The Great Powers and the War in Gaza - with Walter Russell Mead
Over the past 8 months, we've focused most of our attention on Israel's perspective and the American perspective since October 7th. But what we wanted to do today is gradually zoom out from Israel and Gaza, to the perspective of other regional players in the Middle East, and finally examine this war from the perspective of the global powers, especially China and Russia. Has the Israel-Hamas war advanced their interests or reversed them?
Our guest today is Walter Russell Mead. He is at the Hudson Institute, he is the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He was previously the Henry Kissinger fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also has a terrific podcast at Tablet Magazine, called What Really Matters: https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/what-really-matters
He is also a prolific author. His most recent book is -- The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, which you order here.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
WRM: Hezbollah is this terrific gun that Iran has that is pointed at Israel's head. But that gun, if you fire it, if those hundred thousand plus missiles attack Israel, you know, they do a certain amount of damage and in some cases, who knows, maybe even catastrophic damage, but Israel is still there when it's done - angry and armed and ready to go, Iran has lost that weapon. It's gone. So it's more valuable to you, you know, as a loaded gun on your table than as an empty smoking gun in your hand.
DS: It's 11:00 PM on Thursday, June 6th here in New York City. It's 6:00 in the morning, on Friday June 7th in Israel as Israelis get ready to start their day. Over the past eight months, we've focused most of our attention on this podcast on Israel's perspective and on the American perspective in the region since October 7th. But what I wanted to do today is gradually zoom out from the Israelis, and the Palestinians, and consider the perspective of other regional players throughout the Middle East. And then finally examine this war from the perspective of global powers, like great powers, such as China and Russia. Has the Israel Hamas war advanced their interests, or reversed them? Our guest today is Walter Russell Mead. He is at the Hudson Institute. He is the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal. He was previously the Henry Kissinger Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also has a terrific podcast at Tablet Magazine called, ‘What Really Matters’. I highly recommend you subscribe both to the podcast and you become a regular reader of Walter's Wall Street Journal weekly column. Walter's also one of the biggest thinkers on U.S. foreign policy and the lessons of history of U.S. foreign policy. He's also a prolific author. His most recent book is ‘The Ark of a Covenant, The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People’. I devoured the book when I first read it. I had him on our podcast to discuss it, and I continue to refer to it because it's especially relevant to U.S. Israel relations post October 7th. We'll link to the book in our show notes. Walter Russell Mead on: The Great Powers and the War in Gaza. This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast, my longtime friend, Walter Russell Mead. Walter, I would say this is your first time on the podcast, but I won't say it's the first time on the podcast because you've been on this podcast many times. But the reason I sort of want to say it's your first time on the podcast, even though you're returning, is because it's your first time on, which I was surprised once I figured, remembered, since October 7th, you and I have spoken a number of times since October 7th, but not on the podcast. And there's, the life of this podcast very much in sort of pre and post October 7th, so I welcome you to this version of the podcast. Thanks for being here.
WRM: Well, thank you. I should have liked the pre October 7th universe a little bit better, but okay.
DS: So do I. Oh, how I wish we could have gone back to the debates over judicial reform. But here we are. So Walter, over the past eight months, we have focused most of our attention on Israel's perspective in the war, the Palestinian perspective, Washington's perspective. But what I wanted to do with you today is to gradually zoom out from Israel and Gaza and get your perspective on the other regional players and ultimately examine this war from the perspective of the global powers. And I know you just returned from almost a week in Ukraine, so you have been thinking a lot about what Russia is up to. So I wanted to get your take on what ultimately these global powers are trying to do, or trying to not do, in the region and in the war with Gaza. But before that, I want to start with Israel and Gaza. And I want to start with October 7th. And I often ask guests who've come on this podcast for the first time, or certainly for the first time since October 7th, what was your reaction? I mean, you write a weekly column on foreign affairs, on global affairs for the Wall Street Journal. You think about international events, about geopolitics. You are a historian, you have written all these long form books. You have close friends and mentors, people like the late Henry Kissinger, who think about events - and I guess in a, with a larger perspective than many of us, perhaps, what were you thinking as events unfolded that weekend, both personally, or personally and intellectually, I guess.
WRM: It was not like 9-1-1 where within sort of, you know, a couple of hours, after when the second plane hit, this immensity of the event came in all at once. We really only gradually got the news of what was happening around Gaza. And I can remember just sort of at the beginning thinking, well, this was terrible, but this is a raid, like we've had other small raids. And then it just gradually sort of assumed this catastrophic shape, which it, which it still holds to this day. I found myself actually thinking a little bit about Ben Gurion, reflecting on Ben Gurion because he's always struck me - it's always struck me that this sort of fading out of his career was such a, you know, tragic event, where, you know, this sort of leader of great accomplishment came to a place where he was no longer really relevant in the Israeli security discussion. So I found myself thinking, okay, what does this mean for Bibi? What is Bibi's future? I actually got over to Israel, um, pretty short time, less than a month, I think after the attacks, and had a chance to meet with him. And I remember writing a column in the Journal after that saying that, you know, people seem to be thinking Bibi is dead. But I have to say after visiting Israel, it's a little bit like the Princess Bride, he was only mostly dead at that time. And so far he still seems to be holding on to power, but it’s, you know, it's almost every day there is another sort of crisis. Can he continue, will he lose control of events? So that's been a part of it. But I think more profoundly, there is this sense of for the first time in a very long time, Israel seems to be in a situation where it doesn't control events around it. You know, whether it's the, will Hezbollah attack? How will the negotiations over hostage release and so on go? Iran seems to have the kind of initiative in some ways. Iran and its allies have a, even though Israel is winning on the ground in Gaza, politically Israel seems to be constantly reacting to things that other people are doing.
DS: And, in terms of, as the war has played out since October 7th over the past eight months, what surprised you in the course of the war? I mean, this is a very unique war for Israel. Israel's never really fought a war quite like this, at least since the War of Independence in terms of duration, in terms of obstacles, the 350 miles of the tunnels, having this many hostages. I think no country's ever had to contend with fighting a war with this percentage of, such a large percentage of your population being held captive, civilians in most cases, by the enemy you're fighting. So there's a lot that's new for Israel. What has surprised you the most over the last number of months?
WRM: Well, actually it's been full of surprises. One was the eruption of antisemitism in the United States and on campuses. I'd written in the book we discussed last time I was on your podcast, Ark of a Covenant, I'd written about how the sort of declining faith among some in America, in the American experiment, American ideas and ideology, opened the door for a return to antisemitism. I had not expected to see it come that quickly, with that sort of degree of support in so many elements of the academy. So there was that. Then there, on the other hand, one of the things that has been interesting, I mean, we can say many things about whether the US or Europeans or other countries have, or haven't been, supportive enough of Israel, but compared to past wars, particularly in Europe, what we've seen is actually a much slower move against Israel than in past conflicts since 1967. If anything, I would say, even today, countries like France and Germany and Britain have actually held more tightly to a kind of a fundamentally pro Israel orientation than you would have seen even in 2015 or some of the earlier wars. My sense for that, without reading the secret cables, has been that a lot of Arab governments who might in past wars have been jumping on the Palestinian bandwagon are actually, because of their own opposition and concerns about Hamas and Iran, saying close it down, don't cause trouble. But in any case, in some ways, the diplomatic terrain has been much less unfavorable for Israel than one would have expected from the examples of past wars. It's been interesting to see the debate over Zionism in the American Jewish community, again, in Arc of a Covenant I wrote that Israel is a country of Jews for whom Herzl was right. And America has been a country of Jews for whom Herzl was wrong. That is, Herzl's belief was that liberalism, liberal values, the strength of liberal political ideology in non-Jewish Western populations would not be strong enough to provide safety and security for Jewish minorities in those countries. And Israel is full of Jews who found this to be true. America is full of Jews who until October 7th, by and large, considered this false. And so we're seeing a deep debate among American Jews over the relative values of Zionism and liberalism in a way that echoes debates that were seen earlier in history. There are a lot of things going on. This is an extremely complex mix of political, geostrategic, and cultural issues.
DS: I guess that cuts to my next question, which is, what is this war about? You know, some wars are about advancing one party's hegemony in a region or gaining territory. This war seems to maybe be at least partly about territory, but it feels to me like it is, seems to me like it's much, it's something, it's about something much bigger and much different.
WRM: Well, look, I think this is a revolutionary war of resistance with the sort of Iran and its proxies and allies as one protagonist, with Israel and to some degree outside powers like the U.S., even the Europeans, and the conservative Gulf Arab states and Egypt on the other side. But both of those alliances are shaky and have lots of countercurrents in them. But the sort of the big Iranian idea in the Middle East is that they can combine hatred of Israel and hatred of the United States with hatred of Arab rulers and the privileged wealthy sectors of the Arab world into a kind of a regional populist insurrection in which the dislike of Persians and the dislike of religious dislike of Shia will be overcome by Iran's ability to stand at the center of this axis of resistance. I think that is what is, that is the big picture of this war. You know, in a sense, that's what the Israelis ultimately are having a very hard time figuring out how to deal with. In part, because the U.S. looks at this one way, and Israel looks at it another.
DS: Okay, I'm going to want to come back to that, because I want to talk about the regional perspective. And there are multiple actors who are actively participating. Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, there are mediating actors, Qatar and Egypt. And then there are actors that seem to be on the sidelines, maybe working things behind the scenes to some degree, but not taking a frontal facing, directly engaging role. Saudis, the Bahrainis, the Emiratis, I guess the Turks are getting more directly involved than they had been, but let's start with the active players, Iran and the proxies, which, which you just referenced and alluded to. What is actually Iran's perspective here? And I guess by extension, its proxies. And are they really just Iran's proxies or any of these proxies like the Houthis, like Hezbollah, do they have interests that are independent of Iran?
WRM: Of course they do. You know, there really aren't many robots or automatons in world politics. So everybody's got a patron who, to some degree, they share a set of values or priorities with, but then they also have their own, you know, their own perspective. So Hamas is a different thing from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a different thing from the Houthis, all of them, their ways in which they find Iranian support necessary and indispensable, but there are other ways in which they find it chafing, just as Israel finds its relationship with the US sometimes helpful, sometimes really frustrating. You know, this, you find these patterns in all international relations, I think. So each of these is complex. And of course, within each of them - there are factions in Hamas. There are factions in Hezbollah, who have different relations with different factions in Iran, and so on and so on and so on. So at the level of, we can talk about it on a podcast, like this is a certain amount of generalization, overgeneralization, is going to be necessary. But at the same time too, not everybody knows what everyone else is thinking. So, people are not in this, in the Middle East particularly, but, but everywhere in world history, in world politics, people are not necessarily interested in letting the other players know what cards are in their hand. And so, you know, is the leadership of Hamas leveling with the leadership of Iran all the time? No, it's not. Does Qatar play a double game in some ways? Yes, it does, etc, etc, etc. So this kind of feeding frenzy of uncertainty and ambition and competition is I think a primary feature of the situation that we're in now, where the factionalism that we see, say, in the Israeli cabinet or in Israeli politics is kind of mirrored by factionalism that we see in other places. And at the same time, you know, this overall alignment of a group of regimes, and in some cases peoples, who see their interests as broadly aligned with a powerful U.S. presence in the region. And a strong Israel, and see those as positive forces, those groups are in competition, in a contest, with other forces who see both Israel and the American presence as intolerable affronts, something that must be destroyed.
DS: And just in terms of these factions, I mean, you talked about factions, which is interesting. There are factions within the enemies of Israel. There are factions, meaning that they're - Hamas is its own faction. Hezbollah is technically its own faction, which is independent of Iran. And then within Hamas and within Hezbollah, there are factions. We tend to focus on the factions within, say, Hamas and Hezbollah, that are focused on the destruction of Israel, because those listeners to this podcast who care about Israel or those listeners to this podcast that are focused on U.S. foreign policy and U. S. foreign policy interests in the region and therefore have reasons to be concerned about Israel. And therefore we've, again, we focus on the factions that, within these movements, within these proxies, that exist to destroy Israel, but they are not the only factions within these movements. And they actually probably, from our perspective, get a lot less attention. Can you talk about what their interests may be?
WRM: Well, I mean, in Hamas, you've certainly got a clear part of what's going on with the attacks as far as one can tell. And again, we're like somebody, what is it that, Churchill once said, you know, when there are fights in the Soviet Union, it's like two dogs fighting under a rug.
And you can tell something is happening, but you can't really know until the bloody bones of the loser are thrown out from under the rug. So it's not always so easy to interpret the factional infighting of these different groups. But it does look as if part of what was happening is that the political leadership, military leadership of Hamas in Gaza was throwing off to some degree, the leadership of the international movement that was based in Qatar, based in Turkey. It's not clear how committed the international side was to this. I mean, those are people who, maybe from their own point of view, just continued to live in a intercontinental hotel with lots of money and swiping it around, that maybe was okay, and they were willing to postpone the destruction of Israel, or the final war, until at least their kids got through Harvard or something like that, while the people on the ground, you know, had a more radical view of what they wanted to accomplish.
DS: Meaning the difference between the military wing of Hamas in Gaza versus, which is Sinwar, let's loosely call it Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, versus Khaled Mashal and Ismail Haniyeh, who are, you know, bouncing around the region playing diplomacy.
WRM: Exactly. And those allegiances are likely, or those relationships, are likely to shift in response to specific events and so on. And we should understand that all of those people are spending as much time thinking about those relationships as they are about the issues that we are focused on of, you know, the progress of peace negotiations and so on. So that any faction in Hamas is not just thinking, okay, what's best for Hamas as a whole, what's best for Gaza, but what's best for me and my guys against them and those guys. There's a lot of that going on.
DS: Yeah. It's interesting. When I traveled to the region, when I traveled to the Gulf, and I'm sure you experienced this, and you spend time waiting - they go in and out of meetings, government officials, whatever. And you see on the television all the time, you see Al Jazeera most places, depending on where you are, or Al Arabiya or, you know, whichever one of the Arab satellite channels is popular in the country that one's visiting. It's incredible, the wall to wall coverage of the intra politics, intra Israeli government politics, you've seen they're watching Al Jazeera and it's like wall to wall coverage - Benny Gantz did this, Yoav Gallant did that, Ben-Gvir did this… and it's like as though there's no politics happening, and no intra government negotiations happening in these governments in the Arab world, not to mention, what is actually going on behind the scenes among the decision makers in Hamas? We just don't know.
WRM: Right, right. And that again, you know, that's sort of by design to some degree. It is in a way contributing, I think, to the normalization of Israel's place in the region in a really odd way, you know, from thing of the Jewish, you know, the Zionist entity is as that which could not be named, and people were criticized for visiting it and so on. Now you have this intimate knowledge of Israeli politics, through a hostile framework to be sure, but it's harder to deny the the reality of the Jewish state and the fact of a Jewish society sitting in the region. It's possible, I certainly hope, that as you know, as the war ends and things move on, we'll actually, we can see this whole process as part of the way in which Israel sort of sank roots down into the rocky soil of the Middle East and became an obvious, you know, sort of incontestable normal part of Middle Eastern life.
DS: Yeah. It's interesting. And you mentioned it because I mean, there wasn't an Al Jazeera or an Al Arabiya back, you know, during previous earlier wars, at least, you know, in the six day war in ‘67 or the Yom Kippur war in ‘73. But one could imagine that the Arab press could care - so we couldn't monitor it - but one could imagine the Arab press didn't care much about, you know, Levi Eshkol is up, Golda Meir is down. I mean, they just didn't, they, they, it was just, the Zionist enterprise to them was this passing, transient polity. And so what the inner workings were and the inner maneuverings of this thing, that would be gone tomorrow. So they projected, so the Arab world projected, was irrelevant. Whereas now it's, you're right, it's like an implicit concession, that this thing is here to stay and they need to pay attention.
WRM: Exactly.
DS: To what's happening inside.
WRM: Right. You know, every Arab will now be at some level informed that there are parties in Israel, there are factions in Israel, etc, etc, etc, that Israel is a society and a state.
DS: Right. Are you surprised that Hezbollah did not engage in all out war with Israel, either the weekend of October 7th, days after October 7th? Obviously now they're being more provocative. They're launching more and more rockets, drones, some of which seemingly intentionally, although we don't know for sure, but to inflame these mass fires in the north that are just horrendous to watch in terms of the damage they're doing. So separate from that, I mean, that's one track, one way they could have gone, which is arguably just sort of incremental, versus all out war. Many of us thought there was a very high likelihood that they would go for all out war while Israel was bogged down in the south.
WRM: I was generally less focused on the possibility of Hezbollah going to war. My own sense would be that, first of all, Hezbollah doesn't want to lose a war. And it would, they would be unlikely to win a war, and launching the attack at the time that Israel was, you know, absolutely in war mode would not have led necessarily a very good outcome for Hezbollah. At the same time, I think there's something on the Iranian perspective, which is real, that Hezbollah is this terrific gun that Iran has, that is pointed at Israel's head. But that gun, if you fire it, if those 100,000 plus missiles attack Israel, you know, they do a certain amount of damage and in some cases, who knows, maybe even catastrophic damage, but Israel is still there when it's done, angry and armed, ready to go. Iran has lost that weapon. It's gone. Um, so it's more valuable to you, you know, as a loaded gun on your table, than as an empty smoking gun in your hand. And I think, and in terms of how does Iran think that it deters Israel, has deterred Israel, from attacking its nuclear sites or doing other things, I think in the Iranian calculation, the idea that it can use Hezbollah as a retaliatory second strike capability is a significant one. And my guess would be that it does in fact, inhibit Israeli defense intellectuals and policy makers. Because you don't want to do something that would launch that that kind of destruction, you know, so Iran would want to keep that force in being. And Hezbollah, which, you know, at the moment, is in control of Lebanon as much as it wants to be. And, uh, you know, has no internal opposition that it really needs to worry about. The status quo in Lebanon is just not that bad for Hezbollah. So I think what we're seeing again is yes, as now, you know, they want to press every advantage. They want to push Israel on the back foot. They want to do everything they can think of to make life as difficult as possible for the Israeli government. They don't, still, I think, don't want to trigger that all out war. I'm sure president Biden does not want to see that all out war triggered. So there we are. They’re pushing, they're trying to stay close to that threshold. They want to make it look like they're being militant, that they're not completely abandoning Hamas, or that they're not being completely, you know, indifferent and lazy and all of that stuff to the common danger, but they don't want to, in a sense, to, open the war that would see the destruction of Hezbollah's military potential and then leave Israel more or less unconstrained to go after Iran.
DS: Saudi Arabia, what is their perspective on this now? What is their interest in it now? Uh, well, let me start there and then I have some specific questions about Saudi.
WRM: All right. Well, you know, the Saudis are playing a very complicated game. I think one of the things that we all need to understand is that MBS, who, when he first came to power was a little bit like an unguided missile, who sort of, you know, was involved in things like the business with Khashoggi and other things that didn't really work out the way he might have hoped they would work out. He has come up a very steep learning curve and I think is a much more experienced and skillful actor than he was a few years ago. And what we're seeing from the Saudis, I think, is a sort of combination - they are moving, in a sense they're moving in all directions, in order to keep their options open. So, on the one hand, they are moving toward, you know, this defense relationship with the United States, and whether overtly or tacitly, Israel, that the Biden administration is pushing to. I mean, ironically, it is obviously Abraham Accords 2.0. The Biden administration would rather die than openly admit it, that they are following faithfully in Jared Kushner's footsteps in the Middle East - hoping, hoping that they could realize Jared Kushner's expansive vision. They really don't want to have to say that, but it's what they're doing. That is now their best case scenario, that Jared Kushner was wrongly denied the Nobel prize. But the Saudis realized that, that they're not necessarily going to get this. Where is the two thirds majority in the Senate going to come from? For a treaty with the Saudis, that has all kinds of difficult issues like nuclear enrichment and other things like that. We've seen there's been this recent release of a report that purportedly shows, you know, claims that the Saudis were much more directly and officially involved in 9-1-1 than they've admitted. You know, I myself, I may be such a cynic and a skeptic that it seems to me the timing of this thing is awfully convenient. And one wonders whose interest it was for that to come out at this time, but there it is. So if you're the Saudis, you can't be at all sure that you would get this treaty, even though it would be advantageous. And nobody in the Middle East is really interested in American promises that aren't backed by treaties at this point, looking at how fragmented our politics are and how unpredictable we are. And in fact, to some degree, even the value of an American treaty relationship is depreciating, you know, as our sort of incoherence, and overcommitments become more apparent. So the Saudis are very, very definitely looking at other options besides this treaty. My understanding, again, from people who know the region perhaps better than I do, is that the Saudis think they have a much better chance of getting a treaty ratified under a Biden administration, under a democratic administration, because there will be Republican senators who vote for it because they think it's a good idea. There'll be Democrats who would vote, who would die in the ditch against it under a Trump administration, but would loyally support it under a Biden administration. So if you need two thirds, you want this to be from the Democrats, I think.
DS: Well, one thing I've heard on that, Walter, from Israelis who want it, Saudis who want it, and Republican senators who want it, is they basically argue the best reason to do it now is because Republican senators will be for it even if it gives Biden a big foreign policy win right before his reelection. Because Netanyahu and the Israelis want it. And there are Democrats who would vote for it in the Senate, even though the last thing they want to do is give anything to MBS, but they would do it because Biden wants it, and Biden needs it. And so that's how you get the coalition, basically the Republicans do it for Bibi and the Democrats do it for Biden.
WRM: But you know, the clock is ticking, because getting a treaty signed, getting it presented to the Senate, holding hearings - there are not that many days left on the legislative calendar before the election.
DS: Do you think it could pass without Israel involved? So, could you get some kind of Saudi-U.S. defense pact that delivers to Saudi Arabia all these bells and whistles that Saudi wants? On the nuclear side, on the defense side, if it doesn't include the sweetener of normalization with Israel, which matters a lot to a lot of senators in Washington.
WRM: I'm not sure that even that the Biden administration would want that. I think it's a sweetener as much for the Biden administration as anybody else. Otherwise it's, I don't know when an American government has done such a reversal as, you know, trying to make Saudi Arabia pariah state and now giving them, you know, sort of, more support for nuclear enrichment than you're giving almost anybody but India. You know, it's a real, it's a head spinning reversal. And I think in the administration, as well as in the party and in the Senate, it's hard to do that without being able to show something on Israel.
DS: In terms of Saudi's interest in normalizing with Israel, well, we know that MBS definitely wants it. He's made that clear publicly, he's made that clear privately, even more emphatically privately. He also is not king yet. He still needs to transition to be king. And obviously he feels confident he'll be king, but a lot of things could surprisingly go wrong on his path from crown prince to king. Do you think he has any apprehension about overshooting? In his normalization efforts with Israel, to the point that before he's king, he could jam himself up? Internally, in intra Saudi politics.
WRM: Dan, I guess I would actually object to your premise there. We don't know what he thinks. We know what he says. And if you were in his position, you would be an utter blithering idiot to share your deepest inner thoughts with foreign interlocutors, or very many domestic interlocutors. We know that it is very much in his - that he wants Americans and Israelis to believe that he deeply, deeply, deeply wants this treaty. But we also know that unless he's an idiot, and he's not an idiot, he's preparing half a dozen other options, too. You know, so we have to sort of think through what is it that he wants and, you know, or where do his interests lie? You know, the US Saudi relationship was originally based on two things. We would provide Saudi Arabia with security against any external enemy and attack. And then we would also work with the Saudis to ensure the long term development of their oil wealth. And the Saudis would be in OPEC a moderate, because they had hundreds of years of reserves. And so they wanted, they didn't want to make a fast killing in oil that would then destroy the world economy. So they would be moderates in OPEC. We would work with them on these things. All right, these days we are much less reliable as a security partner, and we are also trying to destroy their oil business. So we are doing our best to make sure that 30 years from now, there will be no value in Saudi Arabian oil. So, they cannot look at us as a friendly power in the same way, they simply cannot. They're going to be far more interested in countries like India, that has no interest in ending any oil use anytime soon. They will never want to find themselves in a position of dependence on us. That said, they would, you know, any security guarantees going, that could be very nice, even if they are devalued. So they don't, no longer believe it's a blue chip thing like NATO in 1960. It's just some like weaker alliance that you hope they'll stick to, which is probably where they are realistically. And then any kind of economic cooperation they can get going as they try to convert their economy, you know, in ways that that would make any problems with the future of oil less serious for them.
DS: I want to zoom out now to the global powers. And we spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the U.S.-Israel relationship. We don't spend as much time, certainly since October 7th, discussing what Russia's interests are in the region, and what China's interests are in the region. You just got back from Ukraine. You have been spending a lot of time thinking about the war that Ukraine is bogged down in, and Russia's bogged down in. But, zooming out from the war you were observing, what do you think Russia's interests are in the Middle East these days?
WRM: To make us unhappy and to generate the maximum amount of income possible from Russian oil. But I think we should also add - you know, we forget, uh, in America, we don't think much, that in the last year we've seen the Wagner group basically conquer a significant chunk of Africa in the Sahel. And they're doing this by providing protection to regimes against both jihadi groups at times or other dissident groups or other tribal groups, in exchange for claims on natural resources, gold, uranium, oil in some cases. And they are expanding their, they're continuing to expand their power there. In some cases they are doing this with Middle Eastern Governments or with the support of various Arab regimes, some of whom in other ways present themselves as being friendly to us. So the Russians are playing a big game here. They continue to make money from things like their engagement in Syria. It's not so much that Russia, the Russian economy benefits, but that many of the oligarchs and powerful figures around Putin have resources that come from the - after the death of Prigogine, the unfortunate tragic death of that gentleman flyer, the, you know, Putin has managed to consolidate his hold over Wagner, right? So, the Middle East actually sees Russia, where we tend to still see Russia as this, you know, what was it, John McCain's phrase, you know, ‘a gas station with a flag’, right?
DS: Yeah. Yeah.
WRM: Actually sees Russia as a serious geopolitical player, which is, in the heart of the region with Syria, which has a core alliance with Iran, which is providing important resources, and I would guess intelligence resources as well, to Iran, and which is also operating pretty actively in parts of Africa that are quite close to Middle Eastern countries and quite important to Middle Eastern countries. So, it actually matters much more to Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis, and others, that they have a good relationship with Russia, than mattered even two years ago. And this is the sort of, where American foreign policy, I think again, has lost its way, where other people are playing the great game. We're not, we're sort of, you know, still kind of playing out the preservation of the American liberal rules based order and stuff where other people have moved on into quite different games where some of our objectives are seen as kind of irrelevant.
DS: China. So before October 7th, there was a lot of noise and news about China's rising diplomatic reach within the region. They got credit for engineering this detente between Riyadh and Tehran. And then, since October 7th, I've heard mixed things, that China hasn't taken its foot off the pedal in terms of being engaged in the Middle East, and others have argued, China's pulling back. It's now, the Middle East has gotten too complicated and too hot, in terms of a war for China to have real leverage and really try to have influence. And so it's actually doing a lot less in the region. What's your take?
WRM: Well, I noticed that they've just recently called for some kind of a peace conference in Beijing. So I think they're not throwing in their cards. I think that, you know, they're focused more on their interests than anything else, and their interest is to a reliable source of oil at a reasonable price, is what they want to see. Um, I think they are aware that by being kind of penned, you know, sort of the degree to which the Biden administration is resented by popular opinion and so on across the Middle East for supporting Israel, even if many in the U.S. think it's not supporting Israel enough - the Chinese see that as something to play on. You know, ‘well, look at us. We're not like that at all. They talk about their liberal world order. Well, what about the children killed in Gaza?’ You know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's a perfect foil for China. It is sort of hastening the day, the Chinese hope, of a post American era in the Middle East, where the United States is no longer the most important outside actor in the region, that if Russia's coming up a bit - even though Russia's interest in the Middle East are opposed to China, Russia would like a high oil price, China would like a low oil price. Nevertheless, the sort of common goal of trying to steer the region away out of the American sphere. Look at things like trying to, you know, get Saudi investment vehicles to pay more attention to China, and so on and so forth. There are lots of different ways that the Chinese can be increasing their presence in the Middle East, not necessarily building against the U.S. in a confrontational way for something, time to happen now, but taking advantage of U.S. preoccupation and so on, to begin, to just keep steadily building up your position. Because somewhere down the road, it's going to be useful.
DS: Last question, Walter. If Israel is seen not to be victorious in its war against Hamas, and we don't have to define today what ‘victorious’ means, but let's just say a world in which the war basically ends, or permanent, near permanent, or long term calm is brought to the Israel Gaza border, on the one hand. On the other hand, Hamas, everyone gets, in this scenario that I'm describing, Hamas is not actually gone. That Sinwar may emerge to some degree from the rubble, either literally or symbolically, Hamas or its successor organization plays some kind of power sharing role in a power sharing agreement with whatever governing Palestinian governing body comes into existence in Gaza. So there's just a sense that Israel was attacked in the most unfathomable barbaric way. And the attacker is basically still standing.
WRM: Well, this is exactly what's happened in Lebanon with Hezbollah. Israel basically lost wars in Lebanon. We don't like to put it that way, but that's really what happened. And Hezbollah has ended up stronger than ever. So, I think what we would see is that - so it's not new for Israel to -
DS: Well, explain that, describe that, because it's an interpretation we don't typically hear. Can you just provide a little color on that case study?
WRM: Well, Hezbollah has attacked Israel in the past. And Israel has attacked Hezbollah, fought wars, at the end of which Hezbollah was still standing and very soon afterwards proposed an even greater threat to Israel than before.
DS: Right.
WRM: So that's been a 20 year pattern, right? And Hezbollah not only was able to increase its military power against Israel, it was able to increase its military dominance of Lebanon. So in that sense, this has already been happening on the north front. Right? And as a result, Israel has been living under an increasingly dire threat from Hezbollah's rapidly growing missile arsenal, one which clearly does, in some ways, constrain Israel's ability to act, both on its northern border, but also vis a vis Iran. All right? So assuming that something similar happens, that Hamas sort of reemerges in Gaza, and then over time, one assumes, again, builds up its armament so it's even stronger than it was before… well, I mean, what do I say about that?
DS: Well, I would, then I would say, Walter, that in using your Lebanon example, your Hezbollah example, the difference, again, thinking parochially over here, here I am in New York City, is in Israel's previous wars against Hezbollah, it didn't become a proxy for a broader cultural debate in the West. You know, sort of a civilizational struggle, a debate about liberal values, a debate about anti Semitism more generally. It really was viewed as a regional war. And I don't remember, I mean, I guess in the first Lebanon war, there were major protests over here against Israel. In the second Lebanon war, yes, a little bit, but nothing more than we see in every war Israel basically had between the first Lebanon war in the early eighties through, you know, October 7th, 2023 with detours, obviously around the Intifada where you start to see some protests. But again, what we see now is nothing, like the blowback against Israel in virtually every aspect of American and European and Western life. The blowback we see is like nothing we have seen, I haven't seen in my lifetime. And so a world in which the Hezbollah model is what awaits Israel at the end of this only substitute, Hamas for Hezbollah. What is, what in terms of like, this being a civilizational struggle, it seems like the civilizational side will have lost. If you're basically saying, Israel's seen this movie before that I'm describing, and it's Hezbollah, so if Hamas does that version and is still standing, it will be perceived as Israel having lost and not actually successfully fought back to the most, as I said, the most barbaric ghoulish attack one could possibly imagine.
WRM: I agree with you that it would be disastrous for all kinds of reasons. I guess the one place, Dan, where I have a question is, I guess I don't see, and maybe this just shows my moral unworthiness to live in this country governed by the Biden administration. I am less confident that what's going on in the world is the struggle of Western values against other values and the, you know, the fight of democracy against autocracy. I tend to think, you know, I look at, I think that after WWII, the world seemed to be moving in a Western direction. You know, that Turkey wanted to be more like Europe. You look at, you know, Pakistan, where Jinnah is always seen as wearing, you know, very, a coat and tie, much as Ataturk had done in Turkey. There was this sort of idea that modernity and being advanced was in some way connected to the West, right? I think what we're seeing now, whether you look at India, you look at Turkey, you look at a lot of the Arab world and so on, is that the world is moving in a lot of different directions. You know, and you could make an argument that an industrial society imposes a kind of homogenization on, you know, because you need to organize in many of the same ways for the large industrial enterprises and so on and so forth. While an information based society actually encourages cultural difference and these things. You know, and I think a lot of what we're actually seeing in the Middle East today has a lot to do with this. Even Israel is not really trying to become a more Western country. The number of Israelis who think, ‘gosh, let's be more like France. Let's be more like Denmark’ is not rising with every year. All right? So let's try to pull those things apart. But I think we can say that it's very important for Israel, partly because of its, you know, our connections as Americans to Israel and how we see it, for Israel to overcome this challenge. And I do think that a perception that Hamas has been defeated, and needed to be defeated, and was terrible for the Palestinians as well as for Israelis, that is, it's important for that to happen. Whether it's possible for that to happen, we'll see. I think that it is. I do note that in spite of all the hand wringing and all the delays and so on, Hamas has been progressively pushed back militarily. We are clearly now in a kind of a stage where either that attempt is abandoned or it is pushed forward to the next level. It's a fateful time. It's a very difficult time for Israeli politics. That this is happening at the time of an American presidential election is extraordinary, given the degree of polarization in our country. I'm actually somewhat positively impressed, Dan, that while there has been a lot of discussion and debate in America over what's happening in Israel, and there have been these sort of horrifying things on the campuses and in a few cities or districts of cities - on the whole, the center seems to be holding. This has been, as you noted, the longest war for Israel since the War of Independence. And it's been a war where almost every - you know, we had at the beginning, we had terrible news of atrocities against Jews. But since then, the sort of headline dominating things has been ‘bombs falling on Palestinians’. So it's extraordinary how the support has actually held up and how you look at polling and you really don't see big changes in American support for Israel.
DS: And so what's striking to me is we tend to react to the Biden administration overreacting to a narrow, but very loud, disproportionately loud, segment of its coalition. When in reality, what you're describing is much more the reality in terms of the broad spectrum of American public opinion, which is supportive of Israel, but there's this very narrow faction that we see obviously loudest on college campuses, but not just on college campuses. And I think the Biden White House, who's talking to the Biden campaign, reelection campaign, who's talking to these youth organizers, who are paying way too much attention to a bunch of progressive activists in these college towns. Therefore their voices get so much attention and everybody thinks, ‘oh my god, the youth vote is in play. Oh my gosh’, you know what I mean? And it's just, you know, you saw this polling over the last few weeks where they, where young voters were polled and they were asked like the 10 or 15 issues that were most important to them, and Israel's war in Gaza ranked second last out of over 10 issues. It was like - most kids don't care about it. And yet we can't stop seeing press attention, press coverage about how much the Biden White House is making policy - I mean, Biden was asked by Aaron Burnett in that CNN interview a few weeks ago when he first talked about conditioning arms shipments on Israel's operations in Rafah, where he was asked by Aaron Burnett, ‘are you hearing these protests on the college?’ And he says, ‘I hear them. I hear them. I hear them.’ He said it in a way like he was, their complaints were resonating with him, their protests. He's sympathetic.
WRM: Well, I would hope that after 50 years in American politics, Biden could learn to sound like a hypocrite. You know, ‘come on, I feel your pain.’ You know, it's obvious no matter what his policies are, he will want to project empathy at every opportunity. But again, look, I hold no torch for the Biden administration here, but, you know, you actually look at weapons deliveries and, you know, and then there was all the talk about, ‘Oh, they didn't support, they didn't veto that UN resolution, but they made sure it was an advisory resolution of no real impact before they voted on it.’ They, you know -
DS: Before they abstained.
WRM: Yeah. You know, so a lot of this is perception management. And that's actually what you would expect a semi competent president to do. But, now, you know, whether they, I mean, whether they have overall, a viable, much less intelligent strategy for the Middle East and for the confrontation with Iran, for the management of the relationship with Israel and Israeli security, that is a different question. I think they can be legitimately criticized. But basically the thing of using Israel policy to signal to various groups of supporters, while at the same time, shaping Israel policy in accordance with your sense of the national strategic objective, that's a very typical thing for an American president to do.
DS: But if he's doing it - and then we can, we don't have to belabor the point - but if he's doing it to manage his political coalition here, what he does and says in this globalized media and information environment we are in also has signaling effects to those making decisions in Hamas, like Sinwar, where he's wondering, ‘well, is pressure mounting on Israel or is pressure mounting on us?’
WRM: Right.
DS: And so what does he see when the U.S. chooses to abstain versus veto a tough U.N. Security Council resolution for Israel?
WRM: Well, it kind of depends on how intelligent he is. And I’ve never met the man, so I can't, I don't have a view. If he has, you know, the intelligence of a grasshopper, all right, he knows that that these kinds of things are signaling, and that you can't just sort of take the, you know, the top line headline and turn that into a serious diplomatic theory of what the United States is up to. I would think he would notice that even as these lofty statements are being made, large numbers of bombs keep falling on Gaza that were not made in Israel. And also that the volume does not seem to be decreasing. So I think we have to give… I mean, it is possible that he's a delusional fanatic who has no idea what he's doing. It does seem to me actually that while he may be a delusional fanatic, he does have a certain basic degree of political intelligence, knows that Israel is a formidable opponent, knows that the United States is continuing to support it, though not up to 120%. And I don't think he's looking for hope that the Biden administration will suddenly see the, you know, I don't know, the righteousness of his cause. But overall, I think the people who are the angriest at Biden right now are people on the far left and the Hamas side who believe that all of these things are just sort of hypocritical, you know, concessions while Israel's getting 80% of what it wants people. Yes, or angry on the other side who say, ‘well, where's that 20%?’ But I do think Biden so far has continued to steer this in the way that democratic presidents have normally tended to steer it.
DS: Okay, Walter, we will leave it there. Thank you as always. This is just whetting my appetite, so I'm not going to allow such a long stretch to go between this appearance on Call Me Back and your next appearance, as I did between your last appearance and this appearance. So, thank you, and I will, you referenced your ‘The Arc of a Covenant’, so I'm actually going to repost the link to that book in the show notes. Until next time, thank you.
WRM: Great to talk, Dan.
DS: That's our show for today. To keep up with Walter Russell Mead, you can follow him on X @WRMead , and you can also find his work at the Hudson Institute and at the Wall Street Journal. 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.