RadixJournal - March 30, 2026


NeoCon Idealism vs. Trump's War In Iran

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Obama Donald Trump Douglas Feith David Wormser Judith Miller Jake Sullivan Ariel Sharon Steve Bannon Dick Cheney
Keep Calm and Carry On A More Private Equity

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

165.27

Word count

860

Sentence count

32

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with my friend Jake Sullivan to discuss the Iran deal and its impact on the Middle East. Jake is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and has been a long time friend of mine. He's been with me through it all, and I think he's one of the most thoughtful, thoughtful people I've ever met. Jake and I talk about the deal with Iran and its effect on the region, and how the deal was negotiated by the Bush administration. We also talk about why I think the deal is a disaster, and why we should get rid of it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Now we're at this place where we have an administration, I call them a regime, I think it's fair, I'll call the Iranians, that's an Islamic regime. 0.99
00:00:08.640 We have some kind of weird Trump mafia regime of some sort.
00:00:12.320 But this regime basically didn't even go through the process of trying to lie to the American people to engage us for a year, to try to go to Congress, to make the case, let alone go to European NATO allies and say, we're going to do this.
00:00:29.600 We need a coalition of the willing and all of that.
00:00:32.820 So this is a very stunning moment from just an American perspective.
00:00:37.160 I feel trashed in a way of, oh, I'm not even worth lying to at this point in terms of this current regime.
00:00:44.080 You know, we're like, who's going to be my next wife kind of thing.
00:00:47.280 That's what it feels like.
00:00:48.260 The American people were my last wife. 1.00
00:00:50.460 I don't need to tell them shit. 0.98
00:00:51.820 So there is this aspect that is overthrowing even the sort of the visage of rules and norms, because obviously the whole Iraq war fiasco was not actually them being honest with the American people or being honest with Congress. 0.99
00:01:07.160 Congress, the intelligence was manufactured out of Douglas Feith's OSP office, Office of Special
00:01:14.100 Plans in the Pentagon, Dick Cheney and David Wormser in the vice president's office, and then
00:01:19.940 in Ariel Sharon. So in Israel, basically manufactured the intelligence. But at least 0.87
00:01:25.260 they went through the motions. They went through the motions in The New York Times with Judith
00:01:29.320 Miller being feeding all of this. Well, they here and I'll praise neoconservatives. At least they
00:01:34.880 took some degree of responsibility for their actions in the sense of you break it you own it
00:01:43.160 that was a cliche from back in the day in the sense that nation building which gets this horrible
00:01:50.040 name a regime change wars etc we're all against those things we've all learned the lessons no
00:01:57.780 you haven't learned any lesson because what you're doing now is smashing it and leaving it in the
00:02:03.960 antique shop or something i don't even know that there seems to be no zero idealism i actually saw
00:02:10.440 a clip before we went on with steve bannon and i believe eric bowler formerly of fox news and they
00:02:17.160 were just palling around at cpac and they're saying we're not gonna do any of these regime
00:02:21.800 change wars we're just gonna bomb them and then take their oil and force a deal on them or things 0.93
00:02:28.480 like that and i we don't we're not going to send our soldiers until the arab royal sheiks send 0.98
00:02:33.680 their sons and daughters to die blah blah blah but it's okay i agree with you but like at least
00:02:41.240 the neocons thought that we had some level of responsibility i think they genuinely believed
00:02:47.620 their own ideology they thought we had some level of responsibility for the people who lived there
00:02:53.560 and a responsibility to world history, the geist itself,
00:02:57.720 in order to build a parliamentary democracy there.
00:03:01.220 Whereas it seems like with Trump, we're at war, 0.99
00:03:04.720 we're going to kill them all, regime change. 0.99
00:03:06.680 No, we're not at war. It's fine. 1.00
00:03:08.340 You have all of this kind of thing.
00:03:09.840 And then it seems like the motivation from Israel is the lawn mowing, 0.71
00:03:14.600 which is sort of the metaphor we have here, 0.83
00:03:17.180 which is we're going to smash them up, 0.63
00:03:19.660 and they're going to be scrambled for six to nine months.
00:03:24.280 And then the moment they start to build
00:03:26.640 the London Bridge back up again, 0.99
00:03:29.780 we're going to bomb them again.
00:03:31.940 And there's just endless situation 0.99
00:03:34.460 of they're trying to build a bomb 1.00
00:03:36.780 and we must stop them and bomb them. 0.99
00:03:38.500 I think whatever criticisms you might have
00:03:41.380 for Obama's deal that he made
00:03:44.240 with Jake Sullivan and company
00:03:46.400 in terms of the Iran nuclear deal,
00:03:48.280 Whatever problems you might have with that, at least it was a sort of solution to this impasse of we don't fully trust you, you're a sort of different type regime, we don't want you to have a nuclear weapon, and so we're going to work with you so that we can grow together and parallel in the future.
00:04:13.920 I think that the critics of the Obama's Iranian nuclear deal, of whom Donald Trump was the number one critic, the worst deal in history, in effect, were afraid that deal might work too well, that maybe they will take the money and not fill the bomb.
00:04:35.180 Have you ever thought of that? They wanted to get rid of the deal so that there would be at least movement on the Iranian side to generate a nuclear weapon because they would be again treated as a totally rogue state, not just a somewhat rogue state that the Obama administration treated them. 0.57
00:04:56.700 And they're saying we need a nuclear bomb just for our survival.
00:05:00.660 That seems to be the strategy.
00:05:02.680 It seems to be a kind of endless chaos strategy.
00:05:05.340 There's no world order.
00:05:06.920 There's no neocon idealism of building democracy in the Middle East.