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Foreign.
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Welcome back, everybody, to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute, and the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. Iran is likely using the current ceasefire period to normalize Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz by compelling oil importing countries to establish a bil bilateral transit agreement with Iran while charging fees from vessels that are not part of the bilateral deals. The transit agreements and fee system use a multi tiered system. According to Iranian officials who spoke to Reuters. Iranian strategic partners like Russia and China are prioritized at the top tier, while countries with close ties to Iran, like India and Pakistan, can operate within negotiated transit agreements. Other countries are handled on a case by case basis, and any vessel that has links to Iranian adversaries is denied access entirely. Walter, is this new system news or FO news?
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Well, I for one, am shocked that Iran's mullahs and revolutionaries would use a ceasefire period to realize their own advantages, that they would take advantage of the situation. Who could believe such a thing? Or also that their ambition is to actually own the Strait of Hormuz and be able to blackmail the world at will. Who could have thought this was in the back of their heads? Why? But it is. Certainly it does show one thing, I think, which is that in spite of the strikes that knocked off the top layers of their leadership, there's still a state there, you know, there's still an organization. These are not a bunch of sort of ants running around after someone is kicked over the anthill, you know, purposely scattering and rushing around. These folks actually are able to take decisions and act on them. I would say that we should understand from here that the regime is more resilient than I think a lot of folks may have hoped.
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The threat that Iran could one day unilaterally control the Strait of Hormuz was a concern about Iran going back decades. And it seems to have happened at least temporarily, maybe longer, as a result of this war. Is there a sense in which this wouldn't have happened unless the war had been fought? Or was this something that was going to happen that we were trying to prevent, and it's kind of good that we're fighting this battle now instead of later?
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Well, I would say that they were likely to do this. Nothing that we have seen from The Iranians since 1979 has indicated any interest in doing anything other than establishing a stable regional hegemony that would allow them to control the Gulf's oil supplies and assert their control in every way they could. There's absolutely zero evidence that any other thought has ever even crossed their mind. So in that sense, maybe better now than later, certainly than when they have a nuke or when their ballistic missiles have been even more capable of doing damage. But on the other hand, then you have to ask, and has this war been planned well, executed well? Was there political preparation in the US for what might be an arduous struggle? Is there confidence in the US Position among other countries that will be paying up price for an extended struggle? Is there a coalition backing the war? I'm afraid we get a lot of no, no, no, no. There again, President Trump has entered the war really with nothing but a shoe shine and a smile. That is to say, he believes that he can improvise his way out of any kind of trouble. And he also believes that he can inoculate himself against political fallout at home. Those assumptions have already been tested pretty hard. So far, it is not at all clear that they're holding up particularly well. You know, I think I wrote in the journal at the beginning of this whole thing that this was the greatest test of Trump's career, and he will either succeed and pull rabbits out of his hat and maneuver the Iranians into a position that works, or he'll fail rather miserably and publicly.
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All right, our second story. The Trump administration announced this week the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the Biden Justice Department and Democrats, which, according to the New York Times, forges a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to President Trump's allies. The highly unusual fund was denounced by critics as a slush fund and as a brazen misuse of a once independent Justice Department to carry out the president's personal and political agendas. The announcement provided few details of how the disbursement would work or who would be eligible. But the arrangement raised the possibility that American taxpayers might end up writing checks to those prosecuted for the attack on the Capitol by a pro Trump mob on January 6, 2021, and others the president has cast as victims of Biden administration actions. Walter, is this news or fo news?
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Well, let's see how far it goes. It's not as revolutionary as people think. It's bad news. I want to be clear here. It smells bad. Smells like there's something rotten in the shoebox. And that almost always is because there is something rotten in the shoebox. And I'm thinking of all the dead animals that one used to, pets that didn't work out back in the old days. But it is also true that under the Democrats, you have all of these legal decisions, some of which were done kind of collusively by ideologically sympathetic attorneys, like, okay, we're going to have a zillion dollar class action settlement in this case and it's going to go to all the Pro Democratic housing NGOs that are staff, all these lefty advocates. And that's not corruption, that's not political influence. That's good government. This is as pure as the driven snow. And now when Trump does something that is at least in some ways similar, oh, my goodness, this is the worst corruption ever seen. Not even Nero dreamed of such a thing. This is the end of the republic. Oh, death. Oh, death. Oh, death. Now, it's been an incredibly abusive practice all along, but I will say this, at least on the Democratic side, it wasn't necessarily about personal favors to personal crimes. So this is taking an ugly practice that is a problem and needs to be curtailed and making it even bigger and even uglier. So it's bad news now, what's going to happen with it? And, you know, will there be some more legal decisions here? You know, what's going to go on? I mean, I don't think this thing is over yet. So I'm not, I'm not about to pull the, like, this is news, you know, hit the golden buzzer. This one is, is news, but it's, it's a step in the wrong direction.
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I know there's still a lot of Trump administration left and we, you know, still have a presidential transition to get through at some point. But as of right now, in the annals of American presidential corruption, where do you think the Trump administration stands? You know, given, I don't know, the go tos would be Grant Harding, Andrew Johnson, you know, some others.
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I think in at least this dimension, he succeeded in making America great again. Even George Washington, I've been told, quietly bought up land in what would soon become the District of Columbia. It may be a total coincidence that the site chosen for the national capital was just a few miles from, oh, my goodness, his own home. You know, but there's corruption and there's corruption and there is this sort of corruption that is one or two isolated cases. As far as I can tell, Grant was just a very poor judge of character and kind of got bamboozled by some very shady people whose motives he didn't fully Understand, I'm not quite sure that that's where we are with President Trump and again with Harding. I tend to think it was more laxity than kind of personal gain. I do think this future historians may well look back on this as an era of unprecedented personal and familial enrichment. I mean, Hunter Biden's paintings are going to have and his consulting fees, they will have their place in the hall of fame. But I think President Trump may well find that some of his own friends and relations are right up there with him and maybe even on a bigger scale. Let's wait and see.
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All right. Final story of the week. After capturing Nicolas Maduro in January, the Trump administration is escalating now against Cuba. This week the Department of Justice indicted Raul Castro, 94 years old and still the island's de facto leader, for ordering the 1996 shoot down of two brothers to the rescue planes. The charge follows months of coercion from the White House, including blocked fuel shipments, regional pressure to cut hard currency and OFAC sanctions against Gaissa, the military run conglomerate regarded as the Castro family business. In mid May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Havana to meet Castro's grandson and offer $100 million in Catholic Church administered aid. But the meeting reportedly failed. Marco Rubio, for his part, has signaled the regime itself must go. Cuba, which imports 70% of its food, is out of diesel. Havana endures 22 hour blackouts. Protests have been ongoing since May 13 and World bank economists are projecting a 15% contraction. A Venezuela style seizure may be too extreme, according to the Economist. But the regime is running out of ways to tell Trump no. Walter news or fo news?
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News. I think that the noose is tightening and potentially important news. It's such a complicated mess. There's some things there that I don't actually have a lot of doubt from what I know that Raul Castro did order the shoot down of the planes, the Hermanas Al Rascate planes, and the legalities of indicting him for that, I don't know. But I have to say that if foreign courts start asserting judicial extraterritoriality on people giving orders to kill other people, I think Barack Obama had better be careful about where he goes. Internationally. We are sort of moving toward this chaotic thing where everybody's indicting everybody and everybody just finds their court and throws in an order. And while, you know, the United States is a very strong country and we might in some ways come off better than most when it came to like being our being able to protect the people that we don't want to indict and to capture the people that we do want to indict. We still, as a country whose citizens travel all over the world and we have business that's active all over the world and so on, we actually have quite a lot to lose if we keep eroding the, any foundation of genuinely international law. I mean, again, some of the international law buffs have taken this. They'd like to be able to make Spanish littering law applicable or something like that. It risks going far. Some people might say that's just kind of a picky caveat. And again, Raul Castro is not one of the, not one of our planet's innocence. But overall, I think, you know, the, the Cuban government has reached a kind of a. A sell by date past its sell by date at the moment. It can't run the country. It basically, its economic model is it drives its young people out and they then send remittances back to their families is just not sustainable. And the island has lost 60 years of modernization. It's been a kind of a continual failure in one dimension after another. They've never really been able to do much economically that was successful. Even some of the triumphs of socialism that they once prided themselves on have fallen apart due to their underlying failure. You can say, oh, well, that's not socialism, that's the US embargo. But they had no oil. We didn't have an embargo against Venezuela. Venezuela had plenty of oil. I think it's pretty clear this stuff isn't working. What do you do about that? In a situation like that, Americans don't really want to invade Cuba. Maybe a few of us do, but not very many. And maybe in the state of Florida, where I now live, there's more that are interested in that. But on the whole, no. And I think we should remember too that that in Cuba, the security forces may still be holding together in that sense, a little bit like Iran. The whole country is going down the toilet one way or another. But there is a security force, there's an organization. You know, the Venezuelans were kind of less organized than the Cubans. They would hire Cubans as their security personnel. So this is a tricky problem. And I would say the administration, on the whole turning up the pressure might be a good thing. I think they're also sort of like a fox with a porcupine. They're being a little bit careful in the way they go at it. I think that's a good idea. But the main thing is that cutting off the oil and gas from Venezuela to Cuba is the big thing that they've done. And once that's done, the situation changes. And you do, I think, start reaching a kind of a. A weakening of the Cuban system, a further weakening of the Cuban system, and it becomes more likely that something will happen. But this is still really complicated. Maybe they'll get lucky and there'll be some kind of clear solution. You know, maybe Rel's grandson says, I never really liked that old guy anyway. He's very controlling, he's very annoying. You know, take him away and give me the $100 million in Catholic aid. You know, who knows what'll happen? But. But it is a tricky problem.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. Walter, you were in Ukraine last week, your, I think, third trip since the full scale invasion in 2022. And you wrote when you got back about your three main impressions from this latest trip to Ukraine. So tell us about those.
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You know, this was a really interesting trip. It was a Hudson Institute delegation with some of our longtime friends and supporters, and we had the chance. We landed in Chisinau in the capital of Moldova. Actually had some really interesting time talking to folks there. We met with the president of Moldova, who's a very impressive person and I think has some pretty clear sighted ideas about what's going on in her region. We crossed into Odessa, and from there in Odessa, we saw a lot of the. We met with the officials in the port. As you may know, keeping that port open for grain shipment has really been Ukraine's lifeline. And we were able to kind of see how they've been doing that. We also saw sort of big missile craters in, in the windows of sea facing hotels. Not that reassuring for people staying in hotels, but okay, beautiful city. Went to the opera house, which thankfully remains untouched and is really a kind of a triumph of late 19th century architecture. Went to a community center where we actually, I mean, it was a little bit like World War II or something. There were all these like, women come in in the afternoon and they're like chatting with each other as they weave camouflage mats for soldiers at the front. And some of them are like knitting various things that the soldiers need. I mean, it was really, you know, you really saw this volunteerism and the fact that this center is organized by somebody who is in the political opposition to Zelenskyy, and we had some long talks with some of the folks in the opposition tells you that this is a national struggle. It is not a party struggle. And there really is a consensus broader than the consensus that backs Zelenskyy, that sees this struggle with Russia as kind of life and death for Ukrainians. That was kind of interesting. We drove up to Kyiv and had, again, a whole series of meetings with people there. We learned a lot about the battlefront. And this was really the first thing I think I wrote about in my journal piece, that the war has changed. I mean, I was seeing some of this when I went there about two or three. Must have been three years ago on my first wartime trip. We went to one of these drone workshops where you were actually in a factory that was getting information in real time from the battlefront. And they were saying, okay, the Russians have learned how to counter this. Can you fix that? Or we need something that can do this. They would describe what they needed, and then the people would sit around, okay, like what. What might that be? And we saw them actually adapting a child's toy so that it could carry, like a mine to a tank, which would have to. Have to say, if I were a soldier sitting in a tank, I would find that to be a rather unpleasant moment. A little tinker toy truck or something coming out toward you. Lego, Lego, mines. But coming back this time, it was a. You know, things had really moved to an enormously different level. There's just a shocking moment for me when this medic said, we don't treat people for bullet wounds anymore. It would have been like somebody hearing in the. In the 19th century, we don't use swords. I think I've seen the last cavalry charge and mortars, tanks, guns, rifles, don't seem to have that much military use anymore. And this has happened in four years, and things are still moving. I mean, among types of drones, there'll be. The Russians will figure out some jamming technique, and a type of drone will be useless. Or the Russians will introduce some new thing, and the Ukrainians figure out it goes useless. I think there. There'd just been a moment when Starlink was cut off for the Russians. I'm sort of wondering why it was ever on for the Russians. But that's another. Another question. And a whole class of weapons just didn't work that well anymore. So this is. This is a very different kind of war and is getting more different. But I think, how much money do other armies around the world have invested in tanks and rifles? How much time do soldiers spend still marching around in formation on fields and doing riflery practice, gunnery practice? How much of our whole defense industrial base with little of it has survived the cuts of the last 20 years, is oriented toward producing things that may not be useful anymore. You know, if you, if war is no longer about battalions of infantry facing each other in any way on any kind of a combat field, but you have an 18 kilometer wide gray zone which gets wider as drones are able to, to go farther, where only sort of very tiny groups of 2, 3, 5 soldiers are able to move, and then only very cautiously. My guess is that before too much longer, even that won't be possible. So what are you training people for? What is your command structure all about? I think armies are facing a whole set of existential questions. And I am not sure how much our military, much less anybody else's military, has really cottoned onto this. I know we've got observers there. I'm guessing based on some of the things I heard, that some of our observers may be closer to the front line than you would guess normally, which is, I think, a good thing. I mean, obviously you don't want anybody to get killed, but we need to know what this new kind of war looks like. And I know that the Russians and the North Koreans and the Chinese are on their side are very carefully studying this, modifying or thinking through their own military doctrines and so on. We cannot afford to not be absolutely at the cutting edge of these emerging technological developments in warfare.
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I have a final question that's very speculative and too, probably too big to answer in a few minutes. So maybe we'll come back to it again in a future episode. But on this point about the increasing ability of armies maybe to be able to fight wars predominantly with drone swarms and other AI powered systems, these, you know, sensors, satellites, other kind of robotic systems. In a future where you just don't need like 18 year olds with sticks or with rifles to fight wars, what do you think there are the potential societal implications of that. The one that comes to my mind because it was a part of my own life. But we all know from war films and books and TV shows that we love that going and joining the military and fighting wars is a path for young men that's been around a long time. It's a part of maybe over romanticized part of people's imaginations, but it's real and it's there and it's a way to serve your country and all of that. I mean, what do you think happens when there's just fewer human beings are needed to fight wars?
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That's a really good question. And I'm not sure, you know, I mean, so many things will be changing related to this in some ways, of course, you know, we had already seen a kind of a crisis of that path to manhood. And, you know, think about the Civil War and World War I, where it just turns into a slaughterhouse and you've got people jumping up out of trenches and running against, you know, essentially machine guns, and suddenly the heroism leech leaks out of that. In other ways, things like the Vietnam War, where the, you know, just this grim counterinsurgency slogan broke the morale of a lot of the conscript American army at the time. You know, this notion of kind of going and Achilles fighting, you know, Hector and before the walls of Troy. This was already, you know, more kind of historical memory than actual ideal. So what I think will happen is the ideal may continue to persist in some way, but fewer and fewer people will have an experience that even close, you know, even somewhat matches it. And I think it, in some ways, it's also it. It will advance the kind of disempowerment of the working class, or what, you know, used to be thought of as the working class, the industrial working class, that. It used to be that when you had. When. When states needed these big conscript armies to fight wars, there would come a time, you know, Russia, 1917, 1617, Germany, 1918, where the conscripts just say, enough, enough, and they start walking home. Or isn't the Vietnam War. They were fragging their officers. You know, it's a. It was a way that the public can kind of pull the, you know, sort of pull the emergency brake on what the government wanted to do. And therefore, government had to pay attention to what the dang peasants thought, because if the dang peasants don't fight, you're in big trouble. And I think that in terms of how the American elite lost its ability to lead, part of this was that fewer and fewer people had the experience you did in the armed forces of having to get this group of young men who are nothing like anybody you'd ever hung out with in your life or even maybe wanted to hang out with in your life, the kids you used to be scared of on the playground or whatever. You know, you have to be able to motivate, organize, work with them. And to do that, you got to learn how to understand them. And so we may see a kind of a tendency of the elites moving further and further away from the culture of ordinary people, and then the ordinary people having to look for other ways to kind of yank the elites back to what they think of as reality. So all of that, though, is just a kind of a continuation of trends that we already see in our society. I guess we'll see more of them.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter, you mentioned in the column coming across chefs reinventing Ukrainian cooking to create fine cuisine based on traditional dishes. So tell us the best dish or meal you had there.
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Well, I'm not a caviar fan, so that actually excuses me from some of the dishes that we had. But I am a borscht fan. I'm a big borscht fan. And we were told with great pride by Ukrainian chefs that UNESCO has determined that borscht is a Ukrainian dish and part of global culinary heritage. And so these guys are really working to develop great borscht. And I have to tell you, their efforts are crowned with success. You know, I've had good borscht and bad borscht in my life. I had some really great borscht. So let me suggest, I don't actually recommend Kyiv as a tourist destination right now. You know, Orlov or Odessa. We did have to spend, you know, we were in Kyiv during one of the heaviest air raids of the war. And the Intercontinental Hotel is very nice. I don't give the bomb shelter in the parking garage as many stars. It had WI fi, which is good. But let me just say that sleeping in a beanbag chair, or more accurately, trying to sleep in a beanbag chair while drones and missiles are exploding overhead isn't the most restful way to spend a night. So I don't recommend it as a tourist destination yet. But peace will come. And when it comes, I say get over there and get yourself a bowl of borscht.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Fatanov at Hudson and my co host, Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.
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Sam.