I Asked a Former Trump Official to Justify This War |
I Asked a Former Trump Official to Justify This War
Produced by Annie Galvin
I Asked a Former Trump Official to Justify This War
This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
This is not the presidency many Americans thought they were voting for. It is not the presidency that Donald Trump and the people around him claimed he would deliver.
Archival clip of Donald Trump: I’m going to be the one that keeps you out of war. I’ll keep you out of war.Archival clip of Trump: We’re not going to have war in the Middle East.Archival clip of Trump: We did no wars. I had no wars.Archival clip of Trump: They said you will start a war. I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.
Archival clip of Donald Trump: I’m going to be the one that keeps you out of war. I’ll keep you out of war.
Archival clip of Trump: We’re not going to have war in the Middle East.
Archival clip of Trump: We did no wars. I had no wars.
Archival clip of Trump: They said you will start a war. I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.
I think what was most surprising to me over the last couple of days has been seeing that one of Trump and his administration’s most significant red lines — no ground troops in Iran — is no longer holding.
Trump gave an interview to the New York Post in which he said: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says: There will be no boots on the ground. I don’t say it.”
He said: “I say: Probably don’t need them.”
I’m obviously opposed to this war. There was no consultation with the American public. I don’t think there was a consultation with Congress — and obviously not one with the U.N. I don’t think Trump and his administration are prepared for what they might unleash.
But I wanted to try to understand this not from my perspective but from the perspective of someone much friendlier to Donald Trump’s foreign policy, someone who has tried to think about what his doctrine and approach might mean, who even helped craft it in his first term.
Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She served as a deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term. She led the drafting and publication of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States. So I wanted to see how she understood Trump’s foreign policy in his second term, the risks he’s now taking, the philosophy that can be pulled out of it and what that might mean for the American people and the world.
Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.
Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” and the author of “Why We’re Polarized” and, with Derek Thompson, “Abundance.” Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox. Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.