RadixJournal - Iran, Neoconservatism, and Trump

00:00:00.000 First off, I'll ask you a kind of a harder question, harder in the sense of brass tacks hard, and then I'll ask a kind of deeper or maybe more highfalutin question.

00:00:10.460 So what is the plan exactly? Because they seem to be pursuing these differing rhetorical strategies to different audiences.

00:00:21.480 Because Trump has outright said, as clear as day, we are going to annihilate their military.

00:00:28.880 They didn't just fire in military targets. They fired directly on political targets. In fact, they killed the head of state.

00:00:36.900 And did they kill Ahmadinejad as well, or was he appearing on podcasts?

00:00:41.520 Apparently he's going to be on Patrick Bet-David.

00:00:43.660 Is he literally or spiritually dead? That's the question. Both, perhaps. He'll appear on PBJ's podcast, as I call it, PBJ's podcast.

00:00:54.800 He'll just appear dead on the body and just let, you know, Patrick continue to talk at him.

00:01:01.540 But OK, so they say it's this very contradictory thing.

00:01:06.560 So they are going balls to the wall on the one hand, yet their messaging on the other reminds me of Vladimir Putin's declaration that he was engaging in a special military operation.

00:01:20.280 They're using the same words. But in both cases, you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound.

00:01:26.820 There were little actions in the Donbass region for a decade between Ukraine and Russia.

00:01:35.100 And you could say it was a war of sorts.

00:01:37.880 But once you go in and you, Putin certainly wanted to kill Zelensky or at the least capture him and put him on trial or something like this.

00:01:47.640 He wanted to denazify the country.

00:01:49.820 Who knows what else he was claiming at the time, but it was it was depicted as a special military operation, this little unique thing.

00:02:00.360 It's very precise. We're going in. But the fact is, it can't be like Vladimir Putin is engaged in a four year long war of attrition at this point in order to, quote, denazify Ukraine or whatever he was claiming at the beginning.

00:02:15.520 And I feel the same as well with the United States in the sense of, yeah, this is a little bit more than what we did last summer, but maybe it's not regime change.

00:02:30.160 Maybe it's not boots on the ground. But again, you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound.

00:02:35.420 I don't know how you get out of this without doing a regime change or how you would do a regime change without boots on the ground.

00:02:45.480 So I just feel like there's some and I guess maybe I'll ask the more highfalutin question along with this one, since I'm I'm rambling a bit.

00:02:53.920 But it's like Bush and Cheney and the neocons from UChicago, they studied philosophy, etc.

00:03:04.560 They were able to create an ideology, even a sort of theology about what they're doing in the Middle East.

00:03:13.800 We every human heart yearns to be free. That is basically what there is.

00:03:18.180 Bush literally said that in 2005. We are bringing democracy and democracies never go to war.

00:03:23.480 So our greatest ideals and our hardest realism are the same. That that was how they pitched it.

00:03:29.960 It's brilliant. In fact, it almost is Hegelian. It's like the ideal is real and the real is ideal.

00:03:36.200 And again, it's coming from these philosophers in the Pentagon, which is, I guess, not surprising that they would couch it in this way.

00:03:45.040 And yet they never went into Iran. They were politically neutered by 2006 in the midterm election.

00:03:54.760 They were seen as illegitimate. They were made fun of on various comedy shows.

00:04:00.760 They were willing to go all the way to destroy Iran, which was part of their long term objectives, even in the late 90s. 0.52

00:04:09.800 And now we have Trump who and the Trump administration and the PR wing who can't message to save their life,

00:04:20.020 who are saying just blatantly contradictory things to different audiences.

00:04:24.340 They don't care. They don't know. They're just dumb. All of the above.

00:04:28.980 And yet they've done it. They did the thing that Cheney feared.

00:04:34.640 They did the thing that that was probably a bit too much for John Bolton.

00:04:39.240 He would eat these. Whoa, we might want to slow down here with the war stuff, which is hilarious, ironic.

00:04:46.120 But so we're in this like contradictory situation where there's no justification, no legitimacy, and yet they're going farther than the people who, as you rightly point out, seem competent and, dare I say, cool in comparison with these assholes. 0.97

00:05:07.580 So what are your thoughts on that? 0.87

00:05:09.240 On the plan, obviously, I've been racking my brains to figure out what the hell they're doing for the past, like all of us, for the past four, five days now.

00:05:16.580 And I think it's day four as we're recording this, and they've changed the reason every single day.

00:05:22.180 In fact, I watched a Marco Rubio press conference where he seemed to change the reason about three or four times within the same press conference.

00:05:28.080 So that suggests to me that something hasn't gone, something has not gone to plan, whatever the plan was, has not gone to plan.

00:05:36.380 Otherwise, you're not getting this making up reasons on the fly business and the mission creep.

00:05:40.860 Originally, it was about nuclear stuff and regime change.

00:05:44.340 Then it's somehow transformed now into you can't allow Iran to have short-range missile capability, which on the face of it is an insane doctrine that I don't think they can, I'm not even convinced it's in the remit of American power to be enforced. 0.91

00:06:01.220 Essentially, what you're saying there is Iran is not allowed to have an army or not allowed to have a defense, which I don't think was the original purpose.

00:06:09.920 Which means that you have to do regime change.

00:06:12.480 They've just painted themselves into a corner. 0.99

00:06:15.060 I honestly think, Richard, that it is as simple and as stupid, I'm afraid to say, as they went in there thinking that they create conditions for the people to rise up and overthrow the government. 0.95

00:06:27.220 And when that didn't happen and Iran started fighting back and fighting back in a way that surprised even me, all the stuff with the Gulf states and hitting the strategic assets in the Gulf and so on has surprised even me with how quickly they were able to do that. 0.99

00:06:43.560 I think that they're like, oh shit, what do we do now? 0.92

00:06:46.000 And they're scrambling. 0.97

00:06:46.760 And there's a lot of signs that this did not have, unlike the Bush wars, Bush-Blair wars, if you want to put it that way, unlike those wars, there are lots of signs that this does not have what I would call regime consent writ large, by which I mean the media clearly are not as on side as they were back in the Iraq war.

00:07:10.520 I've seen critical segments on CNN and on BBC and I listen to the shitly radio station here and there's also a memory of Iraq, one looms very large, but also I get the distinct sense that the media is not quite sure that the Democrat Party, I saw that speech from Chuck Schumer earlier on, was being like, what's going on?

00:07:32.700 Why haven't you asked for Congress approval for this?

00:07:36.780 What is the actual plan?

00:07:38.680 Taking us to war, you haven't even told Congress what's happening.

00:07:43.160 You've got the Pentagon leaking against the administration.

00:07:47.040 So I think there's a lot of telltale signs, Richard, that the Trump admin has gone a little bit rogue and the rogue action was precipitated, as Marco Rubio said, by Israel.

00:07:58.820 And that, in a way, Israel has gone rogue and the Trump admin, that one part of the American system has gone rogue with it in a way that the rest of the, even National Review, which is neoconcentral, were saying like, hold up here.

00:08:13.920 So when people like John Bolton and National Review are saying, hold up, are we sure about this?

00:08:19.060 You can tell it hasn't had the normal kind of, they haven't gone through the normal protocols.

00:08:24.900 Also, Foreign Policy Magazine, which is another, I guess, establishment, they also are not sure.

00:08:31.820 In this country, it is extremely unusual for our establishment, for the British establishment, for the British government, for former generals and things like that, not to be 100% on board in my entire lifetime, whether Afghanistan or Iraq or Ukraine.

00:08:47.640 OK, it was complete consensus in our media.

00:08:50.840 OK, you get the occasional Jeremy Corbyn or Peter Hitchens or something, but generally they're all on board.

00:08:56.840 In this one, all week, there's been very senior voices, former ambassadors, former generals, current generals, the actual government being like, yeah, we don't want any part of this.

00:09:08.960 So all of that suggests to me that something unusual has happened here.

00:09:12.840 This is not normal, quote unquote, neocon war.

00:09:16.080 I think it's very much an Israel Trump admin war.

00:09:19.220 At the risk of sounding like Rachel Maddow, are we living, not that stopped me before, but are we living in a dictatorship in the sense that now I know that according to the Constitution, Congress should declare war and so on.

00:09:38.940 But since, what was it, the Korean War was actually justified on the basis of the UN, in fact.

00:09:45.640 And anyway, let's just put, to put it mildly, we've been living in an imperial presidency for many decades.

00:09:51.360 Nevertheless, the buildup to the Iraq War was at the least a year in which the headline on every paper was about the Middle East and about the debate.

00:10:03.600 And the justification with WMDs, most notoriously, and with the freedom agenda, and so on. 0.64

00:10:12.840 And we're at this point where it doesn't even matter.

00:10:18.400 Donald Trump gave a State of the Union address in which Iran was mentioned, but it was mentioned rather lightly.

00:10:24.200 It wasn't.

00:10:24.560 He certainly didn't give anyone the impression that we're going to go to war this week.

00:10:29.960 And if you think about it in this other way, maybe all of that consensus is a 20th century, a holdover from the 20th century in the technological society where you've got to have the papers and the big pundits and the neutral journalists and the politicians from the other side.

00:10:52.120 You've got to get them all on the team, and then we'll go to war together. 0.73

00:10:56.260 Maybe we're just living at this point where not only does Congress not declare war, Congress doesn't, in fact, do much of anything.

00:11:04.960 And they can't because we're so polarized.

00:11:07.220 And we're just living in a dictatorship of Donald Trump where he just does what he does alongside Bibinette Yahoo. 0.73

00:11:19.140 And half of the public is on drugs or watching a pornographic live stream of three transgendered lesbians playing video games to the point where they don't even know this is happening. 0.94

00:11:34.960 And we're just there.

00:11:37.540 It's almost like if the Iraq War, the first Gulf War, that is the George Herbert Walker Bush 90s, if that war didn't exist because it was being played out on television, it's almost like now the legitimization of it doesn't exist.

00:11:53.960 It's not even played out on television.

00:11:56.300 It's almost like postmodern on a new level or something.

00:12:00.700 I don't know.

00:12:01.320 Are we just there?

00:12:03.780 We're not even bothering with any sort of democratic legitimacy at this point.

00:12:10.360 Yeah, so it is very curious.

00:12:12.000 We're down to the point where he's even lost people like Matt Walsh and kind of Indian level slop grifters like Dissident West and people like this. 0.99

00:12:21.080 Even there you're taking off the MAGA hats.

00:12:23.740 But at least he's got Captive Dreamer.

00:12:25.740 He's got his number one soldier.

00:12:27.200 On this score, one of the things that I have thought more than once when I've been watching the propaganda efforts, which I actually think, again, have been Israeli-led, not US-led, about the Bolivian bringing the crown prince back and the dancing Iranian girls and flying that flag with a lion on it, is that I get the impression that a lot of that was built up something 10 years ago.

00:12:51.480 It feels like it's running on feuds.

00:12:53.460 It feels like it's somehow outdated in a way.

00:12:56.840 And the arguments were designed for 10 or for an operation that never quite happened.

00:13:02.180 Now they're doing it and they've just dusted it off without any respect to what the reality is on the ground, how normal people are feeling, how.

00:13:10.580 And if you want to talk about moral justifications, it really does seem to come down to, in Iran, they make women wear the hijab, which is not even true anymore, by the way.

00:13:21.360 But they made, when I was 12 years old, they made me wear the hijab and I want to express the full range of fashion choices.

00:13:28.220 So bomb, bomb the country so I get to wear a bangle in my hair and accessorize, which is not the strong, when you're up against people who have genuine, radical, religious zeal of faith.

00:13:41.060 And it's not fake, they really do believe these things.

00:13:43.860 I wonder about liberalism as a doctrine that can animate.

00:13:47.180 You're asking people to go and fight and die for this.

00:13:49.280 This is actually something James Burnham talked about in his famous book, in Machiavellians and in the Manigiri Revolution.

00:13:58.560 I think it was a Manigiri Revolution. 0.94

00:14:00.060 He said, look, during World War II, it was a time of mass unemployment.

00:14:04.020 The Germans basically were able to call on blood and soil. 0.98

00:14:08.540 And it was a very strong animating doctrine to get men to fight and die.

00:14:12.360 OK, and then he said, look, in Britain and in France and in America, they had to appeal to abstract principles like liberty and freedom and the free market and things like that.

00:14:25.700 And he said at the time he wrote the book, I think it was like 1941, something like that.

00:14:29.580 It was a time of mass unemployment and they were struggling to recruit.

00:14:33.420 They couldn't recruit.

00:14:34.980 So they had to resort to the draft.

00:14:37.540 They had to resort to conscription because the animating doctrine was not strong enough.

00:14:41.640 And that line from Burnham always struck with me because it's you do need something.

00:14:47.260 You do need something.

00:14:48.200 I see even James Burnham saying you need some animating narrative or story to tell that's going to that's going to that's going to make people want to fight for you.

00:14:58.660 And I think this has been America's one of America's great problems since the Second World War that they got away with that one. 0.76

00:15:06.280 They managed to win.

00:15:07.200 They got the Soviet Union to sacrifice 20 million lives or whatever. 0.85

00:15:11.040 They got there by hook or by crook.

00:15:13.300 But then if you look at Vietnam, they had the same problem.

00:15:16.180 The Vietnamese, they were fighting.

00:15:17.600 They weren't really fighting communism.

00:15:19.240 They were fighting for their homeland up against spreadsheets or whatever McNamara was on about.

00:15:25.860 And I think this has been a continuous problem for, I guess, what you call the American Empire.

00:15:31.260 What are you there?

00:15:31.840 What are you fighting for?

00:15:32.700 And if we're down to you're fighting for Iranian girls dancing on OnlyFans. 0.87

00:15:37.220 I would die for that.

00:15:38.740 But you understand what I'm saying.

00:15:40.480 It doesn't feel it doesn't feel strong enough.

00:15:44.440 It's not.

00:15:45.220 And I do think it can't easily be written off as something that's important for a for any country or empire.

00:15:52.960 This is probably why Putin has spent the first decade trying to rewrite Russian history and come up with whatever it is, orthoduganism or whatever.

00:16:02.920 He's trying to find something that's going to animate Russians to want to die for him, right? 0.99

00:16:07.160 Because liberalism doesn't get you there.

00:16:09.320 So this is something that I see as something that maybe a lot of these Iranian diaspora massively underestimate when it comes to the will of Iranians to want to be liberated for what?

00:16:23.100 Like burgers, french fries and a range of fashion.

00:16:26.160 Have we reached the end of ideology?

00:16:28.040 I mean, in the sense of the brilliant thing about the neoconservatives is that they did offer a compelling doctrine, one that was ineluctable, to be to be honest.

00:16:43.600 I remember reading when I first read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and The Last Man, he said in his preface to the second edition or something, it was like, all of these people don't like my book and they criticize it, yet none of them disagree with me.

00:16:59.560 Because their critique of Fukuyama was basically, yeah, the Soviet Union's gone.

00:17:05.240 There's actually a lack of democracy in Iran or there's a lack of democracy in Mongolia or Africa.

00:17:11.420 So they're in a sense affirming his thesis, which is that it's not just that America is powerful and markets are most efficient and thus will win.

00:17:23.380 It's that there is no other source of legitimacy outside of a mixed economy of liberal capitalist democracy.

00:17:34.200 You just can't argue for anything else.

00:17:37.340 Communism is scary.

00:17:38.880 Fascism is dead.

00:17:40.800 It's now a LARP.

00:17:42.120 There's nothing else that you can come up with.

00:17:46.280 And so I think he was actually getting at something.

00:17:49.500 But I would say this, Irving Kristol wrote very specifically that, like the Soviet Union of old, the United States is an ideological nation.

00:17:59.680 So he was just outright saying this thing that MAGA dislikes now and they're like, we're a people, not an economy or whatever.

00:18:08.900 Irving Kristol, he didn't say you were an economy, although that was a part of it.

00:18:12.220 He said you're a theology in a way like you are a revolt against the old order.

00:18:19.980 Gods are not, excuse me, kings are not given to you by gods.

00:18:24.900 You choose them.

00:18:26.120 You have the ability to act freely.

00:18:30.060 Tolerance is the notion of anyone can be an American.

00:18:33.160 Yeah, this is a wild new ideology that would have been inexplicable to someone living in the Middle Ages.

00:18:41.840 But this is who we are.

00:18:44.060 Like the Soviet Union, we are just as radical as the Soviet Union. 0.75

00:18:47.840 And after we defeated the Soviet Union, we're moving forward. 0.91

00:18:52.160 We're not retreating as Buchanan wanted to do in some of his articles in the National Interest against Fukuyama, where it's like, congratulations, we won this ideological battle, but now no more ideology.

00:19:04.140 Let's go back.

00:19:04.680 The neocons were more radical and more compelling and cogent, and their arguments is, no, we believe in that ideology.

00:19:12.240 Let's keep pushing forward, roll back around the world.

00:19:15.800 That was something compelling.

00:19:17.340 I mentioned the Soviet Union.

00:19:18.580 The Soviet Union, at least between 1917 and let's just say 1968, the Soviet Union captured the imagination of most every educated person with an IU above 115.

00:19:36.880 They just did.

00:19:38.500 Moscow was, it was progressive.

00:19:40.460 They wanted to apologize for it at the very least, if not outright admire it, if not outright move there. 0.90

00:19:46.060 And, like, that, you can't just say something's ideology, it's in the air, it's whimsical, it's ridiculous. 0.57

00:19:54.640 No, it's real.

00:19:56.480 It's the most compelling thing.

00:19:58.480 And MAGA is almost, it's almost like they're expressing the decline of the United States and its lack of legitimacy as an ideology itself.

00:20:09.680 Saying something like, oh, it's about this country and our borders and whatever.

00:20:15.680 They're just expressing the fact that we don't have any gas in the tank.

00:20:19.540 And they're treating that as, like, nationalism or as an ideology.

00:20:24.420 Nationalism is coherent and legitimate vis-a-vis empire.

00:20:28.920 I was actually listening to Verity's Don Carlos last night.

00:20:32.200 The poor people of Flanders, how they need, the king needs to go and save them.

00:20:37.540 Like, this notion of national identity, even blood and soil, it makes sense vis-a-vis a cold imperial force that's off in the distance.

00:20:46.940 We want to stay here at home.

00:20:48.340 But when you don't have that, when you're presiding over a declining empire, nationalism is not an ideology at all.

00:20:56.160 It's just an expression of decline.

00:20:59.100 Let's not go out into the world.

00:21:02.200 Let's not preach our values as the best possible values.

00:21:07.500 We live in the best possible country, the best possible time.

00:21:11.100 Let's just tariff everyone and not engage with them.

00:21:16.320 Let's hate on foreigners. 1.00

00:21:17.700 A lot of this, again, just to reiterate, it's an expression of the fact that all of that stuff that was powerfully legitimizing to the United States is now just withered away.

00:21:31.760 And they're treating it as something new or something powerful or realistic.

00:21:36.300 But they're actually just, like, other people surf that wave.

00:21:40.540 And now the wave's gone, but they haven't sunk yet, mangling the metaphor.

00:21:47.340 But you get what I mean.

00:21:48.660 The car is out of gas is a better one.

00:21:51.300 And we just put it in neutral, and we're just coasting.

00:21:55.260 And that's not good enough.

00:21:57.320 It's worth mentioning that after Burnham made those comments in Managerial Revolution, the original neocons, of which Burnham was one, don't forget.

00:22:06.360 This is even before they founded National Review and the Buckleyite doctrine and so on.

00:22:12.080 There were some Straussians involved, Irving Kristol, people like this. 0.86

00:22:15.920 They were very, they were acutely aware of this problem that you're talking about, of the lack of a coherent ideology.

00:22:23.100 And they almost, they were cynical, right?

00:22:26.120 They were Machiavellian and cynical.

00:22:27.600 But they were like, look, people need something to motivate them.

00:22:32.560 And what they basically settled on in the 1950s and the 1960s was a very simple good versus evil narrative, okay?

00:22:42.720 A very simple, whether it's you're always refighting World War II or during the Cold War, right?

00:22:48.960 This is why they were such ardent anti-communists, right?

00:22:52.080 Because they were able to have the Russians there as the permanent bad guy, as the permanent bad guy. 0.99

00:22:58.720 And in fact, I've got a book here called Who Played the Piper, where you can actually watch James Burnham and his friends putting together and inventing out a whole cloth, basically what we call today the center and the center left.

00:23:11.380 The liberal, the non-communist, the anti-communist left was a creation of James Burnham and the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as was the kind of, I guess you want to call the non-fascist right.

00:23:23.900 The non-like we needed a right that's all about Buckley, essentially.

00:23:28.720 They created both of those, but kind of operating software underneath it was just a very simple story of we're the good guys, we're going to fight the bad guys, cowboys and Indians. 0.98

00:23:40.780 It's World War II when we're fighting the Nazis, or it's fighting the bad Ruskies or whatever else. 0.98

00:23:47.700 And make sure that you keep all messaging, whether it's media, whether it's magazine, whether it's intellectual work, on those rail lines as a way of having powerful counterbalance.

00:24:01.000 And part of it, part of the vision of the good, and I've called this boomer truth before, but like a construction, is individual self-expression as the highest good.

00:24:13.440 Something like, something like a consumer choice, something, and so when you get to Fukuyama and you're thinking about freedom, right, it's the, it's a, it's a kind of doctrine of, what do they call it?

00:24:25.180 It's not a word that people use in wealth, in kind of meditation circles and things like that, self-affirmation, self-actualization, there we go, self-actualization, Jane Fonda workout videos, self-bessement.

00:24:41.080 Another thing I would die for.

00:24:42.620 Yeah, individualism, writ large, whether in various different forms, whether it's John Wayne style or John Lennon style, all of the different, Ronald Reagan style, Rambo style, these are all different articulations, He-Man and Hulk Hogan, articulations of the same idea over and over again.

00:25:03.740 And what I think you've seen with MAGA, and I think you're right, Richard, is that they are still feasting on the fumes of all of that, that all of that was built up, nothing has replaced it, but they're still, as they've been trying to sell this war, it's been interesting how often they go back, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago in some cases, and this is probably why it's only really landing with booms. 0.61

00:25:27.920 And older, like older Gen Xers, like you would say, and it's not really landing with the younger folks that much, because none of this shit means anything to them. 0.94

00:25:36.540 And they didn't get, they didn't get a proper dose of the operating software. 0.84

00:25:40.920 And I think a huge reason of the reason, huge reason it's not landing, both in this country and in America, is because back then, back when I was 18, everybody believed in democracy.

00:25:53.280 Everybody believed our government worked for us.

00:25:55.260 Everybody believed that the economy kept on getting better.

00:25:57.920 Everybody believed that you could go to university and buy a house and have a family and all those sorts of things.

00:26:03.180 In 2026, none of those things are true.

00:26:05.480 In this country, just this year, we've had a 45% drop in graduate vacancies here.

00:26:14.060 Nobody can get a house.

00:26:15.480 Parties of the extreme, of the left and the right, are emerging.

00:26:19.400 Two-party systems breaking down.

00:26:20.880 And so it's much more difficult to make the argument, we stand for liberal democracy, and we're going to bomb you into democracy too, when basically nobody at home buys into the central vision anymore.

00:26:34.020 This was the problem with late, this was the problem with the late Soviet Union as well.

00:26:37.780 Nobody believed in communism by the end either.

00:26:39.660 Except Gorbachev, who wanted to reform it, and in the reform, ironically ended it.

00:26:46.420 Yeah.

00:26:47.120 Yeah.

00:26:47.700 It's fascinating.

00:26:48.580 Thank you.

RadixJournal - March 04, 2026

Iran, Neoconservatism, and Trump

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