Bonus Episode: Will the Middle East Be Unrecognizable? - with Jared Cohen
Jared Cohen is Co-Head of the Office of Applied Innovation and President of Global Affairs at Goldman Sachs. He also serves on the Management Committee of the firm. Jared is also the most senior Goldman executive to visit Israel since October 7. But Jared did not just visit Israel – and meet with a range of senior Israeli political leaders and security officials – he also was in Ramallah, in the West Bank to meet Palestinian Authority officials and Jordan – just before Jordan participated in the extraordinary multi-national defense of Israel, despite tense relations between the Israeli and Jordanian governments.
And since then, Jared has traveled extensively throughout the Persian Gulf States, where he has a long history of deep relationships.
It was interesting to get a fresh take from Jared on this region in transition.
Prior to joining Goldman, Jared was an executive at Alphabet, before which he was Google’s first Director of Ideas and Chief Advisor to Google’s then CEO and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. From 2006 to 2010, he served as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.
Jared is a New York Times bestselling author of six books, including "One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide," "Children of Jihad," "The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Business, and our Lives," which he co-authored with Eric Schmidt, and, most recently, "Life After Power: Seven Presidents and their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House," which you can order here: https://tinyurl.com/5xm8v7ft
OR https://tinyurl.com/2ua6mzjd
Paper discussed in this episode: "The rise of geopolitical swing states"
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
DS: It's 10:00 AM on Sunday, May 19th here in New York City. It's 5:00 PM on Sunday in Israel. Jared Cohen is co-head of the Office of Applied Innovation, and he's also president of Global Affairs at Goldman Sachs. He also serves on the management committee of the firm. Jared's also the most senior Goldman executive to visit Israel since October 7th. But Jared did not just visit Israel and meet with a range of senior Israeli political leaders and security officials while he was there. He was also in Ramallah in the West Bank, where he met with leaders of the Palestinian Authority, including the just sworn in Prime Minister, and he traveled to Jordan, just before Jordan had participated in an extraordinary multinational defense of Israel from the attack from Iran, despite tense relations between the Israeli and Jordanian governments. And since then, Jared has traveled extensively throughout the Persian Gulf States, where he has a long history of deep relationships, and a pretty original analysis of what's happening in those countries. So it was interesting to get a fresh take from Jared on this region in transition, which in many respects will be unrecognizable to a lot of our listeners, at least in the way that Jared describes it. I should note that in this conversation, we do not discuss the very recent developments in Iran with the downing of a helicopter that was transporting Iran's president. We will get into that conversation in the next episode, which is with Haviv Rettig Gur. As for this conversation, prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Jared Cohen was an executive at Alphabet, or Google, before which he was Google's first director of ideas, their in-house think tank, and chief advisor to Google's then CEO and executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. From 2006 to 2010, Jared was in government. He served as a member of the Secretary of State's policy planning staff, in which he was a close advisor both to Condi Rice and Hillary Clinton, when each was Secretary of State. He served in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Jared is also a New York Times best selling author of six books, including ‘One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide’, and ‘Children of Jihad’, and ‘The New Digital Age’, transforming nations, business, and our lives, which he co authored with Eric Schmidt. And most recently, ‘Life After Power: Seven Presidents and their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House’. I should note for ‘Life After Power’, which we wind up having a conversation about at the end of today's episode, when Jared was in Israel, he gave copies of that book to people he was meeting with. And it turns out that President Bougie Herzog, the president of Israel recently said in an interview that this was the book he was reading right now. I wouldn't read too much into that, ‘Life After Power’, but it is interesting. Jared Cohen, on: Will the Middle East be Unrecognizable? This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time, my longtime friend, thought partner, Jared Cohen from Goldman Sachs, previously of Google and Alphabet and many other interesting things. Jared, good to be with you.
JC: Dan, thanks for having me. This is long overdue.
DS: Long overdue. I mean, we talk all the time.So there, this is, this conversation is like interspersed in, in the middle of many conversations.
JC: You know what it is? It's dinner without the food.
DS: Yeah, dinner without the food, or dinner with a microphone. How about that? Okay, so Jared, as I mentioned in the introduction, you recently returned from a trip to Israel. It was the first time you've been to Israel in a while, obviously, certainly the first time you'd been there since October 7th, and you came with a range of, I think, pretty unique perspectives, not the least of which is your your perspective from the Gulf states where you have a lot of relationships, and we'll get to that. But even the way you did the trip, which is not how most people I know who travel to Israel these days travel, which is, you started with Jordan and Ramallah in the West Bank and then wound up in Israel. So can you talk a little bit about why you decided to do this trip, the sequencing of the trip, as I just referred to, and then I want to get into the meat of what you learned.
JC: Absolutely, Dan. You're right. I did, I sequenced this in an unusual way. I started, as you mentioned, I started in Jordan, then was in Ramallah, and then spent the balance of the trip all throughout Israel. And, you know, post October 7th, I'd taken two trips to the Gulf before the trip to Israel, and I'd been to the Gulf subsequently since that trip to Israel. And it's the most significant geopolitical test that this region has had in quite some time. And certainly since you've had this paradigmatic shift where the Middle East, once the center of geopolitical gravity, you know, was experiencing an international change where, you know, post COVID everything shifted to Washington and Beijing. And it's impossible to understand what's happening in this region by only going to Israel. It's also impossible to understand this region only by spending time in the Arab countries. Similarly, it's impossible to understand the region only by spending time in the kind of usual set of wealthy Gulf countries that everybody does business in, which is why I also wanted to get to Jordan. It's why I also wanted to get to Ramallah. It's why I went to Iraq after October 7th to get right to the Iran-Iraq border, to get briefed on some of the proxy activities. My whole formula and methodology is, talk to everybody, get as many different perspectives as possible, assume everybody who's talking to you has their own, kind of, intellectual or political agenda, and then you have to put it together like a puzzle.
DS: Okay. So let's talk about that puzzle. First: what you learned in Israel, or I guess, what surprised you based on what you learned, and then let's talk about the puzzle, the other pieces of the puzzle. First, what surprised you? I mean, as you know, we have a lot of people on this podcast who either are living in Israel or people who are working on policies that relates to Israel, the Middle East, and the war, who may not be in Israel, but most of our guests are from Israel. What did you learn in Israel? What surprised you?
JC: I think there's, first of all, there's so many things that surprised me. And it almost depends on which hat I'm wearing, right? There's things that surprised me as a Jewish person living in New York. There's certain things that surprised me looking at the region geopolitically. There's certain things that surprised me, kind of looking at it all through the lens of business. I think for your listeners, I'll start with the kind of emotional reaction, just as a Jewish person in New York, post October 7th, I'd gotten so used to, you know, seeing hostage posters that had been defaced and torn down, you know, repulsed every time I saw it, but you sort of get these things… I don't want to say they get normalized, but you get used to seeing it. And it just becomes part of the day to day, kind of, emotional rollercoaster. And, you know, the first thing that I did when I got to Israel is, I had an opportunity to meet a couple of the parents of hostages, which I thought was an important place to start. But then I did a quick visit as well to Hostages Square. It's right near the Goldman Sachs office. And I had a deeply emotional reaction to being there, for all the obvious reasons.
DS: This is the Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, the main Hostages Square. Yeah.
JC: But the reason is, I saw an entire wall, you know, with, you know, dozens and dozens of hostage posters. And I found myself looking to see where they had been defaced or vandalized.
And I realized it was the first time since October 7th, that I'd seen dozens of these posters perfectly intact. And it just gave me a very significant, and I had a pretty profound emotional reaction, just as a Jewish person, that contrast was quite striking. I would say geopolitically. I think the thing that I was struck by is, we see these protests in Israel. We'd watched them the year before the war. And I think that there was just a misunderstanding that I had, and that I think many people still have, which is, you know, what I found is a country where Israelis, regardless of what they think of their government, they - and they have any number of reasons to protest - that there's a tremendous amount of harmony around the prosecution of the war, and right to left, you know, all levels of the socioeconomic period, ultra Orthodox to Atheists and everything in between - regardless of the party, I found a country, you know, kind of deeply unified around the twin objectives of getting all the hostages back, including the bodies, and dismantling Hamas's capabilities in the Gaza Strip, such that they can't reconstitute. And that level of harmony juxtaposed with the sort of divisions that we saw post October 7th was quite striking.
DS: You mean the divisions pre October 7th? The peak of judicial reform?
JC: Correct. And recognizing that Israelis can walk and chew gum at the same time. Those divisions can still feel very pronounced, can still be debated, and yet the country can be really unified around the response to October 7th and the goals and what needs to be done. The other thing that I was struck by, you know, again, I had mentioned that, you know, right after October 7th, I'd sort of done a pretty comprehensive tour of the region, including in Iraq. I spent an entire day on the Iran-Iraq border. My view post October 7th was that, you know, Iran was the short term winner of the war because they've managed to create this new normal around their proxy groups and what they're willing to do today and in the future, and that they'd sort of blown through any idea that there's meaningful red lines to constrain them. When I was in Israel, I had a chance to get up to the North right near Metula. You know, the IDF had taken me up there. Actually, it was on the Friday, that was the day that everybody was initially bracing for the Iranian response. You know, I'd gone around the West Bank with the Shin Bet and I'd gotten sort of a number of other briefings. And I left with this sort of profound feeling that Iran has a pretty significant tactical advantage on a number of these different fronts, which is highly problematic. And, you know, whether it's in, you know, with the Houthis recognizing that so much of that has to be outsourced to the international community, and it's proving very hard to degrade them and counter them, and it's resulting in the Port of Eilat being closed for a sustained period of time. When you're up in the north, you know, you really see firsthand the 80,000 Israelis that have been evacuated, and the fact that Hezbollah has managed to create and trigger that outcome without moving back to the Litani River, without dismantling any of the villages in the south of Lebanon, and without starting a sort of full scale war, the likes of which we saw in July of 2006. You see the impact of the full land corridor that five Shia Arab militia groups in Iraq have created from Iran, all the way to Syria and Lebanon. You, you get briefed and sort of develop an understanding of the proxy activities, you know, near the Golan in Syria, and so forth. And, you just get this sense of just how encircled Israel is by all of Iran's different tentacles. And it sheds light on why, across the board throughout Israel, the sentiment that you have to deal with the head of the octopus first and foremost, and you can't just keep beating back the tentacles is such a, you know, sort of pronounced and sort of, you know, dominant sentiment that so many Israelis, you know, feel from my conversations. And so, look, the other thing, and Dan, you and I have spoken about this before, this shift from deterrence to needing to deal comprehensively with the Iranian threat, again, not just the proxy groups, but the Iranian threat as sort of defined by, you know, a state sponsor of terrorism - I didn't leave with the impression that this was fleeting. I didn't leave with the impression that this was temporary or reactive or emotional. I left with the impression that this is a paradigmatic shift inside of Israel.
DS: As we said, you spent time with Palestinians on the ground in the West Bank before you were within the Green Line, you know, before you crossed into ‘Israel proper’, quote unquote. Without citing names, but you did meet with senior Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority - what was your sense of their reaction to October 7th? And what I mean by that is, did you sense, because I've been struck, and we've talked a lot about this on this podcast - the, at best their silence, and at worst their public expression of sympathies for Hamas, and what Hamas did on October 7th. Was your impression that that reflected how they really felt, or, it's not how they really felt - but for the time being, that's what they have to say they really feel, and that's more just public positioning?
JC: Yeah, no, look, it was an interesting time to be there. I was there during Ramadan and I don't mind saying what I did there. I was either the first American or one of the first Americans to meet the new Palestinian Prime Minister for no other reason than he had just been sworn in right before I met with him.
DS: Don't say it was just luck, it was just timing. Say he got sworn in and he said, “I want to meet with Jared Cohen.” I'm not -
JC: If you say so, Dan.
DS: “The first official meeting must be with Jared Cohen.”
JC: And look, what I would say was interesting about that conversation - he was very, I actually tried to, in the conversation, kind of get into some of the more geopolitical issues and some of the headwinds and some of the more sensitive topics. And he really wanted to focus on, you know, delivering for the Palestinian people. It was like a very sort of, you know, almost kind of technocratic conversation. That was kind of my takeaway. You know, outside of Israel, a lot of people want to make this Bibi's War. From my, again, my conversations, I'd be hard pressed to sort of describe this as ‘Bibi's War’. I talked to many members of the opposition and people who can't stand Bibi and still can't stand Bibi, but share, you know, his views about what needs to be done. But I think the fact that it's such a tense relationship between him and others in the region creates a kind of convenient argument for why nothing can be done. And that was sort of my takeaway from my conversations in Ramallah - which is, you know, this kind of, this prevailing view that, “we can't do anything. You know, the leadership is not a leadership that we can talk to,” and just kind of absolving themselves of any, you know, kind of responsibility and then kind of, you know, focusing more on the conversation around, around the West Bank. What was interesting is, you know, I got two tours of the West Bank through two very different vantage points. You know, the first was in Ramallah, and the people that took me around was sort of a security detail provided by the PA. And one of the people who took me around had actually been in Israeli prison for 11 years and was released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap. And then the next day, the Shin Bet took me around the West Bank. And let's just say I got different visuals and different explanations. And I think that's part of what's important, because the reason to do these tours around these areas is you're getting a perspective, but it's important to understand in different contexts, what visuals go with which explanations. And so to be able to do the West Bank through those two very different vantage points in sequence with each other, it just gave me a sense of what the narrative looks like and how the narrative evolves as the context changes.
DS: Okay, so, since you were in Israel - and you go to the Gulf, I think, every three months or so. Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain, I mean you bounce around all over the place. So you just returned from the Gulf, I think specifically Saudi. And you have a lot of incredible relationships in those countries. What do you think their perspective is? What is their actual perspective - on the war, the stakes of the war, and where this is going? Separate from what they say publicly, because we know what they say publicly, and I think many of us know that what they say publicly and what they're actually aspiring for are two different things.
JC: Yeah, look, the first thing that I would say is, we used to be able to lump all these countries together as kind of a monolithic Gulf. You're seeing a real kind of de-regionalization of the Gulf countries in the sense that, you know, you have a handful of them that are economically thriving and they're interested in an identity that's unique to them. And so the first thing that I would say is that perspectives vary country to country. October 7th and the subsequent war, it happened at a time where frankly, these countries - again, Saudi, you know, Qatar, UAE, have been enjoying a kind of economic renaissance. You know, I've been going there for decades and you ask them, “what do you want?” And it's always been some version of the same thing, which is, “we want our economic interest to drive the geopolitics, not the other way around.” And they were stuck in this global war on terror framework, and then COVID is what kind of, you know, unlocked them from that. And again, it shifted this focus to, you know, Washington and Beijing. And for the first time they find themselves in more of a sort of, you know, geopolitical driver's seat. And what that looks like and how that manifests itself in each of the three countries, it really varies. When the war happened, it was the first, you know, significant, probably the most significant geopolitical test for the region since these countries had, you know, sort of embarked on this economic journey. And, you know, I think what kind of reveals itself, and it's pronounced by these three countries, is that, you know, the Middle East is kind of a tale of two countries. You have countries that, you know, have the luxury, other economic futures being totally untethered from the geopolitical baggage of the past, right? So again, that's Saudi, Qatar, UAE, and countries that are deeply intertwined with the geopolitical messiness of the past, right? And those are the countries besieged by Iranian proxies adjacent to Israel. And then Israel is kind of a hybrid of the two. So when you talk to these countries about, they all want the war to stop. I don't get the sense that it is as ideological as it has been in the past. I actually feel pretty strongly that it's not as ideological as it has been in the past. You know, I know the young, the sort of young leadership of a lot of these countries, it's a different generation. I'm not saying there's no ideological piece of it. I'm just saying it's a different generation. What these countries want is the sort of economic, they're focused largely on an economic agenda, and an economic agenda in service of what they're trying to do geopolitically. And so I find them less zealous about this. It's a massive disruption to what they're trying to do. It's not a disruption that's really impacting them, but they want to see a more economically integrated Middle East. It benefits them significantly. So that's the first point
DS: That it's less ideological, I agree with you. It's certainly the case with some of these countries, relative to where they were not that long ago. It's less ideological. On the other hand, I do think there is something ideological, which is their fear of Muslim extremism. So that is ideological. They are trying to modernize and reform, and they face a threat from the, you know, ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, call it, which is this extreme version or model or expression of Sunni Islam. And, in many of these countries, the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ has been or could be a threat to these monarchies, to their governments. And they see in Hamas a sort of cousin, not even a distant cousin, a sibling, not a first cousin, then a sibling of the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ So. while they have, they're sympathetic in a sense to the ‘Palestinian people’, quote unquote, they, my experience is, they have zero tolerance for Hamas. And again, it's in many respects, it's about self preservation. That they see Hamas as Muslim brotherhood and, and Muslim brotherhood is Hamas. And so, and they have an ideological hostility to what that represents.
JC: That's a hundred percent true. That's true in Jordan. That's true in Egypt as well, which are, you know, geographically proximate. You asked yourself the question, what's new this time around? You know, the social media piece of this is, it's not that social media hasn't been around in the past, but the algorithmic nature of this brand of social media is very, very different. And so, you know, what all these countries are worried about - and look, this is less the case in UAE and Qatar, which have small populations, and it's much more, you know, an issue in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Egypt, but the social media-fication of this war is, is a huge issue. You have more hours of footage being uploaded to various platforms, than you have probably seconds or minutes of the entire war itself. And it does a couple of things. One, it's injecting identity politics into the street. And then two, it's creating, you know, significant, you know, momentum that could manifest itself in kind of a new chapter of radicalization with a very different generation of extremists. One that didn't know that there was a Israel-Palestinian issue until October 7th. They learned algorithmically in much faster and in very binary ways, without kind of, the benefit of hearing other viewpoints. And I always like to remind people. You know, we should be quite worried about this, not just in the Middle East, but worried about it in Europe, worried about it in the U.S. I mean, the 9/11 hijackers, they were radicalized by watching far less content with no algorithmic dimension of people being killed in Bosnia in the 90s. And we fought against violent extremism for two decades as a result of radicalization that happened pre social media, pre the types of algorithms that we see today. So they're very worried about this. They're also worried that - look, this is a time where they're trying to attract investment into their country. This is a time where each of these countries, you know, has a different thesis around the role that they want to play, in, sort of the future of artificial intelligence. In general, the spread of extremism, you know, geopolitical turmoil, anything that spooks people from the region, not just in terms of traveling there, but socially, economically causes them to look, you know, elsewhere - all of this is antithetical to what the sort of wealthy Gulf Arab countries are trying to do. And frankly, even the less wealthy countries in the region have gotten some of the kind of trickle down benefits, of these Gulf countries getting very wealthy, and looking more towards a future of economic integration. So they're suffering as well. It's just, it's a more complicated problem for them because, one, they don't have the resources that immunize them from what's happening geopolitically, and two, the identity politics are much worse in those countries. Of course, Jordan and Egypt is what I'm referring to.
DS: One senior Saudi official said to me late last year when I pressed him on - because I was struck that it seemed that Saudi was as committed to normalization with Israel as it was before October 7th, obviously the path to it is a little more complicated. But they seemed as committed, and I was asking, I was pressing him about that, and he said: MBS, Mohammed bin Salman has laid out what Saudi Arabia calls the ‘2030’, meaning the year 2030, the 2030 goals, and he says, “you need to understand those goals cannot be achieved without normalization with Israel.” That is to say, if the Arab world has not normalized with Israel, if there's a risk of a flare up at any given moment where you can have some kind of regional war, it would foment so much instability, that it makes our pursuit of these goals impossible. So normalization is not just like a ‘nice to have’, it's actually a necessary input to achieving these goals that Saudi has laid out for itself.
JC: I think that’s completely consistent with what I hear when I talk to them. What's interesting is, you know, in private that they are no less encouraging about the idea that normalization will happen. Exactly as you say, it's just, it's a more complicated path and the timeline has probably changed. The other thing that's happened is, you know, Saudis accumulated a lot more leverage in whatever a deal might eventually look like, right? You know, they're essential, you know, it's now clear that the Israel-Palestinian, you know, the sort of the multigenerational conflict, it can't be managed anymore. There needs to be, everyone sort of agrees, you know, at least among the regional players, that you now need some kind of a comprehensive solution. You hear that being talked about in the Arab countries. I hear less of it in Israel right now because of this sort of immediate goal, end the war. But nobody's refuting the fact that Saudi normalization has to be a central feature of any kind of a two state solution or comprehensive plan. And so if you're Saudi Arabia, you hold a lot of cards right now. The issue with all of this is the U.S. election. You know, as you look at this war, the way I would sort of describe it is, you have kind of a ‘too soon, too far’ problem. The election is too soon, in the sense that - nobody's going to take any significant risk to bring about a kind of resolution here, without getting more information about who wins in November, particularly when we know that the sort of posture of the Biden administration towards Iran, and the posture of the Trump folks towards Iran is very, very different. But it's ‘too long’ in the sense that this is a pretty long runway to endure a pretty volatile status quo. And so what we're looking at is, you know, five, six, seven months of pretty significant instability, where, when you look at the current situation, the way I would describe it is, those that have the capacity don't have the will, in this context, and those that have the will don't have the capacity, in this context. And so a lot can happen between now and the election. But I'm deeply skeptical that you're going to see any country that has the capacity, really put themselves out there and take a sort of swing for the fences type risk here, to bring a resolution to this, without the information that we get the first Tuesday of November.
DS: With these Gulf states, you've described them as I think, early, some of them is the, like, ‘inc states’, like Saudi inc, you know, Emirati inc, Qatar inc. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that, and how that factors into this broader discussion we're having?
JC: It really comes down to what matters to these countries first and foremost. So you're right. I mean, yes, they care about the plight of the Palestinians. They care about a resolution to all these issues. But, you know, at the end of the day, they're sovereign countries. They have huge economic goals that they're pursuing. And they want to set a geopolitical agenda on their terms, not have messy geopolitics force their hand, and they have the resources to do it. Now, if I sort of reflect back on, if you take Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE as just sort of three examples - historically, you know, the geopolitics was driving, you know, all their sort of economic interests. And so the most important conversations that were happening in each of these countries were about geopolitics, you know, war on terror related, and so forth. And then there was sort of a sovereign wealth fund, you know, off in the corner that was managing the endowment. And so you could sort of, you wanted to be flippant about it. You could say, these used to be countries with sovereign wealth funds, and today, you know, there's sort of sovereign wealth funds that are sort of serving as an economic machinery that are powering the ambitions of countries that we should no longer think of as Middle Eastern countries. Right? So you have Saudi Inc, you have Qatar Inc, you have UAE Inc, that happened to be located in the Middle East, but each of these countries is pursuing a massive, massive agenda and the most professionalized economic machinery they have is either their sovereign wealth fund, or in the case of the UAE, an ecosystem of sovereign wealth funds. And their ambitions, there's sort of consistent categories across all of them. Each of them is investing in a modern identity, and it varies country to country, right? So in the case of Saudi Arabia, it's building a modern private sector for the 36 million people who live in Saudi Arabia. So as a G20 Country, that human capital can fill the seat and help diversify the economy. You know, in the case of Qatar, you know, the world cup was like the IPO for a modern nation. And now they have world class infrastructure and they want to, they're developing a thesis to try to bring businesses and people into the country. And in the case of the UAE, they have a first mover advantage as the business headquarters for so many different multinational corporations. And they actually are trying to kind of, one, maintain that first mover advantage, but two, they have kind of a once in a generation technological moment, with generative AI, to really play a global leadership role in, you know, science and technology, which is what they want. And so these countries, they're, they're just not the same as they used to be. I always tell people in the business community who haven't spent time there, you know, you can't go there anymore with a thesis that these people just have a lot of capital and you need to go there and fundraise. They've had a metamorphosis. These countries, you know, have huge global ambitions. Um, they have the wealth to be able to deploy against their own ambitions. And they have an endless supply of businesses and people who are coming to them wanting to partner. So they just have leverage that they didn't have in the past. And so I think it's sometimes helpful - yes, they're sovereign countries, but it's sometimes helpful also to think of them as Saudi Inc, Qatar Inc and UAE Inc.
DS: And you've also written, you published a very important piece, which I'll post to in the show notes a little over a year ago, you published out of Goldman, the, this paper on what you call ‘Geopolitical Swing State.’ So you, you took the nomenclature of American political punditry and analysis about swing states, uh, meaning states within the United States that are kind of battleground states, could go either way in a presidential election. There's usually just a handful of them. And you applied it to the global geopolitical swing states or swing nations, nations that could go either way in, I guess what you mean is siding with the West or siding against the West, and they're in play. And they really matter. And by the way, for those who are following Israel, I mean, I know your focus was in Israel. But I was struck by that because some of the countries you wrote about are very relevant to these alliances that Israel has been cultivating over the last number of years. So can you talk a little bit about that?
JC: Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple of reasons why I ended up kind of coming up with this ‘geopolitical swing states’ theme. The first is, I found that whole terminology around the global south, just not that useful. You know, you're talking about the vast majority of the world. And there's a hierarchy that's developing within that global South. And so I wanted something that was more prescriptive, but the other is, you know, now that we've, again, moved away from War on Terror framework to return of Great Power Competition, you see the U.S. and China as the two winners from hyper globalization, and you realize neither of them are happy with the outcome. The U.S. finds itself, despite all of its aspirations, to decouple and diversify, unable to extricate itself from a reliance on China for a number of geopolitically important supply chains, and China, for all of its aspirations, to revise the liberal international order, finds itself, you know, still reliant on a world where the dollar is the global reserve currency for the foreseeable future. And I don't think this is the cold war. You've never had a situation, you know, at least in the US’s case where its most formidable adversary was also its third largest trading partner. And so the two countries are inextricably linked and they're locked in a great power competition that looks more like a competitive coexistence, where neither side can gain the upper hand without relying on other countries, because there's no international organization or superpower that's able to arbitrate the tensions between the two countries. And so what happens is, as they're courting other countries, and as each country needs, you know, other partners, both politically, geopolitically and commercially, there's a certain category of countries that look at a U.S.-China tension that is persisting, as perhaps a fleeting moment, but a huge economic opportunity. And these are countries that have a differentiated part of the supply chain. They have a differentiated amount of abundant capital, and the flexibility to deploy it wherever they want. They're attractive for nearshoring, offshoring, and friendshoring. And they're led by an individual, young or old, who has a global agenda that they're pursuing that's independent of Washington and Beijing. And these geopolitical swing states, this isn't like the Cold War where you had a non-aligned movement. They're not blocking together. They, they're really being much more multi-aligned. And you see this even with, you know, some of the US’s closest allies, right? So if you look at India, when Russia invaded Ukraine, people forget, the U.S. was trying to couch this as the great battle between democracy and autocracy. That's a very hard thing to do when the world's largest democracy, India, decides to stay neutral. And India stayed neutral throughout this war. They've not really sort of borne any consequence as a result of doing that. They've increased trade with Russia, 400%. They're buying Russian crude for 12 a barrel. They're buying it in rupees that the Russians don't need, that they then have to turn back and buy things in India that they also don't need. And so India has benefited tremendously by staying neutral in this war. And so the Middle Eastern countries, you know, the wealthy Gulf countries, to me, the three of them, along with India, are kind of the ultimate geopolitical swing states. And you're seeing Saudi Arabia and India, I think, emerge as two of the premier leaders within the global south. But you're also seeing countries like the UAE find themselves in an interesting leadership role around, you know, artificial intelligence where, you know, for countries that don't wanna rely on the US for technological infrastructure, but also don't wanna rely on China, you're seeing a country as small as the UAE in the Gulf emerge as kind of a third option. And so these countries are making significant moves right now. They're not, on their own, going to be able to curtail either US or China's activities, but they're asserting themselves. They're gaining meaningful economic advantage. And particularly when you look at a war like the one that's playing out in the Middle East right now, they're proving incredibly relevant and incredibly consequential.
DS: So, India, to me, is the most interesting, because, from Israel's perspective, India had virtually no relationship with India for decades. India was the architect of the Non-Aligned Movement in the UN for decades, which was this block of countries in the General Assembly that tried to orchestrate boycotts against Israel, support bad, you know, hostile resolutions passed in the General Assembly against Israel, and then Modi comes to power, and Modi pushes through a real, like, 180 degree flip in terms of its relationship with Israel. Modi visits Israel, Netanyahu at the time, I think it was in 2017, visits India, and this relationship between Israel and India blossoms. Your point is, like, India's just placing bets all over the place, right? In this particular case, they have reasons to believe that their Israel relationship is worth putting their chips down on, and I'm sure the U.S. is pleased with that, but the U.S. should be careful, because to your point, Russia, Ukraine, they can be completely on the other side.
JC: Yeah, I think it's even simpler than that, which is, India right now has an economic agenda, and because of this phenomenon with the rise of geopolitical swing states, for which I think they're the most significant, they're able to pursue that agenda partially unshackled from geopolitical constraints. They've just not been in that situation before. And so, it's an interesting situation where their economic advantages and their, and Modi's ambition, it gives them some geopolitical wiggle room, which in turn yields them greater economic advantage. And it's just kind of a cycle. And you see this playing out again with the Gulf countries. And it gets back to the point about ideology. When it comes to economics, these countries are proving much less ideological than we've seen in the past. When they were completely constrained by geopolitics, it was easy, you know, to understand why ideology governs so much, but at a time where it's economic interests that are top of mind for each of these countries, the ideology is a variable, but it's not a dominant feature.
DS: Okay, I want to, now, it will sound like we're pivoting away from talking about Israel in the world, but we're actually going to come back to it in a very specific way in a moment. But before we do, I want to ask you about your most recent book, called ‘Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House.’ This is one of a number of New York Times bestselling books that you have authored. This is your most recent one. It is excellent. I read a draft of it when you were working on it. My first question is, why did you write it?
JC: So, I've always been interested in presidential history. But the reason I chose to write this book is, everybody is always asking the question, ‘what's next?’ The most annoying question, especially when you start a new job, you know, I joined Goldman Sachs a year and a half ago, within a week, people were saying, ‘what do you think you'll do after Goldman?’ I said, I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out where the cafeteria is. But it's this persistent question that a world of hyper ambitious people is continuously burdened by. And I was just really curious, how do the people who kind of go through the most dramatic transition in the world grapple with this question? So, there's no more dramatic transition in the world than the President of the United States. Right? And so I wanted to figure out, how do they ponder what's next, because you kind of can't do better than that, unless you're Grover Cleveland and you come back and do the presidency again. But even in his case, he found it was a cautionary tale and never as sweet the second time around. So I wanted to dig into this, and initially I thought it was going to be a history book. What I found is the learnings from these individuals who come down from the political stratosphere and return to civilian life are so prescriptive for the rest of us, and you take these seemingly unrelatable people, and you make their stories something that the rest of us can learn from. And you realize there's a missing piece of history that we would all benefit from. And so I cover seven different presidents and I do Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush. And I picked those seven because they were the only seven worth writing about. This is the thing that I think is kind of amazing. Of the 45 men who've served as president 46 times, most of them had a pretty uneventful post-presidency. And the seven that I wrote about, it's not a ranking of ex presidents, but each of these seven presidents, they were successful, not because they necessarily achieved something greater, but they found a greater sense of purpose than the journey that brought them to the White House or during their time as president. And Dan, you know this, you've written a lot of books. They take a long time to write. And so the context in which you're writing, it also changes. When I started writing this book, I didn't realize democracy might be in peril. And, you know, Alexander Hamilton, you know, in the Federalist papers, Federalist 72, he worried about, the founding fathers worried about this question of what to do with ex presidents. And he asked the question, does it benefit the security and wellbeing of the Republic to have half a dozen men, at any given time, who were president of the United States, wandering around the rest of us, like discontented ghosts? And you fast forward more than 200 years later and the founders were right to be worried. And we kind of have an answer to Hamilton's question, which is, they can either be partners to their successors or they can be their successors’ most formidable adversary and fiercest opponent and everything in between. And so I wanted to use the transition and the idea of an ex president, which by the way is unique to democracies. You know, authoritarian systems don't really, I mean, they don't really have ex presidents or if they do, it's not in the same way.
DS: They either get killed or they die of natural causes, but they don't lose elections.
JC: And so I think the story of democracy, it's not just a story of those who rose to lead and how they led. I think it's a story of what those who led did afterwards. And I wanted to tell that story.
DS: So, I mean, just for our listeners to understand, it is striking, because you take these people who in a sense are the least relatable to any of us, and you make their stories - I mean, their histories as presidents and post presidents is in a sense not relatable, but their decision making about what to do next, or ‘can I ever leave this powerful position in order to go do something else and still have impact?’ That is very relatable, it is very accessible, and so you kind of penetrate their thinking and it raises a bunch of practical questions that I think is, that are relevant to any one of us. But I want to ask you a question about a president you left out, because that's as interesting to me as the president that you included. And one president that I have always been fascinated by is the 37th president, which is Richard Nixon. And one of the things that is fascinating about him is his post presidency. Stephen Ambrose wrote this, you know, one of his biographers, wrote a three volume biography of Nixon, and the third volume is called ‘Ruin and Recovery’, and it focuses on 1973 to 1990, meaning when he was leaving office, and then what he did during those couple of decades to rehabilitate his reputation. One could make the case that you can't rehabilitate Nixon's reputation, but he did become, even with his complicated legacy, he did become viewed as sort of senior statesman, geopolitical strategist, he'd travel around the world, he'd meet with Presidents and Prime Ministers, he'd - I remember being a young intern on Capitol Hill when Nixon came, having just returned from a trip to Russia, and he, Bob Dole was the Senate leader, Republican leader at the time, and he hosted a caucus lunch with all the Republican senators for Nixon. This is in the early nineties. And Nixon was there holding court on what was happening with U.S. Russia relations. And… there was life after power, for Richard Nixon. Why did you leave him out?
JC: So the two presidents that I get asked about the most that I did not include are Nixon and Ulysses S. Grant. You explain Nixon. The reason people wanted me to include Grant is he wrote the first presidential autobiography. And it's kind of the gold standard for presidential biographies. The reason I didn't include Nixon is because I included Herbert Hoover. And I mentioned each chapter is a different sort of archetype or blueprint for how to do this. And the story of Herbert Hoover is a story of recovery. And when I compare and contrast what Hoover did versus what Nixon did, they're not even close. So, Herbert Hoover's a man who lived to be 90 years old. He's defined by three and a half years of the Great Depression on his watch. Before Herbert Hoover was president, he was the great humanitarian who fed the world after World War I. He led relief efforts after the great Mississippi Flood in 1927. He was known as a great business leader who'd risen from being an orphan to a self-made millionaire. He had bipartisan appeal, and when he wins the election in 1928, he basically waltzes into the White House, in one of the most lopsided victories in history, revered by both parties. And post Great Depression, when he loses the election in 1932, he loses by one of the greatest landslides in American history. And Herbert Hoover, he ends up losing his name. He loses his job. He loses his platform. He loses his status as a great humanitarian. He loses his status as a great businessman. He loses his status as a bipartisan figure. And the Roosevelt presidency, which lasted 12 years, felt like the never ending presidency, and he went into this self imposed political exile. And Herbert Hoover's entire 32 year post presidency is a story of recovering that which he had lost. And in his post presidency, Truman resurrects him after FDR dies, and he once again feeds the world after World War II. Uh, becoming the great humanitarian again, he once again becomes a great executive, reorganizing the executive branch of government under a Democrat, Harry Truman, and then under a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower. And he achieves a bipartisan status again, when in 1960, after John F. Kennedy defeats Richard Nixon, Joe Kennedy, JFK's father, calls on Herbert Hoover as the most esteemed bipartisan figure to reconcile the two men, because the country needs to show a united front in the cold war. And what people don't realize about Hoover is he recovers his good name in his lifetime. You know, it gets trampled upon again, posthumously, but Hoover's story to me is a real story of recovery. And what I loved about it is it's only when he decides that he's not going to try to enter public office again and run for president again, that he unburdens himself from this feeling that he was upset or anguished by the fact that he lost the presidency. That's not what anguished him. What anguished him was, to use sort of Arthur Brooks's line, “he was a man who needed to be needed and wanted to be of service.” And that's the thing that he wanted to get back. And it's just a very different story to me than that of Nixon.
DS: Okay. So now I want to apply this to Israel and I should note that “Bougie” Herzog, the President of Israel is reportedly, according to the Jerusalem Post, reading your book right now, which is an interesting move for a guy who should be nowhere near transitioning from power. So, um, it's noteworthy who is reading your book, who's currently serving in public life anywhere. That's kind of interesting. Benjamin Netanyahu is the longest serving Prime Minister in Israel's history. He's the only Prime Minister I know of in any kind of parliamentary democracy that has managed to return to power two times after the first premiership. So he served as Prime Minister from 96 to 99. Then he gets elected and then he gets, he loses his reelection to Ehud Barak. Then he comes back in 2008, gets elected, forms a government late 2008, early 2009, and then serves through, end of, basically, end of 2021, beginning of 2022. Then you have the short-lived government, led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid and a number of other parties. And then Netanyahu comes back into power at the beginning of 2023 for his third term. So some former prime ministers returned to power once. I don't think there's any example I know of, at least in Western, as I said, in Western democracies where someone returns twice. I asked Netanyahu about this when he first got elected, this time in a podcast conversation, he can find no other example. So I'm taking his word for it. I sometimes think what his legacy would have been, and what his post prime minister life would have been, had he not run a third time. In other words, if you look at the period from when he was elected, kind of 2008, when he was elected of the middle of his three terms, the 2008 until basically end of 21, early 22, the Israeli economy was flourishing, GDP growth per capita rising and rising and rising. The tech boom continues. The Abraham Accords, regardless of what one thinks about it, he pretty systematically and strategically moved the world's attention on an outside-in approach to Israeli Arab, normalization rather than inside-out, meaning Israel, instead of Israeli Palestinian to focus on the Israeli-Arab normalization, I think started to focus the world's attention on threat from Iran. He had a lot - he had quite a legacy. And then he comes back into power, and basically it's defined so far by judicial reform in 2023, which was a very divisive period as we talked about earlier. And then October 7th happens on his watch. First question is, do you think it was a mistake for him to come back? But I guess the bigger question is for someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, which I think is the case for a lot of the people you profile - when they're in these positions of power, they can't imagine not being in these positions of power. So it's very hard for them to transition to, ‘I've got to build a new life, I've got to think about my role outside.’ They can't imagine themselves in any other role. And I think Netanyahu, in his mind, is, he was kind of like born to be prime minister. And anything else, no matter how impactful it could be, was just totally foreign to him. And I think he could have had a lot of impact, by the way, outside of government.
JC: Yeah, I mean, look, it's very - when you have that much power, it's hard to give it up. With each of these presidents, you tell yourself a story that you want to do this, this, and that. And then you leave office and your life is, for lack of a better way of putting it, it's boring. You're dealing with mundane people problems. You're dealing with your finances, broken relationships. You don't have the ability to influence as much. You read the paper and you have lots of opinions and you don't know what's going on. I mean, this is a chronic problem regardless of whether you're the leader of the free world in the United States or the Prime Minister of Israel. What's interesting is, Jimmy Carter, after he lost in 1980, made an immediate decision that he wasn't going to try to make a comeback. And he decided, if he can't be president for life, he's going to be a former president for life. And he created kind of the ‘neverending former presidency.’ That's, that's, that's a path. And he made a decision that he was just going to be a thorn in the side to Democrats and Republicans alike, and he didn't really care, right? So that was one approach. I think the interesting way I would answer your question about, ‘was it a good idea for Netanyahu to come back’, is to reflect on an area where I think I have some expertise with the Cleveland case study. So Grover Cleveland throws away the presidency in 1888, staying principled on the tariff. He wanted to keep a high tariff. And he said he knew he was throwing away the presidency and he said he'd never been happier than when he did it because he said, ‘what's the point of being president if you don't stand for something?’ And he had a young wife, and he wanted to start a family, and he had no intention of coming back. But what happened to Cleveland - by the way, he never lost the popular vote. He just lost the electoral college. But what happens to a lot of these individuals when you lose the power is you watch what's happening to the country and you disagree with it. You watch your legacy getting dismantled and you start to tell yourself, ‘only I am able to right the ship.’ So in Cleveland's case, he was worried about runaway spending. He was worried about cheap money winning out over sound money and going off the gold standards. He was worried about the rise of jingoism and imperialism. And instead of looking at a sea of alternatives, he decided only he could do it. And he decides to make a comeback. Everything looked fine, even at the time of the election. And then by the time he took office, and took the oath of office in March of 1893, he inherited the worst economic crisis in the country's history. A group of American settlers had dethroned the Hawaiian queen and annexed the islands. He had inherited a bunch of machine politics and other sort of complicated issues that weren't around the first time around. And his second presidency was much less successful than his first one. And by the time he left office for the second time, he was less popular than he'd ever been. He was more unhappy than he'd ever been. His legacy was more pounced upon than it had ever been. And finally, towards the end of his life, somebody asked him, ‘what should we do with ex presidents?’ And he said, ‘they should be taken out to a five acre lot and shot.’ And then he corrects himself and he says, ‘on second thought, thought a five acre lot is far too big and they shouldn't be shot because a former president has already suffered way too much.’ That was 1897, you know, 1898 humor. But the point that I take away from Cleveland, is, it is very hard to do a comeback and have it go better the second time than it did the first. And what happens is - in business, you look at Steve Jobs as a success story. You look at Michael Jordan in sports as a successful comeback, but we forget about Michael Jordan's third comeback, which was less successful. And so, a comeback is already a risky venture because it's rarely as sweet the second time. A third comeback is really putting things to chance if it went well the second time around. And so people get tired of the same individuals being in charge in democracies, right? If you look at even the US election right now, you have two candidates who are the oldest candidates in American history that are both incredibly unpopular, and they're rivaled only by what happened four years ago when they were slightly younger than they are today. And this is the first presidential rematch, the only presidential rematch that we've had, other than the one that I referred to in 1892. And so why are we in that situation? It's because you have two individuals in the U.S. that don't want to give up power.
DS: All right. Well, that's really depressing. Yeah. This term, I never thought I'd hear this term of what the analyst class is calling ‘double haters’, which is voters who hate both Biden and Trump. And then it's just a matter of - each campaign is trying to figure out which of those voters hate one candidate slightly less than the other.
JC: The problem with that is it means that there aren't really undecided voters in this election. It means that what people are undecided about is whether they're going to vote or not.
DS: Right. And I'm hearing that more and more, by the way, is people are just saying like, ‘I'm out.’ And by the way, and you travel around the world. I'm always struck what I hear from capitals, you know, when I travel around the world, they say, ‘okay, 2020, we get it. Biden versus Trump. But. You know, that was once, but you guys are gonna do this a second time? Something's really wrong with your country.’ All right, Jared, we will leave it there. Thank you. The book is ‘Life After Power’. We will post a link to it in the show notes. We'll also post a link to the Goldman note that I was referring to that Jared authored, and I look forward to having you back.
JC: Great. Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it.
DS: That's our show for today. To keep up with Jared Cohen, you can find him on X at Jared Cohen, and you should also order a copy of his most recent book, ‘Life After Power’, which we'll link to in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.