# Trump’s Iran Deal - with Walter Russell Mead

An episode of [Call Me Back - with Dan Senor](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1539292794), 22 Jun 2026, 54 min.

Audio: https://podcasts.beehiiv.com/d9ee47aa-cc91-4ad0-b1e2-000191888049/01a0599f-c7dc-725e-a326-2afd78c94e7e/01a059a0-1222-70e1-a432-58c9f830a22f/01a059a0-1335-7f13-b839-8b0ac4b40e36.mp3

Did Israel and the U.S. win the battle but lose the war? Israel and the United States achieved what many would consider a remarkable military success against Iran. But the agreement that followed has left many Israelis wondering whether battlefield gains translated into strategic victory. Dan Senor is joined by Wall Street Journal columnist and Hudson Institute senior fellow Walter Russell Mead to discuss the paradox at the heart of the new U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, what it reveals about President Trump's approach to power, and how leaders across the Middle East are recalculating their assumptions about America, Israel, and the future of the region. ____ Call Me Back is made possible by our subscribers. If these conversations are where you turn to understand Israel and the Jewish world, consider joining them. It's what keeps this show going. Become a Subscriber - Inside Call me Back ____ In this episode: 03:42 - The paradox: military success vs. political disappointment 05:03 - Why so many Israelis think Israel lost 07:27 - What was President Trump actually betting on? 21:30 - Does the 60-day deal mean anything? 22:30 - Why sanctions rarely deliver regime change 27:24 - What this war reveals about the future of warfare 35:27 - How Riyadh, Ankara, and Beijing are reading the moment 45:33 - Israel's growing dependence on President Trump More Ark Media: • Want to join Ark Media? Check out our careers page for new openings. • Explore Israel Votes • Listen to Ark News Daily • Listen to For Heaven's Sake • Listen to What’s Your Number? • Newsletters | Ark Media | Amit Segal | Nadav Eyal • Instagram | Ark Media | Dan • X | Dan • Dan Senor & Saul Singer’s book, The Genius of Israel • Get in touch Credits: Ilan Benatar, Beth Pearlman, Brittany Cohen, Ava Weiner, Martin Huergo, Mariangeles Burgos, and Yuval Semo

## Transcript

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[0:52] Look, for the Iranians, they don't believe one single word of the memorandum of understanding. For them, it's an element in the struggle.
[1:01] Sometimes you struggle by shooting things, sometimes you struggle by signing things, but no piece of paper ever written can bind the Islamic Republic of Iran. That is Trump, too. He also thinks that way.
[1:16] So we have two people who fundamentally don't believe in the written word or their own given word, and they have signed a memorandum of understanding.
[1:26] \[upbeat music\] It's 1:00 PM on Sunday, June 21st here in New York City. Happy Father's Day to all the dads listening.
[1:44] It's 8:00 PM on Sunday, June 21st in Israel as Israelis reckon with the outcome of the Iran war chronicled in the memorandum of understanding, which was signed late last week. It seems like a paradox.
[1:56] Israel and the United States just led one of the most militarily successful campaigns in the modern history of the Middle East. They degraded Iran's air defenses. They set back Iran's nuclear program.
[2:06] They destroyed Iran's navy, a lot of its conventional military capabilities. They left Hezbollah battered and leaderless. I can go on. By every military measure, this was an outstanding performance.
[2:18] And then President Trump flew to a G7 summit and signed a piece of paper that, according to the agreement, lifted the naval blockade of Iran, unfroze billions in frozen assets, reopened the Strait of Hormuz, and gave Iran 60 days to negotiate its way back to respectability, international respectability, and acceptance.
[2:38] Hezbollah called it a victory. Tehran is projecting confidence in Israel.
[2:42] Well, Israel woke up to the realization that it may have just fought the first war in its history where it won every battle but might be losing the overall war.
[2:52] So what just happened, and what does it mean, not just for Israel, not just for Iran, but for every country in the region, in the Middle East and beyond?
[2:59] Obviously, what does it mean for the United States that is now quietly drawing its own conclusions about American power?
[3:07] To help me think through this, I called Walter Russell Mead from The Wall Street Journal back to the podcast.
[3:12] He's a columnist there, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and one of the most serious teachers of American foreign policies and interpreters of Trump foreign policy.
[3:21] There's no one better to talk to when there are a lot of questions in the world of geopolitics. Walter, welcome back to Call Me Back. It's great to be here again, Dan.
[3:30] We always call you when we are perplexed by some of the thorniest questions, so you're gonna, like, tie them all up in a bow for us and make it all easy to understand. So we will jump into it.
[3:40] I want to start, Walter, with the basic paradox. Israel and the US, as I said in the introduction, just degraded Iran's air defenses, set back its nuclear program, and as I said, it left Hezbollah pretty battered.
[3:51] Again, these are all by most military measures. It was an outstanding campaign. But then we have this MOU that looks nothing like those results. It looks like Iran, the regime, came out with the advantage in this war.
[4:04] How do you square that? Actually, Dan, I, I think I'd start with the ways in which this isn't really that exceptional.
[4:11] I mean, since 1948, Israel has been winning wars and then been unable to shape the resulting Middle East situation in the way that it would like to. So it wins the war of independence, no peace.
[4:26] It wins in '56, it takes Suez, no benefit. '67, Six-Day War, no peace. And the war of attrition that follows immediately after the Six-Day War for something like three years. Exactly.
[4:39] That is kind of the Israeli condition. Without military strength, without even military superiority over its enemies, it can't survive, but military superiority doesn't give it peace in the region.
[4:54] That's been a fact from the beginning, so we shouldn't be overwhelmed with surprise that something like this is happening again.
[5:01] Okay, so a recent poll came out inside Israel saying that 84% of Israelis believe Israel did not win this war, again, despite this outstanding military success. So I just wanna drill down on what you're saying.
[5:15] Are they wrong? In other words, can they win the war, and that should be its own exclamation mark, exclamation point \[chuckles\] after that fact?
[5:23] And then, of course, the real question is what they can do with that, or did they really not win the war? Well, if you think, you know, what are your goals, that tells you whether or not you win.
[5:31] What, what were your aims, and did you achieve them?
[5:34] If the aim was, as it has been in past military confrontations with Iran and Hezbollah, to mow the lawn, the lawn has been better mowed in this war than it's been in a very long time. The grass is low.
[5:47] It's not clear to me how quickly the Iranians could get back to a nuclear program even if they wanted to, which actually I kind of assume they do. So in that sense, what more could you do?
[6:00] But if the goal is political regime change, it would be, I think, something of a miscalculation.
[6:06] You can hope that as a result of a military shock, there would be some kind of internal shift in Iranian dynamics, either a revolution against the old Islamic Republic or a, a shift to a, a far more moderate version of the Islamic Republic.
[6:22] But that was a gamble and is-- and I don't think there was ever a huge chance of that happening.
[6:29] So in that sense, Israel didn't win the Mega Millions jackpot, but was that really a realistic expectation to go in at the beginning of the war? Iran's government is projecting resilience and confidence. Are they wrong?
[6:46] They're not wrong to project it, but obviously looking strong, sounding tough, that's what you do. And in fact, the weaker you are, the tougher you sound.
[6:56] It's a huge mistake to assume that Iranian propaganda corresponds to Iranian reality, but they would be idiots not to project strength and confidence. Ditto Hezbollah, for that matter, ditto Hamas.
[7:10] All you ever hear is confidence, resolve, we're winning in time. Yes, a temporary setback even, but it was a great victory over the evil oppressor. That's all they ever say.
[7:23] Why is anybody surprised that they're saying it now? So when the war began, when President Trump-- we go back to February, he articulated what he thought was possible.
[7:33] And again, what he thought was possible, as he articulated, was kind of a fluid set of expectations and goals.
[7:38] But based on what you know and your reporting and your conversations with administration officials, what do you think President Trump was actually betting on when he entered this war? Leave the Israelis out of it.
[7:49] What was President Trump betting on? Look, I think, um, it's a mistake in trying to analyze President Trump to think that he has some kind of long-term strategic plan. He's gonna do step one, step two, step three.
[8:03] That's not how he encounters reality. He is sort of, um, we could call him, if we wanted to use a fancy Greek word, niketrophic. He is turning toward-- he wants to orient toward power and victory, right?
[8:17] Dynamotrophic, you could also say. But he is not doing this as reasons, as a reasoned strategist necessarily.
[8:25] What he does is in each moment, he surveys his options, and then he kind of moves in the direction where he sees advantage or where he sees the need to shun some kind of danger.
[8:38] And this can make him extremely effective, far more effective than people expect, because he can be sort of ruthlessly pragmatic in the moment.
[8:48] And also because if you constantly seize on what looks to be the most advantageous course, while you don't always win or always get everything that you want, you often end up better than people who deeply believe in complex strategies expect you to.
[9:06] And that, I think, has been the trajectory of Trump's career this far.
[9:10] And so at, at the start of the war, I think Trump probably, you know, the extent one can try to reconstruct the way that he looks at things, the big prize is that glittering gold prize of the regime change, Baby Shah comes back, or pro-Western Iran miraculously emerges, Trump is world hero.
[9:32] That's what he would love to have. But then what he figured is, okay, if that doesn't happen, uh, where does it go? Then you go into a situ-- a fluid situation of chaos.
[9:43] And Trump's core element of Trump's worldview is that chaos is his home. That's where he's comfortable.
[9:50] Many of us would hate to be like in litigation in fifteen different court cases with bankers calling us up and real estate deals erupting all over the place. That's where Trump lives.
[10:04] And he actually believes that in those situations, he's better than almost anybody at dealing with it, right? And so he moves the situation as he would see it onto his home court of chaos.
[10:19] And there, if there is a rabbit in it to be pulled out of a hat along the way, he can do it.
[10:24] He's relying on his instinctive ability to avoid trouble, to seek opportunity, to reshape a reality in ways that other people don't expect. And then his kind of fallback idea is that that's the middle range.
[10:39] Like top range, regime falls, I'm a hero. Middle range, chaos, and I'll probably manage to do pretty well in it. All right?
[10:49] Low range, it doesn't go that well, but I'm really good at spinning, and so I'll be able to convince enough of my core supporters that, boy, I won a great triumph, that the damage to me is not gonna be too great.
[11:05] So that's how he does these things. Uh, Matt Continetti, who you know from the American Enterprise Institute and also your colleague at The Wall Street Journal, described it this way.
[11:16] He said, "You know, people tend to wonder if there's like a, a secret skill set to what Trump does." Like, you know, the, "Well, is he really playing three-dimensional chess?"
[11:25] Matt's point is, no, no, no, he's not playing chess. He's juggling. That's what he's doing. He's juggling.
[11:30] Now, the problem is he said he's, he's often juggling grenades, so if one of the grenades falls, the implications could be, you know, have cascading effects. But that's what he's basically doing, is juggling.
[11:39] And one of the grenades, if you will, to extend Matt's metaphor that he's juggling right now, is the Strait of Hormuz, and he's decided that he's gotta get the strait open. That's what he's gotta do.
[11:49] So in the midst of his juggling, he's getting the strait open, and he's singularly focused on that.
[11:54] And what he's giving up to get that open, many critics sit there saying, including me, like, "Oh my gosh, you're making all these incredible concessions that's gonna set back so many of the gains that you've made."
[12:06] And thinking about the way Matt framed it, it's like, no, in Trump's mind, he's gotta s- get the strait open. He's not giving up any other concessions. He, he'll have options through the next sixty days. He can go back.
[12:16] He can turn up military heat if he wants to. I'm not saying he will. I'm just saying he, he doesn't think like he's giving anything up in the long term as he pursues w- the fire he needs to put out in the immediate term.
[12:26] Look, for the Iranians, not one single-- they don't believe one single word of the memorandum of understanding. They're not sincerely swearing, "Oh, this is h- what we'll do." For them, it's an element in the struggle.
[12:41] Sometimes you struggle by shooting things, sometimes you struggle by signing things, but really, you know, it's all the same, and no piece of paper ever written can bind the Islamic Republic of Iran. That is Trump too.
[12:57] He also thinks that way. So we have two people who fundamentally don't believe in the written word or their own given word, who have almost between them no regard for law.
[13:11] I mean, the Iranians say, "Well, we believe in the, you know, holy Quran and the rule of the law," but then on the other hand, they have the right to interpret it through their supreme leader, can interpret it pretty much any way he wants.
[13:22] A little bit like Stalin with Marxism. Marxism is whatever Stalin wants it to be.
[13:28] So you have two negotiators, neither one of which believes a word that the other says or expects any s- rational person to believe a single word that they say, and they have signed a memorandum of understanding.
[13:44] So let's not kind of overdo what's happened here.
[13:48] In a sense, what's happened is that without paying one single dime to the Iranians, without giving up anything, Trump has made the price of oil go down something like twenty percent in the last few days.
[14:04] At the G7, he's hailed as a great peacemaker, except by Giorgia Meloni, who had other issues.
[14:12] Meanwhile, the wing of the Trump coalition at home that was, you know, is very restrainer, is sort of tempted by the Tucker Carlson, so on, has now clearly seen, no, Bibi is not the master of Trump.
[14:28] Trump is the boss of Bibi. Whip, whip, whip, whip, all right? Dominance display. He's achieved these things without doing anything. That's the way Trump likes to operate. What does it mean for tomorrow?
[14:43] We will find out tomorrow, and if we want to think about where things are likely to go,
[14:50] we do need to look at sort of the objective facts of the situation because Trump's opportunism calculator will be looking at, you know, each day he'll wake up and he'll look at the political situation, the economic situation, the military situation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and he will make choices based on where he is.
[15:14] Moreover, let's also not forget that part of what he's doing is he wants to maintain the dance of the Rubio versus Vance. Who will be the successor? So we, you know, we started with a kind of a default thing.
[15:29] It's gonna be Vance. He's the vice president. But for months now, it's like Rubio, Rubio, you know, Rubio is coming up on the outside. Vance is slowing, right? \[laughs\] It's, you know, the horse race people.
[15:40] Rubio, Rubio, Rubio. Okay, Trump does not want either one of them to emerge as the successor or anybody else until the absolute last possible moment.
[15:52] Trump wants to designate his successor pretty much the way Elizabeth I designated hers, on his deathbed in a whisper.
[16:01] \[laughs\] Because the moment one of those two people emerges as the successor, power starts to flow away from Trump. Right. That is the, that is the official start of his lame duckness.
[16:12] So that's gonna come as late as possible, as absolutely late.
[16:16] And meanwhile, he does have these two wings of the coalition, the kind of Vance wing, which is more, you know, shady toward restrainer, suspicious of Israel and many other things, and then the Rubio wing, which is more sort of closely aligned to kind of some traditional Republican thinking.
[16:36] And Trump needs to be throwing a little chum to the Vance side, a little chum to the Rubio side. That's, that's how he does things.
[16:44] And Trump is, I think, less on, on many, many issues, he is less focused on achieving a specific policy outcome than he is on maintaining a specific power dynamic, one that keeps him elevated.
[16:59] So we-- I think many people get confused by Trump because they think he's trying to do things that he isn't trying to do.
[17:06] They find it difficult to sort of say, "Okay, in the moment, what are the things that seem most important to Trump, where he needs to do something?"
[17:15] Now, I don't claim to read his mind, but it does seem to me that if you think in these terms, a lot of what he does is easier to explain.
[17:23] In your recent Wall Street Journal column, Walter, you talked about these tools that Trump and almost only Trump has in diplomacy and foreign policy and deal- you know, kind of navigating geopolitics, and I felt like in your piece you kind of go back and forth.
[17:36] On the one hand, only Trump has these tools. On the other hand, those tools aren't enough. Well, they're not. They're not enough for everything. Trump is, as, as I say in the column, Trump is not really a, a leader.
[17:50] He's not someone, say, like Abraham Lincoln, who has this vision of the nation, vision of democracy, a clear-sighted idea, what is the Civil War about? What is preservation of the Union about?
[18:06] If I can do it without freeing any slaves, I'll do it. If I have to free all the slaves, I'll do it, whatever, right? Trump does not necessarily have those kinds of fixed objectives.
[18:18] You know, he has some-- I'm not saying he has nothing, but operationally, that's how he goes, and I think he does make him underestimate and undervalue some of the resistance that he encounters.
[18:32] You know, I think most people would say at this point he clearly underestimated Ukrainian powers of resistance against Russia.
[18:40] I would add to that, that I think he also underestimated Putin's determination to defeat Ukraine at almost any cost.
[18:49] Trump thought it actually would be a fairly easy thing to get some kind of a deal between Zelensky and Putin, and he hasn't been able to, I think because, in fact, that war is harder to settle than his kind of worldview led him to believe.
[19:05] Well, you-- as you write in the piece, that he actually doesn't understand, according-- I mean, in your words, I mean, the power of nationalism in the decision-making of leaders as they're navigating geopolitics, that, that actually ideas like nationalism matter a lot.
[19:20] And if you understand that, you actually do understand the resilience or what he would argue, the stubbornness of Zelensky \[chuckles\] and Putin respectively. Yeah.
[19:28] And again, in some ways, the leader who in many ways reminds me of Trump would be Napoleon III of France.
[19:37] For Napoleon, the th- the thing that's really remarkable about him is in a country that was deeply divided between sort of Republican, Bonapartist, and monarchical ideas, traditional Catholic monarchists, zealous Republicans, so on, Napoleon actually didn't really \[chuckles\] believe in any of these, and that gave him a tremendous advantage because he could, he could sort of dispassionately and in cold blood look at the situation and realize that these different ideologies are kind of, you know, rings through people's noses, and you can pull on, on the chain that attaches them and get them- \[laughs\]...
[20:14] to go where you want them to go. And for the cynic, often believers are the stupidest people on Earth. You just do a little puppet show of the Pope embracing you, and all the loyal Catholics come trotting along.
[20:30] Or you say something nice to Bibi about Israel, and all the pro-Israel people, you know, trot merrily after you like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
[20:40] And we've seen, you know, different things that Trump says about what he thinks about the military.
[20:45] He said some terrible things, very wounded soldier, how terrible that is, McCain captured, so on and so forth, and yet he's still able to kind of get up there with, of all things, the village people and have huge patriotic uprisings around him.
[21:02] Right. He knows and values the power of ideals to move masses.
[21:08] But I think what he misses is that when you have leaders who are driven by conviction, a de Gaulle, a Churchill, people of this kind, or for that matter, I am sorry to say, the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, those guys are much harder to move than you think they're going to be.
[21:29] The, uh, MOU gives both sides sixty days to reach a permanent deal. What actually happens at the end of that window? I mean, I mean, we don't really know what happens, but what do you think happens?
[21:39] What'll happen is that Trump will look at the situation and decide what he thinks is in his interest and do that. That's what'll happen.
[21:48] And what will happen before that, I can see a scenario where a lot of oil gets out on world markets, everybody's stocking up, and so another long-term interruption for the S- Strait of Hormuz would not cause a massive economic crisis.
[22:01] Well, maybe we turn up the heat. On the other hand, stock markets would lose thirty percent of their value, and the price of gas would go to eight dollars a gallon. I suspect we'd see a very different response.
[22:12] But what I can tell you is that for neither Trump nor the Iranian side, a deep, deep, sincere regard for the eternal verities and commitments encoded in the memo of understanding, that would be the last thing that drives them.
[22:28] Walter, as recently as, I mean, the last couple of months, but also go all the way back to, say, April, US administration officials, Secretary Bessent, others, were talking about how, even the president himself, were talking about how the blockade was going to make Iran's oil infrastructure and oil situation generally impossible.
[22:48] Because if they had nowhere-- if they couldn't ship, get o- oil out of the system, their oil infrastructure would start to crumble and kind of implode or explode, depending on how you look at it, from within.
[22:58] It was an unse-- and that would bring the Iranian economy to its knees and to the regime to its knees. Did you believe that then? Or I guess maybe put differently, what did we get wrong about that?
[23:09] O- o- one thing that Americans have gotten wrong, and for that matter, a lot of people get wrong, is we have overestimated the power of American sanctions since the Napoleonic Wars, when Thomas Jefferson levied an embargo against Britain and France, and it produced zero in the way of concessions, right?
[23:30] The United States has thought that our economic pressure actually is-- can achieve more than we think it can, and we do it over and over. There are a lot of reasons why we get so habituated to it.
[23:43] One of them is that when you don't really wanna do anything serious about something, but you don't wanna look like you're not doing something serious, economic sanctions. Ha. You know, that shows I really care.
[23:56] Sanction, sanction, sanction. We do that a lot. It's also something that Congress can do. And so congressmen, you know, there are very few things in foreign affairs that Congress can actually do.
[24:08] Sanctions is one of them. So we have a huge national predilection for sanction. We also, I think we may overestimate the degree to which other countries are actually responsive to economic stimuli of any kind.
[24:24] I mean, the classic example of this is during the pandemic, North Korea cut off all contact with the outside world, its own border with China, and actually there was a lot of misery in North Korea as a result.
[24:39] This was a far greater economic impact on North Korea than all the economic sanctions anybody else could ever impose would achieve.
[24:48] And it was basically a way of North Korea demonstrating to the world, "We simply do not care about your stupid UN Security Council sanctions. They will not change.
[24:57] And yes, you've been telling us we're not a nuclear power for thirty years. We've been one. We are one. We're gonna be more one. And unless you want a war with us, there is nothing you can do about it."
[25:08] And I think Iran has noted that. The Iranian government just killed, we think, 30 to 40,000 of its own people. The security forces held together during that. So a little bit more suffering for the people. Oh dear.
[25:24] Well, maybe they'll come out and we'll kill a few more thousand.
[25:27] The idea that they are sort of like a bunch of New York real estate dealers who if they-- you, you hit them in their profit, they instantly capitulate, that's not who they are.
[25:42] We'll be right back after this short message. \[upbeat music\] Hi, I'm Daniel Hartman, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. And I'm Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
[25:54] What's more important, to be feared by your enemies or morally true to yourself? Should Israel strive to be a nation among nations, or should it accept the fact that it is now a fortress apart?
[26:06] What do Israelis and diaspora Jews owe each other? If you're Jewish- Or a friend, an ally- These questions have been gnawing at you these past few years.
[26:15] For some of you, like for us, these questions have been keeping you up at night, and for some, they've been simmering in the background, waiting for answers. But dilemmas don't always have clear answers.
[26:27] What they do deserve are honest and respectful debates. And as it happens, Yossi and I love to challenge each other to get to the bottom of things.
[26:37] We look at current events through a lens that speaks to us most deeply, a Jewish lens.
[26:42] So if today's Jewish dilemmas are on your mind, tune in to our conversation on For Heaven's Sake, a partnership between Arc Media and the Shalom Hartman Institute.
[26:52] You can find For Heaven's Sake on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you there. And we're back with Walter Russell Mead.
[27:02] Walter, you recently, recently in May, you were in Ukraine, and, um, you came back, and you wrote a piece that really struck me, and I-- you and I exchanged messages about it.
[27:12] Uh, we actually were thinking at the time about having you come on just to talk about this piece, but then of course, events got so intense with regard to, you know, with Iran and the US that we put it off.
[27:21] But I, I do wanna come back to what you wrote in that piece because I think it's relevant to this very conversation.
[27:25] The title of that piece in May was Ukra-- I'm reading it here, Ukraine Offers a Glimpse at the Future of War, and your subhead was The Way Armies Fight Is Changing Daily, and at the moment, that favors Kiev, at least as it relates to the Kiev-Moscow conflict.
[27:40] So I want you to extrapolate that out to what we're watching right now in Iran.
[27:44] Isn't the way this war has been fought and may be ending, at least for now, given us a glimpse at the future of war, both the way we fight, the way Israel fights, and the way countries like Iran can fight using critical choke points in the international system as a tool in warfare?
[28:01] And I guess my question is, how in your mind will what we're watching in Iran and the Strait and the US and Israel change the way we fight wars? Yeah.
[28:10] Well, you know, there are so many things going on that it's very hard to just sort of give a, some simple head top line. It's gonna favor the offensive. It's gonna favor the defensive.
[28:20] It's gonna favor the, the away team. It's gonna favor the home team. Ah, like- Oh, how I wish geopolitics was like NFL Sunday. You know, life would be so much simpler. \[laughing\] How did that team do on fourth down?
[28:33] You can bet on both of them in Polymarket, so maybe- That's true... there's at least that similarity.
[28:37] You know, in some ways, what the war has shown, the, the most frustrating thing for the Israelis and Americans is actually a very old lesson. Air power alone does not win wars.
[28:49] People have assumed since the 1930s that air power would be decisive in wars for various reasons, and it hasn't been, and it still isn't, and we still haven't learned that.
[29:00] We still haven't internalized that because it looks like a wonderful easy button. You press the air war button, and you have superiority. Other side surrenders. Everything is fine. It just doesn't work that way.
[29:14] On the other hand, the fact that basically we're moving toward the automation of war, I mean, in Ukraine, there are places where only a very small number of soldiers are holding a significant chunk of the front because of drones.
[29:29] They've, they've really thinned out the presence of people on the front.
[29:34] That's gonna go forward, and it means, for example, that the size of your economy and your technological level may be a more important factor in national strength than the number of eighteen-year-olds that you can put a, a rifle in the hands.
[29:50] That's actually big. It means in Asia, it means that Japan has the potential to be a much, you know, something closer to a peer competitor with China as a military power, despite the gap in their population.
[30:06] It also, obviously, in terms of US-Chinese, um, balance of power, is probably favorable for us.
[30:13] In the Middle East, I think it's probably favorable for Israel, that, with a caveat, which I'll get to, but it means that Israel, the small size of Israel's population is less of a limit on Israel's ability to generate and use military power should that be necessary in the Middle East.
[30:33] That's a good-- You know, if you're Israeli, that's a good thing.
[30:36] On the other hand, though, and this is something that is less positive from an Israeli point of view and from ours and maybe from everybody's, is that the information revolution is spreading a lot faster than the Industrial Revolution.
[30:52] And so it is getting harder to create and sustain an advantage in military power based on technological s-superiority
[31:04] So the Industrial Revolution starts in Britain late eighteenth century, and basically the British are able to just sort of romp around India and pretty much wherever they want for a hundred years, and it takes a very long time for people to catch up, even for Europeans to catch up.
[31:21] Mm-hmm. All right? That's not \[laughs\] how this stuff works. Maybe at the very cutting edge, the US and China have advantages that other-- it's hard for other people to get up into that league.
[31:33] But if you wanted to talk about the ability to make missiles, drones, and other things that are extremely problematic, say, for Israel, then it's clear that the surrounding countries are becoming more militarily formidable.
[31:49] And again, the Iranians, when we talked about existential Iranian threats to Israel 10 years ago, the only threat we really talked about was the nuclear program, because that was basically the only way Iran could really strike in a significant way at Israel.
[32:05] But one of the triggers for the current war was that Iran's ballistic missile production was reaching a level where Israeli air defenses really could not reliably protect the country from the kind of missile barrage that was likely to happen, and that that would, on the one hand, allow Iran to shield the development of its nuclear program behind the capability of massive destruction through ballistic missiles.
[32:33] But also that the ballistic missiles themselves become a threat.
[32:37] So we've gone from just worrying about the nuclear program, which is a huge headache and difficult to deal with, but a bal-- it is much easier to build a ton of ballistic missiles at distributed sites.
[32:49] It is much harder to stop a ballistic missile program dead in its tracks, and even if you do it once, it's hard to keep it from them to recover.
[32:59] The spread of technological capability is making the Israeli task against Iran a more formidable one.
[33:08] I think Israel will be in a very, very tight situation as the sort of armaments levels of various countries in its neighborhood rapidly rises.
[33:20] So let, let me ask you then, just I'll tick off quickly different leaders or governments and kind of what they take from this. So let's start with Netanyahu, the master of statecraft, the master domestic politician.
[33:32] It's hard-- you're hard-pressed to find another politician leader in any Western democracy that has dominated their own politics for as long as he has. Where is he now?
[33:41] I mean, uh, less so on domestic politics, because we're doing a lot of episodes on that, domestic Israeli politics, but just what is his play now vis-à-vis Washington?
[33:49] Well, he, um, I think he needs to draw attention to the reality that, for example, the ceasefire in Lebanon is actually not being threatened by Israel, but by Hezbollah.
[34:01] And Iran would like to make this whole controversy about why can't Washington control Israel, when really it needs to be why is Iran still enabling Hezbollah aggression?
[34:12] That's got to be his consistent line, and he's got to constantly fight any efforts by people here or anywhere else to portray Israeli action in Lebanon as offense-- you know, as Israeli-initiated.
[34:29] And that means when he does-- when there is an attack from Hezbollah, and he does respond, he needs to do that in a way that telegraphs that essential message to Trump.
[34:40] This sort of, you can't sort of say, "Okay, wow, now they've given me an opportunity and I can really knock 'em out," because in fact, you know, you can't or you would have a very long time ago.
[34:52] But so you, you need to kind of be in constant communication with Washington about what's going on, what you're doing, and you need to be open and responsive both to Trump's need to demonstrate in America that he's the dominant player in the relationship, which in fact he is, and also that Israel is not blocking progress on the sixty-day period out of a desire to destroy it, even if in your heart of hearts you wish you could.
[35:24] What about Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh? He has a very complex situation to think through. Most of the assumptions of Saudi foreign policy now n-- and domestic policy now need to be re-examined.
[35:39] I don't think we're gonna see quite the massive influx of foreign investment and economic development into the Gulf that people were talking about a year ago. That is-- It just looks too scary.
[35:54] And frankly, a certain amount of Gulf capital as well as foreign capital is gonna be looking for other places to go.
[36:00] Now, on the one hand, you're-- if you're him, you're gonna want to try to change that by looking, you know, groping towards some sort of long-term stability, but that's really, really hard.
[36:12] The environment is not favorable. But you are gonna look, and you're also not going to make a lot of moves that on their own are gonna risk that stability or even the appearance of stability.
[36:26] I think the Saudis have now concluded that Israel can't protect them from Iran and the United States won't fully protect them from Iran.
[36:36] That changes a lot of calculations, because I think the warming toward Israel that we saw in Saudi Arabia wasn't simply Saudi dislike of Iran.
[36:49] It was the belief that Saudi plus Israeli lobbying in Washington and just generally economic power and so on could ensure that Washington would do its part as they see it in the Gulf.
[37:06] Israel looks less useful today if you're thinking about the impact in Washington. That's a big change, and it's consequential. Last one I'll ask you about, Beijing. How does Xi see this, or where does he go from here?
[37:22] Look, I think he's happy to see- The US stymied or the perception of the US stymied...
[37:28] if the dream had come true and the Iranian re- you know, and we'd had a Venezuelan scenario in, say, in Iran, both Russia and China would really be in a difficult spot.
[37:42] So I think tremendous relief that that isn't happening.
[37:47] Probably also, though, a sense of a renewed belief that they're in a zero-sum competition with the United States over the long term, that what Trump tried in Iran with the Venezuela option, that just shows what kind of people they are.
[38:04] So I think that will confirm that sense. He's probably encouraged by the strong public reaction in the US against the Iran war as suggesting that that might also apply in the, in the Taiwan case.
[38:21] But as I've said, these military developments in which countries without navies have made navies, uh, you know...
[38:29] We've taken away Iran's navy, but that doesn't mean the US fleet is sailing happily around in the Persian Gulf.
[38:36] So the task of taking Taiwan may be getting harder as time goes on, not easier, and his own military with all these purges and so on does not seem to be prime time for a big, complex offensive movement.
[38:52] So Xi has got, you know, like everybody else, he's juggling. Right. All right, my last question, Walter. You teach a lot of history. You've spent your career reading how these moments get remembered.
[39:03] How does this one go down? Like, what's the lesson that actually sticks?
[39:06] Assuming, and here's my assumption in asking the question, my assumption is at the end of the next sixty days, we're not anywhere closer to some kind of comprehensive deal, some kind of JCPOA Part Two.
[39:17] There's no-- I mean, it's just that what we're in right now is, like, the new status quo for the near future. And so maybe the sixty days we just language into an additional sixty days, another sixty days, and we just...
[39:28] Th- th- that this period we're in right now is kind of the new normal. That's my assumption. I could be totally wrong and things could heat back up again, or they could reach some sort of comprehensive deal, final deal.
[39:37] I don't buy it because I just think the two sides are too far apart on the nuclear question. So by the way, if you disagree, let me know.
[39:44] But assuming you don't- Well, Dan, let me, uh, let me interrogate your assumption there for one second. Sure.
[39:49] Is your assumption that the Iranians go back to building a bomb and this continues, or, or is the bomb effort paralyzed while this continues?
[39:57] To me, the bomb effort is paralyzed, meaning that Iran can't quickly kick off resumption of its program because its program's in disarray.
[40:06] A lot of it's, God knows, you know, buried and not easily accessible, so that if the US and the Israelis see Iran trying to go back and building, they will take action.
[40:15] So I'm, I'm assuming the no- nuclear program is kind of stuck. Not indefinitely, but for a while. Right. There's no inspections. There's no nothing.
[40:22] And the US and Israel can kind of have eyes, like they can see what's going on. And what about ballistic missiles?
[40:28] Does Iran immediately start rebuilding those, and is that becoming a strategic threat, or are they kind of lying flat? I assume they try to rebuild, but again, I don't, I don't think they can resume that overnight.
[40:40] And even if they can, I don't think they can make the kind of progress overnight that would pose an immediate massive threat. Over time, they could. Well, you're actually making an argument for the MOU in a way.
[40:52] All right. Say more.
[40:53] Well, that if, if what we have is a situation where the Iranian nuclear program, whatever they want, is by and large frozen for the foreseeable future, though not forever, and the ballistic missile program, the ballistic missile capability is not really a threat, then a huge blow has been dealt to Iran and there's no need to create a global energy crisis, an economic crisis by interrupting trade through the strait.
[41:21] I mean, that's a defeat. Right.
[41:23] No, I, I would say I would take it a step farther and say that Iran's most immediate need is getting money into their system so they can pay people, pay Iranians, pay government employees, pay security officials.
[41:35] The big risk to Iran, to the regime, is some kind of version of January of this year resuming, that as the war is, quote unquote, "over" and Iranians are kind of resuming their lives and going back to work and, and there's no money in the system to pay anybody.
[41:49] They need to get money in the system just to keep the street calm, and that is the more immediate priority, I think.
[41:55] But th- this is based on experts I've talked to in Washington and Jerusalem, that the, the sense, including intelligence types, that the biggest risk to the regime, according to the regime, is now a resumption of protests because the economy is so battered, and that's where the energy will go rather than the nuclear program and the ballistic missile program.
[42:12] I'm sure that's true, but I'm not sure if that's an existential concern, like they're desperately afraid that if the protests start, the regime will fall. Mm-hmm. Or if they're actually like, "Yeah, that would be ugly.
[42:25] It would be messy. It would make everything else harder. But we'll survive like we have the ten other popular uprisings in the twenty-first century."
[42:33] So if your objective is economic pressure leading to regime change, then you hate the MOU.
[42:41] But if you think that maybe that's not possible, leaving Iran with, for now, no nuclear program and no capability for a strategic ballista- missile program is hardly the worst thing anybody that has ever happened.
[42:57] One administration official put it to me this way, that some economic relief for Iran in the next sixty days during the period of the MOU... By the way, I'm not saying I agree with this.
[43:07] I'm just presenting this argument, okay? Some economic relief for Iran is still small in the scheme of things.
[43:14] In other words, that given the scale of the economic damage done to Iran since the beginning of this war, and even going back to June actually, given the scale of the economic damage, what we're actually talking about giving them in terms of some economic relief in the next couple of months is a small fraction of the overall damage, and that is a small price to pay, so the administration will argue, relative to the considerable economic relief we are receiving by, um, you know, opening the strait.
[43:42] That meaning we're-- a- according to them, we're avoiding some kind of economic or market crisis by reopening the strait, so the trade-off is worth it. But, but let's-- they will say, "But come on, give me a break."
[43:52] Even if you believe we're gonna provide some economic relief to Iran, Iran is so in the hole, hundreds of billions of dollars in the hole because of this war, and they're not gonna dig themselves out of it immediately, even with this relief in the MOU.
[44:05] Do you agree with that? What's your reaction to that? I would have to read a lot more secret squirrel documents than- Than you've read so far? Yeah. \[laughs\] Yes.
[44:14] And, uh, my sense is that, yeah, the Iranians, I think, feel reasonably confident that they can maintain control because let's not forget that revolutions, uh, more often come from rising expectations than from in periods where everybody is spending 18 hours a day just trying to get some rice on the table.
[44:41] Who has time to like be, you know, putting out pamphlets and organizing? You're trying to feed your kids. And so that's not when revolutions normally come.
[44:52] And it seems to me that also as the general poverty level rises, the Iranian government can't give its loyal thugs 100% of their normal benefit.
[45:05] But even if they're giving them 40% of their normal benefit, they're so much better off than everybody who isn't part of the political machine that in a way, just as sanctions magnify, have magnified in the past the power of dictatorial regimes.
[45:20] Look at Iraq, look at Iran, look at North Korea, right? That their power may not weaken as a result of economic suffering.
[45:31] Well, what worries me, again, for the reasons I just said, if my assumptions are right, I'm not that alarmed so far about this period we're entering into.
[45:41] What I am alarmed by is something different, which is the perception now of real daylight between Jerusalem and Washington. That's what worries me.
[45:50] It's actually not the details of how much economic relief does Iran-- Again, in the scheme of things, I think there's a case to be made that it won't have that much of an impact and that the US and Israel still have an edge.
[46:00] What I am concerned is how the region reads tensions now between the US and Israel, because when there is daylight projected publicly, we-- as we've seen in other presidencies, bad actors in the region who are hostile to the US and hostile to Israel can try to drive a freight train through that wedge and through that opening.
[46:20] And that actually, it's a, it's a more of a qualitative thing. It's more of a, a feel, or as my kids would say, it's more of the vibe.
[46:27] You know, the vibe is that you had-- is the commander-in-chief of the United States and the prime minister of Israel locked arms, you know, we're fully connected, fully integrated, we're fighting on the same side, and suddenly...
[46:38] Now, these tensions, as you know, certainly in the Trump era, you can have, you know, the president can be hot one week and-- or cold one week, and then things turn around another week and, you know.
[46:46] So I, I don't wanna overread these. But that said, as you and I were talking about offline before we started this conversation, this past week, the rhetoric got pretty hot.
[46:54] And what bad actors in the region read into that, that's-- And by the way, during the Biden administration, even when the administration was working very closely with Israel and I think was, or at least early on, was very supportive of Israel, the moments I got most concerned about was when they were excoriating Israel publicly.
[47:12] Not because behind the scenes maybe they should have been critical of Israel or should or shouldn't have. That's a separate issue. Of course, leaders can disagree.
[47:18] But when these things blow out into the open, it has implications in the region.
[47:22] Well, I think what you have to look at there is the cost of the whole war, not just the Iran thing, but the Gaza-Lebanon war to Israel, the political cost. And it's not unusual.
[47:37] If you go back to the 1980s, the Israeli war in Lebanon really shook poll support for Israel in the United States.
[47:45] I mean, you see a huge change, and there was a lot of speculation back then that Israel was going to never again regain the kind of favorability that it had previously had. And there were personal ramifications.
[48:01] Reagan apparently never forgave Sharon for his vision of what happened. Accurate or not, it was a re-- you know, the perception was there. And this war has been much longer. The casualties have been much greater.
[48:18] And for most of the time, it's basically a story of Israelis bombing Palestinians and Hezbollah activists, not terrorists from Palestinians right on Israel.
[48:32] So you've had three years almost of sort of nonstop bombs coming, and they're Israeli bombs, and the houses that they're falling on are Arab houses.
[48:44] And that with a public that does not have necessarily a deep knowledge of Middle Eastern history or much time to spend thinking about things as learning about things on social media and extremely sophisticated propaganda campaigns from a number of different sources pushing various lines here, the cost has been enormous.
[49:09] And what we're seeing now is part of the price. The fact that the Democratic Party, for now, it will be very hard for a Democratic president to be as supportive as Biden was.
[49:20] That would be quite difficult for any Democrat. Which means that the Israelis are in the position in some ways of pinning all their hopes on Donald Trump.
[49:30] There is nothing in this universe more dangerous than to be absolutely dependent on Donald Trump. So, um, you know, he senses power like that. He wants to use it. Right. He wouldn't be Trump if he didn't.
[49:46] So here you are. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump would not think that Bibi losing the next election would be a good thing.
[49:55] After all, Bibi called-- was the first foreign leader, as Trump believes, to call Biden to congratulate him on, on the election. Trump is ready to make a phone call. Right.
[50:06] So again, how this is all playing out in Trump's mind is, is hard to say.
[50:12] But Israel is, in terms of public opinion, or let's say in terms of the West in general, Israel is even more isolated than it was in October of twenty twenty-three, therefore more dependent on the Unite-- on American support, with less coming from Europe and, and more intense opposition.
[50:35] And then in America, it's dependent more on the Republican Party than it was.
[50:42] And it's now that the Republican Party is splitting with a pro-Israel and an anti-Israel wing, it's more dependent on Trump as the one figure who can rally the an- keep the anti-Israel forces in the Republican Party connected.
[51:01] Right. I cannot believe that Trump doesn't see this and feel it, right? And so I think from an Israeli point of view, there's a need to think about, okay, what do we do now? Yeah.
[51:14] And I would just say the point you made at the beginning of this conversation, which is I've been thinking about since we've been talking, which is one other lesson that actually sticks, is in a sense, this Middle East war, if it's ending, is ending like many Middle East wars, which is they don't really end.
[51:30] That is correct. And again, the idea that the Middle East is a problem to solve rather than a condition to live in, that is not fundamentally an Israeli idea. Right. And especially, I could say, the Israeli right.
[51:47] That's not realistic thinking, and Israel is a country that cannot survive if it does not think realistically about its situation. All right, Walter, thank you for this.
[52:01] Not real closure, but definitely a, a new frame for us to think about it, to think about this period, which in a sense is, as you're laying out, is-- may have been entirely predictable.
[52:11] But be that as it may, thanks for doing this, and, um, I'll be talking to you soon. Great, Dan. Take care. \[upbeat music\] Call Me Back is produced and edited by Alon Benatar.
[52:29] Our production manager is Brittany Cohn. Our community manager is Ava Wiener. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.
[52:43] \[upbeat music\] \[gentle music\] I'm Deborah Pardes, the host of Arc News Daily.
[53:03] What's happening in Israel and the Jewish world right now matters, but it can be hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all. That's why we started Arc News Daily.
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