The Iran War Is Spiraling Out of Trump’s Control
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Steve Hayes is CEO and editor of The Dispatch, based in Annapolis, Maryland. Prior to co-founding the company in 2019, he worked at The Weekly Standard for 18 years, covering Washington, politics, and national security. Steve is the author of two New York Times bestsellers. He also worked as a contributor at CNN and Fox News, and currently serves as a political analyst at NBC News. When Steve is not focused on The Dispatch, he’s probably traveling with his family, grilling, or riding his mountain bike.
Mike Nelson is a retired Army Special Forces officer and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project. He is formerly of the Institute for the Study of War and the National Security Institute. You can find him on x.com at @mikenelson586.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things.
David French is a columnist for the New York Times. He’s a former senior editor of The Dispatch. He’s the author most recently of Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.
The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, new concerns about the war with Iran. We'll discuss the risk of the war's expansion with Russia and China stepping up support for Iran, and America's regional allies taking more independent offensive action. What is the possibility of unintentional escalation and a broadening war spinning out of control? And then not worth your time, Donald Trump's forty-third golf championship and other peak athletic performance from places you might least expect to see it. I'm joined today by The Dispatch's editor-in-chief, Jonah Goldberg, and Dispatch contributors, retired Army Special Forces Officer Mike Nelson, and The New York Times' David French. Let's dive right in.
[upbeat music] Russia is providing electronic intelligence to Iran that is likely helping it pinpoint American forces in aerial attacks or jam American-made weapons, according to a US and a European official with knowledge of the matter. NBC News, July thirty-first. Iran is expected to receive within weeks a first shipment of up to four hundred Chinese-made shoulder-fired air defense missile launchers. Three sources familiar with the deal told Reuters, as it rebuilds its defenses amid war with the United States. Reuters, July twenty-eighth. Bahrain and Kuwait secretly sent jets to attack sites inside Iran, their first such direct retaliation against Tehran, and an indication of the difficult position Arab states find themselves in as the war grinds on. People familiar with the matter said. Wall Street Journal, July twenty-fourth. While Saudi Arabia pushed US President Donald Trump not to carry out a major attack on Iran over the weekend, the United Arab Emirates lobbied him to take, quote, "more decisive action", the Wall Street Journal reported, citing senior Gulf officials familiar with the discussion. The UAE has carried out its own strikes against Iran and hosted Israeli air defense troops on its soil to help counter Iranian attacks. Times of Israel, August second. And finally, the stop-start fighting between the United States and Iran appears to have entered a new phase as Saudi Arabia has publicly joined military escalations against Tehran-backed proxies. At the same time, an already untenable diplomatic effort to end the war has faltered once again as mistrust deepens between the longtime adversaries. David, I wanna start with you because it appears that you and I were thinking along the same lines-
-over the past week. As I mentioned in the introduction, I think the conversation about the conflict in Iran now in its sixth month has usually included basically two binary possibilities. One, that the United States would choose to escalate to win, and two, that this kind of stalemate, unsatisfying ending could bog down with the United States and its allies in the Gulf. The option that I think has been under-discussed, but which you wrote about this weekend in a terrific column for The New York Times, is the possibility that the war could expand.
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