Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Ed Luce:

There will be basically multipolar disorder. There will be vacuums, power oppose a vacuum. Different actors will rush into it. So I would say Trump’s foreign policy is not going well.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Ed Luce. He’s the Chief US commentator at the Financial Times where he has covered US and global politics for 30 years. Luce is out with a new book called Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet. We’ll talk about this influential figure in American history and the state of the US on the world stage, but first in lieu of the typical Q&A, I am instead joined by Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour to talk about Israel’s recent strikes on Iran’s military infrastructure and the escalating conflict that has ensued since. Sadjadpour is a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That’s all coming up. Stay tuned.

Karim Sadjadpour is an expert on Iran and a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Karim Sadjadpour, welcome back to the show. Thanks for being with us.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Great to be with you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

So you and I have had these discussions from time to time about goings-on in Israel, Iran, the conflicts that have been ongoing for a very long time. So you have some perspective on this. Could we start by your giving your sense to the listener on the geopolitical Richter scale as we sit here today, recording on Wednesday, June 18th, how big a deal all of this is, and however you want to define all of this as it relates to Iran and Israel and the United States?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I think as of now, Preet, I would give it an eight out of 10 score on the Richter scale. I’m not sure if Richter scales have a 10-point scale.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t think it goes to 10, but that’s fine.

Karim Sadjadpour:

So it’s a seven. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

It gives us a sense of … And why is that? Because on prior occasions when there had been skirmishes and leaders have been assassinated, you would not have assigned it an eight. Why are you assigning this an eight?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Well, for a couple reasons. Number one, we have a conflict right now between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel, which is a nuclear power. And so at some point, if Israel feels that their existence is at stake, they have nuclear weapons may be prepared to use them. Number two, there is a distinct possibility that in the coming days, President Trump may feel the need to enter this war specifically to destroy an Iranian nuclear facility in the city of Fordow, which is built half a mile underground, which I think both American and Israeli officials understand Israel cannot do. US has the plane for that, the B-52 and the 30,000 pound bunker busters that would require to hit a facility that deep. And then finally, we’re talking about the potential implosion or certainly the instability, destabilization of an Iranian regime that’s been in power since 1979. And the potential change of that regime could have profound global geopolitical implications. So this is, in my view, an eight out of 10 crisis now, perhaps a nine, which could rapidly move to a 10.

Preet Bharara:

Since 1979, have there been other moments that would rank as high on the question of the viability of the Iranian regime?

Karim Sadjadpour:

There have been a couple moments when the regime really looked to be on its heels, including most recently a couple years ago when we had the Woman, Life, Freedom protest. That was as a result of internal tumult. We’ve never had this situation, certainly not since the Iran-Iraq war, which was very different because Iran was then fighting Saddam Hussein’s army, which was similar in strength or weakness to Iran. Now, you have Iran in a direct conflict with the greatest military in the Middle East, the state of Israel, and potentially against the greatest military superpower in the world, the United States. And so currently, they’re under enormous, enormous external pressure. That hasn’t yet translated in my view, to signs that the regime is on the verge of internal implosion.

The things that you would look for are elite fissures, right? Elite defections, popular tumult. At the moment, the Iranian population is under aerial bombardment and they’re not, I don’t think, thinking about waging political protests. They’re just worried about their day-to-day security. But when the dust settles in the coming days and weeks and months, the regime’s legitimacy could certainly be impacted.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to ask a dumb question. Does all of this go away for Iran? Does the existential threat to the regime go away? Does peace get established if they simply credibly renounce any near-term or medium-term interest in developing a nuclear capability?

Karim Sadjadpour:

That was the deal that was on offer for them last week from President Trump. President Trump, he didn’t care about regime change. He said even this regime can be good. He didn’t even Iran transforming its conduct in the Middle East to say, “You have to stop supporting these proxies like Hezbollah.” All he said is you can’t enrich uranium. Now, obviously, the United States and then Israel are at the moment things could change next week, but at the moment in a much stronger position than Iran. And what Trump tweeted yesterday were the words unconditional surrender.

Preet Bharara:

Right. What does that mean?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I don’t know if he necessarily knows what that means.

Preet Bharara:

He saw it in a movie.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Unconditional surrender. He wants someone to wave a white flag.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Well, it’s remarkable that we have probably a multi-billion dollar strategic communications enterprise in the State Department and Pentagon and elsewhere, and America’s strategic communications right now are being driven by the telephone of President Trump.

Preet Bharara:

Are there domestic reasons why the regime won’t, at least for now, stand down on nukes?

Karim Sadjadpour:

So the danger that any dictator faces is that they look weak in the eyes of their own people. In some ways, the situation Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader is in right now has parallels with the situation Saddam Hussein was in 2003, in which he was essentially given an ultimatum. Either stand down, surrender and look weak in the eyes of your people, be humiliated, or you risk an all-out war with the United States. And he didn’t take the threat of the second option perhaps sufficiently seriously. And we know what happened. And I think similarly, based on the speech that he gave this morning, Ayatollah Khamenei, his speech was one of defiance to say, “We’re not going to surrender. We’re going to continue to fight.” So he hasn’t given indication that he’s prepared to meet those terms.

Preet Bharara:

You wrote a few days ago, something interesting. We know from history the full impact of Israel’s attack on Iran will take years to unfold, and then you write, “It could prevent an Iranian bomb or ensure one.” What’s the scenario in which it would ensure an Iranian bomb?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Okay, so this is I think the profound choice that President Trump has before him, because there’s risks of action, which we can talk about, and there’s risks of inaction. The risk of inaction here is that if one month from now, two months from now, the Islamic Republic of Iran and its nuclear program in Fordow remain intact, you’re dealing with a regime which is much more likely to believe that it needs nuclear weapons to have a cloak of protection, right? And what is likely to happen then is you have a revanchist angry regime in which you have security forces who are much more empowered. They were significantly empowered as of last week, but even more so, and rapid pursuit, not in deliberate pursuit of nuclear weapons. And that is a real possibility, which in some ways I think the Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to attack Iran was in a way trying to hasten that choice for President Trump, to have him enter the war.

Preet Bharara:

A question that I have is, there have been things that Israel has done, and you and I have talked about this, that have shown off incredible intel-gathering prowess and ability to creatively and ingeniously attack enemies, including the beeper gambit with Hezbollah and many other things, that there have also been gaping intelligence failures as we saw with October 7th. So it seems that a lot of what’s fraught about all this is how accurate the doomsday clock is. So Israel engages in some attacks. The reports are that they have set back the nuclear program of Iran by six and a half weeks, four hours two minutes, or competing reports that they’ve not set it back at all.

There’s a lot riding on that doomsday clock and the accuracy of it. And it seems to me that a lot of what you’re talking about and the success of Iran versus its adversaries depends on knowing that timeframe because I assume it’s the case and I don’t know if you agree, that if you believed in the accuracy of your doomsday clock, particularly in Fordow where that manufacturing and enrichment is going on, that any president, including Donald Trump would say okay to the bunker-busting bomb, is all that fair?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Well, Preet, I think this issue is going to be written about for decades to come. Just how close was Iran to acquiring nuclear weapons, President Trump himself, it’s been widely reported, was telling Prime Minister Netanyahu last month, “Relax, we got this. Allow negotiations to be seen through.” His own director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had said, at the moment, there’s no active intelligence that they’re on the verge of weaponizing their program. Since this military action was taken, President Trump’s words have changed. So we know that Iran has been taking this deliberate approach towards the nuclear weapons capability. My view was always that they wanted to be like Japan to be a screwdriver turn away from having a bomb but not necessarily to turn that screw. Did that require military action as of last Friday? I don’t think that that was what was driving Prime Minister Netanyahu.

I think what was driving Prime Minister Netanyahu, I think there was three sources of urgency for him. One in addition to how close they were inching towards weaponization. Two was that Israel had taken out Iran’s air defense forces last fall. And so they felt they had a limited window of time to attack again before Iran was able to rebuild those forces. But three, and perhaps most importantly, Prime Minister Netanyahu feared that Trump was capable of doing a deal with Iran, which would limit but not eliminate the nuclear program. And that was the same kind of deal that he opposed under President Obama, which Trump himself opposed, that it was the worst deal in history. And I think that that was perhaps the greatest source of urgency that Netanyahu had was to sabotage that prospect.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I guess as a caveman diplomat, what I don’t understand is, why isn’t the stance of the United States in alliance with Israel and in alliances with all the other countries in the region and elsewhere, why is in our stance, no nukes today, no nukes tomorrow, no nukes ever, and is one reason to allow a face-saving way for the regime to come to the table, because otherwise, an absolutist view on no nukes would seem to make common sense. No?

Karim Sadjadpour:

We’re living in very idiosyncratic times. It’s not State Department deliberations or Pentagon deliberations which are driving US action right now. It’s really the impulses of Donald Trump. And I don’t mean that facetiously. I think it’s the reality that … The New York Times did a wonderful, very detailed play by play of Trump’s evolution on Iran over the last few months. And you see that this is a president who came to office wanting to do deals, and he’d said that the three thorniest conflicts in the world, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and the Iran nuclear challenge he was planning to resolve in 24 hours. Well, he failed to do that in Russia, Ukraine. Failed to do that in Israel, Gaza. And he had a sense of urgency to get something done with Iran.

And what transpired over the last couple months is this combination of the persistence and insistence of Prime Minister Netanyahu coupled with the defiance of Iran’s supreme leader. Remember, he had sent Steve Witkoff to at least six rounds of negotiations with Iran, and the talks didn’t seem to be yet materializing. That’s not to say they wouldn’t have materialized, but negotiating Iran, it’s not a 48-hour process. And so I think he lost his patience and he lost his will to continue to give Prime Minister Netanyahu the red light.

Preet Bharara:

What would be the consequence in terms of international relations and blowback if tomorrow Trump gave the green light and sent the US bomber to take care of Fordow?

Karim Sadjadpour:

It’s one of those situations in which Don Rumsfeld famously talked about, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. So it’s hard to imagine that dropping a 30,000-pound bomb on an enriched uranium facility. Uranium enrichment facility is now going to have enormous consequences, whether that’s potential environmental damage, radiation. This is something that the neighboring Gulf countries are very worried about. How does Iran respond to that? Do they feel like, okay, this is a doomsday moment for them and they unleash everything they have against regional energy infrastructure and global trade corridors like the Strait of Hormuz?

And then the impact on Iran internally. As I said, I’ve long thought this is one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East. They aspire to be South Korea, not North Korea. It’s a country, it’s a population which wants to live in a more representative, tolerant, open system, friendly relationship with the United States. The impact of something like this could have a decades-long tail, and there are profound consequences either way. There’s consequences of inaction if a month from now the regime is intact and its nuclear facility is intact and there’s consequences of action. And this is the moment that President Trump finds himself in.

Preet Bharara:

Can give you a quick pop quiz?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Do you know roughly the population of Iran?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I saw Tucker Carlson had asked Ted Cruz about that. Said 92 million.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Did you know that before you saw the interview? I believe you did.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Actually, it was assuming it was 91 million, but I saw it’s 91.5. So he rounded up.

Preet Bharara:

Serious question though. I hate to agree with either one of those gentlemen on anything, but did Tucker Carlson have a point about a vocal senator not knowing enough about the country that it hopes to attack?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Dunking on Iran is one of the easiest things you can do in the context of domestic American politics in that it’s a regime which is almost like a Disney caricature of evil, right? Its official slogan is Death to America. It’s ruled by only men who look like evil Disney characters. It’s a misogynistic regime. It’s socially repressive, politically repressive, economically … So there’s a very small lobby in the United States. This is going to oppose you if you say mean things about Iran. And then there’s the reality that men of Ted Cruz’s generation, a formative event for them was the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, right? And so there’s been no US embassy in Tehran since 1979. So that doesn’t surprise me. In addition to all of this is that Israel’s existence, Israel’s security is an issue that most members of Congress feel very passionate about. And Iran’s other slogan is Death to Israel.

But the question is not whether or not Iran is an adversary. I believe it is an adversary. I mean, they make no mistake about that, but it’s, what is the most effective policy and strategy to deal with such an adversary? And ultimately, in my view, the US goal is you want to facilitate Iran’s transformation from a regime whose organizing principle is revolutionary ideology to a government who the organizing principle is the national interest of Iran. Henry Kissinger famously said, “There are few nations in the world with whom the United States has more common interests and less reason to quarrel than Iran, but Iran has to decide whether it’s a nation or a cause.” And this is going to be a huge question, is dropping a 30,000-pound bomb on Iran, is that more likely to advance the cause of a positive political transformation or could it potentially entrench the nasty forces who’ve been ruling Iran for decades?

Preet Bharara:

By the way, is it your understanding that our military and intelligence community believes that a single bomb drop does the job or does there have to be multiple bombardments?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Rarely you will hear a definitive consensus answer, but I think certainly there’s a consensus among American military officials that it’s only something that the United States can do. I’ve spoken to some Israeli generals who think that they actually can do the job if they were to drop repeated bombs on that facility. But as Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone’s got it planned until they get punched in the face.” And so unpredictable.

Preet Bharara:

Well, what’s odd about all this is I can’t remember a time other than that one time I was accidentally allowed into Pete Hegseth’s Signal chat, but other than that, I can’t remember a time when the specifics of a military action were so openly discussed, the particular plane, the particular armament, the particular target, the particular location, the particular likelihood of success. So I wonder if the adversary of Iran, given all the transparent and public talk, has the ability to mitigate against that in ways that our intelligence is not gathering. Is there anything to that?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Anything is possible. I think, Preet, I want to be very humble in saying that, had we been having this conversation seven days ago and you asked me what is the likely outcome of everything that’s happening, I would’ve said, “Well, I think President Trump and Iran, they will reach some type of a limited nuclear deal.” I thought that’s where things were headed, and there was even negotiations meant to happen last weekend, and that proved out to be one of the great head fakes that the Iranians were not expecting that the Israelis would invade before upcoming negotiations. In this context, we know that Israel has been very effective in eliminating much of Iran’s air defense systems. And that’s probably one reason why President Trump is much more aggressive in his language than he would’ve been a couple weeks ago, because in some ways, it’s now a paved road for him. And Israel took out a lot of Iran’s proxies last fall, like Lebanese Hezbollah that would’ve been deterrent to such an attack.

The concern here though is that, again, is this meant to be performative and publicly threatening Iran in saying they need to unconditionally surrender or is our goal here to have the right outcome? And that the danger here is that you have a regime if they feel that it’s kill or be killed or that unconditional surrender would be tantamount to internal death, they may fight that and give it everything they have. That’s not the outcome you want if you’re the United States.

Preet Bharara:

Can we just do a brief thought experiment?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Uh-hmm.

Preet Bharara:

A circumstance in which there would be regime change. There’s been a lot of attention on the erstwhile shah of Iran’s son. Is there really a scenario in which he goes back and governs that country?

Karim Sadjadpour:

He has a lot of name recognition inside Iran, and there’s a great deal of nostalgia for how life was before the 1979 revolution. The challenge always is when you’re living thousands of miles away from a country, how do you organize? How do you come up with coherent men on the ground strategy organization? That’s a real challenge, even if you’re living inside a country, let alone trying to do that from thousands of miles away. And what we’ve learned over the decades from authoritarian transitions is that the way they oftentimes play out and end is not necessarily reflective of how a majority of that society wants to live. Even though, as I said, 80% of Iranians, I would argue, would love to live in a state that looks much more like South Korea than North Korea. In fact, yesterday, Preet, I was speaking to a group of business students, MBA students from India. And I said, “I think India actually can be a great role model for Iran because it’s a country which also for decades was more focused on anti-imperialism and opposing something rather than advancing its own national economic strengths and interests.”

And now India is this remarkable global economic and technological power. And I think likewise, the Iranians are very proud. They want to be sovereign, they want to be independent, but it’s a country which is punching way below its weight, right? Both in terms of its vast resources and its human capital. But the reality is that when it’s been transformed into this situation in which it’s profound insecurity and you have security forces with their fingers on the trigger, what comes out of that I fear is not liberal democracy, right? It’s not one person, one vote, it’s who has the guns and the organization. And at the moment, those are not liberal forces in Iran.

Preet Bharara:

My final question to you is, do you think that Tulsi Gabbard knows the population of Iran?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I doubt it.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. An honest answer. I appreciate that. Karim Sadjadpour, thanks so much for being with us again. I really appreciate it.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Thank you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Stay tuned. My conversation with Ed Luce is coming up. How is Trump handling US foreign policy? Ed Luce is a political and economic commentator for the Financial Times. Ed Luce, welcome back to the show.

Ed Luce:

Preet, it’s always a great pleasure.

Preet Bharara:

Or as I like to call you, behind your back, the Tocqueville of the UK. What do you think of that?

Ed Luce:

I like that. I like that.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a compliment.

Ed Luce:

It’s for sure a compliment. They’re the best Frenchmen ever. And amidst stiff competition, there are lots of great French people.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I say that because isn’t your title Chief US commentator?

Ed Luce:

It is. It is.

Preet Bharara:

Which is basically the Tocqueville seat at the Financial Times.

Ed Luce:

It kind of is. I can pick and choose. I wake up every morning and think, “Am I actually being paid to do this? Because it’s such a fascinating, pleasurable existence.” Now, of course, I do need to pay bills, so I’m glad I’m being paid. But …

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no, no, you recovered from that quickly because that was a bad labor position that you just staked out for yourself.

Ed Luce:

It was a really bad give up all negotiating advantage.

Preet Bharara:

So I want to talk about your book, about the Zbigniew Brzezinski and what it means for today, the lessons you learned in your research and reporting for that book. But before we get to that, there’s a lot of other stuff to talk about that’s going on in the contemporary world, such as it is. So I thought I’d start with a very basic broad and maybe difficult question. As the chief US commentator, how do you think the US is doing in the world at this moment?

Ed Luce:

I’d love to soften my answer and say, “It’s fine.”

Preet Bharara:

Don’t.

Ed Luce:

It’s doing very badly in the world. The world is conscious of the fact that America is dismantling the system it created. Remember that term that Dean Acheson, who was Harry Truman’s Secretary of State used that he was present at the creation, he meant the creation of the United Nations, of the World Bank, of the IMF, of NATO, of all the sort of things we later came to call the rules-based order. And we’re, of course, all aware that often those rules were flouted, but there were still rules. We’re now having the really odd spectacle. By we, I mean, the rest of the world, regardless of where you’re from, of watching the hegemon repudiate its hegemony. And what does that leave? It’s not that there is another hegemon waiting in the wings to step in because China is not going to be the next America. It’s that there will be basically multipolar disorder. There will be vacuums, power oppose a vacuum. Different actors will rush into it. So I would say Trump’s foreign policy is not going well.

Preet Bharara:

So can we take a step back and address the question as to why it would be that the best world order would contain a single dominant power, a single hegemon? We don’t think that way when we make up the order society of the United States. We have the balance of power, separation of powers. We have checks and balances. Why doesn’t that same principle apply to the world or does it?

Ed Luce:

It hasn’t historically. To some degree, under Britain, there was a Pax Britannica, and it wasn’t because Britain could brutally enforce itself on all the other Western powers. Of course, it did on large parts of the global south. But because it could have some cooperation from friends, partners, and allies. And America took that to a new level. It’s first among equals. It’s certainly the biggest and the most powerful, but its power, a lot of its power derives from having alliances, from having dozens and dozens of countries that work in concert with it and to some extent shape those decisions too. So it’s not a dictatorship. Maybe hegemony. Hegemony is a Marxist word. It was coined by the Italians.

Preet Bharara:

It is? Stop using it.

Ed Luce:

Yeah, I know it’s a very specific term, and it doesn’t mean dictator. It means first among equals. It means the person who sets the template, but it doesn’t mean to say they specify everything that’s going to happen.

Preet Bharara:

Let me ask the question in a different way. If you were able to wave a wand or construct the most stable, peaceful, and prosperous world order that you could, would you imagine it to have two or three dominant powers who were balanced against each other and maybe opposed to each other in alliance with each other? Would there be 10 powers that were semi-equal or would there be the single hegemon that we’ve had for a long time? If you were constructing, again, a stable, peaceful, prosperous world order from scratch.

Ed Luce:

So the only time that was attempted was in 1945, 6 after the Second World War. If you were to do it now, I would go back a few years to where America was still strong enough to be able to command the global agenda. And I would have present at the creation 2.0 where the United Nations is refurbished and given new legitimacy where the World Bank of the IMF have much stronger global south voices, where there is a system strong enough to outlive America’s hegemony and to contain China’s more overweening ambitions. You cannot have a global democracy like you have a national democracy. It has to be between governments, and of course, you hope those governments are democracies, but in practice, they’re not all going to be.

Some are going to be brutal authoritarian systems. You still need a forum where there are rules and where issues are discussed and where stuff that cannot be delayed, refugee crises, climate change impact, AI of course, autonomous warfare, these issues are not going to wait until the moment when China and America have suddenly … when the leopard has lied down with the kid. That’s just not going to happen. So we need a pragmatic, more relevant … I mean the UN Security Council’s still got Britain and France on it. It should have India for example.

Preet Bharara:

The question that I have as I think about foreign policy a lot, speaking generally, but you can be specific and you can talk about Brzezinski, if it’s relevant, is the extent to which a smart diplomat, a smart national security advisor, a smart Secretary of State or a smart president who has foreign policy issues to deal with, think about the near-term versus the longer-term and whether or not that’s influenced by domestic politics or something else. So for example, the idea of arming the mujahideen in the short-term in Afghanistan, long-term bad consequences. People have been talking a lot about the near-term arguable efficacy of the war against Hamas in Gaza, but the long-term creation and proliferation of animosity towards Israel and the creation of terrorists, short-term versus long-term. How should foreign policy people in the United States and elsewhere think about the short-term versus the long-term?

Ed Luce:

That’s a really good question. I’ll pick up on a second about the Brzezinski mujahideen question because that obviously had different impacts the further away you look. But the idea that there is ever such a thing as fixing history or fixing geopolitics or fixing foreign policy is one that we are sometimes prone to. We had the whole end of history period after the Cold War. The idea that we’ve settled our arguments and now we’re just going to … That preceded the period we’re now in, the revenge of geopolitics that we’re now living through. And I think Americans, because of American exceptions, and we’re a little bit more prone to thinking the US is suspended from the laws of history than other nations are partly aided by your geography. You are flanked by two great oceans, and normally under most presidents, you see both your neighbors as friends so that we can get onto that later.

Preet Bharara:

We’re so friendly that we may annex one of them.

Ed Luce:

So friendly. And you’ve thrust greatness upon Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, a guy who I’ve known for 35 years, by the way, he’s really, really performing well. But the Brzezinski example’s a really good one because he was quite Machiavellian with the Soviet Union. Remember the Carter administration was the first in many administrations that did not have the Vietnam albatross around its neck. And so it was the first in many administrations that took the ideological offensive back to the Soviet Union having been very defensive in the previous 15 or so years. And that involved human rights, but it also involved some Machiavellian moves. And when the day that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Brzezinski allegedly turned to his military aide and he said, “They’ve taken the bait.” That bait being to be sucked into a quagmire to get their own Vietnam. And there are debates amongst scholars, and I really go in detail in the book into this about the degree to which Brzezinski helped stoke Moscow’s paranoia to get it to invade.

But regardless of that, it did really help bring about the demise of the Soviet Union at the expense of Afghanistan, which was a wrecked country. And it also empowered a lot of radical Islamist groups. Now, after 911, Brzezinski was dubbed by some as the Godfather of Al-Qaeda. I think it’s a little bit unfair because Al-Qaeda only came into existence in 1987 and Carter left office in 1981. But though there is some truth to the allegation that it really did rocket boost Islamism and Brzezinski did take this question many times. And what he said was, “No, look, in terms of scale of threat to the United States, the Soviet Union, the nuclear armed Soviet Union was a different order of magnitude to Al-Qaeda, to which we are overreacting in terms of invading Iraq, giving places like Putin’s Russia or get out of jail free card to round up anybody they call a terrorist.” So he did deal with that question and he unsurprisingly said, “No, the short-term gain was worth the long-term unintended side effect.”

Preet Bharara:

Is there any parallel or analogy that can be drawn between or lessons learned between the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan and the Russian incursion into Ukraine?

Ed Luce:

I think that there is a lot, actually. The situation during the Cold War was that the Soviets wanted to contain threats on their frontier that was seen as the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, these mullahs all rebelling. That’s what made Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, paranoid, but also to export the revolution that was the Soviet Union’s ideology. Vladimir Putin, when he said that the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, what he really meant was not the end of Marxism or Bolshevism. He meant the end of the Russian Empire. And he’s been busy trying to reconstitute it.

Ukraine, of course, is the most important piece of the former USSR. It was the biggest sort of chunk that was lost. And actually this is something Brzezinski would say frequently, and he said in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War that Russia with Ukraine is a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine is not, and Ukraine is the difference. And Putin knows that difference. So I think yes, it could end up being Putin’s Vietnam II or Waterloo. It could end up being Putin’s Waterloo. I’m less certain of that since Trump came to office than I would’ve been a year ago.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve always understood and was taught when I studied these things that democracy was good and the proliferation of democracies was good for stability in the world order. And you can talk separately about whether it’s good for prosperity and for dignity and human rights and all that other stuff, but good for stability. Is that still true given that … and the reason for the increased stability arguably was you want continuity of approach, you want persistence of alliances, that sort of thing. But in democracy, also you have turnover. You don’t have long regimes like the Ayatollah or Erdogan or whoever. There are term limits and politics changes. And so now you have the passing of the baton from Trump to Biden back to Trump. There’s a little bit of whiplash that goes on. Does that say anything about whether or not the premise of democracy being good for world stability is right or wrong?

Ed Luce:

It’s a really good question and it’s important that we understand the degree to which the answer to it is going to shape our futures. Because America has had regime change. It’s done by the ballot box, but this is regime change. But it’s democratically legitimate regime change that may close off the possibility of future democratically legitimate elections. May or may not, that’s another subject. But I think that the quest to export democracy has actually been an immensely destabilizing force in the 21st century and the blowback from that, the Iraq war of course being probably the prime example, but the blowback from that in some ways has given rise to Trumpism, to MAGA, to the rejection of the forever wars.

And again, I don’t want to count any chickens because the situation is volatile at the moment with Iran, but to allegedly reject forever wars and issue a plea to Washington to pull back from global engagement. So there is some democratic legitimacy in all this, but the idea that exporting democracy is a good thing if it’s at the barrel of the gun rather than by way of example and by way of others aspiring to be like you, I think that’s a far better vector to spread the political values we think create a better world.

And I do agree with Thomas Friedman’s original view that generally democracies don’t go to war with each other. It’s just much less likely. And democracies are less likely to embark upon long-term wars because you get punished for doing so. People for some reason don’t like their neighbors and cousins and brothers dying, on their taxpayer dollars going on weapons.

Preet Bharara:

But here’s what’s peculiar about Trump. So put Iran aside for a moment and maybe we’ll talk for a minute about Iran and what Trump has been saying. So this is a guy who campaigned on and seems to be against war and entanglements by the US, but he still is quite expansionist, right? Whether you’re talking about that’s his instinct, that’s his impulse. Grandiosity, more square footage, right? Whether it’s in his penthouse or the nation as a whole, and his aspirations for the annexation, which we joked about with respect to Canada and Greenland, I take them to be real. Is that an odd coupling of being sort of anti-war but pro-expansion? How else are you supposed historically have countries expanded their acreage?

Ed Luce:

I think he’s opposed to fair wars or evenly matched wars. The way I think of Trump’s foreign policy, it is an extension of his biography. He thinks like a property developer or put it this way, he sees the world as a jungle. And in the jungle, big predators eat small predators. Well, they certainly eat prey, they eat. And so if you look like an antelope and dress like an antelope, he’s going to eat you. And Canada did have a lot of antelope-like qualities until recently, and it’s becoming a bit more snarly. Those teeth seem to be acquiring some incisors and some edges.

I don’t think Trump ever, ever wants … He backs off. A colleague of mine coined the phrase for Trump with the bond markets, Taco Trump always chickens out, but Trump talks a big game. I remember when he talked about Rocket Man in North Korea and I’ve got a bigger nuclear button than you or I will wipe Afghanistan off the face of the earth. I mean, he had really extravagant rhetoric, which I think is designed for the base. It makes him look strong, but when he comes close to actual war, if there’s any prospect of it being a sustained war, he backs down. He’s taco, not just with bond markets. And I find that reassuring in some ways, but it’s not for humanitarian reasons, it’s because he’s a classic bully and bullies pick on weak people. They don’t like people of the same size.

Preet Bharara:

So he is not only a taco, he is a soft taco?

Ed Luce:

He’s a soft taco. He’s definitely a chicken taco.

Preet Bharara:

With very few fixings.

Ed Luce:

And no Tabasco.

Preet Bharara:

What about this element of unpredictability as a methodology for engaging in international relations and protecting the homeland? I assume you would agree that complete predictability is not an asset in foreign relations, but continuity is. So I guess my question is, again, through the lens of Brzezinski or not, what’s the right amount of unpredictability or within what range can you help your country? And by country, I mean the United States.

Ed Luce:

Yeah. So I suppose we think of Dr. Strangelove, which is either Kissinger or Nixon and whichever was Peter Sellers I guess was playing a Nixon kind of figure. But whichever it was, this is a classic movie and worth re-watching many times. And if you’re unpredictable, if you’re Nixon and you want the Soviets or Chairman Mao, whoever it might be, to think you are just about capable of doing something crazy, it works because there’s some form there. There’s some credibility with a figure like that. With Trump, I think there’s a really consistent pattern of not standing up to people his own size, of backing off, and that just makes it less of a … And then, what are you being unpredictable for? What’s your larger game? What’s your strategy? And I don’t think Trump has a strategy.

If you look at his declaration of economic war on the world since so-called Liberation day, everybody even in the least bad scenario is going to be worse off including Americans. We still be left … the UK did that deal. They’re still left with a 10% tariff that wasn’t there before. Everybody will be worse off except the Trump family. There’s personal enrichment with so many of these deals. Now, that is the method, I suppose it’s a strategy if you call continued self-enrichment a strategy, but it’s not a foreign policy strategy, it’s a personalization of a superpower. It’s a merging of business with private, with public interest. And it’s no accident I guess. The first really serious deals he’s had are with personalist monarchies like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. That’s the real method to Trump. Always look for the money.

Preet Bharara:

I will be right back with Ed Luce after this. So as we are speaking, I will break down the fourth wall for a moment. I have my television on in the background to cable television. And the chyron says at this precise moment, Trump, “Nobody knows what I’m going to do” on Iran. And what I take you to have been saying for the last three or four minutes is that Donald Trump is quite a predictable man masquerading as an unpredictable one. And that seems to be encapsulated by the quote that I’m reading on my TV screen. Is that fair?

Ed Luce:

I think that’s very fair. The more alarmist and absolute is the rhetoric, that Iran’s got to just climb down, otherwise I’m going to kill the Ayatollah, all this kind of stuff. The more he thinks he’s using that as leverage to get them to talk. So he’s signaling, actually what he wants to do is talk, because he’s not stupid. He’s very immoral. He’s very ignorant but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. And I think he knows, and I think he’s even now got people telling him from inside and outside that if you break it, you own it. And if the Americans are … Israel can start wars, it can’t finish them. And if that means America has to finish it, it’s not going to finish anything. It will open up a chapter that will define the rest of Trump’s presidency. And there’s no crypto scam or golf course that can come out of going to war with Iran. There is just no upside. So I don’t believe he’s going to, but I could be forced. I really hope I’m not from everybody’s sake, but I could be forced to eat my words very soon. There is still an unpredictability.

Preet Bharara:

Don’t say that. Tocqueville never ate his words, sir. He kept those words on the plate. You said a second ago you referred to Trump as immoral, and I’ve come to think of him as amoral. Is there a difference and which do you think he is?

Ed Luce:

Yeah, I think there is a difference. Amoral just means you have no moral compass. Immoral means you’re pursuing actively bad actions. I think he’s both amoral and immoral by those definitions.

Preet Bharara:

Bad combo.

Ed Luce:

It’s a pretty bad combo. He’s certainly not moral. He’s not a moral actor. He doesn’t act on the basis of commonly held values and principles such as whatever it might be, be kind to strangers, turn the other cheek, whatever you choose to pick. His goal has always been personal aggrandizement, and I think that involves some actively immoral actions. I think he agrees with what Elon Musk said, which is that empathy is western civilization’s greatest weakness. I think Trump instinctively, even though he wouldn’t use that language, I think he instinctively agrees. It’s like empathy, that’s for losers. That’s for people who lose their signature property on Park Avenue.

Preet Bharara:

What’s so interesting is you say he doesn’t think empathy is important, but arguably, one of the reasons that he got elected is that he has been seen to be empathetic to a population of people in this country who believe they’ve gotten a raw deal, who believe they’ve been overlooked, who believe that the victims of a rigged system. How do you square his abhorrence of empathy with the feeling that he empathizes with his base?

Ed Luce:

I think I would put it differently. I would say that he identifies with his base, which is different to empathizing. I think he’s through great skill and this sort of market instinct, the reading the crowd and finding the beating heart in the coliseum, of merging his sense of victimization and grievance with a much broader one amongst tens of millions of voters and the MAGA base. And that’s an identity. It’s saying your cause is my cause, I will be your retribution. But I don’t think it comes from a place of sympathy. I think it comes from a place of market instinct, frankly.

Preet Bharara:

You use the term jungle and it strikes me that to think of the world as a jungle is not crazy and is somewhat rational because there’s no global policeman or police force, at least not yet, and probably not for a long time if ever. The problem, I think and I wonder if you agree as the chief US commentator, whether he also thinks of the US internally as a jungle and that’s more problematic. What do you think of that?

Ed Luce:

Yeah, I think the jungle is not the word I would use for how he thinks of the United States. I think he thinks of it as his fiefdom, where … It’s jungle in the sense that he doesn’t believe that laws … Laws are designed for prey. What’s that phrase, “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” And Trump sort of embodies, he personifies that sentiment, which is laws are for other people and they’re just, “I’m Gulliver and I’m going to break these restraints.” I think he sees it as his playground. And when he comes up against hurdles or people who might look like they could take him on, who could trade a punch in the ring, he might think twice. But that isn’t because of any principle or law. It’s a pure raw power calculation. So jungle would not be inappropriate for that. It’s a lawlessness. Its might is right. It’s the bully prevails. But I’m trying to think of what a better analogy would be, but it’s not necessarily wrong.

Preet Bharara:

I see that. The other thought I had about the intersection of foreign policy, international relations with domestic is the degree to which I think with a certain kind of personality, but maybe it’s more widespread than I’ll hypothesize in a moment. The role of domestic nostalgia in foreign policy, right? Isn’t that a little bit arguably what’s animating Putin and Ukraine, this nostalgia for a great past, the empire of the past probably animates certain political trends and dynamics in Great Britain. Certainly animates Trump when he talks about making America great again and this in acquisitive instinct that he has that we’ve talked about and talking about the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Is that inevitable throughout the world? Is it a certain kind of person who has that domestic nostalgia? There’s a compound question. If I were your lawyer, I would object to this line of questioning, but talk about that. Am I onto something there or not?

Ed Luce:

I’ll remember in a moment the name Mark Lilla who wrote the book, the Shipwrecked Mind. Life is advancing at accelerating speed. It’s been doing so really since the industrial revolution, but it picks up speed all the time. And the impact of AI is already dizzying and it promises to be orders of magnitude higher as time goes on. So we’re always prone to nostalgia, to remembering a day when things were simpler and we knew where we stood and we had certain things we could rely on. And politics, therefore, in a democracy, there’s always going to be room for a politician to appeal to nostalgia. To say, I can set the clock back to where things were before.

I think Trump, you’re right, of course America first comes from Charles Lindbergh. I mean, that’s not a good person to cite, but make America Great again is a Reagan phrase. And Reagan himself really harvested the politics of nostalgia. So it’s an inherent thing to changing modern democracies that we’re always going to feel sentimental about what we’ve lost and therefore there’s always a political, there’s room for a political entrepreneur to exploit that. Never by the way to make things like they were before. Reagan made things much less like they were even than when he took office. He ripped up communities through accelerating change.

Preet Bharara:

Look, Putin, if he’s on a domestic nostalgia bender is basically saying the price of going back, which can’t happen for the reasons that you described and won’t happen is I’m going to take a million of your sons and send them to their graves. So it’s a very odd dynamic. Do you have any thoughts, and I want to talk about Brzezinski a bit more. Do you want to add your thoughts to those of everyone else with an opinion on Trump’s birthday military parade?

Ed Luce:

It’s funny. It was also the day of the King’s official birthday in London. So King Charles has his official birthday parade, but these are ceremonially dressed with carriages, not with tanks. In a weird way, the parade that Trump had, and I know there’s been a lot of commentary on the fact and apparently that he resented the fact that they all looked pretty casual and weren’t marching in goose-step formation. He obviously had a Pyongyang tableau in his head and what he got was a pretty casual walk by. But if you were going to have symbols of modern warfare, it wouldn’t be the tanks and the flyovers. He’d have had like 30,000 drones going past him. He’d have just been swarmed by drones.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a better show.

Ed Luce:

That would’ve been an interesting show and caught the world’s attention, but it really boomeranged on him. People didn’t show up. It just was not what he’d pictured in his head.

Preet Bharara:

So imagine Mr. Brzezinski being here and being either the national security advisor or the Secretary of State or some other close advisor to the president. And let’s assume the president was educable and persuadable. What would this person who you reveal as quite a strategic thinker and statesman and strategist, what would he be telling Trump to do? And you can pick any front. You can pick Iran, you can pick Russia, you can pick overall foreign policy issues, economy. What would he be sitting down and schooling Donald Trump on?

Ed Luce:

So it’s interesting, although Brzezinski and Kissinger were these great frenemies, these great rivals, they would agree on this point. And it goes back to Sun Tzu, the Chinese thinker, the Art of War or von Clausewitz, the great Prussian military strategist, and pretty much any other cartilla from ancient Indian history, pretty much any other sort of advisor to princes throughout human history, which is always know your enemy and your friends. You need to be able to see the world from where they’re sitting or from standing in their shoes. You need to understand them as well as they understand themselves. And that means a thirst for knowledge. It means a thirst, a mastery of their languages. Understanding them better helps you to produce the outcomes that you want, which is presumably not war, better.

And so therefore, I think across all fronts, whether we’re talking about relations with Israel, the Iran-Israel situation, the Ukraine-Russia situation, Taiwan, the future of Taiwan, on all these questions, I think Brzezinski would be urging Trump to get independent thinkers and minds with deep experience of the world. Hopefully some of them would speak Chinese and some of them would speak Russian like he did, but he would be urging the primacy of knowledge and clash of ideas. And I just don’t think … it’s been remarked that Marco Rubio holds both jobs first time since Kissinger did, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. And the joke is that’s the only time they ever got along, those two roles, is when Kissinger held them. But the reason Rubio has got them is because he says yes and saying yes, being a yes man is not being a strategist. Trump needs to think strategically. It might sound like a pie in the sky given who we’re talking about but it would be that.

Preet Bharara:

But he thinks he does think strategically. He thinks he’s a master strategist. He didn’t write the Art of War, but he wrote the Art of the Deal, which is a book about I presume strategy. So is he just deluded?

Ed Luce:

I think so. For example, let’s take Russia-Ukraine. Trump offers to Russia everything it would get after a successful negotiation. You do not offer the inducements before the talks begin. So Putin isn’t interested in talks because he’s going to get it anyway. That is the opposite way about which you go negotiating a settlement to a war. The Liberation Day tariffs has driven America’s friends into the arms of its enemies. The fact that Japan and South Korea are now collaborating with China on trade strategy and that to some extent the Europeans and the Canadians too, this is … Again, you are meant to divide your enemies. You’re not meant to unite your friends and your enemies. And so strategically, strategy isn’t just saying I have an end goal. It’s specifying credible means of getting there. And I’m not entirely sure what Trump’s end goal is, but I have a rough idea on trade. But the means steam … well, full steam ahead, Japanese bullet train speed in the opposite direction. This isn’t strategy if it’s based on deluded assumptions about how your partners and interlocutors are going to respond to you. He said trade wars are easy to win. No, they are not.

Preet Bharara:

You said a moment ago that the best advice you can get and the best strategy is built upon as perfect an understanding as you can glean about your adversary. So it seemed to me that the converse is also true, that to the extent you can be completely and transparently understandable to your adversary, that is a disadvantage, which suggests that you are a leader, you don’t want them to be so understandable. And we talked about the mode of unpredictability earlier, and I’m thinking Trump seems quite understandable and playable in the various regards because we understand his motivations and his adversaries understand his motivations. Would you say that he is perhaps the least enigmatic president that we’ve had in modern times, and is that an important metric? The level of enigma that the US president is for purposes of foreign affairs?

Ed Luce:

I think he is less of an enigma to some than to others. So I mentioned earlier the Gulf monarchies. I think that they’re used to this, this personalist way as the last French king said, well, not the last, but one of the great French kings said that the state is me. They get that because that’s how it works there, which means they can talk turkey and do deals and funnel $2 billion of stable coin transaction through the Trump family crypto vehicle, World Liberty Financial. That sort of all comes naturally. And the systems are designed, there are systems to do that. So Trump is utterly recognizable as kith and kin. We see you Trump, we know how you do business. Much harder both in terms of our mindset but also how our systems work for leaders of … for Mark Carney in Canada, or Keir Starmer in Britain or Macron in France to read Trump like other countries do, like less democratic countries do, but also to offer him the kinds of inducements that will get him to climb down.

So democracies are actual disadvantage versus autocracies when it comes to dealing with Trump. Macron cannot just say, “I will give you this and you will buy that.” He can’t. There’s a system there that has to approve procurement and purchase of whatever it might be. So I think there’s still a lot of puzzlement in fellow western democracies about Trump. And there’s still at some level the hope that the adult inside him who is screaming somewhere to get out will suddenly emerge. I think they are deluding themselves if they think that’s what’s going to happen.

Preet Bharara:

No, it’s so interesting. This is a totally different context, but when I became a prosecutor, I learned that you would have victims of fraud, sometimes the most preposterous kinds of fraud, financial fraud, and it could be the most laughable, outlandish, Nigerian classic fraud. And you would begin to prepare them for trial as victim witnesses. And then my colleagues would discover even after being ripped off, even after seeing their tormentors and the fraudsters indicted, charged, hauled into court, some part of them believed that maybe the money they spent to wash the cash that was given to the prince that they had never heard of was real, that that hope never died. The gullible amongst us. Ed Luce, the book is called Zbig, although I guess today you’d be called Zbig. That would his Zbig is his rap name I think.

Ed Luce:

Yeah, Zbig.

Preet Bharara:

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet. Thank you, Ed Luce. And I should refer to you by the name I sometimes call you when we’re offline, Eduardo Luce.

Ed Luce:

Oh, yes. If any, I’d be an Italian. Thank you so much, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Eduardo Luce, Chief US commentator. Thank you so much for your time as always.

Ed Luce:

Delight.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Ed Luce continues from members of the CAFE Insider Community. To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, Ed Luce and Karim Sadjadpour.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on BlueSky, or you can call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.