Ben Rhodes: The World We Made

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome, I think, a first-time guest.

He's a speechwriter and deputy national security advisor under President Obama.

He was deeply involved with the Iran nuclear deal.

He's now a contributor to MSNBC, co-host of Pond Save the World, and author of After the Fall, Being American in the World We've Made.

It's Ben Rhodes.

What's up, man?

Hey, Tim.

Yeah, first time.

First time in a long time.

Okay, good.

I'm pumped.

Yeah, I am pumped.

And hopefully, you've listened to the Tommy Vitor episode so you know what's going to come for you at the very end of the pod.

I have a special segment for WorldOs.

There were four reasons I wanted to get you on the pod, and the last one is hilarious.

So I'm just going to go through them really quick.

Number one, your book is Bill Crystal Adjacent, and we're going to get to that.

I know that you don't like to accept that, but it's true.

Number two, I am a worldo.

Oh, wow.

And Pod Save the World and Shield of the Republic are my napping podcasts.

And so I appreciate that.

So I have you in my ear as I'm kind of waking up from naps.

And

a genuine compliment.

Unlike most of the people in the blob during the Trump era, you've spoken like an actual human about how awful this stuff is rather than Diplo speak.

I like that.

And lastly, I pitched this about a month ago when it looked like Trump was going to do JPCOA 2.

Yeah.

And I thought that was funny.

And it's seeming a little maybe funny in a different way now, less funny.

So maybe we start there.

I know.

We agreed to do this when we thought there was going to be like a deal.

Yeah, exactly.

Very much not a deal.

And so let's just start there with your assessment on the state of play.

Look, we're in this incredibly dangerous and volatile moment, Tim.

I mean, we don't know whether the United States is going to enter the war today or tomorrow.

It seems like we're poised on that precipice.

I mean, in terms of the state of play,

look, I don't think Israel had to bomb Iran right now.

now.

There was no, despite they've made, they haven't really tried to put out some kind of credible intelligence case that Iran was just about to acquire a nuclear weapon beyond what they always say.

The reality is that they've been living with an Iran, with a nuclear program for a very long time.

It would take Iran, you know, estimates range from months into years to both acquire enough nuclear fuel for a weapon, but also to weaponize that fuel, put it on a warhead.

That was not about to happen.

And Trump literally had an ongoing negotiation and had a meeting set up in Oman where it seemed like they were probably going to get some kind of deal.

And so, to me, what Israel did was not some, you know, 5DD, 5D chess move by Trump where he was running a psyop on all of us with Steve Witkoff.

I mean, Trump clearly wanted that deal.

So they basically bombed Iran before it was necessary in a manner that put an end to diplomacy.

And I've been in some of these simulations, Tim.

This happens in all of them, right?

They get to a point where they say, okay, we've bloodied their nose, and now we need the U.S.

to come in and drop its big bomb on Fordo.

And that's where we are.

So you're not buying the story from the Trump administration?

I've been intrigued.

All my former friends, all the hawks who stayed in the Republican Party in good standing, are very excited to share that story.

That like Donald Trump was doing a ploy on the media and the Iranians where he brought them into his little mousetrap.

He put some cheese in there for the Ayatollah and was just being bad cop or good cop, rather.

You don't think that's the accurate story?

Tim, what is more plausible to you?

That Donald Trump and the people around him had the extraordinary discipline to go through a total decoy, months-long diplomatic effort to arrive at a deal with Iran that their Saudi and Emirati friends supported

while actually laying this trap and being disciplined enough not to leak it or tell anybody about it, or that B.B.

Netanyahu, over Trump's objections, bombed those facilities.

Trump was watching, as has been reported, Fox News.

The war looked pretty good on Fox News.

He saw some people saying that this was a great thing.

And then he started calling reporters on the phone and saying, hey, actually, I've been running this psyop the whole time.

I'm for this.

And then all of his hawkish circle, which is only half the circle, and we can get into that, starts banging on him to drop the big bomb on Fordo.

And he's in a bind now because he didn't want to be here, but it's where he is.

I'm going to bet on the latter scenario being the one, not the psyop one.

I'm going to bet on the latter scenario, too.

When you put it like that, it seems more likely that Trump was watching Fox and thought he could get in on a winner.

And this is where, I mean, maybe I'm as susceptible as Trump.

And so I just, I want to hash out with you, my old neocon muscles flex from time to time, you know, and there's an element of this that I am sympathetic to from the Israel side.

Not really, not the BB part.

You know, I wish it was somebody else that was doing it.

But from an execution standpoint, I mean, they've been in a moment where they've been attacked by Iranian proxies for a long time now on all sides, and Hezbollah is weakened.

And they began this effort within Iran pretty effectively, you have to admit, pretty impressively, took out a lot of the Iranian leaders.

And I don't know, like maybe this is an opportunity finally for them to disable something that's been a threat in the region.

Is that crazy?

What's crazy about that idea?

I want to meet you where you are and give what I believe to be the most generous, you know, reason for why Israel is doing this, because it is not that

you know, they had some information that Iran was about to weaponize, you know, a nuclear weapon.

I mean, Bibi's kind of had different versions of that that he said on television, but it's not clear even what their argument is.

Even in my generous acceptance of their plan, I'm not sold on that as the rationale.

The generous argument, I think, would be that Iran is particularly vulnerable right now.

That they have essentially decimated, for the time being at least, Hezbollah.

The U.S., frankly, under Biden, took a lot of shots at those proxy groups and the militias in places like Iraq.

Assad is gone in Syria.

Russia's busy.

Russia's busy, absolutely.

And the shots that Israel took at Iran a few months ago were kind of designed to get rid of some of their defenses and kind of soften them up for this, you know?

And so I think the generous view is less about there's anything materially different in the Iranian nuclear program than it is, like, hey, this is the best chance that we've had, so let's take it.

I still think it's a bad idea for several reasons.

The first is

purely from a nuclear program standpoint, you cannot bomb a nuclear program out of existence.

And when we looked at these scenarios in the bombing years, you know, even blowing up these facilities, you kind of set it back a year.

And then they, you know, could just dig deep underground and decide, hey, now that we know that we're going to get bombed without a nuclear weapon, we're just going to take this whole thing covert.

We're not going to make a deal and we're going to go underground.

That's one scenario you worry about.

They might not do that.

They could come out and put their hands up.

But even then, I don't know that I trust that, you know, because the lesson they've learned is: let's go underground and get this bomb.

That's the first one.

The second one is wars of this scale.

I mean, Iran is a country of 90 million people.

And they're going after the Iranian leadership level.

We famously learned that on the Tucker Carlson show last night.

We're going to get to that.

Tucker, I think, said 92, but yeah, I mean, he's got a point.

This is a big-ass country, right?

And a really important country.

And they're kind of going after the Iranian leadership like their Hezbollah.

Like, you know, we're just picking these guys off.

This is a state.

I hate the Iranian government, right?

But decapitating a state is different than decapitating a terrorist organization.

Who is going to run Iraq?

This is the same question that people failed to ask about Iraq and Afghanistan, and that I, in the Obama administration, George Washington of Iran is going to run Iran, Ben.

Come on.

Well, that's the thing.

I failed to ask it about Libya, so I want to join myself as people that didn't get this right.

Well, that's the thing.

Tim, I saw like someone, I think it was Newt Gingrich tweeting, what Iran needs now is a secular, moderate, inclusive, democratic government.

I'm like, hey, yeah, sure.

That's what we all need.

We need that in the United States, by the way.

So I worry that they're going to do the regime change.

The Bibi's not going to stop.

He hates these guys.

Trump was threatening to kill the Supreme Leader.

And that's when I'm like, this is not going to end well.

Because we've seen where regime change imposed from the outside goes.

It goes into failed states or civil wars or chaos.

You get drawn in.

So it's less that Iran is going to like defeat Israel with ballistic missiles and more like the catastrophic success that could happen if there's regime change change could basically be in a country that is bigger than iraq uh that really is important it has a lot of oil and gas so other russia other countries are going to have interests there china the gulf states that is unselling and then the last thing i just say tim is that i and this is where i may be like a lefty i just think war to solve problems when you there are alternatives that still need to be tested is just is wrong.

You know, there are civilians being killed in both Iran and Israel.

There's no international law that says you can just go bomb a country and decapitate its leadership.

I still believe in a world in which, you know, and I guess I'm an old-fashioned guy that way, it's better to not normalize that, right?

Because we're normalizing a lot of military force in the last couple years.

And Russia and China and others, we wouldn't like it if they did it.

So, you know, I think that we're going to miss those norms when they're gone.

I love how you just casually slipped into that answer, like Trump threatening to assassinate the Ayatollah.

Like, that's something that's happening right now.

Trump just leading out like random assassination threats.

The peace candidate.

Okay, I want to push back on you one more time and then only into the Trump side of this because I'm like negatively polarized on basically all Middle East policy opinions, right?

So if you talk to me about Newt Greenrich, I'm like, that's obviously stupid.

But then I hear the other side and I'm like, that seems stupid too, you know, and I think that while the regime change notion, which Bill Crystal did float on Monday to the consternation of some of our listeners, I hear you, like, obviously was an utter disaster.

And that's like, basically accepted across the board, minus a couple of random, you know, descendants of Paul Wolfowitz at this point.

Like, the regime change effort in the Middle East was a failure.

I hear that.

But, like, from just the perspective of the Israeli people, right?

The appeasement with Iran strategy also didn't work, right?

I mean, like, the deal, the JCPOA kind of led to them, the Iranians being a little bit more flexible financially and otherwise to support these proxies.

The ballistic missile deal expired two years ago, and they've been getting ballistic missiles coming at them.

And so I think you could understand their view that, like, I don't know, dealing with the mullahs wasn't really any better.

Like that, that was a negative outcome for the Israeli people, at least over the last little bit and prospectively.

I would make two points here rather than kind of debate everything about the JCPOA.

Sure.

The two points I'd make is, first of all, I don't think we really, we tested that proposition for two, three years.

I mean, one of the problems we have in this country is an inability to sustain anything, right?

And so I think it was working, at least on the nuclear side, while it was implemented.

Trump was out of there by 2018.

That's three years in.

I think that was working to protect the Israeli people from the threat of the nuclear program.

It wasn't addressing the ballistic missiles and the proxies.

It wasn't intended to, you know, that was going to require other strategies and other work.

But the first point is, I love these things that we started in Obama.

I get this about Cuba, too.

Like, well, it didn't work.

We was there for two years.

You know, you got to try these things out for longer.

And actually, the fact that, you know, we used to say back in the JCPA arguments that it's either a diplomatic settlement or a war.

And we were called, like, mean, you know, how dare you say that the alternative is war?

Now we're seeing that that's the alternative.

But the second point I'd make about Israel, Tim, is that

they've lived with a huge amount.

I understand what you're saying about the enormous amount of risk that they live with from Hezbollah, from Iranian proxies.

But they were also,

I think,

relative to

their history, going through a pretty successful period.

I mean, the economy was booming in Israel.

Security was, I mean, Netanyahu was prime minister, and he was bragging about the security he'd brought to Israel.

Yes, you had not eliminated all risk to the Israeli citizenry by any measure, but this proxy war between Iran and Israel has been going on for decades.

October 7th is obviously a whole other conversation, but that was after, by the way, the JCPOA.

So if we're just talking about the period of the JCPOA, I'm not sure that was a period of like huge insecurity for the Israeli people relative to other periods.

I just, I think the Hawks would say, well, I mean, and I'd like to hear you give your take on the Gaza situation too, but because it's related to all this, but like Hamas is dismantled, Hezbollah dismantled, Iran weakened.

I don't, you know, you don't like to hand it to Bibi on anything.

And this is, you know, maybe less about Bibi, but like.

That's not nothing.

The two problems after that are one, we judge everything in these short-term, you know, news cycles.

I think five, ten years from now, the way the BB is doing this, people will see that it has been incredibly damaging to Israel, to its international standing, to its ability to have any kind of lasting peace based on trust with its neighbors.

But secondly, I just think this scale of violence is wrong.

And I actually think it does something to a society.

It's connected to what's happening here in some ways in the sense of it is not good.

for a country to do what Israel is currently doing in Gaza.

Like, I actually believe that,

you know, maybe it's because I've been living in California too long, but

you absorb what you're doing, you know, and so you're absorbing the like psilocybin, for example, and starting to.

Well, let's say, yeah, we're dancing around that.

But the point is that they're rationalizing like mass skilling on a scale in Gaza that I've never, like, I can't remember happening in the 21st century, right?

And that's not good for a country.

You know, even if you can say you racked up a win against Samas, doing it in that manner, I don't think is good for Israel, the health of that society, you know, and it's moving them further and further to the right.

It's moving their politics to the far right.

And so, one of the, I think, the problem with hawkish foreign policy people is that they, in the same way, by the way, that I think the war on terror did something a little weird to our politics and led to Trump in some ways.

Like, when you kind of normalize permanent war and extraordinary authorities in the executives' hands, I think the erosion of Israeli democracy is not unrelated to their foreign policy and i think some of the hawkish foreign policy people try to separate it well i don't like what bibi does at home but man i love that pager operation maybe those things are connected you know yeah i mentioned that yesterday i mean i'm kind of like giving a steel man argument to you because i i'm like i'm genuinely torn on all this and i just i do think it's hard to like the middle distance It's like hard to see like what the fit, you know, and I said this yesterday, I was like, have we created the next AI bin Laden, you know, through all this?

Like, it's, it's

hard to know.

I do need to, though, just to just to make sure everybody's clear about the perspective they're getting.

There was a report that goes around periodically about how your nickname was Hamas Rhodes in the White House.

Is that true?

Is that accurate?

Are you representing Hamas right now and making these arguments?

Here's the funny thing: is that usually when people are dunking on me about that, they act like that was something that was discovered when it's a story that I wrote in my memoir, which is Rahm Emmanuel nicknamed me Hamas.

I don't want to overstate it.

It was for a few week period when I was, there was

something going on and I was seen as pro-Palestinian.

And it was funny and horrible at the same time, but it was Ram Emmanuel, right?

This is how he is.

And, you know, he would say things like, you know, Hamas over here is going to make it impossible for my kid to get a fucking bar mitzvah in Israel.

You know, I mean, it was that kind of tone.

It wasn't like literally like I supported Hamas or even that he like thought I actually supported them.

It was

Ram gets wrapped tight around the axle, as all the listeners saw a couple weeks ago.

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All right.

I wanted to the Trump side of this and the internal war that you referenced earlier.

So there was the Atlantic article where Michael Scheer called Trump and they talked for a couple of minutes, and then Trump took a call from Putin, which is telling synecdoity about where we are in our society right now.

I often toggle between Michael Scheer and Putin.

Yeah, he said Shear was asking about the criticism from Tucker and from and from Bannon and et al.

And Trump was basically like, America versus whatever I say it is.

And to me, I think I hate to hand it to him.

I think that's kind of right.

I don't know.

I think that there is like an interesting intellectual Twitter battle going on between

the Tuckerists and whatever, the Mitch McConnell crowd, or however you want to put it.

But like...

In the end, doesn't Trump's control of the party more personality-based?

Or do you think that there's something very deep potential fissure here?

What do you think?

I think there's a deep fissure because essentially what is being revealed is that there are still people that have actual differing views within the MAGA coalition.

And you know, you know, Tim, better than anybody, Bulwark, like these have long been fissures in the Republican Party, dating back to pre-World War II, right?

There's always been a kind of isolationist strain of the Republican Party.

with some ugly elements and then some just kind of sincere isolationist elements.

And there's always been a more, you know,

whatever label we want to affix to it, but essentially expansionist or interventionist or you call it neoconservative wing of the party.

Reagan actually pretty expertly was able to bind them together in his own personality.

And Reagan was probably actually less pro-Israel than Biden, though you never would have known it listening to Tom Cotton and them talk during the Biden years.

Totally.

Totally.

I mean, Reagan, we can, you know, I mean, Reagan, Menachem, Begin, let's just say they didn't get along.

And so Trump basically bound them together by force of personality, but he never really resolved the differences.

He kind of always wanted it both ways.

So he would talk a lot about ending permanent wars and being an anti-war guy, but then he would also brag about dropping the mother-of-all bombs on Afghanistan or getting rid of, you know, Obama's civilian casualty

standards for going after certain ISIS targets.

He kind of wanted to be a tough guy and being Bibi's best buddy until he wasn't, but like he wanted to be the kind of tough guy that could appeal to a certain kind of hawkish vibe, even if he didn't sign on to the whole foreign policy, while essentially still being this isolationist America First or Pat Buchanan Republican.

And I think what we're seeing is whether it's Lindsey Graham or Tucker Carlson, like or Steve Bannon, these people actually believe their views.

Now, the Trump voter is going to think that whatever Trump says is as mad guy as America First, but not the members of Congress and the kind of leading, I hesitate to call them thinkers, but talkers in the party.

Yeah, I guess we have to be thinkers.

Well, while we're doing Tucker, just to show a little bit from this debate, by the time this podcast is out, I think the whole Tucker interview with Ted Cruz will be out, but we did get to see two little delicious clips.

I picked my favorite, which I want to share with you for a second.

And I'm noting that, boy, there are a lot of resistance people I'm following who are having strange new respect for Tucker.

Who do I root for here?

Yeah, including Tommy, but let's listen to it.

How many people live in Iran, by the way i i don't know the population at all no i don't know the population you don't know the population of the country you seek to topple

how many people live in iran 92 million okay

yeah

how could you not know that

i i don't sit around memorizing population tables well it's kind of relevant because you're calling for the overthrow of the government

why is it relevant whether it's well because 90 million or 80 million or 100 million whatever because if you don't know anything about the country i didn't say i don't know anything about what's the ethnic mix of Iran.

They are Persians, we're predominantly Shia.

Okay,

you don't know anything about Iran.

So, okay, I am not the Tucker Carlson.

You're not an expert on Iran.

You're a senator who's calling for the overthrow.

You're the one throwing the government.

You're the one who don't know anything about the country.

You're a senator that's calling for the overthrow of the government.

You don't know anything about the country.

I mean,

not bad.

I mean, he's got a point.

I mean, that's almost uncomfortable to listen to.

Like, even though

I don't have any empathy that I can find in my body for Ted Cruz, but it's such a roasting.

Yeah.

It's kind of ironic.

It's like the metaphor I always use in these sort of situations.

It's like the Iran-Iraq war.

You don't know who to root for.

And here it's like the Iran-Iraq war, but they're arguing about Iran.

Exactly.

I will say, you know, people said this after the Iraq War.

Like, people didn't even know the difference between Sunnis and Shias, you know, to swerve for a second.

My favorite novel is The Names by Don DeLillo.

And there's a guy who makes a speech in there about how Americans learn about countries when we're in some crisis with them and start clipping out recipes and memorizing the religion of the country.

There's something to that, right?

And Ted Cruz is that guy.

I think I'd say about Tucker, he's ideologically consistent, and he's actually so dovish, or whatever word you want to fix to it, isolationist, that it encompasses things that I agree with, like that, and things I disagree with, like not wanting to support Ukraine, right?

And this is where you're going to get to my Bill Crystal adjacency.

But essentially, I give him credit for being being ideologically consistent.

He applies it totally across the board.

You know, the same logic that would lead him to not want to go to war in Iran leads him to not want to even provide weapons to a country that's fighting for its survival against Russia, right?

But that's a real wing of the Republican Party, and it wasn't invented by Tucker or Donald Trump, right?

I mean, it goes way, way back.

I mean, it's actually what the Republican Party used to be.

And I think it's where it's going.

I mean, it's the most potent part of the Republican Party, of the base, for sure.

And I just, I think that Trump

egoism within the Republican base, too, right?

And so, like, Trump actually navigates it quite well, I think.

I think that the base of the party, like, instinctually doesn't want to do foreign wars, doesn't care about these people in other places.

There's a little bit of a racism element in it and financial, like, we shouldn't spend money.

I don't care about the sand people, right?

Like, you hear all that when you talk to

Republican voters.

But, and also, too, they want the U.S.

to be great and strong and tough and Hulk Hogan, right?

And so, like, Trump navigates that balance a little bit better than Tucker, I think.

But like that's kind of where it's going.

It's a really important debate for the future of the Republican Party in a lot of ways because this debate has, you know, you could argue, like shaped major aspects of the last century, right?

You know, I mean, FDR had to kind of quash the isolationists to get Len Lease pass, you know, and then we kind of veered from

like who lost China Republicans, which would, you know, like find a home in the Weekly Standard later, right?

To the kind of McCarthyite paranoid, you know, we're anti-communist, but we're focused within, you know, we're focused on inside this country, to bury Goldwater hawkishness, to, you know, business types who want to just like keep the lid on things abroad, but don't want to necessarily stir it up.

I mean, we could keep this going, but the point is that where the Republican Party lands on this, and Reagan, what he did is he could take the evangelicals and pull them into a coalition with like the hawks and and obviously bring in the kind of business community or interests.

And there's your modern Republican Party, right?

And only George H.W.

Bush found the Goldilocks temperature of the soup.

Yeah.

Well, that's the thing.

I mean, it was those three planks, right?

That like that was so potent electorally, you know.

But Trump managed to evict the Hawks while expanding out enough from the other parts to have a winning coalition.

Whether that's durable or not is hugely consequential.

And by the way, it's remade my party.

Like I'm probably less in the mainstream of my own party because I think my party's gotten more hawkish under Trump because we've kind of welcomed in, you know, these exiles.

It's interesting.

I get my backup.

People talk about this.

I get my backup when it is said, you know, like, oh, we went too far trying to appeal to Liz Cheney.

And like,

my response to that is always like, well, I don't know.

Liz Cheney actually wanted...

cared about winning and so volunteered her time.

And so maybe if like the isolationist leftists like had spent more time wanting to attack Trump and less time wanting to attack Kamala, maybe they would have been more visible in the campaign.

I don't know.

You know, so I get a little annoyed by that.

But like strategically, do you think that it has hurt the Democrats to

kind of tack a little bit away from you towards this, whatever you want to call it, towards the more

interventionist?

elements of the coalition?

I think so.

And I expect we disagree about that.

But essentially.

I actually don't know.

I mean, I know what I wish that they would do policy-wise, but politically, I think

I don't know that it, actually, my instinct is that it didn't really matter at all, but I'm open to being wrong about that.

I don't claim to know,

but here's what I think is likely, which is that I want us to have a big tent, right?

So I want Liz Cheney in the tent.

That's the only way you can defeat authoritarianism anyway.

The question is, how much do you kind of lean into it, right?

So is she your leading surrogate at the end?

And I actually think that Democrats are often solving the wrong problem on national security.

The argument I would make is that Democrats kind of got beaten really bad in 2002 and 2004 on this issue and have been in a kind of permanent defensive crouch ever since.

And we still think that it's like a big coup that we can like trot out like a Cheney.

Tim, like, do you remember at the Democratic convention when everybody thought the special guest on the last night was going to be like Beyonce?

Yeah, and it was Leon.

And it turned out it was like Leon Panetta.

It was a hawkish Democratic Secretary of Defense.

And I think that misreads the electorate.

I think the electorate actually doesn't want to see national security validation associated with the war on terror era.

I mean, I'll say this:

every candidate except Joe Biden since 2004 has run as an anti-war candidate.

Like Barack Obama's entire campaign in 2008 was against Hillary Clinton having voted for the Iraq war.

That's how he got elected president, right?

I was just talking to somebody yesterday.

I was like, had Hillary voted against the Iraq war, probably Hillary wins the 08 primary.

It's like the whole universe is different from there.

Maybe Trump is a Democratic president.

I certainly don't have a podcast.

Yeah, no, I'm kidding.

But as someone who's on the inside, there's no way Obama wins without that Iraq war vote, right?

So you have Obama twice, and he's running against wars, and he's willing to take heat for not getting into certain wars.

Then you have Trump.

Then you have Biden in this kind of bizarre election where I don't think he would have won without COVID.

And he wasn't running as like a kind of war guy either, nor was he anti-war.

The point is that the Democrats are worried about the wrong politics on these issues.

They seem to be stuck in this permanent 2002 midterm election, you know.

And I wish they wouldn't do that.

I wish that, like, now, I don't understand why the Democrats aren't saying, hey, Donald Trump said he would end all three of these wars, you know, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, they're all getting worse, and we should not go to war in Iran.

Bibi was wrong to bomb Iran.

Like, it's right there.

It's a 60-18 issue based on the Yuga poll I saw.

And Democrats are still afraid to go there.

And they think, you know, they don't want to cross BB or they don't want to look weak or, or maybe this will work out okay.

And then they'll say we were wrong.

You don't see any of that, you know, like one thing I'll see about Republicans that they're not afraid to take positions, you know, in the same way that Democrats are on this stuff.

Neocon listeners and Sarah Longwell, press the fast-forward 15 seconds button really quick.

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's right.

Political analysis, unfortunately, for us, for my people.

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Tulsi, I just have to talk to you about Tulsi, and then I'll get into some other Trump stuff, not foreign policy related.

There's a political article last night that's so delicious.

There's this creepy video, and I don't know if I put it on the podcast.

I know me and Sam talk about it on YouTube.

People can check out.

Tulsi did this creepy, like three-minute-long video about the specter of nuclear war.

Yes.

And I thought it was Russian propaganda, but it turns out maybe she was trying to do internal propaganda against the Hawks within the administration.

I just don't know.

Trump got pissed about it, apparently, according to the political reports, started started yelling at her.

And then he got pissed again because a reporter asked him about her assessment, his director of national intelligence assessment, that Iran's not close to a nuclear weapon, actually, during a gaggle.

I wonder what you make of all that.

Well, first of all, that video, when I'm in like, you know, whatever gulag they're going to send us to, Tim, if I'm in a white padded room, I think they'll just be piping that video in and I'll be like huddled in the corner, like trying to hide from the sound of it because it's that weird and creepy.

I just watched the Mauritanian, so I'm up to speed.

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly.

So I shouldn't even laugh about it.

I think she, she's simultaneously of the, you know,

isolationist or dovish wing, but she's also just a very weird person.

Like, like, like that video, I think, was more eccentric because of its just strangeness.

And also, like, it seemed like she just learned that Hiroshima happened or something, because she's describing Hiroshima as if...

To like a kindergartner.

It felt like it was like

a PSA for a kindergartener.

Exactly.

And what we don't know behind the scenes and can't see is just how weird is it to have Tulsi in your tent versus how much is this.

Now, what I will say that is relevant to the broader discussion is Tulsi is also, like Tucker, a true believer in this stuff.

So if Trump thought that Tulsi at DNI would just give him the information he wanted, well, that might be what's not happening.

And I actually, as someone who's warned about Tulsi a lot, I was more concerned about her, the weirdness of her views and her giving Trump what he wanted on Russia.

Like the bad side, that she would spin up fake stuff and have Russia rather than not give him what he wanted on Iran.

Exactly.

So it didn't kind of occur to me to be like, well, actually, Tulsi, you know, really does believe this stuff.

I've talked to Tulsi the way back when, and

she's just not going to give him what he wants in Iran.

By the way, this is not a new thing.

I mean, the George W.

Bush administration famously, and the Neocon listeners are already arguing with the podcast, but.

They've turned it off by now.

Yeah.

But In 2007, remember the Bush administration came out with this national intelligence estimate that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, the effort to weaponize their nuclear program.

And the Neocons went nuts then, saying that was the wrong assessment.

But as far as I know, the U.S.

intelligence community has not changed its assessment since that NIE in 2007.

Yes,

people should get the difference here.

It's one thing to have a nuclear program and you get fuel.

It's another thing to kind of do the work to weaponize that fuel and put it on a warhead.

And so Tulsi is not, she's just representing what has been the view of the U.S.

intelligence community since 2007.

But I think what we're learning is, unlike, you know, I've no doubt that Dan Bongino and Cash Patel are going to give Trump exactly the answers he wants to every question.

I don't think Tulsi is.

And that might be part of what's bothering him.

I want to talk about some domestic stuff and our creeping authoritarianism here at home.

The arrest in New York, where you grew up, you don't live there anymore.

You're a West Coast man.

Where I am, though.

I'm in New York right now.

This video

of ICE arresting Brad Lander, who's running for, is a comp troller, who's running for mayor of New York.

And it's like, there's a man in like an evil Spider-Man mask.

Like you can't see any part of his face, like grabbing him.

And he's being pulled and manhandled and handcuffed.

And he's just, all he's asking for is a warrant to demonstrate that they can arrest this constituent, I guess, who had shown up to ICE Court, was not ducking the immigration police, our new federal immigration police.

Obviously, this comes on the heels of what we saw with Padilla, et cetera.

What's your threat level right now?

What did you make of that?

It's really high.

And I got to say, if I had a vote here, I'm kind of a Brad Lander.

I love a Lost Cause progressive.

He might be your number one.

I think he'd be my number one.

And I'm going to do the Lost Cause Neolib.

People ask me, I didn't say on the Zoron pod who I would put number one.

It's Zellner Myri.

So we're both, we'll both do our lost cause Canada.

We can do a trade right now.

I'll

cross endorses.

After he got arrested, I like him.

We can cross endorses.

My threat level is very high.

I mean, look, I always think it's a useful exercise to step back and be like, if someone told you a few years ago that the Marines would be in the streets of Los Angeles and that plain clothes goons would be like tackling Democratic politicians and handcuffing them, we'd be like, what the fuck is going on?

That's crazy.

The degree of normalization worries me because honestly, like as you know, as someone who's looked at authoritarianism in other countries,

like we often hold up Hungary as a scary place where we have an illiberal leader because he's kind of run the playbook of consolidating kind of corrupt power over huge chunks of society.

They don't have, you know, plainclothes dudes wrestling opposition politicians as ground, handcuffing them while deploying the Hungarian military in the streets of cities.

Like, we're past them on the spectrum here.

You know, we're like past Hungary headed to Turkey, you know?

And I think we kind of can't get our minds around that as Americans.

And we still see these as like eccentric things that are happening when they're clearly not eccentric.

Like this is a systematic effort to remake the use of violence in this country.

So, this is the point I made about Padilla.

I was like, you know, in a different world, you could have made the case that this was just a couple of agents who got a little hot, didn't recognize them, acted inappropriately, you know, and they'll be reprimanded or whatever.

And even Corey Lewandowski at the moment was like, guys, let's dial it back a little bit.

Like, that's the more positive spin of that situation.

It's impossible to believe that spin in the context of everything else that's happening with the military, DHS, ICE, and, you know, these other arrests.

Yes.

And again, I also think that there's a sense that in some places, I mean, you know, in the non-alarmist community, that this is temporary, that, well, Trump said he's going to deport a bunch of people.

And so it kind of looks bad, but it's someday the National Guard will go home and these ICE guys will have hit their quotas for Stephen Miller.

I don't see anything temporary about this.

You know, once you kind of cross the Rubicon into like normalizing troops being deployed in the street for the political purposes of the president, once you have the authority to just arrest whoever you want and maybe deport them, maybe distarress them, intimidate them.

At least with this administration, I don't see them like relinquishing that authority.

If anything, I see it creeping in further and further spaces.

And again, that's we have to stop seeing these things as temporary and start being like, huh, like, what if the National Guard doesn't go home?

Like, what if the ICE raids never stop?

Like, what if this is just a tool of Donald Trump's power that he's, when has Donald Trump ever given up something that makes him more powerful?

I want to ask you about the political implications of all this and like how Democrats can fight it, but you saying that, I think maybe there's a bigger conversation that should happen first.

We were on cable news the other day together.

You made a point that was kind of at the end of a comment that was sort of an aside.

And I was like, I have a follow-up on what Ben just said.

Like, you know, let's move on to me or someone for my fucking bullshit or whatever.

And you ended up by saying that you think there should be a real conversation about concerns that they use the Insurrection Act or whatever to impact or cancel maybe, I don't remember the exact word you use, elections coming up in the midterms.

What's your level of worry about that?

Because it was a rare moment where somebody said something and I was like, huh, I'm on the less alarmist side of that one.

And I'm curious why Ben went there.

I don't think it's likely at all.

I think elections are the most complicated piece in some ways to mess with because they're administered by states and it's this kind of labyrinth of bureaucracy in a good way in this case.

But the two things I'd say are: one, if they were to do something to mess with either the midterms or

the next election, it would be through the doorway of national security type authorities, whether under the the Insurrection Act or under some other declaration of a national emergency, which they've gotten very comfortable declaring, right?

I mean, they've declared a national emergency at the border, and that's justified all this other stuff that they're currently doing.

Because the scenario I give you, Tim, is that what if they allow the midterm elections to go forward?

But then afterwards, after they lose, they say, well, there's mass fraud.

And so we don't think that this new Congress should be seated.

Dan Bongino and Cash Patel go out and say, yes, there's fraud and we're going to launch all these investigations of it.

Mike Johnson doesn't have to necessarily seat the new Congress.

And then the military is kind of in the streets quashing the protests.

And then the protests of the election are the basis for declaring some national emergency, right?

Some bullwork darkness here.

That feels

possible, if not plausible to me, you know, like and again,

not 0%.

I'm not saying maybe it doesn't feel 51% that that's going to happen, but it it's not 0.

It's an uncomfortably high percent.

And the reason these protests have been so important is the more the use of the military against protest is normalized, the more possible the scenario I just said becomes.

Because they've deployed the military in L.A.

where I lived because of protests that were not violent.

And if that becomes normal, then all of a sudden, by the time they do that, you know, in a couple of years, if they do it, the frog will be dead in the water, you know, to use an oft-abused metaphor.

Okay.

That's going to keep some people up at night with some night sweats.

Let's assume that the zero, that outcome doesn't come to pass, right?

We have relatively normal elections.

Let's then, within that construct, thought talk about the democratic response to this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That picture, I'm just, I'm stuck of that picture of Lander getting manhandled with the dude that you cannot even see his eyeballs.

Like, like, you know, his, he's so masked, right?

It's not like he's wearing a COVID mask.

And he's got the full, like, I'm robbing a bank mask on, you know?

And I think that this could be something that the Democrats could get traction on and should.

And there's another class of folks out there in the strategy class who are like,

focus on the Medicaid cuts or whatever.

This is a loser for Democrats.

I mean, not don't talk about it, but de-emphasize it.

Where do you fall on that question?

I fall on the like, take this on and emphasize it.

I hate this idea when you see Democrats online being like, you know, Trump is distracting you.

He's going to war to distract you from his tax bill or something.

No, no, Trump is just doing a bunch of different things

that he cares about.

We can do the same.

Like, I don't believe that if everybody's only talking about, you know, tax giveaways to billionaires, that somehow we can't deliver that message.

In fact, actually, I would argue that if all we do is robotically talk about the big beautiful bill, we'll look political.

We'll look like we're a bunch of political consultants who don't believe anything.

I think there's genuine reasons to do what Brad Lander did.

I think I said this on the same segment you were referring to earlier.

I know, in my familiarity with the Republican coalition, there is a genuine anti-government, you know, black helicopter kind of crowd.

Go after the don't tread on me crowd.

Yes, go after those guys.

You want to find a new way to have conversations with people the Democratic Party haven't had conversations with in a while.

This is big government on steroids.

This is the black helicopters actually landing in your community, right?

And so I think you can make a stand on principle.

I'm going to reach the Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughan listener.

Like, there's a percentage of them, I think, that are there's a percentage of them that probably like the fucking masked man going after the lives they hate.

But I think that I am pretty confident that there's also a percentage of them that are like, whoa,

this is fucking, this is weird.

I don't like this.

I don't want agents coming to my door.

I think that's right.

I think that's right.

And I think that there's also people,

and this is anecdotal so far, so I don't want to make too much of one anecdote or two anecdotes, but there are definitely people that did not think the deportations were going to be like the waitress in the local diner who's been there for 20 years or the kid on my kid's soccer team.

They genuinely believed Trump that the deportations were going to be these violent criminals.

I talked to Van Lathan about this last night.

There's that boxer who's from SoCal, your adopted area, Ryan Garcia, who's a big Trumper who's

Mexican heritage, who is who has been speaking out.

And I think that, look, the border stuff,

you can still be for like a totally secured border.

Like, this is so evidently going beyond that.

This has nothing to do with the border, you know?

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I want to also get your two cents on the assassinations in Minnesota, the assassination, the assassination attempt, kind of the...

response from the right about that.

I mean, there's just so many ways to go about it.

Like, I'm curious your thoughts on the domestic terror side, but also this disinformation and these folks living in this alternate reality where they convince themselves that it's leftists and that might justify more violence.

I just, I'd like to hear you cook on that for a couple of minutes.

Yeah, man, this is the scariest stuff that's happening, right?

I mean, this is when, you know, when you have political violence becoming normal, again,

whether it's like the troops in the streets or whether it's the vigilante guy in Minnesota, you just don't know how you put that Pandora, back in the box.

And I'll be honest, I don't know what to do about this because,

okay, the national security guy and me is like,

well, we'd be treating this like a radicalization problem if a Muslim did this.

You know, we'd be, you know, we'd essentially have a task force to study online radicalization and set up some goons at the DHS to hunt over laptops and figure out what's happening.

You cannot, you know, like, that's that's obviously not going to happen with the Trump administration.

And these people are so stuck in the cycle of their information that the United States Center probably believes the crazy shit that Mike Lee put out there.

I guess what I'd say is the answer to me is not to kind of make fun of it online, you know, which is what people sometimes do.

It's to take it deadly seriously and to just relentlessly try to communicate.

the truth of things.

And the other thing I've learned about this, Tim, from dealing with Russian disinformation is the Russians were very well aware that first movers win the information war.

And so my favorite anecdote of this was when that plane was shot down, MH17, over Ukraine during the Obama administration.

The Russians immediately put out all these conspiracy theories.

You know, the Ukrainians shot it down, the Americans shot it down, like it was a crash, when clearly their guys had shot this plane down.

By the time the Dutch investigation was done, like two years later, that determined that, like, anybody who searched online found just a flood of Russian Russian information.

We are too slow to go out and be like, hey, this guy was a Trump supporter.

You know, this is an unpopular but important point.

In the democracy space, there's a lot of people that's like, it's important for us to be extremely accurate and to get things right and to push back, you know?

And I'm not, I'm not pushing for inaccuracy, but I kind of made a similar provocative point at one of these dumb panels that you do recently where I was like, I don't know, maybe our side needs people that are pushing out shit that is a little bit reckless immediately to combat it.

And maybe that's wrong.

I don't know.

That's why I say I don't know, but I want to at least let's surface this point because while they're putting out this guy was a socialist, why can't Tim Waltz or somebody like that be like, hey, this guy, you know, whatever the best, you know, he posted all this Trump stuff or he voted for Trump or he or she gave this anti-gay speech in Africa?

Yeah, he gave this anti-gay, anti-trans speech.

I mean, first of all, this guy is like weirdly made in a laboratory for 2025 America, right?

Like private security contractor/slash evangelist hates trans people.

He's posted West Bank Gazak.

Everything was in this guy's online footprint.

But why not just be like beat Mike Lee to the punch here and be like, hey, we're still going to gather the facts.

We're still going to put out the full information.

And I know while the compromises, his prosecution, okay, there's complexity here.

I acknowledge that.

I do know that one of the reasons why we constantly lose, you know, based on my experience with Russia, information wars, is it's speed wins, not truth or even volume or efficacy yeah the context i was doing this and now i remember was that plane crash it was the reagan plane crash when they immediately were out there saying like dei was a black woman and that was the reason why and i was like why you know couldn't some people on our side immediately go like sean duffy's fault look at it he's only in there for three days and there's already plane crashing

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We're running out of time, so I don't want to belabor the point of the book too long, and we did a full hour on it at one of these conferences, which is on YouTube.

I'll put it in the show notes.

So if people are intrigued by this little taster, they can go watch the whole thing.

I really loved it, the book after the fall, because it was a lot about you grappling with broadly our American mistakes, which is encompassing the mistakes of the Obama era, right?

And at the same time, looking at the threats around the world that are increasing from China, Russia, all these little mini Trumps everywhere, and saying, God, for all of our flaws that we should address, like what comes after us seems bad in every potential alternative.

And that was kind of the Bill Crystal-ish part of it on this.

And so, and then you also kind of talk to these people fighting resistance.

So, anyway, give people just a quick summary of that and what the lessons are.

I looked at how we got here with authoritarianism in, you know, Hungary, Russia, China, the U.S., through the eyes of people who are opponents to authoritarianism.

Hungarian opposition, actually, Alexei Navalny was kind of my character in Russia, you know, the Hong Kong protest movement.

And again, this is, I think, where the Bulwark audience, even the Bill Crystal Bulwark audience, I believe in liberal democracy.

And when I say liberal, I mean, you know, the small L liberal democracy.

I believe in open societies.

I believe that a world order in Russia's image or China's image would be worse than the deeply flawed world order of the United States the last 80 years, right?

It's an important point, actually, because there are people that don't agree with that on the left.

I actually feel like it's been unraveling, obviously, and it's getting getting worse out there as it unravels, right?

And actually, some of my criticism of what's happened in Gaza, I don't think Gaza could happen like 10 years ago, you know?

Part of that is actually the unraveling of the rules-based order, you know?

And I can even make a left-wing argument for some of these things.

I think the lessons that I take from that book are ultimately, and this is actually where I made,

I have some overlap and some difference, I think, with the crystal wing of the podcast listenership.

The overlap is, I truly believe that what we do at home is the most important thing to, it reverberates around the world, you know.

And actually,

this is why

in the civil rights movement, you know, some of the biggest allies of the civil rights movement were people who were like, hey, if we want to win the Cold War, we got to stop being fucking hypocrites here in the United States.

You know, that was actually like a powerful argument that people brought to bear for legislative change and legal changes in this country.

If you talk to Alexei Navalny, if you talk to the Hungarian opposition, you've talked to these Hong Kong protesters, sure, they may have wanted certain things from U.S.

foreign policy.

But I remember Navalny just telling me, like, I don't want your sanctions.

I want your example.

Because I've been making an argument my whole life that a democratic society produces leaders who aren't corrupt and put the interests of the people first.

And fucking Trump gives a taxi driver in Moscow the immediate rebuttal.

And which is basically what Putin's been saying.

Putin doesn't say his system is perfect.

He just says, well, everybody's system is the same.

So you might as well have a strong man who hates kind of the same people that you do, right?

And so the first lesson is that who we are is in how we organize our own society and democracy is the most important influence we can have in winning competitions abroad, winning the Cold War, or winning the next Cold War or whatever we want to call it, you know?

And the other thing I take away that's hopeful, because there's a lot of dark stuff I can take away about, you know, technology and, you know, how it's transformed the landscape.

Yeah, there's plenty of darkness.

Obviously, I wouldn't have liked liked the book if there was no darkness.

Yeah, it's super dark.

So I'm just trying to give positive lessons.

There's a lot of solidarity out there.

I believe there are more of us, us being like people who want that kind of world, than them being the kind of strong men and the creeps.

But we're not wired in with each other enough.

Like, you know, Steve Bannon and these guys have built like an actual

community of solidarity across far-right movements.

And some other people have built a solidarity across autocratic leaders, you know, and we tend to argue with each other, you know, instead of just like charging up the hill, you know, and I appeal to the people that piss maybe on this podcast.

Like, if you spend time being mad about that, we have no shot.

You know, and I apply that to myself, too.

Like, I have to accept allies, you know, because without them, you're going to get crushed because that's what they're counting on is dividing their opposition.

The other thing I took from it that was positive, so we can leave it there, was um, and that I am, that informs my thinking on what we need to do now is all of the heroes that you were talking to who are fighting Orban and Putin and she,

like, at least maybe in your book, there was very little conversation about like, is our advocacy going to pull well with the median person in Hong Kong?

Yes.

You know, like, that was not it.

You know, it's like, it's like, in the face of an authoritarian threat, like resistance and opposition for the sake of it is good because that is needed to stop it.

Yes.

And what you just said, like, bringing in allies from across the spectrum is good.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's not worth nitpicking over.

And then we can figure out the rest when we have a stable democracy about what, you know, the best TV ad is to run in the Columbus market.

You know, and I like that mindset.

I think that's an important mindset that people lose here.

Yeah.

It is both righteous and right to say that what happened to Brad Lander is wrong and not worry about whether it's distracting us from the big, beautiful bill messaging.

All right, final thing.

You got to go.

As I said, the final segment, I do this with Tommy.

Famously, George W.

Bush was quizzed by a local TV reporter about world leaders, and he did not answer the questions correctly, and you and your elk mocked him about it for years.

And so, you will receive a world leader quiz now to end the podcast.

Are you ready, Ben Rose?

Oh, shit, I didn't know this was coming.

Yes, I'm ready.

The leader of Pakistan.

Well, Imran Khan is in jail.

The actual leadership of Pakistan is the chief of staff of the army, and I don't know his name, actually, right now.

I don't.

But that's the actual power in Pakistan.

Okay.

Zardari.

Well, yeah.

Zardari is the prime minister.

You know, he's the duly elected leader.

I guess the point I'm making is that I don't think that, and Zardari is a deeply strange guy who's been around forever.

But the actual leadership of the country to me is the military and the chief of staff of the army because it's essentially a military dictatorship of the civilian front.

And I don't know the name of the chief of staff of the army.

A nuanced answer.

We're going to let you off the hook.

This one is going to be tougher.

It gets easier from here.

The leader of the Chechen Republic.

That was another one W did not know.

Rasmon Kadyrov, right?

Oh, boom.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Kadyrov is like Putin's biggest funky, has a creepy beard, was fighting with mercenaries in Ukraine, is lavishly corrupt, and may have carried out the assassination of Borsh Nemsov because it was five Chechens.

And so sometimes Putin does his dirty work through Kadyrov.

One and a half for two.

You're beating Tommy right now.

I'm going to have a European trip this summer.

Two of the countries I'm going to the leaders are easy.

The third is maybe not maybe easy for you.

We'll see.

The Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

Great name.

Oh,

shit.

Because Mark Ruta is no longer the Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

Let's see.

He was elected July 2024.

He has a name

that is also a name similar to a male body part.

I guess where I'll go for my half is that he was dependent on Gert Wilder Wilder as the far-right lunatic to sustain his coalition.

And Gert Wilder just pulled out, but I don't remember this person's name.

I don't know.

And he pulled out in favor of Dick Shouf.

Is that his name?

That works, Dick Shouf.

I should know that because that's a ton of name.

Okay, now you know.

That's great.

Final question: the demographic makeup of Iran.

Ted Cruz was

Ted Cruz was unable to answer.

I don't know it on a percentile basis.

It is certainly majority Persian.

There's a significant Kurdish minority.

There's a Baluki minority as well.

Okay, Baluki 2%, Kurdish 9%.

There's actually the second minority

is Azerbaijani.

How about that?

Okay.

The reason that I'd keep an eye on the Kurdish and Baluki points is that they have separatist movements for good reason because they've been treated like shit.

And so in a regime change scenario, I would watch that space.

Baluchi separatist and Kurdish separatists.

The Azeris don't, I think, have the same beef with the government.

But yeah.

Running circles around Vitor on the quiz effort.

I didn't even, yeah, I didn't know this segment was coming.

Okay, well, we could.

Well, I wasn't going to warn you.

I'm embarrassed.

It's important to get you.

George W.

Bush that knows coming either.

Ben Rhodes.

I wanted to do China stuff.

There's so much stuff to talk about.

So you're going to have to come back.

I love it.

I love to come back.

All right, brother.

We'll see you soon.

Everybody else will be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork podcast.

See you all then.

Peace.

Don't done when I pull you.

Shut up your mouth and look where it got you.

My mouth runs on two.

Shouts from both sides, but we got the lamb, but they got the view.

Well, now here's the clue.

Life is

on to you.

I hope it will play on you.

Well, I hope mine did too.

As life gets longer, then all of this all the way

to spirit is often

takes shit to make this man I feel endless for me.

I'll go you shot out your mouth, but look where it got you.

My mouth runs on you.

Shots from both sides.

Oh, they got the lamp, but they got the view.

Well, now here's the clue.

We are killed

right where we stand.

Life get rips up and you hope it's plenty on you.

I hope mind behind.

We are killed

right

the hour.

As life is longer, I

feel softer than this feeling.

It takes shifts to make this where I feel

good this free.

The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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