Episode 94: America's war, not Israel's

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2026

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As missile sirens wail over Jerusalem and families crowd into bomb shelters on the eve of Purim, this episode steps back from the noise and the slogans to ask a harder question: What war are we actually watching? In a moment when pundits argue over Israel, regime change, and partisan loyalties, I lay out a different frame -- two chessboards, one regional and one global -- and argue that what looks like another Middle Eastern conflagration is in fact a pivotal move in a far larger US–China confrontation. If we misunderstand that, we will misunderstand everything that follows: America’s resolve, Iran’s desperation, and the shape of the world that may emerge from this fire.

This episode was sponsored by Greg Manson and dedicated to the IDF soldiers who have fallen since October 7, and to the roughly 380 Canadian servicemen who died on June 6, 1944, at Juno Beach during D-Day. We, the living, owe deep gratitude to those willing to sacrifice to preserve Western values.

If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.

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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everybody. Welcome to a special, quick episode of Ask Haviv Anything about the war.
0:12.0	It is Monday, March 2nd as we record, the eve of the holiday of Purim. We ourselves, our family, has been hunkering down in the bomb shelter dozens of times already as missile sirens wail.
0:24.5	We've heard the booms in the sky as they are intercepted over the air over Jerusalem or probably some of them as far as Jordanian airspace.
0:32.2	And they're such loud explosions that we hear them many kilometers away.
0:37.4	Some Israelis have died. So it's been a trying
0:41.3	time. The kids are out of school. Everything is shut down. And nevertheless, we wanted to get out
0:47.1	to you this explanation. There's so much intense debate about this war. In Europe, this conversation about international
0:55.2	law and the destabilizing of the global oil markets. In China, this is the number one topic
1:00.9	of discussion in many places, in Russia, in Brazil, in Canada, all across the world. And what's
1:06.6	happening now in the United States is that this has been taken up as a great cause that is
1:13.2	basically the schism in the conservative movement right now, is Trump fighting a war,
1:18.2	dragging America into a war in the Middle East for regime change for Israel?
1:24.3	Obviously, the anti-Israel forces and progressives and Democrats generally are much, much more
1:28.4	skeptical, as is natural for people skeptical of a war fought by a president on the other side
1:33.6	of the aisle, but also a lot of the anti-Israel stuff comes into it.
1:37.6	And so there's so much debate.
1:39.6	And I think that that debate hides a lot of confusion.
1:43.2	We talk about it a lot, and we understand it very little.
1:46.2	I want to lay out what I think is being missed by the debate, by all these many different
1:50.4	discourses all over the world, whether it's Europe or the United States or the Latin America
1:55.5	or the Middle East, in fact, because I don't think this is a well-understood war. And I think that if you don't understand the fundamental thing that I'm going to try and convince you of, you won't understand the future, you won't be able to predict what's going to happen, you won't know whether America has resilience and sticituativeness in this confrontation or whether Iran does. What do the Iranians think they're doing, bombing a Saudi
2:17.7	oil refinery? How does that end well for them? What does Trump think he's doing? He gave a speech in
	...

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