One President’s Whim. A World in Crisis.

0:00David French:We gave Times employees a preview of Crossplay from New York Times Games, and here's what they had to say. I can finally play with other people.

0:08Jamelle Bouie:I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and co-workers.

0:11David French:I have a J for 10 points.

0:14Jamelle Bouie:I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see.

0:17David French:Tanga is a word.

0:18Michelle Cottle:Oh.

0:19David French:As in English as a second language speaker, I like to learn new words.

0:23Michelle Cottle:New York Times Game subscribers get full access to Crossplay, our first two-player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games.

0:33David French:This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:51David French:I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times opinion. This week, I am back with the usual suspects, columnists Jamel Bowie and David French. Guys, welcome, welcome. Hello, hello. Michelle, Jamel, great to see you all. So this week, we are at the start of a conflict with Iran that is rapidly spreading across the Gulf region. This is a war with no clear rationale, apparently no long-term plan, and a rising death toll. So we're going to dive into the chaos and what anyone can do to make sense of it. And then we're going to take a quick dip back into the pool of the Texas primaries.

1:31David French:Now, the usual caveat, we are taping this on a Thursday morning. So it's pretty much a lock that the world is going to look very different by the time you hear it. So let's jump in and get started. Guys, people were anticipating some kind of attack on Iran for weeks. As of this taping, we're six days into Operation Epic Fury, as the Defense Department has named it. Given all the buildup, is it playing out as you expected? David, you want to take this one first?

2:04Michelle Cottle:I honestly didn't know what to expect. We had been told nothing. The president is in front of the State of the Union, all of America. He has an opportunity to explain. He has an opportunity then to declare that he's going to go to Congress. We then would have an opportunity to learn what would be the war aims, for example. Why would we be doing this? What's the objective? Is it attainable? What's it based on? None of this happened. And so what's happening is you and I and Jamel, we're watching a buildup. And the people who pay very close attention to the news are watching this buildup in the Middle East.

2:40Michelle Cottle:So we know something is coming. But buildups in the Middle East are not unusual, Michelle. I mean, controversy and turmoil in the Middle East is not unusual. So from the standpoint of, is this something that's going to lead to the kind of war that we're watching right now? No, I did not fully expect that in any way. And so what we've had here is one of the strangest sensations of my entire life, which is we're living in a war that was sprung on us by our own government. I mean, we've been in wars before that were sprung on us by opposing governments, but this is one that was sprung on us by our own government and not as a very short, limited operation.

3:25Michelle Cottle:But this is indefinite duration with not clearly defined objectives with the potential, not just a blowback against our troops in the region. But this is also something that risks civilians in a way that maybe many of our other conflicts haven't, because Iran is a state sponsor of terror. And there are a lot of questions about whether Iran could activate terror networks, for example. And so we're dealing with greater risk to American civilians. We already had what looks like a terror attack in Austin, Texas. We have huge risk to American service members. We have risks to the global economy. And this is just, it was just popped right on top of us.

4:06Michelle Cottle:It's a remarkable, a remarkable turn of events. And this is not supposed to be the way this constitutional republic was designed.

4:15David French:Yeah, I actually was, I think, sitting around. I can't remember if it was Sunday night or Monday morning when my sister, who lives in Texas, just texted me. She's like, so we're in a war now? I was like, yep, yep. Well, welcome to the show. Like, they had no idea this was coming, really. And they too, you know, they're in Texas. The Austin shooting made them very nervous. Where will this go? Jamel, what about you? What's your introduction to all of this been like? What has you scratching your head or wringing your hands?

4:49Jamelle Bouie:Yeah, I feel compelled to say that most Americans learned of this. Saturday when they woke up in the morning, right? Like, you know, I woke up, my kids woke me up at 7. I went to go look at what was going on. And it's like, oh, we've started a war in Iran. And to me, I feel like it's been brushed off, just like, oh, what a quirky thing the president's doing. But I think it gets to the core of the absolute contempt for democratic accountability and just explanation that the administration has. That if you look in the past to when American presidents have announced conflicts, and it's from the Oval Office, prime time, right?

5:27Jamelle Bouie:It's talking directly to the American people or in the case before television, it's FDR on the radio at a time when people are tuned in, talking directly to the American people saying, this is the conflict. This is why we're doing it. These are the war aims, an open public thing because going to war is supposed to be an open and public and democratic decision. The reason why the Constitution gives Congress the authority to declare war and not the president is precisely because putting that authority into a single person, it makes it opaque, makes it subject to their whims and impulses. And war is such a – it is one of the most consequential decisions a state makes.

6:17Jamelle Bouie:And so that – in a self-governing country, that's supposed to be something that the public and its representatives discuss amongst themselves. And there's a conversation to have about how the United States has, over the last 50, 60 years, kind of moved away from formal declarations of war. And the executive branch has adopted a lot of prerogative about the use of military force. But even setting that aside, it is really striking that rather than look, you know, figuratively, I suppose, rather than look the American public square in the eye and say we're doing this because of X, Y, and Z, he goes under cover of darkness at Mar-a-Lago.

6:59Jamelle Bouie:Not the White House, not the Oval Office, not some place that belongs to the American public, but to a real private resort in the dead of night and announces this conflict that has already claimed the lives of American soldiers. And that to me is such an abdication of the president's responsibility to the public. And it's such a reflection of this president's, again, contempt for the idea that he's answerable to the public.

7:30Michelle Cottle:The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties that often happens in war. But we're doing this not for now. We're doing this for the future. and it is a noble mission.

7:45Jamelle Bouie:The other thing I'll say to wrap this up real quickly is that the fact that there is no, the administration cannot articulate any kind of coherent war aim or strategy, that every time you ask them, they say something different, that to me should be a sign that the actual process in the White House is convoluted and confused and has no particular order. They can't speak clearly because there is no clear process, because they have not planned, because there is no strategy. You're gambling with people's lives. And if you are spending people's lives, you have an obligation to be absolutely clear and certain and have a plan and a strategy for what you're doing.

8:25Jamelle Bouie:That's what you owe those people.

8:27David French:Well, that strikes me as a very key point, especially with this administration, because a key piece of common wisdom about Trump was that until this past year, he was pretty wary of foreign entanglements. that is no longer true, whether you're talking about the ouster of Venezuela's president or now this war. So I want your thoughts, aside from the execution so far, on what Trump has been projecting as a leader this past week, David, and how you see that landing with the American people, as Jamel was talking about, who were basically kept in the dark until it was sprung on them. Yeah.

9:07Michelle Cottle:And one thing just to amplify on Jamel's, I think, excellent explanation of why we have this system. I think we can easily overdo this argument that says, well, he's just standing in the line of recent presidents who've expanded war powers. We don't have a comparable situation where a president has taken us into this kind of conflict without Congress in a long time. I mean, Bush, he had a congressional authorization for Iraq and UN Security Council resolutions. He had a congressional authorization for Afghanistan. H.W. Bush had a congressional authorization and UN Security Council authorizations and desert storms.

9:45So we're now seeing what it looks like when a divisive president in a divided time fights a war without

9:52Michelle Cottle:trying to rally public support. And it falls on the American people just in an almost perfectly partisan way with 80 % or so of Republicans supporting this because they're going to support whatever Trump does. Overwhelming opposition for Democrats. It looks like independents are against this as well. This is already majority disapproval from day one by most polls, majority disapproval. And some of the defenders of the administration might say, well, so what? He's got to get this done. This just has to be done. I'm like, hold on a second. Do you not understand how democracies fight wars? Let's just suppose, let's just grant the argument for the moment that this had to be done at this time.

10:38Michelle Cottle:Still, you have diminished and minimized your chances of a successful operation by not doing this the right way. Democracies that go to war with public support are very strong. Democracies that go to war without public support, the war effort is very fragile. But again, to circle back to some of the earlier comments, we don't yet know what success looks like. We have heard three, four, five different articulations for the purpose. And this matters. I mean, if you're going to go for a regime change war, that's one kind of strategy. If you're going to go to destroy a nuclear program, that's another kind.

11:14Michelle Cottle:If you're going to diminish a ballistic missile capacity, that's something else. And so there is no situation, I think, where we should say, well, the technicality of congressional approval wasn't followed. But now that doesn't matter. Now let's unite. That's just not the way this works. And look, when I say I'm very critical of Trump, I am not in any way saying that I want the mission of the United States military to fail. What I'm saying is he has set us up. He has created the conditions here for failure by what he is doing. And that is very alarming. It is very dangerous.

11:57David French:Okay, I just, before we go on to goals, which I want to get to, I just want to say that when you talk like that, it gives me bad flashbacks. I did not support the Iraq war. And the reason that it made me so nervous is I did not have confidence that the Bush administration was going to execute it well. And you'd get this whole, well, you'd support it if anybody else were doing it. And I'm like, one, I don't know that that's true, but two, it doesn't matter. It's this administration that's doing it. And if you have questions about the way they are executing it, it just is central to how you expect things to go.

12:33David French:And I just, every time I hear people talking about confused motives and confused goals and not really laying out the case openly and all this backroom stuff, I just have these horrible flashbacks to, oh my God, we're going to land ourselves in another forever war, which was central to Trump's appeal, was that he was going to keep us out of these forever wars, at least for certain segments of his base. Now on to goals. What do we know? Like, as you pointed out, they keep telling us different things. What have you heard that strikes you as the real story here? Or is it just impossible to tell?

13:18Jamelle Bouie:I don't know if there's a real story here. As David noted, if this is a regime change war, the idea here is to change the leadership, change the nature of the Iranian regime, not just the leadership. Because, I mean, I think the thing that's important to understand, and I'm not an Iran expert. I basically, like, know enough to be able to follow a conversation, right? But from what I understand, Iran isn't a personalist dictatorship. This isn't a country where you can take out the leader and everything kind of falls apart because the country is so tied tightly to the leader, as was the case in Iraq, right?

13:53Jamelle Bouie:This is a fairly sophisticated state, a revolutionary state, where there are multiple power bases where large segments of the population are actually kind of tied in to the regime itself in very material ways, which is part of state ideology. It's to prepare for an attack by the United States. But if the goal is regime change, then you can't really do this with missile strikes, right? A regime change operation is going to require ground forces, and the administration has not even begun to make the case for that. If it's just airstrikes, then it kind of raises the question, what's the point here?

14:37Jamelle Bouie:Is it to take out the nuclear program? You tried that, once it didn't work out. So why are we striking? And the way I'll put it is one of the first accounts of civilian casualties was the girls' school. So how many girl schools do we have to destroy to attain whatever objective you're trying to obtain with these airstrikes? And there's no attempt to explain anything in that regard. I want to there's a thing there's a point I want to make really quick and that relates to how Hegseth Pete Hegseth the defense secretary has been talking about this in particular so he has been discussing this conflict in terms um such as you know we we're we're unleashing maximum lethality you know how he talks maximum lethality you know American fighting men are pursuing their mission and the kind of like macho language.

15:33Jamelle Bouie:If you've ever seen that movie with Tom Cruise playing the kind of like you know men's rights style motivational speaker. Magnolia? That's Hank's. Magnolia. That's Magnolia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's Hank's that's whole vibe. And so that's his vibe. And that to an extent is the president's vibe a little bit. Not as much. And then they cannot articulate a strategy. And this just has me thinking Like how much of this is actually less about strategic objectives and more about kind of we have these toys, let's use them and let's demonstrate our strength and masculinity on the world stage. How much of this is that?

16:14Jamelle Bouie:And how much of it reflects the way that the administration understands the world as not like a complex system where you move one thing and a hundred things happen in response, but as like equivalent to almost like a board game as to like risk, where we have lots of guys and they have fewer guys. This would be big, they small. And if we roll the dice and move our guys there, we win, right? A very kind of flattened, barely two-dimensional vision of how the world works. And a sense that other people, other states, other leaders are, you know, the term is non-playable characters. They're NPCs. They simply react to us, the protagonists of reality.

17:01Jamelle Bouie:To me, just observing how they're talking and behaving, this fits this vision of the world, which is, you know, for lack of a better term, insanely dangerous.

17:14David French:Well, what's the one thing that everybody knows about the game of risk? It lasts freaking forever. You can play that game for days and get nowhere. So that's not soothing, Jamal. David, give us your action. So, yeah, I think if you're going to really boil down what is the goal here, I think just to be perfectly blunt, they're trying to pound the Iranian regime to such a degree, hit it to such a degree, damage it to such a degree that it makes it vulnerable to

17:44Michelle Cottle:falling, that it makes it very difficult to reconstitute nuclear weapons. And then if an uprising occurs and there's a democracy that breaks out, great. If not, well, then Iran is very, very, very damaged. And I think that one of the problems, let's just take that even on their own terms, that starts to sound a lot like the strategy that Israel took with Hamas before October 7th. So if you go back and you look at Israel's military approach to Hamas before October 7th. It was these periodic strikes that were designed to degrade Hamas, sort of constantly be degrading Hamas. And in the absence of any sort of permanent peace or any sort of permanent agreement or actual forced regime change, that's what you end up doing when you take this approach.

18:37You just end up hitting them and then they reconstitute and then you have to decide,