The Washington Roundtable on the Iran War

21:56Jane Mayer:Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

22:18Jane Mayer:Jane, can we step back for a moment here? I mean, historically, this is not how wars are supposed to begin in the United States. Am I right? Absolutely. I mean, I don't know if the rest of you had an experience like this, but I went to bed really late on Friday night, early, actually, Saturday morning, and I saw the first stages of Israel's involvement in this. And by the time I woke up a couple hours later, a member of my family saying, oh my God, did you see what happened? So a brief few hours of sleep and suddenly there's this massive war that we're in without warning, without an explanation.

22:59Jane Mayer:That is really not how a democracy is supposed to go to war, nor is it really the way that we have gone to war in this country. We've had presidents who've taken tremendous care to try to prepare public opinion and make the case for war, because it's, of course, the most serious thing that a country can do. To say nothing of going to Congress, for instance, right, Susan? I mean, that's a piece of the process.

23:21The Washington Roundtable:Well, there is the Constitution. There is the Constitution. You know, there is the Constitution. And it's remarkable, of course, because it was just a few days before the war, after this tremendous military buildup had already been sent to the Middle East. I mean, you know, remember, it's not like Donald Trump didn't just wake up on Saturday morning and decide to do this or actually Friday afternoon, I believe, is when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs has said he gave the order. He didn't just wake up and decide to do this. He has sent a tremendous force to the Middle East, an enormous armada of air and sea power.

23:57The Washington Roundtable:He sent incredible capacities into our ally Israel. He did a lot of things to prepare for this, to have the option to go ahead when he chose to do so, because this is a war of choice. And to me, that's the historical departure, is that, you know, the wars that we think of that have defined American history, most of those come in response to an event, right? You know, there's a horrific attack like 9-11, which prompted the U.S. to go after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. There's World War II when the United States is attacked, literally a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. You know, those are the kinds of wars that we tend to think of rather than the idea of a president exercising this kind of unlimited, unrestricted power.

24:43The Washington Roundtable:And for me, I think we have to consider as we try to puzzle through how did we get here that we have a leader in Donald Trump 2.0 who is taking steps that are far riskier, more dramatic, more violent than even those contemplated by Donald Trump in his first term in office. When, remember, this idea of taking out the government in Iran has been a fever dream of parts of the American right for a very long time. And throughout Donald Trump's first term in office, he was repeatedly lobbied by some of his hardline advisors to do exactly the war that we're seeing right now. And he was attracted to it, but he always pulled back.

25:29The Washington Roundtable:He had people around him who warned him of the second and third order consequences. He had people around him saying, you know, are you sure you want to do this? And he had perhaps the check of wanting to seek reelection, perhaps the concern that the American people or his own supporters might have actually believed his, you know, no new wars, America first rhetoric. So it's just a very different Donald Trump right now in a way that I think is is kind of scary because he's exercising this unlimited power that he thinks he has both at home and abroad.

26:00Jane Mayer:We also knew that negotiations were underway for there were peace talks underway. There was a process underway and there was not preparation and there was no we had a State of the Union, but the president didn't say that he was contemplating this. So there was really none of the normal preparation that goes with the consent of the governed. I think one of the questions that we will be all looking at is how much of a negotiation was there by the Trump administration? How much was that a performance? How much was that just a delaying tactic in order to get all of the equipment into the region and assemble the pieces?

26:38Jane Mayer:I mean, it is worth noting here that was not a negotiation conducted by the secretary of state or by a professional diplomat. It was by Steve Whitcoff and Jared Kushner, a real estate developer and the president's son-in-law. And now we're shocked to discover that that negotiation did not produce the piece that they were ostensibly seeking.

26:56The Washington Roundtable:One amazing difference reflecting our polarized society is that there have been a couple of major national polls since the attacks began. And they show the enormous skepticism about this from many Republicans as well as Democrats. Something like 60 percent of Americans not in favor of it, only around 27 percent had support for this. And someone pointed out that support for the Vietnam War in its final days as America was sort of leaving ignominiously was around 29 percent. And I'll be interested to see whether Trump cares about that political constraint in any way anymore. Maybe that's a constraint that doesn't matter for him.

27:37The Washington Roundtable:Maybe, though, the constraints of the markets will matter. Maybe the fact that oil prices are spiking will matter or the fact that the Iranians have chosen a really escalatory strategy here. And that's one thing. I don't know about you guys, but as I think about what surprised me, the fact that the Iranians decided to go ahead and send these ballistic missiles into almost every other state in the Gulf is pretty escalatory. I mean, attacking Dubai International Airport, attacking a hotel in Dubai, attacking sites in Bahrain, in Qatar, even in Oman, which was mediating the talks. Now, as I understand the theory, the case here is to try to get the other states in the Middle East to pressure Donald Trump and to pressure Washington to pull back on the war.

28:27The Washington Roundtable:But it may have, of course, the opposite effect, which is to bring into the Israel-U.S. coalition more firmly the Gulf states. But I still I find that you don't know when you start a war and all of a sudden 10 different countries are involved. Right. You can't be too confident in the outcome here. I think Trump is bitten off an awful lot without clearly having a plan for what comes next week and next month and next year.

28:53Jane Mayer:You know, I've been struck already by the, frankly, the callousness with which Trump is talking about American deaths and the consequences of this war. He said in a video message, that's just the way it is. You know, as you look at the politics around this, and we've talked a bit about how the entire MAGA movement grew out of the, in many parts of the country, the despair that was left behind by the wars over the last 20, 25 years. There are parts of the MAGA base that are already breaking with this war in very vocal ways. What's caught your attention so far, Jane? I mean, I think it's fascinating to see because, you know, typically people think there's a rally around the flag effect.

29:36Jane Mayer:And whenever the United States goes into some kind of military action, people will then support the president. And we saw that in the beginning of the Iraq war with George W. Bush. But this is really different than the pattern that there has been in the past. And it's a danger for Trump within his own base, as you say, because there's a segment of it. And you take a look at people like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. They're accusing Trump of being manipulated by Israel and saying this is a war that's in Israel's interests, not in the United States' interests. So it's splitting his own base. And their portrayal of him is that he's basically a puppet, which is the opposite of the strongman view that he wants to portray of himself.

30:24Jane Mayer:And I think because there was no real rationale given by the administration, there's a sense out there among many people who don't follow politics all the time that is like, you know, what the hell? Why? Why are we doing this? Why this now? There's so many other issues that the country is focused on in terms of affordability and health care and domestic problems, the coming midterms. And suddenly, kind of out of the blue, there's this unasked for violent military expedition taking place. And I think it's shocked people and maybe really cut into the usual feeling that people have about when the United States goes to war.

31:12Jane Mayer:Susan, can you make sense of J.D. Vance's role here particularly? I mean, this is a guy who more than almost anybody else in the MAGA firmament at the highest levels made his name on saying, as he did in 2024, that he supported Trump because, quote, Trump started no wars, unquote. So how is he navigating this?

31:32The Washington Roundtable:You know, it's something to watch the vice president squirm like this. I mean, it cuts really right at the heart of who J.D. Vance has been. I mean, go back. People have compiled these incredible, you know, clips all together of, you know, Vance and Trump just again and again and again. What did they beat over the head of the voters in 2024? Kamala Harris was so evil, warmonger. She was going to start World War III. She was, you know, the reason to support the Trump ticket was because no new wars, no new wars. And Vance, I think a lot of the people who are the kind of hardcore MAGA folks, the Bannons and Tucker Carlson's, they must have seen J.D.

32:16The Washington Roundtable:Vance as their kind of insurance policy in this administration. And I think for them, it's a recognition, first of all, that in their power mapping of the court of the czar here, they might have been off. Obviously, a reflection of power mapping for anyone who's dabbled in some Kremlinology is, you know, that J.D. Vance wasn't even in the room when the strikes began over the weekend. You had the pictures from the Mar-a-Lago situation room, which had the real decision makers. J.D. Vance was not there. He was in, back in Washington, somebody called it the, you know, the kids table situation room with him and Tulsi Gabbard, who was so opposed to any kind of conflict with Iran that in her short-lived democratic presidential campaign, she actually sold t-shirts on her website that said no war with Iran.

33:09The Washington Roundtable:So there's J.D. Vance and there's Tulsi Gabbard. I think Scott Besant was there. Basically, the folks whose opinion wasn't welcome And in the room was Marco Rubio. In the room was Pete Hegseth and Susie Wiles, the president's chief of staff. And I will say another point that doesn't get made enough, but leaving tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of American citizens stranded all across the Middle East, not evacuating them. Even Italy has managed to organize charter flights of its citizens and get them the hell out of the war zone, whereas Americans are calling, you know, the consulates and embassies across the region.

33:48The Washington Roundtable:They're trying to get in touch with the State Department. They were told, we can't help you. No, only now we're having this conversation on Tuesday is, you know, the White House belatedly realizing they had a problem. And I feel like Trump has eliminated so much of the capacity of the National Security Council, of the State Department. He's politicized the Pentagon. When you go into a war like this against a formidable set of actors in the Middle East, the idea is we're not playing with our A-team or our A-game. Our capacities are significantly diminished even from what they were a year ago. And I think as the war plays out, we're going to see more and more, unfortunately, where that diminished capacity leads to, you know, potentially very, very negative results.

34:33Jane Mayer:I mean, we've seen that just in the rationales that have been given. So that instead of relying on intelligence, the U.S. intelligence agencies and national security experts, when Trump gave an explanation today about why it is that we got into this, he said he had a feeling. His feeling was that Iran was going to strike, and so he wanted to strike them first. Starting a war on the basis of one man's feelings without consulting with Congress in violation, apparently, of international law because he had a feeling is just, as you say, not necessarily the A game that we would expect. Well, among the things that this administration cut away in the first year of its time in office, it's worth noting that they also shrank America's foreign broadcasting services like Voice of America, which was exactly the kind of thing that we would have used in the past to try to send messages to the Iranian people.

35:41Jane Mayer:But of course, that's all been cut way back. So we've gone into a war with one hand tied behind our back at best.

35:53Jane Mayer:We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, the costs of war. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

36:06The Washington Roundtable:This week on The Political Scene from The New Yorker, I speak with foreign affairs journalist Ishan Tharoor about the fallout of the U.S. and Israel's joint military operation against Iran.

36:16Jane Mayer:The regime is in survival mode, lashing out in various ways. There is still the possibility of major civil strife and unrest and the emergence of some kind of domestic uprising. Although the one thing Iran is very good at is quashing domestic uprising.

36:34The Washington Roundtable:Join me, Tyler Foggett, on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

36:51Jane Mayer:One thing that I think we haven't touched on yet is the real costs of war. In the full dimensions of that, we started this conversation talking about the war in Iraq and the long shadow that it cast over this country, both in moral terms, but also in political terms and in the sheer cost of it. When you think back on that, what should we be prepared for when it comes to the cost of the war that has just begun? Well, I was just looking at this report and it says that it cost$630 million just to get the forces into position for this. And in the first 24 hours, it cost$779 million. Those F-15s that were shot down accidentally by Kuwait, each one of them cost$90 million.

37:46Jane Mayer:And the price of oil has already gone up by$10 a barrel, which means there will certainly be costs on the home front that are felt right away too.

37:56The Washington Roundtable:Well, and that's right. And we're also going to be hearing an awful lot and are already hearing an awful lot about air defenses and essentially that we're spending down the stockpile that we have of these very important Patriot missiles, the THAAD missile defense system, providing that to Israel and other allies across the region. First of all, we're in the new age of drone warfare. And what you're seeing is Iran use very low-cost Shahid drones to attack targets in its neighboring countries. We're shooting back at them with these very expensive air defense missiles. Somebody said to me, it's like, you know, going after an e-bike with a Ferrari and doing that over and over again.

38:35The Washington Roundtable:So, again, clearly one of Iran's goals at this moment is to keep shooting away at its neighbors in the hopes that it becomes too costly and difficult and too scarce to keep the air defense up. That's one of the takeaways from the Ukraine war. That's another spillover effect, unfortunately, that I'm concerned about, which is that this will have a negative impact on the ability of, if not the United States, since Donald Trump has refused to provide direct assistance to Ukraine. But at least America's European allies have still been doing so. The scarcity of that, by the way, Europe is much more vulnerable even than the United States to the energy price hikes that are happening right now because the United States encouraged Europe to wean itself off of cheap Russian energy, oil and natural gas by shifting some of its natural glass to the Middle East.

39:29The Washington Roundtable:So now it's more vulnerable to a spreading conflict in the region than it was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So that's one fear that I have. And all of this goes in the bucket of, A, unintended consequences. B, and I think this is really important for me, Evan, I think back to, you know, our time on the ground at the very beginning when we didn't know what would happen with Iraq. And, you know, it was a different, maybe a more, I don't want to say naive or innocent time, but certainly for us, maybe just because we were young, there was a presumption of honesty, I think, on the part of the U.S.

40:10The Washington Roundtable:government that was shattered in a really terrible way by the failure to find the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But I remember I went to that conflict with a mutual friend of ours, Ed Gargan, who was a longtime foreign correspondent. And I will never forget in the early days of the conflict, sitting outside at the hotel in Kuwait where we were staying. And Ed, you know, mischievously starts in. We're talking about what could happen. And he says, give me a Q. Give me a U. you know and so he he spells out quagmire and he says look these people don't know what they're talking about you know they think that it's the fantasy of the quick easy painless war that you can you know do what Don Rumsfeld thought we could do and just sort of shock in our way into replacing one of the worst most repressive dictatorships that had lasted decades in the Middle East and just turn that overnight into a kind of American-style democracy to make a mess and think that someone else was going to clean it all up in a way that would work out well for us and them.

41:24The Washington Roundtable:The naivete of that moment. And I just feel like if Ed was sort of transmitting to us, Evan, here's these lessons from Vietnam. Like, what are the lessons from Iraq that we want to tell people that are relevant about right now as we look at the very beginning of this Iran war?

41:42Jane Mayer:This is the perfect moment for what I think has become on our show a kind of semi-regular feature, which is the reminder of Mark Shields and his extraordinary observation right there on the cusp of war in Iraq. He was, of course, the great columnist and commentator. And right before the war in Iraq, he went out and he figured out how many people in Congress actually had experience in warfare, or actually more precisely had children who were serving in combat. And he concluded it was remarkably few. And he said, those in power are totally divorced from those at peril. And it's that phenomenon then reverberates through our culture.

42:25Jane Mayer:And people often ask, you know, how did we become so distrustful of one another? How did we become so distrustful of government in this country? The answer is that we are over and over again, we are thrust into a war like this, like the war in Iraq, where frankly, the explanation for why we are expending blood and treasure is, in the case of Iraq, turned out to be a complete and total lie. And in this case, they haven't even bothered to come up with a coherent explanation. And they've been so callous in the way they've described the loss of life, American life, other life in this. And, you know, you have to know that, of course, it's again in the Mark Shields tradition of observation that Trump did not serve in any war.

43:18Jane Mayer:There was a war where all of his peers did, or many of them did, but he got out claiming that he got a doctor to say he had bone spurs that have somehow miraculously disappeared ever since. Well, I'm glad somebody brought that up in this conversation because, you know, I have to admit, like, I keep thinking about the poor people in Tehran right now who, you know, so many of whom have so recently literally risked their lives for a better version

43:45The Washington Roundtable:of their future. And to see the sort of cynicism and nihilism with which the U.S. administration is pursuing a conflict that we can hope that it brings democracy and a better future. But I truly fear that that's not the outcome here. And I just think of the bravery of those people. Look at what we have been up against here in the U.S. It's nothing compared with what people in Iran have experienced for the last few decades. And, you know, I celebrate and admire so the resolve of people protesting in Minnesota or coming out in the freezing cold and sort of saying to their, you know, democratically elected government, no, this is not American.

44:28The Washington Roundtable:You know, think of the stakes in a place like Iran, where the regime has already shown, even before the U.S. and Israel attacked, has already shown the resolve to turn its machine guns on its own people. And it just feels like we're watching the arc of tragedy in some ways continue in the Middle East in ways that just feel rotten to me.

44:50Jane Mayer:I think about the Americans who are serving in this war. I was looking at a photograph of my nephew and his roommate in college. And the roommate is now a fighter pilot. And what an incredible young kid. He's so patriotic. His family is a military family. They serve as public service. But what what cause are they fighting for here? Yeah, I have to say, you know, we're going to be talking a lot about this topic over the weeks and perhaps months to come. And I think it's fitting that we're winding up here on the subject of the impact on the individual lives who are going to be caught up in it. Because so often when we talk about politics, it can seem almost abstract with these individuals, you know, sort of playing for power in Washington.

45:41Jane Mayer:But, Jane, you're absolutely right. I mean, as our friend Rick Atkinson, who is one of the great authors on war, often says, in the end, war is about young people dying and sobbing mothers. And that is an awfully bracing way to remember what we have just encountered and embarked on.

46:03Jane Mayer:This has been a hard week already, guys, but I have to say I am so glad to be able to think about it and talk about it with both of you. So thank you very much.

46:12The Washington Roundtable:Thank you, Evan. It's really great to be with you both.

46:15Jane Mayer:Likewise. Glad to be able to talk to you about it and look forward to next week to maybe better news. This has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. We had research assistance today from Alex D 'Elia. Our producer is Nora Ritchie, mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thank you so much for listening.

46:52The Washington Roundtable:Hi, I'm David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. At this year's Academy Awards, Timothy Chalamet and Tiana Taylor aren't the only major nominees, The New Yorker will be there too

47:03Jane Mayer:with two nominated short films, which you can watch at newyorker.com slash video.

47:09The Washington Roundtable:Two People Exchanging Saliva was executive produced by Julianne Moore and Isabelle Huppert, and it's set in a dystopian Paris where kissing is illegal. Our animated short film Retirement Plan follows a man as he dreams about all the things he's going to do when he's done working. You can enjoy both of those films

47:30Jane Mayer:and our full library of acclaimed short films at newyorker.com slash video.

47:42Jane Mayer:From PRX.