There's a big debate right now among the political Right over whether the United States should intervene in Israel's war with Iran. Should President Trump bomb Iran? Should he encourage regime change? Or should he completely stay out of it? Glenn Beck and The Federalist CEO and Co-founder Sean Davis discuss.

Transcript

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

GLENN: Sean, welcome to the program.

VOICE: Thank you for having me, sir.

GLENN: You bet. I'm glad to have you on.

You know, I'm not sure -- I'm not sure of anybody's position, because the smart people, like I think you are, are asking questions. And not coming out with these bold declarations. They're just asking questions.

And sometimes, their own response, at least mine is.

It's very nuanced. And I'm not recommending anything.

I'm asking questions, and I'm warning about the mistakes of the past.

I don't trust anybody.

But I also think a nuclear armed Iran is really bad. But I want Israel to take care of it.

I want to be involved in that.

It's their direct right now. Let them take care of it.

What -- where do you go from here. What questions should we be asking ourselves, Sean.

SEAN: Yeah. I love your approach to it. Because it doesn't start with a conclusion.

It's kind of trying to build with what we should be doing from the bottom-up.

Which becomes a discussion of first principles. And I think that's really important.

I think we probably all agree, that we don't want bad people. And we don't our enemies, to have weapons, they use to destroy us.

I think probably everyone agrees in that.

GLENN: Yes.

Well, can I add a caveat to that?

Not just our enemies, but especially those who are batcrap crazy.

Or believe in the return of the Mahdi, and I can hasten his return by washing the world in blood. That kind of -- that puts you in a special category for me.

But, anyway, go ahead.

SEAN: And, again, I think I might even extend it. I'm not sure I want our friends and allies to have it. In a perfect world, we would be the only country, with these massive weapons.
(laughter)

GLENN: Okay. All right. I'll go for that. Okay.

SEAN: So the problem we have is that for, let's call 80 years. You know, 75.

The nuclear toothpaste has been out of the tube.

Soviet -- India, Pakistan. North Korea.

France. Israel.

In South Africa for a time, they all had nukes. And to me, the big problem that I have a really difficult time wrapping my head around, is how do you solve the problem we created with Gadhafi in Libya?

GLENN: Yes.

SEAN: That country gave up their weapons program, voluntarily after Iraq. Kind of before Iraq become another debacle and another cautionary tale. And they gave up their weapons in the US and NATO and our allies. We returned the favor, thanks to Hillary and Obama, by overthrowing Gadhafi and killing it.

I think what that communicated to every leader on earth, good or bad, if you don't ever want to be overthrown, you have to have nuclear weapons.

And so I start with understanding that fact, what is the best, most effective way to make our enemies -- make sure our enemies don't get nuclear weapons?

And I'll tell you, I don't have a good answer. Because we've heard for 40 years, that Iran is on the verge of a nuke.

They're about to have a nuke. They're about to have a weapon. So let's assume we go through with these attacks, and we bomb now or Israel bombs it.

What that doesn't get rid of is the incentive. It temporarily gets rid of a mechanism for I guess enriching uranium. But in four years or five years, how do we deal with that? I don't think regime change is a good idea. We've seen how well that works. It turns into an unmitigated disaster.

And so I think we just have to start with the question, what is the best possible way to incentivize people that we don't like, and don't like us, to not have weapons. And I genuinely don't have a good answer to it.

GLENN: You know what, I keep thinking. Every day I do this job. And I think what Reagan said when I was a kid.

He said, there's going to come a time.

And he was talking to Social Security at the time, but I apply it now to everything. There's going to come a time, where we've made so many mistakes. There won't be a good solution to everything. Every choice will be a bad choice.

And I think we're here. I think we're here. Everything we do, you're like, I don't know. I don't know.

I don't want to do to the mistakes of the past. But I don't know how to stop this now.

You know, regime change. Let me just take that one.

Regime change. It doesn't work. I loved your post. I think it was yesterday.

Yes, our military industrial complex lied about Vietnam. Killed Kennedy. Ran a coup against Nixon, then killed another Kennedy.

Tried to get MLK Jr. to kill himself. Ran drugs through the Americas to fund shenanigans in the Middle East.

Funded Bin Laden in the Taliban. Missed 9/11, and lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Got an ambassador murdered in Benghazi.

Then turned Libya into a slave market run by terrorists. Then created ISIS. Ran the Russia collusion hoax.

Tried to overthrow Trump with the Ukrainian hoax. Weaponized a bat virus that killed millions of people and lied about it. And used the virus they made to steal an election.

Then arrest Trump, tried to bankrupt him.

Try to make him die in prison, and then when they failed, they denied him adequate security, leading him to be shot in the head.

Yeah, they did all of those things.

The drug cartels, Iraq, Bosnia, in the 1990s.

Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s. Still Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010.

Plus, Libya, the whole moronic Arab Spring thing. Ukraine in the 2020s.

These were all disasters that cost millions of dollars and countless lives. You're right on every single one of those things.

Every single one of those things.

So how do we make a decision now'

SEAN: Right. And that's why I think it's important to get to first principles. Which is understanding our limitations.

Understanding history. Understanding how other nations view things. One thing that's driven me nuts in the foreign policy debates that we've had in the country, for 20, 30 years.

Is that there seems to be zero desire to put ourself in the position of our adversaries and our opponents. Saying, how are we looking at things?

Some people, if you try to do that, they'll say, oh, well, you're sympathizing with them. Or you're appeasing. Well, no. This is the basic stuff for negotiation.

You're playing chess against someone. You want to understand what they're going to do next.

So you can respond to it.

And we just never do that.

And I look at this. I think there's probably two major options. For either forestalling or preventing a particular regime for getting weapons.

The first one is regime change.

In the short-term, you can tell yourself, we will overthrow these people.

And then they won't want nukes anymore. Because we will put our friends in, and then it will be food.

Well, that's been ongoing in Iran for 100 years. The Brits and the Soviets were the ones who came in and put the original Shah in. It's been a mess over there.

So personally, I throw regime change out the window. Because it opens up pandora's box of just insanity, as we've seen in the Middle East.

GLENN: Okay. Hang on a second. Hang on a second.

Wait. Wait, on that.

Is there a chance that -- you know, I never saw it.

I kept saying. We headed to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Show me the person that will have their face on the stamp. Show me the person that will have their face on the money.

I never had somebody stand up and say, we need to be free.

And we need to fight for our own freedom. You do have those people that are really tired of this, and much more Western.

I don't want to get involved in a regime change. And I certainly don't want you to say, hey. We're going to help you pick a leader.

Is there a chance this time is different? Or is that wishful, stupid thinking?

JASON: You know, I think it's probably wishful thinking, but I don't know.

I tell you, I have a hard enough time figuring out what's going on politically in my own country. Think about all the time we spent pouring over polls in our election. Talking to our neighbors.

This is a country we were born in.

We understand its culture without even thinking about it. We're fluent in the language. We can talk to anyone we want, whenever we want. And we have a tough time, figuring out what is going on here. I don't have a clue what's happening in Iran.

I don't speak any of the three or four languages over there.

I don't understand the culture. I've never been there.

I've not been able to talk to people over there.

I don't know thousand read the news there.

The idea that I, or really any other Westerner can look at Iran and with any confidence say what the people want or don't want, I think it's crazy.

And so I think you kind of have to be humble about your ignorance. And we are largely ignorant of just about everything happening within Iraq, and its culture and its people.

GLENN: I -- I have to say, I think you're right on that.

Okay. So that's out.

What's the next thing?

SEAN: We kind of set aside regime change, probably not a great idea.

Another option is maybe economic incentives. Yeah, we know you don't want to be overthrown.

That's going to be a hard incentive to overcome. So you're going want to regime change insurance. Maybe we can bribe you out of it. All kinds of economic assurances. This and that.

The problem with Iran is they're sitting on oil, which is probably the most precious resource on earth. I don't think that works.

And so I think what we're left with is probably the Whack-a-Mole that's been going on for years. And I think the nation that's probably best sighted to deal with that Whack-A-Mole. They're the ones at risk.

Iran can't reach us here in the US. They don't have the ballistic missile capability. They're not a direct military threat to us.

They're clearly a military threat to our friends and allies in the Middle East.

And so I think the least worst option is probably Israel doing what it does, every five to ten years, and going and trying to degrade their ability to mechanically make the stuff.

Wait to see what happens, do it again over and over. But to me, that's a regional issue.

And, yes, there are allies. And, yes, they're our friends.

But it's far more consequential to them, than it is to us. And so I have no problem with them, doing what they need to do, to address the threats to them.

GLENN: So I'm with you, 100 percent so far.

Now, I'm very -- you know, we're the only ones with the bunker buster that can get into that.

What does that go down, 12 stories?

20 stories, underground.

Can destroy anything with a 20-story footprint, underground.

We're the only ones that have it. It has to be dropped from one of our planes.

And I'm very uncomfortable with that. Very uncomfortable. I mean, you know what, you want to buy the bunker buster? I'll sell it to you. But you got to drop it.

Once we put that on our plane, and we drop it, aren't we then part of the war?

SEAN: Right. And that -- like I said, that might be the least worse option to the extent that we have to be involved.

GLENN: Yes.

SEAN: When it comes to foreign policy. I think a lot about what Mike Tyson says.

That everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. Once you go and drop a bomb on someone, once you engage in offensive military capabilities. Now, you may rhetorically say, well, it's preemptively defensive. It's an offensive move, whenever you bomb another country.

You are creating the conditions for all kinds of chaos. Who knows how they're going to respond?

Maybe they're rational. They understand, look, we will have to take this one on the chin.

We don't want to fight with the US.

We don't want to fight with Israel. We will have to deal with it.

And maybe they decide. Hey, we were in the middle of negotiations. We thought we were trying to get somewhere.

And if they're going to do this stuff with us, then to heck with this.

We will just unleash hell. That can happen.

Now, I don't know if it will. It's probably less likely to end up taking it.

But it's a possibility. Whenever you go and punch somebody in the face, you now have to deal with the consequences of how they will respond.

GLENN: All right. Back with more in just a second. Can you stay with me for just a few more minutes, Sean?

SEAN: Of course.

GLENN: Before we go to back to Sean, Jason, I had to look up in the break, preemptive strikes.

Is that something new?

Because I know that's -- my age, maybe.

I remember, I don't remember people saying, we have to preemptively strike, more than when it -- when the nukes started coming. And that's when everybody was like, you have to do it before you get one.

Is this a new thing? Or has this been going on forever?

JASON: I want to start out with saying, I'm so glad for Sean in having this conversation.

Because it is sorely needed right now.
It's so bad.

There's a weird irony with preemptive or preventive strikes.

Because the first modern preventive strike, looking at the Cold War era was the start of the six-day war.

When Egypt blockaded Israel, amassed 100,000 troops in Israel.

GLENN: Wow.

JASON: Did the first modern preemptive strike. If they would not have, they would not be here right now.

It's another coal in the fire really.

What is the red line --

GLENN: Sean, what is the red line?

Is there a red line?

SEAN: For us. Or for Israel?

GLENN: You know, any society. Is there a red line?

I think the answer for Israel is a lot sooner than ours.

But is there such a thing as a red line, to go first, and preemptively strike?

I'm sure there is. I'm sure there is.

It's so situational, that I would have a hard time saying right now, this is a red line, that satisfies all conditions for all nations.

GLENN: How about just for Israel?

Red line?

SEAN: For Israel, I would think it would be a delivery mechanism and the actual developed warhead. That's probably what I would look at. Can this immunization at this moment, deliver a nuclear warhead to us right now?


That's what I would say is the red line.

But, you know what, I have not had a country trying to wipe me off the earth for, you know, the last 80 years, 75 years.

GLENN: 5,000.

SEAN: Right.

But hard for me, just given my position, to know exactly what their -- I would say, it's probably close to the same thing.

An ability to attack the US people. Now, you'll hear from the Pentagon and people saying, well, they can hurt our troops in the region.

My view is, well, that's probably a good reason to not be meddling in the regions all the time. Because --

GLENN: Hmm. Hmm.

Sean, thank you so much. What a great conversation.

I really appreciate it. Thank you for being reasonable, rational. And allowing people to disagree.

And learn from our disagreements. Thank you, Sean. Appreciate it.

JASON: You're very gracious. Thank you, sir.

GLENN: You bet. The CEO of the Federalist.

Sean Davis.