The Great Lie of War
About this episode
Days after the U.S. and Israel launched a massive assault on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ezra Klein asks former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes why Trump waged this war — and why his predecessors didn't dare to. Klein calls the doctrine 'head-on-a-pike foreign policy': America reaches into weaker states to kill or capture heads of state without regard for international law or congressional debate, indifferent to who replaces them so long as successors fear U.S. power. Rhodes argues Obama-era war games showed bombing could set the nuclear program back only about a year while risking regional war, refugee flows, and civil conflict — and that killing Khamenei changes little given the depth of the IRGC and Basij. They warn that decapitation without an endgame courts a Libya-style implosion, accelerates nuclear proliferation, and erodes the congressional and international-law constraints that once bound American war-making.