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You are listening to an art media podcast.
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During this period of peak Iranian threat, the US and Israel's interests were very closely aligned. We both wanted to stop Iran, then Israel did everybody the favor of knocking Iran down several pegs. And that has had the paradoxical effect of of making everyone else less aligned with Israel and the US may feel just less worried about the Middle east and it reverts to just don't cause trouble.
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It's 5pm on Sunday, December 21st in New York City as we prepare for the eighth and and final night of Hanukkah. It's 12am on Monday, December 22nd in Israel, where Israelis are turning to a new day. U.S. senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina and a close ally of President Trump's, is currently visiting Israel where he met with senior Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gidon Sar. During his visit, Graham expressed his staunch support for Israel in the region and in the world and told reporters the that Hamas must be forced to disarm otherwise the US should back Israel, graham said. In resuming its military offensive in Gaza, Graham also warned that Iran is rearming after its 12 day war against Israel and the US today, speaking at an official ceremony, IDF Chief of Staff Eyel Zamir hinted that Israel will strike Iran in the future, stating, and I quote, at the center of the longest and most complex war in Israel's history stands the campaign against Iran. This is believed to be one of the main topics that will be discussed by Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump when they meet next week in the U.S. meanwhile today, members of Australia's Jewish community as well as many Jewish allies gathered at Bondi beach for a commemoration ceremony of the terror attack that took place just one week ago, killing 15 people and injuring dozens more. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attended the event, but was met with boos and cries of quote, shame from the crowd. In the wake of last week's anti Jewish massacre, the Australian government is reportedly planning to ban the public chant of the phrase globalize the Intifada. This comes amidst heavy criticism that the state has not done nearly enough to protect its Jewish citizens In the wake of October 7th. With anti Jewish sentiment and violence surging around the world, many Jews are asking themselves what kind of future do they have in their respective countries? Today, Israeli Foreign Minister Giron Sar publicly called on Diaspora Jews to make aliyah, which means to immigrate to Israel, stating quote, today I call on Jews in England, Jews in France, Jews in Australia, Jews in Canada, Jews in Belgium. Come to the land of Israel. Come home. Now into today's episode. Our guest today is Walter Russell Mead, who is an academic, a prolific author, a foreign policy expert. He's professor of strategy and statecraft at the University of Florida's Hamilton School. He's a scholar at the Hudson Institute and a columnist, a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His column is indispensable. I highly recommend you read it. If you don't, we'll link to it in the show notes. If you among his many books, his most recent book is called the Ark of a the United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People. We've had Walter on in the past to talk about this book. In today's conversation, Walter and I discuss the Trump administration's foreign policy and national security doctrine. From Russia, Ukraine to China to the Middle east to our own Western hemisphere. We also talk about Israel's strategic position in the region following October 7th and following two years of a multi front war. With the year 2025 coming to an end. In this conversation, we try to take a longer term horizon than we typically do in these conversations to get a sense of what can be expected in our geopolitics in 2026. Walter Russell Mead on the Trump Doctrine. This is call.
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And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast a fan favorite of the call me back community, Walter Russell Mead. Walter, thanks for being here.
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It's great to be back.
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So I want to start, as I mentioned in the introduction, by taking a step back. President Trump just released his 33 page National Security strategy document last week to lay out his foreign policy priorities. It's a roadmap in his words in the introduction in your Wall Street Journal column, you described it differently and I'm quoting you here, you wrote it is more manifesto than strategy document, expressing what its authors hope are the ideas that will guide American foreign policy for the next generation and giving us their interpretation of Mr. Trump's underlying worldview.
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That's you.
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So you read the document, you read it closely. What does this document tell us about, you know, how we should think about like the next year ahead?
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Well, they really intend to launch a sea change in American foreign policy. And it starts right when they say, okay, number one most important region in the world is the Western Hemisphere. That's a real shift. Also then when they seg into Europe, they really attack European policy, say you guys are destroying yourselves and that matters to us. And if you keep this up in 15, 20 years, you, you face civilizational eclipse. You are canceling yourselves out. And not only do we not like that, but it's not in America's interest to let it happen. And so we're gonna support movements in Europe that take a, in our view, healthy view of the world situation, which sounds, I think, as if they're planning to work with parties like the National Front in France or others reform in the UK who Europeans would say are far right parties who are trying to upset the apple cart.
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The document reads, should present trends continue. I'm quoting from it. The European continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. So is it basically in that sense saying America, at least as it relates to the European continent, is on its own?
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It's not saying that we're there yet, it's saying that's the trend, but it is clearly saying that Europe is not what it was to the United States. And also that unless the Europeans change their approach, the normal kind of transatlantic cooperation that we've seen between America and Europe under so many administrations is actually enabling Europe's decline. And so we need to stop doing that. Yeah.
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A
I was struck by the press reaction to the document because it was fixated on Europe. The New York Times described the document I'm quoting here. A new White House policy document formalizes President Trump's long held contempt for Europe's leaders. So do you think the press is focusing on the wrong priority of this document or at least misinterpreting it?
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B
Well, you know, the press is focusing on what's important to the press. For a lot of people in the kind of mainstream, oh, let's just call them elite. The transatlantic relationship is the cornerstone of world order. And the European Union and the United States and NATO are the pillars on which we are now building a global zone of law, peace, human rights, prosperity, all of those good things. And so for Trump to challenge the foundations of that, it is an assault on everything that is good, holy, important, and can keep us from having World War three. That, I think, is the conventional view of the importance of that relationship.
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So let's talk about where the non elites focused, which was on the Western Hemisphere. Can you tell us how we should be thinking about what the implications of the documents dwelling on the Western Hemisphere, to say the least.
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Well, it is. I mean, it really is fascinating because they go back in history and they anchor their new Western Hemisphere hemisphere policy in not only the Monroe Doctrine, but in what they're calling the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine says, we want no outside powers messing around in the Western Hemisphere. It's ours. That wasn't Monroe's original formulation, but that's how it evolved.
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The Monroe Doctrine declared by President Monroe in 1823, and it was a warning to European powers. Right.
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Basically, at that time, the French and the Spanish monarchies were looking to restore the rule of the House of Bourbon, maybe in Latin America. And the Americans hated it because we were afraid that this would reintroduce monarchy and great powers into the region. But the reality was the British didn't want the French, the Spanish, in the New World, so they would prevent it. So the Americans just were riding on the British power. But that evolved over time. As the US Got stronger and had more to say about what went on, that evolved into this idea that the United States does not want to see other great powers installing themselves in what we began to consider as our hemisphere. Now, Fast forward to 1904. And at this time, the problem was that very, very often South American governments, who weren't always that good with their finances and had revolutions and so on and so forth, would borrow a lot of money from European lenders and then not be able to pay. And these days, we have the IMF for problems like that. But in those days, what you would traditionally do is, is send in the gunboats where you would occupy a major port, and that would mean you'd have the power to collect all the customs duties was just a way of forcing them to pay. And the United States didn't want, for example, German gunboats coming to Venezuela because Venezuela was reneging on its debts to German banks. So Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed in 1904, as I recall, that if a South American, a Latin American country by its own misbehavior is inviting foreign intervention, then the US Will send the gunboats to Venezuela and will decide how much of Venezuela's customs revenue goes to German or English or French banks. We're in charge here. And what Trump is doing is he's kind of expanding that. He's asserting the same kind of police power that the Roosevelt Corollary asserted over the whole hemisphere and saying, look, if they are misgoverning in ways that create huge floods of immigrants, or if the government is so aligned with narco trafficking cartels that it is really an enabler of drug smuggling rather than a government policing it, in those cases of misgovernment, which we are asserting, a police power to go in and clean up the mess. And because Venezuela is exhibit A, a quarter of its population have fled as refugees because of the absolutely horrible economic policies. Absolutely. That government is totally in bed with narco traffickers. And also absolutely anybody from Russia, China, Hamas, Iran, you name it, can play very happily in the Venezuelan playground. So Venezuela is right in the crosshairs of the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. That's what this statement says, and it's a pretty powerful statement. It would be very hard for them to back down from this without a real diminishment of prestige. It would be a very, very kind of public egg on your face failure. So that's why I thought it was as powerful as it is.
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A
You mentioned the role of China around the world and especially in the Western Hemisphere. But what does the document tell us about great power rivalries?
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If you read between the lines, you see a very conventional approach in the sense of, well, America has an interest in preventing any single power from dominating a region. You know, this is something that a lot of American presidents would have agreed with. And that means that if China is trying to dominate Asia, then the United States will form alliances with other countries in order to resist that Chinese drive for domination. And it reasserts a sort of historic policy on Taiwan. But it doesn't have a section on geopolitical great power rivalry or US China. A lot of people have read that as saying that the administration is no longer interested in these issues. I think that's a very deep misreading of their views. But they are definitely using, let's say, diplomatic language about China in a way. They're not using it about Europe. And that's yet another reason the Europeans are so angry. It's like you were polite to China, you were polite to Russia, and then you kick us in the teeth. And yet who's your allies? Who are your friends? That has fueled a lot of the wrath about the statement and a lot of the in comprehension. Why would you do this?
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A
What role does the Middle east have in this doctrine or in this document?
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The Middle east is not on the front burner. They run a little victory lap about Iran in the statement. But if you're thinking of the world in terms of these rivalries, right now the United States has gone from being really worried about Iran's plans to dominate the region to thinking, well, Iran isn't doing it and nobody else is really right now in the kind of position of strength Iran was three years ago. So what do you want?
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All right, I want to drill down here a little bit more on most issues, President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu seem to be on the same page, at least publicly. Iran, Gaza, even Lebanon for the most part, but it's not clear on Syria. So if you're sitting there in Jerusalem and you're Israel and you're reading this document, what should Israel be thinking? What should they be worried about? Are there areas like Syria or others where US And Israeli interests may diverge?
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Look, I think in general, during this period of peak Iranian threat, US And Israel's interests were very closely aligned. We both wanted to stop Iran. And not only that, most of the Gulf Arabs were on the same page that Iranian power was the threat that everybody was worrying about. Then Israel did everybody the favor of knocking Iran down several pegs. And that has had the paradoxical effect of making everyone else less aligned with Israel. So Saudi Arabia is not saying, well, we don't, you know, don't necessarily care for everything the Israelis are doing, but we're not going to worry about that while Iran is at our throat. And the US Is also not gonna, like, nitpick when there is this big Iran thing. But now the U.S. i think Trump administration may feel just less worried about the Middle east and it reverts to just don't cause trouble, don't cause trouble in Syria. Trump is still, I think, with Israel basically on Gaza, but he has a diplomatic advantage and occasionally distancing himself some from the Israeli position. And many people think that maybe Netanyahu doesn't mind that sometimes Trump plays the bad guy and says, don't do this, because it allows Bibi to say to the supporters, well, you know, I'd love to do it. I want to do it so bad, but Trump won't let me. And he's the most pro Israel president we've ever had, and I can't possibly offend him. So you have to understand, I can't help you. But it's not my fault. I think on something like Syria, the Trump administration clearly has come down in wanting the kind of stabilization of Syria. And it doesn't seem to be that worried about some Israeli concerns about what that might mean, maybe especially in terms of Turkish power in Syria.
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Well, I was going to ask you about Turkey. So how worried should Israel be about Turkey and Turkey's rule in the Middle East?
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I think it's an interesting question. Again, with Iran temporarily knocked back a bit, Turkey is the obvious major geopolitical actor other than Israel in the Middle East. And Erdogan has for a long time wanted to reverse Ataturk's approach of saying that Turkey was really only interested in Europe, was not a Middle Eastern country. That was almost 100 years of Turkish policy. And Erdogan is reversing that. And the collapse of the Assad regime opens a huge opportunity in a sense. There's a hope, I think, in Ankara that Syria will be the Turkish Iraq. And what do I mean by that? When Saddam Hussein's Baatha secular, nominally secular regiment, but actually controlled by the Sunni minority over a Shia majority, when that fell, the Iranians were able to kind of pull a lot of Iraq into. Into the Shia camp under the Iranian banner. Turkey would like to do that in Syria, where in a perhaps weakly governed state, Turkey would be the dominant outside power. And by the way, that would give you a lot of influence in Lebanon, because whoever is running Syria has a lot of sway in Lebanon.
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A
How do the Saudis view this possible role for Turkey and the US Approach to this role for Turkey in the region?
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I think there are some qualms. How severe they are, it's hard to say. And the Saudis, you know, they've been trying for years to set something up in Lebanon, and they were kind of never able to do it. And so the Saudis, I think, would like to limit Turkish influence in Syria, don't really want to see Turkey emerging as the captain of Team Sunni. But on the other hand, it's not clear what kinds of alternatives they have. There's also the reality that Turkey is a NATO ally. And at a time, again, the US Is worried about Russia, Ukraine. NATO is already under some stress. I think Trump would love to sell Turkey some F35s, which would also involve the Turks getting rid of their S400 Russian missile batteries. So, again, because the Iranian threat isn't pushing the Americans and the Saudis and the Israelis together, each of us is taking a somewhat different line on this Syria issue.
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A
And you mentioned F35s. How alarmed should Israel be about the US selling F35s to Saudi Arabia?
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I would say not so much about Saudi Arabia. It's a little bit like the awacs. You know, the Saudi armed forces have a history of buying really expensive gear, but not a history of using it in battle in a way that changes outcomes in major conflicts. I'm phrasing that as carefully as I can.
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A
Okay. All right. So I want to ask you a completely different question as it relates to the region we've been hearing for, I don't know, about a decade, that oil doesn't matter so much. And America has enough energy that it produces domestically so the US can pull back from the Middle East. And now AI seems to be this new factor in that discussion and maybe changed how we think about the role of energy and oil. So I guess my question, a big picture question, how and to what extent.
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You know, it's not a simple thing because the latest that we're seeing is that AI is making the Permian Basin and a lot of US Shale a lot more productive. And so that even on the one hand it will be increasing the need for energy, it may not increase American need for Middle Eastern energy. Somewhat more ominously, China has enormous reserves of shale that it hasn't been able to unlock for varieties of reasons. And AI may be opening the door to a lot of Chinese production. So interesting stuff here. But oil does remain pretty important in Trump's vision of geopolitics, I think, where fundamentally Trump wants a lot of American production and he wants low prices for consumers and users. That's tricky because American producers need prices that allow them to make profits in order to produce. So suppose he's successful in getting a less horrible government in Venezuela. Venezuela actually has bigger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, but Venezuela currently produces only about as much oil as Angola. If Venezuela were actually to live up to its potential, the Western Hemisphere would be enormously productive in oil and energy. But that doesn't mean the Middle east has disappeared. For one thing, it may mean, you know, there's oil for Japan and oil for Europe and prices are somewhat fungible. But also the oil of the past lives on as money in sovereign investment funds and money available in the Gulf for investment. If you're an American, do you want the Saudis doing big investment deals in a Chinese technosphere, or do you want that money coming to Silicon Valley and maybe to Israel, India, Japan rather than to China? That actually is important. The oil of the present, the oil of the future may be a little bit discounted, but the oil of the past and the profits of oil remain quite important.
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A
Okay, Walter, I want to take a step back here and get a sense of the characterization of Trump compared to the reality of Trump. We constantly hear that Trump is, quote, unquote, an isolationist and looking to scale back America's role in the world and American military interventions. And he's conflict averse. And if you believe that characterization, there are parts of this document that can validate that for you. And I want to quote here. It says, America's ambitions. Here I'm quoting, overestimated America's ability to fund simultaneously A massive welfare, regulatory, administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence and foreign aid complex. It goes on to say that the foreign policy elites bet on policies that I quote here hollowing out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend. So there's lots of that kind of language on the one hand, and I compare that to the fact that, as we just talked about, Trump is threatening war in Venezuela. Trump has also authorized military strikes being carried out just this past year in, and I list here, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean already and possibly going forward.
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C
So what's going on?
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How do you take those list of countries where our commander in chief has authorized military strikes and contrast it with this characterization that Trump is, quote unquote, an isolationist and some of that language that one would find in this document?
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B
Well, I've never myself thought of Trump as an isolationist. I've always liked the quote that Teddy Roosevelt's daughter used to describe her father. She said he wanted to be the child at every christening, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral. There's nothing in the world that Donald Trump doesn't want to be in the middle of. If Thailand and Cambodia are fighting, Donald Trump wants to be here. Right. So Donald Trump believes in American primacy, but at the same time, he thinks that the America, whether it was the neoconservative policy of the Bush years, spreading democracy, going to make Iraq a democracy, we're going to transform the Middle east, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. He thinks that's crazy. We couldn't do it then and we don't have the money to do it now, especially because China is so much more powerful. And in the same way the liberal internationalists dream, America will bring gender justice to Namibia, America will protect dissident journalists in Myanmar. There is no cause anywhere in the world that America won't vindicate. So he wants a kind of an ideological retreat and a focus on, as he understands it, actual national interests. But does he want China to be the most powerful country in the world? No. Does he want to sit down in a room with Xi Jinping the way Emmanuel Macron sat down in a room with Donald Trump? And Trump would call him Emmanuel and Macron would call him Mr. President. Trump doesn't want to be in that seat.
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A
Okay, I want to now move the conversation to domestic affairs. I get asked this question all the time about the rise in anti Semitism in this country. You have been a student of Israeli history You've been a student of Jewish history, so you're one of the few people that's not a member of the Jewish community that's actually an authority on these topics. You both have proximity to it and distance from it. So I just want to ask you. Many American Jews tend to think that our history here has been exceptional and antisemitism free, more or less basically, for, like, the last 80 years. And that was the golden age of American Jewish life. What we're seeing now with the staggering rise in antisemitism on the left and the right, do you declare that era over? Was that just a holiday from history, as Krauthammer called it?
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B
Well, I think the first thing to do is actually to take a good long look at Jewish history, not just since World War II. I think this is a problem a lot of people have with all kinds of issues in America. They sort of take 1945 as year zero and don't look at, you know, okay, where did 1945 come from? Because actually, the 30s and the 40s were peak eras of antisemitism in American history. If you go back and you look at it, you can see some consistencies. Number one, anti Semitism in the United States has never been absent. And it has definitely had moments of real intensity, but it was always kind of behind anti Semitism in Europe and obviously more recently the Middle East. We have the illness, but we tend to have a milder version of it in the country. It definitely ebbs and flows over time. What causes what's associated with moments of rising antisemitism? One of the big ones is spikes in immigration. After 1848, we had a lot of immigration coming from Germany, a good deal of which was Jewish, but by no means a majority or anything like it. And that was on top of the immigration from Ireland with the potato famine. So it was a huge wave of immigrants who were more different in some ways than we were used to. A much higher proportion of Catholics and really taking the number of Jews in the United States from, you know, 5 or 6,000 to 60,000, 70,000. Still not a huge community, but still a kind of a generalized xenophobia sets in. And Jews are seen as kind of the markers of that alien presence. The children and grandchildren of those same German Jews were very upset 40, 50, 60 years later when in the next great immigrant wave, from about 1880 to 1920 from Russia and Poland and so on. Clearly the presence of these new Jews was felt by the existing Jews as threatening their position of integration. So the 20s and 30s, which were so marked with antisemitism, were very much related to the kind of American reactions to the wave of immigration, which ended, of course, in 1923, when we cut immigration by 90%. And that was easily one of the most popular laws on the statute books for most of the next generation. On top of that, what adds to anti Semitic waves helps form these things is a sense that the American experiment isn't working well for the average American. Somebody went to the populist convention in 1896 and said, the antisemitism there was so thick you could cut it with a knife. The farmers talking about the bankers, the Eastern bankers that are oppressing the farmers, even you look at William Jennings Bryan's famous cross of gold speech. That's an anti Semitic dog whistle. Thou shalt not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. I mean, could it be clearer than that? Okay. And yet, you know, people think of that as, oh, such a lovely speech, such a normal piece of political rhetoric. So populism touched off by economic distress and surging immigration are two things that really do push antisemitism to a higher level. If you look back at American history.
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A
I want to be delicate how I say this, but what about the impact on our politics, or on the politics of Europe, of the growth of the Muslim population in many countries? Niall Ferguson, in his piece in the Free Press where he's talking about the Trump's National Security Strategy document that we were just discussing, he writes here to make the point about how this is making a separate point back to our earlier conversation about Europe. But Neil writes, and I'm quoting here, the most popular name for baby boys in the US is Noah, not Mohammed, as it is in the United Kingdom. The projected Muslim population of the UK in 2050 could be as high as 17%. And he says for the United States, the projected Muslim share of the population is 2.1%. So he's basically saying there's this other factor that is unnerving, not only the Jewish community, especially the Jewish community, but, you know, many other parts of this case UK that he cites. And while the issue that he's diagnosing is nowhere nearly as acute here as it is there, he goes through the data that is a factor that, that I think is unnerving Jews.
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B
I mean, it's interesting to think in some ways Muslim Middle Eastern immigrants are playing a role in American politics, not unlike the role of Eastern European Jews in early 20th century American politics, where if you wonder, like, who were the real radicals who were the ones who were the most against American capitalism? You know, who needs to be deported because of their dangerously un American communistic ideas? It was the Jews. And at this point, whether it's Mamdani or some of the folks up in Milwaukee, what we see is that Muslim migrants play a disproportionately influential role on the left and that that attracts a lot of other people to a whole range of causes who were dissatisfied economically. You have an articulate group who have not a demographic base nationally to speak of, but in certain areas, in certain neighborhoods, a strong community. The Jews of 1920 were in no way, shape or form a threat to the overall direction of American politics. I don't think we're going to be looking to Somalian immigrants to be shaping our political future, but the impact on imagination is significant. It sort of makes it cool if you add sort of. Again, the blacks and the Jews tended to be allies in the 1920s. Now we see alliances forming between blacks in some cities and Muslim immigrants in some cities. So again, the immigrant who senses an ideological opposition to the broader society becomes a call of attraction for other groups who feel alienated. But it is important not to overreact and say, oh my gosh, it's just like France or just like the uk it's very different.
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A
How so?
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B
It's smaller to begin with, all right, but also the Muslims in America much more represent very different parts of the Islamic world. Now, anti Zionism is pretty pervasive everywhere, and in many places anti Semitism is camped onto that. But, you know, Muslims who come from Pakistan and the UK have followed a trajectory where a lot of them are not assimilating, going back to Pakistan to look for brides for their kids. But you're also getting, you know, Muslims from other countries that have a much more kind of open culture and a very different way of doing things in the same way. You know, in France, so many of the Muslims come from North African countries that there's a kind of all Muslims are together. There's a national identification as well as a religious. And in Germany, the Turks. Immigration into America follows different patterns. I'm not saying this to say, oh, there aren't any anti Semites among American immigrants from Islamic countries or that one shouldn't be concerned about where it all could go, but just that the differences between the American migration path and the European migration path are large. And, oh, by the way, we produce more jobs for young people and we have more social mobility. They go to France and they end up stuck in those horrible suburban housing projects, and it's very hard to go anywhere else. You know, in America, like anybody else, you start making some money, you have a much wider choice of neighborhoods to move into. So we don't know yet the story on how immigration will play out this way in the U.S. i suspect we are headed for some cuts in immigration, maybe not as dramatic as in 1923, although, who knows? But I think, you know, the era of mass immigration probably has come to an end, at least for a while.
- [37:09]
A
Okay, Walter, before we wrap, if you were to identify one or two or three you choose big things or trends to look out for in the new year in geopolitics from a US Perspective, what would it be?
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B
Well, one will definitely be the reaction in Europe to the National Security Doctrine and their increased sense of alienation from Trump. In the US Whether the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine stands or falls be a big thing. Obviously, U.S. china relations, we didn't get into it much in this podcast, but it's a very delicate, complicated thing, a lot of moving parts. I'm actually not sure anybody really understands all the dimensions of the US China relation. There's like two wrestlers in the dark sort of trying to grapple with each other and not really sure what's going on or what happens next or where the pitfalls are.
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A
What about India? You didn't mention India.
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B
Well, the awakening of Pakistan after a number of years in which everyone forgot about Pakistan, sort of. They don't like it when that happens. And between the war between India and Pakistan last summer, Pakistan's diplomatic offensive with Trump, Pakistan signing a security agreement with Saudi Arabia. Turkey is now apparently looking at plans to manufacture a lot of drones in Pakistan. The renewed interest across the Middle east in nuclear weapons, and Pakistan's record as an exporter of nuclear technology. All of these things, I would say, are going to complicate India's life, Israel's life, and America's life. And I don't think people are focused enough on that. You know, in America, we draw these lines and we say, okay, everything over here is the Middle east and everything over here is South Asia. I'm a student of the Middle East. I don't study South Asia. That's not my department, said Wernher von Braun. But they're all the same. They're connected, and Pakistan is reminding us of that.
- [39:18]
A
All right, I think you gave our listeners something to focus on that they probably were not thinking they need to focus on. So that's good. Walter, thank you for doing this. I look forward to being back in touch soon.
- [39:28]
B
All right, Dan, Happy holidays.
- [39:30]
A
Same to you. That's our show for today.
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C
If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members only show, Inside Call Me Back. Inside Call Me Back is where Nadavayal, Amit, Segal and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling. To subscribe, please follow the link in.
- [40:04]
A
The show notes or you can go to arkmedia.org that's ark media.org call me back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar. Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin. Already our production manager is Brittany Cohn, Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio. Our associate producer is Maya Rockoff. Community management by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Sinor.