Trump’s Iran policy mirrors Russia’s Ukraine missteps—shifting from nuclear threats to missile strikes—yet lacks the neoconservative moral clarity of Bush’s "freedom crusade," instead relying on debunked propaganda like fabricated narratives about Iranian oppression. With dissent from generals, media skepticism (CNN, BBC), and congressional paralysis, this "Israel-Trump admin war" exposes an imperial presidency devoid of democratic legitimacy, while younger generations reject the hollow post-Cold War liberal order, leaving U.S. interventionism adrift without ideology or exit strategy. [Automatically generated summary]
First off, I'll ask you a kind of a harder question, harder in the sense of brass tacks, hard.
And then I'll ask a kind of deeper, maybe more high-flutin question.
So what is the plan exactly?
Because they seem to be pursuing these different, differing rhetorical strategies to different audiences.
Because Trump has outright said, as clear as day, we are going to annihilate their military.
They didn't just fire in military targets.
They fired directly on political targets.
In fact, they killed the head of state.
And did they kill Ahmedinejad as well?
Or was he appearing on podcasts?
Apparently he's going to be on Patrick Bett David.
Is he literally or spiritually dead?
That's the question.
Both, perhaps.
He'll appear on PBG or PBJ's podcast, as I call it, PBJ's podcast.
He'll just appear dead on the pod and just let Patrick continue to talk at him.
But okay.
So they say it's this very contradictory thing.
So they are going balls to the wall on the one hand, yet their messaging on the other reminds me of Vladimir Putin's declaration that he was engaging in a special military operation.
They're using the same words.
But in both cases, you're in for a penny.
You're in for a pound.
There were little actions in the Donbas region for a decade between Ukraine and Russia.
And you could say it was a war of sorts, but once you go in and you, Putin certainly wanted to kill Zelensky or at the least capture him and put him on trial or something like this.
He wanted to denazify the country.
Who knows what else he was claiming at the time?
But it was depicted as a special military operation, this little unique thing.
It's very precise.
We're going in.
But the fact is, it can't be.
Like Vladimir Putin is engaged in a four-year-long war of attrition at this point in order to, quote, denazify Ukraine or whatever he was claiming at the beginning.
And I feel the same as well with the United States in the sense of, yeah, this is a little bit more than what we did last summer, but maybe it's not regime change.
Maybe it's not boots on the ground.
But again, you're in for a penny.
You're in for a pound.
I don't know how you get out of this without doing a regime change or how you would do a regime change without boots on the ground.
So I just feel like there's some, and I guess maybe I'll ask the more high flutin question along with this one since I'm I'm rambling a bit, but it's like Bush and Cheney and the neocons from U Chicago.
They studied philosophy, et cetera.
They were able to create an ideology, even a sort of theology about what they're doing in the Middle East.
We, every human heart yearns to be free.
That is basically what they were saying.
Bush literally said that in 2005.
We are bringing democracy and democracies never go to war.
So our greatest ideals and our hardest realism are the same.
That was how they pitched it.
It's brilliant.
In fact, it almost is Hegelian.
It's like the ideal is real and the real is ideal.
And again, it's coming from these philosophers in the Pentagon, which is, I guess, not surprising that they would couch it in this way.
And yet they never went into Iran.
They were politically neutered by 2006 in the midterm election.
They were seen as illegitimate.
They were made fun of on various comedy shows.
They weren't willing to go all the way to destroy Iran, which was part of their long-term objectives, even in the late 90s.
And now we have Trump who, and the Trump administration and the PR wing, who can't message to save their life, who are saying just blatantly contradictory things to different audiences.
They don't care.
They don't know.
They're just dumb.
All of the above.
And yet they've done it.
They did the thing that Cheney feared.
They did the thing that was probably a bit too much for John Bolton.
Whoa, we might want to slow down here with the war stuff, which is hilarious, ironic.
But so we're in this like contradictory situation where there's no justification, no legitimacy, and yet they're going farther than the people who, as you rightly point out, seem competent and dare I say, cool in comparison with these assholes.
So what are your thoughts on that?
On the plan, obviously I've been racking my brain to try to figure out what the hell they're doing past all of us for the past four, five days now.
And I think it's day four as we're recording this and they've changed the reason every single day.
In fact, I watched a Marco Rubio press conference where he seemed to change the reason about three or four times within the same press conference.
So that suggests to me that something hasn't gone, something has not gone to plan, whatever the plan was has not gone to plan.
Otherwise, you're not getting this making up reasons on the fly business and the mission creep.
Originally, it was about nuclear stuff and regime change.
Then it's somehow transformed now into you can't allow Iran to have short-range missile capability, which on the face of it is an insane doctrine that I don't think they can, I'm not even convinced it's in the remit of American power to enforce.
Essentially, what he's saying there is Iran is not allowed to have an army or not allowed to have a defense, which I don't think was the original purpose.
Which means to do regime change, they've just painted themselves into a corner.
I honestly think, Richard, that it is as simple and as stupid, I'm afraid to say, as they went in there thinking that they create conditions for the people to rise up and overthrow the government.
And when that didn't happen and Iran started fighting back and fighting back in a way that has surprised even me, all the stuff with the Gulf states and hitting the strategic assets in the Gulf and so on has surprised even me with how quickly they're able to do that.
I think that they're like, oh shit, what do we do now?
And they're scrambling.
And there's a lot of signs that this did not have, unlike the Bush wars, the Bush-Blair Wars, if you want to put it that way.
Unlike those wars, there are lots of signs that this does not have what I would call regime consent, which writ large, by which I mean the media clearly are not as on side as they were back in the Iraq war.
I've seen critical segments on CNN and on BBC.
And I listened to the shitload radio station here.
And there's always the memory of Iraq one looms very large, but also I get the distinct sense that the media is not quite sure that the Democrat Party, I saw that speech from Chuck Schumer earlier on, was being like, what's going on?
Why haven't you asked for Congress approval for this?
What is the actual plan?
Taking us to war.
We don't even know, you haven't even told Congress what's happening.
You've got the Pentagon leaking against the administration.
So I think there's a lot of telltale signs, Richard, that the Trump admin has gone a little bit rogue.
And the rogue action was precipitated, as Marco Rubio said, by Israel.
And that in a way, Israel has gone rogue.
And the Trump admin, that one part of the American system has gone rogue with it in a way that the rest of the even National Review, which is Neocon Central, was saying, like, oh, look here, when people like John Bolson and National Review are saying, hold up, are we sure about this?
You can tell it hasn't had the normal kind of, they haven't gone through the normal protocols.
Also, Foreign Policy Magazine, which is another, I guess, establishment, talk, they also are not sure.
In this country, it is extremely unusual for our establishment, for the British establishment, for the British government, or former generals or things like that, not to be 100% on board in my entire lifetime, whether Afghanistan or Iraq or Ukraine.
Okay.
It was complete consensus in our media.
Okay.
You get the occasional Jeremy Corbyn or Pete Hitchens or something, but generally they're all on board.
In this one, all week, there's been very senior voices, former ambassadors, former generals, current generals, the actual government being like, yeah, we don't want any part of this.
So all of that suggests to me that something unusual has happened here.
This is not normal, quote-unquote, neocon war.
I think it's very much an Israel-Trump admin war.
At the risk of sounding like Rachel Maddow, are we living in not that stopped me before, but are we living in a dictatorship in the sense that now I know that according to the Constitution, Congress should declare war and so on.
But since what was it?
The Korean war was actually justified on the basis of the UN, in fact.
And anyway, let's just put, to put it mildly, we've been living in an imperial presidency for many decades.
Nevertheless, the buildup to the Iraq war was at the least a year in which the headline on every paper was about the Middle East and about the debate and the justification with WMDs most notoriously and with the freedom agenda and so on.
And we're at this point where it doesn't even matter.
Donald Trump gave a State of the Union address in which Iran was mentioned, but it was mentioned rather lightly.
It wasn't.
He certainly didn't give anyone the impression that we're going to go to war this week.
And if you think about it in this other way, maybe all of that consensus is a 20th century, a holdover from the 20th century in the technological society where you've got to have the papers and the big pundits and the neutral journalists and the politicians from the other side.
You've got to get them all on the team and then we'll go to war together.
Maybe we're just living at this point where not only does Congress not declare war, Congress doesn't, in fact, do much of anything.
And they can't because we're so polarized.
And we're just living in a dictatorship of Donald Trump where he just does what he does alongside Bibi Netanyahu.
And half of the public is on drugs or watching a pornographic live stream of three transgender lesbians playing video games to the point where they don't even know this is happening.
And we're just there.
It's almost like if the Iraq war, the first Gulf War, that is the George Herbert Walker-Bush 90s, if that war didn't exist because it was being played out on television.
It's almost like now the legitimization of it doesn't exist.
It's not even played out on television.
It's almost like postmodern on a new level or something.
I don't know.
Are we just there?
We're not even bothering with any sort of democratic legitimacy at this point.
Yeah, so it is very curious.
We're down to the point where he's even lost people like Matt Walsh and kind of Indian level slop grifters like Dissident West and people like this.
Legitimacy's Withering Away00:09:45
Even they are taking off the mega hats.
But at least he's got Captive Dreamer.
He's got his number one soldier.
On this school, one of the things that I have thought more than once when I've been watching the propaganda efforts, which I actually think, again, have been Israeli-led, not US-led, about the Olavi bringing the crown prince back and the dancing Iranian girls and flying that flag with the lion on it, is that I get the impression that a lot of that was built up something 10 years ago.
It feels like it's running on feuds.
It feels like it's somehow outdated in a way.
And the arguments were designed for Tan for an operation that never quite happened.
Now they're doing it and they've just dusted it off without any respect to what the reality is on the ground, how normal people are feeling, how.
And if you want to talk about moral justifications, it really does seem to come down to in Iran, they make women wear the hijab, which is not even true anymore, by the way.
But they made, when I was 12 year old, they made me wear the hijab and I want to express the full range of fashion choices.
So bomb, bomb the country so I get to wear a bangle in my hair and accessorize, which is not the strong when you're up against people who have genuine radical religious zeal and faith.
And it's not fake.
They really do believe these things.
I wonder about liberalism as a doctrine that can animate.
You're asking people to go and fight and die for this.
This is actually something James Burnham talked about in his famous book, no, in Machiavellians and in the Managerial Revolution.
I think it was a Managerial Revolution.
He said, look, during World War II, it was a time of mass unemployment.
The Germans basically were able to call on blood and soil.
And it was a very strong animating doctrine to get men to fight and die.
Okay.
And then he said, look, in Britain and in France and in America, they had to appeal to abstract principles like liberty and freedom and the free market and things like that.
And he said at the time he wrote the book, I think it was like 1941, something like that.
It was a time of mass unemployment and they were struggling to recruit.
They couldn't recruit.
So they've had to resort to the draft.
They had to resort to conscription because the animating doctrine was not strong enough.
And that line from Burnham always struck with me because it's, you do need something.
You do need something.
I mean, I see even James Burnham saying you need some animating narrative or story to tell that's going to, that's going to, that's going to make people want to fight for you.
And I think this has been America's, one of America's great problems since the Second World War, that the, you know, they got away with that one.
They managed to win.
They got the Soviet Union to sacrifice 20 million lives or whatever.
They got there by hook or by crook.
But then if you look at Vietnam, they had the same problem.
The Vietnamese, they were fighting.
They weren't really fighting communism.
They were fighting for their homeland up against spreadsheets or whatever McNamara was on about.
And I think this has been a continuous problem for, I guess, what you call the American Empire.
What are you there?
What are you fighting for?
And if we're down to you're fighting for Iranian girls dancing on OnlyFans, but you understand what I'm saying.
It doesn't feel strong enough.
It's not.
And I do think it can't easily be written off as something that's important for any country or empire.
This is probably why Putin has spent the past decade trying to rewrite Russian history and come up with whatever it is, orthodooganism or whatever.
He's trying to find something that's going to animate Russians to want to die for him, right?
Because liberalism doesn't get you there.
So this is something that I see as something that maybe a lot of these Iranian diaspora massively underestimate when it comes to the will of Iranians to want to be liberated for what?
Like burgers, french fries, and a range of fashion.
Have we reached the end of ideology?
I mean, in the sense of the brilliant thing about the neoconservatives is that they did offer a compelling doctrine, one that was ineluctable to be, to be honest.
I remember reading when I first read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and The Last Man, he said in his preface to the second edition or something, it was like, all of these people don't like my book and they criticize it, yet none of them disagree with me because their critique of Fukuyama was basically, yeah, the Soviet Union's gone.
There's actually a lack of democracy in Iran or there's a lack of democracy in Mongolia or Africa.
So they're in a sense affirming his thesis, which is that it's not just that America is powerful and markets are most efficient and thus will win.
It's that there is no other source of legitimacy outside of a mixed economy of liberal capitalist democracy.
You just can't argue for anything else.
Communism is scary.
Fascism.
is dead.
It's now a LARP.
There's nothing else that you can come up with.
And so I think he was actually getting at something, but I would say this, Irving Crystal wrote very specifically that like the Soviet Union of old, the United States is an ideological nation.
So he was just outright saying this thing that MAGA dislikes now and they're like, we're a people, not an economy, or whatever.
Irving Kristol, he didn't say you were an economy, although that was a part of it.
He said, you're a theology in a way.
Like you are a revolt against the old order.
Gods are not, excuse me, kings are not given to you by gods.
You choose them.
You have the ability to act freely.
Tolerance is the notion of anyone can be an American.
Yeah, this is a wild new ideology that would have been inexplicable to someone living in the Middle Ages.
But this is who we are.
Like the Soviet Union, we are just as radical as the Soviet Union.
And after we defeated the Soviet Union, we're moving forward.
We're not retreating as Buchanan wanted to do in some of his articles in the national interest against Fukuyama, where it's like, congratulations, we won this ideological battle, but now no more ideology.
Let's go back.
The neocons were more radical and more compelling and cogent in their arguments.
It's like, no, we believe in that ideology.
Let's keep pushing forward, roll back around the world.
That was something compelling.
I mentioned the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union, at least between 1917 and let's just say 1968, the Soviet Union captured the imagination of most every educated person with an IU above 115.
They just did.
Moscow was, it was progressive.
They wanted to apologize for it at the very least, if not outright admire it, if not outright move there.
And like that, you can't just say something's ideology.
It's in the air.
It's whimsical.
It's ridiculous.
No, it's real.
It's the most compelling thing.
And MAGA is almost, it's almost like they're expressing the decline of the United States and its lack of legitimacy as an ideology itself.
saying something like, oh, it's about this country and our borders and whatever.
They're just expressing the fact that we don't have any gas in the tank.
And they're treating that as like nationalism or as an ideology.
Nationalism is coherent and legitimate vis-a-vis empire.
I was actually listening to Verdi's Don Carlos last night.
The poor people of Flanders, oh, they need the king needs to go and save them.
Like this notion of national identity, even blood and soil, it makes sense vis-a-vis an cold imperial force that's off in the distance.
We want to stay here at home.
But when you don't have that, when you're presiding over a declining empire, nationalism is not an ideology at all.
It's just an expression of decline.
Let's not go out into the world.
Let's not preach our values as the best possible values.
We live in the best possible country, the best possible time.
Let's just tariff everyone and not engage in them, engage with them.
Let's hate on foreigners.
A lot of this, again, just to reiterate, it's an expression of the fact that all of that stuff that was powerfully legitimizing to the United States is now just withered away.
And they're treating it as something new or something powerful or realistic, but they're actually just like other people surf that wave.
And now the wave's gone, but they haven't sunk yet, mangling the metaphor.
But you get what I mean.
The car is out of gas, a better one.
And we just put it in neutral and we're just coasting.
And that's not good enough.
It's worth mentioning that after Burnham made those comments in Managerial Revolution, the original neocons, of which Burnham was one, don't forget.
Permanent Bad Guy Narrative00:04:20
This is even before they founded National Review and the Buckleyite Doctrine and so on.
There were some Straussians involved, David Kristol, people like this.
They were very, they were acutely aware of this problem that you were talking about of the lack of a Kihiran ideology.
And they almost, they were cynical, right?
They were Machiavellian and cynical, but they were like, look, people need something to motivate them.
And what they basically settled on in the 1950s and the 1960s was a very simple good versus evil narrative.
Okay.
A very simple, whether it's you're always refighting World War II or during the Cold War, right?
This is why they were such ardent anti-communists, right?
Because they were able to have the Russians there as the permanent bad guy, permanent bad guy.
And in fact, I've got a book here called Who Paid the Piper, where you can actually watch James Burnham and his friends putting together and inventing out of whole cloth, basically what we call today the center and the center left, the liberal, the non-communist, the anti-communist left was a creation of James Burnham and the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as was the kind of, I guess what you call the non-fascist right, the non-like we needed a right that's all about Buckley, essentially.
They created both of those, but the kind of operating software underneath it was just a very simple story of we're the good guys, we're going to fight the bad guys, it's cowboys and Indians, it's World War II and we're fighting the Nazis or it's fighting the bad Ruskies or whatever else.
And make sure that you keep all messaging, whether it's media, whether it's magazine, whether it's intellectual work, on those rail lines as a way of having powerful counterbalance.
And part of it, part of the vision of the good, and I've called this boomer truth before, but like a construction, is individual self-expression as the highest good.
Something like a consumer choice.
And so when you get to Fukuyama and you're thinking about freedom, right, it's the it's a kind of doctrine of, what do they call it?
That's that word that people use in wealth, in kind of meditation circles and things like that, self-affirmation.
Self-actualization.
Self-actualization.
There we go.
Self-actualization.
Jane Fonda workout videos.
Self-betterment.
Another thing I would die for.
Yeah.
Individualism, writ large, in various different forms, whether it's John Wayne style or John Lennon style, all of the different little Ronald Reagan style, Rambo style.
These are all different articulations, He-Man and Hulk Hogan, articulations of the same idea over and over again.
And what I think you've seen with MAGA, and I think you're right, Richard, is that they are still feasting on the shoes of all of that.
All of that was built up.
Nothing has replaced it.
But they're still, and as they've been trying to sell this war, it's been interesting how often they go back 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago in some cases.
And this is probably why it's only really landing with booms and older, like older Gen X's, like you say.
And it's not really landing with the younger folk that much because none of this shit means anything to them.
And they didn't get a proper dose of the operating software.
And I think a huge reason of the reason, huge reason it's not landing, both in this country and in America, is because back then, back when I was 18, everybody believed in democracy.
Everybody believed our government worked for us.
Everybody believed that the economy kept on getting better.
Everybody believed that you could go to university and buy a house and have a family and all those sorts of things.
In 2026, none of those things are true.
In this country, just this year, we've had a 45% drop in graduate in graduate vacancies here.
And nobody can get a house.
Parties of the extreme, the left and the right are emerging.
Two-party systems breaking down.
So it's much more difficult to make the argument, we stand for liberal democracy.
Central Vision Decline00:00:20
and we're going to bomb you into democracy too when basically nobody at home buys into the central vision anymore this was the problem with late this was the problem with the late soviet union as well nobody believed in communism Communism by the end, either.
Except Gorbachev, who wanted to reform it, and in the reform, ironically ended it.