3 Takeaways - After the War: 3 Surprising Truths About the Middle East - with Ambassador Dan Kurtzer (#295)

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Is the war with Iran actually a turning point for the Middle East?Dan Kurtzer - former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Egypt, advisor to presidents, and peace negotiator - has seen these moments up close, when expectations surge - and the outcome looks nothing like the promise.His unfiltered take on Iran - and what actually changes after a war like this.

After every major turning point in the Middle East, we hear the same thing. This time is different. After the Arab Spring, after the fall of President Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, and Bashar Assad in Syria. But each time, expectations run ahead of reality, and the region reacts in ways few predict. So why does that keep happening and what are we missing right now? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Toman and this is three takeaways.

On three takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us, understand the world, and maybe even ourselves, a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Daniel Kurtzer. He served as U.S. ambassador to both Israel and Egypt. He's advised presidents, worked on peace efforts, and seen first-hand how moments of optimism in the region can rise and unravel.

He's now a professor at Princeton. Welcome, Dan, and thanks so much for joining three takeaways again today. My pleasure, Lynn. It's good to be back. It is great to be with you. Let's start with regime change. In countries where longtime dictators fell, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Syria, did those countries end up with more stable, democratic or chaotic governments? There's no one-size-fits-all for discussion of regime change,

because revolutions or coup d'etat are different in every situation. In the area that I study and used to work in the Middle East, regime change has almost never resulted in either better governance or a more equitable distribution of economic benefits to the people in that country. The last big opportunity for that change occurred during what was called the Arab Spring. which started in 2011 with the ouster of the Tunisian president and then the ouster of President Mubarak in Egypt. Tunis offered an interesting moment of opportunity because the government that emerged after President Ben Ali ran away, and he did, he ran to Saudi Arabia.

That government included a wide array of different factions within the society, including the Islamists, who did not dominate the government, but it was important that they participated in the government. The problem is that over time, that model proved unsustainable, and Tunisia has largely slipped back into at least a quasi-authoritarian state. It's not as deeply entrenched authoritarianism as existed under Ben Ali, but it certainly isn't what we would call on the road to open democracy. There aren't other examples in the Middle East, which is one of the areas in the world where you have the most authoritarian governance. There are eight monarchies of varying shades of authoritarianism. There are a number of republics, but they're not open society republics.

And how about economic growth? Have the countries grown economically and are the people better off after regime change? There's no evidence that regime change brings about positive economic change. If Iran is significantly weakened, what do you think actually changes and what stays the same? Well, there are many different scenarios about not only the way this war will end, it could end at any moment, but what happens in the period after. and almost all of it will revolve around the degree of stability of the regime on the day after the war ends. It's highly unlikely that I could be proved wrong even during this conversation. It's highly unlikely that this regime will collapse over the years.

The Islamic Republic has built redundancy and various layers of institutional control and decentralized control into their system. They have all of the coercive levers of power. There's a million men under arms in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and an untold number under arms in the more radical best siege. And as we saw a couple of months ago, when the opposition did go out in the streets, they don't carry arms and therefore they were slaughtered. Somewhere between 30 and 40,000 people were simply mowed down by this regime. So looking at a post-war Iran, we're probably going to.

looking at some maybe slightly modified governance by this regime. In some respects, it'll be much more radical than what we had before the war, because the Supreme Leader's son, who's now the Supreme Leader, is a much more radical person than his father was. There may be a little bit of realization that the power disparity between Iran and the United States is great enough that they have to figure out something other than opposition to the existence of the United States, the existence of Israel. But I would not anticipate a much other significant change in Iran. I think where there will be significant change will be the degree to which Arab Gulf states now have to rethink their national security concept. On the one hand, for quite some time to come, they're going to be

reliant upon the United States for their defense. But then they're going to wonder how good an idea that is when the United States goes to war without even consulting them, and they bear part of the burden of the United States having gone to war. Is there a risk that what looks like a win in the Middle East today is really just setting up the next round of conflict? I never nitpick the use of words, but I will in this case. There are no wins emerging from this war. At some point, President Trump, will announce victory, but then he announced that we had won this war a few days after it started. So it'll be an empty comment or an empty pronouncement from the president.

The Islamic Republic will announce that it won. It will announce victory because it survived. But the devastation that's been wrought on that country has set it back decades, if not more. So they'll be governing a broken country and a failed state. So there are no winners here. Everybody's a loser. And of course, you know, in a much more narrow sense, you and I and our neighbors are losers because we're going to be paying much higher prices for the things that we were told by this president we're going to come under control, the groceries and gas at the pump. It may stabilize in a few months, maybe. It may not stabilize in a few months because of the degree to which oil and gas facilities, both in Iran and in the gas, Gulf have now been destroyed. How long will it take to rebuild them? So in a sense, we're going to bear the burden as consumers and as citizens of this war far longer than governments are going to

bear that burden. They're going to move on. We know already President Trump has his eyes said on Cuba. He's lost interest in this war. And we're going to be paying for this war long after it figures in any of the administration's calculations. Unlike Iran, some countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are evolving in very different ways. What's happening there and why have they been as successful as they have been? Well, I'd argue the jury is still out on the degree of success. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman some years ago announced a Saudi 30-30 vision in which the society would open up, there would be a better distribution of wealth,

there would be a reduction on reliance on fossil fuels, building up industry and the services and so forth. There was a major project undertaken to build not just a city, but a whole complex of cities along the Red Sea coasts to move population from the internal area within the country to the periphery. and that has not worked very well. The United Arab Emirates experiment was until four weeks ago far more successful because they decided some years ago that they would use their oil and gas wealth

to become a transportation and tourism hub. And it was working. If you look at transportation networks and the flow of tourism, the airline routing through over the Middle East, You know, whether it was Dubai or Abu Dhabi or even elsewhere in the Gulf, the world was looking at that area as a kind of crossroads for much of the commerce and commercial interaction. And now, if you were a business person, would you want to locate or relocate into Dubai where the financial center was hit by Iranian rockets, where the United Arab Emirates facilities were attacked? and where what looked like a very safe, comfortable, modern environment became the centerpiece of the war. The numbers may change, but four weeks into this war, going on five weeks,

the United Arab Emirates has been hit by more missiles and drones from Iran than Israel. And if you're a banker or a financial services person or a business person or a tourism executive, you're going to run for cover. What do you think the impact of this war will be? Well, it's going to have many impacts. First of all, there's again, even before the war ends, a reaffirmation of American military power, but also a reaffirmation of the degree to which the United States

has either forgotten how to do diplomacy or is uninterested in diplomacy. Second, what's being called Israel's military dominance, will also be reaffirmed. Under cover of this war, there's also a war going on between Israel and Lebanon. And not only is Iran and its infrastructure being destroyed, but Lebanon's infrastructure is being destroyed because the Lebanese government is too weak, perhaps unwilling, therefore, to disarm Hisbala, as it was supposed to do under terms of the 2024 ceasefire. And under cover of these two wars, there is a rush to annexation, de facto annexation of Israel by Israel in the West Bank, with very significant violence being done by settlers, some settlers against Palestinians.

So it's a region that's not going to calm down simply because the guns fall silent in Iran. A lot of rebuilding obviously will take place. So the contractors and those who clear out rubble will have a windfall, but the rebuilding will only last as long as there is not a next war, and there's no guarantee that there won't be a next war. What will be the impact of all of these Iranian attacks on Arab countries in the area? There's an argument that the Israelis were pushing Trump to do this. There's credible evidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia was also pushing Trump to go to war, except he did it quietly. Netanyahu did it from a loud podium, and MBS, as he's called, did it quietly in large part

because in Israel going to war against Iran was and remains popular. And in Saudi Arabia, going to war against Iran is not popular. And therefore, the leadership was not reflecting the mood of the people. And it's also quite possible that the Arab Emirates, United Arab Emirates, weren't pushing from the beginning. They certainly have been supportive of the continuation of the war. One of their leading think tank experts, Anwar Gargash, said the other day that this war can't end with Iran remaining a military power. And that obviously reflects their anger at what has happened to them as a result of the war. You know, Arab attitudes towards Iran will certainly harden in the short term.

But even as their reliance on the U.S. for their defense remains intact, they're going to have to figure out how to deal with Iran. other than relying upon the United States to periodically go to war. And I don't know what form that's going to take. People are talking about a new Middle East. You don't buy it. What are they missing? I don't see the Middle East today as being at an inflection point. Almost all of the social and economic ills that beset the people in the Middle East

have beset them for decades without much change. And one of the first talks I gave at Princeton was on the conditions in the Middle East that seemed impervious to change. Corruption, crony capitalism, poverty, discrimination against women in education and employment, authoritarianism. My talk in Princeton came at a time when the UN Development Program was going through an exercise of having people from the Middle East try to define what was wrong with their society. not having outsiders do that, but kind of looking in the mirror. They started that in 2002. By 2006, they had done, I think, the second or third study. And I could give that speech today.

There's been very little change in any of the metrics that were being suggested in these studies. They particularly focused on three deficits in Arab societies, a deficit of freedom, a deficit of what they called knowledge, which really was a. a deficit of an education system that was not training people in the Middle East to cope with emerging technologies and emerging changes. A lot of wrote memorization. And that hasn't changed very much. And there was a deficit of women's empowerment. You know, in most Middle East societies, women still don't participate fully in any aspect of the society. It's a place that's going to keep us in business for a long time as Middle East analysts because it's a target-rich

environment for this kind of analysis. Looking ahead, what does a realistic best case scenario look like five or ten years from now for the Middle East? I think much of any scenario planning is going to depend on the degree to which we in the United States move away from unilateralism to multilateralism. When we have tried to deal with problems multilaterally, we've had some success. I go back, for example, to the period after the Madrid Peace Conference when we started the multilateral peace talks and the economic public-private summits that took place. There were four of them in the region.

And it looked like we had found, I don't know, a methodology for getting people's attention and denying them an easy exit. In other words, if the United States and Europe and Japan and South Korea and even China, are lining up in favor of economic change or maybe a more open society or a different social contract, it's going to be really hard for people in different societies to push back against that. The United States does it alone, these countries have choices. You know, China had a Belt and Road initiative, and they have ways of investment, which are attractive to some of these countries. So I think one of the most important keys to looking at the longer term is thinking about a multilateral,

a multinational approach to almost everything that we do. And it's not just economic matters. It's also on security. After the first Gulf War, we thought about multilateralizing Gulf security so that it wouldn't rest only on the United States to protect these countries. And that didn't work very well. But why not revive the concept and just do it better? These countries ought to be responsible for more of their own security.

They probably can't be responsible for all of their security, but there's no reason we have to carry everybody. And working with them over time multilaterally in a regional security architecture is probably much wiser than simply selling them arms and then being their protecting umbrella if people start to shoot at them. Dan, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave?

of the audience with today. One takeaway is not to expect fundamental change after this war in the way the region is organized, either in its politics or in its economics. The problems that beset these societies are persistent and endemic, and it would require the kind of leadership that we haven't seen on the part of regional leaders or extra regional leaders to effect change. Number two, that military power will continue to dominate the discourse in this region rather than diplomacy. The third takeaway is the weakness of leadership in the region and at home.

I don't say that in partisan terms, but rather the fact that we have a country that's not producing the kinds of the leaders who think beyond their party narrative, who think beyond what's going to happen in the next election. And you have weak leaders in the region who are afraid of their own publics and therefore unwilling to extend themselves and enter into processes that could possibly lead to positive change. Dan, thank you for joining three takeaways today. And thank you also for your service in government. Thanks, Linda.

If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at three takeaways.com where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.