Dexter Filkins
speaker
521 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 16 Sep
Dexter Filkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, he wants to reimpose the really strict sanctions on Iran that were in place During his first term and what the really important piece of that is, is, you know, it's all aimed at Iran's oil. And so a lot of that was lifted when Biden came back in, you know, and the Biden administration had this idea that, OK, like, well, we'll try being nice. Let's let's see if that gets us anywhere.
It didn't. The Iranian regime has been enriching uranium as fast as they possibly can and they're – I think Trump said this yesterday. How close are they to a nuclear bomb? And he said, well, they're too close. They're very close. It's basically turnkey at this point. Maximum pressure campaign is going to be reimposed and it's going to be hard because I think –
They were very effective Trump sanctions in the first term. It's squeezing the Iranians like like all their clients out in the Middle East, like Hezbollah. They like weren't getting paid. It really it really, really hurt them. And so when the Biden administration took those off, they got kind of a shot of life. So now they're going to try to reimpose these. I think the really hard part of this.
It's going to be like Iran is selling a lot of oil and they're selling a lot of oil to China. And China's happy to buy it. You know, they have an inexhaustible appetite for oil. Can we like call the Chinese up and go, hey, do you think you can just stop buying all that Iranian oil every day? That's going to be hard. That's going to be really hard.
Thanks so much, Terry.
Well, they've been doing a fair amount. So when Biden came in in 2021, he appoints Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense, former general. And essentially signs an order saying set up DEI, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion across the Pentagon. And, you know, the U.S. military, we're talking 3 million people, civilian and military.
And so they set up this bureaucracy that kind of, you know, there's like required classes and stuff. They sort of don't amount to all that much, but they also do a bunch of things. You know, this stuff is so sensitive and it's so controversial. And so, for instance... the Navy did a recruiting ad by a transsexual.
And I think the Navy also did an ad, maybe it was in the Army, but they also did an ad, a kind of animated ad, showing a female couple in the military kind of, you know, getting along fine and thriving in the military. And so they did stuff like that that was kind of, you know, substantively, it might not have been all that much, but it was very visible.
And I think it got a lot of people's attention.
That wasn't my sense of the motivation. I talked to a lot of people, a lot of veterans particularly, who are really opposed to DEI in the military. And what they typically would say is everybody's for diversity in the military. It's that DEI essentially in practice amounts to reverse discrimination and amounts to quotas, even if that's not true. What it says in practice.
But I think, and this is important, I think whether or not the DEI in practice was what they said it was, that is a very widespread perception. And it's a lot of people, and if a lot of people believe that, and a lot of people are talking about it, and a lot of people are online about it, I think there's a pretty good case to be made that that hurt recruiting in the military.
Because it's just because this stuff is so hot button, it's so sensitive that, you know, immediately you lose half of America, right? And so it's like we live in a polarized country. And so when you mention something like DEI, a lot of backs go up. And I think that was happening here. And so I think in this case, it kind of matters less, right?
what the Pentagon was actually doing than what the perception was.
It's really bad. I think the worst place, the toughest place is the Navy, where, you know, you got to go out to sea for months at a time. But for instance, some huge number of ships and submarines in the Navy, in the U.S. Navy, can't go out to sea for lack of maintenance. It's, you know, just an amazing number, like, you know,
I think it was like 40% of the attack submarines are like in port because they're waiting for maintenance. And what somebody explained to me, former naval officer who works in a think tank, studies the stuff in Washington, said that typically what's happening is the Navy is so undermanned that they're sending ships out to sea without enough sailors on them.
And what that means is the priority is to put sailors on deck. So everybody on deck to your job. And what that means is that they're not below deck. Maintaining the engines, maintaining the ship, maintaining the computers. And so the maintenance is slipping on the ships and on the subs because they don't have enough people. So I think for the Navy, the Navy is just, their problems are gigantic.
I mean, I think they've really had to lower some standards to get people to come in.
Well, they don't have enough ships to do everything that they want to do. And that's really the big question, right? So since 1945, the United States has basically taken upon itself world leadership. And that means, among other things, kind of policing the sea lanes, the international sea lanes, which basically keep you know, international commerce kind of flowing.
The Navy, for instance, has a goal of having 75 service ships at sea all the time. They can't meet that number. And they can't meet it for any number of reasons. I mean, we have about 300 ships in the Navy. It used to be close to 700 ships in the Navy at the end of the Cold War. So they don't have enough ships to do the things that they want to do. And so it raises this
really large question, which is, if we don't have the armed forces to support the global commitments that we've made, do we make the military bigger or do we scale back the commitments? And, you know, that's the really big question, the hardest one to answer.
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