Trump’s War With Iran and a New Danger at Home
· The Atlantic
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses the recent shooting in Austin. David warns that the shooting is an example of how Trump could use the threat of terror from Iran to crack down on American freedoms.
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Then David is joined by The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols to discuss the outbreak of war between the United States and Iran. David and Tom discuss Trump’s motives for launching another regime-change war and assess the competence of the administration to achieve its goals. They discuss the mistakes that were made in Iraq by the Bush administration and how, 23 years later, none of those lessons seem to have been learned. David and Tom wonder if the Trump administration has any plan for an end game in Iran, - and discuss how not having one could lead to suffering among the Iranian people and turmoil in the region. Frum and Nichols observe that the United States has embarked on a costly state building project—but the question of whether the Trump administration realizes that is a different matter.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. I’m recording the show at a grave moment in American history. My guest this week will be Tom Nichols, my colleague at The Atlantic, former professor at the Naval War College. And we’ll be discussing our anxieties about the way the war with Iran has been managed, our fears about the uses to which the war will be put by the Trump administration, and our hopes for a better future for the people of Iran, but a future that cannot be separated from the dangers that this war poses to the people of the United States.
There will be no book talk this week; our conversation will be too substantial for that. So I will just preface now with some thoughts before the dialogue about what is at hand.
I should stress, I record this program midday Monday, March 2. It will not be released on audio for a day and a half. It will not be released on video for two days. So there may be intervals. There may be gaps in the things you know about the situation at home and abroad and what I know as I speak to you. But I wanna speak about something that just happened very few minutes ago that is a real indicator, a real warning, of the dangers that the United States faces in this war with Iran.
Shortly before I began the recording, CBS News obtained and published images, or purported images, of the alleged shooter in the Austin, Texas, mass shooting. The alleged shooter was wearing a T-shirt, which, apparently, according to the images that have been released, reveals an image of the Iranian flag.
Now, I personally very much doubt that the shooter was in any way an agent or operative of the Iranian state or was in any way operating on behalf of the Iranian state—might be wrong, but I doubt it. But there’s no question that Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and that it has, over many decades, not only built networks all over the world but activated, triggered networks that have committed acts of terrorism all over the planet: Buenos Aires; Berlin; Washington, D.C. Any prudent administration in a war with such a power would have to anticipate that one resource available to that world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism would be to activate terrorist networks in the United States. You simply have to plan for that, even the best administration with the greatest respect for American liberties.
What if you have an administration that does not respect those liberties? What if you have an administration with a proven record of falsely accusing Americans of terrorism for acts like legally recording the operations of immigration authorities, that has repeatedly lied about what the Department of Homeland Security is doing and why it’s doing it, that has covered up casualties of American citizens at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security? What if you have that kind of government?
Well, that possibility of Iranian sleeper cells inside the United States, that’s not just a resource for the Iranian regime to use against the United States; that’s a resource that the Trump administration can use against the liberties of American people. After all, if it’s really possible that there about to be acts of terrorism by Iran inside the United States, how can Congress continue to blockade funds for the Department of Homeland Security until it gets reforms in the way that the Department of Homeland Security operates, including an end to the lying that has been such a disgrace of the Department of Homeland Security?
You’re gonna see a real press by the Trump administration to say, Release the funds and let the Department of Homeland Security resume its operations exactly the way it wants to, including falsely calling people terrorists if they operate a camera near an immigration agent. You’re going to see attacks on the freedom of the press. This administration has already made it clear that it regards it as illegal, criminal, for reporters simply to ask questions of Pentagon employees about what they’re doing with the American people’s money, about what they’re doing with the American people’s security, about what they’re doing with the lives of soldiers entrusted to their care. Now, that has been the view of this administration: No, you are not allowed to ask any of these questions, and we’re gonna yank your press credentials if you have any unauthorized conversations with anybody in the building. You’re not allowed to do that. Only the designated leaders of the building get to speak at all, and if they’re not speaking or if they’re saying things that look like they might not be true, you can’t second-guess or question them.
We have had many instances over the first year of the Trump administration of false invocations of emergency powers. The whole tariff nonsense, the tariffs that were struck down by the Supreme Court, those tariffs rested on false claims by the president of the United States about economic emergency. Well, now there’s a real war, and there’s a real risk of terrorist activity inside the United States. That’s a much more plausible emergency than anything Trump invoked about tariffs. And what court will say, You know what? We don’t think you’re telling the truth about this, either. Courts will be very reluctant to do that. So there’ll be new assertions of emergency power in all kinds of contexts. We know that people around the president, people who have the president’s ear, have been urging him to use emergency powers against the elections of 2026. The possibility of that temptation being accepted are much higher today than they were 10 days ago or a week ago. And there may be more legal predicates to allow him to do it.
In every way we can imagine, and in many ways we cannot, we’re moving into a terrain of extraordinary danger to democratic institutions. The war in Iran is not just a foreign-policy question; it is an urgent domestic-policy question. It is a massive grant of power to a president and administration that have proven again and again that they will abuse any powers that they are entrusted with.
We all wish, of course, a safe and swift return to American personnel in danger. We wish a safe and swift return home to all the allied personnel in danger. And we wish, urgently, a better future for the oppressed people of Iran, who’ve been so maltreated and murdered by the most aggressive and most repressive regime, maybe on the entire planet.
But Americans also are entitled to think about their safety, their security, and their freedom. And that is suddenly called into question in a way that has been quite theoretical until the Trump administration came along, and even in the early days of the second Trump administration, while it has been less theoretical and more actual, has not been as imminent and ominous as it is today. But the threat now is as imminent and ominous as it possibly could be, or as it yet has been; perhaps it can get even worse. And as an American, it’s your job now not to lose either your ideals or your confidence. The courts still work. The liberties of the Constitution are still on paper. And it’s going to be up to all of us to make sure that the courts continue to operate and that those liberties remain real against an administration that will use any excuse to try to avoid the courts, neuter Congress, and negate those liberties—any excuse—and now they’ve got a better excuse than they’ve ever had before.
So, as I said, a grave moment in American history, a dangerous moment in American history. Not blind to the opportunities for a better Middle East, but don’t be blind either to the risks of a much worse future for Americans here at home.
And now, my dialogue with Tom Nichols.
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Frum: Tom Nichols is an ex-professor at the Naval War College, an expert in nuclear weapons, and of course, a colleague at The Atlantic, who filed early in the morning of the first hours of this war, in an act of amazing summary of knowledge and expertise.
Tom is a five-time Jeopardy! champion and now a returning two-time guest on The David Frum Show. I’m very grateful to him for making the time on this busy day.
I’m going to, just for the information of listeners and viewers, point out we’re recording midday Monday. The audio will post early morning Wednesday, video midday Wednesday, so there’s a gap for a lot of events to happen in the United States and around the world, but we’re going to do the best we can to focus on some domestic issues raised by President [Donald] Trump’s action in Iran.
Tom, let me just start with this. I think you and I belong to that tiny little section of the Venn diagram that is broadly sympathetic to action against the Iranian regime and deeply worried about action by the Trump administration.
Tom Nichols: Absolutely. No one should be shedding any tears for the mullahs, and we should all be hoping that, now that we’re committed to this, whatever this is—I suppose one of the things we should talk about—but if it’s regime change, that this goes well. But not only am I worried about the history of regime change—I supported, as you did, the Iraq War, and we saw that regime change becomes a very dicey business—but I’m also concerned about the competence of this administration to pull off something of this size and I think because of the people who are in it. The president is the president, but I wish he had a better team around him.
So, yeah, I’m concerned. I hope the Iranian regime transforms into something else, but I’m very concerned about this team trying to do it.
Frum: Okay, let’s break this into pieces. Here are the pieces that I think we should address. The first is your question, “What is this?” The second is competence of the team. And the third is intentions of the team, both for the region and here at home. I’m gonna try to get to all of those points.
Let’s talk about what this is. I listened to the recent press conference by [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth, who denounced other wars, [in] very personal terms, waged by Presidents [Barack] Obama and [Joe] Biden and President [George] W. Bush, I presume. And he said, This is not gonna be a war of regime change. There’s no nation building. There’s no democracy building. And I thought, What kind of guy looks at the Iraq War and says, You know what we did wrong in Iraq? We spent too much time planning for the end state? Everyone thought the problem was we did too little planning for the end state, but Hegseth and company say, No, too much. The answer is: Launch a war, then see what happens, with no particular idea about what’s to come next.
Nichols: You and I were alive during that war and paying attention, and one of the things that I heard constantly, especially from the officers who were coming back to us from their assignments and coming back through the Naval War College, is that it was completely the other way around. Donald Rumsfeld would pretty much throw—the secretary of defense at the time—would throw you out of his office if you started talking about Phase IV and what comes after and nation building and all that stuff. He didn’t want to hear any of that stuff. He was more like Hegseth, maybe, than Hegseth wants to admit. He wanted to prove that a transformed small force could knock over what was, at the time, the fourth-largest army in the world, right, that we could go in, and we did that in ’91, and then we knocked over that army, and then we came back in and that we could do it again with this kind of Jedi force. That’s all Rumsfeld was interested in. So the idea that, somehow, these previous wars, we spent all this time chin-pulling about “What comes next?”—the mistakes that happened were because we didn’t do that.
Frum: Right. The Trump people think they’re doing the opposite, but they’re doing, as you say, Rumsfeld on steroids or Rumsfeld without the good manners.
Nichols: (Laughs.)
Frum: Not that Rumsfeld’s manners were so good—
Nichols: Rumsfeld without the tact. (Laughs.)
Frum: Rumsfeld without the tact. (Laughs.)
All right, let’s talk here about the team at home. I think you and I are worried about slightly different things. You’re worried about the competence of the team. I’m worried that war empowers presidents inevitably, and President Trump and his domestic team have proven they can’t be trusted with those powers. And then now they’re going to have greater powers to, for example, crack down on media reporting. It’s a war—you can’t put troops at risk, obviously. So if Pete Hegseth texts you the war plans by mistake, as he did to our colleague Jeff Goldberg, now there’s a real case for punishing the people who receive Pete Hegseth’s mistaken texts.
Nichols: Well, hold on, let me just check Signal, see if anything’s coming in today. (Laughs.)
Look, I share both of those concerns. One of them is more proximate. Here in the first few days of the war, what I’m really concerned about—our military is, operationally, the most capable in the world; they’re just the best. But they can only do the missions that they’re assigned to do. They can’t run the war. That has to come from the White House and the Pentagon. I suppose I take some comfort in the fact that Pete Hegseth has been relegated to giving cheerleader speeches at 8 o’clock in the morning, when he knows nobody’s listening, to a Pentagon briefing room that’s full of his political allies.
I, like you, the first thing I thought—look, why are we going into Iran? I think it is the president’s vainglory. He thinks he’s on a roll, that this is easy to do, that you can knock off dictatorships like Venezuela and then have a parade, that this solves a lot of his problems. It gets people not talking about the Epstein files. I really believe that a huge chunk of Donald Trump’s foreign policy is rooted in trying to get people to stop talking about the Epstein files. I think he is that narrow and crass.
I had exactly the same thought you did, David, which is, Great, now he’s gonna to say, I’m a war president. That means you can’t criticize me. It means I can stomp on the press. It means that I can declare a national emergency. Maybe, as the British Parliament said in 1944, I think it was, This is not a propitious time for an election. There’s all kinds of mischief that comes with a war because, as you say, presidential war powers, especially once a conflict is underway, become almost unchallengeable.
Frum: President Trump has invoked war powers to justify his stupid tariffs, and the Supreme Court said—no, emergency powers, I should say—and the Supreme Court, correctly, in my opinion, said, There’s no emergency. You don’t have these powers. You can’t oppose the tariffs. But this is a real shooting war. There’s no question; this is a war. Powers come with that. If anybody else were president right now, I think you and I would agree the president needs a broader range of powers to bring the war to a successful conclusion, achieve American aims, protect American lives, protect allied lives. But you fear he will make wicked use of those powers.
Nichols: “What presidential powers does he not make wicked use of?” is really the way to put it. Why would anyone assume that this is the set of powers that he will use with prudence and responsibility? Especially when you cannot trust the rationale behind this war. There was no gathering of allies. Bush 43 took a lot of static for the way he went into Iraq. Compared to this, that was lawyered up like a corporate merger compared to what Donald Trump has done: going to the UN, going to Congress, getting all those ducks in the row, going back to the UN a second time, even though, as you know, President Bush didn’t wanna do that that second time around. There’s none of that here. And so I don’t trust why this war was launched in the first place.
Right now, all I can say is our men and women are in action, and I wish them every success and to come home safely. But that doesn’t mean that we should stop asking questions about things like curtailing the president’s war powers, because—I think I can say with confidence—he will abuse them because he has abused all the other powers of his office and these are the most tempting powers there are.
Frum: Now, let me steelman this for a minute. Let me invoke people I know and I think you know who I know what they’re saying and thinking. And I don’t know how many people in the listenership or viewership will agree with this point of view, but it’s a point of view that is important in my social and personal circle, and maybe, Tom, in yours. So here’s the steelman: David, everything you say about Trump, true. Got it. Don’t disagree with you. But Iran has been a lethal danger to Americans since 1979—one atrocity after another, unceasing aggression, unceasing repression at home. Past presidents have all agreed something needed to be done, but nobody knew what to do. The Obama people sent them money. The Biden people allowed them to seize a warship and paid them more money to get the warship back. They’ve committed assassinations, acts of terrorism, and now we know that they’re massively rejected by their own people, who have sacrificed their lives by the thousands in a bid for freedom. This is the moment. This is the president who happens to be in charge at the moment. How can you say no to the Iranian people, and how can you forget all the crimes that Iran has inflicted against the United States and America’s friends all around the world?
Nichols: I’m going to answer with something Ken Adelman said after Iraq. You may have remembered, David, that some years ago, there was a piece in Vanity Fair called “Neo Culpa,” and it was a group of conservatives who had pushed for the second Gulf War who were now asked their second thoughts. It was people like [Richard] Perle and [Kenneth] Adelman and [Paul] Wolfowitz and others. And Adelman said, Look, your cause can be absolutely right but that you have to put it in the drawer that says Can’t do for now.
If we really decided that this was the moment, because of the regime’s weakness, to say, This is the time that we excise this malignancy from the planetary body politic, then do it by assembling your allies, by explaining your cause to the American people, by getting authorization of some kind from Congress. And by the way, as a side note here, my boss in 1991, Senator John Heinz, he wanted to invoke the War Powers Act. And I felt so strongly about presidential prerogative here that I actually kind of strong-armed my boss about why that’s a bad idea. He and a group of Republicans were going to enact it. And I said, Don’t do this. This is—
Frum: Against Gulf War One?
Nichols: Bush 41. Yeah, this was in the winter of 1990. And I said, Don’t do it, because I think it would be dangerous. So if you’re going to do it, I would say I still would be worried about this team and their motives doing it, but if somehow we have reached a national consensus, which we have not, and perhaps even something like an international consensus—maybe just our top five or six allies, as we did in 2003—to say, This is the time, then fine, do it.
This is not the way—just showing up and dropping a lot of steel on a lot of Iranian targets, and then saying, Well, we’ll see what happens. My biggest fear is that the steelman case about “How can you abandon the Iranian people at a time like this?,” my answer is, the way Trump does things and the way it’s looking right now, this is gonna be, as I think you and others have pointed out, this is a moral peril not seen since the Hungarian Revolution. We’re telling people to go out there and oppose their government and risk getting killed. If we’re gonna do that, we’d better be there.
Frum: So 1956, American radio, Voice of America and stations like that, were saying throughout the month of October of ’56 to the Hungarians, at a time when Soviet power looked a little wobbly, Rise up. Rise up. This is the moment. You will be helped. And they did rise up. And the United States did nothing to help them. And the Suez crisis erupted in the Middle East at the same time, and that had something to do with it, but basically, President [Dwight] Eisenhower was not going to touch it. And as you say, I think hundreds were killed. Thousands were made prisoner. A quarter of a million, I believe, were driven into exile.
Let me continue with the steelman now, remembering that, which is to say, Okay, it’s not the time, not the team. These guys can’t do it. That said, the president of the United States a month ago promised the Iranian people that help was on the way. You know he’s a bozo who speaks without meaning it. I know he’s a bozo who speaks without meaning it. But the Iranian people didn’t know that he’s—they thought he was a normal president, more or less, and they didn’t know that his word was worthless , and he said, I promise the United States of America, for whom I speak, promises to help you. Rise up. They did. They got killed in the thousands. They’re being tortured. They’re in prisons. And that promissory note has been issued, and, yes, it’s by President Bozo, but he’s authorized to speak on behalf of a great and good nation.
Nichols: To answer that steelman argument, so the argument is, because we screwed up and baited the Iranian people into thinking we were going to do this, we have now maneuvered ourselves into a corner where, on the fly, pretty much by the seat of our pants, we’re going to do this because of a situation of our own creation. It’s kind of like the argument that the administration was making that we had to go because the Iranians were kind of forward-leaning and were about to hit us. Turns out that wasn’t true. But the reason we were worried that they were going to hit us is because we had amassed a giant armada packed into a pretty convenient set of target packages around Iran. This is the kind of “killing your parents and then claiming you’re an orphan” problem.
If we wanna do this, state it clearly; go to the American people. We had a State of the Union just before this, and it was a carnival. It was a variety show. It was embarrassing. No explanation to the American people that their sons or daughters may be killed. No discussion with Congress, not even bullying of Congress to say, Look, I’m gonna have to do things, and you’re gonna have to get on board, which is what previous presidents did. No after explanation.
The other day, I put up on social media a screenshot of Ronald Reagan, who went on television in prime time from the Oval Office to address the American people in 1986 about a one-night strike on [Libyan ruler Muammar] Gaddafi, on a nation of 7.5 million people. We have gone to war against 92 million people with an eight-minute video of Grandpa in his silly hat.
So again, my answer to the steelman case is, I grant you everything—that this is a terrible regime, it should be gone—but you cannot defend the way this is being done. And in the end, if the Iranian people are again destroyed by their own government, that blood is gonna be on our hands because we baited them into it.
You know—then I’ll get off this soapbox, David—but one thing that really bothered me is Centcom and the White House both saying to the Iranian government and the Iranian security and military forces, Lay down your arms. Surrender. Surrender to whom? There’s nobody there. To ask Iranian cops—forget about the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] or the real heavies—asking any local security forces to lay down their weapons, you might as well ask them to blow their own brains out.
It’s ironic, right, that Hegseth says, We’re not like these previous [administrations], but as you say, Rumsfeld on steroids. Trump loathes Barack Obama, and yet his strategy here seems to be exactly what Obama did, minus a few more allies, in Libya.
Frum: Well, the State of the Union point that you make is very powerful because there was Trump, I think just hours before, days before the beginning of the strike, and he went to Congress—he didn’t just not make the case for a war. He went out and humiliated members of Congress: Stand up; sit down. Stand up; sit down. Why won’t you stand up when I tell you to stand up? I’m the king. Everyone rises when the king speaks. He insulted them. He berated them. He had previously called the Supreme Court, or six of nine judges, in the sway of a foreign power. Then he said, Oh, by the way, I’m gonna be back in a few days for a multibillion-dollar supplemental appropriation to pay for this war I never asked you to authorize. So that’s bad.
But what’s also bad—and here’s, again, to continue with what this imagined, or not so imagined, circle of my friends would say, is, Look, Trump does actually have a plan. He’s a little shy about admitting it because it doesn’t sound very nice. But his plan is the same plan as in Venezuela but on a bigger scale, which is, with the Israelis, to kill everybody in the top 40 positions in the government and then to keep killing people until you find someone who says, Okay, I’ll do what you want. And then when you find the guy who says, I’ll do what you want, you say, Okay, good. You’re now in charge. And that plan, although unlovely—Anne Applebaum, our colleague, has written very powerfully about the abandonment of Iranian democracy—if the goal is: We have to get from here to there while keeping the electricity going, the water projects working. There are hospitals in Iran that have to keep functioning. Children do need to go to school. I presume there’s some kind of pension system; the pensions need to get to be paid. And on your way to whatever a better future is, in the six months after the collapse of the old regime, someone needs to run the place, and maybe a former insider is the best way to get you from point here to point there. And that seems to be Trump’s plan, to the extent he’s got a plan, is what would be said.
Nichols: Well, yeah, I’m having flashbacks now because these were the same arguments that I had,and I’m sure you had back during the second Gulf War, where I did say—I admit it—I said, Look, I don’t know what comes after [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein], but it has to be better than Saddam. Chaos would be better than Saddam because of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and terrorism and all the things. And I admit it—I said, I couldn’t really imagine things getting much worse. And then we made it worse, right? We disbanded the Iraqi army. We did all kinds of stupid things.
But to take this and to compare it, say, to Venezuela, we eliminated exactly one level of leadership in one person, and then we said to the vice president, Okay, fine, you can run things. That’s not gonna happen here. This is a total—
Frum: Well, the 40 top leaders are already dead, so.
Nichols: They’re already dead. At some point, this is an ideological regime. This is a totalitarian ideological regime. Now, there is a huge amount of corruption. I read—I think it was somebody writing in The Atlantic pointed out—that it used to be 80 percent true believers, 20 percent kind of charlatans and hangers-on. Now it’s the other way around: It’s 80 percent charlatans and 20 percent true believers.
Great. But in the meantime, you have a gigantic country. This isn’t even Iraq, and Iraq was hard enough. You have this gigantic country of 92 million people that could fracture into some authorities—you’ll get a patchwork of authorities across the country, and that leaves open a lot of mischief.
Frum: It’s only about 60 percent ethnically Persian, as we’re all about to learn.
Nichols: Yes, we’re all about to learn some things. We’re all about to go through some things.
So I think part of the problem is the steelman case rests on, Yeah, these are all valid objections, but we’re in it now. Well, that’s a hell of a way to do foreign policy. The car’s off the cliff and turning to the guy in the next seat and saying, Well, fine, you drive.
Frum: Okay, well, we are—okay, but—
Nichols: But we are in it.
Frum: We are in it. (Laughs.)
Nichols: We’re in it, so that’s—
Frum: And some tactical military successes have been [achieved]. That underwrites it: Some very important tactical military successes have been achieved, as much by the Israelis as by the United States. And part of the problem—and I say this as a great friend of Israel and on their side—but it does seem like they have a clear idea of where they’re driving the car to, and the United States is a little bit along for the ride.
Nichols: Well, yeah, and I suspect that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has learned how, as most world leaders have, they’ve learned how to manipulate Donald Trump. And I’m sure there’s been whispering in Donald Trump’s ear about You’re gonna be the liberator of Iran. There will be songs written to you for centuries. There will be statues in Tehran. Look, Bill Clinton’s got a statue in Bosnia; you need one. I’m sure he’s hearing all that stuff and responding to it the way we know Donald Trump responds to visions of glory and flattery.
But here’s where I wanna be a War College professor for a minute. One of the things we always warn our students is: Operational successes do not by themselves translate into strategic success. The first two years, the first year and a half of World War II was nothing but a string of Japanese operational successes. Things don’t turn around until midway, and we, frankly—let’s face it—too, at midway, we caught a huge amount of breaks and some real luck to turn that around. But the Japanese in 1945, saying, How can this be? It was two years of winning.
So you really have to be careful with—and I’ve said this both to the steelman arguers, Look, this isn’t over; hold the U.S.A chants, just as to the doomers, of whom I am not one, by the way; I’m concerned, but I’m not a doomer. Saying, Listen, there are some ways this can go right, even under Donald Trump, even with this team in charge. They could, in fact, find their way to a better outcome, and we’d all have to be the first one to say, Not a fan of Donald Trump, would never vote for him, but if he does manage to liberate Iran, send our congratulations.
Frum: I just finished reading a book. It was a book based on the Japanese war archives, and the question is: “Okay, what did they think they were doing when they struck Pearl Harbor?” And the answer is: It was exactly Hegsethism. The civilian leadership was intimidated and weak, and they said, Well, what we’re going to do is we’re going to seize Southeast Asia, hit the American fleet, and then see. (Laughs.)
Nichols: Right. There were some Japanese—
Frum: And what then? Who knows. Your guess is as good as mine. (Laughs.) Something good, maybe. (Laughs.)
Nichols: Fate is a harsh mistress, David. There were some guys in the room who went, The Americans are not—that’s a big country you’re tangling with. And the answer they got was—literally, there were people in the Japanese high command saying, Once we destroy their fleet in Pearl Harbor, they won’t like it, but they’ll understand.
This is something I worry about—again, sort of basic strategic analysis, right? I’m worried that the people in Washington are doing a lot of mirror-imaging. They’re doing a lot of what strategic analysis calls “script writing”: If we do this, they’re gonna do that. And then when they do that, that opens it for us to do this. And it’s all very convenient and congenial to your own assumptions. And I think that a lot of that is going on. But as you say, have they thought through what happens if the Iranians decide, We don’t care. We’ll go out in a blaze of glory. We’ll fire everything at everybody? Are we gonna put ground troops in?
Frum: Well, as we saw in Iraq, I think the military does think a lot about questions like “What if they decide to go out in a place of glory and fire every missile at once?” I’m sure there’s a good plan for that. What is never planned for is “What if everything collapses? And what if you kill everybody, the IRGC take their money and flee, and the electricity stops; the water stops?” It’s not a very forgiving human environment, and there are chronic water problems. What happens if the waterworks stop working? What happens if there isn’t a government and then, whatever organized crime networks exist in Tehran, they become the most powerful force or the IRGC turns into a mafia?
Nichols: I was just gonna say, we should learn from other cases of regime collapse—not just regime change by war, but regime collapse—the former Soviet Union. What happens to the KGB? Well, it turns out they become a powerful mafia and they run the country. What if the IRGC says, We’re the most organized group in this shitshow here, if I can use one expletive, and we’ll get the water back on; we’ll get the electricity going?
But I think the other problem is: Who decides when a war is over? The loser, right? That’s an old adage of strategy. The loser decides when the war is over, unless you literally kill every single person. But it’s the losers who say when it’s done. What if they say, Look, we’ll drag this on forever. We’ll commit terrorist acts. We’ll keep stuff in reserve and blow the occasional thing up. Fine, you’re gonna scuttle part of our fleet; we’ll make the [Strait] of Hormuz practically unnavigable for insurance companies.
In my article—and I know it’s a line you know well from the old days—Barbara Bodine, talking after the war in Iraq, she said, There’s 500 ways to do this wrong and only two or three ways to do it right. And what I didn’t count on is that we were gonna try all 500 ways first.
Frum: Yeah, well, on your point about the loser deciding, I remember reading a memoir of post-war Japan and the memoir writer just marveling that, in the spring of 1946, individual American officers unarmed could go to the market and shop and buy things, and everybody was polite to them. There is no assassination. There was no harassment. They didn’t have to put on a sidearm to go buy things in the market. The society jad collectively decided, We accept you. We accept this outcome. And the United States, in turn, by the way, one of the reasons the Japanese occupation went the way that it did, said to everybody, And by the way, just about everybody here is forgiven. And whoever was the assistant minister of streetcars before is still assistant minister of streetcars today.
Nichols: It was a completely different approach to war. And this administration, it’s almost like the president’s speeches are foreign-policy Mad Libs, where we’re “fire” and just “like I’ve never seen” and “lay down your weapon,” but “this is your moment” and “freedom” and “we’re not—” Who is he talking to? In both Gulf Wars, we, the United States, made an effort to reach out to some of these guys and say, Listen—in Gulf One, I know, particularly—if you use chemical weapons, you are not going to be able to try a Nuremberg defense. We sent word to various generals. Understand what will happen to you. Instead, Trump says, Everybody out there, if you resist us, you get certain death, blood, gore in the streets, but lay down your weapons. I feel like, was there any preparation for this?
Frum: What should you and I, what should anyone who cares about our voices, what should anyone who is watching or listening who shares broadly our perspective, what should we do now? Because American personnel are in harm’s way. We want the United States to succeed in its foreign-policy objectives. This seems, in the abstract, a good cause. And, yeah, it’s run by unworthy—the clowns are the best one. It’s [run] by unworthy people, both morally and intellectually unworthy. But it’s done. There’s no undoing this. What does Tom Nichols, what does David Frum, what do people who care what we think, what should we think and say?
Nichols: Well, if somehow tomorrow Trump fired everybody and he said, Okay, Tom and David, come on in. You’ve got your shot. You got five minutes for an elevator pitch, I would say, This is the time to find somebody that you can talk to. Don’t keep doing this damage that you don’t wanna have to fix later. Go to Congress now—because even I’m getting to the point where I think Congress should invoke the War Powers [Resolution] because there’s a whole issue of constitutionality here that I think we alighted in previous wars that is now completely thrown out the window. And to say to the Iranians, Here’s the new deal: You are going to change your type of government. You are going to stop killing people. Here’s the list of demands. Sign here and you may get away with what’s left of your regime.
Trump’s answer seems to be—and I would say, if I were standing there, I’d say, Mr. President, you can’t kill everybody in Tehran and then say, Now form a government. That’s just not how it works. So you’ve killed the worst guys. Now find the less-worst guys and, basically, get them to seal their own doom over time. But the more that it’s done at the point of American weapons, the more opening there is for all kinds of chaos that could make even worse people more empowered and lose the—this is something very important to point out, not to you, David, but I know that a lot of folks think of Iran as “Death to America” and the whole country hates us. That is not true. The Iranians are an educated, modern people who, actually, a lot of them have a fair amount of affection for the United States, as ironic as that is after everything we’ve been involved with going back to 1953. But you don’t wanna lose that by creating a serious situation where everything gets just pounded into rubble and then people start blaming the nations around the world.
And speaking of blame, I will jump on one thing. Yeah, I think we’re here in this terrible situation because of people like Obama. I don’t take back anything I wrote about Obama’s feckless foreign policy in the Middle East. But the answer to it was not to throw all the cards up in the air and say, Screw it. Let’s just bomb the crap out of everything and see what happens. That is the pendulum in completely the other direction, and I am still really anxious that this is not gonna turn out well.
Frum: Yeah, I have a particular dog in this fight because I’m on record as saying—and people often say this is contradictory, and I keep insisting it’s not—I was against the Iran deal while it was being negotiated. I was against signing the Iran deal. And I was against it in great part because Iran got its benefits up front; the United States got its benefits on the back end. Once signed, once you have made the mistake of signing a deal where the other guy gets his benefits up front, you don’t tear up the deal. He’s already got the $90 billion of unfrozen assets that the Iranians got. At that point, your next choice is, having signed this stupid thing, enforce it, and don’t exit. (Laughs.)
Nichols: For anybody out there who thinks that all of us conservatives from the old days are meeting at the meadows and coordinating our views, the fact that I was exactly—and I was not yet at The Atlantic; you and I were not yet regularly talking—that was exactly my position as well. I was against this thing while it was being negotiated for exact—I said, This violates some basic rules of diplomacy, which is that you don’t front them the hamburger for the money you’re gonna get Tuesday. You don’t do any of that.
Frum: (Laughs.) Right.
Nichols: But once you’re in it and the whole rest of the international community, including your closest allies, have signed on to it, you’re stuck with it, and then you have to make it work. Then it’s the only game in town. And the Iranians,, they were as happy as could be when Trump said, Fine, screw it. We’re out of this. And they said, Great, so are we.
Frum: Well, at that point, the alternative was war, the war we’ve now got.
Nichols: The war we’ve got. But, again, let’s not fall down that hole, either. We’re not fighting this war over nuclear weapons.
Frum: No. We’re fighting over regime change that the administration won’t acknowledge that it’s doing. This is a problem of going in without allies and having alienated all the allies. Supposing we get real lucky, supposing we find somebody who’s assistant to the assistant to the president, he survives, he’s got enough juice to make his writ run, and he says, Right, we’re dealing with the Americans, and we’re undertaking a transition to a better future, and we’re leaving aside the anti-American ideology. We’re giving up terrorism, and we win. We really win; we win the war we want. At that point, it’s still going to be true that Iran doesn’t have enough water for its cities. It’s still going to be true that this country that was on its way to being, had it not—and I quoted this chart where, from 1960 to 1980, the growth in the Iranian and the Portuguese standard of living is identical. Today, in 2020, Iran is really no richer per person than it was in 1980, and Portugal is a fully paid-up member of the first world, the OECD. It’s a wonderful place. And Iran today could be Portugal, but they’re not; they’re poor. So we’re gonna have to help them. We’re gonna have to make sure they have drinking water. And that’s going to cost a lot of money, more, maybe, than the war itself. And Trump has, again and again, made it clear to his base: The United States is not putting up that money. Well, who is?
Nichols: I can think of at least one country that’d be more than happy to do it: China. Or other countries that, perhaps, do not have America’s best interests at heart. The Chinese have been masters at the game of walking in and saying, Listen, the American money always comes with strings, and they’re annoying, and democracy, blah, blah, blah. Here, we’ll just help you build stuff, and we won’t ask any questions.
Frum: And you can take 10 percent off the top, and we budgeted for that.
Nichols: And we budgeted for that, exactly. (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.)
Nichols: It’s a lot of overhead. Everybody’s got overhead, David.
But I think it’s a serious problem, right? This does kind of put the screws to Russia a bit. Again, in that mythical moment where you and I get to walk into the Oval and say, Okay, here’s things you oughta do, and say, Oh, and by the way, Mr. President, now is the time to put the screws to Russia and help the Ukrainians really push this thing, because now the Russians have lost a friend, and that’s a good thing. But when Trump talks about this war going on for five weeks, my answer is: To do what?
Frum: To do what. Well, and this is where the refusal to think about reconstruction becomes an impediment to the war aims, because one of the things that the United States came out of World War II with a reputation for was: If you do fight the Americans and you do lose, they help you.
Nichols: Right? What’s the movie I’m trying to think of? The Mouse That Roared, right?
Frum: The Mouse That Roared.
Nichols: We’re a poor country. We need reconstruction. We’ll pick a war with the Americans, and they’ll come in, and they’ll think—it was a hilarious movie, from the ’60s, even, that people knew that. So, yeah, that was part of the deal.
Frum: And there used to be a Twitter account called Good President Trump, imagining him—
Nichols: (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.)
Nichols: I imagine that person just gave up.
Frum: That gave up. Actually, it was interesting because it was illustrated with an image of Donald Trump with a bald head, like he’d accepted it.
Nichols: (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.) But Good President Trump would say, And by the way, if you do lay down your arms, that we and our allies are going to be there with the money you need to have proper waterworks, to have the electricity, to improve your roads, to send people back to school, to make universities more broadly accessible. Our goal for you is that those 40 years of development or 45 years of development or 50 years of development you missed since 1979, we’re gonna put you back on that track. And the vision is, 40 years from now, you will look like Portugal.
Nichols: And the United States will now have several friends and allies in that region, including a country of 92 million people who, just as Germany and Japan did, are gonna feel pretty warmly about what happened. None of that is on the table, none of it. As you know, I was working through the weekend and working nights, so I purposely slept through Hegseth’s 8 a.m. briefing, which is why I think he has them at 8 a.m., by the way, ’cause he doesn’t think anybody’s watching. But caught up on it later, it’s just insane. It’s all chest-thumping, Conan the Barbarian stuff, not the kind of thing that’s gonna make anybody in Iran say, You know what I oughta do? I oughta trust Pete Hegseth that I should lay down my arms and everything will be okay. To some extent, by what we’re doing, we’re putting some of these guys on death ground. And that’s a bad plan.
Frum: This is the part that they really seem unconstitutionally capable of dealing with, which is to say to whomever emerges, And if you have a plan for a transition to democracy and if you stop repressing, you will live. We won’t ask too many questions about your bank accounts. There’s a role for you. We are not actually planning on killing you all. We offer amnesty and exit if [it’s] as part of a plan to make a transition to a better future for Iran, which is gonna be defined by the Iranians but shaped by the values of all the people who are going to—and this is the key point—help you pay for it.
Nichols: Yes, and the thing I was gonna say about a transition to democracy—or something less oppressive than the thing we just overthrew. We get it, that it’s not gonna happen tomorrow. We’ve learned our lessons. We’re not gonna send you copies of The Federalist Papers and say, Here’s your homework. Just as I think we should have done in Iraq—there was a plan, I guess, from the British to say, Look, if we don’t disband the military, we take a bunch of generals, and we say, We’re gonna put this country under military rule for now, and we’re watching you, and you’re gonna have to transition to a civilian government, and all the time, with Uncle Sam and the allies saying, Don’t screw this up, because we can come back here any time. Instead, we’re simply saying, Hey, people in Iran, kill your government, and go take power. And we’re not coming, by the way.
Everything that Trump is saying, and I really wanna emphasize this, so much of what Trump is talking about would be more credible if he were talking about doing it backed by ground troops, and I don’t want him to do that. Even though we’re off the cliff, there are still dumb things we can do. Even as the car is plunging, we can unbuckle our seat belts and try and stand on the roof. There are things that we shouldn’t do and that I’m worried that, because Trump is a man who can never admit a mistake, that he will double down. ’Cause you know him, David, that’s what he does with everything. This administration always does that, and sooner or later, I think something could happen where Trump’s gonna wanna double down.
This is the time to think about “What do we want? What are we satisfied with? Who’s gonna guide what happens next?” And I don’t think anybody’s thinking about that right now—or let me put it a different way: I’m sure there are people thinking about that that no one’s listening to right now.
Frum: Yeah. Well, let’s finish here but with this thought, which is: We all wish a safe return home for the Americans in harm’s way. We all wish a better future for the people of Iran. We all wish this situation will be resolved quickly and with minimal harm to innocent people. And as much as our mental skepticism is engaged, our hearts are in sympathy with all of those who face danger in this war that didn’t have to happen but has begun.
Nichols: And I’ll add only one other thing: that whatever my thoughts about this particular government, that the good Lord guides them and grants them some insight and wisdom in doing this because they are the civil authorities right now and they have to do this, and so I think it’s important to point out that I hope they do it well, despite my worries.
Frum: Look, God’s probably doing his part as best he can, but Trump doesn’t listen to him, either. (Laughs.)
Nichols: (Laughs.)
Frum: All right. Always a pleasure to talk to you.
Nichols: It was great to see you, David.
Frum: Thank you so much.
Nichols: Thank you.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Tom Nichols for joining me today. As I mentioned at the top of the show, there will be no book talk this week. But I do wanna thank you for viewing and listening to the show and remind you that if you wanna support the work of Tom and me, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will like and share this dialogue on whatever platform you use. Thank you so much for watching and listening to The David Frum Show, and I look forward to joining you again next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.