Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Decoding Trump’s Foreign Policy - with Walter Russell Mead

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Watch the conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QrVakL6qcGg To contact us, sign up for updates, and access transcripts, visit: https://arkmedia.org/ Dan on X: https://x.com/dansenor Dan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dansenor As Israelis continue to observe the implementation of the hostage deal, we sat down with Walter Russell Mead for a conversation about U.S. foreign policy under the new Trump administration. How do we make sense of the president’s approach as he enters his new administration? What are the implications  - both for the Middle East and other geopolitical hotspots? And, where does the hostage/ceasefire deal fit in this new and larger geopolitical context? Walter Russell Mead is the “Global View” columnist at the Wall Street Journal. He is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft with the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He was previously the Henry Kissinger fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.  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 – https://a.co/d/3J67FYL CREDITS: ILAN BENATAR - Producer & Editor MARTIN HUERGO - Editor REBECCA STROM - Director of Operations STAV SLAMA - Researcher  GABE SILVERSTEIN - Research Intern 

The Palestinian movement in its core is not a nation building or rather state building movement. It's a movement of resistance. What it is, is we are saying no. We are keeping ourselves alive by keeping the fire of resistance alive. And as long as we do that, you know, we're going to live in hell, but the Israeli heaven will be less pleasant because of our resistance. It's 1230 p.m. on Tuesday, January 28th here in New York City. It is 730 p.m. on Tuesday, January 28th in Israel, as Israelis continue to observe the implementation of this hostage deal, anticipating the release of additional hostages later this week.

And for conversation about the significance, the geopolitical significance for Israel of this particular deal and also widening the aperture to some degree to have a larger conversation about us foreign policy under the new Trump administration and its implications for the Middle East and other geopolitical hotspots. I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast, Walter Russell Mead,

global view columnist for the wall street journal of the Hudson Institute. One of the leading think tanks in Washington DC and currently joins us from Gainesville, Florida, the university of Florida, where he is teaching a seminar on global affairs at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida. In fact, he goes from this conversation right into the classroom. Walter, thank you for being here.

Good to be here, Dan, good to see you. Walter, our listeners don't get to take your class, although I have heard about the class you are teaching, and hopefully we'll do like a Cliff Notes version of it right now, because I want to start at the pointy end of the spear of global affairs these days which is the foreign policy of the incoming Trump administration. Now you have been excellent on these conversations we've had over the last couple years and also in your columns for the journal in decoding Trump's foreign policy. So to many of our listeners and viewers, this

foreign policy may seem a bit confusing. On the one hand, the president has been suggesting that he's open to deals with Iran and the Palestinians or the Palestinian Authority and Xi in Beijing. But at the same time, I think what has been unexpected for a lot of observers is that he is being, as they would put it, uncharacteristically tough on Putin. You pointed out his remarks at Davos, the president's remarks he delivered at Davos, where he seemed pretty tough on Russia.

So, you know, pushing Israel to end the war in Gaza and de-escalate when many in Israel and on the right thought he was going to give Israel a complete green light to keep doing whatever it wanted to do in Israel and support Israel for some kind of strike on Iran and that he would do everything he could to help Israel end Hamas's rule in Gaza. At the same time, floating Palestinian population transfer to Egypt and Jordan I must say many Israelis most Israelis I speak to including Israelis on the right has been surprised by the things he said on that front and then of course at the

same time he's been releasing weapons holds up for Israel removing all conditions for sending weapons and munitions to Israel. So this is like a flurry of activity I've just described. I don't expect you to get into every piece of it, but just taking a step back. What's going on here? There are several things obviously going on. Trump is a complicated man. His approach to domestic and world policy is complicated and different from what we're used to in political leaders. So trying to kind of wrap your head around Trump is always a difficult exercise, even for some of us who've been working at it for years.

But I think the first thing to understand with Trump, as for that matter it is with someone like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or for that matter, Schultz in Germany or whoever, is his first goal is to maintain and solidify his power at home. And Trump is by profession, he's an entertainer, one of Trump's superpowers, and he has a number of them, but one of his superpowers is the ability to use theater as a political weapon. That he creates theater, you know, by sometimes by upsetting expectations, sometimes by over-fulfilling them. He creates dramas that often cause his enemies and opponents to react in ways that enhance him, but also that put him at the center of the drama. And I'd say one way to understand the last couple of weeks is Trump saying, I'm a different

kind of American president. Remember, Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign once said about Jimmy Carter, I had a dream in which you told me that, you know, I, Reagan, wanted your job, Jimmy Carter's job. And I answered in my dream, no, I don't want your job. I want to be president of the United States. You know, so Trump is telling us in using all kinds of examples and illustrations say, I am not sleepy Joe. I am not King Log. I'm King Stork. I'm gonna be powerful.

My will is going to transform things. No important question anywhere in the country or in the world can be answered without my having my input and I have more power than you think I have the world can be answered without my having my input. And I have more power than you think I have, and I'm going to use it more effectively and more dynamically than you thought I would. And I think everything he's doing at home and abroad, first and foremost needs to be understood

as scene setting for the presidency. And doing it in a way, again, Trump has been the dominant, not just political figure of our time, the dominant figure of our time almost since he came down the escalators in Trump towers. Yeah, it's been a decade. It's been a decade. Right. By the way, just to put it in my little parochial world, I have a 17-year-old son and a 15-year-old

son and everyone around year old son and Everyone around them all the adults around them had just assumed When they were young when Trump first got elected that the Trump presidency would be an aberration That that's not what they would know of as the American presidency in his national American political life in reality They got the last laugh because for most of their life now, they're pretty aware of current events and news and politics, partly because of dinner conversation at home, but just generally speaking,

they're now teenagers, they're following stuff, they have strong views. Everything else is an aberration. They have been living with Trump as the dominant figure in American political life for a decade. So one of my sons is gonna be 18, he'll be able to vote next year. All he knows, the most steadying force, is Trump's presence. Well, he's, um, I would compare him in some ways to Napoleon in the sense that he is an

individual who has managed to make world history, at least for a time time about him. And, you know, whatever you, whether you like Trump or dislike Trump, or for that matter, whether you like or dislike Napoleon, you have to recognize that this is a sign of a certain kind of genius that is very rare. You know, he's an extraordinary historical phenomenon. And you can get confused when you try to apply the standards that you would apply if this were the first week of the Harris administration, what would she be doing?

What would she not be doing? Well, he's not playing that game. He is being the Donald, the grand Trump, the center of American politics and world politics. And I would have to say, regardless of what we think of any single one decision that he has unveiled in the last week or anything that he said, he has succeeded brilliantly in that mission.

He has done what he set out to do with the early days of his presidency. Many critics and supporters have pointed to this idea that he seemed possibly, you know, I think this criticism has been unfair, but the criticism has been that he's been too cozy with President Putin in Russia, but others have just observed that, look,

he seems to he wants the Russia Ukraine war to end and he was going to end it as soon as he became president. And the, and the implication of him saying it was he was going to end it was that he was going to stuff effectively a bad deal on Ukraine. I've always thought the sort of Trump as Putin fanboy was just the most idiotic, self-delusional element of all the sort of Trump derangement syndrome that you see. And by the way, you can identify Trump derangement syndrome in other people without being pro-Trump yourself.

You know, this is not a, I'm not trying to make a statement here that, wow, who's terrific or anything like that. You're going to have that conversation. But the man that Vladimir Putin would most want to be president of the United States forever is Barack Obama. What he wants is a president who makes grandiose moral statements

about human rights and nuclear nonproliferation and American principles, but then doesn't do anything substantive about them. Retreats when pushed, let Syria crosses red line, responds with essentially ineffective sanctions when Putin attacks Ukraine, and meanwhile is systematically trying to limit US oil and gas production in ways that ensure high prices for Putin's oil as far as the

eye can see. That is a pro-Putin presidency, objectively speaking. Oh, and by the way, cutting military spending and thinking that everything is about, you know, soft power and the power of our ideals and example Putin would like a thousand years of that kind of leadership in the United States and tragically for him he didn't get it. Trump's policies were always tough about Russia. People are saying what he's gonna use the oil weapon against Putin. He used it in his first term on you know really trying to juice up oil production, oil and gas production as much as possible and pushing European

allies, pushing countries like Poland to import gas from the United States rather than Russia. You might say, well that's a commercial policy, not a geopolitical policy. It's an anti-Russia policy from the Kremlin's point of view. Or confronting Russian private militias in Syria and killing a bunch of those contractors, which he did in his first term. Right, and for that matter killing Soleimani, although Trump's police record was a rather mixed one in other respects. But the point is that, you know, the reasons people put forward for thinking that Trump is somehow under Putin's

thumb in some way, one of them is, oh, Putin has some kind of comprimot, some blackmail material on Trump. Honestly, I cannot think of a single human being in the last 200 years who is less vulnerable to blackmail. I mean, Trump, if Putin had on film, Trump's shooting a pregnant woman in broad daylight, half of Trump's base would say it's a deep fake. The other half would say she deserved it. Trump is un-blackmailable.

So this idea that somehow, ooh, yes, this is, or a financial impropriety, oh my goodness, he has evidence that Trump did something fiddled with his tax forms or something like that. And the other thing is somehow that they have this deep ideological bond and Trump identifies with Putin's critique of Western values. Because Trump is such a sincere, idealistic believer in morality, he's going to make realpolitik concessions to Putin because he's an idealist. I'm sorry if I disturb anybody's peace here.

Trump is not, of all the things that he is, a naive starstruck fanboy is the last thing Donald Trump is of anyone. So the entire establishment vision of Trump's approach to Russia, it's a manifestation. This reveals the astigmatism and astigmatism in the vision of the beholders. And you got to try to clear your eyes of this sort of thing to have the first. So every, you know, again, from Trump's point of view, you have this entire anguished press discussion. Well, why isn't he being anti-Russia? Is he being secretly pro-Russian in some way we can't say, well, all right, it's all about nothing. Nothing. Okay. I'm going to get to the Middle East in a moment, but these hot spots, since the threats that Israel's facing and what's going on in the Middle East is all connected to these different, you know, this axis of resistance and these broader, you know, Beijing and Moscow.

So I do want to ask you about Beijing. Have you been surprised about President Trump's tone about Xi, where it seems that he's more open to some kind of path to negotiation rather than confrontation so early in his administration? I'm not in the slightest surprised by that. Trump is all about deals, all about negotiations, and we've seen over and over and over again what Trump likes to do in a negotiation is a combination. First he gives you a picture of the absolute worst that could happen if you don't go along with, don't make the deal, then how fantastic the deal would be. And then he floods the zone with chaos and confusion.

That's his standard MO. All right, he's now doing it with China. I mean, why again, surprise, it just reveals him is that even though disguise been dominating global attention spans for a decade, a lot of us are still just so caught up in, you know, he is so different from conventional politicians that we have not yet kind of adjusted our methods of analysis to grasp this. but this is simply Trump being Trump. And by the way, you can't infer anything from this about what he will actually do,

say vis-a-vis tariffs with Beijing. I do think that if China and Trump had a common vision on how the Ukraine war should end, and then China used visible pressure on Russia to get Putin to sign up for that. I have no doubt that Trump would be willing to pay them and some coin or other for that service. But that's a very far, long path from where we are.

But it is a possible outcome. But that's Trump have Have 10,000 possible outcomes swirling in this huge cloud that makes it hard for other people to focus and act. Okay, one of the other things he does is he seems to float very provocative questions, topics that are verboten, like they're untouchable. You're not supposed to talk about them. The foreign policy establishment, it's settled. It's settled, you can't they're untouchable you're not supposed to talk about the foreign policy establishment just it's settled it's settled you can't talk about it you can't even have a serious conversation about it.

Any just raises these questions and you never really know what he serious about and what is not to your point so you know he talks about even before you sworn in this time he talked about the US taking over Greenland and Canada becoming the 51st state. Now those involved with his administration basically say yeah he's mischief making on Canada becoming the 51st state he's not really mischief making on Greenland like he's up to something on Greenland and now suddenly we'll see where it goes there's a real conversation about Greenland there were real foreign policy in the kind of intelligentsia discussions now about Greenland in a way that there wasn't before so first of all do you agree with that that he seems to have actually

sparked a more I mean who knows what will ultimately land with Greenland but the point is he sparked a conversation about Greenland that is getting a little more altitude than I would have expected. This is an example of Trump having a basic insight that is true, that is against the consensus, the very tired and stale consensus of the establishment, and then finding a variety of attention-grabbing ways of exploiting that gap and illustrating that gap.

Now the establishment, the foreign policy establishment and the kind of Atlanticist elite cannot get itself away from the idea that Europe is a dynamic force in international politics. Actually, in some ways, what we're looking at now is the wars of the European succession where Russia has grabbed the French Empire in Africa, Turkey appears to be grabbing the remains of what France once had in the Levant and is quite possibly going to be looking at the Balkans in the future. Russia is obviously grabbing for Ukraine and moving toward Belarus.

The sort of the institutional failures, economic drift and political incoherence of the European Union has created an empty space from a geopolitical point of view and nature abhors a vacuum. Now the Alanis is established for the Biden administration. Germany was our key ally followed only by Japan. Right.

And if you align with Germany, get things with right with Germany, NATO will go well, the transatlantic relationship will go well, the sort of Island of democratic peace that we're trying to consolidate will get deeper and expand. Biden will, I hope, will be the last president who thinks that, you know, that it's a kind of, it's something that might have been true a generation ago, but it's been getting less true ever since.

So Trump sees that, and that leads him to all kinds of things. One of them is European weakness is creating massive vulnerabilities around the Arctic that are of serious national security concern to the United States. All right, if we're counting on Denmark to protect us from Russia and China in Greenland, by the way, you know, as the climate is changing, as the Arctic is warming and becoming a more significant avenue for navigation and also the rare earth materials in Greenland and blah, blah, blah, there's a there there. The scarecrow of the power of the

European Union and a sort of undifferentiated Atlanticist West has lost its power to scare the birds of prey away. Meanwhile, there is this independence movement in Greenland and you think it doesn't have a big population. China and Russia have a lot of money to spend. Are we really prepared as a country to let sort of elections, skullduggery, bribery, who knows what, sort of as Greenland takes kind of an erratic future course. Is that actually something that we want? Now, the establishment can't see that there's a question until Trump asks it because it is so hooked into a vision of a dead world.

Trump gets it. Remember, he wants theater and theater that works for him. So you could make a speech about European weaknesses creating a range of security problems. No one cares. No one listens. But then when you see the Trump plane landing in Greenland. Yes. So that's political genius. And that's something that Kamala Harris in 10,000 years could not manage. Now, is it good policy? That's another question. But again, I would say right now at this stage in his presidency, Trump is much less concerned with sound policy than he is with establishing a solid picture of Trump as the commanding figure

in global and national politics. On this topic of questions, he's just, you know, floating. Like I said, the Greenland one, I don't think there's a serious debate in foreign policy circles about whether or not Canada should be the 51st state, but as I said, there is now, the question about Greenland is like a real thing.

And just in the last couple days, President Trump floated this idea, why can't Egypt and Jordan take a bunch of Palestinians while we've clean out, as he put it, clean out Gaza. I don't even know what he actually meant by that. Clean out Gaza. But for the longest time, I mean, Jordan is actually the population of Jordan is about 60% Palestinian. It is governed, as you know, by a minority monarchy,

the Hashemite kingdom. Egypt has moved every possible resource one could imagine to make sure Palestinians from Gaza don't get in into Egypt. Egypt is like definitely happy for the Palestinians to be Israel's problem and not Egypt's problem. And the conventional wisdom in Israeli foreign policy circles and US foreign policy circles vis-a-vis the Middle East for the longest time has been to just act like the Egyptian government is doing Israel in the US a favor simply by complying with the Camp David Egypt-Israel peace treaty. That that's all Egypt has as long as Egypt doesn't violate the peace

treaty the now four decade plus peace treaty you can't ask anything else of Egypt and let alone that it's all on Israel to make sure that there's not a security threat to Israel coming through the Egypt Gaza border that that's like Israel's problem it's not Egypt's problem and I think when Trump throws out this question why can't pass maybe Egypt should do its part create a zone take Palestinians why can't Jordan and heads are exploding in the Egyptian government leadership in the Jordanian government leadership they're calling Marco Rubio what's good if you want a Hamas government in Amman and you want a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt I

would suggest you do exactly that and move the Palestinians into both. That the reason that both the Egyptian and the Jordanian government don't want to do this is they are concerned with maintaining their own control over populations that is not necessarily that solid. And in both cases, it would be, either the Palestinians would make Jordan a Palestinian state, which some on the Israeli right like to think would be Valhalla. But in fact, would not necessarily redound enormously

to Israel's peace or security. And again, the natural thing in some ways that an Egyptian government might do is make a deal with Erdogan and Turkey and be sort of, you know, reopen to the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains the democratic Islamism in the Muslim Brotherhood mode is probably the strongest political current in the nation of Egypt. It would be immensely strengthened by receiving this group and you know so Israel would probably make all of its problems more alarming if this happened. So I don't think that what Trump is doing by

pulling that rabbit out of the hat is suggesting a miracle solution for Israel and it shows how much he really truly loves Israel down deep or that the Israeli right has So much to hope from them. I myself think that's just part of the cloud of uncertainty That Trump is creating. I mean he's withdrawing if you think about his gestures on the Middle East and then Mixing in with this is and here's two thousand pound000 pound bombs for Israel, and I like this, and I like that. So, at this point, I think the one thing you can say with any certainty is that no one

in Jerusalem, Riyadh, Amman, Tehran, or Cairo really knows what Donald Trump is going to do next. It's vitally important to all of them what he's going to do next. And so their attention is fixated on him. And they are all looking for ways they can influence him to move in directions that they think would be good for them. Again, this is Trump using political theater to, on the one hand, make himself magnify himself in American domestic politics. Look at old Biden. He couldn't get a peace agreement and he couldn't get anything done for years of dreary work

in the Middle East. I'm here for a week and I'm changing everything. So that theater is good for him. But also he's not committed himself to anything. Hasn't committed himself to one single thing, to one single person really, except the release of some weapons for Israel, which if anything, they just add to his bargaining power

vis-a-vis Iran because now Israel has these things. Who knows, will they use them, all right? I think he wants to be the master of all he surveys. This is his preferred method for achieving that result. So far, he's having a lot of success with it. Okay, I wanna ask you about, I just wanna drill down a little bit more on the region. Israel had up until six, seven weeks ago,

basically Russia and Iran on its border with Syria. Now it does not. It actually has potentially, we'll see, Turkey at least. And Neo-Al-Qaeda. And Neo-Al-Qaeda, thank you, on its border. First question is, what do you think the lessons are, just big, high-level lessons that we should all take away from the fall of the Assad regime in Syria?

Nothing lasts forever in the Middle East especially and that regime clearly rotted from within. It wasn't overpowering force and it's clear that the Syria that their enemies the internal militias and all were as surprised by the collapse of the regime as the regime was and by the collapse of the regime as the regime was. And that's very much a Saddam Hussein-like thing where the guys at the top have just been hearing yes, yes for so long. Everyone has gotten so corrupt and so cynical. The resources have been drained out. It's this imposing hollow shell of what used to be a real power. And then one day, you know, you just tap it and it crumbles to dust. I don't know if there are any real lessons to be learned from that. Well, Russia scattered.

Well again, Russia and Iran correctly I think understood in the face of this kind of collapse of a regime. Meaning the speed of it and the totality of it, yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit like the Afghan situation where it's just one province, one province, then another province, and you realize this thing that you've been pretending to yourself was a government that could actually go on fighting after you left was nothing of the kind. So I don't, again, I don't think there are lessons from that.

The real lesson for me is this, Israel has been largely victorious on every front since October 7. It has magnificently restored the reputation that had been endangered by the failures of October 7 for mastery of intelligence, for audacity, for determination to defend itself and its people, and for being enormously overshadowing even Iran in terms of technological accomplishment, all of these things.

It's been a brilliant victory. It doesn't have the same territorial extent maybe as the Six-Day War, but it shows a command, a military command equal to that. But that just simply gets us back to a very old problem for Israel, which is, it wins the war but cannot win peace. Napoleon once said, or maybe it was Talerion who said it to him, you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. In a sense, that remains Israel's problem.

That remains Israel's problem. Now, geopolitically, actually I think in some ways, what we're about to see is that the Middle East is not a problem to be solved, it is a condition to be lived with. And that for a long time, I think, there was the idea that, oh boy, if Iran could just be defeated, then peace would come. The Arabs are already coming to make peace with Israel.

So one last battle and we're kind of over the hill. But in fact, I think the defeat of Iran, the weakness of Iran, weakens the strategic case for the Abraham Accords among the Arabs. Because for the Arab Gulf states and all, there are basically two reasons for the Abraham Accords among the Arabs. Because for the Arab Gulf states and all, there are basically two reasons for the Abraham Accords. One is economics, and that remains, that economic technological cooperation with Israel and a climate of regional peace that encourages investment are both necessary for the kind of economic development that MBS and Mbz both see in slightly different

ways as necessary for the perpetuation of their regimes and for the well-being as they see it of their peoples. But the military side, that with America looking kind of weak and uncertain, Israel is the only power around that's really going to help you against this overwhelming threat from Iran, well, you're not worried about the overwhelming threat from Iran anymore. And you could, for example... Because of Israel's exposing it to be a paper tiger. Because Israel's success, yes.

Right. It's destroyed a lot of its power. Right. And when Iran looked very threatening, someone like MBS could say to the Sunni clerics in Saudi Arabia, now look, what Israel is doing to Palestinians is in Gaza is sad and bad and X and Y and Z, but the heretic Shia are a much greater threat to Islam and the holy places than Israel, which is after all a small country, could ever be. And so when I take these decisions to work with them in support against this common enemy of our religion, I can show you examples in the Koran and the Hadith of this kind of

strategic choice that the prophet himself made, etc., right? And that legitimized and to some degree decreased any kind of popular blowback from pro-Israel policies. But what we see now over the last year is because of the Gaza War and even the Lebanon War, the sort of public sentiment has tilted in most of the Arab countries harder. And you know, sort of the old wound has been inflamed and I can no longer make that only an alliance with the Zionist infidels can save us from the much greater threat of the Iranian mullahs. So we are now going to be in a new configuration.

And I think it's logical to think that in such a situation, a lot of the Arab rulers will find it more important to them than it was even in the recent past to look like they're helping the Palestinians, at least, in order to continue to justify what their continuing sense of their economic interests says needs to be a stable relationship with Israel. Now, we can already see perhaps the next turn of the wheel because Turkey's reentry into the Middle East and Turkey's new power in Syria, we'll see how that long that lasts, of course, but potentially creates an even graver security and ideological threat to the Gulf rulers than Iran did. That a kind of Muslim Brotherhood friendly Turkish Islamism sunny political movement can catch fire in the Gulf potentially in a way that anything kind of supported by Iran might not. Right, feeling that they might be overthrown or they feel more pressure to accommodate to these forces. So, if Turkey decides that what it now wants to do is to replace Iran as the aspirant for dominant power,

you know, it's kind of Neo-Ottoman time, right? Then one could see that again you'd see an Israeli Gulf Arab and conceivably weakened Iranian front against the Turkish attempt to establish a regional hegemony. But what I'm saying is this is a kaleidoscope. You turn the kaleidoscope, all the patterns rearrange, but it's still a kaleidoscope. You have not turned it into a liberal international order, and you're probably not going to. Right. So, you know, Tal Becker, who was recently on our podcast, made the point that we have this sense because Israel has had, quote unquote, relative peace, relative obviously, for the couple of decades, more or less. Obviously, it Obviously it had flare ups 2006 Lebanon war, the second Intifada,

but relative quiet, certainly relative to what it's experienced over the last year and a booming tech economy and a thriving country. And he kind of argued, that may have been the outlier. The reality is Israel's normal is turbulence on more than one border all at once and it's about managing the turbulence and that's the world Israel is in now. And January 19th, the first day of the implementation of the hostage deal, some may have said in Israel this is effectively the beginning of the end of the war. Another way to look at it is, is Amit Segal said to us, it's the end of this war, but there's always going to be another Gaza war. Don't kid yourself.

And God knows what's going to be happening on other borders. And Israel's job is to just be strong in deterring and removing threats, but keeping everything on a low boil. Yeah. And you know, trading a Hamas state in Gaza for a Hamas state in Jordan would not seem to me like necessarily the smartest trade someone could make. And ditto obviously in terms of Egypt, even greater.

So we can go back to sort of Herzl. I mean, one of the ironies to me of Herzl is he writes on the one hand that the Jews have been greatest friends of the European peoples. We've contributed to their economies, to their literature, to their culture, and we want really nothing more than to go on doing this, but they're hating and rejecting us. But then in his novel about the future Palestine, the Arabs say, why would we hate the Jews? They're helping our economy, they're helping our culture. Take a quick look at that, good doctor. I don't think You know, take a quick look at that, good doctor, you know? I don't think Zionism reframes the Jewish question, but it doesn't end the Jewish question.

And I don't mean that in any sort of negative way, but the problem is that Israel is able to surmount individual challenges, but the result is not an end to challenges. Israel is not, you know not marching toward utopia, one more battle and we get there. It's a condition of life. But that's not just true for Israel. The West thought, oh 1990, the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of history. Well, where are we all now? What are we looking at now? So, in that sense, Israel's dilemmas and its problems are fundamentally no different from anyone else's. We're living in a world that's getting more and more dangerous, where the conflicts that are inherent in human nature and human culture are continuing to boil and technological

innovation is both adding to the instability of societies and creating new security problems all the time, and we've all just got to kind of mush forward as best we can. So I do think that, again, to think of something Herzl said, they asked him, you know, what would keep the Jews from so many different cultures? There's so many different sects and beliefs among the Jews. How will they ever work together? And he said, it's the hatred of thes and beliefs among the Jews. How will they ever work together? And he said, it's the hatred of the others that will keep us united. And so during that long period of post-history in the Middle East when Israel was happy and all of this, I mean, Israeli society dissolved into an orgy of backbiting and factionalism.

And you began to wonder if the techie Israelis were all going to move to Silicon Valley and leave the sort of Orthodox and whatever Israelis there. And now the sort of rise of anti-Semitism outside of Israel is making what I think make it less exciting to move your kids, to send your kids to Columbia in the U.S. and at the same time, your sense of common danger is forcing you to figure out ways to work together in Israel. So it's a little bit like an accordion. When it comes in, you get one sound and when it goes out, you get another sound, but it's

all part of the same process. Walter, two questions before we let you go to class. One is, as it relates to this specific hostage deal and ceasefire, obviously we've been talking about a lot on this podcast, you told me offline that you didn't think it was that big a deal, meaning you thought it was a big deal inside Israel and for Israeli politics, but when you, as someone who takes a snapshot

of the bigger geopolitical picture, it's not that big a deal one way or the other. Can you explain what you mean? Well, let me just first double down on, you know, for the families of the hostages and their friends, huge deal. And for Israeli politics, again, where this has been just a sort of a lightning rod for a long time, it's a real event and people are focused on it rightfully, but it is in a sense, it's a domestic news story. Does this change Turkey's ambitions? Does it change Iran's situation?

Does it change anybody's thinking in Riyadh? I don't think, I think in all of those cases, the answer is no. Well, in Riyadh, they could presumably, if the Palestinian, some kind of Palestinian self-governance is a step for potential Israel-Saudi normalization, they can at least begin to see in this deal the beginning of what could be a resul, you know, winding down of the war. I'm skeptical, but I'm just saying. But look, I think again, you know, all of that depends on will Hamas retain enough sort of force and energy to frustrate

anything else being created in Gaza? Right. You know, so it becomes like the Palestinian authority, which is sort of forced to raise a constant low-level war that alienates its own people even when they don't like the faction that is being ward on, discredits them so that you don't really get in, you're just bleh. I think everybody already kind of thought that's what you were going to get. The idea that somehow at the end of the war there would be no Hamas forces that reject peaceful coexistence with Israel, that does not seem to me to be a realistic aspiration.

And I don't think it does to anybody in the regional capitals. So again, the question will be, can you come up with something that looks sort of like if you squint, you know, looks like a Palestinian entity that we can all sort of pretend. But that's what we've been doing with the Palestinian authority for 30 years. And unfortunately, again, what you have is the Palestinian movement in its core is not a

nation building or rather state building movement. It's a movement of resistance. And until that shift takes place among Palestinians and they see their aspirations primarily in political terms. Again, I'm thinking of the early Zionists, another hectare, another goat, we build the state one small brick at a time, but we're building a state. That's not what the PA really thinks. It's certainly not what Hamas thinks.

It's not the priority. What it is is we are saying no. We are keeping ourselves alive by keeping the fire of resistance alive. And as long as we do that, maybe we can't get, you know, we're going to live in hell, but the Israeli heaven will be less pleasant because of our resistance. And as long as that is the kind of psychological cast of not every Palestinian mind, there are plenty of Palestinians who have a, in my view, a much more constructive and positive view of the future. Israel is, you know, there's no basis for what's needed and how you get from here to there,

I, you know, it's very hard to see. All right, Walter, you leave us with a little bit of a cliffhanger. Thank you, we wish we could join you in your class there on campus. This was a great little sampling of what your students benefit from. So as always, thanks for being here.

It's good to see you, Dan. It always is. That's our show for today. You can head to our website, arcmedia.org. That's A-R-K arcmedia.org to sign up for updates, get in touch with us, access our transcripts, all of which have been hyperlinked to resources that we hope will enrich your understanding of the topics covered in the episodes on this podcast. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Alain Benatar, additional editing by Martin Tuergo. Rebecca Strom is our operations director, researched by Stav Slama and Gabe Silverstein, and our music was composed by Yuval Semo.

Until next time, I'm your host Dan Sinor.