Trump Goes to War With Iran

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World on Tom Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

And we are recording a bonus episode on Sunday, June 22nd at about 1 p.m.

Pacific time to discuss the fact that the United States is now at war with Iran.

Last night, the U.S.

military dropped a dozen 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs on the Fordo nuclear site.

We dropped two bunker buster bombs on the Natanz nuclear site, and a Navy sub fired about 30 cruise missiles at Natans and Isfahan to other Iranian nuclear sites.

The total operation involved about 125 military aircraft.

They dropped 75 munitions total, so this is a pretty serious military mission.

Ben, here's a clip of President Trump talking about what happened in a brief speech last night.

Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success.

Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.

Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.

If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.

I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.

And we've gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel.

There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days.

Remember, there are many targets left.

So an ominous ending there, Ben.

So despite Trump's bravado, his national security team is not arguing that Iran's nuclear facilities facilities were totally obliterated, like he said there.

J.D.

Vance said this morning on Meet the Press that Iran's program was, quote, substantially delayed.

In other words, the problem was not permanently solved by bombing, as everyone said before they decided to bomb.

Just a little more background to what happened.

So as listeners know, Israel started this attack on Iran several days ago and did so knowing that they did not have the military capability to take out the Fordo site in particular, which is buried deep into the side of a mountain.

For that, it is assumed that you need these massive U.S.-owned and made bunker buster bombs.

And the U.S.

is also the only country in the world that has the planes that can deliver them.

So, Netanyahu knew that to quote-unquote finish the job, he would have to draw us into this war.

Now, I guess we'll find out if they worked and if Fordo is destroyed, Ben.

But very troublingly, I'm also starting to see background quotes about the need to have boots on the ground in Iran to verify that their program has been destroyed.

So, that would be a pretty massive commando kind of operation that, you know, you can assume the Israelis would rather that those be American boots.

Let's just leave it there.

So, another important question, Ben, is just whether Iran has moved any of its stockpile of enriched uranium out of these facilities before the Israeli and U.S.

bombing campaigns began.

We don't know the answer.

Certainly, something U.S.

and Israeli intelligence would have been watching closely, will be watching closely.

Ben, just lastly, I think it's worth pointing out that even this

really historic, massive, scary mission was well short of the full Pentagon plan to destroy Iran's nuclear program.

This is a quote from Politico.

The Pentagon assessed this year that the U.S.

military would need to do 30 days of sustained strikes to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities owing to their underground depth and spread out layout.

So it looks like this operation was just significantly short of that.

So anyway, let's just pause there.

get your reaction to what happened, and then we can get into what might happen next.

Well, I mean, it goes without saying that I think this was totally unnecessary, that there was no imminent threat from the Iranian nuclear program.

Nothing had changed materially from a few weeks ago, other than Israel,

you know, disrupting Trump's own diplomacy and beginning to bomb Iran and demanding that Trump come in.

So if he and Netanyahu are a team,

Netanyahu is definitely the coach in that equation.

Trump, by the way, didn't sound his best.

He's kind of heavy-breathing and

didn't look that good.

But I mean, in terms of the strike itself and we'll get into all the ramifications of things that could come out of it uh it should be noted that for duh is buried by design deep deep underground and so actually there may not be a way beyond kind of intelligence to determine the levels of destruction there um to determine whether or not any stockpile was moved to determine what might still be operational deep underground and that's where you get into these questions about boots on the ground, which obviously would be a major escalation if it's U.S.

or Israeli troops.

Unlikely that that you're going to get inspectors in there, and I should say that with the JCPOA, the Iran deal, you would have had, you know, not that you would have had them with U.S.

bombs dropping on them, but you would have had access to these sites to see what was going on.

So there's a lot of uncertainty here, and we may not get total certainty.

And we can't really trust what's coming out of the U.S.

government because the Director of National Intelligence changed the U.S.

assessment of Iran's nuclear program after she was commanded to by Donald Trump.

She went from saying this could be up to three years to saying it could be three weeks, I think, for Iran to get a nuclear weapon.

And also they've been repeatedly lying publicly then, which they then come back and say was all just a big ploy to deceive the Iranians.

But in practice, they've just been lying to the American people.

Everything's been a lie.

I mean, what they've said, I mean, and this really bears emphasis because we are so far down the rabbit hole with Trump here that this is making the pre-Iraq war Bush administration look responsible by comparison.

And they were lying as well.

I mean, they're just making up intelligence assessments with no evidentiary basis.

They're not even bothering to put out cooked intelligence.

They're just making stuff up.

We can get into the international piece of this, but Trump did say that there was going to be this two-week pause to explore diplomacy and offer Iran an off-ramp.

And actually, a bunch of European foreign ministers took him up on that.

And we're literally meeting with their Iranian counterpart in Europe like a couple of days ago.

David Lammy, who's been on this podcast, went out and said he met with J.D.

Vance and Marco Rubio, and they assured him that there was a diplomatic opening that needed to be taken.

So

they're lying about the nuclear program.

They lied about the timeline for their own strikes.

How can we believe anything that they tell us?

Trump lied to the world about obliterating the sites.

Not even his own surrogates and lackeys will back that one up.

So it's part of what is, there's so many things that are uncertain about this.

And the worst one is that these bombs dropped on Iran without needing to be.

But one of the things that's really disconcerting is we just can't believe anything that these people tell us about really significant matters of war and peace, and neither can the world, and neither can the Iranians, who thought that they were in a diplomatic negotiation with Steve Witkoff just a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, I think what's important to just keep in mind in the kind of early days after an operation like this is that the U.S.

military can and will win any single battle that they are asked to fight, right?

There's no one that can compete with the U.S.

military, and I'd include Russia and China there.

But where we have struggled as a country and as a military is the long game.

It's like, it's not about winning battles.

It's about winning wars.

And that is often because our strategy isn't clear.

And that is once again the case here.

Like, is our goal to degrade or push back Iran's nuclear program?

Is it to eliminate it entirely?

Are we focused on the ballistic missile program and the proxy forces?

Because those were the things the Republicans always said were not part of the JCPOA and which made it such a bad deal.

What happens, Ben, if the Israelis keep pushing for regime change?

Are we going to back them there?

And then, like, again, even bigger picture, like, and we've talked about this on the show, like, we are just fully entering this might as right, like, rogue state era.

And, like, I'm not naive.

And I know that the United States often has done whatever it wants.

But at least, as you were saying a minute ago, like, in the run-up to the Iraq war, the administration tried to persuade the world and the American people about the intelligence case for WMD in Iraq.

Now, they were wrong and they lied, but they made a case.

There was a vote in Congress.

They went to the UN.

There was an act

to persuade the UN.

Right.

Trump is like completely just done away with that.

Like their message is quite literally, who cares what the intelligence says?

We're doing what our gut tells us.

Like we don't care if it's legal or constitutional or what the rest of the world thinks.

Might as right.

And like, okay, that's fine, I guess, in the near term, but you know, we're not going to love it when the Chinese or the Russians continue to operate that way as well.

Right.

I mean, so any sort of like international order or norms or institutions that are supposed to keep us safe are just like completely tossed out the window.

Yeah, I mean, they're gone.

And the reality is,

look, let's bring Israel into this too.

I don't believe what they're saying either.

I mean, and actually, they said contradictory things too, because the assessments of their strikes before Trump took this strike is that actually maybe they'd only set the nuclear program back about six months because they can't get at Fordo, because they can't destroy these deep underground sites.

But then the Israeli foreign minister was out there saying before Trump took this strike that they'd set it back two years

with the basis for why that is.

And by the way, someone who used to be in the U.S.

government, like, I don't know where he gets that number from because the Iranians know how to do the nuclear fuel cycle.

If they have any fuel and any centrifuges, it's a lot less than two years.

If they have that down in a tunnel, if they have that underground, it doesn't take a lot of nuclear fuel and a few centrifuges for them to weaponize that.

And so I don't believe what the Israelis are saying about this.

I don't believe what our own government is saying about this.

I'm sure the Europeans, and we can get to their response, which has been a little bizarre,

but been pathetic, I'll just say it.

But they got put out on a limb by Trump, and he saw it off the limb, whether like having diplomacy is kind of a facade for the U.S.

to take this shot at the Iranians.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which verifies nuclear programs, they're obviously been cut out of the loop.

There's just nobody in the loop except for Trump and his kind of lackeys around him.

By the way, who we should also add, do you have a lot of confidence in what Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard telling you?

So we've got Israel, the Israeli government of Bibi Nanyao and the American government of Donald Trump, no allies in that tent, right?

I mean, the Iran nuclear deal, we had all the Europeans and Russia and China in the tent.

No UN system, no legal basis for what they're doing.

So it's real rogue state stuff.

And even, and because I've got, yeah, I'm sure like Utah, I may have have got people, you know, all over my mentions, probably half of whom are bots, you know, telling me about what a great thing this is.

Telling me that I love terrorists.

But those people don't even know what just happened.

And those bots don't even know.

Like, what are the, because the Iranians could conclude from this that North Korea, you know, made the right move by going underground in covert and just popping up with nuclear weapons and nobody's bombing them.

And again, what is so difficult to process, and we'll get to the U.S.

politics in this, and we've said this, but it bears repeating, The negative consequences don't necessarily show up the next day.

We can talk about whether they attack U.S.

troops, but let's put that aside.

Let's envision that the Iranians don't take a shot that

harms U.S.

service members.

And we obviously hope that that's the case or there's not some terrorist attack.

But they could pop up in two years with a nuclear weapon because this happened.

And let's not like, like, that's the whole reason that you want diplomacy and a verifiable mechanism with inspectors.

If this thing goes sideways, if it there is to the international piece, if there is like further instability in the Middle East, if there are efforts to disrupt the global economy, if there are attacks on Gulf states, if there are

U.S.

troops that have to go in Iran, that's when you're going to want allies.

That's when you're going to want friends.

And I think Trump doesn't realize it.

You may not feel like he needs friends now, but when you need them, they're not going to be there.

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So, let's talk about how Iran might respond in sort of the short term, and then let's get to the long term.

So, short term, a lot of the possible steps you're seeing speculated about are Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, which, for those who don't know, is a very narrow passage connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman.

It's right off the Iranian coast.

And at its narrowest point, I think it's about 21 miles wide with a far narrower shipping channel that's like two miles wide.

So very narrow choke point where you have about 20% of the world's oil flowing through it.

And that's not just critical for the Iranians to get their oil in and out.

It's key for the UAE, the Saudis, like all these sort of Gulf oil producers.

So if Iran were to close the Strait of Hormuz for any extended period of time, you would likely see a massive spike in oil prices.

And then obviously that would also more likely lead to a direct conflict between the U.S.

Navy and the Iranian Navy that was attempting to shut down the strait.

So that would be a big deal.

They could also just try to mine it or just kind of like slow things down in the strait, but it would be a pretty big escalation.

The other thing you're seeing talked about a lot is whether Iran might use proxies to retaliate.

They have Shia militia groups that they support in lots of places like Lebanon and Iraq.

They could attack U.S.

military or diplomatic facilities.

And the thing I was thinking about, like there are still Americans in Iran because they live there, because they're dual citizens, because just where their lives are.

I mean, you could see them getting rounded up in some sort of scary way.

There were reports last night of the U.S.

monitoring Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S.

I don't know how real that threat is.

It's not my biggest point of concern.

I worry a little more about, you know, attacks on Americans overseas, but obviously, like, that came out of the U.S.

government, that leak.

So it's something they're thinking about.

There could be a cyber element where they launched some sort of cyber attack on the U.S.

in some way, or they could just, you know, go hard at Israel.

All options are on the table here.

I mean, we do have one critical data point to look at for precedent, which was on January 3rd, 2020, Trump had Qasem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC, assassinated.

And then on January 8th, five days after that Soleimani strike, Iran launched 12 ballistic missiles at a U.S.

base in western Iraq.

Now, like only by the grace of God was no one killed, but I think 100 service members had traumatic brain injuries.

And Trump, after that happened, decided to de-escalate and not respond.

But, you know, in that moment, if Iran had killed some U.S.

service member, like we would have been drawn into something much, much bigger.

And so all those options are on the table here.

So this idea that we bombed Iran's nuclear facilities and now it's over, it's like, unfortunately, Iran has a say in the matter of when this ends.

That's right.

And you covered a lot of the short-term attacks that they could launch on U.S.

personnel, the mining of the Straits of Hormuz to disrupt the global economy, the terrorist attack that might not come tomorrow or next week, right?

But whether it's potential sleeper cells in the U.S., and I'm not sure about that, whether it's attacks on Americans or Israelis around the world, that's something that could happen on a longer timeline as well.

There could be attacks, if they just decide to go all out kind of nihilist, they could just start attacking

Saudi oil fields, right?

Not to attack the Saudis, but just to be arsonists, right?

And that's actually probably why the Gulf states have been

not exactly supportive of this step.

So they have a lot of different options.

Cyber attacks as well, they'll almost certainly try to take.

But the reality is, these are all short-term things that could escalate.

To your point, if it does ratchet up, the pressure on Trump will be to take some further shots inside of Iran.

The same people that pressured him in doing this strike will pressure him to kind of go further and maybe go all the way to to regime change.

We also don't know what the Israelis are going to do.

Are the Israelis going to pause?

Or are the Israelis going to keep hitting inside Iran and push towards regime change or try to provoke Iranian responses that drag us further in?

And then you really do have a huge vacuum.

And then the pressure will be, well, we need U.S.

troops in there because it's chaos and, you know, someone needs to secure the nuclear sites or there's a failed state.

You know, there are all these things that we don't know.

And Trump has not articulated this beyond just saying, like, well, I took the shot and it's over.

But the Iranians get a vote on whether this is over.

And the other thing I'd say is that, you know,

even in the better scenarios,

nobody in Iran is going to forget this.

And, you know, look, we have experience in regime change in Iran.

In 1953, 54, we sponsored a coup that seemed like it turned out great at the time, but that laid the seeds for the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the taking of our whole embassy personnel as hostage and this whole conflict we've had with Iran ever since.

When Israel bombed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in the early 80s, it was treated like a big success.

Well, that led to decades of tension and multiple wars with Iraq.

And we all know how that ended.

So this is what Americans have short attention spans on these things.

American politicians are usually afraid to be against military force and strikes like this.

But they have a very long tail, and that could be really bloody and really destructive or really economically disruptive, or it could lead to Iran, again, you know, going dashing for a nuclear weapon and covertly.

But even if those things don't happen,

this is still lighting a powder keg that could explode at any time in the future.

Yeah.

Interestingly,

to your point about, you know, Iran potentially attacking Gulf Arab, you know, like Saudi oil infrastructure, it's notable that, you know, I'm sure a lot of these Gulf countries, they hate the Iranians, right?

Like they're their mortal enemy.

They would love to see regime change in Iran if it led to a friendlier government that came after.

But the Gulf Arabs have not been allowing us to fly through their airspace to conduct these operations.

It's all going through Syria and Iraqi airspace, which suggests some hesitation.

And, you know, a lot of people point out that Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz would impact them as well.

So maybe it would just be a, you know, sort of self-defeating.

I think

it was Rubio or J.D.

Vance called it like a suicidal decision.

But, you know, you go after the Saudi oil infrastructure, maybe take them offline, jack up the price.

Maybe that could net benefit Iran, which is, you know, if they're selling oil

at a higher rate,

you know, that gets them some revenue.

And can I say one other thing, Tommy?

Like, because

all these scenarios you're mentioning remind me that, like,

I thought we were supposed to be focused on China, right?

Like, I personally think we should

be climate change or AI.

Like, whatever, all these things, whatever you're describing, we're going to have more military presence in the Persian Gulf for a long time in the Middle East.

We're bogged down here.

Like, we're not focused on these other things.

And meanwhile, China looks like a responsible global player relative to us.

So

table stakes just got a lot worse.

If the U.S.

looks like a rogue state, China looks like a responsible actor.

The U.S.

is, again, distracted or not distracted, focused on the Middle East and not focused on these broader geopolitical...

you know, tectonic plates that are shifting underneath us.

Nothing about this is going to serve our long-term interests unless, yes, maybe we set back the Iranian program a year, right?

I mean, that's that nobody's claiming that you can't destroy a program.

It's in people's heads in Iran.

They know how to do it.

So, at best, we went through all this to set this program back by like about a year.

Yeah.

Not great.

Okay, so let's talk about how Iran might respond in the long term.

We've talked about some of this, but it does seem likely that they will withdraw from the NPT, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Seems likely they will kick out international inspectors.

You know, you could see a scenario where they kind of announce to the world, like, well, now we're going to develop a bomb because it's the only way we can protect ourselves.

Or they could just, as you said, decide to do it covertly.

I mean, you wouldn't, to your point, I mean, we don't know if they moved around some of this enriched uranium.

You would need just a little bit of that and some of the advanced centrifuges to enrich

uranium to bomb grain pretty quickly.

So that's a possibility.

Politically, I mean, people

in DC talk about Iran like it's completely monolithic and like they don't have have politics to, but this is almost certainly likely to empower the more hardline anti-U.S.

forces who will argue that talks with the U.S.

are useless because they can't trust us, right?

This is as Trump's message and the JD Bance Rubia message this morning was like, now Iran should come back to the table.

Well, I don't know that you can bomb people back to a negotiating table when you've been lying to them and pulling out of agreements you made.

It will almost, this strike will probably stir more nationalism in Iran.

It could harden support for a regime that is pretty much hated otherwise, but

they hate the regime less than they hate being bombed by the Israelis and us.

And then, Ben,

I really can't overstate how much I worry about this long-term terrorism threat.

You know, like I have talked to you about this.

I tweeted that like you could see a bus full of American tourists get blown up somewhere in Cyprus or something in a few years.

And all these MAGA morons were like,

That's, you know, kind of like trying to well actually me saying that Iran's done this in the past and what's the difference?

Like, yes, you idiots.

Like,

that's my point, right?

Like, they have a track record of doing this shit.

If we incentivize more of it, if we goad them into more of it, if we

give them another reason to do something evil that will harm the regime long term, but like they view it as a face-saving opportunity or something they feel like they need to do, this is how the world works, right?

Like, it's like everyone wants to start the story on,

you know, at their kind of deflection point, right?

Like, we're always the victims, victims, we're always responding.

But the Iranians are going to view this as like one of the biggest attacks on their national sovereignty, whatever, you know, in like decades at least.

And they're, they're going to respond in some way.

We just don't know what it will be.

Yeah.

And to your point about diplomacy, I mean, they're, they're going to conclude we made a deal, the JCPOA, that we complied with for years, and then Trump pulled out for no reason whatsoever.

Then we were in a negotiation with Trump, and we thought we were getting close to a deal.

And then Israel bombed us and then Trump bombed us.

And so

that doesn't suggest, I mean,

I would like the best option is, yes, that there's a deal, that the Iranians come out and say, we just want to end this escalatory cycle and we will do a deal with you.

But I don't know.

I mean,

the way that they've, you know,

the way that they've experienced these negotiations, they might be saying that while still doing the covert option, right?

And obviously you try to cover that with intelligence and inspections and a deal, but

I don't think that they're going to trust America's word in a deal.

We'd have to bring the rest of the world into it.

We'd have to bring the UN into it that Trump has ignored, right, to verify that deal.

So this just opens up a lot of questions.

And he is so short-term.

You see him.

He's like, oh, this is done.

I took the shot.

Everybody congratulate me.

I'm moving on.

Iran, Iranian nationalism has been kicked up.

I've talked to people that hate the regime, who say that people in Iran are enraged by this.

There's a rally around the flag thing that happens, even if it's not necessarily rallying around the regime.

That doesn't go away overnight.

Like you said, it creates political pressure on them to do something, but it also

kind of creates a dynamic where kind of change, like the kind of progressive change you want inside of Iran, like the women, life, freedom movement, gets harder, not easier in this scenario.

Like you can't, like we've learned this, bombing a government does not like elevate the more progressive forces in a society.

It tends to do the opposite.

No, I think the Trump people are like kind of hanging this, their hat on this idea that, you know, he gave Iran 60 days to cut a deal.

Then on day 61, the Israelis started bombing.

Then why was Witkoff going to go there on day 63?

Why schedule the meeting?

Right.

Which is so that's totally bullshit.

And then Trump gave them two weeks.

And then you pick up the Atlantic this morning and you read that the two weeks thing was just a ruse to trick the Iranians.

But reportedly, like the U.S., you know, couldn't get those talks going or a back channel through Turkey going with Erdogan because the supreme leader was unreachable because he's in a bunker because, of course, he is, because, you know, we're reading all these reports that the Israelis presented to the U.S., a regime change operation to kill the Supreme Leader.

So, of course, it's hard to get the guy on the phone.

Yeah, it's hard to get on the phone.

So, Ben, let's listen to a couple of Trump's lackeys talking about what happened last night.

First, here's J.D.

Vance on Meet the Press this morning, sort of a supercut of some of what he had to say.

I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East.

I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America's national security objectives.

So this is not going to be some long drawn out thing.

We've got in.

We've done the job of so that's just a great example of how they're not even trying to make an argument.

Like basically, oh no, we're going to be okay in this operation because Bush was dumb and the rest of the presidents were dumb and were smart.

And also, Ben, like JD Vance saying we are not at war with Iran, we're at war with Iran's nuclear program is just such like unbelievable, embarrassing bullshit.

Like the brave truth teller J.D.

Vance, who is, you know, like fighter for the common man, skeptic of wars of choice, would have absolutely crushed any politician who said something that self-evidently stupid and ridiculous because he he knows what it means to bomb Iran.

We're at war with their country.

And by the way, Trump tweeted, Iran now is the choice to end this war.

So they might want to get on the same page here with their spin.

Well, and first of all, we should be very clear, too, in all this bombing, because Israel's bombed them too, and Trump said we, referring to the U.S.

and Israel, Iranians have been killed.

And let's not lose sight of the fact that hundreds of Iranian civilians have been killed.

I'm sure hundreds more have been injured.

Tehran, people have been trying to evacuate.

It's chaotic.

People are panicked.

People are scared.

Those people aren't like, oh, they're not bombing us.

They're bombing the nuclear program.

Those people

are part of Iran.

And you can't just, you can't bomb a country and kill its people and say you're not at war with them.

You're at war with a facility.

You know, that's just not how this works.

JD Venz's superpower is signing absolutely confident and assured and sometimes even intelligent about everything he's talking about, but he has no idea what he's talking about.

This guy, you know, three years ago was like an author, venture capitalist, running for Senate in Ohio.

Like, what does he know about

starting a war over a nuclear program in the Middle East with a country of 90 million people?

So,

their level of certainty in how they talk, they talk about this the same way they talk about trans sports or, you know, ICE raids.

And it's just, it's reality is going to catch up to these people.

There is still such a thing as objective reality, no matter how much they try to speak it out of existence.

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Here's another supercut then of some of Marco Rubio's comments from this morning.

I think he went on Fox News's Sunday show and CBS earlier today.

It was not an attack on Iran.

It was not an attack on the Iranian people.

This wasn't a regime change move.

This was designed to degrade and or destroy three nuclear sites related to their nuclear weaponization ambitions.

Are you saying there that the United States did not see intelligence that the supreme leader had ordered weaponization?

That's irrelevant.

I see that question being asked in the media.

That's an irrelevant question.

But that is the key point in U.S.

intelligence assessment.

You know that.

No, it's not.

Yes, it was.

That's not a political decision happening.

Well, I know that better than you know that, and I know that that's not the case.

What happens next is up to the regime.

Okay, the regime wants peace.

We're ready for peace.

Look, at the end of the day, if Iran is committed to becoming a nuclear weapons power, I do think it puts the regime at risk.

I really do.

I think it would be the end of the regime if they tried to do that.

So this is just a great example of how they're just not even trying to make a case.

Like

your argument is that the U.S.

intelligence assessment about whether Iran has decided to get a nuclear weapon is irrelevant.

What?

And there's total internal inconsistency in what he said, because he described them as three like nuclear weaponization sites.

And then he said that it is irrelevant because they're not.

They're three nuclear sites.

It's different, right?

Whether they've decided to weaponize is whether or not this is an imminent threat.

And so, in the same appearance, he's all over the map.

It's a weaponization site.

Then there's not a weaponization decision.

Then it doesn't matter.

And then if they do decide to weaponize, we'll end the regime.

Like, like, and

just oozing arrogance, you know.

again, I just, I can't help, I, I hope for the best here.

I really do.

I just, I don't have a lot of confidence in watching and listening with these guys.

No, not at all.

Um, so let's just talk about the Democratic Party and the Democratic reaction.

I just, I want to just make the case to Democrats that I feel like in moments like this, there is a tendency to kind of shrink from the debate and to worry that taking military action looks strong and decisive while talking about facts and nuance and restraint or diplomacy looks weak.

I mean, like, what was this operation called?

Midnight Hammer.

Yeah.

It's like, we might just call it war gives Trump a boner.

Yeah.

But like, if you let that political fear silence you now, when people are really paying attention, then only the hawks are the ones out there making the argument and we will lose that fight.

Like, remember, Donald Trump ran as an anti-war guy.

He stole that mantle from the Democrats in 2016.

Joe Biden made it worse, unfortunately, through his handling of Gaza, but also through what I think was principled leadership on Ukraine, right?

But we became viewed as like the warmonger party.

Like we need to get back to being the anti-war party.

And that means not just opposing wars like this, but also standing up for diplomatic problems, which I know I'm going to trigger you now, Ben, but like that gets me back to the JCPOA because

The JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, worked.

It was working when Trump pulled out of it.

His own Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, testified before Congress in 2017 that Iran was in compliance of the JCPOA and that it was in our national security interests to stay in it.

But he pulled us out of it.

And part of why support for the JCPOA was weak, I think, is that very few Democrats would full-throatedly fight for it.

It was like there was so much throat clearing about the flaws and the fact that it didn't encompass the ballistic missile program or support for proxies and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And the reason for that is because Iran's nuclear program was seen as an existential threat, one.

And two, everybody knew that Iran would never cut a deal all at once.

They gave up every element of what they viewed as their self-defense.

But instead of just fighting for the thing, we looked weak.

And like there is a direct line between Trump pulling out of the JCPOA and where we are today.

And unfortunately, it runs through four years of Joe Biden not re-engaging on all of these matters and not getting back into the JCPOA.

But like, I just think we got to like, we got to have some confidence and some courage in these moments.

Yeah, it should not be this complicated.

The JCPOA point is the obvious one.

You had a deal.

It was working.

Iran was complying.

You didn't have a nuclear Iran or a war to worry about when that deal is in place.

Trump tore it up, and that was a direct line to what just happened.

And by the way, when we used to say in the JCPOA debate that it was a deal or a war, people said, oh, how dare you say that?

Well,

it turned out that that was the case.

But let's just start the clock from today.

This was dangerous and unnecessary and based on lies, faulty intelligence, or just outright lies about the intelligence.

The American people are against this.

Republicans and Democrats are against this.

This presents all kinds of risks.

It's the kind of thing Americans are sick of.

It's the kind of forever war politics that have cost multiple presidents.

And yet, Democrats still have this kind of caution about being against the use of military force or being crosswise with Israel or whatever the thing is.

Let me just add this point too, Tommy, to this.

How can Donald Trump be an authoritarian threat to American democracy in every realm except this one?

How can you say that this guy is like a fascist who's like militarizing ICE, who's deploying the National Guard to our streets, and not be concerned about him launching a new war only several months into his presidency?

The last I checked, it's not good when fascistic leaders launch foreign wars.

It's very strange to say, well, I'm against all the authoritarian things Donald Trump is doing, but I'm not against this lawless war he launched against Iran in league with Bibi Netanyahu, another lawless guy who's committed war crimes already in Gaza.

We're going to be on board with that because we don't want to have that political fight.

That makes you look like you have no principles.

That makes you look like you're afraid.

That makes you look weak when we should be pointing out that Trump did this from a position of weakness.

He was dragged into this by Netanyahu and a bunch of hardliners in the Republican Party.

And we cannot pretend like Trump is normal in this one area of policy.

He's somehow normal when he drops bombs on Iran, and he's a threat on everything else he does.

That makes no sense.

The same Donald Trump that is deporting people to Agulag in El Salvador and deploying the National Guard to our hometown of Los Angeles and dismantling the federal government is the same person that launched this strike and has not told the truth about it and has filled his administration with totally incompetent people,

radic incompetent people like Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth who are in charge of this war.

This is not a close call for Democrats.

And I think people are watching this, including people like us who are in the Democratic Party, to be like,

let's see some backbone from our leaders.

Let's see some people who are willing to go out there and have a fight on principle that, by the way, the American people we know agree with us on.

Yeah, and I think

there's a number number of Democrats out there making the case that Congress needed to vote to authorize this war.

And I think that's an important part of the debate.

But where I'm seeing Democrats, I think, shrink from the fight is just on the substance itself.

And that, like, this is not how you solve the problem.

This is not how we're going to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

And that it's not okay for the United States to just act as a global rogue actor and just bomb countries without any sort of legal basis or even intelligence case for why it was imminent and necessary.

Right.

I mean, like, all the Republicans who are saying, oh, no, we didn't need Congress.

The President of the United States has the authority to respond to imminent threats like proliferation of WMD.

The U.S.

intelligence assessment as of March was that Iran was like a year at least away from getting a nuclear weapon.

Like there was no imminence here, and they're not even trying to tell us that that assessment changed.

They're just saying we don't care.

Yeah.

And look, this is where Joe Biden got into trouble because he did a lot of good things, right?

Fighting climate change, joining Paris Agreement, like focusing on Asia Pacific, like trying to standing out for Ukraine.

But it was this region.

It was the Middle East where blank-check support for Gaza, didn't go back into the Iran deal, fist bumping with MBS.

You can't have a Democratic Party foreign policy where you carve out what is kind of the most important file here, which is war and peace and the Middle East and all these complex relationships, you know?

We should have a long conversation in this podcast about, you know, the Democrats want to have an alternative to Republicans.

You have to be consistent and principled on it.

And you can't kind of carve out these areas where you are acting out of political fear because people will smell that and they won't take you seriously on other things.

They won't take your warning seriously on

the National Guard in the streets while you're saying, well, I support Trump dropping gigantic bombs on a country on the other side of the planet with no legal basis or no intelligence basis just because that's where he and Bibi Nanyao decided to go.

Yeah.

And also, we have a political opportunity here where you are seeing a bunch of people who supported Donald Trump in the last election come out and say, this is bad.

We don't want war with Iran.

This is the exact opposite of what he told us he was going to do.

Some have called for him to be impeached.

So we need to speak to those people and provide a clear alternative.

Final thing then, I mean, the international reaction has just been.

completely muted and bizarre, right?

Like Kira Starmer's statement from the UK is a good example, like talks about how Iran's nuclear program is a grave threat to international security, can't be allowed to have a weapon, U.S.

has taken action to alleviate the threat, blah, blah, blah, calling Iran to return to the negotiating table.

Like just a few days ago, top officials in the UK were talking about the illegality of this operation.

Like I don't know, I'm not seeing like

I'm not seeing a lot of voices from our allies saying much of anything.

We are seeing condemnation from the Russians, from the Chinese.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said a kind of a crazy tweet.

A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads and that the enrichment of nuclear material, and now we can say it outright, the future production of nuclear weapons will continue.

You never know with that guy, whether he's tweeting something on behalf of Putin or whether he's just shit faced somewhere kind of popping off

on his social media account.

But I don't know.

I'm curious what you make of just kind of the silence.

in the face of this ballooning war.

Mainly from Europe.

I mean, you know, the global south will be, you know, horrified by this.

Russia and China will try to take advantage of it.

Europe is not unlike the Democratic Party on this one.

You know, they're afraid of Trump.

They're afraid of tariffs.

But the reality is at a certain point, you're going to need your own foreign policy here.

Otherwise, you're just going to be riding, not just shotgun, you're going to be riding in the trunk, you know, while Donald Trump is driving the car off a cliff here.

And I think early returns on this one are, you can tell they're not happy about it, but they're also kind of...

putting their head down.

And I don't think that's very sustainable either.

No, I don't either.

Okay, I think that's it from us for today.

I'm sure we'll be talking about this a lot more this week.

So thanks for listening.

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