This is an audio transcript of the Swamp Notes podcast episode: 'Trump's 'war of whim' in Iran'. Lauren Fedor President Trump started a war with Iran last...

Transcript: Trump’s ‘war of whim’ in Iran This is an audio transcript of the Swamp Notes podcast episode: ‘Trump’s ‘war of whim’ in Iran’ Lauren Fedor President Trump started a war with Iran last week. [VIDEO CLIP PLAYING] US and Israeli air strikes have killed hundreds, including Iran’s supreme leader, and several Americans have been killed as well.  Donald Trump voice clip Right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks. But we have capability to go far longer than that.  Lauren Fedor But now, President Trump says he’ll only accept an unconditional surrender from Iraq. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times, where we talk about all of the things happening in US politics, finance and the economy. I’m Lauren Fedor, in for Marc Filippino, and this week we’re asking: what comes next in Iran? Here with me to discuss is Edward Luce. He’s the FT’s US national editor and co-author of the Swamp Notes newsletter. Hi, Ed.  Edward Luce Good to be with you, Lauren.  Lauren Fedor We’ve also got Abigail Hauslohner, the FT’s US foreign affairs correspondent. Hi, Abby.  Abigail Hauslohner Hi, Lauren.  Lauren Fedor Abby, we’d watched this massive military build-up in the region for weeks, but early Saturday morning, the US and Israeli militaries launched the massive attack across Iran, and I think it surprised a lot of people. Were you surprised?  Abigail Hauslohner Well, as you just mentioned, the president was sort of forecasting this for weeks leading up to it. He started threatening Iran with attack in early January when Iran was in the midst of this very fierce regime crackdown on nationwide protests, and Trump said that he would come to the rescue of the protesters. And then he started deploying US military assets to the region, navy ships, aircraft carriers, various missile batteries to different bases. We wrote a story about how he had sort of talked himself into a box, in a way, by making these threats, telling Iran that it was time for them to make a new nuclear deal. But then also, he and his administration periodically throwing out other objectives that they wanted Iran to agree to, you know, such as ceasing all support for proxy groups in the region. You know, getting rid of their ballistic and short-range missile stockpile. We got our first hint on Tuesday when I think a lot of us actually thought he might make an announcement of an offensive during his State of the Union address. And then, that didn’t happen, obviously. Then on Friday, we started hearing from folks in the Middle East that Israel, you know, was warning some allies to sort of sit tight, but then it really happened. I was surprised to wake up Saturday morning and see that it had all started overnight. Lauren Fedor And why now?  Abigail Hauslohner In the past several days, really, since the lead in to this attack and since it was launched, we have heard Trump and his cabinet members offer several different rationales for why it was necessary to do this now. You know, we’ve heard sort of regime change floated. We’ve heard, obviously, a lot of talk of Iran’s nuclear programme and the fact that they refused to make a deal suggesting that this was punishment for not agreeing to certain terms that the administration wanted. There wasn’t a clear justification leading up to the attack. The administration was actively negotiating with Iran for some sort of new nuclear deal, and we’ve heard several different rationales offered in the days since.  Lauren Fedor Ed, what do you make of all of that mixed messaging? What does that tell you about, you know, how prepared or unprepared the administration was here, and what their aims are? Edward Luce The aims are really impossible to pin down, because they keep changing. We started off with a more extravagant regime change talk from Trump. We just want to degrade or obliterate their nuclear ballistic and other and naval capabilities, all military capabilities. Now, Trump’s back to saying that he’d like to appoint the next Iranian leader. It’s really like trying to nail jello to the wall. What we do have, though, in terms of through lines since before this war — and probably explaining the timing of this war as well — is a consistent and clear Israeli objective, and that is to remove this regime and then let the chips fall where they may. It could be civil war, it could be Jeffersonian democracy, it could be a new strong man who agrees to do a surrender deal, whatever it might be. Israel is very clear. It wants to obliterate the Iranian regime. And Trump . . . Well, the Trump administration is, I was gonna say in two minds about this. It’s in several sort of multiple personalities on this question.  And I don’t think, given the nature of the president, given his capricious, very whimsical approach to governing, that’s going to change anytime soon. But you know, that could also mean that we suddenly wake up one morning and just as the war started overnight, Trump will announce, declare victory, mission accomplished, whatever the realities are on the ground, and say that it’s over, at least from the American point of view. And we did get that. If it’s any guidance at all. Last June, with the so-called 12-day war, when Trump decided to, after 12 days of striking Iranian targets, decided that mission had been accomplished, that the Iranian nuclear programme had been totally and completely obliterated were his words. And then perfectly called upon Israel to respect the ceasefire, which Israel did. So, it’s a wonderful sport to try and guess what Trump’s ultimate objective is. But I suspect, and I’m sure Abby agrees, those of us who’ve been observing Trump for a long time doubt that he knows what it is.  Lauren Fedor As someone who’s observed the president for quite a long time, how do you square what we’re seeing now with his, you know, political brand that was one of no more forever wars, less intervention overseas, America First? How do you begin to kind of thread that needle? Edward Luce Well, it’s probably the most important domestic, political question facing Trump right now, particularly if this war does persist and does feed into higher prices and more of a sense of economic squeeze amongst median Americans and Trump voters. And it is diametrically opposite to what he’s always campaigned on, which is against forever wars, against endless wars, against nation building, policing the world. And that’s how he conducted most of his first term and the basis on which he began and campaigned for his second term with JD Vance as the real sort of neo-isolationist, the one with a theory of the case who’d sort of intellectualised it in Maga circles. And now we have its opposite. Arguably the mother of all wars of choice or what I’ve called, it’s a war of whim. Edward Luce And I guess the politics of this, you know, we are seeing a lot of fractiousness in Maga circles. We’re seeing, you know, people in Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, people like that, very bitterly opposing this as not just a betrayal of America First principles, but as a potential catastrophe for Trump and for Maga. So we’ve got that debate sort of intellectually within the sort of upper echelons of Maga. And we’ve got a broad-based public scepticism about this war. It’s very rare, if not unique, I think in modern polling for an actual war to start where the president’s not got at least 50 per cent and he’s got way, way below that in support of this war. The ultimate test, though, will come on how long will this war go on and will it cause economic pain? And if so, I suspect what you’re seeing in the upper echelons of Maga will spread much more broadly and be really quite disastrous politically for President Trump if it persists.  Lauren Fedor Abby, where does Congress fit in at all here, and where do you know Republican lawmakers specifically on Capitol Hill?  Abigail Hauslohner Well, Congress has the authority to declare war, and under US law, the president is supposed to ask Congress for authorisation to go to war. So the president, you know, as of right now, like he did with the June war, is not calling this a war except when he is, but is not calling this a war by the definition that you need to seek congressional authorisation. And so the Democrats forced to vote on a bill trying to reign the president in and trying to block his ability to execute this war. The vote failed. Only one Republican voted in favour of the measure. And that was Rand Paul from Kentucky, who is often a thorn in Trump’s side, and who has been throughout his career consistently, pretty opposed to US interventions abroad. Publicly, you know, a lot of the prominent voices in the Republican Party on the Hill are echoing the administration’s talking points. They are very faithfully saying that they believe in the president, they believe in what he’s doing, that they think it’ll all work out, whatever that is. But privately, we are hearing scepticism and anger from some people within the president’s party. And I think it’ll be interesting to watch to see if that ends up bubbling up. And we see more lawmakers deciding to break publicly with the president, which is going to spell trouble for him.  Lauren Fedor I think from my point of view, you know, sometimes it’s more interesting who doesn’t speak rather than who does speak. And we wrote a story this week about JD Vance’s kind of conspicuous silence in all of this. And whether or not that tells you something about the discontent that is brewing, particularly with an eye to the future of the party. I think the common theme here, whether it’s on Capitol Hill or in the kind of administration, is just that the longer this goes on, the harder it’s going to be for these individuals to keep repeating the talking points, isn’t it?  Edward Luce And the harder it’s gonna be to not use the word war, you know, the sort of shades here of Putin’s special military operation in Ukraine. There’s a disapproval attached, radiating from the White House outwards to use of the word war. Pete Hegseth would not use that word in one of his briefings this week. And yet at the same time, the justification for what is a war is that it’s been going on for 47 years. So there’s a little bit of a tension in that narrative, and I think we’re gonna see a lot more of this tension, contradiction, confusion amongst administration principles. Precisely because unlike all the previous wars of choice that everybody keeps citing, Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan, which were conducted after whether you agreed with those rules or not, pretty conventional inter-agency vetting processes where debates were had, plans were made, options were presented, and disagreements were litigated, the president then Bush or Obama, then making their decisions. This process is completely absent. I think we cannot overstate the degree to which this is unique in the history of American overseas wars, that the president is making it up as he goes along. And you know, I don’t think it serves any purpose to euphemised to give indirect descriptions of what is a plain fact about the nature of this war, which is, it’s in Trump’s head, Trump decided when it began. He’ll decide when it finishes. For reasons we will be told after the fact that will probably nothing to do with his decision making before the fact. I mean it’s very unusual. [MUSIC PLAYING] Lauren Fedor If we take a step outside of the US, how challenging do you think it is to be a US ally in this moment? I’m wondering if you guys can reflect a little bit on how the Europeans have been navigating the last, you know, how ever many days, as well as perhaps some of the Gulf states, because it obviously puts them in challenging positions as well. Abigail Hauslohner Well, the Gulf states are in an extremely challenging position. I mean, Iran has been launching, you know, pretty continuous barrages of missiles and drones at all of the US, you know, Arab allies. The United Arab Emirates has taken the most hits so far. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, especially, and so on, and they are feeling it. And for the Gulf states, which have been really the most stable areas of the Middle East for a while. Relatively speaking, and you know, especially for the Emirates and Qatar that rely on tourism and trade, their countries as places people wanna come to do business, they’re really feeling the pain from this. There’s a lot of stress about their arsenal of interceptors to shoot down these missiles. And so if this goes on a lot longer, you know, they’re feeling the economic hit the most. And they’re seeing real damage in their countries, and you can see this frustration starting to build. And I don’t know where that goes. I’ll leave Europe to Ed.  Edward Luce Well, so look at the backdrop to this war. The sort of Europeans were already feeling punch-drunk over the Greenland episode and just the general erratic ability now coming from the White House towards America’s European Nato allies. So, the situation was already as bad as any of us could remember it being, even by the standards of Trump’s first term and his first year of the second term. And then we get this war on which none of them were consulted, some such as Britain and Spain requested to provide their air bases for American bombers and jets to use and denied them. But just collectively, there is a sense that this is a war on which Europe was not consulted, where it’s much nearer to the neighbourhood of the war and could get a lot more of the blowback. Not as much as the Gulf states are getting, but certainly in terms of any refugees that result from this, in terms of the impact immediately on gas prices, which have got up considerably more dramatically ’cause of the nature of the gas market, I’m talking about liquefied natural gas than oil prices have. And then they’ve still got 15 per cent tariffs coming from Trump. So the idea that Europe should just play along, I mean, there’s a deep amount of resentment over this. Nevertheless, you’ve seen the UK, which is sort of the swing. It’s in the middle here between Pedro Sánchez in Spain, who’s standing up to Trump and refusing to declare this war as anything other than illegal. And on the other side, Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor has actually swung behind Trump after his visit this week. Starmer has sort of carved a middle ground, which expresses the awkwardness of the fact that Europe’s closest ally and the world’s superpower is doing something none of them like. His Solomonic compromise was not to permit Diego Garcia and other RAF bases for use for offensive actions on Iran, but that they could be used by American planes for defensive actions. I should just mention one other thing, the Iraqi Kurds, which is, you know, one of the tools that Trump has announced he’d like to use to destabilise Iran and the regime, the Iraqi Kurds in alliance with their Iranian Kurdish cousins, Trump having called the leaders of both the semi-autonomous Kurdish regions in Iraq that they have felt consistently betrayed by the west. The last time in Trump’s first term where he pulled support from the Syrian Kurds leading to the resignation of Jim Mattis, the then US secretary of defence, that in the first Gulf war, the Peshmerga were called to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then abandoned. Henry Kissinger famously said about the Iraqi Kurds that we should not confuse covert action with missionary work. I think they have internalised this lesson that they do not want to be a tool of other powers who might then turn around and abandon them, and this appears to be one of the cards that Trump is thinking of playing right now. And this could be a very important factor. Lauren Fedor At the end of the day, do you think that President Trump is going to achieve what he wanted to achieve here? Or do you think that this is ultimately gonna be a massive miscalculation on the part of the president?  Abigail Hauslohner I think we really don’t know because we don’t know, as Ed said, fully what he wants. I mean, we know, ’cause he said this, that he wants something like he did in Venezuela. To him, successful US military operation in which, you know, special forces went in and captured the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. And I’ve heard, you know, people around him say this all the time, he likes quick. He likes quick wins. He likes one and done. He is not interested in long drawn out military engagements. And so, I think that we will see him getting frustrated the longer this goes on, and as the political pressure on him mounts as well. So I don’t know if he will get what he wants out of this, specifically if . . . I mean, I think, already, this has obviously gone far worse than Venezuela. But I think, you know, if his goal is ultimately to topple the regime, I don’t know that he will achieve that. If his goal is to ultimately wipe out Iran’s ability to threaten other states in the region or US assets with terrorism. I don’t know that he’ll achieve that either, even if these air raids wipe out the regime, you know, what we might see after that is a failed state. And in anarchy, we know breeds all sorts of nefarious actors, spillover, potential galore. So I don’t know that in the long term that he will get what he wants, and we still don’t know exactly what he wants. Lauren Fedor I wanna thank our guests Edward Luce. He’s the FT’s US national editor and co-author of the Swamp Notes Newsletter. Thanks, Ed.  Edward Luce Many thanks.  Lauren Fedor And Abigail Hauslohner the FT’s US foreign affairs correspondent. Thanks, Abby.  Abigail Hauslohner Thanks, Lauren. [MUSIC PLAYING] Lauren Fedor This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT. If you wanna sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we have a link to that in the show notes. Our show was produced by Henry Larson. It was mixed by Sam Giovinco. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I’m Lauren Fedor, in for Marc Filippino. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz, and the FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Original music by Hannis Brown. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.