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- [00:05]
A
Welcome to the Political Scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined, as ever, by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer. Hi, Susan and. Hi, Jane.
- [00:18]
B
Hey there, Evan. Great to be with you.
- [00:20]
C
Great to see you both.
- [00:25]
A
From the instant he entered politics, Donald Trump promised to keep America out of wars of choice. Regime change, he said, is a proven absolute failure. In his victory speech on election night 2024, he said, quote, I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars, unquote. Well, here we are. Since Saturday, the United States and Israel have launched a major assault on Iran's regime. The government there is retaliating so far with missiles and drones fired on Israel and across the Gulf. As we tape this Tuesday afternoon, what began as a series of strikes is now widening into a regional. Susan, Jane, for anyone who's covered these issues as long as the three of us have, it's really impossible not to be thinking this week about the last time that an American president started a war in the Middle East. I went into Iraq as a reporter on the first day of that conflict. And 23 years later, even today, it can feel as if we're still living in the ashes of its aftermath and the politics that it created. What have you guys been thinking about over the last several days?
- [01:33]
B
Well, you know, Evan, I remember meeting you in Kuwait when we were sitting there waiting for the invasion of Iraq to unfold. And I think given that Donald Trump and J.D. vance literally are the political products of the backlash to that conflict and to this notion of 20 years of forever war and endless war. And it's really remarkable. And I think for me, the particular moment in this last extraordinary hundred hours or so is actually just the very first thing that Donald Trump had to say when he releases this video overnight. Not only is he saying, we're gonna attack Iran, but he says, the goal is regime change. It made you wanna scream out loud, can it really possibly be now? We'll talk more today about how they've since spent days kind of walking that back. But the moment is worth lingering on. How did we come from 2003 to what was seen as an almost historical mistake, to repeating it all over again?
- [02:35]
C
It's an amazing thing, and most amazing was it was seen as a historical mistake by Donald Trump and J.D. vance. Then they ran on this saying it was a historical mistake. And then I think for all of us, we've all written a lot about all of these issues. And lived through the previous chapter of this. And for me, it was just such a feeling of PTSD to think that we're also immediately violating all the norms of international law and humanitarian law. It is a war of choice and it's not a war of self defense, even by their own sort of fluctuating rationales.
- [03:16]
A
Right. I think we are at the beginning of something. And I think what we can do today is ask what are we really watching here in Iran? What exactly is unfolding? How did we get to this? And what did our experience of the Iraq war and everything that came after that reveal to us about how these moments really do transform society, not only far away on the opposite side of the planet, but right here at home. I'm reminded when Donald Trump came back to Washington, one of the things he did, of course, was he changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. And it honestly, it feels like even though he was campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, this was Chekhov's gun revealed in the first act. As Susan put it in her column this week, when he created a war department, sooner or later he was always going to have to have a real war. So why did he go to war with Iran?
- [04:11]
B
Well, I mean, you know, give me 10 minutes and I can give you 10 different explanations. We've already heard from President Trump and from those around him. I mentioned regime change being one of them. That's no longer the preferred explanation. You've had Secretary of State Marco Rubio say that it's actually about ballistic missiles that were going to potentially in the future be able to reach the United States of America, though experts say that's not real. We've had J.D. vance and others say, no, it's actually about the nuclear program, although experts say that it's, it is not being rebuilt to be an imminent threat after the last round of strikes. You've had Donald Trump himself articulate not just the rationale of regime change, but essentially decades old grievances that go all the way back to the foundation of this repressive regime in Iran in 1979, as if it's a sort of payback for all of Iran's misdeeds ever since then.
- [05:10]
A
So, Jane, you know, clearly, as Susan just described, this is an evolving explanation. None of these explanations have lasted more than about five minutes. What do you think explains it? I mean, if you really had to figure out why he's doing this, what's your sense?
- [05:23]
C
Before we even go through all of what Susan has called in her column, a Chinese menu of different possible rationales that this administration has given us. I think we need to first return to the great philosopher of war, the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, who said famously, no one starts a war, or rather no one in his right sense ought to do so, without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve and how. I don't think we have yet heard a clear explanation of what this war is about, what they intend to achieve, what the strategic goals are and how it's supposed to end. How do we know what success is? It hasn't been defined in the first place what the aim of this is. I mean, we can all speculate. One of the interesting sidelines that caught my eye was a piece in the Washington Post that noted Trump has a bit of a fixation about Iran because he feels that Iran has personally tried to assassinate him. So there's a certain amount of kind of personal payback that maybe has been kind of brewing in his head. That may be part of it. It may also be trying to one up every previous president since the Ayatollah took power in Iran and say that I am the one. I alone know how to fix this. It could just be that it's changing the focus of the media, which I have to say it has succeeded in doing. One thing a war will do is knock everything else off the front pages. And the front pages were not at all friendly to Trump. Most recently in the last couple weeks, his popularity was dropping. The affordability issue was rising, and there was some really startling and potential potentially disturbing breaks coming out of the Epstein files that were about Trump himself. And all of that is now below the fold, if not deeply inside the papers, if not even knocked right out of the coverage.
- [07:26]
A
Yeah. As they grope for an explanation for what's going on here, it was amazing to watch Pete Hegseth in a press briefing that he had on Monday. This was by the first one that he's done in months. And not only was I reminded of Dick Cheney saying back in 2003 that the war would be, as he said, weeks rather than months, but in this case, it was even more of a chaotic description. Hegseth said that the goal of this operation, which they're calling Operation Epic Fury, is to destroy Iran's navy, its missiles, and its nuclear ambitions. But then there was this other moment that I think we have to linger on. A News Nation reporter asked Hegseth if there is any concern of this spiraling into a longer war. And here is his response.
- [08:12]
D
Did you not hear my remarks. I mean, we're ensuring the mission gets accomplished. But we are very clear eyed, as the president has been, unlike other presidents, about the foolish policies of the past that recklessly pulled us in to things that were not tethered to actual clear objectives. So we know we have plans, we have generals, we have chairmans, we have commanders, CENTCOM commanders, Admiral Cooper, who's executing very deliberately to ensure outcomes that I laid out are accomplished. But we would never, in front of a press pool, lay out how long that may take. The mission for our war fighters, which is what matters to us, is very, very clear. And they're executing it right now violently.
- [08:56]
B
And just for the chairman, quickly, I have one.
- [08:57]
A
Jane, you have written a lot about Pete Hegseth. What do you hear there in that moment?
- [09:02]
C
You know, what was striking to me was how hostile his tone is when he's asked a question. He seems really defensive already. And when being questioned about what the end plan might be and how long this might go, the other thing you hear is no answer. There is no end that he gives you, really, about how long this might take. Knowing a bit about Hagseth, I think you have to also know that he brings a certain mindset about the Islamic world to this particular fight. I just remember there was a report, it was a kind of a whistleblower report about him from some of the people who worked with him. And one of the things they described was a night when he, he got really drunk with a couple other guys in a kind of nonprofit he was working with in 2015, I think it was, and he started chanting, kill all Muslims. Kill all Muslims. This is not someone who has a lot of respect for religions other than his own sort of form of evangelical Christianity.
- [10:02]
B
Yeah, I mean, I have to say, like, when I listened to that clip, I have a hard time separating it from the parody of, of Pete Hegseth by Saturday Night Live's Colin Jones, which he literally plays Hegseth as this sort of amped up, shouting maniac who's, you know, kind of screaming slogans at reporters and, you know, performatively, you know, he's playing for Donald Trump's attention. He has no idea what he's saying. It's all empty. If you look at the words, the words mean nothing. He's literally saying, we have plans, we have generals, we have chairmans, we have commanders. Like, this is meaningless claptrap. Basically, that's a guy who's performing for the cameras who seems, as you reported, Jane, just way out of his depth. But when you pull it back right here we are 100 hours into the war. We've heard six or 10 or different people have different numbers for how many rationales for the conflict we've seen. It's remarkable that they would unleash this, by all accounts, incredibly competent and powerful military, while at the same time, politically speaking, these guys are the gang that can't get their stories straight. They can't coordinate with each other. Marco Rubio is saying one thing. Donald Trump is saying one thing. Pete Hegseth is saying one thing. And I think that's where you have almost a very stark difference from this conflict that we started the conversation with. And, Evan, I'd love to get your thoughts about the sort of the then and the now. For me, I mean, we should say a huge difference is that Trump seems to have learned or seems to believe that if he doesn't put troops on the ground, somehow the quagmire of Vietnam or Iraq will not repeat itself. But I also think we have to talk about the difference in America between the politics of George W. Bush's era and this Donald Trump era.
- [11:55]
A
Yeah, I think that it's precisely the reason why we started this conversation talking about Iraq, which is that, you know, the way the American public is experiencing what's happening now and what might come out of this, the, you know, the worst case scenario and the best case scenario is entirely shaped, as it should be, by the agonies of the last 23 years. And, you know, frankly, listening to Hegseth now, it makes Dick Cheney in 2003 sound like clause Fitz. But here's the thing that I think is actually interesting also to try to play out, because, look, I think it's safe to say, and it's probably pointing out the obvious, nobody is shedding a tear here for the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I mean, this is not a man who anybody is is mourning in this country. He was brutal and repressive. I mean, most recently killing thousands of protesters in that country. So then you have to say, okay, well, what is the best case scenario here? What could happen? Is there any world in which this ends up producing something good? I'm going to map out what it might be. And this is not because I'm making the case for it. Can I just sort of make that point clearly? I'm just trying to say, like, how could this unfold in a way that might actually transform that region? And for that to happen, you would need something like what happened in China in 1979. You know, it's ironic that the same year that Iran's dictatorship was driving it into a ditch for the next 50 years, you had China's dictatorship, a brutal and repressive regime, lifting that country out of a ditch over the course of the next 50 years. And the way that it did that was by breaking to some degree with the past, with the leadership of the past, but not throwing out itself entirely. As you know, the Communist Party still rules China. So the optimists today would tell you that what they're hoping for is a kind of Islamic regime that is using this as a way of saying, all right, that previous generation failed. And what we're going to do is we're going to begin the process of renewing this country and transforming its place in the world. But it is worth remembering now, having mapped that out. Look, the reality is, guys, we have never in American history had a case of regime change in a country this vast and complex. It's larger than Germany, larger than Japan. It's three times the size of Iraq or Afghanistan. We went into those countries. We are in utterly uncharted territory.
- [14:16]
B
Now, I think you're exactly right about how uncharted this is. There actually is a long history of American efforts to sort of exact regime change or wage war purely from the skies. And it hasn't really worked out very well. I'm mindful. I think it's a Friedmanism, but it's one that really applies here, which is to say that the opposite of dictatorship in the Middle east is not democracy. And what I fear, the lesson, the takeaway in the short term is that the mullahs are cracking down even harder. A regime that is willing to kill thousands, possibly even tens of thousands of its own citizens, which it did just a few weeks ago. We don't know the full toll of that crackdown, but Donald Trump in his State of the Union address last week used the figure of more than 30,000 people. Human rights groups have said they've managed to verify around 7,000 people who were killed. That is far more people than were killed in the Tiananmen Square crackdown, for example. It's one of the most horrific recent massacres of a people by their own leaders that I can think of. And unfortunately, you see the possibility of these great external enemies coming into Iran. And I just worry that rather than triggering small d democracy and a positive evolution in Iran, that it will inspire, at least in the short term, more of a crackdown, a harder line, extremists in control, people who are willing to kill their own Citizens also, there may be people inside Iran who say, look, we don't like it here, but, you know, the United States is the great enemy and they can't come into our country. People being invaded, it tends to clarify national identity. So I'm very concerned that, again, it's the false premise lesson that I took from our time on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, that what people think is true 100 hours into a war very rarely proves to be true 100 days into that conflict.
- [16:15]
C
I mean, in this case, I hate to sound like the pessimist against the possible positive scenario here, but, I mean, there really, I don't see much of a reason to believe that the objective here is to try to turn Iran into a democracy, or, I think you're right, free its people in the way that those protesters were hoping for, because the Trump administration is not even talking about that. They have not made a plan for succession. They have not tried to bolster the democratic impulses within Iran in any way that I can see. And in fact, the rulers that they've talked about in terms of succession, Trump has seen, you know, very cavalierly, oh, well, gee, I don't know. The first batch that we wanted, they're all dead. So then they've gone to the second batch. He said, well, they seem to be dead, too. And now there's been reporting that the Ayatollah's oldest son has been selected to replace him as Supreme Leader. There doesn't seem to be much of an emphasis, really, that I see on trying to ameliorate the situation within Iran politically. And, you know, in terms of, you know, since we were talking about the history of Iran, we actually have tried regime change in a country as big as Iran, because we tried it in Iran in 1953, and that's when the CIA took down Mossadegh and placed the Shah on the throne there. And the result was what we see.
- [17:40]
A
Absolutely right.
- [17:41]
C
The thing that I think we can say is that there has also been a history in Iran of a very sophisticated society that is well educated. There is a tremendous diaspora of Iranians to America that have high aspirations for a better day for their country. They've had to suffer through a lot, but I'm just not hearing or seeing a sign from the Trump administration that this is what they're really thinking about.
- [18:11]
B
Well, I mean, quite the opposite. Right. Donald Trump said in one of the many, many, many phone interviews he's given to different networks and reporters who called him up in the last few days, I think he told the, it was, quote, the perfect scenario, what unfolded in Venezuela. And I think that's really instructive at this moment. Right. It is because it was in Venezuela where Donald Trump takes out the leader of the country and after years of the United States official policy under Democrats and Republicans to be supporting the democratic opposition in Venezuela. Trump immediately abandoned the democratic opposition in Venezuela and essentially cuts a deal with, with the vice president of Maduro's regime to stay in power. And so they haven't accomplished regime change in the sense of getting rid of a terrible dictatorship that's doing awful things to the country and its own people. They've simply continued that regime, but taken the head away. And I fear that that is what Trump has in mind for Iran because he's told us so.
- [19:14]
A
Yeah. I think the other thing is that he's set a standard here in the way he's talked about this by saying that it is now on the shoulders of the Iranian people to stand up, as he says, and overthrow this regime. What that is is allowing himself. He's sort of laying down the predicate to decide any day he chooses to walk away and say, look, I gave them the opportunity and they didn't take it. But of course, what we know is the society, Jane, that you so rightly described, with its rich cultural history, this incredibly educated group of people, they are also now unbelievably outgunned by the security state. They have none of the infrastructure we've given them, none of the tools by which they could actually stand up and accomplish what it is that Donald Trump is asking for. So he's essentially created the conditions where he imagines that they're going to find their Delsey Rodriguez like they have in Venezuela. But as we've. In some ways, this ties together the threads we've been talking about on this show for weeks, which is this is a man who is intoxicated by the experiences that he's had as he's accumulated more and more power and is completely unaware or at least unwilling to acknowledge the history that got him there in the first place.
- [20:25]
C
No, absolutely, Evan. I mean, I think of the people we've had on as guests recently, the one that's ringing in my ears is what Ruth Ben Gut told us, who is the expert in strongmen's rule. And I mean, and she has almost said, you know, the next step in the playbook is a war, a war of choice, especially when a would be autocrat is cornered and feeling that his popularity is dipping.
- [20:52]
B
Yeah. And history is littered with would be dictators who thought they were just going to have a short victorious war. And, you know, we'll see.
- [21:03]
A
We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, why hasn't Trump made the case for the Iran war to the American people? The Political Scene from the New Yorker will be right back.
- [21:19]
E
This week on THE Political Scene from the New Yorker, I speak with foreign affairs journalist Ishan Tharoor about the fallout of the US And Israel's joint military operation against Iran.
- [21:29]
C
The regime is in survival mode, lashing out in various ways. There is still the possibility of major civil strife and unrest and the emergence of some kind of domestic uprising, although
- [21:42]
B
the one thing Iran is very good
- [21:43]
C
at is quashing domestic uprising.
- [21:47]
E
Join me, Tyler Foggit, on the Political scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.
- [22:05]
A
Jane, can we step back for a moment here? I mean, historically, this is not how wars are supposed to begin in the United States, am I right?
- [22:15]
C
Absolutely. I mean, I don't know if the rest of you had an experience like this, but I went to bed really late on Friday night, early actually Saturday morning, and I saw the first stages of Israel's involvement in this. And by the time I woke up a couple hours later, a member of my family saying, oh, my God, did you see what happened? So a brief, brief few hours of sleep and suddenly there's this massive war that we're in without warning, without an explanation. That is really not how a democracy is supposed to go to war, nor is it really the way that we have gone to war in this country. We've had presidents who've taken tremendous care to try to prepare public opinion and make the case for war, because it's, of course, the most serious thing that a country can do, to say nothing
- [23:04]
A
of going to Congress, for instance. Right, Susan? I mean, that's a piece of the process.
- [23:08]
B
Well, there is the constitution.
- [23:09]
C
There is the constitution.
- [23:11]
B
There is the Constitution. And it's remarkable, of course, because it was just a few days before the war, after this tremendous military buildup had already been sent to the Middle East. I mean, remember, it's not like Donald Trump didn't just wake up on Saturday morning and decide to do this, or actually Friday afternoon, I believe is when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said he gave the order. He didn't just wake up and decide to do this. He has sent a tremendous force to the Middle east, an enormous armada of air and sea power. He sent incredible capacities into our ally, Israel. He did a lot of things to prepare for this, to have the option to go ahead when he chose to do so, because this is a war of choice. And to me, that's the historical departure, is that the wars that we think of, that have defined American history, most of those come in response to an event, right? There's a horrific attack like 9 11, which prompted the US to go after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. There's World War II when the United States is attacked, literally a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Those are the kinds of wars that we tend to think of, rather than the idea of a president exercising this kind of unlimited, unrestricted power. And for me, I think we have to consider, as we try to puzzle through, how did we get here, that we have a leader in Donald Trump 2.0 who is taking steps that are far riskier, more dramatic, more violent than even those contemplated by Donald Trump in his first term in office, when, remember, this idea of taking out the government in Iran, it's been a fever dream of parts of the American right for a very long time. And throughout Donald Trump's first term in office, he was repeatedly lobbied by some of his hardline advisors to do exactly the war that we're seeing right now. And he was attracted to it, but he always pulled back. He had people around him who warned him of the second and third order consequences. He had people around him saying, are you sure you want to do this? And he had perhaps the check of wanting to seek reelection, perhaps the concern that the American people or his own supporters might have actually believed his no new wars, America first rhetoric. So it's just a very different Donald Trump right now in a way that I think is kind of scary because he's exercising this unlimited power that he thinks he has both at home and abroad.
- [25:47]
C
We also knew that negotiations were underway. There were peace talks underway, there was a process underway. And. And there was not preparation. And there was no. We had a State of the Union. But the President didn't say that he was contemplating this. So there was really none of the normal preparation that goes with the consent of the governed.
- [26:09]
A
I think one of the questions that we will be all looking at is how much of a negotiation was there by the Trump administration? How much was that a performance? How much was that just a delaying tactic in order to get all of the equipment into the region and assemble the pieces? I mean, it is worth noting here, that was not a negotiation conducted by the Secretary of State or by a professional diplomat. It was by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, a real estate developer and the president's son. In law. And now we're shocked to discover that that negotiation did not produce the peace that they were ostensibly seeking.
- [26:43]
B
One amazing difference reflecting our polarized society is that there've been a couple of major national polls since the attacks began, and they show the enormous skepticism about this from many Republicans as well as Democrats. Something like 60% of Americans not in favor of it, only around 27% had support for this. And someone pointed out that support for the Vietnam War in its final days as America was sort of leaving ignominiously, was around 29%. And I'll be interested to see whether Trump, Trump cares about that political constraint in any way anymore. Maybe that's a constraint that doesn't matter for him. Maybe, though, the constraints of the markets will matter. Maybe the fact that oil prices are spiking will matter, or the fact that the Iranians have chosen a really escalatory strategy here. And that's one thing I don't know about you guys. But as I think about what surprised me, the fact that the Iranians decided to go ahead and send these ballistic missiles into almost every other state in the Gulf is pretty escalatory. I mean, attacking Dubai International Airport, attacking a hotel in Dubai, attacking sites in Bahrain, in Qatar, even in Oman, which was mediating the talks. Now, as I understand the theory, the case here is to try to get the other states in the Middle east to pressure Donald Trump and to pressure Washington to pull back on the war. But it may have, of course, the opposite effect, which is to bring into the Israel US Coalition more firmly the Gulf states. But I still, I find that you don't know when you start a war and all of a sudden 10 different countries are involved. Right. You can't be too confident in the outcome here. I think Trump has bitten off an awful lot without clearly having a plan for what comes next week and next month and next year.
- [28:40]
A
You know, I've been struck already by the, frankly, the callousness with which Trump is talking about American deaths and the consequences of this war. He said in a video message, that's just the way it is. You know, as you look at the politics around this, and we've talked a bit about how the entire MAGA movement grew out of the, in many parts of the country, the despair that was left behind by the wars over the last 20, 25 years, there are parts of the MAGA base that are already breaking with this war in very vocal ways. What's caught your attention so far, Jane?
- [29:16]
C
I mean, I think it's fascinating to see because you Know, typically people think there's a rally around the flag effect. And whenever the United States goes into some kind of military action, people will then support the President. And we saw that in the beginning of the Iraq war with George W. Bush. But this is really different than the pattern that there has been in the past. And it's a danger for Trump within his own base, as you say, because there's a segment of it. And you take a look at people like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, they're accusing Trump of being manipulated by Israel and saying this is a war that's in Israel's interests, not in the United States interests. So it's splitting his own base. And they're portrayal of him is that he's basically a puppet, which is the opposite of the strongman view that he wants to portray of himself. And I think because there was no real rationale given by the administration, there's a sense out there among many people who don't follow politics all the time that is like, you know, what the hell? Why are we doing this? Why this now? There's so many other issues that the country is focused on in terms of affordability and, and healthcare and domestic problems. The coming midterms, and suddenly, kind of out of the blue, there's this unasked for, violent military expedition taking place. And I think it's shocked people and maybe really cut into the usual feeling that people have about when the United States goes to war.
- [30:59]
A
Susan, can you make sense of J.D. vance's role here, particularly? I mean, this is a guy who, more than almost anybody else in the MAGA firmament at the highest levels, made his name on saying, as he did in 2024, that he supported Trump because, quote, Trump started no wars, unquote. So how's he navigating this?
- [31:19]
B
It's something to watch the Vice President squirm like this. I mean, it cuts really right at the heart of who J.D. vance has been. I mean, go back. People have compiled these incredible clips altogether of Vance and Trump just again and again and again. What did they beat over the head of the voters in 2024? Kamala Harris was so evil warmonger, she was going to start World War 3. The reason to support the Trump ticket was because no new wars. No new wars. And Vance, I think a lot of the people who are the kind of hardcore MAGA folks, the Bannons and Tucker Carlson's, they must have seen JD Vance as their kind of insurance policy in this administration. And I think for them, it's a recognition first of all, that in their power mapping of the court of the czar here, they might have been off. Obviously a reflection of power mapping for anyone who's dabbled in some Kremlinology is that JD Vance wasn't even in the room when the strikes began over the weekend. You had the pictures from the Mar A Lago situation room which had the real decision makers. JD Vance was not there. He was back in Washington. Somebody called it the, you know, the kids table situation room with him and Tulsi Gabbard, who was so opposed to any kind of conflict with Iran that in her short lived Democratic presidential campaign, she actually sold T shirts on her website that said no war with Iran. So there's JD Vance and there's Tulsi Gabbard. I think Scott Besant was there, basically the folks whose opinion wasn't welcome. And in the room was Marco Rubio. In the room was Pete Hegseth and Susie Wiles, the President's Chief of staff. And I will say another point that doesn't get made enough, but leaving tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of American citizens stranded all across the Middle east, not evacuating them. Even Italy has managed to organize charter flights of its citizens and get them the hell out of the war zone. Whereas Americans are calling the consulates and embassies across the region. They're trying to get in touch with the State Department. They were told, we can't help you now, only now we're having this conversation on Tuesday is the White House belatedly realizing they had a problem. And I feel like Trump has eliminated so much of the capacity of the National Security Council of the State Department. He's politicized the Pentagon. When you go into a war like this against a formidable set of actors in the Middle east, the idea is we're not playing with our A team or our A game. Our capacities are significantly diminished even from what they were a year ago. And I think as the war plays out, we're gonna see more and more unfortunately where that diminished capacity leads to potentially very, very negative results.
- [34:20]
C
I mean, we've seen that just in the rationales that have so that instead of relying on intelligence, the US Intelligence agencies and national security experts, when Trump gave an explanation today about why it is that we got into this, he said he had a feeling. His feeling was that Iran was gonna strike, and so he wanted to strike them first. Starting a war on the basis of one man's feelings without consulting with Congress, in violation, apparently of international law, because he had a feeling is just, as you say, not necessarily the A game that we would expect.
- [35:05]
A
Well, among the things that this administration cut away in the first year of its time in office, it's worth noting that they also shrank America's foreign broadcasting services like Voice of America, which was exactly the kind of thing that we would have used in the past to try to send messages to the Iranian people. But of course, that's all been cut way back. So we've gone into a war with one hand tied behind our back at best. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, the costs of War, the political scene from the New Yorker. We'll be back in just a moment.
- [35:54]
D
Hi, I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. At this year's Academy Awards, Timothee Chalamet and Teyana Taylor aren't the only major nominees. The New Yorker will be there, too, with two nominated short films, which you can watch@newyorker.com video. Two people exchanging saliva was executive produced by Julianne Moore and Isabel Huppert, and it's set in a dystopian Paris where kissing is illegal. Our animated short film Retirement Plan follows a man as he dreams about all the things he's going to do when he's done working. You can enjoy both of those films and our full library of acclaimed short films@newyorker.com video.
- [36:49]
A
You know, one thing that I think we haven't touched on yet is the real costs of war in the full dimensions of that. We started this conversation talking about the war in Iraq and the long shadow that it cast over this country, both in moral terms but also in political terms and in the sheer cost of it. When you think back on that, what should we be prepared for when it comes to the cost of the war that has just begun?
- [37:17]
C
Well, I was just looking at this report, and it says that it cost $630 million just to get the forces into position for this. And in the first 24 hours, it cost $779 million. Those F15s that were shot down accidentally by Kuwait, each one of them cost $90 million. And the price of oil has already gone up by $10 a barrel, which means there will certainly be costs on the home front that are felt right away, too.
- [37:54]
B
Well, and that's right. And we're also going to be hearing an awful lot and are already hearing an awful lot about air defenses and essentially that we're spending down the stockpile that we have of these very important Patriot missiles The Thaad missile defense system, providing that to Israel and other allies across the region. First of all, we're in the new age of drone warfare. And what you're seeing is Iran use very low cost Shaheed drones to attack targets in its neighboring countries. We're shooting back at them with these very expensive air defense missiles. Somebody said to me, it's like, you know, going after an E bike with a Ferrari and doing that over and over again. So again, clearly one of Iran's goals at this moment is to keep shooting away at its neighbors in the hopes that it becomes too costly and difficult and too scarce to keep the air defense up. That's one of the takeaways from the Ukraine war. That's another spillover effect, unfortunately, that I'm concerned about, which is that this will have a negative impact on the ability of, if not the United States, since Donald Trump has refused to provide direct assistance to Ukraine, but at least America's European allies have still been doing so. The scarcity of that, by the way, Europe is much more vulnerable even than the United States to the energy price hikes that are happening right now because the United States encouraged Europe to wean itself off of cheap Russian energy, oil and natural gas by shifting some of its natural glass to the Middle East. So now it's more vulnerable to A, spreading conflict in the region than it was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So that's one fear that I have. And all of this goes in the bucket of A, unintended consequences, B. And I think this is really important for me, Evan. I think back to our time on the ground at the very beginning when we didn't know what would happen with Iraq. And it was a different, maybe a more, I don't want to say naive or innocent time, but certainly for us, maybe just because we were young, there was a presumption of honesty, I think, on the part of the US Government that was shattered in a really terrible way by the failure to find the non existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But I remember I went to that conflict with a mutual friend of ours, Ed Gargan, who was a longtime foreign correspondent. And I will never forget in the early days of the conflict, sitting outside at the hotel in Kuwait where we were staying. And Ed, you know, mischievously starts in, we're talking about what could happen. And he says, give me a Q, give me a U, you know, and so he spells out Quagmire. And he says, look, these people don't know what they're talking about. They think it's the fantasy of the quick, easy, painless war that you can do what Don Rumsfeld thought we could do and just sort of shock and our way into replacing one of the worst, most repressive dictatorships that had lasted decades in the Middle east and just turn that overnight into a kind of American style democracy to make a mess and think that someone else was gonna clean it all up in a way that would work out well for us and them. The naivete of that moment. And I just feel like if Ed was sort of transmitting to us, Evan, here's these lessons from Vietnam, like, what are the lessons from Iraq that we wanna tell people that are relevant about right now as we look at the very beginning of this Iran war?
- [41:40]
A
This is the perfect moment for what I think has become on our show, a kind of semi regular feature, which is the reminder of Mark Shields and his extraordinary observation right there on the cusp of war in Iraq. He was, of course, the great columnist and commentator. And right before the war in Iraq, he went out and he figured out how many people in Congress actually had experience in warfare or actually, more precisely, had children who were serving in combat. And he concluded it was remarkably few. And he said, those in power are totally divorced from those at peril. And it's that phenomenon then reverberates through our culture. And people often ask, how did we become so distrustful of one another? How did we become so distrustful of government in this country? The answer is that we are, over and over again, we are thrust into a war like this, like the war in Iraq, where frankly, the explanation for why we are expending blood and treasure is, in the case of Iraq, turned out to be a complete and total lie. And in this case, they haven't even bothered to come up with a coherent explanation.
- [42:58]
C
And they've been so callous in the way they've described the loss of life, American life, other life in this. And, you know, you have to know that, of course, again, in the Mark Shields tradition of observation that Trump did not serve in any war. There was a war where all of his peers did, or many of them did. But he got out claiming that he got a doctor to say he had bone spurs that have somehow miraculously disappeared ever since.
- [43:28]
B
Well, I'm glad somebody brought that up in this conversation because, you know, I have to admit, I keep thinking about the poor people in Tehran right now, so many of whom have so recently literally risked their lives for a better version of their future. And to see the cynicism and nihilism with which the US Administration is pursuing a conflict that we can hope that it brings democracy and a better future. But I truly fear that that's not the outcome here. And I just think of the bravery of those people. Look at what we have been up against here in the US it's nothing compared with what people in Iran have experienced for the last few decades. And I celebrate and admire so the resolve of people protesting in Minnesota or coming out in the freezing cold and sort of saying to their democratically elected government, no, this is not American. Think of the stakes in a place like Iran, where the regime has already shown, even before the US And Israel attacked, has already shown the resolve to turn its machine guns on its own people. And it just feels like we're watching the arc of tragedy in some ways continue in the Middle east in ways that just feel rotten to me.
- [44:49]
C
I think about the Americans who are serving in this. I was looking at a photograph of my nephew and his roommate in college, and the roommate is now a fighter pilot. And what an incredible young kid. He's so patriotic. His family is a military family. They serve as public service. But what cause are they fighting for here?
- [45:16]
A
Yeah, I have to say, you know, we're gonna be talking a lot about this topic over the weeks and perhaps months to come. And I think, I think it's fitting that we're winding up here on the subject of the impact on the individual lives who are going to be caught up in it, because so often when we talk about politics, it can seem almost abstract with these individuals sort of playing for power in Washington. But Jane, you're absolutely right. I mean, as our friend Rick Atkinson, who is one of the great authors on war, often says, in the end, war is about young people dying and sobbing mothers. And that is a. An awfully bracing way to remember what we have just encountered and embarked on. This has been a hard week already, guys, but I have to say I am so glad to be able to think about it and talk about it with both of you. So thank you very much.
- [46:09]
B
Thank you, Evan. It's really great to be with you both.
- [46:12]
C
Likewise. Glad to be able to talk to you about it and look forward to next week to maybe better news.
- [46:21]
A
This has been the Political Scene from the New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. We had research assistants today from Alex d'. Elia. Our producer is Nora Richie mixing by Mike Kutchman. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thank you so much for listening.
- [46:49]
E
Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is DOGE finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, Internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday wherever you get your podcast costs.
- [47:42]
C
From prx.