AEI’s Marc Thiessen and Danielle Pletka devoted their latest What the Hell? podcast to the Trump administration’s efforts to reach a deal with Iran. Danielle Pletka comments on it at her What the Hell? Substack along with transcribed highlights from the interview with podcast guest Elliott Abrams.
Among other things Abrams served in the State Department during all eight years of the Reagan Administration, as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, then as assistant secretary for human rights and humanitarian affairs, and finally as assistant secretary for inter-American affairs. Students of ancient history may recall that he was made to suffer for his service in the Reagan administration. Read all about it in Undue Process.
The WTH? podcast is posted here. I listened to it yesterday and found it well worth my time. I am a long-time admirer of Abrams’s perspicacity and government service. Here he helps translate Tucker Carlson into plain English:
Question: Why are so many on the fringe right claiming that Trump is being “goaded” into striking Iran by neocons?
Elliott Abrams: There aren’t enough neocons to fill a phone booth these days, I think. Well, my speculation is that a big piece of this is plain old anti-Semitism. And what it is basically saying is the President doesn’t want to do this, the Jews are making him do it. It seems to me disgusting and quite dangerous too. There’s no recognition of the arguments. There’s no debate over the arguments. Tucker has on people who will say what he wants them to say. And when you don’t have any argument other than the neocons, and what does neocon mean to somebody like Tucker Carlson, it means Jew warmonger. That’s what he means. And that’s what he’s really saying. As I said, I think it’s pretty disgusting. And it’s also quite an insult of Donald J. Trump that the President isn’t sufficiently intelligent and strong-minded to make up his own mind. He’s going to be led around, not by his hand-picked staff, not by his Secretary of State, his national security advisor, but by the neocon warmongers. Where are they in this administration?
At present, Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. He previously served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the administration of President George W. Bush, where he supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East for the White House, and as Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela in the first administration of President Trump.
