← 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. We're going to talk a lot about the unfolding operation in Iran in the big conversations today. But first, let's start with this week's news items, all of which are tied to the larger Iran story, but we'll borrow from some of its interesting component parts first. So, first story of the week. A week long clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon came to a head this week when CEO Dario Amadei refused to loosen safety guardrails, preventing Claude's use for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. As a result, President Trump ordered every federal agency to immediately seize using anthropics technology. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the company a quote, supply chain risk, a designation typically reserved for US Adversaries, effectively forcing military contractors to avoid Anthropic as well. With a six month phase out of its military applications. Within hours, anthropic's chief rival, OpenAI, announced its own Pentagon deal to deploy its models and classified systems. The dispute has since grown. Messier Amadei sent an internal memo calling Trump's attitude toward Anthropic a demand for, quote, dictator style praise and dismissing OpenAI's Pentagon arrangement as safety theater, which an administration official said threatened any path to reconciliation. As of today, Thursday, March 5, however, Amadei has resumed discussions with the Pentagon. Claude, crucially, is the AI model powering Maven, the data and intelligence system that is behind the current US Campaign in Iran. Walter, is this episode news or Faux News?
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Well, first, let's just note that if you had read those paragraphs out five years ago, no one on the planet would have had any idea what you
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were talking about and any part of it.
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We are in a brave new world and we're having fights about things that didn't exist a very few years ago. I think it is news. I mean, I'm glad that they're still talking because I think the answer is to figure out some way for the Defense Department, excuse me, the Department of War, to be able to use critical technologies that might save our servicemen's lives. We are actually fighting. Let me just say that I for one would approve of that course of action. The deeper issue here is this kind of the way that information and the processing of information is, it has become linked to the strength, security and even existence of the state in that sense, for over 300 years, money has been, and the banking system have been not necessarily part of the state, but have had a very close relationship with it. And central banks, which buy and sell government debt, which do all kinds of things that keep the financial system going. You know, they are, they're independent. At least most of them are independent of the state. Some in former times they were actually often private companies. But the government, the state wouldn't have the power to fight war or to pay its bills if it didn't exist. And so money is both something that ordinary people use in their lives and something that is essential, is almost a constitutive element of government. Well, we're getting to the point where all information is going to be like that. And so information companies are already beginning to have sort of the same kind of importance to government that banks and the financial system have long done. Who knows, in some years we may be talking about the info system or something of that kind and who knows, the central info system, the central info bank or whatever we call it, by the way, I would love to really like get some, you know, angel investment capital and whatever company, you know, that turned into. But, and this is going to cause immense problems up and down the line. And this one of, gosh, you're going to use our poor, innocent, lovey dovey software to kill people overseas. All right, that's, you know, but also that information capability, if you have enough information to defend your country from the bad guys overseas, you also have the information capability to monitor and surveil everybody in the United States. And so does that mean that we're going to be, you know, that our choice is to either just get conquered by China and let the Chinese government have control over the, you know, total control of everybody's information, or do we actually have to build our own monstrous despotism to hold them off? Hopefully not. Let me say we will need a, an infosystem that is as strong and capable as anything that, that an authoritarian government can produce. But somehow we do need guardrails. We, we do need ways to protect our democracy. This is not a new problem for us in the sense that if the government has, has enough force to repel foreign invaders, it also has enough force to quell domestic rebels. So technically this is not, it's neither an insoluble problem nor a completely new one, but it is a really thorny, intricate, complicated one. I would say that right now what we see both on the side of the company and the side of the government is that neither One really has the institutional tools, the legal framework, or the experience to know how these lines should best be drawn. And I expect we're going to see a lot more kind of explosions along these lines. There's another little element in it, which is that the people who work in these companies and who do this design would like some say in how their work product is used. You know, I'm just here. Well, I'm not coding anymore because Claude has taken that part of the job away. But I'm doing whatever is left once all the coding has been outsourced. And I'm pretty sharp, and I'm making a lot of money, and nobody else really can do exactly what I do. And I want to be able to say to the government, you can't make me make something that you then use to destroy my liberties. And I get that. But how much power do unelected employees of tech companies deserve when it comes to national security? Are they really the ones who should get to say, based on whatever their own feelings are at any moment, how this technology can be used? So there's a struggle for power within the companies as well as between the companies and the government. I don't know how it all gets worked out. Everything I'm saying is that this is a big problem. It'll appear in many different aspects over the next few years. And all you can advise folks on both sides is to try to behave with a little bit of wisdom and restraint and humility, realizing that we don't actually have all the answers, even though we do need to make some decisions.
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All right, our second story. The Pentagon is rapidly burning through its stocks of precision weapons less than a week into the massive campaign of airstrikes against Iran, while also expending sophisticated air defense missiles at a rate that puts the US Military potentially days away from having to prioritize which targets to intercept. According to sources who spoke to the Washington Post, the scope of Operation Epic Fury is forcing US Military commanders to make difficult calculations about how quickly their Iranian adversaries will burn through their own munitions. And even as President Trump says, the war may last four to five weeks, two people familiar with US Inventories said that an extended conflict in the Middle east could require drawing down munitions stocks in the Indo Pacific region. A third anonymous US Official said that inventories were so thin that a lengthy campaign against Iran wouldn't leave enough munitions for other threats, especially China. Walter, is this news or faux news?
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Well, first of all, it looks to me like that reporter was really fishing for bad news and kind of pushing his sources to you know, like, well it could, if it went on long enough, long enough not being defined. So he's really push, push, push. Give me, give me some like news that I can make a big. America doesn't have any missiles. It's all going to fall apart. All right? And it's possible that the sources are, you know, don't like what's going on and are, and are trying to help. You know, this could be something they're kind of working on together and of course it could be possible. These are incredibly public spirited people who are taking the courageous step of, of telling the public news that it should know but that the administration doesn't want, you know, etc. But let me just. So, so we don't actually. You read a news story like this, you have, you, you do not know really. He doesn't say how long. Like if you said in two more days, okay, I have a know I have a story. But if it drags on long enough it could require. Well are you telling me that in 15 years it's possible that we, you know, it's, it's this, it's just a puff, it's just a sule. You know, just trying to build something out of the air here that doesn't take away from the fact that a real consideration in this war is you know, do the Iranians run out of missiles before we and our and our associates in this war run out of anti missile stuff. And from what I can tell, no body knows the Iranians have a bunch of missiles. But if, you know, there have been stories recently that the Israelis in the United States and the Americans have been pretty good at finding the underground bunkers where they store these missiles and much to the Iranians surprise and dismay, destroying the missiles. And you're hearing other things too that as the Iran's air defenses have essentially disappeared, our planes can now come in much closer and use cheaper, infinitely more replaceable missiles in the place of these very sophisticated ones that you need to deal with the high end stuff. And then there's the difference between the offensive missiles and the defensive missiles. This is just very, very mix. So I would say pro on the whole, not news and I would also say no responsible American officer or source should ever tell a journalist like important military information that would be of value to the enemy like this. You know, what if, if it turns out that we've only got five days of missiles? I don't want the Iranians to know that and I don't want anybody telling them that and if I were president and one of my military officers was doing that, I would be looking really hard to figure out who that was and how we can court martial because that, that I believe that the, the concept is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Now that said, that doesn't mean that the executive secret should be kept by everybody. You can go to Congress people, there are, there are ways. If there's something you think is really, really rotten in the Pentagon and is of real importance, there are legal ways that you can get that out. But to go like leaking important military information that could affect the outcome of a war or could endanger lives. You took an oath, son and, or daughter, whoever you are, and let me advise you to stick to it.
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Just one follow up. You know, you kind of alluded at the beginning to there are some senior or relatively senior members of the administration who have been making the case even before the administration began, the second term began, that, you know, every military resource dedicated to Europe in the Middle east is a resource that is being taken away from the Indo Pacific theater. And that's the only theater that really matters. When, when it comes down to it, just regardless of the actual levels of our munitions stockpiles, which, you know, we of course don't know the answer to that. What have you made of that argument that it is that zero sum?
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Well, I think it's, it's true about some things and less true about others. You know, just as a simple matter of, you know, like piles of stuff. You know, some piles are bigger than others. Some piles actually are really, really useful in the Middle east, but not that useful in Taiwan. So you know, blob. And it's, it's a kind of a, an apple. Not just apples and oranges, but apples and oranges and figs and grapefruit and kiwi. I mean it's just a big old thing. And sometimes it's also some, some of these things are sort of bookkeeping. You know, do you take a bottle of aspirin that's past the expiration date? Well, maybe you do, maybe you don't. These things are, they come out in the press like they are very clear cut things and they almost never are. That said, it does seem like a really good idea to have more of this stuff and even more important to have the capability that should you need some really fast, you have the ability to make it. And also diplomacy and politics isn't really just about the number of bullets that you have in your rifle case. If hypothetically, and I'm not Saying this is happening and I'm not taking a position on it, but let's suppose that your ability to destroy the Iranian navy, let's just say, which appears to have happened to a very large extent, do that very, very quickly, is something that in China they would say, oh my goodness, they really. This makes it a lot harder to invade Taiwan than we thought. All right, that might mean that even if it did, even if the missiles used to destroy the Iranian navy did cause a little shortage over there in Taiwan, the demonstration effect, the Chinese still don't exactly know how many other missiles you have might, I mean, you know, it's not, not risk free or anything, but there might be times when it would be worth taking a, a bigger lead off base in order to make a point or the gain would be greater than the cost. So to try to turn all. Everybody wants to turn these things into rules, you know, this is the way it must be done. And here's the book of procedures and stuff like that. Life often just doesn't work out that way.
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All right, final story of the week. The CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran. According to cn, the Trump administration has been in active discussions with Iranian opposition groups and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about providing them with military support. Iranian Kurdish armed groups have thousands of forces operating along the Iraq Iran border, primarily in Iraq's Kurdistan region. Several of the groups have released public statements since the beginning of the war hinting at imminent action and urging Iranian military forces to defect. The IRGC has been striking Kurdish groups and said on Tuesday that it targeted Kurdish forces with dozens of drones. According to a senior Kurdistan Regional Government official, the CIA support for Iranian Kurdish groups began several months before the current U. S. Israel era campaign. Walter News orfo news Always difficult to
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tell in that murky world of intelligence. You know, I have to say at this point, if the Kurds haven't become a little bit skeptical about American promises of aid, there's something wrong with the Kurds. You know, foment an uprising among the Kurds and then abandon them is one of the older plays in the Middle east playbook. It's been going on for quite a while. So if I were the Kurds, I would be skeptical and I would want to understand exactly what I was getting and exactly what it was going to do for me. But let's step back from that and look at the bigger question of what does this tell us about the situation in Iran and the, and the war situation? And I think and here, you know, again, I think this does give us a little bit of, cast a little bit of light into the murky darkness of what's actually happening in the war, that it looks as if part of the administration's hope that it can avoid major ground troop engagements in Iran. It says local rebels can take the place of American boots on the ground. That I think is a, you know, it can be a two edged sword because there are people in Iran, a lot of people in Iran, some of them Kurdish, by the way, who don't really want Iran to break up into a sort of nest of hostile micro states at the end of the war. You know, the Azeri part go off, the Baloc part go off the Arab part, some of the other tribes further in the, in the east, the Kurds, etc. Etc. Etc. You know, do you really want your country to turn into Yugoslav ex Yugoslavia with another, you know, long rounds of civil wars and God knows what? And they're probably. And I think there are a lot of people that don't want to do, don't want to see that. And it also has the potential for unifying. Well, it has the potential to unify people who don't like the current Iranian government, but who also think that even a bad government is better than a generation of civil war. And there are a lot of people who think that way in a lot of places. So this is a, it's a dangerous thing to play with. Arguably, the experience of Iraqi Kurdistan, which has been relatively happy both for the Kurds and the Iraqis, seem to be managing it. Maybe this gives you a little bit more, you know, of a framework to think about. You know, so there's an Iranian Kurdistan that is in a federal position with the new republic or kingdom or whatever it's going to be of Iran. That we're doing this at all would suggest that there is a sense that the task before the United States in dealing with Iran is a really significant one. It's not one of just dropping a few bombs on Tehran and then everybody breaks into, you know, Hatikvah and Yankee Doodle and joy reigns. So we'll see. But I would say this, it's news. It shows us. It's a window into a very interesting room.
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All right, that is it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. So just to lay some of the groundwork here, here, Walter, some of the big picture of what's happened since Saturday. So the US And Israel have launched the coordinated air campaign against Iran, targeting key Officials, including the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah ali Khamenei around 2000. Strikes had been conducted between February 28 and March 1 alone and have taken out lots of other key Iranian officials, military commanders and facilities. Iran so far has retaliated by launching dozens of drones and ballistic missiles throughout the Persian Gulf at targets in Israel. And US Military bases in, I think Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the uae. You know, I think over a thousand people have been killed so far in Iran. There was something like, last time I checked, a dozen in Israel. Six, at least US Service members have been killed. Less than a dozen in the Gulf states. Trump's claiming the conflict could last a month. The Democrats in Congress are questioning the legal basis for the campaign. So there's a lot more here than we can bite off in one episode. But I guess let's start with this. So the operation has by all or most measures, been a pretty stunning operational military success so far. At the political level, though, it seems like almost all bets are off. We just, you know, you just mentioned the potential for a kind of Yugoslavia type breakup. That's one potential consequence. You know, people talk about hoping for a Venezuela type scenario. There's the return of the Pahlevi monarchy, there's an Afghanistan type forever war. It's all a really difficult thing for all of us and our listeners to wrap our minds around with the potential scenarios ranging from so promising and hopeful to so horrifying and threatening. So please just walk us through how you're thinking about this as of today.
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Okay. Well, you're talking about all those different scenarios did remind me of the old, during the Vietnam War, the, we had the domino theory that if, you know, South Vietnam fell, then the next one, like dominoes, the other countries would fall, which, you know, happened for Cambodia and Laos. But anyway, I remember the forerunner of Saturday Night Live, which was at the time was a magazine ran a story saying that the problem was that we were using the wrong model. It wasn't dominoes. Maybe we should try the idea of jacks and that China was trying to do a foursy in Indochina by picking up all. In that case, maybe the answer would be to have Taiwan distracted by attacking and so on and so forth. So you could come up with different games, each of which would give you a different model and a different strategy. Just reminds us all how hard it is to wrap our heads around war. You know, war in some ways is the supreme activity of the human race. That is, we, we tend to fight war the way we ought to worship God that is with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. It calls out everything that a society has to put into it. And because of that, it is extremely difficult to understand. It is extremely difficult to plan for. It is extremely difficult to do it well. And so with this war, with all of these kinds of swirling possibilities and so on, as I try to make sense of it and try to figure out, okay, what are the axes on which this thing is likely to turn, it looks to me like it's pretty clear what Trump wants, which is that he wants the regime to change without American forces having to be there on the ground, or at most maybe a sort of occupy the oil refineries or something of that kind. And note, by the way, so far, we have not attacked Iran's oil infrastructure, which is interesting given the sheer volume of attacks that have been going on. And the Iranians don't want him to succeed in that. You know, this is where we are. And the Iranian. If we think about how do the Iranians think they can withstand a combined US Israeli attack? You know, they know already. They knew before the war they didn't have any air defenses to speak of, that the US Was going to be able to do a lot of devastation. They even knew that the Israelis had penetrated them. You know, the. The Israelis knew how many pairs of underwear the ayatollah had left in his drawer. You know, that. I mean, that's, you know, that level of penetration, you know, so why knowing all of this, did they think, okay, no, we actually can still win this thing? And I think they came up with sort of two concepts of how Iran wins. One is that by counterattacks and missile attacks and so on in the Gulf as well as to Israel and to American interests, they could wreak such havoc on world energy markets and world financial markets and cause such distress in the neighborhood that everybody, including Wall street, would be screaming at Trump, stop this nonsense. And they'll have noted that when something sort of similar happened over Greenland, and, you know, Trump backed off of his demands on Greenland when the stock market crashed, and everybody said it was bad, and the Republicans in Congress were saying it was bad, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, so they had this retaliatory strategy. They don't think they can destroy Israel or inflict damage comparable to what they're taking, but they think that they can make enough trouble they can stop oil going in and out of the Straits of Hormuz. Okay, so that's one prong, one side of their approach. And I would Say, at this point, the jury is still somewhat out. This is where, you know, we were talking earlier about, do we have enough interceptors to take out their missiles before they run out? That's part of the problem. You know, if we run out of missile defense before they run out of missiles, their ability to wreak havoc to Gulf oil and gas production is really pretty significant. But even in the current state where we have those defenses, the Straits of Hormuz are essentially closed. There's just not a lot of traffic going in and out of there. And Qatar has shut down a lot of its production and some other places are doing it. And there's also a bit of a hostage thing here. If the Iranians were to attack the water desalinization plants or the power plants that feed them, you would create the most massive imaginable humanitarian crisis in a lot of these heavily populated cities that sit in the middle of a desert. The Americans haven't taken out the Iranian oil infrastructure, and the Iranians haven't taken out the water infrastructure of the Gulf states. You know, interesting. You know, Clausewitz does talk about how war doesn't get to total war right away. So right now, the Iranians seem to be getting a chance to get that first strategy to work. Now, it has been coming on slowly because up until today, yeah, there was some stock market slipperiness, and the oil price is up to. Last I looked, it was about $80 a barrel. I don't know what it is now. Today it looked like things were getting a little tougher. I think the Dow was down like a thousand points. Much more of a sea of red on some of these trading things. And obviously, the longer an oil shortage continues, the more serious the economic consequences and therefore the political consequences of the war are. On the other hand, these Iranian attacks have actually united a lot of countries against Iran. Even Qatar, of all places, has been bombing Iran. I never thought that you'd see the Emir of Qatar, you know, joining this the shade of John McCain to sing bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. But. But we have lived to see that day, Jeremy, you and I. We don't know how that's going to work out. And I'm sure that both on the Iranian side and on the American side, people are trying to figure out how to game this and make some progress. It was a little discouraging late today to see that after Iranian missile launches had dropped pretty dramatically, there was actually a burst of higher activity today. Now, does that mean that they're putting everything they've got into one Last frantic push? Or does it mean they've kind of, like, figured out how to deal under the circumstances and are, you know, and that this is sustainable as of right now, we do not know. So that was one of their strategy and the other, which is their whole card. It's the one they really don't want to have to play. But if they do, we'll see. It's their most formidable, and that's that. It's not that Trump always chickens out, but that when it comes to ground wars, America always chickens out, that, you know, we left Afghanistan. Iran knows better than anybody else how much our departure from Iraq has enabled Iran to become a lead actor in, in Iraq. So they know, and they, they can look at the polls. They see the president is not very popular. They can see the war is not very popular, and that the longer people think the war will last, the, the less they like it. Ground troops are unpopular. High gas prices are unpopular. So I think the Iranians, in a way like the North Vietnamese so many years ago, understand that while the American army is in principle, the strongest fighting force in the world, the question is, do the Americans really have the will or the ability to use it as much and for as long as they would need to? So all they have to do there is to just keep saying no and not talking. And at every stage, Trump has to either accept a political defeat, okay, well, all right, fine. We've destroyed a lot of stuff, and now we're going home and everything is fine. He tries to spin that as a win, or does. Does he face, you know, but the Iranians, meanwhile, aren't giving an inch rhetorically. We're going to keep building missiles. We're, you know, you have not taken away our right for enrichment. We are still proud and strong. So they'll be giving a lot of, like, nasty, ugly rhetoric to rub, rub his nose and our noses in the failure to make the political changes that we hope to make and calling it a victory and celebrating and so on and so forth. And that will force, in their minds, Trump to either go in deeper, which will probably, they think and hope, destroy him politically and make the United States and all future presents so allergic to interventions in the Middle east that we'll never be back. So from their point of view, they still have a lot of cards in their hand, and I don't see them moving toward kind of a surrender process yet. That doesn't mean there might not be somebody inside the IRGC who is very high up and would really much rather be rich than Be holy. There are people like that even in Iran. You know, follow Dulce down the pathway to glory and maybe has enough friends and allies to pull it off. We don't, you know, again, we do not know. But I think the. They're still on the Iranian side. They have reasons to think that if they hold out, they can win. But. But on the American side, as you say, you look at the operational success, you look at the widening of the American coalition, and so far, I don't think President Trump sees any reason why he should come home with his tail between his legs when both sides still think they can win. It's rare for wars to come to an end.
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One final question. We've talked a lot on this podcast over the years about how maybe a better way to understand the things that Trump says and does is less through the lens of, like, policy or strategy as we normally understand those, and more through, on the one hand, spectacle and ensuring that Trump is just unlike any other human being on earth in world politics. And on the other, through his own domestic coalition management of maga. Right before we hopped on here, you know, he pretty explicitly called out Tucker and Megyn Kelly and said, they are not maga. I am maga. So how do you see the war so far? And it's been less than a week.
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He also fired the dog lady.
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That's right. So how do you see it so far through those two lenses?
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Well, you could argue that's sort of like the equivalent of the night of the Long Knives. You turn on the radicals. I do think that certainly right now, Trump is reminding there's nobody on the planet in business or politics or anything else, who doesn't understand that Donald Trump's decisions are driving their day and that if he can be persuaded to end the war, well, things will go one way. If he continues, things will go another way. And then the suspense. Will he win? Will he lose? What will happen? We are. We are right in that sense. We're in the sweet spot. The only problem is that he really could lose. This really is a big gambler. He has bet the farm on this one, I think. I mean, there's always the possibility that he can find some sort of a way to spin out. But, you know, the more dramatic the thing is, actually, the harder it is to exit without something that looks like a win. There's definitely that. And then in terms of the coalition management, I think it is interesting that I believe he's thought all along that the kind of anti Israel to antisemitic kind of element of the MAGA coalition was, once you get offline, not all that numerous. And this kind of heart and soul of the MAGA movement, on the whole, wants America to win, thinks America's enemies are bad, bad, and likes America's allies, particularly Israel, which is. And I think for a lot of MAGA folks, is our best ally, and also admires and respects the display of power and courage. So right now, you've got sort of Carlson and these other folks have kind of the short end of the stick in public opinion, and they're kind of whinily having to argue, well, America really deserves to lose. America will lose. And, you know, to get that once. Once you're in that box, unless America really does start to lose, you're in bad shape. You do not come out well. And so I think, yes, Trump is definitely has. Has decided that he needed to. You know, he's tolerated these people. He's not been kind of giving them a hard time, giving them some space, but they sort of kept radicalizing and they became increasingly anti Trump as opposed to ultra Trump. There's a big difference between ultra Trumpy and anti Trumpy. So ultra Trumpy, that you think Trump is a traitor to the true vision. He thinks that that's where some of these people have gone, and so he's adding to his collection of heads.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter, you touched on it before, but, you know, it's a truism we've all heard for most of our lives that air power alone cannot win wars. And I guess also the, you know, covert operation operations and targeted assassinations and what people refer to as mowing the grass also cannot by themselves win wars. So your tip for the week is to tell us, are these truisms true throughout history, changing the political outcome?
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So, I guess, what do you mean by winning a war? Seriously? I would say. Well, I guess I would argue that to some degree, you say that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are kind of an example of winning a war with air power and causing a political change in Japan. It's never say never. One of the curses of the modern American policy world is the degree to which so many people start thinking that theorems and maxims are so true. You just rely on them to predict things. They're not aids to help you analyze situations. They're like rules. And if you follow them, you'll get a good grade on the test, and then you'll get into, like, an even better job and. And so that kind of goody two shoes, nerdy McGeorge Bundy esque approach to politics. And it so, so I would not. It depends on, you know, can air, air power win award. Depends on what your goals are, what your definition of victory is, who you're fighting, the how much air power are you prepared to use, et cetera. But I do think in this case, it's going to be very, very hard to bomb the ayatollahs into accepting the end of the Islamic republic.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers, Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Vatana of 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.