← Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
What's Trump's plan with Iran, and beyond? - with Niall Ferguson
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Foreign.
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You are listening to an art media podcast.
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Trump people, by and large, are anti neoconservative. They have a very negative view of the forays into nation building and regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so what they're really interested in is what I would characterize as regime alteration. We know what this looks like because it's happening in Venezuela right now. They took Nicolas Maduro out and they said to his number two, Delsey, hey, here's the thing. You can either go to jail, too, or you can cooperate with us and you can carry on with your lousy regime. But you report to us now, not to the Chinese, not to the Cubans. So regime alterations, not like regime change. It's not a kind of idealistic attempt to remake a system. It's an attempt to change it from being in the camp of the authoritarian regimes, China, Russia, etc. And put it in the American camp.
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It's 4:00pm on Sunday, February 1, here in New York City. It is 11:00pm on Sunday, February 1, in Israel, as Israelis wind down their day and monitor events in Iran and US Decision making as it relates to Iran. Over the weekend, the United States and Iran have both signaled a willingness to enter talks aimed at, quote, easing tensions. Mediators including Turkey, Egypt and Qatar are now working to organize a meeting this week in Ankara between US Special envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian officials. American officials told Israel's Channel 12 that President Trump's calls for a deal are genuine and not cover for an imminent military strike. Meanwhile, the IDF's chief of staff, Ayel Zamir, met with senior US defense officials in Washington over the weekend to discuss Iran. This happened as the US Continued moving military assets into the region, including missile defense systems and a naval destroyer currently docking in Israel's Red Sea port of Eilat, according to Israeli Army Radio. Zamir has stated in a recent security assessment that a potential American strike on Iran could occur within two weeks to two months. On Sunday, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addressed the tensions by issuing his most direct threat yet, saying that if the U.S. attacks Iran, quote, this time it will be a regional war. Khamenei said Iran would not initiate a conflict, but would respond forcefully to any attack. Turning to Gaza, Israel on Sunday reopened the Rafah border crossing with Egypt for a day to pilot the system before allowing traffic to begin on Monday. This is the first time the crossing has seen any civilian activity since its shutdown in March of last year. Israeli officials say the reopening will initially allow medical patients and a small number of returning residents to cross under a tightly controlled system which Israel will monitor remotely. Goods and aids will not be allowed to enter through the crossing out of concern for smuggling. Now onto today's episode. While President Trump has disrupted the way US Foreign policy is conducted, many experts in the US and abroad who've been observing the administration's actions in Iran and Venezuela, throughout Europe, Greenland and in Davos are left scratching their heads asking, what is Trump's plan exactly? With us to try and connect the dots is historian and semi regular Call me back guest Neil Ferguson. Neil is a renowned historian and best selling author known for his work on global power, economics and the rise and fall of empires and the biography of Henry Kissinger. We are eagerly awaiting the next volume. He's a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He's a columnist at the Free Press and a CBS News contributor. But before our conversation, here's a word from our sponsor. Over the years, I've written about a lot of Israeli innovations, but among those I missed early on, United Hatzala of Israel, the country's largest nonprofit independent, all volunteer, completely free emergency medical service. The idea began about 30 years ago with a single devastating moment. A child was choking. It took 21 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. By then it was too late. The child did not survive. That tragedy became the founding impulse for United Hatzala, revolutionizing emergency medical care in Israel by placing life saving skills and equipment directly in the hands of volunteer medics. So help arrives fast and often before an ambulance arrives. Learn about United Hatzala's life saving work at IsraelRescue.org CallMeBack and stay tuned to hear from a hero medic who responded to the terrible attacks of October 7th. Neil, good to be back with you.
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Good to be with you, Dan.
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I will say, Neil, you and I have spent plenty of time together. I don't think you've been on this podcast since. Two major developments in your life not of equal importance. One is you becoming a grandfather. And two, you becoming Sir Neil Ferguson.
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You've been knighted in the right order of importance. Yes, I am Sir Granddad.
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Sir Granddad. And does anyone in your family actually call you Sir Neil or.
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No, only to mock and ridicule me because of the Monty Python allusions. You can never really get British people to take Sir Neill any more seriously than brave Sir Robin.
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Okay, all right, let's jump into this, Neil. I want to start with Iran. What do you think is the timeframe? Or let me say this, no One knows the precise timing for a possible US Strike on Iran. But if you are helping this audience understand decision making from President Trump's standpoint, how should we think about a timeframe? Or do you think there's a possibility there's no strike at all that happens?
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There must be some possibility that it doesn't happen. But I think it's not the base case. It couldn't happen immediately after the appalling slaughter that Supreme Leader Khamenei ordered against his own people, one of the most extraordinary massacres of modern history. But it couldn't happen immediately because the requisite naval assets weren't in place. They're now more or less in place. So it could happen tomorrow. But I suspect that it won't happen quite so soon, because President Trump understands he has created immense leverage for himself, not only by diplomatic deploying a substantial naval and air force to the region, but also because he's shown himself in the past willing to use such forces, most recently against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. So he has real leverage and credibility as a president who is willing to use the extraordinary supremacy that the United States enjoys in just about every military domain today. What he can achieve with this leverage against a regime that has lied and cheated and ducked and weaved in every negotiation it's ever been part of is hard to say. And that's why my base case is that strikes take place. I don't think they take place in the second half of this year. I think they take place in the first half, and I think they're more likely to take place in the first quarter than the second. But that's as precise as one can be because that's as precise as anybody in the administration probably is right now.
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So there are these talks going on with Turkey brokering those talks. What do you think Turkey's trying to accomplish here?
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Well, President Erdogan has long had a goal, which is to become a significant regional player in his own right. Although his fantasies of a kind of Ottoman revival re established in Turkey as the dominant player in the region are unlikely ever to be fulfilled, I think he has shown himself to be a deft and unscrupulous player of the game. So I think, as so often, he is seeking to take advantage of the fact that so many other players in the region have been significantly weakened by recent developments. Not only Iran, but its proxies. Syria, of course, has seen dramatic and revolutionary regime change. So he's, I think, pursuing his own ambition to be significant, if not the dominant player in the region. And Good luck to him with that. I mean, I think everybody in the United States, as well as in Israel, should be extremely skeptical of a man whose entire political career has been based on political Islam and who's willing to strike any kind of deal to advance not only his own power, but that fundamental cause of political Islam, which, as we both know, has been a source of tremendous instability to the region as a whole.
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If a US Strike were to take place, what would you imagine as its goals? And I want to flag for our listeners, which we'll post in the show, notes, the piece you wrote for the Free Press a few weeks ago, at the height of the protests, before we knew about the scale of the slaughter in response to the protest, but at the height of the protests, where the regime in Iran appeared to be on its back foot and the conventional wisdom was it was really, really, really wobbly. And you wrote a piece that was a contrarian take, which is not as wobbly as it may seem. This regime and regimes like it are actually pretty durable. They have a lot of staying power. They're incredibly ruthless, and they can hang in there. So I guess maybe first speak to why you believed early on, even though we were all very inspired by what we were seeing in terms of the protest, that was not going to be sufficient. I guess that's the first question. The second question is, therefore, if the administration is going to strike, what's the goal?
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Well, question one was, I thought, straightforward. There's a tendency amongst Western commentators to kind of be excited by revolutions. This is an American problem because Americans have this very positive view of their own revolution. They're always looking for a new 1776 to get excited about, especially this year on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But you have to keep reminding Americans that most revolutions don't have the happy ending that theirs did. They hardly ever produce constitutional liberal representative government that endures more often than not, as, of course, was the case in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution and the Iranian Revolution, what happens is that the ideological zealots come to the fore and the proponents of liberal constitutional order are swept aside and usually executed, if not driven into exile. And so that's the real pattern of history. In any case, what we were seeing in Iran beginning late last year and continuing into January was not a revolution. It was a counter revolution, an attempt to get rid of a revolutionary regime by those people who have lost faith, if they ever had any, in the revolutionary ideology. And the track record of counter Revolutions in history is really bad. It's really, really unusual for a counter revolution to succeed. History is just littered with the bodies of counter revolutionaries for a couple of reasons. One, they tend not to be entirely agreed on what their goal is. Not everybody who was in the streets favored the restoration of the old regime, the pre1979 regime. Bring back the Shah's son, Reza Pahlavi. Some people favor that, including, of course, Reza Pahlavi. But certainly not a vast number of the people in the streets were aiming at that. So there's usually some division about what the counter revolution is trying to achieve. And the other problem is that revolutionary regimes tend to be very ruthless. That's part of their nature. And revolutionary regimes think nothing of slaughtering their own people if their own people happen to have lost faith in the revolution. So my prediction was that the counter revolution would fail, because they usually do. And it did. It was crushed by one of the most extraordinary uses of political force against the citizens of a country that we've seen since the time of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. It's a really extraordinary thing that 20, probably more than 30,000 people were killed in just a few days by the regime's various repressive organizations. Second question, what is the goal of the Trump administration? It's not, I think, regime change of the sort that we used to talk about in the days of George W. Bush, where you'd use military force to get rid of the bad actors and then you'd try to build something vaguely resembling a Western democracy in their place. This was, of course, tried in Iraq, it was tried in Afghanistan. Didn't turn out too well. The Trump people, by and large, are anti neoconservative. They have a very negative view of the forays into nation building and regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so what they're really interested in is what I would characterize as regime alteration, not regime change. And we, we know what this looks like because it's happening in Venezuela right now. They took Nicolas Maduro out and they said to his number two, Delsey, hey, here's the thing, you can either go to jail too, or you can cooperate with us and you can carry on with your lousy regime. But you report to us now, not to the Chinese, not to the Cubans. So regime alterations, not like regime change. It's not a kind of idealistic attempt to remake a system. It's attempt to change it from being in the camp of the authoritarian regimes, China, Russia, etc, and put it in the American camp. Can that be done in Iran? Well, everybody knows that would be much more difficult than it was in Venezuela. But is it impossible? Is there nobody in the IRGC who might take the deal if the choice was we kill you or you cooperate with us? I wouldn't entirely rule it out. I think it's conceivable that regime alteration could be achieved. But in order to be achieved, I think there has to be a decapitation. I think Khamenei has to be taken out. Of course, that was considered last year and rejected. I think it's now very much on the agenda given the way that he has behaved because he ordered the slaughter. And I think in ordering the slaughter, he signed his own death warrant without quite realizing it.
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And whether the regime is taken out or is collapsed or there's some kind of regime alteration, as you describe it from Israel's perspective, I mean, I'm sure the Israeli leadership would like some kind of transformation of the regime, but short of that, they want to get rid of that damn missile production program. They have basic targets, let's say that they would have liked to have been able to finish off after the 12 day war in June that they didn't. It was a target rich environment. There are still targets there at a minimum. I think from Israel's perspective, there's still some more work to be done to just finish off the capacity. Iran has to be a regional threat.
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That's correct. And I think my expectation was that that work would be done by Israel this year when it was politically feasible. I think things have somewhat changed because of President Trump's engagement really with events in Iran that has changed the US Orientation towards a more interventionist state of. So I think we're in somewhat new territory now, but there are obviously conflicting but not necessarily completely contradictory objectives here. The objective of somehow helping the protesters has fallen by the wayside. It would be very hard, I think, to resuscitate the counter revolution. And I always felt that it would be hard to help it with airstrikes. Anyway, that's not really how these things tend to work. The other objective which you just mentioned is to ensure that Iran's nuclear program is not just a bit set back as it was by the strikes against Fordo last year, but really badly set back and really more or less taken out for the foreseeable future. That's possible with a coordinated US Israeli attack. And I think if that were done, it's not clear quite what would be left of Khamenei's regime. So I think there is a way forward here, that takes him out of the picture and creates a regime in Iran that accepts it cannot have nuclear weapons, it will never have nuclear weapons, and it must accept a different relationship with the United States and Israel than has been the case in Iran since 1979. I don't think that's an impossible thing to achieve, given the total weakness that the regime has revealed. It can certainly kill its own citizens, but what else can it do? If you just think about its competences beyond repression, there's not much left. It doesn't work economically. It can't defend itself against airstrikes. I don't think much has been done, really, to improve on its air defenses, which turned out to be so completely woeful last year. So really, its repressive capabilities against its own population are all that's left. That's why it's still in a very weak position, despite perhaps partly because of what it's done.
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And why do you think US Military strikes could not have done something to augment or provide, you know, rocket fuel to the protest movement?
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Well, I struggle to think of an example in history when throngs of people in the streets were protesting at the same time that the United States or anybody else was carrying out airstrikes. These two things are kind of incompatible when you think about it, because the rational response to airstrikes is not to take to the streets, but to take to the shelters. And I don't think that even if it had been militarily feasible, U.S. airstrikes would have made the difference back when the order was given in January by Khamenei to slaughter the people in the streets. The key here is to understand what airstrikes can and cannot do. If you look at Ukraine today, you can see that Russia uses airstrikes in an attempt to demoralize a civilian population, a tactic that was, of course, used in World War II. What the US tends to do with airstrikes is quite different because of the extraordinary precision that the US Is capable of. So what the US can do in Israel, too, is to take out very carefully chosen targets. And in this case, I think those targets would be command and control centers of the regime, of which there is undoubtedly a pretty detailed list in both Washington and Jerusalem. So that's what can be done with airstrikes. And I struggle a little bit to imagine a world in which that could have been done at just the right moment to help the protesters to succeed. It's difficult for me to see how that exactly would have worked.
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And looking back at History. When there are mass protests like we saw, and then they get successfully suppressed, why is it so hard for them to get fresh oxygen?
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Fear.
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I mean, there have been Iranian protests that rise up every few years going back to 2009. There are new protests that somehow come back to life. Maybe not as quickly as we'd like after they get suppressed, but the difference.
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Is that if you look at those previous protests, when the regime clamped down, the numbers of people killed was probably in the hundreds, whereas we're now looking at tens of thousands of people killed. Fear works. Terror is very effective. It's pretty hard to take to the streets when the probability of death is as high as it became in the wake of Khamenei's order to repress the protests. So I don't think there would be a large number of people in the streets unless it became clear that the regime had, in fact, folded. Now, I'll give you an example of how this works. Throughout the period of Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe, there were times when people took the streets in very large numbers. They did it in hungary in the 50s, they did it in Prague, and actually throughout Czechoslovakia in 1968. They did it in Poland in the early 80s. And in each case, case the authorities, the Soviets in two cases, the Polish authorities in the third case, simply crushed the uprising with tanks where necessary. In 1989, it was different. And the reason it was different was that suddenly it became clear that there weren't going to be tanks and there weren't going to be massacres. That was because Gorbachev, then Soviet leader, signaled that the old days were over, that the Sinatra Doctrine had suddenly been adopted instead of the Brezhnev Doctrine, and the different countries could do it their way. And crucially, I'll give an example. Leipzig, In, I think, October 1989, large protests took place there. I know people who were in those protests and the Stasi were there with weapons. And one of my friends told me we really didn't know if we were going to live or die because they could have opened fire and we were unarmed. But they didn't. And once it was clear that the Stasi weren't going to shoot the Stasi.
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For our listeners, the East German secret.
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Police, once it was clear that there wasn't going to be a bloodbath, the numbers in the streets then grew exponentially. And as you will remember, the Berlin Wall itself was overwhelmed. But that will only happen now in Iran if it is very clear not just that Khameneiz is dead, but that all the different parts of the repressive apparatus of the regime are not going to shoot to kill anymore. And that, I think, would require clearly outside intervention for it to happen. In the case of 89, it was ultimately a Soviet intervention that cut the different regimes like the one in East Germany loose. Something is going to have to signal to the Iranian people that it's all over before they'll take to the streets in those numbers again, because as things stand, it's just too dangerous. I mean, in the end, heroic young people take to the streets with the expectation that their probability of ending up in a body bag is way lower than it turned out to be.
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The irgc, the Basij, these security organs inside Iran, I think people often don't fully appreciate this, how deeply loyal they are to the revolution, to the regime, to the supreme leader. These are not sort of technocratic security, you know, executives or managers or generals. They are ideologues, you know, messianic in some cases.
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I think that's right. Although I'm sure there are also, as was the case in. In Venezuela, people who were just in it as a racket. Every revolutionary regime or movement begins with some messianic utopian ideology. And then over time, it becomes gangsterism, it becomes a racket. I can think of many, many examples of this. And I think Iran is at some level in the transition from the messianic utopian phase into the gangsterism that we see in North Korea or in Venezuela. I mean, the Venezuelan regime, remember, was a revolutionary regime. When Hugo Chavez began to chop away at the constitutional order of Venezuela, he was somebody with a Marxist populist ideology, in the same way that there's an ideology for the regime in North Korea. And doubtless also one could say this about other leftist regimes, derelict ones in Cuba and Nicaragua, but those ideologies are, I think, decomposing or have decomposed much more than the revolutionary ideology of the Islamic Republic. And you could sort of think about the timeline of a revolution in these terms. 1979 is not that long ago, especially if you're as old as. As I am and were born before it. I was a teenager when it happened. And so it's still relatively recent, and so the revolutionaries are not entirely gone. They also had the searing experience of war with Iraq. And many of the people who run Iran today were veterans, are veterans of that war. So it's not ideologically derelict the way I think Maduro's Venezuela had become. It had just become a criminal operation. Iran probably has quite a lot of criminal activity going on because that's the nature of sanctions evasion, and people are enriching themselves. So the Iranian elite has its princelings, the equivalent of the Chinese princelings, who are extraordinarily wealthy and like to show off their rich lifestyles on social media, exposing the corruption that is there at the heart of the regime. Part of the reason for its legitimacy crisis, and this is always the case with revolutionary regimes, is that there's this. This big disconnect between what the regime says, it's propaganda, and what it does, what the apparatchiks, the nomagnklatura, to use Soviet terminology, actually do. That was a problem in the Soviet system from quite early on. But of course, attempts to resist the Soviet system, say, in the 1960s, were always crushed, and there were large populations in the Gulag right into the 1980s. So one has to bear in mind the possibility that the Iranian regime still has another generation to run. I suspect that if there were no foreign intervention, it might just be able to keep going in the way that the Soviet system and its satellites kept going, even though they were hated.
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Let's take a short break to hear a word from our sponsor. One of the things I most admire about United Hatzala of Israel is their culture. Their volunteer medics come from every walk of life and they respond to anyone in need, Christian, Muslim, or Jew. Here's Lenore Atias, a veteran United Hatzala medic who responded on October 7th. We treated so many casualties, so many soldiers and civilians, kids, women, men, everyone. We did our best every life that I found someone, still have a pulse. I fight to bring him safely to the hospital and to save his life. What greater mission, what greater impact than saving lives? Join Lenore's mission. Donate today at israelrescue.org callmeback. The defense minister from Saudi Arabia was in Washington last week. According to reports, he, to many people's surprise, conveyed to the president, to the administration, that. That they had to proceed in some way. There was a risk in the US now at this point, not proceeding militarily, and the risk being that with all the assets that have been deployed to the region and after, despite Trump's threats, or in the process, in the course of Trump's threats against the regime, the regime slaughtered, as you said, tens of thousands of people that if there's no repercussion, other than sanctions or whatever, further diplomatic and economic isolation for the regime, that that would actually be a destabilizing and security setback for. For the other countries in the region. So there was this sense that Saudi was cautioning against, counseling against military action. And then the news out of Washington last week was the Saudis were saying, you're actually kind of stuck. You got to do something.
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Yes. Well, I think one of the lessons of the Obama administration was that if the United States acts weakly, if it does no more than give speeches and impose sanctions, like, the effects actually are extremely adverse, it's hard to imagine an Islamic State succeeding as it did for a time, in the absence of the obvious weakness of the Obama administration's Middle east strategy. And the same, of course, is true for the way in which Obama reacted to the initial invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. So I agree with that view that having deployed these assets and made very explicit threats, that's the one thing that the president does. He doesn't do secret diplomacy. He always does it publicly on truth, social. If you make the threats and don't carry them out, that has consequences. And of course, to leave the regime intact now, after all the slaughter there has been, isn't, in fact, a step in the direction of stability. It's actually a guarantee that the instability that has been such a recurrent feature of the Iranian regime's history will continue. I mean, I've felt for some time that what happened last year was unfinished business. It seemed only like the beginning of a sustained effort to alter the regime, and I use that term altered deliberately. There were people in Israel last year who seemed to be content with regime disintegration. I think there are other people in the region who are very nervous of that idea, because if you just disintegrate a regime, who knows what the outcome will be? Iran itself could fall apart. Given that there is a significant ethnic heterogeneity in the Islamic Republic, I think there are certainly people in the Gulf who would be very uneasy if that were to happen. So my sense is that regime alteration in the way that has been done in Venezuela is a sensible way forward, where you simply say, look for the foreseeable future. Just understand that you're answerable to Washington D.C. and we'll see how things go. But the choice should be to the irgc. Do you want to share the fate of Khamenei after he has been killed? And if you want to avoid it, then you need to cooperate with Washington. But the days when you could be part of an authoritarian axis and work with the Russians and the Chinese and the North Koreans, as well as all the terrorist organizations that you've supported, those days are over. If you want to live you're gonna have to live as part of the American underwritten order in the Middle East.
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Okay, so I want to go to that, because you were on our podcast in February of 2022 ages ago. That wasn't the last time you were on. But that conversation was focused on what you called Cold War ii, which was this framework for thinking about the world that you had authored and had been advancing at the before then. And it was basically, we were entering this period akin to the Cold War between the west and the Soviets. And now this was going to be a Cold War between the US And China. So, two questions. One, do you still subscribe to that framework? And two, where does this exact topic worth dissecting right now, which is US Decision making on Iran, fit into that framework?
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Well, I do still adhere to that framework. And I have been saying now since 2018, we're in Cold War. Two, as in the first Cold War, it has an ideological dimension, a technological dimension, a geopolitical dimension, basically economic dimension. It's just that the People's Republic of China has taken the place the Soviet Union previously occupied. And it is a much more formidable rival because it's much more technologically sophisticated and economically large and economically successful than the Soviet, Soviet system ever was. You've got to fit everything in the world into that framework for it to make sense. You have to fit the war in Ukraine into that framework, since Russia is now clearly the junior partner of China. Russia's intervention in Ukraine had a green light from China, has been underwritten economically and supported by China, and then turn to the Middle East. It's the same basic picture where the United States has a very close relationship, not only with Israel, but the Gulf Arab states. China's relationship has been with Iran. Russia's too. The idea of an axis of authoritarians is one I wrote about, had written about when you and I spoke in 2022. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, with some minor satellites such as Venezuela. One might even include Cuba. That's the world order we currently contemplate. And the United States has tried in various ways to contend with this. Now, when we spoke in 2022, Joe Biden was at least nominally President of the United States. And his advisors had an approach to this challenge which I think was very misconceived. They believed in alliances, or at least they said they did. But what they weren't very good at was deterrence, because they preferred to talk about de escalation rather than deterren. They utterly failed to deter the Russians in Ukraine and then the Iranians and their proxies in the Middle east with the hideous outcome that we all remember on October 7, 2023. So the Biden administration did a very bad job of deterring the authoritarians, and if anything, I think it made that axis become more of a reality, because as time went on, the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese were all cooperating much more closely, and even the North Koreans sent troops to help the Russians. So I think what President Trump has done since his re election has been much more effective in challenging this axis of authoritarians and turning the tide of Cold War ii. And I think it's been a quite ingenious strategy in which he's relied less, really, on European allies, which I think think is understandable, since I don't think they have been terribly helpful. And more on American military power as well as American economic power, and going after weak links such as Venezuela and signaling to China, we are capable of taking out the leader of one of your client states. And we just did it. Okay. We are capable of striking Fordo with the kind of. Of bombers and technology that you don't have. These are a very different way of dealing with the authoritarians, and I think a more effective way, though ultimately, and this is the last point I'll make, we still have the biggest question of all unresolved, which is Taiwan. That's the thing that Xi Jinping wants to take control of. As much as Putin wants Ukraine, he wants Taiwan and the United States. United States faces a really daunting challenge there. The good news is that Xi Jinping can't seem to find a general that he trusts. And this constant purging of the Chinese military leadership makes the risk of a showdown over Taiwan diminish, because it's hard to see how Xi could possibly get into such a situation with the leadership of the People's Liberation army in disarray, if not in jail. So that's where we are. And I think you'd have to give President Trump quite high marks compared with his predecessor, for just mixing it up with the axes of authoritarians and challenging their overall global strategy quite effectively.
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B
So on Europe, you just returned from Davos. You wrote a couple pieces that will also post in the show notes for the Free Press on your observations about Trump meets Davos, which was an amazing scene, which was for like a day and a half, half all the conversations about Adavos seemed to be anticipating Trump's arrival and trying to worry in advance about what he would say. And then he spoke, and then the next day and a Half was all about responding to what Trump said. You know, I know there's been a change in leadership at the World Economic Forum, but historically it has been a Europe heavy, European elite heavy convening. So let's just say it's still that even though Larry Fink has been trying to move it a little bit, I think in a different direction. I mean, you spent the whole couple days, few days with European elites largely at the conference. What do you think they're misunderstanding about this moment?
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Well, although I think the World Economic Forum is under somewhat different management, it still remains a vast bazaar in which businesses from all over the world and governments hawk their wares and do deals. And the official program is really a kind of excuse of for all of this deal making in the bazaar. But the tone of the official program hasn't radically changed since the high globalism of Klaus Schwab. That is to say, there are still sessions on climate change, diversity, equity and inclusion, etc. Etc. The critical thing about Davos is that President Trump has long been the pantomime villain of that event. This was not his first visit. In previous visits, I think back to 2020, there were almost boos and jeers, just as there were euphoric cheers for Greta Thunberg. So the idea that Donald Trump is the sort of bad guy is really widely believed by European politicians and many business leaders and certainly by the European readers of the Financial Times, economists, economist, etc, so he was once again the pantomime villain. People went along knowing that they would hate his speech and hating it as they expected to. And the entire week was entirely consumed by a somewhat absurd debate about the status of Greenland, which President Trump had been saying for weeks. As he said at the period around his inauguration last year, he really wanted it. And so the Europeans had their hair on fire about this outrageous threat to the integrity of NATO and the sovereignty of Denmark, etc. Etc. Everybody spent just hours talking about how wicked it was of Donald Trump to want Greenland. And I found it bizarre in the extreme. Bizarre and the other spelling bizarre versus bazaar, B I A R R E. As opposed to the bazaar that I was attending.
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Right?
- [39:00]
A
It was a bizarre bazaar because it was obvious to me that there was nothing terribly serious about this entire Greenland proposal any more than Canada becoming the 51st state. It was classic Trump trolling. Why, I asked myself, is the American delegation so determined to make the Europeans, not to mention the Canadians, spend the whole week talking about Greenland, which is of course really not a big priority for the administration? And the answer was Obvious it was, was to stop the Europeans talking about anything important like, say, Iran or for that matter, Ukraine. So what was really going on, I think was just this huge mask or distraction operation that got everybody talking about Greenland so that they didn't bother asking questions about, well, the aircraft carrier group on its way to the Persian Gulf or Steve Wytkoff and Jared Kushner going to Moscow and then to the Emirates to destroy, discuss peace in Ukraine. I think mission accomplished. They all took the bait. Trump had great fun, the delegation, the US Delegation had great fun. And the Europeans and the Canadians still seem none the wiser, don't seem to have realized just how totally they were played.
- [40:12]
B
I was struck by statements by two individuals. One was Zelensky, President Zelensky of Ukraine, and also the Secretary General of NATO, both of whom in different ways said, Europe, don't misunderstand Trump. Or in the case of Zelenskyy, he all but said Europe, don't overstate how relevant you are.
- [40:31]
A
Well, I think Zelenskyy's speech was remarkable because he absolutely laid into the Europeans because the Europeans have talked a big game about war in Ukraine ever since the Russian full blown invasion of February 2022. But they've consistently failed to deliver what Ukraine needs to avoid defeat beat. Without the United States, the Europeans can't back up their fine words with hardware. And so this, I think, has been trying the patience of President Zelensky for some time. But the really important point, which I don't think has been fully appreciated, is that when the attempt was made last year back in November to try and get peace talks going on a 28 point plan, which was drawn up up by Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Russian interlocutors. I think Ukrainians were also involved. It was the Europeans who said, no, this isn't good enough. We can't possibly make concessions like these to the Russians. And they were the ones who insisted on a change to the proposed peace plan, which of course Putin then rejected. And so part of the frustration in the US as well as in Kiev is that the Europeans are actually getting in the way, way of the kind of compromises that are obviously going to have to be made if there is to be an end to the war in Ukraine. Ukraine can't win the war. It can avoid losing it, but it's hard to see how it can actually win it. It's not about to drive the Russians out of the Donbass. So that's a compromise. Peace that's coming, that's obvious. And I think there's a kind of frustration which Zelenskyy made very clear at Davos with the Europeans because of their fundamental unworldliness. They love to talk about strategic autonomy, but they don't actually will the means to bring this about. I think that's part of what was going on.
- [42:15]
B
You also mentioned Mark Russer, the Secretary General of NATO.
- [42:18]
A
Correct. Since taking on that job previously, he was the Dutch prime minister because this year and last year, he's been very conciliatory towards President Trump. He jokingly called him Daddy.
- [42:30]
B
And he's taken a lot of heat from European leaders for this. Right.
- [42:33]
A
A great deal of heat. There was a text message that he sent to President Trump which was certainly on the verge of sycophancy by comparison with the messages that Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was sending. But Rutte gets that Europe doesn't really have any bargaining position so long as it is entirely reliant on the United States for nuclear deterrence, really, as well as for a vast range of military capabilities that the Europeans can't provide for themselves. So although Marc has to probably deal with President Trump in ways that make Europeans uncomfortable, he's just acknowledging the reality that Europe can't go it alone without the United States. And if President Trump wants some ring kissing, you better get ring kissing. Yeah.
- [43:18]
B
Chancellor Mears has recently said, I think you'd know better than me. He recently said something along the lines that Germany's military is going to be one of the most important militaries in the region in Europe. And I hear these statements and these visions articulated, whether it's from Germany or other countries throughout Europe. Europe. And yet I see these surveys that show like a minuscule number of, in the case of Germany, was astonishing low of Germans, number of young Germans that were willing to fight, let alone die for the military vision articulated by Chancellor Mers or by any European leader, for that matter. I mean, that is one of the things that Europe, when you say Europe doesn't have a lot of leverage, that seems to me like one of the big ones, which is young European men aren't interested in fighting for their respective countries.
- [44:01]
A
That's right. And one could go a little further and say, if one looks at the politics of Germany or France or for that matter, Britain, what do you see? You see in the polls, populist parties leading reform in the uk, Rasomm Le Mont Nacional in France, and the alternativa for Deutschland in Germany. And these parties, particularly the last of them, the AfD in Germany, are, if anything, somewhat not Russophile in their inclinations and certainly not in a great hurry to provide Ukraine with security guarantees that might require some future military contribution to a conflict with Russia. So I think that the European position is doubly weak. It's weak economically, but it's also weak politically. Now, to be fair to Chancellor Mertz, whom I respect, he is doing his level best to rearm Germany and to get the German economy out of the slough of despond it's been in for some years. He understands that Angela Merkel, the last Christian Democrat leader, was a disaster for Germany with her bet that you could base the German economy on Russian natural gas, free defense from the United States and exports to China. It's all fallen apart. And Mertz has got this tough assignment of trying to rebuild Germany's defense capability, which had really worn away way to near irrelevance. But he's up against a real political headwind. And in any case, whether he succeeds or not, we're still a very long way away from Europe's strategic autonomy. Able to run NATO without the United States, that's at least a decade away. And that would assume some significant investment in Europe's nuclear capabilities, which are currently minuscule by comparison with Russia or, of course, the United States or for that matter, China.
- [45:48]
B
Two last questions. I want to bring it to where things look from President Trump's perspective. One is you say that he does not see the Europeans as very serious and reliable allies, at least now in the near future. There is rising volume in parts of Trump space, and I think it's louder than it is actually representative in numbers. I think the numbers are a lot smaller. I just saw another survey on this last few days that show that among the MAGA base, those who are opposed to what President Trump did in Venezuela or what he did in Iran last year, or it's much smaller than you would think, given the hysteria over some of the podcasters and others who've been quite critical of what Trump has been doing in foreign policy. That said, there's something going on. There's something going on on the right. And as it relates to Israel, which seems to be an ally that does, unlike, as you're saying, Europe does actually bring really something meaningful and concrete to the table and its relationship with the United States. How would you describe what does President Trump understand about the US Relationship with Israel that these, like I said, small but noisy and increasingly louder and louder noisy don't understand?
- [46:53]
A
Well, President Trump has never been an isolationist, and I think it was one of the confusions of the last decade that led commentators to talk about him as if he was president. Trump likes old Reaganite terminology like. Like peace through strength. And he understands that the American public will always be behind a president who uses American power effectively, who administers surgical strikes against enemies and avoids getting bogged down in forever wars. President Trump is that kind of a president, and I think he understands very well that that is the kind of president that American voters can get behind. Now, out there on the extremes of the MAGA movement, there's been an outbreak of the kind of toxic politics of the right that had largely been removed from the Republican tent in the days of William F. Buckley. So if you go back to before Buckley, who for many years edited National Review, there were anti Semites, there were hardline isolationists who would have made peace with Nazi Germany if they could have. There were all kinds of obnoxious people on the American right. And buckling made it his life's mission to drive them out of the Republican tent. And the result, in many ways, was Reaganite conservatism, which included the Bible Belt, included a lot of social conservatives, included Goldwater rights from the 1960s, but all the cranks and cooks had been kicked out. The tragedy of the career of Tucker Carlson, to name just one of the people responsible, has been to revive all that lunacy and bring antisemitism back into American right wing discourse. And this, of course, is a tragedy because Tucker Carlson was a broadcaster of considerable talent. I can't fathom why he's gone off the rails the way he has, but he and others are playing with this fire, if you will. It's transgressive. Doubtless it gets clicks. Doubtless the algorithm favors it because it's just so outrageous to say, as Nick Fuentes did, that Hitler was cool school. But politically, this is completely nuts and is, I think, a surefire way to discredit elements of the American right. So that's all going on. It's noisy. It attracts the attention of at least some people in the administration. Some say that Vice President Vance at least pays attention and still has an ear open to Tucker Carlson. President Trump, I think, has very little interest in that kind of kind of thing because he's shown himself really to be a friend of Israel, to understand Israel's importance to the United States as the one democratic system in the Middle east upon which the United States can rely. And I think he's shown himself, as president, to be a consistent friend of Israel, one who can be critical, but nevertheless one who is fundamentally supportive of, of Israel, and sees it as absolutely crucial to the stability of the Middle East. And I hope President Trump will continue to pay no attention at all to this odious lunatic fringe on the far right. And with Locke, those people will just sink back into the irrelevance from which they emerged.
- [50:14]
B
Neal, just in closing, keeping your historian hat on. Every presidency, with time, with distance, we look back at, and there's, at least in global affairs and foreign policy, there's something, something distinctive that you can sum up as to what happened in that presidency, the imprint it left on the world. You know, Nixon in China, Reagan ending the Cold War, George W. Bush's response to 911 and the wars that followed it, Obama's JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran. We can go on. And every, you know, you just catch your breath and can reflect. And there's like, talk about noise. There's a lot of noise in the moment, but you take a step back and you're like, well, there was. Whether it was successful or not, you can kind of articulate the plan. Plan, and you can articulate what was accomplished. And right now, I think a lot of commentators look at what President Trump is doing with these different forays. Venezuela, Iran last June, perhaps Iran again, the fighting with Europe over whatever the issue du jour is. And they say there's no coherence to it. What is this? And we're only one year into this. Okay? So I'm not asking you to look back with an historian's eye at a presidency that's only one year into its second term. But that said, if you had to step back and explain, what is the coherence to this foreign policy? What is it?
- [51:31]
A
I think the critics of the president often talk about a wonderful liberal international order that he is tearing up or has torn up. And as an historian, I have to just remind everybody that this is largely a fiction. There was no liberal international order that they created in 1945 in the ruins of Ukraine, Europe. We entered the Cold war within about two years of the end of World War II. And it was the Cold War that really defined the geopolitics of the second half of the 20th century. And to give credit where it's due, it wasn't actually Ronald Reagan who had ended the Cold War, it was George H.W. bush. And he deserves more credit than he has received for that. In many ways, he was the most successful of all the foreign policy presidents of the modern era. And I think what we can learn if we look dispassionately at American history since 1945 is that American power is much more about A, American military capability and its economic foundation and B, the ability of the commander in chief to exercise that power. Power in an effective way. George H.W. bush exercised that power in a very effective way when Saddam Hussein attempted to annex Kuwait. By contrast, his son used that power much less effectively by embroiling the United States in over ambitious plans completely to remake Iraq and Afghanistan, plans that were not wholly unsuccessful in Iraq, but were holy unsuccessful in Afghanistan. So the key to President Trump is, I believe, that he's one of those presidents who knows how to use American power effectively, which was not true of his predecessor, who was really quite bad at using American power. And I think that's the key to understanding President Trump. The allies squawk. They love to squawk, especially the European allies. But the reality is that that President Biden was not good for Europe, and President Trump has been very good for Europe because President Trump actually is forcing the Europeans to put their money where their mouths have so long been and actually start to make Europe a more effective military ally than it has been now. The big question, which I can't answer because it lies in the future, is does President Trump ultimately prevail over his adversaries? Can he get President Putin, Putin to agree to end the war in Ukraine in such a way that Ukraine survives as an independent state? Can he exert enough pressure on Putin? Can he cut a good enough deal that that is achievable? We still don't know. Can President Trump achieve regime alteration in Iran so that the nuclear threat goes away and Iran ceases to be the sponsor of all the terrorists in the region. We still don't really know how that turns out. And most importantly, Dan, we don't know if President Trump prevails in the the ultimate challenge, which is to deter China from attempting to take control of Taiwan, Taiwan, which is so enormously important economically because of TSMC and the semiconductors that it manufactures for Nvidia. Those questions are unanswered. And I'm not going to attempt to guess. But all I can say is that it's too early to say that President Trump is doomed to fail in these endeavors because his successes in his first term, meaningful successes like the Abraham Accords, to give just one of many examples, his successes as a president in his first term strongly suggests to me that he has a capability to use American power effectively, to use it in a limited way so that wars don't become enormous and escalate to the point of becoming forever wars. But to use it impactfully to deter America's enemies, that's the most important thing at a American President has to do. Not to be nice to American allies, not to make American allies feel good at Davos. That's not the point of being President of the United States. The point of the President of the United States is to deter our enemies. President Trump is good at that, partly because he's made a reality of President Nixon's dream of madman theory. Nixon dreamt that he would be so unpredictable that the enemy, the Soviets, would regard him as so potentially dangerous that it would deter them. This is what he tried to use to get peace in Vietnam, and it didn't work, because nobody really thought Richard Nixon was a madman. They knew he was a pretty tricky guy, but not mad. Mike Pompeo memorably said, and I've heard him say it twice, that he had no trouble at all persuading our adversaries that President Trump was a madman when he was Secretary of State, he said, CNN did that for me every night. So this is why President Trump is quite effective in this role, because people really can't predict what he's going to do. His superpower is that he carries out about half of the threats that he makes. Looking, if you look through Truth Social, or back in the days of Twitter, look through the threats he's made, he does actually carry out about half of them, which means it's a coin toss if you're on the other side as to what he's going to do. The Iranians don't know. The Venezuelans didn't know until he did it. The Russians, Russians really don't know. The Chinese really don't know. And this is a very distinctive kind of power which intellectuals, Europeans and Canadians alike, tend to underestimate. I don't.
- [57:02]
B
All right, Neil, we will leave it there. I really look forward to your book on the Trump foreign policy legacy years after this rest of this administration, because if nothing else, it'll make people's heads explode. Explode. If Trump is the. What did you call him? The pantomime villain at Davos. You're like a version of that, you know, at Davos.
- [57:23]
A
Well, you know, the thing about Davos is the consensus at Davos is just always wrong. And I pointed that out last year. It was wrong last year and it'll be wrong this year. It's always wrong. Yeah. So that's a very reliable basis for being a contrarian.
- [57:38]
B
All right, Neil, we'll leave it there. Thank you.
- [57:40]
A
Thanks Dan Foreign.
- [57:50]
B
That's our show for today. 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 Nadavael, 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 the show notes or you can go to arc media.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 Community Management by Gabe Silverstone. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor. If someone just collapsed right in front of you, you'd call an ambulance. In New York City, that ambulance would take 12 plus minutes to arrive. United Hatzala of Israel often gets there before the ambulance, regularly in three minutes or less. How Innovation United Hatzala's iconic orange Ambucycles ambulance motorcycles weave medics through traffic GPS systems geo locate the nearest volunteers and their AI driven technology helps predict when and where the next emergency will occur. This all means faster care and more lives saved. I have family and friends in Israel that count on United Hatzala and you can too. They'll help anyone who needs emergency care every day, fast and for free. So if you live in Israel, just dial 1221 for help. If you're looking for a cause with impact Pact support United Hatsala of Israel. Donate today@israelrescue.org callmeback and add this number to your phone right now. If you live in Israel. One two two.