From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Friday, June 20th.

Now Fred Kaplan, Slate's War Stories columnist with his take on the latest in the Israel-Iran War and the role of

the United States. In addition to writing extensively about military conflicts in the Middle East

and elsewhere, Fred has written several books about nuclear weapons, which of course are a central

issue in this conflict, books including the bomb, Presidents, Generals, and the Secret

History of Nuclear War, which was published in 2020. Fred, always good to have you. Welcome

back to WNYC. Thanks. Always. Good to be here. Let's start on President Trump's latest statement

about U.S. involvement that he'll decide whether to go in with Israel

militarily on this within two weeks. I see you have a brand new article on Slate just posted

with the headline, Trump isn't engaging in strategic ambiguity on Iran. It's something, what,

much more vague. So flesh it out for us. Well, yeah, some of his

supporters have said, oh, this is raising strategic ambiguity to an art form, which is just nonsense.

I mean, strategic ambiguity means, you know, being somewhat ambiguous about

what kind of threat that you're going to mount if something bad happens. But the point of it

is to keep your adversary cautious. I mean, for example, our policy toward Taiwan is kind of like this.

I think if you're either the Ayatollah of Iran or if you're an ally or if you're one of the Arab countries in the region,

Trump's back and forths just leave you confused. Just make you think there is no point paying attention to anything this guy says.

You can't trust a word. If he's issuing a threat, maybe it's a bluff. If he seems to be bluffing,

maybe it's a threat. This just basically...

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