Talk show host Tucker Carlson skewered Sen. Ted Cruz, R.-Texas, in what could be considered a minute-and-a-half version of the meme “The worst person you know just made a great point.”
In a segment of his show released Tuesday, Carlson bombarded Cruz with questions related to his support for regime change in Iran as the U.S. supports Israel's war on Iran. And Carlson was effective — despite being motivated by right-wing isolationist ideas rather than progressive anti-war sentiment.
It is important to know basic demographic facts about a state one is calling for subverting.
“How many people live in Iran, by the way?” Carlson asks at the start of the clip.
“I don’t know the population,” Cruz replies.
“At all?” Carlson asks.
“No, I don’t know the population,” Cruz says.
“You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?” Carlson presses.
After Carlson tells Cruz that Iran has about 90 million people, he asks, “How could you not know that?”
Cruz retorts that he doesn’t “sit around memorizing population tables.”
Carlson insists it’s relevant because Cruz is calling for the overthrow of the government. He then quizzes Cruz about the ethnic makeup of Iran, and eventually Cruz erupts in exasperation, saying, “This is cute,” and defending himself by saying, “OK, I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran.”
Some might say Carlson pounced on Cruz with gotcha questions. But it is important to know basic demographic facts about a state one is calling for subverting through brutal bombardment and potentially other kinds of attacks.
From a strictly strategic perspective, it is crucial to have an understanding of the population of a country that would — assuming regime change efforts are successful — experience a period of mass instability and displacement in a region of acute geopolitical interest to the U.S. Consider, for example, how the U.S.’s naivete about ethnic sectarianism in Iraq played a role in dooming its imperialistic nation-building efforts there and created fertile soil for the emergence of ISIS. And it makes sense for Carlson to point out that Iran is not a small country. It should affect how the American public perceives what kind of war it could be getting into, and what Iran’s capacity to retaliate against Israel in the long term might be.
But it’s just as important on a moral, humanistic level to have a basic familiarity with a population one is proposing to wreak havoc on through the use of force. Despite what the hawks might want the U.S. public to believe, Iran is not a bunker filled with cartoon villains. It’s a vast country with a rich cultural, political and social history. It's a country filled with tens of millions of people, the vast majority of whom are just trying to live their lives like in any other country in the world. And acknowledging the texture of that reality makes it harder to propose taking a wrecking ball to it.
Despite what the hawks might want the U.S. public to believe, Iran is not a bunker filled with cartoon villains.
Distaste for facts or realistic appraisals of threats is integral to the case for war. Cruz has recently called Iran getting a nuclear weapon “the most acute threat the United States faces today,” which is utter nonsense. Iran is an economically struggling regional power in the Middle East that doesn’t have nuclear weapons; it is far less of a threat to the U.S. than Russia and China, or North Korea, which has nuclear weapons and some demonstrable ability to send them far distances.
Despite Cruz’s fearmongering about the prospect of a “mushroom cloud over New York City or Los Angeles,” the U.S. has many other more realistic threats to worry about. And neither Cruz nor any of his war-hungry colleagues have explained why Iran wouldn’t theoretically be deterred from using nuclear weapons by the same principle that has long prevented nuclear warfare around the world: mutually assured destruction.
Throughout the rest of the interview clip, Carlson pushes Cruz to clarify how dangerous Iran actually is and what the exact scope of the U.S.’s involvement in Israel’s operations are. And he does it with a kind of doggedness often absent from mainstream reporters when they interrogate American politicians about war.
Carlson’s positions don’t come from a humanitarian perspective or a principled defense of sovereignty — consider how soft he is on Russia as it dominates Ukraine. Rather, his ideological case against foreign involvement comes from a right-wing nationalist preference for withdrawal from the world and a skepticism of interventionism that is at least partially rooted in bigotry in some instances. (Carlson has said Iraq “wasn’t worth invading” because it’s filled with “semiliterate primitive monkeys.”)
Ultimately, Carlson’s skepticism of involvement in Iran aligns with where much of the Republican base appears to be at the moment. According to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted between June 13 and June 16, only 23% of Republicans think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Iran and Israel. We will see if Carlson and his faction prevail in the war of ideas — and policy — in the coming weeks.
