With Amazon, more than 50% of the population with less population population,...
If you're still there, you can play. We're going to give you a new copy of "Ramit" and "Tradrückung" in the population of the Herschelers, based on Amazon population data from the year 2025 in Rosbrotanian and EU. "A double-chishbar, a promise and a call for 990, and a launch that was made for me, because it's worth it." This is Deep State Radio. Coming to you direct from our Super Secret Studio,
in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark and Washington,
in Washington, DC, and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to Deep State Radio. I am your host, David Roskuff, and we are joined today by two of our best friends.
“Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center, how are you doing, Rosa? Excellent, David. Excellent, that's terrific and general ambassador, Doug Lut, and Ambassador General, Doug Lut, how are you doing today, Doug?”
Fine, David. Thanks. I think general ambassador or ambassador, you know, like an ambassador, general would be the head of a group of a bunch of ambassadors. The general ambassador can pass everything. We're right, supreme. Can we get the word supreme in there somewhere? Be patient, that day will come.
The Rosa Brooks Administration that could happen.
You can beat the supreme federal ambassador. The supreme, just excellent. Okay, so we've got big issues to figure out here, folks, and I just apologize to the audience. They understand, we have to sit down to the certain time and record this, and events keep going on. So what do I do? I like going on the internet. I'm following stuff on all the different feeds and so forth.
And then I look and it says here, tonight at 9 o'clock, President Trump will announce, we're a big success in here. We want, we want, and then we're going to leave. And then Trump puts up something on true social, and he says, "I talk to the Iranians and they want to cease fire." And if they don't, if a cease fire will bomb them into the Stone Age.
And then the Iranians say, "No, we never talk to them."
Then Trump says, "Maybe we'll blow them up."
“That's all, like I'm confused, and that's why I'm turning to you guys.”
What, what is this all mean? So I'm equally confused as to try to chase some glimpse of reality here. I do think that the President will move us towards an exit in his speech at 9 o'clock Eastern Time this evening because otherwise, why give a speech? I mean, he has said everything else possible across the...
Literally, he said everything you can say. So there's no reason to beat the drums, have a prime time address unless there's something big to announce. There's very little room for escalation, right, which is his other option. Negotiation is being essentially denied by the other party, the Iranians, even through intermediaries.
“And so I think the declare victory come home and leave the mess to others is probably the theme of the speech tonight.”
Hmm. Rosa, what do you think? I think the same thing, I think we won. It's victory this winning. As we know, Trump promised us years ago that we would just win so much, we'd get tired of so much winning.
Well, you're going to go down to Times Square and have one of those swooning kisses with a sailor on the idea. It's, yes, it's V, it's another, it's V-I-Day. V-I-Day. I mean, clearly, Trump likes it when the markets go up when Trump started hinting that he had gotten bored with this war. And it was getting too complicated and troublesome and expensive.
The markets shot up. This makes Trump happy. Trump, this is a happy feedback loop. So I think the overwhelming likelihood is that he declares victory, which, which, frankly, although it is not a victory, since we have not accomplished what we supposedly set out to do, which is totally eliminate Iranians, the fence, the fence of capabilities and ensure that their uranium could not be used in the future to manufacture nuclear weapons.
We have not succeeded in doing that, but I think despite the sort of general carnage and mayhem, we have managed to cause in a few short weeks.
It clearly seems better both for the world and for the United States for us t...
I mean, there are, I, you know, the sooner we just pack up and go home, probably the better for everybody. Well, I, I don't, yeah, it's gone. So the smartest summary of this that I've read is that Trump will be pressured by the three M's, markets, which Rosa mentions, munitions, which have been heavily depleted and maga.
“And I think that kind of neatly sums up what's going on in the Oval Office these days.”
Okay. Well, let's say he is. Let's say we're right. Some people may be listening to this after his speech.
Let's, let's assume that he is given a speech. And here's what I think the speech will say.
We've gone in. We have decimated them. He doesn't know what decimated means, but we, we have decimated them. And we've sunk their Davy and we've destroyed all their missile capabilities. And so our work is done. And if they act up again, we'll go bomb them again. I'm, I'm sure there is a component of what he says where he says he reserves the right to go back in and remember this is now what seven eight months since last time he did this. And so then he, so then he hangs up the phone and he, he starts still in whatever he does changing into his PJs.
But what happens in Iran at that moment? What happens to the straight of hormones? What happens to the flow through the straight of hormones? What happens to the Israelis?
What are the Iranians do? How do they respond to it? What a game this, you know, you spent a lot of time looking at this part of the world. Game this out.
“Well, I think you, you raised a couple key questions with regard to the other protagonist in this conflict, right?”
So first of all, he can declare victory and go home. The Iranians are not going to, they are home, so they're not going anywhere. They're going to continue to sit astride the, the straight of hormones. And try to piece this hell's back together. It's not entirely, it's not clear that this will lead to any sort of change in the status, the current status of the straight of hormones. So the Iranians are benefiting now from selective passing, allowing selective passage through the straight to those countries who are, they see as their supporters.
So China, India, Pakistan and so forth. They're benefiting from the high price of oil that passes through the straight. So they're actually profiting from this. And it's not at all clear to me that they're going to change that status quo anytime soon. The other that you mentioned is the Israelis. So what happens, what happens in Tel Aviv? And is, is Netanyahu willing to not be at war as he faces national elections in the fall. So this is, there are others here who get a vote as we used to say in the military.
But the military of democracy, I didn't know people got a vote in the military. Only by mail. You go at the mail in your vote. But the Olympics, but it turns out the geopolitics in the democracy as Doug suggests, we are not the only country that gets a vote. Well, that's right. And, you know, yesterday the president of the United States, the same Donald Trump, I was mentioning earlier, had a little bit of a truth social eruption in which he said,
“Hey, Britain, France, if you want to get this oil, go get it for yourself. We don't need any oil. And by the way, I don't like NATO.”
And so, you know, and I think they've heard his feelings. Rosa, on several levels, what of which is, you know, in some ways you could look at this whole thing and see this as an extension of what happened around Greenland and Trade and Davos. Where it turns out Donald Trump is not the president of Europe. Wait, what? He's not? No, no.
I know, he thought he was, but it turns out the Europeans are like, no. And he's like, you know, lashed out at a bunch of them.
I mean, obviously, I want to go to Doug next and get his reaction to the imminent death of the organization he was ambassador to, but, but what's yours first, President?
I mean, it the only astonishing thing about his current temper tantrum towards NATO is that we haven't completely demolished NATO yet. I mean, obviously, Trump made numerous threats to pull out of NATO. Many of us thought myself included that the odds were very, very high that that would be a short-term priority when he took office at the beginning of 2025.
He didn't do it.
And every way other than formal withdrawal from NATO, it sounds like he may finally be on the verge of doing what he has frankly already done in all but all but form, which is which is pull out, which needless say.
I'm interested in Doug's take on this. I think would be a real loss not only to our NATO allies but to in terms of our own security.
NATO has been extremely beneficial to the United States, not just to other countries far away. You know, I would actually Doug, I would also love to hear your thoughts on, you mentioned three M's, you know, markets, markets and money. I guess I don't know if it was markets or money, markets or money. That's the United States and Maga. I'd like to hear you talk more about the munitions piece of it because one of the worries that I've had throughout this is the degree to which we are leaving ourselves in a greatly weakened position, vis-à-vis other adversaries and particularly vis-à-vis mischievous Chinese behavior.
I'm a little surprised the Chinese haven't taken greater advantage of our current weakness than they already have and I'm curious to know what you think about that.
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Well, there's a lot there.
So, look, NATO is what approaching its 77th birthday in this month. And in the course of those decades, it has faced repeated challenges to its cohesion. And this goes all the way back to, you know, in 1956 and this was crisis.
“The Vietnam War, the Euro missile crisis in the 1980s, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and so forth, right?”
But it has helped together through all of that, largely on the back of US leadership. And what's now, I think, presenting the most significant challenge in NATO's history is the absence of US leadership. In fact, the denial, the abrogation of US leadership. And I'm not positioned to predict that NATO will come through this as well as it has in the past. What's interesting in part is that this is going to come to a head in a couple months.
You know, this is a summit in Turkey and July. So, Trump will go to Ankara and join the 31 his 31 NATO counterparts and have to explain all this. Or not, maybe that becomes the announcement.
“And a couple points, I think, to recall, first of all, there is now in law.”
The requirement that no president may unilaterally, by executive power only, to remove the United States from NATO. So, so depart NATO. And so he would at least, if he did a formal abrogation of the treaty, he would have to go back to Congress and get the sense of Congress. And that, I think, would be messy because I think most congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle appreciate what Rosa was saying, which is that fundamentally, we've been in NATO for 77 years, not because we're good guys and altruistic.
But because it's been in our self interest, right? And today, at a time when we're entering, what is arguably the most severe challenge we have and looking forward in the years and decades ahead to competition with China.
You know, you have to ask, why would we divorce ourselves from perhaps our gr...
Right? I mean, if you combine the GDP of Europe with the GDP of the United States, you're close to 50% of global GDP, that's an advantage in our favor if we want to set new rules and standards and safeguards in the relationship with China. So none of this makes any geostrategic sense. I simply don't know how to advise with regard to the US NATO relationship, except to say that for a White House, the apparently does not read anything. They should start with reading the NATO treaty because it's actually, it was written by us, by the way, right, back in 1949.
And there are certain restrictions in there and certain definitions that are very, very telling. First of all, it's a defensive alliance. It doesn't go on the offense as Trump is suggesting.
“The allies have an obligation to respond if one of them were attacked, not when one of them attacks, which is the case in this, in this instance, right?”
There are three core values in the second sentence of the NATO treaty, democracy, individual liberty, and rule of law. How are we doing on those fronts these days here in Washington? And then, you know, finally, I think it's, it's just worth remembering that NATO membership in NATO has been in our interest. And in quite frankly, it's been demonstrated over the last several weeks in the part of the interest is that NATO bases, bases in Europe, right? Often, under NATO flags, bring us a continent closer to world trouble spots. Now, in this case, a continent closer to a war we chose, but nonetheless, we could not prosecute the war that the president chose in the Middle East without bases in Europe.
And I suspect one of the weaves that will will witness this evening in the speech is a weave that points the finger at NATO and says, look, we did our part.
“We don't get our energy from the Persian Gulf. We don't need it. Of course, that defies the notion of an intertwined global economy. But let's say, we don't need it.”
You and Europe do need it, so over to you to open the straight of her moves. And I suspect we will hear that tonight. Yeah, I wrote in the Daily Beast overnight that this is the opposite of Colin Powell's pottery barn. Yes. Because instead of, if you break it, you've owned it. He's saying, I broke it, you fix it. And which, you know, obviously none of them want to do. But if I make I want to go from it out, good luck, see ya.
And we rapidly make rapidly for the exit, hoping nobody notices the messy shards we've left on the floor.
Yeah, well, and, you know, some people benefit from those messy shards, rose a minute ago, you brought up munitions following Doug's mention of it. And we talked about the Chinese and munitions. The big early winner from this is the primary adversary NATO was set up to deal with, and that's Russia. Russia's making money off of the sale of oil. We have lifted sanctions not just on the sale of oil, but on a couple of Russian oligarchs during the course of this war. We've, you let the Russians go and sell oil in Cuba despite our tacit embargo of Cuba.
We've consumed, we've consumed munitions that we're going to go to more strategically, should have gone to Ukraine. Exactly. And well, that was going to be my final point. From the point of view of Ukraine, you know, you can't, they want interceptors and we've been using them left and right. And, and so Russia seems like the big winner here rose that fettieth, I mean, even though there's been heavy devastation in Iran, if Iran now moves to the point, where they're just using the straight-of-war musis kind of a toll booth, and it's kind of a different strategic relationship.
They may end up better off here than they were, and trumped today in one of the most remarkable statements on top of all of this said, "Oh, I don't care about Iranian Dix."
“Yeah. I mean, I don't care about the Iranian. So, who wins here, Rosa?”
I mean, the Iranians don't exactly win, right, that they've had multiple layers of the regime have been killed. A enormous amount of their offensive infrastructure has been destroyed.
You know, their capabilities have been greatly reduced.
No matter how this comes out, the Iranians are, and exactly you're going to be saying, "Hare, we're better off than before this conflict started."
It's been devastating for them, and although it's hard to shed a lot of tears about the misfortunes of the Iranian regime, it has also been obviously devastating for the Iranian people. If anything, we seem to have replaced an extremely savage regime with possibly an even more savage regime,
“to the extent that we know what's going on, which is minimal. I mean, I think one of the many ridiculous and appalling things about this is, yeah.”
We don't have, it's not completely clear who we would negotiate with at all, because we have thrown the power structure into so much disarray.
You know, usually it's useful to leave yourself a few people still alive with some ability to make decisions,
so you can actually negotiate with them. It's not completely clear. It's not completely clear who is speaking for whom or who's in control of what in Iran right now. So I don't think Iran emerges as exactly a victor in all this, but I do think that to the extent that we should measure the success of this particular military adventure against the, intermittently, and coherently stated goals that we set out with, which was to destroy utterly destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities, and destroy any stranglehold they have on global energy supplies.
If we leave Iran essentially in control of the Strait of Hormuz, if we leave Iran able to extract significant financial gains from that control,
if we leave the Russian, if we end up eliminating some of our sanctions, because our sanctions have proved economically inconvenient for us, against our actual adversaries, it's a little hard to see how we have gained anything whatsoever, other than having embarked on an adventure that has resulted in the loss of the lives of a number of American service members, serious injuries to many others, you know, grievous civilian harm throughout the region, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't, this is a nobody, nobody wins in this situation, nobody, nobody has won.
We have, we have done this more or less for to know purpose except to cause mayhem. You know, this is, this is what we should expect when we launch a military campaign that has no connection to a political and end state or a political objective, or at least one that's clear, right? And as, as you say, Rosa, we've been all over the map, is it regime change, is it unconditional surrender, is it, the White House gets to pit the successor regime and Tehran, what is it? And so when it continues to prosecute a military campaign in search of an objective,
what you're going to get is something that's going to look a lot like this conversation, right? We, we simply are, are not in a position to, to claim success. And in nearly any category, except for the degradation of Iranian military capability. I mean, yes, that's undeniable, but on almost every other count, at best, it's, we have just lack of clarity. You know, if, if, let's, let's just say this, Iran certainly got beat up. The United States didn't win, note this, write this down, folks, after you've heard Trump say we won.
“But I, I think you have to say, Putin did pretty well out of this, Doug.”
Yeah, no, Putin did fine, but you know, how's that, I mean, how's that feel? It doesn't feel good, but I'm just saying, it's a strange thing, whatever Trump does something, Putin feels, and of course, the cover of the economist this week is, Xi Jinping saying, you know, don't interrupt your enemy when he's hurting himself, you know, yes, yes, yes, exactly right. You know, there's an old army saying that goes something like, in fact, it's actually older than the army, but if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there, you know,
I think it's actually a thinking Alice in Wonderland or something, but my grade school reading fails me here, the grade school literature, but this really applies, right? I mean, we're launched into a project. We don't really know where we're going. We don't know what the end state is.
“We end up eliminating anybody with whom we might have negotiated a political end, right?”
We don't really know the mechanism now in terms of the power structure and the decision-making process inside Tehran, and we're left wanting to negotiate, seeking to negotiate, but apparently unsuccessfully so, because we've, you know, you've taken these military steps, so it's just, it makes very little strategic sense.
Well, I think it does make very little strategic sense, but let's go back to ...
And you mentioned too, Doug, but Rosa, this could keep going on and festering as a wound for a long time to come.
There's no, in Trump can say it's over, but energy prices could stay up, global recession, global food shortages could result. There could be flare ups of this. The relationship between Iran and all of its Gulf neighbors is much worse than it's ever been. I mean, there's real, real hatred and tension there. It looks like, as we go, one of the other things that's going to follow this is a protracted period of instability.
“Yes, that certainly seems likely. I mean, we've talked about, in general, what happens to the world in the wake of of, you know, U.S. leadership generally, and I think, I think already,”
we had created a situation of significant instability, you know, just the uncertainty created in international relations by erratic behavior by the United States. You know, we've made it clear in the context of Greenland and context of Venezuela and the context of our votes strikes in the Pacific. We've made it clear that we will ignore international law quite cheerfully. We've made it clear that we will ignore promises made to allies. We've made it clear that we will change our minds multiple times about what it is we're doing and why and that that our behavior.
Our behavior has become unpredictable, you know, we have become the quintessential rogue state by virtue of our destructiveness and unpredictability.
“So the Iran war just adds even more instability to a mix that was already extremely volatile. I think that, you know, even if Donald Trump were to, you know,”
not tonight that he is stepping down as president that every every senior official is a tired administration is stepping down and that he's he's putting the United States into a conservatorship. So if some grownups can kind of manage our affairs for the next few years, you know, that that that to late, we have already done just so much damage. It would be fair. I, you know, I think it is, we can absolutely say that the, you know, the so-called rules-based international order was already to a significant extent, you know,
beginning to crumble before Trump took off as even before Trump took off as in his first administration. It was a a limping system struggling to keep up with the kinds of threats and challenges that we, we in the global are now facing, but Trump has essentially taken that that, you know, teetering tower and just knocked it down completely. So we no longer have the luxury of a kind of an orderly orderly attempt to shift to new institutions that will be more functional. Now we're, you know, the whole world is just left with this sort of smoking pile of rubble.
Literally, in, in the case of many cities, not only in Iran, but throughout the region. You know, David, as Rosa says, we're beginning to see some of the aftershocks from the military campaign. I mean, obviously the energy market is perhaps the most obvious.
But the fertilizer market, which is a byproduct of energy production, right? The, the drawdown, something like a third of the world's fertilizer supplies comes through the same state of her moves.
It is now planning season. So there will be a impact on the world food supplies as it turns out helium, which is another byproduct of, of the natural gas production process is a key input to the production of microchips and something like 80% of that helium comes through the straight of hormones. And then you see longer starting to imagine not to mention kids birthday parties. Exactly. A lot of those coming. And then you have, you know, maybe aftershocks beyond that.
So sort of third order effects. We've talked about the impact on US relations with its NATO allies, right? The potential for changes in basing structures based on that.
Rosa mentions what's, how's the US? What's the level of golf partner confidence in the United States? First of all, we didn't consult them when we started this war. And then second of all, we've now depleted most of them depleted their key munitions. And what they're going to find is that the timeline for replacement on those munitions is in the years, not weeks or months.
“Because we're going to replenish our stocks first and it's going to take us years to replenish our munition stocks. What about the message to those who are considering beyond Iran, considering acquisition nuclear weapons?”
Of this kind of suggests that you better be, you better go ahead rush to get a nuclear weapon and display it to a world when the project is complete. Not when it's in the program stage in the experimental stage as Iran has done.
Here you think in more the North Korean model of North or the India Pakistan ...
So let's see if I could understand what you're saying here. Rose, it sounds to me like this was a fiasco. And at its conclusion, we are weaker, our allies are weaker, the region is more dangerous. The world economy is less stable. And this is likely to be a set of conditions that continue for some time to come, which takes this from just being dumb or just being a distraction and puts it kind of at a new level for Trump, where he's really, he's really fucked up the global system in a pretty substantial way here.
“And would you say, every day or what do I think fucked up pretty much covers it, where Trump achieves new levels of fucked upness?”
You know, a prominent foreign policy think tech probably were all members recently published a survey among members, asking members to list the 10 worst policy decisions in American history and the 10 best. And of course, the top of the 10 worst is a 2003 invasion of Iraq. It didn't have any of the consequences that we're talking about, right? So I think that particular think tank is going to have to redo its survey of members after this adventure.
Yeah, you know, I joined that particular think tank, which is the council for relations before the first war in Iraq.
All right, 35 years. If I years this failure, arguably the last war we've won, by the way, David, I just, I was first in the first one. Yeah, as a storm. Yeah. Yeah. So 91, you're wary of February 35 years ago. Well, I'm very glad that we had this chance to talk as, as just as we're going off the air here, the White House has set out an email of 15 minutes ago.
And the headline, which just goes back to our opening point is President Trump's clear and unchanging objectives drive decisive success against the Iranian regime.
“So you reminded that there somewhere ruled up in the basement of the executive office building across the street from the White House is a banner, right?”
From 20 some years ago labeled mission accomplished. And I suspect somebody down there is looking for the banner these days. Yeah. Well, you would know, I seem to recall that during the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration, there was only one guy left in the building. Yeah, there was the cleaning team was also there. Yeah, the cleaning team. But when people wanted to know how to order a pizza, who did they call Doug? Sorry, guilty of charge. But I got to say, that's the one thing that's changed by Washington. The pizza in DC since then has improved a lot.
It's everything else is going to help.
Anyway, I'm very grateful to have your input here as always Doug. Thank you. Rosa, thank you everybody for listening. If anything really special happens tonight,
we'll be back with special episodes later in the week. Otherwise, we'll be going through this in our usual sort of way. Until then, thanks everybody. Bye bye.
“Do you have any questions about this school schedule? Or do you have any questions about your schedule?”
No, I don't. I don't have that. I don't have that. Do you have any questions about your schedule? Yes, exactly. I don't have that. I don't have any questions about your schedule. I don't have any questions about your schedule. I don't have any questions about your schedule. I don't have any questions about your schedule. I don't have any questions about your schedule.
