We’ve seen the president in his second term be much more interested in foreign policy, as many presidents are, much more open to taking action, not only in Venezuela, but talking about Cuba, wanting the Nobel Peace Prize, wading into situations he wasn’t terribly interested in, in his first term. For sure. That’s real.
Could that not be part of this? It’s a huge part of it. There’s no question about that, and all presidents decide at some point that they’re not interested in running the United States because it’s hard, and how do you fix Baltimore and Gary, Ind.? And what do you do about homelessness in Los Angeles? These are hard questions. We can’t even make Head Start work, despite many billions and a lot of well-meaning people spending their lives on it. So these are hard problems and I think it’s a universal experience among American presidents, but also among U.S. senators, to decide: I’d rather run the world, because the details are opaque. I don’t speak these languages.
First of all, it’s a display of male power: Send the bombs in to kill the bad people. But moreover you get to feel like I did something, and that’s important and I get it. And this is, as you wisely note, a process that all presidents tend to go through. And so Venezuela, Cuba, I object to both of those efforts very strongly, but neither one, in my view, risks the future of the United States in the way that the Iran war now does. So it’s a big deal. But because it is, by the way, a contiguous neighbor of Iraq, and because Trump spent years talking about what a terrible idea the Iraq invasion was — defined his candidacy in 2016 on that point — it’s hard for me to believe that he just organically reached this place at the end of February, like, Oh, I think it’s a good idea. He did not think it was a good idea. Shutting down a fifth of the world’s oil and gas? Of all people, Trump knows that’s bad.
You said he’s a hostage just now. You told the BBC he’s a “slave” to foreign interests. Correct.
I just want you to be explicit. Trump is being held hostage by whom? By Benjamin Netanyahu and by his many advocates in the United States. And we know that not simply because Trump started the war on Feb. 28, but because he couldn’t get out of it. He declares we’re having a cease-fire. He says, We’re having a cease-fire and we’re having these talks and they’re going great, and we are going to open the strait. And Iran says, Yeah, one of our conditions is Israel’s got to pull back from southern Lebanon. You can’t use the Iran war as a pretext for stealing more land from a sovereign country that’s not your country. And it’s not just Iran who felt that way. I think the rest of the world is like, What are you doing? I thought we were fighting the great existential threat, Iran. And now you’re taking the opportunity to take Lebanon’s shore, the Litani River, and bombing downtown Beirut. What is this?
Anyway, this was all very well known. And within hours of Trump announcing this, Israel publicly, in a way that was designed to get the attention of everyone, including the Iranians, starts killing civilians in Lebanon. Now, what was the point of that? Not to secure the Israeli homeland. The point of it was to end any talk of a negotiated settlement, to keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal. I’m not attacking Israel by saying that. Their goals are different from ours, they’re a different country.