I think we all agree there are — and the Iranian regime was one of these — many regimes in the world that we don’t like, that are tyrannical, repressive, even murderous to their own citizens, that pose a threat to our allies. And in an ideal world, we would like to get rid of those regimes, and the reason we don’t do that often and that Donald Trump himself has criticized that, is that when you undergo regime change, what comes after it can be very unpredictable, can be dangerous, can lead to tens of or hundreds of thousands of people in those countries dying in civil wars. We’ve seen this in Libya. We saw this in Iraq. And so I guess the question I’m asking you isn’t whether or not the Iranian regime was bad or whether or not there was an opportunity to strike it. It was bad. There was an opportunity to strike. And they were developing nuclear weapons, which they would use to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. And people have an argument, as you’ve noted, on whether or not we could have handled that diplomatically. We didn’t handle — but that’s key because Trump didn’t believe that we could handle — Well, I understand Trump. I understand Trump didn’t believe. But let’s agree. We disagree on this. The question I’m asking you is regime change poses dangers. But I’m not — but we’re not talking about regime —— They just killed the leader of that country. Yes, OK. What would you — we could call it not regime change. We can call it the — I agree that we decapitated the leader as opposed to change the regime, but we have heavily destabilized that regime. Trump himself has said: “Well, most of the people we had in mind are dead. So we had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.” And then underneath that the people he thought might run it after that. I guess my question is: Are they planning for this? Like, do we have a theory of events, or are we just — we’ve started something and now we’re just reacting and hoping for the best? Well, I’m not in the Situation Room, not in the White House. So it suggests that — so I don’t know. But if you read press reports, which I’m doing, I imagine they are speaking to opposition figures. I don’t know. But there certainly — there absolutely is a huge amount of uncertainty. So I don’t know. I’m not in the inside in the Situation Room, but my sense is people are thinking about it pretty carefully. So your view is that the way to understand this is that within the broad space of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is: Yes, they are skeptical of America getting involved in wars that will lead to the collapse of regimes and being committed to that, but to them, Iran’s nuclear program was such a distinctive threat. Yes, they needed to do this. Yes.
