Is Anybody Actually Winning Trump’s Iran War?

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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to the recent election in Hungary and the defeat of Viktor Orbán. David counters Orbán defenders who claim that this loss proves Orbán was never a threat. Antidemocratic leaders often face institutional constraints, and it was those institutional constraints that compelled Orbán to accept a defeat after years of abuse of power.

Then, David is joined by former U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger to discuss the current state of President Trump’s war in Iran. David and Pottinger talk about the recent failed negotiations between the two sides in Pakistan, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and what could happen next. They also discuss how the Iran war is viewed in China and how it has been a financial gain for Russia.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum:  Hello and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser in the first Donald Trump term, and we will be discussing the very uncertain, unsettled, and dangerous situation in the Persian Gulf as the United States and Iran conduct this cold truce with double blockades, each of the other. And Matt will be explaining to me and to all of us the state of play as he sees it, from his point of view, as someone who is broadly sympathetic to the agenda of President Trump, even if he is no longer directly associated with the administration.

The book this week will be Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges, a masterpiece of strange and symbolic writing from the 1940s, translated into English in the 1960s.

But before either the dialogue or the book, I wanna talk about a different subject, and that is the dramatic election in Hungary that occurred this past weekend, with this convincing and crushing defeat of the government of Viktor Orbán. Many of those who are sympathetic to Orbán, or who were sympathetic to Orbán, and who wanna see some kind of Orbán-like politics come to the United States have chosen to interpret his crushing repudiation by the Hungarian people as a repudiation also of the idea that Orbán was ever any kind of threat to freedom and democracy. What kind of dictator, they ask, leaves office because he’s rejected at the polls? What kind of dictator has an election free enough that he could be rejected in the polls? And so, yes, goodbye, Orbán, say these apologists for him and for the Trump administration and the people in the United States who like Orbán, Goodbye to Orbán, but let’s also say goodbye to the idea that Orbán was ever a threat.

And that’s what I wanna talk about, is this argument is wrong and in bad faith. Not all dictatorships are the same. Not everything is the Third Reich. Not everything is Joseph Stalin. There are many intermediate forms of corrupted power, and Orbán represented a new one. I wrote about this a decade ago; I spent some time in Hungary in 2016, and I wrote a substantial article about Orbán, which I ended up not publishing, but instead cannibalizing to use in my first major article about the Trump administration in 2017, “How to Build an Autocracy.” And I told there a story that I had heard in Hungary in 2016 about the methods that the Orbán regime used.

There would be, let us say, two restaurants. And both would have violations of the health code. The restaurant that was owned by an Orbán supporter would get away with it, and the restaurant that was owned by a nonsupporter would have to face a fine. Now, the people who were fined were genuinely guilty; they had broken the health code. But they knew that if they had aligned their politics with Orbán, they would get away without a fine, as their next-door neighbor and competitor did, and they were being punished for their politics, even though the ostensible punishment was for the thing they had genuinely done: broken the health code. And I wrote then the most important power in a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to punish the innocent; it is the power to protect the guilty. Orbán created a system where there was some law. He didn’t abolish the law; he just applied the law unfairly, in order to consolidate political power and, by the way, to enrich himself.

Now, it is true the law was still there—and this is why the regime could, in the end, be dismantled. Hungary is a small and relatively poor country embedded within larger frameworks. Its economy is embedded within the European Union, and its armed forces are embedded within NATO. That NATO affiliation is one reason that Orbán could not reasonably imagine using the military to make a coup d’état and seize power. A NATO-trained military doesn’t do that kind of thing. If it does, it may find itself on its way out of NATO, and the military attaches great value to its membership in NATO. In the same way, Hungary’s role in the European Union, from which it derives many, many benefits, meant that Orbán couldn’t throw people in prison. He’s subject, after all, to European laws on human rights and, ultimately, the jurisdiction of the European courts that enforce [the] human rights division. So he can’t just murder people and arrest people and detain people the way he might’ve wanted to. But he could rig the system in many ways, in a kind of intermediate form of what Fareed Zakaria has called “illiberal democracy.” It’s not that it wasn’t a democracy; it just wasn’t fair, and the law was not applied equally, and he used that to consolidate power.

In the end, his membership in the European Union was what doomed him. The Orbán regime in Hungary received three major benefits from the European Union. The first was that trade and investment could flow freely. The second was that people could move freely, and so that meant that anyone who was unhappy in Hungary didn’t have to become a political dissident; they could just leave. If they had portable skills, if they spoke English or German, they could just get on a train and go somewhere where the going was better than it was in Hungary. And that exit was a great safety valve for a regime that otherwise would’ve faced much more dissent at home. The dissidents just moved—they went to Munich.

But the last benefit that Hungary got—this is the thing that really precipitated the crisis—the poorer countries of the European Union received direct transfers from the European Union treasury. At their peak, Hungary’s direct transfers from the European Union amounted to somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of its gross domestic product. That’s, in other words, as big as the defense budget is to the United States. It paid for roads, it paid for many benefits, and it balanced the Hungarian budget and provided a lot of economic activity. As Orbán became more and more authoritarian, the EU froze those payments, stopping Hungarian economic growth and precipitating an economic crisis in Hungary. And it was that economic crisis that brought him down. Now, he might’ve left the European Union, but then he would lose forever the money that he got. He would lose forever access to European investment; German car factories are a major employer in Hungary. And he would’ve lost the ability of Hungarians to move back and forth, which meant the people who were unhappy would’ve been trapped at home, where they were dangerous to him, rather than moving to Munich, where they were less dangerous.

So he was in this intermediate state, and that is what set in motion the events that ultimately brought him down. But especially in the United States, where there are so many people who imagine an Orbán-like future for the United States, it’s really important to understand democracy does not go out like a light switch; it’s like a dimmer. It’s not on or off. It’s at different settings. And you can have an authoritarian leader who dims the lights without reducing the lighting entirely to zero. And that gives us hope because it means there are tools that, even in an authoritarian, illiberal democracy like Hungary, like the one Donald Trump and J. D. Vance want for the United States, the opposition is never powerless. But it’s also a warning because it means that as the lights begin to dim, the movement and the danger can be gradual rather than sudden. It’s not always 1934 and the Third Reich Enabling Act. It’s not always Stalin and the assassination of [Sergei] Kirov. Sometimes it’s what was happening in Budapest since Orbán came to power. And it is important to understand that as a method of self-defense, and as a way of saying off these excuses and apologetics that are offered in bad faith by those who want an Orbán-like future for the United States.

And now my dialogue with Matt Pottinger.

[Music]

Frum: Matt Pottinger is a former journalist, Marine officer, and senior White House official. Pottinger covered China for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal for seven years. After the 9/11 terror attack on the United States, he made a dramatic career change: He joined the Marine Corps at age 32, and completed three combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pottinger served on the National Security Council in the first Trump term, ultimately as deputy national security adviser, one of the few senior officials to serve four years in that office. Pottinger resigned on January 6, 2021.

Since leaving the White House, he has remained a prominent voice on China policy. He joined the Hoover Institution as a visiting fellow, chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and serves as CEO of Garnaut Global, a strategic advisory firm. His book, The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, was published in July 2024.

I should mention we are recording this about midday on Monday, April 13, with a view to releasing on Wednesday. The stories we’re following are so dramatic and fast-changing, we are doing the best we can to keep up with them. So let me begin by asking: Matt, what’s happening?

Matt Pottinger: (Laughs.) David, it’s great to be with you.

Yeah, look, it’s Monday now. We just learned this weekend that the negotiations in Pakistan that were led on the U.S. side by Vice President J. D. Vance came to an impasse on President Trump’s red line, on the core issue of Iran’s nuclear program. And remember, that’s really the main impetus for this war, was President Trump’s determination to try to destroy Iran’s ability to build a bomb and also to try to get them to give up fissile material—it’s not yet technically fissile, but it’s very close to that; it’s 60 percent-enriched uranium, uranium that’s enriched far beyond what you would need for civilian uses. They’ve got probably around a thousand pounds of that stuff sitting around somewhere or in various places, and Iran has also not yet agreed to give up its enrichment capability.

So I don’t think that was a surprising outcome, that these talks in Islamabad did not achieve a lasting peace. The truth about negotiations is that war is an extension of politics, right? And I wouldn’t have expected the Iranians to give away in negotiation what President Trump was unable to take from them in war. And so what that means is that this cease-fire is not only tenuous, but I think that it’s technically gonna be hard to argue that we’re even in a cease-fire for much longer, if even at the current moment. And that’s because Iran is continuing with its blockade.

What you have now are dueling blockades, David. (Laughs.) Iran is basically blocking all shipping in the Strait of Hormuz unless those ships get permission from the Iranian IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and then pay a very steep toll to Iran, so what Iran is doing is basically turning an international waterway into a little Suez-like tollbooth. And so they are conducting a blockade. Now President Trump has announced a counterblockade, in which he’s going to stop ships that pay the toll to the Iranians, as well as ships carrying any Iranian oil—ships that are leaving or going to Iranian ports, those ships are now under U.S. blockade. The U.S. is gonna try to enforce that, at least in the early stages, well west of Hormuz, in the Gulf of Oman.

But blockades are acts of war under international law, under traditional conventions of the law of the sea, and so forth. So what you have are, really, an escalation in the war this weekend. But it’s not yet turning violent from the U.S. side, but it is coercive. So in that sense, we’re still at war, right? The cease-fire is there almost in name only.

Frum: All right, but one of the things that seems so baffling about this conflict is the United States and Israel appear to have achieved great operational success against Iranian defenses. They’ve killed much of the Iranian leadership. They’ve revealed that they have penetrated deeply into Iranian capabilities. But the obvious countermove in all of the how many war games [that] have occurred since 1979 is the United States, Israel strike Iran; Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. This administration seems never to have taken that countermove seriously, and as you and I speak, the price of oil is again back over $100 a barrel. And if you want immediate delivery of a physical barrel of oil in Europe today, that’s going to cost you more like $150, prices that will raise prices for everything all over the world and maybe push the developed world into a recession.

Pottinger: Yeah. Well, look, this pain is gonna deepen, okay, because what President Trump is trying to do is, in order to try to release more traffic from Hormuz, he’s going to stop more traffic, right, in order to basically try to take away the advantage of Iran’s tollbooth that they’ve set up. And so what you’re left with is, essentially, a state of war. I don’t know, but I suspect that the U.S. Navy is going to attempt to do escort operations. They haven’t been willing to do that to date, because it’s so darn dangerous. But given that we saw the news over the weekend that a couple of U.S. destroyers had moved into Hormuz, at least briefly—to my knowledge, for the first time since this war began in late February—tells me that you’re gonna have these dueling blockades and dueling attempts to break the blockades, with the U.S. trying to move traffic, potentially fairly soon, on the Oman side of the median line of this very, very narrow choke point in the water.

Frum: But that, again, suggests not having thought things through. The parallel here is back in the ’80s, during the Iraq-Iran War, missiles were flying between Iraq and Iran, endangering shipping in the Gulf. And the United States then said, Right, tankers can fly the American flag so if anybody hits you, it’s an attack on the United States, and that will deter both Iraq and Iran because they know, if you hit one of these tankers with an American flag, then we retaliate against you. But in this case, the United States got its retaliating in first. So the Iranians will just say, Can we hit an oil tanker at 20 paces with a drone? I bet they can. Can a destroyer stop a drone, or a swarm of drones, from hitting a target as big as an oil tanker? I bet they can’t. And the implicit threat—which is, If you try hitting the oil tankers, we’ll retaliate against you—well, the retaliation has been done.

Pottinger: Yeah, well, I’ve talked to U.S. sailors who—in fact, I talked to a French sailor the other day who had been on a frigate during the 1980s, during that whole operation to try to escort convoys and so forth. And that was in the ’80s, when Iranian technology was not nearly as sophisticated as it is right now. So, David, what you’re seeing right now is, in many ways, the democratization of warfare, the ability of middling states like Iran, and even nonstate actors like the Houthis, who are really sort of a proxy of Iran camped out in Yemen on the Red Sea, both of them have shown the ability to stop commercial traffic through major sea-lanes, and the United States has really struggled. And, again, the U.S. is really on its own. It’s got Israel helping. It doesn’t have any other allies yet coming to help. But nonetheless, we’re struggling. The United States Navy is struggling to keep international sea-lanes open, so we’re in a new phase right now. The nature of warfare never changes. But the character of warfare—how wars are fought—changes all the time, and we’re now having a reckoning, in many ways. People theorize, they speculate, they make assessments, but war is the great clarifier. It’s the accountant. It’s the auditor that says, No, no, here’s your real relative power, relative to the Houthi tribes in Yemen, relative to this badly wounded regime in Tehran.

But, yeah, we’re in a new phase. I’m not certain that the U.S. Navy is gonna be able to pull this off, and if the U.S. Navy has one of its warships crippled or sunk, I think you’re gonna see a very significant escalation by the White House. We’re gonna see larger, further-reaching, and temporally longer consequences of this war.

Frum: There’s a saying on Wall Street: When the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked, and—

Pottinger: (Laughs.) Yeah, exactly. And look, there are positive lessons learned, as well as negative lessons, in this war from the perspective of U.S. power. And in fact, we should talk at some point a little bit about what this means for the Western Pacific, but I won’t jump ahead.

Frum: Well, no, that was going to be my very next question because, as your introduction suggested, you are known above all for your expertise on China. You speak the language. You worked there as a journalist in a more favorable time in U.S.-China relationships. And you are noted for being an early voice warning that China was not evolving into a good global citizen and the United States should take action with allies—that was your view: with allies—to contain Chinese power.

Now, many people observe, and it seems plausible, that one of the effects of this war is to hugely increase Chinese power because the United States suddenly looks like a very unreliable custodian of the security of the Persian Gulf. Twenty percent of the world’s navigable, or waterborne, oil comes from the Persian Gulf, and 80 percent of that oil goes to Asia, with China the single largest customer. The United States is imposing heavy burdens through this war not only on China, but on South Korea, Japan, and many other countries that might have been at odds with China, but now are thinking, Well, we and the Chinese are at the mercy of a United States that is launching a war it does not seem to have anticipated all the consequences of.

Pottinger: Yeah. Well, I would say that it’s still too early to say what the net strategic effect is. It’s possible that China is gonna benefit largely from this war, but it’s not clear yet. That’s not clear.

Beijing right now, you can see in its own statements, its own actions so far, that they’re sort of hedging. On the one hand, I think Beijing was uneasy with the war continuing. We’ve seen reports from the Pakistanis and others suggesting that China played a role in trying to hasten that cease-fire a week ago. On the other hand, we also learned over the weekend, probably from tactical leaks of U.S. intelligence—I only know what I read on CNN here—but that China is actually moving to supply Iran with MANPADS. MANPADs are man-portable air-defense systems, right? These are like the Chinese version of our Stinger missiles that are very effective at shooting down low-flying helicopters, low-flying aircraft. So this would be, potentially, a very serious threat to American air dominance that both the U.S. and Israel have enjoyed so far.

Frum: And the way that stacks up is: The Iranians send a drone. The countermove to the drone—because you don’t wanna hit a drone with a big, expensive missile—is you send up a helicopter with a machine gun, and the machine gun can kill the drone because the drone is moving relatively slowly and it doesn’t have any stealth. And the MANPAD then says to the helicopter, You better keep away, which means the drone can move on the tanker.

Pottinger: Yeah. They can set up ambushes, right? The F-15 that we lost and, thank goodness, recovered the two aircrew from that American F-15 that was shot down recently, I believe it was shot down by a shoulder-fired anti-air missile, just of the type that China is reportedly moving to try to sell to the Iranians. And, by the way, this is China taking a page from its playbook almost a half a century ago. You remember that when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, it was only two weeks later that the paramount Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, invited the U.S. defense secretary at the time, Harold Brown, to start collaborating in finding ways to bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan. And in fact, Deng Xiaoping said, We should cooperate in getting them stuck in a quagmire in Afghanistan. That was almost a direct quote from Deng Xiaoping.

And sure enough, the United States began buying Chinese shoulder-fired missiles and providing them to the mujahideen, guerrilla fighters, who were fighting the Soviets. And then several years after that, the U.S. started supplying Stinger missiles, an even more advanced anti-air shoulder-fired missile. And the Chinese provided the operation to get those missiles into Afghanistan. They raised thousands of mules in Western China and would put these Stinger missiles onto mules and move them over land, through Pakistan, into Afghanistan. The Russians retreated in 1988. They lost control of the air. And soon, they lost the war in Afghanistan. And a few years after that, in 1991, the Soviet Union was gone. It’s possible China is trying to extend a cease-fire while, at the same time, moving to bleed the United States and try to destroy U.S. air dominance and get us either defeated or stuck in a quagmire.

Frum: But the biggest effects may not be anything that anyone intends. So we mentioned that the Persian Gulf is a source of 20 percent of the world’s shipborne oil. Eighty percent of that goes to Asia. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer. It’s not literally self-sufficient, because it exports some forms of oil and imports others. Gas is trapped in North America. Canada plus the United States produce a quarter of the planet’s oils, more than is exported from the Persian Gulf. So the United States is in a relatively benign situation, especially with regard to natural gas, where it’s floating on a sea of cheap gas. But if you are in Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines, Bangladesh, even Pakistan, India, you have to think, The Americans did not think about us at all when they started this war. We are really directly at risk. The South Koreans are having to impose all kinds of draconian energy-saving measures because they’re worried about their supplies of oil and gas. In poor countries, gas is used often as a direct heating fuel, and how will people cook? And many countries in the Western Pacific and the mainland of Asia are thinking, We look to the United States to be our security provider and to care about us, and it turns out they didn’t. And we now have to think, Maybe we have the wrong hegemon here.

Pottinger: Yeah, look, you’re right that the majority of that Gulf gas and oil moves eastward over to India and through the Strait of Malacca and into Southeast Asia and then East Asia. That’s exactly right. A big difference from 30 years ago, when we had to fight the first Gulf War, when we were heavily dependent on imports from that region. That said, no one escapes the effect of a chokehold on 20 percent of the global supply. I learned that this weekend when I was filling my car and—

Frum: There are many supplies, but there’s one price.

Pottinger: Right, right. There’s some regional effect, but not enough to overcome a 20 percent reduction in global supply. And so even though the U.S. is in a better position—we’re buffered, our oil and gas companies are in a position to benefit from higher prices, and so forth—but the strategic effects are pretty hard to contain, right? And this could affect China’s economy as well.

The Chinese economy right now is heavily, heavily dependent on exports. That’s been true for decades. It’s more true now, ironically, than it was. China has a larger trade surplus today than it had 10 years ago, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. They never built the consumer economy that people had advised and thought that they were going to move toward. The property market has collapsed in China, and it’s not really recovering, so that’s had a negative wealth effect; people don’t wanna buy things in China. So Beijing is basically saying, Okay, we’re the factory of the world. Let’s make ourselves the permanent factory and the only factory in the world. And in fact, their strategy now is to deindustrialize the Western democracies and regional democracies in Asia by making literally 100 percent of—that’s their aspiration. They don’t even have a sense of irony about it. They just wanna make everything that’s made. That’s a problem when you have a global energy shock like we’re experiencing right now, because it could lead to a significant global recession, or at least recessions in places like Europe that are major dumping grounds for Chinese excess capacity. So this could be a problem for China if Europe goes into a recession as a result of this shock.

So what you just said a minute ago, which is, it’s really hard to kind of grasp and play out all of the unintended consequences of this thing. It’s gonna take a while before we have sort of a net assessment of kind of what the effect was for China—and other countries.

Frum: You talk to leaders and businesspeople in the Pacific Rim. Do you hear from them any qualms about American leadership as compared to before the Iran war?

Pottinger: Yeah, look, I think a lot of countries are uneasy when they look at what’s happening between the U.S. and NATO—and frankly, I think both sides are at fault on this one. President Trump is exactly right that Europe needs to spend more, and of course, they’ve now made a pledge to spend as much as the United States is currently spending as a percentage of GDP on defense. That’s long overdue. That’s a credit to the Trump administration. But to then threaten the sovereignty of European states and territories, to bully NATO member Canada, to say that we’re gonna seize Greenland, these things are really, really damaging to trust. I’m just back from Asia, and talking to leaders in U.S. allied countries in the Western Pacific, yeah, they’re concerned about all of that. They view any unraveling of NATO as something that’s gonna unleash a major crisis in the form of coercion and war in their neighborhoods in ways that are gonna harm all democracies, all rule-of-law societies.

That said, I do think it’s worth noting that I see no deterioration in the, for example, U.S.-Japan relationship. I think that’s still strong. Prime Minister [Sanae] Takaichi, she doesn’t have other allies that she can really fall back on, so she’s working hard to maintain a strong working rapport with President Trump. I think that that was on display when she visited just a few weeks ago in Washington.

South Korea is still, even though you have a left-leaning government in place—usually that leads to poor or strained ties between South Korea and Japan. In fact, you’re still seeing pretty good ties between the leaders of South Korea and Japan right now. I think that that’s a stabilizing sort of dynamic. I think that’s a good dynamic. And I give credit to both President Trump’s team and President Biden’s team for all the work that they invested in keeping Japan and Korea on cooperative terms.

You see a lot more activity between sort of Australia and Japan now, right? It’s mainly concern about the People’s Republic of China and its axis friends, like North Korea and even Russia, which is active in the Western Pacific as well. But it’s also a sign that countries are nervous about American reliability. So anything that the Trump administration can do to put to rest these just insults to the sovereignty of our allies would go a really, really long way and it would pay off. And, look, now we need our allies again, right? We’re in this war. We’re trying to open the Strait of Hormuz. It would be certainly helpful and a powerful signal to Iran if they were facing a coalition of navies, not just the U.S. Navy, right there in the strait.

Frum: It goes under the heading of “another thing we should have thought about first,” but—

Pottinger: (Laughs.) Sure.

Frum: —if you say it’s too early to say whether China is a net winner from the war, it’s not too early to say that Russia is an enormous net winner from this war. They have billions of dollars—I think it’s almost a billion a day more revenue; you will know the figure better than me—but hundreds of millions more per day than they had before, at a time when the United States is expending munitions that could have been given to Ukraine, and when the relationship between the United States and European allies is so bad that President Trump is speculating about withdrawing from NATO formally. That’s probably what he had in mind with that strange truncated speech he did a couple of weeks ago where he had a big announcement and then he just sort of rambled for 20 minutes to no point.

Pottinger: No doubt, right now Russia’s benefiting from the higher oil prices. They’re benefiting from being able to sell more oil. They’re benefiting from strain in the NATO alliance. Still too early to say how all of that ultimately nets out, but if the U.S. commits an own goal by undermining or abandoning Ukraine, then we’re gonna be in a world of hurt. I haven’t seen that President Trump is turning his back on Ukraine. In fact, after the February 2025—that fateful meeting in the Oval Office when everyone thought that Trump was about to turn his back on Ukraine, in fact, the U.S. has continued its support, provided weapons. It’s required Europe to pay a much larger share of the money for those weapons, which I think is wholly appropriate.

Frum: Are you providing weapons when you’re simply selling them to the Europeans? There’s no element of gift or aid here. I think net U.S. aid to Ukraine is now almost zero. And Ukraine has a civilian economy to keep going, too, and the Europeans help support that.

Pottinger: Well, someone’s gotta pay for the weapons, and the U.S. was paying for them previously; now Europe’s paying a much larger share. The key thing is to keep that flow of weapons going, because you’ll remember, there are people who have been arguing that the U.S. shouldn’t even provide any weapons to Europe to help Ukraine. I think that that would be a huge mistake.

And take a pause for a second: The two most capable allies of the United States are not even technically defense-treaty allies of the United States. They are Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, not a defense-treaty ally of the United States, and Israel, also not a defense-treaty ally, just an informal ally of the United States. These two countries—one of them tiny, in the case of Israel; one of them just a midsized state that people thought was gonna get steamrolled by Russia—these are the two most capable countries that we have as friends right now. They’ve shown on the battlefield that they can take care of themselves. They don’t require the U.S. to join them in fighting, although it helps them, and they certainly don’t ask the U.S. to do their fighting for them. This is an amazing model. This is a model for Europe. It’s a model for Taiwan and for Japan and South Korea and Australia. It is the Ukraine model.

By the way, I would count Ukraine as the most capable military for dealing with post-2022 infantry warfare. The United States has zero. I fought in two wars not long ago, right, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have zero experience in the current character of infantry warfare that began in 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and that’s because we are now fighting semi-autonomized drone warfare, increasingly AI-driven drone warfare, and as of December, the last NATO figures I saw, Russia was losing 1,000 men per day on the battlefield in Europe—1,000 men a day were carted away in body bags or on stretchers, and almost 90 percent of those casualties were inflicted by drones.

So only the Ukrainians, on the good guy’s side, know how to do this kind of warfare. Only the Ukrainians know how to do counter-drone warfare at the level that they’re achieving. The United States has not learned how to do this. The United States does not scale. We make about 300,000 drones a year in the United States, all in. Ukraine’s gonna make 12 million drones this year. Are you kidding me? Trump has talked about the Stone Ages—the United States is the world’s best late-20th-century military; we are not a 2020s military yet, okay? And this is why I’m grateful that President Trump has not committed ground troops to the fight. I think we would learn lessons in blood very quickly about the realities of the character of warfare post-2022.

What I’m trying to tell you is, we need countries like Ukraine and Israel, okay? So does Europe. And Europe needs to be doing more, we need to be doing more just to learn from the Ukrainians. And this applies to Taiwan as well, right? We’re nervous about what China might do next with respect to Taiwan. Taiwan should learn from the Ukrainians. They should also learn—I’m gonna say it—from the Iranians, right? Look at what Iran was just able to do: keeping this strait closed, keeping the U.S. Navy at bay, at least for the last six weeks, by using cheap, relatively expendable, portable weapons like drones, sea drones, sea mines, coastal-defense cruise missiles. So the good news for countries like Japan, for countries like Taiwan is that they now have a template, provided by Ukraine in the Black Sea and provided by Iran in the Persian Gulf, for keeping superpower navies at bay. That should enhance deterrence and encourage Taiwan.

Frum: The flip side of that is the Chinese have had a very good lesson in how they can completely quarantine Taiwan without sending any ships. All they have to do is say, Okay, we’re not going to invade you, but nothing’s going in; nothing’s going out.

Pottinger: Even though you’re right that China would be able to close down a lot of traffic around there, we’ve also learned from this war that airpower alone—so if Taiwan and Japan are able to keep China’s navy at bay using the same cheap weapons that the Ukrainians and the Iranians use, and they have the confidence that airpower alone will not subjugate them, then they can hang in there; they can show that they’re willing and able and have the resolve to fight a long emergency. And that might be enough to deter China from trying to undertake something so complicated and dangerous and unpredictable as a quarantine or a blockade or a full-blown invasion.

Frum: Okay, the logic there has some sinister implications for how the U.S.-Iran war ends. Right now, the balance sheet as we speak is the United States and Israel have done devastating damage to many of Iran’s aggressive warfare capabilities, a lot of its internal repression apparatus. The regime is less able to project power and surely wobblier than it was. On the other hand, it now is the more or less recognized owner of the Persian Gulf, which it didn’t used to be. And although the United States disputes that ownership, there doesn’t seem to be a lot that the United States can do about it. And how does the United States extricate itself from this situation? How does this war end?

Pottinger: It’s going to be decided in Hormuz, right, through a mix of war, coercive gunship diplomacy, and then negotiations. Negotiations are downstream of all the rest of that that I just mentioned, right? (Laughs.) That’s why the Iranians said, Yeah, I’ll meet you in Islamabad, and I’m telling you now, I’m not gonna give up my nukes, or my nuke aspirations. It’s obvious that they’re trying to develop a nuclear arsenal. And I think President Trump and Israel are right to be targeting that capability. We’ve had multiple presidents who’ve said that we will not stand for them having nukes—well, they were getting pretty close. They were within weeks last summer. They have not yet given up the aspiration or the materials or the tools that they would need to enrich, so I actually think that is a noble, correct strategic goal for the United States.

But as you said, we’re now pregnant with this war. You don’t get half-pregnant with these things. And what President Trump is going to try to do is try to build leverage by taking away the tollbooth from Iran. And then it’s sort of a test of wills to see which side cries “uncle” sooner, and the world economy is gonna be choking; there’s no question about it. The world economy is the one that needs that oil—everybody needs that oil.

The short answer is, I don’t know how this ends. I don’t know.

Frum: I’m gonna say something, and because of your past relationships, you may not wanna comment on this. But if it’s a test of wills, say who’s gonna come out with the upper hand: the fanatical, murderous, apocalyptic regime that believes it’s going to get its reward in heaven for all its crime on Earth; or a president with the world’s shortest attention span, who’s seeing his poll numbers at home collapsing because of high gas prices from a war he has no congressional authorization for, no public approval for, he’s never explained a case to it, and he is someone who’s famous for his short-term-edness? I think the Iranian will, although they have way less in the way of material resources, looks like the more robust side in that contest of wills.

Pottinger: When you go to war, you go to war with your military and your nation, even when you’ve got a lot of people who don’t back it. I don’t yet know where President Trump’s gonna come out. I would say the following: It became clear to me in the first term working for him that he views Iran as a separate category of threat from other adversaries of the U.S. And it’s precisely because of his assessment—and I think his assessment is right—that Iran cannot be deterred, okay? This is a country—a regime, I should say, because this is really about the regime, not the Iranian people—this is a regime that attempted to assassinate President Trump while he was running for office at least twice in 2024, according to Justice Department indictments under President Biden’s Justice Department. They attempted to assassinate much of his Cabinet from the first term. In other words, the things that Israel and the U.S. have just done to Iran were a mirror image of what Iran was attempting to do in its own regime-change strategy towards the United States.

These guys are—they’re dangerous; they’re nuts. I think that, if they had a nuclear weapon, they would be willing to take even more extreme risks, knowing that they are protected by a nuclear shield, that no other country would be willing to actually inflict retaliation on them so long as they have a nuke. Now what you’re looking at is sort of Iran conducting something closer to all-out war to try to remake the Middle East as the hegemon. If that’s where we end up with this, we’re not in a good place, absolutely.

Frum: I don’t think it’s a hard sell that Iran is an aggressive regime that’s bad at calculating risk, driven by implacable ideology. I think if you took a vote in the U.S. Senate—Iran: good or bad—there might be two or three senators who’d abstain. And there’s a long blood debt, as you know from your time in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s a long blood debt, that Iran inflicted a lot of loss and harm on the United States, and that’s never been quite requited, although President Trump did kill Qasem Soleimani, the architect of that harm.

But the question is: Who has more staying power here? If fuel prices stay high into the summer driving season, on top of the harm done to the American economy by the tariffs that were imposed in 2025, with a president who was not that popular to begin with, whose numbers are now deteriorating, and who’s famous for his short-term-edness, it’s hard to imagine that these talks can continue in this same way into the month of May and into the month of June.

Pottinger: Yeah, I don’t think the talks are gonna settle this thing. I think that we’re now seeing the negotiation on the battlefield. And it’s still apparently sort of, kind of a cease-fire, but I think the cease-fire exists in name only because, as I said at the top, blockades are acts of war. And now you’re seeing a contest of wills again, on the seas and in the Strait of Hormuz, dueling blockades, and if the U.S. kind of chickens out, we’re gonna be in a pretty rough spot afterwards.

Frum: What happens if Congress refuses to approve the supplementals that are going to be necessary to pay for this war? There are enough Republican dissenters from the war that the supplementals can’t get through the House with Republican votes only. In the Senate, there are many procedural obstacles. You need a consensus to get these supplementals through, and they’re going to be big. What happens if they don’t get funded?

Pottinger: Yeah, well, look, Congress controls the purse. The Constitution’s pretty clear about that. I don’t know what—yeah.

Frum: I think here’s something we can say pretty for sure. There’s a tiny Republican margin in the House. There are probably half a dozen Republican defectors from any Iran war supplemental, maybe more. Once you have one or two, then there may be a lot. There are going to need to be Democratic House members voting the supplemental. Who will they be? And for a war that’s never been authorized by vote of Congress and that the public doesn’t want.

And people are assuming as if this war gets funded, but there could be a real crisis. And then President Trump may try to say, Well, you stabbed us in the back. But given how unpopular the war is, the public may say, That wasn’t a stab in the back. That was a lasso to pull you away from the land war in Iran that we seem to be heading towards.

To have a big war that has already taken a dozen lives, it’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and to do that, Congress may have things to say. AndPresident Trump has refused to involve them at the beginning, like the allies, and you may get some protest at the end if they weren’t there at the beginning.

Pottinger: Yeah, I’ll take your word for it. I think we’re stronger as a nation when we have the support of the Congress and the support of the people when we undertake the most grave responsibilities of government, which are those having to do with war and peace.

Frum: One thing that no one seems ever to have said to Donald Trump is, one of the reasons you involve these people is not just because it’s a nice thing to do. When you have that photograph and there is the president flanked by leaders in House and Senate, flanked by allies, and anything goes wrong and the question is, Who thought this was a good idea?, the president could say, All of us. Look at all these guys. We all thought it was a good idea. (Laughs.) If he’s just there front, center, solo and the question is, Who thought this was a good idea?, it’s him. And when it looks like not a good idea, one man to blame.

Pottinger: Fair point. (Laughs.) That’s good. It’s a fair point.

Frum: All right, I need to let you go, but I wanna press you one more: How does this end? If you were to predict, how does this end?

Pottinger: Remember, I described war as kind of an auditor. That’s not an original idea. The guy who wrote the most eloquently on that is an Australian historian named Geoffrey Blainey, who wrote a book that I wish everyone who ever went into national-security jobs would read. It’s called The Causes of War, and he’s just published a new edition of it in Australia.

This accounting that settles for everyone to see kind of who has more bargaining power, that is done on the battlefield. And I think that what you’re seeing after this weekend is that President Trump is unwilling to accept the math at the current stage, which is with Iran saying, I’m not gonna meet any of the political objectives that you demanded of me: I’m not giving up my regime. I’m not giving up my nuclear weapons aspirations. And by the way, I’ve now taken the Strait of Hormuz as my own little tollbooth. We have the cease-fire, but I don’t think that President Trump is gonna settle for that accounting, and so there’s more accounting to do. And that means the dueling blockades on the high seas. Blockades are dangerous things. They’re coercive. They could easily escalate to use of force.

And I don’t know how this ends, except I can give you an indicator. If the United States is able to convene allies and partners, a coalition of the willing, to provide more of that coercive muscle to keep the strait open, which is in everyone’s interest; this isn’t just a contest anymore between the U.S. and Iran. Everyone who’s sitting on the sidelines—and I’ll tell you, the Gulf states know this, and we have some inkling in the press of what they’re asking President Trump to do. They do not want this war to end on the current terms of Iran controlling a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies. So now’s the time to do something that is not in the muscle memory of the current White House, but which I think is necessary, and that is to actually build a coalition. It’s gonna share the burden, but more than that, it’s going to create both optics and numbers that could be more persuasive to Iran to at least back off on the Gulf.

Frum: Matt Pottinger, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Pottinger: David, thanks for having me.

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Frum: Thanks so much to Matt Pottinger for joining me today on The David Frum Show. My book this week is Labyrinths, by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. We had Italo Calvino last week, so now we’re plunging deeper into symbolic territory with the man who really introduced symbolic writing into English.

If you haven’t read Borges or are unfamiliar with his work, I have to prepare you for a very strange world. Labyrinths is the book that made Borges famous in English. It was published in 1962, but it’s a translation and anthology of stories Borges wrote in the 1940s.

Maybe you need to begin with knowing something about the very unusual career of this man. Borges was born in 1899 in Argentina. He was from a well-to-do and very literate family, and he learned many languages at an early age. He spent his 20s in Europe during the First World War in Switzerland and then in Spain, in neutral countries, returned to Argentina, where he began as a poet. In the year 1938, he suffered a traumatic head injury that left him doubtful about his own sanity. And to test his wits, he abandoned poetry and tried instead short stories, and he wrote some very, very strange ones over the next years.

He found himself on the outs with the ruling authorities in Argentina when Juan Perón came to power. Borges was an Anglophile conservative, a traditionalist, and did not like at all the populist regime of Perón, and he lost a job, and he found himself making a living by lecturing on English literature. But the stories came to greater repute, and Borges himself was politically rehabilitated and ending up as director of the Argentine National Library, ironically at exactly the moment that he began to lose his eyesight to a hereditary condition, another predicament that you might find in a Borges short story.

Borges never won the international claim that really ought to have come his way. He was the sort of person who ought to have won a Nobel Prize, but because of his right-of-center politics—he accepted a medal from Augusto Pinochet in 1976—he flunked the political test that is always there in the Nobel considerations. But the stories are bigger than politics and stand the test of time.

Let me tell you about one of the most bizarre of those in the book Labyrinths—published, as I said, in 1962. This is the very first story, the story that he turned to after his crisis in 1938, and it’s called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” The story is a fictional obituary by a pompous, pedantic, and quite bigoted obituarist of a fictional French writer, Pierre Menard. Pierre Menard had a very obscure imaginary career, and in the later part of his career, in the 1930s, he sat down to write his masterwork, and what he resolved to do was to rewrite Don Quixote in exactly the same words and exactly the same lines as the original Don Quixote. Now, he was not copying Don Quixote, said Pierre Menard, the imaginary author. He was instead drawing on his experience as a 20th-century Frenchman to rewrite Don Quixote from the beginning, exactly the same way as [Miguel de] Cervantes wrote it in the 1600s. And he wrote two chapters and a little fragment of a third chapter—two noncontinuous chapters—each of them drawing on his own inspiration to produce exactly the same book as Cervantes did. And the imaginary obituarist says, When you compare them side by side, they seem identical, but actually, Menard’s version is a lot better because it’s more ironic and written by someone to whom 17th-century Spanish is a second language and not a first language, as it was for Cervantes. The story is humorous, but it raises some very profound questions about the relationship between authors and texts of a kind that have inspired a lot of thought.

Another of the stories in the book is a story called the “Three Versions of Judas,” meaning Judas Iscariot. This is, again, an imaginary essay about an imaginary essayist who wrote an imaginary theology of Judas Iscariot, arguing that Judas Iscariot was, in a way, the true founder of Christianity through a series of very heretical beliefs. And it’s a play on philosophy. It’s a play on meaning. It’s a play on this double game, or this removal game, of imaginary author of an imaginary text about an alien subject, all of which is designed to challenge us to think.

And the reason I draw this to your attention, if you’re not already a Borges fan, is I wanna return to a point I keep making about why I do these books and about what we are losing with the loss of literary culture. Video culture, and especially the kind of short, instant videos we are surrounded with today, encourage us to take the world literally, to be a passive consumer of created objects for us. Literary work, at its best, challenges us to be individuals, to think for ourselves, and understand that text is treacherous. The story of Pierre Menard, a 20th-century writer who rewrites Don Quixote but as a new book, as if it were new, and claims that his version is better, well, that’s a literary game. That is a philosophical problem. That is an invitation on you to think for yourself and be more fully human.

I’m not a Luddite. I enjoy an Instagram Reel as much as the next person—well, maybe not as much as the next person, but I enjoy them. I watch them. But we are losing something. And it’s something that not only changes the world in its loss, but changes ourselves. We need to grab on to it. And meeting Jorge Luis Borges in his Labyrinths is a great place to start.

Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As always, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will like and share the program as well. Thank you for watching and listening. See you next week here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

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