516. Trump’s Iran Delusion and the Limits of American Power
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Trump's gone after Iran. Nobody fully expected him to do so, and now they're creating justifications behind it. But they don't add up. It's a war that feels like the risk is taken by the US, the costs are borne elsewhere.
This is decades of American arrogance coming to a head in the form of this guy.
Why was Iran considered a more important threat than Russia? They have spent colossal sums of money, which could have gone to Ukraine, in this Iran infection.
It's just madness that we're dealing with at the moment. I honestly think this is a form of madness.
Welcome to the Restless Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
Why has opposition to the Iran war been muted in Trump’s America?
And me, Rory Stewart. And Rory, we're going to talk about Iran, inevitably. We're going to talk about what's going on, but also talk about this business of betting on the war. We'll do that in the second half, alongside a very interesting report that came out last week by former civil servant Philip Rycroft about trying to clean up the financing of British politics and deal with foreign interference. But on Iran, there is so much to get through. So where do you want to start?
Let me start with the fact that I'm in the US. So I'm speaking to you from Yale.
How is the US insulated from the impacts of the Iran war?
And I have found myself in the last week very aware that I'm in a completely different United States. I arrived here, of course, sharing many of your views on Trump and on Iran, and I continue to have those views. But I've walked into a United States in which I'm facing blank incomprehension from a huge range of people. Students, people who are Democrats, moderate Republicans. colonels in the military, academics, they are thinking in a completely different way, talking a totally different language. They don't feel anything like the level of outrage, shock, and disgust that we feel about this Iran war. I was here, for example, when there were the No Kings demonstration going on on here in the streets in New Haven.
The sense, it's totally different, I suppose, just to sort of sum up, totally different from my experience. I was in the US during the Afghan and Iraq wars, and again, at a university at Harvard, I'm now at Yale. Then people were deeply interested in the legal justifications of the war, the moral justifications of the war, they were very interested in deep conversations about what was going on on the ground, different theories of military strategy and threat assessment.
What factors contribute to the perception of Iran as a threat compared to Russia?
It doesn't feel like that at all. This is a war where the level of discussion and argumentation is very, very limited. And maybe I'll hand back to you on this. I was talking to somebody who's a Real, really dislikes Trump, is a big Democrat funder. And I said to her, you know, how shocked I was by the Iran war. And she said, I know you're right, right? And look what he's doing to the universities. And that was about all the conversation I got out of it.
That sort of goes against how it feels from reading the polls. I mean, the polls he is at the moment as unpopular as any president at this stage of his term, any president in history. The war itself, the Iran war, is polling with 41% support. World War II had 97%, Afghanistan 92%. Even the Iraq war... against which millions of people marched, had 76% support. So it's really interesting that you're getting that sense. And it's true, I thought that the No Kings marches were enormous, But a lot of people, I guess, they were marching against corruption, they were marching against ICE, they were marching against Trump's kind of general conduct and bluster. But that's very, very interesting. You're there and I have no intention of being there, so it's an interesting perspective.
Well, I guess it's an example of a situation where the majority of the American public don't support this war. But my sense is that for a range of reasons, people are not focused on the detail of it. They're not outraged by it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:00
2
Why has opposition to the Iran war been muted in Trump’s America?
1:00–1:30
3
How is the US insulated from the impacts of the Iran war?
1:30–2:44
4
What factors contribute to the perception of Iran as a threat compared to Russia?
2:44–5:22
5
How are American tech billionaires influencing British democracy?
5:22–14:19
6
What are the implications of the Rycroft report on foreign interference in UK politics?
14:19–18:26
7
How does political funding in the UK differ from other countries?
18:26–18:50
8
What are the potential consequences of political donations from abroad?
18:50–52:38
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Rest Is Politics
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570. Why Trump Acts Like a Russian Asset and Miliband’s West Bank Sanctions
569. Farage’s Foreign Funding Scandal and Germany’s Far-Right Breakthrough