Horton, Scott & Dubowitz, Mark
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This episode is a live, frequently combative debate (rather than a single-guest interview) between two longtime opponents on Iran policy, moderated by Lex, covering the June 2025 Israel-US strikes on Iran's nuclear program (Operation Midnight Hammer, including the B-2 strike on the deeply buried Fordow facility) and the deep history behind it. Dubowitz lays out the establishment/hawkish case: Iran is a designated state sponsor of terrorism that has killed and maimed thousands of Americans since 1979 (Khobar Towers, Iraq War EFP bombs, hostage-taking, assassination attempts on dissidents like Masih Alinejad); it built covert, deeply buried enrichment facilities (Natanz, Fordow) it never voluntarily disclosed; the "AMAD" program (documented, he argues, in a nuclear archive Mossad extracted from a Tehran warehouse and analyzed at length by physicist David Albright) shows Iran had an active weapons program to build five warheads that only paused, not ended, after the 2003 Iraq invasion; and its 60%-enriched uranium stockpile represents "99% of the steps" to weapons-grade material. He argues Iran should be held to the "gold standard" applied to 23 other countries with civilian nuclear power (fuel rods bought abroad, no enrichment or reprocessing), calls the 2015 JCPOA fatally flawed because its "sunset" provisions would have let Iran emerge by 2031 with an unrestricted industrial-scale program, and frames the strikes as a case of "peace through strength" — narrow, selective, deterrence-restoring force intended to drive Iran back to negotiations for "zero enrichment, full dismantlement," while explicitly opposing regime-change/decapitation strikes as risking chaotic collapse and loose nuclear material.
Horton, from an antiwar/libertarian non-interventionist position, disputes nearly every factual premise: he argues Iran never had an active weapons program after 2003 per the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate, that the "smoking laptop" and the 2018 Mossad archive both trace back to the same discredited MEK (Mojahedin-e-Khalq) cult-sourced forgeries, that Iran's 60% enrichment was a reactive bargaining chip (in response to the 2020 assassination of scientist Fakhrizadeh and 2021 Natanz sabotage, both attributed to Israel) rather than a weapons push, and that Iran's real posture has always been a "latent nuclear deterrent" (like Japan, Germany, or Brazil) meant to deter attack, not an offensive first-strike threat — a point he notes even Netanyahu and Ehud Barak conceded to Jeffrey Goldberg. He traces a long chain of what he calls provoked or engineered conflicts: the JCPOA (which he says was working, shipping Iran's enriched stockpile to Russia/France) was needlessly abandoned by Trump in 2018; the Iraq War EFP-bomb narrative blaming Iran was, he argues, fabricated propaganda debunked by embedded reporters finding US/UAE-made components; the 1996 Israeli shelling of a UN compound at Qana (which he says directly radicalized 9/11 plotters Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh) and US support for Israel more broadly are, in his account, the primary drivers of anti-American terrorism, not Iran; and North Korea's actual nuclear breakout followed the Bush/Bolton unraveling of Clinton's 1994 Agreed Framework. He repeatedly invokes the "Israel lobby" (naming FDD specifically) as a distorting force in US foreign policy, prompting sharp exchanges with Dubowitz (an Iranian-born naturalized American) over accusations of divided loyalty, which Lex intervenes to police as unfair.
Despite the friction, the two converge on some points: both agree Iran deserves civilian nuclear energy in principle (disagreeing only on whether that requires domestic enrichment), both criticize the "Russiagate" investigation as having wrongly paralyzed Trump's first-term diplomacy, both are skeptical of the Assad-to-al-Jolani transition in Syria as a large unproven bet, and both name their shared "best case" as a return to Oman negotiations resulting in a deal — Dubowitz insisting it must mean full dismantlement, Horton insisting any deal must preserve some enrichment right or the Ayatollah will never sign. On broader themes, Horton articulates a libertarian foreign-policy vision (the non-aggression principle applied internationally, a minimal deterrent of "a couple of good submarines," America as neutral broker/peace-conference host, and skepticism that "isolationism" is anything but a smear term for non-interventionism), while Dubowitz argues American power and credible deterrence — not disarmament or trust — is what has kept the postwar order stable, drawing an explicit parallel between 1930s isolationist rhetoric emboldening Hitler and today's non-interventionist voices (which he says Khamenei misjudged, much as Hitler misjudged FDR's constraints) — a parallel Horton pushes back against as "overlearning" WWII lessons and projecting them onto every subsequent conflict. Both express concern that failed diplomacy or unresolved strikes could trigger a wider nuclear proliferation cascade (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and East Asian US allies reconsidering their own programs), though they disagree on whether the strikes make that cascade more or less likely. The episode closes with both men, despite deep disagreement, expressing hope for America's future and closing on Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex and the moral cost of militarism.
Excerpts
On Dubowitz's core framing of Iran's enrichment stockpile as nearly weapons-ready:
“Once you have 60% enriched uranium, you've done 99% of all the steps, including some of the steps that Scott's talking about. You've done 99% of what you need to have weapons-grade... They have assembled about 15 to 17 bombs worth of 60% enriched uranium.”
On Horton's counter-argument that the enrichment escalation was reactive, not offensive, and that "trust but verify" was never about trusting Iran:
“The only reason they were enriching up to 60% was in reaction to Israeli sabotage... Ronald Reagan, trust but verify means do not trust at all. It means be polite while you verify... I don't take their word for anything... I sat here and explained to you exactly how I know who was building those EFP bombs in Iraq.”
On the closing, rare point of near-agreement about the risk of the strikes provoking rather than deterring an Iranian bomb:
“Dubowitz: "A wounded animal is the most dangerous animal in the animal kingdom. He retains key capabilities to build weapons... Curb your enthusiasm." Horton: "Who thinks that if they break out and try to start making nukes now that any hawks supporting this war will take responsibility for driving them to it?”