The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
If Donald Trump’s speech about Iran this week was supposed to calm Republicans who fear an increasingly brutal midterm cycle, well, it failed. Republicans reportedly reacted to the speech with dismay and panic, privately declaring that it hadn’t helped at all and might’ve made things worse. And indeed, Trump’s speech didn’t say much of anything at all. In fact, it was really a concession of failure. Trump claimed that the Strait of Hormuz will naturally open itself, essentially admitting right out in the open that he didn’t anticipate the closure and that he has no idea how to fix it himself.
Foreign policy writer and podcaster David Rothkopf has a good new piece arguing that Trump’s war has basically put us on a path to all bad options. So we’re talking to him about all this today. David, nice to finally have you on, man.
David Rothkopf: It’s great. I so admire what you have built here, Greg. So congratulations on all that.
Sargent: Well, you guys have contributed a little to it. So thank you for that. So in his speech, Trump claimed that Iran’s defenses have been decimated, but that the war will go on for a few more weeks and that we’re going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, including electricity plants—which means commit more war crimes. And Trump seemed to admit we’re not really going after Iran’s nuclear material. David, what was your overall takeaway from all that?
Rothkopf: Well, it’s hard to take anything away from it because he’d said all of it many times before. In fact, somebody clearly said to him, you’ve got to give a speech to the American people on this, things aren’t going well. And he gave a speech that revealed to us why he hasn’t given one. They still don’t have clear objectives. The way things are going don’t support any of the multiple objectives they’ve floated. He doesn’t seem to be that interested in outcomes. I think he likes this kind of Venezuela thing—he goes in, he does one little thing, and then he is able to say he took over a country and he gets a lot of credit.
There’s a reason people haven’t attacked Iran, although we’ve been adversaries for almost 50 years. And the reason is, of course, this: there are 92 million people there, it’s a big country, and when you attack it, it has a lot of options. And so we’re sinking into yet another quagmire this time because we have a president who doesn’t take advice, who has no foresight. And, frankly, it’s been a fiasco so far, but there are a lot of signs that it could get much worse.
Sargent: Well, I want to get to that. But first, let’s check out another key part of the speech in which Trump basically says we’re not going to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—other countries are going to have to do it. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): To those countries that can’t get fuel, many of which refuse to get involved in the decapitation of Iran—we had to do it ourselves. I have a suggestion. Number one, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much. And number two, build up some delayed courage. Should have done it before, should have done it with us as we asked. Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done, so it should be easy. And in any event, when this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally. It’ll just open up naturally.
Sargent: So this is really an admission by Trump that he has no idea how to reopen the strait and that he’s basically washing his hands of it. Let’s recall that Trump was privately told about this problem and he shrugged it off. I’d say in that context, this admission is even more damning. He basically blurted out that he’s not going to do anything about this and that he has no idea what to do about it. Your thoughts?
Rothkopf: Well, he had said that earlier in the day—he had said it a couple of times. He was trying to shift the responsibility. You may remember former Secretary of State Colin Powell had something he called the Pottery Barn rule, which was if you break it you own it, right? Trump has a corollary to that, which is I broke it, you fix it. And that’s what he’s trying to do here. He’s trying to say, well, look, you want their oil, go get their oil.
It’s also an opportunity for him to do something here, which is one of the more dangerous implicit aspects of this whole process, and that is attack our NATO allies—attack NATO. He’s really angry that they didn’t come in and say, hey, let’s go along with your illegal war that has no objectives and is only going to produce global chaos.
And so what is he doing now? He’s talking publicly, and since the speech he gave an interview with the Daily Telegraph in which he said he’s seriously thinking of pulling out of NATO, which has been one of the foundations of U.S. national security for 80 years. It’s been one of the most important successful alliances in history. It’s probably one of the most important reasons we did not have World War Three. And here he is wanting to pull the plug on it, which is a disaster for us, very bad for Europe, but it’s good for one guy. You want to guess who that is?
Sargent: Yeah, I think I know who you’re talking about. And to your point, though, not only is he, quote-unquote, angry at our NATO allies for not jumping to the sound of his command to join him—he’s saying all this after refusing to brief them beforehand, before invading. That’s what makes it so ridiculous in my mind.
So he spends the last year crapping all over our alliances, basically telling our allies to fuck off. Then he launches this illegal war with absolutely no consultation with our allies. And then when it goes badly, he says, bail me out, please. That’s not how you do this.
Rothkopf: Well, you know, literally every single thing that he does is the wrong thing in the wrong way for the wrong reason. And that’s a pattern—in domestic policy it’s a pattern, in politics. But it’s especially acute here because there is a long history in national security of actions like this being carefully gamed out, of a big policy process being undertaken to assess risks, of an exploration of historical context, of an exploration of potential consequences, of making weighty decisions in a thoughtful, multi-party manner.
That’s why the National Security Council was created. I wrote two books on the NSC. Well, we effectively don’t have an NSC now because he doesn’t listen to advice. And so you have this ignoramus who ignores the fact that when war games like about this were conducted, we lost.
Okay, there was a big famous war game that was conducted a number of years ago about the U.S. attacking Iran—we lost because they leveraged the Strait of Hormuz. And he ignores that. He didn’t consult the allies. He thought they would just go along with him. And frankly, he thought it would be over in a minute because he didn’t sort of think through 92 million people, 50 years of history, deeply ingrained institutions in that country. He thinks he’s Superman. And of course, that’s fine when you jump off the building. It’s just a problem when you hit the ground.
Sargent: Right. Well, Republicans are not reacting well to the speech. And I think the reason for it is what we’re saying here. Politico reports that a bunch of them are wondering what the point of the speech was—it didn’t provide any kind of clarity about the mission ahead or what will count as success. And it didn’t say anything meaningful about how Trump intends to get costs under control now that his war is driving them higher.
One GOP strategist in a battleground state said this: “What the hell did he just say? A quick recap and a path forward would have been helpful. Instead, it was nonsense left for Sean Hannity to articulate.” David, this strategist is right. This speech will do nothing for Republicans, will it?
Rothkopf: No, particularly since he’s going to keep bombing. This is what happened today, right? They went in, they bombed a bridge. We can debate whether that’s a war crime because it’s civilian infrastructure. He threatened now to go in and bomb their electrical systems. That is a war crime. That is punishing civilians. Obviously, this is going to harden resistance. It’s going to have an effect on how the Iranians handle, for example, the Strait of Hormuz. And what we saw even during the speech was the price of oil going up. And you’re now at $107, $108 a barrel, going to $110 a barrel. I saw an interview today with a noted energy expert who said we’re on a track to get to $200 a barrel.
This is already the worst disruption of global energy flows ever in history. And if he gets to $200 a barrel, let me tell you what that means. That’s not just high oil prices, it’s not just high fertilizer prices—it’s food shortages, it’s high food prices, it’s global inflation, it’s global recession, it is political disaster in an election year for the Republicans. Now, frankly, it couldn’t happen to a nicer group of guys. The problem is that getting to the gigantic defeat that Trump is engineering for the Republicans is going to cause a lot of pain to ordinary people.
Sargent: Well, and I think that’s why Republicans are so deeply disturbed by what they witnessed there. Politico had another interesting nugget. It’s that other Republicans privately say they wanted more specifics from Trump on an exit strategy. And that’s really telling because it shows that Republicans know that this is a serious problem for them in the midterms and they’re just desperate for Trump to end this thing. But of course, they’ll rarely say anything like that publicly. David, I think the key question is this: is there a way out of the war that works politically for Republicans at this point? Can you envision one?
Rothkopf: No. This is a fiasco for the United States. It’s a fiasco for the region. But if anything, it’s probably worse for Republicans. If he hit the brakes right now and he said this is over—which he’s not going to do for several weeks—the after effects economically would go on for several months. But of course, he no longer controls the outcome here. And it’s quite possible that the Iranians could do all sorts of things between now and then to rekindle his ire or to launch terrorist attacks. And so from the point of view of Republicans, all they’re going to have are problems—higher prices, a sign that the president doesn’t really know how to run national security, potential risks for the country. And he looks like a mess, right?
I mean, look at him right now. He just fired the head of the Department of Homeland Security in the middle of a security crisis. He just fired his attorney general, who is a critical partner in this process. He is out of control in the economy, he is out of control on national security, he’s out of control with our allies. Everywhere you look, America is on fire, and Donald Trump is the guy holding a box of matches. And all of a sudden, these Republicans are sitting there going, gee, did we hitch our wagon to the wrong star? And guess what? You and I knew that answer before, right?
Boy, have they. And, it could be one of those watershed elections. And we don’t see Republicans in control of the Congress or the White House, not just for years, but possibly for decades.
Sargent: Well, I sure hope you’re right. Let me ask you about what you mentioned earlier, which is the future of NATO. Where do you see this going? How seriously do you take the prospect of Trump pulling us out of NATO? He doesn’t have the authority to do that, but he could try to do it. And he’s already obviously more or less done so much damage to the alliance that it’s in real trouble. Where do you see this going in specific terms?
Rothkopf: Well, first of all, the secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, is coming to Washington next week. Rutte is a kind of a strange anomaly for the Europeans because he kisses Trump’s ass all the time. And, he’s kind of playing this role of shock absorber while all the other Europeans are pissed off at Trump. But having said that, Trump is not going to get fonder of the UK or France or Germany. Even his friends the Italians have said that he can’t use their bases or their airspace—or Spain—over the course of the next couple of months. And so what’s going to happen is he will disengage.
He can’t get out of the alliance because Congress, recognizing he might try, passed a law that says he can’t. And of course, it’s a treaty alliance anyway. But what he can do is disengage, reduce funds, be less cooperative. And that’s what I’d expect. I would expect the worst relations between the United States and NATO to start right now and extend through whenever Trump leaves office. And at that time, the next president—there are not a lot of things where I think a president can just come in and sort of hit reset, but the next president’s going to come in and try to do that.
Sargent: Well, I want to ask you about that. In fact, I’m wondering why we’re not hearing more Democrats say something to the effect of, when there’s a Democratic president back, when we have a sane president back, we will fix this mess that Trump has made with NATO.
I understand that that’s a big lift, but it seems like Democrats should be saying more clearly that there’s another world coming, that we don’t have to live under President Donald Trump forever. Would you like to hear more of that from Democrats?
Rothkopf: Well, I’d like to hear more from Democrats about what we are going to do to ensure that the United States will lead and be strong in the future. And to be honest with you, a lot of that is not, let’s go back and do it the way Biden did it or do it the way Obama did it. What it really means is coming up with new approaches because it’s a new world. The Middle East post this war is broken. It’s not going to be the same. Israel is not a dependable ally of the United States anymore. We are going to have to find other partners that are stabilizing.
The main competitive force in the region—we haven’t even mentioned here—but it’s China. Look at the cover of The Economist this week. The cover of The Economist is a picture of Xi Jinping saying, don’t interrupt your enemy while he’s hurting himself. And it’s not just the Middle East. We’re going to have to redo what we’re doing in Europe. We are obviously going to go into a very different kind of relationship with Russia. The United States is going to have to figure out how do you have a principal rival in the world—China—with whom you are interdependent economically. You can’t go back to a Cold War. AI is going to change the nature of warfare, the nature of competition, the nature of jobs, the nature of economic growth. That has to be factored in.
And most of all, I want to see a Democrat who comes in and says what George Kennan, the famous foreign policy specialist, said in his long telegram in 1947—and that is that while we face threats around the world, the place we must begin if we want to be secure is with the wellsprings of our own strength at home. We have to make sure we have a good economy. We have to make sure we do not have a divided society. And right now, inequality is more grotesque than it’s ever been. There is an oligarchy. Our tax system is written for them. Our regulatory system is written for them. We’re dismantling social safety nets. We have more money to give to billionaires who don’t need it.
And all of those things may not sound like national security to you, but if they pull the country apart, if they make Americans uncomfortable taking risks, growing new businesses, going to school, investing in the future, if we don’t have the dollars for infrastructure, for R&D, to create the economies of tomorrow, then we’re going to get weaker and weaker within. And that’s going to be much more damaging than anything we might do from a foreign policy perspective. And that’s what I want to see a Democrat talk about—how do we make America strong inside out?
Sargent: Well, and of course Donald Trump is the primary driver of all the forces that are exacerbating all those very things you’re talking about. Our society is much more divided thanks to Donald Trump. It’s more unequal thanks to Donald Trump. And it’s absolutely gutting—it’s essentially shooting itself in the foot when it comes to research and development, thanks to Donald Trump and of course Elon Musk.
Rothkopf: Yeah, and in the end, look, Donald Trump is also 79 years old. He’s going to be 80. You watch him give that speech—he was mush-mouthed, he was confused, he’s clearly on his way out. And I think one thing Democrats need to start thinking about is how do they lead in a post-Donald Trump environment? How do they formulate messages in a post-Donald Trump environment? And this is going to be a lot harder for certain people. How do they move on from the boomer-dominated Democratic Party that has very old school attitudes from everything from, sort of, AIPAC to, what our policies ought to be towards, sort of a Cold War-like continuation—that, the China hawks now are essentially saying, hey, let’s do what we did with Russia with China. It’s absurd.
In 2028, in the next election, a majority of voters are going to be born since 1990. That means it’s going to be millennials and zoomers who are going to determine our future, and we need a generational change atop the Democratic Party. That means a Senate majority leader like Brian Schatz. That means presidential candidates who represent new views. The White House has been a geriatric ward for the past 12 years or so. We need to move on to new, fresher voices with new ideas. And that’s every bit as important as pointing out, as you do so well, that Donald Trump’s a crook, the worst president in history, a narcissist, and an idiot. I mean, all that’s important, but if we’re to turn the page we have to convince everybody else that there’s a page worth turning to.
Sargent: I couldn’t agree more. Just to return to the basic theme of this overall podcast discussion—I do think that Donald Trump essentially made a major admission during that speech by saying that he is washing his hands of the Strait of Hormuz. And I want to ask you about that. Do you see that as sort of a weirdly revealing concession, almost an accidental concession? And also, where does that part go?
It seems to me that Republicans have to face a midterm election—or at least the next couple of weeks or the next few months—dominated by the failure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Donald Trump saddled us with. Your thoughts on that?
Rothkopf: Well, he doesn’t know how to open up the Strait of Hormuz. But I think it’s indicative of a bigger problem. And part of it is, you know, everybody in America has learned the term malignant narcissist—Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist. He only thinks of himself, and if it doesn’t help him, he’s easily able to turn the page. But I’ll tell you something. It’s worse than that.
Please stop electing fucking billionaires. Billionaires do not live on the planet Earth. Donald Trump does not give one shit about whether the price of gasoline is four dollars or forty dollars because he doesn’t pay for it. He doesn’t even notice it. It’s a rounding error in the inflows of cash that come from all of his grift. So a billionaire—Elon Musk, with approaching a trillion dollars—the world could be in flames and he will be circling it. I don’t know if you remember the Jodie Foster movie Contact, where there was this rich guy and he was just circling the planet in his plane and he was never landing. And that’s the thing with the billionaire oligarch mentality—they’re circling the planet on their planes, they don’t ever even come in contact with our world.
We need leaders and presidents who live among us, understand what our lives are like, understand the challenge. And when they fuck up something like the Strait of Hormuz, they go, holy shit, this is going to be real for my family, for me, for the people in my community. So compassion, yes, but also sort of grounding in reality, a place Donald Trump has never visited in his almost 80 years on this planet.
Sargent: David Rothkopf, pleasure to talk to you, man. Folks, if you want more of David Rothkopf, you know where to find him over at Deep State Radio, which is also a partner of this humble podcast. David, awesome to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Rothkopf: Nice to see you, Greg.