On Thursday’s RealClearPolitics podcast, Tom Bevan, Phil Wegmann, and Carl Cannon review the inaugural meeting of President Trump’s “Board of Peace,” concerns it could replace the United Nations, and whether the U.S. could go to war with Iran. The panel also unpacks new reporting on the State Department revoking visas of foreign individuals who were involved in censoring Americans online. Finally, Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, joins the show to talk about the legacy of America’s indispensable founding father. You can listen to the show live each day at 11:00 a.m. on SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly Channel 111 and then on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and here on our website. *** The show opens with the first meeting of President Trump’s “Board of Peace” today at the White House. RCP’s White House correspondent Phil Wegmann reports: “Donald Trump is not just remaking the world order, he’s creating new institutions. A lot of diplomats from the U.N. are worried they’re being bigfooted.” “This fear that it will supplant the United Nations comes from Europe. This is what the bureaucrats and diplomats at the E.U. are telling reporters,” Carl Cannon said. “I would have thought that was kind of silly, but it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. They’re worried that the U.N. is being muscled out.” “Trump’s bull in the china shop realpolitik of, ‘Stop fighting. It’s bad for business,’ seems to have yielded a lot more results than we saw during the Biden administration,” Wegmann added. *** In the next segment, around minute 13, the group debates the irony of inaugurating a new “Board of Peace” while a massive American armada is headed toward Iran. Is this brinkmanship – or a prelude to war? “It certainly looks like we’re moving towards something. There hasn’t been such a concentration of force since the first Gulf War,” Wegman observed. “In the back of Trump’s mind, he’s got to be thinking it might just be easier, rather than doing the hard work of diplomacy, to lob a few Tomahawk missiles at these guys and teach them a lesson.” Tom Bevan asked: “Do you think just lobbing some missiles into Iran – is that going to destabilize the regime? Is that going to topple the regime? And if it doesn’t do that, then what’s the purpose?” *** After that, at minute 19:30, the panel looks at Paul Thacker’s new piece for RealClearInvestigations on diplomatic efforts to pressure the U.K. into toning down support for censorship of political speech: Deporting Censorship: US Targets UK Government Ally Over Free Speech “These groups popped up in Donald Trump’s first term. NewsGuard, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and the Global Disinformation Index in Britain,” Carl Cannon explained. “They always had these phrases like misinformation, disinformation, stopping hate, that sound good, but what they really were doing was disfavoring and punishing and trying to eliminate speech they didn’t agree with.” “I think censorship is evil and I hope they all get sued to oblivion. But the government has a tough sale here to the courts, and I don’t think they’re necessarily going to win,” Cannon added. *** After that, at minute 30, Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, joins Carl Cannon to discuss the indispensable founding father. “So often we think of humility as something that is mutually exclusive with confidence, and that’s not so,” she said. “He was willing to be told no, or told that he was wrong. And that takes an incredible amount of strength for a leader to seek out that type of environment. And I think that comes from his place of humility.” “He had a very keen understanding of what it was going to take for the republic to survive. And the first and most essential part of that was that he did not retain military power,” she explained. “By relinquishing his command and intentionally giving it up to Congress, he was subordinating himself – and by extension the army – to that civilian authority.” *** Don’t miss an episode of the RealClearPolitics radio show – subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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