Trump's Failures in Israel and Ukraine (Connor Echols & Robert Wright)

August 23, 2025·1 hr·4 clips

A former Israeli military intelligence chief — considered a centrist — said killing 50 Palestinians per Israeli death on October 7 was necessary.

Housekeeping comes first. The public conversation opens with Non-Zero membership business before Conor Eccles sets up the weekend edition as a foreign-policy news conversation. Then Israel takes over. Eccles points to news that, in his words, looks past the nail in the coffin of a two-state solution and toward an Israeli one-state direction. Wright keeps coming back to leverage. His claim is plain: if the goal is to end the war, pressure has to fall on Israel. Trump is the recurring test case. Wright sees him as unwilling to push the party that most needs pushing, and he suggests that pattern reaches beyond Israel. The mood is bleak, openly so. Eccles brings in a disturbing example from Israeli media: a former Israeli general and head of Israeli military intelligence defending Palestinian deaths after October 7. The numbers matter. The comment he cites treats fifty Palestinian deaths, including children, for each Israeli death as necessary, while Eccles says even low-end Gaza Ministry of Health estimates have gone far beyond that ratio. For Eccles, the remark is not just one ugly quote. It points to where Israeli political discourse has moved. Ukraine enters as the contrast. Wright says he may part ways with some Quincy colleagues because he favors stronger leverage on Russia, including incrementally threatened and delivered arms shipments to Ukraine. That is what gives the episode its shape. The question is whether Trump could apply pressure in ways that improve both Israel and Ukraine. No tidy answer lands in the public portion. The closing beat sends listeners to overtime, where Eccles says another question may clarify a link between the two wars. It is sober without being staged. The value is hearing two foreign-policy generalists test leverage, responsibility, and political fear without pretending the cases are the same.

As heard by us

A sharp, grim conversation about Trump, leverage, Israel, and Ukraine.

Trump's failures in Israel and Ukraine are framed less as personal chaos than as a refusal to use American leverage where it might matter. Conor Eccles and Robert Wright move from Israel's drift away from any two-state horizon toward a harder one-state reality, then circle…

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Trump's leverage, Israel's war, and Ukraine in one careful foreign-policy conversation.

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