A New Phase in the Iran War

Hello and welcome once again to the American Mind podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Clavin, associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a diary editor for the American Mind. I actually personally oversee the editing of all our editors and writers' diaries, so I know a lot of but that's neither here nor there. I'm joined this week by managing editor Mike Sabo, publisher and president Ryan Williams, and once again, a repeat, a returning guest for I think the third time maybe, somebody we always love to talk to, Will Thibault, director of the American Military Project at the center of the American way of life. He's here because we're going to chat with him about Iran, among other things. We'll have him hang out for the whole show this time and discuss all and sundry, including, to start off, the Fauci diaries. What else? We couldn't resist diving in. Real throwback to our COVID days, which is when this podcast was begun, and so anytime COVID comes back into the news, it feels a bit like a return to our roots and our origins, namely dunking on Anthony Fauci. We're recording this before we have a see Dr. Fauci's testimony, which will take place on Wednesday. We're recording this today on Tuesday, but in advance of yet another showdown between Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul, Paul has released a chunk of diary entries, a massive document. I believe the whole thing is over 1,000 pages. I have not made it all the way through, but I've very much enjoyed combing through these diary entries that Dr. Fauci was keeping throughout the outbreak of COVID. They go back to before anyone really knew that this was going to be a major epidemic. They demonstrate Fauci realizing gradually that this is something serious that requires all of his attention. As this dawns on him, he begins to shift and adjust his perspective, and we get a lot of meticulous, detailed recording about his various conversations with celebrities, the media, the press, but also fellow doctors, and so on and so forth. To be honest with you, the big revelation for me here is I didn't even know people kept diaries anymore. The guy's like a Victorian maiden, pouring over his correspondences with the village next door. That has been one of the more low-blow attacks that Paul has been making with these documents. He's been putting out AI images of Fauci in an all-pink bedroom like a teenage girl, pouring over the records of his newfound fame. This is all part of a slightly more serious line of argumentation that Fauci was more obsessed with fame and with his own public profile and persona than he was with the average American's everyday life and the way that it was getting completely thrown out of whack by COVID. That's one element of what Paul is doing here and what people have found remarkable is that this is a guy who obviously likes the camera, likes attention, even at one point expresses a certain amount of pleasure at being praised by President Trump before they really fell out. But then at the other end, to my mind, I think a more serious set of conversations is about not just Fauci's views on the lab leak hypothesis versus gain of function hypothesis. That is to say, did COVID come from the Wuhan wet market? Excuse me, the lab leak hypothesis versus the wet market hypothesis. Did COVID come from the Wuhan wet market or did it come from a lab where it was engineered using gain of fortune research? Then secondarily, was any of that research, any of that type of research funded by grants that Fauci himself acquired? There's a set of highly involved questions about what Fauci thought was likely at any given time. But then layered on top of that, there's an even more important set of questions, again, I think, about what possibilities he was entertaining while he was telling the public that to believe anything other than the official line was sacrilegious and offensive and probably deadly. In other words, there was a period of time where the lab leak hypothesis was unspeakable. It was the stuff of cranks and conspiracy theorists and it was misinformation that needed to be shut down, perhaps using social media algorithms and so forth. But these diaries demonstrate what was always true and what many people realized, which is that there were disputes among scientists, disagreements as people got their head around what this virus was, how it had come about. I think it's fair to say that Fauci expresses a fair amount of anxiety about the possibility that he and his own research will be implicated in this if it does turn out that COVID was the result of gain-of-function research. I don't know how much of these diaries you guys have had a chance to look through and what struck you about them, what you're expecting from these hearings, but maybe we can start there. Have you guys had a chance to spy on Fauci's diaries and what do you make of them? A little bit. I just want to give one highlight to everyone who has not been delving into this in great detail. This is one of his entries. A big front page article about me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable persons in the world. Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written about me since I am so busy. Seriously. I think people have been saying this is perhaps the greatest public service that Rand Paul has ever offered the country because we all, to varying degrees, not memory hold, but we all moved on from COVID long ago. Some of us much longer ago than others who wanted to continue to hang on to it, like Taylor Lorenz. But it brings back to life, I think, some of the ridiculous aspects of this whole episode. The central comically malicious and malevolent figure of Anthony Fauci is very well compensated at a certain point during this whole episode. He was the highest paid bureaucrat in the country. He received a pardon from Joe Biden on his way out the door. The great service of all this, I think, for those paying attention is to remind them that this horrible episode in our recent history was orchestrated by, more than anyone else, this one homunculus-like man, Dr. Anthony Fauci. I would like to recommend, well, not recommend, but flag for everyone, our friend Steve Hayward had a post from the political questions sub-stack and he recommends, and I cannot endorse this strongly enough, that even though Fauci is shielded from federal prosecution because of the Biden pardon, the states can and should start to bring lawsuits. Fauci is also open to civil penalties as well, and so people should start suing him too. I think bankrupting him and hounding him for the rest of his life is a suitable punishment for what he dragged the country into. And I say that, this may sound mean to some of our more soft-hearted viewers and listeners, but he should be an object lesson in all of this, and a lesson for future such tyrannically disposed bureaucrats, as well as, yes, he ought to be taught a lesson. And then the diaries help reveal why this sort of punishment is merited, because he was saying one thing, as Spencer said, to the public while admitting in private that he was basically lying every day on television, or constantly evolving his narrative to suit the changing facts on the that he was modifying any of his recommendations, or the extent to which he was voicing the voice of the scientific god on the rest of the country. So it makes for disgusting and infuriating reading, and I hope that this public exposure of all this, orchestrated by Rand Paul, makes sure that something like this never happens again. He should be the most visible and most high-profile avatar of all the things that are wrong with our, quote-unquote, independent administrative agencies, and these unelected and unaccountable supposed experts, and their power over our daily lives, whether it be in public health or anything else, ought to be severely restricted, and they should be held accountable. At the very least, they should all be fireable, and recent Supreme Court rulings have brought that closer to a reality than we've been at in this country for the better part of a century. So there's some silver linings to this otherwise depressing episode that's now been re-unearthed by Senator Paul. And so I think, Ryan, probably the most shocking thing, actually, from the diary entry that you read, at the top, I think this is March 2020, yeah, March 21st, at the very top says deaths, 9,800. And then he goes into all the media stuff and all his spotlights and everything like that. So, I mean, this just shows a man who is just absolutely self-obsessed, becoming a celebrity. I mean, there's so much crossover between Jim Comey and how his just self-importance, his grandiosity just showed up time and time again. I mean, this man talks about Trump and his failures and this and that. And it's like, look, I mean, you are living the absolute caricature that you think Trump is. I mean, every single day, the media spotlight. He had, I think, one thing where he pointed out, quote, the Fauci Five, where he appeared on all five Sunday major morning TV news shows that same Sunday. He talks about an amazing profile of me today on Nightline, multiple editorials in the Washington Post, Newsweek, cannot even keep up or read about them, country needs someone to look up to in the face of the Trump presidency. So this is exactly like Ryan said. I mean, this is the bureaucratic mindset. This is why people don't trust their institutions, why they don't trust the people running them. I mean, look at Anthony Fauci. And then I think in terms of, too, the changing his mind and saying one thing in public and saying another thing in private. So there's news that was released about that. He actually privately estimated the covid fatality rate of point two to point three percent. And that was February 2020. Comparing it basically to bad influenza. This is only a month later, he told Congress under oath that the virus was 10 more lethal than the seasonal flu. You have him absolutely waylaying the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration is the Three Stooges, he called them. So this is a guy who, again, just waylaid his opponents, was all about himself and really harmed the country greatly in the meantime. You know, I am rolling my eyes just because I feel like we tried to take political advantage of what happened during covid. It should have been a bigger deal. You know, Ryan, what you're saying is these the the the least just, I think, outcome for these people like Tony Fauci to be in jail. And this is, you know, a good reminder of just how crazy that time was about six years ago. But I am fearful that we're going to kind of fall into this trap again of, you know, somehow trying to relitigate an outcome that's already predetermined. And meanwhile, there's a lot of, you know, near term politics to fight. You know, we'll talk about the Iran war. I think there's an ongoing legal and illegal immigration crisis. And, you know, we still have our own battles of the deep state, the permanent bureaucracy to fight and confront in Trump, too. And and, you know, Tony Fauci is certainly the the grandest villain, but he obviously wasn't the last one. And I think there's still some intransigent, intransigent bureaucrats who are preventing the Trump administration from fulfilling its its policy. We just heard of the one of the chief data officials from the Department of Homeland Security. You know, I don't remember his name off the top of my head, of course, now that I'm talking. But you've probably seen his picture by now. Yeah, kind of this this sniveling. He kind of looks the part, but clearly a liberal who was somehow the one responsible for accumulating and then reporting statistics on deportations for the last 18 months. And, you know, now we're at a point where we don't know what's true anymore, similar to similar to covid. So I think, you know, there are some near term battles. I'm going to be happy to see Rand Paul drag him through the mud. I'd love to see Ryan's vision for civil and state level justice come to fruition, too. But I do think it's a reminder that, you know, in many ways, the twenty twenty two midterms were run on the tyranny of covid and this red wave for which we all hope to never materialize. So I don't want to over index any kind of practical political outcomes on on this one. He's pardoned two. We've tried it before. Three. There's a lot of other work to do. Yeah, I'm kind of with you, Will. I mostly look at this as a harmless sideshow. I wish it were more. I wish I had higher hopes for it. Obviously, this guy is an exceptionally odious personage. Like every time he shows up, it just makes your skin crawl. And I'm I'm with you guys on that. I was as spitting mad about covid lockdowns as I think it was possible to be. I describe it now in retrospect as the only time in my life when I've actively struggled against the sin of rage, the deadly sin of rage. Other deadly sins. Sure, this is not one I'm prone to, but in lockdown, I was angry all the time and I was angry at Fauci and I was also angry at everybody else who played lackey to him. And I was upset with my fellow citizens also for falling for the stuff so easily again and again and again. So I share all of that sentiment. I think you can go back and listen to back episodes of this podcast and listen to me spinning out at length about what a time that was. Nothing to do with how upset I am about covid, but something weird has happened, like it or not, which is that we've entered into a state of collective amnesia about that period. And it's afflicted both sides of the political spectrum. It has to do, I think, with a kind of collective trauma response, to use the therapy language about it, that we don't want to think about how bad that time was. As has been now mentioned, many of the people involved, Fauci included, have been granted certain stays that will allow them to slide by, I think, facing less accountability than we would like. I do think it's helpful, and this is where I will add the slight grace note in Rand Paul's defense, since it's Rand Paul and since this is not a guy who's taking focus away from some other major central right-wing policy proposal. In other words, he's already a kind of peripheral figure. This is his major issue. It's helpful for him to have him around so that we don't slip altogether into amnesia about this. And do remember, as we're disputing about all these policy issues that are currently on the table that we're about to get into, as we're fighting with each other and with others, you know, internally on the right about what the right way forward is, I find it very helpful, at least for myself, to be reminded that that's all taking place within the context of an alternative that amounts to shutting down the schools and COVID lockdowns, right? That's what we were living through just very recently that led us to the point of reelecting Donald Trump. And I think even now, it's too late in the second Trump presidency to say, well, all of our pathologies are just holdovers from the Biden era. We have to own some of the problems that we're now facing. But that doesn't mean we can't remember that the situation now, on the whole, is vastly improved. And it's improved because we're no longer in hock to gremlins like this. I mean, this guy was just, you know, at every level, both personally and professionally, a failure. And I think, you know, whatever we can do to kind of expose that, the better. The last little thing I'll say, though, is if you don't have that set of opinions that I've just articulated, I don't think these diaries are particularly revelatory or explosive. In other words, if you hate him already, they're a great hate read. If you don't hate him, and if you think he was a responsible public servant or whatever, you're going to read these all very, very differently. You're going to think, I think the New York Times headline was like, oh, Fauci reflects on fame and COVID's origins in his diaries. You know, it's going to become this kind of like meditative sort of mirror of the great statesman as he navigates the problems or whatever. In other words, this is not a bombshell to my mind. I haven't read all of it. So maybe there's stuff in there that I'm missing. But I'm not looking at this and thinking, wow, now, at last, everybody who told me Fauci was a great hero will finally be persuaded that he's a louse. Like, that's not the caliber, I think, of document that we've procured, despite the fact that everyone's making a big deal out of it. I also suspect these extensive diaries were his preparation for a large book deal at some point. And so at the very least, Rand Paul dragging all this out into the sunlight will prevent Fauci from scrubbing his public image retrospectively to the tune of some seven-figure book deal. So that's good. That's a good thing. Absolutely. I just finished reading a novel, which I doubt very much that our listeners will like. So I'm not exactly recommending this novel because it's like a gay guy reflecting on life in the 1980s in London, but it's called The Swimming Pool Librarian. It does have the one great line in it, which is, like all diaries, this one had an imagined audience. And I feel like this is kind of true of diary, people keeping diaries, like he probably has a future readership in mind. But as you say, Ryan, it likely would have looked very different in the version he prepared for publication. In any case, we'll all, I'm sure, enjoy watching at least the Twitter clips of this Rand Paul interrogation as it proceeds tomorrow. But let us move, as Will has rightly observed, let us move to more contemporary matters and talk about the Iran war. So, as always, we're glad, Will, that you're here in part because you can tell me I'm wrong about everything I'm about to say. I gather that the Iran war is still occurring. It seemed for a minute as if it were going to cease occurring, and then it reoccurred. Right now, Benjamin Netanyahu is meeting with President Trump. I think he's in DC for Lindsey Graham's funeral, but he and Zelensky have both had meetings with Trump as well as part of this emissary, this visit. And this is taking place in the context of ongoing hostilities really between Iran and the US. I gather that Israel has not been as involved in this new round, post-ceasefire round of hostilities. Not that that won't transpire. I think Netanyahu seems to be itching to do some more bombing in this latest stage of things. But the latest that I've heard about is actually more about the Houthis, this Iran-backed group, attacking Saudi Arabia. So this is a set of proxy skirmishes that seems to be going on. In my view, again, correct me if I'm wrong, all of it seems to have become fairly diffuse. In other words, I don't understand at this point what we're aiming for. Is it simply that Iran seems to be agreeing to open the Strait of Hormuz and then it turned out they weren't actually, and now we need to stick in this until they really do? Is it that Netanyahu has objectives, which will now become clearer to us through this meeting? I've lost the plot of the Iran war, Will, and I would like for you, if you can, to get me back on track or tell me that, in fact, there is no plot and we're kind of floating in free fall. That could be a live option, to be clear, but let me do my best to kind of update us, update the audience on where we are. And let's take it, and I know, I apologize, I'm sure this has been said before, but let's take it once the MOU was signed in early to mid-June, negotiated notably by Vice President Vance, Steve Whitkoff, Jared Kushner, signed though by President Trump, at the Palace of Versailles in France on his visit in conjunction with some diplomatic engagements. So, the MOU was signed and the MOU established a 60-day ceasefire, for lack of a better term, during which the United States and Iran can negotiate a more permanent solution and most importantly, tackle the prospect and the future of Iran's nuclear program. But contingent on that ceasefire window existing was Iran allowing for the free flow of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, a relative cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon, a few other conditions, but those were the two most notable ones. And at different times, both of those conditions became inhibitors to the existence of the MOU itself. And I think we saw in the first few weeks in June, after the MOU came into being, we saw some tit-for-tat punches thrown between Iran and Iran in particular, striking vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States responding. It was chalked up to this tit-for-tat response, almost let bygones be bygones. These kinds of things happen. President Trump's famous line that a ceasefire is mostly a peaceful ceasefire, as you could say. But in any case, we ran out of patience when now about 18 days ago, Iran more deliberately and earnestly started shooting drones at commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. And at that point, and I think reasonably so, President Trump decided to, so to speak, take the gloves off and commenced a more protracted, deliberate campaign, not simply to respond to an instance of aggression or military action from Iran, but to pursue an intermediate degradation of Iranian combat power, especially along Iranian territory, along the Strait of Hormuz. And that, of course, precipitated Iranian response. And that notably, as I'm always trying to keep in mind, the loss of certainly three more American service members and there was a service member killed in Iraq in conjunction with seemingly a botched, uncontrolled explosive ordnance disposal. But in any case, some real cost incurred by the United States military. And let me just kind of take the mantle of trying to defend the administration here. Again, and I'm someone who was skeptical of what war with Iran could produce, but there was the rush to describe the last three weeks of our lives as a restart of the war, as this escalation that signaled, one, the failure of an MOU, of the MOU, and second, preparation for imminent escalation going forward. On the first front, I think that's just categorically untrue. Whatever spin you want to listen to, the MOU was always conditional on the free flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. When Iran did not permit that, or when Iran tried to inhibit that, the United States took action to punish them. I described at one point this military action as not as escalation, but as punishment. And I think that was well within the bounds of the rights of American decision makers to do. But then the second point being that the MOU was contingent on this regional alignment and the ability to stitch together a coalition that I think did want peace to result from this, a more enduring peace. And I think that's still true. And to your point, Spencer, you mentioned some really interesting developments. It was about a week ago that Saudi Arabia intercepted an Iranian cargo flight flying into Yemen from Iran, trying to resupply the Houthi rebels in a more deliberate bid to disrupt the commercial shipping in the Red Sea, a la the first few months of this administration. And so there's clearly this effort by Iran to more comprehensively expand the battle space, truly disrupt the global economic engine, obviously with the Strait of Hormuz, but then bringing the Houthis more formally into the fight and trying to empower them to disrupt traffic through the Red Sea. Over the weekend, or late last week, in the early part of the weekend, we saw numerous attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure. It was a little bit unclear about the source of those attacks, but we were clearly entering a new era, a new paradigm in this post-MOU conflict, if you will. And notably, what I don't think has gotten enough attention somehow is that President Trump and, by all accounts, the Iranians have agreed to return to the negotiating table. And it doesn't mean that there's not a lot left to be seen. It doesn't mean that there's not a real risk of new hostilities. But I think a few things are going to be weighing on the president. First is the opinion of the Gulf states, the Saudis, the Qataris. It was Saudi Arabia's largest oil field that was attacked just a few days ago. I don't think they're eager if that's going to be on the target deck for Iran and the Houthis in the coming weeks. And secondly, I think it's the midterm elections. There's a apparent pattern between the Democrat versus Republican popular vote, if you will, and gas prices and the pattern of the war. And I think President Trump is pretty well-tuned to the domestic political environment in America. Regardless of what you hear from some Republicans in Congress, I think the political environment is pretty clear. It's a pretty unpopular war. That doesn't mean it's not worth it, but I think the politics are clear. And the last thing I'll make, and I'll turn it over to you guys, the visits from Prime Minister Netanyahu are clearly happening in a little bit different of an environment. President Trump has pretty deliberately pre-messaged some of the talking points that were assumed to be coming from Prime Minister Netanyahu. This new mountain, rumored mountain facility of the Iranian nuclear program is seen as this inevitable target of a massive U.S. strike a la Operation Midnight Harammer from June of 2025. But President Trump, even on Fox and Friends this morning, addressed it and he's like, I think I know what's there. I'm not too worried about it. We'll see what happens. You just kind of play the cards as they're dealt, right? I don't think you need to doom or kind of be Pollyannish from day to day with this war. There's, I think, this clear impetus to want a diplomatic solution from the president. But I guess, forgive me for just believing these talking points, that they don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, that the administration realizes that the only way to guarantee that are with inspectors in the context of a diplomatic framework or nuclear deal, or inspectors in the form of U.S. soldiers and military combat power on the other end of a significant escalation in the war that gives us the certainty and the verification of the true nature of Iran's nuclear program. So those are, in many ways, the two realities that have been there since June of last year. And I still think that's where we are today. But I also, I don't think, you know, the last six months proved that this administration was all of a sudden looking for a ground invasion of Iran. I think they're still relatively focused on turning the page on the Middle East, but doing so in a way that means we don't have to come back in two years. Thanks. Yeah, that's very helpful and slightly, I think, more positive than I expected you to be, which is good and a relief. I mean, the boots on the ground option is not one that had even really occurred to me because of what you've said about the midterms in that gas is now almost four bucks outside my house in Nashville. This is a place where gas is typically around 250. And people get very antsy about that. So I kind of had my instinct had been, well, he's going to be looking for a graceful way to put a bow on this with some runway to the midterms. And it sounds as if you're saying that's not off the table. In other words, it's one among a number of things that could happen. Tell me if I'm wrong about that. I think so. You know, there's this notion and I've felt it at times that, hey, the best thing to do is just to leave. Let's turn it over. You know, Iran is not going to close the Strait of Hormuz. It's their economic well-being after all. But, you know, I think even like I consider myself a realist to kind of this new right kind of foreign policy vision can understand that it's probably not a good thing for the current regime in Iran to both have a nuclear weapon and then have uncontested uncontested control over the Strait of Hormuz. I think people like me can also realize that it's not necessarily feasible to just leave. Like we are in this scenario right now. You know, what I was what I still am worried about is kind of some middle ground solution where we, you know, there are a number of islands from Karg Island to a few more, more close to the actual Strait of Hormuz itself that some think are compelling military targets for an invasion. I don't necessarily think that's on the table the next few months. And then just to, you know, add maybe the degree of skepticism or realism you're expecting, Spencer, some reporting in the last 24 hours over the weekend, you know, the military gets their message out through leaks to the New York Times and Washington Post. And some of those came out, you know, a few stories, you know, General Kane advising against escalation or indicating that the military was losing their ability to continue to influence or accomplish administration objectives via military means. And then a story supposedly about Admiral Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, so in essence, the general who's fighting the fight, controlling the fight, saying that the military is running out of, both running out of munitions and interceptors, but then also losing the ability to influence outcomes in the Middle East through military means. And that is, I think, this essential conversation that only realists, you know, folks who appreciate administration officials like Elbridge Colby have been saying is that the military action, foreign policy choices generally come with real trade-offs. There may be warrant and value in the choices you make, but we're in a world now where you cannot fight probably more than one war at a time and where these kinds of trade-offs are really serious and the pressures of our defense industrial base and the inadequacies of it are really coming to bear right now. You mentioned drones very briefly, and there's been a lot of chatter about the next-gen warfare, and you've done some writing on it yourself, actually, about this war and the war in Ukraine, both representing a kind of preview, a look ahead into the future of war. To what extent is that true of this stage that we're in and has that affected kind of conversations? And feel free, if you'd like, to comment also on Ukraine and Russia, because it does seem like those two things are sort of weirdly getting melded together in this dual meeting and maybe even becoming part of one concept in people's minds. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, I'll try and be quick. And I think you and I, Spencer, have talked about this in another forum, but it's worth repeating because I think it's a really essential conversation to have and to perhaps even to listen to. But the differences between Russia-Ukraine and Iran-America. Russia-Ukraine, it's a very static war, and it is relatively close. In essence, the front line of troops between the foremost Russian and the foremost Ukrainian is about 30 kilometers. And although that is much closer than the supposed front line of troops between Iran and America, that is much further away than the front line of troops would have been in a similar conflict, let's say, eight years ago, where the weapon systems of tactical units required that those units be much closer together in order to affect that enemy formation. What drones and also things like items like software and streamlined logistics do is they change what I've termed the battlefield algebra and the battlefield geometry in fundamental ways. The battlefield algebra is different because relatively cheap, more affordable weapons can destroy relatively more expensive infrastructure, tanks, enemy weapons. And then the geometry to which I alluded just 30 seconds ago is that the tactical formation. So when I was in the army, at one point I was an army platoon leader. My infantry platoon was only able to shoot a tank that was about two and a half kilometers away from us. If I were an infantry platoon leader today, I could shoot a tank with a remotely piloted drone about 30 kilometers away with the same kind of kinetic effects. And that's this new paradigm shift. My theory, and I wrote this in a piece for Fox News about six weeks ago, is that this is this fundamental change in warfare because it is lowering the barrier to entry for even, I wouldn't say non-state actors, but let's say lesser state actors to compete in a high intensity conflict. And Ukraine and Russia is really instructive. Ukraine, a much smaller country, a military, the fraction, the size of Russia was able through innovation, the adoption of drones in particular, was able to, and they still are, holding Russia to a relative standstill in what I think will be an increasingly tragic and bloody conflict. Iran, I think, demonstrates a similar kind of ability. There's not this trench line or this front line of troops that relates to Russia and Ukraine. But Iran clearly, even though I think the United States has conducted some 10,000 plus airstrikes since February 28th, Iran is still able to wield combat power effectively. Maybe not to the fullest extent where they would so-called win the war. But sadly, we saw last week, they're still able to kill American soldiers with whatever combat power they have. And my theory is that it is because the combat power by which they can come is cheaper, more accessible, and it means that they can stay in the fight longer. Again, it doesn't mean that they can win, but I do think it changes the calculus of war as a tool of politics. And perhaps it'll be a trend for the 21st century, but it's obviously having an effect now because the United States is having to adjust their defense industrial base in real time to try and participate in this new form of battlefield geometry and battlefield algebra. So you talked about the new technologies. You've mentioned the munitions problem. You've written actually at least a couple of pieces for the American Mind about that and what we can do to build up that supply again. And that's obviously not going to be a short-term task that is definitely going to be more long-term. Could you talk about, too, just seeing reports about, obviously, US fatalities, and then, too, just what Iran's been able to do? I've been seeing reports about them hitting bases, I think, in Jordan and elsewhere. If you could talk about some of the vulnerabilities that that's exposed, how successful their operations have actually been. Obviously, there's the fog of Iran's rhetoric and their state media and everything, but how successful have they actually been, and what should that tell military leaders going forward? Well, and just to tease, the American military project's next launch, we have one coming up imminently on 8-day contracting. I'll tease that. But then the next one we have is going to be about 10,000 to 12,000 words on how the Biden administration left the military in this state of unreadiness. The Trump administration is doing a lot. There's a lot of changes fast, but to not bury the lead, the point is that we saw this coming. The Ukraine war was ongoing for more than two years of the Biden administration. So in essence, much more to be said about that. To your question, Mike, as you say, the three Americans were killed in an air defense base in Jordan last week, as we're talking, so the second half of July. The soldiers there now are, in many ways, falling in on the infrastructure that my units and I used to fight. I was in an infantry unit, a special operations unit, and we'd fly helicopters to a bad guy's house, do the business of the nation, and then return to our home base, if you will. And it was at that home base where we walked around, no body armor, no concern about the world. I'd FaceTime my girlfriend, now my wife at the time, and life was good. You go to the gym, go to the chow hall, and then go on missions. That is not an acceptable pattern of life anymore, because all of those activities, FaceTiming your wife and girlfriend, logging onto the internet on dirty Wi-Fi networks, that's all targetable, traceable activity. I don't know this for sure, but I imagine is part of some of these, call them, for lack of a much better term, growing pains of modern warfare. I wasn't worried about ISIS at the time, or Al Qaeda in Iraq, or the Taliban if we were in Afghanistan. I wasn't worried about them using my cell phone signal to then target and drop bombs on me. But that's what soldiers have to be worried about now. It's a sea change for how the military operates. Again, to bring this to a strategic sense, we're going to enter a world where the whole globe is a contested environment, where you're able to process information, intelligence so efficiently and rapidly that everything is on the table, if you will. That, I think, is scary in many ways, but that's a part of what's happening right now, is that the patterns of life of the global war on terror are colliding with the reality of modern warfare that makes it much easier for even a lesser state actor, in this case Iran, to be able to target and strike Americans at ranges and with sophistication that was previously kind of unheard of for a state of their capacity. The domestic political calculation that we talked about months ago, Spencer and Mike, I think even when one of the last appearances Will was on, or one of the appearances he made with us, that time seems to be on Iran's side, and Trump has fallen into what we feared might be the case, which is as the midterms approach, more and more leverage will be wielded by Iran because it can just survive and continue to gum up this whole process and increase the fears that Trump rightfully has domestically about the effect of this war on turnout, enthusiasm, and all the rest, which will significantly affect, he goes without saying, the rest of his presidency. So it's very difficult, at least for me to see, given the last six weeks and the escalation, de-escalation, and re-escalation that has gone on, it's hard to see a way out of this that doesn't collide with the midterms. I think the president's party is anxious about that, and you see all this polling in daily tranches from the left, center, and the right, trying to either score their own political points or predict their success or failure with what we have, you know, four months to go, three and a half months to go. Let's hope that some resolution of this can be reached in time and that gas prices come down. And I say, let's hope, because I know we all share the opinion on this podcast that if Congress were to fall to the other party, it would be, of course, bad in a partisan sense, but I think bad for the country as well. So I don't know, I hate to be pessimistic about this whole thing, but while celebrating our impressions on this or our partial impressions, I think we talked about it in the sense of, this may happen or this may happen. That is to say, Trump needs to figure out a way, Trump and the administration needs to figure out a way to bring this to a conclusion that seems satisfactory to the rest of the Republican party and especially the voting electorate. And they don't seem to be any closer to that than they were a couple of months ago or six weeks ago, unfortunately. Yeah. When you were out last week, Brian, Mike and I were talking about the war and the tariffs as the two things which are dragging on with inconvenient timing for the midterms, quite apart from what one feels about their validity or drawbacks as policy maneuvers. It seems like time is running thin for these midterms and both of these really major Trump interventions, they're both kind of signature moves by him and the second administration are threatening to cause some real damage. And yes, as you say, I think that would be bad for us all, not just those of us who take the Claremont line on things. We were going to do one final segment on the, speaking of odious personages, the execrable Zoran Mondani, but I think we're going to save that for our Claremont Digital Plus subscribers. So if you want to hear us talk about Mondani and the pied-a-terre tax and his database of evildoers, then you've got to go to claremontinstitute.substack.com and become a paid subscriber. More on that in just a bit, but to close us out just in the time we have remaining here, I have a question just generally for the gang. If it sounds like we're sort of in agreement that the midterms are looking dicey and Trump is going to be feeling increasing pressure, as you said, Ryan, to kind of wrap up some of these things, but it's not clear how he can do that neatly. Do what I said, do you think Trump himself cares? I mean, I know that everybody around him is concerned about this and I could see that he wants to leave a good legacy and so forth. I could also see him being the kind of guy who just, look, I'm here to do a thing. He's never really a big fan of the Republican party. It's not like this was a great love affair between him and them. It's been kind of a vehicle for him to accomplish his objectives and deliver on what he takes to be his mandate from his supporters. And is he now just kind of sailing off into the sunset? I mean, so I asked this because I watched him on the correspondence dinner, which they had to reschedule because you will probably recall a guy tried to kill him at the last one and they brought it back around. He made this speech with a bunch of jokes in it and part of it was like, I'm going to run for it. He brought out a Trump 2028 hat, which I feel like he thought he could do because it was so obviously not happening. And he just gave the impression of being kind of like, all right guys, it's your problem to deal with now. Not that he's not fully invested in the rest of his term, but just that he may be uniquely unresponsive, it occurred to me, to the kinds of pressures that we're talking about vis-a-vis the midterms. What do you guys think about that? Yeah, I think back when we first started discussing the Iran thing, a part of my view of this was it seemed to me that Trump's self-understanding was, uh, you know, if you could pose the question to him, well, yeah, this might turn out to be terrible timing, but I think we need to do it and we have a window to do it. So yeah, them's the brakes. That's, that's what you have to deal with. I think there's a certain part of him that still thinks that way. Uh, and so, yeah, I, that's not quite, um, not quite agreeing with your judgment about his, his indifference to the midterms, Spencer, but it's of a piece of it. I mean, I, I think he still thinks, uh, obviously cause he undertook it that this needed doing. And, uh, you know, you, you can't control, you can't control all, uh, the, you know, what's the line that, I mean, that the enemy gets to set its own, uh, pace. The, the enemy has its own agenda and, uh, there's nothing you can do about it sometimes and you just have to deal with it and roll the punches. So I, I don't, I suspect that, uh, he would not be satisfied with some resolution of this that is dishonorable, um, dishonorable, ineffective, and, um, uh, detrimental to long or medium term us interest just because it means he's much more likely to lose the midterms. I don't get the sense. That's how he thinks from the way he's acted, uh, in his two terms in office. So it is what it is, I suppose. Yeah. I think he was presented with, you know, at the time what he thought was a golden opportunity, uh, to really eradicate kind of the top level of the Iranian regime. Um, I think like Ryan said, I don't think he's going to leave this, uh, like Biden left, um, you know, uh, Afghanistan and Iraq. He's certainly not going to do that. Um, but at the same time, I think there is an air Spencer of, okay, I'm, I'm going to do what I need to do for the greatness of the United States for our future prosperity, all that. But, you know, Hey, JD Marco, you know, this is kind of your project after me. So I think that the, I think you are sensing something there, Spencer, but I do think his heart is in it. Um, he's tied to himself and his personal legacy to the legacy of the United States. I think in such a way that's intertwined so much that, that I think that he really is in this, he cares about it. You know, the politics, I think you're right to say don't concern him maybe quite as much, but that, you know, his presidency, his legacy is certainly something that he thinks about again, in connection with, you know, the actual legacy of the United States going forward. What did the late Lindsey Graham allegedly say is that, you know, you can convince him to do something if he can understand himself as having done something that Barack Obama didn't have the courage to do. And, and I, you know, I, uh, yeah, you know, love him or hate him for it. I do love him for it nonetheless. Uh, I think that's, that's the paradigm through which he's viewing this. Um, but I, you know, I, I didn't expect to be the optimist on the show candidly, but I, I, you know, I watched him at, uh, I think he had a rally or two in Michigan yesterday as we're filming this, um, you know, Monday, July 27th. And, uh, I, I, I look forward, um, maybe if there can at least be this relative stability in the war, I look forward to him, uh, kind of turning his eye around Democrats, the DSA, uh, you know, socialists from the campaign trail, you know, there's all the, you know, what the Trump pack has $400 million. I'm sure they're going to spend really well. And so I, you know, I, I, uh, I'm holding out some hope that if you give him the right enemies, he'll, he'll, he'll fight appropriately. That is an excellent point. I do think he's always at his best with a really clearly defined enemy opponent in politics. And we've been tracking basically from the moment he was elected, what is the Democrat party going to do to regroup? And I think at this point, it's fairly clear that they've coalesced around this vigorous young DSA coalition, and it will be if nothing else, delicious fun to watch Donald Trump of all people go up against, uh, these Kefia wearing gormless Cretans that are going to come for, uh, these various, uh, election positions and, you know, who are genuinely bad news. And so I guess, yeah, um, you guys framed it in a way that is more generous to Trump and closer to kind of what I had in mind. I didn't mean to suggest that he's like checked out or a lame duck or not interested just that, you know, a different president might be more inclined to do whatever it takes to make the mid to soften the blow of the midterms. Trump does not seem like that kind of guy to me. He seems like a person who has taken undertaken these objectives because he thinks and will do his best to, to bring them, uh, to ground to, to finish them up. Um, whether he can do that as another question, but yeah, I, I, I hope very much that he'll be, uh, focused on or lending his weight to the campaign against, uh, Mondani's new crew that he seems to be assembling the Mondani machine. Um, and that is an excellent segue into inviting all our listeners who are not already Claremont digital plus subscribers, uh, to head over to claremont institute.substack.com so that you can get extra episodes of this podcast and a bunch of other stuff like extra episodes of the close read the Claremont review of books podcast, the right, the privilege to comment on articles. Whenever you get mad about something we say you can, uh, pay for the privilege of telling us about it. And of course we also brought out all sorts of like, uh, read aloud articles, um, and occasional substack posts that you can enjoy. So to get all of that and more go to claremontinstitute.substack.com. Thanks very much to everyone for listening to the American mind podcast. 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