A Failure of Imagination: Why the West Keeps Betting its Enemies will Come Around| With Cliff May

A sixth-grade teacher in an American public school gets flown to Doha. First class, five-star hotel. Nobody asks her for anything — they just send her home with some curriculum, some textbooks and a few maps. Cliff May founded the Foundation for Defense of Democracies one week before 9/11. He'd spent a decade at the New York Times before that, so he knows how a story gets built. In this conversation he traces one lie from Soviet disinformation desks to "Israel pushed us into Iraq" to "Israel is dragging us into Iran" to whatever version is in your feed tonight — and argues it isn't a rumor problem, it's a purchase. An influence operation doesn't need you to say nice things about Qatar. It only needs you talking about somebody else. A week before the towers came down, two people walked into Cliff May's office to tell him the country was asleep. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN, and Jack Kemp, the former congressman and Housing and Urban Development secretary, had a thesis and nobody to test it. America, they said, was taking a holiday from history — the Wall was down, the Soviet Union was gone, and the country had decided it no longer had enemies. Then they read him a list: Beirut in 1983. New York in 1993. Saudi Arabia in 1996. Two embassies in Africa in 1998. The USS Cole in 2000. "Is anybody looking at these and trying to connect the dots?" He took the assignment. Nine days later he had an answer he hadn't gone looking for, and the rest of his career — he quit the New York Times and built the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. This conversation is about what he's watched since. Not only the conspiracy theories that trail every American war — the Jews were warned about 9/11, Israel pushed America into Iraq, Israel is dragging America toward Iran — but the habit underneath them: a West that keeps betting its adversaries will eventually come around. Iran in 1979 and China after the WTO already ran that experiment and already returned the result. And then the part that costs money. May's argument is that the deflection is bought, not merely believed — and that an influence operation doesn't have to purchase silence about itself, only a different subject. He describes the offer made to junior people around Washington, the reach of that money into American K-12 classrooms, and why "don't talk about us, talk about the Jews" is the cheapest line item on the menu. In this episode: • Kirkpatrick, Kemp, and the memo that became FDD — written the week before 9/11 • Why he says the 1979 revolution in Iran was Islamic, not Iranian, and how al-Qaeda grew out of it • Misinformation versus disinformation, and why a platform now does for free what the KGB needed a service to do • Mearsheimer and Walt went looking for foreign influence over US policy — and walked past the largest source of it • What hundreds of billions of dollars actually buys in Washington • The sixth-grade teacher who flew first class to Doha, and the curriculum she brought home • Carlos the Jackal's prison book, and the coalition it argued for • 1979: the Iranian communists who joined the revolution and were jailed and executed by the state they helped build • Twelver Shiism, the Mahdi, and what "reconcile competing interests" means when the interest is death to America • Why letting China into the WTO was, in his words, a noble experiment that already returned its result • The cognitive war Israel is winning on the ground and losing on the screen • Yahya Sinwar: "I don't want a villa. I don't want a Mercedes." • Why he thinks the K-12 finding is more disturbing than the campus one Guest: Clifford D. May is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the host of the Foreign Podicy podcast. He spent a decade at the New York Times as a city reporter, a foreign correspondent in Africa, a Washington correspondent and an editor of the Sunday magazine. His essay "Know Thine Enemy" was published in April 2026. More at https://www.fdd.org Mentioned in this episode: • Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand — https://iupress.org/9780253045041/israel-denial/ (note: link is a placeholder — see production notes) • John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby" • Matt Pottinger, chair of FDD's China Program • FDD, Mapping Qatar's Footprint in the United States — https://www.fdd.org/qatarmoneyusa The Honest Take is HonestReporting's interview show — going past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and about the people covering it. Hosted by Ben Chertoff. 🎧 All episodes: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 🍏 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG ▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 If this gave you something to think about, do us a favor — leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 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