The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: A Shape-Shifting Moment in the Middle East

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus. On today's Friday Focus we find ourselves in a shape shifting moment with major escalations taking place in the Middle East. How can Israel and Iran back down from this back and forth show of force? Meanwhile there is strong support in Israel for a forceful counter-attack on Iran. The presence of Hezbollah along Israel's northern border that had prevented Israel from striking Iran is now severely degraded. Is it time for Israel to take out Tehran's nuclear program? In the second half of the show, Rudyard and Janice discuss the US response. The Biden administration, worried about what an Israel attack in Iran will do to oil prices, is desperately searching for an option that allows Israel to respond in the least escalatory way possible.  To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast for the 4th of October. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, the executive director of the Monk Debates. I'm joined by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Well, Janice, here we find ourselves on another one of these hinge weeks. There's been a few of them this year, but the last seven days and what might happen in the next seven days does seem significant, doesn't it?

It certainly does. You have major escalations in the Middle East. We are in one of those shape-shifting moments. Richard. And let's unpack that for our listeners first, unless you were living under a rock, which actually is not a bad place to be these days. You would have heard that Israel was targeted by a second ballistic missile strike from Iran in the last six months. Like the first strike, hundreds of missiles involved at this time, no drones, but significantly more missiles. And once again, thankfully, very few casualties, seemingly one fatality, but impacts on the ground.

Missiles that slammed into Israeli military bases. This has elicited promises on the part of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu for a severe and harsh response. The Americans seem to be similarly echoing that this time will be different. We're not going to be contemplating the type of people. PINPRIK, take the wind strike that Biden urged on Netanyahu after April's ballistic missile attack by Iran. So Janis, looking at the state of play, what the various protagonists are saying publicly, at least, calibrate this strike for us.

How significant do you think Israel's subsequent attack on Iran will be? You know, the strike record is, in very sophisticated jargon, a big deal. Does stop for just one moment over that. 200 ballistic missiles. That would count as a major attack, frankly, anywhere in the world. There's no backroom chatter at this time that this was signaled ahead, and they really didn't want to cause any damage. They clearly meant to inflict considerable damage.

And so that changes the landscape for everybody. And two fronts, frankly. On the first front, the Biden administration is not even making a show this time of trying to restain the response. They have said they will not support an attack on Iran's nuclear installations. But short of that, they're not trying to restrain. Secondly, you have a dynamic in the Middle East. You've talked about it earlier as restoring deterrents. But there is, there's no question that in this part of the world, and increasingly on all sides, on the Iranian side, the Arab side and the Israeli side, it is if we don't respond, we will look weak. And that's what the Israelis drew from the strike this week. That because they engaged in a, what they consider a demonstration response to the last strike, Iran got the wrong signal. And one of the Iranians arguing that because,

they didn't attack fiercely enough. In April, Israel got the wrong signal and went ahead and assassinated Nusserl. The dynamic I'm describing, is the worst. It's the most dangerous. It just has built-in escalations. You do something to me. If I don't respond, you're going to think I'm weak. I've got to do something a little more.

And when I do that, if you don't respond, this is a very, very tough dynamic. to stop once it gets started like this. As we're recording on Friday the 4th of October, Iran in a sense, threatening counterstrikes on Israel's energy sources. It's offshore oil fields, power plants inside Israel. This is a reaction, Janice, to what Biden seemed to float on Wednesday, maybe pulled back a bit on Thursday, which was a contemplation of a Israeli,

strike backed, I assume, by the United States on the revolutionary guards, oil fields, which are the source of, you know, what kind of revenue the regime is able to get. Remember, it is still selling oil to China and other non-aligned, for lack of a better expression, economies and countries around the world. So do you think Israel can be deterred by the threat of a potential escalatory ladder, so to speak, with the Iranians now indicating their attention to counterstrike to the Israeli counterstrike and match. Again, this is very classic, isn't it, Janice, in terms of an escalatory ladder, kind of match and mirror. But heading upwards, not not heading.

downward in terms of the direction of travel on the escalatory ladder. I mean, that's exactly it, Ruddard. You've captured it. And as I said just a minute ago, it's such a tough dynamic to break. For Israel, one of the ways they're able to limit the impact of those ballistic missiles. Because if they had landed, Redyard, we would be talking about significant casualties. And frankly, all game, you know, everything is on the table. at that point.

So what's stopped that is an integrated missile system, that is a missile defense system that Israel has. But that covers the land. It doesn't cover the sea in the same way. And so were there to be an Iranian strike on Israeli oil installations, much more likely, frankly, to get through than what they've been able to do so far. And I'm sure that's a factor in what Israel is planning. The very fact that there was so much discussion about an attack on Iran's energy infrastructures tells me that's probably not the most likely because Israel will want the advantage of tactical surprise. But I have no doubt whatsoever that they will respond. There's, you know, just to again set the context here.

the Israeli military, unless distinguished them from Netanyahu and his right-wing colleagues. After October the 7th, and we're approaching that anniversary on Monday, hard to believe. But after October 7th, they were terrified that Nostrala was going to attack

over the Lebanese border, and they wanted then to launch a preemptive attack. and Biden went all out and restrained them. They look back now and they say, this was a mistake. This was a mistake. We should have done. Look where we are now. We've had to do it anyway, and we've had a year of this.

They look back at Biden, and he said, take the win after the April attack from Iran. And they were a very limited restraint response. And they're saying, that's a mistake. Look what this led to yet another. attack. Now, whether you agree with that logic or not, you can understand, I think, where that kind of thinking is coming from. And to the extent that they see that the American pressure, you know, which the Democratic left in the United States responsible Democratic left says, well, the Biden administration didn't do enough. But if you're a general sitting there and you're

dealing with these multi-fronted attacks, you're saying they went way too far in their advice. wasn't very good because we've had to face anyway what we wanted to do earlier. There's no breaks in the system right now, Roger. Yeah, just a quick observation. It should be noted that there's a high degree of political and social, I think, agreement, concurrence in Israel right now for a significant counterstrike. And I think this is notable because obviously we've had very hot. sharp divided debates in Israel around the war in Gaza, around the issue of the hostages.

But since the second strike, and even in fact, since the start of the Lebanon offensive against Hezbollah, it has been notable the extent to which Bibi Netanyahu has enjoyed, I would almost characterize as cross-party support. And there's really been on this question of the reaction to this week's strike by Iran, a lot of, again, from different parts of the political spectrum, support for a significant attack on Iran to draw a line in a sense under this conflict. But, Janice, my question for you is about Iran's nuclear program, because many people have made, I think a point that certainly gets my attention, is that in the coming months, maybe six months from now,

when the next Iranian ballistic missile strike on Israel happens, Israel will have to think at the back of its mind that one of those missiles, one of those warheads, could house an atomic bomb. Because as we've heard from the United States, Iran is literally a couple weeks. from being able to take its large stockpiles of enriched uranium and turn those into a nuclear warhead. And yes, people surmise that it would take time to have that fissile material, you know,

converted into a warhead and put on a missile. But who knows? Maybe the Iranians with the help of the Russians and Chinese and others have been working away on that technology. And can Israel really afford Janus to? to live with now the existential worry that they are being struck by large-scale ballistic missile attacks by Iran, which is a threshold nuclear power. In other words, Janice, why isn't it time to take out Iran's nuclear program to at least degrade it because this threat has now reached a crescendo?

It's unacceptable for Israel to live with this. So you're making the argument, Roger, that is, being actively made, right? now among senior generals in Israel, that this is a moment, right? And let's add to the picture here that Hezbollah has been badly weakened. Now, who knows how accurate the reports are, but certainly they've been degraded there, not the Hezbollah, even of two weeks ago. So this is a moment for many people of strategic opportunity. and the opposition of the Biden administration is not going to be relevant at this point, frankly, with respect to Iran's nuclear program.

The big challenge with Iran's nuclear program, most of it deep underground. And you can take out some of the assets, but you cannot take out all. And there's nobody in the Israeli military who doesn't understand that they don't have the capacity to do that, that they would need the assistance of the United States to do it. We're talking about, you know, kilometers down buried in hard rock here. They're reinforced all the centrifuge plants and the manufacturing facilities. So it's probably not an option, frankly. It's probably not a militarily feasible option to do.

And it would require not one attack. Why did you saw what happened in the Iranian attack against Israel, two waves of missiles over, frankly, in an hour? This will require wave after wave after wave of bombers that have a capacity to penetrate very, very deeply under the ground as simply not an option. The other side of the story is that, and we've seen this in Russia, Well, when Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons, when you use one, it's all over. You're not only killing your adversary, you're killing yourself too.

It would be, and there's no indication that the Iranian leadership is suicidal, 30 years of this regime and more. Janice, but I agree with you on that point, but, you know, command and control of nuclear arsenals is a critical function. And generally, you know, for better or worse, even with large states like Russia and the U.S., there have been moments of real existential panic where unintended consequences have happened that have brought us very close to the nuclear precipice. So now you're asking Israel to trust a regime that is writing on its missiles death to Israel that has a self-avowed policy to, to eliminate and destroy the, you know, quote, Zionist regime, close quote, and that has elements within it that are demonstrably fanatical.

I mean, would you agree that if Sinwar had a nuclear bomb right now that he could detonate in Tel Aviv, he would do it in the next five seconds? In other words, there are really bad people that are fanatics, And how can one trust that in a regime as already radicalized as the Iranian regime is, and it has these, you know, deeply anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic elements within it, wow, you're asking Israel to really assume a kind of rational actor model for Iran

that, that yes, may hold it at top echelon levels. But who's to say those echelons are stable? Who's to say that they have command and control over the entirety of their military and security forces? That's a lot to ask, Israel. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program, simply go to our website, www.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the

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