Let me focus this a little bit more.
So, from the -- and I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second.
China is a near peer adversary of the United States in many respects, many defense respects.
Russia now is kind of second tier.
Iran is third tier.
So, to play devil's advocate, you talk about how bad it would be for Biden's re-election campaign to have a war with Iran.
But we've been in a cold war, and sometimes it's gotten a little hot, with Iran for 45 years.
There's no upside for the Biden administration to actually take on our historic adversary in the Middle East that is supporting all kinds of terrorist groups all over the world?
PETER BAKER: I mean, look, remember, Iran may be third tier, but Afghanistan was a hundredth tier, and look what they did.
I mean, you know, I mean, it doesn't have to be a truly incredible military to give us a lot of problems if we decide to take military action that becomes excessive, right?
And I think that Biden understands the zeitgeist of the country is not to get too involved in these wars.
And the Trump side of the political spectrum agrees with that.
Now, the hawkish parts of the Republican Party are out today, of course, criticizing him for taking too long, for being too weak, for not going after Iranian targets in Iran, and that's all legitimate debate to have, but they're not completely in agreement themselves, the Republican side of where they want to be at this point.
What haven't heard Donald Trump say, I would have hit them hard, or you've heard him say they wouldn't have hit us because of me if I was there, but he hasn't talked about what he would have done.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, speaking of Donald Trump, he posted on Truth Social the following.
This attack would never have happened if I was president, not even a chance, just like the Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel would never have happened, the war in Ukraine would never have happened, and we would right now, and this is where it goes to 11, we would right now have peace throughout the world, instead we are in the brink of World War 3.
Now, put aside the hyperbole, explain any of you -- because this is a $64,000, explain Republican foreign policy right now.
SUSAN GLASSER: If you put aside the hyperbole, Jeff, you're not left with an awful lot in - to dissect.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It starts off in a kind of a modulated way and then it unmodulates.
But -- SUSAN GLASSER: You're right.
This is the question right now, which is, what is Republican foreign policy?
They are a party divided.
And part of the dynamic that we've seen for eight full years now is that there is a fundamental -- not only a conflict, but actually incompatible worldviews between, you know, what you might call the old Republican foreign policy represented now by Mitch McConnell and, you know, some of -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Tom Cotton.
SUSAN GLASSER: Yes, exactly, the sort of hawkish foreign policy that, you know, inevitably invokes Ronald Reagan's name at least a million times.
You know, that world is the declining, but still influential part of the Republican Party.
You see Nikki Haley representing some of those views in the Republican primary campaign, but it's really -- it's on the downward slope.
The ascendant views are those of Trump's, what you might call, a sort of neo-isolationism, very muscular rhetoric, but at the same time, Trump very wary of military conflict.
You know, he loves nothing more than to brag about how he practically personally assassinated General Soleimani, but at the same time was very conflict averse.
And we all remember very vividly when Donald Trump ordered a series of strikes on Iran and then pulled them back at the last minute.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You wrote a lot about that, in fact, at the time.
Talk about that, do a little comparing contrast on these approaches.
LARA SELIGMAN: Yes, it's really interesting because Trump team has -- in this last week, they've said this wouldn't have happened under Trump's watch because look what Trump did.
He killed Soleimani and that restored deterrence in the Middle East.
They are missing many, many facts that happened along the way.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But to be fair, the Iranians immediately after Soleimani were kind of shocked that the United States actually assassinated their leading terrorist sponsor general.
LARA SELIGMAN: They did almost immediately launched strikes on Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq and they injured more than 100 soldiers.
And soon after that there was another actually deadly strike on a different base in Iraq and they killed two U.S. service members and a British service member and that was really shocking to us as well.
And since then they've continued these attacks on a lower level but these attacks have not stopped in the Biden administration either.
And, in fact, I think personally that the Biden administration wants rather than a war with Iran, I think they want to get back to the status quo, which is little attacks, which we know are not going to go away.
There's no way of stopping them as long as the U.S. is in the Middle East, but they want to go back to the status quo.
And at the root of that problem is Israel and Israel's campaign in Gaza.
And they know that this escalation in the Middle East is not going to stop until those operations stop and that I believe is what they really want to focus on before so to get that over.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Nancy, pick it up there.
The Biden team, until this past week, has been working mainly on both helping Israel defeat Hamas, but defeated in the way that the Americans want them to defeat it.
How does this, what we're seeing right now in Iraq and Syria, how does that play into those efforts?
NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, because if you're the U.S. and you want to mitigate the risk of escalation, the key to it is some sort of agreement on Israel.
Now, you could argue that Iran is exploiting what's happening in Israel to continue its campaign of trying to drive the Americans out.
But either way, between what's happening in the Red Sea with the Houthis and Iraq and Syria and the amount of resources that it has taken to defend the U.S. presence in the region at one point, two aircraft carrier strike groups, we've had destroyers there, that the resolution of that issue at least allows you to look at some sort of longer term reset in terms of what the U.S. force posture should be at the region.
Right now, you've had sort of a surge of air defenses, a surge of naval assets in response to this.
And in some cases, like the Houthis, they have said that once there is a ceasefire, they will stop.
And so I think for the Biden administration, the ceasefire is key.
And in terms of figuring out how to defend the United States presence long term, once that's resolved, it allows you to really figure out what your force allocation will be going forward in a more enduring way that you can start to move some of those resources out potentially and have a more sort of balanced presence in Europe, in Asia where there are also threats that the U.S. wants to address.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
You know, that brings up an interesting point about a country we don't talk about in the last three months, nearly as much as we used to, Ukraine.
And, I mean, there's obviously dramatic events taking place in Kyiv right now.
The very popular general in charge of Ukrainian armed forces seems to be on his way out, very adversarial with President Zelenskyy.
Susan, again, sorry, like a hard, synthesizing question.
But how does the American ever, the Biden administration's uphill effort to convince Republicans to keep and stay in the fight, how does all of this affect that?
SUSAN GLASSER: Oh, I think it absolutely does.
First of all, ever since October 7th, right, we've been in a dramatically different situation, which is that while the world has metastasizing crises, there's still only one president, there's only one White House National Security Council and this has been a consuming, consuming struggle.
And the extent to which the U.S. is now facing the prospect of escalating involvement in the Middle East, I think that is yet another point of distraction from Ukraine.
And, you know, right now, again, making the case to the American people about why it is the U.S. is engaged in these battles.
It's a really hard election year fight, frankly, for anyone and certainly someone who's running against Donald Trump.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, right.
Stay on Trump.
You two wrote a great book about Trump that dealt a lot with foreign policy.
I have to ask because there are a lot of people who believe this, and there's a there's a plausible argument to be made that Trump is the -- it takes the crazy -- the so-called crazy Nixon approach to foreign policy, which is, you know, Henry Kissinger deployed this with the Russians said, look, I'm saying, but the president I work for, he's crazy, you don't know what he's going to do, right?
And Trump's argument, not articulated as such, Trump's argument is nothing bad happens in the world when I'm president because everybody is so scared of me because I'll do anything.
I mean, is there some utility to that?
It comes back to this question about why do we telegraph what we're going to do so far in advance?
PETER BAKER: Yes.
Look, I think there is something to that in the sense that foreign leaders, and particularly our adversaries, have said that they don't know how Trump might react to things.
And they have calibrated their responses and their actions on the international stage in part to that unpredictability, that volatility.
But he also, of course, wants to give himself credit for everything that happens or doesn't happen in the world while he happened to be there.
The fact that Putin didn't invade Ukraine during his watch may only be because Putin didn't need to invade Ukraine during his watch, right?
Why did Putin invade Ukraine to keep them from going to the west?
Well, Donald Trump made it very clear he didn't want Ukraine in the West.
He considered Ukraine to be an enemy.
He thought that they were trying to dislodge him from the presidency.
He made that very clear.
And he certainly wasn't going to help them move into NATO.
So, Putin had already achieved what he wanted to achieve in that sense with Ukraine before Biden comes to office.
So, you can make that argument.
But, of course, Trump is going to make it easy for the American voters to simply say, I'm the guy who brought you great peace and nothing bad happened on my watch, which, again, is a misreading and certainly a rewriting of history, but does raise some interesting questions.
NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, you know, what's interesting, Peter, is we're seeing right now arguably that Putin is making a calculation in terms of the way ahead in Ukraine that if Trump is re-elected, that maybe I'll be in a better negotiating position, maybe the alliance will and Constitution for this war won't last through the year, that that combination allows me to actually get a better deal.
So, in some ways, there are foreign policy decisions being made precisely because they think they know what Trump would do if elected.
SUSAN GLASSER: Well, here, I have to say, like I agree with you that there's no -- it's literally zero incentive for Vladimir Putin to stop fighting any time before November, because he would have someone in the White House who has never believed, by the way, in the legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent state.
Donald Trump has not only said that, he said that to the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, in the Oval Office itself.
The only place where I disagree with you slightly on that is that there's no negotiated deal that Vladimir Putin is looking for.
Vladimir Putin is still looking to achieve a form of victory in Ukraine.
And as difficult as we might see that scenario, I believe that it's highly, highly unlikely, even with Trump in the White House, that you're going to see some kind of Paris peace talks and Vladimir Putin negotiate a long-term settlement.
He has outlined the extinction of Ukraine as an independent entity, and he is pursuing that goal, unfortunately, I think.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, in our last seconds, I want to ask you this, and we saw this in the Obama period.
We've seen this in almost every presidency over the last 30 or 40 years.
Presidents come in, they get sick and tired of the Middle East.
They think there's a way out, and there's no way out.
Is Joe Biden learning what President Obama - trying to pivot to Asia?
You got Ukraine, you've got Taiwan, you've got a million things.
PETER BAKER: Every single time, every single time you think that you can do it differently, that you can focus on China, that you can reorder the Middle East, in fact, through these normalization agreements.
You don't have to pay attention to the Palestinian dispute.
You can move on.
And every time the old Middle East comes back and says, wait a second, we're not done yet.
And it has trapped each president in different ways time and time again.
We saw it with Bush.
We saw it with Obama.
We saw it with Trump as his own character.
But we're certainly seeing it now.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, we'll probably see it in the next presidency as well.
