Trump’s Head-on-a-Pike Foreign Policy

21:04Ben Rhodes:They will find their way to Europe through Turkey. And so I don't think there's been any real planning for this. And that is, to me, like the worst case scenario of a civil war and even fracturing of the Iranian sovereign territory. You'd have huge refugee outflows.

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22:52Ezra Klein:We have not been planning for this. Israel has been planning for some version of this for a very long time. They're a full partner in this operation, which is distinctive about it. What do they want?

23:04Ben Rhodes:I think, first and foremost, they want to smash anybody who poses a perceived threat to them. And they've obviously been principally focused on this axis of resistance, right? So Hamas, Hezbollah, other Iranian proxy groups, and then ultimately the Iranian regime itself. weakening that regime is, in their view, kind of obviously good for their security posture. They're worried about ballistic missiles, they're worried about the nuclear program. If I was going to be cynical, and I know this is a view of some increasingly in the region, it's that Israel's okay with chaos. That if there's an implosion in Iran and, you know, humanitarian disaster there and kind of chaos, that actually advantages their security situation in a way, because that kind of Iran can't pose a threat to them.

23:53Ben Rhodes:And that if you look at Lebanon and Syria, where Israel's also been very active militarily, they're just kind of pushing out not just kind of the perimeter, you know, they're literally occupying parts of southern Syria now. They want this kind of buffer zone in southern Lebanon. And I think that the fears in the region is that they are just kind of methodically, yes, eliminating threats, but also creating a lot of chaos and instability as almost a strategy of giving themselves freedom of action, whether that involves taking the West Bank, whether that involves extending out kind of buffer zones into Syria and Lebanon.

24:33Ben Rhodes:And, you know, that seems more plausible to me than they have some plan to, you know, support the installation of Reza Pahlavi as the transitional leader of Iran.

24:42Ezra Klein:I mean, what they seem to me to have had a plan for, and I think you have to give Some credit to Netanyahu for one of the most remarkable coups of his career was involving Donald Trump in this. Yeah, yeah. And Netanyahu has very, very effectively pulled Trump in by degrees, such that we were supposed to have a very limited bombing campaign on Iran. We were told after that that their nuclear program was obliterated. In Trump's video announcing this operation, he both said Iran was posing an imminent threat and that their nuclear program had been obliterated, which I found a little bit strange. but Netanyahu's ability to get Trump to do what no other U.S.

25:21Ezra Klein:president has been willing to do is striking and I think that was on some level like the real plan here Israel had weakened Iran it had shown Iran to be weaker than people thought it was and I think the push was made to Trump that you have this narrow window of opportunity to do what no other president has done and at least in the way it was presented to him, permanently solve the problem and permanently avenge previous injuries and insults to America.

25:53Ben Rhodes:I think you are exactly right. I think it's worth pointing out. I mean, we were both watching at the time. I mean, this started coming up at the end of the Bush administration in 2007, 2008, when there was a push for Bush to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. Netanyahu has wanted to do this since I've been in politics, you know, very clearly. wanted the U.S., not Israel alone, the U.S. to take out the Iranian regime. And every president has resisted this except Trump. You know, we should say, like, obviously, there's people in the United States, the Lindsey Grahams of the world who want to do this as well.

26:29Ben Rhodes:So it's not just Israel, but it's a pretty small set of constituencies. You know, the public is broadly against this. And you're right, they brought him in by degrees. And we can even go back to the first Trump term, right, where he left the Iranian nuclear deal. That was not something that his advisors were telling him to do. Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, was against it at the time. You know, not even a huge fan of the Iran nuclear deal because he saw if you remove yourself from that deal, you're kind of on a slow motion movement towards this. In a way, it's funny, Trump likes to say 12-day war, and it's been one war, you know, since he pulled out of that nuclear agreement.

27:07Ben Rhodes:It's been like a slow motion series of events that led in this direction. It begins with economic war, begins with sanctions. Maximum pressure. Yeah, exactly. So you pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, you go to maximum pressure sanctions, you assassinate the Qasem Soleimani. Those are all things that happened in Trump's first term. Couldn't get him all the way to bombing Iran itself. Biden clearly, and I've been very critical, as you know, of Biden's Middle East policy on Gaza. He was clearly not keen to go all in with Iran on a regional war. You know, he was supportive of going after the Iranian proxy groups, not this.

27:37Ben Rhodes:Then Trump comes back and they do the nuclear strike. But I think you're right. I think that the Israelis saw the Venezuela operation. He's getting more comfortable with this and he's getting comfortable taking it to regime change. And they see, and this is where the continued use of military force without any congressional authorization is connected to this. Because it's like, okay, there's a president in Donald Trump who is willing to just bomb countries and take huge risks absent any congressional debate or discussion. I mean, we dealt with this in Obama years. You must inhabit this scenario of a war.

28:14Ben Rhodes:If Donald Trump had tried to prepare the American people for this, they would have said no. If he had gone out and given a series of speeches, now's the time we must remove the Iranian regime, it wouldn't have worked. And so I think you're right. This kind of vainglorious, I'm Donald Trump, I will slay all the dragons. You know, we've had these grievances with Maduro, with Khamenei, with the Cuban regime. I'm going to remove all of them. You know, I think that there's a vanity to that that Israel and some of the hawks in this country saw. And they went to him knowing that he was reticent to kind of break from his base this much and do this.

28:48Ben Rhodes:But they appealed to something bigger than his short term political instincts, which is this will make you an historic figure. And I think Bibi Netanyahu has wanted to get an American president to do this since, you know, at least when I was in government, and he has.

29:03Ezra Klein:So one thing that I think is important in that story you just laid out is also there's been a learning about Iran that has been successive. So America pulled out of the nuclear deal, added the maximum pressure sanctions. Iran wasn't able to do very much about that. There was the assassination of Soleimani. There was no significant reprisal for that. You saw Israel decapitate Hezbollah. You saw the then bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites. And I do think something that has been significant here is a growing sense that Iran was not as fearsome as was believed and did not have the capacity to strike back as had been believed, but that you could do this at low cost, which was not what people thought.

29:51Ezra Klein:before.

29:52Ben Rhodes:This drives me a little crazy because I think it's true. But let's just take Netanyahu. The argument was always that they're 10 feet tall, that, you know, they're absolute maniacs who are on the precipice of a nuclear weapon and they've built this massive axis that is coming for us. And I never believed that. I never believed that Iran was as all powerful. And I certainly never believed that they had offensive, you know, that they were going to launch some preemptive war against Israel. They are interested in regime survival. That was always my assessment. And that even some of the proxy groups were meant, the Iranian doctrine was keep this out of Iran, keep the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon.

30:33Ben Rhodes:So part of what used to drive me crazy about the hawkish prescriptions on Iran from inside Washington and Israel is that either argument led to war. If Iran is really powerful, we must take them out because they must be stopped because they're on the precipice of doing something or they're weak so we can take them out. And look, I do think it bears saying, first of all, that we should have a mindset that war is bad and should be avoided. That should be a legal and values proposition that there are preferable outcomes to war itself. The other problem I have with this, Ezra, is there's an incredible short-term thinking about this because you're also sending the message that, okay, Iran was in a nuclear deal with the United States.

31:21Ben Rhodes:They were complying with that nuclear deal and they then got bombed. Whatever Iranian regime emerges from this, I think, is very likely to want nuclear weapons. So this doesn't happen. If you're sitting in Riyadh or even Dubai and Abu Dhabi right now, You're thinking, well, the Americans are my security guarantor, and look at what we just got out of that security guarantee. Like, we got a war that they launched pretty much—I don't buy that the Saudis were pushing this, by the way. I saw them deny that report, and I think they were very reticent about this. Why wouldn't they get nuclear weapons now?

31:59Ben Rhodes:It's like, well, we can't, you know, at the end of the day, the Americans are kind of willing to play with our security, you know, or deprioritize it as against Israel's security. Other would-be proliferators are going to think, you know, look at North Korea versus Iran. And so there's these second order effects, right? And one of them is nuclear proliferation, where the consequences might not be manifest next year. But I don't know, five years from now, I don't think that this kind of action will have made us safer. I'd much rather, you know, if you actually believe in nuclear nonproliferation, it's much better to have that be something you fortify diplomatically than you just remove a regime because it's weak.

32:39Ezra Klein:I want to pick up on what you just said about the Saudis. So there was a Washington Post report that cited at least four sources that had knowledge of the conversations and negotiations. What it basically said was that in public, Saudi Arabia has been against this, has denied its use of their bases. In private, Mohammed bin Salman and top people in the Saudi government have been privately pushing Trump to act. This is something that, you know, if you've been around these issues for a while, you've heard a lot about. The Israelis talk all the time about how nobody wants the Iranian government gone like Saudi Arabia.

33:13Ezra Klein:So you don't buy that that is what was happening.

33:15Ben Rhodes:I'm skeptical of it because I was hearing different things. You know, I certainly, you saw Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt, along with Oman, obviously, trying to avert this outcome. The Egypt thing was interesting to me because the idea that Egypt would take that position without Saudi Arabia, as a chief sponsor, supporting them in that makes me question it. You also see in Saudi foreign policy, you saw a rapprochement with Iran in the last few years. I think Mohammed bin Salman, who I've been hugely critical of, so this is, anybody who's listened to me over the years, I have no love for that government.

33:50Ben Rhodes:But I think he's principally interested in stability. Now, what I think is quite possible is they were reticent of this. they don't like instability of this scale in their region. They don't like the potential disruptions, obviously, to energy infrastructure. But when they see an inevitability to it, they may have kind of come around and been like, okay, we'll talk to you guys about this. I think the most likely scenario is that they're a bit ambivalent. Because again, their security paradigm is stability, stability, stability. And this doesn't feel a lot like stability. I'm not saying this is the biggest issue in this moment,

34:26Ezra Klein:But the centrality of Israel in the operation has raised some concerns for me about what this is going to mean for anti-Semitism. You see the amount of talk on the MAGA right, but elsewhere as well, that Israel's leverage over Donald Trump or that this is all just some kind of Israeli plot. I wonder a bit about the, there are many ways which Netanyahu looks to me to be gambling for short-term position over the long-term sustainability of both Israel's political position in America, but also just the generalized view of the world at a time of very, very sharply rising anti-Semitism about what is going on here.

35:11Ezra Klein:I don't know how it nets out or what it ends up meaning, but it certainly has me nervous.

35:17Ben Rhodes:It has me nervous too. And there's two aspects to that. One is in the region and one is here. I'd just say briefly in the region, like I was critical of the Abraham Accords at the time and I was a bit of an outlier to say the least about that. Because, you know, Donald Trump framed this as a big peace deal when in fact it didn't resolve any of the conflicts in the region. And look at what's happened since. It's been much more violent. And if you talk to people in the region, they see that, oh, wait a second, this has all been about Israeli hegemony in this region. And that is making the Arab states, who were prepared certainly to live with Israel, I didn't think Saudi Arabia had any threat to pose to Israel.

35:55Ben Rhodes:But they're increasingly concerned about a dynamic where there's this degree of freedom of action for Israel. So what does that look like? How does that evolve in the long term in the region? I think here, you're right. I really worry about this because, look, this is not me saying Israel pushed Donald Trump to do this. Bibi Naniya went out, I think, yesterday and said, I wanted this to happen for 40 years. And finally, Trump did it, you know, and he's doing it with us, too. But the U.S. used to be very careful not to do joint military operations with Israel, in part for this reason. This is a very big break.

36:28Ben Rhodes:This is a huge—I mean, people need to think about this. Like, it was, you know, just to do joint exercises, you know, was something people calibrated carefully. because we didn't want to make it look like that Israel and the United States are one in the same for reasons that go in both directions. But here's the thing is Americans are looking at this and they're seeing that we are in a war that seems like it's something Israel wanted us to do. Seems like the benefits accrue mostly to Israel. You know, the ballistic missile program does not pose a threat to the United States. There is no ICBM from Iran that can reach the United States.

37:03Ben Rhodes:So a lot of what we're doing is removing threats to Israel. if it goes poorly, who is going to get blamed? You know, I think that some of that anger will go in the direction of Israel. And I think it's important for us to talk about this because when there's not debate and discussion about it, it migrates to the darker corners, right? And you're seeing that certainly in MAGA.

37:25Ezra Klein:Well, I think one reason this has fed conspiracies is it has felt to many people like such a almost inexplicable break from how Trump sold himself. Yeah. So, I mean, you have, you know, back in 2023, Trump saying, these globalists want to squander all of America's strength, blood, and treasure, chasing monsters and fandoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they're creating here at home. Very on point. J.D. Vance writes a Wall Street Journal op-ed that year titled, Trump's Best Foreign Policy, Not Starting Any Wars. Tulsi Gabbard, of course, sells no war with Iran t-shirts. Now you have Trump kind of start more as certainly conflicts, engagements, left and right.

38:10Ezra Klein:According to Axios, Trump has now authorized more military strikes in 2025 alone than Biden did in all four years. So I think for a lot of people, there has been this, how do you reconcile both Trump and the movement that was around him, right? all the people advising him with what we're seeing now. I got asked over the weekend by somebody, you know, what was a faction inside the White House that wanted this? And I found it actually hard to answer that question. We have not seen a lot of reporting saying Marco Rubio wanted this to happen. You know, J.D. Vance appears to have not. Instead, we're talking about Israel and Lindsey Graham, who's not that influential anymore.

38:50Ezra Klein:Mohammed bin Salman, maybe. I think a lot of people have been very confused with how to explain Trump himself taking this risk.

38:59Ben Rhodes:I had the same mental exercise, Ezra. And let's just go through it. If you look at all these polls, it's wildly politically unpopular. And by the way, that continues to hold even though the Supreme Leader got killed. And the Supreme Leader being killed will be the high watermark of this operation. There's not another person that you can kill that Trump can say is a head on a pike, right? Then if you look at the people that want to inherit MAGA, right? who are looking ahead at the Republican Party. J.D. Vance seems to want to have very little to do with this. Tucker Carlson is railing against this.

39:33Ben Rhodes:You know, the C. Vannons of the world, they're not enthusiastic about this. The Republican Party is not going in this direction. So this is not something that Trump is doing because it's going to be wildly popular.

39:43Ezra Klein:Military didn't want it, Joint Chiefs of Staff.

39:45Ben Rhodes:Joint Chiefs of Staff was clearly putting out, leaking out, you know, that they didn't want to do this. Marco Rubio is much more focused on this hemisphere. You know, Venezuela and Cuba, which they're trying to, you know, strangle through maximum pressure. The Democratic Party is not for this, and particularly the people anticipating the future of the Democratic Party. Who is for this? And it's a very small set of constituents. It is basically Israel. And then it is kind of hardline, longstanding hawks in Congress or in kind of the national security establishment. By the way, the people that Trump said he didn't like are for this.

40:22Ben Rhodes:John Bolton, who he's trying to persecute, is out there defending it. So it is hard to look at this and not—

40:30Ezra Klein:Also, wasn't part of the reason he talked about getting rid of John Bolton, that he's like, John Bolton always wanted me to attack Iran?

40:36Ben Rhodes:Iran, right? And so it is hard to not conclude that Bibi Nanyahu and Israel's kind of push for this was determinative in some way. because again like the the only appeal to trump that made any sense is kind of the one you made earlier where you become a historic figure you know you and finally i mean i do think there's a part of him that's just like these governments have been a pain in the ass for decades right cuba since the 59 revolution iran since the 79 revolution you know venezuela since the chavista revolution i'm going to be the one that finally sells all these scores like there's some of that that is separate from Israel.

41:13Ben Rhodes:But it is hard to not conclude that if Israel wasn't, put it this way, Israel, take the counterfactual, the Israeli government was not pushing for this, would it have happened?

41:24Ezra Klein:I want to talk about the ways in which this might not remain limited in the way Donald Trump has either promised a country or I think promised himself. So I see this as following from the 12-day bombing some months ago. It turned out that didn't do enough. and when it was clear that Iran was racing forward with ballistic missiles, reconstituting a nuclear program that probably was not obliterated in the way Donald Trump had initially said it was. And so we were now involved and Iran was defying him. It wasn't just that it was obliterated. That obliteration was a kind of command from him to them that it was gone.

42:05Ezra Klein:They weren't giving up enough at the negotiating table. and also i think this was meaningful to to trump on some level was now slaughtering its own people you know he didn't like that either i want to give him credit for some humanitarian impulse potentially here so now we're involved even more so now we have kinetically destroyed much of the regime and and its power but a lot could spin out of control here yeah so So I am very skeptical that the limit Trump seems to think he has put on this is stable. And I'm curious, as somebody with more experience here than I have, what you think of it.

42:48Ben Rhodes:I think you're right. And the Israelis have this, it's not a doctrine, but essentially this terminology, it's called mowing the lawn. Have you heard this? Which is, and again, I hate even using phrases like this when it comes to war and human beings. But essentially, the mowing the lawn strategy is that if there's a place that poses a threat, you occasionally just kind of go in and cut the grass. You bomb the threat periodically. And obviously, like Lebanon would be a perfect case of where the Israelis pursued that strategy. Well, they always said this about Hamas. How did that ultimately work out?

43:22Ezra Klein:Exactly.

43:23Ben Rhodes:And there is a risk. And this is why I say we have been at war with Iran. Like the idea that there was something called the 12-day war and now there's a different war. No, no. Like that's not how these things work. Like once you bomb a country, you're bringing this forever war paradigm to it. And so I think it is quite possible that in the same way that the 12-day war was at the end of the story, if Trump stops bombing Iran in a week, two weeks, three weeks, that we're back doing that in a few months because something happened that we don't like. and then you start to get massacres in the streets of Iran or you start to get refugee outflows or you start to continue to see kind of waves of random attacks at the Gulf, are we really going to do nothing?

44:03Ben Rhodes:But then if we're getting back and back in, you know, then we're, you know, getting pulled into quicksand. We are implicated, you know, we are involved. I mean, the common thread to this conversation, Ezra, is like we need to just get this short-term thinking that there's such a thing as 12-day wars or that you solve a problem when you kill the leader. Like that's not how any of this goes.

44:50Ezra Klein:I think it is genuinely striking and a break with certainly the recent past, how little public deliberation there is over quite major American foreign policy actions. and you know the bush administration did lie its way into war with iraq but it did also spend a long time trying to persuade the country that war with iraq was worth doing and we debated how much of the american military it would take what does it mean to be entering into these kinds of commitments these kinds of projects these kinds of risks without really any public debate any significant public or congressional deliberation of what might happen.

45:40Ezra Klein:You don't have a bunch of members of the military repeatedly going to Congress and going through scenarios. I don't want to place everything here on process being poor, but there's a reason that the public and Congress are consulted because if it ends up requiring more engagement, then you actually need that support.

45:59Ben Rhodes:No, I think process is related to outcome. And if you can't make a case to the American people to sway public opinion in the direction of a war or make a case to Congress, I mean, the single most important thing you could do to keep America out of more wars is actually require Congress to take a vote because they're not going to vote for it, given the word public opinion is on this. And so I think it's incredibly corrosive to democracy to have this kind of loop of conflict that is increasingly sidelining Congress and public opinion entirely. I also think there's something even more dangerous, Ezra, which is we keep, you know, I know a lot of people are thinking, when are we going to know how bad it's going to get with Trump?

46:41Ben Rhodes:Like, what if the things that you fear are already happening? Like we already have a president who clearly came back into office wanting the military to be more directly responsive to him than it was in the first term when the military leadership and even some of the Pentagon leadership stood up to him more and more. We have seen him, you know, purge the top of the military general officers. We have seen him address the general officers and say, hey, American cities might be military training grounds. Now we've seen him, within a matter of weeks, undertake multiple military—I'll just give you a few.

47:21Ben Rhodes:We bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. We were blowing up boats in the Caribbean on totally false pretenses that it had something to do with, like, drug trafficking in the United States and potentially committed war crimes. We abducted the leader of Venezuela. We now just killed the Supreme Leader of Iran and are trying to topple that regime, or maybe we're not. These are all things that have happened within three months, right? And at the same time, we see the Department of War telling Anthropic, an AI company, that you will be banned from any business of the government if the Pentagon can't ignore your terms of service against mass surveillance of Americans.

48:05Ben Rhodes:And where I'm going with this is the ultimate guardrail in democracy is supposed to be the separation between the president and kind of the military as an institution. and if the military of an institution can directly serve the interests of Donald Trump with no public debate about what it's doing, no congressional votes on what it's doing, how many more countries are going to bomb and what is that military going to end up doing in the United States, you know, if he invokes the Insurrection Act? And that's not to impugn the military, that's to impugn where Trump is taking this. So I think the darker scenarios, it's not just process nerds, like we need to have authorizations for the use of military force and we need briefings to Congress.

48:41Ben Rhodes:It's, no, like, is the military an institution that just completely serves the whims of the president? Or is it an institution that is apolitical, that is equally responsive to Congress and the president? Because those questions are going to matter a lot, how the next two and three quarters of years of the Trump administration.

49:01Ezra Klein:Although I think it's important to say, it's not that Congress is being defied. Congress has abdicated. Yes, that's, yes, yes. Mike Johnson is not out there complaining. meaning he is supporting this. I mean, there are many ways in which Trump is a disruptive break with the past, but the escalation of not going to Congress for quite dangerous operations. I mean, that was present in the Obama era. I mean, this has been growing for a very long time.

49:26Ben Rhodes:The thing that Obama probably gets the most grief for in his foreign policy was the Syria red line incident. But what was interesting about that, Ezra, is you have this chemical weapons attack. Can you describe what that is for? So we have this, Obama has said it'd be a red line if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons. Then there's a massive chemical weapons use. And we were preparing to bomb Syria. We were. I mean, I was in meetings. I thought we were going to bomb Syria and, you know, going through strike packages, that kind of stuff. And then, you know, Obama makes this decision essentially to say, I'm going to put this to vote in Congress.

49:59Ben Rhodes:I'm not going to go to war with Syria unless Congress votes authorize it. And almost immediately, the support for that begins to evaporate in Congress. Even people like Marco Rubio, who were hawks, would not vote to authorize use of military force in Syria. And Obama's point was, if Congress, the representatives of the people, as envisioned under our constitutional system, don't want to get us into another war with Syria and be responsible for the consequences of whatever happens, then we shouldn't do it. That's how our system is designed. Now, a lot of people pointed out that we should have done more to stop Assad.

50:33Ben Rhodes:And that's, you know, I agree. I'm sympathetic to all those arguments. But I'm also sympathetic to Obama's argument, which is if people don't want the war, we don't have to fight it. And part of what Trump was tapping into in his campaigns was the gap between elites, particularly national security elites, and public opinion. And it is a crazy gap, Ezra. I've lived at the precipice of it. Like the conversations and the strategies in both parties of national security elites versus what the American people want their government to be focused on is a deeply unhealthy gap. And all Trump has done is, OK, that establishment is no longer there.

51:12Ben Rhodes:It's just him. It's like all of American exceptionalism, all of the apparatus of American power, this, you know, I called it the blob, whatever you want to call it. This edifice is now just in one man's head and one man's hands. And that's, instead of solving the problem he said he was running to fix, he's made it worse because it's just up to Donald Trump now.

51:32Ezra Klein:This gets to the question of whether international law still exists in any meaningful way. It does not. What does that mean?

51:43Ben Rhodes:It means that it applies in no way to the United States of America, at least. We are completely ignoring it. There is no, like, I mean, here's how it doesn't exist. In the past, when the United States would do things, let's just say, stretch the boundaries of international law, you would still show up and make a case. You know, here's why this was an imminent threat or here, you know, they don't even bother. And if you look at even because the act of going to war violates international law, if you cannot demonstrate that there was an imminent threat, that you're acting in some form of self-defense or that you have to get UN sanctioned, you know, UN Security Council approval.

52:16Ben Rhodes:Absent those things, you're violating international law. But even in the conduct of war, you know, the United States is currently sanctioning the International Criminal Court, which is the kind of preeminent body that is enforcing the laws of war. What message does that send, you know, about the conduct of war? Because we're doing that because they tried to indict Bibi Netanyahu for war crimes. But if you're basically saying that none of the laws apply to us, at a certain point, Russia and China say, well, then they don't apply to us either. And if international law on the most important matters, war and peace and the conduct of war, whether to go to war and how you fight a war, if those laws don't apply to any of the big powers, how do they apply to anybody?

53:03Ezra Klein:I've wondered how much the reaction from some of our allies who you might have thought of as more committed to international law has actually reflected a collective recognition that it is gone. So Mark Carney in Canada was very, very supportive of Trump strikes. You know, real support from Australia. Germany was pretty foursquare behind us. You know, I think this reflects some of their feelings about the Iranian regime. But I have been struck by the complete absence of outcry from countries that I think, you know, part of their power has to become from commitment to these institutions that maintain a kind of collective or multilateral approach to these questions.

53:47Ezra Klein:What have you made of that?

53:48Ben Rhodes:I've been struck by it, too. I think part of what Trump counts on is if the people I'm taking out don't have a lot of friends, I have more room, right? If it's Maduro, if it's the Iranian regime. I'd say I'm very disappointed in it, though. Mark Carney, I was one of many people that thought his speech at Davos was important and interesting and kind of reflective of what's happening. And also kind of pointed a path to some emergence of something on the other end of this. That essentially if the middle powers, the kind of more responsible countries in the world that still follow at least some international laws and want some norms around conflict and other things.

54:24Ben Rhodes:if they began to kind of stitch together, maybe that could be a place that the United States could kind of rejoin on the back end of Trump. If Mark Carney is going to carve this out, though, if he's essentially going to say, we need rules on trade, but if you bomb Iran, go for it, I think it hugely undermines Mark Carney's own argument. It just makes it seem cynical. It makes it seem like all he's really concerned about is trade, you know, or all I'm concerned about is Greenland because it's European territory, right? And you can attest that I've taken a lot of grief for this over the years. But I just believe that if we think that international law and norms are important, they really have to apply universally.

55:09Ben Rhodes:Like we can't just say that like, well, they don't apply to Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela because we don't like them, you know? The United States built this system after World War II because we recognize that if you don't constrain everybody, you are going to have a repeat of what happened in World War I and World War II. You start to create carve-outs, people start to move into those carve-outs, and there's cycles of conflict that lead ultimately to a world war. I think people need to inhabit the reality that we're moving into more than they are. There are no constraints from international law anymore.

55:44Ben Rhodes:There is a rampant trend of nationalism in the world. There are leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Bibi Nanyahu in Israel, Narendra Modi in India, Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. These are nationalists. Nationalism, absent international law, always leads to more war. And those wars beget more wars.

56:07Ezra Klein:Let me strongman the other side of the case here, which is international law. The international law that allowed Iran to slaughter its own people, to repress them, to fund terrorist proxies, you know, all throughout the region. You're saying that international law was, should have restrained Israel and America against a country that had for decades now made one of its rallying slogans, death to Israel and death to America, and in fact was funding players who wanted to do just that. That one of the critiques you'll hear from the critics here of international law is that international law has been used as a shield by rogue regimes, regimes that do not follow its dictates in all manner of ways, but then hide behind it when they face the consequences that they are bringing down upon themselves.

57:01Ben Rhodes:I guess I'd say first and foremost, Iran has paid consequences. We worked on the Iran nuclear deal for seven years. And the reason I say seven years is that for several years at the beginning of the Obama administration, we built a multilateral sanctions framework around Iran based on the fact that they were violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, international law. So we didn't say, oh, it's fine. You can violate the international law. We said, no, we got UN Security Council resolutions that became the basis of a maximum pressure campaign in the Obama administration. But it was meant to leverage a change of behavior from the Iranians.

57:36Ben Rhodes:You have to kind of come into compliance with international law via nuclear deal in which you are committing to never build a nuclear weapon. You are submitting to intense monitoring and verification of your nuclear program. By the way, like we still had other sanctions on them over their support for proxies. I don't like what goes on inside a lot of countries in the world. There's something peculiar that we are normalizing the idea that that is sufficient basis to go to war in those countries. We don't like it when Vladimir Putin does it. When Vladimir Putin says, hey, the elected president of Ukraine was ousted in a protest movement in 2014, in part by people that were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, I don't agree with that narrative.

58:26Ben Rhodes:But how can we say that Vladimir Putin does not have the right to invade that country? But if we see things that we don't like inside of other countries, We have the right to do that. And I think what people see is that if you truly believe in human rights, then you have to apply that normative framework across the board. And a lot of the very same people that are suddenly human rights advocates when it comes to what's happening inside of Iran have nothing to say about what's happening in the West Bank right now, had nothing to say when Jamal Khashoggi was chopped up in the Saudi consulate inside of Turkey.

59:03Ben Rhodes:have nothing to say about the fact that el-Sisi, the president of Egypt, has 60 ,000 people who are political prisoners suffering horrific treatment. So you either have to be universal and consistent, or I have a really hard time listening to your arguments. I've seen a lot of Democrats, and to some degree I think the international response too,

59:23Ezra Klein:than somewhat paralyzed between their legitimate loathing of the Iranian government and their dislike, distaste for the process of violation of international law, the absence of public deliberation or congressional approval. But I think it has created a kind of muddle in their response, right? Are they saying this should have been done? It's a good thing that it happened, but they don't like that it happened. Are they saying that the only problem with it was poor process? If Trump had gone to Congress, maybe they would have given him the authority to do it. How do you think Democrats should respond to this?

1:00:03Ezra Klein:Because right now I've seen many of the leadership really focusing not on was this a right or wrong thing to do, but was the process that led to it the right or wrong process?

1:00:14Ben Rhodes:Yeah, they're saying all the things that you said. And I have a huge problem with this because ultimately people are not that interested. in the process. If someone who doesn't follow this super closely hears a Democratic leader like Chuck Schumer saying, coming out of a briefing about the potential war in Iran that feels imminent, and he says they have to make their case more or something. What does that sound like? It sounds like a dodge. What do you actually believe as a political party? I was talking to a friend of mine from the—we do this thing in our Obama group text, Ezra, which wouldn't surprise you, which is, imagine if, right?

1:00:48Ben Rhodes:So imagine if President Obama, announced a war on Iran from a vacation property in the middle of the night on a social media post, made casual remarks about the fact that Americans are going to die. It is what it is. And then within like two days, you're already seeing American casualties, American planes falling out of the sky, huge global economic disruptions. The Republican Party would have been absolutely unified. And part of the reason Obama had so little room for maneuver is that they as a political party were able to make an argument against whatever the thing that Obama was doing. The Democratic Party doesn't understand that it's not enough to just say, we want a process vote or a procedural vote.

1:01:29Ben Rhodes:We're going to support the Ro Khanna, Thomas Massey resolution that most Americans have no idea what that is, right? I mean, I support it, but it's not going to do anything. And I think most Americans don't know that it's a vote on whether or not Congress has to authorize something that has already happened, it just makes you look, you know, and again, I'm totally supportive of that effort. This is not a criticism of Rochelle and Thomas Massie, but the point is, is it like, are you for this or against it? And if you're against it, why are you not all out saying that this is reckless, that this is a betrayal of what Donald Trump said when he ran for president, that we don't need more wars, that why are we spending money?

1:02:06Ben Rhodes:The price tag of this is gonna be in the tens of billions. That's money that could pay for the ACA subsidies. At least. You know, yeah, at least. There's your healthcare subsidies right now. Our healthcare subsidies are being spent on a war in Iran. Donald Trump is not looking after your interests. He's looking after some kind of grandiose ambitions in the Middle East. This is a very easy political case to make, Ezra. Like, this is the easiest thing in the world, that we should be nation building at home, not abroad, you know?

1:02:32Ezra Klein:I saw this after Maduro. I think it reflected what happened both in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq, which is that I think that there is a difficulty people have. Maybe they would not themselves go to war for this. Maybe they would not have supported a war for something like this. But when it is against a brutal dictator, on what grounds are you opposing it, right? Is opposing it supporting the continuation of the regime? And I think that's where a lot of the Democrats you're talking about are getting caught, or some of the world leaders are talking about are getting caught.

1:03:06Ezra Klein:So, you know, aside from, you know, we can spend money in one place versus another, I think it's this quite deep question of how do people negotiate and how do they argue against these wars that are partially demanded or justified on humanitarian grounds? I mean, the Iranian regime, as we mentioned, has killed thousands or maybe tens of thousands of their own people. There were Iranians marching in the streets and it was not safe for them to do so. So I sort of have my answer to this, but I'm curious for yours.

1:03:41Ben Rhodes:My answer to this is that war itself is something to be avoided. And that may seem like a obvious point, but it's not. Like we, I mean, to be a little provocative on this too, I think that post 9-11, because we've normalized so much use of military action. Because I could argue, Ezra, it is completely insane that we're sitting here and having a conversation about like, that if we don't bomb a regime, that we're therefore keeping it in power? But does it report to us? And I think what Americans kind of intuitively get better than their political elites, their national security elites and even some of the kind of media conversation in this is they get this.

1:04:31Ben Rhodes:They get that war is terrible. War has risks that even if it's well-intentioned on paper, it leads to bad outcomes for both the Americans who have to fight it, the American taxpayers to pay for it, and pretty much the people on the other end of the war that you're saying are trying to help. We're trying to help the Iraqis. We're trying to help the Afghans. We're trying to help the Libyans. Now we're trying to help the Iranians. And I guess the provocative thing I want to say too is that This seems to happen when the countries in question are brown. I think there's a dehumanization since 9-11 where it's like, oh, look at this Middle Eastern, the next Middle Eastern country up that the regime does something we don't like.

1:05:12Ben Rhodes:We're going to go and just bomb them. I mean, we killed, if reports are accurate, some, either the U.S. or Israel, over 100 girls at a school. And it's not really a big story in the United States. And I actually think to tie this back home, like, I don't think that that mentality, that othering of people who are on the other side of the world after 9-11, I think that othering has come home. I think that the capacity to have the mass deportation campaign that is generally targeting brown and black people is kind of tied to this dehumanization and desensitization of violence that we see in our foreign policy.

1:05:48Ben Rhodes:Like post 9-11, we othered a lot of populations. And if you watch, I mean, I know we're going a little far afield, but I think this is really relevant. I noticed in the Obama administration, like the othering on Fox, you know, that was once just about Middle Eastern terrorists. But then it's about the people crossing the southern border and it comes one big other, you know. And so I think it's a pretty, it should be seen as a pretty extremist proposition that if the United States doesn't go to war with some government in the Middle East, we're somehow condoning everything. I was really mad about the Jamal Khashoggi thing.

1:06:21Ben Rhodes:At no point did I think we should bomb, you know, Mohammed bin Salman for that.

1:06:26Ezra Klein:I agree with a lot of that. And I want to offer maybe one other thing that I think has been threaded through our conversation. And it's sort of my answer to this question, which is war is inherently uncontrollable.

1:06:37Ben Rhodes:Yeah.

1:06:37Ezra Klein:That the fantasy that we were always offered at the beginning is that we can choose what it is we are going to do. That we can control the situation we are going to create. and as we have developed even more precision weapons and more air power and more drones and more ability to wage war at a distance the seduction of that control for leaders and and for others has become all the more potent but that the history of this is we do not control it and as you mentioned Libya with Afghanistan with with Iraq we might think we are helping the people But if we set off a civil war, you could easily have 70 ,000, 100 ,000, 200 ,000, 300 ,000 people die in that war.

1:07:29Ezra Klein:And we have shown no interest in, number one, saying we will occupy the country to make sure that doesn't happen. And nor, as we learned in Iraq, even if we do decide to occupy the country, can we keep that from happening? I mean, Donald Trump was one of the people who started trying to withdraw us from Afghanistan, which then completed in the Biden administration. Again, the inability over a very long time to control the outcome of something like this, even when we were willing to put much more of our blood and treasure into controlling it. And so to me, one of the great lie of war is that you will get what you want out of it.

1:08:08Ezra Klein:Among the many things that scares me so much about Trump is how blithe he is with that. Yeah. You don't feel like this has cost him any sleep at all. And if it goes badly, I think he will walk away and say, well, I gave you Iranians your chance. You didn't take it or you didn't succeed in taking it.

1:08:25Ben Rhodes:Well, yes, I think you're exactly right. I mean, one thing I became very aware of over eight years in the White House, but also in this whole post 9-11 period, is that the U.S. military can destroy anything, right? It can take out any target set that it has, but it cannot engineer the politics of other countries or build what comes after the thing that is destroyed. We had 150 ,000 troops in Iraq and we couldn't stop the violence. And look, you know who knows that? The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps colonel, who's a total hardliner right now, knows that Americans are going to lose interest in this.

1:09:01Ben Rhodes:You know, knows that if we weather this, you know, on the back end, we can potentially do what we want. And there's a callousness in the way that Trump has done this. And precisely because I think war is so uncertain and the cost of war is paid so overwhelmingly by ordinary people, one of the reasons I would like to see Democrats or anybody, frankly, who's concerned about Trump be more outspoken now, is I think sometimes they are reticent to speak out because what if it goes well? It's not just that the Iranian regime is bad. It's that if it goes well, then they'll say, you know, you were against this thing.

1:09:39Ben Rhodes:I'm sorry, I'm against this even if it has the better case scenario. Because we need to be, if you can't take a position on something that's fundamental, is whether going to war when you don't have to is a good thing, then what's the point of all this? We could have achieved our objectives on the nuclear issue through negotiations. We chose to bomb this country instead. So I think that precisely because war can lead to such terrible outcomes, you have to be willing to take a stance against war itself unless it is absolutely necessary. And this certainly didn't meet that test.

1:10:12Ezra Klein:I think that is the place to end. Also, our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

1:10:17Ben Rhodes:So a few things, I mean, on this last question, From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra is a really excellent kind of intellectual history of, for lack of a better way of putting it, a global South or people in decolonized spaces in the 20th century coming up with alternatives to Western hegemony, then I personally, as someone who's been trying to make sense of what it's like to live in a collapsing liberal order, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Schweig. I've found myself reading twice since Trump's election, but it's just haunting and beautiful, contemporaneous. Stefan Schweig was a great Austrian writer writing this, writing in the midst of World War II, his kind of life story, but it's really about the collapse of the liberal order in Europe.

1:10:59Ben Rhodes:And then lastly, a book I read very recently, this last few days, it's called Travelers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd. And what she did is she found letters, journals, other contemporaneous accounts of basically British and Americans visiting Nazi Germany. And so what were their impressions? Did they see, spoiler alert, way too many of them did not see how bad this was going to be or were sympathetic? And all those things, I think, of course, are unfortunately relevant to today. Ben Rhodes, thank you very much. Thanks, Ezra.

1:11:45Ezra Klein:This episode of The User Client Show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker and Jack McCordick. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Marina King, Marie Cassione, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Amin Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Semeluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Andy Rose-Strausser.