← The Rest Is Politics: Leading
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- [00:01]
Alastair Campbell
Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. Sign up to the Rest is Politics. Plus to enjoy ad free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the restispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com. Welcome to the Rest of Politics.
- [00:21]
Rory Stewart
Leading with me Alastair Campbell and with me Rory Stewart. Today we have with us Rob Malley. Rob was right at the heart of US Middle east policy for many, many years, had senior positions under Bill Clinton, under Barack Obama, and under Joe Biden. He was right at the heart of the Middle east peace process, in other words, Israeli Palestinian relations, but also latterly was the special envoy for Iran, senior director at National Security Council in 2014, and was the lead negotiator on the JCPOA, which was the great deal with Iran on the nuclear file. He is probably one of the most thoughtful, certainly American analysts of the situation. So Rob, so much to talk to you about, but thank you for joining us.
- [01:08]
Rob Malley
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.
- [01:10]
Alastair Campbell
We like to start off with our guests just by finding out a little bit about where they came from and why they ended up where they did. So just as briefly as you like, tell us about your background, your parents, your childhood, and how you kind of started the journey to becoming what you went on to become.
- [01:24]
Rob Malley
Yeah, well, that's an unlikely journey in some ways. So my father was sort of a minority marginal figure throughout his life. He was a Jew born in Egypt, so he was already a minority in that sense. Then he was a anti Zionist Jew, pro Palestinian, which made him a minority in his own community, moved to the US As a journalist and was a vehement anti American journalist. So that didn't last too long. He then moved to France, where he has the distinction of I don't know if he's the only American journalist because he acquired American citizenship of being kicked out or expelled from France in 1980 because of his writings which were very anti French in terms of their what he considered their neocolonial policies in Africa. So that's his background. My mother is also a bit of an oddity because she's a Jew from Brooklyn, but who then ends up volunteering for the Algerian National Liberation Front at the UN while they were struggling for independence. But so the one piece which I mentioned because of, because I then joined the Middle east peace team under President Clinton is that the first Israeli or Palestinian I ever met happened to be Yasser Arafat In 1981 or two, I was vacationing with my family in Algiers and in walks Arafat speaks to us in Arabic for an hour. I don't know any Arabic. So at the end of the conversation he's thinking for he apologized and he said next time we meet he'd speak in English. And the next time was in 1998 when I was sitting beside President Clinton as his advisor on Arab Israeli affairs. So anyway, that's kind of the background. There's more, but I will stop there.
- [03:04]
Alastair Campbell
That's good. That's a good background.
- [03:05]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, it's great. And actually we can't quite stop there. It's too much of a good story. So let's lean into this a little bit. I mean, in a sense, your parents are an incredible story of a world which is very different from the world you enter. I mean, the CV that I gave of you, the resume I gave at the beginning of this interview makes you sound like the kind of epitome of kind of American Post 1989 rules based international order, Democratic presidents and doing all the kind of stuff that senior officials with Bill Clinton or President Obama thought they were doing in the world. But your parents are not really part of that story. Not quite. They're part of a different story. They're part of a story which feels more 70s, revolutionary, leftist, Algerian. I mean, when you met Yasser Arafat, to point out the obvious to listeners in 1982, there were many people who considered him an international terrorist, right?
- [04:00]
Rob Malley
Well, certainly the US government did. I mean, the PLO was still considered. The Palestine Liberation Organization was considered a terrorist organization. Yes.
- [04:08]
Rory Stewart
So with the benefit of hindsight, tell us a little bit about the historical context because it's a really important story, the story of the way that critics and radicals and others saw liberation movements in Algeria and the PLO and all that stuff through the 70s into the 80s.
- [04:23]
Rob Malley
For me, it's a background to almost everything, including to, you know, when I listen to Prime Minister Carney give that extraordinary speech at Davos, I'm thinking his rejection of American domination, the vassalization of, in his, in this case of Western countries. That's a theme that runs through what we used to call the third world, what is now sometimes called the global South. I don't know what the best expression is, which is that aspiration, that thirst for dignity, for, for self determination, which also has a very dark side. And we could speak about it how all these countries end up under a pretty despotic autocratic rule. But there is at the heart of all of it a desire for self determination, for dignity. And that's also at the heart of the book that you mentioned that Hussein Inaga wrote, which is the role of emotions and of that, you know, what the, the again, that thirst for dignity that that is that I think courses through history in various ways, various shapes, various shades. And that's the background. It is a background that I've inherited. You're right that it's a bit of an oddity to then end up in, in the U.S. government. But you know, I landed there almost by happenstance and I for the most part found in the various administrations some traces of that, but never, I was never fully comfortable. But the person who I think resonated most with that sensitivity was President Obama. He lived overseas. He was more aware, I think, of how the rest of the world viewed America than most Americans were. And that's part of what drew me to him. And it's also where when I was in government, what I tried to do, being as patriotic as I could be and as loyal as it could be, is to try to inject that sense of the way we view ourselves is very often the opposite of the way the rest of the world views us. Again, Europe may be awakening to that today, but for much of the Third World, that was the way they perceived the west and the United States in particular throughout the Cold War and the post Cold War era.
- [06:20]
Alastair Campbell
I met Yasser Arafat a few times and he's a fascinating character on so many levels. But hope this doesn't sound unfair. Do you think there's any possibility that early meeting that you had, which must have been quite a thing for you to be sitting there listening to this guy who at the time was one of the most high profile political figures on the planet. And you've always struck me as one of the few voices that doesn't go down the very easy conventional route that a lot of people, particularly Americans, I sense, who have this view that Arafat was the guy who collapsed the talks, collapsed the process, when we seemed like having the best chance of actually getting peace. Now, is there a link there? Do you think you were some sort of emotionally invested in him in a way that maybe other people weren't, I
- [07:08]
Rob Malley
don't think invested in him. I do think that I tried to look at the problem, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians through different lenses. You know, as I say, I came from a certain background. Most of my colleagues, not all of them, well, not President Clinton, but most of them were Jewish, as I am. But their encounter with Israel, Palestine was through an Israeli lens. They certainly met Palestine way after they'd met the Israelis. They'd spent time in Israel. They had the. The cultural background. And I tried to complement that unsuccessfully, apparently, by trying to inject a sense of, you know, that's not the way the Palestinians view it. And just to take a very simple example, when I joined the team, 1997 or 8, the Israeli position was, I think, Shibon Peres, who was then president, I said something to the effect that they could imagine returning or giving Palestinians 80% of the West Bank. And that, on the American team, was considered to be an extraordinary sense, extraordinary flexibility. Why would the Israelis give back so much when they had won the war and they were facing an entity that was still, you know, committed or had not yet accepted that Israel would exist as a Jewish state? And I tried to make the case that from a Palestinian point of view, the land was not being given, it was given back in. Anything short of 100% was. Was viewed as expropriation. And the whole notion of what is a compromise, where's flexibility? It all depends on what your starting point is. So 90% could be viewed as extraordinarily flexible. When Ehud Barak, the Prime minister, ultimately agrees that it would be over 90%, that he'd be returning for the Palestinians, that still is. They're giving up 78% of what was mandatory Palestine, and now they're being asked to give a few percentages more. So. So whether that means. I don't know how to describe my sensitivities, but I try to understand that the world did not always look the same way if you took a different perspective.
- [08:58]
Rory Stewart
Rob, there's something very interesting you said there about the majority of your colleagues being Jewish. And I wondered, is that something interesting about the US Administration? That I suppose you could have had a different Foreign Service tradition, which would say that you would almost want to make sure the people working on the Arab Israeli file were people who really didn't have any cultural or political historical links to that file at all. You might, I don't know, bring people who were Chinese, Americans or something to work on that file. And certainly in the British Foreign Service tradition, there was often been a lot of resistance to having people who are nationals or have ethnic relations with a particular region serving in that region, which isn't true in the U.S. i mean, I remember in Afghanistan, you appointed Zalmehzad, who was an Afghan and who had been like a sort of frenemy of the president since he was a kid at high school, as your Ambassador, I'm just trying to sort of understand, is there something about the American culture going on there?
- [09:55]
Rob Malley
I mean, because this was not even. It wasn't the near east office at the State Department. This was the special Middle east envoy office and the people who dealt with it. And I'm not a big believer in sort of making those religious, ethnic distinctions. And the truth is that a lot of them were deeply committed to peace, a certain vision of peace, but were deeply committed to peace because of their background. So I've tried to resist that. What I do think is that there was a lack of knowledge, and I include myself in it, of the Islamic tradition. There was no Muslim on the team. And so even on something as basic as what does the Western Wall represent to Jews? There was no. Everyone understood what it meant. What does it represent to Muslims? No, people didn't know it. And so when certain ideas were. Again, just to give an example, when the. When the Israelis finally, Hur Barak was prepared to accept a division of Jerusalem, to say that parts of East Jerusalem would be under Palestinian sovereignty, there was among some American members of the team a feeling of, how could he do that? They found it very hard to understand. But there was nobody on the team who could understand what some of these concessions would mean for Muslim Palestinian. So I do think that there was a cultural blindness that cost us. I may understand the Palestinian perspective a little bit, but I'm not Muslim. I don't understand. I'm not. I wasn't brought up in that culture. So looking back, I do think that the team would have gained from having people who are more, you know, familiar with, again, the culture, the religion, the background of how Palestinians and Arabs might. Might view the conflict and solutions to the conflict.
- [11:30]
Rory Stewart
Was this ever a point that was made by Palestinian negotiators? Did they ever comment on the fact that they felt there weren't enough Muslims? People didn't understand the Muslim perspective.
- [11:40]
Rob Malley
I. I would not be shocked if among themselves, they would comment on the composition of the team, because there were times when everyone on the other side of the table, maybe barring one person was. Was Jewish. And I'm sure that, you know, that would come up, but I don't recall them raising it with us.
- [11:55]
Alastair Campbell
I do.
- [11:55]
Rob Malley
Okay. Because they would raise it more likely with you than with us.
- [11:59]
Alastair Campbell
They were. They would say, you know, why do these Americans always just sort of sit across from us and mansplain to us about, you know, our problems? So there was. I think there's quite a lot of that went on. There was One other thing that you, Jonathan Powell, who was colleague of mine with Tony Blair and is now the national security advisor under Keir Starmer, and he's been part of a lot of kind of mediation processes and always had this view that, you know, for all the grief and the pain that you sometimes take politically, you have to sit down and talk to your enemies. I'd love your take on that, because were you already out of the political mainstream when. When you were talking directly to Hamas and that caused a huge furore. And I think you had to sort of distance yourself from Obama at the time to the politics. And then lots of diplomats and academics came out in your defense. But just for our listening viewers, give them a sense of what, why you felt that was the right thing to do despite the risk, and whether you actually think that some of these peace processes take far too long, because we all take too long to understand that at some point you have to do that 100%.
- [13:04]
Rob Malley
I think mentioning Jonathan Pell is. I mean, I know him. I think he's done. He's written about this extensively, and I think he's been absolutely right. Yes. This was in the early 2000s, after I left the Clinton administration and I joined the International Crisis Group. Part of the goal of that organization is to come up with ideas to resolve conflict. And how do you resolve a conflict if you don't talk to the parties who are in conflict? That sort of seems elementary. But it's a fact that once you classify some organization as a terrorist organization, you can't talk to them, or if you could talk to them, strict limits. I never quite understood that, particularly an organization like Hamas. This is not at all to defend them, but they had a real constituency, such a constituency that they actually won an election in 2006. So the notion that we were going to deal with the Israeli Palestinian campaign conflict, but completely sort of veto any contact with an organization that had a real say. We knew they had a real say. Now, by the way, A, I don't buy this notion that you talk to a state or an organization, you legitimize them. Hamas's legitimacy did not and would not have come from talking to Americans. It came from whatever legitimacy they had from their own constituents, number one. Number two, I don't think that by talking to them, it means that you accept or adhere to their views. You, in fact, sometimes could talk to them and then conclude there's no point in continuing to talk to them because there's nothing to talk about. So, I mean, that's been. It was a controversy. It sort of brings a little smile to my face to think that the administration that has broken that taboo happens to be the Trump administration. He's done some things right. That's something that none of the administrations I served would have ever even dreamt of, that they could have direct contacts with Hamas, political interaction with Hamas. But I think sometimes Trump just thinks that things that are self evident are self evident, that he ignores the political cost. And in his case, there is no political cost. And that's, that's the philosophy of the International Crisis Group. I, I don't know that I'd extend it to everyone. I don't know that I'd have a communication with ISIS or with, with Al Qaeda. You know, somebody would have to come and make the case. But yes, I think that that's been a flaw of mainly American diplomacy. Although I would say Europe is in a strange position where for the longest time they were ahead of the curve, ahead of the Americans. First they talked to the PLO before the United States did well before, and they actually had contact with Hamas. I remember meeting with Hamas members in Switzerland and elsewhere. But then they sort of fell in line, as Europe often does, and accepted the US position, accepted the Quartet conditions, the conditions that were put to Hamas before any kind of interaction could occur. How do they feel now when Trump is speaking to Hamas? I think Europe must be scratching its head. That's the kind of thing that I think the Europeans should be doing, even if America has more problems dealing with it.
- [15:50]
Rory Stewart
One of the striking things for me is the way in which Gaza has faded from the news. I wonder whether you could take us back and try to give us your sense of, of what we saw October 7th, Gaza, and what that whole period since October meant. What was that? How did you view that? How would you describe it if you were writing about it?
- [16:17]
Rob Malley
Well, so we did write about it. I mean, Hussein and I wrote about it in our book To Mars yesterday. And I think it goes to almost the genesis of the book. What we were hearing at the time were from people saying October 7th is this. It almost was presented as an anomaly in terms of Hamas being the Islamist extremist radicals who did something that they plotted in, you know, and it's true that was plotted by a small group of people, but as if it was sort of at odds with sort of Palestinian tradition. And on the Israeli side, their response, the slaughter that followed, was presented as the handiwork of Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right wing acolytes, Smolc And Ben gvir and what Hussein and I felt at the time was, this is getting it entirely wrong. And the October 7th is Palestinian through and through in the sense that Palestinians have long felt. And this is where emotions come into play that they've been captives, they needed now. This was their chance to be the captors. Their land has been taken. Now they're going to invade what is at that point Israeli land. They had been frightened by Israel, now they were going to take the fright and the terror on the Israeli side. But that's nothing new. I mean, if you look at the history of the Palestinian national movement, movement pre Hamas in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and you know, you guys are old enough, I think, to remember it. Terrorist acts, hijacking of buses, Munich attacks against civilians. That was a Palestinian attempt again to instill fear in the Israelis, to make them taste a taste of their own medicine and to put the Palestinian question on the map, to remind the world, you can't ignore us. And Israel's response was, was not Netanyahu's war, it was Israel's war. And the poll after poll shows that if anything, large parts, the majority of the Israeli public wanted harsher measures, not softer ones. And so again, our theory, a thesis is that October 7th and what followed are not a rupture, they're not an aberration, they're not something that landed from Mars. They are very much the expression of their respective societies, which is why both societies sort of embraced the acts. And when criticism began. So when the Palestinians start criticizing, some Palestinians criticize October 7th. It's not on moral grounds, it's on strategic grounds. Why did you not prepare us for Israel's counter attack? Look at the devastation, the horror. So the criticism is on sort of that ground and on the Israeli side, when increasing number of Israelis criticizing Netanyahu and the continuation of the war, war, it wasn't, look at what, you know, the slaughter of the Palestinians, what many international organizations called genocide. It's because, what about the hostages? You know, what that tells us is that something deeply psychological, emotional, historical happened on October 7 and afterwards, but not because they were breaks, but because they were reenactments of the way Israelis and Palestinians have interacted with each other.
- [19:05]
Alastair Campbell
I completely understand what you're saying there about this. Almost been like a continuum of a long, long, long struggle. Was there something different on both sides about the response? And how much was that to do with the way that our media and our culture and our current politics have changed? Maybe from the time when you first started out on this journey with Bill
- [19:24]
Rob Malley
Clinton, I think there's some of that, you know, there's something different. You know, there are many Palestinian attempts to do things that were analogous to October 7th. They failed in this case. It succeeded in quotation marks. It's a horrific success to a large extent, because Israel was asleep. And again, I think everything that's coming out more and more from how the Israeli cabinet and the Israeli leadership looked at this, they just didn't believe it. They didn't believe that Hamas would do it. They believed that Hamas would be sort of placated by whatever they were given and they didn't want to risk at all. So, yes, it was more intense, more, more. You know, it did far more damage and, and horror than previous attempts. But what inspired it and what they were trying to do was not that different. And again, the Israeli response was also. It's of a piece with many things that Israel has done, but in an exaggerated, intensified form.
- [20:16]
Alastair Campbell
Yeah.
- [20:17]
Rob Malley
Partly because of what they had just. They had just suffered.
- [20:19]
Alastair Campbell
Rory made the point earlier that it's almost like Gaza has fallen out of the international news, when actually there are still quite a lot of people dying. The place is still in a state of total devastation. And the police plan, so called, doesn't really seem to be driving with the same. With the momentum that was meant to be injected into it when Trump first came up with it. So I just wonder what you think that says about the way the world views this conflict as well.
- [20:48]
Rob Malley
Yeah. And you know, in some ways there's also nothing new there, which is a new normal gets a certain established. And when the new normal is slightly better than what had preceded, immediately preceded it, it becomes the new reality that people accept. So you just said it's a ceasefire. That probably wouldn't be considered a ceasefire in most contexts. You still have about four or five Palestinians killed every day. More than half of Gaza is still under Israeli military control. But compared to the way it was three months ago. Yeah, relatively speaking, it is more of a ceasefire than it was there. It's certainly not normal, as you just described. And people lack shelter, they lack basic necessities. Hussein and I wrote this one saying if the Trump plan were implemented even partially, Palestinians in Gaza would transition from utter hell to a mere nightmare. And we're in the mere nightmare now. And so a nightmare compared to hell is improvement. But it's nowhere near normalcy and the tempo. And partly this is, as you say, our new world. Part of it is President Trump in particular, particular who has this capacity of creating news every hour. Not even. It doesn't even need a full day to have a new news flash. So today people's attention has moved on because it's not. It's not what it once was. The attention should also be on the West Bank. I mean, what's happening there is, and it's been for a while, de facto annexation. But there's other issues that people are going to deal with. And so, yeah, it's no longer in the headlines. Again, I don't know how new that is, but it has become all the more intense because of the pace of our social media and the pace of how people's attention span gets diverted to something else.
- [22:21]
Rory Stewart
One of the things that I struggle with is it's described as a peace plan, but it doesn't feel as though there's a clear Palestinian political path here. There's a real question about legitimacy. I mean, who are the elected Palestinian representatives who are supposed to be running Gaza, taking responsibility for it? And so how are you supposed to rebuild a society without having any form of legitimate representatives or government involved in that reconstruction?
- [22:51]
Rob Malley
Right. I mean, first of all, I don't think it ever really even was remotely a peace plan, because at best, at best, even if it was completely implemented, and I think a lot of it is just performative, and it was never intended to be implemented. But putting that aside, even if it had been implemented, we're not talking about peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Some vague mention of maybe under some conditions they could consider Palestinian statehood. But this has nothing to do with peace. It had to do with calming the situation down in Gaza, which is no mean feat. And I certainly wouldn't begrudge it, because for a Palestinian living in Gaza, it's infinitely better today than it was only a few months ago. So I think all that is true, but it has nothing to do with peace. Your other point, which is true. I mean, again, I would say this is often a American habit of trying to pick among the entities that it's going to deal with, those that they're more comfortable with. So not only do you exclude Hamas, which they've done in the past, but you look for the Palestinians or the Iraqis or the Lebanese or whoever who look, speak, dress like we do, and they're the ones who then anoint, and you say they're the moderate ones and they're the ones with whom we're going to make peace, notwithstanding that they may have no legitimacy, no credibility. And today, as you say, so, the, the authority that the world deals with The Palestinian Authority probably has less support and legitimacy than the three of us do among Palestinians. And then the, the technocratic government, yes, there's a technocratic government that was, or authority that's been, entity that's been named for Gaza. You know, these people were handpicked. They have no political representation. And I think, you know, if you look at what the Trump plan is, it's about many things, but one thing it is about is truly about depoliticizing the Palestinian question. It is purely reduced to a humanitarian question. Can the situation in Gaza improve on a humanitarian scale? But the life that would be proposed to Gazans if they were to accept, you know, and you've seen the Jared Kushner plan, and you know, you saw it in, in Davos. And whatever these skyscraper, whatever these buildings that would be built in southern Gaza, the life is a very Orwellian life, devoid of politics, complete, under the complete surveillance of Israelis and Americans, I suspect, where there'd be no organization, no civil society, no ability to organize. That is a vision which again is superior to the nightmare that the Gazans were living. But I think it gives us a glimpse of what a future could look like in different places where there's no ability to organize, no ability to dissent outside the purview of, in this case, the occupier, in other cases, the governing authorities.
- [25:26]
Alastair Campbell
Where do you see this ending? How do you see this ending? Do we sort of stay in the nightmare stage for a very, very long time?
- [25:32]
Rob Malley
I fear so. I mean, again, with improvements, I think over time, people will get more medicine, more food, more shelter. But all that is going to take a long time. There'll be some milestones of success that President Trump and others will point to. How many trucks have come in, how many Palestinians are now living in homes as opposed to living under tents? Maybe there'll even be some security force, international security force. But at the same time, there'll be nothing that will be transformationally new. And I think Israeli de facto occupation of Gaza will continue without any prospect of anything resembling self determination or peace for the Palestinians. So I think, yeah, the most likely scenario is somewhere along the lines of where we are today, with some improvement. A massive refugee camp in which Palestinians are being dealt with as a humanitarian problem that needs to be addressed. I really don't see how we go from here to something that I would call a political settlement. Short of real changes in the US In Israel and among Palestinians, how do
- [26:30]
Rory Stewart
we help people think clearly about the situation of Israel itself? So for many Israelis, they feel under immense threat. They feel very, very vulnerable. They're very conscious of history. They're very conscious of 6 million people being murdered during the Holocaust, of pogroms, of antisemitism, Very, very conscious of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran, and of states that don't recognize the existence of the state of Israel. Very much convinced that given half a chance, these people would wipe them off the face of the earth, are very keen to make people understand they are a liberal democracy. They've brought development to this area. It's one narrative. And there's another narrative at the same time, which is in another way, Israel can be seen in the region as becoming a regional hegemon, a sort of strong man which is running its own illegal wars in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iran, in Yemen, that has nuclear weapons, that has probably the most powerful aggressive military in the region. And from that point of view, rather than being a sort of vulnerable state on the verge of being overrun, it's in fact a state that. That's threatening its neighbors and expanding. How do you think this through? How do you find a way to talk about this to people?
- [28:04]
Rob Malley
I mean, I think both are true, and I think you're absolutely right. I think, and again, we try to do it in our book is to put ourselves in Israeli shoes. I mean, from their perspective, they won wars against parties that refuse their existence, and then they've offered compromises which have either been rejected or grudgingly accepted, and then they get attacked, and every time they withdraw, they withdraw from the parts of the west bank, they get the second intifada in 2000, they withdraw from southern Lebanon, they get Hezbollah rockets, they withdraw from Gaza, they get Hamas rockets. So, you know that it makes sense that they would feel that way. Again, there's a whole context here that we could get into to explain all of that and why there could have been a different pathway. But that's their experience, and I. And I get it. And therefore, the flip side of that sense of vulnerability is a desire to preempt threats, the. Which we see in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, et cetera. So both of those are true. And what is striking is how in the wake of October 7th and what followed, Israel has rarely, if ever, been more powerful militarily. It could project its power almost anywhere at will and get away with it and prevent whatever you want to call it, threats, whether they exist, whether they're genuine or not, whether they're imminent or far away. So from a military perspective, more powerful than ever, from a diplomatic, political perspective, probably More isolated and more of a sort of pariah state than they've been in recent memory. And that gap, they haven't been able to translate the military strength into any form of political or diplomatic asset. And the Palestinian. You have sort of a reverse discrepancy between a Palestinian movement that is seldom been weaker, more divided, fragmented. As you say, there's no representative leadership. But the Palestinian cause internationally has rarely, if ever, been as popular on the streets of London, the streets of throughout the globe. But they haven't been able to translate that global support for the cause into power for the movement. So there's the sort of the disequilibrium on both sides, but that's, you know, both are realities and how you get out of it and how each, either side is going to be able to. Where's the Bank? Where they're going to be able to translate and convert the strength they have into the strength that they lack.
- [30:19]
Rory Stewart
You teach this subject at Yale and elsewhere, it must be the most unbelievably difficult subject to teach. I mean, when I was with you last year, there were. Some of my students were demonstrating for Palestine, some of them were demonstrating for Israel. There were demonstrations, counter demonstrations. Five of my students were taken off to jail. There were people turning up with keffiyehs and Stars of David, and Trump was shutting down funding, and there were names being gathered. I mean, how do you think about how to talk and teach about this in the American political climate?
- [30:50]
Rob Malley
So I might surprise you, and I'm going to invite you. Maybe we should teach it together. It's by far the best class I've ever experienced. I love it because it's one thing to be on a campus where you don't speak to the other side and you demonstrate and, And I get that. I respect it. I was a student once. It's another thing when you have to be face to face in a class of about 20 students for 13 weeks. You could decide you're not going to listen to the other person, but it's going to make it a pretty unpleasant experience, or you're going to listen. And I try to curate the class so that there's some balance. And it's been really rewarding to me. I mean, I love listening to them engage with issues, trying. Even people who think they know the subject, they think they know the history, they then read more and then they hear another point of view. So, yeah, I invite you to come join me because it's. I love it.
- [31:37]
Alastair Campbell
You talked there about, you know, Trump did things. Trump does things that no previous president would have done. And you pointed to one where actually you could say that was a good thing to do, first of all, and try to be as objective about this as possible. You probably feel about Trump the way that I do, but how would you define his approach to foreign policy? And what would he say if he was sort of looking into his soul, not looking into a TV camera, not looking at his truth, social posting and all his ranting and his raving, what would he say is the positive version of his strategy for the Middle east and his strategy for Iran?
- [32:11]
Rob Malley
That's a tough question to try to explain what his foreign policy is. I think it's a mix of instincts, impulses, narcissism, self aggrandizement, and depending on the day and the issue, the sum total of those impulses produce a result. Now, he also has outside voices that try to influence him. So I think every decision he makes makes sense in hindsight, because you could try to look at it and say, you get what he was trying to do and maybe he failed, but you know what went through his brain to get there. But, but the real problem is that ahead of time, it's. It's almost utterly unpredictable. I'll come to what he tries to do. What do you think the best case for him in the Middle East? But I'd say one of the things that makes it so hard to try to figure out his policy is that he has this uncanny ability, when you as former politicians, I'm sure, look at it with envy, is that he could present any outcome, any outcome as a success. So people now are saying in Iran, which will come to that, he's painted himself in a corner. Maybe he could paint himself out of the corner and no matter where he lands, on Greenland, on Iran, on Gaza, he will make a case which he will believe. And believing yourself is the first step towards being persuasive, that it's successful. And he is not encumbered by the logic or the. Again, I'm thinking of President Obama, who thought, well, what about credibility? And what about, I'm going to get bogged down, People are going to say, if I bomb Assad and he's still standing, he said this, if I bomb Assad after his famous red line, I bomb him after his use of chemical weapons, and then the next day he's still standing, I'll look like I lost. Do you think President Trump thinks in those terms at all? No. I'll bomb him and then I'll say, I bombed him and I won. So for the Middle East, I think his vision is the same as it is for other places, very transactional. I will deal with leaders who care about what I care about, money, commerce, maybe power. And we'll do these deals with these countries. And so, you know, that's, that's how he deals with the Gulf. That's how he deals with, that's why he's dealing with Syria. It's maybe how he wants to deal with Iran. We'll come to that. I think Israel, Palestine for him is. I don't think he focuses on it. He sees it as many presidents have. If I could make this ultimate deal, how great it would be, and for him, the deal. And I think instinctively, and I think this is not that far from what Jared Kushner said when you saw him in, in Davos. Let's just offer the Palestinians a slightly better life. And, and then all these political questions of refugees and Jerusalem and sovereignty, to hell with it, who cares, as long as they're living better. That's his vision. And so it is a vision that is really devoid in some sense of politics of what I was talking about earlier.
- [34:52]
Rory Stewart
Okay, Alistair, Rob, let's take a quick break and then maybe back for some more.
- [35:01]
Alastair Campbell
What you said there, Striker Corby. I was talking to somebody recently who was is involved in all this and who said that when Trump was putting forward his plan, he got his people, Witkoff and these guys to go and talk to the Israelis and talk to Hamas and sort of, you know, see where they were. And he just announced that Hamas had said yes. And then the Hamas guys are sitting there saying, we didn't say anything. Before you know it, the whole world is saying that Hamas has signed up to something. It is an extraordinary thing to deal with.
- [35:32]
Rob Malley
It is. No, no, really, I mean, I look at it and I again, just to pivot a little bit to Iran. He has said, for example, that thanks to his intervention, the execution of 800 protesters has been nullified.
- [35:45]
Alastair Campbell
Yeah.
- [35:46]
Rob Malley
Does anyone really think that they were about to execute 800 people within a matter of days? He also has said recently, I don't know if you picked it up, that Iran is trying to build a new nuclear facility. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But whatever occurs, he will say, I prevented that probably non existent effort from coming to fruition and that's his victory. So, I mean, it does give him a freedom that I look at and I marvel about.
- [36:11]
Alastair Campbell
You're jealous.
- [36:12]
Rob Malley
A little bit, yeah.
- [36:13]
Rory Stewart
I suppose the obvious move then, Rob, is to try to talk about what you see as the possible scenarios which might take place with the US And Iran over the next few months, bearing in mind the fact that you just told us that predicting what's going on in Trump's head is impossible.
- [36:28]
Rob Malley
Yeah. I mean, and you mean just about the diplomacy between the two, not what's happening domestically in Iran. And I know you've. We could come to that.
- [36:34]
Rory Stewart
And also what he's going to do with planes and fleets and rockets and Israeli attacks.
- [36:39]
Rob Malley
I mean, so the, the way I look at it, the Iranian side, to me, in some ways, even though I'm not Iranian, I've only spent maybe 48 hours in Tehran years ago. It's more familiar, it's more predictable, it's more understandable, whether one agrees with it or not. It's to make minimal concessions in a negotiation that's supposed to last as long as possible in order for them to maintain maximum assets. At the end of the day, you
- [37:00]
Rory Stewart
said something very interesting there. You're the first policy official I've ever met who said, I spent 48 hours in Tehran some years ago. But the fact is you were one of the key US Linchpins on Iran policy. And I suppose what you're saying there is that one of the problems, problems dealing with a regime like Iran is that even getting visas, getting access to get in on the ground is very difficult. And the type of expertise that you had to develop was reading a lot, talking to a lot of people, studying a lot. But it isn't the type of expertise that you would naturally develop about Boston or New Haven, Connecticut, by just being out on the ground, talking to people, being in the streets.
- [37:37]
Rob Malley
I mean, today it would be impossible to go to Iran. But even at the time, yeah, I mean, that's. It is one of the costs of the estrangement between the two countries. And we could talk, I'm sure we will, about the benefits of isolation and sanctions and whether that actually helps or not. But, yeah, I mean, you know, you're dealing with a culture and the people that we have only very vague understanding of. But so whatever I'm saying now is based not on being in Iran, but being face to face with their negotiators, which is only a small glimpse because even the negotiators are only a piece of a much bigger puzzle and not the most important one, because the decision makers sit in Tehran. And, and so the fact that Foreign Minister Zarif or whoever is at the other end of the table doesn't mean that you're speaking to the soul of the, of the system. I'm not surprised by how Iran is dealing with this. They're trying to set a stage where they will make some concessions, but limit them and try to drag this out and see what, what they can get and want to be able to, at the end of the day, have enough leverage, enough assets, enough deterrent power that they don't feel they're going to be overly vulnerable. The American side is much. I mean, it really is harder with President Trump to figure out what he wants. So you have somebody who is unpredictable, who's not just unpredictable, because we can't predict where he's going, but day to day, we don't know what impulse he'll have. So he's impulsive, he's impatient, and it's hard for system like Iran to deal with that. That's, I mean, and maybe that's one of the strength of Trump, is that he really has them on their toes. They don't know what to expect. I would not be at all surprised if by the end of this podcast, you tell me, oh, we just have a news bulletin that a deal has been struck, a nuclear deal has been struck, and President Trump has announced that it's the best deal that's ever been negotiated with anyone anywhere for the last 4,000 years. Or if you told me at the end of this, oh, we just couldn't news bulletin that President Trump has ordered strikes on Iran and strikes against military political targets. So I think there is a pathway to a deal precisely because Iran would want something coming out. They don't like the position they're in now, so they would like something that would stabilize it. And there's a part of President Trump who's a deal maker who would like to say he's made a deal with this entity that is so hard to deal with. One of the big prizes he could achieve, and as long as he could claim that it's better than the jcpoa, he might take it. So I find it very hard right now to try to predict, so I won't try.
- [40:01]
Alastair Campbell
I'm hearing in you, Rob, not just a fascination with Trump, but a sense that you actually think maybe there is quite often method in his madness. You wrote an article in Le Monde newspaper not long ago, and you went through what you saw some of the, I think some of the failings of the policy under Obama and under Joe Biden, and you said it's hardly surprising that many Iranians, so often feeling abandoned, would place their hopes in Donald Trump. What did you mean by that?
- [40:30]
Rob Malley
I mean, this is, I hear it from Iranian friends and others who either have been there and I think you reported it on yourselves a few, a few days ago. There are many Iranians today who would say there's nothing that could be worse than our current situation and if President Trump were to buy bomb the regime, we would be happy. Which is, I mean it's kind of extraordinary. I suspect that's part of it. Out of desperation. They don't really have a, they don't really know what it would yield. Some of my Iranian students in class say that they think that it could lead to regime change. And when you try to press them on how do you get from bombing regime targets to regime change? They don't know, nobody knows. But you know. Yes, I don't want, I really don't want to sound overly positive or to say that this Methodist madness, but I think his madness is, is a method in the sense that it does keep people guessing. People guessing is not always the worst thing to do. I think if you could marry his unconventionality, his lack of constraint, political constraints, which has hurt many presidents that I've served on Israel, Palestine and in Iran. If you'd married that with a, I would call a more forward leaning strategic vision, you might have something really powerful. Unfortunately, you have, it's married to narcissism and self indulgence and everything that I don't particularly admire.
- [41:41]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, let's just for a second look at that question of the weaknesses. It's no secret, I think that Alistair and I great fans or maybe overly idealize the worlds of Clintons and rules based international order and all the kind of good stuff that Francis Fukuyama was excited by in the 1990s. Right. But I guess we also are able to recognize that in a sense Trump doesn't come come out of nowhere. That populism partly draws on the failures of that age. Looking back, having been in the foreign policy apparatus of Clinton, Obama, Biden, what would be your critique of what America got wrong during that period internationally?
- [42:23]
Rob Malley
I mean, I think there's two critiques which may end up in the same place, but they start from very different premises. And it's the right wing critique, the MAGA critique, or the left wing progressive Bernie Sanders AOC critique. And so you could look at it and say it was a foreign policy of globalization that ignored the industrial base, that ignored what globalization and free trade was doing to the working and middle class. That's not my expertise, you know, and I'm not An economist. I defer to others to say whether that's a genuine critique, but it certainly is a critique that is held. I mean, the whole Davos crowd, the whole notion that this was an elite, that was a dealing with each other and ignoring vast swaths of America, I think there's something there. Again, I don't want to overstate it because I'm not. I'm not. That's not my expertise. But I think that's one critique. The other critique, which is, which, you know, the left would take part of that, and I think the left in the US Would say that they were, that some of these free trade agreements were done at the expense of the working class in the U.S. and the middle class in the U.S. but the other critique is what it's done to the rest of the world. And, you know, that's a critique that I'm quite familiar with as, because of, as you said, my family background, which is a critique, again, that maybe Prime Minister Carney is making about Trump's policies today. But it's a critique that I'm sure you've heard from third world or global south countries for a long time, which is that it's a policy, that American policy of exceptionalism that considers itself able to make the rules for others. And in the guise of exceptionalism, and in the, the guise of claiming that the US Was a power for good, was a hypocritical, duplicitous entity that would bend rules in its favor, bend rules in the favor of its allies, and trample the rights of those that were on the other side of the barrier. Just take for me one issue again. I don't think this is what explains Trump at all, but the question of sanctions. It is quite extraordinary that you have a country that could decide because of genuine disagreements that another country is going to suffer in ways that are. I mean, look at the way Cuba is being dealt with today, or even the way Iran has been dealt with or other entities. That's something that is. I mean, it is quite extraordinary to think of that. That's the power that resides now in the hands of one country because of the role of the dollar. And the metric of success of a sanctions policy is almost never does it achieve the desired goal, because it almost never does. I mean, what. Mention the sanctions policy that actually led to the collapse of a regime and a positive transition. Very, very rare, if ever. The measure of the success of a sanctions policy is the harm it does to the economy. What happened to GDP growth? What happened to unemployment? What happened to inflation. But that obviously hurts the people who you claim you're trying to help. And it really, I mean, it does untold damage. You've seen it in Iraq, we're seeing it now. Another, whether it's Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. And that's not exculpate the countries, the regimes or the governments that have also contributed mightily to corruption and mismanagement. But there's no doubt that sanctions have also played a role. But that's not really an answer to your question. I do think Trump domestically is an answer. And some people said it's the middle finger that he is giving or that the people who vote for him are giving to a system that they think has been overly preoccupied with the elite and with global trade and globalization and Davos. But also on the part, and we say this in Hussein and I say this in our book, that much of at least the Arab world, when Trump won, had a kind of sigh of relief. Finally we're done with the hypocrisy of the Biden, but also Obama, who they felt had all these great speeches but, you know, didn't really live up to their rhetoric. And finally they had somebody who was devoid of any hypocrisy, any duplicity, who said what he believed on which they thought was the genuine American policy of trying to dominate and trying to exercise their hegemony. So there was a little bit of sense that I certainly on the part of Arab leaders who were tired of the paternalistic discourses about how great the international liberal order was and, and, and, and trying to dictate how others should govern themselves. But even at the level of some ordinary citizens, there was a little bit of a sense of, of relief at having somebody who was adorned of any of that sense of, of duplicity that they, they had grown tired of.
- [46:47]
Alastair Campbell
You mean, he doesn't even pretend to care about human rights?
- [46:50]
Rob Malley
Yeah, exactly. I mean, could you imagine a president who says, no, no, no, no, no, this is not about democracy in Venezuela, it's about all oil. I mean, that's kind of a breath of fresh air in a kind of polluted way.
- [47:00]
Alastair Campbell
You were part of the US Team that got the deal that we had on in relation to Iran's weapons program, which Trump then sort of tore up because it was partly because it was done by, by Barack Obama. Give us an insight into how something like that happens. I don't want you to sort of give all, all the details, but, you know, I've been involved, I guess, particularly in things like the Northern Ireland peace process, and it's incredibly complicated and what have you. But on the Iranian. How did that process work? Who were the real powers, who were the drivers, who were the stick, who were providing most of the sticking points? And how did you get from a kind of idea to something that felt at the time like a really big breakthrough?
- [47:43]
Rob Malley
Yeah. So you're right. I'll try to be brief, but I often think about it, about why that negotiation. Negotiation succeeded. And then when President Biden came back into office, the effort failed. And I do think. I mean, there are many reasons why. But what happened in 2015 is you have an American president who believes that achieving a nuclear deal with Iran is a core national security interest. And he believed it because he thought the alternatives, whether he was right or wrong, were either Iran with a bomb or the US Bombing Iran, and he didn't want either one of those. So he was prepared to overcome huge obstacles. I mean, obviously, Israel was against almost every Gulf Arab country, was against. The Republican Party, was against. Most of the Democratic elected officials were also against. So he was prepared to say, you know what? I'm going to do this. And it proves that an American president who has that as a priority is. Is able to overcome one obstacle after another. Again, as a footnote, contrast that with presidents who tried to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who stopped at the first domestic or Israeli obstacle, and you could see the difference. But I also think you had in Iran a consensus that enough was enough, the sanctions were doing too much harm and we could reach a deal. They had built a nuclear program in large part as leverage to exchange against the lifting of sanctions. So I think you had Minefield's domestic opposition on both sides, regional opposition, but a congruence of a core interest. I thought that that was going to be replicated, which is why I mistakenly took the job in 2021, thinking that we would have the same incentives. The US wanted to prevent an Iran with a bomb, and they wanted to not have to bomb Iran, and the sanctions were even doing more harm, I mean, more damage to Iran, that they would want to get rid of them. I think I neglected many things, but two things in particular on the US Side, For President Biden, this was far, far, far from being a priority. He thought this was a problem that could be managed, that could be dealt with by others, that Iran was, you know, it was a problem, but there were so many problems that were more important. And so, yeah, he was prepared to. If a deal came about, he was prepared to sign on, but he wasn't prepared to take on the large opposition domestically, particularly because, interestingly, the regional opposition had abated, at least in the Arab world. So this was. There was never that kind of prioritization on the US Side and on the Iranian side. I think the experience of 2018, when President Trump left a very, very sour taste in their mouth, and it reinforced those in the system who always were very skeptical about dealing with the US and the argument, I suspect that at the end of the day, when the Supreme Leader had to say yes or no to a deal, somebody told him, how do you know that the next president is not going to tear it up? So why are we doing this again? And so that was a very hard argument to respond to. So I think that for me, the lesson of 2015 is it it was really at all hands on deck on the American side. The whole, you know, President Obama made sure that everyone was rowing in the same direction. And he had on the Iranian side at least a congruence in terms of their perception that this was important enough.
- [50:43]
Alastair Campbell
What's the international context within that? I think one of the things that Roy and I talk about a lot on the podcast is particularly under Trump. But maybe this has always been a little bit like this. We talk about the international rules based order, we talk about the United nations as being this sort of hugely important body. But was this very much America, Iran? That was all that was going on. Just as now Trump would say, it's America, Iran, it's America, Israel, very much kind of bilateral view of the world.
- [51:11]
Rob Malley
You know, the key, the entity that had the main concession to make in terms of sanctions was the US But I do think President Obama, and this was one of the. The guidance that he gave the team was we cannot afford not to be fully aligned with the E3. You know, this was Germany, the UK and France. And they were, as I'm sure you know, real tensions between the US and one or the other country, mainly the French, not surprisingly. But he said, we are not going to make a deal. First of all, you couldn't because of the Security Council, because we needed to lift the sanctions there. But also his conception that, you know, they need to be with us all the way. So that was a very, very important part of the negotiations, which is to keep the E3 on board despite the ups and downs. And that was successful. And that was very much part of the President's mindset.
- [52:00]
Alastair Campbell
Where do you see the UN today as an entity?
- [52:02]
Rob Malley
So the UN didn't play. It's not like the UN played a particular role. Although they were the ones as you know, they were the sort of the structure that invented the P5 plus 15 permit members of the Security Council plus Germany. So that was, it was under their mandate. They didn't really play a role in the negotiations. But today, you know, I mentioned my father was a journalist. His first job was as a, in the US was as a correspondent to the un. So I grew up with this notion of Utant and all the great secretary generals. I mean, where's the UN today? Part of it is truly because the international system is not what it was. And if the players in the Security Council in particular not prepared to work together, then it doesn't matter what the UN can or cannot do. But I also think that there was a time when the UN Secretary generals took their jobs extremely seriously and thought they were prepared to speak loudly and to take risks. That has changed over time. Ideally. I mean, this is what was maybe missing from Carney's speech is you're going to need to reinvent an international system that is more reflective of the power balances of the day, but also manages to overcome some of the blockages of the Security Council. I mean, it's a strange creature that was born from the Second World War, doesn't really reflect today's distribution of power, but it has ultimate veto power and it's very hard to change it because they have the veto power over any changes. So we're left maybe with President Trump's port of peace, which is hardly, hardly a healthy alternative.
- [53:24]
Rory Stewart
Your career has been both deeply impressive, but also must be at some levels deeply depressing. I mean, you went through the Middle east peace process and all of that, and presumably you wouldn't think that the situation of Palestinians is better now than it was than when you started your career. You saw the JCPO collapse. You then found yourself in a brutal situation with the Biden administration towards the end of your career there. I mean, how do you think about the world? Achievements, failures, and what does it mean to be somebody invested in Palestine, Israel, Iran, the US government, and in a sense often finding yourself let down or betrayed by all of them over a 30 year period?
- [54:14]
Rob Malley
Yeah, well, first of all, I'd say let down, betrayed. I also take my share of responsibility since I was part of the failures that you just mentioned. I give two answers, one more pessimistic, the other, I'll try to be more optimistic. You know, I think again, those of you, those of us who've been in government, you know that you have to swallow some Bitter pills. Sometimes you have to be part of a policy that you don't fully agree with. You can't resign every time that there's a, that there's something that you're not fully in line with. You know you're not going to always succeed, but you believe at the end of the day that you can make more good, marginal good, that at the end it's better for you to be inside than outside, that you can make a difference. Which is why a lot of people didn't resign in the US government after October 7, despite their very, very, very strong distaste, to put it mildly, with the policy. So you, you create a world for yourself in which you say, I'm making some difference. I think looking back, you have to look in a mirror and say, did I really? And that's, it's a tough question to ask yourself. Was it really worth whatever compromises, concessions, as you mentioned, the controversies. I've had quite a few. But you know, that's, I guess that's part of any, any public life to some extent. So that's the negative side. I mean, you look back, I think everyone has to be honest and ask themselves, did I ultimately do this because I like doing it, because I was in the middle of these discussions in the Situation Room, or did I really make a difference? And as I said, the answer is probably not as uplifting as I'd like it to be. I mean, the more optimistic sign is, I do think, just from an American point of view. So I think I served at a time when certainly in terms of Israel, pa, Palestine, the weight of the consensus was very much lopsided. I mean, consensus in terms of policy, in terms of the no daylight policy towards Israel, the notion that any. No politician in America of note believed that they would pay a price for being too close to Israel. And every politician of note felt, feared that they would pay a price from being viewed as too empathetic to the Palestinians. So that was the world in which. And I maybe tried to change it a bit and unsuccessfully, but that was the world of the administrations in which I served. I think you saw towards the end of the Biden administration after October 7th and what followed, I think you see a change, a beginning of a change, at least in America, where an increasing number of American just voters, but also politicians are now looking at the world slightly differently, particularly with regards to Israel, Palestine. And the students that I teach at Jackson, that you teach are looking at Israel, Palestine with a different moral lens, asking very tough questions about the role that the US played wondering whether the US played any positive role and whether there's a different policy that would be more in tune with their moral sense, with their sense of what role the US should play in the world. So I wonder whether that generation is. Is not going to be a generation that could be. That could shift the US policy in a very, very different way. So, you know, yes, I look back and Hussein uses this word in his, in the book where he says he was a loser. You know, that's a tough word. But yeah, you know, the things that I devoted my life to, Israel, Palestine and then. And then Iran, I can't say were crowned with success. Iran briefly. And today not at all. So, you know, I could look at it through that lens, but I look at it the longer lens of history and I do think there's shifts in this country that give me at least a sliver of hope.
- [57:36]
Alastair Campbell
Yeah. Rob, it's been great to talk to you and we should tell our listeners and viewers that the book is. It's got a fantastic title, Tomorrow is Yesterday. I love that title. And this is about the whole sort of pursuit of peace in Israel, Palestine. And again, I was hoping to end on a more uplifting note, but one of your conclusions seems to me that we've. Do we have to stop even thinking about the two state solution? Because every time anything happens, we all just sort of parrot the line. I've done it now for most of my adult life. Well, I really passionately believe in the two state solution, but you get the sense you'd be much closer to this than I have. You get the sense that you're really, really pessimistic, that what I and you conventionally, historically might have meant by that feels so remote as to be virtually impossible.
- [58:22]
Rob Malley
Well, yeah, and that is one of the themes of the book, you know, that the whole two state solution pursuit may have been off base from the beginning because it was not. Two states was not really what resonated with the emotions, the fears, the yearnings of Israelis and Palestinians. Some of what Rory mentioned earlier and that I mentioned about the Palestinians. Two states don't really. You can't fit what Israelis and Palestinians are fighting about in that construct. But today, I mean, we didn't speak about it, but the recent decisions by the Israeli cabinet, which, which once again de facto show that Israel wants to treat the west bank as sovereign Israeli territory. I'm reading now this is a death knell of the two state solution yet again. Go back and look at how many times, I mean, Secretary Kerry in 2000, you know, 2000, what was it, 1214 was saying, we're two minutes to midnight on the two state solution. And President Obama said, if we don't reverse the settlement enterprise, there's no two state solution. When the Israelis announced that they were going to build the settlements in Malia Domin, it's the end of the two state solution. How many burials is the two state solution going to get before people say, you know what, let's stop? And the problem with it is not simply that it's not going to happen, is that people are still saying this should be where our effort is. And meanwhile everything on the ground is moving on in the other direction. And people are not taking the time to think, well, okay, if a two state solution is not going to happen, what are we going to do? What kind of form of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians is possible? So my fear is 5 years, 10 years from now, the same people are saying 2 state solution are going to say it's the only solution. It's what I still hear these days, you know, and it will, it will not have changed anything because they'll just be continuing to recite that dogma and not opening up their eyes to the fact, you know what, maybe it was never going to happen. It certainly is not going to happen now. I mean, how could it happen now given where, as you just said, everything between Israelis and Palestinians is worse than it was in 2000? By far, on every, you know, there's not a scale on which you could say that there's been progress and we failed back then. So now somehow, because we say it's the only solution, it is going to be the solution. I mean, certainly it's not the only solution. It's the only solution that's been tried and failed. And there are other ones that people are going to have to be people more imaginative and creative than we've been. Israelis and Palestinians in particular are going to have to think of a different way of accommodating their respective aspirations. At some point, I think the world will, I mean a lot. I think Israelis and Palestinians, by the way, their peoples have awoken to that. It's just the others who think that we need to give them hope, but they don't take any hope when they hear President Macron, somebody else say, there's only one solution, there's two state solutions. I don't know any Palestinian of a young generation or any Israeli who says, well, that gives me hope. No, they think they're just whistling past the graveyard.
- [61:06]
Alastair Campbell
Well, Rob, when the history of the single by national state is written, at least you'll be in the books.
- [61:12]
Rob Malley
I'm not sure that will be it, but whatever it is, and I probably won't be here to see it. So.
- [61:16]
Alastair Campbell
Okay. All right, well, listen, thank you very much for all your time and your wisdom and insight. It's been fascinating.
- [61:22]
Rob Malley
Thank you, Rob.
- [61:23]
Rory Stewart
Thank you. Really appreciate it. So, Alistair, my friend Rob. What was your sense of him in. In person?
- [61:32]
Alastair Campbell
I think I met Rob Malley when he was back in the day with, with Sandy Burger.
- [61:37]
Rory Stewart
Gosh, that's going back a long way.
- [61:38]
Alastair Campbell
Well, it is going back a long way. We spent a lot of time with Sandy Burger. Sandy Burger was a big, gruff figure, very, very powerful and I think. And he used to get very, very annoyed about the way that sometimes we, we bypassed the, the official system to go straight to Bill Clinton on various things. So. And I've got a feeling I met Rob. How can I put this politely? Did he used to have a lot more hair?
- [62:02]
Rory Stewart
He definitely had a lot more hair.
- [62:06]
Alastair Campbell
But I thought, I thought that was really, really interesting, partly because of his knowledge and the insight and also that amazing sort of story about his parents who must have been horrified when he became part of the Washington establishment. But also I thought the discussion at the, the end was actually quite sad really, wasn't it, that he. You sort of forced him to confront the idea that maybe everything he'd done hadn't quite worked out. But I just, I still think that this, because this is. We are talking about two of the most difficult, important, complicated, seemingly intractable problems, that it's so, so important that people do understand the history, do keep focused on it and do keep trying to get it all to a better place. And he's devoted his whole life to that.
- [62:50]
Rory Stewart
Yeah. And I also think although Rob was mounting the critique against those Democratic presidents, their foreign policy, there was a lot that was good about it. I mean, let's not forget that during the period in which he was in office, every year from the time he started onwards, there are fewer civilians killed in conflict, fewer refugees, adult life expectancies going up in mortality is dropping down. We will look back. I mean, I know it's for many good reasons. We rubbish the period up to Trump taking over. But I think Carney and he go too far. I think we're forgetting that so much positive actually happened in that post 89 period. And it was partly because American policy wasn't just hypocritical power. It wasn't that they were secretly just trying to steal the oil and pretending to talk about democracy. And Trump's the only person who's being honest about what they were doing. And I think one of the clues to that is Rob Maddie himself. Rob is one of a group of many Americans I know who have a degree of knowledge, sophistication, integrity, diligence in that system, who are extraordinary, really extraordinary. He was a childhood friend of Tony Blinken's. He knew President Obama well. I mean, it's an amazing generation that, and the people I was lucky enough to work with in the Middle east and then in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm afraid the best of the Americans were better than any of us. And you can see it partly with Rob, because you can see he knows an unbelievable amount, but there's a lot of modesty and humility there. I mean, listen, this guy was the lead negotiator on Iran, on the jcpoa. He was essentially Biden's Iran lead, and yet he's very quick to say, I don't really know very much about Iran. That's only possible from somebody who knows a hell of a lot about Iran and is very confident and prepared to be very open about the limits of the system. And he's been through a brutal time, and we didn't talk about it very much, but towards the end of his time, the Biden administration, his security clearance was suspended, and people said that he'd mishandled classified information, and there was statements that he'd followed meetings following his suspension and all this kind of thing. The investigation was only closed after nearly two years of him living in hell, in sort of limbo, where he was almost being accused of betraying secrets to the enemy and things. It's a horrible way to finish a distinguished career in public service, and yet he handles it with such kind of grace and resilience, I think.
- [65:19]
Alastair Campbell
Yeah, no, that was great. I hope our listeners and viewers will really have enjoyed that because, of course, we've talked a lot about Israel, Palestine, and less so maybe about Iran. But I think you, as you say, you had a real sense of expertise born partly of knowledge, partly of interest, but also, you know, huge, deep experience of having seen it at the coalface. So thank you very much indeed for that.
- [65:41]
Rory Stewart
Thank you, Alistair. See you soon.
- [65:42]
Alastair Campbell
See you soon. Bye.
- [65:47]
Anita Anand
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [65:53]
William Duranpool
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
- [66:00]
Anita Anand
Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
- [66:07]
William Duranpool
A rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions.
- [66:15]
Anita Anand
From Empire, the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
- [66:20]
William Duranpool
And I I'm William Duranpool.
- [66:21]
Anita Anand
In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
- [66:31]
William Duranpool
We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were bird, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
- [66:52]
Anita Anand
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