RadixJournal - February 20, 2026


This Is Not An Iran War

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Maduro John Mearsheimer Gen Xers Baudrillard Venezuela Ayatollah Trump Nick
AOC's Curious Nationalism Love and Marriage

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

171.09

Word count

1,575

Sentence count

115

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of the podcast, I'm joined by my good friend Alex Blumberg. We talk about the Iran situation, the Venezuelan situation, and the Iran crisis. We also talk about how the right is in decline and how the left is not.

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 So I was thinking today, I keep hearing these warnings from the populist right or like the center populism, like breaking points or something.
00:00:12.960 They're like, it's going to be a regime change war.
00:00:16.420 And there was, I got another notification from an article in the Wall Street Journal that I read.
00:00:21.240 But there's more hardware in American hardware that is in the Middle East than there has been since the Iraq war days.
00:00:27.680 So something is happening.
00:00:30.180 Maybe it's a bluff or it's saber rattling to get something.
00:00:35.820 But let me just say this.
00:00:38.100 The easiest take in the world is to be anti-war because, you know, it's just like, oh, death is bad, you know, and it's like, thanks.
00:00:47.600 You know, this is what you see from the anti-Zionists now who aren't even anti-Zionists.
00:00:52.260 They're like, you know, Israel is killing children. 0.75
00:00:55.280 Yeah, they're anti-Nayahuists. 0.87
00:00:58.040 Yeah, it's just right.
00:00:59.980 They keep saying it.
00:01:01.360 It's boring.
00:01:02.120 It's not serious.
00:01:03.280 You're not actually questioning Israel.
00:01:06.500 You're not getting it to the heart of the matter.
00:01:08.480 You're just weeping crocodile tears over dead babies.
00:01:12.240 And I kind of get it, of course, but it's just not serious.
00:01:15.360 And that's what we've seen from so much of the right.
00:01:17.900 But anyway, what I mean by this is that the easiest thing in the world is to be anti-war and just to say war is bad.
00:01:25.780 Now, this is one thing that I started thinking about after Venezuela, which is that the right is convinced that America is in decline.
00:01:35.860 And I think they're correct about that.
00:01:38.940 We are clearly in decline when it comes to just, you know, our culture, the nation, institutions, average intelligence.
00:01:50.060 Yes, we are.
00:01:51.280 But why do you do you really think that every other nation is not suffering the exact same fate and in many ways something worse?
00:02:01.020 Like, do you think it's only America that's incompetent or something?
00:02:04.800 I don't think so.
00:02:05.980 And I am not and I am not at all certain.
00:02:09.500 In fact, I think it's the other way around that we have lost power relatively to other nations of the world.
00:02:18.180 Now, you could make a strong case with China, et cetera.
00:02:20.260 But but overall, I'm not convinced that that is the case at all. 0.91
00:02:25.380 Venezuela showed that a woke, ridiculous Trumpian dictatorship can just go in, do stuff, slap people around and then leave. 0.80
00:02:39.640 It's like, bye bye. 0.98
00:02:40.800 Bye bye.
00:02:41.580 Bye bye. 1.00
00:02:42.260 Give the first lady a black guy and throw her in the fucking cargo hall. 1.00
00:02:46.500 Yeah. 1.00
00:02:46.820 That's what you want to do now.
00:02:49.100 Yes.
00:02:49.700 But but we we can still do things.
00:02:55.080 And these other countries are more incompetent.
00:02:59.360 They're more incompetent basket cases than we are, in fact.
00:03:02.280 And so while I am quite hesitant to endorse regime change war or an extended war in Iran, I'm just going to sort of hand it to the Trump administration that they actually are able to do things. 0.53
00:03:21.000 And I'm not going to kind of like come up here and be like, oh, it's going to be nuclear Armageddon.
00:03:28.000 It's the worst thing.
00:03:29.000 It's going to be a forever war.
00:03:30.300 No, the institutions are competent enough to actually learn.
00:03:34.280 They're not going to just repeat that immediately.
00:03:37.560 At the very least, it'll take them another 10 years before they do that again.
00:03:40.560 But I don't know what to say. 0.98
00:03:42.760 I mean, I I wonder the degree to which Iran and countries like Iran are run by the same decrepit boomers with dumb millennials staffing the bureaucracies. 1.00
00:03:56.760 Gen Xers have checked out, so they're we're not even a factor, but boomers and millennial run states that we actually can go and slap people around and get out and they're not going to do anything. 0.95
00:04:10.800 And that's just the resistance left.
00:04:13.680 The tankies are going to be like, oh, no, we'll destroy Israel. 0.95
00:04:16.780 We'll do the Strait of Hormuz.
00:04:18.560 My professor at one point, John Mearsheimer is like, you know, it's going to be a total land war that we won't win.
00:04:24.960 And I'm not convinced by any of these things, actually.
00:04:28.020 So am I naive or am I getting at something?
00:04:30.540 No, I don't think you're naive because because this is another useful utilization of the distinction between the American nation and the American empire, where the American nation is certainly in decline.
00:04:40.220 But the American empire, when you talk about, you know, Ukraine or Venezuela, it's like the American empire is doing totally fine.
00:04:47.860 It's meeting their aims.
00:04:48.900 It's whatever, you know, it's as strong as it's ever been, whatever the case may be.
00:04:52.180 But I do think there is like a kind of distinction to be made between Venezuela and Iran, where we didn't do regime change in Venezuela.
00:05:00.820 We kind of did administration change, right?
00:05:03.080 We just took out it was a we have the vice president taking over and then, you know, welcoming the whatever American official on stage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:05:12.860 But it's I think it's different for a couple of reasons with Iran, where one, to make the case that the vanilla intervention was about Jewish power serving Israel's interests, whatever, was a stretch.
00:05:27.440 It was a huge stretch to make a case.
00:05:28.940 Because us going to war, doing some kind of regime change, decapitation strike, whatever the case may be, in Iran is purely an Israeli geopolitical aim that we are effectuating, right? 0.65
00:05:39.780 Yes.
00:05:40.040 And then secondly, it's not the same where if you think about Venezuela having a kind of constitutional republic structure with a president, a vice president, whatever.
00:05:47.900 OK, get rid of the president. 0.99
00:05:49.680 You have the vice president take over.
00:05:50.980 If they do what we want, then it's OK.
00:05:52.380 If they don't, we'll do it again, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:05:54.520 The structure of the Islamic Republic is different.
00:05:57.480 And it's like, OK, so you take out the Ayatollah and the top brass or whatever.
00:06:02.260 It's not necessarily the legal, the composition of the state is different, right?
00:06:07.560 So I don't know if it can easily be done one to one in the same type of way where it's like, OK, we get rid of the top level and the next ones rise up and we work with them, whatever.
00:06:17.900 That being said, I don't think we're going to do a protracted ground invasion, whatever.
00:06:22.620 Nick's show, I think, last night was all about Iran, and he talked a lot about this.
00:06:25.940 And he's like, yeah, we are building up very much in the regions, do maybe prolonged airstrikes, whatever the case may be.
00:06:33.020 I don't think it'll be – I don't think, again, it'll be a regime change war.
00:06:37.760 I think it'll be a war of really trying to degrade infrastructure to really make them incapable of retaliating.
00:06:46.080 But having to – we'll still have the same, if not the same administration, definitely the same regime.
00:06:53.880 Yeah, much like Venezuela is what you're saying.
00:06:56.160 I mean could they not decapitate the Islamic revolution? 1.00
00:07:00.820 I mean there are existing sort of constitutional, nation-state-y, democratic institutions that are in Iran.
00:07:07.860 I mean Iran has a president.
00:07:09.300 They have a parliament.
00:07:10.320 Yeah, but they have like the council of jurists.
00:07:14.940 So are you going to take out every jurist?
00:07:16.840 Are you going to take out the whole – it's more like saying like rather than just taking out Maduro, you're taking out Maduro and the Supreme Court.
00:07:24.440 You're taking out the president and the Supreme Court and the congressional leadership.
00:07:27.960 It's like it's a little bit more of a bigger lift.
00:07:31.260 Yeah, but we'll see.
00:07:33.660 I don't know.
00:07:34.400 I think something is going to happen due to this buildup.
00:07:38.180 But I don't know.
00:07:39.820 Perhaps I have a sort of cynical indifference about this stuff.
00:07:44.460 It's just very different.
00:07:45.880 It's hard to care.
00:07:46.600 It's very different than when I was a lot younger.
00:07:50.660 The country was different.
00:07:52.340 The world was different.
00:07:53.420 The buildup to Iraq in terms of criticism, dissident criticism coming from libertarians and leftists, not coming from liberals, by the way, and this prolonged buildup and legitimization of the Iraq War.
00:08:10.480 I don't think we're – we've not seen anything resembling that. 0.99
00:08:14.700 I think that was almost like a holdover of the 20th century, and at this point they're like, we don't give a fuck, actually. 0.94
00:08:20.900 We're just going to do it. 0.96
00:08:22.060 I almost feel as though the culture has finally – and I think we talked about this the last time I was on.
00:08:27.100 I think the culture has finally caught up to the Gulf War didn't take place.
00:08:31.660 Yeah.
00:08:32.060 The culture is like these wars don't exist.
00:08:35.020 It's like it just exists on the screen, exists on your phone.
00:08:38.800 If you ignore your phone, there's no war, et cetera, et cetera.
00:08:41.420 I think the culture finally now actually reflects it in a way that Baudrillard was speaking about something nascent.
00:08:48.700 But I think it's fully matured at this point where I think the general population feels this kind of just aloof detachment from it where it's like, all right, whatever.
00:08:56.580 I guess there's a war.
00:08:57.120 You're cocooned in your phone.
00:08:58.940 I mean the phone is like being in a pod in a way.
00:09:02.220 It's you.
00:09:02.920 You could be on a bus surrounded by people, but you're in your little world, your little fragmented cultural world.
00:09:08.800 Well, anyway, we shall see.