School of War - Ep 190: Michael Doran on “Restraint” and the Middle East

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Michael Doran, senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at Hudson Institute, joins the show to discuss “restraintism” as a factor in Trump’s choices in the Middle East. ▪️ Times      •      01:46 Introduction     •      02:20 What is it?      •      05:01 Left, right, center      •      06:56 Syria ’07        •      11:47 Iraq Study Group        •      17:21 Populist expression      •      27:34 Balance         •      30:20 Obama v Trump      •      34:56 Oscillation     •      42:16 Back to JCPOA?         •      45:49 Snapback      •      47:44 Syria ’25     •      52:09 Iran and Turkey Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

In my lifetime, American presidents have come into office each wanting the same three things. They want better relations with Russia. They want to get serious with China and the Pacific. And they want to get the heck out of their Middle Eastern entanglements. The Trump administration here in April of 2025 seems to be proceeding apace. And we are going to talk today about some of the challenges in the Middle East and a trend in thought that goes by the name restraint. and can they stay it? We continue to face

the great situation in Iran. We'll fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Michael Duran, who is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute. He's taught in many places. He's written many books. Most recently, he wrote a long essay in Tablet Magazine, which caught my attention. It's really very good. I recommend it to you called the King's Foyles about foreign policymaking and foreign policy debates in the current Trump administration. I guess it's not most recently because you did have a Wall Street Journal piece over the weekend about Syria, those two things kind of go together. So we'll talk about them all at once. Mike, welcome

back to the show. Great to be here, Aaron. Thank you. So the tablet essay is a analysis and criticism of a trend in the foreign policy debate that you label as restraintism. And I wanted to open with the, well, two obvious questions. First, what is it? But second, why do you, why this neologism, did I pronounce that correctly? Why not I. isolationism or realism or neo-isolationism or these other terms that you hear applied to, at least similar trends. Why? So first of all, what is it? These are the people who are arguing that Ukraine and Israel are dragging the United States into unnecessary conflicts that are not in its interest. And if we just cut a deal with Putin or cut a deal with Iran, then we can stabilize. Europe and the Middle East. And in the Middle East context, that comes with the idea that Israel is

catapulting the United States into conflicts with Iran that are not in its interests. Jeffrey Sachs, economist from Columbia, I believe. Could be wrong about that. Just appeared recently on Tucker Carlson and said, Benjamin Netanyahu has dragged the United States into six wars. I didn't know we had been into six wars because of Israel. And he's trying to bring us into his seventh with Iran and so on. These are the restraints. Why do I call them restraints? This is what they call themselves. I believe in calling people what they want to be called. I don't want to misgender anyone, Aaron, and I don't want to call these people something other than what they call themselves. There's a network funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, a network in a number of different think tanks, defense priorities, Stemson Center, and so forth.

They very, oh, the Quincy Institute, they very consciously created this network and they very consciously made sure it was bipartisan. And the network then has a lot of influence inside the Trump administration. It's got some key, it's won some key jobs. And so after the meeting in the Oval Office, the very contentious meeting between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky, a lot of people in the pro-Israel world, where I spend a lot of money, time, were asking themselves, did Trump's willingness to move away from Ukraine and kind of present himself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine? Is that a portent of things to come with respect to Israel and Iran? And so I was just thinking through that problem.

What are the interesting things about this trend is, as you point out in the piece, and you sort of alluded to just now, not just a feature of the Trump administration or of the Trump administration or of the right, but it has a bipartisan quality. Some of the institutions you just pointed out, the Quincy Institute, is a collection of analysts from both the left and the right. And it does seem odd that you have this union of policy views and prescriptions happy on both the left and the right, less so, I guess, at the center. Yeah, inside the Trump administration and around it, so let's say, you know, on the Tucker

Carlson show. These restraintists are presenting themselves as the opposite of a neocon, and they are presenting themselves as something entirely new, new and different. And they're also presenting themselves as the face of conservative populism. This is the voice, Aaron, of the common man on the street or woman on the street who has been ignored by the global who are in control of our government and in control of the mainstream media, and they have been squelching this authentic voice of the American people. That's the way they present it, and I don't see it that way. Certainly there are people in the electorate who think like this.

These views are not uncommon, but that's just the point. They've been around a long time, and they've been around a very long time inside the American national security establishment, and I know because I worked in government, And I've been arguing with these people since 2005. Okay, well, that's where I want to go next. I mean, we'll come back to Trump. We'll come back to the claim that you make,

which is that this is not authentic, this trend of thought is not authentic Trumpism or authentic Trump populism. We'll come back to that. But the time is 2007, maybe 2005, depending where you want to start. But the incident that you say crystallizes or begins the post-9-11 story of restraintism,

is America's non-involvement with an Israeli strike on the Syrian nuclear program in 2007. Flesh that out for us. What role did restraintism play? Tell us a little bit about the incident. Tell us about your experiences with it. I made a distinction in the article between the era of restraint that we're in and restraintism. The era of restraint starts with the backlash to the Iraq war. Many Americans, I think polling says a majority of Americans think that the Iraq war was a mistake.

In fact, as I understand it, I haven't done a deep research on this, but I've seen the polling from time to time. A majority of Americans who served in Iraq believe that the war was a mistake. And Americans are wary. They're concerned about the debt. They're concerned about imperial overreach. They want a more judicious American policy that puts less emphasis on large-scale military deployments to the Middle East. That's the era of restraint. That's public opinion. The restraintists come with a very specific menu saying, reach out to Iran, distance yourself from Israel.

And those ideas in my mind do not comport with the view of the majority of Americans, certainly not the majority of. of conservative Americans who support Israel and want to see Iran taken down a peg. So the restraints who are on both sides of the aisle, they're in the Democratic Party and in the Republican Party, and they're in the national security bureaucracy as well, they capitalized on the era of restraint to say, well, we have the answer. The answer is Obama. You know, let's do the JCPOA, let's put a bear hug around Israel, don't let it operate, distance ourselves from Israel, hammer away on Israel on the Palestine question, and try to stabilize the Middle East by reaching out to Tehran.

So this era began, the era of restraint, as opposed to restraintism, began in September of 2007 when the Israelis attacked the al-Kibar nuclear reactor in Syria. I dated it then, Aaron, because the Israelis came to Washington, Merid the Ghana, the head of the Mossad came to Washington earlier in the spring revealed to George W. Bush and his top officials the existence of the Syrian nuclear reactor and said that there was a short window to take it out before it went online and started producing radioactive material. And Bush said, no, the United States will not do it and also counseled the Israelis not to do it themselves unilaterally.

And the Israelis didn't take that advice and went. did it. But what I pointed out in the article is that this is a real turning point because according to Bush's notion of what his foreign policy was to try to prevent the nexus of terror sponsors, state sponsors of terrorism and terrorism groups with global reach and WMD proliferation, we should have taken out the Syrian nuclear reactor. But because of the backlash in public opinion, Bush didn't want to do it. He didn't want to go down in history as the mad bomber who widened the war. He could see very clearly what the script was going to be on the left if he attacked in Syria. It was going to be what? The Iraq war wasn't enough for you. Now

you want to start a war in another country expanding the war, bringing us closer to destabilizing the whole Middle East, killing more Americans, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That was the script. He didn't want to deal with that, so he counseled the Israelis not to do it. The restraintism, I don't see that as necessarily restraintism, although the restraints were certainly counseling Bush to go that way. Restraintism I saw in the Bush administration all the time during the Iraq war, during the Iraq war, the office, this is not well understood, I think, by people. The White House office that was responsible for Iraq when I was in the White House was very much in favor of reaching out to Iran. They believed that the way to stabilize Iraq was to have good relations with the United States.

Iran. And so they were restraintists, just like the people who are now in the Trump administration, pretending that there's something totally different than we've ever seen before and representing the voice of the common people. I've been dealing with these arguments exact same arguments, exact same arguments and exact same attitude since 2005. You had an interesting discussion as well about the role played by the Iraq study group, which is something that maybe those who are newer to the scene may not remember as a major feature of the, I guess it's the second Bush term. But just say more about this period because, you know, I think everyone in their mind has Bush chalked up as, well, to put it in the language of the restrainers, peak neocon.

Neokon. Yeah, these dynamics were complicated even then. Who were these people? What was the Iraq study group? How did that play into things? So look, inside the administration, let me give you an example of a restraintist, right, who doesn't get coded that way, you know, because he's not. in bed with the Libertarian Koch Network right now. He doesn't get coded that way, but he's always

been there. This is Brett McGirk. Brett McGirk, who ran the Biden Middle East Polly. He was the senior director and responsible for the whole Middle East under Joe Biden. He was there in the Trump and the Bush administration, George W. Bush administration. He was in the Iraq office. And like I said, that office believed that you could stabilize Iraq by reaching out to Iran. The logic was, Because we're carrying out a democracy policy in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, we toppled him, and he was the enemy of Iran, and he was the Sunni who was suppressing the Shiites, who are a plurality of the Iraq and the majority of the Arabs. And by carrying out this democracy policy, we were empowering the Shiites, who had historically ties of affinity to Iran.

So the idea is the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And Saddam Hussein was our enemy. It was also Iran's enemy. We toppled him. We empowered the friends of Iran, the Shiites in Iraq. We didn't have long-term aspirations to control the oil or anything else, any imperial aspirations. We just wanted an Iraq that wasn't going to threaten its neighbors. That corresponded to the supposedly, I didn't believe any of this, but this corresponded to the

desire of the Iranians. And so what we needed to do was to convince the Iranians that we weren't using our position in Iraq to try to topple Iran and that we really just wanted to create an Iraq that they could live with and that we could live with. And so therefore, we could do this together. So let's reach out to them. What Obama comes along, Obama comes along after Bush and he takes this thinking and elevates it to the strategy for the whole Middle East. By the way, McGurk, what a great survivor. He worked in the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration, then he worked in the Obama administration. Then he worked in the Trump administration, and then he worked in the Biden administration, each time getting a more important position.

So these people are embedded in the national security bureaucracy. They've always been there. Back in the Bush days, the Iraq study group was a congressionally mandated study. on how to get out of the Iraq war. It was bipartisan. James Baker, Uber Realist, who was the Secretary of State

in George H.W. Bush. So he came out of Bush World, but he represented a different kind of trend than Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld in their later iterations in the George W. Bush administration. He's a realist, and the realists, whether we're talking about Meersheimer and Walt in academia or James Baker in the in the policy

world are restraints. This is who they are. They believe that there's a deal to be had with Iran and that and that Israel is forcing us to take extremist positions against Iran that are scuttling that deal. The restraintist inside the Bush administration were whispering to people outside the Bush administration saying hey there's an opportunity now that we're bogged down in Iraq and things aren't going well to further our positions. So they whispered to people in Congress, and that gave us the Baker-Hamilton report, authored by none other than Ben Rhodes, that's the Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications under Obama.

And the report calls for reaching out to Iran, for pulling the troops out of Iraq, reaching out to Iran, reaching out to Syria and and starting a peace process between Israel on the one hand and the Palestinians and the Syrians on the other because Aaron the way to stabilize Iraq is to have an Arab-Israeli peace process. This is actually, this is crucial to the restraintist thinking. It's actually from an actually real, realist point of view. It's absurd. What the hell does the Palestinian question have to do with Iraq or Afghanistan for that matter? But in their minds it does. Well, let's set aside that piece for a second, but whether it's the narrow Bush, relatively narrow, pretty broad, actually, Bush objective of stabilizing Iraq with the assistance of Iran or the much broader, as you characterize it, Obama desire to stabilize the region through detente in cooperation with Iran. How is it that this point of view doesn't represent some sort of legitimate American desire following? the shortcomings of our policy in Iraq in Afghanistan as well, as time goes on, to seek accommodation with those who also presumably want some level of stability, perhaps at the price of greater control and security for themselves, but like who are we really to point fingers for

that kind of thing? And a desire for peace and less American engagement in a part of the world that is famously violent and complicated and at best limited business of ours. Like how is what you just outlined not a sort of expression of a natural and on some level quite understandable populist impulse? It is. I think it is an expression or it appeals to a very commonsensical and legitimate attitude, right? This place, the Middle East is very far away. We don't understand it well.

we have, Bush had these grandiose, this grandiose project of bringing democracy, and this led us to get into a very open-ended commitments of men and material that are not in the American interest. That is, to me, a completely legitimate position. And if I hadn't served in the Bush administration, I might even be a more vocal proponent of it. but I feel a little bit of loyalty to the administration. And I'm aware, I'm a bit more aware than everybody else is of all the debates that went on inside and that the idea that this was just a big neocon muscle movement was, it seems to me, is a caricature of what happened.

But the position, as you describe, is very legitimate. And the idea of seeking a balance in the Middle East is I think a smart one as well. But the restraintist agenda does the opposite. The restraintist agenda starts from the assumption that conflict in the Middle East is caused by our relationship with Israel. It starts with an assumption.

It imputes to the Iranians Pacific goals, Pacific inclinations, that they do not have. The Iranians are trying to expel the United States from the Middle States, This has been their explicit policy from 1979 until yesterday. They try it in many different ways. They have never given up on this.

The evidentiary record on this is huge. So people who are calling themselves realists are saying that, are saying that none of that is true. Iran really wants to deal with us. Somehow they know this. A lot of them have no experience in the Middle East at all. Jeffrey Sacks, who's now on Tucker Carlson, presenting himself as a guy who really understands on the Middle East works.

Like hell, from where? Where does this great knowledge come from? So where does it come from? Hostility to Israel. It's domestic politics. It's a reaction to what they perceive to be the influence of Israel, and they want to counter it by saying, no, no, no, we shouldn't do what they say Israel is saying. Often they don't even know that either.

But it's a perception of they don't like the kind of people in domestic American politics who are pushing these agendas. And so they say the exact opposite. It isn't coming from a knowledge of what's actually going on in the Middle East at all. So I'll give you an example, if I may, from the Baker Hamilton Report. I was in the Bush White House where the Baker Hamilton Report came out. It's like, if I recall correctly, December of 2006, maybe. I don't know. I should know my history better than that, especially since I lived it.

But anyway, I got sent over, I went over as a delegation. Me, Peter Rodman, who was the Assistant Secretary of Defense, we've had responsibility for the Middle East, and John Hillen, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs. The three of us... Soon to be on School of War. Oh, good, good. You can ask him about this. we went over, we went over just as the Baker Hamilton report came out. And all of our, so we went to the double I-I-W-S Manama dialogue.

But as a U.S. officials, you go to this thing because you can meet everyone in the Middle East, all the foreign ministers of the Middle Eastern countries in one day. You just sit there, it's like speed dating, you know? Oh, it's 11 o'clock. It's the Iraqi foreign minister. It's 12 o'clock. It's the Saudi foreign minister. And then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you go down the line.

And all of them, the bigger Hamilton report had come out just on the Friday before we got there Thursday before. They were all going crazy because they thought we were going to cut and run and cut a deal with the Iranians and hand the whole Middle East to the Iranians. And they wanted assurances that we weren't. So like from a realist point of view, if you want to create a balance between Iran and the rest of the Middle East, then you want to have your allies on board. You don't want to have them run and cutting deals, separate deals with Iran. and helping Iran to throw you out of the region. And so we had to sit there, me, Hillen, and Rodman, we developed very quickly because everyone was, all of our allies were panicking.

So we developed a little patter to say, we don't, you know, we don't, we don't abandon our allies. And apparently someone, I don't know who, I was in, off in the Middle East, somebody, I assume it was somebody close to the Saudis, but I'm making that up, I don't know, somebody got to George W. Bush. And he put out a statement immediately, the minute the Baker Hamilton report came out, he came out immediately and said, we are not going to follow the, we're not going to follow

the recommendations of the Baker Hamilton report with regard to Iran, with regard to Iran. And precisely in order to calm everybody now. So me and Rodman and Hillen could point to the foreign ministers and say, yeah, and notice the president's statement, we're not going to cut and run on our allies. By the way, I was at a dinner and I sat next to the assistant secretary at the British foreign ministry. And he said, why did Bush come out? They liked it because they loved all the peace process garbage in the Baker Hamilton report. Europeans love, it's in their DNA to process peace.

So I was sitting next to this guy and he asked me about Bush's statement. And I said, why did he make the statement? Because the Baker Hamilton report, well, before I tell you what I said, Steve Hadley, the National Security Advisor, my boss, just before the Baker Hamilton report came out, they said, listen, this report is coming out. Some of you may not agree with it. You keep your mouths shut.

This is the intersection of foreign policy and domestic policy, and the president has to thread this needle, and it's up to him to decide how to do it. Don't you box them in. Don't you say a word. Anybody ask you about the Baker Hamilton report? Stay mum, right? Okay. So it was really, Steve Hadley's a great wasp gentleman.

He doesn't really often say, you will do this and give orders, but he did. So anyway, I went there to, I was there in Manama, sitting next to this Brit, and I said, the Brit asked me, why did Bush make this statement about the, about this rejection of the Baker Hamilton Report and I said because he thinks it's a it's a warmed over pile of steaming dog shit and then

the next day or the day after that in the financial times there was a there was an article by the from the Middle East correspondent saying that George W. Bush thinks the Baker Hamilton report is a warmed over pile of

steaming dog shit And good job. I thought, oh, no. Oh, no. Hadley's going to understand that I said this. Nobody ever called me on it. I don't know if anyone ever noticed. Well, we'll take this as your formal confession.

I know I confess that I called it. Dr. W. Bush didn't. It's good to come. I hope you feel unburdened. I feel much better now about that. You know, the membership of that delegation, just to our running theme that the Bush administration was, in fact, more complex than the reputation that has earned, you know, John Hillen, who, if memory serves,

yeah, debated Bill Crystal and Bob Kagan in the pages of foreign affairs back in those days. But Hillen. Yeah, but Hillen, Hillen is a real realist. Like when I say real realist, because there's this, like I was saying before, it's a strange thing about America, where you have these, in the policy world, you got James Baker, there's realism. and then Meersheimer and Walt, who I think are crazy, they call themselves realists. Any realist understands that Israel is a great asset to the United States and Middle East. Sorry, I interrupted you.

So, yes. I'm making a point with which I think you'll agree. So you have Hill and you have you, who I don't think of you as a neocon per se, though maybe we should define the term. And then Peter Rodman, who, you know, begins his career as a close associate of Henry Kissinger, not a noted neocon, whatever his many qualities. And that's the Bush administration's delegation to this Middle East conference.

Yeah, I called myself, I didn't really understand all this stuff very well because I came out of academia. I was sucked out of academia into the Bush administration, and I had not spent much time thinking about different foreign policy orientations and so on. And so whenever people would call me a neocon, I knew enough,

I sensed I was not a neocon. And I knew, because I didn't really believe in democracy promotion. But I didn't know. I was not very experienced. So I used to tell people, I'm not a neocon. I'm a running dog of the neocons. That's cool. That's good.

That's good. Okay. So Obama takes restraintism to this maximalist vision of the Middle East. You've never really said, I think, for the record, and maybe it would be good to solicit it. Like, what's, okay. So we don't like. like the restraintist because while it may seem reasonable to pursue a balance in the Middle East, and that seems like a smaller realist goal that's reasonable, maybe even necessary,

we don't we think they're dishonest and they want to just sort of hand the whole thing to the Iranians at the expense of our traditional allies. Was that too far? Go ahead. Yeah, I don't know that's true. There are some of them. Certainly Michael Domino, I don't know him personally, but he's now the Dazdi for the Middle East, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East and the

administration who comes from, I think, defense priorities, if I'm not mistaken, which is one of these coke-funded tank tanks. He was on record, I think I quoted him in the article, but I'm not mistaken, saying the United States has no interest, no vital interest in the Middle East. And the only reason is there is to protect Saudi Arabia and Israel. If you ask me, that's looney tunes. I think it's crazy. But I'm not, I think he probably believes it. But there are tons of others who don't go that far and don't say we should pull out of the Middle East. They will qualify it. And what they want is a balance. But they think that the reason that we don't have balance right now is because we are too solicitous of Israel and not friendly enough to Tehran. And that just shows a complete lack of

understanding of how the Middle East works, who the Iranians are, what our Iran policy has been. And there's not, if we've done one thing with Iran since 1979, it's tried to run after it and cut a deal with it because we knew there were guys there in Tehran that really wanted to cut a deal with us. This is a theme that's been there since the Reagan administration. That's helpful. That's really clarifying. And so, you know, the attitude towards Israel is the main or perhaps most noticeable break between

Obama and Trump, amongst many others. But there's a palpable frustration, annoyance, maybe more towards Israel and towards Netanyahu personally under Obama. And that all flips pretty dramatically under Trump one, as does Iran policy overall. We're kind of in a different place now in 2025, and we should get to that. But under Trump one, the attitude, you know, towards my earlier observation about the cyclical nature of things, the pendulum swings back. We pull out of the JCPOA. We adopt this campaign of maximum pressure. But at the same time, Trump also, you know, has both the rhetoric and I think the sincere

intention of reducing the American role in the Middle East. And these two things in his mind work in parallel, a kind of a swinging back to an alignment with traditional allies like Israel and Saudi and others, which not in the Saudi case, but leads to the Abraham Accords and a desire to reduce the American role, as opposed to the Obama goal of reducing the American role by swinging towards Iran. Why, in your view, I don't think I'm putting words in your mouth here, why was Trump won, first term Trump, right and Obama wrong? I think it just goes to worldview.

I think that Obama's a progressive. He has, he himself has an unrealistic, ungrounded understanding of how the Middle East works, what the goals of countries like Iran are. And secondly, the domestic politics lined up perfectly for him because he created this picture. You remember when he sold the country on the joint comprehensive plan of action, the Iran nuclear deal, he said, you know, there's my plan, which is a huge giveaway to Iran or war. That's our choice. We don't have a deterrence. the thing that Obama did, we don't have a deterrence option.

The thing that Obama did in all of his presentations of the options was to gut deterrence as a real option. So, I mean, if we take the caricature of what Bush was, which is, you know, open-ended, large-scale deployments to the Middle East, on the one hand, and Obama, which is give everything to Iran, Trump is squarely in the middle there. And he believes in deterrence. Trump has this sort of distinctive chip in his makeup in that he believes that economics is the driver of international relations.

I think that, you know, as a kind of fundamental assumption, I would disagree with that. I perhaps with you, I'm not, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think what you and I share in common is a belief that the military balance is really the single most important thing driving international politics. It's not the only thing. We don't have to be reductionist about this, but it's the single most important thing. And it's the thing that you need to get right up front, because if you get it wrong, it can be devil everything else. But Trump comes from a different point of view. He knows that the military balance matters, but he starts by thinking about economics.

And he wants to use the economic tools first and back them up with the military instrument. and he wants to achieve a balance, so being a businessman, so we can all make money, right? This is the, it's the kind of materialist view of how all this stuff works. Like I said, I could sit and philosophically argue with Donald Trump on this point or on that point, but I can get behind that. I can get behind that 100%. Makes a lot of sense to me because Trump, the man, understands deterrence. He understands it in his gut.

He understands it from negotiating. You want to have, you want to negotiate from a position of strength. You don't want to just start giving the enemy stuff before you cut a deal with them. And I think Trump also came to understand who the Iranians were. After all, they tried to kill him. I think he's got a healthy understanding of that. And I want to get to, you know, the Middle East challenges in front of Trump today, you know, April 2025 here in a minute, whether it's Iran or Syria.

But before we do, one more sort of scene setting question, which is help the listeners understand. Because I think there's some, I confess to. some of it myself sometimes. There's some confusion as to how the president who, for example, ordered the strike on Qasem Soleimani or the president who quite recently was calling for American ownership of Gaza to turn it into a sort of profit-making enterprise of some sort. Gaza Lago. Gaza Lago. I heard Mara Gaza. What was it, Trump Riviera? I thought was a good one. Andrew Roberts had a good piece in the Free Beacon outlining, you know, if you like historical president. It's good to get someone from the British Empire or his

historian of the British Empire to talk about precedence for that kind of thing. So you have all that in one column. In another column, you have someone who, you know, calls for the end to endless wars who did, you know, couple a pretty hawkish approach to Iran in the first term with a desire to draw down in Syria, which caused his Secretary of Defense to Jimenez to resign. So Mattis said, I don't know. Well, we can, we can go to the ways there. But who is hired, I mean, the whole, the whole jumping off point of your essay and tablet is not that these people, exist and breathe and that annoys you. No, it's that they've positions of real prominence in this

administration. So the same president who has Mike Waltz as his national security advisor and Marco Rubio as a secretary of state also employs a number of people who come from this network and I think would actually and have on the record said that they are believers in capital R restraint. Explain explain what these apparent inconsistencies or oscillations to the Can I, I, I'll do that, but can I go back to your previous question and make one other point about Trump? Please. And it's the, it's the Israel point. And I want to make it because I needed to answer the question you just asked.

Obama, progressive Americans hate Israel. Or let's just say, progressive Americans are critical of Israel. Maybe that's a more restrained way of saying. You can defend that one more easily, I think. Yeah. Okay. So they are, you know, they want, they don't like close relations between the United States and Israel. And so Obama created a picture of the Middle East which said that all of the people that progressives don't like Benjamin Netanyahu, Muhammad bin Salman, evangelical Christians and so on.

They're the cause of war in the Middle East. Iran in this picture doesn't become, you know, the peace party. But it is the object of diplomacy, which is the path that we need to take in order to bring peace. And so it plays out as good domestic politics. Donald Trump, in addition, I think, in his gut, understanding deterrence, he also has, in his coalition, a very strong pro-Israel contingent. And, you know, in his electorate, his base is pro-Israel. And if we've learned one thing about Donald Trump since 2016, it's that he's a very strong pro-Israel. He's a pretty good politician. You can't do what he's done.

Remarkable, the greatest comeback in American history, you can't do it if you don't understand who you're appealing to out there. And so Trump understands that Israel, that he's in the pro-Israel. His coalition, his electorate is pro-Israel. And he himself, there's no reason to believe that he himself personally isn't pro-Israel. So he's never going to go the Obama route in that regard. Now, we've got to your question. I already forgot what it was. Sorry. Oscillations. The guy seems to go back and forth pretty dramatically in hiring and policy.

There's an appearance, Mike, of inconsistency, but I think you have an account that attempts to... What would the ancient astronomers have said that you're going to save the appearances? You're going to save the appearances of the Trump administration. You're going to explain that to us. Yeah, yeah. So I don't think I want to go with the ancient astronomers because I think you're talking about those who still wanted... They still wanted the sun to be revolving around the earth, right? And so they... That's a very, that's a very sophisticated pushback. But yes, please...

I'm not going, no. No, no. No, I think Trump wants economic-based deterrent. An economic policy, he understands that he has to deter Iran. He understands that very clearly. And he understands that he wants to be aligned with Israel and Saudi Arabia, who are the two countries that are most threatened by Iran. Actually, clearly, we saw him in his press conference with his most recent press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

He also wants to be aligned with the Turks, our traditional ally. That's the triumvirate. Ankara, Jerusalem, Riyadh. He wants to be in good terms with all of them, and he realizes that he needs to deter the Iranians. And so he, but he also knows that he can't trust the traditional foreign policy, because they were they knifed them in the back in in Trump won. So he has to create his own team and in doing that he has reached out to these restraints. He also has a libertarian base in his in his domestic base. You know, he has he has constituents who are who are restraintists.

He also I mean look at he won Michigan by reaching out to the Arab vote in in Dearborn and and and elsewhere. And that's not a big, that's not necessarily a big pro-Israel bastion, the Arab vote of, of Michigan. So he wants to show, he wants to signal to diverse constituencies in the, in domestic politics, that he's open to their viewpoint, that he's taking it seriously. And so he does that in a typical Trumpian fashion. He's riding two horses at the same time. And he'll make, he makes, he makes, He makes statements on Monday that are clearly designed to appeal to the Israel and the pro-Israel community and the evangelicals and everybody like me that thinks that Iran is the problem. And then on Tuesday he makes statements that are designed to appeal to the other constituency. But if you follow what he does and pay more attention to that than what he says, I think you come up with a pretty consistent line of deterrence through strength.

That's what I see him doing. You have a riff in the piece as well that I thought was helpful, which is the oscillation just to stick with the word between a kind of poxies. The zigzag is the strategy. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I thought that that was well put, and that was clarifying for me. That it keeps things off balance to his benefit.

Oh, yeah. He also. He also. He believes him as the final arbiter of policy. He also. Not just abroad where you're zigzagging between. escalation and accommodation, but at home in the Washington policy debate, the zigging and the zagging ultimately redounds to his own decision space. Yes, yes. So he's got all, you know, he's got,

look at the difference of opinions there. You've got Tulsi Gabbard, and who's inclines toward the restraintism viewpoint. And you've got Mike Walsh, who goes a different direction. And they're both sitting there around him. And one day he says, he throws a bone to Tulsi Gavord. see him the next day he throws a bone to waltz. And in the end, all the big decisions will be made by him. And they will be taken to him. And nobody can predict. If we're looking at the Iranian nuclear negotiations right now, you and I can't predict how this is going to, how this is going to unfold, nor can the Iranians. And Donald Trump likes all of that. He likes the, he likes the uncertainty among his advisors, and he likes the uncertainty abroad. And it's not

such a bad thing, either. Well, that's unfortunate because my next question was going to be to ask you to predict how the Iranian negotiations were going to unfold. So we'll do our best, even though you've just told me that you're, you're unqualified, you're unqualified to offer such predictions. I can, I can see a lot of intelligent things around, but I can't. So, you know, we're recording this on Monday the 14th. The president's envoy, Steve Wickoff, was just in the Middle East, engaging in some sort of talks. They appear indirect by any, by any sort of standard that what might typically be applied to it with, with the Iranians. And just to speak in sort of broad caricatures for a second, one group who follow these issues is worried that Trump will walk away from these negotiations and will be embroiled in yet another Middle Eastern War.

I guess that's the restraintist fear. And then another group is worried that these negotiations are going to lead us back to the JCPOA or a deal similar to the JCPOA, which is basically the only kind of deal this view would hold that the Iranians can accept. So what's going on here? I've never seen the situation in the Middle East as a whole like it is right now where we're really, you know, on a knife's edge or at a turning point. There are enormous opportunities in the Middle East today. And there are also, as always, the threats. And so a year from now, we could be in a completely different Middle East and it could be unlike, you know, it could be peaceful, unlike anything we've seen in our lifetime. me, Aaron? Or it could be a lot worse. And I, and I, it's really hard to predict which way it's

going to, it's going to go. And I think every issue we're talking about, I can, I can point out how this is the, how this is the case, you know, whether it's, whether it's Iran proxies, Iran nukes, Syria, whatever. But Lebanon, in the case of Iran nukes, we've got a large buildup of American power. We've seen in Donald Trumpian fashion an assertion of American military power by attacking the Houthis, which was a series. signal to the Iranians as much as to the Houthis. We have a threat coming from Trump saying, you know, in early March, he said, we settle this nuclear thing within two months, or else you're going to see bombing like you've never seen it before. But then he sends off

Steve Whitkoff, who made very, I would just say, relatively conciliatory sounding statements. They accepted the ridiculous Iranian desire to have proximity talks rather than meeting face-to-face so that the Iranians can say that they don't sit down with us because we're weak and illegitimate and so on and so forth. They can pretend to be strong when they're not. And the early discussions appear to be returned, you know, about return to JCPOA type restrictions on the Iranians. That's what it looks like.

I have no, nobody who knows what's actually going on has briefed me on what's happening, but all of the body language sounds like another JCPOA type negotiation. So I can score this if we're scoring it toward what I think needs to be, which is a real hard-headed deterrence against Iran, really take them down a notch and show everyone in the region that they have been taken down a notch. Or conciliation of Obama style, you know, you can score this either way. And so I think we just have to watch and see what happens.

If they actually strip Iran of its nuclear weapons capability verifiably and so that everyone in the region sees that that has happened, I will say this is a fantastic policy. I'm not ready to pronounce on it right away. I didn't love the fact that we sat down. We allowed them to do this proximity talk nonsense. I didn't like the fact that it was only 45 minutes of negotiations. We're going to meet for 45 minutes and then have another week before we sit with him for 45 more minutes. Because what the Iranians are trying to do is string us along by time. They're concerned about the end of the snapback mechanism, which is going to disappear in October.

And if it's not activated the snapback mechanism by July, then it probably can't be reactivated. And so they want to string the negotiations out past July. So they're going to meet once a week for 45 minutes and play their games about whether they're actually talking to us or not. So for those of us in the peanut gallery who struggle with the different? between Mauritius and Mauritania. What is the snapback mechanism? Explain that to the to the, to the crowd. Snapback mechanism. The UN resolution, I think it was 2331, that recognized the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, created a mechanism that allows all of the UN resolutions on Iran. So the 23331 temporarily lifted all of the UN resolutions on Iran, which require Iran, order Iran not to have enrichment and reprocessing

capabilities. So as a matter of international law, they take the fuel cycle away from the Iranians. All of them, all of those, there are, I think, six of those resolutions. They can all be reinstated, and they put economic penalties on Iran as well, economic sanctions. They can all be reinstated. by any signatory to the JCPOA through this snapback mechanism. Last question for you, Mike Duran, and we've gone on for a while and we can't go on for another hour on this. I mean, I could. I would enjoy it.

But in a few minutes, talk about the other major goal in the Middle East that you prescribe for the Trump administration. If the goal with regard to Iran is, I'm going to put words in your mouth here, but you go ahead and correct these if I get it wrong, the restoration of some kind of favorable balance. with Iran in which Israel, Saudi, et cetera, play a central role. That's goal one. Goal two is figuring out the future in Syria and heading off a looming collision there between Jerusalem and Ankara. If those are the other two, if it's Riyadh, Jerusalem, and Ankara that are the three nodes,

we have a looming confrontation in Syria between Jerusalem and Ankara. Talk about that. Talk about the shape of what you think is. feasible there. Talk about the dangers as well. What does it look like if it all goes wrong? I'll do that. But there's one thing I want to, I want to make one statement really clearly, which I think came out in our discussion, but it didn't come out as clearly as I would have liked it. And I didn't think of it until now. And that's that I want this whole discussion of the restraintists, part of my, one of my goals was to make the point that the restraint is don't

represent Trump. Trump is in a very different place. And that's why I'm not overly worried about these guys. I don't agree with them. I think a lot of what they say is hogwash, but I don't get too upset about it because I realize that there's a different kind of guy in charge who's a different view, and we should all remember that. This is, Syria is, after the Iran nuclear question, Syria is the most important issue strategically for the United States. Historically, we don't see Syria, our national security bureaucracy, for some reason. and it's kind of blind to it. But it is absolutely the place

where the new order in the region is being built. And our two allies, our two most important allies for building a new order in the Middle East, Turkey and Israel are bumping up against each other. The friction is growing. It could actually lead to war. The job of a superpower is not just to constrain enemies,

it's also to manage allies. And so the goal should be to turn Syria into a buffer state between Israel and Turkey. Left to their own devices, the Turks and the Israelis will not find an accommodation. I don't think. I'm not, let's say, I'm not confident in that. But if Trump gets involved directly, negotiates with them and presents the United States as part of the buffer between them, I think that he can take both of them to a place that is mutually beneficial.

And so the reason why absent Trump, you think it's unlikely that an accommodation between the two has come to is because their goals are just irreconcilable. That is to say Turkey wants a rebuilt and strong partner in Syria and Israel just can't accept that or characterize the dispute, if you would. So Turkey is increasingly, Erdogan's Turkey is increasingly presenting Israel as the other, you know, as the enemy of Turkey. National Security. Erdogan recently prayed for the destruction of Israel. He has repeatedly said that Israelis are carrying out a genocide in Gaza. He has looked forward to the time when Turkey will liberate Jerusalem and so on. This is a kind of rhetoric toward Israel that you don't hear coming from the Turks toward anyone else. So this is a great concern, as you can imagine, in Jerusalem. The Israelis see Ashara, the Islamist, who's now in charge of the interim government

in Damascus, as a proxy of the Turks. And so they are fearful that Turkey will start playing from the point of view of a significant Sunni power, the same role in Syria that the Iranians played. I personally am less concerned about that, but you can't say that the Israeli concerns are coming from nowhere. That would be a gross dereliction of duty by the United States to assume that. But I personally think there's a way to find a modus vivendi between the two. Or at least I think that that's what we should try. We shouldn't say it's impossible before we, the United States, try. Only the United States, Erdogan has a pragmatic, non-ideological side. If you followed his career for the last quarter century, you can see that he's been on

every side of every issue for pragmatic reasons. Only the United States, with its power, can bring out the pragmatic element in his, in him. I don't think the Israelis themselves can do it. Well, then what I know I said that was my last question, but, but I lied. This, this is my last question. Help me distinguish then your prescription for Turkey and your prescription for Iran. or actually that's the wrong question. It's not helped me distinguish. I can distinguish a very different prescription. You're quite hawkish on Iran and not on Turkey. Go ahead. So, so you would say that if I understand you correctly, I'll repeat your question in different form. You're saying, Mike, aren't you saying that all of the things that you reject about Iran? Because the restraint is to say

Iran is pragmatic, let's cut a deal with it and so on. Aren't you making exactly the same arguments about Turkey. I was politely winding up to that, but you got to the punch before I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I am making the same arguments that they make about Iran about Turkey. That Turkey has a pragmatic side. We can appeal to it and so on. And they're making the people who disagree with me about this. In the pro-Israel world, there's a lot of people who disagree with me. And they say, no, no, no. Erdogan is a Muslim brother and so on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, they are right that I am, The structure of my argument about Turkey is nearly identical to the structure of the argument that the restraintists make about Iran. But it's very easy for me to make this because I think Turkey and Iran are very different places. They're not the same country. The Turks are members of NATO. They have a capitalist economy that is tied into the free market. They have a history of working productively with people that they call enemies all the time.

The Turks, Erdogan. Erdogan is the staunchest support. supporter of Ukrainian claims against Russia. They've never accepted the Russian occupation of Crimea. They haven't accepted the Russian invasion of Ukraine and they support them. At the same time, Erdogan has kept a line out to Putin. He's got one of the more productive relations with Putin, even as he has totally opposed him in Ukraine. So the Turks are fantastic compartmentalizers. I don't think anyone compartmentalizers. I don't think anyone compartmental. it mentalizes quite as well as they do. There airs to 19th century European balance of power

politics. This is the fact that Erdogan has an ideology that he expresses from time to time in ways that are very disturbing. It doesn't mean that they are that they have stopped being who they've always been for the last 500 years. So I just think that people who read the Middle East ideologically are always going to get it wrong. It is always a fascinating conversation with you. I'm not just saying that every time we talk. I learned something, and I'm grateful to you for coming back. Thanks for joining.

What did you learn this time? A few things here and there. A few things here and there. Talk to you soon, okay? Sure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.