Can the US Air Force bust Matt’s studio bunker?

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more.

Hey, folks, don't worry, Matt Bevan is on his way, but I'm Erin Park, and I just wanted to tell you about my new podcast.

It's called Expanse, Nowhere Man.

It's about how in 1999, a young American wandered into one of Australia's deadliest deserts with barely any food and water on purpose, triggering a media storm and one of the biggest searches Australia had had ever seen.

Stick around at the end of this episode of If You're Listening to hear a taste of this wild yarn.

G'day, Matt Bevan here.

I spent most of my weekend out in the yard.

A ponytail palm had been pushing over a rather important retaining wall and I had to spend my time digging it out, digging out the entire rest of the dirt behind the wall and pushing it all back into place.

While I was doing this, I was semi-surprised to hear that the United States had dropped a number of very large bombs on Iran, inserting itself into what we are currently calling the Israel-Iran war, despite Donald Trump saying just hours earlier that he was going to spend two weeks thinking about it.

The bombs they dropped managed to destroy, or at least severely damage, a nuclear facility buried 90 meters underground, which does kind of make my basement bunker superfluous.

It also is particularly impressive to me given how hard I found it to dig out one metre of retaining wall dirt.

So, war with Iran.

Friend of the show, Dr.

Emma Shortis, is here to talk about it and answer some questions listeners have sent in.

She is the director of the Australia Institute's International and Security Affairs Program and the host of the podcast and book, After America.

G'day, Emma.

Hi, Matt.

I was digging for hours and hours and hours.

I spent two of the hours that I was digging listening to the interview between Ted Cruz and Tucker Tucker Carlson that made so many headlines last week.

It was fascinating, to be honest, because the two of them are in kind of a constant two-hour debate about who loves Donald Trump more and who is more in line with Donald Trump's policies.

But also clearly they are very

different points of view on what Trump's policies should be.

Ted wants to drop as many bombs as possible on Iran and Tucker wants nothing to do with it.

We've had an email from Atticus who asks: what was the motivation of the Trump administration to engage with Iran?

A lot of what Trump has done has aligned with Russia's agenda and the Yalta theory that the U.S., China, and Russia should all stick to their own spheres of influence.

That is certainly Tucker's position, but it seems like Donald Trump has gone with Ted's position.

Why do you think that is?

It does seem that Trump has gone with Ted's position.

Beautiful Ted.

Formerly Lion Ted.

Lion Ted.

Now beautiful Ted.

I mean, I think we can see that in the statements coming out of Russia, which have quite strongly condemned what the Trump administration is doing in Iran.

The Iranian, correct me if I'm wrong, the foreign minister is travelling, if not, has already arrived in Russia for meetings there.

So Trump is certainly...

pushing the Iranians closer into that alliance with Russia that suggests, you know, he's not aligned with the Tucker-Carlson position.

And I think, Matt, that's always been the case.

You know, Trump did assemble this kind of motley coalition of the right wing in the United States, a section of which is genuinely anti-war in the Tucker-Carlson school of there is no, you know, there's no argument for the United States being involved in foreign wars like this.

You know, Iraq was a mistake.

And Trump appealed to that part of the base, you know, through his anti-war campaigning, through saying that the Iraq war was a mistake, for example, which very few people on the conservative side of U.S.

politics were willing to do when Trump first came to prominence.

That was part of what set him apart.

Well, Tucker was very much in favor of the Iraq war at the time and now says he was wrong.

Whereas Ted claims that he was always against the whole war and all that kind of thing.

But mind you, Ted was

a Texas attorney at the time and didn't have a lot of influence over that kind of thing.

To be honest, I also kind of bought into the idea that Donald Trump didn't want to get involved in foreign wars, not necessarily from any sort of an ideological point of view, but because he kind of didn't,

it seems like a lot of work and it doesn't

play well.

It doesn't play well, people don't really like it.

You know, he had opportunities in his first administration to get involved in foreign wars and didn't,

including in Iran.

And

so why is he doing it this way this time?

What do you think, Emma?

Well, I think there are a number of things going on.

I think the

the mistake we can make with Trump is assuming that he is anti-war when there is a little bit of nuance there.

He's not anti-war.

He's anti-losing wars.

So he's anti-certain types of wars and certain types of people dying in them.

The difference was always going to be whether Trump could be convinced that he could win a war.

And of course, he thinks he can win anything.

You know, I alone can fix it.

Like, he's the guy who can win.

And so I think there was always that possibility that he could be talked into some kind of intervention.

And I think alongside that, we have to understand just how much Trump loves violence.

You know, he's the UFC president.

He loves displays of violence.

He relishes descriptions of violence.

You just have to listen to the way he talks about blood in particular.

And then, you know, think back to his first administration and the way he really relished talking about dropping the so-called mother of all bombs on Afghanistan.

You know, he loves those displays of like hyper-masculine military power.

And

with Iran and the context of the United States unqualified support for Israel, for example,

with all the people walking around Washington, D.C.

who have wanted to pursue regime change in Iran really since 1979, since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, that has all coalesced into pushing Trump into this position.

position.

Did Benjamin Netanyahu kind of create the perfect circumstance for Donald Trump to get involved in a war like this?

Benjamin Netanyahu, who has managed to wipe out most of Iran's air defense systems, a lot of Iran's ability to fight back against air attacks?

Do you think that...

It was just a perfectly created scenario by Benjamin Netanyahu,

who knows Trump and knows what makes Trump tick.

I think absolutely, Matt, I think you've nailed it.

I think Netanyahu played Trump like almost nobody else can.

You know, he sees clearly who he is.

And, you know, Netanyahu has been pushing for U.S.

support for intervention in Iran for decades.

You know, he was going before Congress in the 90s saying that Iran was a month away from developing a nuclear weapon and that the United States needed to go in.

You know, the presidents before Trump always resisted that, always said no no for very good reasons.

And Netanyahu has now found himself in a position where he has a willing president.

And that's not just Trump.

You know, I think Netanyahu recognises there are people in the Trump administration who

were always going to support that kind of intervention.

You know, J.D.

Vance in particular, who also has styled himself as an anti-war candidate,

I saw him speak in Washington in May before Trump picked him as vice president, and his whole speech was about how

the American middle class, by which he meant the white American middle class, supports Israel out of a religious devotion, a belief that

the way he put it was that their Savior

died and was raised again in Israel.

That's the depth of the religious fervor going on there that we can't necessarily see.

Aaron Powell, that's also something that Ted Cruz was talking about in his interview, saying that he, you know, that we are, we, as Christians, are

instructed to support Israel by the book of Genesis, which is, you know, an extraordinary point of view.

And honestly,

the one you were describing there is the one that I'm familiar with in terms of the reasoning behind the massive support for Israel among evangelicals.

It was an interesting one to be applying.

Genesis to that kind of thing.

It hence obviously caused Ted Cruz to cop a fair bit of criticism, to be honest, over that whole thing.

So yeah, yeah, it's a perfect confluence of events, really, which kind of pulls me into a question from Inari, who asks, for those of us who are too young to remember the Bush era, can we have a recap and a comparison to,

I guess, specifically 2003?

Because obviously everybody in Australia and in the countries that followed the United States into the Iraq war will be wondering whether that's what's about to happen here.

Do you think that there's something different about this in terms of the attitude in the United States to get involved in a ground war in Iran?

I both do and I don't, Matt.

I don't know about you, but it does, I mean, it does feel eerily like 2003.

You know, like I almost woke up thinking I was going to wag school to go to an anti-war protest.

Unfortunately, I'm a long way from high school now, but it does feel eerily similar.

Wagging work to go to.

Yeah.

I think it's part of the job description now.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it is eerily similar.

You know, there are very similar arguments being made about the threat of an imminent attack on Israel and the United States, you know, noise being made about weapons of mass destruction and, you know, that that's the need to go in

to Iran.

But there are also some major differences.

So the Bush administration made those same arguments.

It used intelligence or deployed, I guess, intelligence to support the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

And the Trump administration is sort of doing that, but it's also dropped any pretense at

gathering international support or complying with the principles of international law.

So, you know, in 2003, Colin Powell went before the UN.

He had a whole presentation.

You know, he had boards and charts and things to convince the world that going into Iraq was entirely necessary.

The Trump administration is not bothering with any of that.

It didn't brief anyone's lies.

It was months and months and months of international debate over it that led to it.

It was almost all of 2003 was...

you know, it was going through the Senate and it was going through the House and it was, yeah, they were going to the UN.

Yeah.

And I think importantly in the US context, there was a concerted effort to build public support for that intervention with the US population in particular.

That hasn't happened this time.

You know, there is, I think, a general concern about Iran in the United States that's been built up over a number of decades, but there hasn't been the PR campaign that happened around Iraq.

And that's reflected in public sentiment.

So a YouGov poll done just in the last couple of days suggests that 60% of Americans are against the United States, you know, going into this war with Iran.

And so how that plays out publicly, especially given what we were talking about earlier in terms of Trump framing himself as the anti-war guy, how that plays out publicly in the United States, I think, is something really important to watch.

Charlie, who is 13.

has sent an email asking, how is this going to reshape the geopolitical configuration in the Middle East?

And what would be its ramifications on international security and Australian foreign policy?

I mean, we'll start with the Middle East, I suppose.

But has this already massively changed the power dynamic in the Middle East when it comes to these

countries?

I think I'm going to hedge a bit, Matt, and say I think it's probably too early to answer that question.

You know, I think the Trump administration has come out and said that those facilities have been,

I think they use the word obliterated.

Pete Hagseth might have used that word.

Again, I think we've got to be sceptical about that.

We just don't know the extent of how successful this has been.

And because we also don't know what the benchmarks of success are.

We don't know

what the end game is here.

And so answering that question is...

But also,

there's nothing stopping them from just doing it again.

If it turns out that these plants are actually still operational, then they'll go, okay, we'll just drop.

16 bombs on them rather than six.

Yeah, absolutely.

Clearly,

I mean, I would have thought that eventually they're going to manage to disable these three facilities in particular.

So,

I mean, that sets back Iran a fair bit, clearly.

I mean, I think it does in terms of the uranium enrichment facilities, in terms of the stability of the Iranian regime.

I think this will probably have flow-in effects.

But of course, you know, as many experts on Iran have...

outlined, you know, there isn't a,

I guess, coordinated opposition to that regime ready to step in and create stability.

You know, the instability that would result from the toppling of the regime or even further attacks is really quite dangerous for the region because of the potential for that to spill out into the region.

And I think that instability is perhaps the most dangerous thing because Israel has successfully, you know, attacks on Hezbollah, attacks on Hamas, attacks on the Iranian regime, of course, may set those organizations back, but what they don't do is

create the conditions for stability and diplomacy and peace building.

What they do is continue to radicalize generations of people in those countries who are responding to their lived reality.

So none of that creates the conditions for peace.

It creates the conditions for further instability and further insecurity, making

the geopolitical

reality of that that region also very unstable and very unpredictable.

And I think, you know, that's the other thing that I would say about this is that,

you know, around American intervention in the Middle East, there's so much certainty from punditry.

You know, people will tell you exactly what's going to happen.

And the reality is we just do not know what is going to happen or how it will play out or what that instability or, you know, the choices of particular individuals will create.

And so, you know, we should be skeptical of anybody telling us with certainty what's going to happen, which I know is a very unsatisfactory answer, but I think it's worth restating.

Yeah.

Well, let's talk about just finally something that we have a bit more insight into and more control over,

which is Australia's response to this kind of thing.

Last week, obviously, we were talking about

the

precarious position that the AUKUS partnership appears to be in, with Donald Trump ordering a review of of the AUKUS partnership and

a lot of voices calling for Australia to find a way to pull out of the AUKUS partnership.

So far, the government doesn't seem to be interested in treading that because they have no clear alternative in terms of long-term defensive strategy, as far as we have been able to see.

If this does escalate, and if this does lead to the United States going, okay, we actually need to get further involved in this situation in Iran, Does Australia's situation where we kind of, well, clearly heavily rely on the United States at the moment for both our current and future

defence,

does it box us into a situation where we need to follow them again?

Unfortunately,

I think it does, Matt.

You know, Australia has a long history of following the United States into pretty much every war it has fought since the Second World War, no matter where and no matter why and no matter who's in charge.

And the Australian government, at least in the initial or in the last few days, hasn't done anything that I can see to change that status quo.

And I think it was really striking that the Foreign Minister Penny Wong was asked just today as we were recording, you know, whether there had been a request from the United States for support or for troops to be committed.

And Wong

rightly said that no request had been made and she wasn't going to speculate about that.

And of course, that is the right answer.

But if you look at the history of Australia's involvement with the United States, we've often committed troops to American conflicts before being asked, before any request was being made, on the basis that

we need to shore up that security guarantee that

you were alluding to from the United States.

If we support those conflicts, then the United States will continue to provide us with security.

That's an incredibly dangerous situation for Australia to be in because, just like the United States, the momentum is always towards involvement in those interventions.

And Australia is already implicated, it has to be said, in that conflict through our integration into the U.S.

military-industrial complex, through Pine Gap, through Tyndall, for example, where B-52s, American B-52s can refuel.

So, you know, we're already implicated.

And that means saying no to Australian involvement in any conflict that the United States is involved in is actually a very difficult thing to do.

And Australia doesn't have a history of doing that.

So that's not to say that anything is inevitable.

I think the Australian government would rightly be very reluctant to become involved in this conflict because it is so dangerous.

But the statements of support for US actions that have come out of the Australian Government today and from other traditional allies of the United States

don't bode well, I think, for any real pushback on what the United States is doing.

Aaron Powell, I guess the other possibility is that Donald Trump just may never ask.

Donald Trump isn't really in the business of building alliances at the moment and doesn't particularly care about international support for what he's doing, as opposed to the Bush administration, which was keenly looking for other countries to give them legitimacy in their invasions in the Middle East.

Yeah, well, I mean, looking for partners to go looking for a coalition of the willing.

I can't imagine that Donald Trump is that interested in that.

But as you say, there may be a situation where we offer our support preemptively.

Okay, interesting.

Well, look, much like our conversation last week, I'm sure this will be dated by about 48 hours from now because of the speed in which things are moving.

But it's been a very enjoyable conversation.

Thank you so much, Emma, for giving us more of your time and coming back to answer more of our questions.

It's always a pleasure, Matt.

Anytime.

This episode was produced by Kara Jensen-McKinnon and Cinnamon Nipart.

We'll be back on Thursday looking at how military tactics used by Ukraine and Israel in the last month might have made quite a lot of defense technology obsolete.

I'll catch you then.

It's August 1999 and something strange is happening in the Australian Outback.

When I got there was just organised chaos.

It's one of the most extensive searches ever mounted in the great sandy desert.

A well-to-do young American has dumped his belongings and walked out into the great sandy desert.

A white guy from America, what hope has he got?

They'll be looking for a body.

He sent a postcard to his parents in America just saying, I'm heading into the desert.

Goodbye.

Triggering a media sensation and one of the biggest searches Australia had ever seen.

Once the Americans arrived, it became a lot more bizarre.

We really need to be what we call sempra gumby, always flexible.

He insisted that people use his radio handle, gunslinger.

Are you taking the piss?

But there's one problem that no one's got an answer for.

How do you search for someone who doesn't want to be found?

I felt it was his choice to choose not to come out of the desert.

I knew he couldn't be content with living a life unless he did this.

My name is Erin Park, and I've been obsessed with this story for years.

And I'm not the only one.

Why would a fit, intelligent young man with everything to live for plunge into one of the deadliest landscapes in Australia on purpose?

It's very easy to dismiss it as crazy, but I think when you dive deeper into it, you see that it's not crazy.

It's a story spanning three decades, two continents and some strange encounters.

I really don't know how I started off in the desert.

in northern Australia looking into this and now I'm in bloody Alaska looking for a porcupine.

Every little thread was even more glittery and sparkly and fascinating and quick.

And it polarised opinions the world over.

Were his actions selfish or inspired?

The backlash was pretty fierce.

And it turns out this desert where Robert Berguki went missing is keeping other secrets.

What Robert Berguki did here is just the tip of the iceberg.

We've got a lot of people missing.

It remains a mystery, you know?

At a time when so many of us feel lost, what's the most extreme thing you do to feel found?

The idea of being out here alone scares the hell out of me.

I ain't no Robert Baguki, that's for sure.

And at what cost?

Death will come, and I'll be ready for it.

This is season five of Expanse, Nowhere Man.

Find it on the ABC Listen app and all the usual places.