Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Putin's Panic Surge? With Richard Fontaine

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Vladamir Putin has announced what he called a “partial mobilization” of up to 300,000 reservists. According to reports, these reservists are basically former conscripts that will need training. Meanwhile, commercial flights out of Russia are apparently selling out, fast. The Russian Duma, on the other hand, is passing a law to clamp down on anyone evading their military service. And then there was Putin’s seeming dangling of the nuclear threat again. All against the backdrop of the Kremlin organizing referenda on whether four occupied regions in Ukraine should fall under Russian sovereignty. And how do we assess US military support for Ukraine? Richard Fontaine is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), bi-partisan foriegn policy think tank in Washington, DC. Prior to CNAS, he was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department, the National Security Council, and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He serves on the Biden administration’s Defense Policy Board – which advises the Pentagon. Richard is also just back from a trip to the Middle East – so we also talk at the end about the two-year anniversary of the Abraham Accords (a topic we’ll be returning to from time to time on this podcast) and also the status of the Iran deal negotiations.

The next big shoe to drop would be not a partial mobilization where you call up the reserves, but a full mobilization where you forcibly conscript individuals and send them into Ukraine. That is about as politically unpalatable a move as one could get. So this intermediate move is where they are now. Vladimir Putin has announced what he called a partial mobilization of up to 300,000 reservists. According to reports, these reservists are basically former conscripts that will need training. They're not ready to be immediately deployed to the front lines. Meanwhile, commercial flights out of Russia are apparently selling out fast. We did a quick search for economy tickets from Moscow to London

and could only find an Azerbaijan Airlines flight with three layovers, costing $4,500 per ticket. I guess that's good news for Azerbaijan Airlines. The Russian Duma, on the other hand, is passing a law to clamp down on anyone evading their military service. None of this, of course, is exactly a position of strength. However, there was Putin's seeming dangling of the nuclear threat again, all against the backdrop of the Kremlin organizing referenda on whether four occupied regions in Ukraine should now fall under Russian sovereignty. One recent historical note, using a similar mechanism, Russia annexed Crimea back in 2014. And how do we assess U.S. military support for Ukraine? While we can debate whether

it took too long to ramp up, it did. U.S. efforts also now seem to be making a real impact. Lots of questions today, so we called up one of our go-tos, Richard Fontaine. Richard is the CEO of the Center for New American Security, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C., where I am right now. And prior to CNAS, he was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department, the National Security Council, and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also currently serves on the Biden administration's Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon. Richard is also just back from a trip to the Middle East, so we'll also talk to him about the two-year

anniversary of the Abraham Accords, a topic we'll be returning to from time to time on this podcast, and also the status of the Iran deal negotiations. Lots to unpack. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast my friend and another fan favorite. We've been recently having a lot of fan favorites on, Mike Murphy and Mohamed El-Erian. And Richard Fontaine is one of those fan favorites. Richard, thanks for joining us. It's so nice to be a fan favorite, so I appreciate the opportunity to become one. But you were like, most fan favorites don't ghost me.

You were like busy bouncing around the Middle East, and I tried to get you on, and you kind of went dark on me, and I got a little freaked out. Look, even big podcast stars have got other obligations that they have to fulfill, and you, of all people should understand of course of course i know next time i i got your agent's request next time you want the trailer you want catering before you want you know i got the the triple you know latte

cappuccino i got the whole only green m&ms in the bowl please yeah yeah soy milk not almond milk okay um all right so richard i want to talk about your trip to israel because normally when we have you on this podcast it's all about bad news and you actually have some good news uh from your from your trip to the middle east which we'll get to but it would be um unfitting to start a conversation with you even if we have good news to start with the good news so i want to start with the bad news maybe it's not bad news but um complicated news in the world which is uh news that just broke about uh vladimir vladimir putin saying that he and his government are calling up 300 000

reservists uh to conscripts to serve uh it sounds like on the front lines, even though they're not really saying it's the front lines, in Russia's war with Ukraine. Before we get to the news of the call-up, before you knew of the news of the call-up and given your role with the Defense Policy Board and other projects, you may have had a sense something like this was coming, but let's just pretend you didn't know this was coming. Where did you think things stood with Russia-Ukraine over the last couple of weeks? Because there's been a lot of excitement in the press coverage of Russia-Ukraine. I'm pleased that there's press coverage again. There's sort of like a dark period on press coverage or a blackout.

And now there's coverage again. It was a lot of excitement that Ukraine was on the march. So how did you evaluate things before Putin's latest move? Well, Ukraine was on the march, has been on the march for the last couple of weeks. You know, they had tried to make progress down in the south uh around kersan and uh which had been a pretty heavily fortified area and the ukrainians have been trying to break through there and so they made this move a couple of weeks ago at the in the north and i think the ukrainians probably thought well this might be something of a feint. It may draw some Russian troops away from there,

from the south, where the real action is. And when those Ukrainian troops started pressing on the Russian line, it collapsed. And next thing you know, they were liberating villages that had been in the possession of the Russians for months and have something akin to an additional thousand square miles than they had just a few weeks ago under Ukrainian possession. And so this really is a major setback for the Russians. It also cuts off part of their force down in the south from easy resupply. And a lot of the supply lines that would have to cross water and stuff have become very tenuous. So I think what we heard out of Putin with respect to the 300,000 call up and other things he said too is an admission that the Russians are not doing well in this war. And just so we have the numbers in proper context, the estimates are that they're approximately, it's hard to know because you don't know what Russia is using in terms of private security forces and other non-conventional forces he has access to.

But is it understood that he has about 200,000, Russia has about 200,000 troops in Ukraine fighting this war? Okay. So this bringing, you know, going up, calling up 300,000 personnel is big. It's not like incremental. It's a whole other, it's a whole other step level. It's, it's, it is not a cure-all certainly. And I don't know that it's going to turn the war around in Russia's favor. But by the same token, you can't just dismiss the calling up of 300000 personnel who, according to what they've announced, would come in with military experience.

So it's a sign both of the poor state of the of affairs for the Russians, but also kind of what they've got back that they could throw at the fight. It's also worth noting that in Putin's announcement, so you had the news about the 300,000 reservists that would be called up, but you also had the announcement of the referendums in the four areas. Right. So let's talk about that. So why don't you explain what that's about? Well, so the Russians had had a presence in Luhansk and Donetsk, the Donbass region, even before this war started, which they've expanded. And before the war began- And some of that goes back to 2014? Yeah. And so the proxy war that they had been prosecuting in the East after the seizure of Crimea. And the Russians at the beginning of the war essentially recognized the independence, the Duma recognized the independence of the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics.

You know, they were alone in doing so, really. But this was, they were attempting to sort of formally disunify Ukraine and detach those territories. They've also made a move on Kherson and one other area in the south, and now are occupying those areas. And so what they have announced is that they will hold, perhaps as soon as Friday of this week, referendums in each of those four areas where the population under military occupation by the Russians, of course, can vote whether to be part of Russia or not. And I wouldn't stay up too late watching the returns on that one. I don't think that John King... John King up there with his man. Yeah, I don't know where the big screen is a nail biter, demand a recount kind of thing. I think we can be pretty sure the way that these referendums are going to go, that there are potential implications for this. I mean, one, if after this, the Russians then consider the Russian territories, they're currently being attacked by the Ukrainians, then they may say, well, we're being attacked not

only in the areas we're fighting in Ukraine, but on Russia proper soil. So that's one. And then presumably they could also do things that they, they've said, for example, that they wouldn't use conscripts in Ukraine, although they actually have, that they could move conscripts around into what is, what would then be considered in their minds, Russian territory. So there's some kind of practical potential implications for the sham referendums that they're about to hold. But again, I think that that's a, it's an illustration of things not going the Russian way, and I'm trying to shake things up. And then the third piece of what Putin had to say was on the nuclear saber rattling, which he hadn't heard since the beginning of the war and sort of making these not very

veiled threats. And yeah, let me just quote him for those who didn't read about this. He talked about Russia being subjected to, quote, nuclear blackmail. And then he said to those, I'm quoting the translation here, to those who allow themselves such statements about Russia, I want to remind you that our country, Russia, also has various means of destruction, and some components are more modern than those of the NATO countries, close quotes. That's Putin basically saying, you, the West West have subjected me to nuclear blackmail. I'm telling you, I've got these kinds of toys, too.

And we've got toys that the NATO countries don't have. So everybody better be careful. Right. And I can imagine post sham referendums, the Russians saying, well, this is Russian territory now that is being attacked by Ukraine with Western, including American weapons. And if you're going to attack Russian territory, who knows what might happen? Now, the most observers, including the Ukrainians, and I think the American side aren't taking the nuclear threats terribly seriously. We're not seeing anything move or any sort of actions happening. But this combination of call up reservists, referendums on the ground, nuclear stable rattling for the first time in six months or so, I think shows a couple of things.

One, Putin clearly understands that the war has not been going his way and that he's been losing. He has to do something to shake up the trajectory. And then two, that, you know, he's very far from saying, oh, this has all been a lost cause. I never should have done this in the first place. This is a doubling down on keeping this war going into the indefinite future. So, you know, heading into the winter, it's going to be a particularly critical time. So on the nuclear threat, many, many analysts have argued that there is a danger that the longer this goes on, Kissinger has made this point, that the longer this goes on, regardless of what one thinks about who's at fault here, the longer this goes on, the risk of mistakes goes up. And, you know, mistakes can lead to like major escalation. So even if we think that Putin won't ultimately, even if Western intelligence doesn't believe or isn't seeing any signs that Putin is

serious about some kind of nuclear escalation, do you worry at all that this thing drags out? He gets a little desperate, and, you know, obviously tensions are high, and then you can get, like, this, you know, pre-World War I, you know, trip into a whole other escalation of war than anyone is kind of gamed out what this could look like otherwise. Well, the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon is very low, but it's higher than it was before the war started. And statements like that suggest that it's higher than we would ever be comfortable with. And this is one of these classic low probability, very high consequence events. And so while I think it's very unlikely

that that would actually happen, if it did, we would be in a new era of world history and of potential human destruction. russian's conventional capability is so hollowed out so destroyed so ineffective that it that putin feels necessary to rely only on the high end of the low end of his capabilities the high end being nuclear signaling god forbid even potential nuclear use are on the low end the kind of asymmetric capabilities he has on cyber and special operations forces and information intelligence operations and things like that because the conventional stuff in Ukraine is just not very effective. So yeah, I think you've got to worry about both ends of that. And I just think for too long, there's been too much of playing down what Putin might do based on, you know, oh, he wouldn't do that. I mean, that would be really crazy. He's far too shrewd. And when in reality, he typically broadcasts what he's going to do before he does it.

I mean, right down to that 7,000 word or whatever it was, 5,000 word piece he wrote. When was it? Last summer, I think. Yeah, last June. Well, a year ago. Yeah, so I mean, a year ago where he basically, it was clear in retrospect when you read that, that he was going to go into Ukraine. And I mean, just, you know, in the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine, I mean, he was just broadcasting all this thought that diplomacy was going to slow him down.

It was just so clear that he was going no matter what. And there are other moments in the last couple of decades where we've seen that. So, again, I don't want to like, um, overreact to the speech today on the one hand, on the other hand, if he has a pattern of, of firing up the bat signal, uh, when he's about to do something, him invoking a nuclear threat as, as concretely as he did is pretty unnerving. It is. I mean, anyone who is really threatening the use of nuclear weapons has to be taken seriously to some extent. If we start seeing things moving,

deployment orders given, weapons moving, nuclear units moving, platforms moving, then I think you would see an extreme sense of alarm by everyone who is in on that. I mean, President Biden gave an address at the UN today, part of the UN General Assembly speeches. It was a good speech, and he talked about the gravity of the situation in Russia and Ukraine and why the implications of what happens there go well beyond Ukraine and also confronted kind of head on this idea that Russia is threatening countries with nuclear war.

And I think their hope is that to the degree to which their countries that are sort of in the middle kind of, you know, see how this goes, but they haven't really kind of picked sides, whether it's on the sanctions or even the diplomatic isolation. This helps to nudge some of those undecided countries a little bit more toward the, you know, but both the Chinese and the Indians just in the past couple of days over in Uzbekistan when they had the Shanghai Cooperation Organization did not have nice things to say in the meetings with Putin about the war in Ukraine. So it's kind of rattling them. Do you, it seemed that when the war began, there was a lot of coverage and analysis about how Putin intended to really keep this war far from civilian daily life in Russia and not to really disrupt civilian daily life in Russia. Obviously, the economic pressure on Russia has been considerable, so much for keeping Russians totally protected from it in their daily lives. And then you have this situation where 300,000 Russians are called up.

That was apparently never part of the plan. And I just saw some coverage today that every one-way flight out of Russia is sold out suddenly. And there's all these Russians who are scattering to try to get out of Dodge, and they can't. I mean, how sustainable is that from Putin in terms of his management of domestic affairs when he launches a war that he intends not to disrupt daily Russian life, and the economy's under enormous pressure, Russians are trying to leave, it sounds like they're kind of not letting Russians leave. 300,000 could easily lead to even more. Once you make the decision to do the calling up of reservists, then it's like turning the dial. They've crossed the threshold of calling them up. Now it's like, do we do a little more and do we do a little more? Russian people can see what's

going on. Well, I think that he's trying to be in the intermediate position now because they've called up reservists, but they're not conscripting people. And he tried to avoid the big call up of reservists. And so the Wagner group, these mercenaries that have been fighting there were going around to prisons and they were guaranteeing prisoners time off their sentences if they go fight in Ukraine. And they were trying to take all these kinds of extraordinary measures short of what they announced today. The next big shoe to drop would be not a partial mobilization where you call up the reserves, but a full mobilization where you forcibly conscript individuals and send them into

Ukraine. That is about as politically unpalatable a move as one could get. He, I think for that very reason, hasn't taken it yet. So this intermediate move is where they are now. I think there's something beyond the war coming home. And I mean, in a way, it kind of mirrors the politics in our country or anything else. Countries tend to be willing to make sacrifices if they think the war is going well. If they think that there's an objective worth fighting for and the progress toward that objective is taking place. Right now, they're not seeing progress toward that objective. They're seeing the opposite. The state-run media's ability to spin this seems to be diminishing, at least here and there. And so you're starting to hear dissenting voices about the conduct of

this war and things like that. Now, does that add up to a big policy change or, you know, insecurity of Putin's position? Probably not. But it is something that he's going to have to take into consideration as he makes all these moves, because, you know, the Russians are going to, as every week goes on, they're going to be drawing on a manpower base that is less qualified to fight and smaller than it was before, a military base that because of the destruction of so much of their equipment is less capable than it was before, and an economy that is, you know, ever more susceptible to the coercive bite of these sanctions. So I think Putin really thinks, I should say, I think he thinks that he's playing the long game for two reasons. One is the obvious

one that we always talk about, which he thinks he can outlast the West and its aid to Ukraine and keep throwing people into the fight and all of that. But the other is the economic aspect of this, because as it is right now, Ukraine can't export. The Black Sea coast is blockaded. The eastern part of it and southern part of the countries are in open warfare. And I think the fallback plan for the Kremlin is to try to make Ukraine into a failed economy that would need huge cash infusions from the West. And so I think going forward, you may well see increased attacks on civilian infrastructure that would need to be repaired at great cost, electricity, grids, waterworks, power plants, stuff like that, with the bet that at some point the West is going to stop cutting checks to Ukraine for all of this,

and then Putin will have won through economic coercion what he may not have been able to win on the battlefield. There was talk before, or in the earlier phase of the war, kind of, you know, late February, March, April, May even, that Zelensky, it was understood that Zelensky would accept a return to the, you to, among the ways to reach some sort of settlement and a cessation of hostilities. And again, I won't go through all the details of what these kind of provisional terms, sets of provisional terms look like, but one of them was at least a return to the 2014 status quo. And now I'm hearing more and more experts argue, well, Zelensky's like, no, I'm not so sure I'm returning to 2014. Like, we're on the march right now, we Ukraine, Russia is not. So, you know, maybe the status quo we returned to as well before 2014,

which actually leaves Russia in, from territorial standpoint in terms of what they're occupying in a far worse situation than when they started this war. Is that your what is your view, both in terms of what is your sense in terms of what the Ukrainian government, what Zelensky is thinking in terms of does he have the wind at his back right now and he's going to go for a much bigger setback by Putin than Putin could have possibly imagined before this started? It's very possible. The Ukrainians at the very beginning of the war may have been willing to settle for something that gave the Russians an advantageous position relative to where they were in February 24th. So on February 24th, the Russians were either directly or by proxy in possession of all of the Crimean Peninsula, which they'd annexed into Russia, and portions of the Donetsk and Luhansk areas in the east. And they wanted to increase that.

Had the Russians made an offer at the time, okay, we'll only have that, plus we want you to neutralize your country or something like that, maybe the Ukrainians would have agreed to it in order to stop the fighting. Two things happened. One, the Russian offensive was so much less successful that everyone, including the Ukrainians, the Russians, and everybody else expected. So there was momentum on the Ukrainian side. And two, these unbelievable atrocities in places like Bucha and other things where civilians were just lined up and shot and thrown in mass graves. I mean, these absolute atrocities have quite rightly radicalized a lot of the Ukrainian population. And so things that they would have agreed to with their enemy before, they're not going to agree to now. And so then you fast forward

to where we are now for quite a long time, without being completely clear on what the bottom line was, Zelensky and company have suggested that they would fight back to the February 24th status quo ante. So again, you know, liberate all the area Russia has taken since February 24th, but not necessarily Crimea and that area in the Donbass. And then they would negotiate over the rest. They again, you know, liberate all the area Russia has taken since February 24th, but not necessarily Crimea and that area in the Donbass. And then they would negotiate over the rest. They wouldn't accept the Russian possession of those areas, but they wouldn't necessarily fight over it. Now it's unclear what they would stop at. I don't think that, for example, if they're able to make progress, continued progress in the east, that they say,

oh, well, now we're back to the February 24th line. Let's stop now. I think they continue to push. There'll be a military calculation of where they can hold the line. But the Russians have shown themselves unable to defend a thousand kilometer long line and the Ukrainians are pushing through it. So it's unclear what the Ukrainians would accept, but there is a real possibility that even if the only metric of success or failure is the amount of Ukrainian territory under Russian control, Russia could end up, when all this is said and done, with less than it started with on February 24th, when the entire objective of the war was to get more. What have we learned about the quote unquote pro-Russian separatists in the

East? How did those in those Eastern areas, Eastern territories respond? I mean, Ukrainians, but some of them were, we were told were pro-Russian separatists. How did they respond to the Ukrainian army coming in? Were they uniformly, universally greeted as liberators or was it mixed? Well, I think you got to distinguish between the partisans, the fighters and the little, you know, governments that Russia has put in the puppet governments Russia has put in there. Installed. And the people, you know, for the people, they do seem to have greeted the Ukrainians as liberators or at least a benign force. I mean, Russia's claim that it was invading Ukraine to stop Nazis and fascists and sort of help the people of Ukraine seem to stall out pretty early

when it spent most of its time bombarding towns and villages and civilian areas and apartment buildings and things like that. And so if you're an average Ukrainian living in one of these areas that's being fought over, you don't have much reason to think that the Russians have your best interests at heart, whereas the Ukrainians are trying to liberate your territory from the very people that have waged war in it and have tried to take it over. Now that said, I think you see a bit of almost panic on the areas which remain under Russian control that have these kind of sham governments in Donetsk and Luhansk. I think one of the major reasons why they want to have a referendum and they want to do it, you know, this week is because they think that they will be better protected if they're formally part of Russia than if the Ukrainian army continues

to roll into what is properly Russian or Ukrainian territory, because these guys are not going to have a future in Ukraine to say the least. You know, the U.S. government has gone out of its way to say that it won't directly engage in this conflict from a military standpoint, other than supplying the Ukrainians and obviously putting economic pressure on Russia. But it's increasingly clear that part of Ukraine's success is enabled by, you know, American eyes, American intelligence, you know, not just supplying arms. Brett Stevens had a column recently in the New York Times where he says, you know, the Biden administration deserves a lot of credit for what's happening

in Ukraine. I mean, how would you, what do you make of our role? And is it more expansive than you would have thought before this all got started? It's definitely more expansive than I would have thought. And I think the Biden administration has done a really excellent job. One can quibble, and we all will, about the provision of particular weapons systems, how hard do you try to hold the Ukrainians to not attacking Russian positions on the Russian side of the border as opposed to the Ukrainian side of the border if they're both attacking them and so on. But in the big picture, the administration has marshaled an unprecedented international effort to supply weapons, intelligence, and other forms of assistance to a Ukrainian army under Russian siege and an international effort to

impose costs on the Russians for its aggression. And I think in doing so, they are doing this not only because there's affinity for a democratic Ukraine in the face of autocratic Russia and so forth, but also what this means bigger picture. If you accept a world where big countries can just decide that they would like to have the territory of some other country and take it by force, and there are no costs to bear, and there is no resistance to it, then we're back to the law of the jungle. And we've lived through the law of the jungle before, and it hasn't been a happy time in human history. And so that's really what we're fighting for here. And I think the administration, to its very significant credit, has seen that and has really stepped up in a number of ways to do it.

So, you know, for example, as poorly as the Afghanistan evacuation went, and many of us were extremely critical, both of the policy and its execution then. I think you've got to hand it to the administration for having done a good job here. So speaking of successes or partial successes, let's pivot now to the Middle East. You just returned from Israel, and I think you were in Israel at a particularly both exciting and fraught or uncertain time. Obviously, the uncertainties around what's going to happen with Iran and the Iran deal and the return to the JCPOA, but also a time of excitement. You were there while there was this official visit by Abdullah bin Zayed, the ABZ, the Emirati Minister of Foreign Affairs, member of the royal family. This is obviously the highest level of a highest level official from the UAE to travel to Israel since two years now.

I guess the two year anniversary of the signing of the Abraham Accords. So can you talk about both of these issues that you saw firsthand, both the excitement and the promise of Israel's, you know, accommodation and integration into the broader Middle East, and yet the uncertainty around this nuclear threat? It's pretty amazing that, you know, at least over my career, I've tended to, you know, look at different regions, especially Asia, Middle East, you know, some Europe and things like that. And if you wanted hope or optimism or promise or opportunity,

you didn't look at the Middle East very much. I mean, during the Arab Spring you did, but we know the story of how that ended up turning out. And so you look to Asia, you would look to Europe maybe, but the Middle East was a fascinating set of very difficult entrenched problems. And it was usually a policy choice between bad or even worse when you looked at what was going on there. And this time, there's a lot of problems in Europe. We just talked about a whole bunch of them with Russia, Ukraine, Asia. We can talk about China and Taiwan and everything else all day.

But there's this huge set of optimistic opportunities in the Middle East around the regional normalization with Israel and its Arab neighbors. So I was there, as you said, on the second anniversary of the Abraham Accords. And, you know, there's this reception, which at one level was kind of like almost any other reception that one could imagine at a hotel. But on the other hand, you've got the Emirati foreign minister, you have Bibi Netanyahu, you have a speech by ABC in Arabic. So this is for home consumption, not for, you know, the foreigners.

Meaning it's broadcast, it was being broadcast on television. So people back in, you know, the UAE watching, you know, Pan-Arab satellite channels are going to see him giving a speech in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem? Well, it was in Herzliya. Okay, Herzliya.

But close enough, you know, and talking about the promise of this relationship with Israel. Right. And you have Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, speaking, saying the same sort of thing. And you had Arab ambassadors to Israel who are at this thing and you have Americans at this thing. And, you know, if you just put your head back even a few years, this is unthinkable, right? There was a quiet, there was a quiet

cooperation that increased between Israel and its, and its neighbors on the intel side and a little bit on the security side, maybe some of the counterterrorism side. There were shared worries about Iran, but this has been sort of blown out in the open. And, you know, there was at this reception, there was these two gigantic hearts, one with an Israeli flag and the one next to it with an Emirati flag. I mean, it's like, you know, a little bit of we're at a completely different era. And I think that this, my impression after having spent a week in Israel and talking to, you know, some senior officials and a bunch of other people is they see this as not just a set of opportunities to increase security cooperation with some people that otherwise would be less so or business opportunities for, you know, Emirati capital or Israeli technology or things like that. They see all of that.

But they also see this as a potentially historic turning point about the way Israel's embedded in the region. This is not about Israel as the outlier in the Middle East with its most important relationship being with a country, you know, thousands and thousands of miles away, but rather Israel as a Middle East country that is actively working out in the open with other Middle East countries, which of course would seem very normal and has been anything but since 1948. Yeah, I would just add a couple points to that. One, when I was in high school and college and and I was involved as an activist on behalf of the pro-U.S.-Israel, strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship, it's hard for me to explain this to people who are younger, who didn't live through this era, Saudi Arabia and these Gulf states, they were viewed like

Iran is today. I mean, as far as, if you cared about Israel, you were worried about, you thought about Saudi Arabia the way we talk about Tehran. And, you know, none of this would happen without Saudi Arabia. It's not like the Emiratis are out there kind of freelancing and the Bahrainis. I mean, the Saudis greenlit this, which is extraordinary. And obviously, you talk about Israel's integration in the Middle East, you know, now that Israel's joining Central Command,

and now there's overflight, you know, Israel's being given overflight rights over Saudi Arabia, which again, so Saudi Arabia is a key enabler here. And that in and of itself, it's not just what you saw. It's like, how did that happen? And it wouldn't have happened without saudi arabia and just to think where saudi arabia was in in israel's kind of strategic security storyline not that long ago it was in a really bad place so that that's kind of unbelievable and then the other point i'd make is if you look at what happened after the Camp David Accords, you know, late 70s, 80, and then—so there's huge accomplishment. Carter, Begin, Sadat, you know, this incredible peace.

Israel returns to Sinai, to Egypt, a piece of territory three times the size of Israel. This, you know, normalization. Sadat comes to Jerusalem, speaks before the Knesset. I want peace. I want normal—I mean, it was extraordinary. this you know normalization sadat comes to jerusalem speaks before the kineset i want peace i want normal i mean it was extraordinary it happened and then things kind of froze i mean the next agreement was until it happened and then sadat was killed right sadat was killed for his services right important so that was not that was that that that had you know potentially the the intended effect which is to show this is the price you get for

going to Jerusalem and making peace with the Israeli enemy, the Zionist enemy, right? So, you know, here you go. And so it's not until 1994, the Jordanians signed their peace agreement. So you have a long stretch of time, and then in forever it was, you know... But hold on, but just take those two peace agreements. Yeah. They were

cold peace agreements. I mean, Israelis traveled, Israelis for tourism purposes traveled to Egypt and Jordan. take those two peace agreements yeah they were cold peace agreements i mean israelis traveled israelis for tourism purposes traveled to egypt and jordan it's not clear to me there are many egyptians or jordanians traveling to israel a little bit i guess on the jordanian side uh to israel there was no real joint business activities there was no real trade there was no real joint r and d projects there was some a lot happening on the security side, obviously, but on the civilian side, on the economic side, very little happening. And just in these two years, the number of Israelis traveling to the Gulf on vacation, I mean, these numbers are staggering. Tens of thousands

of people traveling there, back and forth, the trade going on. I mean, I'm on the board of Startup Nation Central, which is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Tel Aviv. Its mission is to deepen ties between the Israeli tech ecosystem and the global tech ecosystem. And they're doing a ton of work with the UAE. When the UAE ambassador and the Bahraini ambassador first showed up in Israel, their first public events, their first public events were at the headquarters of Startup, you know, this innovation headquarters at Startup Nation Central, meaning they are so public about, we're not, this is not like the Egypt situation.

Yeah, we have peace, but we're going to kind of keep it low key, and we're going to exchange intelligence, and we have a security relationship, but that's kind of, they are like projecting, broadcasting, we are in this together, we are doing business together. And I don't mean to sound overly euphoric about this because, you know, you know, good news and diplomacy, especially in the Middle East can crash, you know, on the rocks of, of reality, uh, which in the Middle East often hits hard. However, we've, it's been tested, right? There were basically two Gaza wars,

one big one and one kind of flare-up since the Abraham Accords were signed and those were real tests of the Accords and they held. It wasn't like the Palestinian issue like ripped through this. To your point, you know, just there was a flare-up with Gaza

like two months ago and there you were, you know, just there was a flare-up with Gaza like two months ago, and there you were, you know, a few days ago, sitting there as though the Gaza flare-up never even happened. I mean, it's not like, so when you think about the pressure points that could slow down the momentum or create the kind of pressure that would push this back into more of a post-Camp David Egypt normalization. It seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Yeah, absolutely. It's not a cold piece, the way you had it before. It's vibrant. It's public. It's designed for domestic consumption. It's designed to make money. It's designed to improve. I mean, they're real interests. On both sides. That are being aligned with that, on both sides.

Right. So this is not just something that the Americans cajole unwilling countries into some sort of partnership or something like this. This is paying dividends on both sides, and it should. The other thing from the American perspective is, you know, there's more at stake here than just kind of affinity for Israel and from, you know, some of our, you know, there's more at stake here than just kind of affinity for Israel and from, you know, some of our, you know, Gulf friends and things like that. I mean, you look around the world, and I was sort of alluding to this before, but we got major challenges in East Asia. We got major challenges in Iran. We got major challenges in Russia. There's going to be another major challenge soon in North Korea. And then there's the crisis du jour that we don't even know

is going to happen yet, but it will because that's the way the world goes. And if you can look at the place that has been the cockpit of hostility and instability for decades and say one dimension of this that has been kind of the problem that keeps on giving for many, many decades and take it off the table in a peaceful kind of way. I mean, those opportunities just don't come around very much, and it's ultimately good for the United States. And before we let you go, what does all this mean? And just kind of where you at generally on where the Iran deal negotiation stands? It just seems to me the closer and closer we get to the midterm elections, the likelihood of any,

the administration agreeing to anything in Vienna goes down. And then obviously the recent, you know, whatever that, however Iran was involved in this recent attack against Salman Rushdie and other attacks on human rights activists and former U.S. government officials here in the U.S., and not to mention Russia's role in negotiations over the Iran deal. It's just hard for me to imagine that anything happens soon. What's your take? I wouldn't bet on re-entry soon. It would require the Iranians dropping the latest of their unacceptable conditions. It previously had been that they wanted to be taken off the list of foreign sponsors. So they wanted the Quds Force

delisted as a foreign terrorist organization. Now the issue is the IEA in its inspections found uranium residue in two undeclared sites in Iran and have begun investigating that. And the Iranians want, as a condition of reentry of the JCPA, the IEA to drop the investigation into those, just drop the cases, which the United States and the Europeans are just, I don't believe they're going to agree to do that. They're not going to agree to say, oh, there was a couple of places where you weren't supposed to be enriching uranium and pursuant to the very deal that would require you to only do this in certain places, we will no longer investigate when you may have been doing it anyway. I mean, it's just not in the cards. And so the Iranians, maybe they will drop this and then

there could be some re-entry, but at this point it doesn't look likely at all. The other thing they want, the Iranians want, is literally impossible, which is some sort of guarantee that the next president won't pull out of this and that they'll get the sanctions relief to which they would be entitled. Even if we in the United States elect a president who decides they want to come out. And of course, you can't tie the hands of the next president. President Biden will not be able to lock in, you know, Governor DeSantis or Governor Youngkin in the fall of 2022. Yeah, so, you know, so I think that just leaves us stalemate. And I wouldn't, I'm not looking to any sort of near term reentry of the JCPOA. And then the last, last question, Walter Russell Mead, who we had on a couple weeks ago,

said even if things are unlikely to happen anytime soon, the administration is unlikely to actually formally declare the negotiations are over because it's in everyone's interest to kind of keep the hope alive to, to, uh, to, uh,

borrow a phrase from, uh, Jesse Jackson. So what, is that your sense that they're not going to declare them dead or frozen? It's just going to be, there's no forward movement, but there's no backward movement. It's just kind of,, there's no forward movement, but there's no backward movement.

It's just kind of. Yeah, I think that's, yeah, that's my take. And also the Iranian demands that have been an issue have changed. Well, at the beginning, the problem was the Russian demand that Russian sanctions be lifted. If it was on trade with Iran, okay, that kind of went away. Then it was the Quds Force designation. Okay, that went away. Now it's this issue of the IEA investigation into sites. Who knows, maybe at some point, the Iranians say, okay,

we'll live with those investigations continuing, and we'll try to, you know, stonewall them or something. But then there may be a new kind of problem here. So it's both not a static negotiation in that sense, but also not getting terribly close to any sort of resolution. All right, Richard, we will leave it there. Thank you. And I'm mostly pleased that we pleased our fans with your return. It's my aim.

I'm to please the fans of Call Me Back. You called me back. All right. All right. Thanks a lot. I'll talk to you later. All right. That's our show for today.

To follow Richard's work, you can go to cnas.org. That's C-N-A-S dot O-R-G. And on Twitter, he's at R-H Fontaine, F-O-N-T-A-I-N-E. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.