Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Stephen Walt: Trump, Biden, and Foreign Policy Missteps

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Thank you to The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School for supporting this episode. Visit the link below to learn more about research, ideas, and leadership programs for a more peaceful world: https://www.belfercenter.org/ -------------------- About the Episode: A realist’s critique on the “failures” of the US foreign policy in the Middle East, Russia, and China—and how “we’re paying the price for that in a variety of ways now.” About Luminary: Stephen Walt is a Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School who has been teaching at Harvard since the 1980s. He is also a best-selling author and a columnist at ‘Foreign Policy’. Some of his popular books are “The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy” (2018) and “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” (2007). About the Host: Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur, educator, and Honorary Professor of Politics and International Relations at the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. He is also a visiting scholar at The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University (2022—2024) and a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #StephenWalt ------------------- Get “The Israel Lobby” on Periplus bookstore: https://www.periplus.com/p/9780374531508 -------------------- Earn a Master of Public Policy degree and be Indonesia's future narrator. More info: [e-mail] https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id https://wa.me/628111522504 Visit and subscribe:  @SGPPIndonesia   @Endgame_Clips 

The United States doesn't have to control Asia. We're not trying to do that. We couldn't do it if we tried. We've never been able to. We just need to make sure that nobody else controls Asia. Stephen Walt. Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School. We have a brilliant professor here at Harvard, Stephen Walt, who is also a realist.

Steve's most famous book in the Israel Lobby and U.S. foreign policy, which appeared in 2007, with John Meerschimer. His most recent book is the 2018 The Hell of Good Intentions, America's foreign policy elite and the decline of U.S. primacy. If you're a realist, that doesn't mean you can't strive to make a more peaceful world, but you have to recognize what you're up against. Others may have more at stake than we do, may even have more wisdom. How do you think that it could be remedied? In the early 21st century, largely thanks to the global liberal order,

humanity has experienced the most peaceful and prosperous era in history. That era is now over. Could we be heading toward World War III? Palestinian authority is basically a tool of the Israeli government. To the extent that it serves the interests of the Americans and Israelis in a good way, is there a higher hope for a two-state solution or you don't think that's still going to happen? This is a really interesting question. What I'm suggesting here is...

Hi, friends. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for being with us ever since we started Endgame some years ago. The conversations have been invariably elevating and animating. At least from my personal point of view, it's been a tremendously rewarding experience. And I'm hopeful that you could be further supportive of us by way of clicking on the button, watching every episode as much as possible, if not as fully as possible, and also joining us as a member of the Endgame channel. I can only promise you that whatever we're going to be doing going forward, we'll try to make Endgame a better experience for all of you.

Thank you. Hi, friends. Thank you so much for watching us all this time. we're so honored to have Professor Stephen Walt, who is a professor of international relations at Harvard University. Steve, thank you so much for gracing our show. Nice to be with you. First, I want to just start off with your definition of realism. Tell us.

Oh, this could last an hour. But realism is an approach to international affairs. A school of thought, it has different variations. But it sort of begins with the assumption that you should study politics. as it really is, as it's practiced in the world and not as how we might like it to be, not the way an idealist might present it. And for realists, when they turn to foreign policy, the central issue or the central theme is what happens to politics when there is no central authority, when you have an international system combined in of separate sovereign states

where there is no world government, there's no single agency that can protect these states from each other. And ultimately, each country has to rely upon its own resources and its own strategies to try and make itself secure. So for real, as security becomes the paramount aim of states, because, again, there's no agency, no set of rules, no authority that can keep states from doing bad things if they decide they want to. That doesn't mean every state wants to do bad things, but sometimes some of them do, so all states have to think about that problem, try and prepare for it. And what that suggests is, first of all, states worry a lot about power, who has it, what they might do with it. They tend to not be very trusting because being overly

trusting can leave you vulnerable. It means cooperation, which happens all the time, is always difficult, somewhat fragile, somewhat delicate, hard to sustain. And occasionally, it breaks down completely and we see the international system punctuated by big wars in which, you know, horrible things happen. So realism is not a particularly optimistic view of the world. It's actually a rather bleak view. It suggests that major powers are going to compete for power. They're going to do horrible things if they think their security is at stake. When I sometimes say, if you're a realist, that doesn't mean you can't strive to make a more peaceful world, but you have to recognize what you're up against, and you have to try and design strategies and approaches to world politics

to take the fundamentally competitive nature of international relations into account first, instead of assuming you can just wish them away. Power being the center of many things. The United States has accumulated tremendous amounts of power, economically, militarily, technologically. How do you see the United States in the last few decades in terms of... allocating its tremendous power. Has it allocated its power wisely? In some cases, yes, but I would argue for the last 30 years or so, from the beginning of what we might call the unipolar moment or the unipolar era, the United States has not, in fact, deployed its power, all that intelligently. The end of the Cold War sort of left the United States in this extraordinary position, a position no country had been in,

no serious rivals, no peer competitors. I think George W. Bush once, not George H.W. Bush, his father once said, you know, we found ourselves at the pinnacle of power with the rarest opportunity to reshape the world. Right. And they tried to do that. And unfortunately, many of the things the United States tried to do, whether it's the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the long war in Afghanistan, some other efforts at regime change and democracy promotion. A lot of those things turned out to be costly and ultimately were failures, and I think hastened the end of the unipolar moment. You've written so many great books, one of which is the hell of good intentions, where you've described that the foreign policy failures manifested

in a number of the presidencies, including that those of Obama, Bush, and Clinton kind of led to the election of Donald Trump. Describe or talk about that a little bit more. Well, one of the themes of that book is that there's actually surprising continuity between the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, that there was not, in fact, that much difference between Republicans and Democrats on how the United States should be approaching the world. We sometimes think of sort of neoconservatives as being Republicans, you know, liberal internationalists being Democrats, but there's not a lot of daylight between the two of them. And all three Three of those administrations followed a strategy that I and others have called liberal hegemony.

The idea was that the United States was going to take the liberal order, the liberal Western order that had emerged during the Cold War and try to make it a global order. So to bring as many countries as possible into a set of institutions that were largely designed and led by the United States, whether it's NATO, other alliances, the World Trade Organization. At the same time, of course, as many countries as possible should become democratic market economies. So we were big on promoting democracy in this period as well. And we were going to do this all peacefully if possible, but if necessary, using military force. And gradually create a liberal order everywhere. And this was followed by the Clinton administration, by the Bush administration, and by the Obama administration as well. The problem was it simply didn't work very well.

First of all, it guaranteed that we would have a deteriorating relationship with both Russia and China, who didn't want to be part of an agenda that involved converting to American-style democracy. And some other countries, of course, who were in there as well. Second of all, it turns out we didn't know how to create democracy in places like Libya or Iraq or Yemen or some of the other places that the United States got deeply involved as well. So the combination of alienating some other major powers and ending up in costly quagmires in various places ultimately discredited this whole approach. And by 2016, Donald Trump was right there to challenge it and say, as he said in 2016,

American foreign policy was a complete and total disaster. Now, I think he overstated the case and he didn't have a better alternative to substitute for it, but when he was running against a former secretary of state, that was a potent argument that I think won at least some people over. It wasn't the main reason I think he got elected, but it didn't help. Would you argue that there's been a continuation of seemingly policy failures or foreign policy failures in the past few years to the extent that the likelihood of Donald Trump's returning is quite high? Well, it's higher than I would like it to be. be less for a whole variety of reasons. I'd say two points. First of all, Trump didn't actually

change American foreign policy as much as many people think. He talked a good game. His deportment, his behavior was very different than previous presidents. But the American presence in Europe actually went up during the Trump administration. He didn't alter American Middle East policy all that much, a little bit, but it wasn't as though the United States stopped supporting Egypt, stop supporting Israel, stopped supporting Saudi Arabia, or got really serious about dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on his watch. It was more of the same done in a slightly different style. Previous American presidents had been concerned about China. Trump did, in fact, the one major departure was trying to alter the economic relationship with China.

But by and large, he didn't change things as much. And of course, Biden, in a sense, has gone back to the policies of the Obama administration as well. And the argument in hell of good intentions is that this has a lot to do with the nature of the American foreign policy establishment, a sort of bipartisan set of people who do foreign policy full time and basically are committed to try and to maintain American primacy in the world, to American global leadership, to trying to run as much of the law. local politics of the world as we can. Now, what Trump would do if he's reelected remains to be seen,

but it seems to me the failures of the Biden administration have given him an opportunity on foreign policy that he might not otherwise have had. The war in Ukraine has not gone as the United States has hoped. The situation in the Middle East is a disaster and arguably worse than it was when Trump left. Trump deserves no credit for having done anything good in the Middle East, but the point is that's going to be on Biden as well. And I think that's going to be a hard record for Biden to run against his hope, by the way, Biden's hope has to be that most Americans don't care that much about foreign policy and that that won't be a determining factor in the election. You know, what what puzzles me is that there is this continuation of this divergence between public opinions and policies. Why, why does it? it continue? Yeah. No, it's quite clear, and this goes back many years, not a recent phenomenon, that there's

always been something of a gap between what the public says it wants in foreign policy and what ultimately presidents choose to do. It's worth noting that every president, since Clinton, has basically run on a platform of saying they were going to do less. They were going to be less active in foreign policy. They're going to focus on fixing things here in the United States. So, you know, Bill Clinton said, it's the economy stupid. And George W. Bush said, we were going to have a humble foreign policy, strong but humble.

Barack Obama ran on nation building at home, not on forever wars. And, of course, Donald Trump wanted to repudiate everything. So they all understand that that's what the American people want to hear. Then they get into office and they do something different. And I think that's partly the fact. The institutions, and I mean both the institutions of government, but also the surrounding set of institutions, think tanks, universities, etc., all tend to be very strongly supportive of a very active American global role, even if we don't necessarily have a good idea what

we're doing, and even if some of the things we're trying to do are counterproductive. Is that a possibility, as you alluded to in the book, about, or would respect to the cultivation of some new subpowers within the pre-existing institutions as to bring about positive change within the blob. Yeah. So the blob being a reference to this foreign policy establishment, the term, by the way, coined by Barack Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, who'd seen it work up close and personally. Yeah, I think what you've seen in the last five to eight years is at least a much wider range of discussion. That if you look at what's written in journals like foreign affairs, foreign policy, even to some degree on op-ed pages as well,

if you look at the set of think tanks in Washington, you're starting to see greater diversity. They really did all sort of have the same view for a long time. But the creation of of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the fact that there's a program at the Stimson Center now on American Strategy. There are people at the Carnegie Endowment, which is a mainstream think tank, who have a different view of what America's role should be, suggests that we're starting to have an actual dialogue, a real discussion about exactly what America's role should be in the world, and why is it that the things we've been doing haven't worked particularly well? And I think that's very healthy. That's what you want to

see in a democracy. You know, in an increasingly multipolar kind of order, just intuitively there's a higher proliferation of risk coming from different directions, right? And one of which is what we're seeing in terms of how Russia is actually getting closer to China. Wouldn't that make foreign policy much more challenging for the United States going forward? Special thanks to the Belford Center for Signs and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School for providing support for this episode. Check out links in a description to know more about research, ideas, and leadership programs for a more peaceful world.

Well, whenever you see consequential states, major powers aligning against you, that's not a good development at all. And of course, one of the reasons Russia and China move closer together has been American policy. We've been trying to get tough with both countries with Russia for a long time. And surprise, surprise, these two countries start collaborating with each other. The same way, of course, we collaborated with China back in the Cold War when we were both worried about the Soviet Union. This is balance of power politics operating. And what I think many Americans don't fully appreciate is that if they don't like collaboration between Moscow and Beijing, then they might want to think about doing something different that doesn't make that, you know, the obvious response for those two countries.

So I think, you know, we drove Russia much closer to China than it otherwise would have wanted to be. And we're paying the price for that in a variety of ways now. It seems so counter to what Kissinger had advocated in the early 70s, right? Was that by design or by something else that things have turned out a little bit differently in the last few years? I think it was a combination of hubris and ideology. And the hubris was that back in the 90s when we started the whole process of NATO enlargement, Right. The idea is if you could keep spreading NATO further east, incorporate now democratic countries in Eastern Europe into this wonderful alliance. This would be like an oil on the waters.

We're spreading peace. In fact, the phrase that was used in the 90s was, we're going to create a vast zone of peace in Europe. And realists were warning back in the 90s, this is not going to work if you keep doing this, because eventually you're going to provoke a confrontation with Russia. Russia was never invited to be part of NATO, and quite understandably, they saw it as a direct threat to their interests. And so you had, unfortunately, a lot of American leaders who would say, but look, we're not threatening Russia. Expanding NATO has nothing to do with that.

And they, of course, completely missed the fact that it didn't matter what we thought our intentions were. We could tell ourselves that this was no threat to Russia. But the fact is Russia saw it as a threat, made it clear from day one. that they saw it as a threat. And then when we finally took the step in 2008 of saying that we thought Georgia and Ukraine should eventually join, I think that's when we really had a fork in the road. So it was a remarkable degree of naivete and hubris on our part. The hubris also came in is that for a long time, I don't think we thought the Russians really could do anything about it,

that they were too weak, that their economy was in too much trouble, that it didn't matter. They might object. They might protest. They'd send us some mean messages, but there wasn't much they could do about it. And unfortunately, we discovered first in 2014 and then in 2022 that, yes, there was some things that Russia could do about them. And unfortunately, it's countries like Ukraine that have paid the major price for that. It sounds like that hubris is not going to disappear anytime soon. No, I mean, from reading your book and some of your podcasts that you've done, just. Well, it's, I think it's pretty, there is, I think, a deeply felt strain within many people in the foreign policy world that, you know, almost all global problems should be solved by Washington, or at least Washington should be involved in solving all global problems, that we have some unique abilities and wisdom to provide solutions. And I think that there are some circumstances where that's clearly the case. I think there are a variety of global issues where if the United States is not involved or doesn't play an active role, you're unlikely to get effective solutions. Climate change being an obvious example.

And there's other places where American diplomacy, I think, has been quite effective in heading off trouble promoting solutions. But that doesn't mean we have the answer to every problem that's out there. And sometimes we have to recognize that others may have more at stake than we do, may even have more wisdom on what a solution might be. Last point is, in the unipolar era, when the United States was so powerful, our diplomacy tended to devolve into deciding what we wanted to happen, issuing a set of demands, and then if those demands weren't met, we would just start ratcheting up the pressure. and if necessary, we'd consider using military force. So the way we dealt with the conflict over Kosovo was like that. Certainly the way we dealt with Iraq, the way we dealt with Iran's nuclear program, all had that quality.

We would issue demands and then just ratchet up the pressure. We never acknowledged that in order to get a real deal with almost any country, even countries that are weaker than we are, you have to have some degree of give and take. There has to be something in it. for them or they'll either reject our demands or even if they accept them temporarily, they'll look for ways to get out of them down the road. So we forgot about the normal processes of compromise and adjustment and diplomacy. We wanted 100% of what we wanted instead of being willing to take 80%, but give the other

side 20%. And that is a symptom of hubris. there's a number of foreign policy failures you made reference to in the book, one of which would have been the missed opportunities with respect to Oslo courts, right? Times past, how do you think that could be remedied? So, you know, the Oslo process beginning in 1994 was supposed to lead to the creation of a separate Palestinian state. And the United States, in my view, played a case.

key role in that failure by failing to put pressure on both sides. We put lots of pressure on the Palestinians to make additional compromises, additional adjustments, and to accept a deal that no leader, no government could possibly accept, to permanent vulnerability. And we've refused to put any pressure whatsoever on Israel. And increasingly Israeli governments understood that, so they never offered a deal that Palestinians could accept. So I think we blew that. We had help. We had help. Right. There were mistakes made on Israel's part and on the Palestinians part, but we were in charge and didn't handle that well at all. I think, unfortunately, we've reached a point where it's hard to imagine a pathway to a two-state solution that doesn't involve enormous political, almost, you know, consciousness changes on part of Israelis and Palestinians alike. It's not, in my view, a solution that can now be imposed by the outside.

There are too many settlers in the occupied territories. The level of trust between the two communities is never been lower than it is in light of what's happened since October 7th. And so the idea that Americans and Europeans and maybe some Arabs are going to come in and say, all right, here's where we're going to draw the lines. Here's what the Tuesdays. We want you to accept it. I just don't think that's workable any longer. And what's going to have to happen here is eventually the parties themselves are going to have to figure this one out,

maybe with some help from the rest of us, but not something that can be sort of forced upon them at this point. And what that means, and this is what I think most people have missed, is that means you have to allow for the emergence of a genuine Palestinian national consensus. Palestinians have been sort of denied that opportunity. The Palestinian authority is basically a tool of the Israeli government. It's created to keep order in the Palestinian-controlled areas, but it is not a national movement. It doesn't command popularity.

It's actually incredibly unpopular, hasn't held elections in years, et cetera. So it's not agency. Hamas does have some popularity, not universal. It's not accepted by all Palestinians, but it does have substantial legitimacy. And yet the United States and Israel want to exclude it and anyone who supports it from any consideration. And then you have people like Marwood Bargudi, who's in an Israeli jail with a life sentence, probably the single most popular Palestinian politician. Well, if that's the situation the Palestinians are in, they can't have a political process to figure out what they regard as different possible solutions, different possible approaches, whether it's one state, two state, confederation, alignment with others.

What I'm suggesting here is there's going to be, there needs to be a lengthy political process because this is ultimately a political problem. not just a military problem, not just a security problem, but neither Israel nor the United States, its principal patron, want to allow that process to begin. Maybe we'll see something happen once the fighting that's currently underway is over, but I'm not optimistic.

Is a two-state solution likely in our lifetime? No, I don't think, I'm 68 years old. I don't think it's likely in my life. time. And when we say two-state solution, again, what does that mean? If it's going to work, it has to be genuinely two sovereign states. It has to be a Palestinian state that is in control of its own territory that is not fully demilitarized, so it is constantly living under the threat of Israeli attack and threat of Israeli intervention. It has to be a Palestinian state that is legitimate, that is not corrupt. It has to be a Palestinian state that has fully accepted,

that it's going to be living in perpetuity next door to Israel, et cetera. And we are a long way from any of those conditions being reached. And the only one of those conditions that Israel would accept right now is the last one, that they accept Israel's existence. But they want that state to be a bunch of separate little bantostans with Israel controlling the perimeter, with no real security forces with Israel controlling, you know, the sky above all the borders, that's not a state. That's a small little set of enclaves that are, you know, like reservations in the United States or like the Bantistan's that South Africa tried to create at the end of the apartheid era. It's not going to work. And you would argue or you would think that this would be correlated

with the pervasive nature of the Israel lobby. To the extent that the lobby could have some, I don't know, evolution in a good way, right? To the extent that it serves the interests of the Americans and Israelis in a good way, is there a higher hope for a two-state solution, or you don't think that's still going to happen? This is a really interesting question. So, I mean, American policy towards it.

Israel and towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been almost entirely driven by domestic politics here in the United States and the power of the Israel lobby. It's why the United States has this unconditional relationship where we support Israel pretty much no matter what it does. And we've seen that, of course, in spades since October 7th and with the Israeli attack on Gaza, the fact that the United States continues to arm a country that is engaged in at a minimum significant war crimes and at a maximum, a possible genocide. It's impossible to explain this without focusing on the domestic politics.

But at the same time, you are seeing sort of cracks in this. And this actually began a while back. I mean, the emergence of J Street, which is an arm of what you might call the Israel lobby, but is more moderate, favored the two-state solution. the fact that you have groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and others within the American Jewish community, the fact that attitudes among younger American Jews are dramatically different than their parents have been. So the demonstrations at American universities now have obviously a Palestinian element to it, Arab Americans, other Americans, and many younger American Jews.

all of that suggests that things are starting to shift a little bit. The fact that Senator Chuck Schumer would give a speech on the U.S. Senate, criticizing the Netanyahu government and saying it's time for Netanyahu to go is a significant bellwether in how attitudes may be changing in the United States. But that process is going to be, I think, a slow one for a while yet. And we're already seeing the backlash, the pressure being put on universities, these laws being proposed that want to criminalize criticism of Israel as somehow anti-Semitic and things like that. So this is, this fight is just beginning, it seems to me, in the United

States. Draw a picture of it were to be a one state as to allow the Palestinians to lift. Well, I mean, what we have. Will it be a highly apartheid state? There are several options here. And it's almost impossible to know what's most likely. It depends a lot on how far you look. I mean, the central political problem is that they have roughly 7.5 million Israeli Jews and roughly 7.5 million Palestinian Arabs cohabitating the same area, Gaza, Israel proper, and the West Bank.

So roughly 50-50. But all the political power is in the hands of the Israeli Jews. Israeli, Arabs, and certainly the populations in the occupied territories have much less or no political power whatsoever. So you can have, you can imagine a situation of permanent apartheid where roughly half these people are denied political rights. I just don't think that's sustainable over the decades. I think that that will eventually eat away at Israel's legitimacy. there will be continued efforts at rebellion. And by the way, it's worth remembering that international law gives populations living under belligerent occupation the right to resist.

So Palestinian resistance, which does also have to conform to the laws of war, but Palestinian resistance is not illegitimate, even though we tend to treat it as if it is. So I don't think that's a sustainable solution. There is the two-state solution that we've already talked about, or you can imagine a one-state reality where the rights of Israeli Jews to practice their religion, to have a profound impact on the cultural life of the country, or retained, that they're not discriminated against, they're not threatened, but they coexist as fellow citizens with Palestinian Arabs who also have political rights, can form political parties, can form political parties with, with Israeli Jews, with others, and both sides recognize that the other is not going anywhere

and that they have to form a community together. Now, that's not, to me, a panacea, because if you look at binational states, countries that have two very different groups within them, they often have a quite contentious relationship. It's not necessarily pretty, not easy to maintain. But that is an option, but notice that's an option that requires rethinking Zionism in a fundamental way. And that's not to say, again, that you couldn't have the Zionist idea of a homeland for the Jewish people, but it wouldn't be an exclusive homeland.

And it also requires Palestinians to recognize that the Jews that are there now are not going anywhere either. They're going to have to coexist. I would love to see something like that happen and work. but I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime. Just too many people have got to change their ways of thinking for that to take place. It can occur. We've seen, you know, revolutionary changes of this sort occur in other settings as well, but it's hard to predict and it often takes a long time.

On the basis that the U.S. policy would respect to the Middle East is no different under a Trump or a Biden presidency. see. What's the hope or how do you think this would all vote for normalization? Within the Abraham Accords. Yeah. Well, so the one innovation, if you want to call it that, in the Trump administration, was the Abraham Accords getting some Arab countries to recognize Israel and with the hope that eventually Saudi Arabia increasingly influential could be brought into all of this. This was not as much of a sea change as people thought, because most of these countries had been cooperating with Israel quietly already, and much of this was driven

by their mutual concerns about Iran. The Biden administration didn't reverse that at all. In fact, they wanted to extend it. In my view, they did this because they wanted to tie up Saudi Arabia, They wanted to prevent Saudi Arabia from moving closer to China. So there was a complicated negotiation going on for what the Saudis wanted from us and what we wanted from them. And one of the things we wanted from them was normalization with Israel. October 7th, of course, has put that all aside for the moment. I would not rule it out some kind of normalization down the road. But it is worth noting that the Saudis have said that they're not going to do it.

until they see really credible signs that were moving to deal with the Palestinian problem. They're not going to be put off by a set of promises. And it is also interesting that although a number of Arab countries seem to have helped Israel deal with this Iranian retaliation, none of them want to take credit for it. As in Jordan and Egypt. As in Jordan and Egypt. And I think that is an indication that all of these governments, none of whom are democratic, by the way, all of these governments understand that whatever calculations they may be making, their populations are still very unhappy with what's happening. So I can't rule it out.

You know, I think the Saudi government has been both cynical and in some respects very pragmatic, very realist about this. But certainly what's happening now has made it more difficult to achieve normalization in the short term. What do you think could explain the seemingly strategic silence that's being displayed by the Iranians? I mean, they seem to be very much calculated, right, in terms of telling everybody all the stakeholders 72 hours in advance about what they're going to do and very targeted in terms of not hitting civilians and all that. I think the government of Iran, in some respects, have been the most grown-up, prudent, pragmatic of any of the countries in the region, certainly any of the major powers in the region. They're in no position to get into a serious war with the United States and or Israel, and they don't want to. There's been a sort of simmering, low-level conflict between Israel and Iran for a long time.

You know, Israelis assassinating Iranian officials. We have now killed some Iranian officials on our own. But both sides, you know, we're trying to keep it from turning into an all-out, an all-out war for a whole variety of good reasons. And I might add, that's also true of the Saudis. The Saudis, you know, have had something of a detente with Iran recently because they recognized things were starting to escalate and maybe if we didn't cool things down, there might be an all-out conflict that wouldn't be good for anybody. When Israel attacked the Saudi, I'm sorry,

when Israel attacked the Iranian Council in Syria, this was seen as a step up. I think the Israelis miscalculated. I don't think they thought they were really escalating, but this was clearly seen by Iran as something they couldn't tolerate. They had. had ever since the Hamas attacks in October, they'd been signaling in lots of ways that they were not going to get involved. They were not going to do very much, you know, keep things limited. And then they had followed that. But they felt they had to respond. And as you suggested in your question, the way they responded was actually beautifully designed to accomplish two purposes to tell the Israelis that, look, you've crossed the line and you shouldn't have

done that. And we have to respond. And our population, demands that we respond to. We can't let this one go by, but we don't want this to get bigger. So we're going to give you lots of warning. We're not going to make attacks that we know will cause lots of Israeli casualties. This is a tit for tat kind of response. It's even maybe a tit for tat minus, you know, a little bit less. So let's go back to where things were before. And, you know, as Biden told Netanyahu, you know, you should take the win on this one. Don't respond any further. And for the moment, I think both sides are sticking with that.

But in some respects, the Iranians have been the grown-ups here. Yeah, and they seem to be, well, at least to me, they seem to be able to take a long view, you know, and they're not as impulsive as some of the other. that we're saying in the Middle East. It's also, I think, important to understand what I think the Iranian motives are. Right. And this is not immediate motives, long term. The Iran basically was never all that committed or engaged in the Palestinian cause until the early 1990s.

They didn't provide support for Hamas. They didn't help Islamic jihad, any of the other radical Palestinian groups. It was not an issue they cared very much about. It was the Madrid conference in the early 1990s, organized by the United States in the wake of the First Gulf War, where we were going to try and move the region towards peace between Israel and Palestine and a broader regional order under American, not dominance, but certainly under American tutelage or whatever. And we didn't invite the Iranians.

We deliberately excluded them. And from Iran's point of view, it's like the United States is trying to reorganize the Middle East under its, according to its own preferences and leaving us out entirely. And it's at that moment that Iran begins supporting Palestinian groups and increasing its support for groups like Hezbollah and others as a way of saying, look, you can't dictate what the Middle East is going to look like without listening to us, without hearing us out and without accommodating some of our concerns. It's not to say that Iran was trying to take over the region. They don't have the capabilities to take over the region, but they weren't going to be excluded. And that's continued ever since. And I think it's what's motivating them today. It's not that they're deeply committed and concerned by the plight of the Palestinians.

This is a way of making sure that the United States and Israel and others don't put them in a dangerous or vulnerable position. If there's going to be a new order in the Middle East, they demand to be heard. And in my view, if you were trying to develop an order in the Middle East that might actually work, you can't exclude anyone. You have to talk to everyone. It doesn't mean you have to do everything everyone wants, but you at least have to give them a hearing and take their concerns seriously. Stephen, you got to go. I got two more questions. This relates to Asia.

You've made reference in the past about how. any particular hegemon, if that hegemon wants to be hegemonic, he's got to be involved in Asia, right, in a dominant manner. Who do you think, I mean, you know, I want to juxtapose this with what Lee Kuan, you had aptly pointed out that I think China is out to dislodge the U.S. as the influential or dominant power in Asia. Right. So China, I think, if it could, would love to have a dominant position in Asia.

And by that, I mean, I don't mean conquering all of Asia, expanding whatever. But being in a position where it no longer had any security concerns, significant security concerns from any other of its neighbors. I mean, China's geographic position is not a particularly attractive one. They have major powers on several borders. There are four nuclear-armed countries on China's borders as well. Its geography is constrained, so getting to the open ocean is not necessarily easy, pretty easy to blockade China if it's weak as well. And if any government of China would like a situation that was more favorable. And finally, having the world's most powerful country with formal alliances with Japan and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand and a growing partnership with India

and others. If you were China, this is not an ideal situation by any means. So, of course, you'd like to gradually try to push the United States out or encourage countries in Asia to start distancing themselves from the United States so that you could have a dominant position, not controlling these countries, but putting limits on what they can do and not having to worry that they would do something you might not like, something dangerous as well. The problem is that's going to be hard to do. Right? Asia is not full of tiny countries.

It's full of some, you know, countries with large economies, large populations. And none of them want to be in a inferior subordinate position to Beijing as well. And the more that China has tried to push the envelope, whether it's in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, putting pressure on Taiwan, which is a special case. border clashes with India, all of these things, you know, playing hardball with Australia over COVID and trade relations. All of those things, of course, have produced a negative reaction in these countries, where they're now cooperating more with each other in ways they haven't in the past.

They're spending more on defense, and they're eager to have the United States remain in Asia for as long as possible. So in, from a Chinese perspective, the harder they push, the more. more resistance they face. And I think, you know, despite all of the ways that the United States manages to get itself distracted by other problems, over the long term, concerns about not allowing China to dominate Asia will focus more and more American attention there. The only point I would add to that is the United States doesn't have to control Asia. We're not trying to do that. We couldn't do it if we tried. We've never been able to. We just need to make sure that no

nobody else controls Asia. And fortunately, lots of Asian countries have the same view. They don't want any single country to dominate the region, and they also don't want a war, right? Because that, of course, would damage all of them. And I think that's completely compatible with American interests, and U.S. diplomats should be explaining that to our Asian friends every chance they get. Last one. You've been an advocate for offshore balancing strategy. Sort of like what Nixon, you know, had advocated quite a long time ago. Is that a realistic, you know, ask? Yeah. No, I think that's where we're headed and I think that's where we should be headed, where we recognize that the United States, for historical reasons, is in this very favorable position. Unlike China, with lots of neighbors that are, they have to worry. about we have no neighbors that we have to worry about that's one of the reasons the United States can wander all over the world getting into trouble we

don't have to worry about Canada attacking us or anything like like that that gives us enormous latitude and it means the only really serious threats the United States faces are other great powers major powers who might dominate their region the way we dominate the Western Hemisphere and if they did then they would be free to roam around the world getting into trouble. They might even try to build influence, maybe form alliances with countries near the United States, which we would find very uncomfortable. So the United States has, I think, for many years, really, since the beginning of the 20th century, tried to prevent any other country from, say, dominating all of Europe, dominating all of Asia.

That's why we've entered World War I and World War II. When we've departed from that, we've usually gotten into trouble, right? Invading Iraq, being a good, but when we stick to those basic goals, which are not automatic, but they're relatively easy to do, then we usually succeed. And the trick is making sure

that our partners in either Europe or Asia pull their fair share of the burden, right? And so we have constant arguments with our friends in Asia and our friends in Europe about who's doing enough. I think right now we're in a position where we should be doing a little bit less in Europe, maybe a lot less in Europe, and focusing more attention on Asia because from a geopolitical point of view, the long-term challenge to the United States is in Asia, not in Europe.

Steve, you've been kind. Oh, thank you. All right. Thank you. Nice talking with you. Thank you. That was Professor Stephen Walt at Harvard University. Thank you. This is N-Gain.