This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the ...
I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
It's a widespread assumption among political strategists that foreign policy rarely matters in U.S. elections, but what have Donald Trump's failures on this front are so disastrous
“and destructive that he's about to break this rule too?”
Trump's Iran fiasco is getting worse and newly leaked photos showed dramatic damage to the U.S. abroad. On Russia and Ukraine, he buffoonishly proclaimed that he'd secured an agreement that neither would attack the other's energy sources, but then that blew up in his face. And new polling shows him cratering on both fronts.
So is there a way to make all this matter in the midterms? We're talking about all of it with international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, who's written well on the Iran debacle, Nick Good to have you on. Hi, great to be back.
So with soring diesel prices killing Republicans in the midterms, Trump tried to blame this on the
Russia Ukraine war and not Iran and the other day he posted this on truth social quote, Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian energy targets. Russia has agreed to do likewise, close quote, Trump then suggested this will hold down the world's diesel prices, but then Russia and Ukraine both said, no, we didn't really agree to that.
Nick, can you bring us up to speed on that? Sure. So Russian Ukraine are in a war stalemate at the line, I mean, they're fighting a lot and killing a lot of people, but not moving dramatically in terms of land. When we're at the other, they're both bombing each other long distance, bombing each
others, energy resources, and Trump tried to interject himself among a trip both with Kushner and Steve Woodcoff of trying to, once again, try to make deals and then try to get this to stop by just claiming that it was Ukraine's fault, not his Iran war that actually made diesel prices rise, which nobody bought, and so then when nobody bought that, he tried to sell the lie by saying they're going to stop right now, which they then did not do as they
kept on attacking each other. Right.
“So they're not really listening to Donald Trump on this, are they?”
No, not at all, just about nobody is anymore.
Nick, just briefly, the Russia Ukraine war has basically receded from the headlines and
Trump's basically stopped talking about it, but we should probably remind everybody that Trump said that he would during the campaign, that he would end this war on day one of his presidency. He did, he said he would end it on day one, and the big idea that he and his team have had is to try to pressure the Ukrainians to surrender to Russia, and that's even what Kushner had adjusted where he complained that the Ukrainians would not give up the land that
would want it and therefore that he couldn't make a deal. And of course, Ukrainians aren't doing that, but the other big changes that they've managed to really increase their strike program into Russia, and they're hitting a lot of in particular refineries, which is contributing to the rise of gas prices, but it's nowhere near as big as what Trump has done with the Iran War.
It just compounds the problem.
“I think we should probably focus on this aspect of it.”
It's not a small thing for the President of the United States to go out there and say, I've secured a deal between two major nations that are at war, not to attack each other's assets in one way or another, and then that just to be bullshit. But that's not a small thing, is it? No, no.
It's a dramatic change, and it's another example of how Trump has disrupted the international system by removing that bedrock idea of American credibility that he has forfeited it in so many ways. And another, perhaps the biggest current example of Trump's blown credibility is the way that the United States has not been providing security to its Middle Eastern allies.
To all these different Gulf Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, we're Saudi Arabia, has had to deal now with the biggest attacks against it of the war so far, where a Iran-backed militia attacked its east-west pipeline. And they went and asked Trump for help and BS reportedly called Trump twice and asked him to get involved in this Yemen conflict and cleared up.
And both times the United States and said, no, and our states, the Gulf Arab states are reportedly shocked by this and it upends the entire Middle East architecture. And Trump just simply isn't there and also isn't able to stop either of the hoothees or the Iranians. Well, my foreign policy doctrine says that Donald Trump will screw anybody if he sees
it in his own interests. Let's go to Iran for a bit more. The House just passed another bill that directs Trump to end the war there or got congressional authorization for it. Seven Republicans defected from Trump this time.
Trump's been threatening to blow up the whole country again. Iran doesn't seem to take that seriously.
Nick, can you just very briefly bring us up to speed on what's going on in Ir...
doing what and why the situation stuck?
“So they're both blockading each other, occasionally bombing each other, but largely holding”
back from full-scale war. So nobody's giving in and nobody is letting ships go through, the U.S. under Trump is tried bombing a few more times, but it hasn't really accomplished anything. And the Iranians aren't giving in because they are both their allies around the march, like again Saudi Arabia, because while they're feeling economic damage from the squeeze,
they are also able to impose a lot of economic damage and they can see the U.S. political calendar. They can see the midterms. If Democrats capture the House, they will be better able to try to assert Congress's war powers, which really, the whole thing should not be necessary at all.
That the legal thing should be the Trump is supposed to, the president, is supposed to have congressional authorization to go to war and then under the War Powers Act is supposed to withdraw if he doesn't get authorization, and this is now multiple times that they've taken away authorization that he didn't even have in the first place just to underline it.
“So it's more authoritarian moment, but the Iranians can see this and they can use his”
their advantage, and neither can get one over on the other moment.
Right, it never hurts to remind people that Trump is abusing his power in every conceivable
way that he can. CBS News just published extraordinary photos of U.S. equipment and positions in the Middle East that have been badly damaged by the war. The pictures are powerful. There's aircraft that's been blown up, buildings reduced to rubble.
It's much worse than we knew, but here's the kicker. U.S. service members anonymously sent these pictures to CBS due to restrictions on communicating with the media. As one service member told CBS News, quote, "This is major damage to our bases that hasn't been communicated to the American public, we're standing there with our eyes closed getting
punched in the face." Close quote. Nick, Pete Heggsets propagandists suppressed this info about what's happening to United States, interests, and assets, and it's getting leaked right around the year thoughts on all this.
“Right, it's really bad, and I think we're going to keep finding out about additional”
damage that this did because the Trump administration's main foreign policy priority has been lying to the American people. And so when the war hadn't been going, when the war did not go well, which started, I mean, really before it started, but it was clear that it wasn't going well within a few weeks, and they've been still stalling and flailing and trying different things the entire time,
and while they're doing this because they can't admit their own failure, they are then trying to cover up all this damage because instead of correcting the problem, or instead
of addressing the problem in the first place, they are trying to just keep it from the
public. And they can't. It's too big. The bases that are not being defended, this is too much money, too many people involved. And the way they've tried to keep it out of the media, we can see, especially in the
internet age, that you can't keep images from getting to the public. You know, those photos really reminded me of Trump's 2016 ads in which he tried to demonstrate what he called American carnage. They were pictures of, you know, rusted out factories through the Rust Belt. A lot of these pictures almost look like that, they're like these American bases, which
are just, you know, have been bombed, they're falling apart, they're windows are broken, they're deserted. Yeah, the United States has bases all throughout the Middle East. And this is the big, um, geopolitical architecture that is changing, Trump has lost the Gulf, he's lost freedom of navigation, it seems like he's losing Saudi Arabia, uh, and losing
the Middle East, and it's not clear where the chaos that it will go, but it's clear that they do not have a handle on it at all, and, uh, the damage to the American bases on top of that, there's all the munitions shortages. The fact that they use a lot of the best stuff without really thinking through a plan beyond that, um, and there's all the damage to, uh, various injuries to troops that, uh,
keep on coming out more, and then to US allies and to US interests, and, uh, we're seeing this come into politics now more and more, because it is increasingly unignorable.
It's something where they never can control the situation, but now they have really lost control
of it, and it is spilling over in all directions. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I really have to tell you about our sub-stack. The DSR network sub-stack is the absolute best way to follow deep state radio. The DSR daily words matter need to know, silicaciousness, AI energy and climate, and the daily blast.
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Thank you, and back to the show.
You can almost look at these images, which are really quite striking.
I want to underscore how striking the imagery of these bombed out bases. American bases really look. It's haunting stuff. You can almost see it as kind of like symbolic of American decline in the same way Trump used resting out factories to symbolize his critique of American decline.
Right?
“Yeah, I think that's a good point, and now that you mentioned it, I'm trying to think”
that when the last time there were a bunch of American military bases damaged in photos of like American aircraft and pieces and American facilities and rubble that wasn't something it happened during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was over the sort of thing that we would see at one isolated location from a terrorist attack.
Even the images out of Vietnam, it's the withdrawal through the helicopter and the roof of Saigon. It's not these large military defeats in which there's all sorts of damage. So yeah, it looks like the United States is no longer that number one global power. I mean, still, of course, US has the biggest military, big economy, but it is no longer
acting like it, exercising the powers, like it, the responsibilities and benefits of it. And being seen, I think, definitely internationally, but increasingly domestically, also,
“like this is a problem that there were a lot of advantages for the United States being the”
world premiere power and being seen as such and the responsibilities and benefits that go with it. And giving that away is, I mean, it really wasn't choice and which, I don't know, which is really sucks, but while the American people might not care about foreign policy often, they do when things go really bad and, you know, you can think of the 2002-2004 elections.
Foreign policy was a serious issue. I might say in 2024, it wasn't the number one issue of things like inflation, but certainly Middle East, Gaza is a Palestine where issues in the election, and now that it is reaching out into economic damage to everybody with no end in sight and compounding other economic damage Trump is causing, politically, it seems unignorable.
Well, the polling here has become absolutely crippling and completely underscores your point. The latest Quinnapiac survey found that approval of Trump's handling of foreign policy is 33% to 60% disapproving that's 27 points underwater on Iran's specifically approval of Trump's handling of it is 29% to 65% disapproving 36 points underwater. And on the Russia Ukraine war, Trump clocks in at 28% to 61% or 33 points underwater.
I mean, that's just extraordinary stuff. It's extraordinary failure and an amazing repudiation of Trump's handling of the commander and chief role or whatever you want to call it. Donald Trump really campaigned as the guy who was just, you know, American military power personified, you know, Trump's strong opponents weak, and he's just falling apart across
the board. It's almost amazing to see, isn't it? It is, I mean, in a really, you know, it's a negative way, but yeah.
And that it was, and he has always presented this, but he and Hexeth really dialed it up
when it came to foreign policy and put it into practice was this very shallow conception of strength, this kind of blusterry and I don't know, reality TV, I yell a lot, I act like an asshole, I insult you conception of strength and, you know, or I screw you over I re-neg on the deal and what can you do about it, uh, version of it, and that is not how the world works and never has been.
It's something I feel like I've been saying this the entire time and, you know, now the bill is coming due, but that's, uh, that's not what real strength is. The real strength comes from things like allies, and he has alienated at this point virtually all of them. I, it does not come from kissing up to a authoritarian, so like he's trying to, you know,
with Russia or North Korea or China, um, and I, it certainly doesn't come from things like, uh, with Hexeth of, uh, white men who are clean-shaven and look good on television, who, uh, disdain the laws of war as, like, woken dumb and commit war cards.
“That's how you win wars and, uh, it sounds so stupid to say it out loud, but it's real.”
It's impracticed now and this is why it is, uh, failing terribly and it's also amazing
that they went for it because that's kind of what Russia has been failing within Ukraine. They also add, uh, oh, no, we're taking on a, they them army. It's like transnational culture where Putin's manliness will overcome them and, uh, that is just not how war works. It seems absurd to say that in the, you know, 21st century, I mean, with things like drones,
you do not need to do push-ups, to pilot them. I mean, it does, like, it doesn't connect, but it is a failure of that worldview and, uh, with the most serious consequences, but I am cautiously optimistic of that, uh, the midterms
Will create a degree of a vibe shift of that, uh, will, of a rejection, not o...
the specifics, a Trump policies, but of that larger Trump worldview and, uh, the kind of
Trump headset way of doing things.
“I want to try to tease out a deeper point that I think you're getting at here that concerns”
the way MAGA understands war. You look at Pete Hegg Seth's strut up and down in the early days of the Iran conflict. He thought he was on top of the world. He would essentially go out there and he would talk about how our precision machines were blowing this up and blowing that up and the enemy was just absolutely decimated and he even
invoked God. He said, "God, uh, wasn't answering the enemy the Iranian enemy and presumably is answering Pete Hegg Seth." He actually appealed directly to God for, for, uh, help with his violent conquest. Uh, I guess God's not listening or something, but that aside, what's interesting here is that
they conceived of war as a rejuvenating and revitalizing thing for American empire. You know, we get rid of the wokeness, we get everyone to cut their hair and, and shave their beards and get into manly shape and, and, and the nation would be rejuvenated after it's decadence and decay and decline under liberals. But the opposite has happened.
We've seen an extraordinary amount of decay and decline because of that worldview and because of Trump's implementing of it. Can you talk about that? Uh, sure.
“Uh, I'm pretty sure, I think a lot of this stuff you were just saying could be summarized”
as fascist that, uh, you really fascist in a, uh, especially like a Italian Mussolini way that, um, often too many people think a fascist has exactly what the Nazis did and especially late Nazis, um, you know, say in the 40s, exactly what they did. And, uh, so it's very, um, Mussolini fascist style, especially with, yeah, I'm all under the strutting and if you think the picture is Mussolini with chest puffed out and, uh,
the rest of it. Um, yeah, it is failing in so many ways. And I mean, we can connect this to, uh, domestic stuff with manufacturing or the idea that the, uh, working class are, uh, uh, large white men doing, you know, pretty, and it's, I mean,
always racialized and doing, uh, you know, particularly type of factory work and whereas what is
actually the work in class in numbers, I mean, obviously there's some people working manufacturing but most of the manufacturing at this point is robots. The, uh, working class is all distributed in things like, uh, I don't know, service jobs, for example of, uh, the cleaning hotels and waiting tables and, uh, nurses and I don't know, you know, many others that we can mention, um, and, uh, they have never connected
to that. So there is a degree of denial inherent in fascism about where the, uh, past that they are trying to recapture is fake. It never was real. It was, uh, sort of imagine nostalgia. And so, uh, it can't be recaptured. And yet they force it to, uh, a point where it usually
“then consumes itself, where it falls in upon itself. And I think we're witnessing that now.”
I hope we're witnessing that now that I'm, uh, reading it right, that we are, it's going to take a decent amount of more time to fully dislodge from power. Let's, you know, get through the midterms and we deal with, uh, the Trump in, uh, the presidency and, you know, bigger questions about that. Um, but it does seem to be, including in a way that's a lot of fascist movements do and I'm just thankful that it would be before the election is opposed to doing
a lot of this stupid stuff and economically damaging stuff after the election when, uh, the public denoted chance to react. Another piece of this is immigration. You get rid of all the, the non-white unskilled workers and then the, the, the, the yom in American working class will get more jobs as a result. The, the men will be more attractive to women. They'll have more babies and they'll solve
the fertility problem without having to let in more dark people. It's, it's the same part of, it's part of the story. Yep. Very much so. And, uh, the, again, if you'll still feel weird to me, even though we're living through it, because it does sound like something out of, you know, 20th century fascism, but, uh, that's a lot of what they've done in Stephen Miller is done or there was a department of paper propaganda that, uh, they put out all these AI images of, uh, strapping white, blonde guys
working the fields and, uh, it has not materialized that way at all. You notice they, they have done, a lot of the immigration crackdown that they've promised. It's been, uh, you know, violence in the mass deportation. They've gotten a lot of people out of the country or made it that people don't come, and yet there are in all of these great jobs that have suddenly flowered in response to that,
because that was always nonsense. And by the way, the violence of the removal of non-white immigrants
was also supposed to be rejuvenating the ice propaganda, ice recruitment info is very, very, steeped in that basic imagery. Let's just wrap this up. Donald Trump is essentially becoming a global laughing stock, isn't he? Nick, I mean, that's the opposite story of the, the fascist war-mongering rejuvenating story that they think they're telling. And we're now looking
At a possibility that one or both chambers will be under the possession of De...
what can they actually reasonably, credibly do with the house to put real breaks on this?
“What he really doesn't like, and, you know, this is, uh, of that type, but really doesn't like”
is, uh, sort of being ignored, being shrugged at, uh, not taken seriously, um, which is happening
with a lot of the countries, um, what the Democrats can do if they take the house. And hopefully
“the Senate, but just the house would be enough for it. Um, I think two of the biggest things would”
be, uh, funding that they should, uh, very seriously, um, not fund, uh, various things, including re-lating to the military, uh, that is just going to be burned up in the Iran war to try to force
“congressional power, uh, both power of the purse and also Congress's war powers to end the war,”
um, and also to do investigations that, uh, impeach had peat headsets, start with that, funding and investigations, so there are two biggest tools and they should use them to the backs. That's right, Nick Grossman, they should defund the war in peach headsetth and investigate
the shit out of all of this. Nick always really, really great to talk to you. This was really
interesting stuff. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
