Honestly with Bari Weiss: A World Spinning Out of Control

If you're in LA or have plans to be this winter,

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The Right is paired with a journey into the world of Berlesque

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So get yours at acbdances.com.

That's acbdances.com.

I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly.

There are a lot of experts that we've been hearing about

in the past few weeks.

A lot of people who know a great deal about Hamas

or Hezbollah or Iran or China or Russia,

the regional experts.

There are also a lot of subject matter experts

who can tell us a lot about cyber warfare or decolonization

or, for example, the way that foreign governments

have influenced higher education in America.

All of those stories are important,

but each one of those topics

only gives you a slice of the whole story.

What if you want to understand the whole thing?

Well, that's when you turn to Walter Russell Mead.

Mead, who is a professor of foreign affairs

and humanities at Bard College,

better than just about anyone else right now,

is able to connect what can seem like disparate dots,

say the digital revolution or globalization

or the Iran deal and pull them together

to show us the big picture.

The reason I wanted to talk to him today

is because despite what you read in the headlines,

this isn't just a war between a terrorist group

called Hamas and Israel,

but the bleeding edge of something much more widespread

that has the potential to touch the lives of every American.

No one articulates that better than Walter Russell Mead,

and I hope you find this conversation as important,

as urgent, and as fascinating as I did.

Shortly after I recorded this conversation with Walter

as in hours after,

Yemen declared war on Israel

with Houthi rebels firing missiles at a lot,

and in a major provocation from China,

Israel was removed from Baidu maps late on Monday night.

Though I didn't get to talk to Walter

about these discrete developments,

in many ways they confirm what Walter expresses

in this conversation,

that this war isn't just a regional conflict,

that it is fundamentally about a world, as he puts it,

spinning out of control.

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If you've been listening to Honestly

or reading the free press,

you know that we've been covering

the war in Israel obsessively

since Hamas attacked on October 7th.

We've been staying up around the clock

to get you original reporting, analysis,

opinion pieces, videos, and of course podcasts

to help you understand what is going on in the Middle East.

But so many of you are writing in with questions

about how the conflict even got to this point

and about Israeli history more generally.

Questions like, who runs Hamas

and why aren't they in the West Bank

and how did Israel get established anyway in 1948?

I wish we had the time to get into every detail here,

but since we don't, I'd like to direct you

to my friends at Unpacking Israeli History.

They have episodes with topics ranging

from the history of Hamas

to whether Israel should ransom captured soldiers

and Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

Unpacking Israeli history cuts through the noise

and helps you understand Israel's present

by understanding its history.

So educate yourself and learn the history

behind the headlines by going to Unpacking Israeli History

wherever you get your podcasts.

Walter Russell Mead, thank you so much for joining me today.

Barry, it's great to be back even at a terrible time.

I'm really eager to talk to you

and I've been thinking so much since October 7th

about a few moments sort of from the before times

have sort of leapt out at me.

And one of them was the last time I saw you in person.

We were in Dallas, it was June.

We were both there teaching at summer school at UATX,

this school that I'm on the board of.

And I remember you saying something

that made the hair on my arm stand on edge.

And I remember very distinctly the sort of quiet

that washed over the room, the dinner where we were speaking.

And you talked about how we were in a pre-war moment.

Do you remember exactly what it was that you said that night?

I was talking about how after the end of the Cold War

we went into a post-war moment era in history

where the news was really driven

and international politics was driven

by dealing with the consequences and the loose ends

from the last big international contest.

But it felt to me like right around 2014

about the time when Putin went into Ukraine the first time

we started shifting into a pre-war era.

And in a pre-war era, the problems that you deal with,

the things that you face internationally

are things that if they're not successfully dealt with

could lead to a new era of major great power conflict.

And we are there and October 7th,

I think just hammered that home.

When you said that in June,

could you have ever anticipated

that it would only be a matter of months

before that pre-war era came to a close

and a sort of wartime era began?

Well, it felt like we were moving quickly

and at an unpredictable pace towards a future.

I think even now it's still kind of unguessable.

But something big does seem to be lying in our near future.

Something big and something bad.

I wanna use the time that we have together

to sort of build up to the question of what that big thing,

that big bad thing that feels like it's lying in wait will be.

But I wanna sort of start with a smaller aperture

and widen out toward that bigger theme.

So let's start with what's actually happening right now

on the ground in Israel and in Gaza.

This past Friday, and we're speaking on a Monday,

Prime Minister Netanyahu announced

that the second phase of the war had begun

with IDF troops officially entering Gaza on the ground.

Now many, including many in the Israeli security establishment

are warning that this kind of warfare

is going to be brutal and extremely challenging

for a number of reasons,

not just the sort of urban warfare

that we saw in places like Iraq,

but the fact that there are essentially two cities in Gaza,

the above ground city where the civilians are

and the underground city where Hamas men and weaponry are.

The other thing that many people,

I think many people, not just critics of Israel have pointed

out is that it's going to test international support

for Israel because in trying to wipe out Hamas,

there's going to be a lot of civilians,

Palestinian civilians that were killed.

So simple question, is Israel right

to pursue this ground invasion?

Is there any other way that they could sort of be

defeating Hamas other than this strategy?

I don't think there is an alternative.

That doesn't mean that this alternative will necessarily

work, we'll have to see.

But I think after what happened,

they have to both for domestic political reasons

and for the strength of the Israeli deterrent internationally.

And again, in just sheer self-defense,

they really have to break Hamas.

What does breaking Hamas look like practically?

It would look as if Hamas as an organization

could no longer carry out initiatives on any serious scale

that it lacked the capacity to govern even parts of Gaza

that it had gone, in a way it's sort of like ISIS went

from being this territorial empire and quasi state

into there are still scattered groups in that area

who think of themselves as ISIS,

they're still ISIS fighters.

But the entity that we saw that had controlled almost

everything in central Syria and Western Iraq,

that no longer exists.

But again, the sentiments behind Hamas will not go away.

The people who have had the training that Hamas,

thanks to Hezbollah and Iran have been able to impart,

will not leave their heads.

There will be efforts to begin to reconstitute

and breaking Hamas is not the end of the terrorism problem,

but it does change the focus.

It's an effective response to what Hamas has just done.

One of Hamas's political, almost military strategies

is civilian death.

Not just Israeli and Jewish civilian death,

but civilian death on its own side.

In other words, they seem to want Palestinians,

innocent Palestinians to be killed

in order to turn the tide of public opinion in the West,

across the Arab world, across the entire globe,

against the Jews in Israel.

What is Israel to do in the face of an enemy like that?

When you have to proceed deliberately,

I noticed that the offensive has begun very slowly.

Some people thought, wow, they're gonna just go rushing in

and try to flatten the whole Gaza Strip and so on.

But they seem to be moving in a very deliberate way.

You can't, in the nature of warfare,

eliminate all civilian casualties.

So one of the reasons warfare is a terrible thing

and we should do everything in our power to not have wars,

but they have within that constraint

and within the fact that they're in a densely populated area,

fighting an enemy that glories in the use of human shields,

they are doing what they can

to act carefully and deliberately.

They don't always succeed.

And let's remember, we can be talking about 18 and 19-year-olds

on a surge of emotion.

Some will have had families,

members killed in the initial attacks.

All will be worried about their own lives

and making split second decisions

for hours every day under extreme pressure.

Not everybody is going to get

every split second hair trigger question right.

But there's a difference when civilian casualties

are the unavoidable byproducts,

something that you don't want to accomplish,

that you try to minimize, you do what you can to avoid.

Those civilian casualties are not the same

as those that are done as deliberate murder.

Maybe a way to summon up is that war is not a war crime.

In other words, those on social media,

and there are many of them who list the number

of Israeli dead and list the number,

which is hard to ascertain, a Palestinian dead,

hard to ascertain because Hamas rules Gaza,

but suffice it to say it is a higher number.

They are missing something in your view.

Well, a lot more Japanese died in World War II

than Americans died at Pearl Harbor.

So are we going to say that World War II was a war crime?

Again, this is the thing where people either out of ignorance

or because some kind of emotional bias

is twisting their thinking in some way,

people judge anything Israel does

in a completely different framework

from the way we look at any say of the wars of history.

There are a lot of progressive groups,

including members of Congress,

very prominent people here in America

and certainly around the world, calling for a ceasefire.

Explain if you would to listeners

who are inclined to hear that word and think,

ceasefire is good, ceasefire means the end of war.

Explain if you would why you believe

that calls for a ceasefire are misguided.

Well, let's imagine, let's travel back in time

to July 7th, 1944.

And the Allied soldiers have just landed

on the Normandy beaches

and are just beginning to sort of expand their foothold.

And now you have some very good-natured people,

I suppose, saying, well, let's have a ceasefire.

I mean, the casualties in Normandy are terrible

and the civilian casualties, their French civilians,

their cities like Sherbrooke, right in the path of the war,

we need a ceasefire.

That ceasefire probably would have allowed the Germans

the time that they needed to assemble the forces

that could throw the Allies back into the sea.

And so a call for a ceasefire that sounded so humanitarian,

so even-handed was actually an attempt

to hand the victory to one party.

Now, I am not saying, I would never say

that everybody who calls for a ceasefire today

is consciously trying to help Hamas.

We should never underestimate what the combination

of fuddled goodwill and lack of historical knowledge

can create in the way of confusion.

And there's much more of that than real ill will.

Nevertheless, it remains the fact

that a ceasefire at this time allows Hamas

to continue to prepare, does nothing for the release

of hostages, does nothing really to alleviate

the suffering of the people in Gaza.

The war will resume more bitter than ever.

It's a real mistake, I think, to call for a ceasefire.

Hillary Clinton, by the way, gave a great talk recently.

I don't know exactly when, I just saw it on Twitter.

I think it was in the past few days,

it was an interview with Noro Donald somewhere.

Yeah, it was really terrific.

And she was just very clear, saying,

it hands a victory to Hamas.

It sounds humanitarian, but actually,

it is helping the terrorists.

And this is one of the many times in her career

when Hillary Clinton has been dead right.

Let's say that Israel is able somehow to get rid of Hamas,

to the extent that Hamas fighters can be eliminated.

What happens the day after that?

What would be the group that could come to take over Gaza

in Hamas's place, or is the idea and the end game

on the part of Israel, at least in the short term,

to sort of reoccupy Gaza, which seems like a nightmare?

Well, I think there might be,

there's gonna necessarily be a kind of an occupation of Gaza

because while you've been fighting in one part of Gaza,

you can't not occupy the part behind your front lines

where you're fighting.

So we're looking at an Israeli occupation

of a hostile Gaza in wartime conditions,

and that will continue right through to final victory,

assuming that that comes.

So the end of the war will actually find Israel

occupying de facto all of Gaza.

So the question is not whether there'll be

an Israeli occupation at the end of the war,

but how will it end?

To whom will the Israelis hand over power?

We can actually be a little bit optimistic here

because I think many people in the Arab world,

including many of the Gulf Arabs,

sympathize with the Palestinians as a people

and sympathize with the Palestinian cause,

but have lost all faith

in Palestinian political leadership.

Fatah, the group that controls the West Bank,

is seen as hopelessly incompetent, corrupt.

People say it hasn't had an idea in 25 years.

I don't know if that's fair,

but that's the impression people have.

And then Hamas is an Iranian linked death cult.

And frankly, there are a lot of people in the Gulf

who see that with all of the horror and loathing

that you and I see it.

I mean, it's not that hard.

It's a human thing to understand what a terrorist death cult is

and why you don't want one operating in your backyard.

So I really wouldn't be at all surprised

if we see something of an Arab initiative

to bring in new leadership for the Palestinian areas

of the West Bank possibly, as well as Gaza,

maybe with some kind of a formal continuity

to the current Palestinian authority.

Maybe not, I can't tell you.

But the Gulf states, part of the Abraham Accords,

they want the Palestinian situation to be quiet.

They don't want the Middle East to have recurrent wars.

They don't want Iran to be able to use Palestinian discontent

as a wedge to insert itself into the region.

So in that sense, the confluence of interests

that we saw between the Israelis

and most of the Arabs before the war

is actually still there now.

The Arab governments, due to public opinion

and perhaps their own emotional reactions

to what they see have certainly not been shy

about condemning Israel,

but many also condemned Hamas very strongly

at the beginning.

And behind the scenes,

we're seeing all kinds of indications, I think,

that they are looking to work cooperatively with Israel

to get to a future in which there'll be order

in the Palestinian territories

and some form of Palestinian governance.

But the Arabs are gonna wanna make sure

that it's a sort of rational, pragmatic leadership.

What do you do about the fact

that while many Palestinians in Gaza

just want a good life, they hate Hamas,

they hate what Hamas has done to their people,

there are also a good number of people there

who support Hamas,

who have been indoctrinating their children in schools

from an extremely young age

to wanna go and become martyrs,

to want to go and kill Jews.

I've seen the analogy to sort of denazification

being floated out there in various pieces and things.

And I wondered what you make of that historical analogy.

What would it look like to essentially de-Hamasify Gaza?

Well, one thing I would say is that

the trend across the Arab world

has been away from the kind of deadly

and perverse form of radical Islamism

that Hamas has come to embody.

So that if you look at,

you take surveys of young people in Egypt

and across the Gulf and in other parts of the Arab world,

they're sick of it.

This Islamism, the jihad,

it all sounded very exciting at one point,

but what does it lead to?

It leads to terrible governance.

It leads to civil war.

It leads to unbelievable chaos, random death.

There's no good, nothing good down that road.

So Hamas in that sense,

because maybe it's tight ideological controls in Gaza.

It's the sort of fanaticism that comes very naturally

to people living at the edge of a frontier.

They've created something that's unusual

by Middle Eastern standards today.

And so when I think about,

how the place might evolve in a post-combat era

with the Arab world helping to build something new there

and put in new governors with new ideas,

it seems to me there gonna be a lot of people

at the end of this war in Gaza

who look around the ruins that Hamas has left

and ask themselves,

what good has come from this?

Is Israel any weaker than it was at the start?

Is my house any nicer than it was at the start?

Even angry people who've been socialized

into some kind of fanaticism

are capable of learning from experience.

The Nazi party was not as popular in May of 1945

as it was in June of 1940.

Right now, Walter, the war is being reported on in the press

as if it's a war between Hamas and Israel.

But it seems to me if you just look at the plain facts

that the war is already much wider than that,

that essentially it is Israel and America

at war with the so-called axis of resistance.

You have Hamas and Islamic jihad, of course,

attacking from Gaza,

but you have Hezbollah firing missiles into Israel

from Lebanon.

You have Shiite militias from Syria.

And then you have these 21 American service members

who have been injured in drone and rocket attacks

in military bases in Iraq and Syria by Iran.

Can you give us a sort of sense of the broader war

that's actually going on here?

Well, I do think that what we are looking at fundamentally

is an Iranian war to conquer the Middle East.

It's a war that Iran has been waging for a long time.

Iran's enemies in that war are first and foremost Israel

because Israeli survival is incompatible

with Iran's domination of the region and the United States

because we're a country that has long seen

the connection of our interests and values

with those of Israel.

But it's also a war between Iran

and most of the sunny Arab states.

So Iran's hostility to Egypt, to Saudi Arabia,

to the UAE is really quite definite, quite pointed.

Iranian supported proxy groups like the Houthis in Yemen

have actually sent missiles into Saudi and Emirati territory.

Syria is one of the great battlefields of this war

in which far more Arabs have perished in Syria

in the last five years

than have died in the entire era

of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And yet somehow what's happened in Israel-Palestine

is seen as genocidal violence

while the much greater violence just a few miles away in Syria

in which Sunni Arabs are disproportionately

the greatest victims.

And many, by the way, are Palestinian refugees

living in Syria.

This is just airbrushed away by people

who actually hate Israel much, much more

than they love Palestinians.

But anyway, Iran has seen that it needs

to break American power and resolve

in order to take over the Middle East.

The idea there is that if Iran did manage

to become a dominant power in the Middle East

so that other governments had to basically

toe the Iranian line, Iran would have the power

to control oil prices around the world.

It would be a great power

if it control the Saudi investment funds,

the Emirati, the Kuwaiti, the Barati funds

as well as being able to mobilize the manpower

and the oil resources of that region

would make Iran what it desperately wants to be

a real great power.

The problem, as I see it, is that it's been

an article of faith in the Democratic Party

since the Obama administration

that the best way to deal with Iran is to appease it,

to find a way to maybe reach some kind of detente

with Iran to stroke and pat and quiet Iran under Obama.

It was the nuclear deal known as the JCPOA.

But Biden, at the beginning of his administration,

wanted nothing more than to revive the JCPOA

and did everything possible to try to get Iran back into it.

But amazingly, Iran is more interested

in advancing its agenda than it is

in reaching a civilized responsible agreement

with the United States.

Let's go back, if we could, just for a minute

to the Obama policy vis-a-vis Iran,

which, well, I guess I'll put the question to you.

Do you regard that as sort of the original sin

of this war that we're seeing right now?

Well, look, you can see, you know,

if you wanna ask what was the big mistake

America made in the Middle East,

there's so many candidates for that.

Yes.

And certainly...

Maybe choosing to go to war in Iraq.

Yes, I was gonna say that, you know,

knocking out Iran's biggest regional opponent,

the only country in the Middle East

that was able to keep some kind of a balance in Iran,

and then failing to create a stable Iraq

so that today Iran is the most powerful actor inside Iraq.

Yes, that was a historic mistake.

So maybe it's W. Bush that deserves the blame

in this moment rather than Obama.

I would say what we have is a beautiful bipartisan era.

I talk about a generational failure

of American foreign policy,

where in various, really since the end of the Cold War,

American presidents and the American foreign policy

establishment has pretty systematically misread

the international system

and made more poor choices than good choices.

They weren't all bad,

and there have been some accomplishments,

but on these big strategic issues,

we've basically, we've allowed China

to almost equal our strength in and around Taiwan,

which nothing else makes the possibility

of a U.S.-China war likely than our simple failure

to match China's military buildup,

which we knew everything about in the Far East

all those years.

But you could go back through the New York Times,

through discussions in the Council on Foreign Relations

and other people, and you wouldn't find a lot of awareness

that our failure to do this was creating an immense bomb

that could go off at any moment.

In the same way we appeased Putin,

Bush did it when he invaded Georgia in 2008.

We didn't make a real response.

What we did in 2014,

Neville Chamberlain I think would have been embarrassed

by the Western approach to Putin after 2014.

Then the serial appeasement of Iran.

People thought, I think we lived at the end of history

that American power was so great,

we had an infinite margin of safety.

And so we've, in Russia, in the Middle East,

and in the Far East, we've made one big mistake

after another, and as a result,

we're sort of in a dark alley with three big guys

who don't like us very much.

Let's go back to Obama-era foreign policy.

Steelman, the argument for me,

what was Obama and the Obama administration's best argument

for its policy vis-a-vis Iran

with specifically the JCPOA, the Iran deal?

There were two, and one I don't find particularly compelling

and think they should have been able to see through,

but there was a very sophisticated Iranian influence

operation, I think, that they kind of fell for.

And that was the idea that Iran is the most modern society

in the Middle East.

It's unnatural that these hardliners control it.

Just under the surface is a modern pro-American country

waiting to get out.

Now that part is actually, to a large degree, true,

but the argument then was that by opposing the regime,

by sanctioning it, by pressuring it, by isolating it,

we were strengthening the hardliners.

And so we should have a sunshine policy

by being warming and understanding.

This, by the way, is what many liberals thought

we should have been doing with Stalin in 1946, 47.

It's also what Chamberlain and the appeasers thought

they should have been doing with Germany in the 1930s.

It's the classic delusion that it's our hostility

that makes the hardliners hostile and strong.

And if we take off the pressure,

the internal good guys will win.

Well, very often it's the opposite.

There was talk among the German generals

of overthrowing Hitler in 1938.

But when the English and the French folded like a cheap suit,

that it was impossible after that point

to attack Hitler from the military's point of view.

So there was that.

And I think that delusion is getting harder to maintain,

but a lot of Iranians, the farmer minister,

the former reformist people,

spent just a lot of time courting American diplomats,

American officials, American think tankers

selling this story.

Why was selling that story to themselves

and to the American public so important and valuable?

Okay, and now we get to the stronger of the two arguments,

I think, the one where they really do have a point.

And that is they ask themselves,

what is the worst thing that could happen in the Middle East?

Is it an Iranian nuclear bomb?

Or is it a major US-Iran war in the Middle East?

That is, if President Obama having basically gotten elected

for criticizing George W. Bush's war

to stop Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program in 2003,

now tries to take the United States into a war against Iran

in 2013 or whatever in order to stop

the Iranian nuclear weapons program,

what does that do to the Democratic Party?

What does that do to American public opinion?

I think there was a sense that,

this is the thing that you have to avoid.

An Iranian nuclear weapon, many of them I think have thought,

is a bad thing, we don't want it.

But you know what, the Soviets have a nuclear weapon

and we've lived with it since 1947,

the North Koreans, the Chinese,

a lot of people have nuclear weapons,

we've been able to use deterrents.

And if you look at the deal

that right before the October 7th massacres,

you would see that the US was essentially trying

to offer the equivalent kind of NATO Article 5 protection

to Saudi Arabian Israel.

You know, we would, particularly with the Saudis,

we would put, extend our nuclear umbrella over them,

which was a way of making it,

that they would not go quote ballistic

if the Iranians developed a nuclear weapon.

And so I think both the Obama and the Biden administrations

in their heart of hearts,

have thought it was more important

to reduce the chance of a US Iran war

than to stop the Iranian nuclear program,

even though they're not able to say that out loud.

Beyond that, there's an additional question,

which is, once people really began to worry

about the rise of China,

I said something nice about Hillary Clinton earlier,

I'm gonna say something else nice about her.

Long before 2008, Hillary Clinton

was probably the leading China hawk in the United States.

And I can remember her talking about the dangers of China

when all the other foreign policy people in the room

would sort of roll their eyes.

But once the rise of China really began

to engage people's attention,

then it seemed kind of obvious,

again, especially the Democrats,

but maybe not only the Democrats,

that the US needs to reduce its commitments in Europe

and the Middle East,

in order to be able to kind of move resources,

military resources, diplomatic focus

to the China question,

so that we can do that without going on

kind of a wartime basis,

with going back to Cold War defense budgets

and all of that.

So you'll find some Republican analysts

like Elbridge Colby,

who say, we've gotten,

we've letting ourselves get in such a hole in the Far East

that we have to reduce our commitments elsewhere

or watch the Chinese take Taiwan,

which is actually a world historical disaster that would.

What do you make of that argument?

Well, first, I like Bridge,

I think he's a really smart guy.

Myself, I actually think that unhappy as it is,

we're actually condemned by the nature of our interests

to be a global power.

Let's just characterize these two views

for people who have never heard of the name Bridge Colby,

which is to say there is two ongoing world views

about American foreign policy.

One is the notion that all of these conflicts

are somehow connected.

And if we don't show a muscularity toward Putin,

vis-a-vis Ukraine,

and defending the Ukrainians against Russian aggression,

that will send a signal to Beijing.

Equally, will it send a signal to Tehran?

And then there are those like Colby,

who are sort of in the more realist,

if I can call it that school,

who say things like America is a weakened power,

our munitions are weakened,

our internal will as a country is weakened,

we are no longer sort of America that we once were,

despite the rhetoric coming out of the White House.

And we need to make very calculated decisions

about where we put our resources.

And if we're putting our resources into the Middle East,

let's say, or Ukraine, let's say,

it's distracting us from the core conflict of our era,

which is China.

Is that a fair characterization?

I think that's how Bridge would describe it.

My own take would be a little bit different.

You know, I don't consider myself

some kind of like hideous, dark,

uber Machiavellian realist who, you know,

but I do think I actually, a lot of my analysis,

you know, certainly Henry Kissinger is probably

the living person I've learned the most from,

both from his books and our conversations.

So a lot of people would indeed call me a realist.

So I don't think it's that.

But I do think I look at American international interests

in maybe a, you know, somebody say an idiosyncratic way.

I look at the last 300 years of world history

as this contest, a series of contests

between English-speaking commercial,

reasonably liberal maritime powers

and these big land powers.

So, you know, England versus Louis XIV

in the 17th century, England versus Napoleon,

England and America versus the Kaiser,

England and America versus the Kaiser in Japan,

England and America versus the Soviet Union.

Okay, there's a, there's a pattern.

There's a theme.

Yeah, there's a theme, right?

And in a lot of ways,

if you look at American foreign policy

over hundreds of years, not a few decades,

what you see is that our greatest statesmen,

leaders have always believed that we needed

a balance of power in Europe

so that no single country dominated all of Europe

and was able to kind of harness all that power

to attack us and our friends globally.

But also nobody could do that in Asia for similar reasons.

And then we've added to that since World War II

the idea that Middle East oil is so important,

that we also have to prevent any single power

other than perhaps ourselves who can be trusted

from having the power to stop the Middle East oil flow

and therefore hold the world economy

and the world politics up for ransom.

I think that description of our interests remains valid.

Now, within that, we have greater and lesser priorities.

In most of the Cold War, Europe was the central focus

of the contest, but even so we fought a war in Korea

and a war in Vietnam, and we were heavily involved

in Asia in various ways.

And of course, in the Middle East

during the Cold War, we were involved.

So for me, it seems that the real task

for American leadership now is not to sacrifice

interests that actually are vital

for our prosperity and our safety,

but to find the cheapest best way

to secure those interests,

make a reasoned case to the American people

about why that's the case.

A reasoned case that might include

a little bit of scaring people,

because in fact, if these things don't happen,

the future is quite scary.

And then you can get, as we've been able to do

over and over again in the past,

get the resources that we need for this policy.

Well, speaking of American leaders

sort of scaring the population into sobriety,

how would you rate Biden's actions and his rhetoric,

because those are actually two very different things

over the past three weeks?

And do you think that this war

is gonna mark a watershed among Democrats

about what has been the sort of the consensus position

since Obama toward Iran?

Very good questions.

You know, the president has done some good things

since October 7th.

He has, even if people say it's a bear hug to Netanyahu,

that he's embraced him as a way partly

of trying to control and limit his reactions,

clearly at a time when much of the world

was already starting to isolate Israel and condemn it.

And clearly at a cost to his own standing

in the Democratic Party,

President Biden has been pretty clear

that Israel has a right to defend itself

and has offered American help to enable Israel to do that.

He's taking incoming fire for that,

paying a political price.

And I, for one, want to acknowledge that.

Where I think it's less robust

is one still gets a sense that rather than

telling people the awful truth about Iran,

we still seem to be trying to make this

about just Israel and Hamas, you know, Israel and Palestine,

Israel and the Arabs.

That's not actually what's going on.

What is actually going on?

What is that hard truth?

I think it's this.

I think the Iranians saw that the Biden administration

was putting together a diplomatic initiative

that would bring Israel and Saudi Arabia into open alignment

that, you know, they were negotiating

some kind of Saudi intervention

to provide Israel with guarantees

that the Palestinians would be governed well,

but then get for the Palestinians in return

some more security than they've had in recent years,

more security and kind of political profile.

And Iran saw this as a direct threat

to its own plans to conquer the Middle East

and or to dominate, let's say the Middle East.

Whether Iran made a phone call to Hamas

and said, now is the time to go, we don't know.

But certainly over many months,

Iran has been providing Hamas with the training.

I mean, this may shock you Barry,

but there aren't a lot of big paragliding schools in Gaza,

you know, and you can go back and look at past Olympics,

that the Gaza paragliding team was somehow not there.

But Walter, square this for me.

The Wall Street Journal, especially your paper

on the news side, you're on the opinion side

has had a series of bombshell reports

on the extent to which Iran actively trained Hamas fighters

and also coordinated the massacre of October 7th.

And yet you have in the Biden White House

a total lack of clarity about that.

They're saying that it's not clear

that we don't really know, help square that for us.

It seems abundantly clear.

Why won't the White House admit it?

What's at stake in the White House not admitting it?

Because if you admit that you don't have an Iran policy,

which is to say that the two signature policies

that the Biden administration came in with

were one, quote, will park Russia.

And the other is we'll pacify Iran, all right?

The park Russia thing failed

with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And the pacify Iran has clearly failed as badly.

It's an open stinking sore, all right?

But if you say that,

then you have to have another policy toward Iran.

And what would that be?

Do you get a lot tougher on Iran?

And if you do all that,

first of all, the Democratic left is already really angry

at Biden for going as far as he has on the Middle East.

I'm sure this would just inflame people

even more on the left.

But also you've got then what are you gonna do?

What's your response gonna be?

Are you gonna attack Iran?

Are you gonna help Israel attack Hezbollah?

Are you gonna give Israel bunker busting bombs

to go in and destroy as much as you can

of the Iranian nuclear program in retaliation?

Just exactly what are you going to do?

And no administration wants to make really big decisions

on the fly in real time.

So you do wanna figure it out.

However, I think ultimately my guess is

they still think the worst thing that could happen

in the Middle East is a US Iranian war.

That would be terrible for the country.

Putin is the big winner of this in some ways.

Make the crisis in the Middle East even bigger.

The price of oil doubles goes to $150 a barrel.

Putin is minting money.

Our European allies are facing crippling

economic conditions.

Inflation in the US has taken off

and your reelection campaign is coming up in the next year.

All right, no president is gonna look at that scenario

and say, oh, I'll pick that

until they're absolutely sure

that there really aren't any other alternatives.

And I think there's still people in the administration

who are willing in a way to come up with non-polices,

things that sort of look like a policy

but don't actually address any of your problems

simply because policies based on the honest truth

about the situation in the Middle East

are almost all unbearable

from the Biden administration's point of view.

Before we get to China and Russia,

let's stick for just one minute on what you alluded to there,

which is the way that this war has deeply impacted

Biden's approval rating among Democrats.

He's down 11 points since the war.

And that sort of reflects the broader trend

that we see among Democrats.

Earlier this year, Gallup found that for the first time

in the US history, Democrats' sympathies

for the Palestinians outpaced Democrats' sympathies

for Israelis.

And it's especially notable among young Americans

over one fourth of young Americans,

according to a recent poll between the ages of 18 and 24,

say that the long-term solution to the conflict

is for Israel to be erased

and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.

And I'm not exaggerating that poll.

So what is Biden to do?

And is this just the future

of the Democratic Party in America?

Nobody makes you be President of the United States.

Anybody who's President of the United States

has worked like a coolly,

or worked like a slave in an ancient Greek mine,

you know, sweated blood,

sacrificed friendship, family, leisure time

in a long, long struggle to get that job.

And so when you get that job,

you have to be the President.

You know, you actually have to do it.

And you've got to lead the country.

You've got to tell the American people what's going on.

You've got to tell the American people why it matters.

You've got to tell the American people

what it is that you plan to do about it.

And you've got to convince them that it's the right thing.

Now, if I were President Biden,

I would plan some,

I would look at Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats.

I would start thinking, okay,

how do I explain to the American people

that we are not in the place

we all thought we were a few years ago?

We're in a different and much scarier world.

But at the same time, how do I show them

that with the right choices and right policies now,

we can stay safe.

It's harder than it would have been.

It's more expensive and riskier than it would have been.

But by doing some smart right things now,

we can make it better.

So we're going to begin today,

massively rebuilding the defense industrial base.

We're going to deepen our relationships

with our Arab partners.

We're going to increase our production

of oil and gas domestically,

even as we continue with other things

to promote an energy transition.

Because in a world in which war could break out

in the Middle East, it's just very important

that we be able to do everything possible

to keep world oil markets stable.

You know, so in any case, you do those things.

Then I would bring some sensible,

centrist Republicans into my administration.

I think they do need to understand

that they need some personnel changes.

When major policy choices,

which might have been made for perfectly sensible reasons,

have gone badly, the president doesn't need

when he sends the Secretary of State to the Middle East.

Maybe it shouldn't be the same guy

who talked about wanting to make MBS a pariah.

Maybe it shouldn't be people who are associated

with errors in the past that people in the Middle East

knew were errors at the time

and didn't thank you for making.

And maybe you also want to bring in people

on the Republican side.

Obama had Robert Gates for the first part

of his administration.

FDR had, I think, Stemson, a Republican as Secretary of War.

Today we'd call that Secretary of Defense.

You know, so there are things you can start to do.

I think you talk to business leaders.

I think you talk to Hollywood

and the entertainment industry

and start awakening Americans,

the public at large in our leadership class,

to the real situation that our country is in

and start trying to get everybody working in their own way

at their own pace on their own priorities

as they see them to start pulling in the right direction

in the same direction as we've done

in great emergencies in the past.

Let's stay for a minute if we could on Russia and China

and how they're perceiving the goings on in the Middle East.

We know that Hamas has been very thrilled

with what Putin has been doing so far.

Here is what Hamas said in a statement

from about a week ago.

We appreciate Putin's position regarding

the ongoing Zionist aggression against our people

and his rejection of the Gaza siege,

the cutting off of relief supplies

and the targeting of safe civilians there.

Just yesterday evening in Dagestan

where there remain 800 or so Jewish families,

there was an attempted pogrom.

I guess you could say an actual pogrom.

I think 20 people were injured at the airport there

when sort of a bloodthirsty mob stormed the airport

on the news that a plane was landing from Tel Aviv.

It's like a site out of the Middle Ages

other than the fact of the plane.

So give us a sense, please, of Russia and Putin

in all of this.

Well, first Barry, I should remind you

that the BBC told us that the mob in Dagestan

was anti-Israel, not anti-Semitic, so.

I'm sure they were there

to protest BB Netanyahu's settlement policies.

Yeah, no, there were a lot of things.

Also, Israel's whole stand on intellectual property.

It was an anti-Israel gathering that got out of hand.

Understandable grievances bubbling to the surface.

Yeah, we're back to the Cold War

when Russia was a huge sponsor of Palestinian terrorism

and Russia has decided to go back to that today.

See, we don't want, the Biden administration doesn't want

Russia and Iran and China to cohere

because that just makes all of our problems worse.

But they also know that coheering

makes all of our problems worse and that's what they want.

They want our problems to be worse.

And so Russia, which when you think about it,

Putin and the Ayatollah Khomeini

have almost nothing in common, ideologically, intellectually,

and many of their interests are quite different.

And yet Putin's desire to see American power

strained everywhere

and if possible beaten back in the Middle East

is so strong that he is willing to embrace Hamas.

Remember what a turnabout this is for Putin.

Putin took power by crushing what he called

terrorists attacking Russia,

Chechen terrorists attacking Russia.

So Hamas terrorists doing the essentially the same thing

out of, you know, in some ways comparable political ends,

Putin is now endorsing a hundred percent.

So, but this is all, it all makes sense

when you look at the geopolitics.

Talk to us about China,

which I think you would argue based on everything I've read.

If you're writing that it is the gravest threat

to American national security,

how is Beijing perceiving everything

that is unfolding right now?

How are they taking advantage of it?

Well, first let me say Beijing

is the most important long-term threat.

It is not necessarily the most urgent threat.

And that's actually a distinction

that's also in the Biden administration's

national security strategy.

And it's an important distinction

because China, while it's recent economic

and demographic problems may be causing a rethink there,

but for a long time has been the habit

of seeing itself as a rising power.

So, okay, we don't solve the Taiwan problem

this year, you know what, in five or 10 years

we'll be stronger and we can come back to it then.

While Russia and Iran both are on much shorter fuses.

I think Putin felt that if he didn't go after Ukraine now

he might never have the chance

or never have as good a chance again.

And Iran certainly feels that everything

is going its way in the Middle East.

And if it doesn't push its opportunities to the max

it will lose the glittering prize

that it sees right in front of it.

So China is perhaps a more patient power

than Russia and Iran.

That however, it remains the case

that Xi Jinping, who is let's face it a communist

and a dues paying member of the Chinese Communist Party

who has reinstituted the forms of totalitarian social control

that Mao Zedong would have just only,

if Mao had only had the internet

his ability to control China would be even greater.

And Xi Jinping is building the strongest

most authoritarian government that the world has ever seen.

And he sees American power as a threat.

You know, there are a lot of people in China

who actually don't like what Xi Jinping is doing there.

I don't know how much you've been able to travel in China

but I used to go quite a bit in the old days

and you would hear all kinds of Chinese people

from officials to professors to students

the ordinary people whose vision was that China

as time went by was gonna become a normal country

as they said.

And by that they meant like a Western country

would have democracy.

There'd be less interference from the government

less interference with your right to use the internet, et cetera.

That's what they thought the natural trajectory

of China's development would mean.

But for Xi Jinping and the people around him

that's a mortal threat to the power of the Communist Party

and not coincidentally to their own power in China.

And they see America very much as a country

that we might tolerate Chinese communism

when we couldn't do anything about it.

But any success we have, any power we have undermines

both by example and by influence,

the security, the stability of the communist system

that I think Xi Jinping sincerely believes

is necessary to Chinese development

and even national unity and independence.

So they see us as a mortal threat.

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So Walter, you've written about how the war in Israel

is merely one hotspot for the future.

Israel is merely one hotspot in a world

that's spinning out of control.

It's a very evocative phrase.

And I wonder if you can explain a bit more

about what you mean by that.

What are the things that are spinning out of control?

Because based on what you've written,

it strikes me that that isn't just a comment

on our lack of strong national security strategy.

It's something deeper than that.

Exactly, Barry.

Well, I think the best way to think about

the world situation in our time,

and it's a very grandiose phrase,

but what else can you do is to think that this cliche,

everybody's always talking about the information revolution

isn't just a tired cliche.

The economy is changing, technology is changing.

Just a couple of years ago with the pandemic,

we discovered that all the time

we'd been talking about great stagnation, nothing changing.

Actually, when the pandemic came,

we could all stop going to work,

or many millions of us could stop going to work.

And this great migration of commuters

in and out of the city every day

that consumes an immense amount of energy, time,

economic resources to maintain,

mass transit systems and cars,

it's actually not necessary anymore.

And we're probably gonna move away

from what was the central kind of economic

and social form of the 20th century.

And we'll probably move away pretty fast.

And cities, their tax bases are gonna be in free fall.

Again, all kinds of problems coming there.

But in so many ways, old industries are dying,

new industries, new jobs are coming.

What is artificial intelligence gonna do

to all kinds of work that people do?

I think maybe the self-propelling cars,

self-driving cars seem to be edging closer to reality.

That's a lot of jobs.

So huge social upheavals.

Think about the industrial revolution.

When I call the spinners and weavers

suddenly lose their jobs because of this,

you know, the textile mills.

And the other upheavals that you see,

riots, revolutions,

the political situation inside every country

kind of goes out of control.

Because nobody understands these new forces.

Nobody knew in 1820 that the railroad was coming

and would make things even more chaotic.

And then steel mills, telegraphs, you name it,

that this whole procession of new developments

was gonna upset the status quo in every possible way.

So in other words, technological change

leads to economic upheaval, leads to conflict.

And maybe the war that we're seeing

is in some way connected to the digital revolution

that until now has seemed pretty bloodless.

That's right.

Well, again, the industrial revolution itself,

it takes time for things like communism

to grow out of the social stresses

that the industrial revolution produced.

But, you know, the first wars of the industrial revolution

were cavalry campaigns in the age of Napoleon.

The last war of the industrial era

was probably World War II that ended with atom bombs.

So everything changed during the industrial revolution,

the nature of the state, the nature of political parties,

the nature of religious institutions,

the nature of the family,

this whole thing of the nuclear family

replacing extended kin networks.

Urbanization, in every country,

cities were just a small percentage of the population

in 1800, in every developed country,

there are a large majority of the population today.

So humongous changes, mass immigration

on a scale nobody had ever seen.

And so for much of that time,

nobody understood quite how the economy worked,

you know, what's gonna prevent a recession

or a depression or make one.

No one knew how to develop a social safety net

that would take care of the costs of the industrial revolution.

What I'm saying is we are moving

into another one of those storms.

The 1990s that people thought of as the end of history

and an era of permanent calm,

it was the eye of the storm.

And we are now going, you know,

it looks to me like the eye is passing over

and we're about to get hit with the backside of the storm.

Every time we talk, I'm just so compelled

by what you have to say.

And I go back to what you were saying earlier

in this conversation about how we need Biden

to have these fireside chats and we need sort of the,

the energy and the focus and the duty

of all of these different aspects of American private sector,

American citizens pushing in the same direction

toward a broader goal that is so much bigger

than any one of us.

And then I look to President Biden

or I look to former President Trump.

And frankly, I look to like the halls of the Senate

and Congress, at least most of them and think,

oh my God, who could possibly be the leader

that could do that kind of work?

Because I just don't see that capacity

in our current president.

Like is this moment going to also sort of usher

in a new set of American leaders

with a very different understanding

of our place in the world?

Or who do you look to for a bright spot, I guess,

help me with my pessimism about the current slate of leaders

who you could say have brought us to this past.

And I don't necessarily think

are the ones to get us out of it.

Well, I will say with, even though I'm one of them myself,

I think the baby boom generation has been a disaster

in terms of American foreign policy,

American educational policy,

the direction of American society.

And it really is time for a change.

We do need a new generation of leaders

with new perspectives.

Now that said, the thing that worries me most

is guess who educated these younger generations,

the boomers.

In that sense, we have not done our part.

You look at the state of American universities,

we were talking about that a little bit

at the start of the conversation.

The intellectual leadership

that should have been making our universities

beacons of hope, freedom, innovation.

On the science side, we're not doing that bad of a job,

but anything having to do with the humanities

and social sciences,

we seem to have utterly lost our way.

So I do worry that we've got a new generation coming along

that's gonna have to punch through a lot of illusions,

false teaching, bad ideas,

and ultimately find their way to solid ground.

That's what's going to have to happen.

I think it will because it has to.

One of the things that has happened

since the massacre of October 7th is,

I don't even know the right word,

explosion seems too weak,

an orgy of anti-Semitic assaults,

harassment and violence all over the world.

From Dagestan to Montauk, New York to Cornell University,

you name it, it's everywhere.

And it feels like the lid was just pulled off

of something that was already boiling.

It's hard to express the level of fear, isolation,

alienation that Jews all over the world

have been feeling for the past few weeks.

In your latest column for the Wall Street Journal,

you're not Jewish, Walter,

but you make the case that this isn't a really a Jewish issue.

It's an issue for all Americans

and for all people in the West.

And I wonder if you can explain why that is.

Well, I've just written this book

on the history of US-Israel relations,

Ark of a Covenant, United States Israel

and the fate of the Jewish people.

And so that involved me in a really deep dive

into the history,

not only the diplomatic relationships between the country,

but of the place of the idea of Israel

and the idea of the Jewish people in the American mind.

And it struck me over and over as I was doing this,

how the attitudes that have made the United States

historically maybe the most hospitable country

in world history for its Jewish population

are directly linked to the ideas

that make America work for everybody.

So you think about where has anti-Semitism,

virulent anti-Semitism really flourished in the past?

Where does it flourish today?

We think about medieval Europe,

where these sort of the inquisition,

these kind of fanatical, holistic Christian missionary types

who want to make a perfectly Christian society

with no descent,

not even other kinds of Christians

and certainly no Jews had no space for Jews

in their imagined utopia.

In 19th and 20th century Europe,

the nationalists who wanted to turn Germany

or Hungary or you name it into like the special place

that's for us Germans and pure-blooded Norwegians

and nobody else and we're gonna have our own language

and our own culture and no interlopers,

no alien Jews are gonna be in there

screwing with the purity of our national self-expression.

You find it reviving anti-Semitism there.

Today, obviously among sort of fanatical Islamist

jihadi types who have this vision

of the pure Islamist community in their imaginations,

now there's no room there for proud and free Jews.

And so the Jew becomes identified

for all these holistic total society types

as the face of the great enemy,

the reason I can't live the way I want to,

the reason my beautiful utopia is not working out as planned.

It's the Jew.

In America, we've had a really different idea

of what our society is.

We've long thought that in order for it to work,

it has to be a place where people

from many different cultural backgrounds,

ethnic backgrounds, religious backgrounds

can work together all accepting sort of the common ideas

of constitutional order, the rule of law.

But that within that framework,

we can work cooperatively on common issues

while each group can go ahead and develop.

If you wanna be unitarian,

you can be as unitarian as you want.

You can be, you know, you can be glad kosher Jewish

and that's fine, or you can be like totally secular Jewish

and that's fine.

It doesn't matter to the government.

It doesn't matter to society

as long as you just pull your weight

in this common American enterprise.

That's the vision that enables us to work.

Now it's always been imperfect.

You know, nobody, you know, blacks were not,

you know, Native Americans, a long list of people

and wouldn't work in the same way for women

as it did for men, but here's the thing.

Those who believe in the American way,

and I am one of them,

believe that while we haven't built utopia

and we'll probably never build it,

over the centuries it's gotten remarkably better.

The general level of prosperity has reached a place

no one could have imagined in 1800.

And furthermore, groups that were marginalized

and enslaved, mistreated, isolated, looked down on

have increasingly found better and better places

in American society.

And there's been a growing perception among Americans

that moving down that path is what we should all be doing.

The essence of America is to get better.

Now, anti-Semitism in America, historically,

we've had several peaks.

There was one in the 1890s and other in the 1930s and 40s.

It goes up and down in America.

It's not like never-present,

it's never gone away completely.

But actually the 1930s and early 40s

were some of the worst times.

And what do you see in those days?

You saw the Great Depression,

where unemployment reached 25%.

My grandfather used to talk about one night in the bank

where all of his savings were in, had folded

and he had zero money and no relief on the night

his wife gave birth to their first child.

They had suddenly no money.

So this kind of terror.

And then you had the communists,

you had fascists coming into the country

or arising out of the country.

And people believed they lost faith in the American way.

And as they did, they lost faith in this idea

that people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds

could work constructively together

to make it better for everyone.

And you could do this without giving up.

Like I don't have to give up my Christian faith

for America to be a better place for everybody,

Christian, non-Christian, you know,

by my contributions and theirs

and working together across religious,

regional, cultural lines

to build something good and new makes sense.

And when we lose that, two things happen.

America doesn't work as well and anti-Semitism rises.

You can look at those Tiki torch boys in Charlottesville

back in what was that, 2017 or whatever.

Right.

And you can look at the people marching on campuses today

and talking about death to the Jews and whatever.

They share three beliefs in common.

One, they make an idol of ethnic identity.

So for the white nationalists,

if you're not in the like white, pure group, you know,

you're only a destructive influence in America.

And the exact mirror image for some of the far left,

that if you're white, you're not right,

that this is about new groups

and systematic racism being needing to be changed.

So that's one thing.

The next thing they believe is that the American dream,

this promise that if we follow the American way

and work together, it gets better for everybody,

they don't believe that.

On the right, they think this, you know,

this far crazy right,

they think the great replacement is coming to destroy them.

On the crazy far left,

they think it's only been systemic racism

and all the happy clappy talk about common interests and all

is just a mask for oppression, colonialism,

all of these settler colonialism, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And the third thing that the far right

and the far left have in common is that they hate Jews.

You know, for the white nationalists,

the Jews are part of the great replacement.

They're not white.

And then for the far left, the Jews are white.

They're Uber white even.

So those three things in common,

they're all destructive to what has historically

made America work.

And I think when our enemies overseas look

at the rise of these sentiments in America,

both on the right, not on the left and on the left,

it's not a partisan thing with them.

What our enemies really hate is the vital American way.

And they're glad to see the far right rise up.

They're glad to see the far left rise up it.

It warms their cold hearts to see us ripping

and tearing at each other and denying the truths

that over the centuries have made us the most successful

large human society in history.

Walter Russell Mead, thank you so much for coming on, honestly.

Thank you, Barry.

See you again soon, I hope.

Thanks for listening.

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.