This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
This is not the presidency many Americans thought they were voting for. It is not the presidency that Donald Trump and the people around him claimed he would deliver.
Archival clip of Donald Trump: I’m going to be the one that keeps you out of war. I’ll keep you out of war.
Archival clip of Trump: We’re not going to have war in the Middle East.
Archival clip of Trump: We did no wars. I had no wars.
Archival clip of Trump: They said you will start a war. I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.
I think what was most surprising to me over the last couple of days has been seeing that one of Trump and his administration’s most significant red lines — no ground troops in Iran — is no longer holding.
Trump gave an interview to the New York Post in which he said: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says: There will be no boots on the ground. I don’t say it.”
He said: “I say: Probably don’t need them.”
I’m obviously opposed to this war. There was no consultation with the American public. I don’t think there was a consultation with Congress — and obviously not one with the U.N. I don’t think Trump and his administration are prepared for what they might unleash.
But I wanted to try to understand this not from my perspective but from the perspective of someone much friendlier to Donald Trump’s foreign policy, someone who has tried to think about what his doctrine and approach might mean, who even helped craft it in his first term.
Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She served as a deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term. She led the drafting and publication of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States. So I wanted to see how she understood Trump’s foreign policy in his second term, the risks he’s now taking, the philosophy that can be pulled out of it and what that might mean for the American people and the world.
Ezra Klein: Nadia Schadlow, welcome to the show.
Nadia Schadlow: Thanks so much, Ezra. Pleasure to be here.
In 2018, you described Donald Trump as a “conservative realist.” What did you mean by that?
“Realism” essentially means that you look at the world the way it is, not as you wish it to be. And Donald Trump is someone who sees the world in a particular way.
It’s a world that’s competitive. It’s a world in which power matters. It’s a world in which nation-states matter, interests matter. That’s what I meant by the realism part.
The conservative part: Today, in the current National Security Strategy of 2025, which I’m sure we’ll get into, they actually use the term “flexible realism.” So I might actually say that might be more accurate today.
You don’t want to do everything everywhere. You will take risks, but essentially, you want to make sure that American power is preserved and not expended unnecessarily.
So how did that, in your conception, differ from the Republican-leaning schools of thought that people are more familiar with, which is neoconservatives — like the George W. Bush era — and then paleoconservatives, or isolationists, which is often how people have at least framed Donald Trump?
Yes, I mean, liberal internationalism — some people use the term “neocons”— essentially is a more interventionist philosophy, a sense that America can go in and should often try to reshape the world in its image — this is the classic definition — and that that’s a good thing.
It’s probably more optimistic about the sense that all countries can adopt democracy, and maybe a democracy that looks like ours. We want to promote human rights around the world. We want to promote liberal values around the world, and we are open to interventions around the world to do that — the more isolationist wing of the Republican Party usually. Though frankly, it’s not just the Republican Party. I think you also see that in the progressive left, a sense of: Let’s pull back. We have problems at home. But some people call that group retrenchers.
I think the left sometimes adopts that view with the rationale that America is a cause of problems. And by going abroad, by being abroad, we create antibodies, and we shouldn’t be messing around in those places.
There’s a little bit of that on the right, too. But on the right, I think the retrencher, isolationist view is that we have to focus on our problems at home. What happens in the rest of the world really doesn’t matter, and we need to consolidate our power here at home first and grow our economy. I think the two — wrongly — are mutually exclusive. But I think they’re interlinked.
So when I hear that definition of “conservative realism” — and often when I hear definitions of “realism” — it feels to me a lot can hide in two particular parts of it.
One is: the way the world is. Or: the world as it is. Because people disagree with how the world really is.
So when you say that for Donald Trump, how do you think he really understands the world to be?
And then, of course: Our interests. You often hear the term “America First.” So what are our interests?
How do you think about those two sides of Trump’s foreign policy?
You are right — the assumptions are different. For instance, when Trump came into office in 2017, he was focused on three broad themes.
First was this idea that America was in decline and had been in decline for some time, and he was going to fix that, he was going to help to renew it. And as part of that, he was going to do some significant reordering of institutions.
So for President Trump, first term and, I think, continuing, he saw the roots of that decline in several areas: decline due to the effects of globalization and the deindustrialization of the United States; decline due to trade imbalances that harm the United States and had been harming the United States for quite some time; decline due to a lack of pride in what America stood for and what America was; decline due to other countries taking advantage of our security guarantees. I’m giving you examples of the reasons.
Now, I think, probably if you had a different guest on the show, there might be an agreement — that, yes, we were in decline — but the reasons would be different.
The way that President Trump saw beginning that renewal was by addressing those trade imbalances; making sure that allies and partners did more for their share of security burdens; reinvigorating a sense of pride in America, putting that first and foremost. There is a list of policy issues.
And then third, on reordering, he was very comfortable in not beginning with the existing set of institutions. He came from a world that said: Well, why do we need these institutions? What have they done? What are they doing for us? And what have they done overall? What outcomes have they achieved?
I still think we’re seeing this today. In many ways, we’re seeing it play out in what’s happening in Iran. But I’ll leave it there.
Well, let me see how this fits into it. I think the impression many people have had from things Donald Trump has said has been that, among other things, he feels that George W. Bush — and for that matter, past Democratic governments — had been acting as the world’s policemen. They had been deploying U.S. forces all around the world. The rest of the world is not paying its fair share for security. They are acting under our umbrella without giving us all that much back. And that it has reflected an inattention to our own people and our own problems and our own interests, and instead, too much of our becoming the enforcer of either international institutions or others.
He has been, within that, extremely critical of regime change and regime change wars.
Archival clip of Trump: We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change, wars around the globe, senseless wars.
He’s talked about their stupidity. He’s talked about their wastefulness.
Archival clip of Trump: We’ve spent $8 trillion in the Middle East, and we’re not fixing our roads in this country? How stupid. How stupid is it? And we’re not fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals, even? Our schools, even? It’s crazy.
And one thing that many people said about his first term was that there was a restraint to him — whatever his braggadocio and his saber rattling — that you didn’t see with some other presidents.
He himself bragged that he was one of the first presidents in a very long time not to have started any new wars. People can argue about the degree to which that is true, but it is somewhat true.
In the second term, we’ve now deposed two heads of state within eight weeks. We’ve captured Nicolás Maduro. We are now bombing Iran. We’ve killed the supreme leader of Iran.
How do these things fit together for you?
Well, that’s why when we started the conversation, I conceded that “flexible realism” was probably the better term today.
I worked on the 2017 National Security Strategy, but the 2025 version that came out actually uses the term “flexible realism.” And that is probably accurate — realistic in that he’s seeing certain dangers in the world, and his White House sees certain dangers in the world for the United States, and they’re going to use flexibility to deal with those dangers.
So I see it as, essentially: He saw threats to the United States that had grown — I don’t know, no one can speak for Trump, certainly not me. But I think he would put it as: In the four years that I was gone and I was out of office, certain key threats grew over time. The Biden administration watched these threats grow, and now that I’m back in office, I have to do something definitive about them.
And he would point to open borders. He would point to the millions of undocumented migrants who came through our borders. He would point to the strength of the drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations. Which is why he designated many of them transnational terrorist organizations, because that actually gives the government more legal authority to do things in different ways. You take it out of just pure law enforcement.
He would say — and this is interesting because I know that a recent guest of yours, Ben Rhodes, had a different interpretation — but he would say that Iran continued to develop its nuclear weapons program. I mean, the Israelis would agree. He would point to evidence over the years — and most recently, the past few weeks before the strikes — of Iran’s unwillingness to essentially agree to giving up that program.
So I think he would say that things got worse in the four years he was out of office, and he had to use different tools and a different set of actions to move in a different direction.
I guess the thing that has been confusing or disturbing to me is that he was very clear coming in. He said: We’re tired of fighting. I’m the only president in the last 84 years who didn’t start a war. He said: Under Trump, we will have no more wars.
He said that obviously Russia would have never invaded Ukraine if he had been in charge, that Hamas would have never launched the attack on Israel. He said at the beginning of this administration: We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.
But something feels like it has changed in him with his relationship to military force. I can’t tell if he thinks he has found a way to use military force in a limited way that does not open up the kinds of dangers that previous presidents had gotten into of escalation and occupation. Although now Trump has talked about being more comfortable with boots on the ground in Iran if such a thing is needed.
Is this the same theory we were hearing from him, and it’s just being applied in a different way — or has something dramatically changed?
Iran was not in a more dramatically different place two weeks ago than it was two years ago. We were also told we had obliterated their nuclear weapons program in the June 2025 bombings.
Is there a doctrine here, or are there impulses that are somewhat at war with each other?
From the outside, for at least the last 50 to 75 years of history, there’s been a tendency to say: What is the doctrine? To look for perfect consistency, to look for an overarching architecture that fits all the time. But I don’t think any president can hold to that standard.
We can talk specifically about Iran, but a lot of people would disagree and say that there was a combination of factors that led the Israelis and the Americans to think that they had a window of opportunity that they needed to take now. I think, partly, it was who was going to be targeted, a sense that we needed to do more on the ballistic missile threat, taking out more launchers. The fundamental goal was to remove Iran as a consistent terrorist power in the Middle East.
Now people won’t agree with that. But just because people don’t agree with the rationale doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rationale — it’s just one they don’t agree with.
And the idea, for years, that Iran had been a threat since 1979, and if not, you can also use 1983 — the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut.
What’s interesting as an example of nice debate is that Ben would say the problems began with Trump’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ——
Which is the nuclear deal the Obama administration had negotiated, which gave us more inspection and more oversight.
Right — which aimed to give us more in inspection and oversight.
But I think it’s really interesting because people are looking at the world in a different way. Ben’s view was that the problems began when President Trump withdrew from this deal, and that led to the Iranians actually accelerating their nuclear program. Whereas President Trump, and many people in the first Trump administration, argued: No, the Iranians weren’t abiding by the deal fully. Inspections weren’t allowed. There were many military facilities that did not allow inspections, and Iran’s fundamental intentions hadn’t changed.
These are different viewpoints. So we’re not going to come to agreement necessarily because the assumptions behind them are different. And as you pointed out, Ezra, we’re beginning this conversation with a sense of different assumptions.
I agree we’re beginning with different assumptions, but I think what I’m actually trying to understand are the assumptions from the Trump administration side.
You mentioned the National Security Strategy of 2025. That document says: “The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests; that is the sole focus of this strategy.”
So, to you, what are America’s core national interests when it comes to Iran?
I’d like to start by talking about the core national interests overall.
Those core interests, when I articulate them this way, I think, would be ones that President Biden and President Obama would have agreed with. Why? Because all presidents want to protect the American homeland. All presidents want to grow American economic prosperity, preserve peace through strength — meaning, essentially, to have a strong military to deter and advance American influence.
I think those interests are actually unchanging. It’s in the interpretation of how you get to those interests.
Obviously, for President Trump, a key part of protecting the homeland was: Shut down the border. That was key to him. Build a missile defense system. Also, in terms of preserving peace through strength, a strong military but also deterrence.
And part of deterrence, and I think part of what President Trump is doing now in his actions, or at least the effect of them, will be a seriously strengthened deterrent posture for the United States. No one is going to think that we’re not going to act when we say we’re going to act. I think he saw it as his mission to restore red lines that had not been respected.
When he had said about two months ago that he was going to back the Iranian protesters, people were very upset because nothing then happened. I think that was in the back of his mind and did not go away — that he didn’t want to be seen years later as criticized in the way that Obama was criticized for not backing the red line when Syria used chemical weapons against its own people.
I think that was always in the back of Trump’s mind. I think he’s sensitive to that.
To get to your point about how there’s consensus on part of this, I think you will find a lot of consensus among Democrats and Republicans that it would be in the national interest of America for Iran not to have nuclear weapons.
As you note, the Obama administration created the J.C.P.O.A. That was their version of trying to pursue that national interest.
The fear many people have — the fear I have — is that when you engage in this bombing campaign, when you destroy the existing government, what can come after it is very unpredictable. And it is outside America’s national interest to have responsibility for an Iran that has descended into civil war, an Iran that might have spaces where terrorist groups are now being formed, an Iran that has created a refugee crisis throughout the Middle East.
It isn’t clear to me how much planning they’ve done for that. It is clear to me that they have not prepared the American people for an extended commitment to that.
I think the surprise many people have had is the sense that Trump, Vance, and other people on that national security team had become very skeptical of what America could achieve through force in countries we did not understand, in countries that were not near us and in countries where we could get bogged down for very long periods of time. I mean, we were in Afghanistan for decades and ended up handing it back to the Taliban.
So I take your point that the national interest is not always that controversial, but on the question of whether force should be used, many people had understood the answer Donald Trump had given to that as: No, do not go messing around in the Middle East and getting yourself engaged in countries where you cannot control outcomes.
But that now appears to be what we are doing. So how do you think they understand that?
Yes, I think what’s happening today is that there was a decision that was made that Iran wasn’t going to change with the current regime. There’s always uncertainty, but fundamentally, Iran’s nuclear program was growing. The International Atomic Energy Agency had said that Iranian enrichment was up to 60 percent, and it’s pretty quick to go to 90 percent.
I think Trump went into the negotiations in good faith. I think he sincerely wanted to avoid this. He likes to negotiate, he wanted to negotiate ——
But he bombed them while negotiating.
He bombed them while negotiating to show them: I mean this. [Chuckles.]
That feels like an alternative to negotiations, not a tactic within them.
Yes. I think if you look, though, at the pattern of negotiations over the years, they haven’t resulted in any fundamental change to the Iranian nuclear program.
And so ultimately the decision was: If Iran’s nuclear weapons were going to pose a threat to the United States, it was better to do something about it now rather than wait until it got to a point where it was imminent.
There are doctrines in war about preventive war. Those decisions are pretty tough if you’re dealing with a problem of a nuclear weapon being targeted at you.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in North Korea ——
But we didn’t have an imminent threat of a nuclear weapon targeted at us. Nobody believes that.
Not now, but the idea was that there was a window of opportunity to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. And that was the decision that was made.
People can and will argue about whether or not that was the right decision. But there is a rationale there, that the Iranian nuclear program was progressing. They had an opportunity to both target the regime and perhaps get a better regime in — we don’t know. And this was a moment where we could decisively do the best we could to destroy the nuclear program and also the ballistic missile threat posed in the region.
I mean, Trump had the four points that have been consistently stated: destroy Iran’s nuclear missile program; reduce the role of it as a regional terrorist actor; remove the Khamenei regime; and then destroy the Iranian Navy.
Those points were articulated from the start.
The thing I’m trying to zoom in on here a little bit is that I think we all agree there are many regimes in the world — and the Iranian regime was one of these — that we don’t like, that are tyrannical, repressive, even murderous to their own citizens, that pose a threat to our allies. I think the threat Iran posed to us was less, but it certainly did pose a threat to Israel.
In an ideal world, we would like to get rid of those regimes. Or we’d like those regimes to change into something that we could work with better. And the reason we don’t do regime change often — and that Donald Trump himself has criticized that — is that when you undergo regime change, what comes after can be very unpredictable, can be dangerous, can lead to tens or hundreds of thousands of people in those countries dying in civil wars. We’ve seen this in Libya. We saw this in Iraq.
So the question I’m asking you isn’t whether or not the Iranian regime was bad or whether or not there was an opportunity to strike it. It was bad. There was an opportunity to strike it ——
And they were developing nuclear weapons, which they have said they would use to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, and threaten the United States.
And people have an argument, as you’ve noted, on whether or not we could have handled that diplomatically.
But we didn’t handle — that’s key, because Trump didn’t believe that we could handle — that diplomacy had ——
I understand Trump didn’t believe, but as you say, Ben and others believed that it was handleable under the J.C.P.O.A.
But I take the premise that you don’t believe it was, and that Trump doesn’t believe it was ——
The I.A.E.A. didn’t believe ——
So the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency just said: “We don’t see a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons.”
But let’s agree we disagree on this. The question I’m asking you is: Regime change poses dangers ——
But we’re not talking about regime ——
They just killed that leader of that country ——
Yes. OK.
We could call it not regime change. I agree that we decapitated the leader as opposed to changing the regime, but we have heavily destabilized that regime.
Trump himself has said:
Archival clip of Trump: Well, most of the people we had in mind are dead. So, you know, we had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming. And pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.
I guess my question is: Are they planning for this? Do we have a theory of events, or have we started something and now we’re just reacting and hoping for the best?
Well, I’m not in the situation room. I’m not in the White House, so I don’t know.
[Chuckles.] Fair enough.
But if you read press reports, I imagine they’re speaking to opposition figures. I don’t know. But there is absolutely a huge amount of uncertainty.
So I don’t know. I’m not inside, in the situation room. But my sense is people are thinking about it pretty carefully.
So your view is that the way to understand this is that within the broad space of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is: Yes, they are skeptical of America getting involved in wars that will lead to the collapse of regimes, and being committed to that, but to them, Iran’s nuclear program was such a distinctive threat that they needed to do this.
Yes.
I think I can understand that. I really worry about this world in which it just doesn’t seem to me we have done the planning or talked to the American people or Congress to get them committed to this plan of action.
How do you think about that dimension of it? Even in the Iraq war, there was a lot more public debate. We had people testifying about how many troops we would need.
In the State of the Union, there were only a couple of sentences on Iran. It feels to me like a larger commitment than the American people were quite prepared for.
Well, I don’t think it’s over. We’ve seen press conferences almost every day by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Archival clip of Pete Hegseth: The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. The mission is laser focused: obliterate Iran’s missiles and drones and facilities that produce them, annihilate its navy and critical security infrastructure and sever their pathway to nuclear weapons. Iran will never possess a nuclear bomb, not on our watch, not ever.
By Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Archival clip of Dan Caine: The operation was, again, launched with clear military objectives designed to dismantle Iran’s ability to project power outside of its borders both today and in the future.
And we’ve seen the president speak and articulate over and over and over his four objectives. So I don’t think it’s over. Congress just debated the war powers resolution.
So I don’t think it’s over. I think it’s unfolding now, and certainly the president talks a lot.
But to go back to the overall discussion here about fundamental shifts in Trump foreign policy, I think they would argue that part of the strikes on Iran illustrate the failure of global institutions to deal with threats — or what they see as threats — to U.S. security.
So it’s a broader critique and a broader set of actions designed to push back on the way that those institutions tend to act or not act.
This actually gets to an argument you’ve made recently that I think is important for thinking about here. You wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs called “The Globalist Delusion.” Tell me about the argument of that piece.
The argument there was that there are two competing ways of looking at the world and how to approach problems in the world. One is a more traditional, globalist approach to those problem sets. Essentially, that means there are global problems that unfold all around the world, and we need global solutions.
There was a phrase that a previous U.N. secretary general used — “problems without passports” — the sense that these problems unfold around the world, whether it’s carbon emissions or migration or poverty, and they happen all around the world, so we need global solutions to those problems.
But there’s another way of looking at the world, which might acknowledge: Sure, there are problems that exist around the world, but the best way to approach them is not with a global mind-set but with a mind-set that puts the state first.
It’s clearly, I think, the proclivity of the Trump administration, both Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, to put the state first as the key operating force in the world.
And to Trump and those around him, that’s a good thing. In the 2025 National Security Strategy, they stated pretty clearly that the nation-state is the primary source of power in the world and of action in the world.
So one argument I’ve heard, which actually feels to me like it’s splitting the right much more than the left, is that they bought this. They are full in on “America First” — we have to put the state first. And they feel that this is less about America’s direct interests than Israel’s direct interests. How do you think about that argument that has seemed to be splitting MAGA?
I think it’s in America’s best interest, also stated interest. And I think the president has made it clear that he sees this in both America’s interest and Israel’s interests.
So then you have this argument that one thing happening when you go through the United Nations is that instead of getting action, what you get is process. You get bureaucracy.
This is a longtime critique of the United Nations. It’s a critique you’re making in the article.
Tell me a little bit about this thinking here. Because even previous Republican presidents — like Bush — certainly made a big show of going to the U.N. and eventually went into Iraq with a “coalition of the willing,” as it got called back then. And different presidents — this happened with Obama, too — would eventually go around it.
But there was a feeling that there was a value in trying to make the case to the international community, trying to bring the international community along. It brought legitimacy, it maybe helped restrain others, created a dimension everybody was supposed to go through.
Why do you say that’s not in America’s interest?
I’m not saying it’s not in America’s interest. I’m saying that there are costs to just doing performative discussions. And essentially, I think Trump is much more willing to call out inaction, consistently doing the same things, and to focus more on outcomes.
So yes, we have an interest in communicating and sharing information with allies and partners, with like-minded nations. But I don’t know that we need to spend a lot of time with Cuba when Cuba is on the Human Rights Council. I mean, I think Trump is just willing to call out many hypocrisies and ask: Well, can’t we do better here?
In many ways, he doesn’t see these institutions as necessary to solving problems. That’s where I think we see some of the differences with our allies and partners.
Our European allies — and I have great European friends and talked to a lot of the European ambassadors — they’re uncomfortable with this in a sense. They start from a premise that we should be working through multilateral global first. I’m generalizing. Generally, that’s their starting point.
Trump’s starting point is not that. It’s: What’s the best way to solve this problem? Maybe it’s two people at the table, maybe it’s three people, but it’s probably not 30.
I think my article really tries to go through and show how, even in terms of the outcomes that global institutions want, the things that are important to them — whether it’s eradication of poverty, food insecurity, climate change — they haven’t worked.
So the article was broader than Trump. I think it’s aligned with Trump’s view of international institutions. But overall, we need a better operating system to get to better solutions.
I was thinking about Trump and his preference for action, which I think is undeniably true to him — and I think in some ways to people is attractive. There’s an upside and a downside to that.
The downside of a lot of process is, of course, you just get weighed down in process, and it happens all the time. The upside of some process — this is why we have deliberative institutions like Congress — is that they do force you to deliberate. They would force you to build support. They would force you to question your assumptions.
Is your sense of America’s immediate interests right? Is your sense of what this might require fully vetted? Have you listened to voices that might know things that you don’t?
To what we were saying earlier, the thing I felt is pretty clear is: Trump made a call here. There has not been a huge amount of scenario planning. They’ve not done a tremendous amount of pre-deliberation. What’s going to happen, they’re now reacting to, and they’re willing to be in this ambiguous, reactive space.
Is there not an upside, certainly to Congress and the American people, in terms of making sure that you have brought enough support for doing something like this and making sure you’ve thought through the things that might happen and you’re not left holding the bag alone, or alone alongside Israel, if things begin to go wrong?
Well, every president since 1973 has said the war powers resolution was unconstitutional. Every single president. No president wanted a constraint on his ability to declare war. And lots of conservative legal scholars, and others, will argue that essentially, Congress has power — it has power of the purse. But it does not — I mean, this is a longstanding constitutional debate that completely predates Trump ——
But past presidents have gone through Congress ——
Some.
Much more significantly than Trump did with Iran. I don’t think that’s arguable.
I mean, I watched Bush in Iraq.
OK, but again, we’re five days into a war.
But Bush did that before he started the war. That’s the point.
Trump absolutely should not have done that before the war. I just disagree.
That’s fine. But then make that case.
Well, the case is that it would have given up huge operational security. The whole point of the strike was to go in before the Iranians knew what was going to happen for operational security reasons, to set the conditions in the best way — that Washington phrase that I don’t like: to “set the table” in the best way — for military success.
I think Trump made the choice he did because he didn’t want to give up that operational security, and the timing was so sensitive and so narrow. That’s why I think he made that decision.
The reason I’m pushing on this is that, both with Venezuela and with Iran, he’s making decisions to go very fast before he has built support among the American people or Congress.
That is a change in the way America is acting. Whether that change is good or bad I think will take time to understand. But that seems like a real change.
He’s willing to take risk, and he’s basically elevating a willingness to take risk over process. If in two years the situation in Venezuela is much better, and the millions of Venezuelans who have left their homeland go back, will people say that’s a mistake? Probably not.
In addition, he is speaking to the American people. Trump is on TV. He’s giving press conferences. The Department of War is on TV. They’re explaining what’s happening. They’re explaining the course of action. They’re explaining military targets, goals. It’s happening.
So, in general, you really don’t believe there’s a role for Congress before these conflicts?
I believe the president can make a case directly to the American people, and Congress’s role is the power of the purse.
So the case for Congress is, once we have gone to war, if they don’t like it, they can remove the money?
Congress does not have a constitutional role in the declaration of war. Congress has a role in cutting off funds for wars, which it has threatened to do. And the president doesn’t have to get permission.
But yes, you can debate, you can decide. That’s his choice in how he wants to do it.
I mean, here I will quote the Constitution: “The Congress shall have power to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water.”
“The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy,” but it is Congress that has the power “to declare war.”
Constitutionally, Congress has the power to declare war. But the issue is whether or not a president who deploys military force abroad needs to do so only after having Congress declare war.
There are arguments by constitutional lawyers — which I’m not — like Robert Turner and John Yoo, who argue that the issue has to do with the term “declaration” and what was meant by “declare” versus the president’s ability to deploy U.S. forces around the world, which U.S. presidents have done, like, 200 times, depending on when you start looking — hundreds, at least dozens and dozens and dozens of times — without a declaration of war.
The issue is more: Does the president have to go to Congress every time he deploys U.S. forces? And the debate is about what constitutes a “declaration” of war versus a deployment of U.S. troops or the use of U.S. military force abroad.
What, to you, is Congress’s role in war? Congress does have the right to declare war.
Congress’s fundamental role in war is that it has the power of the purse, and it controls the money that you need to execute wars. And that’s really, really powerful.
Having said that, Congress often does not want to cut American soldiers off from funding. I understand that. It was part of the post-Vietnam debacle of cutting money off completely, and a lot of people are very critical of that and say that the outcome that we ended up with was partly because we couldn’t support the government that we had put in and that all the money was cut off.
So Congress in the past has used that power of the purse to affect the outcomes of war, and Congress itself can be a forum for discussion if a president so uses it. But the president is not obliged to go to Congress to ask for a declaration of war.
I take your point that, obviously, presidents of both parties for a long time have done deployment of U.S. forces and application of force without declarations of war. You get into this, like: What is a war, really?
Right, right.
I think the reason I am pushing on this is that it feels to me that there is wisdom in bringing the American people along into a war that they’re going to have to fund and fight.
Forget cutting the U.N. out of it. When you cut Congress and the public out of it — for something that can be quite significant — going to war in Iran is not a small thing, and I don’t think we just did a little strike. We’re being told there are multiple weeks of bombing coming, and we’re being told that Donald Trump is open to boots on the ground. Doing that without the public being significantly consulted, which would typically happen through Congress — I wonder about its wisdom.
I take that declaration of war power to be there in the Constitution for a reason. This was not a little strike on a terrorist cell. This is America decapitating a foreign regime and possibly taking responsibility for what comes next.
I think there should be an explanation to the American people of what the president is doing and intends to do. But I actually think that is going on now.
Maybe our difference is the formality of going through Congress and how to actually do that. Do you go to Congress and do another type of State of the Union? Maybe that’s probably something that you would prefer.
I think I would prefer that he makes the case and tries to bring the American people into what they are getting into. To me, we’re not talking about a formality. I care less about the literal declaration than I do about the fact that we’re committed to a war that feels like it’s going to escalate and that there was not a significant deliberation of that in the United States.
Yes. But I think, traditionally, that deliberation — the nuts and bolts deliberation — happens at the White House in the situation room.
I think the discussion and the rationale for the strikes were articulated over and over.
I can see your point, Ezra, that explaining those, going to Congress more — I can see your point of view. But I think it’s not unconstitutional to do that. I think it’s the president’s choice.
And it’s important to note, again, I think there have been five declarations of war in American history — very few. None since 1941. So I think it’s a problem and a source of tension that we’ve seen for many, many years.
My understanding, just from reading the news reports, is that Secretary Marco Rubio did go to the Hill. There’s the Gang of Eight, and he did speak with them.
But I think there is a difficult tension between explaining too much of what you’re going to do before you do it, and then risking operational security, which really does risk American lives. And I don’t think the dialogue is over. I think that the longer we’re in this, the more those conversations should be had and explanations should be given. I think the American people are due that.
So what do you see as the downsides of this strategy, where we are moving in and sort of decapitating regimes without a lot of public debate beforehand? Is there a downside to it? Or is this just something that past presidents should have done but didn’t?
No, of course there’s uncertainty. But if you flip it and say: What is the downside to a nuclear Iran? What is the downside to the continuing strength of drug cartels? My understanding and my interpretation is he’s willing to take risks to set conditions now, to put the United States in a better place going forward. He’s willing to take those risks.
In addition, he is, de facto, hugely increasing deterrence, I think, in terms of China, in terms of Russia, in terms of putting what people call the axis of aggressors on their heels. And who knows? In several years, we might be in a position where people say: OK, suddenly we’re facing a much weakened axis of aggressors. It looks totally different than it did a year ago.
One thing I definitely agree with you about is that he’s very willing to take risks, and he is willing to absorb risk in a way that other presidents are not. So if you were in the situation room around the National Security Council, as you’ve been in the past, how would you have thought about the risks here?
You’ve talked about the pros, that we could get rid of the Iranian nuclear program and either topple or create a more pliable regime there. What would you worry about? What are you currently, as a foreign policy person, worried about?
Well, there’s always uncertainty in war. So I am worried, even when we do get the briefings on TV, that there’s a sense of absolute certainty. Because war, as everyone knows, and as the famous theorists say, there’s always friction. There’s always uncertainty. So you don’t know.
Yes, I personally would worry more about the postwar planning and thinking about it. I wrote a book about that called “War and the Art of Governance,” which looked at about 15 case studies of America’s military interventions and how we always had to deal with problems of political instability and stabilization — or not. So I personally would want to think about that.
But I don’t know that they’re not. And in the end, if the risk is higher of inaction rather than action — and clearly the White House thought that, that’s why they chose to go forward.
We don’t know what’s going to happen in Iran. Things are playing out now. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the other populations. But in the end, the question is: Is the regime going to be as terrible as the previous regime? We don’t know.
What are some of the lessons of the book you wrote, as you looked across those different interventions?
I argued that, basically, the U.S. military, whenever it had boots on the ground, essentially always had to deal with problems of political stabilization and economic reconstruction — consistently. They didn’t want to — the Army never wanted to — so there was never actually great planning for it.
But there were periods in American history where we did do more planning, and actually, those cases are well known, in the World War II cases. So Germany, Japan, South Korea and, lesser known, Italy. We were very involved in postwar Italy at the time. Without American involvement, the Communists would have taken over Italy, so there was very deep political involvement.
But these activities were always seen as what we call operations other than war. They were never consistently seen as a part of war.
So I just looked at consistent lessons and themes and a consistent set of problems we dealt with. Which is probably why they are very wary about putting boots on the ground, because we would end up probably having to deal with a lot of those problems.
I think Trump’s view is that he has figured out a way to do this without boots on the ground. He certainly did that in Venezuela and was able to identify a successor to Maduro, whom we seem to have a lot of influence over. And I think, certainly, his hope was to do this without boots on the ground.
Do you think he’s right that we can do it without boots on the ground?
Well, I would be very surprised if he changed his mind about that. I would be very, very surprised.
But the question is: Can we shape the next government of Iran without boots on the ground? I don’t know. I think there are a lot of things we can do, and others can do, in supporting other forces in Iran. And we probably should be doing those things to support the good forces — the better forces — in Iran.
What would those things look like?
Everything from providing the ability to communicate, Starlink, to providing economic resources as needed.
And there’s a whole host of things, probably, in the intelligence domain and nonintelligence domain: working with other allies and partners in the region, the Gulf states, which now seem to be pretty upset at Iran. So I think there are a lot of things.
I think the question is: The Persians are about 60 percent of the Iranian population. So there are other significant populations. And what happens? I don’t know what will happen.
I think many of us are worried about a scenario like what happened with the Kurds in 1991, where America exhorted them to rise up and take back their government and take down Saddam Hussein after we had weakened his regime in bombings. And he slaughtered them.
And right now, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and others have the weaponry in that country. Even if we were giving people Starlink internet access and giving them some intelligence sharing, the idea that unarmed, fractured opposition and ethnic movements could rise up against a very, very heavily armed state structure now fighting desperately to hold on to power certainly seems to raise the possibility of absolutely, horrible violence.
How do you think about that?
Well, it happened with the number of Iranians dying in December and January. Those are the figures. It happened under Obama. Many American presidents previously have exhorted the Iranian people to rise up, and the Iranian people have been slaughtered.
So there is a chance now that, with a significantly weakened regime, there could be a different outcome. I still don’t think American boots should be on the ground in Iran, but there are different ways to orchestrate a better political outcome.
We have decided as a country not to really do the governance stuff well or very well, whether it’s impossible or not. But I think the point of my book was to show that we haven’t, as a country, after those World War II cases, decided that we want to really think about this in a consistent way that would give us a better chance of helping good forces in particular countries.
What do you think it means for American interests if you have a scenario where you have a kind of fractured — maybe not even civil war scenario but violence and parts of the regime trying to maintain power, a lot of fighting in the streets?
We don’t want to put boots on the ground. Is chaos in Iran, in the way that we saw in, say, Libya, because as you mentioned, this has happened in other ——
Right. Well, Libya is a perfect example.
How would you think about that from the perspective of American interests or conservative realism?
Well, from a purely humanitarian perspective, it’s not in anyone’s interest. You have a lot of Libyans who died. You’ve had migrants who have gone to Europe. You’ve seen total disruption for strikes that went in and led to chaos — and continued to have these ripple effects and chaos.
I don’t think America wants to see that. I think for Israel, it’s a different situation.
But in the end, if Iran’s military capabilities are degraded to such an extent that Iran does not present the kind of threat that it has presented to Israel and the U.S. in the past — especially to Israel, but also, to other states in the region — then it becomes a humanitarian kind of disaster. But Iran is a degraded military power that will take a long, long time to regroup, especially if we continue to be what seems to be pretty successful in removing their ballistic missile launchers and continuing to strike their key military targets.
So it’s unfortunate. No one wants to see prolonged chaos. But it’s also not guaranteed. There could be opportunities for a better outcome, more stability, maybe more involvement by the Gulf states in helping that stability emerge. They should be thinking about this and planning, too, and thinking about what a better outcome would look like.
I want to talk a little bit more about the international law dimension of this. Even if it were not all Trump’s fault, the assumption was that you will not have great powers breaching each other’s borders. You will not have things like Russia invading Ukraine and America taking out the Venezuelan and Iranian leaderships.
And we’re moving into something else.
In your view, what are we moving into? If the old order is dying, what is being born?
I think we’re moving into a period that recognizes that much of the old order was quite limited in what it could accomplish. And if you don’t actually achieve outcomes across a range of areas that improve the lives of people, you end up creating cynicism, especially for democracies. So I think we’re moving toward a period in which there’s a recognition that you have to begin at the state level.
I’m not against building coalitions. I think you do, but you build coalitions with like-minded allies and partners, keeping open the option of increasing that pool and working on problems together. So we’re moving from a period that doesn’t default to a global approach, a global groupthink.
And that’s hard, because there are many, many vested interests in that architecture. We went from a U.N. that was about 15 organizations to hundreds today. These are expansive entities that are not fundamentally democratic in the sense that it’s very hard to have recourse.
That’s part of the frustration that many Europeans are feeling. That’s why you see the rise of populism in Europe and huge frustration with the bureaucracy of the E.U., with their voices not being heard. It’s a sense that it’s back to this principle of subsidiarity, where you go and try to solve problems at the local level.
And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing for democracies, because most democracies want to improve not only the lives of their own citizens, but they also do care about other citizens.
Aren’t we also moving away from a world with rules?
One question I often hear, and one question I wonder about, as Vladimir Putin said: The government of Ukraine is corrupt. It’s full of Nazis. It poses a danger to Russia, and we need to take it out. And that’s how he justified his invasion of Ukraine.
We are saying: The government of Iran is bad and dangerous. I believe it actually is bad and dangerous. But we didn’t go to the U.N. to try to convince other people of that or anything of that nature.
If China says: Hey, look, the government of Taiwan poses a threat to us or is plotting against us — are we not just moving into, the way Mark Carney put it, paraphrasing Thucydides: “The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must”?
But that’s happening anyway. The U.N. didn’t constrain Russia. The U.N. doesn’t constrain that kind of power. This argument is recognizing that.
It goes back to our original discussion, recognizing that’s just a fact. The U.N. is not going to constrain China. What’s going to constrain China, if it decides to take Taiwan, is deterrence — all the stuff that we’re trying to build up, at least a decade of serious consideration of how to deter China from doing that.
It doesn’t mean that you don’t have discussions and bilateral negotiations, but having these expectations that the U.N. can really do a lot in that domain, I think, ends up just not being realized and then creates a certain type of cynicism and also tends to empower Russia to do more. Their mind is not going to be changed by the United Nations, and wasn’t.
So you don’t buy what some people say, which is that in the aftermath of the world wars, these various multilateral institutions, from the U.N. to the E.U. and NATO, were actually successful in reducing the amount of cross-border conflicts, of nations invading each other?
Yes, it didn’t prevent everything, but I do think there’s good evidence that this became less of a normal part of human and international affairs than it was.
In some ways, it spoke to the success of that regime, that what Russia did with Ukraine wasn’t just considered the normal state of things, that strong countries invade weaker countries. It was understood as a profound violation of international law that we then assembled a large group of other countries to impose sanctions and to try to impose a cost on this.
And the fear is that a world where you wipe out even something imperfect acts as a license for this to become the typical sequence and typical expectations. And that does matter.
No, I’m not arguing that the U.N. should go away. Absolutely not. But I think the institution, as it evolved from 1945, let’s say 20 to 30 years out — it’s a large sprawling bureaucracy.
And it’s not just the U.N. There’s the W.H.O. It’s more of a global-first approach toward solving problems. The U.N. should exist as a forum for discussion, for information sharing. But I would argue that what was really key to preserving peace, in Europe, at least, was NATO.
And NATO is exactly the kind of organization that we should be supporting. More of these regionally-focused bodies and alliances, where you actually have some skin in the game, you’re putting money into it. Now the Europeans are putting more money into NATO, creating actual capabilities, and I think that happens more at the state level.
So I think we would be better off refining, reducing, peeling back a lot of those layers, looking at more of the essentials, but having much less hope that you can actually get significant operational impacts from these organizations.
I want to end on what often seems to me to be the very fundamental disagreement in foreign policy, which is what makes America strong.
Is American strength a direct product of our capability for deterrence, of our weaponry, of our ability to project force? Is it a product of our ability to work with other countries inside a global order in which we are the strongest player, to organize large groups of countries in our interests and have rules that favor us? Is it both?
What, in your view, makes America strong?
Well, what makes America strong is our republic. Freedom, liberty, what we stand for, what we are as a country.
We are the greatest country in the world. We are flawed. We have problems. But I truly believe we are the greatest country in the world, and that’s what is the core of American strength: our Constitution, our standing up for liberty, for freedom.
I mean, Americans give more in terms of humanitarian aid than any other polity in the world. Americans are generous. But combined with that, what makes our country great are certain capabilities to ensure that we can protect that greatness over time. Some of that is very much military power. Economic strength, too.
All of those things make America great, but it does start from what we are as a country, which I believe in.
Then always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
They’re not in any order, not in terms of publication. Although I am reading right now a book that I think was published two years ago by Robert Zoellick called “America in the World.”
It’s a great book about America’s diplomatic history. And it’s nice because each chapter is short, so for those of you who like to read 10 pages before bed, it’s perfect. You can actually feel like you’ve accomplished something.
But it’s really also pertinent to the 250-year celebrations we’re having. You learn about all of the diplomatic successes we’ve had. And I am struck by how much of it early on is really about bespoke going to countries and personalities. I think Zoellick, in the beginning, talks about the importance of personalities and emotion, and it’s obviously quite relevant to today, where we see difficult personalities and a lot of emotion.
A second book I just took back from my bookshelf because of Peru was “The Mystery of Capital” by Hernando de Soto. I think it’s also interesting to remind us of some perpetual problems in the Western Hemisphere — the tension between socialism and capitalism — and Hernando de Soto specifically speaks about the importance of titles to land. So it’s about private property, ownership and some of the foundations of what makes capitalism work.
And then, third, “The Peacemaker,” the Reagan biography by William Inboden, because also, just to understand, Trump invokes Reagan a lot: “Peace through strength.” Although actually, “peace through strength” was, I learned, first a Nixon phrase, which then Reagan used and now Trump is using.
So those are three books. And then a fourth, a fiction book that I loved this summer, is “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver. I love that book.
Nadia Schadlow, thank you very much.
Thank you Ezra. Pleasure to be here.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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