Eli Lake and Andrew Sullivan Debate the Iran War

Breaking History

The Free Press

History

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2026

⏱️ 130 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week I joined The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan, who has generously agreed to let us share the conversation here. Andrew and I go way back, and few people are as willing as he is to really go toe-to-toe over our disagreements—especially on Israel and America’s role in the world. In our discussion, we cover a broad range of history and politics: from the Iran-Contra affair to the Oslo Accords, and the Second Intifada to Iraq, Iran, Hamas, and the current war in Gaza—along with my bar mitzvah speech about nuclear proliferation and early Zionist influences. Of course we bring it to the present day, debating the political, strategic, and moral stakes shaping Washington’s arguments about the war in Iran today. Take a listen, and you can find Andrew’s Substack here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back, listeners. This is Eli, and I am here to tell you that this is a special programming as we prepare our next big series for breaking history.
0:10.0	What you're about to hear is a conversation slash debate with my old friend Andrew Sullivan.
0:15.0	He needs no introduction. He is one of the great writers of our era, and Andrew and I have a pretty deep disagreement
0:23.6	about the current Iran War.
0:26.6	So this is an opportunity to hear me put through my paces, so to speak, as I jab and parry
0:32.6	with Andrew Sullivan, who's very good at this kind of thing.
0:36.6	And we will see you soon enough as we prepare more bonus content and work on the next season of Breaking History. So enjoy.
0:47.7	Hi there, everyone. Welcome to another discast. This one coming to you in the, well, who knows? I don't know where we are in
0:56.7	this war. I think we are 12 days in. We're speaking on Wednesday, maybe 11 or 12, something like that.
1:03.9	Yeah. Be two weeks by the time you're hearing this. And so some of the things that we're going to
1:08.2	talk about today may be moot by the time you hear this because things happen fast.
1:13.5	But with any luck, we're not going to be talking about the specific nitty gritty of what might happen the next couple of days.
1:19.3	And more about how we got here, what this tells us about where we are, what the future is, etc., etc.
1:26.8	Thank you for subscribing. If you
1:29.9	haven't subscribed, please do, because if you don't, this conversation is going to peter out
1:35.1	at some point when you most want it not to. At least that is the instructions given.
1:41.6	To Chris Bowdenner, who will edit this with that in mind.
1:44.9	We have some great guests coming up. We have Derek Thompson coming on to talk about abundance.
1:50.3	We have Matt Goodwin, who just ran for Parliament in the UK on the reform ticket,
1:56.0	talking about the political earthquake in the United Kingdom. Jonah Goldberg is coming on.
2:01.7	We're going to talk about conservatism, how we've seen it evolve over the last time over our last couple of decades
2:07.9	and our lifetime. Tom Holland is coming on to talk about the Christian roots of liberalism.
	...

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