Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - From Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houtis & beyond — with Bret Stephens

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, returns for a conversation analyzing how the October 7 War is expanding beyond just the Hamas-Israel. Bret came to The New York Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and, for 11 years, a foreign affairs columnist. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. And prior to working in Israel, he was based in Brussels for The Wall Street Journal. Today, Bret is also the editor-in-chief of Sapir Journal. You can find the Sapir Journal here: https://sapirjournal.org/

World War II really began as a sort of series of regional wars that accumulated like rainwater in different pools and eventually spilled into one another and became one in the same war. And I think we're witnessing a similar dynamic today. is that the war in which Israel is engaged with Gaza is probably better seen as a battle within a much larger war, just as, say, the theater in Africa or Europe or Asia or Russia were various theaters of the same proxy, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, on global commercial shipping, a number of major shipping companies have stopped using the Red Sea shipping route. This route links the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal. And shipping through this route accounts for approximately 15 to 20 percent of global shipping traffic, which means it has enormous implications for the global economy,

for global markets. And these disruptions are being caused by Iran via one of its proxies. Now, the U.S. response to the Houthis' attacks will for now be an escort mission, escorting those ships, making it harder for there to be direct attacks on them from the Houthi rebels. This decision was announced by the Biden administration by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin when he was in the Middle East last week. The escort mission, called Prosperity Guardian, will be run under the Combined Task Force 153, an existing multinational maritime security mission that has been in place for some time. Now, confirmed members of this new operation of Prosperity Guardian will include the United States, the UK, France, Italy, and a number of other European nations. The only Middle East participant that we know of is Bahrain. It sounds like a number of Middle East countries, specifically

Arab countries, are involved, but they have chosen to remain anonymous lest they escalate their own tensions with Iran. As I mentioned, the Houthis are proxies of Iran, and they have stated that they will attack all ships heading to Israeli ports, either directly on journeys that are currently ongoing or if they learn of ships that are destined for Israeli ports at a future time. motivations here? And how could the Houthis draw the U.S. into a direct confrontation? Is this an Iranian escalation via Iranian proxies on top of the strikes against U.S. military installations in the Middle East that have been going on now for some time? Where does all this fit into the Hamas-Israel war? And could this be one more accelerant in a potential outbreak of a regional war, or even something beyond just a regional war? These are some of the questions we have for our guest today, New York Times columnist Brett Stevens.

As listeners of this podcast know, Brett is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, and he joined the New York Times after a long career with the Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and for 11 years a foreign affairs columnist. Before that, Brett was editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post. He was based in Israel. In fact, he covered some critical years in a previous terror campaign against Israel. And prior to working in Israel, Brett was based in Brussels for the Wall Street Journal. In addition to his current role at the New York Times, Brett is also the editor-in-chief of Sapir Journal, a journal of Jewish ideas that I'm a subscriber to and I highly recommend. We'll include the link to it in the show notes. Brett Stevens, from Hamas to Hezbollah

to the Houthis and beyond. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast my friend Brett Stevens from the New York Times, who was actually one of the first reporters, columnists to travel to Israel that I know from the U.S. after October 7th, and has been writing extensively about the war. Brett, thanks for being here. It's always a pleasure, Dan. So Brett, I want to start, given events in recent days with Defense Secretary Austin's announcement about U.S. policy and the policy of a number of other governments that we'll get into

as it relates to shipping in the Red Sea. I want to get into that in a moment, but before we do, I just want to get a better understanding of the bigger picture at play here. We hear a lot about, in the couple of years since the Russia-Ukraine war began, it was very much framed as Russia versus the West. It was Russia versus Ukraine, yes, but also all of or most of Europe and the United States and North America. And it really did have that Cold War layer up that we experienced during the Cold War, but it was basically had that frame to it, that it was a Cold War dynamic where you really knew who was against one another and Ukraine was the battlefield. I guess my first question is, should we think of the Israel-Hamas

war in the same way? Because yes, from time to time, we hear about China's role, the side China's taking, we hear Russia's role, the side Russia's taking, we obviously know where Iran is, but it's not framed up typically in the popular press in the same way we were thought to think of Biden versus Putin over Ukraine. It doesn't have that sense of like Biden versus the Ayatollahs in Tehran over the Gaza-Israel border. So is it that comparable? I think it's increasingly clear that the free world, which includes the United States and Israel and our allies in Ukraine, are in the process of becoming engaged in a single world war against what you might call the axis of resistance. That is to say there is a shared ideology between Vladimir Putin and the Ayatollah Khamenei, and Yaya Sinwar, and Xi Jinping in China, and Kim Jong-un in North

Korea. You can mention a few other people. They share a common hatred of the West, a common hatred of the United States and Israel, a common loathing of free and open societies. And they are increasingly in a tighter alliance with one another. So Russia invades Ukraine and hits cities like Kiev and Odessa using Iranian-made drones. They're now obtaining munitions from North Korea and most likely electronic components from China. The Israelis are probably asking themselves just where Hamas was able to obtain some of its sophisticated tunneling equipment, which allowed them to make these very large tunnels. The Chinese are supplying and have supplied Iran with Silkware missiles, which 15 years ago, one of which hit an Israeli ship. So I wrote in February, March of 2022, called This Is How World War III Begins. And I pointed out that if you sort of try to date the beginning of World War II, it's not that easy because, you know, Americans date it from December 7th, 1941.

The Europeans date it from September 1st, 1939. You might say that in Asia, it goes back all the way to Japan's invasion of Manchuria and then much of the rest of China throughout the 1930s. And so World War II really began as a sort of series of regional wars that accumulated like rainwater in different pools and eventually spilled into one another and became one in the same war. And I think we're witnessing a similar dynamic today. So the larger picture here is that the war in which Israel's engaged with Gaza is probably better seen as a battle within a much larger war, just as, say, the theater in Africa or Europe or Asia or Russia were various theaters of the same war in the Second World War. Okay, so now let's talk about some of these players and these different actors in the Middle East theater. We have been very focused on Israel and Hamas. There are obviously some

other actors in that particular, that narrow theater, you know, Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But if you were just to raise the lens a little bit above the Israel-Gaza border, maybe just spend a minute on Hezbollah, because then I want to talk about the Houthis and how they are just like another version of Hezbollah. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, various militias in Iraq, you might say even the Bashar Assad regime in Syria, are all cat's paws of Iranian power. Hezbollah has been around now perhaps the longest in that it really was formed in the early 1980s during Israel's invasion of Lebanon to get rid of the PLO, and the first group, Shiite terrorist group, to form a militia that became an army, that became a state within a state, that became the state itself in Lebanon.

And it's probably the most formidable of the armies, essentially Iranian armies, whatever the names they're under, that Israel faces on its immediate borders. My guess is that as soon as the war in Gaza is done, whether that takes a month or many months, Israel will very likely find itself at war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, too. So this is going to go on, I suspect, for a very long time, and that war, too, will involve powers outside of Lebanon itself. Okay, so now talk to me about Yemen and the Houthis. What's been happening in Yemen? Where do the Houthis fit into it? And why are the Houthis, you know, mucking around outside their borders rather than just putting pressure on their own government inside Yemen? The Houthis took de facto control of much of Yemen,

particularly around the capital Sana'a. Now going on, it's been several years since they've been in control. They're a Shiite militia, armed and largely controlled, as Hezbollah is, by Tehran. And because of Yemen's strategic position at the southern end of the Red Sea, they're able to do a lot of harm beyond, you know, this dusty, faraway country on the Arabian Peninsula. They're in the process of massively disrupting world trade with their drone and missile strikes or attempted strikes on commercial shipping and American naval ships and other naval ships that are trying to defend that shipping.

So you believe that the Houthis and Hezbollah do not act without Iran's blessing or without its direct instruction. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, it's always hard to say because all of these groups have a certain amount of freedom of action. And there's an interest in Iran in giving them that freedom of action because it gives the Iranians some measure of plausible deniability. By the way, I think the same is true of Hamas. But I don't think any of these groups take major steps, certainly not against Western shipping, without both the knowledge of and the assent of people in Tehran. And do you believe that Iran wants to cause trouble for the West and Israel and the U.S., but probably doesn't want to find itself under siege in a full-out war from the U.S. and the West.

I think that's exactly right. And this has always served Iran's purposes, which is to have these other groups with which it is closely aligned, which we know it often all but controls. But being able to say, well, that's Hezbollah, not Iran. Those are the Houthis, not Iran. This is this or that militia, you and I discussed offline, which is how one of these moves by one of these proxy groups could go wrong? And if it went wrong, suddenly we are in a much bigger regional war or even some kind of world war. I'm not holding you to this, but I just think like the 9-11 commission report said that, you know, went through all the, it chronicled all the failures in our interagency process and our bureaucracy, our national security bureaucracy for what led to 9-11. But the commission said, but the greatest failure of all was a failure of imagination. So let's use our imagination here. What is a scenario where all of a sudden one of these proxies makes a move back by Tehran, and it's like, oh no, they went too far, or they misfired, or they got themselves in a jam that makes it

impossible to avoid massive escalation. Well, let's imagine Hezbollah, which has been regularly firing into Israel since the beginning of this war in October, let's just suppose for a second that one of Hezbollah's rockets falls squarely on a primary school in northern Israel, or hits a hospital, or hits a popular falafel shop when 30 children happen to be there. That's the beginning of the second front. Let's imagine similarly that the Houthis actually succeed not only in hitting a major commercial shipping and sinking a large cargo ship, but put a giant hole in the side of an American destroyer, as al-Qaeda did with the USS Cole back in October of 2000, in the waning days of the Clinton administration. And you have 35 American sailors who are dead and a sense of national humiliation. I don't know if

those are things that from an Iranian perspective are going wrong, but you can quickly see then that the United States, in the case of the Houthis and the shipping scenario, could resort to some tit-for-tat reprisal without fear of not only looking weak, but of being weak. And similarly with Israel, the Israelis have been thinking about this northern front for a while and may feel that there's a certain advantage in taking on Hezbollah sooner rather than later. But it's very easy to see how these things spiral out of control. part because of one lucky shot from one radical Serbian nationalist that first involved Serbia and Austria-Hungary, and then Germany and Russia and France and Great Britain, and ultimately the United States. So there is a kind of butterfly flapping its wings effect in any scenario like this. A lot of things are connected. Or maybe I should say the better metaphor isn't a butterfly

flapping its wings. The better metaphor is a cigarette butt in a stalk of dry grass. Do you agree that Iran's paramount project is its nuclear weaponization program? Well, Iran's paramount project is de facto control of the Middle East, of the Muslim world. And the nuclear project is a piece of that, but it's only one piece of that. I think one of the things that's happening with the Houthis is that Iran, with some justification, because it understands how unpopular the burgeoning alliance between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors was with the people of those neighbors, I think they're trying to stir the pot in Saudi Arabia. I think they're trying to create domestic political discontents in Jordan and Egypt and other US allied Arab regimes. They have multiple ambitions. And what the Iranians have

discovered, this regime has discovered, and kind of knew from the very beginning, ever since it took control in the 1970s, is that the United States is never a particularly serious opponent. I mean, the only time they really feared the Americans was in the later years of the Reagan administration, when the Reagan administration effectively sank the Iranian Navy. And it was that action, along with, paradoxically, the accidental downing of an Iranian civilian jetliner that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to agree to essentially peace or an end to the Iran-Iraq war. But the Iranians have rarely found in America an opponent that they respect. I guess the other example is when General Petraeus went seriously after Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and then again in 2000 when the Trump administration killed

Qasem Soleimani. But those are just a handful of examples against a backdrop of persistent American weakness when it came to confronting Tehran. Late last winter, early spring, much was made of the rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran, and they agreed to some form of detente orchestrated by Beijing. So was that completely overstated at the time, the significance of it? Because what you're describing right now is a world in which Iran is still trying to weaken Saudi Arabia in the region. I always thought it was overstated. I said so at the time. I mean, I think what Iran and Saudi Arabia were looking for was something amounting to a temporary truce. The Iranians wanted the

Saudis to stop supporting the women's revolution, the protest activity in Iran. And the Saudis wanted the Iranians to get the Houthis to stop firing missiles at Saudi Arabia. And that's what they got. This has happened periodically over the course of relations between Riyadh and Tehran since 1979, periods of intense and open hostility, followed by periods of quiet. And I think the period of quiet is now probably coming to an end. You have been, Brett, as have I, full disclosure, have been generally impressed and pleasantly, perhaps surprised, positive about the Biden administration's response to October 7th. Do you extend that to how they're dealing with Iran and where Iran fits into all of this?

I guess the question is, is compared to what, right? I'm generally pleased that number one, President Biden found and expressed strong moral voice when he came to denouncing Hamas after October 7th and providing Israel with tremendous amount of military strategic, diplomatic and rhetorical support, whether it was at the United Nations, whether it was sending the Ford carrier group to deter a potential attack from Hezbollah. I think the performance has been admirable. Then I asked myself, well, compared to President Obama, has he performed better? Yes, absolutely. I think back at the way the Obama administration acted in 2014 during one of the conflagrations between Israel and Hamas and questions about whether the U.S. would even provide Israel with certain kinds of munitions, which they wanted.

Biden's better than that. I think back to the Bush administration and its performance in 2006 during Israel's 34-day war. Exactly, 34 days. 34 days until Israel bombed a building somewhere in Lebanon, the administration. Right. And that was supposedly the super pro-Israel Bush administration. So I think compared to those precedents, the administration has done really well. And Joe Biden, I heard this somewhere, said, never crucify yourself on a small cross, crucify yourself on a big cross. He is paying a

political price among progressives and Democrats for his support for Israel. And the fact that he's willing to do it, I think speaks very well of him. You know, I'm a critic of him in many respects. But I think being a mindless critic of any American administration is wrong and foolish. And I want to give praise where it's due. And in this case, on the whole, I think the administration has performed well. So given the intellectual honesty with which you are coming out on Israel-Gaza, what would you prescribe that he do differently on Iran? I take your point that, you know, it's the whole compared to who, but if this thing could escalate the way we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, and you're advising the administration,

you would say do what as it relates to Iran? The administration came into office, I think, with a bad concept, which was bad, both in the sense that it was strategically mistaken and diplomatically misjudged, which was the idea that they could quickly go back to the Iran nuclear deal, and that the Iranians would welcome it. And we know that that concept of on their part failed, they tried very hard. And it failed just because the Iranians weren't prepared to play ball at all. There was no longer, stronger deal, as Tony Blinken used to say. After that, they didn't really have a concept. I think their idea was the world is on fire.

And let's just try to make sure that that fire doesn't spread, at least quite yet, to Iran. That may not be an option for them now. My advice to them is if Iran or the Houthis or their proxies continue to strike American assets in the region, we should strike Iranian assets very directly in Iran itself. And by this, I mean their naval facilities in Bandar Abbas and other ports to send some kind of unmistakable signal that the United States is not afraid to hurt Iran very, very hard in order to force them to change their tactics. The other thing is it also sends a very useful signal that successive administrations mean what they say when they insist that they will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. So far, we have never hit the Iranian mainland. We've dealt with their proxies, whether in Syria or Iraq. My argument is that should change. Do you think it will? Knowing this administration, knowing their instincts,

heading into 2024, days after this conversation is posted, we will officially be in an election year. All signs have been, by my lights, that the Biden administration just wants to bring down the temperature in the Middle East. They do not want something approximating the Yom Kippur War of 1973 that really could have sprung into something much bigger. And even as much as it expanded and escalated, it still had massive implications for the global economy. And as we discussed Cold War implications, it seems like that's the last thing the administration is going to do, is attack Iran.

I've been surprised in a good way on the upside by some of what this administration has done, particularly support for Ukraine. Never enough in my view, but I'm kind of a maximalist by nature. So is it likely? I don't know. I just don't want to rule it out. And I'd like to think that this administration will try to do the right thing. I know that sounds naive and simplistic, but what else can I do except urge administration figures to take the threat of Iran seriously and to get ahead of the threat before it gets ahead of us. Okay, I now want to switch gears. I have two other quick topics I want to hit. One is your recent columns in the Times. You had one, these are all post-October 7th, you had one,

it was sort of like a Q&A on understanding anti-Semitism. You had another one on the testimony of the college presidents and what the big takeaway from that was. And then you had one on what seemed like a two-month between October 7th and when the UN and the UN agency that deals with women's issues and the major women's organizations finally addressed the issue of rape as a tool of war on October 7th. And God forbid, but increasingly likely in terms of what we're learning since October 7th. The theme I see in all of these between what's happening on the college campuses, what happened to the UN Women's Agency, the area you focused on is the double standard. That's the common thread here, is that somehow what happens to Israel or the way Jews are treated is simply just held to a different

standard than we hold anyone else. Is it speech on campus? Double standard. Is it Jewish women being raped? Double standard. It's like almost insert your issue. It's one's criticism of Israel's response to October 7th. We hold Israel to a standard that's different than any other country in the world. That is the thread. I'm not saying there's a formula in your writing, but there's a formula to this post-October 7th world, and it's obviously not just about post-October 7th where you can just insert any issue. Well, because the double standard is at the very heart of antisemitism. What is permitted to other people is not permitted to Jews. That has been a story that goes back not centuries, it goes back millennia. It's how you notice anti-Semitism.

I mean, any other country hit as horribly as Israel was hit on October 7th would be expected to retaliate in the most powerful and uncompromising and unequivocal way possible. That's what the United States did after, proportionally speaking, a much smaller attack on September 11th, 2001. That's the way we responded to ISIS. You know, I was just watching the other day, this extraordinary Netflix documentary about the November 13th, 2015 attacks in Paris, on the Bataclan Theater Concert Hall, Stade de France in Paris. A little more, I think about 130 or 140 people were killed in that attack. Well, France, along with the United States and Britain, has been bombing the hell out of ISIS positions in Syria and Iraq for many years ever since then. When was the last time you saw reporters trying to figure out what the

civilian casualty count is in those attacks? Of course, we just don't do it because we just assume that, rightly assume that any action that's carried out to destroy, eliminate, erase ISIS is justified. And yet when Israel is trying to do exactly the same thing against an equally barbaric enemy in Hamas. The standard is completely different. Then the world suddenly cares very much about civilian casualties. So I've been pressing this theme because the hypocrisy and the odiousness of the position just is so glaring and so overwhelming. I've just recently, I read when it came out, and then I've just been dipping in and out of it again, Michael Gordon's book, Degrade and Destroy, which is his book about war against ISIS, the multi-year war from the Obama administration through the Trump administration. And you read

that book, and I know Michael from when he covered the Iraq war. I mean, he's a very thorough military journalist, military correspondent. You realize the extent of the, rightfully so, the damage the U.S. did to our enemies and anyone surrounding our enemies and anyone living anywhere near our enemies, and you didn't hear a thing about it. And absolutely rightly so, because ISIS is the apotheosis of evil. But when Israel tries to defend itself, and by the way, not defend some distant interests of it, or some outposts of Israeli power, but defend its very people, its women, its children, its elderly, then everything it does is a war crime. I would love these people who are telling

us how Israel has to show restraint to explain precisely how they intend to disarm Hamas, free the hostages, and end the threat to Israel's southern front. They never have any answers. It's just some kind of vague comment that they wish war could be conducted more politely. You know, you should also read another book, you should read Ian Kershaw's history, I think it's called Downfall of the End of the Third Reich. And what the allies were prepared to do to Germany in order to end the calamity of that regime. If the standard that were applied to Israel had been applied to the Allies during World War II, then by 1942, 1943, when some rough equilibrium had

been established between the Allies and the Axis powers, we would have called it a day because of moral scruples out of hurting innocent German civilians in the course of bringing down the Third Reich. But we call World War II the Good War for a good reason, which is that the Good War ended a regime that was a byword for evil. And Israel, in my view, is engaged in a good war to end another regime that's a byword for evil. relevant to this moment. Before I move off this, Brett, you told me when you were in Israel, soon after you got back, that you went down south. You were there soon after October 7th. You went to those southern communities. You compared it to images and the history of the worst period of the Holocaust, perhaps not on the same scale, obviously. Thank God. But the level of dehumanization and barbarism that was involved, you, I mean, I think you

even said it felt to you as an observer, perhaps even worse. Well, I don't want to say worse, because nothing in history is comparable to what happened in Thank God. But I would say that what happened on October 7th was at that level of barbarism and cruelty. And the site of the incinerated homes in the Kibbutzim on the Gaza envelope, that smell of ash recalled Auschwitz. Quantities of blood on the ground recalled the killing of the Einsatzgruppen, Bobby Yar, and other early sites of mass killing and extermination in the early phases of the Holocaust itself. And the historical parallels seem to me quite exact. Completely switching topics to a much more,

perhaps, intellectually optimistic, upbeat, gratifying topic as people are looking for books and essays to read over the holidays. You have a new issue out of Sapir on a topic that is, in a sense, completely divorced from the ugliness of this war. You dedicated an issue of Sapir, and I talked a little bit about Sapir in the introduction to this conversation. I'm a big fan. I'm a subscriber. It's an issue about tech and about Jews and technology, but not in the Startup Nation way, more or less. But you tackle tech from a different perspective. Can you explain why? As a matter of fact, the essay was conceived in the spring of this year. It was executed largely in the late summer, and it was scheduled

to be published in mid-October. And then, of course, the war intervened, and the issue seemed very much off-topic, although we had an extraordinary collection of essays from some very distinguished thinkers. And so what we really did is we held the issue, we changed some of the pieces, or unfortunately had to kill a few of the pieces to take account of the new reality. Full disclosure, mine was spiked. Yours was spiked, but we'll get you back in our pages. Don't worry. Don't worry. It's a good piece to live for another day.

Believe me, there were others too. I believe it. I'm sure I was in good company. I've got thick skin. Look, if National Geographic had a whole issue scheduled for January of 1942 about the marvels of vacationing in the Philippines, then they would rightfully postpone that issue. So that's what we did. We postponed it, but we decided we had wonderful material. And look, the issue of technology in the Jews is important because it involves not just technical questions. It involves a series of profound moral questions that have always engaged Jewish life. For starters, how should Jews deal

with technology? What is it about Jewish ethics that makes it distinct in the way it thinks about the devices we increasingly hold in our hands or the little things we have in our ears and so on? How should Jews engage with artificial intelligence? We write quite a bit about that. I wrote an essay about Abraham Lincoln and his thinking about Hebrew scripture in terms of dealing with the technological challenges of his own day, particularly the cotton gin, which had made slavery profitable and was threatening the very foundations of a free republic. So there's just a tremendous amount of quality material. I think it's about 140 pages.

And it can make for an extremely pleasant distraction for a weekend or so to remind ourselves that even in the midst of the war that the Jewish people now are dealing with and the surge in anti-Semitism, we still have great challenges and issues that engage us, but not only us, and that we can provide some original thinking about. And so that's what we've tried to do. It's a great issue. I'll make a plug here for my friend Daniel Bonner's book piece about Jews and books. Yeah, that's a technology too, believe it or not.

He says, when Jews are persecuted, so are their books. When Jews thrive, so do their books. Yeah, that's a technology too, believe it or not. He says, when Jews are persecuted, so are their books. When Jews thrive, so do their books. They are fellow travelers on the epic journey of Jewish civilization. Well, I mean, the book, the ability to compile knowledge on sheets of paper was the great technological innovation of the 15th century. And I guess before that, you could go to vellum. All right, Brett, we will leave it there. Thank you for doing this, as always, and we will be checking with you soon.

My pleasure. Always good, and see you in 2024. It will be an eventful year, for better or for worse. Yes, an interesting year in a Chinese sense. Yeah. All right, Thank you. That's our show for today. To keep up with Brett Stevens' work, you can find it at nytimes.com, and you should also go to sapirjournal.org. We'll put the link to Sapir Journal in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Seel.