516. Trump’s Iran Delusion and the Limits of American Power
The Rest Is Politics
Goalhanger
4.5 • 11.5K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.com. |
| 0:13.4 | Trump's gone after Iran. Nobody fully expected him to do so, and now they're creating justifications behind it. But they don't add up. It's a war |
| 0:22.7 | that feels like the risk is taken by the U.S. the costs are born elsewhere. This is decades of |
| 0:28.6 | American arrogance coming to a head in the form of this guy. Why was Iran considered a more |
| 0:36.3 | important threat than Russia? They have spent colossal sums of money, which could have gone to Ukraine, in this Iran infection. |
| 0:44.5 | It's just madness that we're dealing with at the moment. I honestly think this is a form of madness. |
| 1:00.0 | Welcome to the rest of politics with me, Alistair Campbell. |
| 1:02.0 | And me, Rory Stewart. |
| 1:04.3 | And Rory, we're going to talk about Iran inevitably. |
| 1:10.4 | We're going to talk about what's going on, but also talk about this business of betting on the war. |
| 1:12.9 | We'll do that in the second half, alongside a very interesting report that came out last week by former civil servant, Philip Reikroft, about |
| 1:16.7 | trying to clean up the financing of British politics and deal with foreign interference. |
| 1:21.6 | But on Iran, there is so much to get through. So where do you want to start? |
| 1:26.3 | Let me start with the fact that I'm in the US, so I'm |
| 1:28.9 | speaking to you from Yale. And I have found myself in the last week very aware that I'm in a |
| 1:34.8 | completely different United States. I arrived here, of course, sharing many of your views on Trump |
| 1:40.9 | and on Iran, and I continue to have those views, but I've walked into a United |
| 1:45.0 | States in which I'm facing blank incomprehension from a huge range of people. Students, people |
| 1:53.5 | who are Democrats, moderate Republicans, colonels in the military, academics, they are thinking |
| 2:00.2 | in a completely different way, talking |
| 2:01.8 | a totally different language. They don't feel anything like the level of outrage, shock, |
| 2:07.7 | and disgust that we feel about this Iran war. I was here, for example, when there were the |
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