Sean O'Keefe returns for his third appearance on the show — and this time, he's not pulling punches. Three months into the war with Iran, the former Secretary of the Navy and NASA Administrator makes the case that nobody in Washington can articulate what winning actually looks like. Not the White House, not the Pentagon, not the people who sent troops into the region in the first place.
We go deep on what's actually changed since this conflict started: allies quietly pulling out of joint exercises, a "blockade to nowhere" in the Strait of Hormuz, and a trade war with Canada that looks a lot like a distraction from a war we can't define the objective of. O'Keefe and I go back and forth on whether tariffs make sense as an industrial security play, whether nuclear non-proliferation is even a realistic policy goal anymore, and whether NATO was ever really about shared values or just shared fear of Russia.
In this episode:
- Why nobody has defined what "winning" the Iran war means
- The Strait of Hormuz blockade and what it has and hasn't accomplished
- South Korea, NATO, and the alliance fallout from years of unpredictable US commitments
- The case for and against tariffs as industrial policy, not just trade policy
- Whether the US can still meaningfully prevent nuclear proliferation
- What role America should play in a multipolar world it didn't choose to enter
Sean O'Keefe served as Secretary of the Navy and Administrator of NASA, and has spent decades at the intersection of national security policy and public administration. This is his third time on the show.
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