The Maga divide over Iran

0:00Andrew Roth:This is The Guardian.

0:07Andrew Roth:Today, will Trump's war in Iran break MAGA?

0:18Andrew Roth:You got questions about Chicago? Me too. I'm Erin Allen, host of the Curious City podcast, where each week I answer your questions about the region. From mysteries like, is this building haunted? To questions like, what happens to birds that get stuck inside O 'Hare Airport? We get into the answers every Wednesday. Then on Thursdays, come back for a deeper dive where we pull a thread from Wednesday's questions to uncover even more surprising and hidden layers. Listen to Curious City wherever you get your podcasts.

0:54Andrew Roth:American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. I was pretty young in 2003, but I do remember the build-up to the war in Iraq. The danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons cannot be ignored or wished away. It was everywhere. Even in Australia, we debated it in classes at school. And George W. Bush spent months making his case to Americans. America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality. He sent his top diplomat, Colin Powell, to the United Nations, where Powell tried and failed to win the world's support.

1:44Josh Wilson:The facts in Iraq's behaviour demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime

1:49Andrew Roth:have made no effort, no effort, to disarm as required by the international community. Even this guy was involved. There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working

2:04Josh Wilson:and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons. No question whatsoever.

2:11Andrew Roth:Back then, most Americans were for the war in Iraq, but many, many were not, and they made it known, tried to stop it on the streets. Today, the US is back at war in the Gulf, its biggest military operation there since Iraq nearly 25 years ago. A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. But this time, no congressional authorization. Trump didn't ask the UN. He didn't even really try to sell it to the public. In fact, he kind of sold them the opposite. I will end every single international crisis, including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine which would have never happened if I was president and the war caused by the attack on Israel which would have never happened And now, as the war stretches into its fourth week with no clear end in sight markets seesawing, global oil supplies and everything that depends on them in peril Will the man with almost messianic appeal among his supporters be able to convince them, convince the public, all of this is worth it?

3:34Andrew Roth:From The Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. Today in Focus, what does the war in Iran mean for MAGA?

3:48Andrew Roth:Andrew Roth, welcome back to Today in Focus. Thanks for having me, Mike. Andrew, I've missed talking to you and asking you a variation of basically this question. From the outside, it looks like the White House's strategy, in this case, in the war in Iran, is very confusing, is very confused. How is it for you? What's it like trying to figure out what on earth Donald Trump is thinking?

4:12Josh Wilson:Yeah, I think that the word that comes to mind is whiplash. You know, every day waking up because the president is up very early and finding out that the direction of the conflict has shifted 180 degrees.

4:24Andrew Roth:Let's turn now to the Middle East. This morning, the president extended his deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In a true social post, the president said, after, quote, very good and productive conversations with Iran, the U.S. would hold off on striking Iranian power plants for five days.

4:40Josh Wilson:We're so used to going into these kinds of wars and conflicts where there's a massive plan for what's going to happen six weeks from now, six months from now, transitions. and I think that the Iran war is unique, I think, in American history almost for the fact that so little planning, it seems, was put into specifically the political changes, you know, what the goals are politically for the country. And so what we found is that as the rubber has started to hit the road and things have gotten difficult, that all of a sudden the White House is kind of freelancing and you'll wake up in the morning and you'll find, like earlier this week, that Donald Trump had suddenly decided that the US was going to cancel an ultimatum to blow up Iranian power plants because all of a sudden secret talks are taking place.

5:25Josh Wilson:So it's very difficult and it moves very quickly.

5:28Andrew Roth:We're doing a five day period. We'll see how that goes. And if it goes well, we're going to end up with settling this. Otherwise, we just keep bombing our little hearts. If you were to give your best guess as to what the White House's strategy is in this moment, what would it be?

5:46Josh Wilson:I think that the White House's strategy in this moment is to find an off-ramp and a way out of this conflict. They have, from the beginning, been talking about how successful the strikes have been. Last night, we sunk their prized ship, the Soleimani. Looks like POTUS got him twice. Their Navy, not a factor.

6:05Andrew Roth:Pick your adjective. It is no more. In fact, yesterday...

6:09Josh Wilson:By all means, you know, the military side of it has been very successful. They've killed so many leaders of the Islamic Republic. They've hit so many military installations. They're taking a pounding. All of their leaders are dead, as far as we know. But the question is, what have they really achieved? And they know that they're getting to the point in this conflict where the longer this gets drawn out, the clearer the gap is going to be between what they say that they wanted to do in Iran and what they actually have achieved. And the fact is, Iran still has the Straits of Hormuz closed. Iran is still able to project some form of power and threaten the region.

6:44Josh Wilson:And Iran is still able to sort of play havoc with the global economy. So unless that changes, they need to find a way out of the conflict very quickly. And I think that's what the White House's goal is right now.

6:56Andrew Roth:Yeah, they need an exit strategy, which, you know, I've been thinking about the war in Iraq. That was something that came up then. How does the U.S. get out of Iraq? In that case, though, it was years into the conflict rather than weeks in this case.

7:08Josh Wilson:Yeah, I mean, this was a much quicker kind of ability for the U.S. to go in and project power. But this was done entirely without boots on the ground, without troops who were there. So on spec, this was a much more limited engagement. The U.S. was just providing a kind of overpowering, overwhelming show of force. But the effect has been the same, that the U.S. has now found itself being pulled into this conflict that it can't really get out of. Iran sort of decides when this ends because Iran is able to close the Straits of Hormuz. So that's what's called escalation dominance. And unless the US can somehow retake control of that, the US is trapped a little bit in this conflict.

7:46Andrew Roth:Yeah. I mean, I'd say it's astonishing, except this is exactly what many analysts predicted would happen if the US attacked Iran. And it's kind of following exactly that playbook. One of the interesting things here, Andrew, is that Trump waited to extend his 48-hour deadline for the Iranians to five days until Monday morning, shortly before the markets opened and his post helped to spark a financial recovery. To what extent do you think the way Trump is talking to the public about this war, the things he's saying are actually with the markets in mind?

8:19Josh Wilson:I think the markets play a huge role for Donald Trump in terms of how he messages with the public. You know, there are two fronts to this war. The first one is really about the war front, about, you know, fighting in Iran. The second one is about how long the US and US consumers can withstand the kind of punishment from U.S. markets, world markets in terms of oil, etc.

8:40Andrew Roth:For the first time in years, oil prices surpassed$100 per barrel. Motorists now gearing up for what will be pains at the pump.

8:48Josh Wilson:Americans are mainly living this war through how much money they spend at the pump, you know, on petrol or on oil, how much goods are going to cost because of shipping costs, how much this is going to affect the U.S. markets as well because of all the effects on companies, all of the effects on the worldwide economy. So when Donald Trump comes online just hours before the markets open on a Monday and says that we're going to have this resolved within five days, which is the length of the trading week, by the way, I don't think that it's a kind of conspiracy to say that Donald Trump is aiming this at the markets.

9:22Josh Wilson:He has said as much himself that he's very much concerned and focused on the fact that there was going to be a bump in oil because of the war and that he's trying to keep it down now because he knows that's the main thing that could force him to end this war early.

9:42Andrew Roth:I mean, it's interesting what you say that for most Americans, they're living this through the cost of groceries, through the cost of things like petrol. I was actually in the US for the first 10 days of the war. And one thing that struck me was you basically didn't see it anywhere. Nobody was really talking about it other than on TV. It wasn't a topic of conversation with people I was meeting. It was happening just so far away. And I'm wondering, what do you know about how Americans are actually perceiving this war?

10:09Josh Wilson:Yeah, I mean, based in Washington, D.C., you know, you can see around you that this is one of the cities where people are the most plugged in in the country in terms of international politics. The buildup was nothing like another event in my life, which was the Iraq War, where we saw months and months of buildup, protests, you know, a really strong and a really angry kind of political discourse about what was happening. And by contrast, I mean, the Iran war feels almost overshadowed at certain moments by so many of the things that are happening in U.S. domestic politics. I think that people have just gotten so much, I would say, politics in the last couple of years that they're overloaded.

10:50Josh Wilson:People are not very plugged into what's going on in terms of the day-to-day of the conflict, the fact that the U.S. doesn't have boots on the ground has made it so that people can put it to the side a little bit. They know what Donald Trump stands for. They know that they have their opinion on him. This is not going to change it in one way or the other for a lot of people. And it feels almost like a foregone conclusion that there doesn't seem to be anything able to kind of push back against this. The Democrats can't. So why really push back? You know, just get used to what's happening.

11:19Andrew Roth:Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, the polls tell us that some 54 % of voters disapprove of Trump's handling of Iran. 52 % say the US should not have taken military action. How much of that disapproval is translating into protests, calls to Congress, people, actual politics?

11:36Josh Wilson:Yeah, we see protests, you know, that are on a smaller scale around the country. But to be honest, nothing like the 100 ,000 strong that we saw, you know, in the run up to the Iraq war or in other cases. There are a bunch of reasons for that. I mean, one, first of all, is that so much of the protest space is taken up by other protests to Donald Trump, that Iran is just one of many grievances against Donald Trump. Two is that it's complicated, I would say, because of the Israel angle. Iran is a country in particular that divides public opinion because even liberal opponents to Donald Trump may very strongly support Israel or not want to be seen as supporting Iran by opposing the war.

12:14Josh Wilson:So I think that that sapped some kind of opposition too. The third one is you You see that a lot in Congress is that Democrats don't seem to be able to put together a united front to push back against this. You know, the strongest opportunities and the strongest pushes to stop this from happening, like the War Powers Act, still weren't able to pass through the Senate. In part because Israel is such a hot-button topic, because many people don't want to be seen as coming out against taking action against Iran because of its history of opposition to Israel. Interesting. Because of that, this war seems to hit, I would say, a sweet spot where it does seem to sap a lot of what could be public opposition to it.

12:56Josh Wilson:And we don't have a kind of critical mass of opposition yet.

13:00Andrew Roth:Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it's unpopular with the public, but among Congress people, those who, at least in theory, help to make decisions, it's a much more mixed bag.

13:10Josh Wilson:Yeah, and I would say it's broadly unpopular, but the question is who's going to vote on that specifically. And so the opposition, I would say, is broad, but there are other topics that hit closer to home for a lot of Americans at the moment. Once again, the economy, entitlements, various other questions about immigration, what this administration is doing in so many different areas of American life, that this is just something that's been thrown on top for a lot of people. And it feels like, you know, the protest kind of sentiment in the states is not at the place where you're going to see big protests right now.

13:44Josh Wilson:And I find that to be the same in Congress as well.

13:46Andrew Roth:Yeah, that's interesting. I wonder if anything would change that. And I feel like the biggest thing that would is an expansion of the war. There's been some talk of U.S. troops being landed on this Khag Island where a lot of Iran's oil infrastructure is based. How likely do you think a ground invasion would be? And do you think that might galvanize public opposition?

14:09Josh Wilson:I think that's the next big question is going to be about whether or not those Marines that are being sent to the region and the airborne as well are going to be actually deployed onto Hard Island or anywhere else onto mainland Iran. That would be the next big step. And it would be a major step back from the Trump administration in terms of their promises not to get into, first of all, foreign wars in the Middle East, and now to actually put boots on the ground in Iran, in a Middle Eastern country. So it does feel like so much of this is dependent on people actually looking at a situation and saying, oh, this is really bad.

14:44Josh Wilson:The administration has gone back on its word, and that's making us angry enough to vote differently. I still think that probably the economy is going to be the thing that affects this administration and its decisions the most because you can't fake it. It can't be kind of rationalized away. If people are paying more money, they'll notice that and they'll vote against you. and that is the one thing that motivates this administration.

15:07Andrew Roth:Speaking of money, here's an eye-popping stat. The first week of the war, the US government spent $11 billion. That's a vast sum of money. Does that cut through at all with the public or does it all just dissolve into big numbers?