Hey Everyone,
If, like me, you feel you’ve suffered whiplash, with a new announcement as to where we are in the war with Iran coming every few hours since Monday morning’s announcement we were ending Operation Epic Fury and launching Operation Freedom (now stopped while we might- or might not - be negotiating a deal with Iran)…well: Joel Rubin is the perfect person to explain what is ACTUALLY going on.
The answer, of course, is that beneath the schizophrenic bluster, there is, alas no actual policy or plan. President Trump’s best hope is that Iran will agree to open up the Straits of Hormuz in exchange for a deal on nuclear enrichment. BUT, asks Joel, “how do you get there?” As we’ve seen in the last 24 hours both sides are flexing their muscles, in a seemingly endless game of chicken.
Joel’s biggest fear is that if he gets an agreement, Trump will be content with a quick two page term sheet - rather than letting the State Department spend months drafting hundreds of pages containing detailed technicalities with clear endpoints about what Iran will or will not do in terms of uranium enrichment and sanctions around Hormuz etcetera.
My response to that is: of course Trump will walk away without going through the laborious process of hashing out the details! He’s a real estate developer from New York! I’ve written a book about real estate developers from New York. According to my reporting, wherever possible they avoid putting anything in writing, because that gives them the option to re-trade tomorrow, and deny they’d ever agreed on anything in the first place.
We go on to discuss Marco Rubio’s came on in the White House Briefing Room yesterday and what that might mean.
And then we get to Joel’s new book, Saving Democratic American Foreign Policy which you can buy here on Amazon.
In it, Joel argues that Democrats have not done nearly enough to define their foreign policy goals and explain to the American people why what they stand for is in their interests. (I agree wholeheartedly on that). He puts forward policy positions that he says encapsulate the three Ps: pragmatism, patriotism and populism.
You can hear a few of his ideas in our conversation.
Finally, he addresses the troubling issue of the rise of anti-semitism in the US and globally. The anti-Defamation League has published a report saying that we have reached the highest level of physical threats tied to antisemitism in 46 years. Joel isn’t worried by just the fact of that - but that this behavioral trend is being normalized within our society.
It’s a somber but important note to end on.
Thank you Ian Dunn, Ashleigh Alauren, Education is a lamp, An Mcgreevy, Don Buckter, and many others for tuning into my live video with Joel Rubin! Join me for my next live video in the app.
