I just saw two video clips that sum up the two sides of the current debate over the Iran War and the Trump administration’s efforts to end it.
The first is a clip of President Donald Trump discussing the prospects for peace with Iran. Of particular interest: his remarks about the need for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restrain himself and stop Israel’s bloodshed in Lebanon.
Like any sane person, Trump sees the problems with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group that threatens Lebanese and Israelis alike. But again, like any sane person, he holds Israel to basic standards of civilized behavior that it, under Netanyahu’s leadership, has long fallen short of. “Too many people are getting killed,” Trump said, repeating yet again his criticisms of Israel for sabotaging U.S. negotiations with Iran by striking civilian areas of Lebanon. “You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. ‘Cause there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they’re not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you.”
Now contrast that with this second clip of neoconservative chickenhawk commentator John Podhoretz expressing almost hysterical anger at the Trump administration for working toward a deal to end this war. Trump, Podhoretz complains, is making it look like America doesn’t have the “resolve” to “exert its will” and “change the nature of the map” in the Middle East. It’s as if Podhoretz wants the U.S. to conduct war as cynically and cruelly as Israel does. “He has choked! He has chickened out!” he shouted, referring to Trump. Why is Trump a wimp, in the view of Podhoretz? Because the president “could not bear the idea of putting a boot on the ground anywhere in Iran. And could not bear the idea of a single American possibly being taken hostage.” Who is Podhoretz even talking to? No one wants boots on the ground.
U.S. military service members, Podhoretz says, are volunteers who choose to “put their life on the line,” so why not put their lives to use? He concedes that it’s not a “good thing” for our men and women to be killed or taken hostage. “But if you’re gonna go to war, you have to put boots on the ground,” he adds. “If you’re going to go to war, you have to understand that there are sacrifices.” Not only soldiers, but the “country itself may have to sacrifice,” including “in the form of wildly higher oil prices.”
“I’m out of my mind here,” Podhoretz said, barely containing himself. “I haven’t felt like this in a long time, actually.”
Podhoretz is part of an ideological faction that was once called “the establishment” due to its stranglehold on power and its ability to get its way regardless of what voters wanted. That explains how he could say such clearly villainous things on camera without, apparently, having any inkling of how repulsive he sounds to the average viewer.
He’s not persuasive, because Podhoretz and his ilk are still not accustomed to having to persuade anybody. They never used to need to persuade people. Instead, the pro-war elites once used wealth and raw power to shoehorn in their candidates of choice—and conduct their wars of choice—without ever answering to anyone.
All of that changed, of course, with the dawn of the political movement that Trump inaugurated in 2015. An antiwar movement premised on holding the elites—the kind of men who talk like Podhoretz—who had given us war after “stupid war,” as Trump said, accountable.
Trump defeated the “establishment” electorally—twice. More importantly, he ignited a new courage in the American people, the courage to believe that they could actually effect change, that they weren’t disenfranchised or stuck choosing preapproved candidates—the Bushes, Clintons, McCains, and Romneys—who could all be relied upon to make “sacrifices,” in Podhoretz’s words, of American blood and treasure whether we liked it or not.
Since the beginning of the American-Israeli war against Iran in late February, Trump’s polling numbers have plummeted. Public polling is clear about many of the reasons why: spiking energy prices, for example. But I believe the public has felt more broadly that Trump, by waging so unnecessary and costly a war, had revealed flaws in his character and was no longer representing the popular convictions he had appealed to on his way to the historic victory he achieved in 2024.
But when I watched those two video clips, I got the feeling that we might be about to see all that turn around, because one clip was humane and representative of the common sentiments of the American people. And the other was dehumanizing and convoluted and contemptuous of public opinion.
In other words, not only do these two clips sum up the debate, but they also make it obvious which side will win: the side of peace—if President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance hold the line.
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