← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
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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. We're 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. There is a second strait in the Middle east vital to global energy markets that Iran is threatening to close if Donald Trump fails to wind down the war. The world is already experiencing the worst disruption to global energy markets in history, following US And Israeli attacks on Iran. But if Iranian proxies close the Bab El Mandeb Strait, a busy Red Sea choke point, it would compound global financial woes and likely push oil prices to $150 a barrel. The strait, hundreds of miles from the Strait of Hormuz at Yemen's southwestern tip, is a pathway for ships carrying about 10% of the world's oil and natural gas supplies. In the past month, the strait has become an alternative route to get Middle Eastern oil to market as Iran's threats have effectively shut down Hormuz. Walter, News or FO News?
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Well, it's not news that they have this capability. The Houthis have closed the Red Sea in the past. So what is the news here is that they are signaling this kind of an escalation, and it's worrying. I think right now we're at the stage of the war where, you know, the Iranians failed to deter a strong American attack. The American Israeli attack has not overthrown the Iranian regime. So now at the stage where both sides are reaching around looking for, for clubs to hit the other with. And this is a, this is a powerful tool. It's more serious in a way than some of the threats we've heard about, you know, attacking desalinization sites or energy infrastructure. Because the problem is that kind of escalation, while the consequences on your enemy would be serious, it opens the doors to massive retaliatory strikes. The Houthi closing the Red Sea would significantly increase the pressure on world oil and energy markets, and in fact, more than usual, because one of the things people have done because of the closure of the Straits of Hormuz has been to shift energy traffic across the Arabian Peninsula through pipelines to go in the Red Sea. So this would be a real escalation, and it would increase pressure on markets everywhere.
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All right, our second story. According to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Trump administration is pressuring Ukraine to surrender the part of the eastern Donbas region that the Ukrainian army still controls offering American security guarantees of Kyiv withdrawals. The US Position aligns with the Russian demand that Ukraine hand over a roughly 50 mile by 40 mile zone in the Donetsk region, part of the larger Donbas, as a condition for ending the war. Ukraine has refused, arguing that ceding the heavily fortified area would give Russia a staging ground for future attacks that would threaten not just Ukraine, but also Europe. Simply handing over the land would allow Russia to escape the immense costs it would incur in trying to seize the territory militarily. Walter, news or FO news?
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This one I actually think is FO news in the sense that, first of all, it is not new news. We have heard many times actually from the Ukrainians about this, and we've heard some from the US Administration as leaks that as the Trump administration is looking for some way to get some kind of an end to the war, it is trying to find something that it thinks would be attractive enough to get Putin to give it up, while then it hopes that security guarantees to Ukraine, if sufficiently strong, would get the Ukrainians to make concessions otherwise they don't want to make. And so far this has had no impact. The Ukrainians really haven't been willing to give it up because it is strategically important. And at the rate the Russians are advancing, or in some cases right now retreating, because the Russians are, have not had a couple of good weeks on the battle lines, it would take a very long time and massive casualties for the Russians to conquer this even if they could. So the Ukrainians are sort of saying, well, why should we give it up? On the other hand, I think in Russia there's a thought of having lost so much already and worked so hard. Is this really enough for us to end the war? So the Russia hawks are still thinking, hey, we want Odessa, we want basically to destroy Ukraine as an independent power, and that this amounts to a defeat. So my sense is that this is too sour a deal for the Ukrainians for them to accept and too sour a deal for the Russians for them to accept. And so I say Faux News, how
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much do you think the war in Iran or the course it's taking is driving the American position in Ukraine right now? I mean, you know, as you said, these, these kind of diplomatic positions that the administration has been taking are long standing. They're not new. But you know, on the other hand, in terms of needing to transfer munitions capabilities, resources, spend political capital on building up a coalition to support the Iran war, the they don't want to waste on Ukraine, et cetera, like how much do you think one is influencing the other right now?
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I say at the moment, not very much. And in fact, if anything, Ukrainian help to counter Iranian drones and also keeping Ukraine in the war so that Russia doesn't have much to send to Ukraine. I would say in that sense, if anything, there may be a slight benefit to the US War in Iran that Ukraine is holding out against Russia. I don't see. I mean, that doesn't mean that some people in the administration may, may not see it differently, but from where I sit, I don't actually see major implications.
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All right, final story of the week. The White House and the Pentagon are considering sending at least 10,000 additional combat troops to the Middle east in the coming days. According to Axios, if the Trump administration decides to send extra troops, it will significantly increase the number of combat soldiers the US has in the region. And it is another signal that a U.S. ground operation in Iran is being seriously prepared. The massive surge in ground troops is being considered. As President Trump says, the US Is negotiating with Iran on a deal to end the war. Iranian officials haven't agreed yet to hold a high level meeting with the U.S. and they are suspicious that the U.S. diplomatic push is another trick. Walter, news or FO news?
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I'd say just continuing noise FO news. No one is saying the Pentagon is sending 10,000 troops. It might send 10,000 troops. If it did, it might be a signal. I mean, you know, and meanwhile, you know, might affect the talks, which apparently aren't happening or maybe they are happening. We have to remember that in a war like this, both sides are issuing press statements not to inform people about what's going on, but to create uncertainty, doubt, worry, whatever, in the minds of the other side. And so I would say in general, we would all do pretty well to reduce the amount of time we, we, we spend parsing the latest leaks from the American side, leaks from the Iranian side. This is a great time to keep your eye on what's happening as opposed to what people are saying.
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All right, that does it for the news this week, but let's dig into Iran more in the big conversation. Okay. You wrote this week, Walter, about how one of the lessons of the war so far is that the Iran doves and the Iran hawks in America both seem to have gotten Iran wrong. Tell us about what you're thinking of there and kind of how it happened.
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Okay. Well, for about almost 10 years, or maybe more than 10 years, Iran policy has been one of the hottest topics in American foreign policy debates. Should the Obama administration negotiate with Iran, should the, the JCPOA be ratified or, or, you know, was it a good idea? Should Trump withdraw? What should happen when Trump does withdraw? Iran. Iran. Iran. Iran. And in all that time, I don't know that that many minds have changed on either side. The people who were Iran Hawks in 2014 seems to still be pretty hawkish today and, and vice versa. So, you know, what, what has changed and where are we now? I think the Iran doves have gotten a couple of things wrong. They hope that there was a way for the US and Iran to kind of work it out, not to love each other or be friends or anything like that, but to sort of figure out a way that the Iranian mullahs could kind of go along and run their country and build up their, their arms, but not too much and not in ways that threaten fundamental American interests. I think that was, you know, I think that's actually wrong. I think that the jcpoa, which reduced sanctions on, gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for a mix of concessions, mostly on nuclear, some on missiles. But the missiles would have expired, the limits on missiles would have expired. Over time, Iran would sort of gain greater freedom of action and the JCPOA did nothing to kind of stop Iran's subversion or its creation of proxies and so on. I think what we're dealing with there is something a little bit like the dilemma the US faced with Nasser back in the 1950s, where the Eisenhower administration in particular really wanted a good relationship with Nasser, badly wanted it. Egypt at that time, believe it or not, this is a long time ago. Egypt was the major Arab country and a leading power in the Middle East, a very developed country by regional standards. I think the Cairo stock market was outside of Europe and North America, maybe the largest in the world. Nasser soon fixed all of that. But, and, but the main thing was the I, the Americans wanted to persuade Nasser that if he worked with us, we could help him build up the strong military that he wanted and develop the Egyptian economy and technology better than the Soviet Union could. And we saw this as a key to kind of winning the competition in the decolonizing world between the Americans and the Soviets, that this would be a big win. And so the Eisenhower administration was really willing to put a lot on the table to try to pull Nasser in. But the, you know, and they put a lot of pressure on Israel, including in 1956 when they forced the Israelis to abandon, withdraw from the sue Sinai when they'd conquered it from the Egyptians. The problem was that Nasser actually, his ambition was not just to develop Egypt. Nasser wanted Egypt to be the nucleus of this pan Arab Islamic nation. Well, he wasn't very Islamist, but the Pan Arab nation that would go essentially from North Africa, include Iraq, Syria, he actually built briefly the United Arab Republic, which was a union of Egypt and Syria. Ultimately, the goal really was to include the oil resources of the Persian Gulf with the large population and again at the time, the technological capabilities of Egypt. And this would make you a true great power on the world scene. And the US Goal then, as I think it has been pretty constantly since, was to prevent another country from becoming so dominant in the Persian Gulf that it could block the flow of oil in or out of the region. And that was so that Nasser and the United States were never able to really reach an agreement, a true agreement, because he was not going to give up his regional ambitions and the Americans were not going to give up our sense that we did not want any country to achieve the kind of power he wanted. I think that's kind of where we've been with Iran, that if the Iranian government were just willing to kind of stay inside Iran, more or less, the United States could live with whatever kind of government they had there might deplore it, might be sad about it, whatever, but we might also be willing to trade with it and work with it. But the Iranians don't want. In that sense, they are. They are not Stalinists who want to build malaccracy in one country. They are Trotskyites who want to spread their revolution. And so that's the real. That's been the core issue between the Americans and the Iranians. And the program of the doves just kind of fails because the Iranians don't want ultimately, the deal that the doves want to offer. Iran hawks, I think, have been right about that. They read the ambitions of the mullahs better. But what I think the Iran hawks have always had a problem with and have, you know, we're seeing it worked out in real time today is that Iran is a pretty, you know, is a pretty tough cookie in some ways. Yes. Now, you know, I don't. Our. The military campaign against Iran has been brilliantly successful in many ways as a military campaign. But when you think about Iran, as is almost four times the size of Iraq and it has something like three times the population of Iraq, double. I don't know. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's a lot more, it's a lot bigger that, you know, the American people don't don't necessarily have the appetite to fight a, you know, a long war ground war in Iran that would be even more grueling than the war in Iraq. There's really just, there's not a lot of sentiment for that. So the Iran doves got right that the Americans don't want to. American public opinion is really not that excited about doing what it might take to get rid of the malacracy. But at the same time, if you don't, then you sooner or later find yourself in a really impossible situation. I think that's where we were that before the war, that what we focused so much attention on the Iranian nuclear program. Because again, if the Iranians actually develop nuclear weapons, it's not so much that they would immediately go use them to attack Israel. I think, you know that I think nuclear deterrence in some ways works. It's just that if Iran, if a nuclear armed Iran decided to stop traffic in the Straits of Hormuz, how eager would the United States be to send ground forces against a nuclear power in the Gulf? And so that would kind of represent the loss of one of the core objectives of American foreign policy since World War II, which is preventing any other country from having the power to use the Middle east oil resources for global economic blackmail of some kind. All right, and so that was why I think the nuclear program was such a focus of so many presidents on both sides of the aisle. But the Iranians, you know, since they've done an end run around that, because they're what we, we reached a point where their missile program and their drone program, remember, the Iranians are very good with drones and they're, and they've been really helping the Russians with drones in, in the Ukraine war that you're getting to the point where the Iranian ballistic missiles would be strong enough potentially to deter Israel from coming in and attack the Iranian nuclear program or deterring us. Because as we've seen without nuclear weapons, just with ballistic missiles and drones, Iran does now have the ability for a while anyway to close the Strait of Hormuz. So if we don't change that reality in some way, we are giving up this objective that has been pretty central to our thinking for, you know, since, since I was in knee pants long before I did much thinking about American foreign policy. And so here we are. That this is why I say the hawks are, are, have been shown, I think, to be right, that that given Iran's drive for this kind of regional power, the United States had to do something about it. But the hawks under, have underestimated the cost. And certainly in this particular, looking at this war, we didn't do much to prepare either ourselves or our allies. You know, we weren't quietly whispering to some of our allies, you know, this might be a good time to build up your oil reserves. We didn't say that to ourselves. And certainly in terms of public opinion, the Trump administration has really not done anything up until recently to try to prepare until the war started. Really, the Trump administration wasn't trying to sort of make a case to the American people about why this might be necessary. They concentrated on making a case of why this would be easy, which is fine if it's going to be easy. But in fact, as I said, you know, it's tough. It's tough. So I think this is where we are. It's a difficult spot. But I do think it remains really important that at the end of this war, Iran not have the ability to block the Strait of Hormuz.
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One final question. You touched on it a bit already when you talked about the Enron of Iran accelerating its ballistic missile and drone program. But, you know, one thing I'm reminded of is when the Obama administration was selling the JCPOA, its big kind of point around that time in 2015 was, look, your options, you, the American people, your options are this nuclear deal or war. Those are the only two options. And so which do you support? And opponents of the JCPOA would argue constantly that, that, you know, it's. It's not that binary. We have other ways of bringing the Iranians to their knees, through economic sanctions, fighting them in Syria, you know, elsewhere, short of an actual war against Iran. And now with this war, I think a lot of the supporters of the JCPOA feel vindicated. And they say, you see, you got rid of it, and now here's the war. It's another way that the administration hasn't responded well to the strongest criticisms of it. What do you make of that?
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Well, again, what it says to me is both the hawks and the doves were half right.
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Right.
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What, what the doves missed was if you didn't do this in 2014, you were going to have to do it sooner or later, and the longer you waited, the worse it would be.
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Right?
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Right. And the JCPOA was not a way out of war. It was simply Iran picked, it drove Iran on a different path to prepare for war. The Iranians did not. When they were signed the jcpoa, they gave up nothing of their regional ambitions. But they said, hey, you know, while the most Direct path might be nuclear weapons. If we can get some sanctions relief and some money in here, we can start building up Hezbollah. We can pursue the same goal by other means. It was utterly delusional of the, of the Iran doves to think that the JCPO had JCPOA headed anything off. It headed off nothing. On the other hand, you're quite right that hawks then tried to mobilize against it by saying, oh, please. You know, and this is, you know, this is. It's like used car salesman. But you, you had people selling the JCPOA used car, and you had people selling the Iran Hawk used car. And like, you know, the fine print of both deals had some problems in it. But I think we really are down to actually that choice, jcpo, in a sense, it was irrelevant, except that it allowed us to fool ourselves for a few years that we had escaped a very harsh choice. And then by the time we face the harsh choice, it's harsher than it would have been had we dealt with this earlier. So, yes, the hawks were wrong about some things and the doves were wrong about some things. I don't think none of that is particularly relevant. That's something to talk about after we get to wherever we get to at the end of this thing. Right now. I do think the thing is, okay, what now? What next? I do think, difficult as it is, we need to try to continue to pursue the goal of keeping the Persian Gulf free to international commerce and depriving any country, any country of the ability to close that commerce off and blackmail the world. And I think that while we have some severe disadvantages, you know, you think about all the military issues around the Strait of Hormuz, we actually, you know, we have more advantages here than some people understand, which is, first of all, nobody actually likes it when somebody closes off the Strait of Hormuz. Well, maybe Putin likes it, but that's a, you know, for, for his own reasons. I saw today, I think the Chinese have apparently had a couple of their supertankers. The Iranians told them, don't come in. They, they may think this may increase international pressure on the United States to, To do something, or they may also think that they're annoyed with China with, Not with, because it hasn't done very much for them and they're hoping to maybe shake out something from the. Who knows? But in any case, they're blackmailing everybody. Nobody likes this. And at the same time, I think it is absolutely clear that the Iranian people, given the chance, would throw this regime out completely. You Just don't have many examples of places where 30 to 40,000 people get killed by a regimental. Because people love the regime so much. Right. And so the Iranian regime, while it has advantages in the war, but we have advantages too. A real question here is what? Obviously, Always in American politics these days, the central question is, well, what's Donald Trump gonna do and how does he see it? And I think at the moment, he's worked himself into a fairly stark binary choice. He can either go home before the strait is open, making some kind of deal with the Iranians so they stop both the Red Sea and Hormuz in exchange for some concessions, which means we will have ceded Iran. Donald Trump will be the man who abandoned a core American foreign policy since Dwight Eisenhower. You know, I don't know that he really wants that to be the verdict here. Or on the other hand, he has to push something through an unpopular war in the midterm. With midterms looming, his own standing in the polls is not high. The economic effect on the average American is clear. Mortgage rates are now up the highest in six months. Obviously, the gas taxes are up. The stock markets are tanking. The. As of today, when I'm speaking to you, who knows where they'll be by the time people. People hear this. So all of these things are going on, and Trump is going to have to make some choices. I think he's going to have to do this. He will do this in his characteristic unique ways. I can't predict what he'll do, but I think we probably underestimate the incentives for him to see it through, or at least to. To try a lot harder than we've tried so far to ultimately prevail. I think the rewards for success, in terms of historical reputation, vindication, success in the midterms, potentially all of that is very, very high. Reinforcing a position for himself as the dominant figure in world politics. I think we also underestimate. Everything I hear is that behind the scenes, the Gulf Arabs are saying, finish the job, finish the job, finish the job. People who think that Israel and the Israel lobby are the prime force behind American policy in the Gulf at this point, I think are missing. It's the Arabs and it's the Israelis, and the Arabs want the same thing. So I think we are underestimating. It's not a question of what is Trump's character, Trump's vision of himself, or anything like this, so much as what are the incentives, what's the incentive structure for Trump to persevere versus the incentive structure for him to step down. I think for the moment there are, from Trump's point of view, there are more reasons to stay the course than there are reasons to throw in the towel.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter, we were talking just before recording about Boss Lincoln. This book you're reading, tell us about it.
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My tip for the week is read this book, Boss Lincoln by Matthew Pinsker. Jeremy, our mutual friend out in San Francisco sent me this book and said I should read it. And so Tully, thank you for a great recommendation. It looks at Lincoln as a political animal. It's not like, oh, what were his great ideals? How did he write these fabulous speeches? How did he acquire this depth of character that saw him through the dark days of the Civil War? How did his anti slavery convictions shape his conscience? All of that? No, no, no. It's like how did he manage to get the nomination in 1860? How did he manage. You know, the Whig party that Lincoln starts out in was tanking and you had all these different factions. You had the free Soil who were kind of abolition and then very extreme abolitionists. The Liberty Party, you had the know nothing or the American party. It was a total anti immigrant party, but then you had a lot of immigrants who were very anti slavery. And so how do you pull all these people together? And by the way, a lot of the answer is patronage and jobs. And so what we see, what he, what he goes into is, is a lot of Lincoln's correspondence with other politicians about political maneuvers and how Lincoln, you know, how did he organize against Stephen Douglas? Not, we don't, we're not reading. You don't read his debates with the Lincoln Douglas debates. You read sort of what Lincoln, how Lincoln thought he could use his opposition to Douglas's popular sovereignty ideas to be, build this coalition. I mean it's, it's really interesting. I'm about halfway through now and I have to say I'm learning new stuff on every page. Which when you think about Lincoln, that's. Most of us feel like we, we've done a pretty good job learning about Lincoln. I'm learning new stuff about Lincoln and I love it.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Fatton of A.T. 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.