You know, I think what we have to remember is that the situation is so dynamic, and President Trump, you know, his greatest strength is really improvisation. He's not somebody who executes, you know, lays a 15-point clever plan. He's not a chess player who's got like eight moves in advance. He's a chess player who looks at the situation after every move and takes what he thinks is the most advantageous move in the circumstances. So given that, between his ability to spin and to convince his followers of different reasons, you know, of different interpretations of what's going on, and then his ability to try to sort of diplomatically or militarily think out of the box, I think it's actually very, very hard to predict.
Welcome to Reaganism. This is Roger Zakheim, director of the Reagan Institute and host of the Reaganism Podcast. Today we are with Walter Russell Mead. We're having him back on the show. Thank you for coming back. He's got a few titles here. He's the Raven B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute. He's the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft with the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, and probably known to most, he is the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Welcome back, Walter.
Well, thank you for making the time. I thought we'd start with where all the action and discussion is. The action is in the Persian Gulf. The discussion is concentrated here in Washington, D.C. You've been commenting on this from the outset, but your most recent column at the time of this recording in the Wall Street Journal is headed "Iran Will Define Trump's Legacy," and in it you explain how the decision in front of President Trump, particularly as it relates to how to handle the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, is very much perhaps the most profound and significant decision President Trump has made in his presidency, certainly since January of 2025. Is that, at the time of recording, still your assessment? Because conditions always are changing, facts are highly dynamic.
Well, they're highly dynamic, but the Strait of Hormuz is not open yet, and we still really don't know how President Trump will handle what could be a long closure of the straits. There's so many unknowns right now, but how President Trump navigates the next phase of the engagement with Iran, the war with Iran, will, I think, very much be legacy-defining.
You know, one of the things in your column that got my attention was sort of this binary way the strait is defining the outcome here. I mean, I sort of had, before reading your piece, my mindset was, well, Trump controls the keys and he could turn this off at any time and declare a victory. Certainly, for those who saw the Iranian regime as a menace, now it's a weakened regime. It's crumbling, perhaps still intact, but tattered. You know, that would be a win. But I think what you argued is that no, in the event the United States doesn't open the straits, whatever has been accomplished today, I guess, wouldn't effectively be a strategic win, and actually it would go over to Iran for the win in the sense that it was able to have the leverage through closing the straits.
Closing the straits and attacking the infrastructure of its neighbors. Yeah. I think we have to remember, you know, why is the United States in the Middle East anyway? Why are we so interested in it? And, you know, a lot of commentators will tell you, oh, it's Israel and the Israel lobby. But honestly, you look at the history and that just doesn't hold up. Back from 1948 to 1973, when Israel could have used a friend, the United States was very standoffish, and the US only became an Israeli ally more or less after Israel had become the dominant military power in the region with the Six-Day War and after it had acquired nuclear weapons, very much against US efforts as we tried to block Israeli nuclearization. So, you know, so why are we there? And people say, well, oil, but America's energy independent. So why do we care about oil? And the answer, of course, is that originally in the '50s, when we started our engagement in the Middle East, we were not worried about oil for ourselves. We were an oil-exporting country back then, but we were worried about European access to energy connected to the Marshall Plan recovery. And we didn't want any country to have the ability to block the Middle East flow of oil. And that's, I think, been true right to the present time. We didn't want Nasser's Egypt to be in that position. We didn't want the Soviet Union to be in that position. We didn't want Iraq to be in that position. We don't want Iran to be in that position. So if this war ends with Iran in that position, it is a rather inglorious ending to the war, no matter how you stack it.
I want to pursue that for a minute, but the point you made at the outset that we're not here because of Israel, despite what the outgoing NCTC director might have said, listeners and viewers could read a book on this. It's called "The Ark of a Covenant," which you wrote. And if you want to truly be serious and understand the Middle East, read that book and you see exactly why the US has been engaged militarily, economically, diplomatically in the Middle East and where Israel figures. And as you've just heard from our guest, we are not there because of the state of Israel. At the same time, the state of Israel, I think, I'm assuming you would agree, has been what Secretary Hegseth calls a model ally here, right? I mean, this is an ally that is helping us achieve our objectives. It's complementary. They're doing it out of their self-interest just like we are as well. But it's not because of Israel where they're... but Israel is helping, as I know President Trump has made quite clear he wants allies to do. Walter, though, as I think about the off-ramp opportunities for President Trump and the US, let's just imagine a scenario here where the president changes his mind, as he's done from time to time on a variety of issues. He could wake up the day after this recording and say, "We're not doing this anymore. We're going to call it a win." And then he has a variety of officials around him, the vice president, the secretary of state, security adviser, and they're going to have to solve this problem of, okay, well, you want to turn this off, we got to get the straits open. 20% of the world's oil goes through the straits. The world economy is going to be impacted unless we solve this. Do you think there's a way to engage the regime if that would be the course of action? And I'm not advocating for it at this moment to say, "Okay, we will stop bombing if you let everybody get through as it was status quo ante." Is that the direction this would go? And even in such a scenario, if they were to realize that, would that be sort of handing leverage back to the Iranians?
Well, I think if I were the Iranians, if I saw signs that Trump was weakening, I would want to raise my demands. You know, I would say, I need some guarantees you're not going to attack me again. I need some guarantees that Israel is not going to attack me again. Why am I going to sit here and have you people come in and bomb me every six months? So, I don't think... and Iran, we shouldn't forget this, Iran doesn't actually like President Trump, or, you know, and when they shout "death to America," they're not kidding. All right? That's not some kind of empty slogan for them. They actually, they really do believe that their strategy of resistance has the ability to break American power worldwide. And by handing us a stinging defeat in the Middle East, they can, you know, essentially break the value of our commitments to other allies, they can create such dissent within the United States that we can no longer act in any way. I mean, they have a whole string of scenarios. And I'm not saying that that's necessarily the case that they can do these. They think they can. And when it looks to them as if things are going their way, that if they just stand there and absorb punishment and continue, like the North Vietnamese, like others, you know, like the Taliban, that in the end we'll go home and go away. And the fact that President Trump is mercurial, that he changes his mind a lot, that will encourage them to believe that they're closer to that breaking point for the United States. So, they're not going to let him off easy. They're not going to easily give him something that he can spend as a win. They actually will want to humiliate Trump and the United States, I suspect.
Yeah. I mean, no doubt this is a deeply ideological regime at the same time. And it's hard for people sort of to accommodate both being true, but I think the regime has shown itself to be this. They are deeply ideological and then they are cunning, pragmatic, and they will do what's necessary as well for regime survival. And they certainly have behaved... They believe time is on their side. They're taking a pounding.
If they think America is losing, they won't be worried about regime survival anymore. You see what I mean? If they think that Trump is cracking, his resolve is cracked, fine, regime is saved. Now let's extract some concessions.
They will think that they're in the stronger bargaining position.
Yeah. And at the same time they'd be looking around and I think, you know, with the decapitation, the continued assassination of leadership, the taking out of their industrial capacity in addition to their military sites, the sinking of their navy, I mean, they certainly have a lot that's falling apart. I think ideologically you're right that they might dig in and not give up. But there must... I wonder if there's someone there saying, "Yeah, maybe we could use a little timeout as well." You know, the classic case for why two sides would sign up for a ceasefire. But I take your point. Again, I think what they drew from the last war was essentially what happened then, a kind of a ceasefire, but we built up more than they did, and Israel built up more. They did not gain from the last ceasefire. And that's the lesson that's on their minds now is, you know, they really would like to humiliate Donald Trump, I think, and there are actually a lot of people probably around the world that would enjoy that as much as the Iranians would. So, and they look at, you know, the lack of European support for Trump. They look at the pressure Trump will be getting from, you know, Asians and Europeans. "We need the oil and gas. We need the oil and gas." I think they think right now that the momentum is on their side. Yes, they're taking a lot of casualties, but, you know, so did the North Vietnamese. They took a lot of casualties, and the Iranians see themselves as working kind of in that vein.
Interesting. I mean, you bring up Vietnam, you mentioned Afghanistan. These are the sort of horrors and traumas that drive Americans and certainly the chattering class to think, oh gosh, you know, we're going to get ourselves into something that we can't get out of. Is it your assessment, Walter, that the sacrifice, the risk required and you have to take on to open the straits is something that President Trump and his coalition is not able to support, is not able to sustain?
Well, there, you know, there's actually, as far as I can see, very little sign that the MAGA coalition is deserting Trump. I mean, you have a lot of sort of talking-head pundits, or we could say at the moment screaming-head pundits, claiming to represent real MAGA against Trump, but the polls that I see show, you know, the sort of trust for Trump in his base is still very high. You know, the trouble is for Trump is if you have 90% of 40%, that's not the strongest political position you can have with midterms coming. But there it is. I think it's... but also, neither you nor I really has the slightest idea at this point what it would take to open up the Strait of Hormuz by military means. Right? Does it mean, you know, getting the rest of the Iranian navy? Does it actually mean we'd have to occupy a strip of land 20 miles deep along the entire shoreline, and even then the occasional missile would go. And it's quite possible, again, with drone warfare and counter-drone warfare evolving continually, that the answers to those questions might be very different three to six months from now from what they are today. So, you know, this kind of, you know, does Trump have the resolve to do X? Well, what resolve is required to do X? And the answer is that Trump would have to make a decision without fully knowing what amount of resolve, how hard this thing is. I think that's the nature of the kinds of problems that war poses.
Absolutely. And as we're recording, Marines are speeding, you know, making their way to the AO. Speculation that there may be Marines on the ground on Qeshm Island. I note something I saw you put on X, you posted, "It's amazing how many experts there are now on Qeshm Island, you know, compared to a week ago." For President Trump, it's without question, there are a lot of unknowns here. But for the military and our planners in Central Command, this is something they've been looking at for some time. This wasn't an unknown problem. You know, we've been dealing with this, as you pointed out, for decades. We dealt with it in kind of the closest analogous situation was in 1987, you know, tanker wars during the Iran-Iraq war during the Reagan presidency. What is your sense of how the military is looking at this and sort of their degree of preparedness, both in terms of the military capability and also the planning?
You know, I think they've done a pretty good job. Although, I do wonder why we don't have any minesweepers anywhere near the Gulf or, for that matter, we don't have any minesweepers at all, or, you know, hardly any. I understand there's some new technology coming down the road that is better than minesweepers, but somehow we've allowed this gap to open up between having an adequate stock of the old stuff and being ready to go with the new stuff. That does not strike me as... I don't know that historians will look back on that as the most brilliant example of military planning in the history of the human race. And on the other hand, I mean, let's be absolutely clear that the military dimension of this, in terms of our ability to take out targets and hit targets, has been very good. Where we're seeing, I think, a bit more of a gap is first and foremost in the politics, the impact of our military actions on the political situation. And, you know, obviously the purpose of military action is to achieve a certain political result, and it's not entirely clear yet that we figured out how to make that connection work. I'm suspending judgment, but it looks harder than at least some people thought it would. Beyond that, the military thing has proved a little bit, I think, more complex than was expected. That while there's been a tremendous downturn in the number of missiles the Iranians have launched, if anything, that seems to have stabilized recently, and even a slight uptick. And it also appears that their accuracy has somewhat improved, and that they've hit more high-value targets in the last couple of days than they did at the beginning. So, you know, so I think our military was right about its planning for what it was going to do. But very often, as they say in war, the enemy gets a vote.
And necessarily, you know, this is not a knock on the American military planners, but it's famous adage that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Yeah. You can't orchestrate a war like, you know, some kind of, you know, like writing a play, a stage play, and it all goes off the way you expected it to. That is not how war works. And while the Iranians have, I think, clearly sustained more damage, suffered more casualties, been discombobulated, and, you know, in some ways decapitated by what we've done, we have not yet deprived them of their capability to respond creatively in the face of our attacks. And given the nature of our objectives, closing the straits, protecting the infrastructure of the entire Gulf, that's a bit of a problem.
