Transcription
This is the biggest question of our time. It's bigger than the Strait of Hormuz by several orders of magnitude, and we are at a critical moment because Anthropic has just revealed that it has the doomsday model mythos, uh, with the principal feature of which is that it can hack any operating system or software with much higher success than any previous model. Uh, this is a, a tremendous power that the United States has, or is it the United States that has it?
So, Sir Neil Ferguson, I know this was billed as a talk on US foreign policy, but we plan to sound your knowledge on all manner of things, but could you just begin by giving us a recap of what's been going on in the past few months in Iran? It's kind of hard to follow. It changes so much. Um, but what's at stake? Um, how do you look at these things? And why, why should Americans care? Because it seems like a great many Americans, uh, care less about this war than they've cared about wars in the past.
>> Well, Merrick, thank you. Uh, first of all, it's terrific to be here. Wonderful to see, uh, such a big crowd. And, and this is what I love the best about the University of Austin. Uh, it's class, and we're going to have, uh, fun up here. The tables have been turned, though. We believe in the Socratic method in teaching, but today the students get to ask the questions, and I'm in the hot seat. Uh, let's think back to, uh, February 27th, the eve of Operation Epic Fury. At that time, uh, my expectation was that Israel certainly would renew offensive action against Iran. The question had been for some time, would the United States join it? You'll remember that last year there was a combined effort by the United States and Israel against Iran that produced the devastating strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. Uh, the, uh, uh, the kind of classic surgical strike that I always feel Americans like above all other forms of military intervention. The problem with the strikes on Fordo and other targets was that they had not succeeded in ending, uh, Iran's nuclear program, nor in slowing down its accumulation of conventional weapons. And in particular, uh, we'd seen in the months prior to, uh, February 28th, a massive buildup of ballistic missiles in Iran, based mostly on Chinese components and materials. And this was moving so rapidly that if no action had been taken, uh, by year-end, Iran would have been in a formidable position, uh, to defend itself and to threaten its neighbors, even without, uh, having a nuclear capability. Uh, these missiles posed a major threat.
So, something else happened, uh, prior to February, uh, 28th, that I think altered the calculations of President Trump. And that was the worst case of political violence against a civilian population that I think we have seen since the time of Mao Zedong, when the Iranian, uh, regime, the theocracy, uh, that rules Iran and has ruled it since 1979, massacred between 30 and 40,000, we estimate, uh, of its own people, mostly young people, mostly, uh, people close in age to the students and potential students in this room, in a brutal crackdown on the biggest wave of anti-regime protest there has been, uh, in the 47 years since the revolution occurred. And so, President Trump, I think, like any, uh, warm-blooded person, was appalled by these, uh, scenes of body bags littering the streets in, uh, Iranian cities, and said, uh, in one of his many Truth posts on this subject, that help was on its way. There was a pause. There is always a pause, uh, between threat and execution. And that pause was necessary for the United States to accumulate, uh, the military capabilities, uh, in Central Command that were clearly going to be needed, uh, for what, uh, was to become Operation Epic Fury.
From a military standpoint, Operation Epic Fury and its, uh, Israeli counterpart were immensely successful in a very short space of time. In a matter of days, thousands of Iranian military targets were hit. And Iran's ability to fire missiles and drones was drastically degraded, particularly its ability to fire missiles. And one could see that in the number of missiles it fired in the first days of the conflict, because it fell exponentially. There were two things that, uh, I think surprised some commentators, perhaps surprised the president. One of them can't have surprised Dan Kaine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The thing that shouldn't and didn't surprise the military planners was that the Iranians, uh, threatened shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, with the effect that the Strait was effectively closed. It doesn't take that much. The Houthis have shown this, to scare insurers and shippers into stopping vessels going into dangerous waters. Uh, so the Iranians didn't have to do much. They just had to threaten, fire a few drones, and everything stopped. Drastic decline in traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Everybody in this room knows that that's something like 20%, uh, of global oil supplies, but it's also a huge comparable percentage of global liquefied natural gas, and a huge proportion of urea and other ingredients essential for fertilizers and sulfur, etc., etc., etc. It's a huge economic choke point. Dan Kaine, uh, will have not been surprised by that. And I'm almost sure, though I can't swear to it, that Brad Cooper, Admiral in charge of CentCom, had a plan, still has a plan, to undo that closure of the Strait. But until that is done, a huge economic shock wave is passing through the global economy, through all the networks that connect the Middle East to Asia, and Asia to the United States. And that shock wave is moving at the speed of an oil tanker or a container ship.
The thing that I think surprised everybody was that the Iranians retaliated not against Israel and the United States, but principally against their Gulf neighbors, in particular the UAE, but also all the Gulf states, including even those that we think of as being friendly to Iran, such as Qatar. This bombardment of the Gulf States was surprising, and in some ways brilliant, but in other ways desperate. I mean, this was how to lose friends and alienate people in a matter of, uh, days of military action. On the other hand, it inflicted a great deal of damage because really the Gulf States were not ready for this, and were certainly not ready for drone warfare. Despite the warnings they'd received from Ukraine about how vulnerable they were, essentially nobody had been buying drone defense technology from Ukraine. And so here we are. Uh, this is an excessively long answer, but you asked a really difficult question, and I had to set the scene. Iran has been militarily greatly weakened. The president said he wanted regime change. We now say that that wasn't the plan. Actually, we got regime change. Regime change happened, but not the kind we wanted. Iran is no longer a theocracy under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It is a military dictatorship under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with Khamenei's son as the frontman. He's probably semi-dead. Uh, and so he's a sort of figurehead. But even if he's fine, uh, he's aligned with these people, and they have made the most of a greatly weakened military position to hold the global economy hostage and their Gulf neighbors hostage. We therefore have reached a point of near stalemate. It's not clear that President Trump wants to take more military action. We can talk about the options that he has. It's not clear that diplomacy is going anywhere. Otherwise, Vice President Vance wouldn't have been in Washington last night. He'd have been in Islamabad. But the talks, uh, one round of which have happened, have really not produced a result, and it's not quite clear who makes the next move. It's not over, and it's not likely to be over this month. That's as much as I can confidently say. It will be over before the end of this year, and I'm pretty sure it will be over by the summer because I don't think it's possible economically, uh, for Iran to, uh, hang on with the Strait blockaded because we've blockaded it, so they can't export any of their oil. I also think the economic pain for the United States will become too much politically within certainly the next eight weeks. That's the shortest answer I can give you to your.
>> I think that about gets us up to speed, and we'll be asking you more questions about Iran in a moment. But, uh, Emerson has a question about recent news from Washington last night.
>> Sure.
>> Thank you so much for being here, Ferguson. I really appreciate you getting us all up to speed, but I would like to introduce a slight digression into a topic that's too important for us to cast aside. Last night, the news came in that another attempt was made on President Trump's life. As someone who has studied political violence and the health or lack thereof of nations who suffer from it, what takeaways should the American people have from this event?
>> Emerson, thanks for asking that. It happened, I think, while we were talking at dinner last night. I think, in fact, I was in full flow about why you should come to UATX and not to some other mainstream, traditional, legacy institution, and when I stopped speaking, somebody came over and showed me, uh, the breaking news. I was supposed to be there, uh, because I was invited by Barry, uh, Weiss, our co-founder, uh, to join, uh, her group at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. And I said, "I can't possibly because I've committed myself to come to UATX, and I'm afraid UATX trumps Trump." Uh, so I could have been there, and, uh, I have friends, including Barry, who were there. I think we are still, we still have not fully processed the significance of the return of political violence to American life in a way that hasn't been seen really since the late 1960s. Of course, there was an attempt on President, uh, Reagan's life, but that was unsuccessful. And since then, security around presidents has been so dauntingly tight that assassination seemed to be a, a kind of past, uh, thing. But it's back. And I think it's back. And I wrote this at the time of the attempt on President Trump's life in Pennsylvania in 2024, because the constant demonization of the president as Hitler or some other dictator has created, uh, an idea that it would be legitimate to kill him. And this is, to me, one of the best illustrations of the dangers of reckless historical analogy. I've spent 10 years more now saying, uh, Trump isn't Hitler, in arguments with people who've made this kind of wild comparison, and populism isn't fascism. Uh, and yet the argument continues to be made, and it will continue to inspire, uh, mentally unstable, uh, people. I think it generally takes a bit of mental instability to want to carry out an assassination, to behave in the way that, uh, this character, Cole Allen, did, uh, did last night. Thank God he failed, and thanks to the Secret Service, he really never, I think, had a chance. Uh, it would have been impossible for him to get close enough, uh, though he certainly tried to overcome defenses by moving very rapidly, but they, they stopped him. And I've heard, uh, from those who were present, including, uh, someone in the administration, that they really did the best possible job. So I'm not going to go into the typical journalistic questioning, "Could security have been tighter?" which it's almost reflexive to ask. I think it's, it's a foolish question. And the interesting question is, why does this keep happening? I don't know if you watched President Trump's press conference shortly after the fact. He said something that was characteristically self-aggrandizing and true. He, he said, "It's the presidents are consequential, they try to kill." And, you know, I sat there thinking, man, that only you could come up with that. You know, Ronald Reagan would never have said that. Ronald Reagan made light of the assassination attempt. But in a funny kind of way, you can't really fault the argument. Uh, it seems to me as if consequential presidents are the ones most likely to be threatened, as, of course, uh, was true in the case of, of Reagan, of John F. Kennedy, of Lincoln. So, where does this leave us? I don't think it alters anything in the geopolitics. I'm not even sure how much it alters the politics, though. We'll see. Typically, there's some kind of bump in approval rating for a president who's survived assassination. But I'm not regarding this as, as likely game-changing. The, the trend in the president's approval rating, the popularity of the administration's policies, has been monotonically downward since October last year. And because the public is most exercised about affordability as an issue, it's hard to see how the war in Iran helps. In fact, it almost certainly makes matters quite a bit worse for Republican candidates as we approach the midterms in November. So, I'm not sure that the failed assassination attempt really changes much. I'd be surprised if it arrested this downward drift of support for the administration.
>> Thank you so much, Sir Neil. Um, you mentioned just now overzealous comparisons being made between President Trump and fascist leaders, for example. You yourself have been a major proponent of the historical analog that compares the modern United States to the late Roman Republic. What do you have to say in regards to correct uses, misuses of this analogy that could potentially lead to problems like this?
>> I think that's a more interesting analogy than the, the Weimar analogy. Uh, though I still think, and I've said this many times, the best analogies are the ones closest to home. It's, it's best to think about Trump and Trumpism in the context of late 19th-century American politics or early 20th-century American politics, because that's what he refers to. The allusions that he makes are always to McKinley. Uh, that was true in the campaign in 2024. He explicitly said he wanted to be "Tariff Man." Uh, he alluded, uh, most recently to Theodore Roosevelt, the "Trump Corollary," which led very swiftly to the, uh, uh, the extraction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. That was another allusion to, uh, the early 1900s. I think it's better to think of Trump as being firmly in the tradition of American populism and politics more generally. I mean, most Trumpian ideas have deep roots in late 19th-century, early 20th-century America. Trump's return to tariffs, his leaning in favor of an easy monetary policy, his exclusionist approach to immigration, it's all straight out of a familiar playbook if you studied, if you've studied 19th-century American politics. The interesting thing about the Roman analogy is that Americans have been asking themselves this question since the founding. It is a recurrent question going right back to the earliest days of the Republic. Are we going to be Rome? We're going to create this Republic, and are we going to end up repeating the mistakes, uh, the Romans made? There's a fantastic recurrence in this, uh, in this country of that debate, of that question. You can find it almost in every decade. You'll find essays in every decade in magazines and newspapers asking, "Are we Rome?" And that's why I think it's an interesting question, because it's kind of the question we ask ourselves. And the point of the Constitution, talked last night about the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago this coming July. But the point of the Constitution that emerged was to build a republic that would be Caesar-proof, that could not go the way of the Roman Republic. And that's, I think, one of the animating ideas in the minds of, of Madison and Hamilton. That's what they're writing about, at least in part, when they write the Federalist Papers. And I think the Constitution does a brilliant job of this. It makes it really, uh, pretty much impossible for any president, no matter how vaunting his ambition, to become emperor, uh, because there's just too much in the way of checks and balances on the executive branch. And I've said, uh, that that will be true for this president, as it was true of previous imperial presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt. And I think it's already evident. I mentioned the polling. I've mentioned the midterms. But there are also the Supreme Court defeats that this administration has suffered. It's very hard to see signs of the Roman disease, except in one respect. And I remember saying this to a group of you in the class on the philosophy of history that we did when we looked at Suetonius and Tacitus. One of the things the Roman historians say about the end of the Republic that is very striking is they say it was really the weakness of the Senate and the corruption of the elites that made it happen, more than Augustus's or Tiberius's greed for power. And that really resonates with me, because the problem in American governance isn't the personality of Donald Trump. Contrary to what you may read in the New York Times or the New Yorker, the problem is that within the constitutional system, over a period of multiple decades, Congress has repeatedly punted on its responsibilities. That's the real problem. And it's still true. Uh, after all, there really should not have been a question that the president had the power to impose tariffs. The Constitution says absolutely clearly that that's the responsibility of Congress. So, I, I think we do have a slight Roman pathology, but it's not in the White House. It's actually on the Hill. And if Congress would do its job, as it's constitutionally required to, I think we could set aside these Roman worries.
>> Thank you for that answer, Sir Neil Ferguson. So, I want to bring us back to.
>> You can call me Neil. This is, after all, a republic, and titles like "Sir" are great in London for restaurant reservations, upgrades with British Airways. But here, I think we should dispense with them. Please call me Neil.
>> All right, Neil. I want to bring us back to the war in Iran and ask what you think about, at the conclusion of this war, what has to happen for it to be considered an American victory in terms of control of the straits, um, Iran's nuclear capacity.
>> This is a really hard question to answer because the administration keeps changing its mind, and one obvious defect of, of strategy has been inconsistent messaging. It's very, very hard to go back to Merrick's point about the popularity of this war. It's a remarkably unpopular war by the standards of any war at its inception. I mean, even the Vietnam War was popular at first. Uh, this is an unpopular war from the get-go. And I don't think it has helped matters that the messaging has been inconsistent. First, it was about regime change, then it was about disarming Iran. Is it about the uranium or the nuclear dust, as the president confusingly calls it, or is it actually about the Strait? If it's about the Strait of Hormuz, then it's kind of hard to make sense of our strategy, because that wasn't a problem prior to February the 28th. Uh, we've created this problem. Nobody previously knew if the Iranians could do this. There was a suspicion that they could, but there really hadn't been, uh, a situation like this when Iran was able to shut down all traffic and then for a period of weeks let out only cargos that it approved, collecting tolls in the process. So that new situation was a consequence of the war. If all we achieve is to undo that, I think it will be a legitimate question, "What was the point?" I think for it to make sense, ideally, the regime collapses. Ideally. What are the chances of that? I think low. I, I've always been a pessimist about this. At the height of the protests in January, I said counterrevolutions rarely succeed. Highly repressive regimes tend to be good at repression. This one proved that. Anyone in Tehran, and I have friends who have cousins there, is terrified. So it would be wonderful, but to me, surprising if within a matter of months the IRGC obligingly collapsed. We're now in the midst of a negotiation, not all of which is public. My understanding is that the administration hopes to arrive at some kind of compromised peace without the need for a return to war by making a generous offer on the economics side, easing sanctions, unfreezing frozen assets, in return for commitments from the Iranian regime, particularly on the issue of the enrichment of uranium. And of course, that's the issue that the Iranians have been haggling with us about for more than a decade, going all the way back to the origins of the JCPOA in the Obama administration. It's a good, but wonkish, criterion would be, um, does this end up being better than the JCPOA? If it's not, I promise you, every single former Obama and Biden official will write a piece for the New York Times pointing out that it's not as good. So, it kind of has to be better than the JCPOA. And, and that, I think, is the tough part, because if I'm looking at this from an Iranian vantage point, they have a chokehold in the global economy, which is only going to hurt more with every passing week. And they also have a threat of escalation if we return to war, because there are more targets they can hit in the Gulf States, including the desalination plants, that would really be very destructive and disastrous. If I put myself in their position, I'm incentivized to play the long game, have multiple meetings in Islamabad, get into some really intricate negotiations about uranium enrichment, and all the time watching the clock tick, waiting for the pain to become intolerable to the United States. The counterargument, which I've heard, uh, in Washington, is we're now doing Operation Economic Fury, and we're going to collapse their economy, which is why the blockade was imposed by us on Iran to end all traffic through the Strait, including theirs. The big question is, whose pain threshold is lower? That's easy. Ours. The other question is, who cracks first? And that becomes a really quite difficult question, having to do with Iran's international reserves, how quickly they're depleted, and how far the Iranians can get enough oil out of Iran not to have to shut down their wells, which would be very disruptive and bad for them. So, right now, a lot of people are doing quite tricky math, uh, to work out what cash can the Iranians access. Uh, you know, they have reserves, but a lot of them are frozen and sanctioned, and can they get enough oil out, in effect, running our blockade, not to have to shut down their wells? That's what it's come down to. The more it's about those technicalities, Faith, the less it's about what's victory look like? Because increasingly, I don't like to say this, but increasingly victory looks like, "Get the Strait reopened and worry about the other stuff after that." That's not a good thing. That's, to my mind, a strategic fail if you're in a situation where success is undoing the thing that the war started. But I'm afraid that's where we probably are.
>> It strikes me that America's inconsistent messaging, uh, poses a danger on both the domestic and, uh, international fronts. I want to ask you about both. Um, why is it that when America says one thing one day and another thing another day, that should undermine its global authority? That should open the door for China or someone else to, uh, negotiate with Iran to do things that the US, uh, seems to be wishy-washy on. Um, but China hasn't stepped in as much as we might have expected. And so what's the deal with that? And then, should I wait to ask you about the domestic question?
>> Go ahead. I can take two.
>> Okay.
>> I can handle it.
>> It, it makes Americans question our motivations. You said, uh, earlier, that part of the reason Trump decided to intervene in Iran was because of this humanitarian crisis. And I think lots of people would support that. Lots of people support the idea of, uh, replacing the Venezuelan regime and saving all these people from their dictatorship. But then they start to think, "Oh no, this is just about oil. This is just about US economic interests, and we don't care anything about, uh, these people on the other side of the world." Or they think, "This is all on behalf of Israel. Israel is the one, uh, pulling the strings, and the US just follows along." And so when the US, or when Trump and his advisors, uh, give different signals one day after the other, it makes people doubt the kind of integrity of the US's purpose and causes enormous, uh, internal dissent.
>> Two great questions, Merrick. Let's start with the geopolitics first. I think if one takes a step back, rather than just focusing on the regional aspects but on the global aspects, it's really quite a bleak picture. First of all, I think this crisis in, uh, the Gulf has led to the biggest crisis in transatlantic relations of my lifetime. It is hard to overstate how bad relations are between Washington and London, Washington and Berlin, and the other European capitals. I was in, uh, Washington a couple of weeks ago, and at an international conference, uh, of mostly Americans and Europeans. It was just awful. The, the atmosphere was extremely fraught. The Europeans now can be divided into two camps: those who have such violent Trump derangement syndrome that they just can't even publicly, uh, say a good word about him, and those who want to appease him or see themselves as appeasing him. So, I don't know how the NATO summit later this year will go, but it's hard to be optimistic. I mean, there's a real risk that President Trump simply says, "I'm done," and NATO becomes NATO. Uh, that's a real risk because, particularly the British and, and the European hesitation to make bases available right at the beginning of the war, it's not something he's readily going to forgive. And I don't think it's just him. Secretary Rubio and others in the administration speak very harshly about, uh, America's European allies. But it gets worse, because the obvious strategic beneficiaries of this crisis are our adversaries, uh, China, uh, and Russia, and let's not forget Little Rocket Man in North Korea. I've been writing for some years now, really since 2022, about the axis of authoritarians, or the axis of ill will. This is a real axis, unlike, uh, the axis of evil back in 2002. This thing really works as a military, economic, uh, axis, and the cooperation just keeps growing more sophisticated. So, let's take the Russians first, because they're the junior partners now, relative to China. The Russians, in many ways, have been rescued by this war from having to settle in Ukraine. Putin was under real pressure. Uh, casualties, uh, on his army's side are extraordinarily high because of the success of Ukrainian drone warfare. Uh, the economic situation in Russia is becoming strained because it's now more than four years, uh, of attrition warfare. Uh, well, he's now getting roughly 150% more in revenues from Russian oil exports, uh, as a result of the war. A, the price has gone up, and B, we've taken the sanctions off. So he has been rescued economically. Uh, so that's, that's bad. It's also bad that China can sit back and watch the United States get into yet another Middle Eastern, uh, war, a war which is consuming a lot of very sophisticated weaponry, of which we have finite supplies. This was something that was a worry before the war, that we actually did not have that many of the vital precision missiles, which are central to the American way of war. We're now in a situation, the latest CSIS report shows this, where we're basically out of, or have 50% fewer, uh, uh, of key missiles than we had before, including Tomahawks, for example, on the defense side, Patriots. We have run down our stocks of, uh, weaponry in a way that jeopardizes the security, uh, of America's position in the Indo-Pacific. Our ability to deter China from making a move on Taiwan hinges on our having adequate military capabilities. Well, that adequacy is heavily compromised at this point. It takes, you know, just a few minutes to fire some of these missiles. It takes many, many months to repair, to replace them. So, I think the geopolitical, uh, second-order consequences of the situation that we're in now are quite troubling, and that's why the United States really needs to get, uh, this situation resolved and not let it drag on. Just in parenthesis, I think there is still a strong argument for using military force to reopen the Strait, which would be a combination of special forces and naval and air power to end the current economic stalemate. But we can come back to that.
>> But just to clarify one thing, the reason China doesn't step in when, uh, the US seems unsure of itself is because it's content to sit back and watch us burn ourselves out.
>> It's doing more than sit back and watch America. It is supplying Iran with weapons, which is more than China dared to do when Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia got dual-use equipment from, uh, China. But the Chinese were deterred from supplying weapons to Russia by a very clear threat, uh, from their national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, of secondary sanctions. Here we see China, which has been arming Iran before the war with the missiles, supplying, uh, Iran not only with weaponry but crucially with intelligence. Both the Russians and the Chinese are helping the Iranians with targeting, and we are doing precisely nothing to punish them for that. So if I'm Xi Jinping, I'm not just sitting back. I'm actively helping Iran and almost certainly advising the Iranians on how to play this. By the way, if you hold any diplomatic meeting in Islamabad, in Pakistan, everything you say is going straight to Beijing. So the Chinese part of this is not passive. I would also argue that one reason it's hard to collapse Iran's economy right now is that China can supply Iran in a variety of ways over the enormous land border that Iran has that we can't blockade. So China's not just sitting back. Can I come to your domestic question?
>> Yeah, please do. And please address the kind of moral question of, uh, whether, whether we're justified in questioning Trump's motives, the, the administration's motives, when they seem to say one thing one day and another the next.
>> Well, I think you're right, and I think I've already said that if you have mixed messaging about war aims, it's not going to work well with a public that is innately skeptical of quote-unquote forever wars. One of the interesting consequences of George W. Bush's presidency is that Americans on both the left and the right became disillusioned about foreign interventions. Uh, the critique of neoconservatism came in two flavors and produced two presidents who were committed to no more forever wars. The first was Barack Obama. The second was Donald Trump. So, I'm not surprised at all that the polling is bad because the administration has clearly failed to make the case for this war in a consistent and convincing way. What I find especially unfortunate and depressing is that for that reason, the war has given oxygen to some of the most noxious elements in our national politics. Again, on both the left and the right. Uh, on the left, uh, the same people who were protesting, uh, on behalf of the Palestinians and making it as if, uh, October 7th, uh, was a date on which Israelis were the perpetrators, not the victims. These same people who protested after October 7th in support of the Palestinians and talked endlessly about Gaza and lamented the deaths of people, uh, uh, in Gaza, are now protesting in support of the Iranian regime that massacred 30 to 40,000 of its own people. I mean, these people are to me entirely odious, as well as hypocritical. But this, in some measure, emboldens them. It's even worse on the right, where Tucker Carlson and those people who have decided to make anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, even anti-Semitism their new, uh, their new, uh, product, take the war as evidence that the United States was merely doing, uh, Israel's bidding. And, and that argument got some unfortunate, uh, support from the way that the New York Times reported on the decision for war. I just want to make it perfectly clear that although Benjamin Netanyahu had his reasons for wanting to go to war with Iran again, and I think would have done it on his own had the United States not become involved, the United States went to war for its own national interest, too. But I don't think we've heard that clearly and consistently enough from the administration. And for that reason, it's easy, uh, for Tucker Carlson and others to say, "We're just, uh, carrying, uh, Israel's water here." So, we, we're in a very dangerous place in our domestic debate on these issues. I, I'm, I'm constantly reminded of the work that, that William F. Buckley did way back in the 19, well, starting in the '50s and '60s, '70s, really his whole career, which was to drive the racists and the anti-Semites and the John Birch Society out of American conservatism, to get them out of the bloodstream of the Republican Party. And that was really Buckley's life's work, and its culmination was the Reagan presidency. I feel as if it's all being undone, and these toxic strains that, of course, were around in the 1930s and in the 1940s are making a comeback. That's another reason why the administration needs to get its story straight. This is a challenge not just for President Trump. It's a big challenge for his potential successors, and they're both deeply involved here. Vice President Vance has become involved in these negotiations to try to end the war. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio may not be in Islamabad, but it's his job too to get this straightened out. And I, I sense that this is part of the problem. It's not quite clear who owns this war, whose file this is within the administration. It's not an easy thing for a vice president to lead. That's, that's a difficult thing, and rarely, rarely works. President Trump, can I make one last point? President Trump has, I think, had a very distinctive communication strategy, which I wrote somewhat critically about in the Free Press just the other day. If you look at all of Trump's "Truths," if I can call them "Truths," using the new terminology as opposed to the traditional meaning of the word "truth," about half the time he's bluffing, and half the time it's real. This was also true of his, his Twitter account in the first administration. So, it's a coin toss whether Trump means it or not. And this has been true right the way through the administration. Say, Greenland is a good example, where Trump threatened military action against Greenland, and the Europeans took him completely literally. They were sure he meant it, and I was pretty sure he was bluffing, and he was. But this war has revealed the difficulty of that strategy, because if you threaten to bomb a country back to the Stone Age, I, I always thought there was one Stone Age, but apparently there were several. Or if you, uh, if you use the F-word, I've always felt when you use the F-word, you're kind of losing the argument. Uh, when you make that kind of communication and then don't carry out the bloodcurdling threats, you are in a very classic problem of, of rapidly declining credibility. So the communication strategy is sort of how not to do it in time of war. It's, it's really a shocking lesson in the dangers of incoherent messaging, uh, in a conflict.
>> That's really fascinating to me, and I'd love to ask you more about it because I, I have to open it up to student questions now. Any admitted students or, uh, current students are welcome to come to the mic. But I, I just found that fascinating because people are always going to ask who has power, who is causing the movements of, uh, American politics. And it, it seems like we can only blame the administration then if, uh, the people on the right and on the left come to these wild conclusions. It's because they, they aren't being told answers to these questions.
>> Well, before we go to Emma, who is very quick to the microphone, it, it's a, a feature, not a bug, of our Republic, that we argue all the time about everything, especially about war. But what's interesting is the way that the advent of the internet, uh, has created an even more fragmented landscape. If you wanted to protest against Vietnam, you really had a very finite number of channels to reach a large audience. There were three networks, and, and then a handful of major newspapers and magazines. But today, it's possible for, uh, extraordinarily, uh, influential but in my view misguided commentators like Tucker Carlson to reach millions of people without the need for any kind of media gatekeeper. Anyway, Emma.
>> You talked about the perception of the American people about the war, and our, and I have to admit, I've asked this question before to another speaker, but in our Shakespeare class, we learned that the idea about peace was that it was unstable, and it would either be foreign war or, um, domestic war. Should we change our perception of peace and kind of reaccustom Americans to thinking that peace is unstable and war is an inevitable part of human civilization?
>> Well, it's always good to bring Shakespeare into, uh, to debates like this, but, but which Shakespeare is the appropriate play? I went recently to see a production of Coriolanus at, at the National Theatre in London. A tremendous, uh, production, very violent as it should be, and Coriolanus is like the opposite of an American politician because he is just a warrior, and he is entirely impatient with the constraints of domestic politics, and that is ultimately his, his downfall. He's, he's ruthless in pursuit of victory over, uh, the enemy and impatient with, uh, the domestic, uh, grumblers. We don't tend to have Coriolanus figures, even when our generals have become presidents. Think of Eisenhower. They, they've actually tended to be, uh, presidents who pursued peace and recoiled from war. Eisenhower had seen enough war, uh, not to want to preside over a third world war. The problem, I think, we have is that we have a generation of politicians, uh, President Trump belongs to it, but it began with President Clinton. A generation who did not serve. If you look at the presidents prior to that point, for a succession of presidencies, either they had, in the case of Harry Truman, presided over leadership during the war, or like all the presidents subsequent to him, they had served. That was true right down to George H.W. Bush. It makes a profound difference, in my view, uh, when leaders have seen war firsthand. The, the Boomers from Clinton to Trump have lacked that intimate knowledge, and I think it helps explain the decline in the quality of our strategic leadership. So, there are two things that they ought to read more of Shakespeare, certainly. One can never read too much Shakespeare, uh, and the obscure plays are sometimes the ones that illuminate these issues. I know you've been reading the histories. Everybody needs a bit of Henry V in the morning, but, you know, you also need, uh, a little bit of Macbeth to offset the Henry V. When the violence becomes domestic, it's completely toxic. But you also need history. And ultimately, the lack of applied history explains a lot of the problems that we, we currently face as a nation. This is the third Gulf War. There have been multiple occasions in history when strategic choke points have been exploited by the enemy. I threw out a few examples in some of my recent journalism. Gallipoli is the great advertisement for not trying to force a strait by, uh, military force. The tanker war of '87-'88 is how you do it. I have a nasty feeling that decision-making around Operation Epic Fury was light on history, as well as Shakespeare.
>> Thank you, Neil. I hate to say this, but we need the rest of your responses to questions to be, uh, much, much shorter than that one. We only have a little more than 10 minutes, and we have about 10 questions.
>> You're on.
>> So my question is about US strategy and foreign policy. Um, so you've argued that the, uh, US-China rivalry is the defining contest of our era, won or lost, in the, largely in the Global South. But surveys show that over 80% of Arab respondents rated the US position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as very bad, and China's favorability rose 15 points in key US-allied Arab states like Jordan and Morocco. And 2024 was the first year China surpassed the US as the preferred, the preferred partner among Southeast Asian nations, a lead China has held for two consecutive years. Uh, given your own framework, how do you reconcile that? How, how do you, sorry, how do you avoid the conclusion that, uh, unconditional military support for Israel is a measurable, ongoing strategic gift to Beijing?
>> Are we going to have short questions too?
>> They should be. That was too long.
>> Shorter questions than that. Shorter responses than that question.
>> I'll keep it short. We are in a Cold War with China. We have been, uh, since around 2018, maybe earlier. What we do in relation to Israel is not the defining variable. It's not the critical variable. And if we were successful, as Israel has been strategically very successful, if we follow it through and achieve success in the Middle East, that will send a very clear signal, uh, to Beijing that we are the dominant power in that region, and that American military firepower, you cannot and should not mess with. That is the way to think about this. But thanks for the question. It's a good question.
>> Thank you. How concerned are you with the polarization and radicalization we are seeing in the United Kingdom? What would it take for Labour or the Tories to regain their trust from the public?
>> Thanks for the question. It's true, uh, the local and regional elections in May. Uh, the Labour Party is going to do very badly. It's the party in power nationally, but the Conservatives are likely to do very badly too, and a whole host of novel parties or relatively new parties will do well, and the result will be an even bigger political mess than we already have. The key thing that has to happen is a revival of the Conservative Party. The party has the best leader. Keir Starmer polls ahead of all the other leaders, including Nigel Farage, because people know that he's a shyster and a phony, and they see that she's the real thing. The party has a brand issue because of multiple bungled prime ministerships since 2016. So if you can revive the Conservative Party, has the right leader, Keir Starmer is the Black Thatcher, and you can turn Britain around. But it's probably going to take another, I'd say, three years of misery before British voters are ready for that Conservative revival. Thanks for asking about it. Thank you.
>> As I'm sure you saw recently, the, uh, two main opposition leaders in Israel, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, uh, formed one, one party. If they're elected in the upcoming elections in Israel, how do you think that will affect, uh, Israel's relations with America, uh, the Trump administration, and the future Democratic or Republican administration?
>> Great question. Uh, it's an important development. In my career, I have learned that there are two subjects too difficult for me to understand. One is astrophysics, and the other is Israeli domestic politics. And so everything I say, uh, in answer to your question comes with a health warning. Uh, I'll never understand it, no matter how many times I go there. I, I know, uh, Naftali Bennett and admire him. I think he would make a great prime minister again. I think Prime Minister Netanyahu is a much underrated and undeservedly reviled figure who will be seen by history as the Bismarck of Israel. But like Bismarck, he is loathed by liberals in his lifetime. I think we're reaching the end of his era, and it is time for change. I think, uh, and all one can hope is that that happens because it will allow the kind of reset that there clearly needs to be. He has delivered great strategic success for Israel at the price of alienating practically the entire Western world, including now American voters, especially young American voters, and that could be a Pyrrhic victory for Israel. That could be a Pyrrhic victory. So I think it's important that, uh, a new face comes to power in Jerusalem for the sake of Israel's relations with its most important ally, the United States. That, I, I hope will come when the election comes before October. Uh, but as I said, it's astrophysics. Thank you.
>> Good afternoon, Neil. Um, you mentioned the Constitution as a preventative measure to an emperorship in America. Um, but at the end of the day, what the Constitution is, as much as I support it, is a piece of paper and a gentleman's agreement. Um, there will come a day when a decision will be made to either support it or tear it up, um, inevitably with the march of history. When that happens, should we be prepared for a pseudo-emperorship in the presidency?
>> I don't think it's, uh, inevitable that the Constitution will fail. Most republics in history haven't lasted very long. Uh, think how short-lived the Weimar Republic was. And history suggests that most, most republics either succumb to tyranny or to anarchy. The founders saw that and wanted to design a very durable republic. The evidence suggests that durable republics do happen. Switzerland is one example. The Venetian Republic is one of the longest-lived examples, and it did close to.
a thousand years. So, I'd like to just give you the confidence that 250 years is just the end of the first quarter and we have way way way further to go as a republic. And why would we give up on the world's most successful political operating system to gamble on something that has nearly always failed, which is imperial power. And the problem with imperial power is you may have a talented guy as the first emperor but there's always going to be a problem with numero duo because the the succession problem is fundamental to autocracy. It is absolutely fundamental. Look at China. What's the succession plan? Answer they don't have one. How about Russia? Who's going to succeed Putin? Nobody dares hold that position. So they all have a succession problem because it's systemically the flaw in systems of autocracy. We would be insane to think that we'd be better off with a king or an emperor than we are with this constitution. And that's why 250 years from now at this institution, which by that time will have entirely replaced the Ivy League, it'll be the biggest university in the United States, we'll be celebrating 500 years. Thank you.
Thank you for your talk. I'm wondering what the US government's relationship with companies like Anthropic and AI technology as a whole should be.
>> I'm so glad you brought this up. And by the way, I greatly admire your bow tie. Uh >> thank you. >> I'm getting slight FOMO having opted for a conventional tie uh this afternoon. This is the biggest question of our time. It's bigger than the street of Hormuz by several orders of magnitude. And we are at a critical moment because Anthropic has just revealed that it has the doomsday model mythos uh with the principal feature of which is that it can hack any operating system or software with much higher success than any previous model. Uh this is a a tremendous power that the United States has or is it the United States that has it? Is it perhaps Dario Ammedday who has that power? If I was Cinping, I'd be more worried about Mythos than about uh Indopetcom, Indepacific Command. I'd be very worried that the United States would use Mythos to conduct a massive cyber attack on the CCP preemptive uh to prevent China achieving military primacy in the Indo Pacific. So you have struck on what I think is the biggest question of international relations today. In 1957, Henry Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a book that made his reputation uh catapulted him out of academia into the realm of of geopolitics. We don't have the book that we need, which would be called something like artificial intelligence and global security. The most striking feature of AI is that it is being developed in the private sector in a completely unregulated competition between multiple companies. with maybe three in the lead. And the the federal government's approach to regulation is that's Congress's problem. That's what the most recent White House paper says. Essentially, that's Congress's problem. So, we have no regulatory framework for this race. It's like imagine if the Manhattan project had taken the form of a competition between somewhere between three and a dozen uh tech companies uh in the 1940s. It it that's where we are and nobody as far as I can see nobody has a clue what to do about this. The Chinese the only other game in town. So it's a two superpower competition as well as a multi-competition. But we are in extremely dangerous terrain until we understand the geopolitical implications of this uh this technology. It has the potential to produce a new kind of conflict which is an allout cyber war between two superpowers.
>> I think we can squeeze in one final question. I'd like it to come from a future student if there are any in line. I guess that's me. >> Okay. >> To close this off, I'd like to ask you young, I myself am aspiring to be a young entrepreneur. Um, and I personally have some hesitation. Um, I I want to build a product that potentially would have military applications and I'm given the government's recent propensity to engage in wars despite saying they wish not to. How would you assuage my concerns to work with the government even in a more civilian light?
>> Well, first of all, you are coming to the right place if you're coming here. There there is no institution I want to stress this for everybody here in American higher education which is better positioned to advance entrepreneurship generally uh and to promote in particular a good understanding of the future of defense uh technology and it's not just because Joe Londale is one of the founders it's because I think our culture is open to entrepreneurship open to issues of national security in a way that other universities simply are not. That's point one. Point two is that you have to remember what weapons are really for. I was in a bar in Kev in September. Uh it's a bar near the center of town frequented by veterans of the war. It's actually a pizza joint. It's quite good, but it's the only bar I've ever been in that has a Latin motto above the bar. And it says, can you guess? See vis pachem parabellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. Wars come when great powers disarm. Britain disarmed in the 1920s. It only belatedly began to rearm in 1938 on the eve of war. That period of disarmament was the opportunity for the dictators, for the axis powers to rearm and begin their their plunderous uh marauding campaigns. So I think the lesson of history is crystal clear. A great power like the United States needs to maintain leadership in defense technology. leadership over the authoritarians, over the Axis powers in order for there to be peace. Now, I can't guarantee that a future president uh won't uh start a war that you don't like. I can't guarantee that. But what I can guarantee is that if we contribute as a university towards the readiness of the United States, its national security in the broadest sense of the word, its prosperity, its political stability, its intelligence, and its readiness for war, that more than anything else will contribute to peace. More than all the peace marches there ever have been, more than the campaign for nuclear disarmament contributed to the end of Cold War one, which was precisely nothing. Cold War I ended not because of CND, but it ended because the United States made it clear to the Soviet Union that they could not possibly keep up with our ability to innovate. They couldn't do the computers. They couldn't do the chips. And Star Wars was a kind of gamecher. Not because we could do it, because they could never do it. And we ultimately could do it. So please come here. Help us make the world safe for democracy. Thank you.
Thanks everybody. A big hand for the students.