Interview Only w/ Kevin Williamson - Trump Has No Way Out Iran War Without Humiliation

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code toodcast. As many of you know, I have clear that I think that the president's situation, iron is he's in a no in situation. It's a no in situation he's put himself in. The Only way he can get out of it is probably either capitulation or some sort of escalation that would be likely politically intolerable. But as much as I think that I have done my best to convey this, I think nobody has written it better

than my guest today, and it's Kevin Williamson. He is at the Dispatch and his columns in particular on a run over the last month have been one of those where I'm just sitting here nodding yes, and I'm like, I wish I could have articulated as well as he wrote it. But that is the beauty of reading. Kevin Williamson and is somebody I've read for a long time. It's the first time I've spoken to him, so I'm looking forward to this conversation. Kevin, Welcome to the podcast.

he's made. He I think he knows it, and he's desperate to find some sort of way out of it that isn't humiliation, and I don't know what that looks like. So as much as it can be fun to sort of, you know, point fingers and go aha, this was a mistake a bunch of us told just so, et cetera, the question now is how do we get out of this with the United States not having its tail between its legs.

he does that a lot. That's kind of one of his things, Like, you know, he doesn't tend to endorse in races where he doesn't think he's going to win. If you look like the Texas Senate race that's going on right now, the runoffs of Republican primary, he still

hasn't touched it. And so one of the points that I try to make, not only in this context, but in lots of other context is a lot of things that we think of as being ethical questions or questions of norms, and you know, kind of tradition and things like that. We talk about these things like they're these kind of airy, fairy metaphysical things that are primarily of

interest to the afterlife, but they have really important practical consequences. And one of the reasons you don't want to have a president who can just run off to war without going to Congress to get some sort of authorization. Is that you want to know what your goal is going in You want to get a read from the people who have to get elected every two years about what they're willing to commit to that project and what they think that the American public is willing to invest and

tolerate in the pursuit of that project. Because there are all sorts of different outcomes and different goals that have been articulated about the campaign in Iran that are not the same. They change during the press briefings. Yes, I mean at times. Yeah. So if you know, if your goal is regime change, that's one thing that's a very that's a hard thing to do. It's a doable thing in Iran. We could do it if we wanted to,

but it's it's a big investment. If your goal is to set back their nuclear program, well that's a different thing. You can probably do with air power and maybe some special forces stuff. If your goal is to have a much stronger conviction and evidence that their nuclear program is not functional and going to be functional in the short term, that's a much bigger commitment. And if your goal is to keep the Straight of horm Moves open to oil traffic and other trade, you could have just not done

this in the first place because it was open. So right now the main thing they seem to be trying to shoes is going to be open. So they are

really just trying to solve a problem that they created for themselves because the Strait was was open before this. And one of the interesting things about this is that Iran has not won a battle with the United States. Iran is never going to win a battle with the United States. It's never going to get close to laying

a glove on the United States. But it's essentially had its territory enlarged over this conflict, because the form is an international waterway over which Iran has no legitimate sovereignty or right to control. But the Trump administration talks about it as though it were Iranian territory, and they're just out there begging them please, you know, you crazy bastards.

As he put it, open the Strait. And I would love to play poker with Donald Trump, because I'm not a very good poker player, but I think he would be worse. He's just the worst of this kind of telegraphing.

good game.

lose something, as long as it's not in Vegas or Atlantic City. We can have those two.

we don't think that's going to happen. We'll roll the dice on this because the Iranians know that they can take more pain than the Americans can, because we're a free, happy, prosperous society where our government has to get reelected every couple of years, and they're not. They're used to being miserable, and if they're miserable, they don't have much they can do about it because the government's got all the guns

and that people don't have much of anything. So the Iranian regime is pretty confident in its place, and Trump

is not so. So far, they've been calling his bluffs one after the other, and they keep they keep winning it. And so now we've got this ceasefire so called, which I'm kind of a language guy, you know, I'm prestickety about language stuff. Am I understanding of a ceasefire? Which makes me enjoy reading? You know. I understanding of a ceasefire is that's what happens when the firing has ceased, and the firing has not ceased, so there is no

actual ceasefire. But now, but you know, conversations about but didn't you know their hold it stops the clock too.

count against the war powers act.

social media that this is what I'm doing, And so he's like he's reading the stage directions and no one's buying. No one's buying the performance. Something I do say from time to time that when I say this, people think that I'm just like trying to get a rise or I'm just being tribalistic or whatever. But one of the most important things to keep in mind about the Trump administration that Donald Trump is not smart. He's kind of a dim guy. He wasn't that bright when he was

in his forties. He hasn't gotten better here on the verge of eighty. He doesn't know.

really weird reason to be Secretary of Defense. But okay, because you want to do bench presses on short form videos and look weird with your hair and whatnot. But I'm not one of the electra people about their hair. But it's a really weird administration. There aren't a lot of people in it who know what they're doing, who

have much capability. It's interesting that Marco Rubio, who's outside of his campaigning ability, which I think is pretty formidable, is in my experience, my read of the guy, kind of mediocrity. He's not really a very interesting person politically.

run Spearit airlines or whatever else the administration's going to want him to do. And he's definitely out of his depth with this stuff. Rubio is fine as the Secretary of State doing Secretary of State stuff, which is you know, traditional kind of diplomacy and meetings, negotiation and that kind of stuff. Expecting him to figure out a way to bail the Trump administration out of this war that they've gotten themselves into because somebody probably convinced them, hey, we

can do it like Venezuela. It'll be like a long weekend and think of how cool you'll look. And then we'll move on to Cuba. And so you can say, look at all these people. You know, the Reagan administration couldn't deal with the RAM but I did. All these American presidents going back to Jack Kennedy couldn't deal with Cuba, but I did. Everyone was mad at Venezuela, which I don't know that Venezuela was ever that big on our list, at least not for a long time. But okay, sure.

They cared about it. I don't think anybody outside of Dave Broward and Palm beached it.

on It supporters Russia and Pakistan. And the fact that Iran is no longer going to be able to enrich uranium or do all sorts of other things like that doesn't mean it's nuclear ambitions have gone away. I love Pete Hexath talking about bombing their ambitions until their ambitions

aren't there anymore. That's that's an interesting metaphysical problem. But there's no reason to think they couldn't buy one, and that the Russians might not want to sell them one, or that the Pakistanis might not sell them one. You know, if I were if I were Putin, I think having the Iranians have one nuclear weapon or two might be a real good thing for me. That changes the math in the Middle East in a big, big way.

you know, exercise some influence over the way in which they use them, which he probably could. And it's something to keep in mind. There are ways for this to get worse that we haven't you know, thought about all that much. I mean, five to fifty diesel. It's not very popular among my people down in Texas and all the f two to fifty drivers and have three fifty drivers and all that stuff. But there's there's worse things in the world than six or seven dollars diesel.

in the and the eye pretty much every ally we have, arguably other than Israel, and right now that alliance is politically problematic. Frankly for the president these days. You can see a little bit of it and breaking uptema.

way without really even consulting them very much. And that's all fine when you want to laugh about, well, what's Belgium going to do about it? But you know what, it turns out we do need these guys from time to time, and there are other reasons to want to preserve that relationship other than immediate short term concerns about

the straight of horror moves. We have other long term strategic interests that having good operative relationships with our European allies would be would be a great help.

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e t hos dot com slash chuck. Application times may vary and rates may vary. I'm assuming that the eventual deal is the Iran Nuclear Deal two point zero because it's what the Iranians know. It is at least where there's some muscle memory and it's it, you know. I'm not sure where else they can go. Obviously, Trump doesn't want that to look like he's just doing that, So like NAFTA, if he renames it, then it's brand new and whatever. That seems to me the most realistic outcome.

But I don't know if he knows how to do this.

all that. Sure, I think they probably they're probably pretty confident that they are, So why not do what they've been doing, which you say, here's our list of demands, here's our fourteen point list. And Trump says, no, I don't like that, And they say, okay, well here's our list of demands. And it's the same thing. And it's the same thing again, and it's pretty maximalist, and they're not seeming to be backing off from anything. So, you know,

I usually like to think the hopeful thing is that when you're dealing with people like this, that they can be bribed in some way, you know, there's some self interest there.

this is not an entity. So his those threats, oh, you know, they're not gonna be able to do this, they sort of don't. I think they fall on deaf ears. And then I guess the other other part of this is they're not as motivated I think, by money as he is. And so so when you take that off the table, it goes back to your simpleton analysis of him. He really is just very simple minded, and so we think, what, well, money doesn't work. Well, now what am I supposed to do? Yeah?

were motivated by. They could certainly have that they could be They really could be the you know, the thing that the United Airborms really aspires to be. In terms of being.

that leads me to believes that they are true believers to some extent. They really believe in their revolution. They really believe in the superiority of their civilization and their way of doing things. Their contempt for their Arab and Sunni neighbors is not feigned. It's a real thing. We do the same thing with China sometimes, where we assume that Chinese nationalism is this kind of artificial, synthetic construction of the Chinese Communist Party, which certainly contributes to it.

But Chinese nationalism is also a real thing. It's a real organic thing among the Chinese people. They really prefer their own country and their own civilization, their own language, their own way of doing things. And they don't look at Italy or France or the United States and say we wish we could be just like that. They say, we wish we're that wealthy. We wish I had that kind of power and some of that prestige and some of the options that we have for being the kind

of country we are. But they don't want to be us. They want to be them. And Trump is, you know, he's an example of all liars think that everyone's a liar, all cheaters think everyone's a cheater, and all you know, shallow, low iq megalomaniacs think that the world is run by shallow, low iq megalomaniacs.

And one group of people that has influence on Trump are the Gulf States. At some point, they're going to get tired of this too. They are tired of this, and they've been in this sort of I am I think that there are some that wanted this and I think there's some that didn't, but there were of the mindset, if you're going to do it, go all the way, don't do it the way you've done it right, which I sort of I sort of respect that that mindset I think that, you know, which is don't do this

half assed. Well he did it half assed and now they've got a worse situation.

toward the future. That's it's a bit different. But then they've got this fanatical, you know, semi medieval regime across the water they've got to deal with.

What would that look like if they and and what At this point My guess is they will. They are now going to have to tolerate a regime that's essentially not friendly for the medium term. And I think that they thought, well, maybe this was going to come to an end sooner rather than later. Yeah.

we wanted. And I suspect what they were really betting on was was regime change, because there have been these popular uprisings in Iran that have been crushed, but they seem to be getting stronger each time there's a new wave of them, and the responses necessary to stomp them back down. Have been more vicious and bloody and wide reaching each time. And I suspect that what they were thinking was that the United States was going to unleash this in some way. That was going to be our goal.

We're going to take out the leadership, which we did take out of a lot of leadership.

expecting the other people to be like him. So if you're the number two guy in Trump's view of the world, what you're really praying for someone to take out the number one guy so you can step up, and he didn't. I think, really consider the possibility that there is this religious and political movement in Iran that is very very deeply entrenched that makes the number two guy or the number three or whatever we're down to. After that opening fusillade a lot like the guy you got rid of.

You know, it's not going to be like Venezuela, where you're basically promoting some capo in a crime family to godfather's status and doing business with him. That you're going to get another guy who's a lot like the last guy. And if you kill this guy, you need another guy who's a lot like him. And because it's a it's a more it's a more legitimate if you understand what I mean by legitimate, not in the sense of democratic legitimacy, but it's a more real, organic, deeply planted, deeply rooted

political movement. It's not, I think, a majority movement in Iran from what I understand. I think that ideologically and

philosophically speaking, their government is a minority government in most ways. But it's not a tiny minority, you know, it's a It's a large enough swath of Iranian society supports this regime, largely, you know, religious people in economically undeveloped rural backwaters in Aram where their real basis support is, which makes it a lot like the Trump administration. Actually, as I observed earlier that.

was true of of Chavez. That's how we grabbed power was using basically running against Caracas. I mean, it is something that I've been concerned about. I've been concerned about with our country is that suddenly we look like a lot of failed states. We look like we're on our way to where the failed small de democracy states have looked like, which is this massive divide between urban and rural develops into this angry movement that topples the wealthy.

you know, or Toronto. It's a different world here. And you know, I began my career working in India, and there's a lot about American politics. He reminds me of Indian politics in a lot of ways.

mid terms. They're talking about losing that Senate race in Texas possibly and which I still don't think is very likely. But there are people in the Republican world who are seriously worried about that kind of thing.

and should be by the way I will. There's ten different good reasons to impeach the guy, just from this time around.

had It's funny, you're going to get some out of boys from some of my some in my audience who I've been getting a lot of questions and been pushing back on it. They're like, you make the case for him to be impeached, but you argue against it. And I'm like, well, don't do it a third time if you don't have the votes, And I would argue, don't do it until you've got Republicans wanting to do it first.

That if you pursue a third one, you know you get defined by this, and I don't think it does you any good if you care about winning in twenty eight.

kind of a high degree of verbal dexterity. We put such a huge premium on this kind of very shallow form of cleverness and trying to think three steps ahead about what's, you know, politically good practice and what's not. And I think we defeat ourselves very very often in doing this. We get worse outcomes than we would. I think people in Congress shoul vote for what they think is right and say the right things, say what they actually believe in, and let people vote for them or

against them. And most of them have the opportunity to go to all sorts of other good jobs. They want to do something else in life, probably not cash, but tell but maybe everyone else, and just go do what you think is right and let the chips for all they may. It's not that hard. Occasionally I'll write a

column where I write a speech for a politician where this is what you should actually say if you were willing to go out and tell the truth about things. And I think in almost every case, every time I've written that column, the speech I wrote for them would have been politically better than the one they ended up giving. Not only would it be them telling the truth about

things and saying what they actually think. I think, ultimately, politically that's probably easier too, because we're not as clever as we think we are. I know a lot of political speech writers. I've known a lot of political speech writers over the year. Some of the are great people,

very smart people, as smart as they think they are. My father this expression not a very nice expression, but I'd like to buy him for what he's worth and sell him for what he thinks he's worth. And that has been my boy images a lot of Washington life.

it would probably mean trips to Dover. It is not without a huge cost and probably worse politics, probably another Senate seat. You know, maybe it's it's four or five or six instead of three, a borderline four. But he might actually accomplish something.

kept him from being worse than he was. He was just simply not that ambitious, and to the extent that he was ambitious, he didn't know like where the keys to the executive restroom were, so it took him a long time to figure stuff out.

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a ground occupation too in some ways. And casting a tremendous amount of money with no obvious benefit insight, and he can't say, well, we took the oil because you're not going to be able to take the oil.

always say the same. So I went down to Texas a couple of months ago, a couple of month and a half ago, to write about the center race down there, the Democratic and Republican primaries, and I talked to some soybean farmers. Soybean farming is not huge in Texas, but I've been writing about soybean farmers for a while since the last Trump had made They should be they end up in there. Nope, we like the guy. We think

he's trying to do the right thing. Yes, it stinks for us that our exports have been so messed up. We really blame the Chinese and not Trump so much. And if it means supporting someone like Kamala Harris or someone like that instead, they're just not going to do it. And you know, we've got little I don't like the whole rhetoric about you know, little family farms versus big, terrible, great, big agribusinesses, because agribusinesses where the values really created in farming.

But we've got a lot of little family farms around the country right now that are closing up operations and getting ready to build condos or whatever they're going to do on their land because fertilizer prices have doubled or tripled in some places, and they consume a lot of fuel. You know, it takes a lot of gas and stuff

to run those irrigation systems. And there's pretty good story in the New York Times other day about was this farm called butter Ridge or something like that, a little family owned dairy that just you know, they started losing one thousand dollars a day that they were in operations, and largely having to do with trade disruptions and then Iran and they should be a little bit about this stuff.

But it's just not the case. We always assume this, But there's really no good evidence for the proposition that people actually vote in a calculating way that alliance with their short term economic interest. That's not how people vote. Voting is a cultural thing. It's a matter of sort of social affiliation, and it's much more like choosing a church than it is like filing your taxes. It's it's it's a sense of who they are.

they would not get on board with it. And I remember, of all people, and this is something else they feel kind of guilty about. I remember talking to John Cornyn about it when Cornyn, I guess was the chairman of the National Republican Senate Committee or whatever, and he was saying,

you know, I get mad at Arland too. I find him very frustrating in all this. And I said, well, are you mad enough to back to me in a primary challenge? And he said, well, he got real Weasley about it, and he said, well is he going to run? It's before he was in the race. And I was like, Okay, that's the only answer I need, you know, That's all

I need to hear from you. And so I was one of those people who thought that John Cornyn wasn't hardcore enough back in the day and now, of course, even though he's pretty trumping and pretty awful in a lot of ways, he is kind of a semi responsible, grown up, halfway patriotic, halfway decent human being that the Republican Party could desperately use more of. So I was

part of the problem. I probably am still part of the problem in some ways, but I'm not part of the Republican problem because I haven't been affiliated with that party in more than twenty years.

kind of conservative would you call yourself?

to trust the American people less and less as the days go by. But if you ask me about you know, what do I think about drugs, or what do I think about prostitution? Or what do I think about education or social security? I'm still apt to give you some pretty hardcore libertarian answers.

a lot of people. Maybe don't go you know, knocking down Chesterton's fence before you figure out what it was built for in the first place. And so I do like incrementalism, I do like slowness. I am anti revolution I do not like all of the revolutionary rhetoric you get in the Republican Party. One of the places where I really party company with with Bill Buckley, who was

one of my heroes. Would he would He would refer to himself as a radical conservative a lot of the time, And I don't think there's any such thing as a radical conservative. You can't be both. I agree, Yeah, I understand what he meant by it, but I don't think there's any such thing as a radical conservative. So if I'd been around, you know, for the Goldwater election, I'm sure I probably would have been a Goldwater guy. If I've been around active in politics in seventy nine eighty,

I'm sure I would have been a Reagan guy. But if I'm looking back on it from the point of view of where we are now and being a little older and a little less app to get carried away with things, I might feel a little guilty about some of that stuff. Do you also would Bean Billboards? If I could? I hate billboards. That's my least libertarian position. She could rid of billboards. Well, I live in a town, and.

to save you, or how many I mean, I do find billboards weirdly telling about what people are seeing. And I don't know. I think I get something from them when I'm on the interstate. But maybe I'm a weirdo.

starting a new party, the Democrats would disappear the next day. And I think it's that. I think the brand is that fragile, and I think it's that potentially, and if Donald Trump said he was renaming the Republican Party, you know, the Trump Mega Party, I'd say seventy percent of elected

Republicans would switch their party affiliations. Point being is, I don't think either party has that much of a Weirdly, even though they're sort of were stuck with him, this dupe duopoly and ballot access make them sort of feel necessary. Yet I feel like they could disappear tomorrow if a bunch of people held hands and left.

don't matter very much. They matter less than they did before Trump was elected in twenty sixteen.

But I think the Democrats could be celebrity dominated to if Taylor Swift decided to run for president. Yeah, the decline of the parties has been a huge loss. You know, from a small R Republican point of view, you want

these mediating institutions. You know. The death of newspapers and the death of political parties has made it very, very difficult to maintain the institutions of a country that is really founded in eighteenth and early nineteenth century political norms, when things were run by political parties and newspapers, you know, the two big national institutions that mattered most to keeping our politics sort of orderly, to keep the aquocracy out of the democracy.

the future thing kind of made almost literally true. Literally yeah, and like, as someone who was once the big trending topic on Twitter for twenty four hours, it's not that great, but some people really want that, and some people really care about that sort of thing.

it's okay because you've had an unusual birthday. Cher will trend here in a little bit. When she turns eighty or whatever, it still looks like she's fifty years old.

who floated Stephen Colbert for president, and there was a part of me that said, you know, Stephen Colbert versus Tucker Carlston, maybe the presidential campaign we deserve.

and he's kind of yesterday's news. Ten years ago, maybe he would have been a more formidable kind of character.

we brought him in and then literally you want to nominate him, that's right, TV and celebrity, and then we basically celebritied the presidency all the way through. Right, We were always looking for the next leading man, the next person in it was. It was a role almost we were looking for, and communication suddenly was a priority rather than the ability to do the job rather than having any other skill set, just simply having the ability to

communicate is everything. And I feel like now we've taken that even further. There used to be some skill set that matter. Oh, you need a governor, because at least a governor knows how to deal with legislatures. So that's what made Reagan work, and that's what made Clinton work, and and that was the case for w and then it's like, now all you need is a communicator now, and if you get your majority in Congress, you can jam through whatever you want to get through. You can

feel like you accomplished something until there's a revolt. The other party comes in undoes ninety percent of what you did and they try to do the same thing. I do fear that we are getting more efficient with our decision making when it comes for presidential politics, where ability is out the window. It is all going to be about who communicates and organizes the best. That's it.

across different times, different civilizations, different continents. I think that the desire to look toward one person, this sort of father figure, to be the personification and embodiment of your

nation and its ambitions and its moral values and its greatness and all the rest of that stuff is just kind of hardwired into people. It's cultures that don't have that are by far the exception rather than the rule. And uh, we have to fight our way out of

this primitivism every generation. You know, we're we're made of the same stuff that the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens were three hundred thousand years ago or maybe a million years ago, depending on which dating system you're going off of.

age of four, and they all started from scratch. They're all uncivilized little monsters when they come into the world, and you have to whip them into shape. And that's just how things are, and we're not going to grow out of it. We have to have institutions in a sort of national memory and a civic memory and a shared civic philosophy that elevates us out of that. You know, every successful country has an idea of itself and what

it's about and what it's there for. We're different for most and that ours are really spelled out in these documents because we're not you know, kind of ethno state. We're not you know, the American race. But even countries that don't have that kind of literary aspect to their national history and their national founding and their founding story. And also we're a very modern country. You know, France has been around for a long time and we haven't.

That idea has to be refreshed and renewed every generation. And if you lose it, just having the words on the page, hanging on a hall, on a document in Philadelphia is just not going to not going to do it for anybody. It's not going to work. I have been losing that because we're postliterate, and because we're rage addled and bored, and we're maybe too rich for our own good.

and good engineers and technicians and stuff. But there's a reason that like all the Internet companies essentially coming from the United States, and why we have things like venture capital that they don't really have in Europe. In the same kind of way I've often said, we have our murder problem for the same reason we have our venture capital industry, because we're just not people who process risk

the same way the rest of the world does. We're very aggressive and assertive and willing to roll the dice on things, and that will ultimately service well, I think, because capital wants to go to the places where the best use can be made of it, unless we really really set our minds about destroying our country and our institutions in a very programmatic kind of way, which you know, Germany, arguably the most civilized country in the world in the

nineteen thirties, did there is president for this, which China did to itself, and the cultural revolution in the Malears, which Russia did, although it was still a pretty backward country when it went through those things. Although we're very civilized and cultured backward country in many ways, so we we're our own best hope and our own worst enemy,

I suppose, is what I would say. And I'm still slightly more than fifty percent of the view that the better version of that wins out in the long run. But I do have a suitcase full of a shoe box full of Swiss Franks with a forty five sitting on top and on the shoe box lit it says plan B.