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- [00:01]
A
Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com if you are the UK or Germany or Paris and you say we need to replace these American enablers, it will probably take you five to 10 years to do this. And so even if you are convinced that Trump is abandoning Europe, the timeline on which you can plug these holes is much, much longer than the timeline of Donald Trump's time in office. Indeed, maybe his time on earth. And so in that sense, you can panic, you can worry, but there's no point in losing your head or in hysteria because the timeline to fix this is 10 years. And so the debate we're now having with the Americans as Europeans is saying we're not pleading, saying please don't go. We're saying we recognize you are going to go. And now the good fight with Jasia Monk.
- [01:22]
B
The war in Ukraine shows no signs of abating. The Gaza conflict remains as perilous and as deadly as ever. There is a looming conflict with Iran over the regime's determination to build a nuclear bomb. And military technology keeps changing very rapidly, with Ukraine recently using drones to stage a spectacular attack on much more expensive and sophisticated Russian planes. The international system is in real flux, and significant conflict feels as though it might be around the corner. To help us think through what is going on in the international sphere, and particularly with questions of defense, I asked my old friend and grad school classmate Shashank Joshi to come back on the podcast. Shashank is the defense editor of the Economist. He has written about all of these conflicts and is in close touch with with senior officials around the world. And he is a great thought partner for trying to make sense of what these developments portend. In the last part of this conversation, Shashank and I try together to think through what the Trump administration is going to mean for the future of the United States and for the future of its alliance systems. Is the madman theory of politics true? And if so, does Trump actually know how to make use of it? Will America's allies lastingly conclude that they cannot rely on the United States? And might some of them be tempted to shift their alliance structures towards other major countries as a result? Can we even predict? Is it even knowable? Does Donald Trump even know where his foreign policy will ultimately lead the United States to listen to that part of the conversation. Please become a paying subscriber. Please support this podcast and since I'm in a good mood, I'm even throwing in a special discount. 25% off. Go to jasamonk.substack.com thegoodfight to support this podcast and listen to that part of a conversation. The Good Fight. It's Shashank Zhosi. Welcome back to the podcast, Sascha.
- [04:17]
A
Thanks so much for having me. I'm honored to be on a second time. What an accolade.
- [04:22]
B
It is an accolade. Well, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, Shashank. And as listeners to this podcast may remember, from the first episode, we went to grad school together, so we've known each other for a very long time.
- [04:33]
A
A frighteningly long time. Yasha.
- [04:35]
B
Frightening, yeah, yeah, that's true. I am frightened by my age. Sachsan, you cover a lot of aspects of international and military affairs for the Economist. I don't know very much about military things, but I was really struck by the recent Ukrainian strikes on Russia in which they were able to use very cheap technology with drones to destroy incredibly expensive and sophisticated military material, including planes that are used to drop atomic bombs. Tell me about the significance of those strikes in the specific Russia Ukraine conflict, but perhaps more importantly, how they signal what transformation of warfare through these new technologies like drones.
- [05:26]
A
It's an incredible incident, wasn't it? Ryasha, did you ever watch the BBC drama Rogue Heroes that was on TV for the last couple of years?
- [05:32]
B
I did not, no.
- [05:34]
A
So it's based on a book by Ben McIntyre about the history of the SAS, the Special Air Service, you know, the British equivalent to kind of, you know, your JSOC, your Navy SEALs. And in the Second World War, this was a unit that would be basically sent to go behind enemy lines and secretly, covertly and incredibly lethally blow up or machine gun or explode a bunch of German planes on an airfield somewhere in North Africa and then in many other places. And this was good old fashioned raiding, right? Military raids go as far back as military history does, but they were incredibly successful. And maybe a dozen SAS members, plus the Free French could smash up a few dozen German planes. Completely disproportionate effect. This is that kind of raiding in the modern age. But the key thing is you can now do it without having to send people across borders, you know, parachuting them a thousand miles behind the enemy lines without hiding them on the underside of trucks. You can send the drones instead and you can send in drones that are remote controlled. In this case, they were reportedly piggybacking off the Russian mobile phone networks. They were able to zoom in onto the airfield, getting really close up and destroy strategic bombers worth 10, 100 times more than the weapons that were being used. And this is basically old fashioned sabotage being prosecuted by modern means. It's not a revolution in warfare, but it's a really good example of how new technology is more democratically available to states that would once have not had long range missiles capable of getting all the way to these airfields. And it's not the only example. Right. If you look at the Houthis just now in Yemen, they have basically just fought the US Navy to a standstill. They have taken down a dozen US Drones, They've been firing missiles at merchant shipping, but also US aircraft carriers. They've forced the US F35 stealth aircraft to dodge out of the way. So I think the lesson here that we are seeing is that certain types of precision military technology, advanced technology, is basically becoming democratized. It's becoming much more easily available to a very wide range of states. And this is going to apply just as much to the US and to the Europeans and to others as it is to anyone else. So in the next conflict, this could be an American airbase, You know, this could be a European air base. That, I think is the real message of this.
- [08:03]
B
Yeah, that is one of the things that people on social media were immediately saying that there's actually probably a lot of very, very expensive and important military apparel in the United States and in other major nations that is stationed in the open air in military bases, because these places have air superiority over their own territory. They're not worried about the ability of foreign nations being able to send major aircraft into those inland bases. But if you're able to smuggle a bunch of drones close to those bases, then suddenly those planes may become vulnerable in a really significant way. I mean, do you think that the American military, or for that matter the Chinese military, are going to be looking at what happened in Russia and scrambling to completely change how they position and store this military apparatus? Are they really worried about something like that happening to them in the coming days and weeks?
- [09:00]
A
They should be, and some of them are. So to give you a specific example, if you look at the Pacific, look at Asia. If you look at the war games in which the American military and people helping them model these conflicts play out the scenarios in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, 90% of American aircraft losses occur on the ground, right to Chinese missiles, Chinese attacks on the ground. And there is a huge problem. The problem is, if you look at sort of 2012, right, Taiwan had 306 hardened air shelters. These are like big hangars that are extremely protected against aerial attack. China had 297, it had fewer of them. In the intervening period, China has built 380 additional ones. And America has only 15 hardened air shelters within 1,000 kilometers of Taiwan, which is basically where a lot of Chinese missiles can reach. So basically what we are seeing, Yasha, is a problem that many people have identified and where, frankly, the Americans are still astonishingly complacent. And this isn't a case of we've never experienced this before. This is a completely new problem. In the Cold War, we completely understood this. If you spoke to European military officers running air bases in Europe, they would say, we fully expect Russian special forces, the Spetsnaze, to come and try to kill our pilots in their bed and to blow up the planes on the ground before they take off. That's much easier than killing them in the air. So we protected the airfields, we dispersed planes to a lot of airfields. And what's happened in the intervening 30 years is, for the reasons you outlined is we've basically become complacent. We've shut down airfields to save money, concentrated planes at an ever fewer number of airfields, and have not invested the money to harden the shelters that we do have. So we do recognize it. Are we fixing it? Well, not at the pace that's necessary.
- [10:53]
B
So you said earlier that this new technology is democratizing warfare. Now, in general, I believe in democracy and think democratizing many things is good. I worry that democratizing warfare probably may turn out to be bad, that it probably is better for the safety and security of the world. There's a few major military forces that are able to monopolize much of the striking force in the world, as opposed to giving the ability to attack not just the militaries of foreign powers, but also civilian targets to a much, much greater range of actors. How will that transform the ability of small countries to wage. How will that transform the ability of non state actors like terrorist groups to, to exact very significant damage?
- [11:44]
A
I mean, it's a great question because imagine if you were speaking to a young US military officer operating in Iraq in, I don't know, 2005, and they were facing the problem of IEDs, improvised explosive devices being buried in the ground. This was a huge problem. As you remember very well. This killed huge numbers of US and allied troops. Imagine telling them, by the way, soon the IEDs are going to be flying. And soon the IEDs will be able to home in on you using object recognition at $50 a chip on board the drone which will be made using cheap Chinese components. And oh, by the way, you can't jam all of them using electronic warfare because some of them will be wire guided, using fiber optic cables that spool out from behind the drone, making them completely immune to your electronic countermeasures. And they'd be sort of, you know, going what the hell are you talking about? This sounds completely fantastical science fiction nonsense. And that's the world we live in, that's the battlefield we live in. So you're right. I think it depends where you stand, right? From the Western perspective it's not great that other countries have access to precision guided strike technology, surveillance technology, drone technology that would once have been the prerogative of the CIA or of kind of a multi billion dollar agency. But if you're say a middle sized power, like let's take the example of Pakistan, this is great. And to directly connect this to another recent conflict we've had, look at India, Pakistan, right. We've just had major clashes between the two sides. Maybe we can talk in more detail about those later on in our conversation. But in the past the options they had were we can shell each other using artillery, which is pretty kind of common, it is not a big escalation. Or we can use bombs and missiles dropped from planes and that's a big, big escalation. What's happened now is these countries have access to what we call loitering munitions, which are basically one way attack drones that can hover for long periods or basically just strike drones, very simple strike drones and those were used extensively in the recent clash. And they blur the boundaries of escalation because they sit between these two interesting categories of shells at the low end, missiles at the top end. And they give new options to a country like Pakistan, which didn't necessarily have the budget or the resources to afford huge numbers of very sophisticated weapons. So what's true of non state groups is also true of middle powers. One thing I'd say, Asha, is that if you're looking at this from the position of a NATO country, particularly in Eastern Europe, let's say you're Estonia or Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, you would be delighted to see that a country like Ukraine has been able to slow down and limit the gains of the Russians using constant surveillance and drone technology because it has slightly equalized the odds. So from a NATO Perspective, a small country perspective. I think there's a lot of good news for them as well, maybe even for the Taiwanese, thinking about a potential repelling a landing on the beaches of Taiwan.
- [14:43]
B
What about the civilian population? I mean, you go back to World War II and the extent to which the technology of planes had ripened over the preceding 50 years meant that you could have aerial campaigns that were much more important than the First World War. And of course, the targeted civilian populations to a much greater extent than they had in the First World War. And this led to the bombing of London with V1 and V2 bombs. It led to the firebombing of Tokyo. It led to millions of casualties, presumably in any major conflict. Now the ability of either belligerent party or all belligerent parties to inflict heavy damage on the civilian population, even of countries that might have assumed that they were immune to that kind of threat, has vastly increased. Should this up our expectation of how many people are likely to die in armed conflicts over the course of the coming decades?
- [15:49]
A
I'm not convinced of that, Yasha, and I'll explain why. The World War II raids that you described, the bombing raids, many of them were explicitly designed to de house civilian populations, particularly industrial workers. Thinking of some of the attacks on Germany, they were designed to cause SAP morale. The firebombing of Tokyo, you mentioned the V2 campaign, which caused many civilian casualties. But in a way, you know, that was explicitly designed to cause terror among civilians. I don't think we see that many campaigns like that today. One of the reasons is if you're thinking about the modern missiles that are being used in general, these are too expensive and scarce to be used just to blow up some general civilians. If you're a military commander, you want to use these to hit a military target. Now, I'm not saying the Russians don't attack civilians in Ukraine. Of course they do. In some cases we've seen in Kherson, for example, there's something that Ukrainians called human safari, where the Russians practice their drone skills by attacking random civilians. It's a pretty horrifying practice and phenomenon, but it's on a kind of limited scale. It isn't the firebombing of Tokyo, it is not Dresden. So it's on a very different scale. And if you think about really deep strikes, the weapons you would need to kind of conduct strikes over cities, neither the Chinese or the Americans have the wherewithal to do that over each other's cities in that way using long range bombers and nor I think do they really have the appetite to do it? Because this is also a key difference with World War II. This is a nuclear age, right? If you start taking out entire cities and causing mass civilian damage, you are very much in the terrain of nuclear escalation. So the long and short of it is, whilst I'm concerned about the impact on civilians or of urban warfare of the kind we have seen in Gaza with a horrifying death toll, I'm not as concerned About World War II type strategic bombing in that sense because I think the modern age of weaponry prioritizes as much as you can precision hitting what you want to hit. You don't want to waste your kind of million dollar missiles on just blowing up an apartment complex if you can avoid it. Does that make sense?
- [18:01]
B
Yeah, I think so. But isn't that precisely where the drones change the equation? Where at the moment the dominant technology is these million dollar? You want each of those missiles to have a target that's worth a million dollars. You know, if you can have a $200 drone with $100 explosive device attached, then suddenly it's fine to hit $300 targets. And if you can produce those drones at a sufficiently high volume, then precisely the calculus that you spelled out start to change very, very quickly and any residential building with four or five or ten stories suddenly becomes a target. But in this very cold hearted military calculus of how much are we spending and how much damage are we able to inflict on the enemy becomes worthwhile.
- [18:50]
A
Yeah. The only thing I'd say though is first of all, two things. One is, remember these systems tend to still have short ranges because that's the nature of cheap systems. You don't have huge batteries, you don't have huge jet engines. If they're going to be consumable, expendable, attritable, they're going to going to be pretty short ranged. So they're not going to reach across from, you know, to San Francisco or something. The other thing to bear in mind is that look at Ukraine and Russia, we are seeing the commoditization of these systems. I heard Ukraine's Deputy Defense Minister the other day say that the country is producing 10 million drones a year. Now I think that may be a slight exaggeration, but even if it's a half that, a third that this is mass production, even then you are still seeing both armies prioritise military targets because at the end of the day, even if the system is $300, you would rather take out an enemy soldier who is attacking you than an Enemy civilian in general, that is still viewed as the better trade off. But having said that, in a future fight with the Russians, if they're in the Baltics, would they resort to kind of civilian attacks on Baltic civilian buildings? I think absolutely. That's a possibility and a real risk.
- [19:59]
B
This is a really interesting way to try and grapple with this new technology. In the course of that, we touched on a number of conflicts because these drones are now being used in so many different theaters. I would love for you to update me and our listeners on what's going on in some of these conflicts. Donald Trump came in promising a rapid deal with Putin to end the war in Ukraine. There have been some minor and temporary ceasefires, but evidently the war is continuing in full force. What is the situation on the ground there? For a while, there was concerns that Ukraine may be close to collapse. I have heard a little bit less of that in the very recent past. Is there any likelihood of the lines between Russia and Ukraine significantly changing in the next months? Will there eventually be a deal if both sides realize that they are just bleeding soldiers and bleeding materiel without making those gains? Or is it imaginable that this war will go on for a long time or perhaps come to a more dramatic conclusion with one side breaking through?
- [21:14]
A
My gut feeling, and to put the bottom line up front, is that this war is still likely to drag on into 2026. But I'm not sure what happens beyond that because you begin to get into much more uncertainty around Ukraine's weapons supply and Russia's economy. So to come back to the present, the lines are changing. Whether significantly or not is a subjective matter. But to give you an idea of this, Yascha, if you look at May, for instance, the Russians occupied about 538 square kilometers of Ukraine in May. That is not a huge amount of territory, if you think about it on the map and relative to the size of Ukraine. But it is twice the territory that the Russians occupied in April, and it is the second highest monthly rate of advance since 2022. So that gives you a sense the Russians are advancing at a significantly heightened pace, but they still don't really have the capacity to break through and exploit the gaps in the line in the sense that you might expect. When we talk about offensives, our mind goes to kind of traditional blitzkrieg type offensives where armies move hundreds of kilometers in a day or a week. That's not happening. The Russians can't do that. But the lines are steadily moving back, and not just in the eastern part of the country in the Donbass region, particularly around places called Konstantinivka, which is a, a very important logistics hub in the Donbas in Donetsk and next door a town called Pokrovsk that many of your listeners will have heard of if they've been following the news. That's the thrust of the campaign for the Russians. But the Russians have also been making gains somewhere in the northeast called Sumy, which is a province where basically they were pushed out of there in 2022. Now they're coming back and I think they've made some sort of modest gains in Sumy. These are still basically dismounted attacks, like they're not using lots of tanks, armoured vehicles in May 19 type sweeping movement. These are basically small numbers of people operating on motorbikes, quad bikes, because they have to disperse, they have to avoid being seen by drones and they haven't got as many men to conduct these big offensives. So right now the question is, how long will that last? This is a war of attrition. Right now the Russians are losing extraordinary amounts of men, more than 1,000 a day, dead and wounded. But the important thing to bear in mind when you hear those figures is, is that also they are recruiting 10 to 15,000 more men per month than Ukraine. And they are doing it by offering huge sign on bonuses to Russian recruits rather than relying on forced conscription or mobilization. So by and large, most Russian recruitment is voluntary. The Russian gamble is that they can keep doing this longer than the Ukrainians can hang on, particularly in terms of remaining arms supply from the United States. The Ukrainian gamble is that they can keep doing this until such a point that the Russians basically run into huge problems with their economy as the oil price falls and as the Russian sovereign reserves run dry into next year. So for me, a great deal of this still depends on whether the US adopts the current policy, which is we're not going to appropriate more money from Congress to the Ukrainian armed forces, but we will allow a trickle of aid to, largely pre agreed aid to keep flowing into Ukraine and we will keep selling things to Europe to give to Ukraine. If they walk away, if they cut intelligence, if they refuse to sell air defense interceptors to Ukraine, if they refuse to sell other ammunition to Ukraine, then I think there is every chance the Ukrainians will run into a much more serious military crisis at some point towards the end of this year or early next year. And then I think we're in a very different picture. But the bottom line is Ukraine can survive, it can stabilize the lines, it can avoid a collapse if, and I think only if, Donald Trump maintains a minimal level of, if not active support, then acquiescence to Ukraine's defence.
- [25:17]
B
So when Trump first came in, it looked likely that he would refuse to continue even with that minimal assistance. He clearly thought of support for Ukraine as a policy of the Biden administration. You know, he has a long standing relationship with Vladimir Putin, which can be contentious, but which also is characterized by some evident extent of mutual respect. He liked, I think, the idea of being the person who goes in and achieves a peace deal, imposes it on the region and on Ukraine, and is hailed as a peacemaker. And none of that has come to pass. Why is that? And where has that left Trump? He seems in the last days and weeks to have been more critical of Trump in some of his social media postings, to have acquiesced with some Republican attempts to impose greater sanctions on Russia. He seems quite disappointed, not just with his ability to achieve a deal there, but also with what he thought was this special bond that he had with Putin. What explains that shift?
- [26:28]
A
I think that we've avoided the worst case and we're avoiding the best case. So the European strategy, Yasha, as you may recall, was to basically say a couple of things. We are willing to step up and provide more aid. We are willing to put together a coalition of the willing to deploy to Ukraine as an assurance force in the event that you agree, a ceasefire, and we're willing to encourage a ceasefire. So. To which the Ukrainians have agreed. So you, Mr. President, now must put this to the Russians and give them a deadline. And if they don't abide by it, you have to finally start applying pressure to the Russians, something you've been unwilling to do to this date, but we hold out hope you still will. And that's the strategy right up to the present. In fact, as we're speaking, not long before we've spoken, Friedrich Merz has been at the White House and Merz has basically done the same thing. He said, you know, it's time to apply pressure, Mr. President, on the Russians. Now, that strategy was based on the fact that the Russians are not going to negotiate in good faith without pressure. It is becoming increasingly clear Donald Trump is unwilling to do that, whether for reasons of delusion about his special bond with Putin, whether because he ideologically has some kind of affinity with the Russian president over their bond as strongmen, or some other reason entirely that we can all speculate over, but remains speculation. But the point, I think, is more interesting than that, as you've kind of touched on is we've also avoided the other extreme. We have avoided the Trump completely walks away and does what he did earlier in the year, which is completely shut down the intelligence flow, completely shut down all assistance. So let me give you a few bits of those good news, right? He's still keeping the sanctions package on the table, even if I don't think he'll actually use it. But we also saw the transfer of American F16 planes to Ukraine to use as spare parts for Ukraine's fleet. We saw the transfer of Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine, which were previously contracted under something called the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. And some of those things contracted under that initiative will keep flowing to Ukraine right through to 2026 because they have been agreed with US companies. And we've seen a limited amount of presidential drawdown authority, PDA funding, which is basically money appropriated by Congress that the president can spend as he wishes to use to draw down U.S. stocks to send some ammunition to Ukraine, although it was a very small amount. So these are very minor steps. But what they indicate to me is that we are seeing Trump detach himself from this conflict, not punish Ukraine, coerce Europeans, not come back trying to sign some kind of completely cockeyed deal with Russia about AI and liquid natural gas and the Arctic, as Steve Witkoff was talking about when he came back from Moscow maybe six, seven weeks ago. But he will also avoid, he's also going to avoid putting pressure on the Russians. So he will walk a middle path. He's saying, this is your conflict. I'm going to allow a little bit of aid to the Ukrainians, but I'm not going to lift a finger to help negotiations. So basically, the ball is now in the Europeans court to keep Ukraine solvent on the battlefield. And I think we will have to come back to the issue of diplomacy next year once the Russians have been softened up, once more pressure has been put on them, or, and I hope we avoid this outcome once the Ukrainians have fallen further back and it's become clear that the Americans are walking away to an even greater extent. And that will result in an even more disadvantageous peace that may be imposed on the Ukrainians that would, in my opinion, Yasha, have grave consequences for the future security of Europe.
- [29:59]
B
Speaking of the future security of Europe, I think during the first Trump term, Europeans basically decided to wait it out. They thought that America had gone temporarily crazy, but that the country was sure to come back to sanity. When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, they got their exact wish and they were able to proceed for another four years under the assumption that they could continue to count on the transatlantic partnership, that the United States would, in the end, always be a reliable ally. I think Trump's reelection and some of his fantasizing about taking Greenland and other things he was saying in the early parts of his presidency have shocked the European establishment much more profoundly. You see criticisms of America not just from the usual suspects on the political left, but also from many people on the European center right that used to be staunchly pro American in the past. And at least in rhetoric, Europe now is committed to becoming capable of providing for its own security. To what extent is it actually taking the steps that would be required to do that? To what extent are European leaders walking the talk of doing the investments in the military capacity, modernizing their militaries, winning the public support that might be necessary for Europe to actually become a significant military player that is able to provide security on its own continent?
- [31:32]
A
They are moving in the right direction. So we are two weeks away roughly from a big NATO summit in the Hague, in the Netherlands, where allies will probably agree to a target of defence spending of 3.5% of GDP on defence, measured as core military spending, with another 1.5% of GDP on defence related spending, which may include such things like infrastructure, cybersecurity and other stuff that would be conducive to good defence, but not really core military capability. Now, we're also seeing a number of other countries move in that direction in a serious way. So look at the above all, Yasha, the Germans, right? The changes taking place in Germany are remarkable. In fact, we have just had at the end of May, the first permanent German deployment abroad since the Second World War in Lithuania. It's a full brigade, right? I was told by an official recently that if you look at German defence spending by 2029, it's plausible that, that we will see German defence spending that is two times that of the United Kingdom, and none of it will have to be spent on nuclear weapons like the uk. That is just extraordinary to anyone like you who has followed the German defence debate in the last two decades. Who would ever have thought we would be in such a place? So I genuinely believe things are changing and I genuinely believe that, you know, that the message has got through. However, you know, I think as well as I do that the capabilities that Europe needs are not just stuff you can buy off the shelf with a billion dollars, right? You can't just go to the shop and say, I will have a heavy armoured brigade. I will have an air defence unit. These things are extremely slow to build because they need requisite defence industrial capacity and in some cases because they're just very complex. So think about the areas where the Americans provide exquisite capability to make European forces capable. It's not a bunch of troops carrying guns. It is enablers, what we call enablers, right? It's airlift, sea lift, air to air refueling, geospatial satellites that can help with battlefield targeting. It is other kinds of intelligence. It is nuclear weapons, of course, right? So the nuclear backstop to forces, if you are the UK or Germany or Paris and you say, we need to replace these American enablers, it will probably take you five to 10 years to do this. And so even if you are convinced that Trump is abandoning Europe, the timeline on which you can plug these holes is much, much longer than the timeline of Donald Trump's time in office, indeed, maybe his time on Earth. And so in that sense, you can panic, you can worry, but there's no point in losing your head or in hysteria because the timeline to fix this is 10 years. And so the debate we're now having with the Americans as Europeans is saying, we're not pleading, saying, please don't go. We're saying, we recognize you are going to go. We recognize you are going to move assets to the Indo Pacific to be able to fight China. Let's make sure that that process is an orderly withdrawal, a negotiated withdrawal in which we plug the gaps. And just to conclude, I was in Tallinn in Estonia two weeks ago and I heard Matthew Whitaker, the US Ambassador to NATO, speak. So he's a very Trumpy official appointed by Trump, no professional experience, but he has the ear of Trump, which makes him valuable to Europeans. And he basically said, we are going to conduct a review of military posture in Europe. It'll probably be later this year, but we will make sure that there are no security gaps that open up on the continent, because we will make sure that you, Europe, are able to fill the gaps that we leave. Now, I think that that is a very pragmatic, sensible approach if the Trump administration sticks to it, if it genuinely meets that promise to consult with Europeans rather than do what they might be doing in South Korea right now, which is unilaterally saying, hey, we might pull out 5,000 troops, some of the best troops in South Korea, and this is a completely blindsiding the South Korean government. So if they stick to this plan, there is a more pragmatic, grown up path ahead for Europe, NATO and America. But there's no guarantee of that with this administration, given everything that we know about its lack of discipline, its bureaucratic chaos, and the fact that the National Security Council kind of doesn't exist right now as a coherent organizing entity.
- [36:04]
B
One of the other major conflicts in the world at the moment is in the Middle east and specifically in the Gaza Strip. The declared war aims of the Israeli government are understandable in light of a terrible attack of October 7, which is to gain control over the Gaza Strip, and of course, to win the release and return of all of the hostages, whether they are hopefully still alive or whether they have, by this point, been murdered. Nevertheless, there are two things that I find both confusing and morally concerning about that conflict. The first is just to understand why it is so difficult for the Israeli military, which clearly has superior force in a variety of ways to gain sufficient control of a Gaza Strip to stop a return of Hamas, to destroy the tunnels, to degrade the ability to. Of Hamas to attack Israeli civilians. And the second is to understand what the true war aims of Benjamin Netanyahu's government seem to be at this point, why it is that this war has dragged on to the extent that it has, and whether that seems to imply or to indicate that the real purpose, whether in military terms or in domestic political terms, is a little bit different than meets the eye. Help us understand what's going on in the Gaza Strip at the moment.
- [37:38]
A
Yeah, sure. I mean, I acknowledge uncertainty here as well, given that I haven't been to Israel very recently. So take my observations with a pinch of salt as a distanced observer. But look, I think, first of all, let's look at this as a military problem. This is some of the most complex urban warfare on earth. This is one of the most entrenched military forces. If you're thinking about this from a Hamas perspective, that we've seen, this expanse and extent of a tunnel network is, I think, potentially unprecedented in terms of such a small area. I often think about the Islamic State in Mosul in northern Iraq, where the coalition tried to push them out of Mosul and did. But they had, like, you know, not. They had, like, you know, a year, a couple of years to dig into Mosul. Hamas has been doing it since 2007 and has been building that subterranean network for over 15 years. So think about how extensive it is. Think about how many of Israel's technological advantages, which are aerial surveillance, satellite surveillance, the ability to fuse electronic intelligence and signals intelligence using artificial AI. That doesn't necessarily help you spot stuff that is underground. It just doesn't. Right because it's not visible, it's under the surface. You can map every square centimeter of Gaza from satellites and from planes and drones, but it doesn't necessarily help you find a tunnel entrance inside a building. And even destroying those tunnels has proven extraordinarily difficult, which is why they have resorted to quite extreme, and in my view, in some cases, quite horrifying, means are flattening entire neighbourhoods en masse in ways that render them inhabitable in perpetuity. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is Hamas, as you know, Yasha is, you know, again, it's a social and military problem. It's a military problem. It has an armed wing, it's well armed, but it also has a social wing, it has a political wing. And so if you are treating doctors, administrators, you know, tax lawyers, civil servants as being effectively part of the same military movement, I think you are at risk of repeating some of the same problems that we saw with the US military in Iraq and to some extent in southern Afghanistan in how they think about insurgent movements that are woven into the political fabric. And by the way, this is not me making any excuse for the sort of horrifying ideology of Hamas, which I think is quite genocidal in its. In its intent. And then finally, to get to your last point on the politics of this, let's just be very clear here. You talked about degrading Hamas to a point where it can't pose a serious risk to the people of Israel. Let's be honest, we reached that point a long, long time ago. And many people in the Israeli security establishment, whether that's Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli Defense Minister, who is. No one by any in their right mind would describe him as the dove, whether it's the former IDF spokesman, Peter Lerner, whether it's former Mossad chiefs, they all agree this war could have been safely and responsibly ended a long, long time ago. While keeping Israelis safe, Hamas was on its knees. The problem is this Israeli government, which is the most extreme Israeli government politically we have ever seen in our lifetimes in, is unable to articulate a political future for Gaza because it depends on political partners in the coalition in Israel, notably members of the far right, that are unable to countenance such a vision, a political vision for the future of Gaza. They want to colonize Gaza, they want settlements in Gaza, they want to raze Gaza and, let me put it quite bluntly, conduct ethnic cleansing so that the people of Gaza are unable to live there. And I know those are very harsh words, but I think they're words that would be recognized by more than one half of Israelis themselves, who often have a more robust and frank and candid debate about these things in their newspapers than often we do as outsiders. So in that sense, I think that the politics of this and Netanyahu's reliance on extreme messianic coalition partners is a large part of the problem for why the Israelis cannot articulate and conduct a sensible political strategy now that they have imposed such military harm on Hamas over the past two years.
- [42:03]
B
I think part of what I'm having trouble understanding here is the analysis of what it is that makes Israelis unsafe. Right. So I think there's a immediate question as to what renders them safe or unsafe from direct attacks by Hamas, and then a broader strategic question about what is going to render Israel safe in the medium to long term. And I have two concerns in this respect. The first is that any democratically elected government will see it as its first priority to avoid repeat of something like October 7th. But part of October 7th was the fact that Hamas had clearly built up enormous strength in the Gaza Strip, used a lot of international money that had flown to that area in order to dig these tunnels under schools and hospitals to, you know, turn it into this giant base for attacks. But part of it was also a security failure on the side of Israel, which looks evidently preventable. It is with Hamas seems to have actually convinced Netanyahu that they were concentrating on building up Gaza and on providing a better standard of living for the people who live there, and that they didn't pose this imminent threat. And a lot of that attack could have been prevented if there had been more Israeli troops on the border with a Gaza Strip. So that is true, then that implies that presumably, in the wake of this great national trauma, future governments would not make the same mistake, would not take the ice off of the Gaza Strip and ice off of Hamas in the same way, and that would then presumably be able to prevent a recurrence of October 7th. Now, of course, the case for degrading Hamas military capacities to some significant extent remained real. But as you're saying, senior Israeli security officials have concluded a good while ago that that moment was reached. And so, you know, that makes it a little bit hard to see how further action at this point is serving the, you know, immediate, I guess, tactical imperative of making sure that the kind of attack which happened a year and a half ago can't be repeated. Now, there's a second question which is about the kind of broader conditions that have to be in place for Israel to be secure. And that requires a strong political military alliance with the United States. It requires being on good enough terms with a number of European countries that you can trade with them, that you can buy military apparel from them. It is premised on Israel being able to have a thriving economy which is at the root of its military superiority. And that means that you need to be able to travel around the world for Israeli companies to cut deals with partners in all kinds of different places. And even if it were true that the ongoing operations in the Gaza Strip were serving this immediate tactical goal of protecting the country from further Hamas attacks, which I'm really not a military expert and I'm not an expert of the region, but I, like you at this point, have my doubts about, I think it would be in serious danger of undermining those strategic underpinnings of Israeli security over the course of the next 20, 50 or 100 years.
- [45:45]
A
I struggle to disagree with you much on any of that, Yasha. Good intelligence, good, better defenses, but more importantly, good intelligence would have prevented this. The comparisons with the Yom Kippur War of 1973, in which a very rigid political conception of the enemy and the enemy strategy blinded Israel, is striking. The resonance between 1973 and 2023. So that's one sort of assurance of security. I also agree in terms of Yuran Israeli thinking about the future of normalization with the region, building on the Abraham Accords, a future recognition by Saudi Arabia, building a better future with Syria too, which is now under a government, remarkably under a former Al Qaeda leader who is now pledging to build a kind of multi ethnic state. We'll see how serious he is. But is talking about Israel not just talking about the Zionist entity? These are remarkable days full of great possibility. And to me, this Israeli government just looks hell bent on shutting them all down with a kind of myopic, politically influenced vision of its security. So I agree. The only thing I'll add to all of this is this could be a moment of great hubris in Israel. It has been so successful in a military sense, particularly in Lebanon, where it has managed to fundamentally smash Hezbollah using remarkable intelligence boldness and without suffering the grave consequences, such as missile strikes on Israel that many people thought would be inevitable and I thought would be inevitable. I'll say that. And it is leading it to a sense of hubris that we can remake the region. We can remake the region in our own image in a way that is favorable for us. We will live by the sword in that sense, a very American post 911 type view as well. And to that end, I think that I could easily see that they could keep going from here. They could look, for example, to bomb Iran, Iran's nuclear program. There is a real risk of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear program in the coming months because they fear that the Trump administration will strike a deal that is basically a weak and fragile and inadequate deal. But what underpins all of this is a sense of trauma. A sense of trauma from October 7th combined with a sense of hubris from the lightning campaigns in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria that has followed, but also in Iran, of course, think about the missile strikes of last year. So trauma plus hubris is a very dangerous combination that can lead to big strategic mistakes. And I don't need to point out the obvious, which is that this is what happened to the United States of America in the 20 years after 2001.
- [48:27]
B
I sadly share that fear of hubris. And the whole conflict, as it has for many decades, just looks like a terrible tragedy in which the understandable fears and resentments on both sides are leading to ever more suffering and ever more civilian victims. And it seems really hard to see a way out. Do you have any kind of sense of what the end game here is? Will this in fact lead to Dazens being forced to flee from the Gaza Strip and Donald Trump opening Trump Gaza? I mean, that seems rather unlikely. But it's also unclear at what point Netanyahu will or would decide to declare victory, perhaps flight some aircraft carrier and unfurl a banner that says mission accomplished and return to business as usual.
- [49:33]
A
The problem, Yascha, is of course, that unlike George W. Bush unfurling that banner for Netanyahu to declare mission accomplished is to reset the political clock, to put his coalition at risk, to put him back in the hot seat. And so there are powerful incentives for him to avoid that moment. And I'm afraid, I fear that this is combined with a broader American impulse, which is detachment. I talked about Trump detaching himself from Ukraine. Right. This administration has two competing impulses. It has the Reaganite peace through strength, assert American power on the world stage. And it has very much The Steve Miller, J.D. vance impulse of including people like him and Hegseth who were veterans of the war on terror and who are scarred by that, of keep out of this. This is somebody else's problem. You can call it neo isolationism if you want. I think that's a bit emotive. I might call it the restrainer impulse. The retrenching impulse. And those impulses are competing. But to my mind right now, particularly with the loss of Mike Waltz as National Security adviser, it is the restraining impulse that is winning out. America is pulling back. It's detaching itself from these things. It's willing to be present on the ground and have a big military, but it's not wild about using it. And we saw that in the Houthi campaign as well, where it bombed the Houthis intensively and then said, this isn't working. We're going to pull back. Which in some ways is a mark of strategic prudence. Right. That's a sensible thing to be able to do as well. But in Israel, what it means is, I'm afraid I see no real course by which significant pressure is applied externally on this Israeli government. I see no coherent Palestinian political movement on the other side that is able to negotiate. Now, let me add, partly that is down to Israel's ability to keep the Palestinians divided. And we see this in Gaza today with the arming of criminal, anti Hamas gangs, often who are doing more of the looting of aid than Hamas is. But on the west bank, we also see a very, you know, an aging, corrupt, kleptocratic Palestinian leadership that is in dire straits politically. So I, unfortunately, I'm afraid I see a future of Gaza that is dire. I see it, you know, the Israelis keeping buffer zones, destroying buildings to keep areas clear, maybe quite plausibly permanent occupation of particular places, and Gazans squeezed into ever smaller areas, faced with utter humanitarian disaster and misery that will be alleviated occasionally and in small amounts, only to return in subsequent weeks. I'm afraid that's a pretty horrifying vision, but that could persist for many, many years. I do not think we have circumstances where either side is going to be able to, and particularly the Israelis, will be able to make concessions on a political solution until the politics of Israel
- [52:18]
B
fundamentally changes, to move a few hundred miles away to a topic that is not much less concerning, what is likely to happen with Iran and its pursuit of a nuclear bomb? Here we seem to be in rather rare scenario, I think, in international relations where there's two very clear paths ahead. But the two paths are radically distinct. One in which Donald Trump comes to some kind of deal with Iran and presumably uses his leverage over Benjamin Netanyahu to force him to acquiesce to that deal in some kind of way or another in which the deal fails. And we are likely to see attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, perhaps with the involvement of the United States, most likely spearheaded by the Israeli military. What are the stakes in these negotiations and which of these rather radically different outcomes do you think is more likely? Or have I mischaracterized the clarity of a choice set here?
- [53:31]
A
I think you broadly get it right. I think we probably will see a deal. I think that the Americans have set these red lines saying Iran can have no enrichment. But in a way, the nice thing about having an administration where they can say eight contradictory things before breakfast is that it gives them a certain diplomatic suppleness that more coherent administrations may lack. And so I think we can already see movement towards a compromise. According to some of the reporting, the compromise may involve a regional enrichment consortium in which a number of regional countries like the United Arab Emirates and Iran enrich together, perhaps on an island in the Persian Gulf. In fact, if you do it on a disputed island in the Persian Gulf, you could even say Iran and the Emiratis both claiming that they are enriching uranium, which would satisfy their own domestic audiences, but would keep the proliferation risk more limited. Anyway, the point is, this is going. I think we have a good chance of seeing that kind of deal. The Trump administration, for reasons I have just spoken about, doesn't have the stomach to militarily enforce its terms. So if Iran walks away, I don't think the Trump administration wants to bomb Iran nuclear sites and trigger a new war in the region. I just don't think it has the stomach for that. So we will probably see a compromise deal, you know, more likely than not. I'm kind of at 55%, 60% at this stage, which still leaves room for worse outcomes. And if that happens, they will say to the Israelis, right, you are swallowing this deal and suck it up. Suck it up. You know, we know you don't like this, but we're going to throw you under the bus, which is what they did with the Houthi deal to end the US Campaign against the Houthis. They said the Houthis have agreed to stop attacks on shipping. They never said anything about ballistic missile attacks on Israel, which continues. So the same kind of sidelining of Israel could take place on the Iran file. However, this is where it gets a little bit more complicated. Does this mean that the Israelis then abide by that exhortation? I don't know. I don't think so. I think you could still very plausibly see an Israeli strike on Iran in defiance of America, which would do limited damage to Iran nuclear site because they don't have some of the key airplanes needed to drop the most penetrating bunker buster munitions on Iran. But they might anticipate or hope or gamble that the Americans will have to then finish the job in order to prevent Iran from nuclearizing at that point. So, in other words, where I'm at right now is we have a strong possibility of a deal followed by a strike nonetheless.
- [56:00]
B
And speaking to the former topic, that could potentially also do tremendous damage to the Israeli US Relationship, I don't know how Donald Trump would. Would take telling Israelis to stand back from nuclear attacks on Iran and then having his wish defied.
- [56:17]
A
Yeah, I think it would be. I think it would be really difficult for the Israelis to do this, and I think it would be infuriating for Trump to watch an ally defy him in this way. But what he would be then told by the intelligence agencies, Mr. President, we think that once the bombs have been dropped, there is a real risk. Iran moves its nuclear program underground and then accelerates its pursuit of a bomb, which fundamentally, let's remember, Yasha has been suspended for 20 years thanks to Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. He halted the weapons program in a formal way back in 2003, and he hasn't started it up again, even though elements of nuclear weapons research have continued. If you bombed Iran, Iran, there is every chance Iran would withdraw from the npt, the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, and would pursue a bomb. Just as when Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1987, Saddam Hussein accelerated his nuclear weapons program to the point where it was alarmingly mature by the time weapons inspectors arrived in 1991. So at that point, Trump may be confronted by the choice between, you know, telling the Israelis to stop it and cut it out and saying, actually, I have no choice but to finish the job.
- [57:43]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the last part of this conversation, Shashank and I tried to figure out which direction the Trump foreign policy will actually take. There are big debates even within the Trump camp about the extent to which Trump and the United States should impose themselves on the world, or to the extent to which they should retrench from engagement. We also discuss the madmen theory of international relations, trying to understand the differences between Nixon's actions in Vietnam and Trump's posture in the world, and discuss whether or not the slogan making the rounds in some foreign policy circles is true. Does tackle apply? Will Trump always chicken out? And what does the perception that he might do to America's standing in the world to listen to that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please make sure that you add the private feed of this podcast to your favorite podcasting app. Go to jaschamonk substack.com to become a paying subscriber. And I'm throwing in 25% off today, so go to jaschammonhapde.com thegoodfight and you'll be able to listen to each and every one of these conversations in full without annoying ads and even without my annoying announcements at the end for about a dollar a week. That's jasiamonktor substack.com the Good Fight thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to good friends. Goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [59:48]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.