David Frum and JVL: Iran Is Going to Make Trump Eat It

**Jonathan V. Last** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast, I'm your host, JVL, sitting in for Tim Miller. Before we get to today's show and our guest, David Frum, a couple of programming reminders. We will not have new shows this Friday or next Friday.
Some of the shows this week may be a little bit late because people like me operate on a different schedule than Tim. Thank you for your patience. Today, I am joined by a very old friend of mine and friend of the pod, David Frum of The Atlantic. I think probably the single most insightful writer in like our Trump age and also the host of The David Frum Show over The Atlantic. David, thanks for coming back.

**David Frum** (0:56)
Oh, thank you. And we have known each other since since, I think, the first Clinton administration.

**Jonathan V. Last** (1:01)
Yeah.

**David Frum** (1:04)
Wow.

**Jonathan V. Last** (1:05)
Okay. So because I think David's best point of leverage is talking about big picture stuff, we're going to do that. But we do have to talk about some news of the day. First, David, earlier this morning, the president of the United States, the commander in chief announced that from this point forward, anytime Iran fires on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, he will be directing the US military to blow up a bridge or a power plant or some other piece of critical infrastructure in Iran. What do you make of this plan?

**David Frum** (1:38)
I'm going to cite something that is said by, again, a friend of ours, Ed Luce, who wrote the biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security advisor during the Carter administration. Almost half a century ago, reports that when the Iranians took American hostages in the 1970s, the very first move that the United States did was to consider military action against Iran. When the United States considered military action against Iran in the spring of 1980, the very first thing that came up in the war gaming in 1980 was, and then the Iranians move against the Strait of Hormuz, what's our counter move? There are, I think, probably entire suites of rooms, maybe entire floors in the Pentagon filled with filing cabinets about what to do about the Strait of Hormuz problem. So there's something kind of bizarre about the Trump administration acting as if this is some new problem that's never been thought of before, they need to improvise a solution to. This has been war game again and again and again since at least the spring of 1980, maybe even earlier. If you don't have an answer to the problem, what do you do about the Strait of Hormuz, then that is a consideration that should stop you from doing the military action in the first place, but they're just improvising. And it goes to show something that has been very alarming about this war from the start. And I say this is someone who's broadly sympathetic to the aims of this war, who hoped it would go well.
But this group doesn't seem to think very hard about things, doesn't seem to have plans, doesn't seem to have plans either for American public opinion, for Congress or for bringing the war to a resolution. And if you haven't thought it through at the beginning, the middle or the end is a pretty late time to start the thinking.

**Jonathan V. Last** (3:11)
Do you think this could possibly work to reopen the strait? Because I mean, it just seems to me that Iran has actually managed the escalation framework very well over the course of this conflict.
They have done really pretty calculated proportional responses in escalation. And it was only once they started striking the real critical energy infrastructure in the other Gulf states that the Americans panicked and that's really what forced Trump to back off. Why wouldn't they simply do that again?

**David Frum** (3:49)
Well, let's not make the Iranians out to be 10 feet high. If you were to see the world from their point of view, I'm sure it looks pretty bad. Much of their military infrastructure is a wreck.
Dozens of senior leaders have been killed that we know of.
So the world doesn't look great from their point of view. But they have one thing going for them, which the Trump administration does not, which is a sense of time and a higher pain threshold. Because President Trump went to war promising quick, easy, cheap victory, because he didn't get buy-in from Congress, because he made no effort to mobilize the public, and because he has no capacity to mobilize the public. His whole war plan was predicated on this better work within about 10 days. Because after that, you're out of patience. He's now got a problem which is, yeah, America's resources are vastly greater than Iran's, America's capability are vastly greater than Iran, but America's pain threshold at this point is about zero. So all the Iranians have to do is stop one ship from moving through the strait, raise the price a little bit and Trump panics because he knows he has no mandate for leadership. He never sought one, so he hasn't got one.