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The Great Lie of War - The Ezra Klein Show | Wave AI Podcast Notes

The Great Lie of War

Tue Mar 03 2026

Two sitting heads of state, eight weeks apart. On Saturday, February 28, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran that resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with much of his senior command. This came less than two months after the United States military captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid. The president seems to believe that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors without events spinning out of his control. Is he right? Ben Rhodes is a New York Times Opinion contributing writer and a co-host of “Pod Save the World.” He served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and worked on the Iran nuclear deal. In this conversation, we discuss the ongoing conflict in Iran, how Democrats should respond, and whether Trump’s “head on a pike” approach to foreign policy underestimates the chaos of war. Mentioned: “Push from Saudis, Israel helped move Trump to attack Iran” by Mic...

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Ezra Klein Show

Episode: Trump’s Head-on-a-Pike Foreign Policy
Date: March 3, 2026
Guest: Ben Rhodes (NYT opinion writer, former Obama advisor, Pod Save the World co-host)

Episode Overview

This episode grapples with a seismic shift in American foreign policy under Donald Trump after the United States, with Israel, has killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and earlier captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Ezra Klein and Ben Rhodes analyze the meaning, logic, and consequences of what Klein calls “head-on-a-pike foreign policy.” They examine Trump’s strategy for toppling adversarial leaders without regime change, the regional and humanitarian repercussions, and the role Israel and Congress have played—or abdicated—in these decisions. The discussion moves from historical lessons, strategic incoherence, and the collapse of international law, to how U.S. politics and media respond, and what this means for the future.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Trump Doctrine: “Head-on-a-Pike” Foreign Policy

Not classical regime change: The U.S. is not invading or rebuilding states (00:47-02:06); instead, Klein argues, the approach is to decapitate hostile regimes by killing or capturing their leaders while leaving their structures intact.
- “America is proving that we can easily reach into weaker countries and kill or capture their heads of state… We won’t even try to persuade the American people or Congress of the need for war… We care merely that whoever comes next fears us enough to be compliant—that they know they might be the next head on a pike.” – Ezra Klein (03:21)
Trump’s perceived innovation: Trump believes he has found a way to impose American will at lower cost or involvement—a distinction from earlier, sprawling wars of occupation.

Historical Lessons, Policy Risks, and the Flaws in Trump’s Thinking

Deep-state resilience: Ben Rhodes notes decapitating the Supreme Leader doesn't collapse deeply institutionalized regimes like Iran’s; instead, it may empower even more hardline military factions or create a power vacuum (08:49-11:22).
- “This is a deep, deep regime with ideological institutions that go far beyond even the Chavista regime in Venezuela... If the regime implodes, I worry about a Libya type situation at scale because this is a much bigger country with over 90 million people.” – Ben Rhodes (09:29)
Danger of uprisings: U.S. air power can’t protect civilians who heed Trump’s calls for revolt; mass slaughter or civil war could follow, as the Arab Spring illustrated (11:22-14:24).
- “Hope is not a strategy. Just going out there and saying I’m bombing your country, rise up… There’s just not a formula.” – Ben Rhodes (12:53)

Refugees, Instability, and Regional Disaster

Refugee crisis neglect: Trump administration has not planned for, nor publicly acknowledged, the likelihood of a massive refugee flow if civil war erupts in Iran (17:36-21:34).
- “Somebody said to me, this is a country that is four times bigger than Syria—remember that refugee crisis?” – Ben Rhodes (19:47)
Regional fears: Neighboring states—Pakistan, Turkey, the Gulf monarchies—are alarmed, fearing destabilization, new conflicts, and waves of humanitarian disaster.

Israel’s Motivations and Influence

Security and chaos: Israel’s interests are in weakening adversaries and in some views, even tolerating chaos on their borders—creating buffer zones and reducing threats, not rebuilding societies (22:47-24:25).
- “If there’s an implosion in Iran and humanitarian disaster and kind of chaos, that actually advantages their security situation… [U]ltimately that kind of Iran can’t pose a threat to them.” – Ben Rhodes (23:20)
Netanyahu’s coup: Drawing Trump deep into conflict fulfills a longstanding Israeli agenda to have the U.S. take direct military action against Iran—one U.S. presidents before Trump resisted (24:25-26:53).

The Collapse of International Law and U.S. Democratic Process

No meaningful international law: U.S. ignores all constraints; there’s little global pushback as long as the target (e.g., Iran, Maduro) is internationally unpopular (51:56-56:22).
- Ezra Klein: “Does [international law] still exist in any meaningful way?”
  Ben Rhodes: “It does not. It implies in no way to the United States of America, at least.” (51:56-51:58)
Absence of deliberation and Congressional abdication: Major foreign policy decisions are made without public debate, Congressional authorization, or significant opposition (44:49-49:41).
- “Process is related to outcome… If you can’t make a case to the American people to sway public opinion in the direction of a war or make a case to Congress, the single most important thing you could do to keep America out of more wars is actually require Congress to take a vote.” – Ben Rhodes (46:14)

Political and Moral Quagmires at Home

Democratic muddle: Party leaders tend to focus on criticizing the process instead of forcefully opposing (or defending) the wars on principle, making their critique look evasive (59:34-62:47).
- “What does that sound like? It sounds like a dodge. What do you actually believe as a political party?… Are you for this or against it? And if you’re against it, why are you not all out saying that this is reckless, this is a betrayal…” – Ben Rhodes (60:32)
Humanitarian pretexts and the illusion of controllability: While the Iranian regime is brutal, Klein and Rhodes press the point that war cannot be controlled and usually produces humanitarian catastrophe and unforeseen blowback (66:41-68:40).
- “War is inherently uncontrollable… The great lie of war is that you will get what you want out of it.” – Ezra Klein (66:41)
Dehumanization and the “othering” effect: U.S. military violence disproportionately targets brown and black populations, and the logic underpinning it has “come home” to justify domestic crackdowns (63:56-66:41).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Ezra Klein on the new doctrine:
“America is proving that we can easily reach into weaker countries and kill or capture their heads of state… We don’t particularly care who replaces the people we killed… We care merely that whoever comes next fears us enough to be compliant… that they know they might be the next head on a pike.” (03:21)
Ben Rhodes’ warning on uprisings:
“I’m tremendously sympathetic to the Iranian people… but as the Obama guy—hope is not a strategy. Just going out there and saying, ‘I’m bombing your country — rise up.’ There’s just not a formula.” (12:53)
Netanyahu’s long game:
“Netanyahu has wanted to do this since I have been in politics, very clearly wanted the US—not Israel alone, the US—to take out the Iranian regime. Every president has resisted this except Trump.” — Ben Rhodes (25:37)
Klein on the public’s confusion:
“According to Axios, Trump has now authorized more military strikes in 2025 alone than Biden did in all four years. So I think for a lot of people, there has been this... How do you reconcile both Trump and the movement that was around him… with what we’re seeing now?” (37:08)
On international law:
Ezra Klein: “Does [international law] still exist in any meaningful way?”
Ben Rhodes: “It does not.” (51:56–51:58)
Rhodes on the universalism of human rights:
“If you truly believe in human rights, then you have to apply that normative framework across the board. …You either have to be universal and consistent or I have a really hard time listening to your arguments.” (58:35)
Klein on war’s unpredictability:
“War is inherently uncontrollable. The fantasy we’re offered at the beginning is that we can choose what it is we are going to do, that we can control the situation we are going to create… but the history of this is we do not control it.” (66:41)
Final position on war:
“You have to be willing to take a stance against war itself unless it is absolutely necessary. And this certainly didn’t meet that test.” — Ben Rhodes (69:45)

Important Timestamps

00:47 — Ezra’s opening, laying out the reality of U.S. killings in Iran and Venezuela; distinction with past “regime change” wars.
04:48 — Discussion of Obama’s approach to Iran; diplomacy vs. military action.
08:49 — Rhodes analyzes why decapitation strategies are likely futile or disastrous in Iran.
11:22 — Trump’s exhortations to Iranians to “rise up”; why that is reckless.
17:36–21:34 — Potential refugee crisis and the US failure to plan for plausible catastrophic outcomes.
22:47–24:25 — Israel’s objectives and its comfort with instability as a security strategy.
24:25–29:35 — The history of U.S. policy toward Iran and the growing perception of Iranian weakness.
37:08–41:07 — MAGA movement’s dissonance; how Trump’s actions break with his own and his movement’s rhetoric.
44:49–49:41 — Lack of public and Congressional debate over acts of war; the withering of process as safeguard.
51:56–56:22 — The collapse of international law.
59:34–62:47 — Democrats and the limbo between expressing principles and criticizing process; lack of clarity or courage.
66:41–70:27 — The myth of controllable war, lessons from past interventions, and why war is not a humanitarian quick fix.
70:32 — Ben Rhodes’ book recommendations:
- “From the Ruins of Empire” by Pankaj Mishra
- “The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig
- “Travelers in the Third Reich” by Julia Boyd

Tone and Language

The tone is sober, urgent, and direct, blending sharp policy analysis, historical reference, and moral concern.
Both Klein and Rhodes consistently foreground the human cost, risks, and unpredictability of war, with an undercurrent of criticism toward both elite policymaking circles and current political leaders of both parties.

For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This conversation is essential listening if you want to understand how the U.S. is now conducting foreign policy on a completely new and dangerous basis, what’s motivating the key actors, how policy is being made and justified, and why, even when the cause is described as humanitarian, the logic and likely impact of these interventions remain deeply flawed. The episode is rich with historical lessons, blunt about political realities, and uncompromising in calling out the lack of real debate or accountability.

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Transcript

Ben Rhodes (0:00)

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Ezra Klein (0:47)

Over the weekend, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran. Within hours, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead, along with much of his senior command. As I record this on Monday, March 2, the Iranian Red Crescent says over 550 people have been killed in the bombings. We know of at least six American service members who have been killed. There will likely be more as the war rages on. There appears to have been a girls school that was bombed. The pictures from that, the grief of the parents is. It's almost unbearable to look at. I just think it's so important to say it's not all geopolitics. These are people, civilians, their lives, their homes, their children. The attack on Iran came less than two months after the United States military captured Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid on his compound in Caracas. America has deposed two sitting heads of state eight weeks apart. I have seen a lot of commentary accusing Donald Trump of hypocrisy. After all, he ran against wars of regime change and now he is changing regimes left and right.

Ben Rhodes (1:49)

We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change wars around the globe, senseless war. The job of the United States military is to defend America from attack and invasion here at home.

Ezra Klein (2:06)

But I think this is not quite a policy of regime change. This is not America invading Iraq or Afghanistan and restructuring the government ourselves. Maduro's regime was left intact aside from him. In an interview with the Times, Trump said that, quote, what we did in Venezuela, I think is the perfect, the perfect scenario. He said, everybody's kept their job except for two people. Trump has called for the Iranian people to rise up against their government. But he's also said he intends to resume talks with the existing Iranian regime. He said he had a few choices for who might lead Iran next, but they appear to have been killed in the initial bombings. The Iranian regime was monstrous, but Trump is not insisting that it be changed, nor is he committing the ground forces necessary to change it. I don't think what we're seeing here is a policy of regime change. I would call this head on a pike foreign policy. America is proving that we can easily reach into weaker countries and kill or capture their heads of state. We will not be dissuaded from doing that by international law, or fear of unforeseen consequences, or the difficulty of persuading the American people or the United States Congress of the need for war on that, we won't even try. We don't particularly care who replaces the people we killed. We will not insist that they come from outside the regime, nor that they are elected democratically. We care merely that whoever comes next fears us enough to be compliant when we make a demand that they know that they might be the next head on a pike. Trump's belief appears to be that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors and do so without events spinning out of his control. He appears to believe that it was idiocy or cowardice or a loyally respect for international rules that prevented his predecessors from replacing foreign leaders they loathed with more pliable subordinates. Trump is a man who has not read much history, but who certainly intends to make it. But what if Iran is not Venezuela? What if the Iranian people rise up, as Trump has asked them to do, and are slaughtered by the Iranian military? What if it descends into civil war, as happened in Iraq, where America had troops on the ground and yet hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed? What if it goes the way of Libya or Yemen or Syria? Who will pay the cost if he's wrong? Ben Rhodes is a political analyst, a New York Times opinion contributing writer, and the co host of the podcast Pod Save the World. He served as a senior advisor to President Barack Obama. He joins me now, as always. My email is reclineshowytimes.com. Ben Rhodes, welcome to the show.

Ben Rhodes (8:49)

I don't think he's right. I think you're right that he believes that he's figured this out. But I think there's a number of flaws with his thinking. I mean, the first thing in the case of Iran is this. For all the focus on Khamenei, who was a reprehensible leader, and by the way, I'm not sure how many years he had left if we're just decapitating him. I mean, time was about to do that. But this is a deep, deep regime with ideological institutions that go far beyond even the Chavista regime in Venezuela. Because what you're talking about is he's sitting on top of this edifice that has been built since the 1979 revolution that includes millions of people under arms. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the irgc, the Basij militias that are usually responsible for the crackdowns that we see when they're peaceful protests, the Iranian military and police. There's a lot of depth to this regime. So taking out even the Supreme Leader doesn't in any way change the regime. And in fact, if you talk about people that might be afraid, the IRGC sometimes been kind of more hardline certainly than the political leadership that Americans usually see in things like negotiations. And then it's also the case Trump thinks. I truly believe, he kind of thinks in news cycle increments. So I'll kill someone to look like we changed the regime, we got rid of the bad guy, we kind of slayed the dragon here. And there's no what happens in one year, in three years, in five years? I mean, I'll be self critical here. Ezra, you remember the Libya intervention? We did the same thing. Essentially. Gaddafi was killed through a mixed. Well, there was an airstrike and then he was killed by people on the ground. Terrible guy, reprehensible leader. When that regime was removed, nothing was able to fill the vacuum except for the most heavily armed people in Libya, which were a series of different militias. Militias. And that civil war spread across borders and suddenly that part of North Africa becomes an arms bazaar. Conflict is spreading to neighboring states. So if the regime itself stays in Iran, I don't think it's fundamentally different just because Khamenei is not there. And if the regime implodes completely, I worry about a Libya type situation at scale because this is a much bigger country with over 90 million people. So the Venezuela operation, I think I saw that and it made me worried about this.

Ben Rhodes (11:43)

I hear something that is incredibly reckless. And we already saw when he was truth posting help is on the way a few weeks ago and Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah was similarly saying, go to the streets. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of Iranians were killed when they did go to the streets by the regime. By the regime. And you cannot protect those people from the air. Right. I mean, let's say there's an uprising and let's say all the remaining instruments of the Iranian regime start to massacre those people. We can bomb more regime targets, but at a certain point you kind of run out of that and you're just talking about people on the ground with small arms. Right. And it just. I'm tremendously sympathetic to the Iranian people and what they've been through. I would love for them to have a different government. But I'll say this is the Obama guy. Hope is not a strategy. Just going out there and saying I'm bombing your country. I mean, this is part of what's so disturbing to me about this, Ezra, is that they don't have any capacity to articulate an end game. And so I think people have to recognize, and I had to learned this the hard way through the Arab Spring. Just because we want a different government doesn't mean that that's easy to execute. And frankly, I think Iran was changing, albeit not at the pace that we want. The women Life freedom movement succeeded in some ways. It didn't change the regime, but you talk to people in that region and the society was changing. Women were starting to go around uncovered. Some of the veneer of the regime had been punctured. Khamenei was old. He was going to die like the capac. For the Iranian people themselves to change that regime over time, even though that's not on the timeline that people want, I think would have been a better bet than just saying we're going to drop A bunch of bombs and rise up. Because there's just not a formula. I mean, Ezra was thinking about this. Everybody's focused on the American regime change, led operations as they should. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and that part of the world. It's not just those regimes that have had trouble. Sudan had a popular uprising. Look at Sudan today. Or Egypt had a popular uprising in the Obama years and Mubarak ended up getting replaced by a more repressive leader. And so we keep seeing in these scenarios that the toppling of an authoritarian government can lead either to chaos or to further repression. And that's my concern.

Ben Rhodes (15:19)

It seems very worrisome because it projects an incoherence to your policy and to your head on the pike strategy. When I hear Trump say that, I hear someone who would like this to be over as soon as possible. But the reality is the Iranians get a vote on whether it's over. And what they know, for instance, is US Munitions, particularly our air defense systems, are going to run lower and lower and lower. And in a way they may be able to hit more targets the longer this goes. I mean, the best case scenario is because I was trying to, as someone who's been critical, I want to inhabit the best case scenarios. Right. It feels like the best case scenario may be a chastened regime that just wants to hunker down and will agree, at least for the time being, to not have any nuclear program that is active and lick its wounds. And maybe that provides some opportunity for that regime to be less repressive. I mean, I guess that's the landing zone here that Trump is trying to meet. But at the same time, we've Bombed them twice now in the middle of nuclear negotiations. And so if you have hardliners in the IRGC or in Iranian circles and they're being told, well, let's stop and negotiate with the Americans, they're not going to believe that they can negotiate in any kind of good faith with Donald Trump. And so I think that there's this kind of strategic incoherence about what the objective of this whole thing is. And that's seen not just by the Iranians, it's seen by the Gulf Arabs, who are now, they're furious at everybody. I think they're furious at the United States and Israel for launching this war, and we can talk about that. And I think they're obviously furious at Iran for targeting them indiscriminately. They don't know what's going on here. What's the goal here? Are we trying to remove this regime? They're wary of removing the regime because they don't want refugees and chaos in their region. What you'd want, I guess, is everybody in the world, the relevant countries in the Gulf and the region and Europe being able to put some diplomatic framework around this. So it's not just this kind of Steve Woodkoff and Jared Kushner trying to talk to some Iranians in a room v the Omanis. But Trump's shifting goalposts of what he's for make it much harder to put any kind of framework around this.

Ben Rhodes (18:53)

Yeah, honestly, I. It doesn't seem that they plan for it. I will tell you that in the run up to this, I did talk to some people I know in the region, right in the Middle east, in the Gulf, who were discussing what they were warning the Trump administration about and one of the scenarios, the kind of worst case scenario. So I'm not suggesting this is definitely going to happen, but I think we have to inhabit this precisely because there was no discussion of the potential consequences. If you have a civil conflict inside of Iran, the economy's already in really deep trouble because of U.S. sanctions, a collapsing currency, so there's extreme poverty there. There are ethnic separatist movements inside of Iran and the Kurdish regions, in the blue regions. And so what you could have is an implosion if there's some kind of uprising and then there's a kind of chaotic civil war, which is not hard to imagine because we've seen that in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, the other places where the US has been involved militarily and million. I mean, somebody said to me, this is a country that is four times bigger than Syria and remember that refugee crisis. And essentially the only places to go are in one direction. It's Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's not a particularly stabilizing thing to imagine. Huge refugee outflows in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We already have a war. By the way, Pakistan bombed Afghanistan the day before this started. Pakistan could get drawn in to this conflict in part to get refugees away and in part to pre the emergence of a separatist Baluchistan on their borders. It crosses their borders. And then the other direction is Turkey into Europe. And you saw Turkey very aggressively being a part of the mediation efforts. This is one of the reasons why they have a lot of fatigue with hosting millions of Syrian refugees and Europe trying to keep those refugees in Turkey instead of getting Europe, they will find their way to Europe through Turkey. And so I don't think there's been any real planning for this. And that is to me like the worst case scenario of a civil war and even fracturing of the Iranian sovereign territory. You'd have huge refugee outflows.

Ben Rhodes (26:55)

Maximum. Yeah, exactly. So you pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, you go to maximum pressure, sanct sanctions, you assassinate the Qasem Soleimani. Those are all things that happened in Trump's first term, couldn't get him all the way to bombing Iran itself. Biden clearly, and I've been very critical, as you know, of Biden's Middle east policy On Gaza, he was clearly not keen to go all in with Iran on a regional war. He was supportive of going after the Iranian proxy groups, not this. Then Trump comes back and they do the nuclear strike. But I think you're right. I think that the Israelis saw the Venezuela operation. Oh, he's getting more comfortable with this and he's getting comfortable taking it to regime change. And they see, and this is where the continued use of military force without any congressional authorization is connected to this. Because it's like, okay, there's a president and Donald Trump who is willing to just bomb countries and take huge risks absent any congressional debate or discussion. I mean, we dealt with this in the Obama years. You must inhabit the scenario of war. If Donald Trump had tried to prepare the American people for this, they would have said no. If he had gone out and given a series of speeches, now's the time, we must remove the Iranian regime. It wouldn't have worked. And so I think you're right. This kind of vainglorious, I'm Donald Trump, I will slay all the dragons. We've had these grievances with Maduro, with Khamenei, with the Cuban regime. I'm going to remove all of them. I think that there's a vanity to that that Israel and some of the hawks in this country saw. And they went to him knowing that he was reticent to kind of of break from his base this much and do this. But they appeal to something bigger than his short term political instincts, which is this will make you an historic figure. And I think Bibi Netanyahu has wanted to get an American president to do this since at least when I was in government, and he has.

Ben Rhodes (29:35)

This drives me a little crazy because I think it's true. But let's just take Netanyahu. The argument was always that they're 10ft tall, that they're absolute maniacs who are on the precipice of a nuclear weapon and they've built this massive axis that is coming for us. And I never believed that. I never believed that Iran was as all powerful and I certainly never believed that they had offensive, that they were gonna launch some preemptive war against Israel. They are interested in regime survival. That was always my assessment. And that even some of the proxy groups were meant the Iranian doctrine was keep this out of Iran, keep the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon. So part of what used to drive me crazy about the hawkish prescriptions on Iran from inside Washington and Israel is that either argument led to war. If Iran is really powerful, we must take them out because they must be stopped because they're on the precipice of doing something or they're weak so we can take them out. And look, I do think it bears saying first of all that we should have a mindset that war is bad and should be avoided. That should be a legal and values proposition that there are preferable outcomes to war itself. The other problem I have with this Ezra, is there's an incredible short term thinking about this because you're also sending the message that okay, Iran was in a nuclear deal with the United States, they were complying with that nuclear deal and they then got bombed. Whatever Iranian regime emerges from this I think is very likely to want nuclear weapons. So this doesn't happen. If you're sitting in Riyadh or even Dubai and Abu Dhabi right now, you're thinking, well the Americans are my security guarantor and look at what we just got out of that security guarantee. Like we got a war that they launched pretty much. I don't buy that The Saudis were pushing for this by the way. I saw them deny that report and I think they were very reticent about this. Why wouldn't they get nuclear weapons? Yeah, it's like, well, we can't. At the end of the day the Americans are kind of willing to play with our security or deprioritize it as against Israel's security. Other would be proliferators are going to think, look at North Korea versus Iran. And so there's these second order effects and one of them is nuclear proliferation where the consequences might not be manifest next year. But I don't know, five years from now. I don't think that this kind of action will have made us safer. I'd much rather, you know, if you actually believe in nuclear non proliferation, it's much better to have that be something you fortify diplomatically than you just remove a regime because it's weak.

Ben Rhodes (46:14)

No, I think process is related to outcome. And if you can't make a case to the American people to sway public opinion in the direction of a war or make a case to Congress, I mean, the single most important thing you could do to keep America out of more wars is actually require Congress to take a vote because they're not going to vote for it, given that where public opinion is done this. And so I think it's incredibly corrosive to democracy to have this kind of loop of conflict that is increasingly sidelining Congress and public opinion entirely. I also think there's something even more dangerous, Ezra, which is we keep. I know a lot of people are thinking, when are we going to know how bad it's going to get with Trump? What if the things that you fear are already happening? Like we already have a president who clearly came back into office wanting the military to be more directly responsive to him than it was in the first term when the military leadership and even some of the Pentagon leadership stood up to him. More and more, we have seen him purge the top of the military general officers. We have seen him address the general officers and say, hey, American cities might be military training grounds. Now we've seen him within a matter of weeks undertake multiple military. I'll just give you a few. We bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. We were blowing up boats in the Caribbean on totally false pretenses that it had something to do with drug trafficking in the United States and potentially committed war crimes. We abducted the leader of Venezuela. We now just killed the supreme leader of Iran and are trying to to topple that regime, or maybe we're not. These are all things that have happened within three months. Right. And at the same time, we see the Department of War telling Anthropic, an AI company, that you will be banned from any business of the government if the Pentagon can't ignore your terms of service against mass surveillance of Americans. And where I'm going with this is the ultimate guardrail in democracy is supposed to be the separation between the president and kind of the military as an institution. And if the military of an institution can directly serve the interests of Donald Trump, with no public debate about what it's doing, no congressional votes on what it's doing, how many more countries are going to bomb, and what is that military going to end up doing in the United States if he invokes the Insurrection Act. And that's not to impugn the military, that's to impugn where Trump is taking this. So I think the darker scenarios, it's not just process nerds like we need to have authorizations for use of military force and we need briefings to Congress. No. Is the military an institution that just completely serves the whims of the president, or is it an institution that is apolitical, that is equally responsive to Congress and the president? Because those questions are going to matter a lot how the next 2 1/4 years of the Trump administration.

Ben Rhodes (49:53)

So we have this. Obama has said it'd be a red line. If the cyber regime uses chemical weapons, then there's a massive chemical weapons use. And we were preparing to bomb Syria. We were. I mean, I was in meetings. I thought we were going to bomb Syria, going through strike packages, that kind of stuff. And then, then Obama makes this decision essentially to say, I'm going to put this to vote in Congress. I'm not going to go to war with Syria unless Congress votes to authorize it. And almost immediately, the support for that begins to evaporate in Congress. Even people like Marco Rubio, who are hawks, would not vote to authorize use of military force in Syria. And Obama's point was, if Congress, the representatives of the people, as envisioned under our constitutional system, don't want to get us into another war with Syria and be responsible for the consequences of whatever happens, then we shouldn't do it. That's how our system's designed. Now, a lot of people pointed out that we should have done more to stop Assad. And I agree. I'm sympathetic to all those arguments, but I'm also sympathetic to Obama's argument, which is if people don't want the war, we don't have to fight it. And part of what Trump was tapping into in his campaigns was the gap between elites, particularly national security elites, and public opinion. And it is a crazy gap, Ezra. I've lived at the precipice of it. The conversations and the strategies in both parties of national security elites versus what the American people want their government to be focused on is a deeply unhealthy gap. And all Trump has done is okay, that establishment is no longer there. It's just him. It's like all of American exceptionalism, all of the apparatus of American power. I called it the Blob, whatever you want to call it, this edifice is now just, just in one man's head, in one man's hands. And that's instead of solving the problem he said he was running to fix, he's made it worse. Cuz it's just up to Donald Trump now.

Ben Rhodes (54:03)

I've been struck by it, too. I think part of what Trump counts on is if the people I'm taking out don't have a lot of friends, I have more room. Right. If it's Maduro, if it's Iranian regime, I'd say I'm very disappointed in it, though. Mark Carney, I was one of many people that thought his speech at Davos was important and interesting and kind of reflective of what's happening, and also kind of pointed a path to some emergence of something on the other end of this, that essentially, if the middle powers, the kind of more responsible countries in the world that still follow at least some international laws and want some norms around conflict and other things, if they began to kind of stitch together, maybe that could be a place that the United States could kind of rejoin on the back end of Trump. If Mark Carney is going to carve this out, though, if he's essentially gonna say, we need rules on trade, but if you bomb Iran, go for it, I think it hugely undermines Mark Carney's own argument. It just makes it seem cynical. It makes it seem like all he's really concerned about is trade, or all I'm concerned about is Greenland because it's European territory. And you can attest that I've taken a lot of grief for this over the years, but I just believe that if we think that international law and norms are important and they really have to apply universally, we can't just say that, well, they don't apply to Iran, Cuba and Venezuela because we don't like them. The United States built this system after World War II because we recognize that if you don't constrain everybody, you are going to have a repeat of what happened in World War I and World War II. You start to create carve outs, people start to move into those carve outs and there's cycles of conflict that lead ultimately to a world war. I think people need to inhabit the reality that we're moving into more than they are. There are no constraints from international law anymore. There is a rampant trend of nationalism in the world. There are leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Narendra Modi in India, Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. These are nationalists. Nationalism, some absent. International law always leads to more war and those wars beget more wars.

Ben Rhodes (57:17)

I guess I'd say first and foremost Iran has paid consequences. We worked on the Iran nuclear deal for seven years. And the reason I say seven years is that for several years at the beginning of the Obama administration, we built a multilateral sanctions framework around Iran based on the fact that they were violating the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty Treaty, international law. So we didn't say, oh, it's fine, you can violate international law. We said no. We got UN Security Council resolutions that became the basis of a maximum pressure campaign in the Obama administration. But it was meant to leverage a change of behavior from the Iranians. You have to kind of come into compliance with international law via nuclear deal in which you are committing to never build a nuclear weapon. You are submitting to intense monitoring and verification of your nuclear program, by the way, like, we still had other sanctions on them over their support for proxies. I don't like what goes on inside a lot of countries in the world. There's something peculiar that we are normalizing the idea that that is sufficient basis to go to war in those countries. We don't like it when Vladimir Putin does it. When Vladimir Putin says, hey, the elected president of Ukraine was ousted in a protest movement in 2014 in part by people that were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. I don't agree with that narrative, but how can we say that Vladimir Putin does not have the right to invade that country, but if we see things that we don't like inside of other countries, we have the right to do that. And I think what people see is that if you truly believe in human rights, then you have to apply that normative framework across the board. And a lot of the very same people that are suddenly human rights advocates when it comes to what's happening inside of Iran, have nothing to say about what's happening in the west bank right now. Had nothing to say when Jamal Khashoggi was chopped up in the Saudi consulate inside of Turkey, have nothing to say about the fact that El Sisi, the president of Egypt, has 60,000 people who are political prisoners suffering horrific treatment. So you either have to be universal and consist, or I have a really hard time listening to your arguments.

Ben Rhodes (60:29)

Yeah, they're saying all the things that you said, and I have a huge problem with this because ultimately, people are not that interested in the process. If someone who doesn't follow this super closely hears a Democratic leader like Chuck Schumer saying, coming out of a briefing about the potential war in Iran that feels imminent. And he says they have to make their case more or something. What does that sound like? It sounds like a dodge. What do you actually believe as a political party? I was talking to a friend of mine from the we do this thing in our Obama group text, Ezra, which wouldn't surprise you, which is that imagine if. Right. So imagine if President Obama announced a war on Iran from a vacation property in the middle of the night on a social media post, made casual remarks about the fact that Americans are gonna die. It is what it is. And then within like two days, you're already seeing American casualties, American planes falling out of the sk, huge global economic disruptions. The Republican Party would have been absolutely unified. And part of the reason Obama had so little room for maneuver is that they as a political party were able to make an argument against whatever the thing that Obama was doing. The Democratic Party doesn't understand that it's not enough to just say we want a process vote or procedural vote. We're going to support the Ro Khanna, Thomas Massie resolutions that most Americans have no idea what that is. Right. I mean, I support it, but it's not gonna do anything. And I think most Americans don't know that it's a vote on whether or not Congress has to authorize something that has already happened. It just makes you look. And again, I'm totally supportive of that effort. It's not a criticism of Ro Khan and Thomas Massie. But the point is, are you for this or against it? And if you're against it, why are you not all out saying that this is reckless, that this is a betrayal of what Donald Trump said when he ran for president, that we don't need more wars, that why are we spending. The price tag of this is gonna be in the tens of billions. That's money that could pay for the ACA subsidies at least. Yeah, at least there's your healthcare subsidies. Right now our healthcare subsidies are being spent on a war in Iran. Donald Trump is not looking after your interests. He's looking after some kind of grandiose ambitions in the Middle East. This is a very easy political case to make, Ezra. Like this is the easiest thing in the world, that we should be nation building at home, not abroad.

Ben Rhodes (63:56)

My answer to this is that war itself is something to be avoided. And that may seem like a obvious point, but it's not. I mean, to be a little provocative on this too, I think that post 9 11, because we've normalized so much use of military action, because I could argue, Ezra, it is completely insane that we're sitting here and having a conversation about that if we don't bomb a regime that we're therefore keeping it in power, does it report to us? And I think what Americans kind of intuitively get better than their political elites, their national security elites, and even some of the kind of media conversation in this is they get this, they get that war is terrible, war has risks, that even if it's well intentioned on paper, it leads to bad outcomes for both the Americans who have to fight it, the American taxpayers to pay for it, and pretty much the people on the other end of the war that you're saying you're trying to help, we're trying to help the Iraqis, we're trying to help the Afghans, we're trying to help the Libyans, now we're trying to help the Iranians. And I guess the provocative thing I want to say too is it this seems to happen when the countries in question are brown. I think there's a dehumanization since 911 where it's like, oh, look at this Middle Eastern, the next Middle Eastern country up that the regime does something we don't like, we're going to go and just bomb them. I mean we killed, if reports are accurate, either the US or Israel, over 100 girls at a school. And it's not really a big story in the United States. And I actually think to tie the this back home I don't think that that mentality, that othering of people who are on the other side of the world after 9 11, I think that othering has come home. I think that the capacity to have the mass deportation campaign that is generally targeting brown and black people is kind of tied to this dehumanization and desensitization of violence that we see in our foreign policy. Post 9 11. We othered a lot of populations. And if you watch, I mean, I know we're going a little far afield, but I think this is really relevant. I noticed in the Obama administration the othering on Fox that was once just about Middle Eastern terrorists, but then it's about the people crossing the southern border, and it comes one big other. And so I think it should be seen as a pretty extremist proposition that if the United States doesn't go to war with some government in the Middle east, we're somehow condoning everything. I was really mad about, about the Jamal Khashoggi thing. At no point did I think we should bomb Mohammed bin Salman for that.