Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. On Monday, President Trump claimed that a former US president praised his aggressive actions regarding the conflict in Iran. Listen.

President Donald Trump: I spoke to one of the former presidents who I actually like. I actually speak to some. I do like some people. Be shocking. And he said, I wish I did what you did.

Brian Lehrer: There aren't that many living former presidents, and guess what? All have denied having such a conversation. Our next guest argues that the United States could have, long ago, toppled the Islamic Republic of Iran with its military might alone. In fact, the US has been involved in a standoff with Iran that, by one measure, has outlasted the Cold War in terms of number of years, from 1979 to the present. Our guest writes, "Whatever has held back the dogs of war, it hasn't been a lack of American ability. The current war with Iran proves," he says, "that with the US dropping $3 billion in bombs and missiles within the first 100 hours, it's time to look at some of the history."

Historian Daniel Immerwahr is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, and author of the book, How to Hide an Empire. His latest piece in The New Yorker doesn't just ask why is the war in Iran happening, but why is it happening now? Professor Immerwahr, welcome to WNYC.

Daniel Immerwahr: Thanks for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: You're interested in that clip of the President citing some unnamed former president supporting this war, and none of them owned up to that. Why?

Daniel Immerwahr: I'd like to imagine it was Obama. No, it's interesting because there is a truth to it, which is that past presidents have regarded Iran as not just a problem, but in some cases, an existential foe. That question, could we not just bomb Iran? That has lingered in the presidential and the national subconscious for decades, although it's never quite spilled over until now.

Brian Lehrer: Your book is How to Hide an Empire, but you argue in your New Yorker article that this is not imperialism. Trump's foreign policy is not imperialism. How do you mean the word, and why do you say this is not that?

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes, so I think it's tempting to see what Trump is doing as imperialism, because this is a strong country lashing out to get its will. In that sense, it bears some resemblance to imperialism, but classically, imperialism seeks empire. It seeks control. It seeks to administer, to govern in some sense. What is so distinctive about Trump is his seeming indifference to that part of it. My sense is that that's not just changing how Trump thinks about follow up, it also is changing about what he thinks is possible. My sense is that the reason that past presidents haven't given in to the temptation to bomb Iran is that they've been worried about its effect on the chessboard. Trump doesn't seem to have that worry, and he seems to have entered this war almost blithely.

Brian Lehrer: If he's not interested in imperialism, the way you just described it, then why is he launching this war here, doing what he's doing in Venezuela, talking about Cuba is next, going after, after Greenland? That'll sound like imperialism to a lot of people.

Daniel Immerwahr: I think the part that sounds like imperialism, and I would fully endorse this, is Trump is acting like a bully. This is a form of power exertion, so that's absolutely true. What is interesting to me is that it doesn't seem to be-- Past presidents have invaded other countries, invaded Iraq, for example, with visions of transformation, with visions of imposing a US order on a region or on the globe. That's the part that Trump has both explicitly disavowed. I'm not interested in doing that kind of thing, he's said, in so many ways. That seems to be informing his actions. He has a kind of shrugging indifference to overseas outcomes even as he delights in throwing power around.

Brian Lehrer: One could argue, though, I think, that Trump is looking for a US-based world order. It's just not the democratic order that past presidents have said they were after. It may not have been that simple in their cases either, but that's at least what they would say, right? The Iraq War, according to George Bush, was, what, Operation Iraqi Freedom. This war is just Operation Epic Fury. It's being hung right out there on Trump and, I guess, Pete Hegseth's notion of anger and vengeance guiding their foreign policy.

There is a Trump coalition, even as he's firing on NATO allies and things like that. There's the arguably anti-democratic, strongman coalition that Trump is putting together with Putin, with Orbán in Hungary, one could argue with Modi in India to some degree, with Bukele in El Salvador. You could go on from there. Maybe it's imperialism, but a different kind.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes, I'm open to that. The thing about Trump, though, is he seems to be not just allergic to longstanding allies of the United States, but the way he often talks about alliances is they are short-term situationships; they benefit in a moment and then they can be discarded the next. A lot of that legitimation of US power, we're pursuing freedom, transformation, that kind of thing; a lot of that was about a search for allies, and a search for a story that you could tell about the United States that some other country might be able to sign on to.

Trump is shocking in how little interest he seems to have in legitimation, and how quickly he will go from- in the Venezuela action, from saying, well, we're doing this for liberty of Venezuelans. Then in the next sentence, he's just salivating over oil; our oil, he says. All the pretense seems to have dropped.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think-- This is the $64-billion question these days, right? Why do you think he really got involved in the Iran War?

Daniel Immerwahr: It's really hard to tell. There's a lot we don't know. It seems quite obvious that Iran-- Excuse me. It seems quite obvious that Israel has sought some version of this for a while, but Trump is the US president who's been up for it. I think a lot of that has to do with his lack of concern for the downstream consequences.

Because past presidents have gamed this out time and time again—could we? Should we? We seem to have the military to do this—but in the accounts that we have from inside the White House, there's always a discussion. That discussion always hinges around other US interests in the region: we could do this, but that would be bad for Iraq, that would be bad for our allies in the Gulf. There's a whole story about other things that might happen as a result that would be connected to US interests. I think Trump is just so uninterested in a lot of that, that he's willing to lash out on a whim in a way that past presidents have been prevented from doing.

Brian Lehrer: Just not thinking it through is what you're saying, to demonstrate his dominance, like he likes to do in domestic policy?

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes, that seems to be his strategy. When he first became president, there was a National Security Council meeting, and they were talking about this kind of thing, how the shin bone is connected to the knee bone, et cetera. They asked him, we need to know, what is your tolerance for risk in foreign relations? He said, I have an enormous capacity for risk. Risk is good.

That is how he operates. Rather than kind of gaming everything out, he's improvisational. What if we do this thing, especially the thing that you told me I wasn't supposed to do? What if I stiff this contractor? What if I declare that this election was stolen? Let's see what happens. Let's negotiate from that point.

Brian Lehrer: You're a historian, so let's spend some time ticking through some of the history of how we got here, which is what you do in your New Yorker article to a large degree. You write, "Although enmity between Washington and Tehran sprang up in 1979, the seeds were planted in the 1950s." This, as many of our listeners know, was when Iran's then elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, nationalized Iran's oil. You note that in 1952, TIME Magazine named Mosaddegh its Man of the Year, but this went against the interest of more England than the United States?

Daniel Immerwahr: That's right, yes. Yes, so the oil in Iran that was nationalized, all of the profits from that had been flowing to Britain, so the British were very animated about this. Meanwhile, the president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, initially looked at Mosaddegh and said, great. He's a liberal. He's popular. He's favorable to the United States. He wants to sell oil to the United States and not to the Soviet Union. This guy's wonderful.

Then the British managed to convince him that even though Mosaddegh himself was friendly to the United States and not a communist, that he might be unstable, and his attempts to democratize Iran might not work, and then that would destabilize Iran, and then that would let the Soviets get a leg in. All of that kind of larger calculation convinced Eisenhower to greenlight a coup attempt, which was shockingly successful, and so Mosaddegh was ousted and arrested. Then the constitutional monarch, the Shah of Iran, reclaimed a lot of his power and became something more than constitutional and became the dictator of Iran.

Brian Lehrer: Tell us more. How was Eisenhower swayed to intervene in that way if there wasn't a direct US interest? You know the debate that's taking place over the last day since the resignation of Trump's counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, over how much control Israel had over Trump's decision. In this historical case, it's how much control England had over President Eisenhower's decision. I'm curious if you see any parallels. You can weigh in on this, the whole Joe Kent business, if you want, but also in historical context, the Eisenhower one.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes. There's a wonderful book that I'd recommend on US-Iranian relations. It's just called America and Iran by John Ghazvinian. He makes the case that Britain did a lot to lead the United States into the war. The difference is that Britain did a lot by appealing to a larger systematic sense that Eisenhower had. They said, okay, don't think about Mosaddegh particularly. Just think about where Iran fits in this larger cold war that you are committed to fighting, and think about what happens if Mosaddegh falls or something like that. That was enough to get Eisenhower to reorient his thinking because he was thinking about his interests really broadly, rather than just narrowly in the sense of Iran.

Brian Lehrer: Staying with that history, you write, "This was the CIA's breakout performance. The United States had just fought a bloody, expensive and inconclusive war to beat back communism in Korea. Ousting Mosaddegh, by contrast, was a crisp victory for just a few sacks of cash." I guess notably different from this Iran War, that was done in secrecy, right?

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes, that's right. Two things to say. First of all, the CIA just went on a spree after that. We think, during the Cold War, it either tried to oust a government or tilt an election covertly 64 times, more than two-thirds in support of authoritarians. The other thing to say is what you just said, that this was done secretly, and it was explicitly done secretly because Eisenhower acknowledged, we can't be open about this kind of thing. We have a larger attempt to legitimate and win allies to our principles, and if this kind of thing becomes known, we're going to lose all our influence in the region.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. There's a popular meme going around. I wonder if you've seen it. It's a photo of Israel's Iron Dome—that's its air defense system—responding to missiles from Iran. The Israeli missiles are labeled 'American tax dollars,' with the Iran missiles labeled somehow also, 'American tax dollars.' Leaving the Israel part aside for the moment, the idea that American taxpayers funded Iran's military buildup, I think comes from two places: the original Iran nuclear deal that was signed under President Obama, and also the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal. Can you riff on that? There's a lot in there.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes. I would push it back further than that. It was under the Shah of Iran, before the revolution in 1979, that Iran assembled one of the world's largest militaries. All of that was US Military hardware being sold to the Shah. It was basically, oil for arms. Then when Iran had its revolution, it had an awkward position of it had a lot of hardware, but it was all US hardware.

You think of that stuff as, on the ownership model, you own it, you can use it, but you should also think of it as somewhat existing on the subscription model, which is that if something breaks, you need a spare part, you need the person who manufactures that spare part. There's the famous Iran-Contra scandal in the '80s. What that was was the revelation that in order to achieve other things in Lebanon, the United States under Reagan had given Iran the spare parts it needed to keep its military running.

The basic fact is that the United States is the largest arms provider on the planet, and it often finds itself in this weird position where even militaries that it's ostensibly fighting have hardware that is genealogically traced to the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a couple of calls or texts as questions for our guest historian, Daniel Immerwahr, from Northwestern University, also a writer at The New Yorker, and author of the latest piece—maybe you saw it if you read The New Yorker—that asks why the Iran War is happening now, and it's got all this history in it. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

You remind us in your piece that President Bush's actions in the Iraq War were viewed as lawless at the time. How do you think they seem in retrospect, given the Trump administration's actions?

Daniel Immerwahr: What is surprising is when you think back to the lead up in the Iraq War was how much energy and attention went into the appearance of lawfulness, how much care went into process. Critics of the Bush administration, and I'd count myself among them, often point out that the members of the administration lied, but in some ways, to lie is to respect a process. It is to agree that there have to be reasons. There has to be evidence.

The difference is that Trump seems completely uninterested in producing a coherent story about why the United States is attacking Iran, why Iran poses an existential threat. He feels very comfortable just switching his story minute by minute.

Brian Lehrer: On to the Obama administration, which took a different tone. You write, "The needle appeared to move." Of course, Obama negotiated with Iran's Supreme Leader, who just got killed in this war, Khamenei. You wrote, "If Obama was hoping for a Nixon-in-China moment, he'd have to fight the US political establishment." It's funny that this comes up because we're going to be talking about the opera Nixon in China in our next segment, so two Nixon-in-China related segments in a row. Why do you bring that up with respect to Obama and the controversial Iran nuclear deal that Trump scrapped?

Daniel Immerwahr: There was so much entrenched hostility toward Iran and so much political gain to be had from insisting that Iran was an implacable foe and one couldn't negotiate with Iran at all, that when Obama- just feeling like he wanted to do the opposite of what George W. Bush had done with his sort of crusading attempt to remake the Middle East, when Obama sought a cooler strategy, a calmer strategy in the sense of, well, maybe we can just deal with Iran, and we can get them to put some caps on their nuclear development, he met with a lot of political backlash, but not only from Republicans. He met it from Democrats, and he met it from members of his own administration.

Notably, Hillary Clinton, who was then his Secretary of State, went to Congress and said, look, I'm not really expecting that this Iran deal will work. It is just a pretext so that when the talks fall through, we can hit them with crippling sanctions. Which is indeed what happened. The talks initially fell through, and the Obama administration applied really aggressive sanctions to Iran, which Joe Biden described as the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have your own take on whether the Obama nuclear deal with Iran would have prevented it from developing nuclear weapons? Maybe that wasn't even Trump's and a lot of the other opponents' main objection. Maybe it was that it allowed Iran to have the money to afford so many conventional weapons which were being used all over the region.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes, so there is an aggravating aspect to this, which is that one of the pretexts that Trump has given for war with Iran is that this is needed to prevent Iran from imminently developing nuclear weapons. Now that's a little confusing because Trump also said in June that he had obliterated Iran's capacity to develop nuclear weapons. The bottom of all this is that Trump campaigned on tearing up the deal that was seemingly effective in placing a cap on how quickly Iran could get to the point of nuclear viability. It seemed like the deal was working.

One objection that people had, that Netanyahu influentially presented in Congress, was that you couldn't trust Iran's adherence to the deal. Secretly, they must have been advancing their nuclear program. Moreover, to lift any sanctions on Iran would just be to encourage the Islamic Republic- to make things easier for Iran.

Brian Lehrer: Your latest article, this New Yorker article we've been talking about asks, What's Behind Trump's New World Disorder? Looking through the long lens of history, as we've been doing a little short version of here, did you find an answer?

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes. People often say that Trump is capricious, and he does one thing and he does another, and he's just rolling the dice every day. I don't think that's right. I think Trump has a career-long hostility to US hegemony, to the idea that the United States would somehow superintend global affairs. He's been really explicit about this for decades. I think now we're seeing the effects of it as Trump is doing one aspect of global hegemony, which is making war, but shrugging off all of the other aspects of it, which are a sense of responsibility for what follows war.

Brian Lehrer: Listener asks a straightforward question that's certainly coming from the news of the last day and the resignation of Joe Kent. Listener writes, "Do you think Netanyahu manipulated Trump to go to war?"

Daniel Immerwahr: I don't know about manipulation. In some ways, Trump is always kind of constantly being manipulated because he acts on his instincts and other people know that. It is absolutely true that Netanyahu pushed for this, and other presidents have resisted and Trump hasn't. Although, it's also the case that Trump has wanted this for decades. We have Trump on record, since the '80s, talking about how great it would be to invade Iran, and how weak other presidents have been for failing to do that.

Brian Lehrer: Well, then maybe the basic premise of this war, as Pete Hegseth especially has been explaining it, is accurate. That Iran has been out to do as much harm to the United States and to Americans as it could for 47 years, in addition to whatever else Iran does, and that's the main reason to weaken it militarily as much as possible, and Trump says other presidents were too weak or too afraid to do it. I'm finally going to try to do it. That's what they say, right?

Daniel Immerwahr: That is absolutely what they say. It's a very paranoid view of the world. It's the view of the world that any country that is hostile to the United States, that might be building up nuclear capacity-- Iran is clearly seeking to be on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons, understandably, as a form of defense, but the line that you usually hear from the administration is a nuclear Iran is intolerable because it will swiftly mean the nuclear bombardment of the United States and its allies.

That's an unanswered question, but it is certainly the case that the administration has fed on the fear that a militarily capable Iran is just unthinkable and cannot cohabit with the United States on this Earth.

Brian Lehrer: Historian Daniel Immerwahr, contributing writer at The New Yorker, where he has that new piece called What's Behind Trump's New World Disorder? He's the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, and author of the book, How to Hide an Empire. Thanks so much for coming on today.

Daniel Immerwahr: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

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