Trump’s ‘war of whim’ in Iran

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0:36Abigail Hauslohner: President Trump started a war with Iran last week.

0:43U.S.

0:44Abigail Hauslohner: and Israeli airstrikes have killed hundreds, including Iran's supreme leader. And several Americans have been killed as well. Right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks. But we have capability to go far longer than that. But now, President Trump says he'll only accept an unconditional surrender from Iran.

1:09Abigail Hauslohner: This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times, where we talk about all of the things happening in U.S. politics, finance, and the economy. I'm Lauren Fedor, in for Mark Filippino. And this week, we're asking, what comes next in Iran? Here with me to discuss is Edward Luce. He's the FT's U.S. national editor and co-author of the Swamp Notes newsletter. Hi, Ed.

1:32Edward Luce: Good to be with you, Lauren.

1:34Abigail Hauslohner: We've also got Abigail Hausluner, the FT's U.S. foreign affairs correspondent. Hi, Abby. Hi, Lauren. Abby, we'd watched this massive military buildup in the region for weeks, but early Saturday morning, the U.S. and Israeli militaries launched the massive attack across Iran, and I think it surprised a lot of people. Were you surprised? Well, as you just mentioned, the president was sort of forecasting this for weeks leading up to it. He started threatening Iran with attack in early January when Iran was in the midst of this very fierce regime crackdown on nationwide protests. And Trump said that he would come to the rescue of the protesters.

2:19Abigail Hauslohner: And then he started deploying U.S. military assets to the region, Navy ships, aircraft carriers, various missile batteries to different bases. we wrote a story about how he had sort of talked himself into a box in a way by making these threats, telling Iran that it was time for them to make a new nuclear deal. But then also he and his administration periodically throwing out other objectives that they wanted Iran to agree to, such as ceasing all support for proxy groups in the region, getting rid of their ballistic and short range missile stockpile. We got our first hint on Tuesday when I think a lot of us actually thought he might make an announcement of an offensive during his State of the Union address.

3:07Abigail Hauslohner: And then that didn't happen, obviously. Then on Friday, we started hearing from folks in the Middle East that Israel was warning some allies to sort of sit tight. But then it really happened. And I was surprised to wake up Saturday morning and see that it had all started overnight. And why now? In the past several days, really, since the lead-in to this attack and since it was launched, we have heard Trump and his cabinet members offer several different rationales for why it was necessary to do this now. You know, we've heard sort of regime change floated. We've heard, obviously, a lot of talk of Iran's nuclear program and the fact that they refused to make a deal, suggesting that this was punishment for not agreeing to certain terms that the administration wanted.

4:03Abigail Hauslohner: There wasn't a clear justification leading up to the attack. The administration was actively negotiating with Iran for some sort of new nuclear deal. And we've heard several different rationales offered in the days since. Ed, what do you make of all of that mixed messaging? What does that tell you about, you know, how prepared or unprepared the administration was here and what their aims are?

4:31Edward Luce: The aims are really impossible to pin down because they keep changing. We started off with a more extravagant regime change talk from Trump. We just want to degrade or obliterate their nuclear, ballistic and other naval capabilities, all military capabilities. Now Trump's back to saying that he'd like to appoint the next Iranian leader. It's really like trying to nail jello to the wall. What we do have, though, in terms of through lines since before this war, and probably explaining the timing of this war as well, is a consistent and clear Israeli objective. And that is to remove this regime and then let the chips fall where they may.

5:17Edward Luce: It could be civil war, could be Jeffersonian democracy, it could be a new strongman who agrees to do a surrender deal, whatever it might be. Israel is very clear. It wants to obliterate the Iranian regime. And Trump, well, the Trump administration is, I was going to say in two minds about this. It's in several sort of multiple personalities on this question. And I don't think, given the nature of the president, given his capricious, a very whimsical approach to governing. That's going to change anytime soon. But, you know, that could also mean that we suddenly wake up one morning and just as the war started overnight, Trump will announce, declare victory, mission accomplished, whatever the realities are on the ground, and say that it's over, at least from the American point of view.

6:07Edward Luce: And we did get that, if it's any guidance at all, last June with the so-called 12-day war, when Trump decided to, after 12 days of striking Iranian targets, decided that mission had been accomplished, that the Iranian nuclear program had been totally and completely obliterated, were his words, and then publicly called upon Israel to respect the ceasefire, which Israel did. So it's a wonderful sport to try and guess what Trump's ultimate objective is. But I suspect, and I'm sure Abiy agrees, those of us who've been observing Trump for a long time doubt that he knows what it is.

6:49Abigail Hauslohner: As someone who's observed the president for quite a long time, how do you square what we're seeing now with his, you know, political brand that was one of no more forever wars, less intervention overseas, America first? How do you begin to kind of thread that needle?

7:09Edward Luce: Well, it is. It's probably the most important political, domestic political question facing Trump right now, particularly if this war does persist and does feed into higher prices and more of a sense of economic squeeze amongst median Americans and Trump voters. And it is diametrically opposite to what he's always campaigned on, which is against forever wars, against endless wars, against nation building, policing the world. And that's how he conducted most of his first term and the basis on which he began and campaigned for his second term with J.D. Vance as the real sort of neo-isolationist, the one with the theory of the case, who'd sort of intellectualized it in MAGA circles.

7:52Edward Luce: And now we have its opposite, arguably the mother of all wars of choice, or what I've called it's a war of whim. And I guess the politics of this, you know, we're seeing a lot of fractiousness in MAGA circles. We're seeing, you know, people in Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, people like that very bitterly opposing this as not just a betrayal of America first principles, but as a potential catastrophe for Trump and for MAGA. So we've got that debate sort of intellectually within the sort of upper echelons of MAGA, and we've got a broad-based public skepticism about this war. It's very rare, if not unique, I think, in modern polling for an actual war to start where the president's not got at least 50 percent.

8:40Edward Luce: And he's got way, way below that in support of this war. The ultimate test, though, will come on how long will this war go on and will it cause economic pain? And if so, I suspect what you're seeing in the upper echelons of MAGA will spread much more broadly and be really quite disastrous politically for President Trump if it persists.

9:02Abigail Hauslohner: Abby, where does Congress fit in at all here? And where do, you know, Republican lawmakers specifically on Capitol Hill? Well, Congress has the authority to declare war. And under U.S. law, the president is supposed to ask Congress for authorization to go to war. So the president, you know, as of right now, like he did with the June war, is not calling this a war, except when he is, but is not calling this a war by the definition that you need to seek congressional authorization. And so the Democrats forced a vote on a bill trying to rein the president in and trying to block his ability to execute this war.

9:42Abigail Hauslohner: The vote failed. Only one Republican voted in favor of the measure, and that was Rand Paul from Kentucky, who is often a thorn in Trump's side and who has been throughout his career consistently pretty opposed to U.S. interventions abroad. Publicly, you know, a lot of the prominent voices in the Republican Party on the Hill are echoing the administration's talking points. They are very faithfully saying that they believe in the president, they believe in what he's doing, that they think it'll all work out, whatever that is. But privately, we are hearing skepticism and anger from some people within the president's party.

10:26And I think it'll be interesting to watch to see if that ends up

10:31Abigail Hauslohner: bubbling up. And we see more lawmakers deciding to break publicly with the president, which is going to spell trouble for him. I think from my point of view, you know, sometimes it's more interesting who doesn't speak rather than who does speak. And we wrote a story this week about J.D. Vance's kind of conspicuous silence in all of this and whether or not that tells you something about the discontent that is brewing, particularly with an eye to the future of the party. I think the common theme here, whether it's on Capitol Hill or in the kind of administration, is just that the longer this goes on, the harder it's going to be for these individuals to keep repeating the talking points, isn't it?

11:13Edward Luce: And the harder it's going to be to not use the word war. You know, there's sort of shades here of Putin's special military operation in Ukraine. There's a disapproval attached, radiating from the White House outwards to use of the word war. Pete Hegseth would not use that word in one of his briefings this week. And yet at the same time, the justification for what is a war is that it's been going on for 47 years. So there's a little bit of a tension in that narrative. And I think we're going to see a lot more of this tension, contradiction, confusion amongst administration principles, precisely because unlike all the previous wars of choice that everybody keeps citing, Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan, which were conducted after, whether you agreed with those wars or not, pretty conventional interagency vetting processes where debates were had, plans were made, options were presented, and disagreements were litigated.

12:21Edward Luce: The president, then being Bush or Obama, then making their decisions. This process is completely absent. I think we cannot overstate the degree to which this is unique in the history of American overseas wars, that the president is making it up as he goes along. And, you know, I don't think it serves any purpose to euphemise, to give indirect descriptions of what is a plain fact about the nature of this war, which is it's in Trump's head. Trump decided when it began, he'll decide when it finishes for reasons we will be told after the fact that were probably nothing to do with his decision making before the fact.

13:06Edward Luce: I mean, it's very unusual.

13:32Abigail Hauslohner: an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at schwab.com slash Washington Wise.

13:47Abigail Hauslohner: If we take a step outside of the U.S., how challenging do you think it is to be a U.S. ally in this moment? I'm wondering if you guys can reflect a little bit on how the Europeans have been navigating the last, you know, however many days, as well as perhaps some of the Gulf states, because it obviously puts them in challenging positions as well. Well, the Gulf states are in an extremely challenging position. I mean, Iran has been launching, you know, pretty continuous barrages of missiles and drones at all of the U.S., you know, Arab allies, the United Arab Emirates has taken the most hits so far, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, especially, and so on.

14:37Abigail Hauslohner: And they are feeling it. And for the Gulf states, which have been really the most stable areas of the Middle East for a while, relatively speaking, and, you know, especially for the Emirates and Qatar that rely on tourism and trade their countries as places people want to come to do business, they're really feeling the pain from this. There's a lot of stress about their arsenal of interceptors to shoot down these missiles. And so if this goes on a lot longer, they're feeling the economic hit the most, and they're seeing real damage in their countries. And you can see this frustration starting to build.

15:20Abigail Hauslohner: And I don't know where that goes. I'll leave Europe dead.

15:24Edward Luce: Well, so look at the backdrop to this war. Europeans were already feeling punch drunk over the Greenland episode and just the general irascibility now coming from the White House towards America's European NATO allies. So the situation was already as bad as any of us could remember it being, even by the standards of Trump's first term and his first year of the second term. And then we get this war on which none of them were consulted. Some, such as Britain and Spain, were requested to provide their air bases for American bombers and jets to use and denied them. But just collectively, there is a sense that this is a war on which Europe was not consulted, where it's much nearer to the neighbourhood of the war and could get a lot more of the blowback, not as much as the Gulf states are getting, but certainly in terms of any refugees that result from this, in terms of the impact immediately on gas prices, which have got up considerably more dramatically because of the nature of the gas market, I'm talking about liquefied natural gas, than oil prices have.

16:35Edward Luce: And then they've still got 15 % tariffs coming from Trump. So the idea that Europe should just play along, I mean, there's a deep amount of resentment over this. Nevertheless, you've seen the UK, which is sort of the swing. It's in the middle here between Pedro Sanchez in Spain, who's standing up to Trump and refusing to declare this war as anything other than illegal. And on the other side, Friedrich Merz, Germany's chancellor, who's actually swung behind Trump after his visit this week. Starmer has sort of carved a middle ground which expresses the awkwardness of the fact that Europe's closest ally and the world's superpower is doing something none of them like.

17:17Edward Luce: His Solomonic compromise was not to permit Diego Garcia and other RAF bases for use for offensive actions on Iran, but that they could be used by American planes for defensive actions. I should just mention one other thing, the Iraqi Kurds, which is, you know, one of the tools that Trump has announced he'd like to use to destabilize Iran and the regime. The Iraqi Kurds, in alliance with their Iranian Kurdish cousins, Trump having called the leaders of both the semi-autonomous Kurdish regions in Iraq, that they have felt consistently betrayed by the West. for the last time in Trump's first term, where he pulled support from the Syrian Kurds, leading to the resignation of Jim Mattis, the then U.S.

18:09Edward Luce: Secretary of Defense. In the first Gulf War, the Peshmerga were called to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then abandoned. Henry Kissinger famously said about the Iraqi Kurds that we should not confuse covert action with missionary work. I think they have internalized this lesson that they do not want to be a tool of other powers who might then turn around and abandon them. And this appears to be one of the cards that Trump is thinking of playing right now. And this could be a very important factor.

18:44Abigail Hauslohner: At the end of the day, do you think that President Trump is going to achieve what he wanted to achieve here? Or do you think that this is ultimately going to be a massive miscalculation on the part of the president? I think we really don't know because we don't know, as Ed said, fully what he wants. I mean, we know, as he said this, that he wants something like he did in Venezuela. To him, successful U.S. military operation in which special forces went in and captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro. And I've heard people around him say this all the time. He likes quick. He likes quick wins.

19:26Abigail Hauslohner: He likes one and done. He is not interested in long, drawn-out military engagements. And so I think that we will see him getting frustrated the longer this goes on. And as the pressure, political pressure on him mounts as well. So I don't know if he will get what he wants out of this, specifically if, I mean, I think already this has obviously gone far worse than Venezuela. But I think, you know, if his goal is ultimately to topple the regime, I don't know that he will achieve that. If his goal is to ultimately wipe out Iran's ability to threaten other states in the region or U.S. assets with terrorism, I don't know that he'll achieve that either.

20:16Abigail Hauslohner: Even if these air raids wipe out the regime, you know, what we might see after that is a failed state. And in anarchy, we know breeds all sorts of nefarious actors, spillover potential galore. So I don't know that in the long term that he will get what he wants. And we still don't know exactly what he wants. I want to thank our guests, Edward Luce. He's the FT's U.S. national editor and co-author of the Swamp Notes newsletter. Thanks, Ed.

20:49Edward Luce: Many thanks.

20:50Abigail Hauslohner: And Abigail Hauslauner, the FT's U.S. foreign affairs correspondent. Thanks, Abby. Thanks, Lauren.

21:04Abigail Hauslohner: This was Swamp Notes, the U.S. politics show from the FT. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we have a link to that in the show notes. Our show was produced by Henry Larson. It was mixed by Sam Jovinko. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I'm Lauren Fedor, in for Mark Filipino. Our executive producer is Topher Forges, and the FT's global head of audio is Cheryl Bromley. Original music by Hannes Brown. Check back next week for more U.S. political analysis from the Financial Times.

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22:39Abigail Hauslohner: Because at Schwab, you can invest your way. No matter your goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place. Visit schwab.com to learn more.