Ep. 138: Why does Tucker Carlson want to appease Tehran?
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Hello, and welcome to Jonathan Tobin Day. I'm JNS Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin. Now let's get started. There has always been something that didn't add up about Tucker Carlson's stands on the Middle East. The former Fox News host, who now has a show primarily seen on the ex-social media platform,

has always been that rare conservative talker who was, to put it mildly, unenthusiastic about the alliance with Israel. Even more strangely, he appeared soft on an Islamist regime in Iran that hated the United States and had the blood of many Americans on its hands.

But while Carlson's impact on public opinion has declined since he was booted out of his prominent perch at Fox and relegated to an Internet show, his influence within the inner circles of the Trump administration seems not only undiminished, but perhaps increased.

None of the controversies surrounding him, including his platforming of Israel haters, anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers, has made him radioactive enough to be exiled from the presidential court at the White House or Mar-a-Lago. To the contrary, his show has regularly hosted administration figures in recent months. That makes his increasingly strident views about Iran particularly ominous.

This is particularly relevant now because President Donald Trump appears to be negotiating a new nuclear deal that could be just as weak as the one struck with Tehran by former President Barack Obama in 2015.

Though nothing has been settled, the prospect of an interim accord that would not only grant legitimacy to Iran's nuclear program, but also its right to enrich uranium is a shocking development to those who assume that the Trump 2.0 administration would be as tough on Iran as Trump 1.0.

So when Carlson launched into a lengthy tirade on X, denouncing Mark Levin, the host of a radio talk show, as well as the Life, Liberty and Levin program that still appears on Fox News, for, quote, lobbying for war with Iran at the White House, it seemed something like a declaration of war on pro-Israel conservatives.

The woke right movement that Carlson leads is a bafflingly diverse and often contradictory gathering of erstwhile right and left-wingers that seem united only by their hostility to Israel, coupled with opposition to anything that is even tangentially connected to Jews and the Jewish state.

While their clout should not be exaggerated, the encouragement it is giving to those inside the administration pursuing an Iran strategy that seems remarkably similar to that of Obama and Biden should not be discounted.

With the outcome of these talks and the ultimate direction of the second Trump administration's foreign policy still far from determined, an examination of Carlson's efforts to bolster and to rationalize appeasement of an Islamist regime that hates America and all it stands for requires something of an explanation. Unraveling Trump's seemingly flip-flop on Iran is no easy task.

His reluctance for the United States to become involved in a new war is understandable, popular, and a reasonable position to take. But the notion that the only choices that Washington has with respect to Iran are appeasement or war is simply not true. It's the same false argument that Obama offered in defense of his Iran policy.

As Trump subsequently showed, a policy of serious sanctions that were rigorously enforced and imposed on American allies could do real damage to the country run by mullahs. An even tougher sanctions campaign, combined with Israeli military pressure that has already cut down to size Iran's allies in Lebanon and destroyed them in Syria, offers hope for a third way.

Nevertheless, the Iranian progress toward their nuclear ambition under the feckless Biden administration, which dropped Trump's sanctions, has brought Tehran to the brink of a nuclear weapon. That's a dismal prospect for Western security that obligates the president to consider that mere diplomacy with a regime whose hostility to America is a given and that can be counted on never to keep its word is not a rational course of action.

How did Trump wind up echoing Obama talking points? It's hard to figure. This is, after all, the same president who rejected Obama's disastrously weak deal that enriched and empowered the Islamist regime, guaranteeing that it would get a nuclear weapon. It also imposed a punishment. He, Trump, imposed a punishing maximum pressure campaign of sanctions against

that restricted its ability to fund international terrorism and in January 2020 killed its chief terrorist, Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. While only one person is in charge in the current White House, Trump, there is no question but that some of his new foreign policy advisors seem to share an aversion to confronting Tehran.

Among them are Vice President J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence. And both are friends of Carlson. That means the question of Carlson's influence and that of his friends inside the administration who may agree with him on the issue is no longer merely a matter of idle speculation.

It is now one of life and death when one considers the possible implications of an accord that could lead to the lifting of sanctions and the preservation of a program that has already made Iran a threshold nuclear power.

Since he left Fox, the filters have been off for Carlson as he has given vent to a variety of extremist views on a number of issues. His highlighting of World War II revisionism about Churchill, Hitler, and the Holocaust, as well as anti-Israel views, has been presented with the same disingenuous, just-asking-questions approach that is customary on the far right.

Carlson's acolytes may think that regurgitating Hamas talking points, whitewashing Qatar, and echoing 90-year-old Nazi propaganda are the hallmarks of intelligent inquiry. But all that points to his unabashed extremism and anti-Semitism adjacent views. There have also been questions raised about whether Qatar or other Islamist entities have been funneling money to him in one way or the other.

Part of the reason why none of this has proved disqualifying for him is the strong reservoir of goodwill among mainstream conservatives that Carlson built up during his years at Fox. During the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, he was easily the most powerful voice refuting the spirit of moral panic about race that swept the country in the weeks and months after the killing of George Floyd.

At that time, he assumed something of a role as the Tribune of the Right, pushing back against woke ideology and myths about police hunting down African Americans. But in subsequent years, Carlson became less focused on giving voice to mainstream conservative opinions and ultimately burned his bridges with his employers at Fox.

He might have sunk into irrelevance, once deprived of such a potent platform as a primetime spot on the nation's most-watched cable news station. Though he reaches fewer people now in a program primarily viewed on the ex-social media platform,

His close ties to the Trumps, via the president's son Donald Jr., proved a lifeline. The fact that he sometimes accompanied the president to public events or was seen at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida in his company ensured that he would still be seen as a figure to be reckoned with. That was solidified when, along with Elon Musk and Don Jr., Carlson lobbied hard for Trump to pick Vance as his running mate.

Vance's strong showing in the 2024 election and his deft ability to show serious policy chops and extreme deference to the president enhanced his standing inside the White House. And did Carlson no harm either. While Vance hasn't endorsed any of Carlson's extreme stands, neither was he willing to condemn them.

The vice president's stance on democracy and free speech in Europe, as well as his defense of working class interests, are correct and broadly popular with most Republicans and conservatives. But the Signalgate scandal made it clear that Vance was, at the very least, skeptical about a tough stand against Iran and the Houthis, the Islamic Republic's terrorist clients in Yemen.

Carlson also made friends inside Trump world while angering many mainstream Republicans and Trump supporters by rushing to the defense of Steve Witkoff, the president's hapless Middle East envoy. Witkoff, like Carlson, is compromised by the support he's gotten from Qatar and has made statements in pursuit diplomacy that seem to be primarily motivated by a desire to appease and rationalize the Gulf state, Iran, and its terror proxy, Hamas.

The more one understands Carlson's position on Iran, the more unhinged and detached from reality it seems. His rant against Levin was an absurd compilation of falsehoods and pro-Tehran spren that could just as easily have come out of an article in the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera propaganda outlet. In plain contradiction of facts that are widely acknowledged by the U.S. government and other sources, Carlson claimed that Iran didn't want a nuclear weapon and was nowhere close to making one.

The picture of a peaceful and non-terrorist regime he painted was as truthful as classic New York Times fraudster and Soviet apologist Walter Duransky in the 1930s was of Joseph Stalin's mass murder in Ukraine and equally bloody purges. That's bad enough. However, the smearing of Levin as a warmonger and the Papuacanesque claim that he wouldn't fight against Iran was a classic anti-Semitic trope.

Equally false was Carlson's claim that Iran, a peace-loving nation that posed no threat to America or its allies, is also a fearsome regional superpower that could defeat the United States and or Israel in war. This was given the lie by the pathetic failure of Iran's missile attacks on Israel and the fact that the Israelis have already destroyed their enemy's air defenses. That latter point makes it particularly vulnerable at the moment to an Israeli or Western attack.

An advantage that might be lost if Trump's talks, even if ultimately unsuccessful, delay any action until after those defenses are rebuilt or restored with assistance by Russia, which is a current quagmire of its own in its three-year war on Ukraine. The indefinite postponement of any strike on Iran that Trump has requested Israel to honor is

is handing a militarily weak, politically unstable, and deeply unpopular regime a lifeline. The breach between those with realistic attitudes towards Iran, such as that of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the Iran appeasers Israel. Some put it down to the difference between those who embrace a true America First policy and those who only essentially believe in an American-only policy that is hard to distinguish from isolationism.

Still, others see this as no different from the debate that has been going on about whether a policy aimed at trying to enable Ukraine to win a truly unwinnable against war against Russia is in America's national interest.

But while skepticism about that assertion is well-founded, the idea that America has no vital interest in ensuring that Islamist terrorists don't set the Middle East on fire, as Iran has done with the multi-front war it fomented against Israel and its threats to Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, is sheer madness.

Allowing Iran to retain its nuclear program, with the likelihood that this would lead to their acquiring such a weapon, would only give it more power to carry on its war against the West. It is true that Trump does not have appeasing Iran as his goal, as was the case with Obama. No fool, he knows the difference between a worthless agreement and one that would actually defend America's interests, as the accord Witkoff seems to be working for clearly would not.

But the same cannot be said for Carlson's position on Iran. His stand seems unquestionably rooted in a desire to abandon American strategic interests in the region, imperil Israel, and empower the West-hating Iranians' Qatari alley.

When one combines this with his willingness to engage in advocacy against the war in Gaza that is being fought against Iran's Hamas allies, which is, like the same positions taken by woke left-wingers, inextricably linked to anti-Semitism, it's hard to avoid this conclusion that his hysteria about those who oppose appeasement of Iran is motivated by something other than American patriotism.

Carlson's soft spot for Iran and hostility for the Jewish state was no secret even during his salad days at Fox, when Israel was a word that was seldom if ever spoken on the network between 8 and 9 p.m. Well, we don't know yet what Trump will ultimately do with respect to Iran and its nuclear program. But we do know that a person whose ill-intentioned motives are obvious seems to have his ear and is seeking to persuade him to do something on that issue.

that is against the interests of America and its Middle East allies, as well as morally dubious. Thanks for listening. Please remember to tune in every day for Jonathan Tobin Daily Edition and every week for Think Twice, my full-length JNS TV program. Whether you're listening to us on any of the podcast platforms or on the JNS YouTube channel, please like and or subscribe to JNS.

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