Ben Wittes

speaker

379 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Ben Wittes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Bulwark Daily · Ben Wittes: Talk About America in Decline · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

And we're facing now a long-term standoff over the navigation rights in the Straits of Hormuz.

And

Lebanon and what the hell Israel's obligations with respect to Hezbollah are, if any, and whether we are going to continue bribing the Iranians with their own frozen assets

Or not.

And I think that's going to take months or years to resolve in a stable direction.

And I don't care what pieces of paper people sign in Switzerland in the meantime.

Yeah, not one of them has been spilled by me.

important test.

I don't mean a legal test, but I mean like, you know, when you're trying to justify an overseas military action, if you have to answer the question, what did you accomplish with reference to things you blew up rather than strategic objectives, you've wasted money, right?

What did you accomplish?

Well, we obliterated the Iranian Navy, right?

and the Straits of Hormuz are closed because oil traffic, right?

If you can't answer the question correctly,

without reference to the things you destroyed, then you actually haven't accomplished anything.

Because the goal, unless you're a child like Pete Hegseth, the goal is never to make things go boom, right?

Clausewitz didn't say politics is the continuation of war by other means.

He said the opposite, right?

The goal is to achieve a political objective.

And you're using violence to achieve a political objective.

Now, you can measure the value of the political objective in terms of dollars.

Showing 101–120 of 379 · page 6 of 19