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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. The US Is poised to impose sweeping sanctions on buyers of Russian oil and gas after senators overwhelmingly endorsed a bill intended to increase pressure on Vladimir Putin. The Senate vot 86 to 12 to advance a bill that imposes primary and secondary sanctions against Russia and individuals and businesses that buy its oil and gas. Minutes before the vote, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Finland's President Alexander Stubb addressed senators behind closed doors at the Capitol to implore them to back the bill. The proposed measures would target Russian officials, oligarchs, and their family members, as well as the nation's banks and financial institutions. Among others, they would also allow President Trump to impose tariffs on imported goods from countries that buy Moscow's oil and gas. The bill, named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, is expected to formally pass the Senate in the coming days and pass the House with similar bipartisan support before being sent to Trump's desk to be signed into law. Walter, is this news or Faux News?
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Afraid there's a lot of Faux News in there. You know, this is, this reminds me a little bit about some of the ways people used to report on energy transition and so on, with, like, front loading, all the, like big, exciting, supposedly important changes and just kind of in the background there noting that there were some problems. I mean, this bill does not force. This bill by itself accomplishes not one thing. It does not impose anything on anyone. It doesn't change any policy. It gives President Trump additional authority to do more things to Russia if he wants to. And by the way, the original language was much, much pushier, but it was clear they couldn't pass the bill unless they left Trump fully in control of this. And the other other thing is that it gives him a huge amount of new tariff authority. Anybody, anywhere, that's any country purchasing stuff from Russia, he can use that to legally impose tariffs. So I think a more accurate news story would be Congress gives Trump additional tariff authority. And by the way, there's no connection. He doesn't have to impose sanctions on Russia in order to be able to impose tariffs on countries. He can actually impose additional tariffs on other countries without doing anything himself. This is not the huge victory that, that the press is trying to spin it into. And again, these are nice people with nice motives. I want to help Ukraine. As you know, Jeremy, I've been to Ukraine three times during the war. I've met with President Zelensky. I would like to see this war end well for Ukraine, but that doesn't lead me to try to blind either myself or my readers to what is actually happening. So I'm afraid this one has to go into the Faux News at least Faux news reporting category second story for
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at least two decades, around 60% of Americans have said they would prefer to start their own business than to toil for someone else, according to Gallup. Yet until recently, fewer and fewer were living out that dream as large firms lured workers with the promise of stability. The share of self employed Americans fell from 36% in 1910 to less than 10% in 2020. That is now changing. Since the beginning of 2024, an average of 466,000Americans have applied to start a business each month. This June saw 531,000 new applications, nearly double the average monthly figure in 2019. Full time self employment rose to its highest level this century in 2025, reaching 17 million. In particular, AI chatbots have made it easier to get a business going by allowing even the tech shy to build a website and navigate local regulations. The share of founders who used AI to help launch their business doubled to 60% between 2023 and 2025, and new cohorts of small businesses are adopting AI earlier and at higher rates. This the technology has allowed people who already wanted to strike out on their own to do so much faster and more easily. Walter News or FO News
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and in some ways this one, unlike the last one, may actually be understated because I think one of the most interesting things about this sort of combination of the rise of E commerce and the rise of AI is there are a lot of people who are starting side hustles on the web while they keep their main jobs. So the number of Americans dipping their toes into the waters of entrepreneurship is, I suspect, significantly greater than the figures that are cited in the piece. And there's some interesting things here. One is the enduring cultural propensity of Americans to want to be entrepreneurs as opposed. I think you could go to a lot of other countries and you would get polls that said no, no, not that. But Americans see the idea of the risk and rewards of entrepreneurship, of freedom in a sense being preferable to being the kind of well fed wage slave in the industrial machine. That suggests that as a people we actually are ready. Or at least some a significant portion of us are ready to go out there and, you know, see what can be seen. I would have really been interested in a bit of an ethnic breakdown, you know, at least from my experience. I see a number of people who are. You wouldn't think of them as the traditional, you know, European, Euro American, entrepreneurial type, Asian Americans, African Americans, many others out there doing the same thing. By the way, come to think of it, that that number also excludes gig workers who, who embrace the freedom or have chosen the freedom of setting their own hours, having more control over what they do sometimes, you know, regrettably because they can't find something more stable, but often because they prefer the flexibility and the control that this gives them. And so there's a meta narrative here, I think, potentially, which is that yeah, AI is causing problems and it's going to wreak havoc in, in certain industries in certain ways. But there is an effect here of cre of making it easier for people to find creative solutions for their, in their own lives. And looking at that makes me feel a good deal more optimistic about, you know, people say, well, where will all the jobs be? People are not only just applying for jobs, they're creating jobs. And that's how we'll get past the job cut side of AI is people making jobs, inventing jobs, creating industries. And so this is news and good news in my view.
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I know at this point it's, you know, very speculative and preliminary, but what would you expect some of the societal or political consequences to be of, let's just say, you know, 10, 10 less than 10% of Americans are self employed in 2020. And then at some point soon, you know, 30 to 40% of Americans are self employed or have their own small business. Like which party would benefit from that? Which kinds of coalitions would you expect to form?
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Yeah, you know, it's different pieces of it will take shape in different ways. And again, the self employment narrative understates the narrative of disengagement from big institutions in favor of self directed. So say parents who go for homeschooling in a state that gives homeschool vouchers. You wouldn't necessarily say that they are being entrepreneurs, but they are cutting themselves loose from the machine to do things in their own way. I think what you're going to find is a combination. There are going to be a lot of people opening bakeries in Brooklyn and things like that who are going to vote very, very left. And Vermont has a lot of small business. Small business does not in and of itself drive people to One or the other or the other. I think we'll see a continued trend toward anti establishment thinking. The whole trend reflects a lack of confidence and trust. Like I give my soul to Acme Incorporated. What is Acme Incorporated going to do for me in return? And the fact that I don't believe the Acme Corporation, you know, is going to actually help me or that I can count on it, that also says something about my attitude toward the government, toward every institution. So I think individualism, I think lack of trust of the establishment. I do think there's certain ways a lot of businesses will lead people to want lower taxes. The tax code for self employment is kind of punitive frankly, where you have to pay both your share of Social Security and Medicare and the employer share and that, you know, you get some tax credits back from that. But it is actually kind of a, kind of a big hit as a lot of people who go into self employment discover. I think there'll be some, interestingly some more pressure on credit card interest. There's a lot of these people going into the entrepreneurial thing are actually financing some of it on their credit cards because that's where they can quickly get financed. They see an opportunity, they want to do something, this is the way I can do it. And in the negative form you'll see people trying to attack, you know, let's put a ceiling on bank credit card rates and so on more positively. What I hope you would see is focus of state and federal governments on facilitating smaller short term credits, creating regulatory structures and so on that make it possible for more banks to bank this kind of small entrepreneurial business. Which there'll be smaller loans and so on and so forth. But I think our society will need to start reorienting itself to the needs of these groups and as that happens, the political parties. Which political party does the best job at saying I am the friend of the small new entrepreneur? That party I think is going to reap a lot of rewards.
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All right, final story of the week. China is more in control of its oil consumption than anyone realized during one of the worst energy crises in history, brought on by the Iran war. The crude market's top customer cut imports by 40% soon after the Strait of Hormuz closed. A single country drop of that size hasn't happened before, even during a major recession. Yet China's economy grew 4.3% in the second quarter of this year. The ability to dial down imports this way is the result of years of planning by Beijing to reduce dependence on overseas oil. There were already signs that the country's energy system had shifted. More than half of all new cars sold in China in 2025 were electric, for example. And US tech bosses realized last year that China's artificial intelligence players were not experiencing the same scramble to find power for data centers, thanks to the country's massive rollout of renewable energy infrastructure. But it took a war to see China's new energy system in action. It's the kind of PR win that climate groups trying to persuade governments to move to a new energy system have never achieved. Walter News or FO news?
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News overlaid by idiotic climate wishful thinking. This whole news story fails to mention that there might be other purposes, you know, that China has been, oh, I don't know, simultaneously vastly and rapidly expanding its coal production and that, you know, it's not just eschewing fossil fuels, it is reducing its dependence on imported fuel. Yes, partly to safeguard its economy in the event of some kind of conflict in the Middle east, but more fundamentally so that it's in better placed and case it's at war with the United States of America again, that, that someone who is ostensibly a professional journalist and an editor can produce something like this without this crossing their mind. It tells us that the sort of vacuous nature of Western education, which has blinded an entire segment of the upper middle class to the fundamental geopolitical realities of life, is taking a toll and continues to be very, very expensive. And in, in that context, it's kind of interesting that the current crisis in a way forced China's hand. I'm not sure that they wanted everybody to know that they were accumulating this much, but China does not spend this kind of money lightly. And oh, and by the way, on the data centers, I really hate to tell these folks, but I think some of them may also be powered with coal. It's not, it's not simply the renewables that are solving the data center problem for China. Okay, I'm happy with renewals. I think it was a mistake of the Trump administration. You know, I'm, I'm an all of the above guy. But this kind of happy clappy dum dum reporting, I just don't know where it comes from. Jeremy, maybe you can tell me. You live in California.
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All right, that does it for this week's news. Let's have the big conversation. So just surveying the headlines from this morning. Wednesday, July 29th. Walter, just this morning. So Iran launched the surprise ballistic missile attack on American forces in Jordan. Iran backed militias in Iraq fired drones at oil facilities in Saudi Arabia's eastern region. For the second day in a row, similar attacks were carried out from Iraq. On Riyadh, US Central Command said that American and Saudi forces are conducting strikes against Iranian proxy groups in eastern Iraq. And finally, Iran is soon expected to receive a first shipment of up to 400 Chinese made shoulder fired air defense missile launchers. Oh, and there was also probably of lesser consequence, Iran ruled out Oman's proposal for regional joint management of the Strait of Hormuz. But in any case, Walter, you wrote this week about Iran as the hedgehog in this war and Donald Trump as the fox. So tell us what you mean, maybe in the context of everything that's unfolding this week.
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Well, you know, this was, this war, like all wars, is very hard to assess in real time. You know, who's winning, who's losing, even what's happening. You know, for example, the, the news so far today is that Iran's attacks on the US Bases weren't particularly successful. Who knows, in the past there's been a pattern of, we find out later. And again, I don't, I do not actually blame the Pentagon for not at every moment telling Iran, oh, by the way, this is how successful your attack was. I think drawing a veil of silence when the enemy is paying attention is wise, humane and just and prudent, for that matter. But nevertheless, this war is unusually hard to read. And because with Donald Trump and the Iranians, neither side believes, as we've noted before on this program, that speech is primarily intended as, as a method of conveying information. Speech is a way of creating impressions and eliciting reactions. Why would you tell your opponents what you're thinking or what's happening? And so we have, you know, you look at the war and on day one, there's diplomacy. Day two, there's war. Three days later, it's diplomacy again. Then war, war. And it's just very, very hard to understand what's happening. We spoke, I think, a week or two ago about how so many people have spent all this time and energy dissecting every line of the MoU between the US and Iran. That seems like several lifetimes ago, but there was a time where every serious pundit felt the need to have an opinion on clause 7, paragraph 2 of the MoU between Donald Trump and the Islamic Republic of Iran. So what I have been trying to do in my effort to make some sense out of what I've called a slop of war, where both diplomacy and military communications, sometimes even military action, is intended to Kind of mask realities rather than, than reveal or express them, that what you got to try to do is somehow keep your, keep your eye on the prize. What's the big picture? What has and hasn't changed? You know, the Iranians, I think right now are feeling pretty confident. And in the first place, the foundation of their confidence is the massacre of their citizens. We all have to understand this. And okay, fine, you can get all moralistic and huffy and puffy about it, and I'm not in favor of it by any means, but if we want to understand clearly, they massacred between 30 and 50,000 of their people and arrested a bunch more. And just in case anybody isn't getting the message, they are hanging in public day by day, some of the prisoners they hadn't already killed. Okay? This regime believes that the foundation of its security is the willingness and the ability of the most thuggish and fanatical of its supporters to murder anybody it takes and as many as it takes to hold on to power. Okay? That's just where they are. And from their point of view, this works. The way you could hope to beat Iran with air power only, I think, is that the air power would trigger internal unrest that would overthrow the shaken regime. They have sought to counter that so that our air power, we can just blow things up, but they still control what's on the ground. And furthermore, the fact that the Iranian forces, the Basiji and so on, you know, are still clearly willing and able to fight for the regime is sending a message to Donald Trump that, you know, if you do invade, this is not, you know, there, there will be casualties, there will be fighting. And furthermore, you might get an Iraqi style insurgency, a Taliban style thing. You know, this is not ugly, not going to be easy or pretty. If you're at all smart, you'll stay out. And if the Iranians can maintain that position, then American options become somewhat less attractive. Especially because the Iranians also have the capability to bomb, as they've demonstrated in the last couple of days, to bomb, to attack US Bases around the region, to attract, to attack energy infrastructure and civilian sites in the Gulf countries. And they're not doing it at the moment. They've, they've done a little bit of it in the past, but their equivalent of a nuclear weapon is that they can blow up or, you know, do a lot of damage on the desalinization plants that people need every minute of every day for drinking water in the Gulf. So from this position and then the ability to stop ships moving through the Strait The Iranians see themselves, I think, very much as a hedgehog curled up around this central core of advantages and capabilities, curled in a tiny ball, and their spikes are sticking in all directions. You hit it with your paws and you're not getting anywhere. And Trump is the fox in this scenario who is trying to figure out how he can somehow deal with this Iranian armored hedgehog. They're not willing to cut him a break. I think they are confident enough in their ability to withstand it. They are committed ideologically to this idea of resistance, so they're not going to help him. But Trump also has some advantages. And I think we can only we have to step back again and look at the big picture in that two years ago, Iran's war against Israel in the west, you know, where was it? Well, it was in Gaza, it was in Lebanon, it was in, you know, it had a strong ally. I can't maybe a little more than two years ago in Assad in Syria. It basically dominated the Fertile Crescent, you know, from Beirut through Damascus and Baghdad. And of course, it had the Houthis in Yemen. This is a very powerful regional force that has been destroyed except for the Houthis, and we'll see what happens there. But the war has moved from the whole Middle east to the Persian Gulf that now Iran has many tactical advantages in the Persian Gulf, but it wasn't a win for Iran that the battle moved from Beirut to the Gulf. And so, you know, Iran is now fighting, so to speak, on its home turf, but it has had to retreat. And the relationships that both deterred Iran's enemies from attacking it and provided extra strength and depth for Iran's defense have been significantly curtailed, in some cases I think, even destroyed. Additionally, I think the Gulf Arab states, while their trust in the Trump administration is certainly less than 100%, do perceive the existential nature of the threat from Iran sort of more clearly than even before. And, you know, if the United States develops a clear war winning policy, you know, I think there's a greater willingness, lack of trust in maybe what they're hearing. But if they heard something they trusted from people they trusted, I think there's a greater degree of commitment than before. The other thing we do have to acknowledge is that whatever you want to say about President Trump's war leadership, and I've been critical on this show and in the past, is he has managed to fight a long war, longer than he expected, a long war against Iran, without creating a global economic crisis. Now, it may be that what Iran is trying to do with this latest round of attacks is not just sort of poke back a bit. But, you know, Iran may be trying to take us into a new phase where since Iran says, well, they're never going to open the strait to us on our terms, so we are now going to go all out and try to create the kind of global and American economic crisis that would force Trump to the bargaining table from a position of weakness. And on our terms, that may be what they're trying to do. I don't know. It's the slop of war, it's the fog of war. But I think those are the positions of the two sides at this moment.
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Final question for this week. I mean, I'm sure there are polls that could tell us, but what's your sense at this point in terms of how big of an issue is this for Trump and Republicans heading toward the midterms? I guess what I mean by that is by this point, the war going on this long, it does seem a little bit less of a burning white hot issue than I thought it would be. It's, it doesn't seem to be quite at the level of, you know, the economy or other more kind of traditional concerns among voters.
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Yeah, I don't think it's helping him. And I do see in polls that he is now at a record low in either of his terms, in his job approval, and especially among independents. It doesn't look good for him. There's also a certain linkage. If the gas price is going to be $4 a gallon, $5 a gallon, actually that's normal living for California. So I don't know, six, seven, eight, I don't know what that, what it goes to under these conditions there. But he. So the continuation of the war, opposition to the continuation of the war may show up less in a voter survey as war opposition than unhappiness about the economy. So I think it's a tricky thing to try to read. Only a few people have the emotional capability to keep the dial turned to 11 all the time about any particular issue. You can only kind of scream and scream and scream for so long and, and then exhaustion sets in. So he may have reached a kind of a trough like that. Also, you know, frankly, it's really hard to know what's going on from one day to the next. Is the war ending? Is the war accelerating? Are they escalating? Are we escalating? Who's winning, who's losing, all of these things. And after a while, I think for a lot of people who know they don't have the time to really dig into it and don't really believe that the news sources that they're getting the information from know a whole heck of a lot. And by the way, they're right here. There's a sense that, well, if I can't, I can't fix it. I can't figure it out. I can't know exactly what is. Let me go think about something else where I can, you know, where I can at least ascertain the reality.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Have you still not seen the Odyssey, by the way?
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I still haven't. That's a plan that we're going to be doing. I can talk about the Odyssey if you want.
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Okay, Walter. So as the last known man in America who hasn't yet seen Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey, give us a tip or two for reading Homer's Odyssey. It could be your favorite translation or how to approach the work or how to think about it in the context of Western literature and history.
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Yeah, well, I mean, it really is, you know, which translation should I read? You know, what is the significance of the Odyssey? My first, strongest feeling here is that I'm just really darn glad that everybody is talking about Homer and I'm glad that people are having like, bare knuckle fights to the death on X about what is the true meaning of Homer. Is this a desecration of Homer or an interpretation? Fantastic. Let's have one about Shakespeare. Let's have, you know, Milton. There's like a lot of people we should be fighting about and life would be a lot better if more of that were happening. So that so far I am deeply grateful to Christopher Nolan and everything, you know, that he's been doing. People, you do hear a lot of people talking about translations. I guess I'm one of these people that thinks there's a little bit of a translation fetishism that goes on. Like the best translation. It's like, you know, the people that have to like, eat in the best restaurant in every town or, or buy their lettuce at the best store. I guess maybe right now that's kind of important. I want to get only the best lettuce right now. But normally speaking, you know, these things, it. It is better to read even a bad translation of the Odyssey than to read none at all. You go over the history of translations of the Odyssey and they have, you know, they've changed over time. The probably the greatest, most influential translation into English of Homer was by Chapman back in the 17th century. And there's a, there's a poem that I've always liked that Keats wrote when he first read Chapman's Homer, which I will share with our, with our listeners today. This was written in 1816. Much have I traveled in the realms of gold and many goodly states and kingdoms seen Round many western islands have I been which bards in fealty to Apollo hold oft of one wide expanse. I had been told that deep browed Homer ruled as his demean. Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold, Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise silent upon a peak in Darien. Now, a lot of people today would tell you, oh, Chapman's Homer, you know, the English, you know, it's like the latest scholarly, you know, and by the way, I'm reading, you know, my colleague, my bard colleague, Daniel Mendelsohn's translation, the Odyssey. And there's a lot to be said for, for new translations. Chapman Pope Some of these old translations are also worth reading as poems in their own right. Obviously, you know, number one, go learn some ancient Greek and go read the Iliad and the Odyssey and a bunch of other things while you're at it in the original. Option two, find a translation. Find a translation that you don't hate and see what you can make of it.
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There you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Ellie Axelrod, thanks to Alex Vitanov 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.