← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
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Sam
Foreign.
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Jeremy Stern
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 skip our usual news faux News format this week because there are so many speculative, anonymously sourced Iran war headlines going around that seem like they are by definition faux news, at least as of our recording time on Tuesday afternoon and can only become news once, or if they actually come to pass. So today we'll just have a bit more of a free flowing conversation on the state of the war in Iran. So, Walter, those headlines I mentioned include, you know, Trump threatening to annihilate various targets in Iran and seize Kharg island unless they reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Then shortly after that, a scoop from the Journal I saw that claimed that Trump's been explicitly telling his cabinet that he's willing to end the war without reopening Hormuz. And then shortly after that, the Iranian President Pescachi, and I think his name is announced. The regime is ready to negotiate an end to the war pending certain guarantees. And then the last thing I saw before we started recording, Pakistan and China have jointly released a plan to end the war, which the White House reportedly is open to. So, Walter, what's going on here and what's been going on since we last spoke on Friday, help us separate the sort of wheat from the chaff.
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Walter Russell Mead
Okay, well, I don't see any wheat in there is the problem. You know, it's Trump's method in domestic politics and even more in war is to create as much uncertainty about his intentions as possible so that you may think he is about to nuke Tehran or else he's about to cede control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran to he's going to convert to Shia Islam and accept the Ayatollah Sistani as his personal sort of font of jurisprudence. I mean, all of those options are kind of open and that's the way he wants it to be while he, you know, I mean, is he stalling for time? Is he sticking his finger to the wind to see which way the wind is blowing? Is he waiting until he has enough military assets on the ground to. To carry out the strikes he's been planning to carry out all along? You don't know? I don't know. I don't think Melania Trump knows. I'm not sure that either Marco Rubio or J.D. vance knows. It's possible that Donald Trump doesn't know what he's going to do in the moment. But, you know, there are things I think we can see that he wants that he's achieving. One of them is he's keeping markets surprisingly stable. You know, when you look at the potential consequences of several months of war and closure of the Strait, you should be seeing much more dramatic movements in stock prices, commodities, all kinds of things should be really screaming in panic and doing all kinds of strange operations. It's not really happening. Markets are down since the war began. But the last time I looked today, NASDAQ was up over 3%. Who knows, as we're talking, maybe down 25%. But basically, when he wants markets to stabilize, he says dovish things. And when he wants markets to, you know, when he doesn't care, he might be more hawkish. People made the point that Friday afternoon. He says a lot of hawkish things. And Monday before the markets open, it's all sweetness and light. And it's true that people are more skeptical of these things now, but they're not skeptical enough. It still has some power to make it work. And as for the Chinese Pakistani mediation, that seems like a stunt. Who knows? It might work. I mean, it doesn't cost you anything to do this, you know, so why not give it a shot? And from China's point of view, China does not actually want crazy financial or commodities markets either. It would like an early end to the war. So China's interests kind of are shaping its role in this, too, I think. So what's going to happen? I can't tell you.
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Jeremy Stern
What's your thinking on the current status of the. Just the military operation itself, I guess, you know, separated from whatever the political end state of all of this is going to be. But, you know, by this point, it seems the US And Israel have really significantly, you know, they've taken out a lot of regime leaders, but not all of them have significantly downgraded the ballistic missile and drone capability capabilities, but not nearly all of it. There's talk about an operation to seize the uranium, the enriched uranium. I mean, are you getting the sense we've kind of hit a wall in terms of what the air campaign can achieve, or is there still kind of a lot left?
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Walter Russell Mead
Again, it's hard to predict the future, and especially in a war. I think what we're seeing is part of it is the illustration of the 80%, 20% law, that the first 80% is the easy part, and then the last 20% can take 80% of the effort. And so the low hanging fruit from a military point of view has largely been picked already. The easy targets have been hit, the super valuable targets have been mostly hit, the vulnerable targets have been mostly hit. So what. But then what that gets you into is the extremely well fortified targets, the targets that have some value, but maybe it's five missiles and a launcher instead of 500 missiles and a launcher. And so it just, and you know, you've gotten all the big names in the government, but now you're looking for the regional governor or whatever. So at every level as you go forward, these campaigns, the capacity to make large gains diminishes and the difficulties of taking them out tends to increase. So I think we're seeing some of that. But I should say that in that Iranian air defenses or Iranian defenses at all are simply not a factor, that it's the nature of the problem that is giving Israelis and Americans their trouble, not the Iranian contribution to the nature of the problem from a military point of view.
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Jeremy Stern
Something else going on last couple days. Trump and maybe more notably Marco Rubio have been really lashing out at various NATO allies this week who to, you know, varying degrees, have either declined, just declined to help the US And Israel in the Gulf or are now, you know, kind of obstructing it by denying the use of their airspace, et cetera. We've talked a lot on the show before about how the administration, you know, flubbed the diplomatic opportunity here to shore up allied support for the war before the war started. But just considering where we are now and the past can't be changed, do you think our NATO allies are making a mistake here or as they see it, you know, maybe France especially, are they going to be vindicated again the way they were vindicated by refusing to support the invasion of Iraq and so forth?
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Walter Russell Mead
Well, you know, how, again, how the war works out, we can't say. But I do think that this will underscore in the minds, let me put this. When Trump and Vance and Rubio are making these attacks their targets, you know, we should think about what they're trying to do and why they're trying to do it. I think they are probably less interested in getting military help from the Europeans than they are in scoring various political points. So they want to make this look like an America first war. If they sort of took the position of, well, now that we're at war, NATO's really important and our European friends are so wonderful and so on. To a lot of MAGA people, this would sound like confirmation that the war was a terrible idea and that Trump was slipping. So accompanying the war with a lot of America first and Europe bashing rhetoric probably makes it go over better in MAGA world than anything else. And for Trump, that's important. I think for Rubio, it's also important Rubio. Clearly nothing has formally been decided, but Rubio and Vance are by far and away the two possible leading candidates for the Trump succession in the Republican Party. And Rubio, he's already got the moderate Republican vote kind of locked up to the extent anyone does. So bashing Europe is not a bad move for somebody who might want to be competing with Vance on the scale and of course for Vance also bashing Europe, it's what he does. And I think that probably has more to do with why they're doing this than anything else. Now, I think it is true that in fact, Europe actually that what the United States is doing in Iran, if it works, would be very much in Europe's interest, that is to say, removing the ability of a fanatical, blackmailing, terror sponsoring regime to strangle the world economy at will. And so there's a case to be made that the Europeans should be helping the United States. And it's also true, I think, that from the standpoint of Europe selling its value as allies to the United States, this is an opportunity. And that's generally speaking, when you have a friend who's in trouble, that's a really good time to offer your friends some support and some help, regardless of the current state of the relationship. It's just good common sense. But that's very hard for politicians in Democratic countries to do when public opinion, and let me state this very carefully and in a limited way, loathes, hates and despises Donald Trump pretty much from Istanbul to Hammerfest in Norway. I mean, the whole length and sweep of Europe. And so any politician who sends minesweepers or military aid to Trump at this point really puts themselves out on a limb. And people, a lot of leaders have looked at Trump over the years and what they realize is like, he's nice to you in the moment, that he needs you, but if you help him Tuesday, that does not mean he's going to turn around and help you Thursday. He will kick you in the face on Thursday if he thinks it does any good. So Trump has created a situation for himself in which people who probably should be helping him are afraid to help him because of outraged public opinion. Now, I do think that the long term costs for Europe could be high here in that Americans, including People who are not Maga. Americans will remember that Europe in America's hour of need was nowhere to be seen. And that's, that's not great. But again, the Europeans would say, hey, look, your stupid war in Iraq, we ultimately tried to help you there. Your stupid war in Afghanistan, we really, you know, we took casualties. We did a lot for you. What gratitude for any of this has Donald Trump shown Europe? And the answer, frankly, has to be less than zero. And so there is, I think, a lesson here that if you behave like a jerk and a bully, should you ever find that you need friends, they, they may be hard to find. Now, again, it's more complicated than this. This is the kind of simple morality play version of it. Europe had, as we've talked about on this program for years, the Europeans have been kind of sitting passively while their economies lost ground in the, in the world, while their militaries became more and more irrelevant, while a set of very, very destructive ideas became, you know, ranging from we don't need no stinking nuclear energy plants to we don't need no stinking computers, you know, took a we don't need to digitize. Our economy really kind of took hold in Europe. And that's really bad for the United States. It's really bad for Europe. So, yes, some, so some of Trump's bullying we can see as necessary shock therapy even. So here we are. Here we are.
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Jeremy Stern
All right, so let's move into talking about your big idea for from yesterday, which is that Donald Trump should seriously consider trying to obtain a Declaration of War from Congress for the first time in 80 years. 85 years. Can you explain this idea a little more and why you think it's important?
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Walter Russell Mead
Okay, well, first of all, you have just killed my motivation for writing because I didn't actually in that article recommend that Donald Trump get a Declaration of War. What I did was say I can see some circumstances arising in which to Donald Trump, that would look like a smart move. And I can see that now everybody in the world is going to forever say, oh, that Mead, he was the guy that wanted Trump to declare war on Iran. I should just give it up. There's no point in writing.
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Jeremy Stern
You could just blame the Los Angeles public school system, who are the ones who taught me how to read.
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Walter Russell Mead
I have said over the years to a couple of my students that if they wanted to sue their local school systems for educational malpractice, I was prepared to speak as a witness for the plaintiff. Okay, so. So I did not actually recommend it, but what I did say was that there are a lot of advantages to an American president in war by having a congressional declaration. And just to focus on some of the ones that might make this particularly attractive to Trump, a declaration of war would largely restore the authority over tariffs that he lost in the Supreme Court. It gives you much greater powers to deport non citizens who you might even think might be a threat. It gives you, I mean, Woodrow Wilson jailed political opponents, censored the news, FDR censored the news, interned the Japanese Americans, even under just insurrection powers, which are similar to war powers. Abraham Lincoln had 300 newspaper editors jailed, and he was actually able to banish a congressman to Canada. I can certainly see Donald Trump having a list of people he'd like to banish to Canada. And those tools exist partly because American public opinion really matters to the country's ability to prosecute a long war, because, you know, an anti war movement that gets ground and gets footing can ultimately stop the United, you know, break our political will to fight. And so that's. So one of the reasons that presidential war powers are so strong is in order to kind of cement the nation's will to fight. So I could see this becoming attractive for Trump. And it also gives him tremendous power over the domestic economy. Now, you do get a certain power to censor news. I'm no lawyer, but, you know, I've looked at it. I've read a congressional research report on this subject, and that's what they say. You can get a lot of control over transportation facilities. I think getting ice permanently into airports would be the easiest thing in the world under war powers. So getting a congressional majority in both houses for a declaration of war against Iran, it's also a signal to Iran and everybody else the United States is serious about the war, I think helps him prosecute the war abroad and strengthens his hand domestically and gives him a lot of the powers he's wanted, but hasn't really been able to gain and hold. So I do think that this may be a direction we could see Trump go in. If the war drags on now, he'd have problems. You need a majority in both houses, and I'm sure there'd be some Republicans who would vote against, but there might be a few Democrats who would vote for. In any case, from Trump's point of view, if the stupid Congress is so unpatriotic as not to let you have, for the first time in American history, to refuse a request for president for a declaration of war, well, he's got an excuse for whatever happens in Iran. He's got somebody to blame for why he may not have achieved certain objectives. And the whole fight is probably one he would enjoy politically. Of his opponents voting against a declaration of war against a country which is at that time killing American troops, attacking American interests, and having death to America demonstrations in the street.
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Jeremy Stern
And then one final follow up to return to my illiterate question at the beginning, how likely do you think this is and if it did happen, do you think this would be a good or a bad way to prosecute the war and for Trump to kind of finish out his term?
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Walter Russell Mead
Well, I think for Trump it might be a great way to finish out his term. I myself, if we were going to have a president with those war powers, I would rather it be someone else and my feeling about. And so I would be very much torn. I think we do need to clear the Strait of Hormuz if at all possible. I think we really. I think it would be worse for the United States and worse for world peace than many people understand if we were not able to achieve some basic objectives in the war. And of course, if there were to be regime change in Tehran, it would be a tremendous blessing, not that I have any read into how likely that would be. So I myself would be really quite torn between wanting to put every tool needed into the hand of somebody who's fighting a war that we probably should win. However poorly organized it was or poorly timed it was, or anything else like that, once we're in it, I really do think we should try to win it. But then on the other hand, you know, the question of what happens with these authorities and how are they going to be used if somebody like FDR could lock up all the Japanese inter. All the Japanese Americans and have it, by the way, upheld by the courts, what would Donald Trump do with this authority so very tough? Now, there might be ways that Congress could craft a war declaration that would limit some, though probably not all, of these powers. And so it might be that you could hammer out some kind of a declaration that would avoid at least some of the pitfalls. But we've elected Donald Trump President of the United States. You know, that was. We did that, and we did that after already having him for one term. We brought him back for a second term. So here we are.
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Jeremy Stern
All right, that does it for the news and the conversation this week. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter, give us your picks for the best and worst wartime president in American history.
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Walter Russell Mead
Well, you know, best. We're going to count the Civil War as a war, and I suppose we probably should. I don't think you can do. I don't think anybody deserves more credit than Abraham Lincoln. I mean, his first couple of years as a general selector were pretty bad. He started the war really knowing nothing about war, but he did come up a learning curve. And obviously by the end, he was doing pretty intelligently about choosing generals. And on the politics of the war, he was also, I think it was a genius from a political point of view of working in the beginning. His vision was that Southern Unionism was a strong enough force that if you agreed to sort of refrain from things like emancipation of the slaves and so on, you might be able to stitch the Union back together without a big war. But even if you didn't do that, it would help you hold the border states, particularly Kentucky, until your military was so strong that they couldn't get away. And he did that, and then he switched gears when it was time to do that. So, you know, pretty darn good, I have to say. You know, but obviously fdr, who I think gets not nearly enough credit for his strategic leadership in World War II, I think there's going to be controversial. I'm sure some people are going to hate me. I do think he was a better war strategist than Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was an infinitely more inspiring speaker about war and persuasion. You know, literally, his speeches in 1940, 41 saved Britain. However, in general, his military decisions did not, with maybe a couple of exceptions. Roosevelt made a lot of very important and very good choices, not least of which was naming Eisenhower to be the supreme commander in Europe. Worst war leaders.
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Jeremy Stern
We've been kind of more competition.
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Walter Russell Mead
We've been kind of lucky. You know, if I'm thinking of declared wars, we've been kind of lucky in our presidency. Lyndon Johnson's conduct of the Vietnam War, I think was poor. It was one of these cases where even more than from conviction, he was driven by political fear in the sort of the Republican attacks over who lost China after 1949 left a lot of Democrats burned and scarred with the idea that you can't have a who lost South Vietnam election. And so Johnson, you end up with a war that is being done in part to avoid political embarrassment for president. That's not a great reason for that. And I think also the sort of the method of gradual escalation, the sort of stories about Johnson hand picking, what are we going to bomb, what are we not going to bomb? This sort of thing is both at the strategic level and the tactical level. I think he misplayed it. And obviously politically he didn't do very well. So you have that. Otherwise, we've generally won a pretty fair share of wars. So I would have to say that Johnson really, to me, kind of stands out a lot. Also, just the sheer size of it, you know, half a million troops in Vietnam. I mean, how deep can you, can you get yourself into a quagmire?
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Jeremy Stern
All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Vitanav 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
Sam.