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This is on point, I'm Magna Chakrabardi.

We're a few days shy of one month of the US and Israel's war against Iran.

The war is projected to cost at least $30 billion by the end of this month.

That's at least $1 billion every day.

And that's only direct military costs.

Then there are the much more massive costs to the global economy.

And the cost in lives, at least 13 US soldiers have been killed.

Thousands of people around the region have also been killed.

And there could be more than six million people who have been displaced.

Now, what exactly is all this for?

We devastated the Iranian nuclear program.

Do you believe that some nuclear capability in Iran remains?

It would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.

It would be years before they could ever get going.

They have 10,000 roughly kilograms of fishnable material.

The 60 percent material can be brought to 90 percent.

That's weapon grade in roughly one week.

There's almost no stopping them.

They have an endless supply of it.

When he says we obliterated their nuclear program, he's right.

We did. We dropped those bombs exactly where they needed to be.

Set them back.

But that doesn't mean they've stopped their pursuit.

We're not going to let them have nuclear weapons.

You can't have a nuclear bomb.

Radical Islamists can't have a nuclear bomb that they wield.

It's menacing activities directly in danger.

The United States, our troops, our bases overseas.

They have declared war on us.

We're not at war right now.

We didn't start this war.

But under President Trump, we are finishing it.

We would love to see this regime be replaced.

This is not a so-called regime change war.

Based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first.

We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.

We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.

If anything, I might have forced Israel's hand.

I don't think it's going to be long.

When it's over, this is going to bounce right back.

So fast.

When are you going to know when it's over?

When I feel it?

You know, you never like to say too early you want.

We want in the first hour it was over.

We don't want to leave early, do we?

We got to finish the job, right?

So that is, of course, President Donald Trump.

You also heard Secretary of State Marco Rubio,

House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth,

negotiator Steve Whitkopf and others just over the past several weeks.

Now, the unpredictability of the President of the United States

is leading to a war being fought on one man's whim.

Other presidents have had irrational impulses.

Let's be clear about that.

But the United States government used to operate with the presumption

that a close cadre of experts would surround the President

to provide factual analysis, reasoned pushback,

and knowledgeable guidance to the commander in chief.

Well, that is gone from the White House now,

or at least evidence of expertise is getting much, much harder to find

in how the executive branch makes its decisions.

I want to say that this isn't a sudden development under President Trump.

It's actually the result of decades of political opportunism

disguised as anti-elitism that has corroded the value of expertise

in American political culture.

So that's why we wanted to bring Tom Nichols back on the show today.

He's a staff writer at the Atlantic,

and Professor Emeritus of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College

where he taught for 25 years.

He's also the author of several books, including our own worst enemy,

the assaults from within on modern democracy,

and the death of expertise,

the campaign against established knowledge, and why it matters.

Tom, welcome back to on point.

Thanks, Magnet. It's good to be back with you.

You know, we wanted to make that assembly of contradictory statements

from various members of the administration,

because most people probably heard them here and there.

But when you hear them one after the other,

it really drives home the point that it's hard to make sense

at all of what is going on in the White House.

I mean, what did you hear in that montage of takes from the executive?

What I heard is the president for his own vain glory,

and his own arrogance that he knows better than any other living human being

has decided to go to war against a country of 92 million people.

And he thought it was going to be quick and easy,

and a one and done, and the regime would fall,

and he would be the liberator of Iran.

And there would be statues to him in Tehran.

And you can see this.

He certainly expects that, you know,

that kind of glory in Venezuela.

He's expecting it again in Cuba.

If the Iranian regime falls, you know,

no one will shed any tears.

And if Trump can pull that off,

he's certainly going to get some of the credit.

But two of my colleagues wrote a great piece last week in the Atlantic,

where they pointed out that at this point,

we are up to 10 different rationales for this war

that go all the way from regime change to nuclear weapons,

to terrorism, to, you know, they're just sort of generally bad people.

And I think the president didn't think this through.

I think other people around him may have.

But in this administration, you're either on board or you're out the door.

Let me ask you, who do you think around the president

might have had a clearer sense or better planning than he did himself?

Oh, I'm sure the military spoke up and said, you know,

that here are the things we can do, Mr. President.

Here are the targets we can destroy.

Here are the operations we can conduct.

However, when he was probably told,

we can't get all of that fissile material.

The regime might not fall.

The straightforward moves is probably going to be closed.

I suspect what happened.

And from, I've heard this similar stories from people that have tried to brief him,

that he just waved it away and said, no, no, it's not going to be a problem.

I, you know, that's, we'll take care of that.

Because he is basically unbriefable.

He just does not sit back and listen and process

the way other presidents do.

I'm presidents have pretty strong feelings about what they want done.

But typically they sit back, they listen, they take it in.

Donald Trump kind of wish casts.

He just tries to will things into reality.

No, no, it'll be fine.

They'll capitulate.

The strength won't be a problem, et cetera, et cetera.

So, so obviously the president is at the center of this.

And this particular president more so than ever.

But how would you evaluate the expertise in the members of the cabinet?

Who surround him in comparison to other presidents during wartime?

There just isn't any.

This is the weakest cabinet in, in modern American history.

Most of these people have no business being in national politics.

I mean, the secretary of defense, the one guy that you would think,

along with the secretary of state, is going to kind of huddle with the president

and say, look, this is a pretty dangerous thing.

Normally, for example, if you look back at Barack Obama,

kind of hemming and hawing and backing and forething about whether to strike Syria,

the people involved were the secretary of state.

You had the secretary of defense involved.

You had the chief of staff who turns out to have been instrumental in pulling Obama away from

striking Syria.

Who are the people that are going to take a walk with the president on the south lawn the way

Dennis McDonough did with Barack Obama.

Susie Wiles, that's not going to happen.

Pete Hegseth has no idea what he's doing.

He's manifestly unqualified for his job.

He's a talk show host who's deeply in over his head.

Marco Rubio, a perfectly plausible secretary of state,

a lot of experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But he's also the national security advisor, which hasn't happened since Henry Kissinger.

And frankly, that didn't go so well the last time someone dual-headed themselves this way.

Tulsi Gabbard, absolutely unqualified to be director of national intelligence.

All of them are at this point, not only do they lack expertise,

they lack courage, they lack conviction, and they're all just trying to hang on to their jobs.

And so what do you think the consequence is, first and foremost, on the American people?

The draining of expertise from the national government means people are going to die.

Whether they are in combat and being sent to try to spackle over the problems that Donald Trump left

by waving away the consequences of a war of choice, whether it's people who refuse to take

vaccines because Robert F. Kennedy, I mean, I can't believe I, in the same way that I have trouble

saying Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, I almost can't get my head around Secretary of Health

and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. But people are going to lose jobs, people are going

to suffer economically. It's easy to dismiss expertise in the government because most of the time,

the effect of expertise on your life as an American citizen is more or less invisible.

Things just work. You know, the lights go on, airplanes fly, oil gets delivered, and so on.

But I think what we're seeing now is the collapse of expertise in the government

is much like Hemingway once said about going bankrupt. How do you go bankrupt?

12, gradually and then all at once. Tom Nichols is with us today. He's Professor Emeritus

of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College. We'll have a lot more when we come back.

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Tom earlier you had said this is the weakest cabinet in American history.

And what I'd like to spend some time doing is we've collected some statements from various members

of the cabinet. And I just want to go through them with you one by one because usually on this show

when we're covering issues, we're talking about sort of one agency in particular. But I think it's

really instructive to hear them all together because the whole picture really sort of tells us where

we are as a country. And let me start with something that's very much on the minds of Americans

right now and Americans who travel on an airplane. And that is the fact that the TSA because of

the lack of funding for DHS, the TSA has not had funding for a while and which is causing huge

backups at airports like Philadelphia, Atlanta, Washington DC, etc, etc. Well, just this weekend,

the president said, hey, let's send ICE agents in to cover for TSA agents who can't come or won't

come to work because they're not getting paid. Well, here's transportation secretary Sean Duffy.

He was on ABC just this weekend. He was asked about the president's plan to put ICE agents

in airports. I would say that, you know, one of the leverage points that Iran has is trying to

drive up the price of oil. It's leverage. Democrats want to see long lines at airports as leverage

president Trump's trying to take that leverage away and not make the American people suffer.

TSA agents are law enforcement. They know how to pat people down. They know how to run the X-ray

machines because they are, again, under Homeland Security with TSA. So if we can bring in other

assets and tools to assist TSA to get rid of these lines, yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.

And the president's looking around every corner to make sure the American people don't suffer

during the shutdown. Now, Tom, when he says, when Duffy says they know how to pat people down,

they know how to run the X-ray machines. He's actually referring to ICE there saying they

are under Homeland Security with TSA. I have a lot of thoughts about how to read that part of

Duffy's statement, but I just want to turn to you first. Well, first one of the things that always

happens to expertise in an authoritarian situation. I mean, we live in a free country and thank

God for it. But the president runs the White House very much like an authoritarian regime,

an authoritarian hot house. And so the key to survival is never to contradict the leader.

And so Duffy has to come up with some kind of cockamami rationale.

I think given what we saw in Minnesota, the last thing you want is a bunch of ice guys wandering

around, you know, patting down your, you know, grandma and your kids as they're trying to get on an

airplane. What what's also going on here, and I think people need to be aware of this,

Trump has been looking for some institution and American government that will be his personal muscle.

He tried to do it with the military and that didn't work out well. He his attempt to militarize

the streets ended up kind of fizzling out. ICE, however, does not have the traditions in the

history of the US military and he he clearly wants to turn them into some sort of paramilitary

rapid reaction force that he can send anywhere at will. And this is probably a good opportunity

for him to prove that it's just dumb. ICE will probably be in the way more than they're going

to help. They're not trained for this. The TSA union had said, listen, we trained for a long time

and we bring a lot of experience to this. I've been a critic of security theater at airports.

But if you're going to have anybody do it, have the people that are civilians who are trained,

sending in immigration cops is again, just a flex it's meant to intimidate people by putting

guys and you know, face masks and weapons roaming around airports. It's going to make things worse.

I mean, the ICE agents themselves are barely trained to do their own jobs as we've been learning

over the past few months. But the fact that the Secretary of Transportation can utter a phrase

like that, I mean, what does it tell you about his own knowledge of what kind of expertise it

takes to run, you know, aspects of of of airport security? There's no evidence that Sean Duffy

is qualified to be a member of the cabinet. But it tells you, even if he knew about these issues,

it won't matter because in this cabinet, the most important thing is to always say that Donald

Trump is right. If Donald Trump said, you know, we're going to take the, you know, the the

federal health service said because doctors know how to pat people down and, you know, we're going

to send 10,000 guys on white jackets. Sean Duffy's answer would be a masterful plan, sir,

because that is the culture of this administration. And that is why authoritarian leaders hate experts

because experts are always the people in the room who raise their hand and say, you know, I know

you wish that it would happen that way. But there are things like, you know, the laws of physics,

history experience that tell you it's not going to happen that way. And people like Donald Trump

hate being told that stuff because their approach to everything is to say, if I say it, it will

happen. Well, you mentioned a health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A little

bit ago. Let's listen to a moment that from him from just last month, February, 2026, where Kennedy

said or claimed that eating a ketogenic diet could, in his words, cure schizophrenia. Dr. Paul

and Robert Harvard has cured schizophrenia using keto diets. There are studies right now that I

saw two days ago where people lose their bipolar diagnosis by changing their diet. Okay, Tom,

just to provide some facts in opposition to what Kennedy said just there. As far as we can tell,

there's no doctor Paulin at Harvard or elsewhere who was directly studied the keto diet and its

impact on schizophrenia. The secretary may have meant someone named Christopher Palmer,

who is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but Palmer told scientific

American that quote, I have never claimed to cure schizophrenia. I have never used the word cure

in any of my talks or research. He did co-author a 2025 study that reviewed evidence for the

ketogenic diet as a possible treatment for schizophrenia. It found that some small pilot studies

suggest that diet may improve some symptoms in some people but had no effect in other people.

So those are the facts. Tom, with Kennedy, we're at a place where it's not just ignorance,

right? It's an aggressive assertion of things that are just

patently not true. Yeah, this is beyond ignorance. This is sheer crack pottery.

Kennedy shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near the federal government, but again,

two things about this cabinet. One is that they were chosen specifically for their transgressive

nature. Trump was very frustrated in his first term by actually having some adults who would say

things like, you know, this is a bad idea. And so in his second term, he said, I'm going to appoint

people and I'm going to force them down the throat of the Republican Senate as a way of trolling

the country. You kept me out of office in 2020? Well, here's your reward. You get Robert Kennedy.

You get Tulsi Gabbard. You get Cash Patel. And almost as a kind of malicious

inflection of unqualified people on the American public, kind of as Trump's revenge.

The other thing is to ask, why do people embrace this? And I think in Kennedy's example,

look, the world's a complicated, scary place, especially after we went through a pandemic.

And people like Kennedy with these crank ideas come out and say, I can re-empower you.

The guy's in the white jackets. They don't really understand schizophrenia. You and I

together can do our own research. And, you know, if your son or daughter is suffering from this,

it's not a tragedy that will have no end. You know, just get them on some high protein,

give them some raw meat, you know, and they're going to be okay. And that,

look, people cling to that in uncertain times because they feel like part of the death of

expertise as a phenomenon is that people feel out of control. And you've had this,

when we've been ill and we go and we watch a doctor, you know, looking at a chart and kind of,

you know, stroking their chin and going, hmm, it's the most disempowering moment in the world.

You know, you're sitting there in a gown saying, what's, you know, your life,

my life is in your hands. What are you doing? And people hate understandably hate that.

And guys like Robert Kennedy say, you know what? Forget those, forget those creeps from Harvard

and the white jackets. I can hear, eat some nuts and berries and you'll be fine.

There's another member of the cabinet that I just want to play some tape from because you

also had mentioned her before. The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard,

she appeared at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing just last week. And she insisted to

Senator John Assoff, Democrat of Georgia, that the only person who can determine what constitutes

an imminent threat to the United States is the president of the United States. So here's a

little bit of Assoff questioning Gabbard. You've stated today that the intelligence community's

assessment is that Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated and that, quote,

there had been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.

Was it the intelligence community's assessment that nevertheless, despite this obliteration,

there was a quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime. Yes or no?

It is not the intelligence community's responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat.

Okay. Here's the problem. No, it is precisely your responsibility.

As you noted in your opening testimony, quote, you represent the I.C.'s assessment of threats.

It's not just that Gabbard is saying, well, we have different views about what imminent threats are.

She's saying it's not even that we're not experts in this. It's not even our job to be the experts

in it. It's like one more step removed from any sense that knowledge, background, or expertise

is essential to the national security apparatus of the country. And Senator Assoff was exactly

right. No, it is exactly your job. If it's not your job to determine what imminent threats are

in the United States, then what is it you do all day? And of course, Tulsi Gabbard, once again,

no qualification for this job other than I think one reason she was chosen is because she is

kind of a strange personality who has some unusual thoughts about the intelligence community.

And so put her in charge of the intelligence community. That'll make everybody mad.

But for her to say, this isn't my job. I was thinking when I first heard that,

as you know, Magna, I used to do a lot of work on the old Soviet Union. And it's very much that

authoritarian cult of personality. I was thinking about something I read in the 30s.

We're a bunch of military officers. We're talking about military strategy. And one of them finally

said, look, military strategy is Comrade Stalin's personal interest than none of our business.

Wow. You know, these were all general saying, well, you know, it's the leader's personal interest.

It's none of our business. And you know, you're seeing this over and over again in this cabinet that,

you know, the secretary of commerce, the secretary of education, the secretary of transportation.

Whatever the leader says, that's the truth. And again, that's why they don't like having governments

like Donald Trump's don't like having experts around. We'll be back. This is on point.

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Tom, there's just a couple more clips here. This one I'm about to play is not from a cabinet member

himself, but he actually has a lot of experience in the diplomatic world of the United States. He

was on our show last week. He's Daniel Kurtzer served as a US ambassador to Israel and to Egypt

as well. And we were talking about the state departments. Responsibility of aiding

US citizens abroad during wartime or times of any kind of crisis. And he told us there's been

such a spectacular lack of planning at the current state department on this that he's received calls

for help from friends who were American citizens stranded in other countries.

This administration is not protecting our citizens in the Gulf. And we've basically

have said to people as someone told me the other day who called me from Israel and said,

how do I get out of here? Told me that when they asked the state department, the state

department said to them, call Expedia. This is extraordinary.

Now, let's move over to the Department of Homeland Security as the folks well know.

Kristinaum, the former secretary is out and likely on his way in is Senator Mark Wayne

Mullen, Republican of Oklahoma. He's the president's next pick for DHS. At Mullen's Senate confirmation

hearing, there were a lot of testy moments. Here's one of them where Senator Rand Paul,

Republican of Kentucky, asked Mullen whether he approves of using violence to resolve political

differences. What I was simply pointing out is some of the rules that still apply to this

body, for instance, Dulling with two consenting adults is still there. I was pointing out what is

still legal for 170 years. Dulling has been illegal for 170 years, says Senator Rand Paul,

two Senator Mark Wayne Mullen. Okay, Tom, I want to sort of play the foil here for a little while

in terms of adding some true rigor to this conversation, some criticisms of both you and me

could be a, we're just cherry picking the, you know, sort of the lowest moments from each of these

cabinet members and that that's not a fair representation of their ability or expertise.

What would you say? That's a pretty big cherry tree. There's, you know, baskets and baskets of

cherries to pick here. So I don't think that's a fair. I mean, the fact that the government

is limping along, you know, going back to Ambassador Kertzer's comments, for example,

means that there are still people in the federal civil service who are still trying to issue visas

and get people where they're going. The rot is at the top. And the, you know, again,

that's going to seep down sooner or later, even into places like the military and the diplomatic

service, unfortunately. So I reject the cherry picking argument because at some point, you've picked

the whole tree. There's just too many examples to just wave away as one off kind of moments.

Okay, so you got to mind that the next bit of pushback I was kind of offer that, yes, there may be

a stunning lack of expertise at the cabinet level. But within each of these agencies, even after

Doge, there are still thousands of people who, you know, are, are career civil servants and they

still have the expertise to keep the government running. So, you know, it might be all politics

at the top. But in terms of the practical functioning of the government, still okay. So we're not

seeing a lack, a death of expertise in federal operations. Well, yes, there are people in, at those

levels trying to make the government work. And the Trump administration is trying very hard to

get rid of them. Donald Trump wants to take thousands of these jobs and turn them from apolitical

jobs into federal presidential appointments. He basically wants to replicate throughout the

civil service the damage that he's done at the cabinet level. So again, I keep saying, you know,

gradually and then all at once, because Donald Trump is trying very hard to flush out

those layers of civil servants who are not, who have sworn loyalty to the Constitution

and try to serve the American people instead of swearing loyalty to Donald Trump and are serving

Donald Trump. Yes. So I want to say that this truth is getting harder and harder to ignore,

right? Because just just a couple of days ago, pro-publica had this incredible piece of reporting

about what Doge has done at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Because last spring,

the president issued some executive orders demanding a complete rewrite of nuclear safety rules

in this country. And I'm also a massive build out of nuclear power. Doge comes in, and this is

according to a pro-publica, basically fires more than 400 people. 443 people either fired or leave

than NRC. Only 57 new folks arrive. So there's a deficit of institutional knowledge in departments

of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that run reactor regulation, nuclear material safety and

safeguards, nuclear regulatory research, nuclear security, and incidents response.

Yeah. Doge was another example of, hey, wouldn't it just be awesome revenge on all the people

that didn't vote for us, especially in the federal civil service, if we just went in and let a

bunch of 20-somethings who have no idea what they're doing, start chopping jobs. Ironically,

the idea of building out more nuclear power, I've been an advocate of that for decades, but not

this way. And if you're going to do that, yeah, I want a bunch of guys in white jackets and

propeller beanies, handling that, and not a bunch of fist pumping bros from the frat house,

firing those people. The other thing that expertise gets in the way of here, by the way,

is profit, which is one reason that I think you're seeing Trump try to slash out all of this

expertise, because those are the people who say, well, yeah, that might be a more profitable way,

but that's a more dangerous way, or that's a less healthy way, or a more destructive to human

health or the environment. They don't want to hear any of that. And I think there's one other

criticism, I suppose we should anticipate here, Magnum, which is, yes, experts have gotten things

wrong. Experts have made bad calls. There's no, we're human beings. I've worked for three politicians.

Sometimes my advice wasn't great, and I got called on the carpet. But experts are more likely

to be right than, again, a couple of bros from Doge, and they are the people that you actually

want to be accountable for their decisions and their actions when they advise political leaders

and government agencies. Tom, I was really caught my attention when you said a lot of this reminds

you of the old Soviet Union, because we reached out to Ruth Ben Giot. She's a professor of history

and Italian studies at New York University and an expert on authoritarianism. And we asked

her about this, and she told us that autocratic decision-making works very differently than decision

making does in democracies. Autocrats develop something called an inner sanctum, a small group of

people who often include family members, friends from the old days, as well as other advisors,

and sometimes even cabinet officials. These are people who are there because of their loyalty

to the leader, who is not there, or anyone who might raise points of view that conflict with the

leaders own. Ben Giot also says that President Trump has an inner sanctum, and it includes people

like Steve Whitcoff and Jared Kushner, who led the negotiations with Iran without taking a

nuclear expert with them before the war. The problem with these inner sanctums is that they

increase the echo chamber that the leader works in, so that over time they can come to believe

their own propaganda, and they rely on fewer and fewer people before making momentous decisions.

This is what happened with the run-up to the war in Iran. Ben Giot says authoritarians purge

or hollow out institutions, meaning they get rid of people across the board who won't be loyal

to the leader. They're not just firing experts, they're firing them in ways that destroys institutional

knowledge, and so when you have a crisis, none of that is available to you, and then it's handled

badly. This has happened in many places where government service becomes politicized. You're

remaking the judiciary and the other agencies into tools of your propaganda and tools of your

authoritarian ambitions, not serving the public. So we asked Professor Ben Giot, given the actions

by the Trump administration that we've discussed, is the United States still a democracy or has the

country slipped into autocracy? Our democracy is severely damaged, but it is still a democracy in

so far as we have a robust opposition party, the democratic party. We still have people like myself

able to speak out. We have the right to protest, and one of my maxims, which I've formed from

studying authoritarians for so long, is you want to use every tool and space that you have for

peaceful resistance, because you never know when it will be gone. Okay, Tom, we're at the point where

it's not just the idea of an expert that has been kind of torn down in this country. It's the whole

concept for the necessity of expertise. Now, you wrote about this in your book, The Death of

Expertise, as a decades on campaign against the concept that some people actually do know a lot,

and that's useful. How would we begin to undo the effects of that campaign?

Well, the first thing is I very much agree with Ruth's point that we're still a democracy, and people

should use all of the levers of democracy while they have them, including voting. I mean, this is a

case where if Trump loses the House in 2026, his presidency is more or less over, which is why he's

visibly panicking at this. So, before people kind of lose heart and say, well, there's nothing that

can be done about it. There's plenty that can be done about it. What's interesting about the way

that this suspicion of expertise, which long predates Donald Trump factors into the political problem,

is that Trump has identified experts as the enemy. And one of the things that I think is very

interesting about this is the way that he has cast experts and federal civil servants and other

Americans as not Americans as an enemy, an enemy to be rooted out as, you know, communists as

traders. I mean, this is, we've gone through a bunch of historical analogies. They're Mussolini,

Stalin, but this is McCarthy on steroids that everyone who disagrees with Donald Trump is

suspicious and an enemy of the country and a trader. He's done that to the media. He refers to

the media as the enemy of the people, an old Soviet phrase. He thinks of experts as people who are

just there to frustrate him and his brilliant plans. And that's, that is something that all of us

can help put a stop to by shaming it whenever, whenever that pops up by shaming that notion and

reminding our fellow citizens that we are all Americans. One of the reasons that this country

has prospered is that we've looked at experts as our fellow citizens who despite their faults and

and their errors are doing their best to make this a good country, a healthy, safe country for the

rest of us. Yeah. And I think a lot of people are now experiencing firsthand in all cross-sections

of their lives, what happens when the United States really drains, drains its governance of

the experts that used to hold it together. So that's a wake-up call for us all.

Tom Nichols, staff writer at the Atlantic and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College,

author of our own worst enemy and the death of expertise. Tom, thank you so much for joining us

today. Thanks for having me. I'm Magna Tucker-Bardi. This is on point.

Alli Vyas was involved with the 2015 negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal.

He's also a nuclear scientist. A new deal was tantalizingly close late last month,

so why did the U.S. and Israel launch their war against Iran anyway?

That Iran has always been the other of the West, this bellwaters state that the West has difficulty

understanding. That's on the next on point.