# The Iran-War: An Autopsy - with Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz

An episode of [Call Me Back - with Dan Senor](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1539292794), 29 Jun 2026, 1 h 02 min.

Audio: https://podcasts.beehiiv.com/d9ee47aa-cc91-4ad0-b1e2-000191888049/01a0599f-c7dc-725e-a326-2afd78c94e7e/01a059a0-1137-7e12-af41-7a876568e4be/01a059a0-12d0-7769-a8d4-bf5e9d592a53.mp3

____ Many supporters of the Iran War, both in the U.S. and in Israel, consider it a failure. Dan doesn't necessarily share that observation, at least not until the fate of the U.S.- Iran deal is clear. Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz, two thinkers that have been following every twist and turn of the Iran war and landed in that camp. So we wanted to conduct an autopsy of the Iran War, at least as where the war stands now. Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of the Remnant podcast. He’s also a senior fellow at AEI and author of a number of books, including Suicide of the West. and John Podhoretz, editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine, host of the Commentary podcast and author of Hell of a Ride. Call Me Back is made possible by our subscribers. If these conversations are where you turn to understand Israel and the Jewish world, consider joining them. It's what keeps this show going. Become a Subscriber - Inside Call me Back ____ In this episode: • What were the expectations vs reality? • Israel and Iran's position today Vs on February 27th. • The war's impact on US foreign policy • what would have been a better strategy in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program? • Did Trump and Netanyahu miscalculate? • Where does the relationship between Netanyahu and Trump go from here? This episode is sponsored by Israel on Campus Coalition. You can follow this link to support their work: http://israelcc.org/ More Ark Media: • Want to join Ark Media? Check out our careers page for new openings. • Explore Israel Votes • Listen to Ark News Daily • Listen to For Heaven's Sake • Listen to What’s Your Number? • Newsletters | Ark Media | Amit Segal | Nadav Eyal • Instagram | Ark Media | Dan • X | Dan • Dan Senor & Saul Singer’s book, The Genius of Israel • Get in touch Credits: Ilan Benatar, Beth Pearlman, Brittany Cohen, Ava Weiner, Martin Huergo, Mariangeles Burgos, and Yuval Semo

## Transcript

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[0:55] When Trump said, "I am going to destroy your civilization," Tuesday morning, and Tuesday evening he said, "I am now declaring a ceasefire," I think it was at that moment that it was clear that the heart had gone out of whatever the hell was going on, that he had decided that he was no longer having fun, and that he wanted to get himself out of it.
[1:18] When you take out the supreme leader and 40-odd members of the leadership of the country, they're going to interpret that as an attempt at a, at regime change.
[1:27] That completely blew up the escalatory ladder thesis on all this.
[1:31] Like, if they had gone in and said to the regime quietly, "Look, you guys are safe, but we're going to take out your Navy, we're going to take out your Air Force.
[1:37] Don't do anything with the Strait of Hormuz or this, we're going to take out your regime," that would have been the right sequencing of threats.
[1:43] But instead, to start at 11 and then try to go backwards creates this problem where the Iranians were like, "We're a Persian Gulf Alamo now. We got nothing to lose. Let's start attacking our neighbors.
[1:54] Let's start mining and droning the Strait of Hormuz because it's this or death."
[1:58] And so I personally think it's possible that the United States could have won this whole thing in real terms, gotten regime change and all that, but it re- would have required a level of stick-to-it-iveness that it would be folly to expect from this administration.
[2:13] \[Instrumental music\] It's 8:00 AM on Sunday, June 28th here in New York City.
[2:28] It's 3:00 PM on Sunday, June 28th in Israel. As many of our listeners know, I have not been hysterical about where the US and Israel are positioned today vis-a-vis Iran. Do I have concerns?
[2:41] Of course, but I'm not hysterical. Some of you have been reaching out to me and the Arc Media team to express your alarm at my analysis thus far.
[2:50] So today, I invited on the podcast two thinkers who have been following every twist and turn on the Iran war and have actually landed in a pretty dispirited place.
[3:00] They are among the most independent and thoughtful writers and analysts on the right. They always have been.
[3:07] But as it relates to today's conversation, especially so during the Trump years, we wanted to conduct an autopsy of the Iran war, at least as it stands right now.
[3:17] Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast, and a syndicated columnist for the LA Times.
[3:26] He's also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an author of a number of books, including Suicide of the West.
[3:34] John Podhoretz is editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine and one of the hosts of The Commentary Podcast, and author of the book Hell of a Ride. Just one programming note, this conversation will be released in two parts.
[3:46] Part one, the autopsy of the Iran war, will be released on Monday, and part two, which will be focused on US politics and trends in US politics, given, especially given events of the past week and in the lead up to the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, which is something we will focus on.
[4:06] Part two will be released on Thursday as folks are heading into the July 4th weekend. We'll be back with the conversation after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the Israel On Campus Coalition.
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[5:28] \[Instrumental music\]And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast Jonah Goldberg and Jon Podhoretz, each of whom have been on this podcast separately. Now they are here together.
[5:41] It will be a miracle if I get a word in to this conversation. \[laughs\] So let me just start with that.
[5:46] I'm bracing our listeners for, like, I will fight to jump in, but this may be difficult because Jon hosts a podcast which usually has others on it, but it is a miracle if any of them are able to get- Not that you'd know.
[5:58] Not that you'd know that there are others there. \[laughs\] They're in the credits. But you don't know.
[6:02] \[laughs\] And Jonah, one of the podcasts that he records each week is, he does-- He gets rid of all the pretense of even having other people on. It's just him for, like, an hour, and it, it hits every weekend.
[6:13] And I actually say, I will say this, I listen to that podcast religiously. I don't know how you do it, Jonah.
[6:19] It's very impressive that he just talks, ruminates for over an hour, and I will just, a plug here, I hope our listeners subscribe to both Commentary and The Dispatch, but if you wanna listen to this weekly solo, as Jonah calls it, you do need to be a subscriber to get behind the paywall.
[6:33] So don't just cheat and do the eight or ten minutes of paywall. Get into the whole episode now. Thank you, Dan. And I'll have links to both in the show says...
[6:40] No, no, no, Jonah, I'm, I really it's \[laughs\] I'm not that religious about political or policy or newsy podcasts.
[6:46] I actually wind up, on podcast world, I listen to, like, kinda spor- a lot of sports stuff and then a lot of history podcasts.
[6:52] Your both Commentary and Ruminant are ones, or Remnant, are ones I listen to religiously, so I, uh, I mean that. Thank you. I just wanna point out about the talking thing. Oh, here we go.
[7:02] If you remember the very fine film Major League? Mm-hmm. The best baseball movie ever made. Hmm. Well, one of them.
[7:08] Anyway, Bob Uecker plays the announcer, and he's got this color commentator who sits next to him, and every now and then he goes, "What do you think, Phil?"
[7:17] And Phil goes, "Uh," and then he goes, "Ah, just a bit outside." Like, Phil, the color guy, never says the entire movie, does not get a sentence out. And I'm sure Christine, Abe, and Seth really appreciate that.
[7:28] I was gonna say, I, I didn't think you'd get all three under the bus in one sentence. That's fantastic. \[laughs\] Exactly. All right.
[7:36] I wanna start, as I mentioned in the introduction, we're gonna do one conversation on Iran and an autopsy of the Iran war, if we do believe the Iran war is actually over. I'm not convinced, but we'll get into that.
[7:46] And then we'll have a second part of the conversation more focused on US politics, where things are going, focused on domestic affairs. So I wanna start with you, Jon.
[7:55] You said that you believed, you said in your commentary, you've written extensively about this on your own podcast, that you assumed Trump would, quote-unquote, "finish the war" simply out of self-preservation, and you can explain what that means.
[8:06] And Jonah, you were skeptical from the start. I remember listening to you at the very beginning.
[8:10] You were, you were supportive, you were sympathetic, you were defending the US confronting Iran, but you were skeptical that the way at least the administration was going about it was gonna work.
[8:20] So I wanna just start with the baseline. What did each of you actually expect when the bombs started falling on February 28th? And I guess at what specific moment did you know the original script had changed or was dead?
[8:33] I'll start with you, Jon.
[8:34] I thought that either the regime would collapse in some fashion or that a new figure would be pulled out of a hat to be the new version of a supreme leader in a country that was no longer called the Islamic Republic of Iran, or that the war would be prosecuted in a relatively conventional way, by which I mean that it would be fought with all these bombs and everything like that, but that it, we would continue to escalate and push our advantage from the air and continue to punish the regime and make it so that it had no choice but to say uncle.
[9:15] And the two moments at which I thought that it, things were going wrong were when it started to become clear that there were targets that they were refusing to hit that were obvious targets, dual use military and civilian targets that in a war are no longer, should no longer be considered dual use.
[9:35] So give an example. Like electricity infrastructure? Transport infrastructure, bridges, some of the internal pipelines.
[9:43] We heard people from the administration saying that they did not want to leave Iran in a crippled position for its future. I'm assuming there was a newer regime, a new government. Right.
[9:56] But since they had never established regime change as a goal of the war, they didn't seem to be building to anything.
[10:05] I think implicitly, and I said this from the, like, day two, this war can't be won if the regime is standing at the end of it because it's a millenarian irredentist regime that has a religious basis for its construction, and, like, it's not, "Oh, well.
[10:23] Oh, well, that's, this is the way it works." Like, all of Shia Islam is somehow discredited \[laughs\] if they walk away.
[10:30] They're not gonna walk away, so you have to remove them or extirpate them in some fashion, and they didn't wanna say that.
[10:37] And so when it became clear that Trump, that they were withholding their military strat, they were withholding their big punches, that they'd gone in big, but then they were kind of calibrating their punches, then I'm like, "Eh, this is a little bit of a problem."
[10:54] And then when Trump said, "I am going to destroy your civilization," Tuesday morning, and Tuesday evening he said, "I am now declaring a ceasefire," I think it was at that moment that it was clear that the heart had gone out of whatever the hell was going on, that he had decided that he was no longer having fun and that he wanted to get himself out of it.
[11:19] Okay.
[11:19] I'm gonna come back to you on some of your points, Jon, but before I do, Jonah, what were your, I guess, expectations when the war started, and when did you realize from your perspective that it was going in a different direction or, or maybe never really got off the ground?
[11:31] It's a good question 'cause I hadn't been thinking about it in terms of the chronology for my own points of view on this.
[11:37] And if we're gonna start the chronology for how I think about most things with the Trump administration, you gotta go back to, like, 2015 because my argument from the beginning has been this sort of character is destiny kind of thing, and that I don't have a lot of faith in Trump as a competent, serious, long-range strategic thinker.
[11:56] He lives in the moment. He goes with his gut. Sometimes it really works for him. I would argue more often than not, at least when it comes to big things about America, it doesn't.
[12:06] So to use a line that we hear at the beginning of pretty much every episode of commentary, uh, hope for the best, but expect the worst.
[12:14] That's sort of how I went into this, and I think the more astounding thing wasn't that this went poorly, it's that how well the Venezuela thing went, and I think that is the problem.
[12:25] Trump saw the Venezuela thing, was really impressed with how it went, saw that this Delsy Rodriguez was a pliant, serviceable, corrupt hack that he could work with.
[12:37] It wasn't regime change, but he got to fulfill this long-simmering desire to, quote-unquote, "get the oil," and he was like, "Well, let's do this again with Iran." And the problem was Iran is a different place.
[12:46] So I still hoped for the best in the beginning, in part because I had a higher degree of confidence than I should've that the Israelis were, in fact, the kind of partners that the administration was saying they were, and that the Israelis, given their actual competence in a whole bunch of military operations over the last 5 or 50 years, depending on how you wanna look at it, that they had a plan for regime change.
[13:11] And this is a point that my friend Ken Pollack made very early in the Iran war that has always stuck with me, is I think the original error of this, other than not building an argument for it with the American people and not going to Congress, which would've vetted a lot of the weaknesses in their plan.
[13:26] Like, even if Trump didn't think the Strait of Hormuz was going to be a problem, if Congress was like, "You can't go in there unless you can assure us that you have a plan for the Strait of Hormuz," they would've had a better plan for the Strait of Hormuz than the wish casting that they had.
[13:40] But Ken made the point that, look, whatever we say, whatever signaling we have, however the negotiations go in the future, when you take out the supreme leader and 40-odd members of the leadership of the country, they're going to interpret that as an attempt at a, at regime change.
[13:58] The watch what we do, not what we say rule really applied to that. That was a regime change move in their eyes, and that completely, no pun intended, blew up the escalatory ladder thesis on all this.
[14:11] Like, if they had gone in and said to the regime quietly, "Look, you guys are safe, but we're gonna take out your navy, we're gonna take out your air force.
[14:17] Don't do anything with the Strait of Hormuz or this, we're gonna take out your regime," that would've been the right sequencing of threats.
[14:23] But instead to start, in spinal tap terms, to start at 11 and then try to go backwards creates this problem where the Iranians were like, "We're a Persian Gulf Alamo now. We got nothing to lose.
[14:33] Let's start attacking our neighbors. Let's start mining and droning the Strait of Hormuz because it's this or death." And they believed that Trump wanted the people to rise up against them.
[14:43] And so I personally think it's possible that the United States could have won this whole thing in real terms, gotten regime change and all that, but it re- would've required a level of stick-to-it-iveness that it would be folly to expect from this administration.
[14:58] Can I make two points in response? Sure. One is that from what we understand, the Israelis did have a plan for regime change, and the administration put the kibosh on it. That's what I was gonna say. Yeah.
[15:10] That's what I was... That's my moment of realizing, oh crap, this isn't gonna work, is when it started to come out that the administration rejected the Israeli plan. Right.
[15:20] My understanding is not that the administration rejected the goal of regime change.
[15:24] It was just that the Israelis had put forward a series of steps that would need to be taken, and the administration was selective as to which ones they adopted. Right. Right.
[15:32] So there were certain things the Israelis were pushing that, as they say it, they kind of sent them into the Pentagon, and then the Pentagon came out with plans that were a version of what they had sent, but not everything, and the Israelis argue, or some Israelis in the system over there argue that this was not everything, and regime change is gonna get a lot harder if we don't do everything.
[15:52] Yeah, so the, the, it reminds me of, it's like when you get instructions over the radio to defuse a bomb or a landmine, and then the guy says, "Okay, now, but first you have to cut the blue wire."
[16:03] And the guy says, "Eh, we're not gonna do that." Yeah. \[laughs\] Right. \[laughs\] Yeah, we'll do the other stuff that you want, but we're not gonna do this blue wire thing, right? That's how I feel about it. Right.
[16:13] But I... See, I think, and the o- the other point I was gonna make, which I, I didn't summarize properly, is there's no question that if you decapitate the regime, you are seeking regime change.
[16:25] So when you say this is not a war for regime change, you're playing semantics, and we were playing semantics and have been, as we have been going through this war, playing semantics because we are negotiating with ourselves.
[16:38] All these negotiations are the United States and Trump negotiating with the United States and Trump. What does the ceasefire mean? When is it breached? If they do X, does that breach the ceasefire Y?
[16:52] We don't know what the Iranians are saying. The Iranians weren't necessarily saying anything. Trump didn't wanna say regime change because Trump said he was against regime change.
[17:02] Then he inaugurates a war, the only logical conclusion of which is regime change, and then he spends six weeks before the ceasefire trying to figure out what to do that isn't regime change, but that will bring the regime to its knees.
[17:20] And so he substituted, as far as I can tell, getting the dust for regime change, that the end of the war, there would be an end, and the end would be that there would be this urn- And in this urn there would be nuclear material, and he would hold aloft the urn standing in the middle of Tehran and show the Iranians who was boss.
[17:43] Because he needed to have a goal, so the goal was getting the dust.
[17:50] But you're not getting the dust without regi- \[chuckles\] change either, because that would mean the regime agrees to have the United States go into some mountain place and start in with digging machines and tunneling machines that can survive an accidental triggering of 60% enriched plutonium or whatever.
[18:10] And so that's only gonna happen if the regime is fundamentally altered. And it was weird.
[18:17] It was a-- We were in a very weird situation 'cause his rhetoric then got more and more and more and more purple, and we were kind of doing less and less and less. Okay. I wanna come back to something Jonah said, though.
[18:27] He said that we took it to 11 too quickly, too soon. So what Jonah's arguing is, what on earth did you expect the Iranian leadership to think was going on?
[18:36] What's interesting is that the decapitation was not always part of the plan, at least in the way it was carried out.
[18:42] It was also an opportunity was presented that suddenly they got this intelligence, the Israelis got this intelligence, that 40 of the top leaders of the regime and the Supreme-- You know, the-- I, I don't have to rehash the whole thing.
[18:53] We did a whole episode on this with Ronen Bergman, where he walked through, like, detail by detail all this intelligence that Israel had. So they went to the US and said, "Look, we have this opportunity."
[19:02] One could argue, absent that moment, they may not have gone to 11 on February 28th. Mm-hmm.
[19:08] I hadn't thought about it in this way, but, you know, I guess, Jonah, there is a world in which the Ken Pollack scenario, as he laid out on your podcast, could have actually worked, but for this gift, if you will, that the, the US and the Israelis received, which was, you know, in the days leading up to February 28th, they got wind of this meeting that was happening in person.
[19:28] "Hey, guys, have you heard about Zoom? Nope, still no Zoom. We're gonna meet in person." They're all gonna meet in person, and the supreme leader's gonna be nearby.
[19:35] That actually may-- Had that not happened-- Let me put it that way. I hate to do this kind of if what would've happened. But had that not happened, you may have gotten a sequencing that you would've preferred. Jonah?
[19:45] Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think that's entirely possible. It's not just that the enemy gets a vote, you know, this cliché, which happens to be true, but so does the law of unintended consequences, right?
[19:55] I mean, so, like, there's so much contingency in the fog of war, and like, "Oh my gosh, we have this opportunity."
[19:59] And because this thing has not actually been planned out well by the administration, they're like, "Oh my gosh, this-- we can't miss this opportunity."
[20:07] But again, if you think about it from the perspective of the Iranians, I have no problem dropping bombs on the Iranian regime, right? Not the Iranian people, but the Iranian regime. I got no problem with it.
[20:14] But, like, twice they launched attacks during negotiations.
[20:19] You mean in June of '25, when Witkoff and Jared were negotiating, then also in the lead-up to this war, Jared and, uh, Kushner and Witkoff were negotiating, and then- Right.
[20:28] Again, you try to see things a little bit through the enemy's perspective, not as a act of sympathy, but as an act of strategy.
[20:35] So you combine those two things with taking out the supreme leader, and you say, "Okay, they were never interested in any kind of peace. They murdered our guy and his family and all these other people.
[20:47] They clearly want us all dead, and our people want us dead."
[20:49] So when they're saying, you know, to the Iranian people, "Get ready to rise up," you know, the members of the Basij know that whatever Trump's plan is, that there are an enormous number of people who have a righteous desire to tear those people limb from limb.
[21:03] And when Trump says, "All you have to do is lay down your arms, and you'll be fine," guarantees from Washington mean nothing to these people.
[21:09] They're terri-- You know, they're terrified of their own people because their own people deservedly hate them.
[21:13] And so it seemed, like, obvious to me at a very early point that Trump just simply thought this was gonna be a replay of a Venezuela kind of thing, and it wasn't going to be.
[21:23] Now, how, how it was going to end, I still don't know. There is this weird argument, let's just call them the MAGA isolationists for want of a better label, right? When Trump did this, they all got very mad.
[21:34] Megyn Kelly and Tucker and all these people got very, very angry. This was a betrayal.
[21:39] Chris Caldwell, who I have respect for, wrote a very unpersuasive piece by my light saying this was a betrayal of the core of Trumpism. I thought it was all BS. I said so at the time. The core of Trumpism is Trump.
[21:50] It's a psychological phenomenon. It's not an ideological or political phenomenon. And Trump, as Joe Pesci would say about the drive-through in Lethal Weapon 2, always screws you at the end.
[22:00] Anyone who puts all of their faith and expectations that he is going to be a consistent and reliable partner gets screwed. Just ask Bibi Netanyahu.
[22:07] So now all the MAGA isolationists love Trump again, or at least they're heartened, and they love Vance because he's regressed back to, you know, listening to Sohrab Ahmari and Teodoro Petras, however you pronounce his name, and all those kinds of people.
[22:19] There's nothing in the rule book anywhere that says those people can't get screwed again, right? That the hawks, that he won't pivot back to the hawks.
[22:27] If Iran humiliates Trump, which is sort of what the news environment is suggesting as we're recording this, that, you know, the Iranians try to close the Strait of Hormuz again, they attack some ships and blah, blah, blah, America's, is fighting back.
[22:38] It's entirely possible in two weeks' time Lindsey Graham is going on Fox saying, "I knew it. He was with us all along." \[chuckles\] And he's back on their side, right? This is the thing.
[22:47] People watch the bull smash stuff in the china shop, and then every now and then they're like, "Oh, but not that vase." Right. \[chuckles\] And it's like, no, that's what the bull does.
[22:57] And sometimes he smashes stuff that you want smashed, and sometimes he smashes stuff that you think he would never smash. It's, that's just Trump.
[23:03] So, like, just making a long-term bet on a straight-line projection of what he is going to do in terms of ever-shifting political and, and military environment I just think is poor advice. So- Okay. All right.
[23:15] Go ahead, Jon. See, this is what I mean. I'm not, I'm not gonna get a word in. So you just go. Yeah. Go get some coffee, Dan. \[laughing\] Exactly. Jon, go ahead. Okay.
[23:23] All I was gonna say is that when you start a conflict like this, and it will move into phases, unless it's an operation like Venezuela or Panama in 1989, right? Where we staged military action to arrest Noriega.
[23:39] That was a five-day operation. Venezuela was a one-night operation Both of which we had very specific goals, very achievable goals, and it, it really would fit like the Colin Powell doctrine of how you do these things.
[23:52] Right. So let's say you have a strategy, and it has phases, and the strategy is Shock and Awe at the beginning.
[23:58] The version of Shock and Awe is the blowing up of the meeting, and then you're going after their missiles, and they're-- you're trying to get rid of the Air Force, the Navy, and whatever defensive weaponry they may have if you hadn't gotten rid of all of it in 2025, and you do that.
[24:14] Then you can settle in if you have a strategy for the long run, which is choke the regime off economically. You've done all this damage.
[24:24] You may wanna keep going in and using their use of ballistic missiles to locate where the ballistic missiles that we haven't gotten yet are to take them out.
[24:34] But basically, you settle in for six months, and they'll collapse of their own weight. They can't export oil. You close their pathway off. Maybe you blow up a couple of refineries.
[24:46] You do this, but you have to be willing to stay there and do it and not have a piece of news every three hours, which would be let them choke on their oil until they literally choke to death if we can just hold fast.
[25:03] And that's where character matters because that is what we can't expect of Trump.
[25:08] Instead, the Iranians kind of understood that if they just made it at a point at which Trump had lost his patience and wanted to get out, they could declare victory, though they have won nothing.
[25:21] They actually haven't won anything. They haven't gained any territory.
[25:24] I mean, I guess if they take control of the Strait of Hormuz and nobody stops them from having that control, they will have won the right to toll the Strait of Hormuz.
[25:32] But victory is then defined simply as preventing America from winning, and that's why, I mean, that Trump was negotiating with himself.
[25:40] If he just understood \[chuckles\] that he had to win and that there was no alternative but victory once he started, it's a matter of will and, like, seriousness of purpose, and I guess Jonah's point is you can't expect Trump to have seriousness of purpose.
[25:55] Right.
[25:55] So the question is then d- if you say that Jonah has low expectations for Trump for the reasons he laid out, then what you're effectively doing is grading, I think, then we're grading this on a, on what would be Jonah's, like, Trump curve.
[26:07] Now, if you take a step back and you say, "Where are we today," right? So if the focus of the war, as we understand it, absent regime change, so let's table regime change.
[26:16] But if you could accomplish serious degradation and setback or, on the more extreme end, obliteration of Iran's nuclear program, if you could achieve all but wiping out or seriously degrading its air force and its navy and its other conventional capabilities and its ballistic missile capabilities and the industrial base to continue the ballistic missile production and then the proxies in the region.
[26:37] So if you talk about those four goals, the nuclear program is not obliterated, but it seems like, you know, frozen may be too strong a word, but it does seem like it's not, it does not seem to be immediately operational.
[26:50] So it's not like Iran can just, like, flip a switch and get back to work on its nuclear program, and that's because of what happened in June and what happened now.
[26:56] The Navy and the Air Force, as we've discussed, seriously weakened, not the threat that it could've been or would've been.
[27:02] The ballistic missile program, sure, they still have ballistic missile capabilities, but again, I cannot believe it was not seriously damaged and set back.
[27:10] And Hezbollah, which has shown more resilience than I would've imagined, I think that would've been the case whether or not the US and Israel launched this war against Iran, and we can get into what's happening with Hezbollah now 'cause there are some developments.
[27:22] But I'm just saying, as far as I'm concerned, those are pretty good facts, meaning it may not have been what many had hoped for and expected when they went into it, but relative to where the US and Israel were on February 27th, Iran, the regime has had to absorb somewhere between half a trillion and $750 billion of economic damage.
[27:44] Now, can the regime still be a threat in the region? Absolutely. Do we have to figure out how to deal with what they can do, their kind of choke point strategy in the strait? Absolutely.
[27:53] But on balance, Iran is, like, objectively weaker today than it was on February 27th. Is that not a net positive? And if you do, if you believe it is, then I still think it was worth the trade, so to speak.
[28:07] My only answer to that is that then it's an opportunity cost question. Was the juice worth the squeeze? That I have no-- I don't think we have any way to answer. They're not telling us things.
[28:20] We don't know until we know that it was good. Like, it looks good in, in, in the way you characterize it.
[28:28] But if you have- haven't lost, but you haven't won either, you're freezing the conflict in place at a moment when Iran can start rebuilding and can start working its will on things, and then that's a question of like, does it look like the US can't finish what it started?
[28:48] And if this is like the fifth time that we haven't won a war that we started or that we were involved in since 1953, since 1950 or something like that, what is a determined adversary like China gonna take away from that?
[29:01] And are there lessons in that psychologically about us that we're teaching them inadvertently? I have a very similar answer, but I would broaden out a little, little bit.
[29:11] Dan, when I hear you list, okay, we did this in the Navy, we did this in the Air Force, you know, these are points I've made. I, I agree.
[29:16] We do hear reports about them reconstituting their ballistic missile stuff to the degree that that's one of the reasons why we had to strike them again in the last few days.
[29:24] Be that as it may, my problem with this is there's a certain amount of sort of McNamara-ism to all of this, of keeping score in terms of, you know, with McNamara it was like casualties, but it's also like we destroyed more of their stuff than we used up Of our stuff and, you know, all that.
[29:40] And it- it's looking within the four corners of a purely military question. This is a point that Walter Russell Mead touched on when he was talking to you recently.
[29:50] There are externalities in the political and cultural and strategic and geopolitical realm that are really difficult to quantify, and this is where I agree with Jon to a certain extent, is that they're also unknowable.
[30:02] I think if you're -- And I don't wanna, like, just hand you a segue to the other half of this podcast.
[30:07] \[laughs\] But if you look at what is happening in American domestic politics in terms of Israel's political reputation, in terms of its political salience in Democratic primaries, in the sort of, uh, right-wing influencer sphere, if you look at what Vance's theory, and I'm not sure it's right, but what Vance's theory about the future of American politics is,
[30:32] all of these things need to be put into the calculation about whether this war was worth it.
[30:37] I keep hearing you, you're the one who has the polls, talk about how the vast majority of Israelis think that Israel lost this war, right? Look, I tried to figure this out, like, a month ago.
[30:46] When was the last war America actually lost militarily? And, sort of the War of 1812 was at least a draw, right? I mean, \[laughs\] but like, like, we don't lose wars militarily.
[31:00] But ask Americans, what wars have we lost, or what wars weren't worth it because we didn't win? They can name a bunch. Right. And that's because political will matters.
[31:10] Does Operation Epic Fury make it easier or harder for an American politician when Israel is up against the wall to intervene on her behalf?
[31:20] And I think it makes it a little harder for a Republican, a lot harder for a Democrat, and I don't think for right now, if you do a big picture thing, this wasn't worth it.
[31:30] It is something that has done more damage to America's reputation around the world. If you talk to people in Europe, I've done-- I've talked to a few in the last month, they think we look like clowns on all of this.
[31:41] That's not good. The transatlantic alliance has been weakened by all of this, although I think that started with Greenland.
[31:47] And now even Israel and the, our putative Gulf allies, they are having a lot of second thoughts about us. I don't know how we put any of that in the pro column. Okay.
[31:56] So Jon, let's-- 'Cause against the backdrop of what Jonah just said, then how do you think Israel's positioned? So that, Jonah just laid out how he believes America's position is perceived around the world.
[32:07] How do you think Israel's doing right now versus February 27th? I think Israel is the country that punches the furthest above its weight of any country, not only in our lifetimes, but conceivably in history.
[32:22] Since Sparta or something, yeah. \[laughs\] Yeah.
[32:25] I mean, the capabilities, not just over the last three months, but I mean, the capabilities that Israel has displayed since October 7th are so dazzling that if what you wanna do is project yourself as the country of the future, Israel has done more for itself in that regard than any other country I can think of.
[32:48] Even if you hate them, you're like, "Man, they are formidable." And this is a country of nine million people on this tiny plot of land that have no business having the world's best small military.
[33:02] There's no country in the world that has the combination of Israel's military capabilities, its intelligence capabilities, and its cyber and tech capabilities. Right. So we have no ally like this. Right.
[33:15] I mean, the Pentagon said as much when, in the National Security Strategy document and in the, the number of press conferences that Hegseth and Kane were-- They kept talking about how the US, Israel's the model ally.
[33:26] I mean, again, I'm not, I'm not here, this is not boosterism. I just, objectively, there's no other country that does all of these things.
[33:31] Doesn't mean there are other, there aren't other countries that do provide a lot of value. I think, you know, India provides a lot of value to the-- I think Korea, I think even a country like Poland.
[33:39] I just think if you just went down the list, the, you can't find another country that has all of what we just laid out.
[33:44] But Israel for itself, and in itself, has a geopolitical problem of its reputation and this sort of global assault on it, which is also about Jewry, and it's a very, that's a very interwoven issue.
[33:57] And we're gonna get to that. But if you need to be a country whose message is, "Don't F with us," Israel's behavior in the last three years is the ultimate don't F with us statement of our lifetimes.
[34:12] And therefore, even this war, which Israelis are clearly very disappointed by, though that also has to be considered in light of how many people in Israel are disaffected with the government and just like here will never, will not wanna say \[laughs\] that they're happy about something.
[34:29] Yeah, but I, I don't buy that, Jon, because- Okay... no, because the polling showed when the war started, the public was overwhelmingly supportive of it, even though Netanyahu was, would be the beneficiary of it, so.
[34:39] And they're still supportive of action in Lebanon, so that's true. But I'm just saying- Right...
[34:44] they may be disappointed by it, and they have every reason in some ways to be disappointed by it, particularly if we find out that they had this seven-stage interlocking plan that envisioned itself as following progressively these steps so that step five preceded step three, and step three helped to get to step four.
[35:06] And as you say, they picked, the Pentagon picked one, three, and five and did them in reverse order, and therefore no gains could be achieved.
[35:15] That's not gonna be Israel's fault, and there's not much that Israel could have done either to control the Pentagon or to say, "No. You know what? Let's call it off." Right.
[35:24] If you're not gonna do everything we're prescribing, then, then we're pulling the plug. Yeah. We're, we're not gonna do that. Right. Any time America asks us to do something, you know, Israel does it, right?
[35:33] I mean, any time, that's really not a question. Yeah, but I just, I'm like, I don't wanna beat up on Israel here or Bibi, but my understanding from the reporting is Bibi went to America and asked America to join them.
[35:43] And here's where I would say if somebody had called me, I would say, "This is one giant meatball you're picking up here.
[35:51] Do you really wanna put all of your chips on trusting that Donald Trump is gonna see this through if it gets hard?" And that I think was a strategic mistake, at least in hindsight. Fair enough.
[36:04] We'll be right back after this break. This episode is sponsored by the Israel on Campus Coalition. Here's something a lot of people miss about what's happening on campus.
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[37:10] And I'm back with Jon Podhoretz and Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, I have a slightly different take on one point Jon made.
[37:16] Look, if you look at what is different about what happened from February 28th to now, again, I take your point, Jonah, that a lot has not gone as expected or some of the assumptions were wrong.
[37:27] But, but if you ask the question from Israel's perspective, is Israel in a stronger position or not? And, and you come back to Jon's, you know, the send a message that, you know, don't F with us, don't F with Israel.
[37:37] The depth of cooperation and the capabilities that flow from the cooperation between the US and Israel, I knew a lot of this existed before February 28th.
[37:49] I d-- I actually knew nothing in retrospect of the extent of this cooperation, of the integration, because even in June of '25, the operation against Fordow, it was not like a joint command.
[37:59] It was Israel conducted its operation, and then they kind of cleared the space for the US to come in with the beautiful B-2s at the end, which was extremely important.
[38:08] But this was a war that was planned, where as though these two militaries-- They, I mean, the Israelis call it, I mean, not officially, but unofficially, the, the Israeli m-- you know, you talk to, uh, IDF Air Force personnel or, or army personnel, they call this the war in English.
[38:22] That's what they call it. They call, call it the war in English because they have to conduct the whole war in English.
[38:26] I was speaking to a friend of mine at an Air Force base in Israel who said all she hears on the base now is English and Southern accents. \[laughs\] That's like the whole base at th- at this base.
[38:35] She says, "So disorienting. You're walking around," you know. And Ben Gurion Airport, by the way, it's a big complaint now of Israelis because it's screwed up commercial aviation.
[38:41] But if you go to Ben Gurion Airport, on the tarmac, all you see are Isra- are US aircraft everywhere.
[38:46] And a friend of mine who is in Air Force intelligence was called up, Israeli Air Force intelligence, who lives now in the US. He gets called up for Miluim, for reserve duty. He gets the plane ticket.
[38:58] The way this works is you get called up, no matter where you are, they say, "We need you back. We ne-" He says, "No problem. I'll come back." He gets the plane ticket. "We'll need you tomorrow."
[39:05] He assumes he's flying to Israel, okay? He gets the plane ticket. The plane ticket is not to Israel. The plane ticket, it's to South Carolina. He's perplexed. He goes, "Why on earth am I flying to South Carolina?" Okay.
[39:15] He calls his commander. He says, "What?" "Oh, we need you to go to the Shaw Air Force Base." Now, I'm not giving away state secrets here. Any of our listeners can Google the Shaw Air Force Base.
[39:23] The Shaw Air Force Base is one of the most important Air Force bases in the US Air Force, and it was where a lot of this war was commanded from. He's in the command room.
[39:33] It's Israelis and Ame-- I mean, fully integrated, running this war together. No, "Hey, you go into that room, and we go into this room." They were all in one room.
[39:42] Admiral Cooper was, like, on the screen there constantly, as though the Israelis and the Americans were all on the same team. We're all doing this together.
[39:50] So even if this didn't go according to plan, or even if you believe that, you know, Netanyahu miscalculated and should have paused, I do think if you're the region, no matter who you are in the region, whether you're the Gulf States, whether you're Erdogan, whether you're whomever, you look at this and say, "Sure, they got some things wrong," but the US and Israel are attached at the hip in a way that gives both countries extraordinary strategic reach in the region, and we don't want to be on the wrong side of that.
[40:19] For now, though, that, the, of course, the history of the- I asked Jonah the question. You see that, Jonah? Sorry. Okay, go ahead, Jonah, \[laughs\] and then we'll come back.
[40:26] Yeah, look, uh, I think that's all, that all sounds to the good to me, right? I mean, like, uh, that level of cooperation sounds great to me.
[40:34] I completely buy that it's an order of magnitude more involved than what we've had in the past with, never mind Israel, but with even maybe the Brits, right?
[40:44] In part because the last time we were that much enmeshed with the Brits, the Brits actually had a military that mattered.
[40:50] But I personally think if they hadn't done the decapitation thing, and they did it as a mow the law thing the first three weeks, and then just said, "You guys better stay down. Stay on the mat," right?
[41:02] "Don't touch more moves. Leave it alone," right? Basically, Midnight Hammer Part Two kind of thing.
[41:07] It would have sent an amazing-- the exactly the kind of message that you're talking about to regional allies, to China, to Russia.
[41:15] I think the lesson that a lot of those countries have taken, maybe not about our military or maybe not about our, our ability to work with Israel, but about our stick-to-it-iveness, our reliability.
[41:26] It went from being a positive message to a net negative message in terms of the seeming we have a political glass jaw in this country.
[41:33] Also, whatever you think about the MOU, which let's just be honest, doesn't mean a hell of a lot, but the way it was written, the way it was structured, the Iranians were very smart to do it in that way, to insist it on putting Lebanon first because their strategic goal isn't to beat us militarily.
[41:50] It's to get both American political parties to turn on Israel And they've had remarkable s- I mean, I'm not-- I don't wanna put it all on Iran.
[41:58] There are lots of reasons for it, but that project, amongst the multiplicity of authors, has had a remarkable success with the Democrats already, and they're making good progress with Republicans.
[42:09] And the way that thing was structured was to say that it was basically to set it up that if Israel did anything to defend itself in Lebanon, Israel could be accused of destroying the-- of breaking the peace.
[42:20] And kinda played out that way for the first week or so, and I think that those kinds of political problems, right?
[42:28] The asymmetry here is always going to be for enemies of the United States and enemies of Israel and enemies of an alliance between Israel and the United States, is always gonna be asymmetrical.
[42:38] Like Russia and China are never gonna go to war to separate us from Israel.
[42:42] But what they are gonna do, is they're gonna pour millions of dollars into bot accounts and to buy certain influencers and whatnot, to sow the idea that Israel is manipulating us, that this all goes back to the USS Liberty, and all that kind of nonsense, to undermine American support for Israel.
[43:00] And I think that this war, even if it did great work in terms of solidifying an institutional relationship between our militaries, it also did dismaying work in undermining the political case, the affinity for Israel in the national conversation.
[43:18] And all them things, that has to be put into the overall assessment. It can't just simply be strictly a military thing. It has to be the whole picture. Because we kicked Vietnam, the North Vietnamese's ass in Vietnam.
[43:33] Didn't work out well for us on the global stage. Can I jump in on this point? 'Cause I wanna ask you a question, Dan. So we not only have the war, but we have the negotiations going on during the war.
[43:44] What do you think people think of that? 'Cause I'm worried that people are gonna take away from this, I mean, to be, like blunt, like you just-- y- you gotta get, get the bribe money ready.
[43:57] You gotta be ready at any moment to give Trump a plane or to have some crypto funds ready for somebody out of the sovereign fund or something like that.
[44:08] That soft power that you can get from hard power is evaporating before our eyes. It depends what your time horizon is.
[44:15] I think it's difficult to apply what the US has done with Israel against Iran and apply it to other theaters and other, you know, how other countries outside of the region at least are reacting to it.
[44:26] Because weirdly, the issue of Israel is something that Trump has been surprisingly consistent on for the 10 years that he has dominated US politics.
[44:37] I mean, you know, we don't have to go through the whole list, but everything he did in the first administration, the Abraham Accords, the moving the embassy to Jerusalem, the recognizing Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights, the r- getting out of the J-- pulling the US out of the JCPOA, taking out Soleimani.
[44:49] Like, there was a consistency to what he was doing through his first term, and then he comes back and he does something that no US president was willing to do, which was to confront Iran militarily, even if it didn't go exactly according to plan.
[45:01] No US president was willing to do that.
[45:04] The hostage deal in 2025, what Trump did there, again, you can say it was like an idiosyncratic part of Trump or not, there was a certain way these hostage deals occurred, which was, you know, Israel would agree to, uh, phase this, and then the, the Hamas would release a few hostages here and a few hostages there over a long period of time, and then there'd be confidence-building and d-- And then Trump was like, "No, I want all of them out now."
[45:26] There's no phases, there's no nothing, and all the hostages are coming out at once.
[45:31] And because Trump had let Israel, leading up to that, move so aggressively deep into Gaza, and there was this sense that like, wait, he's not gonna hold them back, right?
[45:41] And Israel's sitting in like something like sixty percent of Gaza with this buffer that nobody's complaining about. The Gulf States aren't complaining about it. I don't hear Europe kvetching about it.
[45:50] So my only point is, on this issue, there's been this consistency that even there's all this noise, and some weeks we say, "What the hell is he doing?"
[45:58] And one day he says he's gonna obliterate Iranian civilization, and the next day it feels to you like he's using some of the arguments that the, like, anti-neocon war critics always make against us, and your head is spinning, right?
[46:11] And I agree, and I get it, and I do worry about the message that sends and the chaos and this one's negotiating here and there.
[46:16] But if you just take a step back and you look at that arc, I actually-- I think it's impressive, and I'm not worried about the message it sends because it all directionally, so far at least, has been basically pointing in one direction.
[46:29] I think you're absolutely right. I'm thinking more in terms of China.
[46:32] I mean, I'm thinking more in terms of if we had maintained cordial, friendly relationships with our NATO allies in a proper way, you know, pushed them to contribute five percent of their GDP to defense and whatever.
[46:47] All, did all that, but we're like, "You're just a great guy. I love, you know, you're fantastic and this is great and let's all, we'll all eat together, and Georgia Meloni, you're wonderful," and all of that.
[46:58] Instead, three months before he goes to war with Iran, he gets into this lunatic fight over Greenland, which Jonah himself is a supporter of the idea of figuring out a way for the United States to take control of Greenland.
[47:12] Peacefully. Right. Okay. So it's not like you're against that. I'm not against that. I don't think anybody should be against that.
[47:18] It's not imperialist, like forty-five thousand people live there, and we would probably give them a lot of-- \[chuckles\] They would be very rich if we did it. But imagine that we hadn't done it.
[47:27] And we would have all-you-can-eat shrimp again at Red Lobster. Yes. We have a largely Jewish audience here, please. And here we are. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Trump's like, "You know what?
[47:37] We don't even need this oil out of the Strait of Hormuz. Everybody else has got a problem. Why don't you come down and show them who's boss here?" And Europe's like, "Uh, no. Uh, nah. You started this. F you.
[47:51] You just gave us all this crap about Greenland. You insult us. It's not fun. Don't now come crawling to us when you need our help."
[47:59] Now, I think that's stupid, 'cause I think actually Europe would bene- would actually have benefited \[laughs\] from coming in and making a show of force against the Iranians, and opening the strait, and being a, a presence in making sure that the international waterways obey the international order.
[48:15] But it does seem to be a consequence of what Trump did, and that also has longer-lasting consequences. It's not about Israel. This isn't about wh- where, where Israel stands.
[48:27] This is really about America's alliances elsewhere, and, uh, the totally unnecessary bollocksing of things that didn't need to be bollocksed. So I, I just, I have to do it. It's worse than that.
[48:40] \[laughs\] For our listeners who don't listen to Commentary Magazine, this is the line, and it's usually Abe who says it, but not always Abe. Yes, it's everything is worse than that. But go ahead, Jonah.
[48:51] Yeah, so I know it's implied in what you're saying, Jon, but I, I've been banging my spoon on my highchair about this for a while now.
[48:57] We should make it explicit, because the way you talk about it, I know it's not necessarily what you mean, but we kind of anthropomorphize Europe or our European allies as if it's just the leaders who are pissed off.
[49:08] What Trump did with Greenland was make Trump so unbelievably unpopular, and America by extension to a cer- in a much less extent, because a lot of it's on Trump, but it also brought down opinions about America.
[49:22] Made Trump so unbelievably unpopular that even if, 'cause I think you're right, it would've been in their interest to help us out with the Strait of Hormuz and to send minesweepers and all that.
[49:30] It made it politically impossible. Right. The Greenland thing in particular caused Trump to become wildly unpopular with the new nationalist right in Europe. Fair enough. And so asking...
[49:42] They're democracies, too, and so when you, uh, when you ask democratically elected parties and leaders, "Go side with this guy who's just insulted you, and made you look like clowns, and didn't consult you on a war to begin with, to come bail him out.
[49:56] Oh, and by the way, your government will topple \[laughs\] if you do it," who's gonna freaking do that? I mean, like, I, I...
[50:02] Last time I looked, Trump's approval rating in Denmark, which is kind of even in this context an outlier, was like 4%. What democratically \[laughs\] elected politician is gonna say, "Hey, you know, let's go do that"?
[50:13] He's underwater everywhere in Europe. I mean, somewheres it's a little better, like Poland or for some obvious reasons.
[50:19] But for the most part, Trump has made himself radioactive and, but he thinks that European allies are sort of, are his button men and underbosses, and they should just do what the capo says regardless of the politics of it.
[50:32] Well, I mean, it's like Canada. I mean, it's like the story of the Canadian election- Right...
[50:38] where effectively in nine weeks, a victory by the conservatives was made impossible by Trump, and Carney became the prime minister.
[50:47] Poilievre was leading in the polls and was supposed to win, and then Trump started talking about annexing Canada.
[50:53] Canadian public opinion went bonkers, as you can imagine, and he interfered \[laughs\] to his incredible detriment. What utility did that have?
[51:03] Wouldn't he be better off to have Poilievre there as a friend across the border than Carney?
[51:08] But- Let, let me, let me ask you guys just wrapping up this part of the conversation, and each of you can take whichever part of this you want.
[51:14] I guess my two questions are, one, what would've been a better strategy in dealing with Iran's nuclear program if we didn't do what we just did?
[51:23] And then my other question is, where do you, either of you can tell me, where you think things go, and good luck predicting this, in the relationship between Netanyahu and Trump? Which one of you wants to take which?
[51:34] Um, I'll, I'll go with the, um, the first question. I think it would've been better to either build a public case for it, right? Because things can pop out.
[51:44] You can get wins by sending the signal that we're really gonna do this, right?
[51:49] I mean, the reason why Trump did it the way he did it is he wanted sole credit for what he thought was gonna be a huge success, and going to Congress, he thinks makes him look small, so he didn't go to Congress.
[52:00] He didn't build the argument there. He didn't build the argument with the American people.
[52:03] But just on that, Jonah, but also w- they argue, the administration argues w- going to Congress would've gotten rid of the element of surprise, and that was a big part of the strategy.
[52:11] Okay, but the element of surprise as far as I can tell really only mattered in terms of taking out the leadership- Right... which I think is a questionable tactic.
[52:19] I mean, you can't have it both ways and say, "We can take out the air defenses. We can do all these things militarily. But if we give them a heads-up, we can't do any of it."
[52:27] So maybe it would've made the war a little harder, but we w- might have had more allies, and you would've had more public support, and maybe people would've been abing- able to will out, w- wade out a Strait of Hormuz strategy.
[52:39] But moreover, that process of actually making those arguments sends a signal, too, and it would've been a pretty powerful signal in the wake of the Venezuela thing, and maybe that would've gotten...
[52:51] I mean, like, I'm kind of a inspectors schminspectors guy when it comes to \[laughs\] like this, you know, like Vance saying, "This is so amazing that we got IAEA inspectors in." Well, we've had that before.
[53:02] It really, it, there's a lot of devil in the details and all that. But we could've certainly gotten more of that if we had threatened it. I don't actually mind the idea of starting...
[53:11] I think the smartest thing they did militarily was the embargo, and it drove me crazy that everyone was talking about how the war is over while we have an embargo, 'cause embargoes are acts of war.
[53:22] But I think you could've, especially if you got the allies involved, had a really tight embargo and said, "The noose is gonna get tighter and tighter if you start attacking your Gulf Arab allies or the Gulf States or Israel," and all that kind of stuff, and see what shakes out from that.
[53:37] A, a serious intensive pressure campaign I think would have kept the threat of major force theoretical, but also much scarier.
[53:46] Now they're just not as scared of our use of force as th- as, as they would've been beforehand. Something along those lines. Jon? Okay, Trump and Bibi.
[53:55] So Bibi's facing the electorate in three months, and it's the most devilishly complicated political situation that you can imagine, right? There is no way to game this out.
[54:09] You would think if the Israeli public is disappointed in Iran, and that's the thing that he is going to them with as the last thing before they vote, that's not good, right?
[54:20] And that it will then also start raising questions anew about his strategic thinking because of the matter that he has not had to deal with electorally, which is what responsibility he holds for the intelligence failures that led to October 7th.
[54:35] And on the other hand, if you look at the Israeli political situation and you do, you do this sort of like nine-dimensional chess trying to figure out who allies with whom and with all these small parties, it's kind of almost impossible to see how he isn't prime minister \[chuckles\] after October, because either he'll form a government or there won't be a government formed, and he will be the caretaker, uh, for an- another election at which there probably won't be a government formed.
[55:02] So he'll be weakened.
[55:04] But despite all of this talk about how he says Bibi's crazy, yells at Bibi, and Vance has been-- we get leaks from the Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan book about how Jared said that Bibi's crazy and Bibi's crazy.
[55:17] The one thing that Bibi is not is crazy. He is not crazy. He is the opposite of crazy. And like Trump, and while they have-- He is transactional. He is unsentimental. He's a game player.
[55:33] But I think Trump knows exactly where he stands with Bibi at every second of the day, because that's how Bibi does what he does to Trump. I'm sure he flatters.
[55:44] He's-- I mean, he says publicly all these flattering things and renames towns after him and does all that stuff.
[55:50] But it's very clear that when they're in private or when these two nations talk to each other, they are talking very frankly and straightforwardly, and sometimes that's really annoying to America, which wants them to just say, "No, no, no.
[56:07] You know what? We need you to stand down on this one." And Bibi can say, "I can't do that. Like, I can't stand down on Lebanon. I can't." Like, they're firing \[chuckles\] drones at school buses.
[56:18] But I think, as we say, they talk talkless together, and Trump seems to respond extraordinarily well to that. He never has a day if he says something negative, the next day he says something positive.
[56:31] He likes this guy \[chuckles\]. And of course, if Trump becomes really unpopular in Israel because they think that he's, you know, chickened out or something like that, maybe that'll hurt Bibi.
[56:41] But of course, he is also gonna be president for another two years. So I don't see Trump cutting Bibi off. I think when Vance blathers about how Israel has different interests than the United States, right?
[56:54] If that's supposed to be a dog whistle- It's a statement of the obvious...
[56:57] what we think, what those of us who think about this philosophically say that the United States and Israel have deep philosophical and cultural commonalities that make us recognizable to each other in the way that other-- And it's weird 'cause Israel's such a small and new country, and we're much older and all that.
[57:15] But that doesn't mean that our interests align. It really doesn't. And you know, Israel was making deals in the '80s and '90s with nations that made us sick, because what, what choice did they have? Right.
[57:26] The one thing I would add to this conversation, where I don't disagree with you guys at all, and Lord knows I'm a critic of Trump's, but I think one of the values of Trump, one of the aspects of Trump that's valuable in this specific context is we can talk about Athens and Jerusalem and America and Israel and all of these high-flown, you know, philosophical affinities.
[57:44] The real reason why I think Trump gets along with Bibi is he's a New Yorker, and he's a New Yorker from the frigging construction industry.
[57:51] You know how many Jewish guys he's yelled at and then gone and had lunch with, right? You know, like he--
[57:57] that whole milieu of yelling at each other, "Oh, you're screwing me out of my commission," all that kind of stuff, like that is the world he grew up in.
[58:05] That is his way of communicating with people, and Bibi can read that in a certain way that I think-- I, I don't want to traffic in gross here, but like Jews understand, like you argue and you argue, and then you go to lunch.
[58:16] \[laughs\] Right? You know, and there is that aspect. That's the world that Trump grew up in. Right. Well, I'll, I'll just add one other point, and then we'll wrap this part of the conversation.
[58:24] But I will say that on the issues that become sources of tension between the Israeli government and the US government, I don't think they necessarily get much better with the alternatives to Bibi.
[58:36] This is not a case for Bibi. It's just reality.
[58:39] Like, do we think that Eisenkot, a Prime Minister Eisenkot, is not gonna be under the same domestic pressures within Israel to kind of fold on dealing with Hezbollah and Lebanon? I mean, there's no way.
[58:50] Eisenkot's just as worried about those communities in northern Israel as Netanyahu is. Do we think Eisenkot is gonna like quickly race to some kind of two-state solution? Not in a million years.
[59:00] The Israeli public is overwhelmingly against it from right to left. So I'm-- I go issue by issue.
[59:04] Of course, there are obviously big differences between Netanyahu and Eisenkot on some domestic issues, domestic Israeli issues, the Haredi draft, and, you know, dealing with some of the craziness in the West Bank, the settler violence issue, like th- those issues.
[59:17] Again, but I'm just, in terms of where the US government's at, where Trump is at, where he gets frustrated with Netanyahu, I don't think you get a big shift from a policy standpoint with a new government.
[59:27] No, I mean, qui- the only way that there would be a big policy shift is if Trump perceives the new government as being weak. Mm-hmm. And then he'll lose respect for Israel. Right. And that is not an impossibility.
[59:44] One of the weird things about Israeli prime ministers and America is that there are always these moments at which no matter who the pri-- If Rabin hadn't been assassinated, Clinton would have decided that he hated him at some point.
[59:55] That's just the dynamic, because Americans get frustrated, and they want Israel to do something, and the Israeli prime minister says, "I can't." And then they're like, "What do you mean you can't? Yes, you can."
[1:00:05] They're like, "No, you don't understand." \[chuckles\] You know? It's always like that.
[1:00:09] It's been like that for, you know, since the beginning of time, and that'll happen with Eisenkot or Bennett or Lieberman or whoever might be the next prime minister.
[1:00:18] And the key thing with Trump, it's not gonna be whoever follows Trump, which is a whole other world, but will be, "Are you a wimp?" Yeah. Okay, we're gonna leave it there.
[1:00:28] We're gonna wrap this part one of our conversation. We're gonna be shifting the conversation to part two, where I'm gonna be asking Jon and Jonah about the last week's elections in the US.
[1:00:37] Part two will be released on Thursday as folks are heading into the July 4th weekend.
[1:00:43] \[upbeat music\] I want to tell you about one of the more hopeful things going on.
[1:01:01] Every summer, the Israel on Campus Coalition brings more than eight hundred pro-Israel students to Washington, DC from over a hundred and fifty campuses, Jewish and non-Jewish students from the Ivies to the big state schools.
[1:01:14] It's one of the largest gatherings of pro-Israel student leaders in the country. For a few days, students who often feel alone on their own campus realize they are part of something much bigger.
[1:01:25] They get trained, they build a network, and they go home and lead. They run for student government, they organize, they set the record straight, and they look out for the next student coming up behind them.
[1:01:36] That room is the future of the pro-Israel movement. You can help fill it with a tax-deductible gift at israelcc.org. That's I-S-R-A-E-L-C-C dot org. \[upbeat music\]

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