Why This War? A Conversation on Iran
Pankaj Mishra, Ben Rhodes, and Suzy Hansen on Iran
New York Review contributors Pankaj Mishra, Ben Rhodes, and Suzy Hansen come together for a wide-ranging conversation on what the war in Iran means for the future of US politics and America’s place in the world.
This conversation originally aired on April 22, 2026.
Pankaj Mishra is an essayist and novelist, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books and The New Yorker, and the author of two books of history, From the Ruins of Empire and Age of Anger: A History of the Present. His most recent book is The World After Gaza: A History of the Present. He is a cofounder of Equator, a new magazine of politics and culture.
Ben Rhodes is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, co-host of Pod Save the World, a contributor to MSNBC, and the author of two New York Times bestsellers—After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We Made and The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House—as well as the upcoming book All We Say: The Battle for American Identity. From 2009 to 2017, he served as Deputy National Security Advisor and speechwriter to President Barack Obama, participating in all of the President’s key foreign policy decisions. His work has also been published in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.
Suzy Hansen is a journalist, author and editor. She is the author of From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan, which is being published in April 2026. Her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, was a 2018 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan award. She has taught writing at Bard College and Princeton University, and in 2020, she was a fellow at New America. She lives in New York.
I’ve been pushing back against the Trump—Mad and/or senile narrative. Yes, his view of the world and his place in it is profoundly at odds with reality, but given his understanding of these things, his behavior and his statements are internally coherent—not the manifestation of cognitive decline. His recent rhetoric on Iran is, to my mind, in the style of aggressive deal making that he has practiced for decades. You overwhelm your adversary in “negotiations” with crazy threats to obliterate him unless he gives in to your demands. Likely something he learned at the knee of Roy Cohn…. He has no understanding of the nuances of diplomacy because the business world he comes out of has no place for it—it runs on fear and intimidation (and large doses of duplicity). His cognitive “error” is to take to extremes the neoliberal idea that has gained more and more purchase since the Reagan years that government should be run like a business. Trump comes out of a cutthroat business, and runs his administration accordingly.