Steve Hsu: So it could be that we just can't stop certain missiles like the hypersonic missiles, and even if we can stop maybe the less advanced missiles. The cost ratio is so unfavorable that we can't keep it up, and we, we, we literally have, don't have the stockpiles necessary to actually fight an extended war, an extended missile war. I like to refer to this as the first missile war where Iran doesn't, in this case, Iran doesn't really have an air force.

It's not relying on its navy. It's not relying on its ground forces, what it's really relying on is missiles and drones. And you can think of drones as just like cheaper, slower missiles to some extent. So I was not surprised at what's happened. People who carefully study the military, the, the actual events in the first, even in the first week of the war, will note that very, very expensive essentially irreplaceable, billion dollar long range radar facilities that the US and Israel maintain were destroyed by Iran in the first days of the war. That is consistent with my thesis that Iran has some advanced missiles.

Alf: Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of Seeking Truth from Facts. Today I'm very pleased to be joined by Steve Hsu a friend of the show and a regular on the show to talk about the current geopolitical developments. How's it going, Steve?

Steve Hsu: I am great, Al. It's great to be with you and there's so much to talk about happening between the United States and.

Alf: Indeed. Of course we've spoken before about the possibility of an American Israeli regime change war against Iran and the difficulties that that would entail, and we're of course, well and truly there now. So how do you think this came to happen and which party do you think was in the driving seat in pushing the decision to go to war over the line?

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I, I want to caution everybody epistemically that when things like this happen, whether it's the details of the actual military operations or the, you know, decision process, we have incomplete information, so I, I'm not necessarily expressing high conviction any of these things, but I think that Trump was emboldened by the success in Venezuela. I think he was told by the Israelis that they had very strong intelligence in Iran and that this could be a short regime change operation. There's a joke in Israel about Mossad operations in Iran, that there's so many Israeli SPS in Iran that they don't even, they bump into each other and they don't know, you know, they, they don't know when they're actually accidentally talking to another Mossad agent in Iran. So, you know, they could easily have tried to sell Trump that, they had very good intelligence of what was going on in Iran and that they could easily affect regime change.

Alf: I know there was a lot of discussion around Ru Rubio's statement regarding why, why the US got involved and it's some, some were suggesting it, it appeared that Israel was in the driving seat. What, what do you make of that?

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I guess I take Rubio's statement at face value. My it, you know, why would he say that? Well, anyway, I, it seems plausible to me what he said. You know, I do wanna note as someone who voted for Trump that, you know, one of the main reasons I voted for him was I thought he wouldn't get pulled into a war of choice against Iran.

And whereas maybe Kamala would and, and I may have judged it incorrectly, and I may have underrated the strength of the Israeli influence on Trump, perhaps through Epstein kind of kompromat I mean that, of course, most people say that's conspiracy theory type stuff, but I think it's not completely implausible.
In any case they did somehow get him to go along with it, whereas they had been trying, Bibi has been trying for something like 40 years and, you know, through multiple presidencies trying to get the US to attack Iran. And now they've, now they've finally got us to do it.

Alf: And it seems like there are other, there are other sources of Israeli influence on, on Trump as well as like Miriam Adelson or Jared Kushner of course, who has quite long standing ties with the Netanyahu family. And the, so the war lasted just over a month before the recent rounds of peace talks, which we'll get into later.

So the expectations of Iranian performance going into the war? Well, I think it's fair to say quite low especially given the strategic losses they've sustained in recent years. But I think it's also fair to say that Iran has outperformed most of these expectations appearing to have rendered most US military bases in the region, at least temporary temporarily inoperable whilst the damage that has been done to Israel remains somewhat unclear. Crucially Iran now appears to have control over the strait of Hormuz, which doesn't appear to be dissipating anytime soon, although that's still to be determined. What do you think led to Iran outperforming expectations in this way?

Steve Hsu: Yeah, so this is probably the major focus of my interest in this conflict. This, this, conflict does have major geopolitical implications and also implications for, you know, energy resources. But to me, the most important aspect of it is what it tells us about military technological capabilities of the US primarily.
And what the implications are for a potential conflict in the Western Pacific between the US and China. So hopefully we'll return to that in a moment. I was not surprised at how well Iran performed. So in my analysis of the 12 day conflict that happened earlier, I concluded that missile defense was not nearly as effective as establishment media in Israel and the United States leads the average person to believe. So this is a longstanding thing I've discussed on my podcast with you. I believe we

Alf: discussed on a previous episode last year as well.

Steve Hsu: Yeah.

So I think missile defense is much harder than what people think. You can discuss this at two levels. One, can you actually intercept modern missiles, perhaps hypersonic missiles or ordinary ballistic missiles, but which have maneuvering capability on reentry?

I think that's actually quite hard. Even if you can intercept those missiles, the capabilities of the interceptors have to be very superior. To the missiles that they're trying to hit. This is basic physics at play, and so the cost ratio has to be extremely unfavorable to the defender. So it could be that we just can't stop certain missiles like the hypersonic missiles, and even if we can stop maybe the less advanced missiles. The cost ratio is so unfavorable that we can't keep it up, and we, we, we literally have, don't have the stockpiles necessary to actually fight an extended war, an extended missile war. I like to refer to this as the first missile war where Iran doesn't, in this case, Iran doesn't really have an air force.

It's not relying on its navy, it's not relying on its ground forces, what it's really relying on is missiles and drones. And you can think of drones as just like cheaper, slower missiles to some extent. So I was not surprised at what's happened. People who carefully study the military, the, the actual events in the first, even in the first week of the war, will note that very, very expensive essentially irreplaceable, billion dollar long range radar facilities that the US and Israel maintain were destroyed by Iran in the first days of the war. That is consistent with my thesis that Iran has some advanced missiles. Those missiles are very hard to stop either because they're advanced hypersonic missiles, which can't be shot down at all or they created some kind of combined attack involving both missiles and slow drones, but timing things to arrive kind of at the same time that overwhelmed the defensive systems. Now, if there's anything you want to protect, it's a $1 billion radar system, which once it's out of commission, can't be replaced for many years.

And once it's outta commission, you cannot see the launches of missiles, you know, from very far off. One interesting aspect of this is that the warning sirens in Tel Aviv in the past have given people quite a long time, many minutes to find their way to a bomb shelter. Reportedly once this war got going and once these radar systems were destroyed the warnings were sort of as short as 30 seconds, or maybe there was no warning and incoming Iranian missiles would hit targets.

For listeners who find what I'm saying, shocking because they read the establishment media and incredulously believe what the established media tells you about what's happening there. I would just say you should be epistemically very cautious about claims from either side. During a conflict, and if you're older and you've actually lived through a war, so if you remember what public briefings by General Westmoreland were like during Vietnam, or you remember public communications about what was happening in Iraq or Afghanistan, you realize there's no limit to how much these people will lie.
I mean, once you have troops at risk the moral calculus is such that a lie to a journalist is nothing compared to an advantage you would get in a war where your actual people are at risk. And so just remember that like everything goes out the window once you're really fighting a war. And everything is lies and strategically it's justified uh, in the minds of the military and the politicians to lie once it's a war. So you just have to be very, very careful about the information that you're getting.

Alf: I also wasn't particularly shocked by Iran's performance here 'cause of course, I think both you and I have been following the development of missile defense over the past. Past years and going back, in my case, at least to the war in Yemen, where the kind of patriot systems that were given to Saudi Arabia proved to be pretty ineffective against the drones that the Houthis were sending to walk towards the Aramco facilities in which ultimately led Saudi Arabia to make kind of peace in Yemen.

Another example of, of what you described there of one, one involving Israel and one which we actually have some empirical evidence is obviously in, in the nineties when Iraq was obviously then led by Saddam, Hussein was sending scud missiles into, into Israel. They claimed a very, very high rate of interception when later independent analysis found that, that, that those estimates were way off.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, that's a good example of reporting during wartime being 100% wrong. And it could be wrong because one side is deliberately trying to hide some embarrassing facts about how things are going or it could just be during the, during the heat of battle, there's a lot of mis analysis. It's hard to know what's really going on.

You mentioned you know what back in those days was called the, the great scud Hunt. So scuds were a very primitive, kind of Soviet era missile that the Iraqis had and the Iranians have improved missiles, generally scud level or better. And one of the big questions about this conflict is to what extent can Israeli and US forces find launchers of Iranian missiles and take them out?

And those could be mobile launchers that are sort of hiding and then launching a missile and then moving. They could also be very complicated underground complexes, which are built into mountains and which have many, many exit tunnels. And from those tunnels they can launch either launch missiles or send out mobile launchers.

And you know, the US can generally find the entrances to these tunnels and maybe drop some bombs or actually, we, we haven't actually dropped that many bombs. Mostly we've been using standoff weapons, which is a, a whole nother topic if, if we get into the military details we should talk about. But we can attack those entrances and exits to the tunnel systems, but then they can clear them out again.

So it's very unclear like how successful the United States has been and Israel have been in reducing the launch capability and the missile stockpiles of Iran, I'm not convinced at all that we've done a great job. You can see intelligence estimates, official intelligence estimates all over the map saying, oh, we got two, we got rid of two thirds of them, or we got rid of half of them.

But it just shows you they don't really know. And so I would not be surprised if Iran has had a significant reduction. Like half their stuff is gone, but the other half still remains. But I also would not be surprised if most of it's still there. And so that that's, you know, one very important aspect of the conflict.

Something else I'll point out for the, you know, the listener who's like, just doesn't believe thispicture of how things work, that missiles are actually in a way, a kind of dominant kind of weapons platform, even over, like our advanced Air Force. Our aircraft carriers operate one to 2000 miles away from Iran. Okay. And that's extremely, makes life extremely difficult for the aviators 'cause they have to do refueling in order to be able to, you know, fly close enough to launch their missiles and then come back. So. If, if we are operating that far away from Iran, there is a good reason for it because there's a very negative consequence of operating that far away.

But we are, and the good reason is that we actually are worried that Iranian missiles and drones can cause significant damage to our aircraft carriers and other ships. And so I, that's another piece of information that says that, oh, if we ever go up against the Chinese or even the Russians, our Navy would be hiding the whole time. Our Navy would be literally hiding from the other side because of the effectiveness of missiles and drones.

Alf: Now over the, over the past few days, we saw a temporary ceasefire emerge at the last minute on the back of Trump threatening civilizational annihilation. Who do you think has the, the, the leverage in these peace talks and how likely do you think they are to result in anything meaningful in the long term?
Steve Hsu: So we are recording on Sunday, April 12th, and probably some events, you know, we'll have evolved before this episode is actually released. What I just read in the Financial Times and New York Times right before we got on to record, is that Trump is now threatening to block the flow through the Straits. So the Iranians are blocking, are still blocking the straits 'cause the negotiations have collapsed. And now Trump is saying if any country that pays Iran to allow its ships to pass through the straits, the US Navy will block. So that, that could be the next thing is that some Chinese ships that are going through, or even ships going to bound for the UK or something the US is saying that it will actually stop and board those ships now, that that could easily lead to World War III.

So who knows if Trump or the US Navy would dare to actually pursue this strategy. You know, it's something that Trump literally just announced I think in the last couple hours. So I think when I went, when the negotiation started, I thought there was very little chance that two sides would converge because the 10 key points that Iran insisted on as quote, the basis for the talks, very few of those points perhaps none of them are things that pol would be politically palatable for Trump to agree to from the US perspective. So it does seem that two sides are at loggerheads and I, I just don't, it doesn't seem like it's gonna be easy for there to be a compromise.

Alf: You mentioned not long ago that this war is of course occurring in the wider context of the US China competition, and we can discuss various aspects of that. Of course, China says the kind of normally talking point on this is that China gets much of its oil from the region affected whilst Trump it was Trump claims the US doesn't need Middle Eastern oil. Obviously, he seems to be forgetting there that oil's a global commodity, the price of which is affected by global shocks, but nevertheless, what do you think the effect of this war will be a China competition?

Steve Hsu: Yeah, so I would say, coming back to the first question you asked me, that most of the cause of this war really is the Israelis Bibi wanting it. So I believe it was a war of choice. It was not an existential situation for the United States. We can talk about the Iranian nuclear program in a minute, but I do not think this was an existential question for the United States. And I think we were basically, for some reason or another, compelled to do this for Israeli interests. And, but some Trump supporters, some MAGA type people. Immediately jumped in and said, you know, the, the, the subset of MAGA people who don't wanna blame this on Bibi or Israel jumped in and said, no, no.

The reason we're doing this is because if we can seize control of Iran and the hor, the straight of straits of Hormuz this would give us a big geopolitical negotiating advantage over China because China does get a very large portion of its fossil fuels, oil and gas from the Middle East. So that, that was another justification for this.

So in that scenario, had we had, we won a quick victory as with Maduro and caused regime change in Iran and then suddenly a friendly administration or a friendly regime was in power in Iran. Kind of going back to, for example, the s Shah. that would, that would be a big problem for China because in order to get its oil from the Gulf it, the oil has to pass through the Straits of Hormuz, and then that would be under the control of a US puppet regime. Right? That would've been the best outcome for the US. A short war that caused regime change, and then installing a friendly regime, which then controls the Straits of Hormuz.

So, so I think that's the, the best thing you can say for this is it was a gamble to try to do that. I don't think the assumption that. Regime change was gonna be easy, was very realistic. I think that's sort of typical old school NeoCon talk about you know, the people being ready to overthrow a bad regime and they all want to be Americans, you know, or something which is just, I think, profoundly unrealistic. I'm not a Iran expert, but my understanding of the situation, Iran, is that the regime is not as fragile as, you know, those people might have thought. so now the question vis-a-vis China, my understanding is that they have a very large stockpile, which they've been building of, of, petro of fossil fuels.

I think it's something like 1.4 billion barrels of oil that they've stockpiled. So it's almost a year's worth of resources. They also can get oil from the Russians. I think they've also increased their buying from Mexico during this period. So I, I don't think it's that easy to corner them over fossil fuels. But it is a definite concern of China's, I think. I think they would prefer to be able to buy oil from Iran and buy oil from Saudi Arabia, et cetera.

Alf: You mentioned there the other justification on the US side for this war, which was Iran's nuclear program. My thinking on that the 12 day war and the, and the strikes on Ford was supposed to have neutralized, Irans Irans nuclear programs, so. It can't really be true at the same time that those strikes were successful. And still we need to go in, America needs to go in and annihilate their nuclear program. So I don't, I dunno what's going on there and I don't know what, what you make of that.

Steve Hsu: Well, that's an another example of, again, like I say this to younger people who haven't been through this, but someone who reads the news carefully and thinks for themselves. After living through a couple of wars, just realizes that, you know, everything is lies during wartime.

And so during the 12 day conflict, as you said at the end, we said, oh, Trump. Trump came on and said, oh, we dropped these moabs and we really set back their nuclear programs, so now we can call it quits. Right. And you know, the, I think the background for that is they were realizing that. There was no way they could continue to defend Israel against the missile launches from Iran, and that really drove it to wanna just call it quits.

Alf: I mean, I've also heard rumors that Israel were. Taking quite big hits and were asking for a, a kind of ceasefire by that point.

Steve Hsu: Exactly. So I think that's probably true. But in any case, either they were lying then or they're lying now. Right? So, so either, either they didn't actually destroy the Iranian nuclear program or they're lying now about that program being an existential threat that's worth going to war.

Someone in the Trump administration is lying about this. Either they were lying then or they're lying now. Now regarding the nuclear program of Iran the previous leader who we killed, you know, during, while we were negotiating, supposedly negotiating, we killed the supreme leader Khamenei and he had issued a Fatwa, which said, you know, because nuclear weapons tend to kill more civilians than military people, this is not a moral kind of weapon that is, that Muslims can use. And I, I find it convincing that that Fatwa was part of what held back the Iranian nuclear program. I think the Iranians actually given that they have, you know, 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium could, if they want sprint to what is called a gun style fission bomb. So that was the, I believe the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which was never tested. That design was never tested 'cause it's so simple. It's basically just a block of uranium that you fire another which has a sort of region in the middle of it's empty. And then you fire a shape of a uranium that fits into that that vol empty volume. And when the two are together, then it, it goes to criticality and you get a 15 kilo kiloton explosion like the Hiroshima bomb. And everything I understand says that they have enough centrifuges they could sprint toward 92% or whatever it is, enrichment.

In a few weeks and then they could build a gun type bomb, but they were restraining themselves from doing it because number one, their previous supreme leaders said it wasn't a moral thing to do, to have that kind of weapon. Number two, there are many cosmopolitans people tend to regard all of the, all of our quote, enemy regimes as being monolithic, and they don't realize every society has like, sort of multiple competing interests.

Alf: Faction.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. Factions. There are plenty of cosmopolitans who just wanted to like, you know, they would say, we don't need nuclear weapons. Let's not build this and then hopefully we can normalize trade with Europe, you know, and, and other places.

Alf: And there are even moderates in the, in the current regime right now, of course the, the president Pezeshkian is, is believed to be of that faction.

There have been of the past as well. People like, Zarif and Rohani, believed to be of the moderate wing who, whilst they've, seem to have become less powerful in recent years still they still have a voice at the

Steve Hsu: Yeah.

Alf: The high level of Iranian leadership. Yeah.

Steve Hsu: So I believe, you know, my sort of two leading hypothesis for what's happening right now is either the RGC and hard liners have gained enough control over the system now because we assassinated the previous Supreme leader. His son has taken over. His son is someone who is much more aggressive. Yeah. And has AR argued in the past against that fowa as far as I understand. So, so he doesn't believe it's immoral, especially when Iran is facing an existential war against nuclear armed countries ie Israel in the United States.

I think he would say it's okay for them to race for a, a bomb. And so my two hypotheses are one, they have decided to race for a bomb and they're just quietly doing it or the other one is, oh, there's still disagreement in the leadership and they're not sure whether they're gonna race for the bomb.
And so they're, maybe they're not doing it yet, but they're, but I think they're capable of doing it faster than most people think. And they do have advanced missile systems so they can deliver the bomb once it's made. They could build some number of, you know, maybe half a dozen or a dozen of these bombs relatively quickly if we keep pushing them to, and, and what we're doing is, you know, guaranteed to like, strengthen the case of the people who wanna build that bomb. Because once they have that bomb, we're gonna leave them alone. I mean, I, I, you know,

Alf: look at North

Steve Hsu: Korea barring

Alf: some

Steve Hsu: Yeah, exactly. Like North Korea barring some tail risk thing where Bibi just goes nuts and says, oh, they've got the bomb. Gotta launch immediately. That's an

Alf: option. Yeah.

Steve Hsu: Barring that tail risk I think generally we're gonna leave them alone if they suddenly declare we have 10, 15 kiloton bombs,

Alf: If they do a test and it becomes observable that they have one. Yeah.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. I don't even think they have to have a test. I think they can just say, look, we built this conservative, shitty kind of bomb, but it was good enough to destroy Rosio. Okay. And we now have, we now have 10 of them and just leave us alone. What are you gonna do? Like, like I think the US planners are gonna have to take that pretty seriously.

Alf: I mean, I dunno what to what degree you think, 'cause of course for about at least 30 years there's been this, do they don't, they have have a bomb and it seems they have had the capacity to build one at some speed for quite a while. To what degree do you think that that represents them hedging?
Steve Hsu: I think they've, they've had the capability, so, so the enrichment is the hard step and the building the gun type bomb is pretty easy for them. And so, I mean, they, they have pretty advanced missiles. Okay. They're not as advanced as the Russian or Chinese missiles, but you can see they're pretty good.

So I think they've had the capacity to do this. They haven't pushed super hard on the enrichment. I think they were happy with the JCPOA. Hmm. And so what happened is when Trump, Trump won, pulled out of the JCPOA and that's when they enriched to 60%. Now it's much harder to go from zero to 60% than it is to go from 60 to 90 plus percent, which is what you need to actually have a functional bomb. So the last step that they have remaining is pretty small, but they made the big step 'cause the stupid Americans reneged on the JCPOA. So, so then they said, okay, fine, we're gonna do this. Right. So the whole thing is a, it's, it's just a comedy of errors really.

Alf: And, and then moving back to what we were talking about a bit earlier, about how this relates to the US China competition, what do you think the dynamics, particularly as it relates to missile defense and Iran's use of missile technology, what do you think that says about how how a hypothetical US China war could unfold? Yeah.

Steve Hsu: Let's break this up into two pieces. One is the military technology. What we learn about missile war and military technology from this conflict. And the second thing is the, the geopolitical reverberations of what just happened on the first topic. I think, again, like it's, it's just crazy. You can't find very much good analysis on this.

But for people who understand, you know, the physics of missile defense. Understand remote sensing. So for example, probably the Iranian their, some improvement of some of the improvements in their performance. Both of drones and of missiles came from access to the Chinese Beto system, which is better than GPS and harder to jam so that, you know, they could improve their accuracy by, you know, the, the Chinese could easily send a plane load of chips.

Allow the Russian missiles to use the Beto system for targeting and, and geolocation. Those could be installed on drones as well. So there are all kinds of reasons to think that the US, you know, failed to defeat the Houthis. When they tried to block the Red Sea, they, they couldn't shoot down missiles that very easily missiles that the Houthis were launching.

They can't shoot down the more advanced Iranian missiles. Maybe they can shoot down the less advanced Iranian missiles, but the cost factor, the cost ratio is so high that they're kind of out of interceptors. They're actually taking interceptors from like South Korea and other places which, you know, looks really bad to our allies in Asia.

So, so I think now we, if we transpose this to the Western Pacific, the distances are much faster. So I think drones are a little bit less important in that theater, it's, it's really missiles. But I think, and I've maintained this for the last 10 years, US carrier operations and US basis would be subject to attack from missiles launched from the mainland, or from ships or from submarines, whatever you want that are highly accurate in which we can't shoot down.

So our carrier groups would just as they do in the actual war games, retreat to the edge of the map in order to survive. The basis can't move. So the radar systems, the power systems. All kinds of important things at the basis would get knocked out very quickly. And the whole thing would be, you know, not saying somehow the US couldn't eventually prevail, but certainly it would be extremely bloody and costly and there would be a huge shock to us, ordinary people in the us from such a violent conflict in its early days.

So I think that's I think anybody who disputes that is just not, not paying attention to, to what's happening. Now in terms of geopolitical reverberations, every ally of the US is watching, you know, is observing some things like when a country like Iran, which you know, which is really a kind of poor backward country, it's been subject to sanctions for a long time.

However, they have a, a, a core of technically able people who, you know, have built up their missile and drone programs. When a country like that really stands up to the US and is willing to take damage, they're willing to take bombing, they're willing to suffer casualties, but they have effective weapon systems that can threaten US bases and the US Navy, the US can't beat them. And so all of these other countries are realizing this. So, so this illusion of US military supremacy is, is being eroded fast. So that's one huge consequence. Allies in Asia that have to choose between being a little bit friendlier to China and a little bit less subservient to the US or vice versa.

You know, they're looking at this and saying, well, when push came to shove the US pulled all kinds of defensive systems from our inventories and sent them to protect Israel. So they're not gonna forget that calculus. That basically the US didn't, for all this talk about pivoting to Asia and et cetera, et cetera, when push came to shove the US you know, really, you know, cares more about Israel for some reason.

Somehow our system, you know, has to prioritize interests of Israel and not so much the interest of South Korea, for example. I think the South Koreans are hopping mad over installing these Thad systems many years ago that kind of poisoned for some period of time their relationship with Beijing. But now when push comes to shove, we like pack up the Thad system and send it to the Middle East to protect Israel.
So this kind of thing is not lost on people in that region. And so it just, it just makes the US seem like a less powerful and also less reliable ally.

Alf: Moving back to the ways in which this is related to the US China competition. One thing that's emerged recently is that Iran is now charging yuan the Chinese new Yuan to the ships passing through the strait.

So what, what impact do you think the war will have on dollar hegemony?

Steve Hsu: I think it's quite bad for dollar hegemony. I mean, you know, all these gulf countries. Let's go, let's look at the logic. So, you know, they were sort of forced to price their oil in dollars and that was part of the security arrangement.

You know, United States provided security for them. They then had to comply by selling the oil in dollars and then recycling the dollars through, you know, US treasuries and things like this, investments in the United States, et cetera. Now that security arrangement is very much in jeopardy, right? Because they, they saw like the US both couldn't protect them from Iran very well and also like didn't really expend as many resources to protect them as it would expend to protect Israel. So I think all of these GCC countries are recalibrating their relationship with the United States. I think it could be a, it could be a disaster for us.

Alf: Moving to the American home front this war is unprecedented in recorded American history in terms of its unpopularity at the outset. The situation is made particularly acute by the fact that, as you mentioned, president Trump heard run on an America first peace ticket and the promise of not getting involved in foreign wars, and especially not for the sake of foreign countries.

What do you think the long-term effect of this war on American politics could be?

Steve Hsu: Yes, this is a great question because if you look at polling, the Dems are already pretty anti-Israel. And now you have this big fracture within the right, within the sort of MAGA movement with people like Tucker Carlson coming out explicitly saying, Hey, this, this war in Iran should have never happened.
It only happened because of disproportionate influence, you know, of pro-Israeli political forces, you know, or possibly kompomat you know, getting Trump to do this. And so US politics is gonna be, I think, heavily fractured. And, and I think it's gonna be very hard for politicians that are very, very pro-Israel to survive because they're, if they're on the right, their base is kind of fractured.

And if on their left, the very strong majority just favors that position. And I think Bibe understood this. I mean, I think you can find actual, sort of, not even hot mic, but just recorded conversations between Bibe and others where they, they sort of see this sort of political movement or change happening in the United States and that that probably also led to his urgency to carry this out now, because, you know, another term from now I don't think he'll be able to, to get this kind of war going.

Alf: One figure on theAmerican right, who's been consistently against this war on those, like it as you mentioned, is Tucker Carlson. So look, I mean, looking specifically look, looking forward to the 2028 election, and on on particularly the Republican primary. It, it seems that Vance and Rubio will really struggle to distance themselves from this war versus assuming it, it continues and yeah, the most consistent voice against it has been Tucker. So, I mean, what potential do you see for a Tucker 2028 presidential bid?

Steve Hsu: I personally would like to see Tucker run for president because I think a lot of the, you know, he, you know, I don't follow him back carefully, so maybe there's some crazy alien stuff or, you know, other conspiracy theory type stuff that he advocates that I find crazy, but on this particular issue, I think it would be good for a real American populace to, to raise these issues. I mean, Trump raised all these issues himself saying that, you know, we, these wars were all, are all losers for the average American. They don't help the average American. There are mistakes. And then he went ahead and did it.
So there has to be some campaign where people who You know, I, I don't wanna say true MAGA people, but people who have the interests of the average American in mind and want to advocate for those interests and are willing to call out what Trump did, which is promise X, and then do not X, you know, so, so stay out of a war with Iran, but oh, well, no, we're gonna launch a war against Iran. I mean, I think someone like Tucker needs to run. Just to point this out to the American, you know, electorate.
Alf: I think last night actually I saw some very interesting polling on on Tucker, and what it showed is that I think among independence. He's views amongst independents are roughly evenly split between those who have a negative opinion, who have no opinion, who have a positive opinion.

And something like even 20% of Democrats it showed have a, some report having a somewhat positive opinion of Tucker Carlson. And I think it was something like 25% of, or a third of independence. So I don't know what's, I dunno what's going on there. It seems he does have, despite being decidedly on the right, it seems he does, does have a kind of cross ideological appeal.

Steve Hsu: Well, I think a lot of, you know, just average people, if you listen to Tucker in short you know, chunks, you kind of get the feeling. He's a likable guy. He's not an idiot. And he cares about the average person and his basic principles are pretty populous. So they, they could appeal across both parties to some extent.

So yeah, I, I don't see why, I mean, I think he, obviously there's lots of, there's big, big long path between here and there, but, but I think he could be a viable candidate.

Alf: I guess to round off, and we, we did, we did touch on this a bit already. We've discussed before on the show as well, how support for Israel amongst Americans is declining quite significantly. This is occurring and about it has occurred on the left and is occurring on the right, and it's particularly concentrated.

I, I think the particular importance is that it's concentrated amongst young people, both, young ordinary voters, as well as a lot of reports suggesting young party staffers. And this may well present a serious challenge for Israel going forward. So, I mean, how do you think this war. do, do you think this war will have accelerated this loss of support?

Steve Hsu: Yes, I think absolutely. And, and again, like, you know, we don't really know the full story about this war, for example, did we actually deliberately hit twice, double tap a school full of young girls? I mean, did we actually do that? Like of course the establishment media doesn't want to talk about this. You know I think it actually happened and I think we knew what that school was and those were all daughters of people who are in the Iranian military.

So I think this was a very cold-blooded, if, if it turns out that, you know, we did this intentionally, it really was a war crime. And so, I dunno, I just, I think this whole thing, the whole Iran, this war, voluntary war was just a loser for us. I believe it's accelerated the chances that they'll go for a bomb, for a nuclear bomb.

I think it's degraded our reputation around the world. I think it's also exposed the weakness of our military. You know, we have the most powerful 20th century style military ever. Okay. But it's a 20th century style military. It it, it missed all of the stuff with drones and advanced missile systems.
Partially because we were so involved with wars against Insurgencies and, you know, other non-peer militaries for 20 plus years. So we focused on that and we didn't try to build the systems that would be necessary to actually defeat for example, China or Russia in a real peer conflict. Every time we go into action against somebody that has at least some level of capability, it just exposes the situation.

Alf: We alluded this to our, to this earlier and ran off this theme. What role do you think the Israel lobby has played in this, in this whole conflict, and what do you think its prospects for survival in terms of not only loss of support, but competing, competing lobbies on behalf of, for example, Gulf countries, which now have more money than ever. What do you think its long-term prospects are?

Steve Hsu: Well, it's interesting, you know, if, if, so, there was this famous book written by Mearsheimer and Waltz called the Israel Lobby. And it was very, very nuanced. They, they, you know, they took great pains to never bring up concepts like dual loyalty or ethnic affinity. They just said this is an interest group funded from abroad and also funded domestically by wealthy, you know, pro-Israel donors. but the way it's organized, it, it has very, very strong influence on our politics, right? If you're a congress person. You don't toe the line. I mean there, this is a kind of one issue thing, right?

It's like the level of your support for Israel. Go, go visit Israel as soon as you're elected. You know, if you deviate from that, they're gonna run candidates against you and they're gonna lavishly fund those candidates, right? And this goes all the way up to the presidential level. Mearsheimer and Waltz pointed this out. They were basically excommunicated from elite. Discussion Elite discourse for I think about a decade. I actually discussed this with Mearsheimer when I taped my podcast with him. You know it was very painful. So he went from someone who could not, who, who would regularly, easily be able to publish an editorial in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times to someone who literally could not appear in elite media for really a long time.

And he only kind of got rehabilitated recently because of the rise of things like YouTube and podcasts. And in fact, it was because he more or less predicted what was gonna happen in Ukraine, that NATO expansion was gonna lead to a non-linear. Back reaction from the Russian side, and this would be a bloody war.

You know, he sudden, he sort of became, he sort of came back into the public eye because of that. But still, when, when you know that or like that, there's a speech he gave that has like something like 30 million views on YouTube that talk sort of brought him back into the public eye. But even then, like he, I don't think he could get an editorial in the Wall Street Journal with the New York Times.

Maybe now he's more fully rehabilitated. It just goes to show the power of this lobby slash interest group in America. And, and I think like Americans are not allowed to talk about this, like even like the comments I just made could get me into trouble. However, if you go to other countries, like if you ask the top Chinese strategists or political analysts, they just openly acknowledge this point.

Now, of course, you could say, oh, though they're living in China, how could they possibly know? What the main forces are acting in the US political system. But I don't think they're that dumb. I think they actually, you know, have a decent understanding of, of at least moderately good understanding of how our system works and they talk openly about this kind of thing.

So but I think we might've reached Peak pro-Israel influence in the US political system. I mean, only time will tell.

Alf: I think this the kind of outrage that stems from these kinds of discussions really has its origin and an inability to distinguish between the normative and the descriptive, right? Like, whether it's our discussion or Mearsheimer and Waltz book, it's, it's what we're engaging in is descriptive discussion of here's an interest group that has a substantial amount of influence. It's not saying it's like good or bad or whatever, it's just saying This is what's going on, right?

Steve Hsu: Yeah. I mean,

Alf: There are moral issues that come with it, but that's, that's a, they're they're a separate layers here.
Steve Hsu: Yeah. I mean, I think what happened is, so there, there's a descriptive question of is there a very powerful wealthy group of people who are kind of one issue people and really just lobby in favor of like pro-Israel policies you know, foreign aid, military aid, you know, actual military intervention on our part for Israel.

Does that force exist in US policy, in US politics? Who's involved in this? Okay, so, so I think that's a hundred percent descriptive question. So if you were a KGB analyst or a Chinese think tank analyst or a, a, you know, you, you would just look into this 'cause you need to understand the political system of your competitor.

Right? Now the problem is in the US if you're like Mearsheimer and Waltz, I'll just remind you, Mearsheimer was a distinguished, is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, and Waltz is a distinguished professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard. If you touch on this topic then you, one of the main moves that your opposition, that the people who don't like you looking into this will make one of the main moves they'll make is they'll just say, you are antisemitic. Right? And Mearsheimer and Waltz were pretty careful. They, you know, they would write in their book. I think things like, look, we're not accusing people of dual loyalties. You know, this is totally normal for an interest group to arise that has these particular goals. It's just that in this case, this interest group is exceptionally powerful and it influences, you know, US foreign policy in the following way, right? So, so they were very careful the way they wrote, like, I don't believe either of them is antisemitic, et cetera, et cetera. But it's so easy to level that charge against them and then actually just strip them of, you know their reputations in polite society.
And that's kind of an unhealthy situation where you, you can't discuss a perfectly natural, descriptive aspect of the pol the political system in the United States. Right? That, that's kind of the situation that we're in or that we have been in.

Alf: And I think that that's a, a great way to round off what has been an amazing podcast, very in depth, and there's been so much to talk about in so many developments. And thank you so much, Steve, for for coming on to discuss them. And I, I, I doubt it'll be too long before we, we do something similar like this in the future.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. We'll come back again and I, I actually will be surprised if the situation in the Middle East is resolved anytime soon. Yeah. Because the US and Iran really are pretty far apart in the negotiation.

So I, there's, I think there's a very good chance it could spiral out of control. If what Trump just announced a few hours ago takes place and they start trying to stop, like say the Chinese, pay the Iranians to have their ships be able to pass through this straight of war moves and the, and the, and the, and the US boards and forcibly interdicts those ships that could lead to World WarII.

Alf: Hmm.

Steve Hsu: So, you know, I don't think we're out of this problem at all at the moment. We didn't mention what's happening in Lebanon, so you know, now they're mixing it up. The Israelis are mixing it up with Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. Mm-hmm. And the thing that's happened now, I think if you follow closely, is that someone has managed to get these Hezbollah forces some pretty powerful FPV drones of the type that are being used in Ukraine. So I think even some of the ones that have these trailing optical fiber cables that the Russians use are, have been seen in Lebanon, and the, they've been very effective in knocking out tanks. So the whole nature of ground warfare as people who follow Ukraine realize has been transformed by these drones because you, you can have operators far away who are able to knock out tanks, kill individual soldiers, knock out artillery, et cetera.

That had not been seen very much in the Middle East until now. Now it seems like Hezbollah has these kinds of, I mean, these are very inexpensive technology, so, so it does seem like the Israelis are having real problems in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah and I, so I just don't see things cooling off anytime soon.

Alf: Absolutely. And. I think that that'll be much to much to discuss going forward and I look forward to discussing it with you on the show and thanks so much for coming on.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks a lot, Alf.