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- [00:00]
A
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to the to the Contrary podcast. You know what we're going to be talking about today over the weekend? The Atlantic's and Apple bomb posted. The American bombardment of Iran has been launched without explanation, without Congress, without public support. Above all, it has been launched without a coherent strategy for the Iranian people, without a plan to let them build a legitimate Iranian state. And as that war has gotten wider and more deadly, we are going to dive into that with the Atlantics and Applebaum. And thank you so much for joining me this morning. Obviously this is a war of choice and I guess the question is what has Donald Trump chosen and why?
- [00:49]
B
So clearly Donald Trump has chosen to decapitate the Iranian regime because that's already happened. It's not clear that he has a goal after that. It seems to shift and change as time goes on. The question of why, we might need some historical perspective eventually to answer, but there seems several possible explanations. One is that his allies and business partners in the Gulf states and his friends in Israel wanted him to do this. Another is that he has seen Iran as an enemy since it first began appearing in the newspapers in the 1970s and has been resentful that America wasn't able to strike Iran before this. Don't underestimate the degree to which he has these long term historical resentments that go back many decades that he's acting out now. Maybe he was convinced that Iran had a nuclear weapon or might have one, but since there's no evidence of that, it's hard to know how that would have ranked in his thinking. There's no evidence that Iran was close to having nuclear weapons or that Iran was close to striking the United States or anybody really, right at this exact second. So there are many conceivable explanations and presumably eventually learn which ones were the most important.
- [02:19]
A
Well, let me offer some cynical alternatives. And going back to the fact that he did not prep public opinion for this, he did not consult with Congress, it seemed rather sudden. And the rationales are not only not coherent, they're often contradictory. So the more cynical explanation is that for decades Donald Trump has thought of going to war with Iran as kind of the ultimate wag of the dog. He accused Barack Obama over and over and over again of going to war with Iran in order to win elections, in order to distract from something. So in Donald Trump's brain, he's living back a decade ago. He always thought of this as this is the card that a president might play to change the subject. And he's had a rather Bad political run? Is this a wag the dog? I mean, there are people who think that this is a massive distraction. This is the way that Donald Trump tries to change the subject from a flailing presidency.
- [03:20]
B
Maybe. I mean, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in this strange presidency, you have to take all these things into consideration, and above all, you have to understand that Trump sees US Foreign policy through the lens of his own interests. So not America's interests, not Iran's interests, nobody else's interests, just his own interests. And so the question are, is, is it. Or does he have business interests? You know, he has his family, has business partners in the Gulf. You know, is that, is that what's most important, or is it his personal political interests that are most important? Or his. As I said, he has these psychological interests. He has these, you know, obsessions that he's had for many decades that he's trying to play out. Now, as that was, that was the case with tariffs, for example, it's clearly the. That he, he wants a relationship with Russia. This is something he's wanted for many, many decades. So some of these things are just in his brain, and how you sort those things out and decide which is the most important, I don't know.
- [04:19]
A
Yeah, I mean, and apparently he's having some trouble sorting that out as well. He gave that interview to the New York Times over the weekend where on the one hand, he said, you know, they asked him, well, how does this end? You know, one scenario was that the, that the regime troops simply turn over their guns to the American people. I mean, sorry, that they simply turn over their guns to the Iranian people and democracy and freedom flourishes. And then he said, well, maybe it'll turn out like Venezuela, which is leaving the regime in place and finding somebody to work with. And as the New York Times reporter said, this is a little bit implausible. First of all, these troops are the ones who've been shooting innocent civilians and protesters. And number two, you know, the Venezuelan model is completely contradictory to the, you know, rising up the people of Iran. So what do you make of that? Is he just sort of throwing spaghetti up against the wall to say that whatever happens is what he planned?
- [05:19]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's perfectly plausible. I mean, the thing that's strange about this idea that Iranian troops or Iranian paramilitaries should surrender to the people is it's not clear who are the people, to whom would they surrender. And he's, he's implied if they do this, they'll get immunity from Whom would they get immunity? Who would protect them if they did this? Who is the. Who is the reigning power in Iran? You know, who would save them in the US Is not there. There's no American troops on the ground.
- [05:50]
A
No one knows.
- [05:51]
B
And there's. While there is a. There are really important Iranian opposition movements and figures, none of them right now is consolidated into a. You. Into an alternative elite that is ready to take power. So there's a deep contradiction, even just in that idea alone. And then, of course, as you say, that's completely different from suggesting that actually the regime should stay in place just without its former leadership. There are big differences between this regime and Venezuela, I mean, aside from the obvious ones of geography and complexity and so on. The Iranian regime is a radical, revolutionary regime. It is a theocracy which believes that its ultimate worth is decided in the afterworld and that its legitimacy is granted by God. So this is not a regime in which you would easily find people who could do a deal with the Great Satan United States, and happily continue on. So the idea that there would be some kind of halfway situation is more difficult to imagine than it would be in other places. And the idea of leaving this regime in place, especially after there have been these terrible massacres, as I said, it could be a recipe for instability. If a weakened regime is still in charge, then how does it deal with protests in the future anyway? You're right. There is profound incoherence and. And a deep sense that, as you say, whatever happens, he's going to claim that was his idea.
- [07:38]
A
Well, I mean. And the rationales become more problematic the more you look at them. So one rationale would have been to degrade Iran's nuclear capabilities. But, of course, Donald Trump told us back in June that he had completely obliterated them. There's no evidence. They made no attempt, like during the run up to the Iraq War, to even, you know, say, this is what our satellite imagery shows. That's number one. They were suggesting that Iran was planning a preemptive attack. But then the Pentagon had a briefing on Sunday night. They said, yeah, there was no evidence of that. There was these vague inferences that. And again, Pete Hegse says, we're not going to get into democracy building. At the same time, Donald Trump is talking about the Iranian people rising up. But. But this is something you wrote about that I really want to get into. You know, you talk about the no coherent strategy for the Iranian people, and I had forgo all of the ways in which the Trump 2.0 administration had slashed aid to say, with the soft power efforts to build up an opposition in Iran. So we could talk about this. I mean, you wrote the administration has taken money away from Iranian human rights monitoring groups and defunded media projects. So if we are really at war to help the Iranian people, how do we square that with the fact that this administration has been actively undermining the Iranian people up until five minutes ago?
- [09:03]
B
No, the Iranian people were of no interest to this administration, as you say, until five minutes ago. And yes, there have been cuts, some through usaid, some through other programs. There have been, you know, cuts to all kinds of efforts that were being made in Iran to help organize Iranians or help them, you know, create a coherent alternative. Maybe the most damaging and currently the piece of this that's created almost kind of an emergency is the damage that has been done to American foreign broadcasting. So there's an organization called the U.S. agency for Global Media. It's run by Carrie Lake right now, whose tenure is not even. It's not even clear that she's legally in charge. But anyway, she's de facto in charge.
- [09:52]
A
And USAGM run former Arizona Senate candidate, MAGA superstar, Right?
- [09:58]
B
So former Arizona Senate and governor candidate, lost both times. A kind of extreme conspiracy theorist who posts repeatedly on X about the stolen 2020 election. And she has almost totally dismantled Voice of America. She fired hundreds of people, wasting, I should say tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in doing so, canceling contracts, putting people on administrative leave. She's hassled and made life difficult. Also for Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, which is another piece of that organization, which had also had a Persian language broadcast into Iran. And all of these organizations, Radio Farda. Radio Farda, that's right. And all these organizations spent the last year fighting Kerry Lake, you know, trying to stay afloat, worrying about lawsuits, worrying about, you know, whether who is employed and who wasn't employed. There's been massive disruption. Lake has more recently, in a kind of panicked effort, she tried to rehire people to work, work for Persian language, voa. She's now put someone in charge of that, who's a very partisan figure, who isn't. Is clearly not doing objective journalism, is not trying to build credibility. Who's somebody who has a distinct view of the Iranian conflict and debate and who, for example, is an opponent of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. This is the son of the late Shah, who has a. Who in any case has a substantial following both inside and outside Iran. And this person doesn't want the name of The Crown Prince mentioned on the air. So, so it's become a very eccentric organization. It has very little credibility. It's not an institution through which you could broadcast to Iranians and win a lot of trust or support. And actually I'm told that inside Iran, the Saudi based, Saudi backed broadcaster is much more popular and has more credibility, which is pretty extraordinary if you think about it, when you think about American journalism and Saudi journalism. So she has dismantled whatever apparatus there might have been to send messages or create some kind of even common conversation among Iranians.
- [12:13]
A
Meanwhile, the number of casualties continues to arise. The war is spreading. People in the Pentagon are telling the Washington Post that the mood there is intense and paranoid because they don't know how long this is going to last. The oil prices have, have peaked. What are the greatest dangers right now? And the reason I'm asking this is Donald Trump has his own agenda. But when you start a war like this, other people get a vote as well, don't they? Donald Trump likes to feel that he is in absolute control of events. But as you look at what's happening to the markets, look what's happening throughout the Middle east, what are the dangers that we should be keeping our eye on?
- [12:57]
B
I mean, there's such a wide range of things that could happen that I am really not gonna predict any. To be clear, I'm not guessing what's going to happen. I mean, there are good outcomes. There's a good outcome whereby the Iranians find some kind of stability and some kind of regime that can carry them over and is less oppressive. And there is a bad outcome. There's. Iran is a very divided country. It's ethnically divided and politically divided. You could imagine chaos and civil war in Iran that could spill over into other countries of the region. You could imagine a wider war in which the Gulf states are in, involved. I mean, one of the things that we don't know is how much firepower Iran still has and also where its various proxies are. I mean, some of them have been badly damaged, Hezbollah and Hamas by the Israelis over the last months and years, but they may have others. They, you know, they've been sponsoring terrorism for four decades. We don't, we may not know exactly where all those terrorists are and how much ability to do damage they have. And so you have the possibility of a long term conflict paralyzing a really important region. I mean, paralyzing the production and shipping of oil, paralyzing travel. The airports in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and the Middle east are very important ways in which people get across from Europe to Asia. So it's a, you know, the possibility of paralysis and chaos is there. It's one of the. And the worst case scenario is that that then continue. Continues for some time, for weeks or for months.
- [14:38]
A
Well, and the ramifications could continue for decades, as we've seen with international terrorism. I'm reminded that the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9, 11. But what is the Homeland. Department of Homeland Security under Kristi Noem focused on right now? I would like to think that they are now focused on the possibility of various terror threats. But we have shifted massive law enforcement resources and security resources from terror, terrorism, from protecting the homeland to going after illegal immigrants, haven't we? So, you know, in many cases, a lot of these dots, you know, need to be connected because there will be consequences for the decisions we've made so far. I mean, the Department of Homeland Security, you know, is focused on American cities. Are there vulnerabilities that we will discover in the future?
- [15:30]
B
Sure. And, you know, the FBI's counterterrorism activities apparently have also been curtailed so that the FBI can also spend time on the president's enemies and on, you know, illegal immigrants, whatever that means. And so. And so there is a. Absolutely. There's been this huge shift in emphasis at all of the institutions that are designed to protect Americans and are designed to think about these precise issues. I mean, and that's without even going into what's happened at the State Department. A whole, you know, teams of diplomats are effectively unemployed. They're not in touch with anybody. They're not doing anything. You know, civil servants all across the government have been effectively told, we don't want you. You're the deep state. You don't have a job anymore. And at a moment of emergency, that could begin to matter. And the difficulty is we just don't know how. The exact source of instability or trouble isn't something that we can predict, and that's why we had these institutions there in the first place.
- [16:33]
A
And. And I know that we often will focus on one thing to the exclusion of the rest. But I'm haunted by the thought that as this is going on, Vladimir Putin continues to rain death on Ukraine, and that many of the resources that are being used in this war of choice could have been used to deter Vladimir Putin, could have been used to deter President Xi. So let's pull the lens back a little bit. How is the rest of the world looking at this? I heard some spin this morning that all of this is about Containing China, that this will make China, you know, less likely to. Is, is, is that the way that the rest of the world is looking at what's going on right now?
- [17:14]
B
No. I mean, I didn't see how this is containing China. On the contrary, I would think that the chaos could offer China a lot of opportunities either in Taiwan or elsewhere to, you know, spread its influence and present itself as the stable and reliable power. So I don't see, I don't see that at all. You know, regarding Russia, I mean the, you know, the quantity and number of just take, taking Patriot defense missiles, ammunition for Patriot air defense alone, the quantity that had been used in the last few days, I mean, this would have been enough to protect the Ukrainian cities from this devastating blow to the electricity system over the last couple of months. You know, the United States has made a choice like in it doesn't want to. We're not protecting Ukraine, we're not helping Ukraine survive the war and instead we've decided to use the same capacity for this war of choice with an unclear outcome against Iran. And Europeans have seen that. Ukrainians have seen it. I mean, there are other ironies abounding. The Gulf states being surprised by Shahi drones, by Iranian drones and not knowing how to stop them. Lots of Ukrainians have pointed out, well, you could have asked us, we've been stopping those kinds of drones which have been aimed at Ukraine for the last four years. We know how to do it, but you know, nobody sought to ask us. You know, Ukraine now has the most sophisticated anti drone army in the world. And you know, because we, the US is somehow ignoring Ukraine or isn't clearly allied with Ukraine or isn't involving Ukraine in its plans and discussions, that enormous capacity has been, has been ignored. I mean there's a, there's a, there's another irony. I didn't hear all of the, the conversation this morning, but I gather that Pete Hexseth has also expressed, you know, dismay that European allies aren't supporting the US More, more actively in this war on Iran. I mean, European allies have been told for the last year that they are on their own, that the US isn't going to help them, that, you know, Russia's their problem, not America's problem. You know, Europe is a continent that's too far away for Americans to think about. And so they've been told all this for, you know, for many. And now somehow they're being asked to support an American war in the Middle east, which from their perspective is also happening on another continent. Why should they take part in it? So it's a moment when these different and conflicting narratives of the Trump administration really clash. And if you're seeing a lack of enthusiasm on the part of America's allies, then why should anybody be surprised by that?
- [19:56]
A
Yeah, there's no coalition of the willing here. The United States is basically going this alone with Israel. And the relations between Israel and the United States become complicated politically. Give me your sense. Because if you go back just a couple of years ago, the American support for Israel was bipartisan, it was cross ideological lines. And it feels like one of the most dramatic shifts in public opinion and world stature has been what Benjamin Netanyahu has done to, has been done to, has done to the image of Israel in the world. And this strikes me as a high risk for the United States to go it alone with Israel, but also not without risk for Israel being involved in what may turn out to be a very unpopular war. Thoughts?
- [20:47]
B
I heard somebody describe this as Israel's last chance to do a big, you know, a big action with the US Before US Support for Israel becomes impossible. And I think that's, that's possible. So the, it's both among both Democrats and Republicans, the, the people watching the just not just the fight against Hamas, which many Americans supported and understood, but the want and destruction in Gaza and the attacks on civilians and this seeming lack of interest in the fate of people in Gaza and what happens to them after this, and the very cynical projects through the Board of Peace or some other institution to, I don't know, build high rise luxury resorts in Gaza. All that conversation, I think has turned off a lot of people and made them ask whether, you know, this is really, is this a project that we should get behind. Why is this in America's interest, You know, why is it good for anybody? And I, and, and Israel is very much at risk of losing, I think not only Democrats, but Republicans in its broader aim in its longer term. And this may be the last time it's possible at all. This may be one of the last presidencies that would, where you would have a US President who would cooperate with Israel to this extent.
- [22:07]
A
Talk to me a little bit about the domestic politics of this and what this means for people like J.D. vance who have been part of that America first isolationist movement by the this time we've beaten the dead horse of how many times Donald Trump said he was the peace president, won at the Nobel Peace Prize, said that he would never launch wars like this, that that was the kind of thing that Kamala Harris would do. But you do have a substantial portion of that MAGA base which appears to genuinely oppose this kind of foreign adventurism. So talk to me a little bit about what does this mean for people like the J.D. vance of the world who've been making the case against doing things like this
- [22:54]
B
is another aspect of the total incoherence of the policy. So Trump himself has been accusing Hillary Clinton and then Kamala Harris of wanting to go to war. Vance has said repeatedly that he's against regime change projects and foreign wars, especially in the Middle East. Other parts of the right have said that clearly one of the premises upon which Donald Trump was elected was to end forever wars. And that was their language, you know, not mine. And, and the fact that they've just flipped the script in five minutes, you know, I, I mean, maybe you have an explanation for it, but I don't. I mean, how, how you then rebuild a coalition around that. I know. I mean, the only explanation I have is that none of that was ever really true. And all of this has just been about, you know, owning the libs and, and destroying their enemies and whatever language they needed to say in order to get votes is what they would say. And maybe they didn't believe anything. So. And that certainly in the case of Trump, that's clear. I mean, he's a, he's ultimately a nihilist who doesn't have, yes, he doesn't have deep, he doesn't have a strategy, he doesn't have really an ideology. He does have these kind of instincts and things that he likes and dislikes and has liked and disliked for a long time. But others who have strategies and who have ideologies, maybe those were also less deep than we thought they were. You know, maybe MAGA isolationism was opposed to win elections.
- [24:29]
A
It's certainly possible that they have no principles whatsoever. Or maybe in the cognitive distance, they believed everything. They believed that you could be isolationist and still be a saber rattling, you know, military power. Many of those things were in conflict and, you know, held together by the personality of Donald Trump. But this has been a bad week for cognitive dissonance because a lot of these things are now really, really in conflict. I do believe that, Le the influencers aside, I think that was a major part of Trump's success, that there are a lot of Americans who really have grown deeply disillusioned with endless wars. But I'm not sure that replacing endless wars with pointless wars is the solution to all of this. And so I am going to be interested to see what happens with public opinion. Now, in the quote that I read from you that you posted over the weekend, you pointed out that they launched this without explanation, without Congress, without public support. This is kind of unusual, isn't it, in the sense that normally in the beginning of any war, there's massive enthusiasm, right? People, you know, there are the parades and everybody understands or thinks they understand what the, what the war was about. And if things get messy, public opinion slides. I'm not seeing any rallying around the flag at all. And this strikes me as politically a political vulnerability for Donald Trump. But also, isn't it one of the great lessons that.
- [25:51]
B
That.
- [25:51]
A
Didn't Colin Powell talk about this? We never go to war, we never send Americans to war if the public does not understand why and does not support the war. Wasn't that one of the great lessons of the last 70 years?
- [26:04]
B
That was certainly what we thought. No, I mean, to me, that was in a way the most extraordinary. That even in the State of the Union speech, Trump, which turns out it was a few hours really before the war began, Trump didn't really. There was a reference to it, but not a full scale explanation or justification. There was no attempt to build a coalition of allies in either party. And obviously there was no turn to Congress. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama did use American military force, but again, they did it in the context of constantly explaining why, constantly explaining reasons, looking for people in the Senate to support it, looking for support in the public. Here was just no attempt whatsoever. And I think that reflects, again, this thing that I began with, which is Donald Trump sees American foreign policy through the eyes of his own needs. What the American people want, what the Congress wants, what other people want, what American allies wants. None of this interests him. This is about his project, his needs, his whimsical maybe his money, maybe his political interests. You know, whether it's. Whether it's Wag the Dog or whether it's business partners in Saudi Arabia, I don't know. But that's his reasoning, you know, and it's the same. There's no. This, this might not mean a lot to people outside of Washington, but one of the things that's disappeared in this administration is what Washingtonians used to call the policy process. So before any decision was taken, there would be deputy under secretaries and under secretaries from different departments who would present possible outcomes. And here's. Help the president think it through. Here's what the consequences of action X or Y might be. And there would be people at the National Security Agency and there would be State Department and intelligence and the Pentagon would contribute to making a decision like that. And none of that seems to happen anymore. And instead, Trump takes decisions, as I said, based on his own whim or after a conversation with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner or maybe after a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. And so there's no policy process. There's no, you know, nobody else from the government or from, from, from US Intelligence is involved. And that, that makes all of this very strange. You know, there's no, because there's also no breaks. There's nobody saying, yes, Mr. President, but have you considered what would happen if you do this? And he doesn't seem to take any other views into account. And there seems to be no one around him who can criticize or second guess anything that he does, which, you know, which is a kind of key, you know, that's how, that's how monarchies work. Right. But it's not how the American presidency has worked, at least not in recent times.
- [28:59]
A
This seems like a good segue to bring up the other, you know, thing that I hope people don't forget, which is Greenland. Okay? I mean, going from the war in Iran to Greenland, and yet the same process that you just described and the fallout has been massive from all of that. Give me your, you've spent time in Europe, the Europeans haven't forgotten about Greenland. I mean, that seems like that's gonna stick for a while, isn't it?
- [29:28]
B
Right. So I was at the Munich Security Conference, and then I spent a week in Copenhagen working on a longer project. And I have to tell you that I don't think Americans understand what Europeans went through in January. So at one point in January, the Danes became convinced both because of things Trump was saying in public and because of other things they were seeing in private, you know, or behind the scenes. They became convinced that a US Military invasion of Greenland was possible. And therefore they began to prepare for it and think about what this means for the Danes. So they had to have soldiers who were ready to shoot Americans. They had to have, maybe, okay, now I'm speculating, but maybe, you know, anti aircraft missiles in place at airports in Greenland. There are not that many play ways to get to Greenland. So they would have thought of, this
- [30:18]
A
was real for them.
- [30:19]
B
This was real. It was real. They took it seriously. They went, they, they had to accept that this was a possibility. There were a number of other European nations who are close to the date, including all the other Scandinavians, the Germans and others who also went through this process of saying, having to calculate, okay, what if the US Goes to war with Denmark, what does that do to NATO? What does that do to the economy? How do we prepare our, you know, prepare for this catastrophe, essentially? And so everyone went through the motions of genuinely preparing for this to happen and then it didn't happen. Trump made a very long speech at Davos in which he mixed up Greenland and Iceland a few times and he essentially took it off the table. But I don't think the trauma has gone away. So the experience of having lived through that, having been prepared to go to war with what they thought was their closest and most important ally hasn't worn off. And it has all kinds of consequences in economic decision making, in military decision making and security decision making, kinds of Europeans are second guessing, hedging, asking whether they have made the, you know, what, what, what should their posture towards the United States be going forward? What does this mean about their dependence on US Technology? Maybe they need to have different technology. I mean, there are going to be repercussions from this that will take a really long time to sort out. But I mean, above all, it's this sense of hurt and trauma. And I remember being in Denmark, I was asked over and over again, again, do Americans understand what happened and how hurt we are? And of course, no. I mean, I don't think I had to be honest. I don't think Americans do understand. Certainly the Trump administration does, but I don't even think ordinary Americans understand what that meant inside a small country like Denmark, which was hugely pro American, which was a founding member of NATO, which had cooperated with the US In Greenland for many, many decades, including allowing the US to store nuclear weapons in Greenland during the cold, which has huge investments in the U.S. billions of dollars of investments. Danish companies are very, you know, have big presence in the United States. And, you know, and all of this suddenly didn't seem to matter to a US Administration which decided again, for whimsical reasons. I mean, there's, you know, I know there have been a dozen articles in Foreign Policy magazine and so on about the importance of Greenland. That's, it's all rubbish. You know, the, it was a whimsical decision of the president to want to have Greenland and Denmark was left trying to cope with it.
- [33:02]
A
And as you point out, though, this kind of trauma has long term implications of the decoupling, whether it's military decoupling or technological or financial. I just was reading an article last night because my daughter lives in France and obviously there's money that gets transferred back and forth. How many of the Europeans are saying, we don't want to use Visa and MasterCard anymore. We want to create our own forms of transfer, transferring capital. And this may seem like a digression, but basically it's like anything that the Americans can turn on and off, we don't want to make ourselves vulnerable to anymore. And this seems to be part of the thinking that at one point you would trust Americans across the board. But if they think there's a possibility that the US Government can shut them off from something, well, this is going to have cascading effects throughout the economy.
- [33:52]
B
Yeah. This is what Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, talked about at Davos as well, is the fear that the US can weaponize this interdependency. So there are a lot of countries that have essentially co built their economies with the United States, including especially Canada actually, but also Denmark and also Germany and also many other European countries. And they did so on the assumption that the US absolutely shared their values and shared their respect for the rule of law and so on. Once they learned that this was a, the, the relation to the US is different and the US is capable of using that interdependence as a, as a way of, you know, bribing or coercing them, then all of those relationships start to look different. And, and I'm, I'm not saying this is something that will be a, you'll see a rapid explosion or I don't think so. It depends on what happens. But I mean, over the long term, you'll see, you'll see a big change in attitudes. I mean, this is a little bit like what happened in the UK after Brexit, that there wasn't an immediate crash, you know, after the, after the UK voted to leave the European Union. But the decoupling of the UK from the European Union over time has resulted in much, you know, real damage to the British economy, you know, real separation, you know, issues that are now of trade and exchange that are very hard to overcome and fix, and all that kind of seamless integration that seemed possible, you know, a decade ago, it began to fall apart. And I would think something like that would begin to happen with the US and Europe. Again, I don't think it will necessarily be immediate, but it'll happen over time.
- [35:32]
A
So with, with the Europeans still processing the trauma of thinking of possibility of invasion of Greenland, what do you think? What is your sense? How are they looking at what's happening now with Iran? So here's Donald Trump, who did not invade Greenland, but has launched this massive attack on Iran. What is the European reaction to all of this?
- [35:51]
B
I mean, I know that the reaction right now is a kind of holding pattern. I mean, of course, Iran, you know, this was a radical government that supported terrorism for decades. That was a huge problem for Europe as well as for, as well as for others. I mean, I don't think anybody's crying about the end of a vicious totalitarian dictatorship, which also, by the way, had deep links to Russia and to Venezuela and to the rest of the autocratic world. So nobody's sad about that. But of course there's, I'm sure, great concern about what happens next. Stability in the Middle east is important for Europeans. Access to the oil resources and other resources in the Middle east are important, important. And, and right now there's a kind of holding pattern while people try to understand what the US Government's intentions are. I mean, there will be a lot of, inside most European countries, certainly. I was on the phone with an Italian journalist this morning, and you'll certainly hear this in France and the UK There will be a lot of people who are very angry about the war and will, will protest against it. And it will be very hard for any European governments to come kind of wholeheartedly support the US Effort, but especially given that we don't know what the US Effort is in aid of, what kind of Iran is it seeking to build? So I think you'll see people in a holding pattern for some days and then while they try to understand what it is that the US Administration actually wants.
- [37:27]
A
Okay, so in the few minutes we have left, I want to just switch gears just a little bit because you've written so extensively about authoritarianism and autocracy and the tactics of leaders like Viktor Orban. Your thoughts about some of the events that have taken place in this country over the last couple of, couple of weeks as Donald Trump has flexed his power over the media, apparently used his influence to get some of his allies to be able to buy the company that controls CNN and everything. This is something that we've seen before. But give me some perspective about the speed and the scale of what Trump is doing compared to others. My sense is that listening to you is that Viktor Orban took more than a decade to accomplish many of the things that Donald Trump is trying to do, like in weeks. Does it sound all familiar to you?
- [38:19]
B
Yeah. No, no. I mean, so Orban had a sort of multi pronged process. He sought to take over the court system, which he did very slowly. He manipulated the electoral system, but he also essentially empowered his financial allies to take over all of the Hungarian media, his cronies, exception of a couple of his cronies, essentially with a couple of websites. And he did that over a long period of time. He actually made a great effort to do it all legally. He tried not to break laws, partly because he had a need to stay inside the European Union. And he used different kinds of pressure. And you're right that what the Trump administration has done in various, various, these different fields has been really a lot faster. And they've been helped by the tech industry, which seems to share, not all of it, but some of them seem to share his distaste for democracy and his preference for kind of tech oligarchy and the, the pressure on media, the attempt to gather media ownership under, into one group or one conglomerate. This is very much, this is very familiar. It's familiar from Hungary, it's familiar from Turkey. It's familiar from, you know, from Russia, actually, from really any state that is taught to centralize power in the, in the, in a new way. So this is not, this is not what Stalin or Hitler would have done. This is what, this is what a modern autocrat does. They don't do censorship. They do control of the media via oligarchic cronies, which is a somewhat different, It's a different structure. And that is exactly what Trump is doing.
- [40:01]
A
So you mentioned that the tech oligarchs and I haven't delved as deeply as I should into this story, but we had kind of an interesting. That's a mild word. What do you make of the administration lashing out at Anthropic? This is the company, the big AI company that apparently has told the Pentagon, no, we're not going to give you access to all of our tools that might be used for mass surveillance or to power autonomous weapons, I guess what's called, Claude, this super powerful thing. And the Pentagon has basically said, we want you to remove all your safeguards. We want you to give us access to everything. And Anthropic said, wait, no, we don't want to turn over this infinite, unpredictable power to the US Military. And right before launching the war against Iran, Donald Trump basically said, the US Government is completely not going to do any business with this AI company, with Anthropic ever again. Did this kind of send a message to the tech oligarchs that, you know, be careful who you get into bed with. Visit. I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley were a Little bit shocked that. So we have to do absolutely your bidding or you are going to cast us into outer darkness. Do you have any thoughts on this?
- [41:10]
B
Look, this is the threat that the Republican Party talked about for years. You know, the threat of the state taking over capitalist companies. And absolutely, this is what they're, you know, the, the Trump administration's attempt to manipulate private companies to demand, yes, in some cases, shares in these companies to direct how they spend their money or how they behave. So this is, you know, when they, when they scream about Marxism and communism and, and, and, and the threat of, of state control. I mean, this is it. This is a, this is the, you know, this is the, this should be the libertarian nightmare. This is what they've been saying they were afraid of all along. They, that companies would be dictated to by the government. I mean, I don't know what could be the end game of this particular situation. I mean, I don't know whether anthropic can leave the country or whether it can sue or what is the, you know, what recourse it has. Maybe under US Law, there is a recourse, but certainly the instinct of the US Government, or rather of the Trump administration, to want to control and punish people who disagree with it. You know, punish anthropic, not just say, okay, we're going to do a contract with somebody else, which, you know that, that's happened before, right?
- [42:28]
A
Fine.
- [42:29]
B
But to say we're punishing you and we're going to destroy your business. This is, this is something that we've never seen before, at least not in modern times.
- [42:37]
A
No, I think this is a huge story. And if we were not at war, this would be a, hopefully would be something that we would be debating in this country. And Applebaum wants to, again, very, very grateful for all of your time and your insight. Thank you, thank you. And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We remind you every single time, and it seems more important than ever to remember that we are not the crazy one.