Iran's Zombie Regime

The Dispatch Podcast is presented by Pacific Legal Foundation, suing the government since 1973. Welcome to The Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by my dispatch colleague Mike Warren and dispatch contributor and former Army Special Forces Officer Mike Nelson for a discussion of U.S. foreign policy and national security. First, we'll talk with leading Iran analyst Kareem Sajipour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he focuses on Iran and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. And he's also a contributor at The Atlantic. We'll discuss the current unrest in Iran and whether there's a real chance for the people to be freed from the oppressive regime. We'll also discuss the state of the Ukraine-Russia war as the four-year anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion approaches. And finally, in Not Worth Your Time, Olympic skier Hunter Hess said he has mixed emotions about representing the United States. And President Donald Trump has strong emotions, as you might imagine, about that. Let's dive right in. Kareem, Mike and Mike, thanks for joining us today. Kareem, I want to start with a sort of a big picture question to you. We're here in this moment following nationwide protests in Iran, an unspeakable massacre of Iranian citizens by the regime in Tehran, with repeated promises of U.S. military support for those protesters and repeated statements of defiance from that regime. And now, even as President Trump talks about a deal with massive U.S. military presence in the region. Late last year, before these tumultuous events, you wrote a terrific essay in foreign affairs under the headline, The Autumn of the Ayatollahs. Where are we in this moment? And what brought us to where we are today as we have this conversation? Thank you so much, Steve. So I wrote that foreign affairs essay last fall, and it was clear, obviously, even then that Iran is a country on the cusp of a leadership transition because it has an 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, perhaps the longest-serving dictator in the world. And it's a regime which is deeply unpopular, and it's under enormous pressure both internally and externally. So it was my view even then, in the aftermath of the 12-day war that Iran had with the United States and Israel, that change is coming to Iran. And what I was trying to probe in that piece is what kind of change may be coming to Iran. And one of the lessons I've learned over the years as an analyst is to be mindful not to conflate my hopes and my analysis. The analogy I sometimes give is I'm a University of Michigan guy, and every year during March Madness, I fill out two brackets, one with Michigan winning it all and one with what I think is going to happen. And so what I tried to do in that essay is take out my hopes, because I would love to see Iran transition to become like Denmark or Sweden. But, you know, realistically, we know from history that from World War II to the present, only about one in five authoritarian transitions lead to democracy. More often, they lead to another form of authoritarianism. But it's also clear that this is a society which, very modern, wants to be part of the outside world. I say that it's a government that aspires to be like North Korea, a society that aspires to be like South Korea. And so when you're looking at Iranian society, there's good reasons to be hopeful. But again, what we know from history is that authoritarian transitions are often not a popularity contest. They're kind of a coercive competition. And I'll conclude, Steve, here by saying that, you know, if we look back at other uprisings against authoritarian regimes, you know, late 1980s protests against the Soviet Union, the protests that brought down Hussein Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, I think very few Russians probably said to themselves, you know, we want to bring down the Soviet Union so we can be led by a mid-ranking KGB agent. Or in the Egyptian context, very few people said we want to be ruled by another military dictator. And so it's this tension between all of us. I think we're rooting for Iranians to depose this regime, which has been terrible for the country, obviously terrible for U.S. interests as well. But oftentimes it's totally unpredictable what happens next. I want to get to a question about how far down sort of regime support goes in the society. But before I do, let me follow up. As you noted, you wrote this essay before these latest events. And in that essay, you wrote, out of this volatility, Iran's post-Khamenei order could take several forms, nationalist strongman rule, clerical continuity, military dominance, populist revival, or a unique hybrid of these. Given what we've seen over the past six weeks, has it made any one of those outcomes more likely in your mind? Or is this still sort of status quo ante? Nothing's really changed. All of those are still possible. Steve, when I wrote that essay, I submitted to Foreign Affairs seven scenarios. And for space reasons, they took out two of them. And one of them that ended up on the cutting room floor was looking at the prospect of a return to monarchy in Iran, a constitutional monarchy. And it was entitled Iran is Spain. And I think one thing that has changed in our discussions about Iran over the last six weeks is the name Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of Iran. He's been in exile for 47 years since the 1979 revolution deposed his father, the Shah. And because of the fact that there's just been this nationalist resurgence in Iran, and patriotism has become an antidote to the religious zealotry of the regime, Reza Pahlavi's name was being chanted throughout many Iranian cities. So he's become a factor in a way that I think people didn't anticipate maybe six months ago, and that's why Foreign Affairs cut that scenario out of my essay. Editors, right? Yeah, the editors said that. And I think that what we've seen over the last six weeks, it essentially confirms something which I wrote, which is that if Iran does have another strongman, let's say five, ten years from now, after Ayatollah Khamenei, the odds are very low that that strongman will be wearing a turban, that that strongman will be a cleric. Because it's a country which after 46 years of religious dictatorship, I think the one thing that almost everyone can agree on is that they want to separate religion from politics. Well, that leads directly into my next question. You and I have had this conversation offline before, and I found it fascinating, your analysis of sort of the Iranian populace and how much support there is or is not for the regime. If you had to break it down, and obviously this is rough, give us your best guess. How many Iranians support the regime as currently constituted and would support it in a post-Khamenei manifestation? And how much support would there be in Iran for something approaching, a constitutional monarchy or something closer to Denmark or Sweden, as you say? So I think the maximum amount of support this regime has, the utmost ceiling is perhaps 20%. It's much likely lower than that, let's say 15% of society. And the reason why its support is so low is that what's unique about the Islamic Republic of Iran is it's not only politically authoritarian, but it's also economically and socially authoritarian. authoritarian. So in contrast to some dictatorships that will allow you to go out with your boyfriend or girlfriend or drink alcohol or watch the movies you want, this is a regime which has been running kind of this moral police state, and it tries to micromanage every aspect of people's personal lives as well. And what I tell people, Steve, is that when you're a dictatorship and you purport to be a theocracy ruling from a moral pedestal, but you are elbow deep in corruption and repression, that is even more insulting to your population than if you're just kind of a run-of-the-mill dictator, that at least you don't purport to be ruling from that moral pedestal. So I think that the Islamic Republic's moral pretensions, despite all of their corruption and repression, is particularly offensive to people. And then second, this is a country, Iran, which, you know, in my view, it should be a G20 nation. It should be, it's an oil and gas superpower, probably has the second largest reserves of natural gas in the world after Russia, and the third largest oil reserves in the world. It's got enormous human capital. It's got this enormously rich civilization in history, there's no reason why it shouldn't be a G20 nation under proper management, but instead it's this economic basket case. And so I think those factors, the political repression, the economic failings, the social repression, have left it with a very narrow base. Now, that said, we also know from history that even if you're a regime with, let's say, 15% popular support. But if your security forces are able to remain united, organized, armed, and willing to kill en masse, they can live well beyond their shelf life. And this is essentially what's happened in Iran. I call the Islamic Republic a zombie regime because it has a dying ideology, dying legitimacy, a dying economy, a dying leader, but it still does have that lethal capacity. Kareem, one of the conceits, I would say the main conceit of your foreign affairs piece, and one I really appreciated, was the way that you sort of gave us some analogs throughout the world right now. Post-Soviet Russia, you called a strongman cynicism. Post-Mal China, pragmatic national interest. North Korea just doubled down on being a hermit kingdom of repression and isolation. Pakistan, military dominance, sort of supplanting the clerics. and even sort of a maybe a perverted representative government like ala Turkey, you had all of these options of where Iran could go. I'm curious because of my knowledge of how studying the history of revolutions, the way that revolutionaries sort of study the other revolutions, either going on contemporaneously or in history. I'm curious of the broad political class in Iran. And I don't just mean the folks who could sort of continue the current regime, but even some of those lesser known folks in the IRGC who might inherit the leadership of the country. All of the potential folks who could be in that leadership class, how aware are they of these different and sort of cognizant of these different paths for Iran and are thinking about ways to avoid the pitfalls of these different countries who have had been in similar situations and taken different paths? How are they thinking as a sort of broad political class about the rest of the world and what it could offer Iran for the future? That's a really terrific question. And I don't have strong indication that beyond one or two of these models that they are thinking deeply about these issues. And when I say one or two of these models, I think the China model is palpable for most people, right? because essentially in China, to offer a very kind of simplified version of Chinese history, you know, post-Mao, the elites decided that we need to prioritize economic and national interest before cultural revolutionary ideology. And I think that many inside the Islamic Republic, including within the Revolutionary Guards and the clergy, fundamentally understand that. And for them, they don't want to give up power and they don't want to collapse. And they see that, well, China was able to hold on to power and they've endured, whereas the Soviet Union collapsed. If we just open up economically and we ease social restrictions. And so I think that is a model that people have in their heads Turkey given the fact that I call Turkey Iran closest cousin in the world You know similar sized populations similarly rich culture and history both non Muslim countries And so Turkey is a palpable model for people. I think people are also looking at places like Saudi Arabia and the way that Mohammed bin Salman has essentially led this social revolution and taken what was a country deeply entrenched in conservative Islamic values. and just suddenly tried to flip that overnight and how the world has received him. So I don't think beyond those immediate neighbors in China, I don't get a sense that they're thinking deeply beyond that. The other thing I'd say is that, you know, you could make a pretty good argument that what has led to the downfall of so many dictatorships and what has doomed Iran over the decades and centuries is this kind of insistence on what I would call a monopolist ideology, right? The view that only this ideology is correct and only our leader is correct. And anyone who disagrees with us is a traitor. And I think that you now have a very cosmopolitan Iranian diaspora that they've been living in places like the United States and Europe and Canada and Australia and other democracies. And I think, broadly speaking, they want a pluralist country similar to the countries which they've been living as either exile or diaspora community. But I'm not convinced that the revolutionary guards who are just waiting, some of them, for Ayatollah Khamenei to die, they have a similarly pluralist outlook. No, I mean, it does seem that the issue here is, I mean, set aside, you know, an Iranian Lech Valenso or Vassal Havel. I mean, there doesn't seem to even be, I got this from reading your piece, even a Deng Xiaoping in Iran at the moment. How much of this is going to be dependent on somebody like that, an individual emerging as opposed to sort of an ideology or a program for the future of Iran? Yeah, you know, I love this question too, Mike, because I'm guilty of believing in the great man theory of history, which most academics hate. But this is an observation I first read from Kissinger and Walter Isaacson's biography of Kissinger that came out perhaps three decades ago, that Kissinger said that when he was in academia, he was a professor at Harvard before he went into government, he thought that history is driven by impersonal forces. It doesn't really matter who's in power because nations follow their own inexorable interests. And he said after he served in government, he reached the opposite conclusion, that the individual profoundly shapes history. And as you all know, the last book he wrote before he died was a book on leadership. And so I believe, certainly in the context of the Middle East, that this is a region which has been shaped by the ambitions and manias of individual men, much more so than the natural interests of their nation states. And so I do think the same way that Vladimir Putin has shaped contemporary Russian history or Mohammed bin Salman has shaped contemporary Saudi history or the way that Khomeini shaped Iran's modern history, I do think there's also something about the political culture of Iran that seems to lend itself to anointing powerful figures. So as an example, over the last century, Iran has really only been ruled by four men. Reza Shah, who came into power in the 1920s, his son, Mohammed Reza Shah, who was deposed in the 1979 revolution, then Ayatollah Khomeini, and now Ayatollah Khomeini. There's very few countries in the world of that size and scale and importance that have had such little turnover and leadership over the last century. century to only have had four leaders. And so there is something about the political culture of Iran that tends to lend itself to this cult of personality. Now, I hope that changes, and I hope people can begin anew with a representative pluralistic system. But what we know also from political culture is that when governments are overthrown, you don't start with a blank slate. There's kind of centuries of baggage that oftentimes come with that. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Kareem, if I could, I'd like to ask you a little bit about some of the external actors who might influence any potential transition in Iran. Obviously, we've seen the president originally communicate support from the protesters several weeks ago. there's still the communication out there that he made that at that point in time, help is on the way. And we've seen the Lincoln CSG and other forces move into fear. Obviously, they're communicating that there may be potential where a deal is the off ramp that the administration is looking for, but there's still the potential for a strike. Given what we saw in Venezuela that, you know, Maduro was captured, but we left Delce Rodriguez and the rest of the regime intact, willing to work with us. If you were to get a call from the White House, what pitfalls would you advise against as far as taking an unsatisfactory transition or allowing, for example, the IRGC to broker the removal of the Ayatollah or something and retain power and leave everything else in place? What are the dangers that we could do, leave the mission half finished, I guess? These are very vexing, difficult questions, especially when you're dealing with a country in which you haven't had an embassy there since 1979. So our level of knowledge and intelligence as a government vis-a-vis Iran is really low. I remember a study that came out of the State Department, came out a few years ago, that showed that there are more Albanian speakers within the State Department than there are Persian speakers. So what we were able to pull off in Venezuela, and that's still an ongoing story. So it's not clear how that's going to end. I think as President Trump himself has evoked in a true social post, he does see Venezuela as a playbook for Iran. And I think in their heads, if somehow they could get like a political decapitation, preferably done internally by Ayatollah Khamenei's competitors, and then make a deal with the successor leadership, I think that's an outcome that they would welcome. I've spoken to people in the administration who have expressed that view, in part because this is an administration which has been very critical of what the president has called stupid wars and regime change operations in Iraq and Libya and elsewhere. So I think they're nervous about the idea of bringing down the government and the possibility of chaos and anarchy coming after that. But, you know, at the same time, I'm skeptical that, at least right now, that they have potential inroads to successor leadership inside Iran. And we haven't seen publicly at least any space between the Supreme Leader and these Revolutionary Guard commanders who's topped, let's say, a few dozen tiers. He has been hand-choosing. So I think that the president has a set of very difficult choices. All that said, as you all know, this is a very atypical administration and that in previous administrations, you could kind of get a feel for what talking to people in the White House, State Department, Pentagon were thinking, what are the deliberations? And now I joke the most important deliberation is inside President Trump's head. And who is it that he's speaking to? Who is it that's influencing him? I would just say on this question, there is a decade-long history between him and Iran. And on three major occasions, he's rolled the dice. In 2018, he pulled out of the nuclear deal. In 2020, he assassinated Iran's top military commander, Qasem Soleimani. And then last year, obviously, it was the Operation Midnight Hammer. He dropped 14 bunker busters on Iran. And on each of those occasions, I know that a lot of people warned him that his decision could trigger a regional war or even World War III. And he believes that each of those choices were vindicated. And Iran is weaker now than perhaps it's ever been in that it doesn't control its own skies. So my sense, if I had to place a bet, is that the president is leaning much more towards action than inaction. And I'm skeptical as much as he would like to do a big deal. I'm skeptical that we're going to get to that. I can't speak for the State Department's linguistic deficiencies, but following up on that, Karim, I mean, it seems to me on the one hand, one of the things we have not heard either in the Venezuela context or in Iran is much democracy speak from the president, from others. It's been absent, for the most part, from the rhetoric that we've seen come out of the administration. And in that sense, if there were some decapitation strike of the United States, tried to foment some internal coup or something, it would be consistent with more or less what we've heard from the administration. On the other hand, the president did say repeatedly that he was willing to take, I mean, half a dozen times, he was willing to take up arms on behalf of the protesters and the people who were being massacred by the regime in a way that I think suggests some U.S. ownership of outcomes there. And there does seem to me to be a gap there. In your conversations with folks in the administration and your observation of the way that the debate has unfolded, is there anyone inside who would be making what we might considered to be a pro-democracy case? I mean, in other contexts, we might expect Marco Rubio to make such an argument, but it doesn't sound like he's made a very strong argument in the Venezuela context, and perhaps that's the way that he's handling this as well. See, that's a terrific question, and I have a piece which is forthcoming about this, co-written with Anna Applebaum in The Atlantic, about how, you know, imagine if Ronald Reagan were president now and the speeches he would do. I do that a lot. So I actually was going back and looking at some of his speeches from the early 1980s and this common theme about the most powerful force being the yearning for freedom, which is in every human's heart and the championing of democracy and dissidence. And as you said, that is not part of this president's language. And you're right that under normal circumstances, when Marco Rubio was a senator, he may have also been using this language, but I also haven't heard it much from him either. Now, that said, there is also something I've observed, which is that after two decades of failed U.S. attempts to help bring democracy to the Middle East, including in places where we It's been a lot of blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq. There does also seem to be a disillusionment, even if I have to just focus on the Iranian public, about the word that you hear a lot is azadi, which means freedom. I haven't heard the word democracy in these protest slogans. And so what I read in the Foreign Affairs essay is that what people seem to be yearning for is what they say in Persian is zendigia normal, normal life. We want a normal life, economic opportunities, economic dignity. We want a government that doesn't police our personal lives. But they have looked at the palpable models for a lot of Iranian countries they've visited are places like the United Arab Emirates, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. They are observing what's happening in Saudi Arabia. And they say, well, those places aren't democracies. In fact, they're ruled by monarchies. And a lot of the non-monarchies in the Middle East have been great failures, places like Syria or Egypt. And so that's why, in part, for many other reasons as well, but why I think there is this kind of romanticism about pre-1979. And that's why the name Pahlavi has gained a renewed purchase inside Iran. Well, Kareem, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. This has been tremendously informative, and we hope we can have you back again very soon. Anytime. Thank you, guys. Well, that was a terrific conversation about Iran, and we are now going to move to another international hotspot. It been a region of conflict for a long time but in particular for the past four years as we approach the four anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine And I want to start our conversation here by trying to put in perspective the mass death that we have seen as a result of this war. It's something that as the war goes on, if you read newspaper accounts, you'll get an account of a Russian attack on some civilian outpost. You'll hear Ukrainians sending drones. And I think sometimes it's hard to get a sense of where we are four years in. But one piece that did a very good job of, I think, capturing the magnitude was something that the New York Times sent out in its newsletter called The Morning. They sent this out Monday morning. We're recording this Monday afternoon. And I just want to read the opening paragraph and then a quick chunk from a reporter, Mark Santora, who's been over there since the beginning of the war. The piece begins, the newsletter begins, an astonishing number of Russians and Ukrainians have died, vanished, or been wounded during four years of war. Casualties in the conflict are on track to pass two million this spring, about two-thirds of them from Russia. Last year, according to a recent study, Russian casualties were recorded at nearly 35,000 a month. It is a grim accounting and it is ongoing. And then the Times went to its reporters who have been in country for most of the duration of the war and asked them to give their sense. How do you try to communicate this? And this was what reporter Mark Santora said. The scale of death and destruction has been perhaps the hardest thing to convey to readers. The front line, which scarcely resembles a line in any traditional sense, has grown deadlier year after year as the vast kill zone that separates the two sides has expanded and drones and robots make any movement within it a deadly gambit. That kill zone stretches more than 750 miles about the distance from Chicago to New York. I've traveled off into the medical outposts on the front and each time I've been struck by how unrelenting the pace of battle is no matter the season. Mike, let me start with you. Your old colleagues at Institute for the Study of War have been among the people who have kept most careful track of the casualties of the death toll. And I wonder if you reflect back on where we were, you know, not quite four years ago at the beginning of this. Does this track with what we might have expected then? Is this a far greater death toll than people were predicting? How should we understand kind of what we anticipated versus what the reality has been? I mean, we're in a very different place, I think, than what we thought we'd be in February 2022. If you remember the early days of the invasion, it was almost a Hail Mary play to try to get to Kiev very quickly by the Russians. There was the air assault on Hostomel Airfield, which was initially successful for about 12 hours. And during those 12 hours, That looked like great crisis, that if they were able to seize and hold an airhead, that then the Russians would be able to flood Kiev and seize the center of gravity within a matter of days. They advanced along three axes that seemed to have initial success. And in those early days, even after the Ukrainians wanted that attack at Hosomel and after they'd wanted the initial advances, there were still the attacks on Kiev. It looked like the government might fall, that Zelensky himself might be killed and everything might fall apart. So the initial story in February, March of 2022 was of this heroic and unexpected Ukrainian halting of the Russian onslaught. But then what is definitely, I think, been a surprise to all parties, including Putin, who probably expected a very quick and initial success is that vast scale of death. This has become the new model for industrial scale war that we haven't seen since the Second World War. And it's as you pointed out, it's taking emerging technologies as Ukraine has become the lethal laboratory for the world. You know, this is where the future of warfare is going. As you've said, those initial like largely mobile, not only the initial Russian advance, but then several Ukrainian counteroffensives that at times showed various signs of promise have hardened into solidified lines. largely. Some of the soldiers on both sides are less trained, less survivable, and are finding themselves, as you said, they haven't worked out the TTPs to achieve survivability and are falling victim to some of these emerging technologies and some of the old ones. Dumb artillery, unguided artillery is still one of the largest killers on the battlefield. And what's amazing to me is 40 years ago, when roughly 10,000 Russian killed in Afghanistan helped bring about popular uprising and the fall of the Soviet Union, we are seeing, you know, 300,000 to 400,000 Russian kill, including close to a million casualties in total over the course of this war in just four years, compared to 10 years in Afghanistan. And this is in a Russian population of only 110 million. You know, I can't imagine the impact this is having just domestically, yet for some reason, Putin is able to retain his popular support for the war. at least he's not facing domestic upheaval over it. Yeah, to all outward appearances, right. Right. Why have Russians taken two-thirds of the casualties? I think a lot of that is their, I won't say doctrine, but what has been a default doctrine. They're not very maneuver savvy. And they also, for example, I talked to somebody recently when they were looking at initial indications of whether the Russians would invade or not. They said they didn't see a lot of structures that would be used for mobile lodging as they moved forward, and they didn't see a lot of field hospitals. So somebody predicted that that meant for indicators that the Russians weren't actually going to invade. In fact, they were Russian indicators that they didn't care much about the survivability of their soldiers. So many of these offensives we've seen of the Russians, they will like wedge into a pocket, into a salient, take initial success. The Ukrainians will then envelop the pocket attack and the Russians don't withdraw. They just leave those forces to basically be killed. And then they go bring in war conscripts. Now, they've lost a lot of the Wagner proxies that they use. That's not as much of a factor as it was in the early days of the war. But they're still able to pull on conscripts and enlistees who come from the outer parts further away from Moscow. So right now they are not paying a cost for this bad maneuver. They're not seeing an incentive to try to evolve into a more effective force. But I think they believe, and it might be an accurate assessment based on the way they're seeing international conversations go, that they don't need to necessarily reform because the international community will grow weary of this and pressure the Ukrainians before the Russians ever do. I don't have sophistication on this particular subject, but it strikes me that what the war in Ukraine has shown is, I mean, there's an element of almost throwback to the way war used to be. I mean, we hear so much now about modern day warfare and obviously our military is quite advanced. But I mean, the way that we talk about, say, the Russian approach to war, I mean, we might as well be talking about the Russian approach to war from 100 years ago. I don't know if I even have a question. It just strikes me that the sort of idea of progress, even in progress and war, really has been undercut by the way that Russia has conducted this war. And just seeing those casualty numbers, the numbers are shocking only because it feels like I'm reading from a history book and not from modern assessments of some of the modern wars that we've seen just in my lifetime. Again, I don't really have a question. It's striking and shocking when you see particularly that report that the New York Times was writing about today. I mean, it is true that I don't mean to default too much to cultural stereotypes or that there are certain cultural way of war. But there does seem to be a Russian way of war. And even, you know, you remember, I guess, last year, the president talked about the Russians' great victories against the French and the Germans in the Napoleon War in the Second World War. But the Russians sucked down significantly greater casualties. Not necessarily Napoleon's march out. He took a fair amount. But, you know, the Battle of Kursk, which was the largest tank battle in history, was a Russian victory. It was also significantly higher Russian casualties than the Germans. So their technique seems to be to throw a population at a problem. They had it to spare in the past. And in this case, against a smaller neighbor like Ukraine, they seem to think that they have it to spare as well. But it is it does show a cultural desensitivity or a lack of sensitivity to the human cost. They don't care about throwing their sons against this problem as long as Ukrainians continue to die. And again, they think they can sacrifice or they seem to think they can sacrifice lives for time. That as long as they keep the war viable, that eventually there will be a negotiated settlement that is advantageous to them or at least mostly so. Yes, I agree with that. It just it also seems that the cultural insensitivity that we have in the West to that death. I mean, it's we are at a time when we can see it better than ever before. Right. Through the Internet. I mean, just all the coverage and particularly those first first year or so of this war. There's a reason why a lot of people were putting up Ukrainian flags. It was heartbreaking to see all of this and even heartbreaking if you consider what was happening to the Russians who were being thrown in as cannon fodder. and yet there's a sort of let's count on the west to kind of get tired of this i'm just quite disturbed by even our side of being insensitive or desensitized to all of this death it's disconcerting well i worry i want to be very clear about what i'm i'm touching this or how i'm touching this we can't allow our sensitivity to the death to be the sole motivator in what we do as a broker between these forces and you've heard the president use this kind of language There's been so much death, we must bring the conflict to an end. That is a true and virtuous statement. But bringing the conflict to an end in and of itself should not be our end. Bringing the conflict to an end in a justified way is. And there are some well-meaning people in the United States that are not necessarily pro-Russian, but are so motivated by the desire to end the human cost, which is virtuous by itself, that they are willing to agree to almost anything, including sacrificing the reasons for which so many Ukrainians have given their lives for their own individual. And we forget there are still tens of thousands of Ukrainians living under Russian oppression right now. And thousands and thousands of Ukrainian children who have been stolen and abstounded into the Russian interior. Those are things that are unacceptable that we wouldn't put up with that some are asking the Ukrainians to accept. And that's why we can't look at the end being a virtue by itself. A just end has to be what we're seeking with these negotiations. Agreed. Yeah, I agree with that entirely. How much do you both think, to go back to Kareem's reference of great men theory of history, is this just Donald Trump that has kept the United States from taking a more active role? I mean, it is the case that repeatedly over really the past four years, but certainly since he's been back in office, he makes comments and takes actions, provokes fights, proposes policies that can be fairly labeled as pro-Russian. We saw, you know, Mike Warren listening to you describe the reaction in that first year. I think people were aghast at what they were seeing and appalled by what they were seeing, including and maybe even especially prominent Republicans who were blaming this, I think conveniently at the time, on Joe Biden and were faulting the Biden administration for being too weak and for creating an environment where this could happen. and making arguments that the United States had a real stake in the outcome and that it shouldn't be acceptable for Vladimir Putin to roll into a neighbor and attempt to take it over by force and acquire territory by force. I'm struck four years in at the complete absence of those arguments. Democrats make them occasionally, but you don't hear that really from Republicans? Or do you, am I just not hearing it because the stuff that we hear from President Trump is crowding out those arguments? Well, I mean, you hear it from Congressman Don Bacon, who, by the way, is retiring at the end of this year, a Republican from Nebraska. But I think you're right that leadership, I'm of the view that leadership really matters, particularly in a two-party country like ours. Whether we like it or not, the man or woman at the top really can set the tone. And I mean, to go back to Joe Biden, I really think that you couldn't have a worse capital D Democratic president for the Ukraine war to have taken place under then Joe Biden, just his sort of instincts on foreign policy are always off. And you can look at his sort of reticence to approve aid to the Ukrainians I think that was a legitimate criticism of Joe Biden And there have been better and stronger Democratic presidents on these kinds of questions But this is really I think, indicating, you know, there is a gesture within the Republican Party that I think Don Bacon represents, for instance, that sort of wants to be right on this. But when the leadership just has no appreciation for or really any kind of moral or strategic center on this, you end up with the rest of the party kind of falling in line. They're not falling in line behind Don Bacon, even if they might be inclined to, if we were talking about President Don Bacon. But there's a different Don who's president, and that's the problem that I think you're identifying, Steve. yeah i just i'm struck by the absence of those arguments and it used to be the case that the united states could be counted on to make those arguments to make them publicly and to have policies that follow and that the republican party in particular republican leaders especially were the ones to make those no like marco rubio i mean like yeah yeah he'd be the one doing it now except he can't. It's because of his boss. He's shrinking on the couch as President Trump and J.D. Vance attack Vladimir Zelensky. Well, we will talk more about this certainly in the next several weeks as we approach the four-year anniversary and try to keep some spotlight on what's happening in Ukraine. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at thedispatch.com slash join. And if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month free. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you could upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free annual memberships to give away to friends, exclusive town halls with the founders and much more. All right. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Before we go, I do want to spend a moment on a controversy that erupted over the weekend after U.S. Olympic skier Hunter Hess was asked a question about how he felt about representing the United States in the Winter Olympic Games. And I think we can play those comments. It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now, I think. It's a little hard. There's obviously a lot going on that I'm not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren't. I think for me it's more I'm representing my friends and family back home, the people that represent it before me, all the things that I believe are good about the U.S. I just think if it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I'm representing it. Just because I'm wearing the flag doesn't mean I represent everything that's going on in the U.S. so yeah I just kind of want to do it for my friends and my family and the people that support me getting here. Mike Nelson after those comments President Trump suggested that Hunter Hess was a loser and was really not a good representative of the United States. Megyn Kelly among others said that he should be sent home shouldn't be able to represent the United States the Olympic Games. Mike Nelson, your reaction as you watch this all unfold? Well, I think the kid Hunter was kind of a jackass, a little bit. He said some things that probably were less articulate than he could have been, but they were by no means the most offensive or aggressive or adversarial things that have been said about a president by an Olympian in the past or about U.S. policy. But the reason we don't really remember those is because the president at the time, I remember Olympians criticizing George W. Bush, the president at the time didn't feel the need to reply to each one of them. So I think this has been elevated to a level by the president and his proxies that otherwise it would have just flown under the radar. But his follow up on social media, I think, has been much more articulate in that he said, you know, basically he is proud to represent the United States. But one of the reasons is because he represents a country where you're allowed to criticize the president and those kinds of things. Probably shouldn't have done it, you know, in the press conference. That's fine. I doubt these guys are the most media savvy at all times. Most of these sports only come around in our attention once every four years. But I find it interesting that the president, to a certain extent, kind of strikes an effect of this, these Olympic comments. As he is wont to do. Mike Warren was Hess kind of a jackass how do you read its comments you know I will say this was a mistake on my part because I first saw the reaction before I saw the actual comments right and the way that they were presented to me was that U.S. skier hunter has says he's not proud to be representing his country and so I kind of had the same reaction that Mike Nelson did I was like oh that's kind of a jackass thing even if I think he's has every right to say what he wants to say But then I watched what you just played, and there's even less to those comments than I initially thought. He essentially says, I don't really like what some of what the U.S. is doing. And in a way, I wonder how much he's hearing from his international competitors about those specific things. And if his answer, just sort of speculating here, if his answer doesn't come from the context of being asked by maybe some of his competitors from other countries that he knows well, he's been competing for years in the downhill skiing, asking him about what's going on in the United States. And in a way, he's sort of in public in front of the cameras answering those friends of his and saying, look, that's not what I am about. That's not what I support. But I agree with Mike Nelson that a lack of media savvy or media training is not a crime. And it's, in fact, understandable. There's a real sort of the balance here in terms of the megaphone that, say, Donald Trump has and sort of his lackeys in the media like Meg and Kelly have really far outweigh whatever Hunter Hess has in terms of a megaphone. And it's really kind of unfair, to say the least, for Trump to do this. I find the whole thing to be so, you know, it's similar to what's going on. We just watched the Super Bowl last night to the way that Donald Trump is sort of reacting to Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican, Spanish singing, rapping rapper who was the headliner for the halftime show and sort of basically saying it was bad, did not showcase American ingenuity or whatever. the lack of confidence and security from Trump and his movement in themselves and in their own kind of strength. I mean, all of the talk about strength and the sort of chest puffing out that these people have, it sort of, I think, hides the fact that there is not a lot of confidence. And the fact that they can't just hear Hunter Hess say this. And first of all, it's not saying anything, right? Like nobody was asking for Megyn Kelly or for even Donald Trump to weigh in on what Hunter has said. But if they were, they would say, you know what? In China, athletes can't say this kind of thing because in America, we're better than that. And I think, you know, that reveals, again, a lack of confidence and security in themselves. But I think it also reflects the fact that, you know, Donald Trump doesn't just not think that way. He actually admires that in China, the athletes can't speak out against their own government. He kind of wishes that things were like that with American athletes or American celebrities or American people. Again, it just all makes him and his movement seem so small and pathetic. And, you know, just I love that the Streisand effect has gone into effect here because it's one of our best exports, right? We can say, hey, in America, we're free to say whatever we want about the government. I mean, on the list of things to criticize Megyn Kelly for, this doesn't even crack top 50. But, you know, her reaction to this was not only am I opposed to what this kid said, I am now rooting for the United States to lose in this event. Right. Because he had the audacity to criticize the president. So her answer is to remove her endorsement of Team USA. Yeah. Because of this one kid's comments. I mean, look, I almost didn't even want to bring up Megan Kelly in this conversation because she's just in the attention seeking game and we're giving her attention, which is probably not a good idea. I mean, you know, she's the one who made the arguments in effect that Alex Freddie deserved what he got because he was at the protest in Minnesota. I will say sort of similar to your reaction, Mike Warren. I was zero percent offended by what Hunter has said. and it reflects my view of the United States right now almost perfectly. I do have mixed emotions about the country. I talked about getting the question on Danish television a few weeks ago, where the reporter asked me if I think the United States are the good guys. I mean, for my entire life, I would have said, of course, we're the good guys. What do you mean? But I can't say that. And I paused. And I don't know that we're the good guys. And I don't know that we're the good guys because of the stuff that we're seeing from Donald Trump, whether it's the stuff that we talked about with him effectively taking Russia's side, stratorically on the Russia-Ukraine war, whether it's what we've seen with the abuses perpetrated by ICE. I do have very mixed emotions about it. And I don't think it's a problem at all. Even if Hunter Hess spoke in a sort of Jeff Spicoli voice, I could forgive him, forgive him from that. I think what he said was absolutely fine. And Mike, I think you're right. his further clarification in social media has been even better. And finally, I mean, who is Donald Trump to suggest that you can't criticize the United States? I mean, the guy ran for president criticizing the United States, half of the United States. It was just a few months ago at the Charlie Kirk Memorial where he said he hated his opponents and didn't wish them well. You know, that's what Donald Trump is doing. If you compare what Hunter says said to what Donald Trump says on a near daily basis, it doesn't even rate. It's barely worth commenting on. I also have to say, you know, one of the people who weighed in on this controversy is Monica Crowley, who is the chief of protocol now at the White House and had a job in the first Trump administration, got herself in some trouble for plagiarism or accusations of plagiarism, followed her. I have to say, I read Monica Crowley's comments and she said, quote, represent America with pride or GTFO, end quote. And that is get the French fries. Yes. Out freedom fries. But it reminded me of a debate that I had with Monica Crowley back on the day of or maybe it was the day before the presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis in the immediate aftermath of the Access Hollywood tape coming out. And this was this huge controversy. Of course, the president said all these things. He called it locker room talk. Other people thought it was much more offensive. and I did a discussion with her on special report with Brett Baer and she you know more or less she had some soft criticism for the president but we finished up the segment and the cameras went off and she turned to me and said I can't wait until I don't have to defend this guy anymore and I thought you know my my reaction was you don't you don't have to defend him now yeah you don't have to defend him now but you know here we are a decade on and she's still doing this and taking shots at our olympic athletes with this sort of jingoistic weaponized patriotism that i think Mike Warren, to your point, reflects, you know, an unstable or weak movement in support. You don't demand that people say the same things you are talking exactly the same terms. You should be comfortable with something more like that. Anyway. If you like what we're doing here, there are, as you know, a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at thedispatch.com. I'm very late in responding to some of those emails, but we do read everything, even the ones from people who care what Monica Crowley thinks. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for listening. Please join us later this week.