May 17, 2025 • 38 mins
Newt talks with Ilan Berman, Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C., about President Trump’s four-day, three-nation visit to the Middle East this week. President Trump's visit marked a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy, focusing on economic engagement and regional security. During his trip, Trump announced multi-billion dollar deals with Gulf nations, including a major order for Boeing jets from Qatar, signaling a strong U.S. commitment to the region. The President’s visit also included lifting sanctions on Syria and meeting with Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. The Trump administration's renewed diplomacy with Iran aims to forge a more comprehensive and lasting nuclear agreement, amidst ongoing regional tensions. Berman highlights Trump's transformational approach, prioritizing economic opportunities and strategic partnerships over traditional nation-building efforts.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of newts World. President Trump concluded a
four day, three nation visit to the Middle East this week,
where he announced multi billion dollar deals for USAir companies,
including a large order from Gutter for Boeing jets. He
announced that he would lift US sanctions on Syria and
met with Syria's new president, Akman al Shara, and he
(00:25):
suggested there has been progress in nuclear talks with Iran
for long term peace. Here to discuss President Trump's trip
to the Middle East. I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
Elon Berman. He is Senior Vice president of the American
Foreign Policy Council in Washington, d C. An expert on
regional security in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the
Russian Federation. He has consulted for the US Central Intelligence
(00:49):
Agency as well as the US Departments of State and Defense,
and provided assistance on foreign policy and national security issues
to a range of governmental agencies and congressional office. Leon,
(01:14):
welcome and thank you for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Oh, thank you so much for having me back.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Okay, now we're going to talk about Trump this week,
but just for I'm going to share with our audience
what you were telling me about your last week when
you were in Europe.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
All right, Well, I just got back from a couple
of weeks on the road. I was in Europe first
where I got caught in the Iberian blackout that we saw,
and then I traveled to Israel, where I caught the
tail end of the disruption from the hoothy ballistic missile
attack on the Israeli national airport on Bencourine Airport. So
(01:49):
I've been told that I'm not a safe companion to
travel with.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I was gonna say, you managed to find ways to
say keep life interesting. So I mean you have a
look at this for a long time. What is this
year overview of this trip. What do you think is
the long term significance of President Trump's visit.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Well, I think it's useful to remember that President Trump's
outing to the Middle East in his first term in
office was enormously successful, and it had very much the
same trajectory. The idea was to raise America's profile in
the region. The idea was to build assurance and demonstrate
that the United States is fully engaged in the region.
(02:31):
But the context this time, I think is a little
bit different because the administration advisedly has a quite different
foreign policy than it did the last time. The Abraham Accords,
the normalization wave with Israel as a far lower priority,
But the administration is making a very high stakes gamble
on renewed diplomacy with Iran, with the Islamic Republic of Iran,
(02:52):
and so I saw that as the strategic backdrop for
everything that the President was trying to do. Because the
negotiations with Iran are ongoing, it's not clear if they're
going to succeed. What is clear is that the administration
is at pains to hammer out a deal that simultaneously
is longer, stronger, more inclusive than the twenty to fifteen
(03:14):
nuclear deal that was hammered out under President Obama. But
at the same time he has to do things to
make sure that our partners in the Persian Golf, are
partners in the Middle East more broadly, are not adversely
affected and aren't discouraged by this new diplomacy because the
fears of Tehran that you see in the Persian Gulf
(03:35):
run very deep, particularly after the last year and a half,
after they've seen what Iran's proxy network is capable of
in terms of destabilizing Israel.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
We're going to talk some about the specific visits. I
thought probably the most undercovered and amazing piece of this
was his pivot to recognize Syria and the speed with
which they pulled that off. I don't think they'd laid
the groundwork for that before he went to the region.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
No, I think this is very much an ongoing conversation,
and it's frankly, of rather risky play because up until
December of last year, until the fall of the outset regime,
Ahmed al Shara, the new Syrian president, was a specially
designated global terrorist under US law. It was only with
his rise to power that he has begun to be rehabilitated,
(04:28):
and the jury, frankly, is still out on whether there's
a good reason to rehabilitate him. He's certainly talking a
more inclusive talk, but in terms of the policies that
he's implementing, in terms of his control over Syria as
a whole, I think that's very much an open question.
And so clearly the Trump administration's pivot and the relaxation,
(04:50):
the rolling back of sanctions on Syria is an enormously
important symbolic move. I would have liked to see a
little bit more of upfront guarantees from the Syrian that
they were willing to do the hard things that they
need in order to get reintegrated back into the international community.
Because now the floodgates are open, and you can see
over the last couple of days since the President's decision,
(05:12):
since the President's announcement, that the Europeans are relaxing sanctions,
and there's this sort of domino effect that's beginning to
take place. What I worry about is I worry about
Ahmed Alshara, given his history of Islamic radicalism, given the
weakness of his transitional government. I'm concerned that without getting
assurances from him, without putting concrete points on the board,
(05:34):
this may send the wrong signals.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Why do you think that Turkish president won and the
Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed ben Salmon, why do you think
they were so interested in getting because apparently Trump did
this in response to two of them.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
No, I think that's right. And also the Qatari government
is very heavily beginning to invest, very heavily in Syria,
and I think there's a logic there in the sense
that sanctions aren't supposed to be forever, and they're supposed
to be able to be rolled back or changed or
relaxed over time if conditions on the ground warrant, and
the sanctions, in particular US sanctions were oriented towards, specifically
(06:12):
towards the Osset regime. So there's a lot of there
there in terms of rationale for doing it. But there's
also lingering concerns, lingering concerns about Ahmed al Shara's radicalism,
lingering concerns about the fact that given how he governed
when his group Hayatafrira Alsham was in charge in the
Syrian city of Idlib, he governed in a very absolutist,
(06:35):
draconian manner, and we're worried that this may actually begin
to apply to Syria as a whole right, which will
create sectarian tensions. And we're worried about, frankly, about which
partners he's going to choose, because the Iranians may be
down in Syria, but they're not out clearly Ahmed al Shara,
who is soon he has no love lost for the
(06:56):
type of Shiite sectarian Islamism political Islam that Iran is promoting,
but the Iranians still have a presence there. More specifically,
the Russians still have a presence there. They still have
a military presence both in the port city of Tartus
and at the air base north of Tartus at Hamemimi.
And there's a worry that the Russians saw the overthrow
(07:20):
of ASA, their longtime partner, in December, as this really
grievous strategic blow. But what we're seeing now is that
the Russians are actually they may not be thriving, but
they're certainly surviving in Syria. They are engaging in a
quiet dialogue with al Shara, They're beginning to sort of
to husband their resources. They still have a military presence
on the ground. So I think there's a lot of
(07:41):
question marks about the future direction of Syria. And this
is clearly an attempt and an attempt encouraged by the
Saudis and by the Qataris and by the Immordis to
nudge Syria in the proper direction. I'm worried that we
might go too far, too fast.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
But isn't that sort of typical of Trump?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Oh? Absolutely, This is why I think it's necessary to understand.
And when we look at what he did in the
Middle East, it's striking. I frankly think what he said
in the Middle East was even more striking when he
gave that speech in Saudi Arabia, and he verbally, out front,
vocally repudiated sort of the nation building, the human rights
(08:19):
first campaigns that predominated the Biden administration's approach to Saudi Arabia.
That was intended as assurance, that was intended that America's
engaged in America's going to moralize less, but it also
changed the tenor of how the United States has moved
around the region, at least historically, and I think there's
going to be ripple effects from that. They are going
(08:41):
to be felt for a long time if we're no
longer focused on civil society, on building societies, on human rights,
on enshrining values, and we're just focused on this mercantilist
trade policy that benefits us certainly in terms of the
bottom line in the near term, but I think there's
long term effects that may make region less hospitable for
American ideas and American values in the long run.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
We had adopted a policy of trying to create sort
of a standard which clearly most of our allies in
the region didn't live up to. But at the same time,
I look at the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia, who's
in a sense a mixed bag in that the CIA
has concluded that he did orchestrate, or at least to
prove the killing of the Washington Post reporter Jamal Kashoki.
(09:27):
On the other hand, I look at what he's doing
on say tourism. This is not going to be Saudi
Arabia in the sense that it was thirty years ago.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
There's going to be too many people, no listen, absolutely,
and it's already not And I remember the black time
I was in Saudi was a few years ago, but
even then it was already in motion. There was already
commingling of sexes in restaurants, there was already music. And
I think the listeners have to understand that these things
are moving in Saudi Arabia at a lightning pace. And
they're moving at a lightning pace, frankly, not because Saudi
(09:59):
Arabia is reforming. It's because Saudi Arabia is modernizing. And
I think all of this goes back to the Saudi
Vision twenty thirty. And if your listeners are interested, you
can go online. You can google Vision twenty thirty and
what you'll see is a very flashy website that lays
out all of the priorities, but the basic underlying premise
is that Saudi Arabia, the ruling House of Saud, figured
(10:21):
out several years ago that they have to pivot to
being a non oil or a more diversified, non oil
first economy. And in order to do that, they have
to invest in high tech, and they have to invest
in infrastructure, and they have to invest in all sorts
of things that require frankly large amounts of foreign direct investment.
(10:41):
And when foreign investors come to Saudi Arabia, they like
to do things like drink, and they like to have
their wives and girlfriends be able to drive, and they
like to shop independently, and all of this changes that
we see in Saudi society. They're very salutary, but they're
also driven by economic necessity. And where I land is
(11:01):
sort of in the middle. I am delighted to see
the changes in Saudi Arabian, but I also believe that
American engagement without articulating that we actually expect some degree
of governmental transparency, some degree of protections for civilians, for citizens,
some degree of personal freedoms leads you down a slippery slope
(11:22):
where you could end up in a few years acting
very much like the Chinese do in Africa, where it's
value free investing. It's enshrining these very repressive and frankly,
very sclerotic sort of regime. So I think where the
pendulum is swinging, and the way it usually does these
days in American politics, it tends to swing pretty wildly
(11:43):
from one extreme to the other. And we're going from
the extreme of the Biden administration, which was all lecturing,
no meaningful engagement, to I hope I'm wrong, but to
something that looks decidedly mercantile.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I remember in nineteen ninety one when we sent an
expeditionary force because Saddam had seized Kuwait. We had a
big argument with the Saudis about American women driving military trucks.
We won the argument. We just said flatly, this is
how we're going to do it. But at the time
it was a shocking revolutionary behavior. And I think about
(12:20):
the Saudi Arabia that existed in nineteen ninety and the
Saudi Arabia now. It seems to me there is a
certain part of modernity which inherently has to open a
country up. I mean the Chinese tried to counter that
with a toutilitarian structure, but overall, it's very hard to
be part of the modern commercial world and not have
(12:41):
all sorts of things leaking into your society that are uncontrollable.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
No, I think that's exactly right. And there's also the
rhythm of time that kicks in here also. I mean,
all these changes that are happening in Saudi society, you
can imagine them getting rolled back now, but it's harder
to imagine than when they were first instituted a couple
of years ago, and ten years from now it's going
to be harder still. They get locked in over time.
So this is absolutely a salutary trajectory. This is absolutely
(13:08):
the trajectory that we want. But it's okay for us
to be able to say this is good. We like this,
we like this greater openness. And by the way, I
read the President's billions of dollars of deals with the Saudis,
you know, the one trillion dollar agreement with the Kataris
as a very overt signal that America is here, America
(13:30):
is not going anywhere. There's no choices about pivots to Asia.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
What do you think the long term significance is of
the share scale of the deals that were being made
this week?
Speaker 2 (13:58):
This is clearly important from vo from a practical level
and from a symbolic level. Right symbolically, it's an overt
signal to the countries in the region that are worried
about the overwhelming focus on China that some speculate may
become the orienting frame of the Trump administration. There's certainly
(14:18):
folks here in Washington who are China firsters. And I
don't mean China firsters as in they prefer China. It's
China firsters, as in that's the pacing threat that should
be the dominant concern of American foreign policy. And I
symbolically I saw the deals as very much a repudiation
of that. A signal to the golf monarchy is that
America is there, America's engaged, the American commitment to regional
(14:42):
security is important and is well lasting. I also saw
this as in a practical sense, as this is I
think a very bold way to try to improve market competitiveness.
And the China frame does overlay all this because it's
it's necessary to understand that what President Trump has done
(15:03):
has been to make America competitive again in the context
of the involvement and investment in the golf monarchies, because
what we've seen over the last several years, as the
Biden administration has taken a vaccine, has really fallen into
this more hectoring, lecturing tone which dominated until very late
in President Biden's tenure. You saw billions upon billions of
(15:27):
dollars of Chinese investment in the region. The Chinese were
really moving in. We were trying to engage politically, they
were engaging, and they were successful in engaging economically. And
I see these trade deals as a practical step, a
way to increase America's competitiveness in the region by doing
these economic lash ups, by doing deals that rebound to
(15:51):
the durability of America's bonds with the region.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Trump is a profoundly transformational President Trump's now, at least
in this trip going around the planet scooping up money.
It's a totally different experience from anything we've seen, and
it fits his whole focus, which is if he can
get the United States to become once again the dominant
arsenal of democracy, then the Chinese can't compete with us
(16:19):
because the sheer scale of investment. One of the things
that hit me. I'm curious since you were also in Europe,
but I recently ran across a chart of the ten
largest tank forces in the world. There's not a single
European country on the chart. And in fact, if you
took all of the tanks in NATO outside the United States,
they collectively wouldn't have gotten on the chart because the
(16:41):
center of power has shifted so far out of the world.
You and I were born into same things happening here.
I mean, there is no European country that could match
any of these three countries in scale of investment.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
That's absolutely correct, and I think your point about building
the arsenal of democracy is exactly right. I think this
is a great first step. I do hope that that
latter part is not silent right, that these countries, as
robust as their economies are, understand that the United States
(17:17):
benefits in the strategic partnership with the United States. Benefits
not just from the trade deals, but from them aligning
with us not on every value, but on some values,
and aligning with us in terms of our vision for
regional security. And that's why I made the point about
this being about assurance. Also because simultaneously the President is
making a very risky, high stakes play to try to
(17:39):
hammer out some sort of deal with the Iranian regime.
It's not clear that this deal is going to succeed.
It's not clear that the Iranians are going to come
to terms. What is clear, though, is that Iran is
in its weakest point, both economically and politically in decades.
The Iranian ring of fire that they tried to build
(17:59):
around Israel in preceding years has effectively been taken apart,
been picked apart by the Israeli defense forces. It's not
fully disaggregated, but the wartime collapse of Hisbada in Lebanon,
the fall of the Asad regime in Damascus, the Huthis
remain a problem. But I think it's fair to say
that Israel's in a much better strategic position now than
(18:19):
they were a year ago. The Iranian at home, eighty
percent of Iranians now right according to a recent poll,
fundamentally reject the structure of the Islamic Republic and want
a different form of government. Right. This is murder for
an ideological regime and so what you have is you
have a regime in Tehran that's very incentivized to do
a deal. The secret sauce, though, as they say, is
(18:43):
to do a deal that benefits America and really hobbles
the Iranian threat potential over time. And here what the
President talked about when he got us out of the
Obama era jcpoa joined Comprehensive Plan of Action back in
May of twenty eighteen. It still attaches right. His objections
(19:04):
were threefold. The deal was too short. All of its
provisions expired in a decade, some of them substantially before then.
It was too generous. There's too much sanctions relief that
was given to the Iranian regime. And it was too narrow.
It didn't cover things like ballistic missiles and proxies and
things like that. So the president's idea in his first
term was to do a deal that was more comprehensive,
(19:26):
more lasting, more sweeping, and more restrictive. We still have
those objectives. I think the problem that we have now
is we are half a decade further in time from
when we were able to really effectuate change on this.
The Iranian nuclear program is more mature, and the Iranians
have really gotten comfortable with having an indigenous uranium enrichment capability,
(19:50):
a capability to enrich fissile material at home. Here's the problem.
We may hammer out a deal with Iran that limits
their nuclear potential, that limits the range of their ballistic missiles,
that really ramps up international inspections. But if we seed
the case on them having a domestic enrichment capability, it
(20:14):
sets the table in a different way for everybody who's
coming down the pike. Because the Saudis right where the
President just was, the Saudis also want a nuclear program.
Why would the Saudis ask for anything less or expect
to receive anything less than the Iranians get. So if
we enshrine, if we create a framework where Iran's domestic
(20:35):
uranium and richmond capability is enriched, strengthened, or entrined in
some way, then that becomes the floor of any future
negotiations that we have with countries in the region who
also want this capability. And I think that puts us
on a really slippery slope. So it's a long way
of saying the President is engaged in really high stakes negotiation.
(20:56):
And so that's the frame that's the backdrop for everything
that he was doing in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates
in Guitar. The goal here is, I think very much,
to reassure allies, because those allies, just like I am
here in Washington, those allies and their respective capitals are
watching those negotiations close.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
I think in the last two weeks, the Iranian resistance
identified a new nuclear facility that we didn't even know existed,
which just strikes me that when you're dealing with a dictatorship,
there's a whole question here of whether or not you
can ever have an inspection regime that is tight enough
(21:36):
and serious enough that it actually cripples them.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I think you answered the question already, right. You can't.
By the way, this is precisely why when you talk
to Israeli officials, I was just an israel I was
talking to a whole range of officials about the Iranian
nuclear program. As you can imagine, they're very concerned, but
they never talk about eliminating the Iranian nuclear program because
they make precisely this point. Right, authoritarian regime, it has
(22:02):
very tight controls on information. We simply don't know where
everything is, and this is a vexing challenge if somebody's
thinking about military action against Iran like these Raelis are now.
But it's also a vexing challenge if we're trying to
camer out some sort of monitoring framework, because the Iranian
nuclear program is built for stealth, it's built for clandestine development,
(22:23):
and we don't know where everything is well.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
I mean, I remember getting briefed in two thousand and
one on the scale of their underground program. Now they've
had a quarter century to expand all this. On the
other hand, I think Trump is in a real dilemma
because we probably can do very substantial damage between the
US and Israeli forces. If we decide to do that.
(22:48):
We wouldn't try to occupy Iran, we just take out
a lot of facilities. But at the same time, I
think the President would like to not do that, and
I'm not sure he can get to an agreement that's real,
and I worry that they will gradually talk themselves into
accepting a paper agreement that's not real.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
I think that's exactly right. The Iranian negotiating strategy, I
think has been very consistent over time, and you sort
of dial the clock back and look at the way
they negotiated the twenty fifteen JCPOA, and it's very clear
the goal was for them to draw out the negotiations
to buy time to add permanence to their nuclear effort,
and I think that's their plan. Now they're more constrained
(23:30):
in terms of their political stability, in terms of their
economic solvency, and that's something that we can play with,
but fundamentally, no agreement is going to alter this regime's
will to nuclear power. We're not going to do it.
They see nuclear possession as an element of regional hegemony,
but frankly more importantly as an element of regime stability.
(23:52):
Because if you look at the demographics of the Islamic Republic, right,
it's eighty eight and a half million people. Two thirds
of the population is thirty four I think thirty six
now or younger, and the leadership is a generation and
a half older than that, right, decades older than that.
So this is a regime that's rapidly approaching. In fact,
some would say it has already approached and passed. It's
(24:12):
sell by date. The people are young, the people are
increasingly Western orient that they're wired. They may not know
exactly what structure of government they want, but they know
what they don't want. They really don't like this regime
because they've been an economic failure to thrive. There's a
real sense that the regime, because of its ideological restrictions,
is holding them back from interacting in a meaningful way
(24:33):
with the world. The regime sees the nuclear program as
an insurance policy for precisely this eventuality. You have an
increasingly unpopular, aging regime, an arrestive and increasingly westward looking population.
The thing that sort of levels the playing field for
the Ayatolas is if they have a capability that scares
(24:55):
the West enough that they can repress their own domestic
population without incurrent any sort of international center or any
meaningful threat of military action. That's the play, that's the
long term strategic play here. And I remember the famous
Israeli political scientist once talked two decades ago, right when
you were getting those briefings, So the Israelis were talking
(25:15):
about the fact that two trains were leaving the station,
the Iran regime change train, and I don't mean regime
changes then somebody would do it. I mean the fundamental
political transformation train and the Iranian nuclear train. We're leaving
the station at basically the same time, and if the latter,
if the nuclear train gets to the station first, the
(25:36):
first one never gets there right. And I think that formula,
frankly is still very much in effect. And so for
the Trump administration, this is a huge problem. It's a
huge problem because the long play in Iran is about
the Iranian people. It's about the long term evolution of
the regime, and so we don't want to do anything
that creates a situation where this regime, which is a
(26:01):
threat during international security, as a threat to American allies.
As the President heard himself in his touring the Gulf,
it's a predatory regime and there's no love lost in
the Gulf. We have to make sure that any deal
that we do doesn't empower them.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Would it be rational for the United States to adopt
a strategy of regime change.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
I think it's rational from a long term perspective. I
think the long game in the run is always about
the population. It's always been about the population. Whether or
not it's politically feasible to do that is a completely
different story. The American people are sick of intervention. The
American people are sick of these sort of experiments in
regime change, I don't think there's the appetite to do that,
(26:41):
and I think, to his great credit, I think the
President understands that. And I think the President understands that
despite the fact that there's a vibrant Iranian opposition, despite
the fact that eighty percent of the Iranian people now
repudiate the regime, there's really no appetite here at home
to back them in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Well, if you go back and look during the collapsing
phase of the Soviet Empire, places like Romania just suddenly collapsed.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Correct, And by the way, that's another I think chasening moment.
As we learned from Iraq and as we learned most
recently from Syria, revolutions are actually very hard to predict.
We're not good at this in historical context, and so
I think humility is in order. Right. It's not up
to us to change the regime of Iran. It's up
(27:26):
to us, though, to make sure that we don't do
things that strengthen a very bad situation. And I think
that's the proper frame to think about the negotiations.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
The other thing I thought that was striking on this
trip was the degree to which they ignored Israel, didn't
visit Israel, they didn't consult with them. I don't think
about Syria, which is clearly a direct Israeli concern. There
is no rational solution to Hamas short of destroying it,
and destroying it is a very hard problem.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
No, I think that's right. And also, I mean, by
the way this, I would say two levels. I think
the US Israeli relationship is strong. It remains strong. As
you know much better than I. The well spring of
support for Israel may change as a result of different presidencies,
but it remains very strong and very consistent overtime in Congress.
Congress is the centerpiece of the relationship. So I don't
(28:37):
have a lot of concern about this divergence. What I
do see, though, that's concerning, is that familiarity breeds contempt,
and this proximity between Washington and Jerusalem that we've seen
in the past, that we saw in the first Rump term,
I think is leading some folks in the administration to
take the israelis for granted, to say, listen, Israel doesn't
(28:58):
have any other choices. Israel's aligned with US anyway. And
when I was talking to Israeli officials. My advice to
them was that you have to put yourself in the
mindset of the president, and you have to think about
not so much about the historical glue that has held
the countries together, but what Israel has that Trump can leverage,
(29:19):
that Trump can really lean into Israel is a dramatically
dynamic innovation economy. Right. This is the reason why the
Chinese are so interested in Israel. Frankly, it's high tech,
it's AI, it's cyber, it's telecom, it's all these different things.
And by the way, one of the things that I
mentioned that raised a couple of eyebrows in my meetings
(29:42):
was Israel's also a leader in missile defense. Now, a
lot of that missile defense has been developed with American money,
that's absolutely true, but Israel is now blazing the trail
on things like directed energy defense. And the Trump administration
just passed an executive order about a Golden Dome for America,
resetting the way we think about homeland defense, which involves
(30:03):
multiple layers and involves something you and I have been
talking about for literally decades, this multi layer defense system,
not just the guard against road state threats, but to
guard against all manner of threats. Israel has a role
to play in this, It has a contribution to make
in this, and that the sooner the Israelis figure this out, frankly,
the better their bargaining power is going to be.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
That's a brilliant point. There's also a certain danger that
Trump really operates off of an intuitive sense of who
his partners are. And I'm not sure that Netnia, who
has helped himself in their most recent meetings, Trump just
sends to sort of check you off and shift to
the next interesting topic. And I think that that's part
(30:45):
right now, he's closer to the Saudi crown Prince than
he is to the Israeli Prime Minister psychologically.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Listen, I think that's absolutely right. And I think what
was striking to me when I was in Israel, and
you know, I go to Israel every year. When I
was there last summer, objectively, strategic situation was much worse.
They hadn't yet done the Northern Front against his Balla,
they hadn't yet done that second raid that popped the
lid off of the Iranian air defense architecture. Right, they
were in trouble, but the morale was much better. Fast
(31:13):
forward to last week, and in all the meetings, what
I heard was we're stuck in Gaza, right, there is
no endgame, and intuitively the Israeli people see this, and
intuitively the president understands this. There is no play. I
think Ntaniahu has really harmed himself by failing by simply
(31:34):
saying what he doesn't want to see happen in Gaza,
rather than articulating a vision for how to move forward.
Because the President frankly did him a huge favor when
he talked about I know it's sort of been bandied about,
and you know it's been ridiculed as Gaza Lago, but
in reality it was a very important point because the
President deserves credit for injecting some fresh thinking into a
(31:56):
conversation that's gotten positively sclerotic. I'm not sure the President's
plans go work, but it's clear that he changed the
conversation and that's important, and it was up to the
regional leaders and it was up to the Israelis to
run with that change of conversation to articulate a new plan,
and they haven't done that.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
People underestimate how much Trump is a developer, and so
every time I encounter something, he's wondering, can we do
a development here? The development may be military, maybe literally
a development. We were kidding at one point about that
beautiful riviera which would have a Trump Beach Hotel, two
eighteen hole Trump courses in Gaza. But his consistent instinct
(32:38):
is to pivot from a problem to an opportunity.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
I think that's absolutely right, and I think it's the
right instinct. Well for my money, what I would say
is this, there is no such thing as a day
after in Gaza. Day after is an American concept. We
Americans are impatient. We want a fix immediately. And you
saw this, by the way, throughout the conversations that the
administration had with the Israelis. Okay, almost as soon as
(33:02):
the war starts, you know, what's your plan for redevelopment? Right?
This was fundamentally premature. I think what we need to
think about is a generation after in Gaza. Cycle forward,
a full generation. Right. Let's assume that this conflict drags
on for a little bit of time. Let's assume that
coreheads eventually prevail and we do a build in Gaza
(33:24):
a generation from now. What do we want Gaza to
look like? I think it looks like three things. First
of all, security, right, because it's very clear that the
security paradigm that prevailed on October sixth between Israel and
the Palestinians turned out to be insufficient. So the Israelis
need greater security guarantees. But they have a problem, right
because there's a manpower issue. Right now, Israel is burning
(33:46):
through its reserves. It's having a real effect on the
country's economy right, inflation is rising. The idea of having
a large scale force that really just does policing in
martial law in the Gaza strip over the long term,
that's not in the cards, right, That's not in the
cards for Israel. It's not in the capabilities for Israel.
So somebody has to step in and do a bolstered security.
(34:09):
So that's the first thing. The second thing is economic reconstruction. Right.
The model in my head when I think about Gaza
a generation from now is a place like Tangier in Morocco, right,
a port with container traffic that brings in tourism, it
brings an investment, It allows for precisely that type of
development that President Trump is talking about. But in order
(34:30):
for that to happen, you have to attract investment, not
just from the United States, you have to attract investment
from all over the Middle East, right, and that leads
you to that third point, which is deradicalization. And that's
where Hamas comes in. Because if you have an international
hub like that, if you have what is basically a
service economy like that, your prerequisit has to be that
(34:52):
the government that administers it is secular and is pragmatic.
It isn't ruled by ideologues that will blow up the
whole Right, and just my personal view, I think the
Prime Minister missed a huge opportunity last summer when he
came and he spoke before the Joint Session of Congress
to lay out something like this, to say something like, look,
(35:13):
I don't have all the answers. My people are hurting,
but I do know that everyone must end and here's
my vision. And if he articulated something in this neighborhood
and threw the ball in the court of the administration
and through the ball in the court of the Gulf,
I think would be in a very different place right now.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
The new president of El Salvador took over one of
the most dangerous countries in the world, and within one
year had made it the safest country in the Western hemisphere.
And he did it basically by saying, if I have
any reason to believe that you're a member of a gang,
you're going to be locked up for a very long time,
and just physically took him off the street. He in
(35:51):
fact has created a very safe country where people can
be tourists and have no sense of fear. And you
almost have to take that approach to the Gaza population
to figure out, how are we going to get rid
of the people who are willing to use violence, because
as long as they're there, you're not going to ever
get to stability.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
I think that's right sometimes to my point about getting
buy in from the Gulf, getting buy in from international partners.
Sometimes to make a problem smaller, you have to make
it bigger. It can't just be the Israelis who say
that Kamas is unacceptable. We have to get rid of them.
You have to have unequivocal statements and more importantly, unequivocal
action from the rest of the muzzle world to demonstrate
(36:31):
that Hamas is a dead end organization. It's a dead
end ideology. But in order to do that, you have
to foster viable alternatives. And that's not something for Israel
to do. That's something that really requires authentic air voices
to say. The vision for the Palestinians is not Hamas,
it's not the muscle brother something else. And frankly, that
(36:54):
dog isn't barking right.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
You want to plan on that sort of prosperity, safety
and self government for the Palestinian people, and then how
do you work back from that vision to what would
actually make that what would it be like ten years
from now if that vision had been effectively implemented, and
then you figure out what the steps are.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
I think that's exactly right, and sadly, I'm just not
seeing a lot of that work being done in government.
I teach a graduate class on depending on the semester,
on different things. This semester I was doing Middle East
security and that was literally the class project that I
assigned to my students to get together in groups and
come up with a generation after plan for Gassa. And frankly,
(37:34):
I think the technocrats at the State Department could learn
a thing and do by reading their presentations.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
You're a fascinating guy. You have an enormous amount of
knowledge I want to thank you for joining me and
our listeners can find out more about the work you
do at the American Foreign Policy Council by visiting your
website at AFPC dot org.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Thank you to my guest, Delon Berman. You can get
a link to the American Foreign Policy Council's website on
our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtworld is produced
by Gingers Street sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is
Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to
(38:19):
the team at Ginglishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners
of Newtsworld consign up for my three free weekly columns
at Gingerstree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Neute Gingrich.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
This is Newtsworld.
On this episode of newts World. President Trump concluded a
four day, three nation visit to the Middle East this week,
where he announced multi billion dollar deals for USAir companies,
including a large order from Gutter for Boeing jets. He
announced that he would lift US sanctions on Syria and
met with Syria's new president, Akman al Shara, and he
(00:25):
suggested there has been progress in nuclear talks with Iran
for long term peace. Here to discuss President Trump's trip
to the Middle East. I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
Elon Berman. He is Senior Vice president of the American
Foreign Policy Council in Washington, d C. An expert on
regional security in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the
Russian Federation. He has consulted for the US Central Intelligence
(00:49):
Agency as well as the US Departments of State and Defense,
and provided assistance on foreign policy and national security issues
to a range of governmental agencies and congressional office. Leon,
(01:14):
welcome and thank you for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Oh, thank you so much for having me back.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Okay, now we're going to talk about Trump this week,
but just for I'm going to share with our audience
what you were telling me about your last week when
you were in Europe.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
All right, Well, I just got back from a couple
of weeks on the road. I was in Europe first
where I got caught in the Iberian blackout that we saw,
and then I traveled to Israel, where I caught the
tail end of the disruption from the hoothy ballistic missile
attack on the Israeli national airport on Bencourine Airport. So
(01:49):
I've been told that I'm not a safe companion to
travel with.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I was gonna say, you managed to find ways to
say keep life interesting. So I mean you have a
look at this for a long time. What is this
year overview of this trip. What do you think is
the long term significance of President Trump's visit.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Well, I think it's useful to remember that President Trump's
outing to the Middle East in his first term in
office was enormously successful, and it had very much the
same trajectory. The idea was to raise America's profile in
the region. The idea was to build assurance and demonstrate
that the United States is fully engaged in the region.
(02:31):
But the context this time, I think is a little
bit different because the administration advisedly has a quite different
foreign policy than it did the last time. The Abraham Accords,
the normalization wave with Israel as a far lower priority,
But the administration is making a very high stakes gamble
on renewed diplomacy with Iran, with the Islamic Republic of Iran,
(02:52):
and so I saw that as the strategic backdrop for
everything that the President was trying to do. Because the
negotiations with Iran are ongoing, it's not clear if they're
going to succeed. What is clear is that the administration
is at pains to hammer out a deal that simultaneously
is longer, stronger, more inclusive than the twenty to fifteen
(03:14):
nuclear deal that was hammered out under President Obama. But
at the same time he has to do things to
make sure that our partners in the Persian Golf, are
partners in the Middle East more broadly, are not adversely
affected and aren't discouraged by this new diplomacy because the
fears of Tehran that you see in the Persian Gulf
(03:35):
run very deep, particularly after the last year and a half,
after they've seen what Iran's proxy network is capable of
in terms of destabilizing Israel.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
We're going to talk some about the specific visits. I
thought probably the most undercovered and amazing piece of this
was his pivot to recognize Syria and the speed with
which they pulled that off. I don't think they'd laid
the groundwork for that before he went to the region.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
No, I think this is very much an ongoing conversation,
and it's frankly, of rather risky play because up until
December of last year, until the fall of the outset regime,
Ahmed al Shara, the new Syrian president, was a specially
designated global terrorist under US law. It was only with
his rise to power that he has begun to be rehabilitated,
(04:28):
and the jury, frankly, is still out on whether there's
a good reason to rehabilitate him. He's certainly talking a
more inclusive talk, but in terms of the policies that
he's implementing, in terms of his control over Syria as
a whole, I think that's very much an open question.
And so clearly the Trump administration's pivot and the relaxation,
(04:50):
the rolling back of sanctions on Syria is an enormously
important symbolic move. I would have liked to see a
little bit more of upfront guarantees from the Syrian that
they were willing to do the hard things that they
need in order to get reintegrated back into the international community.
Because now the floodgates are open, and you can see
over the last couple of days since the President's decision,
(05:12):
since the President's announcement, that the Europeans are relaxing sanctions,
and there's this sort of domino effect that's beginning to
take place. What I worry about is I worry about
Ahmed Alshara, given his history of Islamic radicalism, given the
weakness of his transitional government. I'm concerned that without getting
assurances from him, without putting concrete points on the board,
(05:34):
this may send the wrong signals.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Why do you think that Turkish president won and the
Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed ben Salmon, why do you think
they were so interested in getting because apparently Trump did
this in response to two of them.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
No, I think that's right. And also the Qatari government
is very heavily beginning to invest, very heavily in Syria,
and I think there's a logic there in the sense
that sanctions aren't supposed to be forever, and they're supposed
to be able to be rolled back or changed or
relaxed over time if conditions on the ground warrant, and
the sanctions, in particular US sanctions were oriented towards, specifically
(06:12):
towards the Osset regime. So there's a lot of there
there in terms of rationale for doing it. But there's
also lingering concerns, lingering concerns about Ahmed al Shara's radicalism,
lingering concerns about the fact that given how he governed
when his group Hayatafrira Alsham was in charge in the
Syrian city of Idlib, he governed in a very absolutist,
(06:35):
draconian manner, and we're worried that this may actually begin
to apply to Syria as a whole right, which will
create sectarian tensions. And we're worried about, frankly, about which
partners he's going to choose, because the Iranians may be
down in Syria, but they're not out clearly Ahmed al Shara,
who is soon he has no love lost for the
(06:56):
type of Shiite sectarian Islamism political Islam that Iran is promoting,
but the Iranians still have a presence there. More specifically,
the Russians still have a presence there. They still have
a military presence both in the port city of Tartus
and at the air base north of Tartus at Hamemimi.
And there's a worry that the Russians saw the overthrow
(07:20):
of ASA, their longtime partner, in December, as this really
grievous strategic blow. But what we're seeing now is that
the Russians are actually they may not be thriving, but
they're certainly surviving in Syria. They are engaging in a
quiet dialogue with al Shara, They're beginning to sort of
to husband their resources. They still have a military presence
on the ground. So I think there's a lot of
(07:41):
question marks about the future direction of Syria. And this
is clearly an attempt and an attempt encouraged by the
Saudis and by the Qataris and by the Immordis to
nudge Syria in the proper direction. I'm worried that we
might go too far, too fast.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
But isn't that sort of typical of Trump?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Oh? Absolutely, This is why I think it's necessary to understand.
And when we look at what he did in the
Middle East, it's striking. I frankly think what he said
in the Middle East was even more striking when he
gave that speech in Saudi Arabia, and he verbally, out front,
vocally repudiated sort of the nation building, the human rights
(08:19):
first campaigns that predominated the Biden administration's approach to Saudi Arabia.
That was intended as assurance, that was intended that America's
engaged in America's going to moralize less, but it also
changed the tenor of how the United States has moved
around the region, at least historically, and I think there's
going to be ripple effects from that. They are going
(08:41):
to be felt for a long time if we're no
longer focused on civil society, on building societies, on human rights,
on enshrining values, and we're just focused on this mercantilist
trade policy that benefits us certainly in terms of the
bottom line in the near term, but I think there's
long term effects that may make region less hospitable for
American ideas and American values in the long run.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
We had adopted a policy of trying to create sort
of a standard which clearly most of our allies in
the region didn't live up to. But at the same time,
I look at the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia, who's
in a sense a mixed bag in that the CIA
has concluded that he did orchestrate, or at least to
prove the killing of the Washington Post reporter Jamal Kashoki.
(09:27):
On the other hand, I look at what he's doing
on say tourism. This is not going to be Saudi
Arabia in the sense that it was thirty years ago.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
There's going to be too many people, no listen, absolutely,
and it's already not And I remember the black time
I was in Saudi was a few years ago, but
even then it was already in motion. There was already
commingling of sexes in restaurants, there was already music. And
I think the listeners have to understand that these things
are moving in Saudi Arabia at a lightning pace. And
they're moving at a lightning pace, frankly, not because Saudi
(09:59):
Arabia is reforming. It's because Saudi Arabia is modernizing. And
I think all of this goes back to the Saudi
Vision twenty thirty. And if your listeners are interested, you
can go online. You can google Vision twenty thirty and
what you'll see is a very flashy website that lays
out all of the priorities, but the basic underlying premise
is that Saudi Arabia, the ruling House of Saud, figured
(10:21):
out several years ago that they have to pivot to
being a non oil or a more diversified, non oil
first economy. And in order to do that, they have
to invest in high tech, and they have to invest
in infrastructure, and they have to invest in all sorts
of things that require frankly large amounts of foreign direct investment.
(10:41):
And when foreign investors come to Saudi Arabia, they like
to do things like drink, and they like to have
their wives and girlfriends be able to drive, and they
like to shop independently, and all of this changes that
we see in Saudi society. They're very salutary, but they're
also driven by economic necessity. And where I land is
(11:01):
sort of in the middle. I am delighted to see
the changes in Saudi Arabian, but I also believe that
American engagement without articulating that we actually expect some degree
of governmental transparency, some degree of protections for civilians, for citizens,
some degree of personal freedoms leads you down a slippery slope
(11:22):
where you could end up in a few years acting
very much like the Chinese do in Africa, where it's
value free investing. It's enshrining these very repressive and frankly,
very sclerotic sort of regime. So I think where the
pendulum is swinging, and the way it usually does these
days in American politics, it tends to swing pretty wildly
(11:43):
from one extreme to the other. And we're going from
the extreme of the Biden administration, which was all lecturing,
no meaningful engagement, to I hope I'm wrong, but to
something that looks decidedly mercantile.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I remember in nineteen ninety one when we sent an
expeditionary force because Saddam had seized Kuwait. We had a
big argument with the Saudis about American women driving military trucks.
We won the argument. We just said flatly, this is
how we're going to do it. But at the time
it was a shocking revolutionary behavior. And I think about
(12:20):
the Saudi Arabia that existed in nineteen ninety and the
Saudi Arabia now. It seems to me there is a
certain part of modernity which inherently has to open a
country up. I mean the Chinese tried to counter that
with a toutilitarian structure, but overall, it's very hard to
be part of the modern commercial world and not have
(12:41):
all sorts of things leaking into your society that are uncontrollable.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
No, I think that's exactly right. And there's also the
rhythm of time that kicks in here also. I mean,
all these changes that are happening in Saudi society, you
can imagine them getting rolled back now, but it's harder
to imagine than when they were first instituted a couple
of years ago, and ten years from now it's going
to be harder still. They get locked in over time.
So this is absolutely a salutary trajectory. This is absolutely
(13:08):
the trajectory that we want. But it's okay for us
to be able to say this is good. We like this,
we like this greater openness. And by the way, I
read the President's billions of dollars of deals with the Saudis,
you know, the one trillion dollar agreement with the Kataris
as a very overt signal that America is here, America
(13:30):
is not going anywhere. There's no choices about pivots to Asia.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
What do you think the long term significance is of
the share scale of the deals that were being made
this week?
Speaker 2 (13:58):
This is clearly important from vo from a practical level
and from a symbolic level. Right symbolically, it's an overt
signal to the countries in the region that are worried
about the overwhelming focus on China that some speculate may
become the orienting frame of the Trump administration. There's certainly
(14:18):
folks here in Washington who are China firsters. And I
don't mean China firsters as in they prefer China. It's
China firsters, as in that's the pacing threat that should
be the dominant concern of American foreign policy. And I
symbolically I saw the deals as very much a repudiation
of that. A signal to the golf monarchy is that
America is there, America's engaged, the American commitment to regional
(14:42):
security is important and is well lasting. I also saw
this as in a practical sense, as this is I
think a very bold way to try to improve market competitiveness.
And the China frame does overlay all this because it's
it's necessary to understand that what President Trump has done
(15:03):
has been to make America competitive again in the context
of the involvement and investment in the golf monarchies, because
what we've seen over the last several years, as the
Biden administration has taken a vaccine, has really fallen into
this more hectoring, lecturing tone which dominated until very late
in President Biden's tenure. You saw billions upon billions of
(15:27):
dollars of Chinese investment in the region. The Chinese were
really moving in. We were trying to engage politically, they
were engaging, and they were successful in engaging economically. And
I see these trade deals as a practical step, a
way to increase America's competitiveness in the region by doing
these economic lash ups, by doing deals that rebound to
(15:51):
the durability of America's bonds with the region.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Trump is a profoundly transformational President Trump's now, at least
in this trip going around the planet scooping up money.
It's a totally different experience from anything we've seen, and
it fits his whole focus, which is if he can
get the United States to become once again the dominant
arsenal of democracy, then the Chinese can't compete with us
(16:19):
because the sheer scale of investment. One of the things
that hit me. I'm curious since you were also in Europe,
but I recently ran across a chart of the ten
largest tank forces in the world. There's not a single
European country on the chart. And in fact, if you
took all of the tanks in NATO outside the United States,
they collectively wouldn't have gotten on the chart because the
(16:41):
center of power has shifted so far out of the world.
You and I were born into same things happening here.
I mean, there is no European country that could match
any of these three countries in scale of investment.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
That's absolutely correct, and I think your point about building
the arsenal of democracy is exactly right. I think this
is a great first step. I do hope that that
latter part is not silent right, that these countries, as
robust as their economies are, understand that the United States
(17:17):
benefits in the strategic partnership with the United States. Benefits
not just from the trade deals, but from them aligning
with us not on every value, but on some values,
and aligning with us in terms of our vision for
regional security. And that's why I made the point about
this being about assurance. Also because simultaneously the President is
making a very risky, high stakes play to try to
(17:39):
hammer out some sort of deal with the Iranian regime.
It's not clear that this deal is going to succeed.
It's not clear that the Iranians are going to come
to terms. What is clear, though, is that Iran is
in its weakest point, both economically and politically in decades.
The Iranian ring of fire that they tried to build
(17:59):
around Israel in preceding years has effectively been taken apart,
been picked apart by the Israeli defense forces. It's not
fully disaggregated, but the wartime collapse of Hisbada in Lebanon,
the fall of the Asad regime in Damascus, the Huthis
remain a problem. But I think it's fair to say
that Israel's in a much better strategic position now than
(18:19):
they were a year ago. The Iranian at home, eighty
percent of Iranians now right according to a recent poll,
fundamentally reject the structure of the Islamic Republic and want
a different form of government. Right. This is murder for
an ideological regime and so what you have is you
have a regime in Tehran that's very incentivized to do
a deal. The secret sauce, though, as they say, is
(18:43):
to do a deal that benefits America and really hobbles
the Iranian threat potential over time. And here what the
President talked about when he got us out of the
Obama era jcpoa joined Comprehensive Plan of Action back in
May of twenty eighteen. It still attaches right. His objections
(19:04):
were threefold. The deal was too short. All of its
provisions expired in a decade, some of them substantially before then.
It was too generous. There's too much sanctions relief that
was given to the Iranian regime. And it was too narrow.
It didn't cover things like ballistic missiles and proxies and
things like that. So the president's idea in his first
term was to do a deal that was more comprehensive,
(19:26):
more lasting, more sweeping, and more restrictive. We still have
those objectives. I think the problem that we have now
is we are half a decade further in time from
when we were able to really effectuate change on this.
The Iranian nuclear program is more mature, and the Iranians
have really gotten comfortable with having an indigenous uranium enrichment capability,
(19:50):
a capability to enrich fissile material at home. Here's the problem.
We may hammer out a deal with Iran that limits
their nuclear potential, that limits the range of their ballistic missiles,
that really ramps up international inspections. But if we seed
the case on them having a domestic enrichment capability, it
(20:14):
sets the table in a different way for everybody who's
coming down the pike. Because the Saudis right where the
President just was, the Saudis also want a nuclear program.
Why would the Saudis ask for anything less or expect
to receive anything less than the Iranians get. So if
we enshrine, if we create a framework where Iran's domestic
(20:35):
uranium and richmond capability is enriched, strengthened, or entrined in
some way, then that becomes the floor of any future
negotiations that we have with countries in the region who
also want this capability. And I think that puts us
on a really slippery slope. So it's a long way
of saying the President is engaged in really high stakes negotiation.
(20:56):
And so that's the frame that's the backdrop for everything
that he was doing in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates
in Guitar. The goal here is, I think very much,
to reassure allies, because those allies, just like I am
here in Washington, those allies and their respective capitals are
watching those negotiations close.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
I think in the last two weeks, the Iranian resistance
identified a new nuclear facility that we didn't even know existed,
which just strikes me that when you're dealing with a dictatorship,
there's a whole question here of whether or not you
can ever have an inspection regime that is tight enough
(21:36):
and serious enough that it actually cripples them.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I think you answered the question already, right. You can't.
By the way, this is precisely why when you talk
to Israeli officials, I was just an israel I was
talking to a whole range of officials about the Iranian
nuclear program. As you can imagine, they're very concerned, but
they never talk about eliminating the Iranian nuclear program because
they make precisely this point. Right, authoritarian regime, it has
(22:02):
very tight controls on information. We simply don't know where
everything is, and this is a vexing challenge if somebody's
thinking about military action against Iran like these Raelis are now.
But it's also a vexing challenge if we're trying to
camer out some sort of monitoring framework, because the Iranian
nuclear program is built for stealth, it's built for clandestine development,
(22:23):
and we don't know where everything is well.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
I mean, I remember getting briefed in two thousand and
one on the scale of their underground program. Now they've
had a quarter century to expand all this. On the
other hand, I think Trump is in a real dilemma
because we probably can do very substantial damage between the
US and Israeli forces. If we decide to do that.
(22:48):
We wouldn't try to occupy Iran, we just take out
a lot of facilities. But at the same time, I
think the President would like to not do that, and
I'm not sure he can get to an agreement that's real,
and I worry that they will gradually talk themselves into
accepting a paper agreement that's not real.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
I think that's exactly right. The Iranian negotiating strategy, I
think has been very consistent over time, and you sort
of dial the clock back and look at the way
they negotiated the twenty fifteen JCPOA, and it's very clear
the goal was for them to draw out the negotiations
to buy time to add permanence to their nuclear effort,
and I think that's their plan. Now they're more constrained
(23:30):
in terms of their political stability, in terms of their
economic solvency, and that's something that we can play with,
but fundamentally, no agreement is going to alter this regime's
will to nuclear power. We're not going to do it.
They see nuclear possession as an element of regional hegemony,
but frankly more importantly as an element of regime stability.
(23:52):
Because if you look at the demographics of the Islamic Republic, right,
it's eighty eight and a half million people. Two thirds
of the population is thirty four I think thirty six
now or younger, and the leadership is a generation and
a half older than that, right, decades older than that.
So this is a regime that's rapidly approaching. In fact,
some would say it has already approached and passed. It's
(24:12):
sell by date. The people are young, the people are
increasingly Western orient that they're wired. They may not know
exactly what structure of government they want, but they know
what they don't want. They really don't like this regime
because they've been an economic failure to thrive. There's a
real sense that the regime, because of its ideological restrictions,
is holding them back from interacting in a meaningful way
(24:33):
with the world. The regime sees the nuclear program as
an insurance policy for precisely this eventuality. You have an
increasingly unpopular, aging regime, an arrestive and increasingly westward looking population.
The thing that sort of levels the playing field for
the Ayatolas is if they have a capability that scares
(24:55):
the West enough that they can repress their own domestic
population without incurrent any sort of international center or any
meaningful threat of military action. That's the play, that's the
long term strategic play here. And I remember the famous
Israeli political scientist once talked two decades ago, right when
you were getting those briefings, So the Israelis were talking
(25:15):
about the fact that two trains were leaving the station,
the Iran regime change train, and I don't mean regime
changes then somebody would do it. I mean the fundamental
political transformation train and the Iranian nuclear train. We're leaving
the station at basically the same time, and if the latter,
if the nuclear train gets to the station first, the
(25:36):
first one never gets there right. And I think that formula,
frankly is still very much in effect. And so for
the Trump administration, this is a huge problem. It's a
huge problem because the long play in Iran is about
the Iranian people. It's about the long term evolution of
the regime, and so we don't want to do anything
that creates a situation where this regime, which is a
(26:01):
threat during international security, as a threat to American allies.
As the President heard himself in his touring the Gulf,
it's a predatory regime and there's no love lost in
the Gulf. We have to make sure that any deal
that we do doesn't empower them.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Would it be rational for the United States to adopt
a strategy of regime change.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
I think it's rational from a long term perspective. I
think the long game in the run is always about
the population. It's always been about the population. Whether or
not it's politically feasible to do that is a completely
different story. The American people are sick of intervention. The
American people are sick of these sort of experiments in
regime change, I don't think there's the appetite to do that,
(26:41):
and I think, to his great credit, I think the
President understands that. And I think the President understands that
despite the fact that there's a vibrant Iranian opposition, despite
the fact that eighty percent of the Iranian people now
repudiate the regime, there's really no appetite here at home
to back them in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Well, if you go back and look during the collapsing
phase of the Soviet Empire, places like Romania just suddenly collapsed.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Correct, And by the way, that's another I think chasening moment.
As we learned from Iraq and as we learned most
recently from Syria, revolutions are actually very hard to predict.
We're not good at this in historical context, and so
I think humility is in order. Right. It's not up
to us to change the regime of Iran. It's up
(27:26):
to us, though, to make sure that we don't do
things that strengthen a very bad situation. And I think
that's the proper frame to think about the negotiations.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
The other thing I thought that was striking on this
trip was the degree to which they ignored Israel, didn't
visit Israel, they didn't consult with them. I don't think
about Syria, which is clearly a direct Israeli concern. There
is no rational solution to Hamas short of destroying it,
and destroying it is a very hard problem.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
No, I think that's right. And also, I mean, by
the way this, I would say two levels. I think
the US Israeli relationship is strong. It remains strong. As
you know much better than I. The well spring of
support for Israel may change as a result of different presidencies,
but it remains very strong and very consistent overtime in Congress.
Congress is the centerpiece of the relationship. So I don't
(28:37):
have a lot of concern about this divergence. What I
do see, though, that's concerning, is that familiarity breeds contempt,
and this proximity between Washington and Jerusalem that we've seen
in the past, that we saw in the first Rump term,
I think is leading some folks in the administration to
take the israelis for granted, to say, listen, Israel doesn't
(28:58):
have any other choices. Israel's aligned with US anyway. And
when I was talking to Israeli officials. My advice to
them was that you have to put yourself in the
mindset of the president, and you have to think about
not so much about the historical glue that has held
the countries together, but what Israel has that Trump can leverage,
(29:19):
that Trump can really lean into Israel is a dramatically
dynamic innovation economy. Right. This is the reason why the
Chinese are so interested in Israel. Frankly, it's high tech,
it's AI, it's cyber, it's telecom, it's all these different things.
And by the way, one of the things that I
mentioned that raised a couple of eyebrows in my meetings
(29:42):
was Israel's also a leader in missile defense. Now, a
lot of that missile defense has been developed with American money,
that's absolutely true, but Israel is now blazing the trail
on things like directed energy defense. And the Trump administration
just passed an executive order about a Golden Dome for America,
resetting the way we think about homeland defense, which involves
(30:03):
multiple layers and involves something you and I have been
talking about for literally decades, this multi layer defense system,
not just the guard against road state threats, but to
guard against all manner of threats. Israel has a role
to play in this, It has a contribution to make
in this, and that the sooner the Israelis figure this out, frankly,
the better their bargaining power is going to be.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
That's a brilliant point. There's also a certain danger that
Trump really operates off of an intuitive sense of who
his partners are. And I'm not sure that Netnia, who
has helped himself in their most recent meetings, Trump just
sends to sort of check you off and shift to
the next interesting topic. And I think that that's part
(30:45):
right now, he's closer to the Saudi crown Prince than
he is to the Israeli Prime Minister psychologically.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Listen, I think that's absolutely right. And I think what
was striking to me when I was in Israel, and
you know, I go to Israel every year. When I
was there last summer, objectively, strategic situation was much worse.
They hadn't yet done the Northern Front against his Balla,
they hadn't yet done that second raid that popped the
lid off of the Iranian air defense architecture. Right, they
were in trouble, but the morale was much better. Fast
(31:13):
forward to last week, and in all the meetings, what
I heard was we're stuck in Gaza, right, there is
no endgame, and intuitively the Israeli people see this, and
intuitively the president understands this. There is no play. I
think Ntaniahu has really harmed himself by failing by simply
(31:34):
saying what he doesn't want to see happen in Gaza,
rather than articulating a vision for how to move forward.
Because the President frankly did him a huge favor when
he talked about I know it's sort of been bandied about,
and you know it's been ridiculed as Gaza Lago, but
in reality it was a very important point because the
President deserves credit for injecting some fresh thinking into a
(31:56):
conversation that's gotten positively sclerotic. I'm not sure the President's
plans go work, but it's clear that he changed the
conversation and that's important, and it was up to the
regional leaders and it was up to the Israelis to
run with that change of conversation to articulate a new plan,
and they haven't done that.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
People underestimate how much Trump is a developer, and so
every time I encounter something, he's wondering, can we do
a development here? The development may be military, maybe literally
a development. We were kidding at one point about that
beautiful riviera which would have a Trump Beach Hotel, two
eighteen hole Trump courses in Gaza. But his consistent instinct
(32:38):
is to pivot from a problem to an opportunity.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
I think that's absolutely right, and I think it's the
right instinct. Well for my money, what I would say
is this, there is no such thing as a day
after in Gaza. Day after is an American concept. We
Americans are impatient. We want a fix immediately. And you
saw this, by the way, throughout the conversations that the
administration had with the Israelis. Okay, almost as soon as
(33:02):
the war starts, you know, what's your plan for redevelopment? Right?
This was fundamentally premature. I think what we need to
think about is a generation after in Gaza. Cycle forward,
a full generation. Right. Let's assume that this conflict drags
on for a little bit of time. Let's assume that
coreheads eventually prevail and we do a build in Gaza
(33:24):
a generation from now. What do we want Gaza to
look like? I think it looks like three things. First
of all, security, right, because it's very clear that the
security paradigm that prevailed on October sixth between Israel and
the Palestinians turned out to be insufficient. So the Israelis
need greater security guarantees. But they have a problem, right
because there's a manpower issue. Right now, Israel is burning
(33:46):
through its reserves. It's having a real effect on the
country's economy right, inflation is rising. The idea of having
a large scale force that really just does policing in
martial law in the Gaza strip over the long term,
that's not in the cards, right, That's not in the
cards for Israel. It's not in the capabilities for Israel.
So somebody has to step in and do a bolstered security.
(34:09):
So that's the first thing. The second thing is economic reconstruction. Right.
The model in my head when I think about Gaza
a generation from now is a place like Tangier in Morocco, right,
a port with container traffic that brings in tourism, it
brings an investment, It allows for precisely that type of
development that President Trump is talking about. But in order
(34:30):
for that to happen, you have to attract investment, not
just from the United States, you have to attract investment
from all over the Middle East, right, and that leads
you to that third point, which is deradicalization. And that's
where Hamas comes in. Because if you have an international
hub like that, if you have what is basically a
service economy like that, your prerequisit has to be that
(34:52):
the government that administers it is secular and is pragmatic.
It isn't ruled by ideologues that will blow up the
whole Right, and just my personal view, I think the
Prime Minister missed a huge opportunity last summer when he
came and he spoke before the Joint Session of Congress
to lay out something like this, to say something like, look,
(35:13):
I don't have all the answers. My people are hurting,
but I do know that everyone must end and here's
my vision. And if he articulated something in this neighborhood
and threw the ball in the court of the administration
and through the ball in the court of the Gulf,
I think would be in a very different place right now.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
The new president of El Salvador took over one of
the most dangerous countries in the world, and within one
year had made it the safest country in the Western hemisphere.
And he did it basically by saying, if I have
any reason to believe that you're a member of a gang,
you're going to be locked up for a very long time,
and just physically took him off the street. He in
(35:51):
fact has created a very safe country where people can
be tourists and have no sense of fear. And you
almost have to take that approach to the Gaza population
to figure out, how are we going to get rid
of the people who are willing to use violence, because
as long as they're there, you're not going to ever
get to stability.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
I think that's right sometimes to my point about getting
buy in from the Gulf, getting buy in from international partners.
Sometimes to make a problem smaller, you have to make
it bigger. It can't just be the Israelis who say
that Kamas is unacceptable. We have to get rid of them.
You have to have unequivocal statements and more importantly, unequivocal
action from the rest of the muzzle world to demonstrate
(36:31):
that Hamas is a dead end organization. It's a dead
end ideology. But in order to do that, you have
to foster viable alternatives. And that's not something for Israel
to do. That's something that really requires authentic air voices
to say. The vision for the Palestinians is not Hamas,
it's not the muscle brother something else. And frankly, that
(36:54):
dog isn't barking right.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
You want to plan on that sort of prosperity, safety
and self government for the Palestinian people, and then how
do you work back from that vision to what would
actually make that what would it be like ten years
from now if that vision had been effectively implemented, and
then you figure out what the steps are.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
I think that's exactly right, and sadly, I'm just not
seeing a lot of that work being done in government.
I teach a graduate class on depending on the semester,
on different things. This semester I was doing Middle East
security and that was literally the class project that I
assigned to my students to get together in groups and
come up with a generation after plan for Gassa. And frankly,
(37:34):
I think the technocrats at the State Department could learn
a thing and do by reading their presentations.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
You're a fascinating guy. You have an enormous amount of
knowledge I want to thank you for joining me and
our listeners can find out more about the work you
do at the American Foreign Policy Council by visiting your
website at AFPC dot org.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Thank you to my guest, Delon Berman. You can get
a link to the American Foreign Policy Council's website on
our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtworld is produced
by Gingers Street sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is
Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to
(38:19):
the team at Ginglishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners
of Newtsworld consign up for my three free weekly columns
at Gingerstree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Neute Gingrich.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
This is Newtsworld.
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