Issue of the Week: War

Published March 3, 2026

Heavy smoke rising from Tehran on Tuesday after U.S.-Israeli airstrikes. Credit…Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

On Saturday, the U.S. and Israel began massive airstrikes against Iran. Negotiations between the U.S. and Iran that had been underway and were scheduled to continue. The airstrikes effectively began a war that quickly spread throughout the Middle East. The impact of the airstrikes in Iran and the impact of war in the Middle East is impossible to measure or predict at this point.

In the Ezra Klein Show in The New York Times today, Klein interviews Ben Rhodes, former senior advisor to President Obama, in a segment titled, The Great Lie Of War. The comments of both Klein and Rhodes give a substantial degree of breadth and depth to understanding the historical and current situation. Although we agree with most of the commentary, we do not agree universally, and at least note that some of the commentary needs further expanding on. However, this is a first-rate piece on events overall, by two extremely intelligent and qualified commentators, and and an excellent starting point.

We will have much more commentary ourselves on this momentous situation to come.

For now, the transcript of the audio and video of the program, and links to listen to it:

The Great Lie of War

March 3, 2026

By Ezra Klein

Produced by Jack McCordick

Ben Rhodes, a contributing Times Opinion writer, discusses why Trump waged war on Iran — and why his predecessors didn’t dare to.

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Over the weekend, the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran. Within hours, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead, along with much of his senior command.

As I record this on Monday, March 2, the Iranian Red Crescent says over 550 people have been killed in the bombings in Iran. We know of at least six American service members killed — and there will likely be more as the war rages on. There appears to have been a girls school that was bombed.

The pictures in the aftermath, the grief of the parents — it’s almost unbearable to see. I think it’s so important to say: This is not all geopolitics. These are people, civilians, their lives, their homes, their children.

The attack on Iran came less than two months after the United States military captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid on his compound in Caracas.

America has deposed two sitting heads of state eight weeks apart.

I have seen a lot of commentary accusing Donald Trump of hypocrisy. After all, he ran against wars of regime change, and now he’s changing regimes left and right.

Archival clip of Donald Trump: We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change, wars around the globe, senseless wars. The job of the United States military is to defend America from attack and invasion here at home.

But I think this is not quite a policy of regime change. This is not America invading Iraq or Afghanistan and restructuring the government ourselves. Maduro was removed — but his regime was left intact.

In an interview with The Times, Trump said: “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.” He said: “Everybody’s kept their job except for two people.”

Trump has called for the Iranian people to rise up against their government. But he has also said that he intends to resume talks with the existing Iranian leadership. He said he had a few choices for Iran’s next leader — but they appeared to have been killed in the initial bombings.

The Iranian regime was monstrous, but Trump is not insisting that it be changed, nor is he committing the ground forces necessary to change it.

I don’t think what we’re seeing here is a policy of regime change. I would call this head-on-a-pike foreign policy. America is proving that we can easily reach into weaker countries to kill or capture their heads of state. We’ll not be dissuaded from doing that by international law or fear of unforeseen consequences — or the difficulty of persuading the American people or the United States Congress of the need for war. We won’t even try.

We don’t particularly care who replaces the people we killed. We will not insist that they come from outside the regime nor that they’re elected democratically. We care merely that whoever comes next fears us enough to be compliant when we make a demand — that they know that they might be the next head on a pike.

Trump’s belief appears to be that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors — without events spinning out of his control. He appears to believe that it was idiocy or cowardice or a lawyerly respect for international rules that prevented his predecessors from replacing foreign leaders they loathed with more pliable subordinates.

Trump is a man who has not read much history, but who certainly intends to make it.

But what if Iran is not Venezuela? What if the Iranian people rise up, as Trump has asked them to do, and are slaughtered by the Iranian military? What if Iran descends into civil war, as happened in Iraq, where America had troops on the ground, and yet hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed? What if it goes the way of Libya or Yemen or Syria? Who will pay the cost if Trump is wrong?

Ben Rhodes is a political analyst, a New York Times Opinion contributing writer and the co-host of the podcast “Pod Save the World.” He served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. He joins me now.

Ezra Klein: Ben Rhodes, welcome to the show.

Ben Rhodes: Good to see you, Ezra.

You served in the Obama administration. It was the policy of that administration that Iran could not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

Benjamin Netanyahu was the prime minister of Israel at that time — he’s been around for a long time. He was pushing very hard for America to attack Iran, destroy its nuclear capabilities, maybe change its regime.

Why didn’t you do that then?

Because we were worried about what the potential costs and consequences of a military action could be, what it could unleash across the region — kind of a version of what we’re seeing. Just a lot of unpredictability.

Frankly, we thought that the principal U.S. security interest in Iran was the nuclear program. That doesn’t mean we didn’t take seriously its support for proxies and its ballistic missile program, but the existential issue to us was the nuclear program. So if you could resolve that diplomatically to avoid a war, that was preferable to the alternative.

A lot of people actually complained that we made that argument. You may remember, Ezra, that it’s either a war or a diplomatic agreement. And tragically, here we are.

What were you worried about?

You said a version of what we’re seeing play out now. If you’re in the U.S., you’re seeing reports of missiles being fired in all directions. Talk me through the scenarios you all considered then.

Well, it’s interesting. We did war games, essentially scenario planning, where you anticipate what might happen in the event of a military conflict.

Part of what I’ll say at a macro level is, having been through Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya in the Obama administration, we had just seen the uncertainties that are unleashed in any kind of military conflict in the region.

Even in the case where you bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, what we determined first and foremost is you couldn’t destroy the Iranian nuclear program from the air. They know how to do this. They know the nuclear fuel cycle. They could rebuild.

So if you’re trying to deal with the nuclear program, at best you could set it back in a very successful strike, maybe by a year.

And what are the risks that you’re taking? You’re taking the risk that Iran will, as we are seeing now, try to lash out and strike at U.S. military facilities across the region. Try to strike out at energy infrastructure — which could be very difficult for the global economy. Strike Persian Gulf allies, strike civilian populations in Israel.

So you could have a situation where you essentially have a regional war, instead of just bombing the nuclear program and getting out.

Inside Iran, there was also the question of: If the regime were to implode in some fashion, what happens next? The likelihood was that you could have protracted civil conflict, and we’ve seen all of the unpredictability that can unleash in terms of refugee flows or conflict migrating across borders.

We didn’t see some pathway to a quick transition to a democratic Iran or a different kind of stable government there. So when you weighed the risks of a military action against the benefits of setting back the Iranian nuclear program a year, it just didn’t seem worth it.

I think Donald Trump believes he has figured something out that has eluded his predecessors, which is that you can change these regimes without changing the regime.

You can capture Maduro, you can use air power to kill Khamenei, and what you’re going to do next is not insist on democracy, is not insist on rebuilding something you like — you are going to simply insist on somebody who is afraid enough of you that they are more pliable when it matters. And what you’ve created is not exactly a puppet but someone who is inclined to follow your orders when you give them. And that maintains a limit on how involved you need to be.

Is he right? Has he figured out something?

I don’t think he’s right. I think you’re right that he believes that he’s figured this out. But I think there are a number of flaws with his thinking.

For all the focus on Khamenei, who was a reprehensible leader — and by the way, I’m not sure how many years he had left — if we’re just decapitating him, I mean, time was about to do that. But this is a deep, deep regime within ideological institutions that go far beyond even the Chavismo regime in Venezuela.

Khamenei had been sitting on top of this edifice that had been built since the 1979 revolution and that includes millions of people under arms — The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the I.R.G.C., the Basij militia, which are usually responsible for the crackdowns that we see when there are peaceful protests, the Iranian military and police.

There’s a lot of depth to this regime, so taking out even the supreme leader doesn’t in any way change it. In fact, if you talk about people who might be afraid, the I.R.G.C. has sometimes been more hard line, certainly more than the political leadership that Americans usually see in negotiations.

Then it’s also the case — I truly believe Trump thinks in news cycle increments. So it’s: I’ll kill someone to make it look like we changed the regime. We got rid of the bad guy. We slayed the dragon here. And there’s no: What happens in one year? In three years? In five years?

I’ll be self-critical here, Ezra. You remember the Libya intervention? We did the same thing, essentially. Qaddafi was killed — there was an airstrike, and then he was killed by people on the ground. Terrible guy, reprehensible leader.

When that regime was removed, no one was able to fill the vacuum in Libya except for the most heavily armed people, who were a series of different militias.

That civil war spread across borders, and suddenly that part of North Africa becomes an arms bazaar, conflict is spreading to neighboring states.

So if the regime itself stays in Iran, I don’t think it’s fundamentally different just because Khamenei is not there. And if the regime implodes completely, I worry about a Libya-type situation at scale because this is a much bigger country, with over 90 million people.

So you could have a situation where you essentially have a regional war, instead of just bombing the nuclear program and getting out.

I think Donald Trump believes he has figured something out that has eluded his predecessors, which is that you can change these regimes without changing the regime.

Is he right? Has he figured out something?

I don’t think he’s right. I think you’re right that he believes that he’s figured this out. But I think there are a number of flaws with his thinking.

When that regime was removed, no one was able to fill the vacuum in Libya except for the most heavily armed people, who were a series of different militias.

That civil war spread across borders, and suddenly that part of North Africa becomes an arms bazaar, conflict is spreading to neighboring states.

I saw Trump’s Venezuela operation, and it made me worried about this.

One of the things you have heard repeatedly from Donald Trump is an expectation to the Iranian people: Now is your chance. We have degraded this regime. You are being supported by air power. Rise up and take back your country.

I think Trump said, “This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

What do you hear when you hear that?

I hear something that is incredibly reckless. We already saw when he was posting a few weeks ago on Truth Social: “Help is on its way,”

Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah, was similarly saying: Go to the streets. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Iranians were killed when they did go to the streets.

By the regime.

By the regime. You cannot protect those people from the air. Let’s say there’s an uprising, and let’s say all the remaining instruments of the Iranian regime start to massacre those people.

Well, we can bomb more regime targets. But at a certain point, you run out of that, and you’re just talking about people on the ground with small firearms.

I’m tremendously sympathetic to the Iranian people and what they’ve been through. I would love for them to have a different government. But I’ll say this, as the Obama guy: Hope is not a strategy.

Just going out there and saying: I’m bombing your country — this is part of what’s so disturbing to me about this, Ezra. They don’t have any capacity to articulate an endgame.

So I think people have to recognize — and I had to learn this the hard way through the Arab Spring: Just because we want a different government doesn’t mean that’s easy to execute.

Frankly, I think Iran was changing, albeit not at the pace that we wanted. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement succeeded in some ways. It didn’t change the regime, but you talk to people in that region, and the society was changing. Women were starting to go around uncovered. Some of the veneer of the regime had been punctured. Khamenei was old. He was going to die.

The capacity for the Iranian people themselves to change that regime over time, even though it’s not on the timeline that people want, I think would have been a better bet than just saying: We’re going to drop a bunch of bombs and rise up.

There’s just not a formula. I was thinking about this: Everybody is focused on the American-led regime-change operations, as they should — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, in that part of the world.

It’s not just those regimes that have had trouble. Sudan had a popular uprising. Look at Sudan today. Egypt had a popular uprising in the Obama years, and Mubarak ended up getting replaced by a more repressive leader.

So we keep seeing in these scenarios that the toppling of an authoritarian government can lead either to chaos or to further repression, and that’s my concern.

There’s a profound confusion in what Trump has been saying. He’s saying: Rise up, Iranian people, this is your moment. He’s also saying that he had three people in mind to lead the regime after this. But now it turns out they’re all dead. So maybe it’s not going to be them.

Yes.

He’s also said that he is willing to be in talks with the existing regime. They were playing it too cute before, but he’s happy to talk now.

So there is this way in which he’s simultaneously signaling an openness and eagerness to see a bottom-up revolt and also a willingness to cut a deal with what remains — so long as they get the deal they wanted, which is no nuclear program, no enrichment, probably no more ballistic missile program and a couple of other things.

But those two signals going out at the same time seem worrisome to me.

It seems very worrisome because it projects an incoherence to your policy.

And to your head-on-the-pike strategy: When I hear Trump say that, I hear someone who would like this to be over as soon as possible. But the reality is the Iranians get a vote on whether it’s over.

What they know, for instance, is U.S. munitions, particularly our air defense systems, are going to run lower and lower and lower. In a way, they may be able to hit more targets the longer this goes.

The best-case scenarios — because as someone who has been critical, I want to inhabit the best-case scenarios.

It feels like the best-case scenario may be a chastened regime that just wants to hunker down and will agree, at least for the time being, to not have any nuclear program that is active, to lick its wounds — and maybe that provides some opportunity for that regime to be less repressive.

I guess that’s the landing zone here that Trump is trying to meet. But, at the same time, we’ve bombed them twice now in the middle of nuclear negotiations. So if you have hard-liners in the I.R.G.C. or in Iranian circles, and they’re being told: Well, let’s stop and negotiate with the Americans — they’re not going to believe that they can negotiate in any kind of good faith with Donald Trump.

So I think that there’s this strategic incoherence about what the objective of this whole thing is — and that’s seen not just by the Iranians, it’s seen by the gulf Arabs, who are now furious at everybody.

I think they’re furious at the United States and Israel for launching this war, and we can talk about that. And I think they’re obviously furious at Iran for targeting them indiscriminately.

They don’t know what’s going on here. What’s the goal here? Are we trying to remove this regime? They’re wary of removing the regime because they don’t want refugees and chaos in their region.

What you would want, I guess, is everybody in the world — the relevant countries in the gulf and the region and Europe — being able to put some diplomatic framework around this so it’s not just Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner trying to talk to some Iranian in a room via the Omanis.

But Trump’s shifting goal posts of what he’s for make it much harder to put any kind of framework around this.

This gets at something pretty deep in the Trump administration’s thinking, or lack of thinking, which is: If there’s any global problem they’re worried about, it is refugee flows and migration.

Yes, yes, yes.

They go to Europe and talk about how Europe is ceasing to exist as a civilization, in part because of Muslim integration and immigration. There have been huge refugee flows to Europe from Syria as part of the Syrian civil war.

Imagine a scenario where you end up a little bit between Trump’s imagined options, which are simultaneously that you have opposition to the existing regime and you also have a regime that has become more compliant to Trump himself on things like the nuclear issue — but is trying to hold power and repressing those who are trying to attack it.

You could very quickly end up in a significant refugee flow scenario. Iran is a very big country. You’re talking about 90 million people. How do the states around Iran handle that?

What does the Trump administration think about a huge outflow of Iranians coming after the U.S. and Israel destabilize the country? Have they planned for that? Should Europe and America take these people?

Yeah.

Should other countries?

It doesn’t seem that they planned for it. I will tell you that in the run-up to this, I did talk to some people I know in the region, in the Middle East, in the gulf, who were discussing what they were warning the Trump administration about.

One of the scenarios, the worst-case scenario — I’m not suggesting this is definitely going to happen, but I think we have to inhabit this precisely because there was no discussion of the potential consequences — is that you have a civil conflict inside of Iran. The economy was already in really deep trouble because of U.S. sanctions and the collapsing currency, so there’s extreme poverty there. There are ethnic separatist movements inside Iran and the Kurdish regions and the Baloch regions.

So what you could have is an implosion. If there’s an uprising and then there’s a chaotic civil war — which is not hard to imagine because we’ve seen that in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, the other places where the U.S. has been involved militarily — and there are millions of refugees: Somebody said to me that this is a country that is four times bigger than Syria — and remember that refugee crisis?

Essentially, the only places to go in one direction are Afghanistan and Pakistan — and that’s not a particularly stabilizing thing to imagine, huge refugee outflows in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where we already have a war, by the way. Pakistan bombed Afghanistan the day before this started.

Pakistan could get drawn into this conflict, in part to get refugees away and in part to prevent the emergence of a separatist Balochistan on their borders. It crosses their borders.

And then the other direction is Turkey, into Europe. You saw Turkey very aggressively being a part of the mediation efforts. This is one of the reasons why. They have a lot of fatigue with hosting millions of Syrian refugees, and Europe is trying to keep those refugees in Turkey instead of their getting to Europe. They will find their way to Europe through Turkey.

So I don’t think there has been any real planning for this. That is, to me, the worst-case scenario of a civil war and even fracturing of the Iranian sovereign territory: You’d have huge refugee outflows.

We have not been planning for this. Israel has been planning for some version of this for a very long time.

They’re a full partner in this operation, which is distinctive about it. What do they want?

First and foremost, they want to smash anybody who poses a perceived threat to them. They’ve obviously been principally focused on this axis of resistance — Hamas, Hezbollah, other Iranian proxy groups and then, ultimately, the Iranian regime itself.

Weakening that regime is, in their view, obviously good for their security posture. They’re worried about ballistic missiles or a nuclear program.

If I was going to be cynical — and I know this is a view of some, increasingly, in the region — it’s that Israel is OK with chaos. If there’s an implosion in Iran and a humanitarian disaster there and chaos, that actually advantages their security situation in a way because that kind of Iran can’t pose a threat to them.

If you look at Lebanon and Syria, where Israel has also been very active militarily, Israel is pushing out not just the perimeter, they’re literally occupying parts of southern Syria now. They want this buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

I think that the fears in the region are that they are methodically eliminating threats, but also creating a lot of chaos and instability as almost a strategy of giving themselves freedom of action — whether that involves taking the West Bank, whether that involves extending out buffer zones into Syria and Lebanon.

That seems more plausible to me than they have some plan to support the installation of Reza Pahlavi as the transitional leader of Iran.

What they seem, to me, to have had a plan for, and I think you have to give some credit to Netanyahu for one of the most remarkable coups of his career, was involving Donald Trump in this.

Yes.

Netanyahu has very effectively pulled Trump in by degrees, such that we were supposed to have a very limited bombing campaign on Iran, we were told after that their nuclear program was obliterated.

In Trump’s video announcing this operation, he both said that Iran was posing an imminent threat and that their nuclear program had been obliterated, which I found a little bit strange.

Netanyahu’s ability to get Trump to do what no other U.S. president has been willing to do is striking. I think that was, on some level, the real plan here. Israel had weakened Iran. It had shown Iran to be weaker than people thought it was.

And I think the push was made to Trump that he has this narrow window of opportunity to do what no other president has done — and at least in the way it was presented to him, permanently solve the problem and permanently avenge previous injuries and insults to America.

I think you are exactly right. I think it’s worth pointing out — we were both in Washington at the time — this started coming up at the end of the Bush administration in 2007, 2008, when there was a push for Bush to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu has wanted to do this since I have been in politics — very clearly. He wanted the U.S., not Israel alone, to take out the Iranian regime. Every president has resisted this except Trump. We should say, obviously, there are people in the United States, the Lindsey Grahams of the world, who want to do this, as well. So it’s not just Israel. But it’s a pretty small set of constituencies. The public is broadly against this. And you’re right — they brought him in by degrees.

We can even go back to the first Trump term when he left the Iranian nuclear deal. That was not something that his advisers were telling him to do. Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, was against it at the time. He was not even a huge fan of the Iran nuclear deal, but he saw if you remove yourself from that deal, you’re on a slow-motion movement toward this.

In a way, it’s funny: Trump likes to say: “12-day war” — but it has been one war. Since he pulled out of that nuclear agreement, it’s been a slow-motion series of events that led in this direction.

It begins with economic war, with sanctions.

Exactly. You pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, you go to maximum pressure sanctions, you assassinate Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani — those are all things that happened in Trump’s first term. They couldn’t get him all the way to bombing Iran itself.

Biden — and I’ve been very critical, as you know, of Biden’s Middle East policy on Gaza — was clearly not keen to go all-in with Iran on a regional war. Maybe he was supportive of going after the Iranian proxy groups, but not this.

Then Trump comes back, and they do the nuclear strike. But I think you’re right. I think the Israelis saw the Venezuelan operation and thought: Oh, he’s getting more comfortable with this, and he’s getting comfortable taking it to regime change.

Israel sees this, and the continued use of military force without any congressional authorization is connected to this because they see there’s a president in Donald Trump who is willing to just bomb countries and take huge risks — absent any congressional debate or discussion.

We dealt with this in the Obama years. You must inhabit the scenario of a war. If Donald Trump had tried to prepare the American people for this, they would have said no. If he had gone out and given a series of speeches, saying: Now is the time. We must remove the Iranian regime — it wouldn’t have worked.

So I think you’re right. This vainglorious: I’m Donald Trump. I will slay all the dragons. We’ve had these grievances with Maduro, with Khamenei, with the Cuban regime — I’m going to remove all of them.

I think that there’s a vanity to that, that Israel and some of the hawks in this country saw, and they went to him knowing that he was reticent to break from his base this much to do this. But they appealed to something bigger than his short-term political instincts, which is: This will make you a historic figure.

And I think Bibi Netanyahu has wanted to get an American president to do this since at least when I was in government. And he has.

One thing that I think is important in that story you just laid out is that there has been learning about Iran that has been successive. America pulled out of the nuclear deal, added the maximum pressure sanctions. Iran wasn’t able to do very much about that.

There was the assassination of Suleimani. There was no significant reprisal for that.

You saw Israel decapitate Hezbollah. You saw the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites.

And I do think there has been a significant, growing sense that Iran was not as fearsome and did not have the capacity to strike back as had been believed. But you could do this at low cost, which was not what people thought before.

This drives me a little crazy because I think it’s true. But let’s just take Netanyahu. The argument was always that Iran is 10 feet tall. That they are absolute maniacs who are on the precipice of a nuclear weapon, and they’ve built this massive axis that is coming for us.

And I never believed that. I never believed that Iran was all-powerful. I certainly never believed that they had offensive power, that they were going to launch some pre-emptive war against Israel.

They are interested in regime survival. That was always my assessment. The Iranian doctrine on even some of the proxy groups was: Keep this out of Iran, keep the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon.

So part of what used to drive me crazy about the hawkish prescriptions on Iran from inside Washington and Israel is that either argument led to war. If Iran is really powerful, we must take them out because they must be stopped, because they’re on the precipice of doing something. Or they’re weak, so we can take them out.

I do think it bears saying, first of all, that we should have a mind-set that war is bad and should be avoided. That should be a legal and values proposition that there are preferable outcomes to war itself.

The other problem I have with this, Ezra, is there’s an incredible short-term thinking about this. Because you’re also sending the message that Iran was in a nuclear deal with the United States, they were complying with that nuclear deal, and they then got bombed. Whatever Iranian regime emerges from this, I think, is very likely to want nuclear weapons so this doesn’t happen.

If you’re sitting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, or even Dubai and Abu Dhabi right now, you’re thinking: Well, the Americans are my security guarantor, and look at what we just got out of that security guarantee. We got a war that they launched, pretty much.

I don’t buy that the Saudis were pushing for this, by the way. I saw them deny that report, and I think they were very reticent about this. Why wouldn’t they get nuclear weapons now?

At the end of the day, the Americans are willing to play with our security or deprioritize it against Israel’s security. Other would-be proliferators are going to think: Look at North Korea versus Iran.

So there are these second-order effects, and one of them is nuclear proliferation, where the consequences might not be manifest next year. But five years from now, I don’t think that this kind of action will have made us safer.

If you actually believe in nuclear nonproliferation, it’s much better to have that be something you fortified diplomatically than your just removing a regime because it’s weak.

I want to pick up on what you just said about the Saudis. There was a Washington Post report that cited at least four sources that had knowledge of the conversations and negotiations. It basically said that in public, Saudi Arabia has been against this and has denied us use of their bases. In private, Mohammed bin Salman and top people in the Saudi government have been privately pushing Trump to act.

This is something that, if you’ve been around these issues for a while, you’ve heard the Israelis talk about how nobody wants the Iranian government gone like Saudi Arabia. So you don’t buy that is what was happening?

I’m skeptical of it because I was hearing different things.

You certainly saw Qatar, Turkey and Egypt, along with Oman, obviously, trying to avert this outcome. The Egypt thing was interesting to me because the idea that Egypt would take that position without Saudi Arabia as a chief sponsor supporting them makes me question it.

Also in Saudi foreign policy, you saw rapprochement with Iran in the last few years. I think Mohammed bin Salman, whom I’ve been hugely critical of — anybody who has listened to me over the years knows I have no love for that government — but I think he’s principally interested in stability.

Now what I think is quite possible is they were reticent of this. They don’t like instability of this scale in their region. They don’t like the potential disruptions to energy infrastructure. But when they see an inevitability to it, they may have come around and been like: OK, we’ll talk to you guys about this.

I think the most likely scenario is that they’re a bit ambivalent. Because, again, their security paradigm is stability, stability, stability. And this doesn’t feel a lot like stability.

I’m not saying this is the biggest issue in this moment, but the centrality of Israel in the operation has raised some concerns for me about what this is going to mean for antisemitism.

You see the amount of talk on the MAGA right — but elsewhere, as well — about Israel’s leverage over Donald Trump or that this is all just some kind of Israeli plot.

I wonder a bit about the many ways in which Netanyahu looks to be gambling for short-term position over the long-term sustainability of both Israel’s political position in America but also just the generalized worldview at a time of very, very sharply rising antisemitism with regard to what is going on here.

I don’t know how it nets out or what it ends up meaning, but it certainly has me nervous.

It has me nervous, too. There are two aspects to that. One is in the region, and one is here. I’ll just say, briefly, in the region, I was critical of the Abraham Accords at the time, and I was a bit of an outlier to say the least about that.

Donald Trump framed this as a big peace deal when, in fact, it didn’t resolve any of the conflicts in the region.

And look at what has happened since. It’s been much more violent. If you talk to people in the region, they see that this has all been about Israeli hegemony in this region, and that is making all the Arab states who were certainly prepared to live with Israel — I don’t think Saudi Arabia had any threat to pose to Israel — increasingly concerned about a dynamic where there’s this degree of freedom of action for Israel.

Over time, what does that look like? How does that evolve in the long-term in the region?

I think here, you’re right. I really worry about this. This is not me saying Israel pushed Donald Trump to do this. Bibi Netanyahu went out, I think, yesterday and said: I’ve wanted this to happen for 40 years. And finally, Trump did it. He’s doing it with us, too.

But the U.S. used to be very careful not to do joint military operations with Israel. And partly for this reason.

This is a very big break.

This is a huge break. People need to think about this. Just to do joint exercises was something people calibrated carefully because we didn’t want to make it look like Israel and the United States are one and the same — for reasons that go in both directions.

But here’s the thing: Americans are looking at this, and they’re seeing that we are in a war that seems like it’s something Israel wanted us to do. It seems like the benefits accrue mostly to Israel. The ballistic missile program does not pose a threat to the United States. There is no intercontinental ballistic missile from Iran that can reach the United States.

So a lot of what we’re doing is removing threats to Israel. If it goes poorly, who is going to get blamed? I think that some of that anger will go in the direction of Israel. And I think it’s important for us to talk about this because when there’s no debate and discussion about it, it migrates to the darker corners, right? You’re certainly seeing that in MAGA.

Well, I think one reason this has fed conspiracies is it has felt to many people like an almost inexplicable break from how Trump sold himself.

Back in 2023, Trump said:

The globalists want to squander all of America’s strength, blood and treasure, chasing monsters and phantoms overseas — while keeping us distracted from the havoc they’re creating right here at home.

Very on point.

JD Vance writes a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed that year titled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”

Tulsi Gabbard, of course, sells “No war with Iran” T-shirts.

Now you have Trump starting wars, certainly conflicts or engagements, left and right. According to Axios, Trump has now authorized more airstrikes in 2025 alone than Biden did in all four years.

So I think for a lot of people, there has been the question: How do you reconcile both Trump and the movement that was around him — all the people advising him — with what we’re seeing now?

I got asked over the weekend by somebody: What faction inside the White House wanted this? And I found it hard to answer that question. We have not seen a lot of reporting saying Marco Rubio wanted this to happen. JD Vance appears to have not.

Instead, we’re talking about Israel and Lindsey Graham, who’s not that influential anymore. Mohammed bin Salman, maybe.

I think a lot of people have been very confused by how to explain Trump himself taking this risk.

I had the same mental exercise, Ezra. Let’s just go through it. If you look at all these polls, it is wildly politically unpopular. By the way, that continues to hold, even though the supreme leader was killed. The supreme leader being killed will be the high-water mark of this operation.

There’s not another person whom you can kill that Trump can say is a head on a pike. Then if you look at the people who want to inherit MAGA, who are looking ahead at the Republican Party, JD Vance seems to want to have very little to do with this. Tucker Carlson is railing against this.

The Steve Bannons of the world are not enthusiastic about this. The Republican Party is not going in this direction. So this is not something that Trump is doing because it’s going to be wildly popular.

The military didn’t want it. Joint Chiefs of Staff ——

The Joint Chiefs of Staff were clearly leaking out that they didn’t want do this.

Marco Rubio is much more focused on this hemisphere — Venezuela and Cuba, which they’re trying to strangle with maximum pressure. The Democratic Party and, in particular, the people anticipating the future of the Democratic Party are not for this.

Who is for this? It’s a very small set of constituents. It is basically Israel, and then it is hard-line, longstanding hawks in Congress or in the national security establishment.

By the way, the people whom Trump said he didn’t like before this ——

John Bolton, whom Trump is trying to persecute, is out there defending it. Also, wasn’t part of the reason Trump talked about getting rid of John Bolton: John Bolton always wanted me to attack Iran?

Iran. Right. So it is hard to not conclude that Bibi Netanyahu and Israel’s push for this was determinative in some way.

Because again, the only appeal to Trump that made any sense is kind of the one you made earlier, where you become a historic figure.

I do think there’s a part of him that’s just like: These governments have been a pain in the [expletive] for decades. Cuba since the 1959 revolution; Iran, since the ’79 revolution; Venezuela, since the Chavismo revolution. I’m going to be the one who finally settles all these scores.

Some of that is separate from Israel. But take the counterfactual: If the Israeli government was not pushing for this, would it have happened?

I want to talk about the ways in which this might not remain limited in the way Donald Trump has either promised a country or, I think, promised himself.

So I see this as following from the 12-day bombing some months ago. It turned out that didn’t do enough. It’s clear that Iran was racing forward with ballistic missiles, reconstituting a nuclear program, which probably was not obliterated in the way Donald Trump had initially said it was.

So we were now involved, and Iran was defying him. It wasn’t just that it was obliterated. That obliteration was a kind of command from him to them — that it was gone. They weren’t giving up enough at the negotiating table.

And I think this was meaningful to Trump on some level. When the Iranian regime was slaughtering its own people, he didn’t like that, either. I want to give him credit for some potential humanitarian impulse here.

So now we’re involved even more. Now we have kinetically destroyed much of the regime and its power. But a lot could spin out of control here.

Yes.

So I am very skeptical that the limit Trump seems to think he has put on this is stable. And I’m curious, as somebody with more experience here than I have, what you think of it.

I think you’re right. The Israelis have this — it’s not a doctrine, but essentially this terminology called “mowing the lawn.”

Have you heard this?

Mm-hmm.

I hate even using phrases like this when it comes to war and human beings. But essentially, the “mowing the lawn” strategy is: If there’s a place that poses a threat, you occasionally just go in and cut the grass. You bomb the threat periodically.

Obviously, Lebanon would be a perfect case of where the Israelis have pursued that.

They always said this about Hamas.

Yes.

How did that ultimately work out?

Exactly. There’s a risk. This is why I say we have been at war with Iran. The idea that there was something called the 12-day war and now there’s a different war? No, that’s not how these things work.

Once you bomb a country, you’re bringing this forever war paradigm to it. So I think it is quite possible that in the same way that the 12-day war wasn’t the end of the story, if Trump stops bombing Iran in a week, two weeks, three weeks, we’re back doing that in a few months because something happened that we don’t like.

Then you start to get massacres in the streets of Iran, or you start to get refugee outflows, or you start to continue to see random attacks in the gulf. Are we really going to do nothing? But then, if we’re getting back in, we’re getting pulled into quicksand. We are implicated — we are involved.

The common thread to this conversation is that we need to get rid of this short-term thinking that there’s such a thing as 12-day wars or that you solve a problem when you kill the leader. That’s not how any of this goes.

I think it is genuinely striking, and a break with certainly the recent past, how little public deliberation there has been over quite major American foreign policy actions.

The Bush administration did lie its way into war with Iraq, but it did also spend a long time trying to persuade the country that war with Iraq was worth doing. And we debated how much of the American military it would take.

What does it mean to be entering into these kinds of commitments, these kinds of projects, these kinds of risks without really any public debate, any significant public or congressional deliberation of what might happen? You don’t have a bunch of members of the military repeatedly going to Congress and going through scenarios.

I don’t want to place everything here on process being poor, but there’s a reason that the public and Congress are consulted. Because if it ends up requiring more engagement, then you actually need that support.

I think process is related to outcome. The single most important thing you could do to keep America out of more wars is actually require Congress to take a vote — because they’re not going to vote for it given where public opinion is on this.

So I think it’s incredibly corrosive to democracy to have this kind of loop of conflict that is increasingly sidelining Congress and public opinion entirely. I also think there’s something even more dangerous, Ezra, which is: When are we going to know how bad it’s going to get with Trump?

What if the things that you fear are already happening? We already have a president who clearly came back into office wanting the military to be more directly responsive to him than it was in the first term, when the military leadership and even some of the Pentagon leadership stood up to him more and more. We have seen him purge the top of the military general officers. We have seen him address the general officers and say: Hey, American cities might be military training grounds.

Now we’ve seen him, within a matter of weeks, undertake multiple military actions. I’ll just give you a few.

We bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. We were blowing up boats in the Caribbean on totally false pretenses that it had something to do with drug trafficking in the United States — and potentially committed war crimes. We abducted the leader of Venezuela.

We now just killed the supreme leader of Iran and are trying to topple that regime, or maybe we’re not. And at the same time, we see the Department of War telling Anthropic, an A.I. company, that they will be banned from any business of the government if the Pentagon can’t ignore their terms of service against mass surveillance of Americans. These are all things that have happened within three months.

Where I’m going with this is: The ultimate guardrail in democracy is supposed to be the separation between the president and the military as an institution. If the military of an institution can just directly serve the interests of Donald Trump, with no public debate about what it’s doing, no congressional votes on what it’s doing: How many more countries are you going to bomb, and what is that military going to end up doing in the United States if he invokes the Insurrection Act?

That’s not to impugn the military, that’s to impugn where Trump is taking this. So I think the darker scenarios: It’s not only process nerds saying we need to have authorizations for use of military force and we need briefings to Congress.

No, it’s: Is the military an institution that just completely serves the whims of the president? Or is it an institution that is apolitical, that is equally responsive to Congress and the president? Those questions are going to matter a lot how the next two and three-quarters years of the Trump administration go.

Although I think it’s important to say: It’s not that Congress is being defied — Congress has abdicated.

Yes.

Mike Johnson is not out there complaining. He is supporting this. There are many ways in which Trump is a disruptive break with the past but also the escalation of not going to Congress for quite dangerous operations.

That was present in the Obama era. This has been growing for a very long time.

Well, the thing that Obama probably gets the most grief for in his foreign policy was the Syria red-line incident. But what was interesting about that, Ezra, is you have this chemical weapon ——

Can you describe what that is?

Yes. Obama had said it would be a red line if the Assad regime used chemical weapons.

Then there’s massive chemical weapons use. We were preparing to bomb Syria. We were. I was in meetings. I thought we were going to bomb Syria. Going through strike packages, that kind of stuff.

And then Obama makes this decision essentially to say: I’m going to put this to a vote in Congress. I’m not going to go to war with Syria unless Congress votes to authorize it.

And almost immediately, the support for that begins to evaporate in Congress. Even people like Marco Rubio, who were hawks, would not vote to authorize use of military force in Syria.

Obama’s point was: If Congress, the representatives of the people as envisioned under our constitutional system, don’t want to get us into another war with Syria and be responsible for the consequences of whatever happens, then we shouldn’t do it. That’s how our system is designed.

A lot of people have pointed out that we should have done more to stop Assad. And I agree. I’m sympathetic to all those arguments, but I’m also sympathetic to Obama’s argument, which is: If people don’t want the war, we don’t have to fight it.

Part of what Trump was tapping into in his campaigns was the gap between elites — particularly, national security elites — and public opinion. It is a crazy gap, Ezra — I’ve lived at the precipice of it. The conversations and the strategies, in both parties, of national security elites versus what the American people want their government to be focused on, is a deeply unhealthy gap.

And all Trump has done is say: OK, that establishment is no longer there. It’s just him. It’s like all of American exceptionalism, all of the apparatus of American power. I call it the blob, whatever you want to call it — this edifice — is now just in one man’s head, in one man’s hands.

Instead of solving the problem he said he was running to fix, he’s made it worse. Because it’s just up to Donald Trump now.

This gets to the question of whether international law still exists in any meaningful way.

No. It does not.

What does that mean?

It applies in no way to the United States of America — at least, we are completely ignoring it. Here’s how it doesn’t exist: In the past, when the United States would do things that stretched the boundaries of international law, you would still show up and make a case about why this was an imminent threat. They don’t even bother.

The act of going to war violates international law if you cannot demonstrate that there was an imminent threat and that you’re acting in some form of self-defense. Or you have to get U.N. Security Council approval. Absent those things, you’re violating international law. But even in the conduct of war, if the United States is currently sanctioning the International Criminal Court, which is the pre-eminent body that is enforcing the laws of war, what message does that send about the conduct of war?

We’re doing that because they tried to indict Bibi Netanyahu for war crimes. But if you’re basically saying that none of the laws apply to us, at a certain point, Russia and China say: Well, then they don’t apply to us, either. And if those laws don’t apply to any of the big powers on the most important matters — of war and peace and the conduct of war, whether to go to war and how you fight a war — how do they apply to anybody?

I’ve wondered how much the reaction from some of our allies, whom you might have thought of as more committed to international law, has actually reflected a collective recognition that it is gone.

Mark Carney, in Canada was very supportive of Trump’s strikes. You have real support from Australia. Germany was pretty four square behind us. And I think this all reflects some of their feelings about the Iranian regime.

But I have been struck by the complete absence of outcry from countries where part of their power has to come from commitment to these institutions that maintain a kind of collective or multilateral approach to these questions.

What have you made of that?

I’ve been struck by it, too. I think part of what Trump counts on is: The people I’m taking out don’t have a lot of friends — I have more room — whether it’s Maduro or if it’s the Iranian regime.

I’d say I’m very disappointed in it, though. I was one of many people who thought Mark Carney’s speech at Davos was important and interesting and kind of reflective of what’s happening, and also pointed a path to some emergence of something on the other end of this — that essentially, if the middle powers, the more responsible countries in the world that still follow at least some international laws and want some norms around conflict and other things, if they began to stitch together, maybe that could be a place that the United States could rejoin on the back end of Trump.

If Mark Carney is going to carve this out, though, if he’s essentially going to say: We need rules on trade, but if you bomb Iran, go for it — I think that hugely undermines Mark Carney’s own argument. It just makes it seem cynical. It makes it seem like all he’s really concerned about is trade. Or: All I’m concerned about is Greenland because it’s European territory.

You can attest that I’ve taken a lot of grief for this over the years. But I just believe that if we think that international law and norms are important, they really have to apply universally. We can’t just say: Well, they don’t apply to Iran, Cuba and Venezuela because we don’t like them.

The United States built this system after World War II because we recognized that if you don’t constrain everybody, you are going to have a repeat of what happened in World War I and World War II. If you start to create carveouts, people start to move into those carveouts. And there are cycles of conflict that lead ultimately to a world war.

I think people need to inhabit the reality that we’re moving into. There are no constraints from international law anymore. There is a rampant trend of nationalism in the world. There are leaders like Donald Trump, in the United States; Xi Jinping, in China, Vladimir Putin, in Russia; Bibi Netanyahu, in Israel; Narendra Modi, in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Turkey. These are nationalists. Nationalism — absent international law — always leads to more war, and those wars beget more wars.

Let’s strongman the other side of the case here, which is international law — the international law that allowed Iran to slaughter its own people, to repress them, to fund terrorist proxies all throughout the region.

You’re saying that international law should have restrained Israel and America against a country that had, for decades now, made its rallying slogans “Death to Israel” and “Death to America,” and, in fact, was funding players who wanted to do just that.

One of the critiques you’ll hear from critics of international law is that international law has been used as a shield by rogue regimes — regimes that do not follow its dictates in all manner of ways but then hide behind it when they face the consequences that they are bringing down upon themselves.

I guess I’d say first and foremost, Iran has paid consequences. We worked on the Iran nuclear deal for seven years. And the reason I say seven years is that for several years at the beginning of the Obama administration, we built a multilateral sanctions framework around Iran based on the fact that they were violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — international law.

So we didn’t say: Oh, it’s fine, you can violate international law. We said: No, we got U.N. Security Council resolutions that became the basis of a maximum pressure campaign in the Obama administration.

But it was meant to leverage a change of behavior from the Iranians: You have to kind of come into compliance with international law, via the nuclear deal, in which you are committing to never build a nuclear weapon. You are submitting to intense monitoring and verification of your nuclear program.

And by the way, we still had other sanctions on them over their support for proxies.

I don’t like what goes on inside a lot of countries in the world. Yet there’s something peculiar that we are normalizing the idea that is a sufficient basis to go to war in those countries.

We don’t like it when Vladimir Putin does it. When Vladimir Putin says: Hey, the elected president of Ukraine was ousted in a protest movement in 2014 — in part by people who were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy — I don’t agree with that narrative. But how can we say that Vladimir Putin does not have the right to invade that country — yet if we see things that we don’t like inside of other countries, we have the right to do that?

I think what people see is that if you truly believe in human rights, then you have to apply that normative framework across the board. A lot of the very same people who are suddenly human rights advocates when it comes to what’s happening inside of Iran have nothing to say about what’s happening in the West Bank. Had nothing to say when Jamal Khashoggi was chopped up in the Saudi consulate inside Turkey. Had nothing to say about the fact that Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the president of Egypt, has 60,000 people who are political prisoners suffering horrific treatment.

So you either have to be universal and consistent, or I have a really hard time listening to your argument.

I have seen a lot of Democrats — and to some degree, the international response, too — somewhat paralyzed between their legitimate loathing of the Iranian government and their dislike, distaste, for the process of violation of international law, the absence of public deliberation or congressional approval.

But I think it has created a kind of muddle in their response. Are they saying this should have been done? It’s a good thing that it happened, but they don’t like that it happened? Are they saying that the only problem with it was poor process? If Trump had gone to Congress, maybe they would have given the authority to do it?

How do you think Democrats should respond to this? Because right now, I’ve seen many in the leadership not really focusing on: Was this a right or wrong thing to do? — but: Was the process that led to it the right or wrong process?

They’re saying all of the things that you said, and I have a huge problem with this because ultimately people are not that interested in the process.

If someone who doesn’t follow this superclosely hears a Democratic leader like Chuck Schumer coming out of a briefing about a potential war in Iran that feels imminent, and he says: They have to make their case more — or something like that — what does it sound like? It sounds like a dodge. What do you actually believe as a political party?

We do this thing in our Obama group text, Ezra, which wouldn’t surprise you, in which I said: Imagine if President Obama announced a war on Iran from a vacation property, in the middle of the night, on a social media post and made casual remarks about the fact that Americans are going to die. It is what it is. And then within two days, you’re already seeing American casualties, American planes falling out of the sky, huge global economic disruptions.

The Republican Party would have been absolutely unified. And part of the reason that Obama had so little room for maneuver is that the Republicans, as a political party, were able to make an argument against whatever the thing that Obama was doing.

The Democratic Party doesn’t understand that it’s not enough just to say: We want a process vote or a procedural vote. We’re going to support the resolution cosponsored by Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie. Most Americans have no idea what that is. Right? I mean, I support it, but it’s not going to do anything. And I think most Americans don’t know that it’s a vote on whether or not Congress has to authorize something that has already happened.

And again, I’m totally supportive of that effort. This is not a criticism of Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie. But the point is: Are you for this or against it? And if you’re against it, why are you not all-out saying that this is reckless, that this is a betrayal of what Donald Trump said when he ran for president, that we don’t need more wars? Why are we spending money? The price tag of this is going to be in the tens of billions. That’s money that could pay for the A.C.A. subsidies ——

At least.

Yes — at least. There’s your health care subsidies. Right now, our health care subsidies are being spent on a war in Iran. Donald Trump is not looking after your interests. He’s looking after some kind of grandiose ambitions in the Middle East.

This is a very easy political case to make, Ezra. This is the easiest thing in the world — that we should be nation building at home, not abroad.

I saw this after Maduro. I think it reflected what happened both in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq. There is a difficulty people have, where maybe they would not themselves go to war for this, maybe they would not have supported a war for something like this, but when it is against a brutal dictator, on what grounds are you opposing it?

Is opposing it supporting the continuation of the regime? I think that’s where a lot of the Democrats and world leaders you’re talking about are getting caught.

So aside from the discussion of spending money in one place versus another, it’s this quite deep question of: What is the difference between how do people negotiate and how do they argue against these wars that are partially demanded or justified on humanitarian grounds?

The Iranian regime, as you mentioned, just killed thousands or maybe tens of thousands of their own people — Iranians who were marching in the streets, and it was not safe for them to do that.

I sort of have my answer to this, but I’m curious for yours.

I think my answer to this is that war itself is something to be avoided. That may seem like an obvious point.

To be a little provocative on this, too: I think that post-Sept. 11 —because we’ve normalized so much use of military action — because I could argue, Ezra, it is completely insane that we’re sitting here and having a conversation about how, if we don’t bomb a regime, then we’re therefore keeping it in power. Does it report to us?

And I think what Americans kind of intuitively get better than their political elites, their national security elites and even some of the media conversation on this is: They get that war is terrible. War has risks — and even if it’s well intentioned on paper, leads to bad outcomes for the Americans who have to fight it, the American taxpayers to pay for it and pretty much the people on the other end of the war, whom you say you’re trying to help.

We were trying to help the Iraqis; we were trying to help the Afghans; we were trying to help the Libyans. Now we’re trying to help the Iranians.

And I guess the provocative thing I want to say, too, is that this seems to happen when the countries in question are brown. I think there’s a dehumanization, since Sept. 11, where it’s like: Oh, the next Middle Eastern country up, where the regime does something we don’t like, we’re going to go and just bomb them.

If reports are accurate, either the U.S. or Israel killed over a hundred girls at a school. And it’s not really a big story in the United States.

To tie this back home, I don’t think that mentality, that othering, of people who are on the other side of the world after Sept. 11 — I think that othering has come home. I think that the capacity to have the mass deportation campaign that is generally targeting brown and Black people is kind of tied to this dehumanization and desensitization of violence that we see in our foreign policy. Post-Sept. 11, we othered a lot of populations.

I know we’re going a little far afield, but I think this is really relevant: I noticed in the Obama administration, the othering on Fox was once just about Middle Eastern terrorists. But then it’s about the people crossing the southern border. And then it becomes one big other.

So I think it should be seen as a pretty extremist proposition that if the United States doesn’t go to war with some government in the Middle East, we’re somehow condoning everything.

I was really mad about what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. But at no point did I think we should bomb Mohammed bin Salman for that.

I agree with a lot of that. And I want to offer one other thing that I think has been threaded through our conversation — and it’s sort of my answer to this question — which is: War is inherently uncontrollable.

The fantasy that we are always offered at the beginning is that we can choose what it is we are going to do — that we can control the situation we are going to create.

And as we have developed even more precision weapons and more air power and more drones and more ability to wage war at a distance, the seduction of that control for leaders and for others has become all the more potent.

But the history of this is: We do not control it. As you mentioned, with Libya, with Afghanistan, with Iraq, we might think we are helping the people, but if we set off a civil war, you could easily have 70,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 or 300,000 people die in that war.

And we have shown no interest in saying that we will occupy the country to make sure that doesn’t happen. And as we learned in Iraq: Even if we do decide to occupy the country, can we keep that from happening?

Donald Trump was one of the people who started our withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was then completed in the Biden administration. Again, that was the inability over a very long time to control the outcome of something like this, even when we were willing to put much more of our blood and treasure into controlling it.

So to me, the great lie of war is that you will get what you want out of it. Among the many things that scare me so much about Trump is how blithe he is with that. You don’t feel like this has cost him any sleep at all.

If it goes badly, I think he will walk away and say: Well, I gave you Iranians your chance. You didn’t take it. Or: You didn’t succeed in taking it.

I think you’re exactly right. One thing I became very aware of over eight years in the White House, but also in this whole post-Sept. 11 period, is that the U.S. military can destroy anything. It can take out any target set that it has. But it cannot engineer the politics of other countries or build what comes after the thing that is destroyed.

We had 150,000 troops in Iraq, and we couldn’t stop the violence. And look — do you know who knows that? The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps colonel, who’s a total hard-liner right now, knows that Americans are going to lose interest in this. He knows that if they weather this, on the back end, they can potentially do what they want. There’s a callousness in the way that Trump has done this.

And precisely because I think war is so uncertain and the cost of war is paid so overwhelmingly by ordinary people, one of the reasons I would like to see Democrats — or anybody, frankly, who’s concerned about Trump — be more outspoken now is: I think sometimes they are reticent to speak out, because what if it goes well?

It’s not just that the Iranian regime is bad, it’s that if it goes well then they’ll say: You were against this thing.

I’m sorry, I’m against this, even if it has the better-case scenario. Because if you can’t take a position on something that’s as fundamental as whether going to war when you don’t have to is a good thing, then what’s the point of all this?

We could have achieved our objectives on the nuclear issue through negotiations. We chose to bomb this country instead.

So I think that precisely because war can lead to such terrible outcomes, you have to be willing to take a stance against war itself unless it is absolutely necessary. And this certainly didn’t meet that test.

I think that is the place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

On this last question, “From the Ruins of Empire” by Pankaj Mishra is a really excellent intellectual history of — for lack of a better way of putting it — the Global South or people in decolonized spaces in the 20th century coming up with alternatives to Western hegemony.

Then, as someone who has been trying to make sense of what it’s like to live in a collapsing liberal order, I found myself reading “The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig twice since Trump’s election. It’s haunting, beautiful and contemporaneous. Zweig was a great Austrian writer who wrote his life story in the midst of World War II. But it’s really about the collapse of the liberal order in Europe.

And then lastly, a book I read in these past few days is called “Travelers in the Third Reich” by Julia Boyd. What she did is she found letters, journals, other contemporaneous accounts of, basically, British and Americans visiting Nazi Germany. What were their impressions? Spoiler: Way too many of them did not see how bad this was going be. All of those things, I think, are unfortunately relevant to today.

Ben Rhodes, thank you very much.

Thanks, Ezra.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck and Marlaine Glicksman.

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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” and the author of “Why We’re Polarized” and, with Derek Thompson, “Abundance.” Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox. Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.