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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on why American progressives seem to have abandoned the fight against climate change. He wonders if, after Trumpism is defeated, Americans can go back to solving issues that really matter.
Then, David is joined by his Atlantic colleague Vivian Salama to discuss the negotiations between Iran and the United States. David and Vivian talk about the fallout from the now-signed memorandum of understanding between the two countries, both in the United States and across the Middle East.
Finally, David ends the show with a discussion of Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be my colleague at The Atlantic, Vivian Salama, and we will be discussing the strange aftermath of Donald Trump’s war and weird peace in the Persian Gulf and with Iran. The book this week will be a novel, Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett: a novel about a hostage-taking based on real events, with an ending that both shocked and disturbed me. And I’ll be talking about the reasons for my shock and disturbance in the final segment. But I want to open with some thoughts about something that is very much not in the news.
We have had a spring of intense emotion and intense activity: the war with Iran, marches, Israel-Palestine, so many issues, battles inside the Democratic Party. And as all of this has unfolded, I find myself thinking, often, Whatever happened to climate change? Do you remember that? It used to be a big deal, climate change. It used to be an issue that formed the basis of political parties. It was supposed to be the reorganizing form of all of our politics. When President Obama described his hopes for his administration back in 2009, he hoped that this would be the moment when climate change would cease to unfold. And here it is, deep into the 21st century, long after Al Gore made his movie An Inconvenient Truth, that put this issue so much on the national agenda, and especially so much on the agenda of forward-thinking people and liberals and progressives. It’s just gone. Gone.
Now, the process of climate change has not stopped. It continues to unfold: a little more slowly and less catastrophically than people feared a quarter century ago, but remorselessly it continues to go. And we are on our way, definitely, to a warming world. And yet the issue is completely dropped from our politics.
Now, it’s not hard to explain why this has happened. You can see the explanations. First, climate change delivered surprisingly little political payoff to either party that undertook the issue. Environmental issues generally appeal most strongly to people who have a little bit of leeway in their lives, a little bit of margin of error. If you’re worrying about how you’re going to pay the next rent bill, you don’t have a lot of mental energy to think about longer-term problems. Your problems are so pressing. It’s people with a little bit more comfort who think about environmental issues. And when people with a little bit more comfort are the swing group in American politics, as they were when environmental issues mattered so much in the 1970s, then environmental issues are ways to move those swing voters. But when the people with a little bit more scope, a little bit more room, are locked up inside the Democratic coalition—and the swing group becomes instead more economically hard-pressed, working-class voters, especially male working-class voters—the environmental issues are not going to move them the way they do the people who used to be swing voters but are now locked up in the Democratic coalition. So that’s a reason.
And there’s a second reason that is not so flattering—which is the politics that get people excited are politics with heroes and villains, opportunities to feel strong emotion against other groups of people. I mean, Israel-Palestine is perfect for this, because whichever side is on, you can get really mad at people on the other side. And it is actually people that are on the other side: The other side is people. So if you’re pro-Israel, you get mad at the people who are anti-Israel. If you’re anti-Israel, you get mad at the people who are pro-Israel. It’s very emotionally fulfilling and exciting. But the climate issue has no human villains. Or rather, the human villains of the story are us. Ourselves.
Now, some people have tried to make the oil companies the villain. The fossil-fuel companies did this to us. But that is too obviously far-fetched to believe. The oil companies, the energy companies—they’re just as happy to sell solar panels or windmills or to install electric power stations. They have no attachment to the business that made them grow up. And indeed, many of the companies that have been forward-leaners into the clean-energy space have been the traditional oil companies of the past. They say, We’re here to make a buck. We’re not here to sell oil; we’re here to make a buck. If we can make a buck selling solar panels, we’ll do that. We’re corporations. We don’t have feelings. We don’t have attachments. We don’t have nostalgia.
The reason the climate-change problem is hard is because fossil fuels offer a very accessible way to achieve abundant lifestyles using existing technology. And to make the energy transition that a response to climate change requires means disruption in the lives of all of us. We’ll probably have some costs. We may have higher taxes. We may have to shift from one way of living our lives to another.
Now, in the early part of the climate-change debate, some of the people who got most excited about climate change where people thought, Right, this is an opportunity to force down standards of living, to make us all live more threadbare and frugal lives. There are some people who find that very exciting, but they’re not very numerous. For most of us, the question was: How do we make an energy transition at reasonable cost? And that’s a technical problem. That’s a policy problem. That doesn’t have clear villains. And, or rather, as I say, if there are villains, the villains are us, who are used to a certain way of life and are reluctant to change it and don’t want to have to pay anything more to pay for the transition from gasoline-powered automobiles to cars that run on electricity that is supplied by a non-climate-changing source, like nuclear power or wind power or solar power. It also means that, again, we may have to pay higher taxes along the way to finance the transition.
Lacking clear villains, lacking clear heroes, the policy is not very emotionally satisfying. But that doesn’t make it any less compelling. And one of my bitternesses about what has happened to American politics over the past 10 years is that the completely unnecessary debate we’ve had—about Should America be a democracy or not? Should the president take bribes or not?—has distracted us from solving problems that are not as emotionally exciting, but are really urgently compelling to our survival as a species. Like: How do we sustain the livelihoods of billions of human beings without destroying the planet in ways, or harming the planet in ways, that make future livelihoods difficult for the next generation or next two generations of human beings? That’s a problem worth worrying about. And yet, we seem to have lost all interest in doing the worrying.
I dearly hope that—along with the many other pieces of unfinished business that have been neglected over the past decade of so much trauma over so little justification—when we get through to the to the next chapter, whatever it is, we can resume caring about things that really matter, that’ll make huge differences, and that future generations will be quite impatient with us for neglecting. Climate change is one. It’s not the only one, but it’s the one that we are in danger not of needing to discover, but in danger of having forgotten.
And now my dialogue with Vivian Salama.
[Music]
Frum: Vivian Salama came to The Atlantic as a staff writer in 2025, after seven years at The Wall Street Journal, where she covered the White House and broke stories ranging from Donald Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland to his combative phone calls with foreign leaders. Before that, she was the Associated Press’s Baghdad bureau chief during the rise of the Islamic State. A graduate of Rutgers and Columbia, she also earned a law degree at Georgetown before embarking on a career of reporting from some of the world’s most dangerous and hostile places, now including Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C.
Vivian, welcome to The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Vivian Salama: It’s so great to be with you.
Frum: Let’s do a review, first starting in Washington and then going around the region, about what the world looks like in the aftermath of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran ending the conflict—or we hope or trust or imagine ending the conflict that began on February 28. Start with Washington, D.C. The president, the White House, the larger capital: Do you think we’ve sufficiently absorbed the magnitude of what has just happened here? And what has just happened here?
Salama: Well, that actually remains to be seen. There are so many uncertainties and questions, even as, while we are talking, we’re really trying to figure out exactly where this is going to go.
The memorandum of understanding is meant to be a short-term promise to basically implement some long-term agreements. And so it’s an agree-to-agree on certain points. In fact, it’s 14 points in all. And I’ve got to tell you, David—one of the really stark questions that we have going into this is how realistic it is. It is very ambitious. It promises a lot to Iran that some of the president’s own allies really are not happy with, including sanctions relief, total sanctions relief if they scale back their nuclear program, among other things.
And right now there’s this big question hovering about whether or not this is sort of the landmark deal that everybody has hoped for. Forty-seven years of tensions with Iran. JCPOA [the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] aimed to sort of reduce some of those tensions, and it was an imperfect agreement. Even President Biden, who was part of that administration, would say so himself. And so there was constantly this effort: the Republicans and particularly Donald Trump campaigning on this notion that JCPOA was flawed because of the fact that it offered sunset clauses—temporary expiration dates for some of the clauses—and that it somehow did not work. I mean, that was really at the core of the argument: that JCPOA did not work and Iran has still been a belligerent actor in the region for too long.
Now, I want to remind your viewers and listeners that President Trump actually pulled out of the JCPOA in his first term. And really, the rapid enrichment of uranium that we saw in Iran took place in the years that followed. And so this question of: Was JCPOA flawed, and did that make Iran a dangerous actor? Was it the fact that we pulled out of the JCPOA that basically gave them free rein to do whatever they want? I think most objective people would tell you it was both. It was an imperfect agreement. And also, withdrawing from the agreement didn’t help. Strengthening the agreement would have been the more ideal solution.
And so now, President Trump argues that they are starting from scratch. But I think he goes into this now, months after this conflict began, way more realistic about how fraught with challenges this issue is. How difficult it is to get Iran to comply. But also, to undo the bad blood that has accumulated not just in the last four months but in the last 47 years.
On top of everything else, President Trump is now talking about the fact that everyone else has nuclear energy in that region, so why not Iran as well? And so he seems to be even stepping back from some of the biggest issues that he had with Iran going into this.
Frum: Let me test a thesis on you. That the United States with Israel went to war—open war, because there’s been conflict forever—but open war with Iran in February in response to a bunch of things: President Trump’s promise in January to help the Iranian people, who had just risen up against the regime and been killed in the thousands and maybe the tens of thousands; his determination to put a final, permanent, total end to the Iranian nuclear program; his desire to impose American will on Iran to be a better actor in the region, maybe to achieve some kind of regime change. The United States threw everything it had at Iran. Air power, naval power—not everything, because we didn’t use land forces—but air and naval power in a campaign that cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And at the end of the campaign, Iran still had a capable military missile and drone program. And Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a completely predictable action. The United States tried to force the opening and failed.
So the thesis is: The United States lost this war on the battlefield. It did not achieve any of the things it set out to do. And not just a strategic defeat, but an operational defeat—because it couldn’t force open the Strait of Hormuz, the predictable Iranian response. It couldn’t control Iranian missile and drone activity. The United States lost the war. It’s now struck a very disadvantageous peace. The interim agreement is bad enough because it gives Iran all kinds of flows of money, sanctions relief with which it can rebuild, whether or not it ever gets the promised land of $300 billion. And this war leaves the United States a much diminished actor, not only in the region, but in the world. What do you think?
Salama: Well, I mean it really depends on whether or not this agreement actually turns into a final, long-lasting deal. In theory, it promises the world to Iran. And it could really pull Iran into this new era of … collegiality is the word that comes to mind, but that’s not the right word. Just in terms of, you know, operating as a nation that approaches negotiations or deals with its neighbors with goodwill.
Frum: Do you believe that at all?
Salama: No.
Frum: So when they say, What we’re doing is we’re withdrawing; we’re ending the war; we’ve failed to meet our objectives; we’re giving them a bunch of sanctions relief up front; and we’re doing all this in order to indulge a fantasy of transformation that obviously isn’t going to happen. That’s what defeat looks like, doesn’t it?
Salama: It is definitely what the Republicans view defeat as looking like. And the problem here is that all of this comes couched with, or in the same breath, as them actually acknowledging that there is no trust on both sides. The U.S. doesn’t trust Iran, and Iran doesn’t trust the U.S. And that’s pretty common when you have adversaries trying to strike peace, write treaties. A lot of bad blood goes into it, and even though they’re agreeing that you can’t sort of wash away decades of hostilities.
That being said, they are almost bracing themselves for potential failure. And what failure looks like is: The Iranians could not open the strait, the Iranians could not try to scale back its proxies, the Iranians could still engage in warfare in terms of hitting Gulf allies and its neighbors, or hitting Israel for that matter. All of those things—not to mention, of course, pursuing a nuclear program in secret if it tried to and wanted to—all of those things would be deal-breakers. And yet, there is no one I talk to in the administration or out of the administration that thinks that Iran will not try to engage in at least one, if not all of those.
And so the question then becomes: How can you be serious about this, when you are openly admitting the fact that you believe that Iran will renege on everything that you’re talking about? I mean, how do you take them seriously? And they keep on saying, Well, if they don’t do it, we’re just gonna go back to bombing.
Frum: Yeah. But look, they have this way of talking. And you have better sources. I don’t really have much in the way of sources. You have great sources, and you’re a great reporter.
Salama: You know a lot of people, David.
Frum: [Chuckles.] But the Trump people are going around town saying, Well, we hope for the best. We don’t know. Look at the agreement. There are many details. And I just keep thinking—do you remember that James Thurber cartoon of two men fencing, and one has had his head completely cut off and the head is sort of spinning through the air on its way to the earth, and the head says something on the way down because it doesn’t know that the head has been cut off? That’s what these people seem to me like. That they have just started a war, lost it—lost it not only at the negotiating table, but lost it on the battlefield. And they’re pretending to others and, frighteningly, maybe even pretending to themselves, that they have not just suffered an ignominious defeat on every point—including starting on the battlefield, where they couldn’t suppress the Iranian missiles, couldn’t deal with the drones, couldn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. They lost the war. That’s why they’re losing the negotiations.
Salama: I mean, David, and even before that, I remember early in the war, talking to a British official, and this person was like, Even the most junior analyst in the basement of our foreign office would have told you that the Iranians are going to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz. And yet we have seen no action from the Trump administration to preemptively try to stop that. It was all reactionary. Why were they not prepared for the inevitable action by Iran of closing the Strait of Hormuz? Where at least, if this war were to go on, we could have minimized some of the economic pain, in particular for the constituents that will be going to the polls in November—not to reduce it all to elections. But if there’s nothing else but politically minded people operating, then why wouldn’t they at least try to minimize the electoral pain that they would feel, while also trying to accomplish something really incredible in the Middle East through this bombing campaign?
Frum: During the hostage crisis of 1979–80, when the Iranian regime took 50-plus Americans hostage, the Carter administration planned a series of military contingencies back in the spring of 1980, and including a major war. They planned that. And back then, in the spring of 1980, they said, Well, the Iranian counter-move is the Strait of Hormuz. Do you have an answer? And there are answers; they’re just very expensive.
And I think what happened to the Trump administration is they didn’t make any appeal to public opinion. They didn’t get a vote in Congress. They said, We are going to do a war, we’re going to do it completely solo, with Israel as our only ally, and some regional clients, but they won’t contribute much. And we’re going to do all of this because it’ll be so quick, and it’ll be over before anybody knows it.
Salama: They thought they’d bring them to their knees so quickly with the bombing campaign.
Frum: We won’t need the support of the American people. And so the thing that a different president might have done—I mean, every president since Carter has thought about a war with Iran, and has had options and papers and planning. And every president has considered it, because the Iranian behavior has been so aggressive and so egregious for so long. And the reason they always don’t do it is because they say, When I go up in front of Congress and say that the Strait of Hormuz will close, gas prices will be elevated for four months, six months, eight months, a year. Yeah, I say: I don’t know how to give that speech. I don’t know the American people will accept it. So I don’t do it.
Trump said, Well, let me just bypass the whole asking-for-permission phase. [Laughs.] And then, This war will be over in a week. And then when it wasn’t, he was stuck—because it wasn’t that they hadn’t planned it; it was that they didn’t believe the plans that are in massive, you know, computer files all over the Pentagon. As you say, in the British government, everyone has thought about this. They just chose not to believe it, because they’re arrogant and stupid.
Salama: And President Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with how this has played out. You know, on the one hand, his advisers believed that this would be over, maximum, within six weeks. And we’re four months in now, with hopefully a resolution in sight, but there’s no guarantees. He has seen the economic pain that the country has gone through. And although he sometimes brushes it off, he recognizes that it definitely has had not only an impact at the pumps; you know, inflation is starting to show signs. And he obviously made that comment a couple of days ago where he talked about “I love inflation,” sort of a flippant comment. He’s frustrated. And I hear it from his advisers constantly that he’s trying to push his advisers to understand why this happened, why it went so badly. Why we shouldn’t. Why couldn’t we just defeat them? We have the greatest military in the world. Why are the Iranians still fighting us? Why are they still shooting drones at us? And this is something that has really aggravated him. It’s also woken him up to the consequences. And so, in part because of that, you see the vice president as now being the face of this negotiation.
Frum: Yeah. But unfortunately, in the interim since February, they haven’t grown any less arrogant and any less stupid, because there isn’t a resolution. I think this is part of it that I am most puzzled by—whether they understand this war. They did not in fact open the Strait of Hormuz. What everyone knows, now, is the Iranians can close the Strait of Hormuz any time they want to, and the United States can’t make them undo it. Before this war, that was a mystery. Could the Iranians close the Strait of Hormuz? What would happen if they did? What would the Americans do in reply? And because of that state of uncertainty, Iran was somewhat deterred. Now, the Iranians, everybody knows the answer. Iran can do it; the United States can’t stop it. Iran has won. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States has accepted that. And that is surrender. That is defeat.
And I am really quite alarmed that it’s not just salesmanship that the administration says, We’ve got a deal—but they genuinely don’t understand the dumb thing they’ve done, and how much worse off the United States is than it was on the 27th of February. Arrogance, stupidity, and the inability to realize that your wallet is gone. And they’re gonna be reaching for that wallet to pay the dinner bill, and they haven’t got it because they gave it to the Iranians in front of the eyes of the whole world, and everyone knows that except them.
Salama: Well, there’s also an alarming naivete in the sort of response that they give in the “what if.” So what if Iran violates this agreement? What if Iran goes back to enriching, or goes back to using its proxies or whatever? And they say: Then we will go back to bombing. But the fact of the matter is they started to run out of kinetic targets months ago. And I was hearing that from some of the U.S. negotiating team, from people in the White House. Where they were saying that they are being forced to shift their focus from military targets—I mean, there’s not none, but there are few left that would actually really make a dent in the Iranian capabilities.
And so they kept on saying they’re running out of kinetic targets. And so, economic warfare is where they were taking things. They wanted to inflict pain on the Iranian regime through economic warfare, which is why we saw the blockade of the strait and other measures taken. A couple of added sanctions, even though there’s very tough sanctions on Iran already. And so they were running out of options to punish Iran for its actions. And so that’s the other alarming aspect of this, is: That if all of this falls apart, we go back to war.
Frum: They’re not going to go back to war. Everyone knows that. And the fact that they’re trying—would try to—sell a report on the idea, Well, we might go back to war—
Salama: Right. And obviously, just to remind people, this is also the president that very adamantly campaigned on the fact that we would not engage in forever wars. Right now they insist that this is not a forever war. It’s a couple of months. He said, Hey, you gotta be patient with me. It’s taking a little longer than I thought. But unfortunately, absent any real breakthroughs here, we are coming into a very long-term cycle of warfare.
Frum: Tell me—let’s shift the camera a little bit to the area where you’ve worked so hard and at so much risk: the Persian Gulf region and the greater Middle East. How, in your estimation, does the outcome look from a Saudi point of view, from an Emirati point of view, from a Qatari point of view, from the point of view of other governments in the region?
Salama: Almost as soon as the text of the agreement started to circulate, I started hearing from Gulf officials. In particular because there’s a clause in there that talks about this $300 billion fund for reconstruction of Iran, and it says regional actors will contribute to it. And I heard from Saudi officials, I heard from Qatari officials and Emirati officials, who were like: Hell no. We are not going to be funding any reconstruction. They are absolutely dreaming. And I said, Didn’t they consult with you guys before putting this in? And they said, No; we haven’t seen any of this text. This is the first time we’re seeing it. They said, We’ve been consulted in the process, but we haven’t seen the text.
And so that was actually a surprise to a lot of them. And they are adamantly refusing. They were refusing to take part in this war to begin with. If you recall back in February, when the discussions about possibly launching war on Iran began, Gulf allies who are host to U.S. bases not only insisted they didn’t want to take part in the war, not only insisted that the U.S. not use the bases in their countries as launching points for this war—some of them even were reluctant to allow flyover rights for U.S. military jets, because they did not want to be seen as assisting the U.S. or Israel in this war.
And so you flash forward. They came to a point where, in the first couple of weeks, soon Ayatollah Khamenei was killed, and they were really taking out the senior leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The Gulf countries I spoke to, and my senior sources there, were like: Okay, look; it’s begun. At this point, there’s no turning back. And at this point, they need to just finish this. They need to make sure that that nuclear program is decimated. They need to make sure that the really, really radical leadership is gone.
And amazingly enough, now we’re flash forwarding a couple months. Much of that hasn’t changed. The Gulf allies still believe that Iran, while weakened, it is still a threat to their countries. The Persian Gulf is not big. They believe that the Ayatollah, the mullahs, are still capable of dictating and really wreaking havoc in the region. They also believe that there’s probably deeper grievances against them, because they were seen. Even though they were hit very hard, even though they were seen as not wanting to get involved in this, they believe that the Iranian government sees them as sort of an extension of the U.S. and Israel.
The Emiratis, who are probably the most hawkish of all the Gulf countries, actually feel like enough wasn’t done, that they still want to see more leadership taken out. And this is one of the big concerns that even Republican hawks have. You know, they share the Emiratis’ view where they say: You have very similar circumstances to Venezuela here, where we do not have regime change happen. And the same players are still involved. And then if the same players are still involved, especially in the case of Iran, you have the same destabilization force and the same potential for no change in behavior. And so, again, we went through all of this.
I interviewed Vice President [J. D.] Vance a few days ago, before we’re sitting here talking. It was in connection to his book, but I threw in a couple of non-book-related questions right before we hung up the phone. And one of the things I asked him, I said: You were obviously the biggest skeptic. And yet here we are, we are on the cusp of having a deal. Was it worth it? Was the economic pain worth it? Was the decimation of U.S. munitions worth it? Even the losses of lives of the service members that were killed, was it worth it to you? And he said, Sorry, I gotta go. And he hung up the phone. [Laughs.] It was the end of the call.
Frum: Yeah. Well, I salute him for that, as that’s not an outright lie. That’s an evasion of the question. It wasn’t just that the United States paid a lot of money. It was that it was beaten. It was beaten. Four dozen aircraft, some of them manned. As you say, the service members dead. And the Iranians. And the question was: Would Iran still be shooting? Who was shooting last? And the United States gave up on this war with the Iranians still shooting. And the United States gave up on this war with the Iranians in control of the Strait of Hormuz, and with a treaty that leaves them forever in effective control of the Strait of Hormuz. Do the regional governments know that? They must.
Salama: They know that the Iranians are still, yeah—that the Iranians are still somewhat empowered.
Frum: How does this look from the Israeli point of view? The Israelis pushed the war, invited the United States into the war, but they then became in a position of dependency on the United States. The Americans have abandoned them, and President Trump is now saying one disagreeable thing about the Israelis after another, and about [Benjamin] Netanyahu personally. They must feel left in the lurch as much or more than anybody in the Persian Gulf.
Salama: I would say that more than the Iranians right now, the Israelis are the wild card in this equation. And that is because the administration, while it has really pressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adhere to the terms in terms of a cease-fire—but also remember the text includes Lebanon as well, where the Israelis have launched not only strikes but have taken territory in the south—that they are trying to rein him in and try to build on the cease-fire with maybe a more lasting peace.
But they offer the caveat that this does not include, first of all, withdrawal from Lebanon, and this does not include Israel fighting back in self-defense. And so that, for me, leaves a major question mark. Because the entire premise of Israel launching this war was because Netanyahu argued that it was in self-defense, that Iran posed a threat to Israel, and that Lebanon—well, Hezbollah specifically—poses a threat to Israel, and so they have to do this in response. And so a week from now, two weeks from now, five months from now, if Israel decides Iran is threatening them, do they launch a full-scale attack again, without the U.S. at this point? That is a big question, and it can easily happen.
And we have seen, although for the most part, Netanyahu will coordinate with Washington and will coordinate with President Trump and almost get permission in these cases, we have seen in recent years that he has not done that. It has aggravated Trump, and it has really caused a friction in the relationship that we were not expecting in a Trump term.
Frum: Here’s another Iranian win. That this agreement now creates—or whatever that we call it, this piece of paper—creates a situation where Iran can order its Hezbollah proxy to hit Israel. And then one of two things happens. Either the Israelis take the punch, exposing themselves as weak, revitalizing Hezbollah, which had been so damaged by Israel’s—
Salama: In no world. In no world.
Frum: Or, the Israelis do something. And then every time they do something, President Trump—who always needs to blame somebody else for his problems—they widen the disparity between the government in Israel and the Trump administration and President Trump personally. So you either hit Israel and get away with it, or you drive a wedge between Israel and the United States. Either way, Iran and Hezbollah win. Either way, the United States and Israel lose. And as President Trump is demanding that Israel adhere to an agreement that not only did they not sign, but they weren’t allowed to read.
Salama: It is so plausible what you’re describing right now. And obviously Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future is the big question mark. Because so long as he is the prime minister of Israel, I do not see him pumping the brakes. He is sort of the darling of the right wing in Israel and believes that this is Israel’s moment. Greater ambitions of territorial gains, but also eliminating what is perceived as the regional threats. Iran was the big elephant in the room there where this war was.
And so he is the wild card in particular. It’s not so much the Israeli government as it is Benjamin Netanyahu. So long as he is feeling emboldened enough that his political future even hangs on the ability to carry out these goals—territorial gain, eliminating these threats, perceived threats in the region—that is gonna be the big question.
Frum: Before the war began, various Middle Eastern players made huge financial investments in important people in the Trump administration. Steve Witkoff and his family. Jared Kushner. Hundreds of millions of dollars from Emiratis, from the Saudis. The Qataris had a jumbo jet. In your estimation, how much of what the United States has done in the region—especially since February 28, but even before—is affected by the fact that the key players have accepted these vast sums of money? Something that is just so astonishingly shocking. And even if you don’t think it’s affected the players, what do people in the region think?
Salama: I could probably spend the rest of your show talking about this topic.
Frum: Go ahead; it’s important.
Salama: So look, there’s one thing that President Trump and a lot of these Gulf sheikhdoms have in common, and that is that they operate in a very transactional way. They’re less ideological than they are transactional. They are also wealthy, very wealthy, from their oil riches. And that has made them a very natural partner for President Trump. Both in his first term, but especially now in his second term.
And over the course of that, remember, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, in the first term was the Middle East envoy, if you will. I mean, his title was something else, but let’s just call him that. And he was the one that was going around negotiating, including the Abraham Accords—which objectively were just an extraordinary effort, where they got several countries to normalize relations with Israel, several Muslim and Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia was the big one that they were aiming for. They did not succeed in that; neither did the Biden administration.
But in the course of that time, Jared Kushner, who … I did a profile of Jared in 2024, just before the election, for The Wall Street Journal. A very long one. About his business, but also interviewed him about potential conflicts of interest if his father-in-law were to be re-elected at that time. And it was an on-the-record interview, obviously. And he insisted to me, said: You know what? The bottom line is, I’m not breaking any laws, and anyone who wants to suggest otherwise can come at me.
And so that is the approach of the second Trump administration. You have ethical violations over here, and you have lawbreaking actions here. They like to swim in the middle. You know, they don’t really care so much about the ethical element of it. They think that those ethical rules were written by the establishment. They’re archaic, and they don’t apply to the common-sense approach of doing business, either domestically or in foreign-policy matters.
And so that transactional relationship that Jared Kushner has with the Gulfies—he’s very close with a number of them, particularly Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, who is about the same age as Jared. They bonded. They talk on WhatsApp all the time. He has that kind of relationship with all of those leaders from his first term, where he was trying to get diplomatic deals. And that continued into the firm that he established, the equity firm that he established, where he then continued those relationships in order to get access to their countries, and other countries as well, to do business deals.
Of course, as President Trump went to get re-elected this second time around in 2024—or the third time he tried to get elected—then the question became, This is a violation of ethics.
Frum: Yeah. What you call a conflict-of-interest problem, I call a business model.
Salama: Right, right. And so that is—
Frum: Do the people in the region think they’ve—
Salama: They’re okay with that? Oh, are you kidding? They love it. They don’t care.
Frum: Yeah. They don’t want these dreary, Jimmy Carter, I-can’t-accept-a-free-sandwich-from-you types. They want someone who says, Half a billion dollars, bring it on. It won’t affect me; no, sir. I won’t be thinking about that half-billion dollars of yours in my pocket at all when I talk to you.
Salama: Foreign direct investments keep the money flowing. Remember that those foreign direct investments into their countries are existential for them. Yes; they make a lot of money off of their hydrocarbons, off of their oil. But the desperate effort by all of those countries, having lived in that part of the world for a time, they have been on a desperate mission—and I wrote about this early in the war—to diversify their economies.
Dubai had a little bit of an edge, because of the fact that it was seen as this glitzy, liberal place on the Gulf. And so it did so with retail, with tourism, things like that. While Saudi Arabia did not have that, it definitely did try to lure investments of different kinds, and Jared Kushner kind of represented the kind of investments that they, in the earlier years, were trying to lure. Now they’re trying to kind of do what Dubai is doing as well, and liberalize in the process of doing so.
This war exposed exactly why they’ve been trying to do that. Because the minute that the Iranian bombs started flying, although they’ve been very lucky in the sense that the hits to their country have been minimal—exception being Qatar, which got hit pretty badly, its gas got hit pretty badly—tourism slowed down to almost a screeching halt. Retail was not selling, because people weren’t going out to the malls while they’re seeing pops and explosions in the air. And they started to see—and of course, their oil is not getting out either—and so they started to see the real vulnerabilities of their economic models. And so go and try to talk to a Saudi right now, or an Emirati, and tell them you shouldn’t be doing business with Jared Kushner because that’s a conflict of interest. They’re gonna be like, Okay, sure thing.
Frum: Well, might they say Wait a minute, we paid good money for American protection, and we didn’t get it. We paid good money to have influence over what your Iran policy was.
Salama: But they did get it. They did get it. I’m gonna push back on that. Their country, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, especially. I mean, I’ve been talking to friends constantly, friends with young children. Are you guys okay? Are you doing okay? They say it is miraculous, the effort. I mean, all those fancy gadgets they bought from the U.S., they worked. They were not getting hit.
Frum: But what about their investments—their more personal investments in Kushner and Witkoff and Trump? Do they feel they have a return on those investments that they made in what you call conflict of interest, and some people might apply even harsher language to?
Salama: In theory, I think, in the short term, there’s definitely some irritation and some bad blood. But their hope is that we snap back after all of this is done. Even if tensions kind of remain at a simmer, as long as there’s a cease-fire, then they can snap back and go to the way things were. That might be naive. I don’t know a lot of people who are desperate to go back and hit up the malls in Dubai right now, while things are still uncertain. And so that might be naive.
However, I do think that they believe that it could snap back. And I think that the jury will be out until we see what happens in the coming months and years, and whether or not they really are able to snap back. If they can’t snap back in the way they did, then I think you’re gonna have a real recalibration of the relationship.
But I will say this: I lived in the Gulf during the economic crisis of 2008. I moved there in 2008. I moved to Dubai; I was in the region already, but I moved to Dubai and Abu Dhabi in 2008, 2009, and I was there until 2012. There was a sense that Dubai was done, that the whole Gulf was done. That this effort to—you know, all they had was hydrocarbons. That was the only thing that kept them going. And everything else, all these other efforts and real estate and shop and tourism and retail, all of that was just a cake dream. That it wasn’t gonna work out. That’s not what this part of the world is for. And obviously, it all crumbled so fast after the economic crisis. And so everyone thought they were done.
They bounced back. They bounced back even stronger than before. It took a few years, but they did. And so I think they are hoping that the lessons learned from that crisis might propel them this time around, and that they’re more equipped this time around to bounce back after this conflict.
But obviously a war is different than a financial crisis, so we’ll see if people really do want to go back. I’m going to be very interested in watching that.
Frum: I want to keep focusing on this question, though. Of the fact that—I mean, it’s so astonishing. It’s so incredible. We’re used to it, because it’s been a decade of this. But no previous generation of Americans were ever used to this idea that the people who are making policy for a region are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy people, governments. Investments that don’t look very market-based at all. Even if they were market-based, it would still be disturbing, but they look either like bribes or like extortion. I mean, what if you’re in Abu Dhabi, if you’re in Dubai, if you’re in Qatar, and you know that your American counterparty is on your payroll. How does that make you think about the United States?
Salama: I don’t think they care. I really don’t. I think they see this as the way business is done. And if you talk to Jared Kushner, or if you talk to President Trump, even they will tell you that in certain parts of the world, this is how things are done.
Frum: Yeah. This used to be one of the parts of the world where things were not done that way, but—
Salama: And this used to be part—and they argue that it set the United States back. That it is not a realistic approach to doing business in the world, in some parts of the world especially. And you know, drawing a line in the sand between ethical conduct and unethical conduct was not beneficial to the United States.
Frum: Yeah. I think I find that argument more interesting. The question was: He is accepting money; is that detrimental? And when someone says “No, it is not a problem that he is accepting money,” that’s an interesting argument. But when someone argues that “It is not a problem that I am accepting money,” that’s not an argument. That’s just a grab.
Salama: I mean, I’m not saying that you’re wrong. I’m saying the Trump administration has made—
Frum: You’re saying that the people who are accepting money see no important problem in them accepting the money.
Salama: Yeah, they think that as long as they’re not breaking the laws, then everything’s kosher, right?
Frum: Right. Well, and one of the reasons they’re not breaking laws, of course, is because the laws don’t apply to the president, and the laws are not enforced against his family. So even if they are breaking the laws, who’s gonna do anything about it?
Salama: That’s right.
Frum: Oh, man. Vivian, I have to salute your years of coverage of this region, and your deep expertise, and your knowledge of the players, and your great work for The Atlantic. It is so important, and I’m so grateful to have you as a colleague. Thanks for talking to me today.
Salama: Likewise, David. Thank you so much.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Vivian Salama for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the show, my book this week is Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. A novel published in 2001; touches on powerful themes of community, loss, and grief. It’s a book that won all kinds of accolades when it was published in 2001, all of which it deserves. I found it a very touching and affecting book, except for an ending that really troubled me. And the ending is what I’m going to discuss today. So if you haven’t read the book, and you don’t want a spoiler alert, govern yourself advisedly—because I’m going to reveal the whole plot and the surprise ending in order to discuss both.
So here’s the story. It’s based on a true incident that took place in the middle 1990s in Peru, when terrorists seized the residence of the Japanese ambassador to Peru. And that terrorist seizure was ended with a police raid that killed the hostage-takers. So the story in Bel Canto is similar, but not exactly the same. It takes place in an unnamed South American country that is seeking foreign investment. In order to get the foreign investment, they have invited a Japanese businessman and his entourage to come to a dinner at the home of the vice president of the country, where they will wine and dine the Japanese businessman and try to entice his corporation to invest in the country. The Japanese businessman doesn’t like to travel, and doesn’t have serious plans to make the investment. But he is an enormous enthusiast for opera. And in order to win him, to woo him, the country has also invited the greatest soprano of the age, Roxanne Coss, to come, at vast expense, and sing six songs after dinner. For the delight of the businessman, and to get him to the dinner to discuss the foreign investment.
Everything goes beautifully. The flowers; the night is beautiful. The flowers are beautiful, the settings are beautiful, paintings are there from the national art gallery in the home of the vice president. There is one hitch at the beginning, which is the president of the country who’s supposed to adjourn, preside over the event—he bails. And the reason he bails is because the president is an addict of a soap opera. And that night’s episode is an especially exciting one, and he doesn’t want to miss the exciting episode, so he doesn’t show up. With the result that when terrorists burst in through the air-conditioning ducts to seize the president, he’s not there, because he’s home watching a soap opera. And so, as a very unsatisfying consolation prize, they take prisoner all the other attendees: the vice president of the country, the Japanese businessman and his entourage, the opera singer, many other people. And the novel unfolds what happens next.
Now, the novel doesn’t have surprises exactly about the plot. We learn early on that almost all the hostage-takers will be killed. What we, with that knowledge—we watch over weeks the formation of a new kind of community among the hostage-takers and their victims. It’s a community that becomes quite intimate in a lot of ways. Now, this community begins with enormous inequalities of wealth and standing. The guests at the party are corporate executives, they are ambassadors, they are wealthy people from the host country. They are all kinds of people. They are important people; they are wearing tuxedos, and the women are wearing ball gowns. The men have expensive watches. The hostage-takers are from the most impoverished classes of the country. Many of them are very young. They speak Quechua, not Spanish, as their first language. Some of them are illiterate.
But gradually this new community forms, and they’re bound together by two connections. The first is: The Japanese businessman has brought with him his translator, a man named Gen, a uniquely gifted person who’s able to learn languages at the drop of a hat. He speaks not only his native Japanese and English and Spanish, but also French and Russian, has some Czech. He just learns languages again the way you would learn the solution to a crossword puzzle. And he forms a kind of multilingual node that connects people through the miracle of language. And then Roxanne Coss, the great singer, she begins to practice to keep her scales going. And her music becomes a bond that unites them. Art and literature become the bonds of connection through this seemingly unequal community.
And as the community develops, we discover among the hostage-takers unsuspected skills. One of the young boys turns out to be quite gifted as a chess player. Another has a beautiful voice and receives singing lessons and may be on his way, possibly, to a great career in opera of his own. All of this, and as the community develops, even more intimate relations form. There are two love affairs that break out. One between the Japanese businessman and the opera singer, Mr. Hosokawa and Roxanne. And the other between Gen, the translator, and one of the young girls who’s among the hostage-takers, Carmen. Gen and Carmen fall in love; the opera singer and Mr. Hosokawa fall in love. They actually are able to find ways to spend the nights with each other. The women have all been released early from the hostage-taking situation. The staff of the house has been released early, and so we have all the men—the hostage-takers, the hostage-taken men—and then a couple of women among the hostage-takers and the opera singer. So it’s a very unequal community of men and female, but just enough that love can sprout. And so it does between the Japanese businessman Mr. Hosokawa and the opera singer, and between Gen and Carmen, the hostage-taker.
Then comes the police raid. Which is described with vivid brutality, of just mowing people down: no attempt to take prisoners. Bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet. And one bullet, the same bullet, kills both Mr. Hosokawa and Carmen. Mr. Hosokawa actually is trying to shield Carmen at the moment of the police raid, and the same bullet kills them both, thus wrecking the symmetry of the two love pairs. Opera singer loses her lover, and Gen, the translator, loses his lover. And that’s the end of the main part of the book.
And then comes the epilogue. And it’s some months later, and we’re the city of Luca, and Gen and the opera singer are getting married. They have fallen in love after the loss of their mutual counterparts. And it’s really—just as the violence of the hostage-taking is shocking—to me, this ending was terribly shocking. Now, there’s a big lively dispute about how to read this ending. The book has been around for a quarter century, and many people have had the same kind of shock reaction to it. And one move to deal with the ending is to say: You know what; the love affairs were the product of a highly abnormal environment, the intense pressure of the hostage taking. And as soon as the hostage-taking ended, well, of course the love affairs were exposed in their unreality, and a new pairing could form very naturally. Another is to say that there’s a kind of sardonic or cynical move practiced by the author, where she is casting doubt on the reality of any human connection. Apart from these more metaphysical realities of art and literature, they’re real, but human beings are not.
But I found myself wondering whether the author maybe believed—as a lot of people do—that human life is kind of dispensable, and that human beings fill roles in each other’s lives. And when one of the roles is vacated, a new person can be invited in to fill the old role. And whether there wasn’t something, actually, in a novel that had so much heart, something kind of heartless about the ending. Did the author understand that, or did she not? That’s the thing I’m left haunted by and wondering about.
And maybe the power of this work of art is that an ending that feels so curdling after the power of the intense experience we’ve lived through, with the hostages and the hostage-takers, maybe that’s a way of jolting us and asking us: Well, do we accept this ending? Because maybe what you just want to do—and if I ever read the book again—is read all the way to the epilogue, and stop there. And leave the story as tragedy, rather than with the appended marriage and happy ending attached so awkwardly to the very end.
Anyway, I do recommend the book. Don’t miss it. But if you’re like me, you may want to skip the epilogue.
Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. Thanks to all of you who share the program and like it and communicate the word on social media. As ever, if you’re minded to support this program and the work we do, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic, where you’ll see my work and that of all of my colleagues. See you next week, here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.
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