David Frum: What went wrong with Trump's Iran war—and why it matters

Welcome to In Conversation with David Frum.I'm your host, Sean Spear, editor -at -large at The Hub.Earlier this week, I put a series of questions to David from you, Hub members, ranging from the ongoing conflict in Iran to recent primary elections here in the United States, and of course, the state of Canada -U .S.trade relations.The next voice you hear is mine, In Conversation with David.

David, thanks as always for joining me.

Thank you, Sean.Good to be back with you.

David, it's been a long time, and I've missed our conversations, but I know you've been busy, including supporting your wife, Danielle, on her book tour.We were thrilled to have her at Hub Dialogues.I encourage people to check out the book and the various interviews that she's done, including some with you, David.

Right.Well, thank you for that.Thank you for your kindness to Danielle.She was on my podcast.We had a rather intense conversation.I actually she showed much better than I did because she's been talking.

We were talking about the loss of our daughter.She has been talking about the subject a lot.And so she's very poised and composed by now, at least in public.I am not so much so.So although I was supposed to be the host, I was the one who actually sort of lost it.We have a show that we recorded with Anderson Cooper that will be released shortly.

And we were on that show together.But thank you for your kindness to her.And thanks to all who have been so generous about Danielle's book and about our family, our family troubles.

Yeah, well, I know it has meant so much to so many people.We've gotten a lot of positive feedback to the interview that I was honored to do with her.And anyway, all this to say, congratulations to Danielle on her success.And welcome back, David.We've had a lot of emails from people who've been keen to hear from you and what has been a pretty eventful six weeks or so since we last spoke.And if you'll permit me, rather than taking up a single topic, I thought I would take up some of the subjects that have played out since our last conversation.

And maybe we ought tostart with the Iran war.Since we last talked about the Trump administration's invasion of Iran, we have a quote unquote, deal.What are we to make of it?How are you thinking about the results of this invasion?And how has it changed the way you thought about it from the beginning?

Well, when this current round of fighting began on February 28th, and we'll all remember that the Trump administration struck Iran in conjunction with Israel last summer.

Yes.

In an operation that looked quite successful at the time, but that Trump has been himself leading the disparagement of and saying it didn't work, it didn't get the Iranian nuclear program.When he struck on February 28th, my initial response, which I put into writing, was to I have no confidence in this team and their management in any kind of way.The idea that Trump would lead the United States into a major war with no approval by Congress, no effort to build public opinion, no effort to make any kind of bipartisan coalition, gambling everything on support, on success so quick, so easy, so fast, nothing would go wrong.And there's no reason to require it.That was a bad approach.Nevertheless, um denuclearizing iran and and perhaps even liberating the long -suffering iranian people those are important goals if it goes well i hope it will go well i wrote then um but i'm really worried that this gang of bozos will mess things up and of course this gang of bozos mess things up um the war was hard they had no support in public opinion and the most obvious iranian counter move a counter move that has been war gamed since at least 1980, America's been thinking about this problem since at least the hostage taking by the Iranian regime in 1979, 1980, is closing the Strait of Hormuz.

There must be entire rooms in the Pentagonfilled with war plans, what if?But no one seems to have activated any of those plans or had a serious thought about what to do with the single most obvious and predictable thing the Iranians would do.And instead, Iran waged economic warfare against the United States.And because Trump had no mandate for this war of any kind, not in Congress, not in the public, Trump pretty rapidly collapsed in the face of Iranian economic pressure.And what we are heading toward is an agreement that is However, that is a real failure for the United States.

There's also increasing indications, alarms, alerts that the war was not an operational success either.The United States seems to have suffered much heavier casualties, much more damage, and done less damage in return than was at first thought.And it looks like that there may have been a military failure as well as the strategic failure of ending the war on terms that are worse for the United States and the West than the terms that prevailed on February the 28th.

doubters of the administration took some solace in the fact that they were working with the Israelis who over the past couple of years have proven themselves once again to have extraordinary intelligence capability of military capability, etc.But it seems to me one of the biggest failures or unanticipated failures of this conflict has been that Iranians themselves didn't emerge as a counterweight to the Iranian regime.That in other words, there wasn't the kind of bottom -up movement that people anticipated would run in parallel with the airstrikes.Talk a bit about that.Why don't you think that came to pass?And to what extent has that contributed to the underwhelming and possibly failed results?

Yeah, I think that's a little tough on the Iranian people.The Iranian people did rise up in January.of 2026.Trump promised them in writing that help would be on the way.You know, I know most Americans know that Trump's word is worthless, but the Iranian people did not know that.Or anyway, they had to believe otherwise.

He's the only American president they had to help them.But because Trump had moved so many assets away from the Persian Gulf to his adventure in Venezuela, which was aimed not at liberating the Venezuelan people either, those assets weren't in place at the time that the Iranian people rose up.And so when he struck months, weeks later, They'd suffered 40 ,000 maybe civilian deaths, imprisonment, torture.The rebellion was broken by the time Trump started.That's one of the things that went wrong.There was another direction in which we were going to go.

I too, like you, put a great deal of hope in the superior wisdom of the Israeli operation.But the Israelis had one big idea, which was using the Iranian Kurds as allies.And not the Iraqi Kurds, the Iranian Kurds.And here we get into a sensitive matter, difficult to speak of, where we have to not let our suppositions overrun what is known.Trump has taken a lot of personal benefits from actors with an interest in this conflict.He took his family company and Steve Whitkoff's company, took a half billion dollar investment from a company in the United Arab Emirates, closely tied to the United Arab Emirates' ruling family.

He took that plane from Qatar.And he's appointed an ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barak, who has a lot of important economic interest in the area and who has a major sway over Donald Trump's judgments.There are a lot of players here had veto power driven not by any public interest, but by their private connections to Trump.And the Iranian Kurdish operation in particular ran afoul of Turkish sensibilities.And again, it's very murky how a Turkish veto was operated.whether it was operated, what role that played.

But a lot of the Israeli plan for acting inside Iran depended on elements that were not allowed to, that were not present.And it's not the Iranian people, it's this military operation of the Iranian Kurds.And again, when this operation is studied by the historians, the two questions I will want to see the answer to are one, how well did the American military do?In my sense, it's not as well as we would wish.And second, to what extent were these private influences on Trump's own wealth and that of his family and that of his friends, to what extent did they play a role in American decision -making?

Fascinating.Let's transition to another subject of American decision making.And that is the announcement over the weekend that the Trump administration intends to, doesn't intend to renew the Kuzma, the USMCA or the, the successor to NAFTA.This is a subject we've talked a lot about over the past several months.I've been struck, David, how little reaction there has been to the administration's announcement.It seems like it was priced into the economy, the market, even Canadian and Mexican and American politics.

Why don't you just reflect on the announcement and what you think it means for the future of continental free trade?

truths that markets have absorbed since 2025 is the presence of a US -Canada free trade agreement does not in any way control the willingness of this administration to engage in arbitrary, punitive actions for any reason or no reason at all.That American trade policy is capricious, personal, vindictive, self -defeating, malicious, and uncontrolled by any agreement.So in that case, I don't know why you'd care whether the agreement is there or not.The big news for Canada was that the.States Supreme Court said that Trump couldn't use these emergency economic powers act to impose arbitrary, capricious, malicious tariffs.He has other bases to try, although I think in time the courts may have to take those powers away too, or say they were never there in the first place.

But I just, I would say when you have a counterparty.who's proven that his word is worthless and his signature means nothing.I don't know why you'd be in a big hurry to get another word and another signature.So in this case, I think Canada and Mexico have no choice but to say, look, the non -renewal of Kuzma doesn't mean that it's canceled.It just means that its provisions roll over.Those provisions are only binding to the extent that Trump that day wants them to be binding.

So it's not really a deal anyway.It's just a series of procedures and protocols.There's no doing business with him.There's really no doing business with him.So you should pay nothing, literally nothing, to get his worthless signature on a piece of paper.And since you'd have to pay something to get his worthless signature on a piece of paper, the only question I have is why is Ambassador Hoekstra still persona grata in Canada, that his interventions in Canadian politics should have had him sent home a long time ago?

I can't believe that he former member of Congress, someone with a pretty worldly background.I can't believe that he repeatedly is baffled as to why Canadians take offense at threats of invasion from their neighbor.It's like some kind of domestic abuser gaslighter.First you beat up the people in the house and then you say, what are you so mad about?So I think just generally, there's no diplomacy to be done until this administration is over.So don't pay anything for the, I mean, you have to continue to do the diplomacy, but don't have much hopes for it and don't pay any price for it because the signature is not worth the paper it's written on or the ink it's written with.

Another area of policy where the administration has beenin the US and elsewhere.Listeners and viewers will know that the administration temporarily precluded Anthropic from releasing a couple of its latest models.There's now talk in recent days about entering into some type of arrangement with open AI whereby the US government would acquire or obtain some equity stake.This increasingly feels to me, David, like a hinge moment where the decisions on AI that I thought were years from now seem in the shorter term, and that the choices the US government makes will have major implications on American technological leadership and the diffusion of AI in its economy.How are you thinking about this issue?

And what are the risks here that the Trump administration gets it wrong?

Look, the risk that they'll get it wrong, it's completely random.Because administration decision -making on this question, like so many others, is driven, I would say, overwhelmingly by corruption.the president's corruption, and those of the people around him.The policy is being auctioned off.There's no strategy.And people don't want to think of the United States as being not even a major Latin American country, but like a banana republic, that policy on crypto, artificial intelligence, Iran, is driven entirely or overwhelmingly by the president's personal financial interests.

But you have to face that fact.So personal financial interests and the president's malice, spleen and spite.Those are the two drivers.To the extent that any strategic thinking is being done by anybody and because they've recruited, the people who are doing the thinking are themselves interested parties.There's been no recruitmentTrump for a long time had an artificial intelligence advisor who was a fully committed investor, who was not working for the United States government, who was an outside person with his own elaborate financial interests, and he got to make many of the most important decisions.

So it's not always Trump's economic interests that are driving this, but it's somebody's.There is no public interest in the Trump administration.There's no thought of it.It's regarded as, it's not even something they pretend to believe in.And so at this hinged moment, the United States has been given a government that is responding to economic interests and malice and spite and resentment.And that, and when people, you know, 20 years from now go back, how was the architecture of the artificial intelligence era laid down?

It was laid down by people who never should have been trusted with government power in the first place.And no one likes to say that because it sounds scary and it also sounds personal.But this industry that has grown up of trying to rationalize Trump's decisions on the basis of something other than what is actually motivating them, it's not helpful, it's misleading, and you shouldn't succumb to it even if it makes you sound less accusatory.

at the risk of turning our conversation more negative, let's end talking a bit about the administration's opponents or prospective opponents.I'm speaking to you from New York City, where, since we last spoke, we had major primaries in which Democratic Socialist candidates associated with Mayor Zohreh Madani defeated longstanding Democratic incumbents, DSA adjacent candidates Politicians have won important primaries in Colorado.We're speaking on July 7th.It's likely in the coming days that DSA -adjacent Senate candidate in Maine, Graham Plattner, will resign.of his personal issues, to say the least.At a moment when the administration and the Republican Party more broadly seems susceptible to serious defeat, it does increasingly seem, David, like the Democrats are aiming to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

One says Democrats, there's a factional fight going on here.And basically they're, you can simplify this as they're the people who are most concerned to stop Donald Trump, and the people who are most concerned to gain control of the Democratic Party.And the second group has been winning many of the most important battles.And their success in, in the house seats.I don't know that Matt makes it makes a macro difference.Um, that is that the, the DSA candidates are winning seats that are overwhelmingly democratic.

Anyway, they're changing the composition.They're doing some reputational damage to the democratic party along the way.I mean, they, when you nominate someone, um, who, volunteered for a group that later was proven to have been an Al -Qaeda front group and who testified on behalf of the blind who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993.That person is probably not going to lose his seat in New Jersey because it's a very safe Democratic seat.But that person is about to become very, very famous in Republican advertising as the face of the Democratic Party.And they have other similar candidates like that who do reputational harm, even if their own seats are not at risk.

But the Democratic path to retaking the Senate is very narrow and very difficult.And some of the must -win states include Maine and Michigan.In both cases, the Democratic primary seems to have chosen very weak candidates who were knowably weak from the beginning and turned down people who could have won.And it's such a strong contrast.The first congressional election after Trumpelection in 2018, where the Democrats chose one steady, sober, middle -of -the -road candidate, often with national security credentials, and one flipped many former Republican seats.

But it's as if the Democratic primary electorate of 2026 is saying, we can do this without Moderates in our own party we can do this certainly without the never trump republicans We're going to do this all with bernie sanders voters and we live in a neighborhood where we think bernie sanders voters Are are the universe and we imagine that that's true elsewhere where it's not true And what we're looking for is people are going to say we reject the american economy We are defined by our hatred of the state of israel We are very we are not at all offended by expressions of outright antisemitism.We are not at all offended by uh expressions of um enthusiasm for Hamas's attack on October 7th delivered the very day after.None of those things bother us, and we don't believe they're going to bother anybody else.And because we live in a very narrow section of Brooklyn, we don't know anyone who was bothered.And when this all turns into a loss in the Senate, again, I think the House is probably safe.The price is going to be very, very high.

One of the questions I ask for Democrats is, you have spent the past 15 years marveling at the way that first the Tea Party, then the Trump people took over the Republican Party.But I have to say from the perspective of 2026, when you think back to the election of 2016, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio back then put up much more of a fight against Donald Trump than Chuck Schumer and people around him put up against Graham Plattner and the other DSA candidates who again, who are putting at risk other Senate seats.So if you are going to be contemptuous or critical of the weakness of Republicans, and you should be, turn the mirror in the other direction and look at yourself and say, what are you doing to stop the Democratic Party from going down a path as it did?and less popular than the Tea Party of the Trump movement?

Yeah, you said that some of these candidates aren't bothered by these radical or transgressive ideas or positions.But I think one could argue that it actually defines them.I'm speaking to you from the 13th District in New York, where a longstanding Democratic incumbent was defeated by a DSA insurgent.If you look at their positions on conventional Democratic or even progressive issues, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, defund ICE, et cetera, the two candidates basically lined up.It was on these more radical questions, particularly with respect to the state of Israel, where there was a wedge, a wedge that, at least in the Democratic primary, seemed to advantage the DSA candidates.So talk a bit about, if their intention is to take over the Democratic Party, where do they want to take it, David?

Well, you just said something very important.They are excited by transgressive personalities.So if you're excited by a transgressive personality, you don't have a lot of standing to be shocked when you discover that the transgressive personality has committed transgressions.If I've got a candidate, as in Graham Plattner, I know he has a drinking problem.I know he's had very difficult relationships with women.And I find a Reddit post in which he said, women need to take responsibility for not being raped.

If they're raped, it's their own fault.I'm going to think that's not just an edgy personal state.That may be a clue, an important clue to things he's done in his own life.I'm not accused.Again, these are all allegations.Nothing's proven.

But if you've written that the fact that he wrote those dismissive words about women victims of sexual violence, If an alarm does not go on your head that I am calling every, every woman he has ever been alone with and finding out from her, was there any, did anything happen to you?And I'm not, we're not proceeding with this nomination until you have an absolute clean bill of hazards.and proven that this is just a pure piece of speculative fancy and in no way connected to your own history.But they thought it was exciting.And the people promoted Platner and are promoting the other bad choices.are caught up in this romance of, they're so far away from the life experiences of most Americans.

They're so fantastically wealthy and privileged themselves, children of Hollywood and trust funds.They have these kind of gangster fantasies of what they think that people different from them are really like and don't understand.People who are poorer than you also value decency.People who are poorer than you also value respect for women.People poorer than you don't think it's a good idea to be drunk all the time.uh, you're all you're revealing in your your fantasy about what people poorer than you are like is your disrespect for people poorer than you and if you don't respect people you shouldn't be in politics and one of the um, the secrets to the obama campaign of 2000.

How did Obama work?Barack Hussein Obama, first black president, he seems improbable law professor, um, you know, uh, from a big city, which we're American kind of presidential cancer usually come from that.Anyone who interacted with him in those campaign years was struck by his respect for the people he talked to.He listened to them.He didn't judge them.He, um, he, he let them judge him.

That's, the first job requirement of a politician to show respect to the people who are going to be your employers.And I think one of the things that defines the DSA world is they have this performative approach, they have this fantasy about what people are like that makes them very disrespectful of the people who are their employers.

your your thoughts uh since we last spoke the the last question is is moderator prerogative.It's my own.And it connects the dots between the first half of our conversation and just what you set out.And that is, I've been struck, David, about the challenge of building what you might characterize as a normie coalition at the precise moment that the two major parties are speaking to smaller and smaller shares of America.How do you go about doing that today?

I think maybe what we need to do is to begin to conceptualize politics as less a struggle between left and right, politics in the 21st century, and more a struggle between the top of the horseshoe and the bottom of the horseshoe.You know this phrase of horseshoe politics where the extremes meet and are close in the center?So I got a series, if someone's looking for national power, I've got a series of questions for them.Do you think that modern pharmaceutical products have extended life and safety for most people?Do you think Ukraine is right in its struggle for independence?Do you support the Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and you condemn terrorist violence against Israel?

Do you think?Our economic system offer is basically fair and offers people a chance to get ahead and do you think that people have earned success?Are acting in pro -social or anti -social just the basic things and I think this you need to find that this slice this not between down the middle between left and right but top and bottom sort of from putting Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton in one party and all the Trump cranks and DSA socialists in another party, because they agree.I mean, what is striking about so many of the people who are anti -Israel in New York is how they're also anti -Ukraine.And whatever rationalization they give for their anti -Israel actions, even if you took that seriously for very long, which I tend not to do, but if you did, it should put them on the side of the Ukrainians, and it doesn't.Why not?

And they share many of the same crazy attitudes toward modern medicine and modern medical technology and modern science, again, as the Trump crackpots.So I think we need to conceptualize it.And maybe the 250th anniversary of American independence is a good way to do it.The modern world at least in the Western democracies, is a very successful place.And it's not perfect.It has things that need to be reformed.

But there's much more to defend than there is to change.And the people who understand what has been achieved and what a tremendous accomplishment it is, and how good life is for most people in most places in the democratic world.they need to begin to recognize their commonalities and understand that all of this is under attack from very extreme views.And whatever the differences of emphasis and choice and policy that you would find within the top part of the horseshoe, when the bottom part of the horseshoe is so effectively cooperating against the top, the top needs to stick together and defend itself against the bottom.

David, we've missed you for some time precisely because of that type of insight and wisdom.Thanks for joining me.Bye bye.