David Frum on Trump’s Iran attack and why Carney’s Canada must be more ‘cold-blooded’ than ever before

(Here’s a sneak peek of my The Toronto Star column, which will appear in the paper this Saturday).

More than 20 years ago, David Frum co-wrote a book called “An End to Evil,” in which he explicitly called for regime change in Iran. So, that felt like a good place to start my conversation with this brilliant foreign affairs observer, born and raised in Toronto, and who made a name for himself at the highest levels of power in Washington, D.C., as a speech writer in President George W. Bush’s administration. He’s now a staff writer for The Atlantic and host of its podcast, The David Frum Show.

Steve Paikin: Are you pleased at the developments of this past week in the Middle East?

David Frum: Pleased is the wrong word. The hopeful indicators are, the Iranian regime is not only one of the most repressive in the world, but also one of the most aggressive in the world. It’s a menace to almost all its regional neighbours. It’s a menace to its own people, of whom it murdered perhaps 40,000 in two days — a bloodier toll than Tiananmen Square in 1989. And it’s a regime where we can see pretty decisively that it’s rejected by its own people, who are ready for a different form of government. So, the action to stop them from acquiring ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, but ideally, to weaken the regime enough that its own people can overthrow it, that’s very hopeful. The danger is that when the United States goes to war, the president acquires all kinds of additional powers. And this president has proven he cannot be trusted with those powers. In fact, no president in American history is less trustworthy with power than Donald Trump. So, I am very worried about the uses he will make at home of the powers that fall into his hands to be used abroad.

What would constitute a successful military operation, in your view?

I worry a lot that the U.S. administration is allergic to thinking beyond the moment when the guns stop shooting. You know, the guns will stop shooting. The Iranians need the electricity to come on. They need water to flow. They need to go to work. Children need to be educated. Old people need pensions to be paid. Hospitals have to keep operating. Who’s in charge of that? It’s not the job of the United States to provide them with a government, but it is the job of the United States, having joined this conflict, to do whatever it can to facilitate the transition to someone else who can do all those things. And the Trump administration just, as a matter of principle, refused to think about that. So that’s a very ominous, possibility. There does seem to be a coherent opposition movement. But it’s not united. And many of its leaders are in exile, and have been in exile for a long time. But it’s going to be a very disrupted place after this operation, and organizing elections will not be something that can be done immediately. So you need some kind of agreed transition that is broadly accepted by all the players in Iranian society, and that transitional government is immediately going to need all kinds of material resources to give the Iranian people the promise of a better life.

Given your association with the Bush administration, which launched a war against Iraq in 2003, I should ask whether you see evidence that the Trump administration has learned any lessons from that experience?

Pete Hegseth, the television personality playing the role of Secretary of Defense this season, gave a press conference last Monday in which he contemptuously ridiculed “nation building” and “democracy building.” The Trump administration looks back at Afghanistan and Iraq and seems to have decided: Since the postwar plans for those countries failed — let us do no postwar planning at all! How will Iran be governed after the destruction of the clerical regime? We don’t know and we don’t care. Of all the lessons to learn from Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s not the right one.

Wasn’t Trump the guy who promised not to entangle the country in foreign wars? Surely his MAGA base must hate this development?

I really think if there is anybody out there who trusted things that Trump said, that’s a “You Problem,” not a “Him Problem.”

Trump’s favourability rating is at an all-time low right now. How much of the decision to attack Iran do you think is wrapped up in that?

That’s a fascinating question. Military action empowers presidents, especially if they don’t have to deal with Congress, and especially if it’s not too expensive, where you have to go back to Congress for an appropriation. He seems to have gotten a thrill out of what he did with (Nicolás) Maduro in Venezuela, and he may be trying to repeat that thrill. But foreign policy success, however triumphant — and this is not a triumphant success yet — doesn’t help you. The most successful foreign policy president in American history was George H.W. Bush. Triumph in the first Gulf War at very low cost. Peaceful resolution of the Cold War. German reunification. The nuclear disarmament of the former Soviet Union. Not a single one of the 50,000 Soviet warheads that worried Bush went astray. All of those things happened. He still lost the next election, because elections are won or lost on domestic issues. And so Trump could have good success in Iran and I don’t think it will help him politically very much. The critique of his presidency by the people who used to like him is, I elected you to do certain things, and instead of bringing the prices down, instead of getting jobs going, what you are doing is focused on your ballroom, on your cryptocurrency schemes, and now you’re at war in Iran. You’re not paying attention to what I hired you to do. And Trump’s great weakness as a politician is he can never believe that he’s an employee hired to do a job. He thinks he’s a master, empowered to give orders.

Prime Minister Mark Carney, very quickly out of the gate, endorsed this military action. Should he have?

This is a complicated question. I don’t say this as a value judgment, just as an empirical matter, but with the radicalism of the change in foreign policy that Carney has brought, Carney is the least Pearsonian prime minister in Canadian history. The Carney view is, while Canada spent much of its existence as a nation under the protection of the superpower of the day — first Great Britain, then the United States — under that protection, Canadians never had to worry much about their own security. That was somebody else’s job. So Canadian foreign policy could focus on values. Carney is now saying, Canada has lost its superpower protector, for the first time since 1867. And in that world, Canada must act in a much more cold-blooded and amoral way. And that’s why it must forgive India for committing assassinations on Canadian soil. It must forgive China for interfering in Canadian elections and brutalizing Chinese Canadians on Canadian soil. And it must accept the American intervention in Iran, because those are all things that are important to those much greater powers, and Canada needs to navigate between India, China, and the United States in a world in which Canadian security is much less secure than it ever has been before, and there’s no room in this complicated equation for Pearsonian talk. Canada is out of that business forever. That seems to be what he’s saying, and it’s very radical.

Let’s pivot to what you see happening on Canadian-American relations. A lot of our politicians are trying very hard to influence this administration, everything from Premier Doug Ford’s commercials featuring former president Ronald Reagan, to Conservative MP Jamil Jivani visiting his old friend the vice-president JD Vance. Is there any evidence that any of that is working?

Well, the fact that it doesn’t work doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Canadians are not wrong to use the tried-and-true methods first. Politics is extremely hard, and the fact that things don’t work doesn’t mean you are foolish to try them. It’s worth the effort. And it was also worth taking the measure of how much of Trump’s hostility to Canada was just bluster, and how much of it was settled implacable malice. I think it’s the latter. And it has taken time for Canadians to accept that that could be true, because it’s so different. It’s so shocking. Canada has a whole history that goes back to the meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and Mackenzie King at Ogdensburg (New York) in the ‘30s, where Roosevelt said an attack on Canadian territory will be (considered) an attack on the United States. It’s America’s first permanent security guarantee to any country. And now that logic has changed, and it’s hard to adjust.

Many people up here wonder whether we should be expending so much effort on a renewed trade agreement with the U.S., because they fear even if he signs it, Trump won’t adhere to it anyway. What’s your view?

As scary and threatening as Trump is, he has one thing in common with every other previous president, which is, he starts with a bucket of minutes, and every day he spends the minutes, and they never return. And as you spend the minutes, the president almost always gets weaker. So, the longer Canada postpones agreements with Trump, the better Canada will do.