Bulwark Takes - Russia is Openly Attacking NATO

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

Eric and Eliot discuss the perilous moment for the American Republic in which we find ourselves after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They discuss the recent developments in the Ukraine war, including the violation of Polish and Romanian airspace by Russian drones and the extreme danger these steps represent to European security. Eliot also reports from Israel on the recent strike against Hamas senior leadership in Qatar, observing that both the Mossad and IDF either refused to carry out or expressed deep reservations about Netanyahu's proposed course of action. The two also analyze recent leaks suggesting that the forthcoming National Defense Strategy will reflect a prioritization of the homeland and the Western Hemisphere rather than the Indo-Pacific, as many had expected. Eric & Frank Miller's Latest on Ukraine: https://thedispatch.com/article/weakness-is-provocative/ Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Grab a coffee and discover non-stop action with BudMGM Casino. Check out our hottest exclusive. Friends of one with Multi-Drop. Once even more options. Play our wide variety of table games. Or head over to the arcade for nostalgic casino thrills only available at BetMGM. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. You know, one or two drones straying into Polish territory is potentially an accident, as the president said. 19 is not. Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bullwork and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. I'm Eric Edelman, counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, non-resident fellow at the Miller Center,

Bullwork contributor. And I'm joined by my colleague in all things. strategic reporting in from Israel. Elliot Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies, contributing writer to the Atlantic, and part-time instructor at Chalem College in Israel. Elliot, welcome back to Shield of the Republic. Well, it's good to be back. The next time you see me, I'll be reporting from my home base in the Washington area. You know, this has been a very hard week in many ways, the United States, in Israel as well, where there was a terrorist attack, which was, I don't think it was particularly well reported in the American press at just a bus stop and six older people killed, another half dozen seriously wounded. you know the the good news is it's still a beautiful place there are a lot of wonderful people it's a place under enormous amount of strain but there are a lot of things to see and do including

climbing a crusader castle in the galilee called montfort which was the home of the order of teutonic knights which is really something to wrap your head around but as so often the case, I digress. And I've been there and done that, and I recall from an earlier part of my political career, having read Professor Joshua Prower's work on the Crusaders in Israel and their fortifications, and striking how much the overlay of crusader fortifications also tends to map to Israeli settlement activities. Yeah, well, I mean, there's, there are all kinds of things. It's another rabbit hole to go down to. I guess the, obviously, the biggest news, which is not really foreign affairs news entirely, although there's an external dimension,

was the murder of Charlie Kirk this week in the United States. I don't, you know, this is not saying we would normally, well, we don't usually talk simply about domestic politics. We're focused on foreign affairs and national security, but I think we should note it. It goes without saying that it's just evil, full stop. You don't say yes, but you don't say, well, on the other hand, it's just evil and worthy of condemnation. It's interesting to see it from here, where, you know, on the one hand, you have a sense that there's really sort of a looming cloud, which to talk about, you may want to discuss a bit what the Trump administration may or may not get up to, I will say I was somewhat reassured by the reaction of the governor

of Utah, Spencer Cox, I thought, spoke really well. I thought Bernie Sanders actually gave a very forceful denunciation of this. Gavin Newsom, who's not my favorite Democratic politician, spoke very well. There were other Republicans, James Langford, I think, you would you had mentioned who who spoke up and saying exactly the right things exactly the things you want politicians to say at the moment our president of course is not one of them so you know that gives me some hope but it's still it's a pretty dark moment yeah i mean unfortunately both you and i are old enough to remember um quite acutely um the paroxysm of violence, political violence, that the U.S. went through for about a decade between

1963 and 1974. A number of assassinations of political figures, including President John F. Kennedy, his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, of course, attempted assassinations of President Gerald Ford. And that, you know, paroxysm of violence was a terrible time for the country, and I'm, you know, I fear we're in one of those terrible times now. The difference between then and now in my book is the totally pernicious influence of social media. And it's made it infinitely worse than it already was in those days. And I think, you know, there's a very big danger that a lot of people are going to see this assassination as

a validation of all their prior beliefs whether about violence emanating from the left or the right and as you just said the important point is that from wherever from whence ever the violence comes it's it's an assault on liberal democracy which is by the way a topic that we do address on this show which is the fate of liberal democracy here at home and abroad, I might add that, you know, I've been watching the assault

on liberal democracy in Turkey that's going on as we speak and is very, very close to extirpating two-party democracy in Turkey for the first time since 1950. And that is a terrible thing in and of itself. I do worry about the uses to which the Trump administration may put some of this. You know, thought Juliet Kayam put it very well. Everybody's looking to see what ideology the shooter had. And even Governor Cox has described this as a, quote, leftist ideology. I don't know that we know enough yet about the motives of the shooter to even be able to say that. What we can say, I think, from the facts that have emerged so far, is that this person was almost terminally online, very involved in the gaming subculture, as Governor Cox put it, the dark corners of the Internet.

And more often than not, a lot of these political assassins have not a really discernible left or right ideology. It's a mix of their own mental illness and stray political thoughts, justifying violence on the Internet, at whether from the left or the right. Although I do think we have to bear in mind the statistical reality that when you look at the charts of, you know, from the FBI and other law enforcement sources of political violence in the U.S., it's overwhelmingly from the right.

That's not to excuse political violence that emanates from the left, like the shooting of Congressman Representative Steve Scalise. But I think it's important to keep in mind, you know, that there's a balance that has to be maintained politically and trying to use this to go after your political enemies, as Stephen Miller and the Trump administration said, is a very, very dangerous moment for the country. You know, I agree with that, just on the social media part, and there really are two aspects

to it. One is, you know, for somebody who is, well, I would say even for people who are not mentally unstable, the way in which Internet allows you to kind of go deep into dark, places. I know people who are extremely well-educated, who, you know, begin obsessively following different parts of the Internet, and, you know, begin believing all kinds of crazy things. So it's a good way to radicalize people who, for whatever reason, are susceptible to that. I mean, I sometimes think it's almost like alcoholism. You know, there are just some people who cannot simply take one drink and leave it at that. So that's one thing.

But then the second thing is, you know, what social media gives you is communities of hate, not discussion, not debate, nothing remotely like that. And so it's really doubly and pernicious. I think as a society, and this may be something we want to talk about with some of our future guests, People are beginning to wrestle with this. So I think there's a much stronger awareness among parents that you need to control social media use by kids. But it's clearly, really is clearly pernicious. You know, we'll see, too, what the legacy of Charlie Kirk is, you know, neither you nor I would be likely to follow him for any reason, just because he's speaking to a very different demographic.

I will say, as I've learned more about it afterwards, even though some of his views, I'm sure I know I've found would find reprehensible, he was trying to engage. He was engaging people who vehemently disagreed with him and going to speak with them peacefully in places where he knew he would not be welcome. And, you know, I think it would be a good thing if everybody would emphasize that, you know, that part of what he did. We'll see what he turns into, or what, you know, he turns into as kind of an icon of the new American right. I think we don't know. And the last thing I'll say is, I mean, this is kind of a dark thought, I suppose, but it's a darkly optimistic one. As you said, you know, you and I remember a pretty terrible time in which not only you had those, that political violence, including assassination and assassination attempts, you had otherwise reasonable people advocating looted. politic things, including riot and violence. I vividly remember there was a very well-known Harvard philosophy professor, Hillary Putnam, who, you know, advocated burning down Harvard's great Widener Library.

And, you know, you were on the campus at Cornell then, and so, you know, you remember those things. So we have passed through periods of insanity like this before. But, you know, it's a bit sobering to remember that those that lasted, as you said, at least a decade in some ways a bit more. Yeah, I think we should probably move on at this point. But as you say, this is the, you know, the assault on liberal democracy and the role of violent rhetoric and is a subject which we are going to return to probably sometime in mid-October with a future guest. So, you know, while you were in Israel, Frank Miller and I were busy writing last week about the large-scale incursion of Russian drones into Poland. We did it in the pages of the dispatch because one of the editors there reached out to us and said, this seems like a kind of big deal to me. You know, it's kind of getting lost in this Charlie Kirk news.

Maybe we should, you know, comment on it, and Frank and I did. And it was followed, of course, by penetrations of Romanian airspace. And what Frank and I wrote was actually taking a leaf from, you know, what Donald Rumsfeld once said, you know, weakness is provocative. And what we've seen from Trump vis-a-vis Putin, both before and since the summit in Alaska, has been a postponement of action, you know, and looking, in my view, for pretexts for an action, you know, for instance, Trump's somewhat unhinged truth social post in which he said, this is Zelensky in Biden's war, as if Putin had not invaded Ukraine twice, and that, you know, we'll, you know, put sanctions on if the Europeans put 100 percent tariffs on,

India and China for Russian oil, you know, as if that is the only way to choke off the Russian economy, that this is really a pretext for inaction. It's not a call to action. And Putin knows it. And Putin, since his meeting with Trump, has been wagering, he can win this on the battlefield. field. The pattern of attacks, the aerial assault on Ukraine from drones and missiles has intensified enormously since the summit. You know, one or two drones straying into Polish territory is potentially an accident, as the president said. 19 is not, as Prime Minister Tusk and as EU foreign minister Kayakalis have said, this clearly seems to be a calculated probe. You know, as Ben Hodges, our former chief of U.S. Army, Europe said, you know, this is a probe

of NATO's air defenses. I mean, NATO, I think actually, although there's been a lot of hand-wringing, including from some of our friends about NATO's failure here, NATO actually, I think, shot down something like 15 of 19 of these things with Dutch F-35s, Polish F-16. scenes. They had Italian AWACs up. They met at Poland's request at the North Atlantic Council invoking Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which allows countries that have been attacked to call for, you know, collective discussion of the threat. NATO's talking about a program. We don't exactly know what it is Eastern Century that's going to step up. It's counter drone capabilities in the frontline states.

So that's all to the good. But it really needs to be a transatlantic kind of effort here with the US in the lead. And there, there is a lot of, I mean, I think, number one, there ought to be a message to Belarus, which was the source of a number of these drones. And with whom Russia has just launched the largest military exercise.

exercise Zappa, 2025, since 2021, there ought to be a message to Belarus that if this happens again, there's going to be military action against the sources of those drone attacks by NATO. And I think the economy, though, is clearly, you know, his Achilles heel. And there are ways to attack it that don't involve the you know the tariffs that uh trump has proposed you could go after you could join the europeans in lowering the oil and price cap which has been a very effective tool against uh russian uh oil revenues uh you could seize the 300 billion in frozen assets and provide them to the ukrainians uh to purchase defense goods both from europe and the the United States. You could add to the designations of the ghost fleet that the Biden administration

did at the end of its term and which the EU has extended and the U.S. is not yet extended to make it harder for Russia to actually carry out the oil trade and diminish their revenues. There are lots of things that can be done and should be done, but aren't being done by the Trump administration. Yeah, so I agree with all that. Trump, I think he, there are a number of reasons why he's not doing revenge, but I think he's personally disheartened because I think he really did believe that he could fix this one in a few days or maybe a few weeks. And of course, it's turned out that it's, that's completely a pipe dream. He can't admit to himself that he totally misread Putin. He is wary of

a large-scale confrontation for whatever, for whatever reason. I would note that, you know, while what he said was ridiculous, you know, the fact is that, you know, our sales of military hardware to Ukraine continue, you know, the kind of quiet collaboration on intelligence and stuff continues. So there's a lot of the, that may be bureaucratic inertia, but I don't think it's just that. I mean, I think Trump is. is perfectly willing to let that go on. He's not willing to spend money, but he's willing to let it go on. The more troubling, I mean, that's troubling because I completely, we should be doing all those things more. The question of why the Russians are doing this, I think there is some

reflection. So what they did was they fired a bunch of unarmed drones at Poland, I think very deliberately so that it you know they weren't actually going to kill people although you know something falling out of the air can if it lands on you will can kill you um i think it probably had several purposes one is simply to intimidate try to an attempt to intimidate uh the polls which is a bad idea of polls being polls but but i we have to remember that putin is not a guy who necessarily perceives the outside world correctly and so i think the same thing with romania it's an attempted intimidation it's kind of a classic sort of salami tactic well if we can get away with this what's maybe the next thing you can do is something a little bit more violent to

estonia for example uh entirely entirely conceivable uh to me that that that will come I think the main, you know, one of the things that's very dangerous about the situations, I think Putin thinks he's winning. I think he thinks he's taking the measure of Trump. Trump's not going to get in the way of anything. He's getting, clearly getting serious Chinese support. He, they are able to mass produce large numbers of drones. And North Korean, not just Chinese.

But, you know, so I think he has that kind of, he thinks he has that kind of support. I don't know if he is being told about the damage that's being done to the oil industry and to economic infrastructure by the Ukrainian strikes, which are continuing and are apparently having quite considerable success. I think he thinks he's on a role, and I, you know, it's very dangerous because he's, you know, on the one hand, he's a criminal and a thug. I think on the other hand, as with many aging dictators, there's kind of a big. messianic element to it as well, where, you know, he's going to be the guy to restore the Russian

empire. So I think what this boils down to is you could get into a very, very dangerous situation. I, my actually, my response on something like this, I mean, I would have been in favor of taking all the sovereign wealth funds a long time ago, but I think it needs to be more overtly military. So, you know, what you just said about going after, that Belarus should know that it's in the crosshairs. I think being willing to intercept drones over Ukrainian airspace in coordination with the Ukrainians, I think that would be a perfectly reasonable thing. So in other words, you know, make the Russians realize that by doing this kind of thing, they are increasing the likelihood of European states getting directly involved

in the defense of Ukraine. That, I think, would trouble them quite a bit. Yeah. I mean, I do think part of, you know, this was a probe and, as you just said, salami slicing tactics. It's also kind of classic Soviet slash Russian wedge driving. And Putin for a long time has wanted to, you know, test the Article 5 guarantee and try and make the Europeans believe that the U.S. is not going to ride, you know, to the rescue of Europe. if it gets into a dust up with him, that they'll be left to their own devices against what he sees as a, you know, a increasingly powerful Russia, even if they see it as a country that's, you know, got a middle-sized European economy and, you know, a military that hasn't actually really distinguished itself, you know, on the battlefield in Ukraine very much. But still, you know, a threat and a worry for them. So it is very dangerous. because he might, you know, miscalculate and, you know, create a terrible situation where the U.S. will have to honor its Article 5 guarantee and, you know, God knows where it goes from there. I would say the other thing about the Trump administration approach to this, which seems really wrongheaded, is they've been engaging with Belarus. They had a senior White House official meeting with Lukashenko.

Now, that was justified on the grounds of winning the release of some political prisoners, which they did, which is, of course, laudable. But they've now sent a couple of observers to Belarus to watch the Zapad 2025 exercise. And there are two things here that I would note about this. One is that the Belarusian military, in the run-up to this exercise that kicked off last Friday, had said that part of the exercise was going to be to showcase the potential use of nuclear weapons situated on Belarusian territory and by Russia. They have pulled back from that a little bit, at least in terms of what they're declaring.

We'll see how the whole exercise plays out, of course. But that in and of itself suggests that maybe the response that they got from NATO was enough to suggest maybe we ought to pull back a little bit. That's a good thing. The effort to engage, I mean, Reuters was reporting that this, you know, outreach to Belarus appears to be a calculated Trump policy. I don't know whether that's the case or not. if it is, it seems to me to be very wrongheaded. It seems to be based on the notion, again, based on Reuters reporting, that Lukashenko talks to Putin a lot. Therefore, he might have influence on Putin. Therefore, we should cultivate him so he can, you know, get Putin to stop this

war, which is a crazy misreading of the power dynamic between Lukashenko and Putin and the way in which influence flows in that relationship. Yeah, well, I mean, it wouldn't be the first time, would it, where they've, you know, just made truly ludicrous assumptions about foreign policy and about what's possible. And this, you know, it's more with coffery, I suppose. So we keep on coining these terms. No, look, I think, I mean, it is a ludicrous thing.

part of what makes the situation dangerous, I think, is I suspect that Putin thinks he has a much stronger hand than he does. I think he suspects that he has a better military than he does. The Russians are pretty clearly sort of trying to mass forces for one last big push to take the Donbos. Who knows? Some of the Ukrainians are clearly very thinly stretched, where they'll be able to pull it off. But you know, there's a, I wouldn't be surprised. of Putin believes all the cliches about, you know, a battle-hardened military. I don't know if you remember the run-up to the first Gulf War, everybody was talking about the battle-hardened Iraqi military going up against these sort of fresh-faced Americans who, you know,

had not fought a war in 30 years. And, you know, quite the reverse was true. You know, they got creamed. And I think the same thing would actually happen to the, to the Russian as well, that if, you know, you took a bunch of exhausted Russian divisions and you threw them against Poland and the Baltic states in Finland, you know, supported by allied airpower, it really wouldn't work out well for them. In a conflict where, you know, it's not like having a static line where you're flying lots of drones all over the place, but a mobile battlefield and one in which airspace is really contested, I think it would look very, very different.

But I doubt that he knows that, and I doubt even more that his generals would tell him that. Yeah, we need to move on to another subject, but I would just note that a lot of Putin's henchmen, you know, his factota, have been making very threatening noises about Finland and how they're going to destroy Finnish statehood. and what not. And speaking as a former U.S. ambassador to Finland, who has some sense of the Finnish military, which is quite good, and its capacity to mobilize very large military force.

I mean, there's a part of me that, you know, I don't want to do this on behalf of the Finns, but kind of bring it on. I mean, it's just, you know, I think it would go very badly for for the Russians. So Israel launched a military strike on on Doha in Qatar this week to try and kill senior Hamas leaders, which at one level is sort of understandable. But I'm curious for you to report back to us how this looks inside Israel because I'm reading, you know, stuff about the intelligence community and the IDF senior leadership having been in virtual open rebellion against the prime minister about this strike and not wanting to go ahead with it. What can you tell us?

So, I mean, I think the first thing to say is it's quite amazing. Playing out in Israeli news reports and newspapers and television is the fact that it's very clear that the chief of staff who Netanyahu appointed Al-Zamir was not in favor of the Gaza a city operation and is not in favor of, was definitely not in favor of the Doha operation. Apparently, there was a kind of a Mossad option, and Mossad said, no, we don't want to do it, so they didn't, they didn't do it. It was, as is always the case with the Israelis, kind of technically exquisite, although it didn't get, you know, these things were always dicey, but they was, I guess, firing a ballistic missile off an airplane, so technically the missiles

flying over Saudi airspace. So there are a number of possible explanations for it. In general, I should say in the background, everybody hates beating. They really hate them. I don't think, people do not think that he has the country's best interests at heart in Gaza, but instead has his own government and his own personal kind of political survival, first and foremost. And he's in the grip of a coalition where he's boxed in by the ultra-right who are a dangerous bunch, Edomar Ben-Kvier and Basil Smotrich, and by the ultra-Orthodox who are desperately keen to avoid conscription. And as in other recent visits, I have to say that the fury against the ultra-Orthodox for not going to serve is considerable. On the Doha operation itself,

I think there are several possible explanations. One, which may be the simplest, is, you know, if you have an exquisite hammer, then every problem does look like a nail. And the exquisite hammer is the Israeli Air Force. Second thing, the Israelis are genuinely committed to killing every last leader of Hamas, and I don't blame them. But I think, you know, one argument is, well, if you take out these guys, then you have a more, that actually opens the way to negotiations.

I think more plausible argument is they're actually just as happy to kill the negotiations. I think, again, this is often the case. The Israelis frequently get kind of tunnel vision, and I think that's sort of what happened. That's part of what happened here. They didn't seem to think, you know, the United States has considerable equities in Qatar, which is a loathsome place.

I'll just stipulate that. It does also have this gigantic airbase of ours, the shape of Al-Aid, which both you and I have flown in and out of. And, you know, just like they don't, this government doesn't care about it. I think the main point I want to make here is popular opinion was not in favor of this.

This was the Israeli government. It's not what the military one, to do, not what the intelligence community wanted to do. And it's, everybody I've spoken to is, seems to be totally convinced that, you know, when they have the next election, which I think is next October, that that Beebe is gone, that he, you know, he has no credibility left. You know, as long as I'm reporting on things here, so I have been teaching, there are Israeli undergraduates, but Israelis do their military

service after high school. Men for minimum of three years, I think women two years. But actually it's usually a lot longer than that. Because if you want to be an officer, you sign up for an additional year. And a lot of kids are recruited for the military service. So, you know, I have undergraduates who, you know, spent six years on active duty. Almost all of them are continuing to do reserve duty, including the women. And so almost every student that I, and so almost every student that I've had, has come up to me and they're very good students. I mean, I really enjoy them. Professor Khan, I'm terribly sorry. I've got been, just been, my unit's been called up. Some of the kids, 500 days of active duty since the war began. And they are, I would say, tired and

distracted. They are, you know, the one thing that I think is important to remember is, you know, There's no question in any Israeli's mind that Hamas is just a monstrously evil organization that's out to annihilate them. And so at some level, the motivation to fight them is there. And despite everything, you know, Israeli society does rally around its military. And the people in the military are just very, it's a people's army. So it's very tightly integrated. And I think it shields them from a lot of the, sort of post-traumatic stress kinds of things that you have, you know, that we experience,

although you have that too. You do have post-traumatic stress. Interesting enough, I was talking to one researcher was talking about, I said, you know, you also have the phenomenon of post-traumatic growth. I said, what? And I checked with my daughters and psychologists. Yeah, there's a, there's that phenomenon, but you get it in societies where there's high social trust and cohesion. So they're, you know, so there are a small little generation, but they're tired. And I think the society is tired. Everywhere you go, posters of the hostages, people wearing yellow rib, everywhere, yellow ribbons, posters saying, bring them home. Pictures of the hostages, absolutely everywhere.

Starting with when you land at the airport, but, you know, on, you know, streets, restaurants, you name it. And some pretty big demonstrations in behalf of Seasfire. Some very big demonstrations. So it's a society that's torn and divided in some ways and angry and exhausted. And it's also, I think, increasingly feeling the Liger internationally appropriately so. There's just been a wave of stuff which is some anti-Israel, some just overtly anti-Semitic. I mean, like in Amsterdam recently really sort of incitements to riot. And they had an anti-Semitic riot there.

Then the sort of performative stupidity of some European governments. So the British just announced that they're not going to have an Israeli student at the Royal College of Defense Studies, although they kind of boast of all the dictators who graduated from that. and then, you know, displace their country's civilian governments like Perviz Musharraf. And it, so there's the sense of being believed in, you know, some of his petty things. Like there was these, there were seven Israeli chess players who were supposed to participate in a chess tournament in Spain. And basically, the organizers harassed them out of it. Just the kind of cowardly despicable ways.

And so they, there's that. On the other hand, they're a tough bunch. So it's a form of collective punishment on behalf of those who claim to be protesting collective punishment. Yeah. Well, and look, and the United States, you're doing it too. You know, you have all these true performers in Hollywood saying, you know, that they tend to boycott Israeli actors and home directors and so on. And, you know, I think, by the way, what all this is doing is this is feeding a reaction on

the right. And it is going to be grist for the mill in Europe, but also in the United States. Yeah, it just strengthens the Gallut mentality, you know, that exists in. Yeah. And the truth is, you know, I mean, I'm not necessarily. Israeli, but I'm Jewish, as are you, and you feel it. Yeah. And you resent it.

And, you know, the Israeli attitude in particular, but I think more broadly, the attitude of Jewish communities outside Israel, so well, screw you, we're going to, we're going to continue. This is not the first time that we've been through something like this. It's the performative aspect seems incredibly ill-suited to actually. accomplish that the ends to which it is supposedly being put, which is to try and somehow protect, you know, Palestinians and the idea of a, you know, Palestinian, you know, state arising out of the occupied territories. So I couldn't agree more. It is completely detached from that.

And it's also completely detached from the reality of Gaza. Now, you know, apparently less bit of news here was that chief of the idea I've said, you haven't told me what the plans are supposed to be for once we conquer Gaza. And I think there may be some Israelis sitting it through, but it's not clear. I mean, Gaza is thoroughly wrecked the way like Mosul was

after we and the British worked it over in support of the Iraqi scheme of maneuver. You're going to need some sort of solution. I also have to say that, you know, I've come to the conclusion that although in some ways a two-state solution would have been the ideal thing, I just don't see how you get there anymore because, you know, you have basically two alternatives. You have Hamas, which is evil, which the Israelis simply

cannot tolerate. And even most European governments realize that the Hamas is, you know, you can't tolerate them. And the Palestinian Authority, which is overwhelmingly corrupt, which has had the opportunity to engage in genuine state-building activities, but really hasn't. You know, you and I, I think both, I mean, I meant, I didn't really know them, you may have known him better, the one Palestinian leader who really got serious about state building, Salam Fayad, who did things like, you know, make sure that you had direct deposit into the bank accounts of Palestinian. and police officers said that their bosses wouldn't skim off the top. And, of course, he had to leave the country after his term dismissed.

Yeah, right. After he's dismissed. So I don't know what the, I don't know what the solution is. I mean, look, I don't, I don't either. I think it's notable that, you know, people like Rob Malley and Hussein Aga, apparently I've not read their new book, but I have read some reviews of it, apparently have concluded that the, you know, two-state solution is dead as well. even though they are very, have been big proponents of it.

I think where we may end up is sort of back to something that, you know, I was involved in early in my career, which was when I was George Schultz's special assistant in the Reagan administration, and we had the Reagan plan, which was for the West Bank to become confederated with Jordan. know, as part of, I mean, I think that's where this is headed in reality at some point, because I think it's really the only realistic option that sort of is really out there, at least in the near term, maybe longer term, there's another possibility. But for the moment, I think that's where it's headed. I agree with that.

This last thought I'll just offer on Israel is that despite everything, you know, the cafes are full. There are questions about the economy, but on the whole, The Israeli economies performed amazingly well throughout all this. There's building everywhere. There's, you know, the modern infrastructure is very striking. People are having babies, which is in some ways, you know, the best indicator of optimism. And the largest families are the ultra-Orthodox.

But, you know, even secular Israeli families are way, way above the report. replacement rate and certainly way above European and Asian levels of birth, which tells you something. Or U.S. I mean, you know, when you walk the streets, you see lots and lots of, you know, people pushing baby carers. I mean, there's something sometimes a little bit weird about it, like this morning I was walking over to Shlem College. And, you know, there's a guy pushing his, you know, toddler. I don't know, the daycare or something like that. And, of course, he's carrying an or this would probably an M4 carbine and he's very cheerful and you know the baby's very cheerful it's all perfectly normal so i want to turn to um another story that is of interest i think to both

of us which is a series of leaks that have come out about the national defense strategy that the pentagon had promised to deliver really by by now by september it's clearly going to take a little longer. But a series of leaks in the press, particularly one in Politico, which seemed to indicate that the direction of the strategy is not headed in the one that I think a lot of people assumed it would go, which would be a strategy that, in the words of the current under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Bridge Colby, ruthlessly prioritized the Indo-Pacific and based on his book. Instead, it appears that it is going to, at the instance of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who, according to Politico, has overruled Colby, going to put a focus on

the defense of the homeland and the Western Hemisphere. Now, at one of the one, level, this is apple pie and motherhood, right? Every national defense strategy since 9-11 has said protecting the homeland is our number one priority. But this seems a little different in the sense that it is based on supposedly a defense of the hemisphere in a way that harkens back to a previous sort of conception of defense strategy, which was sometimes called continentalism, sometimes called hemispheric defense, sometimes caricatured as Fortress America, which was the renient strategy conception before World War II and carries us back, really, to 1940, 41. I don't know whether that's where this is actually going to come out.

I mean, you can certainly see indications of it in what's going on, which is concentration of lots of military force in the hemisphere, particularly around Venezuela, the strike on the, on the quote, drug, narco-trafficking drug boat or maybe migrant boat, we don't know, because the administration has refused to actually provide any serious data on what they did with the strike. And you see it also in the repurposing of the National Guard for domestic defense. So I think if this happens, if that's the way this comes out, this is going to really prompt a very serious national debate about the direction of national security policy. Yeah, I agree with that. I would add to that Golden Dome, so Trump's interest in a very elaborate

defensive system. I think it actually does fit with the interest in Greenland. which, you know, that was in many ways part of the hemispheric defense concept. I think it also, the interest in building up or renewing nuclear forces, which, you know, both of us are very much in favor of. Those are all part of it. And you're right. It was a coherent conception. You know, the actually, George C. Marshall's leading military advisor during World War II was a man named Stanley, Stanley Embick.

He was a lieutenant general. he was regarded as the big brain of the United States Army. Nobody's ever heard of him since. Except you and me. Yeah, well, right. Another little piece of useless, esoteric knowledge that we kind of lovingly gaze at. But, you know, he actually was, did think very seriously about hemispheric defense. He was willing to give up in the Philippines, by the way, which did not make him popular in the Navy.

So it is an old idea. And I think, you know, if there's one thing that I think has struck me in a way about the era that we're living through is that, although there is stuff here that is clearly revolutionary in some way, there's also a lot of stuff which is deep continuity with elements of the American past. And, you know, in the same way, there's the sort of basic isolationism that was in the middle of the Republican Party that Eisenhower B. when he beat Robert Taft for the presidential nomination, it's still there. And I think that post-war internationalism was under threat. I mean, one thing I just noticed is Mike McCall, a congressman from Texas, who a classic Republican internationalist is retiring. And I wonder if you're going to have more of those.

On the other hand, the other side of though, I think what I would say is that's all very well, but the problem is reality intervenes. In reality, you may want to do things that way. You may want to shut off the rest of the world. But even the United States with the degree of autarchy that it does have is not really going to be able to do that, I don't think. Now, the problems you can end up finding that out the hard way and only kind of coming to your senses after dreadful things have happened.

unfortunately, I think, is quite possible. Could I ask you, and we'll see how the NDS thing plays out. You know, we don't know. My guess is, I'm not sure HECSeth has any ideas other than lethality and pull-ups, maybe push-ups too. I think, you know, Bridge Colby has this very simple-minded idea. China equals Indo-Pacific, nothing else matters. somebody who I don't think is simple-minded, and I think does have fairly traditional views as Marco Rubio. And it'll be interesting to see what his, you know, to the extent that he has a thumbprint that he can put on it. And then, you know, the other uncertainty here is J.D. Vance, who most people associate with

the isolationist wing of the administration, which I think is probably right, but he's such a shapeshifter that I'm not sure, you know, I would be convinced that he would be stable in any of his positions. You know, or maybe you take the view that he really is a hardline isolationist and that's just what you have to assume. Well, let me just say a couple of things. One, I think since you raised Stanley Embick, you know, the thing that's very notable about Embick is you're right. You know, before the war, he was the leading kind of military theorist of continental defense. By the end of the Second World War, he had abandoned that and was one of the architects of the notion of forward defense and power projection by the United States in order to maintain

stable balances of power in Europe and in the Far East. So that's, you know, point one. Point two, I'm not sure I completely agree with you about Secretary and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, because he actually, in his time in the Foreign Relations Committee, devoted a lot of it to, in fact, chaired the Committee on the Hemisphere. And because he speaks Spanish, because he is a son of Cuban immigrants to the United States, his first trip as Secretary of State was in the hemisphere. I think a hemispheric defense is actually not necessarily completely alien to his view, particularly since he's adopted many of these America first positions, including on Ukraine,

that he didn't hold a couple of years ago. So his shape-shifting, I would argue, is that it is, you know, at least parallel to Vice President Vance. And with regard to Vice President Vance, I would just say he represented the United States, you represent in Ohio in the United States Senate. And, you know, to your point about Eisenhower defeating Robert Taft, and I'm not sure of Vance actually holds Taft's seat, or whether it holds John Bricker's seat, who carried forward that Taftite tradition into the 1950s under Eisenhower,

it's still very powerful in the upper Midwest where Vance hails from, and I expect that he's actually pretty comfortable with that version of the NDS. I could be wrong. Yeah, I think he may be. I'll attempt a very tepid defense of Rubio in that given what his background is, given he does speak Spanish, and given the hemisphere does matter to us a lot. And something I vividly remember from my time in government, we do tend to neglect Latin America. think he was, you know, he has rectified some of that. I think his interest in liberal democracy

at least was sincere at the time. And I think that that does translate into a somewhat more internationalist point of view. So it seems to me he is fundamentally different from Vance in that respect. You know, the thing that's interesting is, I mean, who, you and I, both know, how people answer polling questions often depends on how they've been framed. But if you look at the MAGA, and even at the Republican Party, which at this point has been sort of taken over by MAGA, I mean, there are very strong majorities that are in favor of an internationalist posture. Now, you know, when you pin them down on particular things, like, you know, should we be sending aid to Ukraine, less so, but there is still something of an internationalist

consensus. Will that last forever? I don't know. Matthew Continenti, I think, has been writing about this and making the case that you have that. The more dramatic changes in some ways are in the Democratic Party, where the left wing of the Democratic Party is really pretty pretty crazy and is, I think, in some ways, not internationalist at all anymore. Well, on that point, again, there's a parallel to, you know, the 1940s, 1950s. I mean, Robert Taft defeated, I mean, Eisenhower defeated Robert Taft and forced that isolationist view kind of underground in the Republican Party for the next 70 years. Four years earlier, Truman had done the very same from the left-wing challenge, which came from Henry Wallace, and that Wallace-site strain, as you say, is very, very visible in, you know, in today's Democratic Party, alas.

Yeah. Of course, you know, the other thing is, and this is one of the things I think we've discussed a little bit, but it strikes me about the current time, is that these currents which, which I thought were more or less dead. They just were always there and, you know, underneath the surface. And if you think about it, periodically, they would erupt with somebody like Pat Buchanan, who kind of took a similar line. And just now they're really out in full force, in part because they've a very permissive government for it. Or George McGovern, who was actually a delegate at the Progressive Party convention in 1940.

that nominated Henry Wallace. Yeah. Well, there is always this neo-isolationist temptation in the United States. And you can sort of understand why. It's going to be particularly dangerous, I think, in the decades. The decades ahead. One thing you touched on, but I know you've got strong views on, and I would like to draw you out on it,

which is this attack that the U.S. Navy launched on this, supposed Venezuelan government, it is amazing to me because this was a law enforcement operation in theory, what they treated as a military operation in which it's okay to waste guys who are, you know, waste everybody on a ship that is headed in the other direction. And it's an act of war. And nobody seems to be particularly caring about that. Now, I mean, If it is filled with Venezuelan drug runners, people are not going to sympathize with them. But that's not really the point. It reminds me there's a famous Lincoln speech about after a mob in which some riverboat gamblers, I think, are set upon by an angry mom saying, you know, we don't really care about the riverboat gamblers.

But we do care about law about due process. There's an arguable case, and some people have argued it. I mean, military lawyers, that these were illegal orders that should have been refused. You know, it's not clear. I don't think they've made it clear yet whether this ship was struck by helicopters dispatched from one of the naval vessels that are out there, or whether it was a drone with some, you know, some 19-year-old, you know, at the controls who, you know, assumed that this order, you know, which we know came from the president.

Because the Secretary of State very carefully said, at the orders of the president, we did this. And since the Secretary of State is not in the chain of command that very conveniently distances him from what is potentially an illegal order. No, it's the disregard and the, you know, the potential that, you know, that this could start to appear in the United States. Let's say one of these, I mean, this quote unquote drug vessel, and again, there's been no evidence provided that it was, you know, that as opposed to maybe carrying migrants. Let's say, you know, this vessel wasn't, you know, 800 miles from the U.S. shores, but, you know, going up the Mississippi, you know, and this is. the continental United States. I mean, there's a very slippery, dangerous slope here involving the military in these kinds of operations. And I worry about it a lot, particularly in a context where posse comitatis doesn't seem to matter. We're getting guardsmen ready to go into

Louisiana. We've got them deployed in the District of Columbia. You know, maybe Memphis. There's the kind of habituation of Americans to the military being used for law enforcement, I think is extremely unhealthy for a democracy. And won't be acceptable forever. We're coming to the end of our time. So I feel I just have to ask you. So what keeps you, like, cheerful or at least balanced in a pretty dismal time? That's very hard to say.

I mean, I would feel better. If more Americans were exercised by some of these issues, as you and I are and as our colleagues at the bulwark are, the fact that people are, to borrow a phrase from Neil Postman, amusing themselves to death while liberal democracy is under threat is a constant source of concern to me. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. on that typically cheering note we'll still soldier on we'll still soldier on won't we yeah we'll see you next week Thank you.