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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. Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism center appointed by Donald Trump, publicly resigned this week by posting his resignation letter on X arguing that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States and that the war was launched under pressure from Israel and its domestic lobby. Kent, a former Army Special Forces soldier who'd been arguing in favor of more aggressive military means against Iran during the Biden administration and first Trump term, became the first senior Trump administration official to resign over the current Iran conflict. Trump responded by calling it a good thing. Kent left, saying he had always considered him weak on information security. The resignation highlighted a fault line within the right, which we have discussed a lot on this show as influential media figures like Tucker Carlson, Meghan Kelly and Joe Rogan have criticized the war. Although polling shows very strong support for the conflict among rank and file Republicans. Kent appeared on Carlson's podcast within 24 hours of his resignation, where he reiterated that Israel drove the decision to go to war and appeared to agree with Carlson's suggestions that pro Israel forces were behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Walter, is this news or faux news?
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Well, I think it's generally faux news in the sense that I think Kent was a non entity before he left the government and remains kind of a non entity now in that it's not a particularly influential post. Tulsi Gabbard's shop is not really considered a, a sort of major zone for policy making or information. Trump has staffed it with people who could keep things he hoped, keep an opening to the far right within the administration. And so the news in a sense is that the anti Trump revolt on the far right connected with the war in Iran is picking up momentum, but only among a very small number of very online people. I think the real concern for Trump has to be longer term and for other people as well. If the war in Iran is seen to go badly or end in a defeat, then we're going to have all of these folks kind of sitting there sort of vultures waiting for the animal to die so that they can, you know, flock in for the feast. And at that point, you know, you, you would see them right now. They, they really have almost no ability to move public opinion. You know, you, you sort of look at the entrails of the polls in vain for any sign that they're having an impact outside their online circles. But if the war goes badly, or if Trump is, you know, starts himself casting around for scapegoats, why am I in this stupid war? At that point, I think we could see something. But until then, this is just kind of wind in the tundra.
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All right, our second story. Donald Trump lashed out at NATO for the second time this week, calling the alliance a, quote, paper tiger, ungrateful and cowards on social media. His post came a day after a coalition of countries, including NATO members, Britain, France, Germany and Italy issued a joint statement saying they would contribute, quote, appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, but would not send warships to help open the strategic waterway, which Iran has effectively shut with drones and naval mines. Quote, we lack the mandate from the United nations, the European Union or NATO required under the basic law, german Chancellor Friedrich Mertz said in Berlin, adding that Washington and Israel had not consulted Germany before launching the war. Walter, is this news or faux news yet again?
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In hindsight, this may turn out to be important or it may just be a flash in the pan. It is true that Europe really doesn't have anything very much concrete to contribute one way or another to reopening the Straits of Hormuz. But it is also true that in making a big thing about it, they may, they are risking some blowback from Trump in the future. I think anybody who pays attention to diplomacy has to know that the Trump administration, Trump administration had wanted to get the Europeans European support over Iran. It has certainly been going about it the wrong way since January 2025. That is insulting people. I think Vice President Vance is off to do, do a kind of last ditch attempt to help Prime Minister Orban in Hungary before his elections and so on.
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We'll talk about that in a moment.
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You could not have designed an agenda that was more calculated to minimize the chances of European support should you ever need it again. Militarily, I don't think the Europeans at this point have a lot to contribute. But politically, for Trump, sort of trying to fight a perception of isolation, trying to maybe get some help roping a few Democrats into support for a war which at some point he will have to go to Congress and ask for some money for if this thing continues, I think there may be some people in the administration now quietly looking back in hindsight and wishing they hadn't taken every opportunity to press all of Europe's buttons all the time. Now, to be fair, even if you do your best to soothe and coax and so on. You're not going to get a lot concretely out of them. The risk, I think for the European, now looking at, from the European point of view, is that actually when somebody you need needs you, you should see that as an opportunity, not a liability. That is, here was a chance to, when Trump actually is feeling defensive and feeling like he could use some help, here would be your opportunity to say, look, let's make a deal. Here's, here's a list of things I want from you. Here's a list of things you want from me. Let's talk. Let's, let's, let's do this thing. If you do that, you could end up where, number one, Europe still wouldn't have a major military commitment in the Gulf because it doesn't have the ability to do much. But it would be, it would be sort of reaffirming the relationship, gaining some things that would be, that the Europeans would see as valuable. So that's the opportunity they threw away. Maybe, you know, the war is going to go on for a while. There may be opportunities to come back to that if the war continues. But I do think it's a lost opportunity. I certainly would have hoped that they could have looked beyond it. But again, you've got, Trump has made it very, very difficult for Europeans giving, looking at their, the public opinion in their own countries, he's made it very difficult for Europeans to be seen as taking Trump's side or standing with Trump.
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What about beyond Europe? Were there other countries or parts of the world where there was a big missed opportunity for some kind of pre war diplomacy to shore up some support? I mean, India, Japan, anywhere else like that.
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In general, I do think historians will look back and say the United States entered the war at a point where the preparation both domestically and internationally was poor, that we've had sort of tariff fights with a lot of allies, harsh words exchanged with a lot of allies and so on and so forth. Is that really. And then you turn around and oh, I need your help. So you've made people think you're a bully and now you're making people think you're a bully in need. That's not really where you want to go. On the other hand, and this is important, the thing that the United States is trying to do now, prevent Iran from establishing a veto over oil and gas and other important commercial flows in and out of the Straits of Hormuz, isn't just some special American interest. Everybody in the world benefits from when that strait is open to commerce and commerce is secure. And Iran was clearly moving toward, and in part has achieved, which is why we're in, you know, why the war is going on this long, has achieved the ability to exercise that veto. And given the nature of the Iranian regime, they would certainly use it to maximize their power. They wouldn't just sort of let it quietly lie there. So there is a real confluence of interests. So the United States in the strait is acting as a kind of a trustee for interests beyond our own, though our own interests are very much engaged there. But we're not in a good position to mobilize that latent support. Possibly as the war goes on, that could change. And diplomacy, you know, every morning a diplomat wakes up and thinks, okay, what are my problems? How do I make them better today? And you can't change the past, but you can affect the present and the future. So American diplomacy may be able to repair some things now, but it's harder than it needed to be, I think.
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All right, final story of the week. As you mentioned Before, Vice President J.D. vance is planning a trip to Budapest in a show of support for embattled Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is facing a difficult election in early April. With elections less than a month away, Orban is trailing the conservative opposition leader Peter Magyar by about nine points and he's been lashing out in a last ditch effort to preserve his rule. Orban is currently vetoing a 90 billion euro EU backed loan to Ukraine. And recently he seized a bank truck transiting across Hungarian territory between Austria and Ukraine, confiscating $82 million in Ukrainian cash and gold that the Hungarian government has claimed, without evidence so far, was being used for money laundering. European media reported earlier this month that the Kremlin has dispatched the team of, quote, political technologists linked to the gru, Russia's military intelligence agency, to run point on an influence operation designed to keep the current Hungarian government in power. Walter, is Vance's visit news or faux news?
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It's news. You know, part of what's going on I think here is that, I mean, I don't know when they started planning this trip, presumably not last week or something. But Vance right now is in a very tough spot politically. He cannot show dissent from Trump's decision to go to war with Iran. And that is extremely corrosive in terms of his political, you know, his political backers. He's very much a no more war, stay out of the Middle east and so on is very much his brand here. And he's now basically being forced to set public fire to his brand in order to, you know, maintain his avoid a break, an open break with his own president. So I think the trip to or to Hungary is a way for him to show that, no, just under the surface, my bad boy credentials are still there. I still am the real America first wing. I still hate all the things that you, my beloved followers, hate. And we all know that my fingers are crossed behind my back when I talk about the war in Iran and our ally Israel. I think that is, you know, that's part of what he has to do. And it may well be that from Trump's point of view, it's worth letting him do that, that Trump does want to keep that coalition together. He does want to minimize the fallout from the war in Iran on MAGA politics. Letting Vance maintain some credibility as a quasi independent actor probably helps him with that. The cost, obviously, is, well, there are a couple of costs. One is there is a risk that Orban may lose, and it's not an inconsiderable one. I tend to think that there is probably that. The polls probably don't fully reflect Orban's chance of winning the election. I mean, I am no expert on the internal mechanisms of the Hungarian government, but Orban has been in power for a very long time, and a lot of his backers have extremely strong financial reasons why they want him to stay in power for a very long time. And I would not be surprised if the mechanisms of the election aren't in some ways more favorable to Orban than you might expect. So in that sense, if Vance goes and wins, it's a demonstration of influence. But I have to say, Jeremy, that one of the things I've never fully understood, and this just may show my own blindness and limits, is why so many folks on the American right have sort of made a hero figure out of Viktor Orban. In particular, he's basically openly said that Russia doesn't really have enough money for Hungary, so Hungary now needs to start acting more as China's proxy. So that what is very, very clear is that Orban is opportunistic. He is not in any realistic way aligned with American policy and purposes, even of the Trump administration. I think there's a kind of, you know, I think Orban, the symbol is bigger than Orban, the reality in the minds of a lot of folks. And I do think that the Hungarians have been been intelligent in spending a lot of money on American conservatives who can go have wonderful fellowships in Hungary and be treated, you know extremely well in a way that, you know, the rest of Europe is kind of closed to some of the folks on, you know, from that farther right band on the spectrum. So it, you know, so, so there are some personal ties and experiences, but Hungary is not really a great example. Even their sort of big efforts to promote fertility have, have not been successful. So I don't, you know, it's, it's, it's one of these things that Hungarians worked very, very hard to build a lobby in that kind of Trumpy magazone of intellectuals and commentators. They've succeeded in doing that. I just would think that's not the smartest move for people in that part of the political spectrum. There are people out there who might be better partners for you.
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All right. That does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. All right, Walter, let's talk more. Iran. Here are six big headlines as of today, Friday, March 20, the Pentagon is sending three warships and thousands of additional Marines to the Middle east and the second deployment of Marines to the region. In the past week. Iran hit the site of the world's largest liquefied natural gas facility in Qatar with a ballistic missile, inflicting extensive damage in retaliation for an Israeli attack on Iran's South Pars gas field. Several oil officials in Saudi Arabia said that if disruptions persist until late April, prices could soar past $180 a barrel by then. Benjamin Netanyahu said joint US Israel strikes have destroyed Iran's ability to enrich uranium and to produce new ballistic missiles, and that he saw, quote, this war ending a lot faster than people think. Netanyahu also said Israel would avoid future attacks on Iran's energy infrastructure after a pair of strikes on key Middle east gas operations sent energy prices soaring and earned him a rebuke from Donald Trump. And finally, the Trump administration is reportedly considering plans to occupy or blockade Iran's Kharg island to pressure Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. So, Walter, I guess the one thing tying this all together is that if last week when we spoke, people still seemed, at the very least, you know, very impressed by the operational military success of the US Israeli campaign. This week, I think, was the week when maybe a bit more panic or potential pessimism seemed to set in a little between all the headlines about an energy crisis, increasing numbers of US Boots on the ground, and Iran's continued ability to keep Hormuz closed with drone and missile attacks. So this week, tell us where your head's at with all of this right
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now, you know, this is not the scenario that I'm sure Trump hoped he would be dealing with at this point. I think the panic may be as premature as some of the optimism has been in the past. You hear a lot of talk, you've heard a lot of talk about, oh, my gosh, America did not have a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Why didn't the Trump administration have a plan, et cetera, et cetera, that I find very unconvincing. I mean, it's quite possible that Steve Wyckoff didn't have a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but it's ridiculous to think that the Pentagon didn't have a whole drawer full of plans and doesn't have a whole drawer full of plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with contingency plans and tables of forces that you need. And they've been running scenarios and war games. But it is also quite likely that none of those involve reopening the Strait of Hormuz in five minutes in order to hit the news cycle at the right moment. So we are seeing now in these movements of troops and movements of assets, what we are seeing is what looks to me like pieces of a plan to reopen the Strait now coming together in real time. How successful will these efforts be? How long will they take? I can't tell you that. Tragically, I don't have a copy of that drawer full of secret plans in my office that I can refer to at any given moment. But also, unfortunately, I don't have the drawer where the Iranians have their counter plans for the American plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. So we are. We're in a situation where we're seeing two competitors having it out on an open field in the middle of the day where they've each got a plan, they've each got a set of assets and ideas, and we're just going to see what happens. Obviously, for the Iranians, the goal is to try to run out the clock. The longer things go on, the higher the price of oil and gas may get, the greater the cost of the disruptions to the rest of the world economy. Likelier, the more difficulty Trump has persuading people at home about the need for what's going on. So there, I think we can see an Iranian plan. Keep your ability to close the straits there. Do occasionally fire a shot and hopefully take out a tanker or something so that you don't have to stop every ship passing through the strait. If you're Iran, you just have to hit enough of them so that most ships decide not to try to go through. So in that sense, it's a little asymmetric on their side. But I can't imagine, again that the Pentagon hasn't thought very hard about exactly these problems. So what it will take and how long it will take, we'll see. And whether, whether the Trump administration has the political strength and the kind of strength of will and determination to carry it through, we're going to see.
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One follow up question. You know, we've talked a lot on the show before about how, you know, Trump may be hasty or underprepared or, you know, have under thought plans when it comes to matters like policy and strategy. But the one thing he's really excelled at for, you know, more than a decade now is coalition management and kind of shoring up and curating his sources of political power and support. Assuming that he's got his eye on the implications of how the war is going for his power and the coalition he's built. If you were him, what would you be considering right now? Would it be going in even harder and putting boots on the ground and doing whatever it takes to open the straits as soon as possible? Would it be cutting our losses and getting out and declaring victory on the destruction of Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities? I mean, from the standpoint of coalition management, where do you think the cards are stacked right now?
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Right. Well, again, you and I don't have the information that he has that, you know, we're not reading the Secret Squirrel up to the minute cables in the White House situation room. So he's obviously going to be making these judgments in terms of his vision of what's happening on the ground and what the likelihoods are. And without knowing that, you know, it's kind of idle to try to it'd be Faux News to be trying to project his state of mind. But I think we can say that there are two things that he would very much like to avoid here. One would be a sense that this is becoming another failed long term forever war, that after running since 2015, he's been running against a failed foreign policy establishment with one failed forever war after another. He doesn't want to be left holding the bag for that. But at the same time, I think he does pretty strongly feel that being a loser is not good for his coalition or his brand or anything else. Those will be the two things he's most interested in avoiding and also in some ways winning the War that nobody thought he could win, that all the experts on like day 20 of the war said, oh, he's lost. He's so stupid. He screwed it up hopelessly. If he then pulls a rabbit out of that hat, all right, he's a big star. So again, in his mind, maybe by the midterm, he's won the war in Iran. Oil prices are coming down. The whole world is in awe of his power. Something has happened in Cuba. You know, he comes in as, you know, the man who does what no other president has done. The man who makes every president since FDR look like a putz, which is what he would very much like. That's how he sees himself. I understand there's discussion in the administration about Manga's birthday, a national holiday, and putting his face on a big gold coin. Those kinds of achievements would be steps in the direction of the position he would very much like to occupy. So he's got positive goals and he's got things to worry about. Probably. If I had to guess, and it is really just a guess right now, he still thinks that he can win. He can pull out something from the war that he can spin as a win and spend reasonably. Minimum, he can spend it to his own hardcore supporters. Maximum. He can spend it in a way that increases his global power and clout. We will see. And then, you know, as events happen, he'll be reviewing, you know, every day. He'll, you know, it's several times in the day, he'll be looking at, are things moving in my direction? This is something I have to accomplish in order to close down the straight. How open the straight? How close am I to it? You know, we tried this yesterday to achieve that result. A, did our effort achieve the result that we want? You know, did our effort actually shut down that missile battery or whatever it was? And then B, did shutting down that missile battery actually relieve the pressure on the strait? And looking at that, he'll be making a lot of judgments about do I trust the military leaders? The military leaders know what they're doing, Are they giving me good advice? And his estimate of that will play into his overall estimate of the situation. Meanwhile, I suspect right now he's saying, boy, all of the people who hated this told me it would split the Republican Party and so on. But look, I'm at like 90%, which is more or less where I've been. So these people told me it would be a disaster. So far, they haven't been right. On the other hand, I think he may be thinking some of my pro war advisors didn't really they under predicted how tough this thing would be. So he's assessing the quality of advice he's getting from different people and then trying to figure out from that what is his best next move.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Tricia from Virginia writes in this week to ask a question I loved. She asked, quote, what magazine has had the best run during your lifetime? Was it esquire in the 60s, Vanity Fair in the 80s, the New Yorker, Harper's in the 90s, the Economist in the aughts, et cetera?
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Well, I mean for me personally there's simply no doubt that Worth magazine in the 90s is the king of all magazines. Because they started sending me on this amazing series of trips. This was the time that Americans were first starting to think about we were shifting from the defined benefit pension, where the company managed your pension and so on to, you know, the current more common system of the 401k and so on. So Americans were having to start to think about being investors and then Americans are starting to think about being international investors. So Worth magazine, bless its heart, sent me on a whole series of trips from anywhere from two to six weeks to make a kind of in depth, top to bottom study of different countries. You know, South Africa for six weeks as it was going from apartheid to beyond Chile, you know, as it was in the post Pinochet era, where was it going to be going? And they were, you know what those trips, I hope, I hope they were helpful to the people reading the articles. For me personally, what it meant was that I was acquiring a kind of in depth knowledge of different countries and experience in learning how to understand a country, how to prepare yourself for that kind of travel, how to figure out from nowhere how do you get to being able to organize a meeting with the finance minister, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's been invaluable. So no doubt from the Walter Russell Mead personal standpoint, that was the greatest magazine of all time. If we're going to look at sort of less important questions, Look, I think, you know, I think the golden age of magazines when, when magazines really had a, had a big impact was already starting to fade in the 80s and 90s. You know, the sort of the New Yorker, I think, you know, in the, in the 40s and 50s in some ways was a, was a bigger deal. The old Saturday Evening Post, which disappeared. Time and Newsweek used to be sort of dominant features in the American political landscape where everybody read at least one of the two, everybody in the conversation followed at least one of the two. So magazines did have this kind of dominance. There were different trends, you know, Esquire and the new journalism. Rolling Stone. I've had a tough experience because I. I did a piece for Rolling Stone, you know, after the great gonzo journalists, you know, had. Had sort of trashed, you know, sort of went to Hunter Thompson, had gone to Las Vegas and so on, and basically spent, you know, all this money on drugs, according to the article, and never really reported what he was supposed to do. So by the time I came along writing for them, the expense reports and the documentation required had become rather cumbersome and annoying. But there was that wonderful time when some of the best writers in America could make a good living even as a freelance writer for places like gq, Esquire, certainly the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Harpers were, you know, I mean, they both continue, but in a somewhat different fashion now. Atlantic is probably closest to being what it was. So it's a. It's kind of a depressing. The New Republic at one point really had a lot of weight and a lot of people who didn't even agree with it found that they needed to know what the New Republic was saying. I think Marty Perz, in some of his time there was very effective. The Washington Quarterly, which, out of which a whole host of very influential journalists emerged. National Review under Buckley. There really was a time when these magazines had a big impact. I wonder if with hindsight, people. People are going to look back and say there were publications like that today.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Fitonov 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.