Ezra Klein: This is not the presidency many Americans thought they were voting for. A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. It is not the presidency that Donald Trump and the people around him claimed they would get. "I’m going to be the one that keeps you out of war. I’m going to keep you out of war. We’re not going to have war in the Middle East. We did no wars. I had no wars. They said he will start a war. I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars."

I think what was most surprising to me over the last couple of days was seeing that at least one red line, many assumed Trump and his administration had, no ground troops in Iran, Even that was no longer holding. Trump gave this interview to the New York Post where he said, quote, I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground. Like every president says, there will be no boots on the ground. I don’t say it. I say probably don’t need them. Probably don’t need them.

I am obviously opposed to this war. I think there was not consultation with the American public. I don’t think there was consultation with Congress, obviously not with the UN. I don’t think they are prepared for what they might unleash. But I wanted to try to understand this not from my perspective, but from the perspective of somebody much friendlier to Donald Trump’s foreign policy, somebody who has tried to think about what his doctrine and approach might mean, who even helped craft it in his first term.

Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She served as a deputy national security advisor during Trump’s first term. She led the drafting and publication of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States. And so I wanted to see how she understood Trump’s foreign policy in his second term, the risks he is now taking, the philosophy that can be pulled out of it, and what that might mean for the American people in the world. Nadia Schadlow, welcome to the show.

Nadia Schadlow: Thanks so much, Ezra. Pleasure to be here.

Ezra Klein: In 2018, you described Donald Trump as a conservative realist. What did you mean by that.

Nadia Schadlow: Well, realism essentially means that you look at the world the way it is, not as you wish it to be. And I think Donald Trump is someone who sees the world in a particular way. It’s a world that’s competitive. It’s a world in which power matters. It’s a world in which this, nation states matter, interests matter. So that’s what I meant by the realism part and the conservative part.

I guess, that’s something today in the current national security strategy of 2025, which I’m sure we’ll get into, actually, they use the term flexible realism. So I might actually say that might be more accurate today. You don’t want to do everything everywhere. You will take risks, but essentially you don’t want to. You want to make sure that American interests are American power is preserved and not expended unnecessarily.

Ezra Klein: So how did that in your conception, differ from maybe the Republican leaning schools of thought people are more familiar with which is neoconservatives, right. The George W Bush era and then paleoconservatives or isolationists, which is often how people have at least framed Donald Trump.

Nadia Schadlow: Yeah I mean, I think this article that we’re talking about was in 2018. So it was about a year. It was about a year after I left, a few months after I left the administration. I think at that point. And it liberal internationalism, some people use the term neocons essentially is a more has a more interventionist philosophy, a sense that America can go in and should often try to reshape the world in its image. This is the classic definition that that’s a good thing, and it’s probably more optimistic about a sense that all countries can adopt democracy and maybe democracy that looks like us. We want to promote human rights around the world. We want to promote liberal values around the world. And we are open to interventions around the world to do that.

The more isolationist wing of the Republican Party, usually it’s not. Frankly, it’s not just the Republican Party. I think you also see that in the progressive left to a sense of let’s pull back. We have problems at home. But some people call that group retrenchers. I think the left sometimes adopts that view with the rationale that America is a cause of problems. And by going abroad, by being abroad, we create antibodies and we shouldn’t be Messing around in those places. There’s a little bit of that on the right too, but on the right, I think the retrench or isolationist view is that we have to focus on our problems at home. What happens in the rest of the world really doesn’t matter, and we need to consolidate our power here at home first and grow our economy. And that the two, I think wrongly, are mutually exclusive, right. I think they’re interlinked.

Ezra Klein: So when I hear that definition of conservative realism, and often when I hear definitions of realism, it feels to me a lot can hide in two particular parts of it. One is the way the world is the world as it is. People disagree with how the world really is. So when you say that either for Donald Trump, how do you think he really understands the world to be. And then, of course, our interests, there’s the I think you would often hear the term America first. So what are our interests. How do you think about those two sides of Trump’s foreign policy?

Nadia Schadlow: Right, so I think that you’re right. The assumptions are different. So for instance, when Trump came into office in 2017, he was focused, I think, on three kind of broad themes one, this idea that America was in decline and had been in decline for some time. And he was going to fix that. He was going to help to renew it. And as part of that, he was going to do some significant reordering of institutions.

So for President Trump first term, and I think continuing, he saw the roots of that decline in several areas, decline due to the effects of globalization and the deindustrialization of the United States, declined due to trade imbalances that harm the United States, and had been harming the United States for quite some time. Decline due to a lack of pride in what America stood for and what America was, decline due to other countries taking advantage of our security guarantees. I’m giving you examples of the reasons now.

On renewal. The way that President Trump saw beginning that renewal was addressing those trade imbalances, making sure that allies and partners did more for their share of security burdens, reinvigorating a sense of pride in America, putting that first and foremost, I mean, there are a list of policy issues. And then third, on reordering, he was very comfortable in not beginning with the existing set of institutions. He came from a world in which said, well, why do we need these institutions? What have they done? What are they doing for us and what have they done overall. What outcomes have they achieved? I still think we’re seeing this today. In many ways. We’re seeing it as playing out in what’s happening in Iran. But I’ll leave it there.

Ezra Klein: Well, let me see how this fits into it. I think the impression many people have had from things Donald Trump has said has been that, he feels that past governments have been acting as the world’s policeman. He has been within that extremely critical of regime change and regime change wars. "We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change, wars around the globe, senseless wars." He’s talked about their stupidity. He’s talked about their wastefulness. "We’ve spent $8 trillion in the Middle East, and we’re not fixing our roads in this country."

And one thing that many people said about his first term was that there was a restraint to him, he himself bragged that he was one of the first presidents in a very long time to have not started any new wars. We’ve now deposed two heads of state in eight weeks. We’ve captured Nicolás Maduro. We have now we’re bombing Iran. We killed the supreme leader of Iran. How do these things fit together for you?

Nadia Schadlow: Yeah I mean, I think that well, that’s why I think when I start, when we started the conversation, flexible realism, I conceded, was probably the better term today in that the 2025 national security strategy that came out. I mean realistic in that he’s seeing certain dangers in the world, and his White House sees certain dangers in the world for the United States, and they’re going to use flexibility to deal with those dangers.

So I see it as essentially, he saw threats growing to the United States that had grown. He would say, the Biden administration watched these threats grow over time. And now that I’m back in office, I had to do something definitive about them. And he would point to open borders. He would point to the strength of the drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations, which is why he designated many of them transnational terrorist organizations, because that actually gives the government more authority, more legal authorities to do things in different ways. You take it out of just the pure law, law enforcement.

He would say Iran continued to develop its nuclear weapons program. He would point to evidence over the years and most recently, in the past few weeks before the strikes, Iran’s unwillingness to essentially agree to giving up that program. So I think he would say that things got worse in the four years he was out of office. And he had to use different tools and different set of actions to move in a different direction.

Ezra Klein: I guess the thing that has been confusing or disturbing to me is that he was very clear coming in. He said, we’re tired of fighting. I’m the only president in the last 84 years that didn’t start a war. He said, under Trump, we will have no more wars. And something feels like it has changed in him with his relationship to military force. I can’t tell if he thinks he has found a way to use military force in a limited way. That does not open up the kinds of dangers that previous presidents got into of escalation and occupation, although now he’s talked about being more comfortable with boots on the ground in Iran.

Nadia Schadlow: I mean, I think from the outside, there’s always a tendency to say, what is a doctrine to look for. Perfect consistency, to look for an overarching architecture that fits all the time. I don’t think any president can hold to that standard. I mean, we can talk specifically about Iran, but a lot of people would disagree and say that the Iranians, that they’re a combination of factors that led the Israelis and the Americans to think that they had a window of opportunity that they needed to take now. The fundamental goal was to remove Iran as a consistent, as a consistent terrorist power in the Middle East. Now, people won’t agree with that. So I think because people don’t agree with the rationale doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rationale.

The idea for years that Iran had been a threat since 1979. And if not, if you want to use 1983, the killing of the Marines, 241 Marines in Beirut. President Trump and many people in the first Trump administration argued, no, the Iranians weren’t actually abiding by the deal fully. Inspections weren’t allowed. There were many military facilities that did not allow inspections. So these are different viewpoints. As you pointed out, Ezra we’re beginning this conversation with the sense of different assumptions.

Ezra Klein: So you mentioned the National Security Strategy in 2025. And so that document says the purpose of foreign policy is a protection of core national interests. That is the sole focus of this strategy. So to you, what are America’s core national interests when it comes to Iran?

Nadia Schadlow: I’d like to start by talking about the core national interests overall. I think those interests are actually kind of unchanging. It’s in the interpretation of how you get to those interests. So obviously, for President Trump, a key part of protecting the homeland was shut down the border, right. That was key to him build a missile defense system. And also in terms of preserving peace through strength, strong military, but also deterrence and part of deterrence. And I think part of what President Trump is doing now in his actions, or at least the effect of them, will be a seriously strengthened deterrent posture for the United States. No one is going to think that we’re not going to act when we say we’re going to act. I think he saw it as his mission to restore red lines that had not been respected. He didn’t want to be seen years later as criticized in the way that Obama was criticized for not backing the red line when Syria used chemical weapons against its own people.

Ezra Klein: The fear many people have, the fear I have is that when you engage in this kind of bombing campaign, when you destroy the existing government, that what can come after it is very unpredictable. And it is outside America’s national interest to have responsibility for an Iran that has descended into Civil War on Iran that might have spaces where terrorist groups are now being formed, and an Iran that has created a refugee crisis throughout the Middle East. And it isn’t clear to me how much planning they’ve done for that. It isn’t clear to me that they have prepared the American people for an extended commitment to that.

Ezra Klein: So let’s get this actually gets to an argument you’ve made recently that I think is important for thinking about here. You wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs called "The Globalist Delusion." Tell me about the argument of that.

Nadia Schadlow: Sure the argument there was that there are two competing ways of looking at the world and how to approach problems in the world. One is a more traditional globalist approach to those problem sets. So essentially that means there are global problems that unfold all around the world, and we need global solutions. But there’s another way of looking at the world which might acknowledge that there are problems, but the best way to approach them is not with a global mindset, but with a mindset that puts the state first. It’s clearly, I think, the proclivity of the Trump administration, both Trump one and Trump two, to put the state first as the key operating force in the world. In the 2025 national security strategy, they stated pretty clearly, clearly the nation state is the primary source of power in the world and of action in the world.

Ezra Klein: You get bureaucracy, you get I mean, this is a long time critique of the United Nations. It’s a critique you’re making in the article. Why do you say that’s not in America’s interest?

Nadia Schadlow: I’m not saying it’s not in America’s interest. I’m saying that there are costs to just doing performative discussions. And essentially, I think Trump is much more willing to say, much more willing to call out inaction, consistently doing the same things and to focus more on outcomes. I mean, I think Trump is just willing to call out many hypocrisies and just ask, well, can’t we do better here. And I think in many ways he doesn’t see these institutions as necessary to solving problems.

Trump’s starting point is what’s the best way to solve this problem. Maybe it’s two people at the table. Maybe it’s three people, but it’s probably not 30. And I think my article really tries to go through and show how even in terms of the outcomes that global institutions want, whether it’s eradication of poverty, food security, climate change, they haven’t worked.

Ezra Klein: The upside of some process. I mean, this is why we have deliberative institutions like Congress is that they do force you to deliberate. They would force you to actually build support. They would force you to question your assumptions. Trump made a call here. He’s making decisions to go very fast before he’s built support among the American people or Congress. He’s willing to take risk, and he’s basically elevating a willingness to take risk over process.

Nadia Schadlow: I believe the president can make a case directly to the American people. And Congress’s role is the power of the purse. So the case for Congress is once we have gone to war, if they don’t like it, they can remove the money. US presidents have done it hundreds, at least dozens and dozens and dozens of times without a declaration of war. I think Trump made the choice he did because he didn’t want to give up that operational security. The whole point of the strike was to go in before the Iranians knew what was going to happen.

Ezra Klein: I will quote the Constitution. "The Congress shall have power to declare war." Going to war in Iran is not a small thing, and I don’t think we just did a little strike here. This is America decapitating a foreign regime and possibly taking responsibility for what comes next. I wonder about its wisdom.

Nadia Schadlow: Traditionally that deliberation, the nuts and bolts of deliberation, happens at the White House and the situation room. But if you flip it and say what is the downside to a nuclear Iran. What is the downside to the continuing strength of drug cartels? He’s willing to take risks, to set conditions. In addition, he is de facto hugely increasing deterrence, in terms of putting what people call the axis of aggressors on their heels.

Ezra Klein: If you were in the situation room around the NSC as you’ve been in the past, what would you worry about?

Nadia Schadlow: Well, I think there’s always uncertainty in war. I personally would worry more about the post-war planning and thinking about it I wrote a book about that, about called "War and the Art of Governance," which looked at about 15 case studies of America’s military interventions and how we always had to deal with problems of political instability and stabilization or not. The army never wanted to. I think Trump’s view is that he has figured out a way to do this without boots on the ground, certainly did that in Venezuela. I would be very, very surprised if he changed his mind about that.

Ezra Klein: But the question is, can we shape the next government of Iran without boots on the ground? Many of us are worried about a scenario like what happened with the Kurds in 1991, where America exhorted them to rise up and he slaughtered them.

Nadia Schadlow: I think there are a lot of things we can do: providing Starlink providing the ability to communicate, providing economic resources as needed. There’s a chance now that with a significantly weakened regime, there could be a different outcome. It’s unfortunate no one wants to see prolonged chaos, but it’s also not guaranteed.

Ezra Klein: If the old order is dying, what is being born? Are we not just moving into the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must?

Nadia Schadlow: I think we’re moving into a period which recognizes that much of the old order was quite limited in what it could accomplish. You have to begin at the state level. I’m not against building coalitions. But you build coalitions with minded allies and partners. We’re moving from a period that doesn’t default to a global approach.

The UN should exist as a forum for discussion, for information sharing. But what was really key to preserving peace in Europe was NATO. We should be supporting more of these regionally focused bodies and alliances where you’re actually you have some skin in the game. What makes America strong is our republic. Freedom, liberty, our Constitution. Americans are generous, but combined with that, certain capabilities to ensure that we can protect that greatness over time.

Ezra Klein: Then always our final question what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

Nadia Schadlow:

1. Robert Zoellick called "America in the World", a great book about America’s diplomatic history.
2. "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando de Soto, speaks about the importance of private property ownership and some of the foundations of what makes capitalism work.
3. The Reagan biography by Will Inboden, because Trump invokes Reagan a lot. "Peace through strength".
4. "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver.

Ezra Klein: Nadia Schadlow, Thank you very much.

Nadia Schadlow: Thank you Ezra.