoffs are taking place now if you too no longer watch the NBA. I did go to an NBA game last year and I watched the Milwaukee Bucks play the Washington Wizards and was stunned to learn that they play music throughout the playing of the game. Now do you all go to NBA games? Have you all witnessed this firsthand or watched this on television? It's horribly disorienting if you go unsuspecting to see this.
- [49:48]
D
Yeah, I've seen it. I've seen it. That's not good. By the way, Steve, it is more likely than not that if it is just a day of the week or the year that we are in the NBA playoffs rather than not in the NBA playoffs. It is a season that seems to go on for months and months.
- [50:05]
A
Certainly feels that way. It was a funny experience to listen to the music and watch the gameplay. Every time the Wizards got the ball, this was game that took place in Washington. They played sort of upbeat, cool kind of hip hop, like you know, the kind of thing that would get the players and the fans very excited about what was happening when the Wizards had the ball and when the Bucks had the ball. It was sort of the. Mildly entertaining. It was the most entertaining part of the game.
- [50:33]
D
Let me guess, it didn't help the Wizards.
- [50:35]
A
It did not help the Wizards, although the Bucks did not play very well, on that particular day. The reason I want to talk about the NBA today, however, has to do with business decisions and fandoms. The Philadelphia 76ers are going to be playing the New York Knicks in round two of the playoffs. And the management of the Sixers has made a decision to do its best to exclude Knicks fans from attending games, home games in Philadelphia. It's about a two hour drive train ride from New York south to Philadelphia. The Sixers put out a statement saying sales to this event will be restricted to residents of greater of the greater Philadelphia area. Residency will be based on credit card billing. Address orders by residents outside this area will be canceled without notice and refunds given. Kevin, if you owned the Philadelphia 76ers, would you take this step to ensure that the crowd was more pro Philly than it otherwise might be?
- [51:42]
C
You know, I lived in Philadelphia for a long time and I was a newspaper there guy there for a while. And Philadelphia sports fans I would think would almost be enough on their own to keep the New Yorkers out of town. I mean, they did physically assault Santa Claus at one point, as I recall, and drove him off the ice of a hockey game. And it was always great when the Eagles were in some sort of big, you know, game, because win or lose, there's going to be a riot, you know, what the news is going to be, and one way or the other, they're going to, you know, cause some trouble. So I don't know if I would do that. I think what I would do if I owned the six years is I would make as much money as I possibly could because that's why you buy a sports team, unless you're some kind of lunatic who needs it for some sort of, you know, personal aggrandizement issue. And I would just make all the ticket sales by auction, I think, to extract the very highest prices that it possibly could. And that would be that, because this is a business. And the whole thing of treating, you know, professional sports like some sort of, you know, civic institution I think is just nonsensical. I'm not the biggest sports fan of the world. I don't watch sports on television because, among other things, I don't own a television. So there's not a lot of chance to watch sports. When I lived in New York, I did go see the Knicks play a few times, and Knicks games were a lot of fun. I enjoyed that. I've been to a couple of Sixers games and also a lot of fun. I went to one Miami Dolphins game in Miami. And that was really a hoot. If I lived in Miami, I think I'd go see a lot of football games. I think it's a great place to watch a football game. I like live sports. I go see boxing when I lived in Vegas and that sort of thing. Also in Philly. Philly used to have a really good boxing club up in North Philadelphia called the Blue Horizon, which is a great place to go see fights. And because it makes you feel like AJ Liebling, among other things, they might
- [53:21]
A
even want to make a movie about boxing in Philadelphia.
- [53:24]
C
Yeah, that's true.
- [53:25]
A
How about that pop culture reference, right?
- [53:27]
C
Yeah. Well, it's funny, we were just talking about. We were mentioning Rocky just briefly before we started on the podcast, because by modern standards of, like, you know, filmmaking that's 120 beats a minute, Rocky is like some 1970s French, you know, existential new wave film or something. It's so slow moving and thoughtful and meditative and moody and atmosphere. It's a great movie. I love Rocky. But you get someone who was born after about 1990 and tried to get them to sit through Rocky and. Well, first of all, you need a translator because no one can understand the language being spoken. But also, I think it would be a very, very slow movie movie for them. Philly is great. I love Philadelphia. It is an underrated city. And their sports fans are psychotic because Philly has this weird urban neurosis of being not quite New York, not quite D.C. and feeling like it's a forgotten city that used to be really important and now isn't, which is true. But it's a great place to live. At least it was when I was there.
- [54:22]
A
I love Rocky Balboa as an Albert Camus protagonist. Mike Warren, Isn't this unfair to Knicks fans? What if you're a displaced Knicks fan who's had to move to Philly for a. Or you're a. A Knicks fan who lives just outside of this area code. Or you're a Philly fan that's moved to New York and you want to get tickets, but you can't because of the restrictions on purchases in the area. Seems unfair all around.
- [54:53]
D
Yeah, this is really kind of the great civil rights struggle of our time, when you put it in those terms. Look, I don't know. By the way, I need to correct Kevin on this. I hate to do this. The Santa Claus incident was at an Eagles game.
- [55:04]
C
Was it an Eagles game? I thought it was a hockey game.
- [55:06]
D
Yeah, it was back in 1968, and the team decided to parade around a guy in a Santa Claus suit who was possibly inebriated. I know that's shocking to hear. And the season was pretty terrible for the Eagles. And so they began, like throwing snowballs at him and all sorts of things. Look, I think that Philadelphia is a great city. It's got great insane sports fans, as Kevin points out. There is an. There's a reason that this is happening. This isn't just sort of coming out of the ether when I think when the, it was two seasons ago when the 76ers and the Knicks played in the playoffs and this was a, this happened where there were just a bunch of Knicks fans that showed up, bought up all the tickets and the Knicks have a very, you know, they're sort of the, well, they're the East Coast Lakers. They have lots of celebrities who show up at Knicks games and it's sort of a place to be seen. And, and so this was a problem where Philadelphia, the team and the city saw all these Knicks fans at a playoff game. And I think they're trying to correct for that. I think it's fine because I think, I agree with Kevin that Philadelphia is a great city and it often gets forgotten. It's also a very big city. People don't realize, I think it's right now it's like the fifth or sixth largest city in America. And I think that they deserve to see their team in Philadelphia. I hope they beat the Knicks because the Knicks beat my Atlanta hawks in the first round. And so I say more power to the 76ers. And if it helps them, you know, the 76ers and the Flyers, if it helps them to keep the Philadelphia Phillies down, where they are, you know, in this season, then I'm all for it as a, as an Atlanta Braves fan. And I say go with God. 76ers.
- [56:45]
C
Steve let me just add, by the way, that the notion that punishing some Philly guy who moved to New York who now can't buy tickets is going to be regarded as unfair in Philadelphia. That's why they're doing this. It's to punish that guy.
- [56:56]
D
Exactly. Exactly.
- [56:58]
A
How dare he move?
- [57:01]
C
How dare he have ambition and go get a job?
- [57:05]
A
Mike this strikes those of us who are Washington Capitals fans as a bit ironic, because when I first moved to Washington, D.C. after I graduated college in 1993, and I lived the first 20 plus years of my life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, without an NHL team, despite being a huge hockey fan, I had to follow. I followed the Chicago Blackhawks, I followed the New York Islanders and the Rangers because they were on national television, like tnt, I think it was, or USA back in the day. But Milwaukee did not have its own NHL franchise. So when I moved to Washington, I immediately adopted the Capitals and I've been a Caps fan ever since. But in those days, back when the Caps played in Landover, Maryland at the Cap center, sparsely attended games with a pretty mediocre team, year over year, you'd go to a game against teams in the area. And by in the area, I mean Philly, the New York York teams and others, Pittsburgh, and It would be 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 4 to 1. Flyers fans versus Capitals fans. The Capitals were not in a position to, I think, exclude Flyers fans from purchasing tickets because then nobody would have purchased the tickets and it would have been an economic calamity. But these are the playoffs. Does Philly have to resort to this?
- [58:28]
B
Well, it's funny because actually the last time we saw each other, we were watching the Caps beat a Philadelphia based team, watching them beat the Flyers. So it all comes full circle. Look, I'm, I've never been to an NBA game actually, since the Wizards are Washington's only second most successful basketball team after the Washington Generals, who perennially lose to the Harlem Globetrotters.
- [58:50]
A
What about the Mystic?
- [58:51]
B
Well, that's true, that's fair, that's fair. But I am a die hard Nationals fan. And like you said, from 2005 until about 2012 when they started becoming a winning team, every time I'd go to a Nats game, there was a baked in away home crowd. Right. You know, everyone was there. There was overwhelming support for the away team that was playing against my Nationals. So I got used to it. As a matter of fact, game five of the World Series here in 2019, I was surrounded on all sides by filthy Astros fans. So, you know, I think there's a certain amount of tolerance for this that you have to just. It's baked into the level of performance that you're going to. You're going to have the opposition party in representation. One last thing I would point out, and not meaning to besmirch Kevin Speed that we all praised, but we should also point out that I believe Stallone wrote Rocky within one weekend. So he may have set the threshold for speed and quality when he wrote that script.
- [59:47]
C
Yeah. And then held out. Like he, he turned down a lot of money for that script because he wanted to play the lead. He was gonna, this was gonna like really launch his, you know, acting career. I don't know if Everyone knows the story, but he was broke. He really needed money. And he, in a very disciplined and admirable way, I think, turned down a couple of big offers until he got what he wanted, which was someone who would make the movie with him as Rocky.
- [60:10]
A
I like it.
- [60:11]
B
Yeah. I think before that his biggest part had been the mugger on the subway in Woody Allen's Bananas.
- [60:16]
C
Yeah.
- [60:19]
A
Well, I think we could agree that Rocky, whatever we think of other Philadelphia sports and Philly sports fans, Rocky is a classic film and it's probably worth going back and watching it again. I should make my kids sit through it if it feels really long and slow.
- [60:34]
C
It is such a good movie.
- [60:36]
A
I like to do that to my kids.
- [60:37]
C
It is not overrated.
- [60:39]
D
It's great.
- [60:40]
A
Perfect. All right. Well, thank you all for taking the time today. Very interesting discussion on Iran and all of its implications and pretty interesting discussion on Philly and sports, too. Talk to you next time. Finally, if you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us@roundtabledispatch.com we read everything, even the ones from people who lumpin Sylvester Stallone and Jean Paul Sartre. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure, thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.