I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to the To the Contrary podcast. You don't want we're going to be talking about today over the weekend.

The Atlantics and Applebaum posted, the American bombardment of Iran has been launched without explanation, without Congress, without public support.

Above all, it has been launched without a coherent strategy for the Iranian people without a plan to let them build a legitimate Iranian state.

And as that war has gotten wider and more deadly, we are going to dive into that with the

Atlantics and Applebaum.

And thank you so much for joining me this morning.

Obviously, this is a war of choice.

And I guess the question is, what has Donald Trump chosen and why?

So clearly Donald Trump has chosen to decapitate the Iranian regime because that's already

happened.

It's not clear that he has a goal after that.

It seems to shift and change as time goes on.

The question of why we might need some historical perspective eventually to answer, but there seems

several possible explanations. One is that his allies and business partners in the Gulf states

and his friends in Israel wanted him to do this. Another is that he has seen Iran as an enemy since it first began appearing in the newspapers in the 1970s and has been resentful that America wasn't able to strike Iran before this.

Don't underestimate the degree to which he has these long-term historical resentments that go back

many decades that he's acting out now. Maybe he was convinced that Iran had a nuclear weapon

or might have one, but since there's no evidence of that, it's hard to know how that would

have ranked in his thinking. There's no evidence that Iran, it's hard to know how that would have ranked in his thinking.

There's no evidence that Iran was close to having nuclear weapons or that Iran was close to striking the United States or anybody really right at this exact second.

So there are many conceivable explanations and we'll presumably eventually learn which ones were the most important.

Well, let me think you offer some cynical alternatives. And going back to the fact that he did not prep public opinion for this, he did not consult with Congress. It seemed rather

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