Appreciate the moral clarity in naming the Iranian regime as evil and taking Iranian lives seriously. Where I think this piece goes wrong is in two places: the means you’re implicitly advocating, and the way you frame everyone who’s skeptical as part of a decadent or cowardly “West that can’t stand up to evil.”
On the means: you talk a lot about our duty to “stand up,” but very little about the actual track record of what standing up with bombs and regime‑change logic has done in practice. In Iran in 1953, in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Chile, etc. Those weren’t episodes where Western leaders were confused about who was “evil”; they were sold in similarly moral language, and they frequently left ordinary people with failed states, civil war, or a different brand of authoritarianism. If we’re serious about morality, we have to be just as demanding about consequences as we are about intentions.
On the politics: a lot of the piece reads less like an argument about Iran and more like a broad swipe at “the left”, as if concern about blowback, civilian harm, or double standards is mostly neurosis, self‑hatred, or secret sympathy for tyrants. That flattens a huge range of left and liberal positions into a caricature and makes it too easy to dismiss any anti‑intervention argument as weakness. There’s a difference between refusing to name evil and doubting that another Western military intervention is the best way to defeat it.
I’d love to see this same moral urgency combined with a more historically grounded and less culture‑war‑coded account of means: what concrete end‑state in Iran are we actually aiming at, what path is being proposed to get there, and what evidence from past interventions suggests that path is more likely to deliver freedom than repeat the same tragedies under a more flattering story.
Thank you for this - it's one of the more thoughtful responses the piece has gotten, and I appreciate that.
On the interventionism point: you're right that 1953, Iraq, and Libya are not proud chapters, and I'd never argue otherwise. But I'd push back on the framing that this piece is advocating for that playbook. The strikes on Iran's nuclear program aren't regime-change nation-building in the mold of Iraq, they're closer to Israel's decades-long policy of preventing existential threats from materializing. And we risk a lot not taking those threats seriously.
On the 'flattening the left' point: I take it partially. There are serious realist and anti-intervention arguments that deserve engagement on the merits, and I have respect for a principled non-interventionist vs someone reflexively defending regimes. Here I was purely talking about very visible and vocal group, the one that was cheering on Hamas post Oct 7, that mourned Maduro's fall, that were immediately, full-throated support for Iran this weekend.
Your ask for moral urgency combined with a historically grounded account is a fair challenge. I can think about that in the future, especially as events progress.
1) Iran has been a state sponsor of terror for decades, an enemy of the US and the West.
2) The American President should consult Congress, address the nation, outline goals and objectives, explain the reasons for, and have a plan in place for American evacuation before launching a war against a country of 93 million people on the other side of the planet. Trump did none of this.
What President Trump is doing is unprecedented, reckless, and potentially unconstitutional. I don’t know a single pro-Ayatollah person….but I know plenty of people that are war-weary and concerned about executive overreach. The ends do not justify the means to all of us.
Yeah I get it - just remember for decades, U.S. policy wasn’t about peace. It was about buying a frozen conflict. Infinite $ to Israel. Infinite $ across the Middle East. Pay Iran to slow its nuclear program; Iran builds proxies and missiles. Pay Israel to counter them. Tip the scales back and forth just enough to avoid eruption.
I guess a reason one could be hopeful as this is the opposite of that approach and we're having people fight it out in weeks instead of decades which could actually lead to real peace after. It could end a lot better than this painful drip of $ where nothing gets fixed and we have fake stability through injections of our taxpayer dollars that leads to conflict every few years.
I have to say…when I subscribed years ago, I had no idea you were a neocon warhawk accelerationist à la Lindsey Graham…is this a new position? I’m still going to subscribe because I enjoy diverse viewpoints and your writing style. I also now have a morbid curiosity about when/if you jump off the Trump train.
I'm hopeful for peace and do not want more long infinite wars. What we are doing now is the opposite of the Bush-era where the military industrial complex feeds off infinite $ going to forever on the ground occupation. That's way different and I don't want us to go back to that. Tactically taking out terrorists and socialist leaders oppressing their people is net good for the world and humanity.
I think if you are actually progressive and you’re not at least a little excited by the prospect of a woman-hating, gay-hating, Jew-hating regime that in no way represents the will of its people being crushed then maybe you're not progressive after all. It doesn't have to go down like Iraq after.
Also I have never supported or promoted any specific politician - they do not pay me nearly enough money for that.
Yep - you’re a neocon accelerationist - farther to the right than Lindsey Graham even. There doesn’t actually seem to be a limit to what you’d let a President do at will.
I am a Progressive and of course despise the Ayatollah, but I’m also not naive enough to think you can bomb a country into regime change.
FYI: The Trump Admin said today that the strikes killed many of the potential successors and that the next ones “might be as bad as the last”. They have no plans, so please stop pretending like there is some 4D chess going on.
Are there any other countries we should bomb this year?
Same politics as the people who took out Hitler and the Nazis. I guess people alive now would have not wanted to help out? This doesn't make me "far right." Just very American and interested in helping our allies, as no one else is really coming to save them. Curious what would you suggest for appropriate course of action?
Also of note liberal blogger Noah Smith agrees with my sentiment that leftist support of Iran shows they've lost the plot (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-shape-of-the-multipolar-world). Which is what this story was really about. This doesn't make us "far right." But I'm with you if there should have been more boxes ticked on approval or whatever, sure fine get them done next time.
If you don’t want to be called a warhawk then stop giving the executive a blank check to bomb any country in the world as long as they have an authoritarian leader. Ends justify the means with you. Pure vibes, no law or consistency
I’ll be watching your (unfortunate) slide into defending more illiberal Trumpian nonsense each month from the sidelines.
Funny thing is that though I travel in pretty liberal circles, I've yet to encounter a single person who defends Iran or its government. Seems like the thing most people are concerned about is the Trump administration just kinda doing war stuff without abiding by any of the process to do so. With Trump being unpredictable and dare I say reckless, few even on the american right seem to believe that he should have the latitude just just take us into another middle eastern war. I've also not met a single liberal who defends Hamas. Despite why we may be told, it is indeed very possible to support Palestinian children not being bombed while also opposing the terrorist BS of Hamas. Just like I can criticize the Israeli government without being an anti-semite. Just like conservatives were free to say "F*ck Joe Biden" without being considered anti-American. Seems like (based on recent polling anyway) that a majority of Americans think Iran sucks but also don't think our country should just be able to go bomb them even when our own intelligence tells us that the nuclear threat was not even close to being imminent.
Yeah there's a *clear* delineation between normal liberals who are proud to be American and leftists (anti-capitalist, want to tear down institutions, think everything is oppression etc). The mistake we made was giving extremists so much institutional control - when as you note normal liberals don't agree with them. There's a similar argument about extremists on the right too. America is mostly moderate
Yeah I hear you but will push back on one thing - the extreme leftists you describe are absolutely not in control of the Democratic Party (see Schumer, Jeffries, nee Pelosi, etc clinging to power) while the right wing nutbags (incl Trump, Miller, Johnson, etc) definitely ARE in control of the GOP.
Actually, I'll gently push back on one other thing too - I don't think the delineation on the left is as clear as you say. For example, many (myself included) are not anti-capitalist but still believe that unregulated capitalism can result in enormous wealth inequality and basically a few billionaires running everything. Not great. As for tearing down institutions, yeah - I think some shitty institutions should be torn down. And apparently the GOP believes in tearing down institutions too considering how The Trump admin has eviscerated so many governmental agencies and pressured universities/NGOs/etc to bend to their will.
The data reads in the late 90s/early 2000s most people were getting along and comparatively people felt institutions were all really functional (on both sides). We should return to that!
Yeah, that would be nice. Have been reading for years now and I don’t recall Adam ever saying anything about the Right and their shift and role in all of this nonsense. Wonder why?
Once again, you post a conservative echo chamber piece and pretend like it's independent thinking.
There is no "modern left" that thinks the way you claim. There are fringe elements, of course, but largely the backlash has been the illegality of the action. Just because you don't like the other country doesn't mean the ends justify the means, because if that happens then we have no laws left.
Meanwhile, you overly simplify the problem. There is no plan for Iran, just bombs being lobbed like we did in the fall. No path for a new government, just Trump weakly asking the Iranian people to rise up against a regime that still has all of the weapons. If we really did want to defeat them, there would be a plan. Without a plan, there is no noble "conquering of evil" - just more theatre.
If you want to write a conservative newsletter, just say that's what it is and we can all move on.
A few things. Calling a story an "echo chamber piece" is not a real rebuttal just a way of avoiding engaging with the actual arguments.
On the "fringe elements" claim - college campuses, major cities, mainstream publications, and elected members of Congress spent the weeks after October 7th contextualizing a massacre. None of that is "fringe" that's really institutional. I think normal liberals need to call this out as another commenter and you both don't seem to agree with it either.
The plan critique is actually fair and worth debating seriously. But it's a separate argument from the one the essay makes. You can believe strikes were justified and think post-strike strategy needs work too. Those aren't mutually exclusive. With the number of terrorist organizations and leaders taken out I think there's a real chance for stability - and that would be pretty exciting. Of course TBD there.
It's such a weird comment to say the last part as I share some ideas that could be classified as liberal, some that could be seen as conservative, some in the middle but don't really think about politics when I process the world. I also think standing up to evil and not siding with terrorists is both a conservative and liberal value.
Maybe we’re not going to agree on the substance here, and that’s fine. But I do reject the idea that ideas have to sit inside party containers.
If an argument overlaps with something conservatives believe, that doesn’t automatically make it partisan propaganda. As always I’m trying to reason from first principles - sometimes that is left, sometimes right, sometimes nowhere cleanly.
You’re right that we’ve had versions of this debate before. I actually think that’s healthy. Remember, liberalism doesn't die from critique, it dies without it. I stand by this story on the topic -> https://www.hottakes.space/p/liberalism-doesnt-die-from-critique
You see yourself critiquing liberalism but that's not really what's happening. If that were true you'd cover more of the nuance and separate the fringe from the mainstream.
As long as you use caricatures to define the left, you're writing conservative viewpoints.
I would very much like normal liberals to reject the extremists (I am pretty much just calling out the illiberalism) and I want normal conservatives to do the same for the extremists on their side. It's a losing strategy to ignore them and let them run culture or institutions for all of us across the spectrum. They want us arguing like this, we shouldn't let them. Can explore this in a future post.
Victims of violence have been ignored for years in New Zealand. It’s a fact, not fiction.
Quite often people get away with it because they say they are victims.
If someone cuts you with a knife or uses any violence, even a home robbery and you defend yourself. You are often described as the person of violence when actually it was the other way round.
In a court of law, the victim is often put as the oppressor and the real people who do evil get off.
Appreciate the moral clarity in naming the Iranian regime as evil and taking Iranian lives seriously. Where I think this piece goes wrong is in two places: the means you’re implicitly advocating, and the way you frame everyone who’s skeptical as part of a decadent or cowardly “West that can’t stand up to evil.”
On the means: you talk a lot about our duty to “stand up,” but very little about the actual track record of what standing up with bombs and regime‑change logic has done in practice. In Iran in 1953, in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Chile, etc. Those weren’t episodes where Western leaders were confused about who was “evil”; they were sold in similarly moral language, and they frequently left ordinary people with failed states, civil war, or a different brand of authoritarianism. If we’re serious about morality, we have to be just as demanding about consequences as we are about intentions.
On the politics: a lot of the piece reads less like an argument about Iran and more like a broad swipe at “the left”, as if concern about blowback, civilian harm, or double standards is mostly neurosis, self‑hatred, or secret sympathy for tyrants. That flattens a huge range of left and liberal positions into a caricature and makes it too easy to dismiss any anti‑intervention argument as weakness. There’s a difference between refusing to name evil and doubting that another Western military intervention is the best way to defeat it.
I’d love to see this same moral urgency combined with a more historically grounded and less culture‑war‑coded account of means: what concrete end‑state in Iran are we actually aiming at, what path is being proposed to get there, and what evidence from past interventions suggests that path is more likely to deliver freedom than repeat the same tragedies under a more flattering story.
Thank you for this - it's one of the more thoughtful responses the piece has gotten, and I appreciate that.
On the interventionism point: you're right that 1953, Iraq, and Libya are not proud chapters, and I'd never argue otherwise. But I'd push back on the framing that this piece is advocating for that playbook. The strikes on Iran's nuclear program aren't regime-change nation-building in the mold of Iraq, they're closer to Israel's decades-long policy of preventing existential threats from materializing. And we risk a lot not taking those threats seriously.
On the 'flattening the left' point: I take it partially. There are serious realist and anti-intervention arguments that deserve engagement on the merits, and I have respect for a principled non-interventionist vs someone reflexively defending regimes. Here I was purely talking about very visible and vocal group, the one that was cheering on Hamas post Oct 7, that mourned Maduro's fall, that were immediately, full-throated support for Iran this weekend.
Your ask for moral urgency combined with a historically grounded account is a fair challenge. I can think about that in the future, especially as events progress.
Two things are true and you are ignoring #2:
1) Iran has been a state sponsor of terror for decades, an enemy of the US and the West.
2) The American President should consult Congress, address the nation, outline goals and objectives, explain the reasons for, and have a plan in place for American evacuation before launching a war against a country of 93 million people on the other side of the planet. Trump did none of this.
What President Trump is doing is unprecedented, reckless, and potentially unconstitutional. I don’t know a single pro-Ayatollah person….but I know plenty of people that are war-weary and concerned about executive overreach. The ends do not justify the means to all of us.
Yeah I get it - just remember for decades, U.S. policy wasn’t about peace. It was about buying a frozen conflict. Infinite $ to Israel. Infinite $ across the Middle East. Pay Iran to slow its nuclear program; Iran builds proxies and missiles. Pay Israel to counter them. Tip the scales back and forth just enough to avoid eruption.
I guess a reason one could be hopeful as this is the opposite of that approach and we're having people fight it out in weeks instead of decades which could actually lead to real peace after. It could end a lot better than this painful drip of $ where nothing gets fixed and we have fake stability through injections of our taxpayer dollars that leads to conflict every few years.
Yeah, that worked great last time.
I have to say…when I subscribed years ago, I had no idea you were a neocon warhawk accelerationist à la Lindsey Graham…is this a new position? I’m still going to subscribe because I enjoy diverse viewpoints and your writing style. I also now have a morbid curiosity about when/if you jump off the Trump train.
Respect.
I'm hopeful for peace and do not want more long infinite wars. What we are doing now is the opposite of the Bush-era where the military industrial complex feeds off infinite $ going to forever on the ground occupation. That's way different and I don't want us to go back to that. Tactically taking out terrorists and socialist leaders oppressing their people is net good for the world and humanity.
I think if you are actually progressive and you’re not at least a little excited by the prospect of a woman-hating, gay-hating, Jew-hating regime that in no way represents the will of its people being crushed then maybe you're not progressive after all. It doesn't have to go down like Iraq after.
Also I have never supported or promoted any specific politician - they do not pay me nearly enough money for that.
Yep - you’re a neocon accelerationist - farther to the right than Lindsey Graham even. There doesn’t actually seem to be a limit to what you’d let a President do at will.
I am a Progressive and of course despise the Ayatollah, but I’m also not naive enough to think you can bomb a country into regime change.
FYI: The Trump Admin said today that the strikes killed many of the potential successors and that the next ones “might be as bad as the last”. They have no plans, so please stop pretending like there is some 4D chess going on.
Are there any other countries we should bomb this year?
Same politics as the people who took out Hitler and the Nazis. I guess people alive now would have not wanted to help out? This doesn't make me "far right." Just very American and interested in helping our allies, as no one else is really coming to save them. Curious what would you suggest for appropriate course of action?
Also of note liberal blogger Noah Smith agrees with my sentiment that leftist support of Iran shows they've lost the plot (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-shape-of-the-multipolar-world). Which is what this story was really about. This doesn't make us "far right." But I'm with you if there should have been more boxes ticked on approval or whatever, sure fine get them done next time.
If you don’t want to be called a warhawk then stop giving the executive a blank check to bomb any country in the world as long as they have an authoritarian leader. Ends justify the means with you. Pure vibes, no law or consistency
I’ll be watching your (unfortunate) slide into defending more illiberal Trumpian nonsense each month from the sidelines.
Cheers
Funny thing is that though I travel in pretty liberal circles, I've yet to encounter a single person who defends Iran or its government. Seems like the thing most people are concerned about is the Trump administration just kinda doing war stuff without abiding by any of the process to do so. With Trump being unpredictable and dare I say reckless, few even on the american right seem to believe that he should have the latitude just just take us into another middle eastern war. I've also not met a single liberal who defends Hamas. Despite why we may be told, it is indeed very possible to support Palestinian children not being bombed while also opposing the terrorist BS of Hamas. Just like I can criticize the Israeli government without being an anti-semite. Just like conservatives were free to say "F*ck Joe Biden" without being considered anti-American. Seems like (based on recent polling anyway) that a majority of Americans think Iran sucks but also don't think our country should just be able to go bomb them even when our own intelligence tells us that the nuclear threat was not even close to being imminent.
Yeah there's a *clear* delineation between normal liberals who are proud to be American and leftists (anti-capitalist, want to tear down institutions, think everything is oppression etc). The mistake we made was giving extremists so much institutional control - when as you note normal liberals don't agree with them. There's a similar argument about extremists on the right too. America is mostly moderate
Yeah I hear you but will push back on one thing - the extreme leftists you describe are absolutely not in control of the Democratic Party (see Schumer, Jeffries, nee Pelosi, etc clinging to power) while the right wing nutbags (incl Trump, Miller, Johnson, etc) definitely ARE in control of the GOP.
Actually, I'll gently push back on one other thing too - I don't think the delineation on the left is as clear as you say. For example, many (myself included) are not anti-capitalist but still believe that unregulated capitalism can result in enormous wealth inequality and basically a few billionaires running everything. Not great. As for tearing down institutions, yeah - I think some shitty institutions should be torn down. And apparently the GOP believes in tearing down institutions too considering how The Trump admin has eviscerated so many governmental agencies and pressured universities/NGOs/etc to bend to their will.
The data reads in the late 90s/early 2000s most people were getting along and comparatively people felt institutions were all really functional (on both sides). We should return to that!
You mean return to an era before social media and smartphones turned everyone's brains into cat food? YES!
Just like in the media piece, there has been one major group that has shifted that has created that change. Hint: it's not the left!
Maybe it would be good to write about them?
Yeah, that would be nice. Have been reading for years now and I don’t recall Adam ever saying anything about the Right and their shift and role in all of this nonsense. Wonder why?
Went through this here btw -> https://www.hottakes.space/p/liberalism-doesnt-die-from-critique ...but I'll see what we can do in a future post so no one feels left out
Once again, you post a conservative echo chamber piece and pretend like it's independent thinking.
There is no "modern left" that thinks the way you claim. There are fringe elements, of course, but largely the backlash has been the illegality of the action. Just because you don't like the other country doesn't mean the ends justify the means, because if that happens then we have no laws left.
Meanwhile, you overly simplify the problem. There is no plan for Iran, just bombs being lobbed like we did in the fall. No path for a new government, just Trump weakly asking the Iranian people to rise up against a regime that still has all of the weapons. If we really did want to defeat them, there would be a plan. Without a plan, there is no noble "conquering of evil" - just more theatre.
If you want to write a conservative newsletter, just say that's what it is and we can all move on.
A few things. Calling a story an "echo chamber piece" is not a real rebuttal just a way of avoiding engaging with the actual arguments.
On the "fringe elements" claim - college campuses, major cities, mainstream publications, and elected members of Congress spent the weeks after October 7th contextualizing a massacre. None of that is "fringe" that's really institutional. I think normal liberals need to call this out as another commenter and you both don't seem to agree with it either.
The plan critique is actually fair and worth debating seriously. But it's a separate argument from the one the essay makes. You can believe strikes were justified and think post-strike strategy needs work too. Those aren't mutually exclusive. With the number of terrorist organizations and leaders taken out I think there's a real chance for stability - and that would be pretty exciting. Of course TBD there.
It's such a weird comment to say the last part as I share some ideas that could be classified as liberal, some that could be seen as conservative, some in the middle but don't really think about politics when I process the world. I also think standing up to evil and not siding with terrorists is both a conservative and liberal value.
Oh, I'm well past rebuttals as we've had this same debate too many times. There is no point anymore. I am just calling out what it is.
It's not a weird comment as you never post anything classified as liberal or even centrist! That makes it a conservative newsletter.
Maybe we’re not going to agree on the substance here, and that’s fine. But I do reject the idea that ideas have to sit inside party containers.
If an argument overlaps with something conservatives believe, that doesn’t automatically make it partisan propaganda. As always I’m trying to reason from first principles - sometimes that is left, sometimes right, sometimes nowhere cleanly.
You’re right that we’ve had versions of this debate before. I actually think that’s healthy. Remember, liberalism doesn't die from critique, it dies without it. I stand by this story on the topic -> https://www.hottakes.space/p/liberalism-doesnt-die-from-critique
You see yourself critiquing liberalism but that's not really what's happening. If that were true you'd cover more of the nuance and separate the fringe from the mainstream.
As long as you use caricatures to define the left, you're writing conservative viewpoints.
I would very much like normal liberals to reject the extremists (I am pretty much just calling out the illiberalism) and I want normal conservatives to do the same for the extremists on their side. It's a losing strategy to ignore them and let them run culture or institutions for all of us across the spectrum. They want us arguing like this, we shouldn't let them. Can explore this in a future post.
They do! That's why they are fringe! Just because they say controversial things to get attention doesn't mean they are accepted.
Victims of violence have been ignored for years in New Zealand. It’s a fact, not fiction.
Quite often people get away with it because they say they are victims.
If someone cuts you with a knife or uses any violence, even a home robbery and you defend yourself. You are often described as the person of violence when actually it was the other way round.
In a court of law, the victim is often put as the oppressor and the real people who do evil get off.