Anne Applebaum: America's War of Choice Is Costing Ukraine Its Shield

Anne Applebaum joins Charlie Sykes to dissect the American bombardment of Iran - a war launched without congressional approval, without public support, and without any coherent endgame. As Trump oscillates between fantasies of Iranian democracy and the Venezuela model, Applebaum lays bare the deeper logic: a president who sees foreign policy exclusively through the lens of his own interests. The conversation turns to what this war costs beyond Iran - Patriot missiles that could have shielded Ukrainian cities from Russian strikes, drone expertise the US never bothered to ask Kyiv about, and European allies told for a year they're on their own, now being scolded for not joining in. From the Greenland trauma that pushed Denmark to prepare for war with its closest ally, to the Orbán-speed media takeover and the government's threat to destroy Anthropic for refusing to strip safeguards from its AI tools - Applebaum maps how the threads of Trump's second term are converging into something unprecedented.

To The Contrary With Charlie Sykes - Anne Applebaum

Charlie Sykes: I'm Charlie Sykes, welcome to the To The Contrary podcast. You know what we're going to be talking about today. Over the weekend, the Atlantic's Anne Applebaum posted, "The American bombardment of Iran has been launched without explanation, without Congress, without public support. Above all, it has been launched without a coherent strategy for the Iranian people and without a plan to let them build a legitimate Iranian state." And as that war has gotten wider and more deadly, we are going to dive into that with the Atlantic's Anne Applebaum. Anne, thank you so much for joining me this morning. Obviously, this is a war of choice. And I guess the question is, what has Donald Trump chosen and why?

Anne Applebaum: So clearly Donald Trump has chosen to decapitate the Iranian regime, because that's already happened. It's not clear that he has a goal after that. It seems to shift and change as time goes on. The question of why, we might need some historical perspective eventually to answer, but there seem several possible explanations. One is that his allies and business partners in the Gulf states and his friends in Israel wanted him to do this. Another is that he has seen Iran as an enemy since it first began appearing in the newspapers in the 1970s and has been resentful that America wasn't able to strike Iran before this. Don't underestimate the degree to which he has these long term historical resentments that go back many decades that he's acting out now. Maybe he was convinced that Iran had a nuclear weapon or might have one, but since there's no evidence of that, it's hard to know how that would have ranked in his thinking. There is no evidence that Iran was close to having nuclear weapons or that Iran was close to striking the United States or anybody really right at this exact second. So there are many conceivable explanations and we will presumably eventually learn which ones were the most important.

Charlie Sykes: Well, let me offer some cynical alternatives, going back to the fact that he did not prep public opinion for this, he did not consult with Congress, it seemed rather sudden. And the rationales are not only not coherent, they're often contradictory. So the more cynical explanation is that for decades, Donald Trump has thought of going to war with Iran as kind of the ultimate wag the dog. He accused Barack Obama over and over and over again of going to war with Iran in order to win elections, in order to distract from something. So in Donald Trump's brain, living back a decade ago, he always thought of this as, this is the card that a president might play to change the subject. And he's had a rather bad political run. Is this a wag the dog? I mean, there are people who think that this is a massive distraction. This is the way that Donald Trump tries to change the subject from a flailing presidency.

Anne Applebaum: Maybe. I think in this strange presidency you have to take all these things into consideration. And above all, you have to understand that Trump sees US foreign policy through the lens of his own interests. Not America's interests, not Iran's interests, nobody else's interests, just his own interests. And so the questions are, does he have business interests? His family has business partners in the Gulf - is that what's most important? Or is it his personal political interests that are most important? Or his psychological interests, as I said - he has these obsessions that he's had for many decades that he's trying to play out now. That was the case with tariffs, for example. It's clearly the case that he wants a relationship with Russia. This is something he's wanted for many, many decades. So some of these things are just in his brain. And how you sort those things out and decide which is the most important, I don't know.

Charlie Sykes: And apparently he's having some trouble sorting that out as well. He gave that interview to the New York Times over the weekend where on the one hand he said - they asked him, well, how does this end? One scenario was that the regime troops simply turn over their guns to the Iranian people and democracy and freedom flourishes. And then he said, well, maybe it'll turn out like Venezuela, which is leaving the regime in place and finding somebody to work with. And as the New York Times reporter said, this is a little bit implausible. First of all, these troops are the ones who have been shooting innocent civilians and protesters. And number two, the Venezuelan model is completely contradictory to the rising up of the people of Iran. So what do you make of that? Is he just sort of throwing spaghetti up against the wall to say that whatever happens is what he planned?

Anne Applebaum: Yeah, that's perfectly plausible. The thing that's strange about this idea that Iranian troops or Iranian paramilitaries should surrender to the people is it's not clear who are the people, to whom would they surrender? And he's implied if they do this, they'll get immunity. From whom would they get immunity? Who would protect them if they did this? Who is the reigning power in Iran who would save them? The US is not there, there are no American troops on the ground. And while there are really important Iranian opposition movements and figures, none of them right now is consolidated into an alternative elite that is ready to take power. So there is a deep contradiction even just in that idea alone. And then of course, as you say, that's completely different from suggesting that actually the regime should stay in place just without its former leadership. And there are big differences between this regime and Venezuela, aside from the obvious ones of geography and complexity. The Iranian regime is a radical revolutionary regime. It is a theocracy which believes that its ultimate worth is decided in the afterworld and that its legitimacy is granted by God. So this is not a regime in which you would easily find people who could do a deal with the Great Satan, the United States, and happily continue on. So the idea that there would be some kind of halfway situation is more difficult to imagine than it would be in other places. And the idea of leaving this regime in place, especially after there have been these terrible massacres, could be a recipe for instability. If a weakened regime is still in charge, then how does it deal with protests in the future? Anyway, you're right, there is profound incoherence and a deep sense that whatever happens he's going to claim that was his idea.

Soft power dismantled

Charlie Sykes: The rationales become more problematic the more you look at them. So one rationale would have been to degrade Iran's nuclear capabilities. But of course Donald Trump told us back in June that he had completely obliterated them. And there's no evidence, they made no attempt, like in the run up to the Iraq war, to even say, this is what our satellite imagery shows. That's number one. They were suggesting that Iran was planning a preemptive attack, but then the Pentagon had a briefing on Sunday night, they said there was no evidence of that. There were these vague inferences, and again Pete Hegseth says we're not going to get into democracy building, at the same time Donald Trump is talking about the Iranian people rising up. But this is something you wrote about that I really want to get into. You talk about no coherent strategy for the Iranian people, and I had forgotten all of the ways in which the Trump 2.0 administration had slashed aid to the soft power efforts to build up an opposition in Iran. You wrote the administration has taken money away from Iranian human rights monitoring groups and defunded media projects. So if we are really at war to help the Iranian people, how do we square that with the fact that this administration has been actively undermining the Iranian people up until five minutes ago?

Anne Applebaum: No, the Iranian people were of no interest to this administration, as you say, until five minutes ago. And yes, there have been cuts, some through USAID, some through other programs, cuts to all kinds of efforts that were being made in Iran to help organize Iranians or help them create a coherent alternative. Maybe the most damaging, and currently the piece of this that's creating almost a kind of an emergency, is the damage that has been done to American foreign broadcasting. There's an organization called the US Agency for Global Media, it's run by Kari Lake right now, whose tenure is not even clear to be legal, but she's de facto in charge.

Charlie Sykes: Former Arizona Senate candidate, MAGA superstar.

Anne Applebaum: Right, former Arizona Senate and Governor candidate, lost both times, a kind of extreme conspiracy theorist who posts repeatedly on X about the stolen 2020 election. And she has almost totally dismantled Voice of America. She fired hundreds of people, wasting tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in doing so, canceling contracts, putting people on administrative leave. She's hassled and made life difficult also for Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, which is another piece of that organization, which had also had a Persian language broadcast into Iran - Radio Farda. And all these organizations spent the last year fighting Kari Lake, trying to stay afloat, worrying about lawsuits, worrying about who was employed and who wasn't employed. There's been massive disruption. Lake has more recently, in a kind of panicked effort, tried to rehire people to work for Persian language VOA. She's now put someone in charge of that who's a very partisan figure, who is clearly not doing objective journalism, is not trying to build credibility, who has a distinct view of the Iranian conflict and debate, and who for example is an opponent of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. This is the son of the late Shah, who has a substantial following both inside and outside Iran, and this person doesn't want the name of the Crown Prince mentioned on the air. So it's become a very eccentric organization. It has very little credibility. It's not an institution through which you could broadcast to Iranians and win a lot of trust or support. And actually I'm told that inside Iran the Saudi-backed broadcaster is much more popular and has more credibility, which is pretty extraordinary when you think about American journalism and Saudi journalism. So she has dismantled whatever apparatus there might have been to send messages or create some kind of even common conversation among Iranians.

Dangers of escalation

Charlie Sykes: Meanwhile, the number of casualties continues to rise, the war is spreading. People in the Pentagon are telling the Washington Post that the mood there is intense and paranoid because they don't know how long this is going to last. Oil prices have peaked. What are the greatest dangers right now? And the reason I'm asking this is, Donald Trump has his own agenda, but when you start a war like this, other people get a vote as well, don't they? Donald Trump likes to feel that he is in absolute control of events. But as you look at what's happening to the markets, look what's happening throughout the Middle East - what are the dangers that we should be keeping our eye on?

Anne Applebaum: There's such a wide range of things that could happen that I am really not going to predict anything. To be clear, I'm not guessing what's going to happen. There are good outcomes - there's a good outcome whereby the Iranians find some kind of stability and some kind of regime that can carry them over and is less oppressive. And there is a bad outcome. Iran is a very divided country. It's ethnically divided and politically divided. You could imagine chaos and civil war in Iran that could spill over into other countries of the region. You could imagine a wider war in which the Gulf States are involved. One of the things that we don't know is how much firepower Iran still has. And also where its various proxies are. Some of them have been badly damaged - Hezbollah and Hamas - by the Israelis over the last months and years. But they may have others. They have been sponsoring terrorism for four decades. We may not know exactly where all those terrorists are and how much ability to do damage they have. And so you have the possibility of a long term conflict paralyzing a really important region - paralyzing the production and shipping of oil, paralyzing travel. The airports in Dubai and Abu Dhabi are very important ways in which people get across from Europe to Asia. So the possibility of paralysis and chaos is there. And the worst case scenario is that it continues for some time, for weeks or for months.

Charlie Sykes: And the ramifications could continue for decades, as we've seen with international terrorism. I'm reminded that the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11, but what is the Department of Homeland Security under Kristi Noem focused on right now? I would like to think that they are now focused on the possibility of various terror threats, but we have shifted massive law enforcement resources and security resources from terrorism, from protecting the homeland, to going after illegal immigrants, haven't we? A lot of these dots need to be connected because there will be consequences for the decisions we've made so far. The Department of Homeland Security is focused on American cities. Are there vulnerabilities that we will discover in the future?

Anne Applebaum: Sure, and the FBI's counterterrorism activities apparently have also been curtailed so that the FBI can also spend time on the president's enemies and on illegal immigrants, whatever that means. So there is absolutely this huge shift in emphasis at all of the institutions that are designed to protect Americans and are designed to think about these precise issues. And that's without even going into what's happened at the State Department. Whole teams of diplomats are effectively unemployed, they're not in touch with anybody, they're not doing anything. The civil servants all across the government have been effectively told, we don't want you, you're the deep state, you don't have a job anymore. And at a moment of emergency, that could begin to matter. And the difficulty is we just don't know how. The exact source of instability or trouble isn't something that we can predict. And that's why we had these institutions there in the first place.

Ukraine and the global picture

Charlie Sykes: I know that we often focus on one thing to the exclusion of the rest, but I'm haunted by the thought that as this is going on, Vladimir Putin continues to rain death on Ukraine, and that many of the resources that are being used in this war of choice could have been used to deter Vladimir Putin, could have been used to deter President Xi. So let's pull the lens back a little bit. How is the rest of the world looking at this? I heard some spin this morning that all of this is about containing China, that this will make China less likely to... Is that the way that the rest of the world is looking at what's going on right now?

Anne Applebaum: No. I don't see how this is containing China. On the contrary, I would think that the chaos could offer China a lot of opportunities either in Taiwan or elsewhere to spread its influence and present itself as the stable and reliable power. So I don't see that at all. Regarding Russia, the quantity and number of just taking Patriot defense missiles, ammunition for Patriot air defense alone, the quantity that have been used in the last few days - this would have been enough to protect the Ukrainian cities from this devastating blow to the electricity system over the last couple of months. The United States has made a choice - we're not protecting Ukraine, we're not helping Ukraine survive the war, and instead we've decided to use the same capacity for this war of choice with an unclear outcome against Iran. And Europeans have seen that, Ukrainians have seen it. There are other ironies abounding. The Gulf States being surprised by Shahed drones, by Iranian drones, and not knowing how to stop them. Lots of Ukrainians have pointed out, well, you could have asked us, we've been stopping those kinds of drones which have been aimed at Ukraine for the last four years, we know how to do it, but nobody sought to ask us. Ukraine now has the most sophisticated anti-drone army in the world. And because the US is somehow ignoring Ukraine or isn't clearly allied with Ukraine or isn't involving Ukraine in its plans and discussions, that enormous capacity has been ignored. There's another irony. I gather that Pete Hegseth has also expressed dismay that European allies aren't supporting the US more actively in this war on Iran. European allies have been told for the last year that they are on their own, that the US isn't going to help them, that Russia is their problem, not America's problem, Europe is a continent that's too far away for Americans to think about. And so they've been told all this for many months, and now somehow they're being asked to support an American war in the Middle East, which from their perspective is also happening on another continent. Why should they take part in it? So it's a moment when these different and conflicting narratives of the Trump administration really clash. And if you're seeing a lack of enthusiasm on the part of America's allies, then why should anybody be surprised by that?

Israel's risky bet

Charlie Sykes: Yeah, there's no coalition of the willing here. The United States is basically going this alone with Israel. And the relations between Israel and the United States have become complicated politically. If you go back just a couple of years ago, American support for Israel was bipartisan, it crossed ideological lines. And it feels like one of the most dramatic shifts in public opinion and world stature has been what Benjamin Netanyahu has done to the image of Israel in the world. This strikes me as high risk for the United States to go it alone with Israel, but also not without risk for Israel being involved in what may turn out to be a very unpopular war. Thoughts?

Anne Applebaum: I heard somebody describe this as Israel's last chance to do a big action with the US before US support for Israel becomes impossible. And I think that's possible. Among both Democrats and Republicans, the people watching not just the fight against Hamas, which many Americans supported and understood, but the wanton destruction in Gaza and the attacks on civilians, this seeming lack of interest in the fate of people in Gaza and what happens to them after, and the very cynical projects - through the Board of Peace or some other institution - to build high-rise luxury resorts in Gaza. All that conversation, I think, has turned off a lot of people and made them ask whether this is really a project that we should get behind. Why is this in America's interest? Why is it good for anybody? And Israel is very much at risk of losing, I think, not only Democrats, but Republicans in the longer term. And this may be the last time it's possible at all. This may be one of the last presidencies where you would have a US president who would cooperate with Israel to this extent.

The forever wars party

Charlie Sykes: Talk to me a little bit about the domestic politics of this, and what this means for people like JD Vance who have been part of that America First isolationist movement. By this time we've beaten the dead horse of how many times Donald Trump said he was the peace president, wanted the Nobel Peace Prize, said that he would never launch wars like this, that that was the kind of thing that Kamala Harris would do. But you do have a substantial portion of that MAGA base which appears to genuinely oppose this kind of foreign adventurism. What does this mean for people like the JD Vances of the world who've been making the case against doing things like this?

Anne Applebaum: This is another aspect of the total incoherence of the policy. Trump himself has been accusing Hillary Clinton and then Kamala Harris of wanting to go to war. Vance has said repeatedly that he's against regime change projects and foreign wars, especially in the Middle East. Other parts of the right have said that clearly. One of the premises upon which Donald Trump was elected was to end forever wars - that was their language, not mine. And the fact that they've just flipped the script in five minutes - maybe you have an explanation for it, but I don't. How you then rebuild a coalition around that, I don't know. The only explanation I have is that none of that was ever really true, and all of this has just been about owning the libs and destroying their enemies, and whatever language they needed to say in order to get votes is what they would say. Or maybe they didn't believe anything. In the case of Trump, that's clear - he's ultimately a nihilist. He doesn't have a deep strategy. He doesn't really have an ideology. He does have these instincts and things that he's liked and disliked for a long time. But others who have strategies and ideologies - maybe those were also less deep than we thought they were. Maybe MAGA isolationism was just a pose to win elections.

Charlie Sykes: It's certainly possible that they have no principles whatsoever, or maybe in the cognitive dissonance they believed everything - they believed that you could be isolationist and still be a saber rattling military power. But this has been a bad week for cognitive dissonance, because a lot of these things are now really, really in conflict. I do believe that, leaving the influencers aside, that was a major part of Trump's success - there are a lot of Americans who really have grown deeply disillusioned with endless wars. But I'm not sure that replacing endless wars with pointless wars is the solution to all of this. And so I am going to be interested to see what happens with public opinion. Now, in the quote that I read from you that you posted over the weekend, you pointed out that they launched this without explanation, without Congress, without public support. This is kind of unusual, isn't it? Normally in the beginning of any war, there's massive enthusiasm. People understand or think they understand what the war was about. And if things get messy, public opinion slides. I'm not seeing any rallying around the flag at all. And this strikes me as a political vulnerability for Donald Trump. But also, isn't it one of the great lessons - didn't Colin Powell talk about this - we never go to war if the public does not understand why and does not support the war. Wasn't that one of the great lessons of the last 70 years?

The policy process is dead

Anne Applebaum: That was certainly what we thought. To me, that was in a way the most extraordinary - that even in the State of the Union speech, Trump didn't really - there was a reference to it, but not a full scale explanation or justification. There was no attempt to build a coalition of allies in either party. Obviously there was no turn to Congress. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama did use American military force, but they did it in the context of constantly explaining why, constantly explaining reasons, looking for people in the Senate to support it, looking for support in the public. And here there was just no attempt whatsoever. And that I think reflects this thing that I began with - Donald Trump sees American foreign policy through the eyes of his own needs. What the American people want, what the Congress wants, what other people want, what American allies want - none of this interests him. This is about his project, his needs, his whims, maybe his money, maybe his political interests, whether it's wag the dog or whether it's business partners in Saudi Arabia, I don't know. But that's his reasoning. And it's the same - this might not mean a lot to people outside of Washington, but one of the things that's disappeared in this administration is what Washingtonians used to call the policy process. Before any decision was taken, there would be deputy undersecretaries and undersecretaries from different departments who would present possible outcomes and say, help the president think it through, here's what the consequences of action X or Y might be. And there would be people at the National Security Agency and there would be State Department and intelligence and the Pentagon would contribute to making a decision like that. And none of that seems to happen anymore. Instead Trump takes decisions based on his own whim or after a conversation with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner or maybe after a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. So there's no policy process, nobody else from the government or from US intelligence is involved. And that makes all of this very strange, because there's also no brakes - there's nobody saying, yes, Mr. President, but have you considered what would happen if you do this. And he doesn't seem to take any other views into account. And there seems to be no one around him who can criticize or second guess anything that he does, which is how monarchies work, right? But it's not how the American presidency has worked, at least not in recent times.

The Greenland trauma

Charlie Sykes: This seems like a good segue to bring up the other thing that I hope people don't forget, which is Greenland. Going from the war in Iran to Greenland, and yet the same process that you just described - and the fallout has been massive from all of that. You've spent time in Europe. The Europeans haven't forgotten about Greenland. That seems like that's going to stick for a while, isn't it?

Anne Applebaum: Right, so I was at the Munich Security Conference and then I spent a week in Copenhagen working on a longer project. And I have to tell you that I don't think Americans understand what Europeans went through in January. At one point in January, the Danes became convinced, both because of things Trump was saying in public and because of other things they were seeing behind the scenes, that a US military invasion of Greenland was possible. And therefore they began to prepare for it. Think about what this means for the Danes. They had to have soldiers who were ready to shoot Americans. They had to have - maybe, okay, now I'm speculating, but maybe anti-aircraft missiles in place at airports in Greenland. There are not that many ways to get to Greenland, so they would have thought of that.

Charlie Sykes: This was real for them.

Anne Applebaum: This was real. It was real. They took it seriously. They had to accept that this was a possibility. There were a number of other European nations who are close to the Danes, including all the other Scandinavians, the Germans and others, who also went through this process of having to calculate - what if the US goes to war with Denmark, what does that do to NATO, what does that do to the economy, how do we prepare for this catastrophe. And so everyone went through the motions of genuinely preparing for this to happen. And then it didn't happen. Trump made a very long speech at Davos in which he mixed up Greenland and Iceland a few times, and he essentially took it off the table. But I don't think the trauma has gone away. The experience of having lived through that, having been prepared to go to war with what they thought was their closest and most important ally, hasn't worn off. And it has all kinds of consequences in economic decision making, in military decision making, in security decision making. All kinds of Europeans are second guessing, hedging, asking what their posture towards the United States should be going forward, what this means about their dependence on US technology, maybe they need to have different technology. There are going to be repercussions from this that will take a really long time to sort out. But above all, it's this sense of hurt and trauma. In Denmark I was asked over and over again, do Americans understand what happened and how hurt we are. And of course, I had to be honest - I don't think Americans do understand. Certainly the Trump administration doesn't understand, but I don't even think ordinary Americans understand what that meant inside a small country like Denmark, which was hugely pro-American, which was a founding member of NATO, which had cooperated with the US in Greenland for many, many decades, including allowing the US to store nuclear weapons in Greenland during the Cold War. Which has huge investments in the US, billions of dollars of investments. Danish companies have a big presence in the United States. And all of this suddenly didn't seem to matter to a US administration which decided again for whimsical reasons - I know there have been a dozen articles in Foreign Policy magazine and so on about the importance of Greenland, that's all rubbish - it was a whimsical decision of the president to want to have Greenland. And Denmark was left trying to cope with it.

Decoupling from America

Charlie Sykes: And as you point out, this kind of trauma has long term implications - the decoupling, whether it's military decoupling or technological or financial. I was just reading an article last night, because my daughter lives in France, and obviously there's money that gets transferred back and forth - how many of the Europeans are saying, we don't want to use American Visa and MasterCard anymore, we want to create our own forms of transferring capital. And this may seem like a digression, but basically it's like anything that the Americans can turn on and off, we don't want to make ourselves vulnerable to anymore. And this seems to be part of the thinking - that at one point you would trust Americans across the board. But if they think there's a possibility that the US government can shut them off from something, this is going to have cascading effects throughout the economy.

Anne Applebaum: Yeah, this is what Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, talked about at Davos as well - the fear that the US can weaponize this interdependency. There are a lot of countries that have essentially co-built their economies with the United States, including especially Canada, but also Denmark, Germany, and many other European countries. And they did so on the assumption that the US absolutely shared their values and shared their respect for the rule of law. Once they learned that the relationship to the US is different, and the US is capable of using that interdependence as a way of bribing or coercing them, then all of those relationships start to look different. I'm not saying this is something where you'll see a rapid explosion - it depends on what happens. But over the long term, you'll see a big change in attitudes. This is a little bit like what happened in the UK after Brexit - there wasn't an immediate crash after the UK voted to leave the European Union. But the decoupling of the UK from the European Union over time has resulted in real damage to the British economy, real separation, issues of trade and exchange that are very hard to overcome and fix. All that kind of seamless integration that seemed possible a decade ago began to fall apart. And I would think something like that would begin to happen with the US and Europe. I don't think it will necessarily be immediate, but it will happen over time.

Europe's holding pattern on Iran

Charlie Sykes: With the Europeans still processing the trauma of the possibility of an invasion of Greenland - what is your sense of how they're looking at what's happening now with Iran? Here's Donald Trump, who did not invade Greenland, but has launched this massive attack on Iran. What is the European reaction?

Anne Applebaum: The reaction right now is a kind of holding pattern. Of course, Iran was a radical government that supported terrorism for decades, a huge problem for Europe as well. Nobody's crying about the end of a vicious totalitarian dictatorship, which also had deep links to Russia, to Venezuela, and to the rest of the autocratic world. Nobody's sad about that. But of course there's great concern about what happens next. Stability in the Middle East is important for Europeans. Access to the oil resources and other resources in the Middle East are important. And right now there's a kind of holding pattern while people try to understand what the US government's intentions are. Inside most European countries - I was on the phone with an Italian journalist this morning - you'll certainly hear this in France and the UK - there will be a lot of people who are very angry about the war and will protest against it. And it will be very hard for any European governments to wholeheartedly support the US effort, especially given that we don't know what the US effort is in aid of - what kind of Iran is it seeking to build? So I think you'll see people in a holding pattern for some days while they try to understand what it is that the US administration actually wants.

Orbán's playbook, Trump's speed

Charlie Sykes: In the few minutes we have left, I want to switch gears a little bit, because you've written so extensively about authoritarianism and autocracy, and the tactics of leaders like Viktor Orbán. Your thoughts about some of the events that have taken place in this country over the last couple of weeks as Donald Trump has flexed his power over the media, apparently used his influence to get some of his allies to be able to buy the company that controls CNN and everything. This is something that we've seen before, but give me some perspective about the speed and the scale of what Trump is doing compared to others. My sense is that Viktor Orbán took more than a decade to accomplish many of the things that Donald Trump is trying to do in weeks. Does it sound familiar to you?

Anne Applebaum: Yes. So Orbán had a sort of multipronged process. He sought to take over the court system, which he did very slowly. He manipulated the electoral system. But he also essentially empowered his financial allies to take over all of the Hungarian media, with the exception of a couple of websites. And he did that over a long period of time. He actually made a great effort to do it all legally, he tried not to break laws, partly because he had a need to stay inside the European Union, and he used different kinds of pressure. And you're right that what the Trump administration has done in various of these different fields has been really a lot faster. And they've been helped by the tech industry, which seems to share - not all of it, but some of them seem to share his distaste for democracy and his preference for a kind of tech oligarchy. And the pressure on media, the attempt to gather media ownership under one group or one conglomerate - this is very familiar. It's familiar from Hungary, it's familiar from Turkey, it's familiar from Russia actually, from really any state that has sought to centralize power in a new way. So this is not what Stalin or Hitler would have done. This is what a modern autocrat does. They don't do censorship. They do control of the media via oligarchic cronies, which is a somewhat different structure.

Charlie Sykes: And that is exactly what Trump is doing.

Anne Applebaum: Yeah.

The Anthropic warning

Charlie Sykes: You mentioned the tech oligarchs, and I haven't delved as deeply as I should into this story, but we had kind of an interesting - that's a mild word - what do you make of the administration lashing out at Anthropic? This is the big AI company that apparently has told the Pentagon, no, we're not going to give you access to all of our tools that might be used for mass surveillance or to power autonomous weapons. I guess what's called Claude is a super powerful thing. And the Pentagon has basically said, we want you to remove all your safeguards, we want you to give us access to everything. And Anthropic said, wait, no, we don't want to turn over this infinite unpredictable power to the US military. And right before launching the war against Iran, Donald Trump basically said, the US government is completely not going to do any business with this AI company with Anthropic ever again. Did this kind of send a message to the tech oligarchs that, be careful who you get into bed with? Because I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley were a little bit shocked that, so we have to do absolutely your bidding or you are going to cast us into outer darkness? Did you have any thoughts on this?

Anne Applebaum: Look, this is the threat that the Republican Party talked about for years - the threat of the state taking over capitalist companies. And absolutely this is what they're doing - the Trump administration's attempt to manipulate private companies, to demand in some cases shares in these companies, to direct how they spend their money or how they behave. When they scream about Marxism and communism and the threat of state control - this is it. This should be the libertarian nightmare. This is what they've been saying they were afraid of all along - that companies would be dictated to by the government. I don't know what could be the endgame of this particular situation. I don't know whether Anthropic can leave the country or whether it can sue or what recourse it has. Maybe under US law there is a recourse. But certainly the instinct of the Trump administration to want to control and punish people who disagree with it - punish Anthropic, not just say okay we're going to do a contract with somebody else, which has happened before, but to say we're punishing you and we're going to destroy your business - this is something that we've never seen before, at least not in modern times.

Charlie Sykes: No, I think this is a huge story. And if we were not at war, this would be, hopefully, something that we would be debating in this country. Anne Applebaum, once again, very, very grateful for all of your time and your insight. Thank you.

Anne Applebaum: Thank you.

Charlie Sykes: And thank you all for listening to this episode of the To The Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We remind you every single time, and it seems more important than ever, to remember that we are not the crazy ones.