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This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third
sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other, undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello, and welcome to Deep State Radio, I am your host, David Ruffka, joined by two of your
“favorite regulars, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center. How are you doing, Rosa?”
I'm enjoying the apocalypse, David. Well, no one is better prepared for the apocalypse than you. You have been waiting for it, you're whole light. We are also joined by our friend Ed Luc of the Financial Times. How do you like a good apocalypse, Ed?
It used to be a West End play called "Oh, What a Lovely War". I think it should be anyone. Oh, what a lovely apocalypse. Every day, every day there's something new. So, you know, I've been talking to people who are like active in the Middle East,
somewhere there, somewhere here. I've seen your level kind of people who understand what's going on, because I don't understand what's going on. You know, the president says we're talking, we're not talking, we're sending intrups, we're not sending intrups.
The Iranians say they're not talking, then maybe we're talking, maybe we're talking to the Pakistanis or we're talking to the Americans, maybe we would like to have J.D. Vance as the interlocutor instead. There's all these conflicting stories.
“So the question one has is, are we going to escalate or is there an off-rip?”
And I just like, before we sort of get into things, I'd like to get your sense of that. And what's your sense of that? So I think we're going to escalate and de escalate, but each time with sort of greater intensity, whilst Trump discovers that he hasn't got any off-ramps here.
So we're in the middle as we speak of the five-day pause that Trump announced first
thing Monday morning by the weekend when most likely we discover that there is no meeting of minds, whether they hold talks in Pakistan or not. There will be 80-second airborne in place and the first Marine Expeditionary unit will be in theatre. Yeah, most likely Trump's just using them as a sort of threat to try and get around to
concede.
“And I think there is a fundamental misreading of Iran going on here.”
It's really not going to cave in, it's fighting for its survival. And therefore each time Trump makes a threat, he's going to have to escalate it from the previous time because he won't have carried it out. So we're in a strangely favorished but entirely predictable dialectic here. What do you think, Razai, I haven't had an exchange with one person this morning as an
amidst of all this, and they concurred with what Ed said, which is Iran's not ready for an off-ramp yet. You know, I think that as usual with Trump trying to discern the rational plan behind his actions as a sort of a fool's game, you know, I don't think that there is an answer to the question, well, is he escalating to de-escalator, is he escalating to escalating to escalate
or, you know, what is he doing, I think he doesn't know what he's doing.
I don't think Trump has, I think it is equally possible that we will get the 80-second airborne
there and so on and that Trump will then check it out and refill his reputation, his taco reputation and simply say, we won and maybe somehow work some deal just to reopen the streets of Hormos and forget everything else because we don't care about everything, else at least Trump doesn't care about anything else and leave and declare victory and
Go home.
I think that's completely possible, and if I were Trump, that's sure what I would be doing
for all the reasons that Ed articulated, but I also think it's perfectly possible that he will send in ground troops and, you know, down the torpedoes and so on and that there will be a long bloody war that will be disastrous both for the U.S. and for the Iranians and around the region because I do not think that Trump is a man who loses sleep over, I think he loses sleep over the prospect of being less famous or going to jail.
I do not think he loses any sleep at all over the possibility of an extended war that kills hundreds or thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, including potentially hundreds or thousands of American troops.
All right, I could occur with that Ed.
“When we talk about offerings, you know, you have to sort of talk about what the on-ramp”
was and what the reason was for doing this one was Nux, one was missiles, one was regime change and so forth and all those seem off the table because the Iranians have played a car. They said we're going to fight economic war and that means shutting the straight and so now I think everything has come down to the straight and it was a little bit interesting,
not a little bit interesting, it was obvious, that the president decided that he would announce that we were not going to attack Iranian energy sites which very likely would have
been a war crime anyway, but he announced that right before markets were going to open
on Monday and I noticed in your scenario when everybody would be in place that you know, you were sort of thinking, well, you know, after the five-year period, five-day period is up which is right after markets closed on Friday and then I thought, gee, you know, when he attacked was a weekend when markets weren't going and it does seem like there is a big economic subtext to this whole thing and, you know, the war is now to paraphrase
from Clausewood economics by other means.
“Yeah, I like that phrasing economics by other means and I think we've got a test coming”
up pretty imminently which is will Trump as I expect and I suspect you suspect, you just expect late Friday evening or early Saturday morning switch from talks are going great and being very productive to one now we've got troops in the region, you better watch out Iran because this time I really mean it over the weekend and then pivot back on Monday and we've had we've seen this process before and I suspect we're going to see it again,
but Trump's got one war aim now and that war aim is to go back to a position where Iran did not have a stranglehold over the global energy markets. In other words, to go back to this day just quote, anti before the war began, that's his only war aim, that's his only off ramp and he keeps telling Iran that that is his pain point that that's his pressure point.
He keeps showing his hand is not a tell there's nothing subtle about this and so Iran keeps being reaffirmed in the knowledge that it's threat against regional oil fields and refineries and it's control over the waterway of the strait of all moves is it's key to survival. So the one thing that Trump wants and to enable them to get out of the war is the one
thing Iran is not going to offer. So tell me how this, how this ends, very quickly add to that all the people and not all the people but keep people in the region is right all along and Saudi Arabia now more overtly than B.S. and I've been some on the Crown Prince are saying finish the job or what does finish the job mean?
You cannot achieve regime change from the air, the logic of what they're saying is put troops on the ground, not Saudi troops, not Israeli troops, American troops, put your
“troops on the ground because that's the only way regime change happens.”
Yeah, I mean Rosa, it seems to me that among the many many many miscalculations of Donald Trump, including false analogies with other things that he's done in the past whether it was the bombing last year or whether it was Venezuela, including, you know, miss assessing what the Iranian response would be and so forth. I think he's miscalculated who the enemy is because the enemy and all of this is the clock.
The Iran can sit this, in fact, Iran gains every day this last longer even as they are being punished because the pressure grows on Trump domestically economically in terms
Of impending elections and so forth and so it, you know, maybe it's the clock...
markets but I think Iran recognizes that and realizes that they may absorb some pain but
given that for them the alternative is really existential, you know, it it may be the only path that they can follow. What do you think? The world is just a bit of an integral and a lot of money and the time and the money that I can't understand from there. Now, the cost of testing is on Shopify.de.
“I think that's right and all the evidence suggests in fact that the hardliners and the”
revolutionary guard are getting a tighter grip on power within Iran. You know, far from
far from doing what Trump claimed we were going to do in the first place which is, you know, liberate the Iranian people, we've created a situation where in fact the hardliners have even more control and we now have two regimes who don't really care who gets killed and one of them is Donald Trump's regime and the other is the Iranian regime and and you know, as you said, it's existential for them, they can and will wait us out. We can certainly send ground troops.
I don't think it's impossible that we will again because I don't think Trump particularly cares but but if we do then we're in for a long protracted conflict, Allah Iraq War in which we may not win. You know, we just we may not win partly because as we know, you define what the way we have defined winning makes it makes it very difficult for us to win. You know, I actually do think Trump might still have an off-ramp. I think that there might just be a little glimmer of possibility
“that everybody gets to declare victory in some way. I think that's what Trump is looking for”
but I don't know if he's looking for it in any way that is at all competent. You know, the problem for Trump is that he can't stand anybody else gloating. He's the only one who's allowed to gloat and of course the Iranians can't the Iranian regime can't tolerate a situation where they have to say, oh, we lost we give in. So we've got this classic standoff where to some extent pride is preventing either side from giving in and it seems ridiculous to say so
but ridiculous forms of pride have given us bloody global conflicts that lasted for decades many, many times in the past. I mean, that's the story of human history is pride and idiocy
“and then you've got millions of people dead. Yeah, it's also the story of U.S. involvement in the”
Middle East where we keep doing this kind of thing and we don't win those wars. We just haven't won any of those wars and Ed Rosen makes a really good point. You know, a lot of times you hear people say, well, what can he do to save face? Because he's so ecotistically wants to save face and the answer here is nothing. His best path out is to just declare victory and
go home even if he loses face. The problem is he won't do it but there is another problem here
at it and the other problem is that he is out of control of this situation and that when you talk to people in the region, they say we're never going back to February 28. Iran revealed that they are willing to attack their neighbors. Their neighbors are now deeply hostile to Iran. Everybody has a different calculus about what do you need in terms of air defense? What do you need in terms of military defense? What do we need given the vulnerability of the straight? What is the role Israel is going to
play? Because Trump can stop and Israel can not stop. Israel's in the midst and we don't even talk about it here but Israel seems to be in the midst of annexing 10 to 15% of Lebanon and so, you know, he pushed the button on February 28 but it seems very unlikely that we can go back to a pre-February 28th Middle East. It's just standing back a little bit. It's really interesting. Some of the
Correspondence that I've been having with people who've read pieces that I've...
war in the last month, saying, "And these are reasonable people and people that I like and
“know, saying, aren't you underestimating the degree to which our missiles, our superiority,”
our just overwhelming firepower has achieved our aims here in terms of taking out this and taking out that and degrading the other, etc. And I have to sort of grip my teeth a little bit because I say, "Well, how many times do we have to go through? How many times do we have to watch this movie?" Before we realise that missiles do not change things for even in the medium-term, let alone the long term, that you have there not a substitute for strategy for political strategy.
War is supposed to be politics by other means. Where is the politics here? Where is the thinking?
Tenancy for us all to go to one degree or another all-heg-setting about the lethality, but our disposal betrays the inability to learn a lesson. I would have thought we've had imprinted all on us again and again throughout our lifetimes that the superior, air power and missile power
“does not buy you an outcome. You have to marry it with a well-thought-through political strategy”
and there's been precious few of those in any of the previous wars we've mentioned. And this certainly not here. So, of course we're not going to go back to pre-February 28th world, but here we are with the president essentially having that as his goal. That is how dumbness is. It's extraordinary how a historic ignorant and it's just a sort of worst, it's not as tragedy or as fast, but it is a worse version of what we've been through so many times before.
Can I add to what Ed said? There are two related additional problems about the argument that our superior firepower somehow has one or is going to win this for us. One of which is that we're running low on missiles. We do not in fact have an inexhaustible supply. We cannot keep up this pace forever. We probably cannot even keep up this pace of attacks for another month or two. If we do and we're already, we're dangerously depleting our supplies. We're
diverting resources from other parts of the world. That's the second piece of the problem. We are from a perspective of US national security. We are diverting resources from elsewhere to focus on Iran, leaving ourselves much more vulnerable in other parts of the world and leaving US allies much more vulnerable elsewhere. If I were China, if I were China, I really wanted to
invade Taiwan and maybe they don't. It's never been clear to me that they actually do. But if that's
what I wanted, I would think this is a really good time. This is a really good time to do that. Because the US is totally tangled up in Iran right now. We already know that even pre-Iran strikes, we already know that the Pentagon's projections of what would happen if we got into a war with China over Taiwan for instance. We're actually not lead to the conclusion that the US wins. You know, they tended to lead to the conclusion that either either you had an inconclusive conflict
or that we lost. We have now made it virtually certain that in any conflict with China over Taiwan, we would lose. I cannot fathom the mindset that says, "Oh, hey, I've got a great idea." Let's, I mean, now I'm doing, now I'm following the same trap. I just at the beginning of this podcast that we shouldn't fall into of attempting to fathom the mindset, which is unfathomable because it doesn't make sense. I'll stop there by just saying that it's unbelievably reckless
and irresponsible not to speak of at this point positively, criminally negligent to do what we're doing both from the perspective of US security and from the perspective of the lives that we are we are playing with around the region and this is now old news, but remember we could go and
“when Trump thought, "Oh, we could bomb a few targets again, just for fun." I think he went into”
this war just for fun. He thought he thought it was going to be another easy one and just treating people's lives as something that you destroy just for fun is so morally low, so it's impossible to find words for it. Yeah, why believe, you know, you guys are using all the right adjectives because this is unbelievably reckless and irresponsible and stupid. As we began this podcast,
A story broke on the Washington Post, which used to be a newspaper in Washing...
the first two paragraphs. The United States has developed a 15-point proposal aimed at ending the
“war with Iran according to people familiar with the plan. Speaking of the condition of anonymity”
to discuss sensitive negotiations, several Middle Eastern officials said the plan offered extensive sanctions relief to Iran in return for the removal of all of its enriched uranium material and abandonment of enrichment processing capabilities limits to Iran's ballistic missile program and the cessation of support to militant groups in the region including his blood, the hooties, and Hamas. I do not know where to begin and my deconstruction of this, so I would let
you deconstruct it. Okay, so really, this is a one-point plan which is on conditional surrender. So I don't know what, I don't know where they got the other 14 points from. But there is this kind of lovely element, which is kind of historical irony where Trump who ran against Obama's roses here, Jikpoha, is agreement with the Iranians saying, "Oh, we're giving all this money back to the Iranians in order for them to do this." And guess, well, that's it's the same deal
plus a bunch of other things the Iranians don't want to do. Yeah, I mean, sorry. I mean, handing over those 140 kilograms, enough to make roughly 10 nuclear weapons, handing over all the equipment that they use to enrich whatever hasn't been bombed that Iranian.
deconstructing any ballistic missile capability and it's basically saying to Iran,
we would like you to strip naked and then we'll sort of pass you a few dollars and you'll have to believe our promise that we're not going to strike you again. The chances of the Iranians accepting this one-point plan, even as a basis for negotiation, minus one in my view. This is not a serious negotiating gamut and of course Iran's own demands that America leave the region and close down its bases and give full control and Suez Canal style to Iran of the straight-of-haul
modes and pay reparations to Iran for the bombing. That is an equally extravagant list of
“demands which I think indicate to us that Iran has no intention until they think America has paid”
a sufficient price, is no intention of calling a halt to this stuff for quite a long time.
Rosa, never has your beloved Jack power looked so good.
In this year, we had over 10,000 electro-fahrzeuge for Amazon liverns in ganz Europa eingesetzt. For liverns like football, for young kickers. I don't know, 10,000 electro-fahrzeuge under Sweden. I don't think they... I don't think any remotely serious person in the Trump administration of whom there are very few, but there are one or two. I don't think they even think it's going to happen. This is sort of a show. I actually wanted to shift focus to the domestic
“politics of this and implications of this because here's both a problem and a boom, right?”
Is that Trump's base believes anything he says? They are not reading the New York Times, they are not reading the financial times, they are not listening to CNN or the BBC or anything like that. And so Trump does have the ability with regard to his own base, you know, about a third of Americans are like solid maga, solid Trump. He can say anything. We could give away Fort Knox to the Iranians and he could walk away and say, "We win. I just got the best deal ever."
And they would think, "Yeah, we won, we got the best deal ever." Because that's the only reality that they're being exposed to. That's both a huge problem, right? It's a huge problem for those who want change domestically. But it also gives him the ability to ignore reality and declare a victory if he wants to. If he is willing to ignore the fact that the Iranians will be crowing and saying,
"Haha, we got the big bad United States to go away.
cowards. If he's willing to put up with that." And every now and then he is, you know, every now
then he's just like, "Oh, I'm just going to ignore them. They're stupid. What do I care?"
“I think he has the domestic ability with regard to his base to simply declare a victory and walk away.”
Even if by any other standards we have lost, the question I think is how bothered he is going to be by the Iranians and people like us and commentators around the world and other world leaders saying, "Taco, taco, taco." If he is truly bothered by that, then he'll keep going no matter what the cost, because he will also figure that his base, he can say, "Oops, he doops. He lost a few more hundred U.S. service members. That's the way it goes, guys." And they'll say, "Well, that's the way it
goes." You know, so I don't know that there is a domestic constraint on him. What I worry about
and I've worried about this many times with Trump in the past, obviously, is that I think what he he does recognize is that he is losing the middle to the extent that there's a middle, you know, that the popular opposition to war is growing. He's already been for months way under water with his approval ratings. The Republican prospects in the midterms, if the midterms are free and fair,
“are grow more dismal by the day. That I think scares the hell out of him, but, you know,”
this is the overused wounded animal metaphor. You know, wounded animals are most dangerous, as he senses that he is increasingly in jeopardy of losing both houses of Congress, if there are free and fair midterms, that will inspire him domestically to ever greater feats of chaos and repression, and ever greater feats of attempted sabotage of the midterms. And all of the signs we are seeing are extremely ominous. You know, we had that Republican sheriff in California, Seizing ballots.
We have Trump's continued comments about nationalizing the objections and so forth. You know, and I think as ever that that ridiculous take Trump seriously, but not literally
comment that people kept quoting back in his first administration and so forth. No, take Trump
“literally. He absolutely will try to do all kinds of crazy illegal things if he thinks he's going to”
lose. So that, that in some ways is what I also worry about. That this gives him even more incentive than he already had to do whatever things he needs to legal or illegal to cement his movements grip on power and lock it in structurally. Okay, we've got two minutes here. So I'm just going to ask for, you know, what minute answered from each one of you, and I assume I assume because I saw people made a lot of money on polymarket that you were in there betting that this war would start.
You've made of because of your contacts. You've made a fortune on this thing. But I do think, you know, there's a, you know, the market fell for the head fake on Monday. Oh, no, everything's going to be fine. Price of oil would down a little bit. You know, if there's more fighting, it's going to go crazy. But if there is no return to February 28, then the market all of a sudden realizes that we're entering a new period of instability here,
that can have a long term economic repercussions that also impact what Rosa's talking about. For sure. I mean, you know, ironically, you know, the economy least exposed is the United States because it is a surplus energy producing country and the ones that are most in the line, you know, East Asia, the Allies in Asia and and on Allies like China, although China much less than Japan, by the way, Japan's far more exposed and the Europeans. So we're all contract,
but some will contract more than others, well, we all are slowing, but some are slowing quicker than others. And America is the most impervious, but you know, there's a larger picture here. He's a American girl who's based on the AI investment boom. And the AI investment boom is itself, there's a lot of sort of confidence trickery in there in the valuations. And a lot of the bets of the big AI companies, including Sam Altman, is the one opening eye at the center of the AI
universe, have been made on the Gulf and that these huge data centers in United Arab Emirates and elsewhere, these are huge bets and and the, you know, Iranian target list includes them and that's going to be factored into future investments. You know, so the longer term impact on how the global economy works, what happens to supply chains? What happens or how much more aware we are of fragility and how much more we put into resilient? This is just going to make it a much less global
Economy.
And that means that's that costs money. It slows growth for everybody. Yeah. No, I think more,
“more fragile future seems to be in store for everybody. Rosa, in other remaining 30 seconds or”
a minute, we have one of the bets that Israel might, but Israel might take a different path.
And just keep fighting, right? I mean, we don't control that card. Right. Israel's agenda is
“Israel's interest in agenda do not align with the U.S.s and Trump is absolutely being used.”
Yeah. Well, so big questions, big concerns as of the middle of this week. We'll keep tracking this
with all of our podcasts, daily ones and each one of the special ones. We've got several special
“ones coming at the end of this week. So please join us for those here at the DSR Network. Subscribe”
at YouTube and follow us and support us every way you can. We appreciate it. Thank you, Rosa. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Bye-bye. You're the best player in this school. You're just a bit of a rat and then you're a student. No, no, no. I'm not. This player is my safe space. You're my, I'm not sure if you're all right. Yeah, exactly. This player is so deep in the world that I just understand. I'm not a student, job or a student. I'm not a student. I'm not a student. I'm a student. Save.
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