WarTalk: Who Won the War?

Second Breakfast Rebrands! Plus: Pope Fight

After six weeks of high-intensity combat are on pause. The WarTalk crew convenes for a full debrief.

Eric Robinson, Tony Stark , Justin Mc, and Secretary of Defense Rock join me to score the Iran conflict.

We discuss…

• Whether Iran’s Strait of Hormuz toll booth is a Trump card or a wasting asset

• How the administration fumbled the messaging on the war’s most heroic moment — the JSOC pilot rescue deep inside Iran

• America as Prussia 1806: the great military machine that can’t learn new tricks?

• Colby’s bizarre knife fight with Pope Leo

• McMasterism, dereliction of duty, and why no one is pushing back

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

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Who Won the War?

Jordan Schneider: Who won the war? Here we are. WarTalk, rebranded from Second Breakfast. We got a special guest, Secretary of Defense Rock — hereby dubbed Mr. Secretary — along with regulars Eric, Tony, and Justin. Should we take a vote? All in favor of Iran winning? What’s the judge’s scorecard here?

Eric Robinson: We got to set out a rule. What determines victory? Did you realize your ambitions that you set out at the start of the conflict? Do you come out of the conflict stronger or in a better negotiating position? Do you retain your combat power?

Justin: The only people who won out of this were those who held long-term commodities futures. On the Iran front, yes, it’s clear we didn’t win. It is very clear the United States didn’t win. Best reporting from the New York Times and elsewhere says Iran’s economy is only a few weeks away from probably fully collapsing without some sort of aid and income. Fiery loss? I don’t know.

If they really were a few weeks away — let’s say they were a few months away from total collapse of their economy prior to this conflict. Obviously there was a lot of damage to the economic infrastructure that occurred during the conflict. All that did was speed up the economic collapse, but now you’ve potentially given them this ability to tax. I saw the report today in Forbes — something like if they did the toll on the toll booth at $2 million a ship, that’s like $9 billion a year at normal transit numbers. That’s 60% of their GDP that you’ve increased flowing in. So it would be a victory that potentially hands them an economic win unless we’re going to go back later and actually force the strait and not enforce the tolls. That’s one of the reasons I lean towards Iran is in a materially better place as a regime at the end of this.

Tony: Which regime though, right? Is the regime that now exists still the regime that exists in a couple of weeks? Because if the IRGC is particularly upset with this deal — their idea of victory is very different from the regime’s idea of victory — then it’s in an even worse position. I’ll also say, talking to some investors, the VLCCs, the very large crude carriers, those that go through the strait will do fine because it’s probably only a $1 increase per barrel. Anything short of that, and you are looking at substantial impacts to profit and revenue. And when you’re talking about a reduced flow anyway — we’ve seen it with the Red Sea, there are fewer ships going through — this has longstanding effects if they allow that toll to go through.

Secretary of Defense Rock: The big winner is Robert Pape and probably book sales for Bombing to Win if I had to pick one. The way he’s kind of broken out on Substack — it is pretty remarkable.

As far as the amount of munitions that were expended, the amount of assets we had to bring in that were used — again, it’s sort of just what was actually accomplished. When military officials are talking about how many meals and energy drinks are consumed and how many targets we hit, it’s like, what are we doing? It feels like this throwback to Vietnam — we hit this many targets and...

Tony: We joined the war on substance addiction on the side of substance addiction.

The 2018 NDS Scorecard

Eric: I want to establish a benchmark because we are speaking through the last six weeks of arguably high-intensity combat in the Persian Gulf. If we go back to 2017 with the Trump administration’s first National Security Strategy, followed by the 2018 National Defense Strategy — this is a principal document that reset American defense away from the excesses and the meandering of the global war on terror and reoriented it towards four large nation states: the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, the North Koreans, and Iran. And in the intervening eight years, two of those four have suffered catastrophic battlefield reverses — the Russians in Ukraine and now the Iranians in their own skies and on the seas.

Did we inadvertently accomplish goals of the first Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy? I’m obviously hedging because the strategic circumstances have shifted — we’re post-COVID, we’re in a different world. But among those big four, are those potential disruptors to global order in a better situation now? Or are they in a fundamentally weaker position than they were at the outset of this period? I don’t know that the 2018 NDS is the right measuring stick, but if we could get Bridge Colby on here, I would certainly like to ask him. Just to give us an eight-year period — when the United States came out of this time of trying to patch together Iraq and Afghanistan, reoriented towards nation-state competition, now we sort of know what it looks like. And for better or worse, we have a couple of case studies.

Justin: They chose to abandon that with the most recent NDS. So if that becomes a fulcrum by which they’ll say, look, this is victory because we said this back in 2018 — they had given that up. The other thing I would say is when we look at the messaging, that’s one of the really important things this administration didn’t do a good job on. The Department of Defense, the whole U.S. apparatus kind of failed pretty hard on the messaging part, in part because we didn’t have really clear goals and expectations at the beginning of the conflict. But even as we continued, we came to a point where people were openly questioning within the United States if what the president said was right or if what Iran said was right — which, given everything that’s ever happened with this administration, that’s a new thing even for the Trump administration.

They lost the ball on the messaging in a very real way. And then we have them openly talking about potential Title 50 action to help protesters who were trying to overthrow the regime in Iran during the initial uprising — potentially sending weapons and support to these protesters. That fundamentally validates everything the regime has said since 1979. Whether it did happen or not, whether it was just something he said in a one-off, they validated the legacy of the narrative of CIA intervention in Iran since 1979.

Eric: And talking constantly about oil reserves didn’t help either. It’s perfect advertising for bin Ladenism.

The Moral Low Ground

Jordan: Tuesday we had Art of the Deal, Genocide Edition, right? It’s sort of unimaginable that we could end this on the moral low ground against the regime that just shot 30,000 people two months ago. But he did it. Hats off to him. That’s a high degree of difficulty move.

Eric: It’s depravity. Justin, I think it’s an important framework to think through this about messaging — how do you communicate in times of war? In previous episodes, we’ve talked about how warfare is a form of bargaining and diplomacy is a component of this, next to armed force. When the president communicates through social media, he’s communicating not to one audience but to a multitude — Iranians who are pro-regime, Iranians who are soft, Iranians who are anti-regime, American forces in the field, countries in the crossfire, and the American public. Calibrating your messages so that it impacts those different audiences the way you want is extraordinarily difficult and it’s not always effective.

There’s a degree of recklessness about the way this administration spoke about their most fundamental responsibility, which is warfare — with the president dangling his normal sensationalism on Truth Social, the Secretary of Defense talking about this being a firm religious obligation, the pilot who was recovered being emblematic of Jesus returning to life on the third day, and then Raisin Cain talking about soldiers crushing MREs. It is difficult to determine what is the actual signal. And to Jordan’s point, the president did break through a substantial amount of noise when he said, I’m going to wipe out a civilization — language you would leave for Nikita Khrushchev in the heights of the Cold War. To hear it from an American president in the 21st century is jarring, and it discredits every one of us.

The Rescue That Got Lost

Tony: The pilot going down — I’m very glad, well, pilots, I should say — I’m glad they both got rescued. That unfortunately did not break through to normal social media feeds the way that the “civilization is going to end” broke through. From my normal friends that are not attached to national security — and I’ve heard this from multiple people — they didn’t know there was a pilot shot down. They saw the tweet though. And if there’s anything we learned from the last couple years, the message that gets through is sometimes more important than the actual statistics. Even if we did achieve all of our operational-level military objectives, that’s not what everyone’s hearing.

Secretary of Defense Rock: At least we found the off ramp. It’s a strange and horrifying way to get there, but we did. I do wonder — over the last couple of weeks, it seemed like Iranian munitions were getting through more easily and hitting targets more frequently. I wonder how much pressure there was on the administration externally — if you go all in, we’re screwed. If we really went through and started hitting their infrastructure the way Trump was saying, they would have gone scorched earth.

Eric: I think the Qataris, the Emiratis, and even the Saudis knew that the Iranian targeting procedures were increasing in sophistication. There was a bit of a dead hand — even if you conducted retaliatory operations, there was some element of the Iranian state that was going to hit you back.

Justin: I think Tony pointed out a really interesting thing about the messaging. What’s disheartening about the ending-of-civilization and the rest of the genocidal talk is that the military actually had a really awesome story to tell — we were willing to spend multiple aircraft, put people into harm’s way deep inside Iran to retrieve one human and bring them back. People are making up crazy stories about what actually happened because they can’t believe the U.S. military would care that much about one person.

Eric: We were retrieving a Stargate.

Justin: There’s been that, there’s been “they actually tried to go to Esfahan to extract the highly enriched uranium.” The truth is there’s actually a really good message there that goes way beyond the warrior ethos crap that’s been talked about — it talks about some of the core things about never leave a fallen comrade, about who we are as a nation and who we are as a military. And that just got completely washed over by everything that happened right after it. It should have been a triumph. It should have been something we held up and said, this is who we are. And we preceded that with the messages we did. It’s not even a loss at that point. It’s tragic.

Jordan: It was four hours and then we got “praise be to Allah.” Was it even four hours?

Tony: In a normal administration, you would have that — we sent in a whole JSOC team to go recover one guy deep inside enemy territory — and then you would contrast every story of the Russians shooting their own wounded because they don’t bother to recover them. That should be played every day. That would be the highlight reel at the NATO summit. But not in this admin.

Secretary of Defense Rock: Even just the zero hesitation — it was interesting to follow as it was happening. You see these videos, in broad daylight, very low, getting shot at by random policemen. Pretty remarkable. But it’ll probably be a footnote in the grand scheme of the public consciousness.

Justin: The only good thing is that SEAL Team 6 is the one who went, so there will be at least three books written about it. Of that, I’m positive.

The Toll Booth Is a Wasting Asset

Jordan: The toll booth is a wasting asset. There will be ways to go around the Strait of Hormuz, and they might not be super economical. But the one thing the Gulf has is money. Everyone’s talking about how Iran has this incredible trump card — yeah, they played it. And now because they played it, the global economy is going to end up adjusting.

Eric: It’s very similar to PRC using their rare earth schedule.

Tony: Can we pivot then to the May meeting, the alleged meeting between Xi and Trump? Whatever was on the docket, I assume it has to have changed.

Jordan: I think there was never anything on the docket, Tony. They’re just going to take some photos.

Justin: Biden-Xi San Francisco 2.0. Nothing of substance will come from it because Biden couldn’t remember his time. Take that.

Jordan: They banned AI from nukes, okay Justin? Come on, give them some credit.

Tony: Let’s be clear — we talked about agreeing to talking about banning AI from nukes.

Justin: Can we just point out that putting AI on nukes would be the most idiotic thing anyone could do? There’s a reason we still use eight-inch floppy disks to run those computers — it’s because we don’t want them on the internet. We don’t want them thinking at all. That’s the last thing anybody wants, the doomsday weapons to have thoughts of their own.

Are We Prussia in 1806?

Jordan: Before we go to China — I want to get Mr. Secretary’s “Are we Prussia 1806?” take. Can we run that one back?

Secretary of Defense Rock: This was a piece I had written in August of 2025. Clausewitz is most known for On War, but he was a ferocious writer — hundreds of pages of letters, essays. One of his most interesting essays, which was the basis for my piece, is called “From Observations on Prussia and Her Great Catastrophe,” which he wrote around 1823–1825. He was trying to figure out how this state — an army that Frederick the Great had barnstormed around central Europe — just collapsed like a house of cards in its third battle against Napoleon.

There were a lot of parallels. It was eerie the way he talked about how nihilism captured Prussian society, how the elite culture had atrophied and was only thinking about themselves, how the Prussian military became obsessed with the way their rifles were cleaned, the way they marched in order during a parade, how many awards went on a jacket. The quote that stood out most to me was he wrote that “vain and moderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job.”

It feels like that’s the way our government and civic culture functions today — this big machine that moves along while the cords get ripped out one by one out of these agencies. And at some point it gives. I re-circulated it today kind of randomly — is this conflict our Jena-Auerstedt?

America as Prussia in 1806

Eric: Prussia gives us an interesting lens. Clausewitz is in the shadow of Frederick the Great — arguably the most capable battlefield commander in Central Europe during the War of Austrian Succession. Using a small but nimble and exceptionally well-trained force, he beat Austrians, beat Russians, and took Prussia from an economic backwater into a major European power. The Prussian elite sort of missed the ripples of Europe that came out of the French Revolution. The gambit that all European states faced in 1770 was substantially different by 1795. The ability of the French to mobilize en masse — the visage of a Napoleon who assembled a force of 100,000 men on the Channel in 1805, marched them halfway across Europe, defeated the Russians and the Austrians at Austerlitz, achieved a favorable peace, all while the capable Prussians continued to elect not to react. There is a lesson here — the Prussians were looking favorably back upon a golden age of military excellence. And that golden age, maybe similar to our 1991 war, was very real and authentically stunning. But at a certain point, shutting up and playing the hits doesn’t get the crowd out in front of the stage anymore.

Tony: What stood out to me was the analysis that Napoleon didn’t necessarily innovate in warfare — he mastered that which was available to him in a way that others had not. If you look at our slow reaction to counter-UAS, our slower reaction to triple mass, I would say those are warning signs that that’s where we are.

Justin: Napoleon basically said, you can’t beat me. I spend 30,000 lives a month as a matter of principle. You’re not willing to do what I’m willing to do to win. Where the parallel really comes in is when you think about an enemy willing to take those losses. We talked about this in the last show — the way our risk tolerance changed with our technological dominance. Do we have the stomach for when those things change to still be a great military power? It’s a frightening thought.

Tony: I’m going back to conversations I had this week with some senior folks who remarked that looking at the Navy today, they don’t have the tolerance to own the littorals. I don’t think that’s entirely true from an operational perspective — there’s a very good reason why you don’t want a carrier group to do a show of force through the strait and eat a Silkworm or 10. But that is a perception that is out there. A lot of the reactions we as Americans, as leadership, have had in the last four to six weeks feeds into propagandistic narratives among our rivals. For people who live in the system, who run the system in Beijing, this validates a lot of their perceptions of American culture and approach to casualties in the modern era.

Justin: Does the fact that we were unwilling in this instance to risk the capital ships to force the strait raise the risk of the assumption from the enemy becoming, “well, they’re not willing to risk their ships, so they’re not going to send them”?

Tony: I think it’s a little different. There’d be one case — if we pulled all our boats out of WestPac, but we’re not going to do that. There’s a question of whether the Americans are willing to take initial casualties and then say, we’re going to fight on. In their minds, it validates the idea that if they hit a carrier or level Guam, that tolerance is too damn high.

Secretary of Defense Rock: We didn’t take Kharg Island. We deployed the troops, but we didn’t actually follow through. If you were Iran or China, that would be my takeaway — they’re willing to take the steps but not actually follow through.

Tony: I want to make clear I’m not making the case that we should have done a thunder run to Tehran. But it is how our enemies think. And I would point you to Ukraine for the last four years and ask whether our enemies are 100% brilliant. But they do adapt. They do read signals. From the reporting in the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere — the Russians were helping with Iranian targeting. The Russians learned that overhead ISR goes a long way to making people feel pain. There were plenty of cases in the Ukraine War where we thought we had the trump card technologically, and then the Russians survived just long enough to change their tactics.

From Jena to Waterloo

Eric: In 1806, Prussia is decisively defeated at Jena and Auerstedt, the state is shocked. But by 1814, Prussian troops are reassembling, contributing to an allied move against Paris, helping compel Napoleon into his first exile. Marshal Blücher takes an army of mostly militiamen and helps finish off Napoleon at Waterloo. A couple decades later, 1866, the Prussians beat up the Austrians at Königgrätz. And several years after that, the Prussians returned to Paris in grand fashion. The darkest depth of Prussian experience is the moment you cited in your essay. But they came out of it quite quickly and aggressively. What are the lessons for us? Is it truly darkest before the dawn?

Secretary of Defense Rock: The Prussian military didn’t really reform as much as they copied. They copied Napoleon, they changed to a corps system. They had started coming up with their famous staff system but hadn’t fully developed it. They were able to harness the revolutionary, nationalistic fervor that they rode all the way to Paris. One of my favorite quotes — after the Battle of Lützen, which was basically a draw, Napoleon remarked to the Prussians: “These animals have learned something.” But they hadn’t really learned something as much as they just copied it and were willing to stand their ground and fight.

I sort of remarked at the end of that essay — maybe it just doesn’t happen. The United States has so much economic power, maybe there’s a way to ride this out the way the Prussians did. Clausewitz always said you can learn from history, but that isn’t necessarily a prediction of what’s going to happen. There is always a bit of hope. But the alarm signals — the longer this goes on, the harder it is to pull yourself out. It happened so quickly for the Prussians that they were able to ride that wave. I do wonder how much longer this can go on, this sort of rumbling along, before it bites you and knocks you out forever.

Jordan: I have another “On War” take. I was reading Machiavelli’s On War the past week or two. Kind of trash. Sorry, Machiavelli. The one piece I liked — he was like, when you’re training your troops, don’t say “turn,” say “left” or “right,” because otherwise everyone’s going to turn in different directions.

Tony: Machiavelli is definitely the lesser of all the theorists.

Justin: Jomini is in front of him, which is saying a lot.

Eric: I liked Sign of the Times and the Batman soundtrack.

Tony: On a side note, there’s this perpetual narrative around Sun Tzu being too simple. I’ve always been on his side because I’ve watched so many officers forget the things they say are so simple. Do you really need complex theory?

Eric: And fight a battle in the swamp?

Jordan: Kharg Island was dry. Eric, sand — it was right there.

Eric: Don’t gobble proffered baits. I remember John Lewis Gaddis not quite shouting that at me, but saying, what do you remember? If you see something obvious that you’re supposed to go and take down, don’t do it, you foolish princelings.

Justin: I can never find the quote, but Napoleon wrote something to the gist of: don’t do what your enemy wants you to do. It’s enough to know they want you to do it. That’s a good, well-reasoned way to approach life.

Jordan: Justin, I found your actual quote. The 30,000 one is apocryphal, but he had a conversation with Metternich in 1813 where he says, “a man such as I am does not concern himself much with the lives of a million.”

Justin: That’s a guy who’s going to change the way the European feudal states wage war if he’s willing to just march the entirety of Europe.

Eric: Levée en masse. People like to dress up Austerlitz and a couple of other engagements because there are these magnificent maneuvers. But a lot of it was just the steady application of grapeshot and illiterate infantry. His infantry attacked in column, not in line. The British infantry were known for being a little more sophisticated — troops operating a steady rate of fire, with a large frontage, able to hold a lot of territory with a smaller number of men. The French would just have a bunch of oafs charging in a column. If the oafs in front fell, you walked over them. It was simplistic, but it was elegant. And it worked. That’s why Napoleon seized Moscow — an extraordinary accomplishment based off some really basic geometries of war.

Justin: Last thing on Napoleon — not ever, but at least on this little bit. The Napoleon movie was terrible. I turned it off 30 minutes in.

Eric: What happened, Ridley Scott? How do you do Gladiator II and Napoleon back to back? You lose your fastball at some point — you’ve got to hang it up if you’re sending that out.

Eric: The Waterloo movie with Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer is on YouTube. It’s not perfect cinema, but it’s epic filmmaking. They got something like 65,000 Red Army regulars to appear in it. Rod Steiger chews the scenery. It is pretty good.

The Colby Catechism

Jordan: We’ve got to close on the Undersecretary of the Papacy.

Eric: That is probably the most unexpected diplomatic feud of the week — between someone who should not be necessarily involved in diplomacy, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, one Elbridge Colby, and the Pope, the Church of Rome.

Jordan: You think you’d be excited — it’s the first American! It’s cool! Come on, can we just leave it at that?

Eric: Somebody who — the Pentagon and Pentagon officialdom do tons of point-to-point encounters, typically with foreign militaries. They do international travel, go to the Shangri-La Dialogue, go to the VFW jamboree. Some Pentagon officials are better at it than others. But Elbridge Colby’s got the reputation of a guy who got pantsed by a bunch of cartoon dogs online and started swearing that everybody hating on him on Twitter were Russian agents. He had a really epic crash-out at one point, but now he’s in a position of real responsibility. And he, according to reports, got into an ecclesiastical knife fight with representatives of Pope Leo.

Jordan: So the reporting is that he basically said, you’re nothing, you don’t have an army. By the way, in the 1400s, there was an anti-Pope in Avignon, so don’t get ahead of your skis on this one. By the way, I went to that Pope zone on my honeymoon. It’s all right — it’s no Vatican.

[fwiw FT is now reporting that it wasn’t Colby but someone else…]

Eric: It’s fascinating that Colby effectively paraphrases a quote attributed to Stalin. In some moment of frustration toward Yalta or the Potsdam Conference, there was some whisper that the Pope was worried about the plight of Catholics in Eastern Europe. And Stalin scoffed and said, the Pope — how many divisions does he have? That’s what the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy intimated.

Tony: In China policy circles, there’s been a gripe for years that the Catholic Church bent the knee a little too much with the Chinese Communist Party in terms of the CCP getting veto over which priests could serve. Given the legacy of the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II fighting communism and going to Poland, it left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. If that had been the fight, I would have said, probably not the time, but I get it — that’s a long-standing issue. But this is something entirely different — basically hinting that you might Maduro the Pope.

Secretary of Defense Rock: I’m coincidentally reading David Kertzer’s The Pope at War, having previously read his The Pope and Mussolini. My one takeaway is the Catholic Church is very sensitive about its image globally and the way it interacts with nation states. The idea that you’re going to go in there and chastise representatives and they’re just going to roll over — what is the thinking?

Eric: What’s the goal? The most precious resource any senior official has is their ability to focus. They are heavily booked from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. if they’re discharging their responsibilities ably. To set time on fire over the presence of a 14th-century anti-Pope is extraordinarily bizarre behavior.

Justin: The Catholic Church has done plenty of terrible things in its history. But in the modern era — let’s say since Pope John Paul II forward — it has at least attempted to care about its flock. Saying harsh things like “there shouldn’t be war” is not really a stance the Pope needs to be chastised for. That’s kind of his thing, man.

Jordan: Who are we more angry at, NATO or the Pope, for their Iran war takes?

Dereliction of Duty 2.0

Secretary of Defense Rock: It’s funny to think that Colby is supposed to be one of the serious ones. He got bipartisan support to be confirmed. And you’re fighting with representatives of the Pope?

Tony: Colby was supposed to be the serious China thinker — which was only the case if you didn’t know what you were actually talking about on China. If you thought being a China hawk meant pointing at China and only that, then yes, he was the serious guy. I know people high level in this administration at the staff level who thought what he wrote in his book — about maybe we just have to proliferate nukes to deter the Chinese — wasn’t serious. But they’ve now spent the last 10 years telling themselves that nothing is actually real. And that is how you get officials who do things like threaten an anti-Pope. In any other place, you wouldn’t have been there in the first place. But people just say crazy shit because that’s what gets you in that role, and turns out, yeah, you are going to do that crazy shit.

Jordan: From the Maggie Haberman article, the tick-tock on how the U.S. went to war — towards the end, she basically goes around the Situation Room getting everyone on the record. “Stephen Cheung gave neither a yes or a no, but said that whatever decision Mr. Trump made would be the right one.” That’s the world we’re in.

Justin: She has a really good point in that article about the difference between General Caine and General Milley: Milley saw his job as preventing the worst impulses of use of military force. General Caine sees his job as only providing best military advisement.

Jordan: And then there was that wild bit:

One person familiar with their interactions noted that Mr. Trump had a habit of confusing tactical advice from General Caine with strategic counsel. In practice, the general might warn in one breath about the difficulties of one aspect of the operation, then in the next note that the United States had an essentially unlimited supply of cheap precision-guided bombs and could strike Iran for weeks once it achieved air superiority. To the chairman, those were separate observations, but Mr. Trump appeared to think the second canceled out the first. At no point during deliberations did the chairman directly tell the president that war in Iran was a terrible idea.

Justin: I could not for the life of me figure out why they held a press conference saying we’ve achieved air superiority over Iran. When you have air superiority, everybody knows.

It shows they had a checklist. These are all things the general said, and they checked them off. When you hear it framed that way, you realize that’s not actually what he was doing. He was just giving you what the military is capable of and where we’ll struggle. At no point is that a values judgment on whether we should use it. The danger is if you’re not surrounded by people who are going to have that hard conversation, it makes that general’s position — being the guy who will push back — much more important. And as you just read, they’re not exactly surrounded by people who are going to push back.

Secretary of Defense Rock: This is Dereliction of Duty all over again — H.R. McMaster’s book exploring the lead-up to the Vietnam War between the JCS, McNamara, and Johnson. McMaster’s conclusion — dubbed “McMasterism” by civil-military experts — states that if the president and politically appointed officials are pursuing policies not in the interest of the United States, you have a professional duty to speak out directly to the public or Congress. That hasn’t happened. I think it shows how that’s just not a thing. That book was on reading lists for general officers for decades. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how apolitical professionalism — framed in this way where Caine is purely giving tactical and strategic advice and that’s his only job — becomes a dodge. Officers in the past knew you actually should give political judgments.

It’ll be fascinating to see, especially in the context of Randy George recently being fired, how this continues. CQ Brown hasn’t really said anything. The SOUTHCOM commander may have resigned because of tensions. Nobody says nothing. McMasterism is fraudulent, in my opinion.

Tony: You’re asking them to do something they never did for the first 40 years of their career.

Eric: Nobody makes GO by telling the principal that the principal is wrong. You can’t do it in public because there’s always going to be some hanger-on with a yes answer. You’ve got to have the self-confidence to say, I don’t need this job.

Eric: I know General Caine — worked for him. I often think he is vamping. He knows it’s ultimately pointless. He’s been thinking about war for a long time. He was an interesting pick. If he’s talking about MREs, if he’s talking about all of these statistics, I think he is trying to get to the end of the press conference so something else catastrophic doesn’t happen. Maybe I’m giving him too much credit. I think he is ideologically on board — I’m not saying he’s some secret defender of the Constitution. But I think he is also trying to exert a degree of professional discipline. And if he is speaking, he is preventing others from also speaking.

Seven Months to Election Day

Tony: We’ve got about six months and three weeks until Election Day. Does this conflict — look, we’re just going to ceasefire here, right? The war is not technically over.

Eric: The Israelis are still conducting a substantial air campaign in and around greater Beirut and southern Lebanon.

Tony: And what happens if there are mines in the strait and they hit a boat? Can we get another conflict in before the midterms? I don’t mean that to sound silly, but it’s very clear they were on a roll and had designs for other things. How does this impact their thinking going forward for other campaigns?

Jordan: There’s no oil in Cuba. Gas prices will be just fine.

Justin: Right after it was going well — “job accomplished, we didn’t need anybody, we told you guys we could do it” — we started seeing comments about Cuba. Then when things started turning and it became “hey, is anybody else going to come do something about this strait?” — we stopped seeing comments about Cuba. Maybe we’re seeing a recognition of the limits of military force during this form of the administration.

Secretary of Defense Rock: I thought the comment about wanting some type of NATO support for reopening the strait — it’s like, on one hand that, and on the other it’ll be some joint venture where Iran and the U.S. share crypto for tollways or something. For the long term, if this holds and Iran gets this tollway, maybe you work around it. But is a future administration going to have to expend political capital to reestablish freedom of the seas?

Tony: There are relics we can point to. During the Arab-Israeli wars, the Suez Canal was down for years at a time. There are periods of recent history where we’ve had to deal with things like this, and they don’t get resolved — they get forgotten by other conflicts. People learn to deal with them. For the administration, how do we get out of this as fast as possible in a way that doesn’t look like we ran away? From a strategic perspective, that might be the first sensible strategic thing they’ve done — the exit is more politically valuable than the actual negotiating results. The American voter does not care whether Iran still has enrichment. They care whether things like this keep happening. For the rest of the world, these are very serious consequences that are not just about a midterm election.

Justin: So we sent an email to Randy George — at least his old CFR account. It didn’t bounce back. So potentially General Randy George coming on the show?

Jordan: Trump earlier today labeled Tucker, Megyn, Candace, and Alex Jones as all third-rate podcasters. The question is: will he want to really start with the first-rate WarTalk? Or is he going to want to build up — enter the field with a third-rate run, then go to second rate, and then hit the stars?

Eric: We’re a notoriously tough room. He’s a long-time listener, first-time caller. We are easy to hunt down — WarTalk on Substack. “I assure you, I am the former chief of staff of the Army and I would like to come and riff.”

Justin: I appreciate having guests who have two first names because I never feel like I’m messing it up when we introduce them.

Tony: There’s always something satisfying about being able to call a senior officer by their first name. Like, hey Randy.

Justin: As a former warrant officer, I just did that routinely because nobody knew what to do with me.

Jordan: I think we got the Colby Catechism as our song. What genre is it?

Eric: It’ll be a Gregorian chant.

Lyrics: