Waiting for War, and a Debate on Regime Change

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Michael Tracey is back for a discussion of whether we will soon be at war with Iran. Some of you have complained about Michael, but he’s very knowledgeable and the perfect interlocutor for when I haven’t had enough time to follow geopolitical events as closely as I would like. Here, he helps clarify Steve Witkoff’s role in Trump administration policy. When you understand Witkoff as a pro-Israel partisan, the approach to negotiating with Iran begins to make a lot more sense. Michael informed me about his “red line” comment on enrichment, which made all the pieces click. We go into Witkoff’s different postures on Russia and Iran, and how they reflect Trump’s own instincts.

We’ve been hearing about Iranian nuclear proliferation and the threat of war for over two decades. Right now, an American strike seems much closer than ever. By the time you listen to this podcast, it may have happened already. Polymarket as I type these words gives a 63% chance of an American attack by July.

Near the end, we discuss what American policy should be towards Iran. I lay out my case for regime change, and Michael is unsurprisingly skeptical. My position is based in part on the belief that there is a very small chance that the US would send in ground troops. People keep going back to Iraq and Afghanistan, but I think the way these interventions were conducted should be seen as a historical aberration. Since Vietnam, we’ve never tried to do large-scale nation building in a foreign country under dangerous conditions, except for Iraq and Afghanistan, which were both launched within a year and a half of 9/11. There is simply no appetite for doing anything similar again, anywhere on the right or left.

A policy of regime change towards Iran therefore wouldn’t mean American soldiers walking the streets of Tehran, but the attempted toppling of a government from a distance and hoping something better emerges afterwards. Michael and I discuss other times states have fallen, and what the outcomes have been for the nations involved. He surprises me by expressing a bit of skepticism over whether the collapse of the Soviet Union was in the end a good thing, though it seems like I may have been able to convince him that it was.