← 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. 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. A ceasefire meant to reopen one of the world's busiest waterways has instead left ship owners waiting on the sidelines. With fewer vessels passing the Strait of Hormuz than during the fiercest days fighting oil prices rose back to almost $100 a barrel on Thursday with little evidence that the strait is close to reopening. Just four ships were identified passing through the strait on Wednesday, down from 11 on Tuesday. The fall came despite hopes that the US Iran cease fire deal would unblock the narrow seaway through which about a fifth of the world's oil and gas supplies normally flow. Iran has insisted that the ceasefire agreement with the US will allow it to maintain control over the strait, requiring vessels to seek permission from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and pay a fee. Walter, is this news or foe news?
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Well, it is news in that it reveals something about Iran's intentions, but it shouldn't be surprising news. The shocking thing here for some is that, my goodness, the mullahs don't seem to be, or rather the irgc, because I'm not sure how much the mullahs have to do with things anymore over there. The IRGC doesn't want to give up control of an important asset. And it is, and I am really shocked about this, not honoring the terms of the ceasefire. Who could have thought that, that the great Islamic Republic of Iran would not be, you know, like a boy scout, true to its given word. But that's what we're seeing regardless of
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how this shakes out. I mean, given everything that's happened in the Strait over the last four to six weeks, would you that it will in the future, in the medium to long term, continue to play the role in global commerce that it has? Or is this kind of forcing the rest of the world to find alternative routes? I don't even know if there are any, but.
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Well, the problem with alternatives is that they are also vulnerable. You can go to a pipeline, but in an age of drones, a pipeline is not all that secure. Maybe you bury a pipeline under a lot of sand and rock, but again, those things are vulnerable to air attack. And to do that for hundreds of miles would be an extremely expensive and slow operation. I think what it's going to do is people are going to find that in terms of a hedge against the Strait of Hormuz being closed, energy autonomy autarky is going to matter more. You know, I think ironically, renewables may get a big boost. I certainly think nuclear power is going to get a huge boost because sort of the two lessons of this are, number one, you can't count on fossil fuels these days as much as you used to be able to. And number two, nukes are helpful. So you put those two things together and I think you see a big market developing for nuclear power, but to some degree also solar and wind.
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All right, our second story. The Israeli military said early Friday that it was striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. The latest attacks in a campaign that is straining diplomacy three days into a shaky ceasefire between the United States and Iran. According to the New York Times, the Israeli strikes against the Iran backed militia have exposed divergences between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump, who appears eager to strike a deal with Iran to end the war. The Iranian Foreign Ministry said delegates from the country would not attend peace talks in Pakistan scheduled to begin on Saturday if the ceasefire was not extended to Lebanon. Walter, is this news or Faux News?
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Now? This is just kind of a mix of speculation and people stirring around these stories of divergence between Trump and Netanyahu are, you know, that's just sort of. When have we had a day where somebody in some newspaper hasn't been writing about that since, since Trump was inaugurated? And sometimes it turns out that they do, they don't see eye to eye. Most of the times it turns out that rather surprisingly, they do. So we've gone from newspapers speculating, feverishly evil puppet master Bibi has dragged that, that fool Trump into yet another war, to Trump controlling Bibi and crushing him. You know, it's ridiculous. It betrays the sort of psychological hunger of journalists, A, to have something to say when there isn't really any, any serious information, reliable information coming at you from anywhere. And B, you know, the combination of, for some, the desire, the psychological need that Trump always look bad, and on the other hand, the equally strong need that Bibi must always look like an idiot, a fool, and I, however, am a genius. That's, you know, this is how people are processing this. And it's, it's not helpful.
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Yeah. And I guess, especially after last summer during the attacks on Iran's nuclear program, it was itself a story that Trump and Netanyahu seemed to coordinate, to plant, you know, these, these press stories about their disagreement to kind of throw people off their scent.
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But I'm Sure.
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You saw that Pew poll from today or yesterday purporting to show that Americans have increasingly negative views of Israel and of Bibi. And it looks like not just, you know, younger Gen Z Americans anymore. It was something like 60% of US adults have an unfavorable view of Israel. And in both parties, I think it was, you know, majority of adults now rate Israel and Bibi negatively. Do you think this is just kind of tied to the immediate, immediate news cycle and it'll regress to the historical mean, or do you think there's something real happening here?
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I think one piece that is widely ignored in the commentary on this and people are not polling in the same way either. Be a hard thing to poll, but real is. I bet you a lot of Americans are sick of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, Egypt. Okay. Sick of the Middle East. Don't like the Middle East. Don't like what people in the Middle east keep doing. Wish the Middle east would either change its ways or turn into something that we could safely ignore. And so I. I think some of this has to be understood as just a generalized American desire to curtail our involvement. And there's a bit of an emotional edge to it because you'll often hear people defend American engagement in the Middle East. Is having something to do with defending Israel or something like that? Actually, as you know, I tend to think we have strategic reasons that. That drive this and that the US Israel relationship has a lot more to do with shared strategic interests than with any kind of sentimentality pro Israel or anti Israel. Again, people want something really big to be happening. It makes. Makes journalists feel important and commentators feel important. I am. I have discovered a major historic shift. Let me explain. All right. There's a lot of that going on. Obviously, Americans keep looking. You know, Israel is. There's trouble in the Middle east and a lot of it appears to be related to Israel and Americans don't like it. And they're paying $4 and more for gas. I wish they just all go away. I would say that that is not. You'd have to ask much more subtle questions to try to figure out how much of this is. I hate Jews, the Jewish state, and the media puppet masters that the Jewish lobby is all about versus why won't people just let us alone? Those are very different things.
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All right, final story of the week. The Middle east war has depleted a key part of America's missile defense system in the region. To rebuild, according to POLITICO, the U.S. needs to go through China in just over A month of war. Iran has targeted several US Radar units spread across the region. Cutting edge defensive weapons that are used to detect and shoot down incoming missiles and drones. Military experts believe many have been damaged, if not destroyed. A key component of those interceptors is gallium, a critical mineral that is also used in other high tech products like semiconductors. China has a near total monopoly over the processing of gallium, and it is already proven willing to limit access. Increased US Demand for the metal to rebuild its interceptors, a process that will take years, only strengthens Beijing's hand in the upcoming summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping. Walter, is this news or faux news?
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I think it is. Again, as so many stories are, a sort of somebody has made a reality souffle. That is, they've taken a small actual fact and just fluffed it up into some big imposing thing. And let's not forget the fundamental bias of media is neither left nor right. It's sensational versus dull. So every hurricane has to be the storm of the century. We have to name winter storms and have like three, you know, like storms have been coming and going and coming and going for hundreds of years. But now, you know, winter storm Erin is bearing down upon New England. Oh, what will we do? What will we do? Right. And so that, I think, is what reader consumers of media have to be really careful. And here, as I understand it, and I don't actually claim to be one of the world's great gallium experts, but the little that I know tells me a, that this is not years, a matter of years. It's more like a matter of, you know, 12 to 18 months before you actually started to get some significant US domestic gallium production. Gallium is sort of a byproduct of things that you do having to do with aluminum, things that I don't personally know very much about, that we used to do as late as the 1980s in the US but in our kind of mass strategic stupidity, stop doing them. The other hand, it's old tech. It's understandable tech. It's not like you have to go out and discover a gallium mine and then dig a gallium mine, then to build a gallium refining plant. All right? It is not that kind of a challenge. And actually, as I understand it, we've already, you know, some steps are already being taken, not just here, but in Australia and so on to do this. So the hunger to push the panic button in media is one of the key enemies of clear thinking. Is it a problem that we've allowed the production of gallium and many other strategic things to sort of disappear and dissipate without thinking it through. Yes. Is it, you know, how bad of a problem is it? Well, you know, 12 to 24 months is very, very different from years.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation.
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Walter, let's just talk about the state of the war and the ceasefire, which is new since the last time we spoke, and the kind of long term consequences of all this in the Strait of Hormuz, which you wrote about earlier this week. And maybe also just how you see the current status of Trump's domestic and international political standing as a consequence of the last month of war over Iran. So just give us your thoughts on the state of all this as of this week.
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I mean, I hate to sound a little bit like a broken record here, but we just don't know very much about what's going on. We've got two people holding talks, you know, the Trump admin, two sides, the Trump administration and whatever cliques are currently sending delegations in the name of the Islamic Republic. We don't know. Will the people that Trump's people are negotiating with actually, will those Iranians actually be able to get their decisions carried out once they get back to Iran? But there are a couple of things we know, we do know here. One is we know that in all diplomatic negotiations, real negotiations, both sides really want to keep the substance out of the newspapers and off the media while they're negotiating. Number two, a lot of people like to leak that stuff. You know, press, you know, again, the A reporter, it's like it's Pulitzer time, baby, if you can, you know, get the, the secret negotiating points out there in the press. But three, we also know that both the Trump team and the Iranians are super experts in the whole art of spinning media, feeding it fake talking points, outright lying. This is what they do. And under current circumstances, both sides think it's actually not just, they're not just lying for fun, they're lying for duty. That, that it is actually in the state interest of the countries they represent, that they keep the media off balance and that they use media challenge to channels to telegraph messages to the adversaries, to public opinion, whatever. And so you have an entire commentariat knowing these things, rushes in to try to parse every little shift of phrase, right? Oh, my goodness. Trump is softening. Oh, my goodness. The Iranians are stiffening. Oh, my goodness. Now Trump is, you know, Trump is back to softening. You know, a week ago it was Trump, the monstrous war criminal threat is going to destroy Iran, could destroy a 2,500 year old civilization. Can such evil exist in human form? And then it's like, you know, Trump is less spine than a jello mold. Okay? That's been how people report this stuff. All right. Trump, in many ways a very unsatisfactory human being. Let us be clear, you know, was no more, you know, Attila the Hun than he was a jellyfish. It's. But people have a need to manufacture content. And I think one of the things we. Again, maybe I'm sounding like a broken record twice now in this podcast, but one of the biggest changes that the attention economy has made to the whole media ecosystem is it has really turbocharged the bias towards sensationalism and simply content creation. There's an appetite for news, therefore there must be news, even if nothing has happened or very little can be known. The way to follow this, it seems to me at this point, is to keep one eye on what's happening. Trump is still sending troops toward the Middle East. That's interesting. On the other hand, the Iranians are, are not opening the Strait of Hormuas, at least at the moment we're recording this podcast. Who knows where we'll be tomorrow? That's interesting. The, the Israeli attack on Lebanon, as I understand it, was less, a kind of less seen as the beginning of a long campaign. I think they had some intelligence about where some Hezbollah folks were going to be. And so there was a very short and very intense bombing. I don't know that. Then the United States rushed in and said, oh, Israel, thou must stop, because my negotiations with Iran require that you stop. I do know that in that the Trump administration, like virtually every administration in decades, has wanted to create at least the appearance of distance between itself and Israel at various times, less sometimes because it, it doesn't like what Israel is doing, but more that this is a courtesy to Arabs and others who would like to be able to say, oh, I condemn Israel, but I'm cooperating with the United States. There's all of this stuff is going on and we just, you know, we're going to have to see. I. I have noticed there's been a little bit more attention paid with the ceasefire to the grinding economic problems and therefore political problems that the Iranian regime now faces. It's one thing while the bombs are actually falling. You sort of rush around in this emergency, state of emergency. The people aren't going out on the street, in part because they're afraid to. The drones are going to be killing people on the street. Now you're kind of dealing with the aftermath, and people are looking at the economic damage. They're noticing that the government doesn't seem to be as sort of well organized and responsive as it used to be. And so politics is happening in Iran. How does that play into things? Nobody knows. The Iranian people don't know. The Iranian government doesn't know, and certainly the CIA and the Mossad, the US and Israel, much less the international media, nobody knows. Unknowns out there. How will the negotiations evolve? I think the answer is, again, both on the American side and the Iranian side. Neither side really quite knows where it's going to be in terms of negotiations, three days, ten days away. Because it's going to be an interactive process. You're going to see different realities taking shape, different political pressures taking shape within the United States, in Europe, in other parts of the world, in the Gulf, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think one thing that people are probably not paying enough attention to is that Iran hasn't just raised the stakes with the United States by saying, you know, we're going to close the Straits of Hormuz. The message of Iran now to its Gulf Arab neighbors is we will rule or we will be ruined. That is our goal is an end state in which we, not you, control what does and doesn't go through the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, in which we have a stranglehold on your economies. Also, we have demonstrated both the capability and the will to attack your oil refineries, to attack your water desalinization plants. So the Iranian kind of bargaining position is to. That Iran must become the master of the Gulf. Now, that I would, I suspect, again, these are, you know, these people don't sort of sit around and talk openly in press conferences, candidly and frankly, about what they're thinking of doing, but I would suspect that that's not a negotiation position that endears Iran to its neighbors. And therefore we should not see what's going on in terms of how the region is trying to influence the Trump. Trump administration. This is not just BB desperate for his war against Iran. It's like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, rulers of Bahrain, the uae. All right, then that is a much stronger sort of coalition in Trump's mind. I suspect it actually looms larger than the European Union as a factor in his thinking. Now, meanwhile, you asked about how this is affecting perceptions of Trump and the position of Trump everywhere, and I would say it's been really bad for him so far. And this is, you know, it has divided his own coalition. I think today we saw the truth Social post. He's saying that Tucker Carlson is low iq. Myself, I think of all the things you would say about Tucker Carlson, I don't actually think low IQ is one of the things. I think some of the other people on that list maybe you can make a stronger case for, but. But not Tucker. But it shows a kind of an open break with the, let's say, the ultra MAGA wing. And I think that is a problem. I suppose that Vice President Vance's trip to Budapest, which is one of the strangest moves, really, actually, in the history of the American vice presidency, one of the most unusual things to happen is, at least in part, Vance must be at least thinking that he needs to retain his credibility with the. The, you know, the more ultra wing of MAGA as this war goes on. And so sort of going out there and doing something incredibly transgressive that all sort of, quote, normal people think is the most ridiculous, nasty, stupid, counterproductive, radical, extremist, pro Putin piece of garbage they can even imagine in their heads. All right, that actually helps JD or the vice president with a significant section of his base. Doesn't help him with anybody else, but it helps him with them. And he needs to keep, you know, part of his assignment politically in the administration is to try to keep that together. And that would, I think, underline the larger narrative that what the war has done is widened the gulf between the United States and the EU and deepened the problems of NATO. And NATO certainly does have problems. Everybody out there who wants to make the case a case against Trump has acquired new ammunition from the events of the last few weeks. If you don't think Trump is doing enough for Ukraine against Russia, lifting oil sanctions on Russia, and. And your war is giving Putin a huge economic windfall. So You've got like, you know, that whole, you know, that whole, maybe that's the string section of the anti Trump of people who hate Trump. And then you've also got the, you know, then you have all the people who think that, oh, the wisdom of St. Barack Obama and the glories of the JCPOA and everything was in a great place and then that, you know, foul tongued barbarian came and wrecked the temple of peace and covered the altar of peace in his own disgusting excrement. Okay, that group is, is really activated here because what they don't want people saying is our failure to deal with Iran 10 years ago, you know, allowed Iran to develop the capabilities which are now posing this danger. We can't have that conversation. So you've got the, let's say the bassoon section of the anti anti Trump orchestra is in full fell. And then obviously for, in for Europeans, it's a clear demonstration of how little the United States cares about them or thinks about them under Trump. Were they consulted before the war? No. Have they really been offered any help to deal with the economic impact of the war? No. Have they been offered even kind of face saving, conciliatory gestures, you know, of pretend consultation and pretending at least being hypocritical, you know, the compliment that vice pays to virtue of at least making it look to their own voters as if they were something other than impotent skulls? No, you're not doing that. You're doing nothing. And of course, Vance's visit to Budapest in a last ditch effort to save probably the most hated statesman in Europe, by the way. I don't say the best statesman, I say the most hated. All of this means that the entire kind of European section of the anti Trump orchestra, I guess that's the horns and the trumpets. I don't know, I'm running out of, out of musical sections or maybe classical music knowledge. But then, so, and then in the US everybody who thinks that NATO, you know, is the, is the cornerstone of American foreign policy and American security policy, and that includes what, 94% of the establishment. Pulling the number out of my hat, you know, it unites moderate Republicans with moderate Democrats, right? All of that activated, then you have, you know, the people who don't like Bibi, which includes, you know, possibly a majority of Americans who still like Israel don't like Bibi. So, and then you don't have, you know, from Trump's point, on top of all of this, the only thing that really silence this chorus is victory. You know, if, if like you know, the people of Iran had had a color revolution, and the Democratic parliament is meeting in Tehran. Okay. At that point, what'll happen is not that these people will hate Trump less or despise him less. They'll simply change the subject. But, you know, and I don't know what it will be, maybe they'll find something. But totally activated, totally focused, and at the moment, Trump doesn't really have anything to say to them. So it has been a harrowing experience from the standpoint, if you're one of the president's political advisors at this point, you were just shaking your head and maybe hoping that things will, that he'll somehow pull some kind of a rabbit out of some kind of a hat here.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Shifting gears pretty dramatically here. Jackie from Maryland writes in this week to ask you, Walter, for your favorite Faulkner novel. Oh, gosh.
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Oh, Jackie, that's tough. But I guess I have to say Light in August, to me, that is a novel that says more about the human condition, about actually the dignity of black America, the moral dilemmas and painful historical experience that both white and black Americans have had. It's also a really interesting story, you know, with a great plot, no spoilers here. But what you have there is in Lucas Beauchamp, I think the hero, the black hero of the novel is a black man who, in the midst of segregation, extreme poverty, you know, a complete kind of rejection of his claims to manhood and independence by so many people in the society around him, has simply persisted in his dignity. He insists on paying his way.
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He.
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He insists on, you know, he holds himself with the respect that forces even serious, you know, sort of some of the white folks in here are, you know, ultimately cannot help acknowledging what kind of a human being he is. And yet at the end, what you see, I think is a, is a really brilliant commentary on the wound that race relations have left in the American psyche, both among whites and among blacks. And in some ways, I think it's not a bad description of problems that we are still wrestling with today, what, 75 years or so after the novel was written.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Vatana, but 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.