Daniel McCarthy on Massie Defeat, Neocons, and America's Role in the World

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast.

I'm your host, John Harris. And we have a special guest who's been on the podcast once before, but someone I very much appreciate. I actually like to check my math against him. If I have a certain political take and this particular person agrees with me, I always feel a little bit better about it because Daniel McCarthy is a very smart individual, but he's, I think, stellar when it comes to analyzing the political situation, including things like foreign policy, which is what we're gonna talk about a little bit today.

He is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He's also the editor of Modern Age. And if you don't have Modern Age, if you aren't subscribed, if you don't go to the website, I would encourage you to do so.

It'll make you a lot smarter when it comes to politics. So without further ado, Daniel McCarthy, thank you for being here and talking to us about foreign policy a little bit.

Thanks, John.

The Republican Foreign Policy Vacuum After Reagan

So you wrote a piece for Compact Magazine on the Massey defeat, but it was really more about the Republican Party and conservative movement and their lack of foreign policy vision post-Reagan. And I'm simplifying it, but you go through each administration and describe, I think perfectly, where the Republican Party was at that particular time post-Reagan.

And then bringing us to our moment now where we have someone, Thomas Massey, who has been compared to Ron Paul a lot with his foreign policy vision, but this is not the policy or the philosophy that the Republican Party is necessarily interested in at the moment.

They're more interested in Trump's kind of peace through strength, strong foreign policy, but obviously it's not a neocon foreign policy. So what I'm hoping to do is maybe flush out some of that piece, connect the dots for viewers, most of whom are gonna be probably conservatives and Christians who vote Republican generally.

Some of them might not be happy that Massey lost. And just to give them some context for all of this. So we could do this sequentially. That's probably the best way to start off and then bring it home to what just happened last week.

So maybe post-Cold War, what was the policy of the conservative movement Republican Party up until the time of Reagan? You didn't really cover this, but pre-Reagan, what were conservatives saying about our relationship with other countries around the world?

Well, up to Ronald Reagan, the Cold War was the predominant fact in the way conservatives thought about foreign policy. The Soviet Union was not just a military threat, was also an ideological antithesis to the United States.

It was an ideological antithesis to Christianity. Across the board, the Soviet Union represented, again, not just a worldly opponent, but also a very different worldview that conservatives rejected. And therefore, conservatives generally favored military strength in the United States.

They tended to be in some ways quite hawkish, but really they were more anti-communist. They were concerned about the ideological threat even more than they were eager to get into foreign countries and fight wars there.

So something like Vietnam, interestingly enough, is a war that gets started under democratic administrations and obviously sort of becomes a major issue under the Lyndon Johnson administration in the 1960s.

So conservatives were not necessarily, you know, demented war hawks or anything like that as they're often portrayed by their progressive enemies. And progressives tried to present Ronald Reagan that way too.

They said, oh, Ronald Reagan would blow up the world if he got a chance. You know, this guy's dangerous. He shouldn't have his hand on the nuclear button. He's gonna get us into wars. In fact, what Reagan actually did was to have a very prudent foreign policy.

He put pressure on the Soviet Union, especially when it came to spending on new weapon systems and new technologies like the idea of space-based defense. He also was willing to support various resistance movements against communism in Central Asia, in Afghanistan, for example, and in Latin America.

But he was not, in fact, bringing us to the brink of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He was not, in fact, about to, you know, send NATO troops marching across the borders into Eastern Europe. On the contrary, Reagan was setting things up so that the Soviet Union would collapse of its own entropy and then basically its own tyranny over the Eastern Europeans and the Russians themselves would bring it down.

And that was very successful.

From Truman to Bush: The Cold War and the Rise of Neoconservatism

Was there a difference initially post-World War II between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy or did that become more of a contrast as Democrats were a little bit more aligned or soft on the Soviet Union?

Well, that's a great point because the Franklin Roosevelt administration really was infiltrated by people who were quite pro-communist and very soft on the Soviet Union indeed. And as a result, coming out of World War II, conservatives were very critical of the Democratic Party, which they saw as being a party of basically surrendering to Stalin.

And even after Roosevelt dies and he's succeeded by Harry Truman, who is somewhat more aggressive at taking on communist infiltration at home and also sees the Soviet Union abroad as a big threat, the conservative movement is still very critical of Harry Truman.

They see him really as being in the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt. But that said, there are a lot of dimensions to the way early conservatives after World War II think about foreign policy. And even though they want to have a clear moral understanding of the Soviet Union as an opponent, exactly what form of resistance to the Soviet Union that's going to take, there are several ideas that are floating around.

They certainly generally support more of a military buildup, although President Eisenhower sees that as a problem. He thinks the country is going to bankrupt itself. So conservatives were worried about that too.

And they looked for cheaper ways to deter Soviet aggression rather than having repeats of things like the Korean War. They thought perhaps we should strengthen our nuclear arsenal and also use covert operations in places like Guatemala and Iran and elsewhere, which is one of the things that opens the door to some of what the CIA gets involved in over the course of the Cold War.

So that brings us to Ronald Reagan, and he has a piece through Strength Vision that resonates with conservatives, obviously credited with winning the Cold War, helping win it. And then after Reagan, you make the case that this mentality continues through Bush, but it's different than obviously the MAGA Trump approach.

So maybe contrast that for us. What makes George W. Bush different than Trump? And are they reading Reagan in different ways? Because they both claim that they're like Reagan.

Right, so there's this great intellectual civil war among conservatives after the end of the Cold War. And because so much of conservative foreign policy thinking has been shaped for decades at that point by the conditions of the Cold War, once the Soviet Union is no longer around, the question becomes, well, what should our attitude towards the world be now?

Should we, in fact, be much more focused on the United States, much less committed to international institutions like NATO? That's what one side says. The other side says, well, actually, the world perhaps is less ordered now because you don't have the superpower conflict.

And because of the potential for disorder, the United States now has to actually take a more active role in perhaps policing faraway conflicts. And the George H. W. Bush administration generally favors continuing to have a very active role around the world in foreign policy.

And you see that with the Persian Gulf War. You'll see it eventually with rounds of not just maintaining NATO, which is one thing, but also as you get into the Clinton administration, expansion of NATO as well, which George H. W. Bush was in favor of too.

When you get to the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s, Bush has become president. He is presenting himself not just as an heir to his own father, but also an heir to Ronald Reagan. And he and a number of people who come to be called the neoconservatives and who, in many cases, self-identify as neoconservatives are saying quite explicitly, well, we believe that you have to have a very sort of engaged foreign policy.

And of course, after 9 -11, the whole country agrees with that. The whole country says, well, yes, the United States needs to fight a war on terror. That means we need to be not just in places like Afghanistan but also perhaps in Iraq.

And then it turns out that George W. Bush doesn't really have a plan for what to do once you've taken on hostile regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so what winds up happening is that this idea that every nation state should be democratic and liberal and kind of like us, this is the vision that George W. Bush winds up pursuing in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And we get these decades-long occupations which are aimed at not just knocking out a regime that's hostile to us, but actually trying to build some sort of liberal democracy in those places.

Trump, Forever Wars, and America First Realism

And then Trump.

Well, and yes, indeed. So Trump is, you know, he recognizes that the American people do not have the patience and it's correct that they don't have the patience to permanently occupy these faraway countries which in fact are very resistant to becoming culturally and politically like us.

He recognizes that these are what critics have been calling forever wars. And he says, when we think about America getting to war, our objective should be to win and our objective should be able to point to something and say, this is what we have been able to get out of the war.

Whereas if you have, you know, conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, it's not clear, you know, what exactly we have in the long run taken, you know, in terms of making America more powerful from these decades-long occupations.

And there's no end in sight when Trump first becomes president in 2016, 2017, there's no end in sight to what we're doing in Afghanistan. So Trump, you know, appeals to people who, Americans who say we should have a less engaged foreign policy, a less activist foreign policy abroad, and that we should in fact, you know, be much more limited in terms of the wars we choose to fight and when we fight them, we should fight them in order to win and to win quickly rather than having prolonged occupations.

Washington, Calhoun, Taft, and the Conservative Tradition of Restraint

When you look back at oftentimes it's George Washington's foreign policy and not to get involved in foreign entanglements or John C. Calhoun who, I mean, he was a war hawk at first, but then he's against the Mexican-American war.

These are figures that are sort of summoned from the past to teach us what real conservatives think about these things or in the 20th century, is it Robert Taft? I think it's Robert Taft, the Republican who's very against getting involved in foreign affairs too much.

And I know that the side that is very, very against all the bases we have and the wars that we fight and all of that, they like to go to the past and try to pick out these examples to say these were the authentic conservatives.

Maybe talk about that a little bit before we get to Massey. Is there an authentic conservatism? Can the real authentic conservatives stand up and tell us what the foreign policy objective is or is this very complicated and are circumstances different and Trump inherited something that obviously he didn't create.

So just try to peel back some onion layers for us because I see this very oversimplified in my opinion, and I think you'd be a great person to just flesh out what the conservative approach to foreign policy is.

Well, we're definitely right to look back to our own history for some guidance, even though America's current position in the world is somewhat different from that of our country at the time of the founding.

George Washington is indeed someone I think that we can always find wisdom in. It's interesting to look back at the circumstances of his neutrality proclamation. So his neutrality proclamation, this is around 1790s.

It is really an attempt to keep us out of what is basically a European war. You could even argue it was a world war, this conflict between revolutionary France and Great Britain. And there are Americans, including Thomas Jefferson, who are quite eager for us to support the French side of that conflict, not necessarily to get into armed conflict immediately, but Jefferson thinks that the French revolutionary cause is the cause of liberalism, the cause of what we would now call liberal democracy.

And Jefferson still identifies the British with monarchy and with everything that he believes the American Revolution was fought against. Adding to this is the fact that we have a treaty of alliance with France.

France came to our aid during the Revolutionary War. We signed a treaty of mutual defense. And so Jefferson and his side of politics is saying, America has a treaty duty to support its ally here. And George Washington, he says that, no, we're not, we're gonna call ourselves neutral.

And Alexander Hamilton makes an argument that actually, France that we had a treaty with was the France of Louis XVI. And now that he has been deposed, it's a completely different regime in France. And therefore our treaty obligations don't continue.

It's controversial, by the way. It speaks to something that a lot of conservatives and libertarians talk about even now in the 21st century, which is to what degree can the executive simply unilaterally set foreign policy?

And to what extent is what the constitution says about Congress's power to declare war, just how far does that go? How blinding is that? Because Jefferson and James Madison both make the argument that George Washington doesn't constitutionally have the power to declare neutrality.

They say that if you need Congress to declare war, then you also need Congress to declare that we're not going to war, that we're not, we're gonna be neutral. And that in fact, neutrality can have a lot of effects on a foreign conflict, which may in fact favor one side over another.

And so Jefferson and Madison are both, they both think that Washington has chosen a policy that's going to favor the British and harm France, even though it's a policy officially of neutrality. So it's a very complicated situation.

And just as you have to think through the complexities of modern 21st century foreign policy, when you go back and look at what George Washington had to do in the foreign policy of our very first presidential administration, he too faced a complex situation.

And he too was accused of many of the same things that a president like Trump is accused of, of being, of using executive power in too broad of a way. And there are sort of great controversies here, including a controversy over who was actually trying to seek peace, right?

So Washington and Hamilton thought that they were doing the right thing by keeping America as much out of the conflict as possible. Jefferson and Madison thought, well, really what you're doing is you're weakening France and you're strengthening Britain because you're maintaining these trade ties with Britain.

And therefore you're actually kind of entering the war on the side of the bad guys and you shouldn't do that. So there's more complexity to that than, you know, a lot of retrospective views would suggest.

As you say, in the Cold War even, there were figures like Robert Taft, who was a Senator from Ohio, who was very critical of NATO, very critical of, you know, the idea that we would have to have a global crusade against communism.

So there was, you know, indeed conservative thinking, which said that actually we still need to look back on this 19th century tradition that is less interventionist rather than, you know, think about, you know, the Cold War as being something that is setting the stage for World War III or that otherwise is going to be a long-term commitment that might bankrupt us.

That was certainly one of Robert Taft's fears. And you can see how, you know, some of these threads continue into various Republican figures today. You can see some of it in Ron Paul. You can certainly see some of it in Thomas Massey and others too.

It's not just libertarian-leaning Republicans, but there is, you know, a true and honorable sense of, you know, restraint in foreign policy that is very conservative as well as quite libertarian. The irony, of course, being a lot of libertarians like Thomas Jefferson, even though Thomas Jefferson, you know, James Madison's the one who, you know, is Jefferson's disciple and finally gets us actually into, you know, a major foreign war, which is the War of 1812, where the United States declares war on Britain and invades Canada.

And of course that doesn't work out so well for us. So yes, there is a conservative tradition of foreign policy restraint in America, but it has to be applied intelligently at every step of the way. It's not simply a matter of thinking that you can do exactly as George Washington did, because even Washington, what he did was controversial in his day.

Honor, National Interest, and the Limits of Small-Government Restraint

The closest I've gotten to trying to understand what a conservative singular position on this would be from the American's perspective is Calhoun, because Calhoun, it has a problem with the British intercepting our ships, conscripting our sailors.

He thinks this is a violation of the honor of the United States. And that's one of the chief reasons in my reading that he's a war hawk. But then later he, of course, is against the Mexican-American war.

He doesn't want a war with England over the 38th parallel. And he tries to basically say that a war for the sake of territory expansion is a wrong motive. And so the difference that I saw in him was that if our honor is abridged, somehow we have an obligation to answer that.

Like we're just being disrespected on the world stage, which maybe is a very Southern thing anyway. Although I know there are people who disagreed with him from the South. Like I think even John, is it John Randolph, disagreed with him about the War of 1812?

Yes, and in fact, that's worth commenting on. So you're exactly right that someone like Calhoun is a figure well worth taking a very close look at. And again, people might be confused because he's very hawkish in 1812, but then less so later on.

And John Randolph of Roanoke, who is a kinsman of Thomas Jefferson, but is very critical. He thinks that Jefferson is in many ways not Jeffersonian enough. But Randolph of Roanoke is also very sympathetic to the more conservative line of thought coming from someone like Edmund Burke in the UK.

Randolph of Roanoke, he's very critical of his fellow Southerners. Randolph of Roanoke is against the War of 1812. And he says that this war is basically, it's about economics. And it's about the fact that Southern economic interests are being harmed by, they were harmed by the embargo that Thomas Jefferson had pursued to try to keep America separated mostly from British economic power.

That was bad for Southern economic interests. And as an alternative to this kind of economic warfare or economic embargo in place of war, which Jefferson had pursued, a lot of Southerners in Congress by the Madison administration, they're saying, well, look, the embargo hasn't worked.

What can we do instead? We've got to end this problem. Let's have a war against Canada. Let's take out the British to our North. And then we won't be held hostage. Our trade won't be held hostage by British power.

So Randolph thinks that is very important. And he doesn't really credit other Southerners' views about honor. Not that he doesn't believe in honor himself. He very much does. But he thinks that other Southerners are basically being deceitful and have motives that are quite different, which is just to say, all of America's wars, you can have some very intelligent, very principled people who wind up being on opposite sides and having very different interpretations of why we're doing these conflicts and getting into them, which is just another reason to take these things seriously and not think you can paint with a broad brush.

Well, I could just envision Calhoun, which is always dangerous to do, I suppose, to take these historical figures and cast them in present situations. But I could envision him seeing the Ayatollah Khamenei and seeing the Death to America chants and using their forces while we were in places like Iraq to attack us and their proxies and saying, you know what, this is an abridgment of our honor.

This is a threat to our trade, even on the global stage, being supportive. But at the same time, it's a very different situation, obviously, with military bases in a region that he never probably would have conceived of us ever having military bases.

And so this is where, in my mind, it gets very tricky. And I admit, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is I, myself, go back and forth and am confused sometimes just because I value the small government argument of let's reel it back.

But then you look at it and it's a knot and you think to yourself, well, who's gonna occupy the space that we're leaving? Is it China? Is it one of our enemies? Is it possible to do this? I want to do it.

But then when you have regimes that are threatening us in massive ways, attempting to seek nuclear weapons that they will, in fact, most likely use, that kind of thing, then, yeah, it does seem like that merits a response.

So any thoughts there with just kind of the situation that we've inherited as a result of post-war activity, Cold War policy, how do you see the United States on the world stage today? And if we wanted to reel it back, what would we even do?

I don't even know how we'd get started in doing that.

Well, you're right.

Not only is there the question of whether rivals or opponents are going to fill a vacuum if we're not playing the sort of expansive role that we've been playing recently, even if our allies fill that vacuum, it turns out that there are risks involved with that too.

And you're kind of seeing that play out right now in the Middle East. So Israel has very grave security concerns with Iran. For us, Iran is a troublemaker and is hostile to us and has used force against our own troops.

When we were in Iraq, it's harassed us and done terrible things to us in various ways. But for Israel, it's a much, much bigger question. And the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon is not negligible to the rest of the world.

Not necessarily because the Iranians have a suicidal desire to make a first strike or anything like that. It's not that scenario that's the problem. It's rather that Iran, which is a nation which already loves to blackmail others, will have tremendous blackmail power if it has a nuclear weapon.

But the Israelis really do have to think seriously about the existential threat if Iran has a nuclear weapon. Partly because Israel is a very small, compact country. So in terms of population, in terms of geographic space, in terms of how much of the Israeli territory is actually not desert, right?

And you can actually have a population. It's quite limited and compact, which means that it would not take a large nuclear arsenal to target the main population centers of Israel and basically annihilate Israel.

So that is a danger that Israel faces that's very different from larger countries, not just like the United States or China. Famously, Mao Zedong said, look, we have so many billions of people in China and we have such a large country.

Even if we get in a nuclear war, we're going to survive it. And we're gonna be able to have a second strike and we're gonna take out our enemies. So Mao thought his country, because of its sheer size, was somewhat insulated against the logic of nuclear destruction.

Iran is also a very big country, both in terms of population, about 90 million people, and in terms of its geographic footprint. And it would be much harder, even if you had nuclear parity between Iran and Israel, it would be very hard for Israel to use the same number of nuclear weapons in a way that crippled Iran as a state relative to how easy it would be for Iran to use a similar number of nuclear weapons to completely wipe out Israel.

So Israel has quite naturally been eager to have a war to stop Iran from furthering its nuclear ambitions. And that means that even if the United States isn't quite sure that we want to get into a war, Iran and Israel is gonna go ahead and do it because their lives may depend on it.

Well, and if Israel gets started on the war, then the United States will feel an obligation. In fact, partly a matter of honor, also a matter of interest, also a matter of political pressure. There certainly is such a thing as an Israel lobby in the United States.

All of these elements are going to make a case that we need to be involved in a war against Iran. If Israel's involved in a war against Iran, then we should also be involved in a war against Iran. And you saw that last year when Israel started a war that it was fighting by itself.

And then subsequently the United States came in and ended the war very quickly. And you see it also now where both Israel and the United States have been partners from the beginning in this longer operation against Iran.

So even if our allies are leading the charge, that can be a conflict we wind up getting into. It would be the same way with NATO. You could imagine that if the Europeans did what we say we want them to do, which is to take more responsibility for their own foreign policy, this might eventually lead to a country like Poland deciding it needs to directly intervene in a conflict neighboring it in Ukraine and that it's going to send its own troops to go fight Russians, in which case, even though NATO is a defensive alliance and we would not be required by the alliance structure to go to war on behalf of Poland, it would still be kind of like something that looks like an incipient world war.

And the United States would probably feel a very strong degree of sympathy for the Poles and would want to support them any way it could, which might ultimately drag us into the conflict. So this is just to say, we may want a policy of disengagement and a peaceful policy that doesn't involve us in faraway conflicts, but the faraway conflicts aren't necessarily going to leave us alone, right?

Not because we're gonna get invaded or anything like that, but because we really do, and this again goes back all the way to the founding, we do have sympathies for different sides, right? So during the founding era, some Americans sympathize with revolutionary France, others sympathize with Britain, and we thought it was really important to us, not only for reasons of self-interest, economic or otherwise, but also for reasons of philosophy and for reasons of honor, that one side win and another side lose.

Americans still feel that way about many of the conflicts happening around the world today.

And we do also have all these military bases in the Middle East as well. I mean, they could attack us, but it wouldn't be our national soil, it would be our large bases that are, and why are they over there?

I mean, part of it is, I know, what we're experiencing right now because of the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, it's, we wanna make sure trade is flowing and that China's not the one that's influencing all of the decisions.

And if there, we want a bargaining chip if there's something that comes up that isn't our national interest. And so, I mean, I look at all of this complexity and it's like, I would love to be Fortress America, like the 80s game.

Like, I just wanna be here and not have to worry about the things over there. But I've wondered whether in a global economy that's even possible, let alone the conditions that we have now with bases all over the world and stuff.

So, yeah, I don't, I didn't expect you to give like the silver bullet answer for here's what America can do to make both of these things a possibility. One, not have to care much about what happens in Europe and Asia and the Middle East.

And two, also secure our national interests and trade policies and so forth. That seems to be the balancing act that every administration faces. And you make the case that there's been a bit of a, well, I'll let you speak to it.

My interpretation was, you said, there's been a bit of a wandering on what our foreign policy should be post-Bush. And Trump's filled the vacuum, but this is not satisfactory to

Transactional Foreign Policy Versus Neocon Romanticism

Yeah, so I mean, part of the problem here is that it's a complicated enough world when you think of it in terms of you know, material interests, economic interests, strategic considerations like, you know, keeping waterways open.

Those are difficult enough, you know, things to get to, you know, tackle in trying to create a foreign policy that serves the country well. And then on top of it, you have, you know, what might be called matters of imagination and sort of grand ideological visions.

And one of the problems after the Cold War is that not only, you know, it was a watershed. It was really a historic choice in the early 1990s where George H .W. Bush, you know, he had elements within his administration that were thought of as realists.

They were meant to be people who considered, you know, military affairs in terms of power, in terms of interests, in terms of, you know, strategic needs and they were not meant to be sort of ideologues who took a romantic view of what foreign policy could accomplish.

The trouble is a lot of that romanticism and a lot of it was, you know, took the form of a certain variety of neoconservatism that did start to creep into even the George H .W. Bush administration. And then it became very much a part of the George W. Bush administration.

And, you know, curiously enough, even Bill Clinton, a Democrat who was, you know, considered to be, he was a, you know, protester against the Vietnam War. He was someone who was coming from what, you know, was imagined to be the anti-war left.

But even Bill Clinton came to see, you know, using American power as a way to advance American ideals. Now, ideals, you know, are a good thing, you know, in the abstract, but when you conduct an idealist foreign policy and you think that you can, you know, bring about not just stability, but also a sort of new dawn, a new world order, as George H .W. Bush said, where you are promoting, you know, your values and your way of life and your form of government all around the planet, that unfortunately is kind of like what the French Revolution was trying to do.

It was trying to do it in a very heavy handed way, but that was certainly what it aimed to do. And George Washington was quite right to say, wait a minute, look, I mean, we may be a republic just like France is a republic, but that doesn't mean that we have, you know, the same ideological goals and the same sort of vision for, you know, democratizing the whole planet.

Well, a lot of neoconservatives did have that French revolutionary, you know, sort of fervor. That doesn't mean they necessarily wanted to have, you know, wars as, you know, aggressive as the French revolutions were, but they certainly did want America to use a lot of military force in pursuit of an ideal, in pursuit of a dream.

And that became a big problem. And it's, you know, it can be a problem now too. Although one of the things that I think distinguishes Trump from the Republicans who had preceded him at the end of the, you know, after the Cold War, is that Trump is not a romantic.

He's not an idealist. He's someone who is transactional and that's actually a good thing. It means he's always looking for deals, but he is willing to use force and he does understand interests in a way that, you know, too few leading Republicans are willing to open their minds to.

So, you know, Trump, I think is, you know, certainly up until now in interventions like the one against Maduro in Venezuela. And for that matter, you know, taking out the head of RIRGC back in his first term, Trump had been very, very good at using exactly the right amount of force to accomplish something significant for the United States and not over-investing and not getting into conflicts that he seemed like he couldn't win or couldn't bring to an end.

The Iran war that we're fighting right now, it's a serious war that, you know, has a proper objective in trying to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But it is obviously a much more difficult and much larger conflict than the ones that Trump has succeeded with before.

And so we're in this very tough position where, you know, Trump is basically, I mean, he has a choice of either trying to strike a deal based on where things are right now, which is going to be tough because the Iranians feel like they have a lot of leverage with the Strait of Hormuz, or alternatively, he can escalate.

He can send in ground troops, try to, you know, take over enough of the coast of the Red Sea that he can then, you know, open up the Straits of Hormuz and deprive Iran of that leverage. But of course, once you get into, once you get on the ground in Iran, then you've got another problem because then you've got to defend your spot on the ground against, you know, the Iranians who have most of the ground on their side and most of the population as well.

So, you know, Trump has, this is going to be the greatest test of Trump's, you know, negotiating skills that we have yet encountered.

And I saw last night, I don't know where things are at this morning, I was trying to figure it out, but it, every hour changes, that it seemed like, despite Netanyahu's posts online, and I think they are supportive of Trump, you know, and Netanyahu is supportive, but there's a lot of people in Israel that are not happy that Trump may strike a deal that gets the United States what we want in our interest.

You know, they can't have a nuclear bomb, they're going to hand over the uranium and dispose of it. But it doesn't go farther, and we're not going to say much about their proxies that are attacking Israel and stuff.

And so, I mean, this is, as far as I know right now where it stands, that Trump seems to think we're making headway on the objectives that America has had in this, but this isn't meeting all the expectations that Israel was hoping it would meet.

Which, if that is the way it goes down, will be interesting, to say the least. Maybe the best thing right now is to just briefly talk about the Democrats a little bit. You made the case in your post that someone like a Thomas Massey has possibilities in the Democrat Party, because the Democrat Party already has ownership or a monopoly on being anti-Zionist, anti-Israel.

So it's sort of a natural fit for the people that are almost like the sort of stereotypical McCarthy when it comes to, or they're getting that way. I mean, Thomas Massey, since his loss, has been just pointing fingers all over the place online, accusing people of taking money from Israel or whatever, even if it's not accurate.

I mean, I've been watching this, and I'm like, what is going on? It's quite remarkable. I've never quite seen anything like this. But is he going to become like Justin Amash or Joe Scarborough or any of these guys who went to D .C., and they just said, we just want fiscal responsibility.

We want some of these libertarian objectives, smaller government. But then when they become the opposition to the Republicans, the Democrats look at them like they're darlings, which is kind of what happened to Thomas Massey.