Power — and the abuse of it — is defining the current news cycle. On this week’s round table of “The Opinions,” the Times Opinion politics writer Michelle Cottle is joined by the columnists Nicholas Kristof and David French to discuss President Trump’s aggressive foreign policy, including the buildup of ships in the Middle East, and what the fallout from the Epstein files misses.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today, guys. I want to talk about the Epstein files from the perspective of Nick’s decades-long reporting on sex trafficking. But first, we want to dig into Donald Trump’s foreign policy moves, which is also perfect for Nick, given his years of reporting from around the globe.
So, let’s get into it. First, Iran. And the usual caveat: We are recording this on Thursday morning, so who knows where this will have gone by the time you hear us. But as of now, Trump has called for Iranian officials to agree to a nuclear deal or to face a U.S. attack very soon. This comes hot on the heels of the president’s assertion that regime change would be the best option for Iran, after massive protests erupted across the country, resulting in the deaths of thousands of protesters.
Nick, as someone who has spent time on the ground there and covered this dictatorship — what do people need to understand about what’s going on there and what a U.S. attack would mean?
Nicholas Kristof: So, I’ve rarely traveled in a country where there is so much antipathy toward the regime. You go around Iran, not just in north Tehran, where there are secular liberals, but you go to rural areas and people are just so pissed off at the government.
And that’s not just about the repression, which is a little bit less evident in rural areas, but it’s about the corruption — it’s about hypocrisy. It’s about the incompetence of the government economically. So, on the one hand, I think that there are actually plenty of Iranians these days, who were just so upset at the way things have gone that they wouldn’t mind a certain amount of foreign intervention to try to topple the regime, despite the deep nationalism in that country.
On the other hand, I think a lot of people — including me — are a little bit skeptical that a military intervention would make things better, as opposed to making things worse. And I think we should have a lot of humility about our capacity to bring about the changes we’d like to see in Iran, and understand that things could go a lot less well than the Trump administration might anticipate.
Cottle: Nick, do you want to just float some bad possibilities so that I can have actual nightmares about what could happen?
Kristof: Yeah. Iran has rebuilt its missile program, and so it can attack not only Israel, but also U.S. bases in the area — in Iraq, Qatar and elsewhere. It may not be able to fully close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes, but it could certainly make efforts in that direction and disrupt the transit of oil.
And, I guess beyond that, it might be possible to decapitate the regime and kill the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But actually changing the regime itself, I think, is a lot less likely. And it may well be that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the military command, is actually what takes over. And it’s not obvious to me that this would be an improvement.
Cottle: OK. That’s plenty for me to be concerned about this week. David, on Tuesday, American and Iranian officials met in Geneva to start working toward, possibly, a nuclear deal. There’s been a buildup of forces in the region, bigger than any we’ve seen in a very long time.
So, what do you make of all this: negotiations on the one hand, and threats on the other? Is it all of a piece?
David French: It’s really interesting to me that we’re here right now, just a few months after the word was that the nuclear program had been obliterated — that there had been a decisive blow struck against this nuclear program. And perhaps the fact that we’re here right now tells us that, yeah, there was damage done to the program, but the program still exists.
Look, I think the best possible outcome, at this point, is that Iran blinks to some degree, and we do get a nuclear deal out of this. I do not want to see this regime get a nuclear weapon. If you’re going to be listing the most dangerous regimes in the world that don’t have nuclear weapons — that you would not want to have them, to see them have them — Iran would be at or near the very top of the list here. So, I want to see a nuclear deal. I do not tend to think that you can bomb Iran just indefinitely to end their nuclear program.
The problem here is, it’s very unclear what the true administration strategy is. If we’re even floating regime change at this point, then you’re really mixing and muddying the waters. You’re really creating conditions where the regime might say: “What are you talking about? Nuclear deal? You’re actually wanting us gone.” That, in many ways, could cause them to hunker down. There’s a very poor track record of engineering a regime change entirely by airstrikes and through aerial means. Now, if we were able to deter, say, a massacre of innocent civilians, that would be a worthwhile use of American power.
But these different outcomes and these different strategies and different approaches — it’s all opaque. And this brings me to this last point: this is why you need to go to Congress. When you go to Congress and you’re explaining to the American people what you’re wanting to do, there’s a couple of things that happen.
One, you’re going to be able to hold an administration accountable. If you’re announcing a war aim, then we can hold you accountable to that. Two, if you’re talking about entering into military conflict — that, yes, could go really well, in the way previous American aerial campaigns have gone, without losses to American pilots, without serious economic or terror attack ramifications. But this is a situation that might not go as well. It might not, and you’ve not prepared the public for that. I think if you talk to the average American, they’d have little knowledge that this is unfolding, and that is not the right atmosphere in which to start potentially dangerous military operations.
So, you have no public buy-in, we’re not clear of the objectives, throwing in regime change seems to be an extraordinary reach. Other than that, Michelle, everything’s going great.
Cottle: Yeah, it’s all great. I mean, Nick, is this like some kind of great strategic ambiguity? Do we think that there is a comprehensive strategy behind this, or is he just winging it?
Kristof: No, I think David is exactly right. It would be great if the regime could be toppled, or if there could be a nuclear deal. But as David suggests, I think it’s going to be really hard to achieve any of that. And Iran has a certain capacity to suffer that I’m not sure we fully appreciate.
Last year’s campaign against Iran went over 11 days. And I think that may have built a certain complacency in the U.S. and in the public, about how this one will go. We should remember that Afghanistan is a lesson in just how difficult military campaigns can be.
And I think we may also have forgotten that the U.S. spent $7 billion, between the Joe Biden administration and the Trump administration, bombing the Houthis in Yemen. And last May, we pretty much gave up and stopped the campaign, without really getting anything substantial from it. Look, it would be great if there were a nuclear deal; it would be great if Iran just announced that it was going to stop supporting its proxies; and it would be great if it dismantled its ballistic missile system — all of which are the U.S. demands. But I don’t really see that Iran is likely to accept any of those in full.
And the U.S. isn’t really prepared to offer Iran any additional sweeteners, like relaxation of sanctions. So, it’s hard to see a deal being reached. Meanwhile, President Trump has, by position, all these forces there. He’s kind of put himself in a position where it’s very likely these forces will be used.
I think everybody remembers that in January he’s told the Iranians that help is on the way, that he was encouraging the protesters, and then thousands of them were massacred without the U.S. doing anything much at all. So, I think he’s kind of on a trajectory that may well lead to bombing Iran, without it being very clear what that accomplishes.
Cottle: Well, this is my other question: has he crossed a line in terms of military buildup? The president, that is. When we’re talking about what’s going on over there, this is something we haven’t seen in a really long time — right, David? This is not like sending a few ships, or whatever, for show.
French: The analogy I’ve used is that it’s this cocked pistol. You’ve moved in enough forces, you’ve put them in a posture that is extraordinarily aggressive — it’s like a cocked pistol aimed at Iran. And the other thing that I would say about this is that there’s another factor hovering in the background, and that other factor is that I think Trump feels like he has a really good track record of dealing with Iran aggressively. So, he had the strike against Qassim Suleimani, Iran retaliated with a ballistic missile strike that was really limited, telegraphed. Although it inflicted American casualties, no Americans were killed.
Then you come in at the very end of this long Israeli operation that has gone very well. And then you sort of administer the coup de grâce to a limited number of targets, and you call that a day. He just went through the Venezuela raid, which was, from a purely military perspective — swooping in with Special Forces, spiriting out the leader of a country without widespread death and destruction — was a remarkable military feat. So, this is also a time when you should be very alarmed and aware that that’s exactly when the temptation to reach too far locks in.
Because you know, one of the records of American military engagements — prior to when both Afghanistan and Iraq began to bog down — is we had been through a long run of very successful military engagements, from Operation Desert Storm to the interventions in the Balkan states. And then it got a lot more difficult and a lot more costly. And I’m not quite sure the administration has counted that cost, in part because of some of its recent successes, and where Trump feels that this is where he has his most autonomy, the most power — that he can immediately exercise the most confidence in the outcome. And that all adds up. It’s starting to feel imminent. It’s starting to feel as if this is unfolding, a process has started that will not stop.
Cottle: OK, so I want to touch on Venezuela, but first I want to take one step back and you guys can explain this to me. So, Trump claimed, with his strikes back in June, that he had obliterated Iran’s nuclear capabilities. And this is part of why he’s feeling good about his record over there. But then here we are again with them having to revisit this issue.
Why is this not seen as, well actually, maybe he didn’t do such a great job last time? And why would we trust him this time?
Kristof: I think you’re right. Look, he did not destroy the Irani nuclear program, but he did certainly set it back quite significantly. The best guess among nuclear experts is that the highly enriched uranium is now deeply buried, that Iran doesn’t have the capacity right now to process it, that it may be building additional facilities and bringing in centrifuges to try to rebuild the program. But for right now, that is not happening. I think you’re right, Michelle, and I think that undermines the whole rationale for what I think is quite likely going ahead.
Cottle: OK, so David, you brought up Venezuela. At the start of this year, the Trump administration went in, they captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. That country is now being run by Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president. So, not a member of the opposition party.
And so not exactly a regime change. What is this telling us about the administration’s global goals?
French: This tells us a few things: One is that the administration will achieve a limited success and make maximal claims about the magnitude of that success. As I said before, the actual military operation itself was pretty remarkable. It was quite a military achievement, but then you trumpet everything that he trumpeted while you’re leaving the entire rest of the regime apparatus in place.
Well, how much have you accomplished, really, over the long term? I think we’ll ultimately look back on that operation as a footnote to his presidency. And so I do think one of the things he does really enjoy doing — and it’s directly related to the strike and Operation Midnight Hammer — was that he achieved something concrete. It was something real. It actually did damage the Iranian nuclear program. And then he dramatically overstated it. And the overstatement is obvious because here we are again. So, I’m going to keep coming back to this point, Michelle: This is why you have a Congress.
Cottle: Hope springs eternal for you.
French: I know, I know. But this is why you have it. So we can have this discussion to hold them accountable for the American people to buy in. This is a democracy. And say what you want about George W. Bush, but he did that both times with Afghanistan and with Iraq. He made the case, got the vote from Congress, and acted under congressional authority.
Cottle: OK, so I want to pull back a little bit more. Before Trump was elected, he said he wouldn’t be starting wars, he’d be staying out of them.
We all remember the no “forever wars” talk. That’s not exactly what we’re seeing in the span of the year. He has threatened Greenland, seized Venezuela’s leader, bombed Iran and threatened to do it again. What’s going on here? Is there a comprehensive strategy that you see through all of this?
Nick, what are your thoughts?
Kristof: I am a little skeptical whenever people do have grand strategies, because that’s kind of what led us to Vietnam. That’s what led us to the Iraq war. George H.W. Bush had, I think, a much more modest sense of trying to engineer changes where we can, but cautious of grand, overwhelming theories. Look, the military toolbox is absolutely essential, and I think sometimes my world of liberals has underappreciated the value of that military toolbox.
But on the other hand, it tends to work best with small, modest operations, and we get in trouble when we try to remake the world in really grand ways. The problem with the Trump administration is I don’t have confidence in either their strategy or their tactics, but I think that some sense of being willing to use the military toolbox in some ways, while also advancing our soft power, our aid, our other tools to bring about change around the world — that is fundamentally what we need. And I really don’t see that happening.
Cottle: OK. Now, we’re going to do a hard pivot. Nick, we’re going to go to a topic that you have been covering for way too long: the sex trafficking of minors. Over the past few weeks, of course, it has gotten a lot more attention because of the drumbeat of discoveries and stories about the horrific revelations from the Epstein files.
Just this morning, in fact, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a member of the British monarchy, was arrested on suspicions of misconduct in public office, related to his ties with Epstein. So, given your experience in this kind of dark world, what have you been thinking as the story has gone along?
Kristof: Well, it’s great that there is scrutiny over Jeffrey Epstein and his enablers. It is fantastic that we are having these conversations. But the problem is not fundamentally just Epstein. And so often we focus on one individual, whether it’s Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, or now Jeffrey Epstein.
Meanwhile, every year there are more than 100,000 cases reported of child trafficking. And that’s a huge understatement of the real number, which we don’t know. And we have structures in our society that fundamentally propel these kids — really troubled, vulnerable kids — toward traffickers.
And just as the Epstein associates were indifferent to these young girls, so I think we as a society are indifferent to the broader problem. And in every American city there are girls who are in trouble. For instance, say mom’s boyfriend is hitting on them. What are you supposed to do if you are a 13-year-old girl in that position?
Well, you run away and you go to the bus station, and then the only person looking for you at that bus station is not some social worker or helpful police officer. It’s a pimp. And, I wish we could take this passion and concern for what is happening with Epstein, and use that to fix some broken systems in the U.S. — like foster care, above all — that fail these girls.
Cottle: So, I know the analogy is imprecise, but this sort of reminds me of the discussions we have with gun violence, which is that we have these huge, horrific, spectacular mass shootings, and people kind of pile on and try to figure out what we could do to address these random massacres. When you’re talking about gun violence in the U.S., there are so many more mundane, lower-profile episodes that are really at the heart of the horrifying numbers.
So, David, do you think it’s even appropriate to talk about an Epstein class when it comes to this abuse and cover-up, or should we be automatically digging down to look at some of these broader social issues?
French: That’s a great question, because I think there’s been a lot of attention on this Epstein class as a uniquely vile subset of people. But if you look at scandals you’ve seen in churches — that’s not the Epstein class. In my journalistic career, I have covered some awful things that have happened to kids in religious settings, for example, that are again, not the Epstein class.
There is a strain of depravity that runs through some subset of human beings — a strain of depravity that leads them to exploit and abuse vulnerable people. And those people can be found at the highest levels, and they can be found at the levels of society where people are struggling the most, and everywhere in between.
And there’s also one thing that I want to talk about: we need to have a real conversation in this country about the influence of pornography, especially with the very early exposure that we’re having. The average age of exposure to pornography — and sometimes it’s not like the dirty pictures that were under somebody’s dad’s or uncle’s bed, right? It’s stuff that’s mind-blowingly awful that kids are being exposed to at a very early age. And I think it’s just warping the whole way in which the sexes are interacting with each other. And exploitation is endemic to parts of the porn industry.
So, I do think we need to have a real conversation about what we are allowing our children to be exposed to at an early age, and what kind of choices adults are making. And I think the pornification of our culture is an aspect of this that we just don’t address enough.
Cottle: So, Nick, you’ve actually done a lot of work involved with the rise of these sites and kind of their detrimental effect on society. You mentioned systemic fixes. You want to walk us through some of what you see as the most promising and the most urgent?
Kristof: Yeah. So, one would be a real effort to prevent these girls from getting in trouble in the first place. And that means some kind of trauma-informed social care; that means schools being more alert to kids who are in trouble and at risk of running away, and then a much greater effort to stop runaways.
The problem is that if you’re a runaway in America, and you’re 14 years old, a pimp is going to find you before anybody else. And then it’s often very hard for these kids, girls or boys, to recover when they’ve gone in that direction. So, more outreach and support, more shelters and homes where they can be sent to and supported. And a real effort to fix foster care.
Only 4 percent of kids in foster care graduate from a four-year college. That should be a scandal. That’s on us. That’s not on these kids.
David made the point that there is this evil that lurks in a lot of corners and leads to this kind of abuse of young kids. I think that’s right, and so, how do we deal with that? I think it’s with accountability. And you can scare people into better behavior. That means creating accountability for those colleagues of Epstein who abuse girls in that context. But it also means going after buyers of sex, buyers of these young girls. And right now, if you buy sex from a 15-year-old girl, there is approximately zero risk that you will ever face any consequences. Zero.
Cottle: Why is that? Tell me.
French: That’s a great question, Michelle. That’s a great question.
Cottle: I just don’t understand. This is one thing we can all agree is a terrible thing, and yet —what do we do?
Kristof: I mean, the problem is that there’s not a lot of sympathy for these kids, because, in reality — look, they are troubled kids. They don’t work well with prosecutors. They often don’t trust the police. And that’s often merited.
The police do arrest them, mistreat them, and these kids don’t testify well in court. And so from a policing point of view, it’s often just easier to look the other way and focus on other issues. But also, when you do actually arrest “johns,” then they are often pillars of the community.
And so they escape accountability in the same way that Epstein himself largely escaped accountability the first time around. It requires us to understand that this is a priority. And I don’t think we’ve made that decision. I will never forget one time, in Boston, sitting in the home of this couple whose 15-year-old daughter had run away.
She’d been on the streets for four or five months. At that point, the parents had been at their wits’ end, they’d gone to the police. The police had been unhelpful. Sitting in that living room with the parents, I found the girl in 20 minutes, advertised on Backpage by a pimp, as if she were a lost puppy.
We gave that number — the pimp’s phone number — to the police. And that night they raided the pimp’s hotel room. He was an armed pimp and he had two girls with him. But that is not a scalable intervention. The police could have done that themselves if it had been a priority, but it has not been a priority.
And that’s not just the Boston Police Department — that’s America, that’s our problem.
French: You know, one thing that I have seen is that people are very good at making themselves victims, even when they should be held accountable. Here’s what I mean: Every incident that I’ve ever looked at, involving abuse within an institution — say the head of a ministry or in a college or a big summer camp — you have one predator, maybe, who has abused many, many people, and it’s the one predator who does the abuse, but it takes a constellation of people around them to enable it to go forward through warning signs, through red flags.
Cottle: They ignore the red flags.
French: The red flags are just waving, like you’re waving in an airplane, and they’ll just push through it. Or sometimes they’ll even know about misconduct and then the person will say: “I’m so sorry, please forgive me.” And then they’ll push through it. And then when the truth emerges, that same constellation of people will flip around and say: “I’m shocked, I’m stunned. I cannot believe how betrayed I was.”
And so everything gets isolated to the individual. And the individual absolutely should be a billion percent held accountable. But we’re always so good at deflecting, at avoiding responsibility, especially institutionally. And so, in my view, if you see an institution that has been through a scandal and it has not engaged in very intentional and systemic reforms as a result of that scandal — as a result of what it’s learned from it — avoid that institution. It’s ripe for more problems. And so that accountability point that Nick makes, I just don’t think it can be emphasized enough, and it extends beyond sex trafficking and into sexual harassment and sexual abuse more broadly.
Cottle: All right. I want us to switch gears, and before we go, let’s end this on a lighter note the way we always do, with recommendations.
Gentlemen, what have you got for me? Nick? The guest gets to go first.
Kristof: Look, there’s so many grim things happening around the world that I just counsel distraction. And so, in my day job, I shout at the world and it pays no attention. But here on the farm in Oregon, we are making our little bit of wine and cider, and it is our little sandbox. And the Trump administration can’t affect our sandbox, and it is so healing and therapeutic to do something that is ours and that the rest of the world can’t interfere with.
So I recommend a distraction — your own little sandbox.
Cottle: I recommend you bring me some of that cider next time I see you.
Kristof: It’s good.
Cottle: All right. David?
French: You know, I’ve actually kind of struggled a little bit this week, I’ve been too busy — I haven’t discovered new things to stream yet, Michelle.
Cottle: You disappoint me, David.
French: I know, I know. It’s bad. So that means that it’s time to think about classic things to stream that maybe people missed earlier in the streaming era.
And so I’m going to pull back to one of my favorites. Have you ever heard of the show “Catastrophe”?
Cottle: Yes.
French: So, here’s the premise of the show — it’s revealed in the first half of the pilot, basically, so not really spoiling much. An American businessman comes over to Great Britain and meets a young woman, played by Sharon Horgan. They have a torrid affair for about a week, and then when he’s back, he gets a notification from her that she’s pregnant. And so he then just decides, we’re going to be together. And she says: “OK, let’s be together.”
It’s hilarious. As my wife says: “That’s a great show — it’s got lots of language and butts.” But it’s also one of the most beautiful shows I’ve ever seen about the richness and complexity of human relationships, and the sheer authentic power of deciding: “I am with you and you are with me.”
Cottle: Love it. OK. I am going to do two, although the first one is more of a plea. I was traveling around Texas all week, and when I was flying home, it was after the Department of Homeland Security had basically shut down, and those poor T.S.A. agents, again, are out there doing the Lord’s work without pay.
So, just get out there and hug a T.S.A. agent today. Just do this for me.
French: Thousands of hugs spreading across America.
Cottle: I could probably get in trouble for that.
And then, in honor of the passing of film great Robert Duvall, I just want to pitch, everybody goes out and watches what is my favorite performance — and what I learned, after his death incidentally, was apparently his favorite performance — which is “Lonesome Dove,” the mini-series. Either of you, have you seen it?
Kristof: I have not.
French: A long time ago. It was a phenomenon when it came on back in the day.
Cottle: It was back in the day when you had a hard time watching it if you missed it the first time. It’s based on a Western epic by Larry McMurtry, who I’m also a fan of. I think the book came out in 1985. The mini-series came out in 1989, and it’s about these two old Texas Rangers, after the age of Texas Rangers, kind of herding some cattle north.
It sounds very basic, but it is glorious. And Robert Duvall as Augustus McCrae is just perfection.
Kristof: I’ve got some great watching recommendations from this show.
Cottle: There you go. It’s got to be streaming somewhere. I have a DVD if you need it, Nick. We can go old school. But I highly recommend it. So, thank you guys. Let’s do it again. Nick, please come back sometime.
Kristof: Happy to. It was a fun, fun morning.
French: Thanks, Nick. Thanks Michelle.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Video editing by Lisa Angell. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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