Those of us who've covered Middle East politics remember well the bad old days when Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama were feuding endlessly over Israel's West Bank settlement project and Iran's nuclear program.
But nothing has prepared us for today's extraordinary level of tension.
Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Franklin Foer and Anne Appelbaum are my colleagues and staff writers at The Atlantic, Nikole Killion is a congressional correspondent for CBS News, and Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the author of Tired of Winning, Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party.
Welcome to all of you.
I apologize to this side of the table.
We're rolling deep on The Atlantic tonight.
Try not to be too intimidated by it.
And congratulations on your book.
I want to talk about that in a few minutes.
But, Nikole, I'm going to start with you because I saw you on T.V.
today.
I saw you earlier.
You were following Marjorie Taylor Greene through the Capitol, a very exciting part of your job, quite obviously.
And there's new anxiety, new tension on the Hill today about Speaker Johnson's longevity.
He is, as we all know, the 174th person to be speaker of the House in the last six months.
She seems to be doing what the hard right of that party has been doing in the last several rounds, questioning his purity to the cause.
Give us a little bit of an update about what's going on up there and whether this is actually a threat to the speaker.
NIKOLE KILLION, Congressional Correspondent, CBS News: You know, Congresswoman Green confirmed that she did, in fact, file a motion to vacate against Speaker Mike Johnson.
What she didn't say was when she may call this up.
She says that this is just a warning to Speaker Johnson, a pink slip.
And in her view, she feels that he has betrayed conference rules, particularly when it comes to this government funding package, because it didn't even get a full reading.
You know, typically there's this 72-hour rule for lawmakers to read through the legislation.
That didn't happen because the text dropped Thursday.
They voted on it Friday, so she was upset about that.
And that is certainly a broad sense among many House Republicans.
I think what's interesting to note, though, is as of now, you don't see a flood of House Republicans lining up.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Are they just tired of this kind of thing, even the harder right members?
NIKOLE KILLION: Well, I think you have some folks who are pulling out their hair like, not again.
But I think that frustration is pretty palpable.
I mean, at the end of the day, to get this government funding over the finish line once again, Democratic votes were required in large numbers.
And that's a slap in the face to many of these Republicans who put Speaker Mike Johnson in that position.
So, you know, he is facing some troubling waters ahead, but at the end of the day, you know, the government had to get funded and, you know, they have to work together to get it done.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
And remind us.
So, Speaker Johnson is suffering from a decision that former Speaker McCarthy made when he allowed any single member of Congress to sort of call a vote or to instigate a vote of no confidence, essentially, is that right?
NIKOLE KILLION: Well, yes, Speaker Johnson is pretty much in the same hot water that former Speaker McCarthy was.
And for a while, Speaker Johnson was kind of getting this grace period.
So, you know, with Marjorie Taylor Greene kind of potentially pulling this trigger or just holding that threat over Speaker Johnson's head could potentially put his job in jeopardy.
Furthermore, when you look at this week, we had Colorado's Ken Buck, who decided to leave Congress early, you have Mike Gallagher out of Wisconsin announcing that he will leave early from Congress in April.
This will reduce Speaker Johnson's majority potentially down to one vote.
So, that means he will likely have to work with Democrats even more, which will create more tension among his own people.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, what you're saying is that Jonathan Karl could wind up being the speaker of the House?
But if you're not -- talk about Mike Gallagher for a second because this is a new development, yet another Republican saying, I'm getting out, dodge like now.
JONATHAN KARL, Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News: Well, look, it's a vanishing Republican majority.
Mike Gallagher was one of the truly sane members of Congress, a serious member of Congress.
He was chair of the special committee on China.
He was one of just three that voted against impeaching Mayorkas, because he didn't see -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The Homeland Security secretary.
JONATHAN KARL: I mean, all of this.
So - - but you have a vanishing Republican majority.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene put this out there really for one reason above all else.
It wasn't even the spending bill.
That was the immediate reason, but she's holding a gun to Johnson's head over funding for Ukraine.
Marjorie Taylor Greene's position is not a penny more for Ukraine.
And the minute Johnson does anything to move towards a vote to provide funding for Ukraine, she's going to push it.
But where's it going to go?
I mean, she only needs -- with this narrow a majority, theoretically, she would only need possibly only one other Republican to join her.
But Democrats now, I don't think, are going to go along.
They've already seen Democrats come forward and say, we're not going to do this again.
Democrats, you know, when McCarthy had the motion to vacate, every single Democrat voted for the motion to vacate because they wanted to vacate him and bring in Hakeem Jeffries.
Well, this time they're not going to play that game.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So they're going to support Democrats would vote for Johnson to stay in the speaker's chair.
JONATHAN KARL: For a price, and that price is likely to move forward on the supplemental funding for Ukraine.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Ukraine.
Since you brought up Ukraine, let me bring in the world's leading expert on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum.
But is this -- you're not only an expert on Ukraine, you actually understand Republican and conservative politics very, very well.
What portion of the Republican Party does Marjorie Taylor Greene represent in her position on Ukraine?
ANNE APPLEBAUM, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: It's very hard to tell, because some of the people who are opposed to aid for Ukraine seem to have real motives.
I mean, it's too much money or America first or something like that, and that might be genuine.
Some of them seem to be acting performatively on behalf of Donald Trump.
And I think Mike Johnson might be one of those.
Trump has decided that he doesn't want money to go to Ukraine, and he wants Ukraine to be weaker.
There's a lot of different speculation about why that would be.
Maybe he has some deal in his head that he's going to do if he wins.
Maybe he imagines some kind of partition.
I mean, there's a lot of -- I don't want to scare everybody with the details, but he's been very, very clear that he doesn't want the House to pass this money.
And there are enough people in the House who either support him or are afraid for their own seats, they're afraid of being primaried, that they have gone along with it.
And I think that, more than anything else, explains where we are.
I mean, it's really an extraordinary moment.
And we have an out-of-power ex-president who is, in effect, dictating American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign dictator or with the interests of a foreign dictator in mind.
And I don't think we've been through this before.
JONATHAN KARL: And I have to say, I mean, I think that it's getting close to half of the House Republicans that are actually in this America first quasi-isolationist camp of not wanting to give any more money to Ukraine.
Mike Johnson is not in that camp.
Mike Johnson tells people that Vladimir Putin must be stopped or he'll move through Europe.
He sounds a lot like Lindsey Graham, who is also in this position of trying to find a way to placate the real leader of the Republican Party, who wants to pull the plug entirely and turn Ukraine over to Putin.
So, that's why you have them with some of these ideas like we're going to do it as a loan.
We're going to try to do it in some way.
But, I mean, the real problem here is exactly what Anne said, it's Donald Trump.
NIKOLE KILLION: And he did put out a statement today saying, you know, going into the recesses, you know, Congress will be out for the next two weeks, that he will move forward with a supplemental.
But to Jon's point, it may look a little different than what we saw on the Senate side.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Frank, what do you think is Trump's ultimate motivation on Ukraine?
FRANKLIN FOER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I think that there's so many grudges, so many layers of grudges that are left over from his first impeachment trial.
I think he's always had this innate sympathy to Vladimir Putin, who he's admired as a strong man.
And then I think there are things that go back to his commercial history in Russia, that he always was attracted to Russians.
He was always enticed by the idea of doing business in Russia.
Michael Cohen in the middle of -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: His former lawyer.
FRANKLIN FOER: He had talked about how -- even during the first campaign in 2016, they were they were trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
And so in Trump's mind, all of these things, the grudges, the commercial interests, the political interests, they all get the narcissism and the ego all swirled together into this motivation that is sometimes quite obtuse to those of us on the outside.
JONATHAN KARL: And straight up admiration for Vladimir Putin.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.
Well, this is about -- this is a broader issue about an attraction to authoritarians, and we're going to get to that when I pivot elegantly to the Middle East in a minute.
But I just want to stay with this Ukraine question just for one more second with Anne, because you alluded to a kind of bargain possibly that Trump and Trumpists have imagined that if Trump comes back to power, obviously, we understand that China and Russia would prefer Trump as president to Biden, I mean, I think that's a fair statement, that somehow Trump will force a settlement that looks good from Putin's perspective.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: He said that in this somewhat incoherent way, right?
He said, when I take power, the war will be over in one day.
You know, there will be a deal.
And people around him have talked a little bit more in detail about a deal.
And, of course, I don't want to speculate about things that we don't really know and might never happen, but, you know, there is some idea that we would have like a new Yalta.
We would divide Europe, maybe.
I mean, there is something like that that's in the air.
He has some idea about it affecting oil prices and you get oil prices going down.
I mean, I don't -- you know, I can't prove that.
But I mean, it's certainly not that farfetched.
I mean, he is someone who thinks like that.
He thinks transactionally.
He doesn't think in terms of what's good for Europe or what's good for America.
I mean, the loss of Ukraine, for Ukraine to have been seen as a failure, if we give away Ukraine, if Kyiv becomes a Russian satrapy, you know, the United States will be seen as a receding power and that will have all kinds of economic and political consequences that we haven't even imagined yet in terms of arms sales and energy supply sales and an America's position in trade talks and all kinds of -- the idea that America is the security guarantor for Europe is very, very important and fundamental to how America is perceived in Europe and around the world.
Trump is not interested in that at all.
He doesn't care.
He doesn't know why it matters.
FRANKLIN FOER: Meanwhile, this is not just a Washington story.
This is a Ukraine story, and I think Anne could speak to this better.
But each delay that we go through has real consequences for the Ukrainian army and for the Ukrainian society, which is thoroughly demoralized by the way that Washington has treated the cause, our ally.
